Random Thoughts & Musings

After collecting copious amounts of data, I have determined that the baby crying algorithm is thus:

do 
    cry();
while (world.state != desirable)

with one event listener registered:

worldChange(world.state) {

    pause(crying);   /* Must evaluate world.state unencumbered.
                      * Amusing side-effect: giving care-giver a 
                      * brief flash of false hope.
                      */

    if(world.state == desirable)
        stop(crying);
    else
        cry();
}

Of course, the root cause problem here is that the baby is reduced to communicating in binary, and ineffectively at that, because there's only one bit worth of information that can be conveyed.

So jcobleigh found out about this purportedly AMAZING chocolate bar made by Sharffen Berger, called the 62% Cacao Dark Chocolate Nibby. (We know it must be amazing because a Broadway composer recommended it, and they know about such things.) After searching in vain in stores in both New Jersey and Massachusetts (Whole Foods, which is supposed to carry it, only had the Milk Chocolate Nibby, which sounds good to me but is anathema to jcobleigh), he gave up in desperation and decided to try buying a bar directly from the Sharffen Berger website, although it means paying for shipping and handling too.

This led to yet another example of why I love jcobleigh, in addition to his amazing prowess with carrot cakes, as described here and here, and a host of other endearing traits (if you love Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory, you'll like jcobleigh, because he's all the best of Sheldon and he's also socially aware, like even a little bit better than Spock, which I know is bordering on heresy, but I think I'm allowed because jcobleigh is my husband).

...where was I? Oh right: today's "to blave" moment on IM:

jcobleigh
4:04 If I order a Nibby from the Sharffen Berger webpage
4:04 It's $4.95 for the bar
4:05 Plus $5.95 shipping
4:05 for $10.90 total

me
4:05 It's an experiment
4:05 that's okay with me

jcobleigh
4:05 OK
4:05 Ordered
4:05 :)

me
4:06 I want a bite of it too. I'm curious
4:06 :)

jcobleigh
4:06 My precccciousssss
4:06 I mean, nice hobbitses
4:06 Of course you can have a taste
4:06 :)

me
4:07 LOL

jcobleigh and I are expecting our first child in early June 2011! :)

I have a coworker who keeps coming up with clever / funny twists on phrases. (Maybe he's not inventing them, but I'm hearing them first from him.) A couple recent examples: "Well, that's back-asswards." and "I know there's a madness to my method, but..."

They're kind of like conceptual Spoonerisms. :)

"The great superstition of modern times is focused on the role given to chance in human affairs. Chance is the new reigning deity of the modern mind. Chance inhabits the castle of the gods. Chance is given credit for the creation of the universe and the emergence of the human race from the slime.

"Chance is a shibboleth. It is a magic word we use to explain the unknown. It is the favorite power of causality for those who will attribute power to anything or anyone but God. This superstitious attitude toward chance is not new. We read of its attraction very early in biblical history:

Take the ark of the Lord and put it on the cart, and in a chest beside it put the gold objects you are sending back to him as a guilt offering. Send it on its way, but keep watching it. If it goes up to its own territory, toward Beth Shemesh, then the LORD has brought this great disaster on us. But if it does not, then we will know that it was not his hand that struck us and that it happened to us by chance. (1 Samuel 6:8-9)

"Chance can do nothing because it is nothing...We use the word 'chance' to describe mathematical possibilities. For example, when we flip a coin we say that it has a fifty/fifty chance to come up heads. If we call heads on the toss and it turns up tails, we might say that our luck was bad and that we missed our chance.

"How much influence does chance have on the toss of a coin? What makes the coin turn up heads or tails? Would the odds change if we knew which side the coin started on, how much pressure was exerted by the thumb, how dense the atmosphere was, and how many revolutions the coin made in the air? With this knowledge, our ability to predict the outcome would far exceed fifty/fifty.

"But the hand is faster than the eye. We can't measure all these factors in the normal tossing of the coin. Since we can reduce the possible outcome to two, we simplify matters by talking about chance. The point to remember, however, is that chance exercises absolutely no influence on the coin toss. Why not? As we keep saying, chance can do nothing because it IS nothing. It is NO THING. Before something can exert power or influence it must first be something. It must be some kind of entity, either physical or nonphysical. Chance is neither. It is merely a mental construct. It has no power because it has no being. It is nothing.

"To say that something has happened by chance is to say that it is a coincidence. This is simply a confession that we cannot perceive all the forces and causal powers that are at work in an event. Just as we cannot see all that is happening in a coin toss with the naked eye, so the complex affairs of life are also beyond our exact ability to penetrate. So we invent the term 'chance' to explain them. Chance really explains nothing. It is merely a word we use as a shorthand for our ignorance."

- Chosen By God, R.C. Sproul, pp. 191-194

As such, Chance is no better a mental construct / superstition than the idea of God is. At the end of the day, both religious and non-religious folk are just admitting, "We don't know", although one group is attributing causal power to a sentient Being (an extension of our self-image and perceived ability to cause things), and the other group is attributing causal power to something that doesn't have causal power in and of itself, but tends to be what it is because of the Law of Large Numbers, which can be observed by causing the same thing to happen lots of times and seeing that it most often tends towards producing a particular outcome. Like the idea of God, Chance is a self-supporting mental construct, no more rational than the "God delusion".

Remember that post I made a couple months ago about submitting an entry to the World Handwriting Contest?

Um...I won first place in the Adult Manuscript (Printing) category.

Yes, the website looks amateurish and you'll have to scroll down until you find my name, but there it is. :)

Kudos to all the people who teased and encouraged me about my handwriting...I never would have submitted an entry if it weren't for you.

jcobleigh and I read a fascinating book recently that we'd heard about on NPR, Gina Welch's In the Land of Believers: An Outsider's Extraordinary Journey Into the Heart of the Evangelical Church (she's a Jewish atheist, Berkeley graduate, didn't end up converting to Christianity and she did an excellent job writing about her experiences).

Welch's writing is skillful, compelling, immediately engaging, and authentic. Her perspective surprised me several times because she provided an outsider's view on aspects of evangelical Christian culture that I take for granted. For example:

• She didn't know she could just walk into a church service. She thought that she had to be invited, or that she had to take a class first or something.
  
• At one point, she observes that she's enjoying singing the music during the church services "even though it had no artistic merit". The observation threw me for a loop, because the concept of artistic merit seemed entirely orthogonal to the concept of music that's intended to get people into worshipping God. It had never even occurred to me before to evaluate contemporary evangelical music in that light, and I realized that Welch is right: it doesn't have any artistic merit. Usually, it's not very challenging to sing so there's not a lot of scope for artists' interpretations, the melodies are predictable, the themes are endlessly repeated, most of the poetry gets the job done but isn't going to wow anyone with its sophisticated allusions, etc. I realized that since the whole goal of modern church music is to get the focus off the creature (i.e., the artist) and on the Creator, I'm okay with the lack of artistic merit...because I also agreed with Welch's observation that's fun to sing.
  
• She was frustrated with the way that Christians responded to her prayer requests for friends and family who were struggling with something. Whenever she asked for prayer for someone, the Christians would always ask whether the person was saved and then the prayer would be along the lines of, "Lord, please use these difficult circumstances in this person's life to draw them salvation," instead of just hearing the request and asking for the person's struggle to be relieved. She felt like the Christians had a conversion agenda instead of a genuine care for meeting people where they were at.
  
• She went on a short-term mission trip with a church group and one of the Christians on the trip brought a concealed handgun went they went out to share the gospel with people on the street. (Okay, note: I don't take this last one for granted! I was utterly shocked that someone would do that!)
  

Welch was brutally honest about her own struggles with belief. At one key point in the penultimate chapter, when she's out on the mission trip, she witnesses what she perceives to be a genuine conversion--or at least, a life-transforming moment of some kind. She stumbles away from that encounter a bit stunned, not sure what she saw or felt in the presence of that conversion, and she tries to explain it away, to tie it up neatly in a box that is consistent with the rest of her secular belief system, but she can't quite. At one point she comes out and explicitly states that she doesn't want to be awed. She's fighting a sense of awe at the encounter and she purposely turns away from it, although not without some effort.

I found the honesty refreshing and I'm grateful that Welch wrote this book. I hope I get to meet her someday; I bet her conversation would be fascinating.

Okay, the title is lame. All the people are insanely pretty. The plot is filled with clichés. The lip-synching is occasionally spotty (or awful in places in HSM 1). Everything has been cleaned and polished to within an inch of its life. The sexuality is in some kind of parallel dimension where everyone is hot but there's a childlike innocence / maturity about it all. There's unexplained synchronized mob dancing and teenage emo and it's easy to see the appeal for 13-year-old girls and gay men, but I still like the High School Musical movies. Like Mamma Mia and Singin' In The Rain and It's a Wonderful Life (minus that awful last cherubic, theologically-spotty line), I finish watching them and I've got a big dopey grin on my face. The tunes follow me around at work and make me smile. I spent five days last week recovering from food poisoning and decided to watch HSM 1-3 because a friend gave us her free copy of HSM 1 and I got hooked.

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• 14:11 Home-built Lego felt tip marker printer: www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX09WnGU6ZY #

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• 13:51 Golden Girls reimagined as Jedi warriors with Betty White as Luke: scifiwire.com/2010/06/golden-girls-reimagined-a.php #

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