Picture Post

I know I’ve become a rather poor blogger, but frankly I just don’t have much ambition to do much of anything. I don’t even read other blogs (yeah I’m so lazy right now that I don’t even want to do my procrastination activities). Even though I’m not willing to put much effort into anything I shall still post something by making use of two great things…(1) lists…no need to think about how to connect thoughts or statements, just put whatever you want and (2) pictures…no need to form your thoughts into any kind of rational form because a picture paints a thousand words. So with no further ado…here are some pictures I would like to share.

(1) Schmocktoberfestive (Schmocktoberfest IV)!

The winner of the pumpkin carving contest...if you couldn't tell the party took place during the MLB World Series...even though the Tigers lost I'm still proud of them

I don't have a good picture of the best costume winners (however I will give congrats to Mike and Karen on their costume) so I'll show this penguin

(2) Trip to Tampa Bay

Here I'll share a quick story....I went to Tampa Bay for a conference just before Thanksgiving. It was suppose to be a nice "break" from the work I had been doing, but due to some interesting timing I actually had to take an exam while at the conference. The professor that is teaching my class was also going so while I was down there he just gave me the exam and I took it in the hotel room. Also while the pictures show a nice looking city it actually is completely empty...it took me over an hour to find a candy bar, which I had to purchase from a vending machine in a parking structure.

St. Pete Times Forum...home of the 2004 Stanley Cup winners. This is the view from the balcony in my hotel room.

This is another view from my balcony but looking out at the rest of the city...so you can tell I had a really nice view while taking my advanced acoustics exam

(3) You Discussed Me!

Ok this one isn't so much of an event but something that brings me a little bit of joy each time I have to go to the lab. While preparing for the experiment in Memphis Ciara and I would have some play time in the lab (above you see her trying to stump me at a game of hangman), and one day she said the phrase "you discussed me." Seriously say it out loud...it cracks me up. Thankfully no one will earse the hangman or the "you discussed me" from the blackboard so it still gives me a laugh when I go down there.

Conrats Rey and Tom

I have several things that I want to post, but for now I'll just send out my congrats to my sister Rey and Tom who got engaged over Thanksgiving. I thought something was odd during the Thanksgiving dinner when my dad asked Tom to say grace...then Tom said a nice prayer and then had everyone say two things that they are thankful for. We went around the table and Tom went last. He said he was thankful for our family welcoming him into our family and then for my sister. It was at this point that it dawned on me that he was going to propose...my instinct was to say "oh you're going to propose." Fortunately I didn't blow the moment by opening my mouth. It was very nice, and Tom welcome to the family.

Tom and my sister Renee'

Politics of Science

I spent the day sitting at a 10 hour long meeting in which I received plenty of criticism (well it wasn’t directed at me personally, but I take full responsibility for the data I collected and that was being “attacked”). First off I’ll admit that it was hard on my pride to have my mistakes criticized in an open forum for 10 hours…especially since I’ve been doing this on a daily basis for most of the past week since these problems first surfaced. Apart from my personal annoyance with this aspect, I also lost some interest in research as a career path. I love doing research, but I’m pretty sure that I love it for reasons separate from the majority.

This meeting was just like the last one I attended in which the lions share of the talk was criticizing the experiments (mind you the previous meeting the experiment hadn’t even started yet). This seems odd to me because the “objective” of the program was to produce computer simulations that could predict our results, which in the end one was in the ballpark while the other was out in left field. Now I fully admit that I have many errors that still need to be sorted out (that was a given when I have weeks to process a years worth of data), but the trends of the data are not going to be totally different no matter how long I stare at the data files. The general approach was to assume that if the experimental data didn’t match the simulations the experiment must be wrong, but it was already given that the code neglected certain physical phenomena that we showed was present…my question at the end of the day is why did their data match so many conditions.

I then went back to the hotel to get some sleep before starting day 2 of these meetings (the 2nd day should be much easier than the 1st). I fell asleep contemplating the above points when I was awaken by my phone (I actually thought it was my alarm since I use my phone as an alarm clock when on the road and started getting ready for the day only to realize it was 10pm not 6:30am). At this point I was too awake to go back to sleep and decided to do a little reading. I began reading “Christianity and Literature”, a paper C.S. Lewis wrote in Theology. What he wrote about literature, I think, illustrates the cause of some of my frustrations with research.

“The Christian will take literature a little less seriously than the cultured Pagan…The unbeliever is always apt to make a kind of religion of his aesthetic experiences…The real frivolity, the solemn vacuity, is all with those who make literature a self-existent thing to be valued for its own sake.”

Lewis then at the end of his paper contrasts the unbelievers created “religion” associated with his craft to that of a believer portrayed in Paradiso.

“…Pope Gregory, arrived in Heaven, discovered that his theory of the hierarchies, on which presumably he had taken pains, was quite wrong. We are told how the redeemed soul behaved; it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.”

The connection between these excerpts and my story may not be obvious, but trust me there is a point. In my view I only pursue research because I’m interested solely in better understanding God’s creation. So my attitude about the meeting is hey lets be honest with the situation, everyone did some really impressive work, but the bottom line is “blah blah blah” (I’ll spare you any specifics here). To everyone else they are even better aware of the bottom line than I am, but it is more important to them that it is shown just how good their work really was. Their main interest being that while this technology was feasible it is important to show the sponsors that they really are good at what they do and hopefully get more money from them for a different project. Now I’ll admit that they have every right and probably even an obligation to do this, but for me this whole “game” is a waste of time and effort. I’ve known this for awhile, but today was one of those days that the fact that stupid politics will have to be dealt with in order to get funding to do research. Thus I’m left with the dilemma of whether my love for research out weights my hatred towards politics.

....also I'll share a short quote from Lewis that I felt like sharing because why not (man I should have made this into a list so I this totally unrelated quote won't stand out).

Walter Hooper (friend of Lewis) told Lewis about an epitaph on someone's tombstone that read "Here lies an atheist, all dressed up but with nowhere to go." To which Lewis replied: "I bet he wishes that were so."

Schedule

My schedule is all out of whack…or maybe a better way of saying it is that I don’t have a schedule. There is no structure to my week, and there is a major advantage to working late a night (no one else is awake so I can be tasks to do stupid side jobs). As a result I usually start off getting up around 8:30am on Monday (I have class at 9:30am), then each day I’ll work later and later. Two nights ago I worked till 4am, last night I worked till 5:30am, and tonight I might even hit 6am. The only real problem with this is that I have class at 9:30am on Friday. So each week by the time Friday hits I’m completely exhausted, which is a real problem when like last week I had a midterm exam.

As a result I’ve been contemplating developing a new “schedule.” The idea would be to change from a 24 hour day to a 25 hour and 40 minute day. That way every two weeks I would start over on my schedule, and the real plus is that I would pick up a day of work every two weeks. I really think this would be easy able to implement because in a two week period I have less than 10 hours of scheduled appointments (class and meetings).

Evolutionary Timeline

Previously I wrote an entry on the evolution debate in which I simply purposed that we leave the evolution topic alone with school kids. I also said that I won’t criticize evolutionary theory directly because there wasn't anyone to argue their side…well I guess I’m going to make a criticism now. However this will only be a response to an article written by the California Academy of Sciences so they initiated it. I picked this article because it has been brought to my attention a few times this week. After my buddy Tommie sent it to me I had two separate conversations with Sherry about it and I heard Bob Dutko discuss it on his talk show. For those interested click here to read the article...it's pretty short.

In the article they discuss the discovery of a T-rex thigh bone in Montana. The bone was so large that they had to break it in half to transport. When they broke it open they found soft tissue that included blood vessels, bone cells, and possibly blood cells. They than claim that this tissue is 70 million years old…alright with such a claim they must have some plausible explanation of how soft tissue could have lasted so long without either fossilizing or decaying. Well it basically avoids this point completely until at the very end of the article when it asks the question, will we be able to clone a T-rex? Their response… “Probably not – most scientists believe that DNA cannot survive for 70 million years. Then again, before this discovery, most scientists believed that soft tissue could not survive for 70 million years either.”

Evolutionist claim that it is the Christian’s that lack objectivity because of their beliefs, but they make this discover and never even consider the possibility that dinosaurs didn’t live 70 million years ago. The problem is that if an evolutionist considers this possibility than then it doesn’t allow enough time for evolution to “get lucky” and produce complexity. I could certainly go off on how mind blowing it is to believe that a theory that requires order to be produce from disorder (contrary to all scientific observations) can be considered scientific fact beyond any doubt. Heck not even order but actual information…order implies that simple repeated patterns form, but evolution has to produce DNA which is actual information. Let me illustrate the difference with an example...a simple pattern would be "INININ", but information is a nonuniform pattern that conveys a thought such as the word INFORMATION...no repeated pattern but ordered symbols to convey a thought. Those that study DNA basically describe it as a library of information written in a 4 letter chemical alphabet and it takes between 1200 and 2000 “letters” to build a single protein.

Honestly there is even plenty of other evidence to support dinosaurs and humans being on earth at the same time…this of coarse would leave no room for even an evolutionist to claim that dinosaurs lived so long ago (well maybe I give them too much credit because when they found a prehistoric creature several years ago they called it a "living fossil"). If dinosaurs and humans are separated in time by millions of years than how is it possible that in every culture around the world there are stories about dragons. Why would primitive cultures that never saw a large reptilian creature walk on earth all have stories about them and paint similar pictures of them that resemble dinosaurs…well I guess once again luck must have played a role. There are also stories of them recorded from only about 4000 years ago found in the Bible (Job 40:15 – 41:34). Obviously at this time the term dinosaur did not exist (it was invented in the 1800s), but in the book two very large beasts (the behemoth and the leviathan) are described in great detail. Some have claimed that the behemoth was simply a hippopotamus, but it says the tail sways like a cedar tree…well unless some really fast evolution has taken place on them in the last few thousand years a hippopotamus tail looks much more like a wet noodle than a cedar tree.

Well if you couldn’t tell this topic causes some frustration for me…why don’t we just look at the evidence and draw logical conclusions based on it. Then we test those conclusions over and over to confirm or disprove the hypothesis…you know science. Some time in the future I hope to write an entry on my feelings about science in general, but for now I’ll just stop at this.