Jon's Notes
Call 211 for Social Services?
Has anyone else ever heard of 211? I just learned about it tonight. It apparently is like 911, just for social services.
Contemporary Worship Revisited
Most of my experiences with so called contemporary worship have left me thinking that it is hollow and empty. Let's see if tonight will be any different. I am attending Haven (Concordia's evening contemporary praise event) for two reasons. The first being concentric circles. Namely that many of the people who I know attend. Most of those people are positive representatives of Christ. Secondly, I need the fellowship. After all, the seed still dies if it has plenty of water, but no soil in which to take root. So, for tonight I will ignore the sound quality (you don't need to be loud if you are good.) and stop second guessing the motives of the musicians and participants, which I should anyway since only God can judge the heart.
Well, the first song was not vapors.
That was interesting. Tonight was enough to convince me to go back next week.
No caffeine after noon
New personal rule: no caffeine after noon. Especially no cappuccino at 7 PM. I can't sleep. Not even Tom Paine's
Age of Reason put me to sleep.
Yes, I just read it. It was mentioned in
Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About in an example on random sampling and the Bible. Let me quote Dr. Knuth:
[…] many of his comments can be seen today as valid criticisms of 18th century Bible interpretation. But in general, he went way overboard in his argument. For example, here's one of the things Tom Paine said:
When we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God.
My sample of 3:16 verses shows that in this respect, at least, he was dead wrong. You have to work very hard to imagine that even 5% of those verses have anything at all to do with what he claimed occupies more than half of the Bible.
I got the feeling that Mr. Paine based much of his book on stereotypes and hearsay—one of the very reasons that he was panning the Bible. At the same time, quite a few of his comments about church corruption ring true. Perhaps the church organizations are simply more corrupt when they are a government agency—such as in France before the revolution. Either way, that is what happens when a group focuses on contemporary implementation rather than on the source document.
I'm going to need to re‐read some of my books on punctuation, because I can't help but feel like I'm misusing dashes and commas.
Status update
Hello everyone, it has been a while. I just reading
Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About by Donald Knuth. I listened to the lectures when they were first posted online, but reading the lecture in print gave me more time to process. It gave me much food for though, but I don't have time to write about it just now. I have quite a mindful between Dr. Knuth and Guy Steele's comments.
School is progressing at as slow a pace as usual, but I am rediscovering why I came here in the first place. It is quite moving and is another thing that I should write about.
That Infamous Party
The Journal Sentinel is
reporting on a party at
CUW's apartments.
I was at the apartment in question yesterday working on their school provided data network. Having been at the apartment in question, I'd like to know how they fit 58 people in one apartment.
This is really quite disappointing, both towards the students and the school. It is disappointing that the students were not more mature, especially considering their seniority. It is also disappointing that Res Life was not more discriminating in their resident placement.