My sister has a blog – at this stage tracking her German holidays (on a scholarship) – if you like it when I try to write wry observational posts, but would prefer them to be funny – then you should check it out.
Izaac has started a Pixar watch blog in his holidays.
I’ve registered a domain for my own holiday project – watch this space.
Did you miss me? The Sunshine Coast was rainy. We read books and slept. We went out for dinner twice. I played Playstation. I watched Ninja Assassin (Very violent, the JB Hifi guy told me not to bother, I loved it – though you probably won’t. Limbs were flying everywhere.). The PM got ousted. We watched World Cup matches. I cooked Master Chef style hash browns.All these factors, combined with time spent hanging out with my hot wife, made the week almost perfect. We came home in time for me to take the field for Kustard FC – a game we won 7-3. If Manly had managed to belt the Panthers it would have been a perfect week.
How about you? Did you miss me?
Hey all. I’m taking a well earned break. Blogging will be sporadic, if it happens at all this week. Feel free to play in the comments.
Al Mohler is the thinking evangelical’s favourite Southern Baptist, he’s reformed, he’s intelligent, he’s eloquent. He seems like a nice guy. But in a talk at the Ligonier Ministries conference in the US he basically did the anti-Wattke (Wattke was the OT scholar who moved institutions after publishing his views on the possibility that Genesis 1 might be compatible with evolutionary theory). Mohler (as reported at Challies.com) says it’s not. And furthermore, that not holding to a young earth, 6 day, 24 hour, view of creation leads to theological disaster.
If there’s one thing I dislike more than stupid theological debates that can’t be resolved, it’s people who make such debates the yardstick of theological orthodoxy. There are people I love, and respect, on both sides of this debate. And I’m pretty sick of posts like this that caricature opposing views in order to attack them. There’s a word for that logical fallacy. It’s a strawman.
Here’s the first “strawman” from Challies’ post – it’s a rebranding of the “literary theory” that is pretty narrow, and doesn’t look like the literary theory any reformed evangelical I know holds to while questioning the function of Genesis 1-11:
“The literary theory. Here we take the first eleven chapters of Genesis as literary, understanding that the Creation story is merely myth, a story as understood by ancient Hebrews.”
It’s almost never held to be “merely myth” – any literary theorists will affirm essentially the same theological truths as the six day young earth adherent. This is a nasty carricature that pays no heed to the complexities of the debate, and certainly rules out any knowledge that we may bring to the text based on ancient Hebrew literature…
Mohler’s (or Challies’) conclusion based on that first strawman is another fallacy:
“The literary theory has to be rejected out-of-hand since it otherwise contradicts inerrancy. We cannot hold to a robust theory of biblical inerrancy and interpret the chapters in this way.”
Why does reading the Bible as literature, or at the very least, pondering the genre of the received text, rule out a “robust theory of biblical inerrancy”? It seems that by including the qualifiers “robust” in this sentence, and “merely” in the first, Mohler can dismiss anybody who agrees with him 90% of the way by lumping them in with the people who disagree with him 100% of the way. This shouldn’t be a question of semantics – a “plain reading” of Mohler’s views is that unless you hold to a young earth six day creation you think the Bible is an errant myth. This just isn’t true of most of the reformed guys I’ve read this year (and in the past) when it comes to disagreements on Genesis 1. Every big name in American reformed circles seems to have a different view on the question – Piper, Driscoll, Mohler, Keller… the reason thoughtful people reach different conclusions is simple – we weren’t there at creation (and neither was Moses), we weren’t there when Genesis was written, and any postulation on the question of the mechanics of creation (past the “God did it by his word” idea) is purely speculative. It’s guesswork. Some guesses may be more educated than others. But to make this some sort of yardstick for theological orthodoxy is perilously stupid.
This is the kind of issue people lose their jobs over. Because of this ludicrous desire to see the issue at front and centre. The bit I think is the most frustrating is the clamouring over the “reformed” label for your view – as though disagreement on the issue is new. Here’s what Calvin said (in a commentary on Genesis 1:16), if you want to be reformed you at the very least want to be agreeing with Calvin. Right?
“I have said, that Moses does not here subtly descant, as a philosopher, on the secrets of nature, as may be seen in these words. First, he assigns a place in the expanse of heaven to the planets and stars; but astronomers make a distinction of spheres, and, at the same time, teach that the fixed stars have their proper place in the firmament. Moses makes two great luminaries; but astronomers prove, by conclusive reasons that the star of Saturn, which on account of its great distance, appears the least of all, is greater than the moon. Here lies the difference; Moses wrote in a popular style things which without instruction, all ordinary persons, endued with common sense, are able to understand; but astronomers investigate with great labor whatever the sagacity of the human mind can comprehend.”
I’m not sure if this sort of view of the world is a blessing or a curse, ignorance is bliss right?
Via Abtruse Goose.
The World Cup has been producing ample fodder for one of my favourite games (which is probably pretty frustrating for other people) I like to call it “hey that guy looks like…”
Here’s an example. The Dutch manager Bert Van Marwijk looks almost exactly like former WWE wrestler Ric Flair…
In unrelated television – Master Chef regular Neil Perry looks exactly like Steven Seagal.
Especially when the latter plays a chef in Under Siege:
Here are Neil Perry’s knife skills on display (in text form) from a Q&A on taste.com.au:
“I love the way you cook and no matter how I try I can’t chop herbs fast or very fine without cutting my fingers. Can you give me some tips on how to chop as well as you do?”
The main thing to remember is to use a slicing action with your knife as opposed to a chopping action. By this, I mean keep the tip of the knife firmly glued to the board and cut/slice in flowing movements. Also, keep your finger tips tucked out of the way at all times. Use the middle knuckle of your fingers as a guide for your knife to lean against and make sure that any part of your fingers below that knuckle are tucked in.
And here, for your viewing pleasure (though it’s probably M rated) are Steven Seagal’s knife skills on display.
And, in a bizarre twist, St-Eutychus has a world exclusive linking the two men, and perhaps establishing that they are in fact the same person…
Neil Perry is the leading Australian endorser of a Japanese brand of knives called Shun knives. Shun knives are made by the Kai Corporation, who in America trade as Kershaw Knives, who just happen to be the manufacturers of the knife Steven Seagal designed.
That’s right. Same knife company. Same hairstyle. Same face. Same Asian flavour. Same person… you be the judge…
Do you have any World Cup lookalikes for me?
Speech to text recognition software is one of personal computing’s final frontiers. The dream of sitting in a room and talking to your computer (and having it understand, compute, and respond accordingly) is, apparently, unlikely to ever become an actual reality. The problems are manifold – the biggest problems being that words are aurally ambiguous and we instinctively translate them based on context and expression, and that certain words have an array of meanings.
Here are a couple of snippets from this fascinating article, that ends up being more about language than voice recognition (you might also notice a couple of things I’ve posted recently in that article).
In 2001 recognition accuracy topped out at 80%, far short of HAL-like levels of comprehension. Adding data or computing power made no difference. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University checked again in 2006 and found the situation unchanged. With human discrimination as high as 98%, the unclosed gap left little basis for conversation. But sticking to a few topics, like numbers, helped. Saying “one” into the phone works about as well as pressing a button, approaching 100% accuracy. But loosen the vocabulary constraint and recognition begins to drift, turning to vertigo in the wide-open vastness of linguistic space…
Many spoken words sound the same. Saying “recognize speech” makes a sound that can be indistinguishable from “wreck a nice beach.” Other laughers include “wreck an eyes peach” and “recondite speech.” But with a little knowledge of word meaning and grammar, it seems like a computer ought to be able to puzzle it out. Ironically, however, much of the progress in speech recognition came from a conscious rejection of the deeper dimensions of language. As an IBM researcher famously put it: “Every time I fire a linguist my system improves.” But pink-slipping all the linguistics PhDs only gets you 80% accuracy, at best…
Researchers have also tried to endow computers with knowledge of word meanings. Words are defined by other words, to state the seemingly obvious. And definitions, of course, live in a dictionary. In the early 1990s, Microsoft Research developed a system called MindNet which “read” the dictionary and traced out a network from each word out to every mention of it in the definitions of other words.
Words have multiple definitions until they are used in a sentence which narrows the possibilities. MindNet deduced the intended definition of a word by combing through the networks of the other words in the sentence, looking for overlap. Consider the sentence, “The driver struck the ball.” To figure out the intended meaning of “driver,” MindNet followed the network to the definition for “golf” which includes the word “ball.” So driver means a kind of golf club. Or does it? Maybe the sentence means a car crashed into a group of people at a party.
To guess meanings more accurately, MindNet expanded the data on which it based its statistics much as speech recognizers did. The program ingested encyclopedias and other online texts, carefully assigning probabilistic weights based on what it learned. But that wasn’t enough. MindNet’s goal of “resolving semantic ambiguities in text,” remains unattained. The project, the first undertaken by Microsoft Research after it was founded in 1991, was shelved in 2005.
Throw three delusional patients of a mental institution together in a locked room and conversation is likely to be awkward. But if you put three with the same delusion in a room it’s a recipe for trouble. Even if a three of them think they’re the messiah… But when you put a psychologist who has a bit of a god complex in the mix bizarre things happen. Here’s the story of the story of “The Three Christs of Ypsilanti”…
“Frustrated by psychology’s focus on what he considered to be peripheral beliefs, like political opinions and social attitudes, Rokeach wanted to probe the limits of identity. He had been intrigued by stories of Secret Service agents who felt they had lost contact with their original identities, and wondered if a man’s sense of self might be challenged in a controlled setting. Unusually for a psychologist, he found his answer in the Bible. There is only one Son of God, says the good book, so anyone who believed himself to be Jesus would suffer a psychological affront by the very existence of another like him. This was the revelation that led Rokeach to orchestrate his meeting of the Messiahs and document their encounter in the extraordinary (and out-of-print) book from 1964, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti…
very little seems to shift the identities of the self-appointed Messiahs. They debate, argue, at one point come to blows, but show few signs that their beliefs have become any less intense. Only Leon seems to waver, eventually asking to be addressed as “Dr Righteous Idealed Dung” instead of his previous moniker of “Dr Domino dominorum et Rex rexarum, Simplis Christianus Puer Mentalis Doctor, reincarnation of Jesus Christ of Nazareth.” Rokeach interprets this more as an attempt to avoid conflict than a reflection of any genuine identity change. The Christs explain one another’s claims to divinity in predictably idiosyncratic ways: Clyde, an elderly gentleman, declares that his companions are, in fact, dead, and that it is the “machines” inside them that produce their false claims, while the other two explain the contradiction by noting that their companions are “crazy” or “duped” or that they don’t really mean what they say.”
And this blog is here to tell you why not… You Are Not So Smart.
This is one of my favoruites – the myth of not conforming to capitalism by buying non-mass market products.
“You needed to self actualize, to find your own way, and you sought out something real, something with meaning. You waved your hand at popular music, popular movies, and popular television. You dug deeper and disparaged all those mindless sheeple who gobbled up pop culture.
Yet, you still listened to music and bought shirts and went to see movies. Someone was appealing to you despite your dissent.
If you think you can buy your way to individuality, well, you are not so smart.
Since the 1940s, when capitalism and marketing married psychology and public relations, the free market has been getting much better and more efficient at offering you something to purchase no matter your taste.”
Unknown bands are a special sort of commodity. Living in a loft downtown, wearing clothes from the thrift store, watching the independent film no one has heard of – these provide a special social status which can’t be bought as easily as the things offered to the mainstream.
In the 1960s, it took months before someone figured out they could sell tie-dyed shirts and bell bottoms to anyone who wanted to rebel. In the 1990s, it took weeks to start selling flannel shirts and Doc Martens to people in the Deep South. Now, people are hired by corporations to go to bars and clubs and predict what the counter culture is into and have it on the shelves in the cool stores right as it becomes popular.
If, like me, you’ve been up late at night watching the World Cup and you’re finding it hard to adjust to life without the drone of the vuvuzela – then I have a solution for you. Use this site as the gateway for your browsing and you can add the monotonous (in b flat) buzz of the Vuvuzela to any web page.
Here’s St Eutychus with Vuvuzela.
The Keanu Reeves meme is gathering steam. Someone, somewhere, introduced this photo of Keanu looking very sad to the picture:
And the previously reported “Thank You Keanu” movement has become “Cheer up Keanu” day (Facebook Event).
Here’s the photo in various forms. Because this is what the collective power of the Internet produces… and here’s a sample.
Now if only Chuck Norris would send him a message of support.
Gladwell is a phenomenon. His books sell like hotcakes. He’s a compelling storyteller and he uses this ability to stitch together anecdotes and essays in a cohesive way. His books are famous for pushing one big idea using several supporting examples presented in an amusing and engaging way.
Here are eight tips for writing like Gladwell. In sum:
1. “Your book is actually going to be a collection of essays drawn together by a loose thread” – You should start writing a bunch of essays about loosely connectected topics.
2. “Each of your essays is going to revolve around a single idea” – Conveniently, these idea then become a chapter.
3. “Illustrate the idea with stories about real people” – Everybody likes a story about real people (this works with media releases too).
4. “Get a professor” – find an expert who is willing to put their names to conjecture and unproven theories, present them as fact.
5. “Best to have some sad stories to illustrate your points well” – You need to balance out all the success stories with stories of people who have failed because they haven’t embraced Gladwell’s concept.
6. “Give things names and remember Douglas Adams’ rule of capital letters” – basically give the concepts you’ve come up with names, catchy names, expressed best by the power of proper nouns.
7. “Don’t fret too much about accuracy, concentrate on telling a good story” – some of Gladwell’s work has been shown to be either based on conjecture or old wives’ tales.
8. “Don’t worry about the new, new thing” – some of Gladwell’s ideas are from papers or events more than ten years ago.
Out of ten:
I can’t even remember who the other player for New South Wales was. He must have been invisible. If more than three of these players are picked next year we’ll lose again.
I take great pride in being a coffee snob, but I’m not one of those people who complies copious volumes of “tasting notes” trying to identify nuanced flavours like berry, or citrus, or caramel, or dark chocolate. But if you want to be that type of person, in any field of gastrononomy, here are some tips.
