Back of the Envelope

Sluggy Freelance -- Alt-Kiki has come over to the dark side--which she was never very far from. Torg comes up with a daring plan, but then decides he isn't quite daring enough when he discovers that he's suddenly become the most hunted man on the planet. And it turns out that Alt-Riff built the retreat-bot just a bit too well when he and Alt-Zoe run into the resistaunce--which is run by people who were kitty food in our universe.

Day by Day -- Sam accidentally sends a virus to the team, causing much consternation. Reagan's funeral is a major topic of discussion among the group.

It's Walky! -- Jason kicks butt! I sure hope he survives the upcoming sure-to-be tragic ending to It's Walky!

College Roomies from Hell!!! -- Dave sneaks back into the facility using his wits and his eye-lasers, while Marsha lets slip Roger's secret to Diana.

General Protection Fault -- Maddie and Sharon take on the henchwomen, while Fooker is pinned down by Dr. Not.

Schlock Mercenary -- After much contemplation, and nudging from Breya, Tagon comes up with a plan for the little ones. Meanwhile, Kevyn hasn't gotten the fabber quite up and running yet.

Joe Carter points out something that seems obvious to us professional science types: scientists have a tendency to hype their own areas of research, glossing over difficulties. There are various reasons for this.

First, as Joe mentions, there's the money angle. For some fields, the potential for entrepreneurial success teaches scientists salesmanship. For most scientists, however, it's a matter of writing grant proposals in order to convince government and industry funders that you can do the research that they want. That money doesn't usually go directly into your paycheck, but it does allow you to hire more graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, to buy more equipment, and overall to do better research. That, in turn, brings you the more important coin of academic research: prestige. The better the funding, the easier it is to do better research, publishing more papers. Now, when discussing your research among your peers, overhyping your work can have a detrimental effect on prestige, so you need to be a little less enthusiastic in your peer-reviewed papers, but not too unenthusiastic. When you're talking to sponsors, however, you're a salesman, and that means putting a positive spin on things.

Second, when all you have is a hammer, all you see is nails. Most scientists went into their respective fields because they saw potential in it. They don't give up their initial optimism easily. So they are always looking at problems and wondering whether their particular field can help. It may be true that some other field is more likely to solve the problem first, but no scientist understands--or trusts--other fields as well as he does his own. His natural inclination is to think that his research holds the most potential to help, and it takes a bit to convince him otherwise. My particular specialty is superconductivity, and for a long time now, it's been a solution in search of a problem. I'm just hoping that quantum computation is finally it.

Intolerant Elle reports on Reagan's funeral procession here.

I use Netscape's free e-mail service as my non-work e-mail account. When I started this morning, I couldn't send e-mail through Netscape's server. So I spent the morning modifying and deleting and restoring files, making things even worse, until I reached the conclusion that the problem was probably on Netscape's end. Then I spent the first part of the afternoon fixing the stuff I had broken. Now, having spent all that time, I still can't send e-mail through netscape's server. But at least it's in no worse shape than it was this morning.

Sigh... On the whole, not time well spent.

Parablemania directed me to this wonderful post at Evangelical Outpost (which I had overlooked previously). I guess I wasn't the only one who noticed that the VRWC* dropped the ball on this one. The problem was that we forgot to tell that gullible Bush that we didn't really mean all that stuff about liberating Iraq and finding Saddam's WMDs. You know he's not all that smart, and sometimes he forgets that he's not really in charge.

*Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, the ones who really are in charge. The Neocon Cabal is just our scapegoat.

The Christian Carnival is now posted at Christ Web. Check out what other Christian bloggers are saying.

Old Post: I considered the question of how eternal security from the perspective of God being outside of time below.

John Zimmer at Letters from Babylon has further thoughts on what it means if God is outside of time and we are not.

Pete Abrams mocks the UN again this week. (For a bit of background, start here. For a lot of background, try here.) While Pete usually tries to avoid politics, and has in fact blasted Guatanamo Bay in the past, strips like this one and this give the impression that Pete has a low opinion of the UN.

Jeremy Frank at Letters from Babylon briefly touches on the question of whether the concept of free will is compatible with the concept of eternal security. He argues that it is, even though he's a Calvinist and thus doesn't feel much need to make that argument.

I've always been an advocate for free will rather than predestination myself, although in recent years I've begun to wonder whether this is one of those doctrinal disputes where both sides are equally right, in that they aren't at all. I won't go into that right now (you may consider C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 4, "Morality and Psychoanalysis," for one of the ideas that is shaping my thinking in this), but I will make this tricky question even trickier.

I've always thought that it makes more sense to consider God outside of time, unconfined by its constraints, and that His view of us is not a linear one. We humans tend to think of our lives linearly: we go from point A to point B, and that leads us to the conclusion that when it comes to your relationship with God, it doesn't matter where you've been for most of your life, what matters is where you are when you die. That's what really counts. And so the criminal who stole and raped and murdered, if he repents on the way to the electric chair, is saved. What of the minister, who preached and cared for the sick and loved his neighbor, who at the end of his life finds himself in poverty, loneliness, and despair, and in his twilight years loses his faith and dies in bitterness? Do we give him up? Does God?

If God looks on our lives as a whole, does He view our salvation as a turning point, as we do, or as a high point? Is faithlessness and disbelief worse for being on one side of that point than the other? Here's where I'll run counter to my own argument and say that it is, since from our point of view, our linear point of view, it is worse. If a child takes a toy from a store without understanding he is stealing, we don't see it as a crime. If a teenager does the same thing, we do, not because the teenager is older, but because he knows better. Rejection of God after salvation is worse than rejection before not because it's on the other side, but because before you didn't know God to reject Him, and now you do. But if God sees our lives as a whole, is that much worse crime of rejection by one who knows Him enough to negate earlier faithfulness? We might consider it so, but then, we live linear lives, and to us the rejection is more recent than the faithfulness. If it is no more recent to God than the faithfulness, then would He see it the same way?

Okay, that's enough making hard questions harder for today.

Ronald Reagan died this past Saturday at the age of 93. He had been suffering from Alzheimer's for a decade, and while we mourn his passing, we are thankful that he is finally at peace.

Reagan was the first president I was aware of, and at the time, it was hard for me to imagine that there was ever any other. I was six when Ronald Reagan took office, and as I don't remember anything about the Carter administration, I think it's fair to say that I grew up with him as president. My parents were moderate Southern Baptists (which would mean fairly conservative to anyone else). While my father liked Reagan, my mother didn't think he was all that smart. We lived in some fairly liberal parts of the country for most of that time, and the outright scorn many of my peers felt for Reagan made it difficult for me to hold him in high esteem. I remember in the 1984 election, where all the kids in my class were talking about how their parents would vote for Mondale. I was astounded when my father told me he was voting for Reagan and explained to me what a good job he was doing. I had never thought about it before, and only now can I see how true that was.

I remember hearing about how during the Clinton campaign, during a townhall meeting, one of the audience stood up and said the World War 2 generation just couldn't understand how horrible it had been to grow up under the threat of nuclear war. Frankly, I wondered what he was talking about. I grew up under that threat, and while I was vaguely aware of it, I didn't spend much time worrying about it. Part of that was religious belief--"Of course the world is going to end someday, but God is in control" summed up my attitude then and now--but I think part of it was Reagan as well. I grew up knowing that the US was strong, so that the Soviet Union wouldn't dare attack us with nuclear weapons, and that it was good, so that we would never launch a nuclear first strike. Considering how many people in the previous decades had believed exactly the opposite on both counts, I have to credit that attitude to Reagan, his optimism and his faith.

When the cold war ended, I was as astounded as anyone. Who knew that the Soviet Union was so weak? Well, it turns out that Reagan knew, and even though I had appreciated his optimism, I had become too cynical to believe that he had been right. But he was, and the pressure he placed on the USSR is what brought it down. I believe that communism is an inherently flawed political and economic model, and I suppose the Soviet Union would have eventually failed anyway, but without Reagan and the will to bring the might of the US to bear on the USSR's weak infrastructure, it might have taken decades, and who knows how many more millions communism would have oppressed and killed in the meantime?

I owe Reagan a debt of gratitude, both for the hopefulness with which I grew up, and for bringing the greatest threat to the US and the world in that age to an end. Rest in peace, Mr. President.

I missed a week for this, so here's my two-week review.

Papers published -- I give full references for a couple of my published papers... I had mentioned them earlier, but they were still in the publication process

Peace in the Sudan? -- Another Bush foreign policy success.

Americans Killed by Middle-Eastern Terrorism -- I look at some statistics and try, without much success to find trends.

Partisan prayer -- Some thoughts on praying about politics, along with an exception.

Bible Translations -- My comments on the Biblical translation discussion in the blogosphere.

Second Revision Done -- The second revision of A Phoenix in Darkness has been done for a week now. You'll hopefully get a chance to read it soon.

Hey, I won! -- My entry to the Captain's caption contest wins. Cool!

Good books nobody's read -- My thoughts on unknown but talented writers, in response to Dean's thoughts.

Publishing A Phoenix in Darkness -- I show off my mad drawing skillz.

Scientists speaking out -- Scientists annoy me. Not people who do science--I'm one of those--but those who claim to speak for all of science.

Americans Killed by Middle Eastern Terrorists, Part II -- I take another look at the data, this time counting attacks rather than deaths, and a trend becomes clearer.