Contradictions in Educational Messages
The following post was written while I sat in class earlier tonight.
I’m sitting here bored out of my mind. My professor is attached to the old style of teaching. The teacher stands at the front of the class and talks for hours on end while using an old overhead projector. For some unknown reason, the software on his computer will not work with the projector. I find that hard to believe. Projectors are atheistic when it comes to software. Their job is to display images, not whether a computer is running Office 2007 or not. Anyway back to my rant.
There is no class discussion. No one is asking questions. I look around the room and I can count on one hand, the number of people that are actually engaged in this lecture. Most people are doing what I’m doing. We wait until the professor moves the paper and then we copy down the next fews words. Then we go back to our secondary tasks to keep us occupied. It will be another 10 minutes before he moves to the next section on the transparency. I think one guy is watching tv on his smartphone. It doesn’t help my mood that the paper I had written for tonight became corrupted and I lost the entire paper. Yes, I waited till the last minute to write it and print it out. Regardless, I would have lost it because I saved it to my USB drive.
Why is this professor reinforcing these one-sided teaching techniques to those who will be going out to continue the education process in our churches? Not everyone learns best by having someone lecture to them for 2 and a half hours. I learn best by taking things apart and working with my hands. I learn visually. I learn by discussing. It’s no wonder I have a hard time getting motivated for classes like this. Lectures and papers are the course du jour in school. I understand that at times you have to suck it up and do what’s required of you. However, it feels like a contradiction to be taught that we need to include all the learning styles when we teach yet they refuse to practice what they teach.
To be a byte or not a byte, that is the question.
I just finished the article, Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch, by John Tierney of the NY Times. He interviewed Nick Bostrom, an Oxford philosopher, who wrote Are You Living in a Computer Simulation. Bostrom contends that we are actually living in a simulation. Think the Matrix but there are no physical bodies for us. We are just programs in some giant computer. He is quoted as saying, “My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that is that there’s a 20 percent change we’re living in a computer simulation.”
Tierney thinks that percentage is higher. As Tierney went on to point out, this theory would help explain all the evil in the world. Some kid is mucking things up. I know when I played SimCity, I would become bored with building my city so I would send tornadoes and Godzilla attacks just to see what would happen.
The concept of morality was also discussed. If this life is just a simulation, is there a need for morality? David Chalmers, another philosopher proposes that even if this is a simulation we should still attempt to get into the good graces of the “Prime Designer.” Tierney used this name to refer to the person or thing running the simulation. Robin Hanson believes that the more interesting we are to the Prime Designer the more likely we’ll get to stick around for the next round of Space Invaders.
I come away from this article with two observations. People want to put their faith in something. They don’t want to put their faith in God so they dream up the idea of a computer running the show. The second observation is that God has set eternity in the hearts of man. Whether they want to admit it or not, each person knows that this world is not all there is. It’s sad, some people would prefer to believe they are a simulation and when the computer is turned off they simply disappear. Whereas, I believe that when I leave this life I’m headed for a place prepared for me where there is no evil, no pain and no tears.
Gag Reflex
For those with weak stomachs, you may want to skip this story. On my marathon trip to Cambodia, I started to feel queasy about an hour outside Phnom Penh. I eventually had to make use of the air sickness bag. After some trepidation, I returned to my seat. However, once I strapped in I felt the waves of sickness begin to hit me again and again. My stomach was devoid of any substance yet my body still felt there was something left to purge. I held the air sickness bag to my face as a precaution.
The smell began to overwhelm me and make me gag even more. I couldn’t bring myself to pull the bag away for too long, afraid of what might happen. So I found myself caught in a vicious cycle, inhaling pungent, horrid odors and gagging and heaving more and more as the minutes passed.
After we landed, I was delirious. I had no fluids in my system and I looked like death warmed over. After about three hours of sleep however, I was right as rain.
I use this illustration to describe in a very graphic way the idea Paul put forth in one of his letters.
“For we are to God the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing. To the one we are the smell of death; to the other, the fragrance of life.”
Do people catch a faint whiff of Christ or does he so ooze from my pores that I produce a spiritual gag reflex in their life? Sadly many of us produce no reaction either way. There is no middle ground in Paul’s words. We are the aroma of Christ and the power of Christ will force a reaction in a person’s life. They will either draw closer to God or harden their heart to God.
Observations from Cracker Barrel – Part 2
When you go to a restaurant by yourself you can either take something with you or you can find something in the restaurant to occupy your time. Restaurants are full of people having conversations and it is hard not overhear some of the conversations. One young family entertained me the whole evening. It was a husband and wife with their young son. The couple were in their early 20s and the boy was probably three or four. He was being a typical boy and squirming in his chair and running around the table.
The first episode occurred after the waitress brought out the drinks. I was working on some notes when I heard a small commotion. I glanced over and noticed the son had spilled his drink. There were two different responses from the parents. The mother over-reacted and couldn’t believe her son would be careless enough to spill his drink. The father simply looked at him and then got him out of the chair. Since the boy was covered in soda, the father took his son to the restroom.
The next interesting episode occurred a few minutes later. The two returned to the table with the father laughing. He relates the story that as they entered the restroom his son noticed the light switch. “What does this do,” he asked his father as he switched it off. The father went on to tell that as the room went pitch black he heard a man from one of the stalls yell out. At this point, a horrified look appeared on the mother’s face. She asked her son if this is what he did. The boy just smiled devilishly and shook his head. His father laughed the entire time. The mother shot her husband a look as if to say, “Don’t encourage this type of behavior.”
I came away from the episode with a few observations. One, the father had not grown up yet. When the waitress came out with a rag after the soda was spilled, the father simply stepped out of the way instead of taking the rag to clean up the mess himself. Also, in regards to the light switch incident, he shouldn’t have shown so much enjoyment out of the story in front of his son. Granted, it was a funny story but he should have waited to laugh with his wife about it later. The father’s actions had a direct link to the mother’s reactions. Because the father was being passive in just these small ways, she over-reacted and came off as the mother that wouldn’t allow any fun.
It just shows that in a relationship, when one person is not fulfilling their role, things go wrong. Many times the other person will take over both sets of responsibilities, because they don’t want things to fail. So one person is doing all the work and the resentment shows up in their actions and words. Sadly, this will fester for years and will lead to dysfunctional and even broken marriages and families.
Observations from Cracker Barrel – Part 1
After working 10 straight hours at Pizza Hut, I was dead on my feet. It was over 100 degrees outside and the inside temperature in the kitchen was 89 degrees. Most of the fatigue came from simply standing. You stand up washing dishes, folding boxes, cutting pizzas and making sauce. I learned when I spent a summer in Spain that my body can’t handle standing for more than a hour. My back begins to stiffen and it just makes me miserable. It is not excruciating pain but just enough to be annoying and constant.
Since I was feeling in such a state, I decided I did not want to cook once I got home. Then the best idea in the world came to mind. Sadly, it was not a cure for cancer. It was two wonderful words, common in their singleness, but once married would make any normal man weep. Cracker Barrel. Country cooking as they call it. Some would say home-cooking. According to Wikipedia, it would also be classified as soul food. My mother is a good cook but she never made many of the foods you find at the Barrel. So I sat myself down to a glass of sweet tea, chicken fried chicken with sawmill gravy, mashed potatoes, fried okra, and some buttermilk biscuits.
I have heard people talk of comfort food. I cannot say that eating chicken fried chicken makes me think of home or lowers my stress. If I am stressed I am more likely to just eat a pint or two of Blue Bell or Häagen-Dazs. I would classify my meal as comfort food in that it makes me think of a simpler time and place. A slower pace of life. It also does remind me of family trips traveling back and forth between Alabama. We would usually stop at the Cracker Barrel in Meridian, Mississippi.
As I was thinking about these things, it occurred to me that there is more than comfort food. There are common everyday occurrences that make us think of that “perfect” day or just some time in our past when “things were right with the world.” I remember distinctly such a time. I was spending my summer in Culican, Mexico. I was staying with a family and the house was always full. However, one Saturday morning I awoke to find the house empty. That was not the only oddity of the day. It was also raining. It wasn’t a hard rain but it was not a drizzle. It was just a good rain. I sat in the silent house, listening to the rain and catching that faint scent of rain in the air. That instantly transported me back to my childhood. I would sit and watch the rain and then decide to go play in it.
The human mind is amazing. A simple sight, smell, taste, or sound can transport you instantly to another time and place. It is good to stop from the busyness of life and enjoy a simple meal and let it nourish your soul and not just your body.
Unusual Preoccupations or Rituals
We all have our own “unusual preoccupations or rituals.” I often joke that I have OCD but none of my quirks stem from the need to offset anxiety. I just do them because I am odd. I noticed one such quirk this morning as I was getting dressed.
It is how I pick my socks. I have a drawer full of socks and they are not stored in any order. I simply dump the entire load of socks into a drawer. I have probably 20 pair of ankle high socks. Several pair are pushing five years old. They do not have holes but over the years the fabric has become very thin. I have about 10 pair of socks that are less than a year old. The fabric is much softer and they are not as dingy. The one easily distinguishing mark is that the newer socks have an orange stitching on the inside of the elastic band.
So every morning, I will dig through the entire drawer attempting to find two socks with orange stitching. When I am done, I also have a stack of reject socks. This process takes much longer on the mornings when I should have done laundry the day before. I end up with one acceptable sock and a pile of rejects. Now it would be unacceptable to mix the good sock with an old sock, so I drop the good sock and try to find two passable second-class socks.
Now good sense would tell me to either give away the old socks or throw them away so I would only have socks with orange stitching. But I don’t. I’m usually in a hurry in the mornings. When I get home in the evenings, I don’t think about my obsession . So until I do something about this situation, I know that tomorrow morning I will be standing over the same drawer looking for socks with orange stitching.
Net Neutrality, Tubes, Dark Fiber and the 700Mhz Spectrum
Let me first begin by briefly describing the debate over Net Neutrality.
Side A: The Major Telecommunication Companies and anyone else that has spent billions of dollars laying fiber and copper lines over which billions of bits of information flow every second. This group thinks that companies like Google, Netflix, Amazon and Apple should pay an Internet Toll for using their cables. From my understanding the toll would be based on the amount of data sent over the wires. For someone like Google, which owns YouTube and makes billions on Internet search, this toll would severely cut into their profits.
Side B: Companies like Google, Netflix, Amazon, and Apple think the wires should be open and free just like the highway infrastructure in the United States. Consumers and businesses alike are able to use the highways for personal use and commercial gain.
This story has been brewing for over a year and the remarks I will mention are from June 2006. A particular set of remarks by Senator Ted Stevens came to mind when I was attempting to explain to my mother how email worked over the network. The Internet being “a series of tubes.” I thought I’d share some of my comments about his statements and let you read and hear for yourself.
I first heard Senator Ted Steven’s remarks on Net Neutrality on This Week in Tech – Episode 60. They only played about 5 minutes of the original 11 minute recording of Senator Steven’s comments. Upon listening to his comments I agreed, and still agree with the hosts that he does not have a clear view of how technology works. As I have listened to the entire clip I have come away with a few more observations.
One, it is usually best to stop and think before speaking. From the sound of it, someone on the committee got him riled up and he proceeded to rant for 11 minutes without making any sense. Two, it’s an old proverb, “Better to be silent and to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.” Three, he seems to oscillate between the two viewpoints. He just does not make a strong argument either way. Four, this is pure speculation but listening to his comments, it feels like he is fighting for lobbyists and not the greater good of the people. In an unrelated case to Net Neutrality, Senator Stevens is under investigation by the FBI and the IRS.
In Senator Stevens’ defense, Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. wrote an article titled, Senator Stevens is Not As Dumb as He Sounds, which discusses how Senator Stevens’ concepts are not too far off.
Oddly enough, while searching through my brother’s Flickr photos, I found this great illustration of Senator Stevens’ view of the Internet. Be sure to read the captions for a complete understanding of network connectivity.
Here are some of Senator Stevens’ comments, which originally appeared on Wired.com. I will interject some of my own comments. My comments will be in bold and Senator Stevens’ will be in italics.
I just the other day got, an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?
Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.
Ok, we have all sent an email to friends, family, or coworkers and it never arrived. It is not however because the Internet was clogged and needed a bottle of Drano Max. Bad cables, finicky servers, spam filters and a whole list of other reasons are to blame. Not clogged tubes.
So you want to talk about the consumer? Let’s talk about you and me. We use this Internet to communicate and we aren’t using it for commercial purposes.
We aren’t earning anything by going on that Internet. Now I’m not saying you have to or you want to discriminate against those people …
Apparently Senator Steven’s has not perused Ebay recently. There are tens of thousands of consumers using the Internet for commercial purposes. Granted, they are not using the amount of bandwidth of YouTube but Stevens’ argument is that there are just a few people using the Internet for commercial purposes. As someone that makes his living by developing web sites, I am earning money by “going on that Internet.”
They [companies like Google, Netflix, Amazon, & Apple] want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.
It’s a series of tubes.
And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
Here lies the infamous quote. There is a Wikipedia article devoted to this quote. This is where Net Neutrality comes into play. The Telcos and some members of Congress want these Internet companies to pay a toll to use “the tubes.” What they don’t understand is this will destroy the model the Internet was founded on and it completely messes with a free market system. If Google has to start paying millions of dollars in tolls, YouTube and Gmail will no longer be free. Netflix will have to do away with their on-demand video downloads. Apple’s cash cow, Itunes, will shrivel and die. They will have to charge more for song downloads and people will just go back to piracy.
Now we have a separate Department of Defense Internet now, did you know that?
Do you know why?
Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can’t afford getting delayed by other people.
I am not really sure why he threw the DOD into the mix but I’ll comment. The DOD has their separate network not because of a fear of hairy bits clogging the pipes. They have a separate network because they have classified documents they don’t want the public or foreign nations seeing.
So that is Net Neutrality in a nutshell and why we should not let the government muck with the Internet. In the end, Google may rule the world anyway. They have spent the last few years buying dark fiber around the country. Dark Fiber is fiber optic cabling that has been laid but is not in use. Many have speculated about Google’s intentions. To fuel the paranoia, in just the last few weeks, Google offered 4.6 billion dollars for the 700Mhz spectrum. This is where the old UHF
If I could get on the Internet in most any place in the country and not have to pay Starbucks or some municipal airport for access, then Viva Google.
Harvey the Wonder Hamster
I was driving back from Louisiana yesterday afternoon and listened to Buzz Out Loud. This particular episode was a retrospective because one of the hosts was leaving. So during the broadcast, they played a 4 minute montage of her random and bizarre comments. One happened to be a song about Harvey the Wonder Hamster. Enjoy.
Cambodia – 2 Weeks Later
You would think that after the number of mission trips I have taken over the last decade or so that I would have developed immunity to the post-mission depression. Every time I have come back from a trip, I have a period of a few weeks that I alternate between wanting to go back and fighting apathy with what is going on at home. The hardest is when I have gone with a group of friends. Our relationships have deepened because of that experience. Then I return home to my empty apartment and nothing feels right. I long for that deep sense of community and fellowship.
A great friend of mine once gave me some insight into this condition. He told me that when you have an experience like this, that is just a glimpse into the joy and fellowship that we will find in heaven. Therefore, when we return to our mundane routines, we long to return to that experience. However, as he also pointed out, that is not reality. What I mean to say is, that is our mountain top experience. We cannot build tabernacles and remain there. We must come back down to the broken and at times mundane valley.
I am still learning how to take what I have experienced on the mountain. It should energize me for the return to the valley. There are also times when the experience gives me perspective as I struggle through the bogs of life. However, most times the overwhelming feelings fade along with the incredible memories of the trip. I allow life to dull those memories in my mind and it feels as though I have spent my entire life in the valley.
It’s 2am and I’m writing this instead of finishing a paper or going to sleep.
I really don’t know what’s wrong with me. When I should have been finishing my last paper of the semester I was writing code for a web page I have been working on in my free time. I wish I could find that magic bullet that would allow me to take the passion and drive I have for programming and instantly redirect that energy into other areas of my life. Plus my sleep schedule doesn’t help. I generally sleep till 8 or 9am and then stay up till 1-2am. Only problem with that is when you have class or a job that wants you there at 8.
Basically there just are not enough hours in the day to get all the things done I have and my brain has shut down from overload. The only time I get to slow down and truly process everything from my week is when I’m asleep. Having mental overload can make for some very interesting dreams. I would slow down but unfortunately I have to work in order to pay bills and for school.
Well it can’t last forever. That’s about all that is pulling me through right now. Things will change. They always do, I just don’t know when.
