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For all my moaning about church people, I sure do go out of my way for them. I go through the old Capone resort town of Cedar Lake (or pass nearby) every time I come back from my client site. Our band leader and associate pastor and all around great guy really digs this pizza that they have at this place called "Pizza Palace" on the lake. I decided to get a few of them next time I was passing through; that is, last Friday.
So, I stop in Cedar Lake, which isn't that far out of my way if I'm taking the side roads as I mostly do. I called in my order in Kankakee and came into Cedar Lake about an hour later, enough time to have those Chicago-style pizzas ready. Pizza Palace turned out to be a shack across the Lake Shore St from the lake itself. It couldn't have been much bigger than my kitchen — and my kitchen isn't very large. Anyway, I pick up these pizzas and start delivering all over town once I get in. I made a terrible mess of things, but you have to admit that anyone who is willing to pick up four pizzas to be delivered to three different locations must like these people.
It looks like I'll be hunting contracts again, as my "stay-alive" work here at BIG through INFOSEC will probably be coming to an end. I know that I have an incredible trove of skills and knowledge, and that the key for me is to get in front of the right people. Unfortunately, I've been in the IT ghetto for so long that I just don't know the right folks.
Why, oh why, did I have to grow into strategic thinking so young?
I'm probably the only person in the world who laments his capability. It sure would be easier if I could be a technical expert at something. Instead, I'm talented at organizations and hard projects.
Maybe I should take the advice I've been giving to JMMJ...
I hate grace. It offends me.
We're reading Philip Yancey's What's So Amazing About Grace? with some folks from our church. Yancey's parables of grace bother me. He retells the parable of the prodigal son, more or less, for modern times. I'm pretty sure that I'm identifying with the older brother these days. The idea of paying the lazy, shiftless last-hour workers the same as me is offensive. Maybe it is just a question of "felt-fair pay" but I rather think I simply do not want to feel like someone else got a better deal than I did.
This is probably why Jesus singles out the religious people to call them "Vipers!" and "White-washed tombs!" When do I forgive the unrepentant? Is it in my power to forgive the debt? Can I do that? More than anything else, I don't want to be cheated out of my vengeance. Surely, for a good man a friend might die, but for this SOB?
I picked up Dick Francis's Decider (Putnam, 1993) in the remainders rack over at Barnes & Noble near the client. I have read an inordinate number of his books, including, but not limited to, Odds Against, (1965), Flying Finish (1966), Blood Sport (1967), Bolt (1986), Straight (1989), Longshot (1990), and Wild Horses (1994). And those were the ones I recalled. Of them, I reckon Odds Against and Wild Horses as my favourites.
I started reading Francis novels when living abroad. There was a used bookstore down from the stock exchange and L and I would go there in search of english reading. Okay, so it was mostly me in search of english reading as L read French fine. While there one day, I picked up his first novel in a 1967 paperback. Cost me about 100 francs, belgian francs, that is. No money at all.
From that point on, reading his has been insanely easy, as his books get overpublished and are perennials on the remainder stacks. Easily bought at US$4 or so.
I can't say that I didn't enjoy Decider, although I confess that I thought that there would be a more complex ending involving some new knowledge about the narrator's wife being related to his mother's first-husband's father's mistress's husband. Which would have been interesting, but, alas, it happened not. Maybe I simply enjoy mysteries or books with a great deal of information about activities I know nothing about, such as Francis's steeplechase horse races. He raced earlier in life, getting knocked out of competition because of an injury. I believe that he was even a lively competitor in the British racecourses.
And, of course, he's dead so you don't have to worry about having to pick up anything else in the future. Nothing worse than getting the latest from an author whose previous work you adored, only to find that the third time out he whiffed the ball.
North America faces an epidemic of depression. A thirty-year old is more than ten times more likely to have had a bout of lasting depression than a ninety year-old. Our children, it appears, have an even greater chance of being seriously depressed sometime in their lives.
I believe that the Church, as we express it in American Protestantism, especially evangelical protestantism, not only does little to redeem depressives, but it actively creates a depression-inducing environment.
Depression, the cognitive theorists have argued, is caused by poor thinking habits that led to a learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is when you have been so beaten by events that you no longer even try. You have learned that it doesn't matter what you do, you cannot change your circumstances. You believe that you are helpless against the fates.
Christian faith, of course, should be a solid antidote for this, even Calvinistic Christianity. (Yes, even deterministic Calvinism!) But our American faith isn't. Why not? What have we lost?
I've been thinking a bit about the Christian grace of hospitality over the past two years or so. I have the good fortune to know folks associated with the Lilly Foundation's "Practicing Our Faith" program at Valparaiso University. They've done some work on hospitality, and one of the participants in the colloquiam, Christine Pohl, has written one of only a handful on the subject in the past quarter century, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition. It's a great book on the subject but like all rare subjects, she doesn't touch on several elements that interest me. But she has a great review of the church fathers and their statements about hospitality. It's interesting that english-speaking Christians have not created much with regard to hospitality. Perhaps we don't think about it. Perhaps it's now filed under "greeting visitors" but that's not quite the same.
Still, welcoming the stranger is a big part of hospitality. Before you can do that, though, you have to have a community into which you can welcome this stranger. And your community must have defined borders, a clear definition of who is in the community (and who is not), so that you can tell who is a stranger. You can't welcome a stranger if you can't identify him. Or her.
[ Continue reading "Let Us Rather Go Out To Them" ]I got the following from the Texans For Texas in an email distribution that they send out. I have no idea how I got onto their mailing list: I'm pretty sure it has something to do with my brother, who worked for some other conservative think tank down there awhile back. This is an article written by a rep from another conservative Texan group, Texas Public Policy Foundation. It's about education.
Of course, the great thing about education is that both sides of the aisle can scream at the other side for whatever they feel will win them votes. And everyone is for better education.
[ Continue reading "Education Woes In Texas" ]I found an interesting article by Cass R. Sunstein on group deliberations and extremism in the Yale Law Journal (2000). He describes his intent as "to case light on enclave deliberation as simultaneously a potential danger to social stability, a source of social fragmentation, and a safeguard against social injustice and unreasonableness." (from part I) Sunstein does a very clear review of the current literature, and points out that groups' tendency toward extremism — or polarization — has been little studied yet greatly affects decision making, especially in juries, something in which Sunstein has a strong interest as a law professor.
Besides having a very entertaining title, Marc Bilodeau and Al Silvinski's "Tolient Cleaning and Department Chairing: Volunteering a Public Service" (1994) has some interesting proofs. Basically, they want to put forth some propositions about figuring out who would volunteer to do an activity that no one wants to do but that everyone would benefit from. Specific examples can be found in the title.
Of interest to Requisite Organization students is the following:
We find that in a very general complete information game, multiplicityof equilibria depends crucially the (simplifying) assumption that individuals have an infinite horizon. If we assume instead that individuals have a finite horizon, the game has a unique subgame-perfect equilibrium outcome in which, ceteris paribus, the individual with the highest benefit/cost ratio from providing the public service, the largest rate of time preference, or the longest time horizon, volunteers immediately and everyone else waits. This remains true even when the time horizon tends to inifinity. [pp. 1, link and emphasis added]
I'm not sure why the person with the longest time horizon is always going to be cleaning the toliets, but it gives a new spin to "servant leadership". It may also explain some other facets about leadership roles.
Let's see if the horde of posts that I have accumulated will work in this automated system I devised. Nothing worth mentioning: it's just some automated keystrokes. But it's pretty interesting. I'm not sure what will happen if something goes wrong. Hopefully, I'll have the rest of these coming up across the days I'm off.
From the newsfeed of the New York Times today, Bill Clinton said the following in response to Pres. Bush, Jr.'s kind and gracious comments at the unveiling of the Clintons' portraits, which will hang in the White House until George and Laura's go up after they leave office, either next year or in 4½.
His face reddening, his eye tearing a bit, Mr. Clinton returned the compliment, saying: "I had mixed feelings coming here today, and they were only confirmed by all those kind and generous things you've said. Made me feel like I was a pickle stepping into history."
I defy anyone to make a bit of sense out of that. J, have a field day.
To be fair, I include a version of the Bush Administration light bulb joke, cited but not shown in the article:
I'd like to thank the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for being my top referrer, after Google Italy. Why this is true is anyone's guess: if I can't write to the conf files, I don't bother asking.
When Clarence, the blogging hillbilly, took me task very kindly about saying "I'm not hillbilly ... but my dad is", I replied back to him that according to family legend, my great-great-grandfather was raised in the Devil Anse Hatfield's house. We could never figure out how that happened or even if it were really true. We did come from what is now Mingo County in West Virginia but my ancestors were a bit between the cracks of modern society and nothing — no record, no artifacts, and very little story — made it up to the present.
A book my father recently picked up provides a goodly amount more information.
Well, it has turned hot and muggy once again in the dunelands of Northwestern Indiana. As I try to fight standing water in my alternately clay and sand yard, I often take time to appreciate some of the fine brewed beverages that are available here, in Michigan or in Illinois. Including iced tea, which I have not been able to perfect since coming back north.
I have started sampling more of the Kalamazoo Brewing Company's Bell's label since I found it for a more reasonable cost over in central Illinois. Bell's Oberon is a tasty wheat beer with a good bit of spice to it. I've not gone wrong in recommending it when out at pubs that serve it. Their tripel, Bell's Sparkling Ale, is decent but not spectacular. Maybe it's too young for my tastebuds. Tripels will mellow then develop some more interesting characteristics as the months go on.
Over at PowerPoint Church this week, our regular preacher has taken holiday and gone off to Missouri with his family. I know, I know: how can any trip to Missouri be holiday? Yet there it is. He elected to not preach by cell phone connection or web camera, inviting instead a one Steve Elzinga. Rev. Elzinga currently works for the Bible League and pastors a church south of Grand Rapids.
Besides being a talented speaker, Elzinga had something to say about Deuteronomy, chapter 6, where the God of Israel tells the people to constantly have the words of the Law before them, thinking about it, talking about it, living in it. He started comparing it to how we can attach meaning to songs, how hearing them brings back a flood of memories about not just one but a host of events. He talked about a hymn that he grew up with, not caring too much for it, but that he kept coming back to over his life. Now, he can't hear it without tearing up. The song and the events it became attached to have become one.
So it is with the holy scriptures.
I have been reading Adrian Warnock's brief insights from time to time, having heard from him when I wrote about why Christians suck. Adrian was ruthlessly gracious, which I greatly appreciated. Anyway, he and another blogger have been holding an ongoing (if on again, off again) debate about miraculous experiences of the Christian faith.
Jolly Blogger recently posted a summary of their cessation vs. charimaticist discussion which points to their discussion. For Adrian's view, take a look at his " Cessationism and Charismaticism" entry.
I have to admit that I have never seen the cessationist argument, which Jolly describes as "the position that there were certain gifts which were revelatory in nature and were designed to authenticate the ministry of Jesus and the apostleship of the twelve disciples. With the passing of the apostles and the completion of the canon, those gifts ceased."
That just never made any logical sense.
I've got a lot on my mind these days. I got hit from behind on Friday coming home, now the middle of a three-car pileup (luckily, no visible damage to the Audi I bumped), and found out that the pregnant (33 wks) young woman who hit me discovered that she is in-between insurances. Moving from one to another, she let one lapse and another hadn't kicked in yet. Sigh. I'm committed enough to my ideals of community to try and work this out with her directly, although she may prefer taking her chances with my insurance company. I'll find out when I get the damage assayed: two new bumpers at least, which can be mighty expensive these days, even on a Subaru.
Then on the way down here, my mobile phone broke. I needed a new one anyway. I 've been meaning to discontinue that relationship for one that was less costly. Although I really like that free incoming calls plan... My brother tells me to get them to give me a free phone for staying with them, but I'm not sure that I want the two-year commitment. Of course, I have no plans on moving and I can keep the number anyway, so,... I have no idea what to do. But I have to get a new phone somehow.
One of the things that I spoke with Ken recently about was the idea of "commitment networks". This phrase has some particular meanings in AI research but he used it as something that was different from an accountability hierarchy. Running it through HiBeam (the old elibrary — we can thank any demise of "e dash" anything) I picked up the following article. It's an interesting excerpt; the entire article has more to it. This quotation comes under the subtitle of "The Commitment Network".
[ Continue reading "On Commitment Networks in Korean Firms" ]You know, J. Michael Straczynski is the best writer in superhero comics today. His storytelling is flawless. Of course, that just makes John Romita, Jr.'s job easier (but it's not the only reason he's called "the best artist in comics working today" by Comic Book Artist).
Happy Birthday reviews the entire Spider-Man legend without being too smarmy. Straczynski and Romita create the best, most alive Peter Parker since Lee and Ditko created him. And S&R make him a lot more subtle.
It's like reading some of John McDonald's opening pages: they just don't get any better than this.
Glenn made the 200th comment on this site, on my 389th post. Congratulations to Glenn!
I really thought it would be J, what with his lion's share of posts. (I think that he even outnumbers JMMJ, who was the original J back a year ago when I started this thing.)
OK, JMMJ, here's my latest reading list. I really need a novel...
Of course, once I start reading Webber I'll have to start reading the Church Fathers. And Akira will lead to evil. But it was 40% off over at Galactic Greg's here in Valpo and I had to buy. I had to! <Moby Dick is back on hold. I need a four-hour plane trip to restart it. Maybe when I fly down to SATX this fall.
"Paradigm Lost: Lessons from the Object (non-)Revolution" by David M. West, in Proceedings of the 11th Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEET '98), February 1998, pp. 76-
Accessible from the ACM Digital Library.
West reviews the philosophical underpinnings of the battle between structured programming and object-oriented programming. It's an interesting read, as he goes back to the basic fight between the rationalist/formalist Enlightenment camp and their pesky detractors, variously called "hermeneutics", "constructivist" or "interpretationalism". We will not see an end to this fight, he argues, since the basis of the differences between the true OO folks (hermeneutics) and the objects-as-code-pieces folks (rationalists) comes down to axiomatic philosophical differences.
Folks, this is the same argument as it is between the Hierarchy-focused organizational thinkers and the Social Network organisational thinkers. Let's play matchmaker!