Computer Tech
I decided to replace my CD-RW drive today. It's been on the fritz for about a year, so yesterday I did some trouble-shooting online. The only solution was to purchase a new drive. Now you may be wondering why I didn't procrastinate longer, but since I had money and I didn't want to go to school (I still managed to procrastinate!), I decided to do it today. When I asked the guy at the shop how difficult it was to install, he said that since I'd never done it before it would be best to bring in the computer and have them install it (for $45). So I decided to do it myself. After pulling apart as much of my computer as I could without the manual (It's in a box in Iowa), I realized I needed some instructions and reconnected all of the necessary wires so that I could find instructions on the internet. But my internet wasn't working, and I wasn't sure if it was me or the network. After trying out my roommates computer, I decided it must be the network, so I went to the basement, disconnected some power cords (not exactly sure which ones, but they were all part of the internet system), reconnected them, and tried out my computer again. This time it worked, and I was able to get the instructions and install the drive.
So, I think maybe I should drop the math degree and go into computers. Then again, it's only a thrill if you have no idea what you're doing and it somehow works. Doing the same thing over and over would get boring. Hmm. I need to come up with a future career/goal.
Any suggestions?
Splotchy Sunburns
After I returned from Egypt, I had a farmer tan from wearing t-shirts all the time. Since today was sunny and warm, I put sunscreen on my lower arms and sat on the back patio and read section A.3 of
Diophantine Geometry. But now I have bright red splotches on my shoulders, a white ring just below my shoulders, and a farmer tan below that. And I'm starting to itch.
Oh, well.
Maybe I'll just let it all fade and then try starting again from scratch, or, perhaps more acurately, whiteness.
New Jersey - Supersize me
A couple weekends ago I went with a friend to New Jersey to see her mother, see the Salvador Dali art exhibit at the art musem, and just get away from school. Anyway, as we went around town shopping with her family, I couldn't help noticing that everywhere we went, in every group of people that we saw, at least one of them was obese. Not overweight, but obese. And it wasn't like these were old people who'd had time to put on the weight--there were kids, teenagers, twenty-year-olds, you name it. I felt like I'd entered the movie Supersize me--without the fast food restaurants, although I'm assuming that the fast food industry is doing pretty well in the area. Anyway, I was shocked. Don't get me wrong, I don't think people should be skin and bones. I like people to be a bit overweight. It makes me happier about myself and they're less likely to have weight-related health problems as well (A useful thing about living with a future actuary is learning stats like that). But to see just as many obese people as those who are not obese is frightening.
Hey all you Iowans, check out this law from Ottumwa, Iowa:
Within the city limits, a man may not wink at any woman he does not know. For you Sarah, from Chicago, Illinois:
It is forbidden to fish while sitting on a giraffe's neckNot quite as funny, but from Canada, is:
It is illegal to kill a sick person by frightening them.And, the clincher, from Toronto:
You can't drag a dead horse down Yonge Street on a Sunday.The top 25 list
I just spent the long weekend (that's Victoria Day for us in Canada) in Ottawa. It was rainy, wet and cold most of the weekend, but my aunt and I braved the weather to see the Tulip festival. For those of you from Pella--imagine more tulips, more people, not so crowded, and fewer Dutch costumes than Pella's Tulip Time. Also, the parade was a boat parade down the canal--no marching bands. Most exciting were the giant fibreglass tulips (or at least the
grand tulip theft--according to my aunt and uncle, a local boat repairman managed to put the sawed-apart tulip back together again) and the international village, where I introduced my aunt to Poffertjes (served by a cute old man and his wife dressed up in Dutch costumes) at the Dutch pavilion and we watched this guy make money with his Double Dutch bicycle:
The double dutch bike--handles work the opposite that you'd expect. Note the gears where the handlebars meet the bike frame. $25 if you can ride 10 feet and you get four tries. I didn't see anyone (other than the guy above who presented the challenge) who could stay on for more than one push on the pedal.
Me in the garden of gigantic tulips.
My favourite fibreglass tulip.
Many, Many Pterodactyls
To get to the Toronto Airport from Waterloo and back, I usually ride the Airways Transit airporter service. It's usually quiet even when packed with students. However, the last time on my way to the airport was a little bit different...
I should have known right from the moment "Faith FM" crooned over the radio. Instead I was just concerned that I would have to listen to over an hour of "contemporary" Christian music. For those of you who know me, you can guess my horror; for those of you who don't--I'm a Christian, but I abhorr "contemporary" Christian music almost as much as Country, which I detest. Why listen to "You are so Holy" repeated a hundred times sung by people swaying around like sea anemones with their eyes closed and hands in the air when you could listen to Handel's
Messiah?
As soon as we'd all paid up, the driver called out: "So what programs are you in?"
Nobody answered.
So he asked again and I thought, "Hey! A talkative driver--maybe I won't be bored this time."
After a while there were a few replies: "Math! Engineering! CS! Psychology!"
Then comes the killer question: "Are any dinosaurs still living today?"
After a brief pause, a chorus of voices shout:"Yes"
"That's right, dinosaurs still live and have always lived with man."
At this point, I'm sitting in front, next to the driver, and all I can think is: "Why me?" I know what's coming next. I even believe some of it myself, but this guy was clearly going to make me and my beliefs look ridiculous.
I thought he would restrict himself to lizards, etc, but after naming some animals (and he claimed that there were hundreds) that were proof that dinosaurs still lived, some of which were true (like the coelocanth--whose name he couldn't remember), others which are most likely fantasy like the Loch Ness monster and the
plesiosaur, he said:
"What are those big flying things? Pterodactyls? They are still alive. I lived in Papua New Guinea for a while and the indigenous people had pictures and stories of big flying reptiles carrying people off. They lived at the same time as man."
Now, I'm not saying that this is impossible, but I think it would be pretty difficult not to notice a flying reptile large enough to carry someone off.
What irked me most was that he kept referring to evolutionists' lack of "proof", and the abundance of "proof" for a 6,000-year-old earth. I tried to explain to him that he was talking to people in math, and he couldn't use the word "proof" when discussing evolution because none of us would take him seriously. You cannot "prove" by example unless you're dealing with a finite set--this is Mathematics 101. Finding a fossil or something that supports your claim is not proof--it just indicates that you may be correct. On the other hand, finding something that contradicts your claim means that your claim is wrong, but it may be possible to adjust it so that things still work.
Oh, how could I forget that his claim that if you date everything correctly, nothing biological is more than 4400 years old--the time of the flood! I asked him what kind of growth pattern was used to determine this--he didn't seem to know that there were different kinds. Don't get me wrong, I don't disbelieve in the flood, it's just that there is just as much fudging going on to make numbers match up to a flood date as there is fudging to make numbers fit the time scale necessary for unsupervised evolution from single-celled organisms to humans. He also told me that at one point the temperature on earth was colder than -300 degrees. No units. When pressed, he decided that the units must be Fahrenheit, but only after being told that it was an impossible temperature in Celsius (which is what we use here in Canada).
But he continued on unfazed.
"Before that," he claimed, "everything was huge, because there was a vapor canopy overhead protecting us from the sun and the atmospheric pressure was so high. Experiments have been done by some scientist...I forget his name...which PROVE that given these conditions, tomato plants grow so large that they can produce thousands of tomatoes, and so everything before the flood was large. Which is why there is so much coal."
I'm pretty sure he got most of his information from this site:
Dr. Hovind’s Creation Seminar (See credentials in link below). Interestingly, AiG has a
site of arguments
not to use as evidence for creation because they are incorrect or unlikely. Almost every argument on the list was presented by my driver as undeniable "proof". I particularly liked the ones about scientific evidence that somewhere we lost a day and moon dust.
Most impressive was his conspiracy theory. Apparantly scientists and scientific institutions, he gave the Smithsonian as an example, "get rid of" evidence which favours creation, not evolution. Once again, not impossible, but certainly (I hope) not likely.
It was just too perfect and sickening. As I left, he told me, "it's all in the Bible--just read it and believe." I have to say I left him hoping to be the one to find undeniable evidence that the world is more than 10,000 years old, there is no Loch Ness monster, and that the inconsistant rotation of the planets, moons, and stars can be explained scientifically.
My own opinion is that I have no idea what happened, but I have problems with just about every theory out there. I am most inclined to believe in Intelligent Design, as in God created the beginning (whatever that was) and controlled the processes that brought about life as we know it.
I find the "evidence" for uncontrolled evolution unconvincing. There is evidence of life forms that are no longer present, but there is no fossil evidence of evolution because evolution is a process that cannot be captured in rock. That is where the human comes in and says, well, this fossil is older than that one and they have similar characteristics here, so it is possible that this is an ancestor of that. But try getting a consensus on the actual lines of descent among the leading scientists in the field! And the number of fossils with proto-legs, or what-have-you, still does not show an actual "link". And there are a significant number of evolutionists who are just as stubborn and dogmatic about their beliefs as their Creationist counterparts.
On the other hand, Creationists (in particular, young earth Creationists) are often dogmatically convinced that creation
as they interpret it (which they usually say is a "literal interpretation") from the Bible is true. However, it's hard to believe in a strictly literal interpretation because that would require believing that the two accounts of creation in Genesis are both literally true, which is a contradiction. But my question is, how did creation happen? Did things just appear out of nothing like a cheesy computer game: Pop! Oh, there's millions of gallons of water. Pop! Millions of tons of dirt. Dust swirls and then, pop! Here's Adam. But, oh wait, it will take a while to create Eve, we have to let Adam sleep and take out his rib to make her. Why is she much more complicated than everything else? Or maybe she isn't and she just popped out from the rib? I am inclined to believe that there was a little more time and processing involved than this. So far the most convincing (because it was not so biased) book I have read on the subject was
Darwin's Black Box by Michael Behe (he presents Intelligent Design as the most likely theory), and he is condemned by people like Kent Hovin for not following the Bible closely enough. Hello!! It's called Science--you do not reject evidence because it does not support your interpretation of creation. Even if you take the most conservative view out there and say that Moses wrote the first five Books of the OT, then you still have the author of Genesis writing hundreds of years after the events took place. How well could you write about events that happened in your ancestral land before your great-great-great- ... - great grandparents were born?
Also, Creation advocates like
this (who probably taught my friendly driver) are just embarassing.
How do I respond respectfully to people like my driver, who are out to convert the world to Christianity by means of hoaxes and half-truths? And how can I rid myself of the desire to convert to Atheism just to spite them?
Oh, well. I'm off to church.
Clueless again
I always have difficulty filling up my car tires with air. A few days ago, as I was driving to the store, my car started making some strange sounds and funny jerks, so my roommate and I decided that one of the tires must need more air. A rather frightening conclusion, seeing how the last time I'd filled up my tires with air (on my way out of town from Iowa to Canada), I put in too much air (50 kPa instead of the 28-41 recommended) and then couldn't figure out how to let it back out--I had to drive home after I had already said my farewells to my family and get my brother to fix it. Anyway, this time I thought that since my roommate was with me, things might go a bit better, except that I forgot she doesn't even know how to drive. After five minutes of us crouching by my front tire watching the tire deflate instead of inflate and trying to determine if we were supposed to squeeze the lever attached to the hose, a man pulled up behind us and offered to help. I told him that I wasn't accustomed to this kind of pump--although I'm not good with the other kind, either, as demonstrated earlier. He showed us that first we had to press the "start" button. Then he filled up the tires for us. The only problem was, I'm not sure what he did (besides pressing the button), so I'm pretty sure that the next time I need some air, I'll be relying on the goodness of another man to help with my car tires.
