human bits » personal bits

through fields of blazing lights

mike — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 01:09:30 +0000

I woke up one morning this week with these words on my mind:

Even in the darkest night
we walk through fields of blazing lights.
There is nothing hidden
that will not be revealed.

and I felt like it was the light which had penetrated my dreams and woken me up.

There are many of those blazing lights. They are all around us. My wife is one of them. It is good to be near her, beside her. Truth and love blaze within her, wake me up, make me warm, keep me real. The light that leaks out of her reminds me that the best part of truth is lived out in flesh and blood. I’m deeply grateful that she is who she is.

mad hattedness

mike — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 23:09:36 +0000

It’s time to put my blogging hat on. (T)hats the one that keeps the sun out of my eyes while I’m sitting on our beautiful eastward facing veranda in the morning with my netbook on my knee. (The eastward facing is beautiful – not necessarily the veranda.) My blogging hat is also my walking hat and gardening hat, sometimes my climbing on the roof hat, sometimes my having a cup of tea and reading a book hat, at the moment my talking about my hat hat, but never my bike riding hat. And definitely not my driving hat – at least not yet – and I hope never. I’m not old enough for that yet – and anyway the hat doesn’t have a broad enough brim. Now my wife or one of the kids will say that I sometimes forget to take it off while I’m driving. I guess that’s how hats become driving hats – but I don’t want that to happen yet. If the hat fits, wear it. This one doesn’t quite – because like most hats its a little too small – but it does have a nice penguin on it and the words linux.conf.au Wellington 2010.

Pretty soon – if not already – it will be time to put spikey bits on my bike hat and get cranky at magpies again. Hopefully I’ll get a ride in later today and find out where the season is really hat.

WMDs

mike — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 08:31:38 +0000

At this time of year it is not safe to ride without at least one WMD – or ‘Weapon of Magpie Distraction’ for the uninitiated. I find magpies particularly distracting while I’m riding, so I’d really like to return the favour by making a few of them feel really distracted. On many days lately when I have been distracted by magpies I have felt very very strongly that my magpie distractor of choice would be a bazooka. A bazooka is probably not the ideal choice however – and I haven’t used one so far – for at least the following reasons:

While the actual blast can be quite distracting – particularly if well targeted – a bazooka may take a while to reload. I read somewhere that a recent survey showed that at least 98% of magpies don’t actually know what a bazooka looks like. This probably means that during the reload time a magpie is not likely to be distracted by the mere presence of a bazooka.
There is also a good chance that the recoil from the bazooka blast will knock your bike over. This is probably more distracting for you than it is for the magpie, unless of course you are being closely followed by an inattentive car or truck driver (who may have been distracted by the magpie.) In that case the subsequent sirens and flashing lights and traffic chaos might be quite distracting for the magpie.

I have heard of at least one case of a tennis racket being used as a very effective WMD. I usually don’t have a tennis racket with me when I am riding so I haven’t tried that distraction yet. On a couple of occasions I have picked up a small tree from the roadside and carried that with me for the rest of my ride. That kind of works, but for me it has never had the impact I imagine a tennis racket would, and small trees don’t make good riding companions.

So lately I’ve settled on the less satisfying but mostly effective distractor of looking just plain silly.

There are of course many many ways of looking silly. If some other nameless cyclist had not come to my rescue I may have had many years of trial and error ahead of me in the search for exactly the right kind of silliness to effectively distract magpies. Fortunately there are many other cyclists doing their best to look silly (that is why lycra bike pants were invented after all) and somewhere along the line some one of them decided to look silly by wearing a hedgehog on his head. Lo and behold he discovered – by chance – that this was an effective magpie distractor. Of course we don’t have hedgehogs in Australia – and the echidna is a protected species – so I’ve had to make do by adding spiky bits to my helmet. So far it seems to be working. There is one magpie about 1km down the road from our place who likes to swoop at least a dozen times each time I ride by him, and I’d say he definitely looks distracted every single time he swoops.

In Swan Hill for a couple of days

mike — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 13:19:19 +0000

Me and Mrs Jo
We’ve got a thing going on
I’ll miss her so bad.

She shows me our God.
A light before the sunrise
To have and to hold.

oh deer

mike — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 12:43:40 +0000

As I was just starting to drift into sleep last night I had a sort of dream about following / hunting some deer at the edge of a forest at dusk. It was like we were cavemen or something – but with hi-tech tracking devices – or very good noses – I’m not sure which – so that we could tell that the deer were staying a constant 2km in front of us. Which is really silly because who ever heard of cavemen using metric.

the big picture

mike — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 04:38:02 +0000

Last week we had a bunch of lovely interesting people come and visit for our open week. Its a great opportunity for some to take a step back from ‘normal’ life and into an experience of living breathing practical Christian community. Visitors sample our everyday life of learning together, working together, living together and worshipping together. By the end of the week many find that ‘the big picture’ has become much clearer.

On the subject of the big picture – recently I discovered hugin – part of a ‘toolchain to create panoramic images.’ I put it to the test with some shots I took last week and I’m impressed! It is very easy to use and I like the results.

Here are three shots taken around our little community. It’s not much to look at but a lot of very good things happen here. I know that I will remember some of the conversations from last week every time I look at these pictures.

love is … a room full of razor blades

mike — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 05:57:42 +0000

If you’re wondering how that could possibly be both true and a good thing, think of Eustace Scrubb in Lewis’ “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.”

love is loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong suffering.
love is not nice pictures of sunsets and flowers.
pretending that everything is OK is not love.
pretending to love is not love.
saying that you love is not love.
not loving is not love.
and everything else is bullshit.
and you know that is true!

I’d been thinking about these things this week – dealing with the consequences of not love (make of that what you will) – feeling the pain of love deal once more with the pain of not love – wondering how far this goes on. Three things remain, and one of them is love.

This then, is a sample from one of our lectures this week.
Lecture snippet “Spirituality of Christian Ministry” Cornerstone Community

weather talking

mike — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 01:42:40 +0000

Last Saturday was indeed the first day of spring and did not disappoint. It was a 50 k’s of bike riding in the sun kind of weekend. Very very nice. But I need a new bike seat and I’m wearing holes in my pants. Yesterday and today are a different kind of story. The wind says ‘the day is mine’, the sun stands back to watch, and the open flat farmland does little to protect from 60 km gusts.

I sleep in the wind. It rushes from ear to ear making strange music.

Whylandra Crossing ride

mike — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 10:03:14 +0000

Last Saturday wasn’t the first day of spring, but it felt like it. I put on my helmet and pumped up the tyres on my bike and took a ride out along the highway towards Narromine – not quite knowing where I was going. Riding on the highway with cars and trucks doing 110 km/hr isn’t that much fun, but before I knew it I was at Whylandra Crossing. I spent the next two or three hours exploring tracks, chatting, avoiding sheep, sitting by the river, listening. A beautiful day in a beautiful place.
Whylandra Crossing Ride

intelligent design

mike — Sun, 30 Oct 2005 06:45:35 +0000

Should intelligent design be taught in school science classes?

Personally I am amazed at the fanatical – almost fundamentalist – response that has come from otherwise level headed scientists and science educators on this issue. I really am amazed. I have no time for ‘creation science’ in general, and I applaud the work of people like Ian Plimer in his ‘Telling Lies for God’, but the knee-jerk reaction against ‘intelligent design’ has been anything but intelligent as far as I can tell.

For starters there are lots of things that should be taught as part of science education that are not science. The history of science, the philosophy of science, scientific method, questions of ethics and the cultural ramifications of the outworkings of science – all of these things are absolutely essential parts of any education in science. They are the bed-rock and the building blocks, the infrastructure and context of science, but not one of them is open to validation by scientific method. Test the reliability of scientific method by using scientific method itself?? Bullshit! Science works within a philosophical and cultural framework that is larger than itself and intimately connected with every other part of human life. How intimately? Well ask any scientist how and why they chose science, and listen to his or her answer. From most you will hear a deeply passionate and personal response. The others probably should have become accountants.

A theory of intelligent design as part of the evolutionary process in the development of life on earth is clearly dealing with issues that are part of science even if it cannot be shown to be addressing those issues scientifically. It should be obvious also that it is dealing with ethical, philosophical and cultural issues that are very relevant to those scientific issues. On that basis alone it is probably worthy of discussion in a science classroom.

But is a theory of intelligent design a scientific theory or is it some other kind of theory? Is it more essentially in the realm of philosophy or theology or history, or maybe even mathematics? There are two questions that need to be answered in getting to the bottom of this. The first is ‘can the theory be tested?’ and the second is ‘how can the theory be tested?’

For a theory to be a theory at all, it has to be falsifiable or testable. In other words it has to ‘stick its neck out’ and say something that might be able to be tested and shown to be true or false. If nothing could ever prove a theory wrong, then really nothing could ever prove it right either. For instance if I say "rabbits can jump further than mice" then someone could put that claim to the test; but if I say "imaginary rabbits can jump further than imaginary mice" I’m not saying anything true or false; because there is nothing – even in theory – that anyone could do to test things one way or the other. If nothing can conceivably show it to be false, then equally nothing can really show it to be true. I am not saying anything that could be true or false even though it might sound like I am. In the same way unless a theory is falsifiable, it is not really a theory even if it may at first sound like one.

How a theory could be tested depends on what kind of theory it is. Historical events are – by definition – not repeatable, so scientific method isn’t much help in directly telling us who did what where and why at some specific when in the past. For that you need historical and archeological evidence – ‘left-overs’ that can then be collected and interpreted. Scientific method may well be useful in evaluating and interpreting that evidence. No amount of collecting, analysing and counting apples will ever prove that 1+1=2, or anything more complex in mathematics. Mathematical theories aren’t tested in the lab, but they are certainly used there. And so on.

So: is a theory of intelligent design really a theory? Is it falsifiable? Does it make claims that can be tested? And if so, is it a scientific theory rather than some other kind of theory? Are its claims testable by scientific method? What kind of claims does it make? What kind of evidence could prove or disprove those claims?

I’m going to stop here for the moment. I will continue this later and I think the answers get a bit exciting. Well they are to me anyway. (I’ve always been a bit nerdy. As a 12 year old I was reading everything I could get hold of on high energy particle physics. ) But tell me if you haven’t already had to do some solid thinking about science in considering the issue thus far.