Recently in Life Category

Ethan's speech pathologist sent home his report from his evaluation for his upcoming triennial review. Two things about it seem a little strange.

1. One of the tests aimed to discover how well Ethan uses appropriate pronouns. The speech pathologist seems to acknowledge this particular problem. The report says:

On many occasions, Ethan provided an appropriate response to the given sentence, however since it was not the targeted response, credit was not allowed (e.g Ethan was shown a picture of a school choir and given the sentence "the choir has a song to sing -- who will sing a song". Ethan replied with "the choir", however the targeted response was "they will").

In ordinary English, "the choir" is actually a more natural response to that question than "they will". Ethan's response is actually superior to the officially-accepted one, taking just the question in isolation. Only if you know that the rules of the game expect you to respond with a sentence including a pronoun will you prefer "they will". Even then, it sounds sort of artificial, but a student who understands the pragmatics of the conversation might do all right on this question. A student with problems involving the pragmatics of conversation will almost certainly not. Ethan has problems with the pragmatics of conversation, which means this question will not test what it's supposed to be testing, which is the proper use of pronouns, but rather the pragmatic ability to discover the conversational rules of the language game being played. So this seems to be a badly-designed test. I wonder how the rest of the test is. This is the only example she gave.

2. Another test involved recognizing semantic absurdities. Presumably with an eight-year-old kid they won't be asking things on the level of the liar paradox, but I would hope they could do better than the example the speech pathologist gave in her report. She says that he couldn't recognize that the sentence, "The plumber fixed the lights" is silly. I can't either. My uncle was a plumber, and he probably fixed lights at some point in his life. He did own his own house, after all. That sentence is perfectly meaningful, and there's nothing absurd about it. I could see how this would be a nice sentence to test actual understanding of semantic absurdity, because some kids might be fooled into thinking that it's semantically absurd, when it's not. But the test actually has it doing the opposite. The kids who can see that it's a meaningful sentence come out with a lower score for vocabulary recognition.

The speech pathologist concludes, "This indicates that Ethan demonstrated difficulty understanding the target words in the sentences that were used incorrectly." Maybe there were other sentences where that's true, but this example shows nothing of the sort. Ethan knows full well what the word "plumber" means, and that's the most difficult word in the sentence. One of the tests the psychologist gave to him during this process tested his vocabulary at the level of the second half of sixth grade (he's in third). His problem wasn't that he doesn't understand the vocabulary in the sentence but that he knows something the test designers didn't, which is that the sentence in question is perfectly meaningful in English and could easily be used without anything silly going on. Unlike the first example, the speech pathologist didn't seem to recognize this fact.

Update: I should say that I accept that you can derive an absurdity from this second example, if you provide a particular context, e.g. if you're told that the plumber is carrying out a job as a hired plumber and doing only that job. If you say enough that someone who understands English fully competently, together with the pragmatic rules of conversation, will understand all that information, then perhaps such a person would think such information tells against thinking the plumber will be fixing lights. But that's precisely my point. You need a pragmatic context to derive the absurdity, and this isn't a test of pragmatics but of semantic absurdities. There's nothing semantically absurd about that sentence.

As you can tell by the late posting of this, I've sort of lost interest in looking for license plates on a regular basis. I got a good sense of what I would find by trying it for a while. I might still post license plates I see on long trips, but this will be the last monthly one. It was fun for a while. I haven't even kept track for December.

U.S. States: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin

other U.S.: District of Columbia, U.S. Government
Canada: British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec

Not seen since Oct 2009: Delaware, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, Tennessee
Not seen since Sept 2009: Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon
Not seen since Aug 2009: Wyoming
Not seen since April 2009: Idaho, New Mexico
Not seen since Aug 2008: Nova Scotia
Not seen since Dec 2007: New Brunswick, Puerto Rico

U.S. States: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin

other U.S.: District of Columbia
Canada: British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario

Not seen since September 2009: Alabama, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, West Virginia, U.S. Government, Quebec
Not seen since August 2009: Alaska, Hawaii, Wyoming
Not seen since April 2009: Idaho, New Mexico
Not seen since Oct 2008: South Dakota
Not seen since Aug 2008: Nova Scotia
Not seen since Dec 2007: New Brunswick, Puerto Rico

September was a really good month for seeing license plates, so this is a much shorter list. A trip down to Philly, then NYC, then Connecticut and Massachusetts and then back halfway across NY helped a little bit, but most of the rarer sights were actually in Syracuse. This is the longest I remember the "not seen since" line for the previous month being.

U.S. States: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin

other U.S.: District of Columbia, U.S. Government
Canada: British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec

Not seen since August 2009: Alaska, Hawaii, Louisiana, Wyoming
Not seen since April 2009: Idaho, New Mexico
Not seen since Oct 2008: South Dakota
Not seen since Aug 2008: Nova Scotia
Not seen since Dec 2007: New Brunswick, Puerto Rico

I heard late last night about William P. Alston's death earlier in the day, strangely not through any departmental channels but through a friend who never met him. He was one of the professors I've most respected in my entire academic career. He wrote his dissertation with Wilfred Sellars on the work of Alfred North Whitehead but spent most of his career on philosophy of language, philosophy of religion, and epistemology. Along with Alvin Goldman and Alvin Plantinga, he helped spearhead the externalist/reliabilist revolution in epistemology, a tradition that I think took things in the right direction. He also was one of the most important figures in the revival of philosophy of religion in the last four decades from a point where it had become looked upon as a joke except to reject traditional religious views to a point where some of the most important philosophers today are Christians or other theists. Alston himself was not a Christian when he began his philosophical career, a path shared with several other notable Christian philosophers (Norman Kretzmann and Peter van Inwagen come to mind).

It was always encouraging to me to think about how successful he was in philosophy given his personality and philosophical temperament, which I think are similar to mine in a number of ways that I'm not like most of my philosophical colleagues. He wasn't a system-builder. He wrote about what he had something to say about but wasn't trying to put together a comprehensive philosophical view on every issue he could have something to say about.

Most of his work didn't involve coming up with brilliant views on cutting-edge issues that no one had ever thought of before (although I think there are a few occasions of that in his work, especially in his most recent work in epistemology). He tended to favor traditional views, sometimes so traditional that the majority in philosophy had left the view so far behind that they considered it a joke until people like him came along to disabuse them of such notions by defending the views in novel ways.

Some of the most important philosophical figures are noteworthy for one or both of those reasons (system-building and novel views). Alston, however, filled a role of simply doing good philosophy, often in small but important details. He might see a fallacious argument that was nonetheless popular and apply an important distinction, perhaps one known to the medievals but often ignored by contemporary philosophers, to show why the argument fails. He found elements of competing views that might be compatible and explained why a moderating position might be better than either original view. He applied new arguments in epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, or metaphysics to some problem in philosophy of religion to show why a new trend in a completely different area makes Christian belief more favorable (e.g. his application of functionalism, a recent view in materialist philosophy of mind, to explain how language about God can be literally true even if not used in exactly the same sense as the same terms are used for us).

The students are back in town. That and a trip to NH filled some states I hadn't seen in a while, but several dropped out too.

U.S. States: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming

other U.S.: District of Columbia, U.S. Government
Canada: Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec

Not seen since July 2009: Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Oregon
Not seen since June 2009: Mississippi
Not seen since April 2009: Idaho, New Mexico
Not seen since March 2009: Montana, British Columbia
Not seen since Oct 2008: South Dakota
Not seen since Aug 2008: Nova Scotia
Not seen since Dec 2007: New Brunswick, Puerto Rico

U.S. States: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin

other U.S.: District of Columbia
Canada: Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec

Not seen since June 2009: Colorado, Mississippi, Wyoming, U.S. Government
Not seen since May 2009: Delaware
Not seen since April 2009: Idaho, New Mexico
Not seen since March 2009: Montana, British Columbia
Not seen since Jan 2009: Nebraska, North Dakota
Not seen since Oct 2008: South Dakota
Not seen since Aug 2008: Nova Scotia
Not seen since Dec 2007: New Brunswick, Puerto Rico

U.S. States: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming

other U.S.: District of Columbia, U.S. Government
Canada: Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec

Not seen since May 2009: Delaware, Hawaii, Kentucky, Missouri, Nevada, Utah
Not seen since April 2009: Idaho, New Mexico
Not seen since March 2009: Alabama, Alaska, Montana, South Carolina, British Columbia
Not seen since Feb 2009: Arkansas, Louisiana
Not seen since Jan 2009: Nebraska, North Dakota
Not seen since Oct 2008: South Dakota
Not seen since Aug 2008: Nova Scotia
Not seen since Dec 2007: New Brunswick, Puerto Rico

I have to make mention that Wyoming enters the list after more than a year. I hadn't seen one of them since May 2008.

We've got two old and falling-apart minivans, and we're buying a newer one pretty soon. Both the old ones really are on their way out. We're going to have to get rid of one of them now, and the other might hang on for a little while, but I'm not fully sure which one to get rid of first. Here are the issues:

1998 Windstar:

1. exhaust system rotting through (several holes)
2. oil pan rusted through and leaking
3. transmission probably won't last too much longer (some resistance to shifting)
4. brake lines rusty but not leaking when last checked (but that was a while ago)
5. almost 135,000 miles
6. a lot less comfortable to drive for a number of reasons
7. registration expires mid-July and is probably not worth renewing
8. inspection is due in November and will certainly not pass without significant expense
9. lots of minor issues, but most are really inconveniences even if really annoying ones (and it looks much worse and has no CD player)

1999 Windstar:

1. We just put a good deal of money into some parts to get the check engine light off so it would pass inspection a few months ago.
2. almost 107,000 miles
3. I've been told it needs a coolant flush pretty badly, and I know it needs an oil change, but I'm not sure it's worth putting even that much money into it
4. The sub-frame under the engine has split just behind the right front tire, which affects steering, and the rest of the frame is rusting away from the central NY weather; if it breaks in another spot, the engine falls out (I've been told it would cost $600-$700 to put a new frame on). My mechanic said it's probably safe to drive it around town for now, but he declared that this is the end of the vehicle. I don't know if he intended the safety pronouncement to last as long as we've been driving it (a few weeks have passed), but maybe he did.
5. much of the engine itself is in good shape (new transmission at 82,000 miles)
6. several more minor problems that I can't remember, and somehow the reports from the dealer and mechanic have disappeared, but these were hidden problems that don't affect anything obvious in any immediate way yet

Either will probably last us until my summer teaching is over, and we'll have significantly less need for two vehicles once that ends at the end of June. So the expiration in July isn't a big problem if the 1997 van got us through that. I'd want a second vehicle by the time classes start at the end of August, though, and that van won't be legal after that. We're not putting any more money into it. But I'm guessing 1998 one may be less safe. Should we assume it will last as a relatively safe vehicle beyond mid-July anyway? We probably wouldn't use it much unless it lasted through August. It doesn't have the guaranteed expiration, though, so it might allow putting off buying another newer vehicle, and it may be safe enough to justify wanting to drive a more comfortable vehicle that looks and sounds nicer. But maybe it isn't.

I hate decisions like this. I don't even have any gut intuition one way or the other of what seems better or which I'd rather keep longer and which I'd rather get rid of sooner. We need to get rid of both, but having a second vehicle is kind of important for the moment. More often than not this summer it's been able to save us from some real headaches that we would have had otherwise, and I have to leave one school immediately after class to make it home in time to eat and make it to the next class, which means I don't want to depend on being able to have the only vehicle but also wouldn't want to rely on Sam having to come get me.

U.S. States: Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin

other U.S.: District of Columbia, U.S. Government
Canada: Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec

Not seen since April 2009: Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, Tennessee
Not seen since March 2009: Alabama, Alaska, Mississippi, Montana, Oregon, South Carolina, British Columbia
Not seen since Feb 2009: Arkansas, Louisiana
Not seen since Jan 2009: Nebraska, North Dakota
Not seen since Oct 2008: South Dakota
Not seen since Aug 2008: Nova Scotia
Not seen since May 2008: Wyoming
Not seen since Dec 2007: New Brunswick, Puerto Rico

U.S. States: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin

other U.S.: District of Columbia
Canada: Manitoba, Ontario

Not seen since March 2009: Alabama, Alaska, Mississippi, Montana, Oregon, South Carolina, U.S. Government, British Columbia
Not seen since Feb 2009: Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana
Not seen since Jan 2009: Nebraska, North Dakota, Quebec
Not seen since Nov 2008: Hawaii
Not seen since Oct 2008: South Dakota
Not seen since Aug 2008: Nova Scotia
Not seen since May 2008: Wyoming
Not seen since Dec 2007: New Brunswick, Puerto Rico

1. I've been extremely busy. I'm teaching two summer classes and barely keeping up with them. Plus the kids have been sick, meaning some have been home and in need of more attention than normal. So I haven't had time to do much blogging. But I've got a few things I've been thinking about that I did manage to put in Facebook updates, which I might as well put here in lieu of anything that will take more time than I have.

2. Remember when Rosie O'Donnell outrageously called it a separation of church and state for President Bush to take the religious identification on the Supreme Court from three to give Catholics, making Catholic justices the majority? I just thought it was worth noticing that President Obama has nominated another self-identified Roman Catholic to replace another Protestant, and I've yet to hear any similar claims from Rosie O'Donnell (although I did hear that Christopher Hitchens is being consistent on this by finding it grave and troubling).

3. I heard a strange NPR story on the dangers of fracking. It took a little listening to discover that they meant this. It was hard to listen with a straight face. I don't know how the reporter got through it.

4. The Supreme Court could rule as early as Monday on a case Judge Sotomayor was involved in that could lead to some real fodder for criticism in her hearing. SCOTUSBlog has an excellent presentation of the issue and how it might go.

5. Once I get a breather I intend to look closely at some of the Sotomayor stuff that SCOTUSBlog has been posting since before her nomination even occurred. I haven't had time to comment on her nomination, but I'm not sure I would even know what to say just yet. Her actual opinions are kind of important, and most criticism so far has not focused on them but on some political speeches and interviews she's given.

Minority Thinker asks, "How Can Parents of Young Children Observe a Day of Rest?" If sabbatarian principles mean we have a moral responsibility to take a day of rest, then what does that mean for a full-time parent whose work is to care for a family? For that matter, what about someone who has a full-time job who then comes home and has a family also to care for? Is it rest from one's job if that rest time is spent doing household tasks and doing a different sort of work? This post is adapted from a comment I left on that post.

I've spent some time reflecting on how Christians should see the Sabbath (and see also this followup). I'm assuming that background here, although some of this might reflect small developments in how I've thought about this since then.

A close look at the biblical passages on the Sabbath reveals that there are certain aspects of farming that they did do and others that they didn't. They wouldn't do any planting or harvesting on the Sabbath, but they would feed their animals, and they would rescue animals if they fell in a ditch. Similarly, for household living they wouldn't gather food on the Sabbath, and they wouldn't do something to bring in income to provide for food if it wasn't something that had to be done every day, but in the ancient world they couldn't prepare a meal and then put it in the fridge to be microwaved the next day, so they prepared food on the Sabbath.

The theological principle behind the Sabbath is less rest and more completion and wholeness or peace with God. God created, and then God allowed his creation to stand. It was complete. His work was done. Of course, it wasn't really done. God still maintains his creation and providentially orders it. But there's a sense in which its completion is celebrated in the seventh-day principle. In Christ we enter God's rest, meaning we are complete and not in need of further work to be in God's family. Christ's work is done at the cross. It doesn't mean we're perfected yet, but of course we're not ever done yet experientially in this life. The Sabbath principle is to recognize what is complete in Christ and to rest in that. In this sense all time since Christ is Sabbath time. It's not that the work week has expanded to include the seventh day. It's that the Sabbath has expanded to include the rest of the week, the same way the holiness of the temple has expanded to include all believers as the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit.

Now there is a secondary principle of observing regular rest as a simple wisdom teaching in the sense of the wisdom of Proverbs, but do we have to do that in the 6-on 1-off pattern of the Sabbath ritual in the Mosaic covenant? I'm not sure why we would. The opponents Paul is dealing with in both Galatians and Colossians are too tied up with observing special days and seeing them as special, and Romans 14 and Philippians 3 allow for the weaker Christians to maintain such customs if they can't bring themselves to be mature enough to recognize the principles in other ways, but Paul's preference is for them to mature and apply the principles in other ways when circumstances warrant it.

I think it's important to notice that different percentages are given for different things in the old covenant, with one-seventh for rest and completion on a weekly basis, one-seventh for resting the land over seven years, one-tenth for tithes of produce, or the firstborn (whose percentage may be as much as 100% or may be much less) for animals and children. I think that signals that the percentage of time isn't really the issue. It all belongs to God, and we symbolize that by giving him the best and by recognizing that it's not from us but a gift from God. This is true with our work in any sense of the term, including parental responsibilities. Finding ways to take breaks, especially when others are willing to handle those ongoing responsibilities for short times, is indeed an application of this general principle. It's a recognition that it's God who enables, and we're stewards of our children just as much as we're stewards of our possessions. With high-needs kids who need close attention, it's impossible to get a lot of time away from them, so it's important to try to find those opportunities, not just for rest but to demonstrate our recognition that we're only doing a task God has given us. Some people don't want to relinquish control, and being extremely possessive of your kids, including caring for their basic needs (and I would say this includes how they're educated) may show a sign that the principle of stewardship isn't full operative.

U.S. States: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin

other U.S.: District of Columbia, U.S. Government
Canada: British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario

Not seen since Feb 2009: Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana
Not seen since Jan 2009: Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Quebec
Not seen since Nov 2008: Hawaii
Not seen since Oct 2008: South Dakota
Not seen since Aug 2008: Nova Scotia
Not seen since May 2008: Wyoming
Not seen since Dec 2007: New Brunswick, Puerto Rico

Sam has posted some more pictures on the picture blog:

Isaiah's kindergarten graduation last year
Ethan's 8th birthday this week
Some birthday costumes
from our walk to the park and its pond on Sunday
Jewel (now at 7 months)

U.S. States: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin

other U.S.: District of Columbia, U.S. Government
Canada: Manitoba, Ontario

Not seen since Jan 2009: Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Quebec, South Carolina
Not seen since Dec 2008: Oregon, Utah
Not seen since Nov 2008: Hawaii, Mississippi, British Columbia
Not seen since Oct 2008: South Dakota
Not seen since Aug 2008: Nova Scotia
Not seen since May 2008: Wyoming
Not seen since Dec 2007: New Brunswick, Puerto Rico

I somehow forgot to do this a month ago.

U.S. States: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin

other U.S.: District of Columbia, U.S. Government
Canada: Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec

Not seen since Dec 2008: Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Oregon, Utah
Not seen since Nov 2008: Alaska, Hawaii, Louisiana, Mississippi, British Columbia
Not seen since Oct 2008: South Dakota
Not seen since Aug 2008: Nova Scotia
Not seen since May 2008: Wyoming
Not seen since Dec 2007: Puerto Rico, New Brunswick

Sam was interviewed for the local news broadcast tonight for a parent reaction to today's decision that there's still absolutely no reason to believe that autism is caused by vaccines. They included some brief family footage without the boys (with me in full mountain man mode) and a still shot of the boys' latest pictures. She's got a link to the video in her post.

Does anyone know if there's a way to download video in that kind of streaming format? I know there used to be a way to do it by changing the filename extension, but I don't remember how to do that, and I'm guessing it no longer works the same way. Update: Got it. Thanks, Jonathan I!

X-Men and Philosophy: Astonishing Insight and Uncanny Argument in the Mutant X-Verse will be published in about two months, at the end of March. You can see the table of contents to see the range of topics covered (and here is the Amazon entry). My chapter, "Mutants and the Metaphysics of Race", will be my first publication besides a book review on the InterVarsity four views volume on God and time, so I'm looking forward to getting a copy to hold in my hands rather than having to look at it in PDF form.

The chapter on destiny and prophecy I wrote for the forthcoming volume in the same series on Harry Potter will not be surfacing anywhere near as quickly. The publisher decided they wanted it to come out at the same time as the final movie. Since they haven't released movie six yet, and there will be eight movies, we'll have a while to wait. The current expectation for the second Deathly Hallows movie is May 2011. The book is pretty much done, but they're going to sit on it for two and a half years rather than releasing it with the sixth movie and then allowing themselves the opportunity to do a second one with the final film.

U.S. States: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin

other U.S.: District of Columbia
Canada: Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec

Not seen since Nov 2008: Alaska, Hawaii, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, British Columbia
Not seen since Oct 2008: South Dakota, West Virginia, U.S. government
Not seen since Aug 2008: Nebraska, Nova Scotia
Not seen since May 2008: Wyoming
Not seen since Apr 2008: Idaho
Not seen since Dec 2007: Puerto Rico, New Brunswick
Not seen since Oct 2007: North Dakota

Sophia was drawing on our dry erase board. I probably wouldn't have been able to put together the various pieces in any coherent way without her narrative, which was something like this:

This is God, and this is Moses, and this is God's friend Jesus. This is the burning bush, and the burning bush sends God down to earth. And that's the story of Jesus.

U.S. States: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin

other U.S.: District of Columbia
Canada: British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec

As I noted in my post last month, as of Oct 31 I had not seen Hawaii or Mississippi since I started this in October 2007. On Dec 1, I saw Mississippi, and on Dec 2 I saw Hawaii. So I've now seen all the U.S. states since I started this in October 2007. Thus I'm switching to a new format, keeping track of when the last time I saw the plates I haven't seen in the month I'm reporting on. So the following plates did not appear in the list above but have been in my lists since Oct 2007, and I've categorized them by when they last appeared.

Not seen since October 2008: Arkansas, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, West Virginia, U.S. government., British Columbia
Not seen since August 2008: Nebraska, Nova Scotia
Not seen since May 2008: Wyoming
Not seen since April 2008: Idaho
Not seen since Dec 2007: Puerto Rico, New Brunswick

More pictures: Jewel in her command center, being entertained and decorated by her brother and sister.

Sam has put up pictures of Sophia's trip to the pumpkin patch with her pre-K class.

U.S. States: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin

other U.S.: District of Columbia, U.S. Government

Canada: British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec

U.S. States Lost from Sept: Kansas, New Mexico

U.S. States Gained from Sept: Montana

U.S. States not seen yet at all: As of October 31, I still hadn't seen Hawaii and Mississippi since I started doing this in October 2007. [But that will change next month. I finally saw one of them today!]

Sam has posted some more pictures of the kids, this time focusing on Isaiah and Jewel.

I'm in the middle of some serious revisions on the "Harry Potter and Destiny" piece, whose next draft is due tomorrow. I'm down to 5364 words. I don't need to write anything new, but I do need to figure out how to get it down to 4200 words. The longer this takes the less time I'll have for grading, and I have about a week's worth of grading to do by Friday. So I'm not even going to take the time to pull out a set of notes from my teaching to reformat for the blog.

I did want to note that I've reached a surprising stage in life. I've now had my first instance of discovering one of my kids forging my signature. Ethan has to record a book he read four days a week, and each is supposed to be signed by a parent. He's taken to writing them in himself, and since I wasn't immediately present but across the room, he decided to copy the scrawl from the signature above so as not to leave an incomplete blank on his sheet (if only he did this with the name and date lines). It was just about perfect, too. He has problems writing letters with precise enough motions, but he has no trouble at all forging my signature perfectly.

Meanwhile, it was Sophia's fourth birthday today, and Sam's got some pictures up. [Update: Sam put up a fuller post with more pictures and text at the picture blog, so I've changed the link.]

Sam has posted a bunch of pictures now that we've got a functional digital camera again, and I've only linked to one set so far (when Jewel was born). Here are the others:

Some pictures from Isaiah's fourth birthday party

Ethan and Sophia posing for pictures with Jewel

Ethan's new obsession making signs

Some older pictures (one very much older; that's Ethan gnawing on the crib)

Ethan being Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs

My hard drive appears to be fried. I'm trying to decide whether to send it off to a data recovery place that does free estimates to see how much it would cost to recover what I've done since my last backup.

I'm trying to locate the CD from my end-of-summer backup, because the only one I can find is from last fall. I have all my assignments saved to school servers, any dissertation work I've done was sent to people on my committee, and my latest versions of material I'm writing for the Philosophy and Pop Culture series is recoverable from my editors. I'll have to get them to send me stuff, though. The Syracuse University server for some reason refuses to save attachments for outgoing mail for later recovery, and I do all my correspondence for those matters with that account. What I won't have is any lecture notes on material I've covered for the first time since fall 2007, and there's quite a lot of it. I'll also lose all my non-GMail email for a year and a whole bunch of files I've put together collecting and organizing information that would take many hours to reconstruct. All of my backups of Ethan's now-scratched CDs were also on that drive, and he may completely freak out the next time he gets a hankering for one of them that we can now no longer just burn. A few of them are on an older computer, but most of the ones he likes most aren't. Only two of them have existing copies that play straight through.

If it's only going to be a few hundred dollars, it might be worth it, but some of these recoveries are closer to $1000. I haven't even had a chance to call Dell for a replacement yet (my first time in a few days with more than a half hour free without something else demanding my time will be tomorrow morning), so I won't be able to rebuild my system until Monday night, which means we're sharing one computer until then unless I go buy a keyboard to see if the computer that's been effectively Ethan's will work with an external keyboard.

It's been hard in the last few weeks even to find time to sit down and write blog posts, and having to share a computer is going to make that harder (plus I've lost my file of things to blog about, including some half-written posts that would save a lot of time in posting something quickly). So what appears here depends on (1) how much time I get without distractions but with a computer and (2) whether I can remember what I wanted to write about or come up with other things quickly enough given my constraints. I may have a little time tomorrow, but I have other things to do during that time, including calling Dell and perhaps contacting a recovery place or two to ask if they had any sense of what this kid of problem would cost. So it may be sparser in content around here than usual for a few days.

Update (Sun afternoon): After my first two attempts to use SpinRite led to a message warning me not to use it because of a BIOS incompatibility, which several people have told me can't be right, and the third didn't even recognize the drive, I tried it one more time at my brother's urging, and it recognized it and didn't give me the crazy message about the BIOS. It fixed enough problems for me to run it in an external drive bay and copy over everything I can get. The one remaining task is to back up my Firefox settings and booksmarks and my Thunderbird email, which I can do with a neat tool designed for backing up Mozilla products if I can boot up my system. It didn't boot when I tried it, though, so I'm running SpinRite again. We'll see if it works.

Update 2 (late Sunday night): Well, I managed to get all the information off the drive thanks to SpinRite, but I had to run it a few times. The worst problem was getting Sam's hard drive back out of the external drive bay I'd put it into during the time I had to boot up my own drive. Somehow it got stuck in there, and I had to widdle away at whatever plasticky/rubbery stuff was functioning like a screw to hold the back end on so I could open it up from the back to push it out. Once I got those off and pulled the back off, it slid right out, so it must have been wedged into the back end somehow. The drive bay probably won't be travelable as easily as it was, but that's a small price to pay for getting all my data saved and getting Sam's drive back into her computer safely (I hope). I better run SpinRite on her drive tonight just in case. It did get jarred a bit in the process of trying to get it out, but it was parked properly first, whereas the initial drop that damaged my drive happened when it was on, which is extremely dangerous. It's an hour later than I like to go to bed, but it's nice to have relative closure on all these things while I await my new drive to appear on Tuesday.

U.S. States: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin

other U.S.: District of Columbia, U.S. Government

Canada: Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Quebec

U.S. States Lost from July: Arkansas, Louisiana, Nevada, South Dakota

U.S. States Gained from July: Alaska, Montana

U.S. States not seen yet at all: I still haven't seen Hawaii and Mississippi since I started doing this in October.

Sam's water broke at 3:15 this morning. She had over five hours of good contractions, but they stopped for over two hours, which is a little unusual. We went in to the doctor's office, and he doesn't seem bothered. He sent us home to wait until things progress more. She was at 2 cm when we were at the office, and the contractions have resumed (but still not nearly frequent enough to justify going to the hospital). So we might have to wait for a while.

Update: Jewel Elisabeth Pierce was born at 10:36 pm on August 18, 2008, weighing in at 6 lbs. 9 oz. Mommy and baby are both doing fine, even if Daddy is still too sick to breathe well.

Jewel basically delivered herself. She had her whole head out without any medical personnel in the room and without any pushing. The nurses finally arrived just in time for one of them to catch her so that my infection-spreading hands didn't have to touch her, and the doctors all walked in after her cord was already cut to find the nurses well into their instrument-poking and information-recording.

Update 8/21: Sam's put up a picture here. She's put a few more on Facebook, but this is the only one so far that's accessible to the whole internet (except China).

Sam's put up some more pictures on her picture blog. This might be more frequent now that we have a camera that both works and will connect to the computer.

The first was actually from months ago. For some reason I forgot to link to it: Sophia putting on Mommy's makeup

Ethan and Sophia listening to the baby. Ethan still thinks he's getting a new little brother, and Sophia still thinks she's getting a little sister.

Ethan doing his new construction worker thing. They tore up about ten feet of concrete sidewalk right in front of our front walkway and then spent exactly a month (to the day) tearing up other people's concrete and filling in new concrete on other people's sidewalks. Exactly a day after they rendered our front walkway nearly useless, they filled it back in again. It's nice now except for the rocks they used to fill in the parts of Sam's garden that they uprooted, which clearly don't look remotely appropriate in the middle of a garden patch. I have to wonder if the exact month was to avoid some legal issue, if for instance we could sue them for taking too long if they went over a month. Anyway, Ethan had a lot of time to watch construction workers while waiting for the bus during that month.

Isaiah just lost his two front bottom teeth. It really is impossible to get a good picture of him if he knows there's a camera anywhere near him, but I suppose this isn't as bad as it sometimes is. Redeye is pretty common, but he's got Goldeneye! I always thought he'd be a good evil dictator, and being a Bond villain at such a young age is a pretty good start.

U.S. States: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin

other U.S.: District of Columbia, U.S. Government

Canada: Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Quebec

U.S. States Lost from June: Kansas, New Mexico

U.S. States Gained from June: Arkansas, Louisiana, South Dakota

U.S. States not seen yet at all: I still haven't seen Hawaii and Mississippi since I started doing this in October.

I was reading through a section of my dissertation that I haven't looked at in a while, and I found myself reading about vague joints. I didn't remember using that expression, so it was kind of interesting to notice it there.

It doesn't exactly sound like the kind of thing you'd see in a Ph.D. dissertation. Of course, neither do gunk or stuff. Metaphysicians come up with some great technical terms sometimes. Of course, metaphysical discussions of holes really are about holes.

Oh, and if you don't have a sense of what vague joints might be, here's a hint.

The boys were at their Occupational Therapy, and it was Isaiah's turn. Ethan and Sophia were playing with a game in the gym, which abuts the therapy room. This was late enough for the room to be empty, since they do their therapy from 5:00-6:45 pm, and this was after 6:00. The sanitation engineer, a woman wearing a pink shirt, came in the room to change the trash bags just as I was poking my head into the therapy room to see how Isaiah was doing. When I went back, Sophia said the following:

Daddy, we were sitting here, and that pink lady came in, and she said hi, but we didn't either, because we were too shy.

1. Sophia still refers to people as having certain colors not because their skin is a certain color but because they're wearing clothing that color. She used to do this regularly when she was just beginning to speak in complete sentences. She clearly knows how to distinguish people according to skin color, but she's got a clear enough sense of accuracy not to call anyone black or white, since no one actually is those colors; Mommy is brown, and the rest of the family is peach. It still doesn't stop her from saying a person is the color the person is wearing.

2. The word 'either' seems to be doing the job of 'also' or 'too', either of which would have sounded very strange, so she substituted something that sounds syntactically ok even if it's semantically crazy. Her error-correction has problems in terms of its positive solutions, but she certainly can catch something that doesn't sound right.

3. Many kids are shy. Some will admit to it occasionally if you ask them. What kind of a kid will volunteer her shyness as an explanation for not saying hi to someone, when you didn't ask for an explanation, didn't know to begin with that the person had said hi and she'd refused to respond, and really wouldn't have noticed if you'd never been told? She realizes that she's being shy by not speaking to the woman, but she has this compulsion to tell us not only that she didn't respond but that her shyness is the explanation why she didn't respond. It's as if she has to speak her inner monologue aloud all the time whenever she's just with us, but she won't say a word to other people. That's a weird combination of being shy and being very much not shy.

4. She doesn't just tell us the events that occurred. She's engaging in behind-the-scenes explanation of why she does certain things, and she attributes it to a somewhat abstract quality of herself, her shyness. Do three-year-olds typically engage in such second-order reflection? This is new for us. Since her brothers are well behind her in such things, we have no idea when this sort of thing normally begins.

Here's a good example of the kind of stream-of-consciousness monologuing Sophia engages in most of her waking hours.

Sophia: Daddy, I want to wear my ugly dress today. It's in my closet hanging on a nail, just like my nail polish. My nail polish is over here. Daddy, look. See, my nail polish is melting off.

She'll often move across several different tenuous connections like that within the course of 20 seconds, and sometimes she even goes on for several minutes. We pick up very little of it most of the time because of how quickly she moves through the various stages.

She also likes to throw in lots of irrelevant information just because she likes to talk about it, so she'll tell me where her bear is (next to her blanket) and have to say that the blanket is a certain color or colors and that her Mommy made it for her. Sometimes she ties things to certain occasions or just mentions some term for a day a while back (often Saturday, which just means a while ago as far as she's concerned).

We got to see her cousin last week, who is only six weeks younger, and I was curious to see if she does the same thing. Not remotely, as far as I could tell.

Oh, and I have no idea why she calls it her ugly dress or why she nevertheless likes to wear it.

U.S. States: Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin

other U.S.: District of Columbia, U.S. Government

Canada: Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Quebec

U.S. States Lost from May: Arkansas, Louisiana, Wyoming

U.S. States Gained from May: Delaware, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Tennessee

U.S. States not seen yet at all: I still haven't seen Hawaii and Mississippi since I started doing this in October.

Sophia: What are you watching, Daddy?
Me: Doctor Who
Sophia: Daddy, what kind of Doctor Who is that?
Me: That's the Third Doctor. The one you know is the Tenth Doctor.
Sophia: Oh.

(Two or three weeks passed, with no discussion on the matter during the intervening time, except once or twice asking if she wants to watch Doctor Who, with a surprisingly positive response. I was home alone and decided to pull out the Third Doctor serial I was in the middle of to finish it. Sophia came home with Sam near the end of it.)

Sophia: Daddy, what are you watching?
Me: Doctor Who
Sophia: Daddy, what kind of Doctor Who is that? I want to watch the Ten Doctor.

My 'e' key had something stuck under it on Thursday night. Normally, it's just a matter of pulling the top off, removing whatever is under it, and putting the key back on. Well, this time it didn't work that way. It worked more the way my old computer did, which means the key just broke off an wouldn't go back on. The next day the 'd' key an the 'c' key stopped working as well.

I called Dell on Friday in time to get an appointment today for a technician to come out, with the complete-care warranty with next-day service that I just renewed for $440 (more like $470 if you count tax). There was some severe weather today that might explain why they didn't bother to honor their agreement (even after a specific appointment from 1:30-5:30, which the the technician even made specific by calling to say it would be after 2:30). No phone call to say they wouldn't be fulfilling the terms of the contract. No email to explain the no-show and ask for a time tomorrow. Nothing at all.

Dell has been very good to me. Still, if you're not going to honor the terms of a contract your loyal customer has just paid for (and I'm not saying this isn't an excusable circumstance) you better inform that loyal paying customer that the service will unfortunately not be able to be fulfilled according to the terms of that contract, to apologize, and to offer an immediate attempt to remedy in whatever way is in your power.

I had a choice between posting some lecture notes that I could cut and paste or typing out this message and inserting all the instances of e, c, and d. Normally, I'd never consider the amount of work involved with the second option if I had a choice, but it's important that companies known for their special customer service (and as I said Dell is very good on the whole) receive a public calling out when they fail even to apologize or notify someone of a failure to keep their agreement. They're usually better than this.

Update (8:43 am Tues 6-17): I called the service scheduling center, and they seemed to think the tech had called us to reschedule. Someone seems to be fabricating records, because no one called us, never mind got us to agree to a time to reschedule.

Update (9:32 pm Tues 6-17): The tech arrived today, with maybe 15 minutes' notice, saying nothing about any appointment yesterday. I'm not sure what happened, but I didn't press it with him. Someone did something wrong, though, because the computer shouldn't have indicated a rescheduling with the customer when the customer hadn't had any contact whatsoever with the tech about rescheduling.

Sophia and Ethan were reciting some conversation about what time it is from something they watched. They kept asking what time it is, and the expected answer was "quarter after" or something like that.

Sophia: Daddy, what time is it?
Me: It's 9:02.
Ethan: It's 9:03.
Me: That's right. It's 9:03 now. But it was 9:02 when I said 9:02. The clock changed.
Sophia (to Ethan): Say "What time is it, Sophia?"
Ethan: What time is it, Sophia?
Sophia: Uh, I don't know.
Sophia: Maybe it's 100 times.

Sophia: Daddy, who are you?
Me: I'm your Daddy.
Sophia: That's silly! You're Ethan and Isaiah's daddy! But Mommy is my Mommy!

I don't remember the context, but a few days ago Sophia listed off a bunch of colors and then said, "Daddy, all of those colors are my favorite colors. But not white. White's my empty color."

She said that about white another time the next day, completely out of any context of color. She was just describing something and said that it was white and that white was an empty color or her empty color or something like that. I didn't get down the exact way she put it.

If she means it something like the empty set, she may be right (at least if she's talking about colored objects; she's exactly wrong if she applies it to light, but a three-year-old isn't going to do that). I'm curious where she might have gotten it from, though, or how she came that conclusion. Maybe it's because white crayons do nothing noticeable on white paper. But why empty? Why associate it with an empty container? It doesn't seem the most obvious metaphor for a three-year-old to use without it coming from someone else.

U.S. States: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, Wyoming

other U.S.: District of Columbia

Canada: Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec

U.S. States Lost from April: Delaware, Idaho, Nevada, Tennessee

U.S. States Gained from April: Alabama, Louisiana, Oregon, Wyoming

U.S. States not seen yet at all: I still haven't seen Hawaii and Mississippi since I started doing this in October.

Sophia holds up her bunny, sans the usual bow tied around its neck: "See, I took off his bow. Now he's a boy."
Me: "The bunny's a boy now?"
Sophia: "Yes, she is."

Me: What's going on here?
Sophia: Nothing.
Me: Then why's there egg all over the place?
Sophia: It's nothing.
Me: Were you playing with the egg?
Sophia: Uh, probably.

I have a few requests in case anyone reading this blog can help. If you've been following my recent submissions and approvals for the Blackwell philosophy and pop culture series, you might have some idea of why I want some of the following information if anyone has it readily available. If you have exact quotes or specific scenes from the movies or issue numbers in the comics, that would be wonderful. I have a large number of X-Men comic books (mostly from the mid-late 80s until the early 90s, but I have reprints of older stuff too), but if it's easy for anyone to find some then it will make my work much easier in two weeks once I'm done grading and begin writing, so I can focus on the philosophy.

1. I'm looking for any instances in X-Men movies or comic books where any character or the narrator uses race-language or species-language to refer to mutants as distinct from humans. This includes when it's morally loaded but also when it's not. I'm interested both in Magneto's elevated view of the rights of mutants as superior beings but also in the factual claim that mutants are a separate race, sub-species, or species.

2. I'm also looking for instances where Magneto has given moral justifications for his questionable or immoral actions, again from the movies or the comic books. (I have no cartoon episodes to verify the information.) I'm interested in his attitude toward humans and the moral difference he sees between mutants and humans. I'm also interested in any general moral principles he might state in the process of explaining his reasons for doing things. Any specific descriptions of Magneto's actions as terrorist would also be nice or descriptions of particular actions he's taken that are morally questionable or outright immoral would also help me.

3. For those more wizard-inclined, I'm hoping to compile a list of seemingly-chance occurrences in Harry Potter, where something not under the conscious control of any character, i.e. lucky occurrences, are absolutely crucial for the major plot of the book to move along, particularly if Harry's success or the bad guys' defeat or frustration in their purposes hinges on it. I'm also looking for specific instances where any characters talk about issues related to destiny, the various prophecies, time travel and changing the past, free will, and so on. If you can give page numbers in the American paperback editions (hardcover for Deathly Hallows) or chapter numbers otherwise, that would be great. But even just mention of the events and how important they are could help me if it's something I haven't thought of yet, especially if it's a really big deal.

Whatever help anyone can offer is appreciated.

We got this message on our voicemail from a number that was listed as RESTRICTED. It was an automated message that must have started before it began recording.

We just need to know what email address we can reach you at. The email address we have for you stopped working. So we wanted to ask you to take a quick second to update your address. You can do it over the phone right now. All you have to do is press 1 and fill out your email address. Just press 1. It just takes a second. That way we'll be able to keep you up to date on the great work that MoveOn's 3.2 million members are doing every day to win back the country from radical Republicans. So please just press 1, and thank you for your time and your continued support of MoveOn. And of course this message was paid for by MoveOn.org's political action and was not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

Then the voice changes, and there's a phone number for how to reach them (I assume for when the recording is left on an answering machine or voicemail, and you can't press 1 to get anywhere).

So is this a new tactic or something? Our phone number is associated with only two adults, both members of the Republican Party. No one else has been at this number since 1999. I don't think MoveOn.org even existed back then. (Update: I guess it has.) I'm pretty confident they would count us as radical Republicans. So is there something we actually did that they incompetently assumed would make us prime candidates for giving money to them? Or are they just trying to annoy conservatives by sending them spam phone calls?

U.S. States: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin

other U.S.: District of Columbia, U.S. government

Canada: Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec

U.S. States Lost from March: Alaska, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Dakota, Wyoming

U.S. States Gained from March: Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, Nevada

U.S. States not seen yet at all: I still haven't seen Hawaii and Mississippi since I started doing this in October.

I wrote before that my proposal for a chapter on mutants and the nature of race was accepted to The X-Men and Philosophy volume and that I'd submitted three other proposals for two other volumes. I haven't heard anything one way or the other about my submission about The Hobbit, but I found out today that one of the two proposals I wrote for Harry Potter and Philosophy was accepted. They liked what I submitted about the limits of authorial intent, but they had a number of good submissions on that topic, and they decided they'd rather go with my proposal on destiny in Rowling's series, so they accepted that one. You can see the blog version of my initial thoughts on the matter here.

Before I even started graduate school, I hoped to be able to write popular-level philosophical discussions about questions that I thought needed serious philosophical reflection that science fiction and fantasy often raise, and I guess now I get to write about two topics I care a lot about in two fictional worlds that I've spent a lot of time in. These will be my first publications besides a book review (although it was a book review that made several substantive points, some of which I thought were genuine contributions to how to think about the issues). That means I need to work hard to submit some parts of my dissertation to journals pretty quickly to avoid giving the impression that I'm a lightweight when it comes to publication. Still, I'm glad to have the chance to contribute to these volumes.

We were out for a walk today, and Sophia and Ethan had gotten ahead of the rest of us. As they approached a road, we called them back. Ethan stopped, and Sophia kept going. So Ethan went over to Sophia, picked her up, and carried her back toward us. Sophia protested in a way that imitated Ethan's usual protesting (which in turn imitates what his teachers say to him when telling him a general rule about not saying no to teachers or some such thing. Here is the exchange that began with that. The first line itself would have been funny enough, but she doesn't stop there.

Sophia: It's not ok to bring little people back to their moms and dads.
Me: Are you a little person?
Sophia: Yeah.
Me: Is Ethan a little person?
Sophia: Yeah.
Me: Is Bear-Bear a little person?
Sophia: Yeah, and so is Isaiah.
Me: Is the baby a little person?
Sophia: Yes, they are.

So she assumes a fetus is a person (whereas some philosophers I know might wonder if Isaiah is a person on their account of personhood, or perhaps they'd think his personhood is just now beginning to emerge now that he's beginning to communicate better). But she also thinks her stuffed bear is a little person. (In both cases it means she's working from a conceptual framework that doesn't require consciousness or the capacity for pleasure or pain for personhood. I'm not sure if there's some condition her assumptions about personhood require, though. I think for the bear she might be speaking in the world of her imagination or something.)

Then she does a third interesting thing. She goes on to use a singular 'they' with the correct grammatically-plural but semantically-singular verb (as opposed to saying "they is", which occurs in some colloquial English dialects even for a real plural "they" but not ever in standard colloquial English, which still says "they are" for a singular referent when gender is unknown). What's funny is that she and Ethan are in full disagreement about whether the baby is a boy or a girl. She wants a sister, and so she must be getting one. Ethan is expecting another brother. [We'll be happy if Isaiah thinks more of the baby than he would a stuffed animal he can throw things at, since that's exactly what happened the last time he was near a newborn. He nailed it in the head with a pretty hard plastic toy. That boy can really aim, but he needs some more discernment of targets.]

Anyway, Sophia isn't going to go out of her way to avoid using male or female terms for this kid. It's just so natural for her that she used the singular 'they' (and got it right) without thinking that she has this view she's putting forward about a baby sister. She's learned the language better than a lot of cranky language prescriptivists who think this expression is some offensive innovation in recent years (even though it occurs in the King James Version of the Bible, not to mention Shakespeare and Jane Austen).

Sam has compiled another list of stuff the kids have been saying and doing.

Meanwhile, the ultrasound technician asked us today if we wanted to know what we're having. I resisted the temptation to say, "What, do you think it might be a lizard or something?"

I've been spending less time blogging in the last few days because I've been working on several things I've been sending off for publication. Actually, they're all for the same series of books looking at pop culture phenomena from a philosophical perspective. I received word on Saturday that my submission "Mutants and the Metaphysics of Race" was accepted for the forthcoming Blackwell volume The X-Men and Philosophy. I'm very happy about that, because it should be a lot of fun to write, and it reflects a lot of the things I'm writing about in my dissertation.

The due date for submissions to two other books in the series is tomorrow, and I've been putting together three submissions, two of them based on things I've written about on this blog before. I've reflected before about destiny in Harry Potter and the limits of authorial intent given some of J.K. Rowling's comments about her stories. The one that took a lot more new thinking was about providence and chance in The Hobbit, which was a lot harder to think through than the same questions would have been for The Lord of the Rings or The Silmarillion.

I thought about something on race in Harry Potter, but I already had these two posts that I could refashion into abstracts for chapters, and I do have a lot of grading to do and still some class prep for tomorrow, so I went with the quicker path. I think it might have beenm harder to come up with something as philosophically-oriented given that the metaphysical issues wouldn't have been as upfront as the difficulties I'm going to be pointing out with seeing mutants as a race. With ethical issues, there would be much less that's controversial that Harry Potter is suited for pointing out. (The examples Rowling gives are much more clearly wrong in an uncontroversial way than the kinds of racism that really aren't universally seen as bad.) It's probably for the best, because now if any of these get accepted it will be a publication, albeit a popular-level one, on a philosophical topic other than my dissertation, and that shows more well-roundedness.

It remains to be seen if any of these will be accepted, but having one accepted for a different volume certainly helped provide the energy necessary to write up what I'd been thinking about for a while. Now I need to get something published in an academic journal in case any of these get accepted, or potential departments I apply to might think I'm only capable of publishing philosophy for a popular audience.

U.S. states: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, Wyoming

Other U.S.: District of Columbia, U.S. Government

Canada: Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec

U.S. states lost from February: Iowa, Minnesota, New Mexico, West Virginia

U.S. states gained (not in February): Alaska, Louisiana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Wyoming

U.S. states seen yet at all: I'm down to just Hawaii and Mississippi. Alaska and Wyoming were on this list after February, but I did see them both during March.

On Sam's picture blog.

Sam has been constructing a list of some cute things the kids have said in the past few weeks. If I'd known, there would be several more that I would have written down.

We've got a working digital camera again, so Sam's uploaded some pictures from Ethan's birthday Tuesday. I also discovered that I'd saved a couple posts from her picture blog to post links to and then never did, of Sophia and Ethan from the summer.

Sam: Hey, stay out of that box!
Sophia: I did.

It's now March, so I've got another set of license plates to post from what I saw during February.

U.S. States: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin

Other U.S.: District of Columbia, U.S. government

Canada: Manitoba, Ontario

Lost from January: Idaho, Louisiana, Montana, Oregon, South Dakota

Gained (not in January): Kentucky, New Mexico, Washington, West Virginia

I still haven't seen Alaska, Hawaii, Mississippi, and Wyoming since I started this in October. I've seen all the other U.S. states. I've seen four Canadian provinces (the other two are New Brunswick and Quebec) and two U.S. territories (D.C. and Puerto Rico).

I'm going to be experimenting for a little bit on the look of this blog. The new installation of Movable Type has been giving me all sorts of problems with comment submission, archives, and failures in spam prevention, because the changes Wink made to the templates when he did the last big site redesign weren't all compatible with the new features of this version of the MT software. I was hoping we could just make some changes in the templates he designed, but that doesn't look possible without more work than he can do on a level of detail beyond my understanding, so I'm just starting new, and if he gets some time he can implement some of those changes again with the new templates. I'll try to do what I can myself, but I'm sure there are limits to that.

It might be a while before the sidebar and features are all set up the way I want them, so if you're looking for something I once had in the sidebar or header, please be patient. I'll try to get the most important stuff done as quickly as I can, but the spam issue is the most important priority, and I want to get the new spam protection features working first. I've also got real life responsibilities, including some meetings at school for the boys this morning and an application to get out this afternoon, so I might not even get to some of the more important stuff until this evening.

Larry Norman has died. Some called him the grandfather of Christian rock music. He helped develop it before it got all commercialized and processed, and many of the earliest Christian rock musicians (Phil Keaggy, Randy Stonehill, Keith Green, The Second Chapter of Acts) were at least at some time all within his circle. His music was often cheesy but in a fun way, and it clearly challenged the status quo in evangelicalism in many good ways.

It was funny when I walked into my department a number of years ago and heard "Why Don't You Look Into Jesus?" playing very loudly through the hall, expecting that maybe our one evangelical professor had it playing (although he's not the type to play Christian music loudly so the whole department can hear). But it turned out to be a different professor, one who grew up in an evangelical home but is in fact an atheist. He had rediscovered Larry Norman on Napster and downloaded a whole bunch of his albums, and he was playing them loudly to illustrate the excellent music he'd grown up with. He wasn't in the least shy about proclaiming his appreciation for this outspoken evangelical rock musician whose lyrics were quite explicitly evangelistic.

Larry Norman had a hard life in many ways. Despite his significant influence, he never had much commercial success compared with the next generation of Christian rock (e.g. Amy Grant, Petra, Michael W. Smith, White Heart, Steve Taylor). He never became a mainstream artist or even a mainstream CCM artist in many ways, even though most early CCM musicians saw him as an important influence and owed him a great debt for helping get Christian rock going in the first place. He had heart trouble for decades, and to top it all off he had serious relational difficulties with several people close to him, the details of which too often made the rumor rounds in the public domain. His heart problems finally caught up with him on Sunday.

But whatever else is true of Larry Norman, he had a big impact on a lot of people, and I've probably been influenced by him indirectly in ways I don't even know about. I never listened to him much as one of my own favorites, but my brother Joel absolutely loved his stuff, so I have some familiarity with his music, and some of the people I did listen to growing up were directly influenced by him.

Larry was very nice to my brother, and I appreciate that a lot. Joel was in a college band called Mustard Seed that some people thought had all the signs of having a decent chance of becoming a hot new CCM act, just as Jars of Clay had done a few years earlier from the same school. (I won't comment on how Jars of Clay treated Mustard Seed when they had a chance to meet them, however.) My brother had put together a bootleg called We Wish You A Larry Christmas. Many people would have been upset, but Larry thought it was great, and he adopted the bootleg and began to produce it officially himself.

When my brother died in 1997, Larry did a free concert at his college as a tribute and performed one of my brother's own songs (Friendship's End) on a tribute CD some of Joel's college friends made after he died. His version isn't as good as Mustard Seed's, but it was a nice gesture. [I can't sing Larry's praises fully on this score, however. He later put that song on one of his own albums, and I have to think an administrative error took place, because he didn't give Joel any credit for it. Given how he'd previously treated him, this couldn't have been a deliberate attempt to take credit for my brother's work, even if it was disappointing to find out about.]

I've already seen several good tributes to Larry's life by people who know and appreciate a lot more about Larry's music than I can do justice to, so I'll refer you to those:

Charles Norman, Larry's brother
Internet Monk
my friend Gnu at Wildebeest's Wardrobe
Mark Joseph (at, of all places, the Huffington Post)
Steve Camp Jeff Smith posts Randy Stonehill's response
Michael Longinow, journalism professor at Biola University (guest-posting at GetReligion)
Chris Willman has a nice retrospective at Entertainment Weekly
Dennis Hevisi, New York Times
Rupert M. Loydell

I may add more as I discover them.

I received a message today from the college I teach at. In response to the shootings at Northern Illinois, they're implementing a third-party notification system. They give no specifics about this system, but at they end they say this:

This system will be a powerful tool that we will allow us to communicate instantaneously. To maximize effectiveness, however, we will need everyone in the campus community to provide us with their most current cell phone number.

Now keep in mind that this is the institution that pays two-thirds of its adjuncts something like $2175 per course without a Ph.D. and about $500 more to those with one. (They arbitrarily selected some departments to give a raise to at the beginning of this year to equal one-third. Next year they'll pick another few departments to make it two-thirds, and the year after will lead to a raise for the rest.) Keep in mind also that they don't normally allow adjuncts to teach more than two courses per semester (with one in the summer, and those pay based on how many students are enrolled). Remember also that it would be stupid for someone trying to finish a dissertation to try to teach more than that (and I only teach that much to retain half-time work to keep health insurance, which the state, not the college, provides and only to families of at least five at my income level.)

[When the adjuncts at Syracuse University formed a union, the faculty at this college were so embarrassed (because they pay even less) that they passed a resolution urging the president to give immediate raises to their own adjuncts, who get paid about 2/3 as much as the adjuncts at the university. It went nowhere for a year, and then they decided to implement the ridiculous three-stage raise described above, which angered the 2/3 of the adjuncts who were now getting paid less than the people who sit next to them in their office without anyone doing any different work. This attempt to pacify the adjuncts thus led pretty quickly to the very union they were seeking to stave off. Suffice it to say that this is one of clearest cases of white-collar exploitation I've been familiar with.]

So why is it that they're expecting people in this kind of position to have a cell phone? Do they honestly expect people with a family who can't afford to have more than one phone to have that one phone be a cell phone that only one of them can have and that it would happen to be with the one who works for them? I'd much rather have VOIP. It's cheaper, includes the free long-distance, and doesn't bring with it the temptation to leave one's spouse stranded at home with no phone. It also allows multiple physical phones with one connection, so we can charge one while using another or have two people talk at the same time. There are times when I'd like a cell phone with me when I'm out, but it's just not a good idea to expect your employees to have one if these are the working conditions you're going to provide for them. Notice that it doesn't say "everyone who has a cell phone". It says "everyone in the campus community". They really are assuming everyone has a cell phone.

Now I could give them my most current cell phone number. It won't do them much good, though. I'm sure someone else has been using it for over a year. They didn't ask for a current number, though, just the most current one, and I can give them that. I probably shouldn't, though. It wouldn't be nice to whoever has it.

Another month has passed, and my license plate records for the last month are ready for posting. Here are all the plates I saw during January.

U.S. States: Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin

Other U.S.: District of Columbia, U.S. government

Canada: Manitoba, Ontario

From last month I've lost Alabama, Arizona, Kentucky, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Washington, and West Virginia and gained Idaho, Montana, South Dakota, and Utah.

I haven't seen Alaska, Hawaii, Mississippi, and Wyoming since I started this in October. I've seen all the other U.S. states. I've seen four Canadian provinces (the other two are New Brunswick and Quebec) and two U.S. territories (if D.C. counts).

I thought I saw an interesting plate last night. I even turned around and went back to where it was parked on the road to be sure. It said "Native America". I didn't know there were such plates. The frame surrounding it blocked everything else off. But then I did Google search this morning to see what it was, and it turns out it was just an Oklahoma plate with the state name hidden. I already had Oklahoma. Oh, well.

I did see the Arkansas plate yesterday morning, which was a nice last-minute addition. Usually the ranks fill out in the first week or ten days of the month and then new finds are sparse, but those finds are usually choice.

The other day I set out to make a burrito wrap with whatever ingredients I could find. I spread a little sour cream on it, put some ham lunch meat laid over that, sliced some Colby-Jack cheese to put on top of the ham, and topped it off with some of Sam's homemade cranberry sauce spread over the top. When I told Sam, she didn't have any problem until I mentioned the cranberry, which led simultaneously to incredulity and disgust. But it was really, really good. I even went and made myself another one. The next day when we had some rice in the fridge I added that to the mix and had a few more.

It reminded of me of the times I've found myself running out of cream cheese in the middle of making a bagel sandwich. What I do then is spread peanut butter on the rest of the bagel before putting the ham and cheese (ideally provolone) in the middle. Oh, and it's almost always a blueberry bagel unless it's near Christmas (when it's sometimes cranberry). It's nowhere near as good as the cranberry ham and cheese wrap with sour cream, particularly the version with rice. But cream cheese, peanut butter, ham, and provolone on a blueberry bagel has got to be tasted to be judged. Feel free to call it disgusting once you've had a few bites.

It's time for another low-effort post listing off the multitude of license plates I noticed last month. It would have been on the high end even without a trip to New York City and Baltimore at the end of the month, but I got a few rare ones added during those travels.

U.S. States: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin

Other U.S.: District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, U.S. government

Canada: Manitoba, New Brunswick, Ontario, Quebec

There are nine U.S. states that I didn't see any license plates from in December. I saw one of them on January 1 in a supermarket parking lot and another this morning on my own street.

Missing from previous two months: I saw Montana in November and North Dakota and Utah in October. Those were the only three October and November had that I didn't see in December. So there are six U.S. states that I didn't see in any of the three months I've chronicled so far (although one of them is already in January's list, so there are really only five I haven't seen since I started doing this).

Additions not in previous months: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, Nevada, Puerto Rico, US government, Manitoba, New Brunswick

Another month has gone by, and I'm now up to my second monthly post recounting the license plates I've seen within the last lunar cycle (or so). Here are all the license plates I saw in November 2007:

California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennesee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin, District of Columbia, Ontario, Quebec

new from last month: Colorado, Delaware, Iowa, Montana, Oregon, Tennesee, Quebec
not present from last month: Louisiana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Utah, Washington

I don't know if I should be disappointed that our trip to NYC for Thanksgiving yielded only Georgia (all the others I noticed on the trip were already on my list or appeared again after our return). It means the motherlode I expected didn't come in, but it also shows how rich the Syracuse license plate hoard really is.

I was impressed that I already had eleven for November at the end of Nov 1. Well, I've already got eighteen for December. That's right. I saw eighteen different license plates just today. It's amazing what you notice if you just look.

I just went out on the front porch to change some light bulbs, and Sophia looked out the front door and said, "Careful, Daddy! It's dark outside!" After the first part, I was expecting some lecture on how it's dangerous to touch light bulbs or to stand on a chair, but she was concerned about the lack of light (which was what I was out there to remedy).

A minute or so later, as I was screwing the cover back on, she looked out again and said, "Careful, Daddy! It's cold and dark and yellow and red outside. And it's green outside too!" Maybe we should put a sign up warning people about the dangerous colors lurking about outside our house.

I never run out of things to blog about, but most of the things I want to blog about take more time than I have. So it's nice when I get an idea to blog about something stupid that takes very little time. All I have to do is keep track of which license plates I've seen during each month, and I get an easy post at the beginning of each month listing the license plates I saw the previous month. Maybe after a bunch of them, if I keep it up, I can actually do some statistics of what I tend to see.

So here are all the license plates I noticed during the month of October:

California (for some reason there are lots of these around Syracuse; I see a few every day; this wasn't true until this semester), Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois (another common one in our neighborhood), Indiana, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota (which I may never have seen before), Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah (not all that common around here, but at least two are in our general neighborhood), Virginia, Vermont, Washington (palso retty rare around here), West Virginia (also rare for me), District of Columbia (this is one I hardly ever see), Ontario

I saw one European-style plates also, but I have no idea what it was. It was on the front of a car with a U.S. state plate on the back, so it probably shouldn't count anyway.

This is without doing any serious traveling during October. When we travel, we usually see a lot more states and at least one other Canadian province. I expect December to be high. I've already got eleven for November, though, so it's off to a good start.

Since I'm expecting to be done with my dissertation by summer, I've been applying for academic jobs, and deadlines are mostly between this week and early December, with most of them in the middle two weeks of November. I've been spending about half the day each day getting materials together, revising my writing sample, rewriting my writing sample (long parts new from scratch), writing cover letters, figuring out which jobs have the earliest deadlines, and packaging materials for the earliest deadlines. I've gotten so far behind on grading because of this that, even though the job stuff should slow down a little bit now, I've got a pile of papers to grade and will be getting a pile of exams in a few more days.

So I don't expect to be doing a lot of in-depth blogging in the next week or so, although I do hope to have a couple posts of content besides just linking to interesting stuff elsewhere. We'll see. The post I wanted to write today will have to wait until tomorrow.

Oh, and I have no idea where my sidebar is hiding. It disappeared when I updated a couple books last night, and I can't find any problems in the code.

[Supplement 11:36 pm: I managed to fix the sidebar problem by reducing it to nothing and gradually adding each component back in. I used to have to do that when the MTAmazon code used to act up all the time. It hasn't done that in quite a while, but it never had this effect anyway. All it did was stop some of the books from displaying or occasionally all the books from a certain point down. This wiped out the whole sidebar. Anyway, I have no idea what the problem was, because the code I removed was as far as I can tell exactly the same as the code I replaced it with.]

From a conversation yesterday:

Me: Sophia, do you want to go back downstairs and watch your new Veggie Tales video?
Sophia: Daddy, it looks like a DVD!

If I had any doubts about her biological parentage, I think this would go a long way toward overcoming them.

The following conversation took place earlier today as we were getting in the car.

Ethan: We're going to go see Grammy and Papa.

Me: No, we're going to go drop Mommy off at her workshop, and then we're going to come back home, and we're going to have fun at home.

Ethan: Then we're going to see Grammy and Papa.

Me: No, we're not going to see Grammy and Papa today. We'll see them soon.

Ethan: We're going to see Grammy and Papa tomorrow!

Me: No, we're not going to see them tomorrow.

Ethan: We're going to see Grammy and Papa yesterday!

We went shopping with Sam's parents and sisters last weekend. Everyone ended up with some loot, but Ethan's new Spiderman mask and gloves seem to be a real hit. The day we finally got around to opening the package he even wore them to bed. We'll just have to watch out that he doesn't suddenly start wearing a black costume.

I haven't seen him wearing them since, but Sophia insisted that I put them on one night when we were waiting for Ethan to put his pajamas on so we could do our nightly reading time. She then proceeded to tell me that I was scary, giggling the whole time.

From time to time Ethan comes home with some form letter sent from his school. Usually they don't pertain to him. One came home yesterday "reminding" parents of the dress code now that it's warm weather again. Since kindergarten kids never got this information in the first place, it's not really a reminder for us but is simply new information.

One of the items regards the length of skirts and shorts. I find it completely unfathomable:

Skirts and shorts must abide by "fingertip rule" -- shorts and/or skirts should be as long as the tip of your middle finger.

I've been teaching a Maymester course on Human Nature since last Monday. It's basically an entire semester in two weeks, with a four-hour class every day, five days a week. I've been able to recycle some material I've taught before, probably a little over half of it. Most of that was last week, which was nice because my grades for the spring semester were due at noon on Friday, an hour before my class. I was asked a week ahead of time, right in the middle of heavy grading season, and things haven't slowed down since then. Given that most of what's still to come the rest of this week is stuff I've never taught before, I expect probably to have even less time than I've had. Maybe it will lead to some interesting posts when I do have more time, though, because it's a lot of material that I haven't engaged with carefully before.

This is why I've been doing a bit more linking and a bit less actual discussion for the last ten days or so, and I have no reason to think that will change before Friday at 5pm, when I'm done with the intensive part of the course. I'll have some grading to do after that, because I think it's unconscionable to expect students to do a whole semester's work in two weeks when they're probably not able to put in even enough time to do all the readings carefully, never mind write about them intelligently.

I do have one series of posts planned once I have a little more time. Max Goss, who runs the politically conservative philosophy blog Right Reason, has asked me to do a guest series at that blog, and I'm going to be writing a series on Augustine, evangelicalism, and the role a Christian (and specifically Christian views) can play in politics. I'll probably post some other things there, but at least the Augustine stuff will be cross-posted here.

Other than that, I'd like to get back to my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series once I have a little more time, and I'd like to write some commentary review posts this summer. I still wanted to put some thoughts together on the Republican candidates after the debates, but that's not complete enough yet to do in the amount of time I've got at the moment. There are several posts on various blogs that I had wanted to respond to, and some of those may just slip into nowhere or get a very late response. I do want to use the majority of my time in June to work on my dissertation, however, and I'm teaching a more reasonable but still intensive summer course from July 9 to August 9, so don't expect a major, substantive post every day even during June, and things may get busy again for me not too far into July.

A friend of mine told me last summer that he was going to make a film. I thought he had in mind something like the home video movies my brothers and I made with some friends when we were in high school. We had:

• a murder mystery involving a Mr. Thurmafer (I don't remember if we had a name for that one, but I thought the character's name was funny)
• Alabama Smith
• Ken the Barbarian (which involved some hokey wooden swords and shields)
• Ken the Destroyer (which we managed to get some real medieval swords and armor for, not to mention a real ATV for the knight's ride-by slaying of the documentary commentator)

Then there were the fake commercials:

•  the product that could start with the skinny, little wimp (me) and end up with my brother (who at the time worked out quite a bit and was on his school wrestling team)
• a Volkwagen commercial where the car that's supposed to stop just before it gets to the two engineers with white robes and clipboards doesn't manage to stop in time
• Foundationland, which made foundations for houses but advertized itself with stock used car sales pitches; we filmed it in the foundation of a house that someone was in the process of building in the neighborhood next door
• two with a character named Gil Isuzu who had a sickly evil smile, wore really loud colors on his shirts and ties, and was trying to sell wide-body trucks big enough to hold three wide bodies (with an arm hanging out the back that he hadn't intended to be shown)

Our friend who engineered the whole thing went on to get a degree in film, but I wouldn't exactly say we were making real films. It was some kids having fun.

It turned out my friend wasn't talking about something like that. He was making a real film, using real film equipment with something on the order of a serious film budget (at least serious for an indie film). He told me he was thinking along the lines of Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre in terms of the kind of humor. He's calling it Whip Cracker, and he's not putting out very much information about it yet (even I know only a little more than what's available online), but he has a trailer up in YouTube. So check out the Whip Cracker trailer, and if you like it give it some good ratings.

"Be a egg. You ca' do it, Mommy. You ca' do it. Mommy, be a egg. Mommy, take your glasses off. Now be a egg. Mommy, wanna be a grass?"

-- Sophia, while decorating Easter eggs yesterday

I was going to post something else today, but I've sort of run out of time. The comments have been unusually busy lately in some very old posts, in case you haven't checked the list of recent comments. There's an intense discussion going on here, but several other posts from a while back have had some traffic. But the majority of my time has gone to getting my new computer up and running. It arrived on Tuesday, and I've spent almost all of my free time doing something or other to install applications, copy files, get it working with the printer, and so on.

The email was the biggest problem. Since I can't find my Office discs, I had to install Thunderbird for email and OpenOffice for what's supposed to be the equivalent of Word and Excel (but the difference is huge in terms of functionality). Thunderbird for some reason can't handle an Outlook PST file, which are the nice and convenient way Outlook stores its data all in one place. The only way to convert Outlook files to Thunderbird is to open the Outlook file in a computer with a working Outlook program and then to install Thunderbird on that system. Then you copy the Thunderbird files to the new machine, and you're ok. So I had to get Outlook up and running with my new file (a very large file, by the way, which takes a while to copy from one computer to another via an external hard drive)) on an old computer, install Thunderbird on the old computer, and then copy those files back to the new computer. Wouldn't it be much more effective just to accept the PST file in Thunderbird? It also didn't register which messages I had read and which I had marked as unread or flagged, which means I have a few years of unread messages now that aren't marked as to whether they contain something significant. I'm not impressed by Mozilla with this, even if I've liked a lot of what they've done in the past.

After all this, I think I'm finally up and running on my new computer. I've been a long-time Dell customer, and while I've had lots of problems in the past they've always done their best to fix the problems in a timely manner based on the terms of my contract. In this case, they've gone well beyond what I could have expect, and I have to give them credit for that. Not only did they replace a four year old computer whose contract is up in two months, but they even sent me a free cable to use for printing now that I don't have a parallel port to use with my existing printer. So I think Dell has easily made up for whatever trouble I've had with all this, and this couldn't have come at a better time in terms of finances and what would have been a very soon need to think about getting a new computer.

Well, I called Dell yesterday to figure out where they were in the process of figuring out what was wrong with my computer. (See here and here for the story so far.) The representative who is handling my case couldn't find anything under the case number he had given me and told me he'd have to get back to me. He thought they must have somehow deleted the case file and just had the computer sitting somewhere pending some information on what to do with it.

When he called me back, he said "Well, I've got some bad news for you." I was expecting him to say the computer was irredeemable for some reason and that they were going to have to send me a new one. It turns out they will be giving me a new computer, but it's not because of anything to do with the old one. Indeed, they don't even know where my computer is. It seems to have arrived with a huge shipment of computers. Someone signed for it. But it's nowhere to be found. Now I'm really glad I managed to back everything up. I was expecting to have to reinstall everything anyway, because there seemed to be some corruption on my hard drive. (My Outlook files turned out to be present but in a directory that was renamed with funny characters in the middle of it). If I have to start off anew, I might as well enjoy the fact that it will be a better computer.

Meanwhile, someone from Dell found my blog because of these posts and sent me an apologetic and reassuring email. (His email address was simpler than the standard format Dell uses, which made me wonder if he was higher up in the company or maybe had been with them a longer time than most of the people I've dealt with, but there could be any number of explanations for that). I even managed to get a request in for my new computer to have the trackstick that looks like a pencil eraser in the middle of the keyboard, and he said he'd make sure I got a computer without a trackstick. I absolutely loathe trackpads and turn mine off. Everything J. Jonah Jameson says about Spiderman is true of trackpads. They're a menace!

But I have to say that as annoying as these problems have been, Dell has been very good to me according to what's in their power. This was an old computer that they don't even make anymore whose contract I extended at least twice, and although they couldn't manage to make the next-day service part of the contract really work out they certainly will have made it up to me by the time this is all done, which may be another week or so by the sound of things. When all is said and done, I will probably have been without a computer for almost a month, and much of the rest of that month will be taken up with getting everything installed and set up the way I want it. But I'll have a new computer that's much faster and has much more hard disk space, and all I'll have to pay for is extending the contract if I want to continue to have Dell service it they way they have done with the previous computer.

Given that I was expecting the computer to break down inevitably sometime after the contract expiration in May, and then we'd have had to buy a new computer out of our tax return (since my pay for teaching just one course this semester is barely covering our essential living expenses at this point), I'd say the loss of a month of use of my computer turns out to be worth it in the end. It's also nice that my spring break occurs during that month, so it's probably only going to be at most three weeks of actual teaching time.

Well, I've shipped my computer off, having copied everything that I thought I might possibly need from it. (See this post and the ensuing conversation for details.) I even found the PST file from Outlook, which was in what looked like a corrupted directory with the name slightly off (which would explain why the program couldn't find any settings when I opened it). For some reason I couldn't see this directory when running Windows on the drive, but I can see it when I'm looking at the drive as an external additional drive on a different computer.

So now I just have to wait for them to sift through every part of it and find all the problems. What I receive back may well be in as good condition as the original computer was. I'll still have to reinstall everything, and that will take awhile, but I managed to find a hard drive enclosure at the local Circuit City, which I didn't know existed until today when the guy at the Best Buy at the mall sent me downstairs to "the competition" because he didn't have any in stock. I was surprised to discover what the competition was, because we've never had a Circuit City before. We did have a CompUSA, but they've all cleared out. When I saw that, I was hoping BestBuy had it, and when the guy said he didn't have it he must have seen something in my face. I doubt he regularly sends people down to Circuit City.

I had an interesting experience at Circuit City, and it raises an interesting ethical question. When I looked at the hard drive enclosures on the shelf, I saw two different ones. It turned out the more expensive one ($40) was for desktop computer hard drives, and the less expensive one ($20) was for notebook hard drives. At least that's what the price markings underneath them said. Since I needed the latter, I checked with a sales guy to make sure it was what I needed, and he said that was what would enable me to connect my hard drive to another computer as an external drive. So I waited in the fairly long line (the only one they had open) and then discovered that the enclosure actually cost something like $35. I didn't want to wait in line again, so I paid it and then went back to check. It turns out the one they had a price tag up for was a different brand. They're charging $15 more for this apparently better brand for the same product, and meanwhile they don't have the cheaper ones in stock and don't have this one labeled. That strikes me as deceptive marketing, whether it's deliberate or not.

I wouldn't normally be the sort of person to buy something like this, use it for what I need it for, and then return it. But given that I thought I was going to be paying a good deal less for this thing (and it was pretty much the store's fault that I had just about paid for it when I realized that), I think I may just return it when I'm done. Sam's going to use it to get some stuff off an older hard drive from her old computer that won't boot up (I already took what I wanted off it once the other computer got picked up by DSL), and I might wait until I get my computer back to transfer things back to it from Sam's new computer (where I put everything in the meantime). But I have no qualms about using their 30-day return policy basically to rent this thing for free, if they're going to do when in effect advertises it as if it's 4/7 of its real price, for people to discover only after they've waited in a long line. Technically speaking, it's not what I thought it was. It's a much more expensive product that does exactly the same thing. They frame their 30-day return policy in terms of whether you're completely satisfied with the product. I'm not completely satisfied with it, even if I'm very satisfied with what it does.

I've been without my computer for nine days now. I had several hours Tuesday afternoon and late evening to enjoy it before it died again, and Dell has now replaced my motherboard twice and my memory once. They were supposed to do this Friday, but they didn't get the parts in time to show up, so they put it off until today, only for it to have no effect. Dell's now decided to have me ship off my computer to a depot, where they will almost certainly wipe my hard drive without allowing me any way to back up anything on it, since I can't boot up my computer. So I have to see if I can get Sam's computer to boot up with my hard drive. Her old one wouldn't, but perhaps her new one will. Otherwise I have to try to get my own computer to load up for longer than the couple minutes it stays active before freezing up, see if I can upload a huge file for my email to some online source or direct connect to another computer, and then copy several files I really don't want to lose but haven't backed up in a while.

Also, I stepped on a nail last night, which got embedded about 3 cm into my foot, and I had to teach this morning before going to the doctor to get my tetanus shot, who told me to keep my foot soaked the entire time I'm home for the next few days, which isn't easy when the kids are trying to overrun me and Isaiah is trying to play with the water I'm soaking my foot in (and the kids have no school this week, so it will be constant). Then I left my lights on when I came home this afternoon, and my charger took a half hour to charge the battery enough to start the engine, with just enough time to go through the Burger King drive through before attending the last class on race my advisor is giving in her seminar this semester, which she thought I ought to be at (and in retrospect I think she was right).

So no real posting today, and given that I'm trying to finish grading some papers this week (which has also been set back quite a bit by the boys' snow days and will continue to be set back by their vacation this week) and given the time I might have to spend backing up my computer if I can actually succeed in a method of doing that, I may not have the time in the next few days to do much.

It's very interesting to me that I could leave a comment on a left-of-center blog about race, a comment that's very sympathetic to a Marx-like perspective in critical race theory (here for those who want to see it in context), followed by a comment clarifying something that has virtually no value-laden component, only to have someone respond the following way:

Jeremy, I say what I’m about to say because I care.

The fact that you have a black wife fills me with dread. I wont go further because I don’t, as they say, “know you like that,” but let’s just say there’ll be a new family on my prayer-list tonight.

This is someone who has admitted in the past to be the sort of person who makes accusations about my views without actually reading what I said, which is particularly evil when the view being attributed to me is nothing at all like the view I'm actually defending. I'm not normally one to be upset when people pray for me, but I think I understand a little better now something of how gay people feel when Christians tell them they're praying for them to stop being gay.

So I'll say for the record right here: Those who would like to pray for me and Sam are very welcome to do so. We would genuinely appreciate it. Like all married couples, we do encounter difficulties in our relationship, and it's a real struggle dealing with three very active children five and under, two of them autistic. That doesn't make our life easy. But one things seems obvious to me, and that's that this person's prayers will likely be about nothing that actually goes on in our lives.

Before telling Sam of this comment and its context, I asked her, "if we were to list all of the problems we've had in our relationship and in our family, how far down the list do you think we'd have to go before we got to something related to race?" I was expecting maybe she'd say that it wouldn't be in the top 100 or that it wouldn't be in the top 500. She instead said something like, "I don't think it would be on it at all." Now maybe some ridiculously radical conspiracy theory about race is true, and interracial couples can have all sorts of devastating race-related problems in their relationship without ever knowing about them, but I think that's what it would take for us to be the sort of people whose relationship could justify the dread this commenter (who knows virtually nothing about us) has.

Grades are due in two days, and I still have about fifty 3-5 page dialogue papers and about fifty 1-2 page papers to grade. You know it's bad when I end up spending several hours grading on Christmas. I did manage to finish grading the exam I've been trying to finish up for the last several days (each day thinking I'd be done by the end of the day), and just getting that out of the way is enough of a relief that it felt restful to be grading.

I'm also relying on battery power until Wednesday when Dell gets me my new motherboard, although I'm grateful that we have an old computer that won't boot up but can still charge a battery that fits my battery. I still have to spend twice as much time waiting for my battery to charge as I do actually using the battery, but it's nice to get a recharge when the wait for next-day service turns out to be five days because of Christmas.

Combine that with everything that's going on for Christmas, and I'm not getting much time to put any decent posts together. More serious blogging will have to wait until Wednesday to resume, I'm afraid, after I get my new motherboard and hand in my grades.

Update (Dec 26, 1:55 pm): I guess the Dell service company that's been assigned to my computer is working today after all. The technical support guy on the phone said they almost certainly wouldn't be. So I've got my new motherboard in already, but it's got a gimpy wireless receiver. I can connect to the wireless in the room where the transmitter is (but I can also plug in directly in there). If I'm downstairs I have to plug in a wireless card to get a signal. But at least I have power now, and I can use the wireless with Sam's old Cisco adapter in rooms where the internal one doesn't work. So I'm back up and running enough to work and just need to get through 38 more papers before I'm done grading. Grading has also been going more quickly today than I'd expect, so normal blogging may return a little sooner than I'd predicted.

I've been making significant progress this summer on my dissertation. For my degree I need to have two papers deemed publishable by a committee of three faculty members. Normally this is done from papers written for classes, with significant effort put in during the summers in the first few years of the program. Because they changed the requirements during my fourth year, I hadn't been expecting even to think about those papers until after I was done with coursework in my first semester of my fourth year, so I was behind as soon as they changed them. Then I began teaching on my own for the first time, preparing a class outright that for the first few semesters needed significant revision as I realized some of what I was doing needed serious improvement to fit with my teaching style and what I thought a course like that needed to be like. Then the three professors who would have been my advisors left in one fell swoop, and the papers I had been working on didn't seem as worthwhile given what the new faculty who had replaced them were saying about my ideas. It didn't help my motivation. All that, combined with teaching new classes regularly, and having to spend a lot of time and energy with the developmental issues with Ethan and Isaiah, not to mention just ordinary family responsibilities and lots of grading, has contributed toward my being basically at a standstill with respect to my work for the last few years.

I did have one good idea for a paper two years ago, and I began working on it with a junior faculty member. That lasted only a couple weeks into a new semester with a new course to teach. I found it hard to reserve the time to write when I was finding it hard to reserve time even to get my class prep and grading done. Several times I tried to get classes I'd done before so I wouldn't have to spend as much time with teaching responsibilities, and then it wouldn't ever be enough to overcome my motivation barrier, and the time I could have spent working on the one paper idea I had would never end up being used for that. Last summer I'd even reserved half the summer to write, and then at the last minute my department offered me a course to teach during that time. We really did need the money, so I took it. Last semester I even ended up with three separate courses to teach, and I barely managed to keep up with teaching responsibilities even with having taught two of them before (in slightly different forms; a huge schedule difference made one very different, and the other had some new material to try to overlap some with the third course, which I'd never done before).

I can't resist linking to "Follower of Jesus" or "Christian"? by Danny Pierce. I happen to share a last name and a couple great-grandparents with Danny (i.e. he's my second cousin), but I'm not sure if we've ever met in person. I think we have, and he thinks we haven't, but even if we did it would have been more than a decade ago. But read his post. Can't you imagine me having written that post? When I read it, I kept thinking his style of argument and way of framing his conclusions sounded so much like my own style of argument and way of framing conclusions. Suffice it to say that I think it's a great post and well worth reading.

Update: See Danny's response to this post. Even his humor is along the same lines as mine. I am indeed his mother's mother-in-law's brother-in-law's grandson, as he is mine.

I've only once or twice explained how I got the name Parableman. Last week I went to a dissertation defense that reminded me of my secret origin, so I'm going to use that as a roundabout way to get to explaining the name. There was a very strange moment at this defense. I just have to say that it's really funny to hear an octogenarian philosopher utter the words "Your mother's a whore!" to a devout Catholic in a suit. It's even stranger given that it was a committee member addressing a question to the candidate who was defending. Indirect discourse is so fun when you ignore key elements of the context. One of the committee members was even visibly shocked to hear that exact expression coming out of his mouth, but in context it was part of a perfectly legitimate question.

What shocks about this is when you ignore or bury the context. I didn't just explain why this professor was uttering that expression. Telling you that he said it to this upstanding Catholic guy in a suit at a dissertation defense is extremely misleading. It was just such an incident that led to my recognition as Parableman. Back in college I said a whole bunch of true things about someone to some friends of both of ours. I left out some crucial information, however. If I'd done it in a different tone it would clearly have implicated some false information that wouldn't have been good, but I used a fairly cryptic and mysterious tone that clued them in pretty quickly that I was hiding something and not exactly suggesting what the information might otherwise have suggested (so it wasn't really slander by implication). They thought this cryptic approach was worthy of the moniker Parableman, and they proceeded to write an entire song about me to the tune of Particle Man by They Might Be Giants. I wish they'd written it down, because it was actually pretty good.

So it has nothing to do with parables, really. It's just that I said some cryptic things. It wasn't exactly out of character to do that, but it wasn't really anything to do with parables. Isn't it disappointing to find out that the Parableman got his name in a way entirely unrelated to anything that could accurately be called a parable?

For future reference (in case I forget) and for anyone who might ever experience this particular problem: I've been wondering for the past several days why my Firefox browser wasn't allowing me to scroll down web pages with my spacebar the way it usually allows me to. I thought there might be something wrong with my keyboard, but the spacebar worked for inserting spaces. Then I realized I could see whether it was Firefox or something else by checking Internet Explorer. It worked fine for scrolling in IE. That meant it had to be some setting in Firefox or some setting elsewhere that would somehow affect Firefox but not IE. The former seemed much more likely.

So I looked through every option in the various menus Firefox has, and only two seemed to have to do with scrolling. Neither changed anything. I even looked through the help file to see if these two functions were supposed to do something that they weren't doing. No, they did things that were unrelated to my problem. In the process I did notice something else strange. It listed Page Up and Page Dn as moving to the top and bottom of a web page. They didn't do that. They moved to the end of whatever line I was on. That should have been a clue. A little later I noticed that when I clicked on parts of a page with no text the browser was acting as if I had clicked on a line with text. That was clue #2, and I reminded me of a menu option that I had dismissed as irrelevant, which turned out to be exactly the problem.

So here is the solution: Under Options, select the Advanced tab. Accessibility Options will appear. Under Accessibility Options, one choice says "Allow text to be selected with the keyboard". That option was checked. I unchecked it, and the problem was solved. Now I can use my spacebar to scroll down web pages.

I'm pretty focused on figuring out racial essentialism at the moment, so I figured I'd link to some pictures Sam has posted instead of posting anything of substance. Some of these are from a while back, and I'd never gotten around to linking to them.

March: pictures from Ethan's birthday
May: Ethan eating rice cakes with a knife and fork
May: Sophia's new dress that Sam made

I've finally got a profile on the Prosblogion site. So far it just lists my academic work, including teaching and research interests and then links to all the posts I've written at that blog. Most of the contributors have had profiles like this all along, but because I had my own blog my name in the sidebar has just linked to this blog. I thought it might be better to have the profile with a link within it to here, and now I do.

My grades for two classes are due today, so I've been kind of lying low for a bit. I've still got five papers to grade, and then I'll need to go hand in the sheets personally. Syracuse University is still living in the 90s with respect to grade reporting. Grades for my third class are due Friday, but I submit those online. So I welcome the opportunity to post something that takes very little time.

I've done the Visited States thing before, but it got lost in one of the moves this blog has undergone, so I'm using Matthew's posting of his as an occasion to do it again. It's nice to see that, even though he's hopelessly outdistanced me in terms of numbers, I've been to six of the twelve states he's never been to.

create your own personalized map of the USA
or check out ourCalifornia travel guide

My Visited Countries post from way back is still up, but its map has long stopped loading up properly, so I've used this new site to update it with a working map.

So, I have been absent from the blog for a very long time. I haven't looked back at the archives, but my best guess is that the last time I posted was in November or so. I do intend to start posting again, so I figured I should briefly reintroduce myself for those who have started reading since the last time I posted. Plus, I have some news.

First, the reintroduction. I'm a postdoctoral researcher in the hard sciences at a major U.S. research university. Additionally, I'm a Christian, with a generally Reformed perspective on theology, for those who know what that means. So, my interests include science, theology, issues relating to intelligent design, current events, and so on.

Next, the news: I'm delighted to say that my wife and I just had our first baby, a daughter, several weeks ago. We saw God's answer to prayer many times throughout the pregnancy and the delivery and in the last several weeks, and we are very thankful.

In the Blac(k)ademic discussion on Tawana Brawley (see my post on that if you didn't read it already), one interesting question came up. The rest of the discussion reminded me eerily of several others I've had on other matters. What is it that many anti-ID people, the racists Kinists at Little Geneva, many radical leftists on race and gender, and some of the hyper-fundamentalists who comment at WorldMag have in common that leads to this same result?

Anyway, this post isn't about the unwillingness to treat your intellectual opposition respectfully and fairly. It's about an interesting question raised by one of the people on that thread. She wondered why it is that white men who marry black women get very upset when they're called racists and often mention that their wife is black in response to charges of racism. She says white women in interracial marriages never think to refer to their marriage as evidence that they're not racist. I have not idea if this generalization is true (though I do find it deeply ironic that I wasn't allowed to make any statements about any tendencies even about small groups of black people I've known -- see the exact statement below -- without being called racist, but she can make all sorts of generalizations about white men married to black women, not to mention all the references to white oppressors overall in that conversation). But suppose the generalization is true, and white men are more likely to say this sort of thing in response to the racism charge than white women would in similar circumstances. As I thought about it, I thought there might be an explanation for this fact if indeed she's correct (which I have no idea about) that it's a fact. At least I might have some explanation in my own case. What follows is a development of a part of a comment I left there.

I want to thank my wife publicly for the hard beginning of every week that she has to put up with. Monday is my long day. I teach in the morning and then again in the evening, and I'm often still on campus well into the afternoon working on class prep, grading, writing exams, and so on. I often have to reorient myself at the beginning of the week and prepare for three hours of Monday night class followed by another hour and a half on Tuesday morning for a different class, with no time in between, so I need to get it all together before I leave (which is 5pm, exactly the busy time at our house because of dinner). Then I have office hours Tuesday afternoon, and by the time I get home on Tuesday Sam is getting ready to go to dance class for a couple hours break from everything that happens at home. When she comes home, I go off to Bible study.

We see each other for however much time I manage to be home between my time on campus during the day on Monday and when I leave for my class and then however much time I manage to be home Tuesday afternoon before she leaves, plus an hour or two after I get home both nights. I know that some couples see each other less than that, but it's difficult for her especially because Ethan and Isaiah have such high needs and high energy. Today was such a day. The kids were out of hand, running all over the place, causing trouble, and getting in her way when she was preparing dinner. Eventually she locked the boys in Isaiah's room, and they had fun bouncing on the bed until Ethan bit his lip pretty badly. That's just an example. Stuff like this goes on all day except when they're at school, which is only a few hours.

So I wanted to thank her for her efforts. She works hard and constantly looks exhausted. I'm exhausted too, but she's constantly dealing with the same thing in the same place for long enough periods of time without much break, and she needs some appreciation. So thank you, Sam. I appreciate all you do.

Sophia has been learning all sorts of words, and she's using them in the right contexts. She's long surpassed Isaiah in the use of words at the right times, though she's got a ways to go before she catches up to Ethan. She's well beyond where he was at this age, though, particularly with respect to asking for things. But there's one thing she just can't get. When we say the word 'yes', she'll repeat it, so we know she can pronounce it perfectly. But when we ask her if she wants something we know she wants or if she likes something we know she likes, she always answers quite emphatically, "No!" with a big smile. So all that feminist indoctrination I had during my orientation when I was an undergrad seems to have been just wrong. From the very beginning of their use of language, girls really do mean yes when they say no.

By the way, Sam's posted several pictures that I haven't yet linked to. Here are several of all three kids from about a month ago, all three kids on the couch, Ethan's birthday a couple weeks ago, Ethan's building projects last month, fun with dinner ware, and Sophia at 14 months in a storage bin.

... in Lithuania, anyway. I have a friend whose (at the time) girlfriend (and now wife) was disillusioned with Valentine's Day. She insisted that he not do anything for her for Valentine's Day. Since they lived at some distance from each other at the time there wasn't much he could do anyway. If he couldn't send her anything for Valentine's Day, what could he do? So he looked up what other holidays take place near Valentine's Day. It turns out Lithuania's Independence Day is February 16. He decided to send her a major Lithuanian Independence Day care package that year. He found all manner of unusual Lithuanian items to include in it.

So you now have a new solution to the problem of the stale, trite, and commercialized holiday that Valentine's Day can be. Just skip it, wait a couple days, and celebrate a much more interesting holiday together (though not quite as interesting as International Talk Like a Pirate Day).

I've been completed wiped out since late Monday night due to the nastiest cold I've ever had. I could barely move by Tuesday morning and slept most of the morning and part of the afternoon, and not a day has gone by without a nap since then. I never get to take naps even when I'm extremely tired (one key reason I got sick to begin with), so this is unusual. I also never miss class when I'm sick. I did so for what I believe is the first time ever on Tuesday, but I did manage to show up for two classes since then. I was barely there for one and had the students discuss in groups and share their findings with the class, and the second one was more like a normal lecture because my voice was improving by this morning (not that it stayed that way by the end of the class). I couldn't really avoid that, though, because this is the class that had already missed one session, and the reading was online, so they couldn't very well look at it and find things on their own without me. But the result is that this morning I was back at Monday's barely-ok-to-teach level, and now I'm back at Tuesday morning's barely-able-to-move level. So I'm hoping I can do tomorrow morning's class, though group work there again would be barely satisfactory if it comes to it. It just means I won't be able to do the more serious filling in of details I wanted to do after saying next to nothing last time, and what I said they probably didn't hear much of. Poor Sam's been sicker than the kids but nothing like what I've got, so she's had to handle them pretty much non-stop, since I've been in bed much of the time I've been home. The kids seemed to have gotten by with just some sniffles and coughs until Ethan threw up just now. At least now I know why he came home from school, crawled into bed on top of my back (which was facing up at the time), and proceeded to fall asleep. I really hope that's not some new bug that I could get on top of this, because I'll be in real trouble if I can't keep my medicine down.

Given all this, I've been barely able to stay on top of preparing what I need for class, and blogging much just hasn't been an option. My lucid moments when I can do more than just read others' stuff have been reserved for class prep and responding to comments. So that's why I haven't been writing all that much. My responses to Bruce came in one of my few lucid moments, and that was really a response to a comment. Very little else I've posted, even in comments, has really been much of a serious effort. But I can at least share some recent searches that came this way.

development of personhood by Lot The
Lot, as in the Lot of Genesis, Abraham's relative? Or does this have to do with drawing lots? Either way, I'm having trouble seeing the connection with personhood.

esv apocrypha
I don't think that's something you should put too much hope in ever seeing. I wouldn't rule it out absolutely, but it's extremely unlikely.

abortion causes autism
Well, if autism is defined as difficulty in developing socially and communicatively, then yes. Someone who is aborted definitely has trouble developing in those ways. If you are wondering whether autism in future children is increased among later children of women who have had abortions, I have no idea. It wouldn't surprise me, because it seems just about everything else that's really bad is significantly increased by such a violent, invasive procedure, but I don't have any specific information on this.

do italians and sicilians have black ancestors
I should think so, at least if they're not completely unrelated to every other human being in the history of the world. There's no information I know of that suggests a much more recent connection to African ancestry, but maybe I'm just unaware of it.

I have a few potential posts I want to write, but things have been a bit busy around here.

1. I spent a long time troubleshooting a memory problem and then waiting a while for Dell technical support, only to find that once they've sent me my memory I still only have 128 MB instead of the 256 MB I'm supposed to have. It turns out one of the motherboard ports was bad in addition to one of the memory chips not working. I thought I tried every combination before getting off the phone with the guy, and I though both ports were working. I must have gotten things backwards in repeatedly turning the computer over to open up the bottom and then to turn it back on when done. Well, the new motherboard should solve a few minor problems that were beginning to annoy me as well, and it's nice to be operating at normal speed again. The nice thing about having a Dell complete care warranty is that they fix anything with no questions asked. I just hope they let me renew it when it expires in May. They're phasing this model out, and we're not ready to buy another computer. Sam's computer is already out of warranty, and they wouldn't let me pay ridiculous amounts of money to renew it for another year. Add to all this that my computer has been really slow lately due to the memory problem, and I've had to wait a little bit just to switch from one window to another. What's really disturbing is that Sam's computer is doing the same thing, and as far as I know she has no problem with her RAM.

2. We've finally begun our long-awaited attempt to make our windows less of a heat sink. It's good that someone who knows what he's doing is doing it, but we had to wait a while to get him. I believe we first talked to him before Thanksgiving. (There's also a currently underway renovation to this blog's design by Wink, but all I have to do is look at what he comes up with and tell him what I think. With a real life person working on our house, I have to talk to him about what he's doing and run and drive him to the hardware store when he needs stuff, since he gets dropped off by his wife.)

3. I'm spending far more time than usual wrangling three crazy kids due to having nowhere immediate to go and no immediate deadline to meet. I think I need to go to campus if I want to work, but that feels weird during a break.

Christian Carnival XCIX is up at Attention Span. The 99 theme is kind of fun. One more to the big 100, which will be returning to the Carnival's founder. I didn't get Agent 99, but at least I ended up with the second best of the categories, Interstate 99, which I'd never known about before. Current plans include extending into my own state. (They violated interstate naming conventions, though, by putting 99 west of 81. I'm not sure what they were thinking. It's immoral to break that sort of convention, particularly when people put such great work into organizing it in a way that you can usually predict what an interstate's number means.)

At the Banty Rooster, Global Warming is Really Global Cooling. [HT: Blogwatch]

Eugene Volokh has an op-ed in the L.A. Times about how easy it is to get a Nobel Peace Prize nomination. Previous nominees include Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Castro. Now what I'm wondering is who counts as a professor, because there are some low-lifes that I might be able to nominate if all it takes is to teach at the college level.

Jollyblogger points out a beautiful Yale prank against Harvard.

Sam's put some more pictures online. Ethan and Isaiah were wrestling this week. For some reason Ethan was really frustrated that Isaiah kept not being where Ethan wanted him, so he kept pushing him and lying on top of him to prevent him from moving. Eventually Isaiah started enjoying it, thinking it was playful wrestling. Ethan continued in his frustration the whole time. It was really weird. It was as if the world would end if Isaiah got up. There's also one of Sophia watching the boys go off to school.

Stuart Taylor examines the claim that Judge Alito is outside the mainstream, concluding that he's well within both the general American mainstream and the legal/judicial mainstream. [Hat tip: SCOTUSBlog]

William Wainwright has updated his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Jonathan Edwards, originally authored in 2002. Most Edwards fans don't look at his philosophy as much as other aspects of his work, so I very much appreciate when a philosopher takes an interest in the first great American philosopher. Wainwright has done a lot to motivate thinking of Edwards as up there with the great early moderns, and I have to agree. Edwards and G.W. Leibniz are by far my favorite early modern philosophers. Edwards anticipated both Berkeley and Hume in interesting ways.

Brooksilver at The Lord of the Blog Rings has a nice post about Christian parables within The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I'm beginning to realize how little I remember from those books. I must have been 10 or so when I read them. I highly recommend his blog as a whole, by the way. I discovered it during his recent hiatus when he wasn't posting anything, but he's been a good friend for years, and I intend to read everything he posts now that he's back to blogging.

Two more pictures of the kids: Isaiah prim and proper and Sophia's underwear hat

Blogs4God has President George Washington's Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1789.

More Ethan pictures: Sam took him outside to play with the fallen leaves.

Proto-Kaw (the band Kerry Livgren of Kansas has reformed based on an earlier incarnation of Kansas that never released anything until this decade) has a new album coming out in February, called The Wait of Glory. We had the pleasure of seeing them and meeting them all this summer, and it was one of the highlights of the last decade for me. The lyrics for the Wait of Glory are up now. I can't wait to hear it. Everything I've heard is that it's even better than their last album Before Became After, which was one of Livgren's best works.

For some really perverse fun, see A Night at the Roddenberry. [Hat tip: The Gnu]

Speaking of the Gnu, he has a response to a few of Scott Adams's comments on Intelligent Design (see Abednego's post). I think his point about Crick and Watson is particularly interesting.

Sam tagged me with this meme, so here we are. I'll leave all the answers under the fold, because it's pretty extended. Here are the questions:

1. Seven things to do before I die
2. Seven things I cannot do
3. Seven things that attract me to Sam
4. Seven things I say most often
5. Seven books (or series) I love
6. Seven movies I watch over and over again (or would watch over and over if I had the time)
7. Seven people I want to join in, too

Christian Carnival XCVI is at Jordan's View.

Have you heard about the 18-year-old elected mayor as a write-in candidate? [Hat tip: Mark Olson]

Ben Witherington reviews Anne Rice's new novel about Jesus' childhood. I can't help but mention that he also gives Firefly and Serenity a thumbs up.

Here's Ethan a few years ago looking like his ducky (that's old ducky, which his mean aunties lost at the store 723 days ago; the new one has a much bigger bill, which I hope his mouth never looks like).

Christian Carnival XCV is at Eternal Revolution.

Mark Roberts has finished his 30-part series Are the New Testament Gospels Reliable? I mentioned it before, when he started it. I haven't gotten through the whole thing yet, but what I've read so far has been excellent. I highly recommend it.

Here's an interesting study on the differences between men and women's responses to humor. Not at all what I would have expected. [Hat tip: Orin Kerr]

Eugene Volokh takes on the suggestion that Judge Alito thinks private ownership of machine guns should be legal. The best part is where the same line of reasoning makes Justice O'Connor out to favor violence against women.

Finally, Sam's put up a host of pictures since the last time I pointed any out. There's the salamander in the driveway. Sophia meets spaghetti. It's been warm, so we've still got some excellent fall foliage. Isaiah's still dodging cameras. Ethan enjoys the weather. Finally, Sophia's beginning to look a lot like Ethan did at her age.

Sam has posted more pictures of the kids.

Christian Carnival XCII is up at World of Sven.

New evidence has been unearthed about the political context of Jefferson's infamous "wall of separation" language. [HT: SmartChristian]

There's a new article in Nature about two new techniques for deriving stem cells. These both sound pretty interesting. Some people are claiming that they get around the ethical objections. If they're successful and do get around the ethical objections, we might expect less pressure from those who want to destroy embryos for stem cell research. I doubt it, though. Alternative techniques in the past haven't stopped those who are single-minded in getting this one so far unsuccessful area of research to be federally funded. See Sun and Shield for discussion by someone who understands the science better than I do.

A little while back, Eugene Volokh had an extended disussion of the New York Civil Liberties Union's attack on military recruiting. Most of his post is great, but I think one element is especially worth highlighting. The general sort of approach he's criticizing has an "Any Stick is Worth Beating the Military With" sort of approach. Normally, they'll complain when affirmative action in its two main forms is not applied. The two main forms are lowering requirements for getting in and going out of your way to try to increase the representation of underrepresented groups by targeting those groups and appealing to them in specially designed ways. If someone isn't doing that, then they aren't pursuing diversity. Yet now they're complaining that military recruiters are targeting minority students, as if that's somehow bad.

I use SBC Yahoo DSL, and the last time I had to deal with their customer service, it ended up being (shockingly enough) a pleasant experience. This struck me as so unusual that I wrote about it at the time (elsewhere). So, in the interest of fairness, I now have a customer service gripe regarding the same service.

My wife and I both need to use VPN (Virtual Private Network) software to access our work remotely, and I haven't been able to get this to work from home. I recently tried it from elsewhere with my laptop, and it works fine. So I concluded the problem was the firewall in the DSL modem, and today talked to SBC tech support. It turns out they know that the firewall in the DSL modem they sold me as part of my original package does NOT work with VPN software. So they are willing to sell me another DSL modem at the full price which WILL work, and won't replace my existing DSL modem which I've had for more than 30 days.

I tried to convince them they ought to replace my existing modem for free, since (a) they knew it wouldn't work with VPN when they sold it to me in the first place, yet didn't bother telling me that, and (b) it took me more than 30 days to figure out that the problem was with the DSL modem rather than with the configuration on my end. But they refused, and explained they have a disclaimer in their service agreement that says that they don't guarantee the DSL will work with any outside software. Fine, but this is worse than a non-guarantee: According to the tech support, they know that the DSL modem they sold me won't work with any VPN software using IPSEC protocols. So they effectively can guarantee it won't work. But did they tell me that? No.

Oh, well. Now I have to go buy a modem which will work. I'm not going to buy it from them, though.

That concludes my gripe for today. And I have to say, this rather outweighs the positive experience I had last time. I'm not very happy with SBC right now, so when my contract is up I'll probably go elsewhere.

UPDATE 11-14-05: To make matters even worse, it turns out that the SBC tech support people have no idea what they're talking about. I found someone who uses the same setup as me at my work and has no problems connecting to the same VPN I use. As a result, I figured out that it was just a matter of reconfiguring the firewall on the DSL modem SBC had originally given me to get the VPN to work. So I didn't end up having to buy a new DSL modem, etc., as SBC had told me I would. That's good, I guess -- except SBC's tech support shouldn't have told me I had to buy a new one when I didn't. So now I'm even more frustrated with them than I was before; if I'd listened to them, I would have wasted $100+ replacing something that didn't need to be replaced.

Ben Witherington has a great post on singleness, marriage, and divorce. I don't ultimately agree with every point, but he's certainly an expert on this topic and has some thoughts worth considering.

At this late date, Factcheck.org takes on the Bush Lied myth. This flatly contradicts almost all of the major statements anyone has ever given against the honesty of Bush and his administration regarding the Iraq conflict.

Finally, Sam has posted three sets of pictures that I hadn't gotten around to linking to yet. First is a paper plate that Ethan painted his hands onto. There's a long story to this one. Basically, as I was getting to leave for the evening and Sam was upstairs rehearsing a dance solo, Isaiah had gotten into the bathroom downstairs, but the noises I heard sounded to me as if she was giving them a bath upstairs. When I figured out that something else was going on, I went into the bathroom to clean it and him, and while I was doing that Ethan decided to get the paints out and paint the kitchen floor. The paper plate was just one thing he did in the process. Suffice it to say that both of them were confined to their rooms until bedtime, at which point they were still confined to their rooms.

There's also a series of shots of Sophia walking and another one of her walking around with the jiggly bell wrap thingy Sam wears when she dances, with a shot of one of Ethan's building projects in the last picture.

Sam has gotten the boys into painting. She's got pictures of Isaiah on our porch and pictures of Ethan, Isaiah, and their cousins Micah and Allana on my parents' porch. Porches make it easy to hose the paint off, provided you mix soap into the paint to begin with.

Terry Pruitt tagged me a month ago with the Five Things I Miss From Childhood meme. I was out of town, and when I returned I found that I didn't have enough time to prepare for the class that started the next week and get my grading done before my class started. As it was I was finishing grading into the first day of class in addition to preparing for class, which was next to impossible to complete in the time I had, but it got done. I just didn't sleep enough and still haven't been able to get myself ahead with class prep now that I'm four weeks in, and it's only a five-week course. Anyway, he wanted me to say five things I miss about my childhood. I can now do that, though it's taken me a couple weeks to prepare this post.

Sophia likes chicken bones, and the kids surrounded me while I was trying to do something or other on the computer. Yes, the beard's gone, not that it will be gone for long.

I'm knee-deep in Augustine for now, so I don't know if I'll have a contentful post up tonight. I've got the next post in the Theories of Knowledge and Reality series ready to go, but I wanted to look through it again to be sure it should be one post rather than two or three, and I want to make sure I'm done with my Augustine preparation for tomorrow before I do that. I don't know if I'll get to it before my concentration gives out. I've been up since before 6 am, and I've been reading City of God and various commentaries on it much of that time (in addition to spending two hours teaching it this morning).

Tomorrow afternoon I move on to Aquinas, which takes me through Monday morning's class, after which I'll be trying to compress Descartes into Tuesday and Wednesday's classes. [I've alotted six hours instead of four to him for my fall class. I hope I can do a moderately decent job presenting the Meditations in four hours.] That will complete my actual teaching time. It feels like the home stretch now that it's the penultimate week, but I still have four weeks' worth of teaching time in normal semester reckoning; it's still 12 hours of class until the final. Two weeks in I felt like I'd been teaching this class for almost half a semester, and I have to keep in mind that I still have almost that much time remaining, which will include preparing for twelve hours of teaching (of which I've not taught more than maybe an hour of it before), writing the final completely from scratch (something I don't have to do in most of my classes because I can recycle material from previous classes), and grading the second exam (the most time-consuming aspect of teaching philosophy).

I'm writing an exam again while preparing for tomorrow's class. Yes, I am doing both simultaneously, and no this is not multi-tasking. In this case doing one is part of the work for doing the other, and doing them together is easier than doing one and then the other. I've finished everything except the stuff on tomorrow's material, and reading with a view toward writing questions is much easier than reading and preparing lecture and then thinking up questions afterward.

Anyway, I don't have time to write a contentful post at the moment. The stuff I've written ahead of time has now all been posted or still needs some more work before posting. Instead, check out Isaiah playing in the neighbor's birdbath. You can't see all of his face, but it's hard to get pictures of him even this good. He doesn't cooperate with cameras. Sam also took some pictures of the local flora and fauna, including some nice blowups of our resident stinging insects.

This time we've got pictures of all three. Here's one of Ethan at school. Isaiah's still sleeping on the floor, but this time he's got Larry-Boy and the curtains for company. Sophia pictures have been lacking of late, but Sam's got four up now.

Sam has posted two more sets of pictures of the boys, Ethan's building projects around the house and Isaiah's own construction project resulting in a very large and very plastic hamburger.

I'm in the throes of finishing up one course, trying to get the grading done before the last day on Thursday, writing an exam for Thursday, trying to secure fall teaching for me and a friend who is out of town with one procrastinating institution and one institution desperately waiting to hear about the other one, and trying to move toward preparing for a course that I'll start teaching before grades are due for the one I'm just finishing, though I have a week in between the two to try to do most of the grading and some prepwork for the second course. It also doesn't help that it's been ridiculously hot. I have a hard time being productive when it's above 70, and it's been in the upper 90s, so I just completely shut down.

I haven't even had much chance to sit down for more than a few hours to get enough grading done to get my students' work back to them. Ethan's out of school, and there's been more need for me to be around to wrangle the kids. My students' work is therefore coming in almost as fast as I can return it. I can't grade when there's more than one kid for me to deal with, and even that's hard, depending on what the kid is doing. Getting a chance to think through what I'll be teaching for this course I've never taught really takes my undivided attention along with my willingness to sit in one of the hottest rooms of the house where all my books are, with the doors closed so the kids can't take the room apart. So anyway, all this is to say that if I get any of the most interesting and contentful posts I've been thinking about, it will be pure indulgence at the expense of more important things, so I'm not planning much of that soon.

Expect to see an interesting post from Wink within the next week or so. He's already written a draft, but he thinks it needs refinement, and I doubt he's going to find a lot of time this week to do it. It will likely bring out some good discussion, and he says it will lead in to some further posts once he's done with that one.

Sam posted some pictures of the garden from two years ago, with young Ethan and Isaiah testifying to the age of the photos. She's got another post at her main blog that I won't highlight yet because I'm still mulling over whether I'm going to post something else on it myself, but I've had basically zero time for the past few days to do more than write a few comments, work on my sidebar a little, and edit some permalinks.

Christian Carnival LXXIV is at Daddypundit.

OrangePhilosophy has moved to a new server to match the URL format for all the other Ektopos blogs now. Irem posted something about temporary intrinsics this week, and I'm still trying to decide if it's an extremely interesting issue or a total non-problem.

Next Monday is the next Philosophers' Carnival. As usual, all the info is here.

Isaiah got into the peanut butter this week.

The 140th Carnival of the Vanities is at Blog Business World. My Affirmative Action, Part X: Race as a Qualification is part of it.

Christian Carnival LXXII is at A Physicist's Perspective. My Baptism for the Dead is among the entries.

David Velleman looks at genetics and homosexuality. I agree with almost everything he says, with the only notable exception his insistence that there is no moral dimension to homosexuality.

Sam's posted some pictures of the kids sleeping last night. Ethan had decided to use the rug in his room as a blanket. Isaiah often ends up in his closet on a sleeping bag. He's there right now. One night I found him on a chair in his room that doesn't have enough room for a kid his size to lie down on, so he was all crouched up in a ball. Last night he went to a common favorite of his, fully under the bed so that we'd have to move the bed aside a great deal if we wanted to put him on top of it. I'm not sure why he detests sleeping in his bed so much. He usually brings a pillow with him under the bed. I'm not sure what possessed him to sleep with his head directly on the floor. Ethan at least usually ends up on his bed, but he insists on taking until he's well past tired before doing so. I put him to bed at 7:00 before I went out tonight. He's still up with his light on, and he turned it on within a minute of my turning it off after I came home maybe 10 minutes ago.

Update: more from the next night

I got my final grades submitted with 40 minutes to spare and nearly three hours of sleep. Now all I have to do until Monday is prepare my syllabus, put up a link in the online section of my course to an online reading once the library puts the reading up, and make a handout on accessing online materials. Compared to the stacks of grading I've had sitting on my desk for about two weeks, that seems like nothing, even though it might take a couple hours.

I was walking home tonight from a talk on campus, and I saw a crowd coming out of the community center on the corner of my street, and as I cut through their parking lot to get to my street I was sort of cutting through the crowd. I saw a few people dressed pretty formally as I went by, which seemed strange to me for people coming out of a community center event, and I saw the guy I'd just passed by being led as if the guy leading him was something like a bodyguard to keep people at a distance. As I was moving away, I looked back and got a good look at his face. It was Ralph Nader, who I'd just heard was in town and was about to speak on campus tonight. I guess he had just finished a talk at the community center. I'm not sure I would have connected his face with who he really was if I hadn't just been talking about him. I'm sure I would have thought he looked really familiar, but Ralph Nader isn't exactly the sort of person I'd expect to see on my own street. Well, there he was, and I was probably only a few feet from him.

I just wanted to check in and say that I'm still here. The comments have been fairly active over the weekend, and that was exhausting. I was also very sick Sunday night and all day yesterday, completely unrelated to last week's sickness. I spent almost the entire day yesterday grading to get an exam back to my class last night, and I had to teach for three hours in the evening while unable to stand more than a few minutes at a time. Then I had to teach again today, and I was scrambling from 5-6 pm last night to be prepared for class and then again this morning for today's mid-day class. So that's why I haven't been posting much of anything for a few days. I've been wiped out with little energy to think about something for long enough to write more than what it takes to respond to comments, because all my concentration has been reserved for grading and then class prep. Now I've got a little leeway before Thursday, but I'm going to be out this evening, so I'm not posting anything substantial today. I just wanted to touch base and report that I've got some stuff I'm working on.

I'm most of the way done with my second post in the commentary reviews series, giving a one or two paragraph review of each of the major commentary series. I've got something I wrote up halfway about punishment, torture, and whether we should delight in the suffering of those who deserve punishment. I've also got a post already worked out in my mind about Roman Catholicism, the Galatian heresy, and what Protestants should think about those who follow official Vatican teachings. I've got my next two posts in my affirmative action series already planned out, and I realized some very interesting problems that open theism raises that I don't think most open theists want to admit. I've also got a post for Prosblogion pretty much planned out on the problem of foreknowledge and free will that will follow up on my recent post there.

I do expect to do my usual Wednesday roundup tomorrow, and I hope maybe one of these other posts will be done by then. I'll almost assuredly be able to spend an hour of uninterrupted time writing during my office hours Thursday evening, unless of all things one of my students actually decides to show up for office hours. There's plenty of stuff I'm working on. I just need to get some time to write it up without distractions and while I can pick my head up enough to focus. Since I seem to be getting mostly better, I expect at least a few substantial posts to be done before the end of the week. I just haven't been able to focus on anything for very long in the last few days.

When the Reformation Study Bible came out, I didn't want to get a third copy of the New American Standard Bible, which was the only translation they had it in. I already had a Ryrie NASB and a Thompson-Chain NASB. Then they changed the translation to the NKJV, which I had already in study Bible form with the Open Bible. Since I'm not a big fan of the textual basis of the NKJV, I didn't want a second NKJV, since I wanted my Reformation Study Bible to be a translation I'd want to read regularly. So I've been waiting for quite some time, and now they've finally released it in the English Standard Version.

This is an opportune time for me, because my hardcover ESV is just about ready to fall apart. I've read all of it now except the minor prophets from Hosea 9 through the end of Malachi, and I've brought it with me most of the time to Bible studies, church, and other occasions. It's nice to have this translation with a study Bible I've wanted to have for years, and the binding will last this time. I made the mistake of trying to find it at the local Christian bookstore, where I was told that it was out but they'd never even received the copies they'd ordered due to such incredibly high demand that the publishers couldn't produce enough of them to meet everyone's orders. Amazon and CBD had pretty high prices, so I checked on Froogle and found that Westminster Seminary had it in stock and could send it out that day. That did. That was Tuesday, during the 4:00 hour. I have it in my hands right now. That's what I call service. Not only did it arrive within two days, but it was hand delivered with a grin by a member of my own congregation who works for UPS!

PlaidBerry raises some concerns about pessimism. People are too often negative when there's a lot to be positive about. I agree. As a Christian, I think there are plenty of things to be negative about simply because God evaluates those things negatively, but you can't use that to ignore the things God considers beautiful, valuable, and good. Certain hope is one of the key excellences the Christian is called to seek.

At the same time, I hesitate about some of what Chad says, particularly this: "My issue here is with those folks who offer plenty of critique and nothing by way of recommendation. Zero proactive effort is taken to remedy the problem (as they see it) and no ideas are offered as an alternate solution. Of course, countless examples of this scenario abound, whether it be at home, work, church, etc." I think this attitude ignores something very important about how God has constructed different people. What follows is a development of my comments on his post (I seem to be doing this a lot lately).

St. Francis of Assissi is known for a famous quote, which for all I know may be apocryphal: "Preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words." I was at the Jesuit college I teach at today, and I saw someone in the little snack bar on campus wearing a t-shirt that had the above quote on the back, in large enough letters that it would be visible from a pretty good distance.

Why was someone wearing this particular t-shirt in an environment littered with people who don't believe the gospel? What were those who made the t-shirt thinking it was supposed to accomplish to begin with? It involves words clearly connected with the gospel. The quote is supposed to be encouraging words related to the gospel but only in certain circumstances, presumably not ones involving casual anonymous contact with someone's back. It's not an outright contradiction, because the message isn't technically the gospel, and I suppose there might be a few extremely unlikely but possible situations in which it would be necessary to wear such a t-shirt, but doesn't it undermine the shirt's own message to wear it in a context when one will encounter nonbelievers (at least in a visible way not covered by some outer garment)?

I try to do something a little different in landmark posts. Sam likes to do Thankful Thursdays on her blog, listing some things she's thankful for and encouraging others to do the same in her comments. I've decided to use my 925th post to list some things about her that I'm really glad for. There are many other reasons why I consider her an incredible blessing, but I wanted to list ten that come to mind at the moment.

Yes, know Thanksgiving was a long time ago, but somehow we never got to developing them until just before Christmas, and then they forgot to include the disc in the package, so I had to leave it with them again to get the electronic pictures. I picked it up last week during my heavy grading and didn't get around to posting any pictures during that time and then forgot about it afterward. So here they are. There were a bunch of other pictures of adults, but I'm guessing people in some of them probably wouldn't like themselves portrayed that way on the internet. Oh, and this is post #900 for those who aren't counting (which I hope is anyone reading this). We're now in the home stretch to #1000.

Well, we can start off with the firstborn. To the left, Ethan is doing one of his favorite things: playing with his VeggieTales videos. Don't ask what he's doing with them. He likes to hold them up against each other and compare them. Perhaps he thinks he's using them as symbols for something else. I don't know. We can't figure it out, and he doesn't talk about his inner life. Next is some weird reindeer hat his aunties made him wear at the mall. This one appears because Sam insisted. To the right is Ethan wearing his grandpa's glasses. He loves to wear glasses and to put glasses on stuffed animals, particularly his duck. Of course, the aforementioned trip to the mall was the last time we saw that duck, so we had to get him a new one. After a month without it, he was willing to accept the closest thing I could find to it, even though he knew it wasn't the same duck.

Those coming from a theistic perspective a likely to view this event pretty differently from those coming from a naturalistic perspective. As the sermon was approaching its end last Sunday, an alarm went off. After the guy next to me checked his watch and it wasn't his, I realized it was mine. I promptly hit something on it to stop it. I forgot to check it later to see what had happened, because I usually don't have the alarm turned on or set for any time in particular. Apparently some buttons had gotten pressed while it was occupying space in my pocket along with the four pens (of different colors) and a mechanical pencil that make their home there. Well, on Thursday as I was doing a walk-through to make sure we'd gotten all we needed packed into our van for our time in NH and NYC, I was about to head downstairs, thinking we were good, and I heard my alarm go off on my office desk. I went in and got my watch and the four or five other items I have left there to be put into my pocket before we left. The alarm had been set for 11:49 am. There's no way that was a time I'd set if for, so both the time itself and the fact that the alarm were turned on would seem to be accidentally caused.

Naturalists just leave it at that. Theists who believe a purposive mind orders what appear to be mindless processes read this sort of situation very differently, particularly those who believe that this mind has purposes that involve human beings, even ones in favor of good outcomes for human beings. According to the theistic worldview, my alarm may well have been set for 11:49 am and turned on, both my processes outside the direct control of any human being, so that my alarm would go off just as I was about to leave, prompting me to remember that it was there and not leave it at home for five days.

I was planning my 850th post to coincide with the seventh anniversary of my brother Joel's death. I've talked about him before here, here, and here. I had just enough posts left to do 2-4 posts a day and then have this one be on Thursday. Then I got really, really sick (no, not with asthmatic bronchitis -- keep reading for that). It took nearly two days to get whatever vile offense was in my system out. Then within six hours after I had literally solid evidence of my improvement I was struck again (yes, that was awful, and yes, it was intended), this time in an even more incapacitating manner but with such intensity that it didn't last as long. I was better by the middle of the next day. Of course that was Friday. Doh! I've finally gotten around to the 850th post, and we're three days beyond the anniversary of when my brother died. I'm also exhausted from grading like a monster for well over a week, putting in a few days of over twelve hours (the two longest days were during the time I was sick as a dog, one I think a full 18 hours). I just don't want to spend the time writing up what I wanted to write. I also have only a short window of a weekend to relax for a bit before I have a week to get my grades for one class in, amidst hosting the Christian Carnival next week. I should easily have time for both, but I might have some more long days if I don't want some long nights next weekend.

The main reason I'm not doing what I wanted to do, aside from the time it would take to reflect on the things I wanted to watch (the memorial service at his college that I couldn't make and still haven't seen, a concert of the one band he was in during high school that I wasn't part of, which I haven't seen for a while, and news footage from when he died, most of which I haven't seen at all), is that such reflection just takes a tremendous amount of work. There are three things that it's just pointless to ask me to try to do when I'm in this condition -- physical work, thinking about important decisions, and reflecting on my inner life. I can read a detailed commentary with all the little Greek details or pick up some technical philosophical article with all its complex logical symbols, and I might even have something to say about it. This is exactly what I prefer to do when I'm exhausted, and I enjoy it as a way to slow down at the end of a long day or week. When it comes to reflecting on what's going on within my own inner workings, that takes being in the best condition, both physically and emotionally. I just simply can't do it very effectively otherwise, and I certainly won't want to. Now when it comes to what's gone on inside me for the past seven years, I think you can see why I don't want to venture into that realm in my current state. This is partly because of the way God made me. Joel was always the exact opposite. The lyrics below make that clear. (Myers-Briggs results: me, ISTJ; Joel, ENFP). I did want to do some sort of recognition of his life, but since I can't force myself to reflect for any more than this introduction required, I've decided just to post the lyrics to my favorite song by him, called Asthmatic Bronchitis:

I was looking through the My Documents folder on my resurrected desktop computer, which was out of commission for well over a year until about a month ago. One of the things I discovered was a text file from 1992 when I was applying to college. It turns out to be a college application essay. It's not the one I used for Brown, and I don't know where that one is. I did this later for the schools I didn't apply early to (Brown at the time allowed you to apply early but not make a commitment to go there, which almost no one allowed at the time and probably no one allows now). Anyway, it's about the time I was a hair's breadth from death in third grade, and it seemed fitting to use it for my 800th post. The style seems really wooden, in restrospect, and it seems really short to me now, but I was 17 when I wrote this, and I don't think I even had a Windows machine at the time. If I had to write about this now, I'd say a number of things much differently and reflect on some things I barely hint at here, but the thoughts I express here give a glimpse into my reflections on my life so far as I ended my time in high school, and it's nice to have captured something of that for posterity. I have changed none of the text that follows except to correct one capitalization mistake that was so glaringly obvious that I couldn't leave it. On to the essay:

I've got two (I assume unrelated) computer problems right now, so blogging willl be unpredictable until they're resolved. I have a computer with good internet access, but I'm stuck on the old desktop for a bit, which means I have to isolate myself to use the computer. The notebook hard drive won't boot up. I'm hoping to get my files off it by connecting it as a slave to the desktop. I picked up the proper cable for that today and will try it tomorrow, I hope.

The other problem is really strange, and I'm curious if anyone has any idea what's going on. I upload files with the Blackboard software for my classes, and my student download them for use on their own time. One of my students told me when she opened a certain file, it loaded up Word and then rebooted. No other student had this problem. I didn't have this problem. When my notebook's hard drive refused to boot, I went on the desktop and downloaded that file, and it did to my computer what it did with hers. It rebooted upon the file's opening. It did this 4-5 times, and then I tried to open Word on its own. It rebooted. Then I uninstalled Office entirely and reinstalled it. I opened Word. It rebooted. This file has been scanned with the most up-to-date Norton AntiVirus definitions, with no virus detected. It opens fine on the computers on campus. I did it myself, and it worked perfectly. No other student has told me of this problem, and I left a message in the Blackboard class area for both classes I teach. So if it's a virus, it doesn't affect every computer, and it's new or unknown enough that Norton doesn't know about it. Does anyone have any idea what might be going on?

Note: the only email address I'm planning to be using until I reconfigure my new hard drive that I haven't asked Dell for is my gmail one, so don't think you can reach me reliably any other way for a few days. I'm not planning to check gmail very often either, maybe once a day.

Update: Some complete idiot at Dell tech support reponded to my email by telling me I should try doing a direct connect between my two computers, which of course requires having both computers on and running Windows. He proceeded to give me detailed instructions on how to do something I've done many times that has nothing at all to do with my problem. I can't boot up to Windows! I wonder if he even read my email.

We finally got the second set of pictures back from the first week of what the United States government counts as Sophia's life. It's amazing how different she already looks at three weeks. Newborns really do look like prunes for a while.

I can't quite figure out what Ethan's trying to do in the picture to the right. It doesn't look like the Vulcan salute, though we know Sophia is quite capable of that. She did it almost every time I saw her in the hospital. I haven't noticed it since then. Maybe her emotions are coming in. This picture is from after Sam and Sophia were home.

This picture is from a hospital visit after I went home. Ethan's excited, but I'm not quite sure he knew what she was. I'm not sure he does now, even. This picture of Isaiah is far better than any in the previous batch, and he's in his usual position on my lap. He doesn't like doing anything else if I'm around unless he's hungry.

I've been a little quiet here. Sorry. I wrote my Legislating Morality post because my school was holding a conference to discuss Gay Marriage. I figured that I would post my views before the conference so that 1) I could clarify my thoughts by writing them down and 2) practice defending my view and see where its major weaknesses are.

I had no idea how much discussion it would generate. I truly meant to keep following up on it, but there was so much of it that, when the conference was over, I just burned out on the topic.

Then the election got really close and I started writing about Bush. Now the election is over and I'm burned out on that too. And I'm rather bummed too.

Schoolwork is starting to catch up to me in a major way too.

I do, of course, still have lots to say, so I'll be posting eventually. But maybe not for a week or two.

I had jury duty today. I wasn't supposed to. I'd called in when I first got the notice, which was shortly after Sophia was born. They don't give you a lot of time. I think it was ten days' notice. I called and asked if I could postpone it until January when I wasn't teaching, and they said that would be fine, but I decided to hold off until I talked to Sam. I then left my summons right where it wouldn't get lost, which means I didn't see it very often and didn't think about calling back any time when I was near a phone. Well, at 1:30 this morning while I was trying to get Isaiah back to sleep, I remembered, but it was too late to call for the postponement. I had to call three people today while I was there to get someone to leave a note on the board in my classroom that I wouldn't be there with instructions to bring their papers to the Philsophy Department. In the process, I stumbled upon the information that I'm being offered a 300-level course at the university next semester, which is rare for a graduate student, though they did give me a 400-level last year. These two classes come up for adjuncts to teach each once every three years, so I'm excited to be able to do both of them. I've been doing 300-level courses at the small college I teach at, but that doesn't seem as much of an honor to get.

Well, anyway, jury duty itself was quite an experience. I spent the large bulk of the time sitting around grading. For such an important civic duty that requires many people to miss days of work, they sure do use their jurors' time ineffectively. I got a fair amount of grading done, though, more than I'd originally hoped to do today if I'd been home and on campus. They spent lots of time telling us what it would be like and warning us that it's not like on TV. Basically three or four different people had to tell us all the same things, each time adding a little new. I wouldn't exactly call it an efficient system, but it amazed me how many times I had to fill my fellow jurors in on things that had been stated quite clearly, so maybe that's why they repeat things so much. They know people don't listen.

As it turns out, this is my 725th post. Here are some pictures from the hospital. All pictures of me and most of Isaiah looked awful, so I picked the best of everyone else and the one decent one of him. First is Sam and Sophia last night, the night after the delivery. You can't see Sophia as well in this one, but the first priority is always to show off Mommy and baby together. Next is one of the best of the early pictures of Sophia. As you can see, she likes to try to put her hand in her mouth, but most of the time she just gets blanket. She did enjoy the small store-bought pacifier once she got it in all the way, but then she fell asleep and it fell out. To the right is another one that I believe was taken the next day (yesterday).

Here's Ethan with his ducky and Alfred from LarryBoy, the Veggie Tales spoof of Batman. If you look closely you can see the remains of the tail Sam sewed onto the duck for him to play with, since he had the original tag he used to play with cut off by his mean Auntie Tiffany. Ducky usually goes everywhere with him, but he isn't allowed to have it during school. To the right, you can see him staring, captivated by his new little sister. I think she freaks him out a little bit, but he's very interested, whereas he wasn't at all when he first met her. Isaiah still can't bothered by her. He'd rather knock all the books off the shelves now that Mommy's home to get mad about it. While she was in the hospital, he just wanted to put playing cards back in their box one at a time for 45-minute stretches.

Here are three more taken the night after the delivery. I look pretty terrible in the one I'm in, but Sam thinks it's not that bad. I guess some of the others were much worse. I wanted a picture with all of us, though, and this is the best one with Isaiah. He's only in a few, and most of them don't show his whole face or display really unfavorable looks on his face. He didn't really want anything last night except to fall asleep in my arms. In the other picture with all of us, my head was already cut off. I didn't even have to modify that one.

Sophia Alexandria Pierce was born at 2:27 pm EST today, weighing in at 6 lbs. 14 oz. Labor began at 11:30 pm last night, and we were at the hospital before 2am. I got very little sleep last night, of course, but I'm home now with the boys for the night. Sam and Sophia are doing fine and will come home tomorrow. Ethan and Isaiah got to see her for a few minutes today and were thoroughly uninterested.

Update (1 pm Friday): She's got a pediatric heart murmur, which seems to have something to do with connecting the lungs and heart in utero, which usually disappears in the transition to the new environment but hasn't done so yet, so they're holding on to her for another day. I'll have to find out more about this, but my impression is that this happens all the time. My intitial search turned up a bunch of medical search engines that didn't say anything about what I was searching for, and I didn't have time before class today to do anything more.

Update 2: This seems to be what Sam was talking about. "It is estimated that at least 85 percent of babies will have a murmur during the first 24 hours after birth. This is caused by the normal closure of a blood vessel and usually goes away within 48 hours." This site calls it a "normal (innocent) heart murmur".

Update 3: I've got pictures up now.

The kids decided to empty a huge boxed filled with class notes from high school and college, along with what I have left of my role-playing game days and a bunch of magazines I collected during college. They decided it would be nice for the box to look nice and neat with nothing in it but air. (They clear tables for neatness's sake also.) Unfortunately, it meant covering our entire dining room floor with papers that were now no longer in any semblance of order. Then they took all the books off one of the bookshelves in there and spread them out over the top of the papers just for kicks. So I spent the morning sorting through all that instead of doing anything else that I might have been able to do in the time I had before coming to campus to teach at 11:30. It took two and a half hours.

While I was doing that, Ethan walked into the dining room with a pack of microwave popcorn, as he is wont to do, and tried to give it to me to show that he wanted some, which is one of his ways of avoiding asking for things. Sometimes, much more often than he used to, he will say things like, "Want some popcorn?" This, of course, is what we say to him when he wants popcorn, but he doesn't quite understand the indexical nature of personal pronouns and the fact that different sentences are contextualized to who is saying them. So he tells us what he wants by saying what we say when he wants them. I told him to go ask Mommy, because I know she wants to limit his popcorn intake but have no idea what her criteria are for when he can and can't have it (for instance, he had three bags of microwave popcorn one day, but other days he can't have it presumably because he had some the day before; sometimes he's allowed to share a whole bag with Isaiah, and sometimes they can only have half a bag). I prodded him out of the room, and I had to exile both of them at one point with the new Veggie Tales "Sumo of the Opera", which they received in the mail from my mom yesterday.

Well, after that was over Ethan came back in the room with the popcorn, not having asked Mommy anything, and he handed me the popcorn. I handed it back to him and was about to say something, when he said "Go axe Mommy", thinking he was repeating what I had said to him last time. (He does this too, saying things like "That's Isaiah's" when we try to stop him from doing something that has nothing to do with Isaiah. All he knows is that it's what we say when we don't let him do something.) Now I don't exactly know where these violent tendencies are coming from, but I told him I don't have the proper equipment for such a procedure. Well, eventually I asked her, she said it was fine, and he had his popcorn, but what struck me as interesting in this was the combination of a normal child development issue with one of his abnormal developmental issues. Not understanding the semantics of pronouns and other person-relative expressions is normal for kids learning language, but it usually gets picked up in a short time. Kids with autism-related problems take much longer to learn that sort of thing. But reversing the 'k' and 's' in 'ask' is something kids usually take a long time to get right, and there are entire dialects of English in which it's correct to reverse them from how standard English does it (in pronunciation anyway, not in spelling). But Ethan is usually extremely good at pronunciation even without knowing the meanings. He even does the accents of the Wiggles or Veggie Tales characters. So it was weird to see him flat-out saying 'aks' for 'ask' without even thinking there was a problem with his pronunciation. He usually knows when he's wrong.

In the middle of normal computer activity this morning, I had to go in the other room to check on something. I placed my computer on the floor, went and did whatever it was, and returned to find an error message on the screen saying that there was some sort of problem and the computer had to be shut down. When I tried to restart, it said I had no bootable drive. I checked in the BIOS, and it didn't detect the hard drive. I haven't tried the hard drive again, I haven't run a disk checker on it, and I haven't tried it in another computer yet, but I think it's shot. I didn't back up some of my stuff recently either.

Fortunately, most of what I need for my teaching is online in some capacity, and the only thing school-related that I lose if I can't resurrect the hard drive is previous semesters's gradebooks. The racial classification paper I've been working on would also be gone, but I have a printout of the latest version of it. There's lots of other stuff that I've collected into easily accesible form that I'll just have to re-collect if I need it, but that can be done with some difficulty, and only the only really important thing that would be completely gone would be email. I have a backup of Outlook from a year ago, I think, but the last years' messages would be entirely gone. I can get a list of what I intended to blog about from a week or so ago, but I don't have anything I added to it in the last week, and I don't have the list of sites I was keeping to see whether I want to add them to my blogroll. The reason this is most annoying is because I've had at least one completely new and unrelated computer problem every single week this semester, actually even starting before that.

When I was in college, one of my spiritual leaders advised me to write up my values and priorities, and I did so and wrote it up on my website. I've revised it a couple times since then, the most recent version from the summer of 2002. In the interest of eventually getting the best stuff from my old website to appear here and in the interest of not having to type up too much new stuff on a day when I seem tied to a sick kid who doesn't like anyone but me, I decided to use this as my 650th post. Don't assume that I actually live up to what I say in this, but when I'm most reflective on my life and my motivations are purest this is what I'm looking toward. I've changed a little this time around, but the main body of this is as it appears on the old site. Please excuse the bad jokes.

In an odd bit of synchonicity, I was also having computer problems. Over the past month, my ability to connect to the internet on this computer had been getting increasingly spotty. Three days ago, I lost connectivity altogether.

I had been having other problems with my computer as well, but I could not continue to work on this computer without connectivity (my ability to update webpages for my clients was particularly difficult to do without it).

So I finally bit the bullet and reformatted my machine.

Which completely failed to solve my connectivity problem. Grrrrr...

I finally narrowed down my problem to my ethernet port (not a card b/c it is built right on to my motherboard). So I disabled it in my hardware profile and threw a new ethernet card in. Finally I'm back up and running.

A Dell technician just left after replacing my motherboard because of a faulty power input. I've been running on batteries for the past few days, charging them in Sam's computer while my computer was shut down and then rebooting every time I need to use it again once the battery is charged. After the new motherboard was in, I reinstalled my sound card drivers (which I'd reinstalled many times while it wasn't working, to no avail), and the sound worked immediately (well, once I realized I needed to turn the volume back up again). So I was right all along that the previous motherboard had a bad sound card, something I thought was true back in April or whenever it was that I got the new motherboard. The Dell tech guy was insisting that it was a corrupt operating system and wanted me to wipe my whole hard drive and reinstall to see if it was software. The Dell tech I talked to this week about my power problem told me I was more likely right than the other tech guy, and the woman who came to install the new motherboard agreed. Sure enough, I was right. Well, it's nice to have sound again after months with just a system beep. Too bad they wouldn't replace my motherboard back when they should have, since it was their fault.

Update: Well, it's not over yet, I guess. This motherboard is defective and keeps freezing up, and they won't be able to fix it until Wednesday due to the holiday. So I'll have much more spotty access to anything on my computer for enough more time that this will be well over a week total by the end of it. I'm going to have to be extra careful to save important posts as I'm tying them, or I'll lose stuff, and I might not want to try taking on anything too time-consuming, e.g. the next affirmative action post on reparations. Maybe I'll just decide to do it on Sam's computer, though, and use this one primarily to transfer files. I'm not sure it's a good idea to use this computer too much with memory parity interrupt errors coming in at no provocation. I'll have to see how bad it is, and that will take some use.

For my 600th post, I've decided to do something a little different and tell an entertaining story. I was once kicked out of a church youth group. Why, you ask? Well, it's not exactly a simple story, so this will take some explanation. My younger brother was always a creative sort, but his creativity usually got him in trouble. I very rarely did anything to get in trouble, but when I did it was usually something that caused real damage. One time I sat on a fence at school that everyone sat on all the time, and it happened to break while I was on it. Another time, I decided to set a clock back after school to screw with the teachers' sense of time the next day. The clock stopped moving altogether. I was playing dodge-apple once, and a window broke. I don't think I threw the apple that broke the window, but my dodge led to its breaking. I think the only time I didn't cause actual damage was when I was trying to figure out how credit cards were supposed to open locked doors, and a teacher caught me. There may not have been more than a few other times that I got in trouble between 6th grade and high school graduation. One of them was the MFD incident, and it probably got the most attention out of any of them.

Army of One has posted the latest Blogdom of God interview with ... me! He asked me these questions months ago, and I did about half of them within a week or so afterward and just got the rest answered and back to him maybe a week ago. It was fun answering most of his questions, so go ahead and check it out to see if it's as fun reading my answers. Also, at the bottom of the post is a list of the first nine Army of One Blogdom of God interviews. If you read any of those blogs and haven't read the intereviews, it's worth doing so to get some more background on the blogger. Someone always presents a different side of themselves when someone else determines the topics and questions than when they can just blog about what they want.

What do you do when road signs lead to flat-out contradictions? Is there a way to know which one trumps the other? I've encountered the following situation more than once. When you have a two-lane (on each side) road, with a turning lane and one lane continuing, there's always the issue of whether you need to stop before turning right from the turning lane. If there's a stop sign, then you must stop of course. If there's a single light for the straight lane and none for the turning lane, then you need not stop. If there's a yield sign, you need not stop. If there are two lights, one for each lane, and the turning light has a red/green arrow, then you go by the light. If there are two lights and the turning light just matches the other one, then you have to stop before you turn right if it's red. What if there's a yield sign and a double light, and you come up to the light when it's red? The double light clearly indicates that one of the lights is for the turning light, and when it's red you have to stop before turning right. But then there's the yield sign. Doesn't that mean you don't have to stop if you're turning unless there's someone coming? The import of this is that you have a legal obligation to do something but that there's also a law telling you that you don't have that exact legal obligation. Right?

Baldilocks found a personality quiz that doesn't go way out of its way to defend every quirk of personality but is perfectly willing to insult you.

I talk about Myers-Briggs personality stuff too often given that I hardly ever explain it. Well, Marla has a great post at Proverbial Wife explaining the typings and why the test is of value.

Richard Chappell found a personality test I've never seen before. It seems to be much more precise than the Myers Briggs test, with five categories and then sub-categories under them. I'm including my results alongside descriptions of each category, with some evaluation. These descriptions are in the public domain, but Dr. John A. Johnson has asked for acknowledgement for having written them.

As I was walking home from campus the other day, I had an amazing realization. For many years I've been wondering why men's bikes have a crossbar and women's don't. After all, men are more likely to want to avoid having something to land on if they slip forward off the seat. Why would women's bikes have the crossbar missing? Presumably men's bikes existed first, since that's things have typically gone. Someone must have deliberately made bikes without that, but how does being female lead to not having such a thing? I've had discussions about this quite a number of times, and no one has ever given me a satisfactory answer during these discussions.

Well, as I said, the reason has now occurred to me, and I think our contemporary situation keeps us from seeing what would have been obvious to anyone a couple generations ago. What I saw when walking home was a woman riding a bike, which I've seen before. What was different this time was that she was wearing a skirt. It wasn't just a skirt. It was a long skirt, and it went down to her ankles. Yet she had no trouble reaching the pedals. Nowadays women wouldn't ordinarily wear a skirt on a bike if they can help it, and if they do it probably wouldn't go down to their ankles. That's why it doesn't occur to most people today to think that a bike would be designed for someone wearing a skirt, but in those days women didn't wear pants very often if at all. They needed a bike that could allow them to have wear a skirt or a dress without interfering with functionality or modesty. It seems obvious once you think about it.

For my 450th entry, I'll post my last (so far anyway) of my series on things you really have no need to know about me (the main body of which was written over a month ago).

Jollyblogger has started a new series on relationships based on a a sermon series he's doing. The inaugural post is on conflict and has some good stuff.

His comments on the use of "righteous anger" as a fake justification are spot on. Almost no one ever has righteous anger, at least not unless mixed with selfish or prideful motivations. Usually people's claims to righteous anger aren't even close. As most people use the term, it describes anger that they feel justified in having, but it almost never involves concern for justice for others instead of concern for one's own wounded pride or feelings of being wronged (even if in some cases it's a feeling of being wronged because a loved one has been wronged).

She Who Will Be Obeyed! has a pretty accurate test for whether you're ready to be a parent.

While I was in New York City for the weekend I was able to do a little writing for posting when I went online with an incredibly slow connection, but I couldn't do much that involved looking around at other blogs and blogging about them, so it's time for another roundup.

Stuart Buck has a helpful post about cable companies and bundling packages. A number of conservatives and libertarians have been arguing that cable companies should charge by the channel, and then people would only pay for what they watch. As much as I'd like not to have to pay for ESPN or any other sports channel, since those will never be watched in my household unless my dad or Sam's dad is around, this sort of proposal doesn't make much sense once you learn a little more about how cable companies work.

Stuart also has a good quote from philosopher C. Stephen Layman that I think shows two things. First, a lot more arguments beg the question than most philosophers will admit. Second, begging the question isn't always all that bad. Many good arguments are question-begging. See my comment on Stuart's post for a little more on why I think this, if you can't see the reasons from Layman's quote.

At Digitus, Finger & Co. we have a striking diversity of feminist responses to Abu Ghraib.

I've got eight windows open now full of other things to read more carefully before deciding if they deserve linkage, but I'm too exhausted now to do more. We've been up late every night, partly from kids not sleeping due to the unfamiliar location, and I have to tutor football players at 8am, so I need sleep. To be continued...

I can't bear to link to Brian Leiter's blog. He just shows such contempt for so many things I hold dear, and he refuses to allow comments. Still, I can link to Mark Steen's Orangephilosophy post that links to his announcement that Mark Heller will be coming to Syracuse. This is the most exciting news I've had in a long time. After the three professors who had restored Syracuse to its former glory as one of the best places in the world to study metaphysics (and I mean like top five) all got snatched up by Rutgers, now tied for number 1 in the U.S. for philosophy, partly because of them, I wasn't sure what I was going to do. I came here partly because of the presence of one of them, and the arrival of the other two seemed to confirm to me that this was the right choice. Then they all left, and others left with them.

They've been replaced by good people, most of them not in metaphysics. The one senior hire in metaphysics is someone whose interests are close to mine, and he's extremely nice and has offered to help me out more than once, but he's been overbooked recently as the only senior metaphysician at a department stocked with metaphysics grad students who came to work with the three who left and are now in dissertation work. So I like him, but it's not as easy for him to oversee as many people as have been assigned to him. Also, his philosophical sensibilities and personality are so far removed from my own that I don't know how easy it would be to work primarily under his guidance. Well, from what I know about Mark Heller, he's almost the perfect advisor for me, so I'm pretty excited. Now I just need to come up with a dissertation that he could oversee.

Mark spent the first part of his career working on exactly the issues I'm interested in. His book argues that physical objects are quantities of stuff extended through time and not just at a time, and his more recent metaphysics work deals with anti-realism about ontology. His current epistemology work is more like metaphysics, since it's about contextualist theories of knowledge, which I think should be relevant to the work on race I'm doing right now. So both my current projects (if you count the stalled one that I'd like to be my dissertation) are related to things he's a specialist in.

Since I can't really write anything coherent, here's part III of at least IV of some stuff you have no need to know but I'm telling you anyway.

Very, very sick. Up all night throwing up, interspersed with very bad diarrhea. Still have no idea what caused it with one but only one other member of the household sick. Felt much better after each purge and able to move around more easily now with just a headache and some uncomfortability in the midsection. Wasn't feeling up to blogging much today but a little better now. Not putting any subjects in these sentences, though they all have the same understood subject. Not counting subordinate clauses.

Here are three more items you don't have any reason to have to know about me. I have two more installments planned (written, in fact, though I need to find some links for some of them). If anyone thinks this sort of thing is worth continuing or if you have any specific questions, let me know, and I'll see what I can do. At some point self-disclosure becomes non-existent with me if I'm left to my own initiative, so if I'm going to be like some bloggers and share interesting bits of information about myself occasionally I may need prodding. Maybe no one who reads this blog cares, but if you do then go ahead and encourage it in particular ways by feeding me questions to respond to.

I'm supposed to be responding questions for the Blogdom of God blogger interview I'm doing for Army of One, so I should get to that before I do too much more of this.

Well, the last set of grades has been turned in. This is the first time I've assigned regular papers instead of dialogues, and it's the highest plagiarism rate I've seen in a couple years, one moderate case and three very serious cases. It's also the most people I've ever failed in a semester (seven).

Normal blogging with what I consider more serious and reflective content will resume shortly. I've got lots of posts planned that I just haven't been able to get to. I'll try to space them out so it's not overkill, and that way I might even have some typed posts that I can put off for when I don't have time to write.

The officials in my country are afraid of President Bush, so they don't persecute Christians as much. Under Clinton it was very bad for us. Many of us were arrested, put in jail, and some were killed. With Clinton, it was very bad. But under President Bush, it has been so much better, so we are praying for him.

This is from a pastor in Uzbekistan, an officially Muslim country that I happen to have been to. It's reported by Admiral Quixote's Roundtable in a post intended for this week's Christian Carnival that didn't make it to the Carnival's host.

What this quote illustrates is that after having been free from Soviet control for a time, the formerly oppressed became the oppressors of all who would threaten the notion that to be Uzbek is to be Muslim (even though many Uzbeks are hardly religious). Evangelical Christians who believe the gospel of Jesus Christ and offer it to all are thus severely persecuted in that land, simply for considering Muslims as possible audiences for their message.

Here is an element of the Bush presidency that I hadn't considered, but it fits with what I understand about how the government officials there operate. They welcomed Americans until they realized how many were Christians who were unafraid to talk about their faith. Then they began to crack down rather quickly once it became clear that they could get away with it without opposition from the American government. I was there around the time this crackdown started. They were deporting foreign Christians at first on the grounds of illegal missionary work, and when the U.S. government said nothing they began to do harsher things, eventually raiding people's apartments, imprisoning church leaders, and much worse things that I'm not willing to talk about in a public forum. The current administration has come down harder on that sort of thing, so this pastor's reaction is understandable. This may not be a sufficient reason for voting for Bush, but it's something Christians who are having trouble deciding should consider.

This post at Baldilocks gave me the idea to share a few things about myself that might be considered curiosities. Perhaps you could think of them as things about me that you might not otherwise have known. I typed up a bunch of these but will probably post them in shorter sets, since they're not brief sentences like Juliette's.

This just isn't my week. I was planning to have graded the second paper for my classes by Monday. That would give them two weeks or so to write their third paper after having received their second one back. Well, life conspired to prevent that, including double-checking, organizing, and mailing our tax returns, doing some serious lecture prep for material I've never taught before, and dealing with my late discovery that the bookstore never ordered the book I've been assigneing to my students to read for a few weeks now.

So I decided I could at least get them done this week. Well, three days in a row I got to the point where I had pulled out a paper and started grading it, and I just couldn't bring myself to get through more than a few pages. It wasn't that the papers were bad or that I had no motivation to grade. It was that I could barely lift my head up. The time change helped temporarily with sleep, since the kids were getting up later, but we also have been staying up later, sometimes a few days in a row well past midnight (in the normal course of things we're often in bed with the light out before 11:00, which is required if we're to get 8 hours). Add to that the 3-4 times a night Isaiah was waking us up for a few days earlier in the week. By afternoon, when I would usually be able to sit down to grade, I was just so exhausted I couldn't get through more than a couple pages.

Somehow I hadn't been to Mark Byron's blog in a while. He was almost assuredly one of the first 20 blogs on my blogroll, probably even within the first 15, and I guess he got lost in the shuffle recently. I noticed two posts yesterday when browsing through what I'd missed that are worth drawing attention to.

He reflects on the moral significance of the fact that 50% of the population is of below average intelligence, with some good economics thrown in.

He's also been thinking a bit about neocons vs. paleocons as compared with unadjectived conservatives and flat-out liberals.

Be careful when using coupons. You might save money, but is it worth being arrested? I suppose it might be if you can later win a six-figure lawsuit over it. (from The Rough Woodsman)

Someone at Harvard Business School during the period when President Bush had been there (and who became a faculty member shortly thereafter) debunks the mainstream narrative of Bush's coasting through school without learning anything, including some reasons to think the Bush Administration really is what you would expect from an MBA who learned what he was taught when earning his degree. I remember seeing someone talking about the poker player political strategy before. I see it in him, too. (link from Keith Burgess-Jackson)

Two barely related matters:

1. Hot Abercrombie Chick is a freshman in college planning, probably, to be a philosophy major. That deserves encouragement. She's just posted a great presentation of the considerations given by Malebranche and Leibniz (two of my favorite philosophers) on the problem of evil.

2. Check out this Hot Non-Abercrombie Chick. It might take a bit to load up, but it's worth it.

I woke up this morning
and I went back to bed
I woke up this morning
and I went right back to bed
Got a funny kind of feeling
Like I got broken glass in my underwear
and I really, really, really wish I was dead

Thus begins Weird Al Yankovic's The Generic Blues off his UHF soundtrack. I never knew what that funny kind of feeling was like until this morning. I really did have broken glass in my underwear. I wasn't wearing them, of course. Somehow they must have fallen on the kitchen floor as someone went through to the basement with laundry, and when Ethan dropped one of our brand-new glass bowls on the kitchen floor today right next to that fallen pair of underwear, guess what happened? I got this funny kind of feeling, like I had broken glass in my underwear.

We're finishing up the tax forms. I guess we're a lot richer than I thought. First, the check that we received as an advance child tax credit payment, that was supposed to be part of what we get now as our child tax credit, turns out to be a complete gift. Since our allowable child tax credit was far higher than our tax itself, and since they subtract the advance check from the allowable amount before seeing how it compares to the tax itself, we still had a higher allowable amount than tax, and we got the credit for our entire tax. So the check wasn't an advance of something that we now no longer get. We get the full child tax credit we can take in addition to the advance check. We must be rich to be getting free child tax credit checks in addition to anything we get when we fill out our forms.

Second, they have these tax "credits" that they apply after they calculate the tax you allow. Any credit normally applies before the final tax owed. But these "credits" are listed among the payments. The additional child tax credit and the earned income credit are among these "payments". I don't remember ever having paid these, but they say they're payments. To clear up the confusion, they also refer to them as "credits", but it doesn't seem to me that they're credited from anything. They would better be called gifts. However, we all know that only rich people get free money from the government at tax time, and poor and middle class people are the ones who pay for those gifts. So we must be very rich, since this is a fair amount of money.

The end result is that our tax "refund" is very close to $300 less than our taxable income itself. Isn't that a little strange?. Our tax itself is almost $1500 less than our taxable income, so what is it that they're refunding? We must be rich to be getting such a high "refund" from tax we never paid.

The reality is that the Bush tax cuts do far more for the low end of taxpayers, particularly for families with children, than they do comparatively for the rich. They give flat-out gifts to people with lower income and merely collect a smaller percentage from people with middle and upper income (though the higher the income the lower percentage less than last year, even if the amount of the drop is more because the tax is more).

Something like this happened last year, too, but not to the same extent. Of course, New York State was another matter. We get a fair amount money "back" from the federal government that we never paid to begin with, but somehow New York still thought we make enough money to owe them something (and it was more than had been taken out of my paychecks). This year, however, even New York (with the highest tax burden of all 50 states) has joined the bandwagon, and we're getting more back than we paid (though not anywhere near as ridiculously high an amount as the federal "refund").

New to the Blogdom of God Alliance is What in Tarnation?!?!? (Note the symmetrical, palindromic punctuation.) He's got a post about his observations from parent-teacher conferences (he's a third grade teacher) about parents who won't get their kids to do homework but say they can't. Further probing shows that the parents refuse to discipline their kids or give any consequences. The reason? They don't want to take away something the kid really likes. Wait, wasn't that the point?

He's also got a lesson on grace from his geometry class, and he uses Mad Libs to reinforce the parts of speech!

One Hand Clapping has some nice thoughts about tipping. He starts with an extremely small sample and observes that a significant sample of those in that subset who are not tipping are Christians and concludes (via a clear logical fallacy) that Christians tend not to tip (or not to tip well). Just to be clear on this, let's look at the structure of the argument.

1. Those who tend not to tip are often Christians.
2. Therefore, Christians tend not to tip.

I see no way to conclude 2 from 1. You'd need to look at most Christians to see if most Christians tip. You don't start with the group of people who don't tip and then notice that many of them are Christians. There may well be a much larger group of Christians who tip and tip well.

Aside from that obvious mistake (which many people in the comments also made about Christians and other groups), there's plenty of good stuff in this post, mostly on the ethical reflections. I wish he wrote more on everyday ethical issues, because he has some great wisdom on these matters, and he often writes about issues most people wouldn't think to include in an ethics book.

Ethan had a language evaluation yesterday, so the fluctuations in diagnosis continue, with little bits of clarity shinging through the thick layers of darkness that the evaluative community has shed on Ethan's status. See Adventures in Misdiagnosis for the story up to this point.

On language matters, this woman said he probably has some neurological reason for some of what he does and doesn't do. He clearly has some of the most obvious traits of autistic communication deficiencies, but he doesn't have all of them all the time. Based on what she saw today, which isn't the way he is all the time, he fits into the autistic category, but she doesn't know where he is on the spectrum. She thinks he has some of the basic skills there, but he finds it very hard to communicate. The problem is mainly in expressive language. Other elements of his language are much higher-functioning.

Joe at Evangelical Outpost had a post a while back with two tests for autism and autistic spectrum traits. One involves mind-reading by looking at someone's eyes, with the rest of the face occluded. [It's a little funny to call it a mind-reading test, given that these pictures are of people faking certain faces to look like they have certain emotions that they don't really have.] They tried to remove some of the subjective factors by trying to find common enough agreement on which emotions the eyes showed, but I doubt it's as objective as they'd like. Either way, it does test some differences between people with Asperger's Syndrome (AS) or high-functioning autism (HFA) and the average person (with differences between males and females.

The other is a personality test somehow labeled "the autism quotient test" that picks out ISTJ traits as autistic traits and then saying that the test reveals who has autistic traits. [Note: Asperger's is a high-functioning autistic spectrum condition with higher-functioning, though not necessarily completely normal, cognitive and language abilities, sometimes even better than normal, but with delays in social and communicative delays with obsessional, repetitive, and routine behaviors.]

On the mind-reading through eye-reading test, there were 36 questions. The average score among AS/HFA people was 21.9. The average male score was 26. The average female score was 26.4. My score was 24, right between the normal male score and the AS/HFA average, just slightly closer to the average male score. (I should say that I got all 20 questions right on the whole face emotion recognition test, but I couldn't find the statistics on how people in general do on that one.)

The AQ test had an average score of 16.4. 80% of AS/HFA people scored at least 32, though the average AS/HFA score was 34.4 on one study and 35.8 on another. I scored 28. I wonder how the male/female differences turn out among the normal score group. The only data I have are for a group of Oxford University students who scored a little better on the mind-reading test than the average person did. The male average among them was 19.5, the female average 16.6. Both averages are higher than the 16.4 overall average, so this select population doesn't set a baseline standard. Again, my score was between the average male score and the AS/HFA average, though this time a good deal closer to the AS/HFA side.

Now there's important new research suggesting that the autistic spectrum is just one side of the male-female spectrum in terms of a number of traits, with males tending to be better at systematizing intelligence and females tending to be better at empathizing intelligence. Autism is a disorder that's even more extreme in the male tendency toward systematizing with difficulty on the empathizing end. There's also a disorder that's the reverse (but it's extremely rare) called Williams syndrome. Given that, I seem to me more male than most men. In other words, I'm quite the studly dude. So take the tests at the link above and see how manly you are!

We've been trying to figure out some developmental problems our son has. We've gotten some very different stories from professionals, and some of it has been basic incompetence, as far as I can tell. (I've always been distrustful of the general medical community, and my experiences tend to support that distrust more often than not, even though the doctors we regularly see our excellent and trustworthy on most things.) We've been trying to discover just what the problems are and how we might go about addressing them and helping him to learn in the areas where he's been delayed.

First, our pediatrician told my wife (I wasn't present for this one) that everything she was telling him was consistent with normal development, but he referred us to a neurologist who (supposedly) would know more about developmental disorders. He later told us that he has no idea what to say about this sort of thing, so at least he acknowledged his inability to diagnose it.

It turns out I knew more than the specialist in this area. The neurologist was fairly incompetent, asking us some general questions and drawing unwarranted conclusions without probing into many areas that would have given a different story. He told us that Ethan is most definitely autistic, with no question at all in his mind. Then he told us that this was all based on what we told him, and nothing Ethan did while we were there contradicted it. What he didn't say is that what we told him was based on what he asked us, which I didn't think covered the spectrum nearly enough, and what Ethan did was based on the limited kind of interaction the neurologist tried to encourage (basically nothing). All the books and internet sources we've looked at suggest many areas that need to be explored to get a fuller sense of Ethan's capabilities and even interests that this guy didn't even bother to ask us about. What really got me is when I asked him if it could be Asperger's Syndrome and not autism, and he basically said that there's never any difference in language ability with Asperger's, which isn't true. Asperger's is defined as being like autism in many ways (though usually not as severe) except with no language issues in principle. There are still effects on language development (particularly with pronoun reversal, repetition rather than compositionality, etc.), but autism has language trouble in principle. It wasn't clear to me whether Ethan had troubles simply because of language inabilities or if it stemmed from other things. My first guess is the latter, which doesn't at all rule out Asperger's.

This is less interesting than some people but probably more interesting than most. Unfortunately, Barbados doesn't show up very well. Aside from Kazakstan, which was just a 10-minute drive-through, I've spent more time in any of these than I have in most of the states on my U.S. map. Barbados and Ireland were a week each, Germany and Uzbekistan were something like 6-7 weeks each, and Canada probably adds up to at least a couple weeks when you combine the various visits. The U.S. is going on three decades. For obvious reasons the 5-6 other international visits I had weren't on the map (4-5 sovereign Native American nations and the United Nations building in New York City).

create your own visited country map
or check our Venice travel guide

Update: I've added a new map, since the old one stopped working, and I've updated the link to the Visited States post, since that one got deleted accidentally during a change in location for this blog.