Cameraphone
If you look immediately below this post, you should see a Flickr image, posted from my cameraphone. (Sorry, JOSH, it's an image, not a text post.) Yes, after four years with a crappy Nokia straight from the era of Ricardos and Cleavers, I finally have a phone that enables me to take and post pictures, read email, control the Space Shuttle, and perform cardiac surgery. (By the way, you wanna hear something dumb? My new phone is a Motorola, and one of the ringtones plays this goofy little ditty followed by the voice of some Eurotrash dude going "Hello, Moto." I think they use this in commercials. Anyway, everytime I hear it, I giggle. Yes, I'm that dumb.) So, I love having a camphone. Hop on over to Flickr (the image below links to my photostream) and see what I'm seeing.
Econ 101
I'm on an economics kick right now because I'm tired of not understanding a damn thing people are talking about when they discuss stock markets, GDP, the consumer price index, steel tariffs, inflation, recession, or government bonds. When politicians pander for my vote and flog their economics plans, I have no way of evaluating their claims, since I haven't the foggiest idea what the hell they're yammering about. (And, believe me, I know that they play on this ignorance to win votes.) [more]News v Post
The email newsletter Cynopsis reports today that...
Bravo will launch a new series on August 10 called The Daily News (Hearst Ent), a six part documentary that highlights day-in-and-day-out operations at the New York Daily News. Each episode with focus on a group of journalists as they move through their day, covering various stories around the city, and the paper's notorious competition with the New York Post.
I think I'm back
Well, it appears I'm back, on the new server and all that crap. I'm sure something's going to be broken, though....No worky
My mike@michaeldietsch.com email isn't working for the moment. It's probably because I fell behind on paying my web host. (Which also means my site might temporarily go offline soon.) Tomorrow, after I get paid, I'll start the process of switching hosts. If things go weird here for a while, that's why.God of the gaps
Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project, appeared on Tucker Carlson Unfiltered recently, to discuss intelligent design and evolution. Collins, who is a Christian as well as a geneticist, said this here very interesting thing about intelligent design:I think intelligent design sets up a god of the gaps kind of scenario. ... [W]e haven't yet explained this particular feature of evolution, so god must be right there. If science ultimately proves that those gaps aren't gaps, after all, then where is god? We really ought not to ask people to do that.
I've said this before. Many Christians would state that if science can't currently find a natural cause for a certain phenomenon, the only possible explanation must be supernatural--that is, God. Any gaps in our knowledge must be filled with God--hence, "God of the gaps." Yet, as Collins points out, that view limits a Christian's conception of God--for as natural explanations emerge, there's less need for supernatural ones. A more logical stance for a Christian might be to say, well, all things in the natural world have a natural explanation, and we'll eventually understand most of those explanations, but we still hold that, ultimately, God is the power behind it all--and the ways in which God moves Creation remain among the great mysteries of our faith. That is actually where Collins stands:I'm what's called a theistic evolutionist. I believe god had a purpose that involved you and me as individuals, people that he wished to have fellowship with. I believe that the way he decided to do that creative step utilized the mechanism of evolution.
Now, I personally don't think God had anything to do with any of it, but I at least respect the consistency and rationality of Collins's faith. I'll end with this--a beautiful statement of faith by Francis Collins:I do think that a thinking person can both be one who believes that science, rigorous science, is the way to understand the natural world and that god is the way to understand the spiritual world. And when you marry the two together, as I get to do, your appreciation of science, of a new discovery, takes on a new meaning because it's a glimpse of what god knew all along and at that moment it's a moment of worship.
[via Panda's Thumb]File under "cautiously optimistic"
Although I know that the MTA breaks everything it touches, I'm still looking forward to this month's automation of the L train. Getting trapped in the closing doors doesn't concern me on the automated L train any more than it does when I ride an elevator. Otherwise, anything that allows the MTA to run trains more frequently (if, indeed, this project lives up to that particular bit of hype) is all right in my book.