The Bible seen in a more modern light?

October 5, 2005
by Nicholas Knisely
Current Affairs / Religion

Catholic Church no longer swears by truth of the Bible – World – Times Online

By Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent

THE hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church has published a teaching document instructing the faithful that some parts of the Bible are not actually true.

The Catholic bishops of England, Wales and Scotland are warning their five million worshippers, as well as any others drawn to the study of scripture, that they should not expect ‘total accuracy’ from the Bible.

‘We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision,’ they say in The Gift of Scripture.

You can read the rest of the article by following the link above. The key point seems to be that the Roman Catholic Church is moving in the direction of accepting the modern biblical scholarship consensus of the Bible as a human document that teaches us about God, rather than a mystical document handed down from on high. The Church calls documents “Canonical” because they’re teachings are worthy of emmulation, not because they are the literal words of God.

This isn’t very far from what most moderate and liberal Episcopalians believe.

(Via The Times Online.)

More reasons Nick is an Apple Fanboy.

October 4, 2005
by Nicholas Knisely
Web/Tech

So continuing my love affair with Apple…

Last night as I was getting ready to retire I managed to trip over the power cord of my Powerbook. The laptop fell a foot to the floor but still seemed to be working. It wasn’t until this morning when I tried to restart the machine that I got the “No Boot Disk Found” error.

Shudder. Horrors. Gasp.

I was prepared to panic, but then I remember that all my data (and I mean all my data) is backed up 2 different ways. And, because I’m using .Mac, all my email, contacts and calendar entries are available from any web browser. So instead of panicking I came into my office this morning, booted up the office computer, found the Apple repair number, called it, managed to get the laptop disk to boot (there were some logic errors that had to be repaired) and went on my merry way. Even if the laptop had not booted, it would have only meant that I would have to work around that issue for a day or two until I either re-installed the operating system and my data, or sent the laptop off to the shop for repair.

Either way I had all my data available, my schedule up to date and 3 other computers (office, wife’s and daughter’s) to use in a pinch.

How different this is than what happened in the spring when the windows computer went down.

Good Game Apple. Grin.

(Seriously: the moral of the story is have good daily backups and sync your personal data to at least one other source daily as well. The .Mac service is expensive for what you get, but it’s sure easy to use, and reliable.)

Noticed the “categories” in the sidebar?

October 4, 2005
by Nicholas Knisely
Weblogs

One of the advantages of moving to TypePad is that it makes it dead easy to organize my posts into categories. Which in turns makes it dead-easy for you to find the things you’re interested in. I haven’t gone all the way back to the beginning of the blog (3 years worth of posts!) and updated the posts with the new categories, but I will over the next couple of weeks.

Let me know if you spot any typo’s or other needed corrections. Thanks!

I have some great pictures from Swaziland that I haven’t posted before. I’ll try to go through my slides and post some of those this week as well.

Today’s Annular Eclipse

October 3, 2005
by Nicholas Knisely
Science

Thousands Gather to View Rare Eclipse (AP)

The sun is seen as it is masked by the moon during a solar eclipse in Rio de Onor, Braganca, northern Portugal, near the Spanish border, Monday, Oct. 3, 2005. Thousands of people gathered across Portugal and Spain on Monday morning to catch a glimpse of a rare and spectacular type of solar eclipse. (AP Photo/Paulo Duarte) AP – From northern Portugal to the heart of Africa, crowds gathered Monday on roofs, hilltops and in city squares for a rare chance to see a spectacular solar eclipse.

This is the first picture I’ve seen of the eclipse. There’s more about the event if you follow the link. (Extra credit available if you’re one of my students and mention this post in class…)

(Via Yahoo! News – Science.)

Is this the beginning of what many have feared?

October 3, 2005
by Nicholas Knisely
Current Affairs / Swaziland

Firebombings kindle political row in tiny Swaziland

MBABANE, Oct 2 (Reuters) – Weekend firebomb attacks, branded as terrorism by authorities in tiny Swaziland, have raised the stakes in a long-running stuggle between sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch Mswati III and the banned opposition.
Police said a firebomb exploded in the Swazi National Court building in the capital Mbabane late on Friday night, hours after a similar attack on the home of government spokesman Percy Simelane in another part of the city. No one was hurt.
Police blamed the attack on the banned People’s United Democratic Movement (PUDEMO), saying a party pamphlet had been found at the court, but the party denied involvement.

A number of people I have spoken with have feared this sort of violence beginning. The police are pointing toward the political opposition as the source of this attack based on a pamphlet they found near the scene. I don’t know that until an investigation is completed, it’s realistic to draw a conclusion. It may have been misguided members of the opposition. But there have certainly been moments in world history where governments have tried to unite support behind them by staging an incident and then blaming the incident on “dissident elements in the nation.” The opposition party has denied any involvement.

Lots of folks were worried about an increase in violence in Swaziland. The crushing poverty and the health crisis facing the nation make it fertile ground for extremists. Luckily to this point no such groups have arisen. I pray that this is not the start.

Top 3 reasons to use a Mac.

October 2, 2005
by Nicholas Knisely
Web/Tech

A co-worker of my wife asked me to put together a list of the three most compelling reasons to switch to a Macintosh. Here’s the email I sent in reply:

Hi –

My wife asked me to send you a brief email listing my top 3 reasons to use a Mac.

Turns out that thinking this through has been a very interesting exercise.

The answers in my mind are pretty simple, but they have very subtle implications.

1. Apple designs computers for the end-user.

Windows seems to be designed for Microsoft’s primary customer, the large corporate sys-admin. Windows has superb tools to let a single administrator easily control thousands of workstations. But this power comes at the price of relatively easily exploitable security holes. It also means that since Microsoft focuses on the sys-admin tools, the GUI and user-space gets less polish. The opposite holds true for the Mac. Given that Lehigh is not really using Active-Domain to manage computers to the degree that they could be managed, the end-user focus of the Mac seems to be better suited to student and faculty users. If Lehigh was Ford or Wachovia (randomly chosen large corporations) it would be the other way around.

2. Apple is built on Mach and Darwin (and descended from BSD).

Building on a mature multi-user operating system brings obvious advantages to security. But there are more important implications. Building on Unix means that the Mac is as facile on networked systems as Linux or other Unix based systems. Microsoft’s TCP/IP networking has been vastly improved over the years, but it’s not at the same level as a Unix descended system. Daemons stay where they’re supposed to stay. User space is discrete and one user doesn’t tromp on another user. (Which if you’ve ever had to use the computer terminals in the Technology Classrooms, you’d recognize why this is so important to me.) Mac’s can use Fink to access RPM’s and apt-get repositories to use pretty much anything put together for Unix and/or Linux. (LaTex? Oh yes!)

3. OSX uses open-format data when possible.

This is the primary reason I switched earlier this year. Having had a hard drive crash and struggling to get my data out of Outlook and onto a spare linux machine I has sitting around I realize what a pain vendor-lock has become. The Mac uses mbox for email, uses simple xml and/or html and pdf for documents, vCard and iCal for address and calendar. All of which can be easily backed up and imported into another system. Having managed to move 20 years worth of files from one computer to another, being able to do that easily and get access to the files once moved is critical to me. The Mac does in natively. Windows does okay – sort of – as long as you use Windows to read the data. I won’t even go into the goodness of spotlight and metadata searching…

There you are. I’d be glad to expound on any of the points. Oddly enough my favorite thing about Mac’s didn’t even make it on the list. Once I convince a person to switch, they quit constantly calling me for support. They just start using their computer. 🙂

Intelligent Design – there’s more to it than many seem to think.

October 2, 2005
by Nicholas Knisely
Religion / Science

For the Anti-Evolutionists, Hope in High Places: “Look East or West and you can detect the rumblings from an irreconcilable divide between science and religion.”

In a new book, “The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality,” the Dalai Lama laments what he calls “radical scientific materialism,” warning that seeing people as “the products of pure chance in the random combination of genes” is an invitation to nihilism and spiritual poverty. “The view that all aspects of reality can be reduced to matter and its various particles is, to my mind, as much a metaphysical position as the view that an organizing intelligence created and controls reality.” Both, he suggests, are legitimate interpretations of science.

I really need to sit down and gather my thoughts about this whole question. In short, I believe in Intelligent Design. I believe it as a practicing Christian and as student of Philosophy and Physics. But I have yet to be convinced that Intelligent Design can be shown to be a sufficient and necessary explanation to the present structure of the Universe and bio-diversity. The whole question of what is meant by the terms “necessary and sufficient” is going to have be teased out – and the difference between believing something and proving something as well.

But I’m certainly being asked to share my thinking more and more frequently… I guess it’s the times we live in. It’s important because of what the Dalai Lama points out above. If we dismiss the whole concept out of hand, we end up taking ourselves down a road that no one wants to travel.

(Via The New York Times > Science.)

In a Melting Trend, Less Arctic Ice to Go Around – New York Times

October 1, 2005
by Nicholas Knisely
Science

Link: In a Melting Trend, Less Arctic Ice to Go Around – New York Times.

The floating cap of sea ice on the Arctic Ocean shrank this summer to what is probably its smallest size in at least a century of record keeping, continuing a trend toward less summer ice, a team of climate experts reported yesterday.

Interesting news from the climatologists. Near as I can tell no one is certain what is causing the problems. But whatever is happening, it looks like it’s serious.