Jim’s Brain Online

Posted by Jim at September 1st, 2004

Kristen and I took the kids out to eat last night. As we were driving, I heard a trumpet.

I used to play trumpet. I still would except that I don’t really have time. If I had time, I’d probably use it to work on my novel or take up electric bass again. Only after I had time for those things would my interest wander back to the trumpet.

Nonetheless, I know the sound of practice, particularly competent but inexpert practice. That’s more or less my level of skill.

So anyway, we were passing some houses and I was assuming that the person had to be playing with a window open. Except… It just seemed too loud for that. Not outrageously loud, but it just wasn’t fading. Noise does that when you’re moving away from the source.

This would have remained an odd but inconsequential mystery except for one thing. As we were driving, Kristen turned to me and said, “Jim, he’s playing the trumpet.”

She was right. The guy driving the car that was passing me in the right lane was also playing the trumpet.

I’m not kidding.

Posted by Jim at August 8th, 2004

It’s now official, geocaching has become mainstream.

The city of Grand Rapids now includes it as a class in it’s Parks and Recreation Guide. Take a look at the bottom of page six.

Posted by Jim at July 16th, 2004

I’ve always had mixed feeling about what I think of as the “Christian Culture Industry.” You probably know what I’m talking about: Christian rock, Christian books, Christian trinkets.

To the extent that these things can be used by Christians to deepen their experience of God, I’m all for them.

What makes my feelings mixed is the idea of Christianity mediated through commercially produced objects which have less connection to God than they do to somebody’s profit margin.

It’s therefore inevitable that I find Channel 54 (of the TCT network) rather bizarre. As networks go, it can sometimes be painfully low budget–most of the time I flip through the channels, it appears to be coming from the same set. Denominationally speaking, it seems that there are a lot of people coming out of the Holiness tradition. As for the political perspective… well… let’s just say that Pat Robertson appears in their news broadcasts.

A great example of what I find strange about it:
My wife recently allowed our children to watch a “Veggie Tales” video. When it ended, she flipped through the channels, stopping in shock and disbelief at channel 54. “Jim,” she said, “you have to come down here.”

I walked downstairs to find that some guy was singing on the instantly recognizable channel 54 set. What was he singing? Painfully Christianized tv theme songs.

“Baptist! I’m a Baptist!” to the tune of the Flinstones. Also, a song about how all Christians were part of the family of God to the tune of the “Gilligan’s Island” theme song. As I walked upstairs, I could here him singing something (my mind effectively repulsed exactly what) to the tune of the theme to Bonanza.

While I’m all for using the media to attract people to Christianity, I’m not convinced that that’s the likely effect of his efforts.

Posted by Jim at June 7th, 2004

Owing to the fact that I’d like a fulltime job, I’ve been looking through the “Jobs” section of the Grand Rapids Press lately.

Typically I look through the computer related ads, then search for IT positions that should have been placed in the computer section (but weren’t), and finally I look for positions related to my statistics/social science background. This means that I typically end up reading through all the ads.

As I went, I discovered an ad that said, “Manage a Concept!” That sounded interesting, if rather abstract. I read further.

As it turned out, the local Hooters was hiring managers.

I’m still not precisely sure what concept a person would be managing at Hooters, but I suspect it has something to do with boobs.

Posted by Jim at April 10th, 2004

I got a little confused when I initially saw the headline of the following article US Forces Attacked in Baghdad, Offer Falluja Truce, somehow managing to replace the word “Truce” with “Juice” in my head.

I imagine I must be thirsty. I can’t imagine what Falluja Juice would actually be like.

Posted by Jim at April 10th, 2004

I’ve really enjoyed the various movies in which Christopher Guest and others do a mock documentary. Examples: A Mighty Wind, Waiting for Guffman, and Best in Show. Before any of these came This is Spinal Tap which included many of the same people as the above mentioned films doing more or less the same sort of thing. The same sort of thing being almost entirely improvised, character-based humor.

I was looking through Amazon recently and ran across a review for “This is Spinal Tap” that simply floored me. Either the writer is rather unaware and thinks that Spinal Tap was actually a real band or he’s getting into the act himself and pretending that they’re real. If the latter, I don’t find his review funny enough to justify him going to the bother. If the former…

Wow.

Read it for yourself (you’ll have to scroll down a bit). The idea that he really doesn’t know that it’s a fake documentary is strengthened when you notice his comments on other movies. For example, he gives On the Waterfront two stars because it’s not colorized. In his view, all black and white movies should be colorized. Mac and Me by contrast, gets five stars.

Posted by Jim at April 2nd, 2004

A few years ago, my wife and I happened to be at Eastown Deli. While we sat there we happened to notice a truck with the words “Steel Erection Company” on the door.

I’m going to guess that they came up with that name in the 1940’s. It’s probably a decent work-a-day name for a construction company–at least it used to be.

It just goes to show how a shift in the most commonly used meaning of a word can really cause you pain sometimes.

Disclaimer: I just noted that between yesterday and today, this blog seems to have taken a turn for the icky. Hopefully I’ll have something more high minded tomorrow.

Posted by Jim at February 26th, 2004

Both of my computers use modern mice. In short there are no balls inside them (a laser tracks their movement), they connect to the computer by USB rather than serial, and they have little wheels between the right and left mouse button.

This is kind of cool–mostly because it means that I no longer have to dismantle a mouse, take out the ball, and use my fingernail to scratch unidentifiable crud off the little wheels.

That’s the good news.

The bad news goes like this:

Owing to the little crevice on the bottom of the mouse, one of my newer, nicer mice now has unidentifiable fuzzy stuff in place that actually blocks the little laser. As I result I had to spend some time pulling the fuzzy crud out. Had I not done so, the mouse pointer would have continued to move only jerkily across the screen.

Oddly enough, jerky mouse movements were the same problem that used to cause me to clean the earlier generation of mice.

There’s some kind of moral here, but it escapes me.

Posted by Jim at February 15th, 2004

I’m already on record as saying that I don’t think cloning is automatically wrong. I just think that it’s impractical and unwise at the moment.

Basically, as I understand it, the number of tries to get a normal clone of an animal is fairly large. I don’t think that it would be responsible to experiment on human beings. A person would have to live for their whole lives with the results of a mistake during their creation.

That being said, I think cloning humans is an inevitability if its possible. Once we get better at cloning animals, people will probably clone monkeys and chimpanzees, some of which are near extinction. Cloning might help save some animals at the expense of some genetic diversity (though with effective use of the techniuque, it might actually encourage genetic diversity). Bearing in mind the relatively small genetic difference between chimps and humans, it seems likely that a good understanding of one will help with the other.

Even beyond animal cloning, the benefits of stem cell research will likely continue to enourage the development of human cloning techniques–and probably more quickly. The possibility of slowing or even stopping Multiple Schlerosis among other genetic problems motivates people strongly.

As such, I think that we’re marching inevitably toward cloning. Not all countries will ban it. Beyond that, it seems possible that banning it in some countries will encourage it in countries with less restrictive laws.

As such, I suspect that banning cloning either for stem cells or reproduction is useless. Better to educate people about it so that it can be used responsibly.

As for exactly what a responsible use of cloning is… Well… I don’t have all the details on that.

I need to be educated too.

Posted by Jim at February 12th, 2004

As I understand it, a scientist has recently cloned a human embryo.

It brings up a lot of issues. The scientist hopes the knowlege won’t be used for human cloning but seems perfectly happy with the idea that the embryo might be harvested for its stem cells.

Personally I find the idea of cloning a person less problematic than I find creating a human embryo to use as stem cells. Granted, cloning a person isn’t practical or moral at the moment owing to the potential for permanent damage and the very low likelihood of success. A clone, however, is basically a twin.

Theraputic cloning opens more disturbing issues for me. It uses human embryos as material for healing people. As such, one might argue that harvesting embryos for stem cells is comparable to creating human beings for parts.

The possibilities that stem cell research opens up sound wonderful and I’d like to see them pursued somehow, but at a gut level, I don’t like the idea of using embryos to do it.