Author: Glen

Conversations

Three recent con­ver­sa­tions, pre­sent­ed ver­ba­tim:

Domino

A Con­ver­sa­tion With My Daugh­ter
I set up a line of domi­noes run­ning around a cor­ner and had my sev­en-year-old daugh­ter sit where she could only see the end. I tipped the first domi­no over and we watched the entire chain fall.

Then I asked her, “How do you know there was a first domi­no? You did­n’t see it.”

She stared at the fall­en domi­noes with a fur­rowed brow for a few sec­onds, then said, “If there was no first domi­no there would be no world. Noth­ing could exist.”

Look out, Aris­to­tle. My daugh­ter is gun­ning for you.

new face
A Con­ver­sa­tion With My Son
Yes­ter­day I took my chil­dren to Hap­py Hol­low. As we were enter­ing the park we passed by an Asian gal dressed up as an ani­me char­ac­ter. I’m not sure which one, but she had on some sort of bulky white body armor. More to the point, she had also dyed her hair pur­ple.

So I said to my wife, “If I was Asian I would total­ly have pur­ple hair.”

My four-year-old son over­heard and said with a dis­mis­sive tone, “If I was Asian I’d have black hair.”

kiwanja_palo_alto_texting_3
A Con­ver­sa­tion With A Stu­dent
A text mes­sage con­ver­sa­tion with one of my stu­dents (ver­ba­tim with a few words removed to pre­serve anonymi­ty):

Stu­dent: “Is pub­lic nudi­ty a sin?”
Me: “What?”
Stu­dent: “Is it just kind of weird or is it some­thing to avoid alto­geth­er?”
Me: “Search biblegateway.com for the term ‘mod­est’.”

One Of The Most Revolutionary Thoughts I Have Read

Papyrus in Greek regarding tax issues (3rd ca. BC.)It does­n’t hap­pen too often, but every once in a while I become aware of some new piece of data that explodes what I think I know about some area I’m inter­est­ed in. New Tes­ta­ment schol­ar (and fel­low Pen­te­costal) Lar­ry Hur­ta­do just dropped a bomb on me.

In his blog post How Long Were Man­u­scripts Used? he men­tions some­thing that had nev­er occurred to me before. Not even a lit­tle bit.

One mat­ter Hous­ton address­es is how long man­u­scripts appear to have been in use. On the basis of man­u­scripts from Oxyrhynchus and from Her­cu­la­neum in par­tic­u­lar, Hous­ton notes numer­ous exam­ples of man­u­scripts dis­card­ed when they were ca. 2–3 cen­turies old. Over­all, he judges that the evi­dence indi­cates “a use­ful life of between one hun­dred and two hun­dred years for a major­i­ty of the vol­umes, with a sig­nif­i­cant minor­i­ty last­ing two hun­dred years or more” (p. 251). And, as he notes, the evi­dence from Qum­ran leads to a sim­i­lar view.

This is of poten­tial rel­e­vance for ques­tions about the trans­mis­sion of ear­ly Chris­t­ian texts, espe­cial­ly those that became part of the NT. If ear­ly copies were intact for some­thing approach­ing a cen­tu­ry or more, then this could be a fac­tor against notions that these texts were high­ly unsta­ble and sus­cep­ti­ble to major revi­sion in the course of trans­mis­sion. But we might adjust our think­ing to allow for an ear­li­er wear­ing-out of NT man­u­scripts through greater fre­quen­cy of usage. OK. Let’s sup­pose that ear­ly man­u­scripts of NT writ­ings typ­i­cal­ly wore out soon­er: twice as fast (ca. 50–75 years)? That still means that the man­u­scripts from which copies were made remained avail­able for poten­tial check­ing for a fair peri­od of time.

This prob­a­bly means noth­ing to most of you, but this is huge if you’re inter­est­ed in the tex­tu­al reli­a­bil­i­ty of the New Tes­ta­ment. This is sur­pris­ing and strong evi­dence in the “Bible is reli­able” col­umn. Check out his com­ments sec­tion where Dr. Hur­ta­do unpacks this a bit more.

Some­thing Dr. Hur­ta­do does not men­tion is that this makes it plau­si­ble that our ear­li­est papyrus frag­ments (such as P52 or one of the hand­ful of oth­ers from the mid-sec­ond cen­tu­ry) might actu­al­ly be direct copies from the auto­graph or only one gen­er­a­tion removed. It’s impos­si­ble to know, of course. But the mere fact that we can even think it plau­si­ble is mind-bog­gling.

Dr. Hur­ta­do got this data from UNC’s George W. Hous­ton in his arti­cle “Papy­ro­log­i­cal Evi­dence for Book Col­lec­tions and Libraries in the Roman Empire,” in Ancient Lit­era­cies: The Cul­ture of Read­ing in Greece and Rome, ed. William A. John­son and Holt N. Park­er (Oxford/New York: Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 2009), 233–67.

Poisonous Rat-Duck Day

PlatypusToday is Ground­hog Day, which is hilar­i­ous to me. How did they out­ma­neu­ver the oth­er ani­mals and get their own hol­i­day?

I per­son­al­ly would pre­fer Platy­pus Day. There’s an ani­mal that deserves to be cel­e­brat­ed. It’s a fur­ry, poi­so­nous rat-duck. A platy­pus is prac­ti­cal­ly a liv­ing Poké­mon.

But some­how the ground­hogs won out. I sus­pect bribery.

For the record, today I will hon­or platypi in my heart. Although Wikipedia tells me that platypi is incor­rect and I should say platy­pus­es or platy­podes. Also, they are ven­omous and not poi­so­nous (ven­om is inject­ed, poi­son is con­sumed).

To which I say: poi­so­nous rat-duck sounds bet­ter than ven­omous rat-duck, and platypi has a sat­is­fy­ing faux-intel­lec­tu­al ring to it. Let rhetoric pre­vail, and let the poi­so­nous rat-ducks have their day on the cal­en­dar!

Commentary Review: Blomberg & Kamell on James

I recent­ly received a review copy of the Zon­der­van Exeget­i­cal Com­men­tary on James by Craig Blomberg and Mari­am Kamell.

I was par­tic­u­lar­ly excit­ed to receive this book for two rea­sons:

So here’s my take on the com­men­tary:

  1. It’s nice and short. This is a plus, not a minus. Too many com­men­taries today run to the thou­sands of pages. This vol­ume is long enough to help­ful­ly explain puz­zling aspects of the text with­out being so mas­sive that the cen­tral mes­sage gets lost.
  2. It pays atten­tion to usabil­i­ty. For exam­ple: the com­men­tary on each verse is pre­ced­ed by a bold­ed Eng­lish trans­la­tion of the verse fol­lowed by the Greek text. Con­trast this with most com­men­taries that seem to assume you’ve got three or four books open on your desk (or win­dows on your mon­i­tor) at once (view the expla­na­tion of James 1:2 to see what I mean).
  3. It keeps you ori­ent­ed. Every sec­tion begins with an out­line of the sur­round­ing text and an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly clear gram­mat­i­cal out­line that makes the author’s argu­ment clear. You can see a sam­ple page at Google Books (click that link — seri­ous­ly).
  4. The com­men­tary ends with a very help­ful sum­ma­ry of the over­all the­ol­o­gy of the book of James — some­thing I wish more com­men­taries did. The dis­ci­pline of Bib­li­cal the­ol­o­gy would be much rich­er if that were the case.
  5. It uses foot­notes. Yay!
  6. I dug into some of the more puz­zling vers­es in James and thought that Blomberg & Kamell explained them with clar­i­ty and wis­dom. Dis­claimer: I have not read this com­men­tary all the way through.

Over­all, I rec­om­mend this com­men­tary if you need to preach or teach on James any­time soon and urge you to look care­ful­ly at the oth­er vol­umes in the series as reviews on them become avail­able (the linked web­site — bestcommentaries.com — is, in my opin­ion, the best place to begin search­ing for a com­men­tary).

Thanks for the free­bie, Zon­der­van! I would have told the truth if your com­men­tary was lack­lus­ter, but I am delight­ed to report that this is a sol­id expo­si­tion of the book of James.

How To Get Better Grades In Physics

Enrico Fermi (1901-1954)Ben Shank is a Ph.D. can­di­date in physics at Stan­ford, where he also serves as a teach­ing assis­tant (TA) for an under­grad physics course. At our recent Thanks­giv­ing par­ty he began rat­tling off advice to one of our stu­dents on how to get bet­ter grades in physics (or almost any tech­ni­cal course). Said stu­dent was amazed and beseeched Ben to make this infor­ma­tion more pub­licly avail­able, and so he typed it up and sent it to our Chi Alpha email list.

With Ben’s per­mis­sion, I also share it below (empha­sis is mine):

  1. From the first day of class, sit in the front of the room toward the cen­ter. At least one study has shown that stu­dents who sit in the front are 2–3 times more like­ly to get an A and 6 times less like­ly to fail than stu­dents sit­ting in the back even when seats are ran­dom­ly assigned on the first day of class. We can debate why this is so all day, but it is so, so take advan­tage of it. (By ‘the front’ i mean the first ten or so rows of Hewlett 200.)
  2. Be sure to get plen­ty of sleep the two nights before the exam. Of all the bad con­di­tions you could be in going into a physics test, being tired is prob­a­bly the worst one that is legal. Stud­ies indi­cate that the sec­ond night before the test is even more impor­tant than the night imme­di­ate­ly before. A clear, think­ing, cre­ative mind is your sin­gle great­est asset for any physics you might encounter. If you have been keep­ing up with the class, get­ting two full nights of sleep is prob­a­bly more impor­tant than any amount of study­ing you might do dur­ing those two days.
  3. That said you will prob­a­bly want to do some study­ing. If you haven’t already, I high­ly rec­om­mend find­ing some­one else in the class to study with. Go over prob­lems togeth­er. Go into the lat­er prob­lems in each chap­ter and pick some that you’re not sure you can both do. Tak­ing an exam well is very sim­i­lar to teach­ing the grad­er how to do the prob­lems, so even if you are teach­ing a friend how to do some­thing you already know, you are prepar­ing for the test. If you both (or all) get stuck on some­thing, con­tact a TA.
  4. Read every prob­lem at the begin­ning of the test. Your mind will con­tin­ue to process prob­lems you are not look­ing at, pro­vid­ed it is awake. (See Tip 2) Stud­ies show that you are best served load­ing all the ques­tions into your brain at the start to give your­self max­i­mum time to con­tem­plate. If you get real­ly stuck on a prob­lem, leave plen­ty of space and move on. Odds are you’ll have bet­ter insight when you come back to it.
  5. DON’T PANIC. Attempt every ques­tion. This sounds real­ly obvi­ous, but we occa­sion­al­ly get blue books that have a few scrib­bles labeled ‘Prob­lem 1’ and noth­ing else. As best we can tell, these stu­dents are look­ing at the first ques­tion, pan­ick­ing and star­ing blankly at the paper for forty-five min­utes or just walk­ing out. This is some­thing worth prac­tic­ing to avoid. If you find your­self in a pan­ic: stop, look away from the paper while slow­ly count­ing to ten. If you are feel­ing calm, you can go back and draw a dia­gram or write down some pos­si­bly rel­e­vant equa­tions. If you start pan­ick­ing again, repeat Steps 1 and 2. If you are not feel­ing calm, turn a cou­ple pages and start the next ques­tion. Things will look bet­ter when you come back to this one. Trust me.
  6. Now for a few tips on get­ting the most [points] out of your graders. Grad­ing a midterm takes 4–5 hours. As much as we try to assess each of you accord­ing to all the knowl­edge of physics you demon­strat­ed, we are going to get tired and even­tu­al­ly parts of our brains are going to go on autopi­lot. If your answers are in clear­ly marked box­es (prefer­ably near the left side of the page) and they are right, there is a reduced chance of any error in your work being marked off. If an answer is wrong, but it’s in a box near the left side of the page imme­di­ate­ly below the work that pro­duced it, then it is very easy for us to find the one lit­tle error and give you most of the points. I know hav­ing all the answers in one box at the bot­tom of the page feels con­cise, but if one of them is wrong we have no idea where on the page to look for the mis­take. On a relat­ed note, it is bet­ter if you work one part of a prob­lem and then work the next one below it. Believe it or not, grad stu­dents can get con­fused if part c is to the right of part b instead of below it. It’s sil­ly, but after a few hours of grad­ing that’s the way we are, so you might as well not let it hurt you. As a gen­er­al rule, each line on the page should only have one equa­tion or state­ment on it. (pic­tures exclud­ed) You may use up more pages that way, but there’s no short­age of blue books.
  7. When­ev­er pos­si­ble, draw a pic­ture. Not only will it help you think, but it also helps us know what you were think­ing. If you are not absolute­ly con­fi­dent in your solu­tion, a minute spent draw­ing a decent pic­ture is prob­a­bly worth it in terms of par­tial cred­it. Too often I’ve sus­pect­ed a stu­dent knew more than their answer indi­cat­ed, but they did­n’t leave a good record of their thought process so I could­n’t grant par­tial cred­it. And that makes me sad. (Orga­niz­ing graph­ics are also great anti­dotes to pan­ic, see Tip 5.)
  8. When you get an answer, check that it makes sense. Neg­a­tive lengths and times are often indi­ca­tors that you’ve made a mis­take, as are e.g. mega­Coulomb charges and kilo­Amp cur­rents. If this hap­pens to you, go look for the error and fix it. If you can’t find it, let us know that you don’t like the answer and why. One of the eas­i­est ways to tell that some­one is lost is if they give you a non-phys­i­cal answer and don’t blink. As a physi­cist, it is much eas­i­er to grade lenient­ly if a stu­dent indi­cates that they under­stand why the result of their cal­cu­la­tion can’t be right. If noth­ing else, the grad­ing rubric often has a point des­ig­nat­ed just for hav­ing a result that could be true. You’ll at least get that.
  9. It is well known that hav­ing good hand­writ­ing improves the atti­tude of those grad­ing your exam. What is less well known is that hav­ing tiny hand­writ­ing can hurt you. Often what is per­fect­ly leg­i­ble to you while you are curled up with your nose 12 inch­es from the paper makes our eyes hurt after the third or fourth hour of grad­ing. Obvi­ous­ly this vast­ly reduces the incen­tive to hunt for that tiny lit­tle math error you made in part a. This is not a small mat­ter. I, for one, tend to get a migraine when I bend over small text for too long. So imag­ine a three hour migraine and then gauge the incen­tive to just mark you off so I can stop look­ing at your paper. Find a test that you have tak­en recent­ly. If you (or bet­ter, a friend) can’t clear­ly read your text at arm’s length, you might con­sid­er con­scious­ly writ­ing larg­er on all tests from now on. Grad­ing fatigue isn’t lim­it­ed to physics TAs.

And that’s what Ben has to say about that. Hope it helps you out as finals draw nigh.

The Most Amusingly True Sentence I’ve Read In A While

Wik­iLeaks is what hap­pens when the entire US gov­ern­ment is forced to go through a full-body scan­ner (Evge­ny Moro­zov)

I laughed out loud.

being a Christian in a sorority

PanhellenicA recent con­vert told me she’s strug­gling with life in her soror­i­ty, so I asked anoth­er soror­i­ty gal I know to give her some advice.

Soror­i­ty gal emailed the recent con­vert and, with her per­mis­sion, I’ve anonymized it and present her email for your con­sid­er­a­tion. I’ve trimmed off the begin­ning because it’s impos­si­ble to anonymize with­out mak­ing it use­less (she iden­ti­fies a spe­cif­ic Chris­t­ian in the recip­i­en­t’s soror­i­ty for her to con­nect with), but the rest of her let­ter is more broad­ly applic­a­ble:

I think [your soror­i­ty and my soror­i­ty] may be dif­fer­ent in terms of their empha­sis on par­ty­ing and drink­ing, but I will def­i­nite­ly try to give you my two cents, and if you want to meet up at any point, let me know and I’d love to get togeth­er to talk and/or pray with you about it.

I have always felt very at home in [my soror­i­ty] as a Chris­t­ian. There are 10–15 Chris­t­ian girls in [my soror­i­ty], and many more who aren’t into get­ting drunk/hooking up. My big is a Chris­t­ian, as is my twin, and my twin’s lit­tle. I try to sur­round myself with these girls, rather than the partiers. I do still go out to the events where there is drink­ing, but I only drink mod­er­ate­ly (if at all) and still always have a great time. Do you have a group of girls like this in [your soror­i­ty]? Are there oth­er Chris­tians in [your soror­i­ty] you can team up with?

Anoth­er thing that helped me ensure that there are enough events that don’t cen­ter around drinking/partying was get­ting involved on the sis­ter­hood com­mit­tee. If you guys have a com­mit­tee like that, I would encour­age you to get involved and make sure those kinds of events are hap­pen­ing.

If you are feel­ing like [your soror­i­ty] is a place where you can’t be your­self or where you are encour­aged to make poor deci­sions, deac­ti­vat­ing might be the right choice for you. My biggest advice to you would be to pray about it and go with your gut. I do think there is room to be a Chris­t­ian in Greek life, but I also think it varies a lot depend­ing on the frat/sorority. Many of my clos­est friends aren’t Chris­t­ian, and I think this can def­i­nite­ly make it more dif­fi­cult to do the right thing at times. But, I think that as long as you have that Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ty some­where, you can make it work.

I feel like I haven’t done a very good job giv­ing you advice here, so please let me know if you want to talk about it over cof­fee or some­thing!

I think that, on the whole, it is pret­ty good advice. What would you have said?

the NIV reloaded

Bible Study 2I sent an email to my stu­dents and it occurred to me that it might be of more gen­er­al inter­est:

Chi Alphans,

You might be inter­est­ed to know that the NIV trans­la­tion of the Bible has been revised. You can’t buy it in stores yet, but it is avail­able online at biblegateway.com

I think you’ll find the trans­la­tor’s notes inter­est­ing. They include a sec­tion on lan­guage and gen­der and also have a list of key pas­sages that have changed in the newest trans­la­tion. http://www.biblegateway.com/niv/Translators-Notes.pdf

And while I’m on the sub­ject of new releas­es of the Bible (which is a weird sen­tence), I should men­tion that there is a new, aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly legit com­pi­la­tion of the Greek New Tes­ta­ment avail­able at http://sblgnt.com/

Final­ly, remem­ber that every trans­la­tion opti­mizes some things at the expense of oth­ers. There is no “best” trans­la­tion. It’s far more impor­tant you read what­ev­er you have than that you engage in some fruit­less quest for the ide­al. In oth­er words, your exist­ing NIV will do just fine from now until you die.

Glen

P.S. There is no “best trans­la­tion” but there is an option you might not have con­sid­ered — you can learn to read the Bible in its orig­i­nal lan­guages. It’s not for every­one, but just think of it: you can earn Stan­ford cred­its while grow­ing in your under­stand­ing of God’s Word — it’s a twofer!

Chutes To Gehenna

chutes and laddersI believe I have iden­ti­fied my least favorite part of par­ent­ing: play­ing Chutes and Lad­ders. My epiphany came about as I was play­ing the longest round that I’ve ever seen. It was all chutes and no lad­ders. Play­ing was like watch­ing crabs in a sty­ro­foam cool­er: as soon as one char­ac­ter was close to escap­ing it was sent tum­bling back down to the bot­tom.

While that most recent round was par­tic­u­lar­ly tedious, I don’t like the game even when it takes ten min­utes because it’s a game with no skill com­po­nent what­so­ev­er. I will con­fess to think­ing — often — that we could deter­mine vic­to­ry by flip­ping a coin instead of through the inter­minable process of mov­ing the game pieces in accor­dance with the dic­tates of the spin­ner and the require­ments of the board.

That’s bad enough, but there is one more fac­tor that evokes dread in my soul when asked to play. It is this: chil­dren young enough to tru­ly enjoy the game are usu­al­ly unable to move their char­ac­ters prop­er­ly, so I have to do it for them. This means I am play­ing the game against myself. A game I don’t like. A game whose two-play­er ver­sion is log­i­cal­ly indis­tin­guish­able from a coin toss yet which has the poten­tial to endure until the heat death of the uni­verse. Even if I win, I lose. I lost as soon as I took the box down from the shelf.

And yet I will play today and I know I will play again tomor­row. It’s like a tor­ment from a Greek myth. Aaargh!

My heart goes out to thor­ough­go­ing deter­min­ists who nec­es­sar­i­ly regard all of life as a com­pli­cat­ed ver­sion of Chutes and Lad­ders. If that’s you, I sug­gest you arrange to be fat­ed not to think about it.

Yikes — New Students Arrive Today!

In which I describe in great detail my pan­icked yet joy­ous feel­ings as the school year begins.

these are random freshmen from some other school... but you get the ideaNew stu­dents arrive on cam­pus today. Yikes!

To Do:

  • Brush my teeth real­ly well, includ­ing my tongue so my breath does­n’t stink.
  • Shave head. Care­ful­ly. We don’t want a repeat of that inci­dent when I missed a patch and looked like a Who from Whoville.
  • Trim edges of beard. The dif­fer­ence between an epic prophet beard and a crazy cult leader beard is sur­pris­ing­ly hard to define, but raggedy beard edges have some­thing to do with it. That, and neck hair. Say no to the throat beard.
  • Print lit­er­a­ture for tabling: new stu­dent devo­tion­al guide, Why Jesus? essay, The Jesus FAQ.
  • Prac­tice smil­ing in the mir­ror.
  • Dou­ble check on throat hair.

P.S. I don’t think I’ve pub­li­cized it here, but I put a new writ­ing online. I men­tion it above in the “print lit­er­a­ture” bul­let point — it’s a ten-day devo­tion­al guide for new stu­dents called Thrive. It, along with all my oth­er writ­ings, is indexed here.