Category: Of Random Interest

College Folk and The Assemblies of God

This from the head of Chi Alpha: According to the 2003 ACMR Report AG churches report there are 245,912 adherents that are 18–24 years old that attend our church. This represents 9% of all AG adherents.

By way of comparison, 18–24 year olds comprise 14% of the California state population (I was unable to quickly find the equivalent national statistic).

You Know You’re From Louisiana

I got one of those forwards from a friend (Brandt Noel) this morning. He never forwards me stuff, so I decided to take a look at it. I liked it!

In abridged version, here’s a Louisiana primer:

  1. There are 5,000 types of snakes, and 4,998 live in Louisiana.
  2. Squirrels will eat anything. And folks in Louisiana will eat squirrel.
  3. If it grows, it sticks; if it crawls, it bites.
  4. It is not a shopping cart, it is a buggy.
  5. “Fixinto” is one word.
  6. There ain’t no such thing as “lunch.” There’s “dinner” and then
    there’s “supper.”!
  7. Sweet tea is appropriate for all meals, and you start drinking it when you’re two.
  8. “Jeet?” is actually a phrase meaning “Did you eat?”

And you know you’re from LA (Louisiana, that is) if:

  1. You measure distance in minutes.
  2. You use “fix” as a verb. Example: I am fixing to go to the store.
  3. You “axe” people questions. Example: I got somethin’ to axe you ’bout.
  4. You only own four spices: salt, Tony’s, Tabasco and ketchup.
  5. The local papers cover national and international news on one page
    and six pages for local gossip and sports.
  6. You think that the first day deer season is a national holiday.
  7. You find 100 degrees Fahrenheit “a little warm.”
  8. You know all four seasons: almost summer, summer, still summer,
    and Christmas.
  9. You describe the first cool snap (below 70 degrees) as good gumbo weather.
  10. A carbonated soft drink isn’t a soda, cola, or pop…it’s a Coke, regardless of brand or flavor. Example: “What kinna coke you want?”
  11. Fried Catfish is the other white meat.
  12. You laugh out loud when you visit friends from other states and they complain about the humidity.

Scripturizer in PHP

UPDATE 12/23/2004: I’ve moved my version of the code to the new WP Plugins repository, so you can download it at http://dev.wp-plugins.org/file/scripturizer/trunk/scripturizer.php

UPDATE: plans are afoot to merge the three existing codebases (Dean’s, Scott Yang’s, and this one) into a single Sourceforge project. (UPDATE 12/23/2004: nothing has really come of that–we’re all a little busy and haven’t really worked to make it happen. Oh well…)

Not realizing that Mean Dean was porting Scripturizer to PHP, I went ahead and did it so that I could begin using it on this WordPress site. At about the same time Scott Yang made one, so there are two versions out there. Sorry about that.

I originally wasn’t going to package it for release, but it turns out that I had to do it to actually use it on my site :), and so I figured I might as well put it in the public version to make it easy for anyone else to use. Also, figuring out how to use add_action was nonobvious (at least when I first did this–I believe the documentation has improved considerably), so I wanted to provide a clear example.

It extends the functionality of the original and also changes the data permanently in the user’s database (as opposed to Scott’s, which filters it on the fly). You can set mine to do that (see the source code), but Scott’s will work that way out of the box. Which you prefer is up to you. Mine is more efficient, his affects all the archives without making you manually edit anything.

Usage: just copy the source code to a file named scripturize.php in your wp-content/plugins folder. Go to your administration panel, click on Plugins, and activate it. Then just refer to the Bible in your posts. If you don’t want a Bible reference hyperlinked, be sure to enclose it in preformatting tags, like so: 

<pre>John 3:16</pre>

Changes from Dean’s original:

  • You can specify a translation you want to link to by putting the standard abbreviation after the reference like so: John 3:16, NIV or 2 Cor 5:20 (NET). This one is huge, for me.
  • Added New English Translation. I like this translation for several reasons, but mostly for its philosophical underpinnings.
  • Made syntax a little more permissive. For instance, you can now specify a reference by saying Gen. 12:1 or Gen 12:1 (period/no period).
  • Made syntax a little less permissive as regards whitespace. Just write things normally and everything will work fine (I changed this to correct some errors I was seeing wherein the link would run into the blank space after the reference).
  • The regular expressions handle linking a little bit differently. It does something more useful when confronted with a crazy reference like Rom 1:3, 5–8, 10,12 that the online Bibles don’t know what to do with.
  • As I mentioned, by default it will actually change your post as stored in your database. Forever. Irreversibly. With no backup. Just be aware of that.
  • You can now specify a default translation. It is initially set to the NIV, because I assume that’s what most people will want.

Please Report Bugs In Bug Tracker
I’d really like to know if you catch any bugs. I use this plugin myself, so bugs directly affect me! 🙂

There is a bug tracker set up at http://dev.wp-plugins.org/newticket, so please report any problems there.

Puncturing Inflated Grades

I just read a great essay: How to End Grade Inflation by Michael Berube (prof at Penn State).

He humorously identifies the problem: English departments have basically worked on the A/B binary system for some time: A’s and A‑minuses for the best students, B’s for everyone else and C’s, D’s and F’s for students who miss half the classes or threaten their teachers with bodily harm.

And then proposes a clever solution: What to do? If we so desired, we could recalibrate grades at Penn State, at Princeton or at any college in the country. The principle is simple enough, and it’s crucial to every diving competition: we would merely need to account for each course’s degree of difficulty.

Every professor, and every department, produces an average grade — an average for the professor over her career and an average for the discipline over the decades. And if colleges really wanted to clamp down on grade inflation, they could whisk it away statistically, simply by factoring those averages into each student’s G.P.A. Imagine that G.P.A.‘s were calculated on a scale of 10 with the average grade, be it a B‑minus or an A‑minus, counted as a 5. The B‑plus in chemical engineering, where the average grade is, say, C‑plus, would be rewarded accordingly and assigned a value of 8; the B‑plus in psychology, where the average grade might be just over B‑plus, would be graded like an easy dive, adequately executed, and given a 4.7.

I have to say, I like it. I don’t think any universities are going to go for it, but I wish they would…

Changed Message Archive Format

I went nuts today trying to figure out a problem with this website–I couldn’t create an entry with a link to Dennis’ message. For some reason Movable Type (the software that maintains this site) wouldn’t save anything with the link text in it. It drove me up the wall!

Anyway, I wound up reconfiguring the entire way that I archive messages on this site before finally deciding to change the text directly in the database.

I mention all this to explain why the front page is all links to past messages–a temporary byproduct of the aforementioned reconfiguration. It will pass as new content is added.