Science, Faith, and Chocolate Chip Cookies

Yes­ter­day we were giv­ing away free home­made choco­late-chip cook­ies on White Plaza, and we got all sorts of won­der­ful reac­tions. My favorite was from a mas­ter’s stu­dent in engi­neer­ing who grabbed a cook­ie and then looked at the poster next to the cook­ie pile.

It was an adver­tise­ment for the upcom­ing Fran­cis Collins talk watch corvette sum­mer online the man who would be king online down­load

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down­load bar­bie of swan lake movie . If the name does­n’t ring a bell, Collins coor­di­nat­ed the Human Genome Project that decod­ed human DNA. He’s also a fol­low­er of Christ.

Any­way, this guy just stared at the poster for about a minute, befud­dle­ment sprawled across his face. He looked at the pic­ture of Collins on the cov­er of Nature mag­a­zine. He read his sci­en­tif­ic cre­den­tials. And then he read the top­ic of the lec­ture again. Then he sort of mur­mured, “Wait. This can’t be right. This does­n’t make any sense.”

So we explained that yes, Fran­cis Collins real­ly is one of the world’s lead­ing geneti­cists. And yes, he real­ly does believe in Jesus. And he’s going to be talk­ing about it Stan­ford.

The stu­dent said he’d be there, and I hope he does show up. He seemed quite earnest. There are a lot of stu­dents on cam­pus who don’t allow them­selves to con­sid­er God seri­ous­ly because they assume that sci­ence and faith are by def­i­n­i­tion opposed to one anoth­er. We hope that by show­ing them a world-class sci­en­tist who loves God we can dis­pel some of that prej­u­dice.

I love this job.

Congratulations, Aaron "Rhodes Scholar" Polhamus!

Chi Alpha @ Stan­ford offi­cer Aaron Pol­hamus was just award­ed a Rhodes Schol­ar­ship

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(see page 10 of the doc­u­ment). That means he gets 2 or 3 years to study at Oxford — ful­ly sub­si­dized. The Stan­ford Dai­ly has a brief write-up

on it which quotes Aaron at some length.

Being a Rhodes Schol­ar is a big deal — some notable recip­i­ents of the award include Bill Clin­ton, Wes­ley Clark (the gen­er­al turned politi­cian), Robert Reich, Daniel Boorstin (the his­to­ri­an), physi­cist Bri­an Greene (yeah, the one who writes the cool books about sci­ence), George Stephanopou­los, cur­rent Louisiana gov­er­nor Bob­by Jin­dal, and scads of con­gress­man and sen­a­tors. Oh, plus Kris Kristof­fer­son (real­ly).

So con­grats, Aaron!

Love and Tolerance

Last night at Chi Alpha’s week­ly meet­ing we had a guest speak­er — mis­sion­ary Mark Orfi­la. He’s been serv­ing for over a decade in east­ern Europe and has been think­ing very deeply about Amer­i­can cul­tur­al val­ues and how they relate to the King­dom of God.

He said a lot of very help­ful things last night, but I think the most help­ful went along these lines (the thoughts are his but the words are mine):

If I had to choose between tol­er­ance and hatred, I’d choose tol­er­ance hands-down.

But we’re not fac­ing a bina­ry choice — we have a whole range of options avail­able to us. And tol­er­ance can’t be the ulti­mate good in a soci­ety for two rea­sons: one philo­soph­i­cal and one prac­ti­cal. There must be some­thing high­er of which tol­er­ance is a spe­cial case, because if tol­er­ance is the high­est good then you have a real prob­lem — how do you han­dle the intol­er­ant mem­bers of your own soci­ety? If you tol­er­ate them, then you allow intol­er­ance to flour­ish. If you don’t tol­er­ate them, then you pro­mote intol­er­ance your­self. Either way intol­er­ance sneaks into your soci­ety. That’s the philo­soph­i­cal approach. But there’s an even big­ger prac­ti­cal prob­lem. Who wants to be tol­er­at­ed? Don’t we all want more than to be put up with? Tol­er­ance is a neg­a­tive virtue — it’s about what we don’t do to peo­ple. I won’t hit you, I won’t insult you, I won’t stig­ma­tize you. It’s a pecu­liar inverse of the gold­en rule — tol­er­ance tells us not to do to oth­ers what we don’t want done to us. It cre­ates a dis­tance between us and nev­er forces us to cross it.

The prob­lem with tol­er­ance for a Chris­t­ian is not that it sets the bar too high but that it sets the bar too low. We are called to love one anoth­er; in fact, we are even called to love our ene­mies. And rather than mere­ly respect­ing the dis­tance between us, we are called to treat them the way we wish they would treat us. Tol­er­ance is a poor sub­sti­tute for love. If it’s the only offer on the table I’ll take it, but in most sit­u­a­tions we should demand more (espe­cial­ly of our­selves).

Thanks for the clear think­ing on a cru­cial sub­ject, Mark.

Scanning a Directory For PHP Errors

My fel­low web geeks might find this script, php-check down­load home on the range movie , use­ful. It recur­sive­ly scans a direc­to­ry check­ing PHP files for syn­tax errors.

Just copy it some­where in your path (like /usr/local/bin) and chmod it to 755.

I wrote the script because I edit PHP using Notepad++, so it’s easy for small typos to enter my scripts. I need­ed a quick way to scan a direc­to­ry after upload­ing revised files.
I wrote it in PHP so that those who need it will also know how to cus­tomize it.

[php]
#!/usr/bin/php
?php // php-check ver­sion 1.0 // recur­sive­ly scans a direc­to­ry for .php files and runs php ‑l on // them (php ‑l checks for PHP syn­tax errors) // revi­sions at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/archives/2007/10/31/scanning-a-directory-for-php-errors/ if (php_sapi_name()!=‘cli’) { die(“This util­i­ty can only be run from the com­mand line.\n”); } $counter=0; $errors=false; func­tion scan_dir($dir) { $counter=0; $dh=opendir($dir); while ($file=readdir($dh)) { if ($file==’.’ || $file==’..’) con­tin­ue; if (is_dir($dir.’/’.$file)) { $counter+=scan_dir($dir.’/’.$file); } else { if (substr($file, strlen($file) — 4) == ‘.php’) { $counter++; $output=shell_exec(“/usr/bin/php ‑l $dir/$file 2>&1”);
if (substr($output,0,2)!=‘No’) { // skips the “No syn­tax errors in …” mes­sage
$errors=true;
echo $out­put;
}
}

}
}
return $counter;
}
if ($argc!=2) {
die(“Usage: php-check dirname (usu­al­ly php-check .)\n”);
}

if (!is_dir($argv[1])) {
die(“Argument must be a direc­to­ry. The most com­mon usage is php-check .\n”);
}

$counter=scan_dir($argv[1]);

echo “$counter files checked\n”;
exit($errors);
?>
[/php]

This is a quick and dirty script — there are prob­a­bly some bugs in it. User beware.

If you find it help­ful, you might also want to check out scripts like PHP CodeSnif­fer

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We Just Felt Our First Earthquake

We just felt our first earth­quake!

It only took us 5 years liv­ing in the Bay Area.

Appar­ent­ly it was this one mys­tery alas­ka movie down­load .

Me And The Mythbusters

I recent­ly sub­mit­ted a ques­tion to the Freako­nom­ics guys for an inter­view with the Myth­Busters.

They picked my ques­tion as the first one!

Here’s my ques­tion and their answer:

Me: Could you describe the brain­storm­ing process that goes into an episode? How far in advance do you begin plan­ning? Who sits in dur­ing those meet­ings?

ADAM: The usu­al crowd at a brain­storm­ing ses­sion is me, Jamie, Alice Dal­low (our pro­duc­er), and whichev­er researcher is doing the seg­ment we’re work­ing on — either Den­nis Kwon or Eric Haven. We also have an on-the-ground exec­u­tive pro­duc­er dur­ing an offi­cial “sto­ry meet­ing.” We usu­al­ly have one or maybe two of them before shoot­ing a myth, but dis­cus­sions about sto­ries can hap­pen all over the place, and at any time.

Often, we’ll ask for cer­tain para­me­ters as far as loca­tions or mate­ri­als, and as we dis­cov­er what’s pos­si­ble or not pos­si­ble, we’ll hone it down to what we’re actu­al­ly going to do. The show’s researchers are fan­tas­tic about find­ing the weird­est of things and experts, and Alice is bril­liant at keep­ing us on track. The dis­cus­sions can be like herd­ing cats — there’s a rib­ald, fun­ny atmos­phere, and we’ll range very far from the top­ic at hand.

Plan­ning can take any­where from a month to a day or two, depend­ing on the sched­ule. We’ve had crit­i­cal loca­tions fall through at the last minute, and need­ed to turn 180 degrees on a few hours’ notice. We’ll also flag dif­fi­cult sto­ries as far in advance as we think nec­es­sary. Some things, like get­ting per­mis­sion to film at Giants Sta­di­um for the Jim­my Hof­fa sto­ry, have tak­en the bet­ter part of a year to work out.

Then there’s the dis­cus­sions that Jamie and I have. We’ll often take a dif­fi­cult prob­lem home, think about it overnight, and maybe dis­cuss the prob­lems we see in it while dri­ving to a loca­tion. We also play devil’s advo­cate with each oth­er — if one of us has a good idea, the oth­er will poke as many holes in it as pos­si­ble, and in this way we try our best to shake out any prob­lems before we hit them.

JAMIE: This is, believe it or not, the most fun we have on the show. There is no under­es­ti­mat­ing the thrill of a big cat­a­stro­phe or explo­sion; but if you real­ly want to know what gets us going, it’s the brain­storm­ing. Once a top­ic has passed muster, some basic research has been done by our research team, and we are down to nut­ting it out, Adam and I swing into action — sort of. Usu­al­ly we go home first and think about it overnight, and then come in burst­ing with ideas. We set up in front of a dry erase board, and lay out any solu­tions we came up with by our­selves.

Amaz­ing­ly, as much as we are of dif­fer­ent tem­pera­ments, we quick­ly spot the best solu­tions and chip in to flesh the approach out. It becomes like play­ing Ping-Pong with ideas. Some­times it gets so intense that there is no time to com­plete sen­tences; it becomes a bunch of ges­tic­u­la­tions, some pieces of words or phras­es, and then, when we come out on the oth­er end, the approach is fleshed out. We call it the “Myth­Busters Mind­meld.” To any­one lis­ten­ing, it is gib­ber­ish, but it allows us to plow through a huge amount of design­ing in no time (which is what we have a lot of on the show).

Read the rest of the inter­view.

Some Thoughts On Servant Leadership

At a Chi Alpha con­fer­ence in St. Louis I just heard Dick Schroed­er use an inter­est­ing phrase to com­pli­ment some­one — “he puts ‘us’ before ‘me’.” Here are some off-the-cuff and unpol­ished thoughts inspired by that phrase:

“Us before me.” What a beau­ti­ful phrase to describe ser­vant lead­er­ship.

“Us” puts the lead­er­ship into ser­vant­hood: “us before me” leads to the over­all good of the group where­as “you before me” can lead to the detri­ment of the group.

To be clear, the Bible does com­mand us to “in humil­i­ty con­sid­er oth­ers bet­ter than our­selves” (Philip­pi­ans 2:3). Does­n’t this lead direct­ly to “you before me”?

Yes. It does. But the prac­ti­cal ques­tion for me as a leader is how to be self-sac­ri­fi­cial in a way that hon­ors my oblig­a­tions to those I am serv­ing. And I have learned that there is a healthy way to pri­or­i­tize oth­ers and a destruc­tive way to pri­or­i­tize oth­ers.

To serve as ful­ly as pos­si­ble there is a cer­tain amount of self-main­te­nance that must take place. Bound­aries must be estab­lished and main­tained. Recre­ation and sab­bat­i­cals must be incor­po­rat­ed. Growth and learn­ing have to take place.

All of these things are self-serv­ing. They require us to say no to oth­ers and yes to our­selves. At times, we wind up say­ing “me before you today because I want to be able to serve you tomor­row”.

But at the same time, all of these things flow from a mature under­stand­ing of “you before me” — putting our fol­low­ers’ long-term good above their short-term desires. For an orga­ni­za­tion, a leader who says “us before me” builds strength. A leader who naively/hyperspiritually says “you before me” leads the orga­ni­za­tion to implo­sion (and like­ly to high lead­er­ship turnover).

Clear­ly, there is the poten­tial for “us before me” to become a pre­text for putting “me before you.” The anti­dote is to keep expand­ing our def­i­n­i­tion of “us”. When­ev­er we begin to sus­pect that our “us” is too com­fort­able, we need to rede­fine the group we are serv­ing in a larg­er way, and con­tin­ue to put “us before me.”

And so a big thanks to Dick Schroed­er for giv­ing me my new favorite phrase: “us before me”. It will prob­a­bly be my favorite for at least a week. 😉

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Stanford 24, USC 23

A hearty con­grat­u­la­tions to the stal­wart war­riors of the Car­di­nal foot­ball team. Defeat­ing the Tro­jans on their home turf with some of our key play­ers side­lined is no mean feat.

May this be a token of things to come.

Praying The Psalms

One of my habits is to lis­ten to some­thing stim­u­lat­ing while I’m exer­cis­ing or on a long dri­ve — and this morn­ing I hit a hybrid between a lec­ture and a ser­mon which is absolute­ly fab­u­lous.

It’s about pray­ing the Psalms, and I found it extreme­ly insight­ful. If you’ve ever won­dered why so many of the Psalms are down­ers, or how we can pray some of the more venge­ful Psalms as Chris­tians you need to lis­ten to this. Gor­don Wen­ham

talks about much more than just that, but the lis­ten­ing is worth it just for those nuggets.

And if you desire to cre­ate wor­ship songs your­self, this is a must. The Psalms have always been the food of wor­ship writ­ers, and any­thing that helps you under­stand them bet­ter will help you com­pose bet­ter songs your­self.

http://www.sbts.edu/MP3/spring2006/20060328wenham.mp3

Just down­load it and burn it to a CD so you can lis­ten to it while dri­ving or throw it in your iPod for when you’re jog­ging or what­ev­er.

If you decide you want to begin pray­ing the Psalms, you can either pray one a day (which will take you through the Psalter about twice a year) or you can pray 5 a day (which will take you through the Psalter in a month). A slight­ly dif­fer­ent plan that takes into account the length of the Psalms (so that 119 stands alone, for exam­ple) is at http://www.bibleplan.org/ps/niv/

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(ht: Justin Tay­lor)

Zeitgeist

A friend of mine asked me to watch the first sec­tion of Zeit­geist (a movie you can watch for free on the inter­net at http://zeitgeistmovie.com/) and give him some per­spec­tive on it.

Here goes:

I don’t recall ever hav­ing run across so many fac­tu­al inac­cu­ra­cies in such a short span of time. I doubt I even caught them all — they were fly­ing fast and furi­ous.

I’ll start with a few that are easy for an untrained layper­son to see right away. There’s some oth­er stuff he said that I know is false, but demon­strat­ing it is less easy. It becomes “my expert you’ve nev­er heard of” ver­sus “his expert you’ve nev­er heard of” with me say­ing “my expert is bet­ter than his expert — trust me.” So I’ll keep this list focused on stuff any­one can eas­i­ly ver­i­fy on their own.

One eas­i­ly-checked fact that he builds his argu­ment on is that the South­ern Cross is the real inspi­ra­tion for the cross of Jesus (watch from 17:35 through 19:03). Three prob­lems with this:
a) The South­ern Cross is a mod­ern inven­tion — not an ancient con­stel­la­tion. Check http://www.windows.ucar.edu/the_universe/crux.html and http://www.fillingthesky.com/constellationhistory.html
b) The South­ern Cross is not vis­i­ble from where the New Tes­ta­ment was writ­ten. In the North­ern Hemi­sphere you have to be below 30 degrees lat­i­tude to see it. The New Tes­ta­ment was writ­ten from Jerusalem on north.
c) It’s hard to see how a con­stel­la­tion that did­n’t exist and could­n’t be seen inspired the sto­ry of Jesus when Romans actu­al­ly killed peo­ple on cross­es all the time. Is he seri­ous­ly sug­gest­ing that the Romans did­n’t actu­al­ly cru­ci­fy peo­ple?

Miss­ing such a basic fact does­n’t inspire con­fi­dence in the more eso­teric, less eas­i­ly-checked facts he uses to make his entire case. There are oth­er eas­i­ly-checked facts he dis­torts. Two from the Bible struck me.

In the time range 23:38 — 25:20 the movie claims that Jesus is a per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of the astro­log­i­cal sign of Pisces. Towards the end of this sec­tion, the nar­ra­tor states that Jesus’ dis­ci­ples asked him when he would cel­e­brate the next passover with them him after he is gone and that Jesus’ answer in Luke 22:10 was code lan­guage for Aquar­ius (the next age of the Zodi­ac). This is easy enough to check — and it turns out to be a lie. Luke 22:10 is about the passover they are cel­e­brat­ing that night, not the next meal they will share after his res­ur­rec­tion. That isn’t a minor dif­fer­ence — it under­mines his entire inter­pre­ta­tion.

Anoth­er exam­ple of his will­ing­ness to dis­tort the Bible to make his point occurs around time mark­er 21:10, when he says that the Bible teach­es that Jesus comes from heav­en wear­ing a crown of thorns, which rep­re­sent the rays of the sun. He quotes John 19:5 to sup­port this point. Look it up. There’s not even a hint of Jesus descend­ing from heav­en any­where in this pas­sage. He’s walk­ing from one place to anoth­er — not descend­ing from the clouds as the nar­ra­tor claims.

These two instances aren’t nit­pick­ing — these are very eas­i­ly checked state­ments in the best­selling book of all time which is always avail­able for instant fact-check­ing on the inter­net at places such as Bible Gate­way. If he did­n’t even check these ref­er­ences that key parts of his argu­ment rely on, then how much stock can we place in his ref­er­ences to obscure ancient Egypt­ian texts that only schol­ars have ready access to?

He’s evi­dent­ly received crit­i­cism along this line, because he felt com­pelled to give some doc­u­men­ta­tion for his use of ancient texts at http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/GMappendix.htm

Just look through it. Pay atten­tion to the sto­ries of Jesus in the right col­umn (you are pre­sum­ably more famil­iar with them). I think you’ll be sur­prised at how flaky that list is.

Bot­tom line: Zeit­geist is very imag­i­na­tive, but that’s about it.

UPDATE 2/24/2008: This post is still gen­er­at­ing com­ments. It’s been six months since I wrote this post, and since then a help­ful review by Ben With­er­ing­ton has been post­ed — The Zeit­geist of the ‘Zeit­geist Movie’. Look to it for a more detailed rebut­tal of the movie’s claims.