One Christian perspective on understanding Christ

The basics of my faith are rooted in Christianity. I use a definition of Christianity that is quite loose, however. Christianity, quite simply, is the belief that Jesus Christ is the Son of God who died and was resurrected for the salvation of all mankind. While this may sound quite common, my definition of Christianity largely ends there. ‘Son of God’ is specifically avoiding the concept of the holy trinity, particularly the notion that Jesus is God. Of about 10 years of discussions about this, I simply do not know this and don’t think the evidence is strong in its case. Furthermore, I do not think this duality is important. ‘Son of God’ to me is a sacred, holy position, as is God. Both fulfill particular roles.

Furthermore, this definition says nothing about rite and ritual, Catholicism or Protestantism. As far as I’m concerned, anyone who believes this central idea is Christian.

So even if that’s a common idea, perhaps now is where it deviates more substantially from most Christian thought. Please read my about page again before proceeding.

Part of my uneasiness about the concept of the holy trinity is the history surrounding early Christianity, a topic I’m interested in. Scholarship (armchair or not) about this period of history, the period of the life of the historical Jesus, is one way in which I feel most connected to God.

One major problem with the early Christianity surrounds the canonization process of the modern New Testament. While there is certainly the clear problem of literal interpretation of a set of translated works, this is a more global issue. The canonization process probably began around the time of Irenaeus in the late 2nd century CE, which is about 100-150 years after the death of Jesus (33 CE). The final canon in its modern form was not perhaps decided until the time of the Roman Emperor Constantine, around the middle 4th century CE. This is almost 300 years after the life of Jesus.

This in and of itself does not, of course, strongly suggest that these works are not somehow authoritative on early Christianity. However, it is when one starts to read about the politics of this canonization that it’s difficult to really trust the decisions of these men. Contrary to the popular teachings of Sunday school, the Bible is not a collection of books that were transcribed word for word directly from God (in English, no less). This is very different and not at all inconsistent to say that this does not mean that our current Christian canon isn’t divinely inspired …

There is a concept called special revelation, in which God intervenes on the activities of humans more or less directly. Many Christians believe that the canonization of the Bible is a product of this special revelation. However, I do not believe in special revelation because it is impossible to test, prove, predict, and understand at all (is God? This conundrum is why I call these things beliefs). The crux of the paradox is how one says one event is divinely inspired and another is ignored by God. The questions about who chooses these things introduces a considerable amount of tainted human interpretation that is, by nature, self serving.

Yet I believe in some semblance of the idea of general revelation, the idea that all of the events in the universe are known to God. An omniscient God knows all, by this definition, including all events past and future. (I’ll write one day at length about how this affects my idea of free will, or the lack thereof.)

Applying this idea to the canonization process, I believe that it is the way it is as the will of God. Simply, it is. Another way of saying this is that it is as divinely inspired as any other event in human history. What does this mean for authority of the New Testament (NT)? For me, it means that there are perhaps other sources of inspiration about the life of Jesus and what this means for the relationship between humans and God. Unfortunately, there are few Christians who share this idea.

One former Christian mentor once accused me (quite angrily) of being an arrogant intellectual about this concept, when I believe all of this inquiry to be central to my understanding of religion and faith. His central argument was that I was prone to picking and choosing what suited my understanding best, which is certainly a danger I acknowledge (for instance, our reverence of Paul is curious to me). I think that the NT is a collection of sources to varying degrees of interest that tell stories of the life of Jesus. I would like to consider them within their historical context in order to understand how to interpret what they say about Jesus.

The dates, for one, should be examined. The letters of Paul to various early Christian communities can be dated to about 50 CE, which is still far beyond the death and resurrection of Jesus. Mark is next, around 65 CE. The strange gospel of John appears to be dated around 80-100 CE, and the gospels of Matthew and Luke are probably also around 80 CE. These men did not live during the time of Jesus, and they were not first hand accounts of his life. It is conceivable that they were written accounts of oral traditions or sourced similarly from the same text. Yet the details surrounding this are unclear. I simply think these writings (like all) should be understood within context.

I reiterate that I could well be wrong about all of this. But the continued scholarship into this period of time, so poorly documented by today’s standards, may give insight into the life of Jesus and the meaning of his life. And so with that, I have to attempt to humbly submit myself to this ignorance but desire to understand the full truth. The number of non-canonical texts on Christianity are staggering from this time period, but we’re only now in the best period of time in which nearly transparent scholarship can occur, unencumbered if we choose by political motivations. This is not to say that this occurs purely at all occasions, at all, but it’s an ideal to which academics may aspire.

xkcd maps for iConquer

iConquer is a Risk-like game of world domination. xkcd is a comic that makes geeks giggle. It turns out that you can create your own maps for iConquer, and I thought that xkcd had two very good candidates for likely maps: Online Communities and Map of the Internet. Imagine taking Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo! and playing out that fantasy that Sergei and Larry swore would never happen.

While this notion takes two seconds to conjure, the implementation of the idea would take far longer, which is why this is my call to the Internet to help. If I make a plea on a personal blog with just four readers, do I really get heard?

Here are some resources. The maps are linked above at xkcd. The iConquer folks (KavaSoft) have a nice developer’s page as well.

Why care about readline?

Readline is a program that enables manipulation of text at the command line prompt of several different shells. If you’ve ever wondered how to search history back and forth in bash using arrow keys or use vi/emacs mode in bash, then you’ve actually been inquiring about readline support. This is only a taste of what’s possible; more can be found at Bindable Readline Commands.

The basics of readline include creating an .inputrc file in your home directory ~/. Nearly any program that uses readline will read the settings in your .inputrc, and nearly all command line based programs use readline.

My .inputrc is super simple and reads like:


set editing-mode vi

"\e[A": history-search-backward
"\e[B": history-search-forward


It’s not exactly a standard program, either. You’ll never have to invoke it from the command line, for instance. It’s installed by default in a folder called ‘include’ which can be either /usr/include or /opt/local/include, for instance. The code in these directories gets compiled into other programs.

Again, much more can be done with readline. While this should get anyone started on learning more about readline, the best source of info is probably its official site.

[vim tip] Bookmark your place in a file

I’m current editing a manuscript in vim, to be compiled in . It’s about 404 lines long and compiles to about 30 pages with figures. Jumping around by line number is not really an option, and scrolling back and forth is not that fun. Enter bookmarks in vim, yet another of hundreds of wonderfully useful features for fast editing.

To bookmark your current place, you can assign any lower case letter to the bookmark by pressing ma to bookmark a. My version of vim (7.2) doesn’t appear to give any confirmation of the created bookmark.

To retrieve the bookmark, you’ll use the back tick (not a single quote) ` and type a:

`a

You can also go to the last edited line with a back tick and period:

`.

Spotlight knows its (co)sines

Apple’s search technology Spotlight changed the way I used a computer. Introduced in OS X 10.4 (Tiger), it makes the location of files almost arbitrary, so long as you know something about the file that’s text searchable. It has a dictionary and calculator feature as well for quick calculation, so I thought I’d test the limits of its calculator with Euler’s identity. No results found! Kind of like Zero! Brilliant!

Misery wished he had company

When I left the house at sundown, the temperature read -6°C. I was cold everywhere and couldn’t feel my toes as they numbly vibrated against the ground on each foot impact. I slowly trudged uphill out away from the city and tried to ignore the stares of people whose expressions seemed to say, we know you’re miserable, so why are you doing this?

The first mile was the last really cold mile, as even my fingers and toes were warming up. I continued on for another mile and cut through a nearby college campus, which was teeming with activity of people dressed in their winter black, moving between the beautiful old buildings. My face was still cold, but at least the feeling of wanting to stop and turn around had passed. Six miles at zero degrees is nothing compared to that feeling.

I weaved my way through the strange campus and exited out a gate on the southern edge, realizing that I knew exactly where I was, which was only surprising since I’d never gone through the campus before. I passed a girl whom I had seen just minutes ago; it appears she was running in a loop around the campus, and this time she waved.

Within a mile I was back in sight of familiar surroundings, with the sun nearly hidden behind the 1.7 mile reservoir, and I was feeling strong. The track around the reservoir was empty. One crazy guy ran around it in shorts, while another guy appeared to be in pain on his sprints. I made good time for the mile I stayed on it, and I made my way toward home, which was still a bit over a mile away.

Unfortunately, the feeling of strength would not persist, and even on a short run, the miserable cold can amplify the pain. My iliotibial band injury flared up and threatened to make the end of my run slow. As I tried to contain it and keep running, a rare abdominal cramp set in, and I kept hobbling along while clutching my abdomen with my left hand. I must have looked pretty foolish, but I usually can’t stop running once I’ve started.

That pain lasted for about half a mile, and when it finally subsided, I had already taken one shortcut home. I decided against a major one, however, and I continued running despite the sharp pains on my left hip and lateral portion of my knee. Thankfully, I’d paid my dues in hills at the beginning of the run, and now, in more ways than one, it was all downhill from there. I managed to get into a rhythm on the final half mile, until a sharp pain accompanied a pop from my left hip. I squeezed it and massaged the tendon in my left hand as I continued to limp home, in a state that was probably not quite “running” any longer.

Finally I made it home, beaten up over just an hour’s run, cold and happy to be finished for tonight. It’s not clear to me yet how I’m going to endure cold weather running this season ….

Aftermarket matte screens?

The new Apple computer lineup is touting its aluminum and glass enclosures everywhere, and the glass display cover has quite a reputation as being far too reflective. Even those of us who didn’t mind the glossy screen of the previous generation might change our tune with the glass enclosure. The machines currently using this include the new MacBook, MacBook Pro 15″, and the iMac.

What I did not realize was that the iMac’s glass screen is easily removable, as evidenced by this video. Apparently, the cover is attached by magnets to the display housing.

There’s no immediately obvious reason to believe that this is also the case in the portable lineup, and I’m not sure if it’s been attempted yet (I would rather not try). I don’t think it’s obviously the same because the demands on portables are different enough from the (more or less) stationary iMac such that the portables may have to be more resilient and have fewer dislodgeable parts. However, Apple’s use of magnets to solve little problems is widely known, from the Titanium PowerBook that used some 7 magnets to hold the keyboard down, to the current portables, which utilize magnets as a display latch.

For the iMac, and possibly for the MacBook and MacBook Pro 15″, this glass is so easily removable, that there’s a good chance that creating a matte finish cover would not be terribly difficult to manufacture after-market. It’s unclear what the optical benefits would be immediately, but surely someone is testing this out. Could Apple have addressed the glossy versus matte debate simply by creating a new market for display cover replacements? Already people are resorting to using anti-glare films from companies like Photodon and Power Support USA. But this is quite an elegant solution that may drive their manufacturing costs down significantly and provide their end users with a choice.

It does mean that the default is the highly reflective glass screen, but it’s probably the case that consumers largely don’t care. But those in the print industry seem to care quite a bit, and they may have to add this aftermarket cost in addition to the Mini DisplayPort adapters and Apple remotes that they’re already paying dearly for.

Three days running

I’ve been logging my miles on Runner’s World’s excellent training log tool since June 15 of this year. It’s been really fun to watch the progression and log miles on shoes and calculate routes and times, etc. etc. The last couple of months, I’ve had more of an intuitive feel and have not felt the need to keep up with it as consistently (the logging, not the running!). Looking back, some statistics that I found interesting:

–Since June 15, I’ve run a total of approximately 3 days and 8 hours.
–I’ve logged a total of 572.2 miles in that time.
–That’s an approximate pace of 8.4 minutes per mile.
–My monthly high was in August, when I ran 132.9 miles. That only works out to 4.3 miles a day, each day that month!
–The longest break I took in there from running was about 2.5 weeks, when I was injured.
–My greatest 7-day mileage total was 80 miles.

17″ MacBook Pro delay speculation

The new line of Apple laptops was released a couple of months ago, and they’re phenomenal with respect to design. For a little background, the now “classic” MacBook Pro design has largely gone unchanged on the surface since arguably the Titanium PowerBooks from 2001, though there have been some less obvious but important changes since then.

Though the classic design has persisted for several years, it still had a number of flaws. As a matter of preference, the optical drive was front-loading, which isn’t exactly a flaw but something I’ve always felt was not ideal. But the more serious flaws include the laptop’s amount of flex when handled with one hand: the sheer torque due to gravity on the machine was enough to warp the optical drive briefly when handled. It made the laptops seem too delicate.

Perhaps the primary flaw in the older design was the lack of a user installable hard drive. Some 20 screws and 20 minutes were required to replace the hard drive, an operation that often left the machine’s top casing a little less than perfect, as it had a combination of weird snaps and connections to be refitted properly. After several careful disassemblies, my MBP top case still had a couple of funny issues.

Hard drive installation on the “classic” MacBooks, however, was the easiest it’s ever been. Simply remove the battery, take out something like 3 screws, and pull a tab and the hard drive could be replaced. It was an oft-overlooked aspect of phenomenal design.

Laptop design isn’t simply making a nice looking case and cramming a bunch of components inside. A lot of technical knowledge is required to figure out how to fit all the components so that the ports are accessible and that the machine runs cool enough. Additional considerations include issues such as hard drive and memory installation, both of which should be able to be done by anyone with a little patience and some familiarity with electronics.

I consider the new MBP 15″ design a phenomenal success because it solved the 2 major problems of the classic: rigidity and hard drive accessibility. It utilizes a fabrication process that cuts the bulk of the machine from a solid block of recyclable alumin(i)um that was pioneered on the MacBook Air and is now used throughout the entire Apple laptop line, save one of two notable exceptions. The 17″ MacBook Pro did not get the unibody treatment, and if you believe my claim about the difficulty inherent in laptop design, it’s not difficult to see why.

The new 15″ MBP has massive under the hood reorganization. Its logic board used to span the entire back of the computer in kind of a weird way. The battery and RAM sat in the middle of the machine like a strange island. Ports were located on both sides.

In the new machine, all of the ports are located on the left, and the entire logic board is contained there. The battery and the hard drive are directly beneath the palmrest of the new machines, and the optical drive sits on the right hand side. The organization is not unlike a bento box at your favorite Japanese restaurant.

For the MacBook Pro 17″, several design choices must be considered. The 17″ had an extra USB port, and it may be possible to retain that or at least another FireWire 800 port. They’ll probably do away with FW 400, if current trends on the MacBook provide any clues. Certainly they’ll go with a mini DisplayPort, and they may be inclined to use another NVIDIA chipset on the 17″. If they try and put ports on both sides of the machine, they’re back to the same problem of connecting both sides of the machine via a logic board (or two) that somehow spans the center of an even larger computer. And considering hard drive and RAM accessibility, it’s not immediately obvious how they might try and accommodate all of that.

Probably we’ll see several of the 15″ cues in the new 17″ (expected as early as Jan.) — hard drive and battery in the front, optical drive on the side, and all of the ports on the left. The only trouble is that, with the larger screen, there still won’t be that much more room for additional ports on the left hand side, considering power, 2 USB, 1 FW 800, audio in and out, the mini DisplayPort, and the ExpressCard/34 slot. They may be able to cram one more FW 800 port on that side, and they’ll have plenty of logic board space for its associated electronics, but these types of issues are a funny trade off that is undoubtedly the cause of the delay in the new design.

Essentially, though the machines appear similar on the outsides, their form factors are different enough to warrant almost an entirely novel design problem that has yet to be fully addressed.

Observations on making music

My Mom and Dad valued music, and while my brother somehow managed to escape from our childhood without learning an instrument, I learned the violin. I wasn’t always eager about it and sometimes outright did not enjoy it, which was probably just a product of hard work and sacrifice to get better at it.

It’s been quite a long time since I have taken lessons, and my music teacher has since passed away, but I’m thankful that I can, at any time, pick up a violin and have a repertoire of songs that I can play. The delay since the last time I played almost doesn’t seem to matter. I don’t often need the sheet music in order to play difficult pieces I haven’t played in years. I find that when I don’t think about the piece and just let my motor memory perform, I get much better results than if I think consciously about the piece.

In fact, often I’ll be playing a piece I knew well once, and the moment I try to think of what note or shift might come next, I have to stop completely. I don’t understand the neural mechanism behind this.

Now my music theory is pretty poor, as I always avoided it as a kid, and I regret that now. And while I don’t have perfect pitch, I have pretty good relative pitch, which means that I can’t name a note randomly, but as soon as I have a known reference point, I can half-step and whole-step my way around just fine. I am sure that there are memory systems associated with the semantic ability to name notes that requires a highly functioning auditory ability to discern notes. It’s something like being able to name colors, irrespective of the subtleties of the shade. These are subtleties of sound.

On a side but possibly related note, I love my music and my jazz music, and I have a really hard time naming tunes with no words, even for songs that I can sing from memory completely. I wonder if this semantic naming system is associated with perfect pitch abilities. Additionally, this kind of evidence suggests to me that the recall for the actual tune (even for tunes I haven’t played but only heard) is very much separate from a lot of the metadata knowledge associated with it, such as the name. The performer might fit into this category, except it’s hard for me to dissociate since I can usually, based on style, make a good guess at the composer, even when I can’t name the exact tune.

I also learned a few other things today. While at a friend’s house this weekend, the subject of Christmas music came up, and I got out the old violin and started to pluck out a few tunes on it. I found myself doing something very strange. I can sing or hum tunes and avoid inciting thrown tomatoes. However, I find that when I’m searching on my violin for that first note, I often end up with a note that falls somewhere in the middle of the song, instead of the one I’m searching for!

That single note in the context of the song I’m thinking about is generally enough for me to play at least a few bars if not the entire rest of the simple song. I can even backtrack and find the first note and start from there, incorporating my new song phrases into a complete song.

I’ve always been fascinated by this apparent ability of mine to identify a song by as few a couple of notes. It really only takes one or two notes, in some kind of rhythmic and timbre (such as the instrument) context, to elicit a memory of the entire song. I can usually name songs I hear from one or two notes, in loud restaurants or on the radio, etc. It can be a pretty random recall of songs I don’t think I know well or haven’t heard in years. It’s annoying when it’s songs that are bad. I’m not sure how that works, either, though it’s not too far fetched to imagine a synfire chain-like string of activity that elicits a memory from a particular stimulus (the sound).

It took me only a few minutes to work out each one of the Christmas songs I was thinking about today. I am classically trained, which for me means that my improvisational skills are pretty poor, though I’m trying to work on them through exercises like transcription and fooling around with variations on a melody.

But I was searching for some sheet music and found a nice resource for Christmas carols, and it had easy transcriptions of a lot of songs, including several I hadn’t thought of. For the ones I had already worked out, the keys were sometimes different. Perhaps because of my reliance on relative rather than absolute pitch, the differences to me are more a matter of taste than of correctness.

For the songs that I was familiar with but didn’t think to work out earlier, playing just a few bars was more than enough to elicit the entire song’s playback in my head, and I was often able to play the rest of the song, without relying on the sheet music, at tempo! Granted, we’re not talking about anything at all complex, but it was pleasing to play the entire melody only to scroll down the sheet and find it was identically transcribed.

One final observation about music and memory. One major misconception about rhythm is that it’s completely dissociated from pitch. This is more often than not incorrect in real life, as different percussion instruments generally associated with strong rhythms (like drums) all have unique pitch qualities that probably are often overlooked (this is part of why sometimes cymbals are used instead of snares; they each have a harmonic quality). While rhythm technically does exist in the time domain, I find that I cannot dissociate certain rhythms (William Tell Overture, as an example) from their melodic content. If I tap out, with my fingers on a desk, that famous rhythm, I cannot hear just fingers tapping on a desk, since I was very young. Not even consciously. I always hear the melody riding on that rhythmic structure. This leads to the curious phenomenon of random songs entering my head when I hear clapping or doors shutting, etc.

The latter of these observations reminds me of those visual tests with the old and young woman, in which you naturally see one or the other. Once you are aware of the presence of the other, you cannot help but see it.

All of these curious observations just make me wonder about how our brains are capable of such breadth (numbers of songs) and depth (detailed knowledge about each). How is this memory stored, and where? How many listens does it take to learn a song and under what conditions is it most salient? We have hints at the answers to many of these questions, but many more remain. It’s a fascinating time to be in the field of neuroscience.

While I’m thinking about it, this all reminds me that I just recently started reading Oliver Sack’s book Musicophilia. It’s essentially a collection of case studies involving patients with peculiar relationships with music. From what I’ve read so far, I highly recommend it.