Category: General

Army Research

I’ve heard a lot of people commenting that it’s small wonder if the enemy knows all of our moves, since most of the Army’s methods and procedures are posted online on public websites. As far as I know you can get every Field Manual we’ve got with a basic Google search. But I’ve found the secret. Just because it’s all there doesn’t mean it makes any sense.

I’ve got a presentation on Thursday on Army In-Transit visibility. So far, in about a week’s worth of research, all I’ve found is a never-ending recursion of acronyms. The general consensus is that, because of RFID tags and various computer systems, everyone who needs to can know exactly where every postage stamp is, at home, in transit, or abroad. But exactly how that data is collected, transmitted, processed, and reported is a complete mystery apparently to every party involved. Make sure you get the batteries in right, and the satellites and computers will take care of the rest.

I’ve got a better chance reporting on the integration of LaTeX into Open Office Software.

Courage

I’ve been reading Clauswitz’ book On War for a the last few weeks, and I think he may end up being one of my favorite authors.

War is the realm of danger; therefore courage is the soldier’s first requirement.

Courage is of two kinds: courage in the face of personal danger, and courage to accept responsibility, either before the tribunal of some outside power or before the court of one’s own conscience. Only the first kind will be discussed here.

Courage in the face of personal danger is also of two kinds. It may be indifference to danger, which could be due to the individual’s constitution, or to his holding life cheap, or to habit. In any case, it must be regarded as a permanent condition. Alternatively, courage may result from such positive motives as ambition, patriotism, or enthusiasm, not a permanent state.

These two kinds of courage act in different ways. The first is more dependable; having become second nature, it will never fail. The other will often achieve more. There is more reliability in the first kind, more boldness in the second. The first leaves the mind calmer; the second tends to stimulate, but it can also blind. The highest kind of courage is a compound of both.

His stuff is usually full of all sorts of wonderful analogies and colorful illustrations, but I really appreciate the analytical as well. He keeps saying he wants to be scientific, but he mostly comes out sounding like Aristotle.

3-leg porridge

When I went to college, it was at a school that had some affiliation with the Presbyterian Church, USA, but for all practical purposes, it was a private secular school with a chapel. It wasn’t as though there was a pervasive Christian atmosphere. Pretty much it was standard-issue multi-cultural liberalism.

A part of the core curriculum to graduate was a class in the senior year on Ethics. Of course, I almost failed.

It was really difficult for me to process their way of gauging right and wrong because they weren’t willing to pin themselves to any particular foundation. It should be pretty obvious that Ethics is the sort of thing that starts from a set of key principles and works the implications out from there. But being the sort of school they were, it wouldn’t do to just assert what these principles ought to be. What if I don’t like your principles?

Instead, they gave us some options. Apparently, it’s a modern pluralist idea to try to present ethics on a 3-legged stool, kind of as a “choose-your-own” morality. So they give you Kant, Mill, and Aristotle to teach Duty, Utility, and Virtue. You’re supposed to choose which system of reasoning best fits the situation and your taste. You’re even told that each form of reasoning has its flaws, so that you have to balance each against the others.

It really got me. Confused the daylights out of me. The problem was that in my heart of hearts, I didn’t believe in morally gray areas. Still don’t. There are things that are hard to do, but it’s not usually hard to determine the right thing to do. So how did they get this perfectly balanced porridge? It took me years to get an answer, and I wish I’d written down who it was that popped the bubble of my confusion.

It’s actually pretty pathetic. Every system has its flaws so long as man is the measure of all things. If there is no standard to hold to, there isn’t even any way to come to a wrong answer. And if there isn’t any wrong answer, there can’t be a right one either. But the very point of ethics is to determine right and wrong. If you set up the system so that the goal can’t be achieved, then there’s no wonder that no one ever achieves the goal.

Sin is determined to tie up moral knots because that twistedness deflects you from judgment. It takes a Champion to take the sword of authority to cut through those knots with a simple standard. Continue reading “3-leg porridge”

Not Elves Exactly

A couple of years ago, I read an article about a man who was doing research on longevity with fruit flies. He said that it was actually a pretty simple thing to increase their lifespan because it was just a function of how late they were able to reproduce. All you had to do was force them to wait later until they were allowed to reproduce, and the ones that were still fertile at an older age also ended up living longer. I’m making these numbers up, but for instance: A typical fruit fly hits adulthood at 14 days and lives to be 30 days total. You select for flies that can reproduce at 3 weeks old, and you get a fly that dies at 42 days, etc.

The scientist extrapolated this onto people and said that we were basically doing this to ourselves right now. How many women put off children till after college? After a career? Some women don’t start trying until they’re nearly out of their 30s. And of course, most of those that wait so long usually have a hard time getting pregnant. But some do fine. Keep that program up and you’ve got a long-term plan for increasing human lifespan, at least for a part of the population.

From here it just gets fun to extrapolate: The key to extending life is therefore postponing menopause, and everything else stretches out proportionately. Postpone menopause, you postpone puberty as well, for both sexes.

So now I’m imagining a small portion of the population, say 10 percent, that lives to be 400 years old, but by that same measure, hits puberty in their early fifties and starts thinking seriously about marriage in their 80s.

I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly…

Repent

I was reading in Matthew this morning that John the Baptist preached “Repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near,
and again, after Jesus was baptized and John was imprisoned, Jesus preached the same thing. The message was “Repent because…” So there must be something about the nearness of the kingdom of heaven that makes repentance more desirable than if it were far off. Isn’t repentance always best? But how much more as the kingdom of heaven comes nearer!

My best guess is that a faithful Christian message about the kingdom of heaven is that it is at least as near as it was in John’s day. Does the cross of Jesus Christ make the kingdom of heaven further off? Either the kingdom of heaven is still near, which is apparently cause enough to repent, or it is even now upon us. Either repentance is urgently necessary, or the time has come in which repentance is no longer any good.

But there doesn’t seem to be any room room, then or much less now, for a message that says, “You might want to consider a change,” or “Don’t you think some different choices are preferable?” A hard-nosed message like “Repent!” sounds a little rude, but it’s the message Jesus preached. Given whose message it is, it’s actually pretty arrogant to say that the message should be adjusted. We should be humble about ourselves, but that same humility requires us to be willing to seem arrogant when communicating God’s Law and Gospel.

How can the cross be worth anything unless there’s first a standard we cannot meet without it?

It’s true if you believe it (or not)

Just finished watching Kung Fu Panda, which I’ve been wanting to see for a while now, and I have to say, it’s a really cute movie. The writing is good; there’s an all-star cast of voice actors; the character arcs have good messages. But there’s this niggling little bit about the message that’s just begging to be deconstructed.

We have this thing about faith. I think it comes from having inherited a Christian culture but widely rejecting the faith itself within that culture. We believe in *Faith*. We take Jesus’ praise for powerful faith and derision for weak faith at face value without noticing that faith has to have an object that’s worthy of it. God likes faith because he wants us to trust him, so he sets up situations where trusting him isn’t the immediate obvious answer – otherwise it wouldn’t be faith. But here in post-Christianity, we’ve dropped the messiah bit, and we’re left with the general conviction that faith itself is some kind of power source, regardless of the object it’s connected to. And boy do we ever attach some weird objects.

And the weirdest one of all is nothing. Not the “heart in a blender” kind of nothing, but this idea that believing in itself makes the impossible real. I take the rope of faith, hook one end to myself and toss the other one up the side of an invisible precipice and **clinch!** It holds! If you believe it hard enough, it automatically becomes true.

And that, of course is the key message of “the dragon scroll.” It’s blank. There is no secret of ultimate power. You look in the reflective scroll and all you see is you. But if you **believe** in yourself, that belief itself will make you invincible.

The problem is that it’s not true. Even if I think about it every night and day, believing I can fly doesn’t make me able to touch the sky. Not only isn’t it true, they can’t even convey the message consistently in the movie. Believing in yourself apparently only works for pandas. The furious five may believe that together they can defeat Tai Lung, but believing don’t make it so. Similarly, Tai Lung may believe that he is the true Dragon Warrior, but somehow he ain’t, and I just don’t see how it could be from a lack of believing. Po the giant panda gets to believe in himself, and Shifu the red panda get’s to believe (in Po), and Oogway the turtle, because he’s infinitely wise, gets to believe whatever he wants. But ultimately, believing only really works if it’s actually true.

Just like in the real world.

Backside of an Angry Squirrel

I’ve really been wanting to write a post about our search for a new church that will fit us well for exactly 8 months, but I just haven’t been able to pull it together. Instead I have this site: The Art of Manliness, hailing from my native Tulsa, and which has among its wares this lovely article on Why Every Man Should Go to a Barber Shop.

It’s very persuasive, except for the part where his experience has been almost exactly the opposite of mine. It seems like every barber I ever went to was a moron when it came to cutting my hair. “A barber is trained to cut with clippers,” Brett and Kate McKay say, which is true enough, and explains why none of them seem to know which end to use with a pair of scissors.

My experience was that a barber knows one haircut and applies it universally. I’d go in, tell the guy that my hair does this and that thing and needs to be compensated for, and every time I’d come out looking like alfalfa with a mohawk.

On the other hand, now I’m humming a different tune. Continue reading “Backside of an Angry Squirrel”

What it is to Translate

I’m crossing my fingers and making another attempt at reading Calvin’s Institutes, this time the Henry Beveridge translation, which seems to actually be easier to read than the Ford Lewis Battles translation. I’m not sure if this is because Beveridge was a better translator than Battles, or if the publishers at Henderickson (whose edition I’m using) decided to provide the extra service of inserting more periods. Either way, the sentences are easier to read, because they’re shorter.

I come, however, across this passage on translating from the Preface of the original translation by Thomas Norton:

For I dared not presume to warrant myself to have his meaning without his words. And they that know what it is to translate well and faithfully, especially in matters of religion, do know that not only the grammatical construction of words suffices, but the very building and order to observe all advantages of vehemence or grace, by placing or accent of words, makes much to the true setting forth of a writer’s mind.

In the end, I rested upon this determination, to follow the words so near as the phrase of the English tongue would suffer me. …

Norton has been talking about how terse Calvin’s Latin original is. Calvin packed a lot of meaning into the original, and Norton found that the goal of putting out the same meaning in English required either a lot more words or a book that was a lot harder to read. His solution was to hue close to a word-for-word translation.

But what catches me is is phrase that “those that know what it is to translate well and faithfully” know that following the precise word order is important. Apparently the folks who prefer to translate in paraphrase know no such thing. Recent translation research proves otherwise.

Below the Radar

Having rested a bit, I’m ready again to write.

Folks have probably noticed I haven’t written anything in this blog in nearly half a year, and there’s a good reason for that: I’ve been away in the Army. I’ve actually had internet access a good part of that time, but I’ve always had a hard time writing when I haven’t had any time to think. Basic Training and Army OCS are hardly hardly good times to collect y our thoughts.

But now I’ve got a bit of time: my next school starts in February, and the jobs I’m going to get in the mean time are supposed to be low-impact leave-your-work-on-the-desk sorts of jobs. We’ll see. The man told me Monday I’d probably be doing something with a Transportation AIT company.

Since it’s been so long and I’ve had so many changes since I wrote last, I thought I’d take a moment and re-calibrate. You might be thinking, When he was in seminary he wrote about theology; now he’s a soldier, he’ll write about the army. You would be mistaken.

First of all, six months a soldier makes, but not a very wise one. I really don’t have a clue about the army. Second of all, war is politics by other means. At OCS, we were strongly encouraged not to blog at all. Everything I could say about the army has political ramifications I’m not allowed to pursue – a soldier tries to stay out of political concerns, because he wants to please his commander. There are also operational security concerns – If I tell you I’ve been stationed at Falujah and on such and such a date we’ll be doing x activity, well, the enemy can search the Internets too.

But I love to write, and I love to share what I write. And I think I know how. The only way I can continue blogging and stay “below the radar” is if I write about something so innocuous, so innocent, that it couldn’t possibly have any effect on anything. In other words, I plan to continue writing about religion.

Possibly there may be some literature and philosophy, some thoughts on education and child-rearing. But as always, there will be nearly nothing about “what I’m doing right now” and all of nothing about what’s going on with the army. A war correspondent I am not.

The name of the site is “Neumatikos,” which means “spiritual,” and I intend to write about spiritual things.