Wow

Do you know what a hypercube is? It’s a cube with four dimensions. Or, if it’s easier to bend your head around it this way, a hypercube is to a cube what a cube is to a square.

We can’t perceive in four dimensions, yet physicists tell us there must be more than the normal three dimensions of space for their calculations to work. Whatever. The important thing today is that somebody figured out how to draw a four-dimensional object. If you can draw a 3-dimensional object on a 2-D surface, what’s to stop you from drawing a 4-D object?

They could have stopped there. Any sane person would. But somebody had to go and design a [rubick’s](http://www.rubiks.com/) hypercube. I hate those things. I once solved one by taking off all the stickers and carefully rearranging them. But this…! I don’t know if there is a word against this kind of crime.

You can download your own hypercube [here](http://www.superliminal.com/cube/cube.htm), or you can play with a javascript version on your web browser [here](http://www.plunk.org/~hatch/MagicCube4dApplet/). My friend Stephen Herr can solve a Rubick’s Cube in about a minute and a half. Can somebody please issue a challenge to him to have a look at one of *these*?

(via my lovely friends at the Schlock Mercenary [Nightstar forums](http://zoo.nightstar.net/viewtopic.php?p=284717#284717).)

I’m just ducky.

You Are A: Duckling!

DucklingThe cutest of the cute, these baby ducks are often spotted in the spring following closely behind their mother. As a duckling you will grow up quickly, becoming one of the adult ducks seen commonly in ponds and streams. Playful and timid, charming and vulnerable, ducklings are nature’s very definition of innocence.

You were almost a: Lamb or a Monkey
You are least like a: Turtle or a Bear CubWhat Cute Animal Are You?

Christian Underground

WARNING: PIPE DREAM ALERT

I recently sent a note out with an updated email address to everyone on my address book (which was surprisingly *short*. If you didn’t get that email, and you want to be able to send me stuff, put a comment to that effect below and I’ll send you my new address). One of the results was that I’ve started getting email updates from my [mom’s](http://mingobird.blogspot.com/) friend Kerry Urbanski. If you don’t know who she is, that’s because you’ve never met her.

This got me thinking. Kerry’s a great writer, with a lot of good things to say, but she’s not particularly active on the web. She does a lot of stuff at her church and in her community; she writes articles and distributes them to friends. But she doesn’t have a weblog. Why? Because starting a weblog is still too tech-heavy for a lot of great writers. My mom only has a weblog because we forced her to, and the formatting’s still not so great on her site because Blogger and Outlook don’t play too nice. This makes me think that there are still a huge number of Christian writers out there who are off the web for all intents and purposes because they don’t have anybody to help them across the transition.

Which got me thinking. How about a multi-user weblog (like Xanga or Blogger) dedicated entirely to publishing quality lay Christian writers? Call it the “Christian Underground.” Support for technical and design issues would be supplied free of charge, with the understanding that the subject matter on each person’s blog would be “public” issues (religion, politics, and culture: yay; catblogging: boo). New blogs would have to be recommended by others in the community and qualified outsiders to limit the costs of said technical and design support.

Basically, the goal would be to have three limiters to zero in on the kind of blogs I’m thinkig of: lay Christians, Public issues, high quality writing. Lay Christians, because professional ministers seem to be able to get themselves in the public eye without too much help. Public issues and high quality writing, because there are plenty other free portals for the personal newsblog.

My original idea was just to call such a site the Charismatic Underground, because that’s what *I* am, and it’s what I miss the most, but a few minutes thought showed that was probably a little too narrow. However, it gave me the idea that we could perhaps include a tagging system where people could indicate their particular religious perspective (Evangelical-Epicsopal-High Church-Charismatic?), and so that people visiting the site could view a list of blogs according to different kinds of categories.

Unfortunately, there are a couple of limiters keeping me from trying out such an idea: It costs about $75 – $135 a year to run a site with a separate domain name. That’s money I ain’t got. It takes time to run tech-support for somebody else’s website. That’s time I ain’t got. The first problem could theoretically be solved by running carefully selected blog ads, and hoping for the right level of traffic, but it’s hard to imagine recruiting a volunteer webmaster for a site that doesn’t exist yet. I can imagine eventually recruiting a fill-in after I’d done the initial setup, but I don’t have time to do even that yet. Sigh.

Anyway, it’s still a great idea, right? Can anybody think of others they wish were blogging, who are being kept out by the technical details?

Wedding photos

Hi there,

We received a package from Kyle’s old roomies, Andrew and Nathan Mackey, and in it was a cd with pictures that they took at the wedding. So I have the first batch of wedding photos up on the gallery site, and they look smashingly good. If you need a photographer in Charlotte, I think that Andrew might be interested and he did a fabulous job too.

I have to go sifting through a couple of websites to get some more. Ces and Jeanna technically had wedding pictures up first but I haven’t had a chance to download them and put them in the album yet. Hope you enjoy the pictures.

I suggest that you view them in the full screen slideshow on the left.

Oy Oy Oy!

My wife and I are both working on our master’s degrees at schools only a couple of hours apart. But that’s about where the similarity ends. Here are a few contrasty things about my wife’s current degree plan and mine:

* First, the good part. My wife’s degree costs around $30,000 per year. Mine costs only around $8,000.
* However, the economic cost of the degree is somewhat related to its economic value. With her degree, Valerie has a resonable expectation of earning a six-figure salary, if not immediately, probably within the first 5-10 years of work. With my degree, if I *ever* earn as much as her, there would be a good likelyhood that I would be guilty of “fleecing the flock,” and since they don’t offer classes in “fleecing” at my school, this is highly unlikely.
* Nevertheless, Valerie should be able to complete her degree within 1½ – 2 years. My degree will take between 3-4 years.

What really gets me though, is the homework. Granted Valerie has a constrictive train ride on which to do all her reading. So I don’t have a firm grasp on how much homework she has to do, but I’m still pretty confident that I have more than her. A lot more. In an average week (i.e. this week exactly), I have about 400 pages to read in all my classes combined. Plus Greek, which we are approaching faster than any language I’ve ever done before. Granted, I”m only in class 12 hours a week, so that gives me a lot of time to do all my reading. But still, for four classes, that’s a *lot!*

Oy!

My Heart Hurts

I’m really, really, really tired of being in school. No, mom, I’m not having a mental breakdown, I’m just worn out. Have you ever read something that made you feel sick to your stomach? Make your heart ache? Well I have and rather recently too. I knew I was going to have some difficulty when my health law class got to “reproductive rights,” I just didn’t realize that it would make me feel physically ill.
Continue reading “My Heart Hurts”

Luther on Education

> If I could leave the preaching office and my other duties, or had to do so, there is no other office I would rather have than that of schoolmaster; … for I know that next to that of preaching, this is the best, greatest, and most useful office there is. Indeed, I scarecely know which of the two is the better. For it is hard to make old dogs obedient and old rascals pious. … Young saplings are more easily bent and trained, even though some may break in the process. **It surely has to be one of the supreme virtues on earth faithfully to train other people’s children; for there are very few people, in fact, almost none, who will do this for their own.**

Emphasis added. Taken from: *[A Faithful Church: Issues in the History of Catechesis](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0819212784)*; p 138