When I was ten years old, Denver got three feet of snow on Christmas Eve. I remember not being able to see much outside that was more than 50 feet or so away from the house, and I remember having a whole lot of fun in the snow the next few days. Never was a Christmas so white.

Three years ago, the last few days of Denver’s winter were marked by about 30″ of snowfall. Businesses closed, kids played, neighbors dug each other out, chili and cocoa were made. But not by me, because I was on vacation in Florida at the time, sweating in 85 degree heat and humidity. Bummer for a guy who loves the snow.

This one I didn’t miss. The storm is of course national news, and it has meant a lot of inconvenience for a lot of people, but for us it was just plain fun. We hunkered down on Wednesday and enjoyed being inside (remember, I work at home, so commuting was not an issue), and today we got up early and spent a few hours shoveling out as a family. The kids proceeded to sled and dig snow caves almost until it was dark. They’re sleeping well right now. I’m about to be.

Kari took pictures, which I’ve uploaded to my Flickr account. (Why am I taking credit for them by putting them in my account, you wonder? Because she told me to. The site she prefers for online photo archiving is more about print-making than photo-sharing, so there you go.)

I know a lot of people were badly put out by this storm, and I bet if I were a retailer I’d be mad, but this really was a good time for us. Life will be mostly back to normal in the morning, but this Christmas will be white indeed. Enjoy the pictures if you’re so inclined.

UPDATE (12/22/06): link to the pictures is fixed now.

UPDATE (12/26/06): I did some clean-up shoveling today to get the patches of ice that had formed in the driveway and to remove a good six inches of snow that had reappeared on the sidewalk. (It always gets re-covered with snow and slush by cars cutting the corner too closely.) There’s still plenty of white on the ground, but the kids’ tunnel had collapsed, and overall the otherworldly fun of last Thursday had quite left the yard and neighborhood. It was sad. Last week the blizzard was all fun and magic, but what about next time? Storms like this don’t happen every year. The next time it snows like this, will my kids even want to play in it? I mean, the nest starts to empty out in six years.

Try shoveling that into the street.

I just came across the coolest bit of data visualization I’ve seen in a while: Worldmapper. Using a technique I blogged about a couple of years ago, the site provides maps that visually render a big collection of datasets comparing the nations of the world along various economic, social, and environmental dimensions. A few obvious examples are total population, GDP, and HIV incidence. As you can see, the area of each nation is distorted to show the nation’s standing, giving you a quick, effective, and extremely cool way to visualize geographical data in a single parameter.

Naturally no collection of data like this could avoid being just a little bit politically tendentious, but for the most part this is a pretty objective look at the world. Indeed, I think critics of the United States (who normally thrive on comparisons to other nations in metrics like the impossibly vague “Gender Empowerment“) will find that this nation acquits itself rather well on the whole. This country appears to be a good and just place to live.

Which, I’m quick to point out, is due in no small part to our good showing in the Home Work Hours by Men cartogram, which is substantially due to my doing the dishes on a regular basis. But really: you’re welcome.

I’m kind of curious whether open-source tools exists to build these diagrams. Michael Gastner provides the code he used to generate the 2004 election maps, but that code requires a commercial GIS tool called ArcGIS. The key piece of functionality seems to be the conversion from shapefile format (which is apparently ubiquitous) to ArcInfo’s ungenerate format (which seems to be always a derived and temporary format). I think if I can do that transformation with a free tool, I can make my own cartograms of stuff. And how much fun would that be?

h/t O’Reilly Radar

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Suppose you’re a bachelor living with your grouchy old maid aunties. Life isn’t great, but you know, you’re used to it. It’s just how things are. You’ve heard of men getting married to nubile young women and enjoying the blessings of marriage and family, but then you’ve heard of billionaires and swashbuckling adventurers too. That’s a different life, a far-off abstract thing which you will never know. It’s not like you curse the heavens on a daily basis because of those aunties.

Then one day Jennifer Connelly calls you up and says she’d love to get together with you for a double mochachino half-caf at the Starbucks down the street from your place. Could this be? You never really thought this kind of thing was possible. You’re some loser who lives with his aunties! Jennifer Connelly wants a mochachino with you? Impossible!

So you meet with her a few times, and you really hit it off. You begin to wonder, could there be a beautiful woman in the world just for you? She looks you in the eye. She smiles at you. She touches your arm. She laughs at your jokes. She really seems to appreciate your Holy Grail and Homestar Runner quotes! You haven’t even hit first base (you’re an honorable man), but still, you didn’t know life could be like this. And every night the smell of your aunties’ St. John’s Voodoo Ginkonecea Zinger tea gets a little more noisome, their snoring a little more shrill.

Then one day her agent calls you and tells you she has to break it off with you. Remember, you’re some dweeb who lives with his aunties, he tells you. You aren’t exactly a crowd-pleaser, if you know what I mean, and the people who manage the lives of big stars need to think of these things. Nothing personal, but you won’t be able to see her again.

Remember before Jennifer, how things didn’t seem so bad with your aunties? Now the smell of their tea is death, their snoring cacophony. You never knew life could be so cruel.

Except the funny thing is, life hasn’t really changed.

1. I have messy handwriting.
2. I met my wife in 7th grade.
3. We started dating in 10th grade. That’s more than half of my life ago.
4. We got married six weeks after graduating high school.
5. She was totally hot then.
6. She still is.
7. I have three children.
8. They are all homeschooled.
9. Most unbiased observers report that they’re well-behaved.
10. Well, yeah.
11. I was born in 1972.
12. I’m about 5′10″ tall, and around 165lbs.
13. I used to wear glasses (a very mild prescription).
14. As of May, 2004, I am a part-time M.A. student at Denver Seminary seeking a degree in Philosophy of Religion. I’m not anymore. Job+kids+school+no vocational reason for it=just too hard.
15. The label “Evangelical Christian” applies fairly well to me.
16. But labels are complicated. You have no idea.
17. I brew my own beer.
18. Most of the time it works out pretty well, no matter what Lileks thinks.
19. I have a dedicated refrigerator in the garage to hold the fruits of my labor. It was given to me by a teetotaler.
20. I have some hope for his eventual repentance.
21. It turns out that refrigerators assume that the ambient temperature in their operating environment will always be higher than their internal set point.
22. On a related note, a hot pad in a refrigerator during a January cold snap will keep beer from freezing.
23. I squeeze the toothpaste from the end. I even used a little plastic device to harvest the most possible toothpaste from the tube as it’s used.
24. This sort of anal-retentive behavior does not apply to the tidiness of my desk. Unfortunately.
25. I am the second of five children. Our birthdays span 14 years.
26. I have a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering from the little-known Florida Tech.
27. I’ve been writing software for more than two-thirds of my life, professionally for one third of it.
28. I started when I was ten.
29. My first computer was a Vic 20, followed by a Victor 9000, followed by a Commodore 128, followed by an Amiga 500, followed by a succession of nameless, faceless, loveless, beige-box PCs.
30. My first real computer program was called “Cipher.” It would encode and decode text in Caesar’s Cipher and Railfence. It was written in BASIC.
31. String manipulation has come a long way since LEFT$(), RIGHT$(), and MID$().
32. I learned BASIC from a paperback book bought from a cheap little newsprint flyer from Scholastic Books.
33. Next was 8086 assembly language, which my dad taught me, with the help of a photocopied 8086 reference manual. Then came C, which I taught myself from the pedagogically unfriendly White Book (first edition) by Kernigan and Richie. Then came Pascal (college), Visual Basic (first consulting job), C++ (later consulting job), various microcontroller assembly languages (too many consulting jobs to remember), and Java (respectable day job that started as a consulting job). Nothing very exotic.
34. I am an Oracle user.
35. I am a Linux user.
36. I am an Enterprise Java developer.
37. To use Struts is not to love it. But I use it anyway.
38. I am an amateur astronomer and astroimager, but I don’t put as much time into the hobby as some people do.
39. I have turned out some decent images.
40. I drive a 2002 Toyota Tacoma. I have taken it off-road several times, loaned it for sundry moves and landscaping projects, and hauled various loads. It’s good to have a pickup.
41. I am not much of a video gamer, but I am a sucker for AOE. Still.
42. I have good friends in Mongolia, Spain, and a couple of Central Asian countries.
43. I have been to Spain, but not Mongolia, and not Central Asia.
44. I have been to Taiwan on business.
45. I’ve been to Mexico on pleasure.
46. It’s very difficult for me to eat a meal without reading something. I think I get this from my mother, who always read while she ate.
47. I was born in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania.
48. I was five when my family moved from there to Colorado.
49. My wife and I lived in Central Florida for five years.
50. My son was born there.
51. My wife loves the climate there. I hate it.
52. I love the climate in Colorado. She hates it. (I could handle a little more rain, if it didn’t mean increasing the humidity and the bugs.)
53. Only in my early twenties did I finally start eating hamburgers with cheese on them. I’m just now starting to experiment with tomatoes and onions, but mushrooms and ranch dressing are welcome additions anytime.
54. Only in recently have I developed a taste for Asian food.
55. People of informal theological education would call me a “Calvinist.”
56. People of formal theological education wouldn’t use the term without the quotes.
57. I believe that God freely and immutably ordains all things that come to pass from all eternity.
58. I believe that I am always free to do what I want to do.
59. I believe that I am never free not to do what I want to do.
60. I believe that negative consequences obtain if I do things that are unethical or illegal.
61. I believe that I have a duty to do what is right.
62. I believe that I wouldn’t have wanted to follow Christ if God had not specifically enabled me to want to.
63. I am an amillennialist, although hardly the best-informed one in Christendom.
64. The label “complementarian” applies fairly well to me.
65. Yet I would also be okay describing my union with my wife as an “equal regard marriage.”
66. This is a labeling problem, not a self-contradiction, nor even a significant internal tension.
67. I do not prefer the label “traditionalist” or “phallocratic misogynist.” (I’m just saying, is all.)
68. I do not use the term “traditional” as a pejorative.
69. I have been known to teach adult Sunday school occasionally.
70. I think the Calvinist doctrine of the Lord’s Supper is a basically a good option.
71. In the past I have been disenchanted with all known theologies of baptism, but I’ve finally allowed myself to be a paedobaptist. It’s a huge relief.
72. I did kind of wait until all of my children profess faith to make this change, so my conversion isn’t exactly the weightiest ever.
73. I take a fairly sacramental view of worship.
74. I think the Emergent Church movement does a decent job identifying some of the problems in evangelicalism.
75. But it has no clue what the solutions should be.
76. Yet it pretends to.
77. And its positive philosophical program is straight from the Pit.
78. I am a foundationalist of one kind or another.
79. I know this makes me uncool in some circles.
80. I am pretty experienced at being uncool.
81. I do not recall ever having voted for a Democrat.
82. I believe that party trumps person in the two-party system, so I’m not too upset about the previous point, nor do I think it is indicative of an insufficiently reflective political mind. Quite the contrary, in fact.
83. I look like my father. Especially with the beard.
84. I was a pretty little girl. My youngest daughter looks a lot like me.
85. Her sister looks a lot like her mother.
86. I’m not afraid of the color purple.
87. I do not see dead people.
88. I generally like open-source software. Given the choice between open source and a proprietary solution, I’ll probably want the open-source one, all things being equal.
89. Of course all things usually aren’t equal. But when it comes to software components of interest to enterprise software development, open-source solutions usually have meaningful qualitative advantages over their proprietary counterparts.
90. I am almost never interested in modifying the source code. Life is too short.
91. Life is, in fact, short.
92. My affinity for open source software is not because I’m a Marxist.
93. I am a capitalist. This means I believe that private property traded in free markets is in general the most just and efficient means of allocating scarce resources and creating and distributing wealth.
94. It seems to me that capitalism requires some public-sector regulation in order for markets to remain free. Antitrust laws, workplace safety laws, and environmental protection laws may be good examples.
95. I expect that the project of strong artificial intelligence-the creation of a sentient computer program-will result in a perplexing failure.
96. But I’m excited to see how close we can get.
97. I believe big-bang cosmology is fairly easy to integrate with the evangelical faith.
98. I do not believe evolutionary biology is as easy to integrate.
99. Absent the assumption of naturalism, I don’t think evolutionary biology is all that great of an account-although it is not as laughably bad in all cases as some may suppose it to be.
100. In any case, I’m not on board.
101. I don’t always mind anticlimactic conclusions. That’s just how it is sometimes.

Here’s an idea:

I’m a large. If you’re feeling generous, throw in a small for Zach, who happened to see the picture on my monitor and found it quite funny.

And while I’m posting, let me give you the obligatory apology for the slow blogging. I am working against a deadline at work, which has been imposing to say the least. But hey, sign up and you’ll get an email when we’re open for business. SpotComponents.com: For all your passive component needs!

I recently stumbled across an email from my good friend, Paul. It was a small collection of essays sent to a group of several of us who all had the same infamous eleventh-grade Honors English teacher together. It reminded us of Mr. Gerkin’s uncompromising literary standards and the enduring influence he had on us as writers.

The original essays are posted here, and are given only as scanned images. I have mirrored them here for your convenience. Click on each thumbnail to see the whole thing.

El Niño

Most high school essays on El Niño would be sterile regurgitations of an entry in the World Book Encyclopaedia, or more likely, a brushed-up cut-and-paste from How Stuff Works. This young auteur transcends the antiseptic account of science by convincingly tying a meteorological phenomonon together with our most primal fears (which are about dying and seeing trees burn down).

Lightning

Sometimes trees don’t burn, but does it shake the human psyche any less to see them knocked down? Again the axe is laid to the root of Enlightenment scientific bravado as the same young wordsmith expounds not just the nature, but the true human significance, of lightning. So good it took two pages!

Walt Whitman: A Biography

This touching tribute isn’t content merely to grapple with the difficult circumstances of Whitman’s life, but instead it artfully identifies them with the full scope of the ugly viscera of the human condition. As such it contains some profanity, but it is easy enough to bowdlerize for reading to younger aspiring writers. (Homeschool parents, take note!)

Hopefully I’m not the last one in the world to find out about this, but I just found the neatest site: 20q. It’s an AI implementation of the game of 20 Questions, and it seems to be pretty good. I just tried it with “a math textbook” in mind, and it got “textbook.” Next I tried something ab it more abstract: “the month of January,” to which it guessed “the season of summer.” Not half bad, considering that it’s starting with a blank slate each time and it’s as dumb as a condition code multiplexer. (Computer engineer joke. Sorry.)

Check it out. I’m sure you can stump it without much effort, but you may be surprised at what it does get. (It just guessed “logarithm” when I was thinking “supralapsarianism”–maybe I threw it off when I said supralapsarianism could bring joy to some people. Accurate answers help, I suppose.)

Post in the comments some of the things it got and didn’t get.

I realize that this is an old meme¹ and incredibly cheap blogging, but:

1. I promised my brother I’d get him a picture of the office setup with the new speakers.
2. Much of my writing time will be taken up for the rest of the week by an Apologetics paper due on Tuesday, so I may not post again until then (the paper will be posted here when finished).
3. I’m an incredibly cheap blogger.

Thanks go to friends Jason and Jane for the speakers and to friend Cary for the receiver. Outlook’s email notification sound has never sounded quite like this.

Here’s a large version for anyone who wants to try to find Waldo, establish my exact age, or determine what I had for dinner last night through your nearly superhuman powers of induction.

Note that this is also where I work, which I am about to go do right now.

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¹This is the first time I’ve used the word “meme” in my blog. I hate the word, but I may have to bow to the pressure of language change. I no longer object to people saying “person” where “man” used to suffice, so I suppose such accommodationalism is inevitable. From now on, we will meme it up here.

Labor Day was an appropriate day to empty out the kiddle pool on the back patio. It’s the end of the season, it had been filled for the better part of a week, nobody was playing in it (with the exception of a little bit of splashing on the part of one of the little Adeodatuses on Sunday evening), and the water had become dirty enough to reach Eyesore Status. When I went to pick up one side to dump it out, I noticed some little critters squiggling around in the water. Can you say microscope, kids? I knew you could.

We were up in the mountains doing Labor Day Things for most of the day, but upon our return I broke out the family microscope for an impromptu science lesson. (Lesson: these are mosquito larvae. They live in standing water. People normally think of swamps, not your kiddie pool. Gross, huh?) A few hours later, the kids in bed, I went to dump out the water at long last, when an idea struck me: digital camera.

Does that work? Can you just hold up the lens of the camera to the objective of the microscope and snap a picture? Oh, can you. Enjoy…

I took several videos. Please excuse the Windows Media format, but the free trial version of Ulead Video Studio 8.0 makes much smaller WMF files than it does MPEGs.

   

I have at least two more that are worth posting, but the little animated thumbnails are a pain! Watch this space during the weekend for more.

And for the stills:

   

   

Well, anonymously:

pictureThe last time I wrote a column that mentioned evolution, a reader complained on his Web log that probably 20 percent of my columns were on that topic. (Though he was kind enough to describe himself as a fan, on that particular topic he is not.) That turns out to be wrong, as it happens; I asked our archives to find anything with my byline containing the word “evolution,” and there are 15, over seven years. Not all of them are columns, and not all of them are about biology, but 4 percent is pretty close.

Linda is talking about her fourth- or fifth-favorite gadfly, me. I didn’t get a link out of it, but then with how little I’ve written in the past month, she could as well drop by for dinner unannounced with the rest of the Rocky Mountain News editorial staff to find toys on the floor and unfolded laundry on the couch. Non-linkage was quite merciful under the circumstances.

And hey, what am I doing posting anyway? Aren’t I suppsed to be like superhumanly busy these days or something? Well, something like that. Blogging time has been non-existent in August, and next semester doesn’t look like it’s going to be easier. However, the course material will lend itself more naturally to interesting posts, so if I can make it happen, I will. I have to write no fewer than four papers by the end of December, at least three of which will be postable. You’ll have at least that much. It will never make me a superstar of the blogosphere, but it will keep TimBerglund.com alive.