Uncle Bigbones

So I'm an uncle now. First time ever. Hopefully not the last. My little buddy Seth was born yesterday afternoon by c-section, and is a perfect baby boy. My sister said that he nursed well after he came out, and he took that dern soothie pacifier pretty well, too. I get to go see him again this weekend at his home (vice the hospital), and can't wait. Also exciting is the fact that he'll have a baby girl cousin (and Jess & I will have a daughter) in less than 6 weeks.

Let me just say that anyone who firmly says "I don't believe in God" must never have held a newborn baby. "For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb." (Psalm 139:13). Amen to that. God is good.

I'm so excited, and I just can't hide it

cheesy title, but it's the truth.


Here's the deal...I just found out about Bethesda Software's (developers of Morrowind, Oblivion, etc.) plans to release Fallout 3 in fall of this year!! Here's the description off the webpage:

Vault 101 – Jewel of the Wastes. For 200 years, Vault 101 has faithfully served the surviving residents of Washington DC and its environs, now known as the Capital Wasteland. Though the global atomic war of 2077 left the US all but destroyed, the residents of Vault 101 enjoy a life free from the constant stress of the outside world. Giant Insects, Raiders, Slavers, and yes, even Super Mutants are all no match for superior Vault-Tec engineering. Yet one fateful morning, you awake to find that your father has defied the Overseer and left the comfort and security afforded by Vault 101 for reasons unknown. Leaving the only home you've ever known, you emerge from the Vault into the harsh Wasteland sun to search for your father, and the truth.

http://fallout.bethsoft.com/eng/home/home.php

For those who don't know or have never played the Fallout series, I would highly suggest playing them ASAP. Fallout & Fallout 2 were turn-based roleplaying games, with a tile-based scrolling graphics engine. Fallout: Tactics gave the option to dispense with the turn based stuff, and have it appear more real-time, instead of choosing your move every time. I really like the game. I would say that I like Tactics the best of the three, but maybe I wouldn't if I'd never played the first two. There was also a Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel game for the XBox, but I never played it. I didn't like the graphics, and didn'thave an XBox at the time, so no big deal.

Anyhow, I'm seriously jazzed, and hoping that my new video card (new to me, anyways - bought it for $25 off of Newegg.com. It's a 256MB Radeon x700 series. Not top of the line anymore, but better than my old one and definately affordable) will be able to run it. Yeah.

What do you think...

When you look at the dots above, do you see a pattern emerge? Is it the first 10 dots in a pattern, and the pattern beginning to repeat with the last 4 dots? Could the pattern be the first 13 dots, and begin repeating with the last dot? Or could it be a pattern in itself from beginning to end? Or could it even be the tail end of a larger pattern?

What do you think after looking at the picture with more dots added in? Appears to be the tail end of a larger pattern. And now there's no telling whether the first two dots are the end of a pattern, and the rest of the dots on screen are the repeat, or what. And imagine if this thing was more than three lines, more like 639333333 lines.

"What the heck is this blog about?" I know. Well, here's the deal. I'm trying to understand how people buy into this whole "global warming" stuff, based off of only a couple hundred years of data. Now before you go all whirling dervish on me, please let me say that I think humans are supposed to be good stewards of the planet that God has created for us. I can't stand littering. I cringe inside when I see all the new developments going up here in Camden County, where they just bulldoze the place flat, not leaving a single tree for shade or beauty or oxygen. I think we are in pretty poor shape when it comes to taking care of the earth. I'm glad more attention and focus is on it, but I don't think that creating hysteria out of partial data is the way to do it. And people are fighting so hard to keep this stuff in the news. This morning, it was "Leading Climatologist reverses view on the relationship between global warming and hurricanes." Guy is a scientist at MIT. Smart guy, right? Right. So why is he buying into this global warming thing?

There is always the chance that I'm just totally missing the proverbial boat. But I really do try to look at the facts on something before I make a definite decision. I'm talking facts now, not the interpretation of the data. Recorded numbers and information, no problem. Someone telling me what they think the numbers mean, okay, but that's your opinion. Someone passing laws, trying to get people fired from their jobs, etc. based on what they say the numbers mean, without being able to prove it by the scientific method (which amounts to a theory), I have a big problem with.

Here are some questions I've got, and some observations I've made since this push started a year or so ago:

• How do you know it's warming, in the sense of an uncontrollable rise in mean temperatures all over the globe, when you've only been measuring data for such a small amount of time? Back to the dots at the top of the post - can you really tell if we're at the end of a warming wave and getting ready to start getting cooler, or can you prove that we're on a steady uphill climb with no end in sight? An accurate thermometer wasn't even invented until Mr. Farenheight in the early 1700s. So the last 300 years is really all that we could possibly have reliable data on, for the sake of trending, and at that time there weren't all the climate agencies like we have in modern times to record all the data. We've only been keeping seriods records for some 150 years.You could make some predicitons based off of that if the earth had only been around 500 years, but "scientists" (there come the quotes again) have once again changed their minds based on their interpretation of data collected from telescopes, and the general consensus of the secular scientific community seems to be that the earth is around 4.6 billion years old. Yet they're looking at just the tip of the tail, and creating mass hysteria.
• How can you prove that all this CO2 is turning up the dial on the universal oven, crisping all out polar bears and making slushies of our glaciers? Weren't the icecaps (made of frozen carbon dioxide) on Mars melting over the last several years, too? Have they had an Industrial Revolution on the red planet and are now cranking out CO2 as fast as we earthlings are? Or could the two similar results be caused by the same thing, - maybe the increased solar activity? Sun = hot.
• I know that in my community, we have bulldozed acres of shade giving trees and laid acres of heat holding asphalt. Wonder why your neighborhood (this is more "community warming" than global ) feels so hot? How many trees are in your yard? I can go 5 miles down the road to my mother's house, and the breeze over the lake, plus the shade of the hundred-year-old oaks amounts to a difference in temperature of probably a good 5 degrees from my house.

There are many more things that have come up, such as Chicago having the coldest winter on record, and all those meetings on Global Warming initiatives being cancelled because of snowstorms. Article today called "Ocean Cooling to Briefly Halt Global Warming, Researchers Say" By Jim Efstathiou Jr. A research scientist says "If we don't experience warming over the next 10 years, it doesn't mean that greenhouse-gas warming is not with us. There can be natural fluctuations that may mask climate change in the short term." Another says "Natural variations over the next 10 years might be heading in the cold direction, but if you run the model long enough, eventually global warming will win." One more person says that "The world will become at least 2.5 degrees Celsius warmer by 2100, compared with the pre-industrial period." How often do weathermen accurately predict tomorrow's weather? Ever looked at the 10-day forecast? Is it ever on the money? Look. I work with a group of people whose job it is to produce forecasts. Not weather forecasts, but production forecasts based off of years and years of accumulated data. There are computer systems that produce the results after the data is fed into them, etc. These people get thrilled and give high fives when their predictions from a year ago turn out to be within 10% of the actual amount. But here this guy is going to predict a mean rise in temperature from 92 years out? He doesn't even care, because he'll be dead and the legislation will all have been passed by the time his prediction is proven true or false.

How about the "farm under the sand" in Greenland? Look it up. Farm buried beneath 20+ feet of permafrost for 500 years. So at one time, Greenland was MUCH warmer than it is now. Right now it's about 85 percent covered by a sheet of ice. If we're colder now than we were 500 years ago, how can a warming spell (which isn't happening anyways) be the "end of humanity," as Al Gore spells it? Friggin' short sighted idiots.

Did Jesus really walk on water?

A “scientific report” came out about a year ago claiming that Jesus may have walked out to the disciples in the Sea of Galilee on a small sheet of ice instead of the biblical account of him walking on the water. You know how "science" always has to have a natural explanation for things, as they can't accept anything supernatural as a possibility. If you remember the story from the bible, Jesus goes off to pray alone, and the disciples get in a boat and row out. Storm comes up. Jesus catches up to them by walking across the water. They’re scared, and think it’s a ghost. Jesus says to have courage, and identifies himself. Peter says, “Lord if it’s you, then let me come to you.” He gets out of the boat and begins walking across the water towards Jesus. Becomes afraid of the waves beneath him and starts to sink. Jesus grabs him and lifts him out of the water. When they get back to the boat, they worship Jesus. You can read the actual bible text in Matthew 14:22-33.
Below is the text from the article being discussed:

Rare conditions could have conspired to create hard-to-see ice on the Sea of Galilee that a person could have walked on back when Jesus is said to have walked on water, a scientist said today.
The study, which examines a combination of favorable water and environmental conditions, proposes that Jesus could have walked on an isolated patch of floating ice on what is now known as Lake Kinneret in northern Israel.
Looking at temperature records of the Mediterranean Sea surface and using analytical ice and statistical models, scientists considered a small section of the cold freshwater surface of the lake. The area studied, about 10,000 square feet, was near salty springs that empty into it.
The results suggest temperatures dropped to 25 degrees Fahrenheit (-4 degrees Celsius) during one of the two cold periods 2,500 –1,500 years ago for up to two days, the same decades during which Jesus lived.
With such conditions, a floating patch of ice could develop above the plumes resulting from the salty springs along the lake's western shore in Tabgha. Tabgha is the town where many archeological findings related to Jesus have been found.
"We simply explain that unique freezing processes probably happened in that region only a handful of times during the last 12,000 years," said Doron Nof, a Florida State University Professor of Oceanography. "We leave to others the question of whether or not our research explains the biblical account."
Nof figures that in the last 120 centuries, the odds of such conditions on the low latitude Lake Kinneret are most likely 1-in-1,000. But during the time period when Jesus lived, such “spring ice” may have formed once every 30 to 60 years.
Such floating ice in the unfrozen waters of the lake would be hard to spot, especially if rain had smoothed its surface.
"In today's climate, the chance of springs ice forming in northern Israel is effectively zero, or about once in more than 10,000 years," Nof said.
The findings are detailed in the April 2006 Journal of Paleolimnology.


Okay, so they pick a part out of a bible story and then attempt to discredit it (although maybe not maliciously), but don’t include any supporting details. Here’s why I have a problem with this: Other than the fact that I believe the bible is the infallible authoritative Word of God, they leave out any analysis of the story that would contradict their findings. Let me set the scene using the biblical story combined with their hypothesis and tell me if it sounds plausible:
You have the disciples out in a boat, rowing like mad in the midst of this storm. Now, the boat isn’t embedded in ice, or they wouldn’t be rowing like mad. So they don't see any ice. However, Jesus comes walking or floating out to them on a sheet of ice. Disciples are afraid and think He’s a ghost. So Jesus says not to be afraid. Peter tells the Lord to call to him. Jesus does. Peter gets out of the boat and begins to walk to Jesus. On what? Ice? How would the disciples be rowing in fluid water if Peter can get directly out of the boat onto ice strong enough to support his weight? Did they dock at an ice floe?

And if it were a thin sheet of ice Jesus was walking on, when Peter stepped out and realized that it were ice, wouldn’t he say, “Aw, Jesus. We thought you were walking on the water. This is ice.” But he doesn’t. He keeps walking, and then starts to sink. Jesus, on this sheet of floating ice just beneath the surface walks immediately grabs him and says, “You have so little faith. Why did you doubt me?” Does that sound like something Jesus would say to someone who had just fallen through ice? It takes “faith” in the natural to walk across ice, just as it does to drive your car across a bridge, but it takes faith in the supernatural to walk across water. 

Two other points: 1) Peter was a fisherman from Galilee by trade. He knew the seas. He had been doing this for years. Even if this was the only time in 60 years that it had frozen over, he would understand that it was ice. 2) If this never happened, then Jesus is a fraud in the miracles department. Of course, Peter would realize this, and would not have been bold enough to die for the name of Jesus later in his life. 

Also amazing is how this guy knows pretty much how many times the sea of galilee has frozen over in the last 12,000 years. What data is he analyzing? I mean, what sort of scientific tests is he running to make this determination, and what historical data is he looking at? It's all bullkrap, which is why you shouldn't swallow everything "science" feeds you.

P.S. Don't think I'm anti-science, because I keep putting it in quotes. I am all for the Law of Gravity, and for all the things that can be proven through the scientific method, and for historical happenings (although though the events happen as fact, they are reported/interpreted subjectively quite often - revisionist history).