Last weekend, John Piper talked in his sermon of the historical basis of our faith. Specifically, he was preaching on the role of the Word of God in our salvation, and spent some time talking about the nature of that Word, and how it forms the foundation of our faith. I found it profitable, and thus today’s reflection is based largely on what he said.

That the Word of God is critical to salvation is plain from 1 Peter 1:23 — we have been born again “through the living and abiding word of God.”

Read more...

Steve Yegge has a blog (his "Blog Rants" blog) where, once or twice a month, he posts a length (in Internet terms, at least) missive about some facet of programming, languages, and the software industry. He’s got a variety of good things to say, and I’ve found the posts of his that I’ve read to be rather insightful and worth paying attention to.

Anyway, the present topic. Recently, he posted an explanation of why he writes such long posts. In his defense of his blogging style, he discusses an interesting concept (albeit with no studied scientific basis). He discusses short-term (about 20 seconds) and long-term memory (lifetime), and proposes the existence of an intermediate memory bank, where thoughts are kept around for 10-15+ minutes while the brain decides whether they’re worth filing in long-term memory. An interesting hypothesis, and I can definitely see what he’s saying and where he’s getting it. Even if it is entirely irrelevant as far as actual psychological science goes, it does seem like a fun and useful working concept and it has some interesting practical results.

Read more...

Some weeks ago, I wrote an article on my dilemma trying to determine which language to use for a calendar system. I just thought I’d make a public update to not leave it hanging.

The solution is Emacs. I’m now using org-mode, combined with diary. I’m working on some Perl and elisp hacking (so far just the Perl) to create a calendar system that synchronizes with my Clie (using PilotManager, since it already has a conduit for BBDB). This, combined with Gnus for reading my e-mail, is working rather well, and using remember.el I can easily convert an e-mail into a task. I even switched from IMAP (nnimap backend) to the nnml backend and that seems pretty nifty (so far).

Read more...

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here. I’ve been busy lately, though, and writing blog posts hasn’t exactly been a high priority.

Jenn & I picked up a book recently that bears the following text as introduction:

Read more...