Southern Bread Blog

If I’m not careful I’m going to have to rename this blog “The Evan Erwin Ongoing Commentary Page”. I just can’t help it that he puts up such good topics. Anyway, a recent post caught my eye and I thought I would put my two cents in from the thoughtful Christian homeschool-dad perspective.

I think that comment by Mrs. B was strangely worded but it’s not illogical. What she is probably trying to say is “You seem to have a high sense of morality for someone who doesn’t think any basis for morality exists.” There is no getting around that for an atheist. A true atheist is beholden to one governing moral standard: rational egoism or some other form of egoism. That’s it. That’s all that exists. Now, egoism might be capable of producing plenty of people with decent moral character, but it can just as easily produce a Joseph Stalin without any logical inconsistency at all. That is what makes people uneasy around people who boldly proclaim their atheism. To a pure, consistent atheist virtue is just a word.

We rarely see a truly pure adherant to egoism though. Almost everyone is influenced by religious beliefs to some extent during their upbringing and that infuses the conscience with a lot of guilt. By the time a person is older, it’s pretty hard to expunge the bad feelings they get from being selfish, and to look at the world in a non-moral way. I know the bit about christians thinking atheists are “weirdo serial killers who can’t wait to rape a baby” is hyperbole, but I don’t know a single christian who even remotely thinks anything of the sort. But I do know plenty of people, christian or not, who get a little unnerved about someone proclaiming their atheism. In a sense, the atheist is saying “Hi, I’m Dave. I have no moral grounding for any of my actions.”

We see here though, that Denise is furious because she thinks that someone handing her kid a Church flyer in school is “wrong”. Since she is a self-proclaimed atheist, I have to assume that by wrong she means that it’s illegal(Wrong == Illegal). So it is wrong because a majority of our society has decided that teachers handing out church flyers in school is undesirable. That doesn’t seem to jive though, because I think it’s safe to assume that if teachers handing out church flyers became legal tommorrow, she would still think it was “wrong”, so that can’t be it.

Maybe by wrong she means that it isn’t in her or her child’s self-interest(Wrong == whatsBestForMe). That is fine, but why should I or anyone else care about her own self-interest. It’s my job to worry about my own self-interest. If what’s best for her jives with what I feel is best for me, then it will all work out good, but if not then I am in no way bound to her sense of “wrong”. It wouldn’t seem wrong to me at all. No, I think what is going on here is what offen happens with atheists. She is smuggling morality in the back door. A universal wrong can only be universally wrong if there is a transcendant standard that dictates it, and that is not allowed in an atheist’s worldview.

There are many, many atheists who are nice, upstanding people and have a high moral character. But they aren’t that way as a result of their belief in athesim. They are that way for other reasons. Maybe it just feels like the right thing to do. I just think that atheists should not be surprised when people are hesitant about trusting their moral commitments. At least if you are agnostic, you’re admitting that your not sure about it all. A person who proclaims atheism on the other hand is making a definitive statement about how morality fits into their worldview(if they don’t cheat that is). Mrs. B may be guilty of an irrelevant choice of wording (being nice really has nothing to do with anything), but her intuition about moral grounding is probably sound.

Honestly, in the end I just don’t see the big deal. If you think what the flyer espouses is incorrect just toss it in the trash can and explain to your child why it’s rubbish. If your explanation is reasonable and makes sense then your child will be able to see that and they will probably toss it in the can themselves next time. Christians have been having to do that kind of thing in public school for years. How many christians have had to throw condoms away and explain to their 15 year olds why they shouldn’t be having sex right now?

Another food post. I should start a food category I guess. Anyway, I cooked spaghetti and meatballs for the family unit Sunday night. I’m not very good in the kitchen but it turned out really good. I used the recipe found here but since I didn’t have all the ingredients I just substituted what we had. I was able to make the meatballs exactly as the recipe called, but for the sauce I ended up doing it like this instead:

Ingredients:

• 18-20 oz. of Plain/Traditional Spaghetti Sauce
• Olive Oil
• 1/3 Cup of Red Wine
• 3/8 Tsp Minced Garlic
• 2 Tbsp Minced Onion
• 1 Tsp Oregano
• 1/2 Tsp Basil
• Kosher salt to taste
• Pepper to taste

Directions:

1. Get a medium sauce pan and cover the bottom with olive oil
2. Add in the garlic, onion, oregano, basil, salt, pepper and stir it all up to make sure it’s all soaking in the oil
3. Let it sit for about 10 minutes while you prepare the meatball mixture
4. Once you get the meatballs made, stick them in the fridge and turn on the medium-low heat under the sauce pan
5. When it gets warmed up and you start to smell it good, put in the wine and cover
6. Check it often until you see that the wine has reduced down
7. Now add another dash of red wine and add the 18 oz. of plain sauce
8. Stir it up good
9. Now just stir it occasionally while you cook the pasta and meatballs

It turned out great. I’m sure it would probably be better with all fresh ingredients but sometimes you have to improvise. My wife liked it and that’s all us men really care about when we cook. We can like it just fine, but as long as the wife gives her nod of approval then all is well.

*Part I, *Part II

First off, it’s pretty evident to me that the Bible teaches that children are not held to account until a certain time in their life. It’s also clear that it has nothing to do with a magic age. Years are just a convenient metric for measuring the passage of time. I don’t see what reason God would have to adopt a human contrived metric for measuring time as a way to determine personal responsibility for the sins that person has committed. That seems ridiculously arbitrary.

It seems as though everyone has a certain point in their maturity where they begin to comprehend right and wrong not simply as things that result in punishment or praise, but as something innate. When you can determine that an action is wrong in and of itself, regardless of it’s consequences, it seems to me that you are now ready to be held responsible for committing that act. Drinking a beer doesn’t have anything to do with sin, but it shouldn’t take you but a minute or two to remember something you did in high-school that you know was wrong. And you won’t need a bible to figure it out either.

But it is a choice. Not everyone believes. I do. Evan doesn’t. We have both made a choice. The choice is not between Heaven and Hell. The choice is and always has been between believing that Jesus is God’s Son or not. Why would God reward a man for believing that he doesn’t exist. That might sound hokey, but think about it. We don’t do that with our own children. We want them to take what they know of us and have “faith” in that. I can give you a good example.

Recently we have been working with my 4.5 year old daughter to learn to trust us. For instance, yesterday she wanted a sip of my wife’s coffee that was luke warm. She asked if it was hot and my wife told her no. Then she asked for one of us to take a sip to prove that is wasn’t hot. We reiterated to her that it wasn’t hot and she needed to trust us. Then she asked if she could stick her finger in it and test it. My wife told her no, that she didn’t want fingers in her coffee and that she should trust what we say because we wouldn’t tell her something that was going to hurt her. I then reminded her that the night before she hadn’t believed me on another issue and I had proven to her that it was true. This time we wanted some trust. She took a sip and it wasn’t hot. Trust is all that’s required. It’s not a blind trust. It’s a trust born out of a knowledge of the nature and character of the one being trusted.

Me either. That doesn’t have anything to do with God or his redemptive plan though.

I’m not sure exactly what he thinks those “hundreds of hands” have done to the scriptures. The historical reliability of the Bible is one of the strongest points in the arsenal of any Christian. Attempts to discredit portions of it by the likes of the Jesus seminar are just plain siliness. The parts that are actually historically questioned for legitimate reasons such as John 8 and Mark 16 are readily admitted and cautioned against by Christian apologists. I questioned a verse in James just the other day. The fact remains that 99% of scripture is almost impossible to discredit in any meaningful way.

Ann Rice would be sad to hear that seeing as how she is now a follower of Christ.

That may be what most churches are about these days but again, it has nothing to do with who Christ is, what God has done, and what the truth is. Leaders of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Bhuddism, etc. can all make you feel loved in some way or another. That isn’t a hard thing to accomplish. The difference is that Christianity fits perfectly with the way we instinctively know the world to be. That lends it a credence that is simply missing from any other worldview. Love is empty without a knowledge that what you are committed to is also true.

Understanding can lead to belief, but understanding is not the problem. The knowledge is there for the taking. Belief has forever been the stumbling block to the proselyte. Belief entails an admonission that the thing being believed is true. And if Jesus truely is God, that changes everything in a person’s life. A whole worldview shift is never an easy thing.

I stumbled upon this pair of refutations of the young-earth population rate argument. The population rate argument is primarily against evolution, not the age of the earth, though it is often employed by young earthers to show that their position is reasonable. Their are actually two parts to the argument, the latter of which is often ignored, and they go like this:

1. Given a historically lower than average population growth rate, we can arrive at the earth’s current population rate in a time frame that fits into the young-earth timeline. Usually anywhere from 6,000-10,000 years.
2. If man has been around for 2.5 million years or more, todays human population should be so absurdly big that the earth could not sustain it.

That seems like a very reasonable argument to me if the math holds up right. Let’s tackle the second part first.

First of all, we start with the general scientific consensus that man is at least 2.5 million years old. It may be more, but it’s certainly not less. From what I have found, they are dating flaked stone tools back 2.5 million years so it’s a pretty safe bet those were homonids making them. The other thing we need to know is what the human population was at it’s earliest estimate. The best I could find was that the human population around 8000 BC was 5 million. I got that figure by looking at as many human history timelines as I could find; and 5 million seemed to be a pretty consistent estimate.

With this data in hand I run into my first problem with this account of human history. In order to believe that in 2,492,000 years we only got up to 5 million humans, you would have to accept that the human population only netted 2 new humans per year for over 2400 millenia. That’s pretty hard to swallow. It would seem that growth rate for an emerging new species would have to be robust at first in order for that species to gain traction. Also, if it’s not robust then why is the evolution happening in the first place? According to the terms of natural selection, a new species is selected when it develops a characteristic that conveys an evolutionary advantage on it. Why would a species with an evolutionary advantage over it’s peers have such a terrible, terrible growth rate?

Not only that, but in the 10,000 years since you would require a nominal growth rate of no more than 0.07% to avoid going over the current population of 6 billion. Again, this seems very hard to swallow. Those 2 growth numbers are just ridiculously low. And if you bump the growth rate up to 0.08% (just 0.01% more), you have to expect a modern population somewhere around 14 billion. If you go up to 0.09% then you are left with a modern population of 40 billion. That’s nearly 7 times the current global population and we aren’t even at 1% yet.

So summing this up: A modern understanding of hominid history would require that from -2,500,000 BC to -8000 BC, the human population only grew by 2 people per year, and then from -8000 BC to present, the average growth rate was only 0.07%. This hardly seems sustainable for any animal population. Modern species with a growth rate of only 2 per year are probably at the top of the endangered list, yet we are to believe that humans maintained those paltry numbers for 2,502,000 years.

More later.

I have a Hauppage PVR-250 card that I use to capture video with. I love the card but it only lets me capture audio in mp2 format. This is fine for about 85% of standalone DVD players out there but I happen to have one of the 15% that doesn’t play mp2 audio. Mp2 is not actually in the official DVD spec so players are not “required” to support it, even though most do.

The officially supported audio formats are PCM and AC3. PCM is a raw audio stream. It sounds very good but it’s incredibly huge. That makes it impractical for all but the shortest of videos. AC3 is a great sounding, small codec and is perfect for most situations. The only time it’s not practical is when your source audio is really lousy. In that case it can actually make it a lot worse. But as long as you have a good sounding source, you can encode to AC3 pretty painlessly.

I use FFMPEG for almost all my transcoding needs these days. It can do pretty much anything you want, including making perfectly DVD compliant ac3 audio streams from an mp2 source. I wrote the following batch file(called transcode.bat) to make it happen:

@echo off

@set videos=C:videos
@set tools=C:tools

:: Prerun commands
C:
cd transcode

:: Convert audio to ac3
::
IF EXIST %1.ac3 GOTO CLEANUP
echo Create an ac3 audio stream from mp2...
%tools%ffmpeg -i "%videos%%1.mp2" -vn -ab 224 -ac 2 -acodec ac3 -y "%1.ac3"

:CLEANUP
::
echo Multiplex streams...
%tools%mplex -f 8 -S 0 -o "%1.vob" "%videos%%1.m2v" "%1.ac3"

pause

If your file is called “home_movie1.mp2″, you would call the script like this:

> transcode.bat home_movie1

Before I call this script I use ReJig to demultiplex the .mpg file created by the Hauppage software into an .m2v(mpeg 2 video stream) and an .mp2(mpeg 2 audio stream). I keep all these source video/audio files in a directory called “C:videos” and all my command line tools (like ffmpeg.exe and mplex.exe) in a directory called “C:tools”. Just download the latest ffmpeg and mplex and put them in “C:tools” before you run this. The script uses “C:transcode” as it’s working directory so create it also before running. When the script finishes transcoding the AC3 it will multiplex the .m2v and the newly created .ac3 into a DVD compliant .vob file. If you don’t want this just comment that part out.

Here is another homebrew coffee bean roaster I saw today. I’ve got to try this out one of these days. You can get green coffee beans for a lot cheaper than roasted ones and the roasting is supposedly not very hard. Here is the previous roaster I saw online.

When I’m writing web code these days, I find myself using LDAP in some form almost every time. It’s become the “glue” that ties a lot of our web/intranet apps together. If you have never worked with LDAP from within a CGI, here is a kind of skeleton example to get you started. It uses perl’s Net::LDAP module to grab a list of users from the “Domain Users” OU of our Active Directory and show them in an HTML table. The returned results are sorted alphabetically by first name (“givenName” in directory speak). Net::LDAP is feature rich and has all the bells and whistles you are likely to need for an intranet app. Check out the API documentation for more details.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use Net::LDAP;
use strict;

##: Bind anonymously to the ldap database
my $basedn="ou=Domain Users,dc=domain,dc=com";
my $ldap=Net::LDAP->new(’ldap.domain.com’) 
  or die "Couldn’t connect to directory server.n";
my $mesg=$ldap->bind(’user@domain.com’,password=>’********’) 
  or die "Couldn’t bind to directory server.n";

##: Query LDAP to get a list of users and their info
$mesg=$ldap->search( 
  base=> $basedn,
  filter=> "(objectClass=user)",
  attrs=> [’displayName’,’givenName’,
           ’sn’,’mail’,’telephoneNumber’,
           ’streetAddress’,’l’,’st’,
           ’postalCode’,’homePhone’ ] );

##: Display the directory
my $count=0;
my $results="";
foreach my $entry ($mesg->sorted(’givenName’)) {
  $results.="<tr>";
  $results.="<td>".$entry->get_value(&#8217;displayName&#8217;)."</td>";
  $results.="<td>".$entry->get_value(&#8217;streetAddress&#8217;)."</td>";
  $results.="<td>".$entry->get_value(&#8217;l&#8217;)."</td>";
  $results.="<td>".$entry->get_value(&#8217;st&#8217;)."</td>";
  $results.="<td>".$entry->get_value(&#8217;postalCode&#8217;)."</td>";
  $results.="<td>".$entry->get_value(&#8217;homePhone&#8217;)."</td>";
  $results.="<td>".$entry->get_value(&#8217;mail&#8217;)."</td>";
  $results.="</tr>";
  $count++;
}
$mesg=$ldap->unbind;

print STDOUT "Content-Type: text/htmlnn";
print STDOUT "<html>nn<head>n";
print STDOUT "<title>User Listing - Full</title>n";
print STDOUT "</head>nn<body>n";
print STDOUT "Records Returned: <b>$count</b><br />n";
print STDOUT "<table border=&#8217;1&#8217; rules=&#8217;1&#8217;><tr>";
print STDOUT "<th>Name</th>";
print STDOUT "<th>Address</th>";
print STDOUT "<th>City</th>";
print STDOUT "<th>State</th>";
print STDOUT "<th>Zip</th>";
print STDOUT "<th>Phone</th>";
print STDOUT "<th>Email</th>";
print STDOUT "</tr>n";
print STDOUT $results;
print STDOUT "</table>n";
print STDOUT "</body>n</html>";

My little girl(4.5) started her first day of Kindergarten yesterday. She was so excited about it that we had a hard time getting her to bed the night before because she was so worked up. Of course, we are homeschooling and so my wife is her teacher. The curriculum we chose starts out with day one of the Genesis account and goes through all the days of the creation week mixing in activities and reading to tell the story. The math part is really cool too. You use these things called “Cuisenaire Rods” along with a workbook that uses math as a base to learn colors, letters, shapes and all sorts of stuff.

Most of the stuff is going to be pretty easy for her right now since she is almost 5 but that’s fine. We have heard that when they are little it’s ok for the work to be easy for them since it gives them confidence and a sense of accomplishment. You want it to be challenging without being overwhelming where they get frustrated. My wife has been studying the teacher’s workbook religiously and has come up with a good schedule for each schoolday. The lessons in the My Father’s World curriculum that we picked out take about 1.5-2 hours to complete.

She also painted up a special tub for my little boy(2.5). It has learning games in it like letter and math puzzles, a building block mat that uses stackable pegs, and a bunch more stuff. That is his special “school” tub that he can only play with during the school lesson. It keeps him occupied while my older one is learning her lesson but it’s still engaging his mind since they are all educational toys. And since he can only play with those toys during school time he doesn’t get bored with them as he would with just normal toys from his room.

In Alabama you don’t have to register your child until age 7. At that time we will sign up with a home/church school group. We will use these first couple of years to get used to the whole process and refine the daily schedule. We have heard that a good schedule is doing full lessons Monday-Thursday and then having a “light” day on Friday where the kids can be a little more free with what they want to learn. That sounded like a good plan to us since Friday could then be used as a catch-up day if they needed some extra help in a certain subject. We have also heard that it’s best to do schooltime in the morning when the kids are wound up so that’s what we’re doing.

Don’t get me wrong. I hate government intrustion into my life, and I hate the thought of my actions being monitored by the government. But if their was ever a case for government surveillance programs, this foiled terrorist plot in England is it. While every liberal in this country has been trying to expose Bush’s secret surveillance programs for the last 2 years, England has made no apologies for monitoring everything from subway lines to traffic intersections and sidewalks.

Like I said, that freaks me out to no end, but it is also the sole reason this massive terrorist plot was thwarted and thousands of lives were saved on both sides of the pond. From the article:

Well, in this country that “covert” operation would have been outed by the New York Times and given the terrorists plenty of time to get away and change their plans so as not to be caught the next time around. Another quote:

That pretty much sums it up. In order to catch secret terrorists, carrying out secret plots using secret surveillance on us, we have to have secret programs, that carry out secret operations using secret surveillance of our own. It’s not rocket science unless you’re a liberal and then everything is rocket science.

I had some e-mail correspondence earlier this week with R.K. Campbell about open carry vs. concealed carry. R.K. is a very well known gun writer. Here is his bio from Gunblast:

“An established and well-respected outdoors writer, Bob writes for Shotgun News, Handguns, SWAT Magazine, American Gunsmith, Knifeworld, Police, Women and Guns, and GunWeek, among others. He is Contributing Editor of Women and Guns and Executive Editor of Boar Hunter. Bob has also published occasionally in Tactical Knives, American Handgunner and Guns, and he is a regular at Krause Publications’ Gun Digest and Handguns. He also wrote a significant portion of the 4th and 5th Editions of Assault Weapons.”



“Bob has also authored three books: Holsters For Combat and Concealed Carry (Paladin Press), The 1911 Semi Auto (Stoeger Publishing), and The Handgun In Personal Defense (The Second Amendment Foundation).”

He was very nice and gave me some good advice during our e-mail conversation. I highly recommend his book The Handgun in Personal Defense. It’s a very good primer on the selection, use and carry of a pistol or revolver for personal defense. I was able to read it in less than a week but I’m a slow reader. Most people could get through it in a couple of nights. It’s one of those rare books that can be read straight through and also kept around as a reference later. I guess I like his writing mostly because he shoots straight and tells you what he really thinks of a gun. Most gun reviewers will never say a bad word about any gun. I guess they don’t want to hurt their relationship with the manufacturers.

Corresponding with Mr. Campbell reminded me of the good ol’ days of the internet when people actually responded to e-mails. In the mid-nineties when e-mail and the web were starting to get big you could e-mail just about anybody and they would happily reply to you. Those were the days when Bruce Campbell was giving out his AIM address like it was no big deal. Now people treat e-mail as if it were a nuisance. I guess all good things come to an end, but R.K. was a refreshing change. You can read his latest article on concealed carry at Gunblast.com.