Wired Article

I’m officially going to stop blogging.  Wired’s suggestion made an excellent point that it takes up too much time to keep a blog active.  So, future posts will be on Facebook.  More permanent stuff will go onto my website eventually.

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/16-11/st_essay

Anyways,

Good luck to all the bloggers out there!

Alex

There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed his Mind by Anthony Flew

Although, I wouldn’t consider Anthony Flew to be an extremely well-known atheist.  He does appear to have been defending atheism academically and honing the arguments in favor of atheism for half-a-century.  He has read papers in the presence of C.S. Lewis and debated William Lane Craig in the early 21st century.

I think this book provides an excellent overview of the arguments that is tied together with how Flew made the journey from being an atheist to a deist. Also, N.T. Wright has an excellent appendix at the end discussing the evidence for Christ and the resurrection. In contrast to many strictly philosophical works, this book is very readable while still maintaining much of the depth and respect for the arguments that one would expect in a philosophical work.

Francis Schaefer’s Trilogy: The God Who is There, Escape from Reason, and He is There and He is Not Silent

I generally like these books. I particilary like how Schaefer integrates philosophy, culture and theology. This is an exceptional thing since, many books on theology I have read ignore the connections bettween these three. These connections are important, because philosophy oftentimes effects the culture, which has an impact on the church.  Throughout, this process Schaefer provides a good overview of philosophy as it relates to culture and theology especially.  He also defends the idea of absolute truth and morality.  It’s also very readable and interesting!

The Mathematician’s Brain: A Personal Tour through the Essentials of Mathematics and Some of the Great Minds Behind Them by David Ruelle

This book takes one through some of the main discoveries of some famous mathematicians in an attempt to help the reader understand what makes a mathematician tick.  I personally found this book to be fascinating.

UGA Graduate School

Anyways, so I had a great time at GaTech meeting Dr. Sherrill! However, in the end I felt that UGA at the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry is the best place for me to grow as a scientist, which is in the end what I’m going to grad school for right. Also, I’m still not sure whether I’m ready to live in the big city and I prefer quieter environments with lots of Southern cooking available(grits, meatloaf, fried okra, fried everything, ….). Finally, the pay at UGA doesn’t hurt and cost of living.P.S.: If you have no idea what I’ve been talking about for most of this note, then the short of it is that I’m going to UGA to work at the CCQC starting June 2. Here are some links to those interested:

http://www.psicode.org

http://www.q-chem.com

http://www.ccc.uga.edu

Book Review: Federalists and Antifederalists, The Debate Over the Ratification of the Constitution

Federalists and Antifederalists: The Debate Over the Ratification of the Constitution (Constitutional Heritage Series, V. 1) by John P. Leffler, Richard Kaminski

Summary: After a short introduction, a selection of papers, newspaper articles from 1787 and 1788 display the arguments and the ferocity of the debate over the ratification of the constitution. Thus, a selection of essays from the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists describe what both sides of the debate thought about the following topics: the Nature of Republican/Democratic Gov’t, the Senate, the House of Representatives, the President, the Judiciary, and the Bill of Rights.

Review:  It is an excellent overview of the arguments presented by both sides of the debate over the ratification of the Constitution.  In the process, the debates also present something of what the founders(both Federalist and Anti-Federalist) thought of how republican government’s should work, and how the government under the Constitution would work.  It also can help us analyze many of the issues at hand today.  Since, the issues they dealt with are very similar to ours.  Such, as the representativeness of the gov’t(Congress),  fears of “Big Brother” or a despotic gov’t arising.  It also reminds us of what the intentions were to restrain the President from doing such things as making war!

Go Clinton!

Yeah, Clinton is winning by about 80 votes and won by a very slim margin Super Tuesday. I’m personally tired of having an idiot as president.

New releases

GNOME 2.20 and KDE4 are soon to be integrated into many distributions in the upcoming months!!!! This includes possibly Hardy Heron(Ubuntu/Kubuntu). KDE looks especially cool, although GNOME looks good as well.

KDE has a really cool looking panel, and improved most of their applications!

GNOME’s interface hasn’t changed much, but they have improved many of their applications as well.

Still I’m much more impressed by KDE’s work so far!

Anyways, I can’t wait for the summer when I’ll have a chance to run these through the gauntlet!

UT-Knoxville REU-2007 Summary with R. Harrison

3 projects:

1) To write a Hartree-Fock program(calculate the energy of a Lithium hydride) in FORTRAN, then port this to a GPGPU. 2) Calculate the energy of C6 structures and determine their quadropole moments. 3) Make a model of an atom-like system with just a dipole, and a system with just a quadrupole. Then, adjust the charge(q) and the distance seperating the charges(a) to determine how large a quadrupole needs to be to bind an electron, and use the dipole model to confirm that the model is sane.

Book Review: The Church, the Falling Away, and the Restoration

The Church, the Falling Away, and the Restoration by J.W. Shepherd is an excellent overview of the three subjects in the title. That is this book discusses briefly and largely accurately the doctrines of what the Church should be, how the Church fell away afterwards, and then the attempt at restoring the New Testament church, which is a continuous process. Although, Shepherd focuses on the attempts in the late 1790’s to mid 1800’s.

The fascinating part that I find in this book is the last portion. This is because it appears as if numerous people from various denominations(Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian) decided to eventually depart from their various creeds and preach the Gospel pure and simple. They chose to cross the sectarian lines separating the various denominations. There is even one part where two groups operated without knowledge of one another, but for the same purpose. Eventually word got around and they decided to meet one another to see whether they saw eye to eye or not. After some discussion, they decided that they basically did believe the same things and joined together to form what they called “the Church of Christ”. They also cases before this point such as when John “Raccoon” Smith started a small movement and then later joined with Campbell in the Restoration movement.

It’s always good to be reminded of the non-sectarian spirit of the past, lest it die out and be forgotten.