Bartlett Publishing

Researching Creation / The Mind

JB — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 03:30:00 +0000

[WARNING - this post may not make any sense until I give my BSG talk - sorry - I'll refer back to it later after I describe that talk]

In preparation for my BSG talk on creationary cognition models, I was digging through some papers, and ran into a whole collection of papers on the Gödelian argument against the physicalism of the brain. Would someone please take these papers to the theology departments? Anyone?

This whole area of research seems completely unknown outside of a few specialists (though Penn State seemed to have a lot of contributions, or at least a lot of archived papers that Google Scholar pointed to).

Anyway, when I had started my research in seminary, I thought that my Gödelian argument for the soul was at least somewhat unique. I had read Voie's use of Gödel, but did not realize that there was an actual literature on the subject. I have to say I was a little disappointed when I found Robertson's paper on free will. I realized my argument wasn't brand-new.

Anyway, I found one paper that comes at least a little close to what my BSG presentation will be on - Copeland's Turing's o-machines, Searle, Penrose, and the Brain. On the one hand, even if I didn't add anything to the conversation, I think just popularizing these ideas is worthwhile. However, my goal is to begin a research program to systematize these ideas as part of a general cognitive studies program. I think one reason why these ideas aren't getting as much play is because they are being relegated to philosophy. What we need to do is to start experimenting - then we can put them into practice.

Some interesting and related papers I found in Google Scholar:

Technology Musings / Comparing Research vs Practical Languages

JB — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 15:30:00 +0000

I recently ran across this excellent comparison between Standard ML and Objective Caml. It is good, because it describes the different types of choices that are often made between languages used for research and those used for practical projects.

Simpler Living / The Tomato Experiment

JB — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 04:06:00 +0000

Today I embarked on a little experiment. I noticed last year that if you let tomatoes sprawl out, they would grow roots along the stem. I wondered if that meant they would easily re-root.

This year, after chopping down the pole beans (which didn't produce *anything*), I decided to devote the space to my tomato experiment. What I did was trim a bunch of my tomato plants, and plant the trimmings in my new bed. Having heard that honey can encourage rooting, I dipped many of them in honey. I also took some longer cuttings and some shorter ones. We'll see how well they all do.

I'll try to post pictures as I go along.

Simpler Living / Books I Have and Want

JB — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 03:42:00 +0000

On my "to buy" list:

Books I think you should read:

The Backyard Homestead - my all-time favorite book on the subject - everything you need to inspire you and get started!
Fresh Food from Small Spaces: The Square-Inch Gardener's Guide to Year-Round Growing, Fermenting, and Sprouting - an excellent guide to doing more with less.

Researching Creation / BSG/CGS 2010 Meeting Speaker List

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 05:16:00 +0000

Todd just posted the talk list for the BSG/CGS meeting. It looks to be a really exciting time, and I have no idea how they are going to fit so many talks into a day and a half - probably switching to a multiple-track format. Anyone who wants to interact with creation research should come here. Here's the link to register. After this week the registration price goes up.

Here is the list of talks:

Biology

Bartlett - Estimating Active Information in Adaptive Mutagenesis
Bartlett - Developing an Approach to Non-Physical Cognitive Causation in a Creation Perspective
Demme - Grasses and Shrubs or Grain and Thorn-bushes? The Vegetation of Genesis 2.5
Francis - Use of Halobacteria as a Model Research Organism in the Undergraduate Research Laboratory
Sanders - Baraminological Status of the Verbenaceae (Verbena Family)
Wilson - Revisiting the 'Clear Synapomorphy' Criterion
Wise - Dominion: Human raison d’être, Foundation of Bioethics, Foundation of Environmentalism
Wood - Species and Genus Counts for Terrestrial Mammal Families Reveals Evidence for and against Widespread Intrabaraminic Diversification
Wood - A Re-evaluation of the Baraminic Status of Australopithecus sediba Using Cranial and Postcranial Characters

Geology

Austin - Submarine Liquefied Sediment Gravity Currents: Understanding the Mechanics of the Major Sediment Transportation and Deposition Agent during the Global Flood
Cheung, Strom, Whitmore - Persistence of Dolomite in the Coconino Sandstone, Northern and Central Arizona
Garner - Permian Cross-bedded Sandstones and Their Significance for Global Flood Models
Gollmer - Deep Ocean Interaction in a Post-Flood Warm Ocean Scenario
Hutchison - Potential Mechanisms for the Deposition of Halite and Anhydrite in a Near-critical or Supercritical Submarine Environment
Oard - Dinosaur Tracks, Eggs, and Bonebeds Explained Early in the Flood
Ross - YEC Geology in the Classroom: Educational Materials, Challenges and Needs
Snelling - Radiohalos in Multiple, Sequentially-Intruded Phases of the Bathurst Batholith, NSW, Australia: Evidence for Rapid Granite Formation During the Flood
Snelling - Radiocarbon in Permian Coal Beds of the Sydney Basin, Australia
Stansbury - How Does an Underwater Debris Flow End? Flow Transformation Evidences Observed within the Lower Redwall Limestone of Arizona and Nevada
Whitmore, Strom - Clay Content: A Simple Criterion for the Identification of Fossil Desiccation Cracks?
Whitmore - Preliminary Report and Significance of Grain Size Sorting in Modern Eolian Sands
Whitmore, Maithel - Preliminary Report on Sorting and Rounding in the Coconino Sandstone

Researching Creation / Sanford Publishes New Bioinformatics Tool

JB — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 02:47:00 +0000

John Sanford, a young-earth creationist biology professor at Cornell, just published a bioinformatics paper describing his new genomics tool, called skittle with a bioinformatics graduate student Josiah Seaman. You can read the paper here. The tools allows you to color the genome and experiment with alignments to visualize patterns that are not detectable by other methods.

You can download the program from Skittle's website on sourceforge., or find more information about the program at dnaskittle.com.

It runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

This tool allows us to detect a number of new patterns in the genome. Not only does it help to find tandem repeats, it also helps to find structured variations in those repeats.

This holistic approach to genome analysis is precisely the sort of research that IDers and creationists are interested in. The reductionist approaches of the last century were useful for digging deeper, but they often blinded researchers to the larger-scale activities of what was happening.

From the paper:

As we have been able to better visualize tandem repeats using Skittle, we have seen a surprising amount of internal complexity. Some of this complexity seems to be easily understood in terms of point mutations and indels, but a great deal of the complexity appears to provide an intriguing array of "puzzles" which invite further study. These puzzling patterns include co-varying deviations from a repeating theme, and internal patterns that are not simply "repeats within repeats". For lack of a better term we are referring to these patterns as structured variation.

If tandem repeats have any function, the "structured variation"
described above could conceivably carry information. A perfect repeat cannot contain any information beyond the base sequence and copy number. However, a repeat with variation can contain considerably more information. Each of the three types of observable variation (substitutions, indels, and alternating repeats) has a direct analog in electronic information technology (amplitude modulation, phase modulation, and frequency modulation, respectively).

And then later, he mentions something interesting about the alignments:

Interestingly, the self-adjusting cylinder alignment, which was designed to simply optimize local alignment as would be expected in vivo, causes a marked increase in the visual coherence of all complex tandem repeats. This suggests to us that such coherence might reflect a minimal energy state, and may reflect actual structure in vivo, and might even reflect an unknown biological function. Logically, such coils could change circumference in multiples of the repeat length and so might modulate local genomic architecture.

Anyway, I am really excited about this, and hope to dig more into this as I have time.

Thanks to Sal for pointing this out to us!

Researching Creation / Todd Wood on Owen's Resolution to the Form/Function Debate

JB — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 16:11:00 +0000

Todd Wood has an excellent introduction to the form-vs-function debate, focusing on the ideas of Richard Owen. From his post:

Owen's eclectic embracing of functionalism and structuralism were answers to different questions: 1. Why are organisms so well-adapted? and 2. Why are there homologies?....Organismal similarity was to Owen based a [sic] natural law of the archetype. The differences Owen attributed to functional requirements. (Thus he saw two answers for two different questions.)

Simpler Living / Wide-Row Planting - My New Favorite Gardening Technique

JB — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 18:23:00 +0000

Last year I had really bad output from my garden, as well as the year before that, with the small exception of some tomatoes that grew well. This year, the garden is much more successful. I attribute that to three factors:

I started gardening much earlier this year. I started growing things from seed in my garage in February, and planted mid-March.
I used raised beds for several of my plots. This keeps the weeds out, and keeps the plants from drowning in our sometimes torrential rains.
I used wide-row planting.

What is wide-row planting? Another, slightly more descriptive name for it could be "massively overplanted garden beds". This year, I threw out most recommendations for plant and row spacing, and just flooded the garden beds with seeds.

The results have been phenomenal:

Grow more in less space
Don't have to stake pea plants
Less bother with weeding

Less maintenance - more food!

Here's my wide-row planted pea plants:

You might be saying, "but you do have stakes in there!" That's true, only because I got scared at the last moment and said, "what if they all fall over!?!? However, let me assure you, that the peas prefer to hang onto each other than the stakes - almost no pea plant is attached! My pole beans are another story - they like the stakes, though I am curious how well they would do without them.

In any case, these peas required no staking whatsoever - they just attach to each other and hold themselves up. And they are producing tons of peas. I actually think that I under-seeded it, as there are several spots where I didn't get a pea plant, and feel that the space is under-used.

Here is my massively overseeded lettuce:

I didn't overseed my collards, but I think I should have.

Here are my overseeded beans. On the left I have pole beans and on the right I have bush beans:

Next year I'm just doing bush beans, and leaving the stakes in the garage. The pole beans haven't produced anything, while the bush beans were wildly productive.

And then, here are two more beds:

The bed on the right has peppers. It is overseed but not massively so. I'll have to correct that next year :) The bed on the left is fairly well overseeded. It is a 3'x3' bed, and has 6 tomato plants and 3 cucumber plants. All of which are doing very well (I already got to make pickles from these guys, and the tomatoes are just about ripe).

I also overplanted my radishes, but I've already discussed those.

To get an idea about just how many seeds I planted, for the peas I used a single Burpee 4oz Value Pack for both beds (each 3'x3'), and for the beans I used one value pack for each bed. I'll probably do two packs for the peas next year, or at least spread them out better. From looking online, a 4oz packet of seeds will probably have about 300-400 seeds.

Anyway, why waste garden space? Sprinkle your seeds liberally. Using 3' rows with a decent walkway between rows will allow you to reach in anywhere you need, and give your plants plenty of companions while they grow. Consider wide-row planting (i.e. massive overseeding) for your garden next year!

Researching Creation / Creation Research Society Conference

JB — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 12:49:00 +0000

It's the conferencing time of year! The Creation Research Society is putting on their conference this year at University of South Carolina Lancaster July 23-24. Here is a preliminary list of the talks that are going on (i'll post again as this is updated):

Mark Armitage - Some Unusual Tiny Plants
Charles McCombs - Mutations and Natural Selection: A Population Genetics Study using Mendel's Accountant
Douglas A. Harold and Lindsay N. Harold - Origins Research Group Involving Current Students in Creation Research
Joel David Klenck - Genesis Model for the Origin, Variation, and Continuation of Human Populations
Charles McCombs - Reality of Chirality
Jeff Tomkins - Plant Cold Tolerance Research at ICR: An Intriguing Venture in Irreducible Complexity and Intelligent Design
Cheng Yeng Hung - Concurrence between Science and Bible on Our Immediate and Original Ancestors
Raúl E. López - The Paleolithic Archaeology of Palestine: A Biblical View.
James J. S. Johnson and Nathaniel T. Jeanson - What is a created 'kind' (mîn), as that term is used in Genesis, and from where do the 'kinds" we see today originate?
Thomas J. Foltz - The Creationist's Silver Bullet: Information, Origins and the Impossibility of Macro-Evolution
Joel David Klenck - Genesis and the Gardens of God
Joel David Klenck - Geographical Locations of Genesis Gardens
Samuel R. Henderson - A Theoretical Extension to Newtonian Gravitational Theory
Mary Beth De Repentigny - Looking for the "God Particle" at the Large Hadron Collider
Patricia Nason - What "Science" Is Being Taught in Our High Schools?
Don Moeller - Craniofacial / Dental Mutations in Zebrafish and Mice Disprove the Ability of Evolutionary Genetic and Developmental Biologic Models to Substantiate Functional Structural Intermediates in Craniofacial/ Dental Evolution
Ronald C. Marks - Science Worldviews Impacting Science
Eugene Chaffin - The Carbon Isotopes and the Strength of the Nuclear Force
Cheng Yeng Hung - Reevaluation of Earth Age Using Hung's Geochronological Dating Model
S. G. Smith - Men, Memes, and Metaphysics
Richard Overman - Evaluation Of The Ar/Ar Dating Process
Wayne Spencer - Extrasolar Planets and Creation
Keith Davies - The origin of the distinctive patterns of element abundances in the sun
Ronald G. Samec - Astrochronology: Toward a Maximum Apparent Age of the Time Dilated Universe
Danny R. Faulkner - Is the Flood Memorialized in the Constellations?
Michael Oard - Dinosaur Tracks, Eggs, and Bonebeds Explained Early in the Flood
Mark Armitage - The anatomy of light production in Photinus pyralis

Quite a list! I wish I had time to go to both this and the BSG conference, but funds are limited this year. Hopefully next year I can go to both, and maybe a a secular conference or two.

In any case, you can register for the conference here ($55 for CRS members, $90 for non-members).

In addition to all this, Danny Faulkner will be hosting a free field trip on Sunday, July 25 to Wood's Bay State Park, one of the Carolina bays.

Sounds like a lot of fun! As I mentioned, I'll update this when I get a finalized list of speakers, and I will also post the BSG schedule when it is available. You should come to one (or both) of the summer conferences!

Researching Creation / A Home Microbiology Lab

JB — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 02:49:00 +0000

Just found this site and thought someone here might find it interesting. Especially interesting is this page, with instructions on how to setup a kitchen microbiology lab.

Here is a virtual lab.

Simpler Living / Being Nice to the Bunnies

JB — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 13:39:00 +0000

Everyone I know who has the garden fences it off to keep the animals out. That seems a little unneighborly to me. Certainly, if some critters are decimating your garden, you should take some action. But, so what if you have to make do without 10% of your garden? Is it really worth the extra trouble? And, perhaps, is nature doing something that you don't realize?

I've never spent too much time worrying about pests. The neighborhood bunnies, last year, had their way with our tomatoes, so much so that I had to pick them while they were still green in order to get anything to eat.

However, a wonderful thing happened. Because the bunnies had eaten so many tomatoes, they had also spread around hundreds of tomato seeds! So, this year, all over my yard, tomato plants are springing up! Now, a lot of these are weeds - they are growing in a spot being used for some other purpose. But I'm going to let a lot of them go, and be thankful for the bunnies who ate last years tomatoes, but whose appetite actually multiplied my abundance of tomato plants this year.

This year, I've expanded my garden quite a bit, and added collards. Well, so far, the bunnies have left everything else alone - even the lettuce - and focused on the collards. I let them have them - if they take one crop and leave the others, why not live in peace? And, I found in the last few days that the collards are now growing strong. The bunnies knew how to eat the collards so that they kept growing well!

So, the bunnies, rather than being a pest, are actually helping my gardening efforts. Perhaps we would be wiser if, instead of trying to find ways to cage our plants away from the bunnies, we thought of ways to channel the bunny-power into spreading our seeds where we want them to. Maybe we should teach ourselves to live with nature, not against it.

Technology Musings / Cross-browser DIV Rotation by arbitrary degrees in CSS and/or javascript

JB — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 20:49:00 +0000

I've spent most of the day on this, so I thought I would share. Most people don't know this, but CSS3 has some *really* cool stuff coming - auto-rounded corners, gradients, and.... DIV rotations! Unfortunately, it will be about 5 years before any of this becomes mainstream. IE8 only has the very beginnings of CSS3 support.

So is there any way to get this on current browsers? Yes! The fine folks at CSS3Please.com have given us a way to do some of these cool effects using existing CSS. If you just want, just go their, edit the stylesheet on the web page (yes! it is editable!), and copy/paste the resulting CSS into your CSS file.

But what if you want dynamic rotation? Well, I looked at the CSS3Please source code, and figured out how it was all being calculated. The IE6, IE7, and IE8 part is the worst, because it relies on a DirectX Matrix transform operation (isn't Internet Explorer always fun to work with?). Not superfun, but do-able. However, to get this calculated, we will need a Matrix library. So, first, download and install the sylvester javascript library. Then, put this javascript into your page:

<script src="sylvester.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
function degreesToRadians(num) {
	return (num) * Math.PI / 180;
}
function createIEMatrixString(M) {
	return 'M11=' + M.e(1, 1) + ', M12=' + M.e(1,2) + ', M21=' + M.e(2,1) + ', M22=' + M.e(2,2);
}
function rotateElement(e, deg) {
	deg_str = deg + "";
	rotate_transform = "rotate(" + deg + "deg)";
	matrix_str = createIEMatrixString(Matrix.Rotation(degreesToRadians(deg)));
	filter_str = "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Matrix(sizingMethod='auto expand', " + matrix_str + ")";

	e.style["rotation"] = deg_str + "deg"; // CSS3
	e.style.MozTransform = rotate_transform; // Moz
	e.style.OTransform = rotate_transform; // Opera
	e.style.WebkitTransform = rotate_transform; // Webkit/Safari/Chrome
	e.style.filter = filter_str; // IE 6/7
	e.style.MsFilter = filter_str; // IE 8
	e.style["zoom"] = "1"; // ??? Probably IEs
}
</script>

Now, you can just do:

rotateElement(document.getElementById("whatever"), 20);

And that will rotate the element. Note that this *sets* the rotation, so if I do this several times it will only keep the rotation at what I set it to, it won't keep on adding rotations.

Anyway, a little bit of work, a little bit of code for your client to download, but it works.

UPDATE - just found this jquery plugin that *might* do something similar, but haven't looked at it closely yet.

Simpler Living / The Amazing Radish

JB — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 04:14:00 +0000

This year, I decided to try growing radishes. Why, you ask? Because, as a computer programmer, I like things to happen instantly. Unfortunately, gardens don't grow instantly. However, radishes grow in 30 days, which, in gardening terms, is a blink of an eye.

So I decided to grow a garden bed of radishes. Therefore, I decided to do some radish research, and found out several amazing things about radishes. The first thing I learned was that you can eat every part of every radish in every stage of life! You can eat the root, you can eat the seedlings, you can eat the leaves, you can eat the flowers, and you can eat the seed pods. Not only that, you can use the remains of the plant as food for other plants.

(Flowering Radishes)

So, here's what I did, and so far it's worked out really well:

I overplanted my bed - way overplanted
I thinned out the extra seedlings into a plastic dish (leaving plants about 2 inches apart), and used the seedlings as sandwich sprouts
I then harvested 3/4 of my radishes at harvest time, and kept both the leaves and the roots
I used the radish roots in salads and stir-frying, and I used the leaves in soups. I'll post my recipe later, but it's really easy. You could probably also use the leaves in a stir-fry, but wouldn't want to eat them raw.
I let the rest of my radishes go to seed. However, I found out that radish plants get really, really tall - about 4 feet tall. I added some supports, but even then most of them fell over.
I plucked the bean-looking pods from the radish plant, and - wow! - they had the texture of a green bean and the taste of a radish. You can use them just about anywhere, and the radishes were absolutely loaded with these things. I would guess that each plant had about 30 seed pods on them. And, while it doesn't have quite as much taste, the root is still edible.
I planted the radishes about March 16, and it's now June 8th, so it was about 84 days.

(Radish Seed Pods)

I think next year what I will do is, rather that just keeping the back row to go to seed, I'll just thin the radishes at the root stage from being a few inches apart to being a few feet apart.

But, that's not all. It turns out that radishes have one more trick up their sleeves. Because they have such a long root, they can actually pull nutrients from way down underground to the surface. So, you can use radishes as a "green manure". Plant them about 2-3 weeks before the first frost, and let the winter freeze kill them. They will bring nutrition from the sun and from below the soil to the top of the soil, then the winter freeze will kill them off, and they will nourish your soil over winter.

They actually have specialized radishes for this (fodder radishes), but really, for the small home gardener, any kind can be used. I imagine that the deep radish root will also be useful in breaking up clay soils.

Technology Musings / An Index to My Old IBM DeveloperWorks Papers

JB — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 03:53:00 +0000

I often have to refer people to my old IBM DeveloperWorks papers, but it always takes so long to find them. Therefore, I am going to post links to them all here to make them easier for me (and you) to find. The dates were pulled from the IBM site, and some of them seem incoherent. If I find the true release dates of the papers I'll put them in later.

Series 1: Theoretical Computer Science for Practical Computer Programmers

In this series, I introduced a lot of material that is usually only studied in theoretical computer science, and showed how it could be useful for practical programming:

Inside Memory Management (2004/11/16) - a look at a variety of ways that memory is managed in different systems. Includes a functional memory manager (malloc/free implementation) written in C. Covers manual memory management, reference counting systems, pooled allocation systems, and garbage collection. Sadly, I was not aware of Apple's combination of reference counting and autorelease pools at the time I wrote this.
Better Programming Through Effective List Handling (2005/01/05) - this is an introduction to how linked lists work, why they are so useful for a variety of tasks, and how languages such as Scheme take advantage of them in interesting ways. Starts in C, and includes a simple introduction to Scheme.
Higher Order Functions (2005/03/31) - Discusses how higher-order functions (functions that take a function as a parameter and/or functions that return a new function as a result) work and how they can be used to good benefit in programming. Also discusses the relative equivalence of closures and objects, and when to use each one. It begins using scheme, and then shows how to use everything in C.
Mastering Recursive Programming (2005/6/16) - this is an introduction to all of the fun associated with recursive programming. It starts with a simple introduction to recursion, and moves on to how recursion can be used to write programs that are provably correct, how (and why) to convert loops to recursion, how tail-calls work, and how tail-calls are implemented in assembly language.
Continuations and Advanced Flow Control (2006/05/24) - continuations are an amazing, generalized flow-control construct from which you can implement just about any other flow control you want (threading, throw/catch, generators, and prolog-style backtracking computations). The paper gives an introduction to a variety of flow-control structures (with various examples in Python, Prolog, and Java), and then shows how each one can be implemented using Scheme's continuation constructs. Probably needed more explanation on the backtrack stuff - it's pretty amazing, but quite a bit different from the way we normally think about computation.
Lazy Programming and Lazy Evaluation (2006/12/18) - this is an introduction to delayed evaluation, how it is implemented, and how it can be used practically. Shows how to use lazy evaluation to make use of infinite lists. Examples are in Scheme and Java.

Series 2: Metaprogramming

Metaprogramming is one of my favorite subjects. In this series I give an introduction to several kinds of metaprogramming and how they are done. I wish I knew ruby when I wrote these, as Ruby's metaprogramming system is just awesome!

Introduction to Metaprogramming (2005/10/20) - describes several metaprogramming systems, including CPP, M4, and Embedded SQL. Then shows how and why you might want to build your own metaprogramming system. Then I introduce Scheme's macro system, and how to do many of the same things that were in the other metaprogramming systems.
Metaprogramming Using Scheme (2006/05/02) - goes in-depth on how to write metaprogramming systems with Scheme, and then shows how this creates a super-easy way to make domain-specific languages. (Most DSLs are better done as metaprogramming systems for more general-purpose languages IMHO). Compares the flexibility of a Scheme-based DSL to XML-based configuration languages.
Enterprise Metaprogramming (2006/02/28) - describes the computational equivalence between graphical and textual metaprogramming systems, and why each one would be useful in different circumstances. It also shows how that even with the advance in ease of use of computer programming languages, there will always be a split between the roles of a domain expert and a programmer - no tool can bridge the gap. It then describes the Model-Driven Architecture (MDA), and how it can be used to extend the concept of metaprogramming further. An example MDA application is given in Scheme, which produces both a set of C++ structs and corresponding SQL data definition statements from a single diagram built by the Dia program.

Assembly Language for the Power Architecture Series

When I got a PowerPC Mac I wanted to learn PowerPC assembly language, but didn't have time. I thought, "hey, if I can convince IBM to pay me to write about it, that would give me a good excuse to learn it". That birthed this article series:

PlayStation 3 Programming with the Cell Broadband Engine

IBM's Cell processor (called the Cell Broadband Engine) was the driving force behind the PS3. It had a main processor and eight vector processors (each vector processor was a full-blown processor, though very limited). Given the right workload, and the processor would scream. However, if it wasn't programmed carefully, it would actually be slower than most other processors. This is especially difficult because the vector processors actually used a different assembly language with a different memory model than the main processor. This series walks a programmer through everything they need to know, from installing Linux on their PS3 to writing, complling, and linking their code.

There was supposed to be a final paper where I applied everything to a scientific application, but I got worn out by the end and just had to stop.

Simpler Living / Simplifying Sandwiches and Salads

JB — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 03:03:00 +0000

What can be simpler than a sandwich or salad? Isn't a salad itself the essence of simple living?

Kind of. The lettuce you can cut right from your garden. The onions you can pull out of your garden (though mine didn't grow this year). But there's one thing that doesn't grow in your garden - salad dressing.

I have to admit, I'm a sauce kind of guy. Sandwiches and hamburgers are usually dripping with mustard and ketchup (and sometimes mayo) and salads are usually drenched with dressing.

But then a fascinating thing happened - a few friends of mine started eating salads without dressing. For me, this was a shocking idea. Salad without dressing? Absurd! But then I started thinking about it. What parts of a salad are simple and what parts are not. Well, the dressing isn't. It's also the worst part for you, and the part that is the greatest distance from the garden.

But here's the deal - I can't do dry lettuce. I just can't. So I had to find a simpler way.

And then it dawned on me (you all are probably smart enough to figure it out - I'm a city boy, and these things take some thinking for me).

Strawberries.

Strawberries are one of the closest things that nature has to a sauce. They are juicy and sweet, and most importantly, liquidy. So, I tried to make a dry salad with only lettuce, onion, and sliced strawberries. And you know what? It worked! I had to use several strawberries, but, as long as I got a slice or two with each bite, the salad tasted pretty good!

If you were too desperate for a sauce, you could probably go a little further and actually crush the strawberries into a sauce, but I found that just having them there, sliced, was sufficient.

So there you have it - lettuce, onions, and strawberries - a royal, and simple, meal. Little or no preparation, just pulling things out of the garden and into a bowl.

This same concept also works for sandwiches. For sandwiches, I also like using avocados the same way I use strawberries. They are themselves a sauce. In fact, just a little rough handling of avocados is basically all it takes to make guacamole.

And who doesn't like a guacamole sandwich?

Tasty... and simple.

Simpler Living / Super-simple pickle recipe

JB — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 02:48:00 +0000

I don't like cucumbers, but they are very easy to grow. However, I do like pickles, but a lot of people made pickling sound hard. However, it's super-easy and super-quick with the right recipe. This is a modification of this recipe.

I got two small cucumbers from the garden. They were probably half-sized. I only picked them because I was impatient to wait for the rest of them. I then sliced them thinly. I also sliced a half of a small onion. I put these things in a small jar.

I then took 1/2 cup of vinegar and mixed it with 1/2 cup of sugar, and added just a little bit of salt, mustard seed, ground turmeric, ground cloves, and dill. I then boiled it until the sugar disappeared.

Once the sugar was dissolved, I just poured my stuff over my cucumbers, closed the lid to the jar, and stuck it in the refrigerator.

24 hours later...pickles!

I wonder, however, if all of the spices are needed. I think next time I'm going to go super-simple and see what it tastes like with just vinegar, sugar, and salt.

Simpler Living / Welcome to the Blog

JB — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 04:34:00 +0000

This blog is the log of an ongoing personal experiment - to see about living a simpler life in the suburbs. By simple I don't necessarily mean easy, at least according to the modern definition. By simple, I mean some combination of the following:

A shorter distance between needs and production
Less B.S. in my day
Living *with* God's creation rather than against it
Living in deep community with others
Appreciating the process as much as the results
Being able to live without modern advances
Being able to unplug from the constant daily electronic whirring machine without it or you falling apart

In short, living sacramentally. Being thankful to God and to others for everything we have, we eat, and we do, and doing everything in a meaningful way that also enhances community. It doesn't mean eschewing all things modern - I still make my money as a computer programmer - but it does mean ordering your life so that you could make it without them.

The first and most obvious thing to do is to start a garden - both to eat from and to learn with. So most of my first posts will be about gardening and making stuff with my garden.

And, a lot of this is just fun - I like to experiment and make stuff. It comes from programming computers where I never have really *made* anything at the end of the day, so this gives me the chance to be a part of the real world of making stuff, and experimenting with making stuff.

I also like to be minimalistic. I like to experiment with recipes and see if I can shave off ingredients and still get a decent result. Can I get something tasty with just two or three ingredients? Or with easier-to-find ingredients? Or something that just grows straight out of the ground?

In the long run, I expect that this style of living will decrease my annual costs. However, depending on what you do, it may require some capital expenses.

In any case, I hope you enjoy my blog, and enjoying with me my experiments and learning in this.

Also, I'll probably use this space as my personal blog, too, since that's part of community as well.

Technology Musings / A Simple HTML Geolocation Map with Twitter and Google Maps

JB — Wed, 26 May 2010 04:40:00 +0000

New Medio just released <a href="http://www.newmedio.com/site/postings/17?section_id=2">a cool new tool to do geolocation/geotagging maps of Twitter posts</a>. Can be used HTML-only (no Javascript coding required!) or with a Rails plugin.

Researching Creation / BSG 2010 Conference - Register Today!

JB — Fri, 21 May 2010 12:42:00 +0000

Registration for the 2010 BSG Conference is now open! I'm excited - Creation research is not a very hot topic in my city, so I rarely have people to talk about new ideas with. So I get excited when the BSG conference rolls around, because I get to spend some time listening, thinking, and talking about God's creation with other interested researchers. I'm giving either one or two talks this year (one has been accepted, the other is still in review).

If any of you are interested, please come! I love meeting readers. In addition, the conference will be at Truett-McConnell college, where Kurt Wise is setting up a Creation research center. It should be fun!

Researching Creation / Team Creation Award with Folding @ Home

Wed, 12 May 2010 14:23:00 +0000

For those of you who don't know, Stanford has a research project called "Folding@Home" which utilizes extra computing power on people's computers to make a massively parallel computer for doing research on protein folding. Back when I owned a PS3, I used to run this all the time, and started "team creation" for keeping score. Now, however, Dan Watts has been leading team creation, and has just generated a score of 1,000,000 points! Click here to view the team information, and click here to view the certificate.

If you want to be involved in this project, download the software, and then put in team number 59478 to be a part of our team.