"Back to the Front: Emerging Artists"
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Featuring: Philadelphia Artists Exhibit Duration: September 11 - November 06, 2004
Location: Slought Foundation 4017 Walnut Street Philadelphia, PA 19104-3513
Reception: Saturday, September 11, 2004 ; 6:30-8:30pm
There was a time I still remember (somewhere in the 60's) when I was driving in the back of a Ford mustang to O'Hare airport and held my girlfriend's hand (now she is my wife - for thirty three years). I can still remember what it felt like, strange.Read the poem…
''Just in the past few months,'' Bartlett said, ''I think a light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.''The article is compelling reading (but I may be easily mislead). Nonetheless, I find this passage troubling:
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.If it sounds like me at my worst moments, how do I evaluate him?The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'
which took me to Ian's Shoelace SiteHow to Tie Your Shoes
[Sharp Sand]
When your feet hurt, as mine do, you concern yourself with your footware, including how you lace your shoes.
Welcome to Ian's Shoelace Sitewhere I may learn how to tie my shoes so they do not unlace at inconvenient times.
Who'd have thought there was so much technical knowledge and creativity tied up in shoelaces? Most people figure they learned all they needed to know about shoelaces in kindergarten!
35. The CALVINISTS are (usually) right about most things Personally, I prefer a sort of Horton-Capon cocktail, with Lutheran soteriology for a chaser. I guess I better say I am a sortof good, sometimes bad Calvinist. The good Calvinists, while often right, are usually either cage phase or just annoying. But Calvinism is more fun than any other theology, mostly because Calvinists fight particularly viciously.
I wish the last part were less true than it is. We can be a regrettable blot on the Church.
[Boar's Head Tavern: A BHT Must Read]A BHT Must Read
This is why Tim Keller is rapidly becoming one of my favorite preachers. His explanation of a Gospel witness that mixes a variety of approaches mirrors what I am trying to do in the diverse kinds of ministry that I am doing at OBI. Making the Gospel attractive (because so much of the baggage isn't.) Answering objections. Dealing with the cultural substitutes. Emphasizing community. Finding the place for a more thorough, Biblical explanation of the Gospel.
This is just superb and well worth keeping and studying. (Thanks to Mr. Monergism for the link.)
Posted by Michael Spencer at October 25, 2004 03:54 PM | Comments (0)
Tonight during our Dynamics of Biblical Change class, Dr. Powlison shared a quotation with us from one of his teachers. It went something like this: The amount of glory you bring to God is not measured by the amount you accomplish, but rather by the difference between what you are in yourself and what you become by grace.
I figured I'd bring this a step further and point out that that quotation (as I understand it) is from Jack Miller, whose life and teaching affected so many people from the US to Uganda, Ireland to India.
The problem with an arrangement like this is that contact with other students is lost (except for time time waiting in line for a cup of coffee at the break). Now, granted, I know a number of the auditors/students already from church, but we don't often have a chance to talk (not about class and counseling issues, at least).
But here is a fellow student, moved by the same things I am. He's sitting here in the virtual school lunchroom (at Sacred Journey » Prayer Requests and the Litany of Despair), and I can find out what moved him, and who he is. (And, I can meet him at the Indelible Grace Concert next week. We're cutting class, too.)
Unison is a file-synchronization tool for Unix and Windows. It allows two replicas of a collection of files and directories to be stored on different hosts (or different disks on the same host), modified separately, and then brought up to date by propagating the changes in each replica to the other.
I've started using Unison for maintaining directories of lecture notes:
(I also use the little laptop at work, where I synchronize a directory of meeting notes with my workstation/server on my desk.)
This works wonderfully, so far. I've recommended it to a co-worker who uses Windows, since it can work easily across shared directories (if he doesn't want to use ssh).
After breaking the ketchup down into its component parts, the testers assessed the critical dimension of "amplitude," the word sensory experts use to describe flavors that are well blended and balanced, that "bloom" in the mouth. "The difference between high and low amplitude is the difference between my son and a great pianist playing 'Ode to Joy' on the piano," Chambers says. "They are playing the same notes, but they blend better with the great pianist." Pepperidge Farm shortbread cookies are considered to have high amplitude. So are Hellman's mayonnaise and Sara Lee poundcake. When something is high in amplitude, all its constituent elements converge into a single gestalt. You can't isolate the elements of an iconic, high-amplitude flavor like Coca-Cola or Pepsi. But you can with one of those private-label colas that you get in the supermarket. "The thing about Coke and Pepsi is that they are absolutely gorgeous," Judy Heylmun, a vice-president of Sensory Spectrum, Inc., in Chatham, New Jersey, says. "They have beautiful notes--all flavors are in balance. It's very hard to do that well. Usually, when you taste a store cola it's"-- and here she made a series of pik! pik! pik! sounds--"all the notes are kind of spiky, and usually the citrus is the first thing to spike out. And then the cinnamon. Citrus and brown spice notes are top notes and very volatile, as opposed to vanilla, which is very dark and deep. A really cheap store brand will have a big, fat cinnamon note sitting on top of everything."
I always wondered what made the difference: I may not really like Coke or Pepsi, or some other top-of-the-line brands, but I could not bear the off-brand colas or mayonnaise or whatever: there was a difference.
The whole article is fascinating, in it's scope (all of food) and focus (ketchup).
It's the solution to all your RSS bandwidth over usage. In 10 seconds, start saving your bandwidth! We support RSS 0.91, 2.0, Atom, RDF and more!
Apparently they read a given RSS or Atom feed for you (just insert my.rsscache.com/ after the http:// in a URL) and track your IP address. Once you've requested the same feed five or so times, they'll empty it until something new is posted. This reduces user's inbound bandwidth usage. A blog owner can modify the URLs for her feeds, and readers will then benefit from the caching service without taking special action.
Naturally, I wanted to know, cui bono? who benefits from this (or, better, how does RSScache/D2Soft win)? Apparently they will sell a suitably-scaled version of the caching service to site-owners, expecting to reduce their bandwidth usage (and resulting overcharges) substantially. For instance, they'd reduce the monthly bandwidth usage of my feed from around 600MB to 50MB (based on 60K hits/month, which I haven't seen (I have 40K hits over the last year on the whole site).
I found it funny that the feed they used to e-mail me was one that was abandoned a few years ago.
Update: I also wondered if RSScache might insert ads into the feed, which seem's to be the question in McGee's Musings about Engadget.