May 4, 2008

Amazon's Kindle Back in Stock

Amazon’s Kindle is a unique technology that is positioned to deliver electronic and print media, including books and newspapers, in a package that is highly mobile yet provides a reading experience matching a typed page. The product rapidly sold out late last year and Amazon's supply chain seemingly collapsed. Those issues are over and it appears that a warehouse full of product awaits consumers.

The low power grayscale screen provides highly readable text and wireless connectivity, without a monthly service charge, enables readers to access the Kindle store from most locations.
With over 100,000 electronic books available, the innovative device is likely to achieve significant market penetration for mainstream book readers. In my estimation, the current offering will fail to capture many of the classic texts of interest to Christians, instead emphasizing books likely to generate significant sales. Even so, the Kindle represents the coming change to fully electronic media, in which vast libraries are at the command of the reader. An incredible amount of content is “just there”, wherever you go, in a highly readable format.

Because the electronic books are of little value once reader, I would prefer a subscription service that charged a monthly fee for unlimited books, a rental rather than purchase. This would truly place a mobile library at my fingertips without significant (initial) investment.

Posted by tim at 6:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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March 23, 2008

A Lesson from ER

I stopped watching ER more years ago than I can remember. However, this scene from a reason episode has a lesson worth considering.

Posted by tim at 5:41 AM

December 21, 2007

Blogs For Life Set for January 22, 2008

FRC will host the third-annual Blogs For Life conference on January 22nd, 2008 at Family Research Council Headquarters in Washington, D.C. beginning at 8:00a.m. This event will precede the March for Life, which will mark the 35th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision.

A webcast will be available for those who can't make it to D.C..

Speakers to include:

Hadley P. Arkes

Michael Illions

Eric Schiedler

Jill Stanek

Star Parker

Details and registration are developing, so check back for more details after the new year.

Posted by tim at 8:42 AM

December 13, 2007

Tyranny Reigns in Zim

Once a regional breadbasket, Zimbabwe has grappled with rampant inflation during seven years of recession. Shortages of foreign exchange, fuel and food have been widely blamed on mismanagement by the government of President Robert Mugabe.

On a monthly basis, the consumer price index rose by 18.6 percent, according to the Central Statistical Office (CSO).

The central bank has forecast inflation to rise to between 700-800 percent by March before it starts to slow down, although some analysts say Zimbabwe could for the first time record four digit inflation figures this year.

Its inflation rate is one of the highest in the world.

"The whole of housing expenditure, education and food and non-food items have contributed more to the annual inflation figure," CSO acting director Moffat Nyoni told journalists.</blockquote>Few countries have been so devastated by the policies put in place by one man. Mugabe, who last year denied the obvious widespread food shortages, now blames the country's economic nightmare on others:<blockquote>Mugabe denies charges that his policies are responsible for the economic crisis, maintaining the economy has been sabotaged by Western powers opposed to the seizures.</blockquote>His lies are apparent - inflation results from <strong>government</strong> creation of money.

Despite all of this and much more, President Robert G. Mugabe's party nominated him as its candidate in the presidential election in March.

Posted by tim at 10:08 PM

July 30, 2007

We’ve been deceived in the most profound manner

Man vs Wild macho man Bear Grylls checked into hotels during his survival adventures and had his crew help out in difficult situations:

But this British adventurer is now the subject of an investigation by U.K.'s Channel 4, which already has confirmed that Grylls checked into motels on a few occasions when he was depicted on TV having slept under the stars. Other allegations have been made suggesting that the crew that records Grylls in action isn't as hands-off as it might appear to viewers.

[snip]

For all its self-professed realism, "Man" always required some suspension of disbelief. Grylls often commented on the painful loneliness of being alone in the wild, but unless his camera crew was staffed by bears, he did have some company out there.

In retrospect, Grylls' preternatural unflappability in even the most dire of circumstances always seemed a bit too good to be true. In one episode, he made an interminable slog through hip-deep snow drifts in the French Alps. Braving the frigid conditions, his frustration was evident only in the following comment: "I'd really murder for a cup of tea."

For all we know now, perhaps he was sipping English Breakfast on fine china between takes.

Perhaps at this point we should pause and question the legitimacy of educational/nature reality shows in which the actors unnecessarily risk life and limb in a portrayal of bravery and survival tactics. Do we really expect to a person to purposefully put themselves in a dire situation so that we can be thrilled by their eventual survival?

Posted by tim at 5:47 PM

July 20, 2007

That Intelligent Checkers Game

There are 500,995,484,682,338,672,639 possible different checkers play positions and a computer program, called "Chinook", knows them all. If you play your game perfectly the best possible outcome against the computer is a draw. You can never win.

Chinook was developed by scientists at the University of Alberta who used an average of 50 computers for two years (876,000 computational hours) to determine the best move to play in every situation of a game.

The leader of the team described the feat this way:

"We've taken the knowledge used in artificial intelligence applications to the extreme by replacing human-understandable heuristics [rules of thumb] with perfect knowledge. It's an exciting demonstration of the possibilities that software and hardware are now capable of achieving."

The assembled knowledgebase of checkers combinations is rather impressive but don't you find it somewhat ironic that the strictly deterministic algorithm, with "perfect knowledge", is called "intelligent"? Leading up to this pinnacle, algorithms were created to mimic human thought by employing heuristics, Bayesian networks, expert systems and other automated inference engines.

Continue reading "That Intelligent Checkers Game"

Posted by tim at 11:18 PM

June 25, 2007

Don't Live Your Faith

That's what Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) told an audience of 10,000 at the United Church of Christ in Hartford:

"Doing the Lord's work is a thread that's run through our politics since the very beginning," Obama told church members. "And it puts the lie to the notion that the separation of church and state in America -- a principle we all must uphold and that I have embraced as a constitutional lawyer and most importantly as a Christian -- means faith should have no role in public life."

His notion of faith appears to be a hollow appeal to sentimentality, in which one assents to a particular ideal but never experiences a life altering change. Or, perhaps his view reflects a desperate attempt to find meaninging through an irrational faith that cannot be expressed or known.

Continue reading "Don't Live Your Faith"

Posted by tim at 12:35 PM

May 19, 2007

Adult stem cells and Spinal Cord Injuries

Following a head on collision, Jeni Rummelt was paralyzed from the waste down. After six years as a paraplegic, therapy with adult stem cells has apparently given her feeling in her lower extremities:

The first step, a trip to Moscow, Russia. For a procedure not available in the u-s - adult stem cell therapy at the Neurovita Clinic.

"The give you shots for four days on the 5th day what those shots have done is make your bone marrow create an abundance of stem cells."

The stem cells are drawn from Rummelt's own blood and separated in a special machine. Then they are injected into her spinal fluid. Three trips and six injections later Rummelt can use her hip-flexers to crawl. A considerable feat, after not being able to move the lower half of her body for years.

"I had no feeling, no sensation, if my leg fell I had no idea at all," said Rummelt. With therapy Rummelt grows stronger everyday she can even stand. And she can actually feel pain in her foot, five years post injury.

Rummelt credits the stem cell injections and her intense physical therapy.

The potential is quite amazing. So is this video.

It's thrilling to see the development of potential therapies for injuries previously thought to be permanent. However, you have to wonder why this has gotten to little coverage. Reflections of a Paralytic comments

It is disappointing that this story is not found anywhere else. Any treatment that gives feeling and movement back to a patient with a complete spinal cord injury 5 years later is truly a medical breakthrough. This simply does not happen.

Research and applications involving adult stem cells simply do not get the same attention that is given to mere speculation concerning the potential of embryo destroying stem cell research. Why?

Posted by tim at 3:37 AM

May 11, 2007

Christless Christianity

After a lengthy blogging hiatus I bring you two paragraphs from Michael Horton’s article, Christless Christianity:

No matter what we say we believe about Christ's person and work, if we aren't constantly bathed in it, the end result will lead to H. Richard Niebuhr's description of Protestant liberalism: "A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through a Christ without a cross." According to University of North Carolina sociologist Christian Smith, the working religion of America's teens-whether evangelical or liberal, churched or unchurched-is "moralistic, therapeutic deism." And the answer to that, according to many megachurches and emerging churches is "do more; be more authentic; live more transparently." This is the good news that will change the world?

Christless Christianity can be promoted in contexts where either the sermon is a lecture on timeless doctrine and ethics or Christ gets lost in all the word studies and applications. Christ gets lost in churches where activity, self-expression, the hype of "worship experiences" and programs replace the ordinary ministry of hearing and receiving Christ as he is given to us in the means of grace. Christ gets lost when he is promoted as the answer to everything but our condemnation, death, and the tyranny of sin, or as the means to the end of more excitement, amusement, better living, or a better world-as if we already knew what these would look like before God addressed us in his law and gospel.

To read the entire article you need to subsribe, which is well worth doing. Or you can sign-up for a free trial.

Posted by tim at 6:17 PM

March 28, 2007

Adult Stem Cell Research to Benefit Diabetics

Researchers continue to make substantive progress toward the application of adult stem cells to diabetes treatment. Unlike embryonic stem cell research, the therapies are more than a conjecture - they are reported with concrete clinical evidence. In addition, adult stem cell applications do not involve the destruction of a human embryo.

Here are seven recent reports from the Coalition of Americans for Research Ethics (stemcellresearch.org):