reading materials

I've been reading a fairly excellent book recently (stolen again from Pat Hastings - sorry, I'll give it back soon). Mark Noll from Wheaton College wrote "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" quite a while back, and it's been an influential work on the history and current state of the minds of American evangelicals. Think of it as a commentary on the development of the mental habits American evangelical Christians often exhibit.

The book is (so far) largely a constructive criticism towards habits common to evangelicals (for example, individualism, populism, preaching for an emotional response, urgency of action over thought and deliberation, etc), but so far the real strength of the book has been documenting how these habits came about, and in fact, how these tendencies saved Christianity in America at different times in this nations history (though many became weaknesses over time). Two particularly interesting notes are how the separation of church and state may have ultimately led to the "consumer church" culture, and how the Conservative Right became identified (and disliked) so closely with evangelical Christians.

Reading the history of how the evangelical movement developed is like seeing the Ecclesiastical quote "there is nothing new under the sun" being fleshed out with old examples that parallel modern-day church/sect movements. I'm only at the start of the second section, page 72, but it's been a very rewarding read so far.

Hope everyone had a good thanksgiving =)

nick trefethen is funny

Interesting note - problem 21.5 in Dr Nick Trefethen's book "Numerical Linear Algebra" is hard. My prof assigned it to us on accident, but realized soon afterwards that it was basically an unsolved problem. He emailed Trefethen, asking him about the problem in his book, and Trefethen's reply was (almost verbatim)

"Dear me, I have no idea what I was thinking when I put that problem in the book!"

Heh.

porno porno PORNO

There. Got your attention, didn't I. Extra points if you can tell me what the title is a quote from.

But no joke, I watched a documentary tonight called "The Price of Pleasure", hosted by a bunch of groups (the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, the Radio-TV-Film Department, and the Senior Fellows honors program of the College of Communication of the University of Texas; the student group Texas Feminists; and the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault.) The intro (abstract?) for the film

Critics of pornography have observed two trends in pornography in recent years: Commercially produced sexually explicit material is more mainstream and normalized than ever, while at the same time it has become more overtly cruel and degrading to women and more racist. Why is that, and what effect does it have on our ideas about gender and power, sexuality and relationships?

To explore this question, the documentary film “The Price of Pleasure: Pornography, Sexuality and Relationships” investigates three aspects of the pornography industry — production, content and consumption — to help gain a deeper understanding not only of the material but the larger culture in which it’s produced and consumed. The film includes interviews with pornographers, pornography performers, and scholars in psychology, media, economics, and popular culture. Men and women candidly discuss how pornography has affected them and their partners. The film examines pornography’s effects on the performers and audience, moving beyond liberal celebrations and conservative denunciations to engage a nuanced discussion of desire and harm, choice and system constraint, liberty and responsibility.

It was definitely a documentary to make you think about things, and it makes a large difference when taking erotic material to remove it from the private sector and put it under scrutiny for a large group of people to examine. In light of the social commentary that Vox (my church in Austin) puts on everything, this was an especially relevant topic when discussing racist and sexist content that emerges in pornographic material and its impact on popular culture in the past and present. Interesting note - the filmmaker is Chyng Sun, a Taiwanese woman who came to the US at 30, and her observation as an outsider to US culture brings out points I probably wouldn't have noticed otherwise.

Here are links to both the website and the trailer. A word of caution; the trailer is fairly graphic even when censored. If anyone would like to borrow the DVD, I also have it and would love to watch/discuss it with you if you're ever interested.

pretty humbling

An excerpt from an interesting old article - a computer scientist attempts to quantify in bits about how much information a human being can remember. After running a long set of experiments, the result he comes up with is that

The remarkable result of this work was that human beings remembered very nearly two bits per second under all the experimental conditions. Visual, verbal, musical, or whatever--two bits per second. Continued over a lifetime, this rate of memorization would produce somewhat over 10⁹ bits, or a few hundred megabytes.

Kind of interesting. If the brain is a computer, it is a completely different type of computer than the ones we're used to.

Full article at http://www.merkle.com/humanMemory.html