Motes in the Sunbeam

I had a chance to spend time with an old college friend and he inspired me to resume my blog. Today's post is a spiritual sequel to this post from last year:

http://blog.spotd.net/2014/05/hardly-mote-in-sunbeam.html

I wrote that after a visit to Washington DCA reminded me of the amazing things that man has accomplished. It also reminded me that we are dependent on God for these abilities, whether we recognize it or not. I concluded that post with this quote, from an article written by Truman G. Madsen:

When man measures himself against the infinity of the cosmos he is almost nothing, "hardly a mote in the sunbeam." But when he measures himself against Christ, who overmasters all of these worlds and world systems, and realizes his kinship to Christ, all diminutives become superlatives. The more man comprehends the vastness of the universe, the more he recognizes his own dignity and worth. The cosmos is God's temple. But man is his offspring--a living temple, given dominion over the rest.

During Spring Break last week, we enjoyed very contrasting experiences. We spent three days in a state park, disconnected from the digital world. It was a time to enjoy nature and appreciate our amazing world. Then we drove to Cape Canaveral to watch a rocket launch and visit the Kennedy Space Center, fully immersing ourselves in the technology and achievements of the modern era.

Despite the seeming differences in these two experiences, I came away with greater appreciation for the greatness of God. The excellence demonstrated by the achievements of our space program are significant and that excellence glorifies God because, in the end, it comes from Him, just as does the Suwannee River. And I marvel at them and give thanks to the Lord for the wonders of this world.

Furious Nature

You need to visit this link, if only to watch the stunning, short video of a tornado hitting the St. Louis airport.

It's a stark reminder of how powerless we are against an unpredictable and unstoppable force like the weather.

I corrected the above link (4/26, 12:29 pm)

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In Which I am an Environmental Hero

I have always felt like a good environmentalist. Not a fanatic, of course, but very conscientious. I recycle everything that is recyclable. I gather old batteries and household chemicals for proper disposal. And I reuse Ziploc bags whenever possible. This is my greatest achievement in the environmental area.

Example:

Isaac pooped the other day, as is his custom. It was my privilege to clean the young man, and faced with the terrible choice about where to put the diaper, I considered the following:

1. Bathroom garbage
2. Kitchen garbage
3. Direct to garbage can

Of the three, the latter is the least injurious. Any and all smells are taken outside. We never did buy a diaper genie, despite every intention to do so with each child. With Isaac we usually put the diapers in the bathroom in his room, the door of which is always closed. Most of the time this works well, but this this was an especially odiferous diaper, and I was struck with a marvelous idea.

Earlier in the morning we had been cleaning the freezer and had removed some freezer-burned fruit. The ziploc bag remained on the counter, and I decided to put the diaper in that used bag. This afforded me the great liberty of putting the bomb wherever I desired. It was liberating, and a wonderful second life for that plastic bag.

Before you remind me that putting a disposable diaper in a plastic bag, both of which would soon be on their way to a landfill, was no great act of environmental heroism, I can assure you that in the environment nearest to me, where my nostrils were now saved from accidental offensive olfactory ingestion, epic poems were thought of (though not written) and all rejoiced at the banishment of the beast.

Aftermath

Well, my face freaks me out a little when I look in the mirror and I feel pretty lousy. It has been a humbling reminder of my human frailty. I am going to bed, but before I do...

I will not be running for a little bit, but found this article, critical of barefoot running, to be pretty interesting. I remain intrigued by the idea, and not fully convinced by either side.

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Dive Deep

There is a new movie coming out on February 4th, Sanctum. It was inspired in part by an experience that the filmmaker had while diving with Wes Skiles. I've written about Wes before. He passed away in a diving accident last June and was a great guy.


You can read more about the origin of the film and how Wes took Jim Cameron on his first cave dive a few years ago.

Awesome Video Saturday CXLVIII

A few months ago Wes Skiles died accidentally, while diving off the coast of Florida. He was a great guy, and this video was put together as a tribute for The Jacksonville Film Industry Reception. He shot all of the video, including the musicians.

A Fascinating Life

A local photographer, filmmaker, and explorer passed away Wednesday while diving. By any definition, Wes Skiles was a cool guy. He had done things that most of us would never even attempt, such as mapping underground waterways and exploring uncharted caves. He directed films, worked in TV, and has the cover photo in this month's National Geographic.

I was able to get to know Wes a little bit over the past 6 years or so. As someone who wanted to be a filmmaker at one time, I was fascinated by his work. He was a big idea guy and was able to see some of those ideas come to fruition. I know he had a lot more that he hoped to accomplish as well.

He recently had a photo selected for the cover of National Geographic Magazine. You can see some of his work here.

His wife, 2 children, and other family are in our thoughts and prayers.

Mineral Rush

Significant, possibly enormous, mineral deposits have been found in Afghanistan. It is both problematic and wonderful. It could transform the poor nation into a commodity powerhouse, which is extraordinary. It may also have other, unintended consquences.

SPOTD #159

It has been almost a month. There's a lot here to enjoy.

Today's Phrase:
Too many football losses lately.

Actual
Cuando pierdes, no pierdes la lección.

Phonetic with emphasis on bold syllable
Kwan-do pyair-days, no pyair-days lah lek-syown.

Translation
When you lose, don't lose the lesson.

Sweet Rebirth
Mercedes is planning a spiritual successor to one of its all-time classic cars- the Gullwing. Take a moment and check out these beautiful pics.

Movies
I'll keep it brief-
Valkyrie: Pretty good. Solid acting, interesting story.
Inkheart: Wholesome, didn't care much about the characters. Nice story.
Wolverine: Better than expected. Effects could have been better. Beautiful locales.
Next: Forgettable but fun. I fell asleep part-way through for about 5 minutes.

Innovations
Why is Halo 3 ODST a significant release? Find out here.
What implications does the new iPod Nano have on other gadgets? This post from Popular Mechanics supposes that the inclusion of the video camera makes it an even more formidable device. I just learned that it actually has an FM tuner as well.
This is a review of historical sports innovations.
A new kind of portable shelter promises to provide better conditions for those displaced by natural disasters.

Rat Eater
There is a pitcher plant in the Phillipines that is tailor-made to chow down on small vertebrates like rats.

Anti-Papparazzi
A Russian billionaire has installed a countermeasure against photography. It may be illegal, and it is an interesting technology.

Link of the Day
Normally I reserve this space for something silly, but I thought it would be worthwhile to highlight the life of an extremely influential person that few of us were aware of- Norman Borlaug.
This was an article that was written when Borlaug turned 90. Borlaug died a few weeks ago at age 95. This remembrance also looks at the significance of a man who may have saved more lives than any other person.

For Dads

Happy Father's Day to the dads out there (me too).

In a very manly bit of helpful information, given a recent uptick in animal intrustion into suburban areas, here is how to predator-proof your home AND survive angry animal attacks.

Happy hunting.

SPOTD #153

We're going on a little trip later today, but I have some posts in the queue, so never fear.

Today's Phrase:
From pioneering industrialist Henry Ford.

Actual
El fracaso es una oportunidad de empezar de nuevo, de manera mas inteligente.

Phonetic with emphasis on bold syllable
Ell frah-cah-so ess oo-nah ah-pore-too-nee-dahd day em-pay-sar day nway-vo, day mah-nair-ah mahs een-tay-lee-hen-tay.

Translation
Failure is the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently


Movies
We saw Star Trek. I liked it. More here.

Tracking
Michael Yon is a self and reader-financed journalist who has become well known for dispatches from Afghanistan and Iraq. He has been writing about a tracking school in Borneo and it is fascinating. Soldiers from friendly armies all over the world go to this school to learn both urban and jungle/forest tracking. Good stuff.


I Wonder What's in Here?
This is a helpful article from the Wall Street Journal's health columnist on supposedly healthy foods.

Lava Livin'
There is a huge underwater volcano that has led to adaptations in sea life that are new to many scientists. Pretty cool.

Kryptos
There is a sculpture at the CIA headquarters in Virginia called Kryptos. It contains a code that has not been decyphered in the almost 20 years since the sculpture was dedicated. This is an interesting story about it from Wired.

Conspiring Minds
The internet has made it easier for conspiracy nuts to disseminate theories and ideas. This article helps explain how.

Link of the Day
Although the Swine Flu fears have subsided, authorities have produced a simple test at Do I have Swine Flu? It never hurts to be certain.

SPOTD #152

Coming at you from sunny, and increasingly warm, Florida.

Today's phrase:
An excellent phrase, inspired by one of the items below.

Actual:
Más tocino, por favor.

Phonetic with emphasis on bold syllable:
Mahs toe-see-no, pore fah-vore.

Translation:
More bacon, please.

We've Come a Long Way
Since Joseph's aunt and uncle gave him this little gem at Christmas my love of Nerf weapons has been reborn. I happened upon this retrospective of Nerf's finest creations.

Movies
Disturbia: A pretty good thriller. Not a bad rental. Not all that surprising, and a little grisly, but fun.
Run, Fatboy Run: Very funny british movie that had me a little misty at the end. It's the little boy. Not too Hollywoody, with some wacky, but not totally outrageous characters.
Bolt: The introductory sequence to this movie was great. I would watch a show like that. The kids loved it- "Zoom zoom."
Duplicity: First movie I've seen in the theater since Benjamin Button in December. Not bad, but not great. Slick and well-acted, but insubstantial.

Good Sport
This was a great story from the Miami Herald of a local kid getting an unlikely shot at the NFL. I'm not sure if he got drafted, its a good story.
In less happy news, former BYU quarterback John Beck was cut from the Dolphins. His only legacy is the classy way that he played, but I guess that's better than nothing.

Keep on Shrugging
I've written about Atlas Shrugged 5 Times on the blog. One of my favorite books ever, and it may (MAY) finally be made into a movie.

World's Oldest Lady loves...Bacon
And who can blame her? At 115 years she can do whatever she wants.

Idiot Watch
A German woman jumped into the polar bear exhibit at the Berlin Zoo, and then was attacked. I think she got exactly what she deserved.
Honorable mention? Whoever engineered the flyover of the 747 in New York City on Monday.

Link of the Day
Speaking of biting animals, how many piranhas does it take to eat a person? Click the link and find out.

SPOTD #151

It hasn't been that long since the last edition. I've just read a lot of great stuff, especially the link of the day.
I'll be pulling for Michigan State tonight. UNC is pretty formidable. Should be a good game.

Today's phrase:
From Winston Churchill. He would know.

Actual:
El éxito es aprender a ir de fracaso en fracaso sin desesperar.

Phonetic with emphasis on bold syllable:
Ell ake-see-toe ess ah-prain-dare ah eer day frah-cah-so enn frah-cah-so seen dace-ace-pare-ar.

Translation:
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.

Rare Dolphins
A large group of endangered Irrawaddy dolphins was found near Bangladesh. This is great, and not just because these dolphins look like alien dolphins (they are actually more closely related to orcas than the familiar bottlenose dolphins).

Battlestar Blues
I am feeling the lack of one of my favorite shows, Battlestar Galactica, and it looks like I'm not alone.
Another show has left the air, ER, and I think that it did so quite well.

Bad Film = Good Humor
Eric Snider reviews Bruce Willis' 1991 film Hudson Hawk:

Die Hard and Die Hard 2: Die More Harder were huge hits in 1988 and 1990, and that gave Willis the confidence to try an idea he'd come up with himself. The concept: a grating action-comedy where the action doesn't make sense and the comedy isn't funny.
The film: Hudson Hawk
The result: I CANNOT SEE YOU, FOR I HAVE CLAWED MY EYES OUT.

Black Market Spokane
A ban on detergents deemed environmentally unfriendly has led residents of Spokane Washington to Idaho.

Bad Call
An interesting bit of history has emerged between T.S. Elliot and George Orwell. Orwell orginally sent the classic book Animal Farm to the publisher where Elliot was director. It was rejected, as its politics were not all that convincing. Very interesting in retrospect.

Link of the Day
I saw this on the Travel Channel- it is something called the Hellfire Challenge at a wing joint called SmokeEaters. The extra-hot sauce has the equivalent of 1/2 a Habanero pepper PER WING! I once ate two habaneros as part of a pepper challenge, but I had non of the restrictions of this place:

1. SIGN WAIVER FORM ADMITTING THAT YOU ARE AN IDIOT FOR THE DAMAGE YOU WILL BE CAUSING YOUR MIND, BODY, AND SPIRIT FOR ATTEMPTING THE HELLFIRE CHALLENGE.
2. PARTICPANT HAS 10 MINUTES TO EAT 12 WINGS TO THE BONE.
3. AFTER EATING 12 WINGS PARTICPANT MUST WAIT AN ADDITIONAL 5 MINUTES AT THE TABLEBEFORE EATING OR DRINKING ANYTHING.
4. NOTHING TO EAT OR DRINK DURING THE CHALLENGE INCLUDING THE 5 MINUTE WAITING PERIOD.
5. NO NAPKINS ARE ALLOWEED TO BE USED DURING THE CHALLENGE OR DURING THE 5 MINUTE WAITING PERIOD.
6. PARTICPANT MUST LICK CLEAN ANY SAUCE ON HANDS BEFORE THE 5 MINUTE WAITING PERIODWILL START.

This is just nuts. Would any of you try it?

Climate Change, Shmimate Change

This is an interesting column that explores the weakening "consensus" on Global Warming.

Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the "hottest in history" and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.
Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit that, thanks to "natural factors" such as ocean currents, temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this cooling effect is merely "masking the underlying warming trend", and that the temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).
Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a "scientific consensus" in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world's most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that "consensus" which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.
Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month's Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and "environmentalists" gathered to plan next year's "son of Kyoto" treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for "combating climate change" with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times.

It really comes down to the question of priorities. Where do we allocate our finite resources? It should be focused on the issues that we KNOW we can affect, such as child mortality due to unsafe water.

Pump it out Chief!

Frank Mundus was a true man of the sea, the rumored inspiration for Jaws' Captain Quint. In Mundus' own words:

Everything he wrote was true, except I didn’t get eaten by the big shark. I dragged him in.

Read this New York Times obituary for more information about this very colorful figure.

Cuba's Katrina?

This is a round-up of info regarding the situation in Cuba after the multiple storms that have hit the island:

• Castro is playing games with foreign aid, as this Investor's Business Daily editorial illustrates.
• Babalu highlights the experience of a British couple that was vacationing on the island during Ike:

  COUPLE from Knutsford were barricaded in a Cuban hotel restaurant for nine hours after a hurricane hit their holiday resort.
  Nic Casey and Paul Dootson also had to manage on food rations and without running water as the island of Cayo Coco was cut off from the mainland in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike last week.
  For four days she was unable to contact her family to let them know she was safe.
  She described how she had caught snippets about an imminent hurricane on Spanish-speaking news channels before official word came from the hotel. “We’d been out on the beach and we came back to the room to get ready for dinner and a computer print-out had been put under the door saying a hurricane was coming,” she said.
  “It said we should go to dinner as normal and not have anything to drink and then to go back to our rooms.”
  . . .
  “We were not happy with the way they treated us,” said Nic, who landed at Manchester Airport on Sunday.

Nothing like the communist paradise.

Whither the bias?

CNN, that's whither!

You may have heard about this little video clip, where a former Chair of the Democratic National Committee is heard making the following comments about Hurricane Gustav's imminent "attack" on New Orleans:

The hurricane is going to hit New Orleans about the time they start. The timing is, at least it appears now, it will be there Monday. That just demonstrates God is on our side,” Fowler said, while laughing. Fowler also told Spratt that “everything’s cool.”

This post is about the way that this is being portrayed by the two major cable news networks, CNN and FoxNews. CNN's Headline:

Dem apologizes for joking about hurricane

FoxNews' headline:

FORMER DNC CHIEF APOLOGIZES FOR ‘GUSTAV IS A SIGN FROM GOD’ COMMENT

Do you see the distinction? CNN makes the assumption in the headline that the individual in question was just joking. That is not clear on the video. The FoxNews headline makes no such assumption. There is an important difference here.

Can you imagine a Republican making such a comment, suggesting political gain from a natural disaster? Surely such conversations have taken place, but the treatment by the media would surely be different.

Quake (AweVidSat bonus)

Lacy and I are always talking about which state is more dangerous to live in- Florida or California? Obviously I point to earthquakes and she to hurricanes. Since there was recently a quake in Southern Cal I thought I would post some funny videos (one new, one old) of what happens when a quake hits).

This was during a taping of Judge Judy:



This is a hilarious bit from an old episode of David Letterman. That second anchor clearly is the inspiration for Ron Burgundy: