March 7th, 2010
I have a clipping from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, July 28, 1997. It talks about an experiment conducted by David Merrell. His experiment was to observe the effects of music on mice. There were three groups: the Mozart mice, the hard rock mice, and a control group that listened to no music at all. His tests ran for three weeks.
At the end of the experiment, the control group had cut its navigation time in half. The Mozart mice did even better, cutting their time by 8½ minutes. But the hard rock group did much worse — taking 30 minutes to complete the maze, bumping into walls, staggering aimlessly about.
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Tags: Music
Posted in Opinion | 1 Comment »
February 28th, 2010
This chart (download in PDF format) depicts the seven ceremonial sabbaths of Leviticus 23, which were part of the various Jewish feasts, and shows how they were fulfilled (the antitypes) in the New Testament era.
Here is a mini-view of the chart. (The PDF version is much larger, designed to print on 11 x 17 inch paper.)
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Tags: theology
Posted in Christian | No Comments »
February 26th, 2010
Introduction
Church conflicts — whether over doctrines, matters of lifestyle, or policies — are often described as conflicts between “conservatives” and “liberals.” Given the Bible’s call to unity, this factioning of the church should be cause for concern.
The factioning of the church into conservative and liberal camps is a fascinating process. To the casual observer, it may seem that the many specific points of contention between the two camps are over unrelated issues. For example, what does a theological position on the human nature of Christ have to do with the length of women’s dresses? Though both are conservative positions, a studious observer would find little direct relationship between the points. Indeed, there are many who freely hold to only one or the other of those two points, and see no contradiction in doing so. Yet despite widespread exceptions over specific points, there is a noticeable polarization. Something draws church members towards either of these two groups, each representing a collection of diverse issues. In the end, people tend to adopt a collection of related ideas and practices, which could be classed as either liberal or conservative. Put another way, people who hold doctrinal views deemed conservative also tend to adopt conservative lifestyle choices and policies. Those who favor liberal church policies tend toward liberal theological and lifestyle stances. Of course, individually people tend to take various exceptions to their party platform.
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Tags: church, standards, theology, trends
Posted in Christian, Seventh-day Adventist | 3 Comments »
February 21st, 2010
There is nothing like attending a class, taking a trip to another country, or buying professional software to help you learn a language. But sometimes you have to settle for what is cheap or free.
Here are some free resources I’ve been using lately. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Spanish
Posted in Reviews | 1 Comment »
February 16th, 2010
Note: This technique creates not merely a 3D-like globe, but an actual stereoscopic image when viewed with 3D red and blue glasses.
Using surface textures from NASA and a bump map from another online source, I created a fully rotatable, 3D globe of the Earth in Photoshop CS4 Extended. It can be viewed or lighted from any direction. There is also a separate cloud layer I can turn on, edit, and move around. My master file is a very large image (6000 × 6000 pixels), more than ample to fill a full spread at 300 ppi.
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Tags: 3D, Photoshop
Posted in Photos | 2 Comments »
