The spread of Christianity

During the 1800's, missionaries from the western European countries spread all over the world, taking the gospel to people groups that had never heard the good news.  This was brought up during a talk at my church's mission conference last weekend, by a Bishop from Africa with whom my church has worked for many years.  His point was that although those missionaries brought the Word that saved them, they also tried to encapsulate it in the cultural trappings of the western European - where the African life was full of joy and song, where drums and dancing were a way of life, the missionary churches were somber and reverent, and holiness was linked to quiet contemplation.  Of course the great thing is that even through the cultural misunderstanding God could and did a mighty work on the continent.

Also, it is interesting to compare that with the beliefs of the evolutionists of the period....


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The more things change...

I was having a discussion over lunch with a friend when we got on to the subject of how the early church worshiped.  Interestingly enough, there are some letters and other documentation existing from the first and second centuries that fill us in on how the early church went about 'having church'.


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Did talk radio force Romney's hand?

Today, Mitt Romney gracefully bowed out of the Republican primary race at CPAC.  After reading some of his speech I have to wonder, did talk radio force his hand?  Romney says in part,

I wonder if he is more worried about what others may do in his name, rather than what he may do in the race.  There has been a lot of vitriol from a lot of prominent people for McCain, and if that got dragged out then no Republican would stand a chance come November.  By exiting now, those people can come to grips with a McCain candidacy, and even if they are not pro-McCain, they can at least stop being anti-McCain.  Romney has removed their reason for the attacks by bowing out of the race, and he has put the good of the party before his own quest for the presidency, giving it a chance to heal while the Democrats continue battling.

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Some thoughts on the Republican Primary

Well, by this time the voting in 'Tsunami Tuesday' states is wrapping up, and we'll soon find out who the real front runner is for the Republican nomination.  While I was listening to Bill Lumaye on WPTF during the ride home, a thought came to mind.

First let's set the scene.  Bill was talking politics, and Rick Martinez jumped in with some words for the conservative side of the big tent.  Basically, he thinks conservatives need to grow up and quit being 'cry babies' about McCain's candidacy.  I think most of this stems from Ann Coulter's statements that if McCain gets the nomination she's voting for Hillary.  Plus, a lot of talk show hosts have recently started talking up Romney as the next great conservative while bashing McCain, like Rush, Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Hugh Hewitt (but he's always been a Romney guy).  Rick seems to think that there's too much whining going on, and not enough action.

I don't necessarily agree with this.  I think that what we are seeing is a sudden coalescing of the conservatives behind the right most of the remaining candidates.  Before Florida, there were still a lot of conservative options, like Fred Thompson, Duncan Hunter, and Tom Tancredo.  Since Florida, they have all gone away.  That leaves Romney.  Remember that Florida was only a week ago in this accelerated primary season, so I don't think it's unusual that they have come out for Romney, and come out forcefully.  And coming out in the way they know best and the way they can have the most impact.  They had to if they were going to make any impact on 'Tsunami Tuesday'.  Also, the complaints against McCain have always been there, they were simply overcome by a lot of other talk about a lot of other candidates.

So, are conservatives a bunch of cry babies?  I don't think so.  Ann Coulter probably went too far, but she made her point.  If the nomination is still up for grabs when the primary comes to North Carolina, you better believe I will be there making my voice heard.  And so will a lot of other conservatives.

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The Navy of tomorrow

Is going to have some pretty cool toys to play with - especially this one.

So, this thing has a range of 200 miles, and the projectile reaches speeds of 8000 feet per second.  My question is, how do you control it?  That has to be a lot of G forces generated when that thing launches.  Can a GPS module handle it?  And what about whatever moving parts are necessary to keep the projectile on target?  How do you keep them from being sheered off?  A 200 mile range is great, but it's useless if you can't put ordinance on target. 

There is some speculation that some kind of sabot round would be used, and I think that makes a lot of sense.  A sabot is essentially a missile in a missile.  It was originally designed to defeat tanks, where the external sleeve would expend itself on the tank's armored shell, blowing a hole in it that the inner projectile would slide through so it could explode on the inside.  In this case, the sabot would be used during the launch, ablating and expending itself during acceleration, leaving the internal missile unharmed and able to complete it's mission.

via Hotair

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Do Republicans really think this way?

Within this article Powerline discusses the tendency of Republicans to nominate the heir apparent, or 'next in line' as our presidential nominee.  Is this really how people think?  We're only talking about the most important job in this country, and the person who will be, for all intents and purposes, the most powerful person on earth.  Leading America should not be a case of 'next-in-line', it should be a case of who can do the job best.  Personally, I am more interested in electing the person who has the best credentials and lines up the closest with my beliefs, not the guy who thinks he deserves it simply because he comes next.

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What to do with Exxon's obscene profits

So, Exxon-Mobil's rolled up over 40 billion in profits over the last year.  The question in Washington seems to be, "How do we get our hands on some of that?".  In fact, Hillary is talking about resurrecting the windfall tax on oil profits.  In typical big government fashion. the politicians are approaching this the wrong way.  If they want to get some of that back in to the hands of the people (of course, I'm making the assumption that that is what they actually want to do), increasing taxes is not going to be effective.  I, however, do have an easy solution.

Repeal the dividend tax.




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The Nightmare Scenario

So, I get a chain email that goes something like this:

So is it feasible?  Who knows in today's political climate.  I had actually had this thought before, but I don't think that the voters would stand for it.  Plus, the Democrat Party has to get some new blood front and center.  The Clintons aren't going to last forever.

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Ray Tracing - the holy grail of 3D gaming

I think TG Daily is being a little short sighted here.

The work this guy is doing is amazing.  I have been playing around with ray tracing and photo-realistic images since POV-Ray 1.0.  During college, I would create a scene and set it rendering before I hit the rack - with the hope that it would be done in the morning.  Now, much more complex scenes can be done in real time.

Anyway, ray tracing, like most physics algorithms, require a massive number of parallel computations to be performed.  This can be done in multi-core CPU's.  It could also be done in the graphics processor.

Both nVida and ATI (AMD) have released programming modules to use their graphics card as general purpose massively parallel calculators.  They are both also looking at how their GPUs can be used for physics calculations.  I think I see some synergy here.  What if you did that ray tracing on the 128 stream processors in a nVidia 8 series graphics cards instead of on a measly 8 CPUs?  If the frames per second truly scale with the number of processors, then it should be no problem.  Plus, look at something like the Cell processor in the PS3.  It already has 8 cores, and the Cell can be scaled quickly to 16 or 32.

With the combination of these two trends, I would say the future of 3D gaming is looking bright.

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Why the NAU?

With all of this talk about President Bush and the North American Union (NAU), I think it would be useful to take a look at it from the standpoint of motivations.  Namely, why would a theoretically conservative President want a North American Union?
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