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All right, this is something that I’ve been wondering about for a long time, and I figured there would be nowhere I’d be more likely to find a good answer than here.

I introduce this question not as a challenge, but out of a genuine interest in learning.

Got you all curious yet? OK, here goes:

So your average evangelical or fundamentalist Christian uses the Bible as the foundation for their moral and thelogical reasoning, operating under the theorem that the Bible is the official Word of God. I would be interested in hearing how they arrive at this conclusion.

The usual answer I get is “Well, in Chapter X Verse Y, it says this…” But you can’t quote the Bible in order to prove that the Bible is the Word of God. That’s about as clearcut an example of circular reasoning as I can come up with. So are there other answers out there?

As a caveat, folks abound with reasons why the Bible is *not* the Word of God, most of which I’ve heard already. Again, I’m more interested in seeing what reasons are out there for the affirmative.

(takes his clipboard, enters the protective observatory bunker)

Recent research indicates that the long-held wisdom of slathering yourself in sunscreen before going outside may not be that smart after all. The most interesting statistic? That for every 1 death from skin cancer avoided by using sunscreen, there may be 30 deaths from other forms of cancer due to lack of Vitamin D.

Okay.. short and sweet tonight. I know Russell Crowe is a bit of a pig. I know the name is kind of dumb, but I want to tell you that I and my wife saw “Cinderella Man” tonight, and can honestly call it the best film of the year thus far.

Yes, I liked Star Wars more, much in the way I love Taco bell tacos. I need them.. they are a part of me. But a film like this is a five course first class meal at a five star cinematic restaurant, and it deserves to be doing better than it is at the box office.

Maybe it was the name, maybe the SITH took some revenge on it, either way… this film deserves to be seen, and the film company is so sure you will like it, there is a deal at many theatre chains, that if you do not, they will refund your money, no questions asked.

I’m excited about this film. I cheered, my wife cried (and actually wanted to talk about and dissect it afterwords, a rarity) – we both sat there moved and affected and, its a darn fun film a lot of the time. So, yeah.. I think you’ll like it, and if we go see movies like this, maybe they’ll make more of them.

On this 4th of July, while the flags are waving, I’m going to mull over this question:

Would $86 Billion have cured cancer?

A Swede who was kidnapped in Iraq hires bounty hunters to track down and “take care of” his attackers.

Story from here.

Yesterday we noted that Ulf Hjertström, the sexagenarian Swede who survived a 67-day kidnapping ordeal in Baghdad, reportedly was paying professional bounty hunters a handsome fee to track down his erstwhile captors. Expressen, a Swedish tabloid, picked up the story and got in touch with Hjertström to get the lowdown.

Hjertström, an oil broker whose career took him to Iraq 25 years ago, makes no bones about the decision to exact revenge on his abductors. “I’ve lived [in Iraq] for a long time. This is how things are done there. It’s nothing new to me,

What’s up with not having to sign any more credit card receipts at retail food counters? Am I the only one that’s noticed this recent change?

It started at Chipotle. Several months ago, I swiped the card for my burrito and…okay, my burrito and chips…the counter dude said that they’re not asking for signatures anymore on credit receipts.

The primary reason I can fathom for making this change is for operational efficiency. Some operations guy up the chain decided to emulate Starbucks and implement any change that would decrease queue system time. If true, then this seems absurd because the signature process takes 3 seconds at most. They still have to swipe the card and they still have to wait for both the merchant and customer receipts to print. What’s the point of bypassing the signature and saving 3 seconds?

Maybe the operational efficiency isn’t intended for customers. Maybe they’re sick of reconciling the receipts at the end of the day. They figure they save X amount of labor hours a year by avoiding the task of matching receipts to the roll record.

Is it for security? Are people standing out back of the restaurants, digging through trash, to lift signatures off the card receipts?

I tried searching Proquest to see if there was an article written. Couldn’t find anything. Is this weird? Am I the only one?

So we saved, and shopped, and looked, and spent months debating, then finally bought a new digital camera. It’s coming in the mail, and should probably be here by Friday. It’s the Kodak Easyshare Z7590. We’ll have to let you know how well it works after it arrives, but the cool thing, to me, was the great deal we got.

We had been hunting for a good deal on a digital camera. The one we have was a Wal-Mart special, $99.98 piece of junk. The funny thing is, the pictures it takes aren’t great, they tend to be really fuzzy when taken indoors, the shutter speed is laughable… yet it worked. We liked it, because we could take a ton of pictures, put them on an SD card, dump them on the hard drive of our PC or Mac, and be able to take all the pictures we liked without spending a fortune on developing them all. We’ve used it a lot, and the cheap-o digital has lasted longer than any other camera we’ve owned. It’s still working! Maybe we’ll give it to the kids or something.

But really, how many of your pictures turn out to be “keepers” that you scrapbook? Maybe out of a whole roll, 2-5 pictures will be worth keeping. The rest may make decent fodder for the lining of scrapbook pages, or they’ll sit in a dusty bin moldering in the attic.

Anyway, we knew we wanted a new digital camera to replace the old. A conventional camera just makes no sense for us. After several months of off-and-on hunting, we finally figured out what it was we wanted:

• Minimum of 4 megapixels, so that we could print out an 8×10 photo from our printer and have it look good.
• High optical zoom capability. This is important, because most “point-and-shoot” cameras only zoom up to 3X using their optical lens, and then maybe 3X more using “digital zoom”, which really sods the quality of the photo. You’re better off not using digital zoom at all, and just cropping the picture later.
• Good reviews
• A name-brand. No more “Connor 5000” or “GenericBrand001”.
• We wanted to make sure that the viewfinder view (the little eyepiece) and the display would give you exactly the same picture. The problem with our existing digital camera is that the viewfinder is, at best, a gross approximation of what you’ll get from the screen. But when you’re taking pictures outdoors in bright sunlight, there’s not an LCD made that can handle that kind of glare.
• It had to use “SD”, or “Secure Digital” media. It’s what we’re already using for our electronics, and I like to stick with it. We actually ended up deciding on SD some years ago because that was what our Palms supported. I’ve never regretted the decision, as I have an SD slot in the side of my laptop, SD readers on our computers, and everything we use uses SD. Makes it easy to figure out if we can transfer stuff without weird cables everywhere.
• It had to support video with audio. We’re not looking to make it into a camcorder, but occasionally you just can’t capture the moment in a still shot. Then it’s nice to kick the camera into video mode, and record a few minutes of video to archive the movement of something special. Our old camera had the ability to do video, but no audio.
• It had to have ways to add at least a few accessories. With the high-zoom capability, a tripod mount would be a must.
• It needed a high-quality glass lens.

With that laundry list, there are actually a ton of different choices available. We looked at several of them, and the one that kept popping up was the Kodak Z7590, along with its little brothers in the “DX” series. The camera is 5 megapixels, 10X zoom, has excellent reviews, is a name brand, has a digital viewfinder (a second, small LCD which shows the same image as the large LCD), uses SD media, does video recording at SVHS quality with audio, can do a tripod and a shoe flash, and has a reasonable-quality glass lens. So we checked out the camera in Wal-Mart and a CompUSA, found that it had the features we wanted, and more, and set out to find the best deal.

About the only thing missing is the possibility of using a remote control. Remotes are handy for when you’re taking a picture at very high zoom and don’t want to jiggle the camera at all by pushing the button. A timer can serve a similar function by letting you stay hands-off when the camera shoots, but it’s slightly less convenient. Oh well.

We didn’t know when we started hunting, but Dell sells consumer electronics. It’s not their primary business, but if it’s closely associated with computers — as digital cameras are — they probably sell it. Anyway, in cruising the Internet for good deals, I ran across an article talking about “coupon stacking” with Dell.

I’d stacked coupons buying my laptop from them several months ago, and saved a crazy amount of money versus regular price. About $800. I hadn’t even thought of it for anything other than computers, though.

Well, we were able to do it again. Regular retail on the camera is about $400. We used a 20% off coupon code that we found on the Internet for that specific model of camera. Then I found a “$30 off all orders of $300 or more or $60 off all orders of $500 or more” coupon. And Dell Home was running a promotion with free shipping for all orders of $25.00 or more.

So I bought a tripod and a 1GB memory card to go along with the camera. This changed our pre-coupon price to a little over $500. We applied the $60.00 off coupon, then the 20% off the camera price coupon (order is important: if we applied the camera coupon first, Dell’s web site would only let us take $30.00 off the total order via the Dell Home coupon, as it was then less than $500.00). I changed my shipping option to the “free” option.

Total price for a top-of-the-line point-and-shoot Kodak camera, plus tripod and a gigabyte of memory: $365.00. Retail price for the camera alone — and the price down at the local Wal-Mart — is within pennies of $400.00. We saved over a hundred twenty dollars by shopping smart. It’s even a better deal than I could find trying to get it through Amazon, or off eBay.

The experience showed me that, many times, there are much better ways to shop than your standard “run down to Wal-Mart and buy one” approach. They may advertise “always low prices”, but there are ways to get high-quality products from reputable dealers for substantially less than the Mart.

In case you haven’t heard or read, the Supreme Court this week ruled that firms like Grokster are criminally liable for providing software for downloading and sharing copyrighted media, like music.

Every report I’ve read, from the Wall Street Journal to the Washington Post, called it a landmark decision. Each report also was skeptical as to whether the decision would hamper further illicit online infringing.

I personally agree with the Supreme Court decision. Given current copyright law, their unanimous decision makes obvious sense. I guess it sort of is a landmark decision.

I love bittorrent.

Need some advice from my fellow Barnsonians (particularly those with advanced vocal degrees from famous music performance colleges) on how to restrengthen the singing voice.

Yesterday, I auditioned a young singer for my studio recordings. The kid was pretty talented. Great pitch, nailing high notes. So halfway through the audition I decided to join in on harmonize, rev up the spirit of the process. It might have been by the third note that I realized how terrible my voice sounded. The kid was carrying me through the tune.

I haven’t sang in the studio or live for one year. 12 months. 365 days. You know what happens when you don’t practice an instruments for that amount of time? You lose your chops.

I need my vocal chops back in two weeks. What do I do?

I read an enlightening perspective on the embryonic stem-cell research debate on the New York Times Letter to the Editor page regarding Mario Cuomo’s recent esssay on the subject.

Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University, put it succinctly:

Mario M. Cuomo mars his well-reasoned essay on the use of embryonic stem cells by characterizing the crucial moral issue as whether “human life starts at conception.”

Even the earliest embryo conceived of human parents is alive and a member of Homo sapiens, and that is enough, in the eyes of many, to make it a living human being.

The crucial moral question is not when human life begins, but when human life reaches the point at which it merits protection.

It is to that question that the significance of consciousness and viability, discussed by Mr. Cuomo, should be addressed.

Unless we separate these two questions – when does life begin, and when does it merit protection? – we are unlikely to achieve any clarity about the moral status of embryos.

I’ve never really thought of it in those terms. If you think about it, there is human life which we (as a society) protect, some which we do not protect, and some which we intentionally destroy through war, executions, etc. If we accept that embryonic life is fully human the moment it is fertilized, it definitely changes the question of the ethics of embryonic stem-cell research.

It seems to me that it’s obvious that an unfertilized egg deserves little or no protection. Thousands of hysterectomies per year attest to that point of view. Similarly, sperm isn’t protected life. If it were, well, virtually every male on the planet would be guilty of genocide by the time he was fourteen 🙂

Similarly, we don’t protect unborn human life which strongly endangers the life of the mother. We are incapable of protecting the fertilized eggs which fail to attach as a result of in-vitro fertilization by hopeful couples wanting to have a child. We can’t protect against miscarriages, as my darling wife and I learned through painful first-hand experience. In general, in the US we do not protect human life which is not yet viable outside the womb, through easily-obtainable abortions.

Embryonic stem cell research holds both great promise for the health and longevity of humans, and reading this brief response convinces me the chief ethical concern is not when “life” begins, but how much it’s worth to us. I’ve found myself wondering which life is more valuable: the fully-developed one which might be saved through the use and destruction of a stem cell, or the potential one in the petri dish.

I doubt there’s a clear-cut answer. Even if the alternative is to discard the stem cells entirely.