Routine Revelations

Finished reading: Resurrecting Easter by John Dominic Crossan 📚

Today marks the beginning of Holy Week for Christians, and every year it seems the focus is on believing the stories happened rather than pondering upon and growing from the question, how are these stories relevant today?

In the Crucifixion story, what we have is a parable against civilization. The kingdom of Rome is a typical kingdom within the normal protocols of this world and, as such, it is based on violent force and imperial coercion. It is simply the normalcy of civilization in Mediterranean place and first-century time. But the kingdom of God is an antitypical kingdom in that it does not even allow violent “fighting” to free Jesus from execution—recall John 18:26. So the Crucifixion and Resurrection story is not simply about Jesus clashing with or triumphing over Pilate, but about a hopeful option for humanity to find a way out of the violence-based civilization it has created for itself.

The true question of faith is not whether resurrection happened or has begun, but rather whether the world is being and will be transformed through our collaboration with Yahweh in Christ! Our lack of faith in the story of Jesus and in the work of Christ has us stuck in the normalcy of civilization.

One of my best friends who lives in the town we grew up in sent a picture of the foot of snow that fell on his patio over night. Meanwhile, we have this…

#NotAFool

I think we are getting near to testing the question of whether or not a U.S. President, former U.S. President, or a candidate for U.S. President is above the law. I don’t think this question has ever really been answered/tested. Ford pardoned Nixon, so there never was an attempt at putting him on trial.

At the root of the question is whether our laws should be used for political gain. I think nobody would argue that laws should not be used for political gain, but doubt they never have been. On the other hand, the idea that anyone running for U.S. President is shielded from being put on trial does not seem right either as that means when one feels they are at risk they will simply declare their candidacy. I strongly suspect this is the reason why Trump declared he is running for President.

All of this reinforces how broken is the United States.

There is something oddly satisfying about opening a mail app and finding no email. I think it is related to some form of PTSD of seeing spam.

The regional round of the 2023 NCAA men’s ice hockey tournament was too predictable. Except for Cornell upsetting Denver, all higher seeds won each game. The games on Friday, including Michigan Tech versus Penn State, were blowouts, suggesting a huge difference between the top eight and bottom eight seeds in the tournament and over all in college hockey. The Frozen Four will be on April 6, Minnesota plays Boston University at 5 PM, Quinnipiac plays Michigan at 8:30 PM, the winners play each other for the national championship at 8 PM on April 8. I don’t know what it means, but Michigan Tech beat Boston University in early January.

Populations are shrinking, but what does it mean over time?

Each month, Russia’s population diminishes by around 86,000 people (not including casualties from the war in Ukraine), Japan’s by around 50,000, and Italy’s by at least 20,000.

Source

The 2023 NCAA Men’s Ice Hockey tournament starts today at 2 PM with Boston University Playing Western Michigan, Michigan Tech played both these teams, beat Boston University and lost to Western Michigan. In the games I am interested in, Minnesota State plays St. Cloud State at 5 PM and Minnesota plays Canisius at 9 PM. Michigan Tech plays Friday at 5 PM. Go Huskies!

I watched the final of the World Baseball Classic last night, and the semi-finals the days before. All the games we really exciting and bring good energy to the start of the baseball season. I know this will never happen due to obvious reasons, but I wonder whether the games would be better if they were played later in the season or at the end when presumably all the players are at the top of their game. Japan’s pitching really dominated. Happy that Kyle Schwarber had that big hit in the eighth inning to give us a chance, but up to that point it looked like the USA was completely out of the game.

My social network for two is called text messaging. Lots of prior art here, I think. Others might use Signal, Slack or even MS Teams. Heck, email works.

Just this past Wednesday I found myself in a conversation about what is woke and what is anti-woke, as the person who I was talking to didn’t understand. I think anti-woke as it is being used is easier to define. Basically, whenever someone is claiming they are anti-woke they mean they oppose the enforcement of beliefs upon themselves or others. For some it’s simply the label for ideas they don’t agree with or norms/rules they don’t want to abide by. I think at the root of this issue is a decrease in tolerance for each other. As an example, one side may say one must use proper pronouns in reference to a person, the other side says that one must not be forced to use certain words or have to listen to one other’s beliefs because listening is the same as indoctrination. There is no effort made to meet in the middle because each side wants their way, one side says they are just being polite, the other side says they are just using common sense.

I expect the Silicon Valley Bank collapse is going to be quickly politicized. Before we get to who is doing what wrong, there should be an attempt to explain to the average American why it matters to them. These situations keep coming across as simply bail outs for rich people making mistakes, at the expense of the average person, and while that is true some times, it is not true all the times.

Last night we had thunder and lightning during the snow storm, our first experience of thunder snow. Endured several brief power outages while trying to watch college playoff hockey. (Let’s go Tech!) Woke up to see some of our bushes crushed and several trees with branches forced low due to weight of the wet snow.

To say it’s been a weird winter is an understatement.

Dave writes of the wish for the ChatGPT web site to render results so that he doesn’t have use screenshots. One can interact with ChatGPT via its API, I followed the instructions here to write my own script that I can keep running in a terminal window on my computer. Here is an example of copying an answer (result) to question I asked via the script to my day notes log.

We have another winter storm warning today, expecting snow to start around 1 PM and go throughout the night. I think that we have had a very mild winter, with very little action up until the last three weeks. During these three weeks we have alternated between spring and winter, with two ice storms and now the one today. We are now in meteorological spring, meaning temperatures are now warmer on average than during the winter. The constant big changes certainly bring the average up.

Today is the 25 year anniversary of Apple discontinuing the Newton Messagepad. The Messagepad was the first Apple product that I purchased, having long desired but not affording a Mac. I went in to debt to by the Messagepad because I saw it as transformative. Although it was over-hyped and set up for failure, it consider the Messagepad as the great grandfather of the iPhone. Most who know Newton at all recall its failures at handwriting recognition, a technology that today works very well and hardly talked about. As far as I know, Newton was also the first commercially available object oriented operating system that provided functionality not to dissimilar what assistants do today, 25 years ago!

Comcast has data caps and overage charges for most of their broadband customers, which conflicts with the idea of providing customers with higher bandwidth. I could pay $30 more per month to eliminate the cap, but do I really need gigabit per seconds speeds? After fix months or so Comcast “upgrades” our bandwidth for free and the only discernible reason is they want to push towards paying them more per month for our Internet service. It all feels like a scam.