Freedom of Choice

America is the land of choice. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that Americans have far more choices in general than any other nation on earth. It's so ingrained in our psyche that we see "choice" as a given, almost an "inalienable right." This right to choose extends from the most grave (the choice to murder your own unborn child) to the most mundane (orange juice).

The last time I was at the grocery store I was struck by the vast selection of orange juice. Apparently, one or two choices is not enough for something as simple and basic as orange juice. For example, Minute Maid has no less than 10 varieties of orange juice! (This is excluding blends with other juices and "juice drinks.") Not to be outdone, Tropicana has at least 12 styles of OJ! According to Tropicana's website, you have the following options from which to choose:

• Original (no pulp)
• Home Style (some pulp)
• Grove Stand (lotsa pulp)
• Calcium + Vitamin D (no pulp)
• Grove Stand + Calcium (lotsa pulp)
• Light 'N' Healthy (watered down OJ w/vitamins--oh, and no pulp)
• Light 'N' Healthy with Pulp (some pulp)
• Fiber (some pulp--of course)
• Low Acid (no pulp)
• Healthy Heart (no pulp)
• Healthy Kids (because kids apparently need their own OJ)
• Immunity Defense (no pulp)

With all of those options before you, if you're like me you might just stand there in a daze for several minutes trying to figure out which one you want. And then you might just walk away emptyhanded, or go grab a Coke.

The Law Comes Naturally

The other day Brant and I were discussing the idea that the idea of Law comes naturally to us as humans. We all inherrently understand that good deserves reward and bad deserves punishment. Of course, reinforcement of this throughout our lives helps.

Last week, my wife called me up and told me that our eldest son's (he's three) sense of justice had been offended. I had driven to work, having forgotten to take the car seat out of my car and put it back into my wife's. My wife had to drive a couple of residential blocks with my son buckled in with the regular seatbelt to drop him off at his grandparents'.

When my wife explained to my son that she could get in trouble from a policeman if stopped, my son responded in bitter protest. But Daddy was the one who didn't put the car seat back--He should get in trouble! Though my wife tried to explain that that it's her fault for driving with him not in a carseat, he would have none of it. He saw the greater error as being my own and justice would simply not be served by punishing Mommy. And rightly so!

Ah, the clarity with which moral issues are seen by small children! (And may I never forget the carseat again!)

See: There was no moon landing

This story oughtta make all those conspiracy nuts out there who think that the US staged the Apollo moon landings on a Hollywood back lot feel real good. "Suuure you lost them. Uh huh."

Entertainment Junkies

America is a nation of entertainment junkies. We're addicts. Just like a heroin addict, all we can think about is our next fix. NFL, NBA, NASCAR, Snoop Dog, Christina Aguilera, American Idol, Sez and the City, Lost, 24, etc., etc. We walk around town in a trance with our iPod earbuds glued to our ears, faithfully attending Regal Cinema or the Troubadour or Edison Field on Sundays, where we bow to the gods and goddesses we have made with our own money, who in turn happily help us shoot up for another fix. Meanwhile, the important things of the world go on, and we're oblivious to them.

Want some proof? Here's the latest: Snow White's Seven Dwarfs are more well known than the 7 US Supreme Court Justices. What's worse? The 3 Stooges are better known than the 3 branches of US Government. And more people know Bart Simpson is Homer Simpson's son than know that the Illiad and Odyssey are the Greek poet Homer's epics poems.

Symptoms of a declining culture? I think so.

The Fashion of the Christ

Okay, I have no idea what possessed me. I think someone at the recent SCCCS conference mentioned Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. And today, on my way to lunch, the thought occurred to me: "Someone out there must have done something called "The Fashion of the Christ."

Sure enough, here's a fashion show, starring a Jesus Christ impersonator.

Yes, it's a bit irreverent--but probably not sacreligious. I see it as a demonstratation the common misuse of Jesus as an icon for people's (including Christians) current cause du jour. In other words, people commonly make Jesus the spokesperson and posterboy for their particular hobbyhorse; this illustrates the tendency a bit more clearly through idiodic humor.

Enjoy (or don't)!

SCCCS Conference

Reminder: This weekend is the annual Summer Conference, sponsored by the Southern California Center for Christian Studies. This year's theme is "Holywood Worldviews and the Cultural Mandate." Speakers will include (among others) Jack Hafer and Brian Godawa, Producer and Screenwriter, respectively, of the award-winning film, To End All Wars. Should be a good and informative time, as usual. Location is the Student Center of Cal State Fullerton. Time is Fri (8/4), 7-9pm; Sat (8/5), 9:30am - 4:30pm. Admission is free.

GeekSpeak: CRC's

Okay, here's part two of the introduction to checksums, as recently learned by this novice. The concept of a Cyclic Redundancy Check is derived from polynomial math. The idea is this: Take your file or a block of data in binary notation and convert it into a polynomial with coefficients of either one or zero. Ex, if your message was 1101:

1101 --> (1)x^3 + (1)x^2 + (0)x^1 + (1)x^0 --> x^3 + x^2 + 1

Do the same for some carefully chosen "key," Ex:

101 --> x^2 + 1

Multiply the message by x raised to the degree of the key polynomial (in this case, the degree of the key is 2). Ex:

(x^3 + x^2 + 1) * x^2 = x^5 + x^4 + x^2

Divide the result by the key. Ex:

(x^5 + x^4 + x^2) / (x^2 + 1) = x^3 + x^2 + x, R = x

The Remainder is the CRC. Convert this back into bits, Ex:

x --> (0)x^3 + (0)x^2 + (1)x + (0)x^0 --> 0010

Once you send the message, the computer at the receiving end can perform the same operation. If the CRC's are the same, then it is very likely your message was received without error.
All of this math is performed "modulo 2," which basically means that odd coefficients become 1, odd negative coefficients become -1, and even coefficients become 0. Ex:

4x^2 + 3x - 1 --> x + 1

Also, it is imperative that a "good" key is chosen. Really smart mathemeticians have figured out which keys work best. Generally speaking, the longer it is, the more error-proof it is. As an example, a very common CRC key is called "CRC-32". It's polynomial is:

x^31 + x^30 + x^26 + x^25 + x^24 + x^18 + x^15 + x^12 + x^11 + x^10 + x^8 + x^6 + x^5 + x^4 + x^3 + x + 1

As we would presume, computers can peform these operations in a more efficient manner than trying to do complicated polynomial math, but as other people have covered this well, I won't go into that here.

Anytime you use the internet, these kinds of operations are going on in the background without you even knowing it. Be thankful that people a lot smarter than you or I (well, at least I) have gone to the effort to figure all this stuff out for us!

GeekSpeak: Checksums

Here's something interesting to the techies. In my quest for learning new things, I did a little research about what a CRC (cyclic redundancy check) is. Since I found the subject interesting, I thought I would share a little about it here.

A CRC is a type of checksum, and is a way of attempting to ensure that data (e.g., a computer file, or stream of data over a network) has not become corrupted since it was first created. (And data can easily become corrupted because computers often misunderstand the messages they're being sent.)

A simple checksum works like this: you (or, more realistically, a computer program) goes through the file (or a specific chunk of data) and adds up the values of each of the bytes. The total is the checksum. If part of the file was changed, the total would typically change as well. This is actually a very easy algorithm to implement. For example:

Say you wanted to send your friend the following word: hello

The computer translates each letter into the following values: 104 101 108 108 111

The checksum would, therefore, be: 104 + 101 + 108 + 108 + 111 = 532

But, what if an error caused the 'o' to get lost along the way? hell

The new checksum would be: 104 + 101 + 108 + 111 = 421

If your friend's computer did a checksum and compared it with yours, it would discover the error and ask your computer to re-transmit the word--and it is unlikely that this time it would have an error.

Piece of cake! The downside is that there is a good chance the checksum will not catch certain kinds of errors. (For example, if a byte of data with a value of 0 get inserted, it will not increase the value of the checksum, even though the file size has increased by one byte.) Thus, a more robust--and complicated--technique is usually employed. Next time I'll talk about the CRC method of error-checking.

Orphans with Parents

Parents spend only 19 minutes a day looking after their children. This comes from yet another study (this one in the UK) which shows that parents are orphaning their children while they pursue their careers.

And yet, I thought the following quote was particularly interesting:

"Recent research showed that most mothers with young families would prefer to stay at home and look after their children."

So why don't these mums go home? Unquestionably, the middle-class life is expensive (probably even moreso in the UK than in the US), and the cost of living is continually on the rise. But the question that no one wants to ask is this: is the standard of living we demand for ourselves of greater importantance than spending more time raising our own children? Do we really need two Mercedes? Do we really need those gym memberships? The Tivo? The Satellite TV? All the latest techno-gadgets? The daily Starbucks venti, iced-blended, decaf, mocha frapuccino? Not that this will solve all of the problems. But I submit it would go a long way to reducing the number of orphaned children as our cost of living would often diminish to the point that mom could come home and pursue her dream of (and, dare I say, responsibility for) caring for the kids.

The above story reinforces what I have heard recently that American fathers, on average, spend only 4 minutes with their children each day! That is yet another problem. Does Dad always come home and plop himself in front of the TV, or does he spend this time rastling, snuggling, reading, worshiping, and praying with his kids?

Is there really any wonder that today's children have a different worldview than their parents, would rather spend time with their peers than their families, are promiscuous, get into drugs, and eventually grow up to be nasty, brutish adults?

Of course, what goes around comes around. You can just picture how the kids will respond:

"By the way, Mum. When you and Dad need care in your old age... Don't come asking me for help. I'm sure the government have a nice little hole carved out for you in some state-run nursing institution where you can waste away the remainder of your days while Sis and I are out looking after ourselves. Didn't you hear about the brilliant 103" plasma screen telie that's coming out soon? I've just gotta have one o' them! And, of course, the wife's gonna have to work to help us pay for it."

Scots Wha? Huh!?

So this is my first attempt at a blog. Okay, that's not quite true--I started a blog several years ago, just as they were coming around. But I ran out of time to keep it updated and eventually gave up. Now that blogging is "all the rage," I decided to try giving it another shot. (Of course, now I have even less free time, so we'll see...)

I always have lots to say--not that anyone really ought to listen. Then again, I figure that what millions of people post on their blogs is not really that interesting. And if they can do it, then why not me too?

So, what's with the name? I have to admit that I have an extremely hard time coming up with usernames and the like. But since a large part of my heritage is Scottish, and since one of my favorite interests is in all things Scottish, Irish, and English, I figured why not name my blog after the title of the poem by Scotland's bard, Robert Burns.

The title "Scots Wha Hae," which means "Scots who have," comprises the opening words of the poem. The poem is typical of the nationalistic poetry of Scotland, a land which struggled for independence from the English for centuries. I certainly don't know enough of the situation to make any sort of claim for Scottish autonomy today, but for historical (and literary) reasons, the poem is valueable.

Anyway, here's to high hopes.

Slainte Mhath!