Random Thought #65

I watched a video last night that was about time-lapse photography, specifically of nature. The video that this guy created was amazing but so was the message. I highly recommend it.

Random Thought #64

I got an email from Deseret Book today advertising Elder Bednar's new book entitled "Increase in Learning". Its a different kind of book that is a little more interactive and comes with supplemental materials, but when I click on the link to look at this book, at the bottom was a link to a service called "Seek" from Deseret Book. I checked it out and found all sorts of cool information. There were a number of videos that involved young adults asking Elder Bednar questions from his book. I love every single one of his answers and I've been waiting for awhile to see if/when an apostle would step up and speak frankly about seriously searching and studying the gospel.

This video describes what I have felt for quite awhile now and is the reason behind my own studies. I've never been able to put it into words exactly, but its just a feeling that you get. It gets you all excited and you don't want to do anything else but learn. Its an amazing feeling.

I liked this video because Elder Bednar somewhat speaks out against the simple sunday school answers that we are so prone to give. Its not that the answers are wrong or inappropriate, its simply that we can recite stuff until we are blue in the face, but rarely do we understand what we are saying and even more rarely do we live it. We draw near to the Lord with our lips, but our hearts are far from Him.

I'm excited for this book and I hope everyone reads it and that it awakens in them a desire to feast upon the words of Christ, desire to learn and gain intelligence, and become more like our Father in Heaven.

Random Thought #63

I finished reading a book about the Golden ratio last week. Very fascinating book. It is designated by the greek letter ϕ. It is a cousin to the very familiar letter π. It is represented as c = π * 2r where c is the circumference of a circle and r is the radius. I wonder how pi actually got its name. Whenever you cut a pizza (also known as a pie in some areas) or a cake or a pie, you are literally making a radial (defining a radius) cut. Fascinating huh? After all, there aren't too many greek letters that also have the same name as a pastry and since the greeks were the ones who were big into math and such, it only makes since. Interesting. BTW...I'm eventually going to teach myself greek and hebrew (I hope) so I can better understand the scriptures.

Random Thought #62

I think I've told most people but I found my passion. I thoroughly enjoy biochemistry. It excites me. I can get thoroughly engrossed in it and it challenges me. I'd love to go back to school and take some courses on it but I'm not entirely sure what I'd do with a degree in it if I were to go that route. I think that's kind of a good thing though. I think that shows that I enjoy it just for the sake of learning it. I just want to learn and be excited by knowledge and the learning process. So much of today's norms expect you to go to school, but mainly for the express purpose of obtaining employment and climbing some sort of ladder to proclaim your success. I just like to learn for the sake of learning and the joy it brings me.

Random Thought #61

I was listening to the Saturday's Warrior soundtrack on my way home from work when they mentioned line upon line and precept upon precept. I'm not sure why it struck a chord with me this time as I have heard that phrase multiple times but this time it actually meant something to me. I just finished reading a book on The Golden Ratio by Mario Livio and I learned so much about mathematics, music, art, and nature that I hadn't known before but I understood it and got value from it because of two things. 1) I was prepared. I had read many other books and articles that referenced different aspects and concepts in this book so I had a little bit of background knowledge and if I didn't know something, I paused to read up on it. 2) I was open to the possibility that there were others who had something to teach me and was willing to be taught. The more we humble ourselves and become teachable, the easier it is to learn new things. We also have to learn the basics before we can move on to more complicated topics. I had to understand what the golden ratio was, its various forms and relation to Fibonacci numbers, platonic solids, phyllotaxis, etc before I was ready to understand the concepts of fractal geometry or theories of false vacuums creating multiple self-similar universes. Line upon line; precept upon precept. The Lord is ready to teach us, but he is waiting for us to be prepared, teachable, and ready to put forth the effort

Random Thought #60

As I was driving back from work today, I noticed a Hummer H3T next to me. I don't know why but I thought about how blatantly obvious the name of the vehicle was. It was a Hummer, 3rd generation model and was modeled like a truck. Their other two models were also obviously named. The H2 and the H1 or original Humvee. The humvee even got its name from an acronym HMMWV (High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle). Why are things so simply named? As I mentioned in a previous post, philosophy is divided up into its parts; philo = love and sophos = wisdom. Sophos is also the root of the Sophoi or 7 wise sages of the Greeks during the 6th century BC and the sophists who later perverted the term by selling wisdom through paid courses, thus setting the stage for paid education. I just read in the comics this last week that Philadelphia gets its nickname of "the city of brotherly love" because Philadelphia is translated in greek as literally philo = love and adelphos = brother. Surnames are like this too. For quite awhile, people only had one name but due to population increases, surnames were given and usually related to patronymic or matronymic system (johnson is literally john's son), a profession, a residence, or some other attribute that would define them more specifically. What's most interesting is not the logical naming of items, places, people, etc but more the evolution of language. I bet that if we knew and understood the adamic language or perhaps had insight into the complexity around the tower of babel event, we would better understand the naming conventions that arose and developed over time. Can you imagine poor Adam having to try and name everything? That would be an interesting event to behold. One last thought on context and language; if we study and understand the language and cultural norms of the piece we're reading, it makes a world of difference. How many of you actually knew Philadelphia's nickname was actually a literal translation in greek? I didn't. It would be interesting to know who named it that and why. Now that I bring this up, I can't help but think about Lehi and his posterity camping at various locations in the wilderness and in the promised land and them naming various places for certain reasons. Cool stuff. Can anyone tell me what Lehi means? Its rather intersting and there is a place named Lehi due to an event that occurred there. You'll find that story in Judges. Happy Searching!

Random Thought #59

So I was reading from the Book of Mormon to our girls the other night and was reading from 1 Nephi chapter 3, v 1-3. It talks about how Lehi had his dream that his sons should return back to Jerusalem to get the Brass Plates from Laban. I was trying to get the girls to repeat back to me what was happening in those few verses. I brought up the Brass Plates and one of them said "Daddy, we have plates here and we made food for you so you can eat on the plates". I didn't think she was paying attention and was going off on some tangent so I corrected her and went over the summary of those 3 verses again and she just looked at me like I was some sort of moron and repeated her statement, as if I hadn't heard her the first time. We obviously weren't connecting so I went on to tell them why they wanted to get the plates. It was because of the genealogy of their ancestors that it contained. Since they didn't know what genealogy was, I tried to explain it as parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc. As soon as I said that, they again replied with "we don't like ants daddy...we don't have any ants". I, of course, missed what they were saying completely and felt like I was never going to get through to them. Finally my brilliant wife told me that they were listening to me but did not understand the context in which I was using these words. They heard a word they recognized and related to me their experience with that word as they understood it. Needless to say, I felt a little stupid. That got me thinking. Do our Sunday School discussions of the scriptures and our own personal study sometimes miss the point due to the lack of contextual understanding of the scriptures? Do we look at the language nuances that played a role in writing the various books? Do we understand the religious and political events that took place during those times? Do we understand the cultural norms, traditions, history, and perspective of the people? If not, are we perhaps missing the full story the scriptures have to teach us? I think so. Perhaps we need to do a little more than simply read the scriptures 30 min a day or read a book from cover to cover. Perhaps we need to feast upon the words of Christ and try to understand them at the deepest possible contextually-rich level.

Random Thought #58

I went to a little forum last week on Wednesday that involved world-famous genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter and the VP of ExxonMobil's Research unit, Emil Jacobs at Rice University. They were talking about their joint effort to genetically tweak algae to create recyclable biofuels on a mass scale. Anyways, it was a public event but by the "cocktail party" food items they had available, you would have thought the leaders of nations were there. I had no idea what most of the stuff there was, but I was a little hungry so I had a couple of tiny sandwiches. This raised numerous questions for me.

1) Why do snobbish events always have food that nobody has ever heard of?
2) Why does that food not taste very good?
3) Why do they serve it in such little portions?
4) Why is it so expensive?
5) Why do people pay for it AND eat it?

Think about it....when was the last time you went to some eclectic or upscale restaurant? Did you not ask your at least 1 if not all of those questions? I don't get it. If anybody has a clue, please feel free to comment? Personally I'd rather pay 1/5th as much for food that I recognize and that I know tastes better.