Eclectic Amateur

From First Things — How to Change Your Mind:

Before I reveal the four steps I want to reiterate that while the advice could transform your life, it likely will not. As with most life-altering advice, it is simple, easy to implement, and even easier to ignore. Statistically speaking, the odds are great that you’ll ignore this advice. But a handful of you will try it so for the one or two people who will find this useful, the four steps that will transform your worldview are:

1. Choose a book of the Bible.

2. Read it in its entirety.

3. Repeat step #2 twenty times.

4. Repeat this process for all books of the Bible.

Christians often talk about having a Biblical worldview yet most have only a rudimentary knowledge of the Bible. They attempt to build a framework without first gathering the lumber and cement needed to create a solid foundation. The benefits of following this process should therefore be obvious. By fully immersing yourself into the text you’ll come to truly know the text. You’ll deepen your understanding of each book and knowledge of the  the Bible as a whole.

The entire article is worth reading.

For August 2011, my book will be 1 Peter.

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the US government can not pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government’s reckless fiscal policies. Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that “the buck stops here.” Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.
— Sen. Barack H. Obama, March 2006

As the French saying goes, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Ilargi at The Automatic Earth writes about the Greek Debt situation:

Tanks in the street of Athens, and people throwing themselves out of windows. It’s come to this kind of threatening language, and in the next 48 hours or so it will only intensify, and financial markets will fluctuate because of it as if that’s their very and only purpose in life.

The words about the tanks and suicides come from one of Greece’s newly fangled fat twin political duo, Theodoros Pangalos, the deputy prime minister who appeared out of nowhere the past few days, as far as that is physically possible for someone his size.

Look, I’m not trying to make fun of fat people here, it’s just the irony that the fact that the “face” of Greece in the international financial media has overnight changed to these two huge guys that no-one outside of the country had ever heard about before. And that they’re the ones threatening the Greeks with hell and brimstone if they don’t agree to austerity measures that will make a substantial part of the population go hungry. “We all have to tighten our belts now”, that sort of thing. Well, those are quite some belts to tighten.

Wow.  Looks like, for austerity measures, they could start with “think globally, act locally.”

While entertaining, why does this affect us (Americans, that is)?  Read on:

But yes, do ask yourself: what do you think would happen in New York, LA, Atlanta, Chicago, if those Greek austerity measures mentioned above would fall on the doorsteps of your community? Same question for those of you living in London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Montréal.

Maybe this is a good time to speak up. At least now you still can. Once there are tanks in the streets, that may prove to be not so easy anymore. Look, Greece is not the worst of the lot, or the biggest issue. As Jon Stewart pointed out last week, Greek debt amounts to some $44,000 per capita. In America, it’s $45,000.

We’re all in this together, believe it or not. US banks have exposure to Greece through credit default swaps to an extent that nobody can define. We do know, though, that it’s substantial. And that if the Greek austerity vote fails on Wednesday, those US banks will come looking for more bailouts. From a government that can’t even agree on a debt ceiling, because the debt is so monstruously high already there is no way out anymore.

I doublechecked — the quoted number is low.  As of today, the per-capita share of the U. S. debt is $46,027.83 (direct from the Treasury divided by the Census).

It’s also fun to compare Greek vs. U.S. unemployment numbers, but for right now, I will leave that as an exercise for my readers…

So far, no disasters with the seedlings, so they are still doing well:

Tomatoes!

More Seedlings

I also have some lettuce starts as part of the Slow Food Huron Valley seed trial:

Lettuce Test Plot

The upper left is ‘Grand Rapids’:

Grand Rapids

In front of that is some ‘Black-Seeded Simpson’ I planted for comparison:

Black-Seeded Simpson

Front and center is ‘Sunset’:

Sunset

And the front right variety is ‘Sanguine Amerliore’ (also known as ‘Strawberry Cabbage Lettuce’):

Sanguine Amerliore

The two rows that aren’t doing so well are the ‘Cimmaron’ and ‘Australian Yellow Leaf’ that I planted for comparison (top center and top right).

I’ve also started a four-pack of the ‘Mini Yellow Bell’ pepper which is in with the rest of my pepper seedlings.  I have some ‘Hanson’ head lettuce growing which is the SFHV trial variety but which I selected on my own to try as a fall planting last year.

I was asked this by a friend tonight, and it made me think.  What have I been reading lately?  (I’m only going to count real, bound, ink-on-dead-trees books.  Blogs, Facebook, newsfeeds, and webcomics will not count for this purpose.)

Let’s see: fitness, gardening, more fitness, Carmelite spirituality, stage combat, economics, and bits of BritLit.

In case anyone wonders why this blog is named “Eclectic Amateur”, this should help explain.

Well, it’s been a year since I said that I was going to get active on GNOME development again.

Perhaps that was over-optimistic.  Real Life™ did not go away and give me copious free time – and even snuck in a curveball or two.  Still, I haven’t been completely idle.

The original plan was to use the OMAP Zoom2 development platform to test GNOME using the ARM processor, with a further goal of exploring the OMAP video capability (ultimate motive: enable Cheese).  The Zoom II was made available by TI and provided by the GNOME Foundation.

The TI OMAP Zoom2 development system

This was going to be accomplished by using OpenEmbedded and Ångström to build GNOME for ARM.  As Ångström has Zoom2 support, this ought to have been simple.

In theory, at least.  In practice, I ran into the following obstacles:

• I had not worked with git-based development before, and (at least at the time I started), and the latest-and-greatest pull were probably a bit more bleeding-edge than I should have started with.  No big deal there; standard teething troubles for trying to learn how to work with a new project.
• Also at that time, one of the GNOME recipes had a build failure in it, and I was not yet familiar enough with OE and BitBake to fix it myself.
• Working around that build failure, I discovered that my build system didn’t have sufficient disk space to hold a full OE build anyway.  (The OE documentation advises you to make sure you have “sufficient” system resources and bandwidth for a complete build, but is frustratingly non-specific about what qualifies as “sufficient”.)
• This was about the time that my build system gave up the ghost anyway.
• Poked at it a bit more with a borrowed build system that did have enough disk space.  That one died too.

Lessons learned:

• Be more realistic about how much time I can squeeze in for GNOME projects, and remember to allow for life changing my schedule and commitments.
• Do not underestimate the required beefiness of an OpenEmbedded build machine.
• For OpenEmbedded development, stable branches might be your friend.

Plan B is now under consideration.

My little table of seedlings, almost two weeks ago:

Pepper and tomato starts, 4/10/2011

This was almost two weeks ago, so they’re bigger now.  I’ve repotted the largest tomatoes already, and need to do some more.

As you can see, I am doing my traditional overplanting of tomatoes — we can really only eat so many, even if they are tasty heirlooms.  The plan is to try canning some salsa this fall.  The peppers should help with that, too.  Last year was the first time I’ve ever gotten any yield at all with peppers.  Hopefully, that wasn’t a fluke.

See what happens when you neglect the Environmental Impact Statement?

From John Michael Greer comes this reflection on the value of from-scratch cooking with basics:

I want to talk about something a good deal more basic: the awkward fact that the food you can produce in your backyard garden, or acquire in any other way likely in a deindustrializing world, does not magically appear in the forms that most Americans are used to consuming. A nation used to eating factory-breaded chicken tenders and JoJos to go is going to face some interesting traumas when food once again consists of live chickens, raw turnips, and fifty-pound sacks of dry navy beans.

It’s easy as well as entertaining to poke fun at America along these lines, but the difficulties involved are very real. A very large fraction of today’s Americans, provided with a plucked chicken, a market basket of fresh vegetables, and that fifty-pound sack of navy beans, would be completely at a loss if asked to convert them into something tasty and nourishing to eat…

You may be thinking that it’s all very well to praise home-cooked meals produced from raw materials, but cooking that way is a very time-consuming process, not to mention one that involves a vast amount of hard work. You’ve seen the gyrations that actors in chef hats go through in cooking programs on TV, you’ve glanced over the forbidding pages full of exotic ingredients and bizarre processes that make today’s gourmet cookbooks read like so many tomes of dire enchantment out of bad fantasy fiction, you’ve seen racks of women’s magazines that treat elaborate timewasting exercises disguised as cooking instructions as a goal every family ought to emulate, and you’ve unconsciously absorbed the legacy of most of a century of saturation advertising meant to convince you that cooking things for yourself from scratch is an exercise in the worst sort of protracted drudgery, and probably gives you radioactive halitosis and ring around the collar to boot, so you really ought to give it up and go buy whatever nice product the nice man from the nice company is trying to sell you.

If all this has convinced you that you don’t have time to cook, dear reader, you have been had.

Read the whole thing.

What I really want for Christmas is a shiny new Android tablet.  Is that too much to ask?