Don't bother reading this post

I am posting another nothing post.
I have nothing to say because I am lazy and don't want to think of something meaningful to say.
I just like having words flowing out from my typing fingers.
It is almost like having a beautiful piece of blank paper and a fresh black pen.
My thoughts always dry up at that point.
The paper and the computer screen look so inviting, but I can't think what to write!
Hence the invention of nothing posts. Because nobody likes to read nothing, and that is frequently what I write.
As I have mentioned before, there is vast quantity of nothing already out here on the web.
I suppose my bit of nothing will not make any difference, because, after all, when you add nothing, nothing changes. Nothing is increased.

Speaking of nothing, this post is actually something. Computers use bits and now I know binary numbers so I know how a computer would be storing this post. Sort of. My ideas of how computers work are rather hazy. But I do know something about binary numbers. I had a lab yesterday where we hooked up a bunch of wires and got four LED's blinking binary numbers from 0 to 15. They looked so pretty.

equations

You know what? I have found some equations I absolutely love.

You think I'm crazy, I know, but I really do like these equations.
There are two I am thinking of at the moment. The speed of sound equation
and the velocity equation that uses the speed of sound and the Mach number.

The speed of sound equation is this:
a = √γRT
The flow velocity equation is this:
V = Ma

Aren't they so cool?

γ is a Greek letter called gamma. It has different numerical values based on what fluid you are calculating the speed of sound in. For air, this is 1.4.
R is the gas constant. For air, this is something like 287 J/kg/K.
T is the temperature of the fluid.

M is called the Mach number. It is an important number in aerodynamics. You can find it easily if you know the flow velocity. It is V/a. If you know M, you can find the flow velocity.
The flow velocity is the velocity at which the fluid is moving at a particular point in a flow.
A flow is pretty obviously a bunch of moving fluid.

So now you know the two equations I am in love with at the moment. They are beautiful, simple equations.


And I know I wasn't studying too long last night.

A nothing Post

My mum found this really funny quote on her gmail :

Smoking kills - If you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life.

Brooke Shields

Isn't that funny?

The Quote of Wednesday

I have been reading "Stepping Heavenward" by Elizabeth Prentiss. It is a most amazing book which I think I must read again to more fully grasp all that was said.
So here is a quote from it:

"Bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. Take
what I cannot give--my heart, body, thoughts, time, abilities, money,
health, strength, nights, days, youth, age, and spend them in Thy
service, O my crucified Master, Redeemer, God. Oh, let these not be
mere words! Whom have I in heaven but Thee? and there is none upon
earth that I desire in comparison of Thee. My heart is athirst for
God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?"

page 184

Happy 19th Birthday Kirk!!!!!
I love you lots!!
Love always,
Jo

Wednesday Poem

The 23rd Psalme

George Herbert


The God of love my shepherd is,
And he that doth me feed:
While he is mine, and I am his,
What can I want or need?

He leads me to the tender grasse,
Where I both feed and rest;
Then to the streams that gently passe:
In both I have the best.

Or if I stray, he doth convert
And bring my minde in frame:
And all this not for my desert,
But for his holy name.

Yea, in death's shadie black abode
Well may I walk, I fear;
For thou art with me; and thy rod
To guide, thy staffe to bear.

Nay, thou dost make me sit and dine,
Ev'n in my enemies sight:
My head with oyl, my cup with wine
Runnes over day and night.

Surely thy sweet and wondrous love
Shall measure all my dayes;
And as it never shall remove,
So neither shall my praise.

Poem Game 2

Here are the rest of the poems we wrote during the poem game.

Joel's poem is first:

Mr. Pare was looking in his dictionary,
He was looking the word "Hairy",
When suddenly his lunch got stale,
And he began to fiddle with a
pine cone, and then began to sew,
without a thimble,
He pretended that he was driving his car,
or was being condemned

I had some trouble reading Joel's handwriting, but I think I got it all. He gets really silly when we play this game.

The next one is mine:

It was unintentional
And very un-understandable
(Is that in the dictionary?)
An accident that nary
a person could repeat.

Somehow the strange old fiddle
With its worm-eaten middle
Was dragged form a box
With a stale smell and engraved fox
to accompany the pine cone fire.

An odor of hazelnut coffee
Mingles with the scent of pine tree
While the fiddle plays madly
Like a music box that's sadly
and terribly out of tune

After being woken by the sound
A bear begins charging around
And smashes Joel's red car,
Recently guaranteed to be up to par
with inspection regulations.

The guests had to leave by sleigh.

All my poems always have a story in them. Mostly they end up that way by accident.

This last one is my dad's:

It was completely unintentional,
the dictionary was rather stale,
so he made a fiddle from a pine cone,
and played it on the phone.

Very hungry - have a hazelnut?
We'll play the fiddle with a thimble.
Still hungry - orange next?
Set the music box on the table.

There's a bear on the car -
it's squashed now, guaranteed.
Don't eat the starfish! it's not far -
We'll ride the sleigh and hitch the steed.

Have some milk - it has calcium.
With the fiddle playing, a drink for a queen.

Dad said a poem written with this list of words would have to be post-modern. Also he was unsure how to fit condemned and coating in to his poem, but he had all the other words. Yes, hungry-orange was one of the words on the list.

Annie did not know quite what to do in the first round, so she just wrote down the list again.

That's the end of the first poem game. I'm trying to decide whether or not to post the poems from the second game we played.

Poem Game 1

Last night we played the poem game again. You can see the rules and the poems we wrote.
So I thought I'd post our results so everyone else can be almost as amused as we were. I'm not going to post all the words we came up with, but I will put the words we used in our poems in italics.

In random order:
First, here is Mum's:

It was unintentional that I chose the dictionary
for out came a fragrance so stale.
My eyes fell upon the word canary
and all at once I could hear the wail
That mournful wail of the fiddle.
What, do you think that a riddle?
Mournfully high then mournfully low
I'm so glad it's only one!

Although there are supposed to be at least five words from the list in the poem (see the rules here), Mum was holding a wailing Bethan. That seems to have also affected the content of the poem.

Second poem is Noelle's:

My chocolate chip cookie,
became very stale;
For I was playing on my fiddle,
a song about a whale.
Pine cones are very furry,
and my eyesight very blurry,
because I ate one to many,
a hazelnut cookie.
My thimble rolled away on me,
It reversed it's gravity,
And now it's sitting in a tree,
looking as happy as can be.

I guess she was thinking about cookies because we were eating Christmas cookies while playing this game. I am puzzled by the furry pine cone line. I never thought pine cones furry.

Next poem, Jo's:

The unintentional consequence of
his studying the dictionary was
that he became increasingly
stale. "Stop it!" he suddenly
cried. "When you fiddle with
the pine cone you make me
drop my hazelnut into the
thimble! And I can't hear my
music box when you make such
a noise! You sound like a
bear driving a car guaranteed
to run like a starfish! I would
prefer it if you drove a
sleigh, It would improve
the quality of the calcium
in the queen." After that
he was condemned to be
continually coating jellybeans
with chocolate.

I believe she used every word in that "poem". She said it was free verse.

The Quote of Wednesday

Since I have not found anything interesting today to quote, this is what I came up with:

"If muffins grew on trees, I would cultivate them."
Laura D.

That is a quote from a girl I met in college. I did not actually hear her say this, but her roommates found it so memorable, they wrote it down and frequently tell to one another again when they are in a silly mood. Laura loves muffins, and that is why she said this.

Tyndale and Spurgeon

On New Year's Eve, our family likes to pick a long movie and watch it instead of the dropping ball (a disappointing appearance - dropping balls ought look more like a dropping ball, not a slowly moving ball). This Eve, we watched God's Outlaw, a DVD about William Tyndale who translated the Bible from Greek to English.

William Tyndale lived in England during the time of King Henry VIII. The Reformation was just reaching England and books like those by Luther and English Bibles translated by Wycliffe were not allowed. Tyndale longed for people like plough boys and farmers and other common folk as well as the many unlearned priests to be able to read God's Word for themselves. So he began translating the Bible to English. Only, he needed it published, and that couldn't happen without a license. But he could not get a license because it was many churchmen believed it was wrong for people to read the Bible for themselves. They said the common people would not understand it without all the traditions of the church, that the people had no learning and would use the Scripture wrongly. Because of this, Tyndale left England and had his New Testament printed in Germany and smuggled into England. Of course the authorities were not happy about this, so they had spies after him. He lived a poor and dangerous life for many years. Finally, he was betrayed and summarily martyred.
But the Bible was being read all over England in English. Sometime after Tyndale's death, King Henry VIII ordered great English Bibles to be kept in all the churches and licensed them to be printed. At last the common people could legally keep and read English Bibles.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jo was reading Charles Spurgeon's Morning and Evening to me. The evening reading for today was about being renewed in the Scripture every day, feeding ourselves and becoming rooted in God's Word.

"We know the only way to prevent the body from wasting away is to eat meals frequently. It is just as necessary, in order to restore the soul, to feed on the Book of God, listen to the preached Word, and partake of the Lord's table."
Spurgeon, Charles H.Morning and Evening New Updated Edition. Hendrickson Publishers, Inc., March 2005

She and I agreed that we needed to be reminded of this for we have failed too many times.

And then we realized how great William Tyndale's gift was. For by God's grace we are able to read His Scripture and be renewed directly from the Word.

Oh, thanks be to God for raising William Tyndale, for placing us in a country in which Bibles are legal and in abundance, and for drawing us to Himself.
His mercies are everlasting and the truth of the Lord endures forever!

Friday Vocabulary - Aliquot

The experimental procedure entails taking two aliquots of the unknown and treating one with test reagent X and the other with reagent Y.

-Qualitative Analysis of Some Organic Functional Groups.
-Chemistry I Ladoratory

So what does aliquot mean? It means to designate a part of a number that divides the number evenly and leaves no remainder.The example my dictionary had was that 5 is an aliquot part of 15.
I think that's all for now.

Bethan Faith, born November 11, 2006


Isn't she cute??? She is being held by dad.
So that's where we've been. Friday Vocabulary coming right up!!

Nothing

This is a nothing post. I have nothing to say and it's six-thirty.

Nothing posts are fun to write. One does not need to have a clearly defined idea of what to write. Nor do you have to think about polishing and perfecting what you do write. I guess you could say it was similar to a writing excercise I practice in my writing class called "freewriting." Both types of writing are easy and almost mindless to begin. Both stir up one's thoughts and encourage more thinking. After a couple of freewriting excercises, I have dozens of thoughts flowing through my brain. Sometimes they lead to a good topic; other times they spawn each a dozen more thoughts and topics. I have not written enough nothing posts to find out if they have the same effect on my brain.

How do you go about writing a nothing post? Well, first of all you must sit down and yawn. Then you stare off into space for about five minutes. When you have come back to earth, you look at your computer screen for about two minutes. It's hard on one's eyes to stare at computer screens for much longer than that. When your eyes are suffienciently dry and sore, you finally begin typing. Just put your hands on the keyboard and type in the first sentence that comes to your mind.

A good time to write nothing posts is at the end of the day. You must be just tired enough to want to not think hard, but not so tired you will fall asleep. Nothing posts are also good "fillers" in between several serious posts on a blog. Of course, you must not write too many nothing posts. They work better in small doses.

There are already too many blogs that have nothing but nothing posts. This is not a good situtation. It is an example of shallowness and laziness. Poeple do not want to think and work to write serious posts. Many, many young people and older people write hundreds of nothing posts every year. Can you imagine the quantity of nothingness that is produced?

Unfortunately, this laziness is something we all fall into. My own blog tends to nothing more every time I post if I can spur myself on to post at all.

But if you are struggling with this sin (like myself), know that God is able and will help you.

"Through sloth the roof sinks in,
and through indolence the house leaks."
Ecclesiastes 10:18

BibleGateway.com

Studying the Scriptures

I'm part of a small group on campus, and we're studying the Gospel of John. As college students, we're all interested in bringing Christ into our daily life and finding new ways to serve Him in the midst of homework, job decisions, and being bombarded with false worldviews. As part of this search for ways to grow in Christ, we thought it would be great if we took a verse from our study and think/incorporate it throughout the week. One guy, Scott, called it "lifework" because he didn't like the word "homework."
So this was the verse we chose a couple of weeks ago:

John 5:39 "You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me," BibleGateway

It is a good challenge to find Christ in every passage I read. It is especially fun to find Christ in the Old Testament, for they testify of Him, but not so explicitly as the New Testament.

Friday Vocabulary - Vermiculate

In the last Friday Vocabulary I did, I had a quote from The Pilgrim's Regress and I defined a word that was in it. Well, there's another word in the same quote that I want to define this time. The word is vermiculate. I'm not going to repost the whole quote, just the part with the word in it so you will have some context.

The Landlord does not make the blackness. The blackness is there already wherever the taste of mountain-apple has created the vermiculate will.

So what does vermiculate mean? Vermiculate basically means wormy So what the guide is saying is that

the blackness is wherever the taste of mountain-apple has created a wormy will

There are other meanings for vermiculate like being wormlike in shape or appearance, having wavy or winding markings like worms or worm tracks, and moving like a worm.
That's all for now.

Wednesday Quote

Kirk had a test today so I don't think she was thinking about the quote she was supposed to do. So I'm doing it for her. :)
The quote for today comes from Charles Spurgeon. I found it on Girl Talk in this post.

“No man can do me a truer kindness in this world than to pray for me.”

Charles Spurgeon

Which I think is true for all of us.
That's it for now! I have to go study for the SAT now.Bye!!

Friday Vocabulary - Fissiparous

Hello! It's been a bit since I last posted. I've been trying to keep up in school. Here is my post for today.

I was reading The Pilgrim's Regress By C. S. Lewis last night in a chapter entitled "The Black Hole" where the main character asks the guide why the Landlord made the black hole if he was so good. I came upon this paragraph:

'The Landlord does not make the blackness. The blackness is there already wherever the taste of mountain-apple has created the vermiculate will. What do you mean by a hole? Something that ends. A black hole is blackness enclosed, limited. And in that sense the Landlord has made the black hole. He has put into the world a Worst Thing. But evil of itself would never reach a worst: for evil is fissiparous and could never in a thousand eternities find any way to arrest its own reproduction. If it could, it would be no longer evil: for Form and Limit belong to the good. The walls of the black hole are the tourniquet on the wound through which the lost soul else would bleed to a death she never reached. It is the Landlord's last service to those who will let him do nothing better for them.'

The Pilgrim's Regress: Book Ten: Chapter 4

When I got to the word fissiparous, I thought "I wonder what that means?" So I thought I would look it up and use it for Friday Vocabulary.

Fissiparous means to reproduce by fission. Fission is something that various simple plants and animals do in which the parent divides in two or more parts and each part becomes an independent individual. It also means to break up into parts or to split apart.

Well that is all for today. See you on Monday!

The Quote of Wednesday

I promised Jo that I would post the quotes of Wednesday again. Next week I've got exams so I'll be giving the quote to Jo to post.
I was going to post something from St. Augustin, but I went to a physics colloquium at four today and my brain is still running on that.
Maybe though, you all might like to hear about symmetry? Mario Livio, a physicist and writer, wrote a book about symmetry. He spoke about it today as a guest lecturer. It was an excellent lecture. Maybe I'll change my major from engineering to physics.
But this isn't a proper quote for Wednesday. I do not have one for today. So instead, I suggest you to go listen to John Piper's sermon on expository preaching. I am not sure where to find it, but I will ask my dad (who downloaded it on his cell phone).

Meanwhile, you can ponder these words from John 1:1 to 5.

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it."

Hmm, I wonder if there is any symmetry there...

Friday Vocabulary - Vicarious

Hello!! The word for today is vicarious.
Vicarious means to take the place of another thing or person. It can also mean to endure, suffer, or perform something in the place of another person.
It reminds me of Jesus' substitutionary death on the cross.
That's all for now!! See you on Monday!

Hello! It's been a bit since we last posted.
This summer we've been rather busy. Kirk is now a Freshman at a near by college. I don't know how often she will be able to post but she said she'll try posting a quote every Wednesday.
This year I'm a senior and am trying to pick up all Kirk's chores as well as help mum but I'm going to work posting into my schedule somehow. I'm going to start the Friday Vocabulary again and I'm also going to try posting something on Mondays. I'm not sure what the Monday posts will be about but I'm open to any suggestions our faithful readership might make.
I guess that's all for now. I'll see you all on Friday!