Tech.samaritan

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The post Never give that up. appeared first on Indexed.

G.K. Chesterton stood 6 foot 4 and weighed 286 pounds.

During the First World War a lady in London asked why he was not out at the front.

He said, “If you go round to the side, you will see that I am.”

A spelling net is the pattern made when one writes down one instance of each unique letter that appears in a word and then connects these letters with lines, spelling out the word. For instance, the spelling net for VIVID is made by writing down the letters V, I, and D and drawing a line from V to I, I to V, V to I, and I to D.

Different words produce different spelling nets, of course, but every spelling net is an example of a graph, a collection of points connected by lines. A graph is said to be non-planar if some of the lines must cross; in the case of the spelling net, this means that no matter how we arrange the letters on the page, when we connect them in order we find that at least two of the lines must cross.

A word with a non-planar spelling net is called an eodermdrome, an ungainly name that itself illustrates the idea. The unique letters in EODERMDROME are E, O, D, R, and M. Write these down and run a pen among them, spelling out the word. You’ll find that no matter how the letters are arranged, it’s never possible to complete the task without at least two of the lines crossing:

Ross Eckler sought all the eodermdromes in Webster’s second and third editions; another example he found is SUPERSATURATES:

Since spelling nets are graphs, they can be studied with the tools of graph theory, the mathematical study of such networks. One result from that discipline says that a graph is non-planar if and only if it can be reduced to one of the two patterns marked K₅ and K_{(3, 3)} above. Since both EODERMDROME and SUPERSATURATES contain these forbidden graphs, both are non-planar.

A good article describing recreational eodermdrome hunting, by computer scientists Gary S. Bloom, John W. Kennedy, and Peter J. Wexler, is here. One warning: They note that, with some linguistic flexibility, the word eodermdrome can be interpreted to mean “a course on which to go to be made miserable.”

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The post OMG = One More Groan. appeared first on Indexed.

I take issue with the deliberately inflammatory headline that Google is to blame for destroying the workplace since open office style workplaces were around long before Google, but the topic is worth debating.

I have a variety of issues regarding the open office trend. Let’s start with the fact that the folks often making the space decision are managers who already don’t spend much time at their desk because they are, by necessity, in meetings all day. They’re already in a quiet and private conference room where they can focus on the task at hand. They (we) don’t intimately understand the daily tax of constantly being interrupted because they (we) are not living it on a daily basis.

These same managers are often ones who are staring at the bottom line with the best intentions. With the increasingly painful rents in technology hotbeds like Palo Alto, San Francisco, and New York city, it just makes good financial sense to reduce the square footage per employee which means less walled offices because they consume valuable square footage. Don’t worry about the sardine factor, this smaller space will help create a more connected workforce and drive greater collaboration and innovation.

I appreciate the math because I’ve done it, but I get twitchy when fiscal responsibility is used a justification for maximizing productivity. This, my friends, is called a rationalization – a defense mechanism in which controversial behavior are explained in a seemingly rational manner to avoid the true explanation.

It is also bullshit.

In the past five years, the teams I’ve seen work at impressive speed are the ones who self-organized themselves elsewhere. They found a dark corner of the building, they cleared out a large conference room, or they found an unused floor of a building and made it their own. While this might strike you as a case for shared common open space, it’s not. It’s an argument for common space that is not shared because these teams have work to do and don’t want a constant set of irrelevant interruptions. This is why I’m in favor of pod-like set-ups where teams working on similar technology and projects have their own enclosed space. I believe this is the type of set-up that encourages the most efficient forms of collaboration.

A question: when do you do your best work? What are your ideal conditions? They vary by your personality type and whether you’re a introvert or a extravert or a stable or a volatile. If you’re a software engineer, your craft is code and you’re at maximum productivity when you have long uninterrupted minutes and each unexpected visual and auditory interruption is a unique opportunity to completely lose your train of thoughts, context, and hard to recover mental momentum.

The advantages of open space are undeniable: low friction access to the team encourages valuable serendipity, a lack of hard wall offices reduces perceptions of organization hierarchy, and there is an immeasurable subtle joy being able to look across the room and realize this is my tribe.

It’s a business and there are good fiscally responsible reasons as well as culturally ones to move to an open space, but who is doing the math on productivity? Who understands the compounding productivity interest earned with each consecutive uninterrupted minute of work? It is there in those hard to capture collective minutes where your best work is happening.

Beeftopia sends this excerpt from an article at BusinessWeek: "There’s no evidence of any way, shape, or form that there’s a shortage in the conventional sense," says Hal Salzman, a professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers University. "They may not be able to find them at the price they want. But I’m not sure that qualifies as a shortage, any more than my not being able to find a half-priced TV." ... The real issue, say Salzman and others, is the industry’s desire for lower-wage, more-exploitable guest workers, not a lack of available American staff. "It seems pretty clear that the industry just wants lower-cost labor," Dean Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, wrote in an e-mail. A 2011 review (PDF) by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the H-1B visa program, which is what industry groups are lobbying to expand, had "fragmented and restricted" oversight that weakened its ostensible labor standards. "Many in the tech industry are using it for cheaper, indentured labor," says Rochester Institute of Technology public policy associate professor Ron Hira, an EPI research associate and co-author of the book Outsourcing America.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

thechristmaspatch:

Hyperbole and a Half - The Motivation Game

this is too accurate for me right now

Weil’s Law of University Hiring: “First-rate people hire other first-rate people. Second-rate people hire third-rate people. Third-rate people hire fifth-rate people.” (from French mathematician André Weil)

“Slowness is frequently the cause of much greater slowness.” — Montesquieu

tongue-shot
n. speaking or talking distance, voice-range

Inhabitants of La Gomera, a small mountainous island in the Canary group, use a whistled language called the Silbo to communicate over great distances. “This is a form of telephony inferior to ours as regards range, but superior to it in so far as the only apparatus required is a sound set of teeth and a good pair of lungs,” noted Glasgow University phoneticist André Classe in New Scientist in 1958. “The normal carrying power is up to about four kilometres when conditions are good, over twice as much in the case of an exceptional whistler operating under the most favourable circumstances.”

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If you could describe the essence of this summer for you, what would it look like?  For me this year, it’s drinking plum wine at the beach. We picked some wild plums last month, and quickly turned them into an easy wine.  And on every sunny evening available to us, we have been packing up […]

The post Quick & Easy Plum Wine appeared first on And Here We Are.

Rome is north of Chicago.

Venice is north of Minneapolis.

London is north of Calgary.

Paris is nine miles south of the U.S.-Canada border.

This is a slight departure from my normal articles but I thought it might be an idea to write a comprehensive article on catching crayfish. There isn’t a huge amount of information out there so I thought it might be an idea to write a piece on how to do it, license requirements and bait etc. This won’t be the most exciting of articles but I’m hoping it will be informative and clear up a few murky issues such as licensing.

 

First things first, what are they? Crayfish are essentially small freshwater lobsters of which there are two main kinds in the UK. The native White Clawed Crayfish and the invasive American Signal Crayfish.

Native White Clawed are much smaller than their American cousins. Critically endangered they are limited to a few tiny clusters in the south and some larger areas in the north of the UK. Catching one of these proctected species of these will land you in some seriously hot water. The Environment Agency are very unlikely to grant you a license in any areas where they still exist.

American Signal Crayfish are the ones we want to eat. They are causing untold chaos in our waterways. They eat and out compete most our native crayfish and fish and cause huge damage by burrowing into the banks. They are also a vector for the ‘Crayfish Plague’, they are  immune to this disease but it proves fatal when spread to our natives. Fortunately these utter bastards taste fantastic and are great to eat.

Below you can see a map with their locations across the UK.

Do you need a license?

Yes. The license is completely free (link below) and you should receive it in less than a fortnight. It’s important to apply for a license to make sure that you aren’t trapping the last of our White Clawed Crayfish or in an area with breeding otters/water voles. Just fill in the form with your trap dimensions and where you want to catch them. Within a couple of weeks you will receive some tags for each of your traps, attach these and then you are good to go!

http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/homeandleisure/recreation/fishing/119096.aspx

How do I catch them?

The easiest way is traps, these are easily purchased on the internet or you can make them yourself. If you do buy a trap on the internet make sure that entrances are less than 9.5 cm. Traps with bigger entrances can be modified. I can’t stress how important this is, these measures are put in place to stop otters from entering your trap and drowning.

Other methods include some bacon tied onto a piece of string or drop nets (read how to make one here)

Once you have finished crayfishing ensure that you have cleaned all your traps and dried them in the sunshine to stop the spread of crayfish plague.

What bait should I use?

Fish heads, bacon and chicken carcasses are all work well and can be sourced very easily. Another slightly unusual bait is a tin of cat food with a few holes punched in. The benefit of using cat food is that the crayfish can’t actually get to it through the can so it should last the night.

Leave the trap overnight and fingers crossed you should have some crayfish the next morning!

Before you cook them

Crayfish don’t taste fantastic when they have been first caught and need some time to ‘purge’. At the very least leave them for 12 hours but leave a day or two if you can. Crayfish can suffocate if left in a small amount of water, if you plan to leave them in a bucket/bin make sure you keep changing the water so that they can breathe. When possible I leave mine to sit in a bath for a few hours at a time.

 

 

Leaving them to purge removes a slight muddy taste that they can sometimes have, it also empties their intestines or ‘vein’. If you don’t leave them long enough and they still have some food in them you can remove the vein yourself. This can be left in and removed after cooking or you can use a nifty trick to remove it before. The video below shows a quick easy way to do this.

 

 

If you dispatch them with a knife to the head you can then twist the back/middle flap on the tail and then pull the flap. If all goes to plan it should take out most of the vein with it at the same time.

Cook them for around three minutes in boiling water (or court bouillon for extra flavour). Hopefully some more recipes to follow!

Also once home please don’t forget to wash down your traps and let them dry off in the sun. If you don’t do this you can spread crayfish plague to other areas and wipe out the last of your native crayfish.

 

 

The post How to catch Crayfish appeared first on Well hung food.

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If you’re looking for a job at Google, don’t rest on your Ivy League laurels.

The company is taking a more data-centric approach to understanding what makes for successful hires, in lieu of focusing on degrees or transcripts. “G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless—no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation,” says Laszlo Bock, Google’s senior vice president for people operations, in the NYT. This discovery has led Google to hire more people with no college degree at all. Up to 14 percent of some teams are now made up of people who never even attended college.

Bock offered some suggestions about what’s wrong with higher ed:

I think academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment. One of my own frustrations when I was in college and grad school is that you knew the professor was looking for a specific answer. You could figure that out, but it’s much more interesting to solve problems where there isn’t an obvious answer. You want people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer.

Going to college and receiving a degree is still a young person’s best bet for securing gainful employment. But it is telling that one of the nation’s leading tech firms, once known for hiring the best and the brightest from the nation’s top schools, now believes that degrees and test scores are no longer a strong indicator of success. If companies like Google, which are constantly complaining about the lack of skilled workers, don’t think that colleges are preparing kids for the workforce, we should sit up and take notice.

Employers are hungering for innovation, creativity, and leadership—skills and talents that are often acquired outside of academia. High school students (and parents), take note.

[Google office image courtesy of Shutterstock]

Howard University and several other historically black colleges and universities around the country have been facing serious financial shortfalls this year. Earlier this month, the vice chairwoman of Howard’s board of trustees sent a letter to trustees sounding the alarm on the university’s financial situation. Days later, the chairman of the board announced that there was nothing at all to worry about, and that Howard remained “financially and operationally strong.”

The Washington Post has gotten to the bottom of just what’s going on: a 2011 technical adjustment by the Department of Education tightening lending requirements has led to a precipitous drop in the approval rates for loans to parents of students—11 percent nationwide but up to 36 percent for historically black schools, a reflection of the fact that their students are more likely to come from poorer families with lower credit scores.

Predictably enough, the lobbying knives are out, reports the Post:

For the Obama administration, the uproar over parent loans at HBCUs poses a political challenge. Leaders of the United Negro College Fund and the Thurgood Marshall College Fund have pressed Duncan for relief for parents and students they say have been unjustly deprived of loans. The administration has helped with loan appeals but has shown no indication that it is willing to reverse the 2011 action.

Credit is due to the Obama administration for holding the line on this for now. While our heart goes out to the students scrambling to cobble together tuition payments in order to complete their studies, a set of statistics in the article points to the true culprit in this story:

Federal data show that tuition and fees at Howard doubled from the 2000-01 school year to 2011-12, to about $20,000 a year. In that span, the volume of federal loans approved for parents of Howard students more than quadrupled, to about $45 million. Tuition and fees at Howard are now about $22,700 a year.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more concise illustration of the term “bubble.” This is a clear sign of how the unconscionable upward drift of college tuition and fees are stressing the most vulnerable. The pressure on Washington to ease the lending standards for these loans is happening so that this game can go on for yet another round. But at some point, the game will have to end, and a generation of young people will be left with loan payments that will stretch lifetime earning potential to the breaking point. To deny this ugly truth is just delusional.

There are many things Christians can learn from science – among them is how to think. In thought about the deeper matters of science (particle physics, mathematical theory, etc.), there are a number of accepted rules that are useful in theology as well. One of those is the requirement of “elegance” when constructing a plausible theory. It is understood within scientific and mathematical thought that what is true and accurate as explanation and theory should somehow be “elegant.” For example, there is a simple elegance in Einstein’s E=mc². That something as universal as the relationship between matter and energy could be expressed in such a simple manner is indeed elegant. Doubtless there might be another manner to express this relationship, a more convoluted and complicated manner, but science would rule it out in favor of Einstein – elegance and simplicity are somehow more accurate as a description of reality. The continued search for a “unified field theory,” a theory that “explains everything,” is not a pipe-dream or figment of the scientific imagination. It is an instinct and understanding that reality is one, that it ultimately “makes sense,” and does so in a manner that can finally be understood and stated in an elegant manner.

There have been numerous theories throughout human history that gave an “account” of the world. Some of them were quite complex. I think of Ptolemy’s explanation of the movements of the planets, complete with “epicycles” injected into their overall movement to account for why planets sometimes seem to “move backwards.” Such movements, it turned out, were far more simply and elegantly explained once it was learned that the planets, like the earth, revolve around the sun. Their movements therefore appear different from those of the surrounding stars we see.

Christian theology, when done rightly and in a mature manner, has something of the same quality as good math and physics. Theology is, after all, speech or thought about the One God, and not about complexities and multiple theories. Christian theology is not, when rightly done, a collection of Trinitarian doctrine, Christology, soteriology, ecclesiology, sacramental theology, moral theology, etc. Such compartmentalization of Christian doctrine is a holdover from medieval scholasticism, perhaps the lowest point in the history of Christian thought.

The Protestant Reformation, though seen by some as the beginning of the modern period, must also be seen as a development within Christian scholasticism. Both Luther and Calvin were products of the scholastic model and their theologies (and particularly those of their successors) reflect this historical reality. Thus there are within the Christian movements founded by the reformers, the fragmentation and compartmentalization of medieval thought. Though the sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist have been fundamental realities of the Christian life since its beginning, many Christians can give no proper account for their significance. To say that they are “commandments” of Christ simply begs the question and leaves the sacraments as afterthoughts, Ptolemaic epicycles, glued to the surface of some scheme of justification, which is glued to Christology, which is glued to Trinity, all of them only lightly connected, even carrying within them mutual contradictions, held together only by some sense that they should all be there (perhaps because they are actually mentioned in the New Testament).

Such presentations of Christian thought lack elegance and simplicity. They present a confusing array of theories (complete with their own specialized jargon) but without unity or a proper sense of the unity of God and His relationship with His creation. It is little wonder that such fragmentation is often utterly powerless to answer the questions of the culture that surrounds it. A few isolated verses of Scripture are simply useless in the face of the “unified” theory of human sexuality and gender being offered by the modern world (to give but one example). A Christianity that cannot present a gospel that is, in fact, a truly complete world-view, is a neutered artifact, an antiquity that is both boring and sterile. It does not “preach.”

I embrace the traditional teaching of the Church on matters of gender and sexuality, but struggle to do so in a unified manner. Mere assertion of tradition is finally insufficient, a symptom of theology’s abandonment.

In the years that I have studied (and lived) Orthodox theology, among its most profound and enduring aspects is its inner unity. Orthodox theology is not a collection of thoughts – but rather a single thought which may been seen from various angles. In the centuries of the great councils, a common language of Trinity and Christology developed, such that we may speak of the Person of Christ (hypostasis) with regard to the Trinity, and the Person of Christ with regard to the Incarnation, using the same word, with the same word carrying the same meaning. Some refer to this as the “Neo-Chalcedonian” thought of the Cappadocian fathers (Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, etc.). It was the failure to embrace this completion of theological language that created the schism between the “Eastern” Orthodox and the “Oriental” Orthodox, the so-called “Monophysites.” The language of St. Cyril of Alexandria, championed by the Orientals, was correct in its place, but inadequate for the growing synthesis of expression that was giving a growing account of the fullness of the faith.

My experience has been that the whole of the Orthodox life, its theological expression, its understanding of moral activity, its sacraments and liturgy, are but one thing. I sometimes describe this one thing as union with God. It is certainly the only phrase I know that holds everything in its proper place and understanding. To stand within such a theological “structure,” is to be shielded from the fragmentation of the world and an undisciplined, scattered collection of doctrines. The One God is not readily perceived by a scattered mind, and is even more obscured if the theology of that scattered mind is itself a collection of discrete fragments.

It is in this context that I raise periodic objections to the penal substitution theory of the atonement. As epicycles go, it is a major gloss on the fabric of the Christian faith. When I read discussions of this theory I see a variety of fragmentations introduced. God’s holiness and its inability to endure sin; God’s justice and the necessity for equity; God’s mercy and love sometimes pictured as rivals of His holiness and justice. And all of these aspects of God stand divorced from the sacraments, Trinitarian thought, and other areas. Indeed penal substitution theory, at its worst, wreaks complete havoc on Trinitarian dogma. The Son is made subject to the Father’s wrath to such an extent (in some accounts) that He is utterly cut-off and separated from the Father. The Orthodox certainly confess that “One of the Trinity suffered in the flesh,” but in the same hymn declare, “Who without change didst become man and wast crucified, O Christ our God.” I was recently told by an Evangelical that the Incarnation represented a “change” in God (not to be confused, he said, with God’s immutability). It is just such compartmentalization that creates the confusion of much Protestant thought and occasionally absurd statements (similar sources have spoken to me about the beauty of hell and of the sinner’s condemnation).

The fragmented character of most non-Orthodox theology is a reflection of its poverty and the loss of a proper Christian vision. The unity and simplicity, even the intuition of the early fathers that such a unity should exist, are reflected in the Creeds and liturgies of the Church. St. Ignatius of Antioch said, “Our doctrine agrees with the Eucharist and the Eucharist agrees with our doctrine.” Such a statement makes no sense in the context of modern Christian thought.

Modern Christians attend Church, celebrate the Eucharist, are justified and are working on being sanctified. They think about various aspects of God. They are liberal or conservative, tough on sin or soft, Biblically-centered, or culturally sensitive. They are many things but never one thing. Thus when engaging them I have to ask, “Which of your gods are you now describing?”

God is One, and His creation is one. Good speech about either has this in mind. I have acquaintances who are “Young Earthers.” Unable to reconcile an old universe with the absence of evolution and literal readings of the Creation story, they build a box and a wall between themselves and much of modern science. They protect themselves by arguing, “It’s only a theory,” as though their various hermeneutical creations were somehow not theories and more reliable. But as theories go, theirs has little unity and is only a strange combination of confusing assertions.

True theology has no need to fear human science when it is done well. It does better to insist on elegance and simplicity and other hallmarks of the truth rather than to set forth medieval scholasticism of any sort. The world should, in turn, demand as much of Christians theologians.

 

 

 

One day [Ben Franklin] came, half-frozen from his long ride, to a wayside inn. A great crowd was about the fire, and for some time Franklin stood shivering. Suddenly he turned to the hostler.

‘Hostler,’ said he in a loud voice, ‘have you any oysters?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Well, then,’ commanded Franklin in still louder tones, ‘give my horse a peck!’

‘What!’ exclaimed the hostler, ‘give your horse oysters!’

‘Yes,’ said Franklin, ‘give him a peck.’

The hostler, decidedly astonished, prepared the oysters and started for the stable. Everybody instantly arose from the fire-place and rushed out to see the marvellous horse eat oysters. Franklin took the most comfortable seat before the roaring blaze, and calmly awaited developments. Soon all returned, disappointed and shivering.

‘I gave him the oysters, sir,’ said the hostler, ‘but he wouldn’t eat them.’

‘Oh, well, then,’ answered Franklin nonchalantly, ‘I suppose I shall have to eat them myself. Suppose you try him with a peck of oats.’

– Carl Holliday, The Wit and Humor of Colonial Days, 1912

Despite not watching television for 20 years, I’m not a staunch believer in what Ted and Blake are saying. I’m more of a MILD believer in it. :)

Relax in your room, and then head outside to play some volleyball on your private court.  Call your neighbors over to join you in a game of billiards, or practice your golf swing in the rec room. End your night with a DJ spinning beats in your backyard. No, this isn’t a resort; it’s off-campus housing for college students. And the amenities get a whole lot more ridiculous than that. The New York Times reports:

Even through the recession and the housing crisis, student housing development has remained robust, outperforming other sectors in part because the rising college student population increased the demand for accommodations. Construction of student housing, though down from its peak five years ago, continues to boom, and analysts predict growth in the coming years.

With all the competition, developers are looking for ways to set their properties apart. That has led to the construction of complexes with tanning salons; spas offering manicures, pedicures, facials and massages; 24-hour workout rooms with virtual trainers; and outdoor pools with bars and cabanas. There are washers and dryers that send text messages when a cycle is complete, and exercise machines that allow users to check their e-mail.

Private developers aren’t simply competing with one another. Public colleges, fueled by readily available student loan money, have built luxurious dorms to attract students from across the country. Students at the University of Michigan can enjoy salmon filet, lamb, or even shark at one of their residence halls. A dorm at the University of Cincinnati offers a 40-foot climbing wall and an indoor river. For those in need of pensive relaxation, The University Village Suites at Kennesaw State University provides an art gallery.

College students today live a bit like Cinderella, though. With a little government fairy dust, they land in the lap of luxury, enjoying a four year ball. But once the clock strikes graduation, they’re immediately chained to a pumpkin of debt.

We’ll wait to see what form Prince Charming takes.

This article is among the first written for the blog. There is something to be said for the blog itself  having “stayed put.” The internet is an ephemeral creation. I hope to be providing a stable platform for learning, for questioning, for conversation. With a few emendations, I offer this reprint. That the article is still useful after an entire 6 years is astonishing!

In monastic tradition, a monk makes four vows: poverty, chastity, obedience and stability. Most people are familiar with the first three but not with the fourth. In classical monastic practice it meant that a monk stayed put: he did not move from monastery to monastery. It was not a new idea. Before this vow was formalized in various Rules, there was already the saying from the Desert: “Stay in your cell and your cell will teach you everything.”

Staying put or stability doesn’t sound all that difficult – certainly easier than poverty, chastity and obedience. But it may indeed be the hardest thing of all. The “noonday devil” which tended to afflict monks from the beginning, was especially known as the temptation at some point to leave your cell and just go visiting, where gossip and many far worse temptations could make themselves manifest. Staying put was the hardest battle of all. In its most extreme form in the the East we see the Stylites, the monks who lived on the tops of pillars (St. Simeon’s was over 300 feet tall!)

In our modern world stability is an extremely rare commodity. The average American moves once every five years. When I first came to Oak Ridge (Tennessee), I was constantly told by the old-timers, “People in Oak Ridge are from everywhere!” In 1943 when this city was founded as part of the Manhattan Project, that statement was truly unusual. Americans rarely relocated. But I had to break the sad news to my new co-citizens, “Everywhere you go, people are from everywhere!”

There was a time in my hometown in South Carolina that a trip to the store or Mall would bring a dozen casual meetings with friends and acquaintances. Now they are all strangers when I visit – or rather I am the stranger. I do not live there anymore.

All of this would just be sociologically interesting if it had no effect on our lives. But it has a profound effect.

In 1950 (to pick a date), the most common pattern in our country was for a local boy to meet and marry a local girl and to settle down and raise their children in the community in which they themselves were born, with relatives and friends forming a network of relationships that surrounded and nurtured (or harrassed) them. Divorce rates and crime rates were relatively low in most places. Stable communities tend to have stable families. The network of relationships promotes this. We have lived in these relatively stable forms for most of human history. Even the great nomadic tribes traveled as tribes.

In 2013 (to pick another date), the more common pattern is for a boy to meet a girl in college or later – he is from Virginia (say) and she is from Ohio (say). They marry, move to Oregon and begin their careers, or they met there and married. Family is the stuff you negotiate as in “whose parents do we visit at Thanksgiving this year, etc.?” The network of friends is often his friends from work and her friends from work, and frequently not much more.

In 1980, living in Columbia, S.C., I attended a conference in which the lecturer asked an auditorium of about 400 to raise their hands if they new 5 people on their city block. A few hands went up. I wound up in the last group. I knew no one in the Apartment Complex where we lived. Most of us did not know a single neighbor. And that is not an unusal modern pattern.

This brings us to the loneliness of modern man. The internet has probably made us more connected, in a virtual sense, than we have been in a generation. But, of course, their is an extreme level of volunteerism in this virtual community. If I don’t want to post today there is nothing you can do about it. We are not a natural community.

I cannot touch you or hear you laugh. I share a photo so you know something of what I look like. But how do I sound? How much of my native Appalachian dialect still clings to my tongue (not much, but some).

And we only know what we choose to share. It makes for a very thin village indeed.

As modern man has lost his stability (I blame our economic structures largely for this phenomenon – moving expenses are tax-deductible, for example) so we have lost the fruit of stability. Crime, divorce, the simple consensus that makes a culture a culture disappears. The 1950′s three channel television and white-bread families were probably the last cultural manifestation of an earlier consensus that will not return. It cannot return without stability.

I have lived in this small city since 1989, the longest I have ever lived anywhere. I have come to know many people in this town of 25,000 and I know my parish of 100+ souls quite well. Stability for me means I have a child buried here, and I will be buried here as well. It is a goal I have – a very long term one.

For all of us, some form of stability is necessary, even if it is one we must largely create ourselves.

I would point to the Orthodox Church as an example of stability. I can read from centuries of writings and recognize and understand what is said. St. Athanasius is as interesting to me on a daily basis as, say, Fr. John Behr. The “latest thing” in Orthodoxy just isn’t very late. There is a stability that comes within that part of life – a stability I cannot create but to which I can submit. I am Orthodox and I can daily seek to imbibe more fully what that means. It can create me (which is probably much to be preferred).

I cannot leave the modern world (or post-modern if you prefer). I was born in 1953 and there’s is nothing to be done about it. But there are commitments that I can make – that any of us can make. I am married. I do not take a vow of poverty, but everything I own is owned by my wife as well (no private property). If you have children, you will learn a certain form of poverty no matter what. For the married, faithfulness is the form of chastity. I do not take a vow of obedience (nor did my wife for that matter), but we have a life of mutual submission – my will is not my own. We are not here because I alone wanted to be here. We are here because we wanted to be here (ultimately, I suppose there is obedience – to my Bishop, and to my God – but on a daily basis His Eminence does not interfere. God can also be strangely silent).

But stability is more fleeting. I think that only by becoming part of a larger community, even larger than the present and reaching into the past, do we begin to find stability. Many Christians today live, at best, as part of a movement. It is an interesting word – incompatible with stability. Nothing in my life compares with the stability of 2,000 years of living Tradition. Stability means to live my life in the neighborhood of the Kingdom of God where the saints know my name and encourage or harrass me if necessary.

God give us the grace to come to the place of stability in you. Put me some place where I can stay put.

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In East Bangor, Pennsylvania (pop. 800), there’s a little diner named for the trolley that used to take people to the once bustling steel town of Bethlehem.  The proprietors have adorned the walls with photographs of other local things that…

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Franz Bibfeldt is unusual among theologians — he doesn’t exist. In 1947, divinity student Robert Clausen invented the name for a fictitious footnote in a term paper at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, and his classmate Martin Marty then wrote a review of Bibfeldt’s book The Relieved Paradox in the seminary magazine. The book was imaginary, but the conspirators arranged for it to be cataloged at the school library and always checked out.

When the hoax was discovered, the perpetrators were reprimanded and Marty was sent to Chicago, where he eventually rose to become a dean at the University of Chicago divinity school. So, Marty said, “Bibfeldt had more influence on me than any other theologian.”

Under Marty’s influence, Bibfeldt grew into an invisible mainstay at the school. A display case in the entry hall was filled with signed photographs of mayor Richard Daley, Spiro Agnew, Illinois senator Charles Percy, former Georgia governor Lester Maddox, and the 1971 Playmate of the Year, all inscribed to Bibfeldt, and an annual symposium featuring bratwurst and beer was held each year on the Wednesday closest to April Fool’s Day. Graduates eventually spread Bibfeldt’s gospel elsewhere — he’s noted in the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation; a session at the American Association of Religions meeting in 1988 was devoted to Bibfeldt; and in 1994 the evangelical magazine The Wittenberg Door named him theologian of the year.

Bibfeldt himself is characteristically modest — reportedly he has given only one interview, and that to Howard Hughes — but his acts are famous:

• He adapted the Sermon on the Mount for American audiences, writing, “Blessed are the happy who have everything, because they won’t need to be comforted” and “Blessed are the impeccably dressed, because they will look nice when they see God.”
• He responded sharply to Kierkegaard’s Either/Or with a treatise titled Both/And, followed by the conciliatory Either/Or and/or Both/And.
• Other publications include A Pragmatist’s Paraphrase of Selected Sayings of Jesus, The Boys of Sumer: Akkadian Origins of the National Pastime, I Hear What You’re Saying, But I Just Don’t Care: Thoughts on Pastoral Counseling, Luther on Vacation: From Worms to Cancun, and The Wealth of King Solomon: A Hebrew Scripture Prefigurement of Sports Contracts.
• “It is more difficult for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle,” he wrote. “Yet, with genetic engineering, we can now breed very small camels.”

“We use him very mildly, gently, to satirize the whole theological system,” Marty said. “There’s really no malice in it.”