Anticipation
“Anticipation, Anti-cipation, An-ti-ci-pation … is making me blue!” At least, that’s my rendering of the song.
On Monday, I depart this city to travel to the distant environs of California. In the interim, I need to set my affairs straight. Mostly, that will consist of cleaning the house, since my mom is returning from Barbados tomorrow, buying stuff (clothes, shoes, hygienic miscellany) to take to Calif., and battening down the hatches on the site so I will be able to do interesting things while not having ready access to my accustomed tools. Oh, and finishing up on my cousin’s computer so it can sent off concurrent with the stuff my mom is shipping to Barbados.
I am addicted to printing. Right now, I’m printing a ton of differential geom. notes written by B. Csikos— incidentally, he said he used ChiWriter to typeset them; it would be nice to have access to ChiWriter, I really do like the chic typewriter style, but it is sadly obsolescent, and even in its obsolescence, a proprietary product. The notes look surprisingly high-quality (in terms of comprehensiveness and looks) for a non-book format; of course, they are a lot on the concise side.
That’s my new spiel this summer, differential geometry. That, and I’m trying to take my love affair with real analysis to its inevitable conclusion, so I can make moves on its sister, complex analysis. See me pun! 
I also got both volumes of the great Core Java 2 books for less than $25, so I will be boning up my Java competency sometime soon. I look forward to being able to use Java to visualize stuff; seems like it would serve as a good graphical RAD for visualization purposes. Maybe that’s just because I’ve seen so many visualization packages based on Java.
I just saw a sad “worldview debate” on Christianity vs. Naturalism hosted by the UC system, which pitted Dr. William Lane Craig against some other guy. Craig was the Christian apologist, and the other was a less than mediocre champion for naturalism. Predictably, Craig’s arguments did nothing but indicate that it is reasonable to conclude that the universe was created by something with the purpose of supporting life, doing nothing to support his claims that the proposed something has all, most, or even any, of the qualities Christians attribute to their God: personality, goodness, maleness, three-in-one-ness :), omniscience, omnipotence, benevolence. His biases were obvious: at one point, he referred to the “hostile, mindless universe”, as if that statement makes sense. All the same, he got his point across, which is more than can be said for Mr. Naturalism. All he did, was recount in way too much detail a story from his childhood (in short: “Daddy, who created God?”, “Son, never ask such questions; you must have faith!”— good point, but by far not the only one salient), and denounce religion as too many words, too little ideas (i.e., what does ‘god’ mean, or ’spirit’, etc.). He didn’t raise any scientific points, at which I was disappointed.
Possibly relevant posts:
- Incoherent ramblings (12/29/2001)
- What caused the Big Bang? (8/28/2002)
- Election and other evil notions (8/4/2001)