Last week I finished reading Guerrilla Learning. Andrea had the chance to read a fair amount of it first. Eventually, I swiped it from her because she was taking it slow. It didn’t take me long to find out why she was taking so long with it. It is chock full of little gems that give you lots to think about. Here is a single sentence worth a few minutes pause:

Each thing we do – no matter how valuable – has an ‘opportunity cost’: It costs us all the things we are not doing or paying attention to while we are concentrating this one thing.

There is an odd bit of irony that comes into that statement from my perspective. I haven’t said much about the project I’m working on. Most of my career has been carried out under confidentiality agreements, so I’m used to not talking about work. Without getting into too much detail, the project I’m working on is a decision support system which weighs the cost of hundreds of thousands of ‘opportunities’ and recommends the most cost effective solution.

In choosing to homeschool, we cut ourselves off from other opportunities. I expect most HSers have come to the same realization. At this point, we have been doing this for over 12 years. And we have had the chance to see the fruit that has been born out of choosing and sticking with that opportunity. There is nothing that would persuade me to not do this all over again. I recall talking to an acquaintance last fall who had just started sending her oldest to kindergarten. Without thinking about it, I blurted out, “I couldn’t do it.”

She asked, “Couldn’t do what?”

I said, “I couldn’t send Emma to kindergarten. I just couldn’t.”

In choosing to homeschool, we made some opportunity choices for our kids. We knew we were doing that. But it wasn’t until a few years ago that I realized we had given them something that few children get in lieu of the things we had taken away.

• They’ve seen how the adult world operates.
• They’ve seen household finances in action.
• They’ve learned how to get along with the same person/people over a long period of time.
• They’ve seen adults disagree, compromise and continue to work together and love one another.
• Whether or not they could explain it to you, they understand opportunity cost better than many adults that I know because they’ve been given access to opportunities and choices.

Over the weekend I had a fair number of conversations with one or more of the children. What occurred to me on the way over here is that I talked to them as adults. Whether or not the world considers them to be adults, I do. Over the course of the weekend, I had explained to all of them the situation we had as a family (what I mentioned briefly in the post below the disappearing post) and the interim solution we had come to. Even though it wasn’t described in terms of opportunity and cost, I did describe both the opportunity that was there for us and what the short term costs were going to be.

Children should not be secluded away from opportunities and costs. They need to be able to make plans, execute them and see the results. They need to see other people with more experience at it than them working it out. They will never come to understand opportunities and cost as long as someone else is telling them what their opportunities are and assigning a cost to the failed opportunities through an arbitrary and artificial mechanism.

In some of the other posts where I talked about comment spammers, people have left comments wondering why they do it or why go to so much effort for so little gain. The hope of comment spam is to raise the spammer’s site in the search engine ranks by having links to the site on as many web sites as possible.

The irony is that if you look at our sitemeter referral stats, at any given time somewhere between 10 and 20% of the referrals are from search engines. Although it’s been a while since I checked, I was curious tonight and looked at the search queries and results that people clicked through to from a search engine. Tonight, in most of the search queries, we were on the first page. Some of the queries were:

1. Sean Paddock (6th)
2. creating a banner with gimp (3rd)
3. christian life (6th)
4. temperament god gave you (1st)

The reason I find this so ironic is that I haven’t made much of an effort to get the site to show up in search engines. The thing that will get a site up the search engine ranks the fastest is people clicking on something from the site that show up in a search. The search engines track how often searchers chose a website. I can only conclude from this that searchers have chosen this site quite often. Perhaps, if spammers put something worthwhile on their sites, they might have better success with the search engines. I think I’ll just keep up with what I’ve been doing.

Despite your size, as Mr Beaver you are decisive, confident and bold. You are brave in times of need and show great loyalty to those you respect.

HT: Here in the Bonny Glen

You Should Get a JD (Juris Doctor)

You’re logical, driven, and ruthless. You’d make a mighty fine lawyer.

HT: Making it up

I brought the camera with me this week. Last week, I decided to try another route to the western half of the province. There is no direct route from Miramichi to here. The route I tried is the northern route. As it turns out, this highway’s reputation is much worse than it is in real life. It is better driving than the way I had been going, takes about 20 minutes less time and I use noticeably less gas. Nonetheless, there is a sign at the eastern end of the highway after the last of the houses which one would only be likely to find in Canada (you can click on all the images below to see the full size image):

The translation for the sign is, “make sure you’ve got a tank full of gas and supplies. This road is not our top priority.” About 50 km from the sign (into the wilderness) is this stream/river. The first image is upstream. The second is downstream.

After another 50 km or so, I also saw this river/stream. Both of these rivers are in a protected wilderness area. Upstream and then down.

At about 125 km after the sign, I arrive in Plaster Rock. Plaster Rock is home to Tobique Log Homes, who built Plaster Rock’s handcrafted log tourism center:

HT: Mommy Brain

Yep, another meme. In this one, the most popular book to movie adaptations are listed. B indicates I’ve read the book, M indicates I’ve seen the movie. I’ll also add in parentheses which one I liked best. Feel free to play along at your site. Let me know if you do!

1. B – 1984
2. Alice in Wonderland
3. American Psycho
4. Breakfast at Tiffany’s
5. Brighton Rock
6. Catch 22
7. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
8. A Clockwork Orange
9. Close Range
10. The Day of the Triffids
11. Different Seasons (includes The Shawshank Redemption)
13. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (aka Bladerunner)
14. Doctor Zhivago
15. Empire of the Sun
16. The English Patient
17. Fight Club
18. The French Lieutenant’s Woman
19. M – Get Shorty
20. The Godfather
21. M – Goldfinger
22. Goodfellas
23. Heart of Darkness
24. The Hound of the Baskervilles
25. Jaws
26. B,M – The Jungle Book
27. A Kestrel for a Knave
28. LA Confidential
29. Les Liaisons Dangereuses
30. Lolita
31. B – Lord of the Flies
32. B – The Maltese Falcon
33. Oliver Twist
34. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
35. Orlando
36. The Outsiders
37. B – Pride and Prejudice (not finished readin it yet)
38. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
39. The Railway Children
40. Rebecca
41. The Remains of the Day
42. Schindler’s Ark (aka Schindler’s List)
43. Sin City
44. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
45. The Talented Mr Ripley
46. Tess of the D’Urbervilles
47. Through a Glass Darkly_
48. B – To Kill a Mockingbird
49. Trainspotting
50. The Vanishing
51. Watership Down

My additions:

52. B,M The Bourne Identity (loved both)
53. B,M The Bourne Supremacy/Ultimatum (loved both)

HT: the brew crew adventure

Your Five Factor Personality Profile

Extroversion: You have medium extroversion. You’re not the life of the party, but you do show up for the party. Sometimes you are full of energy and open to new social experiences. But you also need to hibernate and enjoy your “down time.” Conscientiousness: You have medium conscientiousness. You’re generally good at balancing work and play. When you need to buckle down, you can usually get tasks done. But you’ve been known to goof off when you know you can get away with it. Agreeableness: You have medium agreeableness. You’re generally a friendly and trusting person. But you also have a healthy dose of cynicism. You get along well with others, as long as they play fair. Neuroticism: You have low neuroticism. You are very emotionally stable and mentally together. Only the greatest setbacks upset you, and you bounce back quickly. Overall, you are typically calm and relaxed – making others feel secure. Openness to experience: Your openness to new experiences is medium. You are generally broad minded when it come to new things. But if something crosses a moral line, there’s no way you’ll approve of it. You are suspicious of anything too wacky, though you do still consider creativity a virtue.

If you hadn’t picked up the pattern yet, every 2 weeks I end up away from the internet for a couple days. Starting in 2 weeks, and for the duration of May, I’ll be away from the internet between Tuesday night and Friday. Tonight, when I fired up bloglines, I had about 200 unread posts. So, I had alot of reading to do.

Last Sunday, I posted a pic of the William & Mary in the shade garden. Today, I was out doing some landscaping/gardening (which I’ll fill you in on in another post), and walked by the the shade garden. Instead of a couple of blossoms, the William and Mary is in full bloom. You can see that the blossoms have changed colour. They open pink and over a few days turn to the blue you see in this pic:

Originally, I had written and posted an entry with this title very late Saturday night. In a way, this is going to be a rewrite of that post. But, I realized over the first few hours on Sunday that I had tried to address too many subjects in one post. There are a number of doctrinal errors which underpin the arguments in favour of punishment. I was trying to respond to the ones that I’m aware of. I realized on the drive over here on Sunday evening that doing that is not necessary.

One of the first major characters in the Bible is Abraham. And the New Testament says this of him:

And Abram (Abraham) believed God, and it was counted to him for righteousness.

And the question I asked myself, upon discovering this passage many years ago, could be synonomous with,

Is there anything in the Bible which indicates that the statement, ‘Ron believes God, and it is counted to him as righteousness.’ is not true?

There is in fact nothing anywhere in the Bible that says or even suggests that. Quite the contrary, the New Testament is littered with passages that say it is true. From my own reading of it, I believe that communicating that the above statement is true (in reference to any who chose to believe) is the primary reason the New Testament was written.

The question which arises is, ‘What is it that we ought to believe?’ I am going to excerpt a number of statements from Arlan’s original comment (found in this thread):

1. the repentant child is welcomed with open arms
2. Having done what was wrong, I was afraid
3. we should be afraid of the chastisement God will bring if we sin

But, if I believe and it is counted to me as righteousness, none of these statements are of any direct concern to me. The second and third statements are representative of Job at the beginning of his story. Obviously, there is a doctrinal error which leads to the above statements (since they clearly conflict with belief being counted as righteousness). The error is perhaps more clearly shown in this portion of Carlotta’s comment:

Certainly the overall Christian message I took away from my youth entailed the perfecting of the act of looking for and understanding one’s mistakes or sins, seeking forgiveness for these and on the other side perfecting the art of forgiveness.

In fact, that is the overall message I took away from my youth. While both seeking and giving forgiveness play a role in the Christian life, the above statement is not the Christian message. I’ll frame the true Christian message in phraseology which will relate it to this post:

Because God is holy, just, perfect, etc., the sin of man (used in this paragraph in the human race sense) caused a separation between man and God. The separation leads to man’s eventual death. To correct that situation, God took the form of a man and accepted consequences (i.e. death) of man’s error in his place. For anyone who believes in that person and that act, it is counted to them as righteousness.

Now to correct Arlan’s statements:

1. It is not that a repentant child is welcomed with open arms, but that a believing child is welcomed with open arms. A believing child may repent. Ergo, derivatively, Arlan’s statement is true. An unbelieving child cannot repent.
2. I am not afraid of having done wrong. We have all done wrong. Living a blameless life is not what Christianity is about. Knowing that whatever you do, you are still going to do wrong things, is relevant to the Christian life. But, doctrinally, you are not a Christian if you are afraid of having done wrong. (i.e you have ceased to believe the central tenet of Christianity.)
3. We should not be afraid of God’s chastisement. Arlan’s statement contradicts at least a dozen passages in the Bible.

Even though we say a religion is a set of beliefs. Really, it’s not. If we have a set of beliefs that we do nothing with, they’re fluff. Religion is about what you do and the underlying reason for why you do it. Now that I’ve explained the why of Christianity, I’d like to show you ‘what’:

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

What this verse says is that the perfect religion consists of 2 things (i.e. The basic, central/critical tenets). The first is to have mercy. Christianity is a religion of mercy. The principle stems from us having received mercy from God and us, having received/accepted it, are under obligation to offer it to others. And that takes us back to the mercy triumphs over judgement.

Rather that try to elaborate on what the pollution of the world might entail, I’m going to close with the list of qualities which exclude the pollution of the world:

love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

I do not see punishment as being consistent with those.

Last night and tonight I worked on widgetizing themes at homeschool journal. I might be doing that for most of this week.

Also, I’ve been adding to my spam blacklist. Almost feels like taking a weed wacker to a weed patch

Oh, and thanks for the birthday wishes. I wasn’t home with the family, but I still enjoyed my day.

In our northern climate, we always look forward to spring. This year it has come weeks ahead of its usual time. 2 weeks ago, I pruned back the rose bushes because they were budding already. Last year, the ground was still frozen, covered in ice and snow on the first of May. I hadn’t seen William and Mary before a friend shared some of hers a couple years ago. I didn’t know until the next spring, that it would be it rather than the narcissus, daffs, or tulips that we would see blossom first each year. We will see the blossoms of those in another week or 2. The second thing I like about William & Mary is that it is still blossoming when the frost hits in the fall. It makes a wonderful accent and ground cover for a shade garden. So, i thought I’d share our first proof of spring and warmer weather: