Oh and did I mention they’re coming to Houston May 6?!

So many of us surely remember FOTC classics like “If You’re Into It,” “Business Time,” and “Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenocerous.”  But recently we discovered a gem of a new video, called “Sugalumps.”  It reminds me somewhat of Justin Timberlake:

Hahaha.

Automator is a nifty piece of software that allows you to create “workflows,” or tasks that you’d like your computer to perform. This reduces the time needed to perform certain tedious or repetitive tasks in Finder, Safari, iPhoto, and other applications. In my case, I needed a way to rotate some pictures. First I tried to rotate them in Preview, but this didn’t work because Preview doesn’t actually rotate the image file itself — it merely rotates the way the image is viewed in iPhoto or Preview. To actually rotate the image file, I did a little searching on Google and found out that Automator can perform the task quite easily.

First, you open Automator, and it asks you what type of file or media you’d like to perform your task on. Choose the appropriate starting point, then click “Choose.” In my case, I chose “Photos & Images.”

Then there are a series of actions from which you can choose in a list, or you can use the search bar to try to find the action you have in mind. I chose Photos > Rotate Images. I dragged this action to the right-hand window to “build my workflow.”

To make this workflow accessible in the Finder, I went to “File > Save As Plug-in…”, named the workflow, and selected “Plug-in for Finder.”

Then, it was ready for use…

Hooray! There are other features of Automator that I haven’t explored, but it looks pretty full-featured, and quite easy to use. I recommend it for anyone who has a lot of photos or media to process on their Macs.

As a sidenote, watch this clip of Collins on the Colbert Report on Dec. 7, 2006 (He showed this during his lecture, actually); it’s really funny:

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Quotes:

Stephen Colbert: “I’m going to pop you into the Colbert autoclave and sterilize your ideas.”

Francis Collins: “Evolution is God’s way of giving upgrades.”

Collins’s lecture left me with many questions that I think I’ve always had in the back of my mind but comfortably decided to leave alone for another day.  I accept and trust the scientific method; there is no question about that part of myself.  But if I call myself an atheist, I’m doing so without considering all the evidence in a thorough and logical manner.  I haven’t given faith as much thought as I would consider necessary in, say, evaluating a scientific theory. Even being an agnostic doesn’t seem like the right decision either because I’m the kind of agnostic who doesn’t know whether I believe in God — I haven’t looked into it enough to know what I really believe. I’m ignorant and shouldn’t be comfortable with that.  I guess you could also say that I am irreligious — religion isn’t central in my life, and I feel I have a set of personal values and morals that keep me on course.  But it’s not like I’m satisfied with my life at all or think that I am anywhere near being the person that I would like to be.  Nor have I yet found a passion in life or some cause to which I can wholeheartedly devote myself. Looking into these questions of faith could be one way of becoming more self-realized.

I’m not sure if this is always how he organizes his presentations, but in the lecture tonight, Collins started from a science perspective.  Maybe this was in an effort to reach the more scientifically-minded in the audience which would be presumably more prevalent at a research university like ours.  He explained his scientific background and an overview of genetics (it was rather funny when he displayed a cartoon of a cell with a nucleus, and inside the nucleus was a picture of a book with “Genetic information” on the cover.  Collins pulled up the slide, paused, and said, “This may be highly insulting to many members of the audience…”).

Collins then transitioned into a discussion of his religious background and the gradual progression from being an atheist, to questioning religion, to accepting the existence of a God.  This was then extended to believing in a personal God, and then to Collins’s eventual acceptance of Jesus Christ as Savior.

In the talk, Collins made the distinction between believing in a God (deism) and believing in a “personal” God who takes special interest in human affairs.  I can see the logic behind believing in a God.  Collins talked about the existence of “finely tuned” universal constants (Planck’s constant, the gravitational constant, the speed of light, etc.) and how, if these constants were at even only slightly different values than they are now, our universe would not be able to support the eventual evolution of intelligent life.

There are two conclusions that can be made from this:  either there are an infinite number of alternate universes and we just happen to be in the right one, or there was a God who came in the beginning and set all the physical constants to the values that they are.  Collins says that he believes the latter is more likely because the first option is just as incredible as the second (which I did not fully understand; each of the two options is really amazing if true and so I don’t really see why one would be more believable or logically acceptable than the other), and so believing in a God isn’t incompatible with science because there isn’t a good way of explaining the universal physical constants from a scientific standpoint, and that’s where God comes in.

Okay.  Perhaps.  I may be able to accept that argument, though I’m neither a theoretical physicist nor a theologian so I am not sure I fully understand it.  But okay, I can see how a scientist could become a deist, as Albert Einstein apparently was.  So then a personal God comes into play when one considers the moral laws that govern humans, said Collins.  He cited altruism without personal gain as an example of a seemingly inexplicable moral law from a scientific/evolutionary standpoint.  There must be a God, Collins says, that put these moral laws into place.

Even that I can see as logical.  But then how do you go from that to being a Christian?  There are many religions in the world; why would you choose Christianity?

Dr. Collins happily signs a copy of his book, The Language of God, after the lecture.

All of this was clearly influenced by C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, which I read last summer, and indeed Collins referenced it several times in the lecture.  (Free copies of Mere Christianity were actually handed out to anyone who presented a Rice ID.)  Collins kind of lamely took on the question of why he was a Christian instead of subscribing to some other religion by citing Lewis’s famous argument that you can’t think of Jesus just as a great (but human) moral teacher — you have to either believe he’s evil, he’s crazy, or he really is the Son of God as he claimed. There is no in between, according to Lewis.  I don’t really understand this argument.  Why do you have to accept or reject Jesus wholesale?  If you meet a person who you think is insane in some respects, that doesn’t mean that everything he says must not be true — there are times when you may agree with his opinions on some moral issues.  Similarly, some of Jesus’s moral teachings are reasonable even from a secular standpoint, so why does not believing he is God mean that we have to reject his ideas as well?  I don’t see why that has to be true.

Also, Collins professed his belief in the Resurrection, and said that different accounts of the event agreed on certain details which was sufficient evidence, he felt, to prove that it really did happen. I’ll have to look at these alleged eyewitness accounts, but I’m still not satisfied.

In any case, I like Collins’s take on Christianity and the interpretation of the Bible. He is the sort of thinking, reasoning Christian that I respect. For that matter, he also is a scientist that I respect. It was a good lecture that made me think.

]]> http://snippid.com/2009/01/22/are-science-and-religion-compatible/feed/ http://snippid.com/2008/09/26/hurricane-ike-continued/ http://snippid.com/2008/09/26/hurricane-ike-continued/#comments Fri, 26 Sep 2008 06:32:00 +0000 admin http://snippid.com/?p=40 A link to my Hurricane Ike web album:

Hurricane Ike

We students are fortunate, as we have only been inconvenienced by a lack of running water for about 2.5 days, but have had almost uninterrupted electricity, internet, and hot food in the serveries.  In contrast, about 99% of Houston didn’t have power immediately after the hurricane, and a Houston Chronicle article written Sunday at 9 PM says that only 1 in 4 Houstonites have power.  Only the Medical Center area had power immediately after the storm, and I don’t know if the electricity at Rice has come from a Houston plant or one of our own plants, but in any case, we’re much more well off than the average Houstonite at the moment.  Water has even returned; at first, a brownish trickle from the faucet, then clear water at a close-to-normal pressure.  That is something to be grateful for, despite the horribly clogged toilets.

Some Bakerites put their energy to use by clearing fallen foliage and debris from the area surrounding our residential college.  It was great seeing people channel their energy and boredom into something constructive for the campus.  Looking beyond Rice, there are other ways people can help as well:  give blood, donate money to a reputable charity, get in touch with volunteer agencies to see if you can help on-site, if you live close to hurricane-affected areas.

More later on the hurricane, when I get around to uploading pictures.

Kudos to you, Tavi, for having a voice and a style that is all your own.  I’m still trying to find mine, as I start off this blog.  We’ll see how this evolves.

Edit:  It looks like access Style Rookie has just been limited to “invited readers only.”  Sigh.  Suffice it to say it was a good blog.  I think it’s probably a good idea it was limited, however, particularly since she’s 12 years old. Anyone can see a public blog, including potentially unsavory characters.  This is another good thing to keep in mind as I embark upon this whole blogging thing.

I apologize for the hideous color scheme.  I have much to learn regarding CSS and stylesheets, it seems.  No, I do not really think that tan and pink go together harmoniously.