All posts by Phil

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Do Your Light Bulbs Last as Long They Should?

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I haven’t written down any dates, but for the last ten years or so with all the push to stop using incandescent bulbs, I’ve purchased several CFLs that did not last as long as I thought they should. Has that been your experience as well?

I remember touring an energy-saving model home at a museum in Georgia and the guide saying CFLs were super longlasting. The Internet is saying they could last five to ten times longer than incandescent blubs. My wife almost derailed the guide by asking if their long life relied on leaving them on most of the time. Our CFLs have burned out just as quickly, if not more quickly, than regular bulbs, and maybe that’s because we turn off the lights when we leave the room, like our fathers taught us to do. (We’re not lighting the whole neighborhood, are we?)

As I type, it occurs to me the lights in this room have been in place for a very long time, at least long enough for me to forget when I put them in. They’re probably LEDs.

We wrote last year about the number of filaments Edison actually tested, because folklore has run away with that number. Today, I offer you a video that shows a light bulb that has been burning since 1901 and the story of a group of businessmen who conspired to keep light bulbs from becoming nigh-perfect.

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Whose Fourth of July?

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Professor Glenn Loury of Brown University writes about the ‘American Project’ and black Americans in this essay from earlier this year.

When we talk about race and American citizenship, we must ask whether the currently fashionable standoffishness characteristic of much elite thinking about blacks’ relationship to the “American project” — as exemplified, for example, by the New York Times’ 1619 Project — truly serves the interests, rightly understood, of black Americans. I think not. Indeed, I think a case can be made for unabashed black patriotism, for a forthright embrace of American nationalism by black people. The “America ain’t all it’s cracked-up to be” posture that one hears so much of these days is, in my view, a sophomoric indulgence for blacks at this late date. In fact, our birthright citizenship in what is arguably history’s greatest republic is an inheritance of immense value.

He makes these four points, which you can read on 1176unites.com.

  1. The founding of the United States (1776) was vastly more significant for world history than the first arrival in America of African slaves (1619).
  2. The Civil War has a significant freedom legacy.
  3. Black Americans have been transformed and marvelously transformed themselves in the 20th century.
  4. Consider what achieving “true equality” for black Americans actually entails, an immeasurable amount of work.
Religion

In China, A Christian in a Bad Church May Have No Options

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PastorZhang San writes, “As Christians living under a communist regime—the Chinese Communist Party was founded 100 years ago [Thursday] —there is a sense in which we are blessed. As Proverbs 30:8–9 says, ‘Give me neither poverty nor riches . . . lest I be full and deny you and say, “Who is the LORD?” or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God.’”

But churches hide from strangers to guard themselves against being reported to the state. If a believing family wanted to find more biblical teaching than they are receiving at their current church, they may not be able to find another congregation.

My Life as a Christian Under a Communist Regime
Uncategorized

Should a Christian be Cremated?

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“And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. Therefore encourage one another with these words” (1 Thess. 4:16-18 ESV).

Encourage one another with the truth that those who die in faith will rise in faith. They have not been lost because they died before Christ’s return. These believers (including Paul, I presume) did not imagine it would be at least a couple thousand years before that return. Christ had ascended in their lifetime; why wouldn’t he come back in just a few years? Not matter when it happens, Christ’s physical resurrection and ascension is the reason we believe the dead in Christ will physically rise again.

The question for some of us is what state the body should be in for the resurrection. I heard a pastor on the radio this weekend claim the faithful would be raised from their graves as is. Of course, he said, God can reassemble any body from any state of decay, but why force him to do more than he needs to do. Why usher along the decay by cremating a family member? He asked, do you know Christ will not return a few days after your death? What if he does and there you are, a pile of ashes?

I can understand personal arguments for burial over cremation. Christian tradition leans that way. I’ve read that Christianized countries tend to bury the dead, and countries will little Christian influence tend to cremate. That’s not what we have here. The Bible does not imply we will be raised like zombies in whatever nasty state our bodies are in. Most of us (99.999% of us) will have no bodies in our graves, if we still have graves. Within a month of our interment, the best of us will not be presentable.

The Bible does tell us to respect our bodies. Our funeral services should be exercises in hope that honor the one who departed and those left behind. And since the Bible does not command Christians to bury the dead, some of us are asking whether the economic choice of cremation would show the proper respect.

That’s what it comes down to for me. In the past, burial would have been the cheapest, most natural option. Years ago when we talked to someone about buying grave plots, it was several thousands of dollars to be buried but only a few thousand, maybe only several hundred, to be cremated. I can understand how funeral and burial costs add up. When I buried my parents, I helped reduce those costs by buying caskets online. The cemetery part was already covered.

Covering a couple burials myself worries me a bit. It’s the kind of thing you can’t look up online because they won’t tell you the costs up front. You have to talk to a salesman. Hiding the price before you talk to a salesman is how they tell you it costs more than you want. They want a chance at talking you into it.

To the guy who thinks the Lord will raise the dead like zombies, come on. Even Lazarus came out of the tomb in better shape than his body had been that morning.

What do you think about burial and cremation for low-income believers?

Authors, Uncategorized

They Drag Us into Trouble, But What Can We Do?

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No one believes he is living by lies. We think a particular disagreement is inconsequential or that it isn’t our issue. We think we aren’t the ones to speak out, because reasons.

A voice from 1974 calls to us and everyone in our century:

There was a time when we dared not rustle a whisper. But now we write and read samizdat [banned literature distributed in secret] and, congregating in the smoking rooms of research institutes, heartily complain to each other of all they are muddling up, of all they are dragging us into! There’s that unnecessary bravado around our ventures into space, against the backdrop of ruin and poverty at home; and the buttressing of distant savage regimes; and the kindling of civil wars; and the ill-thought-out cultivation of Mao Zedong (at our expense to boot)—in the end we’ll be the ones sent out against him, and we’ll have to go, what other option will there be? And they put whomever they want on trial, and brand the healthy as mentally ill—and it is always “they,” while we are—helpless.

This is how Solzhenitsyn begins “Live Not by Lies,” which he released the day he was arrested, a day before his exile. “We are approaching the brink,” he says, “already a universal spiritual demise is upon us; a physical one is about to flare up and engulf us and our children, while we continue to smile sheepishly and babble:

‘But what can we do to stop it? We haven’t the strength.’”

He says maybe civil disobedience is beyond us. Maybe how the Czechs stood up to their government is too much. What we can do, at the very least, is to reject lies.

“Even if all is covered by lies, even if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way: Let their rule hold not through me!”

Blogs, Socials, Music

Sufficiently Courageous to Defend His Soul?

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I like Mumford & Sons, a British folk rock band with a hard-driving sound that will stomp a foot numb. I haven’t looked them up in a long while, but that cave song of theirs has seeded my ears. I remember it regularly.

Banjo player Winston Marshall posted a few paragraphs today on why he is leaving a group he loves. It boils down to the reaction the band got over one of his tweets. He tried to address it, only to earn more backlash. And though the reaction was both ridiculous and typical of current political foolishness, he felt he needed to step away from the band to cause the others musicians the least damage.

So why leave the band?

On the eve of his leaving to the West, Solzhenitsyn published an essay titled ‘Live Not By Lies’. I have read it many times now since the incident at the start of March. It still profoundly stirs me.

“And he who is not sufficiently courageous to defend his soul — don’t let him be proud of his ‘progressive’ views, and don’t let him boast that he is an academician or a people’s artist, a distinguished figure or a general. Let him say to himself: I am a part of the herd and a coward. It’s all the same to me as long as I’m fed and kept warm.”

I gather the band has talked about it fully. I hope they support Marshall even while letting him leave. For the rest of us, let’s consider ahead of time how to defend our souls when the time comes.

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Could Old English and Old Norse Speakers Understand Each Other?

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Jackson Crawford and Simon Roper tackle this question and talk for an hour about languages at a far deeper level than I can follow. Believing our readers will take interest in this, I share it in ignorance.

Blogs, Socials

Filtering Images, Videos, not just Websites

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This is the kind of tech we’ve been thinking should have been active for years. Justin Taylor says Canopy has “the most effective technology on the planet to block pornography.“

Canopy’s CEO says, “One of the big challenges of navigating the digital world is that explicit content no longer is limited to pornography websites. It can appear anywhere and everywhere, which renders many of the traditional safeguards ineffective.”

Canopy, an expansion of an Israeli tech developer, has developed a smart filter that “can detect sexually explicit content in real time and seamlessly remove it.” They also fight sexting by scanning images stored on the filtered device, flagging them, and offering the user to either delete them or send them to their parents for review.

Fiction, Reviews

Knots and Crosses by Ian Rankin, Rebus #1

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Having read the fourteenth book in Ian Rankin’s John Rebus series, I looked up the first one, published in 1987. It was fairly different overall. I’ll have to read a few more to see whether this one or the other is the anomaly.

In Knots and Crosses, DS John Rebus is pulled away from all of his current cases to join the growing team going after the separate kidnappings of two pre-teen girls. At his first conference, they announce it has become a murder investigation, and they have as many as zero leads. Rebus and a younger officer are assigned to comb the M.O. files for possible leads–the worst mental drudge. The police get nowhere until the murderer finally presses his point, that his main goal is Rebus himself.

Rankin has earned a lot of praise for his use of Edinburgh in these novels. Though Rebus is an officer at the fictional Great London Road police station, other details are well grounded. One of the main ideas you get from this book is that Edinburgh is good city, filled with stone walls and solid people. Kidnapping and murdering random girls couldn’t happen in this city. But Rebus and his fellow officers are dragged into the long shadows of sinful Scottish men.

Knots and Crosses delivers a fairly good original story for the series hero. In A Question of Blood, everyone knows Rebus doesn’t talk about his Army days, but in these pages all of that is spelled out. We also learn Rebus is a Christian, which means something unclear. Maybe he had a churched upbringing (though thinking of his father, I don’t know why they would attend services). He seems to hold to rudimentary Christian tenets and seek hope in a Good News Bible, but his sexual morality is complete mess and he avoids the church as if he has been wounded there. I wonder if we will see more of his faith in other books.

The main thing I disliked about this book is how the perspective jumps between many characters: a few cops, a couple victims, a newspaper man. His editor gets a couple paragraphs. The murderer gets a few lines. I think the ole universal third person may have been a better narrator.

Fiction, Reading

Culling the Shelves of Bad Books

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Sometimes I browse a bookstore as I would other stores I visit while playing the tourist. I look at the many curious spines, letters, and colors, seeing the curiosity of one, the value of another, with little intension of buying either. Sometimes I go to a bookstore in hope of finding a few, specific titles or types of books or maybe anything by that guy who wrote those stories–you know the ones–about that cool thing, remember, and though I enter with hope, I must put it on a table somewhere to pick up something else, because I gradually despair of finding anything I want.

But there are times when I take a chance on a book I know nothing about. That’s when I run the risk of having my wife read it.

I’m a slow reader. If I wasn’t so good-looking, I’d be notably less successful than I am. My wife is fast reader, and I don’t mean by comparison to me. I can buy her a promising title from the used bookstore, and in two days, having read it through, she’ll ask me to take the trashy thing back.

I went to the used bookstore a couple weeks ago, carrying a mug of hope for reasons I don’t recall. Maybe it was our recent collection of trade-ins and having avoided the store for about a year. Inspired by Lars’s recent urban fantasy reviews, I wanted to find something fun and maybe good to try. So I went home with a steampunk novel, first of a series. Saying she needed to screen it for the kids, my wife read it immediately.

I think I read somewhere that nothing in steampunk was worth reading. It was all fan-fiction, heavily derivative. This book has to be step aside from that, because it was traditionally published by an author who has many other published books, but it isn’t good.

Getting all of this from my wife, the dialog is awful, particularly everything the heroine says. The plot is dragged down by her constantly wrestling over marrying someone instead of doing the adventure thing that you’d expect from a novel like this.

The devices and contraptions are interesting, even though they don’t move the story. The pirates are vile, needlessly dark, and disappear after their initial scuffle, which may be realistic but not fun. The zombie disease doesn’t make sense, and I don’t need to go on.

That’s the risk I run plucking a book off the shelf, being too kind to the cover art, and even reading the description or a random page. I’ve done that before to positive effect. More than that, I don’t need to buy books. I have many good ones on my shelves and more on that little Kindle thing that could spy on me if I didn’t put it to sleep with no wi-fi every day.