There is a ton of information packed into this baby name chart.  I post this in honor of the fact that we must choose a name for our impending son and I think we have.

In conservative Mennonite churches – at least in those with which I am familiar – once or twice a year in anticipation of Communion there is a service dedicated to the testimonies of church members. For me, it is often encouraging because I get to hear how God is working in my Christian brothers’ and sisters’ lives.

Now, one may or may not be interested in predicting, at the outset of the service, how long it will last. To do this, you need two pieces of information: 1) How many people will testify; and 2) How long their testimonies will take, on average.

Several weeks ago on April 5 we had a testimony service at my church. I decided to do a little data collection and note the length of time from the beginning of one testimony to the next. I collected this data for probably 80% of the people, skipping perhaps the first 15 (all elderly) and the last 10 to 15. So I could have a biased sample in that I only included a portion of the older people, but we will assume that all is well.

Using Minitab I explored the data a bit. First a histogram:

And now some summary statistics:

N: 90
Mean: 45.56
Median: 35
Standard Deviation: 36.21
Standard Error of Mean: 3.82
Min: 5
Max: 170
Q1: 20
Q3: 55

Several interesting things here. First of all, the mean is almost smack dab on 45 seconds. Thus, as a decent estimate of how long the testimonies will take, count the number of people who will give testimonies and multiply by 0.75 minutes.

I think it’s interesting that the maximum is under 3 minutes. No extended discourses from anyone. You can see from the histogram that most of the testimonies were less than 1 minute with only a relative few longer than that.  Oh, and there was one uncertain data point.  I probably should have thrown it out, but I counted it as 2:25 when it possibly was 1:25, for what it’s worth.

I’m proud of Amy, for she has become a disciplined flosser since we’ve been married.  I have followed in her footsteps to some degree, but I have imposed certain principles which govern this part of my oral hygiene:

I floss every other day, with the following exceptions:

1. I don’t floss on weekends
2. I don’t floss if I have one or more canker sores
3. I don’t floss if I’m sick
4. I don’t floss on vacation

To me, this places reasonable limits upon the inconvenience of flossing, with the added bonus of allowing minor indulgence when I’m not feeling altogether well.

I was sitting in our weekly meeting at the consulting center, and my boss got to talking about students and how some of them do not meet his expectations. He said a senior faculty member told him once that farm kids do the best in the program (which I assume was referring to applied statistics), because they come in with a very practical problem-solving mindset.

On the farm, you have to solve the problem at hand with what you have, and such a skill can be translated into a setting such as applied statistics, where you might have some messy data and a method that sort-of-but-doesn’t-quite fit. So you evaluate what is important and necessary in the data analysis and find a way to make it work.

I’ve been thinking, recently, about building the kingdom of God and how that relates to me, right now.  Frankly, I don’t feel that I am doing my part on a day-to-day basis here in State College.  Mostly, it’s because of my spiritual apathy.  But I believe there are also a couple of aggravating factors which you might call the “feet in two Christian worlds” (FITCW) problem and the “your main Christian world is far away” (YMCWIFA) problem.  Unfortunately, these have followed me from Oregon State to Penn State.

The FITCW problem presents itself when the spiritual energy you might focus on your church is split between two receivers, in our case our home church and the Christian grad students group.  The YMCWIFA problem is closely related and is posed when you go to church far from where you live and/or go to school or work. These things work in tandem to dampen the sacred scintillation that might prod me into ongoing, everyday work for the kingdom. 

Perhaps a more basic issue brought up by these two problems is a lack of immediate community.  Our church is far away so we are unable to experience life with them on a daily basis.  The Christian grad student group is close by, but because we don’t fully plug in it has little chance to be the solution.

Now does that sound like an excuse?

The next thing to think about is how to defeat this, since I have a year-and-a-half or so left.

My in-laws are not big fans of the Scrabble Dictionary, with its massive list of arcane words. If the probability that a word comes up in everyday conversation approaches zero (i.e. zoeal), or if it is a shortened form of another word (i.e. za), or if it is a blatant perversion of a well-known word (i.e. luv), then it probably won’t be popular with them.

Consequently, they would like this, from Andrew Gelman. He decries the acceptability of foreign words like qat and xu, but as a commenter points out, where do you draw this line, since many English words are borrowed from other languages?

I think the Scrabble Dictionary gets a bad rap. It is simply reflective of the words which are considered, by one dictionary or another, to be valid English words. To craft an alternate list of admissible words would be hugely confusing, unless clear guidelines could be established which would easily distinguish “Scrabble words” from others (akin to the rule that no proper nouns are permitted).

I do think that in a “friendly” game, a reasonable rule would be that a player should be able to honestly define any word that is laid. Or, alternatively, decide on a dictionary and allow people to look up their words before they play them. The problem with the latter rule is that it renders infeasible the concept of the Challenge, which is a really interesting part of the game.

Over the years, I’ve had a recurring dream which invariably includes these elements:

• I’m a college student
• I’ve registered for a class but missed most or all of it
• The final exam is rapidly approaching

If you’ve been a student who cares about school, you realize this is horrifying.

Remarkably, it seems that this periodic nightmare has updated itself.  Instead of playing the role of delinquent student, I am now teaching a class for which I have somehow shirked duty.

My guess is that in both cases a deep-seated fear of failure has exerted some influence on my subconscious.

For better or for worse I have joined Facebook. I must say that I feel reduced in some way as I have spent time there, what with the mad grab for “friends”, the vacant gawking at the pages of those new e-chums, the obsessive compulsion to post “status updates.”

On the other hand, I have been able to make at least a one-sided connection with many people, including family, and that was the reason I joined in the first place.

Do I need another virtual time-waster? Not on your life. There may come a time when I perform a wholesale scaledown of my internet habits, but for now I’ll take the good and try to keep the bad under control.

Because I tread in nonchristian-but-nice circles, I am not necessarily confronted with obvious ungodliness on a day-to-day basis at work (besides my own).  So I note with interest situations I encounter in which people without Jesus do not act in a Godly manner.  The following doesn’t quite fit into that category, because a) this is not a person I have ever personally encountered and b) if you read his blog you realize that he does not seem to be a paragon of Christian virtue.  Nevertheless, Scott Adams of Dilbert fame says, while discussing the house he is building:

But my definition of green isn’t about giving up what you want so much as finding the greenest way to do it.

Here he’s trying to do something which on its face would seem to honor God (taking care of the earth).  But what would be more Christlike would be to sacrifice, not just do good when it’s convenient.

William Saletan writes about “Science, Technology, and Life”  for Slate.  He isn’t overly ideological in his writing, but he has called himself a “liberal Republican” and he does write for a left-leaning online magazine about the interface of culture, science, and technology.  In other words, I wouldn’t expect him to have traditional Judeo-Christian cultural values.  But interestingly, as I have read his work I have noticed an undercurrent of discomfort about some of the societal trends he is observing and documenting.

Case in point.  Earlier this month he wrote a column about the emerging possibility of designer babies, the idea that parents could screen embryos not only for their level of susceptibility to diseases, but for cosmetic traits as well (“I want a son who is 6′ 2″, with blue eyes and red hair … oh, and make sure he can sing like Pavrotti, do three-digit multiplication in his head before he turns 4, and puts on muscle like an athlete on steroids”).  This is an awful proposition.  In this reproductive paradigm, would-be parents can produce children artificially, then screen them for the traits they desire, throwing the rest away.

The interesting thing is that, in this article, Saletan strikes an almost fatalistic tone, writing things such as:

Embryo screening has become permanently entrenched. … Culturally and politically, there’s no going back. …

Once you’re screening for “severe” cosmetic conditions, you can no longer rule out other cosmetic criteria. …

By the time [a "designer baby" doctor] opens his trait-selection business and does for that practice what he’s already doing for sex selection, it’ll be too late to stop him. In fact, before you know it, we’ll be used to it.

Somehow, I am encouraged by the undertone of alarm implicit in this article.