Belief Seeking Understanding

This is the 9th in a series of interviews with bloggers who are part of The Blogdom of God. The Blogdom of God is a loose group of Blogs that identify themselves as 'God blogs'.

Today's interview is with the blogger of Belief Seeking Understanding This blogger will help you to see the phrase, "Fruit of the Womb" in a totally different way.

Q. Are you familiar with the EFCA?

A. I hereby confess I first thought you were referring to the Evangelical Council on Financial Accountability, instead of the Evangelical Free Church of America. That tells you right there that I'm not very familiar with it.

*I asked this question because the church I grew in which I was raised, The Evangelical Free Church of America is headquartered in Minneapolis. -jdm

When I was in college, many years ago, one of my friends in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship was planning to be an EFCA pastor. EFCA congregations are pretty rare in Texas, where my wife and I have lived most of our lives. We have visited an EFCA congregation since coming to Minnesota.

Q. Every created thing reflects some aspect of it's creator. What do you think the invention and subsequent development of the computer reveals about the human race?

A. It reveals that the human race is not only creative, but is continually improving the tools to express its creativity. Apes use a tool to extract termites from a hollow log, but they don't build power drills. I show a slide in my classes that show that the amount of computer power you can buy for a dollar has been exponentially increasing since 1885. The rate of growth jumped with the beginning of electronic computing in the 1940's, and again in the 1980's with the advent of VLSI chips. Moore's Law is just the tail end of this growth curve. The development of computers shows that humanity reflects on the consequences of tools. It means that humanity has
the capacity for wonder. "Hmm, well, if we can do this, what would happen if we try to do that?"

Q. Why did you start blogging?

A. The entry for October 13 pretty much says it, but I will add some background. Looking at Hugh Hewitt's website got me interested in the SCSUScholars, which got me interested in writing about higher education. The blog of Bruce Eckel, author of "Thinking in Java" and a number of other
books, inspired me to blog about things I was noticing regarding software. Some of my students have encouraged me to publish a newsletter about things in my classes, so the blog satisfies some of that. I've read the One Year Bible about four times, and it occurred to me that I discovered some things the second time that I didn't notice the first time, and it might be useful to share some of the things I noticed.

Q. How did you end up teaching? How did you end up teaching at St. Thomas?

A. My first teaching job was at a technical school, which was little more than a tube between the federal government and the proprietors of the school, using the student loan program as the principle means of extraction. I hereby tell the truth and shame the devil. I was going nowhere slowly career-wise, and I wandered into it, because it seemed like a better opportunity than anything else at the time. When I was there, I felt like a safecracker, trying to figure out the combinations of the minds of the students, but for the purpose of putting something into them instead of taking something out. In between teaching at a technical school and teaching at St. Thomas, I obtained a Texas teacher's certificate, and had a brief, undistinguished career as a high school math teacher in Garland, Texas. I talk about this briefly in the post "Purpose Driven Life Day 3 - What's My Obsession?" My father assisted me in continuing my education,
which I did, getting a master's in 1995 and the Ph.D in 1999. I would have gotten it a year earlier, but my advisor went on sabbatical.

I had heard numerous horror stories from Ph.D students about the difficulties of job hunting, so I took a shotgun approach. St. Thomas was very enterprising in responding to my application, sending me emails when I was at a conference in Australia, bringing me up for an interview in the week between Christmas and New Year's Day. My wife was tired of living in Texas, and didn't want to live on either coast. One of our children had significant allergies, and we thought the shorter growing season would be good for him. I wrote about this a little bit in the posts "Purpose Driven Life Day 9 - The Smiles Of Heaven" and "Purpose Driven Life Day 10 - Love, Devotion and Surrender" Minnesota is a great place to live, if you like fishing in the summer and snow in the winter.

Q. In simple terms, what is a Cayley Network?

A. The very asking of that question raised you several notches in my book. A Cayley network (Cayley is capitalized as it is named after the mathematician Arthur Cayley) is a collection of vertices and edges which follows certain rules related to finite groups. These networks or graphs have the delightful property of looking the same way no matter which vertex they are
viewed from. This is a good thing because if you were connecting many processors in a parallel computer, you wouldn't want the network connecting them to have any intrinsic "bottlenecks." The networks used in parallel computers these days (rectangular grids with wraparound, called torii) are Cayley networks.

Q. Can you explain to me why C++ is inferior to Java?

A. Let me count the ways! Bjarne Stroustrup, the inventor of C++, said "C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."

The replacing of pointers in C++ with references in Java immediately gets rid of a number of horrible things which can be done with C++. It greatly reduces that direct control over memory that one has with C++.

Java and C++ are both object-oriented languages, but Java reduces the potential complexity by eliminating the feature of multiple inheritance. Multiple inheritance means that an object can say "I have all the capabilities of both object A and object B." But what if A and B have different ways of doing capability C? Which one is the effective one? Java's getting rid of this reduces the number of ways you can mess things up this way.

One of the big problems of C and C++ is memory leaks, which happen when a programmer reserves some memory at some point, and something happens where that memory doesn't get released. Java solves that problem by using garbage collection, where memory that is being taken up by something that isn't being used anymore is returned to the space of free memory.

Finally, Java delivers on the promise of portability made by C. It was supposed to be possible to seamlessly port a program written in ANSI C that ran on one machine to another machine that supported ANSI C, but there were lots of things about the ANSI C standard that kept this from being the case. For example, if you specify a variable with the data type int in ANSI C, it
could be either 16 bits or 32 bits. Java's additional layer of abstraction (the Java Virtual Machine) keeps this from happening.

The developers of Java claimed that Java was an evolutionary development over C++, as opposed to a revolutionary development. Another way of saying this is that Java is C++ without guns, knives and clubs.

Q. Do you have a shredder at home that you use regularly?

A. I do have a shredder at home, but I don't use it regularly! You must be asking this after I've gone on and on about the Dennis Bennett identity theft case. I should use it more than I do.

Q. What type of church do you attend?

A. Ah, confession time. We have visited a number of churches in Minnesota. We have attended Speak The Word Church, a large interdenomination charismatic church. We have attended the local Lutheran church where some of our children went to school. We have visited Grace Church, the evangelical mega-church in Eden Prairie. We are currently in between churches. This is
something about which I'd appreciate it if you and your readers would pray, that there would be a church where we can both serve and grow.

Q. You've written a lot about The Purpose Driven Life. Can you summarize the most important lesson from the book?

A. And I'm going to write a lot more before I'm through! Somehow reading this book and writing about has given me an opportunity to write about things that are near and dear to me, the existence and discovery of purpose, meaning and direction. It has also inspired me to share my weaknesses, which I think has added some credibility to my writing. The most important
message is that you have a purpose that the world didn't give to you, that the world can't take away. It's not immediately obvious, but you can discover it and live according to it.

Q. On the political spectrum where would you place yourself?

A. I took one of those tests the other day where it placed me on a map, where north and south represented beliefs regarding economic freedom, and east and west represented beliefs regarding personal freedom. I'm a centrist with libertarian tendencies. I thought I was more of a conservative. But I'm not a total libertarian, becuase I don't believe in repealing all regulations on sexual behavior, and I don't believe in repealing all drug laws. I'm not a total conservative, because I don't believe in repealing all taxes, and I don't believe in getting rid of foreign aid.

Q. You have six kids. Did you plan on having a big family or did it just happen?

A. In the immortal words of our former chief executive, it all depends on the meaning of the phrase "plan on having a big family." Dr. Laura Schlessinger says that if neither spouse gets their tubes tied, then both spouses are planning to get pregnant. We consider a big family to be a blessing. It never occured to me until I read the Bible that the brand name "Fruit of the
Loom" was a pun on the Bible verse that says "the fruit of the womb is a reward." Two of our children were planned, four of them happened.

Q. Are you from a big family?

A. Not only am I an only child, but my father was an only child, and my mother was the younger of two sisters. I think my children are better off than I was, because they have to learn to get along with others more than I did.

Q. Is there anything special you'd like people to take away from your blog?

A. Delight in God, skill with computer technology, developing lifelong learners who keep their beginner's mind - it all goes together.

Q. Is there anything else you'd like to say?

A. This poem by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, from the collection "Gitanjali" or "Song Offerings," is my prayer.

Where the mind is without fear and the head held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments;
By narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by Thee
Into ever-widening thought and action;
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake!

It turns out that Tagore toured America in the 1920's. One of the stops on his tour was Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. There was a young man attending the lecture named Myron Bass, who was my grandfather. It just goes to show that the seeds one sows have consequences far beyond what we can see.

If you haven't read previous Blogdom of God interviews, check them out here:
Josh Claybourn
Adrian Warnock
Fr. Jim Tucker (Dappled Things)
SecretAgentMan
Totem to Temple
LaShawn Barber
Antioch Road
Ryan's Head

If you are a member of the Blogdom of God and would like to be interviewed, please contact me. -jdm