May
10
2008
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Written by Barry Bryson
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Saturday, 10 May 2008 |
 Phrenology, a pseudo science quite popular in the 19th Century, attempts to do diagnostics and forecasting by examining the bumps on a person’s head. I have an old encyclopedia which contains a quite detailed Phrenologist’s diagram of a human head portioned out like a map of the Balkans. Phrenology may be a pseudo-science, but it is an involved one. If there are any Phrenologists still out there, I think my head would be a good study, as it is as lumpy as a bowl of bad oatmeal – a fact that prevents me from shaving my head. I always thought that phrenology was a great way to tell the future, because, unlike palmistry, it can be adjusted. I always thought that if you were going to have your scalp read, you should carry a ball-pine hammer with you. Then if you didn’t like your fortune, you could take a few whacks at you own noggin and change your fate. I imagine saying to disagreeable phrenologist: “There are a few more lumps, so what does my head say now, smart guy?” I guess if you did that a few times too many, of a few times too vigorously you wouldn’t be saying anything.
Diagnostic and forecasting tools today are more sophisticated, but not much more accurate. The five day forecast is still less accurate than the Old Farmer’s Almanac. There is a simple reason for this, of course. Humans are flawed. The more sophisticated a forecasting system – the greater amount of human involvement – thus the greater likelihood of flaws (both in number and severity).
Still, we want that five day forecast, and make plans based upon it. I’m flying out to Arkansas later today, and have been scanning the weather channel daily – hoping and praying that the weather patterns in D.C, Little Rock, and Charlotte, North Carolina will align in such a way that my flight and connection will not be adversely affected by inclement weather. So far, so good – although there were pods of tornadoes in both Virginia, and Arkansas last week. The weather seems fine now, and I am only at the mercy of USAir, the FAA, and the Department of Homeland Security. I am fairly sure that at least one of those institutions does use phrenology in conducting its business. So I will wait and see, and hope for the best.
In Bible class last Sunday we studied that great passage from James 4.13-16:
Come now you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such a city, spend a year there, engage in business, and make a profit.” Yet you will not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a while then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills we shall live and also do this or that.” But as it is you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil.
James is not arguing that we should neglect to plan ahead – only that we understand three things as we make our plans: the fragility of life, our own ignorance of the future, and God’s absolute control. He says that to forget is to become arrogant, and to become arrogant is to become evil.
And so let us never forget to think, and even to say “Lord willing,” as we have been instructed to think and say. Let us never forget that life is brief, that we are ignorant of the future, and that the God we serve is omnipotent.
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May
02
2008
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Written by Barry Bryson
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Friday, 02 May 2008 |
 Driving home last weekend I passed many crosses, big ones and little ones. The big ones were always in groups of three, always on a prominent elevation, and the middle cross was always bigger. Sometimes the middle cross was painted gold. The little crosses I saw were not so uniform in size or number but they were always near the road – never on a hill or promontory. The little crosses were always garlanded with flowers. Sometimes there were notes attached. Sometimes other items lay there. The space around the little crosses had the reverent and offertory effect of the household shrines one sees in the home of a Hindu, or Buddhist.
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Apr
25
2008
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Written by Barry Bryson
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Friday, 25 April 2008 |
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 The baby did indeed have a head full of thick, blond curls you would naturally tousle. This is evident in most photos of him, but the best, I think, is of him standing on a bench, flanked by two Westies and two Scotties. The snapshot was taken in the summer of 1931 – not long after his first birthday, and less than a year before he would be kidnapped and murdered.
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Apr
09
2008
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Written by Barry Bryson
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Wednesday, 09 April 2008 |
 Last week I made reference to Barbara Walters’ fondness for the gauzy filter placed over the camera lens. As the years have gone by, when one watches her interview specials, one has to squint a little more to get focused on the screen. Barbara Walters’ fuzzy filters represent only one strategy aging celebrities use to mask the toll of time – we are also familiar with Joan Rivers’ surgeries, Mary Tyler Moore’s turtleneck sweaters, and William Shatner’s girdle. I hope we have at least a little sympathy for them all. We are, all of us, to varying degrees complicit in propagating the culture of youth-and-beauty in which we enslave our celebrities – it is a culture the Bible rejects (I Peter 3.3-4).
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Apr
04
2008
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Written by Barry Bryson
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Friday, 04 April 2008 |
 I was recently reading Anne Morrow Lindberg’s first book, North to the Orient which details her and her husband Charles’ pioneering flight between Washington DC, and Nanking, China via Point Barrow, Alaska. The trip, made in the summer of 1931, demonstrated that this direct route across the arctic was feasible. Their Lockheed built airplane, the Sirius, had a longer flight range than any other single-engine airplane at the time, but still had to make 7 refueling stops before it reached Japan. One of those stops was Point Barrow – the northernmost settlement in the United States.
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Mar
27
2008
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Written by Barry Bryson
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Thursday, 27 March 2008 |
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 I watched a really interesting NOVA last night on PBS about Australian paleontologists who were exploring a recently discovered cache of bones in one of the many underground, limestone caves that honeycomb the subterranean Outback. They found several complete and nearly complete skeletons from little known and previously unknown species of marsupials. The one that really interested me was a man-sized species of kangaroo, now extinct, that clearly had horn-sockets on its skull above its eyes. The Aborigines have long remembered, in their oral tradition, giant, horned kangaroos.
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Mar
19
2008
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Written by Barry Bryson
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Wednesday, 19 March 2008 |
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 In 1777, on his third and final voyage, Captain James Cook gave the King of Tonga the gift of a turtle. The Tongans gave it the name Tu’Imalila, and considered it a chief. It lived at the Royal Palace grounds in the capital of Nuku. The Turtle lived there for 189 years, surviving a fire which blinded it. Tu’Imalila thus lived long enough to encompass the Age of Exploration and the Age of Space Exploration. Had the turtle lived 11 more years, and reached its bicentennial, its lifespan would have included the launching of Voyager 2, which has, for some time, been exploring beyond our solar system.
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Mar
14
2008
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Written by Barry Bryson
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Friday, 14 March 2008 |
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 I have a little exercise I do with my three daughters which I thoroughly enjoy, although I am sure by now they find it tedious enough. I like to point out all the famous people whose fathers were (or are) ministers. It all started when they got interested, one by one, in Jane Austen. Now, whenever they watch a Jane Austen movie, or read a Jane Austen novel I ask (ad nauseum) – “And what did her father do?” “He was a preacher, Dad,” they reply. “Yes, Jane Austen was a preacher’s kid, and so are you, and so was: Charlotte, Emily, and Ann Bronte, and Louisa May Alcott, and Aretha Franklin, and Tina Turner, and Nathaniel Hawthorn, and Denzel Washington, and Tori Amos, and Condoleezza Rice, and Toni Braxton, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and W.C. Handy, and the McGuire Sisters, and the Pointer Sisters, and Abigail Adams, and Duke Ellington….”
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Mar
06
2008
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Written by Barry Bryson
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Thursday, 06 March 2008 |
 Researchers nowadays are able to map the history of certain viral epidemics among prehistoric peoples by doing archaeological work inside our own cells. Some viral infections invade a cell’s mitochondria. It seems that when a person survives such a deadly virus, fragments of that virus’ DNA get preserved in the survivor’s mitochondria, and are passed down through the generations as battle scars of survival. Thus, researchers can recover, and identify these fragments in living persons, and know where their ancestors may have lived in the past, and some of the epidemics their ancestors survived. The benefit of these viral DNA fragments to the individual is that they can help cells combat new viruses.
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Feb
29
2008
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Written by Administrator
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Friday, 29 February 2008 |
 Grace is the heart of the Gospel. Without God sacrificing Himself on a cross, we are left with a superior moral system, but with a religion unable to provide for our inability to live up to that moral system. In other words, we are left with nothing. Benjamin Franklin, not long before his death, was asked by Ezra Stiles, president of Yale University, to make a statement of faith. He replied: “Here is my creed. I believe in one God, the creator of the universe. That he governs it by his providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable service we render to him is in doing good to his other children. That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental points in all sound religion, and I regard them as you in whatever sect I meet them. As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, is the best the world ever saw, or is likely to see.”
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Feb
22
2008
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Written by Barry Bryson
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Friday, 22 February 2008 |
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 Immediately in reach of my left hand is a chafing dish containing multi-colored paper clips. Each paper clip is connected to another in a rainbow chain that extends several feet. In order to use a paper clip I must extricate one from the chain. I take great comfort in this, because I know who linked them. I know, because when I was a kid I would sit at the preacher’s desk and link his paperclips. I did this because I really liked my preacher, and that’s the kind of thing kid’s do. So I feel curiously loved (and arthritic), as I wrestle a paper clip from the chain. Also, the fine motor skills, and squinting involved in the process reminds me of the truth of the scriptures, for:
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Feb
01
2008
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Written by Barry Bryson
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Friday, 01 February 2008 |
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 You may not have heard about this (I doubt it), but there is a school-bus sized piece of space junk which is dropping 1054 feet per day, and is due to hit earth sometime in March. Our government is so concerned about this that they have assigned the Department of Homeland Security to monitor the hunk of space debris’ descent. I wondered why space junk fell under the purview of the Department of Homeland Security, but then who else would be assigned to keep a peeled eye on it – Fish and Wildlife? I guess that since our ports are secure, the Y2K bug has been exterminated, and the guy responsible for the anthrax attacks is safely in the federal pen, they have the extra resources available to track the space junk that slips out of orbit (do I have my facts straight?).
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