Job's Redeemer

There's a verse that's often quoted at funerals from Job 19.

For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth.
And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God.

Think about that verse. Job says that his Redeemer will stand upon the earth. Christians understand him to be referencing Christ. But Job wasn't a Christian. Job wasn't even a Jew. So did Job know that he was talking about Christ? Was he expecting a literal physical incarnation of God? If so, what was the basis of his expectation? And if not, what redeemer was he talking about?

The Hebrew in the answer to this question goes way beyond what I can handle. But the implications are fascinating. Job's mentions wanting an arbitrator in chapter 9, when he says no one can stand between man and God. But he doesn't say this arbitrator doesn't exist; he says that the arbitrator isn't present! The implication is that the one who can stand between Job and God exists, and is also Job's redeemer, who he believes is coming.

Job is taking issue with God's treatment of him. He is saying that the one that will settle this dispute will come and stand upon the earth. Job believes that he will see God when justice is given, but that that justice will be given by someone else! Job doesn't want God to save him. Job wants someone to save him from God!

This makes so much sense in the context of the rest of the book. It's full of Job claiming his innocence. Job believes that God has done this to him, that Job himself doesn't deserve it, but also that another force of justice besides God will make things right! Like Abraham and so many others in the Bible, Job serves Yahweh, but he doesn't really get that his god is different than all the others.

So when God arrives at the end of the book, He explains to Job just who he's dealing with; no mere tribal god, but the Creator of all things. Job's knowledge of God was limited. So was Israel's knowledge. So is ours. Job served God the best he understood how. His getting a few details wrong do not diminish this in the slightest. Obedience with imperfect understanding is far from a flaw. If it was, we'd all be in the same position.

So at the end, Job becomes silent, because his whole argument is null. The god he believed in and worshiped and served was vastly bigger than he understood. He now understands that there is no higher power. Job has no appeal, no case to make; all his speeches and arguments have been based on a false premise. He shuts up because he grasps that his god, who he believed to be subservient to some ultimate justice, is Himself that ultimate justice. There is nowhere else to turn.

Light in the Box

A few months ago I came across Light in the Box. Now normally, I'm an Amazon sort of guy. But this little site has some great stuff! Specifically, I got an unlocked Android phone with a huge screen for just over $200. Works great so far. Highly recommended!

And before anyone asks, yes, it's probably a Chinese knockoff. It works fine. It probably came off the same assembly line in some unauthorized-by-Samsung third shift, and just got labeled differently. Its existence is probably a violation of Chinese law, but let that be a lesson to Samsung for manufacturing there in the first place. If you want to protect your IP, build somewhere else!

VPNs, Tor, and Bitmessage

For obvious reasons, I'm becoming more and more concerned with privacy. The goal isn't to make yourself impossible to hack; there's no way of accomplishing that. But you can make penetrating your security cost more than it's worth. Unfortunately, the world of available tools is confusing, and frankly, a little frightening.

I've taken up using a VPN (Private Internet Access, if you're interested) which theoretically helps anonymize all my internet traffic. A VPN encrypts all my traffic and sends it through one pipe, where it gets mixed with everyone else's traffic before it leaves. So everyone can see who my VPN is, but as long as the VPN provider can be trusted, I'm anonymous. Good luck with the trust part.

Tor can be used to similar ends, but there's no single person to trust. The network is peer-based, not client-server. Your traffic is encrypted in several layers, then bounced from node to node in the network, each node decrypting a single layer of encryption. When the final layer is reached at the exit node, the data leaves the Tor network and goes to its destination. But no single node knows where everything is going. It's not perfect, of course, but it's got fewer trust issues than a VPN.

Tor is great if your goal is to circumvent law enforcement. Whether that's a good thing or not, naturally, depends entirely on who's law we're talking about. If you're circumventing censorship laws to publicize human rights abuses, more power to you. But Tor doesn't know the difference between that and hiring an assassin. I'm not making that up; on the front page of Tor's internal wiki are links to services where you can have drugs delivered to your door, buy a stolen Paypal account, have someone murdered, and order counterfeit currency.

These are evil things, and I'd rejoice to see all that shut down. But the Tor network has also done a lot of good in places where governments are abusive and censorious. (You know, Iran, Egypt, the United States of America...) Perhaps this is a corollary to government being the price we pay for civilization; crime is the price we pay for privacy. Perhaps one day we'll have a world where privacy isn't necessary to survive our government.

Moving on.

Bitmessage looks fascinating. Email sends messages to your destination through a series of forwarding servers. Bitmessage instead has everyone's inbox encrypted and mixed together, and that database is shared peer-to-peer. Everyone has a copy of everything, but only the recipient can decrypt their own messages. Like Tor, there's no one to trust.

Unfortunately, I can't make it work. I've yet to successfully send a message to anyone besides the echo address (BM-orkCbppXWSqPpAxnz6jnfTZ2djb5pJKDb). And the only messages I've received were from a newsgroup that was full of racists. If anyone has better luck, please let me know. And feel free to message me at BM-2DCANQGGBZeRkZRhFBmErnApJ7d38s2A2L

Teach how to think

I teach algebra at the University of Phoenix. None of my students are in any sort of science/technical field. Nursing is as close as it comes. So I'm frequently asked the eternal question, asked of any math teacher whose students aren't there voluntarily, "What is this good for? When am I going to use it?"

Math isn't the only subject that gets this kind of questioning, of course. History, science, really almost any school subject can be. And answers like, "Math is everywhere!" and "Knowing where you came from can help you determine where to go" just aren't satisfying.

Here's the truth. I'm 99% sure my students will never again have to find the slope of a line. Just like I'm 99% sure that most history students will never need to know the dates of the Spanish-American war. But that's not why you study these things.

To do math well, you have to be able to apply a set of rules in an organized fashion. You have to be able to recognize the kind of problem you're dealing with, apply the relevant algorithm, keep all the details straight, and recognize when you're done. So if you learn to do math, you must also learn these skills. And those skills are used everywhere.

You don't take math to learn math. You take math to learn to solve problems in a structured fashion.

You don't take history to know what happened when. You take history to know why things happen. You see how people have behaved throughout history, you learn the patterns, and you see how those patterns repeat themselves.

You don't take science to know what kinds of rocks there are in the world. You take science to learn that the world operates according to predictable, deterministic (or at least probabilistic) fashion.

We focus on the details at the expense of the true overall lesson. If all we're testing our students on is how well they memorize trivia, we're wasting everyone's time. We're not teaching how to think.

Stack Exchange

I love the Stack Exchange. You know all those websites that come up in Google searches that have a question-answer format? And you know how bad they all are? This is web Q&A done right. It's amazingly well designed. So many subjects, the potential for many more, and a great system to make sure the whole thing stays high-quality. Ones of particular interest include:

Electrical Engineering (where I am now a top 100 user!)
Software Development
Sysadmin
Advanced user
Life as a programmer
Christianity
Biblical Hermeneutics
Sci-fi/Fantasy
TV/Movies

Seriously, this is a great way to learn, share, and organize information. It's set up like a game, with points and accomplishments. Once you get going, it's hard to stop! Find ones you're interested in, and go!

Bagworm genocide

The trees outside my house are covered with these things:

They're all over the neighborhood, they've already killed one tree of mine, and they're working on the others. I'm pulling off as many as I can, but there are literally thousands of small ones. I've sprayed all the trees, and haven't seen any movement since then, so I'm reasonably confident most of them are dead. I've also fed the trees with some Bayer plant protecting stuff. So far, I think we're at a stalemate.

I want to go on the offensive. I want to wipe out this species. How do I do it? And is there any reason I shouldn't?

TV streaming boxes

I enjoy my television setup. I ripped all my DVDs to a pair of USB hard disks, one WD Elements for TV shows, another Seagate Backup Plus for movies. Both are connected to a low-power server, which has a gigabit wired connection to jacks throughout the house. Each TV in the house has a streaming box attached, including two older WD TV Live, one newer WD TV Live, and one Apple TV.

The Apple TV requires an iTunes server, which only supports limited file types. The WD TV boxes are far more flexible and easy to set up; they read files of almost any type, directly off a Windows file share. I especially recommend the newer model, which has a vastly improved user interface.

Neither seems to support any sort of randomized playlist or video shuffle, so it's impossible to set up a sort of "channel-surfing" background noise channel. If anyone knows of a player which supports such a thing, let me know!

So here's the weird part. Whatever show I'm watching will intermittently freeze. The show will stop for between thirty seconds and three minutes. After that time, the video will skip ahead by that length of time, forcing me to rewind.

Imagine, watching the latest episode of Suits. You get to the juicy part (which, let's face it, is the entire episode), and then the show freezes. And worse, when it recovers, you get a lovely fast-forward spoiler of the next three minutes.

Unacceptable!

What's weird is that it's not the network. While the video is frozen, I can VNC into the server, no problem. But the server can't read the USB hard disk! If I try to open it, explorer freezes until the video resumes.This implies that the problem is between the server and the drive.

I've had multiple WD Elements drives behave this way. The Seagate drive, however,doesn't seem to have any such problems; watching movies, I'm fine. I'm seriously considering abandoning the WD Elemenets drives except as backups.

I also had an interesting issue with the server. All three Live boxes, at the same time, stopped seeing the server shares. Any PC could access the shares, and the network cabling all remained functional. The problem turned out to be my newly-reformatted Windows 7 desktop PC. It had assumed the duty of telling everyone where all the network shares were. The server was running XP. Windows 7 doesn't speak the same language as Windows XP in this regard, so suddenly all the streaming boxes couldn't see anything. Turned my desktop off long enough for the XP server to re-establish control, and all was well. One frustrating hour, I tell you!

Going gluten-free

About three years ago I went to the doctor for acid reflux. She ran some tests, and told me I had both H. pylori and coeliac disease. She then suggested I take some antibiotics for the H. pylori, and remove all gluten from my diet for the coeliac disease.

This seemed to me to be unscientific. Why change two variables at once, especially when one of them is a trivial change and the other is a massive lifestyle alteration? So I took the pills, kept eating gluten, felt better, and didn't think about it again.

A few weeks ago I realized that for some time I'd had persistent stomach aches. Remembering my test results, I decided to see if that was the cause. It's difficult to run a controlled double-blind study on yourself, but I did the best I could. First, I went gluten-free for a week.

Do you have any idea how hard that is? I barely made it a week, and even then I had slip-ups with things that you'd never expect to include gluten. I can confirm that gluten-free bread and pancakes are pretty disgusting, though I did have some good gluten-free toast at the Pfunky Griddle. Gluten-free pasta's edible, and gluten-free Rice Krispies are quite good.

I also did some reading, and it turns out that exposing children to gluten before six months increases their odds of developing coeliac disease by, like, 5x. When I asked my dad about this, his response was "Wait, even cream of wheat?"

So there's that.

After a week, I was feeling better. People say it takes months to really be clear of the stuff, but I just couldn't take it any more. Next step, gluten overdose! I ate a loaf of bread in a day, deep dish pizza, all the gluten I could get. And it didn't hurt me.

So do I really have coeliac disease? Probably. The test they ran is very high specificity. But if it's causing me a problem right now, at this stage in my life, it's not obvious enough to be worth throwing out my entire diet.

Those of you who have serious gluten issues, I wish I could help you. Going gluten-free removed much joy from my life, and I hope you handle it better than I did.