Opportunity Stuck on a Dune

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Mars Rover Opportunity seems to have roved into a rather deep patch of sand from which it is now having trouble extricating itself. Check out this hazcam photo to see just how far into the Martian sand the wheels have sunk. The rover team at JPL is carefully working on solutions for Opportunity to wiggle and ease out of the sand without getting more stuck.

Another advantage for human explorers: an astronaut could simply lift his knees higher.

Also check out Spirit rover’s lovely panorama from the slopes of the Columbia Hills.

Arnold, the Adventists, and the Sabbath

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Legalism 101: in which Arnold, a Christian ex-Seventh Day Adventist, meets up with his old Adventist friends.

(Update: Life Outside Adventism, a followup epistle from Arnold.)

I remember reading some Adventist literature in a Wordstar document a long time ago, and it was, at the start, good and solid Christian doctrine on sin, grace, salvation, and the sufficient propitiation of Christ — but something funny happened a few pages in. The text began to cover the Old Testament, with, as you may expect, a special focus on the Jewish Sabbath and its importance to the faith, then suddenly turned from the Bible to a rather unhinged history lesson on the “evils” of Roman Catholicism, how the Pope is the Antichrist and the Beast of Revelation, how the Catholics had twisted Scripture by changing the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday, and that true Christians must worship on the Old Testament Sabbath, as so ordained by God in the Ten Commandments. The Adventists’ Sabbath rule wasn’t a legalistic binding, (i.e. you don’t go to hell for not worshipping on Saturday, since you’re saved by grace) but the message being pushed was clear: “Evil people changed the Sabbath to Sunday. You’re a Christian; you’re not going to do what the evil people are doing, are you?”

The author of Hebrews is fairly clear about the new meaning of the Sabbath rest given to those who follow Christ: “So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his.”

The Sabbath day of rest was intended as a sign of the time when we would rest from the toil of the Law, by placing our faith solely in the grace of our Savior, and not in our own works. The early church broke bread and collected offerings on the first day of the week as a way of commemorating the day that Christ rose from the dead: not as a way of replacing the old Sabbath, but as a way of celebrating a new one, a Sabbath which transcends days of the week and works of the Law, a Sabbath that the elect will always be in, on all days, for all time.

Hey, Saturday-worshippers, I didn’t make this up. It’s in the Bible. Yet, as I do with the Roman Catholics: if you acknowledge Christ as Lord and believe that God raised him from the dead, I embrace you as brothers and sisters yet.

More from CARM.org and TheBereans.net.

When Paulo Got DSL

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Well, I’m now on DSL; I ordered the service last week, got the self-install kit with modem/wireless router two days ago, and the activation notice came today. Installation was seamless: hooking everything up and installing and configuring the software took just 30 minutes. Cancelling my old — and faithful — dialup account at Allvantage took just two minutes more.

At last, my connection speed actually feels “normal.” Now I can pick up my laptop and carry it to the couch to use the internet without trailing that phone line behind me, and the first twinge of bandwidth guilt — that feeling of needing to use all this lightning-fast throughput to download something — is already setting in.

I’d like to be nice and share my wireless connection freely for neighbors to pick up, but of course I’m concerned about monitoring connections for possible security risks, both technical and national. OS X 10.2.8 has a firewall on it, but I’d still like to know who’s connected to my network at any given time. I tried downloading Kismet, but the documentation was incomprehensible. Now I’m trying MacSniffer (OS X graphical frontend for tcpdump output), but of course, that just gives me a raw, unintelligible flood of data. Anyone got solutions for OS X?

Update: Sensibility has taken hold, and it’s all WEP’d now. Thanks for the advice.

Exploding Toads and a Movie Review

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Toads in Germany are mysteriously exploding, and scientists aren’t sure what’s causing it. I’ll bet it involves the introduction of nanomeds into their environment followed by large doses of gamma radiation.

(Yeah, yeah, I just rented Hulk. Not all that great; the movie was really trying for a “comic book” effect, and what it achieved instead was more annoying split-screens than 24.)

Update: The culprits might be hungry crows skilled at quickly pecking out toad livers. I guess that’s why we call a flock of crows a “murder.”

Pandora1.jpg

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Pandora1.jpg

First photo with my new Nokia 6600. Of course it’s of my cat.

Sky as Subject

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I walked home from work today, passing by the White House to check on the Treasury Duck (update on that here), but she wasn’t nesting when I dropped by, so I moved on. Lots of lovely sky scenery:

Altocumulus Above N Capitol and E NW

Traffic light at North Capitol St and E St near Union Station, with altocumulus translucidus clouds overhead.

Contrail Above the Alley

A fading contrail over the Well-Dressed Alley.

John Witherspoon's Back

John Witherspoon turns his back to the camera and faces the altocumulus floccus clouds above.

Photos taken with an Oregon Scientific Thincam.

Recent Reading: In The Presence of My Enemies

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In the Presence of My Enemies, by Gracia Burnham. Remember the Burnhams? Missionaries on furlough, they were kidnapped from their beach resort by Abu Sayyaf thugs in 2001, and were held hostage for more than a year before a tragic rescue attempt, in which Martin was killed and Gracia wounded by “friendly” fire.

Gracia’s account of their time as hostages is written in simple and natural language, interspersed with flashbacks to her Christian upbringing, marriage to Martin, and ministry work in the Philippines. Frank and brutally honest about every aspect of the hostage situation, Gracia’s story describes problems from disease and diarrhea to struggles with faith and morality. Gracia readily admits points when they behaved in less than a Christian manner, giving in to faithlessness, despair, distrust, and hatred; yet always finding themselves brought back to faith by little miracles which saw them through to the end of the ordeal. They dealt with struggles of faith as we all do, and were never always perfect, but were constantly reminded that God watched over them, and had called them to live and die for his purposes.

By the way, there were parts where I couldn’t help but smile at how Filipino the story was, from the onomatopoeic first line, to descriptions of food and drink, to retooled vocabulary words and other cultural quirks. In some ways the book is as much a look into the Filipino psyche and culture as it is a kidnap-and-hostage story.

More info:

The End of Cherry Blossom Season

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Withering Cherry Blossom Stems 2

Fallen, withered cherry blossom stems litter the walk around the Tidal Basin. The cherry trees are simple green-leafed trees like any other now, and will be so till next Spring.

Submerged Tidal Basin bank

High tide and pre-storm river surge have swollen the Potomac so that the Tidal Basin has flooded its lower-lying banks near Jefferson Memorial. The poles sticking out of the water mark what should be a waterside walkway.

Photos taken with an Oregon Scientific Thincam.

Oregon Scientific DS6628

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I just impulse-bought a new camera at the Discovery Store: a blue Oregon Scientific Thincam DS6628. It’s about the length and width of a credit card, but a few millimeters thicker. Image quality is just barely okay — a bit fragmented and faded, which I expected — but it’s comparable to my old Pencam SD, and quite decent for a tiny camera. Additionally, and unlike other tiny cameras of its genre, the thincam comes with a plugin flash attachment, which helps immensely for indoor and night photos which most other non-flash-equipped tiny cameras would be unable to capture.

Here’s the first photo, taken at night in my room with just indoor lighting and no flash. (Click to view it larger on Flickr.)