SPAIN: What Al-Qa’eda Hath Wrought

You remember when al-Qa’eda attacked Spanish rail lines just before and their recent national election and caused the incumbent party to lose power for its support of the U.S.-led War on Terror.

Now the consequences of that loss of nerve by the Spanish public are coming home to roost.

The way things work in countries with a parliamentary system of governance (like Spain) is that whichever part is in charge of the government basically runs the show and is able to enact sweeping changes in the law, to which opposition parties can put up far less resistance than the opposition party typically can in the U.S. Congress.

Now that the socialists are in power in Spain, they are conducting a thoroughgoing political campaign to restructure major Spanish social institutions. The changes are so sweeping that Spain’s leading churchman, Cardinal Antonio María Rouco, has accused the new government of taking Spain back to Moorish times, when Muslims ruled the country.

It’s a sad story.

Read it.

Some Good News On The Media Front

Couple of positive items regarding the media:

1) The panel in the House of Representatives has approved the Family Movie Act, clearing an early obstacle that puts it on the road to become law.

The Family Movie Act, if enacted, would clarify copyright law to protect the right of companies to manufacture devices that will skip offensive content in DVDs, etc. Thus parents could purachase the ClearPlay DVD player for their household so that when kids watch movies, offensive content is blocked (e.g., by dropping the volume level to zero when cuss words are uttered or jumping forward in scenes with nudity).

The Family Movie Act would protect companies that manufacture such devices (at the moment, that’s basically ClearPlay) from lawsuits alleging copyright infringement by Hollywood bigwigs.

No word yet whether the bigwigs will try to sue manufacturers of remote controls that have “Mute” and “Fast Forward” buttons on them.

To become law the Family Movie Act must be approved by the full House and the Senate.

2) MTV has some competition. A new venture known as The U Network (TUN) is scheduled to begin airing on 150 college campuses (compared to 700 campuses for MTV’s college outreach channel).

TUN executive promise to offer college students cleaner, more intelligent, more politically balanced programming compared to the filthy, “dumbed-down,” left-leaning content offered by MTV.

Get the story.

The Ivy League Myth

This article from a writer with the CATO Institute makes a very interesting point.

It starts out talking about the problems with affirmative action programs. There’s not much new in that quarter. Those problems have been explored by many before.

But then it goes on to make a point that is really interesting. According to the article:

[E]conomists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger found that name-brand colleges [such as Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Stamford] are the modern equivalent of the Dutch tulip craze. Prices go up and up, but elite colleges offer no financial benefit that less selective schools do not.

Dale and Krueger compared students rejected by selective colleges with students who attended those schools. They discovered that when students’ entering credentials, such as high school grades and test scores, were the same, the rejected students made just as much money as those who attended “top tier” universities.

Students know something about themselves that admissions committees do not. If you think you are Cornell material, you are – even if Cornell doesn’t notice – and statistics show that you are just as likely as Cornell grads to succeed in the game of life. This means that preferences don’t raise minority incomes.

Racial preferences can’t send more minority students to college and don’t raise the incomes of those they move around, but they do reinforce a harmful myth: the myth that credentials, not skills, are the key to success. Students of all backgrounds suffer because elite schools perpetuate this myth.

Ivy league institutions maintain their status by rejecting far more applicants than they accept. To keep applications coming – and parents paying tuition – they practically claim to have bottled success. Anyone can rub elbows with the brilliant and powerful, they imply, and be set for life.

But studies show that skills, not name-brand diplomas, determine advancement in the real world. Harvard grads do well, but they do well because they are skilled and driven, not because they have Harvard degrees.

This confirms something I’ve observed–that there is a low correlation between academic prestige and professional ability. Indeed, some of the most effective and productive folks I’ve encountered do not even have a degree in their selected field. Apologetics is particularly noteworthy in this regard in that nobody in the Catholic world offers degrees in apologetics. (Indeed, I myself am an example of this: My degree is in philosophy, and not from an Ivy League school). But the same is true of others I encounter as well. Often the best people are “self-made men” who lack credentials.

My experience is that native intelligence and drive count for far more than credentials. With intelligence and drive you can acquire the skills that no college program can give you. Careers in academia definitely open doors for one, and do give one a leg up in knowing one’s field, but no matter how prolonged academic careers are, most professional learning is still acquired by on-the-job training. People who are fresh out of school in any field aren’t nearly as skilled as those who have been working for some time. And the sharper and more motivated you are, the more you will push yourself to acquire the skills need to do top quality work.

Admittedly, not all the Big Name Universities are Ivy League, but we might well call the prestige associated with having a degree from such schools “the Ivy League myth.”

Catholic Exhaustive Concordances

A reader writes:

Hello Jimmy, I use the Strongs Exhaustive Concordance alot when studying, as well as the vines Expository dictionary, I know that the strongs has some faults since it is based on the faulty King James Version. My question is, is there a Catholic Exhaustive concordance, similair to the strongs? While the strongs does have it’s faults I really like the way it is set up, but would like a more faithful translation. Thanks you for all your time and efforts, you have help pave the road home for this convert.

Regarding your conversion, all I can say is that it is my honor to serve.

Regarding a Catholic exhaustive concordance, I regret to report that I do not know of any–certainly not any that I could recommend. Years ago I did see an exhaustive concordance of the New American Bible, but my impression looking through it was not favorable. I was struck how markedly inferior the technical aparatus in it was compared to Protestant concordances.

Also, since the recent Catholic Bible translations have all used the dynamic equivalence philosophy of translation, it kind of takes the edge off of the purpose of a concordance. If you’re using a concordance to do more than try to find a particular Bible verse that you’ve forgotten then you’re probably using it to do Bible study, and dynamic equivalence tranlsations are not suited for serious Bible study (though they may be fine for devotional Bible reading). In other words, if you’re wanting to use a concordance, you probably don’t want one based on recent Catholic Bible translations.

The Bible version I normally recommend for Bible study is the Revised Standard Version: Catholic Edition. I don’t know of any concordances specifically based on this one, but it’s only a few words different from the plain ol’ Revised Standard Version, so a concordance based on that (not the NRSV) would do.

The fundamental thing is, though, that today you don’t need an exhaustive concordance. Bible study software completely eliminates the need for concordances. That’s one reason they’re getting harder to find. Publishers aren’t making them as often because the market for them is drying up. Bible study software will do the job better. With a concordance you can only look up one word at a time, but with Bible study software you can do all kinds of fancy searches that will dramatically increase the chance of your finding the material you want while dramatically cutting the time it takes you to do so.

I remember the old days when, if you wanted to find a passage with two words in it, you had to look up both words in an exhaustive concordance and then manually compare the two lists item by item. Ugh! That took forever! Now Bible software will do it for you in a couple of seconds.

In fact, most of the higher-end Bible study software products will do searches far more sophisticated and the Boolean searches you’re probably used to doing on Google.

Basic Bible search web pages are also available. Most of the time when I’m looking for a verse, I don’t even bother booting up my Bible study program. I simply open a new window for my browser (which I always have up) and go to Bible Gateway to do my searching.

These days the only time I use concordances is if I’m looking up something in the original languages, in which case I’ll use an exhaustive concordance of the Hebrew Old Testament, the Greek New Testament, or the Septuagint. And the only reason I do that is because I haven’t yet practiced enough to type speedily in the Greek and Hebrew fonts that my Bible study software uses. (I’ll eventually get around to making that transition.)

So my basic advice is to not worry about getting a Catholic exhaustive concordance because, you don’t need one. Get used to doing electronic Bible searches–via Bible Gateway or your Biblt study software that you download or purchase–and you’ll soon find yourself saying, “Man! This blows concordances away! How did I ever get along without this?”

Meet Optimus Prime

optimusprimeNo, not the leader of the Transformers, but someone who admires him a whole heck of a lot.

This Optimus Prime is a member of Ohio’s 5694th National Guard Unit. According to the story,

He legally changed his name on his 30th birthday and now it’s on everything from his driver’s license, to his military ID, to his uniform.

“They razzed me for three months to no end,” said Prime. “They really dug into me about it.”

Prime says the toy actually filled a void in his life when it came out.

“My dad passed away the year before and I didn’t have anybody really around, so I really latched onto him when I was a kid,” he said.

No word as to whether Optimus has shought baptism since his name change.

HAWKING: Black Holes Have Bandwidth!

hawkingThanks to a reader for passing along this story.

As Albert Einstein once remarked in critiquing quantum mechanics, “God does not play dice with the universe.” But while God may not gamble in physics, Stephen Hawking definitely does. In fact, he’s just lost a bet. (Such bets are common among astrophysicists, who are inveterate gamblers.)

What was the bet?

Hawking bet John Preskill of Caltech that black holes are total information traps, that they don’t let any information out about what has fallen into them, that they have zero bandwidth.

This conclusion led to what is known as the “black hole information paradox.”

Well, it turns out that Hawking has now concluded he was wrong. Black holes do release information as the evaporate (you did know they evaporate, right? 😉 and, theoretically, one could recover that information.

Hawking is now scheduled to eat a plate of spaghettified crow at a physics conference in Dublin.

He also now has to pay up on the bet he made with Preskill. According to the story,

The forfeit is an encyclopedia, from which Preskill can recover information at will.

For more information on what Hawking may announce at the conference, see this story reporting a possible solution to the black hole information paradox that posits that black holes are actually cosmic fuzzballs made of subatomic string.

Ain’t science cool?

HAWKING: Black Holes Have Bandwidth!

hawkingThanks to a reader for passing along this story.

As Albert Einstein once remarked in critiquing quantum mechanics, “God does not play dice with the universe.” But while God may not gamble in physics, Stephen Hawking definitely does. In fact, he’s just lost a bet. (Such bets are common among astrophysicists, who are inveterate gamblers.)

What was the bet?

Hawking bet John Preskill of Caltech that black holes are total information traps, that they don’t let any information out about what has fallen into them, that they have zero bandwidth.

This conclusion led to what is known as the “black hole information paradox.”

Well, it turns out that Hawking has now concluded he was wrong. Black holes do release information as the evaporate (you did know they evaporate, right? 😉 and, theoretically, one could recover that information.

Hawking is now scheduled to eat a plate of spaghettified crow at a physics conference in Dublin.

He also now has to pay up on the bet he made with Preskill. According to the story,

The forfeit is an encyclopedia, from which Preskill can recover information at will.

For more information on what Hawking may announce at the conference, see this story reporting a possible solution to the black hole information paradox that posits that black holes are actually cosmic fuzzballs made of subatomic string.

Ain’t science cool?