The Greenup Family

Another post I read added at least two more thoughts to the discussion, but I still feel that it is a tough matter, that can’t be discerned from afar.

1. “If our children cannot find acceptance and tolerance in church, where would they ever find these? If they are not welcome in their Father’s house, where else would they be?”

2. “Allegedly, Adam had not only been disruptive, but violent as well. But you know what? My son can be that way, too. And given what we know of our son, given what we have learned from our years of living with and loving him, I still feel that he should NEVER ever be deprived of his chance to worship”

The first of these points is right on, and should be wholeheartedly supported.  The second has serious issues.  At the base of it is “Your right to extend your arm stops where it meets my face.”  Somewhere between these two positions, a middle ground has to be found autistic people should be welcome in the church, and they frequently are not, but that doesn’t mean you should go over the top to the other side either.  I note that the posts I saw that were most outraged about the church were made by people who claim to have autistic children themselves.  Do they hold the position because they have more intimate knowledge of autism, or because they are a member of the set themselves?  I am not trying to argue ad homiem, but am trying to see through all of the issues involved.

Additional thoughts

What if a naturalist came and charged that true worship should be done naked as Adam and Eve did?  How about a holy roller in a catholic church?  Where is the line between authentic enthusiastic worship and distraction to other people’s attempts to do so in their own way?

Love Love Love.  All should be in love, but unfortunately, we’ve got Earth, Earth, Earth, so it’s a little tricky.

A post at Floating Axehead about an autistic child and trouble in a church really stirred me up this morning. (added: news article here) There are so many troubling issues here.

On the church’s side:

• The child DOES seem to be a danger. The article mentions that “after one service Adam got into another family’s car, started it and revved up the engine while there were people in front of the vehicle.”
• The family has a separate study room in their home so that he is not disruptive to the other family members and their things. The family should be receptive to the church’s attempts to work out a solution.

On the family’s side:

• Kids fight. hitting another kid (who may also be large) may not be a big deal.
• Lack of control over his bodily functions, or panicing and racing from the church are not things that are wrong or that he should be punished for.
• Do the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) restrictions on discrimination apply?

On the Misc side:

I laughed (nervously) at the part about comparing watching a video feed in another room being similar to everyone staying home and watching the service on TV. I think (hope) this is a case of arguing the extreme; Just because some things are necessary, expedient, appropriate, or efficient for some, does not mean that they are for all. The extreme of “everyone staying home and watching the service on TV” is Isaac Asimov’s society of the Solarians, where nobody ever came into the same building together, but always “screened” one another. As someone who works from home and likes to shop online, I’m already a little sensitive on this subject.

Another blog quoted Luke, saying: “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them.” I’m not sure this is REALLY ripping out of context, or a valid point. He’s not a LITTLE child, and that was a specific statement in a specific situation, and generalizing it should be done with caution. Still, Especially from a Catholic perspective, this is “coming to Him”, and the restraining order is a classic “hinder”.

This issue highlights how difficult it is to trust anything you hear these days. I am sure that many will only hear “church obtains restraining order against disabled child”. The opposite story “church diciplines family for being unloving to other churchgoers” might be just as wrong. It makes me feel at the mercy of the media (which I don’t trust) because there is no way to gather the correct amount of information about the things I hear. Because I know that the slightest subtleties of wording can influence people in polls, I even have some concern that I have not “neutralized” the title on this blog post, and people scanning RSS feeds will get only those four words about the problem and form a conclusion. Maybe I should have stolen Floating Axhead’s title “Between the Rock and a hard place”

I generally hate the way copyright law is structured, but this
http://techdirt.com/article.php?sid=20070201/140812 seems like an
instance of a corp REALLY shooting themselves in the foot. more than usual.  There’s
the potential of seriously annoying a large group of people to no real
economic gain, AND there was money to be made by choosing a different
strategy.

The  stance they chose (after the church tried to compromise)
effectively was about trying to pick a fight or restrict access.  Was
there any chance that a church was going to attempt to negotiate a
license, when even bars don’t pay one? No. Football is not a core part
of any church’s ministry.

If the NFL had chosen instead to find a way to cooperate that wouldn’t
have weakened their perceived ownership of their intellectual
property, they could have gained significantly in viewership of
marginals and support.  People who don’t NEED  (or perhaps even WANT)
to watch the superbowl, but would for the sake of a fun gathering, or
even to help with support. (policing food, drinks, and kids) (yeah,
many of these wouldn’t watch much of the game or commercials, but
probably more than they would have otherwise) Some people will still
find a “fun gathering” at a local bar, but for most businesses the
goal is to EXPAND your market, not filter it. (by “those who feel
comfortable in a bar” for instance)

ADDITIONALLY, many churches have had a long-standing internal conflict
about the issue of “are you committed to Christ or The Game”, and some
moderate sports fans, people who actually WANT to watch, have been
choosing church INSTEAD, (and in most cases dealing with VCRs and
other issues like premature revelation of the conclusion)  Some of
them probably just “give it a miss”, as they are really more hockey or
baseball fans than football.  Rather than encourage this group (and
get their “neilson ratings”, which don’t track VCRs and PVRs well) the
NFL prefers to promote division and trouble.

So the NFL is turning off: support people, significant others,
groupies, and low-to-moderate sport fans.
They are gaining: Exclusivity for Die-hard fans, maybe less of a
“family friendly” image, annoyance of some pastors who may call for a
boycott, visibility of stupid copyright laws, “free advertising” in
the form of a conflict (though as “the bad guy”)

Time is passing. The Time is coming. Which time? Well, at this time ; ) the one I’d like to discuss is when Unix Time overflows at 2038-01-19T03:14:08. The current solutions most people have proposed have involved recompiling anything necessary using either an unsigned time_t (giving another 70 years) or using a 64 bit value (giving another 292+ billion years) to delay the problem for a while.

These are fairly workable solutions, for a definition of workable that includes “somewhat quick and dirty”. Using usigned just puts off the problem a while, and I think going to 64 bits is both wasteful and stingy at the same time. Bothering to keep space for more than a million years, at the current rate of software change, is just a waste of time. : ) Additionally, NOT bothering to consistently track milliseconds (which can be very important for computing purposes) is just poor design based on too much emphasis on backwards compatibility. Normally I’m all over backwards compatibility, but I think enough things would still be broken by the improvement, that it might just be better to get fresh.

As cpu speeds continue to go up, someday we will exceed milliseconds, and have multiple log entries with the same timestamp.

What about the past? With a properly designed system, we could do a better job of dealing with history. Right now, when people want to specify a time in the past, they can only use binary timestamps for events going back to 1901. Anything earlier must be represented in another format, making direct comparisons impossible.
I am sure there are a number of historical applications that could benefit from a consistent, universal, linear time standard. One that comes to mind is digital photo collections that include scanned items; My personal collection does not currently go back before 1901, but it comes close, and I’m sure that others’ do.

Let’s replace that silly little 32 bit number with a 256 bit number!!! With 256 bits, we can measure the entire length of estimated creation in the smallest possible unit of time, Planck Time. Plank time is 5.4×10^-44 seconds, the big bang is estimated at 13.7×10^9 years ago, and a year is 3.2×10^7 seconds, for a total of about 8×10^61, which would take a little over 200 bits to represent. Add only one more bit, and you can go 13.7 billion years into the future too. Spice it up to 256 bits to keep the word-alignment folks happy, and you’ve got the universe in your pocket.
Admitedly, we only have an estimate of Plank time, but anything that we use is going to need periodic correction for drift anyway… computers use some of the cheapest timepieces in creation… It would be nice to have a processor that could add only one in its time register, but as a matter of practicality (and probably special relativity too) until things get INSANELY fast, I think we’re going to be adding something like 5×10^34 or more each clock cycle.

Unfortunately a grand proposal like this will be destroyed by one of two things:

1. THAT’S TOO MANY BYTES!
• Cope. it’s not that bad. Disk is cheap.
2. WHERE SHOULD WE PUT ZERO?
• 14.7 billion years ago? 13.7 billion years ago? The “year” 0? 3BC? 30AD? 1901? 1970? 2000? 2001? I really don’t care too much, so long as no one tries to divide by it. (they will.)

I should mention though, that 13.7 billion years ago is probably a pretty hard time to pin down exactly, and someone is eventually likely to play with the date routines and find out something silly, like “The universe began on a thursday.”

Additional info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_time