This coming Sunday, April 2, at 2:00 AM, people in Edinburgh and across most of Indiana will have to do something they haven’t had to do in more than three decades. They will have to spring ahead – move their clocks up one hour in observance of daylight saving time.
So that means 2:00 AM will actually be 3:00 AM. And if you are one of the unlucky ones who have to get up early for work on Sunday morning, you’ll be losing an hour of sleep, unless you remember to go to bed an hour earlier on Saturday night.
I was one of the proponents of changing all of Indiana to daylight saving time. It makes a lot of economic sense, and it means much less confusion for those who travel, communicate, or send freight across state lines.
It also means there should be less TV schedule confusion. Cable shows will remain at the same time all year, just like local and network shows. It also means there will be no more need to tape delay network broadcasts in the summer.
Of course, the major advantage for most people is that they will get an extra hour of daylight in the evening. Fourth of July fireworks probably won’t begin until 10:00 PM, because it won’t be completely dark until then.
But there will also be some minor annoyances, at least until we get used to them.
The most obvious annoyance is that we’ll have to remember to move our clocks twice a year. We’ll have to spring ahead and fall back.
For the manually-set clocks, it will mean taking them down off the wall and moving the hand around to the next hour before you go to bed Saturday night. Some digital clocks might be easier to reset. And the newer ones might do it for you.
New digital clocks detect the time of day through digital signals that come in through the power lines. If you have them set to observe daylight saving time, you probably won’t have to do anything to them.
The same is true of your computer, assuming you have already set it for the Eastern Time zone and set it to observe the daylight saving time switch. If not, you should do that now.
Just double click on the time in the lower right corner of your screen (assuming you have a Windows operating system). Then click on the Time Zone tab at the top of the window that pops up. Select Eastern Time from the drop down menu, not Indiana Time. Then put a check mark in the box on the bottom left that says “automatically adjust clock for daylight time changes.” And you’re done.
Failure to adjust your clocka, especially in the spring when we have to set them ahead, might make you late for whatever you have planned this Sunday. Or, assuming you can get through the day without noticing all your clocks are behind an hour, you will be late for work on Monday morning.
In the fall, it’s not so bad. If you forget, you’ll just be an hour early for work. But if you remember, you’ll be treated to that extra hour of precious sleep that you will be denied this coming Sunday.
What standard time giveth, daylight saving time taketh away.
Sunday, March 26, 2006
Saturday, March 25, 2006
WWJD? Jesus Wouldn't be a Fundamentalist
When George W. Bush was elected president the first time, by the Supreme Court, not by the people, his victory could at least partially be attributed to the lack of a strong candidate by the Democrats. Al Gore was tainted by his association with a president who directly lied to the American people, albeit about a matter not pertaining to national security.
When Bush was elected president the second time, again by a slim margin, his victory could also be attributed in part to a very weak Democratic candidate who appeared to vacillate on key issues.
But his second victory was also helped significantly by what was viewed as a giant shift to the right by a constituency that was tired of what they saw as a national trend toward sinfulness and debauchery. Score one for the religious fundamentalists.
That victory made it seem as though the country had turned some corner toward salvation, and the fundamentalists wasted no time in capitalizing on their presidential victory.
Bush had already stymied medical research in key fields like stem cells and therapeutic cloning. So the fundamentalists turned their attention to the American education system by attempting to infiltrate it by posing as science professionals.
It didn’t work, of course. And now they’re regrouping following a stinging setback by a federal judge in Pennsylvania and, more recently, by the failure of an anti-Darwin bill in Utah.
But there may be even more regrouping necessary than many may believe. The shift to the religious right in this country on the coattails of our increasingly faltering president may not have been as seismic as many originally thought. And it might have been only a temporary anomaly.
Polls continue to indicate that, while belief in God is quite high, most Americans do not adhere to most fundamentalist beliefs, especially younger Americans.
A former pastor of the First Christian Church in Edinburgh who now is behind the pulpit of a church in Southern California was recently featured in a Santa Cruz newspaper article about fundamentalism. Steve Defields-Gambrel is a preacher on a mission, against fundamentalism.
He says fundamentalist Christians belie the whole message that Jesus intended us to hear.
Fundamentalism is the belief that the bible is the unerring word of God, spoken to men by God, and that every last sentence of it is true and literal in its meaning. Fundamentalists also believe that Jesus Christ is the only path to eternal salvation. It supposedly harkens back to the early days of Christianity, when it was in its purest form.
Not true, according to Gambrel.
Fundamentalism was founded only about a century ago, around 1901. It grew out of several church revivals in the South that were partially the result of what some believed was a shift toward godlessness brought on by advances in scientific discovery. Prior to the 20th century, nobody was a fundamentalist Christian.
Gambrel said that fundamentalism often results in a harsh and even unloving form of Christianity that is just the opposite of what Jesus intended. Fundamentalism stymies one’s progress toward religious enlightenment; Jesus boldly stepped ahead.
“In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says he’s not here to abolish the law or the prophets, but six times in a row he revises them,” Gambrel said.
Jesus was a revolutionist who was eventually condemned to death for his heresies against the established “fundamentalism” of the day. There’s no reason to believe he would be any different if he walked the earth today.
Fundamentalism is repressive; Jesus was progressive. Fundamentalism is judgmental; Jesus was accepting. Fundamentalism is condemning; Jesus was forgiving.
As for the bible, the early Christians had none. It had not been canonized yet. That didn’t happen until centuries after Christ.
“The scary thing about canonizing is that it was done by committee," Gambrel said. "Nowadays we don’t respect many things done by committee.”
Gambrel’s point, and mine, is that we as Americans can certainly oppose depravity and immorality. We can do so by avoiding the things we disagree with, but also by constantly learning and evolving. Faith should be a dynamic process, not stalled in time and stultified.
If we choose to be Christians, we can be enlightened ones, not those who blindly follow the dogma of the unenlightened zealots.
According to Gambrel, early believers didn’t call themselves Christians; they called themselves the people of the Way, as in highway. They even used the phrase, “according to the Road,” instead of “according to the Bible.” He said following paths God presents means staying on the road, but simply moving forward.
And moving forward is something that fundamentalism cannot tolerate.
When Bush was elected president the second time, again by a slim margin, his victory could also be attributed in part to a very weak Democratic candidate who appeared to vacillate on key issues.
But his second victory was also helped significantly by what was viewed as a giant shift to the right by a constituency that was tired of what they saw as a national trend toward sinfulness and debauchery. Score one for the religious fundamentalists.
That victory made it seem as though the country had turned some corner toward salvation, and the fundamentalists wasted no time in capitalizing on their presidential victory.
Bush had already stymied medical research in key fields like stem cells and therapeutic cloning. So the fundamentalists turned their attention to the American education system by attempting to infiltrate it by posing as science professionals.
It didn’t work, of course. And now they’re regrouping following a stinging setback by a federal judge in Pennsylvania and, more recently, by the failure of an anti-Darwin bill in Utah.
But there may be even more regrouping necessary than many may believe. The shift to the religious right in this country on the coattails of our increasingly faltering president may not have been as seismic as many originally thought. And it might have been only a temporary anomaly.
Polls continue to indicate that, while belief in God is quite high, most Americans do not adhere to most fundamentalist beliefs, especially younger Americans.
A former pastor of the First Christian Church in Edinburgh who now is behind the pulpit of a church in Southern California was recently featured in a Santa Cruz newspaper article about fundamentalism. Steve Defields-Gambrel is a preacher on a mission, against fundamentalism.
He says fundamentalist Christians belie the whole message that Jesus intended us to hear.
Fundamentalism is the belief that the bible is the unerring word of God, spoken to men by God, and that every last sentence of it is true and literal in its meaning. Fundamentalists also believe that Jesus Christ is the only path to eternal salvation. It supposedly harkens back to the early days of Christianity, when it was in its purest form.
Not true, according to Gambrel.
Fundamentalism was founded only about a century ago, around 1901. It grew out of several church revivals in the South that were partially the result of what some believed was a shift toward godlessness brought on by advances in scientific discovery. Prior to the 20th century, nobody was a fundamentalist Christian.
Gambrel said that fundamentalism often results in a harsh and even unloving form of Christianity that is just the opposite of what Jesus intended. Fundamentalism stymies one’s progress toward religious enlightenment; Jesus boldly stepped ahead.
“In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says he’s not here to abolish the law or the prophets, but six times in a row he revises them,” Gambrel said.
Jesus was a revolutionist who was eventually condemned to death for his heresies against the established “fundamentalism” of the day. There’s no reason to believe he would be any different if he walked the earth today.
Fundamentalism is repressive; Jesus was progressive. Fundamentalism is judgmental; Jesus was accepting. Fundamentalism is condemning; Jesus was forgiving.
As for the bible, the early Christians had none. It had not been canonized yet. That didn’t happen until centuries after Christ.
“The scary thing about canonizing is that it was done by committee," Gambrel said. "Nowadays we don’t respect many things done by committee.”
Gambrel’s point, and mine, is that we as Americans can certainly oppose depravity and immorality. We can do so by avoiding the things we disagree with, but also by constantly learning and evolving. Faith should be a dynamic process, not stalled in time and stultified.
If we choose to be Christians, we can be enlightened ones, not those who blindly follow the dogma of the unenlightened zealots.
According to Gambrel, early believers didn’t call themselves Christians; they called themselves the people of the Way, as in highway. They even used the phrase, “according to the Road,” instead of “according to the Bible.” He said following paths God presents means staying on the road, but simply moving forward.
And moving forward is something that fundamentalism cannot tolerate.
Sunday, March 19, 2006
Big Bang's Smoking Gun Discovered
We measure our days and nights in hours, minutes, and sometimes seconds. It takes most of us about 90 seconds to make a refrigerator run during a TV commercial. Most of us have a work day that lasts eight hours. And our weekends seem painfully short at two days.
On the scientific level, however, time periods can be measured in extremely tiny or extremely long increments. For example, the Global Positioning System, which uses satellites to pinpoint the exact location of, say, a person with a GPS cell phone making a 911 call, works its magic by measuring the time it takes the radio waves to reach the cell phone in nanoseconds, or billionths of a second.
On the other end of the scale, geologists measure the age of fossils in millions or hundreds of millions of years. And the age of the universe is measured at 13.7 billion years.
Recently, however, scientists using the orbiting Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe have merged the incredibly large time scales of the universe with the unimaginably tiny time scale of microelectronics. They have managed to take a picture, so to speak, of the first trillionth of a second of the birth of the universe.
Fifty years ago, there was a debate raging of astronomical proportions. Really, the debate was among astronomers who couldn’t agree on whether the universe had a beginning, dubbed the Big Bang, or whether it was in a so-called steady state.
That debate was laid to rest once and for all in 1968 when a couple of radio technicians at Bell Labs serendipitously discovered the cosmic background radiation, which was predicted to exist if, indeed, the universe began with a bang.
Unfortunately, the Big Bang theory couldn’t explain how stars and galaxies could form. It predicted a very smooth universe. Our universe is lumpy with matter.
Then, 25 years ago, a scientist named Alan Guth figured out that if the universe had started with an immense inflationary period during the first few trillionths of a second of the Big Bang, that would create fluctuations in the energy field that would result in galaxies, stars, and planets.
Ever since then, astronomers have been looking for the smoking gun that would prove or disprove Guth’s inflationary theory. And it was announced just last week that the smoking gun has been found.
WMAP data showed that the cosmic background radiation is polarized on a small scale. In other words, it’s lumpy. It’s astonishingly compelling evidence that the universe did, indeed, go through a very brief and rapid inflationary period during the first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang.
I’m sure that is very exciting news to astronomers and cosmologists. But what is even more exciting to me is that we are living in an age when humans have actually learned not only to probe inside a time period of a trillionth of a second, but the very first trillionth of a second of the universe’s existence.
One doesn’t have to understand how it works to appreciate how truly fascinating it is.
On the scientific level, however, time periods can be measured in extremely tiny or extremely long increments. For example, the Global Positioning System, which uses satellites to pinpoint the exact location of, say, a person with a GPS cell phone making a 911 call, works its magic by measuring the time it takes the radio waves to reach the cell phone in nanoseconds, or billionths of a second.
On the other end of the scale, geologists measure the age of fossils in millions or hundreds of millions of years. And the age of the universe is measured at 13.7 billion years.
Recently, however, scientists using the orbiting Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe have merged the incredibly large time scales of the universe with the unimaginably tiny time scale of microelectronics. They have managed to take a picture, so to speak, of the first trillionth of a second of the birth of the universe.
Fifty years ago, there was a debate raging of astronomical proportions. Really, the debate was among astronomers who couldn’t agree on whether the universe had a beginning, dubbed the Big Bang, or whether it was in a so-called steady state.
That debate was laid to rest once and for all in 1968 when a couple of radio technicians at Bell Labs serendipitously discovered the cosmic background radiation, which was predicted to exist if, indeed, the universe began with a bang.
Unfortunately, the Big Bang theory couldn’t explain how stars and galaxies could form. It predicted a very smooth universe. Our universe is lumpy with matter.
Then, 25 years ago, a scientist named Alan Guth figured out that if the universe had started with an immense inflationary period during the first few trillionths of a second of the Big Bang, that would create fluctuations in the energy field that would result in galaxies, stars, and planets.
Ever since then, astronomers have been looking for the smoking gun that would prove or disprove Guth’s inflationary theory. And it was announced just last week that the smoking gun has been found.
WMAP data showed that the cosmic background radiation is polarized on a small scale. In other words, it’s lumpy. It’s astonishingly compelling evidence that the universe did, indeed, go through a very brief and rapid inflationary period during the first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang.
I’m sure that is very exciting news to astronomers and cosmologists. But what is even more exciting to me is that we are living in an age when humans have actually learned not only to probe inside a time period of a trillionth of a second, but the very first trillionth of a second of the universe’s existence.
One doesn’t have to understand how it works to appreciate how truly fascinating it is.
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