I’ve been finding people online that I haven’t seen or spoken to in several decades. I don’t know of a real way to catch up from all of that other than lengthy conversations in-person, but those aren’t practical in the short-term, so I adapted this from something I put together for my high school reunion last Summer to be better than nothing. Read the rest of this entry »
30 Years in 221 Words
February 18th, 2010Climate Change Perhaps from Hydrogen?
February 15th, 2010Just a stray thought that struck me the other day, and I wanted to bring it up to see if anybody happens to know how to answer this:
Much of the current focus on addressing climate change has to do with reducing carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. However, burning fossil fuels also involves the release of hydrogen compounds, most particularly, of water. Water vapor, aka steam, to be more precise. Iirc, water vapor is a greenhouse gas, and its release raises humidity in the locations it has been released. It contributes to more cloud cover, and could reasonably be expected to result in increased rainfall/snowfall and raising ocean levels (although, admittedly, a lot of tons can be added to oceans without raising sea level by a millimeter).
Now, it’s good to have water, because we are mostly water, but I’m just wondering aloud in print if this has received sufficient attention. Anybody?
Health Care Bill Realities
February 2nd, 2010Based in a comment I made elsewhere that I want to keep. I may build on this at another time.
If the Democrat leaders in Congress want to pass a health care bill, they’re going to have to settle for consensus points. If they really want to improve the health of Americans, they’re going to have to find the guts to tell people about the choices they are making that are exploding the costs of health-care across the board, and nobody likes to tell people they are dependent on that they need to eat their spinach. Read the rest of this entry »
Disagreement: The path to real learning. (Life is tough, brother. Get a helmet.)
January 20th, 2010Another comment from another blog that I wanted to keep where I could find it.
Many years ago I bought a new computer — a 386SX-16running MS-Dos5, with a user interface called GeoWorks that had client software for this upstart on-line service that thought some day it could challenge the big-boys (Compuserve and GEnie) called America On-line. It had a free trial number of hours, and I looked around and around (it was a long-distance call to the only access number in my area, and things didn’t move fast on my 2400 baud modem), and, at the very end, I found a listing for Hatrack River Town Meeting, which rung bells from a book I had just bought by Orson Scott Card — there was a little blurb at the end of the book. So I went there, and met Scott and a bunch of people. After a while I was invited to come to a private area called Nauvoo, and there I met Robert Woolley. He was one of the more insightful folks in that space, but it was pretty low-key and happy for the most part. Read the rest of this entry »
I fired my anti-virus software yesterday.
January 19th, 2010It was a long time coming, and I’m a little sad about it. But it was clear that we were not satisfying each others needs. It needed way more computing resources than I could provide, and I needed something to catch me in the case that I should slip and get an infection, but, otherwise, to stay out of my way. Read the rest of this entry »
2009 Christmas Letter
December 28th, 200919 December 2009
Well, Merry Christmas! Time for the State of the Blain again.
Read the rest of this entry »
Limitations of Religion
December 27th, 2009This is an excerpt of a comment I made to a friend who is having a tough time with the church she recently left:
No matter what you do, churches are made of people, and people fail. I don’t have much experience with a pastor-based church, but it seems that what you’re alluding to is an unfortunately common experience. Great pastors being followed by inadequate interim pastors who are unwilling to be replaced by more competent pastors, resulting in schism and exodus. I don’t have a solution for that — it seems inherent in the system to me.
But, without churches, there isn’t anybody to teach us about important things. Yeah, I know, we can go directly to God, but our ability to do so on our own isn’t always that good, and it’s very easy to teach ourselves the Gospel according to Me, which includes all our pet doctrines and gospel hobbies, and avoids anything we don’t want to think about very much.
Churches, scriptures, and the witness/testimony of others are windows through which we can perceive things of God. They are helpful, good and useful, but they aren’t God, and worshiping them is a much easier idolatry than worshiping God is. If we accept them in their limitation, and seek to transcend those limitations with God’s help, as we try to transcend our own limitations with that same help, over the long run, we will get what we most need. If we set our sights on them, and succumb to the temptation to worship them at the expense of the God they teach, then we will fail, sooner or later, but badly.
Email to Harry Reid
December 22nd, 2009Bro. Reid,
I have just received an email that tells me that you might be getting some one-word contacts with the word “Gadianton.” While I have many points of disagreement with you (only about political issues as far as I can tell), I disagree much more strongly with people trying to beat you up with the Book of Mormon.
So, if you wanted to start involving Republicans in the crafting of the Health Care bill, and keeping the President’s campaign promise that it would be drafted by Republicans and Democrats under C-SPAN cameras, I’d be very good with that. But, whether you do this or not, please let this one conservative Mormon Republican voice stand against the wing-nuts and nut-job Mormons who don’t understand that political disagreement doesn’t make you evil.
Sincerely,
Blain Nelson
A note to Mormons (and others) trying to help friends avoid a planned divorce.
November 24th, 2009This is what some of them would like to say to you, but don’t necessarily know how:
Thank you for your concerns about me and my family. I know you have the best of intentions for us, and want to do what you can to help keep my family intact. I love that you want to do this for us.
You can’t do this for us. We’ve already tried every available option, looked under ever rock, and prayed as much as we can. We will be divorcing. That isn’t a question. We don’t know what the future holds beyond that. I don’t yet know when or if I will be married again. This is a very difficult time for me, and I’m none too sure what I will be doing tomorrow. I might just cry a lot.
When I say things like “We just grew apart,” or “We’re not in love anymore,” or just generally don’t tell you anything bad about my marriage or my spouse, this is my attempt to tactfully tell you that what you’re asking about isn’t your business. I’m not going to tell you why we’re divorcing, and you should be grateful that I won’t. There are any number of things that may or may not have led into my decision that you don’t want to hear about: emotional, physical or sexual abuse of me, my children or both, addiction, mental illness, infidelity, and a great deal of pain. I don’t want you to think of or treat my ex badly, and I really don’t want to talk about any of this with you. And I really do want you to drop the questions about what we’ve done or not done, or tried and not tried. As I’ve said, this is a very, very difficult time, and your well intentioned inquiries just poke at emotional wounds that haven’t had the time to become scars yet. It feels a lot like getting kicked when you’re down, and this is why many people leave the Church after they divorce.
I have a support system that’s working for me right now. I appreciate your willingness to be a part of it, but right now isn’t the time for that. Perhaps later.
Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History series Ghosts of the Ostfront
November 22nd, 2009This requires more than the usual “Share” on Facebook, because folks would just blow this off as something that sounds like the usual weird thing I post, and it deserves more than that. This series describes the war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in the Second World War, and shows how the Soviets beat the Nazis, and the price paid by all parties in the process. Dan Carlin makes a point of putting the listener into the situation to help you build images in your mind to help understand how these crucial battles were carried out in all their awful details. Having just finished the series, I am quite aware of the debt all of us owe the megalomaniacal Josef Stalin, and I’m also a bit nauseated by that.
If you’ve seen Saving Private Ryan, you’ve seen a graphic representation of war fought by the rules on the Western Front. On the Eastern Front, the most egomanical and evil leaders of the twentieth century fought a much larger and more vicious war without any rules, and this series tells you that story. If you want to understand how the world became what it is today, this series is worthy of your consideration. Each of the four parts is quite long — perhaps 90 minutes each. It will require quite a bit of your time to listen to. It is most definitely not for children, and is not for those who can not handle violence. But I do recommend it to those who can handle it.
