Christmas gets more complicated when the kids grow up. There are multiple families with which to have Christmas celebrations. Austin & Janae's family open gifts Christmas eve and they got to bed very late. So, we didn't get up too early to exchange gifts at our place.

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or   Two views on how life came to be:

Introduction

Your world view is extremely important. In fact, it may be your most important belief. It gives your thoughts structure, and is your basis for interpreting the world around you. It is your belief of what is truth.

Your world view includes the abstract and philosophical assumptions that you have. From these you build up a model of the world. The model includes your learning and experiences, and it enables you to make predictions about objects and situations. The view and model might be thought of as being at the ends of a continuum: the world view works with big truths and the model works with details of operation.

There is a lot of randomness in our world. Detecting what is real in all this noise is not easy. Our world view and model of the world work together, as a system that allow us to recognize what we consider is important and ignore the rest. Since we cannot handle what does not fit, our world system also limits us. We reject the anomalies or interpret them into something that does fit. Therefore we may not be able to recognize anomalies for what they truly are. This means that having a correct world system is very critical.

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I went on a hike with Austin & David to the Chief at Squamish, BC, a massive hunk of granite that overlooks the town of Squamish on the road to Whistler. It has three peaks that we climbed.

The hike is challenging and is extremely vertical. A lot of hiking is up actual stairs. They had a sign cautioning people not to do the hike unless they were prepared.

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The question of what is a species has no good answer. The difficulty is that there are several definitions for species. This is generally acknowledged as a problem. There is disagreement on how organisms should be classified. In many cases it is because it is not obvious to all biologists what distinguishing factor should be used for classification.

Humans are driven to organize and classify their world. Darwinian evolutionists are driven to find cases of speciation consistent with and supporting their world view. And scientists are personally driven to carve out their own piece of the world. The result is that species divisions can become extremely fine-grained. I also think that the divisions become silly.

To illustrate this, I will apply these species definitions to humans. All humans are currently classified in one species, Homo sapiens. However, by applying common species differentiation methods, it appears there should be many species of humans!

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The English word "love" is an entity with multiple meanings. Under its big umbrella, it includes a continuum of meanings from sexual desire, to friendship, to altruistic care. The interesting part is that it is possible for the whole range to exist simultaneously in a relationship. However, only parts of its meanings may be true in some other relationship. For example, the newlyweds love each other, he loves his buddies, she loves her baby; same word, not likely the same meaning.

As humans, we may make use of this defect in the word, as for example in this conversation: "Do you love me?", "Yes, I do." If that is all that was said, then each person probably chose their own meaning. And the same thing happens with the word "evolution".

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A guy on the internet by the name of Rob has written a piece suggesting a means of convincing people of the veracity of Darwinian evolution (evolution as the explanation for the origin of species). He used the illustration of three modern systems that function surprisingly well. He thought they each had similarity in operation to Darwinian evolution. The mechanism for the success of these systems has been hard for people to grasp. Likewise he thought that because people have found the mechanism of Darwinian evolution hard to understand, maybe that was why they rejected it. Therefore these systems might be used as teaching cases to convince people toward Darwin.

Wikipedia

The first system is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is somewhat controversial because many people find it hard to trust as a source of authoritative information. Since anybody on the internet can change its contents, how could it be reliable? And yet at least one study showed it to have accuracy similar to Encyclopedia Britannica.

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This has been the best year in my memory for wild berries. And today I must have eaten a pound of huckleberries and blackberries!

I explored two parks that I never before had visited. I walked their trails, took in their sights and ate their berries. Both parks are in forested valleys. The main trails in Terrace Creek Park were gently sloped and sometimes paved. Yost Park is quite steep in places. It's trails were nicely maintained with bark or other surfacing.

Logging was once a primary industry in the Pacific Northwest. Many of these old-growth evergreen trees had become huge. Loggers characteristically cut them off above the place where the trunk widened into the roots. Since they decompose slowly, these stumps from trees logged even a century ago are still commonplace. And huckleberries love to grow out of old stumps.

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Jessica and I went to the Apple store to check out the hot new iPhone. It really is a cool device.

This was a picture I took with another iPhone that I then mailed to myself. It was very easy, very smooth. The most amazing thing about the iPhone is that it does work like advertised.

It is an expensive device. Also there are a couple of little things that I would like to see improved. However, if Apple is responsive and does fix these issues in updates, I really think I would like to have one!

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Today I finally graduated from the University of Washington with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computing and Software Systems.

The graduation was at the "Hec" Edmundson Pavilion on the UW central campus. It is the same place where Austin & Alan graduated from Inglemoor High School.

The weather was beautiful. All of my family was there. It was great!

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I talked with some of the mechanical engineering guys at work about what opportunity there might be for Alan to work the summer at Philips. Alan submitted his resume and dropped by to talk with some of them informally when he was here during his Spring Break. After he got back from school, they invited him in for an interview. And then they offered him a summer internship position. He started today.

It was interesting to see what paperwork he had to go through. I have been at Philips for 20 years now. (Originally it was ATL which was bought by Philips.) So it has been a long time since I have seen the starting-employment routine. I am certain that I didn't go through some of the things they had him sign for (e.g. background check authorization, etc).

It is pretty cool to go in to work with your son. However there are occasional transportation issues to consider. For instance, I have a few more classes to complete yet. So tomorrow I leave from work early - before Alan is done.

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I have started my last UWB class: Multimedia and Signal Computing! And I am scheduled to graduate in June!

I am definitely getting tired of taking classes. I don't know if it is because the end is so close or if it is because I haven't had a break between quarters like usual before.

I think the class content will be interesting. Some of it involves math that I haven't used in a very long time, so I feel the mental rust. Other parts are very familiar. Sometimes the two parts occur in the same lecture! So I am sitting back and relaxing some times and other times I am taking careful notes.

Most of my previous classes I have not owned a laptop computer. Now that I have one, I am taking it to all the classes (even though I am taking my notes on paper this quarter). I might use it to look up more detail on Wikipedia or through Google when the material of the moment is not too difficult. To me, it adds quite a bit of interest to the lecture.

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Alan wrote a paper for a class at school about some ideas for revitalizing society. This got me thinking:

Religion is the human manifestation of a spiritual system. That which is spiritual is non-tangible and not under the control of humans. And yet spiritual influence may be the most significant influence we perceive in our lives.

Humans need guidance to access the spiritual realm because we do not perceive it natively as we do the physical realm. And religion is the primary means of that guidance. (But religion also gives humans spiritual influence. This can be a risky thing!)

• For talking purposes, let's us ignore questions regarding which religion is correct. And lets also agree that genuine and complete truth does exist in the spiritual realm.

Spiritual values are a primary source of human values and religion is the conduit to them. Religion has historically been the most powerful means of uniting people. Therefore, we can see that religion can be the best means for creating vital communities.

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Last weekend, I got sick. I think it was some sort of 'flu'. I had two days of low fever: I only went above 100F (37.8C) once. However, I was quite weak until this weekend. Since I don't usually get sick, the whole thing was quite surprising.

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