Parents...time to say no to the celebrity culture

If you are a parent who allows your children to become enchanted by the celebrity culture, you've been disappointed once again. While I am no fan of Hannah Montana or Miley Cyrus, one can't help but see in the news the controversy resulting from the recent image of Miley that has become public. What kind of a world do we live in when a 15 year old girl can be used in this way? The question really is...where are her parents?

The broader point that I want to make is that it's time for Christian parents to just say no to to the celebrity culture so that we may say YES to what's much more important. Parents, why don't we set godly role models before our kids? Why don't we teach them to read about the heroes of the faith instead of spending hours watching the banal happenings on cable television? We are so often like the lemmings who just follow one another right off the cliff into moral chaos. Where are the parents who will have the courage to give their children something better? Where are the parents who will teach their children that beauty is less about the outward and more about the inner person?

Goodbye Edward Lorenz

I wanted to salute mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz (1917-2008) who died recently. Known as the father of "chaos theory" and a Professor Emeritus at MIT, this man contributed immensely to our understanding of complex nonlinear dynamic systems. Well-known for the fabled "Butterfly Effect", he aided us in our understanding about the predictability of the output of complex systems and showed that many systems are extremely sensitive to the initial conditions. In other words, the flapping wings of a butterfly in Brazil may result in a devastating tornado in Texas at some future time. The importance of his work cannot be overestimated and he has been compared to Isaac Newton with regard to how his work changed our understanding of reality. I have included my own rendition of the Lorenz Attractor.

Goodbye Professor Lorenz!