Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in build4eternity's LiveJournal:

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Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
1:28 pm	Irregular verbs Why isn't the simply past of "pick" "pack"? I picked it up/I pack it up...the latter sounds good but it's not standard English! (Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 24th, 2007
1:50 pm	People don't like being tired, but I've found that it's when I'm tired that I see myself most clearly. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, April 20th, 2007
8:37 am	This is my favourite way to work: I am in my room, twillight drifting through the window and mingling with the soft lamplight and the glow of my yellow walls. The hall is quite, but in the TV room I hear occassional chatter. I am by myself, but not alone. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 17th, 2007
10:50 am	A bit past Pasca, but couldn't resist... CHRIST IS RISEN! INDEED HE IS RISEN! "O Death, where is your sting? O Hell, where is your victory? Christ is risen, and you are overthrown. Christ is risen, and the demons are fallen. Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice. Christ is risen, and life reigns. Christ is risen, and not one dead remains in the grave. For Christ, being risen from the dead, is become the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. To Him be glory and dominion unto ages of ages. Amen." - The Paschal Sermon of Saint John Chrysostom (quoted on www.oca.org) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, March 23rd, 2007
11:54 am	More evolution stuff... [Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<a evolution.berkeley.edu>') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.] <a href="http://www.iconsofevolution.com/>Icons of Evolution</a><br /><a href=" http:="" evolution.berkeley.edu="">Teaching evolution</a><br /><a href="http://www.ncseweb.org/icons/iconsconclusion.html">Refuting "Icons of Evolution"</a><br /><a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/">Refuting creationist attacks on evolution</a>, see also their <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/wells/">FAQS</a> (Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 20th, 2007
12:47 pm	Isolation I've felt incredibly isolated lately. I think the root, which by its nature is at first glance unseen, may lie in the fact that my friend Lesley-Anne moved away. When friends go away, I rarely consciously miss them; instead, I enter a sort of subliminal depression: I get tired, reclusive, have trouble concentrating and eventually find myself in a state of isolation, from which I then gradually emerge until the next perturbation. At the same time, I know much of my current malaise began before Lesley-Anne left; perhaps it was the anticipation of her leaving tied up in it, but I think there is more. I can't decide how much I want to say about the more obvious features of this isolation. I am feeling much happier now...I had a good talk and prayer with Richard last night (and with Nicole as well as him the night before), and a good talk with Sandy and April this morning. I also ran into Laura, who I know from an undergraduate genetics class last year who'd like to get together just to study and do neat plant stuff...I'd really like that. A Romanian friend once told me a saying they have that God will give you something, but he won't put it in your basket. God is offering me many avenues out of this isolation. I need to make sure I take them. Both my statistics classes have discussed search algorithms for finding solutions to equations where it's not possible to do so directly, perhaps because it isn't possible to integrate a certain function. If the search procedure works well, great, but sometimes it gets hung-up and obsesses over a point that's almost the best solution but not quite, because the search procedure just doesn't manage to step far enough to get into the territory where a better solution is to be found. Sometimes if the terrain over which it searches is too weird for the specific way the search algorithm works, the search never converges on a solution at all. All of this is just to say, those of you who pray, pray for me: I feel like a search algorithm that won't converge or that is stuck on an almost-solution that isn't really. Most people think I am hard working. I have lousy work habits these days. I think it's partly because I crave people but my work is incredibly isolating. But still, I have lousy work habits. Something needs to change. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, March 10th, 2007
11:41 am	A book to read I'd like to read Disposable People. I wonder...in the past I've written about issues of women's rights and social justice. I withdrew from this last summer because my efforts were coming from (and fueling) my sense of anger more than anything. I sensed the need to develop instead a life of prayer. Sometimes now I want to get back into things; I am not sure it is time yet though. I think that a person needs a deep sense of humility and a deep peace in God to take part in such work without destroying their own soul, and I'm not sure I've developed that yet. (Comment on this)
8:50 am	More on Evolution I think I've come to accept evolution as a mechanism inherent to the created world. At least, my inclination leans very heavily in that direction. Some of the important questions on my mind are 1) what is real theism? 2) what does it mean for the human to be both made in the image of God and fallen, and for creation to be itself fallen with and because of the human fall, if the created world evolves as science describes? 3) why does the world still seem uglier and less joyful to me when I look at it through an evolutionary lens? I think alot of the answer to the third qusetion lies in the answer to the first; evolution usually comes to us tied to a philosophy that is at most deistic, often blatantly materialist and atheistic, so that it's hard to imagine at first how a true theist might conceive evolution. I think anwering these questions is more about asking and keeping my ears and eyes open to receive whatever God will send my way about it, as well as quietly mulling over it in my mind; hurriedly trying to think through everything isn't how I want to go about this because I don't think it would actually work. As Augustine often says, This oh God is how I have come to think; you alone can show me the truth. ------------------- I had the most beautiful dinner tonight: tomato sauce with mushrooms and home-cooked beans (including that most beautiful of beans, the pigeon pea), garlic and butter and chopped parsley and cilantro with rice. It was beautiful. I had two bowls of it and was delighted. Rachel read the first bit of the Silmarillion to me over the phone. I almost couldn't talk after hearing it. I want to read it again. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, February 26th, 2007
1:16 pm	Various Observations 1. I just talked to a classmate who asked about my reading break; at first I said it was unproductive but I realized that is not so. For my reading break I decided to experiment with having a READing break...I had some interesting books on genetics and statistics I wanted to read and so I read them, preferably in interesting places. I also listened to the better part of The Language of God by Francis Collins, the head of the Human Genome Project. I think it would be neat to take a Reading Week once per term to do more or less what I did this last week. (Just to give credit where credit is due, I got the idea for reading this way mostly from observing Rachel! Yay for Rachel!) 2. I keep eating such huge breakfasts that I don't feel hungry at lunch. This annoys me because I like having set schedule of meals and so on. Then I say, Oh Heather! Don't be silly...just eat when you're hungry and be glad you eat at all! (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, February 25th, 2007
12:44 am	Me again! Always living in the future, a sucker for a dream ...get back to the present, Heather, back to the present! (Comment on this)
Thursday, February 22nd, 2007
9:07 pm	More on Evolution It seems to me that much of the creation-evolution debate involves a rather odd view of God, that things that have mechanical explanations must be independent of God and that things that have no apparent explanation are God's domain...this is a caricature, of course, but it holds some truth. This doesn't seem right to me. Doesn't a faithful reading of the Bible indicate that God is present and active in the most mundane of events--like in Psalm 103/104 where even the lion going out to get it's food at night is a work of God. So having an explanation like the theory of evolution is no less theistic (as opposed to deistic) than views that require a "special act" of God for the appearance of some or all life forms. I am not yet ready to embrace evolution wholeheartedly because I think there are real theological implications to doing so; the meaning of the Fall in Genesis is one (evolutionary theory predicts that the most recent common ancestor of all humans lived 10 or 100 thousand years ago--I forget which--and was at that time a population of several thousand individuals--I forget again exactly how many, but I know the prediction far exceeds 2! Therefore, it messes with the idea of an "actual" Adam and Eve who could have an actual Fall. In general, evolution seems incompatible with a pre-Fall world of no death or suffering...evolution is all about death and suffering weeding out those less suited to their environment.) I am not yet ready to wholeheartedly reject evolution, not only because there is substantial evidence for it as a scientific theory, but because perhaps God created a world that can evolve, in his own wisdom and ingenuity, knowing that things would happen to mess up his creation, and building into it the capacity to adapt, not die. St. Augustine should be added to my list of want-to-reads...he wrote a fair bit about Genesis and possible understandings of Genesis 1-2. I don't know what I want to believe about this in the end; no, I do. I want to believe that God is "everywhere present and fills all things," that they exist because he continually wills their existance. I want to believe that creation is beautiful. I just struggle with whether creation can be beautiful if it evolves via the kind of competition and violence that seems stock-in-trade of the evolutionary process. I really don't want to have an argument about creation-versus-evolution or anything; it's one topic I really hate to argue about. But if you have thoughts you would like to add (including critique of the ideas I present here), whether theological, scientific, or both, please do. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
11:11 am	Evolution I'm on reading week right now; my plans to read have not succeeded as wildly as I'd hoped, but I have covered some interesting territory, some on purpose some not. The not-on-purpose was that I meant to read The Fourth Day, a book on theistic evolution, but haven't gotten around to that at all. But in the kitchen I've been listening to The Language of God, by the head of the human genome project--who is a Christian. He is decidedly both a theist (not a deist) and also accepts the theory of evolution, and discusses in part of the audiobook his reasons for holding both these perspectives simultaneously. I have much I could say about this, but sleep is needed and so I'll only note down a few names I'd like to read up on: Theodosius Dobzhansky (who wrote Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution) Aruther Peacocke A google search also turned up some potentially interesting quotes in this blog (use edit --> find to search for evolution...it's somewhere in there!) I had a good talked with my housemate S. who leans much toward the six-day-creation side of things; she recommended a book called Icons of Evolution, by Jonathan Wells. There is much I could say about this, but I must sleep. (Comment on this)
Saturday, February 17th, 2007
11:10 am	Anywhere but here Change changes nothing. The only thing in life is to just stick with it. (Comment on this)
Friday, February 16th, 2007
12:37 am	Crocus Day! Today for the first time I noticed the crocuses. I went back to campus to finish a stats assignment; I've never been in the computer lab at midnight before. I ran into a classmate, T. and he and I got to know each other a bit. It was great. As I stood at the bus stop near the Village I saw the nightlife of UBC: mostly teenagers, children of the night in baseball caps and baggy pants, too young, too small to be out at night. I wanted to protect them, but they don't want to be protected. (Comment on this)
Thursday, February 15th, 2007
9:43 am	Happy Multiplication day! Guess what? Today is 14/2/07...if you multiply the year by the month you get the day! Happy Multiplication Day! The next one will be March 21 (21/3/07) and then April 28 (28/4/07). After that you'll have to wait for 8/1/08, 16/2/08, 24/3/08, 9/1/09, 18/2/09, 27/3/09, 10/1/10...the last multiplication day in our lifetime will likely be 31/1/31, though I suppose you could start celebrating other multiplication days, like day times month...there will be none like that in 2007, but in 2008 we could celebrate 2/4/08. So there are many more to come! Horray! (Oh yes, and Happy Valentine's Day too!) (Comment on this)
Sunday, February 4th, 2007
9:15 am	Quote of the Day "Often the blessed Abba Zosimas would say, 'We human beings do not know how to be loved and how to be honoured.' " ~ from In the Heart of the Desert: the Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers by John Chryssavgis Current Mood: need to sleep (Comment on this)
Saturday, February 3rd, 2007
8:10 am	The secret dreams of a would-be geneticist To one day... - be a dance/aerobics instructor - to teach a sex education course at church - to lead plant ID walks on a very regular basis - to study at Regent College - to use my bus pass to take random busses and sit in random coffee shops people watching and to all the while keep a journal of what I see and what I think, in realtime - to actually go and read poetry in a coffee shop (the Blenz in uptown New Westminster is so nice for that)...a good selection of Gwendolyn Brooks would be perfect, though I'd love to read some other poets too - read the CS Lewis space trilogy, Man Alive and other books Rachel has recommended to me - write a letter to a really good newspaper and have it published; to do so on a regular basis (though I expect the publishing would be less frequent than the writing) - to hold an informal ESL class in my home - to be a funky granny (biological or otherwise) - to grow a significant portion of my own vegetables in an urban lot - to learn to crochet something other than a square - to buy that George Washington Carver poster I've always looked at online and put it up in my office - to decorate my room someday (I've lived here a year and haven't done it yet!) - to decorate my office - to do a survey of the plants growing in the alleyways and gutters and write up and inventory and use some kind of diversity index to describe what I find numerically - to design and run a civic education course for homeschool students--we'd learn about everything from where your food comes from to how the postal system works to what goes on in parliament to where your sewage goes after you flush the toilet...we'd go on field trips to all sort of places (parliament, the garbage dump, a vegetable packing house or greenhouse...) and learn about everything from the physics behind the electromagnet used to move scrap metal and the old car lot to the biological consequences of runoff from garbage dumps to the economic theory behind exchange rates - to eat dinner...now [I just had a really great talk with Rachel and played with candles. I'm happy.] (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 24th, 2007
3:17 pm	I just had my first REAL committee meeting, and it went GREAT! Gott sei Dank. Or as Bach would say, Gloria Dei. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, January 19th, 2007
1:32 pm	More about small mercies I think the reason why it's tempting to call what I discussed the other day "small mercies" is that as soon as they come you practically forget how keenly you felt the lack. Both yesterday and today without even having to try too hard I met some other students who are working on similar things to me, whether in molecular evolution or statistics. Nothing hardcore has materialised yet, but it's so nice to have a beginning after realising how alone I've been in my work over this last year. Thank God for small mercies, which may not be so small after all. (Comment on this)
Thursday, January 18th, 2007
12:09 pm	Nice genes... I had fun today. I was reading over my notes for Gene 502 and since there is no text for the course, I started looking up words I didn't know on wikipedia, and googling for articles on research that used the technique or principle we were talking about. It was a grand exploration! So, the genetics lesson of the day: a conditional mutant is a aberation from the normal ("wild-type") form, function, etc that is only see when the organism is raised under certain conditions. For example, the mutant might produce a pigment where there formerly was none, but only at low temperatures. (I have heard of a breed of cats with leg/ear pigmentation that behaves this way...I am guessing this breed aquired this sort of mutation somewhere along the way). Conditional mutations are useful in genetics because many mutations are not as benign as pigment--many can be lethal. But it the mutation is conditional, then you can raise the organism under "permission conditions" (meaning that the mutation is not expressed) and then then expose the organisms with this mutation to the conditions for expression, but at varying stages of their development from embryo to adult, and see if the mutation is lethal at all stages or not, and see what it does when it's not lethal. Our assignment was to think of situations under which this system for studying development does not work, what the exceptions to the rule are. I'm still thinking about that part though. (1 Comment |Comment on this)