I'm off to Winter Retreat with Campus Crusade for Christ in Sisters, OR. Should be interesting if nothing else. And I'm thinking there will be quite a few something else's.

But I'm not taking my computer, so unless there just happens to be internet access at the church where we'll be, I probably won't post again until Sunday evening at the earliest.

I know two people. Hopefully I'll know a lot more by the end of the weekend.

I would compare this retreat with our Youth Camp, for those of you who are familiar with that.

I want to philosophize about life, excitement, great desires, and just where the focus needs to stay. And what the focus is. And what some of my dreams are.

Good stuff, but for another time.

I have a print quota of 500 pages in the IME computer lab, and less than four weeks into the term I've used over half of it.

The biggest reason was because we had to bring a handout to class to distribute to our classmates. That was 40 pages right there. Then I found a mistake on my paper. Being obsessive about things like that, I had to reprint the whole things. That's 80 right there. Plus we have PowerPoint teachers that we need to print slides out for.

I can tell that my Manufacturing Processes lab is going to be a trial. The labs are actually sort of fun, but it's my lab group.

One of the problems is, I'm obsessive about doing things "write" and neat and conscientiously. But when the partners tend toward listlessness, sloppiness and shortcuts, it can get frustrating.

Dad brought up the fact last night that one of the reasons I chose Industrial Engineering was because it fit more conveniently into my school schedule than the other engineering disciplines. He’s right, that did influence my decision, though it certainly wasn’t the only consideration.

Then he asked me if I’d have made a different decision looking back.

I certainly wouldn’t have chosen any other sort of engineering. Maybe mathematics, I don’t know. But I really like the place I’m at now. If I wanted, I could pretty easily get into a Math grad program too, I think.

The point is, even when I was young and stupid and didn’t know what I was doing, God was guiding me.

I’m left in wonderment. There must be something I’m not getting. What else could possibly explain this utter disregard for cold, hard evidence?

It could be irrationality, but irrationality is not normally found in the scientific community. It would be hard for me to totally subscribe to this theory.

I could be missing some information. I would tend to lean toward this one, but I even asked a direct question and the answer flies in the face of this theory.

Perhaps it’s because the masses are so deathly scared of this phenomenon so the scientists just allow ridiculousness to perpetuate because it doesn’t take much doing right now and it keeps ignorant people happy. And it covers their rear ends. This theory is probably the most legitimate.

We’re talking radiation here, where millirem are units measuring the amount of said radiation.

Think about it.

People in the United States absorb about 300 millirem a year from “background radiation” which is simply naturally occurring radiation from the ground or our bodies or the food we eat or the buildings we live in.

The government has a current policy that the general public shouldn’t be exposed to more than an additional 15 millirem a year. Ok, fine, that’s great, if not a little obsessive.

But let’s say there were a dirty bomb exploded in a major city. A dirty bomb is basically a traditional explosive that is laced with radioactive material that would then be blown around the city.

Then are we going to continue this stringent requirement of only 15 millirem a year?

Do you know what amount of radiation has been shown to significantly increase cancer risk? 10,000 millirem. 10000!

Yet there’s a debate about what to do if we faced large-scale, though relatively weak, radiation in a large metro area. Look at the potential cost of cleaning up to the strict current standards. Forget it. Instead, look at that 10,000 figure, give a nice, healthy cushion and set the clean-up standards so that the average person wouldn’t be exposed to more than, say, 2000-5000. That seems more than reasonable to me.

Unless I’m missing something.

A guy in Work Design was frustrated with the geometric statistics and he was not tactful in letting the teacher know after class. It was very, very interesting, and there were some tempers that were getting close to flaring. It had settled down by the end of the discussion.

It's getting clearer to me, too, though I certainly haven't conquered it.

Tough day teaching music. I need to spend some quality time organizing myself.

We just whooped up on this team in our first intramural basketball game. They scored two points in the second half I think. We're not too bad, we certainly secured a lot of turnovers in this game.

Tom's making me think.

That's a good thing.

Long day today. Seven straight hours of class.

Rucker went crazy today in Work Design, threw out a whole new way of looking at statistics. It was mind-blowing to say the least. It seemed a bit scattered and unorganized, but it didn't help that we weren't up to speed with our linear algebra skills.

It's a geometric view of stats, where you use design spaces and error spaces and vectors.

Imagine, if you made 50 observations, you'd have a 50-dimensional space. And 48 or 49 of those dimensions would be error space, which translate, in traditional statistics, to degrees of freedom.

And it gets worse from there.

I'm becoming sickly! Slacker. I'm sort of sick again, and it's only been a few weeks since my last little bout.

Let me see if I can formulate the three challenges that I've experienced in the last four days.

(1) I went to the Campus Crusade for Christ meeting on Wednesday. This time the speaker spoke on Paul's declaration: I've fought a good fight, I've finished my course, I've kept the faith. To paraphrase.

What am I fighting for? I mean really? Grades? Prestige, with all my grandiose plans? Money? Am I really in "the" race that really matters? Would I have any regrets if I left this earth today?

I have to wonder at myself sometimes. Because I take pride in my grades. Because I have a warm feeling in my heart when I think that someday I'll have a Master degree or two hanging on the wall. Because I get warm fuzzies thinking about a good job that will pay good money.

It just makes me wonder.

(2) Diffusing the Fragrance. If you want to know where that comes from, go to 2 Corinthians 2:14. A lovely word picture that really has direct bearing on (1), because to me it communicates God's desire that we are vessels that essentially dispense the fragrance of Him to both the saved and the perishing.

I came up with this cheesy mnemonic to help in cultivating this desire and putting it into practice: ESP.

E ndeavor to think about God througout your day. Keep Him on the tip of your mind.
S pend time alone with God, the longer you linger the better. Develop that intimacy.
P ray for boldness and for opportunities.

(3) There was a group of youth that just got back from a Mission Trip to Mexico, and they shared tonight at church. Wonderful things happening in their lives as a result, and very challenging things that they shared. A question asked by some of them: why is it that we only do this kind of stuff (tract distribution, street preaching) on trips like this? Why can't we do it at home? To me, this points back to (2) as well. We can, we must be sharing the Love all the time.

But am I?

Today was a tough day.

I'm going to speak tomorrow at a retirement center. My Grandpa preaches there twice a month and this week he's gone to Puerto Rico, so he asked me to fill in for him.

One of the principles that I try to live up to is to take public speaking opportunities when they're presented to me, because I want to become a dynamic public speaker.

So I said sure, I'll preach....errrr, speak for you.

So I was studying today. And it’s true, what they say, that the Devil will attack you hardest when you’re going to give, going to do something for God. Can’t say I was altogether successful in fending him off at times, either. Sigh. It’s sort of complicated. But we keep pushing ahead.

The title of my talk is Diffusing the Fragrance.