Today was very busy. When I got home, I just ate dinner and cleaned up the guest bathroom toilet (still nasty from before the work on the house was done. So nasty). I think I did a pretty good job. Nobody's gonna know how nasty it was except the rebuilders who had to handle it (sheesh).

Today I had this machine I was supposed to run some tests on. It's a big machine -- we've been planning the tests for like a month. I spent the whole day trying to figure out an unexpected problem with an ancillary sensor on the machine, because that stupid sensor kept causing the whole thing to reset. Every time it reset, I had to wait 30 minutes for things to spin back up, and it reset over and over again. I tried testing between resets, but it was messing up my results, so I spent all day trying to fix it. Finally I got around it and I was able to run one single iteration of the test before my time ran out. The numbers came in really smoothly, so I have very good reason to believe that the results of that last test were reliable, but they aren't the results I was hoping for. If I had more time I might have been able to compensate for the results and figure out a solid solution to the problem which necessitated this test in the first place. All I could write on my report was "more testing needed" and a couple speculative solutions.

On the way home, I stopped at Walmart and picked up some ramen, but now I wish I also picked up hot sauce, because it was pretty bland. Salty and bland. I mixed in eggs and tuna to make it better, but I'm like 90% certain that I ate a big chunk of my paper bowl. Lucky me, I double-bowled it.

Then I ate too much nutella.

God is good to me, though. There's a good storm happening outside. And, during my lunch break, I was able to cobble together this outline of my epistemological argument. I haven't really developed the content much since my last exposition on blogger, but I've cleaned up the delivery quite a bit, and I've tried to be more careful about some of the wording. Here's the link.

...man, I want to spend time with my son.

I hope Isaac grows up with an appreciation for history, philosophy, art, rigorous thought, and the power of carefully articulated ideas. I hope he someday looks at paintings and asks the person next to him, "what do you think the artist is trying to tell us?", and means that question with sincere curiosity. I hope he reads a poem that brings tears to his eyes, not because he relates to it in sadness necessarily, but simply because of the lucid depth of the prose. I hope he hears music that makes his young knees fail beneath him for beauty. I hope he reads a book that makes him rightly mourn for the deception infecting so much of the world. I hope he doesn't just hear and dissect Scipio's argument, but expounds upon it. I hope that his knees grow calloused by frequent prayer for justice. I hope his wife compels him to perpetual readiness to give himself up for her as Christ on the cross, if only by means of her unflinching loveliness in his eyes.

I hope that the light of his soul isn't crushed by bitter and disillusioned elementary and high school teachers, fenced-in by the standardized tests and curriculums, recapturing some semblance of unfulfilling joy by letting themselves get caught up in trendy buzz-facts, like all that garbage out there relating to the near-intelligent nature of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence doesn't exist yet, everybody. We aren't even close. We still have no idea how the brain works, really. Give it another 50-100 years and then maybe. I hope that his teachers are passionate about their subjects, and that they act on a rigorous commitment to justifiable truth. I hope he finds a well-paying job that he likes, succeeds by the grace of God in it, and gives that success right back to God in glory.

I hope I don't push him too much to be like myself. I know that if I let him explore his own God-given disposition, while carefully instructing him in good and moral religiosity, he may become a much better man than I. I can't wait to see who he will become!

"If everybody eats, it's a good night."