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I was inspired to write this after reading a column in World magazine. That column had referenced the quote “It takes a village to raise a child.” and what stuck with me from the column is what it takes to make a village.

What does it take to make a village? It takes families.

For a healthy village – one that would do a good job in helping to raise a child – you need healthy families. “Healthy” as in emotional and social health, not physical health. What happens if your village is full of dysfunctional families? You wouldn’t want your child raised by that village.

I connect this to the concept of herd immunity. “Herd immunity” in the realm of diseases and vaccinations has to do with if a large enough percentage of a population is immune to a disease then the disease won’t spread throughout the population.

If you replace “disease” with “dysfunction” and “physical health” with “societal health” then that’s the picture I was getting in my mind of what I wanted to convey. If most of the families in the village are traditional families then the children will be “immune” to a lot of problems that befall society (plenty of citations out there, here’s one).

People want to live in a good neighborhood, but if they’re not trying to be a good family and also good neighbors, then it’s not going to stay a good neighborhood. It’s like the saying about traffic: you’re not stuck in traffic, you are the traffic.

You could keep going with this concept: what does it take to make a good family? and then what does it take to make a good whatever that answer was? Etc.

Why does God allow evil? Why does evil exist in the world?

Those are some questions that are a good combination of philosophy and theology.

I like to answer them with a different branch of study – physics.

The question of why evil exists is framed wrong, because evil does not exist – just like cold and dark do not exist.

“But!” you may protest, “I can see and feel darkness and coldness, so how can you say they don’t exist?”

Cold and dark are just the terms we have for lack of heat and lack of light. They do not actually exist as things in and of themselves. If they existed, you could produce them. No one can produce cold, and no one can produce dark.

If you could produce dark, you could make a flashdark that would “shine” a shadow wherever you pointed it.
If you could produce cold, you could make a refrigerator that would not have a heat byproduct.

Remember, refrigerators and air conditioners don’t make cold, they just transfer heat. That’s why the other side of it blows hot air – that’s the heat removed from the inside.

Also, if you could produce cold, there would be no absolute zero – you could always add more cold to make the temperature go down further.
There is also an absolute dark, with no light. But you can always add more light to make something brighter, and you can always add more heat to make something hotter.

That’s because light and heat are the things that do exist.

Evil doesn’t exist, it’s just the term we have for a lack of good. As a Christian, I would adjust that sentence to say “lack of God” because He is the source of goodness. If you disagree, then you’ll have to clarify where goodness comes from. If you don’t believe in God, then you should not be asking the question about evil because there is no fundamental right and wrong. “Evil” in that case can just be rephrased as “deviation from the cultural norms”.

Trying to find out what is causing the evil is like trying to find out what’s causing a room to be dark. There is no source of darkness; the solution is to bring in some light. If there’s too much evil somewhere, the solution is to bring in God.

Of course, the analogy breaks down at some point, so don’t take it too far. And this does not cover the discussion of “Why does God let bad things happen?”

We have finally joined the civilized world and switched to an unlimited cell phone plan.

I kept my old family share plan because it was grandfathered in and once I switched away from it I could never get it back. Plus, 15 gigabytes a month should be plenty for any reasonable family.

But we had been going over the 15 GB allotment the last couple months, and the overage fees were adding up. We are in a somewhat rural area and there’s no good wired internet option, so our cell phone plan is also our home internet, using a USB hotspot that’s also on the family share plan.

Anyway, I had been resisting the call of the unlimited plans because the last time I had checked they were more expensive than our metered plan. One option was to get an unlimited plan for just a USB hotspot for the laptop, but no one does that. You can’t even get just a USB hotspot on a limited plan by itself. Everyone forbids a USB hotspot as the only device in a plan and requires at least one phone line.

Except for Boost mobile, but we tried their USB hotspot and it was terrible. The device was fine, it was their signal was so poor. Then we tried a T-Mobile line and it was great. They offered a free USB hotspot for a month. Their signal was great, speeds were good. But then the trial period was over and they didn’t make it easy to keep using that device. I was ready to pay $30-$40 a month for a limited USB hotpsot plan, but they didn’t want my money.

In the end, it worked out better I suppose, since I had no other option but to switch my existing AT&T plan to unlimited. I did have the option not to switch, but after pricing it out, their new unlimited plan was cheaper than my old family share plan. Even if I didn’t want unlimited data (so as to prevent the family from becoming mindless zombies), it was going to at least save me money.

For a little while before the switch though, I did feel like such an old-timer. I reminded myself of the people who saved every little thing because they lived through the Great Depression, but I was trying to save every little bit of bandwidth. Just like it doesn’t make much sense for me today to wash and reuse tinfoil, that’s how I probably appeared to my kids. “Dad, why are you worrying about how much data we are using?” They never actually said that, but I imagined they were thinking something along those lines, since to them just about every place has Wifi and bandwidth is just not something that needs to be thought about.

Oh well.

Maybe someday I’ll tell them stories of the first couple of modems I ever used – the 300 baud, then 800 then 2400 baud modems on the family’s Commodore 64. No prefix of kilo- or mega- or anything. Just plain ol’ baud. And yet the messages went through a lot faster than some of these texts that I send these days. When I see a text taking forever to send, I’m thinking to myself “It’s only 50 bytes. At the speeds this phone can transmit at, the transaction shouldn’t even be noticeable.”

I suppose that’s the price of convenience.

A recent Bible study question asked if Simon the sorcerer from Acts 8 was a true believer. A lively discussed ensued, with me and one other guy saying yes and most other people saying no.

I had various reasons, but I thought of this one later so I’ll share it now.

Do not judge so that you will not be judged. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you.

Matthew 7:1-2, emphasis mine

In some circles, people declined to answer the question, saying it wasn’t their role to determine that. I think that fits with my thinking, which is that it is better to err on the side of grace and give people the benefit of the doubt, because that’s how I would want them to treat me if the tables were turned.

A couple days after that, Some Wife brought up the fact that Kanye West had released a Christian album. Alpha had already downloaded the album (due to poor internet at our house, people here have to download music and videos for offline viewing rather than stream things, and the downloading is best done somewhere else) and so he Bluetoothed it to the van’s radio while we were driving back from a cross country meet. While that was playing, we debated the topic of if Kanye was a Christian releasing an album or a non-Christian releasing an album for Christians. No son, don’t listen to his older songs.

As we were talking, I made the connection from Kanye to Simon the sorcerer. Are we judging Kanye by the standards we hope to be judged by? I thought it fit quite nicely.

I like my cars simple. One reason is because they’re easier to work on, but another is that the kids who are learning to drive will learn to be better drivers if the cars do less for them.

Here it is, illustrated:

Let’s use blind-spot detection as an example. If the car always tells a kid when there’s a car in his blind spot, he won’t feel the need to check his blind spot himself and thus he won’t develop the good habit of doing so. Conversely, if he learns to drive with the needs to check his blind spot before changing lanes, he will develop that habit.

Kids, or anyone for that matter, need to get the good habits when they start learning to drive. It’s a lot harder to gain new habits once the subject has been learned.

There are a number of other safety features that have been added to vehicles lately, and they all work fairly well in that they accomplish their goals.

It’s not limited to vehicles either – there are other examples such as tamper-proof outlets. You can’t always protect people from their own foolishness.

Our DMV system was much improved a couple years back when they added online check-in. I learned about it when I went in for something and I could enter my cell phone number and they texted me updates, such as my wait time of 2.5 hours. So I went back to work until my wait time was about 20 minutes and then I headed back in. Worked great.

But even better was the shortcut I found. Then time I went in, I wanted to get there when they opened. I did, but so did a few dozen other people. I knew from my precious visit that I could send a text to get in line, so I did. But I learned that the online line didn’t open until the office did. So I couldn’t get in line early like I thought I could.

But here’s the shortcut: the online check-in opened at the same time as the doors. So even though I was 30th in line or so, I ended up being second in line because the people in the physical line can’t check in as fast as online.

It was great. We would all file through the doors and they called my number just as I was walking in. Literally no wait. I was in my car driving out of there in less than 10 minutes after they opened, and I didn’t have to stand outside for half an hour to be first in line.

The next couple of trips to the DMV were like that: get there a couple minutes before they opened, stand happily in line because I knew it didn’t matter where I was standing really, and then check in right at 9:00, file into the office and get called up right away.

I would be in the car heading back to work before 9:10, which is awesome for a system that had been leaving me to sit in a hard plastic chair for two hours awaiting my turn.

Then this last time I got in line just before they opened. I was about 50th in line, but I didn’t worry. The doors opened at 9:00 and I checked in online only to be informed that “this branch is appointment only”.

Well that threw a wrench into my plans. Now I had to wait in line with the common folk.

So I waited, and I heard someone else ask the line-directing lady about checking in online, to which she answered that online check-in now starts 30 minutes after the doors open.

Rats.

They’re onto my scheme.

So the line-directing lady sent most of us into another line and some other people she sent to sit in a waiting area. Our line actually went relatively quickly. I though about checking in online right at 9:30 to skip ahead a few spots, but I was next in line at 9:30 anyway so I didn’t do that.

I suppose I can’t complain. The new way is more fair. I’ll just have to get in line a little earlier.

I’m not a fan of the new digital keys.

I lost a set of house keys and needed to get replacements. So I went to the nearby big-box store and had them copied.

It turns out they have a new key-copying machine.

Digital keys!

Ooooh, fancy new machine. Instead of cutting the new key by tracing the old one, it scans the old key, digitizes the information, and then uses that information to cut the new key.

One of the benefits touted by the banner next to the machine is that you never need to worry about losing the keys because the machine can save your key’s information and they can cut a new key from the file and they don’t need the old key anymore after it is scanned.

My worry is that, since this is a national chain big-box store, the key file isn’t stored just on that one machine but on the company’s servers so that key machines at any of their stores can cut any stored key. And that means if hackers get into the server they get not only names and passwords but also house keys. Not a good idea if you ask me.

I don’t need to worry about that though, because the keys are poor quality so I’m not tempted to go there anyway. In fact, I specifically go to a local store that has an old-school analog key cutter. The digital key idea isn’t bad, but they didn’t give it enough bits. The keys they copied for me are the metal equivalent of a pixelated photo. Yes, you can tell what it is supposed to be, but it is noticeably different.

And it not just looks – the blocky digital key doesn’t work as well as a normal copy. A normal key just goes it and I can turn it and the door unlocks. The digital key goes in fine but it doesn’t turn unless I get it to the exact right depth. And that takes a few tries some times. It gets annoying, especially to some younger members of the family who have not yet learned patience.
“Can I open the door?”
“Sure, here’s the key.”
“Why’s it not working?!?!”

Any, be wary of the new digital keys. Progress isn’t necessarily better.