Wedding Pictures!

Yay!! We got the pictures of our wedding!! I'll be posting a bunch of pictures on Monday.

America Bless God

If America were a stock, it would be a “buy”: an undervalued market leader, in need of new management. But that points to its last great strength. More than any rival, America corrects itself. Under pressure from voters, Mr Bush has already rediscovered some of the charms of multilateralism; he is talking about climate change; a Middle East peace initiative is possible. Next year's presidential election offers a chance for renewal. Such corrections are not automatic: something (a misadventure in Iran?) may yet compound the misery of Iraq in the same way Watergate followed Vietnam. But America recovered from the 1970s. It will bounce back stronger again.


See full article here.

Charity (Unconditional Love)

Here's a great overview of the work ACWR has done regarding hurricane Katrina. May God be glorified!

Brain Teaser

Can you move a single matchstick to form a valid mathematical statement?


No sticks can be discarded, an isolated slanted stick cannot be interpreted as I (one), and a V (five) symbol must always be composed of two slanted sticks. The only valid symbols are Roman numerals and "+", "-" and "=". OK, now try this one:



If you had trouble with that last puzzle, fear not - it means your frontal lobe is probably intact! Healthy adults are frequently outperformed by patients with frontal brain damage on that test, according to a 2005 study by Reverberi et al.

The authors tested 35 patients with focal brain lesions to the lateral or medial prefrontal cortex, along with 23 age- and education-matched healthy subjects, on a series of similar "matchstick arithmetic" problems, with 3 minutes to complete each problem. Whereas only 43% of healthy subjects completed the second problem, more than 80% of the patients with lateral prefrontal damage were able to do so!

So healthy adults might search for solutions that respect the rules of normal arithmetic, and assume that this constraint is implied. One might never even consider the mathematically ill-formed solution to the second problem:

The Toll

I don't necessarily agree with everything in this article, but nevertheless it's good to read and remember to pray. We're so far removed it's easy to put the horrible suffering of others out of our minds.

BAGHDAD - Marwa Hussein watched as gunmen stormed into her home and executed her parents. Afterward, her uncle brought her to the Alwiya Orphanage, a high-walled compound nestled in central Baghdad with a concrete yard for a playground. That was more than two years ago, and for 13-year-old Marwa, shy and thin with walnut-colored eyes and long brown hair, the memory of her parents' last moments is always with her. "They were killed," she said, her voice trailing away as she sat on her narrow bed with pink sheets. Tears started to slide down her face. As social worker Maysoon Tahsin comforted her, other orphans in the room, where 12 girls sleep, watched solemnly...

Rest of the article here

P.S. I just noticed what my "verse of the day" is on my side bar. Leviticus 19:18 - Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD.

More than you wanted to know.

If you couldn't care less about what I do for a living, then stop reading now. :-)


This building has been consuming way too much of my time lately. I've put in a lot more overtime this week than I'm used to. The picture above (low resolution) is the duct work layout in one quarter of the building on the second floor of four. The blue is the supply duct work which delivers hot or cold air to the occupied space and the yellow is the return duct work which takes air from the room back to the main fans in the basement (which are really really big).

The two next pictures give you an idea of how big some of this equipment is and how confusing the ducts supplying and returning air can be. The first one is my boss next to the chilled water coil. Those pipes he's looking at go in and feed a bunch of smaller pipes which are in the air-stream just down from the fan. As the air blows over these pipes full of cold water the air cools down and dehumidifies. Then it's pushed through the ductwork to the space.

Amazing Machine

Machine: NASA's Crawler-Transporter
Cost: $14,000,000
Claim to Fame: Largest self powered tracked vehicle in the world

This machine has 8 tracks (two at each corner). Each track has 57 shoes, and each shoe weighs 1,984 lbs! That's 113,088 lbs per track just for the shoes!! That's a grand total of 904,704 lbs worth of track shoes. That's 452 tons JUST for the track shoes. The entire transporter weighs 6 MILLION pounds (3000 tons)!

Moving on.

The height of the platform is adjustable from 20 to 26 feet above the ground, and it can tilt to keep the rocket vertical even up the 5% grade to the launch pad. It measures 131' long by 114' wide.

It's powered in a similar fashion to locomotives by a diesel-electric system. It is driven by 16 traction motors which get their electricity from four 1,000 kW generators driven by two 2,750 hp diesel engines. So basically, to move this behemoth, you have two HUGE diesel engines driving 4 massive generators making electricity for 16 electric motors!

On top of all that you have two 1,065 hp diesel engines driving two 750 kW generators which are used for jacking the platform, steering, lighting, and ventilating. There are also two 150 kW generators which are available to power the Mobile Launcher Platform. That's a grand total of 4 diesel engines making a combined 7,630 hp! They power a total of 6 generators which create 5,500 kW of electricity!! That's enough to power around 5,000 homes!

In order to generate that kind of power the crawler burns 150 gallons of diesel fuel per mile! It's tank holds 5,000 gallons giving it a range of just over 33 miles on a tank! The maximum speed of crawler is about 1 mph loaded or 2 mph unloaded. It takes the vehicle between 5 and 8 hours to transport the shuttle from it's assembly area to one of two launch pads at the Kennedy Space Center.

NASA currently owns two of these machines and they have traveled over 2,500 miles since they were put into operation in 1965. That means they've been in service over 40 years!!

What an engineering marvel!

The Sole Survivor

By Laura Blumenfeld

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 11, 2007; Page A01

The blood in his eyes almost blinded him, but the Navy Seal could hear, clattering above the trees in northeast Afghanistan, rescue helicopters. Continue here...

This is to remember...that everyone involved in wars has a face.

the Superb Lyre

This is truly an amazing video. The whole thing is good, but it gets truly amazing
about one minute and forty seconds into it. God's creation "is full of His glory".

And now...Life

A lot has happened since I posted last.

I got married.

Thanks a ton to all of you who could make it. It meant a lot more than I thought it would to be surrounded by my family and friends.

Our honeymoon went great. We were in Naples, Florida.

I'm going to post pictures once we get them off our camera.

Our home is slowly coming together. We went to Bed Bath and Beyond yesterday to finish buying stuff off our registry that we didn't get for presents. It was actually pretty fun. We spent a little over an hour filling up two carts, and then checking out took a little over an hour. That's right...over an hour in the check out. Craziness. We had a bunch of discounts that they needed to apply and they had some problems figuring it out. We also had a bunch of returns and the lady messed up those so we had to recheck a bunch of stuff. But it ended quite well.

Anyway, I'm rambling. Check back for pictures of the honeymoon.