How to Twitter

First, get an account, at twitter.com.

Then, decide what you want to learn about. Pick two to ten things that interest you: knitting, NASCAR, rabbit raising, fishing, NBA, etc. For each of these, if you already were to know a famous person in that category, say Dale Earnhardt, Jr., or Danica Patrick for NASCAR, go find out his or her Twitter feed. Type in the name in search box under "Who to Follow" link on Twitter. Just be warned that some celebrities have had pranksters (or earnest fans) create fake accounts in their name: some of these accounts are useful, some are not. Click on their name, then "View Full Profile." "Follow" him or her. Then go to that person's "Following" list and Follow the whole list-- everyone on the list. Don't worry for now as to getting "too many"-- you'll weed out the creft later. On to your next interest. Say you're a huge fan of Pixar movies and like especially the ones directed by Andrew Stanton. Find him-- his userid is actually "6Mman", and follow everyone he's following. You could also just search for a topic -- try "rabbit raising." Follow everyone.

http://twitter.com/#!/who_to_follow

http://twitter.com/#!/DALEEARNHARDT8
http://twitter.com/#!/DALEEARNHARDT8/following

http://twitter.com/#!/DanicaPatrick
http://twitter.com/#!/DanicaPatrick/following

http://twitter.com/#!/6Mman
http://twitter.com/#!/6Mman/following

Perhaps you need some more. Go to wefollow.com, and search for some celebrities your admire or topics you are interested in. For example, if you're a Lutheran, you could go search for "lutheran" . Follow lots and lots of people-- maybe both Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner. Again, when you find interesting persons, go and follow ten or twenty people that they follow as well.

http://wefollow.com/

Hopefully, you will have gotten to a thousand people to follow. One mistake I made when I started Twitter was worrying too much about all the textual garbage that shows up when you view the tweets a person has made when you "View Full Profile". There may be many messages to individual Tweeps in the form of "@Johnny blah blah blah" but these won't show up in your view of Twitter unless you also follow the person addressed. Use instead the quality of tweets in your timeline to decide whom to unfollow.

Now weed out the creft.

Now look at your Timeline. Some people on twitter are saying or sharing links to things which are witty, entertaining, inspirational, or highly useful all day long. On the other hand, some people are repeating themselves every few hours, engaged in inside jokes, puffing themselves up, making a half-dozen posts in a row, and other behaviors that wouldn't be tolerated at a dinner party. Unfollow them. You don't have to apologize, this is not a social friendship in the same way that Facebook friends are. Think of them as news feeds. Do you apologize to CNN for turning off the channel? There are also a number of practices that some Tweeps engage in that are not helpful. If you see someone you admire say something like, "Follow my friend @Johnny, he has links to great steak recipes," that is, give a reason for following him, you may want to follow Johnny. If however you see, "#FF @Johnnie @Billie @Suzie @Millie @Maureen @Doreen @Squidleen", then you probably want to unfollow this person. There is a silly tradition by some to just blindly mention names of people to follow. If you watch these tweeps, you'll find that some of them recommend the same folks over and over-- get out while you can. I find it annoying. There's also an absurd tradition to "Retweet" the "#FF" when you get mentioned; probably some fools who will offer thanks back for the retweeted #FF. Do you see the point? At a dinner party, a friend tells you "Johnny thanked me for thanking him." ???!! It pollutes the stream with text that our already overloaded eyes have to jump over to get to the next tweet. Another pet peeve is multilingual tweets. I'm unfortunately monolingual, so if someone posts even 10% of the time in another language, my eyes get tripped up as it takes me a few seconds to figure out it's a different language.

If you start making tweets and start to get followers, don't worry about following them back. Some are spammers & phishers, some are shameless commercial promoters, some just have bad "dinner party" conversational habits. Some are real people wanting to converse. Again, CNN & Barack Obama & John Boehner will not probably not follow you back. Personally, I do not expect them to follow me until I have built a reputation for the kind of tweet they are interested in.

What's the optimal number of people to follow? Well, for basic users, Twitter has a limit of 2000. My advice first is to grab quickly a thousand people who might seem to be interesting, then weed out any and everyone over the course of a few weeks who makes a single post that is either annoying, uninspiring, or unintelligible to you. You'll probably still have a few hundred, and just check the stream when you can.

If anyone else is boring, tweets too much, or gives unintelligible information, get rid of them. This is your feed. Don't worry about having more total tweets coming in to your timeline than you can read in one day. Twitter is like a dinner party, or a webcam feed from the coolest dinner party ever. Tune in when you can, then turn it off and get on with your real life.

Social Media Best Practices, II

Climate Gate, explained.

It contains at least one mistake. The professor should be saying, “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” I made a mistake with a dangling "f" when I had to break the comment into two frames.

and the whole set should end with, "Even if the science of future climate change were debatable, I don't think that I'd trust anyone who denies that the globe itself isn't warming." The video tends to knock off the last phrase.

Social Media Best Practices

What if people used social media in the same way that they talked in real life? What if people talked in real life the way they do in social media?


I say what's stupid in one setting is stupid in the other.

Space Walk

Here's an image I made in povray. In the background is NASA's recent image of Mercury from the MESSENGER mission. The image is no where near complete. But it's at that stage where I'm just throwing elements together. Sometimes these early versions have so much genius to them by accident, that you can never improve upon, only destroy, with intentional tinkering.

Which kind of universalism?

Here's a quick post on my take on the recent controversies related to universal salvation. (Rob Bell).

Some may point to passages that seem to imply that Christ saves everyone, not merely that his death could save everyone, but that it in fact does save everyone regardless of their religious view or faith in Him. I do not share this view because I believe it to be disproven resoundingly by a host of other bible passages.

But even if you were take the view that Christ saved all, there are two very different ways to apply this conviction. Different in terms of how you would evangelize, how you'd talk to folks in other religions.

1. One is to walk into the mosque or synagogue (or the parking lot of such if you are shy) and proclaim, "You are all saved because of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the only Son of God!".
2. Another is to proclaim, "You are saved by God. You honor this God by worshiping and teaching exactly as you have been doing! Have a pleasant day!" Then you see a the person who doesn't attend any religious observances at all and you hand him the county interfaith directory and say, "Please pick one and become devout at it in order to be saved."

The people I've met and read about who seem to exhibit leanings towards universal salvation seem to have this this Type 2 (above) Evangelism. It's as if they decided first and foremost to be good citizens in the Interfaith Council and then bent a religion around that view. Of course, one should be a good citizen in the (secular) community, but this is not always the exact same this as advancing the interests of the Interfaith Council. It's pushing religion.

I find it to be most deceptive, illogical, and unbiblical. Now, if someone were teaching every week that Jesus was either a myth or not divine or not raised, isn't that more of a problem to the God of the bible than the person who rarely thinks about Him at all? If anything, I would guess that if you actually believed in Christ and met someone who didn't believe in any god, it would be better to leave that nontheistic person alone rather than insist they pick another religion.


IMAGE CAPTION: Pick one, no less than one, or else!

Multi-speed, curved, walk cycles on the moon

This animation was inspired both by the scenes in 2001 where astronauts exercise by jogging on the inside of a curved spaceship and a Mario Brothers game where Mario runs around little planets. I also wanted to show of the versatility of my walk system in povray. I've got characters walking according to curves in 3D space and multiple speeds.

Walk around the world

More tweaking of povray walk cycle code. Testing out that I can make the walk path lie on a nonplanar surface.

Man through maze, second draft.

In this version, I simply put in a natural_spline for the spline that controls time-to-position along the path, and this makes for a very natural acceleration. The red dots are on the ground every nth increment of time.

It got cold last night!

I noticed that yesterday, between 2PM and 2AM, the temperature dropped-- it did not increase-- thereby disproving all claims of so-called "global warming". Wait, do you find that a dense observation? Okay, I suppose that I note it got colder from September to December of this year? Is the theory of climate change disproved, or am I still dense? Okay, what if we go to a really, really cold winter? Is it dense still? Would it leave a false impression if I were to go find proof of a very cold winter season (during a calendar year which scientists say ties for the warmest on record), and only mention the winter part of the story?

NOAA's report says,

"According to NOAA scientists, 2010 tied with 2005 as the warmest year of the global surface temperature record, beginning in 1880. This was the 34th consecutive year with global temperatures above the 20th century average. For the contiguous United States alone, the 2010 average annual temperature was above normal, resulting in the 23rd warmest year on record."

Just a reminder that if the average of something, say school buses' weights, were increasing year to year, then it is no disproof of the average weight change if you were able to point to one really skinny kid on the bus. In temperature terms, that means that the summers got hotter than any cold parts got colder.

Now let's discuss this. There you are, sitting in your chair, not thinking about the weather at the moment, and someone comes up to you and makes sure that you have information that this past winter was really cold. Then they go and mention "global warming" and "the religion of climate change". This is what happened in my reading of Frank Turk's Pyromaniacs blog. It's a blog with religious and Christian themes, not a blog about science. My view is that if you had kept up to date with the scientific data (not the theories, just the raw data), you would be questioning whatever political or religious philosophy that inspired such posturing.

What views of government and religion are threatened by the data?

• In my view, biblical Christianity, the doctrine of the church historic is not. Martin Luther, in explaining the meaning of the Seventh Commandment (Thou Shalt Not Kill), in his Large Catechism, said,

  "It is just as if I saw some one navigating and laboring in deep water [and struggling against adverse winds] or one fallen into fire, and could extend to him the hand to pull him out and save him, and yet refused to do it. What else would I appear, even in the eyes of the world, than as a murderer and a criminal?

  So Christianity isn't threatened by worrying about people drowning. It demands it. It points to how helping those who are laboring in deep water is a way to honor the commandments. It also tells us how greed and covetousness isn't God's will.
• In my view, free market economics and a philosophy of small government is not threatened. Say, take the issue of some toxic chemical or bird flu virus strain. If I am convinced that something threatens the public, this information doesn't threaten free market economics. I could first and foremost pull the plug on all tax subsidies, and I could strive to make sure that the court system doesn't prevent those who have been damaged by the product from seeking damages. Those two things would go a long way to addressing the problem, more so than "regulation". I could also refrain from dissing those who use the public square to educate the public about the dangers. I could also refrain from publishing misinformation, spurious pieces of data.
• Humanism, per se, isn't even threatened, at least not that kind that is defined by thinking highly of humans. Humans produce poop and CO2. Our civilization long ago got used to the idea that people ought to be careful how they handle one product of their body, where they put it. What's so strange that another body product has to engender equal care?

What is threatened?
• In my opinion, in religion, a gospel reductionism or antinomianism is surely threatened. Wordnet defines Antinomianism as: "The theological doctrine that by faith and God's grace a Christian is freed from all laws (including the moral standards of the culture)" In my opinion, one reason so many conservatives are upset about global warming is because it presents a place where they are being called to repentance. Their churches aren't doing it, focusing instead on choosing the correct team.
• A statist conservatism is threatened. If you got chills at the idea above of people being able to sue over pollution, I think you're a bit statist. Pollution is a subsidy. You want the state to prevent people from getting compensation for damages they suffer, because the damage-ers are politically favored, or something called "civilization" benefits.

These criticisms are not directed at the person who doesn't care about global warming. They are not directed at folks who don't understand the science, or are troubled by all the arguing, or even skeptical. My criticisms are directed at those whose philosophies are troubled by the possibility of woefully sinful behavior in your everyday actions. At those who introduce scientific topics into religious settings, and in so doing misrepresent the facts-- not the esoteric theories or predictions, but the actual facts that a fifth grader could verify, like whether 2010 was hot.