I pulled a fairly typical "Dan move" last week. I went to a lake about 45 mins from here with some friends on Saturday, and I think I dropped my keys in the lake. We came in two cars, and when we were leaving, they dropped me off at my car and left, so I was stuck there. I eventually was able to borrow someone's phone and call and they came back and picked me up.
I got rides to work and service the next couple days, got a key made at the dealership, and got a ride to my car. The public dock I was parked at didn't allow overnight parking, so I had two tickets for $72 each on the windshield. In addition, my registration was expired, so I had another ticket for $176. I'm going to try and fight the first two due to the extenuating circumstances, but the third one is just my own stupidity.
Also, a couple weeks ago, I heard a loud electrical pop, followed by a puff of smoke, when starting my car. The power-steering has gradually stopped functioning since then. Lovely.
For that small number of visitors who don't frequent Donny's site, here are three interesting articles on the looming threat of terrorism in the skies. After 9/11 I figured that they would have to find other methods of attack, since naturally the airlines would be so paranoid that they wouldn't let it happen again. After taking some recent flights where the security seemed to be back down to pre-9/11 levels, and then reading these articles, I'm not so sure ...
I found the following statement from last week's book study remarkable:
"In the greatest of all demonstrations of his power, [Jehovah] resurrected his Son, Jesus."
This surprised me, but the more I thought about what it took to perform that feat, the more amazing it seemed. Being a programmer, I started to think in terms of the serialization of objects (bear with me here). An object can represent pretty much anything (customer, company, document, etc.), but an object is only "alive," so to speak, if it's loaded into memory. Once loaded, it can actively function, accept and return information, perform calculations, etc. If you pull the plug on the computer, however, the object disappears. If you want to preserve an object when the computer is powered off, or for the purpose of sending it to another computer, you need to save it to disk, a process called serialization. This can capture not only the structure and data of the object, but also information regarding the state of the object and its components (e.g., is the object currently listening to requests, or is it asleep?). The serialized object on the disk is effectively "dead," inert, unable to perform any functions. However, it may be "resurrected" at any point in the future, picking up its duties right where it left off.
I imagine the resurrection performed by Jehovah functioning similarly. At death, he saves a complete snapshot of an individual to his memory, or "disk." At the time of the resurrection, he just deserializes the person, loading him or her from disk into the physical world. Of course, his error handling routines are able to prevent the loading of defective components, so the resurrected object would avoid troublesome bugs, while still containing all the data, structure, history, and state information of the original.
Can you imagine how much disk space and processing power would be needed to do this for a human being, to recreate every memory, conscious or not, every feeling, every physical characteristic, every thought? Incredible. Is it realistic to believe that God could do this for every one of the billions of humans that have ever lived? That brings us back to the point that launched this topic: Jehovah resurrected Jesus. Jesus had been alive since the beginning of creation, perhaps for billions of years. As God's master worker, he was delegated the task of using Jehovah's power and wisdom to create the entire universe and all other living beings. He was likely endowed with essentially limitless memory, and would thus be able to recall every detail he had ever observed. Although Jehovah was the source of power, the Son would have wielded this far more mightily than any other created being. Yet, when he was executed, for three days he existed only in God's mind. It follows, then, that to restore this life, complete with all that accumulated detail and the capacity to wield unfathomable power, would be a greater demonstration of power than either the original creation of Jesus or even the creation of the entire universe. Awesome. Could we have a better guarantee of God's ability to deliver on his promises?