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The PCA's general assembly is currently underway so I spent a few minutes this evening listening to the live webcast (the Windows Media server seems overloaded, but the RealPlayer feed is watchable). Some of the procedures reminded me of an earlier post wherein I suggested that reformed / presbyterian folks were probably nerdier than the average Joe.

The CanRC and URC both are more prescribed than the PCA in terms of liturgical forms, but someone suggested to me that the PCA has one at the most elaborate and lengthy church orders. Given that the current edition of the PCA's Book of Church Order clocks in at a whopping 347 pages, I'm feeling inclined to believe them.

According to the posted schedule, the controversial report on the federal vision is to be delivered tomorrow at 2pm Central Time. (ReformedNews.com has been covering the controversy in some detail). We'll see what comes of that.

• In the 9 months that they've been running, the spam filters here have flagged and dealt with approximately 30,000 spam comments. (The trigger words are making the spam filter page start to resemble a pharmacy inventory)
• Recently I've started getting spam account signups ... approximately 5 per day.
• The spam folder in my GMail account shows just over 4600 spam emails in the last month

The class I detested throughout high school was English. In university I took a critical thinking course for the sole reason that it was the only alternative to an English class.

For some silly reason though, a lot of people expect me not to hate English. Amongst my former high school classmates, people seem to guess English as my major about as frequently as they do my actual one. I read more than most. I tend to like Shakespeare. I subscribe to a word-of-the-day email list. I also seem to blather on in written form more than a lot of others.

Why hate English, you ask? There are a number of reasons...

• arbitrary grading: The grading on any writing assignments I was required to submit throughout high school was consistently inconsistent - it seems that some like the way that I write and some don't. Some years I was consistently at the top of the class, and others I was probably close to the median. I could take a good guess as to what my final grade would be simply based on the teacher assigned.
• silly assignments: I believe that fiction is meant to be read, not to be analyzed to death. 'nuf said.
• inane rules: English is one area where I think rules are meant to be broken, and this is why I would expect Shakespeare to have failed English 101. He's credited with quite a large number of contributions to the English language, and one does not make contributions by sticking to a rulebook.

  One of the books that I'm currently reading is On Writing Well.

  This confirms what lexicographers have always known: that the laws of usage are relative, bending with the taste of the lawmaker. ... In the end it comes down to what is "correct" usage. We have no king to establish the King's English; we only have the President's English, which we don't want. Webster long a defender of the faith, muddied the waters in 1961 with its permissive Third Edition, which argued that almost anything goes as long as somebody uses it. (p. 40)

  Rules in English are seldom absolute as many claim. Consider an episode of the Grammar Girl podcast:

  [There] are some confusing situations when it comes to apostrophes. For example, [A bunch of people] asked how to make a singular word that ends in s possessive. I know that this is a raging debate even at the highest levels of government because [two listeners] sent me a funny article describing U.S. Supreme Court squabbles over making the word Kansas possessive. Words such as Kansas that end with an s can be stumpers when it comes to apostrophes.

  Is it Kansas's statute with an apostrophe s or Kansas' statute with just an apostrophe at the end? Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the majority opinion and prefers to leave off the extra s, referring to Kansas' statute with just an apostrophe at the end, whereas Justice David Souter wrote the dissenting opinion and prefers the double s of Kansas's statute with an apostrophe before the final s.

  So who's right? ... Unfortunately, I have to admit that this isn't a hard-and-fast rule; it's a style issue.

I've been looking at replacing an old desktop computer, and one of the primary concerns that I'm looking out for is a minimum number of moving parts and a corresponding lack of noise. There's some support for this out there, but still it's pretty hard to build a silent machine.

"Everyday noise is under the radar, yet it affects everyone's life," said Louis Hagler, a retired physician in Oakland, Calif., and an advocate for quiet, who recently published in the Southern Medical Journal a review of studies linking noise exposures to health problems. "We don't say to people, 'You just have to learn to live with sewage in your water,' " Hagler said in an interview. "Why should we tolerate sewage coming into our ears?" (From a a Washington Times article)

(HT: Justin Taylor)