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Incidentally Jon and I later discovered that Khee-Teck had been snow-shoeing that afternoon not too far from where we went.

One of the first things that I generally do when evaluating a book is to flip to the back cover and look at who's endorsing the thing and what they have to say about the volume. In an ideal case, what I'd like to see is an endorsement penned by a vocal and visible opponent of the book's conclusion who is at the same time willing to stipulate the book accurately presents the opposing case as well.

One of the key features that I look in an author is their willingness to honestly interact with opposing views instead of misrepresenting them. I also look for authors who invite criticism of their works. Someone who won't accept criticism is simply not worth reading in my opinion. Neither is someone who won't admit to not knowing the answer to a question. In a public forum where response is more off the cuff and there is little time to dig for the correct response I relish hearing phrases such as "I don't know" or "This is not my area of expertise".

Today, gullchasedship posted the following extraction from a ramble on open-mindedness:

Caricatures of Catholic beliefs, when discovered for the parodies they are, lead one to Rome.

I think that in that phrase one can substitute a whole lot of other systems of belief.

I've been gathering some resources to begin reading about the Federal Vision and this seems to be one area in particular where the advocates are arguing that the detractors are mischaracterizing them. To quote Doug Wilson (HT: gullchasedship):

I am one of the most vocal advocates of the federal vision, and I deny all four of the characteristics of that vision as kinda assigned by Clark. These are strange doings. Somebody doesn't know what he is talking about. Either I am not in the federal vision at all, or the federal vision is not what its opponents claim, or it is not monolithic as its opponents claim. In any case, this book is out of line.

At the moment there seem to be relatively few books arguing against the Federal Vision, so I picked a copy of The Federal Vision and Covenant Theology: A Comparative Analysis. Given some the level of negativity on the book's Amazon reviews (phrases like "full of mischaracterizations and exaggerated claims"), I must say that I was a little distressed to see an endorsement from Michael Horton on the book's back cover.

Over the last few years it seems that I've hit the age where are a few jokes about singleness tossed in my direction from time to time. When around families with small children I've heard questions like "have we scared you off from having kids?" a number of times. I don't really take such questions seriously, but at the same time it sometimes still bothers me that they're asked - even if in a joking fashion. To be honest, I'm probably more positively inclined now to the idea of having kids at some point in the future than I was of the notion in the past.

The recent release of the latest Canadian census results have brought this idea to mind again. Some newspaper articles seem pleased by the growth, whereas others have sounded at least somewhat worried. Canadian population growth really only seems to be coming through immigration at this point, with the average Canadian woman having approximately 1.5 kids. This is a subject that occasionally comes to the forefront at work/school and there people seem to think of immigration as some sort of panacea. I, on the other hand, tend to agree with Tim Challies' assessment of the situation:

All-in-all, many Western nations, Canada among them, are effectively committing suicide--or at the very least are knowingly and willingly radically altering themselves. By refusing to have children, people are allowing their nations to decline. The low birthrates can only drive a nation downward. The Canada of the future will looking very little like the Canada of my childhood and the Canada of today. As native Canadians refuse to procreate, we will have to continue to encourage immigration in order to sustain our nation's economy. This will be increasingly important as the generation of baby boomers hits retirement age and expects the pensions they have been paying for for all the years. Someone has to be able to fund their retirement. But there will be fewer people to do so unless we encourage immigration. But this becomes a vicious cycle, for fewer people will immigrate to a nation when they know they will have to pay high taxes to fund social programs for people they do not know and care nothing about.

Some people pass the time in some ways and some in others. There's the relatively well known examples of people memorizing sequences of digits in π - the current Guiness memorization record stands at 67,890 digits, although unofficially a news story on π day mentions an unofficial record of about 100,000 digits.

Here's a weirder clip from the article:

A software engineer in Virginia named Mike Keith wrote a poem to pi, a "piem." A love letter, in a way. To say that it is a something to behold is an understatement: It is nearly 4,000 words long — and the length in letters of each word corresponds to pi's digits.