Summer Project!

Well, summer is officially here; I had my last final yesterday afternoon and am all unpacked at home. These days, though, it's hard for me to know what to think about summer. Like any kid, I used to be ecstatic about summer as a time to play with friends and celebrate our freedom from the tyranny of schoolwork. This summer most of my friends seem to be out of town and I'm honestly struggling to figure out what to do with no schoolwork, but I fear not, because I know what I'm doing with this summer!

From June 11th to August 7th, I'll be on a missional project in inner city Milwaukee, sharing the gospel and helping people. There are a lot of blanks to fill in as to how I'll be filling 8 or so weeks, but I'm excited to have God work through me like never before. Summer projects are pretty big with Campus Crusade for Christ and are constantly described as truly life-changing experiences. So while I'm nervous about the challenges I'll face, I'm pretty excited for the whole life-changing part.

So before you ask what I'll be doing with my summer, hopefully by some miraculous stroke of luck you will read my blog and learn that I shall be in Milwaukee! Sadly, the project leadership is pretty adamant about me staying for the whole thing; one of the hard parts of the project is all the stuff I'll miss, including my family's yearly vacation to Maine and my old Bible study leader and dear friend's wedding. I'm trusting it will be worth it.

More meditations are likely to come as I spend time preparing for this undertaking.

On my Other Blog

Yes, blogogrid, apparently I need two blogs even though I can barely maintain one. I've made a side blog for posts on music to avoid cluttering this one; it can be found here. I'll leave the posts on music that are already here as well as bring them over to the other one; any new posts on bands, albums, songs, etc. will go there. General ruminations on music or musings about high-end audio will remain here. Enjoy!

On Fractal Flames

A few posts ago, I realize I mentioned 'fractal flames' without further explanation, in the context of saying how much cooler nebulae are. Fractal flames are hobby of mine, and they're still pretty cool.

Basically, fractal flames are art generated by math. Fractals themselves could be considered a subclass of this, but fractal flames are much more general and artificial. With that said, let's get to the cool pictures!

This one is a 3'x2' poster hanging in my room. My favorite.

So, fractal flames are pretty cool. I post all of them to my Photobucket Account, along with some other regular fractals. The software I made all these with is called Apophysis, which you should totally check out. It takes some practice, but fractal flames are so awesome that it's not too hard to stumble across something awesome, tweak it a bit, and render a great image. Most fractal flames are abstract, but occasionally something discernible jumps out. Both of these were made with a single render, and no editing except color fixing done to them.

And there you have it: the rest of the story of why I'm called Fractal. If you have time, check out Apophysis and make mind-blowingly cool images of your own!

On the Redesign

Greetings, questionably existent audience! Just a quick update: I actually spent some time today and messed with the HTML to change the layout a bit. Everything is now wider, and the header has been updated. This is mostly so the formatting of my last post would match what I saw as I was writing it, but it's nice to have some space. Also, I changed a few colors to reinforce the greyscale aesthetic I have going and changed my blogo-name to a the more fitting 'Fractal'. Peace out, tell your friends!

On the Wild Ride

Ever since my first semester of college, I've greatly enjoyed biking around the city, and the advantage that living in a centralized location like the University of Minnesota gives me to this. Back home in the 'burbs, biking is a constant struggle of avoiding cars and navigating a maze of city streets to find the least painful way to where you want to go. It's not too far from college to my house, but it's tough going, as I have to cross two freeways. Minneapolis, on the other hand, is a veritable hub of bike trails, and from it I can bike just about anywhere in the city. I hope to live somewhere on the bike network someday.

A word about how I bike: I don't just go for bike rides, I go for bike adventures. I set out with my trusty bike map of the city, a full water bottle, and some goal in mind. If I get lost, I just get to see more of the city! I like to bike the Grand Rounds, a circuit of Minneapolis about 35 miles in length which goes through pretty much all the scenic parts of the city.

But as lengthy and fun as that is, since not long after I came to the U I've been planning and hoping for something even bigger: biking to, and around, Lake Minnetonka, a sizable body of water in the far southwestern suburbs of Minneapolis. The route I've had planned since freshman year looks something like this.

It's kind of hard to see on this small size (click the picture to enlarge), but the red line is my route. My dorm is near the red dot marking downtown Minneapolis on the right, and my house is in the lower right corner; I drew a scale into the lower left corner. Needless to say, it was an epic, wild ride.

I spent days preparing for the ride, fixing the various problems my 30-year-old bike was having, procuring all the supplies I'd need, and waiting for a break in the monotonously cold, wet weather we'd been having. 60-degree temperatures and "mostly sunny" conditions were forecast for Sunday, May 9, so off I went. Luckily, my church has night services, so I didn't have to miss that. I got up early Sunday morning, got ready, and packed my bike. Note the water bottle filled with Powerade. That stuff is like high-octane fuel for humans. Helmeted and bundled up for the chilly morning, I set off, saying hi to the people waiting to go to my church.

And so it began. I biked through the neighborhood of my dorm, past the Riverside Plaza apartments to the bike trail along the light rail line--a handy way to get through southeastern Minneapolis. This soon took me to the Sabo bike bridge, which leads to the Greenway. I'm sad more people don't know about the Greenway; it leads straight across the city just north of Lake Street and is a very efficient way to get around (in the daytime, at least).

Several miles of pedaling later, I was past the city portion of the Greenway, which lets out around Lake Calhoun. If you keep following it, which I did, it leads out to Hopkins and beyond. Hopkins happens to be where my dentist is; it's good to know I could bike there in a dental emergency.

From Hopkins, I got on a mostly gravel trail. Others might be worried about subjecting their road bikes to crushed limestone, but my bike is in fact a mountain bike, having graduated to mountain bike status after I rode it 8 or so miles on a mountain bike trail in the Minnesota Valley, which drew many stares. The trail slowed me down slightly, but I didn't have much trouble. Soon it left suburban Hopkins and continued into some extremely pleasant forests, making for great picture taking.

After some scenic riding, I made it to the closest corner of Lake Minnetonka, Carson's Bay. I'd come this far once before, but I'd turned back immediately and gone home. Not today. I continued on the gravel trail and after another mile or so, I saw this.

All this time, I'd mostly been biking past houses; due to all the waterfront property, I didn't get many glimpses of the lake like this one. Even though it would be expensive and troublesome, I think it would be simply amazing to live on the lake. I biked through downtown Excelsior, then went through what amounted to a ribbon of forest through more lake towns. This continued until I got to a park on the far side of the lake.  I was saddened that I'd never seen this undiscovered treasure before; it was nice to bike through some open space after corridors of forest for miles.

Then it was a few more miles on county roads (a deserted one with no shoulder, and a busy one with a nice wide shoulder, which was less scary) before I got to the little town of St. Bonifacius, population 1873, the most remote place I've ever biked to. It was quite a nice place with a definite historic small town feel to it. I ate lunch there in a Subway that I later learned had been built where an old creamery had been. After restocking my bike with red Powerade, I was off again! More great biking through nature ensued, but before long I hit civilization again.

Luckily some of this civilization was in the form of Minnetonka Beach, probably the nicest neighborhood I have ever seen. (Not a good place to have a medical emergency, though, due to the speed bumps on the roads. So, if you're rich and healthy, live in Minnetonka Beach!)

I was treated to a few more views of the lake before leaving it behind. More biking (a common theme here) ensued until I reached familiar territory: the Grand Rounds! More specifically, Theodore Wirth Park, my favorite portion of the Grand Rounds.

I was in the home stretch now. I'd biked this way numerous times before, and soon Minneapolis was in sight. I rejoined the Greenway where I'd gone off to Hopkins, then biked the last few miles back home.

The final distance is in kilometers, but that's still pretty far--67 miles. Exhausting? Yes. Worthwhile? Yes. Epic? Definitely.

On the Glory of Nebulae

Hello, blogosphere! I'm pretty elated, having just destroyed my first final. It was for my history of rock music course (best class evar, by the way). This is the class where I sat in the front row and took careful notes every day. On the course evaluation, when it asked what I could have done to be a better learner, I sincerely said "Nothing". The class is so good that you want to pay perfect attention every day so as not to miss anything. The best question was "Compare three heavy metal genres we discussed in class", for which I easily wrote about twice as much as necessary. Good times. Now I just have my three difficult finals to go before Summer arrives!

Anyway, on to the topic I randomly selected from my list of blog topics. Namely: nebulae! We extensively studied these stellar phenomena and how they form in astrophysics, and I am convinced they were created by God to BLOW OUR TINY MINDS. Take a look.

This is the Eagle Nebula. It is 92 trillion kilometers tall. You might recognize this picture of part of it, known as the "Pillars of Creation".

Nebulae like this one are large clouds of dust and gas that eventually collapse, heating up to the point where they form stars. Large nebulae like this are star factories! They take on interesting shapes as star formation and supernovae blow the dust around, creating "holes" in the cloud.


Then we have the Crab Nebula:

Not all nebulae are centers of star birth. The Crab Nebula was formed by a supernova; it's the outward-traveling remnants of an exploded star. Pretty cool, no?


This nebula isn't as well-photographed, but its's formed around the largest known star, VY Canis Majoris, which is about 2,000 times the diameter of the sun. If it were at the center of the Solar System, it would extend all the way out to the orbit of Saturn.

And the Homunculus Nebula, around the most luminous (brightest) known star.

These nebulae are formed by extremely massive stars that shine so brightly that they literally can't hold themselves together, blowing their outer layers off in extremely impressive clouds. My astrophysics professor apparently helped take the picture that led to the naming of the Homunculus nebula. (it was poorer quality than this one and kind of looked like a baby...)

The Ring Nebula, one of the most symmetric ones:

The Ring Nebula is formed by a star not too unlike our sun that reached the final stages of its evolution, becoming a helium-burning red giant that blew its outer layers off similarly to the huge stars above on a smaller scale to produce an especially symmetric nebula. (The white dot in the center is the remnant of the star)

This is the Orion Nebula, another hotbed of star formation. My fractal flames are cool and all, but this completely blows them all away.

Some of these images are false-color, meaning they're made from a variety of frequencies of light that aren't necessarily visible, but that last one is in visible light, meaning if you could somehow travel to the Orion nebula, you would actually see that. The Earth has some pretty cool views, but nothing that can compare to nebulae. Truly God's creation is an amazing thing indeed.

On the Still, Small Voice

A few months ago, when Hope Community Church (the church I attend while in college; I highly recommend it for anyone who is interested) was preaching through the book of 1 Corinthians, they did an excellent mini-series on spiritual gifts. The takeaway verse was 1 Corinthians 12:7, "Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good." He went into detail on the specific gifts Paul names in places, like wisdom, prophecy, helping others, and, of course, speaking in tongues. From these sermons I concluded that I have the Spiritual gift of wisdom; I'm able to listen to God's "still, small voice" and share what He teaches me with others.

I could post multiple times on spiritual gifts, but my focus this time is on a specific instance of the gift of wisdom that happened to me last night. While at the weekly meeting for Campus Crusade of Christ, during worship, I asked God in prayer, "What's the most amazing thing You've done in my life?" I can't fully express how cool it is to ask God questions like this and (sometimes) get an answer back. This time I did get an answer: "The most amazing thing if that I have given you life." (I don't remember the exact wording) At first I took this to mean that I'm alive, i.e. that I have earthly life, but then I realized He probably meant the true, eternal life I've been given through the Spirit, by the sacrifice of Christ.

That in itself is pretty cool. But the fact that the answer came in specific words, that there is an 'exact wording' deserves further mention. As a rule, I think in concepts. Once those concepts solidify or make sense, my brains puts them into words for the sake of communication, if only with myself. Since my brain starts with a meaning and puts it into words, it's impossible for me to misunderstand or misinterpret my own thoughts. Unless other people think much more differently from me than I thought, I would guess this is the case for most people.

So the fact that I misunderstood this already-worded answer, if only briefly, tells me that it's not from the echo chamber of my mind; that this "still, small voice" really is God speaking to us. Or I'm just crazy. Or both!