Timothy's Thoughts

W hat are the arguments for saying that the Earth is old and what are the arguments that the Earth is young? Below is a list of some that I have heard on both sides. I doubt that anyone will read this and go away having changed their mind on the position they hold. I do, however, think that if someone wishes to argue their position they will need to address the reasons that are given on the other side. Reasons for Young Earth Reasons for Old Earth The Bible says creation took six days. The word used for "day" could be translated as "period." The Bible says that Adam was "in the beginning." The word "day" is used multiple ways in Genesis 1. The great flood would have removed evidence of anything prior to it. Hebrews 3 implies that we are still in the seventh "day." The geniologies have enough people to cover about 6,000 years. Genesis 1:12 declares that "the Earth brought forth," implying that it took some time for the pl...

I remember thinking when I was a kid that stories were just a segment of the characters lives. You could think of an author picking a beginning point of the story at some key event, finding a good end point, and just giving the details of what happened in between. But as I began to write my own stories, I discovered that this isn’t the case at all. It may be true of the beginning and ending, but it’s that middle stuff that gets you. When outlining a story, there are some key things that have to occur at various places in a book. The setup for the story always occurs at the beginning, even if you have to rip it out of the middle of the sequential order or even after the end of the story. The reader has to understand what is going on and why it is important. Then the characters have to be seen doing their thing. This is where the reader really starts to enjoy living in this world we’ve created, but it only goes on for about the second quarter of the book. Then it all falls apart. The wo...

A fter watching several videos from the One for Israel Ministry ( www.oneforisrael.org ) I began to notice a trend. Many of these Jews who have come to accept Jesus as their messiah declare that they were surprised to learn that Jesus was a Jew. Some chose not to read the New Testament because the rabbis told them not to and they assumed that the New Testament was instructions to Christians to persecute Jews. “Jesus is not for us” is a common theme that these people were taught. So when they began to learn about Jesus being a Jew, and reading the New Testament that is written by Jews and about the Jewish scriptures they were shocked. I don’t know many Jews, but I encounter plenty of gentiles who speak of God in ways that are inconsistent with who I know God to be. They speak of God as being an evil being and I question how anyone could read the Bible and come to that conclusion. But that’s just it. They haven’t read the Bible. They don’t know my Jesus. These people aren’t rejecting J...

I 've always had a fascination with mazes. While messing with the Python plugin for Art of Illusion I decided to write a maze generator in Python. The image to the right is a rendering of the maze that is produced by that code. I did it as a Scripted Object, which was probably not the best idea since it recalculates the maze whenever something changes, but my excuse is that I was testing out some things related to Python scripted objects in Art of Illusion. I'm including the code below, but with the caveat that it has a defect at one of the boundaries that I haven't figured out yet. It doesn't remove a wall for one or two of the cells. Aside from that, it will produce a good 3D maze. import random mazeWidth = 25 mazeLength = 25 wallLength = 1.2 wallHeight = 2.25 wallThickness = 0.05 WALL_UP = 0 WALL_DOWN = 1 WALL_FIXED = 2 class cell():   X = 0   Y = 0   N = WALL_UP   S = WALL_UP   E = WALL_UP   W = WALL_UP   visited = False   def createm...

H ere's a question for you: what is the advantage of using Python over Java? Because of the recent publication of the second edition of Extending Art of Illusion I've been spending time working on scripts for Art of Illusion. Straight out of the box, Art of Illusion provides scripting capability for Groovy and BeanShell. This makes sense because Art of Illusion is written in Java and both of these scripting languages are based on Java. But most other graphics programs use some variation on Python as their scripting language. In a post on Python Scripts in Art of Illusion  I wrote about creating a plugin that adds Python to the languages that Art of Illusion supports. I use Python for things I do in my day job mostly because it's available. But with adding it to Art of Illusion I have a direct comparison between Java and Python. It got me thinking. Is there some reason to choose to script in Python rather than using Java, Groovy, or BeanShell? When I setup the interpreter...

I took a break from the cloth simulator to look at adding Python as a scripting language for Art of Illusion. I had some success at pulling in the Jython library and was able to get the following Tool Script to add a Cube to the scene: undo = UndoRecord(window, True) obj = Cube(1.0, 1.0, 1.0) objInfo = ObjectInfo(obj, CoordinateSystem(), "Cube "+str(1)) window.addObject(objInfo, undo) window.updateImage() window.setUndoRecord(undo) In a video I demonstrated that a Groovy script could be used to add a Cube to the scene . The Groovy script was as follows: undo = new UndoRecord(window, true); obj = new Cube(1.0, 1.0, 1.0); objInfo = new ObjectInfo(obj, new CoordinateSystem(), "Cube "+1); window.addObject(objInfo, undo);                       window.updateImage(); window.setUndoRecord(undo); As you can tell, the code is essentially the same except Python doesn't use the new keyword, True is capitalized in Pyt...

F or each of the first ten chapters of Extending Art of Illusion I have created a video that demonstrates some aspect of it. One of the things I found when writing the book was that it is difficult to demonstrate animation on the printed page. In chapter 7 I give code for a tracker object that will rotate an object or objects so that the object is always pointing at one of the other scene objects, no matter where it is located in the scene. In the book I tried to show this with a sequence of still images taken from the animation. But in the video I have been able to show the video of a head with eyes that follow an object as it moves around the scene. Not only that, but it is possible to show that these changes are occurring even as the scene is being edited. Below is the list of videos: Chapter 1: Use a Script to Add a Cube to Art of Illusion Chapter 2: Storing and Loading Chapter 3: Position Objects on Floor Chapter 4: Point at Objects Chapter 5: Resting One Object on Anot...

A fter the second edition of Extending Art of Illusion went to press my attention turned once again to the question of getting it into the hands of readers. Outside of people called Mom, people don't generally buy books just because someone wrote it. I've purchased a few books just because I knew the author, but I don't buy second and third books "just because."  Those of us who love books need a reason to buy a book. No, that's not right. We want a reason to buy a book. We are begging authors and publishers to give us a reason to buy a book. We want to see a book and say, "If I buy this book this is the knowledge I will gain or the story I will enjoy." We are cheering for authors to provide us with a good book. It's in that context that I make the case for people to buy the latest edition of Extending Art of Illusion . I stopped to ask myself why anyone would need this book. It may seem like it is a little late to be asking that question. O...

R obots don’t sin. Of course we’ve all seen movies where some robot makes decisions concerning right and wrong, but the reality is that robots just run programs. The brain of a robot is nothing more than a device that reads data and writes data. It’s actions are controlled by what that data tells it to do. Robots don’t have a soul. If a robot does something that it shouldn’t do, we may shut it down. We may repair it. We may throw it in the landfill. But we don’t do that out of a sense of justice. If there is anyone held responsible for the evil done by a robot it is the designer, the programmer, or the operator, not the robot. Robots don’t sin because they have no capability to decide to go against their programming. But if the inability to decide to go against their programming keeps a robot from sin then that implies that anything that can sin can decide to go against their programming. I mention this because I recently heard someone claim that “freewill is a myth.” Their basis for t...