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Whee. Stander Symposium was interesting. Did you know that if you take a flat-fold origami model (meaning one that you can press between the pages of a book without smashing it), mark all the folds, unfold it, and color the regions with two different colors so that no two touching regions have the same color, when you fold it back up again, one side will be all one color, and the other side will be all the other color?
After lunch, I went to a presentation on some work that a graduate student and a professor have been doing for the Air Force. When you're flying an unmanned plane by a computer, and you tell the plane to turn left, if the message gets to the plane too slowly or the plane takes too long to calculate how far it needs to turn, the plane could turn too late and miss the target. So the Air Force basically gave an algorithm to this grad student and said, "Here, make this run faster." The project isn't done yet, but they're apparently getting good results already. They designed some specialized hardware that can do certain computations a lot faster than software can and they've more or less cut the processing time in half.
Religion & science panel discussion was thought-provoking as expected. Fr. Heft commented (I can't remember why) that studies have been done which suggest that Catholics have the best sex lives. Everyone laughed at that, but then I thought about it and realized that it's actually pretty believable. It's because we treat it as more than just a physical thing. It's the thing that creates life, and what could God be more intimately involved in than the creation of life? I imagine that that's the time when you'd feel closest to God.
Many good points were made, and I think it's a tough issue. Fr. Heft and Dr. Barnes argued that both faith and reason can be used in both science and theology, and Dr. Brecha and a biology professor that I didn't know argued that faith should be kept to religion and reason to science. My personal opinion is that religion and science are perfectly compatible, and being who I am, I think I've really got the best of both worlds. But I don't really want to launch into a musing on that at the moment.
Also listened to some music. There were a few sax quartets, some guitarists, and a jazz group that consisted of a sax, trumpet, cello, keyboard, and drums. The jazz group was amazing.
Hmm. Homework to finish. It never ends.
~DigiFaith
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