“Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age?” 1 Corinthians 1:20 (NIV)

Paul has already pointed out the Corinthians' problem with quarrels over leadership and expressed his relief over not giving them reasons to further those divisions. Now Paul points out a limitation of the world's wisdom with these rhetorical questions. If the wisest men by human standards did not chose Christ, why should the same wisdom be used in the selection of leadership in the Corinthian church?

“For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel—not with words of human wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.” (NIV)

I often think of this verse when I hear about the newest church growth method or witnessing technique that just came out. There is often a strong emphasis on the methodology of the business world. The pitch is centered on the success achieved at other churches. To help learn the particular approach, there are usually manuals, videos, and special edition Bibles available for purchase.

I do not think the problem necessarily lies with trying to develop a system for attracting people to the church. It is the pragmatic philosophy and emphasis on the method as the means of success that is dangerous. It is not the power of man and his abilities that change people; it is only the power of God (and yes, God can use purpose driven churches).

“Meeting needs does not always satisfy needs; it often stokes further ones and raises the pressure of eventual disillusionment”

The idea of what constitutes a just war has been discussed and debated for centuries. The questions of when and how an army should withdraw from an occupied country are relatively new ones. These questions are particularly relevant for this time because of the war against and occupation of Iraq. I will put forth the argument that the answers to these questions have to be developed in the context of the justification of the war. If the war were fought in self-defense due to an invasion by the now occupied nation, the victors are under no moral obligation to restore it. It would behoove the occupiers to not leave the nation in shambles as can be seen from the aftermath of World War I in Germany, but there is no moral imperative to do so. In contrast, if the justification of the war centered on gross violations of universal human rights occurring within a nation, the occupiers have an obligation to ensure that the citizens of that nation are in better conditions after the withdrawal than before the war.

The changing justification for the war on Iraq makes the analysis of a withdrawal all the more complicated. Initially, the war was justified as a preemptive action to eliminate a serious threat to the United States's security. The weapons of mass destruction have not been discovered in Iraq, and the evidence of their existence has proved to be very shaky at best. The removal of Saddam Hussein as dictator for the benefit of the people of Iraq has become the post-invasion justification. I believe this leaves the United States with the responsibility of rebuilding the infrastructure of Iraq, helping to create a legitimate, functioning government and ensuring a stable security environment. Without this, a withdrawal will leave the Iraqis worse off and so would not satisfy the humanitarian aims of the war. Satisfying this ethical obligation comes at a high cost, but it is the right thing to do. As the kindergarten adage goes, “You made the mess; you clean it up.”

What do you think? Does the shifting justification for the war affect the United States's postwar responsibilities? If deposing a dictator were the aim of a war, is the attacking nation under any obligations after this has been accomplished? Do you agree with my premise that the justification of the war determines or at least heavily influences how and when the occupiers withdrawal?

This is the standings for the American League East after the games on Sunday, May 16 were completed. It is the first time the New York Yankees have had a .500 winning percentage since early April. Their current 8 game winning streak has created a feeling of hope among both their fans and the media. The newspaper headlines no longer talk about the “Slumping Yankees”. Instead, it is now the “Surging Yankees” who are “climbing” up in the standings.

How likely is it that the Yankees will win the Eastern Division? Did their poor start doom the team in the playoff race this year? In this analysis, I will not consider the F-Rays since they have such a strong affinity for the bottom of the standings. The Toronto Blue Jays are at best a .500 team so that leaves us with the Baltimore Orioles, Boston Red Sox, and the Yankees.

If the Orioles continue to win at their current pace, the Yankees would have to play like the Yankees of 1998 with a .700 winning percentage to finish ahead of them. Fortunately for the Yankees and their fans, it is very unlikely that the Orioles will continue to play this well. Last year, the Orioles finished around .500. If they win at this rate for the rest of the year, the Yankees would have to win around 55% of their games to catch them. If we give the O's credit for significant improvement over last year's team and assume that they are more likely a .550 team (89 wins over a full season), the Yankees have to win almost 60% of their remaining games. That would mean that this year's team would have to play as well as last year's team for the rest of the season. It is quite possible that the Yankees will finish in front of the Orioles.

Even though the Red Sox are currently behind the Orioles in the standings, they are by far the better team. The Red Sox have won about 60% of their games so far in the 2005 season. There is no reason to think that they cannot continue winning at this pace since they are doing it right now without two of their top starting pitchers in Curt Schilling and David Wells. If they do maintain their current winning ways, the Yankees will need to have a winning percentage of .630 from today forward to place ahead of the Red Sox. The Yankees have only had a winning percentage this high in two of the years of their current run starting in 1996. It is not looking good for the Yankees finishing ahead of the Red Sox this year.

All of this is from a fairly optimistic perspective—that the Yankees are showing their true ability now as opposed to the April version of the team. If the team's future performance is actually closer to the team that was crushed by the Devil Rays than the one that did the same to the Mariners and Athletics, neither a division crown nor a wild card spot is in the team's future.

After the initial greeting and thanksgiving, Paul spends the remainder of the first four chapters of 1 Corinthians talking about the divisions in the church. The divisions have two primary causes. The first is that the Corinthians are spiritually immature. Those who are immature will always find reasons to quarrel. The second is that they lack an accurate understanding of the nature of man and his relative position to God. This causes them to divide into groups based on their loyalty to certain leaders.

Paul exposes their faulty view of man with the following points:

• Man's wisdom is nothing compared to God's wisdom. Why should you put so much faith in a man when his wisdom is foolishness from God's perspective? Plus, how can you select the best man to follow using your worldly wisdom?
• God does not choose to work through those whom human wisdom would say are our best representatives. This is a pattern seen over and over in the Old Testament. If God does not use human wisdom as a criteria for leadership, should we?
• God is wise, but his wisdom is revealed through spiritual means. The Corinthians were not mature enough to have this wisdom. Worse still, they thought that they were wise.
• Man cannot judge spiritual things very well. Only God can judge the heart. Therefore, the Corinthians should be careful judging the relative merits of their leaders' works.
• God works through man, but it is not man's doing. It is “only God who makes things grow.”

The Corinthians did not realize that God's power is not to be found in man's abilities and wisdom. Those who were quarrelling probably thought they were fighting God's fight by trying to raise their man to a position of preeminence in the church. They thought they were rich but proved to be spiritually poor. They thought they were wise but proved to be fools.

"Jason Giambi went 1-for-4, flailing miserably in his first three at-bats before lining a ninth-inning single to right to end a 4-for-41 slump..."

This was taken from the Associated Press recap of Friday night's baseball game featuring the New York Yankees and Oakland Athletics. This type of reporting bothers me considerably. It is primarily an issue of sample size. Four at-bats is not enough data points to make the determination that Jason Giambi's slump is over. This is especially true when going 1-for-4; it is not that different statistically from getting 4 hits over 41 at-bats. We just cannot tell the difference between a .300 hitter and a .100 hitter from a 1-for-4 night. Let me explain this.

First, let's model the probability of whether a player gets a hit during an at-bat using a binomial random variable. For those of you who don't like math, you can stop reading now...or you can think of this as replacing the player with a coin. Heads and he gets a hit. Tails and he heads back to the bench. In this scenario, we are not dealing with a fair coin meaning that the probability of getting a hit (heads) is not 50%. For most players, it is much lower than half—somewhere between 25% and 30%. We can think of a slump as replacing the normal coin for that player with one that is even more weighted towards making outs. Breaking the slump would mean returning to the normal coin. In Giambi's case, let's say that his normal coin returns a hit 30% of the time since his career average is .295. In his current slump, he is getting hits around 10% of the time. Now the question is how certain can we be that he has gone back to the normal coin (broken the slump) given the evidence of a 1-for-4 game.

We plug the numbers into our handy binomial distribution formula and get some answers. A player who gets hits 10% of the time will get a single hit in four at-bats about 30% of the time. A player who hits around .300 will go 1-for-4 around 40% of the time. Given the small sample size, it is basically impossible to tell the difference between a .100 hitter and a .300 hitter if they both have a 1-for-4 night. The same holds true for telling whether Giambi has broken his slump or not. Now, if he had gone 2-for-4 or 3-for-4, the numbers would have come out differently. In four at-bats, a .300 hitter is about five times more likely to get two hits, twenty times more likely to get three hits and eighty times more likely to get a hit every time. Then maybe we could do a hypothesis test to determine how much confidence we have that Giambi broke his slump. As it is, I am expecting an 0-for-4 today.

I think I have finally finished tweaking my RSS feeds. In the process I changed how I was calculating the GUIDs, which probably created double entries on many aggregators. I have added a comments feed and feeds for each category.

Warning: this is addictive.

A colleague of mine showed me this. It uses the same type of visualization technology as the previous technology entry. This one lets you see the connections between web sites. It uses Google's clustering algorithm to create the graph. Java is required.

The Text

“One of you says, ‘I follow Paul’; another, ‘I follow Apollos’; another, ‘I follow Cephas’; still another, ‘I follow Christ.’ ”

The church at Corinth has divided itself into sects as history has shown that man is wont to do. I am sure that if we could look back in time at one of their gatherings, we would see all the followers of Paul sitting in one corner, the followers of Apollos in another and so on. Each group would be discussing the doctrinal errors of the other groups.

There is nothing wrong with following a church leader. In chapter 11, Paul exhorts the Corinthians to follow his example as he follows Christ. That last clause is important. Christ is the head of the Church. Christ is the husband as the Church is the bride. We should not be holding up men in the place of Christ.

I think it is also important to consider that Paul urges the church to be united in “mind and thought.” It is one thing for a church to talk like it is united; it is another to actually be united. Sometimes discussion of minority opinions on an issue is discouraged for the appearance of unity. This is not the kind of unity that Paul wanted for the church.

The New York Yankees recently benched Bernie Williams, their starting center fielder for almost the past 15 years. He is a five-time All-Star. He has won four Gold Gloves and a batting title. He is on the Yankees' all-time lists for most games, most hits, most home runs, and so on. At the time of his benching, Bernie was batting .247 with just one home run. He has a reputation for slow starts to the season. Bernie is 36 years year old (turning 37 in September).

For the past two or three years, he has poorer than normal stats and this has been attributed to various injuries he has suffered. A question to consider is whether the decline is due to the injuries or are both the decline and the injuries due to old age (for a baseball player). Take a look at the graph. This shows Bernie's OPS for every year he has been in the major leagues. OPS is on-base percentage plus slugging percentage. The number of runs scored by a team over a season has a higher correlation to OPS than team batting average so it is a good metric for evaluation. A star player will generally be around or above .900 in OPS.

You will notice that the decline started in the late 90's. This looks like a gradual deterioration of skills that was masked by injuries in the past three years. Another perspective is that the injures are chronic conditions and are what led to the decline, but the end result is the same. It is unlikely that we will see the Bernie Williams from the championship Yankees teams of the late 90's again.

Most likely, the Yankees will become tired of Tony Womack's defense in left field and the growing pains that a rookie like Robinson Cano will suffer through and return Bernie Williams to a more full-time role. The Yankees picking up the option on his contract for next year is not likely though so this may be the last year of Bernie in pinstripes with the interlocking NY.

Bernie does have his next career lined up which is a lot better than most professional athletes. Take a look.

This is not an example of cutting-edge technology, but rather a case of what happens when two interesting technologies are combined. It is an interactive, visual thesaurus. The two technologies that it uses are graph visualization and WordNet, which is a database of synonyms that captures word semantics. I don't think it is something I would use as a serious resource, but it's fun to play with it. To try it out, go here and click on the "try it now" image. Caveat: It requires Java, but most people already have this.

“One is not justified by faith by believing in justification by faith. One is justified by faith by believing in Jesus.”

The quotes that I will be posting in this space are ones that I come across in my reading. I will not agree with every quote I post. Sometimes a quote interests me because of the latent philosophy behind it with which I may disagree. My expectations are that I will in these cases (and others) post a comment with the quote that explains why I published it here.