Author Archives: mhick255

Good Things Happening at Ohio State

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Henry F. "Fritz" Schaefer, III

Henry F. Schaefer, III

Yesterday, I drove up to Ohio State for a luncheon hosted by OSU’s Fellowship of Christian Faculty and Staff. The guest of honor, Dr. Henry F. “Fritz” Schaefer, III, was delivering the first of three lectures in Columbus. Dr. Schaefer is one of the world’s foremost chemists, the author of hundreds of journal articles, and the director of the University of Georgia’s Center for Computational Chemistry. During his talk, he mentioned that one of the benefits of growing older was seeing more and more of your friends win Nobel Prizes. No offense to my friends, but I think Dr. Schaefer travels in different circles than I do!

Dr. Schaefer is also a committed Christian. At this luncheon, he spoke to Christian faculty and staff about “The Worldviews of Great Scientists,” highlighting how many scientists throughout history have been committed believers. The list includes great historical scientists like Michael Faraday (whom Schaefer called “the greatest experimental scientist of all time”) and William Henry Perkins (the inventor of the world’s first synthetic dye – at the ripe age of 18!), but also important living scientists, too, like many of the Nobel Prize winners he mentioned.

Later in the evening, Dr. Schaefer spoke at a student event sponsored by the Veritas Forum, for whom he has often spoken. This talk was organized by Jonathan Weyer, a campus minister with the Coalition for Christian Outreach. I met Jonathan when I spoke at OSU in this spring, and we had a chance to chat a little bit more. Jonathan has developed a ministry among OSU’s atheist and agnostic students. He has the right personality and mind to address their hard questions and, perhaps more importantly, gain their trust and friendship so that the Gospel earns a hearing. Pray for his efforts.

Dr. Schaefer’s third talk, however, was the real reason he came to OSU. Today, he was speaking to OSU’s Supercomputer Center and Department of Chemistry for their annual Pitzer Lecture. His topic? “From Charge Transfer Complexes to Gallium Nitride Nanorods.” Dr. Schaefer exemplifies the kind of Christian scholar that ESN seeks to encourage and equip. I’m not talking about his accomplishments – few of us will count Nobel Laureates as our good friends – but the combination of his love for science and his love for Christ.

After the luncheon, I was able to have coffee with Seth Aldridge, the campus minister for OSU’s Student Christian Fellowship. SCF has attracted a number of honors students and high achievers to its ministry. Seth and I brainstormed about ways that ESN can connect students with Christian faculty at OSU.

I hope that Columbus will become a regular stop for me in the spring. All of the right elements are there – committed Christian faculty, campus ministers like Seth and Jonathan, a critical mass of Christian students heading to graduate school – but it will depend greatly on my level of financial support. If you’d like to make a year-end gift to my ministry, click here. All new or increased gifts, up to $4,000, will be matched in full, so this is a great time to increase your impact.

Why Greenways matter

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The Enquirer is reporting that the Boone County Greenways plan has been scrapped. This was the work of the Northern Kentucky Tea Party. Here’s their statement:

“This goes against all three pillars of the Northern Kentucky Tea Party, which are fiscal responsibility, limited government and free markets,” said Willie Schadler, the organization’s president. “It is fiscally irresponsible to continue with this study.”

Fiscal responsibility? Boone County is one of the fastest growing counties in Kentucky.  It’s responsible to plan for parks and recreation now, rather than waiting until property values make it cost-prohibitive. Could New York City build Central Park today?  It would be impossible: the land is worth billions on the open market.

Photo by hubertk via Flickr

Your Tax Dollars at Work: Idlewild Park

Your Tax Dollars at Work: Idlewild Park

Limited government? How about good government? As Boone County grows, families will need places to walk and play.  Too much of Northern Kentucky is already plagued with sprawl, poor planning, and traffic congestion.  Right now, Boone County’s residential areas are islands separated from one another.  We have great parks, the county fairgrounds, historic buildings, all within a mile or two of my home, and I can’t walk with my children to any of them.  Our roads were built for farmland: narrow, two-lane highways with deep ditches and no shoulders.  Those roads make no sense in residential areas.

Free markets? Free markets require structure. We couldn’t have private property rights without property laws, county records of deeds, or government maps and surveys.  None of our county roads were built by free markets. Boone County has zoning laws in many parts of the county limiting how the property can be used. Heck, we have laws that tell certain types of criminals where they can and cannot live. The question is whether we have “free markets.” The question is how do the common interests of the people intersect with the private interests of individuals.

Here’s why greenways are so important.

Paula Brehm-Heeger, who has lived in Hebron since 2002, applauded county leaders for trying to plan for the future.

“When we planned to move, we looked at Loveland (Ohio), which has the great bike trails, the Miami Whitewater area and Boone County,” Brehm-Heeger said. “Those were all communities that were looking forward and we wanted that.”

She said a recently installed sidewalk near her home was teeming with activity almost as soon as it was completed.

I have no idea what the Northern Kentucky Tea Party is so angry about in this case.  Greenways are a no-brainer: a low-cost way to dramatically improve the quality of life for our community and our children. This is an investment for the future.

How to Back Up Your WordPress Website, Automagically!

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I maintain several WordPress-based websites, all of which are, well, important to me, including this one, and it would seriously stink if something happened to any of them. Jason Tarasi posted a great how-to at ProBlogger.net with easy instructions for backing up a WordPress blog using the uber-simple WP-DB-Backup plug-in. I installed the plug-in, and my WordPress installations started emailing me daily copies of their databases. Awesome.

But what to do with these backup copies? Well, I have a Dropbox account (that’s my referral link) that I can use for safekeeping. Dropbox is a great app that lets you synch files and folders on your hard drive with an online file-sharing service, even keeping files synched across multiple computers if you want. You can share files and folders with others, so, for example, your wife and you could use it to work on your Christmas letter. Each time one of you made a change, it would be synched across all computers. It’s great for larger documents or things that are more complicated than Google Docs can handle.

So I have a place to store my WordPress backups, but I don’t really want to manually save the new backups every time they arrive. How could I make this process automatic and invisible?

After several failed attempts, here’s the process I created. Continue reading →

East Coast Bias in '80s Children's Movies

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Just finished watching the 1985 Sesame Street movie Follow That Bird with my kids, and I was amazed at the Children’s Television Workshop’s horrible depiction of the Midwest. Sesame Street, of course, is based on a New York City neighborhood, with a decidedly “urban” look and feel, but random slams against the Midwest were the last thing I expected when sitting down for a nice Friday night movie with the kids. At the beginning of the movie, Big Bird is “adopted” by a family of dodo birds living in “Ocean View, Illinois,” which appears to be somewhere near Peoria.

Of course, the movie isn’t all “down with Middle America.” The cause of Big Bird’s Midwestern exile? Miss Finch, an overeager social worker who thinks Big Bird needs help finding a “real family,” whether he wants it or not. She decides Bird’s fate in a Boston board room, alongside the rest of her philanthropically-minded friends. So perhaps it isn’t Midwesterners that CTW looks down upon: just non-New Yorkers. 🙂

A quick rundown of the Dodos and their town:

  • The Dodos are idiots (as in “dumb as a…”). They fail to recognize Big Bird, even asking Bird if he has seen a large yellow bird on his plane.
  • They live in “Ocean View,” with no ocean within 1,000 miles.
  • The Dodos live in a bland suburb, with every house identical (except for theirs – it’s identical to the others, but hoisted up on a pole like a giant birdhouse).
  • The Dodo kids (“Donnie” and “Marie”) have no imagination – literally. When Bird says, “Let’s pretend I’m Snow White,” Donnie replies, “But you’re bright yellow.”
  • The Dodos are kinda racist. When Bird gets a postcard from Snuggy, they “tisk tisk” his choice of a non-bird best friend.

In other words, Dodos complete the list of Midwestern stereotypes: dull, small-minded, uncreative. Anyone with talent or tolerance has long ago flown the coop, so to speak.

Eh, who cares? It’s an awesome movie. Go watch it immediately. Here’s a small mushroom-flavored taste.

http://player.ordienetworks.com/flash/fodplayer.swf