Popcorn has the status of a tradition in our family.  Microwave popcorn is okay in a pinch, but for serious munching it falls somewhere below second rate.  How did things get this way?

When I married Becky, I discovered I had married the world's best popcorn maker.  Popped in a pan, topped with real butter (and much too much salt in the opinion of my Preventive Medicine colleagues, I'm sure) and served in "rauhen Mengen" (German for "huge quantities").  This was life big-time.

There aren't many things I've ever learned to cook well.  Hmm ... actually, I can't think of anything I could claim to have cooked well.  But I made sure that Becky showed me how to make popcorn her way.  In fact, over the course of 22 years I managed to destroy an aluminum pressure cooker we got as a wedding present.  How?  One pot of popcorn at a time.

I am such a popcorn fiend, that early in our married life I took over the responsibility for making the family tradition.  Now the height of levity in this regard came some time in the last year when Becky, Becca and I were sitting in the living room one night and I expressed an interest in repeating a family tradition.  My wife, who loves me more than life, offered to do it for me.  Becca, caught off guard by Becky's offer, turned to her and said, "Oh, do you know how to make popcorn, too?"

It's Sunday night - time for the winddown of the weekend before the week starts up again.

I was reviewing a paper for a journal tonight.  I really liked the idea behind the paper and they had a great dataset.  But they really botched the analysis.  The reason for it is not that hard to understand, so let me try to explain it.  I can't tell you about the paper, so let me choose an imaginary example:  the number of parking tickets written on a given day.

If someone asked you, "Does the number of parking tickets written on a given day in the average American town vary by day of week?", you'd look both directions and wonder where the hidden camera was.  (Does anybody remember Alan Fundt and Candid Camera?)  If you got beyond that, you might think: I could get this info for a number of towns and pool the info.  But the towns differ in size, so how can I pool information over towns that somehow takes account of the size of the town?  I know, why don't I calculate for each town and each day the expected number of parking tickets for that day.  For example, assume Bigtown had 313 days on which tickets were written and 31,300 issued tickets that year.  You'd expect 100/day.  If they had 150 on the fourth of July, that would be what percent higher than expected?  (OK: (150 - 100)/100 = 50% above expected.)  That makes sense.

Now, does it make sense to pool these relative percentages over towns?  You wouldn't want to pool just the numbers, because then Morris, IL, (population 12,000) would be dwarfed next to Chicago, Milwaukee, etc.  So, you might hope using relative proportions would make sense.

But here's the problem: what if Podunk only issues on average 1 ticket a day.  (Imagine Podunk as being rather like Mayberry, USA, on Andy Griffith.)  On July 4 they might issue 50 to all those out of town people who don't know how to behave in a small town.  This would be a 4900% increase in one day!  Do you think that should carry the same weight as a change from 100 a day 150 a day in Bigcity or more like the difference between 100 a day and 5000 a day?

It's probably safe to assume that you'd think there is a difference between 50 on the fourth of July in Podunk and 5000 in Bigcity (or even 149 in Bigcity).  Relative proportions just aren't a useful way in combining information across cities that differ widely in size.

The paper I was reviewing was not about parking tickets, but about deaths.  So, we need to be both careful and respectful in the way we analyze the data.  We need to combine in an appropriate fashion so that the conclusions we draw reflect the variability in the data.  The people who wrote the paper were calculating these intermediate statistics (relative proportions) and then treating them as if they were infinitely accurate - and ignoring the fact that knowing about the deaths of a few people is not as valuable as knowing about the deaths of hundreds or thousands of people.

For those who are curious, Poisson regression would be a better (and more honest) way to combine information across cities.  The estimates produced in that fashion would reflect the fact that larger counts (and larger denominators!) give us more information.

We have an adult class at church that is looking at the way Jesus touched the lives of people.  We chatted today about something that occurred while Jesus was talking to people in the house He lived in at Capernaum.  Jesus had a home that He consistently came back to at Capernaum.  One day He was talking with a group that filled His home.  Some men approached the house carrying a friend of theirs on a stretcher.  They quickly realized they couldn't get to Jesus simply by going through the door, because the entire house was filled with people.  So they got this crazy idea:  we'll make a hole in the roof and lower him down in front of Jesus!  If we can just get him to where Jesus is, we know Jesus will touch and heal him.

Imagine having a front row seat to a teacher, who even His enemies feared because He was such a captivating speaker.  Suddenly you start feeling dust and dirt filtering down - and then a torrent of dirt and roofing material collapses upon you as a hole in the roof opens above!  I am guessing that they were not happy campers.

Jesus was teaching - who dared to interrupt!  Who dared to rip apart the roof - didn't they know that would make a mess and require costly repairs?  How would people react today?  I'll sue this guy!  This is my house!  He can't do this to me!  I'll make him pay!

Jesus knew that the true value of real estate is sum total of the lives of the people that are loved and changed within its walls.  The hole in the roof was adding value to the house!  So He healed the man and sent him on his way.

We talked about the importance of using our homes to show love to other people.  That's the real key to increasing the value of our real estate.

So here I am in my office, hiding out, while the house is taken over by women!  No, the door is not locked.  But from the volume that is sometimes attained on the other side of it, maybe it should be.  Becky and Becca have three other mother/daughter pairs over and all indications are that the evening has been a success.

A few weeks ago I told the story about an analysis I did that I got excited about.  The sequel to it is that it looks like, though it was a better way to do things, the final message wasn't much different.  The major players have to decide whether it is worth spending an extra month of spare time stolen here and there to rewrite the paper.  Based on the straw poll so far I'd guess the majority will vote for efficiency of action.  No problem.  You can't know until you try something whether it will turn out to produce a really interesting result.  It was good work.  In some sense that is it's own reward.

Oh - and the consolation is actually that the "other paper", the one I was working on with a different colleague when I came up with the way to analyze this data, did find some neat stuff and will see the light of day.

A group of us at church are taking a look at how Jesus touched the lives of people.  At the very start of His preaching, Jesus began inviting some (or all?) of the people He talked to personally to be come "fishers of men".  What do you suppose they thought He meant?

They didn't think Jesus meant "evangelism", because that idea didn't exist yet in the same way it does now.  It didn't mean "invite people to church", because there were no churches.  It didn't mean "invite people to synagogue", because the synagogues weren't sure they were in favor of what Jesus was doing.

I can only see two things they could have imagined under "fishers of men". 
1) Someone who helps other people change the direction their life is headed. 
2) Someone who gets other people tied in to what Jesus is doing.

Over time I'm sure they accumulated a fuller picture of what Jesus meant by "fishers of men".  The first time Jesus invited Peter to become a "fisher of men" (Mark 1:17) it was intriguing enough that Peter left the nets that day and followed Jesus for a time - but then he went back to fishing.  Some time later (Luke 5:1+) Peter is back in the boat and Jesus comes to him again.  At the end of that experience Jesus tells Peter that he will stop what he is doing (fishing for fish) and from then on be a fisher of men.  And he does.

But whatever it was that those early disciples understood under "fishers for men", it was enough to catch their attention, get them to turn from the direction they were headed, and start following Jesus. 

What do you think they understood?
Why was it enough to get them headed a new direction?

I spent a few minutes with my plane this afternoon.  There was a breeze from the east, which always makes flying a little more interesting with a plane as light as the AeroBird.  I was able to do a few circles before something seemed to change in the tail section and it began choosing its own direction, which unfortunately included clipping a tree followed by burying its nose section in the soft mud of the creek.  (Yes, there are worse places it could have buried its nose.)  It seems a rubberband, which provided back pressure for the tail section, had snapped and left the plane mid-flight.  After replacing it and wiping the nose off I headed into the skies again and turned a few more circles before coming down for the last time today.

The house will be a little quieter tonight.  Becky headed for the airport with Marco to pick up Anne and Jon, on their way home from skiing.  I'm sure Anne will be glad to see him again - and the affection will be returned on the other side as well.  It was fun to have him here.

Joel set up a directory on our family web site where I can store documents for the adult class I teach at church.  That's pretty handy.  I downloaded FTP Commander from Tucows, which makes it really easy to shift files back and forth and rename directories.  OK - in the interests of honesty I did manage to gum up the index.html file Joel wrote to drive the thing.  But I'm confident he'll have "Limping Ox" up and dancing in no time (which is a reference to a figure in a skit by the comedian who did "The Hippy Dippy Weather Man", but whose name escapes me for the moment).