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).

Joel and I have had a variety of experiences with RC planes – most of them negative.  Three years ago we bought a HobbyZone AeroBird (while Joel was visiting us in Baltimore).  The day was windy and our experience motivated us to pray without ceasing for the duration of the first flight.  (The plane spiraled up to about 50ft high and got caught by a sudden gust from the south.  Yes, we did get it back, but our enthusiasm for flying on windy days was somewhat dampened.)

I think it was sometime last year I bought Joel an AeroBird, so we could fly together.  We had a couple of short flights last summer, but the big success came yesterday and today.

The shots aren’t that hot – screen shots from some video we took of one
of the flights – but you get the idea: plane in air – plane no longer flying a minute and a half later and
(smiling) person carrying plane (Joel) – must have been happy landing.

Lately we’ve also been finding out more about the Meyer-side genealogy.  We know names of my grandparents, maiden name of my fraternal grandmother.  We also found out that there was some American Indian blood mixed in on my dad’s side – probably Cherokee, but we’ll have to track that down (if we can).

I like to wrap up my days (nights?) by flipping through the blogs of
the people I love to see if something new has popped up that I haven’t
seen yet.  Sometimes I have to laugh at myself, though.  My
blog link (blink?) is in the list with the others and sometimes I catch
myself clicking on the link and wondering if there is anything new on
my page.

One of the advantages of having your work as your hobby is that you get
to do it all the time.  Of course, the disadvantage is that you
have to do it all the time.

One of the enjoyable sides of statistics this fall has been shifting
over from Splus to R.  R is open source (read “FREE”), but
maintained by some very smart people (who provide a lot of code for
Splus as well).  I can do nearly everything I want in R and I
don’t have to fight with the Splus license manager to be able to do
it.  There are a few occasional perks of Splus that I miss – but
since they’ve decided in the last couple of years to focus on the
people with the big bucks (financial institutions, drug companies), I
don’t really miss much.

Today I’ve been working on a project that involves looking at two
cognitive tests that were done in several hundred women who were at
different stages of the menopausal transition.  The tests work
like this.  An interviewer reads a brief story and then asks the
interviewee to name as many story elements as they can.  There are
12 elements that are scored, so everyone gets a score from 0 to
12.  This is called immediate recall.  The interview goes on
to other items and then, a few minutes later, the interviewer repeats
the question (this is called delayed recall – sneaky, isn’t it?) and
notes how many elements the interviewee can remember.  Got
it?  On average the women in our study could name about 10 of the
12 elements.  Pretty good!

The part of the brain that is working when we do immediate and short
term memory tasks like this involves the prefrontal cortex (which is in
the front of our brains).  This part of our brain happens to have
more estrogen receptors (ie things that make cells sensitive to the
presence or absence of estrogen), so it is reasonable to think that
this type of memory might reasonably be enhanced (or not) as a woman’s
estrogen balance changes during the menopausal transition.

Everyone wants to know if there are differences in the level of
functioning and, if so, what those are.  Some colleagues out in CA
had been working with this data and had not found any significant
differences.  I recently started working with the same measures
(immediate and delayed recall), looking at the relationship between
various genotypes found in blood samples and scores on our memory
tests, and realized that there was a better way to approach the
analysis of these measures of immediate and delayed recall.  My
colleagues were thinking of them as a continuous score on a scale of 0
to 12 and examining means and standard deviations as if they were
normally distributed (as in “bell-shaped curve”).  The problem
with that approach is that there is a clear “ceiling effect” – that is,
you can’t get more than 12.  So, you could have a standard
deviation of 2 and a mean of 10, but you would never be able to get 2
standard deviations above the mean (10+2*2=14), because the maximum
score is 12.  That’s bad, because in a normal distribution you
would expect to see about 15% of your people have scores above 12.

Another way of thinking about it is like 12 flips of a coin.  How
is that?  Well, there are 12 elements and the interviewee either
succeeds (heads) or fails (tails) to name each one.  Statisticians
call this kind of collection of successes and failures a binomial
random variable.  There is the tacit assumption that the
probability of successfully naming each element is the same, which is
not strictly true.  (Some are probably easier to remember.) 
But as a famous statistician (I think it was Dr. George Box) once
pointed out:  “All statistical models are wrong!  But some of
them are useful.”  In this case thinking of the test results as a
binomial random variable is more useful than thinking about it as
having a normal distribution with a mean and standard deviation.

Cut to the chase.  When you treat the results using means and
standard deviations, there are no significant differences. 
However, when you treat it as flips of a coin, there are significant
differences, even after you adjust for a whole bunch of other things
that are also related to cognitive functioning (age, education,
ethnicity, BMI, poor health, vasomotor symptoms, poor sleep, somatic
symptoms, mood symptoms, estrogen levels and FSH levels).  The
primary finding will be that there is a small but significant decrease
in the number of elements named by women who are post-menopausal
compared to those who are late peri-menopausal.  And the effect is
significant at the 0.001 even after adjusting for multiple comparisons,
which is statistician-speak for “WOW!”.

It’s Monday night and I’m back on the farm.  The rate of change in
my environs seems strange:  breakfast yesterday in Bar Harbor,
Maine, supper in New York City, breakfast and lunch in NYC today and
supper tonight in Joliet.  I’ll catch up to myself sometime later
this week.

There is normally a let down after the major goal of vacation has been
accomplished (okay – yes, this was a men’s vacation).  We climbed
one mountain and drove up another on Saturday and, as you might say,
things went downhill after that.

In need of some new goal or objective, I remembered that Joel might be
able to use a new futon.  We batted the idea back and forth and
decided to make a raid on IKEA somewhere between Bar Harbor and
NYC.  We identified a likely location. (In New Haven, CT, the IKEA
is right next to I95.)  We drove pretty much straight through from
Maine to New Haven.  In less than an hour we had found and
purchased the futon and cover, packed it into the HHR and hit the road
again.  I looked like something out of the godfather, sitting the
in the back seat behind the driver, with my reading light on (because
the futon took up the whole right-hand side of the car, back to
front).  Then we had an additional goal: the dropoff point for the
rental car was only open until 10pm.  But, by 9:15 we had
completed our tasks and were sitting down to a well-deserved dinner at
a local establishment.

The vacation was a huge success.  EOWANE 2005 is now in the books.

EOWANE pt. III

Today we spent the middle of the day at Acadia National Park, hiking and driving and enjoying the beauty.  For more of that, see Joel’s blog.

My part is documenting the culinary adventures.  For lunch today we stopped at a sandwich shop called Michelle’s Brown Bag Cafe.  Joel had a sandwich and a bowl of squash soup.  I had a turkey wrap with feta cheese that was good.  As you can see from the photos, it was pleasant both inside and out.

Tonight’s “work” was of a different nature.  It was Saturday night … and everybody knows what a true Meyer eats on Saturday night (if he can get it):  PIZZA!!!

Joel located a promising pizza shop called Rosalie’s.  It had some very high number on someone’s scale and we were not disappointed (at least in the sense that, if we couldn’t have the real thing – Becky’s pizza – it was a pleasant imitation).  Anyway, we had a pleasant meal, walked around town a little, found a book shop, picked up a couple of paperbacks and headed back to our room.

EOWANE continues …

(Eating Our Way Across New England)

Today we left Lowell, Mass., connected with I95 again and headed north.  Of course, we didn’t do that before we had a chance to have breakfast (complete with a cup of coffee).  The weather was again better than ever.  We had some initial traffic leaving Mass. (construction work on a bridge) but after that it was pretty smooth sailing.  We swapped seats once we got to Maine and I took a stint at the wheel.

Maine is beautiful.  Lots of water and trees.  A few of the trees are turning, but most of them are still wearing summer greens.  Now, on to the important information…

We stopped for a late lunch.  In fact, we had one false start.  We walked into a little cafe in a quaint Maine town, moved over to a table to sit down and just as we moved into position, one of the waitresses came over to point out that it was after 2pm and they weren’t serving lunch any more.

A few miles down the road we found the sandwich shop in the next picture.  The food was good and we enjoyed a peaceful, mid afternoon (3pm) lunch.  It seems like we have some kind of deficit.  The acronym by which today’s lunch place wants to be known is obvious from it’s name: Market on Main’s sandwiches.  After lunch we crossed the street to a toy shop and then next to the toy shop for a used book and coffee shop.  (What lunch is complete without a cup of coffee?)

What kind of vehicle are we cruising the coast in?  Here’s a photo of the Chevy HHR we’re in:

Of course, the pairing my new 175W power inverter with Joel’s laptop and an FM wireless transmitter to the car’s radio provides access to Joel’s entire (and legal) music collection.  I took a picture of the laptop, but it’s not really newsworthy.

Around 6pm we got into Bar Harbor and our motel.  As you can tell, we’ve got wireless internet in the room.  Joel’s tapping away on his keyboard as I do the same on mine (with SciFi running in the background).  After checking in and getting our stuff into our room we headed for town.  After walking around and stretching our legs a little, we headed to the outskirts of town and Jack Russell’s Steak House and Brewery.  The beer was good and so were the steaks.

Tomorrow we’re going to hike to our heart’s content and our legs sorrow.  Can’t wait to see Acadia National Park. 

It must be vacation!

I flew this morning to LaGuardia airport in New York City.  Joel picked me up in the car he had just rented (this sounds like a plot from Ocean 11 or some such conspiracy movie).  We headed north and out of the city.

After driving for awhile we realized two things 1) the traffic was no longer like the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago at 7am and 2) we were hungry.  Given both need and opportunity, we took an exit into Connecticut and ended up at the location you see in the first photo –  (D’Angelo’s Subs).

Recovering our Fahr-drang (very loosely translated “driving drive”), we raced onward, crossing state after state lickety-split (which isn’t so hard, when the states are roughly the size of an overgrown Illinois County).  (Okay, so we went from NY to Connecticut to Massachusetts.)  Our onward surge only spent itself as we neared our destination for the evening, Lowell Mass.  (Famous for a variety of reasons, including being mentioned in a James Taylor song about a single mom with three kids who worked in a mill.)

The next step in this year’s “Eat your way across New England” was a restaurant called “Mama’s Italian Grill” in Chelmsford, Mass.  (See next two pictures…)

The “Mama” who waited on us was kind enough to take a picture of us shortly before we ate too much.  Unfornately, she thought she had to back up just about into the next room so that she could be sure she had us both in the same picture.  A side effect of this approach was that the center of the picture was not on the table or one of us, in fact, not even in the same building.  The Staples sign is almost in focus, which is more than can be said for the good food on the table or the two smiling faces bracketing it.  Hmm… I guess you can get a sense of the ambience at any rate.

I should add that Mama’s was an interesting place.  When we got there (about 7pm), things seemed to be quieting down.  There was what appeared to be a group of regulars gathered around the bar (which was very clean and not very dark).  However, as the evening wore on, the size of the crowd gradually increased, giving the lie to our assumption that the evening was on the down swing.  But we were on the down swing, and so we swung ourselves out of our booth and trudged slowly to the car … which really deserves a blog of its own.  Just a teaser:  it’s a Chevy HHR with about 1000 miles on it, so really new.  More on that some other time.

Tomorrow we’re off to Bar Harbor, Maine (affectionately known as BaHaBa, and not to be confused with BaHmBg).  Should be great – weather is stellar and BaHaBa is on the same peninsula (or was it island?) with Acadia National Park.  Can’t wait to see it.  Tomorrow night we stay at a Best Western in BaHaBa.

The “currently listening” is what we used for road trip music today.  Tomorrow we have Joel’s laptop, an FM transmitter and my inverter (nothing like a bit o’ tech to spice up a road trip) to provide music for us as we rocket through a couple more states.

Why is it that an approaching vacation invariably results in late
nights?  Trying to get things done before being gone for a few
days, I guess.  Reached a temporary goal in one project last night
and almost another for a different project tonight.  Still need to
proof read and go back and verify results.  One of the greatest
frustrations to a writing team is to have the results changing again
and again as a result of small errors (flies in the ointment).  It’s worth it to invest the time to repeat analyses
until the chance of having bad code or a copyist’s error approaches 0.