An object on water displaces its mass; an object in water displaces its volume. Formerly, the anchor was on the boat, displacing its mass from the lake. Once submerged, it would displace its volume instead. The difference in the level of the lake would be the volume of the anchor minus the mass divided by the density of the anchor. Since Anchors are by their very nature denser that water, the anchor would displace more water while on the boat that it would while in the water. The water level of the lake would fall.
It is often said that those who fail to learn the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat them. I've been teaching a class on the book of Jeremiah; two weeks ago, we looked at the people of Jerusalem putting their faith in the existence of the temple. "Yes," nod the collective heads in my class, "the Israelites should have put their trust in God, not in some building." I suppose I shouldn't have been caught off guard this week when somehow the comment was made: "Well, we are a people set apart - the church of Christ I mean. It's important to wear that name." But it isn't. Isn't that just what we talked about the week prior?
I've come to the conclusion that some people are never going to get past "the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord" in their thinking. Oh, we could replace the sign out front, perhaps it could say, "Meeting place for Christians" or something, but it wouldn't matter. There would still be people who would find some object in which they can misplace their trust. That's why we have Jeremiah (and the rest of the Old Testament) though - it shows us that while people never change, we have the lessons of the past to draw on. And if we choose to learn from them, we can avoid making the same mistakes ourselves.
Good thoughts! It's hard to understand how people can be soo dogmatic about the name "church of Christ" when there are so many other names that the church is also called in the NT. I just don't get it.
I can't decide if our clients have a lot of faith in our programming skills, if they just don't really understand much about computers or if it's just a kind of general cluelessness, but it's funny how in the last week my boss has asked me about a few requests that clients have and after considering them for a while my conclusion is: "Computers can't read minds." On the other hand, it seems like we're getting closer every day to being able to read specific nerve impulses and use them as data input, so perhaps a computer that can respond to more precise intentions isn't that far off. Kinda reminds me of Neuromancer.
It's a field that has a lot of application, too. Beyond just helping disabled people by providing new frontiers in robotics and prosthetics, I wonder if you could eventually put a chip in your head that would replace your keyboard and mouse. I'd buy that.
In the brief time the television was on yesterday, someone being interviewed made a comment along the lines of, "The biggest problem with America today is that we're divided." I usually just ignore things like that, but that got me thinking about the history of the United States. Haven't we always been divided? Whigs and Tories were divided over rebelling against British rule. Whigs and Democrats were divided over expansion of U.S. territory (remember Manifest Destiny?) Then we were divided over slavery, and then again over segregation. We were divided over whether or not to get involved in the Great War, and then again over our level of involvement in WWII. We've been divided over the Korean and Vietnam wars. Is there ever a time when we've actually been united?
This got me thinking about another topic that has always intrigued me, the parallels between the Roman Republic/Empire and the modern U.S. In this case, cultural diversity was both a strength and a weakness of Rome. They borrowed from just about everyone they ran into, and while they imposed some parts of their own culture on conquered territories, they left a lot of things intact as well. Perhaps the description fits us as well as it did Rome: "In that you saw the feet and toes, partly of potter's clay and partly of iron, it will be a divided kingdom; but it will have in it the toughness of iron, inasmuch as you saw the iron mixed with common clay."
