Done!!!

I just finished my last exam. Ever. Exciting?!?! Yeah I thought so!!

I love Don Cherry

State of the Union

Just for you Lynnette :-P

I'm alive.

Almost done my final term of school!!

Life is good.

Soo...The other night I was watching the State of the Union address and I was struck by a few things. The environmental stuff is a bit scary because everyone is just getting on the bandwagon and forgetting to take their brains with them and think through this stuff and how it is going to affect the country.

Another thing that I found a bit worrisome was the "stimulation package" that is supposed to help reduce the effects of the coming recession. Why am I worried about it when it involves things like tax cuts (which I like :)? simply because tax cuts without corresponding budget cuts are not tax cuts at all but merely tax deferrals. Also, stimulation ultimately won't correct the economic problems that have led to a recession, and they may in fact make it worse in the long run. The government can't create jobs and productivity (i.e. as much as some people would like you to believe to the contrary, the government is not God, and so it cannot create wealth out of nothing...all it can do is artificially redistribute(and waste)wealth). The whole speech talked about how we need to trust the people, so lets trust them to do what is best. Let people make their own decisions without clouding reality over with an artificial 'stimulation package' that is only going to fool people into doing something that really doesn't make sense. This may prop up the economy for a period of time; however, eventually people will catch on to what is really going on at which point the recession will hit harder than ever.

Oh and a little advice here. Don't believe the talking heads on TV who try to tell you that you have a moral responsibility to spend money in order to spend our way out of a recession. Investing your money stimulates the economy just as much as buying a new computer with it does. Either way you are contributing to new jobs since that invested money is used by someone to start a business or build a house or something else that stimulates economic growth. You have no moral duty to spend your way out of a recession, and savings can help you get through it. Don't forget that savings are a good thing to have :)

One other note: Stop and think about what aid to Africa really means in terms of ending poverty.

It wasn't all negative though. I really liked Bush's stand again 'Pork barrel' or special interest funding.

There I posted. Happy? :)

Dave Westy

How can I get this open?

A little educational video for y'all on how to open a wine bottle when there is no corkscrew to be found....engineering style :)

so ya

I don't post on here anymore. How sad is that? y'all miss me don't you? yeah yeah, I don't want to hear it.

Well I'm getting close to going back to school soon. My last 8 months of school and then I'll be DONE 8-) wow. I'm not going to know what to do with myself. In the meantime I'm working away at Phil's Milwrighting doing some millwright stuff and building fences. Its a good job and I"m outside all the time so know I have very blond hair and a nice little tan. Hmm yeah, nothing else too exciting going on in my life. Greg on Corrie on the other hand have something very exciting. They just got ENGAGED!!!! Yeah I know I can hardly get my mind around it either. Congratulations guys, I"m so exited for you both.

Well there you go you know what's going on in my life, don't you just feel so special now?

Dave Westy

Its that time of year

Hmm...Time to post something on here again I think. Just a quick one though cause I want to get to bed and get in a good night's sleep. So what is going on in my life right now?

Well, I am working for a fencing company for the summer putting up fences (duh). Lots of work and exercise. (maybe I'll be able to put on some muscle this summer) Hey I can dream can't I? Don't take that away from me. Other than that I ain't up to too much. Playing some sports whenever I can and always staying out of trouble *innocent grin* Oh and I"m driving the 'boat' (aka my parent's big red van). Lots of fun :)

Bed time for me though. nighty night y'all

Dave Westy

School's out work must start

All the exams are over, the goodbye's are said and then the harsh reality sinks in. Davey boy you don't have a job yet. I'm so glad to be done with school for now and not have to lose my mind studying for exams but I need to find me a job. School doesn't pay for itself as I've found out and so if you know of anyone who is looking for someone let me know because I'm looking for work. I'd like something in the chemical engineering field for the experience, but I'll work in other areas too. Its hard to pay the tuition without having money in the bank you know.

In other news, the weather is beautiful and spring has once again sprung. Baseball season is coming up and hockey playoffs are here. Ahh yes, job or no job, life is still good.

Dave Westy
....job hunting....

Done

Guess who's done classes for the year? Yup. ME!!!!!!!!!!! two more weeks of exams and then its summer freedom :D. I still need a job though...

Back to the books
Dave Westy

Done

Guess who's done classes for the year? Yup. ME!!!!!!!!!!! two more weeks of exams and then its summer freedom :D. I still need a job though...

Back to the books
Dave Westy

Hello World

I am busy.
Too much school work.
Two more weeks of class.

The end.

Pictures

Ok since I know not everyone has facebook I'll post a few pictures of the trip on here too.

Lydia and Kara on the way there

Yup Tim has his shirt off. The temperatures were amazing

Derek chipping away at the wall

My aim wasn't so good

Kara and Mike cleaning mortar off the bricks. We cleaned about 2500 bricks

Grinding the mortar from between the bricks.

Reedy River falls in downtown Greenville

Group picture by George's (not quite) Redneck truck

I'm still not quite sure why Sarah thought it would be a good idea to buy a toy that can pinch people from a distance.

Wide awake and full of energy

Sarah also has more pictures up on her blog as does Ruth.

Back in Canada

Why does it have to be so cold in Canada? I just got back from South Carolina and I don' t like the weather up here at all. Who wants to go back there with me?

It was a very fun and successful trip. We accomplished a lot of work on the new seminary building and it was great to see how hard everyone worked and the way everyone worked together and pulled their share of the load and didn't complain. We got a lot done and I'm very proud of everyone that went with. Y'all were a ton of fun and I'm glad we could get so much done and still have a blast. I posted a bunch of pictures up on Facebook and I'm sick of uploading pictures right now so if you want to see them head on over there. And while you're one Facebook check out my 'relationship status' Suffice it to say I am a happy man. :D

That's all for now folks.

Dave Westy

Its cold

I'm sitting here in the kitchen studying and after a while I noticed that my toes and ears where starting to feel a little cold so I took a look at the weather and noticed that its -27 with the windchill today. Maybe that explains the 2 inch layer of ice on the inside of my window. Well I better get back to the studying (after I find my gloves).

Its me

Well I am alive and well just very busy with school and homework and all that stuff. It really is quite a challenge to keep finding reasons to put off the homework. Well not really, but I am taking a few minutes to post on here just so that y'all can keep up to date on Davie. Between classes and homework and volleyball and hockey I still manage to find some fun. I'm heading to Woodstock for the conference tomorrow and the trip down to SC is coming up soon. We are still trying to locate a full sized van for that so if you know of anyone that has one we can beg, borrow or steal. let me know. Other than that I have a bunch of midterms coming up next week and an assignment to finish up right now. *sigh* I better get at it. Have a good week!

Dave Westy

My life

So, I've decided to come out of hiding for a few minutes and post something on here. I've been pretty busy lately with classes, homework and all the rest of it that comes with being back in school. I'm playing volleyball once again this term and so far we have won our first two matches in two games straight. Other than that I'm doing exciting stuff like calculating the Nernst Potential in an electrolytic solution and other such interesting calculations. Don't you wish you were an engineer? Of course I also have to start looking for work for the summer term so if you have an leads you know where to send them. Well its time to get back to the books so I can finish up my assignment and go snowboarding this afternoon!!!

Dave Westy

Snow!

Its been snowing here all week. Who wants to go snowboarding?!?

Random stuff about me.

ok I've been tagged so I'll do this.

6 random facts about me:

1) I have 7 brothers and only 1 sister

2) I don't like chocolate

3) I average 3 hours and 45 minutes a month talking on my cell phone

4) My front two teeth are mainly fake

5) I pay $17 an hour for the classes I take at school (Approximately)

6) I am very mad at my school right now because in spite of the (large amounts) of perfectly good money I fork over to them every semester they can't do simple things like keep the jobmine website up and running.

Let's do some brick work!

For the first time engineering students at Waterloo actually get a reading week! in the past we have only gotten 2 days off while the rest of the school had a whole but that has finally been changed. So this led me to ask myself "self what are you going to do with you week off?" and it hit me: Go down to South Carolina and do some volunteer work for Greenville Presbyterian Seminary of course! They acquired an old school building a little while back that is currently being renovated so that the campus will be able to move there since the current building has rather limited capacity. However, this building needs a lot of work before it is ready to be used and that, my friend, is where you and I come in. Right now the building needs to have some brick-work done. The grouting on the bricks is not very good and needs to be replaced so I'm putting together a group of volunteers to go down there and help out with that. It will be a great help for the seminary as well as a good experience, plus its going down to South Carolina in February...Bonus! My reading week is from February 17-24 and so I hope to travel down for those dates and help out. Oh and it gets better: You too can have this incredible experience, just let me know you are interested and I'll get you all the details.

...back to class
Dave Westy

New Years Etc

Well it is now 2007. The year has started off well with the traditional youth events in St. Thomas, and hopefully it will only continue to improve. We had Arthur Voaden Gym again this year and had some sweet volleyball going on and then we had the skating in Port Stanley again this year. I would also like to let you all know that it was at skating in Port Stanley 25 years that my mom and dad first met. If it wasn't for this great tradition I might not be writing this today. I wonder if anyone will be saying the same thing about this year 25 years down the road. Someone should figure out how many couples have gotten things rolling at St. Thomas new years activities. Or maybe I'll just think about all the fun us non-couples had. Shoot I even made $2 ;)

It was a fun time indeed. Ushering in the new year with a bang and not enough sleep and then getting sick as a reward. Oh well, I'm back in school now trying to get myself back into 'study mode.' Its tough to do but it feels good to be back in the old apartment again. Well I have class bright and early tomorrow (1:30pm :-P don't you just love first week?) so I'm heading off to bed. Have a blessed week!

Dave Westy

States

I've made another pilgrimage down to the States and or course it was a total blast. It is so good to see old friends again and renew old acquaintances and use lots of tp :) its was tons of fun just hanging out and playing games and doing some other stuff that I will refrain from telling you just inc ase any cops read this blog :P I haven't even left yet and I already feel like coming back. Oh and did I mention the Beamer my good friends Re and Greg gave me for free? Awesome times! Here are some pictures:

This is my new beamer behind those studly young men

Cheers!...

Rudolf isn't so lonely anymore

What kind of holiday would it be without breaking something?

A few of us crazy ppl

Lots of fun I tell you.

Hi

Just wanted to let you know that I am alive. Christmas is such a busy time of year especially when your car breaks down and you are working 11 hours a day and you have a christmas party of some sort to go to about every other day and you have to pack up all your stuff so that you can be cleared out of your room by the end of the week and you are flying down to the states for a few days on a pretty much last minute idea and you have to figure out all the paperwork involved in taking a car back from said flight down to the States. Yes indeed. Not much time to post, but after the holidays are over, I will have much to post on. I need to get pictures from people too, but right now I need to go to bed. 4:30 up tomorrow. Yippee.

Is God a Killjoy?

I'm reading a book called the Ten(der) Commandments by Ron Mehl and it has really made me stop and think so I though I would share some of the gleanings I've gotten from it so far with you.

So often when people think of God and the bible they see someone who is a killjoy. They read the Ten Commandments and the hear rattling chains and clanking prison doors. They see these Commands as the harsh, legalistic, confining commandments of a god who finds some kind of sadistic joy in watching people suffer as they try to keep his laws. Is this really the case? Are the Ten Commandments a binding burden on us that God has put there just because he can?

Have you ever stopped and taken a moment to read through Exodus 19 in its lead up to the giving of the Ten Commands in Exodus 20? 'The Lord called to Moses out of the mountain, saying, "Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob, and tell the people of Israel: You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on Eagles' wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words that you shall speak to the people of Israel."' (Ex 19:3-6)Did you hear that? In his introduction to the Ten Commandments God talks about bearing his people up on eagles wings. The Lord was reminding them of how much he had done and how he had saved them from oppression and slavery. How can a God who loves his children so much that he will use an analogy like that of a mother eagle teaching her young to fly and making sure they don't get hurt, give unloving commands? No! God's commandments are expressions of his love and care and concern for his people. They aren't just some arbitrary laws that he has given to makes us unhappy, they are the loving words of a loving God. "I bore you up on eagles wings!"

love can come in many different shapes. It might come as a quick hug from a friend when you need it the most, it might come as a word of encouragement or a box of chocolates, or a love letter, or a blood soaked cross on Calvary's hill, or it might even show up written in stone. I might come as Ten Commandments. God has written us a love letter (the bible) and it is full of stories about him and those that follow him, it is full of wisdom and poetry, it is full of fantastic and glorious stories about what he is like, and it is full of advice. Loving advice. Fatherly advice. Perfect advice. Ten Commandment advice. Who wouldn't want to listen to commands like this?

Dilbert

Have you ever had this happen to you?



I love Dilbert!

Global Warming Part I: The Science?

This has been rattling around in my head for some time now, but as I was writing this up I found I had far too much to say for one post and so I've broken this down into a multi-part series. Part I is about the science behind the whole Global Warming fad.

Global warming has become the hot topic of the day. It seems hardly a day goes by that we don't hear something about it in the news and politicians are going on and on about it and what we should do about it. Usually this takes the form of regulating carbon emissions and many countries and states have already put in place restrictions on these emissions. A lot of people are very worried about global warming and what it will do to us all, so much so that a group of politicians got together and decided to enact something call the Kyoto Protocol which requires assenting nations to greatly reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. But what exactly is all the hype about? Should we really be getting all worked up about global warming and be spending trillions of dollars in an attempt to curb it? I think not. Let me explain why.

First of all it's poor science. Well actually to be more precise, it is not science at all. You see, science involves using the scientific method to arrive at a conclusion. This means it needs two key things: observable and measurable evidence, and repeatability. Thus for example something like the law of gravity is scientific. We can observe what happens when we drop something and we can measure the acceleration change and we can do this over and over and over again making us extremely certain that this law holds true.

Global warming on the other hand does not involve repeatability of any kind since it is merely conjecture about the the future. Also, It only involves evidence insofar as it extrapolates far beyond what is mathematically and scientifically acceptable, and it ignores true evidence in that most of the parameters in models have to be guessed at or estimated since we cannot now everything about our climate. It is far to complicated for even the most powerful computers to come even close to calculating the effect of every parameter, without even considering the fact that we are far from know what exactly all these effects are. Let me briefly illustrate this fact. There is something that is known as the butterfly effect I know that link is quite technical but the point of what I'm trying to show you is that potentially every flutter of a butterfly's wings can have a huge effect on the weather and thus unless our models account for every flutter of every butterfly's wing, ever bird that flies, every man and animal and plant and fish that moves on this earth, unless it accounts for every fluctuation in the sun's energy output, unless it accounts for all the forest fires and volcanoes, unless it accounts for so many parameters that we can never know, it will not be truly accurate. The question is how accurate do we have to be to have a reasonable model? How much stuff can we ignore and how much do we need to include? We don't know. We are missing the repeatability factor and so much of what is done is just educated guesswork. The parameters used and the weight they are given in the models is guesswork. The model designers use the parameters they think matter the most and then assign them the values they think they will have.

Now of course we don't need to know any of these things to be able to say that global warming will happen. If, for example, we were to look at global temperatures and say that for the last 500 year the temperature has always gone up be 0.01 degrees per year we would be able to say with a large degree of certainty that it will continue to do so. However to look at the approximately 30 years of data that we have indicating a global warming trend and extrapolate that into the next 100+ years is HORRIBLE science. I would receive an instant F if I tried to do anything of that sort on a lab or assignment. With only 30 years of data you cannot extrapolate more than 5 years into the future and still have any degree of certainty. For example if we were to look at the 30 year warming trend that occurred from ~1915-1945 we would predict that average world temps would be about 1 degree F higher than they are right now. We can't use the data that we have to extrapolate into the future until we have much more of it.

Therefore, we see that since the whole global warming theory relies on simplified parameter inputs (and therefore is highly susceptible to the preconceptions and assumptions of the person creating the model and entering the parameters) and also has no repeatability and cannot be verified or tested it is not true science.

Coming next: The consensus?

Get Firefox

Yesterday when I was looking at my blog at work I was forced to use Internet Explorer to view it and I noticed something about it. IE pretty much sucks of course, but I didn't realize just how badly it was displaying my blog, so if you are using IE and you see a messed up looking 097 across the top of it and you have to scroll down past all the posts to be able to see the links and stuff on my sidebar, I apologize. I apologize on behalf microsoft and the developers of IE, but I also apologize on my own behalf for not pointing you toward the solution seeing that about 60% of my pageviews come from people using IE. The solution you see is really quite easy. I could recode my whole page and fight with it until it works in IE, but I'm kind of lazy so I'll tell you how to fix it: Just GET FIREFOX. I have a link on my sidebar if you scroll down(WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY down if you're using IE :-P) Just click on that and you'll be able to download firefox for free.

I've been using Firefox to browse the web for about a year now and I've never looked back. Its a much better browser than Ineternet Explorer in pretty much every way so you should really get it. You'll be amazed at how much better my blog looks, and the rest of your surfing experience with be improved too :) Its worth the download.