There are only 1,000 Orochi people in Siberia

With approximately 200 million Punjabi Shaikhs (in India and Pakistan), 121 million Japanese, 54 million Brahmins (India), and 52 million Turks in desperate need of hearing the good news, why would anyone bother with the 1,000 Orochis? Not only are they small in number, but they make their home on the remote rivers of Tartar Strait in Russia's far east.

A Siberian Shaman.

Living in near-total isolation, the Orochi people long ago assumed the world to be full of dangerous spirits. In order to appease these gods, they created an elaborate system of rules and sacrifices. Fire and tigers were considered worthy of worship. In order for them to communicate with the many deities, they sought the assistance of mediators or shamans.

The Orochi people were right to seek a mediator. It is true that by their own merit or works they cannot gain the approval of God. What they did not know, and still have not heard, is that God Himself provided a mediator in Jesus Christ. Instead of consulting shamans, they can go directly to Him and find favor with the One True God.

(from Global Prayer Digest, March 2011)

Louis Agassiz, greatest paleontologist of Darwin's day, was a Creationist

Jean Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) is regarded as one of the greatest scientists of the 19th century. A founding father of the modern American scientific establishment, Agassiz was also a lifelong opponent of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Long before the mutational theory of evolution was popularized, Agassiz foresaw the overwhelmingly harmful nature of mutations and the inability of “selection” to produce new life forms. He recognized that the problem with Darwinism was not the survival of the fittest, but rather the arrival of the fittest. Agassiz knew, as did most all animal and plant breeders both then and today, that clear limits exist to variation and no known way exists to go beyond these limits in spite of 4,000 years of trying. Creationists today refer to this fact as variation in life limited to that existing within the Genesis kinds. The fact is, all mutations known to us cannot even begin to produce the variety required for molecules to mankind evolution, but rather they create monstrosities.

(for more, see Jerry Bergman, Louis Agassiz: Anti-Darwinist Harvard Paleontology Professor, Acts & Facts March 2011, Institute for Creaton Research)

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Germany to fund courses of Islam at universities

German education minister Annette Schavan ("Christian" Democratic Union party) has introduced state-funded Islamic courses at universities in Tübingen, Münster, and Osnabrück. These will provide full training for Muslims desiring to become imams. She says, "We want Islamic religion classes in as many schools as possible in Germany."

Pray against the foolish mindset that allows her and other European leaders to participate in the social and religious demise of their own cultures.

(from a Christian prayer letter, March 2011)

(also see Germany to offer state-funded Islamic study courses from 2011)

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Creation and our Moral Judgment show our need for God

By observing creation all around us, we should know that a living Creator God exists. In Creation, God displays his unlimited intelligence and power, and shows that he rules over all things in the exercise of his will.

Each one of us have a sense of moral judgment (even atheists), because God has placed that sense of morality in our hearts and minds. The living God has the right to set standards of behavior for us.

Our suppression of the self-evident about God in Creation, and our natural hatred of his standards of behavior show our need for reconciliation with him.

In light of our need, the news of Jesus Christ and the salvation he offers through his death on a cross and his resurrection from the dead  is truly good news. It alone provides a way for us to return to our Creator.

(based on The Testimony of Natural Revelation, by Timothy R. Stout)

(This commentary by Marko Malyj is based on the article published in Creation Matters, a publication of Creation Research Society, Volume 16, Number 1, January/February 2011, to appear at http://www.creationresearch.org/creation_matters/pdf/2011/CM16%2001%20low%20res.pdf.)

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Pray for Believers in Turkey

A prayer partner from North America recently toured a town in northeastern Turkey. A spa attendant at one hotel called her aside and quietly said "I'm a believer in Jesus." The young woman told our friend she learned about Christ through Christian satellite broadcasts. In speaking of her faith she said, "The people here are all Muslims, and no one else knows." Pray that she and other potential followers of the Lord in this extensive area will soon have opportunities to join in Christian worship.

---

In mid-January a Turkish believer in a city near Istanbul was stabbed multiple times by a cousin and suffered damage to one of his kidneys. His uncle had threatened to kill the young man because of his conversion to Christianity, and the cousin was probably acting on his behalf. The believer's own father agreed with this action and says he hopes his son dies. Pray that the young man will completely recover physically and emotionally, and that his family members will experience dramatic encounters with the Lord.

(from a Christian prayer letter, March 2011)

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Dinosaur Addiction can have Awful Consequences

This almost worshipful fascination in this generation is growing explosively. One wonders how many leading modern evolutionists were drawn into evolutionism and away from God through their childhood study of dinosaurs. Stephen Jay Gould, for example, testifies that he got his start that way, and he is probably today's leading spokesman for evolution.

(for more, see Henry M. Morris, Dragons in Paradise, Acts & Facts, March 2011, Institute for Creation Research)

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How to unbrick a PSP (Huh? what does that mean...)

Recently I bought my son a used Sony PSP 2000 for $50 from a friend as a birthday present. The next day he went to Gamestop, tried out Rapala Pro Bass Fishing, and the PSP stopped working. He brought it home to yours truly, a 50-something IT expert.

I know nothing about PSPs. Four hours of hard work, and this is what I figured out. The PSP was fully bricked!!!!

Huh? The verb "to brick" was not in my vocabulary two days ago. What does it mean, you ask? "When used in reference to consumer electronics, 'brick' describes a device that cannot function in any capacity (such as a device with damaged firmware). This usage derives from the fact that some electronic devices (and their detachable power supplies) are vaguely brick-shaped, and so those which do not function are useful only as actual bricks." This is according to Wikipedia.

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What happened? What did we do wrong? Well, looking back in hindsight, what we should have done first with the used PSP (or any such game device) was to update the firmware to the latest version. For a PSP, the instructions for doing this are at the Sony website here. (It wasn't easy to find the instructions, and they aren't so simple to follow, but that is another topic.)

Since we didn't know to do this ... when the Gamestop employee gave my son the Rapala Pro Bass Fishing game to try out, she should have asked whether his PSP firmware was up to date (of course she didn't). My son should have known not too, but he inserted the UMD disk for Rapala Pro Bass Fishing at Gamestop to try it out, it detected that the firmware on the PSP was an old version, 3.50. It said that it needed to upgrade to 4.0 or higher. I don't know if my son clicked OK (he should have known not too), or if it just went ahead and tried to do the upgrade. It tried looking for the upgrade on the memory card, on the UMD disk, and by way of connecting to the Internet (which wasn't enabled), and it couldn't find it. Meanwhile, it gave the helpful message:

 "Updating. Do not turn off the system, remove the memory stick or remove the ac adapter."

There was nothing he could do. He turned off the system. By doing so the PSP got bricked @$^& meaning that the boot firmware is corrupted and does not respond at all when you turn power on, so the display stays completely blank.

Enter the IT expert (me). After 2 hours I figured out what happened. I then figured out that 95% of PSP's (and other similar systems) can be unbricked!! There are dozens of youtube videos with suggestions how to do it, but the only method that really works is to shell out $32  and purchase a Pandora Battery and Magic Memory Stick. The PSP battery is not just a dumb battery, but has some electronics in it that somehow safeguards the firmware from being hacked. But when you are fully bricked you have to get around this anti-hack system. The Pandora Battery is a modified PSP battery that allows the system to boot from a memory stick instead of from the firmware. The Magic Memory Stick has custom code that downgrades your corrupted firmware to an older version. So when you go back to your old battery and memory stick and turn your PSP back on, the firmware will boot. This is called "unbricking" your system.

But I didn't want to pay $32 to see if this would actually work. So I tried the procedure in 3 or 4 of the more unusual youtube videos, I was downloading weird software onto my PC, trying to construct my own Magic Memory Stick, learned about how to open up your PSP battery and convert it into a homestyle Pandora Battery.

Two hours later, I finally figured out that we did not fit the 95% of users that could be unbricked. We were in the bad 5%!! The failed youtube videos plus another hour of google searches proved this - I figured out that part of that 5% are Piano Black PSP 2000 Slim with BARCODE starting with AB02. They cannot have custom firmware, because it has the TA88v3 motherboard. You cannot unbrick such a system. It is virtually hackproof. If you insist on trying to fix it, you will have to replace the motherboard, yeah, right!!

We're going to throw the PSP away, $50 down the tube. But this IT expert sure got an education....

Evolution: A can of worms

So, are we descended from worms? Evolutionists have recently engaged in a pitched battle over where worms are found in their "tree of life". Another missing link has apparently appeared (or disappeared, depending on your point of view perhaps). A much better explanation is that God created all living creatures during the six days of creation as recorded in Genesis, and that he created them to have certain similarities. After all, how could any group of creatures be completely dissimilar one from another?

(excerpted from Amy Maxmen, “Evolution: A can of worms” Nature 470, 161-162 (2011), cited in "Evolution Running Backwards", Creation-Evolution Headlines, February 2011), also cited in Creation Matters, a publication of Creation Research Society, Volume 16, Number 1, January/February 2011, to appear at http://www.creationresearch.org/creation_matters/pdf/2010/CM15%2006%20low%20res.pdf)

A marine worm in the
phylum Acoelomorpha.

 Accoels are tiny worms peppercorn-sized worms found in sea-bottom muck. They represent a crucial stage in animal evolution — the transition some 560 million years ago from simple anemone-like organisms to the zoo of complex creatures that populate the world today.


But a recent report published in Nature is causing scientists to rethink the storyline. It is titled Acoelomorph flatworms are deuterostomes related to Xenoturbella . The study by an international team of researchers, who used new analytical techniques and data, removes acoel worms from their position near the trunk of animal evolution and instead places them closer to vertebrates.

The rearrangement of the tree of life has triggered protests from evolutionary biologists, who are alarmed that they may lose their key example of that crucial intermediate stage of animal evolution.

If acoels do fit within the deuterostomes, the worms must have evolved from an ancestor with a central nervous system, a body cavity and a through-going gut that connected an anus and mouth. So researchers would need to explain how acoels and Xenoturbella lost those and other characteristics. They would also be left to search for another primitive-looking lineage that represents the evolutionary step between jellyfish-like animals and bilaterians. If one even exists.

"I will say, diplomatically, this is the most politically fraught paper I've ever written," says Max Telford, a zoologist at University College London and last author on the paper. "This means that we have no living representative of this stage of evolution: the missing link has gone missing."

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The Christian religion is very gentle - Identify and utilize its weakness

Myanmar's High Command.

"There shall be no home where the Christian religion is practiced," states the first sentence of the "Program to Destroy the Christian Religion in Burma." The document, created in 2007 and reportedly sanctioned by the government, outlines a 17-point plan to "wipe out" Christians. "The Christian religion is very gentle," states the document. "Identify and utilize its weakness."

Starting in 2009, the government has banned house churches, a popular way of meeting for new Christian converts. In addition, the military junta that rules Burma has targeted the majority Christian Chin, Karen, Naga, Kachin, Shan and Karenni people groups, by destroying Christian schools, hospitals and churches, as well as raping and killing Christians, according to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.

"The government wants this country to be one religion," said a Christian contact in Burma. "If there is a way to stop all kinds of religious activities other than Buddhism, they will. They will always try to stop our work."

(from Voice of the Martyrs, March 2011)

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.JPEG for compression? God's algorithm .BRAIN is far better

How can the brain transmit and process that much visual information? The answer is, apparently, it uses compression – just like computers compress raw camera photos into more manageable JPEG images. That’s the title of an article on Science Daily: “JPEG for the Mind: How the Brain Compresses Visual Information.” \

The .JPEG Compression Algorithm.

“Computers can beat us at math and chess,” said Ed Connor of Johns Hopkins, “but they can’t match our ability to distinguish, recognize, understand, remember, and manipulate the objects that make up our world. “This core human ability depends in part on condensing visual information to a tractable level. For now, at least, the .brain format seems to be the best compression algorithm around.

(excerpted from  "This Is Your Brain on Bytes", Creation-Evolution Headlines, February 2011)

(also published in Creation Matters, a publication of Creation Research Society, Volume 16, Number 1, January/February 2011, to appear at http://www.creationresearch.org/creation_matters/pdf/2010/CM15%2006%20low%20res.pdf)

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Tzedakah Ministries

Tzedakah Ministries has a burden to see the Jewish people restored to a righteous covenant relationship with God - one that is only possible through Messiah Jesus.

What is unique about Tzedakah Ministries is that we believe that the best avenue for accomplishing this work is through local Christians and churches. As Franz Delitzsch wrote, "for the church to evangelize the world without thinking of the Jews, is like a bird trying to fly with one broken wing."

Tzedakah Ministries has produced more than a dozen unique evangelist tracts ranging from providing a gospel answer to the Jewish mysticism cult Kabalah to showing how Jesus' Hanuakkh appearance was a pronouncement of both his Messiahship and deity.

For more, see the Tzedakah Ministries website.

(Amy Downey, LCJE Bulletin, Issue 103, February 2011)

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Maybe God used computer models to invent marriage

Callaway's results could be used to suggest that there was an Intelligent Designer who utilized computer models, and determined that monogamous marriage was ideal for the competitive propagation value of homo sapiens.

Summary of  Mathematics and Marriage, by Don DeYoung

(This summary by Marko Malyj is of the article published in Creation Matters, a publication of Creation Research Society, Volume 16, Number 1, January/February 2011, to appear at http://www.creationresearch.org/creation_matters/pdf/2011/CM16%2001%20low%20res.pdf.)

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Evolutionary biologists have struggled to explain the origin of monogamous heterosexual marriage. Many of them have concluded that it is a mystery. Some say that evolution favors the widest possible dispersal of a male's genes, and that marriage is an imposed feature of "western society" which conflicts with evolutionary "norms" (Fortunato and Archetti; Barash and Lipton, 2001). This is the kind of "science" that now supports the assault on marriage from homosexuals and others.

Callaway, who is another evolutionary biologist, recently used complex computer models of social behavior to compare the biological multiplication produced within groups practicing monogamous marriage versus groups geared to the wisest possible dispersal of genes [what Christians would call promiscuity! - uMarko]. Callaway determined that

1) Monogamy provides exclusive investment of a couple’s resources in their offspring, giving siblings a competitive advantage over the polygamous alternative. 

2) By giving up multiple wives, men sacrifice their own selfish interests for those of the group.

3) Monogamy tends to prevent men from fighting over women, leading to greater stability in society.

These factors and several others were weighted while the computer model was run over several generations. Callaway concluded that Monogamy and marriage may suit men and women after all. The results gave a solid advantage to monogamy over polygamy for the well being of society.

---

uMarko's 1st postscript: Callaway's computer models did not compare the biological multiplication of homosexual "unions", which is zero. Homosexual unions can only exist as a parasite to Heterosexual unions, otherwise they would have no offspring to process.

2nd postscript: Callaway's results could be used to suggest that there was an Intelligent Designer who utilized computer models, and determined that monogamous marriage was ideal for the competitive propagation value of homo sapiens. However, monogamous marriage is too good (!) and has resulted in "overpopulation" of the planet. Therefore, evolutionary biologists must step in and take corrective action.

3rd postscript: Bible-believing Christians can use Callaway's results to prove that God actually ran sophisticated computer models before deciding to create Eve to be Adam's partner, and then giving them and their children the ordinance of marriage forever, to provide for their well being and for the continued propagation of their children.

Reference

Barash, D.P. and J.E. Lipton. 2001. The Myth of Monogamy. W.H. Freeman, New York.

Callaway, E. 2010. Monogamy and marriage may suit men after all. New Scientist 205 (2742):13.

Fortunato, L. and M. Archetti. 2010. Evolution of monogamous marriage by maximization of inclusive fitness. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 23(1): 149–156.

Thief comes to Christ in Burma, and villagers get angry

David was the neighborhood thief in one of the lake regions of Myanmar (Burma). Poor and without food, David stole from other residents to survive. And in a community that lives on the water, stealing is not an anonymous activity. Everyone knew David was a thief, and they ridiculed him for it. They thought he was possessed by demons, so they refused to associate with him. David could not get work, and he did not have a place to stay. He would sleep in boats and hope no one caught him. Then he met Peter, a Christian.

"Peter never scolded me," David said. "He never spoke any kind of bad words to me. He always showed love, and I felt happy when I was with him."

Eventually, Peter told David about Jesus Christ, and David accepted Christ about a year later. David cleaned up his act, stopped stealing and started working with Peter in his business as a boat mechanic. But soon the villagers found out and decided to put an end to Peter's evangelism.

One night in early 2009, Peter was awakened by yelling while he was sick in bed at a friend's house. He looked outside to see dozens of boats carrying 53 villagers with torches and machetes. "Leave this place," they shouted. "If you don't leave, we'll burn this house down."

Once Peter was kicked out, he lost not only his home but also his livelihood. He could not feed his family. He became a marked man, and no one in the lake region would rent him lodging, hire him or even allow him on their property. He was an isolated man living on an island.

The other 100 Christians in the lake area have experienced the same treatment. "Most of us are struggling to get our daily food," Peter said. "Yet I feel so happy, because I feel myself that I'm counted worthy to face that kind of persecution for Christ. Whenever we face opposition and whenever we face problems, it draws us closer to God and very soon we feel joy."

(from Voice of the Martyrs, March 2011)

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I am Joseph, your brother!

The apostle Paul asserts a certain priority (Romans 1:16) for the witness to the Jewish people. Every local church should demonstrate sensitive obedience to the enormous debt we owe the Jewish people by including a generous allocation to prayer for Israel and witness to the Jews. After all, "salvation is from the Jews" (John 4:22). Christian love instead of arrogance should foster "envy and jealosy" among the Jewish people for what we possess in Christ (Romans 11:11).

We long for the day when the Jewish people will hear deep in their hearts the tender voice of the Son of God himself speaking quietly, but firmly: "I am Joseph, your brother." We long for the day when Messiah will return and the entire people of Israel will know the Lord.

We also praise God that in the meantime he has been and is so gracious as to raise up the witness, working providentially through a multitude of circumstances to reach his people.

(Emanuel Machnicki, LCJE Bulletin, Issue 103, February 2011)

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Did Animals Eat Meat Before the Flood?

"Scripturally and scientifically, the answer appears to be yes. God created a world which was perfect and free of death, violence, and carnivorous behavior. After the Fall and the Curse, some animals became violent carnivores and even cannibals. The fossil record bears abundant testimony to this fact. Man, however, was not given meat to eat until after the Flood. The Bible also tells of the new heavens and new earth, where once again meat-eating and violence will be unknown."

Selections from Did Animals Eat Meat Before the Flood? by Andrew V. Ste. Marie

(These selections by Marko Malyj are of the article published in Creation Matters, a publication of Creation Research Society, Volume 16, Number 1, January/February 2011, to appear at http://www.creationresearch.org/creation_matters/pdf/2011/CM16%2001%20low%20res.pdf.)

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The Bible describes the perfect world God created in Genesis 1 and 2. One of the most notable attributes of the pre-Fall world was the absence of carnivorous (meat-eating) behavior.

Of course, Adam and Eve sinned and everything changed, including diets. Carnivorous activity is a prominent aspect of our world today, but when did it begin? It is not specifically mentioned in the Curse (Genesis 3:14–19). People were not given meat to eat until after the Flood (Genesis 9:2–4). But what about the animals? Did they begin to eat meat before the worldwide Flood? Scripturally and scientifically, the answer appears to be yes.


Biblical Evidence

The Bible describes the world before the Flood in Genesis 6:11–12: "The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth." The Hebrew word basar (flesh) seems to refer mainly to people, but also to animals (see Genesis 6:19, 7:15–16, 21).

People had corrupted their way and “cast[ed] off” God’s laws. The animals had apparently done the same. This is not meant to imply that animals were willfully sinning. point is that animals, as well as people, were engaging in corrupt activities which God had not originally built into His perfect creation.

The Bible clearly implies that there was violent animal life prior to the Flood. Paleontology tells the same story.

Pre-Flood violence and carnivorous activity revealed in the fossil record

Much of the fossil record was certainly formed during the Genesis Flood. There is general agreement among many young-earth creationists that at least the so-called Cambrian through Cretaceous rock layers were laid down in the Flood. Therefore, in this paper only evidence of carnivorous activity in these layers will be presented.

Ichthyosaurs. Ichthyosaurs were marine reptiles which resembled dolphins. Many well-preserved skeletons have been found in various places around the world. Gut contents have also been found; fish and fish scales, cephalopod (squids and octopi are cephalopods) hooklets, smaller ichthyosaurs, small turtle bones, and even a bird bone and pterosaur (flying reptile) remains have been found in the stomach areas of
fossilized ichthyosaurs.^1,2

Sharks. Sharks were also predators before the Flood. The (now presumed extinct) “Ginsu Shark” Cretoxyrhina seems to have been a vicious mosasaur killer. Partly digested mosasaur pieces have been found inside fossil specimens of Cretoxyrhina.³

Crocodile-like reptiles. Phytosaurs were reptiles similar to crocodiles with nostrils near their eyes. An animal vertebra has been found with tooth marks perfectly matching phytosaur teeth. One metoposaur (giant amphibian) skull has a row of phytosaur tooth marks from the back of the skull into the brain case.⁴ Stomach contents found in Belodon, a type of phytosaur, indicate it fed on a variety of reptiles.⁵

Theropod dinosaurs. Theropods were the two-footed, meat-eating dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor. There is a large amount of evidence showing many of these animals to have been carnivorous.

The "Fighting Dinosuaurs" fossil.

Tyrannosaurus rex is by far the best known theropod. There is good evidence it ate meat and may have attacked live animals. Bite marks attributed to T. rex have been found on approximately 18 dinosaur
bones.^6,7 The famous “fighting dinosaurs” fossil preserves a Velociraptor locked in combat with a Protoceratops (similar to a small Triceratops).⁹ Other Protoceratops bones bear Velociraptor tooth marks.¹⁰

Cannibalism. Even with all this evidence of violence and carnivorous activity in the fossil record, the fossils tell of yet more pre-Flood corruption of God’s perfect creation — cannibalism. Some fossils of the theropod Majungatholus from Madagascar have teeth marks exactly matching Majungatholus teeth. Whether Majungatholus hunted or scavenged its own kind, it was a cannibal.¹¹

Summary

God created a world which was perfect and free of death, violence, and carnivorous behavior. After the Fall and the Curse, some animals became violent carnivores and even cannibals. The fossil record bears abundant testimony to this fact. Man, however, was not given meat to eat until after the Flood. The Bible also tells of the new heavens and new earth, where once again meat-eating and violence will be unknown.

"The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’ den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea." (Isaiah 11:6–10)

References (selected)

1. Kear, B. P., W. E. Boles, and E. T. Smith. 2003. Unusual gut contents in a Cretaceous ichthyosaur. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 270:S206–S208.

2. Norman, D. 1985. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs. Crescent Books, New York, NY.

3. Wieland, C. 2005. Dragons of the Deep. Master Books, Green Forest, AR.

4. Taylor, J. 1999. Fossil Facts and Fantasies. Mt. Blanco Publishing Co., Crosbyton, TX.

5 Walker, C., and D. Ward. 1992. Fossils. DK Publishing, Inc., New York, NY.

6. Longrich, N. R., J. R. Horner, G. M. Erickson, and P. J. Currie. 2010. Cannibalism in Tyrannosaurus rex. PLoS One 5(10):e13419.

7. Longrich et al. (ref. 22) list 17 such specimens. Their list does not include the Edmontosaurus skull with T. rex bite marks (ref. 8).

8. Taylor, J., and A. V. Ste. Marie. 2010. Creationists can be paleontologists! The Witness 8(7):3–12.

9. Hodge, B., and B. Davis. Two Fighting Dinosaurs? Retrieved July 18, 2008 from www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v1/n1/two-fighting-dinosaurs.

10. Hone, D., J. Choiniere, C. Sullivan, X. Xu, M. Pittman and Q. Tan. 2010. New evidence for a trophic relationship between the dinosaurs Velociraptor and Protoceratops. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 291:488–492.

11. Rogers, R. R., D. W. Krause, and K. C. Rogers. 2003. Cannibalism in the Madagascan dinosaur Majungatholus atopus. Nature 422:515–518.

Changing the lives of Bulgarian Orphans through Camp

Bulgarian brothers Vulio (age 10) and Plamen (7) attended a camp led by New Hope Bulgaria Director Dimitrie Todorov.

"The two boys," Dimitrie says, "had been placed in an orphanage because their mother was so sick. A family from the Philadelphia Church in Burgas became acquainted with Vulio and Plamen when their adult daughter - who had been adopted from an orphanage as a child - volunteered at the orphanage. She invited the boys to attend church, and they soon learned about our summer camp."

Camp Kotel was held at a retreat center in a small mountain town not far from the seaside city of Burgas in southeastern Bulgaria. Dimitrie coordinated this camp. "During camp," he remembers, "I watched these two brothers meet new friends and really connect with them." Today they love to go to church and learn about Jesus as much as they can! The boy's mom is still sick, but she feels well enough to have them back home now. And their influence has caused her to go to church, too.

(Connect, March 2011, Volume 41, Number 2, a publication of New Hope International)

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God provides expertise for ICR's K-12 Christian school science curriculum

Institute for Creation Research is excited about new opportunities the Lord has recently opened for us in our educational ministry! ICR has traditionally focused on graduate-level education, but we have been repeatedly approached by Christian schools to develop creation-oriented science education programs for the K-12 segment. This is no small task - science is a technical and complex subject, and special skills are often required to design suitable material for the lower educational levels. Frankly, ICR was not completely geared to meet this need. But we felt the Lord's leading and pressed on by creating the Science Education Essentials series of creation-based science curriculum supplements for the K-12 Christian and homeschool markets. The Lord has blessed, and these materials have been well-received. But it was clear ICR would need professional assistance if we were to continue this vital outreach program. We made it a matter of prayer and waited for the Lord to direct our steps.

The Lord knew this, of course, and supplied just what we needed (Philippians 4:19) through the generosity of a long-time supporter. As such, we are delighted to announce ICR has recently hired Dr. Rhonda Forlow to serve as our full-time curriculum professional for the K-12 school segment. Dr. Forlow brings a wealth of experience in K-12 curriculum development and will focus on producing more Science Education Essentials supplements on a variety of science subjects. We pray these biblically and scientifically sound teaching materials will encourage Christian teachers to promote a truly biblical worldview to the children entrusted to their care.

But that isn't all. Recently, several large local Christian schools have requested our help in designing creation-oriented science education programs for their middle and high school students this coming spring. And another large local church has asked for our assistance designing a similar program for their Vacation Bible School program this summer. Without the Lord providing the necessary means through Dr. Forlow, ICR would have been forced to turn these requests down. Needless to say, Dr. Forlow has been hard at work designing an engaging educational program centered on a "CSI" theme, complete with staged "fossil digs" on the ICR campus and follow-up lab work that will teach students to think critically on major science issues.

It is truly an exciting time at ICR. Please continue to pray, and give as you are able, to maintain this vital ministry in the days ahead.

(letter from Henry M. Morris, IV, Director of Donor Relations, Institute for Creation Research, February 11, 2011)

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Best software/hardware podcast setup for serialized audio books

After a couple months of trial and tribulation, I have finally come up with the best podcast recording setup for serialized audio books. It's easy! Only eight steps to follow:

1) You must first make sure that your hardware is capable of streaming audio without dropouts. If you are using Windows, install DPC Latency Checker. Follow the guidelines on the Product Sheet for shutting off drivers that are causing unacceptable latency. Make sure you have your recording hardware, like your USB headset, plugged into the computer when you run the latency check. You will probably have to temporarily disable your wireless driver from Device Manager to get all green during the check. You may also have to stop your anti-virus service. Once you find the right combination of drivers to disable for acceptable latency, you will have to disable them each time you make record an episode from your book.


2) I found that my Dell Latitude E6500 laptop failed the latency checker even if I disabled all possible drivers and stopped all possible services. If your hardware does not pass muster, you may need to purchase a different computer. It is almost an impossible to buy a computer, sight unseen, that will have adequate latency. However, NoteBookCheck is a fantastic site that reviews laptops and netbooks, and includes stats from DPC Latency Checker for each one. If you want to track down an acceptable netbook, go to Google and search on this combination:
    netbook dpc latency site:http://www.notebookcheck.net/

3) The best recording software for Windows is Audacity. Limit your recording to less than 45 minutes per episode, usually one episode for each single chapter of the book that you are recording. After you record your voice track, export to a .wav file.


 4) Install CN Levelator. Levelator adjusts the audio levels within your podcast or other audio file for variations from one speaker to the next, for example. Run Levelator, then drag and drop your .wav file onto the Levelator window for automatic processing. Levelator will create an output .wav file.

Rick

5) Then import the .wav file created by Levelator back into Audacity, and mix in separate intro and outro music tracks. A great source for royalty-free music .mp3 files for your podcast intros and outros is Rick’s FREE Royalty-free Music Download Page.

6) From Audacity, export your podcast with the intro and outro to an .mp3 file. Make sure you tag it according to Podiocast's ID3 tagging convention, as given at the Authors Guidelines link which can be accessed from the Podiobook Authors page.


7) Upload your finished .mp3 to a file sharing site. I use Divshare. You will be staging your files there for ultimate delivery to Podiobooks.

Podiobooks.com

8) The best site for distributing your serialized audio book is Podiobooks. The term podiobook was coined by Evo Terra to describe serialized audiobooks which are distributed via RSS, much like a podcast. Listeners to Podiobooks.com can choose to receive the episodes of their books via an RSS feed or by listening to episodes by directly downloading episodes from the Podibooks site. Some listeners keep the audio files on their computers, some transfer the book to CD, but most transfer the file on to their MP3 player so they can listen no matter where they are. See the Podibooks FAQ.

Look for my first podiobook series sometime in 2011!

Marko

Transform Bible verses to short URLs for Facebook, Twitter

http://ref.ly lets you transform your Bible references to short URLs, good for Facebook posts and Twitter tweets! Your fans and followers can then click on your reference to immediately pull up the verse! You can enter a single verse, or an entire passage. For example,

John 3:16 becomes http://ref.ly/Jn3.16.
Hebrews 11:1-3 becomes http://ref.ly/He11.1-3.

"God's word is living and active, sharper than any double edged sword!" Do you know where that verse is?

Too Smart to Believe

From a Russian pastor who saw the fall of the Soviet Union:

“Growing up, we only had one Bible among a 600-person congregation. Sadly, after communism fell we got a number of people who got degrees in the U.S., came to Russia, and started to spread really weird stuff. Like, ‘I have a Ph.D.; why do you believe in a six-day creation?’ And when I try to speak to them, they say, ‘You don’t have a degree. You can’t speak.’”

“When I started to come to the U.S., I was really surprised to hear things like that. How can you be a Christian and not believe in a six-day creation? It doesn’t make sense at all. If God is great, He could create for one day! He chose six days, so why do they try to limit Him?”

(excerpted from Dao, C. 2011. Russian Pastor Visits ICR. Acts & Facts. 40 (2): 22.)

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Mayor comes to Christ by way of an awful sermon

Fifteen years ago, Nathan Lewis, pastor of Evergreen Presbyterian Church in Beaverton OR, found himself preaching what he thought might be his "all-time worst" sermon to the newly established church plant. To make matters worse, the mayor of Beaverton happened to be visiting that Sunday. But when the service ended, Nathan was astonished to see that the mayor was deeply moved. "I finally understand what the Gospel means - I want to become a Christian," he said. Says Nathan, "I realized that the Holy Spirit had taken what I thought was a bad sermon and used it to make a change in the mayor's life."

(from "Multiply", the Mission to North America newsletter, Spring 2011)

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Japan Does Not Face Another Chernobyl

"With all the death, devastation and disease now threatening tens of thousands in Japan, it is trivializing and almost obscene to spend so much time worrying about damage to a nuclear reactor.

"The containment structures appear to be working, and the latest reactor designs aren't vulnerable to the coolant problem at issue here.

"The decay heat must be absorbed, and as a last-ditch effort the emergency core cooling system can be activated to flood the entire containment structure with water. This will do considerable damage to the reactor but will prevent any further steam releases. The Japanese have now reportedly done this using seawater in at least two of the troubled reactors. These reactors will never be restarted.

"If a meltdown does occur in Japan, it will be a disaster for the Tokyo Electric Power Company but not for the general public. Whatever steam releases occur will have a negligible impact. Researchers have spent 30 years trying to find health effects from the steam releases at Three Mile Island and have come up with nothing.

(excerpted from William Tucker, Japan Does Not Face Another Chernobyl, Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2011)

Please pray for the Japanese people who are suffering in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami!

Abraham Lincoln on the purposes of our Almighty God

"The purposes of the Almighty are perfect, and must prevail, though we erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance. We hoped for a happy termination of this terrible war long before this; but God knows best, and has ruled otherwise. . . . we must work earnestly in the best light He gives us, trusting that so working still conduces to the great ends He ordains. Surely He intends some great good to follow this mighty convulsion, which no mortal could make, and no mortal could stay."

(in a letter written by Abraham Lincoln, September 1864, during the darkest days of the American Civil War)

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Bowling Green Ohio is 10% Muslim

Traveling along I-75 South about
six miles outside of Bowling Green

Please pray for Christar workers and their ministry to refugees in the Bowling Green, Ohio area - it is estimated that 10 percent of the city's people are Muslims. Pray the the Lord would raise up more workers to reach out to this people group.

(from Christar's prayer bulletin, February 2011)

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The Gospel according to NASA

The good news given to us in the Bible is that Jesus Christ has paid for the sins of those who trust in him, and will return to create a New Heavens and a New Earth. If you do not want to accept this gift from God, here is an alternative gospel, from NASA and other potential colonizers of the heavens, as reported by Ben Austen in the March 2011 issue of Popular Science.

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"Given the risks humans pose to the planet, we might someday leave Earth simply to conserve it." (Liberty Foundation)

"The dinosaurs died out because they were too stupid to build an adequate space faring civilization." (Tihamer Toth-Fejel, General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems)

"After completing a $200-million study in 2000, NASA reported that a colony could be dug several feet beneath our own moon's surface or covered within an existing crater to protect residents from the constant bombardment of high-energy cosmic radiation." (NASA)

"The presence of life-sustaining ice on the moon is a precursur to permanent lunar bases, hotels, and even casinos." (National Space Society)

"Mars compares to the moon as North America compared to Greenland in the previous age of maritime exploration." (Robert Zubrin, head of the Mars Society)

"In 2002, NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft detected continent-size regions of water ice in the Martian ground, and in 2008, photographs from the Phoenix Mars lander confirmed the presence of ice there." (NASA)

According to Princeton University physicist, Gerard O'Neill, "a massive freestanding orbital habitat" could be designed consisting of large cylinders spinning along an axis at a rate of about one rotation per minute.... Populations on these ships would be kept well above 150 people to avoid the consequences of inbreeding, although ideally the rotating habitats would exist in socially interactive clusters. Residents could also use stored DNA whenever the gene pool needed more variety." (Al Globus, contractor at NASA Ames Research Center)

"If you get your ship into orbit, you're halfway to anywhere." (Robert Heinlein)

"A massive centrifuge, called a 'slingatron', could be used to spin objects until they reach a velocity at which they can be flung out of our gravitational well." (physicist Derek Tidman)

"We should keep an open mind about the possibility of more advanced approaches, including wormhole teleportation and faster-than-light warp drive" (Marc Millis, Tau Zero Foundation)

"Self-replicating nanobots could one day be sent to an asteroid, where they would bore through the surface and begin the mining process, or they might be shuttled to the moon or a distant planet, where they would reproduce and spread and in time create an entire industrial civilization ready for people on their arrival. Human DNA might even be packed along with these civilization-building nanobots and used to spawn people when the time was right." (Mark Hopkins, National Space Society)

"There is no reason to think of human biological evolution as a passing phase; one day we all might be reengineered into sentient machines, our identities uploaded and transmitted into deep space, with scaled-down ships no longer having to provide radiation protection, closed-loop habitats or legroom." (Mark Hopkins, National Space Society) (author Ben Austen responded "your vision of the final frontier, sexless and bodiless as is, doesn't seem especially romantic". Hopkins acknowledged, "Well, maybe not, but you didn't ask me about romance.)

"A manned mission to Mars is already financially and technologically achievable, if only we drop the notion of a return flight." (Dirk Schulze-Makuch, astrobiologist at Washington State University)

"In 20 years, humans would have established a permanent Martian base." (Dirk Schulze-Makuch)

"In the weeks after Dirk Schulze-Makuch and his co-author published their article in the Journal of Cosmology, they received more than 100 emails, from 16-year olds and 65-year olds alike, each one announcing a readiness to leave for Mars immediately."

"Right now, most of the progress toward space settlement is being accomplished in the private sector."

(excerpts from After Earth: Why, Where, How, and When We Might Leave Our Home Planet, by Ben Austen, Popular Science, March 2011, p. 46ff)

(Marko's comment: I hope you live long enough to see this dream, and that you are one of the tiny elect number of people chosen by our leaders to embark on this odyssey, since there will be much less room than the 6 billion people that God currently accomodates on our planet Earth!)

Is your kid addicted to video games?

According to a 2009 study, nearly 1 in 10 gamers aged 8-18 are addicted to video games. “The pathological gamers in the study played video games 24 hours per week, about twice as much as non-pathological gamers. They also were more likely to have video game systems in their bedrooms, reported having more trouble paying attention in school, received poorer grades in school, had more health problems, were more likely to feel “addicted,” and even stole to support their habit.

If you’re worried about your child’s gaming, here are a few resources that can help:

On-Line Gamers Anonymous
Center for Internet Addiction Recovery

(reported by Rhonda Callow, Is your kid addicted to video games?)

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