I've written about all I can of chapter 6 as possible without getting the last bit of data that I need. Hopefully, I can get on the SIMS on Monday or Tuesday next week. So tomorrow I'll finish up my sample prep, which involves polishing a piece of chert until it is super shiny. Better bring my mp3 player!

I've been addicted to Guitar Hero lately. It's so much fun to rock out to songs, and the difficulty ramps up so gently that it keeps you playing. I'm trying to beat the game on the "Hard" difficulty setting, which uses all five fret keys. At first this was hard to get used to because you can only use four fingers, which means that you have to shift your hand to play the songs. The easier songs only required one or two shifts, but on later songs my hand is all over the place! It took be seven or eight tries, but yesterday I finally beat Crossroads, which contains what some consider to be the greatest guitar solo performance ever, making Eric Clapton an official guitar god. There are actually two solos in that song, and both are f-ing hard. So now I have the final five songs to beat, which are probably going to kick my ass for a while. Pantera's Cowboys from Hell and Ozzy's Bark at the Moon were hard enough on "Medium"!

I finished chapter 5 of my dissertation today! That one went pretty quickly (only two weeks, I think). Now I'm in sort of a predicament, because I don't have all the data for chapter 6 yet. I have to get some on the SIMS. I might just write the beginning of the chapter and then move on to chapter 7 until I get the last of my data. But it feels so good to be getting all this over with.

By the way, A People's History of the United States as a really good book. To sum up so far:

1. European explorers were assholes
2. Slave owners were assholes
3. Land-owning colonists were assholes

For a history book, it's a pretty entertaining read.

For a month or two I've been reading this book about the history of the early Christian church whenever I have a few minutes of downtime here and there (like waiting for my laptop to boot up or when I'm running backups). I've always wondered how Christianity became this whopping religion that had such clout in the medieval world. Obviously, this was helped when the Roman emporer Constantine made Christianity the official religion of Rome. But I could never figure out what happened before that. I mean, I was tought in school and Sunday school that early Christians were severely persecuted and fed to lions, so how can such a religion ever prosper to the point that a friggin' emporer could convert? Well, the book helped out a bit. It turns out that official persecution was intermittent until 313 when Constantine proclaimed Christianity was OK. I think it was only about 20 years total for that first 300 years. And it was mostly directed at Church leaders who were supposed to give up their sacred documents. Everybody else was required to just make a public sacrifice to the Roman gods, and if you didn't go, then nobody really came looking for you. For the common person, they were only persecuted if they did something obvious to bring it on themselves. I'm not saying it wasn't horrible for early Christians, I'm just saying the picture they paint in church is far from accurate.

Anyway, the main reason persecution was intermittent was because Christianity was so popular, which meant there are Christians merchants and civil servants. When persecution occurred, then the Roman economy suffered, and the emporer couldn't raise sufficient armies to fight the Turks or barbarians. So when external threats arose, persecution ended.

The Christians basically had about 40 years after the death of Jesus to grow before Nero burned Rome and blamed it on the Jews, which in turn blamed it on the Christians (which was considered just a radical Jewish sect in those days). That was the first time people were fed to the lions. Jews were pissed off because the Christians were growing so rapidly, mostly because they were inclusive, appealed to Platonic philosophy, and didn't require circumcision. The Greek-speaking world saw it as a rational alternative to the official Roman paganism.

But how did Christians ever come up with the idea of a pope? As rediculous as it sounds, the pope only became a worldwide leader until the mid 400s with Leo I. Before that, Roman bishops tried to enforce a church heirarchy based on foundation by Peter or Paul. But the problem with this is that once the Roman capitol was moved to Constantinople, the church there was automatically an authority even though neither Peter nor Paul had anything to do with it. The first hint of Roman authority was in a letter by Clement in 96. He was trying to say that churches should follow the example of the Roman church, but a mistranslation caused later people to think that he was saying other churches should obey Rome. Later bishops attempted to enforce this primacy, and Rome did have some authority, especially in the West, but really nobody cared. Then Leo I at the council of Chalcedon in 451 really hit it home that everyone should obey Rome, and since such things were written down in the canon of the council, it was basically Christian law from then on.

I could go on and on, because it was a pretty interesting book. It was not a good read, though. The book assumes you know a lot already about the history of the Roman Empire, which I do not. Anyway, now I'm moving on to this book of revisionist history. I've only read two pages, but I already think Columbus was an asshole!

I was at Fry's Electronics this weekend picking up a cheap USB drive so that Kelly's parents can backup their computer (even though it turns out that their backup software won't recognize a USB drive under 8GB! Stupid OneCare!), when I noticed a demo for a Playstation 2 game called Guitar Hero. It's a typical timing game, where you have to press a combination of buttons when they appear on the screen, but I've heard alot about it recently (like "Best game of the year" kind of talk). Oh, and did I mention you use a plastic guitar as the controller! So I tried out the demo for like a minute and it made me giddy. For a game that looks so stupid and sounds rediculous on paper, it is unbelievably fun to play.

Well, Kelly and I were trying to figure out what to do on the fourth of July because she had the day off. So I went and bought the game. Then Tracy and James were in town, so they came over and helped us rock out. It was so much fun! I like playing Iron Man by Black Sabbath, but Kelly's favorite is More than a Feeling by Boston. We beat all the songs on easy mode pretty quickly, but started to get stuck on some of them on medium difficulty. I guess we need to practice more!

Kelly had Friday off, so I also took the day off. We had a great day making food and watching the British stage production of Oklahoma! Consequently, today Kelly is working, and so am I. I think of it as merely switching Friday and Saturday, which seems fair to me because I can avoid rush hour traffic and crowds on both days. Anyways, today I finished Chapter 4 of my dissertation. It turned out to be a 41 page, 35 MB monster, which explains why my laptop has been running so slow lately. Onwards to Chapter 5 (Gunflint and Strelley Pool Chert) and postdoc proposals next week!