The “three wise men” in the story of the nativity are believed to be Magi or Zoroastrians.  As the story goes, these three wise men followed the Star of Bethlehem in search for the messiah.  For the most part, the Zoroastrians supported the one-god concept - and they also believed in a messiah.  It made sense for them - sometimes regarded as the original astrologers - to use their special talents to seek out the baby Jesus.  It makes sense purely from a narrative standpoint; although to me…

How might a person go about studying something elusive like serial murder or terrorism?  I have no formal exposure in this area.  Much of the technology that I mention in this blog is meant for another purpose.  That other purpose is to study characters in movies, which for me is a great diversion.  In particular, I like to map out where certain characters might be found (or lost - i.e. missing characters): the settings they occupy, their roles, their relationships.  It goes without saying…

In order to prevent my programs from freezing up while running long calculations, I generally run the calculations on separate threads.  In Java, this process can be accomplished by separating the GUI from processing.  In the code below, a thread for an instance of MyProcessing would be invoked using start(): e.g. “(new MyProcessing()).start();” would run indefinitely until T is made null.  T can be made null by calling stop() or by directly making T null.  Often when the GUI is closing, I…