The Bible has a lot of epic stories, that seem very improbable. For example: The story of Noah seems a little unlikely. The parting of the Red Sea makes for a cool movie, but also seems a bit improbable. The story of Jonah sounds a little like a fish story. Did the Nile really turn into blood? And what about Balaam’s talking donkey? The bible…
Sunday Morning Shared Breakfast at the First Methodist Church I don’t recall exactly how we became involved with the Sunday morning shared breakfast at the First Methodist Church (also called First Church as it was literally the first church in Seattle), but my wife learned about it online in late 2017 and we volunteered several times. In 2021 we became involved again, and it has…
This is where things get hard, because as I mentioned before – people are homeless for different reasons and there is no magic bullet that helps everybody get back on their feet. Their needs range from immediate (e.g. eating, etc.) to long term (e.g. housing, etc.). The good news is that their needs are so diverse that there’s a really good chance that you can…
Do we have a duty to help the homeless? This is obviously a matter of opinion – if you don’t think that your money or effort should go towards helping the homeless, I doubt that anything that I say here will sway that. This was the recurring theme on the The Good Place (one of my favorite shows): “What do we owe to each other?”…
For this post I can rehash statistics and talking points, but that would be boring. Camp United We Stand is a county sanctioned homeless camp that rotates between church parking lots every three months – mostly in the Shoreline, Washington area. I have been a friend of the camp for the past 18 months, so I decided to interview a few residents to learn their…
Seattle ranks 18th in terms of population (755, 078) within the US, but it has the 3rd biggest homeless population (16,385). Chicago ranks 3rd in terms of US population (2,664,452), but ranks 13th in terms of its homeless population (6,139). Houston ranks 4th in terms of US population (2,314,157), but ranks 22nd in terms of its homeless population. What is going on here? One theory…
Myth 1: Most homeless people are mentally ill It is estimated that about 30% of the homeless population in Seattle suffers from a serious mental illness. I have encountered many homeless people that are seriously mentally ill, but most are not. I also suspect that for many this is a chicken-and-egg situation. Living on the street is filled with trauma. I suspect that even the…
I know that there have always been homeless people, but I don’t remember seeing any when I was growing up in Seattle during the 1970s. In fact, Google AI says that homelessness was such a small issue back then that it was not very well tracked. I could not even find a decent graph that went back further than 2007. But today, you see homeless…
Homelessness is a topic that has been on my mind a lot over the past few years and I’ve been wanting to write about this for a while. It is a very broad topic with lots of data, but very little understanding. A 5-minute blog post will not cover the subject, so I am planning on doing a series of posts on the topic. I…
DirectFlip is a feature which allows the DWM to: This was not particularly hard to implement, but after getting it to work I realized that we had a fundamental architectural incompatibility. To understand the issue, I must draw some timing diagrams and give a brief explanation of how display hardware works. Generally speaking, display hardware has to continually re-read the image from memory and send…
