Dodona Update
Zip Dobyns
We have added more ministers to our church roster this summer, including a long-time friend and her brother in our first double ordination service. It has been a relaxing summer with time to read after a lot of travel during the first five months of the year. I’m enthusiastic about some new information on exercise and diet which I will mention in News Notes, and of course enjoying my daily swim as well as the time to read. September did get more hectic with the tragedy of the deaths of two women who were leaders in meeting the desperate needs of the poor and ill of the world. Most of our articles in this issue seem to feature tragedy, with Diana’s early death and two murderers who also died young—one by suicide and one by execution. Though it seems morbid to focus on such tragic lives, they let us test the techniques of astrology, including the asteroids, and hopefully, they give us insight into the psychological states which can produce such lives.
My biggest delight this summer was getting my computer upgraded. I now have a Pentium 200 with a 5 gigabyte hard drive, Windows 95, a 16X CD ROM, the fastest modem currently available, a larger monitor, and a scanner! I still do not have the scanner working. When you upgrade part of a system, other parts also have to be upgraded. In order to work on the accident research project, I added Microsoft’s Office 97 to get the Excel part to be able to do Chi Squares. It included Word 97, and the scanner would not work with Windows 95 or Word 97. I ordered a later version of the scanner software but it is not yet functional. Soon, I hope.
Once this issue of The Mutable Dilemma and Asteroid-World is finished, I hope to dig into the accident research. Mark wrote a program which compares each pair of a subject and the date of his/her accident with all other subjects who did not have accidents on that date. So, instead of having a handful of control subjects, everyone else in the data collection becomes a control for the person who actually had the accident. Since we have over 2,400 in the Swedish data set, even with my new Pentium it took about 17 hours to run all the comparisons—over 8 million calculations in all. I have only started to do the analysis. There are never enough hours. But it will come in time.
I hope all of our readers have a fine fall and winter. We are looking forward to rain from El Niño.