The Mormon Monk

The parable of the vineyard, found in Jacob 5, is one of my favorite sections of scripture. But now, after reading Outliers , by Malcolm Gladwell, I have an added appreciation for the Zenos's parable. According to Gladwell, rice paddies are a unique phenomenon in that the output of a given plot of land is directly related to the time that a farmer spends working the land. For most crops, this is not the case--once the weeds are gone, it doesn't matter if you continue to hoe your rows of beans; if you don't believe me, just ask Thoreau, who was more than happy to walk away from his beans when the necessary work had been done and who still reaped a bumper crop. For rice paddies, however, additional work leads to additional rice. This is because the plots of land that rice grows on must be perfectly level--the water with which the farmer floods the field must rise to a uniform height on each plant or else the yield decreases. Since no field is perfectly flat, there is always a

Fear not, little flock (and I do mean little): I am your blogger; you shall not want for copious reading material. I write to you on the environment-friendly internet; your green pastures will not be polluted by paper waste products. I will restore your faith in my blog, if only for my name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of PhD exams, you should fear no blogdeath; my keyboard and computer will inform you. I prepare an overabundance of words for your consumption; your patience with my verbosity will run out. Surely my blog will haunt your inbox all the days of your life, and I will never stop writing. Ever. My PhD exams have kept me busy and prevented me from writing for the past month. A special thanks goes out to Uncle Dave, whose hand-turned tulip wood pen made my success (I passed!) possible; so that you too can have an idea of what it's like to read and regurgitate 200 books in a marathon nine hour exam, I've reproduced one question and answer from the ex