The Unforgivable Sin

What is it? Is there such a thing. Many different people have many different ideas of what the unforgivable sin is.

To address this, we must first understand how forgiveness of sin works. Sin is forgiven through two main acts of Jesus. The first act I’d like to address is the act of Jesus interceding for us. When God sees us commit a horrible act of sin, Jesus stands as our defender, knowing the temptation we felt because he felt it. Jesus understands the desire that leads to all sin, because he felt that desire at one time or another in his life. At the end of the age, when we stand and are judged guilty of our sin, it will be Jesus who steps in and gives us pardon, because he knew how impossibly hard it was for us.

The second act is the crucifixion. Most people know about the crucifixion, but don’t know or understand why it works. The most important principle of the crucifixion is the use of a loophole. Maybe its a loophole in nature, maybe its a loophole allowed in conflict between God’s infinite mercy versus God’s perfect justice. The primary requirement of this loophole was a sinless person to live a perfect, sinless life, and die with the sin of others. The first step of this was for the person to be born without sin. Only a true virgin birth can accomplish this, for sin is passed through the male seed. After the person is born without sin, they must never sin through their life. Jesus followed the law of Moses faithfully throughout all the days of his life. He was sent to the wilderness to be tempted for 40 day, so that his will could be fully tested. He even used his abilities to turn water to wine in order to keep one of the ten commandments, “Honor your father and mother.” The last requirement is for this perfect, innocent person to suffer and die with the sins of others on his shoulders. And so Jesus was flogged, maimed, and asphyxiated until he died. During this entire process, he gathered the sin of the world from the past, present, and future to himself. So great was the amount of sin upon his shoulders that this spiritual, unseen entity impaired the sunlight for hours. At last, because he himself had never sinned and therefore never earned the penalty of death, gave up his own spirit with the weight of all the sin on his shoulders.

With these acts working in concert accomplish this incredible forgiveness. We are forgiven of the punishment of our sin, because through the crucifixion Jesus literally traded the acts of his life for ours. He is guilty of our sin while we are raised up for his accomplishments. In this Jesus words “I have not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it” becomes truth. For because of Jesus, it is as if we lived our life following the law of Moses in perfect, impossible, obedience. We are also forgiven of the judgment of our sin, because Jesus understands what we went through when we fell, and has compassion and sympathy on us. He stand before us so that God is never angry or disappointed in us, but can love and cherish us no matter what.

So now we’re back to the question. What is the unforgivable sin? Some believe it is suicide. After all, suicide tears down what God struggled to build in you. It seemingly circumvents God’s plans for you. Suicide destroys what many believe is God’s holy temple, for if you accept Jesus into your heart then he lives in you. Who are you to desecrate or destroy God’s temple? Who are you ruin God’s plan? It is an inconceivable act, and therefore cannot be forgiven. Suicide may also be unforgivable because it ends your life in sin. If your life ends in sin, what time then is there to be forgiven for that sin?

Lets view each argument for suicide individually. The first of which being that suicide desecrates and ruins something holy in the sight of God. However, this can be said for all sin. Sin has consequences, regardless of whether or not its forgiven. It affects you and those around you. It gets in the way of what God wants for your life and others. So then the only difference between suicide and other sins is the severity of judgment against the sin. But as we know, Jesus intercedes for our sins, bringing compassion upon us and not anger or judgment. So how can Jesus possibly sympathize with suicide? When did he ever want to end his own life? Even now I bet you understand the point I’m about to make. How many times do you think, when Jesus was hot, tired, starving, and constantly pestered by the devil himself, did Jesus look longingly at a rock,or a cliff considering how, if he could just die, then all the pain would disappear? At what number of lashings did Jesus’s mind begin to wander toward an escape for all the cruelness that had been pointed his direction? How many times do you think Jesus had fallen before he almost hesitated in getting back up while all his people whom he loved were heaping insults at him and spitting on him? Jesus understands the deep, inescapable pain that leads people to suicide. He, of course, would stand up for those who died by there own hand, because he knows their pain.

The only argument left, is the more logical, less emotional argument. There just isn’t time to be forgiven, because you are dying in the midst of your sin. I ask you, when has time ever been a barrier to God? How could an act 2000 years ago forgive your sins from yesterday. Jesus’s act would have to reach two thousand years in the future to affect yesterdays sins. So if it can affect yesterday’s sins, why couldn’t it affect sins two more days in the future. As mentioned earlier, you claim the perfect life of Jesus. When you die, regardless of how, you die in the life of Jesus and not your own. Suicide has no hold on you, except that it ruins all the good works you could do, and makes the lives you would've and did impact emptier than they were before. Suicide is horrible, but not unforgivable.

What shall we say then? Is there no such thing as an forgivable sin? Jesus tells us that this is not true. “Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit shall not be forgiven, in this age or the next.” Does this mean you can’t say anything bad about God. The old testament is filled with righteous people, who cry out to God in frustration. Job was one such person. When everything became too terrible for Job to endure, he cried out against God. And yet, at the end of Job’s story, God blessed him many times over how he had been blessed before his test. Jesus strictly means “blasphemy.” In the contextual use of the word, that means telling lies in relation to who God is. For instance the Jewish priests and rabbis called it blasphemy when Jesus claimed to be the messiah. In fact it would have been blasphemy if Jesus had not be the messiah. So to clarify, blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is basically to claim that the Holy Spirit is not what it truly is. Claiming God does not exist for instance would classify. To claim that Jesus, who is God, is nothing but a prophet or a “good person” would also classify. Really, it is impossible to not blaspheme against the Holy Spirit unless you truly believe in Jesus. However, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that he died for your sin, then you will be saved.

The Re-Purposing of This Blog

It's been a long while since I've posted anything. Originally I was going to keep this blog to update the world about Project Naomi, but alas, since I have started work, I find it very hard to code when I'm not working. Because of that I have decided to re-purpose this blog (title drop :) ). Short and to the point (for the people who get bored with me rambling) this blog will be a question and answer blog about literally anything and everything. Have a question? Leave a comment with your question.

Now to the rambling.

I think... a lot. There is rarely a moment when I'm not thinking. For those who know me you know that moment comes when I'm talking, but that's beside the point. I considered many subject and come to many conclusions. Regardless of how brilliant or stupid these conclusions actually are, they stay locked inside my head until I get the motivation to put something inside my journal for my loved ones to read after I die... which is rarely since I go to bed around midnight and I frankly don't want to write at that time.

So here I've decided to share my thoughts and conclusions. To explore and research topics I might previously have never thought about. But rather than letting this be all about me, I want it to be driven by you. I want to talk about what your interested in. Doubts about life, or topics of science. Curiosities about me, and ramblings that have to do with the Wizard's First Rule. From politics to fashion. Any question is free game. Let me put my keen and penetrating mind to that task. If you have a story I wrote that you have liked, but I stopped working on it, you can ask me to write another chapter as your question. My post if I choose will then be the entire story so far, plus the new chapter.

The format is simple. Leave a comment on my last blog post for what your questions is, and I'll pick a question and ramble my thoughts out. I can't promise I won't be biased in my picking, but if I am, I'll be biased towards difficult questions. Questions that make me think, because if you make me think, you'll make me want to write. (Theoretical physics and space is my favorite =D )

As for how often I will write, for now my answer is once a week. I feel like I have the motivation to do once a day but I know myself too well. Too many projects left unfinished. Too many stories left unwritten. So once a week it will be, and I will do my very best to answer thoroughly, looking at all sides of the situation and leaving no stone un-turned.

I believe my spiritual gift is wisdom, so please let me share with you.

-Kao Pyro of the Azure Flame

Color-Image Segmentation

One of the biggest hurtles I'm encountering in my senior design project right now is separating the person from everything else. The paper I read today discusses that very problem in excruciating detail. Let me tell you, it's not as easy as I thought, but if my current idea fails, I might just fall back onto some of the concepts this paper discusses. This paper looks at separating objects from each other by looking at the problem from a classification and clustering point of view. In other words, it takes the values of the pixels and groups them together based on their similarities.

By itself, looking at color similarity can be very flawed. The same color can appear in several different part of the picture. Also, given different lighting, certain colors can appear as different colors that might show up elsewhere. In this case, you have different partitioning results in different lighting. In order to address this problem, the researchers in the paper look, not only to the RGB color values, but to the location of that value within the picture. The assumption is that if similar colors exist in close proximity, it is likely the same object. You also have to consider noise. With a single pixel being so tiny, it's not uncommon to have a single pixel be an abnormal color from its neighbors. To ensure correctness, they find "core" pixels. They do this simply by looking at the neighboring pixels, and see if a minimum number of neighboring pixels are similar enough to the chosen one. You then take those and cluster them based on both proximity and color value, and determine what is and isn't the same object.

The paper also include "fuzzy mode detection." I have to be honest with you. I do not know what the paper is talking about during this part. What is a "mode?" If I could answer that question, maybe I'd be able to follow this section of the paper better. Sorry guys.

Source:
Losson, O., Botte-Lecocq, C., & Macaire, L. (2008). Fuzzy mode enhancement and detection for color image segmentation. Journal on Image and Video Processing - Color in Image and Video Processing , 1-19.
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1362851.1453693&coll=DL&dl=ACM&CFID=96602743&CFTOKEN=40588068

Artificial High-Resolution

Recently in my digital photography class I learned about HDR pictures. Specifically how to combine pictures with different exposure values to create a picture similar to what your eye sees. I admit, I never thought the same ideas would apply in a research paper I read for my Computer Science senior design class. Instead of combining pictures to get all the detail from multiple exposure values, the paper discusses getting a high resolution picture using a collection of low-resolution pictures. The idea is pretty much the same though. Since each picture will have different pixels with good information, you take the good information from each picture and add it to the final product. This seems like  a fairly intuitive approach to the topic. However, the technique is not without it's obstacles. You see, in photography you don't always get the exact same picture when you press the button a second time. Something in the scene might change. For example, your angle to the object might be different ever so slightly. The background might change or move, especially if there are creatures in the background. A direct merge of these pictures would result in very messy final picture. Not exactly the "super resolution" you're looking for.

The paper is actually about addressing this obstacle. They approach the problem understanding there may be subtle differences in the different picture, and bring in the idea of error. They create a curve based upon all the pictures and then assign error weights based upon how far the value of a pixel is from the curve. The farther the pixel value is, the smaller weight it has. The assigned weights are based upon an outlier threshold determined at the creation of the curve. These weights allow for the final picture to partially ignore, or even exclude irrelevant information from the final picture. The results of this method are a crisp picture that exclude extra data, including  extra objects that may be placed in one of the contributing pictures.

Source:

El-Yamany, N. A., & Papamichalis, P. E. (2008). Robust Color Image Superresolution:. Journal on Image and Video Processing - Color in Image and Video Processing , 1-12.

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1362851.1384984&coll=DL&dl=ACM&CFID=95749724&CFTOKEN=17292690

Kinect making 3D video

I discovered a post that makes a 3D video artificially using the Kinect sensor to record the video. The proposed algorithm is a prepossessing stage. Using raw depth data from the Kinect to have the depth element to the video is the depth map is relative and full of holes. The depth data is recorded based upon reflected infrared light coming originally from the sensor. To help compensate, the article proposed using the RGB frames to help clear the depth data up. The proposed algorithm has five steps in order to created an accurate depth map for the 3d video. The first step creates a series of motion estimations using both the frames before the current frame and estimates the motion vectors of the frames after the current frame. The second step is to create a confidence metric for the motion vectors of the future frames in order to assess the quality of the motion vectors. The third step is to use the motion vectors on future frames for "motion compensation" in order to have a better accuracy of the depth of the frames. The forth step is to perform basic depth map filtering. The final step is to fill any holes with the data of neighboring pixels.

The results of this algorithm is a video conversion at 1.4 frames per second. Keep in mind this is not the viewing rate but the processing rate. The algorithm fixes problems with the original depth map. It also make the depth map smoother and more stable.

- Kao Pyro of the Azure Flame

Source:
Matyunin, S., Vatolin, D., & Berdnikov, Y. (2011). TEMPORAL FILTERING FOR DEPTH MAPS GENERATED BY KINECT DEPTH CAMERA. 3DTV Conference: The True Vision - Capture, Transmission and Display of 3D Video (3DTV-CON) , 1-4.
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/search/srchabstract.jsp?tp=&arnumber=5877202&openedRefinements%3D*%26filter%3DAND%28NOT%284283010803%29%29%26searchField%3DSearch+All%26queryText%3DKinect

Finding the Face

Today, the paper I read is less about using the Kinect, and more about processing an image. A big part of my project is about creating a partial skeleton for the Kinect. In order to do that I need good anchor points to place the joints at. In this case, I've decided the head would be real reliable. The paper is about an efficient algorithm to detect where the face is. The paper mentions several ways to go about detecting a face. The three ways mentions were knowledge based, image based, and feature based. The paper proposes take the feature based approach. Feature based is about finding specific features in the image common to faces, such as skin color, face shape, the eyes, and the nose. The paper goes over two of theses features.

The first feature it approaches is finding the skin color. However a major problem with skin color is differing tones. To solve this issue, they decide to take the image and convert it to a different color scheme. They use the YCbCr color scheme, because it makes a large distinction between skin and non-skin. It also applies the same to many different skin tones and colors, making the algorithm accurate for a variety of people. After the conversion, they draw a bounding box around the "skin" pixels, which in essence is the face.

The second feature they cover are the eyes. They take the bounding box they found with the previous feature as a starting point. Then, assuming the eyes would be in the upper half of the box, they cut out the bottom half to reduce the search area. Then they use a technique called Hough transform, which identifies specified geometric shapes easily, in this case, the eyes as an oval. Hough transform takes many calculations, and can be a problem in programs that require more immediate results.

- Kao Pyro of the Azure Flame

Source:

Choudhar, M. V., Devi, M. S., & Bajaj, P. (2011). Face and facial feature detection. Proceedings of the International Conference & Workshop on Emerging Trends in Technology , 686-689.

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1980022.1980169&coll=DL&dl=ACM&CFID=69641785&CFTOKEN=95949759

The Digital Smile

I'm not going to lie. The paper I read was short. So short, in fact, I nearly passed it up until I started thinking about it. Although it was short, it still informed me. It gave me facts and ideas, that i'd only be able to attribute to this paper. For that reason I'm writing about it. The paper was explaining a demo that used the Kinect to map facial gestures to an onscreen avatar. That's right. When you smile, you're character smiles. When you look like you utterly want to destroy the enemy who stole all you're online glory... well, same thing happens... kind of. The paper explains that though their framework, you don't have to manage lighting or put intrusive sensors on the subject. However, because the signal from the Kinect has a lot of "noise" you can't 1-to-1 map your face to your character's face either. To solve this problem they use a technique very similar to normal gesture recognition techniques used with Kinect. They have a pre-loaded database of facial animations, and use a sort of splicing between what the camera sees and those animations. The whole process can be summed up in this way: The Kinect determines which expression your current expression matches, and the activates that expression animation on the character model.

I was actually surprised I didn't think of this before. After all, all of the papers I have read said as much. Pre-load the database with preset gestures, then do machine learning to match the input with the closest preset. Using this same idea, putting in emote detection in our project really isn't that hard. Depending on the availability of time and resources, we could likely add emoticon support within a couple of weeks.

-Kao Pyro of the Azure Flame

Source:
Weise, Thibaut, et al. "Kinect-based facial animation." SA '11 SIGGRAPH Asia 2011 Emerging Technologies (2011).
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2073370.2073371&coll=DL&dl=ACM