A Brief Testimony

This morning in my prayers, I felt prompted to ask for the opportunity to share the gospel. As I look back at the day, I see some opportunities that I missed, being in the midst of work and other things. So, while there is probably no one in the world that reads my blog, I've decided to bear my simple testimony of Joseph Smith and The Book of Mormon.

I find myself living in an age where it seems that religious people are ridiculed as being close-minded and judgmental. It is in this time where I draw great strength from the tireless testimonies of the ancient prophets of the Book of Mormon and modern prophets like Joseph Smith and Thomas Monson. A song that I really like goes like this:

In a day where people hunger

For our time when good men wander

A book is designed, to give help divine

For our day

It's a work and a wonder today.

It refers to The Book of Mormon, a second witness of Jesus Christ that stands next to the witness of the Apostles in Jerusalem. To me, it is an anchor in a world that is driven back and forth like dust before the wind. I am so grateful for its teachings and its witness.

I am also grateful for the man who spent his entire life wading through the consequences of standing firm to his conviction that he had translated The Book of Mormon by the power of God and that it was true. Joseph Smith was an honorable man, and I believe his testimony.

I love my Savior, Jesus Christ, and I anxiously await his return which will mend the broken-hearted at last. "Come, O, Thou King of Kings, we've waited long for thee" is my prayer in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

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How Many Teeth Does The Tooth Fairy Pick Up Each Night in Utah?

Somebody asked me a question about my Tooth Fairy post the other day that got me thinking. How many baby teeth are lost every day in Utah?

I began with Googling. Surely someone else has thought of this and run some numbers, right? Lo, there is a tooth fairy site that claims that the Tooth Fairy collects 300,000 teeth per night.

That's a lot; however, when I ran the numbers, it started to seem awfully low.

Let's assume that the Tooth Fairy collects all baby teeth regardless of quality and we assume that all children lose all their baby teeth. The world population of children sits at 2.2 billion, with 74.2 million of them in the United States. Of those, approximately 896,961 of them are in Utah. This means that somewhere around .04077% of the world's children are in Utah.

If we assume that kids in Utah lose teeth at the same rate as all other children in the world and that each day in the year is just as likely as the rest to lose a tooth, then we have that of the alleged …

BYU and the Sunday Compromise?

I read an article by Brad Rock this morning where he quoted heavily from Dr. Thomas Forsthoefel who was giving his opinion on religious institutions being involved in sports. BYU, of course, came up.
I think Forsthoefel came off sounding a bit misinformed about the culture, drive, mission, etc. of BYU. Below is the email that I sent to Brad Rock this morning after finishing the article:
Brad -
That was an interesting article. I tend to disagree with Forsthoefel, though, or at least disagree with what I may have read into his comments.
A quote in your article says:
"There may be a kind of growing pain. BYU is in the real world and the real world works on Sunday. Can we (BYU) live with the adjustment? I'm empathetic with that, whatever decision is made, people are going to be unhappy.… Some will say get with the program, we'll be OK at the next level, others will say we've sold out and we've made a deal with the world."

This seems to suggest one or two things; fir…

Mental Math Tricks: Is this divisible by 17?

Image via WikipediaSo, most know how to tell if something is divisible by 2 or 5, and many know how to tell if something is divisible by 9. What about other numbers?

So, here are strategies for discovering divisibility from 2 to 10, and then we'll talk about some rarer, more surprising divisibility tricks:

Divisible by two:If the number ends in 0, 2, 4, 6, or 8, it is divisible by 2.

Divisible by five:If the number ends in 0 or 5, it is divisible by 5.

Divisible by ten:If the number ends in 0, it is divisible by 10.

Divisible by nine: If you add all the digits in a number together and that new number is divisible by 9, then it is also divisible by 9.

Example #1: 189 -> 1 + 8 + 9 = 18, 18 is divisible by 9, so 189 is also divisible by 9
Example #2: 137781 -> 1 + 3 + 7 + 7 + 8 + 1 = 27, 27 is divisible by 9, so 137781 is also divisible by 9
(Note: If adding six numbers together in your head seems difficult, look for my next post on number-grouping tricks. Soon, adding six numbe…

I'd Rather Be Deriving

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