To the end

Faith

Awhile ago, I was challenged with the notion that I already have all the faith I needed. I don’t need more faith, I just need to rid myself of creeping unbelief and doubt. Someone brought up Jesus talking about having faith like a mustard seed, and asked if that meant faith was meant to grow like a mustard seed. Here are the passages where Jesus relates faith with a mustard seed.

So Jesus said to them, “Because of your unbelief; for assuredly, I say to you, if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you. (Matthew 17:20 - NKJV)

So the Lord said, “If you have faith as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be pulled up by the roots and be planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you. (Luke 17:6 -NKJV)

Nowhere does Jesus say that the faith needs to grow. He’s simply stating how little faith is actually needed to accomplish seeming impossible things. The following passages is Jesus telling the parable of the mustard seed.

Another parable He put forth to them, saying: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and sowed in his field, which indeed is the least of all the seeds; but when it is grown it is greater than the herbs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches.” (Matthew 13:31-32 - NKJV)

Then He said, “To what shall we liken the kingdom of God? Or with what parable shall we picture it? It is like a mustard seed which, when it is sown on the ground, is smaller than all the seeds on earth; but when it is sown, it grows up and becomes greater than all herbs, and shoots out large branches, so that the birds of the air may nest under its shade.” (Mark 4:30-32 - NKJV)

Then He said, “What is the kingdom of God like? And to what shall I compare it? It is like a mustard seed, which a man took and put in his garden; and it grew and became a large tree, and the birds of the air nested in its branches.” (Luke 13:18-19 - NKJV)

In all these versions of the parable, it is interesting to note that Jesus is not talking about faith. He is likening the kingdom of God to a mustard seed that grows, meaning that the kingdom of God grows and expands. However, He is not talking about our faith that grows.

It is encouraging, yet challenging, to be responsible with the revelation that I have all the faith I need to see the impossible happen. Weeks ago, crystals appeared during one of our meetings on campus a few minutes after one of our friends from Stockton, Matt Gonzales, prophesied about gemstones being a sign that God was going to do on our campus. Soon after, crystals appeared in our friend’s church in Utah and even at breakfast. I will admit that even seeing these crystals appear firsthand, I was skeptical to a slight degree. Like, sometimes I don’t actually expect God to do something impossible, you know? Being unsure of something is not a bad thing necessarily, but there is a fine line between caution and doubt.

I don’t need to increase my faith, I need to decrease my doubt. James 1 talks about how a man who doubts is like the sea tossed by the wind, and is double-minded and unstable in all his ways. Faith is a choice to stand on what He is saying and believing that He is faithful. The faith to believe for salvation is a gift, and I have the faith to see the impossible. Looking back at the past years in college, there are so many miraculous things that I thought I would not see for years and decades, but I have seen them with my own eyes. The glass ceiling is broken and there is no limit to how high He wants to take us.

Disciple

A disciple is someone who has no other options but to follow Jesus. There is no plan B. Do you have a backup plan?

‘Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus

’Tis so sweet to trust in Jesus,
Just to take Him at His Word;
Just to rest upon His promise,
And to know, “Thus saith the Lord!”

Refrain:
Jesus, Jesus, how I trust Him!
How I’ve proved Him o’er and o’er;
Jesus, Jesus, precious Jesus!
Oh, for grace to trust Him more!

Oh, how sweet to trust in Jesus,
Just to trust His cleansing blood;
And in simple faith to plunge me
’Neath the healing, cleansing flood!

Yes, ’tis sweet to trust in Jesus,
Just from sin and self to cease;
Just from Jesus simply taking
Life and rest, and joy and peace.

I’m so glad I learned to trust Thee,
Precious Jesus, Savior, Friend;
And I know that Thou art with me,
Wilt be with me to the end.

Written by Louisa M. R. Stead, after she lost her husband who died trying to save a drowning boy. There’s something about those old hymns that are so profound. They are still real and speak to the heart even over a century later..

When words fail

It’s been a tough week with a lot of stress from school and life, more so than usual. I find it easy to get lost in the downward spiral of hopelessness and trying to struggle my way up and out with my own means. After a while, I got to a place of worrying about not having enough money or food in the near future and I came to a point where I began to put things in perspective. The thought came to me, “If I only was as concerned about my spiritual health and relationship with my Heavenly Father as I was about my physical circumstances..” I was reminded of saying Christian things like, “God, you are more to me than the air I breathe. You are my bread of life and living water.” It’s not like I didn’t mean it then, but my physical worries brought to light the depth of those words. Like, really? Is He my everything? Does He really take precedence before my natural needs? It’s interesting how easily I can drift into the mindset that I can actually live without Him. “Oh I need to work out my current circumstances first before I have the luxury of being with God.” No, I cannot live without Him. He is my daily bread, the air I breathe. He is life and life in abundance.

Smokes and Mirrors

In my class today, the professor was telling us how her daughter wanted a $600 prom dress because her friends said they were getting $600-800 dresses. The professor obviously was not going to drop that much on a prom dress, the most she would give her daughter was $300. That’s still quite a bit of money in my opinion. Anyway, it just made me think how people can feel significantly better about themselves just by what they wear. It’s interesting that a piece of clothing can be given so much value and that value becomes attached to its wearer. What is the actual difference between a $600 prom dress to a $300 one or a borrowed one? Nothing, except to those who know the monetary value, which is pretty arbitrary in most cases.

These thoughts led me to ponder how we easily identify ourselves externally, as opposed to internally, in our culture. It creeps up on us without us realizing it. Our self-esteem is proportional to all these external factors: how we look, the stuff we have, the things we do, etc. I want to identify myself by who I am without these outside definitions. I want to be free of external controls and begin to live life from the inside outward. Sometimes it’s hard to see what is true about myself, the layers of external influence can be quite imbedded. But God knows who I truly am, He lives inside me and He believes in me. Internal control. When I come to know Jesus, I see as He sees.

“For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.” 1 Corinthians 13:12.

Warning: Nerd Post II

After my first post about overclocking my new computer, I spent some more time testing the system. This time I was interested in seeing the relationship between the increase in CPU frequency and the needed increase of core voltage on the CPU. The new Sandy Bridge Intel processors have made overclocking ridiculously easy. Overclocking is basically increasing the speed of the CPU in performing calculations, or making the computer faster. The Core i5 2500k is rated to run at a stock frequency of 3.3GHz. The FSB is set to 100 MHz, and the default multiplier is 33 (33 x 100MHz = 3.3GHz). Overlocking is as easy as changing the multiplier, eg. from 33 to 45 (45 x 100MHz = 4.5GHz). However, as the frequency of the CPU is increased, the CPU requires more voltage to remain stable. In turn, the increase of voltage also raises the temperature of the chip and so there is a limit to how much it can be overclocked before it overheats. Thus, overclocking is a procedure of trying to achieve a higher CPU frequency (more GHz) while raising the CPU core voltage as little as possible.

Through a lengthy process of testing, I was able to find stable settings (3+ hours of prime95) for 3.3, 3.6, 3.9, 4.2, and 4.5GHz. I compiled the information into the two figures below. Fig 1 uses the CPU core voltage settings from the BIOS. Fig 2 uses the actual CPU core voltages while under load taken from CPU-Z (a monitoring program). For example, even though I set the CPU core voltage (Vcore) to 1.025V in the BIOS, the actual Vcore drops to 1.008V when the CPU is working at 100%. This is because the system automatically lowers the Vcore when under load to lower the chip’s temperature and prevent overheating.

Fig 1: The Vcore setting in the BIOS vs CPU frequency

Fig 1: The actual core voltage while under load vs CPU frequency

The black dots in the Fig 1 and 2 are the empirical data that I took. To predict the kinds of core voltages I would require in order to overclock the CPU above 4.5 GHz, I used quadratic, cubic (3rd degree polynomial) and exponential approximations. The cubic fit was the closest with an error of 0.0030 and 0.0019 volts with the Vcore setting and actual core voltage respectively. The quadratic fit was not far behind with errors of 0.0033 and 0.0032 volts. The exponential fit was the worst with an error of 0.0137 and 0.0150 volts.

The conclusion is that I would have to set the core voltage to ~1.5V in the BIOS (which would be about 1.475V under load) in order to run a stable overclock at 5.0 Ghz. Since the safe 24/7 core voltage for the core i5 2500k is said to be around 1.350V, the max stable overclock that I would be able to achieve with my system is around 4.6GHz. My results do corroborate with what I have read online that it becomes inefficient to overclock above 4.5GHz as the voltage step needed to bump up the CPU frequency grows at a constant rate with respect to frequency (first derivative of a quadratic fit is linear).

Anyway, it’s been a week of putting my new computer through its paces and now it’s time for me to actually use it.

Warning: Nerd Post

This week, I am on winter break and came back to the Bay Area and upgraded my desktop computer. It had been pooping out on me and there were some incredible deals that were just too tempting. Currently, the build is a MSI Z68A-GD65 (G3) motherboard, Intel Core i5 2500K processor, Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX+, and 8GB of G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3 RAM. I don’t normally overclock my computer because I don’t really need to nor is it worth it. However, like a kid with a new toy and plenty of time to play, I took it for a spin. I took some baseline tests at the stock 3.3GHz and then overclocked to 4.5GHz to compare and there was about a 25% improvement in performance. This made me curious about the relationship of overclocking and the increase in performance. I decided to do some tests.

Test Methodology

HyperPi - Calculates Pi to 1 million digits, the less time it takes the better.
PassMark Performance Test 7.1025 - A series of tests for the CPU, higher score is better

Starting at the stock frequency of 3.3GHz of the Core i5 2500K, I raised the clock by 0.1 GHz and ran HyperPi and PassMark three times. I then took an average of the three results. This took awhile because I had to restart my computer each time I changed the CPU frequency.

Results

Table 1: Data from all the trials

To get a better idea of what all the data meant, I plotted the values in MATLAB and noticed they all lined up fairly nicely. So I did a least squares approximation using a linear fit and plotted them together to see how close the linear fit was to the experimental values.

Fig 1: Plot of HyperPi data and the least squares linear approximation

Fig 1: Plot of PassMark data and the least squares linear approximation

I thought it was interesting that the performance increase of the CPU was linear, I initially guessed it would be exponential or maybe quadratic because of the jump in performance from 3.3Ghz to 4.5 GHz. From the linear approximation, I calculated that for every 0.1GHz increase of the CPU frequency, there was about an 1.77% and 2.71% improvement in HyperPi and PassMark respectively. After overclocking by 1.2GHZ, that’s a 21.2% and 32.5% improvement in HyperPi and PassMark respectively, an average of 26.9%. For about a 36% increase of the CPU frequency, you get about 27% increase in performance. That’s actually not that bad.

The bottom line is that it’s pretty pointless to overclock when I spend 75% of my time surfing the web and using Microsoft Office, but it’s cool just because I can. These numbers that I generated are not definitive and there’s probably a margin of error to it. However, I found it interesting and other geeks out there will probably too. When I did the tests, I had my core voltages set at 1.35V because I knew that it was stable for sure up to 4.5GHz. After slight tweaking, I have found that I can run 4.5GHz stable set at 1.33V with low Vdroop (after 3 hours of prime95).