The future arrived while no one was paying attention

One of the problems of being inside time is that most things change gradually. A consequence of this is that you tend not to notice when things have radically changed over the course of a few decades. When I was a boy, an amazing movie came out that blew me away. It had cool futuristic things like robots and space travel. Well it seems that reality is quickly catching up.

The Urban Dictionary

With new slang being constantly created, one often comes across unknown words. Where to go to find the definitions? Well a great resource is The Urban Dictionary, a user contributed collection of definitions that I have found quite good. Here are some of the interesting definitions I have come across that deal with Christianity:

Heaven: A place that seems to get further and further away as humans’ scientific knowledge improves. About 100 years ago, Heaven was right above our heads. Then, when we started flying airplanes, it wasn’t there, so it was moved right above the atmosphere. Finally, when we sent people into outer space and to the moon, it wasn’t there either, so now Heaven is way past Pluto somewhere.
Hell: A place where you get poked with pitchforks by red men with horns and goatlegs and listen to the Village People sing for the rest of eternity. Satan: Welcome to Hell, sinner! *pokes victim* *man screams* Out of nowhere: In the Navy…
Christians: Christians are the number one reason why Christianity is not followed, misunderstood, hated or basically ignored.

Jesus: A pretty cool guy whose reputation has been run down by his horrible fan-club. Used by the said fan-club as an excuse to do whatever they decide is “right.” Dude: “Hey! What the hell are you doing to my car???” Other dude: “Jesus’ will.”

Google and Lonely People

Well it seems that if you Google the phrase “I am so lonely” one of the top hits will be this message board thread. It seems that 1000s of people have done this and found this site. A few things I noticed while I was there:

  • Most people are quite surprised to discover that there are so many other lonely people out there who did the same Google search
  • Several of the posts are quite insightful and have helped others in the thread
  • Some people post multiple times, some even becoming regulars to the thread — making online acquaintances in the process
  • Google is not only sending people to this thread, they are also profiting from it via some highly targeted ads (such as “therapy” and “dating” services)

The thread is a little under a year old and has almost 1400 posts (about 3 posts a day). However, the truly sad thing is that this same board has another topic called “suicide”. This thread only started last December and already has near 2000 posts (close to 10 posts a day). I won’t even talk about the Google ads in this thread.

As a footnote to all of this: there is yet another thread on this same board about the relative merits of the Xbox vs other gaming consoles. This thread (which started in February) has close to 3000 posts now — I’ll let you do the math. I’m not quite sure how to interpret this fact.

We really are monkeys!

Just in case you were not already convinced, here’s proof:

When taught to use money, a group of capuchin monkeys responded quite rationally to simple incentives; responded irrationally to risky gambles; failed to save; stole when they could; used money for food and, on occasion, sex. In other words, they behaved a good bit like the creature that most of Chen’s more traditional colleagues study: Homo sapiens.

All I have to say is “Ook!”

Update:

We are now trying to turn monkeys into humans:

Scientists have been warned that their latest experiments may accidentally produce monkeys with brains more human than animal.

What’s next?

Sad Technology

Just discovered an interesting blog called “SadTech“. While many of the articles are great, these two in particular are simultaneously very sad and very funny:

Visiting the Dentist

Today, when we go to the dentist, we are primitive people. What we have is a person reaching into our mouths with a scraper. When that doesn’t work we get cavities, and we turn to a dentist with a drill. A drill of all things! And when that doesn’t work, the tooth gets pulled out. This does not sound a whole lot more advanced than civil war surgery…

Cigarettes

When you think about sad technologies, there are few that are sadder than cigarettes. Cigarettes should probably be the SadTech poster child.

What to say…?

Well it has been quite some time since I have posted anything here. Lots has happened — the major event being that after 37 or so years of being a regular church attender, I have stopped. Why you ask? Well several reasons really. It’s not like this came out of the blue. I have been dissatisfied / unhappy with church for some time but was too lazy / complacent to do anything about it. My wife has made the same decision, albeit for her own reasons, some of which are similar to mine. So what are they you ask? Well in a simplified form they are as follows:

  • I had a very hard time with the idea of “worshiping” a God who allows / causes such incalculable suffering
  • I found that I was unable to stay intellectually honest while at the same time trying to accept many of the church’s doctrines (science has made great leaps that the church has just not been willing / able to integrate into its world view)
  • I find that much of the church is just socially out of touch with the modern world, especially in conservative groups (woman as equals, contraception, etc.)
  • I have grown more and more distrustful of large systems (government, big business, big unions) and that includes organized religions

There are other reasons as well, but these are the ones that immediately spring to mind. I have taken a large step back to reassess just exactly what I do believe. Here is the process that my wife and I have taken so far:

  • read books, including: “The Naked Ape“, “The Christian Agnostic“, and others
  • attended a Philosophers Cafe about “The spiritual Journey”
  • watched a movie entitled “What the Bleep Do We Know“
  • wrote down what we believe as individuals and then see what commonalities there are
  • revised the above list at a later date and clarified / refined the list
  • wrote down how these beliefs can play out in our daily lives

While our new spiritual journey is certainly more work, I feel it has been much more authentic and personal for me. While I am certainly not throwing out the baby with the bath water (so to speak), there is certainly an awful lot of filthy water and seemingly very little baby in my former belief system. What are your thoughts?

 

My Cyber Poet

A recent study asked people what their favourite word was. They came up with a list of 70 words with the top five being:


1 Mother
2 Passion
3 Smile
4 Love
5 Eternity

I’ve always wanted to create an automated poetry program and this was the impetus to do so. It’s a simple Perl script that has the full list of seventy words, organized by parts of speech. It creates sentences from templates. It is still pretty rudimentary but here are the results of a few test runs:

The Aqua Paradox Loved the Shipshape Renaissance.
You have an Umbrella only a Galaxy could Tickle.
The Hilarious Sunshine Loved the Cute Eternity.
I Flip-flop inside when I see a Gothic Mother.
The Cute Hippopotamus Cherished the Fantastic Night.
Some Gazebos are better than any Shipshape Explosion.
The Cosy Eternity Flip-floped the Blue Coconut.
The Gorgeous Giggle Twinkled the Hilarious Explosion.

I know computer poetry has been around for a while now but it just got a little better with the help of this survey!

My Latest Addiction

Well it used to be that this blog was my on-line addiction (silly, I know) but now the Wikipedia has become my latest obsession. First it started with reading some great articles, including:

Now, however, I’ve delved into actually updating and even contributing new entries:

Who knows what wild and crazy thing I’m prone to do next… 🙂

From an inner threat to an outer(space) one!

I just got back from a three day stay in the hospital. It turned out that I had a (very painful) case of Acute Sigmoid Diverticulitis (the inner threat). While I was there my wife bought me an astronomy magazine to help pass the time (it turns out that hospitals are very boring places). One article in particular caught my eye — it was about a solar flare that impacted earth satellites. This happens all the time of course but this one was very different — it was not caused by our sun , but from one 45,000 light years away. This article details the incident nicely. That’s not the worst threat however, my magazine went on like this:

Truly dangerous sources

Somewhere within our galaxy lies a handful of future gamma-ray bursters. These are invisible until the moment each erupts in a beamed blast of energy so strong it is capable — even from 3,000 light-years away — of wiping out all life on Earth. Scientists blame the almost instantaneous collapse of a massive star into a black hole as the prime cause for most gamma ray bursts (See “In the line of fire,” Astronomy, January 2004.)

The Universe is a much scarier place than I had ever previously imagined.