U.S. religious knowledge survey

recently, the pew forum on religion and public life released the results of their recent U.S. religious knowledge survey. sadly, 86% of THE PEOPLE SURVEYED (not americans as they would suggest... it IS an extrapolation afterall), believe in "god" or a higher power. the problem is, most of these people who believe in god/higher power don't really know the tenets or history of what they believe in. it seems they know that church means dressing up the family on sunday, going to church, feeding the kids cookies so they are quiet during the service, listening to the sermon (a.k.a bible cliff's notes), eating some stale bread and wine, and then going home to watch the game. it's tradition, it's a habit (and a bad one at that, in my opinion). many of these people base their personal beliefs and political stances on a book they haven't read. they cherrypick the parts of their book that support their prejudices (homosexuality is bad) but ignore the ones that just aren't fun [no premarital sex, no pork, no eating lobsters, no rare meat, shaving, or cutting of the hair (still, i think that link is a bit strange too. i think since jesus was basically raised a jew as far as we know, he was a jew who stirred a following and started an offshoot that was probably still based in part on judaism. similar to how islam is based on judaism, acknowledges jesus, and is just a 3rd iteration / prophet from the original judaism)].

as usual, i digress. i find it entertainingly ironic that of the people polled (and again, this is but 1/1000 of a percent of the population) that atheists/agnostics topped the poll with the best scores followed by jews, mormons, and the best catholic score coming in 5th. if you are here, more than likely you know i am an atheist. i was raised lutheran until the age of 14 or so when i went to TheMom and said i didn't believe in god. it didn't make sense. math and science explained a lot more than church did for me, and even though there's a lot that science couldn't explain, that set grew smaller every day, something that doesn't happen with religion. TheMom was heartbroken, thinking she raised me wrong, but i assured it had absolutely nothing to do with that. it had to do with my free will and the thinking/analytical mind i was born with. as i got older, she came out as an agnostic. i hope this wasn't from my doing as i'm not much for proselytizing... as long as no one gets hurt, i think everyone has the right to believe what they want. i believe she was agnostic far earlier in her life, but that just wasn't accepted so she fell in line with what she was supposed to do culturally. i don't blame her for this. it is certainly a safer environment now to walk away from religion, at least in the western world.

i've lived in the hindu culture which i am quite fond of in their acceptance of other religions. sadly, those other religions were massive missionary expeditions which i thoroughly despise. i personally witnessed the bringing of clothes, money, food, and classrooms to the young. the parents were hindu and the children converted to mormonism via the missionary church that was set up. i asked the parents how they felt about their children leaving the religion they themselves were brought up in, and they said as long as their children were happy, the parents were happy. i half believed this. hinduism does seem to be a happy, peaceful religion trying to better oneself. on the other hand, they wanted their children to be happy and children are simple creatures. a new pair of shoes, a crisp clean white shirt and new tie all their own, a snack after the service that the parents couldn't afford. the children would be happier, but could it be said their happiness was bought? still, the hindus i met weren't angry about it, they were just trying to give their children a better purchase on a properous life by selling out their religious beliefs.

as for christianity, i've been reading the bible off and on for years as an education tool, a piece of literature. while i was in egypt, i read the qu'ran during ramadan as is typical of most muslims. i read this, too, as an educational tool. many of the muslims i worked with were excited that i was converting. when i explained that i was reading it to educate myself on the culture and the people, i ran in to quite a few who asked me stop reading it because that was not the purpose of the book. that's not to say they are any worse than some christians i've told about reading the bible keeping in mind a high degree of "suspension of disbelief". there are always going to be moderates and fundamentalists in every religion. i fear the fundamentalists in all of them. the same bible-thumping christians who tout their 2nd amendment right to keep and bear arms are usually the ones who claim this is a christian nation, forgetting that the 1st amendment, aside from protecting freedom of speech, also explicitly prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion. we are NOT a christian nation, we are a nation of many, believers and non-believers, and a diverse spectrum in between.

i believe over the course of civilized man, religion on the whole has done more harm than good, but on a personal level, i'm sure it's helped it fair share. for fun, why don't you go here and take the abridged test. i was hoping for a score of 100%, but i missed one. :-(

it's good to have time to be back.

blown away by scale

i am currently located in bellaire, ohio, TheUnitedStates, earth, TheSol system, TheOrionArm, TheMilkyWay, TheLocalGroup, TheVirgoSupercluster, TheKnownUniverse. each of these descriptions is EASILY several orders of magnitude larger than the previous one in the list. that is, ohio is at least 10 times larger than bellaire; TheUnitedStates is at least 10 times larger than ohio; etc. that is just mind-boggling considering as things get bigger, 10x bigger than that is just so insanely bigger that thinking of the next step makes brains cell runs for cover.

say, for example, you place a grain of sand on the very center of the 50-yard line on a football field. this grain of sand represents earth. a scaled sun would be a bit larger than a softball, just about the size of the 50-yard line stripe itself. that may not seem like a huge difference, but in actuality, you can fit about ONE MILLION earths in the sun (and thus approximately 1,000,000 grains of sand in this softball). now here's the insanity of scale... the largest known star in the universe is YZ Canis Majoris. can you take a guess how big it would be? just take a guess, would it fit between the 40-yard lines? maybe, the 20-yard lines? would it be goal line to goal line? think about it and take a guess...









well, if you gave up on guessing, i'll tell ya. granted these are rough calculations, but you'd have to add a football field to both sides of the one we are standing on and (neglecting endzones) YZ Canis Majoris would reach to the FAR 5 yard line on these extra fields. we think of our earth as big. we think of our sun as big. while it takes 8 minutes for our suns light to travel to use from the earth (just to reiterate, going the speed of light), it takes about 8 HOURS for light to cross from one side of YZ Canis Majoris to the other. just for shits and giggles and maybe strokes for people who have a hard time with big numbers. the number of earths that would fit in this big guy... almost 10,000,000,000,000,000. that's ten quadrillion earths in just one star.

that's about as far as i'm going to take the numbers for now, but think briefly... there are BILLIONS of stars each found in BILLIONS of galaxies each found in what might be millions of super-clusters. the scale is just awe striking and humbling. and with that, i need a break or a beer... or both.

my whatzit

so, my trip down to tampa was more sociable than usual. what seems like eons ago, i was working in trinidad, and i’d taken a book about how to make people like you, or how to start conversations or meet people or something like that. i don't remember much about the book except that the author used several really weird terms like "have sticky eyes" and "have a whatzit". the one thing i took away from the book is the "have a whatzit" to start conversations. that was easy for me because i like gadgets.

on the flight from pittsburgh to DC, i was seated next to a middle-aged woman who noticed my kindle DX. i was testing the DX because in the "portait" position, it shows an entire page and also what page you are on out of how many the book has. when you turn the kindle to the "landscape" position, the text turns accordingly, but it also sizes up the font. for some reason this does not change the page count (i determined that you have to use the joystick to scroll down the page in this position). the lady next to me noticed my experiment and asked how i liked it. i told her it was good, but no backlighting. she told me she was looking for an e-reader for an elderly friend of hers who wanted to learn calculus and figured and ebook would be the best way. i don't know why i didn't go further into why an elderly man would want to learn calculus. my excuse will be that i was nervous that i was having to converse with someone without prior preparation. i let her check it out, she apologized several times about interrupting, but i had no problem with it. i learned she works for a company that organizes clinical trials for HIV/AIDS treatments, and they are showing some promise in, not a cure, but a drug that makes it more difficult to transmit. fancy. as our conversation was reaching it's natural end (because i'm still learning how to do this whole talking to people thing), the pilot made the announcement that we were about to land and all electronic devices had to be switched off. that, i told her, was another drawback of the e-reader. she apologized again that i didn't get to read very much at all, but i re-asserted that it was no problem, and that i enjoyed the conversation.

on my connecting flight from DC to tampa, i was seated in the middle. from the way the guy to my left was glued to his blackberry, i figured he was a business type. he had on slacks, collared shirt, and had a clean haircut. i thought the lady to my right was just a crotchety old ethnic grandma. she seemed inconvenienced when she realized there would be a big man sitting next to her. once we were at cruising altitude, i whipped out the kindle to try to get some reading done. it didn't take very long at all before the lady to my right asked if you could change the font size on the kindle. i'm pretty sure you can, though i wasn't able to figure out where while trying to show her the functions that i DID know how to operate. i mentioned how it was very convenient for me since i travel a lot, and that it was much easier to carry 400 books on this than in a steamer trunk. the man to my left asked what i did, so i elaborated a bit. in trying to fit in with you humans, i then tried to bounce the question back, asking what he was doing in DC. i found out that he was there for an interview at a new church, and he actually lives in tampa. after some brief shit-chat, we found out that the lady to my right was a principal in england. she splits her time between london, where her husband works, and sarasota, where they are snowbirds. they got into a conversation about separation of church and state (he believes it should be, she experienced the opposite being in england, there is no such thing). he was concerned about the downfall of morality and traditional values. he spoke of how dysfunctional families breed dysfunctional families, so soon we would be exponentially out of control as a society. i tried to bite my tongue through most of this. i shouldn't try to be confrontational AND sociable. that's just too much on one plate. apparently, the pastor started out as an engineer in college and then found (lost?) his way to god, so he went to seminary. somehow it was thrashed out that i was an atheist, so he wanted to pick my brain. at least that's what he said. while i was curious about what a pastor does when it's not sunday, what does a church interview entail, and how can seminary last so long when there's really only one book, it seemed to me that he just wanted to know where i went astray, what caused me to lost faith so young, etc. he wanted to re-convert me rather than actually converse. it wasn't abrasive by any means, just disappointing. the first half of the trip, i thought he was kind of a normal person, open to new ideas, but then he fell into the same religious role i'd expected in the first place. we briefly talked about evolution and "irreducible complexity" and there having to be a maker. i hadn't expected to get into a theological debate, so i was a bit scattered, though sufficient, in my defense of what i think is right, but i got my point across.

before we knew it, the flight was over and we decided to introduce ourselves (somehow, i always do that backwards). i'd met ThePastorJohn and ThePrincipalDoris. his wife and four kids were waiting to pick him up, she was driving down to sarasota, and i was going to rent a car to get me to my hotel and my next assignment.

and all these things happened because of my "whatzit".


oh, and on a completely unrelated point, florida drivers are fukking nuts. they can't drive for shite, they speed, tailgate, and cut people off all willy nilly. you guys suck, really.

meat is murder

i have a question to my vegetarian friends... and on that note, i have no vegetarian friends, so could you pass this link on to them so i could get their opinion. from this article it seems we may be only 10 years away from test-tube meat. that is meat that you would buy, cook and eat, that was grown in a laboratory rather than fed on a farm and slaughtered. this meat would be able to be adjusted to be healthier, have more of the good fats and less of the bad fats, and would decrease the need for grazing land and in the worst case, buildings cramped full of animals solely for business.

i saw this a report on this on CNNi before i saw the article. studies show that livestock produce nearly 18% of the greenhouse gases that might be affecting our climate. the entire fossil fuel industry (cars, power plants, etc) only produce 13%. that's right! cow farts are doing more damage to our environment than that gas-guzzling SUV you have. if we can culture healthier meat in the lab, we'd significantly reduce greenhouse emissions on a level not even fathomable by environmentalists trying to fight fossil fuel emissions.

so, the question is: vegetarians... would you begin eating meat? would you eat THIS meat? it's no longer "meat is murder"; it never had a face, as is the reasoning for some, AND it would be better for the environment to have people eat more lab-meat, thus making it more cost-effective. if not, what excuse would you have not to? dietitians typically don't say to completely remove red meat, but to limit it to like one serving a week, and as far as i know, there are no health risks associated with chicken at all (we're not talking salmonella here, though that would be significantly decreased since chicken factories that help spread that would be eliminated). would you eat lab-chicken? i'm just curious.

i would. i don't see a problem with it at all. healthier, better for the environment. seems to be pretty much a win-win as long as the cost isn't too much.

quickly... some cool stuff

i'm crazy sunburnt from my afternoon sailing trip yesterday. good stories to be told, but that'll be in a day or two. until then, i ran across these and thought they were pretty cool.

i SOOOO want this zombie shirt. fantastic marketing!

and this link talks about a renewable energy concept that would totally rock to see implemented. it's based on bikes being used to charge batteries which then charge electric buses. people ride bikes in europe all the time, we should start doing that in the US.

carl sagan and a non-sequitur revelation

i just thought that was cool. while rifling through some papers, i found a drunken scrawl of a revelation i'd written down ages ago.

• i'll never be normal, in that, i wonder why women dance more than men instead of wondering why i don't dance with women

help NASA name node 3

node 3 of the international space station (ISS) is looking for a new name. stephen colbert, host of the popular "the colbert report", wants us to help get node 3 named after him. i think it would be funny if it could happen. if you want to help, go here and "submit your own". in the box, put "colbert", and submit. you'll feel better doing it, being a part of pop culture if he wins. he's already ahead of scientology's "xenu".

awesome, though a bit long, short movie

World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo.

i was really impressed by this movie. at just over 9 minutes, it's a bit long for most internet users to wrap their MTV-gen attention spans around (it started slow for me, but i refused to urge to fast forward) but worth the watch. this guy makes a virtual city (street) kinda like the holodeck on star trek or "the strangers" from dark city but with a minority report flare. if you have 10 minutes (plus DL time), check it out. you can read a bit more about the creator from this link.

encryption for the layman

i received a newsletter today from grand illusions. they are one of the places i get all my geek toys from, as well as thinkgeek. at the end of the newsletter, it had a "puzzle". i recognized the puzzle immediately as it is a real-life example of how public- and private-key encryption works (that stuff your web browser uses all the time so you aren't thieved of your credit card info). typically, the story involves Alice (A) trying to contact Bob (B) without Eve (Eavesdropper) finding out the message. this time they used john and mary and left eve to be understood as the general populous. the first answer is an example of private-key encryption, the second is public-key.

John and Mary have fallen in love, via the internet, and John wishes to send Mary a ring. Unfortunately they live in a country where anything sent through the mail will be stolen unless it is enclosed in a padlocked box.

John and Mary each have plenty of padlocks, but none to which the other has a key. How can John get the ring safely into Mary's hands?

_____________________________________

1. John puts the ring in a box, padlocks the box, and sends it in the post to Mary. Mary attaches a padlock of her own, so there are now 2 padlocks on the box, and sends the box back to John. John uses his key to remove the original padlock, and sends the box back to Mary. Mary uses her key, removes the remaining padlock, opens the box and retrieves the ring.

2. John sends Mary an empty box that has been locked with a padlock. Attached to the hasp of the padlock is a key. John then sends a second box to Mary; this box can be opened using the key that was attached to box 1. Inside box 2 is the ring.

see, computers aren't hard. i thought that was cool.

do you really care?

it is commonplace for people to ask "how are you?" when seeing someone for the first time in the day. i don't quite like that. i mean, seriously, do you really care? at one time, many, many moons ago, it was probably used as it was supposed to, but now it's turned into a generic greeting that makes me feel uncomfortable. i prefer "what's up" or "what's going on?". with the former, you can deflect the inanity of the question with a smart-ass reply like "the price of oil", "NOT the market", or the old standby, "the sky". with the latter, you have far more topics to speak about: work, family, money, etc.

i speak of this because here in egypt, EVERYONE asks "how are you" (in arabic, of course), and they ask it EVERYTIME they see you. all of you who read this blog know that i'm not doing well. these people don't really care how i'm doing, it's just a common courtesy to ask, but it wears me down having to lie. i might not be thinking about the shitty things that are going on in my life, i might be truly distracted, but when they ask... it all comes flooding back, and i have to then lie. "i'm doing great", "meyya, meyya" (means 100%).

i'm kind of the happy-go-lucky guy at work. i don't raise my voice, i don't complain much, i curse on occasion if i knock my head on a scaffolding pole or something, but in general, everyone knows me to be in a good mood. with this whole shitty situation, i've had to start wearing masks. some days i might be in a piss poor mood, but someone will eventually come up to me, asking me how i am, and i have to throw on the smile, tell them everything's fine, what do they need. it's exhausting. when no one's looking, when no one's around, i can let the mask fade away, but that isn't very often at work. it's strictly an external facade, i still feel like shite inside. some days i'm at it so long, that i can't take it off even when i go home. i can't embrace my issues because i've been faking all day that everything is OK. they really don't want to hear about my shite. they wouldn't understand, and even if they did, they'd probably think less of me. i couldn't tell them the truth anyways; my throat closes when i even remotely think of having to explain what's going on in my heart and in my head. i want someone to talk to, someone strong enough to know that my flaws only compound this situation, and i'm pretty sure they are hard-wired flaws. there's no changing them no matter how much i want to.

TheElectrical advised that i see a therapist (as well as cutting down on drinking, pity smoking, and i should lose weight, but i digress). i suppose it might not be a BAD idea, but again, there are several genetic predispositions i have against that course of action.

1. i think i'm smarter than them - i minored in psychology in school, i took enough classes to have a decent idea what the fukk is wrong with me. granted, i didn't take the "how do you fix it" classes, but i have a general idea of what they would suggest, i suggest it to myself, my friends suggest it to me, but i'm just closed. it's not like i can't see the door, rather, my hand is on the knob, and i just can't turn it. i had a bad experience with a high school psychologist during a break up then. i'd pierced the bridge of my nose with a safety pin, left it in, and went to school. i was kicked out of just about every class, and the psychologist was called in. she said she knew i was an actor (yes, i joined thespians for my girlfriend at the time), that i might be able to put on a good show, but she felt i was like an orange... hard skin on the outside but juicy just underneath that skin. i'm not making this up. right then and there, i labeled her a joke as a professional, figured she was bottom of her class, and wrote her off. i wasn't impressed. i'm sure there HAS to be better therapists out there, but my first impression left a bad taste in my mouth


2. i broke me, so i can fix me - well, technically, I didn't break me, but i put myself into a position that allowed me to let down my guard to be broken. i've been witness to every little psycho synapse firing in my head, i've felt every heart pang for the most unrelated, benign reasons, it's all documented here in my head in my own proprietary format. there's no way i could explain it coherently to someone outside my head. they don't have the right codecs (i'm such a geek). i need time to analyze the data, but i've not had time to arrange it into an easy, user-friendly format. looking at the raw data, right now, it seems it isn't the product that is flawed (again this is preliminary), it's the process. i think i'm pretty damn good at relationships on the whole. everyone has their shortcomings and such, but in general, i think i have a pretty good handle on how things should go. the process is fukked in that, i just spend that time on the wrong people. i'm blinded by attention, by beauty, by learning about new things from new people, by the excitement of this amazing new person who wants to spend time with me. in doing so i might be missing telltale signs that we may not be compatible. i miss the hints, i miss the suggestions.


3. strangers vs. friends - this guy is a complete stranger. how am i going to open up to him, when i have a hard time opening up to my close friends? i was always the guy who listened to other peoples' problems, the shoulder to cry on. i didn't want to burden them with my problems because mine were so insignificant in comparison, so i tried my best to keep quiet. telling a stranger how crazy i am? come on. therapists are only human. they're trained to be non-judgemental, but we are animals. there will always be a judgment made, an impression formed, even if it's in the remotest hollow of the basal ganglia, i'll be judged. my friends know my good and bad already, they already know that and yet, they're still my friends. they accept my idiosyncracies, or at the very least, they aren't threatened by them. they aren't judging me, they already did that years ago, for free, they STILL stuck around, even if only to see what the fukk this guy is going to do next. these are people i love, i trust, and i still have a hard time letting them know exactly how messed up i am. a stranger who has to learn all my background plus current problems in several 60-minute sessions... i don't know if i'd trust their evaluation for lack of thoroughness.


4. i'm just too damn proud - there's not much more that can be added to that. i don't want to be fukked up, i don't want to admit that i can't deal with this on my own. i'm not into holistic medicine, i know my boundaries (i think). if i have cancer or a broken arm or a bullet wound... know i can't fix those, but my brain (unless i'm more fukked up that i though) is not injured. it may be chemically imbalanced or dehydrated, but it's not like something is there that shouldn't be. if there is no physical defect, i think i should be able to manage it myself. mind over matter (except in the case of the aforementioned bullets and such).

you know what i just realized? i'm a hypocrite. you didn't even ask me how i was doing, you mightn't even care, and yet i let you have it. i apologize. had i not ranted on about that in the first part of this post, this would be OK as it is my blog and you came here voluntarily. next time i'll give you warning.

i'm going to try to write more on ZUMEL(i put a short post up there today), really, and i'm going to really try to get some vacation pix and stories up for you soon. i give you my word, and that, my friend, is stronger than graphene. please someone corroborate that for me. hah. later kids.

do i have the bends?

i've felt fine all day, then after lunch i was called to site to witness some air blows. we have to blow air through the pipes and visually inspect that they are clean before installing them. normally this is done with an air compressor, but the site doesn't have one that 1) can reach the pressure we need, 2) provide clean air (some oil residue), and 3) provide dry air (see previous note). so, instead we are using nitrogen straight from the bottle. we had to do more blows than normal to get it clean enough, and it is in a pseudo-enclosed space, so i'm guessing the nitrogen level was higher than normal air. i under stand the concept of decompression sickness, or the bends, but i'm not sure if ingesting more nitrogen than normal can also cause it. i'm feeling like dogshite right now, bad cramps, headache, etc. i googled "can you get the bends from breathing nitrogen" to no avail. i'm going to go try to curl up to make this pain go away.

alexandria picture post

the library at alexandria. though this library is breath-taking, i'm sure it's nowhere near as impressive as the original back in roman times.


this is the inside of the library at alexandria, looking from the top floor down.


jules had a habit of popping her head into my pictures this trip. this is the library from the bottom floor looking up.


this is me, looking the consummate dopey tourist, standing next to a real live dead mummy at the national museum of alexandria.


i like these. i think they are called box statues. they are meant to represent someone sitting with their knees pulled up to their chest, then the front is adorned with hieroglyphics detailing their life.


here is a stereotypical tablet with hieroglyphics inscribed on them.


the taxi that we took from the library at alex to our hotel had this "pitch" and "roll" gauge on it. if you know anything about egyptian drivers, neither of those gauges were very level throughout the trip. that being said, i want a set of those gauges.


this picture isn't from alex, but i had to share it. i think their is something wrong with this picture, but i just can't put my finger on it. if you can't tell what books those are, click on the picture for a larger version, as you can do with all the pictures in this post.

the rest of my alexandria pix are here if you are interested. also, i updated my "location" in the right sidebar. now, it shows my apartment location rather than the hotel i moved out of.

this is completely bad ass!!!

check out the picture in this link. that is just totally frickin' awesome.

THEY'RE TRYING TO USE THE BACKDOOR!!!!

Penn & Teller Creationism Bullshit


not THAT backdoor, you pervs... oh, just me then? anyways, i think it's an amazing coincidence i ran into these two videos within the same relative timeframe. i've heard of the show called "bullshit", starring penn & teller. i may have even seen an episode or two at BTVJGJHo's house. this episode is about creationism and intelligent design. of course, since i'm on the side of P&T in this episode, i'd have to say, it's well organized, detailed, and thought out. of course, i'm a bit biased, but i HAVE done some formal debating (coincidentally with BTVJGJHo) and understand that you have to look at both sides of the argument critically in order to support your points and rebut to counter's points. i think this episode set a good foundation for that type of debate.

separately, i found a link to a CNN.com video about the anti-christian themes in the new movie "the golden compass". i think the movie looks good, i blogged about it many moons ago here. the president of the catholic league believes that this movie is trying to introduce children to atheism through a fantasy movie. they are afraid it's presenting christianity as a big, bad meanie society while promoting atheism as a free-thinking utopia, of sorts. this is what happens when grown-ups forget what it was like to be a kid. the kids are going to see witches, and fighting polar bears, monkeys, cats, and a cool story. that's pretty much it. the adults who, by this time in their lives, probably have their minds pretty much made up on this topic, might pick up some of the religious overtones, but that's a moot point.

anyways, i digress. the title of this post is such, because ironically, that paraphrase is used in both arguments, against creationism and ID in the "bullshit" episode, and against atheism in CNN.com report.

when will we ever grow up, er... i guess in this case, grow down?

water battery

the embed link isn't working for this vid, so i'm just going to have to link to the page itself. this college professor shows you how to make an electrical spark from water. it's 6 minutes long, but pretty cool. check it out here.

the last question

this is a short story by isaac asimov i wanted to share with you. you can read it in about 10 minutes or so, but it's long enough that i didn't want to post it here. i've been reading isaac asmimov's foundation series lately, and it is amazing. i found this short story while using stumble, and was equally impressed. it seems a bit monotonous, but that adds to the complete story. also, if you didn't know, asimov likes to jump time-frames rather willy-nilly, particularly in stories like this, where one paragraph is "X" time-frame and then next is "X + 25,000 years" without nothing it. we have to use context clues. if no one has read asimov, i just wanted to give you this glimpse, and maybe hook you like i am.

tell me what you think about it. i was pleasantly surprised by the ending (don't peek), which is why i like asimov.

IT arch-demi-apparition?

i was going to say i'm an IT god, but 1) i've titled a post that before, and 2) if i do recall correctly, right after i did that, all my amateur work came crumbling down around me leaving me near tears.

my company had us install an encryption program. it sucks, i hate it, but i did it because we were kinda threatened with "non-compliance" if we didn't. anyways, they give you two pseudo-warnings... don't ever hibernate, and don't use PCMCIA devices anymore. fine, i can handle that. then the other day at work, i didn't plug my computer in and went out in to the field. when i got back, the battery had gotten to JUST that level where it hibernates itself to save your data. i mean, it had JUST started. it was 1 block in the progress bar, but there was no turning back. ever since then, my outlook has been royally fukked. my best guess is that the hibernate function and the encryption program were racing to the finish to see who could get done first. hibernation won with the encryption program only getting through a portion of my email program, so half was encrypted and half wasn't. when i rebooted, the encryption program decrypted everything, thus (and this is only my theory) decrypting the encrypted portion of my email (good), but using that same decryption key on the remaining un-encrypted portion led to an actually encrypting of it (get it? FUKK!!!)

so, i talked to the help(less) desk, and they proved just as useless as i'd expected. so i've been rockin' my amateur ways and been messing around with importing my old .pst files into a new one, one folder at a time until i found the part of the file that was screwed. coincidentally, it happened to be my work folder. seriously, how could karma work any more efficiently than that. i could've lost any other info on there and been cool with it, but the one folder that, every time i import it, goes china syndrome on me is my work folder. i'm trying to be zen about it. i think i'm doing pretty well. at least i can send and receive e-mails again without spamming everyone (yeah, for some reason, whenever i wrote an email, it went to the outbox, would send, but would stay there, so the next email i would send, would send the other AGAIN, thus spamming people with repeated emails).

one thing that is helping is my armadillo run game. i found this while working in pittsburgh, and i seriously suggest it to any engineers, geeks, physics-lovers, etc. i'm absolutely enamored with it. check out the demo on that page. i played the demo for like 5 minutes and went straight to buying the whole game. it SOOOO rocks. if someone gets it, or plays it and appreciates it as much as i do, let me know. i wonder if there is any way to share designs. that'd be cool.

well, it's lunch time, i'll give you kids more lovin' later.

shooting stars

TheNephew was allowed to stay up past his bedtime tonight to see some "shooting stars". the perseid meteor shower was supposed to be peaking from around midnight to morning. for a while it was clouding up, and he'd come in every 10 minutes... "is it time?" "is it still cloudy?" etc. we went out around midnight and got to see quite a few nice streaks across the sky. i saw a few more than he as i know what i'm looking for and he was getting tired. he wanted to make a wish on a shooting star (since his friend wished that his grandpa would get pizza... and he DID, wishes are still indestructible). he got to make his wish; eh, i even made a few myself. it was a nice show, but he had to go to bed, and i could use some sleep myself. did anyone else go out and look at the shooting stars with me?

we are all bugs, part 2

well, here is "kinda" part 2. it isn't so much my perspective as the late carl sagan, world renowned cosmologist. check out what he said about earth, from a picture taken by voyager as it looked back on us while it sailed past the end of the solar system.

we are all bugs (part 1)

ok, i'm going to let you follow me through this. this is my stream of consciousness, and it is turbulent. just in case it doesn't work, you'll see the work i went through...

1. i look up the circumference of the earth at it's largest (it spins, so there is centripetal force; therefore, at the equator):
   
   24,901.55 miles



2. i divide this by 2 (since the furthest you can SEE is halfway round the world, and i convert this into millimeters for ease of use (i hate metric but (1) i don't know if americans can REALLY fathom anything smaller than an inch and (2) metric makes so much more sense... it's decimals kids!!!


20,037,580,000 millimeters (that's 20 BILLION, 37 MILLION, 580 THOUSAND, 000 millimeters

or 210,367,873.2267 flaccid penises for you curious folk out there (courtesy of weirdconverter.com


3. i look up the average size of a virus [rhinovirus in this case (the common cold)]:
   
   from the best i can tell it is 20 nanometers, so we'll go with .00002mm for arguments' sake.



4. then i search for the distance to the nearest star:
   
   4.37 light years (converted that is 4.134251x10^19mm or 9,804,959,294,158 marathons...that's for my web-buddy, Rich|Championable (though he may not want to be associated with me anymore)



5. now i find the average height of a human being:
   
   1650mm seems to be the average for humans, globally, both male and female, from the 5 seconds of google.com data i scoured through.

so, from that exercise, we've determined that:

1. dividing 2 by 3, we get that the farthest away one cold virus can be from another is 1,001,879,000,000,000 units



2. dividing 4 by 5, we see that the we are in proximity to the nearest STAR by
   
   25,056,066,666,666,666 units

that's only 25 to 1.

AND that is slightly intoxicated math. could be worse or better. what i'm saying is, is that we're not so far away from the stars as we think. if i went into how far away the nucleus (neutrons/electrons) is from the electrons, my numbers would blow your mind. we are a big world, and a monstrously huge universe... but it's all scale, and scale can be reduced to relativity. we aren't so far away from anything we might strive for. don't let anything convince you otherwise...

and TOMORROW, i'll tell you why we are bugs. you might think it is depressing... but really, if you THINK about it, it's so amazingly hopeful. i can't wait but since i got distracted by math (i'm not a normal man, they go home, sleep, drink, take a lady back and make love, watch SportsCenter), i'll have to do it later. maybe i'll do atomic relations tomorrow. thinking of that... i'll probably be single forever. now THAT is an awful thought, though rigorously proven.

thanks for tuning in.