Gamelot's Realm

Hmmmmmm

2010-04-09T13:38:00.000-05:00

Sorry, I've been trying to think of stuff to put here.
http://xkcd.com/621/

Is the Bible always literally true?

2010-03-18T12:38:00.003-05:00

1 Kings 7:23, KJV:

"And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about."

Seems to indicate that the circumference of a circle is *exactly* 3 times the diameter, rather than pi times. Judging from the reactions of some Christians to science, that means that 3 is the correct answer, and pi is just a *theory*.

Teach the controversy, people!

Boondock Saints II

2009-11-05T23:53:00.003-06:00

Just got back from seeing this movie, and it is quite enjoyable. As good as the first? No chance. This is not a movie that I'll be watching 35 more times. However, it is a good movie on its own merits.

I have to say that the undertone of homosexuality that was strong in the first one is *much* stronger in the second. This fortunately clears up about halfway through the movie and lies dormant after that. I think it'd be interesting to see if anyone tried to do a psychoanalysis on the first one, and compare their thoughts to the second.

I also think that the comment I heard before seeing this movie, that it was a movie with a lot of fan-service, is fairly accurate. There are things clearly done just because they want to give fans a thrill. Some of the scenes and characters are the same, even when you might not expect that to be possible.

The rest of this post I'll put in a different color, so that you don't have to read it if you don't want to - it's all spoiler.

There were a few disappointments in the film:

First, the opening feels extremely contrived. The Saints are in Ireland living with their dad, and have let their hair and beards grow out. They're farming sheep. Supposedly, this is the life they've had for eight years, but for some MYSTERIOUS reason, now that's not enough for them. Now, had they simply taken out this reason, perhaps the part where the priest walks in and tells them a priest in Boston was executed in their style would've been enough on its own.

It's also way too convenient that they happen to meet a Mexican fighter in some underground fighting ring that they go to for *absolutely no reason* at least that's apparent at the time. Later, it appears that this is either on the docks where they find a boat to take them to the US, or that it was somehow onboard the boat (though that seems a tad unlikely). A bit more exposition would've helped here, but the scene was only to help set up this Mexican guy who would be their new Rocco. Unfortunately, the part of Rocco was written for Rocco, and new guy can't fill it terribly well.

The rest of the movie up until Detective Greenly walks in and gets killed was pretty good and flowed together well, a few uncomfortable moments aside (Why, for instance, would an FBI agent resort to such physical violence when confronting someone who had shown no sign of intent of malice?). However, Greenly's death seems sudden and forced - perhaps as a way of showing that they're not kidding around, and he's the most comic character, so he has to die - but it was very abrupt. You never know why he showed up there and the others in their group didn't, for instance.

I also really liked the movie right up through when the Saints get arrested, and I think that's where the movie should've ended. The rest is obvious fan service, and I wonder if they are planning a third movie now.

The Left's Secret Weapon: A Fake Right

2009-08-06T07:12:00.002-05:00

In American society, we have a political spectrum from left to right, where Democrats fall somewhere around the middle and Republicans fall somewhere around the right side. In between and all around are Independents - some are members of recognized political parties, such as the Green, Socialist, Reform, and Libertarian, but the majority of Independents are completely unaffiliated with any political party (often because parties are not recognized in certain states). There are, in fact, more Independents than there are Republicans; and, while there are more Democrats than either, neither the Republicans or Democrats have enough votes to win a majority without courting the Independent vote.

One possible method of convincing Independents of your party's cause is to convince them that the other side is full of complete lunatics. Destroy the ethos of your opponent and you destroy your opponent. But we've long grown tired of mudslinging politics - so how can you accomplish such destruction without obvious mudslinging?

The obvious answer is to insert paid actors into the other side, pretending to be for their cause, but to have such horribly over-the-top self-righteousness toward the cause that moderates are driven away from it. It creates a belief in the minds of moderates that these actors (and, by extension all members of their cause) are full of wharrgarbl.

Now, I'm not saying that Democrats created Fox News as a Straw Man for the opposite side (see what I did there?), but whether or not Fox News exists for that purpose, it is accomplishing that purpose. Case in point - the Birther Movement. It is not conceivable, at least to me, that all Republicans are such utter morons as to believe the Birthers might be right when every single time their argument has been put forward in a new way, it's been completely and undeniably refuted. The latest example of this being the supposed birth certificate from Kenya that is so full of mistakes even George Jr. wouldn't fall for it. Yet Fox News keeps loudly putting it forward as gospel, both through their own talking heads and the poor dumb saps who fall for it and take copies of the birth certificate with them to town hall meetings. Sanity arrives only in the form of Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, who mercilessly ridicule the Fox News folks for espousing such views. By so doing, the Independents (and even left-leaning Republicans) are left examining the supposed views of the Right and finding them to be bat#!$@-crazy.

Changing definition of beauty

2009-03-11T07:14:00.002-05:00

I find as I grow older that some of the women on my top 20 list from 2005, I would no longer rank as highly as I did then. Just for fun, I decided to pull up that list and see how my opinions have changed.

#1. Keira Knightley - Off the list
#2. Anna Paquin - Off the list
#3. Natalie Portman - Off the list
#4. Ashley Judd - Off the list
#5. Monica Potter
#6. Elizabeth Hurley - Off the list
#7. Kristin Kreuk
#8. Michelle Trachtenberg
#9. Jennifer Garner
#10. Claire Forlani - Off the list
#11. Jennifer Love Hewitt
#12. Jessica Alba - Off the list
#13. Thora Birch
#14. Alexis Bledel
#15. Heather Graham - Off the list
#16. Monica Bellucci - Off the list
#17. Lindsay Lohan - Off the list
#18. Ashley Olsen - Off the list
#19. Angelina Jolie - Off the list
#20. Gwyneth Paltrow

Perhaps a more telling question would be - who would I list now? I don't know...

Wasteful Spending in the Bailout Package

2009-02-03T12:54:00.005-06:00

CNN provides the GOP list of wasteful spending from the Bailout Package today.

In it, Republicans provide a total of 32 items they've deemed wasteful, for a total of $19 billion (19,090,500,000, to be exact).

It's good to know that in the roughly $800-900 billion bailout, only $19 billion - 2.4% by the most conservative estimate - is enough to make the GOP try to vote it down, despite the remaining 97.6% being perfectly fine, not wasteful in the slightest.

Why LCDs suck

2009-01-15T12:03:00.003-06:00

I'm rather fed up with the difficulty of finding a decent LCD monitors. Here's the problem: with an LCD screen, you need approximately 3" of distance for every 1" of diagonal screen size in order to see everything you need to see and to not see the individual pixels of your image. This size was based on a 720P television, so 1080P screens can actually be a bit larger.

When it comes to desktop LCD monitors, you can still use the same measurement. Problem is that we tend to sit much closer to our monitors. I measured, and I sit almost exactly 2 feet from my monitor. Translated, this means that if my monitor was 720P, it should be only 8 diagonal inches in size.

My monitor is not 8 inches. It is, in fact, 19.

An 8 inch diagonal monitor, widescreen, would be approximately 7 inches wide by 4 inches tall. In this space, there are 27.35 square inches, and there are 921,600 pixels in this space, or 33,700 pixels per square inch.

Now, scale this up for a 19" monitor. A 19" widescreen monitor is approx 16.5" wide by 9.3" tall, for a total of 154.25 square inches. To see the pixels the same effective size, you would need a total of 5,198,400 pixels on your screen, or a resolution of 3040x1710

And the vast majority of 19" monitors are only 1440x900. A few are as high as 1680x1050.

Now, Dell offers LCD screens on some of their laptops that reach as high as 1920x1080 on a 15.4" diagonal screen. This tells me that the technology to reach higher is out there. But LCD manufacturers continue to offer LCD monitors with horrible resolutions as their flagship lines. To reach higher resolutions, 2560x1600 (the highest I could find on a computer monitor), you also have to choose a screen with a 24" screen size, and as we've seen from my example above, this is still too low a resolution to see graphics without pixels, unless you sit 3 feet from your screen rather than 2.

The next problem, though, is that the response times on monitors are still too high. Consider this: If you have 60 frames displayed in a single second, each frame is displayed for 16.67ms. If you have a 5ms response time, that means that 30% of the frame's life is taken up by changing pixels. That's much, much too slow for me. A 2ms response time, however, means only 12% of the time the frame is up on the screen it's going through a change, and that's a whole lot better.

Just try finding a 2560x1600, 24" screen with 2ms response time. If I could find one, I'd buy it and just deal with having to sit 3 feet away from it.

This one goes out to Connor

2008-10-10T14:50:00.003-05:00

You've really got to read this. It's pretty much dead on.

What's Wrong with Libertarianism

My favorite line is this:
"Libertarianism strikes me as if someone (let's call her "Ayn Rand") sat down to create the Un-Communism."

For the rest of you - Ayn Rand's philosophy fills every inch of Goodkind's not-fantasy fantasy series. Could explain why I hate it...

NaNoWriMo

2008-10-08T21:30:00.002-05:00

Please visit:

My new NaNoWriMo attempt

Political compass

2008-09-03T22:40:00.004-05:00

Here's something incredibly interesting:

Explains really well why I support Kucinich. Gravel used to be right next to him, but they explain the change of position in the accompanying article.

Oh, as for my own graph:

Go read the article at http://www.politicalcompass.org and take the test

Misery Index

2008-09-03T13:45:00.005-05:00

Obama's economic advisor Laura Tyson went on Colbert last night and made some comments that were outright lies (which is amusing considering how much the Democrats are bashing Lieberman for lying about Obama's voting record, which I'm not touching with a 10-foot-pole at this time).

What she tried to say is that the Misery Index is the best economic indicator, and that it shows the country as doing better under Democratic presidents than under Republican presidents historically. Here's the truth of the matter:

Name	Average	First Month	Last Month	High Point	High Point Date	Low Point	Low Point Date
Bush Jr.	8.02	7.93	11.3*	11.3	July, 2008	5.71	October, 2006
Clinton	7.80	10.56	7.29	10.56	January, 1993	5.74	April, 1998
Bush Sr.	10.68	10.07	10.30	12.47	Nov, 1990	9.64	Sept, 1989
Reagan	12.19	19.33	9.72	19.33	Jan, 1981	7.7	Dec, 1986
Carter	16.26	12.72	19.72	21.98	June, 1980	12.6	Apr, 1978
Ford	16.00	16.36	12.66	19.90	Jan, 1975	12.66	Dec, 1976
Nixon	10.57	7.8	17.01	17.01	July, 1974	7.8	Jan, 1969
Johnson	6.77	7.02	8.12	8.19	July, 1968	5.7	Nov, 1965
Kennedy	7.14	8.31	6.82	8.35	July, 1961	6.4	July, 1962
Eisenhower	6.26	3.28	7.96	10.98	Apr, 1958	2.97	July, 1953
Truman	7.88	13.63**	3.45	13.63	Jan, 1948	3.45	Dec, 1952

* July, 2008. This is the most recent month available.
** January, 1948. This is the first month data is available.

Perhaps the most important indicator from this is the change from the beginning of a president's term to the end of his term, looking at this for each of the presidents, and omitting Bush Jr. (because his term isn't over) and Truman (because recording started in the middle of his presidency), we see the following balance:

Democrats: Increase of 3.34 in misery index
Republicans: Increase of 0.81 in misery index

Based on this, the Republicans are actually better for the economy than the Democrats. But, perhaps the most important thing to understand is that on average, neither side is particularly "bad"; rather, it's particular presidencies - especially Nixon and Carter - that had the most harmful impact on this value.

(all numbers available from The United States Misery Index)

Begging the Question

2008-07-24T08:40:00.002-05:00

I often see people complaining about the modern use of "beg the question." They see people using this phrase when those people really mean "raise the question," and get indignant because "begging the question" is supposed to only relate to a logical fallacy similar to circular reasoning.

I'd like to caution the true grammarians who might be reading not to fall into the trap of assuming that the modern use is in any way incorrect. To proclaim any use of language as "incorrect" is to use a prescriptive approach to language. The problem is that language changes - to try to prescribe its meaning is to try to lock it in place at a particular point in time. We can do that with Latin because Latin is a dead language, no longer spoken as a native language for any speaker. English, however, is living, and that means that as time passes, meanings and rules change. "'Ain't' ain't a word," as we like to say, but it certainly was well-used in Victorian times.

Modern grammarians, however, prefer to use a descriptive approach to language. That is to say: we look at how people are using language and try to describe the natural rules people have created for themselves, rather than forcing rules onto people. The fact that people use "beg the question" when they mean "raise the question," then, implies that "beg the question" is proper grammar in this scenario.

Our God is an awesome God...

2008-07-16T20:17:00.002-05:00

New argument for my good friend, Rhology (and of course, I would not argue so vehemently with the man if he was not an old friend):

Do you believe that God is awesome?

If yes, do you believe that God is more than awesome?

If yes, do you believe that God is so much more than awesome that we lack the language available to describe just how awesome God is?

I'm going to assume for a moment that all of the preceding questions you would answer in the affirmative. It's a fairly standard practice for evangelicals and fundamentalists to proclaim God in this way, that He is so amazing that language is not well suited to describe Him.

Assuming all of this, would it be safe to say that language is a tool that, while it can convey meaning, is ill-suited to conveying the specific meanings that are intended? For instance: If I say that God is awesome, and I also say that the new Honda that came out this year is awesome, surely I don't mean that God is like a car (although his angels may be in one Accord!) You may hear the word "awesome," you already conceive of the contexts of the word "awesome" - that is, you envision different things you consider awesome, and if you're trained to understand the etymology of the word, you may even stop to think that this thing is engineered to create a sense of "awe" in people.

Words are full of connotations - meanings they carry with them that don't necessarily have anything to do with the original word or the meaning in its current utterance. The word "mutilation," as I once argued, literally means a modification to a person's body, such as piercing or cutting, that in some way detrimentally effects the form or function of that part. Taken literally, you could say that ear piercings are mutilations. However, when we think of mutilation, we don't think of just that simple definition - we envision people being brutally murdered, their bodies cut apart, and so on. We envision horrible acts of violence by one person on another. If we do use the word mutilation to describe ear piercings, calling them "ear mutilations," suddenly we have a concept that sounds like people in shopping malls all across the country are victimizing little girls by irrevocably maiming their earlobes, doing emotional and physical trauma from which these kids might never recover. Or, they could simply be feeling like they got stung for a little while, but really happy that they get to wear earrings now.

Language is unfortunately not innocent, in the sense that there are no virgin words, they've all been around the block a few times, and picked up diseases (in the form of connotations).

What connotations you believe apply to a particular word depends greatly on your objective filter - the lens of your belief and experience by which you observe a bit of data. As I said on your blog (and you agreed):

"For a person not yet a Christian, they have to use whatever objective lens they have to view it, because we each approach issues initially from our own personal experiences" (Gamelot, 07/16/08).

When I write a blog, I have my own personal connotations I intend for the words to carry. Sometimes, we may come to a disagreement merely because of a misunderstanding caused by the fact that you read the words differently than I intended them. But, once I've thrown those words out there, they carry all those meanings and then some.

This is a possible benefit for language, if you see language as an art form. Just like in a painting, the painter may have intended his audience to see certain things and have certain emotional responses to the painting - but the true art of the painting lies not in what he intended, but what the audience actually gets out of it. It has a power beyond its paint. Language does too.

Where am I going with all this?

If language is ill-suited to convey extremely specific meanings, then any meanings we derive from it can and should be understood to be just that - the meanings we derive from it. We need to be aware that others can derive different meanings and have perfectly valid reasons for doing so, based on the lens of their experiences. The language doesn't contain just one meaning or the other - rather, it contains all of them.

Of course, the Bible was written in language.

You say that
"God obviously has a vested interest in communicating clearly to His people, so yes, God had a hand in preserving His Word intact" (Rhology, 07/10/08). If that's the case, then by virtue of the fact that He chose to provide His Word through media of multiple translations of an archaic language, He must have known that the language would pick up connotations along the way, and He must further have INTENDED the language to pick up those connotations, because otherwise His message wouldn't be communicated clearly to His people.

Thus, each person who reads the Bible and applies his own lens of experience reads the Bible in exactly the way God intended him to read the Bible.

What we think we know about God

2008-07-15T09:18:00.004-05:00

One of the things I constantly hope to do is to bring light to issues on which protestant Christians hold as commonplaces - those things which everyone just assumes to be fact without verifying. In some of these cases, the Truth may be just as people had assumed; however, there are certainly cases where the Truth is at best a murky subject.

For instance:

We assume that Satan was an angel who aspired to the power of God, and as a result was cast down from Heaven to Hell at some point in the past. There is even a number thrown out: that 1/3rd of the angels were behind Satan, and that they fell with him to Hell and became demons. The only Biblical passage with any implication on the origins of Satan is a statement made by Christ:

"'I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven'" (Luke 10:18, NIV).

Which means that Satan was at one point in Heaven, and implies that he was cast out of it. Where he fell to, at that time, is not made clear - we know he has the ability to walk on Earth (Matthew 4:1-11, Job 1:7) and even has the ability to return to Heaven for visits (Job 1:6). There is apparently some method by which he can return to Heaven, for Revelation speaks of a war in which Satan and his armies fight the Heavenly armies, and again Satan is cast down to Earth (Revelation 12).

But nowhere in that is Satan identified as an angel. Nor is there any place in which the demons are identified as angels. There is certainly never a place where it is identified that 1/3rd of the angels became demons.

Indeed, the only more in-depth "scriptural" reference to Satan appears to be in the Septuagint book of Esaias, which theoretically protestant Christians do not accept as Biblical canon. In that book:

"How has Lucifer, that rose in the morning, fallen from heaven! He that sent orders to all the nations is crushed to the earth. But thou saidst in thine heart, I will go up to heaven, I will set my throne above the stars of heaven: I will sit on a lofty mount, on the lofty mountains toward the north: I will go up above the clouds: I will be like the Most High. But now thou shalt go down to hell, even to the foundations of the earth" (Esaias 14:12-15. Obtained from The Septuagint Bible Online, July 15, 2008).

This is the only place it seems where the name "Lucifer" is granted to Satan. Lucifer is a commonly accepted name for Satan, however.

I think, though, that the true source of this Angelic Satan myth is Milton's Paradise Lost, which, coincidentally, names Satan's true name as Lucifer, meaning that Milton borrowed heavily from the unaccepted Septuagint texts (Of course, during Milton's time, they were canonically accepted by the church). Paradise Lost features the story forward from the time that Satan is cast out of Heaven to the time Adam and Eve are driven from the Garden of Eden. In Book V, Milton describes Lucifer's power thusly:

"The wonted signal, and superior voice
Of thir great Potentate; for great indeed
His name, and high was his degree in Heav'n;
His count'nance, as the Morning Starr that guides
The starrie flock, allur'd them, and with lyes
Drew after him the third part of Heav'ns Host:"

In that last line, it's clear where the concept "1/3rd of angels" originates from - a work of epic poetic fiction written by a Catholic only 341 years ago. Yet, it's considered "fact" by protestants simply because it's something "everyone knows" and thus no one bothers to verify. What Satan is - fallen angel, demon, or something else entirely - is not terribly important; rather, I use this example as a representation of problems I see with modern protestant teaching - that too many things are commonplaces created from sources outside of the Bible, and thus are simply unquestioned. We should always be questioning everything we believe, so that we can come to a closer understanding of the Truth every day.

When Insultingly-Bad Movie Physics Are OK, and When They Aren't

2008-06-30T12:44:00.003-05:00

I really hate it when movies abuse bad science, but I think there are times when it's OK to do so.

For instance: The Force in Star Wars is bad science, because we know that there isn't a Force in the real world. However, up until the midichlorian disaster of 1999, the Force was a completely acceptable phenomenon in the movies. The reason for this is that before Star Wars shows us the Force in action, it gives an explanation that, in the fantasy of the story, is acceptable. Obi-Wan Kenobi sits all of us down and explained what the Force is, and as the story unfolds, the Force is slowly unveiled and its power realized. We are drawn into the concept of the Force, and begin to accept it, even though we know that it can't possibly exist in the real world. We've bought into the premise of the Force, and now when the Force is shown to us again, it's fine.

In the same way, when we see Peter Parker climbing the side of a building, we accept it because the story gave us an explanation - a genetic mutation caused by the bite of a radioactive spider. We know that it wouldn't happen in the real world, but to accept the story and continue watching, we accept the premise. Then, whenever he needs to use his mutant powers to save the day, we already accept that his mutant powers are real.

We have already suspended our disbelief, to steal a concept from Coleridge.

When the movie has already set us up for the need for that suspension on a particular topic, we happily oblige. Whether it's a weird storm in the sky that our plane flies through and traps us in a time warp about to be eaten by the Langoliers, or we jump from twig to twig on the tops of trees because of our spiritual knowledge of Kung Fu, all of these things are acceptable because the movie has established that they are part and parcel to its story - we must accept them or we have no plot.

The problem comes when movies try to do things with science that are not set up beforehand. They are things that could be done *properly* without any negative effect on the story. You are able to create a wormhole in space from one point to another, but you can't do it when a few thousand volts of electricity are hitting your brain? Sure, I can buy that, so long as the electricity isn't of a fatal dosage level. Oh, now it is? Then why aren't you dead? We need that explanation presented in the story (because my super power also allows me to survive enormous electrical surges, duh!) or we have no reason to continue our suspension of disbelief. Something in the story has just shocked us out of that suspension; once that's happened, it's hard for us to get it back.

Also, it does no good to try to fix the problem much later. When Han Solo claims to make the Kessel Run in under 12 parsecs - parsecs being a unit of distance rather than of time - it's unbelievable because those of us who know better have our suspension of disbelief ruined without a clever and immediate explanation. When that explanation must come later (oh, because the Kessel Run requires running dangerously close to a group of black holes, so the closer you can cut to the black holes, the better), it isn't as satisfying. Either the explanation must be immediate, or the reason for the explanation (an inappropriately-chosen term, in this example) should be omitted.

It really wouldn't be that expensive, or difficult, for Hollywood producers to consult with someone with at least reasonable science proficiency before releasing a movie to insure that none of these issues come up - but the point is, most don't care because the % of people who will understand the problem is fairly small. However, as the value of nerdiness increases (which it is doing), that % will increase year by year. They won't be able to ignore the problem forever.

New argument

2008-03-29T00:06:00.003-05:00

(Borrowing Plato's style):

Me: Would you agree that God is eternal?
You: Yes.
Me: And that God is unchanging?
You: Yes.
Me: So by that logic, what God is at any given point in time, God is to this day?
You: Yes.
Me: So even at the first point in time, as recorded by Moses, God was the same there that He is now?
You: Yes.
Me: Then if we look at the very beginning of the Bible, aspects of God's nature reflected there should still be present today?
You: Yes.
Me: The first five words of the Bible are these:
"In the beginning, God created"
This means that God's very first act in our history is the act of creation. That should mean that God is a creator, yes?
You: Of course.
Me: So that means that God is still a creator.
You: yes.
Me: If God is still a creator, what is He creating? In all of creation, from the tiniest atom to the largest galaxy, we see no evidence of new matter. We see no new Heavens anywhere, we see no new Earth anywhere. We see only what we have. If God creates things by saying a word and *poof* they exist, then we should still see things coming into being as *poof* - new object here. Even if things are so far away that we can see back into the history of the universe to what you claim is the beginning, 6,000 years ago, we should see evidence of new objects *poofing* into existence. But we don't see that. What we do see, however, are stars coalescing out of gasses, and other stars exploding into gasses. We see a great cosmic dance of new systems being formed or destroyed, but never do we see something appear where there was nothing before. This can mean only one of two things:
#1) We haven't looked hard enough, despite our massive space telescopes and arrays.
#2) The definition of God's creation is not a *poof* exercise, but rather a building exercise. The same way I might create a house out of bricks, wood, nails, and cement.

The Law

2008-03-07T06:45:00.003-06:00

Rhology, I'll need some help from you on this one, because I am having difficulty finding all the verses I'm thinking of. While God writes His scripture on our hearts and minds, He often does not write the chapter and verse numbers! :)

I have often struggled to understand Paul's treatment of the law. I think anyone would, as Paul seems to talk in circles. However, this morning as I was considering it, I came to a new interpretation of it that I'm SURE is only new to me, but that finally helps me to understand it. I thought I would share.

I am having trouble at the present time pegging down the exact verse, but it is the one where Paul is talking about the law and how, as Christians, we are no longer bound by the law. Many groups claim to be Christian because of this chapter - they believe that if Christ destroyed the law and gave us freedom, then we can pretty much do whatever we like. One group I'm specifically thinking of is Liberated Christians. They believe that Christians should pretty much be able to sleep with each other completely without regard to marriage bonds or any other factor. I once tried to argue with the owner of the site to convince them that they were, in fact, sinning, but I failed miserably to convince him because I did not have a good enough understanding of this chapter of the Bible.

However, what I came to realize this morning is that this whole concept is predicated heavily on what kind of people are making the choices. Looking at sin as a group, sin is anything that:

Does not glorify God
Does not show love toward others
Is done despite the possibility of being wrong

If any of these things are violated, we sin. The law is entirely tied up in those three things. However, some things that are technically law are violated by Christ. The point is that Christ came to say that what is important is not the law, but the reason for things. All of His actions fulfill those three things. He showed that it is acceptable to do certain things that technically violate the law because the law is only in place to guide those who are incapable of keeping themselves to those three things.

But only someone who has given himself completely to God can do those things. For example: Cuss words are not that bad, they aren't specifically forbidden to us anywhere, and they're just words, technically. But is there any way they can possibly glorify God? If there is not, then I sin when I cuss. Even if I believe they can glorify God, but that they don't always do so, or that there is any chance that they do not do so, then I sin when I cuss. There is no law to govern this.

Fun

2008-02-09T14:21:00.001-06:00

We've forgotten what fun is.

We don't have fun anymore. We occasionally go watch people having fun, though usually they're not having fun either, because they've turned what is supposed to be fun into a profession that requires immense training and has taken all the fun right out of it.

What Republicans Can Never Understand

2008-02-08T11:38:00.001-06:00

Even recently, I was a Republican.

I carried a system of thought that made perfect sense to me. It seemed totally logical, and based on my experiences it was.

Then about three years ago, I spent some time with a woman who completely changed my perception. Without intending to, without telling me she was trying to change me, without telling me anything was wrong with me, she simply told me some profound truths about the world. It completely opened my eyes.

And she's the strongest Christian I know.

The Republican thought process is basically this: Every human being is 100% in control of and responsible for his or her life.

This has profound impact on many areas. If someone is homeless, it is because he/she doesn't want to work, and he needs to get off his ass and get a job. If someone is an alcoholic, he/she needs to join AA and stop drinking. If a woman is pregnant with a child she doesn't want, she should've thought about that before she had sex. If someone is gay, he/she either chose that life or has not chosen no to have that life. In all areas, a person should have the strength of will to overcome life's adversity, and anyone who doesn't does not deserve our sympathy.

Now, in theory, that's great. In theory, people should be masters of their own domains.

In the Republican mind, everything is in black and white. Every situation to a Republican is a dichotomy, and when you think of life in dichotomies, it all works very easily and you can deal with the world in simple ways. Laws are easy to draft because there are only two sides of a legal coin to think about.

The problem is that life is not simple. When you enact a law, it has repercussions that you may not even consider. That's because not everyone fits into a narrow world view.

Take, for example, a person who lives in a part of the city where 80% of the population is below the poverty level. If that man goes out and tries to get an education and get a high-paying job to get out of poverty, his community shuns him because he's no longer fitting in with the rest of the people he's long called family and friends. Sure, he's perfectly capable of earning the money, but to do so he has to give up everything that's important to him. We should not be surprised then when he finds himself desperate to make ends meet, robbing a convenience store for twenty bucks. It's not the life he chose, but rather the life that his society chose for him. That doesn't excuse the crime, but it does explain to us why it occurs and why mere criminal prosecution is powerless to prevent it.

Now take the same man, and assume he's always been absolutely unwilling to commit a crime, but because of his poverty he lives in a very run-down, disgusting to upper-class tastes, HUD housing project. The city comes along and sees the project as something driving people away from downtown, and in an effort to beautify the city and revitalize downtown, they tear down the project and let a private company build high-income townhouses. The man's entire life is now displaced, because he can't afford to live where he has for his life, and the new projects further north of town don't have the business infrastructure to hire him or provide him with any money. This is a man that society has not only completely abandoned, but completely frustrated, because he is utterly powerless to change his situation.

What you start to see is that people aren't in control of their own lives. Control is something we imagine for ourselves, but in reality all of society controls us - builds us into an image that it desires. Society desires the downfall of pop stars, it desires the rise of new celebrities, it desires those who don't fit neatly within its many images to be hidden so as not to offend the delicate tastes of everyone else.

And it will always do so.

My new philosophy on life has become this: There's too much suffering in life, so wherever it's possible to eliminate suffering, we should do so. It's a view that no man is an island, that we're all interconnected and responsible for each other. And it's a view that means I can never be a Republican again.

Vote Cthulhu

2008-01-31T21:42:00.000-06:00

So now we have a race narrowed down to effectively 4 candidates. I'm assuming, for the moment, that Huckabee is history (and I certainly hope that's the case). The four remaining, of course, are:

Obama & Clinton - D
McCain & Romney - R

Now, I certainly never expected to see McCain make a comeback, as evidenced by my original posting on the topic, but I'm glad he did. He's the Republican candidate I dislike the least. The danger of having McCain in the presidential election is that I don't know if he can get enough Republicans to vote for him, and I don't know if he can get enough Democrats to vote for him. I can hope, though.

I've also thought it would be amusing to see Clinton running as the VP candidate for McCain. I can see it happen. But again, too many Republicans would be too dead-set against that.

Of all the issues to take into consideration for this election, the most important seem to be the following (with scoring):

Economy: Mitt Romney +1.
Education: John McCain +1.
Environment: Hillary Clinton +1.
War: No points to anyone. None of them have a good strategy.
Health Care: 0s all around again.
Homeland Security: Clinton & Obama both +1.
Immigration: 0s again.
Social Security: Barack Obama +1.

Well... that tells me absolutely nothing. The other arguments - such as gay unions and abortion - don't have anything to do with the presidency in my opinion. So once again, I'm stuck choosing between Clinton and Obama... I'm really not sure how to make that choice. At least once one of them is chosen over the other, the final vote for President should be an easy one.

Iowa

2008-01-03T10:15:00.000-06:00

Today, of course, is the Iowa Caucus. If previous polling is any proof of who will stand through for Iowa, we'll see:

Democrats
Clinton, Obama, Edwards

Republicans
Giuliani, Romney, Huckabee

Of those 6, the only candidate worth anything is Edwards. He has the experience that Obama lacks, the morality that Clinton lacks, and the knowledge that the Republicans lack that morality doesn't necessarily have a place in politics. He is a very Machiavellian candidate, which I like.

Brand Loyalty

2007-12-20T11:50:00.000-06:00

Here's a fun little exercise: examining my own brand loyalty

Suave
Garnier Fructis
Gillette (Mach 3 and Fusion, shaving gel, aftershave)
Oral B
Tide
Dawn
Cascade
Clorox
Lysol
Charmin
Coke (and associated products)
Lipton
Kellogg's Low-Fat Granola
Sweet & Low
QuikTrip
Braum's
Sonic
Panera Bread
First Watch
Lean Cuisine, Healthy Choice, and Smart Ones
Bertolli
Kraft
Wal-Mart
Great Wall
Zio's
Johnny Carino's
Logan's Roadhouse
Starbucks
Gloria Jean's
Borders
Best Buy
Supercuts
Petco
Blockbuster
Office Depot
TGI Friday's
Honda
Linkin Park
Coleman
M&M (especially dark chocolate)
Good Eats
Heroes, Criminal Minds, House, Psych, and Burn Notice
Nike, Brooks, and New Balance

I'm sure there's a ton I've missed, but that's still pretty extensive. A lot of people may not think about what brands they're loyal to, but when you automatically buy a particular item because you need to "pick up ______", you're doing it too. When I go to the store to pick up butter, eggs, or milk, I buy the freshest thing they have - but when I buy dish washing detergent, I'll reach for the Cascade without even investing 3 seconds of thought into it. My most extensive thought will likely be "hey, it's on sale right now, maybe I should buy this smaller size. *calculate the price per ounce* Yup, this size is the cheapest way to go."

Brand loyalty is only a bad thing in that it makes us sometimes pay more for exactly the same product or that it keeps us from trying new things - but it does make for much easier mental processing.

Politics

2007-11-24T21:46:00.000-06:00

I got a little sidetracked with life so I haven't posted my promised "Hate Me" reading yet, but I did finish half so maybe I'll do the rest soon.

In the mean time, I'd like to take a moment to talk about some more important issues - namely, politics. I've taken the VoteMatch Quiz to try to figure out who I should vote for, and I have taken this many, many times. I think it fails to realize the comparative importance of some issues, or to adequately address them, but it is an interesting quiz nonetheless. Here are my answers for the quiz, and a brief defense on those I feel need it due to their contradiction with "party-line" politics:

Abortion is a woman's right: Support (read my previous postings to understand my change in view from "oppose")
Sexual orientation protected by civil rights laws: Strongly Support (again, blogged previously)
Permit prayer in public schools: Oppose (However, there are some exceptions: I think if a teacher sponsors a Christian club on campus, all attendees are in relative agreement about religion and thus the teacher should not be restricted from participating in the club. If this rule is applied to all teachers and all clubs, so that an Islamic club could also be on campus, then the state is not sponsoring a particular religion over another. Also, teachers should be allowed to acknowledge their own beliefs - meaning, if a student asks a teacher "what do you believe," the teacher should be able to relate his or her personal beliefs with the disclaimer that he or she is not saying the students should believe the same way.)
Death Penalty: Strongly Oppose (I'm also opposed to life sentences. Why are we so happily willing to throw away human life? I think people who feel that life sentences or death sentences are good need to spend a year in jail, just to see what it's like)
Mandatory Three Strikes Sentencing Laws: Strongly Oppose (See above)
Drug use is immoral: enforce laws against it: Oppose (Anyone should be allowed to do any drug they want so long as it is kept in a controlled environment. Meaning: cocaine bars would be perfectly fine so long as someone was there to make sure no one left while still under the effects of cocaine, and that no one got hurt. Home drug use of some drugs should be illegal in some situations. All public drug use should be illegal, including smoking and drinking. Your right to kill yourself with a drug ends when it encounters anyone else's right not to be killed by your use of that drug.)
Encourage Immigration and Offer Amnesty: Support. (Illegals want to come into our country for the jobs. That means they're going to work and contribute to the economy. How is this a bad thing? The people who don't want to work or contribute to the economy are people who've lived here all their lives)
More Spending on Armed Forces: Support. (We need a strong army, not only to protect ourselves from crazy people, but also to provide training and jobs to US citizens. The military does a mind-numbing amount of good work for this country even in non-military ways: for instance, the Internet was largely a military invention.

Require companies to hire more women and minorities: Oppose. (As long as companies cannot skip over women or minorities in their hiring practices, companies will hire the best person for the job, regardless of their gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. Companies exist only for the purpose of making money, and they will hire whoever is best suited to help them do that. This makes companies more competitive for good employees, and makes people more competitive to BE good employees. Forcing any other hiring rules only serves to, in certain cases, lower the bar, which serves absolutely no one.)
More federal funding for health coverage: Strongly Support. (Preserving the health and well-being of all its citizens is the basic definition of a government. In this day and age, medical care is a necessary component of that preservation. Picture this: A family with 2 parents and 2 children that makes $60k/year and can afford the basic necessities and can even afford to put some money aside for retirement or college. Everything is going great until the daughter develops a rare disorder that will kill her unless she gets a very expensive procedure. The parents' insurance will only cover the procedure up to $3,000 dollars, but beyond that, they require him to pay for the bills, and he cannot possibly afford to do so. In a country with socialized health care, the story of this family would be a happy one, because they could simply get the procedure done and move on with their lives. In the US, the parents would be forced to choose between saving their daughter's life or protecting their own quality of life, and that's really no choice at all. Once they had agreed to pay for the procedure, they would then spend the next 20 years pulling 2 jobs each just trying to pay off their steep medical bill, the work would stress them out to the point of damaging their own health, and their children's educational and social needs would be largely unserved and undeveloped. I just want everyone to have the happy ending to this story.)
Privatize Social Security: Neutral. (Social Security was a bad idea to begin with, but we're stuck with it now. Privatization would get it out of the hands of a government that has horribly mucked it up, but perhaps simply an overhaul of the system could repair the damage.)
Parents Choose Schools via Vouchers: Strongly Support. (We should not, as a country, limit religious instruction to the wealthy. The two possible arguments against it are: That Christians would be served while no other religions would be, and that if private school vouchers were available, no one would go to public school. To the first: if there were vouchers, then schools for other religions would become much more likely realities, and we're not serving their religious needs at the moment anyway so if someone doesn't have a religious school to go to, it's no different than life as it stands now. To the second: Good! If public school is so crappy that everyone would bail on public school and go to private school, maybe the idiots running our schools and governmental education bodies will wake up and realize that something is horribly, horribly wrong with our education system. Vouchers wouldn't completely pay for most private education, so many parents would continue to send their kids to public school - and many parents would prefer the secular environment of the public school anyway, regardless of their own religious affiliation.)
Reduce use of coal and oil: Support. (Coal: meh. It'd be good for the environment to cut back on coal, but it's still cheap and we don't have to rely on foreign governments much for it. Oil: Hell yes. It's horrible for the environment and under control of the 2nd-most powerful monopoly ever. The problem is that none of the alternatives presented so far (and I mean none) are actually good alternatives. Ethanol is the worst of these. Sure it burns cleaner than gas, but it still doesn't burn cleanly enough, and it requires us to grow more of something we're subsidizing through heavy government grants already: corn. Corn is great in small quantities, but because it is in literally everything we eat and drink, we have come to rely on it too much as well. And just think: if corn producers could sell even more corn, the price of it would skyrocket too, making our foods and drinks suffer.)
Allow churches to provide welfare services: Oppose. (This question is dangerously worded. Absolutely churches should be able to provide services to the poor, there's no question in anyone's mind about that. What this question means is that we replace a government-funded program of welfare with a religiously-funded one. This is dangerous for multiple reasons: First, the government can't monitor the activities of a religion, so how can we make sure that all people who need welfare are getting it? Second, what happens if the religions don't make enough money to support everyone?)
Decrease overall taxation of the wealthy: Oppose. (This question mostly has to do with the flat tax. Gravel's theory on it, that those who make more will spend more, works well on paper but falls apart when you realize that the fabulously rich spend a much smaller portion of their annual income on things that would be taxed than the poor do. A man with a 7-figure income can purchase a $4,000 TV without blinking an eye, and only be spending 1/1000th of his income. A man who makes $14,000 per year could only spend $14 in the same way, but that $14 is much more important to him, as he has to watch every penny that goes out. He couldn't even buy the HDTV he'll have to have to watch any programming in the near future. It is a phenomenally large tax on the poor. Now, a progressive income tax would be a possibility, but would be extremely difficult to figure out. If tax worked as such, it might be pretty good:

Item Cost	Tax %
$0-10	0.5%
10-100	1%
100-1000	2%
1000-10000	4%
10000-100000	8%

Of course, the numbers would have to be calculated based on people's normal spending and the math would get really complicated, but computers could handle it all.
Support and Expand Free Trade: Support. (Excepting national security risks or countries that are just being horrible jerks. The dollar is currently slipping against the rest of the world, and while opening our trade to other countries might lower it further, chances are it would help balance out the global economy and eventually lead to a more stable world.)
End Development of a Missile Defense ('Star Wars'): Neutral. (I'm torn, really)
Link human rights to trade with China: Strongly Support. (For that matter, why do we allow human rights problems anywhere in the world? China is far worse to its people than Saddam ever was, but we won't invade both because they have a huge military and because they are a major world economic power. That doesn't mean we should be bedfellows.)

The greatest song ever?

2007-09-17T11:29:00.000-05:00

The more I hear "Hate Me" by Blue October, the more I'm convinced it's the greatest song I've ever heard. Perhaps there are greater songs out there, but I've not heard them.

Why do I consider it the greatest song ever? That is a bit more complicated. I'll post the lyrics now and then come back when I have free time (hah) and do a line-by-line guide to them:

Blue October - "Hate Me"
I have to block out thoughts of you so I don't lose my head
They crawl in like a cockroach leaving babies in my bed
Dropping little reels of tape to remind me that I'm alone
Playing movies in my head that make a porno feel like home
There's a burning in my pride, a nervous bleeding in my brain
An ounce of peace is all I want for you. Will you never call again?
And will you never say that you love me just to put it in my face?
And will you never try to reach me? It is I that wanted space

Hate me today
Hate me tomorrow
Hate me so you can finally see what's good for you

I'm sober now for 3 whole months it's one accomplishment that you helped me with
The one thing that always tore us apart is the one thing I won't touch again
In my sick way I want to thank you for holding my head up late at night
While I was busy waging wars on myself, you were trying to stop the fight
You never doubted my warped opinions on things like suicidal hate
You made me compliment myself when it was way too hard to take
So I'll drive so fucking far away that I never cross your mind
And do whatever it takes in your heart to leave me behind

Hate me today
Hate me tomorrow
Hate me for all the things I didn't do for you
Hate me in ways
Yeah ways hard to swallow
Hate me so you can finally see what's good for you

And with a sad heart I say bye to you and wave
Kicking shadows on the street for every mistake that I have made
And like a baby boy I never was a man
'til I saw your blue eyes cry and I held your face in my hand
And then I fell down yelling "make it go away!
Just make her smile come back and shine just like it used to be"
And then she whispered "How can you do this to me?"

Hate me today
Hate me tomorrow
Hate me for all the things I didn't do for you
Hate me in ways
Yeah ways hard to swallow
Hate me so you can finally see what's good for you

Poll

2007-08-23T11:58:00.001-05:00

I've added a poll to see what those few frequent readers I have think I should do more of on this site. If you like my "whatever random thought pops into my head" format, just vote for everything. :)

Romans 14

2007-08-22T10:27:00.000-05:00

This is the post I've been promising regarding a chapter that I think is too often overlooked and gives insight on how to diplomatically handle problems that arise between belief systems in the church.

Romans 14

Now, first I'd like to provide a bit of background. In Romans 13, Paul admonishes people to be loving toward one another. He says "The commandments [...] are summed up in this one rule: 'Love your neighbor as yourself'" (Romans 13:9, NIV). He then goes on to say that we especially need to do this because the end of time gets closer every day. Then in Romans 14 he presents how to show love to those whose faiths are weak and strong. Then in Romans 15 he goes on to say that the strong should try to give their strength to the weak, for the benefit of the weak rather than for the pleasure of the strong.

All of this seems to be to make this point: that we must be gentle with other Christians and try to love and support them. In a modern skyscraper, the steal beams are all necessary to keep the structure upright. If one beam takes damage, the other beams carry the load to keep the building from collapsing. Otherwise, the beams spread the load out amongst the entire support so that they don't take too much stress. This is the idea behind the song "Lean on Me," and I'd especially like to point out the following lines:

If there is a load you have to bear
That you can't carry
I'm right up the road, I'll share your load
if you just call me
(From "Lean on Me" by Bill Withers)

When we love each other, as Christians are meant to do, we are supposed to support each other.

Unfortunately, too often our first intent seems to be to judge those we see as having sin. In a church, if it is discovered that one of the members of the church was a sex offender, the likely response of the other members of the church is to expel him, regardless of what offense, how long ago it occurred, etc. When challenged by the quote "'He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her'" (John 8:7, KJV), many church members seem to say "well, of course I have sin, but at least I didn't do THAT." They believe that it is necessary to prune the branches from time to time in order to get a well-formed tree. While this is true, gardeners have to know which branches to cut and how to cut them properly to encourage growth. The members of a congregation who tend to do the pruning are those who whisper gossip to each other about a man's sins, failing to realize the irony of using gossip to relay the sin. Additionally, because it's based on gossip, the church members learn sordid and inaccurate details about the sin through rumor and speculation, and the problem becomes multiplied.

It was exactly this kind of mentality that Paul is writing to. In Romans 14, he made several key points:

#1) "Accept him whose faith is weak, without passing judgment on disputable matters" (Romans 14:1, NIV).

Paul goes on to describe a scenario regarding vegetarians and meat-eaters, but the very first line of the paragraph is his main point. Later, he says "Therefore let us stop passing judgment on one another. Instead, make up your mind not to put any stumbling block or obstacle in your brother's way" (Romans 14:13, NIV). The point of this first section is that we have enough problems just dealing with our sins, we don't need additional problems dealing with our church. Brothers and Sisters in Christ should be supporting each other rather than attacking each other. God alone gets to decide someone's eternal fate; our goal as Christians should be to give every Christian the best possible chance.

#2) "So whatever you believe about these things keep between yourself and God. Blessed is the man who does not condemn himself by what he approves. But the man who has doubts is condemned if he eats, because his eating is not from faith; and everything that does not come from faith is sin" (Romans 14:22-23, NIV).

The point of this passage is as follows: If you have a set of beliefs that other people in the Church do not share, you must be absolutely certain about them. Any doubts at all are an indication of sin. In Paul's example: if you think that it's acceptable to eat meat, but you think that there's a small chance that God doesn't approve of eating meat, then you shouldn't do it. Regardless of how small the chance is, there is that chance. Sin is a separation from God. If you do something knowing that it could separate you from God, then you show yourself to be accepting of that separation. Thus, you are sinning. However, in the same example, a man could be completely convinced that eating meat is not a sin (I have no doubts about it myself, for instance). For him, it's not a sin then. It's one of Paul's "disputable matters." Someone who doesn't feel he can eat meat shouldn't be mad at the person who does, for both viewpoints can be fully logical interpretations of the Bible.

Taking this to other areas: the Southern Baptist church believes that dancing is a sin. For them, it is a "vertical expression of horizontal desire". I can frankly see their point, especially in modern "bump and grind" style dancing or in dancing moves out of the movie "Dirty Dancing." However, dancing itself is not the act of sex, so the sin within it must be the desire it creates. The question comes down to this: if dancing has the potential to cause lust, does it cause lust in everyone? If the answer is yes, as the Baptists seem to believe, then it is a sin for everyone. If the answer is no, it's still a sin for anyone in whom it does cause lust.

For myself, I've never experienced lust from dancing. Then again, I don't have a clue what I'm doing and so I spend all of my thoughts on trying to just make sure I don't screw up. Even with the aforementioned "bump and grind" - I once had a very attractive girl, who I was frankly interested in, drag me onto the dance floor and attempt to dance that way with me. Again, I had absolutely no clue what I was doing, and being a good little Christian boy, I found her dancing to be embarrassing rather than sexual. My only thought was "how do I politely tell her that I'm not comfortable with this?" I obviously failed, as after that night I've never seen her again. Perhaps that's for the best. But the point remains that during this entire event, I did not have sexual thoughts (not for lack of effort, mind you - I wasn't *that* good of a Christian boy), but simply because the dancing didn't inherently force them upon me.

So for me, dancing is not a sin. For others, however, it may well be.

#3)"Do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food. All food is clean, but it is wrong for a man to eat anything that causes someone else to stumble. It is better not to eat meat or drink wine or to do anything else that will cause your brother to fall" (Romans 14:20-21, NIV).

Remember that the entire point of this section has been how to help the weak be strong. If someone has a weakness in a particular area, those who do not share that weakness should be sensitive of it regardless. If, for instance, a church were to have a wild and crazy party, and dancing were to spontaneously break out at that party, someone who feels lust when dancing may feel pressured by the group to get out on the dance floor. Thus, this person begins dancing, and begins lusting, and the whole experience causes him or her to be weakened.

However, there are far too many things in the world that can cause a person to sin. It's impossible to prevent all of them. This is part of the reason why we need our Church to be a place we can be completely open with each other. If I go into a church right now, and tell them that I have a problem with lust when I see a woman with a short skirt on (which is true - learned something you didn't want to know about me just now I bet), they would likely not provide any support. Church the way it should be done would have the women ceasing to wear short skirts until such a time as I could overcome that desire, so that I would not be weakened during worship. But if I don't say anything about it, no rational person would have any reason to suspect a problem, and thus I can only be weakened.

#4) "As one who is in the Lord Jesus, I am fully convinced that no food is unclean in itself. But if anyone regards something as unclean, then for him it is unclean" (Romans 14:14, NIV).

This is perhaps the most difficult and abused part of the entire chapter. "No food" could also be translated "nothing" - which means that nothing in the entire world is inherently evil. Wow. Alcohol is not inherently evil. Cocaine is not inherently evil. Guns are not inherently evil. Nothing is. This concept has opened up a whole slew of possible arguments, some of which may be completely wrong, but those arguments do find a seeming champion in this passage:
Premarital sex
Extramarital sex (including orgies)
Homosexuality
Abortion
Suicide
Self-Mutilation
And the list goes on. Basically, anything that could be traditionally considered sinful can be argued in favor of with this passage.

However, Paul provides the test in item #2, that you must be absolutely certain about your beliefs. Everything we do should in some way bring glory to God. If premarital and extramarital sex can bring glory to God (and there are some who say "yes," though I am not among them), and a person can believe in it without having any doubts, then for that person it is not a sin. However, we should strongly question anything that seems so antithetical to Biblical teachings. There are many indications in the Bible of such fornication being sinful, so how could a person believe these things? Still, if someone can believe without doubt that what they're doing is right and good, at least according to this interpretation of this passage, it would be fine.

There comes a bit of difficulty when dealing with things like murder, rape, and other violent assaults. There have been indications in the past of people committing serial murders because they believe they are serving the will of God. "Boondock Saints" is a movie about this very idea. Surely it is still evil for people to commit these acts, even if they have no doubts about them.

How to resolve this? I don't at this time have an opinion formed. In my heart, I say that "nothing" must not literally mean nothing, meaning there are still sins regardless of the person's intent and beliefs who is doing them. But that's not what it says. So, for the commentary section I'll leave open this question: how do you interpret Romans 14:14?

WARNING - SPOILERS AHEAD

2007-07-30T10:39:00.000-05:00

The title ought to do it, don't you think?

Yes, I've recently finished book 7 of Harry Potter, and I'd like to get my thoughts on it down before I forget them, so I will be posting SPOILERS:

1) I had already written to some friends, though not posted here, the reasons why certain characters had to die. For instance, before book 6 had come out, I had predicted the death of Dumbledore because he represented the old mentor, the Gandalf, the Obi-Wan of the story. That character always has to die. There are two other characters that always have to die: the Chosen One and the Jester.

The Jester is the comedian of the story, the one who breaks those tenuous moments in a story and makes it more lighthearted. When the Jester dies, it's like the humor is being snuffed out of the world, and it shows that the world has just become a much more serious place. In Harry Potter, the Jester is a combined character - George and Fred. I had originally predicted both would die, but had I considered the issue more, I would've seen that just one would die, like Castor and Pollux.

The Chosen One is a character that doesn't always die, but there are certainly more literary references to the CO dying than to him surviving. With Harry Potter, it was interesting that he was specifically described as the Chosen One during the story. From a literary point of view, Christ can be described as the Chosen One, and it is by Christ's sacrifice that humanity is saved from evil, but it is also because of Christ's willingness to sacrifice Himself that He is able to be resurrected, to defeat death. Harry has almost an identical story, though toned down considerably: he sacrifices himself to save the world, but his salvation is for this life rather than for the afterlife. He defeats death because he is willing to sacrifice himself, but after a fashion it can be seen that he never really dies. This obvious comparison is specifically noted by the author, in her choice to use a phrase from the Bible in reference to the Deathly Hollows: "The last enemy to be defeated is death." This line originally comes from Paul's first letter to the church in Corinth:

But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. But each in his own turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him. Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For he "has put everything under his feet." Now when it says that "everything" has been put under him, it is clear that this does not include God himself, who put everything under Christ. When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all. (1 Cor. 20-28)

It would be easy to carry this religious allegory further: If Harry is the Christ, it is because he is born of magic. Magic is the god of the world. If Magic is the god, then muggles represent various pagan cultures. Further, the houses of Hogwarts represent different religious groups. Slytherin would obviously be the Fundamentalists, and it is a sort of ironic jab at the Fundamentalists who get angry about Harry Potter for seeing it as a pagan story itself.

2) The Epilogue was partially satisfying, but I would've liked a bit more. It mostly served as fan service, to tell us that Harry and Ginny do get together (I think most of us were happy about that), as do Ron and Hermione. There was also a brief fan glimpse of Neville as a professor of herbology. However, we're not told some other things that might've been useful or interesting, such as:
Who is headmaster at Hogwarts?
Who is the Minister?
Did Neville ever get married? (I was always hoping he would get with Luna)
Is George still running the shop?
What do the "big 3" (and Ginny) do for a living?
Whatever happened to Hagrid?

Of course, the epilogue wasn't strictly necessary. The "excuse" for the story came during two exposition scenes: A) Severus' memories, and B) Harry Potter meeting The Architect... I mean, meeting Dumbledore in his death vision.

3) The story seemed to rush on at times, and drag on at others. It seemed almost a way to make the story longer, but there are scenes where the exact same conversation occurs over and over again. It went something like this:

Person 1: What are you saying?
Person 2: Leave her... come back to Montana with me.
Person 1: I could no sooner run away from her than myself.
Person 2: I'm not asking you to run, I'm asking you to face reality!
Person 1: Whose reality, yours or mine?
Person 2: My reality AND yours, that's whose!
Person 1: What are you saying?
Person 2: Leave her... come back to Montana with me.

and so on. I think she was trying to show that these were difficult riddles to figure out, but by the third time Harry and crew waste 5 pages in circular reasoning, I had to put the book down for an hour and go play video games.

New thoughts on Abortion

2007-07-24T08:34:00.000-05:00

I'm torn now.

I have recently discovered a new way of thinking regarding abortion. My faith demands that abortions not occur, but of course I cannot force my faith upon others. The logical answer I have long used against abortion is this: if you voluntarily chose to have sex, knowing the risk of getting pregnant, you already made your choice - you don't get to have an abortion.

However, there was always one concession to that that I, along with almost every other Republican in the world, made - if you didn't voluntarily choose to have sex, ie. you were raped, then abortion was acceptable. I still feel that abortions shouldn't occur, but I'm not willing to put undue hardship upon a woman or girl who can't handle the pain of it. Many rape victims who become pregnant by it struggle with feelings of depression and suicide, and we just don't have the support structure in place in our country to help them deal with those feelings and the pregnancies.

That line of thought opened up a stunning revelation.

I realized that if abortions were only available to those who had been raped, these women would need to tell someone about the violence that occurred to them. Am I willing to pass a law stating that when a woman is raped, she must relive the violence by talking about it over and over again with perfect strangers. What about a 9-year-old girl who is molested by her uncle? Should she be forced to communicate that trauma? All I can say is this: it would be another crime to force these laws upon women and girls, just so they could get the support they need.

What this means is that abortions must be legal and open to women without question. As much as I hate the idea that a selfish woman would want to have an abortion because she simply wants to be able to be a nymphomaniac, I also hate the idea that a teenager couldn't get an abortion after being raped. Ultimately, I feel that we need better support in place for all rape victims, but that still doesn't change the fact that rape is unbelievably painful for some people to talk about. All human life is precious, and that includes the life of the mother as much as of the child.

Homosexuality is genetic. For Christians, it's still wrong.

2007-02-25T20:02:00.000-06:00

From the "I can't stand to hear really stupid arguments from both sides" department comes the arguments used by Christians to debate for and against homosexuality. The two most common are these:

Pro homosexuality: Homosexuality is a genetic trait. If God does not make mistakes, then God must be OK with homosexuality since He made it a genetic trait.

Anti-homosexuality: You still can't prove that it's genetic.

Now, the latter argument is just silly. As Christians, we should not denounce scientific findings as unprovable just because they challenge our beliefs. This particular finding is pretty well supported, and the scientific community has come to accept it as fact.

So, Christians in my audience, repeat after me: "Homosexuality is genetic." Good. Have a cookie.

Just because you acknowledge that it is genetic does not mean you have to concede the second point in the pro-homosexuality argument: namely, that God endorses it for that fact. Check this:

Romans 5:12 - Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned

Romans 7:23 - but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members.

When Adam and Eve committed the first sin, their transgression made possible that all people should sin. The sinful nature came upon all mankind. Just as Paul says in the second quote, while he tries to do good, his body continues its desire for sin, making him a prisoner of sin. All people must fight sinful desires. One man may desire adultery, in that he lusts after every woman he sees. Another man may be covetous, and unable to control his desire for the things his neighbors own (to the point, perhaps, of stealing from them or bankrupting himself). Another man may be prideful, unwilling to believe that anyone else could be a Christian, or unwilling to believe that they have the same desire to serve God that he does. All of these things are sin, and all of them can become so exceptionally strong, that they do just as Paul says and make prisoners of us all.

Further, there are some genetic derivations that make people more susceptible to these sins. Take, for example, this article on a genetic link to violent tendencies. There is a gene that generates enzymes which consume serotonin. Serotonin is necessary for fighting off violent feelings. So people with this genetic trait cannot help but be violent toward others. Often, this results in violent assaults and even murder.

However, would anyone suggest that these people should indulge in their desire for murder? Far from it! If anything, we want them to avoid doing this, even though they are prone to do so. We do everything we can to force them to be nice, through laws, punishment, and medication. But if their genetic code says they should be violent, shouldn't we let them? No! That would cause our crime and violence problems to go up even higher than they are now.

Homosexuality is not dangerous to society as violent tendencies are, but the argument used is the same. God does not make mistakes, this is true, but every single one of us has certain predispositions - genetic or not - toward sin. Each of us are called to "take up our cross," to bear the proverbial monkey on our backs forward. God can and will forgive us at the end of our road, but only if we don't continue to indulge in our sins willingly. We must fight, regardless of how hard it is, regardless of what complications have been made for us.

God does not tempt us, but He does TEST us. One man's test may be homosexuality, another may be lust, another may be putting things ahead of God, another may be violence, but all who are called must put off the sinful nature.

Creationism + Evolutionism

2007-02-10T18:28:00.000-06:00

According to New Scientist, some Christian churches are beginning to embrace evolutionism and are this Sunday holding "Evolution Sunday."

Considering I've been telling people since 1997 that Christianity and Evolution can go perfectly hand-in-hand, I am very excited about this. I posted a small bit about the duality in my blog on September 30, 2004, titled "Discarding the Evidence." To go into it in a bit more detail, the idea is as follows:

#1: The translation of time in Genesis is a weak translation. The original ancient Hebrew never said that each event happened "the next day" but rather "another day." With this view, the seven days of creation could be separated by millions or even billions of years.

#2: The word "make" can mean to build slowly over time, just as humans might make a house. So, when God says "let Us make man in Our own image," it could be that He doesn't mean "instantly, now," but rather something similar to "let Us put into place the biological mechanisms that will eventually lead to the creation of man in Our image."

#3: God, being the great and powerful ruler of the universe, would have the foresight and ability to start the universe in exactly the configuration needed in order to allow these biological processes to produce humanity. Like a master of dominos who sets up a display thousands of pieces long, knowing that by pushing on just one of them, a chain reaction will occur causing all the others to fall down, God could produce particles and energy in exactly the configuration necessary to produce exactly the right people and exactly the right universal situations to produce specific people, including Adam, Abraham, and even those of us alive today.

This view does not take any power away from God. If anything, it remarks even further on the intelligence of God than creationist views do. It ascribes to God a wisdom and knowledge, a supreme intelligence and ability to plan, that are far greater than anything conventional Christian teachings cover.

Same-sex marriage

2006-10-25T14:56:00.000-05:00

Here's my views on Same-sex marriage, because I think they could revolutionize the debate:

#1: From a Christian standpoint, homosexuality is wrong. There is no "but God created people like this" - God also created people who have a section of their brain removed that prevents them from killing others, so they are genetically predispositioned to commit murder. It's still wrong when they kill.

#2: From a Christian standpoint, the term "marriage" indicates a union sanctified by God. Christ says of marriage:
"I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery" (Matthew 19:9).
Yet the divorce rate in the United States, the country with the highest Christian population in the world, is 40% (divorcereform.org). If marriage is a sanctified union, it should not legal to end it so easily.

#3: Non-Christian groups are allowed to marry. If a Buddhist fell in love with a Muslim, the two could legally get married. This indicates that marriage is not a strictly Christian activity in the United States. Even atheists get married. So not all marriage in the United States is based on Christian definitions of what marriage should be, just as not all weddings are performed in a Christian church. Some are performed by a justice of the peace, some by a Rabbi, some by a Druid.

Thus, marriage cannot be defined as a "Christian" activity and thus the rules of Christianity cannot be applied to the legal definition of it. Without Christian definitions of marriage, the only argument against same-sex marriage is one of what is best for children raised in that kind of home environment. However, children are already being raised by same-sex couples, and there are many heterosexual marriages that create horrible home environments for children. Children are best protected by ensuring that they're brought up in loving, stable environments. Same-sex marriage can provide these environments.

My rules for tipping

2006-10-05T10:26:00.000-05:00

About 2 years ago (December 2004 if you want to go look for it), I posted a blog about waiters that talked about how I tip. I've often thought about writing a tipping guide, but an article on Fark has finally prompted me to do so. So, without further delay, here is:

Terry's Tipping Tree

1) Determine the price of the ticket. Use the price *without tax* for your calculation.
- a) if the waiter did not bill you for an item for any reason, add the price of that item to your total ticket price.
- b) if the waiter billed you for an item you felt should not have been billed, remove the price of that item from your total ticket price.
- c) if the waiter added a gratuity to your bill, use the price of the bill without the gratuity.

2) Determine the % that the waiter should recieve:
- a) Start with 15% automatically.
- b) Each time any member of your bill (not your party) has to wait 1 minute for a non-alcoholic drink refill, deduct 1% for each 1 minute. If no member of your party has to wait for a non-alcoholic drink refill, add 5%. This indicates the server's attentiveness to your party's needs and an ease with which you can get the server's attention should you need anything.
- c) When you are seated, if the server waits longer than 1 minute to get your drink order, deduct 2%.
- d) After you have placed your drink order, if the server takes longer than 2 minutes to return your non-alcoholic drinks, deduct 3%.
- e) Any time you request something from the waiter (with two exceptions to follow), if the waiter is able to accomodate your request within 1 minute, add 5%. Exceptions: If you have to ask for a non-alcoholic drink refill, deduct 1%, and 2% for each minute it takes to receive that refill after asking. If you have to send back your food because the waiter forgot something you asked for (such as getting the sauce on the side), deduct 2%. If the waiter then gives you the food or drink in question for free at the end of the meal, cancel these deductions.
- f) If the waiter is willing to spend time chatting and being friendly with you, add 5%.
- g) At the end of the meal, if the waiter asks you if you want change, deduct 5%. If the waiter brings you "tipping money" (description to follow), add 1%. If the waiter brings back the pennies (meaning, he did not round up on the change he owed you to the nearest nickel), deduct 1%. If the waiter does not bring back enough change (ie, he owed you $5.52 and brought back $5.50), deduct 3%.
- h) Unless you feel slighted by waiter in some way, always try to leave a tip in exact-dollar increments, or at worst in 50-cent increments. Exceptions: If you tip with a credit card, or intend to leave cash without waiting for your server to return, feel free to round up to the nearest whole-dollar or 50-cent amount. ie, if your bill was 17.32, and you leave a 16% tip (without tax), it would bring your total to 19.89. Round it up to $20.

It's a lot to calculate, but it's only intended as a basic guide. Get the idea for the numbers in your head, and then you can guestimate your tip at the end of the meal. I never spend time calculating all of that out, but I can *feel* for the meal based on things I've noticed when I'm putting the tip together and know roughly that this person got 3% in deductions but 7% in credits and so ended up with a 19% tip.

"Tipping money" works as follows:

If your change is $5.00 or more, but less than $9, the waiter should bring back your change in $1 bills. The waiter should always try to ensure that your change includes enough options to cover between a 10 and a 30% tip. So, if you had a $22 meal, the waiter should return at least enough $1s to cover $2.20 and $6.60. That means bringing back a $10 bill and 8 $1 bills in change. Yes, it's cumbersome if you do tip poorly for the meal, but if you decide to leave a $4 tip (20%), then it means you aren't forced to round the waiter's tip up or down because they brought back a $5.

RPS

2006-09-29T10:08:00.000-05:00

This article is an excellent explanation of how to play Rock-Paper-Scissors.

For advanced RPS, add the following to your repertoire:

Player profiling
- When you play someone you know, try to use what you know about them to determine ahead of time what they are going to throw. Each player falls into one of four categories:

0: A player in this category doesn't think things through. This person will always throw rock.

1: A player in category one only takes things to the next logical step. Meaning, if they throw rock and you throw paper, they will choose one of two options: if they are an agressive personality, they will throw scissors to attack your paper, if they are a defensive personality, they will throw paper to make sure your paper can't win. If you don't know whether they are agressive or defensive, choose scissors.

2: A player in this category takes things one step beyond the next logical step. If they throw rock and you throw paper, they will then think that they should throw scissors to attack your paper, but they will realize that you are onto them and that you will throw rock to attack their scissors. As a result, they will choose paper to attack your rock. Choose scissors.

3: The last category is only reserved for the absolutely most intelligent of players. The 3-step player will try to outthink their opponent in exactly the way I have talked about here. What they throw will depend on their perception of you. Fortunately, their perception of you could be wrong. If they throw rock and you throw paper, they will take the 2-step approach to the next step, assuming that you will choose scissors to attack their paper, and they will toy with the idea of throwing rock. However, because they don't want to seem predictable, every time they will choose to instead throw paper to stalemate your paper or attack your rock. Choose scissors.

As you can see, if your opponent throws rock first, you should always throw scissors on your next throw, unless you're playing an idiot.

River improvement project

2006-09-07T18:11:00.000-05:00

Tulsa is currently considering a river improvement project known as Tulsa Channels. The project is an attempt to make use of the Arkansas river for housing and shopping. As someone who currently lives next to the river and often shops at the Riverwalk Crossing - a very successful private enterprise that has recently been built along the river - I can support this project easily. As a pessimist and Tulsa resident who is already taxed heavily, I oppose it.

Something needs to be done with the river. I have been saying this for a long time. The vision that brought the Channels plan into being is very similar to the vision I've had as I drove across the river on highway 75. (You can see what I'm talking about if you search google satellite for "Tulsa" and move just of the starting point to the river.) South and east of the bridge is a small island, probably 100 feet wide and maybe 500 feet long, with trees and grass. This island is never submerged due to the way the river has been engineered, yet nothing is being done with the island. Often as I've looked at this island, I've considered the possibility of developing it into a yuppie port of call.

The Tulsa Channel project seeks to do the same thing, only it's chosen the opposite bank of the river (in the exact same area, however) and intends to manufacture its islands. For those thinking that building islands on the Arkansas River might be a difficult prospect, take another look at Google maps and move up and down the river - there are sandbars all throughout it owing to the fact that the river is *not very deep*. In fact, the water level at the current island is probably less than 15 feet all year-round. Most of the water for the river has been diverted around the city to prevent flooding and to provide a stable waterway system for ships coming in from the Gulf of Mexico.

What I like about this project is that it is seeking to make use of the river. Riverparks is the most beautiful park system we have in Tulsa, and certainly the most popular. It extends for at least 8 miles along the river, from downtown all the way to the suburb of Jenks. In some places it occupies both banks of the river, though its continuous trails are only on the eastern bank. There are occasionally businesses that have purchased land along the river on the eastern bank, including my apartment complex, a Native American tribe's casino, and a small, outdoor restaurant. The park is boarded by a long, fairly fast-paced road. There are many businesses, houses, and apartment complexes on the far side of the road from the river, but only those 3 along the bank in the same area as the park.

Considering the fact that this park has a long bicycle/hiking trail and is frequented by all of the yuppies in town, I've always thought this trail would make an excellent location for businesses catering to those types of people. Yet for some reason, businesses and the city have not jumped on this idea.

Indianapolis has, by contrast, an amazing system set up. Not only has their downtown been renovated completely to attract yuppies, but they have established their own "fake river" if you will. The "Canal Walk" is a beautiful, venice-like canal through the city, complete with apartments, restaurants, gondolas, and amazing stonework. When I visited this amazing location, the beautiful girl on my arm wasn't the only reason for me wanting to stay in the place forever. It was truely a gorgeous site. Here is a gallery that contains a few pictures of the canal walk, so you can see for yourself and try to get a sense of what the place is like.

Indianapolis's downtown is a rich, vibrant place that people *want* to be. Tulsa's downtown is depressing. The buildings are run-down, homeless people dot the sidewalks, and the general population of the city tries to stay away when not doing business. This is a shame, because downtown is supposed to be where people go to be together. That's why it's downtown - it's the center of the city, the center of the action.

My only concern is that the river project won't do what truely needs to be done for Tulsa. Yes, the river needs to be renovated. Far less money could be spent with far greater results, however, if we simply improve the infrastructure of the land surrounding the river and try to encourage companies to move into it. Additionally, the river improvements won't draw yuppies into the city core without more work done to the downtown area. Our city needs a major overhaul of downtown if we are to attract people to it. The dingy nightclubs we currently have won't do it, as evidenced by the fact that so many have shut down. Another apartment plan near downtown won't do it either, proven by Renaissance Uptown, Lincoln Park, and the Tribune Lofts. Yes, people will move into those apartments, but they want to get out of downtown as quickly as possible when they're not going home for the evening. They spend their time and money in Jenks or Broken Arrow, not in the city's core.

I don't mind seeing more taxes - just so long as they are taxes that are going to return something useful to me. A hip, happening downtown would be useful to me as a yuppie myself. A bunch of new apartments downtown that I can't afford and that feature no other benefits won't be useful at all.

Planets

2006-08-16T10:11:00.000-05:00

Ok, because I don't like the "round and orbiting" definition of the Astronomical Union, here is my own definition of a planet:

#1: It must have a gravitational pull, at its surface, of at least 1m/s². The size definition of 480 miles doesn't take into consideration variations in density.

#2: It must have an atmospheric pressure of more than 0.25 kPa at surface.

(For planets with no discernable surface, #2 is assumed to be met, and #1 is assumed if the planet's diameter, with atmosphere, is larger than 10,000 km)

#3: It must orbit a star with a Perihelion of at least 75% the distance of its Aphelion. (OR if the planet is also a satellite of another non-star object (known as the "core object"), the core object must meet the requirements of #3.)

This would reclassify the solar system as follows:
Mercury: not a planet
Venus: planet
Earth: planet
Moon: not a planet
Mars: planet
Mars' satellites: not planets
Ceres & asteroids: not planets
Jupiter: planet
Jupiter's moons: not planets
Saturn: planet
Titan: planet
Saturn's other moons: not planets
Uranus: planet
Uranus's moons: not planets
Neptune: planet
Neptune's moons (including triton): not planets
Pluto, Charon, and other Kuiper Belt objects: not planets

Religion in school

2006-08-09T08:52:00.000-05:00

Before I begin on this, understand that I do believe in the separation of church and state. However, there is something to consider that I don't think anyone has discussed yet.

That is: by refusing to allow any kind of religious teaching to occur in public school, we're denying religious teaching to the poor and middle-classes. The upper class (and the upper-middle to an extent) can afford to send their children to private school. A religious upper-class family can insure that their children receive a solid theological upbringing 6 days a week as opposed to just 1.

The painful irony is that it's mostly the lower classes that are highly religious and would desire to teach their children theology in school. The upper classes usually aren't as religious and thus don't *need* the private schools to teach theology.

No, worship services one day a week isn't good enough for some religious people; and, with the amount of homework currently assigned by public schools, after-hours services can't meet the need any better. Either we need to offer religious classes at public school (which isn't discriminatory - you can offer a class in Christianity without offering a class in Judaism just as you can offer a class in women's literature without offering a class in men's literature) (These classes could be completely voluntary and take the place of an elective), or we need to offer private school vouchers.

And to the argument that "private school vouchers would destroy the public school system" - duh. Public schools suck. Let's destroy them.

Am I...

2006-06-21T22:55:00.000-05:00

...the only Republican who thinks Ann Coulter needs to shut up?

Should we be happy?

2006-06-08T21:38:00.000-05:00

Al Qaeda terrorist Zarqawi was killed yesterday in an air strike, and people in the US and Iraq seem to be dancing in the streets over his death.

Is there any reason Al Qaeda hates us? Nah.

Those of us who are Christians: I don't think we should be cheering for the death of this man. Yes, he murdered thousands of innocent people. Yes, he was an evil, evil man. But we're cautioned not to cheer the misfortunes of our enemies. His death is a victory in the "war on terror," but still a tragedy nonetheless. He died a heathen. He will burn in Hell for the rest of eternity. We should never celebrate that.

Why the dollar inflates

2006-05-31T10:44:00.000-05:00

I was doing some serious thinking about inflation and the dollar, and I came up with what I think is an excellent theory.

Points:
1. People always want to make more money. In our society, we judge success by how much income a person is making, so everyone who wants to be successful must earn more.
2. If the total amount of money in the nation is stationary (as it would be if our money was backed by gold), then the only way one person can make more money is to take that money from someone else, forcing them to earn less.
3. If we want to protect the poor, we can instead increase the amount of money in our nation. This causes the value of the money to be less, but allows people to *believe* they're becoming richer without actually becoming richer.

I guess I really need to start recording every thought I have

2006-05-28T08:06:00.000-05:00

The reason I say this is because the ones that seem mildly interesting but altogether unimportant to society are the ones I see years later making headlines in international news organizations.

Take, for example, the question of which came first: the chicken or the egg? I rationalized years ago that it must be the egg, because the chicken wouldn't have evolved later in life. Quelle Suprise, that's what is being claimed now on articles like this one: http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/05/26/chicken.egg/index.html

So as I say, I just need to start recording everything I say. Then again, I have no credentials, so no one will believe me, and when I show everyone that I said it first, they'll just think I'm trying to prove myself smart or something.

Being Judgemental: Part 2.

2006-04-30T09:16:00.000-05:00

I used to attend a church where people didn't understand how to properly be judgemental. There were a few people in the church who felt the need to constantly correct everyone else. This bred two problems: #1, that the people who were doing the correcting alienated others by taking on that "holier than thou" attitude, and #2, that the people who were being corrected didn't feel they could correct the sins of the first group. The people being judgemental were sinning as well, because they were starting gossip and rumors, and preventing those people they didn't like from working in the higher tiers of the church's organizational structure.

The church has since mostly fallen apart, save for those few people who were correcting everyone else, and a handful of people who for some reason like to be pawns in that kind of environment. I did gleam something useful from this experience, however: in a church, one person can't be doing all the correcting.

After all, if one person did all the correcting, that person would have to be as good as Jesus in order not to totally screw up everyone else. The Walk with Christ in a church is meant to be a group effort - everyone corrects everyone. If a church can't foster that kind of attitude, then it tends to fall into the one-man model, and it takes on the sins of whatever man that may be, whether he is the pastor, or the church secretary, an elder, a deacon, or even just a guy who likes to fall asleep in the front row.

Metagaming and the Point Buy System

2006-04-24T15:42:00.000-05:00

(Or: why rolling the dice is better than working the numbers)

In today's installment of "Why I'm always right," I'd like to talk a moment about the Point Buy System used in many Role Playing Games (RPGs). The concept behind these systems is that all characters can be kept relatively equal in standing with each other by preventing them from getting a lot of attribute points at high levels. Attributes are issued a certain number of points, and the players can choose how many points are assigned to each attribute to increase that number.

My distaste of this system can be best expressed by a quote from the Neverwinter Nights 2 Forums (nwn2forums.bioware.com):

"Normally Fighters don't get above 12-14 Intelligence in a Point-Buy system so it's not like they have a lot of excess skill points to spend." (SIC)

Intelligence is not an ability that fighters necessarily *need* to be good fighters. They could need Strength, Dexterity, or Constitution to make themselves better warriors, but Intelligence does absolutely nothing for the fighter - that is, until the fighter becomes a person's *character*. You see, in a video game and all too often in the pen-and-paper version of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), players don't act out their character, so they don't have to make the character interesting in any way. As long as the character can beat stuff up, or cast the best spells to destroy everything, that's all that is required to finish the game.

However, when people actually act out their character, and try to play the *story* surrounding the character, then they need to make the character a real person. Few real people have low ability scores in all their mental attributes and still make awesome fighters. In fact, the best fighters are also going to be intelligent enough to know when not to rush in to fight the dragon, or how to read their opponents and wait for an opportunity to strike. Role-played, story-driven characters need decent mental attributes to match their physical abilities.

But, in a video-game environment, not everyone can be counted on to build their character with good role-play intentions, even in role-play servers. There will always be someone taking advantage of the points to maximize the attributes that are key to their class. And, because other people feel the need to be useful in combat as well, others who want to be good role-players will find themselves maxing their important attributes and minimizing their unimportant attributes in order to be competitive.

A dice-roll system eliminates this. It makes people use attributes they might not otherwise have used. The fighter may be handsome. The wizard may be strong. The rogue may be clumsy. The bard may be frail. It's entirely left up to chance, and it teaches us to become heroes despite our downfalls. Random is beautiful.

Rule variant idea for D&D

2006-04-21T14:28:00.000-05:00

Here's an idea I had for a rule variant in D&D:

Instead of weapons being enchantable, the weapons enchant themselves as they slaughter consecutively more creatures. For every creature a weapon kills, add that creature's character level to a stat called "LOCK" - Level of Creature Killed. Simple, eh? The weapon must be the one inflicting the final damage that claims the life of the creature.

When a weapon reaches 100 LOCK (should happen between 7th and 8th level), and again every 100 LOCK after that, it receives a small enhancement bonus.

1st LOCK: +1 damage of type (ie, +1 fire, +1 ice, +1 sonic, +1 piercing, or +1 slashing), or +1 attack.

2nd LOCK: +2 damage of type or +2 attack.

3rd LOCK: +3 damage of type, +3 attack, or etherealness (stacks with 1st 2 LOCKS).

4th LOCK: +4 dmg or atk, or cast 1st - 3rd level wizard or cleric spell once per day.

and so forth

Would this be legal?

2006-04-20T20:37:00.000-05:00

Would it be against the law to build a militia group, take it overseas, and attack another country to take it over?

ie, since Iran is pulling all this BS with their uranium right now, could you put together an army, take it overseas, take over their country, and then start selling oil at a reasonable price again?

You'd make a rediculous profit.

On a side note - I'm turning into a hard-core Democrat, I'm afraid. The current policies of the Bush administration are so far to the right that it requires going way, way to the left in order to offset them. I think this will result in Hilary winning the next election, if North Korea and Iran don't nuke us first.

Another cheap plug

2006-04-13T10:05:00.000-05:00

If you know me, you know that I used to be completely addicted to a game called Neverwinter Nights (NWN). NWN was great because it allowed for true roleplaying experiences, and as I actually like RPGs for the fact that they let you get *into* a character and create a story for the character, that was a huge deal for me. I created Caldur Stend, an elven fighter in the service of Torm, but his elven nature constantly tore at him, trying to make him more chaotic in nature than the strict laws of his religion demanded. His story had lots of internal conflict, as well as external conflict (falling in love with a woman named Sofia d'Orleans, fighting with a man named Xander Kross, who was basically an evil foil of Caldur, dealing with the struggles of his friends Brastias, Caine, and Will). It was a lot of fun, and to this day everyone involved in those stories remembers them fondly (the man who played Xander has actually written 20+ chapters of a novel about his own story).

Now, Neverwinter Nights 2 is in production. The game looks amazing, and I can't wait to play it. I hope to establish another great character with intriguing story on a server in the near future.

My fear, however, is that the server won't be as much fun as the former. The server I used to play on, back in the day, was Lands of Acheron (LoA). LoA had very strict rules which kept the riff-raff not interested in roleplaying *away* from the server. It also had very low magical content for items, meaning that 20th level people weren't really any better off, equipment wise, than 5th level people (I kept the same longbow from the time I was 5th level until the time I was 27th level). I did get some rather low-level, special items for my character because of the story line I created for him. It was really cool having those items, and they helped to make the character special rather than overpowered. All of this worked together well to make for a good RP experience.

However, the man who made the LoA server is now more interested in World of Warcraft, so he has no plans to make LoA again on NWN2. This is a shame. Fortunately, the people who played Brastias and Xander are getting together to make a new server. Will it be as good as LoA? I don't know... but I'm looking forward to it with excited, if nervous, anticipation.

Being Judgemental

2006-03-05T22:11:00.000-06:00

All too often in today's society, Christians are trying to be as accepting and loving of all people as possible. While to an extent this is good, the idea of judgemental Christians is becoming so unacceptable that even Christians are trying to steer clear of the idea completely. And this, I think, is bad. Christians are supposed to be able to see the downfalls of each other and come to the rescue, to help one another get over our difficult sins. This means, on occasion, judging one another when we are committing sins without realizing they are sinful. I pulled the following quotes together from the NIV, and added some personal commentary, to explain my position:

Quote:
You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge the other, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things. - Romans 2:1

Means that if we make a judgement against someone for something, we'll be judged by the same set of criteria. Another favorite:

Quote:
Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. - Luke 6:37

Is one that is quoted all too often (you may have heard it as "judge not, lest ye be judged," but that's King James Version).

But at the same time, when you look at things like Paul's letters to the churches, he comes out and tells them when they're doing wrong. Jesus, when he sent out the groups of apostles, commanded them:

Quote:
If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake the dust off your feet when you leave that home or town. I tell you the truth, it will be more bearable for Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town. - Matthew 10:14-15

And, immediately after the do not judge remark, the following:

Quote:
How can you say to your brother, 'Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,' when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye. - Luke 6:42

He's not saying "don't take the speck out of your brother's eye" - but instead, that you do so only after you make sure you don't have one yourself.

What I'm getting at is this: We have to correct our fellow Christians when we see that they are doing wrong, but we must know that we are sinners as well, and that we could be wrong in what we're telling them. We must be certain there is no sin present in our decision before we offer correction. Further:

Quote:
Accept him whose faith is weak, without passing judgment on disputable matters. - Romans 14:1

Basically, if there is any room for interpretation, it's something that we shouldn't be making a judgement on.

Vista

2006-02-27T09:47:00.000-06:00

So Microsoft is unleashing its new OS on the world soon. Here's what CNN had to say about it:

Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft (Research) expects Windows Vista Home Premium to be the mainstream consumer product, allowing users to record and watch high-definition television, burn and author DVDs and perform other multimedia functions.

It also incorporates Tablet PC technology to decipher handwriting to let users write notes on the computer.

Vista Home Premium will be the middle option for consumers, sandwiched between the high-end Windows Vista Ultimate, which also includes business-oriented features, and a bare-bones Windows Vista Home Basic without the multimedia capabilities.

Why is it I think Vista Home Basic is probably the version I want? After all, my video card doesn't take TV input, and I already have all the DVD authoring software I need, and I'm sure the other "multimedia" functions are going to be resource hogs too. Unless Ultimate has features that allow me to turn everything under the sun off and optimize my system more than Basic does, I'll be going the Basic route.

(text quoted from http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/27/technology/microsoft_vista.reut/index.htm?cnn=yes)

Waiting

2006-02-09T18:41:00.000-06:00

So I'm sitting across from a fairly old man - he's in his late 60s or early 70s, fairly overweight, wearing blue jeans and a red baseball-style cap, and one of those bad windbreaker jackets that can't possibly be warm but all people over the age of 50 seem to wear every day of their lives.

He is sitting on a couch, doing absolutely nothing but looking around and occasionally looking at his watch. He appears to be waiting for someone; my guess is that his wife is taking a class here and he is waiting for her to get done, even though the class is three hours long and won't be done for at least another 25 minutes.

Yet here the man sits. Why does he not have a newspaper, or a computer (ok I grant, I did say he's fairly old)? Why does he not go up to the library only fifty feet away and read a book or a magazine? What is it about this man that causes him to waste his time in the common room of a college campus meerly sitting and waiting?

It kinda makes me wonder if perhaps I'm the one wasting my time, that I'm missing out on something by typing a blog or playing a game on my computer - yet, at the same time, I can't help but feel that at least by doing this my mind is active and healthy.

The unnamed third dog.

2006-02-01T18:27:00.000-06:00

It's amazing how quickly your life can change... and how odd it is to watch that change occurring, know it's huge, and yet still only be able to watch like you watch all the rest of your life passing by.

Monday, Jill brought home a dog. It was one she found in the street, a dog that had narrowly avoided getting run over by a very angry driver. Jill took the dog in, hoping she could find its owner. Upon hearing of this news, I was rather annoyed - Jill already has two dogs, and believe me, two are enough. I knew that she wouldn't be able to take care of a third dog, partly because of how much more work it would entail, and partly because of the fact that the apartment only allows a resident to have two dogs at most. It also really didn't help the fact that we were moving all of our stuff into a single new apartment, and have less than two days left from today to finish.

When I first met the dog, I didn't go over and pet it immediately, or anything like that. I wanted the dog to know that I didn't want it around, so it wouldn't get too comfortable. Then she (the dog is a girl) came to me and licked my hand and wanted me to pet her, and my attitude changed a bit. Over the next few hours, I started coming to the realization that her life wasn't very good, that she was probably on the street because her owner had thrown her out, or she had simply run away from a bad life. I realized too that she was very lonely, being cut off from anything resembling a pack.

That night, I decided I would sleep on the couch so at least I would be nearby in case she needed to feel like someone was around. I guess that was the right decision for her, because she jumped up on the couch and curled up next to me. It wasn't exactly the most comfortable sleep I've had for a while, but it was awfully darned cute.

I spent the next day at work trying to will myself up to the point where I could take her to the pound if I couldn't find her a home. I failed miserably at that - Jill kept reminding me of how awfully the conditions were at the pound, how they kill dogs when they aren't adopted, etc. After all of my effort, I just couldn't do it. Instead, we posted her information on a message board to see if anyone would be interested in taking her. Of course, we never stopped looking for her original owners, in case they were looking and just didn't know where to look, but we also knew we had to do something quickly.

Last night I slept on the couch again, and actually slept through the entire night without waking up. And the little dog slept right next to me all night.

Then today, someone replied on the message board that they would be interested in taking the dog. Just this evening, she came over to meet the dog and see what she thought of her. I guess she liked what she saw, because she took the dog and they're on the way back to her house now.

I'm still not sure how I feel about this. To one extent, I'm *really* happy the dog is gone - I just couldn't keep up with her, she ate vociferously, would run away all the time, and cried when we weren't home. But to another extent, I've already really created an emotional bond with this dog, and I'm sad to see it go. Which is odd for me. I used to hate dogs. How is it that I've changed so much?

Well, whereever you sleep tonight, #3, I hope you like your new home.

I'm a link whore

2005-11-29T21:53:00.000-06:00

Warring Factions

Click that

It's good

Really

The Space-Time Vortex Around Earth

2005-11-19T18:23:00.000-06:00

An interesting experiment is almost over, and I thought it might be fun to talk about it, and introduce an idea perhaps NASA scientists haven't thought about...

According to Einstein's theories, Earth creates a divot in the fabric of Space, and gravity is the effect of things sliding down the fabric of Space into this divot.

Because the earth is spinning, this should create a twisting of space and time around the earth, resulting in a vortex. That's what this experiment is designed to test.

I, however, have a few things to point out that may disturb this idea: The earth is revolving around the sun. This may cause a drag in space-time behind the earth ... it may also result in eddies in space time behind the earth, rather than a vortex actively going around the earth.

Lawsuits - when are they right, and when are they wrong?

2005-11-02T12:17:00.000-06:00

In the U.S., we've become too lawsuit-happy. Everyone knows that, so I'm not going to bother to prove it. However, what we do need to do as a society is realize when lawsuits are appropriate and when they are not.

A lawsuit is not designed as a free source of income. Take, for instance, Stephen Diamond. He is a private lawyer in Illinois who has been filing lawsuits against online retailers for not charging Illinois state taxes. Now, ultimately it's good for the state of Illinois, and for many other state governments, because they have been getting shafted by these online retailers. So, when the Attorney General of Illinois decided that the state would join Diamond's lawsuit, it was really good for the state. They're going to be getting tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars on the deal.

However, where this stinks is this: Diamond is getting millions on the lawsuits. In Illinois, if you sue a company for tax evasion, and the state joins your lawsuit, you're entitled to 25% of whatever the state recovers. So, if the state recovers 60 million bills, Diamond's firm will pocket 15 million.

So, should Illinois get money out of these companies? Absolutely! They should've been getting paid taxes all along from them. Should Diamond receive any of that? Sure! He should receive a commission based on how long and hard he worked to bring this to the state's attention. National average income is $12/hour. If Diamond's firm collectively spent 1.25 million hours working on this project, then absolutely they should be getting that much money. They didn't, so they shouldn't.

The 15 million that Diamond is receiving is coming directly out of taxpayer's pockets, and that's what's most annoying about it. That 15 million should be going to schools, infrastructure, the homeless, etc., in the state of Illinois.

Along the same line of thought, and what served as the trigger to this whole posting is this: the MPAA is sueing a grandpa because his grandson downloaded 4 movies online. 3 of the movies they already owned on DVD! They're asking for $400,000 in damages. But I have to ask this question: Did this old man do $400,000 worth of damage to the company? By his grandson downloading these 4 movies (which were immediately deleted, btw), did they cause 14000 people to collectively decide not to buy the movie on DVD? Of course not. He didn't even cause his own *family* not to buy them on DVD.

The MPAA and RIAA lawsuits are cases of people suing not just because they want to recover damages - that's understandable, and should receive our blessings - but are instead cases of people just being downright mean. "I have the right to sue you, so I'm going to sue you" seems to be the attitude that so many companies and people in our world take. If I sued everyone I had a right to sue, I would be a billionare by now. I haven't, because I understand that people are human and will occasionally make mistakes.

You don't have to file a lawsuit to tell someone they've done something wrong. Let's grow up and start communicating like rational adults.

Not posting for a while...

2005-10-19T15:31:00.000-05:00

I'm in the middle of writing a book, and it's taking all of my literary creative talent to be able to do that... so I'm not going to be posting anything on here for a while most likely.

Not to fear... what with all the global disasters - oh, and the earthquakes and hurricanes and such :) - there's plenty for me to talk about

Thanks,

2005-09-04T20:25:00.000-05:00

To the other countries of the world who have offered their financial aid during the Tsunami relief efforts, I for one say "thank you." I can only hope that the rest of our population will respond in kind, and that we will start realizing there is a world beyond our borders that doesn't just exist for our tourism.

Where does a stupid person live? Anywhere he wants.

2005-08-15T12:25:00.000-05:00

I really feel the need to write a book about this, but for now, I'll keep it to a simple posting. There is a trend in America that extends to many different arenas, but one of those specifically has raised my ire enough to make me blog about it, and that is: People moving in somewhere and expecting the neighborhood to change.

Case in point: Bells Amusement Park in Tulsa cannot expand onto land it already owns simply because the people who live in the neighborhood around it are complaining that it's already too loud, and it would be even louder if it expanded more. Bells has been in place since 1951 - that's 54 years for those who can't do math. The vast majority of the residents of the surrounding neighborhoods have been there much less time. This means that they moved into the neighborhood *knowing* that there was an amusement park right across the street. What did they think the noise level would be like? Did they think it would be as quiet as a Maytag? If you move into an area where you know the neighborhood is noisy, I'm sorry, but you have to deal with the consequences.

A better example might be the neighborhood just south of the airport. It's a big airport, there are planes taking off and landing ever few minutes. If you move into that neighborhood, you're going to hear them. A lot. Deal with it.

I can't even come up with a good rational argument for this because I'm just too angry at the stupid people who expect the world to change to fit their needs. It shouldn't have to.

The effect of school on the genius mind

2005-07-30T06:40:00.000-05:00

The education system in America is designed to provide instruction for the average student. The concept behind this idea is that every student should graduate with what they need to know to survive the world in terms of math, science, language, and history. The instructional material is tailored so that students in the average range intellectually should receive a challenge.

The problem with this plan is that only 95% of students fall into the "average" intellect category. The other 5% have an IQ at one extreme end of the scale - either highly intelligent, or highly retarded. For the latter group, schools have long had special classes and slower instruction, for students can be held back if they do not learn enough, so that they repeat a grade and get a second shot at it. For the other group, however, schools are woefully unprepared to meet their educational needs.

Geniuses are occasionally offered one "gifted class" they can go to which allows them to study other topics of more interest, but these classes tend to meet infrequently. Some school systems will offer to let a student "skip" a grade - move directly into the 9th grade from the 7th grade, for instance - but many schools will not for fear of having a student miss out on proper socializing. Skipping causes another problem, in that if the gifted student had anything left unlearned in the skipped grade, he or she wouldn't have all the knowledge they need to succeed in the new one. Finally, only those students who are already hard workers will be blessed with the chance to skip a grade, because those students who are not hard workers but who are still geniuses won't have the grades high enough to prove that they need a more advanced level of study.

The problem all of this ultimately generates is that the minds of geniuses are allowed to slowly waste away in twelve years of school. By the time a genius graduates, he or she has had little if any kind of challenge, and has taken to simply breezing through school on his or her amazing intellect. For a genius, learning new facts is something that takes only one session in class, and no homework. Homework becomes a hassle and a bore, so the genius usually will skip it in favor of simply taking the test, passing it, and getting a grade in the class that is just barely above average.

And thus, the genius becomes lazy.

Without the proper kinds of challenge, the genius will go on to college and pick something rediculously difficult for the average person (such as nuclear chemistry or astrophysics) and still approach the class in the same way as before - attending class but not doing the homework. If the class is too difficult, the genius will find himself (or herself) unable to keep up with the work load and will eventually drop out. If the genius is driven to get a degree, the genius will pick something much easier on the next attempt, and thereby slide through college the same way he or she slid through high school.

This will carry over into life as well. The genius will become the dreamer - always thinking of grand ideas, but lacking the willpower to implement them.

How can I prove this? 1 out of every 2000 people you meet is a genius. How many of them do you hear about on a daily basis? Stephen Hawking is the world's only current recognized genius who is also out there making new and fantastic ideas and discoveries all the time. Every once in a while, another genius will be spoken of who has invented a number of products, but in every one of these cases, the genius was already fairly well off financially and was able to personally fund (or easily obtain backing for) these special projects. But, with 1/2000th of the population being a genius, we should have 150,000 geniuses in the U.S. alone who are constantly doing great, amazing things.

Truth is that we do have that many geniuses in the U.S., but we don't recognize them. As one of my college professors told me, "you can't be a genius, because geniuses wouldn't be going to school here." That's the stigma in our society, but if a genius isn't driven to succeed, how would the genius get into schools like M.I.T., Berkeley, etc? They wouldn't, so they go to schools like Tulsa Community College.

So, enough complaining, and on to the solution. The genius mind doesn't need to skip a grade, because of the chance of missing some key data. What the genius mind needs instead is fast-paced instruction. Classes for geniuses should be set up so that students are learning material twice as fast as in normal classes - when a topic is taught, the teacher moves on with another topic and doesn't linger. The genius mind will get it anyway, and won't need an hour's worth of reiteration. In this way, the genius mind will be challenged, and the genius will not grow up to be a lazy bum. Once we have a nice core group of geniuses, the technology level in this country should grow by leaps and bounds.

But it'll never happen...

Top 20 Hottest Babes

2005-07-25T14:14:00.000-05:00

Just for fun, here's my list of the top 20 hottest women in the world:

#1. Keira Knightley
#2. Anna Paquin
#3. Natalie Portman
#4. Ashley Judd
#5. Monica Potter
#6. Elizabeth Hurley
#7. Kristin Kreuk
#8. Michelle Trachtenberg
#9. Jennifer Garner
#10. Claire Forlani
#11. Jennifer Love Hewitt
#12. Jessica Alba
#13. Thora Birch
#14. Alexis Bledel
#15. Heather Graham
#16. Monica Bellucci
#17. Lindsay Lohan
#18. Ashley Olsen
#19. Angelina Jolie
#20. Gwyneth Paltrow

I say I want a revolution

2005-07-14T07:51:00.000-05:00

Read this:
Missing Word Story

If that doesn't make you completely and utterly angry at our legal system, you don't deserve to be breathing. To summarize the story, justice is being denied in at least 2 dozen cases simply because the criminals weren't specifically informed of their rights to have an attorney present during questioning. Regardless of whether the criminals knew they could have a lawyer present anyway.

Now, I grant that we have to protect all of our citizens, and that police can often coerce testimony out of people when they aren't even guilty simply through the force of their questions. What we should be doing in that situation is throwing out the specific testimony that was improperly attained, and if a jury trial has already occurred, throw out the results of that trial and go back to court again without the testimony. Of course, police would have the opportunity to obtain testimony again, with the suspect having the knowledge that a lawyer can be present. But we can't do any of this, because it's illegal in this country to try someone twice for the same crime, regardless of if their first trial is deemed invalid.

Too many people walk out of jail on a technicality. The worst part of this: they're on the street right now, and they might be ready to do the crime again.

This kind of stupidity in our legal system is just icing on the cake I've been preparing today. I've realized that the Judicial branch is the most corrupt portion of our country, and there's no way under our current constitution that we can fix it. The head of the judicial branch - the Supreme Court - has the power to do pretty much whatever it wants, and this one portion of our society is totally anathema to the rest of our government. Where we elect officials in the Legislative and Executive branches, Judicial officials are chosen completely without input from the American people. Where Legislative and Executive branches can have their corrupt officials removed from power - either by the choice of the people not to re-elect, or through impeachment and recall - the corrupt members of the Supreme Court receive lifetime appointments and can never be removed (unless they just volunteer too - and when was the last time a corrupt official volunteered to remove himself or herself from office?).

I will grant that the Legislative branch has the theoretical power of impeachment - a power, mind you, granted by the Constitution, which is open to interpretation from the Supreme Court. This means that if the Supreme Court decides its members can't be impeached, then voila! They can't be impeached! This is exactly what happened in 1805, when the courts ruled that the language of the impeachment power basically meant that the justices could only be removed from office if they committed a felony offense. So, until Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter, Stephen Breyer, and John Paul Stevens all suddenly decide to commit armed robbery, the Supreme Court will remain dominated by liberals who are free to make corrupt and nearly criminal rulings.

And because the Supreme Court has the final word on the constitution, their power can never be removed. What does this mean? That unless we suddenly have people in the Supreme Court who wouldn't mind becoming powerless by ruling against themselves, the only way to fix the situation is to completely do away with our current constitution and draft a new one, and that would require an overthrow of the government, since the current government and all of its officials desire to have the old constitution in place in order to keep their jobs.

Perhaps there's a way to draft a new constitution without overthrow, and I open the floor now for anyone to post possible alternatives.

Vivent les États-Unis.

War of the Worlds

2005-07-05T07:55:00.000-05:00

I was able to watch the movie War of the Worlds over the weekend, and I have to say I was pretty dissappointed in it. A lot of the science in it was pitiful, and as it might be a while before we see a debunking on it from a site such as Bad Astronomy, I thought I might go ahead and post my problems with the movie. Not all of these are science-based, but some are.

Spoiler Warning: Do not read below this line if you don't want to know what happens in War of the Worlds!

#1: As the lightning strikes, all of the power goes out in the city.

This is the effect of an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) often produced as a secondary effect of a nuclear weapon. EMPs can be produced without the use of nuclear weapons - all that's needed is a very dense magnetic field and a way of compressing it very, very quickly - so if an alien race were taking over the world, an EMP might be considered a good way of getting rid of the current technology...

EMP knocks out all electrical systems - it actually fries most electronic devices because it causes surges of thousands of volts on "on exposed electrical conductors, such as wires, or conductive tracks on printed circuit boards, where exposed" (Kopp). This means that things like automotive solenoids are especially sensitive to the effects of EMP, but things like batteries will often survive the blast.

So it is true that cars and trucks would need their solenoids replaced before they could be driven - as Tom Cruise's character correctly suggests. I have one big problem with the solution though: EMPs would destroy every Solenoid within their area, including those located inside an unshielded auto parts store or garage! If a mechanic tried simply grabbing another solenoid out of a box and installed it into a vehicle, the unfortunate mechanic would have exactly the same problem as before - the new solenoid would be just as bad as the old one.

Simply put: there's no way in hell the mechanic would've gotten that van running.

Now, it would be possible if the EMP was extremely weak - but then again, other solenoids would have a fairly good chance of surviving then, so at least a few civilian vehicles would've been up and running immediately again.

Finally, an EMP blast destroys all electronic devices with exposed circuits, including video cameras. So, how is it that the idiot who was filming the destruction of New York managed to have a working video camera when all other electronic devices were toast?

I did like that the military equipment was still functional. Most military equipment would continue to function during an EMP because the military has spent the money to shield their gear from the effects of the pulse. It would be catastrophic for our military to be completely shut down during a nuclear attack, after all.

#2: Tom Cruise is the world's best mechanic.

This one is simpler than #1: If Tommy could figure out that the solenoid needed to be replaced, someone else would have, too! When a mechanic is trying to get a car's electrical system fixed, he or she would take certain steps, and eventually those steps would include replacing the starter. So why is Tom the only guy on the road with a working vehicle?

#3: In ancient warfare, swordsmen wouldn't run up to the castle wall and start attacking it with their blades.

So why does the American military? It's the same effect - we know that we're not going to be able to punch through the shields of these mecha, so why are we sending squadrons of Apache helicopters to rapidly fire missiles at them? I can see the military trying to protect the civilians behind them, but the aliens aren't even getting slowed down from the impact of these missiles. It'd be more effective to have the helicopters simply flying around the tripods. Then you'd have a scene reminiscent of a human trying to swat a fly that just won't land. The aliens would at least have to try, then, and that might slow them down just enough to let the civilians get away.

#4: Don't put all of your eggs in one basket.

We're under attack from aliens that move slowly but have lasers that can cut huge swaths of destruction. Good idea: spreading out. Bad idea: gathering together. Worse idea: gathering together in a slow-moving vehicle with no routes of escape. Yet that's exactly what the military decides to do - people are loaded on to a ferry which slowly sets sail. Of course, the fairy is attacked after it launches, capsizing the ship and sending Tom & family into the briny drink. Anyone who didn't see that coming is just painfully myopic.

#5: You're fleeing for your life. If you stop moving, you'll get killed. In a mass of people, if you're driving a vehicle, *some* of them will get run over.

Yet Tom stops when he sees a woman holding a baby. Hit the gas, run her over. She should've gotten out of the way a long time ago.

#6: Speaking of which...

Where did Tom get enough gas for that van?

#7: Taking them alive.

Why did the aliens need to consume some humans? Most humans were destroyed by their evil laser beams (though for some reason, the aliens stopped using those beams after about fifteen minutes). They're here to destroy all life, as far as we can tell. Yet the aliens pick up humans and eat them. What's the point? Everything of nutritional value an alien could consume could be found in other creatures such as cows, and we have those in abundance, so why bother with eating humans? And why do the humans need to be alive? Kill the bloody human, freeze him in your cold-storage locker, and eat him when you get hungry. Yeesh.

#8: Free falling.

The aliens appear to be at least 40 or 50 feet high. When the pod carrying the humans falls from a tripod, though, everyone is just fine. No humans were harmed in the falling of this pod.

#9: Why would birds land on a moving vehicle?

The birds land on the sick alien. I never have birds land on my car, even when it's stationary.

#10: 70% of the earth is covered with water!

Ok, so the aliens had to have a weakness, and that weakness had to be something extremely common. Granted, it's not as bad as the weakness in Signs, but it's pretty bad nonetheless. The aliens get sick from all of the bacteria and viruses that exist on earth. In fact, they get sick awfully darn quickly. It's rather funny that the aliens, who are technologically superior to humans, never bothered to send a scout down to find out if maybe there would be any problems with living on this planet, and they never thought that maybe they wouldn't want to eat the food here. I guess bacteria and viruses don't exist on their planet.

#11: Why bother attacking from under the earth anyway?

So what's the point of all this? We never really get that. There's no reason given why humans would need to be exterminated, and as far as we can tell the aliens don't really seem to discriminate between humans and plant life (as evidenced by the massive fires we see burning). However, the aliens have been planning this for millions of years if they have all their war machines buried underground. So, to what end are they attacking? Is it simply to destroy all life here? If so, why? Do they just get kicks from killing people? It's obviously not because they need to feed on alien life, or they would have found a way to protect themselves (see #10).

More importantly, any excuse that involves simply eradicating life on the planet can be accomplished in a much easier way. As Platt has suggested on his site (in reference to Star Wars III):

Bad:
There are big land battles in this movie (and all the others, too). Attack ships come, invaders storm out, shots are fired, mayhem ensues.

Good:
This really bugs me. Infantry? Really? Is that the best this advanced civilization can do?

I have a better plan. Take all those honking huge ships, go behind a mile-wide asteroid, and push it so it drops onto the planet. Massing over a billion tons and impacting at 10 kilometers per second or so, I guarantee it'll end the battle quickly. In fact, the explosive yield of such an impact is about 65,000 megatons. That's way, way more than every nuclear weapon on Earth. Bang! End of battle.

Oh, you want the planet to be usable when you're done? Picky, picky. But OK, then drop several hundred smaller asteroids. Same thing, but you can maybe aim them better, and target smaller battles. Once the smoke clears the planet will be in somewhat better shape.

And if you screw up? Well, there are always more planets.

Really, it'd make a lot more sense.

#12: The Eye of the Storm

Last but not least, at the end of the movie, Dakota is safely reunited with her mom and stepdad. It seems everyone in Tom's family has miraculously survived. More surprisingly still is the fact that they live in a house on a street that has been completely unharmed - there's not so much as debris in the street!

Tom just lucky, I guess.

Bibliography
Kopp, Carlo. The Electromagnetic Bomb - a Weapon of Electrical Mass Destruction. Air & Space Power Chronicles. 5 July 2005. http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/kopp/apjemp.html

Platt, Phil. Review: Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. 21 June 2005. Badastronomy.com. 5 July 2005. http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/movies/starwars_sith_review.html

I must be constantly entertained

2005-06-30T15:50:00.000-05:00

I don't understand why... but I feel that I must be constantly entertained. I can't spend time not doing something. I can't wait patiently for someone, I can't be comfortable biding my time... instead, I need to get up, get out, and get on with life. It's a need to be done with whatever it is I'm planning to do. I don't make decisions quickly, but once I've made a decision, it's time for me to act upon it, and I can't stand waiting for other people to act - I've made my decision, I'm ready to go, so you should be too.

Unfortunately, this has had some disasterous effects.

Is this a known medical condition (like ADD)? Is there anything I can do about it?

Here's an interesting link

2005-06-29T07:46:00.000-05:00

http://brandtrainers.blogspot.com/

This is a man who is in marketing, and as marketing is something of a hobby for me (Those of you who remember know I did marketing as a major for a brief time as well), I find this website very insightful. Especially pay attention to his analysis of the Norelco Quintippio ad spot. I love that commercial, and he explains why.

Why Nice Guys Finish Last

2005-06-24T09:09:00.000-05:00

I just finished reading a post regarding nice guys - by which they mean those people in the world who are perfectly decent human beings, generally nice to everyone, not necessarily unattractive, but still completely unable to meet the woman of their dreams. The poster suggested that there were a few reasons why nice guys can't get laid. They are as follows:

1. Nice guy is ugly.
2. Nice guy has no self-respect.
3. Nice guy is shy.
4. Nice guy is heartbroken.
5. Nice guy doesn't take advantage of opportunities.
6. Nice guy is a whiner.

Now, I will attempt to pick apart these argument in an attempt to explain the real reason why nice guys finish last.

1. Nice guy is ugly.
As has been pointed out numerous times, women don't care about looks. Yes, looks can be attractive, but it is a man's personality, intelligence, and sense of humor that make him really appealing to the opposite sex. The looks are the hook - they're what baits a woman into first taking an interest in a man, but if he can't hold their interest, they'll look elsewhere.

It's really about the same for nice guys - they ideally look for beauty, but they know that it's the woman's soul that will be truely attractive to them, and they also know that statistically about half of those pretty young girls on the dance floor will grow into fat slobs by the time they're forty. True love, the ideal for every nice guy, must be based on depth rather than what's on the surface.

Most girls realize this too... at least, the ones nice enough to love a nice guy.

2. Nice guy has no self-respect.
Nice guys often respect themselves just fine, but it's possible to have self-respect and still not be confident around women. The key is that confidence is an outward symbol of self-respect, but not proof of self-respect. I've known many people who exuded massive amounts of confidence, but when I got to know the real person behind the mask, I discovered little more than a scared child who simply hides behind confidence as a way of trying to make other people like him (or her).

So what's really meant here is that the nice guy has no apparant outward confidence. A man can respect himself, can even believe himself to be a god among men, but at the same time he can be worried that a woman will not take an interest in him. Usually, this is not caused by simple fear or worry, but by repeated evidence to support that theory. Rejection to some people breeds resiliance, but to other people it breeds social anxiety. It becomes something that, no matter how cool the guy is around his friends, and no matter how much money he makes, how good he looks, how smart or funny he is, he will not be able to get around by simply being told to "be confident." It's a real psychological disorder that a man may not be able to overcome without considerable psychotherapy.

Now, some nice guys really do have a problem with self-respect. If that's the case, unless they have some friends telling them how awesome they are on a regular basis, they're not going to get over this feeling. Psychotherapy could help in this situation as well, but the *last* thing the nice guy needs is for people to tell him he's more worthless for having no self-respect. That's really just feeding the fire.

3. Nice guy is shy
This is the same as #2. Shyness can be simply innate, but usually people get over simple shyness by the time they're adults. It could very well be that the person has social anxiety disorder, and that comes out as shyness or a lack of confidence. It could also be that the person is simply shy. No amount of telling a guy to get over it is going to help - he's always going to be shy.

So how can this be fixed? Well, if it is social anxiety disorder, shyness, or a lack of self-respect, psychotherapy will be the only way to resolve the issue. However, there is another way to resolve the problem as well: friends helping the nice guy get a date. Take a look at Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. When he's trying to woo Hero, Claudio sends Don Pedro to talk to her for him. Don Pedro basically uses his own charms to get Hero's affection, then diverts it back toward Claudio. Nice guys need a friend who is capable of doing this.

For a real life example (this actually happened): two guys - one "nice guy" and one cool guy - go into a bar and sit down to have a drink. They see two cute girls sitting at another table, so cool guy goes over and starts talking with them. After a while, he motions nice guy over to the table, and nice guy sits there rather quietly while the other three talk, occasonally answering when being talked to directly, but otherwise trying depserately not to run screaming out of the bar. Eventually, as the conversation progresses, nice guy is warmed up to the girls a bit more, and cool guy says he's going to get up and get a drink, leaving nice guy to communicate with the girls on his own. Now that he's already talking to them, the difficult part of an introduction is over, and he's able to do a much better job than if he had tried to meet them on his own. Unfortunately for our real-life nice guy, the final question that must be asked on such an evening - the request for girl's phone number - goes unasked because he is incapable of asking on his own. Cool guy will need to step in once again on behalf of his buddy to help him out.

4. Nice guy is heartbroken
Impossible to have happen unless the guy isn't really the stereotypical nice guy or unless he has a cool guy friend (see above). Nice guy will eventually get over it, but he needs his friends for support in the mean time. Once he is over it, he'll either be a regular guy again, or he'll continue to be nice guy, but the heartbreak isn't what will keep him from getting the girl in the long term (and really, no one should ever date on the rebound anyway).

5. Nice guy doesn't take advantage of opportunities
I cannot possibly stress how true this one is. All too often, the nice guy becomes "just a friend" who is always on the outside of the girl's love because he can't break down and ask the question that he so desperately wants to ask. The reason? Once a nice guy becomes friends with the girl, he really values that friendship. If he asks her for something more, he has to face the possibility that she might not want to be friends with him anymore, because instead of being simply the nice guy that she can trust with any of her deepest thoughts and needs, he'll become an attempted suitor, which is a different type of creature alltogether.

All I can suggest to the nice guy is this: if a girl is friends with you, she'll still be friends with you after you ask her out. Don't come out and tell her you're madly in love with her, but do actually ask her out on a real date. If she says sure, she may even think about it as not a real date at first, but your intentions will be blatantly obvious at some point during the date. If she's not interested, you won't even need to say anything - she'll come out and tell you that she just wants to remain friends. Really, she's smarter than you give her credit for. But if she is interested, she might not say anything about it at all. Get yourself ready for that scenario by watching Hitch, and just remember the 90% rule. :)

Whatever you do, however, don't ask her out while she's dating someone else, or soon after they break up.

And remember: if you don't ask her out, you'll always remain "just friends."

6. Nice guy is a whiner.
Everyone whines.

Read that again, please.

You see, everyone on this planet wants people to pity them at some point. Those people who don't whine all the time simply internalize the conflict, but it's still there just as much for them as for anyone else. Sometimes, people who whine don't know how to handle a problem on their own - but sometimes, the problem is bigger than just one person can handle.

The answer? If your buddy is whining, BE NICE! The whiner needs sympathy and support to overcome whatever problem it is they're facing. They won't resolve the issue by being told to simply pick themselves up and deal with the problem. What they're looking for is for someone to really be their friend and be there for them, and they may not be getting that kind of an emotional shoulder to lean on anywhere else. So, if they're whining around you, that means they're looking at you for that kind of support.

That doesn't mean you have to let them just whine or cry about their problem, but it does mean, if you're their friend, that you need to help them with the problem. It also doesn't mean that you need to tell them how to fix it - most likely, they already know how to fix it. But, if you actually *help them* fix it, you'll be revealing to them that you are a true friend. Go the extra mile, help your buddies out.

-----------------

That's really the point of all this - the man who can't get a date because he is a nice guy is really someone who just needs the support of his friends to overcome his social and personal obstacles. Once he gets a girlfriend, after all, he'll be whining about being alone a lot less. :)

First thing we do...

2005-06-21T13:12:00.000-05:00

The Robert Blake trial - and to a lot of Americans the Michael Jackson and OJ Simpson trials - proved one old proverb of the American justice system: the man with the most money wins. The best lawyers in the world command a hefty price tag, and as a result they earn millions of dollars each year. This means that the lawyers who can win cases regularly will only be available to the wealthy, and the lower classes are stuck with the lawyers who are only moderately effective at best. The government, too, is given these low-priced lawyers because we're not willing to pay our public defenders a 7 digit salary.

So what's the solution? Well, I have one, but I'm not sure how good it is - salary caps for lawyers! Make it so that, depending on the type of case, lawyers couldn't earn more than a certain amount of money on each case. Civil injury claims could be limited to $1000 bucks, for instance - this would make our country a lot less lawsuit-happy, but it would also make it so that an empoverished person without the benefit of pro-bono legal services might have the same quality of legal defense as the giant corporation he is having to go up against.

The Memory Remains

2005-06-21T12:52:00.000-05:00

(The following is a blog I wrote on paper in my spare time, and I have transcribed here with no corrections. Any clarifications I feel need to be made will be put in parentheses)

If an event is powerful enough, can there ever be reflection ala Coleridge? Can a meditative state help us to come to a greater understanding of an event? We have but memories - be they recorded in the form of writing, audio recordings, photographs, or video - and regardless of our choices for acting or writing, the records can never convey the true feelings of the mind. If they could, no one would ever need to interpret Frosts iambic ramblings on forests and walls, but instead everyone would know in an instant upon reading the words what they mean. Therefore, regardless of skill or volume, the feelings we have about an event are unique to us - no one will ever feel the same way about the same event.

So regardless of the strength of an event, no one will ever know exactly what we mean, and even our attempts to recreate the event in our own minds will be lost with time, because as our memories fade, so too our memories of emotion fade. When we see a picture or read a memoir of our writing, that reminds us and triggers the emotional response again, but because the exact memory has faded, the emotional copy will never be the same. This is why people fall out of love - that emotional response they had at first sight becomes dull and brittle, and eventually the very emotion is surplanted by other emotions, often with negative consequences.

The adage "time heals all wounds" is due to this concept as well. Wounds are kept open by constantly picking at them. By emotionally picking at them - encountering thoughts or reminders of what triggered the emotional wounds - we keep the pain fresh in our minds.

So we are driven to record those things that are good - and occasionally those things that are bad but have good components to them - so that we may be reminded as best as possible what that event meant to us. When you see pictures, whatever they may be, try to remember that they are merely records that someone took to remind them of something good. Even pornography is like this - the photographer picks his pictures by what he enjoys, and shares those pictures with others. In the case of paid pornography this is a different story, because the photographer or editor is trying to choose those photos which will most entice a purchasing audience, but such enticement hinges upon the memories of the audience - people tend to like certain photos because the pictures remind them of specific events in one fashion or another and they tend to discard those photos that have no meaning to their lustful subconscious. The lust for porn is an attempt to recapture a real event using substitute means, or to trick the mind into accpeting as a real event something which only occurred in a man's fantasy. Of course, all fantasy is based on an element of reality being extrapolated with fictional data.

If the mind repeatedly experiences similar events - for instance, in my account of the lady at the pool, (regarding a girl I saw at a pool one time, and all I need to say about it here is that she was attractive enough to be etched into my memory) if the same girl or a similarly attractive one were to repeat the performance - would the event become any less special? With people we love and are intimate with, the desire for intimacy seems to only decline with the lessening of activity, so I would tend to believe that, in fact, the event never truely becomes dull in the mind. Rather, all of the events tied together become sharper, which makes us more desirous of a repeat performance - however, it is the combined, repeated event that becomes prevalent in the mind, rather than a unique instance, so that without reminder of one instance in particular, all occurrances blend into one.

It may be that we tell stories of specific events in order simply to remember them ourselves.

Machiavellian Capitalism

2005-06-17T21:32:00.000-05:00

I've come to a painful realization. Perhaps it will come as no surprise to my readers, perhaps it, like other things I've said, deserves the "obvious" tag, but it is a new observation to me nonetheless.

We are a society of assholes.

I group myself into this category because I realize that I, too, am an asshole. We're forced to be by the bottom line. Every man needs a certain amount of money to survive in this country, and as a result anything dealing with cash brings out the worst parts of us. Take, for example, the concept of computer tech support. The customer paid a certain amount of money for a warranty on his system, and he's entitled to a certain amount of support based on that money. If his system is down, and he needs it for business, he's in very dire straits. He will be losing money if he doesn't get his system fixed ASAP. The tech support company, however, has already made its money from his contract, and if they send any parts, even the ones they're required to send under the contract, they'll be losing money. Most of the time, neither company - the customer or the vendor - makes enough money to completely absorb the loss of capital, so that each must try to salvage as much of their money as they can. And, because this money is what they need just to survive, they will fight viciously to try to protect it.

They're not in love with money, per se. Neither one is committing any specific "sin" against humanity. But, in the process of saving money, both customer and vendor become assholes. When this happens, one of the two is always going to get screwed.

I'd like to see comments here on how we might fix it. I'd say that Star Trek may have it right, in that the way to go is to be rid of money, but it's just not practical. Even socialism is bad, because the government becomes a third agent of assholedness.

On Pleasure and Purpose

2005-06-13T09:05:00.000-05:00

(this posting is PG-13, parental guidance is suggested)

When we think about something as living, we must consider that the life form has the capability to reproduce. There is no species without reproduction - cats beget cats, dogs beget dogs, plankton beget plankton. Everything in life is tied to the need to procreate. We're born, we eat, we breathe, we drink, we grow until we're capable of reproducing, then we reproduce for a certain period of time, and finally we die. That is the cycle for every living being, from protozoa to pear trees to the humpback whale. Even those creatures that do not reproduce through sexual activity still reproduce - usually through the splitting of cells.

Life can only exist as the result of reproduction. Each cell will eventually die, but if it reproduces before it dies, then a simulacrum of the cell will go on living. Thus, for life to continue, it must reproduce. There are often other needs for life as well: cells need food, water, some type of oxygen, etc to go on living. But, regardless of the input of food, water, oxygen, etc, the cells will eventually die. Through reproduction, however, the cells will be able to create copies of themselves and in essence live forever. Each cell will die, but the species of cells will live.

Thus, it can be said that the purpose of life is reproduction. Sexual activity exists for the simple need for a species to reproduce. Therefore, it can be said that the defining purpose of sexual activity is procreation. Regardless of whatever other purposes it might serve - just as life may serve other purposes than merely reproduction.

Now, if the purpose of sex is reproduction, then it follows logically that sex became pleasurable out of the need of the species to reproduce. Examining the logic of natural selection, you have two specimines: Specimine A gains pleasure from having sex, while Specimine B does not. Specimine A is far more likely to have sex, therefore, because he or she derives pleasure from the encounter. Specimine A produces more offspring than Specimine B does, and thus A's genetic code for pleasure occurs more often in the population than B's genetic code does. Pleasure thus derives from the need for the species to procreate.

Once creatures have pleasure from a certain activity, they are driven to do it more often. The tastes of fat and sugar are more enjoyable than other tastes, for instance, so early humans were more likely to eat foods that are high in fat and sugar. These tastes signal to the brain that it's getting the nutrients it needs to survive, so it will crave these tastes more often. So too does the brain crave the pleasure of sexual activity because the instinct has been built in to know that sexual activity is chemically gratifying, and the chemical gratification comes from the evolutionary need to procreate as in the above paragraph.

However, the subconscious brain that drives the desire for sexual activity doesn't understand the difference between standard intercourse and other forms of gratification. For this reason, manual, homosexual, and oral intercourse can be pleasurable forms of interaction. They will still fill the need for the chemical release in the cortex, but they occur without the possibility of procreation. They are forms of sex that occur only for their pleasurable aspect, and not for their purpose.

In the grand scheme of things, it can be said that such activity is "wrong" for a species because it does not lead to the possibility of procreation.

Granted, it can be argued that castration, vassectomies, "tube tying", removal of the uterus, birth control, and spermicides are all "wrong" in the same sense of the word. If the purpose of sexual activity is reproduction, then people should only be engaging in sexual activity when they are ready to reproduce. Ideally, that would be where we were at in our society, as sex for merely the pleasure of it is illogical.

Then again, I don't know any Vulcans. Do you?

More on the nature of opinion and fact

2005-06-09T13:17:00.000-05:00

An opinion is a belief that exists without complete proof. If I say that the Angels are the best team in baseball, that's an opinion; but, if I can proove that they are the best team in baseball, then it becomes a fact.

If I make the statement that everything is an opinion, then I am stating my own opinion about the nature of fact. Instantly contained within that statement is the negation of that statement: if everything is an opinion, then even the opinion that everything is an opinion must be an opinion, and it can therefore never be proven. Thus, it's very easy to argue against the statement that everything is an opinion because all that's necessary to invalidate it is the opinion to the contrary.

Despite this logical conundrum, I will attempt to prove that everything is indeed opinion through the use of logic.

First, let's briefly examine the nature of fact. If we say that 2+2=4, it would seem logical our statement would be factual: we use the number "2" to represent a physical quantity of items - 2 apples, for instance. If we take two separate groups containing two apples each, and we combine those groups together, we will end up with a total of four apples. When we do this, we accept certain things to be true:

1. The items being counted exist
2. The items can be quantified
3. The items will not randomly change in quantity
4. The number "1" refers to one example of an entire species of item, regardless of physical differences between the items

And many more. When any of these accepted truths are incorrect, our numbering system is thrown off. For instance, if we use weight to determine the number of apples, and we weigh one apple and use its weight to determine what all apples should weigh, when we add the other three apples and weigh them we will certainly come up with a number of apples that is not equal to "4". Furthermore, if we classify "apple" as being the skin, the core, the juice, the stem, and everything else that we normally think of as belonging to the concept of "apple", then what happens if we add in something that does not contain our complete classification? What if two of my apples are green, and two of my apples are red, but in the mind of another observer, apples must be red to qualify as apples? What we find then is that the math we're doing on the apples - adding the green ones to the red ones and coming up with a value of 4 - is not the same math that the other observer is using - he would come up with a value of 2.

Because of this, the "fact" of "2+2=4" is only true for those observers who share the same previously accepted truths. Only if we all assume the same things can we agree that something is true.

Now, if all fact is based on statements that are universally accepted as true, if an outsider comes in who doesn't agree with that truth, there are two possibilities: either the fact is faulty, or the opinion of the newcomer is. But which of the two is the fact? The newcomer has just as much right, by the nature of existence and the ability to make logical assumptions and deductions, to claim his own belief as fact if he can logically explain why that fact is a fact. Furthermore, since each person - the newcomer and the original believer - has a different set of assumed truths, both can logically explain why their particular fact is a fact, even if the facts are opposite.

Therefore, because facts are subjective to the accepted truths of the observer, someone who doesn't hold those accepted truths would find those facts to be merely opinions, based on beliefs that cannot be founded in their particular set of accepted truths. Because each being has the right to believe as it will, any given set of facts can be invalidated by a set of assumed truths that cannot support them, and thus any given fact will become nothing more than opinion.

Thus there can be no facts, as all facts are subjective, but instead there are merely a myriad of opinions with different levels of theoretical backing that proves them to one observer but not to another.

Happiness and Misery

2005-06-05T11:51:00.000-05:00

I just had an epiphany, and I'm not sure if it would qualify for the "obvious" tag on Fark or not, but here goes:

People who are happy tend to get happier. People who are miserable tend to become more unhappy.

Ok, I don't know if I can prove this, but I'll set out to do so through logic. When you're happy, you perform better. You tend to be less lazy (because you're always looking forward to whatever is next) and you are willing to take more risks (case in point the fact that the length of women's skirts can be directly tied to the current economy - during recessions, skirts are longer, but during economic booms, skirts are shorter. Don't think I'm being sexist or weird, this is actually a proven trend).

This could also be why good things tend to come all at once, and bad things tend to come all at once. When you're happy, you work harder and you're nicer when you're working. This leads to upper management giving you a raise or a promotion, which would tend to make you happier still. When you meet someone and fall in love, the happiness that comes from being in love causes you to become more attractive to everyone.

At the same time, when you're miserable, no one else wants to be around you. You tend to delve into self-pity, and self-pity gives way to poor job performance, a rude attitude, etc.

So the next time you find yourself asking why a deluge of bad things tend to be happening at once, remember this: It's not that a lot of bad things are happening at once - rather, they've been building up for a while.

What it means to be an American

2005-05-31T14:11:00.000-05:00

You might think this would be a sappy post about how important it is to be prideful in our nation, or you might think it'd be a critical post about how we've screwed up the world. You'd be wrong.

What I intend to do instead is to describe what makes this country so unique. I was just thinking about the situation regarding language. Some people want English to be the official language, but of course there are groups of people even within the US that speak other languages exclusively - such as chinese, spanish, french, etc. - and there are people who want to protect those groups from being unfairly punished for not speaking English.

As I rationalized this issue in my mind, I first argued that a single language often helps to unify a society. Take, for example, France. The creation of the French language served to unify the people and create a sense of national pride. Now, one of the things difficult for Americans to understand when they go to visit France is the fact that French people really tend to consider people based on the language they speak. An American who speaks French well will be well-liked, whereas an American who has to consult a French dictionary and horribly butchers the language will be served dishwater.

However, that concept works only for a nation, and a nation is a nation because of a common ancestry of its people. But America is no such thing. The people of America don't share a common ancestry - there are people from every country in the world living here.

America is a completely synthetic country, and the only thing that ties its people together is a commonality of the mind. We all believe basically the same thing when it comes to individual freedom. That personal freedom often explodes in the way we argue against each other regarding various other beliefs we have, but it is that liberty that allows us to make those arguments in the first place.

Just thought you might appreciate that observation. Now, as for the language issue - well, there's a problem here: We shouldn't discriminate against people based on their language, because forcing people to learn a new language is a form of discrimination (after all, it can easily take a person 7 years to learn a language - while we might insist upon them learning English, do we prevent them from being able to function in the country for the 7 years while they're trying to learn it?). However, at the same time, we can't expect laws, signs, and tests (such as the driver's license test or the citizenship test) to be written in 150 different languages.

Perhaps the computer age will be able to resolve some of these issues. Because almost everyone in the world understands Arabic characters (like the ones I'm using now in my writing), almost everyone can find a particular word they're looking for. For instance, if I write down for someone that they should go to Memorial, and they see Memorial on a sign, they'll know they're in the right place regardless of what language they speak. Also, because most traffic signs use varying shapes instead of just words, we can recognize the images of signs and know what they mean without needing to know the language. Illiterate people, after all, can still drive. For these reasons, I think that as long as the language barrier is overcome in dialog situations, it should be fine for people to speak whatever language they want to speak. Computers, using software similar to Babelfish, can translate written words between two languages, so it may be possible that computers can help us resolve a lot of these dialog problems.

However, if states want to require English to be spoken, I think that we'll need to offer free English lessons to anyone who wants to learn. Don't expect people of other languages to pay to learn English when they can't get a job without learning English in the first place, but instead offer free English lessons so that they *can* learn English and then become a vital part of the workforce.

All blanket statements are false

2005-05-25T14:52:00.000-05:00

I'll grant that while the title of this article is a paradox (after all, it's a blanket statement), it seems to be true with regards to every other blanket statement. By blanket statements, of course, I mean those statements we might make about a group, that all members of that group have some other quality that they don't have just based on the definition of the group. For instance:

All cars are red.

Well, obviously, not all cars are red. Therefore, the statement is false. However, if I say instead:

All cars have motors.

This seems to be true. The motors might not be obvious (take, for example, the motor that drives the electric car that's trying to break the land speed record. Some people say it's not a motor, but it still uses electrical impulses to spin a rod between coils, so it is a motor of a type), but they still exist.

Even with this latest statement, however, it's easy to invalidate that statement. For example: is a car that has had its engine removed still a car? It may not drive, it may not even serve any of the functionality that we expect from the definition of "car", but it's still considered a car. Now that it's had its engine removed, however, it may be completely without any type of motor. Ergo, not all cars have motors.

So blanket statements must be immediately false as soon as they're created because, logically, unless something is a necessary component in the definition of an item, the statement can be easilly invalidated. Here's an example of a blanket statement that includes a definition:

All invertibre lack spines.

The definition of "invertibre" is "lacking a spinal cord" - so by definition this blanket statement is true. If an invertibre was given a spine, it would cease to be an invertibre.

That being said, I take issue with the comments of many people regarding religion. For example, a professor recently called Christians "moral retards" who cause a lot of damage to society through their oppressive beliefs.

Certainly, this is true of some "Christians". For instance, the crusades were led by such Christians. Also, the Christians who follow Falwell or the 700 club are typically this type of Christian (I say typically because, again, it's not true of all, but only those I've met or had experience dealing with).

I am a Christian, and I'd like to think I'm a relatively logically-thinking person. I don't go around attempting to force my beliefs on everyone else, but I am genuinely concerned that every man should be saved. Christ didn't insist that everyone in the world believe in Him. In fact, when the pharisees said He was being blasphemous for calling Himself the Son of God, He basically just shrugged and said, "Whatever you want to believe." God is fine with people believing in the wrong thing - He wants us to choose Him, not be forced into accepting Him. As such, when Christians go around telling other people that they're going to Hell for doing something - while they may or may not be correct, they're not helping the situation any.

The comment also refers to repressive Christian thinking, which I believe is still not something that Christ would endorse. If I believe that God created the universe, then I've also got to believe that He's a master of science. He knows how people are put together, how gravity and motion work, how the universe formed and how it will end. However, He didn't go out of His way to explain each and every little detail to humanity. The reason: it's not really important in the spiritual scheme of things. He explained everything that was important to man's spirituality. He left the rest for us to figure out for ourselves. It would've spoiled the game to give us all the answers right away.

So there are Christians in the world who stand up for this repressive thinking and forced morality, but there are also those who are not. I am but one example, and there are much better referents. Paul, one of the first founders of the Christian church, wrote many letters to early Christians explaining why and how things should be done, and at each point that he explained something he was extremely logical. He would not only explain what to do, but why it must be done. For the best example of this, read Romans chapter 14. Another example is C.S. Lewis, whose Chronicles of Narnia series is so beloved by children of varying religions the world over. He was an excellent thinker, and he wrote a logical book to explain how and why Christianity may be accepted as real to a thinking person. That book is titled Mere Christianity. This is one of the best books I've ever read, and I strongly recommend it to anyone pondering agnositicism or Christianity from a philosophical level.

Boredom

2005-05-22T15:09:00.000-05:00

In olden times, there wasn't a lot to do. For instance, in the 19th century American West, kids would invent games when they wanted to play, but adults would just as often sit at home and do chores. As we might define it now, it was a very boring life.

But, it had a very beneficial side-effect: it gave thinkers the time and space they needed to think.

What would the world be today if not for the poetry of Robert Frost, or the stories of Ernest Hemingway? Such creative genious may have only been able to come about through the inspiration of idle minds.

Today, however, we don't need to be idle. We have video games, television, clubs, sports, transportation - a virtually limitless supply of things to keep our minds occupied. By staying so busy, we prevent ourselves the luxury of having nothing better to do.

I, for instance, want to write. Or at least, I say I want to write, but when it comes right down to it, it's much easier to sit down and play Neverwinter Nights or Guildwars rather than actually busting out my dusty MS Word.exe file and typing away at a novel. I may never actually churn out anything more than a short story or poem that is published only in an obscure book that no one's ever read (and yes, I have had two poems published in obscure books so difficult to find that even I don't have a copy of them. I also, frankly, can't remember the least thing about the poems. They were drivel I churned out just to meet a school requirement in one case or, in the other, to see what kind of drivel gets published in collected volumes of poetry).

Some would say: "Well, if you really wanted to write, you'd do it." I don't think that's really a fair summary of my problem. I am addicted to keeping my mind occupied. When I don't, I do occasionally come up with some really killer ideas (for instance, I have this theory on gravity that I'm researching right now to see if anyone else has posited it before). But the times I don't keep my mind occupied come few and far between, and usually occur when I'm in the shower, or driving to or from school, and I don't actually have a pencil or a recorder with me to write down my ideas (neither of which would do very well in the shower anyway).

Revenge of the Plot Holes

2005-05-19T16:24:00.000-05:00

WARNING

DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS IN THE MOVIE, "STAR WARS EPISODE III: REVENGE OF THE SITH"!!!

That being said, I just saw Episode III last night and really enjoyed it, but Lucas needs to learn to consult his earlier works when he's writing a sequel/prequel.

There are some plot holes in 3 that do not mesh with the events that occur in the original Star Wars trilogy.

#1: "Your father wanted you to have this when you were old enough,"

Referring to Anakin's lightsaber, when Obi-Wan gives the lightsaber to Luke. In Episode III, Obi-Wan comes into possession of the lightsaber after defeating Anakin in a lightsaber duel. When he does, Anakin says nothing about what to do with the lightsaber. While "many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view," I can't see a way of analyzing this event without coming to the conclusion that Obi-Wan just straight-up lied.

#2: "she died when I was very young."

Referring to Padme, Leia is telling Luke that she only remembers images and feelings of her mother. Here's the thing regarding that: in 3, Padme dies in childbirth. Leia wouldn't have known her real mother. Yes, there will be losers out there who claim that Leia had some kind of "Force connection" with her mother that left the images in her mind, but that's the same kind of answer as the one we got regarding parsecs as a measurement of speed.

#3: In 3, Yoda tells Obi-Wan that Qui-Gon has learned a way to cross the gap between death and life and reappear to his student after death.

In the original trilogy, Anakin learns that too. How?

Answers Without Questions

2005-05-16T07:38:00.000-05:00

The Internet is an amazing tool, especially with search engines like Google and Yahoo. Any information we need to find we can simply type into the search bar, click OK, and within a second we have search results that, at least occasionally, should relate to what we're looking for.

There is an associated danger with this, however. Search engines keep us from having to ask questions because we can instead instantly gain knowledge of any wayward question our minds may be pondering. Instead of having to verbalize the question to someone, we type it in and go, and we find all the information we need. If the trend toward an Internet society continues, eventually we may no longer ever need to ask each other anything - if we are truly desirous of a particular piece of knowledge, it would be faster to type it into a search bar than it would be to ask someone for that information. Further, since the Internet provides links to many different sources, it's possible to verify the information by consulting several sources instead of just getting the information from one. Therefore, the Internet is a superior source of answers, but by providing instant answers, it will limit our need for questions. How boring will society be in the day that we only talk about ourselves, and anything we want to know about another person we can research?

Now, you may be asking yourself: Why can't we still ask questions? Well, if we don't need to ask questions, why would we? Language tends to gravitate toward the necessity of society. If society eliminates the need for questions, eventually our very language would weed them out.

You may also ask yourself: Can't we still ask rhetorical questions? The problem is not that we can't ask rhetorical questions, but that all questions would become merely rhetorical. Take, for example, the question: "What did you do at work today?" If I already know what you did at work today, because I gleemed that information from a website, I don't really need to know the answer to the question. The question has therefore become rhetorical.

Since conversation cannot exist without questions, we're really talking about the eventual breakdown of spoken language. In the future, the extremely distant future mind you, it simply won't be necessary to speak. Once we have the ability to hook our brains directly to the Internet, all conversation will take place within the depths of our minds and not be verbalized. Further, all conversation will take the form of queries to search engines. Will that be a good thing? Humanity will be far more efficient, without the need of extraneous words that really carry no useful meaning of their own but simply take up positions in a sentence...

Or is it possible that the question is such a fundamental part of our minds that we never will be able to turn completely to search engines for our answers, that we will always find ourselves having to ask the questions instead of simply finding the information independently?

Why English Grammar is important

2005-05-12T11:18:00.000-05:00

There are a lot of grammarians in the world who might say that my previous post was wrong, only for the fact that it attempts to prescribe rules for English grammar. Languages change as people use them, so modern grammarians believe that the proper way to study the language is not to impose grammar rules upon people but to instead describe the rules that people use naturally.

This is my defense of prescribing grammar; but, it's a little tricky, so hang on tight.

First, English is not a written language. It is a spoken language. It is learned in the mind of native speakers of English by its sounds. We hear the words spoken by our parents and by others around us, and we pick up the rules and vocabulary of English by what we hear. This results in the various dialects of English, as different people speak the same language in different ways.

However, when we attempt to record our language, we have historically had only one option available to us: writing. We write to record our thoughts and express them to others after some time delay (even though it might be a mere millisecond delay in the case of AIM or other online chat methods). Using writing, people thousands of years ago were able to record messages that we are still reading today. It is not permanent, but it's better than simply speaking, which requires the vibration of molecules to carry itself, and which will eventually dissipate to the point that it can no longer be heard by even electronic methods.

So we write. However, writing is not a natural occurance of the mind. While we might naturally pick up a language, we won't learn to write without someone teaching us to write. As a result, the rules we learn for writing are rules that are specifically set up in advance so that all English speakers can recognize the words. The letter "K" doesn't represent the sound [k] any better an "H" might. But, because we have rules telling us that the letter "K" is supposed to sound like [k], we learn to make that translation in our minds, and we can get to the point where we do so almost instantaneously.

Also, when we write, it's very easy for us to be misunderstood. That's because writing doesn't carry as many messages as speech does. When I say something, the intonation of my words, my body language, and the pauses in my speech can make it very clear exactly what I'm saying. So, if I say "I love you," but my tone is more sarcastic, you'll realize I'm making a joke rather than a confession of my feelings. In writing, we only have the literal, written word, which we still must translate with our minds, in order to understand what is written. This can make writing very easy to missinterpret.

For these reasons, we need prescriptive grammar. Please note, I'm saying we only need it for our writing system. Language itself cannot be prescribed - if the language is used regularly, it will undergo various changes. Writing, however, will remain rigidly static, only changing when the spoken language makes demands that the written language cannot handle.

On a slightly-related side note, the need for writing to be more easily understood also explains the proliferation of emoticons (smilies and the like). By sticking a simple symbol into my text, I can imply emotions that my writing cannot. So I can now say "I love you :p" and the :p - an emoticon that expresses the idea of a person sticking out his tongue - means that I'm really being silly, not serious. However, because emoticons involve typographical symbols, they're difficult to use within the course of a sentence. For this reason, prescriptive rules for the grammatical use of emoticons still need to be created.

English Grammar Lesson

2005-05-12T10:49:00.000-05:00

Here's another English Grammar Lesson for you:

When you need to add the letter "s" to a word to make the word either singular or plural, you should always simply add the "s" or the "es." You do not need to add an apostrophe!

For instance, with the word "see" as a verb, if you were to have a singular subject such as "she," you would need to add "s" to the word "see." So:

She sees correct
She see's incorrect

Additionally, acronyms work exactly the same way:

DAs correct
DA's incorrect

Using an apostrophe would indicate that DA owns something, as in "The DA's case." Without the apostrophe, the DA is simply plural, so "The DAs will present their case."

The most difficult and confusing distinction is between the words "its" and "it's." Remember that there is no plural form of the word "it" (the closest word would be "they"), so "its" is not, by definition, "two or more of 'it.'" Also remember that we like to make contractions of the word "is" by using " 's " as well. As a result, "it's" has come to refer only to the contraction of "it is" or "it has." The word "its" is the possessive form of "it."

Though the way I remember it is to say that "its" is backwards... when you think it's possessive, it's not.

But, if you come away with anything from this posting, remember that apostrophes are only used for possessive forms or for contractions, never for making words singular or plural.

And throw these rules completely out the window if you go to Canada. Their @#%!ed up grammar system says it's right to use apostrophes to make words plural. :D

Movies... not quite as important as the end of the world, but...

2005-05-11T09:56:00.000-05:00

So the big buzz right now in Hollywood is the fact that box office sales are down 22% from last year's figures at this time. Hollywood execs can't figure out why people aren't flocking to their movies...

Maybe people are finally getting tired of the tripe.

I mean, really, movies like Troy are good only for the fact that they are epic in scope, but the writing behind them is atrocious. Star Wars is an excellent example. The writing has always sucked. We've just turned a blind eye to the writing because we enjoy the action and the story behind the story. After all, when thrown from a high-speed transport onto the desert floor below, Natalie Portman's character in Episode 2 lies motionless until someone approaches, then gets up and runs off with them. That's not good writing.

So maybe, just maybe, people are starting to become accustomed to good writing and they want more of it. The first Matrix movie was good writing - and even good acting for the most part. Independent films such as Clerks and Boondock Saints challenge the thoughts that we have on a daily basis. Even big film studios have been getting into the act a bit, with movies like Ray and Million Dollar Baby. These are good movies, with good writing, good acting, and most of all an emotional point that makes people think rather than simply react.

The old cookie-cutter movies that made Hollywood powerful just a few years ago may not be able to cut it in today's society. People have been awakened to the expressions of the mind, and they want more of it.

Benediction

2005-04-19T12:22:00.000-05:00

So.. wow... I'm a bit overwhelmed at the moment. A new pope has been elected, and this one's pope name is Benedict XVI.

Coincidence?

Check this out: In the 12th century, a man who has since been sainted, St. Malachy, issued prophecies regarding the lineage of popes. For a small sampling:

#263: De medietate Lunæ - of the half moon - the pope of this prophecy was John Paul I, who was made pope on the day of a half moon, and died almost one month later, on exactly the day of another half moon.

#264: De labore Solis - of the laboring sun - This pope, next in line on St. Malachy's list, was John Paul II, who was born on the day of a solar eclipse, and was buried on the day of a solar eclipse.

#265: Gloria olivæ - glory of olive - This pope is the one just elected today, and he has chosen the name Benedict XVI. St. Benedict's order is referred to as the Olivetans. St. Benedict predicted, long before Malachy, that the Benedictine order would lead the world into the final days...

Malachy predicted a 266th pope, but different interpretations of the prophecy have said that this could be: Christ Himself, the antichrist, or simply a pope leading the church at the time of the antichrist. Regardless, it appears that there is very limited time left...

Fun

2005-04-18T07:55:00.000-05:00

We all try to have a good time, regardless of the ways in which we choose to do that. However, given our short life spans - 70 years is about average - we don't really have a lot of time to be goofing off. Theoretically, knowing that our time is short, we should be working constantly to do phenomenal things, like writing the great American novel, coming up with a unified theory for astrophysics, becoming the world's greatest ping-pong champion... ok, maybe not the latter, but the point is still the same: We should be spending all our time in pursuit of a goal.

So why, then, do we try so hard to have fun? Fun is a way of releasing endorphins into our brains, it gives us a feeling of euphoria, perhaps a sensation that everything is all right, when if we really stop to think about the nature of the universe, we must understand that everything is not all right at all. If we are destined to the grave, then nothing can possibly be all right about the world, and we don't like to think about that. In fact, it is this very need not to think about things that causes our need for fun. Fun, then, is the absence of thought.

Now, I'll grant that some forms of fun can cause us to think in limited terms. For instance, if I really enjoy reading fiction books, some of the things the fiction writer says may prompt me to have small inquizitive insights into his material, so I will have a limited amount of thought occuring. Or, if I play a mind game such as Scrabble that requires me to search my mental dictionary for words, it might prompt me to use the creative parts of my mind. These are forms of mental exercise, but they are that in multiple ways. Exercise itself releases endorphins, which again shields us from thinking about things as they really are. Mental exercise does the same thing - it gives us the ability to use our brains without really using them for anything important.

There is, however, something that bothers me about the concept. The fact is that no matter how hard we try to work on mental acrobatics to come up with the greatest ideas mankind has ever known, we will constantly come back to inane, useless activities that take precious time away from those critical pursuits. We may very well *need* to have fun. It may be that we have to turn off our brains at some points just to give our neurons the chance to recover from the electrical storm we're thrusting through them in the course of rational thought. Like a runner needing to take a break after a long race, our minds need to take a break when we're exercising them in our mental arenas.

Fun should be reserved, then, for those times when our minds just can't take any more. However, once we do get to the point where we need to have fun, nothing should prevent us from doing so. We need to rest our brains, recouperate, and then attack the problems again.

Good/Bad

2005-04-14T11:45:00.000-05:00

The problem with almost everything good in this world is that it includes elements of things that are bad. Diets, for instance, often don't work because they include elements of bad nutrition in with the elements of good nutrition. The Atkins diet recommends cutting carbohydrates completely out of the diet - well the problem with the American way of eatting is not that we eat any carbs at all but that we eat *too many*. If you were to add up all the carbs you eat in a day, you'd be floored at how many you're consuming. The problem with fats is not that we eat any, but we eat too many. The good thing in the Atkins diet is the cutting back on carbs. The bad thing in the Atkins diet is the eliminating or cutting *way* back on carbs.

This is true of, as I said, almost everything else in life. Take, for example, Buddism. I like that religion quite a bit, because it teaches that desire is the source of pain and by eliminating desire you can eliminate pain. The problem is that if we never want anything, we lose out on innovation, on invention, on discovery. They teach that evil and good coincide together, but that is accepting of things that are harmful to our nature.

Judaism is, likewise, an imperfect religion. This is not because it's original setup was imperfect - if Jews actually practiced what the Torah told them to practice, they'd be doing pretty well for themselves. The problem that exists in Judaism has existed since the day Moses picked up a hammer and a chisel: Human nature is to climb to the top of the political mountain, so to speak, and the only way for a "prince" to retain a position of power is to convince people that they need him there. As such, a leader will bend the rules of religion to fit his own political needs. When people were first allowed to believe whatever they wanted, this spread out a bit so that each and every person bends the rules a bit more. What Jewish people currently believe and practice has absolutely nothing to do with what the Torah says for them to do - but don't try telling a Jewish person that, they won't believe you unless you are a very respected Rabbi of their particular religious grouping, and the only way you can become a very respected Rabbi of a particular religious grouping is to blindly believe the rules as they are now, not as they were intended to be.

Catholicism has the same problem. Protestantism has the same problem. Every religion on the face of the earth has the same problem.

The secret, though, is that at the very core of Judaism and, as it naturally follows and extrapolates on the core rules of Judaism rather than the rules as they were changed, Christianity, the principles are the essence of pure goodness. If it were possible for any single person on the face of the earth to follow the rules as they were really defined, and not interpret them for his or her own evil desires, that person could become pure good as well. Other religions do not have pure goodness at their core, because they still promote and uphold a small number of evil desires.

I'll need to expound on this when I have more time to research and really ponder the concept...

Off the basketball thing for a moment...

2005-03-08T15:24:00.000-06:00

I just suddenly realized the true power of the internet. Over 4000 years ago, when the people built the tower of Babel, God struck them all with different languages so they couldn't work together. If we can get over our desire to make money with every single thing we do, I think the Internet will repair that rift in humanity. Now, more than ever, people are communicating their thoughts across the net, especially in the form of blogs.

Science has proven that a group of people can come up with ideas better than a single genius can. That gives me problems, seeing as how I *am* a genius, but it also gives me a bit of hope. If humanity unites under the net, perhaps we can come up with some truly amazing ideas.

I just hope there's time...

More...

2005-03-07T08:00:00.000-06:00

This week's AP poll hasn't come out yet, but here's how I think teams fall on the list. My big 3 are still Illinois, NC, and Boston College, but there isn't a wide degree of separation between Boston College and Wake Forest (in fact, if Wake wins 1 or Boston loses 1, they'll switch positions). However, the distance between Wake Forest and Duke is large enough that even if Wake lost one and Duke won one, they wouldn't switch. I think it's probably safe to call the top 4 teams the top 4 teams until the big tournament.

Also, Ohio State managed to beat Illinois, even though OSU is ranked #59 on my list. Even a dead clock has to be right twice a day...

Edit: new AP Rankings added

1. Illinois (1)
2. North Carolina (2)
3. Boston Coll. (7)
4. Wake Forest (3)
5. Duke (5)
6. Gonzaga (11)
7. Kentucky (4)
8. Kansas (9)
9. Louisville (6)
10. Syracuse (16)
11. Arizona (8)
12. Oklahoma (17)
13. Washington (14)
14. Oklahoma St. (10)
15. Utah (15)
16. Connecticut (12)
17. Villanova (19)
18. Michigan St. (13)
19. Alabama (20)
20. St. Mary's
21. Pacific (18)
22. Cincinnati (21)
23. Pittsburgh (22)
24. Southern Ill.
25. Charlotte (25)

(other)
28. Nevada (24)
30. Wisconsin (23)

The complete AP poll has not yet been released, so I can't see what rankings St. Mary's and Southern Ill. have.

I don't get no respect...

2005-03-01T08:38:00.000-06:00

I think Southern Ill and Boston College aren't getting any respect in the AP rankings. Know what I'm saying?

1. Illinois (1)
2. North Carolina (2)
3. Boston Coll. (5)
4. Wake Forest (4)
5. Duke (6)
6. Kentucky (3)
7. Kansas (7)
8. Syracuse (13)
9. Washington (10)
10. Oklahoma St. (8)
11. Gonzaga (12)
12. Oklahoma (20)
13. Louisville (9)
14. Arizona (11)
15. Charlotte (18)
16. Utah (16)
17. Connecticut (15)
18. Villanova (19)
19. Michigan St. (14)
20. Alabama (21)
21. Southern Ill. (26)
22. Pittsburgh (24)
23. Pacific (17)
24. Cincinnati (22)
25. Texas A&M (35)

29. Nevada (25)
34. Wisconsin (23)

Updated Rankings

2005-02-24T11:17:00.000-06:00

A good system must take into account wins and losses as the occur. So,

1. Illinois (1)
2. Boston Coll. (3)
3. North Carolina (2)
4. Wake Forest (6)
5. Duke (7)
6. Kentucky (5)
7. Oklahoma St. (4)
8. Kansas (8)
9. Syracuse (15)
10. Arizona (9)
11. Washington (14)
12. Louisville (11)
13. Gonzaga (12)
14. Michigan St. (10)
15. Alabama (16)
16. Oklahoma (22)
17. Charlotte (21)
18. Utah (13)
19. Connecticut (17)
20. Pittsburgh (18)
21. Villanova (23)
22. Southern Ill.
23. Pacific (19)
24. Texas Tech
25. Texas A&M

NCAA Basketball

2005-02-22T12:47:00.000-06:00

I know you all just *love* basketball (and by "you all" I of course mean my 2 regular readers), but I really get excited about the NCAA basketball tournament because, heck, it's just a lot of fun.

However, I am always trying to come up with a new and improved method of ranking teams so that I can make a better prediction of the outcome of the tournament. For anyone who really follows the tournament, you know that this is about as easy as coming up with a method of winning at Roulette that actually *works* - lots of things sound good on paper, but don't work in practice.

Anyway, I thought I'd share my current top-25 ranking so you can compare it to the AP's ranking and we'll see who's right when it's all said and done.

1. Boston Coll. (3)
2. Illinois (1)
3. North Carolina (2)
4. Oklahoma St. (4)
5. Wake Forest (6)
6. Kentucky (5)
7. Kansas (8)
8. Duke (7)
9. Syracuse (15)
10. Alabama (16)
11. Arizona (9)
12. Washington (14)
13. Pittsburgh (18)
14. Louisville (11)
15. Gonzaga (12)
16. Michigan St. (10)
17. Oklahoma (22)
18. Charlotte (21)
19. Utah (13)
20. Connecticut (17)
21. Villanova (23)
22. Texas (30)
23. Southern Ill. (28)
24. Pacific (19)
25. Cincinnati (24)

(not making my list but appearing on the AP list: 29. Wisconsin (20), 32. Nevada (25))

Think it's odd that an undefeated team would be ranked only #2? Well, that's a bit of a concern for me as well... we'll see how it plays out.

By the end of next week, we'll be completely done with play for the season, and we can see how the AP polls stack up then.

The Real Top-50

2005-02-21T08:48:00.000-06:00

http://www.1up.com/do/feature%3FcId%3D3116290

This is 1up.com's top-50 most influential video games of all time...

I think it's a load of blarney. They're missing what are, in the opinion of everyone *else* in the gaming world, the most important games of all time. Thus, here's a new list to fix everyone's opinions...

These are games I have yet to add (but will if I get the time):
Baldur's Gate
Everquest
Warcraft
Final Fantasy
Grand Theft Auto
Street Fighter II
Myst
Mortal Kombat
Tetris
Super Mario Bros.
Metroid

And here, thus far, is my top 10 list...

#10. Dragon's Lair:
It's so pretty...

#9. Tron:
Tron! Come on... Tron!
All right, fine, all that really made this video game was the movie... but still, it's TRON!

#8. SimCity:
Maxis's bid into video gaming history came not with the Sims, but with an old game from the days of the 286 called SimCity. SimCity was a lot of fun, allowing the player to step into the rolls of an immortal city-builder with $20,000 in cash and the knowledge that one fateful day his city would be destroyed by a fire, a flood, a tornado, or maybe, just maybe, godzilla coming out of the sea and crushing everyone in the city.

#7. Wolfenstein 3D:
How did this not make 1up's list of top video games ever? Long before Doom, Wolfenstein had an American soldier mowing down evil Nazis performing sadistic experiments in Castle Wolfenstein. Granted, it didn't have the power or sophisticated graphics of Doom, but darnit, Wolf was the penultimate 3d video game. And it had one thing going for it - rather than the demons and pentograms that made Doom infamous, Wolf had a good guy killing a bunch of bad guys. It was a simple formula.

#6. The Legend of Zelda:
When the Nintendo first came out, the flagship of the system was *not* Super Mario Bros. Sure, Mario was boxed with the system, but that just meant that the company wasn't making any money off of that game. Instead, the game that was marketed the most, the game with the highest number of commercials and the greatest in-store sales, was The Legend of Zelda. There was something special about following a little green pixelated elf pointing a sword weakly at his enemies that has led to a gaming empire. Truly the greatest game in this series was the Ocarina of Time. Wind Waker fell miserably short of the mark - it was cute, but it wasn't the megalithic beast that Ocarina was... but I digress.

#5. Solitaire:
Come on, admit it - no other video game has been played more than Microsoft's Solitaire. Ever since Microsoft released it - what, 15 years ago or so? - bored office workers have wasted their lives clicking on Microsoft's artistic recreations of the Queen of Spades and Five of Diamonds, sorting them and arranging them to try to win a pointless game. Here's to Solitaire, the great leach of productivity.

#4. Donkey Kong:
This game started a different kind of genre - after all, it was the game that spawned Mario and his Princess. It was Nintendo's first big product in America, and we have it to thank for the myriad releases to follow. Not only that, but it was a hugely popular game.

#3. Pac-Man:
Pac-Man is a cultural icon like no other video game. If you showed the entire list of video games to 100 people on the street, chances are that only Pac-Man would be recognizable to everyone on the list. Even today commercials are still being made featuring cars gobbling up little white dots.

#2. Zork:
At least they got this right... I still get a warm, fuzzy tingling in my heart whenever I see those immortal words, "You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here."

#1. Pong:
No game is more important to the history of video games than Pong. It really is the game that started it all. It may not have been the first video game ever - heck, Zork wasn't the first text-based adventure, Baldur's Gate wasn't the first RPG, Everquest wasn't the first MMORPG - but it's the game that broke open the genre, and in Pong's case, the genre was the entire video game industry.

Why Religion is Exclusive

2005-02-18T11:18:00.000-06:00

As a Christian, one of the complaints I receive constantly from non-Christians is that Christians are not open-minded and accepting of their religion. There are differing views on this from different denominations of Christianity, but the majority of us say that Christianity is right, therefore all other religions must be wrong. A lot of people have a problem with this concept, so I'd like to explain why we feel that way...

First, there are two possibilities of the universe: in one, a god or gods exist, and in the other, no gods exist. The two are mutually exclusive - if a god exists, the universe must have a god.

Second, there are two possibilities for gods: just one god, or many gods. Again, these concepts are mutually exclusive - if there is just one god, then there can't be any other gods. Note that I am using specifically the phrase "just one god" because, by definition, if there is one god who is simply more powerful than the rest but there are still other gods, or if one god grants his powers to others to make them into gods, then we no longer have a "just one god" system.

Third, if there is just one god, then any other gods mentioned must not exist, since there can be only the one god in a "just one god" system.

What that means is that if God is real, and if the Bible is correct in identifying Him as the only God in a "just one god" universe, then no other deities can be real and a godless universe must be absolutely out of the question.

If a Christian believes beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Bible is correct and that God is real, then that Christian must, by necessity of the exclusive properties of that belief, believe that all other religions are false.

It's not a question of being judgemental about other religions - it's not a conclusion that we have the option to make and we choose to make it in opposition of other religions. Rather, it's the only thing logic will allow. If my religion is right, yours must be wrong. If I believe in my religion, I must believe that too.

This doesn't mean I don't believe in your right to believe and practice as you choose, but it does mean I honestly think you're going to Hell for believing something different, and I believe it's my duty as someone who knows the Truth to save you from that end.

Arguments That are not Arguments

2005-02-18T11:11:00.000-06:00

One of the most annoying things in the world is when people try to argue with me just because they think they disagree. They may be saying the same thing I am in a different way, or they may be saying something different that isn't necessarily opposite. IE, if I said an orange is like an apple because they both contain natural sweeteners, acids, and seeds, and someone else were to argue that an orange isn't like an apple because they have markedly different colors, tastes, and textures. We're simply seeing the same problem from different perspectives that yield us to come up with different answers. Neither one of us are incorrect, we're both right-on.

The problem often comes when I see both sides and I want the person I'm "arguing" with to see both sides as well, and for the life of them they just can't see it my way. Then I must spend hours trying to explain what I'm talking about, and invariably they will argue against it based on points that are still not opposite to what I'm saying.

BTW Connor... this one's for you ;)

Why Oh Why Didn't I...

2005-02-15T14:36:00.000-06:00

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/02/14/energy.waves.reut/index.html

I came up with this idea when I was 14... never really wrote anything about it or told anyone about it... and now it's being installed in places around the world to take advantage of the power of waves...

Argh. It makes me so annoyed that someone else capitalized on an idea I had but never tried... I could be a millionaire by now, but NOOOO, I had to keep my big mouth shut...

It's not "The West Wing", that's for sure...

2005-02-15T11:08:00.000-06:00

Please, someone stop the insanity!

The White House is now taking former American POWs, who were abused in the prisons of Saddam, to court to keep from having to pay out the $1 billion that a judge had already ordered the government to pay. The excuse? We need that money to help establish the new and improved government in Iraq.

Lovely way to treat the people who served their country by bravely facing their captors each and every day, people who were beaten to within an inch of their lives regularly, people who still wake up in the middle of the night, sweating and screaming from dreams of the torture they received.

Don't blame me, I voted for Kerry. :D

Some people are too stupid...

2005-02-14T07:44:00.000-06:00

What if:

You stopped to help a man who was trapped in a burning vehicle on the side of the road. You got him out of the car, but by removing him you jarred a loose bone in his spinal cord and now he's a paraplegic. Hey, at least it's better to be a paraplegic than to be dead, right?

Not in this world.

You probably know what would happen next in the story... the man sues you for injuring him, and wins a multimillion dollar lawsuit that means you'll never be able to afford to buy more than raman ever, ever again. That's the way it works. You do a good deed, and you get punished for it.

You know what it all boils down to? People not taking responsibility for their own actions. It's the desire of one man to make someone else pay for said man's mistakes.

Of course, the perfect case-in-point is occuring right now. There's a case where a couple of girls maliciously sought to cause aggrivated damage to their neighbors by ... baking them cookies. How horrible. What kind of girls are we raising in this country? And, of course, the woman who they delivered the cookies to has rightfully sued and won a settlement of roughly $900 in a court of law. I love America.

Out of sarcasm mode now, here's the deal: The woman says that the girls need to take responsibility for their actions, but it's this WOMAN that is not taking responsibility for hers! She says she had an anxiety attack at the sound of the girls knocking on the back door. What kind of person has an anxiety attack at the sound of someone knocking on the freakin door? Get some help, woman! You had two other people at home with you! A calm, rational person would have gone to check out the noise, or at least sent someone else to do it, not suddenly broken down in fear at the sound of nothing.

Woman, you say the girls need to learn to take responsibility for their actions... what actions? They're teenagers! They were trying to surprise you by leaving cookies on your doorstep! How criminal!

B@#%*

Milestone

2005-02-11T08:44:00.000-06:00

Today marks a new point in my weight loss...

Today I hit 171 lbs, and it's the first time in at least 10 years that my BMI (body mass index) has been within the "healthy" range. Granted, it's still the upper limit of the range, but regardless, it's a heck of a lot better than I was doing.

Maybe I'll go out and celebrate by eating at Taco Bueno.... just kidding!

I've lost 28 lbs since starting this diet, and while it's been over the course of about a year, I feel that's a healthier way of losing weight anyway. Besides, people plateau at various weights, meaning that as they lose weight, their body stops losing weight and holds steady for a while. For me, it was 180. I was at 180 for something like 4 months, and though I kept exercising and eating right, I couldn't drop below that point. Then, suddenly, the barrier broke and I was able to drop below 180 about one month ago, and have since lost 9 pounds...

160 is my goal weight... it's just around the corner.

Finding the Balance: Unions and the AFL-CIO

2005-02-08T13:07:00.000-06:00

So I think I'll start writing a few articles about taking the middle ground in politics - there are a few cases where the middle is the only way to be. One instance of this is the issue of Unions.

First, a history lesson. Guilds first formed in America in the early part of the 17th century to protect workers from the corporate corruption. They didn't become formal unions until 1792, when Philadelphia shoemakers organized. They gained true power in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Corporations had absolute power over their employees, and could own the entire town where they operated and where their workers lived. Thus, even the store in town was owned by the company - appropriately referred to as the "company store." These stores offered a line of credit to employees, but the store charged way too much for its goods. Employees of the company would end up in debt to the store because they simply couldn't make enough money at their jobs to be able to buy what they needed to live. That's where the famous song line, "I owe my soul to the company store" comes from. People would be so far in debt to the company that they could never quit working for the company, and by working for the company they would only drive themselves further into debt.

With that kind of mindset, labor unions were absolutely necessary. Eventually, unions had enough power to fight the corporations and change policies so that workers could get shorter work weeks, health care, better wages, better working conditions, etc.

Now, unions have much more power than they've ever had before, and they're the ones abusing it and becoming corrupt. For instance, in most states, to go to work for a grocery store means you have to be a member of the grocers union. If a store passes over a union member for a non-union member, they get fubard by the union for doing so. Many union members know they don't even have to worry about doing their job because they can't be fired - they're members of a union, they have the protection of the union. Unions have enormous amounts of capital, and majorly alter the vote in any election or legislative session. If a union encounters a law it doesn't like, it starts throwing money and lobbyists at the problem and eventually it goes away.

The problem is two-fold: If we get rid of unions, the corporations become corrupt. If we give the unions the power they have now, the unions become corrupt.

Thus, what we need is a strategic middle-ground. "Right to Work" may be such a middle-ground. Labor unions argue that the "Right to Work" policy kills unions, but that's not completely true. If a union operates in a field, it will still be guaranteed to have a certain number of members. Generally speaking, a large number of skilled workers will be unionized. Thus, since all companies are going to want non-union employees if they can get them, the non-union skilled workers will be spread thin, and the union workers will still make up a majority of a company's work force. When a labor union calls a strike, then, they still have the power of a union to force a company to bargain. They don't have supreme power, but they do have enough power to protect their interests. That's what we have to strive for - leaving each group with only enough power to protect itself and produce a positive income.

Sometimes, unions do have it right... for instance, the AFL-CIO is saying how bad the privatization of Social Security will be, and I can't agree more. The government's only concern with Social Security is that there is enough money left to pay all the people who receive Social Security. A private company would not only be concerned with that, but also with making an income. Give it to a private company, and you'll force people to pay more money to get smaller returns. Leave it alone, and there won't be enough money to pay for everyone in the system.

There is another option - abandon Social Security alltogether. Whatever money is left in the system, divide it among all the people who have paid for social security based on how much they have paid in (ie, if there are 30 billion dollars in the system, and I have paid in 28,000, but my 28,000 is only part of the 60 billion that everyone in america has paid in, I'd get 14,000 back. It'd still suck to have paid that much in, but at least I wouldn't get nothing.)

REM may be right...

2005-01-26T13:02:00.000-06:00

Beware the ides of March . . .

Woot!

2005-01-22T10:21:00.000-06:00

So I stepped on the scale today and I weigh 175 lbs now. Woot. Only 15 more until I reach my "goal weight", though once I get there I'll have to see how I look and feel to know if I need to lose more or what not. Probably it's just going to be mostly weight training and such when I get to 160, so that I can build up my puny, girly muscles. I have dated girls who were stronger than me, so really I should've taken that as a clue a long time ago...

For those of you who don't know, this journey started at 199 lbs. When I stepped on the scale and realized that I was almost at 200, I freaked out and decided it was time for a lifestyle change. That was about a year ago now. After I've shed 24 lbs, I feel soooo much better, and I'm generally getting more organized in my life. It's awesome.

I also talked to a friend of mine last night for the first time in a few months. He told me that he's in basically the same boat - had been 205, is down to 180, and he's a half-inch shorter than me (I'm 5'10"... or at least, really flippin close to it). He's feeling the same awesomeness of how much healthier he is and how much easier he's able to focus. It's cool having a friend to talk to who is going through the same thing you are.

Let me explain...

2005-01-19T13:35:00.000-06:00

Sorry... I didn't have time to finish the previous post, so let me explain where I was going with this idea. Basically, I'm going on the whole "anti-Bush" sentiment. That may not seem to flow from my previous article, but it does - people are protesting Bush in droves, but their protests will ammount to nothing, just as Bush's administration will ultimately be unimportant in the grand scheme of things.

Sigh...

2005-01-19T09:39:00.000-06:00

We all concern ourselves with things that don't matter to history. For isntance: the Tsunami is important. The lives of those that died and those that have yet to die from the disaster, those are all important. However, when history books are written 1000 years from now to talk about the most important events of the time, they likely won't even mention the tsunami in passing, and if they do it will only within the context of other major disasters of our time. It is a bigger disaster than any that has come before it in terms of how many countries were affected, but it is not the biggest disaster of all time, or even of the last 100 years.

I'm not saying the tsunami doesn't matter, it certainly does for right now. However, when the history books are written 1000 years from now, they'll only remember Hitler. He's the only man who has had enough of a lasting world impact to still receive any credit 1000 years from now, even though people may still remember him as an evil dictator, they will nonetheless remember him. Bush, Clinton, Kennedy, Roosevelt, Yeltzin, Mandela, Chirac, and all of the other "great world leaders" will be completely forgotten in the annals of time.

How will they talk about our time? They'll probably say that the 20th century was the "Technological Renaissance", a time when suddenly the world woke up from the pre-technology life and everyone everywhere embraced invention. In just the last 150 years, we've gone from farm-based economies and manual labor to manipulating individual molecules to create new and powerful structures (thinking specifically of carbon nanotubes). In the entire history of the world, no single century has seen the sheer number of technological advancements per capita that our last century has. We clone sheep, we visit distant worlds with robots, we can find other planets outside our solar system, we can travel around the world in 3 days, we've landed men on the moon, and we've built powerful computers that we can carry in our pockets.

The tsunami is a disaster, and I feel deeply moved to help them out, but I have to be a realist and accept that in the grand scheme of things, the disaster will not be remembered. I guess that's why we need so badly to remember them now, because to those who are living, they are very important.

Etymology

2004-12-30T15:01:00.000-06:00

It's time for a language review. If there are any words you'd like to see me address on this, e-mail me or post them in the comments and maybe I can make this a regular event. :D

Anywho, two topics for today: The old "progress/congress" joke, and the word "Potentional."

First, there's an old joke that goes thus:
If the opposite of pro is con, is the opposite of progress congress?

First, logically this statement is true. Because of the way we build words, we can say that If A is opposite of B, AC is opposite of BC.

The problem is the supposition we make at the beginning of the statement: "If the opposite of pro is con." They are not opposites in this sense, because their original meanings, in Latin, are not opposites. The root word, "gress," meant "to go." Pro originally meant "forward," so "progress" meant "to go forward." Still, we say we're making progress when we're going forward toward our goal. In the joke, however, pro means "benefit"... as in "we're weighing the pros and cons of..." These are two differense senses of the prefix "pro."

Similarly, "con" in the joke means "negative," whereas the original meaning of "con" is "together." "Congress," therefore, originally meant "to go together." Based on this definition, it came to mean "meeting" and also the group of people who meets in government.

So, while it's a funny joke, it just doesn't hold any water when analyzed.

I'd also like to discuss the word "potentional." This isn't really a word, but a surprising number of people (go ahead, do a google search for it) have been using it as one. The word they're looking for, of course, is "potential," meaning "possibility, capability, or power" (from dictionary.com). Potential derives from the following roots and affixes: Potent (strong) + ial (characterized by). Thus it means "characterized by power," which is a pretty accurate definition of its meaning today. Potentional would add an extra layer to to this. -ion means "process" or "the result of a process." So Potentional would mean "characterized by the process of strength."

Is there a process of strength? If so, how do you go about characterizing it?

Whatever, anyway, this made-up word is just really, really bad, and should be avoided unless you desire to make fun of people who make up bad words. It's not a remotely cromulent word. The people who say it may be getting "potential" mixed up with "portension"... that seems appropriate, since I have a great deal of foreboding when it comes to the word potentional.

huh?

2004-12-29T13:20:00.000-06:00

More ranting.

When I have arguments with athiests over the existence of God, invariably I quote passages of scripture or other Christian authors. Even more definite is the response I seem to get from every one of them. They always accuse me of being an idiot with no original thoughts of my own. I'm sure Connor will interject a comment at that... :p

Anyway, why is it that it's always the athiests that say that? It's all right, I'm sure, for a scientist to quote Hawking when talking about a Unified Theory or Darwin when discussing Evolutionism. Theoretically, these two men were experts in their field, and there's nothing wrong with quoting what they're saying. Yet, in the minds of atheists, there seems to be a double-standard when it comes to experts on religion. It's OK to quote an expert so long as that expert has a secular view, but the moment we have a Biblical scholar like C.S. Lewis present an argument, we aren't allowed to quote that.

When I quote something, I quote it because it provides other, more authoritative voices than my own to back up my side of the story, not because I'm an idiot who only quotes others. I make up my mind based on my own research, but I also find that some people say the same things I'm already thinking, and do it more succinctly and with more authority than I ever could.

Vegetarians

2004-12-28T23:33:00.000-06:00

Ok, so I read a post by someone who is a vegetarian, and I thought I'd make a few remarks about it...

First, I'd like to point out that I totally support vegetarians, and think that's the best way to eat. However, at the start of this article, I'm going to spend a bit of time bashing on them.

Whenever I hear Vegetarians state their reasons for being vegetarians, invariably the arguments always come back to one single argument: "meat is murder." Let's analyze this statement a bit. Meat comes from the muscle mass of animals, and in most cases the animal is either a chicken or a cow. When you eat meat, you're biting into the organs that gave the animal the ability to trot or fly, or even those muscles that gave it the ability to breathe and eat. Most of the time we only eat animals that have long since gone to that elephant graveyard in the sky, so the best way to describe our consumption habits is "gnawing on slowly rotting carcasses." Tasty.

Now, animal lovers say this is murder for one simple reason: We're the ones raising the creatures purely for the sake of harvesting their tissues, and when they're ripe, we slaughter them. It *is* technically murder if you define murder as the intentional act of one person to take the life of a living creature.

Here's where the bashing comes in.

When we harvest carrots, what do you think we're doing to them? Carrots were alive, we pluck them from the ground and cut them up, and eat them with a light ranch dressing and some crutons. Yum. By the definition of murder above, this is technically a murder. Yet without ingesting matter that was living, we would die.

What about apples, oranges, and other fruits that simply fall off the tree? Aren't they safe to eat? Well, technically no for several reasons: First, those fruits never simply fall off the tree - you can't trust fruit that has been on the ground for any length of time. They are plucked from the tree while they're still growing, still living. Also, we may view the tree as the living organism and the fruit as simply a byproduct of the tree - but that view wouldn't be entirely correct because the seeds within the fruit are still living, but we're consuming the fruit they would use to grow and become trees themselves. It's akin to eating an egg, even without the yolk.

Regardless of what happens, we're requiring life to get the energy we need to us. The basic reason for this is that we need the energy the sun provides, and we have no way to get that energy ourselves without some other creature consuming it first.

My second bashing of vegetarianism is this: animals don't seem to have any qualms about killing their food and eating it. Look at tigers - they hunt zebras and antelope, pick out the weakest members of the pack, take them down, and eat them before the dead beasts' blood has even had a chance to turn cold. The rest of the animal kingdom acknowledges this fact - only humans turn against the tide and say it's wrong.

Thirdly, nature has equipped us for the consumption of meat. We have canine teeth that are designed to let us pierce flesh. Most of our teeth are molars designed for chewing plants, but not all. If our teeth are designed for carnivorous eating habits, that just means it's in our nature to eat meat.

Lastly, most vegetarians think the creatures we're eating are cute little fuzzy creatures that never hurt anyone and consciously spend their entire lives worrying and crying about the day they'll have to go to the slaughterhouse. They've been watching Charlotte's Web a few too many times. Earth to vegans: most animals in slaughterhouses feel no pain when they're killed, and they certainly don't have the intelligence to worry about their future as a steak.

So anyway, that's all I've got to say about that... now then, there are some genuinely GOOD reasons, however, for being a vegetarian (ones that don't have anything to do with killing "Peggy the Love Pig").

One such reason is the sheer volume of food that a cow needs to consume in order to be eaten at the dinner table. For every 1000 pounds of feed we put into a cow, we get about 100 pounds of meat. If we simply ate the feed ourselves, we'd be able to supply corn to the entire world and keep everyone fed easily. Think about the fact that Americans alone make up 300 million people of the Earth's population, and if we multiplied our food reserves by even just 5, we'd be able to feed an additional 1.2 billion people in the world just from what we throw to the pigs. Clearly, it's inefficient to eat meat. For the sake of ending world hunger, vegetarianism is a much better way to go.

But back to the corn thing... did I forget to mention that pretty much all the vegetables we feed to cows, chickens, and pigs is cornmeal? Yes, the wonderful, mystical ear of corn, a food that serves no purpose whatsoever other than to make animals fat for the slaughter. It's amusing that it's also the largest staple of the American diet, and Americans are the fattest country on earth. Hmmm. Anyway, not only are you consuming corn when you eat corn and obvious corn products (ie, chips), but also when you're eating the butter on popcorn or drinking a can of coke - both contain corn syrup. Additionally, since all the meat you eat has been corn-fed, your diet is even more wrought with corn because you're absorbing it from the creature that was slaughtered after eating it. And, because we think corn is the greatest gift God ever gave us, we spend tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to make it cheaper for farmers to grow the stuff, making cornmeal much cheaper, and eventually making it the prime choice for ranchers to use it to feed their chickens, pigs, and cattle. If you give up animals just because you want to get away from corn as a dietary staple, then you've got a good reason for quitting the game.

BTW, if anyone feels they need to be a vegetarian, they should be. If anyone feels they can't be, they shouldn't be. Neither side should force the other to do what it wants. This is as per Paul, the great Christian writer and minister of the 1st century. In his letter to the Christians in Rome (the book of... ROMANS! Who would've thunk it?), Paul tells them that some people's faith requires them to eat meat, and others requires them not to, and both views are fine. See Romans 14.

Nothing can be proven

2004-12-27T15:00:00.000-06:00

Nothing can ever be proven. After all, what is proof? To prove something, we have to show evidence that something is true without any questions to the contrary being expressed. For instance, we say that if we drop an apple, we see the evidence of gravity pulling the apple to the earth. We can repeat the experiment a seemingly infinite number of times and we should get the same result - the apple will always fall. We say that we have proven gravity works because the apple always falls. We say it's nonsense to believe that if we drop the apple 3 million times, once out of all those times the apple might do something different - like float there, or fly away, or fall slower than normal.

But have we really proven the apple is falling? After all, relativity teaches us that how we perceive things depends entirely upon how we're moving relative to objects. Is it possible that the earth is flying up to meet the apple, rather than the apple falling down? Further, is it possible the apple is only falling down because of a particular distortion in this section of space, and that another section of space might see objects flying apart rather than coming together? And, most importantly of all, what about our perception? Do we really know for certain that what we're seeing is really happening? Could it be that reality as we know it is merely a facade for some other type of existance, and the "apple falling to the earth" is really an expression of the essence of the apple and the essence of the earth interacting in a world we can't perceive?

Some of these things sound like nonsense, I'll be the first to admit that, as I intended them to sound silly... but they bring up a good point: We can be sure of nothing that occurs outside of our own thoughts. This is what Descartes (I never thought I'd be quoting that moron) meant when he said "I think, therefore I exist." He was looking for the answer to this very question - what can be proven? His answer: Only thought can be proven, and everything else must be taken on faith.

I would argue that even thought cannot be proven, because the theoretical possibility of something else controlling our thoughts still exists. Aliens, for instance, could be manipulating our minds (thus the need for tin foil hats!) "The Matrix" was all about robots controlling our thoughts so that we experience and think what they want us to. It is still possible that such a reality exists, so that everything, down to even our thoughts, must be taken on faith.

So, I propose a new way of looking at proof. Science seeks to prove the purely empirical (not to be confused with empyrical, which would make science a part of coal's combustion process). The empirical world is the world as we see it, and since we are forced to live in the world we perceive, we need empirical evidence and data to help us improve our quality of life. However, we cannot discard the possiiblity of a spiritual world outside of our own empirical world, possibly a place where our prayers go when we meditate, but possibly even a place where our thoughts are the physical, palpable stuff of the universe. Imagine two spirits sitting next to each other in a couch. They have come together to have a conversation and share a bond, but only within the spiritual realm. In the empirical world they're confined to, they are 800 miles apart, sitting in front of two separate computers, typing away at their keyboards.

If empirical evidence must be taken on faith to a spiritual mind, why can't spiritual evidence be taken on faith to an empirical science?