A bump in the Night

There was excitement at the community hall last night.

A goodly number of the town worthies had gathered at the Town Hall for the annual pancake supper, hosted by the local church in honour of Sh rove Tuesday.  Suddenly, midst all the babble and munching, there was a very loud thump and everyone felt the floor move.. Most people stopped talking (notable in itself) and looked around wondering who had fallen off their chair. Speculation was rife, and fruitless.

Ultimately, two intrepid young chaps ventured into the catacombs under the hall to investigate. They discovered that one of the teleposts holding up a floor beam had disintegrated under the increased load of all those pancakes.  Apparently it had been weakened by years of dampness, and broke apart, letting the beam, and consequently the floor, drop a couple of inches.

The town fix-it man was called, much joking ensued, and all was well.

--
http://leepaulson42.blogspot.com/

Interesting ruling on Monday in a case in England:

"There is no place in British law for Christian beliefs, despite this country’s long history of religious observance and the traditions of the established Church, two High Court judges said on Monday.

Lord Justice Munby and Mr Justice Beatson made the remarks when ruling on the case of a Christian couple who were told that they could not be foster carers because of their view that homosexuality is wrong. "

The complete article is at:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/8353496/Foster-parent-ban-no-place-in-the-law-for-Christianity-High-Court-rules.html

It does seem to be a bit of a reach to tell people that they can't be foster parents because they think homosexuality is wrong.  I wonder if it makes any difference whether you are opposed to homosexuality on religious grounds or just on a mistaken understanding of human sexuality??

Not that I'm opposed to this ruling.... although they don't mention this angle in the article, I think that if you don't want Muslim beliefs to influence our lawmaking, you must also ensure that Christian beliefs don't either (although in this case they probably both believe the same thing).

The real problem is that you really cannot separate Church and State.  The Muslims understand this, and want to go all the way in using their faith to regulate their lives. Christians seem to want it both ways.

I think that it is a real test of your religion, in a way.  If it can't be used it to run every facet of life, then there is either something wrong with the religion or the lifestyle.  To say that separation of church and state is a workable arrangement is bunk.  Either change your religion, or change your state, one or the other....it is untenable to attempt to live by two sets of contrary rules.

Of course that's a bit simplistic... it assumes that everyone believes the same thing.... which they don't....You can't therefore, make everyone happy, so the only solution is to make everyone unhappy, which is exactly what most governments manage to do, and do very well.

I have trouble with labels

I have a lot of trouble with labels.  Personal labels that is. Oh, I know, they are important to our way of life, and there are some that I like to hang around my neck. It’s nice, for example, to be labeled a senior and get discounts at restaurants. Or to be labeled a grandfather, a retiree, or a fireman.  Lots of labels are nice to be able to wear.  Those are the ones that describe only one aspect of yourself, or maybe a condition that is only temporary.  However, labels that become more all-encompassing and attempt to pin down the basic you or what goes on in your head really give me trouble..

Labels dealing with faith or the lack of it are the most difficult. Even political labels are not so bad. I wouldn’t mind being called a liberal, for example.  But call me a Christian and I’m liable to get angry; or call me an atheist and I’m liable to say “now hold on a moment….”  The problem is, well, really there are two problems. First, many labels, especially those dealing with “faith” are too restrictive.  When you try to wear them, they begin to pinch like new shoes that are a size too small. They may describe a part of you, or a part of what they mean may fit you but not the rest, or other people may have a different understanding of what the label means.  The result is that the label does little to describe the real you and may, in fact be quite misleading.

Labels tend to be absolute, brokering no wiggle room.  As such they come in two opposite types: affirmative labels, like Christian, and denial labels like Atheist.  Denial labels do little to explain what you are, only what you are not. Affirmative labels have denial aspects too, since claiming to be a Christian, denies belief in many other things.

The problem really asserts itself when ideas are turned into labels. I applaud the concept of agnosticism, for example, but would balk at my spiritual understanding to be limited by such a label for I am also an ignostic (or a theological noncognitivist, if you prefer) because I believe that before you even approach the problem of proving that He exists, you first have to define the word “God”, and ignostics believe that is impossible.

While I can claim acceptance of any of these ideas, I cannot accept them as defining labels. In that respect, I think that denial labels are probably worse than affirmative labels since they  end to be more confining that affirmative labels and do very little to explain who or what you really are.

But even the affirmative labels have their limitations. In the past I have considered myself a Gnostic; have greatly admired Buddhists, and even considered myself a Christian at one time. I later leaned toward Pantheism and, finally, the Humanist way of thinking. 

The problem remains, however, that none of these labels really fit properly, although some come very close. Pantheists, Humanists and Buddhists, for example, deny the existence of God, in that respect they are all Atheistic and probably Agnostic and Ignostic as well. Buddhists however, accept the concept of consciousness surviving the death of the body, while Pantheists and Humanists tend to deny all spiritual concepts.  It really becomes impossible to find a label that perfect;y fits my personal view of reality. And therein lies the problem. Any label broad enough in scope to accommodate ones beliefs would be so fuzzy as to be useless.

The concept of god may be at the root of the problem, since most faith labels are referenced to God in some way, as if that were the basis of all religious thought. I disagree. While the idea of God is important to any discussion of religion, and will be tossed around for millennium to come, He is not the prime concept behind 99 out of 100 religions. The idea that consciousness can survive the death of the material body is death is, for if you don’t believe that your consciousness will still exist after your body returns to the earth, then all other religious discussion is meaningless. Nothing else matters and even God becomes impotent.  Perhaps, then, more “faith” labels should focus on that concept rather than on the existence or non-existence of God.

So… in the end, what label could I pin on myself? I don’t know. I guess I’ll have to make one up. But then, what use is that. Labels are meant to convey a description of yourself to others. If I pin a label on myself that only I know the definition of, what use can it be? I guess I’ll just have to be content with Humanist for the time being, after all, it does come closer than anything else.

The pope.... with a small p

So the pope has decided that its ok for male prostitutes to use condoms. Tell me; why in the name of all that is right, decent, sane and logical, does this ridiculous announcement rate national news.  Considering all the lives that have been lost and degraded by this man, I wonder how he is able to sleep nights. However, the blame is not totally his. A great deal of the blame has to be shouldered by those who believe it necessary to follow the vaticans' ridiculous edicts. Isn't it time the human race grew up and put this nonsense behind us??

More intresting trivia

Some interesting scientific and historical items I picked up in recent readings:

1. CHARLIE CHAPLIN:  Apparently Charlie once came in third in a Charlie Chaplin Look-alike contest in Monte Carlo.

2. WHO REALLY FLEW FIRST?  Contrary to popular opinion, the Wright Brothers were not the first to achieve powered flight. The first was, apparently, a Frenchman, Clement Adler, who flew a powered craft some 50m. (Some 13 years before the Wright Brothers).  The Wright Brothers were the first to achieve controlled powered flight. (true to form, whatever an American invents is, naturally, the more important than anything anyone else may invent).
   However, the Wright Brothers were apparently, (and I haven’t confirmed this), the first to realize that the propeller is in fact a rotating wing, and as such it generates “lift” just as a wing does.  Therefore since the tips move faster than the inner part of the propeller blade, the pitch can vary throughout the length to even out the “lift” over the length of the blade.

 

3. THE FIRST VOICE BROADCAST:  The first voice modulated radio broadcast was made by a Canadian. Tom Edison had hired a Canadian physicist named Reginald Fessenden who, in 1897, wanted to experiment with broadcasting the human voice. Edison, however, discouraged him, saying that such a thing was less likely than man’s chances of jumping over the moon. Nevertheless, Fessenden made the first voice radio broadcast on Dec 23, 1900.

4. Lord Kelvin, while president of the Royal Society, proclaimed that “X-Rays will prove to be a hoax” and also that “Radio has no future”.

5. SCRATCHES ON CD's:  found out an interesting fact about CD’s.  I’ve always wondered why scratches don’t come through as pops or dropouts in the audio. The way it works is the two audio tracks are sampled 44,100 times per second each and the samples are turned into digital codes representing the amplitude of the sample. You would therefore expect that a scratch would ruin enough of the coded samples to cause either a dropout or a pop in the audio. It doesn’t.
   
   The reason why it doesn't is that the crafty buggers who designed it, realized that the samples don’t have to be put on the track sequentially….. they can, instead, be “interlaced” out of order so that a scratch that is wide enough to interfere with several codes in succession will in fact be spread out over several waveforms and will not be detectable.  They also, of course, included three error correcting bits in each sample which allow the reader to detect and sometimes to actually correct, an error. By the way, the track on a CD, starting from the inside, is actually about 3 ½ miles long and the speed of the disc changes from about 500 rpm to about 350 rpm at the outer edge so that the bits/second is constant.

6. COMPUTER CHIP LIFE:  Modern computer chips apparently have an expected life-span of about 5 years continual service.  There are three mechanisms responsible:
   ELECTROMIGRATION: which causes atoms in the metal to be swept along like pebbles in a stream to be deposited where they shouldn’t be.
   OXIDE BREAKDOWN: weak spots developing in the insulating oxide layer and causing shorts.
   HOT-CARRIER INTERACTION: where overenthusiastic electrons may punch through the oxide layer.
   Older chips with larger internal components can apparently last many decades.

7. SPAM:  The word “spam” representing junk e-mails, comes from a skit performed at the final Monty Python Flying Circus show of 1970 wherein they insert the word “spam” throughout the skit.

8. BALL POINT PENS: Do you know why ball point pens leak when they get wet?  Did you know that they do? Well, the reason is that when you finish writing the ink left on the ball immediately dries, form-ing a seal. If, however, the pen gets wet, the seal is broken and the ink leaks out.

 

9. SUPERGLUE: Apparently scientists are not really sure how superglue works. One theory is that it is because of “van der Waals” forces, which are forces between molecules resulting from the interaction of their polarities.  What they do know is that the cyanoacrylate (superglue) reacts with water to form long chains that coil around each other and bond together to form a hard resin. That’s why it sticks to skin so well and why it is used to detect fingerprints.

Now thats a spider

I have been digitizing a huge box of slides for an old friend (old meaning that he's 85) who spent a lot of time in the middle east in the sixties, and I ran across this slide:




Now if you look closely, it looks like a spider with ten legs and a pair of really wicked looking fangs.  Notice that the hand is keeping its distance.

Feeling that this warranted further investigation, I searched the web for desert spiders, thinking that if this thing really is a spider, then I have found absolute proof that God doesn't exist, since no rational being (I assume a god would be rational) would create such a thing.

It is (was) a spider. A Camel Spider to be exact (probably named that because they eat camels). I also found a site devoted to the little beasties:  camelspiders.net 

Furthermore, the one in the slide above IS A SMALL ONE, they can get to be 10 inches long.  Below is a more modern picture (from the site mentioned).  Now I know for sure there is no God.

By the way, they don't have ten legs. The two long things out front that look like legs are feelers of some kind.  They tell me (and I don't believe it for one minit) that they are relatively harmless.  However its rumoured that they can inject an anesthetic so that you don't feel them taking chunks of flesh out of you while you sleep. 

I'm never going to the Middle East.

The isolation of white phosphorus

Here's a little story that may appeal to those with a more twisted sense of humour.

Back in the summer of 1669 an alchemist named Henning Brandt, tried to make gold by heating a concoction of sixty buckets of human urine mixed with charcoal (do you know how long it takes to save up sixty buckets of piss?, I bet his wife could have told you).

Needless to say, the gold didn't materialize, but he did succeed in producing an entirely new material; white phosphorus. In fact this was one of the first elements to be isolated by chemical means.

Now white phosphorus reacts quite readily with oxygen and for that reason it is normally stored in water. As soon as it is removed from water, it begins to glow. If you remove enough from the water it bursts into flame. You can actually put some on your fingers and write with it.... it will glow for quite awhile. However, just increase the quantity slightly and you have fire. To quote Mr Brandt “'twill burn the place most dreadfully”.

Now Brandt was keen to find a use for this remarkable new material, and it's glow suggested medial applications to him, (I guess medications were different in those days) and it occurred to him that it just might be a handy cure for some sexually transmitted diseases. Whether he was so afflicted we don't know, but we do know that he tested his theory, and to quote him (and this is the punch line) : “If the privy parts be therewith rubb'd, they will be inflamed and burn for a good while after”.

That may well have been the forerunner of dispassionate understatement in scientific reportage.