#200!!!
Mood:  don't ask
Topic: Site Info
This is post number 200!!! Wow, can you believe it? 200 posts!!! I'm not going to do another review like I did at around 100, but just want to say that I've really enjoyed this blog so far. I really love the opportunity that you readers give me to write and get my thoughts out there and knowing that others are reading them. It really helps me to not only formulate my thoughts by writing them down, but to refine them since I know that others will actually be reading them.

Well, 200 posts over....approximately 71 days. That comes out to an average of 2.8 or 3 posts per day. That's not bad. It means that you can usually come here and enjoy at least 20 minutes and maybe even an hour each day of my writing and thoughts. Hehe, that makes me quite happy.

I can't wait for 300!

So, quick reminder - the first day was 2 Nov so go back there if you haven't read everything. I recommend that if you find yourself insanely bored for a few hours to go back to the beginning and read through again. And this time provide comments! q;o) Because I love comments.

Ok, the next post will be a Bible one unless there's nothing to write about in the particular passage. If I don't do that, then that's it for today (most likely) and I'll see you tomorrow.

check your email!!!
Mood:  sad
What do you do when you've poured your heart out in an email and want to make sure that the recipient reads it? If you have a blog that you know that they check, you tell them in that blog to check their emails so that they can know how you feel. So everyone else ignore what's next.

So, it's 2:21am Sunday morning and I just sent you an email. You know who you are for we just had a discussion that facillitated the need for the email. It took me half an hour to get everything out of my head onto that electronic ether so that I could get it to you. Please take the time to read it and take a peak into my mind. Just in case there was some hiccup in the email system I'll also be forwarding a copy to your school email.

just a quick post
Mood:  sad
I just wanted to get something in rather quick. I'm going to be busy most of the day tomorrow so I won't be able to make a post. Still, I didn't want to have another day without a post. If I get a chance I'll write more later.

Search Words, just one more time....
Mood:  quizzical
Topic: Site Info
I don't plan to do this all the time, but the words people used to get here ballooned compared to yesterday and I'm not quite sure why. So here they are:

The Following had one person each
28. hindman - I don't even remember writing this word....
27. earl - is this from when I wrote about National Security?
26. girls - I'm not sure I want to know what they were looking for when my site came up...
25. improvements - hmm....does this demonstrate how useless meta crawlers can be?
24. streaking - whoever followed this here was probably dissapointed...also, I wrote about this quite a long time ago
23. get - hmm...useless word to search if you ask me
22. pictures - good wiht my artwork
21. clearly - someone would search this word? They must have been doing like my and typing random words...
20. 4
19. with - another silly word to search
18. camel - probably from a bit of scripture
17. cause
16. city
15. mooning - another thing I wrote about a long time ago
14. sitcom
13. death - probably due to my Star Wars post
12. seen
11. face
10. rid - strange word to be searching...
9. home
8. sim
7. neighbor's - this is from the one about my mom
6. toe - when did I write this word?!?
5. this

The Following had two people each
4. cannons
3. parabolas - obviously 3 and 4 are related
2. the

This one had 3 people
1. of - OF?!?! they search the word OF? and the fact that it led 3 people here is kinda ridiculous

Well, no matter how you got here, I'm glad you came and hope you come back often! I have a post nearly every day!! (It's been every day except one since I went on vacation)

Artwork of the Day
Mood:  happy
Topic: Artwork


Face-Off
?2003 Eric Mesa @ drop the bomb productions

Enjoy, and for more artwork click on my Binary World link on the left there


A little about this piece: This picture is of a Hockey Game at Cornell University. It was shot with a Kodak 2.2 megapixel 3600DX camera. No editing was done except maybe some cropping

#195
Mood:  chillin'
Carol Mosley Braun: I think that her presidential bid is an exercise in futility. I applaud her for trying, but I think that we're a long way from a black woman becoming president. Everyone I ask says that they wouldn't vote for a female for president no matter what her ethnicity. So she has that against her to begin with. Interestingly enough, it's usually the girls that I ask that are so vehement about not voting for a woman. Additionally, although America has made some huge progress away from our racist roots, I really don't think that anyone who's not of European decent is ready to win that office. We're getting there, but I don't think it's going to happen. Hopefully she isn't spending too much money.

On God's Life as a Non-Temporal Being
Mood:  chatty
Topic: General Religion
Every once in a while I think about what it must be like to be a being such as God is who is outside of time. The fact that God is outside of time has a few ramifications. First of all, it means that God experiences everything in time at the same time. By being outside of time He knew the last thing that would ever happen at the same time that He knew the first thing that happened. It's very hard to get your head around it.

So I wonder, what does He do? Does He skip around? This means, also that He knows the outcomes of every action at the moment that the action begins. Does this mean that interventions ripple through to the end? Or does it mean that all of the interventions that were going to happen were built in at the beginning?

In the end, I don't know if that makes any difference. I think it takes someone like Einstein to actually understand what this means. I can't even begin to think about how thinking about things and God this way affect anything - if it does.

The only thing I can think of is whether it has to do with Free Will. I will probably make this another post, but it seems that for every example of free will in Christian philosophy there tends to be an example of determinism. Like I said, I'll probably talk about this in another post and I'll also bring in some non-Christian sources in my attempts to figure out just whether or not we have free will and whether it matters that we do. (not that I think it's possible that I'd solve the problem when dozens of lifetime philosophers were unable to, but perhaps I can get a little close? q;o) )

Come in Buck Rogers
Mood:  chatty
Now Playing: "Mars Forever" - Fantastic Plastic Machine (this is a song made of Marvin the Martian clips)
Topic: News
So aparently Bush is going to make an announcement next week about our space exploration intentions. His plan consists of first establishing a base on the moon and then using that to blast off towards a manned mission to Mars.

I'm not impressed. Ever since I was a kid I'd been told that by this time we'd have vacations on the moon and at least one other planet would be colonized. Even Robotech (Macross, etc) had us flying through space by now. So I'm not really impressed with out progress.

Another problem is that, unlike Kennedy he's not saying that we need to get this done by the end of the decade. No, no...I think he's saying that sometime in the next fifty years we should do this. That is so ridiculously bogus. Fifty years from now?!?! You won't be in office nor can you guarantee that your successors will follow in your footsteps. Perhaps they see it as a waste of resources.

Oh yeah! That reminds me that we're spending...what is it? $91 BILLION dollars on the war in Iraq and rebuilding Iraq. Just WHERE is the money for this space exploration going to come from? I certainly don't want the old folks in our society to go with less healthcare just so that we can build another terrorist target? a target that's extremely deadly because of how long it takes to get to the moon as well as the fact that you can't breathe or survive in space if something happens to your controlled environment.

Don't get me wrong, as an engineer and sci-fi fan I''d love nothing more than for us to begin to colonize other planets and our moon. But, is it feasible in today's world? I hope that one day we won't have to worry about that anymore.

Ah yes, High School
Mood:  chatty
Now Playing: "Ex-Girlfriend" - No Doubt
Topic: Dan
I was reading my younger brother,Dan's blog, and his post on people spreading rumors about him being with a girl got me all nostalgic about high school. Boy, it's only been 3 years since I left, but it seems like an eternity. I think that's because HS and College social interactions are so different. In HS everyone knows everyone else. My HS had a graduating class of 500 the year that I graduated and I knew about 80% of my classmates. That makes it quite easier for rumors to spread like fires used to back when people first started living in densely packed cities. Now at Cornell things are quite different. I don't know the majority of the kids in my own major, not to mention my graduating class. And of the people that I know and am good enough friends to hang out with, we barely see each other on campus. I could probably go an entire semester, and in fact, I know I have gone semesters not seeing people that I'd previously hung out with daily or weekly. Therefore things spread less quickly there. Also, rumors tend to be confined to your circle of friends so it's containable. Most people are in overlapping cliques, but these cliques form out of necessity so that one can have friends that he sees more than once a year. It's a form of ensuring social interaction with the same people on a fairly regular basis.

hehe...

Strange Sync
Mood:  happy
Topic: TM
It's a fairly common fact that analog systsems in the same room will sync up. You may have heard of the examples:
1) Place two grandfather clocks in the same room and wait a certain amount of time. After a while the pendulums will be swinging in sync with each other despite the fact that they were probably at different speeds before
2) Two women spend an inordinate amount of time together (best case - they live together) their menstrual cycles will sync up
and there are more examples, but I think you get the point. Well, a couple of days ago I was sitting on the couch doing some TM when suddenly I became aware of the fact that my breathing AND my heart rate had synched up with the clock that was ticking in the room. It was a very weird experience to hear my heart beat along with the clock AND to exhale and inhale to the beat as well. Then surprisingly even though I was away that it was going on, this continued for another few minutes before my awareness disrupted the connection. If anyone's every experienced something like that, don't hessitate to share your experiences.