Category: Random Thoughts

The general category for posts on this blog.

Evolution Revolution

Random Thoughts

Intelligent Design isn’t the stupidest idea to ever be put forward, but its got unique issues of its own. See, the Theory of Evolution that is taught in schools today is not the original theory proposed by Charles Darwin. It bears similarities, but over the year as science has been able to find evidence the theory has been tweaked. Evolution doesn’t deny God. It’s still quite possible that the series of events, of mutations, that we perceive as Evolution is actually a brilliantly designed plan of God that is unfolding over millions of years. There is plenty of room for God in Evolution.

Intelligent Design, on the other hand, holds that some facets of living creatures, like the eye for example, are so complex that they could not have evolved through the course of millions of years of mutation, but had to have been created “as is” by some force outside or greater than the Universe. While Evolution can prove that small mutations occur and can trace genetics through many generations of an animal, Intelligent Design can’t prove that “stuff just happens”… unfortunately, it can’t be disproven either until someone builds a time machine and goes back to see if eyes evolved or if they just showed up.

That is my problem with Intelligent Design… it wants to be science, but because its core theory cannot be in any way proven by the scientific method, its supporters strive to redefine science to allow Intelligent Design to fit. That’s exactly was Kansas did… their school board redefined science to allow for more than just natural and observable phenomenon to be included. The caveat here is that by doing so they have technically opened the door for ghosts, and leviathan elder gods, and more to be considered perfectly good science. Essentially, what they have done is allowed non-falsifiable (things that are impossible to be shown as being false) theories to stand. Part of the scientific method is that your theory has to be either true or false, it has to be defined such that if a given condition arrises, the theory will fail. Intelligent Design doesn’t have that, at least without time machines… If, one day, a new organ appears in an animal that cannot be linked to mutation, then ID is correct. However, if no new organ ever shows up from now until the end of time, ID might still be correct. There is no event that can occur under which the result is that ID is false.

Over at the University of Kansas, a few teachers have decided that enough is enough, and are putting together a new class to study the mythology of Intelligent Design. And its were it belongs… One day Zeus might show up proving that the old Greek myths were correct, but if Zeus never shows up it doesn’t prove them false. That’s what myths are, things believed to be true but utterly unfalsifiable. Intelligent Design belongs in religious study, it belongs at church, until such time as they revise their “theory” to allow for the possibility that its wrong.

9 0 2 1 Oh no you didn`t!

Random Thoughts

Just about every Tuesday I can be found down at the North River Tavern (formerly Taco Mac By The River) matching wits with the trivia gods… or at least having some food and drink and conversation while playing trivia for house cash. We do fairly well, our team, winning one of the three cash prize places every couple of weeks. Winning third place nets you $20, and its almost worse than winning nothing… splitting the money five or six ways barely takes a bite out of the bill. Second place at $40 is better, but first place at $60 is where its really worthwhile. Food and a soda will run you $10 at the tavern, so a five or six man split on the winnings means you eat for free and only pay for alcohol. It works out well for the waitress too, with $10 to $15 less to have to spend it means each person will be tossing in an extra couple bucks into the tip pile, quickly pushing a 20% tip into the realm of 40% or better.

Thursday nights, the North River Tavern runs trivia again, and sometimes we go. While Tuesdays is sort of a ‘General Knowledge’ type trivia with all sorts of categories, Thursdays is theme night. Well, this week’s theme was ‘Beverly Hills 90210’. Some of our team didn’t make it, not being thrilled about the topic, but I’ll admit I watched the show… 6 of the 7 seasons anyway, I got bored of it at the end. The show was fun to laugh at.. the plots were ridiculous, and the only person worth rooting for was David Silver. For some reason Brian Austin Green’s character just had this underdog quality that made you want to see him overcome his hardships and win a little bit… everyone else on the show you wanted to see tortured and burning in hell because 99 times out of 100 their problems were their own damn fault and never should have happened to begin with.

Anyway, our team, three members strong, managed to get first place. Woohoo! Go us! Of course, we aren’t complete 90210 geeks or anything, out of a possible 1120 points, we snagged first place with a whopping 220. So no, we aren’t the biggest geeks in the world, but we were the biggest geeks to show up Thursday for trivia at the North River Tavern.

All Hallow`s Eve

Random Thoughts

The Halloweens of my childhood are dead.

This may not seem like a great revelation considering that I’m 31, but it is sad to me to think it, to realize that it is really gone. First off, lets begin with the costumes. As a child, it was rare for a kid to have a 100% store bought packaged costume. You never did that. You bought pieces and parts, then you took some old clothes and made the rest. A vampire costume was some fake plastic teeth, some fake blood, maybe some white face paint and a cape… the rest of the outfit was made of dressy church clothes with hidden holes or that were a half size too small and were going to be tossed out or donated anyway. My personal favorite year was a pair of jeans, a white t-shirt, and a pair of scissors… some fake blood, a little black face paint around the eyes and I was a pretty kickass zombie. Too many kids these days just go to the store and pick up a costume. Then one by one they come to door looking exactly alike, the same couple dozen or so popular costumes over and over.

Second… it’s 5pm right now, the sun is still shining quite brightly, and already I’ve seen kids out in costume. Its still daylight… trick-or-treating is supposed to happen after dark! As a kid, we never started until the sun had set. Not that there are many kids out, because most of them are going to be doing their trick-or-treating at the local mall, where its completely safe. Of course, to a degree I can’t argue… when I was young, my parents taught me pretty well about avoiding strangers and I was required to know all the local streets, how to get home, to trusted neighbor’s houses, and even to the nearest police or fire department should an emergency arrise. It was called parenting, and my parents did it. Most kids I’ve bothered to speak to these days can hardly find their front door from a half block away, let alone be trusted to actually think too much for themselves and reason out how to handle an unexpected situation. In my day, if a sicko tried to snatch a kid from a group, the other kids would run screaming, parents would be swarming the street in seconds… now, I suspect most kids would stand there and wonder if it was going to be on the news later, and it might dawn on one of them to tell a grown-up what happened if they knew they were going to be rewarded for it. Not that many of today’s parents would ask, or care, or even realize their child was gone until it came time to send them to school the next day… maybe.

Third, no one decorates anymore. I do, we put up monsters and spiderwebs and all that stuff in the front window. (Hey, I’d decorate my lawn but I live in an apartment and I don’t have one.) But one window out of a few hundred just ends up looking silly. The neighborhoods I grew up in, they had style. Frontyards became graveyards. Eerie music would poor out ever time a door opened. You actually approached each house with apprehension because you didn’t know if it was just going to be a person with a bowl of candy, or a monster to jump out at you and toss candy in your bag if you could manage not to run away. One year, when I started feeling a bit old to actually go out for candy, I worked the door at our house. I dressed up in some jeans and an old flannel shirt, I put on a mask and stuffed pine straw into my clothes so that it poked out at the ankles, wrists, neck and waist… then I sat on the front step with the bowl of candy in my lap and a little sign that said “Take One”. I stayed as motionless as I could, and some kids were scared to approach, but if they did I stayed still for them… but the ones who walked right up and tried to take a handful of candy instead of just one, them I grabbed, by the wrist, and held on as they tried to run away screaming. Once they’d wrench free and I’d get back up, these teens would stop crying and compose themselves and start laughing about who just got scared, and they’d resolved to find someone else and send them this way, and I’d assure them I’d be there.

And that leads into number Four… Haunted Houses. I love them… or I used to. The last few that I’ve been to though, they just sucked. Too crowded, we walked single file through the house, never more than five feet from the person in front or behind, and every scare was anticipated. If they jumped out at someone a few people ahead, they wouldn’t be reset to jump out at you, and if you watched seven people walk past corner or dark spot without a scare you could be pretty sure it was waiting for you. Thanks to the cry babies and sue happy idiots in our litigious world, they can’t touch you. Not that I want people in a haunted house to get man-handled, but part of what is frightening about a guy in a hockey mask coming at you is the idea that he’s going to get you! Of course, if he’s legally not allowed to come into contact with you in any way, it’s not too worrysome anymore. He may be running out you, but he’s going to stop… he has to or he’ll lose his job, and you can sue the haunted house right out of existance.

That about covers it… everything that I loved about Halloween has been eroded and what remains is this bizarre 100% safe commercial holiday that some people still oppose of religious grounds despite the fact that nearly everything one might oppose has been stripped.

Happy Halloween!

Covered in a White Sheet

Random Thoughts

Yesterday, on my way to work, there was traffic. Lots of it. As usual, I guessed there was an accident, and there was. Normally when I get stuck in traffic, by the time I reach the area of the accident the most I ever see is the last of the tow trucks pulling away. Yesterday was different.

The bus crested the hill and we could see the cop cars, the ones that had been passing by us for the last twenty minutes. The road is five lanes, two each direction with a turn lane in the center, and the cops have three lanes, the two southbound and the turn lane, closed and are routing traffic through the two remaining lanes. As we approach, I notice that there aren’t any tow trucks, no fire engine, no wrecked cars. As we pass, I see trails of blood on the street, and human sized white lump with tennis shoes sticking out of it. The white sheet is stained with red in places, and the shoes are pointing in directions that two feet on the same person shouldn’t be pointing at the same time. There was a truck and a couple of cars pulled over, and there was a man, the truck driver from his dress, sitting on the curb crying. About a dozen cop cars were around, and everyone was waiting for the ambulance or the coroner to show up. And then we passed and continued down the road on our route.

I assumed that the truck had hit a pedestrian, since he was the one who was crying and being consoled by officers, but I wanted to know what happened. So I started to search the web… all the local news channel sites I could find… nothing. It seems that there was another accident earlier that morning in the Atlanta area, a 19 year old kid who was drunk or high was on the wrong side of the road and killed a woman in a head on collision. I found lots of stories on that, but none on the accident I can seen the aftermath of. Finally I did find something, on Scan Gwinnett, a website where they scan police and emergency freqencies and post stories and recordings. It turns out the truck had nothing to do with it… however, the pedestrian had been crossing the street and was hit by three cars. Police are still investigating, and so far no one has been charged, and they don’t know why the man was crossing the street there and not at one of the nearby lighted intersections.

I’d never actually seen a dead body not in a coffin before, technically I guess I still haven’t since I only saw shoes and a white sheet, and the whole thing kinda creeped me out. I felt sad even though I didn’t know the guy or any of the drivers, and I also felt angry because it was his own damn fault for not crossing at the light. And today I feel… differently sad, because this guy died and three people will live with having hit him, and lots of people saw the accident and the aftermath, but it wasn’t important enough to rate coverage by any of the local news stations. I mean, I can understand having to pick and choose what stories get airtime in the limited broadcast, but there is no limit on a website. Did none of their reporters even cover it? Was a story even written?

Zombies on Mass Transit

Random Thoughts

Ever seen the movie ‘Shaun of the Dead’? The scenes in the beginning when he’s riding the bus and all the people around him have this eyes-glazed-over look to them? That’s what my ride to work is like every day. More than ninety percent of the people just sort of sit there, lost in their own thoughts, or perhaps not having any thoughts at all. That means that less than ten percent of the people, less than one in ten, is listening to music or reading or talking. Even then, some of the people who listen to music do what I call “listening to secret music” … see, on my MP3 player, I have only songs that I like, songs that make me smile, tap my foot, bob my head, mouth the words… good music. Lots of these other people, they either have only music that they don’t like, or they’ve been socially shamed into not drawing any attention to themselves or showing any emotion at all. Except for the tinny sound escaping their headphones, you’d mistake them for the one who are just sitting there lost in their lack of thoughts.

This all leads me to another issue… I’ve been having dreams lately, pretty much every night… Zombies. Running through zombie infested cities, holding off the horde from a mall or a Wal-Mart, surviving against the odds. In my conscious life I find myself wondering, if it really happened, if zombies really did start to emerge and the world went to hell, would I survive as well as I do in my dreams? Would I be the movie hero, or would I end up being another mindless creature prowling for flesh? I’d like to think I’d be a survivor.

So I find myself wondering as I ride the bus, if these people, the ones with no emotion, eyes unfocused and slack-jawed, were to suddenly turn and begin the tell-tale zombie moan, how would the story end? My daydreams echo my night, and I stand on the MARTA train, never sitting, never letting myself get lazy, and I imagine a disturbance at the far end of the car, screams, blood, and I pull the emegency brake cable and I open the door and drop to the ground running, or I yank hard on the loose hand rail and lay in with skull crushing blows on the ‘infected’. And I smile, and the music plays a soundtrack to the destruction, and I tap my foot and I bob my head and I mouth the words, and I rejoice that I’m not one of those people… the living dead, slack-jawed and mindless, shuffling off to work the grind, shuffling home to rest up for the next day.

Homeland Security

Random Thoughts

Since 9/11 I’ve been through security at the Atlanta airport a few times. People are so desensitized to it now that its automatic, when you approach the metal detectors and xray machines you take off your shoes and place them on the conveyor belt. People practically strip just to avoid getting hasselled. So I went to the airport yesterday with a certain expectation… and an expired driver’s license.

Now, my birthday was the 10th and I had just completely forgotten to renew it. So I got stopped and then turned away. They sent me to a desk to argue my case and see if they’d be willing to stamp me through. They didn’t.

However, the guy standing next to me had a different problem. His name was Steve Johnson, but his ticket was in the name William Hawkins. (Names have been changed to protect the innocent.) So Steve begins to unravel his story… His name used to be William Steve Hawkins, but he doesn’t like the name William so he’s always gone by Steve. As a child, he was adopted, Hawkins is their last name. He didn’t get along with them, and a few years ago he sought out his biological parents, and found them, they were named Johnson. He’s made a good relationship with them and last year he had his named legally changed to Steve Johnson. Now comes the silly part, as if its not silly enough. Steve’s wife (still named Hawkins) booked his flight for him, using a credit card that was still in his old name. So his driver’s license says Steve Johnson, but his credit card and his ticket say William Hawkins. And they let him through.

So the lesson here is, if I had had someone elses driver’s license or someone elses ticket and a good story, I could have gotten on the plane. But since I had my own expired license, I’m a security risk.

Goodbye VCRs, Hello Medusa!

Random Thoughts

Sometimes I really hate the Television Networks. They seem to insist of fighting head to head instead of spreading out all over the week. Every fall season, its inevitable that of the roughly fifteen hours of TV I want to watch it all airs in the real space of about 4 or 5 hours, meaning that quite often two, three, or even four shows are on at once. Seeing as how I pretty much hate having commercials interrupt my TV shows, I tape everything and watch it later to allow fast forwarding, which also allows me to make plans any night of the week because I’m always taping anyway. One of my VCRs decided to start dying on me… crinkling tapes causing me to miss shows when they didn’t record, and its tuner started making things fuzzy… so I went looking to buy a new VCR. No one really makes VCRs much anymore, and what I really wanted was a dual tuner device so I could finally pick up that fourth show some nights (I only had three VCRs)… they don’t make those. Even these new devices with a VCR and a DVR in them only have one tuner (you can’t record on both the VCR and the DVR from two different channels at once). After a long search, I finally just gave up and started looking for a complete alternative.

I thought about going with a Windows XP Media Center Edition based PC since I know a couple of people that have them and love them, but the price seemed to be a bit much, and it only legitimately supports two tuners. Of course, you can hack it to handle as many as you want, but reports are pretty consistant that Microsoft programmed their usual bloat and once you get the 4th or 5th simultaneous recording going it pegs the processor (which shouldn’t happen, since any decent TV tuner card actually has its on encoding processor on it and doesn’t use the CPU at all) and starts chugging, causing any number of problems, unless you spend a huge amount of money on a monster machine that can handle all that. Pricey. Then I stumbled on Medusa.

Well, really its SnapSteam Media’s software, but they titled this particular setup of 6 tuner joy after the fabled gorgon killed by Perseus. I followed their recommendations, built a $500 PC (could have been cheaper, but I wanted a special case that looked like a media component and not a PC) with the exception of a 320GB drive instead of a 40 (a nice 130 hours of storage on the “Better” quality setting), and SATA-150 instead of ATA-100; and bought the Medusa pack with the 3 dual tuner cards instead of 6 single tuners. And yesterday I successfully recorded 6 programs at once. Now, with the SnapStream Beyond TV software set up to record all new episodes of all my favorite shows, I’ll never need to set a timer again.

So, like the title says… Goodbye VCRs, goodbye video tapes, goodbye setting timers on multiple units and watching TV schedules like a hawk for unexpected changes, and goodbye pain in my ass… Hello 21st Century, and hello Medusa!

NASA and the Moon

Random Thoughts

I’ve always loved the space program. I’ll watch any movie or documentary on the subject, and I’ve done many a school report on both its successes and its failures. I want us, the human race, to get out there iin the Universe and travel. As a step to that, we, NASA that is, is planning on going back to the Moon.

Now, this is one point where I disagree with lots of people as I don’t think we should go to the Moon. For one, there really isn’t anything there. Sure, we might be able to put a base up there, but it will be about as self sufficient as a space station, only much further away and more expensive to travel to. Second, going out into space, seeking out new life and new civilizations and stuff, we need to get over our reliance on Earth based launches. See, in space, you don’t need aerodynamics much… a brick flies as well as anything else in a vacuum. So, in my opinion, we should be focused on building three things… Cargo launch rockets, large capacity as efficient as possible to punch through the atmosphere and take supplies to orbit; Lander crafts, nice aerodynamic space planes for taking people in and out of the atmosphere; and Flying Bricks, for hauling cargo and lander crafts across the universe, built in space and never intended to enter atmosphere. But forget all that, and lets just stick to NASAs “the Moon is the key to space travel” idea.

They unveiled their plan… Apollo on steroids. They put up the lander module in space with one launch, then launch the crew capsule with crew later, dock in space and head to the moon. Fine, sounds like a nice plan, and they’ll be on the Moon by 2018. They plan on sending unmanned probes to the Moon to do some scouting too, in 2008 and 2011… and this is where I have a problem.

We’ve got these rovers on Mars. We launch them from here, rocket them to Mars and land them, and now we have these little motorized dune buggy science robots roaming around the planet looking at cool shit. Its a good design… so, why not just adapt the existing Mars lander probes to do stuff on the Moon? Are they saying its going to take over 2 years to build a Mars lander? Or are they going to needlessly go back to the drawing board and start from scratch?

We should have a Moon lander in less than a year, period, end of discussion… why? Because, given what we’ve been able to learn about Mars using the landers, we’d probably be able to tell if its even possible to build a functioning base on the Moon and we won’t have to wait until 2018.

One of the issues with living on the Moon will, of course, be oxygen. One of the cool things about the Moon is that there is already oxygen there, in the rocks. I know it sounds funky, but one of the more common substances on the Moon is called ilmenite which is made of Iron, Titanium and Oxygen. Currently there is a contest going on, like the X-Prize they did for putting a man in space, where the object is to design a functioning process to extract the oxygen from the rocks. This is also why we need a probe on the moon within a year, to make sure we can do it, because in two or three years we will need to be sending unmanned robot vehicles with test equipment to see if it really works on the Moon. I’d hate for us to design and test, on Earth, a process for making oxygen just to get to the Moon in 2018 and find out that it doesn’t work out there. Now, maybe this is what they are planning for the 2008 and 2011 probes, but they only mentioned searching for suitable landing places.

Anyway, enough from me… my main point here is that we already have the technology, why design the same stuff over again? Just rig up a Mars lander and get thee to the Moon already!

The Last Seat on the Bus

Random Thoughts

I ride the bus to work, and I really enjoy it. I get to read, or listen to music, all the while not having to worry about idiots in traffic. It doesn’t really take any longer than driving myself did, and with gas prices these days it’s a hell of a lot cheaper. At last tally, I’m saving myself over $200 a month by riding the bus. But there is one thing that bothers me…

I get on the bus as the main transit center, which means the bus is empty or near empty when I get on. Now, traditional society dictates that since all seats on the bus are in pairs, if you get on the bus and there is an open pair, you sit there before sitting next to someone else. Women are allowed a bit of leeway, it’s okay if they sit next to another woman instead of taking one of an open pair if she doesn’t want to risk sitting next to some random man later on. As the bus drives, we pick up more people, and always by the time we reach the transfer station to the train, the bus is full.

In the city of Atlanta, we have a large population of blacks and hispanics. So, its not unreasonable to believe that often I’m the only white guy on the bus. Sometimes there are a couple of white women, but not always. As a white guy, I also have a shaved head. My hair line is receeding, and I look awful when I grow my hair out, so I shave it because it looks better. I have a goatee. So, I’m a white guy with a shaved head and a goatee. I’m also a nice guy… I’ve got no visible tatoos, no scars, and I wear business casual clothes (polo shirt and khaki pants most days). I sit and read my book (science fiction, fantasy, classic literature, mysteries, the odd other book here and there) or I have my headphones on listening to MP3s from by PDA phone. Every single day, the seat next to me is the last one to get filled.

I don’t know what’s up… should I feel slighted? Discriminated against? I don’t stink, I’ve asked. And I’m not wearing any internationally recognized symbols of hatred. I’m just a guy reading a book and/or listening to music. And yet, once it gets down to the last seat available, the next person to get on the bus will look around, scanning the entire bus looking for a chance hidden seat, before finally fixing their face in a downtrodden look of defeat and resign themselves to being forced to sit next to me.

I just don’t get it.