I read the following quote at “The price of everything” blog:

“You couldn’t get a clue during the clue mating season in a field full of horny clues if you smeared your body with clue musk and did the clue mating dance.” – Edward Flaherty.

I can’t wait to find someone to insult.

Chopsticks are great - until you get to that last bit of food at the bottom of the bowl that is. Then you’re left trying to turn a pair of round sticks into a spoon. They’re not so good with soup, or steaks. Maybe the satisfaction of eating with chopsticks is simply the extra effort needed to get food to mouth without detouring to table.

I’m a big fan of the “hard” science fiction genre - sci fi that attempts to visualize what life will be like in the distant future, by extrapolating from current scientific knowledge. Authors like Greg Egan, Richard Morgan, Alastair Reynolds, and Neal Stephenson.

I love the following quote by Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal and professor of cosmology, and astrophysics at the University of Cambridge:

“I’d like to widen people’s awareness of the tremendous timespan lying ahead — for our planet, and for life itself. Most educated people are aware that we’re the outcome of nearly 4bn years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun’s demise, 6bn years from now. Any creatures that exist then will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.”

Wow! Think how complex we are now, and consider that homo sapiens probably evolved about 2 million years ago, and I think that we are evolving at a faster rate now than we ever have in the past. Also we are evolving ourselves, with body modifications, brain modifications, and tools. I find it hard to imagine what we are going to be like in 1000 years, let alone 6 billion years!

“I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” - Stephen Henry Roberts

“He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice.” - Albert Einstein

“All models are wrong but some are useful.” - George Box

“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.” - Epictetus
Note that there is also a great Zen story about this idea.

“I am rarely happier than when spending entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.” - Douglas Adams

I know I’ve been posting on religious issues fairly frequently recently. Been watching Richard Dawkins of The God Delusion fame, talking at Lynchburg. Want to test the consistancy of your beliefs? Try Battleground God. But maybe you’re too stupid to be an athiest?. Dilbert’s creator Scott Adams has a blog entry talking about the Pope in Turkey. Funny.

So I was at our morning programmer’s coffee and the topic of religion drifted onto the agenda. We started talking about how much misinterpretation of hebrew scriptures has made it into religious doctrine. The Virgin Mary… I mean, come on! Married and still a virgin? Apparently the word for “virgin” and “maiden” are pretty similar, if not the same. Check out the Wikipedia entry for more details. Anyway, there’s a pretty funny video on YouTube which is an animation based on how ridiculous a literal translation of the Book of Job is. Check it out!