OddThoughts

Wait! Before the religious jelots come attacking me with torches please allow me a moment to explain.

I’m not saying that the bible is wrong, or that it isn’t good, or even that God did not have a hand in it.

I’m saying it was written by human beings, beings which are imperfect, make mistakes and have a free will. Beings who form  committees to decide which of the words sound best and which need to be thrown out.

We know the bible was written by human beings; they in fact often name themselves (eg: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and of course the authors of the old testement, some of which are anonymous or use Pen names)

It is often argued, however, that the hands that wrote the bible were “guided” by the hands of God and are therefore his (or maybe her) words. Perhaps this is true but does not change the fact that it was written (and translated over and over by the hands of man (and women).

The first “law” of the universe (or law granted by God if you prefer) , is that humans are given “free will”. The ability to choose.

God would not take away that ability for any reason (hence explaining the reason that evil exists)

Free will also causes humans to intrepret, paraphrase, and adapt to information. So even if the almighty guided the hand of the authors of the bible, and deciding which parts to include and which to exclude, humans also had a part in this. They were not “zombies” only able to do the will of God.

And therefore; all those “errors” or “contridictians” that seem to appear are either

a) Mis-interpretations by the humans reading the words

b) Incorrect details recorded by the humans who wrote the words

Most likely, it is a combination of both. In a similar manner there are “so many different” religions again because humans have the ability to choose.

Inspired By:Weekend Philosophy: Alan Watts on Nothingness — Waxing Poetically: Addressing Culture with a Twist of Poetry

Any discussions involving nothing will immediately lead to a paradox yet for some reason we use the word nothing all the time. Those of you mathematicians out there, of which I certainly am not, have devised a nice mathematically representation of nothing which they call zero (0). Well could you please explain something to me? Okay by the definition of nothing (0) and the definition of 1. I will agree that 1 + 0 = 1. Which only makes sense, we are taught if Joe has 1 apple and I give him no apples (or take no apples from him) than Joe still has 1 apple. Even I, with my limited mathematical knowledge understand that, what I don’t understand is 1 X 0 = 0. I was told to memorize it since the third grade. The definition of X is to add the number (in this case 1) 0 times. If I put that into English I would be saying this: Joe has 1 apple and he never(0) adds no (0) apples to it so he now has no(0) apples. Okay, so I agree that 0 X 0 must be 0 because that statements says: I have nothing and I never add nothing to it at all (which is a double negative in English) so I still have nothing. By the mathematicians very words he eliminates a definition for never dividing nothing up. (0/0). From what I do know about mathematics everything must solve (0/0) since all objects of any kind X 0 = 0. All I’m saying is we base a great deal of mathematics on a paradoxal concept which even leads to error’s in English such as the above double negative. As a matter of fact a computer does not even understand this concept of nothing and will undoubtedly complain should I ask it to tell me (0/0). Calculators do the same thing.

Well I still didn’t tell you what nothing is have I? (that sounds like an interesting statement) When all else fails, when all idea’s have been exhausted, when thought breaks down into elementary concepts, and when we are absent from all we know to be TRUE what is left then is nothing.

You can’t touch it, you can’t smell it, you will never see it but it “exists” nevertheless. What is between any two objects in a vacuum? The moral is be VERY careful when using a concept such as nothing.

Okay the last concepts I wish to discuss is the word GOOD and the word RIGHT. These are two other concepts that the dictionary conveniently jumps around on. RIGHT I think I can easily define because I have already defined TRUTH. In this book what is RIGHT is what is held to be TRUE. Keep in mind that this means that RIGHT is as individual as TRUTH and it is not collectable as society might make it appear to be. We only make it appear so because we do function in a society and as such we must “bend” the “truth” so everyone will believe one thing is RIGHT and another is WRONG.

The concept of Good is a difficult one because it involves some emotional assumptions that won’t be discussed in detail until later in this book. An individual does GOOD when he/she commits an ACT believed to be RIGHT, also believing the consequence of that ACT to be RIGHT and furthermore having a “feeling” that the ACT benefits people as a whole. The “feeling” is the most important part of this definition because we “feel” Good when we do Good.

I hope your not bored with all this defining business but just look at it as bookkeeping so later on when you disagree with something I’ve said you can just go back to the definition and try and see it from my point of view. Of course you must agree with my definitions and I hopefully have convinced you of their validity. Here is the biggest application of my definition, which is the scope of this entire book. In other words if you skipped this entire chapter you should READ at least this part:

All knowledge in any form, whether spoken, written, acted, once it has ended you are left thinking. This is the key of a good story but after a while that thinking subsides and other things enter your mind. I want to leave you thinking with this book and continue thinking the rest of you life this is DOW. The end result of all knowledge is the same if we think about it long enough. From Stephen Hawking, to All My Children, to Sesame Street. They all DO the same thing. They all invoke thought and when we invoke thought we open up worlds which otherwise would never be possible.

Well I hope you can see how one definition can spawn a number of different things about life. I should stress that I am not saying we should let everyone out of prison just because they’ll promise to be good. However when a person really does believe they can feel remorse…when they really do feel it of there own accord and when they are prepared to re-enter society then those people deserve the a chance to start over because those are the people who will not go back to prison and those are the people who have earned it. It just takes some longer than others.

It is a well believed myth that we live in 3 Dimensions. If you want to know the location of any object you can give things such as Latitude, Longitude, and Elevation which should pinpoint the object(at least on the earth; there are equivlent names for the universe as well)

Of course this is a false assumption.  We live in a word of 4-Dimensions, the 4th being, of course time. We don’t often consider time as a dimension. If I ask my wife “Where did I put my wallet?”, she doesn’t have to tell me the location (X, Y, and Z)  and the time, since the time is assumed to be “now”

If I could time travel though, It mike make sense ask, where was my wallet yesterday? or where will my wallet be tommorow?

4 Dimensions can be a tricky thing to get your mind around and first glance to some it sounds paradoxical. It can also cause questions of free will. Is the future already determined? Are we not able to change it?  What keeps me from killing my parents in hte past and thus prevening myself from being born, but then how could I have time travelled in the first place?

The best analogy for understanding 4 Dimensions is actually a simple computer game cartridge/DVD game. Think of you favorite computer/console game.

If you hold the game in your hands, you can see it look at it touch it. Now imagine you are a being existing outside of hte normal 3 Dimensions.  Although you are unaware of the “outcome” of the game. This is the 4th Dimension, all that is needed for all the possible outcomes is present within that cartridge. There is no ‘magic’ to it. It’s all just a bunch of bits and bytes, that when played (when experianced) flow in time.

You see once you decide to play the game you switch your point of view. Now longer are you looking in 4 Dimensions, you now “experiance time” and there fore switch from a 4 Dimensional view to a 3 Dimensional view.

This is related, in a similar manner to the idea that the “observer” effects the expirement simply by watching it. (see: The Plausibility Agrument )

Do you remember back in high school, the debate, is light a particle or a wave? Why does it seem to have both properties?  Same problem, and it is no coincidence, for things that can move at the speed of light. Sub-atomic particles for instance essentially “exist” in 4 Dimensions, and therefore when observed, we are only observing from a 3 Dimensional point of view so they don’t exactly “behave” normally.

I hear this said all the time by people. Joe got diabetes because he was overweight. If he wasn’t overweight he would not have gotten it.

It causes a dangerous stigma amongst fellow diabetes like myself and is a mis-conception that I would like to clear up.

The facts:

There are 2 types of diabetes (aka Diabetes Mellitus - Sugar Diabetes)

TYPE 1 DIABETES

This is the ‘uncommon’ form (and happens to be the kind that I have). We have to take daily injections of insulin because our body is no longer producing insulin. Type I usually occurs at birth or when very young and is sometimes known as juvenile diabetes. Although it doesn’t always. In my case I was diagnosed with Type I at age 18

Type II Diabetes

This is the more common well known one that is often associated with obesity. For type II Diabetes their body does make insulin, but it does not use it effectively. So they usually need to take medication (pills) or sometimes insulin injections as well to control it.

Type I diabetics have no relationship to obesity at all. The pancreas is broke and doesn’t work (there are various theories why this is). You can’t control it without insulin . You are dependant upon insulin injections to survive.

For the Type II diabetic the more weight you have; the harder it is to control your diabetes because the effectiveness of insulin is highly related to your body weight. Some Type II diabetics can even have a normal life without any medication simply by keeping your weight low.

So if you have diabetes then keep your weight low is very important to your overall health

The effectiveness of insulin in your body is dependant upon your weight. The more you weigh, the less effective the insulin is. This is true regardless of weather or not you are diagnosed as diabetic or not.

Just like every other organ in your body; everyone’s pancreas is a bit different, some do a better job then others. If you have a weak pancreas as you gain weight your body cannot use the insulin effectively, and your pancreas is unable to keep up with the demand.

If you are born with a weak heart and you try to run a marathon, you might have the same problem.

So now imagine that floating over everyone’s head in the world is a is a number. Everyone’s number is different and no one knows what the number is. If a person gains more weight then this number, their pancreas will not be able to keep up, the level of sugar in the blood will rise and if the go to the doctor they will get a diagnosis of diabetes.

So gaining wait did not cause diabetes as much as it allowed you to ‘discover’ your diabetes. The problem was always present; you just didn’t know it until you gained too much weight.

Statistically speaking, if we were to graph everyone’s number it would probably form a normal distribution, there will be a few people with very low numbers (who will show diabetes at low weights), and a few people with high numbers (who would have to gain like 5,000 pounds before they had a problem). But most of us fall somewhere in the middle, such that somewhere around say 350-400 pounds we would start to see the problem.

As we get older the pancreas (just like other organs) don’t work as well, so your “number” decreases with age. So you may have been fine at 250 pounds at 25 years old, but this weight may become a problem at 50.

So in conclusion, obesity does not cause diabetes, it is not even a risk factor for diabetes. It simply allows you to ‘discover’ the problem and learn what your ‘number is’. That’s why you may heard it said that it is suspected that over 1 million people may have diabetes but half of them don’t know it yet, because they have not yeat reached their number.

And when the statistics show that an increase in obesity co-relates to in increase in diabetes. It just means that more and more people as they gain wait are learning what their own ‘personal’ numbers are.

Don’t agree with me?

Okay, here’s your challenge! Find me some documented scientific evidence (not some half brained theory) that proves obesity causes damage to your pancreas, and only then will I change my mind.

As an example, we know that as you gain weight by eating high cholesterol foods, a substance known as plaque builds up in your veins and arteries, which eventually causes blockages and leads to heart attacks and strokes; and therefore obesity is a causal factor for heat disease.

If you don’t brush your teeth, plaque will also build up there, which will cause tooth decay.

There is no known substance or condition that occurs when you are obese that causes damage to your pancreas!!!! If you think you can find one please let me know.

Hope this helps clarify things once and for all !!

I don’t know if you realized it or not but in my definition of truth I automatically assume that the person(s) believing a truth have the freedom to do so. There are many people who would argue that this is not the case and would state that everything either is Determined or PRE-Determined. Interesting enough some of these people still believe that there is Freedom they just choose to interpret it in a different way. Let’s consider another example: Your walking down the street and suddenly you feel hungry and decide to go to Tim Horton’s for a bite to eat. You don’t stop to think for one moment that you don’t have any choice because feel that should you decide to change your mind and go somewhere else you are free to do so. The argument held by some people is that this feeling of freedom is purely imagined. Now here comes the fun part, let’s apply TRUTH to FREEDOM. If we imagine freedom, freedom is TRUE because we believe it to be so and that is all that matters according to my definition. Ah hah ! There you have it…some more “common knowledge”

Would you like to know why I am so fond of these words “common knowledge” ? Back when I was in elementary school, the fifth grade to be exact, I was told to do a project on the tongue. Well what I did was look the word tongue up in the dictionary and then I elaborated on this one definition with diagrams of taste buds and elaborate words, it was a very impressive project. My fifth grade teacher, Mr. Murphy, came up to me and asked, “Where did you get all the information for you project?”. I bet you can guess what I said, “Common Knowledge”. That’s what it was and I suppose that’s when I learned the power of those two words. I did get strange looks from the teachers when I responded with that answer in case your interested.

“Universal Truth is imaginary”

What exactly did I mean by that anyway? Well if TRUTH is subject to what an individual believes to be true, I should stress at this point that you really must believe it and not just SAY you believe it (there’s a BIG difference), the individual must therefore have a personal truth which is different from other’s personal truths since it is widely recognized that no two people see the same thing the same way. You may think in your mind that everyone believes that “X” is true when in fact only you believe “X” is true while the next person believes “Y” or “XX” or “X” only when “Y” is true.

There are a few other definitions I should clarify in this chapter before going on to Chapter 2. If you look these definitions up in the dictionary (and I urge you to try it) you will find that they wind up leading into complex definitions that tell you nothing at all. Truth is one such definition - probably something like “faithful to fact or reality”. Doesn’t that tell you a lot? Some definitions even say “not false”. Being the type of guy I am I immediately looked up false and found “contrary to truth”. Isn’t the dictionary wonderful!

There has been some recent attention to the idea of ‘disclosure badgets’ and disclosure policies for bloggers.

The basic principle being that if you are reporting on information about products and services, and if you are being paid for such postings/endorsements that you should disclose this information.

This got me thinking about traditional media, and yes, they have various codes of ethics they must follow when reporting stories where their information may be biased. However, let us not forget, that the news is not just out there to inform but to also entertain.

Interesting news sells newspapers, and advertising. Journalists, reporters only get *credit* for stories that will sell. So if your story has a specific spin, and that spin is popular (in the web world we might say “viral”. Then you are recognized for it.

But this too affects objectivity. The media might tie together otherwise unrelated stories and activites in an attempt to put a certain ’spin’ on a story to make it more interesting.

Let us consider media attention given to several stories regarding poor quality products being shipped from China. If we weave all these stories together we end up with a pretty poor picture of China, causing people to wonder, should be be buying anything from this country?

Then add to this recent calls to boycott China products due to the treatment of Tibet, again asking people to stop buying items from China.

Now I’m not saying China is perfect, no country is, I’m just asking folks to consider that there is more to these stories then meets the eye? Could somone / some group be pulling the puppet strings here?

I once had a link to an interesting post (well I thought it was interesting anyway). It was called ” SOA as an evolution of ideas and practices” by the SOARanch.

I was completely disappointed this great informative site is now nothing but a bunch of hard core sex pics and fantasies. What has happened?

Would most people rather go look at some naked pictures of male anatomy and perverted pictures then to read a post about service oriented architecture? Perhaps the next frontier in web based software?

So I keep very careful track of the sites that I link to, and within 2 days of the site switching to this sex site (no one told me by the way), the hits to the site increased over 1000% (yes that 4 zeroes). Am I the only one disgusted by this?

Well I’ve change the link, now it points to this post! So all you perverted folks when you find the page will hit this page, and probably be disappointed (keep it in your pants !)

Service Oriented Architecture is fancy phrase made up by computer scientists and/or engineers. Like other worlds by the league of extraordinary geeks and nerds it has been shorted to the acronym (SOA).

It is in fact, nothing new, and is simple an evolution of the existing concepts from Object Oriented Programing (OOP) Distributed Computing (DCOM). The basic idea is quite simple, use the web to enhance the notion of computing and applications over the network, using fancy terms such as XML and “web services”

Instead of everyone writing their own “private” web solutions to existing backend databases, what if everyone followed an established standard; and then everyone’s programs could communicate with one another using this standard. In fact this blog, the xml behind it and things like pings and trackbacks are an excellent example of how this all works.

Well anyway, I thought this was all pretty cool, and if you still want to see some of the old “SOA Ranch” you can check it out on the good old Internet Archive Way-back machine here :

http://web.archive.org/web/20080211121640/www.soaranch.com/what-is-the-soa-ranch/

And for those of you disappointed perverts who were so bored they couldn’t wait 2 minutes to read this interesting post, this is the closes “dirty” pictures you’ll get to see:

The only dirty picture you’ll get here is something like this:

Dirty Pictures? | Funny Jokes at JibJab

Now stop being so dirty minded !