My window seat...

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From RMStringer

Last week...Cheer contest

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Breakfast...Pecans!

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The Captian...

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Morality Play?

I live in America. It used to be at one time the greatest place on earth to live. Now Rape, Robbery, and Violence like Pastor John C. Hagee in San Antonio said one day; they are the norm on the TV and the Evening News. Is America the fabled Babylon? I think so. With the evening news being about Brittany Spears and her latest romp; where is the real news? We have a whole generation of little girls that want to be like her. We have a whole generation of boys dressing like they are from prison with the saggy pants that do not fit them. Urban music is the programming media for the next generation. The media is owned by corporations and they filter what we hear and see, only letting out what is in their best interest. The declining morals of our society have been occurring for many years but I think it can be traced to a critical point when Madalyn Murray O'Hair filed suit to stop prayer in school.

We used to be a God fearing society, that is no longer the case. The United Stated was founded on Biblical Principals and we have gotten away from them; it is expressed in the moral decay that we are experiencing in our society. With our nation being flooded by illegal immigrants and the business relocating to foreign countries, what will keep us afloat? Where else in the whole world can you go and have a baby and it become a citizen with all the benefits of a true American? Nowhere ELSE! I would go back to the isolationist principals of the early 1920s through the 1940s that lead us to another war. For if we do not look out for ourselves, then who will?

We were once the shining star in the world. Now no country, save a very small few, are our friends. We try to stand for all that is good and right but clearly fall on our faces. The level of decay we are facing is in my opinion paralleled only by Rome before its fall and decay. Where else in the world will more people vote for a singer on TV than will vote for the Presidential Elections? Only in a culture, so decadent as ours can that luxury be had. People use TV as a way to escape from their real duties. People use TV as a baby sitter instead of raising their children like in days past. TV is not the answer.

Do I claim to be any better? No, I struggle each and every day to make myself better and to try to rise above the quagmire of moral morass and decay that infest the country that we live in. I am no crusader like in the days of old. I am just one voice against the ever increasing wash of white-noise generated in cyberspace.

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Before a cold front...

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Neil deGrasse Tyson...Another Essay

The Perimeter of Ignorance
A boundary where scientists face a choice: invoke a deity or continue the quest for knowledge
by Neil deGrasse Tyson
From Natural History magazine — November 2005

Writing in centuries past, many scientists felt compelled to wax poetic about cosmic mysteries and God's handiwork. Perhaps one should not be surprised at this: most scientists back then, as well as many scientists today, identify themselves as spiritually devout.

But a careful reading of older texts, particularly those concerned with the universe itself, shows that the authors invoke divinity only when they reach the boundaries of their understanding. They appeal to a higher power only when staring into the ocean of their own ignorance. They call on God only from the lonely and precarious edge of incomprehension. Where they feel certain about their explanations, however, God gets hardly a mention.

Let's start at the top. Isaac Newton was one of the greatest intellects the world has ever seen. His laws of motion and his universal law of gravitation, conceived in the mid-seventeenth century, account for cosmic phenomena that had eluded philosophers for millennia. Through those laws, one could understand the gravitational attraction of bodies in a system, and thus come to understand orbits.

Newton's law of gravity enables you to calculate the force of attraction between any two objects. If you introduce a third object, then each one attracts the other two, and the orbits they trace become much harder to compute. Add another object, and another, and another, and soon you have the planets in our solar system. Earth and the Sun pull on each other, but Jupiter also pulls on Earth, Saturn pulls on Earth, Mars pulls on Earth, Jupiter pulls on Saturn, Saturn pulls on Mars, and on and on.

Newton feared that all this pulling would render the orbits in the solar system unstable. His equations indicated that the planets should long ago have either fallen into the Sun or flown the coop-leaving the Sun, in either case, devoid of planets. Yet the solar system, as well as the larger cosmos, appeared to be the very model of order and durability. So Newton, in his greatest work, the Principia, concludes that God must occasionally step in and make things right:

The six primary Planets are revolved about the Sun, in circles concentric with the Sun, and with motions directed towards the same parts, and almost in the same plane. . . . But it is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions. . . . This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.

In the Principia, Newton distinguishes between hypotheses and experimental philosophy, and declares, "Hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy." What he wants is data, "inferr'd from the ph¾nomena." But in the absence of data, at the border between what he could explain and what he could only honor-the causes he could identify and those he could not-Newton rapturously invokes God:

Eternal and Infinite, Omnipotent and Omniscient; . . . he governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done. . . . We know him only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes; we admire him for his perfections; but we reverence and adore him on account of his dominion.

A century later, the French astronomer and mathematician Pierre-Simon de Laplace confronted Newton's dilemma of unstable orbits head-on. Rather than view the mysterious stability of the solar system as the unknowable work of God, Laplace declared it a scientific challenge. In his multipart masterpiece, Mécanique Céleste, the first volume of which appeared in 1798, Laplace demonstrates that the solar system is stable over periods of time longer than Newton could predict. To do so, Laplace pioneered a new kind of mathematics called perturbation theory, which enabled him to examine the cumulative effects of many small forces. According to an oft-repeated but probably embellished account, when Laplace gave a copy of Mécanique Céleste to his physics-literate friend Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon asked him what role God played in the construction and regulation of the heavens. "Sire," Laplace replied, "I have no need of that hypothesis."

* * *

Laplace notwithstanding, plenty of scientists besides Newton have called on God-or the gods-wherever their comprehension fades to ignorance. Consider the second-century a.d. Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy. Armed with a description, but no real understanding, of what the planets were doing up there, he could not contain his religious fervor:

I know that I am mortal by nature, and ephemeral; but when I trace, at my pleasure, the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch Earth with my feet: I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia.

Or consider the seventeenth-century Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, whose achievements include constructing the first working pendulum clock and discovering the rings of Saturn. In his charming book The Celestial Worlds Discover'd, posthumously published in 1696, most of the opening chapter celebrates all that was then known of planetary orbits, shapes, and sizes, as well as the planets' relative brightness and presumed rockiness. The book even includes foldout charts illustrating the structure of the solar system. God is absent from this discussion-even though a mere century earlier, before Newton's achievements, planetary orbits were supreme mysteries.

Celestial Worlds also brims with speculations about life in the solar system, and that's where Huygens raises questions to which he has no answer. That's where he mentions the biological conundrums of the day, such as the origin of life's complexity. And sure enough, because seventeenth-century physics was more advanced than seventeenth-century biology, Huygens invokes the hand of God only when he talks about biology:

I suppose no body will deny but that there's somewhat more of Contrivance, somewhat more of Miracle in the production and growth of Plants and Animals than in lifeless heaps of inanimate Bodies. . . . For the finger of God, and the Wisdom of Divine Providence, is in them much more clearly manifested than in the other.

Today secular philosophers call that kind of divine invocation "God of the gaps"-which comes in handy, because there has never been a shortage of gaps in people's knowledge.

* * *

As reverent as Newton, Huygens, and other great scientists of earlier centuries may have been, they were also empiricists. They did not retreat from the conclusions their evidence forced them to draw, and when their discoveries conflicted with prevailing articles of faith, they upheld the discoveries. That doesn't mean it was easy: sometimes they met fierce opposition, as did Galileo, who had to defend his telescopic evidence against formidable objections drawn from both scripture and "common" sense.

Galileo clearly distinguished the role of religion from the role of science. To him, religion was the service of God and the salvation of souls, whereas science was the source of exact observations and demonstrated truths. In a long, famous, bristly letter written in the summer of 1615 to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany (but, like so many epistles of the day, circulated among the literati), he quotes, in his own defense, an unnamed yet sympathetic church official saying that the Bible "tells you how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go."

The letter to the duchess leaves no doubt about where Galileo stood on the literal word of the Holy Writ:


In expounding the Bible if one were always to confine oneself to the unadorned grammatical meaning, one might fall into error. . . .
Nothing physical which . . . demonstrations prove to us, ought to be called in question (much less condemned) upon the testimony of biblical passages which may have some different meaning beneath their words. . . .
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

A rare exception among scientists, Galileo saw the unknown as a place to explore rather than as an eternal mystery controlled by the hand of God.

As long as the celestial sphere was generally regarded as the domain of the divine, the fact that mere mortals could not explain its workings could safely be cited as proof of the higher wisdom and power of God. But beginning in the sixteenth century, the work of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton-not to mention Maxwell, Heisenberg, Einstein, and everybody else who discovered fundamental laws of physics-provided rational explanations for an increasing range of phenomena. Little by little, the universe was subjected to the methods and tools of science, and became a demonstrably knowable place.

* * *

Then, in what amounts to a stunning yet unheralded philosophical inversion, throngs of ecclesiastics and scholars began to declare that it was the laws of physics themselves that served as proof of the wisdom and power of God.

One popular theme of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the "clockwork universe"-an ordered, rational, predictable mechanism fashioned and run by God and his physical laws. The early telescopes, which all relied on visible light, did little to undercut that image of an ordered system. The Moon revolved around Earth. Earth and other planets rotated on their axes and revolved around the Sun. The stars shone. The nebulae floated freely in space.

Not until the nineteenth century was it evident that visible light is just one band of a broad spectrum of electromagnetic radiation-the band that human beings just happen to see. Infrared was discovered in 1800, ultraviolet in 1801, radio waves in 1888, X rays in 1895, and gamma rays in 1900. Decade by decade in the following century, new kinds of telescopes came into use, fitted with detectors that could "see" these formerly invisible parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Now astrophysicists began to unmask the true character of the universe.

Turns out that some celestial bodies give off more light in the invisible bands of the spectrum than in the visible. And the invisible light picked up by the new telescopes showed that mayhem abounds in the cosmos: monstrous gamma-ray bursts, deadly pulsars, matter-crushing gravitational fields, matter-hungry black holes that flay their bloated stellar neighbors, newborn stars igniting within pockets of collapsing gas. And as our ordinary, optical telescopes got bigger and better, more mayhem emerged: galaxies that collide and cannibalize each other, explosions of supermassive stars, chaotic stellar and planetary orbits. Our own cosmic neighborhood-the inner solar system-turned out to be a shooting gallery, full of rogue asteroids and comets that collide with planets from time to time. Occasionally they've even wiped out stupendous masses of Earth's flora and fauna. The evidence all points to the fact that we occupy not a well-mannered clockwork universe, but a destructive, violent, and hostile zoo.

Of course, Earth can be bad for your health too. On land, grizzly bears want to maul you; in the oceans, sharks want to eat you. Snowdrifts can freeze you, deserts dehydrate you, earthquakes bury you, volcanoes incinerate you. Viruses can infect you, parasites suck your vital fluids, cancers take over your body, congenital diseases force an early death. And even if you have the good luck to be healthy, a swarm of locusts could devour your crops, a tsunami could wash away your family, or a hurricane could blow apart your town.

* * *

So the universe wants to kill us all. But let's ignore that complication for the moment.

Many, perhaps countless, questions hover at the front lines of science. In some cases, answers have eluded the best minds of our species for decades or even centuries. And in contemporary America, the notion that a higher intelligence is the single answer to all enigmas has been enjoying a resurgence. This present-day version of God of the gaps goes by a fresh name: "intelligent design." The term suggests that some entity, endowed with a mental capacity far greater than the human mind can muster, created or enabled all the things in the physical world that we cannot explain through scientific methods.

An interesting hypothesis.

But why confine ourselves to things too wondrous or intricate for us to understand, whose existence and attributes we then credit to a superintelligence? Instead, why not tally all those things whose design is so clunky, goofy, impractical, or unworkable that they reflect the absence of intelligence?

Take the human form. We eat, drink, and breathe through the same hole in the head, and so, despite Henry J. Heimlich's eponymous maneuver, choking is the fourth leading cause of "unintentional injury death" in the United States. How about drowning, the fifth leading cause? Water covers almost three-quarters of Earth's surface, yet we are land creatures-submerge your head for just a few minutes, and you die.

Or take our collection of useless body parts. What good is the pinky toenail? How about the appendix, which stops functioning after childhood and thereafter serves only as the source of appendicitis? Useful parts, too, can be problematic. I happen to like my knees, but nobody ever accused them of being well protected from bumps and bangs. These days, people with problem knees can get them surgically replaced. As for our pain-prone spine, it may be a while before someone finds a way to swap that out.

How about the silent killers? High blood pressure, colon cancer, and diabetes each cause tens of thousands of deaths in the U.S. every year, but it's possible not to know you're afflicted until your coroner tells you so. Wouldn't it be nice if we had built-in biogauges to warn us of such dangers well in advance? Even cheap cars, after all, have engine gauges.

And what comedian designer configured the region between our legs-an entertainment complex built around a sewage system?

The eye is often held up as a marvel of biological engineering. To the astrophysicist, though, it's only a so-so detector. A better one would be much more sensitive to dark things in the sky and to all the invisible parts of the spectrum. How much more breathtaking sunsets would be if we could see ultraviolet and infrared. How useful it would be if, at a glance, we could see every source of microwaves in the environment, or know which radio station transmitters were active. How helpful it would be if we could spot police radar detectors at night.

Think how easy it would be to navigate an unfamiliar city if we, like birds, could always tell which way was north because of the magnetite in our heads. Think how much better off we'd be if we had gills as well as lungs, how much more productive if we had six arms instead of two. And if we had eight, we could safely drive a car while simultaneously talking on a cell phone, changing the radio station, applying makeup, sipping a drink, and scratching our left ear.
Stupid design could fuel a movement unto itself. It may not be nature's default, but it's ubiquitous. Yet people seem to enjoy thinking that our bodies, our minds, and even our universe represent pinnacles of form and reason. Maybe it's a good antidepressant to think so. But it's not science-not now, not in the past, not ever.

* * *

Another practice that isn't science is embracing ignorance. Yet it's fundamental to the philosophy of intelligent design: I don't know what this is. I don't know how it works. It's too complicated for me to figure out. It's too complicated for any human being to figure out. So it must be the product of a higher intelligence.

What do you do with that line of reasoning? Do you just cede the solving of problems to someone smarter than you, someone who's not even human? Do you tell students to pursue only questions with easy answers?

There may be a limit to what the human mind can figure out about our universe. But how presumptuous it would be for me to claim that if I can't solve a problem, neither can any other person who has ever lived or who will ever be born. Suppose Galileo and Laplace had felt that way? Better yet, what if Newton had not? He might then have solved Laplace's problem a century earlier, making it possible for Laplace to cross the next frontier of ignorance.

Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance. You cannot build a program of discovery on the assumption that nobody is smart enough to figure out the answer to a problem. Once upon a time, people identified the god Neptune as the source of storms at sea. Today we call these storms hurricanes. We know when and where they start. We know what drives them. We know what mitigates their destructive power. And anyone who has studied global warming can tell you what makes them worse. The only people who still call hurricanes "acts of God" are the people who write insurance forms.

* * *

To deny or erase the rich, colorful history of scientists and other thinkers who have invoked divinity in their work would be intellectually dishonest. Surely there's an appropriate place for intelligent design to live in the academic landscape. How about the history of religion? How about philosophy or psychology? The one place it doesn't belong is the science classroom.

If you're not swayed by academic arguments, consider the financial consequences. Allow intelligent design into science textbooks, lecture halls, and laboratories, and the cost to the frontier of scientific discovery-the frontier that drives the economies of the future-would be incalculable. I don't want students who could make the next major breakthrough in renewable energy sources or space travel to have been taught that anything they don't understand, and that nobody yet understands, is divinely constructed and therefore beyond their intellectual capacity. The day that happens, Americans will just sit in awe of what we don't understand, while we watch the rest of the world boldly go where no mortal has gone before.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. An anthology of his "Universe" columns will be published in 2006 by W.W. Norton.


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Another Quote...

Preliminary Expectoration

"Faith therefore is not an aesthetic emotion but something far higher, precisely because it has resignation as its presupposition; it is not an immediate instinct of the heart, but is the paradox of life and existence."

"A purely human courage is required to renounce the whole of the temporal to gain the eternal; but this I gain, and to all eternity"

Fear and Trembling by Sören Kierkegaard 1843

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Thought for today...

Spirituality speaking, everything is possible, but in the world of the finite there is much which is not possible. Fear and Trembling 1843: Soren Kierkengaard Posted via my LGVX8600 phone.

Emigrate - New York City

I just heard this on the radio down in Charlotte North Carolina. The station was New Rock 106.5FM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emigrate
Emigrate is the name of a band led by Richard Z. Kruspe, guitarist and founder of Rammstein.

Thought Of The Day...

Walter Kaufmann described Existentialism as, "The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life.



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Cold Water....

We were in Charlotte North Carolina all weekend for a Cheer leading contest called The Spirit of Hope National Championship. We stayed at the Hilton Charlotte that was downtown. It was across the street from the Convention Center where the contest was held. It is a 20 story hotel and they are doing some remodeling to the place as well. The elevators took forever to get up and down to the different floors. Also, when we woke up on Sunday morning expecting to take a shower, the water was COLD! No one in all of the 20 floors had hot water, No One!! That sucked!!


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Hellraiser in Charlotte NC...

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From RMStringer

Neat Light...

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Yesterday...

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Snowing Today!

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Help, My House Is To COLD!!! BURRRR

What are we? Are we a bunch of robots? Help me please i don't know if it is to cold for my children in here. Can we not control the temperature in our own home? I DAMM SURE DON'T NEED SOMEONE TELLING ME WHAT TEMP TO SET MY thermostat to! What will be next? Will the State of California install a arm to wipe our asses in the bathroom? Those liberal no good dumbasses in California need to grow a brain and stop being such a bunch of little girls. We don't not need the state or country to regulate the thermostats in our homes. The Governator is sounding more like a NAZI(Kennedy) every day!

We are heading straight to the "Big Brother" country like in Fahrenheit 451. Grow a single cell and adjust your own damm temp in YOUR HOUSE!! Get a life!! I can tell if my home is too cold or hot; YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO AS WELL!! If the state of California was not so damm tight on its EPA regulations you could have had more power/light generation facilities 20 years ago. You would not be in the state that you are in now with not enough power to go around. Plan ahead! Many states have upgraded their power grid and do not suffer the same fate of your "Rolling Black-Outs"

Grow Up, Act and Think For yourself. Be Adults and regulate your on damm air conditioners. The other 49 stated do it! We do not need any more governmental regulation in the USA.

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TollBooth Users...

I was on my way to work this morning and was driving my usually way, down the toll road (Powhite 76), and i was coming to the first set of tolls. I was slowing down and i picked my booth to pay at. There are two on the northbound lanes. I picked the left one. I was about a car-length from the cement walls when out a NOWHERE cam this Jeep Cherokee and cut in front of me. IF i had been any closer; the lady and i use that term very loosely, she would have hit me! What was even more funny was the fact that she had to pay just like me and when she came out the other side, she was only two cars ahead of me. What an asshole! We all have some where to be in the morning and there are two pay lanes, two EasyTagg lanes, and two coin lanes, more than enough to accommodate all of the traffic. It only takes a turd to make the punch go bad!


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Thought for today...

In spite of the fact that love is essentially based upon the sensuous, it is ennobled by reason of the consciousness of eternity which it embodies: for what distinguishes all love from lust is the fact that it bears an impress of eternity. Either-Or Vol II Soren Kierkengaard Posted via my LGVX8600 phone.

Deal Or No Deal...Dumbass!

As you, like me and 50 million other Americans are gathered around their Television Sets to watch NBC's Deal Or No Deal. One has to wonder...

We have watched the show since it came to NBC. With Howie Mandel as the host of the show and lots of pretty women to handle the cases it is fun. The participants always give a good show, some more than other with their theatrics and weirdness coupled along with Mandel's seriousness and his germ-a-phobia makes for good TV.

One central theme that i witness on this show is GREED! I like to gamble on the occasion and it is fun taken in context of what it is, a passing fancy. People come to this show and try to strike it rich be playing the odds and betting that the case they pick holds the 1million dollars. They are playing against the odds and they are not in their favor. I have never witnessed a person win the big prize, NEVER. Also when they get greedy by not taking the bankers best and final offer when they have exhausted all of the big prizes and they deiced to go for it, they loose! I saw it tonight. A girl was offered $283,000 and did not take it. She cleared all of the $1,000,000 prizes and was left with $100,000 as the top prize. she left with $55,000, a far cry away from 283. With taxes in California, she would be lucky to get about $20,000.

She took a chance and crapped out like most of the people do. Some get smart and take the Deal with a less substantial offer than the 1,000,000 and have something. They come with lofty goals and bet for the big bucks only to leave with little or no money. DO they not realize that taking the lesser offer, they still come out ahead? Remember it takes money to get there...

They should have made a deal and not taken the "No Deal".

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