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yammerings from a Monday
Sep. 8th, 2003 11:09 pmYou're not going to want to read this entry. It's likely going to be long.
Having said that... I got back, about an hour ago, from a lecture done by this fellow Huston Smith, who's spent a whole lot of time and effort thinking about religion. The talk was put on by The Wesley Foundation here at Tech, and Rev. Steve emcee'd the whole deal. It was pretty well impressive.
Dr. Smith talked about all sorts of interesting stuff, and out of the whole experience, I found out that a) he was the first Westerner to get to experience the whole Tibetan Buddhist Monk multi-tonal chanting thing (they can produce more than one note at once, which is amazingly slick), b) he knew Joseph Campbell, thought he was a swell guy, and recounted a little anecdote-let in which a six-year-old told Campbell that he couldn't park in a particular space because said youngster was being a fire hydrant, and c) Dr. Smith identified himself as a Methodist and a Universalist, pulling out the idea that one God spoke (or speaks) to people all over the world "in different accents" and created all these different world religions -- right after busting out the "and nobody comes to the father except through me" line of scripture. "I am the way and the truth and the light." He quoted, throughout the talk, from the Tao Te Ching, from the Koran, and from the Bible. His basic point was that modernity and the alienation and cynicism associating with it come about largely because we've made the logical error of assuming that the only truth is scientific truth (which he named "scientism"), which is in itself an unscientific and illogical claim to be making, that the whole of what Is is what you can perceive.
The other part of his talk was about politics -- which he started off by asserting, to thunderous applause, that this administration was the worst one we've had in the history of the country in terms of (he laid it out in four categories) economics, international harmony, civil liberties, and maintaining-of-democracy...
... so essentially, I was in the choir he was preaching to. He's pretty slick, though. I approve of Dr. Smith. I'm'a go pick up one of his books, next time I'm at the bookstore.
Cimmy came over this weekend. We did Six Flags. We had a party. We hung out with my family and went to the mall and whatnot. Yay :) Cimmy wrote a pretty complete description of the weekend's festivities, and a lot of you probably already read that, so...
I've been looking for cool birthday presents for myself, because most of the birthday present-age that was given to me came in the form of Stored Value (it smells of the sweat of the working classes), and I'd been considering new machines for running hackmode.org... and the first thing that jumped to mind was the ICE Cube, which you can get rather cheaper from TigerDirect than from ThinkGeek. Although ThinkGeek is still pretty cool. There was another barebones kit from TigerDirect that came with a processor and ram, and that was looking pretty good too. But it's not nearly as pretty.
I really would rather get some more exotic hardware than a stupid PC, but PCs are pretty inexpensive, and pretty much a known quantity, and getting an Apple would be much more expensive, and for a server machine ... eh. Probably not worth it. But oh my goodness... those new G5s... there needs to be some more choices out there for hardware.
Screw it, I'm buying something that runs a Transmeta chip. Or maybe I should just get myself a nice mp3 player, because the music in the gym here at Tech is generally pretty boring.
Oh yeah, and today Eric McCorkle left himself logged in in the States lab, so we baggypantsed him to git.talk.haiku:
Date: Mon, 08 Sep 2003 16:25:04 -0400
From: Eric Larsen McCorkle
Newsgroups: git.talk.haiku
Subject: very baggy pants
taste is temporal
but comfort lasts forever:
my pants are baggy.
-- The Rev Eric Larsen McCorkle, Esquire, Sr.
... what else did I have to say? I forget. I should work on stuff, because there's a lot of stuff to work on tonight. Oh yes. And Strick is amazingly cool and I want to be like him (more or less) when I grow up. We hung out with him a bit last night.
Thank you for your time :)
Having said that... I got back, about an hour ago, from a lecture done by this fellow Huston Smith, who's spent a whole lot of time and effort thinking about religion. The talk was put on by The Wesley Foundation here at Tech, and Rev. Steve emcee'd the whole deal. It was pretty well impressive.
Dr. Smith talked about all sorts of interesting stuff, and out of the whole experience, I found out that a) he was the first Westerner to get to experience the whole Tibetan Buddhist Monk multi-tonal chanting thing (they can produce more than one note at once, which is amazingly slick), b) he knew Joseph Campbell, thought he was a swell guy, and recounted a little anecdote-let in which a six-year-old told Campbell that he couldn't park in a particular space because said youngster was being a fire hydrant, and c) Dr. Smith identified himself as a Methodist and a Universalist, pulling out the idea that one God spoke (or speaks) to people all over the world "in different accents" and created all these different world religions -- right after busting out the "and nobody comes to the father except through me" line of scripture. "I am the way and the truth and the light." He quoted, throughout the talk, from the Tao Te Ching, from the Koran, and from the Bible. His basic point was that modernity and the alienation and cynicism associating with it come about largely because we've made the logical error of assuming that the only truth is scientific truth (which he named "scientism"), which is in itself an unscientific and illogical claim to be making, that the whole of what Is is what you can perceive.
The other part of his talk was about politics -- which he started off by asserting, to thunderous applause, that this administration was the worst one we've had in the history of the country in terms of (he laid it out in four categories) economics, international harmony, civil liberties, and maintaining-of-democracy...
... so essentially, I was in the choir he was preaching to. He's pretty slick, though. I approve of Dr. Smith. I'm'a go pick up one of his books, next time I'm at the bookstore.
Cimmy came over this weekend. We did Six Flags. We had a party. We hung out with my family and went to the mall and whatnot. Yay :) Cimmy wrote a pretty complete description of the weekend's festivities, and a lot of you probably already read that, so...
I've been looking for cool birthday presents for myself, because most of the birthday present-age that was given to me came in the form of Stored Value (it smells of the sweat of the working classes), and I'd been considering new machines for running hackmode.org... and the first thing that jumped to mind was the ICE Cube, which you can get rather cheaper from TigerDirect than from ThinkGeek. Although ThinkGeek is still pretty cool. There was another barebones kit from TigerDirect that came with a processor and ram, and that was looking pretty good too. But it's not nearly as pretty.
I really would rather get some more exotic hardware than a stupid PC, but PCs are pretty inexpensive, and pretty much a known quantity, and getting an Apple would be much more expensive, and for a server machine ... eh. Probably not worth it. But oh my goodness... those new G5s... there needs to be some more choices out there for hardware.
Screw it, I'm buying something that runs a Transmeta chip. Or maybe I should just get myself a nice mp3 player, because the music in the gym here at Tech is generally pretty boring.
Oh yeah, and today Eric McCorkle left himself logged in in the States lab, so we baggypantsed him to git.talk.haiku:
Date: Mon, 08 Sep 2003 16:25:04 -0400
From: Eric Larsen McCorkle
Newsgroups: git.talk.haiku
Subject: very baggy pants
taste is temporal
but comfort lasts forever:
my pants are baggy.
-- The Rev Eric Larsen McCorkle, Esquire, Sr.
... what else did I have to say? I forget. I should work on stuff, because there's a lot of stuff to work on tonight. Oh yes. And Strick is amazingly cool and I want to be like him (more or less) when I grow up. We hung out with him a bit last night.
Thank you for your time :)
