Nothing misses the point of itself quite so well as religion. People are morons. A recent story [LINK] describes how...

"Central Florida student Webster Cook, ...is facing suspension after removing a communion wafer from a Mass held on-campus. Once blessed, these Eucharist wafers must be consumed immediately and Church leaders have said that Cook's actions were offensive."

It continues..

"Regardless of the reason, the Diocese says its main concern is to get the Eucharist back so it can be taken care of properly and with respect. Cook has been keeping the Eucharist stored in a plastic bag since last Sunday."It is hurtful," said Father Migeul Gonzalez with the Diocese. "Imagine if they kidnapped somebody and you make a plea for that individual to please return that loved one to the family.""

It's hardly comparable to kidnapping, now it is? I have actually witnessed this happen at my own local church whereby a parishoner put the wafer in his shirt pocket. In that case, the priest stopped what he was doing, followed the guy back to his seat and asked him to eat it.

Cook seemingly woke quite a bees nest when he did this to the point where he began receiving threats on his life.  More tangibly the University threatened to suspend him for not eating the wafer.

PZ Meyers is an outspoken biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota. He came to Cook's defense on his blog [LINK].

Now PZ seems to be quite the sh1t stirrer as his post reads...
"if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I'll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare."

It didn't take long for PZ to begin receiving threats of violence from folks around the net, all under the auspices of upholding Christian beliefs. What happened to turn the other cheek?

PZ then published one of the emails on his blog, complete with the sender's email address and IP address headers. At which point folks track it to...1-800-flowers! Yes, the moron had used their work address. She was promptly fired [LINK].

PZ continues to get threatening letters: [LINK] and [LINK].

Sort of ruins the whole "love thy neighbor" thing but presumably this is just a small segment of the religious population making the others look bad.

Meanwhile the SGU points out; whilst all of this furor is going on over wafers...the Pope is merely "considering" an apology for the sex abuses in Australia. What's that mean? He's sitting around going "Hmmm..should I apologize? Well I didn't do anything wrong...still maybe I should...ah feck it..."?

The church is guilty of sexual abuses in many countries, the UK, Ireland (where a Bishop actually fathered a child), the US, Australia and on and on. Why would the pope need more than 10 seconds to decide whether an apology is warranted? And moreover, what good is an apology when your life's been ruined by a priest? To quote George Constanza "you can stuff your sorries in a sack".

It's all about priorities. I'd place sexual assault a little higher on the list over cracker theft. Shouldn't folks be up in arms over THAT rather than taking wafers out of a building? Makes me wonder why folks bother with any of it. The net result is a wasteful expenditure of energy.
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Filed under: Life

Ahh...a thing of beauty...

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Filed under: Engineering | Weird Wild World

At the deli where I work (the deli BY my work, I don't work at a deli), you can build your own salad. Over time I've arrived at a list of items that make up a good salad for me;

1. Buffalo chicken
2. Cheddar cheese
3. Jalapenos
4. Shredded carrot
5. Kidney beans
6. Green Peppers
7. Thousand island dressing

It's a spicy salad and it works well. I get the same thing every time, in the same exact order. In this way I avoid wasting time making needless decisions on stuff that doesn't ultimately matter. It's like Seth Brundle (BrundleFly) and his suits. BrundleSalad. They should just add it to the menu* ; "I'll take the BrundleSalad".

Anyway, to get to the point; today the deli-lady made the mistake of including Mandarin Oranges in place of Jalapenos. She heard me say "Jalapenos" and interpreted that as "MAN-DAR-INS". A fatal mistake.

So now I'm eating a sweet citrus fruit in an otherwise spicy salad; If you're ever stuck making some nachos and you've run out of Jalapenos, DON'T reach for the mandarins. These flavours are NOT inter-changeable. Is it fair to say Jalapenos in mexican food are immutable? It just doesn't work.

This'll likely throw off the rest of the day completely.

* as a side note, in the years I've worked at Exchange place, the local diner created a Shanahan menu that had two items, "The number one" and "The number two".
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Filed under: Life

I love this. Is this not both the best tattoo and simultaneously the worst ever? And where does he have the closing tag?


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Filed under: Weird Wild World

A few weeks ago I had to go to London on a business trip. I had no travel-sized toothpaste but I did have an empty travel-sized toothpaste tube. Not wanting to carry a huge tube of toothpaste for a short trip and without even thinking about it, my mind hatched a plan.

By opening both the the full tube and smaller empty tube and placing their tube-openings end to end I was able to slowly squeeze and transfer toothpaste from one tube to the other with almost no waste.

Even more impressive, this resourcefulness went from having the need, to idea, to implementation to completion in less than 60 seconds.

I set a mental note at the time to blog about this universal wisdom and hence this post.
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Filed under: Life

My brother Jim is an avid and talented painter amongst other things and after much encouragement has started his own blog. http://inspiredtopaint.blogspot.com

He's already posted quite a bit of content and I think anything that increases the creative output in the world is a good thing. It's also great for me as I get to see what he's up to.
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Filed under: Blog

A recent article in the New York Times described scientists observing a supernova in action [LINK]. I couldn't help but be amazed at the science in this article. It also reminded me of some other facts about life, space and myself which are not always top of mind.

Essentially the article describes how scientists were able to observe a supernova from the very beginning of the process. It's very rare to have a telescope pointed at the right spot in the sky in order to catch this. Normally astronomers see the afterglow of the collapse which might be months or years old. It's kind of like the Universe's Funniest Home Videos except replace "Funniest" with "Fascinating" or "Scientifically Significant".

This event took place 88 million light years away.  A light year is of course the distance light travels in an Earth year (about 6 x 10^12 miles). In more meaningful terms; this event, relative to time on Earth, happened 88 million years ago and light from the event has traveled the vast distance across space and is starting to reach us now.  You have a window of a few months to capture the data with a telescope. What an amazing thing that we here we are 88 million years later, capturing the event in our telescopes.

The Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old. the universe itself is estimated at 13.5 billion years. In that time matter/energy is neither created nor destroyed and doesn't go anywhere. It hangs around changing form. Entropy is conserved.

By that reasoning, each and every particle in your body, is roughly the age of the universe. I'm not 100% certain of the accuracy of that statement but I think a more firm statement is that the information (entropy) contained in the particles that you are made up of has remained constant and is at least the same age as the universe. Note I said particle, not necessarily atom.

We also have the old example of Caesar's last breath. What happened to the air from Caesar's last breath? Answer: nothing, it's still around. If you do the math involved in the number of molecules he breathed out, combined with the time since then, assuming a uniform distribution, it can be shown that with each and every breath we're breathing in the SAME atoms he breathed out. [LINK]. Rebeca Watson [LINK] made the observation that given enough time passed, with each and every breath we're breathing the flatulence of everyone that's ever lived. Oh dear. I think I need a mint.

So at different levels, we're different ages. Whilst I'm now 33, at the molecular level I'm thousands of years old. At the atomic level, I'm probably as old as the Earth, ruling out the possibility that my atoms arrived via meteorite. At the particle level, my matter dates all the way back to 300,000 years after the big bang. At the Entropy level, I'm as old as the universe. Not only that but that but my Entropy will live forever.

This sort of thinking may also indicate I may be having a mid-life crisis of some kind.
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My co-worker Marc's got a good post on code optimization[LINK]; I couldn't agree more in this case.

I think programmers should be given a mandatory course in games programming and/or embedded systems. One of my first jobs out of college was programming a home-grown smartcard reader for the CAROLAN project [LINK]. Can't believe I found that link. I worked on this for 3 weeks in a tiny shop above a bakery in Rathmines. There was myself and one other guy, the electrical engineer who was busy soldering up boards on the other side of the room. It was a lot of fun.

I've written a few game-type things back in the day, the Maze of Madness[LINK], Dungeon of Death[LINK], Gloop[LINK] and so on.  Essentially you can't get good frame-rates without a little optimization.

One thing I hear commonly is that optimization is something that was easier in the "OLD" days of C, C++ and Assembler. I'd challenge this with an example I wrote recently in C#. It's a thing that creates collages/mosaics using the Discrete Cosine Transform [LINK]. the basic steps are as follows:

a) Gather images from Flickr
b) For each image, compute the DCT, storing the largest components of the transform along with their positions.
c) Take an input image and split it into sample areas.
d) For each sample area, compute the DCT vector.
e) Scan the database of DCT vectors to find the closest match using the Root Mean Square [LINK]
f) Place the highest scoring image in the sample area and move on...

This is a neat little application and as you can see quite CPU intensive with MANY places for optimization. Nevertheless, after gathering a database of over 35,000 images, the application takes roughly 1 second PER sample area when computing the best target image. This is after much optimization.

As you can see, C# is a powerful language with many conveniences and advanced constructs to make programming easier. That said, it's ALSO possible to perform a lot of optimization, without the use of assembler or C.
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Filed under: General Programming

Ordinarily I'd say "work has been crazy" but lately life in general has been crazy.  I have an excess of things which are all scrambling for time in my conscious mind. 

My recent thumb injury is healing but the nerve damage is causing a lot of problems. Imagine constant, intense pins and needles in your thumb, not being sure if you're holding something with adequate grip pressure and lastly severe shooting pains on the slightest touch. Yes I know, boo hoo, wah wah.

Prentice Hall was nice enough to send me a bunch of books (of my choosing) free gratis in the hope I'd read them and provide some feedback. I barely have time for food let alone reading but one book that's been cracked a few times is "SOA Principles of Service Design". [LINK] I've even come up with a horrible joke on the topic...

"Did you hear the one about the anti-social WSDL?....He was a real pain in the SaaS".
Ugh, *groan* that's almost too bad to write down.

So I'm working through this book and will publish some thoughts when I've gotten through enough of it to do it justice.

I've come up with a number of projects ideas which I'm hoping to develop on a common framework. I need an outlet more to rid my mind of this stuff than to achieve anything particular. Not sure if that statement objectively makes sense but hopefully if folks know me they'll understand what I mean.

I have (finally) gotten access to Nova's Twine Beta [LINK], I have high expectations and will post more on my experiences in the coming weeks.

Lastly, I have a pit in my stomach this morning as Karen is undergoing another round of chemo today. I cannot convey in words how hard this is for all involved (Karen, our kids and if I'm feeling selfish, myself also).
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Filed under: General Programming

This guy made a drawing using a GPS device in a briefcase and DHL. [LINK] A process known as GPS Drawing. (Also checkout Geo-Caching for more fun with GPS devices). He claims it's the "Biggest Drawing in the World". Great.

On first blush this seems like a neat idea. However, I can't help wondering...

a) Why bother? You can generate those GPS coordinates and draw the picture without ever sending anything anywhere.
b) The picture is a self-portrait. I would've hoped if you're going to draw a big picture on the Earth you could think of something that'd have a bit more meaning to the other 6 billion people you're drawing on.
c) With all that fossil fuel spent flying the briefcase 110,000 miles, this is certainly the least eco-friendly drawing ever made. Compare to the tiny bit of graphite the pencil on paper would've used. Talk about excessive carbon footprint!
d) Is it Fake? Seems hard to imagine a shipper sending a package in weird loops out over the Atlantic Ocean just for kicks.

So I'm left thinking this artist's a self-serving moron. I guess that's art for you.
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Filed under: Not Recommended | Weird Wild World