Virtual Thought

The ever amusing Xinhua news service (which I only know about because Google News picks up its stories all the time) has a story about laser beams being directed into airline pilots’ eyes.

This is fantastic. Welcome to the future, a future populated by laser-wielding terrorists and killer robot police.

I guess they’re still investigating, but… where did these lasers come from? The ground? Other planes? Passengers? Were they lasers as in “laser pointer” or lasers as in “industrial argon laser”?

Weird.

From This is about Self-Reference, a badly written, true yet false, hodge-podge of self-referential ideas:

This a self-referential sentence

Thit sentence is not self-referential because ‘thit’ is not a word.
-Douglas Hofstadter

This sentence has cabbage six words.
-David Moser

This gubblick contains many nonsklarkish English flutzpahs, but the overall pluggandisp can be glorked from context.
-David Moser

Does this sentence remind you of Agatha Christie?
-Ann Trail

If the meanings of ‘true’ and ‘false’ were switched, then this sentence wouldn’t be false.
-Pete Maclean

You have of course, just begun the sentence that you have just finished reading.
-Peter Brigham

If you think this sentence is confusing, then change one pig.
-Uilliam Bricken Jr.

Although this sentence begins with the word ‘because’, it is false.
-Douglas Hofstadter

The world will little note nor long remember what we say here.
-Abraham Lincoln

joestump.net is a really interesting place. I went there looking for icons, and found an interesting couple of articles:

First off (and I already knew this), fully 1/3 of Americans are Biblical literalists which means that the word of God is to be taken at its face—what you read in the Bible is, literally, God’s Own Truth and cannot be messed with or interpreted. In a link of that article, Joe posits this interesting question, though: “I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?”

Reminds me of this great West Wing episode in which you get to see Martin Sheen go through the same litany… but I digress.

If the Bible can’t be messed with, why do we have so many versions that are all different? Why did King James add things to it? My answer to that is always to point out the little editorials that have, of course, happened to the Bible throughout history.

What’s really great, though, is the comment on the first article. The person responding in that comment states that Jesus freed us from Old Testament law by dying on the cross… and includes many, many Biblical passages that reference that.

Including my own personal favorite (emphasis is mine):

Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that l will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah: Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the Land of Egypt; which my covenant they break; although I was a husband unto them, saith the Lord, But this shall be the covenant that l will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying know the Lord; for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord; for l will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” (Jeremiah 31:31-34.)

I could be really snarky and say something about not obeying the Ten Commandments anymore, but I’m not going to. Of course it’s easier to make fun of this comment because I never like publicly talking about my faith because it is intensely personal. So I’m not going to be snarky. Instead, I want to tell you that this is the God I love. His laws are written in my heart and I don’t have to go to my fellow humans and tell them about my faith because they already know.

My iniquity? Totally forgiven.

There’s a club in London, England that recently hosted a No Wax night. People bring their iPods and get to play three songs for everyone to dance to. They trade off with another mp3J (DJ is so TwenCen) for every song and it is their responsibility to make sure that dance flow is maintained. Here’s the CNN article that I stold my title from that describes the event.

I read this article in the same sitting. It describes a new realtime digital accompaniment akin to solo guitarists using loop machines, but only if the loop machine could improvise, add harmonies, and, oh, play 30 cellos at once or something. Pretty frickin’ cool!

I spend a lot of time thinking about where music is going. What is the Next Big Sound? Should we prevent it from being co-opted by Big Music or let them come on in so that it becomes a commercial populist movement that everyone can participate in for a fee? The music industry is trying to work with mashup artists like Kid606 to produce bootleg mashups of popular tunes in a post-modern deconstruction of modern music. But mp3Jing seems like a new sort of beast… interactive in a really basic and unsophisticated way, sure, but totally connective. It allows the fans to create a sort of fabric of musical tastes in their own democratic mashup of music. I dunno… could be way cool.

The Perry Bible Fellowship is a sick and twisted little strip written by Nicholas Gurewitch. Absolutely hilarious, totally twisted… you should check out some of the other crazy stuff on his site!!!

...and I need money for kung-fu lessons.

Remember “Mr. T ate my balls?” Or the more recent “All your base are belong to us?” Is this one the new Internet meme?

Here’s another incarnation.

Here’s an article on Slate in which Mrs. LeGuin responds to the mockery that was the SciFi channel’s series, Earthsea.

This one’s a slight rehash of the other, with some more detail hidden among the paragraphs.

It went down just like I predicted. Thanks, SciFi, for screwing up my favorite fantasy series ever.