What do you believe?

I've been reading American Gods by Neil Gaiman, quite a good read if you have the time, and I found this passage interesting. Take from it what you will, or take nothing at all - the choice is up to you.

"It's not easy to believe."
"I," she told him, "can believe anything. You have no idea what I can believe."
"Really?"
"I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it." She stopped, out of breath.

What do you believe? Answer in the comments section below, please.

Deja Vu Again

I recently saw Deja Vu which was an interesting documentary up until the 2/3's mark where it turned into Time Chasers (One of my favorite MST 3K episodes by the way. I hear it's getting a sequel and I hope the Film Crew is there to tear it a new one.)

Now I don't think I'm ruining the documentary if I mention that (Minor Spoilers) there is time traveling technology in it used to fight crime. My thought is that they used it wrong. In one scene crimefighter, Denzel Washington going by an alias, is watching a woman through a time-wormhole-thingy and he shines a laser through the wormhole and she sees it. Using that bit of knowledge alone they could have stopped all crime. In the film they use the technology to collect clues. They should instead just use the time traveling technology to blind criminals.

I think this is a completely humane way of dealing with criminals, because its much harder to commit a crime when you are blind, plus they are not being imprisoned or killed. It's win win. So since we have the technology already we just need to write our senators and tell them that this is what we want to do with it. We could even give it a catchy name like "The Damascus Conversion" Bill, or something to that effect.

It's the G4m3 of Life!

No spinning the wheel this time around. Instead, try to design an environment where all the little squares will live in peace. But it's not as simple as it sounds. There are rules, and the rules actually are as simple as they sound:

1. If a cell has one or no living neighbours, it will die of loneliness.
2. If it has too many neighbours - four or more - it will die from overcrowding.
3. New cells are "born" whenever an empty square has exactly three living neighbors.

Enjoy.

Photophile

Taken at my Grandma's 80th birthday.

Lots of Nude and Naked People

If you squint real hard...you might hurt your eyes.

18,000 nude, naked people bared everything to the wind during a Spencer Tunick photo shoot in Mexico City. That's a lot of birthday suits, or as they say in Spanglish - cumpleaños suits.