Feb 26
“The Talpiot Tomb could be soon the most famous holy relic in the Christian empire. Canadian Titanic director James Cameron and filmmaker archeologist Simcha Jacobovici have set to prove that it once held the remains of Jesus of Nazareth and his family. The evidence and interpretations of the artifacts will be presented in a documentary “The Lost Tomb of Jesus” on the Discovery Channel March 4th on the Discovery Channel at 9 p.m. ET/PT.” Find out more?
Feb 21
I worked at McDonald’s when I was a sophomore in high school. I had to get up at like 4:30 every Saturday morning to work the breakfast shift. It was right next to a mall and was slammed every morning. There was this manager – he was the one that put together all of the orders – that would yell things out to rest of the employees to tell them what things to make. He would yell things like, “pull 11, pull 32, and run a b,d,c,d”. I never knew what he was talking about and figured someone must have understood this secret code.
One day when it was a little slower, I asked another manager what all those codes meant that he would yell out on Saturday mornings. She said that no one had a clue why he did that nor what he was talking about. Even as a 16 year old, I was a little shocked. One morning, during the middle of the rush, I asked him what he was saying. He told me he was telling the staff what to make, in order to stay ahead. I told him that no one knew what he was talking about. He looked at me quizzically like he already knew that. I went back to my station at the to-go window.
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Feb 17
Coming out of my cage and I’ve been doing just fine. Gotta gotta be down because I want it all. It started out with a kiss. How did it end up like this? It was only a kiss, It was only a kiss. Now I’m falling asleep and she’s calling a cab. While he’s having a smoke and she’s taking the drag. Now they’re going to bed and my stomach is sick and it’s all in my head but she’s touching his chest now. He takes off her dress now. Let me go. And I just can’t look, it’s killing me and taking control, jealousy. Turning saints into the sea, turning through sick lullaby. Joking on your alibi but it’s just the price I pay. Destiny is calling me, open up my eager eyes, I’m Mr. Brightside.
© The Killers
Feb 13
Did you know that you can stop light? This concept has been around since Einstein’s days when he proposed that at absolute zero all motion stops and all matter blurs (this was based on previous work by Satyendra Nath Bose). It was only a matter of time before a few scientists actually figured out how to capture light in this state and move it somewhere else. What does this mean for normal folks? Well, not much … yet. The practical applications are pretty sci-fi. It means that information can be stored as light and then moved (at the speed of light) somewhere else – aka “Beam Me Up”. I doubt I will see the real applications of this sort of technology in my lifetime, but it’s a major step forward in particle physics.
This concept has always fascinated me – I mention it here. Physicists have known for a long time that the speed of light is variable (though used as a constant in most equations including light). However, this fundamental constant of nature is now no longer just variable – it can be stopped. I wish Bose and Einstein were alive today to see this. The one human endeavor that continues to leap forward is science. Politics, culture, war, religion, and disease are still the same as they were 2,000 years ago and not very inspiring. However, nature has given us this wonderful way of looking curiously at the world and asking why, how, when? That our little minds could glimpse something true about the universe is profound. I cherish these moments because science gives me hope.
Nature has put together a cool interactive section about this on their website. Take a look.
I watched the movie Saw III this weekend. I’ve seen I and II also, but this one was interesting because it contained more of the back story, the motivations of Jigsaw. For a person to seem truly evil their past and motivations must remain hidden so the reader or audience cannot identify with them. This allows us to distance ourselves from evil – to point to it as an external force, rather than something that is an integral part of ourselves. I wrote a paper on evil as an undergrad and I chose the Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars (Return of the Jedi) as a perfect personification. As the new Star Wars movies were released, Palpatine’s past was slowly revealed to us – almost enough identify with him as a person and not just an abstraction of evil.
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Feb 7
I was at a beach party late into the night. The sand was black and rocky – the ocean was beautiful. As the party was winding down, I realized that I had no idea where I was. I asked one of the guys that was at the party where we were. He said, “We are in Burundi.” I have dreams all the time where I find myself far away and have to walk back home, so this is not that unusual. When he said “Burundi” I realized that I was not going to be able to walk. How had I gotten here? Only if I had woken up on another planet could have been more lost. My friend said I could stay with his family until I figured out how to get home.
When we got to his home there were some local men that wanted to harass me. They didn’t trust me because I was white. I told them that they should probably be nice to me because I was an American (some echoes of the movie Babel in my dream?). They finally left me alone and we all ate breakfast together.
The next morning I was on my way out of the country but we had to take these government officials to a strip club and get them drunk as a favor for letting me go. I sat at the bar and the waitress brought me a Perrier Budweiser (I have no idea – I guess a really fizzy beer). Somehow Duran Duran was in the club, too, and they were all dressed up like women. Why Duran Duran was in Burundi, I have no idea.
I had to make a a phone call to the U.S. Embassy and I also called home. The waitress at the bar said she would call my parents for me to see if they would pick me up at the airport. She dialed the number, and I was thinking to myself, “How does she know my parent’s phone number?” I made it out of the country and the next thing I know, I’m in a Jeep and it’s summer in Southern California. I’m driving through L.A. Then, I woke up.
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