My Living Will

Received in an email from my Mum …

Last night, my friend and I were sitting in the living room and I said to her, “I never want to live in a vegetative state, dependent on some machine and fluids from a bottle. If that ever happens, just pull the plug.”

She got up, unplugged the Computer, and threw out my wine.

She's such a bitch...

:-)

Of the dozen or so webcomics that I follow, my very favourite is SchlockMercenary - the ongoing exploits of a group of Mercenaries working in the 31st Century.

Howard Tayler, the author, manages to tell a consistent ongoing story that's funny and engaging and still manage to have a daily punchline that makes me laugh.

Here's one of my very favourite SchlockMercenary strips - click through to the archives on the SchlockMercenary site:


For what it's worth, I figure the best character isn't Seargent Schlock himself, but Commander Kevyn Andreyasn - the teams resident mad scientist. To quote his bio:

Commander Kevyn Andreyasn never aspired to a career as an officer in a mercenary company. A certified genius, he easily qualified for Spannington's Registry of the 100 Most Intelligent Humans, and was only dropped from the registry when Lord High Muckity Spannington learned that Kevyn was risking his life by doing violence for money -- a clear indicator of less-than-stellar reasoning if ever there was one.

May you never hear an Ommminious Hummmm ...

The role of Science

I was listening to Episode #104 of Astronomy cast, and Dr Pamela Gay, one of the hosts ended the show with a comment (after the 57 minute mark) I felt was worth sharing:

There is a lot of mystery in the universe, and every new piece of information we find gives us a little bit more understanding, and just makes the picture we're trying to paint a little bit bigger and requires a lot more paint.

It's a wonderful marvellous universe filled with science that we're still trying to understand, and because we don't understand it people mistake it for magic. As scientists it's our job to describe the magic, and give it equations, and give it math, and give it graphs and give it computer models, and basically to beat things into a bloody pulp of understanding.

At this point, I'm sure some of you are reeling and confused, give my Christian faith and all. Let me explain ...

I believe that the universe is fundamentally knowable - that there is nothing about the way it works that is out of bounds, nothing fenced off with a sign saying "off limits", nothing that cannot be known.

I also believe that we are created in Gods image, with skills of observation and logic and insight and introspection that we should use to the best of our ability.

To refuse to use those talents to understand the world around us - to willingly and deliberately cover our heads with our hands and shout "la la la" at the top of our lungs to keep out reality - is to deny both our own nature and the nature of the loving God who blessed us with those skills in the first place.

Disney’s FastPlay

For Christmas, Madeline received a DVD of the Tinker Bell movie from her Brother. She loves it.

One of the “features” included on this disc is FastPlay – something that Disney is including on most of their current movie releases. The idea of FastPlay is that, left unattended, the movie will automatically start.

I saw an early review of FastPlay which came to a derisive conclusion that FastPlay was in fact the slowest way to get to the movie itself.

After all, with FastPlay, you wait for the automatic trigger, watch a couple of promotions of other movies, get berated for watching a pirated movie (even though you bought an original, though I guess that’s a different post) and then the movie would start.

That reviewer, though, has missed the point. The Fast of FastPlay isn’t to do with how fast the movie gets started … it’s to do with how fast the parent can get away and do something else.

With a FastPlay movie, the parent just has to turn on everything, put in the DVD, press play and walk away.

Without FastPlay, a parent has to do all those things then wait around for the menu to eventually come up (which only happens after you watch a couple of promotions of other movies and get berated for watching a pirated movie, even though you bought an original …), make a selection and then walk away.

So, from the Parents perspective, FastPlay is indeed faster.

Of course, this all assumes that the kids watching the movie are complete technophobes, not a situation that applies in our household. I gave up writing instructions for the babysitters years ago, telling them to just ask Cameron how to turn things on – he had this down pat at age 4.

Even Madeline (now 6) knows how to turn everything on, put in a disc and watch the movie. In fact, going through the special features is one of her favourite bits.

Legal quote

Saw this quote on the Freakonomics blog:

Now-retired U.S. District Judge Wayne Alley (Western District of Oklahoma) wrote:

 

I suppose counsel have a penumbral constitutional right to regard each other as schmucks, but I know of no principle that justifies litigation pollution. … This case makes me lament the demise of duelling. I cannot order a duel, and thus achieve a salubrious reduction in the number of counsel to put up with.

Ouch!