Posted by Adam on January 25th, 2004 — Posted in General
Regan and I went to Detroit yesterday. Despite being very cold, the roads were clear, so the drive was pleasant enough. Once we got there, we ate lunch at this fresh little diner near the campus of Wayne State University. Unfortunately, I’ve been feeling sick lately, so I didn’t have the appetite to eat all of the food I’d ordered. It was good though.
Then we went to the Detroit Institute of Arts and saw… you guessed it… art! We checked out an installation by Yoko Ono called “Freight Train”, murals by Diego Rivera, a painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, and other works of African, Islamic, American and European art. It was cool. However, as time progressed, I started feeling sicker and my legs started hurting. So, once we left the museum, we got something to drink, and just drove back to Grand Rapids. We had planned on getting some Arab food in Dearborn, but I just wasn’t up to it. Even though I was sick, I really did enjoy the trip.
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Posted by Adam on January 18th, 2004 — Posted in General
I have occasionally asked myself this question: “Why would anyone believe anything he reads in a chain email (aka forward)?” You check your email, and there, wedged between messages for 100% Natural Penis Enlargement Pills and a personal email from a young lady who would like it very much if you would watch recordings of her pleasing herself sexually, is an email from a friend or aquaintance. The subject starts with “FW: FW: FW: FW: FW:” and 54% of the content of the message consists of who has already sent the message to someone else, and a collection of “>”s. You read this message of anonymous origin, often reporting the secret life history of a political figure, or some miraculous event that should strengthen your faith in God or the goodness of humanity. What in the world would make you think this message is factually sound? What lends credibility to it? What makes a person think that the Nigerian royal family has singled her out for transfering money?
My first theory is that the key is that you receive these messages from someone you know. It comes from Jim, so that makes it credible. Of course this is silly, because the original sender is probably about 20 people removed from Jim, but perhaps the name in the “From” field is enough to convince people that the information is valid.
Although this might play a part in how these forwards dupe the masses, I couldn’t really accept the most recent sender theory as the sole reason people believe chain emails. So my second theory is the age old reason for many a self deception. People simply want to believe what they read. They would really like for what they read to be true, so they just believe it. They use the email to support what they already believed. What silly fools.
But wait. Oh yes. Self examination rears its ugly head. It’s true. I thought of a forward that I had accepted as true. You know the one where the science professor tries to disprove the existence of God by claiming that if He existed, he would stop a piece of chalk from breaking when he dropped it. And guess what, oh yes, God caused the chalk to slip out of his fingers, roll down his pants leg, and come, unharmed, to rest on the floor. This shattered all that the professor knew about the world, so he fled the room, and a student listening to the lecture gave a sermon and got everyone saved. While I had doubted the divine intervention of this story, I had accepted the factual events as true. What if they weren’t? So I went to snopes.com and checked it out. A researcher had looked into this very email, and written a report about it. As it turns out, there is no factual evidence to support the story, and it has all the earmarks of a fictitious legend. It seems I had been duped like all of the other poor fools out there. Owned.
Linked from this article was a tract that outlined many of the things I had been taught in High School about the theory of evolution. It shows how much of the evidence for evolution is simply untrue, and much of it deliberate lies. However, this tract makes only a couple of sparse references to other document to back up these claims. Most often it points the reader to a video series created by a group whose purpose is to disprove evolution. Hardly a credible source. So how do I know that these supposed facts are true? Even in high school it was simply taught without source references.
Then this brought up the old question of how I can trust anything that I did not experience myself (*). Perhaps a large portion of all of the second, third, and more-hand information that I have received is untrue. When it comes to the sciences, I have likely verified less than 1% of what I have learned. Why do I trust all of this information? Unfortunately, the reason this is an old, recurring question for me, is that I have no answer to it. Guess the only reasonable thing to do is to just go on believing like those who tout their chain emails as Gospel Truth. Unfortunate.
*Some philosophers might argue that you can’t even trust those things you have experienced (evil genius, etc), but I’m not that paranoid.
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Posted by Adam on January 17th, 2004 — Posted in General
This was the week that the computers rebelled. It seemed that all week we just couldn’t get any computers functional at work. At one point (on Thursday, I believe), we had five computers and one monitor all on the workbench, and we couldn’t get any of them working. That is frustrating.
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Posted by Adam on January 4th, 2004 — Posted in General
I was in my car yesterday and saw a sticker on another car that I liked. I did some Googling, and found that there was a group making T-shirts with the same slogan on it. Unfortunately they have stopped producing them. They still have a web site with the image on it though.
Who Would Jesus Bomb?
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Posted by Adam on January 2nd, 2004 — Posted in General
It occurred to me a few weeks ago that one of the biggest disappointments of my life is that I am not the best. At some point, I’m not sure when, I realized that there is nothing at which I am the absolute leader. I am not the most intelligent, not the fastest, not the strongest, not the most popular, not the funniest, not the purest, not the most artistic, not the most creative, not the most disciplined, not the most humble.
I am normal. I am one of many. I am not the pinnacle.
There was a time when I thought there must be something at which my ability is unprecedented, something I could do better than any other person who has ever lived, but I have learned that there is not. And this knowledge is crushing.
More proof that I’m just a typical male.
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