While I am completely fascinated by history, I have now given in to what our future can possibly bring. It may seem odd, but a game I played during the last week really activated this faculty. Mass Effect 2 explores the possible future in quite interesting ways. One hilarious, yet  fascinating bit was that races from different planets having a liking for a female only alien race. All the different races arguing that the Asari are more like themselves than other races.The game really awakened an old yearning to buy a telescope, and to keep on dreaming and imaging the future.  I am also now looking into getting some science fiction books. I have heard good things on the works of Isaac Asimov.

But I must say I am captivated by the Mass Effect world. This is probably the greatest burden on death for me, missing out on what the future can be.The weird yet wonderful music of Carl Sagan and Co also keeps me dreaming. To share another anecdote, while searching for a background of my favourite character I have stumbled onto an elegant human, dressed up as an Asari, the one  you are feasting your eyes on, on the right. It must have been some hard work doing all that, but did achieve to give me a smile in an otherwise bleak day.

Moving along, our campus has been plagued by Bible Thumpers the last couple of years now. These events seem quite common on American campuses, but not really heard of here in Sunny South Africa. I love freedom of speech, so naturally I think it is great that these guys come out and say their say. It also leaves ample opportunity for a counter demonstration. The recent demonstration of the most hated church in America, before the offices of Twitter jumps to mind. I don’t know where these local guys come from, they did offer me a business card, but for some silly reason I declined. Having read many blogs from American students, I can proudly say that these guys are truly just as misguided as the ones in the new world. Most students have been indifferent to their peaceful demonstration over the last few years, but this week I made effort to approach them, only to find a group of students already arguing with then. I had the opportunity to talk to the black guy who seemed just to be a peon for the white guy who was surrounded by students. I asked him some heart felt questions and made it very clear to him that his message is evil and that above us is nothing but sky. I must say it is also easy to win an argument against these guys if you know their argument better than they do. In the process I also managed to silence a few liberal Christians who where against the posters, but not against the spreading of the ‘good news’. I made it clear that the problem is not the method, but the message.

They did hammer on how bad it must be to be a materialist in dealing with death. I am quite humbled to have share the story of Roger Ebert.

PZ did an excellent job of summarising the journal.

Ebert is dying in increments, and he is aware of it.

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear, he writes in a journal entry titled “Go Gently into That Good Night.” I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.

There has been no death-row conversion. He has been beaten in some ways. But his other senses have picked up since he lost his sense of taste. He has tuned better into life. Some things aren’t as important as they once were; some things are more important than ever. He has built for himself a new kind of universe. Roger Ebert is no mystic, but he knows things we don’t know.

I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.

Ebert takes joy from the world in nearly all the ways he once did. He has had to find a new way to laugh — by closing his eyes and slapping both hands on his knees — but he still laughs. He and Chaz continue to travel. (They spent Thanksgiving in Barbados.) And he still finds joy in books, and in art, and in movies — a greater joy than he ever has. He gives more movies more stars.

Speaking of returning from a blogging hiatus, one of the bloggers I used to follow a lot during my first varsity years have returned to the blogging scene. Mr Ivo Vegter, a libertarian and journalist for the now deceased Maverick who had some influence over my political/economic views, and view on climate science. I will admit now that my views have changed on climate change, by the people over at scienceblogs especially Pharyngula, who made me understand that skeptics are not the climate change deniers or the vaccination opposition, but the peer review method of science itself. So I will keep an eye on his blog, but this time as part of his opposition. Although Ivo is more of an economic commentator, I would say my political views are now largely influenced by Christopher Hitchens, and Noam Chomsky, and of course the likes of Thomas Paine, and other enlightenment generation political philosophers. Then again, I don’t follow the whole climate change debate any more, or care much about local politics and or economic policy. It is just too boring, when you can instead debate religion and international, especially American politics.

On work, things have never been so hectic, but light or a bike rather, is at the end of the tunnel. My fingertips are bleeding for the various projects I am busy doing for the university. I just hope I get my office soon, so I can get at least some vague form of routine in my life, which was, although pleasantly, absent for a couple of years now.

On books, I have finished with a few, including: What is Good, The Greatest Show on Earth, Catch 22. Currently I am trying to enjoy Love, Poverty and War, by Hitchens. I have to admit, I feel a bit alienated, not so much by the style of his writing, but by the sheer magnitude of his influences. Never have I read anything like it in it’s vastness and I do sometimes wonder, if there was ever an event on planet earth which escaped the hawk-like eyes of Hitchens? Fuck knows, but I submit to his intellect with a puzzling grin of incredulity.

On godlessness, I have donated a couple of bucks to the Red Cross and recently to Soil for Life, after some hostile initiative by the folks over at Yuppie Chef.

In the beginning – specifically on October 23, 4004 BC, at noon – out of quantum foam fluctuation God created the Big Bang, followed by cosmological inflation and an expanding universe. And darkness was upon the face of the deep, so He create Quarks and therefrom He created hydrogen atoms and thence He commanded the hydrogen atoms to fuse and become helium atoms and in the process to release energy in the form of light. And the light maker He called the sun, and the process He called fusion. And He saw the light was good because now He could see what he was doing, so he created Earth. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

And God said, Let there be lots of fusion light makers in the sky. Some of these fusion makers He grouped into collections He called galaxies, and these appeared to be millions and even billions of light-years from Earth, which would mean that they were created before the first creation in 4004 BC. This was confusing, so God created tired light, and the creation story was preserved. And He created many wondrous splendours such as Red GIants, White Dwarfs, Quasars, Pulsars, Supernovas, Worm Holes, and even Black Holes out of which nothing can escape. But since God cannot be constrained by nothing, He created Hawking radiation through which information can escape from Black Holes. This made God even more tired than tired light, and the evening and the morning were the second day.

And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the continenets drift apart by plate tectonics. He decreed that sea floor spreading would create zones of emergence, and He caused subduction zones to build mountains and cause earthquakes. In weak points in the crust God created volcanic islands, where the next day He would place organisms that were similar to but different from their relatives on the continents, so that still later created creatures called humans would mistake them for evolved descendants created by adaptive radiation. And the evening and morning were the third day.

And God saw that the island was barren, so He created animals bearing their own kind. Thou shalt not evolve into new species, and thy equilibrium shall not be punctuated. And God placed into the rocks, fossils that appeared older than 4004 BC that were similar to but different from living creatures. And the sequence resembled descent with modification. And the evening and morning were the fourth day.

And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly that moving creatures that have life, the fishes. And God created great whales whose skeletal structure and physiology were homologous with the land mammals He would create later that day. God then brought forth abundantly all creatures, great and small, declaring that microevolution was permitted, but not macroevolution. And God said, “Natura non facit saltum” – Nature shall not make leaps. And the evening and morning were the fifth day.

And God created the pongids and homonids with 98 percent genetic similarity, naming two of them Adam and Eve. In the book in which God explained how He did all this, the Bible, in one chapter He said He created Adam and Eve together out of the dust at the same time, but in another chapter He said he created Adam first, then later created Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs. This caused confusion in the valley of the shadow of doubt, so God created theologians to sort it out.

And in the ground placed He in adundance teeth, jaws, skulls, and pelvises of transitional fossils from pre-Adamite creatures. One chosen as his special creation He named Lucy, who could walk upright like a human but had a small brain like an ape. And God realized this too was confusing, so he created paleoanthropologists to figure it out.

Just as He was finishing up the loose ends of creation, God realized that Adam’s immediate descendants would not understand inflationary cosmology, global general relativity, quantum mechanics, astrophysics, biochemistry, paleontology, and evolutionary bioloy, so he created creation myths. But there were so many creation stories throughout the world that God realized this too was confusing, so created He anthropologists and mythologists to explain all that.

By now the valley of the shadow of doubt was overrun with skepticism, so God became angry – so angry that God lost his temper and cursed the first humans, telling them to go forth and multiply themselves (but not in those words). But the humans took God literally and now there are over six billion of them. And the evening and the mornin were the sixth day.

By now God was tired, so He proclaimed, “Thank Me it’s Friday,” and He made the weekend. It was a good idea.

On a similar note, Robert Crumb’s book on Genesis is also now available at your favourite local bookstore(except CUM by default).

On a book update, I am still busy with A brief History of the Future, and What is Good, and also bought my copy of Dawkins Greatest Show on Earth.

They should put his “Creed” in every hotel bedroom instead of some holy book.

Against all Gods is a rather short book at around 60 pages. You can probably fit all he has to say in a 2 hour lecture or so. I have only read about 20 pages, and so far it has been good, although I expected a bit more in terms of the use of the English language. It has been very easy reading up to now, but I have grown fond of the articulatory barbed writers such as Paine, Pinker and Dawkins. Then again, its way to short to judge the book on only the first 20 odd pages. I will revisit this in a later post when I have finished with both books.

Other than that I have been busy with beefing up my portfolio with some example work. I will post these later after I have submitted them to the potential employer, they include a logo, a full vehicle vinyl wrap, a large roll up poster and a website cover.

The brand new book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution was released on my birthday as a sign from God. Well perhaps not.

As the cover and name would suggest it is a book on the evidence for evolution. His previous books where all on the process of evolution, his gene centered view in his first book; The Selfish Gene, the process of natural selection and the improbabilities of the forming of complex systems is covered in TBW and CMI. The Ancestors Tale was a rather long walk to the origins of life from modern man. This new book now delves into why we know evolution is true, by using evidence gathered through various areas of the sciences.

Two must have books in my opinion. But I first need to wait, as I have about three unread books and another two from A.C Grayling on order.