Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Charity, Etc.

The concepts of charity, economics, justice, etc. must all be applied on a personal level. Perhaps I will elaborate later.


Powered by ScribeFire.

Monday, September 10, 2007

Did you know?

Noil



From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia




Noil is the short fiber left over from combing wool or spinning silk. Silk noil is also called "raw silk", although that is a misnomer. As noil is a relatively short fiber, fabric made from noil is weaker and considered less valuable.



Powered by ScribeFire.

Advice

Do you have sticky sticker residue on something that's bugging the poop out of you and yet you can't seem to scrape it all off? Here's a hint:

Put some lighter fluid onto a paper towel and use it to wipe off any remaining residue once the sticker has been removed. Just be sure not to do it around the campfire.


Powered by ScribeFire.

Sunday, September 9, 2007

A Tip for Cooking French Fries in the Oven

If you're cooking French Fries in the oven, give them a light brushing with extra virgin olive oil before you pop them in. This will help them to crisp up to a nicer golden brown and will help prevent charring before the fries are cooked all the way through.

C'est magnifique!


Powered by ScribeFire.

Flavour Mixture

For some reason when you dip a donut (glazed, in this case) into milk, the flavor of the milk actually overwhelms the flavor of the donut. I find this strange because it would seem to me the taste of donut is stronger than the taste of milk, but this experience proves me wrong.


Powered by ScribeFire.

Saturday, September 8, 2007

10 Percent? More like a nothingth.

Okay, I'm going to use this blog to try to work through a little thought I had earlier, so bear with me if the continuity is a little off. This is the first time I've written anything down about this thought other than its initial mention in a conversation I had with my mom.

On a side note, it's very difficult to think with the television on, and I wish I didn't have a roommate who watches TV. For now, however, I will view it as concentration training.

Generally speaking, what we've heard throughout our lives is that we use about ten percent of our brains.
Whether this is because of some fluke in our design or because the very process of being alive is so complex that it takes the other ninety percent just to keep breathing has never been determined. It's also never been determined exactly what we use that supposed ten percent for.

The part that really interests me is that there is actually no established link whatsoever between our thoughts and the organ in our body we call our brain.

Now, they say we only use ten percent of our brain (but here we're going to substitute brain with 'ability to think'), but what if we don't even use that much? What if it's not our brain, our thoughts at all? And here is where it gets odd.

Imagine that the entirety of creation is one gigantic thinking mechanism, or brain. The vast majority of this mechanism is involved with keeping itself operational, of course, but the process is divided evenly throughout the hundreds of billions of infinities of cells, organisms, creatures, rocks, and living beings making up this brain's creative matrix. Every part of this creation therefore has an equal share in the power of the thought of the entire universe. Now, on the whole, this would mean that our brains, and the thought processes that we use, aren't ten percent of anything at all, but rather the tiniest fraction of infinity.

Now, assuming that this is true, and we have merely the tiniest inkling of thought compared to the majesty of the universe as a whole, think about what this must mean about the power of the entire structure! Here we are with our grain of sand on a beach, somehow able to create a culture, a society, literature, stories, lives, machines, and tools. This tiniest fraction of the tiniest portion of the thinking power that the entire universe shares, and we are able to use it to create a structure that makes our lives easier, that makes our own personal universe a thousand times more comfortable.

It is impossible to imagine the power that the entire structure as a whole must have!

Of course, it is possible to imagine, if we assume that the pattern scales downward and upward, which in an infinite system is the only possible assumption, i.e. our own existence mirrors that of the universe, primarily concerned with existing, and yet we have an entire system of existence inside of us that is completely ignorant of our greater purposes. You can imagine it, I'm sure, and so I don't really have to elaborate any further on this point.

The point that grabs me at this point is where does free will and a sense of self come from? As far as I can tell, that must be the influence of God in the universe, because there is absolutely no reason for us to exist sentiently unless there is some greater moral purpose to this system, some good toward which the system is working.

This is really boggling my mind right now. I have a really strong desire to stop discussing it altogether and just to let it be.

But the desire to explain has to come from somewhere.

*sigh*

The TV makes me feel bad about my thoughts, coming in at the times when I'm most involved with these things, a scream from a crime drama, a cry of "No!" ceasing my train of thought in its tracks.

Of course the entire thing is inexplicable, has always been here, and always will be here. That doesn't mean we can't talk about it. Someone seems to think that discussing it will somehow make it cease to exist. If that were the case our thousand year literary history would certainly have destroyed the universe by now.

I really am surprised a lot of the time that we manage to survive at all.


Powered by ScribeFire.

Nicotine Fits?

Well, dear and beloved readers, I am sitting here in the midst of a day of computer cleaning and re-organization, and I was inspired to type up this blog entry because I just recently had my first really noticeable fit of withdrawal from having quit smoking cigarettes about a week ago.

Let us picture the scene. Here I am, sitting in shorts in a t-shirt at my desk, relatively fresh from one of those really awesome weekend trips to the bathroom where you get to take a bath, then take a shower, drip dry in the cool air, brush your teeth for ten minutes straight, floss, shave, and just generally get CLEAN. I'm going through my computer, adding new programs here, removing old programs there, messing around with Google's impressive array of software, drinking a cup of chocolate milk (my absolute favorite drink, other than cold water). All of a sudden, I began to feel as though I were being cornered. I felt like there was some force pushing me down, and I was getting angrier and angrier at the ambient noise in the street, at the glare from my computer screen, at the music I had on, at me. It got to the point where I was ready to punch a hole through my monitor before I got up and walked around my apartment a little to try and calm down.

I sat back down, still feeling angry and frustrated, but not knowing why, when my subconscious mind popped in with a sudden, "By God I would love to smoke a cigarette." I knew it would make the anger temporarily abate in the process of lighting fire to one of those cylinders of nicotine and chemicals that have been my solace for so long.

In the process of having that above thought, I realized that perhaps my completely irrational anger and frustration were in fact the result of nicotine withdrawal. I hadn't thought much of withdrawal before. My symptoms had been mild and limited to a general craving every once in a while, but after some reading online reading, I realized that maybe my body had released all those stressful chemicals in the hopes that I would try to quell them with a cigarette.

Regardless, it sucked, and as I continue my road to freedom from nicotine addiction, my respect grows in each passing day for those who have succeeded, as does my envy for those who have never started the habit. And for all those out there still smoking (including my previously mentioned roommate), keep on keepin' on if it's what you want to do, but damn, those things are crazy.

Edit: Interestingly enough, I was continuing my read of the page I linked above when I came across this sentence: "Our cravings are the mind's psychological means of warning us that it's time to ingest nicotine to avoid experiencing physical withdrawal (nervousness, irritability, grouchiness, tension, anger, rage, frustration, sweating, jitters, shaking, inability to concentrate and mind fog)."

Post Numero Un

Alright, so here is this blog. This blog is here, and I am typing it, and this is the first post, in this blog. This is not the first blog post I have typed. In fact, I typed many, many posts on my last blog at Xanga.com (Phoenix39571). However, I felt it was time to upgrade, and this blogger gizmo has some excellent integration functionality with all the new Google gadgets I just downloaded.

Such as, Google Desktop, Google Web Accelerator, Google Talk, Google Earth, Picassa (which is essentially Google Photo Album), etc.

I realize the previous sentence was not actually a sentence and therefore technically should have neither a capital letter nor a period, but such is life. Sometimes sentences that do not deserve the honor receive the trappings of a true, honest to God sentence. And nothing can be done about it.

I'm wondering, as perhaps are you, whether the purpose of this blog will be inane personal news (always interesting to read about nonetheless), extensive metaphysics (boring, but sometimes thought provoking), social commentary (generally boring), music talk (always interesting), or some other hitherto unforeseen purpose. It will probably be a combination of all of those things.

Let It Be is an excellent song, speaking of music, and the reason I bring it up is because I've got KFOG radio (San Francisco's Own) playing on the computer at the moment and they deigned to put it on. It is a lovely thing for them to do, if you ask me. Oh yes, and The Beatles did that one, for those of you living in brown paper bags.

Anyway, I hope you will all enjoy my blog. I haven't much to write about at the moment, and I'm actually looking forward to getting all the settings down and get to where I can work this new blog like a master blacksmith works the edge of a sword, or something like that anyway.