Choices -

What would you do if you were given a choice similar to the one proposed in movie The Box? If you accept, you will receive a million dollars, and then, someone in the world, probably someone you don't know and would never meet, will die. Remember that they may well be a 'bad' person, or they might be about to die anyway, or in them dying you might save the lives of many other people who they might have inadvertently killed for example in a car crash. However, they might be a family man who is the sole income earner for his 5 kids and wife, or it could be a human rights activist or some other such person.
What about the potential from Death Note; If you write a name in the book, they will die that night. Who would you choose? Would you choose people that you really really don't like, or would you choose people that you deem as evil, and if so, then who would you choose and how would you define evil? or would you just never use your power.
What if you were a 'mutant' such as in X-men? Would you work to defend those who hated you? or would you defend yourself from them? What if your choice (either way) meant alienating some people who you have had as friends or even making them enemies.
What about the choices that are made in the Sin City story 'The Yellow Bastard'? Could you choose to die to save the life of someone else - who you probably didn't know very much at all? or if you don't want to answer that one take the choice featured in 'The Big Fat Kill', another Sin City story - could you kill many people to save the lives of others?

What about some choices that are more likely to happen; chances are that we will never find ourselves in any of these situations so how about some plausible ones.
How about a simple one to start with. What if when receiving change for something you slipped it in your pocket without counting, only to find out 15 minutes later that you had been given an extra couple of dollars? What about if you had been short changed by the same amount?
What if you found a wallet on the side walk that had a $50 in it? What if there was no identification? What if there was a couple of hundred dollars in it and no identification?
What if a close friend of yours was assaulted and you found out who did it. What would you do? What if after you notified the police, they managed to get off all charges? What if it was a friend of yours?

Just something to ask yourself.

In other news, it is the beginning of the month formally known as November. Movember is a charity to raise both funds and awareness for two issues in men's health, Depression and Prostate cancer, both of which are ignored by men due to the stigma attached by it and the desire to appear bigger or tougher than you are. Get behind it guys.

Descriptions of God

There are many ways in which God (in the Judeo-Christian form of the Diety) is described. Most of these don't appear to have any basis in either the literature or the mythos of these two religions. So I thought I'd look at a few of the descriptions that come from either the Septuagint (known to Christians as the Old testament), or in the final case, from the book of Revelation.

I think my favorite description of God comes in Isaiah 6 verses 1-4, simply because it shows the sheer awesomeness of God. Basically Isaiah describes God by talking about other things. For example, the first thing he mentions was that the hem of his robe filled the temple. By way of comparison, on us, the hem is at most an inch and more often only about 10mm; this hem, the tail end of the robe, filled one of the biggest buildings of 5th century BC Israel - a space roughly 3500 cubic meters.

The next thing that is mentioned is his entourage. We have an indiscriminate number of seraphim, what are now considered (at least in christian circles) as the greatest of angels. They have 6 wings. With two of them they are covering their faces (so that they don't see the incredible glory of God, like Elijah had to wait in the cave - another awesome description of God), with two of them they are covering their feet (so they don't sully the sanctity of they ground - like Moses and the burning bush) and with two of them they are flying (even if for no other reason than they can this shows awesomeness). Still we haven't recieved a clear physical description of God.
Then these guys start singing. They're singing about how awesome God is, even though there isn't much that can compete with them. Their voices shake the entire temple, meaning that even without direct contact with the ground, their voices are having the same effect as an earthquake, and they're just God's crew.

My next favorite description of God has already been mentioned. It comes in 1 Kings 19. Elijah's life has been threatened and so he is feeling quite depressed (understandably). It shows both the awesome power of God and seemingly conversely, his incredible gentleness. Elijah is hiding in a cave in Mt Horeb when God tells him to step outside for a moment and see God's glory. A tornado style of thing comes and tears up the mountain, an earthquake shows up and shakes the mountain around, and then comes an inferno. We're also told that God wasn't in any of them. This is merely the glory of God. When we actually do see God, it's in a gentle whisper that essentially says, 'don't worry, I am here'.

The final description of God, as I've said, comes from Revelation, in particular Chapter 19 v 10 - 16. Here, we are given a description of Jesus. This isn't the baby jesus of the stable (yes lack of capitals was intentional there) or the caucasian jesus on the cross (which conveniently forgets that Jesus was a Jew and therefore didn't have blue eyes) - this is a warrior king about to ride into battle. His eyes are fire, he wears many crowns (making him a King of kings), his robe is dipped in blood (presumably the blood of his enemies, meaning that he is riding out against an already defeated army), out of his mouth comes a razor sharp sword where there should be words, he is the one who treads the winepress mentioned in chapter 14 which leaves the blood of his enemies flowing at a height of around 6 feet for 300km, and finally on his thigh is tattooed KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS as his name. Yes he does have tickets on himself, he isn't meek and mild like we've been told.

Dreams

Dreams are one thing that I think we take too much for granted. I mean, what actually is it? We lie comotose for a few hours, hallucinate vividly and then usually suffer amnesia about the whole thing. What, except for the fact that it happens to everyone, is normal about this? I ask this question because of a few dreams that I've been having lately - things like being in the very centre of an explosion (the only part of this dream I remember) or windsurfing in a river style of dam thing before going to get psychoanalysed. These are the less messed up dreams. So my question is, Why do we put so much stock in our dreams? It isn't often that I think about explosions or dying in them, or even windsurfing, so why did I dream about them? Is it a Freudian slip of my subconscious or is it just random? These are things that I don't know or pretend to understand. The inner workings of my subconscious brain are something that I'm still trying to figure out.

However, I'm not just going to leave it there. I had a dream last night that I would like to discuss. In it, someone said to me that he knew why I did things. This almost definatly has to be an outworking of my subconscious somehow - so I took note. I was told that I only did things so that I would be recognised as a good person (ironically this was immediatly before I beat someones face in), something that I have in the past noticed. So then the question arises, why did my subconscious feel the need to tell me this and why now? I don't know I and I don't particularly wish to speculate.

In other news, I've changed the layout of the blog and was wondering if there is anything else that I should do to it, or if there's anything that you would like me to discuss here. If there is, feel free to leave a comment below.

It will be sunny one day

Often when I see something that is supposed to be inspiring or motivational, I look at it and almost immediately think how clichéd it is, often because these things end up being clichéd on their own, and as the demand for these things increases with our desire to 'improve' ourselves, I don't envisage that this will change any time in the near future. This means that me finding something that I see as motivational is a rare occasion, which I suppose has given me a bit of a pessimistic view on many things.
However, on these rare occasions that I find something inspiring, I usually save it somewhere. This has lead to a large pile of quotes sitting on my computer like:

All knowledge is stored somewhere. Be it in books, heads or deep under glaciers. And when we find it, we make it ours. Faith is bricks; knowledge is mortar. -- From The Book of Cataclysm

or,

Nature is busy creating absolutely unique individuals, whereas culture has invented a single mold to which all must conform. It is grotesque. -- U. G. Krishnamurti

These get left in the WSOGMM of quotes that I find interesting due to their humour or their views on the world.

I recently found a letter that Stephen Fry sent to someone who was suffering from depression which I found to be quite thought provoking. Having lived through it, he wrote to her, not with specific advice, not by telling her how much she was loved (in fact he said that he didn't want to do that), but with understanding. The link to see the letter is here. He likened human emotion (in some cases) to the weather in what I think is one of the most insightful metaphors around. In essence, he said that, Yes sometimes it rains, Yes sometimes it rains for a long time, yes at the end of the rain, the clouds go away and the sun comes out, no you can't control the rain, and yes life can be crap. I highly recommend reading it in its entirety just for the gentle way he says it.

Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities. -- Aldous Huxley

RIP Sheldon Kaplan

You will never have heard of Sheldon Kaplan, and yet, he has made an incredible impact on the lives of many people you know, and possibly your own. He is the inventor of the ComboPen, an early auto-injector syringe used to combat nerve gas. He is also the person who realised that this system could be used in other applications - like the more well known EpiPen, which he also invented. He died about two weeks back.

Many people who have designed/built/invented medical equipment are sadly overlooked in any capacity except for in obscure textbooks about medical history or occasionally for the Nobel Prize for physiology/medicine (again mostly ignored), and yet, they usually make a difference in most peoples lives. For example how many of you have heard of Roald Dahl? How many of you knew that he helped develop the WDT valve for alleviating hydrocephalus, a developmental disease more common than Down Syndrome.
This is a sadly ignored part of research and design.

However, now that I've mentioned the Nobel Prizes, how can I fail to lead you to the Ig-nobel prizes; the awards that are given to achievements that that first make people laugh then make them think, and according to Nature magazine are "arguably the highlight of the scientific calendar." It is a list of absolute, whacked out, brilliance that Australians feature on possibly more frequently than our population would normally allow. It features things that often deserve more attention than they get, for example, Lal Bihari, the (not) dead founder of the Association for Dead People, an Indian organisation that actively lobbys on behalf of people who have been wrongly declared dead and therefore no longer exist - leaving them unable to work, travel, acquire property etc, despite being still alive. Or this years Peace Prize (slightly more deserving than Barack Obama in my opinion), Stephan Bolliger and associates from the university of Bern, Switzerland for their research on whether it is better to be hit in the face by a beer bottle if it is full or empty. Or my personal favorite, the Australian man who in 2001 invented and patented the wheel. (the patent application and acceptance can be seen here)
Click here for more details on the award and the winners.