mmmmbacon.com - Where life is as yummy as bacon

negatory

I am a meat popsicle.

Really neat sculptures

Check out this website, called Sculpting Geometry:
http://www.bathsheba.com/

This woman makes sculptures based on mathematical forms, and not simple ones like spheres and cubes. No, these are escher-esque and have descriptions such as "I hardly know what to say about this. It's a peculiar shape with one side and three edges, able to stand on any of its twelve identical feet."

Also, she makes laser-etched crystals based on mathematical and scientific entities. With laser-etched crystal, you create 3D forms inside of a crystal by making hundreds of thousands of tiny fractures in the crystal, each one barely visible by itself. A computer trains a laser on each point, and the laser heats up the crystal until it breaks.

Africa pictures

In July, Cheryl and I took a three week trip to Africa. I have put up a page here.

Enjoy!

consensual hypnosis

From Alan Watts:

"So you see that the Zen practice involves using words to get beyond words, where we might use words simply for their sound. Let's suppose you say the word 'yes.' Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. You come to think after a while 'Isn't that a funny kind of noise to make?' And we are delivered from the hypnotic effect of words by this particular use of words. We learn they're only words after all, but we hypnotize people by using words. And children, for instance, have no antibodies against words, so they get absolutely frantic, you know. 'Jeannie called me a sissy!' So what? But children get absolutely desperate about it because we put this power of words upon them, these incantations. These are spells, you see. All magicians embroil people in spells and incantations, because they use words to beguil. And so then, we are from infancy told who we are, what is our identity, what our expectations should be, what we ought to get out of life, what class we belong to. And we believe the whole thing. And having believed it, we come to sense it, as we sense the hard wood of the corner of the table, and we think it's real, and it's a bunch of hogwash. It's an amusing game, if you know that that's all it is, and can be played with eloquence. But the more you know it's ONLY an illusion, the better you can play it."

music, music, I hear music

Music is such a gateway for me. I don't know to where, exactly, but when I hear a song that resonates with me, it just pulls at my heartstrings and produces a feeling in me similar to being in love. I think I actually fall in love with the song. It colors everything else in my world. Songs sound better, people are funnier, and warmer, and it generally just feels good to be alive.

Music, when it touches me on that level, is a spiritual experience. Perhaps this is what the angels singing in heaven make you feel like to hear them. I suspect there's also something neurological going on, that differs from what happens when you hear ordinary music. It's as if the neural pathways that are coincident with the experience of love are firing. That would be an interesting experiment - do a brain imaging study when someone is lost in the moment of passionate, transcendant music, and compare it to the image of someone experiencing a passionate, transcendant relationship.

A critique of athiesm

Atheists hold the belief that if God exists, they will be able to know it. This is based on the idea that if something exists, it will be observable (the so-called objectivist point of view).

This worldview has been wildly successful when it comes to understanding the physical properties and behaviors of matter and energy. We've been able to vastly increase our understanding of reality, thanks to the simple philosophy that all phenomenon have an observable cause. No longer do spirits and demons cause disease; complex weather systems, not angry gods, are responsible for droughts.

However, this worldview doesn't do so great when it comes to understanding the human mind, or beauty, or love. We aren't much closer to understanding how the human mind and the physical brain are related to another than we were at the dawn of the enlightenment. Sure, we understand lots of things about the brain - but the mind/body dilemma is as severe as it's ever been. One of our top philosophers, Daniel Dennett, is so committed to the objectivist point of view that he refuses to acknowledge that consciousness exists. In his philosophical writings, we are all zombies, incredibly complex machines, but that ultimately we have no free will at all. This is the kind of absurdity that arises from taking the objectivist point of view too far.

fucking funny

http://www.angelfire.com/ex/kingcrab/Bloodninja.txt

heart

"Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't it is of no use." - Carlos Castaneda

faith in science

One thing that really irks me is when I hear or read statements in the media, such as: "The universe is 13.7 billion years old."

The problem is the confusion of theory with fact. A more honest statement would be, "we currently believe the universe to be about 13.7 billion years old." The ideas and assumptions that have led to the above statement also have yet to be proved scientifically with observation. Is this just semantics? Not at all. As soon as you take a scientific theory and present it as fact, you've turned science into a religion.

taking it for granted

"Youth is wasted on the young." - old people

"Life is wasted on the living." - dead people

terrorists do not hate freedom

"Terrorists hate freedom." You hear this over and over again from George Bush. This is a fabrication that is used to distract us from the complexities of the War On Terror. This falsehood is perpetuated to simplify the debate and make the distinction between good and evil as wide as possible. Us versus them. Right versus wrong.

It's a ridiculous notion. If it were true, terrorists would be terrorizing Iceland. How come we never hear about the attacks on the free citizens of Switzerland? They're attacking us because they hate us. Palestinians attack Israel because they hate Israel. Chechnyans attack Russia because they hate Russia. They don't hate freedom, they hate lack of freedom - their own.

movies, masculinity, and the american dream

http://www.columbia.edu/~lcc20/amhs/index.html

At this point I've only read the essay on Fight Club but it seems to me to be the most coherent analysis of this movie I've seen.

Here's my summary of the essay, and my own thoughts about the movie follow. Warning: spoilers ahead.

optical illusions

Some good optical illusions here:

http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/saishin-e.html

CSS websites

http://www.csszengarden.com/
http://www.maxdesign.com.au/presentation/listamatic/index.htm

Good CSS websites. Some amazing stuff with that first link.