LOST: Still Got it!

After the season 5 premiere, I was extremely apprehensive about LOSTs take on time travel. The LOST flavor of time travel leans more towards magic then it does to science. Admittedly, I was disappointed for the season premiere, I wanted the deeper story to be all based in reality. Week two, I’m over it. The quality of the show comes from the story, not how well they justify practical use of theoretical science. Maybe I’ll think differently when there are no more secrets to be revealed, but for now, LOST is still the best show on TV.

Old People Rule the World

February 17th of this year was supposed to be the end of TV broadcasting via airwaves. So what happened? The government ran out of vouchers to give to people to obtain cable boxes. The government is delaying the digital transition by 4 months to buy time to obtain more vouchers to give away. This transition was supposed to happen back in 2006, the FCC is way to concerned about upsetting old people who are afraid of change. Way back when color TV originally came out, the FCC protected the grumpy population by demanding that all broadcasts are backwards compatible with black and white TV.

While we are waiting for digital TV to take over the world, play Barack, Paper, Scissors to pass the time.

TiVo Series 3 (Goodbye to Motorola)

Over the past few weeks I have been earning my soul back from the devil.   However, today, I sold my soul once again, I got the number 10 large with a coke.

I’m planning on taking my birthday money and buying the new TiVo.  The plan is the TiVo HD Series 3 DVR with the external 500GB hard drive.  Currently, we are running an old SD TiVo along with an HD Motorola DVR from Comcast.  That’s right 2 DVRs, extremely wasteful and not sleek.  Along with this, we also subscibe to NetFlix.  So at any given time we have our recorded shows randomly spread across 2 DVRs and the red envolopes sprinkled all over.  The new TiVo will hopefull solve all this mess and allow us easy TV access to YouTube.

It seems like so far TiVo doesn’t have access to Comcast’s On Demand.  I am unimpressed by this, however, the loss of Comcast’s sloppy, confusing, and finicky VOD (Video On Demand) service could be gotten over by instant access to NetFlick VOD.

Revolutionary Road

So I’ve been sick again, it’s lame.  Ashley and I saw Revolutionary Road last night.  Prior to seeing the movie we both had read the book.  Ashley had created a book club (The Radical Book Club) that only survived for 1 book.  Revolutionay Road was to be the second.  The movie followed the book almost exactly.  It’s a good mix of arst-fartsiness, melodrama, and Leo!  Much of the movie Leo and Kate are fighting.  We all know that most fights are downright stupid, Ashley kept turning to me during one of their ’bout’s and reminded me when I did ‘this’ or ‘that’ and then we both would conceal a mocking chuckle at the two former Titanic starts for actin’-a-fool.

I highly recommend this joint, it’s about 2 hours, you get to see some breasts for a split second (to both our dismay Kate Winslet did not bear anything this time around).

In Patrick Swayze news, he’s not looking to good these days.

Social-Networking Atheism

I know what I believe, and I feel very strongly about it.   I really believe that when things matter to you, honesty is the best policy. In the past year or two, I’ve morphed into a hardcore Atheist. Having been a guilt-ridden Christian all my life before prior, Atheism is so exciting to me. Imagine, coming to the realization that one of the most important things to you, all your life, was wrong, It’s life-changing.  It’s inspired me to question everything, to be skeptical. With the loss of religious faith, I have gained excitement about the world I live in.  Learning is a wonderful thing instead of a dangerous thing.

I’m super excited about my new look on life and I want to be open about it.  However, my openness has exposed me to my parents. My Mom joined Facebook and thus the cat was let out of the bag. Side note: I’m super proud of my Mom for being hip with the kids on the coolest social-networking site ever. However, I feel so sad for her.  I know how Christians see Atheists and it’s not too good.  I imagine that she’s very sad about it, and for that I feel terrible.

However honesty is the best policy.  I am passionate about my beliefs, and I also love my Mom. If I chose one over the other, then both would be diminished.  If I’m honest then I can trust my Mom fully and believe how I want.

Interview

I’m interviewing for a digitizing position today. Interviews are always stressful. I just ate some birthday cake to calm my brain.

Had Enough of Obama?

Well I haven’t yet, but if you have:

American Idol is on tonight.

Lost is on tomorrow!

Karma

In a nutshell Karma is the Buddhist belief that your current actions will be the cause for future events. We are the result of what we were, we will be the result of what we are. Generally speaking this sounds like a good idea.   It’s empowering, the individual has direct control of the quality of their life to come by acting either good or bad.

No scientific evidence exists on the existence of Karma.  It would be completely impossible to measure.  People only know about Karma by searching for the reasons for life events.  If people understand why things happen, they then can control them, feeling in control is a comforting feeling.   So very quickly Karma changes from a method of understanding the world, to a tool of trying to control the world.  Often people fall victim to confirmation bias and assuming that correlation equals causation.  Confirmation bias is drawing attention to the hits, and ignoring all the misses.

Confirmation Bias:
HIT: “I was a nice person, and then someone acted nice to me.”
MISS: “I was a nice person, and nothing happened.”

Correlation does necessarily equal causation:
“I took headache medicine and my headache went away.”
EFFECT: Headache went away
CAUSE: Medicine worked or headache simply wore off

The idea of Karma is very similar to The Law of Attraction or more popularly known as The Secret.  Karma states that your actions dictate your future, The Law of Attraction states that your thoughts dictate your future.  The problem with both is that once someone takes on all responsibility for things that happen upon them, they then take responsibility for their own health.  It’s not fair to assume that your health is strong or weak due to your moral actions. It leads to guilt and even more dangerous, non-medical treatments.

Instead of either of believing in Karma: Just be a lawful person so you don’t get thrown in jail and be nice to people so you have friends.

Hudson River Maricle

So many people (i.e. Bill O’Reily) are saying passengers of the Hudson River place crash, were saved as an act of god. What I don’t understand is why didn’t god skip a step and the loss of property, by using his power to keep the birds from flying into the engine into the first place? Most be one of the god-works-in-mysterious-ways things. I guess god allowed the plane to crash so he could then demonstrate his love by working through the pilot and cause him to act heroically and thus safe the passengers. I guess having a assuming that the pilot was simply a good pilot faced wasn’t a possible scenario.

The Death and Return of Superman

Today is my birthday, I just turned 27. The typical Henley birthdays last for a week, therefore this is the Week-of-Jason. My party was on the 16th, wife took me out to the Melting Pot on the 17th, my Mom’s taking me out today, and my Dad tomorrow. Then Ashley’s parents sometime next weekend.

Among the personalized signature from James Randi, Ashley also got me the Death and Return of Superman in hardcover. Way back in 1992, when I was 10, I heard on the news that DC Comics was going to kill off Superman. Being incredibly naive I thought this meant the franchise was coming to an end. This was as good an opportunity as any to get in on comics. I asked my Mom if I could get the one where he dies.

We went to Wonderbook and Video and my Mom pre-orderd for both Jeff and I to get each issue leading up to, and following his death. Each week Jeff and I would make the journey on foot from our house to Wonderbook and Video to get the latest issue. Week after week Superman battled Doomsday. One week Superman was winning, one week it was Doomsday until finally both Superman and Doomsday were dead.

Following his death was several issues dedicated to his funeral and then several about his supposed return in suspicious new forms. The collection just kept going and going, and being 10, all I wanted to see was action, and there wasn’t too much action while was Superman dead.

Flash forward 17 years later (wow almost 2 decades) and my wife has bought me the hardcover version of that entire story (all 700 some pages of it). Reading it really takes me back.