Serenity

You always see the first part. It’s not offensive or strident. It’s cool and ironic. It doesn’t require you to know God is the Father of the Son Jesus and that you must believe in Him to gain that serenity.

Here’s the “rest of the story”:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardship
as the pathway to peace.

Taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;

Trusting that He will make all things
right if I surrender to His will;

That I may be reasonably happy
in this life,
And supremely happy with Him
forever in the next.

~Reinhold Neihbur

Ritalin Killed Hobbes

Dear Mr. Obama

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Dear Mr. Obama

‘Fat Gene’ No Excuse

Once again it is proven there are very few things in which we humans, as independent moral agents, do not have a choice.

It was not good to criticize an obese person because they may have been a carrier of the ‘obese gene’ and therefore had no choice whether they were chunky not trim, but studies out recently point to the fact that exercise counteracts the effects of that gene.

WebMD: Exercise Can Overcome Obesity Gene

The study showed, as past research has, that people with certain variations of the FTO gene were more likely to be overweight. However, the researchers found that being genetically predisposed to obesity “had no effect on those with above average physical activity scores.”

LATimes Blog: Lessons From The Amish: We’re Not Doomed To Obesity

OK, folks, it’s time for another round of Health Lessons We Can Learn From the Amish. Four years ago we discovered that the Amish maintained super-low obesity levels despite eating a diet high in fat, calories and refined sugar. They key was their level of physical activity — men averaged 18,000 steps a day, women 14,000. That’s monumental compared to the paltry couple of thousand or so most of us eke out in a day.

A recent study revealed even more about the Old Order Amish: They maintain low obesity levels despite having a gene variation that makes them susceptible to obesity. The secret here? You guessed it — lots of physical activity.

The important thing to remember is that we have choices, and our response to those choices affect out lives. If we are slothful and do not maintain our bodies by diet and exercise, we have none but ourselves and the choices we are responsible for to blame for the fat adorning us.

Wildlife Voting (D)

My mom sent me this by email:

A disturbing trend has been observed in nature, illustrated below:

Animals that were formerly self-sufficient are now showing signs of belonging to the Democrat Party. They have apparently learned to just sit and wait for the government to step in and provide

This Week, Vista Redux

American Texan and I purchased a car on Monday. A 2007 Mitsubishi Outlander with 14,500 miles on it. It’s white, gets good gas mileage, handles OK for my tastes, is the first automatic transmission vehicle I’ve had in a long time, and is the first car I’ve purchased which cost more than any one of my computers.

On Wednesday evening American Texan cut the side of the tip of her finger, through her nail. Nice sharp new knives of unfamiliar shapes and abilities tend to be dangerous. The emergency room and hand specialists for 5 hours are a wearing ordeal. Now for the insurance and the hospital bill.

On Saturday (tomorrow) we have our Chicago-area wedding reception.

And I reinstalled Vista on my computer.

Actually, I did that two weeks ago now.

Vista Ultimate 64bit.

It runs.

Programs and drivers are now compatible. I like enough of the features to keep it. And the fact that my wife’s new laptop runs the same version gives me a good reason to upgrade now. I like as similar a network topography as possible to ease administration and system management.

Vista does not really have any compelling reasons to keep it besides it’s additional security (which I turn off most of the visible elements) and it’s volume controls.

I would not pay money for Vista, but if it is not an option, such as a new computer, I would only purchase the Ultimate edition, which is incredibly overpriced except as an included option.

But I am actually running Vista and am happy with it for the time being. Now I just need to wait 18 more months for Windows 7. I’m currently trying to decide how I’ll score cheap copies of that one.

Afraid Of Sarah Palin

The Hawaii Reporter’s Dan Douglass is afraid of Sarah Palin.

With One Stroke

McCain has restored a great deal of hope to me.

Coworkers who don’t necessarily agree with my politically are even calling the election for McCain-Palin.

I am hard pressed to think of another person who could actually bring a history and actual person of outside-Washington strength.

Obama-Biden are two pols, one young and inexperienced with anything besides Chicago-style corruption politics and one old and seasoned in the ways of Washington lies.

Palin has actually run something, stood up to corruption in her own party, and is in touch with ordinary Americans in ways that nobody else running this November are: she hunts and fishes, has children, including one with Down’s Syndrome (Hat Tip: Sol).

Welcome aboard Mrs. Palin.

And you know any strategist recognizes this is also about someone challenging Hillary in 4-8 years.

Why, God?

Andree Seu, a favorite author of mine in World Magazine, encountered what we might at first blush call a freak accident or narrow escape but which God considers another chance to glorify Him:

Lawrence and Nancy’s 3-year-old son fell out of his second-story bedroom window

I’ve been dealing with the loss of a good friend and did not immediately connect the significance of God’s work reaching across these two incidents because Lawrence and Nancy’s son, Sammy, lived. But God did. And speaking through Andree to me He revealed even the smallest and most indirect part of His plan is so very perfect:

…(Y)ou might ask why, if God is so amazing, He didn’t stop Sammy from falling out in the first place. There you got me. All I know is that people were mobilized to pray and cook and watch Matty, and so it seems that God was giving lots of folks an opportunity to love in ways they wouldn’t have otherwise. And that’s the best I can do with that.

Where Is HAL?

It’s been 43 years since artificial-intelligence innovator Herbert Simon claimed that in 20 years machines would be capable of doing any work that a man can do.

Hollywood thought it would be done by the year 2001.

Mankind is a curious being, full of inconsistancies and unacknowledged frailties.

On one hand we are so very full of our own ability, claiming that we can create intelligence equal to our own. On the other, we have such a dim view of ourselves, claiming an intelligence equal to ours can be created, by us.

Defining artificial intelligence as non-organic, human-created machines capable of independent thought, cognition, and self-awareness, we find ourselves woefully short of our stated goals and claimed abilities.

Network World magazine, June 23rd 2008 edition, says that while the whole dream as one realized entity, a truly intelligent robot, is still far off, many of the individual parts and technologies are already developed. But with a very telling by-line perhaps you’ll see the issue:

The grand promise of intelligent machines underestimated the complexity of reproducing human cognition.

The irony is heavy surrounding this.

The last two centuries have been a progression of the understanding of human cognition. From the age of reason through the psychoanalysis of Frued and Williams, we have broken down our own minds and thought processes until we believe them to be simply incredibly deep chains of logic switches. We put lots of logic switches on silicon wafers and fed electrical pulses through pathways signifying instructions and found our creations could process commands: input and output.

We made them faster and faster until we thought that with the proper instructions these processing cores could, with the proper instruction sets, become artificially intelligent.

We assumed that human kind is simply a more evolved animal with deeper instruction sets, more complex preprogrammed responses. But with each new iteration of technological improvement, we are becoming more aware than ever of the gulf seperating us from our machines.

I will go out on a limb here and state that even if we had forever, humans will never build a machine that is artificially intelligent.

We will make things seem to be intelligent, but they will all boil down to increasingly complex instruction sets compiled by humans and limited by the very myopic view of our existence which leads us to believe we can actually create intelligence, and will fail in our ultimate goal.

The reason is that we are not solely the result of random processes creating complex logical structures around an organic adapted structure. But we are beings which exist here and hereafter with logic, yes, but also with will and emotions and moral reckoning.

There will always be a gulf between us and our creations: we cannot breathe life into anything.