http://tonyrogers.bandcamp.com/track/great
Found this little nugget of a song. Normally I hate (read loath) TV commercials for many reasons but every once in awhile one shows up and a gem is to be found within. This song on the above track was featured in a Purina dog food advertisement and the sound hit me just right.
For me this is a tragedy and not a comedy. I'm fighting the notion that the song is talking about pets and will continue with the assumption we are talking about people. For me the singers voice doesn't convey bliss or contentment but a sense of what is wrong. Someone else can see what I could be but I still cannot. I feel within that I have the energy to accomplish, but have no outlet. The person who can see these things remains as a icon, to keep striving for greatness.
At the end though it seems that the feeling remains but its almost a resignation has set in. Or maybe I feel that at the end because the song ends, who's to say?
To a point I was good
Tried to do stuff that I should
Tried to do what you said
Tried to sleep in my own bed
But my bones wouldn’t rest
‘Til I put me to my test
And I remembered what you said
That I could be great
So so great
(let it right out)
Being good isn’t tough
But it’s also not enough
What’s the use enduring birth
If I can’t find what out it’s worth
I need dreams, I need plans
I need you to understand
And I remember what you said
That I could be great
So so great
I can bite off more and I can chew
We may never know what I can do
I could be great
So so great
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Early Bird
This image was take by me in Spokane, WA on July 19, 2011 4:18 am. It is of the Upriver Dam. This dams purpose is to provide water for a large portion of the city of Spokane. Down river, perhaps 750 ft or so, is the second portion of the facility shown here:
The last two images were also taken by me at approximately 6am. The images are free to use but please credit my blog if you use the them.
Saturday, February 11, 2012
All we have to do, is get rid of the pulse
This is an excerpt from the March 2012 edition of Popular Science:
Regar and the Central American patient proved that humans could survive, indeed thrive, with no pulse.....Rather than augmenting an existing heart...they would replace it entirely with two turbines, one to do the work of the left ventricle and one to do the work of the right.
Last March, they got their long awaited chance. A 55year old man named Craig Lewis showed up at the Texas Heart Institute with a case of amyloidosis....Lewis had slid form perfect health to death's door in less than a year.
The doctors attached him to a heart lung machine, and another device took over function of the kidneys. He kept going into cardiac arrest, though, and staying attached to the machines was no longer feasible in any case. "That's permissible for only 5 days, and he was on day 14,"
Cohn says...."There was no way he was going to survive a heart transplant; the amyloid would have attacked it."..... Cohn removed Lewis's disceased heart and replaced it with a pair of Heartmate II's.
Two days after surgery, Lewis sat up in bed and spoke with his family. An aspiring engineer, he even sketched ideas for how better to hook up the heart....The patients liver failed so bad that within 5 weeks, he lost consciousness and his family asked Cohn to witch the heart off. But he'd gotten those 5 weeks time to say goodbye. And he'd left a legacy.......
This excerpt is taken from a larger story on how they have already replaced in part or the total function of the heart with a small turbine. It is a continuous pump that produces no beat. The article talks about 2 people on this planet who walk around not with a thump thump of the heart rhythm but flatlined, with blood flow and pressure. Wild.
What moved me about this article was the time this "heart" gave to Craig Lewis. It is interesting how we live our lives and what amounts to a large part of our awaking time, is spent on focusing on moving time along. By not being at work or some function or with boredom. Or doing all the things that we MUST do and not spending time on whats important or worse yet, wasting time in the worst possible way. It is an interesting dynamic that when we are out of time, what would would give or do for just a few days or even hours more.
There have been many a philosophical tale or story devoted to what would you do in your final days and that notion usually brings a great swell of emotion. Depending on various factors some people would think to engage in extreme sports, skydiving or base jumping, or getting a Corvette. Nearly everyone would make it a priority contacting loved ones, cherished friends and reconnecting with people lost to time and commitments. What might you do dear reader?
Regar and the Central American patient proved that humans could survive, indeed thrive, with no pulse.....Rather than augmenting an existing heart...they would replace it entirely with two turbines, one to do the work of the left ventricle and one to do the work of the right.
Last March, they got their long awaited chance. A 55year old man named Craig Lewis showed up at the Texas Heart Institute with a case of amyloidosis....Lewis had slid form perfect health to death's door in less than a year.
The doctors attached him to a heart lung machine, and another device took over function of the kidneys. He kept going into cardiac arrest, though, and staying attached to the machines was no longer feasible in any case. "That's permissible for only 5 days, and he was on day 14,"
Cohn says...."There was no way he was going to survive a heart transplant; the amyloid would have attacked it."..... Cohn removed Lewis's disceased heart and replaced it with a pair of Heartmate II's.
Two days after surgery, Lewis sat up in bed and spoke with his family. An aspiring engineer, he even sketched ideas for how better to hook up the heart....The patients liver failed so bad that within 5 weeks, he lost consciousness and his family asked Cohn to witch the heart off. But he'd gotten those 5 weeks time to say goodbye. And he'd left a legacy.......
This excerpt is taken from a larger story on how they have already replaced in part or the total function of the heart with a small turbine. It is a continuous pump that produces no beat. The article talks about 2 people on this planet who walk around not with a thump thump of the heart rhythm but flatlined, with blood flow and pressure. Wild.
What moved me about this article was the time this "heart" gave to Craig Lewis. It is interesting how we live our lives and what amounts to a large part of our awaking time, is spent on focusing on moving time along. By not being at work or some function or with boredom. Or doing all the things that we MUST do and not spending time on whats important or worse yet, wasting time in the worst possible way. It is an interesting dynamic that when we are out of time, what would would give or do for just a few days or even hours more.
There have been many a philosophical tale or story devoted to what would you do in your final days and that notion usually brings a great swell of emotion. Depending on various factors some people would think to engage in extreme sports, skydiving or base jumping, or getting a Corvette. Nearly everyone would make it a priority contacting loved ones, cherished friends and reconnecting with people lost to time and commitments. What might you do dear reader?
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Book review in less than 100 pages.
Sam Harris (author) often seems amused but possibly 'unenthused' about being part of what some have called him and his compatriots "The Four Horsemen". Of course I am referring to Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett and Sam Harris, a quartette of godless heathens. In a review of his book, A Letter to a Christian Nation, Sam Harris nails several arguments home with a basic and thought out candor that would make a fan of political correctness shudder. But thank our lucky stars we don't really care for "pc" here.
I don't mean to insult unnecessarily but I can see how both a book like this and reality as we Atheists put it, is indeed very insulting to those whos beliefs we attack here. People who put faith before reason would find this a very hard read undoubtedly because Sam along with millions of others find that faith should be the last ideal to be propagated through ones mind. But faith is the ideal held foremost to these peoples minds so there is very little common ground with which to begin to converse on these matters in the most polite way.
All that aside this book is in the format of an open letter. Its roughly 100 pages is an easy read not loaded with overblown rhetoric but it is fairly simple and to the point. Some have chastised it as being "fundamentalist atheist" while attacking christian fundamentalists. It attacks the bible. So how can you believe in being christian but not believe in the bible is beyond me but I digress. It makes strait forward points that get to the heart of the matter and it WILL get you thinking. I give it a 9/10 only for being short even though that was the goal.
A couple of the arguments which I will highlight here is: Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape, torture, and kill her. If an atrocity of this kind is not occurring at precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at most. Such is the confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that govern the lives of six billion human beings. The same statistics also suggest that this girls parents believe - as you believe - that an all powerful and all loving god is watching over them and their family..........One wonders just how vast and gratuitous a catastrophe would have to be to shake the worlds faith. The holocaust did not do it. Neither did the genocide of Rwanda, even with machete wielding priests among the perpetrators. Five hundred million people died from smallpox in the twentieth century, many of them infants. God's ways are indeed inscrutable......Of course people of all faiths reassure one another that god is not responsible for human suffering. But how else can we understand the claim that god is both omniscient and omnipotent?
Even if you don't accept that as a valid argument, as seen in genesis god wiped out the population of the earth himself or in revelation god will do it again, to the point of god doesn't care about death. It should at least set the stage for further arguments and get a person thinking.
If you think that it would be impossible to improve upon the Ten Commandments as a statement of morality, you really owe it to yourself to read some other scriptures.....we need look no further than the Jains: Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the bible (and the ten commandments [mine]) with a single sentence: Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.
Sam goes on to say which makes my point for my follow up: Imagine how different our world might be if the bible contained this as its central precept.
Reading the comment section of another review of this book, the commenter had this to say "Hasn't the 20th. century taught us anything? People like Hitler (who said he was christian but was not), Stalin, or Mao suppressed religion and murdered people who practiced it". Sam Harris says reason should win out but a government that murders its people, does that seem reasonable? SO, it should seem apparent but if not immediately so we should strive for building up that wall of separation of church and state that Thomas Jefferson fought so rightly for.
It is a secular state that atheists, anti-theists, and the like should and overwhelmingly do strive for but they usually don't get that point across. They, I, would like to see a world where reason wins out but that thinking is set aside for the singular, personal mind. The conversations we have should reflect this in that criticizing religious beliefs should be like criticizing any other fact or idea but that in no way means one should adopt a totalitarian view against such religious ideas on the scale of government. To separate church and state does not say to DISALLOW the building of a church or similar.
So go out and buy this book and get some neurons firing. In ending ↓↓↓ abraham going to kill his son on orders from god. Fortunately for Isaac god either changed his mind or figured he temped abraham enough.
I don't mean to insult unnecessarily but I can see how both a book like this and reality as we Atheists put it, is indeed very insulting to those whos beliefs we attack here. People who put faith before reason would find this a very hard read undoubtedly because Sam along with millions of others find that faith should be the last ideal to be propagated through ones mind. But faith is the ideal held foremost to these peoples minds so there is very little common ground with which to begin to converse on these matters in the most polite way.
All that aside this book is in the format of an open letter. Its roughly 100 pages is an easy read not loaded with overblown rhetoric but it is fairly simple and to the point. Some have chastised it as being "fundamentalist atheist" while attacking christian fundamentalists. It attacks the bible. So how can you believe in being christian but not believe in the bible is beyond me but I digress. It makes strait forward points that get to the heart of the matter and it WILL get you thinking. I give it a 9/10 only for being short even though that was the goal.
A couple of the arguments which I will highlight here is: Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape, torture, and kill her. If an atrocity of this kind is not occurring at precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at most. Such is the confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that govern the lives of six billion human beings. The same statistics also suggest that this girls parents believe - as you believe - that an all powerful and all loving god is watching over them and their family..........One wonders just how vast and gratuitous a catastrophe would have to be to shake the worlds faith. The holocaust did not do it. Neither did the genocide of Rwanda, even with machete wielding priests among the perpetrators. Five hundred million people died from smallpox in the twentieth century, many of them infants. God's ways are indeed inscrutable......Of course people of all faiths reassure one another that god is not responsible for human suffering. But how else can we understand the claim that god is both omniscient and omnipotent?
Even if you don't accept that as a valid argument, as seen in genesis god wiped out the population of the earth himself or in revelation god will do it again, to the point of god doesn't care about death. It should at least set the stage for further arguments and get a person thinking.
If you think that it would be impossible to improve upon the Ten Commandments as a statement of morality, you really owe it to yourself to read some other scriptures.....we need look no further than the Jains: Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the bible (and the ten commandments [mine]) with a single sentence: Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.
Sam goes on to say which makes my point for my follow up: Imagine how different our world might be if the bible contained this as its central precept.
Reading the comment section of another review of this book, the commenter had this to say "Hasn't the 20th. century taught us anything? People like Hitler (who said he was christian but was not), Stalin, or Mao suppressed religion and murdered people who practiced it". Sam Harris says reason should win out but a government that murders its people, does that seem reasonable? SO, it should seem apparent but if not immediately so we should strive for building up that wall of separation of church and state that Thomas Jefferson fought so rightly for.
It is a secular state that atheists, anti-theists, and the like should and overwhelmingly do strive for but they usually don't get that point across. They, I, would like to see a world where reason wins out but that thinking is set aside for the singular, personal mind. The conversations we have should reflect this in that criticizing religious beliefs should be like criticizing any other fact or idea but that in no way means one should adopt a totalitarian view against such religious ideas on the scale of government. To separate church and state does not say to DISALLOW the building of a church or similar.
So go out and buy this book and get some neurons firing. In ending ↓↓↓ abraham going to kill his son on orders from god. Fortunately for Isaac god either changed his mind or figured he temped abraham enough.
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