Layered Thoughts

I have Mr. New President streaming live on Hulu right now as I write this, and he just said that we are witnessing events that define a generation. Perfect words to describe what Americans realize during the succession of every President.  As we transition over to a new leader, those in my generation at my age are watching someone take over the reigns of a country that we are soon going to try and lead ourselves. Mr Obama is leading my generation as of today. Hopefully he can lead this country to a point where we will all be able to witness the next generation watch their President take over.

I finally started working on mockups for the first product of my soon to be company.  So stoked about it.  I haven’t gotten past the Photoshop stage yet, but I’m nearly half way done mocking up all of the user interface screens so once those are done, I’ll move on to slicing those up, coding them, and then plugging them into the application I’m going to start programming. I’m not going to get too detailed as to what the application is until it launches, but I will say that it has to do with fitness and it’s going to be a really simple and easy to use tool while still being pretty powerful behind the scenes. I’m really excited to be able to use a lot of what I have studied over the last few years to put together a functional product for the web.  I’m tackling all things technical while my business partner will take care of the marketing and sales sides of things.  Hopefully we can reach a point where this can become our full time job, as we have another product we want to build which is really unique and has the potential to change its market in a big way. I’m hoping to write about a lot of the things I learn along the way. Whether it’s how to fix things, or how to plan out things, or some sort of programming trick I learn along the way, I’ll put up some posts about them so someone out there might be able to take something away from it. I’m also starting school (5 classes) this Friday which is probably going to steal a lot of time away from me as I will have a pretty big reading load to take care of every week.  I’m hoping to adopt a 6 hour a night sleep schedule so I’m probably just going to end up addicted to caffeine and kind of crazy so it should be entertaining at least. Time for some Ramen and some more work. D

So here I am, cruising around on my bike through Mission Bay along the boardwalk this last weekend, when I realize that I’m surrounded by a ton of people staring at both horizons.  I wasn’t really paying too much attention until it got to the point where I was swerving from potential accident to potential accident attempting to remain as out of it as possible.

But then I looked up to my right and was staring down the face of the biggest moon I had ever seen, in broad daylight, with the sun setting behind me, and I had to stop.

I felt like it was my duty to take some pictures of what I was staring at.  Yet all I had was my Palm Treo cell phone.  Great phone, awful camera.

Regardless, I grabbed it and pulled my bike over to the side and pointed my phone at the moon and then realized in my viewfinder was what seemed like a professional photographer with a lens on his camera that looked like a damn cannon barrel.

So to avoid the irony of taking a shitty picture of something with someone taking a much better version of the same picture in my own shot, I moved a few feet over and continued taking some pictures.

And these are what came out.  To be fair, a few of these are from the next day when there was another crazy sunset at the beach, but still, all of these are from a 24 hour span of time, taken within 10 blocks of what I have called home for the last year and a half.  Pretty great.

Days like this really make you slow your life down and enjoy yourself.  I definitely took an extra long bike ride that day.

Also, if you click on any of those images, they’ll pop up into a lightbox over the page, which is pretty sweet.  Except for the fact that they’re a mile wide. Oh well.

Peace.

Ben Stein’s movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed did happen to have some interesting points.  But one that I found glaringly annoying was the point about the possibility of the spontaneous emergence of life on Earth. About a third of the way in, Ben Stein talks to a few different experts in the field of bioligical evolution who make the point that the chance of life spontaneously emerging from the chemicals and gasses present on Earth is 1 in trillions and trillions and trillions.  A very very rare possibility indeed. Stein then goes on to joke that this proves that there is a much better chance that a designer put things into motion rather than life randomly beginning on Earth.  He even points to the fact that a scientist in the 1950’s put together an experiment where he put the essential elements of life in an apparatus and subjected them to an electrical shock (see: lightning) and no life appeared.  This experiment, to Stein, proves that there is just too low of a chance of low spontaneously emerging even when all of the ingredients are present. That makes sense when performing an experiment in a petri dish. But Stein’s error in all of this was saying that the chances of life spontaneously emerging are so low that they are impractical and that that is evidence enough to prove that there must be a designer who started everything.   When performing petri dish experiments, this is justifiable.  But let’s think about the universe as a whole. Scientists have concluded that there are 200 to 400 billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way.  And these same scientists have discovered that there are upwards of 125 billion of galaxies this size in the known universe, with the number of discoveries increasing every day. Each of these galaxies with all of their stars has the capability of housing billions upon billions upon billions of planets of every shape and variety. Our Earth alone has over a trillion square feet of surface area.  A trillion. Finally, most scientists agree that the universe is somewhere near 13.5 billion years old. Unfortunately, I don’t have a calculator capable of multiplying all of these numbers together. But if one were to think of multiplying all of those stars and galaxies together, with all of those planets, with all of that surface area, over that course of time, one would realize that the potential for the conditions for life to spontaneously emerge somewhere in the universe is much much higher than what is presented in the movie. But none of this was presented in the movie.  The facts that were presented were taken out of context and put into a new context that leaves one to think that a designer is a much more logical solution than the spontaneous emergence of life. And this is what bothers me so much about people placing God as the reason for so many things.  It takes away from how lucky we are as humans here on Earth for happening to be one of the organisms able to emerge so “miraculously.”  By giving God the credit for such special and lucky instances of statistical chance truly takes away from how special our days on Earth really are. Stein fell victim to a situation where Occam’s Razor (that which is the simplest solution is most likely correct) led him in the wrong direction, for he didn’t take the vast scope of the universe into consideration when making his outlandish claims.

I’ve been playing around with Amazon recently (they’ve got some amazing tools and widgets) and have put together a reading list page to track all of the books I am either reading or plan on reading.  Most of the books are about religion and philosophy and I’m trying to be objective in regards to what books I want to read.  I plan on reading some books with a religious standpoint in addition to those with an atheist standpoint so as to force myself to make up my mind rather than let the books do it for me.

I’ve never really been one to have resolutions when it comes time for the new year.  But now as I am more independent and older and working to live on my own and put myself through school and eventually make a good living for myself, I think it’s a good time to put together a list of goals and get a little bit more disciplined. So here is the list I have come up with so far:

1. Read A Book A Month: To be fair, my goal is actually to read at least 12 books this year, as I’m sure some will be read much more quickly than others. I’ve realized that reading is much more important that I had previously thought.  I have been caught in the trap of only reading short articles online in the last year, which is good for quick information, but bad when trying to grasp larger concepts.  So I have decided to read as much as possible this year, basically filling in my gaps of free time with books.  I’ll stick mostly to non-fiction as I want to read to learn rather than read just for entertainment, though the first book I have chosen is the fiction novel The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (It was written to exemplify her philosophy though).  I’ll mostly be focusing on reading about philosophy and religion as that is what I enjoy reading the most, but I’m sure I’ll gather a few computer books along the way.  I’m hoping to add a page to this blog that lists all of the books that I have read or plan on reading along with my notes about each one.
2. Read The Bible: I’m an atheist.  That’s most likely never going to change.  But in order to further my study of religion and the philosophy of religion and the reasons why nearly everyone else is religious, I have decided that I need to read the Bible.  I have found what looks to be a great study Bible, the Holman CSB Student Bible, that is written in a more modernized English which should make things a little bit easier to follow.  I’m sure this reading will bring about a fair share of blog posts…
3. Do Better In School: This goes hand in hand with the reading goal.  What holds me back from getting straight A’s is my tendency to procrastinate.  So my goal is to eliminate that procrastination and get ahead of the game from now on in school and raise my GPA a bit.
4. Write On This Blog More: I have done pretty well so far (except for these last two weeks, but it was the holidays and I was on vacation) but I’m hoping to get at least 5 posts on here a week from now on.  I have about ten different post ideas with notes going already, and plan on continuing to use that system to brainstorm ideas, and then pick and choose ideas from that collection to officially post.  I’m hoping to keep a high level of quality and originality for each post and plan on focusing on computers/programming, philosophy, and religion as my topics.
5. Get Back In Shape: What kind of resolution list would this be without this one?  I used to be in pretty good shape.  I’m not in bad shape now, I’m just not in good shape any more.  So I’m going to be realistic and set my goal for the gym at at least 3 workouts a week, with an almost 100% focus on weight training.  I’m tempted to follow the system in this book, The New High Intensity Training: The Best Muscle-Building System You’ve Never Tried…
6. Go Camping: I do go camping a few times a year with a lot of my friends out at Lake Buenavista by Bakersfield and its a blast but it isn’t real camping.  I want to get into more wilderness type camping, and even more I want to get into backpacking and minimalist camping, including making shelters and eating wild plants and fishing/hunting for dinner.  I really like all of that stuff and have never really done it and want to get into it.  I have a trip planned with the girlfriend at the end of March but I’m sure she won’t be down with me not bringing a tent and sleeping in a cave so maybe after that one.
7. Start My Company: I have a business partner.  I have a well developed concept.  I have the knowledge to program the web app. I even have some seed funding.  I’m ready to start a company whose product is a web application.  I know it will succeed, it’s just a matter of doing it.  And what better time to start than the beginning of the year?

Seven goals.  I think it’s a pretty modest set of goals in reality and I think I can manage reaching all of them.  I’m hoping to post enough here to build up some pretty good traffic because that would be a huge motivator to keep posting frequently so I might experiment with some traffic building ideas.  But I don’t want traffic to become the main goal of the site so I won’t go too crazy with any of that. So we’ll see how everything goes.  I’m sure I’ll have a lot of updates on here about each of the goals listed above and how I’m doing with them.