The Shark Tank gives a daily tale of something goofy that has happened to someone in the technical world. I particularly appreciated this one from Monday (fourth item).

Frantic new sales guy grabs IT pilot fish as he walks by and asks why the printers don’t work. “He showed me the problem printout, which had been unceremoniously discarded in the trash,” fish says. “I asked which pages were missing. ‘All the even pages,’ he said. I took the pages out of the salesman’s hands, flipped them over, handed them back – and asked, ‘Now what pages are missing?’”

From The Matrix:

Morpheus: “We don’t know who struck first, us [humans] or them [the machines]. But we know that it was us that scorched the sky. They were dependent on solar power and it was believed that they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun.

“Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.

“The human body generates more bioelectricity than a 120-volt battery. And over 25,000 BTUs of body heat. Combined with a form of fusion the machines had found all the energy they would ever need.

“There are fields, Neo, endless fields where human beings are no longer born. We are grown.

“For the longest time, I wouldn’t believe it. And then I saw the fields with my own eyes, watched them liquefy the dead, so they could be fed intravenously to the living. And standing there facing the pure, horrifying precision, I came to realize the obviousness of the truth.

“What is the Matrix? Control. The Matrix is a computer-generated dream world built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this.”

Now a University of Pennsylvania biologist has started us down the road to making the Matrix a reality.

Headline Popular Science: Be Your Own Battery: A backpack converts human motion into electricity

Today’s tech-savvy soldier with night-vision goggles, radio and wearable computer is primarily battery-powered. Now biologist Lawrence Rome of the University of Pennsylvania has found a far better way to recharge the 21st- century soldier—and civilian, for that matter. The solution, funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research and the National Institutes of Health, is a backpack that harnesses the up-and-down motion of the hips when a person walks and converts the mechanical energy into electricity. “I pulled my 30-year-old external-frame backpack out of my closet,” Rome says. Weighting the pack, he set it on springs so that it would bounce with each step and then coupled it to a generator. Carrying weights of between 44 and 84 pounds, testers generated up to 7.4 watts, more than enough to directly power a full flight of electronic gear or to recharge batteries as they die.

The doors to the Pleasant Unity United Presbyterian Church are red. Now you know.

geotagged

In his song They’re Not Here, They’re Not Coming, Don Henley asks why aliens would come visit our world.

Would they pile into the saucer
Find Orlando’s rat and hug it?
Go screaming through the universe
Just to get McNuggets?
Well, I don’t think so, I don’t think so
It’s much too dangerous, it’s much too strange
Here in a world that won’t give Oprah no home on the range

So if not for Disney World or McDonald’s, why would aliens come visit our planet?

For views like this.

I’m old enough to remember when baseball was called the great American pastime. But that day is long gone. Now there is another great American pastime.

Headline Chicago Tribune: Red Sox Sue Over World Series Ball

BOSTON — The Red Sox asked a judge to let the team keep the ball that Doug Mientkiewicz caught for the final out that clinched Boston’s 2004 World Series title.

Ownership of the ball has been in dispute during the 13 months since pitcher Keith Foulke flipped it to Mientkiewicz, giving Boston a four-game sweep of the St. Louis Cardinals and its first World Series championship in 86 years.

Mientkiewicz, who clutched the ball in his glove and joined teammates in celebration, later put the ball in a safe deposit box and claimed ownership when the Red Sox asked for it.

In January, after he was traded to the New York Mets, he loaned the ball to the Red Sox for one year. He would get it back “unless the ultimate issue of ownership has been otherwise resolved,” the agreement said.

Lawyers for the Red Sox filed a lawsuit Wednesday in Suffolk Superior Court asking the court to keep the ball or place it in some other “secure location” until a judge decides the ownership question.

Sit back and enjoy the court room drama, because lawsuits are the great American pastime.

Q.61. What does the fourth commandment forbid?

A. The fourth commandment forbids failing to do or carelessly doing what we are supposed to do. It also forbids treating the day as unholy by loafing, by doing anything in itself sinful, or by unnecessary thinking, talking about, or working on our worldly affairs or recreations.

As I mentioned in last week’s catechism question, I struggle with the correct way to observe the Sabbath. The catechism’s answer to this week’s question of what to avoid on the Sabbath seems a bit legalistic and strained. I think it might go too far. Yes, we should avoid working on the Sabbath, and we should avoid sinful things (as we should on every day), and we should worship on the Sabbath. But does the commandment completely forbid loafing and recreational activity?

Here’s the scriptural warrant for not loafing given in the footnotes of the Shorter Catechism:

Acts 20:7-12

⁷ On the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread, Paul talked with them, intending to depart on the next day, and he prolonged his speech until midnight. ⁸ There were many lamps in the upper room where we were gathered. ⁹ And a young man named Eutychus, sitting at the window, sank into a deep sleep as Paul talked still longer. And being overcome by sleep, he fell down from the third story and was taken up dead. ¹⁰ But Paul went down and bent over him, and taking him in his arms, said, “Do not be alarmed, for his life is in him.” ¹¹ And when Paul had gone up and had broken bread and eaten, he conversed with them a long while, until daybreak, and so departed. ¹² And they took the youth away alive, and were not a little comforted.

So, we should not loaf on the Sabbath because Eutychus fell asleep during an extremely long sermon and fell out the window? I hardly find that compelling.

Remember back in January of 2005 when Harvard’s president, Larry Summers, made the radical statement to a meeting of social scientists that men and women might be different, and this difference could have something to do with why more men than women are in the highest levels of math and science at academic institutions. (President Summers suggested three explanations for the underrepresentation of women in tenured math and science positions at elite universities: 1) Because of their priorities, married women choose to spend their time and energy differently, 2) women have different abilities than men, and 3) there is discrimination in the job search and hiring. It was mainly the second point that got him in trouble. To read his whole speech, click here.) This hypothesis crossed one of those politically correct lines that you are not allowed to cross.

After his remarks, there was a minor firestorm of protest. A woman who was present at the speech was so upset by what Summers said, she walked out without listening to the whole speech, saying, “That kind of discrimination holds people back.” His own faculty sent him a letter criticizing him for publicly stating his hypothesis. In some circles, there are certain things you are not allowed to say, and that men and women might be different is one of them.

Flash forward to yesterday’s Washington Times:

Headline Washington Times: Now, there’s proof: Men, women different

Some stark new clinical evidence shows that men and women are just not the same upstairs.

“The comedians are right. The science proves it. A man’s brain and a woman’s brain really do work differently,” a research team from the University of Alberta in Canada announced yesterday.

After analyzing magnetic resonance imaging (MRIs) of 23 men and 10 women, the team found that the sexes use different areas of the brain even when working on exactly the same task.

“The larger implications of this work is that we may increasingly find out that there are differences in the ‘hard wiring’ of male and female brains,” said study author Dr. Peter Silverstone, a psychiatrist.

Though Dr. Silverstone hopes that these revelations will lead to more innovative ways to treat depression and other mental illnesses, these findings might one day explain certain persistent behaviors that make for a more lively existence.

Why do men, for example, refuse to ask for directions while women are busy peering at maps and landmarks during the same automobile journey? Why do women cry and men sleep through a sappy movie? Could it be that old hard-wiring?

These are social scientists who are doing a study looking for differences between men and women, and then suggesting that these physical differences could account for behavioral differences. Hasn’t anyone told them they should be outraged at even suggesting such a possibility?

But it gets worse. The Washington Times article goes on to quote a psychologist who did a study that suggests that president Summers might have been right in his comments.

“Human evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior,” said psychologist Richard Haier of the University of California at Irvine upon releasing his study of male and female brains in January.

Again using MRIs, he found that men have more than six times the amount of gray matter — which controls information processing — in their brains as women do. But females have 10 times the amount of white matter, which controls networking abilities.

The findings “may help explain why men excel in tasks requiring more local processing (like mathematics) while women tend to excel at integrating and assimilating information … such as required for language,” the study found.

It is interesting to see the difference in expectations. The social scientists themselves carry on research and write paper making conclusions about differences between men and women, and it is freely accepted as science. But if a major university president publicly postulates to a group of social scientists that there could be differences between men and women, people get up in arms.

An e-mail exchange from work ran something like this:

From our testing area: “There is a spelling error on the web page I’m testing. The word ‘Triple’ is spelled ‘Trifple’. Here’s the screen print to show the error.”

After examining the screen print, someone from my area responded: “Yes, ‘Trifple’ is misspelled, but it is in a user entered field. Whatever the user enters, the screen displays, and the user misspelled ‘Triple’.”

“Oh, yes,” came the reply from the person who reported the ‘typo’. “That is what I entered.”

Scratch that one from the bug list.

Headline Reuters: Theologians to ask Pope to suspend limbo?

According to Italian media reports on Tuesday, an international theological commission will advise Pope Benedict to eliminate the teaching about limbo from the Catholic catechism.

The Catholic Church teaches that babies who die before they can be baptized go to limbo, whose name comes from the Latin for “border” or “edge,” because they deserve neither heaven nor hell.

Last October, seven months before he died, Pope John Paul asked the commission to come up with “a more coherent and enlightened way” of describing the fate of such innocents.

What an interesting way to describe babies: innocents, particularly when Catholics hold to the doctrine of Original Sin, and the whole reason Catholics baptize babies is to remit all sins, both Original and actual.

If babies are in fact innocent, then they neither need to be baptized (according to Catholic doctrine), nor is there any reason for inventing a place called limbo.