“The answer to the question ‘what comes after death’ is not suitable for bringing back to this life” – it is beyond our ability to grasp, to understand and to verbalize. Not sure that we would become any happier if we found out (Jan Schumacher, lecturer in Church History at the Norwegian School of Theology )
What I great way of saying we really do need a leap of faith – or as they put it in the Matrix; humans are unable of coping with total bliss, it overloads our base systems and impulses, misery and wonder, uncertainty and pain – all contribute to making us what we are, to making life and consciousness such a unique experience.
There are limits to what we can put into language, no matter how fluffed up we try to make it with abstract terms and phrases. Just as the Uncertainty Principle makes it hard to take down the full view of quantum particles (speed or position – as the observation influences the observed), so our mind is unable to clearly explore the depths of the Universe and what lies beyond while staying connected to our everyday frame of reference.
So, three high flying thought and beyond subjects almost straight on, just spaced up by some coffee. The post have been written up over the weekend, in Word and dumped in here for links and posting (on a sidenote I had to paste in the html mode rather than Compose to avoid overload of MS Xml markup getting in here as well) Now for some more hands on geek style subjects;
Wired has done a redesign of the magazine (just got the fourth issue with the new look, waited to have a better feel of the minors as well the more obvious adjustments) – and overall I think it has worked out pretty well. Some minor nuisances – but by popular demand the Colophon seems to have returned – however, the overall feel is good. One area that still needs some thought is the online – paper cross use. Wired.com/extras is a step in the right direction.(BUT... it seems you have to move fast as the link no redirects to the main page for the newest number and list the special features for those articles, with older items banished to some unknown state
One amusing thing in the new Wired; the letters pages (rants & raves) now only have an email chat@ as point of interaction - but the text printed in the magazine and online still has the basic legalese boilerplate:
"Submissions may be edited and may be published or used in any medium. They become the property of Wired and will not be returned."
What does that mean online? A no-bounce policy? How do you return an e-mail – sending it back will leave yet another copy on your outgoing server rather than removing it from your system. Good example of old tradition failing hopelessly in a digitized environment – where a product and a copy are identical, the cost of making another (or another million for that matter) zero once it exists in the first place.
