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Diary of a B+ Grade Polymath ([personal profile] tcpip) wrote2009-02-05 12:23 pm

Love and Cosmology, Work Failures, Book Reviews

Last Sunday Rev. Dr. David Sammons, Visiting Professor of Unitarian Universalist Heritage & Ministry, Star King Ministry, gave his a presentation on "That Confusing Word Called 'Love'". He made an extension to what is commonly called "the Unitarian-Universalist trinity" of freedom, reason and tolerance - by extending it to 'honesty' and 'compassion' which he considered to the key features of the notion of love. After the service, I led the discussion for the Unitarian Philosophy Forum which had an excellent turnout for a discussion on Dark Matter and Dark Energy, and particularly its relationship to the scientific method. We made good use of the BBC programme Most of our Universe is Missing. I have since started writing a paper on the issue and discussion, but find myself sidetracked by holographic principle.

Life at VPAC hasn't been fun for our users of late with three hardware failures on one of our storage nodes in a two-week period. Having 14 drives fail due to a faulty LSI card in the space of six minutes can be sort of scary, especially when we have to restore over twenty million files and almost 8 terabytes of data. It has meant an extended outage on our supercomputers, however users have been most understanding. On a work related topic from some years ago, the proposal that Martin McGuire of ConnectIE and I put together to convert East Timor's ccTLD into a revenue-raising international telephone directory has been taken up; but for a commercial interest and not for East Timor.

When Ticonderoga Online restarted at the very end of last year a number of my book reviews were included; The Last Witchfinder (historical fiction, entertaining, well-written, informative), Hidden Empire and A Forest of Stars (plain-vanilla space opera, somewhat unimaginative) and Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (typical Phillip K. Dick - which is good). Still have a small mountain of other books I've promised to review.

[identity profile] tcpip.livejournal.com 2009-02-05 04:11 am (UTC)(link)
Doesn't it just! Especially after the example they gave of the black hole recording its history on the event horizon.

[identity profile] tcpip.livejournal.com 2009-02-05 06:13 am (UTC)(link)
Heheh..

A few years ago at the Melbourne Unitarian church we had a theist speaker (which I missed regrettably) who was also an physicist. He said one of the most frustrating things he found in many religious people was that the whilst he was trying to work out how many dimensions the universe really had they were trying to tell him that all truth could be found in one book for all eternity.

I guess when confronting by hard questions some prefer to escape to simple solutions.

You might find a current article to your liking along these lines..