Day: 13 May 2004

Personal Displays of Affection

Dana fantasizes about his idea of a perfect PDA – fortunately for him, most of his wishes are already commercially available (and the laser keyboard is coming soon).

I hate PDAs. There is something banal about using a plastic stick to scratch tiny characters onto a small patch of plastic while peering into a murky plastic screen just doesn’t grab me.

What I want, does not yet exist:

  1. Ultra-high contrast, ultra-high resolution true colour screen
  2. Make that a flexible e-paper screen
  3. Or a projector screen. I’m not picky.
  4. WiMax or FireWireless access, or some other newfangled broadband wireless standard
  5. User design is built around a portable web browser
  6. Voice recognition; so I can just say “Weather for Toronto” and go straight to that webpage
  7. Open document format – because I don’t feel like having to pay for some proprietary locked copy of Alice in Wonderland, thank you

PDALive showed a concept of the PDA of 2010 by Popular Science. Yeah, that’s kinda what I’d like. Until then, I’m lugging this notepad with me. It doesn’t lose charge, and I can even use it as a coaster.

Makes us more than just well-fed cows

Astrobiology Magazine interviews Brother Guy Consolmagno. He has a M.Sc. from MIT and a Ph.D. from University of Arizona. He also just so happens an astronomer of the Vatican Observatory. He’s also proof positive that science and theology can coexist together.

…If God made the universe, and he made it good, and he loved the universe so much that, as the Christians believe, he sent his only son, it’s up to us to honor and respect and get to know the universe. I think it was Francis Bacon who said that God sets up the universe as a marvelous puzzle for us to get to know him by getting to know how he did things. By seeing how God created, we get a little sense of God’s personality. And that means, among other things not going in with any preconceived notions. We can’t impose our idea of how God did things. It’s up to us to see how the universe actually does work.

Yes! Fundamentalists, I hope you’re writing this down. Being devout doesn’t mean turning off your neocortex, and being scientific doesn’t mean being an athiest.

The whole scientific enterprise really does coincide well with Christian theology. The whole idea that the universe is worth studying is a Christian idea. The whole mechanism for studying the physical universe comes straight out of the whole logic of the scholastic age. Who was the first geologist? Albert the Great, who was a monk. Who was the first Chemist? Roger Bacon, who was a monk. Who was the first guy to come up with spectroscopy? Angelo Secchi, who was a priest. Who was the guy who invented genetics? Gregor Mendel, who was a monk. Who was the guy who came up with the Big Bang theory? Georges Lema