An atheist thinks about… Who Created God?

Or (a better question) how was God created? Better because it may not have been a “person” but a mindless process of some kind…

Why is an atheist even thinking about this issue? Because I like myth and story, and exploring a logical construct that smart people have been fiddling with for thousands of years can only be a good thing. Like learning math.

As to the question, generally the question is answered by simply defining God as that which required no creator. But, come on, that’s lame. That’s just a way to shut people up and stop them asking questions. Bertrand Russel, in Why I Am Not a Christian, put it best when he said that if you assume the universe must have had a creator, why not the same of God? And if you insist God did not need any creation, why not assume the same about the Universe?

There has been some interesting thought in the last few years on the possibility of the universe being a simulation. In that case, who is the creator? The alien programmer? The alien kid who bought the alien TRS80 in the alien Radio Shack, and loaded up the UniverSim program and created us? Or do we have to go back to THAT universe’s creation?

Let’s face it – we are ill equipped to think about deep time and space and large numbers. We survived because we were good at selecting the less-poisonous berries, running away from saber-tooth tigers, and reproducing, not because we could ponder the nature of Time, Space, and Everything.

So our intuition that time is a line, has a Beginning and an End, is probably unreliable.

When I read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, I got the feeling (again, probably unreliable) that Hawking was claiming that the universe was boundless in the direction 90 degrees from time, and that the beginning and end were like the south and north poles. Asking what’s south of the south pole is merely a badly formed question.

But interesting to think about.

One Calendar to Rule them All…

On my Android device (made by Google) I could effortlessly add an Exchange (i.e., work) calendar and see my personal and work calendars ON ONE SCREEN, as god intended.

On Google Calendar (also, presumably, made by Google) you can not do this and must jump through all kinds of hoops with syncing apps or publishing Outlook calendars to WebDAV sites (wha?) or something, none of which work!

I call that broken. I want my work calendar on my Google calendar. And it’s 2015, so I should be able to get that.

Picture-hanging technology

I just hung 6 pictures in a pattern, and I have to say, picture-hanging technology needs to catch up with the rest of the western industrialized world. What you need is to arrange the pictures in the computer, and then using come kind of projector, project spots where the nails go.

And nails are terrible! They leave holes. I’ve tried those hook-and-loop 3M things, but if the weather gets hot, they just dissolve. Useless! Except maybe in New England… with global warming, not even there. It was such a promising technique – they came off sort of cleanly (not perfectly though – I’ve had a couple of them pull paint off), and you could reposition. Also, they show from the side, and are quite obvious. So, terrible.

Somebody, please figure this out. I’d pay for a solution.

Why does web browsing suck so much now?

Between pop-up windows, prevention of pop-up windows, hideous ads featuring skin diseases, creepy little animations, videos with sound that you can’t stop, video ads that crash, crashing your whole browser, inappropriate sexual clickbait, advertisers who have no concept of “appropriate”, and constant software updates, simple web browsing has become a hideous chore.