A New Religious Debate

Cycling through my news articles for the morning, I came across this plum from Wired News:
http://www.wired.com/news/wiredmag/0,71985-0.html?tw=wn_index_10

It is about a group called The New Athiests, who are challenging all intelligent people to clarify their stance on the existence of God. This group is much different from previous groups of atheists, as they not only reject the belief in the existance of God (and consider it a disease), but they also reject all groups of people (agnostics, liberal believers) who may agree with some, but not all of their beliefs. They seem very binary; either you're with them, or against them: 1 or 0.

For a liberal believer of the Christian faith like myself, it is quite disturbing (and insulting). The article is a good read, and and I think it provokes some good thoughtfulness. However, I find it humorous that this Dawkins guy does not realize you cannot have prayer without religion; his belief system will just spark a new religion, thus propogating what he is intending to destroy.

It doesn't seem he looks too closely at the basic tenants of the teaching of all relgions: love, respect, humility, and being a good person. Also, I'm profoundly disturbed by the extremist stance he takes; in this manner, I daresay the New Atheists can be likened to terroristic organizations such as the Taliban and the Branch Dravidians. Please note I have nothing against atheists; I've just have never had any respect for any type of extremist, for those who cannot respect others, but demand respect for themselves.

Strangely enough, while I was reading the article, I started thinking of an old hymn we used to sing in church when I was a little girl. It goes:
"I believe in the sun
Even when it isn't shining
I believe in love
Even when there is no one there.
And I believe in God
I believe in God
Even when God is silent."

Something to chew on I suppose. That's all for now.

And yes! Suzanne has posted quite a bit in the last few days. What could it mean? Probably that she's avoiding doing work. And I would agree! So, back to work I go.

Friday nights...

So two Fridays ago I decided that I would go out and have some fun. So I went and visited some of my friends and played video games :-) I played the original Zelda. This was amazing, since I never played any game in the Zelda series (yes, it's true), and I had an absolute blast. Later, when someone else wanted a turn, one of my friends let me play with the character creation screen on City of Villains. It was amazing; while I really have no interest in playing the game, the level of customization a person could put into their characters just had me in awe. So after quite a bit of fine tuning, I came up with a character, who I named Czara. Below are some screenshots of her. Pretty badass, no? :-)




Check out her boots.. aren't they cute? <3

I guess this is a geeky girl's way of playing dressup :-)

Ok, it's late.. I'm pretty much done posting for a few days. Have a good night!

The Last Weeks of October

So much has happened in the last few weeks, it's hard to list all of them. All good things, so you won't hear me whining much :-)

Let's see: at the end of this semester, I will be staying permanently at Amy's apartment, and it will be my primary address of sorts from now onwards. It's really exciting, since I finally have a place I can call home. Plus, my housemates are really nice, so I really like being there.

I gave my presentation to the RPI chapter of the ACM last week as well. Believe it or not, it was a success! People genuinely seemed interested in what I had to say, and I got asked back to give future presentations (at least once a semester!). Hooray! Also, they advertised my talk all over campus, which, for me, was quite shocking/flattering, since most talks do not get advertised. About 20 people showed up, which was pretty good, and I got some really good questions. If anyone is interested, the slides for my presentation are up on the main page of my website.

Let's see... what else? Oh! My good friend Amy (who's going to graduate at the end of this semester.. *sniff*) and I decided to dress up together for Halloween this year. My sophomore year and her freshman year, we got dressed up as pirates, and it was a ton of fun :-) Since this is her last semester, I guess we're going to have a repeat just for old time's sake. But, what to be? Our first idea was going to be "Cowboys and Indian" (guess who the Indian would be?). Then we had a "Disney Princesses" idea (I would have been Jasmine), and we even had a girl-version of the "Village People" idea (again I'd be the Indian... but there weren't enough girls!). So Amy and I were talking one night, and I jokingly (emphasize, JOKINGLY) suggested that we go as characters from Sailor Moon. Horrifically enough, she ran with it, and it now seems I will be Sailor Mars and she is going to be Sailor Mercury. Amy's even dyeing her hair blue! I'll post a picture or two if my dignity allows it.

So this last weekend, we carved pumpkins and worked on our costumes. Believe it or not, we actually were able to make pleated skirts from scratch (go us!) and the costumes are probably going look surprisingly good, considering our total lack of any sewing expertise. We're almost done... though I want to save the actual pictures of us till after Halloween, I might post a quick pick of just my costume.. I'm so excited! Our pumpkins also turned out quite nice. Below are two pictures of Amy's pumpkin, my pumpkin, and our suitemate's pumpkin (coincidentally also Amy). I also have a closeup of my pumpkin, which was a black kitty against a moon. Pretty simple, but I haven't carved a pumpkin since I was like five, so it was a heck of an experience for me.




Oh! And of course, I should mention Computer Science Day, which has been the highlight of the past few weeks. Rensselaer hosted the first annual Computer Science Day last friday, in which we welcomed four world renowned researchers to come and talk about research related to a particular topic. This year's theme was Computational Geometry, and our researchers talked about geometry and topology as they applied to db search (Dr. Indyk), Computer Vision (Dr. Ponce), Bioinformatics (Dr. Edelsbrunner) and Random Sampling Methods (Dr. Kannan). It was positively amazing, and I attended all the talks. 12 am Friday, I was elated, and singing random CS carols that I made up, like "Little CS boy", which were horrific knockoffs of existing Christmas carols, such as "Litte Drummer Boy". I will spare you the lyrics. But to see how giddy I was, here is a picture of that Amy took of me and her on the morning of CS day:



Don't I look happy? :-)

Anyways, that's all for now. This post is waaay too long. I will probably post some other random junk about what I've been up to in the next few hours/days. This week is going to be busy, since aside from working on probability, I still have the halloween costumes to make. But you know what? I'm doing well, and I'm doing happy :-) So life is good.

More later!

Being a chick rocks

Yeah, I whine about it every 28 days, but man, being a woman totally rocks most of the time.

I was listening to some of my music today, and one song that played was "Bitch" by Meredith Brooks. Quite a bit of the lyrics reflect on how mecurial I think every woman can be. Compare to another song that I really love, "She's Always a Woman" by Billy Joel, which I think also is very descriptive of most women (and me most of the time). I always liked Billy Joel; finally a man who realizes that all woman-kind is crazy, and always has been, and always will be, and that it's not worth trying to make us into logical creatures.

Yeah, so it's late, and I need to get up early tomorrow and do work all day. So, that's all for now! I'll give updates as they come.

Oh! I turned 22 recently! Hooray for getting old!

"And the most she can do
Is throw shadows at you
But she's always a woman to me..."