Rational Thought vs. Superstition

Why fight for rational thought in school? Because it is there in increasingly short supply.

Church / Vote / State

I had a bit of a disturbing experience this morning. I voted for a school bond. That isn't the disturbing part. The polling place was in a church. Specifically, it was in the religious primary school attached to the church, but it was still in a church.

I'm an atheist so the building has no special relevance to me, but I wondered about others who do have faith in a supreme being and what effect the location of the polling place would have on their vote.

What if the polling place was in a Gurdwara and everyone had to take their shoes off and cover their heads before entering?

Would the proximity of flame in a Zoroastrian Fire Temple potentially be seen as a risk to the ballots?

What if the polling place was in a mosque? Should voting be disrupted during one of the five daily prayer periods?

What if the polling place was in a jinja and you had to have permission from the Shinto priest to enter?

Where would the polling place even be able to be in a mandir? How about the Bahá'í Houses of Worship? Or a Latter-Day Saint temple, where non-Mormons are forbidden to enter?

What if, as is more and more common, your priest made a sermon prior to election day about the very topic on the ballot that you disagreed with, but the polling place was in your place of worship? Which would take priority, your duty to God, country or your conscience? Should someone of faith even have to make that choice?

Zune 2.5 WTF

I really like my Zune, and I'm glad that I can now buy TV shows if I want to, but come on...$144 for a single season? The shows are already slightly more expensive than they are on iTunes ($2.00 instead of $1.99), but season passes on iTunes are a wee bit more realistic. Most are in the sub-$40 range.

Injuries

While I was in my training track today, my granddaughter Alex was hit by a car while she was crossing I-10 around here to head home.

She's currently in the trauma ward at Texas Medical Center in Houston.

Beyond that, I have no information. I'll try to keep you posted.

Update: She was jaywalking across the frontage road while talking on her cellphone. She has a fractured pelvis, possible spinal and head injuries, and keeps drifting in and out of consciousness. To top it all off, she isn't insured. Still trying to get more information.

Update 2: She's supposed to go home today. No spinal or head injuries, just a broken pelvis and a quiet sense of gratitude for having been skipped by Darwinian selection.

Eight Days of Exhaustion

I am sure that everyone has had one of those weeks where even though nearly everything has gone wonderfully, you still want the week to be over. This is one of these weeks.

Note: I will update this post later with relevant hyperlinks. (Update: Updated and typo fixed.)

I am currently sitting in the Addison Conference and Theater Center for Dallas TechFest 2008. I had to leave at 6:15am to get here, and since the only wireless available to me is unsecured pay service, I'm typing this on my BlackBerry for lack of anything better to do.

A week ago today, I was lucky enough to get to see a live riffing by the crew at Cinematic Titanic of their next movie riff, the Roger Corman "classic" known as "The Wasp Woman.". (You can see this over at archive.org...but do you really want to?)

I have spent the last week poring over nearly 100,000 data records to try to find an integrity issue with our numbers, putting out fires at work, and overall just working myself a lot harder than normal...and now I am here so I can learn more stuff so that I can do more work.

Let nobody tell you that coders make sense. At least I am investing some time in my future. I know many coders who don't...or even worse, won't.

Anyway, I'm going to be posting a bit over at some other blogs in the near future. Currently finishing up a post called "There are no theists in QA.". Guess what the topic is?