Tired Road Warrior

The following was written in a review by Mary Pols of the book Devotion by Dani Shapiro:

“Devotion does not provide a template for finding your personal Jesus (or whoever).  It’s a history of Shapiro’s quest to explore her own faithlessness.  She grew up in an Orthodox household but cast aside her Hebrew religious study as a teenager.  As an adult, her sense of God was that if he existed, he was not a micromanager.  (”As far as I knew, he had never gotten me a parking space.”)  She wants to believe in something but doesn’t know what.”

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“The legacy of (Alan) Turing the mathematician rises above any possible sensationalism.  His contributions were supremely elegant and foundational.  He gifted us with wild leaps of invention, including much mathematical underpinnings of digital computation.  The highest award in computer science, our Nobel Prize, is name for him.

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The following is an excerpt from an article by Peggy Fletcher Stack which originally was published in the SLTrib on Feb 13th, 2009:

(Daniel) “Fairbanks (associate dean at UVU in Orem) believes with most biologists that evolution is the unifying theory in the field. . . .

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According to Time Magazine, the 17th best invention of 2009 is:  “The Planetary Skin.”

“What happens to Earth when a forest is razed or energy use soars?  We don’t know because environmental data are collected by isolated sources, making it impossible to see the whole picture.  With the theory that you can’t manage what you can’t measure, NASA and Cisco have teamed up to develop Planetary Skin, a global “nervous system” that will integrate land-, sea-, air-, and space-based sensors, helping the public and private sectors make decisions to prevent and adapt to climate change.  The pilot project–a prototype is due by 2010–will track how much carbon is held by rain forests and where.”

This is the type of effort I would like to see on a river-basin scale.

Time Magazine (Sept 28, 2009) has an interesting short article on Wikepedia:

“. . . early in 2007, something strange happened:  Wikipedia’s growth line flattened.  People suddenly became reluctant to create new articles or fix errors or add their kernels of wisdom to existing pages.”

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I feel strongly that members of the human race are co-creators of the Earth with God.  That we will be held accountable for the impact we have on this planet.  The creation was not a static event, but very much a dynamic event.  The earth is evolving even as I write.

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I’ve always been impressed with real-time monitoring and control technologies and their ability to improve conditions on the earth.  But I had never fully thought through where these technologies might be headed long-term.  One possibility is:  they are paving the way for sophistricated forms of geoengineering.  The whole idea of geoengineering is starting to get buzz in the popular press.

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After 400 years, the Vatican is rethinking its image of Galileo Galilei.  Instead of being a heretic, he is being recast as a man of faith.  Top Vatican officials are now saying that Galileo should be named the “patron” of the dialogue between science and religion.  But this embrace only goes so far.  There were plans in 2008 to place a statue of Galileo in the Vatican gardens, in honor of his invention of the telescope.  These plans were scrapped, no explanation given.

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The King Follett Discourse, delivered by Joseph Smith in the latter part of his life, has always been a favorite doctrinal exposition of mine.  But recently the Mormon Church has backed away from some the doctrine elucidated in Smith’s funeral address.  I think this is to accommodate the Christian Right, many of whom feel Mormons are not Christian because of their belief that man may become like God, a doctrine commonly referred to in Mormon circles as “eternal progression” or more recently as the “plan of salvation.”

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Transhumanism and its possible relationship to Mormonism received considerable publicity through an article recently published in Sunstone. While many of the arguments/speculations in the article didn’t resonate with me, the idea of a religion developing a positive stance toward technology did. The rapid acceleration in the growth of technogical innovation is a fact of life and we need to learn to deal with it. Taking unyielding negative stands should no longer be an option.

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