lurid.org

This is by far my favorite story of all those I have written.

After all, I undertook to tell several trillion years of human history in the space of a short story and I leave it to you as to how well I succeeded. I also undertook another task, but I won’t tell you what that was lest l spoil the story for you.

It is a curious fact that innumerable readers have asked me if I wrote this story. They seem never to remember the title of the story or (for sure) the author, except for the vague thought it might be me. But, of course, they never forget the story itself especially the ending. The idea seems to drown out everything — and I’m satisfied that it should.

*****

The last question was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061, at a time when humanity first stepped into the light. The question came about as a result of a five-dollar bet over highballs, and it happened this way:

Alexander Adell and Bertram Lupov were two of the faithful attendants of Multivac. As well as any human beings could, they knew what lay behind the cold, clicking, flashing face — miles and miles of face — of that giant computer. They had at least a vague notion of the general plan of relays and circuits that had long since grown past the point where any single human could possibly have a firm grasp of the whole.

Multivac was self-adjusting and self-correcting. It had to be, for nothing human could adjust and correct it quickly enough or even adequately enough. So Adell and Lupov attended the monstrous giant only lightly and superficially, yet as well as any men could. They fed it data, adjusted questions to its needs and translated the answers that were issued. Certainly they, and all others like them, were fully entitled to share in the glory that was Multivac’s.

For decades, Multivac had helped design the ships and plot the trajectories that enabled man to reach the Moon, Mars, and Venus, but past that, Earth’s poor resources could not support the ships. Too much energy was needed for the long trips. Earth exploited its coal and uranium with increasing efficiency, but there was only so much of both.

But slowly Multivac learned enough to answer deeper questions more fundamentally, and on May 14, 2061, what had been theory, became fact.

(more…)

Stories such as this are usually dismissed as urban legend, but I can tell you first hand that it isn’t.  I don’t think the story will accurately convey the level of embarrassment and hilarity experienced by the people present, but it is worth repeating.

Eight senior-level managers for a Fortune 500 company gather together for a meeting.  Six of the managers are in a large conference room at corporate headquarters,  two others are dialed in remotely via speaker-phone.   The meeting is heated but productive and relatively drama-free until the leader calls it to a close.   They agree to adjourn until a later time, and one of the managers reaches over and presses the disconnect button on the speaker phone.

The six managers continued talking for a few minutes, wrapping up details of items brought up in the meeting, at which time, with unexpected clarity and intensity, very distinctive porn sounds started playing over the speaker phone.  There were some “oh my god right there”s, and “yeah yeah yeah”s underpinned with cheezy 80s sounding porn music– baw chicka baw baw.

The managers just stared at each other, not knowing quite what to say.   Evidently, the manager who attempted to press the disconnect button didn’t disconnect the phone.   Also, one of the other managers on the other end didn’t disconnect his phone either.   The result was the six managers being serenaded by Shaving Ryan’s Privates or whatever porn flick the remote manager was watching in his office.

They were able to figure out who it was and the director in charge of the meeting is “dealing with it.” 

The moral of the story: make sure your phone is disconnected before watching porn in your office.

Bowman gave me some sage advice before I left for Detroit.

“Do *not* check any bags.  They lost my bag and never found it.  It was miserable,” he says.

It was with a smug confidence in technology that I checked my bag in Baton Rouge before flying to Detroit with a connection in Houston.  All luggage is bar-coded now, how can they possibly lose bags?   With all the attention paid to terrorist threats, luggage inspections, etc.  Just plain losing a bag seems like it shouldn’t happen, right?

I shared the fully packed flight from Houston to Detroit with about 20 ultra Christian teenagers from Alabama who were starting a church field trip.  Three girls, about 13 or 14 years old, sat in front of me.   Snippets from their conversations during the flight include:

“Megan you shouldn’t play those games [she was playing Animal Crossing on a Nintendo DS] because they don’t glorify God.”

“What’s the movie? Just My Luck?  Uggggh, I can’t watch that because Lindsay Lohan is in it.  I don’t like her because she used to make really nice movies for Disney but then she wanted to start being all skanky so she sued Hollywood so she could stop making movies for Disney so she could be a skank.”

When the flight attendants told us to turn off portable electronic devices one of the girls said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if *people* had an on/off switch?  We could turn ourselves off and not worry about anything.   Oh, wait.  How would we turn ourselves back on?”   Pause while they all consider the question.   Then one of them says, “Oh wait, GOD would turn us back on!”

I did my best to drown them out with my headphones and liberally applied volume, but those are a few of the things I accidentally heard while changing playlists.

The plane landed, I headed over to the luggage pickup to wait for my bag.  So I waited.  And waited.  And waited.  I waited so long that by the time I realized something was amiss, everyone was gone and there were no bags left.  I still didn’t want to admit that my luggage had been lost, so I waited some more.   When people from another flight started gathering to get their luggage, I gave up and headed over to the lost baggage office. 

No big deal, I thought to myself.  With all these cool new technologies, the agent should be able to tell me exactly where my bag is.   I give her my info, which she punches into an ancient looking terminal.  She looked at the terminal like a dog looks at a calculus problem– confused and uninterested.   She said, “Well, I can’t tell if your bag made it on to the plane or not.”

“But…the technology?  The barcode?” I plead, pointing at my luggage pick-up receipt with the matching barcode to my now evidently lost bag.

“Oh, they never scan the bags.  Those barcodes don’t mean anything.”

I was given a phone number to call in 24 hours to check the status and an online tracking number that I could use to track the bag.   When I asked the lady how the fuck an online tracking number would help if SHE COULDN’T TRACK MY FUCKING BAG, she gave me that dog-looking-at-the-calculus-problem look.  So I left.

It’s probably because I still harbor a lot of unresolved resentment over the whole MT-Blacklist debacle that I haven’t bothered blogging much in the past year. Thanks to Jay Allen’s poorly written anti-comment-spam tool MT-Blacklist, I had a complete failure of my MoveableType installation back in June 2005 and had to switch to Wordpress. Never mind the fact that the blatently bad, unpatched bug that caused me to lose 4 years of work was a KNOWN but undocumented issue at the time. Never mind the fact that forum posters had been screaming for Jay to post some sort of warning about the possible problem. Never mind the fact that the reason Jay didn’t post a warning is because he was busy interviewing with and getting hired by SixApart, (the company that owns MovableType), rather than looking out for his users. Never mind any of that.

What is done is done and I’m not bitter. Much.

It is time that I put that behind me and started writing a bit more frequently. The new site design is the first part of that process. I think I’m finally happy with the layout and feel of the site for the first time since the conversion from MT.

As usual there has been no shortage of drama to blog about, only a lack of motivation to actually do it. Entries coming soon bout my step-sister’s half-hysterical half-scary meltdown at my house, my grandmother’s amazing recovery from the brink of death, and a very cool story about my dream to own a black cowboy hat.

Does God exist?    Academics and theologians have debated this issue for two millennia.  It is one of the most important questions that we as intelligent human beings can ask.

The classic arguments against the existence of god runs as follow:

THE “EVIL” PROBLEM – Because evil exists, God can not be all-powerful and all-knowing and all-loving.

THE “PAIN” PROBLEM – Because pain, disease and natural disasters to occur,  God can not be all-powerful and all-knowing and all-loving

THE “INJUSTICE” PROBLEM – Arbitrary injustice exists, and bad things happen to good people, therefore an all-powerful God would not allow this to happen if he existed

THE ARGUMENT FROM SIMPLICITY — Since God is invisible and the universe is on different if he exists or does not exist, it is simpler to assume he does not exist.  AKA Occam’s Razor

And now, after after thousands of years of scholarly debate, we finally have a NEW argument against the existence of God, just discovered in Russia.

THE “OH SHI- ITS A LION GET IN THE CAR” PROBLEM – If you invoke God’s protection against a charging lion, and you die, then God can not exist.

Reuters Wire reports — Lioness in zoo kills man who invoked God  

KIEV (Reuters) - A man shouting that God would keep him safe was mauled to death by a lioness in Kiev zoo after he crept into the animal’s enclosure, a zoo official said on Monday. 

“The man shouted ‘God will save me, if he exists’, lowered himself by a rope into the enclosure, took his shoes off and went up to the lions,” the official said.

“A lioness went straight for him, knocked him down and severed his carotid artery.”

The incident, Sunday evening when the zoo was packed with visitors, was the first of its kind at the attraction. Lions and tigers are kept in an “animal island” protected by thick concrete blocks. 

Original here.