We Geek Out!

The other day I was searching for some advice on Ruby on Rails. I got the usual links to message forums, experts exchange, HOWTO articles, documentation and API pages. One of the search results I found was a link to a twitter account. It seemed out of place among the other resources, but I soon discovered that this user is essentially using Twitter (via hash tags) as a gigantic, distributed message forum. And he's not alone.

Science and religion have supposedly been at odds with one another since the invention of science.

I can see the difference, but I don't think it's such a hard line.

Science is all about explaining stuff. How it works. Predicting the future.

I like to think of religion and spirituality as that which we know is there, but cannot explain. Some of those things eventually get explanations, and some don't.

Think about all the crazy stuff that people used to believe in the past. The world is flat. Germs weren't discovered until the 1850's - people thought you got sick from demons. Chances are pretty good that something that all of us believe right now, is dead wrong. It's something that we all know for certain. And we couldn't be further from the truth.

How many myths from our past have now been explained through science?

So, it's a moving boundary.

Several years ago, I created my own Contact Manager application. I did it in Ruby on Rails because it was quick. I had it published online at a semi-public URL, so I could access it from anywhere. It was open to public registration, but I was the only one who ever created an account on it. So basically it was a single-user custom app that had exactly the features I wanted it to.

It was perfect. It had tagging, and you could add as many phone numbers, e-mail addresses, or postal addresses as you wanted. It would keep track of accounts like Livejournal, AIM and MSN Messenger. I could even keep track of relatives & roommates sharing the same address, and each contact had three dates associated with it: how long I'd known them, how old their contact information was, and how long it had been since we talked.