Strangely Perfect

It Was 50 Years Ago, Today …when mankind left the gravitational confines of our Earth. A poor boy from the steppes, Yuri Gagarin, simultaneously became the first man in space and the first man to leave Earth and orbit it completely.  (This is something that took NASA several steps before John Glenn finally emulated the [...]

One Small Step for Man, one Giant Leap For Mankind When Armstrong said those words (except I missed out the ‘a’), it looked like men & women would be walking tall on all sorts of astronomical bodies in a continuation of the Apollo programme.  As we no know, things didn’t quite work out like that [...]

What Does That Title Mean! A. Those who practice Buddhism do so without any expectation of grace or favour.  They do it for two reasons: To Improve their own life and continuing existence To improve other’s lives and future existences You don’t have to believe that they do this – after all, it could all [...]

The Hell of Incessant Suffering and the Land of Tranquil Light Note: This was originally published here http://buddhastate.co.uk/blog/?p=30 on Sunday, September 24th, 2006 at 4:28 pm and filed under Buddhism..  The link has been dead for quite some time, looks unlikely to re-appear,  so I’m showing the words here as they are so wonderful because [...]

What it Means The key thing that separates us as humans from other creatures is our creativity based on our natural inquisitiveness tied in with our sense of self and it’s place in the universe. Endlessly pondering, thinking and wondering. That’s why it’s such great news that one of the largest international collaborations is working… [...]

Meteor Last night, a washing-machine-sized  lump of rock plummeted from the depths of space right across the face of Utah, USA, and right across the news screens.  there are now quite a few videos on-line because the people of Utah are so paranoid (it appears), that the whole place, offices and homes alike, seems to [...]

Exploring the Simultaneous Nature of Cause & Effect Star Trek: The Next Generation: Finale, Episode – “All Good Things…” I’ve just watched the double episode finale to the TNG Picard series just after the cyclists finished their ascent of Mont Ventoux in this years Tour de France.  It was “All Good Things…”(see link, link & [...]

Freedom and the Law In stark contrast to the US which still insists on draconian measures against people thought to be bad (the lowest of the low Rumsfeld called them), the UK has had a landmark ruling for common sense in a democratic, freedom-loving country. Nine Law Lords have unanimously ruled it was unfair for [...]

New Search Engine Last night I had a few hits from something called Bing but paid no attention  to them.  It turns out that it’s the new Microsoft search engine (see Guardian article here, guardian.co.uk…searchengines-microsoft), not just a revamped Live Search, apparently.  In this article, much play is made on what ‘Bing’ actually means, quoting [...]

Man with Black Hat Blames Everyone Else! Ahmad Khatami, a member of the Assembly of Experts in Iran who has a black hat, has said that the fingertips of the West are definitely on the ghastly bombing in the south-east Iranian city of Zahedan on Thursday.  So it’s all my fault then…? Interestingly, within two [...]

Introduction I’m a born twiddler.  Even though something works quite happily, I’ll try something else. So it was yesterday. In an effort to improve the ‘user experience’ and promote a bit of feedback on this website, I’ve been twiddling with various plugins. Caching for Speed Some time ago I changed caching methods from Donncha’s WP [...]

The acknowledged founder of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, created the idea and much of the system that allows information to be shared, from the web page, by hyper-links, across the globe.  His was a basically altruistic idea. Brilliantly, it has brought disparate peoples together in hitherto unforeseen ways.  Anyone (like me), can [...]

A Case of One Man’s Cake is Another Man’s Poison I first read the short story, “The Bureau d’Exchange de Maux” by Lord Dunsany, in the late seventies in a compilation, probably a Panther Books one.  It’s staggering simplicity is matched by the masterful telling. View Larger Map Later, in (a sort of) homage, Crawling [...]

Two rockets have been sent up recently by NASA. The first, a mission to monitor and greater understand how CO2 affects climate, failed. The second, a mission to search for new Earth-like worlds got up okay, will soon start searching. I’m all for expanding human knowledge and can understand the reasons for the missions.  In [...]