Eternity is a long time, and concepts of the afterlife in the world's religions are mixed. It looks like that are two schools of thought: the heaven/hell model of Christianity and Islam, and the reincarnation model of the Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists. I was surprised to learn that Judaism is noncommittal on the afterlife and Buddhism doesn't have a concept of the soul.
I've been in a Jewish synagogue only once, for the funeral of a friend's wife, and I was very impressed. There was no mention of God or heaven at all all. The service was completely devoted to the life of the deceased, and while a sad occasion, the emphasis was on the joy she brought to those who knew her. The sorrow was tempered by fond memories of her life and I think that approach was a great comfort to the bereaved. It was the first funeral that I walked out of in good spirits, glad that I knew her.
Reincarnation is a fascinating notion. Is being a human an upgrade from a previous life form, or a downgrade from a more spiritually elevated creature? I don't understand how reincarnation works, maybe we just return as better (or worse) human beings; the spiritual nature of animals confounds me and I won't be drawn in any discussions about the relative enlightenment of dogs versus cats.
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Although discouraged, eating meat is not prohibited by Hinduism although beef is the least preferable. The animals should be killed as quickly as possible with the least amount of trauma, not unlike the approach of Judaism and Islam.
I didn't find any mention of pork in the Hindu diet, which is still prohibited by some faiths. Years ago I read a nice piece of fiction about a guy who genetically engineered swine to chew cuds, so the resulting animal was considered kosher. It may be much easier to genetically modify beef to taste like pork, and I'm sure somebody is already working on it. I don't think venison is kosher because deer don't chew cuds; you need that ability and cloven hooves to be considered kosher but I'm no expert.
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The style of ice cream maker that Mr. Beagles mention sounds like a good investment, considering how much I like ice cream. There are a lot of tasty looking recipes online and I imagine the same machine could be used to make gelato or sorbet.
There was a thing called a "push up," that I remember as a kid that we called "sherbert," although I think the proper term is sherbet, but that's wrong because it was a a sorbet, not sherbet. It came in two flavors, orange and lime, although we called them orange and green because the taste difference wasn't significant. It was a cylinder of product that was pushed up in a thin cardboard tube, like a tube of caulk, and quite refreshing on a hot summer's day.
This was about the same era that had real popsicles that came with a deep groove so you could break them in half to share (ha, ha). You would split them, usually on a stoop, but they never seemed to break cleanly in half. I remember some that were blue, but I don't know what flavor they were supposed to be.
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The word "resurrection" has a lot of baggage, so I will refer to old discussions as "zombie topics."
This zombie topic references previous discussions about artificial intelligence and voice recognition. It seems that some users of smart appliances, using Amazon's Alexa, are unknowingly ordering stuff from Amazon because of words spoken on their TVs. Here's a long excerpt:
Telly station CW-6 said the blunder happened during a Thursday morning news package about a Texan six-year-old who racked up big charges while talking to an Echo gadget in her home. According to her parents' Amazon account, their daughter said: "Can you play dollhouse with me and get me a dollhouse?" Next thing they knew, a $160 KidKraft Sparkle Mansion dollhouse and four pounds of sugar cookies arrived on their doorstep.
During that story's segment, a CW-6 news presenter remarked: "I love the little girl, saying 'Alexa ordered me a dollhouse'."
That, apparently, was enough to set off Alexa-powered Echo boxes around San Diego on their own shopping sprees. The California station admitted plenty of viewers complained that the TV broadcast caused their voice-controlled personal assistants to try to place orders for dollhouses on Amazon.
We'll take this opportunity to point out that voice-command purchasing is enabled by default on Alexa devices.
This is not the first time an ill-conceived TV spot has caused havoc with voice-control systems. In 2014, a Microsoft Xbox commercial featuring actor Aaron Paul demonstrating Kinect voice control was blamed for causing consoles across the US to spontaneously boot up and launch the game Titanfall every time the ad aired. ®
Be careful what you say around those smart machines.
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