Three short items

Three short things with no obvious connection - if you want, you can make the connection. Let me know what you come up with!

New hotel Dubai

Dubai is known for its extravagent architecture, and the planned Apeiron Hotel will be no exception, as you can see from this photo. This is to be a 7-star hotel - I didn't know there were 7-star hotels (but then I don't exactly live in these circles). The hotel will be accessible only by plane or boat.

It's planned to be built on a small island less than half a kilometre off the Dubai coast and will cost a mere US$500 million.

Revenue Sharing

I'd never heard this expression before, but it seems that 'revenue sharing' is what happens, at least as far as the Internet is concerned, when people who have affiliate programs running on their blogs or other websites, share the income that comes as a result of people clicking on the ads and (preferably) buying something as a result. I used to have an affiliate with Amazon, but it was pretty much a non-starter for me. However, on another site where I 'deposit' articles that stay readable pretty much forever (at least in Internet terms) I gain revenue from both the article itself and also from Google's Adsense system. The latter came in a couple of years ago on this site, and has proved to be the more valuable of the two systems.

One of these days I'll actually make my first $US100 off Adsense. It'll only have taken me three or four years...

Monkey Defense

Monkey Defense games (I have a feeling we'd normally spell that as 'defence' in New Zealand) are also called Monkey Tower Defense Games, because they involve Monkeys, Towers, Balloons and....Defense. Actually now that I read things properly, it's not 'balloons' but 'bloons' - bloons seemingly are merely balloons that people like to pop in games on the Internet. Okay....

That's how the Monkey Defense game started, with an increasing number of balloons/bloons needing to be popped. Sounds ridiculously infantile, but it took off like a storm, and now there are innumerable games involving the same principle...although principle might be too high-falutin a word for what the game involves.

Two extracts from Finding Sanctuary

Finding Sanctuary is by Abbot Christopher Jamison.

In February 2004 BBC Television broadcast a programme entitled 'What the World Thinks of God.' As part of their research they commissioned Bradford University's Peace Studies Department to carry out an audit of wars over the last hundred years, with specific reference to the role of religion in causing those wars. Looking back at history, they analysed the actual mechanisms by which religion might case war and found several possible ways in which this occurs. These mechanisms might be the promise of salvation to those who fought the infidel, or the intention of religious leaders to seize holy places - both key factors in the medieval crusades. Or they might be the desire ot convert the enemy, as in the wars of the Reformation.

The researchers then analysed the thirty-two wars of the twentieth century. Their conclusions were that only three had a significant religious element. They considered the Israeli-Arab wars, for example, to be wars of nationalism and liberation of territory (and I would ad that the same is true of the Irish wars and conflicts). They noted that the current campaign being waged by Arab terror groups is largely about political order in the Arab countries, especially the presence of foreigners there. These groups use the language of religion, but the use of religious language to justify terrorism is disowned by mainstream religious leaders.

Political leaders use differences in confessional faith as a way of mobilising support for political wars, and it is mainly in this way that religion becomes a factor in war. Furthermore, the main wars of the century (the two world wars, the Russian civil war leading to Stalin's regime, the Chinese civil war leading to Mao's regime) claimed seventy-five percent of all casualties of war in the twentieth century: they killed 150 million people. None of them is attributable to religion. The recent conflicts in which religion has played a significant role have killed only one per cent of the number of victims of secular wars.

This study provides evidence that religion is not a major reason for war in modern times. But the two great moments of violent religious conflict in Europe, the Crusades and the Reformation, have cast a long shadow over the popular mind, so that even though there have been no truly religious wars for many centuries, even intelligent commentators still insists that religion causes wars. The reality, however, is that in the modern world it is governments, and not religions, that cause wars. (pp 165-6 Weidenfeld and Nicolson edition 2006)

And on another tack entirely:

I offer a final story from the desert fathers and mothers. A young monk once went to see his superior: 'Father, ' he said, 'I must leave the monastery because I clearly do not have a vocation to be a monk.' When the older monk asked why, the younger monk replied: 'In spite of daily resolutions to be good-tempered, chaste and sober, I keep on sinning. So I feel I am not suited to the monastic life.' The older monk looked at him with love and said: 'Brother, the monastic life is this: I rise up and I fall down, I rise up and I fall down, I rise up and I fall down.' The young monk stayed and persevered. (pg 172 ibid)

And in spite of the title of this post, one more:

You may be wondering whether such an approach to scripture is only for monks, so I offer you this thought from St John Chrysostom, the great fourth-century Archbishop of Constantinople. "'I am not,' you will say, 'one of the monks, but I have both a wife and children, and the care of a household.' This is what has ruined everything, your thinking that the reading of scripture is for monks only, when you need it more than they do. Those who are placed in the world, and who received wounds every day, have the most need of medicine." (pg 66 ibid)

A handshake

I was just reading a book called Finding Sanctuary: monastic steps for everyday life, by Abbot Christopher Jamison, when I came across a photograph about halfway through of a handshake. It accompanies the section on Community, and the photograph shows two men shaking hands, though all you can see are their unclothed arms from about the elbows down.

I don't know why this photo struck me as particularly interesting, and I thought I might have a quick look on the Net to see if I could find a copy of it. (I didn't, but you can see something similar here.)

Well, so far I haven't, but to my astonishment, I found hundreds of photos of handshakes on Google images. Each Google image page (on my computer anyway) brings up 18 images. There were 55 pages, making nearly a 1000 images of people shaking hands. Some of them are images connected with the idea of handshakes, but the majority are either of two people shaking hands, or of someone offering to shake their hand. Drawings, photographs, clipart, the lot.

Why is this so extraordinary, you ask, since people shake hands constantly - on an average day in a small country like New Zealand, with some 4.5 million people, there could well be a million handshakes a day.

That in itself is striking. This sign of peace between people goes on minute by minute throughout our nation, and throughout the world - at least in all those places where a handshake is the norm.

The photo on the left is by David Swart, Flickr.com

Sock Monkey

Okay, what the heck’s a sock monkey? I hadn’t heard about such a thing (at least my memory tells me I haven’t) until I came across it today on a friend’s site. She has a Squidoo page on it, as it happens, which is partly why I got involved in Squidoo at all. I couldn’t rate her site until I’d joined Squidoo, and then once I had I was greatly encouraged to add my own site.
Anyway, my friend has given plenty of info about sock monkeys. In fact, I now know what to do with the various socks I’ve been finding since I got home that have a hole in the toe or heel. I’ll be making sock monkeys with holes.
I thought at first a sock monkey might be something along the lines of a monkey we have here in the house. It's a very flexible creature, very floppy, and it has hands that pull out of its arms. (Yes, I know, sounds grotesque.) The hands are on elastic, and if you 'shoot' the monkey off - rather like a catapult - it sails through the air with a fierce jungle monkey noise. The grandchildren love it.

Up steps homo habilis; in comes a harem

I know I’m considered dumb when it comes to discussing things evolutionary, but let’s consider the following and see who‘s dumb. I’ve just come across a headline in The Times newspaper for the 9th August, 2007. It states Evolutionary theory overhauled after the discovery of ‘handy man’ fossil. All I can say is, I wish. I wish the Evolutionary theory was being overhauled, but regrettably it’s not.
What the report was about was that two human fossils have been found in Africa, by Mrs Leavey and her daughter. From the way the report reads you’d think that these were full blown skeletons, possibly complete with various anatomical parts. Nope. The two fossils are a jawbone and a skull.
From the first fossil, the scientists have deduced that the idea that two previously ‘discovered’ species of humans, one called homo erectus and the other called homo habilis (he’s the tool-maker) has to be reconsidered. Now, as a result of finding said jawbone, they have come (rather quickly, I feel) to the conclusion that instead of one descending from the other - descending in evolutionary terms that is, which means millions of years, they actually lived side by side for a long time. (You know all that time evolutionists have to play around with - it’s very convenient.)
But if the finding of a jawbone brought us to this overhauling of the theory, the finding of the skull brought us even further. I have to quote this bit: “The second fossil is significant for what it reveals about the probable sexual habits of Homo erectus.” Keep that stuff about the sexual habits in your head for a minute and remember that this is nothing more than one skull.
Apparently it’s the smallest skull ever found, but do the scientists just say that? No, they say, it’s the smallest homo erectus ever found. Pardon me? They then go on to tell us that it’s an adult skull, almost certainly that of a female. Now because they think it’s a female they deduce from this that the males of the homo erectus group were much large than the females. I think Homer Simpson has it right when he says, Duh. Haven’t you noticed that the males of the currently existing homo erectus happen to be larger than the female? Obviously this has been overlooked by the scientists writing the discovery up. .
You could forget this point if they didn’t go on to burble on about the disparity between male and female gorillas and between modern male and female apes and monkeys. Because the latter are monogamous, and the gorillas tend to have a male who has a form of harem, therefore - wait for it - the homo erectus was a male who kept a harem. This is deduced from the small size of the discovered skull. Which is almost certainly a female.
Oh, dear. Evolutionists can get away with anything, because no one can actually prove them wrong.
You can read an article that's almost identical to the Times on here.