God is looking for the good-uns

We talked about the option of what might have been before The Big Bang and one of the things I said was that perhaps just before The Big Bang the Universe was collapsing to a point. The possibility of this was at least seconded by a recent article from Friday last. The reason that such a thing is being thought of is because of measurements taken in this Universe, Einstein's self confessed great mistake, "The Cosmological Constant" is 100x smaller than it should theoretically be.

I was discussing the possibility of such things with my daughter as we (ashamedly) drove to McDonalds this evening, and she thinks that if this is so then we are living the same life over and over again, as there is no reason why this Universe should be any different from those that came before.

Then I got to thinking that maybe that is true. And that God is waiting for us to break the cycle of what we have always done, what we did before. Some grand test that when we realise that it is a test, and what is being tested, then (and only then) do we awake from it?

Shades of why The Matrix is attractive to so many? I'm special, I worked out the answer ner ner ne ner ner ! Who knows? (and who cares?) :-)

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Top 3 books

1 (by a mile) Dragons Egg by Robert L. Forward. Visionary. He even manages to make an account for Jesus).

2. 2001: A Space Odyssey.

What can I say?

3. The History of The World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes. Exquisite. You'd like this one.

It has been pointed out by more than one reviewer that the book opens with an account of Noah and the Flood (the biblical re-creation, if not the creation of the world) and that it closes with a final chapter which envisions a contemporary form of heaven. But between chapter one's origins and chapter ten's ends the remaining eight and a half chapters do not progress chronologically. Chapter two stages a hijacking of a pleasure boat by modern Arab terrorists. Chapter three transcribes sixteenth century court records of a case in the diocese of Besançon, France. Chapter four invents the journey or crazed fantasy of a woman escaping by sea from a nuclear-ravaged West and is mildly futuristic. Chapter five is divided between a section recounting the shipwreck of the French frigate, the Medusa, in 1816, and a section analyzing the stages in the painting of the "The Raft of the Medusa" by Géricault three years later. Chapter six recounts a fictional 1840 pilgrimage of an Irish woman to Mount Ararat where she dies. Chapter seven is titled "Three Simple Stories." The first story concerns a survivor from the Titanic, the second Jonah and a sailor in 1891 both of whom were swallowed by a whale, the third the Jewish passengers aboard the St. Louis trying to escape from Nazi Germany in 1939. Chapter eight is a story about a modern film actor on location in the Venezuelan jungle (suggestive of Robert Bolt's The Mission). Next comes the half chapter, "Parenthesis," an essay on love. Chapter nine recounts another fictitious expedition in 1977 to Mount Ararat by an astronaut in search of Noah's ark.

Didn't we do our top books already - isn't that how "Enders Game" got mentioned?

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People slap people online a lot. It's the new way of communicating, no frills. Should we adapt or die? Darwin?