![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
Friendship with theists?
Nov. 12th, 2009 | 05:28 pm
posted by: little_e_ in atheist
How often are you friends with religious people? I don't mean can you ever be friends with religious people, or can you have shallow friendships with them, but how often do you form deep, lasting relationships with theists of any sort? When meeting new people, do their religious beliefs (or lack thereof) influence your opinions of them or whether you pursue a friendship with them? Do you "respect" other people's religious beliefs?
I posted my own opinions over on my own journal and a parenting forum I frequent--that not only do I find most religious beliefs silly or harmful, (and therefore don't respect them,) but also that I therefore have trouble being friends with religious people. (Often to my disappointment.) Typically in my experience peoples' religious beliefs have not simply been innocuous and easily ignorable, but have caused them to act in ways that I find problematic. I don't mind if someone has some religious beliefs that don't actually affect their life or which make them be better people, but this is rare.
There are two noticeable trends in the responses I've received so far. Atheists have tended to agree with me; Christians (or people of undisclosed religiosity) tend to reply that I'm being a judgmental ass (my language, not theirs) and should be more "respectful" of other people's religious beliefs--basically, give religious folks a chance. One person accused me of being the most hateful person they'd met on the entire board.
Am I really more hateful than most? Or just more honest? What do you think?
I posted my own opinions over on my own journal and a parenting forum I frequent--that not only do I find most religious beliefs silly or harmful, (and therefore don't respect them,) but also that I therefore have trouble being friends with religious people. (Often to my disappointment.) Typically in my experience peoples' religious beliefs have not simply been innocuous and easily ignorable, but have caused them to act in ways that I find problematic. I don't mind if someone has some religious beliefs that don't actually affect their life or which make them be better people, but this is rare.
There are two noticeable trends in the responses I've received so far. Atheists have tended to agree with me; Christians (or people of undisclosed religiosity) tend to reply that I'm being a judgmental ass (my language, not theirs) and should be more "respectful" of other people's religious beliefs--basically, give religious folks a chance. One person accused me of being the most hateful person they'd met on the entire board.
Am I really more hateful than most? Or just more honest? What do you think?
Link | Leave a comment {11} | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend
Dreams
Nov. 12th, 2009 | 01:36 pm
location: home
mood: 
complacent
music: Black Crowes, "She Talks To Angels"
posted by: glowing_dragon in useless_facts
Adults dream off and on, for a total of about an hour and half to three hours every night. The average person has about 1,460 dreams a year.
Scientists suggest that the dreams of fetuses are mostly composed of sound and touch sensations, given the lack of visual stimuli in the womb.
Elias Howe (1819-1867) said one inspiration for his invention of the sewing machine came from a nightmare he had about being attacked by cannibals bearing spears that looked like the needle he then designed.
Falling dreams typically occur at the beginning of the night, in Stage I sleep. These dreams are often accompanied by muscle spasms, called myoclonic jerks, and are common in many mammals.
In general, pregnant women remember dreams more than other populations. This is largely due to the extreme hormonal changes during pregnancy.
The quality of dreams depends, at least in part, on the stage of sleep in which the dreams occur. Dreams during REM tend to be more bizarre and detailed and have story lines. Dreams in stages 1 and 2 of sleep are simpler and shorter. Deep-sleep dreams tend to be diffused and may be about nothing more than a color or emotion.
Source: My Trivia Today newsletter.
Scientists suggest that the dreams of fetuses are mostly composed of sound and touch sensations, given the lack of visual stimuli in the womb.
Elias Howe (1819-1867) said one inspiration for his invention of the sewing machine came from a nightmare he had about being attacked by cannibals bearing spears that looked like the needle he then designed.
Falling dreams typically occur at the beginning of the night, in Stage I sleep. These dreams are often accompanied by muscle spasms, called myoclonic jerks, and are common in many mammals.
In general, pregnant women remember dreams more than other populations. This is largely due to the extreme hormonal changes during pregnancy.
The quality of dreams depends, at least in part, on the stage of sleep in which the dreams occur. Dreams during REM tend to be more bizarre and detailed and have story lines. Dreams in stages 1 and 2 of sleep are simpler and shorter. Deep-sleep dreams tend to be diffused and may be about nothing more than a color or emotion.
Source: My Trivia Today newsletter.
Link | Leave a comment {4} | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend
Network Maintenance: Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 04:00-06:00 UTC/GMT
Nov. 11th, 2009 | 02:00 pm
posted by: dwell in lj_maintenance
On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.
Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.
We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!
As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.
Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.
We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!
As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.