...and the leaves stood still...

The sun rose, having no other choice, on the nothing new.

This post, like Wikipedia, will be a collection of ill-separated facts and impressions, informative but meaningless.

Since when did the accumulation of material goods and possessions, often of a domestic nature, equate with maturity? By this measure, someone who owns more imported Italian silk couches than me is a more "mature" person (and, therefore, a better person, and more deserving of society's approval). Actually, I may have just answered my own question.

But I still refuse to believe that just because I am equally happy to sleep on a couch, a bed, or the floor, I am guilty of juvenile behavior.

Direction is for people who are short on time and patience. A person who has both to spare may go whichever way she damn well pleases. At any rate, we will all end up in the same place eventually.

You are listening to a song that you've half-heartedly heard a hundred times before, only this time, something is different -- you're in the right kind of mood to appreciate it, or you're not tuning it out or distracted by other things, or a chance phrase or melody catches your attention....and suddenly, you realize how wonderful of a song it is, and wonder how it's possible that you've never noticed it before. Was it always a good song that you'd simply never truly listened to, or did you actually evolve to the point where you could finally understand it? If the latter is true, then what prompted you to keep it, not knowing if you would end up liking it or when?

Music isn't "natural" in the same way that "art" is natural. You can look at a waterfall in nature and a work of art by a famous painter and consider both to be "beautiful," but how many people would consider sounds that they encounter out in the wild, in the course of their everyday lives, to be "beautiful" in the same way that a Beethoven symphony is beautiful?

Science fiction is supposed to be about the exploration of the human condition through the use of technology -- but a lot of science fiction deals with the interaction with alien beings, and many of those stories don't have much to do with technology at all. So why this fascination with aliens as a theme of sci-fi? My theory is that the theme isn't really about technology at all, but about how to bridge the communication gap between human beings and something that fundamentally does not think like us, be it aliens or computers.

Of course, computers do not "think" -- but they do in the anthropomorphic sense that they seem to take input, process it, and give output based on the result of the processing done on the input. The same may be said of certain humans.

People can, and do, anthropomorphize anything, from lolcats to toons in online games to God. It is not necessarily bad. In any case, it's the only vantage point we have to see things from.