Noah's Ark

There have been numerous search parties that have found Noah's Ark. What is interesting to me here is not that it was found (again), but that there are so many mountains with 4,000 year old boats on them.

Just by the fact that these boats are 4,000 years old pretty much blows the idea that the universe was created 4,000 years ago - aimed at my fundamentalist friends.


Anyway, the question I have is what happened 4k years ago that: 1) made people decide to build boats on top of mountains and/or 2) how many people besides Noah survived the great flood. I've seen scientific representations of how the great flood happened (which I find plausible) where Pangea begins to break apart and the resulting fissures release subterranean waters, the weight of Pangea being so great that water fires off into the sky for approximately 40 days. I like that, it's almost sexy. The problem here is Pangea, I mean PANGEA!! We're not talking about ancient times but pre-historic times. We have fossils that date back 400-500 million years but not random wooden structures which can be assumed to be boats.

I don't know; I guess I'm just sceptical about these things. I alway wonder what the point of having proof is...well I know why people need proof; I just wonder why anyone's faith can be so weak that they need proof. This extends to The Bible - who cares if it is to be taken literally or was written by God itself. If your faith is based on the validity of a stack of paper then your faith is only as strong as that stack of paper...or it's validity. Since things like The Bible simply can't be validated you get nuts weak on faith tramping through the mountains to find boats that don't exist.
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I guess if your the kind of person that needs physical tokens of your faith then people finding the ark or some ancient scrolls is awesome for your spirituality, but I have to ask:
is this strengthening your faith or are you strengthening your faith in your beliefs?

New Project

So I've been pouring hour after hour into my new prodject. It's beginning to get tiresome.

Busy Busy

I've been a busy, busy bumblebee.

Check out one of my projects: Hyptronics.com

While I'm working at home I have at least three things going at once, sometime more:
explorer - website design, adsense, amazon affilate, online email, misc. other marketing sites
chrome - streaming netflix, random interesting sites, website test, facebook
firefox - website test
open office writer - scripts for banners, articles
thunderbird - monitor four email accounts

You get the idea. Anyway, I started with the first episode of The X Files and thought back to the good old days when it was on the air. I think back about how watching TV even back then was a family thing which emphasizes the disconnect today: here I am doing all I'm doing while Tiff's doing what she's doing. I realized that I can't just watch a movie or just eat dinner.

Makes you wonder about way back, like in the 20's. What was it like then? It's no wonder that people seemed more intelligent or purposeful - they weren't pulled fifteen different ways. At the same time, however, your average office worker must have been retarded inefficient....

It makes you wonder whether we're on the right track as a species or if we took a wrong turn in Albuquerque.

Disgusting

Usually I'm able to think like Google and get what I want on the first search. Sometimes it takes two, but that's only if I'm looking for something fairly obscure. Today, however, I was completely blown away by the results I got.

I might get 3-4 hours that I can spend with my daughter in a week, but I'm usually so tired from work that I just go through the motions with her. I have today off, so I kept her from preschool to really get some quality time in. To get some ideas on what a daddy can do with a toddler I did a search for "daddy daughter" thinking that I'd get some pretty general results from parenting websites or books like this one or even something a little off. In actuallity I got some very specific results about a very specific "daddy daughter" activity...I'm not very impressed with the human race.

Google is able to gauge what we value as a society and give us results based on those values, so basically our society is more interested in a Freudian father-daughter relationship than a healthy one.

I'm not even unimpressed as much as disgusted.

Weird

Oh man, I'm really finding some weird stuff lately. Check this out:

Conversational Hypnosis

What happened to good old GHB? Wow, that's horrible, shouldn't have said that.

Holistic Pregnancy

You know you just have to wonder about weird stuff like holistic infertility treatment. Take these for example:

Pregnancy Miracle: Holistic and Ancient Chinese System for Getting Pregnant and Having Healthy Children

7 Mistakes Report

I mean, it looks like they're preying on the poor infertile women clinging to every possible shred of hope possible.

More BS (cont'd)

What makes this whole CHIP ordeal absolutely retarded is that if anyone from Superior, Seton, CHIP, or the Texas Department of Health and Human Services had made one single phone call - ever - none of this would have happened. I bet ~$5 of our tax money was wasted on postage when a virtually free phone call would have nipped it all in the bud.

More BS

So today I have completely lost my faith in our government's ability to administer anything and by belief that doctors really mean it when they take an oath to do no harm.

Here's my experience with the CHIP issue today:

I started by calling the state human services people. After 30 minutes of refining the random info they could access I finally pieced together the fragments of Fall 2009:

1) CHIP began coverage through Superior on July 1, 2009.

2) Medicaid took it upon itself to "update" our address to our previous home on August 28, 2009. The CHIP rep could give no reason as to why Medicaid would "update" our address.

3) Since we were "living" outside Superior's coverage area we needed a different provider, and get this -> since all mail to our "new" address was returned a health plan was chosen for us. Notice any problems here? Anyway Superior ends September 30, 2009 & Seton begins October 1, 2009.

4) Since all mail is getting returned CHIP changes our address back to the "old" address - the correct one - and reprints/mails one solitary notice, mentioning how the state has decided to do whatever it wants without our consent or making us aware (paraphrased liberally). Additionally Seton is to mail us an ID card. This letter is dated October 1, 2009, and we didn't keep the envelope to verify the postmark. Two problems here: ID cards are sent to wrong address (and returned obviously), and now we're once again living outside of our provider's coverage area.

5) Sam gets sick,and on October 17, 2009 she spikes a 106 degree fever, resulting in a trip to the ER. We give the hospital her Superior ID card because that's what we have and what we think we have.

6) We get Sam's new ID card from Superior. You see CHIP changed us back without notice again after they "updated" our address.

7) We get a letter from the hospital about the claim being denied. Tiff pulls out the new ID card from Superior to update the account info.

8) We get another letter from the hospital about the claim - we make sure the info is correct again.

9) Time goes by. Then we get this letter from the collections agency demanding $467. I tell them I need to find out what's going on and call CHIP. About five hours later (five hours over three days) I've put together all the above.

10) By the way, the collections agency wants money for "physician services." All that talk with the hospital - yeah, different bill. Not only is it a different bill, but it's a bill we haven't even seen yet. We've been calling the hospital about a bill that's coming from a third party,and no one has caught on. I specifically asked the lady at the hospital if we were talking about the bill for $467 (that specific amount), and she said yes. What she should have said was, "No. The amount of your hospital bill is $1,004." Then I would have said to myself, "WTF!?! Something is amiss."

What's worse is we're being charged ~$1,500 total for a Nurse Practitioner to misdiagnose our daughter with the flu "by the look of her eyes" - she had an ear infection as correctly diagnosed by her pediatrician a week later. It seems to me if taxes are raised to support universal healthcare it's because of the greedy bastard hospitals like Memorial Hermann in Katy, TX...$1,500 for a pseudo-doctor to look at my daughter's eyes and request an xray. Do no harm? What a joke, if energy companies were raping people like Memorial Hermann is it would be all over the news like Enron. But the medical industry? No, medicine is for good....

Right now the bitterness is too great, so I'll have to finish this later.