Real Life

If you're looking for technology-related events that have occurred in real life, check out events. This section is simply documenting some other things relating to life, and not being solely limited to the electronics.

Biographies
Religions
Messiah

The Messiah of Jewish prophecy has certainly, undeniably had a huge impact on mankind, including Jews who were predicting their Messiah's coming mellinia ago, more recent Jewish people who continue to hold onto the same prophesied promises and seek this Messiah, and those who are familiar with those promises and discovered them to be fulfilled through the life of a man who was known to be walking on this Earth about a couple thousand years ago. Although opinions of these prophecies or, more specifically, their fulfillment may vary, what isn't as questionable is whether people of wildly different cultures, for hundreds of generations, have had their lives touched in some way by these prophecies and/or the views of their fulfillment. CornwallChurch.com's Easter 2010 presentation (as made visible throgh Vimeo.com) (hyperlinked to from CornwallChurch.com's Easter 2010 presentation) helps to demonstrate how this is undeniably true, even for those who have not accepted certain specific views of the fulfillment.

Religions

Many people believe the truth can be reached if one only seeks it wholeheartedly. For example, for mellenia there has been the text of the book Jeremiah which says, “You shall call on me, and you shall go and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You shall seek me, and find me, when you shall search for me with all your heart.” Although those words were from a message which, from the nearby context, was intended to be delivered to a specific people, many people extract from that a lesson, which is the belief that seeking the truth wholeheartedly will ultimately lead a person to the correct source of truth. (There are other texts with similar messages, such as versus three through six of the second chapter of the Jewish book of Proverbs.)

Perhaps the greatest threat which technology places upon any ancient truths is helping to speed things up so much that people end up with such a fast-paced lifestyle, capable of doing many things but only a fraction of the even larger amount of time consumers which are offered for one to choose among. With such a lifestyle, there may seem to be no time to dedicate one's self fully to the pursuit of truth.

One truth, however, that may likely be agreed upon more universally, is that a lifestyle is destructive when it is so fast-paced that nothing ends up being given a proper amount of time. Regardless of which specific belief system that individual serious believers may subscribe to, they generally don't agree with the notion of inventing one's belief system by mixing whatever seems most convenient by an overwhelming array of options, creating a state of having many quasi-beliefs with no real solid conviction in any of them because they were created through a lack of any serious effort investigating what appeared to really, truly be right.

Many people would like to see all religions dissolve into a single belief system which is universally accepted by all people who take religion seriously. Many such people are unhappy with the current state where hardcore believers of one religion pit themselves against hardcore believers of another religion over matters that may seem to be minor differences. Such a viewpoint would seek to add to the religious choices available. There are major religions that state exclusivity, and have done so for many centuries. A famous example would be the first two of the famous “Ten Commandments” as quoted by both the books known as Exodus (chapter 20) and Deuteronomy (chapter 5). The last five versus of Christianity's holy text provides two warnings about changing the scriptures.

When multiple religions each specify that only the views of that one religion are the correct ways and truth, that religion becomes mutually exclusive with other religious views, and so that religion cannot simply be combined with newer religions of incompatible beliefs. An attempt to alter the religions to remove incompatible statements would end up altering the religions so substantially that the resulting set of beliefs would be significantly different, enough so that serious believers familiar with the ancient texts would consider the results after such changes to be different important beliefs. Ironically for those who would like to see such changes performed in order to achieve a unified religion, the end result would actually be the creation of yet another new religion that would not be compatible with earlier religions which have been established for well over one, and sometimes multiple, thousands of years.

Resources

Those who enjoy the philosophies of using software which does not use restrictive/commercial licensing may appreciate the approach, and reasoning behind, the specific translation known as the World English Bible. See: World English Bible: Status. The Wayback Machine @ Archive.org's archive of the World English Bible's status shows that the page from Christmas Day, 2005 A.D. matches the archived page from June 9th, 2008 A.D., and those versions matched writings at least as late as October, 2010 A.D. So in a time spam of at least nearly five years, no movement has been reported in any of the unfinished sections of this project. (Then by the Wayback Machine @ Archive.org's 2022-August-14 archive of the World English Bible's status, the status indicator of “2” had been removed from Numbers and Deuteronomy, while otherwise being unchanged. The next archived copy that archive.org's Wayback Machine had of the page removed the status section from that page, and later on that page was removed.)

Another resource known to use the abilities granted for freedom of speech to help spread text has been Project Gutenberg's tenth release (or thirtieth release or ten thousand nine hundredth release) feature the KJV, which is free of any copyright restrictions. Similarly, the site offers other varieties: versions of the text include the Douay-Rheims translation, the Reina Valera translation, and some content from the World English Bible.

Some sites that offer multiple translations include BibleGateway.com, Bible Verse Finder (bibref.hebtools.com), and Multilingual Bible at ScriptureText.com, the latter of which seems to be integrated with Online Parallel Bible at http://Bible.cc. (The NLT is red-letter, even though the NIV is not shown in red-letter on this site.) This is also related to Biblos.com, e.g. Biblos.com (Luke chapter 11), which shows multiple languages. Another option which does so, verse by verse rather than word/phrase by word/phrase: Mechon Mamre's Hebrew-English Bible (According to the Masoretic Text and the JPS 1917 Edition) shows Hebrew next to another language. (The main page has a hyperlink to an older version of the page, but look for the name of one of the books.)

Additional resources, for those who would prefer media (audio CDs and/or videos), rather than searchable online text, will be made available from a hyperlink available at this section.

[#philkatz]: Phillip W. Katz (“Phil Katz”)
A page about Phil Katz (from TOOGAM.Com's archive) references some other resources about this famous name. Many of today's youth may, just about inevitably, feel their technical skills will allow them to be part of the ruling class during the information age that this world seems to be in. Such people are encouraged to consider the PK from PKWare. (PKWare is the company that released PKZip, and introduced many people to the Zip file format at a time before widespread usage of alternatives that used a graphical interface.)
[#siralfrd]: “Sir, Alfred Mehran” Karimi Nasseri
A page about “Sir Alfred” from TOOGAM's archives discusses the situation he had been in for very nearly eighteen full years.
[#supridea]: (Great?) Ideas
Project 10^100
Google decided to donate some money. Characteristically, the company did so in a way that got people thinking about good possibilities. See Google's Project 10^100.
Fun
Inner-word letter scrambling

“deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are...” if “frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses” while being readable.

True?

See: Matt Davis of Cambridge, Everything2: randomizing letters in middle of words

Shelley Berman's Soap Story
Snope review of Shelley Berman's widely circulated soap story
Sinclair Gordon's “Let's Hear It For The Americans”

Broadcasting History: Unique stories: Americans (Original Script) has a recording that may be listened through a Flash application that ends up playing http://broadcasting-history.ca/ccf_resources/ccf_resources-bios/ccf_bio_audio/53-americans.mp3

Snopes Review

Video at YouTube: Gordon Sinclair reading “Let's Hear It For The Americans”

Toys
Staple-less stapler

Various reviews of various products: Youtube.com video: ECO Stapler vs. the Metal Stapler, Youtube.com video: The Harinacs Stapleless Stapler, Youtube.com: two unusual staplers, Kokuyo's Staple-less Stapler Crimps Paper, slow rise

For some/one of these products, here is some purchasing info: B3.net: Staple-less Stapler