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I was privileged to attend the 2005 Michigan International Auto Show, thanks to some tickets from Kelly’s dad. Kelly turned down the opportunity, so I was accompanied by Brad Keen, a college roommate of mine.

We happened to stumble across a Lexus RX that had the accessories turned on; that included the touch-sensitive LCD navigation console. We happily pushed buttons, found directions to the nearest Burger King, and generally did all the guy things when confronted with the fusion of technology and automobiles. That turned out to be the highlight of the show for us; a close second was getting our photos taken with some of the Dodge/Chrysler vehicles.

written by Kyle

I’m not sure where to begin this post; it’ll probably be horribly scattered, but that is an accurate reflection of my thoughts on this topic.

This tsunami is, “according to BBC”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4128509.stm, the worst disaster I’ve seen in my lifetime. I’ve struggled with feelings of detachment; around 2,700 people died on 9/11 and I remember having this gut-wrenching feeling. Over 150,000 people died in this tsunami, and I read my updates on CNN and then went back to work.

It wasn’t until I visited “Gospel for Asia’s web site”:http://www.gfa.org/ that I began to realize some feeling of remorse. If you are a Christian, I’d recommend visiting GFA’s “special section devoted to the tsunami”:http://www.gfa.org/gfa/tsunami and take in the photos, updates, and videos. GFA is a missions organization that specializes in equiping native missionaries to take the gospel to their own people. They began in India and spread out to other southeast Asian countries. As such, they are uniquely situated to provide relief in a timely and effective manner.

Unlike many international aid organizations that must bring in outside teams, GFA already has an intimate knowledge of each area, their cultures, languages, and needs. They have, through their native missionaries, already established relationships with the impacted communities. Thus they were able to get to work on providing relief immediately, without the setup delays other organizations have had to cope with.

I don’t want to dimish the work other relief agencies are doing–I think they provide a valuable way for the world to assist with the disaster. I just felt that my contribution to GFA was the best, most efficient way for me to directly aid the relief effort.

I hope America really take the lead in the relief effort–it would be nice to have see America doing something positive on the global stage for a change. In that vein, I was very impressed with Apple. They devoted the entire front page of “their web site”:http://www.apple.com/ to collecting relief money for the Red Cross for a week. Though the front page has gone back to business as usual, there’s still one prominent link to their “Tsunami Donations”:http://www.apple.com/give/ page. Kudos to them for corporate ethics.

I want to leave everyone with these photos from BBC:

* “In Pictures: Tsunami Strikes”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/4134703.stm
* “Your Pictures: Asian quake disaster 1″:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/4148379.stm
* “Your Pictures: Asian quake disaster 2″:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/4135141.stm
* “In Pictures: The ruins from above”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/4142425.stm
* “Mother in photos survived tsunami”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4141733.stm
* “Amateur videos of the tsunami strike”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/nolavconsole/ukfs_news/hi/nb_rm_fs.stm?checkedBandwidth=nb&nbram=1&checkedMedia=ram&nol_index=in_depth/world/2004/tsunami_strikes&news=1&nbwm=1&bbwm=1&bbram=1

written by Kyle

I know, I know. First post after the holidays and it’s not even remotely related to the holidays. I’ve come close a couple of times to posting a holiday recap, it just hasn’t happened yet.

Moving along…

The online magazine _The Edge_ asked 120 scientists (and other assorted interesting people) what they believed in, even though they couldn’t prove. The “ensuing answers”:http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_print.html make a good read, but here’s my current favorite:

Alexander Vilenkin, a physicist at the Institute of Cosmology, Tufts University, “believes the universe is infinite”:http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_print.html#vilenkin. I’m going to go try paraphrasing his theory–my profound apologies to Mr. Vilenkin if I screw up.

Since the universe is infinite, there are an infinite number of regions just like ours, and an infinite number of Planet Earths. Within a particular region there are only a finite number of histories (i.e., “the way things happened”). So we have an infinite number of Planet Earths and only so many ways things could have happened on Planet Earth. Thus there are an infinite number of Earths that have the same history as us. There are also an infinite number of Earths with a slightly different history. To quote Mr. Vilenkin, “So, if you are not satisfied with the result of the presidential elections, don’t despair: you candidate has won on an infinite number of earths.”

See? No need to migrate to Canada. Just take comfort knowing that somewhere out there an infinite number of Kerrys are getting ready for their inauguration ceremony.

written by Kyle