Theology

I am uninstalling Google Chrome for now, but I may try it again in the future

Please provide any additional detail on your reason for uninstalling:

Chrome has recently decided to close immediately whenever I try to open it. I click the Chrome icon in my Start menu, the Chrome window sort of flickers into existence for a split-second before disappearing. This is the second time it's behaved like this; last time I solved the problem by uninstalling and reinstalling again, but I'm sick of dealing with it.

Furthermore, I've found that Chrome has serious trouble with a lot of sites. In particular, MSDN developer help pages (which I find myself using a lot these days) tend to have all their text shoved into a unreadably tiny column on the left side of the window. It also seems to have trouble with redirects; some sites I visit will redirect perfectly normally with every other browser I've used (IE, Firefox, Safari), but Chrome will inform me that the site doesn't exist (or something like that, I've forgotten exactly).

I really liked the home page with easy-to-click buttons for the places I visit most often, and the search box that magically appeared there after I'd used wordreference.com a few times was pretty cool, too. However, as far as actually browsing the web goes, Chrome seems to offer no advantages over Firefox, and for the most part is vastly inferior. I may try Chrome again in a year or so if I hear you guys have ironed out the kinks, but I'm pretty fed up with it at the moment.

Aldous Huxley talks about sunglasses

Before the war in 1914 it was, I remember, the rarest thing to see anyone wearing dark glasses. As a small boy I would look at a begoggled man or woman with that mixture of awed sympathy and rather macabre curiosity which children reserve for those afflicted with any kind of unusual or disfiguring physical handicap. Today all that has changed. The wearing of black spectacles has become not merely common, but creditable. Just how creditable is proved by the fact that the girls in bathing suits, represented on the covers of fashion magazines in summer time, invariably wear goggles. Black glasses have ceased to be the badge of the afflicted, and are now compatible with youth, smartness and sex appeal.

This fantastic craze for blacking out the eyes had its origin in certain medical circles, where a panic terror of the ultra-violet radiations in ordinary sunlight developed about a generation back; it has been fostered and popularized by the manufacturers and vendors of colored glass and celluloid spectacle frames. Their propaganda has been effective. In the Western world millions of people now wear dark glasses, not merely on the beach or when driving their cars, but even at dusk, or in the dimly lit corridors of public buildings. Needless to say, the more they wear them, the weaker their eyes become and the greater their need for "protection" from the light. One can acquire an addiction to goggles, just as one can acquire an addiction to tobacco or alcohol.

(from The Art of Seeing, Chapter VII: The Eye, Organ of Light)

Our Glorious History, Part VI

<grisom> I've decided that not even Jesus can alter the navel of the world. However, it is conceivable that the world's navel will relocate when the world is reborn four years from now. Hopefully the new location, if any, will become obvious at that time.

<grisom> Oh! Almost forgot: One key thing that I do not know is when a day starts. The Western world has for the past while started the day at midnight; the Jews (and, I think, Muslims) start the day at sundown; I think much of East Africa starts the day at sunrise. I have no idea what the Mayans and Egyptians did.

<grisom> As I mentioned earlier: When does the day start and end?

"The Jewish day begins at either sunset or at nightfall (when three second-magnitude stars appear). Medieval Europe followed this tradition, known as Florentine reckoning: in this system, a reference like "two hours into the day" meant two hours after sunset and thus times during the evening need to be shifted back one calendar day in modern reckoning."
"The Islamic and Jewish weekdays begin at sunset."

"In ancient Egypt, the day was reckoned from sunrise to sunrise."

"Present common convention is for the civil day to begin at midnight."
"According to Slavic folklore, midnight was time when strzygas rose from graves to suck the blood of mortals, zmoras assailed the sleeping to steal their breath, and devils came for sinners. Polish Jews believed that it was the time when dybbuks possessed people, causing insanity."

<umunmutamku> YES

<grisom> *stares* Okay, I... didn't realize this would be such an easy choice. :)

Unless there are any objections, then, I say the day of the winter solstice, and the leap year, is determined by MIDNIGHT at the DELPHI MERIDIAN. This turns out to be *checks* an offset of almost exactly one and a half hours from GMT. Which, magically enough, is halfway between the time zones of France and Egypt.

<umunmutamku> So when Itzpapalotl leads the tzitzimime in a swarm down from the cracks in the sky, it'll presumably happen at exactly midnight. :)

<grisom> Ew. What?