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Birds eye view
March 17, 2009

As Meredith and I were flying down to Florida in February, I was looking down at the thousands upon thousands of lights on the ground. They were seemingly endless. And I imagined all of those people, hundreds of thousands of them, going about their lives, completely oblivious to the fact that I sat from my vantage point observing them. In a sense, I felt completely irrelevant, because I was totally detached from each of their lives, without any power to be seen or to affect them. I guess it was a kind of loneliness. But then I imagined that down there, in that sea of humanity, people were praying. Maybe I couldn't see them, but they were there. Some of them were laying in bed, reaching out to God. Some of them in their cars sending thoughts to heaven.

I had this moment of understanding, a window into that aspect of God's relationship with us: In a sense God is like I was, watching us, desiring this sea of people, despite their hectic lives, to turn their attention to Him. And when, against the odds, people do, how wonderful that must be to (proverbially) look down and see faithful people. Prayer is a loving act.

Automatic gas/brake March 12, 2009 An interesting post on Gizmodo today made me realize that this will be the first feature of autonomous driving that will be developed: Fully automatic gas/break in cars. I like how this post describes it, especially the part about using GPS to know when to decelerate for corners. Of course! It makes so much sense. I would tend to agree that this technology will likely see the light of day in the next ten years. I'm not sure how pervasive it will become, but I wouldn't be surprised if it catches on. One of the biggest obstacles I foresee is having stop lights smart enough to communicate to the surrounding cars. Maybe in large cities, but not smaller towns?

Wolfram Search March 9, 2009 Along side Powerset comes Wolfram Search, due to launch in May. This is exciting stuff, and I can't wait to see what they've come up with. From the little I've read, it sounds as though they're actually modeling the knowledge and then using natural language parsing to allow the user to query that model. Very cool.

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