The following day was celebrated with my family at my parent’s house.

The week’s activities included scuba diving, beach volleyball and chillin’ on the beach.

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Chicago is a really cool city; beautiful architecture, clean streets, good food, good shopping, etc.  I would love to return to see a few sights we didn’t get a chance to see.

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Last night, around 11:15 (after I had headed to bed), I received an SMS from my good friend Maya. The message was simply, “omfg, rita’s dead?!?!”. When I viewed the message around 7:30 this morning, I replied immediately, “um what?” then checked facebook for updates to Perry’s or Rita’s profile (it was too early to call Perry). Nothing.

Around 8:30, I finally called Perry and asked, “Dude, I received a really weird text message from Maya last night. Wassup?”. He replied curiously, “I dunno, wassup?”, and from the tone of his voice, he had no idea what I was thinking. So I explained the situation and he reassured me everyone is fine. After our call, I called Maya to ask her what she was smoking, only to reach her voicemail. Shortly after, Maya sent another text, “Dexter” – She was referring to Rita’s shocking death in the season finale of Dexter. LOL

That would have been funny enough, but then Maya called me a few minutes later, “Alex, I’m SO glad you called me this morning. There was a power failure at our place, and if you didn’t call and wake us up, we would not have made it to work on time today.”

They asked subjects a series of questions about controversial moral issues, such as the death penalty and abortion, and also asked them about beliefs on those issues of famous people and of God. Not surprisingly, subjects’ own beliefs mirrored the beliefs they attributed to God.

These two lines of evidence both suggest that people tend to project onto God their own moral beliefs. This … does imply that people can change their moral beliefs first, and then attribute those changing beliefs to God after the fact.

Stepping back, the study draws the following conclusion, which I fully agree with:

This is why questioning our own motives, and our own process, is critical to a skeptical and scientific outlook. We must realize that the default mode of human psychology is to grab onto comforting beliefs for purely emotional reasons, and then justify those beliefs to ourselves with post-hoc rationalizations. It takes effort to rise above this tendency, to step back from our beliefs and our emotional connection to conclusions and focus on the process. The process (i.e science, logic, and intellectual rigor) has to be more important than the belief.

The full article is located here.

2. Full Moon
Not many levels, but it’s one of the few puzzle games that does a good job of ramping up the difficulty appropriately.