The advantages that are being discussed are the reduction of farmland required to produce the same volume of end-product (meat), the ability to better control the spread of meat-borne diseases, the ability to supply locally-grown meat to larger urban areas much quicker, and reducing the environmental impact of farming livestock and transporting the meat to and from the slaughterhouse.

As a vegetarian, I’m going to make a few comments on this prospect from a totally different angle than most people are debating the issue.  This is the first time this nature of thing has ever been proposed in history, and it raises an entirely new set of questions related to ethics that have just never been addressed before.

Is it Meat?

Well, the first and biggest question I have is: does lab-grown meat qualify as meat as far as the restrictions of plant-based diets are concerned. Many people who end up as vegetarians (myself excluded) come at that conclusion based on the inhumane treatment of animals, or the desire not to kill animals. If meat can be produced without killing the animals, or putting them through the inhumane treatment many consider livestock farming to be, is this ‘meat’ ethically safe for these people?

Is ‘McPork’ really pork?

There are a number of diets that currently allow the eating of a wide range of meat, yet exclude pork from that list (Kosher, Halal for example). Does lab-grown ‘McPork’ violate these religious restrictions?  Again remembering that the reason for these restrictions within those diets is likely because of the bacterial contamination that could be tightly monitored and controlled? To a religious person who refuses to eat beef because they revere the cow above other animals, would being able to eat meat supplied by a cow without killing it be an act of worship and gratefulness, or would it still be off-limits?

Cannibalism?

So I think we could agree that the majority of the world considers eating humans ethically wrong.  That belief isn’t based in the fact that human flesh doesn’t contain any nutrients or protein that would could incorporate into our diet – but rather that cannibalism is non-sustainable and depends on murder to thrive. The natural dead present a source of human flesh, but most of the time the cause of death being disease or age makes that flesh less than ideal for consumption. Does our new-found ability to grow human flesh in a laboratory even taking an example from a human who either consents to the sample being taken, or possibly even being paid for delivering a sample mean that cannibalism is still ethically wrong? Does this open the door to celebrity sources for our meat?

Logistics

If we can produce many times the amount of end-product meat compared to the size of the sample taken, does this now open an all-new goldrush in the culinary world by the cheap, local production of exotic meats? Some animals like squirrel don’t have enough meat to merit a place on the plates of the hungry – but if you could grow a foot-ball sized solid steak from a squirrel – what wine do you pick for that? Who would know how platypus is best seasoned – does that work well with curry, or is it better breaded and fried? I don’t see this as an ethical problem quite the same way as the other above, but surely it will have massive impact on the menus of your favorite restaurant. Is eating a Poodleburger a jump you’re willing to take?

Conclusion

Obviously there will be much much more issues with implementing this new ability on the ethics side of things (more than developing the technology or facilities). Would you opt for lab-grown meat if you could ensure disease control, know you were doing your part to help reduce the environmental impact of livestock farming on the planet, and also getting a superior product? How much willing would you be extra to pay? At what point do you set the limit on the sources of meat you’re comfortable eating?  All of these questions are going to have to be answered eventually, and the sooner we start thinking about it, the sooner we can find a solution we can live with.

—Tom

/me puts on his 'web-troubleshooting hip waders' and steps into the murky swamp of the website…

Two minutes later voilà! the front page had returned, and the new page had also been added.

What did I learn from this? Surely I’m not a super-genius who can prophetically find problems and solve them instantly. The reason I found it so quickly and was able to revert it was because I knew that website intimately. I built it, I knew what each and every character of text needed to be, in order for it to work correctly.  I could fix that site in moments while still groggy from recently waking up – but I might take hours to fix a site designed by somebody else.  See I’m just the regular kind of genius, the kind that knows what he’s done very well, and has no clue about what other people do or how they do it.

I think if I can pull back from this even further I’d put it like this, I knew the truth about the website, I knew the way it ought to be, so any place anything differed from that state of truth, I knew immediately and was able to fix it.  There could be a million ways it could have differed from the truth it would have been impossible for me to study, learn, or even prepare for all of them – but I didn’t need to prepare for all possible contingencies, I only needed to study and know the truth in its pure state in order to restore it.

So where do we go from here? What did I really learn today, that I can fix a website I built? Yes, but I think this whole adventure and crisis served as a reminder that skill, talent, desire to fix things are worth far less when you don’t know the truth. I guess goal #1 should always be to have an unquenchable thirst for the truth and let everything else fall into place after that.

—Tom

In OS X 10.4 Tiger, when you brought up the ‘Get Info‘ dialog box when a file was selected, it gave the option to preview the file. If the file happened to be an audio or video file, a seek-bar showed up with the controls to play or pause the preview – but it also allowed you to arbitrarily select any point in the file and continue the preview from there. This seems like a great feature (it was) and it really allowed you to quickly get a grasp on the entire contents of a 10-minute song in just a few seconds by allowing you to jump to the location within the file that you were listening for.

Then, between OS X 10.4 Tiger and OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, something changed. (I’ll admit, I skipped 10.5 Leopard, so this change may have happened in Leopard and not Snow Leopard). Now, in Snow Leopard the seek-bar from Tiger has been replaced by what I’ll call a round preview ‘clock button‘ for lack of a better term. You press the circular ‘play‘ button and it displays the progress through the file as a circular ring that wraps around the button.

Wow, still a great visual indicator of the progress through the file, arguably more visually appealing, and arguably more space-saving – how can’t this possibly be anything but a step forward for one of the tech industries most famous innovators? Well, here’s where I have a bone to pick; when they switched from the quicktime seek-bar to the ‘clock button‘ style, they forgot to add in the functionality that would let you arbitrarily seek through the file. Now you can only listen to it from the beginning, or stop the preview. Hardly as intuitive as the solution they already had, and quite a step backward, forcing me to launch a media-playing program to skim through a folder full of files to find the correct one to…open in a media-playing program to enjoy it.

Please Apple, cut out the rotten bits and let us enjoy the rest of what you have to offer. I could understand if this was your first attempt at a preview dialog, but to remove already-existing functionality and fail to present any newer functionality just seems like a big mistake to me. So tell me, how does this Apple taste to you?

—Tom

Because I’ve strangely become immune
To the thought of seeing you
And the smell of cheap perfume
Is just a ring around the moon

There’s no more beauty in this world…

Somehow those words both gripped exactly how I felt, and set it free at the same time through the beautiful music those words where sung over.

…But at some point something changed—I found beauty where I least expected it and now those words serve as nothing greater than a marker to a chapter of my life that’s quickly closing.  It all happened before I realized what was taking place, but somehow I find myself surrounded by peace, happiness, and tranquillity where before there wasn’t.

I’m thankful, but now as I lay that outdated anthem to rest I’m searching for a new verse to find refuge in during this new chapter that’s opening ahead of me.  I’m not sure yet, but I think it follows the tune of “Assurance” by the same band.

So you need assurance that
Everything’s gonna be fine
’cause you’re just a woman who’s
Everything good in my life
Though we’d been over, weeping over,
Our last goodbyes.
I have learned to live with these fatal gifts,
And still you’re mine…

Sometimes a song can capture our emotions better than we can express them ourselves, but now, even though this is the closest to how I feel at the moment, I can’t help but feel that it cheapens my beautiful situation and I’m not entirely sure that it does it justice.

For now, instead of trying to find the right song to match how I feel I think I’ll focus on finding out where this new chapter leads me, and what more beauty there is to be found in it.

–Tom

Alone with the Sea

Assurance

–Tom

Most of the music here is non-copyright and occasionally there will be copyrighted stuff there, but only that which the original artist has allowed to be redistributed.  Click on the picture below to enjoy!

–Tom

random |ˈrændəm|
adjective
made, done, happening, or chosen without method or conscious decision : a random sample of 100 households.

So ‘random‘ means a selection from within a range of perfectly equal possibilities. That sounds about right doesn’t it, well lets consider the definition of ‘arbitrary‘ now for a moment:

arbitrary |ˈɑrbəˌtrɛri|
adjective
based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system : his mealtimes were entirely arbitrary.

Wow, now that sheds some more light onto how I’m feeling. Randomness is a part of arbitrariness, but it includes the whimsical aspect of human choice, not the mechanical aspect of randomness which is much more mathematical and based on probability. It still sounds pretty silly, so lets give an example:

“This blog post was very random.  I loved it.”

Well, was it a random selection from any number of existing or potential blog posts that could have been posted, or is it more likely that is was an arbitrary post, chosen with little regard to the consequences or impact it would have from any number of potential posts that could have been written. Think about it.

–Tom

Well, I heard a group of religious thinkers talk about it a couple of years ago at the university here in town, representing a bunch of different perspectives on the issue.  This was one of the ideas presented, and I thought it was beautiful, so I just latched onto it and made it a part of me.  Tell me what you think!

–Tom

Watch the video below and see how I used Fluid to make an app out of Dailybooth.com and Facebook.com.

NOTE: for our windows-using friends, I’ve been told that Google Chrome has this ability directly from within the browser!  I’ve tried it with Chrome and it works! Also, check out Mozilla Prism which tries to do the same thing but with Mozilla’s products!

–Tom

–Tom