Quakes and the state of Nairobi City

The Sunday Times had an article on Dr. Owuor sometime back. His CV is noteworthy at the very least:

• A former professor of medicine at the University of Oklahoma
• A post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Pharmaceutical Biotechnology at the College of Pharmacy at the University of Illinois
• Department of Pharmaceutics and Drug metabolism at the Earnest Mario School of Pharmacy at the State University of New Jersey-Rutgers
• Environmental and Occupational Health Science Institute (EOHSI),
• Professor of medicine at the University of Oklahoma, USA
• The Cancer Institute of New Jersey (CINJ) in the Division of Surgical Oncology and Department of Surgery of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, teaching as a research specialist
• Appointed as a specialist consultant in forensic toxicology and aircraft medicine
• Has published articles in the Journal for Biological Chemistry, Molecular Pharmacology (JBC)
• Has worked with the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists. (medicine)
• The list goes on...
  

It is perhaps a sad reflection on my character that it takes that list of qualifications, to get me (and other folk like me) to sit up and pay attention to what this man has to say. Nevertheless, pay attention I have.

So the question arises - what prompts a man who should on the face of it be more comfortable saying things like:

“I have been involved in running research, cancer chemotherapy and drug metabolism in the human body. We also introduced drug-induced signal transduction in drug design and discovery”

To start making statements of the kind we have heard the last couple of years:

“I warned them of severe earthquake if they did not repent, and the following day, there was an earthquake. The same was the case in Monterrey also in Mexico, which experienced an earthquake within 24 hours of my preaching,”

Kenyan Analyst conducted an interview with Dr. Owuor in which he catalogues his life and spiritual evolution and call. Perhaps it should come as no surprise to Bible believing Christians that God still can and does call people in such spectacular fashion.

Fast forward to February 2007 and the doctor has again reiterated a prophecy he first proclaimed awhile back. Earthquakes are to hit Nairobi!! Now that is a scary thought after all, my office is on the tenth floor (with a brilliant view of the city I might add)!!!
What's even scarier is that the reasons he gives as to why a Holy God would seek to punish the church, can hardly be faulted. Kenyan Analyst gives an overview of the doctor's recent press conference.

So perhaps more important then the how or why is "what am I going to do about it"! And for the life of me I can't think of anything better than to get down on my knees.

Because quite frankly from where I sit on the 10th floor looking out my window as the sun sets on this beautiful city, an intellectual discussion on the minutiae regarding the correctness of the good doctor's every word will do me little good if, ten minutes from now, this building should fall.

Repentance is a Biblical imperative! Earthquake or no earthquake, we need to pray!

Game Over!

Came across an article by Paul Cringley who figures Google are out to control the internet. In his words, "the game was over before most of us even knew there WAS a game".

I had put up an earlier post on Google. Sad thing is that, like most people, I don’t at this point in time really care who owns and controls the internet. Hence my extensive use of google's cache on this blog.

Maybe in a few years when the effects of such dominance truly begin to affect my daily life and intrude on my personal space, will I belatedly realise the danger of the apathy with which I currently view the present developments.

According to Cringle:

Seeing Google as their only alternative to bankruptcy, the ISPs will all sign on, and in doing so will transfer most of their subscriber value to Google, which will act as a huge proxy server for the Internet. We won't know if we're accessing the Internet or Google and for all practical purposes it won't matter. Google will become our phone company, our cable company, our stereo system and our digital video recorder. Soon we won't be able to live without Google, which will have marginalized the ISPs and assumed most of the market capitalization of all the service providers it has undermined -- about $1 trillion in all -- which places today's $500 Google share price about eight times too low.

It's a grand plan, but can Google pull it off? Yes they can.

This is messed up!

My brother sent me this story today, and I was shocked!
And to think that people are actually taking up the challenge...

"Brian and Kelly are co-founders of the Rational Response Squad... And recently they came up with a new way to publicize their cause. It is called the Blasphemy Challenge.

What they did was challenge people to make videos of themselves, denying, denouncing or blaspheming the Holy Spirit, and then post them on YouTube.

"We wanted to do it in such a way where we stripped the power from religious institutions that instill fear in people," says Brian. "And we did that by blaspheming the Holy Spirit, by showing that we are not scared of this unforgiveable sin.""

Read the full story here

At the actual site the following:

"There's only one catch: We want your soul.

It's simple. You record a short message damning yourself to Hell, you upload it to YouTube, and then the Rational Response Squad will send you a free The God Who Wasn't There DVD. It's that easy.

INSTRUCTIONS:

You may damn yourself to Hell however you would like, but somewhere in your video you must say this phrase: "I deny the Holy Spirit.""

All this brought to mind a passage from Luke 16:27

"He answered, 'Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my father's house, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment. Abraham replied, 'They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.'" 'No, father Abraham,' he said, 'but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.'"He said to him, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.'"

Google's Dark Fibre

Don Dodge on Google's dark fibre connections

"Google has been quietly buying up huge amounts of dark fiber to connect all of their distributed data centers. This plan will take years to unfold, but all the pieces are falling into place.

Dark fiber is a term used to describe unused fiber optic cable in the communications infrastructure. It is "dark" because it is "unlit" by usage.

So, why has Google been buying up lots of dark fiber?

Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support ind power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We're talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.

Two years ago Google had one data center. Today they are reported to have 64. Two years from now, they will have 300-plus. The advantage to having so many data centers goes beyond simple redundancy and fault tolerance. They get Google closer to users, reducing latency. They offer inter-datacenter communication and load-balancing using that no-longer-dark fiber Google owns. But most especially, they offer super-high bandwidth connections at all peering ISPs at little or no incremental cost to Google.

Where some other outfit might put a router, Google is putting an entire data center, and the results are profound."

It can also server as the carrier for certain bandwidth-heavy or security-intensive products that should not run on the public Internet (instead, you'd only have to reach the edge of Google's private "Internet")."

See also:
Google's Own Private Internet

Mankind - a truly wicked race

Warning: do not follow the link below if easily unsettled - there is graphic material detailing the after effects of the dawn of the nuclear age

So often we hear and talk about war, yet shielded from its effects, it takes on in our minds a sanitised palatable existence. And so talk of nuclear proliferation and matters of that nature barely catch one's attention.

Which perhaps goes some way to explaining the deep sadness I felt when I came across this link today.

It brought to mind a television documentary I watched sometime back with actual footage of soldiers eating the raw flesh of their vanquished foes off a tarmac road, during a conflict not many years back.

Strange that it is when faced with these grim realities, that one is forced to come to terms with a statement made throughout the ages by a pained Father.

The heart of man is truly and intrinsically wicked, no matter how hard we try to run from this basic truth.

Is it any wonder then that Scriptures record:

"The LORD saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain."
Genesis 6:5-6

"There is no one righteous, not even one;
there is no one who understands,
no one who seeks God.
All have turned away,
they have together become worthless;
there is no one who does good,
not even one."
Their throats are open graves;
their tongues practice deceit."
The poison of vipers is on their lips.
Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.
Their feet are swift to shed blood;
ruin and misery mark their ways,
and the way of peace they do not know.
There is no fear of God before their eyes."
Romans 3:10

We are in need of our Maker

The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.
John 1:5

Ecclesiastes

"What do workers gain from their toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end."

Ecclesiastes 3:9-11

For what it's worth, at least he's "clean and nice looking"!

"I deeply regret any offense my remark in the New York Observer might have caused anyone. That was not my intent and I expressed that to Sen. Obama."

That was US presidential hopeful Senator Joe Biden's comment after his earlier statement on Senator Obama:

"I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," Biden said. "I mean, that's a storybook, man."