Okay - this article could go on for quite a bit.  But the fact is, a CBC re-run of "Seven" (a mini-series investigating a selection of issues relevant to Canadians) concentrated on this very subject tonight - and some of the statistics about "my faith" are pretty alarming.  In 20 years, less than 4% of Americans will call themselves Christian if current trends hold!  And yet, to me, the main cause of this is both obvious and terminal: very few demominations of the Church are open to change.  Recently, Benedict XVI (the Roman Catholic Pope) came out with yet another edict of intransigence: that all other Christian churches fall short of being truely Christian or as close to God as the R.C.'s.  Why?  Because their ministers can't trace their baptisms back to any of the 12 original disciples of Christ - like St. Peter.

What a bunch of malarky!

Then the Christian evangelicals - the targets of every joke and stereotype about Christianity we can dream up today.  And maybe - sorry guys - rightly so!  This group, like several other flavours of Christianity, is just not open to mcuh.  Some of the more, what I call "fringe" elements that believe in blarney like Creationism are so instransigent, they need their collective heads examined.  But not just on the body of evidence regarding what God wants or doesn't want individuals or mankind collectively to believe; on the very ideas that will win souls, based on such things as acceptance of popular scientific evidence, of popular medical evidence (re: aids), on the scope of knowledge that, having undergone broad acadmic review, is accepted by the overwhelming majority as true.  And then rejection of culture thing - what in hell are you thinking needling Hollywood over the fictional charactures it blows up on a big screen to tell a story. Another fact is that humanity really likes theatre - and there's no sane way to prove that this is an evil unto itself, as many theologians seem to suggest.

In short - there's just a funny little world that a goodly number of Christians belong to that open themselves up to critiques of such dillitante academics of the ilk of Dawkins which are probably doing way more harm to the Church than any good God wants delivered.  "The Church", if I can call it that, needs to adapt - to evolve into something that people will want to be a part of.  Maybe that's not something that necessarily focusses on God exclusively.  I'm not suggesting we turn the Churches into banks so Christ can come back and upend the tables of moneylenders again - but that doesn't negate the fact that for many centuries, the Church was popular because it was at the centre of community.  And as community itself has conceptually eroded, so has the Church.

Maybe the Church should be championing community, maybe even more than God.  There's certainly a demand for that in our everyday lives.

God knows.

• Sudanese enboy to be turfed from Ottawa

Google's latest expansion of its Google Earth mapping utility reverses the orientation of the application so that instead of looking down at the earth, the user finds themselves looking up at the sky.

Google Earth is quite the utility indeed, although not a very good replacement for some of the more popular planetarium software packages (like Starry Night), which may be the fancy of the backyard astronomer.  But though the environment of Google Earth, the sky itself becomes the new landscape, against which an index of data from a variety of sources has been made available, including the Hubble Space Telescope and its more powerful Earth-based cousins.

But how easy is it to find stuff and/or explore the known universe?  Well, I'm fortunate - as a child I was part of a youth organization called the "Manitoba Astronomy Club" (which, to my dismay is still in action with an estimated 20 members, yet still has no website!).  And that childhood enthusiasm for astronomy left me with a basic familiarity with the constellations of the sky and a fair bit of other errata about telescopes and astronomical phenomenon.  Without this, I suspect the astronomy neophyte might find themselves thoroughly lost.  By default, the star names aren't event displayed, although selecting the appropriate layer in the left-hand pane fixes this.

Antares (a Sco) and nearby objects magnified, courtesy the DSS Consortium via Google Sky.

Details about Antares appear when the user clicks on the star - prompting the appearance of the familiar Google "info bubble".

So with the constellations displayed, finding the more familiar stars is pretty easy.  And perhaps the neatest feature is the ability to "zoom in" to those areas of the sky where a telescope of higher power has taken more detailed images.  By way of an example, I've included some screenshots of a randomly-selected area of the sky from last night; all listed at the right.  As you can see, Antares features prominently - since it's the main subject of the example.  And to find out anything known about the star (including references to external websites), the familiar Google "information bubble" appears when the user clicks on the star with basic information and links to more detailed info.

And to add to this review, I thought I'd cover the "search" feature.  Back in the early days of Google Earth (and, for that matter, "Google Maps" - its web-based cousin), searches for places outside of the United States didn't necessarily yield useful information, nor did the interface move to anything close to the desired target.  I couldn't count the number of times I typed in "Ottawa" with some additional keywords trying to pull up a map of the city I live in - only to pull in Ottawa, Ohio rather than Ottawa, Illinois.

Of course, those issues were dealt with and there's a much more natural query processing system associated with Google Maps.  When it comes to stars, fortunately astronomers tend to not re-name stars with the same names over and over again (as we do with cities and towns on Earth).  So, the searching seems to work well if you know the name of a stellar or galactic target.  To examine how well this worked, I went to the California and Carnegie Planet Search website, where a catalog of stars known to have planets around them are listed.  I picked as my target "HD 69830" - a star 41 light years from Earth (relatively close), with at least 3 planets ranging between 5 and 20 Earth masses in size (the outermost of these is orbiting in the star's habitable zone or "green belt").And, voilà, the star was instantly matched in the search list, and Google Sky automatically panned away from Antares and centred on my target star.

Sadly, this is not the result for the moon or planets.  For these, Google has introduced a rather confusing system intended to track the position of planets and the moon in the sky on specific dates.  You'll notice a "slider" control toward the top of the images (just to the left of the familiar "compass" gadget).  This operates in a fashion roughly analogous to Microsoft Word's margin and tab controls.  Moving these around results in a kind of smear of both planets and stars for the start and end dates denoted by the position of these sliders.  And the search doesn't seem to locate a particular planet or moon - regardless of the date set using the slider.  So finding these objects is a little troublesome at the moment.

Finally, there are still as yet a number of key, desirable features for an index of this kind still not yet available:

• it's not yet possible to add data about stars, which might be absent, yet acquirable from other websites - extending the advantages of community-based contributions about stellar phenomenon the way Google Earth has traditionally done,
• there's no horizon, nor any obvious way (I could find) to specify my own location on the Earth's sruface to get an idea what the sky looks like right now, and
• there's no way to index the view of the sky (planets, moon, sun) to the current time, although there's strangely a prompt in a properties window which allows one to specify a time zone - as if there were features dependant on this information, which there don't yet seem to be.

These features will likely be made available in future versions, but it would have been good to have them available before the launch of the product.  It's puzzling why this wasn't forthcoming prior to release of the product.  But even as-is, it still offers the trappings of a tool which will ultimately prove very useful for indexing discoveries made about our galaxy and the surrounding universe - which will particularly be useful when trying to get data bout exoplanets and perhaps data from the terrestrial planet finder (launched early next decade) into the hands of the general public in a way that relates that information to the sky above.

Protest management tactics at Montebello seem to have gone off the deep end and police generally take yet another hit at their reputations.  Someday, the smart police will outnumber the dumb ones - and they'll finally realize collectively that although technology is making crime harder to get away with, so too is it making corruption and bad policing.

They got caught penetrating and inciting violence at North American leaders' summit this past weekend.  Who "they" are exactly is as yet unknown, but, clearly, I for one am getting really tired of living in a society where police fear-monger about supposedly rising crime rates (which they're not - they're actually the lowest they've virtually everywhere in Canada in 30 years) and where little old ladies call in to shows like Lowell Green's show on CFRA radio here in Ottawa complaining about law and order issues, and how we need even more police (even though Ottawa has more police per capita than any other city in the country already).  The fact is we need fewer police - and the police that are left should get of their cars and start foot-patrolling neighborhoods like mine, hassling and arresting the crack dealers at the end of my street instead of worrying about that big drug bust or arresting innocent, peaceful protesters at a political demonstration.

Before then, my respect for police will be restricted to saying "yes, sir!" whenver I speak to them, so as not to unwittingly trigger the power trip most of them (not all, mind you) otherwise seem to be on.

You may have noticed if you know me (as most who read these little artilces do) and there's one topic conspicuously absent: sex.  It's not because I have nothing to say about it.  Nor is it because there's nothing going on in that department for me (although my social life has been a little, shall we say, uninspiring lately).  But while doing some coding for my company tonight, the TV was on again in the background and the show was all about women discussing their views on sex.

I wouldn't call myself the biggest expert on this subject, but I do offer a number of useful experiences.  And I still marvel at some of my friends and people I just know - at how their relationships seem to be failing for what are obvious reasons.  And these people I speak of seem completely oblivious to those reasons!  Particularly in the department of heterosexual or bisexual men who are dating women and are baffled (in one poignant case) that their ongoing belittlment or insulting of thier partner yields a distancing of themselves from that parnter.  Or, in another case, absolute inattentiveness to their partner's wants or desires - it's just about the sex.

I'm glad I've kept my relationships simple.  They've all failed for one reason or another to this point, true.  But I know exactly why in every case.  And I'm confident I've neer been cheated on, and I've always - ever been honest with my partners.  I've respected them, treated them well - been an adult and not beeen a total pig.  And, while I wouldn't describe myself as especially romantic by nature - I know how to be; because it's appreciated by others.

What's more frustrating is watching such painfully stupid melodramas unfold before my very eyes without being able to tactfully explain the problem to one or both parties - because it's none of my business, unless asked directly.  (And probably not smart to intervene even then.)  Nor was it much better hearing those same complaints from women about their own love lives.

Again, I'm no expert on women.  But as I heard each articulate their likes and dislikes - none of it seemed terribly surprising.  But for all the lack of success in my personal sex life of late - and the seeming infrequency with which I have asserted myself in recent social contexts - I gotta say I've been and will likely yet make an amazing boyfriend by the sounds of it all.

And that's a sad statement, in my view.

We all like to think we live in a society that celebrates equality - equal rights; my rights end where yours begin, etc.  It isn't perfect, of course.  But - on the whole - when it comes to basic rights, treatment by our government, and on matters of public policy we all expect to be treated fairly and with a minimum of bias, all things being equal.  But a few take that a little further....some so far as to suggest that economic equality is also somehow desireable.  That it's undesirable to have economic inequality in our society - as was tonight's re-gurgitated diatribe by CBC's Avi Lewis (during a re-run of his "On the Map" program).

Avi is a pompous, granola-crunching left-ey; a dillitante academic and armchair social engineer whose achivements in journalism roughly paralell the visibility of his own bloated ego, so far as I can tell.  In another life - say in a paralell universe where instead of the "who-ya-know" reality that governs true success, we find a meritocracy - Avi is a malcontent who stalks G8 meetings amidst a throng of idealistic university students, anarchists and sociopaths who get off on inciting riots.  There is scarcely another face that darkens ones television screen with more cynicism or greater number of snide remarks with such unrelenting volume, and he should be sent packing along with the idiot that produces his rubbish on CBC's news channel - both to be replaced with more intellectually stimulating and socially-relevant entertainment like "Get Smart" or maybe "Crusty the Clown".

Like any typical aspiring pompous academic, Avi holds the view that everyone should be equal in all respects.  Although this might be an easier model to memorize and apply rules to, it does not reflect the true dynamic of human society, left to its own devices.  Nor is it desirable.  Guest after guest kept re-using the word "inequality" during the segment (in talking about the growing gap between rich and poor in China), but not one commented on why this was a bad thing.  The tacit assumption was that there was a serious problem with this.

In the end - nobody wants economic equality.  If we did - we'd be saying that we'd want everyone to be only so rich, and no rich just as much as we'd be saying poor and no poorer.  We'd all be equally wealthy - and completely unable to advance our fortunes.  Regardless of the fact that many of us might actually be financially better off in such a system to start with, isn't to say it would make us any happier.  And, of course, we only need to look to why the Chineese have rejected this system (called "Communism" or "applied communism", and the reasons are many) and count those reasons to quickly realize economic equality is a terrible idea.

What is important, of course, is equal opportunity.  As with the concept of equal legal rights, equal commercial opportunity (or a "level playing field" as it might be called) is key to assuring that when inequality occurs, it's as close to being rationalized by merit as possible.

Would I assert we have that system now?  By no means.  But it is somthing to strive for.  And if China's own inequality is increasing - it's important that everyone in their society understand why and accept the rationale for it lest they find a lot of people like Avi suddenly clamouring for another communist revolution.