The Vatican this week released a “new” list of seven social sins to augment the original seven cardinal vices better known as the seven deadly sins. The new list is as follows:

1. “Bioethical” violations such as birth control
2. “Morally dubious” experiments such as stem cell research
3. Drug abuse
4. Polluting the environment
5. Contributing to widening divide between rich and poor
6. Excessive wealth
7. Creating poverty

The original seven deadly sins:

1. Pride
2. Envy
3. Gluttony
4. Lust
5. Anger
6. Greed
7. Sloth

The first two new sins might as well be the same. I’m still trying to figure out what the deal is with the catholic church being ok with not advocating birth control (24 million cases of AIDS and 2 million deaths in 2005 due to AIDS in Africa is A-OK with the Pope, just as long as they’re not using condoms). The last three new sins could also be the same. Granted, contributing to poverty, possessing great wealth, and creating more poverty are morally reprehensible, but could easily be grouped under - oh, let’s say - “Fiscal Immorality.”

I think the Vatican would be better served looking outside their own ranks for more universally accepted truths rather than trying to update their narrow views to “jive” with todays youth (geez, how old do I sound there??) or current technologies. In other words:

What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done;
there is nothing new under the sun.

Ecclesiastes 1:9

If this is true, then we’ve already gotten ourselves figured out, and all we have to do is listen to the voices of the past and allow that to point our way. For instance, the Vatican should really have just gone with the original Seven Social Sins as written by Mahatma Gandhi around 1925:

1. Politics without principles
2. Wealth without work
3. Pleasure without conscience
4. Knowledge without character
5. Commerce without morality
6. Science without humanity
7. Worship without sacrifice

From “Young India”, 1925, Mahatma Gandhi

Notice numbers 2 and 6. Huh, way back around the turn of the century people were worried about science/wealth and morality too. All-in-all, this list is more eloquent, more thoughtful and better articulated. These seem to be better oriented towards modern lifestyles and concerns. They even feel more universal and timeless - like they’ll even withstand the test of time - go figure. Sounds like Vatican scholars really need to do a better job of researching their subject matter.

Links:

News item on Bloomburg
via BoingBoing
The complete works of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (see Volume 33 page 135 for his list)
Image Credit

I know everyone’s at least seen the so called “Little Bigfoot” photo taken by the Spirit rover. Oh, you haven’t well a few days ago it was the photo of the day on the Astronomy Photo of the Day page. Go check it out. Done? Okay, here’s the thing, I looked at that, and yeah, I saw it. but here’s the thing, same scale, opposite side of the photo (nearly all the way over), there’s a feature I’ve dubbed the “Wolfman of Mars”. Go ahead take a look, here’s a blow up to help find it:

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See anything familiar looking? No? How about if you compare it to this:

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Image from Wikipedia.

Now, I know that NASA is rolling their eyes at this whole thing. All I’m saying is that maybe we’re not looking at the problems from the right angles. Maybe we should be looking for scaled down versions of life instead of microscopic or full sized. Maybe we shouldn’t let our preconceived notions of what life should look like cloud what we see or what we’re looking at. Eh, what do I know. All I know is that Martians are little and red-brown. No wonder we never saw them there before…

Yesterday started banally enough - morning routine and all. Then I looked outside the window. It had rained, which means all that raking and leaf blowing I did over the weekend was all for naught.

When I talked to my wife from work, she mentioned that she was having some problems with connecting to our home network with her laptop. I told her to unplug the wireless router and plug it back in again (things would be so much easier with a little “reset” on these things - manufacturers, take note!).

On the way home my truck’s check engine light came on. Okay, no major problem yet, I’m still able to drive for now. After I got home that evening I decided that I’d see if my wife was still having problems. That started a lovely, 4 hour ordeal that I’m loath to repeat.

As it turns out, her wireless card wasn’t working anymore, and Vista, being that sterling example of how not to design an OS or GUI, was of little help. We’ll just have to wait and see if it’s still under warranty with HP for replacement parts, otherwise I’ll be picking up a new mini-pci card for her. As a temporary measure I tried adding a wireless USB dongle (hehehe “dongle”), but Vista Home Premium (I know those words, but when you put them together like that, I just don’t understand them) didn’t have the drivers built-in (huh, go figure). So I tried to download them on my laptop. Thus started phase two of my evening - wireless router troubleshooting.

The wireless router has been acting wonky for a few weeks now, netstumbler has been reading the wireless access point as, not only the programmed SSID, but the SSID and a random string of characters on every probe. Which is weird because I have it set not to broadcast the SSID to begin with, so the fact that it’s identifying itself that was is troubling. Long, story short I spent the next couple of hours trying to get my crappy, spare wRouter working (f**k you D-Link, f**k you very much). Ah the joys of a web interface that isn’t compatible with Firefox (’nuff said).

After I got that working (I’m leaving out the part about trying to upgrade the firmware in a futile attempt to get the UI to work with Firefox, heaven forbid that I try to manage it from something other than Windows), I tried to connect to the internet. No, that didn’t work either. I accessed my DSL modem, and ran diagnostics and pings from there. No DNS, huh. I tried calling BellSouth - no… sorry, the “new” AT&T (which is to say the old AT&T, just with less customer care). The customer service number was of no help, everyone was gone because it was after hours (but what if I have a problem?! what - no helpful message telling me who to call after hours for service? oh well). Then I found the number for the internet support, oh good. That worked, eventually - when I finally got a line (yes, for 20 minutes I wore my redial button clean of letters because they didn’t have the number of phone lines to cover the number of customers calling in - let me make this clear, the PHONE COMPANY didn’t have the lines to cover the call volume - that should give you an idea of the size of the problem). Turns out the prerecorded message said they were having a “region wide problem” and that customer service techs (?) didn’t have any more details.

Eventually, my internet was restored (at least they new how to fix the problem and got things going in a “timely” manner), I got to the internet and got the drivers I needed. While I was pulling my hair out (what little is left) I saw news reports (my TV/cable was working at least, although one of the local channels faded out a couple of times…) about the North East and West coasts getting pounded by extreme whether. That’s when I thought about how even though I was stuck in my little corner of hell, I was still better off pulling my hair out with these smaller problems than those poor bastards who were getting snowed in or flooded out. I guess it’s all a matter of perspective.