the tindog coffeehouse

If Peanuts’ Lucy Van Pelt is a liberal wacko nutjob, then Charlie Brown’s little sis Sally must be a Sean-Hannity-listening, government-bashing, ultra-paranoid (and probably gun-toting) member of the Tea Party movement:

Previously:
Lucy Van Pelt, Liberal

A short (but lovingly sweet) list of semi-random (but probably connected to a similar list in an alternate universe) thoughts from last night’s Lost:

• Hurley and Libby finally got their date on the beach. No, I didn’t cry, but that was pretty cool.
• If Lost is ultimately a love story, then that point was certainly hammered home in this episode. Is there such thing as a true soul mate? Yes, absolutely (I’m married to mine).
• There’s probably a lot more that can be said about the importance of love within the context of the show, but just to repeat a point I made last week: the “man of science” would make the argument that love doesn’t really exist, that like any other emotion it’s a product of evolution to help further the survival of our species. But the “man of faith” would argue that love is the basis for our (and the universe’s) very existence, and as such, it drives (or should drive) everything we do. Faith — and love! — wins.
• I guess both the island and the writers were done with Ilana. That will go down as one of the greatest character deaths in TV history, mark my words.

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Source.

The question is, can a church exist completely online? A lot of other Christian writers and bloggers have already addressed this pretty extensively, but the question keeps coming up.

The short answer is no, and here’s why:

First, as Northland’s Joel Hunter (who looks eerily like George W. Bush) pointed out, a church is more than just a building. The church is the people, and those people can meet anywhere: a traditional church building, a house, at Starbucks, or even online. But it’s about more than just meeting at the same place to hear a sermon or sing some songs; it’s about relationships. The church, at its heart, is a community of believers who learn together, worship together, pray for each other, and serve one another. And an online-only church can’t do that effectively.

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I’ve been doing these weekly recaps of Lost for several weeks now, and usually I do so from the “man of faith” perspective. But this week is a little different. Today is all about science.

It just so happens that while ABC was showing “Happily Ever After”, an episode in which the Island world and Sideways world intersected via electromagnetic pulse-surviving Desmond Hume, the Science Channel was showing a program about… wait for it… parallel universes. Crazy, right?

Now, I know nothing about quantum physics or advanced mathematics. I was a history major. But the whole concept of parallel universes (whether you agree with it or not) plays a pretty big role in Lost, so let me see if I can summarize it at an extremely basic level. (Bear with me.)

In the 1980s a mathematical model called string theory emerged as a way to explain how the universe is constructed. It presented the universe as a collection of infinitely small oscillating strings, and it proposed the idea that there were multiple dimensions, some of which we couldn’t see or experience. Over time, several string theories developed, all of which contradicted each other, and a new idea came along to take its place: M-theory.

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Ars Technica has an interesting breakdown of AT&T’s 1922 plan to single-handedly control every radio station in America:

But AT&T had another idea—a network of almost 40 radio stations strung together via the telco’s long distance lines. They would broadcast to local areas wirelessly and share content via AT&T’s long routes. The company intended [New York City radio station] WEAF as the beginning of that experiment. …

As for competing stations, they would be “minimized or foreclosed through the efforts of the local broadcast associations to function inclusively,” Wurtzler explains, “encouraging all… to join in the shared collective effort.”

If this sounds all nice and Woodstocky in print, AT&T’s implementation of the concept was far less pretty in practice, and that led to the scheme’s demise. First the telco began denying non-Bell System radio stations access to its long distance lines for shared projects, forcing other networks to experiment with inferior telegraph rather than telephone connections for their experiments. Then AT&T drew more anger by suing a nearby competitor to WEAF, claiming that its broadcast operation infringed on the carrier’s patents. “To the public, already disturbed at the growth and power of trusts and cartels, AT&T seemed to be jumping with hobnailed boots over the little fellow,” write historians Christopher Sterling and John Kitross.

AT&T abandoned its plans for broadcast domination in 1926, opting instead to monopolize the wireline connections between stations. In its place, RCA, General Electric, and Westinghouse formed NBC, with CBS and ABC following soon behind.

Ars speculates that AT&T’s withdrawal from broadcasting probably had a negative effect on innovation, with today’s broadcasters “constantly standing in the way of competing platforms, such as cable television, satellite radio, Low Power FM, and white space broadband.” I’m not so sure. It’s reasonable to assume AT&T would’ve been just as obstructing, if not more (if the company’s history since then is any indication).

Either way, it’s an interesting reminder of a technological future that might’ve been.

Previously:
Can you hear me now?
Vanity Fair’s history of the Internet
The evil genius of AT&T MicroCells