Inspired by others

Everybody is writing about such thought provoking topics today! Twice now I've finished reading someone's post only to come running over here to write my thoughts on a similar subject - one of the very reasons I enjoy blogging so much.

First, Kepanie of Knitspiring Odyssey posted this little number referring back to Knit and Crochet Blog Week. She mentions that design was something she wanted to work on and has been a having a little fun with lately, and I commented that design is also something I've been having fun playing with, and that I seem to change every pattern I've been working on lately. Then I stopped to think for a moment.

I have 45 projects listed on my Ravelry page. Approximately 25 of them are either patterns I just made up, or patterns that I changed, improved, added something, took away something, etc. That's more than half. I seriously cannot leave a pattern untouched. Lately it seems like everything I make from an existing pattern is actually an exploration in order to learn how to make something else from my own pattern. Last night I started visualizing not 1, not 2, but 3 different pattern collections I could eventually pull together based on things I've made up. It's actually really exciting to have all these ideas start coming together, but since they only exist in my head so far, it's going to take a lot of work to translate these ideas into real patterns.

Then I went over and read what PandaBearOfDoom at Random Knits had to say about faith healers. Well, this sounds like it's right up my alley, no? Her take was that words cannot heal alone, especially serious conditions like cancer (I promise I won't go nuts over marijuana's healing effects this time) and that it is more likely a placebo or psychosomatic effect.

One of my favorite oddball phrases is "Post hoc, ergo propter hoc" which in Latin means "After it, therefore because of it" - as in you felt sick after eating that hot dog, therefore you're sick because of the hot dog. It's a very basic way of coming to a logical conclusion, it's also a very easy way of coming to a logical fallacy - the school bell rang after you sat down, therefore it rang because you sat down. As the dormouse in Wonderland says "It's like saying 'I breathe when I sleep' is the same as 'I sleep when I breathe'". I think faith healers say "Look, this person got well after we prayed, therefore they got well because we prayed." The question is then is this true, or a misconception?

The mind body connection is a mysterious thing and I think we've barely scratched the surface of what we're capable of doing with our minds and energy fields. Our bodies have the capability of producing enough energy to power a whole city, what else could we do with all that energy? You know how they say we only use 10% of our brain capacity, and then you start thinking about what might happen if we used 100%? Well Bruce and I decided that would probably actually not be a good idea, kind of like seriously over-clocking a processor and then frying the motherboard. But what if we did figure out how to most efficiently optimize our minds? As we invented the internet and continue to push technology as far as we can, I think we can take the power of our minds to similar heights. This may sound a little kooky but I actually think the internet is the the product of reverse engineering of the hive mind and that it's our blueprint for where our own evolution is headed.

So I guess the short version of that is I think those faith healers are on the right path, but they're also just still standing on the front porch, they have yet to even get past the front gate.

Songs for today:
Solar Quest - Acid Air Raid
Pitchers - What They Don't Like (hard dance style)
^Same song - DJ Krip remix (trance) <-- this is why I love the electronic music scene, same song, such a different sound