Just Ask Oldguy

Oldguy, why is the cello harder to learn than guitar?

I was wondering about your thoughts on what will happen if someone travels the speed of light? Will they become infinitely small and heavy and instantaneously turn into a black hole? I heard they made something travel faster than the speed of light. Will they be making new theories, then? Also, about time stopping with the speed of light. Try and get something about that in there too please.

Are you saying that humanity, and by that extension, humans, could be replaced by a computer entirely? I’ll presume that you don’t believe in the idea of a soul?

Dear Oldguy,

How much of a cyborg can you be and still be considered human?

I have always wished to be immortal so that I may master every interest there is; I want PhDs, I want to master the guitar, everything. In my opinion, we will be able to replace every part of the body but the brain (due to it’s deterioration) in my lifetime. Do you think we can stop brain deterioration? How much of a person can be robotic, and still be called a human (and not a cyborg.)?

Dear Oldguy,

Many people think that the “traditional” family (e.g. one husband, one wife, and their kids) is dying. This seems to be the case in America. The debate is whether that’s a good thing. Some people actually encourage the decline of nuclear families as new forms of families arise. Other people discourage it because they claim the nuclear family is the most stable kind. Do you think that over time this kind of family will cease to exist? If so, what do you think the implications will be?

From http://www.justaskoldguy.com/questions/608

Quote:
“4) The above also works for testing rope bridges across deep river gorges. I guess what I’m saying in the last few answers is that the smart people keep the rest of us around just in case we might come in handy as cannon fodder.”

Do you not condisder yourself a smart person?

What is the evoluntionary advantage of stupidity? It’s so rampant that there must be a logical reason for it.

I’ve been a Christian for the majority of my life. The only time I wasn’t, was a brief run-in with a Wiccan friend and I experimented. I’ve turned away from it because it was too much pressure on my life.

Recently, I’ve been doubting my faith. Not because I don’t believe in God or Jesus, but I don’t see it the way everyone else does. God hasn’t been too nice to me (a downward spiral of events.), but my church hasn’t been giving me any advice but “Well, you need to pray more.”

What I feel they are saying is, “You must have done something wrong. Talk to God about it, and don’t come near me. Human flesh is a conductor of electricity.”

I’m thinking of giving up my Christianity and church, because I’m discouraged, angry at God, and my views have been becoming different.

So, my question is, what should I do? I don’t know my options. IF I leave, then what? Is this normal?

Last night I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get a query to work for Engineering Faith. All I wanted to know is how many followers each faith had.

I made a query like this (slightly simplified):

[code:3uubksc2]SELECT SUM(following_size)
FROM followings
GROUP BY faith[/code:3uubksc2]

This should have returned a list, like 3618 followers, 837 followers, and so on. Instead, it returned "1000" for each faith.

Now, I could easily tell that no faith had exactly 1000 followers. 1000 wasn't in the database at all actually. So I assumed I was doing something wrong, and got annoyed with it, and spent a good hour or so messing with it.

In frustration I tried this:

[code:3uubksc2]SELECT SUM(following_size) * 1
FROM followings
GROUP BY faith[/code:3uubksc2]

And it worked exactly as expected. For those less technically inclined, I multiplied all the results by one, and it went from always giving "1000" to giving the right results. Keep in mind, this is not my code doing this - this is the industry-standard MySQL database.

So my question is... can I swear off computers and live as a hermit in the woods?