Hot water!

Check out Magali's comment for June 06. She sent me a pic of her geyser. Anyone prepared to venture the depreciation on Magali's house as a result of this terrible happenstance?

Check out Wikipedia's excellent article on synchronicity.

One of the most important aspects of my job, is creating significance from seemingly meaningless events, so I take a perverse interest in how human minds recognise patterns - even when patterns aren't actually there.

For instance, people need comfort when grieving and the natural temptation is to resort to the stories of my tradition, like heaven and "God's will". Thus we impose a pattern on a person's life which makes sense of their death. The problem is that the patterns can be more disturbing than comforting: God's will becomes God's punishment.

I prefer to think of life as chaotic and unpredicatable. Coincidences, like Magali's geyser, serve only to illustrate for me how chaotic the world is and how absurd our pattern recognition system can be if we look for patterns without consistency.

The essential thing about being human is choice. Our freedom means we can overcome the chaos of life. But this means being consistent in our choices. By such consistency, I impose upon the world an order. It is a tiny - no, puny - order; a logic which is completely overwhelmed by the magnitude of the universal stream of chaos.

And yet, it is significant. How? The scientific endeavour is a clear example of how the cumulative weight of thousands of tiny, logical efforts has been able to offer humanity the chance at controlling the chaos. Democratic (more than just the ballot) process also demonstrates a remarkable power to "change" history.

If there is a mysterious power at work in the universe, we don't need to alarmed. It is not in bar-codes and 6 coloured rainbows. No, this power is human and the results are far more surprising! What do these numbers mean to you? To me they represent the ingenuity and resilience of the human animal:

1994 Year of South Africa's freedom
1919 Year of the creation of the formula for the chlorination of drinking water
2003 Year of the newest democracy on earth: East Timor
299,792,458 Speed of light in metres per second
3.14159 26535 89793 23846 26433 83279 50288 41971 69399 37510 Pi