Saturday, January 06, 2007
The karma of rescuing
Last Saturday, I heard a BANG on the kitchen window; despite my having hung so many suncatchers on it that it barely lets in any light, the birds still fly into the bare spots pretty frequently, so this didn't alarm me at 1st... until I looked up from the computer to see a little tweetie lying motionless on the air conditioner. I lunged to the sliding glass door to see if he was moving; usually they're just stunned and fly away after a few minutes, but sometimes they don't recover before it gets dark and have to be put up in a tree so they don't spend the night on the ground (at least until the cats show up). This bird did something I'd never seen before; he slowly rolled over onto his back with his feet in the air. Shrieking in dismay, and ignoring my husband's admonition that he was a goner, I yanked open the door, dashed out and tenderly scooped the tweet up; I saw no injuries or blood, neither his head nor his wings were at funny angles, and his eyes were open and blinking, so, with relief, I called out that he wasn't dead and probably not injured, just badly stunned. I cradled his tiny body in my hand, petted him with one finger and talked soothingly to him; he didn't struggle or peck, and looked up at me with no sign of distress.
It was early evening, and if I hadn't been there the bird would have just laid on the cold metal with the air around him getting colder and darker, and might easily have slipped from being heavily stunned into death... at best, he'd have recovered too late to fly away, and, with nowhere to hide, been dinner for the 1st cat (or raccoon) that showed up. Luckily for him, though, I WAS there, and I stood on icy tiles in bare feet, shielding him from the chilly breeze with my jacketless body, while he snuggled into my warm palm and showed no indication of wanting to leave; after about half an hour, when it had darkened to the point that I was getting really concerned that he wouldn't be able to see well enough to fly, he finally stirred, and, when I flattened my hand, flew onto the patio cover, and then off to his nighttime roost... and I dragged my half-frozen body (I'd lost most of the feeling below my knees) back into the house, suffused with the happy glow that comes from helping, and probably saving, a little wild creature.
Early the next day, I was in my study when I heard a bang at the kitchen window... followed by 2 MORE bangs, at which I vaulted from my chair and sprinted to the glass door, envisioning a dazed bird flying repeatedly into the glass that'd have to be trapped before it bashed its brains out. What I saw, with a creepy sense of deja vu, was a tiny avian form lying on the air conditioner; before I could even determine if he appeared injured, there was a sort of blink, and the bird was GONE, as if by some malign magic... and then my brain decoded what I'd seen, which was an evil hawk that had swooped in with unbelievable speed and snatched the poor tweetie as it lay there stunned and helpless. I was frozen in horror for several moments, and then I heard an agonized wail... it was me. My husband, who'd still been asleep, came staggering out to see what I was screaming about, but I was inconsolable; one of my beloved birdies had been taken away to endure a hideous death, which could have been averted if I'd been in the family room where I'd usually be at that time and seen the hawk chase the bird into the window... I'd have been out the door and grabbed its intended victim before it had time to circle back to pick it up.
It seemed especially cruel to have had to witness that while still feeling pleased from having rescued a bird; even worse, what if it was the SAME bird? My husband tried to reassure me that the one I'd saved would have remembered its accident the day before and avoided the window, but it could hardly be expected to do an in-depth analysis with a hawk chasing it, and would likely still be weak and groggy from what was probably a concussion and thus be the slowest of the flock and the easiest prey, so... :-(
To distract my grieving mind from imagining gory ends for the tweet I'd been petting less than 24 hours before, I tried to sort out the karma of the situation: Clearly, bringing a reasonably highly developed creature back from death or danger would generate + karma, as its thoughts and feelings would change from - to +, and, in the former case, the resurgence of its life force would also be +. When I asked myself what the long-term karmic effect would be, I recalled the concept I outlined in my post of 2-18-06
"When you take an action that affects others, it's as if you handed each of them a long string that you've got one end of, along which the karmic energy you created by that action travels to them, and along which THEIR karmic energy in response to your action flows back to you... not just then but at every future time that they take action or otherwise produce energy (ie via thoughts or feelings) because of your action."
and it seems clear that, since saving a person (from death or major danger) is about as big of an effect on their life as you can have, doing so would tie their karma to yours, and permanently too, because the action of having saved them would affect them every moment forever; could this not apply to most animals as well, so that when you save one you get karma from it, not just at the time but for the rest of its life? And therefore; if a person or animal that you saved did bad things, would that - karma not then flow back to YOU? What if a person you save murders someone? What if a stray dog you save gets rabies and kills a child? What if the black widow spider you piously relocate away from the garage floor (instead of squashing it as SHOULD be done to all vermin) bites your neighbor and he dies? Is there any way that the - karma from those events could fail to flow back to you? Is this why in some so-called "primitive" cultures if you save someone you're responsible for them forever... is it for your own protection?
Now, a little bird could never do anything harmful, so there's no worry there, but... what if I saved the bird from an easy death, where it would just have gone to sleep and never woken up, only to have it die by being torn apart by a hawk instead? What's the karma of THAT? Did the extra few hours of life make up for the worse death? What if the hawk had grabbed the bird just as it flew away from me? Would its pain and fear have been greater than the + feelings it had had when I took it from cold metal to a warm hand, making the net karma to me -? Your instinct might be to deny that, because we see saving a bird as doing a good deed for which we should be rewarded, but karma does NOT pass moral judgments or give rewards, it's just mindless flows of energy, so you could easily do something morally and ethically right, something everyone would agree was good and kindhearted, and still end up with - karma. No, that isn't fair, but that's because karma's NOT fair; that's the biggest thing that people don't understand about it, because we humans persist in the idea of some force being out there that sees us as a parent sees children, a force that shares our morality and acts accordingly... there may well be such a force (I can't prove there isn't), but karma isn't it.
The final karmic concept here is; getting karma "forever" from a creature/person you save really just means "for as long as they live"... and so the amount of + karma you could get from the continuing life force of who/whatever you saved isn't a fixed amount, but depends how long the rescue-ee lives. Thus, if the hawk took the bird I saved, that ended my + karma from the saving, whereas if the bird had lived out its normal lifespan I'd have gotten another few years of it... and if I'd saved a member of some species of parrot instead, I could have had a century of + karma from it, assuming *I* lived that long. Again, this isn't "fair," but you can't get karma from a dead person/animal, so I don't see any way around it.
That's my 1st spiritual insight of the year, the 1st in far too long; I'm going to keep pushing myself to figure out the karma of different situations, and hopefully the next epiphany will be along soon.
It was early evening, and if I hadn't been there the bird would have just laid on the cold metal with the air around him getting colder and darker, and might easily have slipped from being heavily stunned into death... at best, he'd have recovered too late to fly away, and, with nowhere to hide, been dinner for the 1st cat (or raccoon) that showed up. Luckily for him, though, I WAS there, and I stood on icy tiles in bare feet, shielding him from the chilly breeze with my jacketless body, while he snuggled into my warm palm and showed no indication of wanting to leave; after about half an hour, when it had darkened to the point that I was getting really concerned that he wouldn't be able to see well enough to fly, he finally stirred, and, when I flattened my hand, flew onto the patio cover, and then off to his nighttime roost... and I dragged my half-frozen body (I'd lost most of the feeling below my knees) back into the house, suffused with the happy glow that comes from helping, and probably saving, a little wild creature.
Early the next day, I was in my study when I heard a bang at the kitchen window... followed by 2 MORE bangs, at which I vaulted from my chair and sprinted to the glass door, envisioning a dazed bird flying repeatedly into the glass that'd have to be trapped before it bashed its brains out. What I saw, with a creepy sense of deja vu, was a tiny avian form lying on the air conditioner; before I could even determine if he appeared injured, there was a sort of blink, and the bird was GONE, as if by some malign magic... and then my brain decoded what I'd seen, which was an evil hawk that had swooped in with unbelievable speed and snatched the poor tweetie as it lay there stunned and helpless. I was frozen in horror for several moments, and then I heard an agonized wail... it was me. My husband, who'd still been asleep, came staggering out to see what I was screaming about, but I was inconsolable; one of my beloved birdies had been taken away to endure a hideous death, which could have been averted if I'd been in the family room where I'd usually be at that time and seen the hawk chase the bird into the window... I'd have been out the door and grabbed its intended victim before it had time to circle back to pick it up.
It seemed especially cruel to have had to witness that while still feeling pleased from having rescued a bird; even worse, what if it was the SAME bird? My husband tried to reassure me that the one I'd saved would have remembered its accident the day before and avoided the window, but it could hardly be expected to do an in-depth analysis with a hawk chasing it, and would likely still be weak and groggy from what was probably a concussion and thus be the slowest of the flock and the easiest prey, so... :-(
To distract my grieving mind from imagining gory ends for the tweet I'd been petting less than 24 hours before, I tried to sort out the karma of the situation: Clearly, bringing a reasonably highly developed creature back from death or danger would generate + karma, as its thoughts and feelings would change from - to +, and, in the former case, the resurgence of its life force would also be +. When I asked myself what the long-term karmic effect would be, I recalled the concept I outlined in my post of 2-18-06
"When you take an action that affects others, it's as if you handed each of them a long string that you've got one end of, along which the karmic energy you created by that action travels to them, and along which THEIR karmic energy in response to your action flows back to you... not just then but at every future time that they take action or otherwise produce energy (ie via thoughts or feelings) because of your action."
and it seems clear that, since saving a person (from death or major danger) is about as big of an effect on their life as you can have, doing so would tie their karma to yours, and permanently too, because the action of having saved them would affect them every moment forever; could this not apply to most animals as well, so that when you save one you get karma from it, not just at the time but for the rest of its life? And therefore; if a person or animal that you saved did bad things, would that - karma not then flow back to YOU? What if a person you save murders someone? What if a stray dog you save gets rabies and kills a child? What if the black widow spider you piously relocate away from the garage floor (instead of squashing it as SHOULD be done to all vermin) bites your neighbor and he dies? Is there any way that the - karma from those events could fail to flow back to you? Is this why in some so-called "primitive" cultures if you save someone you're responsible for them forever... is it for your own protection?
Now, a little bird could never do anything harmful, so there's no worry there, but... what if I saved the bird from an easy death, where it would just have gone to sleep and never woken up, only to have it die by being torn apart by a hawk instead? What's the karma of THAT? Did the extra few hours of life make up for the worse death? What if the hawk had grabbed the bird just as it flew away from me? Would its pain and fear have been greater than the + feelings it had had when I took it from cold metal to a warm hand, making the net karma to me -? Your instinct might be to deny that, because we see saving a bird as doing a good deed for which we should be rewarded, but karma does NOT pass moral judgments or give rewards, it's just mindless flows of energy, so you could easily do something morally and ethically right, something everyone would agree was good and kindhearted, and still end up with - karma. No, that isn't fair, but that's because karma's NOT fair; that's the biggest thing that people don't understand about it, because we humans persist in the idea of some force being out there that sees us as a parent sees children, a force that shares our morality and acts accordingly... there may well be such a force (I can't prove there isn't), but karma isn't it.
The final karmic concept here is; getting karma "forever" from a creature/person you save really just means "for as long as they live"... and so the amount of + karma you could get from the continuing life force of who/whatever you saved isn't a fixed amount, but depends how long the rescue-ee lives. Thus, if the hawk took the bird I saved, that ended my + karma from the saving, whereas if the bird had lived out its normal lifespan I'd have gotten another few years of it... and if I'd saved a member of some species of parrot instead, I could have had a century of + karma from it, assuming *I* lived that long. Again, this isn't "fair," but you can't get karma from a dead person/animal, so I don't see any way around it.
That's my 1st spiritual insight of the year, the 1st in far too long; I'm going to keep pushing myself to figure out the karma of different situations, and hopefully the next epiphany will be along soon.
Thursday, January 04, 2007
Am I crazy, or is Google updating PageRank RIGHT NOW?
(I guess those 2 things aren't mutually exclusive, huh, lol?)
Update, 1-10-07: *** I WAS RIGHT!! *** A well-known Google employee admitted on his blog today that PR IS currently being updated... and *I* figured it out almost a WEEK ago!! Yay me!! :-)
I've done every kind of search I can think of, checked every site, blog or otherwise, that I can find that deals with Google issues, and can't find any mention of an update. Many people have estimated an update for this month, most for the end of the month but a couple for the 1st week, and 1 even referred to odd behavior from Google going back a couple of weeks that they thought was indicative of a rapidly-approaching update, but no one that I've seen has said that it looks like an update is underway... so I'm tossing out an extra post to alert you to the following:
If you query Google's data centers about a URL, you normally get the same PR # back from each one; if you get DIFFERENT #'s for the same URL, that's supposed to mean that a PageRank update is in progress... and I've checked a bunch of URL's on several different sites that show all the data center results, such as this one
http://livepr.raketforskning.com/
and most of them are showing 2 different PR results. And, I've encountered some anomalous 0's, and when a data center reports a 0 for a URL with non-0 PR it can be an indication that that center is being reset, which also happens when PageRank is being updated. AND, the % of data centers reporting each of the different PR #'s for the URL's I've been repeatedly testing is varying quite a bit, thus causing the total PR to vary, which is ALSO typical of updating going on. So; either there's an update in progress, OR, Google is up to something else pretty major that I've never read about that does the same thing to the data center results.
Either way, why can't I find any other references to this? Is it possible that I'm the 1st one who saw it? SOMEONE has to be 1st, but...??!!
Update: It's been over 17 hours since I posted the above, and I STILL can't find any mention of the data center issues ANYWHERE. However, having spent WAY more time than I should have on searches, I've found a few mentions on forums going as far back as 12-30-06 proclaiming that various Google changes were occurring that meant that a PageRank update has begun; I also found a much greater # of posts in that timeframe where some poor guy would say that his toolbar PR had changed, and did that mean that PR was being updated, and every pompous @ss on the forum would slam him about the meaninglessness of toolbar PR, and that nothing mattered except when the data centers started showing changes... and the one time the victim replied that he'd checked his site with the data centers and saw wildly differing PR's, the pompous @sses replied that THEIR sites didn't show any changes and so the victim's data was somehow meaningless (no one pointed out that this was hypocritical and insane of course). I've also seen a few mentions of search engine results and backlinks changing, and CSS pages being intensively crawled, with no mention of what this might mean for PageRank; maybe if all those folks got together and compared notes, they'd see a pattern and reach a conclusion? Or maybe ONE person within the Google-watching community will check the data centers and report about it, so the "experts" can tell us if it's an update or some other serious Google change?
Update, 1-10-07: *** I WAS RIGHT!! *** A well-known Google employee admitted on his blog today that PR IS currently being updated... and *I* figured it out almost a WEEK ago!! Yay me!! :-)
I've done every kind of search I can think of, checked every site, blog or otherwise, that I can find that deals with Google issues, and can't find any mention of an update. Many people have estimated an update for this month, most for the end of the month but a couple for the 1st week, and 1 even referred to odd behavior from Google going back a couple of weeks that they thought was indicative of a rapidly-approaching update, but no one that I've seen has said that it looks like an update is underway... so I'm tossing out an extra post to alert you to the following:
If you query Google's data centers about a URL, you normally get the same PR # back from each one; if you get DIFFERENT #'s for the same URL, that's supposed to mean that a PageRank update is in progress... and I've checked a bunch of URL's on several different sites that show all the data center results, such as this one
http://livepr.raketforskning.com/
and most of them are showing 2 different PR results. And, I've encountered some anomalous 0's, and when a data center reports a 0 for a URL with non-0 PR it can be an indication that that center is being reset, which also happens when PageRank is being updated. AND, the % of data centers reporting each of the different PR #'s for the URL's I've been repeatedly testing is varying quite a bit, thus causing the total PR to vary, which is ALSO typical of updating going on. So; either there's an update in progress, OR, Google is up to something else pretty major that I've never read about that does the same thing to the data center results.
Either way, why can't I find any other references to this? Is it possible that I'm the 1st one who saw it? SOMEONE has to be 1st, but...??!!
Update: It's been over 17 hours since I posted the above, and I STILL can't find any mention of the data center issues ANYWHERE. However, having spent WAY more time than I should have on searches, I've found a few mentions on forums going as far back as 12-30-06 proclaiming that various Google changes were occurring that meant that a PageRank update has begun; I also found a much greater # of posts in that timeframe where some poor guy would say that his toolbar PR had changed, and did that mean that PR was being updated, and every pompous @ss on the forum would slam him about the meaninglessness of toolbar PR, and that nothing mattered except when the data centers started showing changes... and the one time the victim replied that he'd checked his site with the data centers and saw wildly differing PR's, the pompous @sses replied that THEIR sites didn't show any changes and so the victim's data was somehow meaningless (no one pointed out that this was hypocritical and insane of course). I've also seen a few mentions of search engine results and backlinks changing, and CSS pages being intensively crawled, with no mention of what this might mean for PageRank; maybe if all those folks got together and compared notes, they'd see a pattern and reach a conclusion? Or maybe ONE person within the Google-watching community will check the data centers and report about it, so the "experts" can tell us if it's an update or some other serious Google change?
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
*** It's my 3 year blog anniversary!! :-) ***
Happy New Year!! I hope that this will be the best year ever for you and your loved ones. I found a hilarious e-card for the occasion:
http://www.hallmark.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ecard|10001|10051|143940|-102001;11441;-102178||P1R7SO|ecards
I think the 3rd "resolution" is the funniest... and the most like something that'd happen to ME. I'm feeling encouraged about the coming year, because TWO of the raccoons that we haven't seen for months showed up tonight, which my husband and I choose to see as a good omen... if nothing else, it got us started off on the right paw, er, foot.
It's hard to believe that it's been THREE YEARS since I started this blog, knowing absolutely nothing about the blogosphere, never having had a personal site of any kind before, and with only a sprinkling of html commands to get me started on battling with the template. I wish I'd thought to take a screen cap of how the blog looked then, with an empty sidebar, that 1st couple of tiny posts, and of course my nifty flaming counter... yes, I knew enough to get a counter right off, but that was ALL I knew about what would be useful (or fun) to have on a blog. It looked so intimidating then, with all those zeros; even a 1000 hits seemed like a distant dream, as how on Earth would I ever find that many people to read my oddball posts... and a couple of months ago I passed 150K hits and barely noticed. Pretty wild.
What makes this special is that, because I blog anonymously, none of my readers are loved/liked ones from my "real life" here to see what I'm up to between phone calls and visits; everyone who comes here is doing so for just one reason... to see what I have to say. I'm not gonna go all falsely modest and pretend like I think I'm boring or anything, but even the most intellectual of my friends wouldn't want to be subjected to in-depth analyses as often as my regulars read them here; it's surprising, but very happy-making, to know that there ARE folks out there who like to think things through out to 10 decimal places like I do, or at least to read topics covered more in-depth than the standard couple of paragraphs. And; when someone comes here to read, they're not doing so in response to my looks, my net worth, my achievements or my force of personality, they're just here for my ideas, and how they're presented... and that purity of appreciation for what's in my head means more than I can say.
The other thing that continues to blow my mind is how many people from other countries come here; 45% of my visitors are non-American, and, while it's no surprise that the largest #'s of them come from Canada, the UK and Oz, right behind them is, not another Western nation like you'd expect, but SINGAPORE... what about my essays appeals so much to the citizens of that exotic land I have no idea. I've had visitors from 169 countries so far, many of which I couldn't find on a map when I 1st encountered them and some of which I'd never even heard of before coming online; it's always exciting when a new one shows up on the geo-locater (usually a tiny island nation at this point) and I look it up and learn what sort of place it is. There's a grim side to all this geo-locating, though; judging from the display of the last 20 cities visitors came from in my sidebar, I used to have several regular readers from Yogyakarta, Indonesia, but since earthquakes devastated that area in May
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_2006_Java_earthquake
I haven't seen a single hit from there... and I've had the sad thought many times since then that I need to HOPE those missing readers are just too busy for blogs now because they're helping to re-build, rather than the all too likely reality that they've been left homeless or destitute... or worse. Although painful, this illustrates what may be the best thing about blogging for me; it makes me think more globally... cities and countries that were just names on a map 3 years ago feel "personal" now when I hear of disasters there, or see a movie or TV show that's taking place there, and I care about the people in distant places in a much more concrete way than before, when all I had was the abstract way we love all humankind (and I hope that that enhanced caring is happening to lots of other bloggers as well, for the obvious reasons).
Another good thing about blogging is that it forces me to ponder important topics in more depth than just thinking about them, or even talking in person to people about them, ever would; this has led to my getting a boatload of new ideas, especially in the spiritual zone (although not much of THAT last year, sadly, but I've followed through with my resolution to start seeking out new spiritual epiphanies rather than waiting for them to appear as I used to be able to do, and have already come up with a new one that'll be covered in my next post). This may not sound like much to some, but for me it's the equivalent to if you discovered that by doing origami with your $ you could make it multiply... wouldn't that make you value origami pretty highly? As I've said before, I could be a brain in a bottle without missing the physical world much as long as I had internet access (DSL and a computer with telepathic controls, maybe?); I've had more new thoughts in the past 3 years than during any equal time period of my life, including college, and blogging is why.
When I started this blog, I truly intended for it to only have analytical posts, not personal ones or, worse, blogging about blogging, which has always seemed vaguely masturbatory to me; 2006 was such a train wreck in some ways, though, that my perceptions were dulled and my eagerness to pursue new info weakened, leading to far fewer "intellectual" essays than in the previous years. In 2007 I'm hoping to get back to discussing "Science, the unknown, and the human race" most of the time; however, since people seem to like my personal posts, and blogging-related posts are part of what links bloggers together, I'll concede that those things have a valid place here too, and you'll still be able to hear about my husband's foul-ups, the antics of critters on my patio, and my latest battles with sidebar doodads and the sites that provide them.
Oh, and useful URL's, too: If you haven't been pinging, or have been but have been dismayed by the problems some of the "broad spectrum pinging" sites have been having, try this one, which hasn't dropped the ball yet:
http://www.ping.in/
If you ping every time you post, it'll really help your traffic; don't ping more than every half hour, or when you HAVEN'T added new posts, though, because that'll get your site ignored or banned. You should also ping here
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping
to be sure that Google has you in their blog search database with all your posts... they invite you to ping every time your blog changes, but I think a little caution for non-stop posters is a good idea here, too.
Since this is a new year, it's time to back up EVERYTHING: template, archives, files, cookies, bookmarks... make sure every sort of data you've got online also exists on your own computer (don't trust ANY website to never lose your stuff), and everything on your computer should be backed up on a secondary computer, an external hard drive, or, to be fully circular, one of the websites that allows you to store a bunch of files. This might seem like a bit of a pain, but it's NOTHING like the pain you'll feel if your computer dies and takes all your stuff with it, or Blogger (etc) wipes out your blog and you can't reconstitute it.
And finally: Thank you to all my readers, especially my blog buddies, and double-especially those who've been with me for a long time... without you, I'd just be another geek doing a blogging version of one hand clapping. Here's to another 3 years!! xo
http://www.hallmark.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ecard|10001|10051|143940|-102001;11441;-102178||P1R7SO|ecards
I think the 3rd "resolution" is the funniest... and the most like something that'd happen to ME. I'm feeling encouraged about the coming year, because TWO of the raccoons that we haven't seen for months showed up tonight, which my husband and I choose to see as a good omen... if nothing else, it got us started off on the right paw, er, foot.
It's hard to believe that it's been THREE YEARS since I started this blog, knowing absolutely nothing about the blogosphere, never having had a personal site of any kind before, and with only a sprinkling of html commands to get me started on battling with the template. I wish I'd thought to take a screen cap of how the blog looked then, with an empty sidebar, that 1st couple of tiny posts, and of course my nifty flaming counter... yes, I knew enough to get a counter right off, but that was ALL I knew about what would be useful (or fun) to have on a blog. It looked so intimidating then, with all those zeros; even a 1000 hits seemed like a distant dream, as how on Earth would I ever find that many people to read my oddball posts... and a couple of months ago I passed 150K hits and barely noticed. Pretty wild.
What makes this special is that, because I blog anonymously, none of my readers are loved/liked ones from my "real life" here to see what I'm up to between phone calls and visits; everyone who comes here is doing so for just one reason... to see what I have to say. I'm not gonna go all falsely modest and pretend like I think I'm boring or anything, but even the most intellectual of my friends wouldn't want to be subjected to in-depth analyses as often as my regulars read them here; it's surprising, but very happy-making, to know that there ARE folks out there who like to think things through out to 10 decimal places like I do, or at least to read topics covered more in-depth than the standard couple of paragraphs. And; when someone comes here to read, they're not doing so in response to my looks, my net worth, my achievements or my force of personality, they're just here for my ideas, and how they're presented... and that purity of appreciation for what's in my head means more than I can say.
The other thing that continues to blow my mind is how many people from other countries come here; 45% of my visitors are non-American, and, while it's no surprise that the largest #'s of them come from Canada, the UK and Oz, right behind them is, not another Western nation like you'd expect, but SINGAPORE... what about my essays appeals so much to the citizens of that exotic land I have no idea. I've had visitors from 169 countries so far, many of which I couldn't find on a map when I 1st encountered them and some of which I'd never even heard of before coming online; it's always exciting when a new one shows up on the geo-locater (usually a tiny island nation at this point) and I look it up and learn what sort of place it is. There's a grim side to all this geo-locating, though; judging from the display of the last 20 cities visitors came from in my sidebar, I used to have several regular readers from Yogyakarta, Indonesia, but since earthquakes devastated that area in May
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_2006_Java_earthquake
I haven't seen a single hit from there... and I've had the sad thought many times since then that I need to HOPE those missing readers are just too busy for blogs now because they're helping to re-build, rather than the all too likely reality that they've been left homeless or destitute... or worse. Although painful, this illustrates what may be the best thing about blogging for me; it makes me think more globally... cities and countries that were just names on a map 3 years ago feel "personal" now when I hear of disasters there, or see a movie or TV show that's taking place there, and I care about the people in distant places in a much more concrete way than before, when all I had was the abstract way we love all humankind (and I hope that that enhanced caring is happening to lots of other bloggers as well, for the obvious reasons).
Another good thing about blogging is that it forces me to ponder important topics in more depth than just thinking about them, or even talking in person to people about them, ever would; this has led to my getting a boatload of new ideas, especially in the spiritual zone (although not much of THAT last year, sadly, but I've followed through with my resolution to start seeking out new spiritual epiphanies rather than waiting for them to appear as I used to be able to do, and have already come up with a new one that'll be covered in my next post). This may not sound like much to some, but for me it's the equivalent to if you discovered that by doing origami with your $ you could make it multiply... wouldn't that make you value origami pretty highly? As I've said before, I could be a brain in a bottle without missing the physical world much as long as I had internet access (DSL and a computer with telepathic controls, maybe?); I've had more new thoughts in the past 3 years than during any equal time period of my life, including college, and blogging is why.
When I started this blog, I truly intended for it to only have analytical posts, not personal ones or, worse, blogging about blogging, which has always seemed vaguely masturbatory to me; 2006 was such a train wreck in some ways, though, that my perceptions were dulled and my eagerness to pursue new info weakened, leading to far fewer "intellectual" essays than in the previous years. In 2007 I'm hoping to get back to discussing "Science, the unknown, and the human race" most of the time; however, since people seem to like my personal posts, and blogging-related posts are part of what links bloggers together, I'll concede that those things have a valid place here too, and you'll still be able to hear about my husband's foul-ups, the antics of critters on my patio, and my latest battles with sidebar doodads and the sites that provide them.
Oh, and useful URL's, too: If you haven't been pinging, or have been but have been dismayed by the problems some of the "broad spectrum pinging" sites have been having, try this one, which hasn't dropped the ball yet:
http://www.ping.in/
If you ping every time you post, it'll really help your traffic; don't ping more than every half hour, or when you HAVEN'T added new posts, though, because that'll get your site ignored or banned. You should also ping here
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping
to be sure that Google has you in their blog search database with all your posts... they invite you to ping every time your blog changes, but I think a little caution for non-stop posters is a good idea here, too.
Since this is a new year, it's time to back up EVERYTHING: template, archives, files, cookies, bookmarks... make sure every sort of data you've got online also exists on your own computer (don't trust ANY website to never lose your stuff), and everything on your computer should be backed up on a secondary computer, an external hard drive, or, to be fully circular, one of the websites that allows you to store a bunch of files. This might seem like a bit of a pain, but it's NOTHING like the pain you'll feel if your computer dies and takes all your stuff with it, or Blogger (etc) wipes out your blog and you can't reconstitute it.
And finally: Thank you to all my readers, especially my blog buddies, and double-especially those who've been with me for a long time... without you, I'd just be another geek doing a blogging version of one hand clapping. Here's to another 3 years!! xo
