david stoker's blog » Religion http://www.davidstoker.org/blog living life to the full Sat, 02 May 2009 17:33:52 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Back home in Orlando! http://www.davidstoker.org/blog/2008/05/03/back-home-in-orlando/ http://www.davidstoker.org/blog/2008/05/03/back-home-in-orlando/#comments Sun, 04 May 2008 03:14:30 +0000 David http://davidstoker.org/blog/?p=8 After finishing off my duties at the Engineering graduation last night it was time to finish preparing for my move back home for the summer! I am officially done living in dorms! Next year I’ll be living in an apartment off-campus with my own bedroom and own bathroom! CAN’T WAIT! I definitely enjoyed living in the dorm and I’m glad that I did it. It was a very interesting experience and I met some very strange people along the way but I guess that is the point of college! I am glad to be done with freshman year and very glad that I can finally relax and enjoy not having to go to class and study for tests! I will certainly miss living in Beaty Towers and I’ll miss having my roommates and other people around all the time in case I get bored. It feels great to have the first year done and even though it seems like there is so much more college left, there really isn’t! It will be over before I realize it and then I’ll be forced to get a full time job and see what I really learned. So exciting! I can’t wait for the future.

Now that I am back home and have a full desk to myself, I was able to redo my computer set up. I bought a second Acer 22″ monitor at the start of the year to use as a TV and later took it out of use when my room mate got a new 26″ LCD TV for us to use. Now that I have a new graphics card and two monitors I finally have my ideal dual monitor set up! Here is a picture:

Dual Monitor Setup

I’m pretty excited that I finally am able to use this as my set up! It consists of 2 Acer 22″ LCD screens, my “Hackintosh” desktop running Mac OS X Leopard and a Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse. I feel more productive already and I definitely enjoy being able to watch a movie or TV show on one screen while writing an e-mail or surfing the web on the other! I know that this set up will also help a lot when I am trading on the Forex market but I’ll write more about that sometime later. Overall, feels great to be home and feels good knowing that I have nearly four months of summer ahead of me!

]]> http://www.davidstoker.org/blog/2008/05/03/back-home-in-orlando/feed/ 1 The Great Attractor http://www.davidstoker.org/blog/2008/04/03/the-great-attractor/ http://www.davidstoker.org/blog/2008/04/03/the-great-attractor/#comments Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:30:57 +0000 David http://davidstoker.org/blog/?p=4 I was studying for my Physics quiz the other day and was reading a chapter on Gravitation in my Physics book when I stumbled upon the term “Great Attractor.” To quote my book, “The Local Group is part of the Local Supercluster of galaxies that is being drawn by the gravitational force toward an exceptionally massive region of space called the Great Attractor. This region appears to be about 3.0 x 108 light-years from Earth, on the opposite side of the Milky Way.” WOW! What an interesting concept and strange phenomenon. The first thing I thought of when reading this though was, “Could that be heaven?” The name fits. The concept fits since everything in the Universe is being drawn towards it. And it just sounds good.

I did a quick search on Google to see if other people made some type of religious connection with this idea of the Great Attractor. I found an article by James McGillis talking about the same idea. He approached the topic in a very metaphysical sense which was interesting to read. I like the idea of thinking about God or heaven being out there in a specific place in the Universe but at the same time I don’t know if it is reasonable. I am a firm Christian and I believe that God is omnipotent and omnipresent. That would mean that God would have to be in this Great Attractor region but also everywhere in the Universe at the same time.

All in all, I just like the idea of the Earth being attracted to this defined region in the Universe called the Great Attractor which in actuality could the location of “heaven.” I guess you could say that it is a very cliche idea but a fun idea to contemplate all at the same time.

Here are a couple interesting pictures illustrating the Great Attractor.

The Great Attractor Diagram

Great Attractor Picture

One last interesting fact! The Great Attractor is “attracting” galaxies and Superclusters at velocities in excess of 600 kilometers per second!

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