100 Posts!

Welcome to my 100th post on Spritzophrenia! Not bad for a little over eight months, don’t you think? Perhaps I should wait for the 108th post, a Hindu mystic number? Or the 888th, a propitious Chinese number? Or the 69th, Hugh Hefner’s sacred number? Meh, let’s get on with it…

Numbers make me think of the ancient Hebrew story of the Babylonian King Belshazzar having a feast, and suddenly seeing a ghostly hand writing upon the wall of the banqueting chamber, the words: Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin Number, number, weight, division. Which means, “you’ve been weighed in the balance, and found wanting”. (And your kingdom will be divided among the Medes and Persians.)

Woo!

I don’t know in whose balance I shall be weighed, but I appreciate you guys approving my “weight”. Today, I’ll simply point to some Spritzophrenia posts you might have missed:

* Mystical experience in a godless universe More of that atheist spirituality stuff.
* Satanic Panic Some thoughts on satanic hysteria.
* My Avatar spiritual experience Can a film be a spiritual gateway?
* Let there be light relief Cartoons via BiggerThanCheeses.
* There’s Probably No God? Atheist advertising.

I’ve quietly been adding more features. You may have also noticed the new Search box which will help you find topics of interest more easily. Also, because I’ve never had one before, I present my first poll so that you can dictate my future spiritual path

To conclude, I present not one, but TWO of my favourite tunes, if you wish to listen and enjoy. First, “Run” by Ecano (Oliver Lieb in one of his many incarnations). I DJed this song over a 120,000 Watt system to 13,000 people. Ahh, memories.

and Abyss by Wizzy Noise

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Google Does Not Find Everything

And neither does any other search engine. Interesting:

Focus group and survey research indicates that undergraduate students typically turn to popular Web search engines when they need to find information. These search engines index only the “surface Web,” where less than 7% of the information is appropriate for educational or scholarly purposes.

No single Web search engine indexes more than 16% of the surface Web, yet we have no evidence that students use more than one search engine when they look for information. According to BrightPlanet, the “deep Web” is 500 times larger and growing faster than the surface Web. The deep Web provides information in all disciplines, for all constituencies, that is 1,000-2,000 times better in quality than the surface Web.

Approximately 95% of deep Web content is publicly accessible without fees or subscriptions, but deep Web content, like scholarly commercial resources licensed by the library, is not indexed and therefore not accessible using popular Web search engines. The growing concern is that many undergraduate students may be searching only 0.03% of the Web to complete their assignments, ignoring entirely the books, journals, databases, full-text digital resources and other scholarly materials provided by the library. Because of easy access to the Web, undergraduates are using library collections and services less than in the past and, in the absence of quality information and tools on the surface, this may imperil the quality of student learning. For this reason, some faculty members do not allow their students to use Web resources in class projects.

From Troll, Denise A. “How and Why are Libraries Changing?” Digital Library Federation. Library Information Technology- Carnegie Melon, 9 Jan. 2001. Web. 29 Nov. 2009. http://www.diglib.org/use/whitepaper.htm

A commentator suggests the numbers may be slightly old and inflated, but nevertheless.

Also: Google Fails Evil Test