You’re about to call a friend who screens calls based on Caller ID. You want them to answer the phone because you’re in a good mood and they would be more likely to answer the phone if they knew you were in a good mood and wouldn’t talk their ear off complaining. Well…

Enter the Emotional ID System

As you prepare to dial your friend, your phone would prompt you to select your current emotion.

Then you would dial the number as usual and the above picture is what your friend would see on his phone

Walla! You know what emotion the caller is! Simple. Elegant. Fun. Productive. Questions? I thought so!

• What if I don’t want to send an emotion?
  Then don’t. There shouldn’t be a reason that you must send an emotion along with your phone call. I would guess that as this becomes more prevalent that you would be frowned upon for obscuring your countenance.
• Can’t I just lie and choose an emotion I’m not feeling?
  Of course. But once the recipient answers the phone and notices that you picked falsely, then they are less likely to trust your emotional icon. My guess is that there would be sufficient social pressure to keep this honest. If I’m screening my calls for only happy people today (or sad people that I want to encourage), then I’m less likely to answer your calls at all and you’ll want to shape up if you want to chat.
• But none of the phones in circulation support this feature.
  Some may be able to since you can send images between phones. But it doesn’t matter. The turnover for phones is HUGE! People upgrade (or break) their phones all the time. And if this was the killer app for new phones…LOOK OUT!!!
• This is stupid! Do you really think it will be popular?
  Of course it’s stupid! Most of the methods we communicate with today are trivial and silly. Look at IM. :-) That’s why it will become popular and I will make lots of money off the idea. You heard it here first.

From Netscape News – link

It seems like more and more people are thinking that what we have here in this Solar System and planet Earth is pretty unique to the Universe. Because of the way they’ve discovered other planets in other star systems and the highly elliptical orbits, they are getting discouraged in their search for a star system capable of supporting life as we know it. A fascinating (if quick) article. It’s funny, though, with all the billion-billions of stars out there and we start making broad statements after looking at just a couple thousand of them. O well. The hubris of humanity strikes again. :-)

While my wife and I were housesitting, I flipped to random pages in several books to find something interesting to read. Here’s sections of a passage hot from my mind…

“During certain periods in the existence of all human societies, a time has come when religion has first strayed from its basic meaning, and then digressed further and further until it has lost track of this meaning and eventually ossified in the already established forms, at which point it has come to have less and less influence on people’s lives.

At these times the educated minority, no longer believing in the existing religious teaching, simply pretend to believe in it because they find it necessary for the purpose of holding the masses to the established order of life. Although the masses might cling to the established religious forms through inertia, their lives are no longer guided by religious demands, but simply by popular custom and state regulations.

This has occurred many times in various human societies. But…never before have the educated minoriy, those with the most influence on the masses, not only had no belief in the existing religion, but seemed convinced that today’s world no longer has any need of one. Rather than persuading those who doubt the truth of the professed religion that there is a more rational and lucid doctrine than the existing one, they persuade them that on the whole religion has outlived itself and become not just useless, but a harmful organ of social life…These sorts of people do not understand religion as something known to us through inner experience, but as an external phenomenon, like an illness, that happens to overwhelm certain people, and which we can only investigate through external symptoms.

[The educated minority] believe in science, a science that embraces every aspect of human knowledge, harmoniously united, assessed according to its degree of importance and in command of such methods that the data obtained is indisputably true. But since there is really no such science (and what is referred to as science is a collection of incidental, totally disconnected items of knowledge which are often completely useless, and not only fail to present the indisputable truth but very often present the most crude delusions, displayed as the truth today and refuted tomorrow) it is obvious that the thing which [the educated minority] claims must replace religion does not exist. [Their] assertion is entirely arbitrary and based on a completely unjustified belief in the infallibility of science, a belief quite similar to faith in the infallibility of the Church [or other religious institution].”
- A Confession, Leo Tolstoy
(emphases added)