>>> Index Page (index.html) <<<
>>> Don't ASS-U-ME
these lines are coding errors; you will end up making an ASS out of U and ME
... <<<
ARTICLES
Preamble &
General Mysteries
The Universe & Its Mysteries
Cryptic Creatures
UFOs
Aliens & Alien Autopsies
Real Aliens & Alien Abductions
Ancient Astronauts - Series #1
Ancient Astronauts - Series #2
Phenomenal Places
Bible Mysteries
Jesus Mysteries
Index Page
Mysteries of the World / MOTW (Version 0.0d)
So What's YOUR Favorite Mysteries?
Do your favorite unsolved or unexplained Mysteries include much sensationalized stuff such as UFOs ... or do you go for the paranormal and/or supernatural mysteries ... or the more mainstream scientific mysteries? If so, you have come to the right place! We look into EVERY mystery! See the left NAVBAR.
Anyway, besides this Index Page (and the left NAVBAR webpages), we also have the following pages:
That is, the existence of a HomePage helps to keep the actual Index Page small in (terms of file) size, or in terms of page length, i.e., within the excellent Site Build It! (SBI!) guideline of 4 to 8 paragraphs of text.
Having a HomePage, separate from the actual Index Page, also allows us to "experiment" ... that is, to "test out" various interesting technologies and stuff.
BTW, in the terminology of SBI!, our Index Page is a "Tier 1" page, which makes our HomePage a "Tier 2" page. There can only be ONE Tier 1 page, and it always bears "index" as its filename.
Here's an interesting quote (adapted!) that I am somewhat in sync with ... the quote is a sort-of warning to all who choose to be totally skeptical of anything that they choose to be skeptical about!
Hubris
... on a Cosmic Scale
I believe that many of the people who report such things as UFO sightings, or who have had success at dowsing, or who claim to be in contact with the dead are often credible, are not delusional; nor (worse) are they blatant liars.
I believe that because something sounds absurd and impossible, it is not, therefore, de facto, absurd and impossible.
I believe that man as a species does not understand even a hint of the incredible complexities and mysteries of life in our universe. I believe it is easier to be cynical than open-minded.
I believe that I do not know everything.
The biggest problem with the unrelenting skeptics
, those who rule out even the possibility
that paranormal activity is real, is that their scorn and skepticism leave no
room for anything outside their specific worldview. That is hubris
on a cosmic scale. Granted, the overwhelming majority of paranormal claims are bogus, but the literature of the supernatural offers countless incidents that are unexplainable, yet powerfully convincing.
Poltergeist activity is a field of paranormal phenomena that is extraordinarily convincing. Multiple witnesses have reported seeing the same thing: pictures spinning on a wall; chairs moving across the floor of their own accord; writing appearing out of nowhere. Are all these eyewitnesses to be treated as liars or crazy?
And what about statues that begin to "bleed," and it is later determined conclusively that the fluid they exude is real blood?
Or the people who claim to have been abducted and implanted with something that, when removed, is made of a material that is unidentifiable by scientists and doctors?
In the spring of 2003, a show debuted on the Showtime cable network called Bullshit!
(Yes, you read that right ... those wacky cable programmers!)The show was hosted by the popular magicians Penn & Teller, who became famous for performing astonishing tricks and illusions, and then revealing to the audience how they did them.
The show was a weekly anthology that looked at a range of fringe and paranormal topics, from alien abductions to chiropractics.
The show was defiantly one-sided and the problem with it was its hostility and utter closed-mindedness (not to mention the host's mockery and name-calling). It seemed to be nothing more than an enormous overreaction to the subject matter.
In the first few shows, they attempted to debunk mediums who talk to the dead, people who have been abducted by aliens, magnet therapy, reflexology, and chiropractics. (They later moved on to relationship counselors, sex therapists, and other mainstream enterprises. Guess they ran out of truly weird stuff to make fun of.)
The thesis of the show was blatant: there is no paranormal anything and no matter what anyone claims, it's all bullshit. This precluded any balance whatsoever and, thus, Penn & Teller came across as shrill zealots who accomplished nothing more than to leave the viewer wondering, "Why so angry, boys?"
Chiropractic treatment is paid for by insurance companies. If it is utterly useless (as some of the "experts" appearing on the show claim), then why is it a covered expense?
The benefits of magnet therapy are still inconclusive. Many people claim a great deal of relief from wearing them. Are all these people deluded? Penn & Teller would have you believe so.
Reflexology is based on the science of acupressure and acupuncture points, specifically on the feet. Does it work? For every mocking debunker, there are people who claim results.
One doctor proclaimed that testimonials are all anecdotal, and, thus, completely unreliable. As I say elsewhere in this book, the accounts of infections being cured by the application of a bread poultice were also anecdotal — until science discovered a little something in the mold called penicillin. Also, the accounts of pain being relieved by chewing on the bark of a willow tree were anecdotal — until science discovered something in the bark we now call aspirin.
It is arrogant and foolish to completely rule out all anecdotal evidence as worthless. Can all UFO sightings be false? All of them? Even the ones reported by Air Force pilots? Penn & Teller would have you believe so.
The Weird 100
is a plea for open-mindedness. It is also my hope that the book gives you
something to think about.I do not think it foolish or naive to be open to the possibility that science cannot explain everything. If anything, history has proven that repeatedly.
("Introduction")
UNSATISFACTORILY UNEXPLAINED
How did Stone Age man complete the mammoth feat of engineering that is [today known as] Stonehenge?
Are mysterious codes encrypted in the Bible that contain the hidden word of God?
This comprehensive anthology of the world's most intriguing mysteries will keep you hooked from start to finish.
The Complete Book of the Unexplained
A Thrilling Exploration of the Earth's Most Baffling Mysteries
[Adapted]
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It is my sincere hope that you are not, or have not become, so gullible as to fall for anything bogus or nonsensical or farcical, such as falling for stuff like "Astrology" or "I-ching" or some such similar garbage ... including falling for anything that is featured, as a warning, in our public service webpages — our entire Mysteries of the World / MOTW Website is geared to warn readers and viewers of these scams, hoaxes, frauds and tricks, in other words, we are asking you to beware and be aware!
It is intellectually dishonest to believe in something that is not true, even if it is profitable (that is, even if it makes you a lot of mullah, money, cash, whatever); surely, you are not chained to the "bean-counter" mentality, are you? Because if you are, that is really, really sad!
If you want to be liberated or if you want to awaken, then walk away from that which is not the truth! ("The truth shall make you free", says the Bible, right? Yes!) Especially, don't be so chained to the money, that you become "richly asleep", unable to awaken from the nightmare of your own making that has ensnared you!
[Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening;puts it:
see also Living with the Devilaka ego or Mara]
Cheers again!
Paul Quek
Webmeister
Woodlands, Singapore
P.S. Some people ask me who is that cute PYT at the top of this web page ... is
she my girlfriend, they ask slyly? "I wish!", I replied, if not slyly, at least
dreamingly.
P.P.S. Have a look at the following YouTube video clip ...
P.P.P.S. Thanks to the folks at SBI! SBI! gives results!
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The Complete Book of the Unexplained
A Thrilling Exploration of the Earth's Most Baffling Mysteries
is a gripping anthology of the world's most mystifying conundrums.From eerie tales of curses, witchcraft and ghosts, to miraculous accounts of religious visitations and angels, it covers the complete spectrum of the unexplained.
Combining scientific research, witness accounts and historical evidence, the authors recount the most bizarre episodes of our planet — and beyond — in vivid detail.
Intriguing secrets of lost civilizations, alien abductions, mystical places, mythical beasts and stories of life on Mars are revealed, along with tales of individuals whose remarkable psychic powers have set them apart.
Guaranteed to astonish and intrigue, The Complete Book of the Unexplained
sheds new light on the deepest, most awesome secrets of the universe.The Complete Book of the Unexplained
A Thrilling Exploration of the Earth's Most Baffling Mysteries
[Adapted]
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| Truth in an Age of Deception  | |
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| The Weird 100"TAKE A WALK ON THE WEIRD SIDE"Sure, everyone's had the occasional odd experience — the car
keys vanishing from your kitchen table, déjà vu  , the case of the disappearing beer. Most of them can be explained away. (The dog took your keys; you really have been here before; your roommate drank the beer.) But what about the true enigmas, the puzzles of science and the universe that can't be so easily dismissed? Questions such as:
In this fascinating compendium, Stephen Spignesi presents one hundred of the strangest, most mystifying riddles on earth including: angels and zombies, near-death experiences, crop circles, poltergeists, auras and halos, Nostradamus's predictions, possession and exorcism, The Philadelphia Experiment, reincarnation and past-life regression, Stonehenge, time travel, legendary beasts and mythological creatures, and more! Filled with dramatic photos and drawings, as well as "pro" and "con" evidence from believers and skeptics alike, THE WEIRD 100 explores the unbelievable while proving that life is a lot more
interesting — and infinitely weirder — than we
ever imagined. | |
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Telling the Truth (About Santa, Etc. ...)
One mother I know cheerfully admitted that the whole story was hokum and forfeited her children's trust for the rest of her life. A father of my acquaintance tried to stress the poetic truth of the tale and faced an embarrassing interrogation about his hocus-pocus with Santa suits, Christmas stockings and half-eaten mince pies. Another said, 'It's true about Santa the way it's true in the book that Long John Silver was a pirate.' 'So it's not true,' his little boy replied. An academic couple, after discussing it thoroughly between themselves, decided to tell their children, 'It's true that Santa brings you your presents in the same way that we speak of the wind hurrying or the sun smiling.' The little boy and girl, who concluded that the sun and wind exist and that Santa does not, never forgave them for this evasion.
A schoolmaster who taught my own children and had a very pious little girl tried saying that the Santa story was a parable: 'You don't suppose,' he said, 'that the things Jesus told in the parables actually happened, do you?' The child ceased to be pious. Fellow-Catholics gave me rival advice. 'Tell your boys,' one said, 'that the Santa story is an attempt to express the divine love that is reflected in parents' love for their children.' I felt this was good doctrine but that there was no place for Santa in it. 'Of course Santa exists,' the other asserted. 'He's Saint Nicholas, mediating for children.' I was prepared to admit this but felt that it tended to make the image of the gift-bearer pagan and abominable - which, I suppose, it is. I still feel the Santa tale is more than just another of the falsehoods we invent to manipulate our victims but I have not yet found the sense in which it is true or a way of expressing it which exactly fits the facts.
-- Thomas Dunne, Truth - A History and a Guide for the Perplexed (1997)
Science & Our Beliefs
Science has illuminated so many of the corners which were unknown to our ancestors that we have come to accept scientific explanations in preference to religious explanations.
But belief in science, that is materialism, cannot satisfy us as a full explanation of reality because it is a one-sided view. Science can explain how, but it cannot explain why. Science cannot provide us with an ethical or moral basis for living our daily lives.
In this situation many people feel a loss of direction. They cannot find a belief system to follow. Science does not satisfy their need for moral guidance. Traditional religions are not believable in the face of scientific discovery. They can see no pattern in the way that life unfolds, and things seem hopeless.
In Japan today, most people have no religion. This may seems strange to people of other countries but it is true. The national religion of "Tennosei" or Emperor worship, a religion which was part political manipulation and part fanaticism, perished with Japan's defeat in World War II, and since that time most Japanese have followed the path of materialism in their efforts to rebuild an abundant and comfortable society. This lack of religious belief is increasingly troubling the young people of Japan.
[The same lack is obviously present in most countries. - Paul Quek]
[ ... ]
in Eido Michael Luetchford's
Introduction to Buddhism & the Practice of Zazen:
The Teachings of Gudo Nishijima Roshi
Techie-Geek Note ;)
This "version 0.0d" of the Index Page (which is simple and short) is coded almost entirely with the "<div></div>" element coupled with the "float" attribute (e.g. "float: left" is used frequently), thus slowly moving away from the "<table></table>" element. So far, I have avoided the "table hell" and certainly don't intend to descend into the "div hell" (or suffer from "divitis"!), as that would be the coding equivalent of jumping from the frying pan into the fire!
[Version 0.0c of the Index Page was still coded using the "table" element ... with its start tag ("<table>"), its end tag ("</table>"), and along with much use of deprecated attributes like "align=" and "width=".
And — together with using a lot the "table" element — I have always been quite fond of using, and it's became quite a habit, the very deprecated "font" element with its start tag ("<font>"), its end tag ("</font>"), together with associated attributes like "face=", "size=", "color=" and the like. With version 0.0d, much of these deprecations have been recoded to conform with the more semantically-proper CSS usage.]
But since I am not a CSS purist, I won't entirely avoid using anything that's not CSS ... or that's been declared "deprecated", for that matter! While I will avoid "tables" where I can (simply out of ease-of-code-maintainability consideration, and for no other reason ... not even downloading-speed consideration!), I find some use of "tables" quite relevant. This means, no automatic replacement of ALL "tables" with "div's"! Yeah, I know the replacement is possible (i.e., conceptually, a "table" can be coded with either the "table" element or the "div" element), but I just don't find it that worthwhile (yet). A tool can be beautifully designed, it can even have plenty of bells and whistles, it can be efficient (i.e., "doing things rights") and allow you to do things effectively ("doing the right things"), it can have a thousand and one reasons going for it! So, what? ... especially if the tool can sometimes be such a klutz and a hazzle to use for some really simple tasks! Let's face reality ... sometimes, all you need is a duct tape, for the quick, easy and, often temporary, fix! Thus, I won't avoid "tables" entirely ... or any so-called deprecated elements, tags or attributes. ... Besides, the matter of "tableless" web design, or webpage layout, is not as simple as it appears, nor is it what many code hackers think it mean! Go ahead and Google "tableless design" — after reading up on what the Google SERP throws up, you may not be so thoroughly convinced, either way! Luckily for web authors and publishers, many browsers will continue to support the "deprecated" elements, tags and attributes! (Lack of, or variability in support of, XHTML, especially in stupid MSIE6, was also a pain! Don't even talk to me about IE7, IE8, .... They have been MUNGed real bad! (MUNG = mash until no good.) Micro--- brain ... soft--- beware! ... What a crock! Pardon my French! See the XHTML stuff below.)
Naturally, the "table" element is still relevant and correct for tabular data! (Which was the original reason for the existence of this HTML element.)
One early difficulty I had with using div's in place of the "table" element — and also in the process trying to avoid the use of the deprecated "align=" attribute — is the centralising of the div's, especially when "float" is also used in conjunction with the div's ...here're some initial explorations I did that you may wish to have a look. From those preliminary results and some more tinkering, plus lots of online searches, I think I have managed the overall transition from tables to div's reasonably well ... :)
So, as a personal exercise, I will slowly convert (emphasize the slowly) as much of the earlier code into, at least, HTML-4 compliant code — and, maybe, even adhere to some XML-based languages — such as XHTML (at least 1.0, if not 1.1) and Atom/SOAP/RSS for page dissemination, or "syndication", purpose (some usage, at least at XML 1.0 compliance-level, is already implemented in the Mysteries of the World / MOTW Website, automatically by SBI! -- check out http://www.mysteries-of-the-world.com/mysteries.xml and also the SBI! ads above in this page).
Of course, XML (and thus, XHTML or RSS, for examples) does not permit "omissibility", so all tags have to be closed, which can be a pain when, for uniformity sake, implementing closed tags in HTML pages as well, for tags like "<p>" and "<br>" (so got to have "</p>" and "</br>")!
Anyway, I am still looking forward ... eventually! ... to see what can be done with the currently-being-developed/still-quite-new HTML-5 and XHTML-5, provided the browsers support both much more widely than they did with the earlier specifications.
FYI, here are some notes from Wikipedia that may be of interest ...
XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) is a family of XML markup languages that mirror or extend versions of the widely used Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the language in which web pages are written.
While HTML (prior to HTML5) was defined as an application of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), a very flexible markup language framework, XHTML is an application of XML, a more restrictive subset of SGML. Because XHTML documents need to be well-formed, they can be parsed using standard XML parsers — unlike HTML, which requires a lenient HTML-specific parser.
XHTML 1.0 became a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Recommendation on January 26, 2000. XHTML 1.1 became a W3C Recommendation on May 31, 2001. XHTML5 is undergoing development as of September 2009, as part of the HTML5 specification
[ ... ]
Adoption [of XHTML]
The similarities between HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 led many web sites and content management systems to adopt the initial W3C XHTML 1.0 Recommendation. To aid authors in the transition, the W3C provided guidance on how to publish XHTML 1.0 documents in an HTML-compatible manner, and serve them to browsers that were not designed for XHTML. ...Such "HTML-compatible" content is sent using the HTML media type (text/html) rather than the official Internet media type for XHTML (application/xhtml+xml). When measuring the adoption of XHTML to that of regular HTML, therefore, it is important to distinguish whether it is media type usage or actual document contents that is being compared.
Most web browsers have mature support for all of the possible XHTML media types. The notable exception is Internet Explorer by Microsoft [MSIE]; rather than rendering application/xhtml+xml content, a dialog box invites the user to save the content to disk instead. Both Internet Explorer 7 (released in 2006) and Internet Explorer 8 (released in March 2009) exhibit this behavior. Microsoft developer Chris Wilson explained in 2005 that IE7's priorities were improved security and CSS support, and that proper XHTML support would be difficult to graft onto IE's compatibility-oriented HTML parser; however, Microsoft has added support for true XHTML in current developer previews of IE9.
As long as support is not widespread, most web developers avoid using XHTML that isn't HTML-compatible, so advantages of XML such as namespaces, faster parsing and smaller-footprint browsers do not benefit the user.
Criticism [of XHTML]
In the early 2000s, some web developers began to question why Web authors ever made the leap into authoring in XHTML. Others countered that the problems ascribed to the use of XHTML could mostly be attributed to two main sources: the production of invalid XHTML documents by some Web authors [I find free XML validation software to be useful here! - Paul Quek] and the lack of support for XHTML built into Internet Explorer 6 [MSIE6]. They went on to describe the benefits of XML-based Web documents (i.e. XHTML) regarding searching, indexing and parsing as well as future-proofing the Web itself.In October 2006, HTML inventor and W3C chair Tim Berners-Lee, introducing a major W3C effort to develop new HTML 5 and XHTML 5 specifications, posted in his blog that, "The attempt to get the world to switch to XML ... all at once didn't work. The large HTML-generating public did not move .... Some large communities did shift and are enjoying the fruits of well-formed systems .... The plan is to charter a completely new HTML group." In the current HTML and XHTML 5 working draft, its authors say that, "special attention has been given to defining clear conformance criteria for user agents in an effort to improve interoperability ... while at the same time updating the HTML specifications to address issues raised in the past few years." Ian Hickson, author of a paper criticising the improper use of XHTML in 2002, is a member of the group developing this specification and is listed as one of the co-authors of the current working draft.
Simon Pieters researched the XML-compliance of mobile browsers and concluded "the claim that XHTML would be needed for mobile devices is simply a myth".
Oh yes ... btw, you may have noticed that the left NAVBAR, the right NAVBAR (comprising RSS-cum-Google AdSense ads), and some (not all) of the text are "dragable" ... just playing around with this simple coding trick! Cheers!
KFCP stands for "keyword-focused content page" ...
This Tier 2 webpage is based on the keyword "index" (technically) or "mysteries of the world" (semantically).
BBA (Hons), MAppSci (CompSci)
[Bachelor of Business Administration, Honours]
[Master of Applied Science, Computing Science]
Check this out: Cool Software! (New window opens)
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