Monotheism is the canon that there is only one god. You see, before monotheism was "in", people had differnet gods for different things, a god for good health, a god for battle and so on. And whichever it was they needed help with at that moment, that's the god they would pray to. But monotheism is very strict on this, only one go-to-guy.

If you consider the implications, they would have to be wide ranging. First of all, from an administration point of view, it's a lot easier to send all your mail to the same guy, regardless of your case. Secondly, you don't have to worry that some gods would feel slighted because you constantly do business with others.

Since there is only one god, however many "religions" you could invent, they would always address the same guy. And indeed, this is something the major religions accept, that through Judaism, Christianity and Islam, it is the same god you worship. This is a very troubling truth, for several reasons.

If there are several paths to god, several ways to reach him, which is the best one? Which is the way that given a lifetime of deeds based on those "guidelines" gives you the highest "score" with god? What is the best way to ace the test? Is god going to reward followers of one religion higher than followers of another? That doesn't seem fair, does it?

I think intuitively we tend to believe that god *is* fair. It *does* pay off to be a good person, god will reward those who are good and punish those who are bad. Isn't that what we believe? So he shouldn't treat you better for picking one religion over another, should he? Because they are all ways of reaching him.

But if all [monotheistic] religions are equally good, it means that they are instances of one another, that they are redundant. Consider the following illustration from mathematics.

f(x, y) = x * 2 + y * 2

g(x, y) = (x + y) * 2

f and g are functions. In fact, they are equal, because they produce the same output for the same input. As long as this condition holds, it doesn't matter what happens inside, it doesn't matter how the output is computed. All that matters is what the result it. It may be that g is more "clever" in computing the result than f, but both do the job just as well. What it boils down to is that you only need one of f and g.

This is a mathematical illustration of what we've already established about religions. All are ways of reaching god, equally good ways. However it is you go about reaching god through these different paths, ultimately gives you the same outcome. And that means.. one is as good as the other. There may be one that is more "clever" or "efficient" or "easier", than another. And if so, why wouldn't you pick the most "clever" way, just like a mathematician would use the function that gives him less work?

If two religions don't specify that you must be a lifelong follower to be worthy of god, we can consider them interchangeable. In Christianity, you can become a follower at any point in your life, and god won't reject you. If that's also the case with Islam, then you can switch between them.

In particular, this gives you flexibility. If as a Christian you move to a country where Islam is the standard, you can switch and not "miss a step". Or if you don't like praying as much as you should in Islam, you can become Christian and pray less.

You are...Nurse Laverne Roberts
A.K.A. "The Gossip"

Mmm! Honey, you've got it all together! Whatever you do, you do it well. You're helpful to a point, and those close to you feel they can count on you. But you're not a doormat! The only problem is, with all those good qualities, you tend to be a bit judgmental of others...and you tend to share that judgment way too easily.
>Take the test<

J.D.Honest, cheerful, hallucinating.

6166 other people got this result!
This quiz has been taken 23528 times.
34% of people had this result.
>Take the test<

Very disparate results. Almost as if these tests were complete hogwash. :/ And here I was dying to know :(

Recall the last time you were impressed by a Yahoo! website, product, or service. Okay, that was fast. Why is it that these guys are so hooked on being mediocre? Not bad, mind you, or evil, just sub standard. So that almost everytime you use one of their services it pains you that there are glaring bugs they could have fixed.

I already reviewed once how they are destroying Yahoo! Mail, which is actually one of their very best services, in favor of a new version of the service that's much worse. But that's just the top of the iceberg.

Today I was watching an interesting talk about javascript on Yahoo! Video, and I soon realized that Yahoo!'s flash video player is the worst one I've ever seen. When I watch it, the play button gets stuck so I can't pause and none of the maximize/minimize controls seem to work either. And if you think it's Adobe's linux flash plugin that's buggy, I'm happy to say that I can watch flash movies without a hitch on any number of other sites.

And that made me think back on various times I've used Yahoo! services in the past. Many years ago, I was trying pretty hard to promote Juventuz, my football fansite. Back then, the surest way of getting good traffic was to be in Yahoo!'s directory. Their directory was very exclusive and very hard to get into. As one of the leading fansites in my particular category, I think I waited about 2 years for my site to be added. Meanwhile, the category listed a couple of sites that were either almost dead or completely 404. After Juventuz finally got added it didn't make a big difference anymore, by that time I had built up good traffic through other means.

Of course, the reason Yahoo!'s directory was important was that they were a force in web search, long before the Google revolution. But if you look at their search right now, it's hard to be impressed by it. It's only a single input box, there's no advanced options to filter on language or whatever. Compare that to Google's advanced search that has lots of options.

So what else does Yahoo! do? Flickr. It wasn't built by Yahoo!, but they own it now. And it's a successful site, probably the most popular photo sharing site, and might be Yahoo!'s more successful venture right now. But the navigation is horrible. Once you zoom in on a picture, there's no way to navigate, you have to go back. And the way albums are presented, it's awful. The best photo site I think is Zoomr (unfortuantely they are in the middle of a redesign right now), although there seems to be little competition in this space.

Yahoo! is a veteran internet company, and one of the major players. But is there anything they are leading at? Their search is far inferior and always has been to Google. Their messenger service is basically irrelevant. Their map service I think was launced after Google's, and I don't know anyone who uses it. Yahoo! Groups is decent and pretty popular, but if you actually need to set up a group it's quite a pain to use and very limited. And, of course, their video is fairly irrelevant to Youtube. For an internet company, they don't seem to have much of a talent for internet products.

There are basically two approaches to learning anything you'd like to learn. Well, maybe not anything at all, but it certainly applies to a lot of things. You can shoot for skill or you can shoot for knowledge. They aren't the same and generally you have a good reason for wanting one or the other.

Definitions
Knowledge is the academic, theoretical part of the picture. It is knowing what, and why. Knowledge is about knowing your field well in a structured way. It's about knowing the concepts, the terminology. It's about being able to use concepts from one field to another, to spot patterns between things. It's being able to discuss your field with a peer, or read technical papers about it. You could say it's a way of organizing what you know in a way that makes it possible to keep track of it and talk about it.

Skill is the application oriented, practical avenue. Where knowledge is about knowing, skill is about feeling. It's about knowing how. Skill is all about being useful, it's only about being able to do things. Skill isn't about knowing why things are as they are or what exactly they are. Skill doesn't demand you be able to explain how to do something, just that you can do it yourself. And you don't have to know how it is you know how to do it either, you can be born with a talent for something and find it so intuitive that you're skillful without really learning what it is.

To take an example, consider driving a car. Knowledge is knowing the structure of the car, the physical processes that take place, knowing what all the instruments do. But even if you don't know any of those things, skill is about knowing how to drive. Not knowing that the left pedal is called the clutch does not preclude you from driving, it's a piece of knowledge, it's not a piece of skill. But being able to press in that pedal, at the right speed, and release it just when it needs to be released, that is skill.

Or if you take mathematics, knowledge is knowing what differential equations are, how they work, why they are useful, and where they can be applied. And if you see one, you know what ways there are of solving one, what formulas and strategies exist, and where to find them. Skill is being able to solve them, even if you know nothing else.

Argument

In a sense, knowledge is the absence of skill and skill is the absence of knowledge. They are complementary. You might say there is most to gain from adding skill to knowledge or knowledge to skill (think MacGyver). If you're good at doing something, and you add knowledge, you will learn how to talk about what you know, how to describe the subtleties of your skill, and even (if you so wish) how to teach someone else how to do it as well as you do. On the other hand, if you have knowledge and you add skill, then not only will you be able to discuss what you know in a precise and accurate way, and read about it to add to your knowledge, you'll be able to apply that knowledge to do something concrete.

I think that most people are biased towards one of these. That means in most cases they will prefer one over the other. And it makes sense, because it's hard to cover both. I certainly find a great deal more satisfaction in skill, and I think that's probably subjective. It may be because skill is more tangible, it's more about having a feel for something rather than knowing a lot about it. It's also that skill is a way to eliminate thinking. If you know how to do it, you don't have to think about it, you can do it quicker.

But above all skill is about perfecting your ability. The more skilled you are, the more expert you are in the thing you do. And skill tends to study that thing in greater detail than knowledge does. Not through academic discussion, but through trying and failing so many times that you know how to do it better than any theorist could work out for you. Skill is expert knowledge that cannot be communicated, because it's too complicated to do so. Theoretical knowledge can be communicated.

Thus, in knowledge, everything can be taught, in skill not everything can. If you're learning a skill from a teacher, you will never get the exact solution, you will only get guidelines. The rest.. you have to figure out yourself. For instance, say you're learning to ski. The instructor will tell you how to move your body, how to shift your weight from one side to the other, how to approach a turn, how to brake etc. But however much he may want to, he will not tell you exactly at what angle to lean into a turn, and what amount of tension to apply in a muscle at a particular instant, how many milliseconds after one turn to take the next etc. And even if he were able to tell you exactly how he does it, it would not help you anyway, because everything you have to do depends on the precise circumstances in that instant, circumstances that are not known in advance.

In theory, it is possible to work out all these details. But even if you had this knowledge, it would be so incredibly complicated that you wouldn't be able to use it. Only a computer could calculate all those values in time to do what you have to do.

Conclusion

So skill is self taught. Perhaps you were given guidelines and tutoring on how to learn a certain skill, but no one can tell you exactly what to do, this you have to determine yourself. So, as a logical conclusion, the way you do something is not the way that someone else does it. Because you both learned that particular skill through different paths. And by that you could argue that the way you do it is unique, no one else does it exactly that same way.

Perhaps that uniqueness is why I find skill more satisfying. Isn't that also what you're thinking when you're skilled at something? "No one can do this exactly the way I do." Not consciously thinking it, but I wonder if that isn't the conviction we all have.

Football as a sport is not really anything that special. It's how you wrap it and sell it that makes all the difference. The difference from a cult following to nationwide adoption, to domination even. This is why you have to be very shrewd about how you promote the competition.

I think we can agree that the English have this down to a pretty exact science. They are certainly the best at it. I don't know if they have the best national ratings (probably), but their product is proving the most palatable abroad at any rate (much to the chagrin of fans of non-English football in their respective English football dominated countries).

I give you the English football league:

1. Premier League
2. Football League Championship
3. Football League One
4. Football League Two
5. Conference National

Now, you might say, why is league number three called League One? That's a good question. And why is the 2nd league called the Championship? Again a good question. In other leagues "winning the championship" actually means (in an unwritten understanding) winning the top league. Odd.

Elsewhere it's very easy to know where you are in the system. Primera, Segunda, Segunda B, Tercera (First, Second, Second B, Third). Serie A, Serie B, Serie C1, Serie C2, Serie D. Slightly confusing because there are two C's. But, of course, elsewhere isn't as successful at selling tv subscriptions, are they.

But you see it's all about how you wrap it. The truth of the matter is that the first league matters and none of the others do. If you invite someone to watch a match with you, thinking it's the top league they're watching, and it turns out it's the Championship, they are not going to be thrilled about it. It's like if you wanted to meet the Pope, would you settle for a bishop instead? No, it's not nearly the same thing.

But you can always distract people from the truth. League One sounds a lot better than League Three, which is what it actually is. And for the clubs in that division, it must feel a lot more satisfying to win League One.

This is my proposition for next year. It's too bad they can't use Champions League, which is reserved for something else.

1. Premier League
2. Championship
3. The Super League
4. Queens Finest League
5. Premium League