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One of the thoughts that occasionally crosses my mind is the average age of the Canadian population. Recently Statistics Canada released some updated information. If you read the reports, Calgary's population has the lowest median age of any major city in Canada, yet even there things seem a little off. Consider a quote from an article entitled Alberta's fountain of youth

Goodyear's other aspiration, "to be a daddy," is also reflective of the province-wide baby boom, which is further contributing to Alberta's younger population. ... but despite record growth among the workforce population in Alberta, the region is hardly off the hook when it comes to an aging population. Alberta's fertility rate -- at approximately 1.8 children per woman -- is still not at replacement levels

Note that even though births don't meet the "replacement rate", the article still dubs the situation in Alberta a baby boom.

Consider a blurb from another article:

Statistics Canada said Tuesday the country's labour force is at the point where one person leaves for every one person entering it.

But in about 10 years, Canada will slide into a negative worker replacement ratio, where more people retire from the workplace than enter it.

"In part, Canadians will fill the jobs, and certainly immigration and regional migration," demographer Andrew Ramlo told CTV Newsnet.

"But what we're also going to have to look towards is that the labour force already here, you and I, will have to be much more productive. With the number of people retiring, we simply won't have enough immigrants to slow that down over the coming decades."

Our galaxy weighs three times 10 to the power of 42kg - a number written as 3 followed by 42 zeroes, which has echoes of author Douglas Adams's fictional answer to the question of life, the universe and everything in his series Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

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One thing that's interested me is the relationship between science and theology - I've got a number of books on the topic sitting on my shelves and today I got a copy of Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About from the library.

The book mentioned above was authored by Donald Knuth, and is basically a transcript of some lectures given on the relationship between computer science and technology. Knuth is a fairly well known guy in computer science and author of perhaps the best known volumes on computational algorithms. He's won a Turing award - generally considered the Nobel Prize of Computing, been awarded the National Medal of Science in the US, and according to one source had been awarded 18 honorary doctorates by 1995.

I know that Knuth came from some sort of Lutheran background, but I wanted to get a better idea of where he stood on things. From reading the first few pages of the book, it would appear that he fits definitely on the liberal side of the spectrum. Theologians that he quoted appear to by and large be people like Paul Tillich and Peter Gomes.

A few quotes:

Don gaves his opinion that the questions have no objective, universally valuable, and applicable answers; that everyone has to try to seek answers for themselves. From the feedback, I gathered that some people were disappointed. But the vast majority of people were excited. Against all of their prejudices, here was someone religious who did not claim to own the truth. Instead, Don invited his listeners to find their own path, of questioning and reasoning about themselves and all the rest. (from the foreword, p. ix)

The 3:16 project was a turning point in my life because it opened my eyes to what other scholars have written. I learned to appreciate the way that God is present in the lives of people from many cultures. I learned that there were deep connections between Christianity and other world religions. (p. 7/8)

I'm not the kind of person who explicitly emphasizes my Christianity and implicitly asserts that the people I meet had better believe in God the same way I do. (p. 11)

I think my faith was greatly shored up by the 3:16 project, because it survived the attacks of so many writers who hold diametrically opposite views. On the other hand the experience did weaken my faith in certain specific thigns, such as some of the stories of miracles that I was brought up with. At present I don't think those stories are necessarily true, although I still believe that they could have happened. My current attitude is that many specific details in the Bible might not be historical, because I know now about what can happen to manuscripts over long periods of time, and because I often find significant discrepancies in newspaper accounts of events that I have witnessed in person. (p. 15)

I was extremely happy two months ago when the Lutheran church voted to have full communion with the Episcopal church. ... I've become much more ecumenical in my approach and not specifically Lutheran. I'm also glad that the Lutherans and Catholics will be signing a so-called Concordat later this month in Augsburg, Germany, resolving the major differences that split the church in the sixteenth century. (p. 15)