Random Acts of Awesome

I've been thinking a lot lately about three related things. Events, data, and stories. Events are things that happen. A thunderstorm is an event, a bird on a branch is an event, a date is an event. They are just random moments of simple or complex pieces of matter interacting with other pieces of matter. A person sitting on a bench and thinking is an event, if only in how their face moves and expresses things to those observing. Data is what flows out of events. It is independent of observation, but inaccessible without it. Data is uninterpreted, available as information in a pure form. Stories are data interpreted. They are what data turns into as soon as it flows through an eye, fractured into countless fractions by whatever filters exist behind any particular eye, and forever changed. Stories are necessary, but also easily and incorrectly mistaken for data. So, I've been thinking about my own relationship with these things. It started with my lack of faith in god, an...