Wednesday, December 31, 2008

I stumbled on this, this morning.

I really do hate this kind of crap because once you figure it out, it's just a trick.

No matter what, your getting D. It starts with a math trick, pick any number, you end up with 4, which equals D. There are not a lot of countries that start with the letter D, I think Denmark may be the only one. Then there are not a lot of animals that start with k, and there is only one fruit that I can think of that starts with the letter O.

Although I will say, I picked kitten, then nectarine, and felt pretty proud that I forgot about the most obvious choice, kangaroo.

But the point is that the whole thing is trying to trick you in to believing you picked a random number and you just happen to think the same as everyone else. It's stupid, I hate when people try to play tricks on you.

I hate when I got to the grocery store and see something labeled 2 for 4$, that if I just buy one, it rings up 2$...

Why didn't they just price it at two dollars then? They're trying to trick you in to buying two.

Bad business practice... this day and age, companies really need to "win people over" especially with the fact that a lot of customers have an easy option to get digital products for free. You have to treat your customer like your friend, and help him/her get your product easily, and not with so much confusion.

Saturday, December 27, 2008

this dream

I had a dream last night. I was strolling along the Pakistani border when an American military official approached me, he said, "Son, we're going to need your help."

"Me?"

"Yes, the president's plane has been shot down over Pakistan and we need to get in there quick."

"ok..." I said, pondering the dangers ahead.

"The problem is, we have a uav up, a predator drone, but the only thing controlling it is this mouse and keyboard. We simplified the controls, but you need to be able to jump between modes so you may end up allowing the vehicle to fly by itself while you operate it's weaponry."

"Now, you'll have to understand that the drone is rather far away so there's a little bit of 'lag' in between what you see and what's really happening..."

I interrupted him right there, "Don't worry about it, I got this."

---

it was a day dream. It's interesting how the military and video games have found a meeting point with unmanned aerial drones.

It's no wonder that America's worried about other countries hacking our systems, never mind building your own army, just take over the one your trying to invade.

That's a scary thought, but what a great video game idea.

---

The hitbox lag is a joke about Battlefield 2. The game has a poor net code and that's just how it plays:



At first it can be pretty annoying and is a turn off for a lot of gamers, but for some, it's a challenge and feels good when you have a lot of skill.

---

I went to future shop yesterday. I've always loved shopping there, because that's where you can buy the future.... but at what cost, future shop? What cost?

Tomorrow will come and we'll be like, where is it? Oh yeah... we sold it... in a shop.

at the future shop.

I got myself an 80 dollar headset for 20 bucks!

:D

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

9863 days = 27 years

27 laps, the Earth revolves the sun at an astounding 30,000 mph. So strange that we can't feel that. I wonder if life would lose it's serenity if the universe flashed by us...

Everything seems so slow, when it's not... The sun, carrying us, flies around the galaxy at 485,000 mph.

That is insane... If we break our land speed record of 763 miles per hour, it's like, which direction in accordance to our orbits was the vehicle traveling?

In relation to our galaxies black hole, it could have been going around 500,763 miles per hour.

That 763 miles doesn't seem to be that big of a deal anymore. Here, in relation to our Earth, that seems so fast, and yet our entire galaxy is traveling towards some "great attractor", passing a thousand kilometers in a single second. Our galaxy covers what that vehicle does in an hour in a second.

I wonder what life would be like if we could actually feel or see just a bit of that speed...

Would we ever have a moment of peace?

I've had the pleasure of witnessing 27 laps around our sun, but that's only like 1 millionth of the orbit around our black hole.

A small fragment in time. They say our sun has traveled around the galaxy 25 times since it's birth, but I wonder if maybe there were a few faster rotations in it's earlier days, maybe it's more like 27

that would be epic.

And yet, it doesn't really mean anything... I wonder what life would be like if we lived in a binary star system and our planet had some kind of complex figure eight rotation, one that's always changing... How would we keep track of anything?

What would it be like if our days and nights were always changing? 7 hours of night here, 10 days of light there.

That would be weird.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

The world as I see it

By Albert Einstein

"How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people -- first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving...

"I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves -- this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts -- possessions, outward success, luxury -- have always seemed to me contemptible.

"My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude..."
"My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that for any organization to reach its goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced, they must be able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality... The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

"This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man... I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence -- as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature."

Saturday, December 20, 2008

wind turbines on buildings

Check out this article.

best band/clan name ever

I was thinking, if someone was losing himself to dementia, is it like an alternate demention?

Demention

I was like, wait, that's not a word... best band name ever though... look at it, so robust and conflicted...

Is he trying to spell dimension? Does he mean De-mention, like trying to take back something he said? And the word sounds like demon, but it's spelled men, so that just adds like 4 more dementions.... lol

demented...

lol, I looked it up, some techno band was over that shit.

Demension with an S looks available... if this is your band name and you make it big, you owe me buddy.

Sunday, December 14, 2008

best bf2 videos

Now for something entirely different:

My favorite videos from bf2



This is one of the oldest bf2 videos of a guy named Redux from Europe. In Bf2, the chopper was meant for two people, but the game was very action-orientated, and you could switch seats on the fly. When you jump to the gunner seat, you can use the machine gun and tv guided missle, but the chopper spirals "out of control". Or rather, the developers programmed it to spin in a clockwise motion.

You can control this by how you're flying the helicopter when you switch seats. This led to an extremely engaging experience that I doubt the developers ever intended.

Redux was the first person that I've ever seen to take this flying style in to tournament play.



This video is from another chopper enthusiast that must have spent a huge amount of time gathering his footage. A lot of the shots are not just against fast rolls or slides (hard to hit), but also around and through objects.

The one thing I loved about BF2 was that there were so many firsts. Like, first time hitting a jet with your helicopter missles. In this video you see him not only hitting jets, but hitting them as they go under bridges and through tunnels, something extremely hard to pull off.

I wish I could have recorded more of the things that I pulled off. I never had a computer that could handle it.



That shot is like threading a needle while hitting a dust particle that's passing by on the other side.



Here's another old one with 20id, one of the best teams of bf2. What I loved about 20id was how creative they could be. Clever usage of pixel shots is shown in this video.



Here's a video with me in it. I come in around 5 minutes in. (my nickname is Hatchet)

I used to play for a team named crack clan. I was invited while playing CSS and discovered online tournaments through them. When Bf2 came out, I jumped all over it. Here was a great teamwork based game where so many different things can happen. I left crack clan over some disagreements. They would have these crazy plans that I thought were just plain stupid and I was always one to voice my criticism. I went over to a team called "Network of exceeding Tactics" and flew with a guy named Irish. We tore a lot of teams up and at one point, no one could touch us. What we were especially good at was killing a lot of ground targets, fast. We were a terrifying force. Irish was a good guy but had a terrible temper.

I forget exactly why I left Net, I think they just became inactive in bf2 after a while and I joined Team Dynamic. It was around then that I teamed up with Zman, a younger guy from Texas. This kid was amazing with the tv missle. When we were on our game, no one could touch us.

We climbed to the top of the 2v2 chopper ladder and stayed there until it got boring.

There's a couple other videos that I remember were pretty awesome and if I can ever find them, I'll try to update this post.



Snarf dominating with c4 back when you could chuck it. They later patched it so you couldn't do that because it was just too damn powerful.

Life is a prison

I talked to a man once, he said he attempted to commit suicide and flat-lined for a minute.

He mentioned that it seemed much longer then that. He told me that he woke up in an entirely different form in an extremely unusual luminous world.

Some thing bright and formless spoke to him and said, "Congratulations inmate #99s7, you have served your time."

It was then that he remembered everything, before his life on this Earth, he was an awful man. Thinking about all the torment and despair he had to endure on Earth and not knowing anything, he felt terrible for what he did. All the time being stuck in a meaty body trapped with other prisoners and not having any purpose or understanding...

He explained that it was only through suicide, can you escape your prison term.

My friend couldn't take this, he attacked the form that was revealing this information to him, and before he knew it he was waking up from out of a coma, in this world.

---

Hi, I made up this short story to illustrate a few points.

A lot of religions either intentionally or unintentionally teach that life is suffering, that there is something much better out there waiting for us.

When I was a child, I sincerely believed in heaven and one of my first questions was, "why don't I just kill myself?"

And this thought, like a seed, lingered throughout my teenage years.

Common sense (cause well, pain sucks and pain = death), and "Christian" logic, like saying "thou shalt not kill" includes suicide, prevented me from doing anything stupid.

Nevertheless, I wanted to die. Sometimes people wonder why teens start smoking...

Suicide is a result of firmly believing that this moment, right here, the one your experiencing right now, is garbage.

It's taking a made up story like "life is a prison" and believing it.

When for all we know, this moment is the best there is.

Saturday, December 13, 2008

bionics

if you could would you ever install memory chips in your head so your memory never slips?

I've been enjoying this ask500 site a lot, and asked this question recently. It's been an interesting subject to me because I don't think we are that far off.

Other things to think about:

"What would it be like if you had a calculator that you could access with your mind, giving you perfect instant mental math every single time?"

"What about GPS? How far will google maps go? Could you get a satellite image of your position uploaded to your mind in real time?"

I don't know if I would do it. In a way, we're already plugged in to computers, recording information that's stored in the computers memory so we don't have to.

Remember a time when you had to memorize phone numbers?

Now we have our phones do that for us. It's not plugged in to the brain, but it's hooked up using our "natural" plug-ins, our eyes and ears.

How long before we're implanting tiny blue tooth headsets in to our ears?

Thursday, December 11, 2008

sigh...

"A groan of tedium escapes me, startling the fearful"

As I drove my beaten up small pick up truck to work this morning, I got to see a pair of sundogs, only emphasizing the weatherman's dismal warnings of a cold future.

Working outside in a Winnipeg winter wouldn't be so bad if it was just the feeling of the cold. Tools freeze, gloves make everything clumsy and everything becomes slippery and dangerous. Frustrated, I wanted to put a couple boards on the roof really quick and didn't feel like nailing down a board to keep me from sliding off.

That was a mistake. When I started walking on the roof, my feet started to slide, I tried to do the "fall flat" technique which almost always works. This time, I just kept sliding. There was that moment where "oh no, no, no", turns in to, "this is happening."

Know what I mean? When denial of the moment turns in to acceptance.

Luckily, I landed in the right way and in some snow to cushion the fall. No injuries, so I just went right back up the ladder and finished the job.

On the way home, I passed this semi truck and seen that the light ahead was turning red so I started to coast. Some douche bag behind thought that I wasn't coming up to the red light fast enough for him, so honked at me, passed in front of the semi on my right and jumped in front of me only to slam on the brakes at the light.

He was staring at me the whole time, saying some shit that probably wasn't very pleasant.

I just stared right back, in such a blank way. I almost wanted to antagonize him just to see what he would do. I was in one of those state of minds where I just don't care...

"Is this a test? It has to be. Otherwise I can't go on."

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

nine something something

I have a lot of stuff that I've been meaning to write about. It's strange because I have no idea who I'm writing to or 'when' I'm writing to. A strange notion that came to me when I thought about the difference between writing on the internet vs. writing in a book.

The internet could be around for a very long time...

It's very likely that people from the future will be studying our old blog entries and messages to one another to try and understand the past.

So every time I write something, it's like, what kind of audience do I have here?

The reader could be someone from facebook checking to see how things are going in my life, or it could be someone from the year 2320 trying to see why a half-black president was such a big deal to us, or why didn't react to the Canadian party decision in a different way.

(Why is there such a big transfer of power at the same time of the United States anyway?)

There's the conspiracy theorist in me again, lol.

So I think to myself, who do I write to?

Then I freeze up. I know I should have a voice that speaks to everyone, but I'm not quite sure what that is.

In the end I know that something is better then nothing, so I'm just going to type.

I remember reading about a man that would try to write without thinking so that his mind just flows on to the paper.

I've been thinking about brain theories after seeing this video. It's interesting because we all have brains but it's not very often do we stop and think about how they're working.

I was thinking about how we lose our memories because generations of brain cells didn't teach younger generations that information. Think about a really old memory, like when you were a child. A lot of times the memories that come up are ones you've thought of before. In your body, there are only a few cells in your eye and brain that stay with you your whole life, the rest is being replaced on a constant basis.

So by thinking of recent memories, your teaching younger cells to hold on to those ones.

Now, how much information can be stored in these cells? I've heard of people that can remember everything they see. Maybe they've just found a way to train their cells better.

Generation after generation of cells that are getting stronger and stronger.

But then, I've heard of someone that has a perfect memory but a poor imagination.

Here's a guy that argues that the brain has a central "controller" that determines how the brain works.

...

We all forget things, all the time. Computers have given us contrast, (and allow us to 'store information' without putting the effort on our cells). We can see how weak our minds are.

Or is being able to forget things a benefit?

If someone told you something like, the sun sits still.

So you believe for your childhood life but then decide through logic and reason that that statement is false. You need to forget about it, how would we ever handle any new information if we didn't discard the old?

This has probably all been discussed and I should take some time to educate myself on the subject so I can catch up.

The reason why I write it is because I have a lot to say and despite the audience, I should write more often and quit letting all my good ideas disappear.

In a way, passing on information to younger people is a lot like how our brain works.

Sunday, November 23, 2008

9831: hmmm

ever wonder about the fact that there are millions of different species on this world, but we only eat so few?

And of those few species that we've chosen to domesticate and eat in such huge quantities, two of them (pork and beef) are sacred in two major religions(Hinduism and Judaism)?

9831: strange awakening

This morning I woke up to an odd sight.

1. My cat's treats that I keep in the cupboard with her food was on the floor, but it didn't look like she even ate any of them, since they were all in the bag and none were spread around. Weird, I thought to myself.

2. Her bag of food was on the counter with a hole in it, and in the cupboard was a pile of her food. This was the strangest thing because there's no way she could have put the bag on the counter. Now, for a good long time, I knew that she figured out how to open cupboards, and have seen her exploring every one except the one with her food in it. She had never broke in to there before and would always patiently wait for me to feed her instead of helping herself. So, it wasn't that weird that she got in there and rip open the bag, but how did it get on the counter?

3. In the middle of the floor was a big puddle of water. Her water dish was untouched, and there was no evidence of anything spilling on the floor. There was no evidence of any leaks of any kind. Where did the water come from and how did it get there?

My best guess is that I was sleep walking. I must have walked in to the kitchen and found that she had broken in to her food cupboard, and for whatever reason, took the bag and put it on the counter. Then I somehow poured water on the floor. Who knows? Maybe I was dreaming of a fire in my kitchen. Maybe I was trying to grab a drink of water and missed.

I wish I could have caught it on video.

Saturday, November 22, 2008

9830: Waking life

Here's a cut from the movie waking life that I wanted to share.

9830: another one of my crazy theories

In the comments, I made a joke about life coming from dead planets in the form of a supernova. I don't take it too seriously, but it's fun to play around with the possibilities.

Supernova's may be the cause of sped up evolution as the gamma rays from a nearby star radiate a planet. This has been brought up before.

Here's my thoughts. What if a planet was blown up by the star, and somehow the information of the life on that planet was passed on to another?

like a highlander, the next planet would obtain that information, and all the evolutionary work of the dead planet could be absorbed by a nearby star system.

It's really more of an example to show that there are many many other possibilities out there. Now, I know a lot of creationists will dismiss any theories as attempts to get God out of the picture, but to me, that's the lazy way of not trying to explain how God could have created life. Maybe we just need to understand the parameters that He has to work with.

Perhaps the highlander supernova theory is just Gods way of "saving data" from a lost planet.

9830: Princeton team challenges Darwin.

taken from this site

A team of Princeton University scientists has discovered that chains of proteins found in most living organisms act like adaptive machines, possessing the ability to control their own evolution, which appears to offer evidence of a hidden mechanism guiding the way biological organisms respond to the forces of natural selection, provides a new perspective on evolution.

"The discovery answers an age-old question that has puzzled biologists since the time of Darwin: How can organisms be so exquisitely complex, if evolution is completely random, operating like a 'blind watchmaker'?" said Chakrabarti, an associate research scholar in the Department of Chemistry at Princeton. "Our new theory extends Darwin's model, demonstrating how organisms can subtly direct aspects of their own evolution to create order out of randomness."

The researchers -- Raj Chakrabarti, Herschel Rabitz, Stacey Springs and George McLendon -- made the discovery while carrying out experiments on proteins constituting the electron transport chain (ETC), a biochemical network essential for metabolism. A mathematical analysis of the experiments showed that the proteins themselves acted to correct any imbalance imposed on them through artificial mutations and restored the chain to working order.

The work also confirms an idea first floated in an 1858 essay by Alfred Wallace, who along with Charles Darwin co-discovered the theory of evolution. Wallace had suspected that certain systems undergoing natural selection can adjust their evolutionary course in a manner "exactly like that of the centrifugal governor of the steam engine, which checks and corrects any irregularities almost before they become evident." In Wallace's time, the steam engine operating with a centrifugal governor was one of the only examples of what is now referred to as feedback control. Examples abound, however, in modern technology, including cruise control in autos and thermostats in homes and offices.

The research, published in a recent edition of Physical Review Letters, provides corroborating data, Rabitz said, for Wallace's idea. "What we have found is that certain kinds of biological structures exist that are able to steer the process of evolution toward improved fitness," said Rabitz, the Charles Phelps Smyth '16 Professor of Chemistry. "The data just jumps off the page and implies we all have this wonderful piece of machinery inside that's responding optimally to evolutionary pressure."

The authors sought to identify the underlying cause for this self-correcting behavior in the observed protein chains. Standard evolutionary theory offered no clues. Applying the concepts of control theory, a body of knowledge that deals with the behavior of dynamical systems, the researchers concluded that this self-correcting behavior could only be possible if, during the early stages of evolution, the proteins had developed a self-regulating mechanism, analogous to a car's cruise control or a home's thermostat, allowing them to fine-tune and control their subsequent evolution. The scientists are working on formulating a new general theory based on this finding they are calling "evolutionary control."

The work is likely to provoke a considerable amount of thinking, according to Charles Smith, a historian of science at Western Kentucky University. "Systems thinking in evolutionary studies perhaps began with Alfred Wallace's likening of the action of natural selection to the governor on a steam engine -- that is, as a mechanism for removing the unfit and thereby keeping populations 'up to snuff' as environmental actors," Smith said. "Wallace never really came to grips with the positive feedback part of the cycle, however, and it is instructive that through optimal control theory Chakrabarti et al. can now suggest a coupling of causalities at the molecular level that extends Wallace's systems-oriented approach to this arena."

Evolution, the central theory of modern biology, is regarded as a gradual change in the genetic makeup of a population over time. It is a continuing process of change, forced by what Wallace and Darwin, his more famous colleague, called "natural selection." In this process, species evolve because of random mutations and selection by environmental stresses. Unlike Darwin, Wallace conjectured that species themselves may develop the capacity to respond optimally to evolutionary stresses. Until this work, evidence for the conjecture was lacking.

The experiments, conducted in Princeton's Frick Laboratory, focused on a complex of proteins located in the mitochondria, the powerhouses of the cell. A chain of proteins, forming a type of bucket brigade, ferries high-energy electrons across the mitrochondrial membrane. This metabolic process creates ATP, the energy currency of life.

Various researchers working over the past decade, including some at Princeton like George McClendon, now at Duke University, and Stacey Springs, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, fleshed out the workings of these proteins, finding that they were often turned on to the "maximum" position, operating at full tilt, or at the lowest possible energy level.

Chakrabarti and Rabitz analyzed these observations of the proteins' behavior from a mathematical standpoint, concluding that it would be statistically impossible for this self-correcting behavior to be random, and demonstrating that the observed result is precisely that predicted by the equations of control theory. By operating only at extremes, referred to in control theory as "bang-bang extremization," the proteins were exhibiting behavior consistent with a system managing itself optimally under evolution.

"In this paper, we present what is ostensibly the first quantitative experimental evidence, since Wallace's original proposal, that nature employs evolutionary control strategies to maximize the fitness of biological networks," Chakrabarti said. "Control theory offers a direct explanation for an otherwise perplexing observation and indicates that evolution is operating according to principles that every engineer knows."

The scientists do not know how the cellular machinery guiding this process may have originated, but they emphatically said it does not buttress the case for intelligent design, a controversial notion that posits the existence of a creator responsible for complexity in nature.

Chakrabarti said that one of the aims of modern evolutionary theory is to identify principles of self-organization that can accelerate the generation of complex biological structures. "Such principles are fully consistent with the principles of natural selection. Biological change is always driven by random mutation and selection, but at certain pivotal junctures in evolutionary history, such random processes can create structures capable of steering subsequent evolution toward greater sophistication and complexity."

The researchers are continuing their analysis, looking for parallel situations in other biological systems.

9830: Intelligence continued 2

As I look back over my previous posts, I noticed I tend to repeat myself.

But, like a lot of ideas that I cook up, I'm attempting to extend on them, and trying to find resolution.

Why intelligence? Maybe it's so we can spread to another planet and save life as we know it. Like developing fingers before stepping foot on land, perhaps we developed intelligence so we could get to another planet.

This is also a very different view of evolution since having intelligence may be a way to not only save our own species but all the other species on our planet.

When I think about evolution, sometimes it seems like it's own entity. Like God could be evolution itself. Perhaps the first time God ever seen the world was when He figured out how to make an eyeball.

9830: Intelligence

Why did we evolve intelligence? Or for the creationist, why were we created with intelligence?

Now, from the creationists perspective there are a lot of questions that can be answered in a very ignorant manner by just saying, "because that's what God wanted, or, you can't question God's motives/ God works in mysterious ways."

Well, any logical person should ask these questions and not just leave them unanswered, whether your a creationist or evolutionist. Life would have gotten by just fine if we were single celled bacteria.

One observation I want to talk about is the fact that all lower forms of intelligence are comparable. A dog isn't that much smarter than a cat, and a cat isn't that much smarter then a rat, and so on. There would seem to be this huge gap between the intelligence of animals and man.

Why? How come there are no creatures in between the smartest apes and the dumbest man?

One of the things that I picked up from Stephen Hawking and his books is this concept of the new evolution.

From species to species, there is only so much information that can be exchanged in our dna, and this can be expressed in bits.

Once man created language, that amount of information that could be passed from one generation to the next was much, much more.

So you could say that once we passed that threshold, we soared above and beyond all other creatures by using a trick. Once we discovered writing, that passing of knowledge could now skip generations and be copied and spread around much faster.

Once again, we soared even faster above all other creatures. This is the new evolution, and it is a telescoping effect.

With this, we could appear to be much smarter then we really are. Did man need to be born with the knowledge of how to make a steam engine? No, they only had to take the knowledge from generations before and add to it. Or as Isaac Newton once said, "If I have seen further than others it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants."

But my main question is why? Why did we take that first big step? While other creatures seem perfectly fine with "ook, eek", in other words, "watch out", or "come mate with me", human beings went much farther then that. We created names for water, love, existence.

Another thing that puzzles me is the fact that we have a section of the brain dedicated to language. So, did we evolve that section of the brain and then start speaking, or did we start speaking and that in turn slowly evolve that section of the brain? (The latter sounds more logical to me, but one has to consider those odd looking fish that were developing fingers in it's fins before it ventured on to land.)

It seemed to have a plan, but how?

How could the cells in the body understand that they would need fingers on land?

"Evolution frequently produces adaptations that come to be useful in the future for a different purpose"

Friday, November 21, 2008

lol



it looks like a face, he he he

Thursday, November 20, 2008

9828: Behind closed doors

I love conspiracy theories. There's just so much that's possible that we don't know about. I don't take any of them that seriously, but they're still fun to think about.

I watched a bit of CNN last night. The "big three" automakers were asking for money and the politicians were criticizing them for arriving in each of their own private jets. "You couldn't have downgraded to first class, or jet-pooled?" one said. "It's like someone arriving at a soup kitchen with a top hat and cane." another quipped.

I suppose Detroit felt that if the banks could get free money, that they could too. Go back in time 5 years and ask anyone which industry would need billions of dollars to stay afloat, and no one would of replied "banks and the auto industry".

What about the bank ceo's, they don't travel around in private jets? I can't help but think that the rich is ripping off the poor.

Anyways, back to the conspiracy theory. Have you ever seen, "Who killed the electric car?"

It's about GM destroying a fleet of electric cars that everyone thought were perfectly fine vehicles. They offer many compelling reasons for switching over from combustion to electric, and why electric cars don't need the infrastructure that hydrogen-fueled cars require.

This all took place in the 90's, around the time that GM started pushing suv's.

My theory is that the oil companies seen this move as a direct threat and paid the car companies large sums of money to not sell the electric cars and paid them more money on how many gas guzzlers they could sell. When the pressure from the environmentalists got to be too much, GM went ahead and began to work on the "Chevy Volt" (A new plug-in hybrid). The oil companies cut off their funding, and now without that added cash flow, the auto-makers are looking to the government to help them out.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

did you know?

I thought this was interesting

9826: Incredibots and Left 4 dead

Incredibots!

This one's really cool, I didn't really have time to get in to it, but at first glance, it looks pretty slick.

Left 4 dead is finally done, and that's pretty cool. Co-op is where it's at. For me, when I play a single player game, I just can't get in to it. Throw a few friends in there and then all of a sudden the pressure's on. Gotta be there for my pals, and all that. It makes for a more rewarding experience.

It would have been cooler if each player had unique characteristics so you could play the game differently every time. Maybe have an RPG system in there. I have a feeling after you've played through each campaign a couple times, it'll probably get boring.

The developer has to ask the player, "What's your motivation for going through this same level again and again?"

Sure, the enemies may be in different places or whatnot, but to me, it seems rather pointless. Been there, done that, moving on.

Monday, November 17, 2008

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Frantic


fun old-school top down shooter


I got like, 285 million at the end

9824: shift

here's a cool game that came out a while ago. Obviously influenced by Portal, but still, a unique play mechanic and a cool little game.

459 seconds.

Saturday, November 15, 2008

9823: Cameras

I like thinking about the future. Hearing about the possibilities and wondering where time will take us is enthralling. Especially in these exponential times where our technology is progressing in leaps and bounds.

When the camera was first invented, it must have been the most amazing thing. Seeing an image frozen in time without an artists hand, must have been quite the spectacle.

Nowadays, it's no big deal. We're squishing more and more megapixels in to cameras with bigger memory cards at a smaller cost, constantly.

As a security device, it seems like a no-brainer. In the paper today, I read that more school buses are being equipped with cameras, and the government is setting up more cameras in high crime areas to try and catch criminals in the act.

Red light cameras are becoming more and more common. I admit that when they first came out, I was happy because I thought I never broke the law. Turns out that I do from time to time, but you can be sure that the red light camera's changed my driving habits so that I never try to "beat the red" when I see a yellow light pop up anymore, I stop when I know I have the space to do so.

This is a good use of technology. Without the expensive cost of police men watching every intersection, we now have cameras to do these things for us. I'm a prime example of a citizen that is now a better driver (although a little frustrated), because of it.

So, my prediction is that we'll see these come in to play more and more. Every intersection will come equipped with a red light camera. Streets that people didn't feel safe walking down will be equipped with a camera so if anything happens you can be sure that it'll be recorded. Satellite cameras will get more powerful.

Eye-witness reports do not hold as much water in court as we thought they did. Artists recreations of people can be way off. With cameras, the truth comes out.

With memory cards being able to fit an incredible amount of data, it won't be long until everyone has a camera on them filming all the time. Any crime that a person witnesses can be recorded. If the camera uploaded it's view to the internet, this could prevent someone from stealing the device.

"always-on" cameras could be worn in many different ways. The camera could be worn in a necklace, in a hat, or in a pair of sunglasses:


- More cool how to projects

Without wires, of coarse.

This will bring in a new wave of true reality television. People that have had interesting experiences happen to them could bring their footage to an editor who could try and get other angles from other sources. Reality shows that we have now are always far from reality as once you know that you have a camera on you, you start acting. When your just living your daily life with a camera that's always on, it's a different story.

The next step to something like this is image recognition. Say for example, your on a trip to a far away place, and you see a mysterious animal. You want to know what it is, so you use your camera to find a frame with a good shot of the animal, and the software can tell exactly what it is, giving you all the information you desire. Maybe you lost your keys, do a search for the last time the camera seen them. Say your on a job, and your looking for a specific tool that you misplaced.

There could be many other potential uses for always-on personal cameras. Many scientific studies could be conducted with large groups of volunteers.

Some big questions are, will they catch on and will they be socially acceptable? As shown in the video above, this can already be done with a little know-how. But what about the people that don't care to know how. Any cell phone company could issue a bluetooth headset with a camera installed, but where is the demand? Also, what can be done to negate privacy issues?

In my opinion, there should be something that tells anyone around that the person is wearing an always-on camera. A little red light should be mandatory.

This shouldn't be something sneaky, but more a device that tells everyone around you that your honest and you expect others to be honest as well. With a camera like that, any time you have an argument over your whereabouts, you could just pull out your cell phone, and just prove where you were.

Likewise, if someone said something to you and later lied, saying that they never said that, you could just rewind to the conversation.

With cloud computing, this could all be uploaded to the internet as it's recorded, allowing you to clip and edit any sections you want to make public.

Someone could put their whole lives on the internet... On your deathbed, you could literally flash the whole thing before your eyes.

That's food for thought

Friday, November 14, 2008

9822: funny running game

doh, missed a day already. Wow, lol

This games hilarious

I found a way to scoot pretty good, but could only actually run about 4 meters. I couldn't get the right technique to keep him going.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

9820: flash games

I've got a lot on my mind but not sure on what to write, so I'm going to try and keep this site updated daily by linking a flash game whenever I have nothing else to post.

Todays:

Missle game 3d

I got to like, lvl 2, and died so I gave up.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

We are all psychic

Physicist's say that everything that can happen happens. So, if the possibility is there, then it is inevitable. We may not witness it happening in our dimension, then it happens in another.

I heard one physicist say that this only applies to the microscopic realm, but others will say that it extends to the macroscopic.

So, if this is true, then we all have the possibility to see the future. In fact, we do it all the time.

In a game of chess, (or this neat flash variation), one has to predict the possible routes and see the possibilities to be able to play effectively. So a probable prediction is just as good as psychic ability.

I can go buy a lottery ticket and know that the numbers I chose are going to win because it's a possible outcome. I just don't know if I exist in the dimension that wins.

So I may be doing one of my alternate selves a favor, but I've found myself questioning the parameters of an alternate self.

In movies like "The One", in other dimensions, there is the chance of many different versions of yourself. Possibly billions and billions. But when your talking about other worlds, you have to wonder where do you begin and where do you end? At any point one of those particles is going to go in a different direction forming a different you. There might be dimensions where you look exactly the same with tiny differences, some with bigger differences and more where you look and act completely different.

So where do you begin and where do you end? Is there any connection at all?

I like to think about the possibilities. One idea I thought of is based on the idea that when your alternate selves die you become a little more powerful. Well, if you were ever in a car accident where you narrowly died, or are a thrill seeker that lives a dangerous life, then the chances are you're stronger because you're killing off your alternate selves. Obviously since people aren't gaining super powers like in "the one" that this is either very subtle or simply not true. (I'm guessing the latter, but it's still fun to think about)

There are other ideas you could stem off that train of thought. Let's say there was a dangerous event you had the opportunity to partake where the odds of surviving are 50/50. By participating, half of your alternate selves are going to die. What if losing your alternate selves made you weaker?

But then you have to ask, do these alternate selves continuously spawn off of one another and does it matter if some are killed off? Is this maybe a way to insure that we don't completely wipe ourselves out?

A lot of strange questions in the world of quantum physics.

Friday, November 7, 2008



Here's Brian Greene on string theory. I like his way of explaining things, although I've read that the metaphor of the ant on the wire isn't really accurate.

Some people think string theory is a joke, like this guy:



I can't help but want to side with Brian Greene, I just don't get why this Garrett Lisi guy chose to speak about how he's probably wrong and that he's a surfer bum living out of the back of his van. Like, is he trying to brag about his life or is he talking about quantum physics?

Still, he makes a good point about theoretical physics being a long shot. They could both be wrong.

I like how it all revolves around the hadron collider, should be interesting.

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Tuesday, November 4, 2008



reminds me of bonobo, a very cool band.

The Arecibo Message


Do you know what this picture means? It's actually a radio message reconstructed from binary, and if there is intelligent life out there, it's quite the test on their intelligence.

Check out this website for a full explanation, it's pretty interesting.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

9805: Music industry solution

My prediction is that someone is going to make an open-source music browser where your money goes directly to the artist.

The users will be essentially purchasing a service, they'll buy the song and it'll be stored online for them, easily downloaded with no software required. That song will be yours forever. It should be able to be downloaded super fast, a smart p2p that can detect files in your direct vicinity to get it to you faster. It should have the option to play it online if you don't want to d/l it. You should be able to browse through other people's libraries and even listen to what they're listening to at the same time.

It should be a smart, intuitive browser, and when you buy rights to a song you should get anything you want from that song, lyrics, rock band tracks, tablature, videos, etc. It'll essentially be a bundle that the artist puts together, but you can pick and choose whatever you want to d/l, and the rest sits there to either be viewed online or downloaded later at your convenience.

The reason behind all these features is so that your actually paying for something that you can't get for free.

The storage, convenience, speedy d/l and cheap price that mostly goes to the artist.

Whoever develops the application gets a small cut to keep things organized.

The key would be in the device itself. The purchases that you make should have the option to show up on your phone bill. The browser is online and it should offer services like free radio.

If you hear a song you like on the radio, you should be able to click on it, and have the option to purchase it.

By being super cheap, like a quarter a song, it'll be worth it.

Monday, October 27, 2008

9804: Flying machine


Everyone wants their very own flying machine.

Here's one for only 60k that you can build yourself in only 40 hours. It looks fairly safe, with four engines, if one breaks down, you can still have the others to make it to safety. If there's some catastrophic failure, there's a parachute for the whole thing. They're also talking about adding air bags under the seat for any hard landings.

Link to the companies website.

They're talking about having folding parts so you can store it in your minivan or suv.

Man, if only I had sixty thousand dollars.


How it works is pretty simple. To go forward, you pull the rotors down, changing their orientation and pulling you forward.

Normally, without a tail rotor, a helicopter would spin around in circles. That's where the dual rotor comes in. The rotors spin in opposite directions keeping it stabilized. To turn side to side (yaw), one of the rotors will slow down enough to turn the machine in the desired direction.

Friday, October 24, 2008

9801: video games




Wouldn't it be scary if they found a way to develop unmanned military vehicles in a very cheap way, to the point where they were built so fast it was hard to find people to pilot them.

(this is an interesting movie/video game idea)

So what if the military issued another free game like they did with America's Army but people were actually controlling vehicles when they thought they were playing a simulation.

That would be freaky.

9801: predator



Unmanned vehicles are the future of the military. I wonder how long it'll be before we see armies of these things going head to head.

Losses would be purely financial

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

9799: Escalopter

Have you heard about people trying the escalopter?

Here's the video that started this new public display of silliness:



She looks like someone that's a lot of fun.

Here's a site dedicated to the escalopter

Monday, October 20, 2008

9797: octopus

have you seen this yet? Pretty sweet, an octopus that can not only look like it's surroundings, it can change it's texture.




Life is truly amazing.

Sunday, October 19, 2008

pirate comic, lol

9795: Robots!

I got this crazy sweet game idea I want to share.

It starts off as a simplistic multiplayer shooter where your placed in an arena against one or more human opponents.

Everyone has a robot factory. These robots start off with simplified programming.

It could be extremely simple, introducing the player to the game.

For example: "Go to metal, pick up metal, bring back to base, create new robot, repeat"

And the players shoot at each other, with the new robots doing nothing but creating more robots until there is no metal.

The AI is up to the player. To keep things balanced, there should be a system where the more complicated the player makes his code, the more advanced of players he's matched against.

So, you could start off with programming that any new robot creates a gun, attaches it to his arm and follows the player.

With really simple "If, then, shoot at," commands, the player can get right in to the game, and get as creative as he wishes.

"If enemy spotted, shoot at enemy." or "if taken 50% damage, run to factory"

The idea came to me when I thought about AI and how I don't really care about single player games because I know the AI was programmed by the creators to simply shoot at me until I kill it. It's purpose is to make me feel challenged but eventually die.

In a multiplayer shooter, the other players intentions are to defeat you, plain and simple. It creates for a more intense experience. So why not a game where the programmers face off against each other. The player taking on the role of the programmer.

This opens up a very different form of gameplay. One where every game gets more and more complex.

Imagine you've played for a while. You discovered how to make your robots build a wall, and create some cannon or something to attack your opponents factory.

Your opponent took an entirely different approach, having his robots work in squads to intercept any collectors of metal.

Before finishing the cannon, due to lack of metal the opponent defeats you. So you go in, and program ways to protect the metal. Once you've advanced enough, you get to the next tier.

Balance issues may be a big problem with a lot of freedom, I think the game in itself would be an interesting experiment.

Thinking about the AI getting more and more complex reminds me of evolution. I thought to myself, maybe that's why life was put on this planet, just to see how complex it could get if it was competing against each other to survive.

I think it's a great game idea and if anyone steals it, don't forget where you got it from. There's more where that came from.

Saturday, October 18, 2008

9794: The futuristic perspective

I've been thinking about how influential science fiction is. When someone writes about the future, they speculate and imagine what we will be able to do and hopes to get a realistic interpretation.

By putting a vision on the table, it's shared and as a human race, we typically look at what we think is possible and we try to make it possible. Some people say William Shatner changed the world with Star Trek.

cell phones, touch screen monitors, other technological advancements which were first perceived by the creators of the show, and are now a reality.

It's interesting to think about. Here's a group of people trying to predict the future. With their images, they inspired inventors to make it happen.

If they didn't make the show, would these things have been invented?

Another interesting aspect about the old star trek was it's positive view on our future. (Any sci-fi about human's surviving passed the point where we can live off this planet is positive in itself). But Star Trek went beyond that. There was no racism whatsoever, it wasn't an issue.

I was thinking about this. It's a fact that any animal wants to protect and spread it's gene pool. Our family's are the closest to us. Apart from that are our friends, and from a scientific viewpoint, we pack together to protect ourselves from other dangers.

I think as a people, we've evolved from having a smaller pack to a bigger and bigger one.

United States of America has almost 10 million square kilometers of fairly dense population. That's a pretty big pack.

Racism is simply evolutionary junk, from a time where our pack consisted of nothing but our own race and anyone outside was considered a threat.

You can see how our relationship with animals has become one where instead of defending any animal that is not our species, we've evolved to one where we have a co-existence with many species. Or perhaps a better description is where one species realized the other wasn't competition anymore, they've found a co-existence.

hmmm. Now I'm thinking, the human species is the human species, the fact that we fight amongst each other when other animals of the same species seem to co-exist just fine would seem that we're progressing backwards.

Unless... A species competes among other species to get ahead, and once it's the leader of all the species, essentially, since there's no competition, the species naturally competes among each other to get ahead.

Which is a good thing I suppose, but racism in this context is still a very bad thing. It's like one member of a bigger pack begrudgingly not accepting new members to the pack.

So, what would it take for our human species to quit fighting amongst each other to get ahead?

Hypothetically, what if we could have world peace? Who would we compete against? Evolution is essentially about survival. If we don't feel threatened, we don't really need to change anything.

Competition like a space race, sports and things like that are good, but if they're not about survival, it's not in the same category.

You would think that the only way we could work together as one would be if the whole world was threatened.

Maybe climate change will start to be more obvious and we'll see countries all agree to drop military funding to avert a crisis.

It would be great to see the Americans decrease military funding in favor of revitalizing their economy.

They already have the biggest military in the world, maybe it's time to set an example and at least lower the rifles a little bit.

I've always said that if the new world wants to take terrorism seriously, it's not about how many bombs you drop and terrorists you kill, it's about changing the global image.

If the United States put more effort in to helping countries in the world, using military to help people and show it through the internet and television, people might not assume America's the great devil.

Instead of holding on to evolutionary junk, maybe the politicians shouldn't be telling people things like "we have to protect ourselves from countries that don't like us very much" and spreading fear of terrorism, and recreating that paradigm of the all-American hero.

Here's how you do it. Americans, take note, this is an awesome idea. You invest in a team of high-tech soldiers, take the best and brightest. Pick the people that you want to represent your country. Send them to places like Darfur with camera's all over the place, get it all on tape, and make a show of it.

This should all be in the name of protecting the innocent.

Say for example, the viewers watch as a uav kills a ragtag group of terrorists that refused to surrender. And then it shows an effort to help the community that was attacked, where a group of people are taught how to build schools, make greenhouses, windmills, and give them internet so they can have access to the wealth of knowledge available.

I'd watch it. And then hopefully other nations will see that America is the worlds boy scout always helping out. Perhaps the notion will spread.

I know it's hard to imagine but imagining it is just the first step.

Thursday, October 16, 2008

9793: Palin spoof



I seen the SNL skit before the debate, I couldn't believe it when I seen she was repeating her word for word.

Her being made fun of by Tina Fey is one of the biggest influences in this entire election. They say that any publicity is good publicity, not when there's a vote involved.

There's publicity that can sell a few albums and there's the kind of publicity that sways your decision on the leader of the most powerful country in the world.

This is very bad publicity. When I see a clip of Palin, I'm thinking, is that the real her or Tina Fey making fun of her, because she's talking the stupid talk again, lol.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

9792: Free will continued

I wanted to talk about the free will thing.

In Waking Life, this character talks about determinism, and how our world view is a universe where every event is the result of events before it.

The more I think about trying to argue against it, the more I come back to determinism and how it really seems like we make our decisions based on passed experiences.

Well, obviously, we do. If your at the supermarket, and you have the choice between milk that's expired and milk that's still good, passed experiences would have you choose the good milk. Those passed experiences were caused by something else, so on and so on.

Yes our lives are determined by our choices but our choices are determined by past experiences.

So did we really have the choice in the first place?


This type of philosophy has been going on for a long time, watch the movie, the author brings up some very interesting points.

It's a big conundrum for religion. If there is free will, then there is no way to predict the future. If any choice by any person can change the outcome of events, then any type of real prophecy would be impossible. If free will does not exist then it would be pretty mean for God to be sending people to hell just because they were dealt a bad card from the start.


My opinion is that we must have free will, and the choice between a universe where everything is random or works like gears in a machine is too limited.

I think what it comes down to is that the brain is using the system, firing off that electron to send off those signals to the muscles to move the arm to grab something, the brain is still acting like a brain. Making decisions, choosing options based on random memories. Yes, the physical properties that make up the brain follow specific laws, but the brain itself is an entirely different system.

Why does it have to work like the random chaos of the tiny world, or the predictable massive universe? Maybe there is some place in between. Maybe the answers will come with a good brain theory.

9792: free will

Wow, what an uninteresting election. Added to the fact that the American election is far more interesting once again, our government is:

No one. Wow, I can hardly contain my excitement.

Thinking about it, we really have to take a look at the whole system when the country can't make their minds any better then their leaders.

The other day I was thinking about how difficult it must be. When a politician passes the torch from one person to another, he's like, here ya go, there are more people then ever before, with bigger debt then ever before, too much new technology that we know how to deal with, and the broad array of responsibilities and potential is tremendous.

And then the public starts barking. I wonder how some of these guys even sleep at night. I watched Mccain being grilled on the view, and at the point where Mccain was once again stretching for the Christian vote, he said "I pray every night."

I wonder if it would go something like this:

"Dear God, please forgive me for my sins. I'm sorry for making all women look bad by picking Sarah Palin as my vp. Thank you God, that the American people are gullible enough that even after George Bush destroyed the economy, and was rediculed more then any other president, that the American people would still consider voting for me. I'm sorry God, for stooping to a new low for trying to associate Obama with terrorism, but I mean c'mon God, he is not my friend. I mean, look at his name, why on Earth would anyone in politics not legally change their name before running for president with a name like that? I'm pretty sure he's an arab in disguise, that old lady was right!"

ok, that was a lot more funny when I imagined it.

So, I stumbled on this website with 10 films guaranteed to blow my mind. Waking life sounded interesting, so I watched it last night. It's a really interesting film with deep profound intellectual conversation.

When we try to show a dream, we can never really come close. Any movie or show is usually foggy or some cheesy effect that never really grabs that dream-like perspective.

Thinking about this, when you watch someone's representation of a dream with your eyes, your relaying it through a different medium. It's like, trying to tell someone how something tastes. Because you don't dream with your eyes, it's a similar medium, but not the same.

A dream is like an open-world simulator, where it seems like it's created by your own mind with memories and information from the conscious world, but the movie brings up interesting concepts like the crossword puzzle experiment, where we're all connected. Ideas seem to spring up in bunches, like we're gathering in our dream state and discussing things.

It got me thinking about information and where it comes from. Something I've been thinking lately, about AI and how it will never be like a human because it can't come up with anything new. It only does what it's told, and we keep adding to that, but it can't get new information like we can.

Like, if we're just systems, collections of strings, where does the new programming come from? You can see animals reacting and acting accordingly, but new ideas and human ingenuity seems to be beyond that.

The movie reminded me of a time in my life where I'd wake up in the middle of the night and couldn't get back to sleep because of something so interesting and profound that I had discovered in my dreams. I don't know why, but it doesn't happen any more. I feel like I need more stimulation, something to wake up that drive for knowledge again. I suppose a movie like this is a good start.

Saturday, October 11, 2008

9788: take that!

I just woke up on my couch a little while ago. Fell asleep watching the discovery channel. I thought maybe I would have learned a thing or two subliminally but all I can think about is adding some roo to my doo.

(It's a bad overplayed commercial where a masseuse violently beats a kangaroo, and hair products fly out of the kangaroo's vah jay jay. I'm not making this up)

I have no idea when I fell asleep, and it's very early.

I was sick yesterday, threw up something nasty and felt like sharing it. I can't remember a more chunkier vomit. It literally felt like I was taking a dump through my mouth. I'm pretty sure my food was all ready to go out the back door when it got recalled at the last moment. I should of checked to see if it was brown.

That'll learn ya for reading my blog, lol.

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

9785: human stupidity

If the human race was smarter we would all have dirt over our heads. Doesn't it make sense that if the planet has sustained an equilibrium, that we shouldn't tamper with it too much. When we develop a new community, we clear cut any forest, and re-sculpt the land, building homes out of wood. In Canada, we do have a good replanting system that provides more trees, but as our population grows the development of the land with more people and more farms create more co2 producers occupying what used to be a forest.

O.K., so doesn't it make sense to cut down the forest, build the buildings, then replant the vegetation on top our houses?

I seen this video on the news where this family in the suburbs turned their yard in to a farm, and the reporter kept referring to them as odd, like it was so strange. Looking around, I thought to myself, if I was an alien from another planet, I would think it's absolutely ridiculous that we're all not doing that.

We ship our food from around the globe, wasting energy in the process. What a stupid notion.

Growing up in society I've always felt that people must know better then me, that simple things like putting gardens on rooftops wouldn't be done because it's not the smart thing to do because no one is doing it.

But then I hear people calling native American's Indians, and Bison, buffalo, when this is an old mistake being repeated because no one has the balls to just quit using the wrong words. It's an ignorant mistake and it's been going on for centuries.

So I think to myself, maybe designing a shingle that is meant to repel water and sunlight should be a rooftop meant to embrace it.

Not only would organic rooftops create more Oxygen and eat up Co2, they provide excellent insulation and in situations where the city is under heavy rain fall, incidents of flash floods are less likely to occur.

It just make sense. We need leadership that's willing to put forth big changes. Climate change may be beyond our control, but even if it isn't then two things might happen;

We'll be ok, the sun will return to it's regular cycle, we all made a big ruckus over nothing.

or, we'll all die, the sun will keep getting hotter, the greenhouse effect will only emphasize this effect and the human race will be over forever.

So, the way I look at it, whether it's in our control or not, we should drastically change the way we live to sustain an equilibrium. This isn't an unachievable goal. Like when the United States was dedicated to go to the moon, we have a mission set out before us. We can know when we're there when co2 levels decline.

If we can prove that we, as a people can control the climate of this planet, then that is not only a great move for human kind to show that we can protect ourselves but also that we have planetary influence. If we can control this planet's environment, we can control others. Maybe it's something that our grandchild's grandchildren will take seriously, but it's something that our small decisions now, like putting garden's on rooftops, will affect.

And quit calling native American's Indians, you stupid moron's.

Monday, October 6, 2008

9783: intelligence, cont.

When our species developed legs, it was to insure it's survival by being able to live in a different environment. And so, it would make perfect sense that we developed intelligence to continue surviving in different environments. Our bodies in their natural state couldn't possibly survive in the cold arctic. With our tools and know-how, we can now live in places like Canada.

Where monkeys would have died, we have survived.

And so in this era of exponential technological growth, perhaps we should focus our energy and strive to push our frontier. To get another space race, to compete with each other, not to destroy the other but to insure humanity's survival.

Sunday, October 5, 2008

9782: Intelligence

Why intelligence?

We could have evolved in any way. We could have grown wings, or gone back to the sea like the dolphin, but instead we chose a different path. (we, evolution, God, w/e you believe)

But why? Life as bacteria does just fine, and some say our intelligence will ultimately be our own doom.

I prefer a more optimistic point of view. What if we evolved to have intelligence because we seen that the earth underwent massive extinctions because of meteors, floods, pole-shifts, etc., and we're currently evolving to develop the ability to get off the planet?

Think about it. Similar to animals evolving to walk on land so they could survive, it would make sense that species would want to ensure it's survival by taking the next step, outer space.

To get around it, our bodies would have either needed to develop some sort of method that can escape the Earth's gravity and survive outer space, or become intelligent enough to develop the tools to do so.

We/evolution/God chose the second option.

Saturday, October 4, 2008

Friday, October 3, 2008

9780: Mushrooms and flowers

Isn't it strange that flowers can really look like vagina's and mushrooms really look like penises? I'm just saying.... (is penises even a word, firefox says so, but firefox doesn't even recognize it's own name, so wtf is up with that?)



link to pics of flowers

Thursday, October 2, 2008

9779: politics

So I just stumbled on this article, and have a few things I want to get off my chest.

First of all, what is up with the fear-mongering? People are still afraid of Al-Qaida?

The fact that these "ex-FBI" agents string off these crack-pot theories on how Al-Qaida is going to strike after the election and then spouting about how the terrorists would "prefer" Obama is bullshit.

You can see how the American government is using fear tactics to sway the vote. (isn't that in itself terrorism?)

"But Kevin R. Brock, a former FBI agent who was principal deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center, disagrees with the theories. Although speculation about attacks timed to the election may seem logical and rational, Brock says, “Al-Qaida is neither, and so far has not followed such dependable, predictive patterns. Could it happen? Sure. But my sense is that any such prediction would be based more on luck than hard intelligence"

Thursday, September 25, 2008

9772: cool game and cool building

Here's an interesting zombie movie with a twist. It's interactive, just like those choose your own adventure books.

I also found this interesting. It's a short on dynamic architecture.

The site can be found here. The idea is that the whole building rotates, allowing it to generate electricity for it's own use and buildings around it.

It's funny because a while ago I had suggested to some people an idea where the air would travel up the building in to a turbine. I was playing with the idea, wondering about different shapes the building could be to maximize the efficiency, but seeing this video proved what I thought all along. I'm not the only one that thinks about this kind of stuff. Having the whole building rotate in sections is a brilliant way to utilize all the wind hitting the surface area. It also looks incredible, and it's piece by piece design is ingeniously efficient.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Monday, September 22, 2008

9769: LHC explained

Here's a nice little video that helps explains how the large hadron collider works.


Thursday, September 18, 2008

Friday, September 12, 2008

9759: Dimensions

I stumbled on this comic today:

I've had this story idea for a while that's similar to the comic. I really enjoyed the Jet Li flick "The One", with it's crazy inter-dimensional concept that if the different you's in alternate dimensions were killed off, then the remaining ones get stronger.

I was thinking about this and thought, well, from a physics perspective, every time you risk your life, there are many alternate versions of yourself dieing. If you just barely, barely survived an accident, then there would be a large percentage of your alternate "self". The question is, when do you not call it your self? There would be so many different versions of you, some that would look and be completely different, for example: Exact same mother and father since the dawn of humanity, but the genes were selected differently. Where do you draw the line on what would be your alternate self?

check out this wicked sweet game

Monday, September 8, 2008

Spore



I only wish it was multiplayer. I'm very interested to see what the mod community can do with a game like this.

Friday, September 5, 2008

Metallica 'Happy' Despite 'Death Magnetic' Album Leak

Lars Ulrich replied in response to their album being leaked from a record shop in Paris: "Listen, we're ten days from release. I mean, from here, we're golden. If this thing leaks all over the world today or tomorrow, happy days. Happy days. Trust me. Ten days out and it hasn't quote-unquote fallen off the truck yet? Everybody's happy.

“It's 2008 and it's part of how it is these days, so it's fine. We're happy."

lol, listen how many times he says happy. He sounds crazy... "happy thoughts, happy thoughts..." when really he's raging inside:

9752: Death Magnetic

So the new Metallica album has leaked on to the web.

I summed it up to a friend and thought it was pretty funny, so I'll repost it here:

It reminds me of that hot chick from high school, who got all fat, but then went to the gym and is now looking pretty good, really reminds you of her hot self in school, but she's still looking pretty old and is trying a little too hard. Oh, and you know she just wants you for your money.

Either way, I'm still hitting it. It's a solid album, and really does seem like it fits in with old Metallica albums. I may be picky, and contradictory, but it would seem to me that the old Metallica albums had more melodic softer parts to give the heavy parts contrast. This one is almost all fast and heavy, with the exception of "the day that never comes" and "unforgiven III". Maybe I'm just getting older, but it would seem to me that songs like Orion and Master of Puppets always started off rocking, gave you a break in the middle with a soft relaxing bit, only to tear it apart and give that last final impact.

Thursday, September 4, 2008

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Funny shit


rofl... the look on his face is too much.

speaking of disturbed humor, here's a hilarious comic I stumbled upon: