loneliness

stumbled on this image today. I can relate to the woman in many ways, although I don't know if I truly am happy alone.

space and water

So they say that life as we know it requires water. I wonder how the original life came to be. While swimming yesterday, I was enjoying the near weightless feeling when I started thinking about why life started in water.

I wonder, maybe life began before this planet existed and was a space based life-form and perhaps the water on our planet was a suitable transition from the gravity in outer space

The Sims 3 and piracy solution

I'm not going to lie, I don't buy a lot of games and certainly don't like paying for "DLC" or micro transactions. The Sims 3, while built on a very nice engine doesn't come with a lot of the items that the original 2 games came with. These are now purchased online, item by item.

An idea I think would be really interesting is if they started issuing a free version of their game with all the features but, you're obligated to upload custom content which then becomes property of EA. This idea came to me when playing Spore, where the creature creator was a free download, and the creatures were uploaded to EA's servers and were actually used to populate other planet's when you bought and played the game.

A game like the Sims would be great for this, especially if the process of scanning things like furniture and digitizing become much more simplified. I've seen some videos of people scanning things with simple, every day, video cameras.

Now of coarse, you would need to know how to tag properties to the item, make sure it doesn't clip and all of that, but tutorials and good software can make this real easy.

People are going to download these games anyways, if Maxis provides the engine and the tools, they could potentially build a portion of the game and let the global community add to it, and later turn around and sell these, at an affordable rate.

Now, of coarse a lot of people would want to take advantage of this, and I could see it not working out in a couple ways, one, where everyone downloads the free version provides free crap that no one buys. Second, where the system is set up in a way where everyone that does get the free product actually provide a quality service that pays off, but people still pirate the game anyway, getting the game without providing a service.

In my opinion, the second outcome is the better one, so it would be ideal to shoot for a good system, and in my opinion, this would go really good when tied with beta testing.

For example, the sims 4 is announced and there is a big media announcement about this idea, one that sends the message that if any hacker want's to get their game for free, EA is saying, "alright, that's fine, but you have to do a little bit of work for us."

Sort of like a restaurant owner saying, "Alright, you can have a free meal, but you gotta do the dishes."

The first that sign up take part in beta testing and once the "item/product creator" is done, they get access to it with a bunch of support to help add whatever they want to the game, also, taking part in the construction of the game with feedback, and so on. Basically, wherever EA can find a service, this can be brought to the freebee crowd. "Freebee", like a bunch of worker bee's, lol, I like that.

So, the free game wouldn't come until the system has verified that you've provided some sort of service.

Yea, hacker's might find ways around this, but I think when it comes to the intelligent computer crowd, they would respect this idea.

Respect goes a long way in this new digital era. There are plenty of examples of businesses that have thrived because customers support their business model.

10055: The new evolution

I stumbled on this article from "the daily galaxy" titled: Stephen Hawking: "Humans Have Entered a New Stage of Evolution"

I remember reading (or rather, listening to an mp3 at work) about this idea in one of Stephen Hawking's books, I think it was "A brief history of time".

Basically, you can break down DNA in to bit's and bytes, and that when we developed writing, through the brain that evolution created, we found a way to pass down much much more then what our DNA ever could.

It all reminds me of this clip from waking life:



(the new evolution part is after the girl's talk on language, which is also very interesting and damn I wish I could meet a smart chick and hear her talk like that, gets me all excited if you know what I'm saying)

I posted this clip a long time ago, but I keep coming back to it. If you haven't seen this movie, here's the link, yea it's a torrent, but it's the fastest easiest way to transfer this valuable information (that I'm aware of), and it's good information. It's the kind of movie that makes you think, again and again. Get's the gears turning...

Please, if you agree and enjoy it as much as I do, send the creators of the original content some money and ask that he write some more.

Back to the article:

Meanwhile, Hawking observes, our human brains "with which we process this information have evolved only on the Darwinian time scale, of hundreds of thousands of years. This is beginning to cause problems. In the 18th century, there was said to be a man who had read every book written. But nowadays, if you read one book a day, it would take you about 15,000 years to read through the books in a national Library. By which time, many more books would have been written."

But we are now entering a new phase, of what Hawking calls "self designed evolution," in which we will be able to change and improve our DNA. "At first," he continues "these changes will be confined to the repair of genetic defects, like cystic fibrosis, and muscular dystrophy. These are controlled by single genes, and so are fairly easy to identify, and correct. Other qualities, such as intelligence, are probably controlled by a large number of genes. It will be much more difficult to find them, and work out the relations between them. Nevertheless, I am sure that during the next century, people will discover how to modify both intelligence, and instincts like aggression."

At around 3:30 in the clip above, the crazy professor states: "Before in the old evolutionary paradigm, one would die and the other would grow and dominate, but in the new paradigm they would exist as a mutually supportive, non-competitive grouping, independent from the external."

The part I want to focus on is non-competitive grouping.

Now, on the large scale, it would be very nice if we could get rid of war altogether, but competition and aggression are always put in a negative light. If it wasn't for competition, we wouldn't be advanced, we wouldn't be where we are today.

I've been playing a lot of video games lately and listening to these lectures on game theory and have been thinking about this for quite a bit.

When I play my games, and for me, my obsession has always been multiplayer, human vs. human type of games, I often ask, "why do I enjoy this so much?"

What is it inside our bodies that says, "let's butt heads, let's compete, let's see who's better."

This applies to every game we play, even "games" in business and relationships.

We're always fighting, our bodies will not let us drop competition and aggression. In my opinion, if it would have benefited us as a species, we would have evolved to be passive by now.

When we get to the stage of "self designed evolution", we're going to have to ask ourselves some very serious questions, like "what do we want?", and "what can we do that evolution hasn't already done?"

One of these days

I'm going to have to leave. I don't know where to go, but I really do have to change my environment. I have to adjust my lifestyle.

I've always been addicted to video games, but lately... it's all I do. I used to have a purpose, but now I have no one to work for, my goals are all gone and I've become comfortable with the fact that I will one day die.

I have to change that. I can't be fine with living and dieing a meaningless life. I have to do something.

I stumbled on this volunteer abroad website that looks pretty interesting. It helps you get hooked up with volunteer services in far away countries. I was thinking about volunteering, just to have something to do and meet other people, and I love adventures so this might be right up my alley. Just need to make some money to get started.

I wish I had a writing job. I know I could probably get one if I worked for it. I think I just need to find the right niche, the place where my kind of thinking would be appreciated. Maybe something to do with my interests, like video games... or maybe something else... maybe traveling?

I watched a bit of this show about a guy that just travels and eats. I can't stand it, probably cause I'm just so damned jealous. I wish I had a show where I could travel, but instead about eating, it would be all about adventure. Where to get your heart racing. That would certainly be a lot more interesting.

I've been asking myself a lot of big questions recently, like what's the meaning of life, and the follow up questions like, is there one at all, and should I bother thinking about any of it, or is thinking about it all just a big waste of time.

To many, I think, they don't bother thinking about it, they don't care.

I don't like that approach. To me, the fundamental purpose of our existence is the single most important thing regarding our lives.

So, I think it's a pretty big deal and deserves some thought.

To many others, there is none. No purpose to life, no reason for plants and animals, and it just happened. Which at first sounds awfully depressing, but to me it seems like the difference between a straight objective based game or an open ended game that never ends.

And when you look at that analogy, it seems to look like, that if there is a purpose to our existence, then once whatever that purpose is done, our existence is no longer needed. The games over.

A lot of Christians would believe that once humanity is done with, like, our physical bodies, our spirits will exist in a happier place for all eternity.

When you break it down, and try to look at that from an alien perspective, a notion that there's this alternate self, and alternate place that is perfect and so much better, it really seems to put a negative view on Earth and our own bodies.

I know, I'm bashing on religion again, and I've been doing that a lot, but I've gone down this path of logic and reasoning that has led me to believe that if we did have some sort of ultimate meaning, some sort of task or purpose to being here in this universe, that we would have been told what it is by now.

...

I remember one time I was going to write a book where the Earth was a cell in a massive body, like the galaxies of all the universe is an organ to some massive being.

The story was that human beings were injected in to the organ to fight off a virus.

I think I may have combined too many bizarre concepts in to one book idea, I probably wrote about it on this blog before. Sin caused things to be out of sync, and the hero of the story had to get in line with his alternate selves to unleash his super powers and defeat the evil virus and save the big entity.

The point being that in the book, there was an ultimate purpose for mankind.

And now I'm asking, well, what happens when we're done. I'm not saying, will this massive entity, either the fictional one I've created, or the ones written in the various bibles, have mercy on us and let us live in heaven where everything is fine and dandy, I'm asking, what's the point at that point in time.

Y'know? Like, what's the point of existing after we're done our ultimate task.

Point... that's a funny word, when I think about it, and I do this a lot, where I wonder how a word came to be, like where it came from. It would make sense if it came from the word point, like the point of a blade.

Which is at the end.

And now we've come full circle.

Which makes me think about a recurring purpose... but then, what's the point?