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31/10/2006 WaterWater is one of the basic building blocks of life. There is no question that we all depend on it in our everyday lives. In fact, most organisms depend on water in some way.
Water is a seemingly inexhaustable resource in most parts of the world, but some people don't know exactly how much they should be drinking. Actually, there is a huge safety region for the consumption of water ranging from getting all water content from food, to drinking in excess of 14 glasses per day. The real danger of water comes from trying to breathe it.
It is, however, possible to specify to a greater degree of precision, how much water an individual should be drinking. There are a few simple questions that you need to ask yourself first:
People who need the least amount of pure water live in a mild to cold climate, are inactive, eat moisture rich food, take no medications, metabolise water very slowly, and don't take concentrated nutritional suppliments. The exact amount of water needed can vary a lot. Doctors may tell you to drink 8 glasses a day, and they would be giving you good advice, since that is the safest amount of water to drink, well within the safety limits. However, if you find yourself dehydrated or suffering from problems related to dehydration, you may wish to take more water. Even if you are feeling fine, you could probably benefit from another glass of water. Some symptoms related to dehydration include dry skin, dry mouth, unusual hunger, faintness, sensitivity to temperature, and headache. If you don't have access to clean tap water, you may want to get some bottled water, change your pipes, or petition your town to clean up its act. 27/10/2006 Importance of ScienceScience has been a driving force of the progress in the world for many hundreds of years now. History has also greatly benefitted to the effect that most historical accounts can be verified as true or false. There are people who have made fortunes from their scientific studies and theories. There are also people who have died for their scientific work. However, science is a tool to be used carefully and with a great amount of seriousness.
Science is a tool, plain and simple. It is not a way of life, and it is not a minimum standard practice. Scientific methods are also not always practical when certain variables are put into play. Variables such as short life expectancy of the test subjects, for instance. I have recently seen that I must clarify the roll that science has in our world, and put to rest some of the absurd ideas that many people have.
Science is limited. We can all see that it is relatively new compared to similar practices for the same applications. People used to guess what things did based on a whim instead of logically testing them. People who used to make rules were usually of a high social status, as well. Such people were often not interested in what made the world go round, rather, they were interested in what could manipulate the people into keeping them in power. In many parts of the world, people can no longer make preposterous claims and be believed because of their social status. Sadly for us, there is still an archaic scientific community out there which works this way.
The scientific community respects theories. This community respects results which back up these theories. The scientific community also doubts people who have not been in the community for very long, and for many great scientists, it is difficult to get respect if you start making grand theories at the begining. There is also another side to science. It is a side that is difficult to work with. Many scientists don't even think of it as science at all. This means that you should not declare your findings or theories to the world right away. To be accepted right away, you must toil your whole life in the background until your findings are either the backbone of a scientific practice, or until someone prominent declares what you have found out, in which case you can cite your own work as being before their time, an claim it all for yourself.
Science is a process. Make a theory, set up a test, and record all of the results. I am using a loose definition of the scientific process here because there are so many fields of science that any more specifics would exclude many important studies completely. For instance, there is a scientific practice which I call passive testing. To accomplish passive testing, all you have to do is observe something in your surroundings that are extremely similar, and record any differences. An example of this practice would be for a scientist to watch a group of people who buy a questionable product and record the results. If one of them dies of food poisoning a while later, you have a good idea what it was from. If all of them die of food poisoning a while later, you know that if you did your test properly, you may have your culprit. Passive testing is a progressive way to wait for a phone call from the individual(s) you want information from. It is also an optional, yet required, precursor to taking many dangerous products off the market.
Lets set up a small passive test right now. We shall say that a scientist asks a group of people with glasses to do eye exercises for several months. The scientist is 'one of the guys/ladies,' and goes out every once in a while. As the months progress, the scientist carefully notices who is keeping with the program. At the end of the period of time, the scientist asks the people in the group how much they have benefitted from the exercises. Each person says about how often they did the exercises and how much it helped. This data is now referenced as passive test results.
Science is extremely important to modern society. It gives people a reason not to accept just any claims until they see the evidence to back them up. It also records the evidence and spreads important health information to the scientific community around the world, and then to the public. Without the standards that science introduces, we would all be a bunch of groups of zealots sweating and starving in the desert somewhere. There is usually no scientific community to hold checks and balances out there.
Science is relevant to everyones life. All of the people of the modern world, whether they realise it or not, are scientists. When you eat your food, you may notice how it tastes. This is an example of an observation. Some people will also notice how salty their food tastes, how spicy, how sweet, and how bitter their food is. Everyone practices a level of science in everything they do, but most do not record their data. If everyone recorded their findings, no matter how insignificant it may seem to you, the world would reach a new age. Of course, we can't record everything, so there are computers and microchips which will monitor it for us.
The sheer data of science are greater than the sum of its individual findings. Science is based on percentages. The more results a scientific enquiry gets, the more accurate the percentage will be. There are some complications, like stray data which was done improperly, but this can be weeded out by computers. In science, no matter how unscientific you are, remember this: there is no 100%. This is why you may see a lot of products which you know work completely, have a '99.99% effective' statement on the label. The only absolute in science is that there is no recordable absolute. With this in mind, you can understand why there are so many 'miracle products' out there. Something can work .01% of the time, which means it DOES work, but not on most people. This may sound like math, and it should. Math makes the world go around. 23/10/2006 Terraforming the DesertCurrently, desert civilizations are not thriving as well as green, lush ones. People are often starving, few crops can grow, and you must scrounge for whatt little water you find. There is no reason for deserts to even exist anymore. That's right, deserts should be just another faded picture in a history book. If I ever get money (which I will), I am going to make a huge solar powered PVC pipeline that pumps fresh desalinated water directly from the ocean to the center of the desert. From there, pipes can spread water all across the desert in every direction for people to drink. The best part is that everything for this plan already exists, and the technology will only get better with time.
I can imagine huge buildings floating on pontoons about 10 yards above the water. They have long thin pipes dangling down into the water to suck it into one of the many water purification chambers. A big twisting of pipes circles around from the core out the side of the structure forming a gigantic rubbery pipe that extends onto the land. It takes electricity from the surface of the pipes, and pumps at sections of the pipes help to pump the water deeper and deeper into the desert.
Next, I can imagine more and more of these appearing in the water next to eachother, pumping more and more water into the desert, making it a lush oasis all over. The people the system is made to help will eventually be educated to repair it and continue to add on to it.
There are some problems that come with the task of desalinating ocean water. These include fish, plankton, and certain perceived environmental dangers. For the most part, the environmentalists think that the machines will pollute the ocean. Since they are solar powered, this problem is eliminated. Secondly, they think it will harm the wildlife by sucking it up. This can be solved by putting several filters around it. One large solid box shaped net will be under the water to filter out debris. Smaller filters will be on each suction pipe to keep out small creatures. A complex bio filtration system will sweep out tiny organisms and place them back into the water. The remaining water will be distilled and then flash pressurized(optional). The remaining water is presumably drinkable and can be piped out to the desert for as long as the remaining battery power lasts after the sun goes down. There is also an obscene claim by some environmentalists that you can suck all the water out of the ocean. Maybe you could in a few thousand years... Another problem is with the storms and such. The pipeline could be self-contained, and made out of or coated with very strong materials.
These water purifiers will create a costal economy by itself since you need people to keep the plant running smoothely. The water should not be made expensive, probably only enough to keep the system running, and each city along the main pipeline can keep up its segment of the system in order to keep main providing costs down. It would be neat to use the sand deposits in some of the sandy desert regions to make glass pipes that you can see through. Perhaps they could be underground pipeline segments to keep out the algae.
There is another issue facing this plan. There may be tribes of people out in the desert who want to kill you! That shouldn't be much of a problem once you send salesmen (make sure they're desert salesmen) into the desert to win over the desert peoples' hearts and minds to the cause. In fact, the desert farmers might send their sons out to protect the pipeline construction effort from bandits, or even help build it. Every farmer wants more water for their crops, and living in a desert means that you can control the water levels of your farm much more easily. Watever you put on it is exactly what it gets, unlike the unpredictable weather patterns of the moist climates.
With flowing fresh water piped to wherever a pipe can reach, what do the farmers of the desert have to say now? Of course they can still complain about the sandstorms, but they were there before the running water, and they still farmed it with enough success to survive. They could possibly build large concrete warehouses to grow their crops in, ones that use artificial light, so if it gets buried it won't matter. Just dig out the solar panels and go on.
Now, investors have something to say. This plan is going to take too long! Of course it won't make you any money right away, we're talking about the wellfare of an entire desert nation. We're talking about the people eeking out an existence without the things that most people take for granted. Try eating clay for even a week and see how you'd like it for a lifetime. This isn't just about money, it's about finding a new source of agricultural land for the masses of people who have come to populate the earth, and soon, the other planets. Gender DominanceLife is made to survive. People are a part of that system as well. In fact, people control the way life spreads. I am not talking about scientific controls, I'm saying that people make things happen in ways they couldn't happen otherwise. I was thinking about a lot of different things all at once and decided to write some of them down.
I am not saying that women are weak and men are strong. I am saying that it was easier for men with more testosterone and territorial instincts to do outdoor things which build up the body, while women were content to do chores which would not. There are, however, some instances which started the cycle of change. One example would be that men became the business person and women were forced to do the farming along with their children. If men hadn't done that, women would not be quite so liberated. The answer to the second part of the question is that male-female dominance has been fluctuating for hundreds of years in different parts of the world. The reason women come to power is because they have brains too. When a society becomes too mentally dominated, then will the women become equals with men. If men had stuck to hunting and simple farming, women may not be quite so liberated. The point to all of this is that men and women are generally interchangeable when it comes down to survival. Here's a nice little resolution for men and women to make: never take all of one kind of responsibilities as gender-related. If you do, you will be dooming yourself. One small misconception of the old days has been that women have better fingers for knitting and sewing and men have better hands for working in the fields and using heavy machinery. When women started using heavy machinery, guess what happened, their hands got better suited for it. When men started sewing, guess what, they got thin spindly fingers. It's not magic, mind you. It's not evolution either. Whatever you decide to do in life, your body will adapt to it in a hardly noticeable way. This may happen in a lifetime, though. If your hands get huge and clunky from 20 years of hard labor, don't expect to get small thin hands from doing sewing, or the other way around. It could be possible, but don't count on it. The Middle-EastLife can be hard. Some people like it that way, and other people can't stand it at all. It is hard to live in the desert without any supplies, money, or foraging skills. Temperatures in the desert can reach extremes of hot and cold just with the passing of the day. Water can be scarce and wind storms can be hard to survive.
There is still hope. Most of this hope is, however, false hope. There are the dreaded 'silver tongued devils' lurking in the desert, offering you rest in return for you soul, or even your life. Beggars become bandits and slaves become soldiers. These people don't care about you, they just want to wipe out their competition in any way possible, and that way involves you and their competition exploding into a large pool of meaty bloody bits.
Religion is not in question here. Factions are not really fighting for their beliefs, they are fighting for the 'silver tongued devils' who whisper in their ears about secret treasures they will recieve in their next life. No, anyone crying the battle cry of a well-known religion or belief is spouting rediculous nonsense, they might as well remodel a bathroom saying they're making a broom closet. The religions and faiths of the ages have taught one thing above all else, peace and complacency. Only war against someone if you can't co-exist.
I would go to Iraq or some such country, not to see the carnage taking place over there, but to learn how those 'silver tongued devils' are able to get all of those people onto their side. I would then use those techniques to win over tons of people to build an ocean-to-mainland purified water pipeline. All of those poor people scrounge around when a little overabundance of water would solve all of their problems. Once they have plenty of bulk food product growing, they can make food processing plants that run on solar power. With the technology that exists today, they should build their food processors underground from their crops, about 1-2 levels below.
There are still those who would dare to take up the lifestyle that breeds corruption and death. Their numbers would be greatly diminished after all of the previous things came to pass, so they would be easily contained in prisons or just shot. They could possibly be trained to be where they belong, in the military doing something constructive like teaching.
As in all of my blogs, I must try to send the point that computers are the key to ultimate power. Computers are a high-level commodity which can not be used to the fullest if the society is not thriving. Young people are better at learning to use computers, so their pre-modernization duies like tending the livestalk and the crops need to be taken care of in some other way. In most advanced societies, machines do the work. Machines have always been the source of ultimate power, and computers have always been the key. Until recently, people did all of the computing and processing. If you controlled the people, you had ultimate power. Now, machines can do anything that people can do, or at least make it easier. This means that if you have computers and machines, you will have a portion of ultimate power. The state of California is currently planning to be a major producer of electricity for the entire world. That is one example of near ultimate power. 12/10/2006 Cultural BalanceMany people throughout time have pondered the myths and hidden realities of cultural stability. The characteristics of a culture, the different levels of each area of modernisation. In every aspect of our civilization, we have for ourselves an anchor which holds everything where it is or digs in and pulls everything else forward with it. Every part of our culture is an integral part of every other part, and without each part, we would not only be a different people, we would also be a more primitive people. Not only is this true for where I live and study, but for every human civilization throughout time.
The way a group of people identifies itself is based on who is in it. We know that we need food, a home, and a dumping ground for waste. Without these, there is no civilization, but perhaps a subculture or a group of slaves. With every new person, and with every new job, there is an increase in the love for one's culture. With every new advancement in each field, there is a new hope for the future. Without this advancement, people either become more defensive of a way of life, or they begin to rely on outside sources. Many people think that it is just the way things are, and to some extent they are right. However, it can be thought of in more specific terms of cause and effect. For example, people often have races to see who can do something, or totally different things, fastest. Some people naturally want to advance or modernise things, and other people, seeing what is going on, will want to do better in their field as well.
There is also a dark side to the process. A generation or group of generations can decide to advance a field such as farming or even social structure, and they will get a long way in fifty years or so, and once they have all died off their decendents will decide it meant nothing. Luckily for us, the art of record keeping has long been very important to civilization. It has not only advanced, but its prestige has increased to the point that it is collected by millions of people just so they know they have it. In the past, people were not so lucky. Small groups of people, possibly even multiple generations, would advance a field of science and vow never to allow the information to leave their small group. When the next generation took over, they took this advancement for granted, and mingled with other outside cultures. They were almost always shunned by the others regarding their advancements, and were often warred upon to extinction. This is where my point about us being lucky comes in. With the art of record keeping being so imortant within our culture, when we come upon a group of people with some advanced knowledge or techniques, we will record it and copy their records as well. Then, if we decide to take them into our society, we can take all sense of their culture away from them without losing much of the important things, at least some day in the future, some person will come along and find the old records and find the meaning and importance of them. The person will work hard to spread awareness and may begin to spread practices and teachings across our civilization until everyone has benefitted from the knowledge and the work of the people of the past ceased to be pointless and in vain.
Everyone should be able to understand this concept, if at least by understanding the ever-present 'generation gap' that usually appears between parents and their children. I hope that one day this gap will disappear, but it serves as an easy-to-relate-to example in all of this. People of the old days used to make up fantastical stories about their ancestors, not only to make the tale more interesting, but to hold on to them for future generations to possibly decode and understand with later wisdom. There are many such stories in nearly every nomadic culture. They speak of strange beasts and mystical powers. This is merely a way to include something that may be important for the future, that yet may not be fully understood properly. For instance, for a simple nomadic tribesman describing the complexities of modern medicine, a story may say that the person wore strange garments and had magic potions and cured all manor of illnesses with a shiny jewelled cactus needle and a wave of his/her hand. Perhaps the person got there on a helecopter, so the person would say that the doctor flew in on a vulture that made loud noises. Perhaps even, this is the magical medicine creature that can turn into a person and back into a loud shiny vulture thing.
All stretches of the imagination aside, this is how things will always be. Pretty soon, in my era, either computer technology will pull everything into a new age, or the new age will pull the technology back to the old ways. Many people are noticing that we are too reliant on it, and we are also recognizing the toxic effects of some of it to our planet. People are quickly switching to less pollutant technology, and many people are taking the huge leap back to living in the jungles and picking fruit from the trees for survival. No matter what happens, it will eventually lead to more advances and more cultural balancing acts. We will see that some people are going to like the new and exciting things that civilization has to offer, and some people like the old and exciting things that civilization used to offer. To be honest, I just hope that it doesn't lead to such bad catastrophies as have happened in the past, but the history books say that the greater the imbalance the greater the concequences. I think that today's major shift will not be computer technology or information gathering, but personal security. Everything else seems to be moving along well enough, what do you think is happening, and what elements of your culture do you see trying to balance itself out? 09/10/2006 AgriculturePlants are really not such complex organisms. They need the right temperature, mixture of gasses, and mixture of soil. Scientists know the stages of every food plant and their requirements at each one. For example, there are companies that grow potted flowers on a slow-moving assembly line track that is fully automated. When the plants reach the end of the track, they are in full bloom and ready to be shipped to anyone anywhere in the world. The machines are still rather large and clunky, but as they shrink, the possibilities will become endless. Today, farmers grow crops in a very clumsy manor. They have large, overweight, overpowered, slow, low efficiency machines that take a lot of energy and break down often. Each machine may need to be used two to three times per day, but many farmers only go out once every few days. Many farmers will do soil tests and take plant samples to a comparably sophisticated lab where they check to make sure that conditions are not quite deadly. Here I will explain how to make a more cost-effective and simpler system which also makes more food using less space. It uses machines which may initially be expensive, but will become quite cheap as more farmers buy into them. It also relies strongly on robotic advances in technology which are at least a decade old. I wouldn't be surprised if, after reading this, a group of programmers decide to start a farming business instead of creating useless unproductive software. The reality of the matter is that most things can be improved upon in a big way, and that people just don't see it. I am obviously a progressive thinker and a visionary and if you're in the agricultural business you'd do well to take my advice.
That aside, I will now explain how it all works:
Dirt is dirt. Most farmers only get one helping of it when they buy a farm, and ocassionally supplement it with some of the readily and locally available cow-pie and plant-mulch mixtures which the farmer may have even made for his/her self. The air quality in some regions is a bit bad for certain plants, so if you want that, you have to make an indoor greenhouse sort of thing and adjust the gas levels yourself. Once you have the basic outer structure of your indoor farm, the system will pay for itself in only a few years. This is because people don't think of bulky farm equipment being used indoors. What you need now is an intricate and sophisticated system of water pipes and gas tanks which regulate the gas mixtures in the building and the hydration of the soil. You also need a state-of-the-art solar roof which will not only run all of the little electronics, but will also heat, cool and light the building to the exact specifications of each plant. You will find, as time goes on, that keeping out pests is easier than if you were outside. You can simply take a sonic device and slowly scare every insect into a disposal receptacle located at one end of the building. This would be pointless in the outdoors, since the pests will usually remember where the goods are and simply come back. In this system the walls will keep any future assault, including natural disasters such as infestations out of the process. Things like blistering heat will only serve to charge the batteries of your building, and reduce the heating costs. Storms, floods, and other such things, if they can't tear off the roof, will merely fill up your water reserves and force you to use your battery power. Since you don't want to pay extra for special soil, you can dig your building into the ground a few feet, which protects against wind and insulates, in addition to providing you with free soil which you can enrich easily enough through local sources.
You may decide to go farther and dig way down to get more dirt and build a multistory building. This will now not only be a more efficient process yeilding more crops per square footage with no pesticide and low electrical costs, but it will also double your output with little cost to the landscape and no extra square-footage! I would say that you will probably start living large if you know what you are doing. You could make four different levels, one for each season, and produce crops all year around. You can save seeds from a small amount of your crops to plant next year, which will nicely buffer your wallet. You could even get a bee hive of friendly European bees to polinate your plants, and have no worry about them cross-breeding with those mean african ones, and have some nice honey as a bonus, *yum*! Pretty soon you will have all of your expensive components, which have not broken down a single time yet, payed off, and you can start building up your retirement fund, or your yacht fund! You will also be able to boast the ever more desirable claim of totally organic crops which will help you resist the lowering costs of food resulting from your huge harvests. You could even ship a percentage of your excess crops to the relief efforts overseas to feed the starving children of whoever's starving nowdays.
With lower costs also comes the chance to do more with what you have. You could start some chain stores or make some brand name products for yourself. You could eventually create a thriving empire and completely change the farming industry as we know it. However, keep in mind that it's not just about making money. If you increase effeciency enough you could lower the price of everything in the country so that it can start exporting things for a profit. Eventually, when all of our needs are easily taken care of, we can start living like the people on Star Trek, where only weird alien creatures use money, and you can follow your dreams and find happiness in whatever field you choose, and automate all other things such as garbage disposal. Simplifying 3D InteractionsAnother part of my mission involves making an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) all by myself only using existing mathematical information, and no outside information except experience playing MMO's myself. This could be thought of as a bothersome thing to many sales types, but to an inventor type, it is a dream come true. It is amazing that I have gotten as far as I have, considering that I am learning everything as I go. I have also found that I am one of the wiser programmers out there, since I have it in my mind to focus on programming tools instead of just programming my brains out in plain text. The other advantage to making programming tools is that you can make them do complex things that you would otherwise use a workaround for, which would probably have ended up slowing the program down.
Algorithms are another of my interests. They make complex and long mathematical equations into small, comparatively simple bits of code which can work on a huge variety of inputs without being altered, and therefore, without using any brain power. They are commonly used in while and for statements to do things quickly. It is similar to using a large paint roller that is the width of a wall instead of using a small sponge. Although there are some advantages to using the small sponge technique, you need more skill and you take more time than with using the large wide paint roller technique.
Three dimensional programming is more difficult than two dimensional programming. Although there are many very nice 3D programming packages out there now, it still takes longer because of that extra dimension. It is also more difficult for the computer to process 3D than 2D because it is more complex, and some computers just can't handle 3D at all. For people who are math wizards and don't really care about graphics, I reccommend using a DOS-like system which just uses lines of text characters. Placed in the correct configuration and with the right math, you can speed up your game 100 fold. This gives you more processor power to make a more creative and richer game. For those of us who can't live without 3D graphics, the road may be a tiny bit bumpier. You will need to paint enviting 2D images that will look good wrapped around a 3D object. You will also need to think about light and shadows, and you will have to make sure that things that are off the screen are not bogging down your graphics processor. Although this may sound complicated, there are packages that will allow this to be done automatically.
There are also many features that are expected in 3D games as a standard minimum. I will list some of them, and will explain many of them:
I now see that I have written a rather lengthy article, so instead of going on, I will invite you to email me somehow. Thought ProcessesI am now going to let you in on a little secret. Something that many people know, yet nobody seems to understand. It is an exclusive first person view of a common thought processing system that has existed for countless generations. Yes, I am going to tell you what makes me tick, but don't read too much into it.
The almighty thought process, what is it, and what makes it so vital too human existence? Since I only harbor a certain type of thought process, I only have a one-sided view on the subject. On the other hand, who's to say that anyone can't just learn a thought process? Anyways... here it is, don't try to refer any of my terms directly to scientific terms as they may not be completely compatible:
I have grown up from childhood with a goal. It has been to advance my knowledge and abilities and keep my stress levels low. My brain developed an engenious system of thought that makes it possible for me to concentrate on trivial things while I am mulling over the origin of life and the mathematics of reality. As far as I am consciously aware, there are four main systems at work. There is the subconscious, which I have no direct control over, but which controls me the most. There is the conscious, which is me in the moment of action, which is who makes the fingers and toes move in real time. There is the intermediate, which is controlled by the conscious and subconscious, but can't control any of the bodily functions, but can still help out in the logical system. And there is the primal, which strongly persuades emotions, physical and mental reactions to outside stimuli, and semi-conscious bodily systems such as blood pressure and heartbeat.I have been learning to understand and master these various mental components from birth, with most success in the intermediate and conscious areas.
It is said that we have a long term and short term memory. My conscious mind stores and filters the very-short term information and my intermediate mind stores and filters the short-mid term memory, while my subconscious mind further filters out information in a real-time and delayed way which allows me to remember things I had wrongfully forgotten in the short term. You should be able to guess that the subconscious system is connected to the other three, in fact, I suspect that it is the connector between them.
The duration of my short term memory can be from a few seconds to several minutes. It also blocks off areas of time that are not worth remembering which allows for extra room in the small information buffer. My short-mid term information storage system also varies widely from a few moments of complex data to many segments of simple information separated by time-elapse markers. The long term system is basically a day to a week long depending on how much information deemed 'worthless' has to be stored for social interaction purposes, such as remembering to put my name at the top of my paper, which I inconsistently forget to do over the course of several days. I also have another system that I cal my permanent memory. This is information that my subconscious is told to look for and remember for one of my self-preservation activities. For example, I would remember the faces of everyone around me in my class at school (which I am out of, FYI). I suppose this activity is forced by my primal thought processes which hold the self-preservationist urges.
Time-elapse segments are the brain's way of saying "nothing happened during this period", or that the brain had to work this hard for this many things, which it in turn translates to a time estimate. Since the passage of time can be easily smudged, I estimate that it is controlled by an oxygen-hungry nerve cluster or gland which is strongly exposed to the heartbeat and somewhat underfiltered blood. It should be attached to the sensory areas of the brain, so that when these are messed with via drugs, it also becomes affected.
What helps me think is this mixture of thought process all working together. I am beginning to be able to access thought process record keeping information and switch around priority levels for all sorts of things. For some reason, when I was young, my priority system put physical skills and spelling at the top of the priority list. I was very unnerved at getting a lower than 100% score during the weekly spelling tests, and figured out that I could just study my spelling book ahead a few chapters. I was never very good under pressure, so I never did well on spelling bee's. My strongest memories of my early school days was faces, highly stressful events like picture day and accidentally hurting people, and how to spell. I then started getting sicker and sicker as I got older, until I came down with Crohn's disease. As the stress mounted, I had to play more and study less, until I stopped doing homework altogether.
Back to the point, during all of this, until I got extremely sick, I had been studying people very closely. I understood things they didn't even understand about themselves. I didn't even know I was doing it except when I would accidentally meditate and get strong urges to mentally note every strange thing people did on a regular basis. This is what separated me from others like me. I had a stuffed up nose and didn't like to breathe very much. I would get to a higher plain of consciousness and become one with my other thought processes. I could see that I had a lot on my mind even though I felt like I was not accomplishing anything useful in my life. This is pretty much how it is today. I am casually building up my body so it can keep up with my mental persuits. I am doing very little to advance my career and make money, mainly because I respect the thought priority list that has been made, and secondly because if I do work, then the stress would force me to get rid of the thought processes.
Here's a little example. Think of going to a meeting in which your boss tells you that you need to think up a report or essay on some topic or another. You leave and forget about it until the following week when your boss expects you to be almost finished. This could be a single day, but I am making a point. The boss reminds you that he/she expects the report to be on his/her desk by tomorrow, and you decide to get started on it that day. You suddenly remember how to do an essay all the way from n'th grade, and start putting ideas down onto the paper. Here is where it differs from how a 'normal person' is supposed to do it. A normal person would scrawl all kinds of on or off base ideas, half baked and still cooking. You on the other hand only put down ideas which will be in the end product. You soon decide that you are finished and start the organizing part. I happen to be inexperienced with organization, so it might take me a while. You have finally got the organization done and have a first draft completed within a short amount of time (minutes? hours? idk.) You then quickly type it out on the computer and click the spell-check button which leads you through the proofreading system which nobody pays attention to, except for you. You make sure your sentences mean something by quickly forgetting what you wrote and reading back what you have with the objectivity of a stranger. Now that your spelling is corrected and you are sure your sentences have made sense, you don't bother to make additions or subtractions, and you press the print button.
I very much respect my mental abilities now because they were taken away from me during some period in my struggle with Crohn's disease. I have explained a lot already, but there is still more. I don't know if you have heard of the 'set it and forget it' saying on that rotisserie infomercial, but that's exactly how my mind works. In fact, I didn't do a bit of prep for this article or any of the other articles. I just downloaded the information into my conscious mind and started plugging away. I am careful to proofread every few sentences as I go, but that's usually taken care of by other processes. For instance, on the day of a spelling test I would quickly read ahead in my spelling book for the next chapter for next week. I would scan over the meanings of words a few times and clump the whole group together so that I'd remember them all at once. I would then promptly forget them until the pretest. The part of spelling tests I had the most trouble with was remembering whether the teacher had said another spelling word, or whether she was just chatting with an outgoing student. I was never very interested in the intricate trivialities of social interaction. I don't like guessing games in which you don't get to study first, or at least get time to warm up. I would take a few seconds to face a person before responding to them, and I would often go into a state of social shock. Although I did very well with spelling, it was a bit trickier to do math. I couldn't just memorize data tables of mathematical information, I had to consciously use a part of my brain that I had allowed my subconscious to control. I had to slowly learn how to think in this new way, and it helped me begin to understand the mediums that the mind works with. It turned out that it is not important to do all those complex calculations, as long as you know how to do them and you know how to program it into a computer. Luckily for me, my spelling genious is making it easy learn how to program and it will make it ever easier as I make programming tools specifically suited to my strengths and weaknesses. 08/10/2006 Social OrderPart of my mission is to help edge along world peace. This is something everyone says they want, but they think it will either get in the way of their freedom, or create anarchy like in the days of hippies. Although this is an absurd world view, I see that it is one and that it must be changed in order to affect world peace.
Social order is currently looked upon with distaste with the idea that the government would deem certain types of social indiscriminance to be illegal. The thought that you have to control your behavior in a way that would make you feel uncomfortable is the main thing stopping social order today. However, this is also one of those absurd world views of social order which needs to be changed in order o affect world peace.
There are people, people with no social morals and a lot of social skills, who are promoting these negative and flawed views of things which are integral to this much needed thing. They do not sit in dark corners crafting their plots in a secret society along with a choice few confidants. They wander around social events with blatant lies dripping off of their tongues like water from a spring. It's almost like second nature to them, in fact to many it is a game. Call it gullibility of others, or the blind trust of friendship, but whatever it is they are exploiting it. They do it for personal gain and popularity, and the sad thing is that they usually don't realise that they are preventing world peace at all.
Now that we have gotten the troublemakers out into the open as much as can be done in a short scrawling, we must figure out ways to defend against these people and reverse the damage that they have caused in the first place. The number one rule when dealing with these social deviants, this rare breed of people with no social disorders, is to make a life choice to never believe or disbelieve anything unless it is verifyable by anyone at any time, within limits. This is a sort-of scientific system, call it empirical if you like, which works on ninety percent of the 'social menace' that is getting in the way of our goals. There are a select few powerful types with money, brains, and looks who may try to slow down the effort, but world peace is part of human 'evolution' if you like. It is something that will happen eventually no matter how badly the military forces want to stay in business. Another way to pick out the 'bad seeds' is to wait until they are publically dead-set on opposing you, then give a totally logical and obviously acceptable statement to them. If they oppose it in public, it will be the start of their downfall and their reign of power will slowly end. I realise I am using some pretty sided words, but as a proponent of the movement to spread peace to every part of the globe, I see it as a kind of WAR.
Social war is an odd thing. It is something that is waged everywhere there are people. There are places in which social wars are prevented, however. These are places in which everyone is determined to 'love' eachother and care for eachother under with a common bond or a set of common bonds. This can be thought of in many families as family love, but in many households there are multiple dominant people who are constantly at war for dominance. In the special places where this is prevented, though, all dominant people become submissive to the common bond and mutual respect permeates the environment. Anything that is thought of as negative or hurtful is either turned away or, when important, it is discussed in a sensitive way to ease any possible pain or other side effects. People also tend to respond to negative things without aggression, but instead they will ignore or show concern for the target of the negativity.
Here are some examples in which social warfare is waged, and in which it is averted:
WAR: One day you see a person taking a shortcut through your lawn. You chase the person off of your lawn and halfway into the nearby property. Now it has two sets of footprints, you're really angry because you spent a whole hour on it last week. You decide to leave a nasty message on the offending person's answering machine and watch for him/her the same time tomorrow.
PEACE: So the person walked across your lawn like before. You approach the person and shout their name in order to get their attention. The person stops at the edge of your property as you approach. You ask why they were in such a hurry and find out that they have to be home for visitors. You stress how much you value the pristine condition of your lawn as you both continue toward the other person's house. You are invited to stay and eat with him/her and the visitors who turn out to be friends of yours too.
As you can see, the peaceful example is much more interesting and you got a free meal out of it as well. You can probably understand how happy the people in the peaceful scenario are and that they are much better friends than the ones in the war scenario. There are some people who still have a problem with this as far as it has gone. They say they don't want to talk to some "nigga" who would just bore them to death anyways, and probably do things to them after they have been put to sleep from it. Aside from what many people currently think, it is not 'only natural' to think this way. Life is not about keeping yourself awake. If the conversation goes south, and you have tried to signal to the person about your disinterest, you are perfectly fine to put your hands on the person's shoulders and tell the person you'd better be going now, before your friendship loses the spindly legs it has to stand on. There are also people who think in a much uglier way. They see how the animals in nature treat eachother, with dogs barking and cats carrying mice in their mouths to eat. They see lions and tigers take down deer and such, and say that's how things are, that's what life's about, it's a constant struggle for survival of the fittest. This is just not the case. The simple fact of the matter is that we are not creatures who need to keep other creatures from entering our territory for fear that they'll steal our resources, or heaven forbid, our mate(s). Of course there is a part of our culture that seems that way, but it's not the human way. People get food shipped to every part of the globe, so we're not sharing scarce resources. And if you married or are dating someone who would leave you for any Tom, Dick, Melinda, Joe, Sally, or Harry who comes along then you were asking for it in the first place.
All nervous inferiority complexes aside, there is still the biggest matter of social misdirection. People think that world peace is just for 'tree huggers' and such. Those people are not too lazy, they are merely afraid of new things, which is perfectly normal. In fact, most of us are afraid of something we don't really understand, such as this concept of peace. How can all of these angry people with nothing to live for supposed to change? What would it be like if even I stopped exploding at every little incidence of spilled milk? Wouldn't I be losing part of my identity, or worse, would I be hiding my true self?
The obvious answer to this, if you know anything about psychology, is that it's a mostly painless and only positively impactful process. And no, it doesn't mean you are losing your sense of self, you won't be hiding your feelings or being fake. You will merely be responding to things in a self-aware and educated way. You have merely made a decision. This is something that takes generations to 'evolve' into society and seconds to take away. It is a system that was created by people who lived in extremely close quarters and survived to have families of their own. It must not only be directed toward your family, but to every person you meet. Your 'vote' of peace will also have a ripple effect. People around you will notice how much they enjoyed being around you. Your pleasant way of communicating and reacting to possibly negative situations may even make them respect you. They may even want to be more like you! You can still do the other things that you like, you can still have outbursts from time to time, but in this new environment it will not escalate into hate, it will be looked at with concern. When people pay attention to problems in an objective and peaceful way, they often solve them!
Congratulations, you have read through this extremely long article and I hope you either got something out of it, or that your beliefs have been repeated here. Hopefully you have not skipped to the end, because I use a peculiar writing style which forces people to read through it all. And thanks. 07/10/2006 The Computer Game IndustryBright and brilliant are the stars of the night sky, and without moving, they are far from where you see them.
Unless you lived in a smoggy city all your life and don't know astronomy, you know what I'm talking about. Light from the stars takes so long to get to our eyes that the star may have gone supernova 100 years ago and we wouldn't see it for another 20k years, or however long. Like many things, this can be applied metaphorically to nearly anything in life.
The computer game industry is not really an industry. It is a scientific petri dish of software technology that is struggling for a source of income. There are a few large corporations who strive to beat out all others just to make money, but aside from that, there is a real sense of enhancement of our quality of life. I myself find the game industry to be a slightly filthy yet interesting cash flow opportunity, so I have purchased a server for myself and will soon begin to make computer games using it. I have been slacking with my programming studies often, this is because of the stresses in my life and other things bothering me psychologically that I haven't quite figured out.
Meanwhile, the server does turn on, and the OS does boot up. In addition to that, I have been reflecting on the effectiveness of regular practice and how programming tools, like all tools, greatly simplify life. Just imagine how difficult it would be for hundreds of school children who can't play outside or be let near small board game pieces to have fun during recess otherwise. Sadly, however strange that previous sentense seemed, it is quite common. They used to punish children like that, but now they're not allowed that pleasure.
A server is an important thing with any online program with multiple people accessing it simultaneously. Any computer that can handle the online software could theoretically be a server, but there are also computers that are specially designed to be servers. They usually don't have so much in the way of a graphics card, and are often used to store and serve out data from huge databases as quickly as possible. When I was younger, I thought servers made what you see on the screen, then spew it out across the wire until it hits your screen, but I know better now.
In a MMOG or Massively Multiplayer Online Game, the server only sends information like the properties of other objects within range of your character. It doesn't make them, your computer has to make them itself. When you see another person't avatar running past you, you aren't really seeing their avatar, you are seeing a copy of it pasted onto your screen. In fact, in a well programmed game, that is the same thing for your avatar as well.
The client software, which is the game run on your computer, is what you run to get the information about the environment. The server software, which is run on the server, remembers what and where everything is so it can copy the information onto your computer when the client asks for it. In fact, in a well programmed game, the client can only ask for things to happen, it can't order the server around. However, there are programs in which you can do this from the client, but most are not MMOG's.
I am currently gaining the skills to program -for free- so that I can give access to other players for as low a rate as possible. My supplemental income should support me until the game takes off, at which point I will be able to pay for myself. The details of which will be posted, probably in a few years. Until then, I will continue building up the information base of the game and make the graphics engine.
A little info on the game shouldn't hurt, I suppose. The game will feature a 'reality realm' in which your avatar lives as if it were a real human. The only difference would be that it doesn't exist when you are offline which freezes it so it won't be hungry or have to use the bathroom all the time. There will also be a fantasy zone in which is contained a completely fabricated digital universe. I will start small at first, only making a single planet to explore, but soon people will want to join my franchise and I will become president of a truly far-reaching digital empire. I am already well aware of the legal and political intricacies of such a system, so I am confident that everything will work out. I will not be allowing my game to enter the world of the stock market though. I hate to see people go broke over little weaving lines on paper, so I will ensure that everyone saves enough buffer money to quit while they're ahead. This 'buffer' money will also be the deciding factor for how I share my franchise because I will be providing it to people who want to join.
Anyways....
The fantasy zone is similar to the reality zone, except that it is partitioned off to paying players. They get to be game master of their section and make their own rules. There are many rules they may change. They may create new items which only exist in their realm. They may create, delete, or edit, temporarily, the statistics of any object, or they can make the object itself not exist. This is only in their realm, with locked items appearing in a locked items partition to be restored when the item is legal to the realm.
For example, if your realm is a prehistoric one, you wouldn't allow sci-fi or modern items into it. If your realm is magical, you would allow players to have an extra magic ability like levitation. If your realm is mythical/legendary, players could have the strength levels of Hercules or turn people to stone like the Gorgons.
The fantasy zone could also be useful to scientists who want to test out some theoretical science projects. They could make a super-rocket fuel that makes their spaceships reach distant galaxies and such. Or they could make a more a horrible disease that could wipe out all life as we know it. Or they could make geological events and such things. Inventors could create prototypes of their inventions to show the onine world at a digital inventor's rally. Inventors would greatly benefit from a machine that magically materialises parts they need for their inventions.
What about hit points, guns, and foul play you ask? I don't know, as a game master you will decide what goes on in your realm. I will be hard at work making my own fantasy world as well, why don't you stop by for a look? 06/10/2006 Psychological ModificationFor several years now, I have been studying the techniques and effects of psychological modification 'in the wild,' which is a little preoccupation of mine. My mild psychosis caused by my sickness from Crohn's Disease had left me mentally incapacitated for a great while, four or more years. I also experienced a dementia seemingly triggered by social interaction. I am only just coming out of it, and although I was mildly retarded during the ordeal, I had severe traumatic flash-back events for several months. As a person of very high standards and morals, my embarrassment was overwhelming... Notice how my mission blogs are all about me...
Everything I do in life is based on the premise that computers are the key to ultimate power, and we are all biological computers. In effect, the computer, furnished with robotic limbs, can do whatever it wants for as long as it wants, just as long as its eternal solar power source, the sun, doesn't go nova, which would perhaps increase the power input for a short time anyways. We are ourselves computers furnished with a working biological framework of brain, torso, reproductive organs, arms, and legs! But sadly there has been a war going on for biological supremacy which is nearly obsolete in nature. This war has caused us to continuously create mere prototypes and a lot of excess unintegrated code, resulting in the situation that none of us are suitable for commercial release (aka, Release Candidate). Of course, we can't all just sit around doing nothing, complaining of the glitches that we have found, or the viruses we have accidentally aquired during our shady conduct.
Here, I have begun, with complete awareness, to debug my biological components and 'download the latest drivers and utilities' in the effort to make myself as close as possible to the criteria for a Release Candidate. If everyone does this, we may one day be able to produce a viable product to efficiently exemplify the human race.
Currently, I am in preliminary stages of research and development, but I am confident that, if I don't die any time soon or get some horrible disease again, I will at least gain some ground for future generations. I shall now share with you a list of my preliminary successes:
Here are some things that I have not had much success with, but am working on:
And the list goes on. If you would like to help me in any of these areas, or would like help yourself, leave me a comment or try finding my contact info somehow. I can give you a limited progress report, however, because I am still perfecting my physical data recording skills. Most of my findings are stored away safely in my mind, which I would be glad to share upon request, and it would help me if you would specify as much as possible. K _ Wifler AT hotmail DOT com Creator of Destinies, MeWelcome to another blog entry. I make sure to include unimportant information and think for at least two seconds before writing.That having been said, I will now continue with the first of many mission statements and updates.
My ongoing mission has been to learn how to program. Having learned, I must then create an extensive array of programming tools and simulations as I build up my programming skills. Eventually my tools must make complex plain-text programming into a tedious, redundant, and obsolete waste of time. Next, I will have a tool for total world domination, at which point I must learn how to apply my abilities to robotics. Of course, I will not be taking over the world, but I will be studying and pioneering the fields of Artificial Intelligence and autonomous robotic self-upkeep and repair. Having mastered these concepts I will probably be 40+ years of age and ready to propel myself to an uninhabitable planet, possibly with a special someone (female), to begin the terraforming work. On the side I will be dabbling in bio-robotics and mitochondrial reverse-engineering, to the ends that I may extend my lifespan indefinitely.
My progress on this task is still not very far. I am still slightly recovering from the disabling effects of Crohn's Disease and am still building up my body to military regulation. I have yet to complete my first big programming tool, which I will probably find to be lacking and make something better once it is finished. My current side project is creating a 3D MMORPG in which players will never find themselves out of options or in a slow point unless they have been warned about it. I am still refining my ability to program with the clumsy tools at hand, I am especially annoyed at the slow speed of text input, as my hands are too shaky and I can feel every joint movement in my fingers and the stretching of my skin.
With the onset of Crohn's disease I am only 4 years off track, but I am confident that once the slight dimentia wears off I will be more than able to catch up. I have had many revelations already that my intelligence is returning to me, although my bothersome psychic ability to channel the intelligence of others keeps getting in the way of making an accurate diagnosis. I have been putting off my research of psychic phenomonon because it is not a widely accepted field, however I have a gut feeling that it will be important for my future. |
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