Ingress - Its Full of Triangles!

Note: this is not a review!
 
I have been playing Ingress which is a GPS augmented-reality based game on my Smart-Phone for the last two years and I have finally got to the point where it no longer holds any appear for me whatsoever, it has become more habit now than any enjoyment.

The game itself is very simple and has a quite addictive game play to it which will keep you happy for at least two years (in my case) or a few months in others.  Besides the game itself it has a fairly strong social element which had a definite appeal to me, I always like meeting new people plus it does get out you of the house walking in the fresh air.  Other forms of travel are also used:

• Cargress - (walking can be slow)
• Traingress - (Greener especially when you do not own a car)
• Busgress - (This occurs when the trains are delayed)
• Helicoptergress (for those richer players)
• Swimgress (for those that have dry suits)
• Boatgress (for those that are either richer or have a friend with a boat)

The game is played all over the world, it also has big events called Anomalies normally centered in several big cities around the world.  You can have many as six hundred players in each city battling it out.  Apparently there are seven million players world wide as opposed to World of Warcraft that have just over five million although I suspect the fresh air in World of Warcraft is probably virtual.

Sounds amazing doesn't it? Well Yes and No, I went to Cardiff in 2015 for the Shonin event which was extremely well organized and I did love the social side however the game itself I was bit bored with to be honest.  It was completely different to the normal game you play which I definitely preferred at the time.

There is a story to game which is sort of simple, two factions one called the Resistance aka Smurfs (Blue) and the other called the Enlightened aka Frogs (Green).  The Frogs are fighting for a bunch of green bug-eyed aliens called the Shapers who are meant to bring enlightenment (hence the name) to all humanity.  The Smurfs are against that idea although I understand there is another bunch of aliens on the side of the Smurfs which is where the story becomes a little more complex.  The problem I have with the story is that whatever the players do in the game it appears to have no effect upon the story line.  Although I could be completely wrong on this aspect since I have not delved deeply in the back-story since the early days of my play.

This guy lasted two months and much of what he says I agree with:

http://www.baconfatlabs.com/2014/09/leaving-ingress-my-ascendency-and-decline-as-an-agent/

However I have not quit yet just playing a lot slower, I am level 14 and there is only two levels to go.  Then its maxing out your badges none of which have much allure.

The upshot is that I have met a lot of new people and made some good friends in the process. The game play was good while it lasted, I liked the strategy of it.

Without giving too much away I have found it curious that Enlightened players tend towards more a chaotic style of play whereas the Resistance are more ordered.

Irony strikes again!

Mind Snap

Following on from my previous post (although I had this idea several months ago from a fictional perspective) I was thinking about what happens to the Mind/Soul after death should it exist other than as an emergent property of the human brain.

My original idea (to be used in an Alternate Reality Game/Free Style Role Play Game) was that when the physical body dies the Mind/Soul is pulled back through time to its original point of conception/birth.  The energy created in the passage back would effectively strip away most of the memories for that person so that when it returned it would mostly be a blank slate. 

I know this sounds very like X-Men Days of Future Past however I had the idea before I saw the film.

Think of it as a reverse Wheel of Life (Indian philosophies) instead of being reincarnated in another organic body you get to live your life again and again in the same body endlessly until such time you achieve the perfect life and attain enlightenment.

Déjà vu is you remembering a previous repeat of your life which in theory would mean you are either on the right path or the wrong one depending on how you look at it.

Would this doom you to repeat your mistakes or make new ones?

This idea leads me to think of time as a flat plane where everything is happening all at the same time, an infinite Möbius strip with no boundary.   The mind/soul is connected to the physical body at both ends of its life and when one end dies it snaps back to the beginning or I suppose the end which would cause an interesting effect upon a person.

Would memory provide the answer if you are in a repeat or not?  Does everyone experience déjà vu?

An interesting thought experiment but no method to prove it.

Note: I am aware that the boffins have explained why Déjà vu occurs but it has no soul to it.

Recursion see recursion

Here's a mind bending thought experiment for you to think about.

They say that when you die your life flashes before you, what if your current life is actually your real life flashing before you.

What happens when you get to end does it start all over again in a never ending loop?

A Crude Future

Recently I have been looking into what causes the changes in the cost Petrol/Gas, which is a product of oil.  Oil is a commodity, commodities are raw materials or primary agricultural products that can be bought and sold basically stuff that comes out of the ground or grown like:

• Corn
• Coffee beans
• Copper
• Gold

The price of oil sits upon a wobbly tripod (simplified):

Supply & Demand

High demand decreased supply will raise the price and the inverse will drop the price.

Speculators (futures market)

If enough buyers speculate that the price will rise then the suppliers will hold back until it rises in order to sell at a high price.  There have been a number of regulations put in the place since the 1990’s to stop this from spiraling out of control however Speculators can still affect the price.  And according to some 60% of the oil market is pure speculation and they could be right since any money market is effectively based upon a fantasy of potential profits.

Geopolitical Nature of the Economy

If a large country is in recession this means less manufacturing is going on, less jobs,  less people driving buying petrol/gas and less oil produced goods required by said country.  This affects their demand for oil products and we are back to supply and demand.

OPEC controls about 40% of the oil supply in the world which is based mostly in middle eastern countries which over years have been stricken with war.  In 1973 an oil embargo was placed against Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the US for their involvement with the Yom Kippur War.  The price oil rose from $3 per barrel to $12 globally by end of the embargo in 1974

Natural disasters also affect the price normally making it rise.

The Industry

The oil industry is split into three categories: Upstream, midstream and downstream (midstream is considered to be part of the downstream)

Upstream

This covers all oil exploration, development and production of crude oil or natural gas.

Downstream and Midstream

This covers oil tankers, refiners, retailers and consumers

All three of these streams are contributing factors to the price.

United Kingdom Continental Shelf (UKCS) – North Sea Oil
 
From the year 2000 UKCS has been in decline compared to ten years after 1966, between 2000 and 2008 there has been a 90% drop in new oil discoveries in the North Sea.  According to the Department of Energy and Climate Change who are responsible for UKCS over 50% over the North Sea oil reserve has been extracted in the last forty years, in theory there is up to 25 billion barrels are left.

As of 2013 the UK consumes more oil products than it produces which means it has become a net importer to balance its demand.  Offshore conditions make the UK a high-cost producer of oil however the UK exports oil-related goods and services that are worth more than $40 billion a year.

The cost of Brent Crude (which comes from the North Sea fields) is a major benchmark for the international oil market however its price has had a widening divergence from those of the other markets.  Lots of theories have been put forward for this and most of those appear in that wobbly tripod at the top of the page.

The Upshot

A butterfly flaps its wings in Japan and the cost of oil makes up its own damn chaotic mind.

DIY Peace

What’s the best method of creating world peace, well before you go near any practical methods you really need understand the root causes of war.  If we think of war as a crime (which it is) then we could proceed by breaking the causes into three steps:

Motive, Opportunity and Means.

Motive

The grass is always greener in your neighbours garden, is this a good enough to go to war?  Your neighbour’s garden has oil underneath it, simplified you are greedy.

Your neighbour believes in different things to you, is this a good enough to go to war?  What does it matter what your neighbour believes, oh wait a minute because your neighbour does not believe as you do therefore your neighbour must be evil, your neighbour threatens the status quo.  Is religion an excuse or a reason?

Your neighbour's Great-great-great-great grandfather killed your Great-great-great-great grandfather, therefore your neighbour is evil.  This can be down to how children at brought up, the people on the other side of the wall are bad.

Tradition can be a killer of good values, it does not let people have their own experiences to become less likely to kill someone they have never met based upon something happened five generations ago.

Your neighbour is bad person, head of the government, takes from the poor and gives to the rich – that would be revolution/civil war.  A coup-d'etat would be a less violent method than full blown war.

Opportunity:
Well that happens a lot due the fact we tend live next door to every other country, islands fair better than most although that normally gives way to civil wars instead.  Of course through alliances with other countries you get multiple countries invading one or worst two super powers using a small country as a battleground to fight between their opposing ideologies like Vietnam and Korea.  Also a perfect battleground to test new weapons and guess what we are back to greed.  Are opposing ideologies an excuse?

Means

The top 6 arms exporters in the world are:

USA, Russia, China, France, Germany and the UK.

They are effectively all the super powers on the planet, if they wanted peace to occur it would be a simple method converting their weapons factories over to something useful like alternative energy supplies and recycling all weapons.  Money however TALKS!

To quote one of my favourite authors Issac Asimov: “Violence is the last refuge of incompetent” 

Which would make mankind staggeringly incompetent for most of its history, we have failed to learn from our mistakes.  This is irony on so many levels.

Enlightenment by Resistance

Would the absence of war mean peace or just a population under control?  For any civilization to develop you must have change and for change to occur you need resistance to the status quo.  If everyone agrees with everyone else then all that happens is stagnation, civilizations like that are easily destroyed by simple culture shock or the degeneration into the worship of the past, loss of science etc.

Violence should never be used as a form of resistance it gives in to our most basic of instincts which is why there have been very few periods in history where there is an absence of war.  Man has failed to evolve in the last ten thousand years if we had war would be non-existent by now.  Perhaps ten thousand years is too short of time to expect that amount of change to achieve enlightenment?

Unfortunately for us change is violent.

Correlate or Bust!

Since having started this blog I have found myself reading far more news than I used to, more for some inspiration in writing next the post.  What I have across is seeming unrelated news items that look like they are connected.  One of my favourite authors H.P. Lovecraft said in one of his novels:

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”

As a concept he may be on to something although in this day and age of mass media it should be easier to correlate the data using data- mining tools and the computers can go insane with the knowledge.

The problem with coincidences is that nobody takes into account all of the other data out there, two news items just over week apart with similar circumstances would suggest they are related in some way but how about all the other incidents that were not reported because either they were not considered to be news worthy enough or that they happened to individuals.

Am I paranoid or just unable to correlate enough information to create a proper view of what is a coincidence and what is an anomaly.  If I am paranoid then I would be entering the heady domain of conspiracy theories.  What is odd about conspiracy theories is the extremes they go to for their explanations, a simple answer is better than a vastly complicated one and yet those that believe in conspiracy theories seem to prefer the complex ‘truths’ as opposed to the simple ones.

Conspiracy theorists say: They want to believe!

Well I prefer to know!  Belief takes us into the realms of religion which have no place in science.

I have read a far number of conspiracy theory websites and watched several on Youtube normally when I have been playing the Youtube game of bouncing between videos from the related videos pane. In some cases it only requires a couple of links before you find a video about a conspiracy theory from a start point of scifi shorts (no surprise).  Although Yubtube does seem to be somewhat saturated in them.  Their evidence either lacks body or basic common sense more often than not both. Much of their science is pseudoscience based upon misinterpreted concepts which I have done the same myself, it is quite easy to do.

I never take anything as true especially it is something I read or seen on the Internet, you should always fact check from as many sources as possible.  In the antique trade it is like having provenance for an item except in this case instead of an object we are looking at truths about the world.

Too often people watch a TV ‘documentary’ and assume everything said is true just because it is meant to be a factual programme.  Nobody questions the ‘facts’ of the programme.  Questioning seems to be going out of style but then I am generalising like I always do.

As I have often said: The Truth has Become an Urban Myth

Jetsam #1

Blame it on the Wildlife or perhaps they could not find a weasel?

http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/22136/20160513/raccoon-causes-power-outage-in-most-of-washington-suburbs.htm

729 trillion miles from Earth but still talking about the weather, they must be English.

http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/22285/20160517/mysterious-alien-radio-signals-exoplanet-extreme-weather.htm

Depressions cured by psilocybin (aka Magic Mushrooms) the new valium.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-3594245/Magic-mushrooms-hell-people-tormented-incurable-depression.html

Sea creature in Wales (Not a Dragon) Looks like an Alligator carcass to me.

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/remains-sea-creature-washed-up-11342984

Space Weather: Beware of fridge magnets…

http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/22216/20160516/magnetic-field-explosions-above-the-earth-captured-by-nasa-mms-spacecrafts.htm

Circus Animals

A little follow up on the previous post about the weasel and the collider, CERN told a news agency the following:

“We are pretty sure this was caused by a small animal,” a press officer for the LHC told NPR. “A weasel, probably.”

Indeed, the remains of a fried animal were found on the grounds outside the LHC, close to a cable that had been gnawed through.

I have checked the first two pages of Google’s search results regarding the news of this event and none of the websites have asked: Why or How?

They just accept what they were told to be true.

The event in 2009 with a bird that managed to drop a piece a bread in just the right spot to cause a problem, although no bird was spotted and in fact CERN themselves are not particularly sure what caused the power cut, read their own news article

Two events in a eight year time span and they are out in the countryside after all.

Why is it that the press accepts what they are told to be true, why is it that nobody asked any questions?

Is this what today’s press are now like, report what they are told and nothing more.

I wonder if this is an isolated incident.

Nature's Way

You may have heard the news from last week that a weasel chewed into a cable at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN Switzerland thereby shutting the whole thing down and in process electrocuting itself.

The question is why and how did a weasel get in the first place?

The cost of the collider is quite amazing really £2.8bn as of January 2010 perhaps someone was hoping the weasel in the works would cause more damage and save some money a somewhat naive view I would think.

LHC is quite safe despite what other people would have you believe, the universe pretty does similar things the LHC does by design and the Earth is hit by comic radiation every second, we are still here.

CERN has provided its own slides for the day in question, see here look at slide eleven.

I find it curious that the LHC has been running for eight years without a single incidence of wild life incursion or at least none reported in the national press apart from one possible bird in 2009 which was never found.  Upon searching through the Internet I came across the following post:

NO damage has ever been caused by them they do NOT chew strings on the bales,nor electrical cables nor pee on the animal fodder... - See more at: https://www.angloinfo.com/normandy/discussions/topic/930563#sthash.EJR8VTvR.dpuf

NO damage has ever been caused by them they do NOT chew strings on the bales,nor electrical cables nor pee on the animal fodder.

Which begs the question why was this weasel chewing on the one cable that could shutdown the LHC just when it was running causing a: "severe electrical perturbation".  According to another website:

Friday's incident came at an unfortunate time.

Scientists had been gearing up to resume experiments at the giant lab early next week following a technical stoppage of several months, and to relaunch their superpowered hunt for particles that could change our understanding of the Universe.

Following the weasel incident and several other technical issues, Marsollier said "we will now need to check over the entire machine again".

He said it remained unclear when the experiments could resume, but added that it clearly would "take more time before we can get started."

Who does it benefit that the LHC is not running?

Is there a fringe organisation out there that thinks they saved the world from destruction, did they think using a weasel would be a neat irony?  Who knows, I definitely do not.

Friday's incident came at an unfortunate time.
Scientists had been gearing up to resume experiments at the giant lab early next week following a technical stoppage of several months, and to relaunch their superpowered hunt for particles that could change our understanding of the Universe.
Following the weasel incident and several other technical issues, Marsollier said "we will now need to check over the entire machine again".
He said it remained unclear when the experiments could resume, but added that it clearly would "take more time before we can get started."


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-04-weasel-large-hadron-collider.html#jCp

NO damage has ever been caused by them they do NOT chew strings on the bales,nor electrical cables nor pee on the animal fodder... - See more at: https://www.angloinfo.com/normandy/discussions/topic/930563#sthash.EJR8VTvR.dpuf

NO damage has ever been caused by them they do NOT chew strings on the bales,nor electrical cables nor pee on the animal fodder... - See more at: https://www.angloinfo.com/normandy/discussions/topic/930563#sthash.EJR8VTvR.dpuf

Theories of Dark Stuff

The basic scientific method is as follows:

1. Develop a theory based upon existing data and other current theories
2. Make observations
3. Think about it, why is this happening
4. Come up with a Hypotheses – causes
5. Test your hypothesis with experiments
6. Update your theory and start the whole process over again

Science has this problem with the universe, when looking out into the universe there appears to be an awful lot of stuff we cannot see not for lack of trying I might add.  We are using every method possible to see stuff in universe and yet our universe has parts missing.  I expect the box it came in says somewhere on the back: May contain small dark parts (do not give to small children).

27% of the observable universe is missing so to fix their theory of Everything scientists have come up with a bodge factor called: Dark Matter which is supposedly composed of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) however despite different methods of detection none have been found so far.

In the 1990s after observations of the universe showed it to be expanding at an increasing rate a new form of energy was hypothesized to exist called: Dark Energy which apparently is the cause of the expansion.  All evidence is so far is indirect and completely over my head regarding the actual science.

Dark Flow first appeared in 2008 showing that galaxy clusters had a peculiar velocity and they are flowing in a common direction towards the Centaurus and Hydra constellations which is also towards the Great Attractor.  Is the Great Attractor the source of the Dark Flow and do we really have to name the velocity Dark something?  How about Spooky velocity instead, oh yes that has been used already.

In 2014 scientists claimed that the universe is missing eighty percent of its light to fix this glaring issue they came up with Dark Light which is created by decaying Dark Matter that matter nobody can currently find.  See article here: 80% Light Missing

Four universal bodge factors to make their theory of Everything work.  The problem with applying the scientific method step five is that it all too far away making it extremely difficult do testable experiments.  There are however quite few scientists out there that have alternate theories regarding the Dark stuff.

If we look down at the quantum level we have a problem seeing particles because basically they are really small and we have to use instruments like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to detect anything useful and even then certain particles are quite elusive particularly anything dark or Higgs like.

Surely with all this dark stuff in universe we can persuade it to make an appearance by creating the conditions that it cannot say no to.  The LHC is probably one method although so far it has failed to yield results, please correct me if I am wrong.

I find it annoying that whenever something is missing in the universe it is immediately labelled Dark something, yes I understand why but it seems to lack imagination.  I'm currently missing a work polo shirt does that mean I should say Dark Forces have taken my shirt.  How about we described stuff the correct way.

• Dark Matter = Missing Matter
• Dark Energy = Expanding/Missing Energy
• Dark Flow =  Missing Flow
• Dark Light = Missing Light

 In fact lets just say: Missing!

---

Update on my previous post: Smoke and Mirrors is Stranger than Fiction

My recent of understanding regarding quantum stuff has changed today as you could see in the above previous post, where I stated about observation of particles:

Atomic particles pop in and out of existence when we "observe" them or not...

Well that turns out to be a complete misunderstanding of the cat theory which is just a thought experiment and a common misconception of what a wave function is by us lay-persons.  A wave function is a mathematical description of a particle instead anything actually real.

I shall leave the previous post as is since it provides of evidence of the one true constant in the universe: Change.

The End of the World is Nigh Part II

Many keen observers will have noticed that the world completely failed to end yesterday when Mercury did the hokey cokey in front the Sun. The Sun was not impressed the constant glare was enough to send Mercury on its way.  However you may remember the Youtube prophet did hedge his bets by saying:

...warns that this could be a sign that this could be interpreted as the end times for humanity.

I think that perhaps it is going to be a slow motion disaster and really kick off in sixteen months time (September 2017) when Planet X aka Nibiru is meant to be doing a close flyby.  Closer enough to suck continents off the planet, apparently the US government has built hundred and thirty underground bases in advance of its arrival.  I can only assume they are on parts of the planet where the continents are well and truly stuck to the magna below or perhaps they have some fancy anti-gravity device that keeps them firmly connected to the planet.

What are the origins of Planet X I here you ask, well scroll back to 1846 after the discovery of Neptune when astronomers were wondering whether perhaps there might another planet beyond Neptune.   Planet X (x = unknown) was suggested by Percival Lowell as hypothesis to explain why Uranus and Neptune had discrepancies in their orbits.  A large unseen planet could perhaps account for the irregularities.

Percival Lowell died in 1916 having failed to find his planet, however in 1930 Clyde Tombaugh discovered a planet which was later named Pluto.  Honouring Percival Lowell, as his initials made up the word's first two letters.  As it turned out Pluto could not be Planet X because it was way too small.

Scroll forward to 1989 when Voyager 2 did a flyby of Neptune and it was found that its mass was at least 0.5% less than first thought.  The Jet Propulsion Laboratory recalculated the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, the irregularities vanished and so did Planet X's need to there.  I suppose X could of been elsewhere at the time...bowling perhaps.

Now scroll forward five years and we get The Nibiru cataclysm put forward by a lady called Nancy Lieder who:

...has the ability to receive messages from extraterrestrials from the Zeta Reticuli star system through an implant in her brain. She stated that she was chosen to warn mankind that the object would sweep through the inner Solar System in May 2003...

2003 someone must have got their maths wrong, wow a stupid alien perhaps forgot to move the decimal point.  Working in base 14 must be a pain and then having to convert back to base 10 for us even more stupid folk on planet Earth.

Seriously though my problem is if it just over a year away why has not a single amateur astronomer spotted it yet, except in the form of exceptionally bad Youtube photographs.  In this day and age of modern digital photography you would think they could get one decent shot of it.  Much like all the bad shots of UFOs, Aliens and Elvis.

To read more about the cataclysm check out the Wikipedia article.

Apparently it is a massive government cover up (literally), they are using reflective panels in that part of sky so nobody notices.  Who knew?  Apparently the entire Internet but it is a well kept secret!  Except for those bad photographs of course those Men in Black must had turned down the opacity levels to moon someone.

Occam's razor rules and often gives a close shave except in the Chaotic universe of Nibiru where anything can happen.

The End of the World is Maybe Nigh

You know I have lost count of the number of times the world has been prophesied to end, still here after 2012 all that doom and gloom for that year all based upon the Mayan calendar because it finished in that year obviously nobody ordered new calendars 2013.  I sure the Spanish invasion probably put a dent in orders.

This time it is some chap on Youtube talking about the transit of Mercury passing in front of the Sun and the number three:

The Prophetico released a video last week analysing the correlation between the alignment of the planets and star constellations, suggesting this natural phenomenon could be of grave significance.

Mercury’s rare passing in front of the Sun on Monday, May 9 occurs only around 13 times a century and last took place in 2006.

What I love is that he is hedging his bets which is rare for a doomsayer:

The Prophetico explains that the moon will be exactly three days old at the time of Monday’s 7.5-hour Mercury transit which is significant as it is related to sex sins in the Bible.

The Prophetico warns that this could be a sign that this could be interpreted as the end times for humanity.

It is shame he brought in the Bible a book that has been translated many times and heavily edited by various different incarnations of the Church and not actually written down until several hundred of years after the events described in the book.  Lost in translation ring any bells.  Excerpt from Wikipedia below:

...the original Greek writings and manuscripts written by the original authors of the New Testament, have not survived. But historically copies exist of those original autographs, transmitted and preserved in a number of manuscript traditions. When ancient scribes copied earlier books, they sometimes wrote notes on the margins of the page (marginal glosses) to correct their text—especially if a scribe accidentally omitted a word or line—and to comment about the text. When later scribes were copying the copy, they were sometimes uncertain if a note was intended to be included as part of the text. Over time, different regions evolved different versions, each with its own assemblage of omissions and additions.

The Bible has become like modern day statistics which if you cherry pick what you want from the data you can reach the answer you were looking for.

Back to the 'Prophetico' the newspaper Express web article says:

The website summarises: “Judah will have to suffer in exile, although with the understanding that God will eventually thrash their enemies.

However I cannot find his website anywhere and the domain name is up for sale so perhaps he is leaning towards it ending.  Considering the quote above I think Judah is a reference to Edward Snowden it so fits with the text.  Oh look there's me cherry picking too, it is practically a national past time.

The main problem I have with any numbers or calendaring relating to ancient books written by man is the issue of the actual age of the planet.  Which at rough count is four and half billion years old or written in number form: 4,500,000,000 Okay I admit it does not sit well on the calendar and it is going to be a long year to say on a regular basis.  Taking any calendaring system produced by man in this context is arbitrary at best.

The other issue I have is man's arrogance assuming that we are somehow special in all the universe, to be put our existence into context:

...the modern form of humans only evolved about 200,000 years ago. Civilization as we know it is only about 6,000 years old, and industrialization started in the earnest only in the 1800s.

Astronomers are still working on the age of the universe but their best guess it about fourteen billion years old, so when someone pops up in the media says the world is going to end based upon the Bible and some arbitrary number systems we have come up with, I take it with a pinch of salt.

Real ways the world could end:

• Yellowstone national park volcano erupts that would be bad
• Bloody big asteroid smashes into the planet bad also
• I could die, it would be the end of world for me, very bad
• Earth, the alien TV show could be cancelled - okay probably not real

These are just a few of the potential disasters waiting round the corner.  If the world does end tomorrow I will happy in the fact that I will not have to get up early to go to work.  Of course if I am dead it will not matter at all, I am sure the universe can get along without me it certainly did before I was born.

It is all a matter of perspective and so the best course of action is to have fun.

Feels Good to Give

Last week I saw a headline in the Daily Mail (I do not read it, just noticed it whilst standing in the queue at Waitrose) about how Britain sends 0.7% of  the national income to foreign aid their complaint was that it is being to used fund palaces of the super rich in those countries instead of going to the poor.

Apparently they got a petition going that clocked up 100K signatures in 24 hours, they said the nation roared.  Well the population of the UK is 64.1 million it is more like a squeak than a roar.

The Huffington Post refutes this story somewhat: In Defence of Foreign Aid

I will be the first to admit that I do not give enough to charities however it nice to know that some of my taxes go people less fortunate that myself in third world countries or places hit by war.  It is putting the Great back into Britain.  According to the Daily Mail:

Britain's aid budget is now second only to that of the US thanks to the Prime Minister's insistence on raising spending to 0.7 per cent of national income.

People complain about migrate workers coming into Britain do you think they would come if their own countries were not ravaged by war or famine and/or other natural disasters.  Whilst we do live on an island we all still live on the same planet.

It is about time Britain gave something back for all the staggering cock ups in history throughout the world all in the name of the Empire.  You can blame whoever was in government at the time but ultimately we the people voted them in or we stood by and said nothing.

Britain has been making a mess of other people's countries since year dot however to name one from the early 20th Century just after World War I, Mesopotamia was broken up by Britain into what know today as Iran and Iraq.  Excerpt from Wikipedia:

Britain imposed a Hāshimite monarchy on Iraq and defined the territorial limits of Iraq without taking into account the politics of the different ethnic and religious groups in the country, in particular those of the Kurds and the Christian Assyrians to the north. During the British occupation, the Shi'ites and Kurds fought for independence, and the British employed Assyrian Levies to help quell these insurrections. Iraq also became an oligarchy government at this time.

I  was not even born yet but it feels like this was birth of bad things in Iran and Iraq, if only we had left them alone.  I will admit however that human nature being what it is I cannot blame all the bad things in the world upon my place of birth.

You think the Americans have had terrible foreign policies in their short history but Britain is a past master of making a pig's ear of foreign affairs.

Feels good to give something other than war.

Billionaire Bites

When I was still a kid (during the 1970s) I remember my Mum making a sweet that had a shortbread base layered with caramel and then topped with melted chocolate.  Which was pretty much heaven to me at the time.

Scroll forward thirty odd years and one day at work someone had a birthday and they brought in cakes for everyone.  To my surprise there in a plastic container was the same type of sweet from Waitrose but the slices were way smaller about three centimeters square.  Waitrose called them Millionaire Bites aka caramel shortbread which according to Wikipedia originated from The Australian Women's Weekly during the 1970s.

Last Halloween I decided to reinvent the sweet to be somewhat more decadent as befitting the festival being celebrated.

I changed the base from shortbread to a chocolate brownie then layered with caramel and topped with milk swiss chocolate.  Sadly I have no picture of it from last year but when I make another one I will update this post.

And yes it did taste very good indeed.

It is curious to note that there are three different methods for making caramel since at the time I had never made caramel before.

1. Boil Sugar and water together til it takes on the brown colour (don't stir) - classic recipe
2. Boil a can of condensed milk - 2-3 hours (seems too much time to invest in)
3. Heat butter and brown sugar until dissolved add condensed milk bring to boil stir until brown

Of course you can cheat and buy pre-made caramel in the shops, I took option three which added perfectly to my vision of the sweet.  I have to admit however I did cheat on the brownie recipe because I bought Betty Crocker's brownie mix which does save time especially when you are trying to make it all in one evening along with a baked cheesecake.

If you want to check out my seriously low number of recipes please go to my wiki site.

Star Wars: Parallel Forces

I have finally watched the new Star Wars film The Force Awakens, went shopping in Tesco Express for lunch and it was sitting there saying buy me only a tenner.  I figured how bad can it be it be, the people I that I know to have watched it have simply stated one word answers like: Awesome!  I already have the others so why not.

First off lets get the obvious stuff out of the way, the acting was good and the effects were the typical Hollywood blockbuster quality.

This next bit I warn you is a SPOILER ALERT although as it turns out not much one if you have seen the first film.  When I say first I mean Episode IV: A New Hope not the one where Darth Vader is just out of his nappies.

Opening scene oh look its a Star Destroyer exactly like all the other films, I am however willing to forgive this since it is a nod to the first three films.  However it does not stop there with its similarity to Episode IV: A New Hope.  Droid (BB-8) given secret plans crash lands on a desert planet does this sound familiar to you at all?

Basically you can marry most of the well known scenes from the first film to the Force Awakens although the order is different, let me give you a few more examples:

• Weapon that can destroy planets
• Millennium Falcon lifts off desert planet chased by bad guys
• Droid meets young person with potential Jedi powers
• Old warrior lets himself get killed by younger bad dude

You get the idea, there is some attempt at humour mostly by Hans Solo played wonderfully by Harrison Ford (still the star of the film) but does not quite make it.  Princess Leia is still wearing her hair with those braided circles on the sides of her head just in case I assume that the fans did not recognise her.  She does not look that old yet.

If you take the film on its own it is pretty good unfortunately I have seen the first film and its annoys me that the writers completely failed to come up with something original.  There is twist about who is Darth Vader's replacement which sadly is revealed a little too early for my likening.  I was not even vaguely surprised by the revelation.

Irony sucker punched me.

Smoke and Mirrors is Stranger than Fiction

I have recently read an article on Scott Adam's blog (creator of the Dilbert cartoon) about how science is an illusion using quantum mechanics as its base along with a cognitive scientist called Donald Hoffman who explains it (The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality) so much better than Mr Adams but not simpler.

I decided to post a comment on the article based upon both articles as I saw it, a more simplistic view:

Basically this is quantum theory taken to the nth degree. Atomic particles pop in and out of existence when we "observe" them or not as the case maybe. The cat is either dead or alive or most probably scratched its way out of the box having a night on the tiles leaving the radium wishing it had decayed sooner then at least it would have a dead cat as company.

Thinking this through does stuff at a quantum level fail to meet up to classical physics because it is for most part unobserved by conscious organisms whereas in the macro-verse that we live matter is under constant eyes whether they be human or otherwise.

Donald Hoffman suggests that there is consciousnesses all the way down that they create the reality we see and feel. Taking this theory to its logical conclusion (I could be wrong) if all of reality does not exist then these consciousnesses must exist outside of this reality otherwise the consciousnesses could not exist either.

Have I taken a complex idea and simplified it too much probably. I'm not a scientist just a part time unpaid out of the box thinker.

I post also second additional comment:

 ...however if you allow for Brane-World Scenarios then these consciousnesses could exist in a different Brane and if the consciousness were made up of particles (Idtrons perhaps) that were without mass with a spin of 2 like the hypothetical particle Graviton then they could pass between Branes or affect them. 

A whole Brane (Idverse) reality consisting of consciousnesses that create our physical world by observation alone.  Each of consciousness connects to a living organism whether it be human or not.

This reminds me of Philip Jose Farmer's series Riverworld (1971-83) whereby artificial souls (wathans) were created by an ancient alien race.

Logic is not a illusion if the consciousnesses are connected to us.

Then the whole of Donald Hoffman's ideas was refuted in this article by one of the world's best theoretical physicists Lubos Motl (never heard of him myself but I don't travel those circles).  I realised however this would potentially make an interesting baseline for new Alternate Reality Game so I set about writing the basics down.

The title for my game was Apex Ids:

Consciousnesses made up of Idtrons inhabiting a Brane world (Idverse), they grow by connections to living organisms in other brane worlds, starting from the microbe to intelligent life and beyond.  What is evolutionary best route for the Ids?

The basic idea is that at the beginning of the multiverse Idverses only contained one consciousness (Id), this first one grew so large that it no longer could interact with living organisms of our type of reality but it could still influence our reality through nature and whispering into the minds of the rich and powerful.  The first Id spawned other Ids as per Donald Hoffman's theory, now the question is how would these Ids grow (well used plot devices):

• Love/Peace/Harmony - speed growth in a Id
• Chaos - slows growth in a Id

The Apex Ids would have grown slow large that their best route for staying alive would be to control the growth of the Ids below them therefore I decided to go for a revolution of lower Ids against the Apex Ids, revolutions are all about taking control from the ones in power.

My revolutionaries were called The Church of Eon that on surface were all about peace and harmony but at the deepest levels intended to topple all the major governments of the world using people given super powers by use of drug therapies to enhance their physic abilities.  The basic goal of the Church was to stop all wars and get everyone to live in peace thereby starving out the Apex Ids.

Youtube is always an excellent resource for writing and ideas, my intent was to point the players at links to do with creating super powers which was fine until I came across this one:

Mind Science Kept Hidden - Documentary

This sounds fine until 4:50 minutes in at which point we are in conspiracy theory territory, I suppose it not be surprising that my fiction should mirror this "documentary" since I had recycled the usual suspects of any revolution.

Original thought doh!

Upon reflection I decided to drop the game and post it here instead, I still like its concept from a fictional perspective but it has lost its appeal for me.

Introduction

...so I thought since my life is currently not full of stuff happening at the moment I thought I would write a blog seems like the perfect time plus I love the irony of it.

I promise NOT to write about sex, religion, politics, reviews, movies, music, fiction and anything else you can think of that never seems to go down well at Sunday lunch.

 The only reason I am using this site is because it has best editing interface however I may cut and paste onto Tumblr & Google+ as well.

In case you were wondering who Foilhead is, I created him as a fictional character for a Alternate Reality Game, check out my wiki.

That's it hopefully you may enjoy what I write or not, polite comments welcome.