Land of the...OMG!

Well Trump has done something that most politicians never do when gaining office and that's attempt to fulfill election promises although I maybe generalising like I always do.  My previous post back in early November last year was perhaps a little bit optimistic:

I read Trump's policies after he had won to see what what we were in for and what effect he would have on the world, to say I was surprised would be a somewhat understatement.  Zero evidence of a southern wall and in fact very little of what was said in sound bytes throughout the campaign appeared in his official policies.  His policies are heavily watered down versions of his rhetoric, unfortunately his ideas on huge tax cuts, deregulation and massive public spending looks like a recipe for disaster.  Although since he is a successful businessman I would like to think he has a better understanding of managing money and running a country than Hilary Clinton.

Well the last part was, in the last few days since he has taken office the policies he intends to invoke will effectively cut American off from the rest of the world in terms of trade, science, basic human rights and the giving of aid.  It is only five days into his presidency I hate to think what it will be like in a couple of years time.  I would not be surprised if they started teaching Creationism in schools.

One wonders if half the population of the America are xenophobic since they voted for a man that is showing all the qualities of one.  Perhaps the election was rigged after all.

His recent statement about Iraq's oil is deeply disturbing I can only hope it was one of those sound bytes that is used to misdirect the public away from other news.

That news being the Trump administration is placing a gag order on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regarding all webpages, social media and Twitter feeds that have climate-change information.  In the land of the free, free speech just went out the window.  America is taking its first steps towards a police state, historians (if there are any left) will place a marker on this day in the timeline it will say: Beginning of America's fall.  There is a similar marker from last year when we in the UK voted to leave Europe.

Back in 1963 another President was killed for trying to change things for the better, maybe history will repeat itself but this time as a farce.  Not that I would ever condone such an act being the pacifist that I am but it would not surprise me if Trump did not finish his full term.

Trump's Tax plan mostly benefits the top 1%, so yet again the rich get richer.

Updated 26.01.17, what a surprise NOT: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-38760792

Big Brother

1984 has been here awhile now however the quality of the pictures are not as sharp as you have been led to believe.  Have you ever looked at CCTV camera footage?  I have once when I was in my teens doing jury service which was played on DAT tapes and quite recently.  The level of quality has not perceptively improved by much which makes no sense whatsoever considering the mega-pixels I get on my phone and yet CCTV footage is still truly abysmal.

I have watched lots of CSI/Crime shows where the forensic bods take CCTV footage of a car and immediately resolve its number plate by applying a special filter, that's pure fiction no facts whatsoever.  If you start off with big pixels and poor resolution no amount of fancy imaging techniques is going to help you just end up with bigger pixels.

Recently in the news there was a report about a NASA astronaut covering up an potential UFO on the ISS Webcam feed, where the quality close-up is pretty good indeed.  That being said the so called evidence the SecureTeam10 shows is somewhat lacking not to mention the pure coincidence of the Astronaut's hand being suddenly in the way.  The evidence lasts 4 seconds on the camera and they have to slow it considerably just to spot it which means the astronaut would have been unlikely to see anything in that short space of time especially since I am sure he was too busy doing his work.

I will be the first to admit I am not a astrophysicist however looking at the evidence I would say either it was a meteoroid which hit the atmosphere and bounced off or it was most likely an artifact within the camera itself remember no gravity even a little bit of dust inside the camera's innards can cause all sorts weird effects.  Although I admit the way it fell looked more like space junk to me.

On thing Conspiracy theorists love to do is look at old photos of the Moon landings either to say they are faked or to point at some vastly distance object and say its not naturally occurring because it is curved or looks too straight. Curves occur all the time in nature just look at spiral galaxies.

Wikipedia has an excellent page about Apollo photos, which is well worth a read.  The cameras back them used film and over the course of the Apollo missions they took thousands of photos a lot of which ended up on the cutting room floor because of poor quality, incorrect exposures etc.  The astronauts had been trained to use the electric Hasselblad cameras  however even with this training it takes time to get perfect shots or take an awful lot and get lucky.  To which I can testify, in the summer of 1993 I spent five weeks camping on Canada traveled roughly five thousand miles in a beat up Ford Explorer (1969) with two friends who were both competent photographers.  Myself however not so much, I took over six hundred photographs of which I whittled down to one hundred fifty of reasonable quality and this is with a point and click camera.  The picture below was taken quickly and I did not notice that the 'P' sign sat nicely on top of the 'arking' sign.  One of my friends returned a year later to take the same picture on purpose.

Which goes to show the more the pictures you take increases the likely hood of some quality shots.

Whilst camera quality has improved over the last fifty years it is still far from perfect, distance shots require big lens otherwise you end up with big pixels.  You cannot hold Apollo photos to same standard of photographs today that is just basically idiotic.

Adverts Denied!

Admittedly I did not really want them I was just curious as to what adverts would appear but Google Adsense sent me an email, excerpt below:

"It's our goal to provide our advertisers sites that offer rich and meaningful content, receive organic traffic and allow us to serve well-targeted ads to users. We believe that currently your site does not fulfil this criteria."

Oddly enough they cannot spell 'fulfill' correctly despite the fact Google spells it correctly for you.

Obviously I am not offering "rich and meaningful content" too bad!  This blog has always been about me putting my thoughts down when I want to.  If people want to read it fine by me,  I do like to share my wandering mind unfortunately it has been somewhat sporadic of late.  I blame my muse who is mostly likely holidaying is warmer climes.

The winter months are always quiet, pretty sure my mind avoids all forms of inspiration when its cold outside.  Probably a primal instinct, it tends stay in its cave.

It is currently snowing outside first snow we have had in nearly four years. 2010 & 2011 we had some snow, pretty sure I bought my snow shovel for the car from Amazon in 2011 which of course meant no more snow, til now.  It is meant to snow for four hours tonight and a couple tomorrow morning so perhaps finally my purchase will come in use.  Pretty big flakes too twas a pain to drive in, I hate driving in the snow.

Looking at the news is just pointless these days I mean what is fake news and what is real?  Intelligence agencies are leaking all over the place if you believe the news to be true, more like NOT!  Unless of course it is disinformation then it is probably true well false.  Oh! Hell! You know what I mean.

The Truth truly has become an Urban Myth!

I am sure Trump loves the irony.

Reality at a Distance

The curious thing about our universe/reality is that anything that is extremely far away from us does not make sense like for instance the fact that scientists think that the Universe is missing matter and light, to fix these discrepancies in the theory of everything they created bodge factors called Dark Matter & Dark Light. There was Dark Energy as well but they seem have spotted Gravity waves so the Dark Energy must exist.  If you leave our macro-verse and travel down to the very very small you eventually arrive at the Quantum level where surprise surprise nothing makes sense either.

Atomic particles appear and disappear seemingly randomly and if you observe a particle it changes its position I can only assume particles are particularly shy of any external observers.  Particles can also be entangled with one another which apparently allows for instantaneous communication between the two.  It has been referred to as spooky action at a distance.

Classical physics all works nicely at the human level of perception but once you observe the very distant or the very small reality falls apart, why is that?  Are there holes in the make-up of this reality?  Is Reality perhaps nothing more than a vastly complex computer model and what we are seeing are the edges of the model whereby the designers of Reality did not think they needed to code for the Quantum level or the larger workings of the Universe.  If we are part of a computer system how could we ever prove a negative or positive.

Another possibility although I suppose somewhat similar to a computer model would be what Creationists believe (no facts just belief) based upon on the literal truth of the Bible.  Where supposedly God created the Heaven and Earth in six days, I suppose it could be argued that since the Bible does not fully defined the length of a day those six days could have encompassed four billion years which is roughly the age of the Earth.  Humans have only been around for the last 200,000 years and in the last 6000 years civilisation started.

Creationists have fallen out of fashion in many religious circles over the last decade and have been replaced with a new philosophy called Intelligent Design whereby they do not believe in the literal truth of the Bible however they still maintain their belief despite all evidence to contrary:

“certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection."

It is somewhat curious that Intelligent Design has evolved from Creationism by a process of natural selection.

What are the chances to discovering the real truth in my life time probably very unlikely unless someone invents a Interstellar drive or an Ant-Man suit which allows us to find the sign which says:

Abandon all hope all that enter here.
And an exit sign that says: Yeah! Right!