People are asking why I don't update more frequently, in answer to this question, I present: a boring update:
The other day I moved from the smallest bedroom in my house into the biggest bedroom in my house. The big bedroom was previously occupied by Joann Massanaoud, the anally-retentive Parisian with the annoyingly foppish laugh, but now he's moved out (I think I broke his will), and his master bedroom was left vacant.
This probably happened a couple of weeks ago, but I've been reluctant to move in because the door was closed. Now, I hadn't seen Joann for days by this point, but, like Schroedinger, I couldn't be certain that Joann wasn't still in his room without collapsing the quantum probabilities and opening that door - and even though it was really unlikely, I didn't really fancy the odd chance of storming into my housemate's room with all my stuff to find that he's just been sitting on his bed silently and in the dark for the past fortnight. That would have been awkward.
But yeah, I finally moved in yesteryesterday, and its so spacious! I actually have space to traverse. In the small room, I was literally only able to open the door open a crack and then leap onto my bed. On the other hand, all that empty space means that it does get a lot colder, and I haven't been able to pick up any reception for any of the Fours on my TV yet...
Speaking of TV. I was watching 'The Passion' on the Beeb on sunday, and James Nesbitt makes a really good Roman. The character of King Herod was made to be really sympathetic and Jesus was basically just a weirdo - which is a good angle I feel.
Speaking of Jesus, I saw this thing about Jesus within Islam. Basically, Muslims quite highly revere Jesus, acknowledging him as one of their most important prophets, however, they deny that he was God, and that he died in order to absolve all Mankind of sin. Muslims like to say to Christians that they believe in Jesus too, and that they have so much in common and they should be bestest friends... which seems silly to me, because by denying the divinity and the sacrifice of Jesus, they're denying the most important aspects of Christianity. It'd be like gatecrashing an Amnesty International meeting and saying, "Oh yeah! I believe in Human Rights too! Ah yeah, Human Rights, they're great, I love 'em to bits. Except um, I don't believe that the right to not be enslaved or murdered can be included as a Human Right..."
I'm not saying that religions shouldn't be the bestest of friends, (well, I might be, as an antitheist, the principle of divide and conquer comes to mind...), but it seems there are some things about your faith that you should maybe keep quiet if you want to win friends.
Hmm... I don't think this update is sufficiently boring... Errr... Ooh. Last night's Deep Space Nine was really good. It involved time travel and there was a dilemma. Seriously, I think DS9, (as lame-o Trekkies abbreviate it), is the ideal science fiction series, as opposed to the other Star Treks where there'll be a problem for one episode, but then the ship will just fly away from it forever as the credits role, DS9 is set on a space station, a stationary space station, so when there's a problem, it'll still be there next week. As such the series is incredibly non-episodic, instead preferring huge intricate intertwining story arcs that spread across several seasons. Its a joy to watch.
In academic news, I, um... I haven't done any of my essays for this term. I seriously have no idea what the fuck is wrong with me. I mean, I know that nobody enjoys writing essays, but I seem to have a proper psychological block. It sometimes gets to the point where I'll be looking at an empty word document and find myself literally wanting to do anything else. Like, if you asked me whether I'd rather work on an essay for an hour, or be kicked in the bollucks for an hour, I would really have to think about it.
That's not to say I'm not interested. The essay questions I picked are all pretty interesting, and I reckon I could probably produce some quite detailed blog entries on their topics, or talk at length about them... But I just literally can't bring myself to start typing out these essays. Maybe its some kind of psychological crusade of self-destructiveness... I do have a tendency for those.
Tuesday 18 March 2008
Monday 10 March 2008
A GameCube for the GameSquare
A certain someone tells me that there three things that one needs to take interest in in order to be a real man:
So then I started to drift away. I later got a Nintendo 64, but I never really got completely into it, I only really had three or four games for it...
UNTILL NOW! The other day I bought a GameCube. My friend Chris was visiting Lancaster, and he dragged me into GameStation, (what is it with gamers and KangarooCasing?), he looked around, I worked out stupid ways of saying 'video games', ('fiddero james' was my favourite). On the way out, I say the GameCube in the front window. It was a special edition including a copy of Pokémon Colloseum, and it only cost £24. I frantically tried to think of a reason why I wasn't immediately buying it, but failed, so I went in and bought it up.
The Pokémon franchise is the sole exception to my distaste for video games. I got really into it when it was big and new, (the games, not the cards, trading cards are stupid), and I never fell out of love with it. One of those three or four games I had for my N64 was Pokémon Stadium. But Pokémon alone wasn't enough to keep up-to-date with video gaming. I only ever owned an old fashioned monochrome GameBoy, so when the games stopped being compatible with that I stopped playing them. I downloaded Emulators of the new games and played those for a bit, but you couldn't trade with Emulators, or do any of the other things that needed link cables. BUT NOW! I have my £24 GameCube. So welcome back to Obsessionville, Tom!
Also, I just happened to buy this in the middle of essay-writing season... its almost as if I did that on purpose...
- The Sportball: Uncheck. Its pointless, noone ever makes any witty quips, and it just goes on forever, (figuratively, and literally). The Sportball is lame and I hate it.
- Automocars: Uncheck. In my opinion, driving is a very antisocial activity. People go around in their huge metal phallic symbols excreting tonnes of poisonous gases into the poor defenceless atmosphere. Also, some cars make loud noises. People whose cars make loud noises should be punched in the head untill they stop moving.
- And thirdly, Videro Games: Uncheck... but not as unchecked as everything else... More than the other two things, I can just about see the point of video games, (except games about playing sportball or driving automocars, those are lame), but its still not something I'm really interested in. Maybe its cos I'm not very good at them, but then maybe I'm not very good at them cos I don't play them very often? Also, they're quite expensive... like, a well-stocked video game collection is a several thousand pound investment, accumalatively. And I don't really see that its worth it...
So then I started to drift away. I later got a Nintendo 64, but I never really got completely into it, I only really had three or four games for it...
UNTILL NOW! The other day I bought a GameCube. My friend Chris was visiting Lancaster, and he dragged me into GameStation, (what is it with gamers and KangarooCasing?), he looked around, I worked out stupid ways of saying 'video games', ('fiddero james' was my favourite). On the way out, I say the GameCube in the front window. It was a special edition including a copy of Pokémon Colloseum, and it only cost £24. I frantically tried to think of a reason why I wasn't immediately buying it, but failed, so I went in and bought it up.
The Pokémon franchise is the sole exception to my distaste for video games. I got really into it when it was big and new, (the games, not the cards, trading cards are stupid), and I never fell out of love with it. One of those three or four games I had for my N64 was Pokémon Stadium. But Pokémon alone wasn't enough to keep up-to-date with video gaming. I only ever owned an old fashioned monochrome GameBoy, so when the games stopped being compatible with that I stopped playing them. I downloaded Emulators of the new games and played those for a bit, but you couldn't trade with Emulators, or do any of the other things that needed link cables. BUT NOW! I have my £24 GameCube. So welcome back to Obsessionville, Tom!
Also, I just happened to buy this in the middle of essay-writing season... its almost as if I did that on purpose...
Friday 7 March 2008
Doomsay
Hey, you know how food prices keep going up? That's pretty lame. Do you know why that happens? Because food is harder to grow these days. 'Cos of Global Warming.
Most of the nations that produced an agricultural surplus 20 years ago, (i.e. produced more tonnage of food that they themselves ate), now... um... don't. In Asia, for instance, China and India were once renown for their rice exports, now, in the entire region, only Thailand produces enough rice to be able to safely flog on the world markets without risking famine within its own borders.
The same goes for all other staple crops in the world. Millenia of selective breeding has made the plants we eat very specified. The problem with biological specification is that it leaves you very open to extinction, especially when your specific environment begins to whither away. Well, maybe thats a bit alarmist, there are countless breeds of staple crops - if a farmer notices his current crop isn't taking too well, he can order in a load of seeds for a different breed that will handle better... But this can only go so far, agricultural difficulties are steadily accumulating.
And hey, that word, 'steadily'... yeah... don't get used to it. Right now Climate Change is steady, but it won't stay that way. There are a certain number of 'tipping points' in the global system, that, once reached, cause huge chain reactions. For instance, the temperature in Antarctica only has to raise by a few more degrees to drastically increase the amount of meltwater dripping off the Antarctic Mountains, this water seeps down through the ice and accumulates between the snow and the land... essentially lubricating the entire ice sheet. Eventually, several million tonnes of ice will simply slip off the land that holds them, and result in a large increase in sea level.
This itself will cause a new chain reaction, a higher sea means higher winds, and higher winds means warmer weather at higher heights, warm weather at high heights, especially in the polar regions, will lubricate more ice sheets and fuck us up even more. So don't expect anything moderate. Ice Sheet Collapse will either not happen, or happen to an insane degree... and the former is not very likely.
So what do people do? They say, 'Uh-oh! We need to do something!', but, because they themselves are not very well informed, and, more importantly, because there is a huge multi-million pound industry dependent on misinforming them, the completely well-meaning urge to 'do something' ends up causing more harm than good.
Case in point: biofuels. Now, there are essentially two issues at stake in much what is jumbled under the 'Green' umbrella. The first is the maintaining of resources, making sure we don't run out of anything crucial, the second is protecting the macro-environment, minimising the output of greenhouse gases, etc... sometimes, these two issues interlap: for instance, recycling certain metals assures that new mines need not be opened, and preserves mineral resources for future generations, whilst simultaneously saving energy, as metal recycling often only requires a simple process of remelting and remoulding, as opposed to a process of heavy-mining, smelting, schmelting, zibbilimelting and all those other clever, yet very carbon-intensive processes, that metalmongers have devised over the centuries: metal recyling preserves resources and saves energy. However, this interlapping is far from common. Biofuels are often believed to be good for the environment: they are not. The chemical reaction taking place within a tank of biofuel is identical to the chemical reaction taking place within a tank of diesel... the benefit of biofuel is that it does not require the burrowing into of oil deposits, its impact on the atmosphere is negligible if not nonexistant.
Furthermore, the production of biofuels relies on huge areas of arable land... we're starting to see this today, in communities where people are starving, farmers chose to rip out their stable crops in order to produce the cash crops needed to made the biofuels. El Jefe himself, Fidel Castro, is a staunch proponent of this view: he says that Western insistance that Developing World farmers turn their attentions to the growing of plants to fill our cars' engines rather than the growing of plants to fill the bellies of the world's poorest people amounts to a campaign of Imperialist genocide... He may have a point.
So, good intentions + oppurtunistic capitalists = a plethora of supposedly 'Green' schemes to free you of your cash without necessarily assisting our species' ability to survive in the slightest.
And that's why environmentalism won't work. Because the principle actors involved in stopping Climate Change have no interest in stopping Climate Change. They have an interest in selling peace-of-mind to people by assuring them that they themselves are helping; supposedly, one would assume, the best way to convince an individual that they are helping would be to actually make them help... but this doesn't take into account how easily tricked human beings are. So people go about recycling their used paper, despite the fact that a) paper biodegrades completely in landfills, b) paper recycling is a mechanical industry, complete with all the conveyer belts and furnaces and all that carbon-burning shebang and c) tree farming is one of the only industries in the world that actually produces more oxygen than CO2.
My personal opinion is that instead of trying to prevent Global Warming, we should prepare for it. Forbid unsensible building on flood planes and deconstruct/dyke up anything under 30ft elevation above sea level, invest more money into greenhouse and hydroponic farming, and other methods that don't rely on the external environment. Because these are concrete aims. If we hire private companies to do these, there are simple and intuitive ways to make sure that they do actually do them, in contrast to the claims that we are given these days, ("We've built an off-shore wind farm that will help the environment!" - Will it? Can you prove it? - "Absolutely not!").
However, opinions like these are considered defeatist amongst mainstream environmentalists... so, yeah, that's why we're fucked.
Most of the nations that produced an agricultural surplus 20 years ago, (i.e. produced more tonnage of food that they themselves ate), now... um... don't. In Asia, for instance, China and India were once renown for their rice exports, now, in the entire region, only Thailand produces enough rice to be able to safely flog on the world markets without risking famine within its own borders.
The same goes for all other staple crops in the world. Millenia of selective breeding has made the plants we eat very specified. The problem with biological specification is that it leaves you very open to extinction, especially when your specific environment begins to whither away. Well, maybe thats a bit alarmist, there are countless breeds of staple crops - if a farmer notices his current crop isn't taking too well, he can order in a load of seeds for a different breed that will handle better... But this can only go so far, agricultural difficulties are steadily accumulating.
And hey, that word, 'steadily'... yeah... don't get used to it. Right now Climate Change is steady, but it won't stay that way. There are a certain number of 'tipping points' in the global system, that, once reached, cause huge chain reactions. For instance, the temperature in Antarctica only has to raise by a few more degrees to drastically increase the amount of meltwater dripping off the Antarctic Mountains, this water seeps down through the ice and accumulates between the snow and the land... essentially lubricating the entire ice sheet. Eventually, several million tonnes of ice will simply slip off the land that holds them, and result in a large increase in sea level.
This itself will cause a new chain reaction, a higher sea means higher winds, and higher winds means warmer weather at higher heights, warm weather at high heights, especially in the polar regions, will lubricate more ice sheets and fuck us up even more. So don't expect anything moderate. Ice Sheet Collapse will either not happen, or happen to an insane degree... and the former is not very likely.
So what do people do? They say, 'Uh-oh! We need to do something!', but, because they themselves are not very well informed, and, more importantly, because there is a huge multi-million pound industry dependent on misinforming them, the completely well-meaning urge to 'do something' ends up causing more harm than good.
Case in point: biofuels. Now, there are essentially two issues at stake in much what is jumbled under the 'Green' umbrella. The first is the maintaining of resources, making sure we don't run out of anything crucial, the second is protecting the macro-environment, minimising the output of greenhouse gases, etc... sometimes, these two issues interlap: for instance, recycling certain metals assures that new mines need not be opened, and preserves mineral resources for future generations, whilst simultaneously saving energy, as metal recycling often only requires a simple process of remelting and remoulding, as opposed to a process of heavy-mining, smelting, schmelting, zibbilimelting and all those other clever, yet very carbon-intensive processes, that metalmongers have devised over the centuries: metal recyling preserves resources and saves energy. However, this interlapping is far from common. Biofuels are often believed to be good for the environment: they are not. The chemical reaction taking place within a tank of biofuel is identical to the chemical reaction taking place within a tank of diesel... the benefit of biofuel is that it does not require the burrowing into of oil deposits, its impact on the atmosphere is negligible if not nonexistant.
Furthermore, the production of biofuels relies on huge areas of arable land... we're starting to see this today, in communities where people are starving, farmers chose to rip out their stable crops in order to produce the cash crops needed to made the biofuels. El Jefe himself, Fidel Castro, is a staunch proponent of this view: he says that Western insistance that Developing World farmers turn their attentions to the growing of plants to fill our cars' engines rather than the growing of plants to fill the bellies of the world's poorest people amounts to a campaign of Imperialist genocide... He may have a point.
So, good intentions + oppurtunistic capitalists = a plethora of supposedly 'Green' schemes to free you of your cash without necessarily assisting our species' ability to survive in the slightest.
And that's why environmentalism won't work. Because the principle actors involved in stopping Climate Change have no interest in stopping Climate Change. They have an interest in selling peace-of-mind to people by assuring them that they themselves are helping; supposedly, one would assume, the best way to convince an individual that they are helping would be to actually make them help... but this doesn't take into account how easily tricked human beings are. So people go about recycling their used paper, despite the fact that a) paper biodegrades completely in landfills, b) paper recycling is a mechanical industry, complete with all the conveyer belts and furnaces and all that carbon-burning shebang and c) tree farming is one of the only industries in the world that actually produces more oxygen than CO2.
My personal opinion is that instead of trying to prevent Global Warming, we should prepare for it. Forbid unsensible building on flood planes and deconstruct/dyke up anything under 30ft elevation above sea level, invest more money into greenhouse and hydroponic farming, and other methods that don't rely on the external environment. Because these are concrete aims. If we hire private companies to do these, there are simple and intuitive ways to make sure that they do actually do them, in contrast to the claims that we are given these days, ("We've built an off-shore wind farm that will help the environment!" - Will it? Can you prove it? - "Absolutely not!").
However, opinions like these are considered defeatist amongst mainstream environmentalists... so, yeah, that's why we're fucked.
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