The Skater Diet

soda-2820018__480  You heard it here first: All About The Skater Diet!

Skateboarders are a curious breed. They’re a very eclectic group. They’re selected from all ages, even though they’re mostly school-age. They all have different levels of intellect, though they’re mostly the young and bored, experimentally creative. They come from the streets, and they come from suburban homes. Some have even been known to come out of the city. They come from inland and the coast. They come from surfing ancestry. Some of them fear the ocean, and others love it.

Despite all of these differences, they all have one thing in common, and it’s not that they all have traces of the Ocean Mother in their bones. The thing they all have in common is that they are all thin. Scrawny, even. It’s a secret that has eluded mankind for ages: Why are the skateboarders all as thin as sticks? I’m about to divulge that secret. All you have to do to find out what I know is to send me 19.95$ in freshly drawn ATM currency. JUST KIDDING! Send NO money! I’m going to tell you for FREE!

Here’s how it works: First you have to go get yourself a skateboard. Don’t worry about the quality of this item, because you’ll have it trashed in about a week. The important thing here is that you get a board; it could be a stick with wheels, just get one. Then you ride it. You ride it hard and you ride it a lot. You ride it down the street. You ride it to your local skatepark. Does it matter if you know any tricks? No. Everyone has a first time. The tricks will come, so don’t worry. If you’re a little bit nervous about going to the skatepark because it’s a new set of peers for you, then use this simple disguise: put five Band-Aids on one of your elbows, and another one on your forehead. Everyone there will assume that you had an accident that left you off balance. But that’s not where you should focus. Do you want to diet, or not? Don’t get me distracted. The rest of The Skater Diet is that you skate all day. You only take a break around lunchtime, when you go to the closest convenience store (7-11 is recommended by 4 out of 5 skaters) and buy the largest sugary beverage you can buy. You take that with you, and you skate out the rest of the day.

Simple, right? And it works! I personally know people who have lost tons of pounds by doing this fabulous diet program. Even better is that The Skater Diet is legal in the U.K., Australia, North and South America, and even Japan! Get yours going today!

Robots (Control)

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One of humanity’s worst fears is kind of a Frankensteinian fear. We fear that we’ll make something so powerful and intelligent that we will end up serving it. Robots are our new Frankenstein’s Monster. They can have superior control, advanced tools, super powerful limbs, and nearly prescient intelligence. Of course, a robot with artificial intelligence can only be as smart as the smartest person who programmed it–except that many of us who work in the field of programming don’t work alone, so the intelligence is compounded.

Not long ago, in the news, we saw that self-driving cars already messed up royally. That happened fast, didn’t it? So how long until an AI robot takes over your house, just like everyone fears? See, we can all learn a lesson from Star Wars. “Droids” were everywhere in that movie world, but did you see anyone really respecting the “droids”, or making close companions out of them? No. Did Luke fly a self-piloting speeder? No. He was the pilot.

What else can we learn from Star Wars? If you’re really smart, you make your closest companion a Wookie, not a robot. Make your closest friends people who have telekinesis, not artificial intelligence. Make sure you have the ultimate control over any and all robots in your house. (Heard of emergency protocols? If not, you will.) And make sure whatever vehicle you choose can be piloted by you—just in case.

Skyward Hawking

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One of the best things I ever heard come out of any scientific mind was when Stephen Hawking said that we could travel at the speed of light if we would only peel off the nonessential parts of our personal mass.

Isn’t that a great analogy for death? Our spiritual self becomes free from the handicap of a limited, mortal shroud. Is a spirit massless? What we know about life is limited. What we know about death is likewise limited. How is a person made? How is a person unmade? When is death really certain? When does life begin? Some say before the temporal body is conceived, life begins. Others claim that only after the baby takes its first breath, life begins. These are all valid points of view, and worth considering. Scientifically we can see that life is in the smallest parts of a person’s birth, but whether those parts still belong to the mother and father, or if they already have a life of their own is still up for discussion and discovery.

If our intrinsic mass is the only thing slowing us down from traveling the speed of light, then how do we manage to shed off the inessential portions without actually dying? It’s definitely an interesting and fun thing to think about: What are the essential parts of the human form? What is the ideal mass for something to travel at the speed of light? Hawking may already have discovered the secrets.

So far, there is only one thing we know of that can travel faster than the speed of light, and that is thought. And thought is easily defined as having no discernible mass, so it fits neatly in Hawking’s physics.

One of the things limiting us to patrolling our own galaxy is the fact that it takes us so long to get from one place to another. Right now, we’re settling for the idea of having outposts on the various planets and moons and other space-rocks that could line the way for us to explore elsewhere. We would leapfrog our way out. But if we could master the reduction and simplification principle, we might go much farther in less time.

Food for thought, via the skyward thinking of our dear Stephen Hawking. See you on the other side of the unknown!

Video Gamer’s Reality

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Have you ever heard a song and thought, That reminds of my favorite video game…?

There are a few diehard Zelda fans who revere Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero” because it might have been in the game. They still know the real title music when they hear it. They know when they hear something even close in style that they’ve played a game with that kind of music in it. Oh yeah, the thumbs start trembling excitedly and their eyes glaze over as if they’re suddenly transported right into that interactive world.

Have you ever seen a chevron painted on the street, like the one in the picture above, and thought, This should give me a burst of speed…?

If you have, then you know exactly what it’s like to live in the video gamer’s reality. It must be some kind of parallel world, because people from far parts of the globe have reported experiences like that. One minute you’re writing reports on your office computer, and the next you’re flying through the darkness of the starry universe shooting down enemy ships. One minute you’re driving the company truck, the next minute your driving a tank. One minute you’re riding the bus, and the next minute you’re driving the bus erratically, smashing down the pedal, racing for that next ramp so you can leap this ten ton hunk of diesel burning machismo over the broken overpass…and then you come down, not landing the bus, but landing your sense of reality right back where you were. You wish you were there, but there is no there. At least not anything you can hold down and make it stay.

One more: Have you ever accidentally looked over someone’s shoulder, someone you don’t know, and saw them playing a game on their phone like Candy Crush, Angry Birds, Plants vs. Zombies, or Geometry Dash and you wanted so bad to tell them how to play the level they’re on because you’ve already beaten it, and you know they’re going to make a mistake, but you don’t say anything because, well, you don’t know that person, and that would be really awkward to jump right in and say something, plus they would probably get mad and tell you it was your fault that they blew the level, and that’s what you would do if someone over-the-shoulder played your game for you?

Where’s My AI?

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Have you ever heard of apophenia? It means to communicate by using a series of seemingly unrelated ideas. Well, I have an acquaintance, even a friend, who makes lots of sense when I speak to him directly, but when he creates online conversations, he is totally apophenic. He trips from subject to subject so rapidly, there are few people who follow his online rants. In fact, there are few people who can follow his online rants. He does not construct a paragraph thoughtfully. For instance, while chatting with him about his pet peeve, “climate change”, he managed to change the subject seven times. He wandered off into subjects like the caffeine and cocaine contents of certain soda, the pay-off of American auto manufacturers by their government, and how many people work at NASA. Now, if you take all of these subjects one by one, you can see how they do relate to the original topic, though the relation is no doubt indirect. It may even be interesting to note here that one definition of the word apophenia is to read connective meaning into someone’s seemingly unrelated ideas. So, for me to understand my apophenic friend even better, I have to employ apophenia? It’s not easy.

Another acquaintance of mine, who, unfortunately, I can’t really say is a friend, has autism. For this man, I have to employ a great deal of patience. He does not understand figures of speech at all. He takes every word literally. If you tell him you sent smoke signals, he would look up in the sky for the smoke. If you tell him he ate crow, he would mentally review his last few meals. If you told him someone was pulling his leg, he would ask you why you can’t see the obvious truth—no one is even so much as holding his leg.

And this is where I think AI could shine. Really, really shine. If I had an Artificial Intelligence program to communicate with both of these men, then more clear sentences could be arranged, more clear thoughts could be passed around. Of course, we would have to input the specific case of each man. I would have to tell the AI that the first man uses apophenia. I would have to tell the AI that the second man has autism, and probably I would have to tell the AI what sort of autism. And of course the autism would have to be diagnosed to discover the specific kind. Then again, an AI could be trained to detect the subtle nuances of an autistic mind.

The great conclusion of all of this would be that we could all communicate with each other more effectively. I can just imagine how the AI would pare down the first man’s ideas like this: “And I believe in thegungadincocacolamachinepoisoncontroleradication fromouterspacetimecontinuumfactoreconomicsofahockeygamefistfight will cause climate stasis.” So that I would hear only: “I believe in climate stasis.”

And then with the second man, I would say, “He’s pulling your leg.” And he would hear, “He is not telling you the truth. He is instead fabricating a non-existent scenario for your entertainment and amusement, while simultaneously using you as part of the humor. You are now friends. The appropriate response is to laugh, make a fist, and punch him in the shoulder.”