That rocket-powered car you planned to be the first person on the planet to 3D-print and test yourself?
Tag Archives: technology
New rules
A new subgenre of videogames forces you to be aware of the mental needs of your fellow gamers, with depression, PTSD and other mental conditions affecting a player’s ability to fully participate in MMORG programs. Some players spend their whole time in therapy or in the hospital recovering from injuries in previous game sessions. Some players actively participate as mental health professionals, family members and other support group members.
The subgenre has increased game sales tremendously.
New gamers are so heavily involved they can’t distinguish the games from real life.
The games aren’t different than real life, except that real life has now been fully monetised to look like games, every person on Earth having been incorporated and their points/lives/likes/views/clickthroughs providing them enough income they can afford to work in part-time jobs.
Long live the commerce revolution!
Scrum with rum on the run in the rain
Tonight I will sleep.
How much can two (or more) people synchronise their states of energy?
Bai floated across the room, feeling ill, tired from her travels across the planet’s surface, to-and-from the Orbiter Entertainment Conference Centre circling Mars.
An ancient, well-preserved copy of the Oxford Multilingual Dictionary suspended in a stationary position above Lee’s desk.
“Are you okay?”
Bai shrugged. “I didn’t sleep well last night, got maybe 2 marshours’ sleep, same the night before.”
“Do you want to practice our dance?”
Bai attempted a weak smile. “That’s why I’m here. Let’s do it.”
As they stepped through the first 40 marsecs of their routine repeatedly, they stopped occasionally for a break.
Bai stopped and looked Lee in the eyes. “Look at this.”
In his thoughts, Lee watched a conversation between Bai and a man whose identity was left blank.
The man walked up to Bai in the conference centre bar. “I know everything about you.”
“You do.”
“Yeah. You got that tattoo within the last few weeks, didn’t you?”
“Nope. Had it for over two years.”
“No you didn’t. I said I know you. You just got it.”
“Sorry, but you’re wrong.”
“I missed you. Where have you been the last two weeks?”
“I was out of town.”
“What were you doing?”
“I was working.”
“What kind of work do you do?”
“I thought you knew everything about me.”
[The sound of crickets chirping had been inserted from Bai’s longterm memory.]
Bai stopped showing her memory to Lee. “What do you think of that?”
“That guy…he…”
“He’s the chief of police, that’s who he is. Thinks his orbiter privileges give him some sort of special abilities.”
“Did you give him that look of yours?”
Bai made a face that said ‘Are you talking to me?’
Lee smiled. He responded to everyone differently, some making him laugh uncontrollably. Bai gave him a warm feeling inside just by being herself, cracking her jokes that were so funny to Lee he was embarrassed to let himself let his boyish guffaw snort out loud. “Did that turn him off?”
“I wish. He even said he had a special friendship with my boyfriend, said that my boyfriend, being military, was going to leave me. I told his he was wrong. My boyfriend is French — French boyfriends have to go on to the next woman — it’s in their DNA.”
Bai sat down, exhausted. She took a few sips of energy water and a few drops of baby food formula. “This is the best stuff, no matter what they say.”
Lee nodded.
After their dance showcase practice, they worked on a few moves from a historic dance form called Lindy Hop.
Bai described the best she could how the dance moves should appear in engineering terms, which Lee quickly absorbed.
They cut their practice short because Bai was feeling too weak to go on.
Later that day, Guin met Lee for more dance practice. They reviewed their previous dance lesson stored on the ISSA Net, seeing where they needed improvement and went from there.
Lee’s empathetic neuron net was extra sensitive to people who triggered his proximity sensor array, most notably Bai and Guin in the last few days. His brain circuitry surged with pulsating neurochemical signals, flooding his thoughts with old, broken memories, incomplete images and uncategorised emotions, all at the same time.
After the lesson review, Lee allowed his thoughts to relax, leaving unanswered questions from earlier in the week to fade into the background.
However, as they warmed up, Guin sensed Lee’s tense shoulders and arms. She told him to relax, let their arms connected to their hands form a smiley face.
Lee’s conscious thoughts understood the word “relax” but after a terrible car smashup on Earth when he was a teenager, Lee had forgotten how to translate the word into action for the nerves, muscles, ligaments and tendons of his left arm and shoulder.
He did not have the knowledge to ask Guin what “relax” meant. He wanted to learn but his thoughts were still disconnected from the past few days of rewiring habitual pathways.
Guin kept working on the dance steps with Lee, slowly working with him to forget what he was doing, no longer thinking but dancing the steps, closing the gap between them and fading Lee’s personal space into nothingness.
Lee could have let the ISSA Net get rid of the annoying brain-muscle connection problems but he was “old skoowuhl” as Shadowgrass called him and liked the challenge of the personal struggle of his current self forming around and against the previous versions of himself left in deadends and byways of his central nervous system.
They knocked out the steps.
Next on Lee’s list was working through the unexplored feelings he had for Guin and Bai, decades old, just as Bai could recall an old man named Marcus she remembered training when the man was a teenager.
There was so much more to learn about them and their shared connections.
But what’s a lifetime for if one can’t return to Earth in one’s thoughts and go wakeboarding every now and then?
Guin and Lee checked in on Shadowgrass to see how his homework was coming along. Shadowgrass was studying the history of the extinct social system called politics, trying to understand the need for hierarchical bureaucratic layers of society once called government. “Dad, did we really used to waste so much energy on superfluous levels of managing our species’ resource needs?”
“Yes, son, we did. That’s why Earth’s climate changed so drastically over a short period of time. Mismanaged priorities.”
“I’m glad we’re not like that.”
Me, too, son. Me, too.”
Guin turned to go. “Sorry, guys, but I’ve got a rover’s load of work to do at the lab. Lee, please practice the apache move we went over. I want you to have it down to a science when I get back next sol.”
“Sure thing. Don’t work too hard.”
“‘Work’? You mean, don’t have too much fun!”
The three of them laughed at Lee’s slip. ‘Work’ had almost completely left the common language of Mars, replaced by Martian society’s ability to shift colonisation needs according to the abilities and desires of the nonrobotic inhabitants such as humans.
As Lee rolled into bed alone, he found himself crying, a memory of his father passing through his thoughts. He still loved his father after all these years, having forgiven his father for unknowingly mistreating his son in his attempt to raise his son the best way he knew how in the moment and based on his personality shaped by his own father’s mistreatment of him.
Living longer didn’t make old memories go away, just more memories to choose from, the earliest ones gaining or fading in strength as memories accumulated and cross-referenced themselves.
His mother didn’t raise a fool, just watched him often make a fool of himself as he grew up.
Kickstarter Update #1
Hey, you fans out there! Guess what?
This is the first major update on my official Kickstarter campaign.
I am totally excited because this project, which I’ll detail in a later update, is a sure winner.
I know you’ll love it.
But, before I launch the Kickstarter project, I want you to join me as I walk the path of a soon-to-be successful entrepreneur.
Success requires planning.
LOTS and LOTS of planning.
And research.
So, without further ado, let’s dive into some research.
Before we get started, let’s create a folder on our Internet-connected notebook PC and call the folder something fun.
How about “Kickstarter Project Xceed Xpectations“?:
A good place to store our research.
Easiest next step, conduct an Internet search for Kickstarter business plans:
Probably the most important point about launching a project on Kickstarter is actually knowing what kind of projects you can launch on Kickstarter. Not exactly rocket science here but it pays to be attentive!
Let’s jump over to Kickstarter and read some of their basic requirements:
Well, good news so far. We can fit our Project Xceed Xpectations easily into one of the categories.
But what about a good Kickstarter-based crowdfunding business plan?
By now, the Internet is well-noded with suggestions about a successful business plan but let’s just stick to two videos:
- Young Female Entrepreneurs’ “How to be Successful in your Kickstarter Campaign“
- Marty Koenig’s “Kickstarter crowdfunding checklist“
The second one first, which can be boiled down to two important details. Yes, two again.
- First, 90% of crowdfunded projects have met/exceeded their goals after reaching 30% of funding.
- Second, a quick list of important tips:
- Have a pitch video
- Offer three or more perks
- Update your backers and followers every few days, preferably every day
- Post media to our gallery frequently
- Link to your other social media pages
- Keep the campaign less than two months old
Okay, that’s enough for today’s Kickstarter update number one. I’ll conduct some more research and come back to you with my business plan.
I might, just might, give you a hint about the project itself. Who knows?!
What is a hug worth?
I almost started this blog entry with an apology to readers for delving too much into thoughts and not enough into actions lately but only because I’m looking at a set of stamps entitled “MUSCLE CARS: AMERICA ON THE MOVE,” which invites me to jump behind the steering wheel and burn rubber.
A song jumped into my thoughts this afternoon: “I Heard It On The Grapevine.” What a doozy!
I have a business plan to complete tomorrow and a video to record later this week as my Kickstarter campaign nears its launch date. Not sure which parts to include as part of a robot construction package. Also, should I have a combined campaign or launch a separate project on PledgeMusic?
My mechatronic children are going to miss their new playmates, I can tell you — a desktop lamp has its shade pulled down in sadness, for instance.
But that’s okay. Change is good.
With only 13401 days to go, I’ve got some significant fundraising to promote.
I can no longer sit on the fence and watch the world rush past me at this crossroads of life.
I admit that sitting here is scarier than taking action, action which takes up my energy and reduces me idle thoughts.
That’s okay, too. Variety is good.
I can slip in and out of the colloquial without noticing.
What I’ll discover is the difference between a person who hugs politely, a person who hugs for comfort and a person who doesn’t hug at all.
Just like the fact that land wars are declared in order to test new technology and deplete the stock of old technology.
For whom are the lyrics of a song written? What undertones and undercurrents are designed into the melody?
I know if I want the brass ring, it’s not going to jump into my hand, no matter how far outstretched it may be, then I better make the grab while I can.
The person who can jump in and tell the story with me the quickest — that’s what I’m talking about.
A true model citizen.
What are you looking for in the long run — a single person to be your one and only or a plethora, a cornucopia of tastes?
I hope to make everyone I meet a better person than before, whatever better may mean in the moment.
How many of us can keep putting ourselves out there and give and give and give without end? How do we recycle energy to keep recharged?
What defines us? Our vocation? Our social network? Our possessions? Our family?
When you’re talking alone with someone, is your conversation any different than when someone else is in the room?
The years of chronic pain in the tensed muscles of my shoulders hunched over in anticipation of being beaten by my father are slowly dissipating. I no longer have to fear his passive-aggressive love, never sure if a hug was coming or a smack in the face, physical and/or verbal.
Hugging someone without fear is a tremendous feeling. So is dancing with someone without fear while letting my emotional state and set of thoughts rest in my fingertips, palms, forearm, biceps, shoulders, neck and back.
The passive-aggressive relationship with my father is partially tied into the relationship between my wife and me and it is damn hard work to overcome old habits tied to responding to passive-aggressive people as a chameleon personality.
Maybe I should summarise this blog in a single phrase: dancing is mental AND physical therapy.
Abi, as our dance instructor, is like my father — I’m never sure from moment to moment if she’s going to praise or criticize me. Last night, when I saw a deep-seated fear briefly flash in Jenn’s eyes, I realised that the old fears of my father were showing on my face and in my reactions to Abi, and wanted to run as fast and as far away from the dance studio as my legs and lungs could take me but I was attached to Jenn, who herself seemed to have withdrawn a little.
It was a revealing moment for me, if not for her, showing me why dancing with her was so much different when only my wife was watching us than when Abi and my wife were watching.
Enough of thought set reconfiguration, although it is fun to write about what goes through my thoughts in these personally enlightening moments to complete the circle of the mental/physical therapy.
Time for action, assisting my wife, Abi and Jenn get whatever it is out of me, this humble set of states of energy, that makes them better than they were before, maybe even happier — some of our goals are aligned but not every single one of them, as it should be. Hopefully, I’ll be better and happier, too. I sure plan to be!
How the house burned down
“What story, Mom?”
“Well, Amish pirates are not known for subtlety. They’d rather kill you and turn you into fertiliser than negotiate with you.”
“But we’re not like that, are we?”
“Shadowgrass, let me tell you the quick version of what happened when one of your great-great-uncle’s cousin’s boy’s father’s cousin’s nephew’s cousin’s uncle’s father’s boy’s cousin’s uncle burned the house down. It started one day when the two of them were clearing a field…”
“How big was the wasp?”
“Bigger than the farmhouse.”
“Bigger than our Martian habitat module?!”
“Yes.”
“What did they do?”
Bai popped into their thought trail. “Hey, guys! I’m back!”
“Hi, Bai. How did it go?”
“Great. But boy, am I mentally wrung out. Alek advanced me to the next level of dancing. I’ll tell you something funny. He said, ‘You know the way a guy keeps pestering you to dance with him and you aren’t interested? He keeps asking and asking until you are giving him the look that says ‘Get away from me!'” I told him, yeah, I’ve made that look. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘stop giving me that look. Act like you want to dance with me. Flirt with me!’ Me! As if I don’t know how to flirt.”
Guin and Shadowgrass laughed with Bai.
“Hey, can you believe Stephane only drank water last week? And he’s accusing me of finally growing up!”
“When are you coming over to our colony?”
“I don’t know, Guin. Depends on my schedule. I’m booked for the next two marsweeks.
“Okay, I’ll see you when you get here.”
“Sure thing.”
Guin turned to Shadowgrass. “Where was I?”
“Jersey and the Frenchman were about to battle the great, big, gigantanormasaurus Wasp.”
“That’s right. But it’ll have to wait until tomorrow. You’ve got work to do.”
“Ah, Mom. I thought you said that you and Dad brought your electromechanical design wizardry to Mars so no one would have to work again.”
“We did. But then we found that we liked to share time with our creations. Nothing like getting your hands into the soil yourself.”
“Must be the Amish pirate in you, eh, Mom?”
“Well… I don’t know…”
“Stabbing giant worms with your sabre! Slashing through deadly grass blades!”
“That’s right, son. You can imagine what all we faced on Earth and why we wanted to start over here. Just make sure you get plenty of nightmares letting your imagination run too wild. And remember to tell us about them tomorrow.”
“Mom, you’re being facetious, aren’t you?”
“Am I?” She smiled at her little genius and scrunched her nose. “Maybe just a little bit.”
Machine fun fodder
Saw this Ford work truck at the home show yesterday. A young man walked up to me and said it would make the perfect gangster/drug cartel “enforcement” vehicle — just mount a few machine guns and grenade launchers in place of storage boxes and you could mow down whole neighbourhoods in a fast driveby. Maybe he’s has a heavy dose of Grand Theft Auto and Jason Statham films in his life?
God’s School of Medicine — “Change for a change”
I walk this planet as if I’m a visitor from outer space, surrounded by the nicest people who treat me as if I’m one of them so either I am or I am not. We certainly seem to be from the same universe and share almost all of the same symbol sets (i.e., memories of similar social/mass media training).
I as this set of states of energy exchange energy states with other people in the form of body movements such as voiced symbol sets, facial expressions, torso/limb placement and electrochemical/heat interaction via handshakes, hugs and kisses.
Also via this blog.
When a feeling of familiarity seems to pull out of my core being, I cannot distinguish the difference between whether I am meeting someone for the first time, neither one of us having heard of or encountered the other, or whether we have heard through hearsay, second opinion, reputation or written/spoken fact about the other.
This afternoon, my wife and I attended a local “home improvement” fall home & garden show in the south exhibit hall at the Von Braun [Civic] Center.
We met a lot of the exhibitors and engaged in both humorous and informative conversations, starting with a guy who joked I must be the father of one of his fellow exhibitors and ending with the guys who plan to look at our roof for much-needed repair work.
In between were numerous insights and observations.
Toward the end of our tour of the show, we stopped at the Alabama Cooperative Extension System booth which advertised and sold home radon testing kits.
The person we met and talked with most was a woman named Patricia “Pastor Doc Pat” W. Smith.
Pat looked at my wife and me as if she knew who we were. She felt something special about us that went beyond the need for a radon test kit.
If I didn’t know better, I would say that she had read my blog and knew something about me or had heard from someone who had read my blog; that or the fact I live my life the same way I write my blog so that I am truly the multifaceted crystal ball that takes light in, reflects/refracts it back in new patterns but all in accordance with who I am through-and-through.
She told us the following story about her life that she wants to share with the world, being a “retired” pastor of the AME Christian denomination and a PhD in cell biology:
- Born in 1944 and raised in Jackson, Tennessee
- Her father, a stockboy at a Kroger-type grocery store, sent all five of his kids to college, including Patricia
- Patricia was sent by bus by her father to attend Knoxville College in 1962
- Patricia graduated in 1967 and went to work at Oak Ridge National Labs testing the effects of chemicals on rodents, including the famous test that proved the white sweetener in the pink packages is carcinogenic and states so.
- While she worked in Oak Ridge, she lived in an efficiency apartment in one of the old barracks where the original Oak Ridge nuclear bomb development employees lived.
- Patricia often processed film slides in a darkroom where her boss, a Japanese man, would sneak in and scare her so she decided she couldn’t stay in that job, leaving in 1969 to get her master’s degree.
- I can’t remember but she said she either got her master’s degree at Virginia Tech, where she stayed at Fox Ridge Apartment, or she got her PhD there.
- Anyway, she moved to Florence in 1971 and worked for TVA, studying the effect of the hot nuclear plant effluent water on local wildlife, including a salamander.
- She later attended seminary school and became an AME pastor, preaching for 17-1/2 years.
- Her son was born in Blacksburg, Virginia, the first black/African-American baby born in the county hospital in over 25 years; he lives in Atlanta and is CEO of some aviation group associated with an Atlanta airport.
- Her adopted son, from Cameroon, who still calls her Pastor Doc Mama, graduated from the University of North Alabama, lives in California and works in the computer industry.
- Her daughter is married to a computer animator, also in California.
- Patricia is working with her adopted son to launch a website dedicated to roving ministry she calls God’s School of Medicine, started in 1994, the website slated to go public next month. The ministry is basically a place where people get to tell their life stories, sharing how they overcame adversity to get where they are so those who are in a dark place in their lives can see no matter how bad you’ve got it, you’ve got hope that someone like you has made it.
- As part of her ministry, Patricia is going to share her own life story, where God told her simply “Change for a change.” What does that mean? Well, if you give a twenty-dollar bill for a three-dollar purchase, you roll the seventeen dollars you received as change into the receipt and put it into a container — bucket, jar, box, whatever. You keep accumulating that change until you’re ready for change. Get it? She can tell you more about it on her website.
- Meanwhile, she misses her church ministry. A bishop told her that she has put enough effort into God’s School of Medicine that God may be giving her the message it’s time to go back to serving a church; in fact, the bishop has three churches, at least one in Walker County, that need her more than she knows.
Until tonight, I didn’t even know someone like Patricia existed, a seventy-year young woman whose father was a humble produce stocker at a grocery store, a black man in the upper South of the United States of America, put his daughter through college, who majored in cytology and got a job at ORNL in 1967 as an African-American research associate, going on to get her master’s degree and then her PhD.
Amazingly, her story almost parallels that of my father, whose father was an illiterate day labourer and grandfather a tin smith for the railroad, making sure my father stayed focused on completing his college degree and going to greater social heights than them. My mother’s story is similar, graduated as valedictorian and got her master’s degree as daughter of a factory worker/farmer with a sixth-grade education. The story of two women and one man, two white and one black/African-American.
Patricia asked for our prayers as she launches her website, twitter feed, and PayPal donation tithe system, meeting with the board of directors as they finalise plans to lease a building to house their God’s School of Ministry in all legal respects to “do as the Romans do” here on Earth, and then, after the website is live and the ministry growing, going back to preach in Walker County.
She told us there’s one message she wants to get out to everyone she knows, including the man who lives down the county road from her outside Florence, Alabama, a prominent Caucasian farmer in the community — he asked for her healing for his blood sickness (leukemia?) and she gave him some verses of the Bible to repeat as medicine, thanking Jesus for taking care of any side effects of the prescribed medication he takes three or four times a day:
No matter who you are or how old you are, DO SOMETHING! Don’t just sit there, feeling hopeless. She’s living proof that no matter where you come from, you have hope to go somewhere else, if you just choose to do something, anything, about it, just as she has and she continues to do at almost 70 years of age, come next year. And by doing something, you make changes that influence other people to get out of their hopelessness, changing themselves and so on.
One percent of Alabamians work in science and engineering?
Room for improvement!:
And you thought the practitioners of Parkour were ambidextrous…correction: I mean omnidextrous
Nature’s feats of engineering are fascinating!
treetrunkdings 