Information

I’m sure by now, dear reader, you have come to the conclusion that information exists. It’s not a grand conclusion to make – we live in a time called the information age and you are reading this on a medium sometimes referred to as the information super highway. But I would like to propose a thought experiment for you. It’s kind of an odd one as I was woken at 2am by this idea and so it may not come through as well as I had hoped, as I write this at 2.40am.

Imagine, if you will, your body. It seems normal to you. Your lungs breathe, your heart pumps blood and your hair grows. Now your body has a few things that make it uniquely yours as well, the way you walk, the sound of your voice at the pattern of your retina. But where is all this information stored? Now imagine a computer; as you read this you are the benefactor of several functions of the computer that you probably don’t realise; the way your display works be it a CRT (cathode ray tube) or an LCD (liquid crystal display), both options format the information that they receive via electronics into a usable format that at the present point in time is relaying my thoughts to you.

All of these functions, from your heart to the text on screen require information. I have kept this list very short as to try and not confuse the issue, but there is one more thing I would like you to try and hold In your head at the same time. Your Chair. Chances are that, while reading this, you are sitting on some form of chair. Now the previous two examples I have given incorporate a process of active information transfer; your computer talking to Google and then translating that information which I had previously stored there as text back into a readable format for you, and your heart pumping blood around your body when stimulated to do so by an electrical impulse from your brain telling one half to contract and the other to do likewise in turn. But here is where things start to get tricky.

The chair too has information imbued to it – let us assume for the time being that it is a simple wooden chair with a padded seat. This chair was put together by a craftsman of some skill – be that skill great or little it required at least a basic knowledge of measurement, wood craft and how a nail works. With this information, the craftsman created an object to sit on that would support your body weight, and then he added a more comfortable seat to make the experience more enjoyable. Now that all of this information has been put into the making of the chair, where does this information go? Where is the weight rating or the stress tolerance of the nails and screws used in its construction? The chair still works without you, and I understanding such things, but all that information must be stored somewhere, because if I were to sit on a chair not designed to take my weight, an easier thing than you might think, the chair would fail because those same tolerances that had been put into the construction of the chair would be overcome and the chair would fail. But even the failure of that chair could be pre-determined if you had that original information, my weight information, and the information about how I would distribute that weight as I sat upon the chair.

This is also true of your heart, we know that if your heart receives the wrong electrical signals or those signals are over powered by an outside source, then your heart too will fail, or be brought back from having failed if the charge is supplied in the right way by someone with the right knowledge. And we find this again in the world of computers: give the computer incomplete or wrong information and it will be unable to perform the task that it was asked to perform.

And so we get to my Idea. All of this information must be stored, and it must be accessible in one form or another so that when I sit on the wrong chair, or the network cable is pulled from the computer, or the heart gets the wrong electrical signals, or a hammer strikes a nail, everything acts as it must according to this “programming”.

But where is it stored? Well, you may or may not have heard of metadata; it’s the data that is collected about, say, a phone call that is not relevant to the call itself. For example – I call my friend to talk about sound desks. The meta data associated with that call is the length of the call, who the call was from and to, where the call was made and received, and so on. The call itself was about sound desks but the meta data was still recorded so that I might be billed for the call (or that the government might snoop). But the metadata has nothing to do with the call itself.
Therefore, I am proposing a metaverse, a place where all information is stored, from the length of my call to how well the nail was hammered onto the chair to the quality of the nail when it was forged and what the elements were doing before they were made into a nail.

A place where all information exists, and must continue to exist so that all past and future interactions of this information may be recorded and predicted or reviewed. How many times will your heart beat before it fails depends on a number of factors both internal and external and is in some way relevant to the number of times my heart beats and the nail in the chair. It has long been said that everything is connected, but the question of where is it connected is what woke me up tonight. Why is it that if I hold a lighter to a candle it will burn but if I hold a lighter to a tap I will not get the same effect? Information. Information that goes back as far as time itself, Information that must be available and yet hidden so that when we see a chair we do not see all the backstory of every atom, of every fibre of wood, of the tree that grew from the seed that was planted from the branch that dropped it from, from, from.

All of this information must be able to be accessed at any given time by any given object or substance, but the information must also be immutable, unchangeable, or everything (that is related) would fall apart because a butterfly flapped its wings.

So as you go about your day, dear reader, try to think of the information metaverse, where all things are stored and interact according to...


Well, this is interesting...

The Screen Dichotomy

I am a gamer and a watcher of many things, and it occurs to me that we are getting into an interesting phase. Movies are starting to be remade; Judge Dredd, Robocop and Total Recall to name a few. Movies are getting less and less original and stretching bad franchises more and more. With Fast and Furious SEVEN coming up and a promise for three more thereafter, one must ask, has the movie industry become so dumbed down that we will never again see the likes of The Shawshank Redemption or Schindlers List? Will we ever again see the likes of good comedies like unto Robin Hood – Men in Tights, or the epics like Dances With Wolves, or must we be beaten over the head with Saw 15 and yet another Scary Movie or Final Destination.

But at the same time we are experiencing a massive leap in the level of television production. From seemingly nowhere we have fantastic series like Sherlock, The Newsroom and The Blacklist. We have Game changing series like Hannibal – made in the USA but with enough world-wide funding to keep being made without the support of any major American network, or Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, which has movie like effects on a TV budget and in a TV timescale.

Movies that take longer to produce and are shorter to watch are becoming worse and worse while TV that takes less time to produce and lasts longer is getting better and better. And then there is the inverse we are currently witnessing in the field of computer games (I speak mostly of PC’s here being a PC gamer only but I’m sure this applies across the board.)

More and more computer games are going to something like the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game or MMORPG, a format that doesn’t take a comparatively long time to program. A format that while playable, continues and continues with no end in sight. The shorter single story game, that takes much more time to program having to build everything from scratch, is becoming less popular, yet this is where the advancements are being made; and cost less for a better experience. These games have long been around and have continued to improve while the MMORPGs stagnate and become dull. With all the missions done, one can only interact with the other, often lesser intelligent, players, showing them what no one would show you and holding their hands through the same missions you have already completed for no apparent reason them save to now and then compare your equipment with your neighbour’s., all the while putting more and more money into in-game purchases and into the latest update of a game that costs you as much as a stand-alone game cost you and is far less satisfying. Meanwhile the standalone game gives downloadable content often at no cost or much cheaper for much more game play.

So here we arrive at an interesting position. Movies that take longer to produce are getting worse while TV that takes less time to produce is getting better; while MMORPGs that take less time to produce are becoming more prevalent and worse while standalone games that take much more to produce are continuing on an upward curve but are becoming less and less popular.

So here I sit dear reader, confused by this screen dichotomy, and I am reminded of the poem by AA Milne called Twice Times and as one got better as the other got wuss I ask myself and you – 

What can we expect from these two giants of screens going forward?

Where to from here?

And what new idea will change the game in such a way as to get everything on the up and up again?

Time

Time

{Writer’s note – an apology, because of the nature of English and the common ways of phrasing things, there will be a number of apparent puns about time in the following piece. None of these are intentional unless specified; they are just a happy accident of English}

Time is one of those things that seem to be the cause of a lot of people’s anger; they have too much, that must wait for too much of it, it seems to go on forever (pun intended), or conversely it runs away from them or runs out, runs short, or there is just none left at all. Movies play with its passage and it is the subject of many television shows, books and musings. Though after all that, it is largely misunderstood.

The thing about it is – we all have the same amount, or at least that is what the powers that be would have us believe. It seems to stretch out and contract entirely of its own will. As a child I remember that the hours, days and weeks stretched out before me as thought to eternity – or at least as far as the next term break.

And yet, as an adult, I find there are times that time disappears from me entirely and I find myself working absurdly late nights for reasons that escape me – not unlike the time before it.

This misperception of time is due largely to busyness with which we fill our lives. We have become, as it has been said, time poor. This is mostly down to electricity. Before we had easily accessible light facilities and entertainments that could keep us up and “interested”, or rather awake for hours on end, we were, largely, reliant on the sun to give us or daily portions. This gave us less time in which to be so busy and the nature of the work we were required to do before electricity became normal made us tired and being unable to complete more than a full day’s work, we rested for the evening content with our work.

But now we are so very busy and driven in what we must cram into a day that instead of a roughly 12-hour day, it has become far more common to start our days before dawn and return to our beds well after dusk, and so we have lost what a standard day means. This is not helped by the corporations that shorten our year as much as possible by starting Christmas sales in early November rather than the previous standard of only a few weeks before Christmas.

This disproportionate collapsing and expanding of how we view time has greatly altered our view of it. Combined with the media available on the subject I had thought that conversations on the subject would come easily and freely to many. But alas, this has not been my experience, especially on the finer points of the subject. Bring up, for example, the subject of eternity amongst most people and they will look at you blankly; ask them if life is predetermined or if free will exists they look at you quite quizzically. The fact of it is that in the last question the answer is simply that it depends on your point of view – something I thought most people had the ability to change; though when it comes to time they seem locked into a single point of view – of that being inside the current time stream.  Perhaps, as an exercise, you, dear reader, should try to remove yourself, or at least your point of view from the current time line and view the entire stream as though from a helicopter.

People often mistake time for an unchangeable constant that has only the appearance of speeding up and slowing down, so I will leave you with this small titbit. Time itself is changeable – and this is not only a theoretical thought experiment – time has been proven to be changed by physicists in an extremely simple experiment by taking three atomic clocks, leaving one standing still, and taking the other 2 on flights round the world – one east and one west. I will leave you, dear reader, to further seek any answers you may wish to find, but suffice to say that the answer is not what you think. But keep in mind – if you wish to live longer than others, live faster and higher – both have an effect on time.

So thank you for spending some of your time to read what took me some time to write about time, and next time I’ll try and be a little briefer between writings so that I might take, if you will allow it, some more of your time…

Loss.

Loss.

A warning if you will, this blog will have some of my personal beliefs in it – I present them not for argument or to offend, but because they are my beliefs and that’s all there is to it.

My Grandmother goes in for surgery tomorrow; she is 80 years old and may not come out of it. My Grandfather (on the other side) is similarly aged and is going downhill rapidly. Next weekend all being well, I will go and see him for what may very well be the last time. This will leave me with only one grandparent left alive (my other grandfather having died a few years ago).

Now people may say that I’m heartless or callous, or in fact that my whole family is inclined that way. We tend to celebrate at funerals. Now don’t get me wrong – we are sad and we will miss the person very much, but we know where they are and we know that we WILL see them again. Now most who know me would say that I’m a bit out there, and rightfully so. I’m a weird sort of a guy, it’s true, and part of what makes me that way is my belief in God and his son Jesus Christ. And it is partially this belief and the current situation that I find myself in that has caused me to call into question what it is that others believe and what others feel during such times.

I know that my grandfather, or at least his essence – what we call a spirit - is in Heaven. I will see him again when I die and go to be with Christ; I will also see all those whom I have lost between that time and this who believe in Christ as their saviour. I will not see, however, many of my friends (at least at this time because they are not Christians) who do not believe, this saddens me and I, in my own way, continually try to teach them what I know to be true.

Now many people say that they believe that they will see their loved ones again once they die; others believe that we decay to nothing; and still others believe that we are reincarnated and live our lives once more. These are just some examples; there are many more. But one thing strikes me about all of these beliefs, while they are often espoused at funerals and during life, there seems to be a general lack of conviction behind the proclamations. I say this not because I doubt the faith of the people but rather from what I have observed at funerals of those who do/did not believe as my family and I do – that there is a firm certainty behind our faith, a conviction of truth that allows us to know and not merely hope, to stand strong and not merely offer platitudes.

I have a few questions for these people. These are not questions to be answered publicly but rather questions to be thought over, prayed over (if you are so inclined), and decided upon for your own self-interest. And in my humble opinion, eternal life.

I will only address a few here but I will try to encompass as much as I can in this short piece of writing.

Firstly, to those that believe that we came from nothing and it is to there that we return:

Why does death bother you? Why does human suffering or indeed life itself? Why do you cry when you lose someone? And what have you lost?

To those that claim a belief in heaven – Why do you cry so? If you believe in heaven and that you will see the person again, what causes you such great sadness? Are you afraid that they have not made it into heaven or that you are the one who will not make it? What do you fear lies beyond the grave that causes you such grief?

And lastly, to those that believe in reincarnation, what is your worry, that the person you know and love may not come back? That they may be on a lower order or that you will not know them when you come upon their being once more?

Now it may seem to some, if not many, that I am being overly prosecutorial about all of this. I’m sorry if it offends, but please try to think about what it is that has caused you the offence rather than just feeling the offence itself.

And to those who are interested, I offer an answer to your questions. I believe that God, who created all things, sent his son to die for our sin (which was breaking God’s perfect law)  and serve our sentence because that is the only way we can get to heaven to be with him and live forever as he originally intended. We all meet God when we die and will have to pay the cost for breaking his law. Christ has already paid the cost – we just need to claim it. But please – don’t take my word for it, look it up, do some serious research, ask God to show himself to you. Now I won’t lie by omission here, there is a flip side to all of this: if we don’t live up to God’s perfect standard, and I know none of us can, then we must face God without being able to claim Jesus’ payment for our sins as our own, which means we must pay the cost ourselves – and I DESPRATELY don’t want that for ANY of you.

I would wager that, at this point, I know most of my readers personally, so firstly thanks for reading J but please consider what I am saying here – most of you know that I do take this stuff seriously and that while I am a little wacky, this holds true for my life. So if you do know me and want to talk, just call or text or e-mail me; and if you don’t but still wish to talk, just leave a comment. Failing ALL of those methods of communication, check out this link that will tell you more about what I believe.

I KNOW that I will see my grandparents again. Do you?

Feed pollution.

Feed pollution.

Over the past few weeks I have noticed a disturbing trend on my Facebook news feed. There has all of a sudden been a massive increase in people telling me how they are going to vote and trying to convince me to do the same. While I have no problem with people voting or even telling others how they voted, this ongoing ocular onslaught of red green and blue posts bothers me a great deal – is it not enough that we must endure road signs, radio and television advertisements but also we must now suffer through these ongoing advertisements on our normal everyday Facebook walls?

Now I understand that for a long time politics has tried to infiltrate our every aspect of our lives and that these representatives of the people require us to vote for them so that they may be employed and govern as they see fit so that our country continues to continue. But when did we suddenly become America and become so very polarised as a nation? When did we start to attack our friends for what they believe or say? And why are we doing this?

These times have made people bitter and spiteful, people attacking others openly in the firm belief that their candidate and party are superior to all and are the be all and end all – that their party will cure all of the country’s ills and make this a better place for all to live.

My question is this – how many people do we need in power? And how are they monitored once they get there? Some of you may not remember due to a lack of age but in my years I have seen parliamentarians sleep during debates, advertise underwear prices from their desks and generally act like children.

Is this what we want from our members of parliament? I have heard many people say that they are undecided this election – they have grown tired of all the posturing and pomposity and say that this election is becoming the lesser of who cares. 

So it seems that we have two major sides – Those who don’t care about the election, as it seems to them that whomever we get, things will remain largely the same – and those who are so passionate about their given party that they feel the need to flood our feeds with campaign promises and political ads.

This second group of people, from comments I have heard, are annoying and are beginning to alienate their friends. And for what? I know of no one who has been persuaded one way or the other by this Facebook war, but there are many who have been defriended and many more offended by this flood. My hope is that come Saturday much of this will disappear. I know that the signs and also that the major advertisements will cease but I don’t think that the electoral commission has made any rules around Facebook. 

So what do we do? Do we limit what people can post about with regards to elections? Do we make a law regarding what an individual not directly affiliated with a political party can say?

I guess what I’m asking is, what is a friendship worth and how has this new world of digital communication changed how we relate to others? I don’t remember people being so forward in preaching their opinion before Facebook, and I think that friendships were stronger because of this. But if we are to go digital in our political field, then why not go all the way? Allow us to vote online and have debates online, allowing the voters to see what we want to see and respond accordingly. Or perhaps the answer is an app that simply blocks all political posts.

I don’t really think we will get the law change – and anyway the law moves too slowly for the modern world. But perhaps there is another way to do this entire thing. Perhaps we should rejig the entire system; perhaps we should change the way we elect the new government; perhaps we should have a popularity poll so that we could change the government based on an individual’s popularity, a system that would allow constant change to keep up with a constantly changing country. Perhaps then we could finally have an end to the flood that has overwhelmed us and our news feeds –instead just a constant low hum in the background, just a note, a line in the news feed – Joe Blogs voted for Fred Dagg of the farm party.

Down Time

Down Time.

This tour with Excel has given me two things in equal proportion; very, very busy periods with barely room to eat, and times of abject boredom. It is in the second  of these two instances that I write this essay. I am also writing in a car, so if you‘re prone to motion sickness, you might not like to read any further.

We are currently traveling from Timaru to Oamaru in the South Island – a distance of about 80km. This means that for about an hour I will have very little to do other than to listen to my own playlist (currently Red) and look out the window. This got me to thinking: we all have down time in our lives, and we all need it, but what do we do with it? Many of us, I suspect, spend it watching TV, reading a book or listening to music - in other words, using our down time to watch, read or listen to what others have created. But what do we give back in return? There is an interesting little equation that says that if Bill Gates saw a $100 note blowing across his path, it would not be worth his time to stop and pick it up. This means that  his time is so valuable that it benefits him more to do what he wants to do rather than to do what just about anyone else in the world would do – stop and pick up the note.

This got me thinking – when we watch TV, listen to music, or read a book, we are literally spending our “free” time on purchasing that experience. In addition to that, we will also pay cash money for the experience. We go and buy a book – purchase an album or sit through advertisements to watch our TV program, and so we end up paying twice for the one experience given that our time is worth money as well as the money we spend on the original product.

Here in New Zealand, 90 percent of people live within 40km of a beach, an unlimited free resource to go and enjoy with friends, family or even to walk the dog by yourself. We take this resource so much for granted that few of us seldom even visit a beach during the winter. New Zealand also has some phenomenal natural views, of mountains, lakes, forests, rivers, cliffs, and combinations of all the above. Yet we seem to prefer to wait for the latest two dimensional work of fiction to come out from the United States so that we can sit and absorb every line of dialogue and the sales pitches right along with it – because how many people actually use the mute button for ads anymore?

Now I am aware that not everyone enjoys the views or tramping or swimming or surfing. I am one of those people. But even if you choose to ignore the natural beauty around you, the question remains: how do you choose to spend your time, and what is your time worth to you? Do you value your time at the rate that you are paid at work? Do you have a higher standard for it? For those of you lucky enough to have children, how much time do you spend with them? Is time with them worth more to you than that promotion at work that demands those extra hours? Come to that – how much do you value your job – most people will spend forty hours a week there – is it worth your time?

How much time do you spend with your significant other, or on the search for them? Do you tend to think of your time as infinite? I know I am guilty of this one – I spend time doing things that are ultimately without use to anyone other than lining somebody else’s pockets – time I will never be able to get back. And what do I get for it? Well, in short, wasted time.  It occurs to me that as I approach 10 years of being married to my lovely wife that we have very little to show for it in terms of the material. We now own (well, are paying off) a house, but apart from that we are in much the same position that we were in when we first got married, at least in terms of material goods. But I am pleased to say that we have grown closer to each other and to others around us. We now have friends all across the country whom we keep in regular contact with, and our relationships with our families are all good. How have we done this? We have spent a large amount of our down time investing into others. We have also moved around the country quite a bit, and I’m sure that helps – but we are also both happy, both with our relationship and with our jobs. Neither of us dreads going to work, and when we are not working we also enjoy going to see our friends.

Well, we are now coming to our destination, where I am about to spend time with people I have never met before, to invest my time with them. I hope that you have appreciated the time I have just given to you. It was about an hour of my life. I’ve changed albums now and have travelled the distance between the two towns. I could have done it without thought of others; I could have done it talking to my team whom I travel with; but I thought that you, dear reader, would enjoy some more of my thoughts during this time. So please accept this essay, my time, and my editors. What will do with your down time? I would also like to thank you for giving me some of your time and reading this essay right to the end.

Mascunism.

Hey all, Before I post this here essay (the one that will get me in trouble) I'd like to take a moment to thank Matthew Ferri who edits all my essays - after they are written i send them to him and he does a fantastic ob of making them readable so that you, dear reader, can understand what I'm saying. If you would like him to do any work for YOU contact him through his Facebook pageThanks Matt :D
Rowan
(by the way - he didn't edit this bit - can you tell?)

Mascunism.

Where have all the good men gone and where are all the gods? Where's the streetwise Hercules to fight the rising odds?

You might have recognised the lyrics from I Need a Hero by Bonnie Tyler. But she raises a good question, where have all the good men gone? I consider myself to be an OK man and I hope my wife considers me the same, but the question remains, and I suppose we should first define what a good man is.

I think that this would largely depend on who you ask. Everyone is going to have their own opinion on this, but I’m going to try and forge a reasonable path and you, dear reader, can feel free to agree, disagree or comment as you see fit, but I’m going to go ahead and write this anyway.

I think that the initial roots of the good man existed somewhere around the 1930s. The good man is a gentleman; he opens doors for women and works hard for a living. He is able to fix his own car and he mows his lawns. The good man lends a hand when he is able and helps his friend to move house.

The good man is a little sexist – not because he has a dislike of women but because on some level, I think, most women, however independent, like to be a little spoiled. They like to have the doors opened and chairs pulled out. They like to be told that they are beautiful on average days and that their perfume smells nice when they aren’t wearing any. Problem is that a well-adjusted man – one who treats women as a pure equal, doesn’t do these things.

Feminism has done many great and wonderful things for women. But what came before has had an unintended side effect; some men, having been told that women are equal for many years – some for as long as they have lived, have accepted this as gospel and, shockingly, have started treating women as equals. Not opening doors, not pulling out chairs and not telling them that their hair smells nice. Why? Because they wouldn’t do it for another man.

Men have allowed women to do the jobs that they want to do, to make the laws, to become doctors and to leave the men at home with the kids (when they stick around for more than the announcement of the pregnancy). But in all of this, I think that both men and women have lost something. There was a time - and not so long ago at that - that an announcement of pregnancy spurred a question – not of whether to keep the child but rather one of marriage. Now I don’t deny that contraception in its more modern forms has also had an effect. Not only on the previous situation but also on the inherent goodness that we men seem to have lost. We no longer stick around in relationships, no longer care about the women whom we impregnate, and some are not only no longer good fathers but not fathers at all.

I don’t think that there is any one cause for this sudden lack of good men, but it does seem as though it was inevitable. It is also measurable, I think, but in a strange way – and for this I return to songs – specifically songs of the time. There is an interesting, and not at all scientific, correlation between men’s treatment of women and themselves, and the music of the time. Such a link can be found here. Watch as the years tick by and the language gets worse and worse and the way people are referred to also gets worse and worse.

Men have often referred to themselves and their male friends in friendly but derogatory terms, but have referred to women with some respect, and other wives, mothers, sisters and daughters with more.  I can’t speak for women on this, but when men start treating women as equals, well, to put it quite simply, they get what they ask for. I don’t think the majority of women are ready for that.

It’s the little things that I think will now separate the good man here, but I think that we have to change our attitudes in order to find him again. There are, I think, some jobs that women are unable to do, and while I think that women should be able to choose any job they wish to do, in my industry I have seen only one woman working fulltime. How many women house movers have you seen, or, for that matter, road workers, builders or plumbers? In the same way that men still dominate these jobs (and for a reason), there are some things that men should not do – for very similar reasons.

So, to answer the initial question – the good men have been killed off by society, feminism, medical “advancements” and other reasons too numerous to mention. What can we do to get them back?

I say that we may need another revolution – we’ve had feminism – now perhaps it’s time for the men to stand up for their rights and privileges – to be able to open the door for women without being called a sexist pig, to compliment a woman without being accused of sexual harassment, to counter those parts of feminism that went too far.

Bring on Mascunism

---

The Human Condition

The Human Condition.

It has long been the dream – and oftentimes still is – that one would be able to fly From the Greek poets and Icarus to Leonardo da Vinci and his helicopters and fixed wing flight: we have dreamed of soaring like birds – of leaping from rooftops and tops of cliffs to feel the wind in our hair as does Superman, Batman or Storm, of feeling the wind between our knees and that realisation that we are indeed free.

That’s not the only thing we have dreamed of – of being able to breathe underwater, of being able to see through walls, of telepathy and teleportation. As humans we dream of many strange and wondrous things, everyone has the same dream and everyone’s dream is different – we dream of what we see in nature; we dream of what we see portrayed in movies, books or stories told to us by others; we dream of the one to have fun with and the one to grow old with – we dream of the perfect job, the beautiful house and that car.

But there is a problem. We are human, we continue to dream, but we never get to that perfect place, even if we do get what we believe we want. Take for example that pipe dream to fly – we have, after a fashion, achieved that dream – we mastered flight – or, at least, we built something that allowed us to fly. But what if we did gain the ability to fly? What if we all grew wings overnight? Well, for a start, the fashion designers would have a field day – so would the biologists – but the real question is what we as a race would do.

Sure, I think some fun would be had – some new laws written, some mid-air collisions and mid-air other things, but in 50 years when things have settled down, what would we do?

I think that we, as a race, would become accustomed, then bored, and then we would come back full circle; we would return to our current state – we would let our wings sit, we would cease to use them, and they would become a bore. You would start to see people forming flying clubs – you could go out for a morning fly with a small group of friends, and those who didn’t wish to fly at full pace could perhaps join hover groups and become the joggers of the skyways.

And herein lies the problem – we are seldom sited as humans. We always want that next thing, we always want something more. If we could breathe underwater, we would get bored of that, too. The same applies for telepathy – would we really want to hear everyone else’s thoughts?  Rather, would we want our own thoughts to be heard? And wouldn’t seeing through walls get kind of old – especially if others could see us getting changed, and while personally I think teleportation have a more lasting appeal, I’m sure that even it, given time, would get old – and though there would be fewer kidnappings, taxis and bus drivers would be out of business.

So, what do we do about this? At a time when technology is over-running us and people are doing less yet achieving more, when our science fiction is only valid for a year or two at most because the fiction has become fact, what yet remains?. Take Minority report or Star Trek (the original series); what separates us from them? Minority report? Nothing – all the tech exists in different forms – Star Trek? Warp drive and transporters… and we are working on transporters…

What, then, do we do? Do we continue to dream? What dreams may come? What do we do when the dreaming’s done? What do we dream when the dark days come? But I suppose that the real question of all this is, what is the point? What are we really looking for? What drives us?

There have been several attempts in the past to solve this problem – after a fashion, it has been tried by many individuals, governments, and religious organisations. Hitler tired it with the thousand year Rich; Mao tried it with communism; Julius Ceaser tried it with the Roman Empire; and arguably many of the popes have tried it. But what have You done about it? What have you done to help man be fulfilled and realise potential? Perhaps a better question is, are you complete? Do you still have dreams? Are they being realised? Will you have the same dreams in five years’ time or will they have been dealt to.  In short, what are your dreams worth? Are they bettering you as a person or are they just temporary things that once realised will, like wings, get boring and old. What is your Ultimate purpose? What is it that makes your life worth living?

The once and future darkness.

The once and future darkness.

We live in an age of light, of electricity and computer powered things, from cars to satellites, from monstrous mining equipment to robots that can fit on your fingertip, from safes that lock away our precious items to hermetically sealed doors for our labs. Power governs most everything – but the old saying is true even here – power corrupts. So what happens when the power goes off?

I thought I’d do some research for this particular topic and I was struck by something – As many will know this year marks 100 years since the beginning of the great war in 1914. It may surprise you, dear reader, to know that my lovely little country first had electricity brought to its fine shores in 1886! And though it did not become common until 1917, it was here, so that by 100 years ago we had passed out of our previous darkness and, as it were, stepped into the light.

But even then – had we somehow lost the wonderful spark of light – we would not have been so badly off. Many, if not all, would have been able to very quickly adjust to life without power, as they had  experienced the phenomenon coming into being in their own lifetime. It is perhaps also worthy of note that, as I write this, through my research I find that on August 28 1914 the first Kiwi volunteer for the great war was buried in NZ. Lest we forget.

So that was the old darkness – the time before electricity came – some would say a simpler, easier time. A time with no computers, no cell phones and yes – no internet! Some of my friends say that they were born for such a time as that, “When men were men” Etc. Etc. For myself – I am a child of the digital age – almost everything I do requires not only electricity but also electronics; from driving my truck to washing my clothes not to mention the many and various tasks involving computers that set about making up my everyday life.

So what, then, is this future darkness? Well, in short, it is a thought experiment. Imagine if you will today’s world, a world of computers, supermarkets, and online finical records. Now imagine a global Electromagnetic pulse (fries everything with electricity running through it) and here you are in the future darkness. No electricity generation, everything that uses electricity blown, and no quick fix.

So, first up let’s deal with the practical stuff and start at the bottom – Shelter. New Zealand does pretty well here; we don’t have many high-rise apartment structures and most of us live in our very own self-contained house. Aussie would do ok  if they could get out of those densely populated cities. I would hazard a guess that any city the physical size of Auckland with more than say 2 million people living in it has a problem. New York, London, and Tokyo are just plain gone. OK, so that’s shelter. What about food and water? Supermarkets with their large refrigeration and distribution warehouses, not to mention transport network, are dead, but again NZ does OK here. Most of us have the capability to grow our own food and catch our own water (though my gutters need a clean), and if we thought about it and shared with neighbours, we should be all right. Farmers actually run into a slight problem here; they have to get rid of some of their stock in order to keep the herd healthy and viable. Also people will start wanting their own cows and sheep, and may just outright take them. The aussies don’t fare quite so well here but could do OK – Australia has a harsher climate to grow things in and so may suffer here without pumped water. Again, any big cities are dead.

So we’ve come through the worst of it with most people being reasonable and nice to each other, realising that we are all in this together. It’s time to start talking to each other – So far any given town doesn’t know (but assumes) that they are the only ones affected. Well good news, New Zealand; we actually have a few horses and other beasts of burden not too far outside our towns, so we can start to set up a communication network again. Also Kiwiland has some of the best sailors in the world, so we can even go and talk to our Aussie friends – if only we can find some of those celestial navigation charts again.

But all of this has been broad strokes stuff – How would this affect your daily life? How often do you get up at dawn and go to bed around sunset? How much sex would you be having without contraception? When was the last time you ploughed a field or hand milked a cow?

Personally? If this happens, I struggle a bit. I’m a big guy, so would probably be useful lifting and pushing things. I don’t have any real farm knowledge, so I would have to learn that, but I think I could be a useful teacher of it once I had learnt. But first things first – I would have to get home from Invercargill to Hamilton…

By the way – if you found this an interesting thought exercise and thought “Oh, cool idea but that could never happen,” check out this.

An Electrical Perspective

11/10 of my friends would say that I’m weird. I am an English geek who can’t spell, a sound geek who can’t play an instrument, and a computer geek who can’t clock a game without the cheat codes.

Hi, My name is Rowan, and I’m an electronicaholic.

But then, dear reader, so are you. Perhaps not to the same extent that yours truly is, but still, in no small measure, you are an electronicaholic. This, not all to shocking realisation, has come upon me as I travel down the South Island of New Zealand. I have been looking at some stunning views, thinking how easily Sir Peter Jackson filmed here, as it dawns on me: I live my life through an electrical perspective.

I, until today, have never been farther south than Christchurch. A little city on New Zealand’s East coast – and while I have seen all of this before, it seems like so much Lord of the Rings, so much movie set – and in my mind, at least, it all exists in two dimensions.

We see so much, too much, that way now. We take pictures – not for the memories but for the instant buzz when someone likes our flattened moment of time. Ironic, then, that since the digital age has become more prevalent that our pictures have become more permanent – no more slide shows at Nana’s house when she comes home from a three-month long cruise and relives the memories. Instead, we live it in the instant moments after she has taken the picture as it pops up on a news feed halfway round the world.

Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that all this technology is a bad thing – nor indeed that we should go back to those old fashioned slide shows – but I do believe that we should recognise that we more and more experience the world around us through a digital lens – either ours or another’s.

As a Video geek (OK, OK, I’m a fully-fledged geek), I perhaps observe this more than others. When going to a concert, one of the most common sights is people filming the concert on their cellphones. Now, again, there is nothing inherently wrong with this, but why have they paid $100+ to go and see a concert only to view it on a five inch screen with awful sound? An electrical perspective? And a bad one at that. Especially when you can buy the concert on a medium of your choice for less than $50 and enjoy it with all of your friends, at a time and place of your choosing, in comfort, with places to sit and nary a fear of missing anything.

The Digital World is not coming – The Digital World is here. We spend our days looking at computer screen – electrons flying in different patterns governed by an endless string of zeros and ones. When we get home we watch TV or play on the computer where our digital movements are recorded and analysed by mainframes, so that, along with the rest of our digital footprint generated while shopping and getting those fantastic discounts, the annoying ads that pop up will be less and less annoying and more pointed to what we would like to see. So after our phone has tracked where we have been and what we have done for the day, our supermarket has logged what we’ve bought; our gym has noticed how long we were there for; our car has tracked how hard we were on the engine; the insurance app has recorded every time we have been over the speed limit; our bank has noted where we spent our pay check, how quickly and on what. And finally, after all that, our internet activity is logged, our faces tagged, our profiles linked with friends. We must come to the inescapable truth that not only do we all have a digital footprint; we all, Dear reader, are eletronicaholics.

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Punch The Keys

"Punch the keys dammit!!" Finding Forrester had it right: while writing, one must indeed punch the keys. This is true not only of the typewriter but also of the laptop. I, at least, find the need to be very noisy when I write. I’m not sure why this is; I just find it gratifying. But perhaps the thing that I miss most is the ability to express myself in my own words – not to have to muzzle my expression while being around those who constantly require the definitions for my words. 

The requirement to explain myself is annoying and almost degrading to the other person; I feel as though I belittle such people as I speak to them. I know that this notion is incorrect, and I am aware that, in truth, I am in fact expanding their mind and their vocabulary by educating them in the art of the English language, both in diction and in knowledge. Yet still I feel almost aloof, and so I do what I must to avoid the long and mind-numbing explanations that come with speaking at my level of language. I tone down my vocabulary to the lowest level, the lowest common denominator, so that all might understand. I’m not sure that everyone can appreciate this dilemma. I fear that it is one only experienced by those who have been brought up to love the English language and appreciate its finer points, to be able to argue it down to the definitions of words and why one should use one word instead of another when addressing certain types of people or making an argument in a certain arena.

Some might say that I’m an English snob, and there is a certain truth to that. I cringe when I hear “th” pronounced “f” or those who mumble, mispronounce or otherwise mutilate the mother tongue. It bugs me that people do not take enough care to communicate effectively with their speech, let alone the murderous way they portray the English language on common social media websites, especially when they are trying to make a point that they wish people to take seriously, or indeed when they are commenting on a major life event. These are the times when accurate and precise language are needed so that all might share in the news or appreciate a strongly held belief.

Now it is true that language evolves, changes and grows. But what we are currently witnessing is more unto the reduction of language foreseen by Mr Orwell is his Novel 1984 – we are killing language, reducing its form and size until we are left with a strange mutilation involving numerals and symbols, to the point that a person living 50 years ago would not understand the diatribes polluting the internet, and as such our common use of the English language, so that we all lose our extended ability to both recall and use words, words, words, as Shakespeare once put it.

Read this book.

This loss, therefore, is suffered not only by me but also by the public at large as we bring up children who not only use acronyms to describe how they are feeling in online situations but have started to use these same acronyms in everyday “speech” going as far to say LOL rather than laughing and to say BRB rather than the full version, be right back, for fear that the extra half second it costs them may in some way be massively detrimental to their life and that they may miss some experience because they uttered a fully formed sentence rather than the only slightly shorter and yet far less descriptive one. And some would say even more heinous acronyms, like WBU, that they have become accustomed to using. And all the while English loses so much of its expression to the point that one must oft even define ‘acronym’ itself to the very culprits who use them as common place language, as they know not what they do.

This sad predicament that we now find ourselves in is largely due to technology. The very thing designed to make our lives easier, better and more knowledgeable has had the opposite effect, culling the language of Shakespeare, of Milton and of Wilde to a state where none of those giants would be able to recognise it, let alone read it.

Perhaps in punching the keys all too often we have killed the very thing we were trying to create – not by a thousand paper cuts; but instead, by a million million strokes of the keys, we have stabbed and typoed our way into a pseudo English scarecely worthy of our predecessors.

Perhaps we should all put down the laptops and pick up a pen every now and again, open a book instead of waiting for the movie to come out and speak – though speak with elegance it would, like those who came before us.