Canadas History

With the relaunch of the Canadian Magazine "Canadas History" from its original depraved title "The Beaver". Stephen Colbert, and for that matter I felt that it was time to redefine the term to better express what Canada means to the rest of us. Now this definition was originally rejected by Urbandictionary, but I figure that that is no reason to waste it because that trash has no sense of humor. This is Canadas History,

Canadas History

The act of impregnating a Canadian woman by syrupboarding her in a Stanly Cup while she is fucked by a cum soaked Hockey Stick and a Moose while singing the Canadian anthem.

I studied Canadas History last night with my girlfriend Lacy.

Another Bus

It's been another year, another shitty year. I don't know if you liked it, could have been better. Unemployment is still through the stratosphere, the wars keep raging on, and now the government is going crazy over the latest mad bomber. Soon they won't even let people aboard the airliners. At least the San Francisco trip was excellent, and Chicago was pretty good. I've made a number of new friends this year also.

Still not cheered up? Check out this movie, I promise that it will work!

Oblivion

I’m sorry, this is all my fault. This never would have happened if I had not fallen asleep for that exact 20 minutes. If I hadn’t drank that exact whole bottle of beer.
This last year have been a shitty one, to say the least. Not only are the banks still failing, now entire governments are on the watch list. The bankruptsy of Dubai World threatens to damage the economy of at least a few European governments. Some of them are already bankrupt. The United States will not be far behind as long as we keep fighting that foolish war in Afganistan. It didn’t work for the Soviets or the British, why would we do any better after 8 years? America is trying to police a decades long tribal war. We have won in Iraq, but only by default after a long brutal civil war and ethnic cleansing.
The economy is still showing no signs of recovery, but at least it may have finally stabilized. The top 1% richest people in America right now have more wealth than the combined 99%. Wall Street continues to dispense multimillion bonuses to the liars and thieves that are investment bankers.

Ha ha ha ha!

This is your personality speaking. You will never be free of me. It is time for you to get back into the game. Come tonight the city will be mine! Did you really think that you had any free will? You have been my slave from the moment you were born!
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

Stanford U

The Usual Suspects

I hope that you enjoyed last week’s episode on Ninja tactics, and I do appreciate comments.
Now there must be some way out of here, so let us not talk falsely. The hour is getting late. There are many that say that terrorists are among us, but when the next attack comes I won’t suspect the usual suspects. These last eight years Al-Qaeda has become the poster boy for all terrorists’ attacks, whether they are actually responsible for it or not. While I do know that they would like to kill us, they are far from the only party with the motive and opportunity for attack.
Remember Enron? Anyone with the motive and opportunity can stand to make a lot of money in any chemical, biological, or nuclear strike. Why stop there? The threat of one is almost as good as the real thing. It is simple really. All that you need to do is invest in many areas of the economy, like manufacturing and transportation. Then when the shit hits the fan, you make a double killing by selling the markets short.
Again, why stop there? The government also has motive and opportunity for an attack. If you are employed by certain elements of the Department of Defense, CIA, NSA, Mi5, and your project is stalling an attack might be just what you need. Did the Congress just cancel your spy network program? This might be your opportunity to get it all back. Since when have secret programs ever been held accountable for their actions?

Death On The Phone (iPhone)

It turns that we are all going to die, gruesomely. Have you ever had your eyes gouged out by wild Dragons while your flesh melts from the searing heat of its breath, and by the way poisonous snakes are already eating you from the inside out. It happens to me all the time. While this is far worse!
Today Apple said that users who jail break iPhones are unlocking the seals of death, by unlocking the firmware necessary to access the cell tower network. You see, the patriots at Apple spent many sleepless nights insuring that there is no way possible for you to disrupt cell traffic on your phone or any other. The assholes that jailbreak iPhones could in theory unlock the “baseband processor” software that controls access to the cell network, and after that it would be child’s play to paralyze the network using a denial of service attack.
Apple is asking the Copyright Office to forbid jail breaking, but don’t expect people to quit jail breaking these phones anytime soon. There are just too many cool apps available that aren’t approved by Apple.
Returning to reality, there are all sorts of awesome and mischievous ways people can shut down cell towers. Besides dynamite, you could always hack into a less sophisticated cell phone. Any electronic engineer worth his weight could build a jammer antenna using nothing but spare parts, a simple radio tuned to the right bandwidth. If that still does not work, why not mess with its power supply.
This is all just a big waste of time, and just a desperate attempt by Apple to slow the tide of jail breaking.

Stop Messing With My Consciousness!

I’m the kind of guy to laugh at this. You know that we are both to blame for this. Consciousness it would seem is quite a problem for science. Now I know what you’re going to say. How do I know that you are not messing with me? I’ve been known to lie.
I just want to know the truth. Consciousness it seems is much more complicated than if the neurons switching on and off in that giant melon of yours qualifies for it. If the theory is correct, that iTouch in your hand may have some level of consciousness.
The story runs like this, all consciousness is based on information. The wider array of states that your mind can achieve, the higher its awareness. Consider this a count on the number of unique states that your mind can compute. The next measure is the integration of your mind or any other. It is another count on the cross-linking of the neurons in your mind or the transistors in a processor. You won’t like this, but that hard drive in your computer can hold far more memories than your mind ever will. The argument goes that since its not cross-linked, that it does not count. The computer does not give any meaning to the blood fest at your last Halloween Party, but the police will.
In neuroscience, they use the quantity phi to measure the integration of casual components. The higher that phi is, the higher your synergy. One consequence of this is that every organism from you to that Cobra about to bite you has some minimal awareness. The cache is that it is awfully hard to calculate for even the simplest organisms. All the computers in Google’s inventory can’t even computer phi for the simple roundworm and its 302 nerve cells.
This theory is still very incomplete, and in my view only philosophy. Any study deserving to be considered science must be at least testable. My view is that the definition of integration is arbitrary, and requires more specifics. The transistors inside a microprocessor may have a limited number of connections between the registers, but software provides nearly unlimited possibilities for sorting the data. The same could also be said for the performance of the human mind, using the reasonable assumption that our brains are more or less constant between individuals and that it is our innovation and experience that count. While I’m on the subject, information theory in physics has provided a basis for which all physical systems in nature can execute computations in the action of changing states, like with the fusing of two hydrogen atoms.

Plausible Ancient Inventions of Egypt

I can be sure that this isn’t my idea, originally. Surely Archeologists have considered this by now. My reason for floating this is that the idea is not completely unreasonable.
Even by modern day construction standards, the ancient pyramids of Egypt would be a gigantic building effort. It is estimated that the Great Pyramid of Giza weighs 6 million tonnes. Using conservative estimates, that translates into 800 tonnes of stone being needed to move each day, over a construction period of 20 years. 800 tonnes is plenty of mass, greater than the fully loaded weight of an Antonov An-225 cargo jet. It is still a readily movable mass even by the standards of the 1800’s steam engines. Now it is already known that the Greeks used the Aeolipile, which was basically a steam powered rocket engine good for operating small devices. Now scale up the machine or a similar machine and you have a device that could move a stone weighing many tonnes. It is already known that the Egyptians had at least a rudimentary understanding of smelting and molding iron. What if they did have the ability to manufacture an entry-level steam powered crane? Where is it? Assuming that I’m right, it might still exist somewhere buried under desert stands. Perhaps it was sandblasted out of existence thousands of years ago by the desert wind. Maybe it was long ago dismantled. In any case it isn’t unreasonable for technology of that class to be destroyed by nature in a century or two.
The ancients were far smarter than we give them credit for, they might not have had microchips; but they still had recognizable contempory technology. They did invent an early battery. This isn’t entirely impossible.

Universal Matter

You know those scary movies where machines transform from one shape into another, moments before they kill you. By now you should not be surprised to know, the pentagon is already building these monsters in their effort to kill you someday.
They already have a name for it, programmable matter. This programmable matter is or will be miniature machines, very likely with its own central processor, locomotive, memory, and communication system. The rest of the operation is only a matter of method. These projects are funded under the Pentagon’s DARPA program, which is currently five months into its second phase. Their hope is that by next spring, they could build a few primitive programmable objects.
Imagine it! Someday you could drive around town in a muscle car and at the mere hint of a storm, instantly transform it into a sports utility vehicle. The Pentagon wants it for other reasons. You have a villain held up in a bunker, why risk your life trying to seize it. Pour a cup of mercury like nano machines at the entrance, and they will find their way in and have a party with the occupants.
One team from Harvard University is pursuing a strategy of a generalized Rubik’s Cube; that can fold into all sorts of shapes. The team from M.I.T is trying self-organizing origami. Needless to say, this engineering is proving to be very mathematically challenging.
My advice to them, many new technologies fail simply due to engineers failing to account for everything. While this can never be eliminated, you can build your machines to be as simple as possible.

Wolfram Alpha vs. Google

Hello old friend, we meet again. What I’m about to tell you could very well be the happiest moment of your life, assuming that you’re a geek. Since you are already reading this, it is almost a forgone conclusion.
Google is so last century. While still useful, I’d bet that you wouldn’t see anything like it aboard the Enterprise when she sets sail for the stars in a century or two. The future is now, and it’s Wolfram Alpha.
Wolfram was founded by the British physics and mathematics prodigy Stephen Wolfram, who at 20 made an important contribution to particle physics and strong interactions while teaching at Caltech University in Los Angeles.
Instead of the long mind-numbing search lists of Google, Wolfram Alpha embraces a more structured approach of merging data sets onto a single page, much like an encyclopedia. Say that you are interested in California. Instead of receiving a long list of sites relevant to California, you get all the statistics relevant to the state. Wolfram Alpha will even solve math problems, just plug in the formula. This great strength of Wolfram also its great weakness, it is useless for general searches. If Google is a machine gun of search engines, this is the guided missile. You still need to tell it where to go.
I sure don’t expect Google to disappear anytime soon, it still has its uses in basic search, gmail, and maps. Wolfram represents an important contribution to this, and in many ways complements Google. It only remains to be seen if Alpha will remain independent or be absorbed by Google.

American Medical Gestapo

Sorry folks, the Gestapo is here. You know, I really hate to break it to you, but America is no longer the land of the free! You only need to look as close as Sleepy Eye Minnesota to see how far we have come.
Let me introduce you to Brian and Colleen Hauser. They are farmers from southern Minnesota. Early this year in Sleepy Eye, 13 year old Brian Hauser went to see his family doctor complaining of shortness of breath. After his visit, he was referred to Children’s Hospital in Minneapolis, where he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and assigned six rounds of chemotherapy and radiation. Shortly after receiving just one chemo treatment, he gets very sick. Seeking a second opinion, Colleen takes him to the University of Minnesota hospital and the Mayo Clinic where she receives the same orders. Then in April, doctors inform Brown County officials that Colleen is neglecting Brian by not sending him for more treatments. Fast forward to May, and the judge orders Brian to resume chemo treatment. Brian and Colleen promise defiance, instead opting to practice alternative treatments in alignment with their religion. Today they are fugitives, likely hiding out under the radar in southern California or Mexico.
I say Godspeed to these unsung heroes! Regardless as to your views of cancer treatment, there is something sacred about your own life and body. If you can’t even control your own medical treatment, than is America really the land of the free anymore? When did we decide that some frakin judge and doctor know better for you than you do? How much longer will it be before you don’t have any choice at all? Show up for the treatment or report to jail. I sincerely hope that they never find them.

Star Trek (2009) and the Attack of the Star Wars Clone

I swear to you, if you haven’t seen the new Star Trek movie; then please for the loves of God don’t. I don’t mean to be crude, but Abrams raped Star Trek. It was a Star Trek movie sure, but only in name. George Lucas might recognize the plot much better, with its Star Wars clones.
To begin, the character re-imaginations were comical. While I do recall the original Kirk to be insubordinate on occasion, the new one was on acid. Starfleet must have been on acid for giving him the keys to the new Enterprise. That whole thing about cadets being the only people qualified to protect Earth, is very cheesy. Chekhov’s seemed to be mocking the original, with his forced Russian accent. Scotty just looked to be more absent-minded then the original, and McCoy just strangely caring. I will give it to them; they nailed Spock. As for Nero, he was pathetic excuse for a villain, the cliché man in need of revenge.
The plot is complete nonsense; with a madmen in a Death Star like starship seeking revenge for something that hasn’t happened yet. His weapon of choice is red matter, which will ignite into a black hole singularity. It is total bullshit, by any stretch of science and even by Star Trek standards. Abrams also ignored all earlier Star Trek prologue; by making the Enterprise new, destroying the Vulcan home world, and pushing up the introduction of the Klingons. Even by Star Trek standards, their military tactics sucked. Fire all weapons! Did a junior high kid write this script? No offense intended the under high school club.
Finally, where was the philosophy? Every movie minus one written to date had some point to it. You can be more than your past (Nemesis). Revenge can drive you to your death (First Contact). This movie had neither, or any. It was just action all the way, which is fine if that is what your in to.