Near the top of my favorite Scotty lines in Star Trek The Original Series is: “Check the language banks and find out what … a ‘heater’ is?”
That comes from episode #49 from the second season: A Piece of Action where an alien world is evolving around a book from the roaring twenties. The ‘heater’ in question is a weapon.
Scotty died in 2005 and his ashes were flew into space. Amazon Web Services evangelist and Syndic8 guru Jeff Barr’s wife Carmen is a real estate agent here locally and was negotiating the sale of Scotty’s house. How did that work out, Jeff?
I had assumed Scotty’s ashes would be floating around space for a long, long time exploring the galaxy but that was not the case.
The payload was found in its designated recovery zone 20 days after Farmington, Conn.-based UP Aerospace sent it up in a 20-foot rocket on April 28.
The rocket, the first to be successfully launched into space from the fledgling Spaceport America in southern New Mexico, made a 4-minute suborbital flight before drifting back to Earth.
From this are we to assume there is no way to tack along our ashes when we exit this life on a probe visiting other galaxies?
I’ve never watched the Oprah Winfrey show. Not a single episode. Not even one segment. At best I’ve seen a few scattered minutes of it on other people’s television sets and have turned my attention elsewhere. Sill, I’m sure she’s a good talk show host or she wouldn’t have amassed a large audience and following. This is important because of an endorsement Oprah has made that I’ll get to shortly.
As readers know, our family of five hasn’t had television service for nearly a year now (I’ll write a post updating how things are going around the one year mark), but even if we had TV, I still wouldn’t watch Oprah. I’d rather sit through one of Robert Scoble’s raw footage videos than watch Oprah (although I see Podtech finally gave him an editor). So there’s my Oprah experience and disclaimer.
Oprah endorsed this mega bestselling self-help book called The Secret by Rhonda Byrne based on a DVD of the same name. I had to look the book up on Amazon (pictured right, affiliate link if you really want to buy) to see what it was about:
The Secret contains wisdom from modern-day teachers — men and women who have used it to achieve health, wealth, and happiness. By applying the knowledge of The Secret, they bring to light compelling stories of eradicating disease, acquiring massive wealth, overcoming obstacles, and achieving what many would regard as impossible.
Whenever someone tells me about a single idea, concept and/or non-spiritual belief that changed their life I have to hold back from snickering. Are some people really that gullible? There can be no single secret to making your life better. There are several things you can do mentally, physically and spiritually to increase the odds of living a more fruitful, happy life but a single life altering secret? Rubbish. If such a mind blowing powerful secret existed it would be the worst kept ’secret’ on the planet.
Karen Cerulo, a professor at Rutgers University studied how human beings deal with the future.
Cerulo found that when most of us look out at the world and plan for our future, we fuzz out our vision of any failure, fluke, disease, or disaster on the horizon. Instead, we focus on an ideal future, we burnish our best memories…
Now there is a study I can get behind. Most people want to look ahead at a positive future, who wants to think they’re going to be living in a van down by the river? (Ok, maybe in a Chris Farley SNL skit). I strongly believe in positive grounded thinking which requires routine analyzing of your past and present life. Look around and ask yourself if you really need some secret to help you change the future. Just look at what you did yesterday and are doing today to help change tomorrow.
7 guidelines for a better present and future
If you want to make a positive future for yourself than the following are my 7 guidelines to a better present and future and you don’t need to buy some book or DVD. In fact, I’d say most good advice you receive in life will come from family, friends or research and exploration you conduct yourself, not something a stranger tells you (and if I’m a stranger to you then yes, that applies). I like the number 7, it’s a positive number. If you get three sevens in Vegas it usually means you win something.
Put family first, friends second, yourself third, strangers last
Work hard, play hard
Learn something new every day
Don’t hold onto stress, release it
Eat right, exercise more
Make choices in life that won’t ruin a good night’s sleep or make you wary of looking at the reflection in the mirror
Smile, laugh, love, sing (yes, even off key), pray and cry as these are all vital release points
There, my non secrets about being successful in the present and future. Oprah probably won’t recognize or endorse them, I mean who endorses a guy who writes at a blog called Things That … Make You Go Hmm, but if you do those seven things above consistently, if you live by those guidelines, no crystal ball will be necessary to live a happier present and future life.
Myself, I’m weakest at #5. I don’t eat very healthy and my exercise regimen is terrible. I’ve tried to get a good exercise plan going, but it gets back burnered too often. As I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten better about releasing stress (#4) but that’s still a problem a few times a year. It’s amazing what a good night’s sleep will do (#6) and I feel successful about making good decisions I can live with (#6), which many times lead to making less money than I could have made by choosing a different path. Worth remembering that money and good decisions sometimes don’t go hand in hand.
As for #7 where prayer is mentioned, I don’t want to get too religious on readers here because I’m not a deeply religious person. However, I do believe it’s important to have some kind of spiritual belief and to spend a portion of life on earth exploring and developing this belief. Something to believe in that controls life beyond our earthly existence is a very real and necessary part of our species.
I’m not yet convinced there is a single supreme entity but I don’t consider myself an atheist either. I think there is something beyond life on earth and it could have one or more supreme beings in control, but I haven’t worked out the details yet.
I would like to think that people who have lived life honorably will go somewhere once their hearts stop beating. Heaven? Not sure, but there has to be something beyond this relatively short life we live. Something where our essence marches on. I’m fascinated by this subject but continue to search for the answers. One of my prayers is that my exploration on the subject will be complete before I die. I feel like the yearning years (retirement) will yield the greatest success in my spiritual journey.
The eighth rule (bonus)
Because I like bonuses I’ve added one here for readers who made it this far in the list: serendipity. Remember me writing above that by doing several things you could increase the odds of having a happier present and future. I believe fate plays a role and that some amount of luck is involved. Even if we do everything right, we can still fail.
Even if I write the world’s best blog post ever there is a chance only a very small number of people will read it, that it won’t get slashdotted or dugg, be linked by major newspapers, get me on radio, TV and so on. Everybody, myself most certainly included, needs a certain amount of luck in each and every endeavor.
The biggest difference between those with more personal success and happiness are the ones who keep trying. You’ll fail a whole lot more than you’ll ever succeed in life but one, two or more lucky breaks will never happen if you stop trying.
Final thought: money isn’t everything
My problem with a lot of self-help books is too much focus on “being wealthy” as if being wealthy means someone has lived the happier life. There are lots of hard working, good people who will never be wealthy and yet live a wonderful life. Having more money and stuff shouldn’t be anybody’s #1 goal in life. It’s not mine. Having more happiness? Now there is one to live by! Wealth can be very transitory. Ask those who had it at one point but don’t have it any more.
What are your guidelines to living a better present and future life?
I first heard about kryptonite being discovered from Robin Quivers news segment during this morning’s Howard Stern show and then as I’m reading through the morning’s RSS feeds, I saw the BBC story confirming below. For those who don’t know, the Quivers news segment on the show is where they talk about real news stories and make fun of them.
Researchers from mining group Rio Tinto discovered the unusual mineral and enlisted the help of Dr Stanley when they could not match it with anything known previously to science … “Towards the end of my research I searched the web using the mineral’s chemical formula - sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide - and was amazed to discover that same scientific name, written on a case of rock containing kryptonite stolen by Lex Luther from a museum in the film Superman Returns.
The article points out that no, it’s not green like in the Superman comics and movies. While this might seem like a strange coincidence for a comic book story, a lot of science fiction has been proven prophetic.
Automobiles showed up in fiction long before becoming a reality for example see the inventor of science fiction Jules Verne via Encyclopedia Britannica:
Verne’s first novel, Paris au XXième siècle (Paris in the Twentieth Century)—written in 1863 but not published until 1994—is set in the distant 1960s and contains some of his most accurate prognostications: elevated trains, automobiles, facsimile machines, and computer-like banking machines.
The scent of April Fool’s day is upon us, be careful out there today. The answer to the True or Fool question is in the spoiler text below which you can reveal by clicking the “show” button.
TRUE or FOOL: do a few minutes every decade contain 61 seconds?
TRUE! in order to keep atomic time in agreement with astronomical time, leap seconds occasionally must be added to UTC. Thus, not all minutes contain 60 seconds. A few rare minutes, occurring at a rate of about eight per decade, actually contain 61.
Anybody else fall asleep a lot in History and Science class? Honor bar answer form: did you get this right?
It doesn’t surprise me that we’re learning animals are smarter than we thought. Some animals have amazing intuition. Chimps making weapons? You bet.
Chimps have often been seen to use sticks to retrieve insects such as termites for food. This time, a chimp carefully sharpened a stick to make a spear. It then thrust the spear into a hole in a tree to skewer a bush baby – a small primate that chimps regularly eat. The researchers saw 22 instances of such spear hunting. Scientists know that chimps make tools, including stone tools. Now they are seen to be making weapons
Chimps need to eat too and hunting with your bare hands is more difficult. Speaking of weapons don’t forget what day it is today. A widgetified (?) version of today’s Hmmcast will arrive later at the scheduled 4:20 time. I’m starting to look forward this day of the week.
In December I was looking for something positive to write about Sony because it seemed almost everything being written about them was negative including the lackluster PS3 launch. This morning I found one thing the PS3 is doing well at — distributed computing via Folding@home — thanks to Coding Horror:
The Playstation 3 is indeed dominating the charts; as of this writing, the PS3 is responsible for a whopping 72 percent of the computing power in the entire Folding@Home project. It’s only a matter of time– a few weeks at most– before the PS3 constitutes more than 95 percent of the computing power in the entire Folding@home network.
Interesting that the PS3 would be better at distributed computing than most PCs.
The Folding@home project can be accessed and activated in the PS3 menu by navigating to the link near the PlayStation Store. You must agree to allow your PS3 to be used to do the following:
By connecting to the folding@home network, your PS3 system will help support medical research designed to increase our understanding of serious diseases. This research may eventually lead to cures. Folding@home is supported by Standford University and volunteers who are making a contribution to society by donating computing power to this important project.
Our electricity bill at home is already higher than most our neighbors (according to the electric company) but I’m all for donating computing power to good causes and agreed to burn some more downtime power. The next step was downloading a 50MB file. While doing that, I perused the folding@home website that describes one of their project goals:
to simulate protein folding in order to understand how proteins fold so quickly and reliably, and to learn how to make synthetic polymers with these properties.
The loading is done, time to fire up this badboy (load screen at top of this post). There is a wind-like blowing sound that gets old fast so note to mute the volume. A picture of the earth slowly rotating shows lights where the distributed computers are currently working:
If this power consumption stuff keeps up we’re going to have to buy some solar panels.
Goodbye gamer thumbs? Someday that could be more reality than fiction. The start of this could be companies like Neurosky that are marketing a “cost effective bio sensor and signal processing system for the consumer market.”
A man dressed as Darth Vader from the “Star Wars” film series demonstrated the NeuroSky invention on Thursday by turning his toy light saber on and off at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco without pushing a button.
“It’s like the Force,” he said, referring to the film premise that unseen energy could be tapped and channeled by the mind.
The Nintendo Wii has enjoyed success by providing a unique controller design (the Wiimote) which can be used in many different ways to control gameplay, so the timing of a mind control controller could be coming to a game system in the next couple years. These types of controllers and games have seemed more like gimmicks to date, I suspect a future where we control devices with our minds is not that far fetched.
How about moving your mouse with your mind? Forget voice-activated commands — most haven’t worked that great to date anyway — how about mind activated commands? Launch Firefox. Delete spam. Or perhaps for the Twitter denizens: I’m thinking about doing a search on Google.
Humor aside, this could lead to a whole different kind of computing. The evolution of many technology innovations begins with pleasure activities. People seem most interested in using for entertainment purposes first. After or along with games will be more er adult uses and then it will move into the mainstream technology sector.
One of the coolest museum exhibits I’ve ever seen was King Tut. Saw it on a field trip in school in the 70s and was captivated. Easily impressed as a youth, but the fact that the exhibit has stuck with me over 30 years now tells me it was really something spectacular. Have you seen the Tut exhibit? If not, you’ll have another opportunity soon.
Since the discovery of his tomb in 1922, Tutankhamun has captured the hearts of people around the world. Buried with him were treasures beyond the imagination, a tomb holding the most magnificent treasures of the Golden Age of the Pharaohs and giving us a glittering glimpse into the past.
Egypt seems like a fascinating place and if it wasn’t geographically located so close to hazardous areas, I’d like to visit there someday. The snakes part worries me a bit, but I doubt they are roaming around Cairo. Fortunately, London much closer, so maybe if the visit makes it into 2008, we can plan a London trip.
As for snakes, apparently ancient Egyptians were concerned about keeping poisonous snakes away from the mummies.
While Egyptians considered their culture and religion superior to that of their neighbors to the north, they were willing to do anything to protect the mummies of their kings from the poisonous snakes.
Believing that some snakes spoke the Semitic language of the Canaanites, Egyptians included the magic spells in inscriptions on two sides of the sarcophagus in an effort to ward them off.
This find is noteworthy because it “might be the most ancient Semitic text ever discovered” (Updated 6:08pm PST: quote per Richard Steiner, a professor of Semitic languages at Yeshiva University in New York. I also fixed the screwed up link which wasn’t wrapped around the IMG tag properly.)
HD-VMD. There’s a name you probably won’t remember since none of the major studios are signed on board to support the format yet, but it isn’t completely without potential, especially considering the text I bolded below.
Initial HD VMD discs will have similar capacity as the first hi-def discs released by the majors. But players will cost much less: Next month, the company will release software enabling users to play the discs on their computers, likely for free. Actual players cost less than than $300 — a significant savings vs. the $500 to $800 HD DVD players or the $1,000 Blu-ray decks — due to lower manufacturing cost.
With Microsoft already fortified on the HD-DVD front and Sony with Blu-Ray and a smattering of major studios choosing sides where does this leave HD-VMD? Without major studio content support can HD-VMD be a contender? The nmeinc.com website succeeds in telling us how great it is, but the online store simply carries the sometimes ominous words: “coming soon.”
It seems silly to suggest HD-VMD has any chance, but compared against Blu-Ray and HD-DVD which aren’t exactly off to a disruptive start replacing — or even supplementing — DVD, almost anything is possible. I’m still going with DVD not being seriously threatened by any of the HD options available to date. Yes, the high and low end technophile crowd will continue to eat up HD, but we’re still a couple years away from the mainstream public en masse buying into a different physical format than DVDs. And I still think the replacement format will be something without moving parts and vastly more storage space like holographic or perhaps even protein based storage.
Moving parts wear out. Think of the heads of a VCR and tape versus the replay factor in a DVD and there was a definite advantage since nothing was physically touching the DVD (yes, the laser is reading it, but there is no head on the DVD essentially wearing it down with each play). Surely there is some theoretical limit of wearing out a DVD as the more cycles it will eventually weaken and crack, but it is nothing to the effect of taping running across a head. Also, it can be rough on CD/DVD media just taking it out of the protective case.
Now imagine something that doesn’t require spinning of the media. Imagine a credit-card sized object being able to hold your entire families music and movie libraries. Something like that would be disruptive media, not yet another spinning object of any kind read by more effective lasers.
Rush Limbaugh decided to criticize Michael J. Fox in his ad below for acting over the effects of Parkinson’s:
“I stated when I saw the ad, I was commenting to you about it, that he was either off the medication or he was acting. He is an actor, after all.” — Rush Limbaugh
Politics aside, I can’t stand that blowhard Rush Limbaugh. I’ve tried listening to his radio show a few times and his voice just rubs me wrong. He sounds like the loud, obnoxious guy at the event you wish would shut his hole. Unfortunately this smack across the face of Michael J. Fox probably won’t negatively impact Limbaugh’s popularity. Limbaugh is a self-admitted pill addict and that didn’t hurt his popularity, so why expect any different here? Limbaugh kind of reminds me of Biff from the movie trilogy Fox is best known for Back To The Future.
Fox wants stem cell research approved because it would help find a cure faster for diseases like he has and is emphasized in the video below that Limbaugh was criticizing.
Does it make any difference if Fox intentionally went off his meds for additional impact in this video? Not to me. He still is living with a disease that he needs medication to control. Having to pop pills to keep the shaking down for the rest of your life is a sobering thought. Can stem cell research help find a cure that wouldn’t require Fox and others afflicted to take medication for the rest of their lives? It can’t hurt.
President Bush weighed in on stem cell research in 2001 only allowing research on a small 60 existing stem cell embryos:
I also believe human life is a sacred gift from our Creator. I worry about a culture that devalues life, and believe as your President I have an important obligation to foster and encourage respect for life in America and throughout the world. And while we’re all hopeful about the potential of this research, no one can be certain that the science will live up to the hope it has generated.
Eight years ago, scientists believed fetal tissue research offered great hope for cures and treatments — yet, the progress to date has not lived up to its initial expectations. Embryonic stem cell research offers both great promise and great peril. So I have decided we must proceed with great care.
CNN delves into the stem cell issue and response following the Bush administration decision. I understand the ethical cloning concerns, but I can think of a lot worse things to spend tax money on than stem cell research (hint: Iraq).
It’s too easy piling on Limbaugh’s idiotic comments here as others are already doing, so where do you weigh in on the more important issue of stem cell research? Ironically perhaps Limbaugh will fuel renewed interest and positive, productive discussion and debate on this topic.
The answer to the True or Fool question is in the spoiler text below which you can reveal by clicking the “show” button.
