Validate Your Life

Athletics:
Strange episode for West African country, Togo, at the Olympics.

One of their competitors, whom many Togolese did not know because he resided in France and had only visited his home country once, won Togo’s first Olympic medal!

Boukpeti, 27, who chose to compete for Togo in Beijing when it became clear he was too old for France, said he now had a “very good reason” to visit the African nation after stunning the field and spectators at the Olympics.

Yeah, always a good freebie to realize someone is competing for your country of whom you’ve never heard of and they win a medal!

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I had not idea earthquakes were still wreaking such havoc.

It’s the latest of numerous of aftershocks from the 7.9 quake that struck Sichuan on May 12 and killed almost 70,000 people and left 5 million homeless.

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Meteorology: Cool that twitter proved to be the main method of communication after the earthquake today.

Celebrity: This site was shocking. It’s old news. Many of those people died years ago, but how in the hell was Jimi Hendrix (for example, on the shock list) only 27? He looks like he’s 50 in some pictures! Another shock was James Dean’s early death. I had no idea some of those

Politics: I just saw Nancy Pelosi on the Dailey Show. Thank goodness someone started pouring in some intelligent people into the White house.

Health: Apparently, watch out for dirty pool water. Stay near the clean fluids.

Finances:Turns out when the FDIC seized the mortgage company IndyMac on July 11, the inevitable cascade of financial repercussions has started to appear.

The chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said Tuesday more banks are in danger of failing, and that the government agency expects to raise premiums to restore its reserve fund after paying out billions of dollars to depositors at IndyMac Bank.

Sure, Sheila Blair affirmed that it won’t happen again:

“Based on the supervisory data and financial data I have, I would be very surprised if we had failures of that size institution or larger…”

but the instability of certain banks remains.
Blair affirms $100k consumers have in a bank (or $250k in some retirement accounts) is covered by a protection program if the bank fails…great, but what about those holding a 250k+ margin in a bank that fails?!

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• Tour de France: Cadel Evans leads from Australia. Way to go getting the “down under” guys showing up for a change from all the Italian, French, and European spin vets.

• Latest iPhone App: via iPhone’s amazing (and free) AOL Radio App , I’ve been dialing into KFWB. While they may not be the largest radio station out there, for local SoCal news, they present a very solid rap and have their act together in covering local events. I encourage you to check them out.
• Joke of the Day: This poor bloke has seen E.T. just one too many times.
  The most hilarious article of his “eloquent” and “comprehensive” coverage of extra-terrestrials was this sound bite: “You know…they could made of water. I don’t even know.” I almost did a spit-take drinking my morning tea hearing that one. No more slime, goo, nor multiple heads — aliens are now “made of water”. The nerd comment of the day would be that “Humans — being, like the Earth itself, about 70% water –are all alien, then! “They’re out there, man. They got them little graves and stuff.”

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This is pretty big news. I’m familiar with Vivendi (owned some stock traded over the european market for awhile) and know the Activision and Blizzard game brands, this merger is about as big as Macromedia and Adobe fusing to one killer web development app.

Big news!  Bill Gates Retired roughly a week ago.  Clinton’s democratic VP and Obama as Presidential nominee.  How did I miss this news?!!  Well, okay I learned about Gates’s retirement before July, but Why wasn’t there more coverage of this?  Especially the Bill Gates news?  That’s one of the biggest computer news items of the 21st century!   I think I have to get into a system of instead of trying to catch “all” big news, merely follow a few major themes (like ’08 race, ’08 olympics, occasional celebrity, and Apple news).

In the United States

Zip codes in CA run from 90000-96199. If you’re outside of that range, you’re in the wrong place!!! Haha!

Recently read this great article and it sparked some interesting ideas. Superheros are only identifiably heroic when they can connect to other humans! Otherwise, they’re just alien. The most secure way of making that connection, honestly, is flaws. Batman’s troubles over his dead parents, Ironman’s drinking problems, Maxwell Smart’s stupidity and bumbling, all those flaws make their great deeds identifiably humanly heroic. Cool stuff. Otherwise they’re just mythological!

Yeah, that’s awesome. Superheroes who are perfect without flawed are just myth. The stories of Neptune and Jupiter from Ancient Rome helped Romans understand their mysterious world and answer some of the questions that could only be answered with scientific breakthroughs millenias to come. Same goes for the Zeus, Posieden, Athena stories from greece. Those mythologies embodied flawless, “inhuman heros”. A star contrast from the very human and flawed, but exceptionally heroic characters in many of todays films.

Maybe we have re-invented mythology into a global flawed mythological superhuman superhero. The kind that is a little bit closer to us than Zeus on Mount Olympia, or Neptune beneath the sea. Modern culture has crafted “gods” (superheros) that blends the myth into our reality because we recognize elements of each of us in the our 21st century heroes.

Swell – Swells is long, oceanic surface waves, consistently formed by tropical storms and wind systems. A few fractions of a second difference in a wave, on the other side of the ocean, creates a totally different set of waves. Swell waves are often mixed with local chop “noise” waves.

Swell Size — Swell waves are measured in “swell size” which is 33% of the largest wave in a set (trough to crest).

Fetch – The fetch is just the “un-wave” part of water. The larger the flat water (fetch) and the stronger the wind, the larger the wave will be. Shores that have inslands in front of them have a very short fetch (blocked), so smaller waves. The swell is generated by wind blowing consistently over a fetch.

Local Wind – too intense of a local wind will make the swell waves too choppy and unsurfable. Ideal is a slight offshore wind, that blows into the face of the wave, scooping them out even more!

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Alas, I cannot speak from the “literary front lines” of PDK as I have not read Androids nor Scanner, but have seen both film interpretations (Blade Runner and linklater’s). If I ever get around to reading PDK amidst the hundreds of other books on the to-read list, I think I’ll like Scanner the best, it was written almost 10 years later, maybe his writing craft more honed, but I didn’t realize how PDK owns (or net speack pwns!) the book-to-sci-fi-film area. He wrote minority report, too? So that’s scanner, minority, blade runner, total recall, paycheck– pretty big sci-fi selection. Sure, asimov set in motion the robot movies, but that’s only really “one big movie” (just a bunch of remakes, bicentennial man and i,robot some of the most recent). PKD spawned Totally unique films from his books.

Total Recall and Blade Runner are some of THE most epic film sci-fi renditions (save 2001). I loved all those movies, and gravitated to all of them, but only just now discovered that the common vein between total recall, blade, scanner, paycheck, and yes, even screamers was PKD. I’ve seen all of those movied and loved all of them and only just realized the common denominator is PDK. far out! That’s like doing problems over and over and then abstracting out to see a larger, framework formula. cool!

And talk about prolific. Prolific is an understatement for this guy. 121 published short stories and dozens of published books, nine of which were turned into Sci-Fi movies!!! Who else has done that? What other writer has achieved that much book to film coverage? Dickens? Not really, his works get clumped in that 18th century pile of the same flicks. It’s shocking at how unique all of PKD’s works are. Almost like multiple authors (or a multiple-brained single author) wrote the wide-ranging complex variety of works!

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Parralax — okaya parralax is the “apparent” (But not actual) movement of an object visually because of the REAL movement of the observer. Most common is the STellar parralax where a very distant (millions of miles) star appears to move, but realy it’s the earth orbitting annually revolving around the sun that creates the impression of the star moving, a parallax. A large parralax angle means the star is closer. the farther away a star is (or an object is )from the observer, then the smaller the parralax angle (The smaller amount of shifter that occurs on the visual spectrum. A sundial is a perfect eample of a natural parralx (the dial moves (attached to the earth taht moves) creating hte impression that hte shadow moves. Just bottom-line, the observer (earth, or dial, or whatever) moves creating the impression that a distant objects moves. The closer the object, the larger the parallax angle.

Another well known parallax is the mercury retrograde. Note: this is mercury’s apparent (not real) retrograde, that said, all apparent retrograde is really just a parallax effect. Mercury or Mars does not actually move backwards in the orbit. The earth just loops back around the sun so the vision the sun casts (From the earth) makes it look like it flips back the other way, In short, whenever the earth gets horizontal with a planet(it hten goes diagonal, given different rates of revoltion), the the parralax fliparound retrograde effect occurs.

Apparently students are now being suspended and experiencing harsher punishments for improper paper-writing content, which is, of course, the classic American, idiotic attempt toward reform. This is what American’s do. They recognize a serious problem (like school shootings) and then, instead of observing, tapping into intention, listening into the feelings — the essence of the problem, the ailment that needs to be nurtured — they start punishing and prohibiting. Punishments and prohibitions dangerously glaze over a problem like school shootings, temporarily embalming it, only to have it resurrect itself with an even more uncontrollable ferocity. Are the people on school boards really this ignorant, naïve, and bloody stupid?! Do they really think that prohibiting a certain type of paper writing is an attempt towards a solution? This is a “sham resolution” – an attempt to remedy that APPEARS like a lot of action, but is actually all show. It’s useless, and it’s beyond infuriating and downright funny that they actually think they’re alleviating it.

If you read THIS, you’ll get some great insight into the origins of violence, and THIS paper offers another great insight.

After you read those quality pieces, you’ll quickly be able to assess that violence is schools is caused by improper upbringing, violence in the media and video games, and peer pressure for a reputation. Conclusively, the last thing you do is start scolding and slapping wrists (which is the first thing that American bureaucracy began doing) and you commence healing the home front, ensure family’s don’t infuse violence, change the exposure to violence in the media, and address social image concerns. ACTING like they have a solution, and knowing they really don’t is one thing, but the fact that bureaucracies may actually think that they’re solving a problem by actually altering paper writing topic structure is actually an asinine procedure quite typical of most bureaucracies.

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