A camera

A small child about eight years old is sitting alone in a schoolyard.
He is depressed.
He is often depressed.
At school he is bullied heavily.
At home he is emotionally neglected.
He does not understand the empty feeling he feels, the feeling he would later learn was loneliness.
He does not understand why.
He cannot make his sorrow leave.
He cannot find comfort.
So he does what most children do when neglected.
He blames himself.
This is his fault.
This is the way the world works.
It is his place to suffer and fail.
He cannot win or succeed.
It is his place to suffer and fail.
This he believes.
This he thinks.
He cannot cry for he fears it will make things worse.
He cannot ask for help for he fears he would suffer from asking.
A glinted coin smiles at him from the trodden mud.
He pockets it.
The school is holding a raffle that day.
A whim, he buys a ticket.
Money forever lost for he simply cannot win, even at a game of chance.
This he thinks.
His number is the second called.
He is gifted with a wonderful, shiny new camera with numerous, essential accessories held in a big, beautiful box.
He is happy.
This means he is wrong...
This means he can succeed...
This means there is hope...
That not everything will turnout as he believed it will.
That one day he will no longer be burdened with that empty feeling.
That he won't always be bullied.
That he might lead a happy, joyous life in the end.
He is proud.
For the first time he can remember he is proud.
He is excited.
He hadn't wanted a camera before.
But it didn't matter what it was, he was going to cherish it.
It was his.
He was going to care for it.
He was going to take pictures of everything he had ever liked, that had ever made him feel good.
Then he was going to take pictures of the pictures and cherish each one.
He was going to care for it, clean it, keep it.
He was going to cherish it.
He approached his mother's car.
He is proud.
For the first time he can remember he is proud.
He has finally done something he feels is worthy of approval.
He shows it to her.
She smiles.
She is usually uncaring or grim but for once she smiles.
"That's nice we could use a new camera" she says.
All happiness vanishes from him.
"But it's mine..." he mumbles.
"You can have one of the older ones" she replies.
He doesn't argue.
He knows she will not listen, she will not care.
Speaking only makes things worse.
This he believes.
This he thinks.
This he knows from countless prior arguments.
Brooding he enters the car.
The drive back is silent.
It always is.
They arrive home.
His big, beautiful box is taken from him by hands stronger than his own.
An old battered camera is pushed into his hands.
It is cracked.
He hates it.
He takes two pictures of his ceiling before the vile thing decides never to work again.
He watches the camera be taken out of it's box and placed on self with the other cameras.
It is beautiful, shiny and out of his reach.
He cannot cry.
But he does anyway

Small things can have a lot meaning.
A pointless comment to one person can change the views of another.
Sometimes small things can be powerful and moving.
But again could be a waste of time to some one else.
Small moments can change someones course in life but be completely forgotten by others who where there.
Never underestimate the small things for they make up the world, everything and everyone on it.
Never forget that because something may hold no meaning to you does not mean it holds no meaning to others.

Sustainability

With peck oil, global warming and a number of other pockets of misinformation being bounced around incessantly I thought I'd share my opinions on them.

Global warming
While it is true that the global temperature is rising and will continue to rise, it is entirely false that we can prevent it.
It is a natural inevitability that will lead to the next ice age, we are mearly speeding the progress.
I will make some concessions though: Yes an ice age is extremely bad for civilised society, Yes we can slow down it's approach if the whole world changes drastically to become "green"
But truth be told there are other things to concern ourselves with such as the possibility of a solar storm which could wipe out all transformers on an entire continent and we could have at most a 19 minuet warning for this.
Where as an ice age will happen and happen soon (in geographical terms) it will be perfectly survivable and I reckon civilisation will pull through it intact (if something else doesn't cause it to come crashing down).
The thing about ice ages is that while known to the general public as a massive drop of temperature which remains constant for a long time this is not the case...
An ice age is actually a period of rapid fluctuation, changing in a matter of few thousand years from glaciers and sheets of ice over northern Europe to savanna grass.

Peck Oil
Ahh peck oil and renewable energy such a fun topic in which no two people seem to be able to agree on figures and arguments are won on the basis of who has the prettiest graph.
First off :No! Peck oil has not happened yet!
The recent drop of supply was due to the American invasion of Iraq causing stagflation.
In fact the price of oil is already recovering.
However the fact of the matter is that peck oil is not only possible it will happen soon (not in geographical terms).
But my main problem with this topic is the alarmists who seem to think that when we reach peck oil we instantly run out.
Where as peck oil is just that a peck the highest possible production of oil in history followed by a decline.
Imagine a world with rapidly increasing oil prices...
I can I see a world were companies seek out alternatives to lower the cost of production, were people walk to the shops because the car costs to much to run for casual uses, were electricity production has moved to alternate sources, were the most popular type of public transport is the electric train.
Also this is world suffering a major global depression but nothing it can't recover from.

"Green"
There is a difference between Eco friendly and green.
It's Eco friendly to plant a deciduous tree, it can support anywhere between 600-6000 insects which in turn feed larger creatures and power the Eco system.
The leaves of deciduous tree are great for the soil etc.
It'd be "green" to plant a coniferous tree in the same spot but not Eco friendly.
Let me explain coniferous trees support under a 100 insects at most and when their leaves (yes an awful lot coniferous leaves end up on the ground anyway) decompose they turn the soil acidic making it poison for most other plants.
"Green" seems to me to be something entirely PR related.
People try and be "green" so they can wear the badge and be popular, in other words "green" is just something that is fashionable.
In many things that try and pass themselves of as "green" pollute in other ways.
Let's take electric cars, Eco friendly?
Well seeing as electricity comes from magic electric cars help keep the environment clean right?
Besides the fact that anything that uses electricity is not Eco friendly electric cars are not Eco friendly for another reason production.
The mining of the zinc necessary for the batteries poisons rivers, any fish in the river, any animals that drink from the river and any plants that grow near the river.
Then there is the tries and any plastics in the car, the mining and smelting of any metal and I could go on.
But it is enough to say that the construction of every single bit of every single component in a car of any kind polluted the environment in some way.
How about bio fuels?
Are they Eco friendly? (I hate the term Eco friendly only slightly less then "green" due to it's overuse and it's misuse)
No they require too much farmland to produce and many third world try and produce them as a cash crop and worse still massive areas of rainforest's are slashed and burnt for the production of bio fuels.
Which brings me to my final topic for this evening.

Sustainability
As hunger and famine stab at many equatorial nations and mankind's demand for energy soars many ask what can be changed to make to make our society more sustainable.

The answer to that is simple nothing.

Our society civilisation will not become sustainable because it is in the midst of a population explosion.

Anything we do exponential growth will make it unsustainable.

We are living things we will expand to fill all available space and stress all available resources.

The problem with humanity is that while we are living things we have removed the usual complete dependence on the Eco system through the wonders of farming.

This gave us the potential to vastly over populate beyond the Eco systems capacity to cope with our activities, combined with modern medicine extending our life span means Eco nightmare.

If each of us were to use a faction of the electricity we do now and the population growth continued even by using method like dams, wind farms, tidal generators, and solar panels we would run out of places to put them and materials to make them out of pretty soon.

The effects of this can already be seen...picture for a moment the plant a vast sphere it's lands criss crossed with roads, sprinkled with small towns and occasionally touched with a large city.

Imagine for a moment the massive patch work of fields and farms that occupy the space between these towns and cities.

Consider the time before farming when 90% of the total land area of the earth was covered in forests.

Our need for farmland has pushed that down to 30% now a days.

Problems are already cropping up such as the aforementioned equatorial nations.

Their problem is caused by a combination of factors: third world debt, poor education, drought and over farming.

(tangential rant/Which is why I never bother with charities that say they intend to teach the poor starving Africans to farm or send over animals.

That's not their problem they already know how to farm it's poor soil, lack of rain, advancing desert and the west's stranglehold on their economy.

Farming only causes the desert to advance faster!

And they wouldn't be in such big trouble if they weren't being squeezed for everything of worth they as a nation own/tangential rant)

Why do they have to over farm in the first place?

Simple it's a combination of desperately needing something to help pay off the third world debt and needing to feed their vast population.

Examine a graph of the world population over history.

Will that graph simply level out?

Or will it behave like graphs usually do after such a spike which is to peck and then descend rapidly back down?

One thing I know for sure is that that level of population increase is impossible to sustain.

The Forgotten...

...blog.
I haven't looked at this, I haven't even thought about this blog for almost a whole year!
Well I have had an interesting and stressful few years:

First off my parents separated in a very ordered and civil fashion something me and my siblings were fully aware they intended to do a full two years before they told us.
Everyone seems much happier with the way things are now.
Dad no longer has a 50 minuet commute to his 18 hour work.
So basically I see much more of him now.
Still at the time the transition was while planned down to the last detail quite a stressful time.
Both my parents moved to temporary housing until their respective new properties were finished construction.
This meant I practically moved house four times in one year!
All this was hardest on mother who often displays obsessive compulsive tendencies (as a lot of mothers tend to).
She likes everything organised and neat and can became irrational and aggressive when this is not the case.
She found the disorder inherent in moving property especially stressful.
This was compounded by the fact that she was supporting three kids and had just lost the majority of dad's income and lacked any proper job experience other than retail (a field in which employers always employ young attractive people over older but more experienced potential employees)
This had all happened before my last blog entry and in retrospect I'm surprised I didn't mention any it.

After that last entry I ditched even sparsely updating this thing as my leaving cert (Irish state exam at the end of school that determines what places in college you can get) was approaching in a few months time and the impossible happened...I actually studied.
I had ten subjects to pass some with more than one paper so it had me just a little worried.
And yet it was easier than I expected it to be.
But a few days in I was hit with a shock I came home to find dad there.
Odd considering that we spent the week with mother and the weekends with dad.
When I got home he whisked me off to the hospital to where my siblings were beside my mothers bed.
The headaches and migraines she had been complain about the last while that the GP had diagnosed eye strain turned out to be an aneurysm which had ruptured.
She was suffering from severe hemorrhaging in the brain the doctors were desperately tyring to stabilise her enough for transport to Beaumount hospital as they did not possess the equipment or specialists for the operation required to save her life.
Knowing what I did about biology I knew if she could almost die without warning.
Despite this I had another test to go to the next the day.
Still I didn't let it put me off and ploughed through it.
A few weeks later she returned home the doctors having successfully sealed the aneurysm with a endovascular coiling ( translated from the unnecessary Latin means invessal coiling this is where they insert I assume a coil into the thick vassals around the thigh and groin and pass it up into the the brain where it causes a thrombotic (?) reaction which if successful seals the aneurysm (and leaves a platinum coil which as a metal coil heats up if exposed to large amounts of EM radiation)
As you would imagine she found walking and difficult and had to have us (my siblings and I) do most of everything for her.
This is harder than it sounds not because we had to do everything but because we had to do it for her.
As I mentioned before she exhibits OC tendencies towards neatness and order this extends to the point that she cannot relax if she feels anything is out of place.
The longer she remains in one place the more things she sees that she wants corrected.
The more things she corrects the more she sees.
The more she sees the more frustrated, unreasonable and aggressive she becomes.
This is someone whose blood pressure we have to keep low.
The only way round this is have it very difficult to see something out of place which is hard, it's like having a job cleaning show houses were if you screw up some one could die.

Since then she has been in and out of surgery and is on critical illness benefit and trying to pay her bills off that paltry offering.
What ever about most benefits being small enough sums critical illness benefit is for people whose doctors say they cannot work the only available option of real income.

Despite all that I still got the results I wanted.
Yet surprisingly not the course, turns out they mucked up and no one was signed up to the course this year.
But I got another course, it doesn't have as an exiting curriculum but at least it's run by people at least competent at administration.
It's also on the far shore of the country but this being Ireland that just means a four hour bus journey home at the weekends the rest of the time...Independence whOOO!
It takes a bit of adjustment for the first while I was still cooking for four.
And it takes some time ,some new friends and some late nights to realise the mind blowing convince of having a super market open 24/7 three minuets walk from your apartment.
Speaking of friends my new friends here make me realise how crappy my old friends were (if you could even call them that).
As for the course itself (bachelor in computer science with computer games design) it assumes no prior experience.
Which means that so far this year it's been mind meltingly simple as it would be to anyone with a dribble of programing such as myself.
My biggest fear is that as that it's hard to pay attention to people teaching you things you already know, my attention will slip and miss the transition between things I know and the vital things I have yet to learn.

And that's where I am at the moment.
My first year of college is approching the end and my life is finialy getting some kind of order to it.

infinity

Intrestingly I've found a cummunitiy based client space sim. in dev.
Unlike most projects without company backing this one looks likly to sucseed.
Not only that it's a very abmitious project (something most devolopment compainies would never be) a nearly infinite proceduraly generated world, seamless movement between atmosphere and orbit, control of muiltiple ships.
Naturaly I'll be supporting this emerging game and will be posting iregular updates on it.

Edit: I forgot to post a link so here it is http://www.infinity-universe.com/Infinity/

We are Broken

A short poem I scribbled.
Enjoy

Ancient and insurmountable we stood tall.
But we are broken, one by one we fall.
We have survived through nature's might.
We have risen after fire's flight.
But we are broken.

That which strode boldly about our roots,
creatures majestic, can no longer taste our fruits.
We have watched life grow and learn.
We have watched life twist and turn.
But we are broken.

Across continents we spanned, shoulder to shoulder.
Now in your hearths we smolder.
To the earth we tumble, our wood you take.
For nothing more than your own greedy sake.
But we are broken.

The grinding sound of diesel powered death.
echoes among us and one by one we fall.

War, Violence, Geoncide

How much do you know about the word around you?
What forces drive our universe of laws and our society of regulations?
How much do you really know about the world you experience everyday?



Human perception is flawed, we look at the world in light of right and wrong, good and evil.
But right and wrong only exist in our minds.
Yet every group of human beings that form quickly establishes what should be done and shouldn't be done, right and wrong.
It is instinctual, it allows us to exist as a group and without it there would be no human civilisation.
Our every every goal is ruled by instincts, how we achieve those goals is up to our rational mind.
Nothing we have every wanted has not been a result of our instincts.
My point in short is that right and wrong are figments of our imagination and we are ruled by our instincts.



I wonder do you realise the true effects of the things I have mentioned in the title?
Death, misery, and suffering are undeniable consequences of war.
But people see it in light of right and wrong, I will not hesitate to say I believe that without war the human race would be extinct.
It's all because of something called the gene pool.
When talking about genetics strength does not mean muscle power but ability to survive.
The more people who have strong genes in a society the stronger the gene pool.
War, murder and genocide is essential for removing weaker genes from the gene and keeps the gene pool stable.
Without them our species wouldn't progress, wouldn't properly evolve.
This is why we have these, this is why we are instictivly violent.
Evoltion is mercless natural process with no sense of wrong.

Can you imagine a world without violence?
I can and I can see mankind's civilisation crumbling.
I probaly seem pro war in this post, I am in fact a pacefist (that means to me at least that I won't enage in a violent act unless it is the only option to protect someone else from harm)
Reading this you're probaly muttering to yourself about what a fool I am and violence only causes suffering and without it humanity would be great and glorious.
If that is the cause I don't realy feel like tring to convince you further.
Good luck in your life were you without even realisng it are causeing famine and suffering on the other side of the world.

It's Human Nature

It's strange that when we need or want something we quickly become bored of it and desire more if we ever get it.

Simply put this means no material good will ever sate your desire for material goods so happiness cannot come from material goods.

I know this and can discuss it but in nearly the same breath can start discussing computer games and computer consoles.

Why?, the answer is simple I am human, subject to all our insticts, all our compulsions and all our emotions.
And the point behind this post?
No point just motiveless typing.