God

The only way in my mind to understand the concept of a monotheistic God is to view it through the lens of computer technology. Specifically video games. So I’m going to try this and if you find any holes, please reply.

For starters lets define the concepts of omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent and put them in the context of this argument.

Omnipotent = All powerful – Having control over everything in this universe
Omniscient = All knowing – Knowing everything in this universe
Omnipresent = Everywhere – In this universe

“In this universe” is the key phrase here. When any one of us play a simulation video game we too are all those things. Even more so if we are the creator of that game that can tweak it as we play it out.

Now imagine a God who is playing a simulation game. Something akin to The Sims for instance, but way more detailed.
The ability to play the game having already programmed its basic laws and tweaking it as they go. Adding expansion packs, levels and so on.

Would it be so difficult for this God to be everywhere? The ability to fly over everything and hone in on different things at different times. The ability to reverse or pause time to go back and see things that might have been missed without affecting the course of play.

Would it be so difficult for this God to know everything that is happening in the simulation? The ability to have key events pop up as alerts. The ability to know where characters are going or what they will aspire to do. The ability to let them make choices given a set of predefined options. The ability to know what choices those characters will make based on a variety of predisposed criteria/programming.

Would it be so difficult for this God to be all powerful in the simulation? The one who created the simulation, created all the options, created all the boundaries, created all the laws and created all the outcomes. The ability to reprogram and tweak the simulation at will.

Would it be so difficult for this God to play as a character (or many characters) in this simulaton themselves?

What about morality? If this God created the morality of this simulation and then did something against that morality, does it make the morality invalid or the God immoral? Is a programmer wrong if they change the code or hack something to work a certain way at a certain place even when it doesn’t jive with the rest of the code base they’ve already created? Is it wrong for this God to create the base morality and then play against it from time to time? From our perspective down here the answer is yes, from outside the simulation its probably not any more offensive then any one of us sending a lemming to their death. We don’t have to follow the morality we defined for the characters of the simulation. It’s not our morality, it’s theirs. Yet we assume that our morality is the only morality and that it must apply the same to the creator as it does to the created.

Admittedly, sometimes the universe seems to me like those out of bounds areas in video games. The ones that you will either never get to because nothing is programmed beyond them or you need to level up to access.

When God is often talked about it is said that we cannot know God or see God completely. Is this not like a character in a simulation being fully unable to see the programmer/player?

Of course like a simulation we play, how much does this God really care about each of the characters? Surely we would have no problem spiting the characters that backtalked to us or rewearding the ones that did as we bid. Likewise we could reward the bad characters or spite the good ones, just for fun.

What evidence does a character in a simulation have for the existence of a programmer/player from their perspective? None. Yet the programmer/player does exist.

What motivation does a programmer/player have to prove their existence to the characters in the simulation? Any one of use could tell our simulation characters that we exist outside of time and space and created everything. But why would we care to do that? What does it benefit our own ego to do that? When we want accepance we go to our peers or authority figures to gain it. We do not ask for acceptance from our creations. At best we USE our creations to gain acceptance from peers or authority figures.

The biggest question is, where did such a God come from? Since I’ve been playing guessing games throughout this whole post, I make no apologies about doing it here as well. Perhaps it doesn’t know. Remember that I already defined its omniscience to “this universe.” Perhaps trying to understand anything about its state of being is as difficult for us to understand as it would be for one of our own simulation characters to understand our state of being. It’s just beyond the ability of our imagination.

Like I said, to me, this is the only framing of this argument for a monotheistic God that works for my mind.

While this is just a thought, it begs the question, is it reality? Does it matter if it is or isn’t reality? Would we ever even know? Some could believe it if they want to believe it. But it seems to me that people only believe concepts like this when it benefits/rewards/scares them toward some motivation. The problem with this concept is that its such a perfect framing for a monotheistic God that it shows an unpredictable side to such a God that gains an individual human nothing of benefit, reward or fear to motivate such a belief. It’s an idea of how a monotheistic God might actually be, not how a monotheistic God might be of benefit/reward/fear to humans.

SOPA / PIPA In A Nutshell

Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act are two bills that are designed to restructure the internet in favor of large media companies who don’t want to change their ways of doing business in the modern internet age.

That’s what all of this really comes down to. I think most of us would agree that content creators should be paid for their work. That’s not even a debate.

What this is really about is the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) wanting to stop people from pirating their movies. Their solution is not to find a better way to sell their movies, hell no! Instead they want the government to pass bills that will allow them to shut down any website without trial for even mentioning where someone could find these illegal downloads. This is a big deal because it means any website with a comment section or blogging system or social network capability would have to monitor everything being said by everyone around the clock for fear of one rogue comment that might get them shut down.

What the motion picture industry needs to do instead is get creative and offer people new ways to easily purchase their content at decent prices and greater portability. But these guys are greedy. They’d do anything they can to keep the old system in place. They want you paying $10+ for a theater ticket and then another $15-30 for disk purchase later on.

Warner Brothers recently increased its delay on new video release for Redbox, Blockbuster and Netflix from 30 days to 56 days. Why? Because they want people to buy their DVD’s and Blu-ray disks. Hey that’s their right, but it only hurts them. More and more people are discovering that they don’t want to spend $15-25 on a disk they’re probably only going to watch once or twice.

If these companies got with the program they would release immediately on the internet at $1-4 for an HD movie rental depending on how new it was. They would allow multiple services to offer these rentals in multiple platforms (TV, desktop, phone) to maximize portability. They would allow multiple ways to pay for it. There would be no delay between disk and download.

The result? Piracy would go down dramatically.

But instead they want to burdon our legal system by giving the government draconian laws to shut down websites on a whim just because someone mentioned something illegal in common speak.

It’s the wrong way to do it. Then of course you have to ask yourself, if you give the government the right to do this, how will they learn to abuse that in the future. What new and creative ways can they find to limit our freedoms based on this law?

Search First!

I’ve been a messageboard user for well over a decade. Dating back to the late 1990′s. I love messageboards or forums as they are also called. They are a wealth of information and community. They are the precursor to modern day social networks even though messageboards are still around and thriving. But they are often not talked about on tech blogs because they aren’t new and exciting. They aren’t run by silicon valley startups with millions of dollars in venture capital or angel investors. Most of the time a messageboard community is run by a single individual who does it as a hobby and will elect certain other community members to act as forum moderators. While there are a few successful generic message forums, they mostly tend to be niche communities that focus on a given subject, such as filmmaking, religion, e-cigarettes and so on. They then break that subject down into individual forums and sub forums as a way of organizing and categorizing content.

Successful messageboards suffer from one particular problem more than anything. Repeating topics. As messageboards are often used to ask questions and get answers, community veterans find themselves answering the same questions over and over again. They get sick of it and start yelling “search first” in the comments.

I have been a member of more forums than I can count. I have also been an administer of a handful of messageboards. From my experience, people yelling “search first” tends to produce a negative effect on the members being yelled at. It makes them feel unwelcome in the community. Most of the time that message is given to new members, some of which have never used a messageboard previously. It can be a real turn off.

But what’s an even bigger turn off is that messageboards are anti-search to begin with. On one hand you have members yelling “search first” and on the other you have messageboard software that does everything in its power to prevent you from searching.

The software often buries the search form on another page which has a ton of check boxes and text areas which can immediately confuse a new user. Then after entering a term they may be returned with an error that tells them they must enter more than three characters. Upon entering more than three characters they are then returned with another error, that they must wait 30 seconds before submitting a new query. Some forums even rub salt in an open wound by making them fill out a captcha (those crazy unreadable letter/number images) before submitting their query.

Imagine if Google had all of these restrictions. Would you ever bother searching for anything? Wouldn’t it be simpler just to hit the “new post” button and ask your question in the way that you want to ask it? I bet it would.

The Solution
Forum search needs to be dead simple, limitless, powerful and looking you in the face the whole time you visit that community. Like a big long search field at the top of the forum, stacked right where all the sticky posts are. It needs to return results in real time as a member types. It needs to be limitless in the minimum number of characters or how many searches can be performed in a given period of time. Last of all, it should NOT be a process that requires a captcha.

We no longer live in an internet that is starving for resources. Today we have virtual servers, cloud hosting and nearly limitless bandwidth, even on the least expensive hosting providers. Database sharding and smarter software on more powerful machines makes search queries less painful than they used to be. Couple that with most users today being on broadband connections and there is no justifiable reason to fear extra database queries on an already niche community.

The logic is pretty simple. If you have a small community with a small amount of active users then you will have less search queries to begin with. If you have a larger community then you should probably view yourself as startup and find ways to monetize your community to pay for the extra resources you need.

Upon doing these things I think we’ll find that people will be more inclined to search first and as a result, annoy vetrans less and create a more welcoming environment.

Jeans & Shit

Spoof Fashion Ad

I’ll be honest. The fashion world confuses me. Every time I see clips of runway models doing their walk, the first thing that comes to my mind is “what the fuck!” I’ve seen better fashion from drag queens on Jerry Springer. Thank god this plastic wrap shit doesn’t end up in stores where we commoners spend our money.

Now I know this is the new world and this blog is supposed to be all open minded and pushing the boundaries of how to approach things. So let me take this negative stance toward the fashion industry and put a positive spin on it. The one thing I do like about the fashion industry, there are no patents. That’s a beautiful thing. It means that anyone can take someones design and rework or improve upon it. This scares some. But in reality it hasn’t hurt the fashion industry. Fashion is everywhere, including those knock off designer handbags you can find from street vendors. But it doesn’t stop people from throwing down big money for the real thing, if even just for gloating.

If only we could carry this over into other industries, we might just live in a better world where innovation moves even faster that it does today. Even if some of that innovation shows itself in the form of a model in plastic wrap looking like a space villain from a low budget sci-fi flick.

I don’t fear Google+

You would think that because my partner and I are developing SocialMore.com we would be hesitant and a little fearful of today’s announcement of Google+. This is after all Google’s answer to Facebook and social networking as a whole.

Google+ shares a few things in common with SocialMore in terms of grouping people and sharing things. But then, every new social network is going to have those things in common. So that’s not really a big concern. No doubt Google will have a lot of people wanting to use this new service of theirs. They have a good shot at dethroning Facebook or at least knocking it down a few notches. Which means we could see a whole new shift in the social networking landscape over the next few years. If history is any sign, people will become disinterested in Facebook and try out new services like Google+ and SocialMore.

So why don’t I fear Google plus? Why am I not just packing up shop and stopping development on SocialMore? The reason is simple. I think people are going to be burned out on social networking in the next couple years. That doesn’t mean it’s going to go away. No, instead it wil just become part of the fabric of the internet. In fact it always has been. People have been connecting and sharing stuff with each other since the dawn of the internet. That’s the entire point of the internet. Social networking is really just a buzz word and a set of tools that make it easier to share with people. The real power is in what those tools can do. Simple things like organizing your friends and family into groups and putting Like buttons on your stuff is just the beginning. What we intend to do with SocialMore is expand into what really matters; your content. It’s one thing to pass links around, but it’s another to get your content out there and seen by the right people.

SocialMore offers something different. Even if it doesn’t grow to be the size of Facebook or Google+ it wil certainly have its place. We’re building SocialMore because it’s something that we want to use ourselves. Something that solves a problem we’ve had for years. I know I’m teasing you right now by not telling you what that is, but there are some things we need to keep close to our chest for the moment. But I do fully believe that if you have passion and what you’re building solves a problem, it will find its place.

Nikon D5100 hopes

Update: January 30, 2012
Nikon announced the D5100 on April 5th, 2011. Turns out most of my hopes were realized, unfortunately the video quality doesn’t match the D7000. Details here.

Chances are Nikon is going to release or at least announce a D5100 within a week. That said I really hope it has the video capabilities of the D7000 rather than those of its younger brother the D3100. The video on the D3100, although 1080p/24fps, contains no manual control and jello galore. It’s my hope that Nikon can release something that will compete head to the head with the Canon Rebel T3i in the same price bracket. I’m tired on Nikon being behind the times when it comes to video. The D7000 is a good showing but if they can’t bring those video features down below $1000, we should also just pack it up and forget about Nikon once and for all when it comes to serious professional video.

Beyond that, I also hope Nikon brings this thing with a side swivel LCD screen and not that silly vertical LCD the D5000 had. The D5100 better be sporting a million pixels on its lcd like its Canon counterparts. Especially if they plan to hit the T3i price point. They are so much easier and nicer to focus on than these half megapixel LCD screens.

I say this because I really love Nikon cameras and the Nikon look. So I hope for the best with the D5100. If it hit these marks I know what my next purchase is. If it doesn’t, it’s going to have me shaking my head.

E-cigarette terminology

Turns out e-cigarettes are gaining popularity and with it are massive communities of devoted e-cigarette users out there. Just like all technologies and niche communities there are terms, slang and short hand that get invented to express what’s being talked about. If you’re new to e-cigarettes I’ve decided to make this post so you can learn what these terms mean.

But it’s as much for me as it is for you. I don’t want to have to keep putting simple explanations into parenthesis every time I write a blog entry about e-cigarettes. So instead at the top of each of those blog entries I’ll just link back to this post. I’ll also try to keep this post updated as new terms, technology and slang come about. That said, let us begin.

• Analog = A traditional tobacco cigarette that is burned and inhaled. Get off the analogs they’ll kill ya!
• E-cigarette (e-cig) = Electronic cigarette otherwise called a personal vaporizer
• Personal vaporizer (PV) = A technically more accurate term for an e-cigarette. These aren’t really cigarettes they are personal vaporizers.
• Vaping or vape = The act of inhaling the vapor a personal vaporizer emits.
• Vapers = People who vape.
• E-Liquid or E-juice = Sometimes called smoke juice or rarely e-fluid. Is the liquid that is turned into the vapor you are inhaling.
• Propylene glycol (PG) = The base ingredient in most e-liquid. Same as used in smoke/flog machines.
• Vegetable glycerin (VG) = An alternative base ingredient in e-liquid. Sometimes mixed with PG.
• Milligrams (mg) = The amount of nicotine found in a given e-liquid. (0mg, 4mg, 6mg, 8mg, 11mg, 12mg, 16mg, 18mg, 24mg, 30mg, 36,mg, 48mg) Unless you are a heavy smoker and/or experience with vaping we recommend you stay below 24mg. Good to start with 12-18 and if it’s not strong enough, go up. Just remember that you’ll probably vape more than you smoked. So don’t overdue the nicotine.
• MilliLiters (mL) = The amount of e-liquid in a given container. Be it cartridge, cartomizer or bottle of e-liquid. Typical carts/cartos hold between 0.25-1mL of e-liquid. Bottles can be bought in various sizes.
• Atomizer (atty) = The heating element used to turn the e-liquid into vapor that is inhaled.
• Cartridge (cart) = A plastic cylinder with poly-fill used to absorb and hold the e-liquid that will be vaporized.
• Cartomizer (carto) = A disposable (but often refillable) atomizer and cartridge combined into one piece.
• Auto Battery = A battery that senses either sound or air pressure and turns on the atomizer.
• Manual Battery = A battery that requires you to hold a button to turn on the atomizer.
• Starter Kit = Starter kits are what most people buy when they first begin vaping. They usually include two batteries, a five pack of carts/cartos, one or two atomizers, a usb charger and wall adapter. Cartomizer kits don’t come with atomizers since the cartomizers have atomizers built in. Kits will vary in price and equipment included depending on the model and vendor who sells it.
• Vapor Production = The amount of vapor a particular e-cig model and/or e-liquid produce.
• Throat Hit = How strong of a hit you get at the back of the throat when inhaling vapor. Different combinations of e-cig models and e-liquid can produce stronger or weaker throat hit.
• Dripping or drip = The act of dripping 2-3 drops of e-liquid directly on an atomizer and vaping.
• Driptip = A special open mouth piece that can be put on the end of an atomizer or cartomizer for easy dripping.
• Flooding = When too much e-liquid is added to an atomizer it can flood causing it not to vape properly or at all.
• Ohm = In the e-cig world this term comes up often when talking about atomizers and cartomizers. It refers to the resistance of the atomizer or cartomizer in question. Lower Ohms mean less resistance and higher Ohms mean more resistance.
• Low Resistance (LR) = Referring to Ohms of a atomizer or cartomizer
• High Resistance (HR) = Referring to Ohms of a atomizer or cartomizer
• Voltage = Used in reference to the batteries and what kind of power they push out. (3.2v, 3.7v, 4.7v, 5v, 6v, etc.)
• mAh = How much electricity a battery holds.
• Mods or mod = Modifications made to an e-cigarette. Often used in reference to big batteries.
• Big batts = Big batteries used in place of smaller cigarette sized batteries. Big batts last longer.
• Personal Charging Case (PCC) = They can look like plastic or metal versions of traditional cigarette packs or look completely different. They are used to store your carts/cartos and charge your batteries while on the go.
• Adapter = An adapter is used to convert one e-cig model component to work on another e-cig model.

Model Specific Terminology

• 510 = The most popular model of e-cigarette used by beginners and experienced vapers. 3.2v batteries. Most people prefer the manual batteries on this model since auto batts can be set off by loud music in bars.
• eGo = Based on the 510 the eGo uses a slighly larger and thicker battery for longer run time. 3.2v batteries.
• KR808D-1 = Another very popular model that started the cartomizer trend. Easy to use on the go. 3.7v batteries. The auto batteries on this model are pressure activated so they work just as well as manual batteries.

If you discover anything that needs to be corrected or added, please leave it in the comments.
Thank you

E-cigarettes and me

The first time I saw an e-cigarette was couple of years ago at a bachlor party. A buddy of mine had one he bought from some store online. I don’t know the model but it was a pen style. Black with tappered tip and blue LED. He explained it to us but I didn’t pay a lot of attention. My first thought was “it’s coming from China and we have no idea what kind of chemicals you’re inhaling there, could be very dangerous, more so than regular cigarettes.”

About a year went by and I didn’t think about them again. Then in October of 2009 one of my bosses at work brought up that she was thinking about getting an e-cigarette and I made some ill informed comment similar to my first thought about them.
However this time I decided it wasn’t fair of me to be so biased without doing any research. So I hit the internet. I learned that e-cigarettes really are a great alternative to smoking. I learned that the ingredients in the e-juice (or e-liquid) are very few, usually 3-10 compared to the over 4600 chemicals found in a burning tobacco cigarette.

Over the next month I convinced myself that I too wanted to try an e-cigarette. Not only did I want to try one but I was in a super hurry to try one. I was amp’d up and didn’t want to wait for some online vendor to ship me one. So I hit a local smoke shop and bought the worst piece of crap e-cig available for an absurd $50. As I learned later on that same model could be bought online for $9 and no one recommended them.

Well I tried it and I hated it. It tasted like burnt dog shit. Not that I’ve ever had the pleasure of setting fire to dog shit and inhaling. But that was my basic interpretation.

Still I didn’t give up. I did some more reading, decided to be a little more patient and settled on a model called a KR808D-1 sold by Vapor4Life and branded by them as a VaporKing. Now this was more like I was expecting it to be. Good vapor, good throat hit and a decent taste.

They ended up screwing up my order because apparently I hit “buy” on a starter kit configuration they were “toying” with late at night and removed the next morning. So they ended up sending me a kit that wasn’t as complete as what I had ordered. As a result I got on their forum to ask about it and everyone pretty much thought I was just complaining and trying to scam them. Until that is, some other member decided to run a google search and check google cache pages to discover that indeed that kit configuration did exist for a few hours and I must have ordered during that time. Big apologies all around and a phone call from the head honcho at V4L who wanted to personally apologize and send me a whole bunch of freebies. A few days later in the mail I received about $100 worth of free stuff. Including a whole bunch of stuff I probably wouldn’t have bought myself at the time, but once I had it and tried it out, I got a really good idea of what stuff was my favorite.

Well I spend the next two months going through all of those freebies and only made one order for some juice. Deciding I would refill the empty cartomizers. Things were going great and I had completely kicked traditional (analog) cigarettes by that point. Then for whatever reason I stopped using the e-cig and quit everything. I don’t remember why exactly. I think I read something on an e-cig forum that spooked me a little and made me go back to those thoughts that maybe these things could be worse than analog cigarettes.

After a month or so of being completely free of everything, I got stressed out at work one day and bummed an analog cigarette off a co-worker. Suddenly I was right back on the pain train that is tobacco cigarettes.

I spend the next 6-7 months smoking again. Like the last time I had smoke I started having breathing problems at night where I would wake up and have to hit an inhaler because my throat would get constricted. That year of smoking machine rolled pipe tobacco before my first e-cig experience really took my health for a spin.

So I decided enough was enough. I’m getting off the analogs for good. Last time I used the e-cig it successfully helped me quit smoking and made my breathing problems go away. So it was the perfect device to do it again.

Here I am now. Ten days on the e-cig again and I haven’t touched a real cigarette. I feel better, I’m not as tired and worn out, I’m more active and my breathing problems have begun to shrink on me. These things really are a gift to smokers.

I’m going to spend a little more time talking about this subject in depth on this blog. This is my first post about it. So I’ve created a category called “E-Cigarettes” where all those posts will go. Check back often as I update this topic and other topics that might interest you.

What is Spirituality?

I was listening to an atheist podcast a few weeks ago where one of the hosts said something along the lines of spirituality being a BS word that doesn’t really mean anything. Personally I don’t believe that. But I know where he was going with it.

I’ve heard people throw around the word spiritual as a sort of generic non-religious term. Something used to describe a belief without a set of rules. I’ve also heard people use the term in relation to religion.

But what is spirituality exactly and is it important?

Well without going to a dictionary, I’ll give you my interpretation.

I think spirituality is an emotional high that consists of the human condition longing for great order, peace and inspiration from the unknown. Like an orgasm of the imagination.

It’s very real by that definition. I’m not sure anyone would want to sensibly debate such a definition. The debate comes in as to whether or not there is a connection to a higher power that takes place with such a feeling. I’m not here to debate that. I’ll leave that up to you.

The question now turns to whether or not spirituality is important. Obviously it is. Spirituality has existed throughout most if not all of human existence. Sometimes it has been just personal beliefs and sometimes it has come wrapped up in a container of religion. It has taken many shapes and forms but it hasn’t ever gone away. As such it must play an important role in the development of humanity. I’m not sure how. I mean off the top of my head I can say that it’s been used as motivation, inspiration and a means of gaining a sense of inner peace. But what more, I cannot say.

SocialMore to compete with Facebook

I’m building a new social network with my partner. SocialMore.com is designed to be an alternative to Facebook. Our goal isn’t to try and beat facebook or anything like that. In fact a lot of people have said “you’re crazy, facebook is huge, how can you compete?” I think the simple answer is, facebook is not the end. It’s not as if the world ends tomorrow and facebook is declared the winner. Clearly there is a lot of room for new sites in the social networking space. But very few people have the vision to see that. Everyone else is building niche social networks so as not to compete with facebook out of fear that they don’t stand a chance. We on the other hand believe we have some good and interesting features that offer something facebook doesn’t.

Our goal is to launch the beta of SocialMore.com by the end of the year at the latest. It will take some time to make sure everything is in tip top shape and to weed out what works and what doesn’t work. We’ll be running a private beta before we go public with it. Hopefully that will begin this fall.

This is a very exciting project with a lot of promise. Stay tuned for more information. Both here and at SocialMore.com