Wednesday 28 November 2012

Memories


Over the last few weekends i have been doing a job that i had put off for years.

After my first marriage broke up most of my life was boxed up and then hauled around from one short term place to another. Most of what was left of my life was shed - first all my books and sports gear then most of my cameras and musical instruments. Eventually it was down to just a few boxes of papers and photographs.

These then sat on a shelf in the shed of the house we have been renting for the last four years. I've not looked at any of it for something like ten years and some of the papers in there i've not looked at for maybe twenty years.

I'd been planning to put all of the old family photographs together to take back to New Zealand and give to my ex. The opportunity has recently come and with it also the incentive - for it is likely that i will be moving to a distant country and i do not know if i will ever get the chance again.

So i bought a photo and slide scanner on eBay and for the last four weekends i have been scanning pictures and documents going back more than sixty years. The first day of it drove me to whisky. It was too much - yes there was joy at seeing all the wonderful old pictures of my children when they were young and my wife when she was lovely - but with every joy came sadness at the lost family. After a few hours each new photograph brought more joy and more sadness than i could stand and i sought solace and numbness in Jim. It does not take much to trigger my need for escape and each of these two or three thousand pictures was  itself enough.

The following weekend was little better. The third, well i was starting to get over it, and by the last weekend i got through it all sober and happily through with the task.

I can't say i did a perfect job. Most of the photographs were unordered and i had to guess what year each was. At times i was gauging the year by the closeness to a major event like the birth of a child - so seems to me when i look at them now that there's a lot of pictures around the years of the birth and fewer after. It's not that i took more pictures about then - it's simply that the years between seem empty and so my allocation to years has echoed that feeling.

The next job will be to pass all the prints and slides to my ex. Maybe somehow she can aid with getting the years right. After that when or if i ever get the chance i might go through the thousands of negatives looking for great old pics that might have been lost or given away.

Wish me luck :-)

p





Thursday 22 November 2012

Friday 19 October 2012

A letter of note


I suck an RSS feed from Letters of Note

the site publishes or re-publishes letters from famous people.

This one (copied in full) really speaks out to me:



Thursday, 18 October 2012


People simply empty out


In 1969, publisher John Martin offered to pay Charles Bukowski $100 each and every month for the rest of his life, on one condition: that he quit his job at the post office and become a writer. 49-year-old Bukowski did just that, and in 1971 his first novel, Post Office, was published by Martin's Black Sparrow Press

15 years later, Bukowski wrote the following letter to Martin and spoke of his joy at having escaped full time employment.

(Source: Reach for the Sun Vol. 3; Image: Charles Bukowski, via.)

8-12-86

Hello John:

Thanks for the good letter. I don't think it hurts, sometimes, to remember where you came from. You know the places where I came from. Even the people who try to write about that or make films about it, they don't get it right. They call it "9 to 5." It's never 9 to 5, there's no free lunch break at those places, in fact, at many of them in order to keep your job you don't take lunch. Then there's OVERTIME and the books never seem to get the overtime right and if you complain about that, there's another sucker to take your place.

You know my old saying, "Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors."

And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don't want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does.

As a young man I could not believe that people could give their lives over to those conditions. As an old man, I still can't believe it. What do they do it for? Sex? TV? An automobile on monthly payments? Or children? Children who are just going to do the same things that they did?

Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: "Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don't you realize that?"

They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn't want to enter their minds.

Now in industry, there are vast layoffs (steel mills dead, technical changes in other factors of the work place). They are layed off by the hundreds of thousands and their faces are stunned:

"I put in 35 years..."

"It ain't right..."

"I don't know what to do..."

They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work. I could see all this. Why couldn't they? I figured the park bench was just as good or being a barfly was just as good. Why not get there first before they put me there? Why wait?

I just wrote in disgust against it all, it was a relief to get the shit out of my system. And now that I'm here, a so-called professional writer, after giving the first 50 years away, I've found out that there are other disgusts beyond the system.

I remember once, working as a packer in this lighting fixture company, one of the packers suddenly said: "I'll never be free!"

One of the bosses was walking by (his name was Morrie) and he let out this delicious cackle of a laugh, enjoying the fact that this fellow was trapped for life.

So, the luck I finally had in getting out of those places, no matter how long it took, has given me a kind of joy, the jolly joy of the miracle. I now write from an old mind and an old body, long beyond the time when most men would ever think of continuing such a thing, but since I started so late I owe it to myself to continue, and when the words begin to falter and I must be helped up stairways and I can no longer tell a bluebird from a paperclip, I still feel that something in me is going to remember (no matter how far I'm gone) how I've come through the murder and the mess and the moil, to at least a generous way to die.

To not to have entirely wasted one's life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.

yr boy,

Hank


Saturday 13 October 2012

like stepping through a door


like stepping through a door
or falling down a stair
from this to the next
can happen anywhere

anytime it can happen
and one day it will
a slip or a stumble
a fall or a spill

be careful

p


Friday 17 August 2012

MS SQL Server Spatial to Google Maps KML

I don't usually post code tips on my blog but this one might help some other poor soul.

You have some map data stored in SQL Server as geometry (or geography) and you want to extract it in a format that you can use in your google maps mashups.

I wanted a Q and D solution that would be confined entirely to SQL Server functions. I can certainly write C type code (maybe a million lines in my life) but i wanted this totally within SQL Server and easily used.

Note that my maps are relatively simple - there are no interior rings though there are all sorts of combinations of MULTIPOLYGONs, GEOMETRYCOLLECTIONs and simple POLYGONs. You should check your own maps for complexity and if necessary add support for interior rings (which i don't need).

Here's the 3 main pieces of code i wrote to satisfy my needs.


This first function returns the MultiGeometry part of my Placemark (sorry, everything above you will have to sort out yourself):


CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[kmlGeometryElementsExtract]
(
@p_Spatial geometry
)
RETURNS xml
AS
BEGIN

DECLARE @v_spatialXML xml

SET @v_spatialXML = dbo.kmlGeometryElementsExtractAux(@p_Spatial.ToString())

DECLARE @v_collection xml
DECLARE @v_multi xml
DECLARE @v_poly xml

SELECT
@v_multi = nref.query('.')
from @v_spatialXML.nodes('/bracket') as R(nref)
where
nref.value('.[1]/@tag','varchar(100)') = 'MULTI'

IF @v_multi IS NOT NULL
BEGIN

RETURN (

SELECT
(
SELECT
dbo.kmlGeometryCoordsConvert(nref.value('.','VARCHAR(MAX)')) as 'outerBoundaryIs/LinearRing/coordinates'
from @v_multi.nodes('//bracket') as R(nref)
where
nref.value('./bracket[1]','VARCHAR(MAX)') IS NULL -- no backet below
FOR XML PATH('Polygon'), TYPE
)
FOR XML PATH('MultiGeometry'), TYPE
)

END

SELECT
@v_collection = nref.query('.')
from @v_spatialXML.nodes('/bracket') as R(nref)
where
nref.value('.[1]/@tag','varchar(100)') = 'COLLECTION'

IF @v_collection IS NOT NULL
BEGIN
RETURN (

SELECT
(
SELECT
dbo.kmlGeometryCoordsConvert(nref.value('.','VARCHAR(MAX)')) as 'outerBoundaryIs/LinearRing/coordinates'
from @v_collection.nodes('*/bracket') as R(nref)
where
nref.value('.[1]/@tag','varchar(100)') = 'POLYGON'
FOR XML PATH('Polygon'), TYPE
)
FOR XML PATH('MultiGeometry'), TYPE

)
END

SELECT
@v_poly = nref.query('.')
from @v_spatialXML.nodes('/bracket') as R(nref)
where
nref.value('.[1]/@tag','varchar(100)') = 'POLYGON'

IF @v_poly IS NOT NULL
BEGIN
RETURN (
SELECT
(
SELECT
dbo.kmlGeometryCoordsConvert(nref.value('.','VARCHAR(MAX)')) as 'outerBoundaryIs/LinearRing/coordinates'
from @v_poly.nodes('*/bracket') as R(nref)
where
nref.value('.','VARCHAR(MAX)') IS NOT NULL
FOR XML PATH('Polygon'), TYPE
)
FOR XML PATH('MultiGeometry'), TYPE
)
END

RETURN NULL
        
END



The kmlGeometryElementsExtract function above calls this one - which looks like a hack but it turns out to be the fastest way to skin this cat - i had written a FSM to do the job but SQL Server string handling is way too slow if you are concatenating one char at a time to a large string.

 CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[kmlGeometryElementsExtractAux]
(
@p_SpatialString VARCHAR(MAX)
)
RETURNS varchar(max) -- in xml format
AS
BEGIN

DECLARE @v_result VARCHAR(MAX)

SET @v_result = REPLACE(@p_SpatialString,'GEOMETRYCOLLECTION (','<bracket tag="COLLECTION">')
SET @v_result = REPLACE(@v_result,'MULTIPOLYGON (','<bracket tag="MULTI">')

SET @v_result = REPLACE(@v_result,', POLYGON','POLYGON')
SET @v_result = REPLACE(@v_result,'POLYGON (','<bracket tag="POLYGON">')
SET @v_result = REPLACE(@v_result,', LINESTRING','LINESTRING')
SET @v_result = REPLACE(@v_result,'LINESTRING (','<bracket tag="LINESTRING">')

SET @v_result = REPLACE(@v_result,'), (',')(')

SET @v_result = REPLACE(@v_result,'(','<bracket>')
SET @v_result = REPLACE(@v_result,')','</bracket>')

RETURN @v_result

        
END


The kmlGeometryElementsExtract function above also calls this one - which simply formats the coordinates element contents to suit my needs - YMMV:


CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[kmlGeometryCoordsConvert]
(
@p_CoordsString VARCHAR(MAX)
)
RETURNS varchar(max)
AS
BEGIN

/* this line replaced with line from post comment below   
RETURN CHAR(10) + REPLACE(REPLACE(@p_CoordsString,', ',',0' + CHAR(10)),' ',',') + ',0' + CHAR(10)

here's the new line:
*/

 RETURN CHAR(10) + REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(@p_CoordsString,', ',',0' + CHAR(10)),' ',',') + ',0' + CHAR(10), CHAR(10), CHAR(10) + ' ')

END




Hope you find that useful

pop


ps see DB rankings here: DB-ENGINES

Friday 13 July 2012

Dear Apple, Dear Samsung

I am still using an old Nokia 1110i Phone:
Nokia 1110i

Work gave me a nice new HTC smart phone some time back but after i used it for a week i threw it in my drawer and went back to the Nokia.

My family asks why i don't have a smart phone - they all have one.

I don't have a smart phone for the following reasons:

  • The battery lasts for little more than a day and if i forget to charge it it becomes a useless brick
  • Email is not meant to be answered instantly - why should i want it everywhere i go?
  • There's not a single smart phone that provides what i want from a hand-held computer
  • At work and at home i have great huge screened desktops running Linux and Windows - in between i'm driving or riding my bike
  • I live in a city where i grew up and don't need GPS
  • I don't play games
  • I don't like to spend money unnecessarily

I would buy myself (or get work to buy me) a nice new smart phone if it could provide what i want:

  • at least 2 days of battery life even under moderate use
  • connectivity so that i can use a normal large desktop screen, keyboard and pointer - ie i want to plonk it down on the desk, have it recognise available interface devices and automatically start to use them
  • ideally the whole phone is a solar energy collector that augments the battery life

If you mighty technical geniuses can give me a nice unix based pocket sized computer with built in coms for everything i need - i'll spend up to $2000 for it

In the mean time i'm sticking to my Nokia - it has a battery life of up to 15 days, does not pester me with emails, costs me nothing if i lose it, does not break if i drop it, and most of all

does not communicate to the world that i'm a brainless consumer

pop

ps, if such phones were available how long do you think Microsoft would last - everyone on earth could get rid of their desktops forever and most of their laptops and their stupid tablets (a touch sensitive screen interface need only be that - an interface)

of course, maybe what Microsoft is planning is to beat the competition by being the first with such a device

but i doubt it - they are still stuck on blood-sucking the dying life out of their poor trapped MS Office users

brainless leeches

p

Friday 6 July 2012

Patricia Kuhl: The linguistic genius of babies (TED)


This talk is just fascinating

it suggests that if you really want your kids to be awesome then you should expose them to as many native foreign language speakers as possible for as much as possible and starting as soon as they are born.




and this too

p

Monday 23 April 2012

Good buy? Windows?


oh Microsoft you gave me
all the worst years of my life
all the crashes and the blue screens
suffered through so many nights
I was so buzy in the backrooms
writing work-arounds for bugs
in your costly new releases
foisted on us guileless mugs

and i'd been always
one forced to buy you


I've been using and working with computers since 1978. Back then i caught the bug about the time i started university. I recall walking through the University of New South Wales wondering how i was going to learn about computers. There was no computer science course. There were only papers that one could take in math, science and engineering that included some computer programming. I enrolled in a course in surveying because that seemed to offer me the most options to take papers that included computing. I learned FORTRAN, APL, Pascal and how to program HP programmable calculators. The FORTRAN programming was done on punch cards.

I started a computer science degree in 1983. That then gave me a bunch of majors. I was right into DCL and Unix. I was an avid owner of any computer i could afford. I learned every language i could get my hands on an interpreter or compiler for. I had the very first copy of K & R in the country.

I remember when DOS and Windows came along and most particularly when MS Word came along and gave us WYSIWYG. Gave? No way - MS always cost big big bucks. But the thing is, even though there were way better things around (Tex, Unix, DCL) the cost of a PC and the rush by "business" people to computerize saw MS take off and what i have always thought was true rubbish rose to dominate the desktop market. Oh yes there came NT but even NT was a pale shadow of the power of Unix and C.

Oh woe is me how gawd awful it has been to watch. I have stuck with *nix and time to time have been pure Solaris or Linux but work has always been easier to get on Windows no matter just how bad it has been.

Sure Windows has had some highlights though all of them very costly. But mostly it has become the same as it was when IBM was on top - gutless, uneducated and talentless people have dominated the business market for a long time and they have been stuck on buying Windows because they think they can understand it. Idiots.

The overly long dominance of Microsoft is now drawing to a close. They will retain some niches for some time i am sure (eg SQL Server) and even produce some good stuff (who knows - though Nokia is staring down the barrel of having made the wrong bet there). The writing is on the wall. Linux and other Unix variants will dominate.

Just recently i have completely abandoned Microsoft at home. My home network is now all Linux Fedora 14 and 16. I'll never go back to Microsoft. Not when i can have the sort of power i have here at the price i pay for it all: $0.

The internet runs on Linux. The world is rushing to adopt Android which is Linux. The Apple devices all run a version of Linux. Routers and switches, embedded devices in cars and fridges and almost everything else electronic are Linux. Many of the emerging weapons technologies (like hive-minded swarms of thopters and other RS and WD platforms) use variants of Linux.

Good bye Windows and good riddance.


Friday 10 February 2012

Friday 3 February 2012

The Viagra Haircut




So here's what i learned from some young Asian women.

A (usually western) man who is in his late forties or older and who sports a shaved head is identified by the girls as having a "Viagra Haircut".

Western men who are going bald and who are looking for a younger woman will shave their heads because they think it makes them look younger. Often they are also getting to an age where they also need Viagra.

In fact what it communicates loud and clear is that such a man is looking for a young Asian girl and that because he is not smart enough to figure out that he is telegraphing he is an easy (ie stupid) target - the girls will play him for every cent they can get out of him while they try to figure out how much money he really has and whether or not he is likely to marry and if so how hard it might be to get a portion of his wealth. All the while they are laughing about you behind your back (or in front of your face if you don't understand their language).

Men of the same age who do not sport the haircut (balding or otherwise) are considered to be unknowns - ie you have to first convince them you are stupid before they will treat you as such.


So guys, if you are sporting a shaved head in Asia you'd better realize that the girls think you are stupid.

p

ps - check out the viagra haircut on the slimy banker in this video - he comes in at 2:40



(picture from http://quiddityofdelusion.blogspot.com.au)

here's a great Viagra Haircut




Saturday 28 January 2012

the Atheist and the Christian

"John!"

"Bill is that you?"

"Yes, gosh, it's great to see you. What's it been? ten years?"

"Yes, the last time was at the graduation. How've you been?"

"Great! I'm married now with two kids. What about you?"

"Well, i'm getting married next month. Fantastic girl. Amazing family."

"So, John, you still trying to convert everyone?"

"No. Actually, i'm an atheist now. You know, evolution and all that."

"Unbelievable John. I'd have never imagined you to give up Christianity. It was, like, your defining Characteristic."

"Well Bill, we can all learn. It was like a light went off in my head. It was my fiance who helped me understand. She and her family are atheists. Like you."

"Uh, funny that John. You see, i'm no longer an atheist. I've been saved."

"You're kidding me! You? You were the ultimate atheist right through school. You knew more about evolution than even the science teachers. What happened?"

"Well, i guess i had time to think about it. And my wife, she's a Christian. She opened my eyes to God's Truth."

"That's amazing. Who'd have thought? You! A Christian! Absolutely unbelievable."

"Yeh. Weird ay."

"You believe all that stuff about God?"

"Yeh. I do."

"Like you believe that the earth is only 5000 years old?"

"Yeh. Really. It is."

"You're shitting me."

"No. It's true. Evolution is a scam."

"Well i'll be fucked!."

"Er, i'd prefer it if you'd not be so profane."

"Sorry Bill. I just can't get over it. You really mean it, you've taken to heart everything?"

"Yes. Jesus saved me."

"The Ten Commandments too?"

"Yes, absolutely"

"So, what's the Third Commandment?"

"Ah, 'Don't Kill?'"

"You mean you believe in God now but you don't know the Ten Commandments?"

"Well you don't need to know all the details to believe something. Anyway that was what you were into - all that Bible reading all through school."

"I guess so. Yeh maybe you're right. I can't claim to know a lot about evolution."

"Really? So, what has more impact on diversity - sex or mutation?"

"Ah, mutation i guess. Is that right?"

"You know what John. I recon we should both go get drunk."

"Yeh. I think that's a good idea. You can teach me all about God and I'll teach you all about evolution."

"Crazy."

"Aint it the truth."


pop



Friday 27 January 2012

Stocks will go up!

According to Robert Trivers (The Folly of Fools, pp 133, 134 "Positivity in old age") "by age sixty (if not earlier), a striking bias sets in towards positive social perceptions and memories". "[Older people] simply do not attend to negaive information".

Baby Boomers hold a lot of wealth. Combine this wealth with a bias towards the positive and a blindness to the negative and it's quite likely that over the next decade, as more and more boomers enter this age, we shall see some impact on prices. Many still feel that they have not saved enough. What else are they to do but try to reap some profits? If enough are buying it will contribute to positive feedback - sending prices even higher. There certainly does not seem to be too many negatives hindering economic growth - energy seems quite safe for now.

Of course, i am approaching that age group, so maybe i am blind to the negatives.

pop


Monday 23 January 2012

Black Swans from a Black Swan

Comment in response to:


    The Black Swan of Cairo, and herehere and here.




Until about 65 million years ago dinosaurs filled every ecological niche imaginable. We poor mammals survived by our wits and tactics we evolved to protect our young for as long as possible. Not only we mammals but a few  other species evolved tactics that kept their young hidden - crocodiles, turtles, birds. They were not to know that a Black Swan event would turn these strategies to another advantage. But that's how natural selection works - traits that aid survival for one reason can lead to survival for an altogether different reason.

The dinosaurs happily laid their eggs in the open air and for tens of millions of years the balmy climate incubated them. Temperature volatility was unknown. Mom dinosaur need only be nearby to protect her clutch - the climate would do the rest.

Eggs can incubate in a very narrow temperature range. Vary outside that range and nothing hatches. If by chance you were a species that evolved to hide eggs where how you did so also provided insulation or warming from the ocean or decomposing vegetable matter your eggs would still hatch. If you were carrying your young around inside they too were protected by your high metabolism (developed to better run from hungry dinosaurs).

Came an unforeseen event - a meteor impact that lowered global temperatures by more than eggs could tolerate and lo - there were no longer any dinosaurs (other than the few that survived in some remote isolated warm places that became dwindling islands of last refuge against the explosion of other species that survived - like us).

I sometimes wonder if by blanket inoculation against all disease there will come a time that, because of collapse of our infrastructure, vaccines will no longer be available. Nor insulin, nor plentiful clean water.

Of course, Murphy always being ready to do his best (worst), such a collapse will come when there are no books left anywhere - we all depend on google for everything and with it gone not only will we not have access to vaccines and modern medicine but we'd not have access to information with which we might recover. We could go from 9 billion to 90 in a matter of decades. Whatever species had been suppressed by us would then be let loose - from viruses and bacteria to everything you can imagine - rats, cockroaches.....

Safety is a two edged sword - one day we too might find ourselves like the dinosaurs - totally dependent on a very narrow set of conditions.

But then, all species have their life cycle.


pop






What do other's have to say?


    One-way Evolution (New Scientist)


    





Thursday 19 January 2012

Party on Dudes



i've often wondered if the peak of population looms
and our time is bright but short - just like a fleeting flower blooms
and maybe there's no going back - the tipping point's been crossed
'cause we're all of us the most we'll be - peak people






It’s pretty well known that populations can have a lifetime that looks like this:




What Figure 1a depicts is the population over time. It starts with just a few individuals then, as they breed in response to highly available resources and lack of predators, their population grows. Eventually, they become a resource for predators and/or resources deplete and their population falls.

As I progress in this article I would like you to consider the following statement:

The area under the population curve represents the total number of individuals of the species that will ever live.


If the statement was true of humans then statistically it is most likely that I am alive at the same time as the largest number of humans that ever lived:







Whatever might be true of reindeer, rabbits and bacteria etc, there are many people who would argue that humans are different.

For example there’s the idea of a sustainable population:




It’s interesting that the total area under the curve of a sustainable population might be the same area as the normal curve. If this is so then what is the difference if we live now or somewhere else under the curve? In the end the total population would have been the same.


There are also plenty of economists who believe absolutely (or at least assert) that human population growth can continue forever:




That’s an attractive idea though I leave the problem of the really far distant future to the philosophers – the current cosmological model suggests the universe is not infinite.

Assuming that we can grow exponentially forever, the goal then, of all human activity, is to keep us on that curve. Population, resource use, energy use etc must all follow in lock-step the exponential growth curve that leads us to our infinite future.

But every now and then one important curve or another shows a deviation from exponential growth and threatens us with the dark future of the population profile outlined in figure 1a. These I will call the “uh oh” moments:



(And note that there are a few who keep pointing this out eg Declining Economic Growth due to Low Oil Supply Growth)

The “uh oh” moments, economics tell us, will lead to new resources being exploited to bring everything back on track to our infinite future. I call these rescues “phewww” moments:




Of course, those who are strong believers in the idea that we should try and achieve sustainability will see “uh oh” moments differently:




The “doomers” will have a darker view:




I wonder where we are really? I wonder where I am (and you are) on the curve. I certainly hope I’m where Figure 4e suggests I am:



It might be a worry though if I'm actually here:




Where do you think you and I are and on what curve?

Party on dudes.

pop

(a short story on resource depletion: The Land of Skinny People)


Thursday 12 January 2012

Somebody that i used to know - Gotye and Kimbra

check these out

here's the viral cover:




here's a cover of the cover - ukulele version




here's the original - check out the art work eh :-)



and here's a studio version





pop

Sunday 8 January 2012

Richard Feynman/Christopher Sykes

These are great.

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out:



Jiggling Atoms:




Fire:




Rubber Bands:




Magnets (and 'Why?' questions):




Bigger is Electricity:




The Mirror:




The Train:




Seeing Things:




Big Numbers and Stuff (i):




Big Numbers and Stuff (ii):




Ways of Thinking (i):




Ways of Thinking (ii):




The last Journey of a Genius:




No Ordinary Genius:



I got these from RichardDawkins.net


Friday 6 January 2012

Working together

This brilliant performance/lesson in how we can work together rather than to work a odds with each other.

enjoy




Tuesday 3 January 2012

Wish upon a Star

i go out to watch the sky
each night
staring for a while
but not too long

some nights i get my wish
a streak of light across the night

so brief

silent

and gone

my wish is faster
and burns more bright

and every shooting star i catch
and hold with my words

brings you closer

closer

*



An old man once explained to me what "wishing on a star" actually meant. After years of watching various people become successful I've come to accept that what he told me was totally insightful.

A shooting star (that which we wish upon) appears for ever so brief a moment and it does so totally unexpectedly. You have maybe 1 second before it disappears from view again.

For your wish to come true you have to make it before the shooting star disappears.

Now i know that that will come as a surprise to most readers - that your wish only comes true if you make it before the star disappears - but if you think about it it makes a lot of sense.

Let's say that you are very focused on something you want to achieve - and that it fills much of your daily thoughts. You want to become a doctor say. You really want it. You do everything that you can to progress towards that goal. Reading medical material. Studying hard. Learning all you can that takes you where you want to go. You live and breath it.

Now, staring at the sky you see a shooting star - and instantly on your lips is the wish to become a doctor. It's totally automatic - there's no thinking about it or weighing this desire against that one. It's a crystalisation of all you are - a doctor.

How likely is it that your wish will come true?

Counter that with the WISHY-washy wish you might make if you can take as much time as you like to make the wish. Unless you have something that really drives you, defines you, you're likely to make any old sort of wish - like a new bicycle or to win the favour of someone or other. The wish will have no meaning and is likely to be forgotten soon after you made it -  your mind wondering off on some tangent triggered by any arbitrary stimulus.

Wishing on a star works - if you are worthy of the wish.

pop


ps - this post was originally a comment posted to The Archdruid Report



Sunday 1 January 2012

Dilbert does science

This is pretty cool


Oldish physics and not quite so old behaviour science.

p