Camping set-up
A few things I like camping with;
Oilskin/goretex jacket – Oilskins have the pro’s of greater durability and less flamability, while goretex is very flamable and less durable but more breathable and less weighty.
Waterproof snowboarding pants with cargo pockets – every pair of pants should have cargo pockets, these things are awesome.
bivvi bag and sleeping bag and sleeping bag liner – these just fit into the stuff sack I use, next time I’d get a compression sack that has lots of spare room on the side to make it not so difficult to repack these.
jute hammock from trade aid (I’d like to replace this with a hennessy hammock at some future point)
Thin nylon fly – set this up above the hammock and it will keep the rain off, any tarpaulin should do this though thinner and lighter is easier to carry.
MSR multi-fuel stove (this thing is great, but difficult to get lit when burning kero, a lot of people recommend carrying white spirits around to get them started).
Leatherman charge ti multi-tool (These come with a 25 year warranty, and I’ve already broken half of the large flathead screwdriver and one of the side plates in the year or so of ownership I’ve had – but, I use it every day)
lighter – gotta have fire. Also, dealextreme sell flints for ridiculously cheap and do 1 cent shipping to most of the world, if that’s your preference… then you can start a fire with a flint and a carbon steel knife.
Merino wool thermals – a good pair of thermals is a wonderful thing for staying warm when it’s cold, and wool will retain heat even when it’s wet and is non flammable.
65 litre backpack with side pockets and seperate top pocket and internal cavity for sleeping materials accessible from the bottom – this is great, I put the stuff I’ll need regularly that isn’t big on the sides – ie msr, etc, first aid equipment in the top, and the hammock/fly/sleeping bag in the bottom.
Sleeping in a hammock definitely has it’s pros – lighter weight, easier setup, comfy nights sleep… But it has it’s cons too, only good when there are trees/posts around.
Tents take longer to setup, and need flat level ground, and are less inconspicuous.
I’ve tried a few different methods of maintaining cellphone charge while on the go, and I really do recommend a solar panel with twice the rated output you think you’ll need for that job, none of the products I have tried really meet their specifications. Foldable or rollable solar panels are comparatively light weight and turn you into a bit of a cyberbum.
I like being able to set myself up to bail temporarily on standard accomodation, but one area I need to work on is food… As it is, I wouldn’t live long without a supermarket nearby.
Also, I’m a believer in the lightweight camping philosophy – if it’s more than you can comfortably carry for a decent distance, then it’s simply too much.
Shonline Opping
A few places I like to browse for online goods;
www.ebay.com
www.trademe.co.nz
www.graysonline.co.nz
www.dealextreme.com
I spend a bit of money online, but when it comes to buying some things I really like seeing them in real life first; going to the stores and trying out and checking the sizing of a pair of pants, or a laptop, getting a feel for build quality and dimensions and fit.
You can save a lot of money by doing this; some items that sell for NZ$280+ can be bought for NZ$150 incl. shipping if you can just get over the “I WANT IT NOW” feeling 
.
Keep in mind though, that you will be charged GST if the total cost is over NZ$400.
From Earth to New Hope
They swam through the darkness with hyperdrive, to a strange new world. It was barren and dry, and it’s atmosphere was carbon dioxide, the world spun fast and close to the sun so it was hot, but it was room to live.
The terraformers had arrived hundreds of years before, massive automated star ships designed to heal and create life giving worlds.
The lichen was starting to survive now, it was too early to colonise; they had been rushed for over-population and war were always threats to survival.
It was a new world, not a friendly world initially but it too could be turned, as humanity had changed the shape of so many other aspects of it’s environment.
They orbited in sleep for a hundred years, before the world was showered with gene seeds and nano seeds, laying the foundation for oxygen and human life further down the track.
They continued to sleep until the world was no longer too hot, merely temperate, survivable at the poles where ice would form.
As the gene seeds created life, the nano seeds created the requirements for human survival, shelter and production facilities, unravelled from the tiniest code stored inside them into entire buildings and worlds.
Over many hundreds of years, the transport ship had slowed enough and the world became habitable; they were woken, the ship plunged to the surface, re-entering successfully and hitting the outskirts of a city made by nanites.
Now they would wake, they would survive.
The Ansible
How the ansible could work
“Everyone thought it was just a crazy idea, would never be possible.
That was before they made the first worm-holes, just minute little dents in space time big enough to be percievable in real time a million million miles away. Just little rips in the fabric, only sustainable for a split second.
That was before the warp-gates, before we had enough energy to sustain the worm holes, back when the colony ships still relied on sub-light speed propulsion. It worked like morse-code, a brief blip-blap and an almost undetectable spark would happen so far away…
It took them a long time to be able to quickly recharge the capacitors, to repeat the process, even longer to be able to pick up the blips and respond.
This was far before we were sending whole ships through.
Like the flashing of a mirror to signal a ship at sea, but light wasn’t fast enough to carry the flash anymore.
They saw the potential, even from Terra to Nix was over 5 hours by standard light speed, with the ansible you could send the information instantly.
The only bottle neck was the recharge time, while you could send tens of gigabytes of information to Nix with a five hour delay, you could only send a few words to Nix in real time. It wasn’t practical for exploring our own solar system, but it became essential when we started with the real deep-spacers.
It’s all ancient history now anyways…”
The evidence for and against
So far as I am aware of, there is no clearly visible objective and verifiable evidence that God exists.
All the evidence is subjective in nature, personal accounts of Gods intervention, conversations, and so forth.
An aetheist would have to know more than I do, for an aetheist knows there is no God
– Carl Sagan
What Carl Sagan is referring to, is the lack of evidence to disprove Gods existance, hence it is rational to conclude that Carl Sagan is an agnostic.
Some people are “functional aetheists”, remaining uncertain as to whether God exists or not, but seeing no signs of God anywhere around us.
I think whether you believe or not, has to do with your own experiences – it is easier to believe in something if you have seen it for youreslf, and whether you believe other people who state they have experienced contact by God.
How it all began
The quantum ripples rendered different probabilities, never quite crystalising into solidity, nothing was definite.
Until the ripples became self-aware in one area, an observer.
With observation comes reality.
With the observer’s first thought, the ripples hardened, like water hardens into ice, like Schrodinger’s cat becomes live or dead.
In the beginning was the mind.
Occam’s Razor
when you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better.
Occam’s razor is good for expanding knowledge, but there are limits.
When you have two competing theories, one being that human beings are created, the other that we evolved, and the simplest is better, that would lead to a belief in creation.
When you have two competing theories, one being that America does not exist, the other being that America does exist and the world is round, from the perspective of a European in the middle ages, if the simplest one is better, then there is no America.
Science is incomplete, there may well be immenseness out there that we have no idea of.
Further to Faster than Light Speed
A friend of mine had the following to say about my previous article on light-speed.
Pressuming you are moving at the speed of light and you have survived your inrcease in mass and density, light travelling toward you and away from you would still move at the speed of light, the doppler effect would mean that light travelling towards you would be of such short wavelength that you would be vaporised but you would still be be hit by it at the speed of light. This is due to the fact that light does not move like sound (longitudinally) but transversely. Reference to 5th paragraph “faster than lightspeed”
Now, this has to do with relativity, and true travel faster than the speed of light, rather than relative travel faster than light.
Once upon a time, people thought there was a mysterious and magical aether in which certain things were a guaranteed constant, the metaphor of all actions being limited by a chess board, rather than in dynamic relationship to each other sums this up.
This means that the constant theory of reality (that the speed of light is constant everywhere) relies on a pre-set chessboard like map of spacetime, where as the truth appears to be that space time is relative, a dynamic area with deformable terrain.
The assumption made here is that I am referring to true travel faster than the speed of light, in a given area, rather than relative travel faster than the speed of light, which is definitely possible.
The speed of light is constant from any light source, at about 300,000km/s, but relatively, based on the initial direction and movement of the light source, the speed of light can appear to be exceeded with a well-placed observer.
To travel faster than the speed of light, setting out from near to a light source such as Sol, one must exceed the speed of radiance.
To be on the other side of the universe, and moving at 0.9x the speed of light towards us, and another object on this side of the universe such as Sol, moving at 0.9x the speed of light towards that object, gives a net effect of exceeding the speed of light. This is validated by theories and evidence based on the analysis of quasars.
However, to truly exceed the speed of light, that’s something that I need to do more reading on. Studies on quantum entanglement have shown this is possible, however from one human to another, the fastest method we have for passing information is via light, which I think affects our thinking about light.
No human would ever be able to witness successfully an object moving at faster than light speeds and away from us; which I think is a big part of this whole thing.
Faster than lightspeed
A probable view of light, from the perspective of moving faster than, and through the light that has already reflected from the destination and other places.
They say if you go faster than light you go backwards in time.
I think that’s wrong, and I’ll explain why;
We comprehend reality via our eyes, from where we stand. Anything at faster-than-light speeds and moving away from us would be invisible to the human eye.
If you image what it would be like to move at the speed of light, you would never be able to see behind you with human senses, and you would only see infront of you.
If you were to move faster, you would start moving through the light that had already reflected from where you started, perhaps giving the illusion of going backwards in time. You wouldn’t truly go backwards in time, you’d just see events that had happened earlier in time.
In planes that move faster than the speed of sound, it’s impossible to hear any noise from behind you, because you are moving faster than the sound from an event behind you, that’s why a bomber moving at over the speed of sound can see the flash from the bomb, but will not hear the explosion.
If you were in a silent plane moving faster than the speed of sound, without disrupting the air around you, you would probably hear things that had happened in the past, thereby going backwards through sound.
If you are moving at the speed of light, you won’t see a watch where you started from tick – the time piece will appear to be frozen in time, but the watch will still tick, well you wouldn’t see a watch where you started out from ticking anyways, and a watch ahead of you would tick twice as fast.
Light is how we see, that’s all you have to grasp.
Put simply, if you are going faster than sound, you won’t hear a gunshot behind you.
But you’d ultimately move through the sound waves ahead of you, thereby giving the illusion of going backwards through sound.
I hypothesise that light is the same; that one does not go backwards in time after exceeding light-speed, but rather can view events that occured prior to starting off on the light-speed flight, beause one is passing through the remnants of light.
Logic God
Subjective Realities Logic illustrated
Isaiah 55:89
For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.
We exist.
That we exist proves that reality can support sentient life.
If reality can support sentient life, and reality has omniscience, then reality would track input from sentient beings.
If that is simply an omniscient calculator, as self-aware as an internet search engine, then that will, sooner or later, deduct that there are certain truths that can only be confirmed by sentience; such as that life is worth living. No one would deny that statement, at the worst they would say “maybe for someone else”.
If reality is omniscient, that would be the all-knowing God some worship.
That truth can become twisted at times, one can say they individually want to live wonderfully, and they would rather have a different group die horribly, but the global truth is that over-all everyone wants to live wonderfully, and I believe that can be done without infringing peoples right to life and happiness.
That truth would lead to actions in favour of survival of sentient life, because the truth is that sentience is worth having and wants to be treated nicely. Read the rest of this entry »