Da Vinci Code WMD

The Da Vinci Code movie seems to be following the phenomena of the book, its big. Why and what is the relevance of it ?

The story cuts through to the core of our western belief system, established by our historical heavyweight of belief system perveyors the catholic church. Holywood, the contender of belief system perveyors is offering fun alternatives.

In reality not much of the story can be 'proven' historically, not so disimilar to the original then.

For me a good angle is who's story is older and more original, you cant 'prove' either are true anyway.

The most interesting historical fact in there is the 'Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute' verified by the recent findings in what are called the gnostic gospels. In particular the gospel atributed to Mary showing that she must certianly have held some higher rank.

The real issue is one of church credability. They changed the story to sute their ends. You cant have a male dominated priesthood and hence society if you got females of rank in your core cultural story. You could say they have Mary the mother of Jesus, But you cant call her a real female, she is a unatainable sexless ideal that can still procreate, no woman can atain this withouth complete denial of their true nature and even then they cant have kids.

The church sold story of the two Marys dysfunctionaly splits the human female architype. The sexless is evelated and the sexual is denigrated. When the fundamanetal archetype of woman is broken apart in this way there is no power in womanhood in society. This is the perfect pitch for keeping a race in subjugation. And it has worked for two thousand years.

For me this is the WMD of the Da Vinci Code. The part that is sending the shockwaves through our cultural story and forcing it to be reevaluated. Similar to the shockwaves caused by the realisitaion that we were lied to about WMD in iraq, people everywhere are beginning to realise at some level they were lied to by the church. You may say you don’t go to church and don’t care, but if you live in the western world your culture has been formed by this view like it or not. A change like this in the underpinnings of the core western cultural story is sisemic none the less.

Two things are happening:

1. There is an ongoing slide toward trusting no organisation, people are realising they all can lie for their own interest. This great news because its true, people need to think for themselves.

2. The church purveyed and established societal view of the feminine is crumbling, this is making way for a complete re-evaluation of the role of feminine is society. Extremes are likely to emerge as the pendulum is now free to swing again as it finds its new equilibrium. New and ancient feminine archetypes will compete with each other and vie for recognition in society in some way. The male (yang) archetype will feel threatened as it has been top heavy. Over the coming years I expect this to manifest tangibly in traditional male dominated organisations such as the church, the medical elite, the scientific elite and male dominated government.

The big bandwidth bandwagon and the commodity cpu

As opposed to oil, presently bandwidth is expensive.

Continuing the trend, bandwidth will get cheaper and cheaper. There is nothing hard for bandwidth companies to do accept compete with each other. The tec behind the internet gets cheaper and better every year and the wires can take much much more.

Companies that are purely in the business of providing bandwidth are going to struggle unless they offer some sort of additional service. The provision of these 'bundled' services will also become highly competitive and hence cheep.

To consumers this means everything that comes over the wire will drop to virtually nothing for the distribution costs. Many of the additional services will also get very cheep very quickly.

This means,
very cheep voice contact to anywhere
very cheep video contact to anywhere
video on demand and high def will get cheep.

Phone companies will be the biggest losers, expect them to desperately try to diversify their services and add 'bundles'. They will always loose to more competitive and focused companies on the net that provide the services. Say Vodaphone try to bundle games to augment their services and give people a reason to keep paying. This will struggle even medium term, specialist game services on the net will provide better options for consumers who want to choose their offerings. The bundled service will always be inferior so will stay cheep, it cant justify keeping up the distribution cost.

The content companies and the service companies will continue to be kings. The people that provide new and unique content or the people that provide useful services. Not the distribution providers.

The only way to make money on distribution is monopolise it and mark up. Something that is no longer easy to do. Game consoles are a good example where this trend still continues but even their is loosing traction against app stores.

CPU's
Over the medium to longer term the device at the end of the distribution line will be factored into the distribution paradigm. What i mean by this is that the phone, console or tv will also become very cheep (and often become part of the wire service, like a tv or phone is now)

There are still a few years to go here but chip tec is already beginning to go wide rather than deep. Ie it is going more toward parallel processing rather than faster processing. Both Intel and AMD are going this way and so is IBM/Sony with Cell. its the only big way forward in chip tec. But it is much less technically hard to make parallel chips than faster chips, so once again the competition is coming, and this means cheep chips on the end of cheep wires.

It will become just as hard to monopolise your chip IP in the future as it is becoming to monopolise the wires today. Intel will struggle and once again must move to 'bundle' service to keep value for its customers high.

(Intel will loose its high profitability for chip tec. And will need a new buisness model over time. They will have to get into software. Intel's money comes from the fact it has the deepest pockets to invest in the fabs that take the latest chip fabrication tec to market. This means they can fab the fastest chips the cheapest and quickest to market.. CPU's going wide changes all this)

Its going to get harder and harder to justify the hardware upgrade cycle to consumers. I see time frames of around 2-4 years for the wires and 4-6 years for the devices when these transitions really bite. The wires will be the most dramatic as there is nothing physical for the consumer to switch. The display will come last as there is more innovation to be had here. Until we go all the way to 3D projection screens will be moving.

New content that requires upgrade will always be actively sought after by the chip people. -> app stores deliver this.

Its all good for consumers.

morals

Morals never made much sense to me but as so many people seem to think they are important, i wanted to think about them some more...

After looking at morals and their application in the world, i conclude that morals are used by humans to justify being inhuman. It seems that by being moral people do the very worst things.

So morals are not what people think them to be.

As most inhuman acts are done in the name of morals I am glad i never bought into them. I think it is best to be nice to people rather than being moral to them. But I guess some cant figure out how to do the being nice thing, so they madeup morals instead.

The problem is every situation in life is unique, if you apply a fixed ruleset to life you are a robot and you will endup treating people bad in key situations.

Morals cant substitute being sensitive to a persons feelings or even just asking them what they would preffer in a tricky situation you dont quite understand.

Taking this further i guess the most moral people must be the most insenstive people. They will need a moral code because the cant figure out what to do, they have to go an look up in a morals book.

The reason someone wont be able to figure what to do is because the cant intuitivly 'feel' what is best in relation to the preson or situation... they are 'numb'.

So logically, insensitive people have to be the moral ones. Insensitive robot people that will do whatever the program in the book says. Its easy to manipulate numb people, its normally done by carrot and stick techniques.

I am glad that we are challenging traditional moral codes in society. So much unconstructive behaviour comes of these. We are transitioning from being a set of inhuman robots programed by religious rulers to nice human beings that have a chance of getting on.

You see, if everyone has morals it is impossible to get on. The sooner we drop morals completly the better.

pc to the death

There seem to be two themes for me today in the news.

The main being the freedom of speech issue:

After western society spent so long deciding that freedom of speech was a good and important thing for a progressive and modern society, we now seem to be caving in to aggressive people who are scared by such a thing.

We seem to confuse being PC and polite with pandering to all religious views.. How ever intolerant those views are. The religious hatred bill in the UK is a good example of something not only being a regressive step but also being just broken in logic.

What if we had a religion that was intolerant to other religions (hmm, how could that happen) and what if that religion said offensive things about another religion as part of its core beliefs...

What madness we entertain on earth..

Second theme, Lovelock, father of gaia theory gives us about another 20 years before the world is in environmental chaos, no one still cares, he thinks we should all just start partying, there is nothing anyone can do about it. Lets just build a few more wind turbines and that should fix it, not. Oh and Exxon Mobil just posted the largest profit ever of any company - 36billion. cant confirm, but I'll bet that is more than has ever been spent on alternative clean energy, ever ever.

What madness we entertain on earth..

god and science 3

This is the 3rd in a series and should be read in context..

The conclusion of my last piece was that religions are constructs of social science and that it is these religions that have be a necessary part of our social cohesion and development over the last 10,000 years.

The other conclusion that seems weired to most is that science as presented to the general public, and religion are one in the same thing. They are systems to explain the world to people who need to understand the world to help them feel safe. These systems formed an integral part of the human move into cities and organised societies, at their most fundamental level they are systems to give security to people in an insecure world. They answer the basic questions of, why am i here, where do i go when i die, who is a good person etc etc.

Science is presented as a dogma, i have never seen any of our science presented as 'this might be how it is, but actually we really dont know' For me the argument over which is better is just as good as arguing between a Christian or Muslim god.

This is all hardly surprising as our modern science evolved as a reaction to religion but also a product of our religious culture and organisational systems. I like to use the analogy of great saints of Christianity with the great scientists of the modern world. Saints were often vilified or even killed by the established christian church often to be made saints many years later. The same happens with the great scientific discoveries, the establishment often makes a fool of the scientist until many years later the maverick if proven right.

The Great Divide

So I hope all this discussion makes some sense. My goal is to get us onto a deeper issue i call the great divide. The great divide is all about the core notion of right and wrong connected with might is right.

I believe that the great divide is the root of all human conflict, and at its root stems from basic human insecurity, this is then manipulated by the goal of the religion that the human currently goes with. Be it the government propaganda, the football team, the religion and your need to be right about something that you decide you want to be right about to feel better about yourself.

It is the great divide that will cause all religions (as i defined them) to fight with each other, this goes for science too. These religions including science will then go on to fight within themselves, they will fracture and divide and form offshoots that will continue to fight amongst themselves.

If you have right and wrong...

Only one can be right...

The one that will be right, is the one *you* have picked (going back to the self referential god thing)

If you go with this, you are living in the great divide and you have a religion probably taken on from your parents and society around you. This forms your programming and keeps you mentally safe, but it also makes you vulnerable to programming by others.

If you can really be ok with the concept that no one knows all the answers and in particular *you* dont know all the answers

You dont live in the great divide.

The only other useful conclusion i have for now is:

The stronger one needs to hold onto the notions of great devide the more insecure the person is.

energy

Where we get our energy from as a civilization will shape and change our lives.

1. We can no longer keep using carbon fuels like oil and gas at the current rates because we are at or near the peak of global production. Prices will continue to rise.

2. Generating energy in this way produces greenhouse gasses which are beginning to cook our planet.

Out of these two points. I think the second is irrelevant. I doubt we will manage to make any major impact on our carbon emissions judging from progress so far. Certainly not the 60 to 80% cuts required to make any significant difference. If we could organise that, we could organise world peace, we dont have the will for either at this time.

The scale of change required will only happen by force on this planet, the forces will be economic.

The major factor affecting the economy of any country in the next 15 years will be the rise in prices of oil and gas. America and China will fight over control of these resources. (eg America taking iraq and China buying oilfields)

What should any country do in the face of this ?

We can modify our economics to support and accelerate our direction to the fix. Otherwise our economics will have to be modified as they start to fail.

Oil and gas are going to continue to get more expensive as predicted due to increased demand and supply shortage. This effect will be felt first in the economy of any country as energy literally 'powers' the economy.

So any country that invests heavily in and plans now for:

a) energy efficiency and everything that this connects to (eg trains, canals and local food)

b) more localised and sustainable energy production

c) non manufacturing based information economies, with localised recycling infrastructure (get computing and work from home, grow your own anything or buy it from your neighbour)

Will become the strongest economies of the future. Its common sense

Companies that already do this are showing significant economic gains today. This is a simple abc plan to a next generation sucessful economy.

* The rich countries have the resources to do this but not the political will,

* The poor countries could most easily make these changes but don't have the money.

The best and most rapid way to implement abc is raise taxes on all non sustainable energy products and use the money for the investment in abc policies !

People wont like this solution but they will like the alternatives far less. Society will be pushed to get governments to make these policies in a reactive way as the economy fails them, that's backward.

If America does not start to adapt soon its economy will become unsustainable. Farming in particular will need a big overhaul due to its triple reliance on oil for machinery, fertilizers (ammonia is a byproduct of oil refining) and transport/machinery. Food will get expensive quicker.

Funnily enough Cuba is a great example of what to do right, they were forced to go organic because of the US trade embargo and they now have efficient farming based on old fashioned crop rotation schemes.

We don't need more energy, we just need to use it better and there is a simple way to fix the problem. Its now down to which countries think ahead and do it to build there populations a strong and sustainable future.

I think in 100 years from now people will look back and laugh at how much energy we waste today and how we used our economic system so badly to hide this fact.

Even ignoring the inefficiency issue remember that energy is all around you. It is essentially free, we as a world have allowed for and relied on a centralized system of energy generation and grid distribution because it can be easily monopolized. This will all change to local forms of production and tapping energy.

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Germany shows There is plenty of energy around.

intelligent design again

The debate rages on.

"HARRISBURG, Pa. - "Intelligent design" cannot be mentioned in biology classes in a Pennsylvania public school district, a federal judge said Tuesday"

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051220/ap_on_re_us/evolution_debate

We live in a world of confusion, our teaching methods are backward. Why do we have to teach absolutes. It seems we are scared to admit to our children, hence ourselves that we don't have absolute answers to anything.

Would it not be better to teach what we have discovered to date and then discuss the predominant views. There are facts and there is dogma. Teach facts and let kids think for themselves, analyse the facts and decide.

If you teach dogma, don't be upset when dogma is all around you.

Both evolution and intelligent design have issues as theories. But I believe id is a reaction to the dogmatic presentation of evolution by scientists desperate to prove they have an answer, they have a theory. ID looks worse though, at best it seems like an argument to say we were created by aliens. Probably..

god and science 2

The essential conclusion of my last god log was this:

The word god is meaningless as the meaning most people think it has, but the word has a tonne of meaning in a personalised context.

The word is a key into the individual human psyche, and tells you about the person describing god to you.

A useful conclusion if you like thinking things through.

An inner key

So with the word god you have an easy key into a persons inner world. You may say this is open to abuse by people that hold this key and know how to use it. I would say so... Its a natural step to start tampering with peoples inner world if you can set yourself up in any position of authority on the definition of the word.

This is similar to how viruses can attack computers. A virus can only get into a computer if there is what is known as a vulnerability in the system. The virus exploits the vulnerability to get into the computer and then can proceed about its nefarious business appropriating the computers assets for its own ends.

I am proposing that the equivalent human vulnerability is this:

Any human that believes any other human can define god for them has this vulnerability manifest.

For an organised group this is a very useful device and can be a powerful cohesive force to motivate societies in directions that are predetermined and planned by a leading group or individual.

If what i am discussing is not a science of god what is ?

In fact right from the very earliest human history do we see this played out time and again. The formation of the first towns and cities in the earliest cultures like the Sumerian and Egyptian are accompanied by the formation of a definition of god. Large groups of humans could only come together and operate under a unified command, if there was a command structure, a system to operate it and someone to drive it.

I am going to call this type of science religion, I want to separate this from the word spirituality which is a wholly different thing and something I may return to in another piece.

In my definition, religion is the hierarchical command system for motivating large groups of humans that operates though the 'god' psychic vulnerability in the human.

The first scientists i believe, were the first people to operate rationally constructed systems to motivate people in ways they desired. These were the high priests of the earliest cultures. And I claim that it was only when this science was understood and deployed effectively that the earliest city states came together.

You can bet these were the smartest people around. It is also interesting to note that these same people handled the geometry and mapping out of the movement of the stars and planets to a very high degree of accuracy. Certainly rational and very scientific in their approach, equivalent to the scientific elite of the day.

I don't think these fellows would have been troubled by reconciling issues of god and science. They practiced a thoroughly rational art that delivered understandable and testable results.

They certainly got the human motivation thing right, the pyramids of egypt are a constant reminder of just how good their science really was.

god and science

Just saw a bbc program on the nature of god and its compatibility with science, it got me thinking... and wanting to write something down.

Can you be scientific about god ?

To go into it we need to wade though words that don't really have much good defined meaning, we are not on easy ground. the ground is a world play.

'scientific'.. instead of using this confusing word i am going to go with 'rational'. The program, and many people dont seem to think you can be rational and have a view of god. Well i dont claim to know that much on the subject, but i have observed most people seem to be most irrational about anything close to this subject. I think then, this would explain the prevailing view, that never the twain shall meet..

This brings me to the second word, god. Well you certainly cant be rational about this word if you cant give it a meaning. As far as i have discovered, this word means something different to everyone i meet. If i ask them to tell me about their view of the meaning, most people go off into the sunset with an incoherent dialogue that looses me fairly rapidly.

So to go any further into this observation i have to conclude at least that the word god does not have any useful meaning. At least the meaning it has, is not the meaning most people think it has. it gets even better.

All I have to go on is what i have observed in my life to date, and what i have observed in respect to this word is that its a meaningless word unless you connect it to the person you are talking to.

Startlingly the word takes on a new light, it opens a key into someones inner world. Their hopes, fears, views on morality get put onto their definition and personal relationship with their view of this externally so named figure. As far as i have seen to date in nearly all people i have met, this external figure turns out to be their own inner self. Ask most people to define god and they are defining their own idealised self.

Well, at least if you want to get to know someone its a great discussion point.

I believe you can be rational about god, provided you can be rational...

Unfortunately science itself is often irrational as people are quoting under the guise of science, just because they are a scientist it does not make them rational. If these people are not rational then what they say is not much use either.

Can you be scientific about god ?

A first step could be to say, a rational view of god is that the word tells you about the person telling you about the word. Most scientists dont study much about people, hence dont have to much useful to say on the matter.

I think you could be scientific about god, but not many people have really tried. Everyone including most scientists start talking about themselves before they get any distance into the issue.