Life Goals

For some reason, I thought it might be amusing for a moment to write down a definitive list of things that I would like to accomplish during my life, in order from most to least important. Some of them aren't that important, but would be neat. So then, lets see...

1. Become a master of the martial arts
2. Build a balloon-craft
3. Be pretty decent at music when I'm old
---ok forget about the order now, its random from here on---
-Be excellently flexible
-Get a PhD or something
-Create or help to create some kind of theory about how to travel faster than light
-Build some kind of spacecraft that uses such a device
-Own a castle
-Live in Japan or China and hang out under the Lotus blossoms with wise people
-Have a dojo in my house
-Have a big cherry tree with those pink flowers that look really cool in the autumn in my back yard, on flat land, fairly sheltered from the wind with nice grass that drains properly under which there is plenty of space for practising tai chi
-Learn to play mental chess as well as I can play regular chess
-Backpack across Europe and Asia
-Learn Japanese and maybe Mandarin
-*more to come*

Who needs a board?

I just finished playing a game of mental checkers with my Dad. It was pretty insane, but awesome cool. We did away with the board and pieces, agreed on a coordinate system and sat around a table playing it for something like an hour and a half :p. Long game of checkers, I know, but it's not easy to mentally keep track of all the pieces, let alone strategise and figure out what piece is sitting on what square with what coordinates. I beat him in the end, with 5 pieces to spare, mostly thanks to few careless moves by him. To be fair, I had my fair share of stupid moves as well :p. Actually, we cheated a little bit, my brother had a board nearby on the couch that we couldn't see and was keeping track of our game for his own amusement, watching us make silly moves. We had to ask him things now and again to make sure our mental pictures were still right, which they often weren't quite. We didn't look at the board once during the whole game though, which I feel is not bad at all for a first try. By the end of the game I think we were pretty comfortable with the setup and with associating coordinates to pieces quickly, so perhaps we can start to improve our capacity for tracking all the pieces now. We'll see how much this skill can be developed with practice. It'd be awesome to be able to sit there and be good enough to play a game as quickly and accurately as if the board was right in front of you. And to not need the crutch of someone else tracking the game for you. It requires a certain clarity of mind that is not easily achieved, as well as a good memory.
Where did this come from, you may ask? I've been playing a decent amount of Jade Empire on Xbox since it was released on Thursday, its a pretty nifty game. I recently came across two martial arts masters in it who were standing about in a town mentally playing a strategy game. It sounded a bit more complicated, I think it may have been that game in which each player has a colour, and placing two of ones own tokens on either side of a line of enemy tokens changes them all to ones own colour. Either that or the one where putting a token next to an enemy's changes theirs to your. Whatever it was, It sounded so cool that I had to try it, though I decided to try it out with a simpler game first. Checkers was about the simplest thing I could think of aside from tic-tac-toe, and that would just have been lame. The number of pieces is still large enough to be troublesome however. At the beginning of the game we were fine, only having to remember a few moves, but after a little while it started to get damn hard. Only when we got down to 6 pieces each did it start to become easier for me to track all the pieces again. I'll have to see what I can do about increasing that number.
Oh yes, about this hovercraft thing, sorry fudge, I havn't been able to come up with a useful equation for you yet. I have something relating the mass flow of the air going out the bottom of your craft to the height it shold hover at, but it doesn't relate the mass of your hovercraft to that at all yet so I couldn't tell you how hard it will be to produce that mass flow. Thus its pretty useless for now. I'm still thinking about it though, I'm sure it can't be THAT complicated, I just have to think of the right way of approaching it...
I know that the only way you could possibly make something like that float is by increasing the air pressure along its bottom surface, the theory of which is apparantly a little tricky :p.

Firefly rocks

I've been watching quite a bit of Firefly lately and have decided that it kicks arse. Best show i've seen in a long time. Unfortunately there is only one season of it, which sucks, however they are apparantly making a movie of it, and possibly more if the first one does well. So that at least is something. Hopefully all their movies do extremely well and they decide to do more series after that.

On another note, I have 3 assignments due next week. Damn. Especially since my dad has gone out and aquired a 160 gig hard drive and a radeon 9600 graphics card which I have to install into the compy for awesome-cool gaming action. Mmmm... C&C Generals with full graphics options and awesome smooth gameplay...*drools*. I havn't really played any PC games for a long while due to my graphics card being too poor. Having this thing opens up serious gaming opportunities. He got it off a guy a work, apparantly this guy always has the most awesome hot-shit computer around, so he has a fair bit of "old" hardware lying about. The radeon 9600 has been around for a little while now but its still way more awesome than the poor geforce 2 I have in there at the moment. My dad hasn't even really bought it yet, the guy just gave it to him to try out for a while, said he'd sell it to us if we liked it. I'll have to play MOO3 and some other crap, but Generals will be the most awesome. That game rocks, its just been a little slow on my current setup. Soon, soon...

Psychology eh?

So, I did that test thats going around. It was a little odd, I got ENTJ whereas in all the ones i've done previously I've gotten INTP. True, the ones that are different got pretty weak scores in this test. Perhaps I'm sort of borderline. That or this particular test is crap.

Your Type is
ENTJ
Extroverted Intuitive Thinking Judging
Strength of the preferences %
11 75 75 22

Qualitative analysis of your type formula

You are:
slightly expressed extrovert
distinctively expressed intuitive personality
distinctively expressed thinking personality
slightly expressed judging personality


Link to description by J. Butt

Sort of accurate. That very first quote is dead wrong, but after that its not so bad. If you take into account the fact that I got only 11% for the extroverted part and adjust the description accordingly then it's not too bad.
TRADEMARK: -- "I'm really sorry you have to die."
Heh, thats cool.
I read the INTP one out of interest as well, there are some things in there I can relate to also. Perhaps it is a combo then.

Anyway, while I was driving to uni this morning, I found myself pondering this:

THE ABSURDITY OF FOLLOWING THE 10 COMMANDMENTS OF GOD
(At least for the reason of being afraid that you will go to hell if you don't)

Consider first that God is some all-powerful and all-seeing entity that created the universe and everything, or else is some kind of super-conciousness that pervades all the universe and all life, or is simply the universe itself as seen as a 4+ dimensional entity unchanging and complete in all its beauty and magnificence.
Anyway the first definition is more the one I am here to deal with.
So this all-powerful and all-seeing being can presumably see all throughout time and has complete knowledge of everything that can and will happen. Having created humans exactly as we are and having explicit knowledge of how we develop as people throughout our lives, He would surely know how certain events would contribute to who we are and how we react to the world around us.
As an all-powerful and all-seeing being, it is obvious that He has complete control over what happens to us, either through his action or inaction, simply because of this knowledge. Therefore it would be completely absurb for this entity to pass a bunch of laws upon man and demand that he obey them, as it is the entity itself who determines whether or not man is going to follow them.
Perhaps this is all part of some divine scheme you say. If it is it can only be one that is extremely sadistic. To pass such laws upon man, knowing full well who is going to obey them and who is not (remembering that He in fact controls who will and will not obey them), and then say that those who do not follow them will be sent to hell where they will suffer an eternity of torment (through no fault of their own, it was preordained by God from the dawn of time) can hardly be seen as the actions of a good and just god. No-one claims that he is always nice and hurts no-one, but sadism is a flaw that surely a divine being could not have.
I'm not saying that the 10 commandments aren't reasonable enough things for the most part or that people shouldn't follow them, just that they are not of divine origin.

That is all.