Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7

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It is rather bigger than a mobile phone.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 with its AMOLED screen is much clearer and more vivid than ordinary screens, although this picture taken with flash does not really show either of them at their best.

Yesterday during the lunch break I went to buy the Galaxy Tab 7.7, in my humble opinion the best tablet / datapad available at this time. On my way, however, I thought of the poor starving children in Africa, and turned aside. I was almost back at the office when I realized that Samsung almost certainly does a lot more for Africa than I ever would even if I tried. Which I don’t, at least in an economic sense.

Today I actually bought this thing. It is sleek and lightweight, even though it has a back plate of light metal instead of the plastic that Samsung normally uses. Samsung has taken some flak for the “cheap feeling” of their plastic chassis, even though it certainly withstands more falls than even the Gorilla glass used in the front. I honestly don’t see their or most gadgets surviving any treatment that would break the usual lightweight and durable plastic. But this is their showcase product, it seems, so they threw in the metal plate. Luckily it is thin enough to add very little to the weight. Compared to the original 7″ Galaxy Tab, the 7.7 is noticeably lighter and very comfortable to hold for reading.

The crowning piece however is the display, using the AMOLED technology which delivers unparalleled vivid colors and the blackest blackness available in any screen today. It also seems to be gentle on the battery. The resolution is 1280×800, which may seem like a modest upgrade from the 1024×600 used in all their 7″ tablets, yet is the same as their 10.1″ Galaxy 2 and with a better display. The new iPad (3) has it beat on screen resolution, but is (at least for now) not available in one-handed size.

The Galaxy Tab 7.7 is definitely one-handed most of the time for reading. It is not too heavy to hold in one hand, although you will need another hand to actually use it for anything more than reading books. It is incidentally a beautiful e-book reader, the black of the letters very black and the sepia of the pages very sepia. Well, that is how I like them. Your pages may vary.

I generally use the tablet in portrait mode, although if you use it to watch movies or look at pictures you will probably hold it in both hands in landscape mode. Because of this preference, I use SwiftKey 3 instead of SwiftKey Tablet 3 as my keyboard. It is not free, but very affordable. (Actually I use the 3 Beta today, but by the time you read this the final version is on sale. If you read this the first week, it is at half price, but it is well worth the price of a couple hamburgers anyway.) SwiftKey Tablet is made for typing with two hands, and has the keyboard split with half on the left side and half on the right. This is an abomination in my sight and looks just unnatural. Then again I have used QWERTY keyboards since I was 6 or so, so it is almost up there with potty training when it comes to ingrained attitudes.

The tablet comes with Samsung’s own TouchWiz shell on top of Android “Honeycomb”. To be honest, I don’t see this as much of an improvement. Android 4 “Ice Cream Sandwich” is better than any of the two, and if I feel extremely energetic one day I may root the tablet and install unadorned ICS on it. For the most part, however, I don’t spend a lot of time in the operating system, but mostly use it to start the apps I use regularly.

The apps I use regularly are not the ones that come pre-installed from Samsung, although I do use the ones that come from Google. The “improvements” from Samsung are as usual nothing of the sort, in my opinion. I would rather they did not waste any of the tablet’s 16 GB on this, but I am not all humans in the world. Still, I think we can agree that Samsung comes at this market from the hardware side. Their software does not have the power to rouse men’s heart that Apple’s has.

Be that as it may, I soon downloaded my usual apps and got “productive”. If this is your first time using a tablet after you are familiar with smartphones, you may be looking for the menu key, either in hardware or on the screen. There does not really exist such a thing in Android 3, but clicking on the status display bar in the lower right will reveal the setup choice for the phone as such, while individual programs usually have a visible menu symbol in a corner, typically the upper right (although Spotify uses the upper left). Legacy apps from smartphones may have a menu symbol in the lower left row along with the back, home and task manager soft keys. And some few legacy apps may not work properly if at all, but this is rare.

One thing that did not work properly was connecting to an old SparkLAN WX-6615 wireless router at work. At a distance of two fairly thin walls, it was easily good enough for the Galaxy Note and an older, cheaper LG phone, not to mention two laptops I have tested it with. But the 7.7 timed out loading even fairly simple web pages, and had to try multiple times to get new email. So that was a bit of a letdown.  It really made me wonder whether I have got another “Monday machine” – remember, generally it is the customer who does quality control beyond turning the machine on to see that it boots up – or whether the Galaxy Tab 7.7 generally has worse Wi-Fi receptivity than anything that has been made the last five years. That seems unlikely for a high-end product designed to show off Samsung as the new hi-tech leader of the world.

I switched to 3G from my phone provider (the model comes with room for a SIM card) and it worked beautifully. But when I switched back to Wi-Fi, the problems returned. Next I enabled ad-hoc wireless hotspot on the LG and placed it mere inches from the tablet. This time it had no problem connecting and loading. And then when I turned off the hotspot on the LG, the tablet automatically remembered the wireless router and reconnected to it, without stopping by 3G. And now it loaded web pages quickly, even playing YouTube with only a short buffering. Clearly the problem is not with the Wi-Fi hardware, then. I don’t know whether this problem will happen with another Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7, or even with another SparkLAN WX-6615, not to mention other Wi-Fi sources. But it is definitely worth mentioning, in case someone searches for a similar problem in the future.

Because I totally write this to inform and entertain, not to show off my living in the zeroth world or anything. That’s not something I am proud of. It is accidental, not essential, as the ancients would say. Of course, the ancients did not have as many gadgets as we have. That may be why some of them became wise eventually.

Remembering Eternity

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Should I look into my heart from when I was a child?

Sometimes in silence a remembrance comes to us from the depth of our early childhood. In a similar way, a “memo” from Heaven may reach our heart. Or we may not remember it until we are gently reminded by someone who Was There, then suddenly the details spring to mind.

When I say “remembering Eternity”, I don’t mean in the same sense as a religious proverb that was popular in the Christian Church when I was young, “Consider the brevity of life, the certainty of death, and the length of eternity.” I am sure that is useful, if somewhat oppressive to the ordinary human, and some of us not so ordinary humans as well…

I mean something entirely different and much weirder, which probably will make NO SENSE whatsoever to ordinary humans. Well, my apologies in advance if you are one of them. I don’t see many of you here.

There is this tome of esoteric Knowledge, by a much more widely accepted author than Boris. Despite some measure of fame, the author of Meditations on the Tarot preferred to be known simply as “Unknown Friend”. This is not without reason: He had in his younger days written certain books which he could probably not in good conscience rescind, but which would interfere in a negative way with this book, written toward the end of his life and published after his passing. I recommend therefore to not delve into his identity.

I don’t read the book much, just open it now and then. This may well be my loss, but although the book seems to be far more mainstream than Gnosis by Mouravieff, it is still very esoteric. So, I nibble. You know I have a weakness for this stuff and could easily sail up, up and away from consensus reality, which I now at least regularly visit. (Along with the world of the Sims, obviously…)

***

I turned a page and read about contemplation, the practice of which he calls “listening in silence”. I may have mentioned in passing that in my Lightwielder fiction (which is a bit of a metaphor or parable or simile or some such), the spiritual practice of the Servants of the Light is called “listening to the silence”. So he got my attention right there. This silence is an inner silence, of course, and I will explain if you ask how one can attain to it even if living by a high-traffic road or while taking the commute bus or train to work. Just ask if you don’t know.

There are those who hear God speak to them if they listen intently. But I have benefited the most from listening to God’s silence. In so far as I have benefited at all from anything in my life, this would be a big part of it, I believe.

***

But the next part was also super interesting. Unknown Friend claimed that this listening in silence is a form of recall, of remembering. He says that just as we have horizontal memory of the past, so we can also have vertical memory from Above. If you remember me recently speaking of how Eternity is at a right angle to Time, and that we can imagine Time as horizontal and Eternity as vertical… (I forget whether I uploaded that or decided it was above my pray grade.) Anyway, this is the same thing.

He also cites Henri Bergson that “pure memory is a spiritual manifestation. With memory we are in very truth in the domain of the spirit.” Again this is equivalent to my claim that Time is the first spiritual or at least mental dimension, in the sense that we do not perceive time directly, but reconstruct it with our mental powers of memory and anticipation. Animals can remember, sometimes with great clarity over long spans of time (famously elephants have such a memory), but humans have a unique ability to mentally “travel in time” as I call it. Unknown Friend describes it from another angle, that the past travels forward into the present and is reflected as if in a mirror.

In the same way, we can make our brain a mirror to what is Above, to timeless truth as I would call it. (Above corresponds to Eternity, as the horizontal corresponds to Time.)

I m not good with pure contemplation, or perhaps I have not taken enough time for timelessness. But when I read esoteric Knowledge, this is how it works: It resonates in my heart in the same way as a memory. It seems strikingly familiar. It is as if I already knew it, even though I don’t, even when I know I have never heard it before, could not possibly have heard it before. It can be hard for me to know whether I have written about something here in the past or just heard about it for the first time, that is how familiar it sometimes is.

I’d love to write more about all this, but I would go out on tangents and end up so far above my pray grade that I could not upload it. Unfortunately this is not just a memory of the future, this is already my second attempt…

Problems of our time

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She's grown up to be really considerate of other people

If we could grow up to become really considerate of other people, we could overcome the challenges of our time. It is this we lack, more than money or technology.

Modern technology and economics have certainly made life easier for billions of people. But the challenges we face now in the 21st century are mainly challenges of the mind. I don’t mean necessarily insanity and such, although of course mental health problems are widespread and very troubling. Rather I mean what we might call “spiritual problems”, although they should be obvious even to those who don’t believe in spirit. Perhaps we could call them “problems of attitude”?

The error of our times is to try to fix attitude problems with technology, economics or legislation. I will not say that these are entirely ineffective. But they can be compared to fixing a leaky roof by placing umbrellas. Not only does it look absurd to those who see it from outside, but it is a short-sighted “solution”, suitable only for those who have no responsibility for the building and are planning to leave soon with their whole family. Hopefully we won’t all be in that situation with regards to this world.

For example, there is now plenty enough food in the world for everyone to eat their fill, and then some. But that is not exactly what happens. True, obesity is now actually afflicting a greater number of humans than is starvation, but there is still starvation. It usually only happens – at least widely – in countries at war or civil war. So it is certainly a problem of attitude, although not necessarily the attitude of the starving. (Although that can certainly happen too, that they are one of the sides in a war, and have some responsibility for it. That is not always the case, though. And in most wars, it is the stronger who attack the weaker.)

Speaking of obesity and health challenges: I know, I know. There are various hormone and metabolism problems that cause people to gain weight at an unnatural pace. It seems unlikely, however, that a fifth or so of the population have mysteriously mutated over the course of a generation or two. In any case, there are good news from science: Even if you are heavier than recommended, this will do little or no harm if you are physically active, exercising at least at moderate intensity for half an hour a day or so. (Or an hour every other day.) So unless you have a mutated metabolism and also a broken spine, you should be doing fine. If you have the right attitude, that is. The attitude that makes you force your body to do things it does not particularly like sometimes.

Unfortunately, many people really exercise their mind making up excuses instead. If people would eat when they were hungry and stop before they were full, and be physically active at least some minutes each day, that alone would stop the huge growth in health expenses in the rich world. I am not kidding. Sure, there are many expenses that come because we can treat illnesses that were fatal in the past. Treatment for these is typically very expensive. But living a life of moderate self-restraint will dramatically reduce the risk of falling gravely ill. Mind you, we are talking of risks here, possibilities and percentages. It is not like the law of gravity which is very simple and predictable. So you can eat right, exercise regularly and die horribly anyway. But on a large scale, like that of a whole nation, a more responsible lifestyle would have a dramatic impact.

Then there is the whole thing about fearing death. Now, this is an attitude that I sympathize with personally to a very high degree. There are few things I want less than death! But even so, here is something to think of: A very large part of the medical expenses in an average human life happens in its last year. This is independent of the age. If you live to 90, most of the expenses will be in the year from 89 to 90. If you live only to 50, most of the expenses will be from 49 to 50. Of course, this is not without exception, but it is the rule. In other words, a great deal of our hospitals, our doctors and our medicines are employed to prolong life by months or weeks. Of course, in some cases we just can’t know. There is a chance, even if it is small, of survival. And there is nothing we want more, usually.

Still, if we are actually old and we have an illness that is anyway going to end our life within months, I feel that there should be an option to submit to the course of nature. I am told that in America this is what happens if you are poor. But for those who have nothing to fear from death, I feel that it should be an option even if you could afford to stay around for a few months longer. In days of yore, it was not uncommon for old people to feel that they had accomplished what they came to Earth for. “Now let thy servant depart in peace.” I can’t say I feel like that now, but I hope to be able to say that some day. We may long for eternal life, but it is folly to think that science can do that for us, even with tax-financed health care.

Another attitude problem is that we consider our personal luxury more important than the planet. There has been some progress in this, in some parts of the world. But not enough. We are still destroying the biosphere at a terrifying speed. Species go extinct all the time. Fertile soil is washed away or blown away by the wind because of thoughtless agriculture that leaves the soil open to the elements at times when flooding or drought occurs. Forests are cut down that protected the soil, wetlands are drained that absorbed floods. And of course arable land is covered with roads and buildings. So far we have managed to keep food production high enough, higher than ever actually. But we cannot afford to lose more arable land as population is still set to grow. And we should not unravel ecosystems except in the most dire emergency.

***

In short, the great challenges of our times and probably the next generation as well, is our attitude. As long as we think in terms of money and not time, of luxury and not happiness, of receiving and not giving, of being done to and not doing – as long as we think in this way, it will be difficult to solve our problems, and new ones will appear. The roof will leak in more and more places until it collapses on our heads. For now, we have only this one planet, and we must share it with each other better than we do today.

 

Lifetome worldbuilding

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"Oh gosh. My imagination ran wild there."

Isn’t a library the best place for your imagination to run wild? ^_^

I have yet another idea for a story I’ll probably never write, although if I live, I may give it a shot either in JulNoWriMo or NaNoWriMo.

The basic premise is related to “The 1001st Book”, but this is closer to my own reality, although it is still highly symbolic, vertical projected onto horizontal and with a tinge of urban fantasy. That would be the closest genre, I guess: Urban fantasy. Although that genre seems overrun with vampires and werewolves these days. This is not like that. Very unconventional.

The main character is a rather solitary adult man (unlike the late teens I usually have, but somewhat similar to my Eternal Road in this regard, which makes sense from the intended audience).  His favorite place to hang out is the library, and one day an unfamiliar librarian tells him that he has read a thousand books. As a reward, she lends him a book that is not in the shelves: The Chance of a Lifetome.

Yes, the mythspelling is intentional. For the book tells the story of the mysterious and legendary book called “the Lifetome”, which enables the reader to travel to worlds outside of our timestream. While in these worlds, one will hardly age at all, even should one stay there for many years. One is also virtually immortal while there, as even if one should seem to lose one’s life, one would just return to the timestream. There are supposedly a myriad of these worlds. While they may seem to be outside of time, they have their own time, although it flows differently from ours: While there, one will see not only the seasons come and go, but people are born, live and die; only the visitor, returning home after decades, will find that hardly any time has passed. In this way, one may live for centuries or even millennia, just not in one’s homeworld.

The Chance is not itself the Lifetome, but contains clues to the next book. Each book must be read and understood in order to correctly predict which is the next, until the last in the series is the Lifetome itself.

I have picked up the word “lifetome” (as in “the work of a lifetome”) from the One Cosmos blog, but there is no relation between its use there and my worldbuilding here. Well, apart from the obvious, that the blog has sent me down the path of chasing numerous books, some of which have sent me to other books and so on. But then again, that is what happens when you read a thousand books, don’t you think? ^_^

(In case it isn’t obvious, the books are themselves “lifetomes”, allowing us to sit in on the lives of many others. Through the magic of books we can travel in time, we can see empires rise and fall, even the stars are within our grasp. We can visit worlds filled with magic, or worlds sparse and harsh and gray, or worlds so mundane that they might be our own. It is an amazing thing in its own right, and I am glad to see that neither the gramophone nor the cinema have managed to eradicate reading, contrary to predictions…)

Payday

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There is something called “first world problems”, but I think this one must be categorized as a “zeroth world problem”:  I have a straight salary, no variable parts, no overtime. (Travels, which I avoid when possible, are refunded separately.) Now today it was payday again, and for some reason I felt the urge to know how much I was receiving. But unfortunately the corporate website hosting my electronic pay stub was overloaded, so I could not find out until after closing hours.

I might want to interpret this as “I am not particularly interested in material goods”, but my new computer would like to argue the opposite. Perhaps it is more that I have lived for so many years, I can’t really go around remembering how much I earn for each year. It will surely change again if I live for another year. Probably upward, although I am not sure this is in my best interest. The more expensive we are compared to foreigners doing the same job, the greater the profit that may be had by outsourcing our job.

But for now, we here in Norway seem to think the trees will grow into the sky. Of course, that’s what I remember from my American friends some five years or so ago, too.

Me, a kaleidoscope?

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 “God, please just overlook what I do tonight!” That’s a perfect case of what I mean. But even if God overlooks it, we must not. This is the paradox. 

I have not read in Gnosis I – the Exoteric Cycle since the day I discovered his teachings of the three time dimensions. I probably will again, given time, but I haven’t. Yet the scent of it lingers. Looking at my own entries from before I read it, I recognize bits and pieces that people usually don’t say, but that I and Boris Mouravieff do say, and somewhat similarly. It is rather weird. Boris Mouravieff is rather weird, if I may say so. He seems a bit outside consensus reality, even for an esoteric religious person. That does not necessarily mean he is crazy – it could be that the rest of us are crazy. Or it could simply be a different angle, as I like to think it is with me.

Take for instance the fact that our personalities are kaleidoscopes.

I was just a fairly small boy when I got my first toy kaleidoscope. It was a simple thing: A tube of cardboard or plastic or some such, with a simple lens at the eye end, and at the other end a part made of small mirrors and pieces of plastic. I held it up toward a light source, and the image of the small colorful pieces was reflected in the mirrors, causing a symmetric picture. Being human, I liked symmetric pictures. And being a child, I liked them being in bright colors. Also, being a child, I broke it eventually. I am not sure if I ever saw another. But the memory remains, even if vague.

Whenever I wanted a new picture, I would only shake the tube slightly, and the pieces rearranged themselves, causing the whole mirrored image to change beyond recognition.

The human mind really is like that, isn’t it? Just as Mouravieff says. Although I won’t vouch for his mathematics showing that there is just under 900 combinations in each and every human personality. If you are curious about the math, I’ll look it up, but that is not the point. The point is, I have written about this too, although not in those words.

What I have written about is the science of “hot” and “cold” mental states. This is not my invention, definitely, although I have observed them for many years now in my own life. Cold states are those in which we think rationally, and we usually have a fairly stable personality during all our cold states, although they can certainly differ too: Work is usually one such cold state of mind, perhaps the coldest of them all for most people. Most also spend the greater part of their home life in such stable states of mind, I like to think, although they may feel and act different from their job persona. (I tend to forget job-related things when I go home, unless I send a mail to myself. But I can very confidently predict how I will react, and I will keep an appointment if I can remember it.)

Hot states are usually set off by basic instincts: Lust, fear, anger or disgust. They are different from the cold states in that it is hard to predict what you will do in them, and it is hard to keep promises from one state when you are in another. This also holds true between different hot states: A promise made in fear may be extremely hard to keep while in lust, or the other way around. But also between hot and cold: People may honestly believe they would put a raw earthworm in their mouth for a week’s pay, but faced with the actual earthworm, they find that it is just too disgusting, their body decides to forget their resolution. There are about 5% who do take the earthworm though. These are the people you need in your military, send the others home. But that’s beside today’s point.

Today’s point is, we are kaleidoscopes. When we are shaken, our configuration changes, and we show a different picture for the duration. Our psyche consists of several pieces or parts, usually working together in a particular configuration that we tend to think of as “me”. But when shaken, either by an earthworm or a sexy person, one or more pieces of our psyche are “swapped out” for other pieces that fill the same spot, and the appearance of the whole becomes strikingly different.

Intriguingly, people here in the Nordic countries are less completely transformed by lust, by and large, than our immigrant population. I think this is because sexuality is more openly accepted as an integral part of life here, and so there are more connections between that part and the everyday parts of the psyche. We are able to think about sex in our cold states, as seen by people talking about it without breathing heavily or anything. So it takes more to cause a swap-out which puts lust in the driver’s seat. For many of our male immigrants, seeing a woman in scant or tight-fitting clothes is enough to make them behave like insane monkeys, while for us natives it is more of a gradual bending of the compass needle of the mind.

Be that as it may, it is clear from direct observation of myself and others that we as a natural personality are not a pearl of great price, but the broken shards of a kaleidoscope. When shaken, we change into something different, sometimes even into something that is hard to recognize.

Insofar as there is in us such a pearl, an indivisible and unchangeable part, perhaps it is better sought in exactly the part of us that watches the kaleidoscope and observes the shifting of its pictures.

A great mistake, so it seems to me, is to want “closure” when we observe in ourselves such shifts which we do not approve of. This is particularly the case with larger shifts, of which you can hear people say: “I don’t know what possessed me”, “I was not myself”, “this is not me”. That is nice, that we have higher aspirations than what we at all times can maintain. But it is important to accept the difference between “this is not the whole of me” versus “this is not me at all”. In the latter case, we seek closure. I am not sure that is a good idea.

For a Christian, for instance, to have been forgiven is often taken to mean closure. If God and men (or even, hard as that may be, women) have forgiven us, then It Didn’t Happen, right? Well, I don’t think so. To quote (for the Christian, specifically) 2. Peter 1:9, “But whoever does not have them [i.e. the virtues] is nearsighted and blind, forgetting that they have been cleansed from their past sins.” To turn a blind eye on the parts of one’s kaleidoscope that don’t match our prettier aspiration, or at least to only perceive them fuzzily, is associated with not developing the qualities expected of the believer.

When some religious people are called “observant”, it is understood that they observe the precepts, the teachings of their religion. But it is also requested that one observe oneself, as the early Christians were told: “Pay attention to yourself and the teaching, keep at it; for when you do so, you shall save yourself and those who hear you.” (1.Timothy 4:16.) As it happens, this is a core tenet of Buddhism as well – the teaching of self-reflection as a saving way.

So, to the extent that we can do so without triggering neurological disorders, I believe it is to the best that we keep watching the kaleidoscope of the mind, until we have become thoroughly disillusioned about using its shifting sands as a foundation. It is not easy, but I keep trying.

Flynn periods?

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It is a hamster, and it is highly unlikely to have built the Great Pyramid.

Hopefully you know of the Flynn Effect. It is one of the more amazing facts in modern history, but not everyone is aware of it yet. And I can see how it may be hard to believe. But it is documented beyond reasonable doubt, or even unreasonable doubt. Unless there is a worldwide conspiracy that somehow overtakes even those who set out to disprove it, humans are getting rapidly more intelligent. Not just educated: The effect is greatest in forms of intelligence that are not specifically trained in school, and starts before school age. The speed of the increase varies from one part of the world to another, but they are all rising, and fast. The global average is about 3 IQ points per decade or 10 points per generation. That means that each generation is genius compared to their grandparents, basically. (Your grandparents may vary.)

The Flynn Effect has been going on for as long as there have been IQ tests, about a century in the first places that started. Now you may think the obvious answer is that people have become more adept at taking IQ tests, but it works equally well on children the first time they take such a test. And while there is an improvement in each individual with repeated tests, this is a fairly small improvement that is long since overrun and left in the dust by the collective progress of the Flynn Effect.

Yet if we try to prolong this effect into the deep past, madness ensues. We would then have to assume that the great cathedrals of Europe were built by people who could not tie their own shoelaces if their lives depended on it, and that Plato spoke to people with the mental capacity of chimpanzees at best. The Pyramids were presumably built by the intellectual equivalents of hamsters, and the Stonehenge perhaps by guppies. Something is definitely wrong with this picture.

Perhaps the progress began early in the 19th century? The period from 1850 to 1910 saw the invention of the pedal bicycle, the motorcar, the airplane, the telephone, the electric light and radio. While far more inventions have been made since then, most of the 20th century can be said to have been shaped by the inventions of the previous two generations, which were gradually deployed around the world and made more and more affordable. But if we go back to 1850, we find a world that is just plain alien, little more than the Middle Ages with added steam engine and telegraph. Not that these are small things, but still. Some kind of mental quickening seems to have happened around 1850 and accelerated to this day.

But the IQ scores of people in that age remain speculation. Perhaps the geniuses came first, and their example somehow triggered the great masses to begin ambling toward the heights. We shall probably never know for sure. Although it would help if we knew the cause of the Flynn Effect. We don’t. There are hypotheses, but none is an obvious winner.

***

But what if this is not the first time? Well, it probably is the first time we have a global Flynn Effect that is sustained for a century. Actually, this is the first era that we know of that has a global anything – globalization did not exist in the era of the longboat, not for lack of trying. But there is no reason why a sufficiently large local population could not experience its own Flynn Effect in the past, if some of the hypotheses are correct such as better food supply, or hybrid vigor from people breeding outside their local community, or a Zeitgeist – spirit of the times – that rewarded intellectual prowess. Several such possible triggers may have come together numerous times in human history.

Most people today tend to think that the ancients were stupid. Certainly people in the distant past did not have telescopes and computers, and the ordinary worker was not even literate. But there were pockets of intellect in many cultures at various times. China had several such, with an intellectual class poring over great libraries. Even ancient Sumer, one of the earliest civilizations, had large libraries ranging from myths to tax records. But harder to quantify are the oral traditions. Masterpieces such as the Iliad were composed and handed down entirely by mouth and ear before eventually being written down. The same holds for the great epics of India, or for that matter my Norse ancestors. Most of this tradition was probably never written down but faded away due to harsh times or competition from literature.

So what I mean is that there may have been pockets in time where people grew more and more intelligent for each generation for a hundred years, as has now happened here. Or for two hundred or even three hundred years. But if their Zeitgeist did not run toward technology, architecture or sculpture, we would be hard pressed to find any sign of it.  Some ancient religious texts are amazing in their clarity and depth, but were they the product of a single author or editor, or were they simply the crowning glory of a temporary religious or spiritual civilization that may have been far ahead of our times?

Some remnants from these times have made their way to our own. The benefits of proper meditation to the health of the individual and society, for instance, is something we have only recently begun to rediscover. And while the theory of acupuncture seems to be off in the far left field, the practice is surprisingly effective. Who knows how many other great inventions have existed, only to be swallowed in the mists of time?

We should not assume that our modern global civilization is possible because we are biologically more advanced, that our brains have evolved over the last centuries or millennia. There may be some traces of such evolution, according to some scientists, but by and large every tribe of humanity has enough brains for the modern world, no matter whether they have a long and distinguished history of civilization or just came out of the rain forest buck naked. So there is no reason to think that we have superior brains to those who lived 2000, 3000, or even 4000 years ago. All we have is the benefit of learning from their example. But there may be many things that once were known that have become unknown again in the meantime, as Dark Ages swallowed each civilization in turn.

I wonder, if our own civilization must fall, whether we can convey its splendor to those who may follow. Or will they simply see us as madmen, destroying our world, ruining nature’s beauty, building vast prisons of iron and concrete, and leaving behind twisted sculptures of metal and silicon of no conceivable use?

Sims 3 Showtime review

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Greetings! Magnus the Magus returns to amaze and amuse you all! The Sims 3 Showtime expansion, not so much. Though it is not bad – just bare.

Showtime is the sixth expansion pack for The Sims 3, and came out in March this year. I recommend waiting until you get it for half price, because it has only half as much content as the earlier expansion packs.

The expansion has one unique feature, though. If you feel you need this, there is only one way to get it: The “Simport”. With this new feature, you can send your performer sim to a friend’s computer and have him perform at a stage there, then return home with unique awards and rewards. In fact, you can have a tour of four friends before returning home. I am sure this is cute if you have friends who also play The Sims 3 and are not afraid to admit it. It is pretty limited though, and it is not obvious why you or your friends would want to play a performer sim in the first place.

The name of the game, “Showtime”, is a pun on the ability to show off your sim, but also refers to the show business careers that come with the pack, all three and a half of them. Wait, wasn’t show business the point of that earlier expansion, Late Night? Yes, and the three new self-employed careers or “professions” could have been included in Late Night except they use the self-employment game mechanics from Ambitions. So the self-employment system is basically duplicated in this pack, but with far fewer careers than in Ambitions. Thus the “half content at full price” accusation, which seems quite exact to me.

That said, the new careers are definitely new and original. You can rise to stardom as an acrobat, a singer or a magician. (No points for guessing which one I picked for my self-sim!) You are free to perform for tips in parks and street corners, and this will give you valuable work experience. Singers can also deliver sing-o-grams, which is amusing but (once in a blue moon) can set your sim on fire fatally. Then again, the other two careers are not entirely safe either.

In all fairness, the careers are pretty good, with great flexibility, the ability to design your own scene layout with various affordable lights and effects, and a genuine sense of accomplishment when the high-society arenas start asking you instead of the other way around. The income at level 10 is definitely something to write home about, even a single performance a week can feed a large family in luxury. It is up to you whether you want to control your sim on the scene or let them do what they want, but as usual they are not the brightest candles on the candelabra so you can generally maximize their career by giving a helping hand.

Still – 3 careers plus the ability to moonlight as a DJ? Not a full expansion pack. There are no new across-the-board gameplay improvements either, except the ability to post to your sim wall (like Facebook wall) if you are logged in. I don’t log in, as I don’t use The Sims 3 as a Facebook replacement, and I doubt many outside EA’s test lab do. Anyway, this dubious ability is added to your game for free regardless of whether you buy the expansion, if you run the game updater after March this year.

There is one more thing, though: The genie. The Dusty Old Lamp from Sims 2: Freetime is back, and this time the genie can be socialized with and supposedly even married. So the game expansion at least upholds the tradition of adding one more “supernatural” sim type in each expansion. If you have a thing for genies (perhaps as the result of a certain old TV series) this may tip the scales.

Overall though, I get the impression that EA’s creative team died or retired barely halfway through the production of this expansion, and the bosses decided to honor their memory by publishing the expansion with only the three finished and one unfinished career.

 

Sleeping while still alive

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Sometimes I just lie in bed, looking at the shining plumbbob suspended in the air above me – no wait, that’s my sim. Me, I tend to fall asleep almost as soon as I get my headphones on. It is just getting there that takes a long time!

There is a saying “I’ll sleep when I’m dead”, and sometimes I wonder if a part of me is thinking that way. Unfortunately, this attitude is likely to bring on the final sleep much earlier than necessary.

Over the last few days I feel more and more “run down”. It takes less exercise to make me stiff and sore. I believe sleep may be the missing ingredient. I have found in the past that physical exercise requires more sleep. For mental work, such as my job, a nap will do wonders. But when I actually burn off 500-1000 calories and use my muscles in slightly unfamiliar ways, my body needs the downtime to put itself back in full working orders.

Unfortunately, of late my good ideas appear as on cue around 11 PM.  Well, they may not be “good” in the Biblical sense, but they certainly are ideas. Whether journal entries (which may or may not ever be posted) or fiction, they emerge with unprecedented clarity when the clock should have encouraged me to put head to pillow.

I don’t generally suffer from insomnia these days. Well, to some small degree from the insomnia of the asylum seekers upstairs, who still tend to move their shouting closer to the bedroom at 0 – 1- 2 AM, but I have largely gotten used to that. Besides, I have the delta brainwave entrainment. But neither sleep nor delta entrainment go well with writing fiction about magic worlds or unexpected college romance. Or for that matter entries like this, finished around 23:55 European time.

Who to cling to

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Ah! People who believe are saved? Except… it seems the one thing all believers agree on is that it matters what you believe and who you believe in – believing in the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost is not the same as believing in Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, not to mention Urd, Verdandi and Skuld. In fact, there is even the occasional bloodshed over which version of each deity you believe in…

***

Among the very most powerful lines I have heard in a worldly song was this, from Candle in the wind by (Sir) Elton John:

And it seems me that you lived your life like a candle in the wind,
never knowing who to cling to when the rains set in.

Because although we like to forget it, all our lives are such. When the wind is right, it makes our candle flare up brightly. When the wind turns, or the rains set in, we are snuffed out in a moment. Even if not, we flicker and fade after such a short time, consuming ourselves like a candle.

 ***

“But for me” says the Psalm, “it is good to keep close to the Lord.” Millions of us think so, at least from time to time, and particularly when the rains set in. Unfortunately there are now, and for a long time has been, many sects and outright heresies, who preach “a different Jesus and a different gospel” as St Paul already noted in the 0050es. There are indeed some who consider Paul one of the most accomplished at this re-imagining of Christ – I just mention that to show how hard it is to know anything for sure.

How do we know we’ve got the right Lord or the right God?

I think you can see from the last couple weeks of this journal that I am worrying about that. I didn’t use to, because the Presence in my heart would be my lifeline. And that is still how I feel. But I am no longer just playing in my crib under the watchful eye of the Original Parent. I have begun to dabble in things that may be too big and too wonderful for me. And I am not sure how to deal with that.

Do I really need to know all these things? I mean, yes, I am born to know things. It is my destiny. That’s the kind of guy I am. But I think there can be too much, way too much of it, or going too far ahead. Do I really need to know whether the moon is a cosmic fetus or how many dimensions of the mind there are beyond the 7 I can recognize? Do I need to know how long the astral body lives? I don’t see these things helping me to cling to God when the rains set in.

For some, that is all there is, to have a simple faith in God. And when the fog of life’s tests and temptations is so dense that you cannot see another step in front of you, that is all there is to us all, those of us who are blessed to have even that. But in this world there are born people with different personality types and different destinies. This is a good thing. We should not quarrel over this, as long as we seek each in our way to help others and not harm them, and to stay close to God or the Light.

But beyond the basics, there are so many doctrines, teachings and dogmas, so many competing sects and whole religions, all sure that they have The Truth.

I was blessed to meet, when I was still very young, a group of very pure-hearted Christians. Their teachings were not so much about things that can never be verified, like the various heavens and hells or what God did before creating the universe. They were more about how to recognize temptations before they have time to carry us off, how to react when people don’t conform to our expectations, how important it is to watch our thoughts and not just what other people see. Things like that. A practical mysticism, is how I think of it. I know the purity of these people, or at least back then. A purity that is unimaginable even to the vast majority of religious believers.

So when it comes to these things, I know from whom I have learned them, and that makes me very sure. Those who held tight to these teachings and meditated upon them became for all purposes actual saints. They became truly holy. I would go in and out of their homes, I saw how they treated their spouse and children (for those old enough to have that). I talked with young men one to one and sometimes prayed together, so I feel I know something about the purity of their heart. (Obviously I hardly ever was alone with a young woman, except in dire need such as having to travel in a car together to get home, and even that very rarely. But I am sure they were as pure and holy as the men, if not more so.)

So I am blessed in this, I have something to fall back on, to cling to when the rains set in. I know, not from theoretical speculation but from seeing and hearing firsthand. To a more modest degree, I feel like John in his first letter: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched —this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.” So when I am in doubt as to whether I have taken a wrong turn, I have this to fall back on. How I wish that all were so blessed. But most are not, and I must take care not to deceive you. It may not be just me who will lose out if I lose my way and get puffed up by false teachings.

***

 I had been out walking and jogging today – I have done that a lot lately, walking part of the way and jogging part of the way. I was on my way home and had slowed down when the first heavy raindrops began to fall. By then I felt a strange but not unknown feeling. I checked my pulse watch, and my pulse was speeding up more and more, even though I was slowing down. One of those episodes. As the rain set in, big drops falling like cold tears, I started praying for those who had been puffed up and had begun to think of themselves as gods or saviors or very important persons in the cosmic hierarchy. I assume they started out much like me, having amazing insights, only more so.

The rain continued, but after a while I noticed that my heart was beating normally again. It was after that I suddenly recalled that line from the song.

And it seems to me that I live my life like a candle in the wind, but still knowing who to cling to when the rains set in?

(Now, the sunny days, those can be really hard in that regard…)