Government needs to spend, and spend big, to end floods

It is terrible to read about the floods devastating parts of Britain.  Is it not time to address the real issue, and it is not the bloody rain.  Our drainage system is a disgrace, the sewage system not much better, the roads are a mess, the population is excessive, we have concrete and tarmac everywhere, destroying natural drainage routes for water; these are the realities of UK2012. 

Our country cannot cope with the demand placed on our infrastructure anymore.  With all the cutbacks nothing is ever renewed or repaired, unless in a catastrophic state.  We are a wet, temperate, country, ill prepared for the climate we have to deal with continuously.  Any form of minor upheaval always manages to catch us out.  In this day and age, it is a total disgrace.  The governments of this country for many decades have disregarded the need to better infrastructure, to match the demands of an ever-growing population.

Since our country is in a state of depression, and there is little money for basic infrastructure needs, the problem just gets worse and worse especially when we are in an increased precipitation period. 

It rains in Britain, it has always rained in Britain, but we have never had so many people live in Britain.  We have not seen such austerity when we have had 60 million legal citizens before.  As I look out my kitchen window, I can see a farm that is nowhere near a river, and this farm is nearly completely flooded.  No river has burst its banks, it is because of poor drainage, this last summer after a few major storms (for Britain that is), the smell of sewage was terrible at times from blocked drains.  That was on the days we actually could see the sun.

All the crap, the fallen branches, the leaves, the twigs, the litter, and god knows what else that accumulates in drains, has blocked them, like blocked arteries.  Eventually you have a heart attack, and unless this government finds a way to start to improve infrastructure, and spend some bloody money, on roads, and drainage, and sewage, and understanding how to deal with the massive over population in times of increased precipitation, then this country will have a heart attack.

Britain is like a stately home that is in need of renovation, but the problem is it is far too expensive to contemplate and we all know what happens when left in disrepair.  Who knows what will happen when we have 70 or 80 million pop.  The whole country might be flooded by then, and with any luck, some of the dim-witted greedy MPs will lose their houses, like the poor families that are losing theirs now.

When will the internet become self-aware?

I believe, though may never actually find out that the first non-biological sentient being, will be the internet, in whatever form it is at the time of its metamorphosis.  As it changes from a chrysalis into a butterfly, like a phoenix it will rise from the flames of anonymity.  I know this is not a new concept, but I do not think humans working to find the answer to artificial intelligence will create it; we will not work it out unfortunately.  I think it will come because of evolution, it will occur naturally.  The internet will naturally evolve into a sentient self-aware species.

The question is not if but when.  The question is will we know it or not.  The question is what will happen once its awareness exceeds the boundaries of our control.  It all sounds like science fiction but I doubt it will be.  The internet will become self-aware one day; it is just how long it will take.

The massive brain we call the internet with all its cable connections, Wi-Fi, its synaptic nerves constantly growing forming newer and newer pathways, larger and larger memories, more powerful processors, larger hard drives.  At present, it is instinctive, unobtrusive, clusters of small fragments of intelligence working in random, chaotic, nonstandard patterns.  Eventually this pattern will lose its randomness, and the chaos will become less, the links will work in unison and with pathways and memory, so vast it will become an actual living intelligent self-aware entity.

Humanity will then be like worker bees keeping the hive queen alive, feeding it, nurturing it, and allowing it to grow and to learn until it does not need us anymore.  When that happens anything is possible, I wonder if I will be around to see it.  I wonder if any of us will even know what is about to hit when it does finally out grow its need for us.

Murray would struggle to keep World No. 1 unless he improves clay court game

Murray will always find it difficult to become world number one.  The main reason is 5000 ranking points are up for grabs on clay, and he is not one of the best clay court players.  Until he improves his clay court record, it will always be an obstacle.  He has to reach finals and win 500 clay court events, until he can do this, he will always struggle.  This does not mean he cannot reach World No.1, but it will always be a brief stay, unless he has a stellar season winning three of four slams.

Murray is probably either number one or two on hard court these days with Djokovic, and one or two on grass with Federer.  He is number two or three with Djokovic indoors, but on clay he is about five or six compared to Fed and Djoks who are two and three.  This may seem nothing is the full context of a season, but at their level of elite tennis, it is massive.

Obviously, this is at present and things can change and often do.  Murray can improve his clay court game and it is a surprise to me, how unsuccessful he had been on the surface, considering his type of game.  On top of this, I have not accounted for Rafa Nadal, who is of course the greatest clay courter.  It is still unclear how he will play when he finally returns.  Long layoffs of six months or more do not normally help elite tennis players.

I read with interest Pat Cash's comments about Federer not be considered the greatest tennis player ever.  Since I think he is wrong, I will give another reason why Federer is above Laver, who Pat thinks deserves equal standing.  Yes, Laver the greatest of his day and according to Cash won over 200 tournaments, to Roger’s 80.  The big difference is this, and this is why players now have it far harder than in the past.  Now the top players have to play each other, in every tournament, not just the slams.  There are no easy rides.  It is compulsory for top players to play the Slams and 1000 events; they do not get to cheery pick a surface that suits them best and play the majority of their tennis of that surface.

For Roger to have the success he has had over the period he has had it, against the best players every week; it is incredible.  Unfortunately, we will never know whether Laver could match this, but we know Federer has.

Where do you draw the line with dope cheats?

Finally, they have thrown Lance Armstrong out of cycling because of his underworld type exploitation of his own sport, cycling.  Using his illness to hide a deep desire to win, he has perhaps changed the way we think of dope cheating in future.  In the past, it was one man or woman’s sole desire to be the best at any cost, before that it was one nations desire to be the best.  Now with Armstrong we realise it was one man’s desire corrupt an entire sport and bend it to his will.  Does this go beyond the boundaries of other drug cheats and so does it set a new precedent? 

If they decide as I have read this morning, to remove all trace of the years between Armstrong’s first win in 99 to his last in 05, do we have to do this with all sports blighted with the evil of enhanced athletes whose sole purpose was cheating to win and being the best.  This is not a simple task, there are many sports, some major ones where doping is used extensively even if it is not headline news.

Alternatively, do we take a different view and start enhanced versions of sports, allowing athletes who want to use performance-enhancing drugs to win, to play-off against each other.  ‘Super Cycling’, ‘Super Boxing’, ‘Super Athletics’; is it a good idea to allow this to happen or is it the natural evolution of competitive sport. 

Would anyone really be interested?  Is the danger of the drug or use of the drug an issue now?  Is the sport more dangerous with the use of drugs?  Is there a significant advantage to using a specific drug in that sport?  Will it change our attitudes towards drugs?  Many more questions come to mind, beyond are they cheating.  

I occasionally watch American Football, and to see the size of those linebackers, those big blokes on the line of scrimmage, whatever they are doing to their bodies in the name of their sport.  I bet it is not all good, even if it is not drug enhanced.  Athletes put their bodies through a massive amount of stress and pressure just to reach the top.  Yes they seem healthy when they are young, but what will most of them be like in the forties and fifties, especially in the heavy hitting contact sports.  For every great legend, you see on TV, still looking healthy and full of life, there probably is many more, in agony unable to walk properly or move without painkillers.

I am not condoning cheating; I think it is vile and disrespectful to one’s self and ones fellow competitors.  Saying that, if all the cheaters cheat, and they are all on a level playing field and no one can cheat further and it makes it even, then we will know definitely, whom the best is.  If control and legislation do not work then we need to find new avenues.  What if they legalised performance-enhancing drugs, what if because of a change, the sport became more popular made more money, more profit.  What if because the sport allowed access to drugs they found, newer, better ways to enhance, and it helped humanity.  It might be a long shot but it is a possibility.

Modern day sport is part of the consumer cycle.  Modern sport creates competitors, competitors increase the sports popularity.  The best competitors are watched, and the best win to become so popular that they enhance the sport.  Allowing other commercial companies to invest in that sport so they can make more profit.  The products are then sold on mass to the competitors and also the spectators of that sport.  A perfect cycle.

Or do we continue with the present format, trying to find drug cheats and never truly knowing who is the best because being the best may just mean you are the best at cheating.  Until they sort it out in sport, we will know this period of history as the uncertain period before we realised the way to go forward.  The time when we cannot be certain, how good someone truly is, because of people like Lance Armstrong, Ben Johnson, Marion Jones, the East Germans, and the many others from many sports who know they cheated to win.  The ones who cheated and got away with it, and worst of all, the ones who cheated, got away with it, and won.

Matter might be a living object and Dark Energy consciousness

I wrote a post some months ago about Dark Energy and what it might be, my conclusion was a philosophical one.  It must be some kind of memory or storage for knowledge.  I used the title of the piece ‘Could Dark Energy be Heaven?’

I had another thought continuing in that vein.  The known Universe as we perceive it, only started to expand after the creation of dark energy (If we start after the great expansion called inflation).  Dark Energy makes up approximately 74% of mass of our known Universe, so we could argue that for every one part of matter there are three parts of none matter.  What if the expansion of the Universe, started when matter became alive and emitted a new form of energy similar to consciousness?  If we were the hot cup of tea, and the heat given off through entropy is our consciousness over our lifetime, changing into a new form of energy, which we know as dark energy. 

I know it’s a long shot but why not, surely some clever mathematician, physicist, or cosmologist can create an equation for thought, for consciousness.  One part living matter gives off three parts of dark energy through consciousness – memory, thoughts, experiences, and information.  And if you use Einstein’s famous equation E = mc²  then the amount of information, consciousness, etc. stored in the Universe is considerable.

I realise this may seem a bold statement with little evidence, but you can roughly work out the likelihood using probability.  When you take into account the age of the Universe and the likelihood of other sentient species having existed, as well as the many other types of living objects created throughout the history of the Universe, and if you take into account how long a sentient species may survive until extinction.  If you add the other life forms we cannot at this time comprehend because of our lack of information regarding the object we call the Universe.  Surely someone more knowledgeable than me can think of an equation that shows the correlation between probabilities of life existing since the Universe began, probability of it having conscious thought, the amount of dark energy in the Universe, and all the other variables involved.

The big problem with the Universe is we know next to nothing about it.  We are virtually working from a blank canvas.  We think we know a great deal about how it works but I doubt it.  I would suspect we know less than a quark on the great canvas on the Universe, as near to nothing as you can get on a Universal scale. 

I know this because we have only just started our quest, we have to understand our predicament and situation and realise that everything we believe to be true no matter how conclusive it may seem, is likely to be false or only a small part of the whole. 

Yet I believe because we are essentially one of the luckiest objects to be created by entropy, because we ended up with the power to think.  We seem like the anomaly, a freak happening, probably a billion, billion to one, yet still that number is insignificant when scaled against the whole of the Universe since its birth (if it was ever born).  As far as we know very few other species or anything for that matter can think and are self-aware, and we know for certain from our perspective no other thing can do it as well as we can.  This in itself using the laws of probably is unlikely.  Just because we believe we are the highest form of intelligence, does not mean we definitely are, from our perspective we are the highest, but maybe every living thing whatever we perceive it to be, whether alive or not, existing or not, may from its own perspective believe it is the highest form of intelligence in its reality.

If you think about it, it is just as likely for other living objects to believe they are unequalled. If every form of life believes it is the highest form of intelligence for its reality; or you could say to survive its environment, what would that say about the universe?  The Universe itself does not even follow its own laws as the continued formation of more dark energy pushing everything further apart can only give two conclusions either the first law of thermodynamics is wrong or the Universe stores energy in another way different to dark energy and matter related energy.  And if we use entropy, we can say that dark energy is a more dispersed form of the energy it was before it changed.  Perhaps that is the energy created by living objects (which might be all of matter) as they go about their existence in their own specific perspective of reality.

Science tries to use evidence from our perspective of reality, to create a viable plausible concept of the Universe and what it might be and how it might work.  But it is not conclusive, it is not certain, it is only ever appropriate at the time.  And it can always be proved wrong eventually.  History proves that, perhaps in two hundred years, scientists will look back on this time and think of our knowledge as similar to Newton, and Galileo.  Great steps forward but not quite right, and they will be in the same boat as we are in five hundred years.

Autumn

As the leaves they turn from green to brown,

And the air starts to feel colder,

As the sun’s great warmth begins to wane,

And the world gets a little older,

As the nights close in and darkness descends,

And we light our fires to smoulder,

It’s autumn’s a slow death to the cold of winter,

And winter’s the sleeping coma.

Europe wins the Ryder Cup

Just before the final singles day began Jack Nicklaus was in the Sky studio, Butch Harmon had predicted a massive win for Team USA 18 -10, and even the European pundit couldn’t see a European win.  Yet wise old Jack, the greatest golfer of them all said, well I don’t quite see it like that. It will be close and I feel the class is on the European side; they might come back and just win this, Team USA need to watch out.

How right he was, in an amazing final days singles golf, the gods and Seve were smiling on Team Europe as they came back to win 14.5 to 13.5.  This has to be the greatest comeback of all, yes the Americans did it in ‘99 but that was on home soil, this was on foreign soil in front of a patriotic and noisy crowd.

You could sense from the beginning something special was about to unfold when the first four players all scored birdies off the first.  Ian Poulter the hero from Saturday night chipped in, then later Rory McIlroy chipped in as well, after only arriving ten minutes before his tee time.  Europe needed to get off to a great start and get some blue on the board and with Luke Donald winning the first match out, Europe won the first five matches.  After that it was a rollercoaster of high tension and energy as the loud, raucous, American crowded were slowly quietened by the brilliance of Europe’s play. 

The significant action seemed to happen on the last few holes, especially the 17^th.  Team USA lead 1up in two matches involving Phil Mickelson and Jim Furyk; Phil was in the bunker and played a delicate chip to within a few feet.  Then Justin Rose knocked in a 35 yard put to win the hole with a birdie, Mickelson then went long on the last and the impossible seemed probable as Rose won the hole to win the match 1up.  Furyk thinned his chip and could not put in the subsequent put back up the green on the 17^th, he then lost the 18^th and those two matches seemed to spell the end for Team USA.

Still it did go down to the wire, Martin Kaymar nearly gave us a scare on the 18^th when 1up only needing to two put from  20 yards away he left himself a tricky winner but luckily he made it and the cup was retained, then Woods conceded the last hole to Molinari and the impossible became a miracle.  Europe had won the Ryder Cup.

The Ryder Cup is the best golf to watch on TV by miles and last night’s singles will go down as one of the greatest ever.