I’m sad that people like David Icke make money

I have been downloading a lot of documentrys off of mininova.org lately.  There have been some really good ones like “This Film is not yet Rated“, “No Limit” and “The Root of All Evil“. I then got the first avi from this torrent. Its quite big so I didn’t want to download all of it just in case it was crap.  Thank god I think these things through.  Basically its this British guy David Icke, that goes around the world giving lectures about his “research”.  He claims (and has done for 20 or so years) that the world is controlled by an elite group of people.  These people have blood lines going back 4000 years.

He talks about Golbalisation and politics all being controlled by these group of people.  He says that all religion has been made by this group to fight against each other to keep the world under control.

He cleverly uses conspirisy theories like 9/11 and the war in Iraq, to gain support from people who like to question the social norm.  At the start of the talk he shows a slideshow of common photoshop images of Bush and other US presidants.  All of this gaining support and basically doing a comedy routine to get people to like him.

Then the really weird theories start comming out.  Like how 90% of the American presidants come from the same blood line.  Or how the education system in all delevoped countries it trying to teach kids not to express themselves through art.  Or the Christofer Colombus actually knew where he was going.  Another good one is the the CIA rigs up its employees that make the person dependant on some secret chemical.  Also he said that someone from the CIA told him that we have a cure for cancer and some sort of technology that creates “abundant growth of plants in deserts without water”. He goes on to say how banks lend us money that doesn’t exist.  He bases this on the fact that the money is not “taken out of their vault” but transferred electronically.

All the while pausing for claps from the audience.

Now I can see how some people might be inclined to believe some of this stuff.  Especially people that agree with his political views and anti-American views.  You don’t have to look much further to find some of his other views which he tries to slide into his talks towards the end.

The best one is a reptilian race of people, control the world from underground.

If you watch this guy doing a talk you can actually tell just from his body language that he knows his lying.  He knows what his doing and he knows that the 201 books his written are going to make him a lot of money.  It annoys me that people pay to see this tard and that he can make money off of people trying to be different and believing in stupid ideas.

Open minds only

YouTube really does get you watching lots of different stuff with the “Related Video’s” section that is next to a video your watching. The thing I search on YouTube the most is robotics videos. As I started to look at related videos from a MIT robot this was the path I ended up on…

MIT Robot – > Mars Rovers -> Video about Life on Mars -> a Creationist Video

I have no beef with religion in its basic form. Be good to your neighbor, don’t steal shit etc etc. If you believe in a higher power, thats your choice. What I do have a problem with is people using religion to make money or force other people to do what they want. This includes trying to convert people to their way of thinking.

I believe the bible was created to show people examples of why you should be a good person. People have used the bible and their interpretations of it for personal gain.

One aspect of religion that I hate, is the closed mind most religious people have about science. Creationism is the worst of it IMO. I’m going to go through a “few” points this guy brings up and why I think he is wrong.

• At the start of the video his name appears with “Chemist” under it. Although it turns out he does have a chemisty degree, this is obviously a way of showing the audience that he is a chemist and knows what he’s talking about. Forgetting the fact that 99% of chemists disagree with what his saying. I think it’s a bit backwards using a science title to fight against science.
• He then goes on to explain why he thinks the earth is only 6000 years old. He uses the bible to get the ansestry all the way back to Adam and Eve. One point he makes is that there are 75 generations back from Jesus and gives an estimate of 50 years for each generation. This is “around” 4000 years which seemingly validates his point. The life expectecy in Roman times (the 1500 year period around the birth of christ) was only 28. Clearly the only figure he could use to get the figure he needs without it sounding stupid is 50 years.
• He then “proves” the scientific geological clock wrong by saying that at the grand canyon only has half of the layers of rock that geologists suggest should be there. Forgetting the point that when new rock is distributed around the earth from violent events in the past, that the rock isn’t distributed perfectly around the entire earth. When a volcano erupts, the lava doesn’t flow across the face of the planet. This isn’t even taking into account erosion from wind and water.
• He then starts to explain how Evolution works. He makes jumps from fish to cats and from cats to apes. Clearly trying to show how huge of a difference there is between the species.
• He then finds things in nature that are 6000 years old. Therefore proving the earth is only 6000 years old. I can find things that are 2 years old as well.
• Then he goes onto explain why we have 6 billion people on the earth today. He uses the figure of 150 years for a population to double. He then halves the population every 150 years to get a population of 5.5 when the great flood happened. He doesn’t give any reason whatsoever to explain why the population would double every 150 years. The only reason I can think of is thats the number that gives him the answer he needs. Actual population figures show that the population growth has been quickly increasing for the last 1000 years. Not staying as a linear constant.
• He also discredits fossils age because they don’t come out of the ground with tags on them with the date they were created. Such a brilliant tactic.
• He then uses examples of carbon dating that gave wrong results. This somehow proves that carbon dating doesn’t work. Even though every single type of test thats ever been created has given a false result before. I’m sure there have been plenty of examples where a pregnancy test has given a false result. I don’t see him saying that pregnancy tests aren’t to be trusted.
• He then asks people to ask “Were you there?” when people say things are over 6000 years old. When he suggests what to do when the question is turned back on the person, he only offers the bible as proof that you can use. 2000 years of Chinese whispers translated through many languages. This is the proof you should use when science asks you a question thats to hard for you.

After sitting through this video I came across a comment from someone to this link. It’s a video of a 2.5 hour debate between this guy and a professor with a PhD in Biology at a college in the USA.

If your interested in this blog then the 2.5 hours is well worth it. He gets owned completely on every topic they discuss.

Oh no, not another Blog

My first blog post. How super exciting. Lets get one thing straight right from the get go. I can’t spell, I don’t want to spell and I don’t care if bad spelling annoys the crap out of you.

Now we’ve got rid of the grammar police I can move on to the reasons I’ve decided to bless the Internet with my blogging presence.

1. I’ve seen a lack of these so called blogs and I feel compelled to change that
2. I’m about to start getting back into robotics and feel blogging my success/failures MIGHT actually help other people (which is what I understand the point of blogs to be)
3. I really, really want to put links on random words in my blogs that point to funny things.

So I’ve been inspired to get back into robotics and AI programming after my super smart friend Glennzor showed me the “new” Lego Mindstorm robots that you can get. Basically its a programmable board sitting in a Lego Technic shell. It has some shit GUI programming for it, but can be (from what I understand) programmed using a higher language.

At $380 a pop for the setup its a little out of my price range at the moment because of a small cash flow problem I’m having with the ATO. Those crazy cats, gotta love’em.

But once I get my hands on one it will be a good refresh back into robots for me. I did an Engineering course at Uni where I made a robot using a Motorola Chip that could use IR sensors to follow a simple track and find its way back if lost.

While that doesn’t sound cool, believe me, it was. There were two things I didn’t like about the subject though. The first was that I had to code in assembly language. I hate assembly language. The second was that watching a robot car follow a track isn’t all that fulfilling. However, I did get to learn a lot about the basics of how to let a robot control its moments autonomously.

The second (and more important) thing I did in Uni was an AI subject. I think it was called “Intelligent Agents”. I did some really cool stuff in that which ended up being an assignment in Java that kinda used Evolutions theory of survival of the fittest on virtual fish. The fish basically had attributes like

• Distance from another fish
• Speed of swimming
• Distance away from a virtual shark (which was your mice cursor)

So using your shark you could kill off fish that were out on there own (like what a shark would do in nature). As you killed off fish they were replaced by combining the Chromosome attributes of the remaining fish to form a new fish. Basically letting the surviving fish have a bit of a shagfest.

After a small amount of time you could see all the fish banding together and moving away from your little shark as a group just like in real life. Who’d have thought.

The professor that took this class was blind and was doing research in Robotic Vision which also sparked my interest.

So the past two weeks I’ve been busy thinking up crazy Robot challenges for me to work on. 99% of these I don’t see myself ever completing but here they are -

• Using only normal video inputs from cameras, get a robot to have depth perception and internal local mapping using an array of techniques not restricted too
  • Bifocal Cameras
  • Auto Focus algorithms
  • Structure from motion
  • Cameras being able to pan/tilt independent of the main “head” i.e like our eyes do
• Use machine learning to let a robot work out the quickest and safest way to navigate through a dynamic maze.
• Get a robot to be able to recharge itself autonomously.
• Work on doing something with a lot of small redundant robots that use Collective AI to communicate and solve a problem that one itself couldn’t solve.

Oh I have more but this will do for now. Some of us have to get up early in the morning. I’m luckily not one of them