Saturday, January 13, 2018

This Week . . . .

Did anyone notice the robot "pole dancers" at CES?
They had heads made from a well known surveillance camera. 



Sunday, January 7, 2018

Sheldrake’s Ten Dogmas of Modern Science


(1) Nature is mechanical , like a machine – animals and we too are machines

(2) Matter is unconscious

(3) The laws of nature are fixed

(4) The total amount of matter and energy remains the same.

(5) Nature is purposeless

(6) Biological inheritance is material – all of your attributes came from DNA, imprinted behaviours and other material sources.

(7) Memories are stored materially in our brains

(8) Your mind is nothing but the activity of your brain

(9) All psychic phenomena are illusory

(10) Mechanistic medicine is the only one that works. Complimentary or alternative medicines may appear to work but that is just an illusion or happenstance.

 Thanks to Rupert Sheldrake for these. 

Disclosure?


I am not a member of any religion, creed or caste.
(I was briefly a member of the Sydney Atheist society but then it got all too hard to get to and they wanted more money so that was the end of that. Don't even get started on why we need an "Atheist society" in the first place!)

I don’t “believe” anything: why I do is collect evidence and assemble it in a rational way to get glimpses of a bigger picture that I theorise exists. Normally I am content to watch other people do their digging and enjoy the intelligent analysis of people I trust – in general.

Nobody gets all of it right – for example I have heard a number of people making supportive noises about a certain movie that shows (supposedly) a UFO being chased by a USN jet fighter. Then I listened to John Lear give his sixpence worth: he called it BS because it just doesn’t even look realistic and the pilots don’t talk like real Navy pilots. I am very glad that John said it because right from the first time I saw it something looked fake to me but I couldn’t identify all of the reasons why – and he has a lot of experience that strongly suggests it is fake.
But I digress.

For a while last year I was watching “Cosmic Disclosure” with DavidWilcock and Corey Goode – not because I believed it all but because it had a certain entertainment value even though there was never any supporting evidence for the grandiose claims made.

Then there was one day on a bus to work where at least two people actually set out to mock them – to me directly. I won’t bother you with the details but the event stuck in my mind because someone planned that, and it suggested that they needed to refute Corey Goode’s stories to me.
I don’t know anyone who would do that.

The two people disappeared before I could do anything – and besides, I had to get to work.
Those who did it had to locate me to carry this out, which means they have at the very least some surveillance chops – but the big one is why.
Why bother? 

I paid a whole ten dollars a month or something pitiful like that to the host, “Gaia TV” which also has lots of videos about how to meditate and a lot of other "new age" type stuff which I have not bothered with. Does someone want to kill Gaia TV so bad they are paying people to destroy their paying customers or is it something specific to Cosmic Disclosure?

Why was someone watching what I watch on the internet in the first place?
What did they hope to gain?
I have no idea.
So I am left with a big WTF. 

Just so you know. 

Thursday, January 4, 2018

The Contenders, episode four (or is it five? I forget)



Author’s note:
I won’t bother with the whole series, just know that I have been considering a replacement for my current computer and this is the survey of possible contenders.
I started off looking at server machines because I like reliable solid gear but after digging into the costs of buying the parts and seeing it was around $10k I decide to rethink. 
Here is the chart I made up comparing CPU power and cost for high end desktop gear:



So, from the CPU chart it can be seen that although server grade Xeon CPUs beat the heck out of anything else, the wallet is going to be bitten hard: and note that cost is only the CPUs, one must add in the cost of the rest of the machine too . . . . . . so why insist on server gear? Will I be running it 24/7? nope. Will it need to be running full bore all the time? Nope.
Ten grand is a year’s worth of savings for me so anything I buy better be worth it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sooooo . . . . how about the latest Intel CPUs?
The Core i9-7980XE looks impressive but once again the wallet will suffer for it and then there are a couple of other issues: first, it uses a lot of power and generates a lot of heat to get that performance so you better make sure it has lots of cooling, and then there is the matter of getting hold of one: nobody is selling made up machines with one in . . . . .
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So that leads to the current top-of-the-heap from Intel, the Core i9-7900X.
I wouldn’t be getting one without a GTX 1080 Ti GPU card as that is the best current one - so, after a bit of digging around here are a new group of contenders - all have the 7900X and a GTX1080 Ti, I didn’t care so much about the other bits.

(1) PCCG Phantom                                                         $6899
Has two 1080 Ti’s in SLI (joined config)

(2) Alienware Area 51                                                   $5999 ($1000 discount)

(3) Kenjun Special                                                         $5084

(4) Newegg Battlebox                                                    $4257

This might look simple but there are hidden costs: all must be shipped to your door and the Newegg will come from California. I can’t get any info about how much shipping will cost at the moment – Newegg didn’t answer my question. 

Both (1) and (3) ship inside Australia. If I knew what the shipping cost of the Battlebox was I might choose it first but I get that sneaky feeling it’s going to hike up the price near the $5k line again and the Battlebox has one of those garish glass-n-lights boxes too. 

The PCCG is a bit pricey - even if you pull one of the GTX cards and The SLI bridge out, it still comes in at $5561 - and they won’t let you change the config, you have to take what they sell and change it yourself after which sucks. 

The best is the Kenjun, they will let you change things once you have placed your order and it comes in a plain black case instead of one of those ugly glass-and-lights thingos. They are based in QLD so it should not be too pricey to get a delivery and I could even maybe get the door replaced with one that does not have glass but sound deadening instead. Nice, quiet, plain black box: I want all the action in my computer to be on the screen.
-----------------------------------------------------
This should give a net performance gain of either 164 % according to Passmark or 184% according to Geekbench when compared to my current computer. 
Yeah, benchmarking is crap huh? If you get nothing else from this article, bear this in mind. Look at the three benchmarking columns above - and how consistent they are. not. 
 -----------------------------------------------------
I was really hoping to double my performance but the only way to do that without going overboard is the 7980XE – well, unless I go back to the server gear again and that adds $4k-$5k to the cost.

Considering that this (current) computer has cost me about $7k without including several extras (SSD’s, GPU card, RAM), paying out $5k doesn’t sound too bad. It also has upgrade potential that the old one lacks. Well, okay, it looks that way at the moment but then many have been infuriated in the past by changes in sockets, chips and so on so it doesn’t pay to get too optimistic about that.

Well, regardless of that, I maintain that if it took me six months to save the money I should take a corresponding long time to spend it too.