General – Page 12 – The Wacky World of Chris Knight

2009/07/232009/07/24

You really do have an aura!

I’ve seen a lot of things in my life that I can’t explain, and yet absolutely happened. Because of that I’ve had the occasional frustrating discussion with otherwise intelligent friends who call bullshit on me because they don’t believe in ‘ESP’. The problem is that the acronym ESP often gets misused in the same way that UFO gets abused. UFO != alien ship. UFO == Unidentified Flying Object. Just because you don’t know what it is does not make it alien. ESP does not mean magical psychic powers; it means ‘Extra-Sensory Perception’ which translates to perceiving something outside of the standard cataloged five senses.

Japanese researchers have demonstrated that human beings emit visible light. Sounds pretty much like an ‘aura’ to me. Now, admittedly, this ‘aura’ is 1000th the light level the human eye normally perceives; but that is the part that makes it ESP; because the light level the human eye ‘normally’ perceives is not universal. Some people hear better, some people see better, and some people just might be able to detect the visible light emitted by the human body under the right circumstances.

This is a perfect case of ‘just because you couldn’t detect it doesn’t mean it wasn’t there’. Two hundred fifty years ago the idea of a cell phone would have got you burned at the stake. When I was a kid everyone thought I was cheating when I could be blindfolded, spun around, and could always point north; and now we know that humans really do have an internal compass. In the near future some people I know will be laughed at for thinking auras didn’t exist.

The human body literally glows, emitting a visible light in extremely small quantities at levels that rise and fall with the day, scientists now reveal.

Past research has shown that the body emits visible light, 1,000 times less intense than the levels to which our naked eyes are sensitive. In fact, virtually all living creatures emit very weak light, which is thought to be a byproduct of biochemical reactions involving free radicals.
People Emit Visible Light (PIC)

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2009/07/022009/07/02

Stu-Fi – Impact (or How I Learned to Hate the Stupid)

I’ve been a Science Fiction & Fantasy junkie since I learned how to read. The two earliest books I remember reading that didn’t involve Dick and Jane were “Around the World in Eighty Days” and “The Magician’s Nephew”. I don’t agree with Harlan Ellison that the shortened “Sci-Fi” is an anathema that ruins the genre; and as such I wish to now coin the counter-term Stu-Fi as a shorted version of Stupid-Science-Fiction.

I want to coin this term because I’ve been watching a mini-series called Impact. It is supposedly a science fiction piece, but the science is so frelling bad that it is damn near Fantasy. Since there are no Unicorns, I can only conclude that it is Stupid-Science-Fiction, or Stu-Fi for short; which is basically the science fiction genre written for the inhabitants of the movie Idiocracy. To put it bluntly, if you have a sixth grade understanding of science this mini-series will make your head explode.

It’s one thing for Star Trek to show warp drives, and Star Wars to have super-light drives; because these are theoretical technologies that we may still develop even though we don’t currently know how to accomplish it. It is an altogether different thing to show a scene where the counter balance of a massive orbital object effectively neutralizes the Earth’s gravity causing an ocean freighter to rise out of the water, which then closes up the hole where the ship had been. Hey, you fraking boneheads, water closes up and forms a smooth surface because of gravity! If you neutralize that gravity, even if it is by means of a completely wrong understanding of mass and orbital mechanics, the water would rise up with the ship! What kind of moron wrote the CGI scripting to show a ship float out of the water because of ‘gravity fluctuations’ and yet coded the ship to be dripping water back down to the ocean? Did anyone consider that without gravity water doesn’t drip downwards? Please, don’t bother trying to explain that the ship is metal and is somehow affected differently, because the next scene showed bales of hay floating in the air. If you are inconsistently stupid you are still stupid!

Einstein was right: “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”

I wanted to credit Mike Rohl with inspiring me to coin the term “Stu-Fi” but a little bit of IMBD searching reveals the disturbing fact that he has been involved in a lot of shows that I have enjoyed. The thing is, Supernatural and Smallville are more Fantasy than Sci-Fi, and so I can cut them a lot more slack. Impact takes itself much more seriously, and so my condemnation is more serious. As much as I want to shield someone whose work I have liked, I still can’t blame just the writers; Mr Rohl, as the director, surely had some ability to quell the stupidity that this show not only displays but damn well flaunts.

I have googled it. “Stu-Fi” doesn’t exist anywhere else as of 2009-07-02. This is where you heard it first. I blame Michael Vickerman,Mike Rohl and Impact.

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2009/06/242009/06/24

How wireless Internet can save you big bucks while car shopping.

People use the Internet all the time to find deals. Just about any time I am researching a purchase I check Google Shopping Search, eBay and Amazon to see if I can save a few bucks. What follows are a couple of real life examples of how I recently saved quite a few bucks while shopping for a new car, thanks to Google and my iPhone.

It all started with a couple of friends who had just purchased a 2008 Jeep Wrangler. They got what I considered to be an excellent deal, and with one more 2008 at the dealer they talked to the salesman and he was willing to give me the same price without enduring the three hours of haggling that my friend Jeri put him through.

When we started doing the paperwork he said he was giving me the same price as Jeri, except for the wheels on the Jeep. Seems a few weeks back someone stole all the spares off the Jeeps on the lot, and rather than buy factory spares they pulled all the tires off one Jeep to use as spares, and bought that Jeep shiny rims and new tires. I asked him what the difference would be, and while he was talking to the general manager I went out to the Jeep to Google the specs and prices of the tires they bought as replacements. He came back and told me the difference would be two grand; and I asked less or more. He laughed and said more of course, since this was an ‘upgrade’. I told him no-go and showed him my math:

  $600 - new factory rim (a guestimate from a previous repair)
  $250 - new bf goodrich P255/75R17 tire (what the dealer charges for this tire)
------
  $850 - per replaced tire
 $3400 - x4 tires

  $148 - Ultra Motorsports rim
  $142 - Nitto P265/75R17 tire
-----
  $290 - per replaced tire
 $1160 - x4 tires

The 'upgrade' costs $2240 _less_ than the factory rims and tires, and I'd prefer BF 
Goodrich over a tire manufacturer who I was unaware of until that day and which I 
could put on my Jeep for a LOT less _and_ still get to keep my factory tires to sell 
on craigslist.

Faced with facts, and that I wasn’t going to accept this ‘upgrade’ unless they took several thousand dollars off the price, they agreed to swap my tires for the ones on a 2009 Jeep sitting on the lot. Just because the dealer says it is an ‘upgrade’ doesn’t mean it is worth more money.

Next up was an alarm system ‘upgrade’. The Echo-2 is a 2-way radio module that alerts you when your car alarm is activated. I was offered this upgrade ‘at cost’ of $740; but only right then and there if I rolled it into the loan. I passed, and did some googling. The Echo-2 module from Omega alarms costs $79 on eBay. According to the manufacturer’s manual, it connects with three cables to existing ports on the alarm, and looks like it takes all of 15 minutes to install and configure. Yup, ‘at cost’…

My single most important piece of advice to any car buyer is to not be afraid to challenge what the dealer says. Secondly, don’t be afraid to google the real answers right in front of them; since they will be less likely to spew bullshit if they already know you are going to research and confront. Don’t mistake the confidence they exude with being right, and you need to stand up to them when they are bullshitting you.

Oh, and if the dealership tried to talk you out of changing your own oil with synthetic Mobil-1 so they can sell you their regular maintenance package, and they say “using synthetic will void your warranty”, just tell them you want that in writing so you can send it to Mobil’s legal department. I use Mobil-1 and I get really annoyed when dealers try to tell me this will void my warranty. To me, this is a long term investment. I owned a Geo Storm that I fed nothing but Mobil-1 and decent gas, and in the 14 years I had it I got a consistent 30 MPG and had no engine related issues. My personal belief is that car dealerships want to change your oil so they can use crap oil that reduces the overall lifespan of your vehicle. It really isn’t in the best interest of your dealership to help you get 14+ years of hard life out of your vehicle. Same thing for my mom’s car: same diet, and currently at 13 years with no engine problems.

-Chris

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