The Messengers of Yesh Web Address

Friday, May 31, 2019

Using a Certain Power

On the writing front, it was another week of editing old works for modern comma rules.

I just deleted a message on my answering machine that said my subscription to my Windows computer expires today. My subscription to my computer? Strange. I distinctly remember purchasing it. I don't think those people will go to hell for those lies, but I do think it will make their place in hell that much hotter.

The other day I mentioned I was reading the French version of 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke and how it seemed simpler than the other books I've been reading. It was the movie version and not the real, original book. I finished that and started Rendezvous With Rama by the same author. After a dumbed-down movie book, it was a kick in the face. I had to look up words right and left.

Hoping to find French books that are easier to read, I tried finding more books based on movies, but alas, I didn't see anything I would really want to read. Instead of books adapted from movies, Google wanted to show me movies based on books. That was a fail.

After a living for a while, you develop certain powers. On Amazon, I ordered a French version of the Isaac Asimov book, Caves of Steel, on March 18th. It was the next book in a series. It was supposed to arrive from France around April the 26th. By the middle of May I was almost out of French books, and it still wasn't here. I looked up reviews for the vendor and discovered that shipping could take absolutely forever. I decided to use one of my powers. I ordered 5 French books in a different series from American bookstores, that would arrive in about a week more or less. Thus, I would have tons of books, and it wouldn't matter how long the late book took. Doing it that way made Caves of Steel show up almost immediately. My powers are strong!

Have a great weekend.

Friday, May 24, 2019

Current and Past Scams

I've had some calls lately from people saying my "subscription to Microsoft Windows" "expires today" and that all services will stop working unless I call them back and hand over an unspecified amount of money. They lost me at subscription. How can they get away with lying like that? People in Washington D.C. can commit all kinds of crimes and get away with them with the one exception of lying. If politicians go to jail for lying, how do they let other people get away with it? Why aren't telemarketers going to jail? I wonder how many people who use Macs get those calls.

Another scam call I get is the one in which they claim that the past three months of my credit card payment history have been amazing and that I qualify for their credit card! I don't use credit cards. How can my use of something I don't use be amazing? What a bunch of liars. It's called knowing your audience. They didn't.

One day I got an email from myself saying that I'd been hacked. They wanted bitcoin, or they would shut down my account and publish videos from my web cam showing me doing naughty, sexually explicit things. Before they got to the part about the web cam naughtiness, it sounded real and scary. Hey, I don't have a web cam. And if they had my password, how come I could still log in to get my mail? If I could do that, I could change the password myself. Lots of people fell for that one. Hmm, what are people doing with their web cams?

Years ago, when it was still relatively safe to answer the phone, I got a call from a company trying to sell me a magazine subscription. I told the girl I wasn't interested, but she didn't take no for an answer. I told her okay. Do they have Physical Review Letters? I figured they wouldn't. If you're not familiar with it, it's a very high-level physics magazine that wasn't generally available to the public and still isn't. I think it was around $200 a year at the time. It might have been more. It was super expensive for a magazine. The girl told me she didn't see it listed, but she had this other magazine that had a similar word in the title. No, I really want Physical Review Letters. What is it about? she asked. Physics. Oh, they had this other magazine. No, I really want Physical Review Letters. It's really good. I kept her going for a while. She eventually gave up. Was I being naughty? Or I was I saving someone else from getting a sales call? You decide.

For a very funny video by a guy who replied to a spam email, check this out. It's ten minutes, but it's well worth it, if you like laughing.

Have a great weekend.

Friday, May 17, 2019

Fun Dream

The highlight of the week was a dream I had. I was invited to be in a new, experimental spaceship this guy was testing. Experimental made me nervous because no one would be able to rescue us if something went wrong, but I took a chance. One other person was onboard. He was kind of standoffish and didn't talk. We flew past a bunch of planets and moons kind of like a tour of the solar system. The planets/moons would be blurry from a distance then pop into focus with clear details. Unfortunately, we went by them so fast I was only able to get one good picture with lots of detail. I was by a big window. The pilot was flying the ship. The standoffish guy was kind of down a passage with no windows but still had sort of view out the windows where I was. We never crashed or lost pressure.

Before going to bed I had watched part of a Star Trek episode and listened to some Christian videos. Two of them talked about stepping out and taking chances when God throws something your way. Clearly, the dream had a lot of day residue in it. I was in space. I took a chance when opportunity arose while not knowing the outcome.

One way of looking at dreams is to see all the characters as an aspect of yourself. It's your dream. It's in your head. The characters come from your own mind. The pilot would be sort of a creative part of myself that pushes ahead with advancement when other fans of space are still stuck on the cost per pound to orbit "problem", a problem that is easily solved by the way. The standoffish guy would be the part of me that holds back too much. He had an amazing chance to experience the solar system but was back in the corridor/alcove and was merely looking on from a distance.

The me part of the dream was enjoying seeing all the moons and things, but there was a problem. The camera I had was big and bulky. It was about 12 inches by 12 inches(30.48cm x 30.48cm) with toggles and buttons. If you've ever seen one of those camera boxes that hunters and wildlife researchers strap to trees to take pictures of wildlife, it was similar to those. It was the reason I couldn't get any good pictures. We were going so fast, and the views were so amazing that by the time I hit the right buttons the planetary details were gone.

One way of looking at the camera is to see it as details or complications. I spent a small amount of time fiddling with the camera to get pictures I could look at later that no one had ever taken. I was doing that instead of focusing purely on the main experience. Maybe that's a dream imagery way of saying I need to stop sweating the small things and concentrate on the big picture. It could also be a way of saying that more preparation is needed for unfamiliar things. I didn't know the camera. The one good picture I got was after I had learned the camera. If I'd been properly prepared, the pictures would have been seamless and easy. Part of my thinking while working the camera was proving that I had seen all those amazing worlds. Maybe the camera was showing me I don't always need to care what other people think. I knew I was seeing all that stuff whether anyone else believed I had been there or not. Was the camera just a hindrance I could have let go of?

So, dreams are fun. On the book front I've been going through AoE sentence by sentence checking commas. I'm almost done.

Have a great weekend and pleasant dreams.

Friday, May 10, 2019

New Grammar(Comma) Rules

This was a proofreading week on the book front. For a while I've been aware of changes in grammar rules from when I was in school, specifically comma rules. Some would recommend a comma after the word while in the previous sentence. In my books I only put a comma after a leading prepositional phrase if it has five or more words or if it would be ambiguous not to use one, and I'm not changing it. Commas after a prepositional phrase is just one of the new rules.

Not too long ago I did some proofreading and light editing for someone and had to look up a comma rule to make sure I was using the modern rule. I patted myself on the back and went on. This week I ended up looking up comma rules more in depth. It's so discouraging. I had to email the person I did the proofreading for and tell her about the modern rules and how I didn't know all the changes.

So and nor are considered to be coordinating conjunctions now. So I could see. I've been using it as one for a long time despite knowing the rule against it. I don't see how nor could be one. I've never in my life used nor as a conjunction between independent clauses nor ever seen it done. It doen't make sense to me in standard or informal English. Anyway, I spent way too much time this week searching for and reading about modern comma rules. It doesn't help when I find conflicting information. It also doesn't help when a grammar book I own tells me some of it is a matter of personal taste. As long as it's easy for the reader, I can make it up as I go along.

My next book coming out, AoE, is for a young adult audience that sees modern grammar in school every day. I think it's important to use rules that won't distract them from the text. I also like the idea of not having to look up comma rules again. I'm going to have to learn all the new rules and go back and apply them to all my books. The struggle continues.

French Stuff
For a while I've been using a page count for my French reading, instead of using whatever extra time I have. I've been seeing better progress that way. Some of the books I'm reading are modern, and some are translations of things I read when I was younger. I'm almost finished with 2001: A Space Odyssey. Unfortunately, the French version I got was based on the movie and not the book, which was very different. I've been flying through it. It's so much easier to read than the Asimov and Heinlein books I've been reading. I was feeling good about myself until it occurred to me that the book has to be dumbed down for a mass audience the way newspapers are written at a lower grade level. It's still nice to be going through it more quickly.

A while back I got the French version of Heidi for free on my Kindle. Between having to look up words and not enough excitement in the story, I set it aside for the moment. I read a little more of it recently. It's a lot easier to read now, and I can read it faster than before. Unlike 2001, I know the improvement is real. I can imagine finishing it in the near term. It doesn't have car crashes or plane crashes. No one has been murdered. The goatherd boy isn't going to turn out to be a Soviet spy. Heidi isn't going to rebel and try to overthrow the natural order of things. Her grandfather won't turn out to be a retired MI5 agent who needs Heidi's help to stop an international assassin. Nevertheless, it's a classic. I'll at least have read one of the classics.

I've been thinking more about doing a language exchange. There are multiple sites where people can sign up to talk to a native speaker. So, if I want to learn French, a site would connect me with a native French speaker who wants to learn English. Part of the time we talked would be in French and the other part in English. It's all free. I could spend as much or as little time as I wanted. I could talk to a different person every night, if I wanted to. I'm not quite where I want to be with my vocabulary yet, but I'm getting close.

Have a great weekend.

Friday, May 3, 2019

Another Nail in the Coffin

A while back I saw an article about the minimum number of people it would take to establish a colony on another planet. It was a very high number. I was thinking about that again this week and looked it up. The minimum number of humans needed for a viable colony is 10,000, though that doesn't insure 100% preservation of the human genome. The number for that is 40,000 people. One of the articles about the study is here. Different articles conflict a bit on the numbers. That one says 14,000 minimum. It also has this interesting tidbit:

"Almost no natural populations of vertebrates dip below around five to 7,000 individuals," he said during the FISO talk. " There are genetic reasons for this. And when they do go below this, sometimes they survive, but many times they go into what's called a demographic or extinction vortex."

Thus, a colony population of a few thousand people would not survive. It would take a ton of people. (More information on extinction vortex.)

One of the most disturbing scientific findings in recent times was the discovery that humans are losing about 200 base pairs of DNA per generation. Hold onto that thought.

When thinking about the minimum number of humans necessary to preserve our genome, it occurred to me that this directly applies to evolution. According to evolution, humans evolved from simple organisms and continue to evolve into more and more complexity. Also, according to science, humans evolved from one woman who is referred to as Eve or ancestral Eve.

Wait a minute. If vertebrate species need well over 5,000 individuals to survive, how could humans possibly have evolved from one woman? If we need 40,000 people to prevent losing part of our genome, where did that diversity come from? We now know that we're losing 200 base pairs of DNA per generation, a complete contradiction to the evolutionary model. Instead of becoming more complex, our genome is shrinking from complexity to simplicity. In other words DNA follows the law of entropy.

That's the end of Darwinian evolution. A primitive monkey-woman would not have had the genetic diversity to birth our species, not to mention there would not have been the 40,000-person minimum population needed to preserve our genome.

Darwinian evolution is dead. It violates the law of entropy. It violates the law of abiogenesis. It violates the laws of genetics. Over and over again, science keeps disproving Darwinian evolution. Evolutionists keep believing in it anyway. Where is the rational thought?

According to the Bible, Adam and Eve transmitted a very complex genome that is decaying over time. That's what science keeps confirming. We're not evolving. We're devolving.

Have a great weekend.