Saturday, June 30, 2012

How far off is the Zombie Apocalypse?

With a new particle that can enable your body to oxygenate without breathing, one is left wondering isn't this just the sort of technology that will bring on the Zombie Apocalypse?

Scientists invent particles that will let you live without breathing

Thursday, June 14, 2012

The Ice Dragon and the Blue Rose (my first original work!)

Announcing the release of my first electronically published book (ebook) on Amazon.com called Decide My Quest: The Ice Dragon and the Blue Rose. This is an interactive adventure where you are a young man who must battle the Ice Dragon and find the Blue Rose in order to marry the Princess.

The new innovation of the Decide My Quest (TM) series is you get to see events in your quest from different points of view based on decisions you make. The challenge in writing an interactive adventure in electronic form was providing a method to allow the reader to make decisions on which actions to take in the story. This is accomplished by providing links at the end of each chapter. You can use the normal interface to click on those links, similar to how you click on the chapter links in an ebook's List of Contents.

This book was fun to write, and I hope fun to read and navigate. It is meant primarily for younger readers (9 and up), but older readers will hopefully appreciate it as well. It's $2.99 on Amazon.com. That's a bargin for a book of its lenght. Similar style printed interactive adventures cost much more for less story.

Sunday, April 15, 2012

The President has a plan to destroy the economy! Really???

So, I got this thick package in the mail. In it, there was a detailed list of predictions about how the president was acting out a plan to ruin the economy. Predictions were grandiose and far reaching. A lot of money was spent creating this package. I'm sure thousands, if not millions were sent out. The point of the package was to scare everyone into investing into gold.

The year that I received this package (and several others like it)? Circa 1995 all the way to 2000. What happened to gold during this period? The value was depressed nearly the whole time. It fell well behind inflation.

I started getting advertisements more recently about gold again. This time, similar predictions are being made out the current president. Again, the timing of this promotion happens to coincide with the value of gold falling behind inflation. Coincidence?

Under Bush Sr., the economy continued to falter and the value of gold raised. Under Clinton, the economy roared ahead of even the most optimistic predictions. All that value was lost under Bush Jr. and the value of gold raised again, even more radically (but still behind inflation when averaged across history). Poor handling of the economy almost plunged us into a Great Depression II, but instead was forestalled to become Great Recession due to quick actions by Obama. Actually, presidents only marginally have impact on the economic state, but entities like Fox News seem promote the idea that presidents are all powerful.

If you listen to gold pumpers, they sound a lot like Fox News, but even further extreme. Wild predictions about how bad things "will be" under Democratic presidents and their diabolical plots. Really? OK, yeah, let's ignore the fact they have been 100% wrong due to their predictions' poor timing. Let's ignore the facts that they own substantial amounts of gold and stand to profit from its promotion. Let's ignore the facts that these people promote fanciful scenarios as guaranteed facts. The fact is that the economy is now picking up (more quickly than expected by many) meaning that gold is now a poor investment again (generally, gold falls when the dollar strengthens). Yet, now these gold pumpers are heavily promoting ideas of an immediately impending disaster, as though the economic disaster of 2007/8 didn't even happen and is still waiting to happen.

When the economy as does fail (and it will one day, but who knows when, ...it will be some time near the end of the entity of the "United States of America"), at that time, gold will be the least of most people's concerns.