Site Update (Contact Form Fix)

Hello to all readers,

Firstly, I would like you all to know that I appreciate every single one of you that takes the time to read any of my posts. I take a genuine pleasure seeing everyone interact with the site in anyway they should so choose. My personal favourite, is every moment I get to spend in the comments where people engage and share their perspectives.

As part of this – recently I tried to improve the site by adding an About page and a Contact page, so that should someone wish to speak in a more private forum or find out a little bit more about anything in particular, they had a means to do so.

However, it has only come to my attention at the time of writing (19/07/2018) that my contact page was broken. The contact emails were not being sent properly, and then also being flagged as spam on the receiving email. What this means, is that I haven’t received any emails from any readers, since the new contact page was set up a few weeks ago.

There was a particular spike in traffic at one point on the Contact Form – which leads me to believe that someone may have attempted to contact me, and yet I did not receive it.

Please accept my sincere apologies, for the issues that were on both the WordPress site (for which I have been in contact with them, and managed to get rectified), and then when I fixed that, there were also issues with my automatic spam detection and deletion. As a result of all this, I would not have received any contact emails, before this date (19/07/2018).

Feel free to resend any messages, and as always I will endeavour to get back to you all, as soon as possible. Your messages, no matter how big or small, are very important to me. Equally if you sent a message on this date, please resend it just to ensure I get it.

Thank you for your time.

Until next time.

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Discussion: Language, without barometer

Suppose that in ten million years, humanity has been long wiped off the face of the planet. Some life still remains, but it has regressed to a more primitive state, due to some cataclysmic event, caused by our own iniquity, or some element of chance.
No animal that could understand the basics of calculus has existed on the rock called Earth for a very long time.

When one day, entirely by chance, our no longer blue planet is discovered, by some nomadic civilisation, who managed to achieve travel into the stars without using that same technology to blow each themselves up. In the ruins alone, under the assumption that concrete has eroded into mere particles that blew in the wind, and pages from books lost their ink; this civilisation would be able to piece together very little of what we were. Even if somehow some homestead had managed to endure the withering of time – if it had been cocooned in a blanket of ice, for instance; where would you even begin to understand what objects were?

A slab of metal and glass filled with silicon lines, in the corner of a room, where every piece of furniture is pointed at it. Knives and forks on the dinner table, for fighting no doubt. Window frames on the second floor, because we could jump so high, and often used that for quick access. Cloth in wooden containers, powdered energy in glass jars, animal carcasses in large white frozen boxes. It would be a frightening world of guesswork without a basis by which to guess. Everyone has had that experience of trying to tell a story, that was funny at the time, but after telling it out loud you find the other person does not find it so. Think of this, except not only do you not speak the same language, but you share no history, no culture, no prospects, no allegiances, and perhaps not even the same galaxy.

Now let’s suggest that humanity as a collective decides that the idea of a future civilisation discovering our remains and not being able to fabricate who we were is just too harsh a thought to bare. So they decide to devise a solution to this, or at least to devise a means in which to help these future nomads. And as a collective, they have decided to accept applications from anyone on the planet, and accept any ideas anyone on the planet may have on how best to communicate with the future visitors.

The problem then becomes the focus of this article: How do you communicate with these visitors? How do you construct a language, without barometer? In our own world, translations of works are inherently different to the language in which they were originally written, mainly because there is no word which translates over 100% – but at least we have something by which we can vaguely relate it to. But with an alien visitor -you don’t even have a set of words, objects, animals, or plants, by which you could guarantee you share. Not only this, but you cannot even predict the senses this alien might use to perceive the world around them. It is not enough to suggest you could communicate in a language that is a concatenation of a number of languages that are most frequently used or most expressive; because you cannot guarantee this creature has ears. Or perhaps they do but do not hear in the same frequency as we do. Perhaps you wish to communicate in symbols? – Well it has taken us thousands of years to build up semiotics to the point we can look at something and register to which category it belongs to at a glance, and even now most humans struggle with all of them, they differ in time and they differ from culture to culture. Equally, as before, the visiting nomads may not have eyes. Or if they do, maybe they do not see colour in the same range that we do. Lets say that they do have eyes – well what do they even register as a note? Say they looked at English at a glance, they could interpret the white space between the letters as the symbols rather than the letters themselves.

The possibilities are near endless for interpretation. This would be fair to say of something that came from our planet, or even our galaxy. But this could be a visitor that we may not even recognise as intelligent life, and yet regardless, it is. So much so that it had travelled through the stars to find us.

Furthermore then, we have an obligation to protect intelligent life as best as we can. To avoid any kind of pain and anguish where we can. If something can intelligent understand the universe and perceive its own consciousness, it must be our responsibility to ensure it.
It is important then to have this discussion – say we are aware of what brought about our destruction. It is our obligation then, to warn these visitors of the dangers we could not avoid. Perhaps areas of contamination, physical or otherwise, should be left in the past and certain technologies either avoided or proceeded with caution. The question being, how do we do this?

How would you communicate to something that may not even perceive the world in the same way that you do? And on a more personal note… Would you? Would you personally make an application to share your thoughts on how best to do this?

Arguably our only efforts to communicate without language thus far, is music. For thousands of years, we have communicated celebration, happiness, fear and war to others through music. No lyrics required to communicate exactly how we feel. Perhaps this would be our best bet to begin. Perhaps the sound of children laughing, the rain forest, or the ocean reaching the shoreline. The times at which we as a species were most at peace.
But then, while this may provide an example of our environment – it doesn’t necessarily define who we were or are. When we were good or bad. When we loved, and when we hated.

If we continue on a scientific trend – would we leave behind a hologram of a child as an ark of information, to provide context to who we were? Would this be the most realistic option, to convey our messages of peace in as many images and as many words as we possibly could? Could this child hold out a hand, with the bumps on his hand spelling in braille, and his words echoed in every other language, and Morse code? Would what the child spoke even resonate on any parallel? Should we literally throw sounds and light in some form of pattern, and hope that something sticks? Data dump our history and languages in as many different patterns as possible? Perhaps an AI, that can use everything that we are currently to determine what COULD be encountered in the future? Statistically, this is probably necessary. As much as they would like to earn us, we may need to learn it first, in the form of some machine learning. To discuss topics not only do we not understand yet, but we may never even have encountered in our cosmically short lifespan.

What if we decided that we wanted to communicate, only that which we wanted to communicate. I.e. perhaps we would wish to leave out the horrid parts of our history, or tell much more embellished versions of it in myth, legend, and art rather than the much more hard to swallow science and objectivity. If we were to do that, how could we separate semantics from pragmatism? To say very clearly what is, and not what we meant to say. This applies to our language, and also our visualisation of our culture. Say we built, or painted, or sculpted a grand cathedral, and hid it in some frozen ark – we may try to convey how complex and grandiose we were in our architectural choice – only to find that our visitor friends interpret the use of space as inefficient. They may regard our distinct lack of compactness instead, as a sign we were not intelligent whatsoever. That we were too wasteful. Perhaps then, they would be right.

The questions are endless, and arguably you could discuss for the millions of years we are hypothetically wiped out discussing what we could and should do – if and when we should – why and where we should. In fact, this question, which its infinite possibilities seems to grand a task to bestow upon us, and too great a burden to endure.

But if something is important enough, you must always try. Even if the expected outcome, is failure.

However; the question remains: Would you? And if so, how? How would you begin to construct a language to speak beyond the stars, without barometer?

Go.

Home

Broken heart; and tired mind.

Useless body, set out to find,

A solemn place to belong,

Where you can dance, and write your song.

Where worries past, will not follow,

Torture you, obsess and swallow.

Where what you grow into; matters more,

Than what you were, from long before.

 

Companions come, and surely go,

And while where they went, you’d like to know,

Free they are; let them wander over hill,

And out of sight, forever still.

Love you’ve had, has left you to dwindle,

And still with open heart you’ve managed to rekindle,

Time again sparked hope from ash,

And time again, your body’s been smashed.

 

Bruised and cracked, imperfect and scarred,

Your thoughts and feelings, permanently marred.

Trust and expectation are always cautious,

Every bout of closeness, makes you noxious.

Never been given reason for kind,

Yet still your heart, and that word entwined,

And so through fog you wander on,

To find the place, where you belong.

 

It’s darkness out there, with fumbling hand,

You cast it out, searching for land,

In lieu of that, as you’ve found times past

Instead you feel somebody, at last.

They hold you tight, and pull you close,

You could not tell who needs who most,

But of course you would not let on,

Your defences are up, you appear to be strong.

 

You’ll try not to care, for fear of ridicule,

It will go unnoticed, that it’s yourself the fool.

You’ll talk and wonder, and eventually you’ll share,

And at some point you’ll come to realise you care,

You capsulise and notice, every detail

And while you try to find the bad, every time you fail,

While every other has given you reason to doubt,

You find yourself in wonder of what this person is about.

 

There’s hope and wonder now in your eyes,

And try as you will; you can’t disguise.

They’ve broken through; see who you are,

And they adore you still, for that every scar.

Through imperfection they’ll see you perfect,

They’ll see beauty where you see defect.

And as paths ahead split, you wish; nae you know,

They’ll follow you wherever you go.

 

Then at some point, as you both foot down path,

And you try to anticipate what could be aftermath,

You realise you no longer travel simply side by side,

But you walk hand in hand, and together you stride.

You don’t look ahead, and rather stare into eyes,

As the dawning sun, breaks the burning skies.

Together you slow, almost down to a crawl,

Amidst dewy grass, wild land critters answer the call.

You both seem to hear, you need not travel any more,

As together you understand, what you’ve been looking for.

Come away; take them in hand, and lay, for no longer you roam,

What you searched for was love; and so with love – you’re home.

 

Quote of the Day: Kindness

“You are never too important, to not be kind.”

Stochastic

adjective: stochastic

1. having a random probability distribution or pattern that may be analysed statistically but may not be predicted precisely.

What this effectively means, is that while we can retroactively analyse that 70% of people who suffered from X succumbed to Y; we cannot say guarantee that 70% of people who suffer from X will succumb to Y.

This is why, mathematically, you should not let something with a small chance of success stop you just because of its likelihood to succeed.

“If something is important enough you should always do it. Even if the expected outcome; is failure.”

It scientifically, succinctly, with supporting evidence, suggests how important it is not to give up on something. How odds are important, only to the mass – not to the individual.

Equally, it humbles the self.

By the same logic, that which is overwhelming likely to work in your favour; may not. Not because you’re bad, or because you made a foolish decision – but because even if something has a 99.9% probability of happening, it still by definition requires 0.1% of people for it not to happen to, or for. And when it is you who finds themselves in the latter percentile, you will be acutely aware that percentage of probability offered you no benefits. You were tarred, by the fact that statistics mean nothing to the individual.

No matter how good a decision you make, or how bad a decision you make, it can go the other way. No because it was the right or wrong thing to do, but because an immeasurable number of other factors had an effect on that decision, which you could not possibly measure or account for. Differences that on their own are negligible, but together if they hit that sweet spot, it can just work out for you, or not.

It’s all chance.

The chance that you’ll fall madly in love. The chance you’ll get your dream job. The chance you’ll be hit by a car tomorrow morning, or that the world will be obliterated by some passing celestial body. The trivial decisions, and the grand. Use chance to share a little kindness, and compassion in a world that appears to grow more grey by the day. Be that one light, turning for all to see, in weathering storm.

So when you see someone on the street, shivering in the cold of the winter, or with chattering teeth from the damp of their sleeping bag that covers them on the ground – be kind. They could have made every possible good decision on the planet, and still been that 0.1% whom it did not work out for. In return, be the 0.1% who stops. Who shows a little compassion, care, and much needed unconditional love.

If you think you are affected by the anxiety of this world, if you fear the next day or if you cry when no one is around, imagine how they must feel. Heartbroken to not have the one they love have their arms around them, and the warmth that comes with it. To be affected by mental illness that comes with the trauma of living on unforgiving streets. To feel unwanted.

You, no matter how clever, how forward thinking, how prepared, or how entitled you believe yourself to be – are not so far separated from the man on the streets. Do not think yourself more important.

You are never too important, to not be kind.

These words may not hit you – they may not break your heart as intended. But if you fall into the 0.1% whom it does hit, I hope you fight with yourself in the night tonight, and decide to do something better. Stochastically, some of you should. But I hope more of you do.

I’ll have to leave it up to chance.