Planetary Exploration: Living Room Addition

The other evening, I had the notion to take a picture (with my Atrix 2's camera) of one of our cats hiding underneath the couch. While doing so, I flipped my camera's setting to take a negative image and turned on the "flash". While doing so, it dawned upon me that underneath the couch looks like another planet at that setting. Dust settling down within the focal point looked like snowfall. That gave me an idea to stage some rocks to see what I could come up with. (And yes, you can thank a good case of ADHD for what you'll see.)

The secret to this was to stage a few rocks, shoot it with a negative "exposure" effect and then touch up the image with Pixlr Express for added realism (or to create a fantasy scene.) All of this was done from my phone (except the first and last two, where I added some additional touches on my laptop.) What you'll notice with the result of using the negative exposure effect, is that your brain's interpretation of the image is thrown out the window. You don't immediately recognize that you're looking at fibers in the carpet, for instance. I'm not going to pretend that there isn't a fake feeling to some of these, but would you suspect they're taken on a living room floor? You be the judge. At first glance, they can look rather convincing.

On this first one, I simply laid some stones that I'd collected on a hiking trip in Colorado, as if they were two pieces of a puzzle. After some experimentation, I placed another couple of pieces in front to give it a sense of scale and depth. Afterwards, I cropped the photo,  removed the "anti-shadows" (the negative of the shadows cast by the flash) with a clone tool (on my laptop) added a sunlight style effect in Pixlr, and I was done. The end result reminded me of a boulder near a beach you might find out in the Pacific Ocean somewhere.

Beach Boulder

These next three were taken with some dust-like material. It was my attempt to mimic something you'd see from a space probe visiting Mars. The material I used was some left over Grancrete (a concrete substitute), that I've had for nearly a decade, sprinkled upon a tile where I created a small crater. Over the years, moisture exposure has caused some pieces to clump together and gave it a look as if small, dusty rocks were thrown in.

Martian Crater 1

Martian Crater 2

Mars Lander Landscape

Of course, if you're going to have a probe on Mars, why not have it take a shot of some rocks nearby? So here I went back to the rocks used in my first photo, added in some blowing dust and sun glare with Pixlr, and here's the result.

Martian Rock Field

Next we have the same rocks, rearranged into a couple of plateaus. For the starry background, there was an overlay feature in Pixlr that I used. That required me to edit this on my laptop, however, as stars appeared across the entire photo.

Extrasolar Planet? 

Finally, here's one using the same technique as with the other rock shots. I stitched the rocks with a smudge tool, and added some artificial light. What I found unique in this was the look of dust rolling across the top of the plateau stone. This was an artifact from the "anti-shadow". I decided to leave that in since it made it look like dust, or some kind of vapor was rolling off the top. 

Plateau

Not bad for something considering it was created underneath my couch, now only if I had some dry ice... Read More!

Explanation for the Mercury "UFO"

Alright, a YouTube video popped up showing what purportedly is a UFO using cloaking technology tagging along the planet Mercury.

Take a look:


Now, before you stock up on Armageddon day supplies of a pending alien attack, fear not, I have an explanation of what I think this is.


NOTE: Since my original writing this blog, I have continued my quest to get to the bottom of this and refine my thoughts. You can read all of this, or simply skip to the bottom, for the real answer to what is going on.

The first thing that came to my mind was Mercury's magnetosphere. If you've seen simulations of earth's magnetosphere, you'll recognize the tale-tale signature of what a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) or solar flare looks like when it hits Earth's magnetosphere. If you watch the video there is a nice gap between the bright CME impact zone and the planet. It's pretty darn locked on.

EDIT: I also labeled the area that has already been explained by the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL)Here you'll notice the darkened band, which is the previous state of where Mercury was, and the light glint you see just above it. (You can still see the background stars are added back to the image.) You'll notice that the darkened band stretches back only so far, leaving behind the intense light. I would imagine if the correction time period was shortened, then the darkened band would be narrower, and more of the aurora would be visible.

Before I jumped to this conclusion, I did a little research, to first find out where the inner planets are currently located in their orbit, and a little about the satellite (named STEREO). So, I found this link, and made the graph below, adding STEREO to it based on it's likely position given by the fact that it's roughly within the same ellipse as Earth (though it doesn't orbit Earth) and the angle of Mercury and it's trajectory within the video. Now, you'll note that SECCHI is the label that I used for the satellite, which I got from the YouTube video. SECCHI is just the name of the instrument on the satellite. It was after making this graphic, that I learned about STEREO's name.

As it turns out, all you need to do is visit this page, and it confirmed my guess of it's position.

Now, I know what you're thinking, how can I be so sure? Well, I asked the same thing myself. Questions like, does Mercury even have a magnetosphere? The answer to that is.... yes. OK, then what does it look like? Check out this drawing provided by our good friends at NASA:

Essentially, this is just one heck of an Aurora. What we are seeing is the area that is aptly labelled the "bow shock". If this phenomenon doesn't have a name already, it ought to be called a Mercurial Equatorial Aurora, or Mercurial Aurora or something like that.

So, there you go, that's my quick explanation as to what we're seeing here. Of course I should give the disclaimer, I'm not a NASA scientist or anything like that, but, just your average Joe who likes to read about it once in awhile.

FINAL EDIT...
Well, after doing some more image analysis, I have conceded that the explanation given by the NRL is indeed correct. It is merely an artifact of the image subtraction (which doesn't go far enough to cover it's previous day's track.) Looking back, the problem with the YouYube Animation is that it only shows one day. In fact, if you check out the actual archives you can see that each day's images are grouped. So, I did something to prove the NRL explanation, and put together a two day animation here:

Taking a closer look at the images, and the previous day's track, the first smudge of Mercury starts to appear after 12 hours. So, if you can imagine there is a program that automates this process and falls short just a bit. What needs to happen is they need to add another 12 hours worth of frame subtraction. It's the kind of thing that I'm sure they run in circles trying to tweak. I've labeled the first 5 or 6 frames of each of the days in the two day animation. You can see that the image artifact matches the speed of the background stars, rather than the planet. If this doesn't satisfy you, you can always looks through any day of the archive, and watch the UFO, Aurora, image artifact appear at the end of each day.
So, there you have it. Was that a waste of time? Well, maybe. At least now it is explained without question or further doubts. On the sunny side, we all learned more about our solar system, and about image processing, which goes well beyond your average textbook explanation, huh?

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Advertising on Facebook

Have you ever wondered about the effectiveness of Facebook ads? Well, I was curious, and wanted to drive some more traffic to my business page, so I gave it a shot. Read on, and I'll tell you what I've discovered.

First, if you know me at all, you know sometimes I like to just dive into things. (If you didn't know that before... well, now you know!) I don't always get my feet wet to test the waters, and sometimes, I let my impulsiveness get the best of me. I applied the same thing to running my first set of ads on Facebook. Quite frankly, I think most people.... a good percent of people... there might be some others that would have a similar approach. I mean what is there to loose, right? At most we're talking about spending 50-75 cents per click. That's not going to break the bank or anything, right? I would hope not.

Anyways, I own a small landscaping business, and I decided to select my target market: anyone living within 25 miles of a preferred city, for anyone over the age of 27. Right away, the Facebook Ads app, calculates the size of your potential market. I figure, the more, the merrier. So long as the target audience lives in the area that I serve, and is old enough to (likely) own a house with enough money to spend on landscaping, that should be fine. They do provide a place to limit your audience by education attainment, interests, gender, relationship status, and even sexual orientation/preference. Not wanting to limit myself there, I left those empty. If there was a spot for household income, and home ownership, that would be perfect, but since that isn't exactly a statistic that people want to share within their social group, I suppose I'm out of luck on that. Ideally, I would have chosen college grads only, but I didn't want to exclude people that either never went to college, or perhaps, just didn't place that info into their profile. You don't have the choice to select more than one option, as you can only choose high school, college student, or college grad or no preference. So, for that situation I let my age bracket selection be the driver there. My thoughts were to put the ad in front of as many relevant people as possible, and I'll let the audience decide if they are interested. If they are interested and they decide to click, then I'm good to go. If not, that's OK too. All I had to do then was make sure my ad had a neat looking picture, some good catchy wording (which included my phone number), set my pricing point and presto!... I was set.

So, with a simple click of the mouse on a Friday afternoon, I was in business running my first ad. Less than 5 minutes later, I got a phone call. I was impressed, and gleefully answered the phone. As it turns out, it was indeed someone who wanted my services, but, as it turned out, that fella found me on Google (where I am not currently advertising.) So, after the conversation, I looked up to view the ad performance page and I really liked what I saw. My ad had already been seen by thousands of viewers and placed thousands of times. To top that off, I was getting some clicks and, even better, a new fan who "liked" my page! I couldn't have been more pleased. Suddenly, my business was getting more attention than it probably ever had gotten before. After the first hour or so, I trustingly let Facebook do its thing. Later that evening, I checked, and I saw numbers in the tens of thousands, with several more clicks. I went to bed that evening thinking that this was the best move that I've made yet in all of the marketing that I've done. Even if not one person clicks, I'm still getting the attention of thousands of people! Genius! Right?

Waking up the next morning, I had to check the progress. A few more clicks, and the ad was still being seen by people, but just a few hundred (rather than the thousands) had seen it since midnight Pacific time (when the daily counter resets). "Not bad," I thought. After all, it was only morning. I mean, other than an ad-crazed man, who checks Facebook that early on a Saturday morning? I went on about my day, and left to go take care of the service the caller from the previous afternoon had requested. As I traveled to my job of the day, I couldn't help but wonder who all might call. After putting in a 6 hours of solid hard work, I wrapped up my job, and headed home. After a quick check, I was very disappointed. At best, only a few dozen people had seen my ad since the morning began. No wonder my phone hadn't been ringing off the hook. What gives? I wasn't sure. On Sunday, activity seemed to pick up, and I was OK with that. I figure that after an initial burst of attention, a slow-but-steady approach was not a bad way to go. Besides, I didn't want to spend all of my allocated money in just one or two days.

As my first week progressed, I let things be for the most part. At some point during the week, I updated my business page some, hoping to convert more clicks into "likes". Sometime around mid-week, I decided to try something different. Instead of tweaking my first ad, I simply added another to see what might get the most attention. After adding my new ad, I received a disturbing notice: my ad wasn't being run and I had a message attached to it suggesting that I need to either become more creative, increase my spending limit, or fine-tune my audience. Surely, I didn't need to make a more creative ad. My first ad seemed to do just fine, why would a slightly tweaked ad not be good enough for Facebook to run it? That didn't make sense, so I sent in a request for help. I got an automatic response some time later saying that a real person would review my case, and respond sometime in the next couple of business days. Fine, I'll wait, right? Well, not exactly. I decided to take things into my own hands and push my ad, rather than wait for a response. After giving it some thought, I raised my bid price some. Nothing. So, I raised my daily spend cap. I figure with two ads, I need to increase that some. Lo-and-behold, both ads were working after that change. Conveniently, I received a human response from Facebook (well, as far as I know, this guy was human), saying that my ad looked fine, and that it should be working. Well, of course it was, I'd fixed it. I didn't really need them to help me in the first place, I've got this figured out now, but thanks anyways.

As the first week drew to a close, I was pleased by my ad campaign. I hadn't brought in any new business, but at least I was getting people looking to notice that I exist. Given the time of the year (it was mid-November), you can't expect everyone to want new landscaping designs or services. On Sunday, our church did something unique: it gave away money to all who attended. The purpose was for us to take that money, somehow invest it or grow it, and then return and give it back. They did the same last year, with some people baking cookies, making lemonade, or performing gift wrapping services. It's a great idea, and I knew exactly what I could do: plant flowers. I could have my wife join me, and whoever wanted to spruce-up their home with flowers, we could do that. Later that afternoon, it hit me: I'm going to place some Facebook ads and create some awareness to what we are doing. The newly created ad was launched, and the response was unbelievable. Nearly twice the people had seen my ad (compared to the first night with my business ad), and clicks were coming in left and right. It was great. I thought, "you know, I've done the right thing here, I should have some phone calls in the morning." As the morning came, I was in shock. At the stroke of midnight, Pacific Time, my ad was virtually shut down. My ad had only been seen by one person! Take a look at the screen shot below and you can see the results.

Taking a look at that, you can see source of my frustration. Questions started rolling through my mind: Was this some discrimination against my Christmas themed ad? If that is true, how could they do such a thing? Was my daily spend cap set too low? What gives? What have I done to deserve this? Frustration. I took a screen shot, and sent it in. Unfortunately, I haven't received a response from the ad team. Either they're busy, or maybe I missed the responding email in my junk box, I'm not sure. Whatever the case might be, I knew one thing: my ad needed to return to its former glory. I decided to create another new campaign, with the hopes of catching that "beginners luck" that I seemed to have been struck with, not once, but twice. The third time around, a new campaign wasn't bringing in the same results. Now, I was stuck. Still no response to my email and my hope was dwindling. Then, I started searching online for Facebook ad problems. It seemed like I wasn't the only one with the problem. One suggestion that came to mind that my ad wasn't running with as high of a frequency because it wasn't getting a high enough click-through-rate on previous runs. Then, that's when it dawned upon me: I'm competing against all of these other ads out there. If Facebook is smart, and you know they are, then they're going to place a focus on the ads that make them the most money. They want people to click on your ads, and if people aren't clicking on it enough compared to other ads, then it'll run second (or third) fiddle to those "better" ads. It's not that my ad was bad, looked ugly, or lacked creativity, it's just the fact that a lower percent of people are going to click on it compared to other ads. Why is this? Because I'm a landscaper. Compared to a credit card, or a smartphone, not as many people are interested in landscaping. Just on the surface, not all of my targeted audience owns a home. Right there, I have a smaller percent of my selected audience than compared to an Android smartphone. Next, more people are likely to have an interest to click on a smartphone ad, rather than for some flowers. Give that some thought: not all homeowners want to pay someone to plant flowers for them. So, what can I do? I'll start by fine-tuning my audience right? It makes sense. You limit your audience, so to increase your click-through-rate. Then after some time, when Facebook detects that my ad is more effective, they'll run it more often. But, wait, there was still one more option, I can pay per each 1000 views. Hmm, that makes sense. Now I can buy views, rather than clicks. Suddenly, like a flip of a switch, I'm getting hits. Within minutes, I've blown through $5 on ads. Suddenly, an ad that hadn't seen action all day has over 8 thousand views. That was nice. But then, I've only gotten 3 clicks. That means that I'm paying $1.67 a click, or roughly twice what I was paying when my ad was being run through the first few hours of the pay-per-click rate. Unfortunately, after the initial burst of activity, things dropped off a cliff. Literally, the ad stopped running again. Then, I noticed one thing: my ad, which is set to run for 30 days, has a lifetime budget for $150 dollars. I've just busted though 1/30th of my budget. So, it makes sense that it would stop running. Facebook wants to make sure my ad runs through the duration of the campaign, while at the same time keep things within my set budget. So, there you have it. After a week and 2 days of experimenting, I seemed to have figured out what it takes to run a successful ad on Facebook. I'll keep you updated when I get more results in, but for now, I'm calling it a night!

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Why Politics Should be Removed from the US Deficit (and Surplus) Policy

Over the last few weeks, we have all witnessed the train wreck that has culminated from all of the bickering going on in D.C. which ultimately ended in the US credit downgrade for the first time in history (at least since our recognition of this standard.) Now, about the only certainty going on in the aftermath is that there will be days, weeks... OK, years where we'll be hearing about who to blame this fiasco on. Take your pick: Democrats in the Senate, Republicans in the House, Tea Party folks, the President himself, and even the S&P itself (because there are those who think the downgrade was unfair.) Personally, I think all of the above have contributed in wreaking havoc, except the S&P. On that note, claiming the S&P downgrade as being unfair, is about like getting mad at your neighbors for calling 9-1-1 when your house is on fire. Moreover, placing blame now is about like wondering who started the fire or how it started, when what you really need to be doing is evacuating from a burning building. If the truth be told, the fire started long before this 112th Congress came into session. What they were arguing about wasn't that there was a fire, but how to pull the fire extinguisher pin and where to aim it. Now that they've failed to do that, let's run out of this burning building, catch our breath, and discuss where to go from here.


Despite where you put the blame, I think at this point we can all agree that the situation that we're in is a train wreck, and it is likely going to take quite a bit of time before we can solve this problem. Much like the ongoing problems that we face, nearly 4 years after the start of the recent economic troubles, it took a long time to get to where we are at, and it will take us some time to get us out. To make an analogy, we discovered that building houses on the slope of an active economic volcano, just wasn't a great idea. Thankfully, I think for the most part we were able to see this problem, take some recommendations from economic experts, and we've made some corrective adjustments. Time will tell how the ultimate outcome of these decisions will be. But, as it stands, I think most of us can agree that pulling back on reckless lending will help us overcome this problem.

Now today, what we face is a much bigger problem. I can say that my entire lifetime has been eclipsed by deficit spending. The couple of years in the late 90's where we had a "surplus" was just a mere blip on the radar. A lot of today's problems can be rooted in Keynesian economics. Perhaps, more aptly, I would say our problems lies within the misapplication of Keynesian economics within our federal government. I am personally a proponent of the theory behind the policy. I do believe it has been given a bad name, however, due to it's misapplication.

Keynesian economics is like this: Imagine a child wanting you to walk her to a park with a swing set, and in this case, you agree to go. Now, once there, she spots the swing set and runs over towards it, and hops on. As she swings, she has no problem getting things started on her own. Now, with the desire to go a little higher, and faster, she asks for a "push" so you agree and stand behind her at that perfect distance from the midpoint withe the perfect timing, and give her the correct amount of force.

Now, pause this scene in your mind for a moment. Imagine if you had stood closer to the midpoint. If you stood too close, it becomes increasingly difficult to push her back. In addition to that, although you can reach her, she is not in a position that is optimum to where your arms reach her back. Likewise, if you stand too far back, you simply cannot reach her at all. Now, once you've determined the correct position, you must match the frequency of the child swinging back. Pushing too soon, or too late can result in the opposite effect of what you are trying to accomplish. You can actually cancel out the force of her swinging which will result in her slowing down. Finally, let's assume you've figured out the correct position to stand in and the correct frequency, but now you must push her with the correct force. If you are pushing with too much force, suddenly, swinging is no longer fun for the child, as she begins to scream, begging to slow down, or worse yet, she looses her grip, and falls. Now, if you don't apply enough force, you might as well be sitting on the bench, watching her swing on her own.

Pushing a child on a swing is a very natural thing to do. Without being conscious of the physics behind it, most people can master this technique. Anyone that has mastered it, or otherwise has been on the receiving side of the beneficial push, will recognize that the enjoyment of the child, (and perhaps the one giving her the push) is maximized versus simply sitting on a nearby bench watching her swing by herself. Keynesian economics, in essence, is the practice of the government acting in the role of the pusher. This sounds great in theory, but when politics is involved, unfortunately, those variables, of distance, frequency and force are often mismanaged.

Right now, our nation is about like a family with two inept parents teetering on divorce, with three children all wanting a push on the swing set. Imagine the parents arguing with each other about where to stand, and how hard to push. The next thing you know, Dad gets hit in the jaw, because he is not paying attention, and suddenly their son is knocked off, and busts his nose on the ground. Now, you've got crying children, a bloody nose to clean up, and no doubt, some parents pointing their fingers at each, all to blame the other.

True Keynesian policy requires the dedication and finesse of a single person (or entity) with the best interest of the child (economy) in mind. Otherwise, with the misapplication, you might as well be sitting on the bench and let the economy swing itself, to minimize damage that can be done.

Currently, one part of the Keynesian economic equation that is controlled on a federal level is monetary policy which we have assigned to the Federal Reserve. Theoretically, the Federal Reserve acts in a non-partisan way to stimulate the economy, primarily by controlling the interest rates. If you set them too low, you risk over stimulating, and higher inflation, whereas if you set them too high, you can stifle the economy, and risk deflation. Economic stimulus and currency stability aren't the only roles of this federal institute, but they are no doubt, one of the more important ones.

Another component of the equation is fiscal policy, which is controlled by Congress, and ultimately approved by the President. Unfortunately, what we have learned to call this policy is "deficit spending." It's been called that, because that seems to be the only part of Keynesian economics that is ever applied. We have not learned to master the other side of this theory, and that is to learn to save (or otherwise let off) during years of growth. The idea is of Keynesian economics is for the government to spend, or otherwise stimulate the economy when it is down, and to back off when it is growing.

Since I've been alive, and even prior, we tend to give the child a push when needed, but then we run with the child to the other side, and keep on pushing, even though the momentum of the child would have been enough to carry her to the opposite point, as well as enough to make it all the way back to where you originally pushed her. The problem now is that the person doing the pushing becomes exhausted very quickly and before long he or she would want to give up. This is how we've mismanaged these goals in the past. Both political parties are to blame here, as both sides have done their fair share in spending, whether it's on entitlement programs that are out of balance, or military spending, or through mismanaged taxes. If one party pushes too hard, the other party attempts to run out and grab the child to slow her down. The next thing you know these two parties are at each other's throats. The child is then forced to choose a favorite parent (through elections) but ultimately they lock horns once again, and no real progress is made.

Now, with our current fiasco, we have discovered that it seems that neither party can get along. The situation is so bad, that the only thing that they could agree on, is to disagree, and to hold off on any real decision making until the after the next election cycle, (or beyond) to end this fight. This is the reason why the S&P downgraded the US. It was the lack of true leadership. Call it brinkmanship, call bad politics, or whatever you want, at the end of the day, our elected leaders failed to deliver. The S&P is simply looking at the situation, and they are placing their bets on the side that says, "I don't think this is going to get any better anytime soon." I don't think anyone can blame them for that. If history proves to repeat itself, then we'll see the same fight all over again in 2013 and beyond, unless we change something.

I propose that we change who makes the decision on how much of a deficit, or surplus we have and perhaps to some degree how we get to that point. What if we removed politics out of this decision? In a way, having politicians deciding what is right or wrong here, makes about as much sense as having congress vote on whether or not to call for evacuations for a given city, to get out of the way of an approaching hurricane. As a weather enthusiast, I can tell you that the professionals at the National Hurricane Center (NHC), rely upon all sorts of models, and data to make their forecasts, which ultimately determines who, if anyone, needs to evacuate. I can't even begin to imagine the chaos if this were some political decision. I've seen people argue over which models are superior, in the comment sections of weather blogs. Like myself, these people are usually passionate enthusiasts, but most of them aren't experts. Ultimately, though, none of the models are perfectly correct, yet the NHC gives fairly accurate forecasts, despite this. They are able to do so, because they are experts. For you sports types, just think of these weather blog commenters in the same way you hear from Monday morning quarterbacks, armed with the latest statistics. Perhaps Congress is a step or two above being a Monday morning quarterback, but do they really have the best long term goals in mind? More importantly, do you think they really understand what the economic data means and what policies to implement?

On the monetary policy side of things, the Federal Reserve, acts much like the NHC. When you read their commentaries, and their reports, they are written from the standpoint of economics, oftentimes with dry language that gets to the point. They make their monetary policy decisions based on this economic information and not politics. (Sometimes they are even known to oppose the party that appointed them.) On the other hand, for fiscal policies, at best, they just provide advice to Congress. At the end of the day though, Congress must still decide on fiscal policies. Unfortunately, even the best of them have a propensity to miss the mark, simply because politics stands in the way. As I've demonstrated by my swinging child example, any variable that is off can actually be counter productive. Even the Federal Reserve has missed the mark in the past, but for each target they miss, they learn to better adjust their aim. The NHC, likewise does the same for hurricane forecasting. Each year, though, they fine tune their craft, and forecasts do get better.

The understanding of economics in many ways, is not much different than weather. So, why not have more experts involved with the decision making. Why not have experts that have goals that last more than 4 years? I know the idea of stripping this from Congress seems, perhaps like it is a step too far, as if we are removing power from the our representative government. But, then these days, it seems that we cannot afford to give them the responsibility either.

My initial thoughts on this are to put more of this fiscal responsibility into the hands of the entity that we currently call the Federal Reserve. Why? Simply because they already have the capabilities to "read" the economy. They have the best tools to decide when to push, and when to step back and they have the experience to use those tools. They implement this information every time they meet to make adjust monetary policy, why not do the same for fiscal policy? Perhaps Congress would have some role in making these decisions, and they should, but perhaps their policies should fit within the recommended range of this entity. If the entity says to raise the taxes, Congress would simply ask "how high". Or better yet, if they suggested to lower them, Congress asks how low, or for whom. When it comes to having a deficit, balance or a surplus budget, this entity could decide which policy to follow, and by how much, and pass that guideline to Congress. Congress at that point, would have to hash out the details as they have always have done, but keep within the prescribed range. Perhaps this entity could hash out the details ahead of time, and create a few variable plans, and hand those to Congress who would then vote on them based on what would best serve their constituents.

I think these ideas are certainly something worth debating. Ultimately, in order for this to work, you would have to give this entity some teeth, enough to enforce their guiding budget principles. Not doing so would all be a legislative waste of time. I have no doubts someone would bring up the constitutionality of such a measure. If that is true, then maybe this is something that should warrant such a change. I do know one thing though: the status quo is not getting the job done, and I'm afraid we are running out of time. This is just my idea, but if you think of something better, then by all means, let's discuss that. We cannot afford to sit around and do nothing.




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The Theory of Everything Explained

Tonight, after doing some "deep" thinking, I came up with the "Theory of Everything". OK, by that, I mean the theory of how seemingly "nothing" could turn into everything you see today. My theory proposes that everything that exists today is made up of, and originated from exactly one particle. Admittedly, I cannot explain the origin of the first particle, only how it became everything we know today. Open your mind and read more below.



Ok, the concept here is simple: all things started with one elementary particle, and only one elementary particle has ever existed and that all things are made of this one particle. This particle, which you may call the "God" particle, (though not necessarily the same as the currently sought after "Higgs boson" particle) I'll name the "genesis" particle, to help differentiate from the others. This one particle has the ability to travel back and forth through time. A better way to think of it is that it can vibrate forwards and backwards through time. Now, suppose that initially this genesis particle existed for "x" amount of time. (Any amount of time could be used, I suppose... at least in the "early stage" of this theory. You can use one second, if that makes it easy to imagine.) In fact, better than that, we'll say that this unit of time of its existence is the most elementary unit of time possible. In other words, no other division of time is smaller (unless otherwise imaginary), just as no other particle could be more elementary. I'll call this unit of time a "bop." Now, suppose the genesis particle vibrated around and lasted for one bop. Then let's just say that it travels back in time by exactly one bop, and when it does, it "meets" the earlier version of itself. Next, the process repeats, and the two twin particles vibrate for one bop and then appear back in time by one bop, making four particles (which are all really just the same particle, just from different time frames, folded upon itself (in a nearby space.)

>Here's a crude drawing to represent what happens:

For a quick thought on this....
Imagine if you will, if you owned a telephone booth sized time machine. And you stood in front of it for a minute, and sort of wondered in a circle, before you decided to go in. When you enter, you emerge exactly one minute earlier in time, which means you find yourself standing in front of your one minute younger self. Now, imagine if the two of you repeated the same thing, so that there would be four of you.

Get the idea?

Now that initial step would repeat itself until the amount of matter grows to a critical point to where things start to interact with each other and perhaps some of those particles begin to clump together. The strangeness of this idea is that although all of the matter is really just the same particle, they begin to interact as if they are unique particles. Some continue to "duplicate" while other "rogue" particles clump together and form groups. These early groups would have formed the early ancestors to what we all know to be sub-atomic particles. Eventually this mass would have become very dense, and would have at that time initiated what we now refer to as the "Big Bang." The same physics from the that step on, as we've come to know them would then apply to the rest of the creation of the universe as we know it.

So there you have it. My theory of everything is that everything that you see is actually just one particle that continuously traveled back in time, which effectively duplicated itself in that instance of time, grew to a critical mass, enough to create the sub-atomic particles which began the universe that we all know today.

Now, you may wonder, why and how did I come up with this? Well, the answer is simple. I started off thinking about what it would be like to see yourself at an earlier state, by going back in time. Then I thought, if you could go back to see yourself in time, what would it be like if you had several of your future selves visit you? It would give the appearance of a growing mass. In fact, the amount of mass occupying that space would indeed have increased at that one instance in time. My next thoughts moved to, "what if that applied to just a single particle?" All of that led me to consider this a possibility however strange it may seem. Now granted, its a wild one, and its the type of thing that is born from late night, past-my-bedtime, type of thoughts. But then, think about it: What if this idea was possible and true? What would the implications be? What are your thoughts?


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