Doug's Sounding Board

Last night we ate at Star of Siam. I ordered Golden Chicken and for some reason I didn’t get it until several other people were done. I wasn’t too worried because I had a chicken satay stick from Nicole to keep me from starving.

Anyway, when it did arrive it was great! It’s a fried chicken but without breading and there’s some other flavor in the oil too. Anyway, if you’re at Star of Siam in Soquel then youshould check it out.

I made it past the bug in Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy. The game is getting more action oriented with more things to fight and kill. There are still plenty of puzzles though. If I get stuck on one I can pretty much guarantee that I will wake up and be able to clear it right away. Not a game for the tired.

For anyone about to play… The second time you get control of the mummy, save at the beginning of that stage and DO NOT save again until you go back to controlling Sphinx.

This morning as I was pulling in to the parking garage at work I hit 500km on my electric scooter! Also it’s been over 3 weeks with no flat tire!

Last night Nicole and I went up to visit my Aunt Rita in Oakland. Everythign was packed up and today she’s on her way to Reno. My dad was there and I helped him move some stuff downstairs for Goodwill to pick up today. We also helped finish the last of the food in the freezer,

I hope where she’s going will be much better than where she was. It certainly won’t be worse.

So we decided to try and do it ourselves after not feeling confident that the contractor we were talking to would do what we wanted, and the place that would do what we wanted we expensive enough that we couldn’t do much else.

We don’t know when we’ll start yet but it should be interesting.

I don’t know if anyone reading this cares, but Star Wars tickets are on sale. I have mine for all day on the 19th of May on Screen 4 at the Santa Cruz Cinema 9. Join me! Hold a place in line for me for between shows!

I finally had a change to ask the internet about the “Adobe Premiere could not grab a frame buffer error” I wou;d get when trying to render the movie to a DVD format. It was frustrating because it woul dbe working and then stop. Well I found there is an up date to fix that problem. What modern commercial software doesn’t know to check and let you know there are updates out there? So lame!

Anyway, not I just need to work out why sound isn’t being recorded (I think I have a cable hooked up to the wrong hole) and I’ll be set to move forward on Star Wars!

On Thursday Nicole went nuts on one of the flower beds out front. She ripped everything out, put in good soil, and put in some native plants. It looks better than it ever did! Now it’s not something you have to avert your eyes from. YAY!

I just finished reading The Holographic Universe because it sounded like it had some neat ideas in it. Overall it did indeed have some interesting ideas, but the support of those ideas throguh much of hte book was very weak.

The basic premise is that there is a theory in physics that explains everything as being an interaction of wave fronts that creat the hologram that we see as reality. There is another holographic theory of mind that is in psychology where a part contains the information of the whole as well, as evidenced by removing part of the brain not destroying the knowledge of how to do something. Memories and other brain functions are not all local to specific portions of the brain.

Now take those and draw links between them and use that to try and explain psychic phenomenon. I’m not saying this isn’t the way things really are or not because there certainly are things out there that aren’t explained by current theories and things that people don’t want to try to address because they are too far out there. I’m glad people are working to try and explain these things even if they are considered the outside fringe of science.

The problem with this book is the support for many claims are anecdotal tales from the author or his friends. The other weakness in the support is in jumping to conclusions. After spending considerable time explaining how people have been shown to be able to manipulate physical phenomenon like which holes balls will fall in statistically vs no concentration, he uses a completely different explanation for how the contents of a tape got changed when experimental subjects were supposed to focus on changing it. The explanation? They changed the past! It’s going to be a lot easier to change a tape than to change a computer generated tape made some time in the past.

The other example was in his explanation that subjects predicted the future by guessing what picture would be shown the next day. This was after a lengthy description on how mind reading and telepathic communication can be explained by this theory. It’s more likely that the subjects were influencing the choices of picture made by the researcher.

If the author had stuck to a the few areas where his points do seem to hold up instead of trying to stretch it to fit any reported oddness that happens his case and book would have been much stronger.

I’d say to avoid this book.

Word is back from the adjuster that her car is totalled. Nicole is still doing well and still has some soreness and I’m still grateful that she got out of it with so little damage to herself!