John Ratcliff's Weblog

I just received the following comment from Grahm Lawton, features editor for the New Scientist magazine. "Graham Lawton, features editor, New Scientist said... Disclaimer: This comment is from the features editor at New Scientist. John, don't shoot the messenger... Boltzmann brains are a genuine problem in cosmology. Serious cosmologists take them seriously. We report on what they're thinking, in an honest and balanced way. What's the problem? We don't make this stuff up, you know - if you don't believe me, plug " Bolzmann brains" into Google scholar. If you don't approve of the fact that people are working on this problem (spending your tax dollars) that is your prerogative, but have a go at them, not us!" I think Grahm makes a reasonable point. If, in fact, the Boltzmann Brains 'problem' is treated seriously by serious scientists then I grant it is worthy of a mention in a science magazine. That said, I don't think 'New S

What the hell is 'science' coming to? I subscribe to the 'New Scientist' magazine. This is a weekly rag that contains a lot of interesting science articles as well as commentary. I really like that it comes weekly as it sort of feels like a 'Newsweek' for science. However, it isn't like that all of the time. Some issues look more like 'The National Enquirer' than a supposedly sane and rational magazine. With great frequency it seems the editors pick some way out topic in cosmology or quantum physics and use it to create a cover story with outrageous proclamations in the headline. Yet, nothing in the past can match the audacity of this weeks issue. This week they devoted the entire cover story to the 'problem' of Boltzmann Brains . I kid you not! Now, you probably don't know what a Boltzmann Brain is, neither did I. Having read the article I now realize that neither do the cosmologists. The logic I read from the article sounded something

Brother Greg Stewart left a thoughtful comment to my rant on esoteric Freemasonry. I'm sorry if I hurt his feelings, I just felt a sense of balance needed to be brought to the topic. Brother Stewart's comment reads as follows: Br. John, thank you for the kind words. One of the few comments i can come away saying is that I did not want to alienate anyone, from an esoteric stand point. My use of the term (and idea) was for me to say that my opinion is of a few, of whom do not conform to the main-stream, idea of what Freemasonry means. Is that right, or is that wrong, I can't say. I don't think any of us can. I can say that personally, I have found a deeper meaning of it. Having taken all three degrees apart and looked at the individual pieces, and then reconstructed them, they have come to say something more to me than their surface representation. Perhaps I am misreading my tea leaves, but when you have a system of metaphor and allegory, you have to take the whole system

I realize that this post is going to cause some Web-Wiplash, but I think that is ok. For years I have held onto some old Planetside screenshots that I wanted to post online some day. After scouring an old hard drive yesterday these are the ones I came up with. Still, I know I am missing many of the screenshots I really wanted to keep. Especially ones from when the game was very early in development. I designed the entire client side game engine myself and I had a lot of fun during the development process. One of my regrets is that, in many respects, the final game did not look nearly as visually impressive as it did at certain points during development. There were a number of reasons for this. One was from a technology stand point. Most developers of an MMO game engine might assume it would be reasonable to stream data in as a player moved around the environment. That was certainly my original design. However, once the game got into heavy beta testing there was a strong push to get eve