Train crazy

The way trains operate in the UK is not logical, let me explain....

Imagine London is a clock face. The place where the number 11 is located is called Amersham. The palace where the number nine is Located is called Uxbridge. If you wanted to go from 11 to 9, you would take a train to where hands meet and then back accross.

That is a long distance in total because you are not going in a straight line. The distance is like going all the way accross the city. You would think this makes the journey expensive, right? Well no it doesn't, you only get charged £1.80 for that journey, about the price of two loafs of bread.

Now imgagine the city center is located just below the middle of the clock. What would happen if you took a train there? You would get charged much more, even though you are travelling a smaller distance. The pricing of the metro rail is there to reduce the crowds I believe.

The way I look at it is, instead of solving the problem of overcrowding with technology and innovation they punish commuters and make them pay for entering the inner zones of London.

I look at a train as an elevator that goes forwards and backwards instead of up and down. It should be very cheap to travel on a train not just in the suburbs but everywhere. It should be like a Netflix subscription where commuter pays £10 per month and go where they like in the city.

World & world cup

Well, the Russian world cup is gleaming and the world is turning, my world is still the dessert of insight, dry of the waters of knowledge.

There are so many Questions that may never have an answer. In the Christian faith, some christians claim that the faithful redeemed souls go straight to heaven when they die. Others claim that you wait in the grave until you are resurrected on Judgement day and then go to heaven. The irony is that they can be both right at the same time because your time stops when you are unconscious. If you did wait in the grave, you wouldn't be aware of the passing of time. You could be unconscious for a million years and think that you were only dead for 1 minute after being resurrected.

But I do wonder.  I hope that the creator of the Universe shows me mercy and peace.

The flow of life

If there is one thing I can be certain of in this world it is the fact that I am a thing. My body is a structure that can be broken just like any other thing in this world.

I will make the most of every day while I still have this body and it still works. However I know that I have a short time before my body stops working and I am longer a living being. Life as I know it will end soon within some decades from now.

Even the matter that builds my body is unstable and can break apart. The atoms that I am made of a made mostly of empty space.

Brake revelation

Earlier in the month, my car had some issues, the back brakes were faulty. My car uses mechanical hands called Calipers to squeeze heat resistant pads against a metal disk attached to a wheel, that is how the brakes slow the car down. The calipers were catching on the wheel disks and making scratching sounds and causing vibrations to travel back up to the brake pedal. Anyway, I got the issue fixed but the week before I had the brakes repaired I learned a valuable lesson.

I was traveling at slower speeds on the motorway to compensate for my car's fault and learned that my car actually uses less fuel at slower speeds. I was driving at close to 70 miles per hour normally but when I had faulty breaks, I was driving just under 60 miles per hour. My car was able to travel nearly 340 miles when the tank was full. Normally my car would run out of fuel just before 300 miles.

It cost me a few hundred pounds to fix the brakes but it saved me more because I realized that cruising between 55 and 60 miles per hour is the most efficient speed for my car. 

Every time I refill my car I am saving about  £4.60 because I am burning less fuel to get by. I fill my tank up every week so  I am saving £18.40 per month. That is £220 per year. Many new cars now don't burn fuel, they use stored electricity but until I have such a car I can apply this new knowledge.

Nine Nine Nine

When I was a kid I liked to watch a TV show called Nine Nine Nine. It was a show about people that were in grave danger but were rescued. In the UK, the phone number used to summon the emergency services is 999. I believe that is the reason the show was called 999.

The presenter of the TV show was called Michael Buerk I think. He would tell the story of the accident and the people involved would be interviewed. We would be shown a reconstruction of the accident and bit by bit would hear the story from the person involved.

The TV show had two effects on me. Firstly, it made me feel lucky because I'm not in the same situation. Secondly, it would make me feel empathy towards the person. I would be absorbed in the story and would root for the person to survive even though I knew they would.

Abortion

Last month the Irish community voted to abolish their anti abortion law. Abortion is a very complicated issue and sometimes it is not clear what is wrong and what is right.

There are people in this world that would love to invent the time machine or take a Delorian with a flux capacitor back in time and abolish the law in the past, those people remind me of the "John Smith" agent in the movie called "The Matrix". In the matrix, the world we live in is a simulation and our senses are plugged into a computer program. John Smith is a bad villian because he rebels against the system and hates mankind. Neo Defeated the John Smith program by letting it kill him or take him over because the code that allowed John Smith to defy death was running inside his body. When John Smith killed Neo, he killed the software that kept him alive. His eyes shined and he exploded and freed all the people he had infected. This is a strange twist of the grandfather paradox you see. If you abolished abortion in the past then perhaps one of your ancestors would get aborted and you would shine and evaporate like the John Smith agent in the Matrix movie,  So be careful what you wish for.

Anyway...

The question I have is where do you draw the line? There is a point when life that is aborted is no longer a non sentient mass of tissues floating in the womb but a small person. Where do you draw the line?

In my view, I don't know if it is right or wrong to allow abortion. The only thing is that I would reduce the time limit to 10 weeks because the sex of the fetus is undefined at that stage and some people use the gender of the baby as grounds for abortion. Perhaps if someone's lifestyle changes while they are pregnant and they feel like the baby will have a hard life then they maybe trying to pause their family until circumstances are better. Or perhaps they were raped or the baby has a defect that puts both their lives at risk.

Life is a gift so if you can the please avoid abortion. That is all I can say.