What April 2024 Means To Me

Throughout April I thought this may was going to be a general election but I was wrong because they had a snap election in December 5 years ago so the new general election will be later this year. There are still elections on may but they're for the mayors and commissioners. 

It was always cloudy this month and very dark. The Israelis are still trying to rescue their hostages and people are still protesting about the conflict. They're ignoring all the other conflicts in the world, even the ones that have more casualties, lots of selective outrage. In the middle of the month there was a direct exchange of missile fire between Israel and Iran. It started when Israel accidentally hit the Iranian embassy in Damascus city in Syria. 

I managed to get a good deal on a Nintendo switch and was playing Red Dead Redemption throughout the month. It is an old game and they ported it over to the console the way it is; to me it is a new game because I never played it. I missed out on playing a lot of the 3rd person open world quest type games from the previous decade. I have no regrets with the way I use my down time, life is too short to care. A young boy was killed by a maniac with a sword the other day.  I feel pity for the boy and his family. Life is short and it can be shorter than you think. That is why I try to enjoy my down time. 

What April 2023 means to me

April 2023 started off as a typical April, lots of little spring time storms plus a mixture of hot and cold spells. The days were getting longer and in the middle of the month it was my son's 4th birthday. 

A civil war broke out in Sudan. Sudan is a country in East Africa that sits next to Egypt on the coast of the red sea opposite Saudi Arabia. They have a long history of military coups and civil wars unfortunately. I wish them a peaceful future. I think it was the paramilitary fighting the standard military. Two different military groups were fighting for control of government infrastructure, airports, central banks and ports. 

Towards the end of April I learned that Tucker Carlson was suspended from the fox news network. His removal from the show seemed to be a reaction to his speech he gave during the weekend before he was fired. He wants people to pray more and thinks abortions as a whole are evil and things like that. 

A few things were overlooked, they tested a new emergency alert system here in the UK but it didn't work properly, in my experience when that happens it's because the government were approaching friends or family for the contract. They possibly weren't using public bidding. When a government needs special hardware or services, they should allow private companies to bid for the contract and somehow prove they're competent. Not just approach a friend or family with connections. I'm not saying that is the truth though, only that government project failures are usually down to that. 

The other thing I noticed is many autocratic nations are banding together to share resources and currencies. They're trying to create an alternative market to the west. They're creating an eastern resource trading and power center. Perhaps the dollar will no longer be a global reserve currency in the near future. 

What April 2021 means to me

It was Easter and Passover during the first week of April this year. The weather was very nice most of the month. Roughly in the middle of the month we came out of lockdown, the non essential shops reopened and the hospitality sector went back business. I saw queues on the street for people to go into clothes shops and hair dressers, some of the queues were akin to the queues outside Northern Rock high-street bank the previous decade when they went bankrupt. They were queues fit for a roller coaster ride. Super queues that zig zaged down the street. 

Around the time the lockdown ended, prince Philip died. Then it was my son's second birthday and I tried untethered high quality virtual reality for the first time. It was the same day as Prince Philip's funeral. My son's second birthday was semi isolated because there was still restrictions for how many people can come into your home at one time.  A few days later I witnessed the first powered flight on Mars, the Inginuity drone/probe flew a few meters from the ground. Mars' atmosphere is very thin so the rotor blades had to spin very fast. 

What April means to me

I will always remember April 2019 as Jacob's Spring because my son, Jacob was born in the middle of April and April is the middle of Spring.

April is the Month I became a father and I was given my own family, the best gift I have ever been given. I hope to be a good father for Jacob. My wife named our son, I gave him the middle name Curtis, an abbreviation of courteous, which means to be respectful.

My wife's sister and parents accompanied me and my wife while we were waiting for our son to be born. I enjoyed their company however I found it strange to not work for 5 weeks, plus the tension from waiting for Jacob got to my head and I think I looked stressed and angry. I hope they didn't get the wrong impression about me.  I really enjoyed their company and hope they will come again.

The weather in April was very cold and cloudy. Not what we normally get in the middle of spring.

There was a large terrorist attack in Sri Lanka, an Island next to India. I won't say anymore. Only that God won't reward anyone that destroys themselves and others.

Jullian Assange (Wiki leaks co-founder) was arrested inside the Equador embassy and the world was shown a picture of a black hole event horizon the way it actually looks. It looked the way I imagined it would look. It was a hole that is black.

The Brexit deadlock persisted throughout April. Britain may never leave the European Union. I sense that everyone on both sides of the continent are just fed up and want some progress to be made.

Black hole vision

Earlier in the week on the 10th of April, a picture of the "Event Horizon" of a giant "Black hole" called Messier 87 was revealed to the general public. April will go down in history as the month we saw a black hole. The trouble is that it is impossible to see a black hole itself because it pulls light in so all you would see is a black void. Infact the inner edge of the "Event Horizon" would also be invisible because the Event Horizon is the area of gravity that overpowers light.

It may be possible in the future to see a black hole because you don't need light to see things. I saw my unborn baby using a device that can see sound waves. Bats and dolphins can see sound. Radar machines can see radio waves, night vision cameras can see infra red light.

The only thing I know can escape a black hole is gravity itself. (I don't know what hawing radiation is).  If you could measure tiny changes in gravity around a black hole then you would be able generate a picture, however gravity always seems to crush large objects into the shape of a sphere so that is probably what we would see.

I often wonder why they didn't call it a black sphere because that is the shape it probably is.