It is Monday, January 11th at 4:48 AM. The holidays are a distant memory as is 2015.
As I mentioned in a previous post we’ve done a lot of reorganization and cleaning to get the year started off right and now only have one room left to do. Yesterday morning was spent out on the patio doing the gardening. The first thing was to take the plastic cover off of the vegetable garden. It can be very windy and chilly here so a cover is necessary to the plants do not get wind-burn and it also creates a miniature greenhouse. I then moved a plant that has been growing well into a pot into the earth next to the birdbath. There had been a geranium but a day or two ago a vole at the whole thing. We’ll see if he does the same with this new plant. I also took some rosemary cuttings to plant outside the gate as it seems the deer will eat everything except rosemary. Hopefully those will grow and help hold the hill in place.
One thing I do want to mention about 2016 is that I have seen the future! A week or two before Christmas I received a promotion from Samsung that if I installed Samsung pay on my phone the company would give me a $100 credit for the Samsung store. So I installed, filled out the claim form information and waited. The time frame was rather short and the claim had to be completed by 12/31. I waited until 12/28 then sent a message to the help desk as I still had not received the confirmation. I did receive it the next day and used the reward to buy a Samsung Gear VR which cost $99 – thus using the reward I got it for free. This VR is incredible and will become the way we use the internet in the future. I was absolutely amazed and this type of jump is akin to photos becoming “moving pictures” or what we now call video – it is that incredible! In a decade or less I would imagine that most people will no longer be taking 2D photos but simply press a button for a full 3D photo in which one takes a snapshot of the entire environment. We will no longer only be able to look at one static frame but instead behind, to the left, right, up down, in every single direction of a photo – including behind the picture taker them self!
The Gear VR is like Morpheous describing the Matrix, “unfortunately no one can be told what the matrix is, you have to see it for yourself.” It is very difficult to explain VR; it cannot be shown in a 2D picture or video. If I were to try I would say it is a completely immersive environment just like one experiences life now, but you can only look and the quality is a little bit diminished from using your own two eyes to look around now. One also can only use two senses – sight and sound to explore new surroundings. Some environments are real but are things most people will never experience such as being in the cockpit of a Blue Angel jet fighter or surfing in the tube of a massive wave in Hawaii. Others are surreal computer created environments which one might see while on acid (never been on acid but I imagine that is what it might be like.)
I think the only reason VR is still in the early adopter stage is because people cannot see what it is like without owning one or going to a technology computer products convention. Another good way to describe it and is probably one of the reasons Facebook bought it is that it will revolutionize the social media experience. Now, we’re just interacting on a 2D page sharing a bunch of 2D stuff. Imagine going into a room, or the moon, or a club and interacting with virtual avatars of your friends. As the VR technology advances they should be able to recreate a replica of one’s actual body; we would still need body tracking hardware but I’m sure that will come. Then we could congregate in any environment that could be imagined such as on the moon, or in an environment similar to what an ant experiences – these two examples are already being used in VR social although we just see template avatars at the moment.
It will be fun to look back on this post five or six years from now after VR has changed everything. Let his post serve as my claim as a first adopter of VR technology which is simply due to a promotion by Samsung – otherwise I wouldn’t have bought the headset!
In other news, I’ve been thinking about making a major upgrade to the fish tank. I’d like to replace the gravel with sand and put in real plants. I do need to figure out what to do with the goldfish as they create a lot of waste and make the maintenance difficult. However, I’ve had them for so long that I’ve become attached and finding another place to put them is difficult as they’ve grown big. One did get ich and I put him in the tank outside to be medicated but the two other fish were picking at his fins and almost killed him. Once I recognized this I put him back in the main tank (ich or not) and he immediately went, hid and didn’t move – so much so I thought he might still die. But then in the evening I saw him in the middle with the other much larger goldfish and it seemed as though they were both very glad to be back together. It seemed as though they were almost cuddling! They were both looking at me and I felt bad for having put the one through such a traumatic experience.
It made me think if perhaps we too are in some sort of cosmic or universal fishbowl with a higher being looking at us? Perhaps it chooses to do nothing when humanity is going through hardship such as the current refugee crisis. The religious people believe that there is one “god” and he does intervene in mysterious ways. For me, I think that is a complete figment of their imagination and the stories just a way for humanity to give an answer to the greatest questions of all – where are we, what created us, what is really going on? I think those that do not contemplate or search for these answers are stuck in a low state of consciousness/awareness. There is something going on that humanity is not privy to and most likely simply cannot contemplate such as an ant cannot contemplate San Francisco, let alone the United States, the galaxy or universe. What is it that we are not able to comprehend outside of our universe or beyond our senses?
I for one could not truly contemplate virtual reality only two weeks ago and now my eyes have been opened thanks to Gear VR. Perhaps our human experience is akin to never being able to take off our virtual reality gear from birth until death?
I have to say, I always enjoy a post that starts off with something mundane like gardening but arrive at a very deep philosophical question. Writing this post has been fun but unfortunately it is Monday morning of a very busy week and the holidays, sadly, still remain a distant memory.
It is time to get the day, week and continuation of the year 2016 started.
