The Qassia Intelligence Engine

I've just been putting some intel on to the Qassia site. It's what they call an intelligence engine. I've been enjoying it tremendously, in the two or three days that I've been a member.

The idea of it is that you add intel (that is, intelligence) to the site. It can be anything, like an article, or a snippet of information, an experience you had, or just anything really. In return for posting your intel, you get two things. You get a backlink to your website or blog (this blog, in my case) which is what they call a QUALITY backlink, a backlink that the search engines will follow - in the jargon, it is not a nofollow backlink. And you get your account credited with a currency called Qassia dollars, Q$. Those users with more Qassia dollars end up with their intel appearing higher in the tag rankings, so they are more visible.

I'm really enjoying it, because you are allowed to post anything you want to, just as in a blog post (obviously subject to the usual guidelines against porn, spam, and blatant advertising).

If you want to take a look at Qassia, I will be most grateful to you if you click through my link here. This is because if you go through my link I will get 100 Qassia dollars if you do sign up with Qassia, so I am being honest with you about it.

Of course if you prefer to go to the main page at Qassia.com, that is OK by me. I know some people prefer to find their own way, and dislike using affiliate links. But anyway, please do leave a comment on an intel of mine just to say hello!

I'm going back there now to post some more intel. Maybe see you there! Sphere: Related Content

The Secret Number Of Sergeant Pepper

One time when we had not very much to do, and we were feeling very bored, and we REALLY wanted to know just what the answer to it all was, all of a sudden someone turned the album cover of the Sergeant Pepper album upside down.

With the cover in that position, it was easy to see that the word BEATLES when viewed upside down, made a seven digit number. The number was 5371038.

A couple of the digits had to be fudged a little bit to make them be numbers but don't forget that at the time we were quite used to the idea of trying to interpret strange shapes and colours and configurations of patterns which might or might not contain some cosmic message relayed from another dimension. It just went with the territory. And also, as you can see from the picture of the album cover, the word is constructed in a flower bed so the letters are not too rigid.

The next logical thought was that it might be a secret telephone number which you could call and get the lowdown on all the Beatles mysteries, such as, was Paul really dead, who was the walrus, does Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds really stand for LSD, what is the meaning of number 9, and a host of others.

But not only those mysteries. What if the secret number was channelled in some way, perhaps from a neighbouring galaxy, or from a non-physical dimension of the space-time continuum. In such a case, the Beatles and their album art designers might be unaware that they were being used as a medium. What if you could phone up and get the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything?

Naturally we tried London first, since the flower bed looks like it might have 01 next to it, which at that time was the London area code. No luck. Then we tried Liverpool, of course. Then New York (the Big Apple) and then Los Angeles that centre of fantasy. All drew a blank.

Which was a pity, because it had seemed such a great idea, and it might have been cool to know every secret there was to be known! Incidentally, numerologists may like to know that when you total the digits, you get 27, and when you total those digits in turn, you get the number 9. How amazing is that?

We couldn't help feeling that there might still be an area code out there, and that it might still be available to reveal its secrets to those who find it. Sphere: Related Content

Reflections Of Spain From Somewhere Nearby

Good day to you, gentle readers, no matter where in the world you are. Welcome to another zencath post by me. This one will not greatly presume on your patience or your time, because I have to confess to being a trifle fatigued, having only recently returned from Spain. I was on vacation there, and in the course of that vacation I visited every one of the autonomous regions, except the Basque country.

Let no one try to fool you into thinking of Spain as a small country. It may not look all that big on a map, but when you are inside it, you realize that it is truly enormous, full of deserts and mountain ranges. You may not know this, but it is a fact that Spain has mountains over a greater percentage of its land area than any other European country, except Switzerland. The land of Spain has many many towns, and I feel like I actually visited every single one of them during my stay.

My neighbour has declared, with typically Gallic logique, that such a thing is impossible, the adundance of the cities it is too great in order that one might visit to them all with much of ease. My reply is to try to patiently explain that he, being French, has too rigidly scientific a mind to comprehend the English love of hyperbole.

I toy with the idea of pointing out that the ancient Romans recognized this, since their name for us was the "Hyperboleans" (the lovers of exaggeration) but this would not be strictly accurate. They actually called us the "Hyperboreans" (the people from the back of the north wind).

I am sure that my neighbour and most of his countrymen believe that the English are crazy. However, I KNOW that the French are crazy - splendid fellows though they are.

For example, there are more tight rope walkers from France than from any other country. Also, the hot-air balloon was invented by the French inventor, Montgolfier. Need I say more?

Incidentally, when they made the first flying balloon, they had to put sandbags in the basket to hold it down on the ground. When Montgolfier was asked how he would fly if the balloon was full of sand, he replied that, in order to fly, why of course they would throw out the bags of sand.

So how would he get back down again? Montgolfier answered, But naturally, it is very simple, monsieur, we will just put the bags back in the balloon again. Sphere: Related Content

LSD - Has It Got A Future?

I wrote an article about the drug LSD some months ago, which unexpectedly became popular. The present article looks at some of the issues involved and paves the way for more discussion of this fascinating topic.

Those readers who have been closely following the fortunes of this blog "That Reminds Me", intrepid band of heroes that you are, will probably already be aware that this blog exists in two different locations on the web. There is a Wordpress version and this new improved version on Blogger.com.

Both of these free hosts are amazing in many ways, but both are also in different ways, deeply annoying, and for the most baffling of reasons. I do not intend to go into these reasons at the moment. Perhaps I will at some later date. Users of these hosts will no doubt know what things I am referring to anyway.

My main reason in writing this post is to talk about how my LSD post got on. I first wrote it back in April this year, because I had happened to notice by chance that it was the 65th birthday of LSD on April 7th. More correctly it was the 65th anniversary of the invention of the drug by Hoffman in Switzerland.

I thought at the time that there would be very little interest in the topic, but I was wrong. In fact, the LSD birthday post is one of the most popular posts on that Wordpress version of "That Reminds Me". So I intend to post some more articles on the subject for the benefit of those readers, and there are many of them, who have shown interest. I have no anxieties that you will be able to find my articles in this new location, since the keyword LSD seems to be an exceptionally buzzy one for some reason.

I will confine myself here to the observation that, when it was first studied, LSD was hailed by many authorities to be a wonder drug, which would have far-reaching consequences in the cure of many mental illnesses. Yes, you did read that right, in the CURE of mental illnesses.

Perhaps now may be the time for a reappraisal of this remarkable substance? Sphere: Related Content

Auspicious Dates

I was thinking about auspicious dates. The idea is to choose an auspicious date to begin an enterprise, or to start a course, or declare war - for what reason? In ancient times, one chose a date that was auspicious in the hope that one or other of the gods would smile on one's endeavours.

The ancient Romans had a way of deciding if the time was right for some enterprise to begin. Their soothsayers would watch the flight of birds. Depending on how the birds were flying, they could tell if the time was good or bad. In Latin, avis=bird, and specere=watch, giving us our word auspice. So the bird watchers were the experts in Rome, and even the Emperor would do nothing without consulting them.

There has been much interest in recent years in numerology. This is the idea that a number can be somehow associated with some type or principle. Thus it is now well known that the Chinese believe the number 8 to be a lucky number. This is apparently because their symbol for 8 is almost identical to that for "wealth". And they believe the number 4 is unlucky because, apparently, it is similar to the symbol for "death".

Incidentally, the number 8 is sometimes called the Forger's Friend, because every other number can be changed without being detected into an 8 by adding a line or a curve in the right place.

The number 7 has been widely held to be a lucky number in the western world. It is a number that is beloved of crap shooters, and their game is based on the curious fact that 7 is the most common total that can be obtained when two dice are rolled.

But I'm digressing again! My point in writing this article was to make the observation that it seemed very strange that the Chinese organisers of the Beijing Olympics should have chosen August 8th 2008 as an auspicious date to begin. One would have expected them to choose a date based on the Chinese calendar. Instead, they chose a date that is the 8th day of the 8th month after the Western New Year, and in a year that is 2008 years after the birth of the founder of a religion that is not widely followed in China. Furthermore, this birth date is now generally acknowledged to be inauthentic. Some authorities put the birth of Christ at around 4 BC, which would mean that this year is not 2008, but 2012. What if the actual birth was in 4 AD, then this current year would be 2004, most unfortunate for a Chinese soothsayer!

To make matters worse, the date of New Year is fairly arbitrary in the western calendar. The Roman New Year was in the month of March, so the 8th month would be October, as you can see by its name - "octo" means 8.

Suppose these arbitrary factors had combined to make the start date, which the planners believed so lucky, to be in reality, 04-04-04, that would be terrible, would it not?

But it was not terrible, it was very auspicious. Why? Because superstition, auspices, auguries, divinations, fortune telling, all take place in the MIND. The mind has a power that none of us yet fully comprehend. Some people even believe that nothing actually exists that is not the mind. But that is for another day. Suffice to say that I think it was the firmness of their conviction that the date was auspicious that in turn made it BE auspicious.

If you believe and do not doubt, you will say to this mountain, Go, and throw yourself into the sea, and it will be so. Sphere: Related Content

After The Olympic Games -The Final Standings

During the Olympic Games, one of the things that interested me was the debate about the medals table. Some people were saying that the method of publishing the rankings so that gold medals were counted first, then silver and so on, led to a distortion of the achievements of each country. Thus, as one commentator pointed out, a country with only one gold medal would be higher in the rankings than a country that had fifty silvers.

Clearly this would be wrong, but this absurd situation is perhaps unlikely to ever happen.

The organisers of the Games, as they were Chinese, would naturally go along with the system as it currently stands, since they beat every other country in the number of gold medals by a healthy margin.

I have found two sites that give slightly different rankings for the final standings. The NBC report ranks the countries on the total number of medals, while the report from BBC Sport adopts the more official line. Is it merely a coincidence that the NBC version puts America at the top, while the BBC, being British and moreover the only major TV channel that is ad free, remains more impartial? Could it be that the NBC reporters could not tolerate the idea of the USA coming second in the final rankings? It is undeniably true that America won more medals of all colors than any other country, but can it really be right that a country should come first in the rankings through the fact that it achieved more second places than all the other countries?

Some might say that the USA in the next few years is going to have to get used to being second in many other ways than in sport. I would not presume though to have any opinion about that, since I have no expertise and little interest in economics or politics.

It was suggested that there should be a points value assigned to each medal, thus Gold=3, Silver=2, Bronze=1. The idea being that you would be including ALL the medals in the count (not only the golds), but recognizing that the medals have a different relative value. I spent a happy five minutes or so calculating the outcome of this system,and I found that the positions of the top 6 countries for 2008 was identical to that given in the BBC report, and the same thing happened when a Gold medal was given a points value of 4. I have no idea how all the countries places would be affected, since I lost interest in calculating after the top six.

So I think you'll just have to accept the fact, China won. But after all, they should do, they have a population in the gozillions. If Jamaica had had the same population as China, then the gold medal tally of Jamaica would have been 3600. Who said the Jamaicans were laid back?

Happy Days! Sphere: Related Content