I couldn’t help but write a response to the top story this morning on CNN.com

More here:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/americas/05/30/brazil.tribes/index.html

Apparently this article describes how these people have never had any contact with the outside world. The article goes on to state, “Its director, Stephen Cory, said the new photographs highlight the need to protect uncontacted people from intrusion by the outside world.”

But what I don’t get is what are we protecting them from? Starbucks and birth control pills? The last I check the modern world has a lot more innovations that make life a heck of a lot nicer not to mention life spans MUCH longer by removing problems such as Malaria, Colera, Yellow Fever not to mention cutting back on the mortality rates from the Flu, TB, Measles, and Pnumonia. So I ask again what is it that we are saving them from? Electricity, fresh drinking water? Or is it polution and over population that we are saving them from. If that is the case then why don’t we all go native and strip naked to go back to living in caves with leather straps for clothing and pick berries from the bushes.

What really bothers me is the following quoted statement in the article, “Cory said in a statement. “The world needs to wake up to this, and ensure that their territory is protected in accordance with international law. Otherwise, they will soon be made extinct.” ”

Let me make this perfectly clear! These are HUMAN BEINGS! These are NOT some species of panda or tiger! What would be extint here is the mind-set of sub-human culture older then the 3rd world. What becomes extint is the cave-man social civilization, if it can be called that. More to the point what is lost is the attachement to pre-science understanding of the world in which we live and with it a measure of the superstitions that accompany a narrow world view such as a flat Earth, Earth centric universe, or dare I say it, a Sun centered universe. Maybe people should be focusing their energy more or “Protecting” HUMANS from the Moon Landings Hoax and inspire our kids to go into fields of science, math, physics and chemistry and challenge them selves for grades better then a C-minus.

Just some food for thought!

Seth

Well if you haven’t noticed yet, there are a major series of updates I’ve made to the site in the last few weeks.

1. I’ve finally finished doing all the major design work for the Personal Web - sub domain here are the links:

Personal Web - Home: http://www.setheden.com/SethEdenPer/index.htm

Rather then listing all of the links I’ll let you browse it for yourself. Each page has custom graphics and buttons so that’s why it’s taken me a full month to get it all finished.

2. If you look carefully you’ll see I’ve added 3 categories of site links to the right blog-roll. This makes it easier to navigate back to any other section of my site from this page.

The other part of the reason that it took me so long to get this all done was because I reformatted my Hard Drive, and I did that because I wanted to install a trial version of Adobe Audition such that I could remaster some tape recordings

Ok finally got my own forums online, I still plan to customize them and hopefully get some custom graphics and stuff in line with everything else I’m doing on this site.

Note: There is a

As you can see I’ve updated the Blog graphic with my own custom title.

Time to make the forums.

Cheers

Seth

Finally the long awaited Personal.SethEden.com Sub-domain is online!

Basically at this point the page is only a template for other topics of interest on the same sub-domain. I haven’t done any work yet on any of these menu links yet so all the links except the one back here to the blog are dead. I will be working my way down the list adding them as I get them done. Enjoy and feel free to let me know what you think of the site!

If you haven’t already noticed, I’ve posted all the new site graphics that I made while I was in Thailand. This comes with a special thanks to my girl friend for taking the time to upload all the files from her laptop since they didn’t burn properly on the DVD I made just before my departure. I couldn’t have done it without you Mahal!

Hope you like it, I do.

Cheers

Seth

I just finished developing a new set of graphics buttons for my site. Of course I haven’t done any re-touching yet, or even tested them out. So I’m not sure how much more work it will take before I like the final result, but at least I’ve gotten the ball rolling for retooling my site. I still have some new title graphics to work on, and I haven’t even started to restructure the site itself, however, getting the buttons done is an important first step.

The last few days here in Thailand I’ve been down with a BAD cough and I haven’t been able to do much of anything. My girl friend finally went out and got some Robitussin. Ever since then I’ve been on the rebound, thus I’m doing much better now. Only about 1 more week here and I’ll be flying back to the US.

At this point I can feel I’m already starting to miss this place and I haven’t even left it. Mostly because I won’t be with my girl friend any more, but also because the weather here is absolutely AMAZING, and I just know the weather in Minnesota is going to be nothing but crud for another

Well the game engine has been coming along nicely. I’ve been working with a guy named Charles and we’ve developed some really cool core engine components so far. Up to this point it’s been nothing but the core windows components and basic support for the DirectX SDK API.

I wanted to have full support for dynamically switching between full screen and windowed mode while in the game. So we got that feature running, also there was some other related features to being in full screen and clicking on some other window in the event that the user has multiple monitors but the game is only active on one monitor. Similarly the game engine must also handle an ALT+TAB out to another application or window, and from windowed mode the game should pause rendering when the game is minimized or placed in the background.

We got it to pause the game rendering but the game itself is still executing and eating up the CPU. When the game engine is not active of course it should not be eating CPU power because the user might have to do something important like writing a blog post, or responding to some important e-mail or making a quick edit on some web page. Since most video games require the full attention of the computer hardware games are developed with a very high priority setting for executing on the CPU. Just because the rendering is paused doesn’t mean the priority level has changed so we still need to implement a system that will drop the priority level thus not requiring large amounts of CPU time to do nothing when the user wants to work on something else for a bit, or step out for a quick lunch between levels or whatever.

Last night I finally broke down and downloaded the new version of Visual Studio 2008 Express and directX9c SDK. I found a really cool tutorial online for learning how to program video games. Granted I already know how to program windows GUI applications in C++, the last of my few contracts have been in VB or VBA, so my actual ability in C++ is a little rusty and I’ve been planning to get back to it for some time. Specifically I really wanted to finally put some focus on getting good at it.

Here was the tutorial site that I found:

http://www.directxtutorial.com/

So just this morning I followed the first tutorial for DX9 and got the little windows application to display a blue screen, then fade it to black, and fade back to blue in a repeating cycle. It’s still a little jerky so once I get it nice and smooth I’ll see if I can post some source code and a downloadable exe in my software section. I haven’t had this much fun in a LONG time!

Once I get this thing working a little better in the direction I want to go, I’ll probably post a web forum so members can come and hang out and have more interactive discussions.

I was going to comment on this article:

http://www.marsdaily.com/reports/The_Appeal_Of_Mars_999.html

But I’ve been to busy at work and at home to really put together anything as of yet, since I wanted to post pictures along with my argument. I’ll have to get to it later.

I did, however, want to note these two articles also recently posted on the MNSFS mailing list:

http://www.rocketryplanet.com/content/view/192/38/

And:

http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/searagon.htm