I've been reading on what current physics say about the possibility of time travel. There are three ways that you could create a closed-timelike-curve which would allow traveling back in time. One is a gravitational wormhole – made by combining a black hole and a white hole. Hard to do – because you need a LOT of negative energy to keep it open. We know negative energy can exist - we've MADE It in laboratories, but you'd need a LOT – for a warp-drive you'd need about 10-billion times hte mass of the universe worth (oops).

Then there is a magnetic wormhole – much easier to do (doesn't need negative energy) but it does need a shitload of magnetism and the length of the wormhole is inversely proportionate to how much you have. Any wormhole made with the magnets we got today would have to be about 150 lightyears long – and magnets all the way from one end to the other… expensive to build methinks. You could probably find short ones on neutron stars – where there is incredible magnetic forces, but since the gravity there will also squash you into a cube about 3mm on a side… not really a safe place to go for a time-trip  

Option three is the most practical. Ronald Mallet discovered that  light too can bend space-time, and light can be bent. Light at normal vaccuum speed needs a LOT of energy to bend, but we CAN slow light down, Harvard experiments have managed to bring it down to below the speed of sound using Bose-Einstein concentrate. True that exists near absolute zero – but it's already more practical.

A bent light time-machine is by far the simplest, make a circle out of it, and walk along the donut further and further into the past until you step out. It's still beyond current technology but out of all the options – the one which has the fewest practical problems to overcome, and most likely the closest to being practical to build. 

All three however have one major problem – none of them will let you travel back any further than the moment of their construction. You can always go back AS FAR AS the time you first built it… but never earlier than that.

Bringing us to my point… I can't possibly be the only one who has noticed that this ENTIRELY solves the cumulative audience paradox and partially the grandfather paradox can I ? Why don't we have records of millions of time-travelers witnessing the birth of Christ ? Because time machines built say in 2020, can never go back to the birth of Christ. They are great if you keep them running for a while and you want to go back from 2065 to 2020 – but you can't GO back far enough. This solves the cumulative audience paradox for all historic events prior to their construction (and thus any historic events we can currently use to state that this paradox even exists).

As for the grandfather paradox – it rules it out entirely for the constructors (they are already conceived and born by the time they built it, they can't go back far enough to prevent it, and it only enters again if it's kept running enough for a future time traveler who was conceived AFTER it's construction to use it to prevent said conception happening. Of course, this may or may not be possible, either way to build and keep running such a device would in all cases be expensive and one can therefore imagine that is' use would be rather well regulated. Whoever i s paying ot keep it going over numerous generations will get to choose who can go back, how far, and for what purpose. Killing your grandfather probably won't get stamped by the managers who will take over

Still it does raise the less violent paradox version of a future traveler going back to right after construction and destroying the machine through sabotage, so it never ran long enough for him to have used it that far, so he couldn't have gone back in time to destroy it, but he did, so it did, so … solve that one !

Yeah, I really DO think about this sort of stuff for fun… 

It's time for another filkday over at the silentcoder brain, and you have to suffer through it with me.

Pwn Me.
Sung to the Tune of "Rape Me" by Nirvanna

Pwn me
Pwn me, my friend
Pwn me
Pwn me again

I'm not the only one .IIIII [3x]
I'm not the only one… 

Root me
Goatse my desktop again
Hack me
Pwn me, my friend

I'm not the only one.IIIII [3x]
I'm not the only one… 

My favorite taco sauc
I fear your open source
You wiped my data this morn
Replaced my thesis with porn

Pwn me
Pwn me, my friend
Pwn me
Pwn me, again

I'm not the only one ?, IIIII [3x]
I'm not the only one..

Pwn me! (Pwn me!)[8x]
Pwn me!

Ouranophobia is the fear of heaven. Now of course that sounds a bit unusual – of all the things people can be afraid of heaven doesn't exactly jump to the top of the list. Those who believe it exists, after all, believe it to be an ultimate reward – life beyond death and opposed to eternal suffering beyond death… it doesn't sound like something most people would be scared off now does it ?

Well the phobia exists, there is pretty much nothing on this planet (real or conceptual) that somebody, somewhere isn't obsessively afraid off. It's just one of those weird quirks of the human mind – reinforced by the fear-based advertising and news of the consumer-culture that people have a tendency to develop obsessive fears of things. The classic joke among atheists is that Ouranophobia is a very valid fear – after all heaven is where all the Christians hang out and the thought of an eternity in their company would scare the hell (see what I did there) out of a lot of people…

Well now Ouranophobia has gained even greater legitimacy.  In South Africa our esteemed, brave and fearless dealer has announced to us that the way to get to heaven is to vote for the ruling party. That in fact rather than checking the mystical book of St. Peter – Heaven's gates can be opened simply with an ANC membership card. A sort of "my name isn't on the list mister bouncer but look I got a platinum credit card" at the nightclub approach to religion I guess.

So if hanging out with the self-righteous (I always found that one odd – doesn't being self-righteous directly remove the very reason somebody would be a believer in the first place ?), judgmental hypocrites of organized religion for all eternity wasn't scary enough – now you'll have to join them with the self-righteous, self-enriching disciples of the ANC's church of tenderpreneurism and the majestic priests of cabinet… yep… suddenly heaven became a great deal scarier. 

Between the penguin-suited elders and the penguin-suited black diamonds the place would resemble Sandton City on a Sunday afternoon – and while there are definitely some scarier places in the world – right now, I'm having serious trouble thinking of more than one or two. 

All the blame for this post should be given to @jacobril on twitter.

In a far distant corner of the unfashionable South-Western spiral arm of the Indian Monsoon lies an unregarded yellow-red lump of rock. The ape-like inhabitants of this rock have a problem – in that most of the time nobody else in the world really acknowledges their existence, that their contribution to world culture consists of a guy who catches crocodiles for a living and a wannabe of the same guy who got stabbed in the heart by a fish and that their importance to world politics is almost as big as that of a solar eclipse that is only visible from Jupiters's moon Io. And then suddenly it all changed and the country that most people would be hard pressed to remember  on a typical day came to be the star of every front page in the world…

Not since the place was first founded by criminals were so many people being bailed out. As they rush to save their loved ones you can, in your minds eye, hear their desperate baahs for help superimposed upon the thwack-uh-thwack-ah-thwack-oof-thwack-oooh-thwach-ugh which is a woman's tennis match while Australia manages to dominate both main stream and sports news channels for the first time in it's existence.

And in the far-off distance the outback lies in perpetual baking heat, a kangaroo drinks from the dust-swirled remains of a billabong, a boomerang slices through the air and a snake curls itself around a branch seeking some shelter from the parching sun. On a hilltop a bush ranger sits, the corks around his hat hanging still in the windless air and wonders if somehow they can get a little of that water sent here.

As he stairs up at the cloudless sky, a small pocket radio brings news of the rising waters and he tries to remember what rain even looks like. He turns away from the scene and seeks shelter in the lee of an overhanging rock, retunes the radio to a sports channel and opens his breaches while trying to imagine that what he is hearing is something far more exciting than two steroid pumped power-women hitting a ball back and forth with oversized fly-swatters.

On a nearby island a small marsupial, famed for it's ferocious temper rushes through the underbrush in search of grub and other delicacies utterly unaware that when the rest of the world hears it's name the image that springs to their mind is of a horn-eared, bow-legged creature that spins like a compressed tornado and annoys Bugs Bunny.

In the far off Sidney a politician announces a new law that blatantly discriminates against aborigines and refugees and amidst the chaos of wild cheering ads a few more websites to the blacklist for the giant government censorship program, ensuring that young Australians will never have to suffer the potentially damaging effects of political commentary or women with breasts less than B-cup in size.

As the sun sets over the giant kleenex box honored by the name of opera house and the minds eye pulls back you see ones more the tragedy of human suffering in the floods, the stupidity of purposeless human endeavour on the tennis court and stark contrasts between them. The fortunes paid to the women with skirts shorter than the thickness of their thigh-muscles to be hidden in Swiss Bank Accounts and guarded over by tax attorneys with the social grace of a rabid junkyard rotweiler while other people struggle to protect what little they posses from the fury of nature hoping against hope that political rhetoric would through some previously unobserved magic translate into real aid this time.

And unobserved a man sitting on the far side of the ocean notices all this, contemplates it and writes a horribly tasteless blog like this one about it all as Australia adds yet another minor footnote to the history of the world. One part of him smiling at his puns and clever wordplay and intelligent social commentary, another aghast at the subject of his own humor – and no part strong enough to censor either.

Wednesday evening I met up with Megan and Caitlin on Dolphin beach where we went for a long beach walk joking and chatting before heading out for some pizza. After the pizza we decided to go to the Banned Rock Lounge nearby where we went and sat in the outside courtyard by the small fold-out pool with our drinks.

The place was pretty empty (it being a Wednesday night and all) but there were a few people there. The table next to us had three guys who were all shirtless and behind us was a table with two more guys and one girl in one of those "I'm so hot" outfits with a red top that showed plenty of cleavage. 

They one guy at the table next to us was in that friendly drunk stage where he was trying being best mates with everybody but mostly we were pretty much ignoring the other people and chatting among ourselves while enjoying the club's excellent music. At some point the three guys from the table ended up in some sort of competition showing off their bare chests to the girl at the other table so she could pick the best tan and torso.

We joked about this at our table and the friendly drunk came over and asked me why I hadn't joined in the competition. I looked at him and jokingly said "Because I'm the guy sitting with two hot chicks already". He responded: "So ? I don't see them on your lap". I was going to reply "Yet" but Megan piped up and said "Was there earlier" and gave me the sexiest wink you can imagine…

At which point mister friendly drunk slunk back to his table, tail between his legs while I gloated like never before in my life ! 

Just in case it's not obvious. This post is satirical.

• Capitalism – the idea that the purpose of the economy is to make legal pretend-people richer than actual people.
• Socialism – the idea that the purpose of the economy is to be a legal Robin Hood, steal from the rich and give to the poor. 
• Libertarianism –  the belief (always heavily disguised as free-market capitalism)  that if any member of a society cares about any other member of that society the society will collapse.
• Raegonomics – (also known as trickle-down economics) the belief that a state should fund it's excesses by overtaxing those least capable of affording higher taxes while reducing taxes from those who are most capable of paying taxes.
•  Palinism – a version of Raegonomics that claims to be focussed on reducing state excesses while simultaneously promoting expensive and continuous warfare and military expense.
• Merkelism – the idea that rigid job protection and an economy primarily focussed on producing actual goods is stable and can be buffered against recessions by the spending power of a population whose jobs remain secured is notable in that the one thing it could never manage to export to even one other country was itself.
• Obamaism – the idea that it is better to create new jobs than preserve existing ones, but better to preserve existing corporations than to let new ones replace them.
• Mbekinomics – the idea that a country with no credible military threat and extensive poverty should rather spend huge sums on advanced military technology than food, a sort of socialistic Palinism.
• Zumaism – the idea that the leader of the nation can create half a million jobs by having half a million children and hiring them each a personal nanny.
• Thatcherism – Any attempt to implement Raegonomics in an existing wellfare state based on the belief that trickle-down-economics is metaphoric of a multi-story long-drop with a coin-operated door on the second-floor.
• Bushism – Raegonimic Palinism but done exclusively with negative numbers.

Okay, I'm out of ideas – but please feel free to add yours to the comments.

Yes I turned the song that started the genre of thrash metal into a slightly sarcastic song about romance…sorta.
Yeah, I went there.

Sung to: Battery by Metallica
.
Calling the eyes pretty
Say the hair is shiny
No split ends to tear away
.
Hypnotizing power
Compare her to a flower
Flattery is here to stay
.
Feeling out her boundaries
Interest has found me
Cannot stop the flattery
.
Plying on the sweet words
Slipping in the heat words
Can’t resist the flattery
.
“Wanna start a family ?”
Flattery is found in me
Flattery
Flattery
.
Say her boobs are awesome
Tonight she won’t be wholesome
Never any impotency
.
Hungry kisses seeker
Gentle touches sneaker
Growing the insanity
.
Feeling out her boundaries
Interest has found me
Cannot stop the flattery
.
Plying on the sweet words
Slipping in the heat words
Can’t resist the flattery
.
“Wanna start a family ?”
Flattery is found in me
Flattery
Flattery
.
Circle of eruption
Teases bringing traction
Promises of energy
.
Whipping up a fury
Never gonna hurry
We create the flattery
.
Feeling out her boundaries
Interest has found me
Cannot stop the flattery
.
Plying on the sweet words
Slipping in the heat words
Can’t resist the flattery
.
“Wanna start a family ?”
Flattery is found in me
Flattery
Flattery
Flattery
Flattery

While my supervilian powers are well known within the elite circles of my chosen lieutennants (and a more select subset there-off among those chosen to become members of my Harem after I become the dark ruler of the world), nonetheless there are some powers that I believe would greatly aid me in my conquest and which, as yet, I have not managed to acquire.

• The power to make annoying songs of my choosing stick in people’s heads (always good to make any enterprising heroes think they have become manic depressives)
• The power to make stupidity hurt (continously).
• The power to always hit every streetlamp green
• The power to talk entirely in rhyming palindromes (because it would be awesome damnit)
• The power to force a person to think rationally about his next action (actually that would be kind of a hero power but what the heck)
• The power to instill mortal fear in telemarketers by whistling down the phone line
• The power to reverse entropy (so I can unscramble eggs you know)
• The power to prevent stupid things from becoming fads

This list is far from complete, but should give a fair idea of the kind of supervilian powers I believe will allow me as your future lord and master to rule with a relatively benign iron fist.

So I’m sure you’re all in one of two categories by now. Either you are eagerly waiting for the next chapter in OMGpwnies’s diary, or you’re just eagerly waiting for me to write about anything at all else for a change.
Well today I figured I’d serve the second category and write about something else. For those in the former group – don’t worry, a new diary is coming tomorrow – and it includes some pretty cool stuff – including the tanking of Gnomerigan.

Today’s post is somewhere between humor, philosophy and politics… but ultimately it’s a bit of light hearted dreaming with some serious moments… I am about to list my top ten predictions on what would happen if I lived in a perfect world… and then my top ten predictions on what will probably happen instead. Timeline… give it say, 2 years – putting us neatly in 2012.

And yes it’s all very silly, but hopefully, in silliness lies a bit of make-you-think.

In a perfect world
1. Will Wheaton becomes the first unanimously elected president of the United States
2. My wife Felicia Venter (born Day) and I are decide to name our first born daughter Jaina Proudmoore Venter.
3. Seph Blatter’s four year trial for single-handedly bankrupting South Africa ends with his conviction and sentencing to ten years in Rooigrond prison.
4. Julius Malema’s body is found in his parktown home, apparently having drowned in his heated pool after going for a drunken swim. His will has all his assets sold and the money used to form a trust-fund for poverty-relief (somebody told him it would look good in the press and there’d be plenty of time to change it after everyone had forgotten again).
5. Steve Hoffmeir and Joost Van Der Westhuizen announce that they are in fact gay, and are getting married. The entire country gossips about who will cheat first and who with. A year later they discover they were both cheating at the same time… wih Nathaniel.
6. As a direct result of the above – every conservative Afrikaans family in the country suddenly decide that moffies are cool, and not the spawn of Satan after all and furthermore declare that they have always thought so and “look I even have a moffie friend who cuts my hair”. They can’t figure out that you won’t really pass much mustard as having gone beyond discrimination while you continue to use pejorative terms like “moffie” but at least they are making the effort.
7. After yet another spate of shocking revelations of corruption, the accused politicians actually resign their jobs and apologize to the people.
8. Multiple independent sources determine that violent crime in South Africa is now the lowest in the world. Nobody can even remember what all those razor-wire fences were for.
9. The government declares digital freedom a basic human right. Copyright terms are reduced to 14 years, software may not be legally sold or distributed in any other form without source code and there is a ban on “protective measure” technologies that could interfere with citizens exercise of their fair dealing rights. Copyright propaganda that overstates the limits of copyright becomes grounds for having said copyright revoked. The success of the program in South Africa leads to it’s adoption in the EU and Canada and subsequent enforcement as WIPO treaty
10. HIV vaccination is approved for human use and subsequently becomes a legal requirement much like polio in the past, with the tide of new infections stemmed, the eradication of the disease becomes a viable reality

What will probably happen instead
1. Outrage over Obama’s liberal politics lead to a far-right swing in US politics and Rush Limbaugh becomes the leader of the free world, thus effectively removing any “freedom” in it for anybody who isn’t a Straight,White, Wealthy,American, Christian.
2. Still a single divorcee, I sit on my couch watching Doctor Who and trying to decide if I’ll eat pronutro for dinner or bother to call for pizza
3. President-for-life Jacob Zuma announces that after his sterling success running the reserve bank for 3 years and maintaining both inflation and interest rates of over 30%, Seph Blatter is to become the new Minister of Finance.
4. Julius Malema’s body is found in a the pool of a Sandton Socialite of the new “Black-Kugel” variety, as is hers, both apparently overdosed on cocaine which they were snorting through rolled up copies of the South African constitution.. Rather than finally ruining faith in his rhetoric, he is hailed as a martyr and the ANCYL announces that in his memory they will never again elect a leader who has passed any subjects in school… ever.
5. Steve and Joost , both feeling their last scandals sufficiently forgotten, announces their next marriages. Somehow, yet again, both are getting married to models.
6. The ACDP announces that should they win enough seats in parliament they will campaign for the ritual stoning of gay people as an official policy. Thousands of Afrikaans families switch their votes from the DA to the ACDP.
7. After yet another spate of corruption charges, numerous MPs are found guilty, fined and return to work the next day with no concerns about the matter.
8. South Africa’s violent crime rate actually hits a daily death-toll that surpasses that of the (continuing) war in Iraq.
9. The government declares that Microsoft and Apple are now the only .legal entities allowed to sell software in South Africa, fair dealing laws are scrapped, and under pressure from WIPO a DMCA style prohibition on bypassing protection measures is put in place. Downloading an MP3 now carries the death penalty they refuse to give to murderers.
10. The minister of health declares that, in contrast to the FDA, the HIV Vaccine which the was declared fit-for-human-trials in 2009 already and is now declared safe and usable, has a minor risk of damaging your hair follicles and will therefore be banned in South Africa. It takes 6 years and numerous court cases to get it made available in state hospitals and those who get the vaccine are generally excommunicated from their churches on suspicion of promiscuity.

So… which future do you want to live in? What will you do to make the right one happen ?