The Clairvoyant

Hope I don't get burnt out with all these updates, it would be so sad when I finally get up the steam again (of course this is sarcastic). The difference from the summer is that stuff actually happens. The biggest news to hit the Swedish political scene is that one of the Sweden Democrats has turned into a wild card and left the party, still retaining his seat. This means that it is a possibility that the Alliance is one seat closer to the magic number of 175 (the current is 173 so they are missing 2). Of course, they can't touch him since his past in SD means he's almost an outcast. To avoid the future debate that they are just power hungry and leave themselves open for attacks from the red-green parties he probably would be left alone up to his own schemes. This logic probably apply to the red-green as well, especially since the only possible party would be the Social Democrats, the green and left party are diametrically different in the only question that SD has shown any interest in, immigration. Doesn't help that he have some problems with alcohol and medication. Well, it make it easier for the Alliance overall since the opposition is getting more fragmented and could raise doubt about SD over the health of the party. The interesting thing is that I thought of this possibilities as late as yesterday (if you choose to believe me), and that the danger for SD would be that one of the wild cards would adopt an even more extreme party like the National Democrats, incidentally they themselves where once a part of SD that broke lose. If that would happen their effort to appear as a "clean" party would be severely damaged if that would be seen as an interchangeable political view in the party.

And that was the political update for this update, now to different things. Now it seems that someone is looking into my mind, damn americans, what can't you do? Well, it's just some news that scientist have constructed a computer that if you put enough data in it could foretell events in the future. The thing is that I thought on a similar idea a long time ago. Simply program a search engine to search the web after certain buzzwords (preferably news and social media in all known languishes) that would give an indication for certain geographic hotspots around the world where something might happen. Then you have to analyze the data (it's here I find that political scientist would be very good to have) and it's here we have the problems with this idea. It's not foolproof. First, this idea is only workable if everything is reported in the news or by people, a blackout on information or no internet, then it collapses (incidentally the computer in the article has a similar problem, since it appears someone has to put in the information and in that case it would be to late to stop or warn about what's happening which defeats its purpose). Secondly, my idea is prone to the human error since it need humans to analyzes  the information that is gathered. This of course needs someone more knowledgeable with these sorts of things, but the possibilities are many if you would get it to work. You could warn of future trouble or even catastrophes (earthquakes and tsunamis often have smaller shakes and so on before, but they are often missed in the media so if some buzzwords could catch them and a geologist would interpret the data you could give a statistical prediction of what would happen). Other things would be that gambling on the stock-market could be a bit easier (if we lock-on to certain parameters and companies an economist could theoretically provide an idea if the company's stock would rise or fall). Personally I would call it the Oracle Project and put it in a skyscraper I would call the Tower of Delphi. The gambling on the stock-market would be the financial branch that pays for the whole project and with the surplus it would probably be best to branch out in different areas so in case the human error makes an appearance. Pity I don't know anything about programming, and then it probably wouldn't work because all those assigned on the analysis team would just be on Twitter and Facebook.

Final thing for today, I finally finished Secret of Mana, a game I wanted as a kid, but we neither had a SNES when it came out and it was rather rare when we got one... in the late 90's. A bit pity since I probably would have appreciated it a lot more then than now. Maybe because I might have finished it in one sitting, I took a break for half a year or more so the story went a bit over my head. But the graphics was still nice, the controls a bit awkward until you gotten used to it, but the damn ring-system was kinda annoying at times. The music was alright, but I couldn't help but draw parallels with Chrono Trigger that came a couple of years later. Certain bits are somewhat similar sounding, especially the palace music after you gotten the Mana seeds are reminding me of the "sealed doors" and somewhere in Secret of Mana something from either Ocean or Zeal Palace. The ending a bit sad (but that's usually expected for Square and now Square Enix), but the impact was somewhat lessened due to the pause I took, although that didn't help when I met an important end character after I resumed the game and didn't feel emotionally attached to it (might have to be due to the ending being spoiled years ago in a video game magazine).