Here be spoilers for Doctor Who. If you’ve seen the episode ‘Doomsday’, then you can read this. If you haven’t seen ‘Doomsday’ but you want spoilers, you can read this. If you don’t want spoilers at all, exit this tab right now.

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Still here? Let’s get to work then, shall we? This post is all about a certain regeneration of the Doctor and a certain companion.

Yep, these two. Today I am focusing on the goodbye scene in Doomsday when the Doctor leaves Rose in the alternate universe. If you need to refresh your memory, here’s the video again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvkjthzlyV8

I hope that didn’t make you cry.

Anyway, here’s my theory: if the Doctor wanted to say I love you, he would’ve said so.

I mean really, he had plenty of time to just blurt it out. Right after she said the dreaded three words, he could’ve gone something like ‘I love you too’ but he didn’t. He stalled. Go rewatch the video. See it? See the obvious stalling? See the seconds he wastes by staring at her face? SEE IT?

So yes. I think he was stalling. Why would he love her?

1. The age difference is absurd. 900+ and 19. From the start, it was sort of doomed.
2. She basically raped the TARDIS. (more on this in a future post)
3. She’s just one girl in a long chain of companions, but she can’t accept that. Look at how she treats Reinette, Sarah Jane, Jabe, and everyone else. No.
4. She built a dimension cannon, even when the Doctor TOLD HER NOT TO.
5. She doesn’t care if universes will collapse, she just wants some huggytime. Excuse me, I live in one of those universes. I don’t particularly want to die.
6. NO.
7. NO.
8. No.

As you can see, I am not a shipper of Rose/anyone. I think she was a bad companion, but I’ll talk about that in a different post.

And that’s basically it. In summary: the Doctor was probably stalling when he said goodbye and I don’t like Rose at all. Bye!

« Un homme d’esprit de ma connaissance croit qu’on pourrait cependant regarder la durée comme une quatrième dimension » «Mais c’est aussi une sensation. »

D’Alembert

Vous souvenez-vous de ce téléfilm : « La quatrième dimension » qui passait à la télévision dans les années 80 ?

Comment était-il réalisé ?

Dans un premier temps il y avait un homme en costume cravate (le narrateur : Rod Sterling, scénariste de la série) qui évoluait dans le décor où l’histoire allait se dérouler. Puis, il dressait le portrait des personnages et souhaitait aux spectateurs : « Bienvenue dans la quatrième dimension ! »

Ensuite nous rentrions dans le vif du sujet et les personnages étaient projetés dans un monde étrange ou inconnu : une autre réalité.

Puis, pour finir, l’homme en costume-cravate concluait en exposant son point de vue sur la situation des personnages. J’ai choisi de comparer le rôle de cet homme à celui du médium qui baigne en toute conscience, comme un électron libre et par-delà la logique dans une autre réalité.

Dans un premier temps, je pense que le médium perçoit, indépendamment de lui-même, la réalité passée, présente et future de son consultant car il est entre deux mondes qu’il peut relier (médium signifie milieu) – entre ces deux mondes il y a : la vacuité, le vide, un flux d’énergie où tout est possible.

Le médium est donc entre la réalité présente et absolue et accède à une réalité extérieure par ce canal (tout comme l’homme du téléfilm).

Ainsi, son esprit n’étant pas conditionné, il accède à une vision « plus vraie » des choses.

Pour conclure ce billet je vous invite à regarder un épisode de la 4^ème dimension qui présente le cas d’un homme projeté dans son passé et qui finira, après avoir vécu cette expérience, par regarder vers l’avenir d’une manière plus optimiste (dans cet épisode Rod Sterling n’est pas filmé).

Easy as A, B, C . . . from BB

Utah author, Dene Low—a well-educated woman and writer of both fiction and non-fiction—has participated in panel discussions, taught classes, and led workshops on a variety of writerly subjects. In January, I was privileged to attend her new workshop on using neuroscience in the writing process—which really gave us all something to “think” about!

Welcome, Dene. How long have you been writing? The first time I intentionally wrote a story, I was in the fourth grade—so, several decades. My story was about a mermaid and I even made my own little book for my story. It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I got published.

What areas are you most interested in writing about now? My first love is fantasy, but I work on whatever idea I come up with. Right now, I am working on manuscripts for fantasy, paranormal, mystery/romance, historical, and instructional books. Some of my ideas are for young adult/middle grade and some are for grown-ups. This fall a non-fiction book I wrote about grandparenting in blended families is coming out. Another book, a humorous mystery, is also coming out either this year or next. My agent is currently selling three of my fantasy manuscripts.

You have some interesting ideas on how the mind works, and how that relates to writing. How have these theories informed your writing, especially your fiction writing? Absolutely! I have developed a writing system based on using neuroscience to explain why some innovative writing strategies work and how to choose various strategies in different writing situations. Last fall I decided to test it. I was 16,000 words into a manuscript and I wanted to get it done before Christmas, so I took a week off work and used the system. I had scheduled eight days of writing, but I got the first draft of the book done in six days—an additional 32,000 words. Then I used the revision part of my system to revise the book. Pretty slick.

Tell us about your first publication of a book? The first book I had published was Petronella Saves Nearly Everyone, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. It’s a young adult fantasy/mystery set in an alternative 1903 London. I was actually working on my dissertation for my Ph.D. at the time when I got the idea for this book. I think I was so bogged down with academic language that I needed something just plain fun to write and the book is definitely fun. I finished it at the same time I finished my dissertation. My friend, the wonderful Rick Walton, encouraged me to write it and encouraged me to send it out to several publishers. Editor Kate O’Sullivan called me one day just as I was going to teach a class to tell me they wanted to publish my book. I was excited—and even more excited to realize I’d just sold a book to a major publisher from the slush pile. The original idea was to write a series, so I’d have the second one done, but the economic downturn caused those plans to be shelved.

Any final ideas you’d like to leave with us? The writing journey is never completed. It is continuous. The only things you should not do? Never give up and never think you can’t learn more.

Thanks, Dene.  Your prodigious writing output is inspiring, and we’re loving the idea of “Persistence Pays”!  Thanks for sharing.

See you day-after-tomorrow for Sunday’s Snippets!

Consider that the official view of the Catholic church is that a marriage is not consummated until a child is conceived. In fact a husband could nullify such a “unholy union” without having to suffer the harsh chastity consequences of a divorce! So thereby I conclude that childless sex does not necessarily spiritually bind man to a woman. That is not what makes them “one in flesh”. That only happens by way of a child they had together! The child is what the Bible is referring to as the oneness of flesh that exists between husband and wife! it’s not some sexually produced biological hormonally morphed “cleaving” of a man to a woman by reason of sexual intercourse alone! So in fact childless/unholy relationships are not yet considered bound marriages and could be nullified without the expensive excommunicating recourse of a divorce!

They say that Pi is a fixed constant that can never be changed and I say to that “balderdash”! In fact it is not even fixed! How can a number with a never ending fraction associated to it be fixed? 3.14…. ad infinitum is not a fixed number! I thought how nice it would be that such a profound number like Pi be something like a whole indivisible prime number like 3 instead. Have it play right into that sacred trilogy thingy making it ever more so reverent! Wouldn’t it be nice that a circle with a whole number radius should have a whole number area as a result? How grand it would be to say that that a circle with a radius of one has an area of 3 instead of 3.14… ad infinitum! It’s simple to do actually once one let’s go the premise that our measuring stick is immutably fixed! All that needs to be done is to reduce the space between it’s measuring marks. Let’s calculate how much by using the area of a circle with a radius of 1 to simplify the math.

3 .14159* r² = 3

r² = 3/3.14159 = 0.95493

r = = .9772

So if we change our standard of measures by reducing them across the board by 97.72% then the new shorter ruler when used to measure a circle with a radius of 1 that radius will be physically shorter and thereby the circle will be physically smaller and the monumental task of determining the new Pi number by a grueling triangulation process utilizing our new slightly shorter ruler would equate to exactly 3! Think of it this way, think of it as if you were to measure the shorter new radius of 1 with the old ruler it would only measure .9772 and not 1 so then the area of the circle would calculate the same as the new math determines it to be namely 3 (3.14159*.9772² = 3). Both still calculate the area of that same physical circle to be 3 and that’s all that matters!

All we are truly doing is fine tuning our measuring devices so that whole number radiuses will produce whole number areas is all which should make intuitive sense to just about everyone except perhaps those that have the profitable copyright protection on the old rulers! Heck I could have Pi equal anything I want by changing the measuring stick to be the appropriate length to make the calculation of it work! For instance I thought this would be tricky example let’s make Pi = 1 by reducing the physical size of our new ruler by ;

3.14159 * r² = 1

r² = 1/3.14159 = 0.31831

r = = 0.56419

56.4%

That works for a radius of 1. Now an area should be able to be calculated by just squaring the radius of it as measured by our new ruler. Let’s see if a radius of 2 works. New ruler says it should be 4 let’s see if the old ruler measures it the same.

3.14159 * (2*.564)² = 3.997

Pretty darn close and when you consider that I rounded these numbers a great deal it would certainly calculate very nearly to 4 precisely!! So if I were to take our existing ruler and reduce either it’s size by 56.4% or keep it’s size the same and increase the number of inches on it to be a tad over 21 (12/.564= 21.28). Then I eliminated the need of a Pi constant at all and the formula to compute the area of a circle would be r²! How’s that for a mathematical revelation!

PS

To help you swallow this a bit better let me enlighten you to the history of how the size of an inch was determined. It was the rule of a thumb at first. But not all thumbs were the same and those who had bigger thumbs were getting away with the King’s share of things, perhaps even why Giants were created to have the greatest trade advantages of all! Then it was thought that the standard should be 3 grains of rice laid end to end, but again not all rice grains are created equal! Eventually we finally decided on a length of measure that was set in stone and that it’s copied size was used as the definitive measure of our modern day inch! Certainly no exact science derived it but just an arbitrary decision of it made law! All I say is let’s be more precise with it now!

PPS

Beware Not all Pi’s are Created Equal

The above discovery concerned me in that by refining the measure of a circle’s radius effects the area calculation. Consider the difference in physical lengths that exist between the metric system and ours! I felt that someone was getting the short end of the stick here and in fact that is the case! I am going to use as an example the area calculation of a circle that has a radius of one meter that we convert over into square yards! The area of a circle with a radius of one meter is 3.14159 m² to this would be applied the standard conversion factor of 1.09631 yards to a meter to suffice us to say that circle has the equivalent area of 3.43567 yds² and we would then multiply the price we pay for such yardage. But watch this! If we were to take our yard stick and use it to measure the one meter radius it would measure 1.09631 yards and the actual square yardage of that 1 meter circle would instead calculate to be 3.7573 square yards! So given the above math to conduct a commercial transaction, Us Americans would be skimming approx 1/3 of a square yard and getting it for free! Doesn’t seem like a whole lot but one you’re dealing in big business quantities it amounts to a great deal! So that fixed number Pi truly must be recalculated for each and every standard of measuring device that is calibrated differently then another trading country’s! For our particular example Metric Pi would have to be;

Metric Pi x 1² = 3.7573

Metric Pi = 3.7573

So those selling metrically and want to trade with an American concern need to use this factored Pi number so as to not be skimmed out of an honest profit!

Stay tuned I’ve used this logic to eliminate Leap Years and made a year equal exactly 365 days instead! All I had to do was shorten the tick of a tock ever so slightly!

Now that we have eliminated that fudge of Pi thingy it’s onwards to eliminate the need for the fudgy Leap year thingy too and thereby what it will take to insure our current year now equals exactly 365 days only! And the solution is simple, we need to change the current standard metronome of time by slowing it down ever so slightly! In other words slow down our clocks tick tocks! By how much you say? By precisely

365/365.242199 = 0.9993368811143314795342145007729

and I shall round to 99.934%. A very imperceptible difference of the length of a second’s tick but one that will insure that our year’s calendar days, as dictated by our new clocks, will work out to be precisely 365 days with no leap year corrections needed! How easy was that!

For The Templar Paradox, we spent time in Rome again and a new trip to Salzburg which was actually really quite a pleasant surprise. In fact it’s one of those places I’d go back to. For my next instalment we are off to Berlin in September, as it’s changed so much since my last visit in 2004. I need to use some of the older parts of town and delve into the Eastern part of the city a little more.

Some of THE TEMPLAR PARADOX is based in Paris, and I lived there for a while so writing about it wasn’t difficult. However what was harder to do was remember all of the back streets and place names!

The solution here is the other part sinister but part amazing Google Street View. Now I admit I find it a bit creepy in some ways but in others it’s a godsend when you cannot actually get to somewhere or you need the detail of a look or a building or a street scene quickly, maybe need to follow a route, a chase, an escape, anything, it really makes the difference.

For scenes in the French south-west, well I lived there too and spent probably 5 of the last 19 years there on or off, so it has deep resonance and I am very much attached to the place.

Yet the surprise comes not from what I knew, but about what we were living around without knowing it: The Templar Horse you can see on www.jonchamps.com which if anything was the astonishing surprise of a lifetime.

I’ll be updating the website with new research images to link to the book next week. Come back and see more then.

Comments on your way of researching and any tips and ideas always welcome!

The funicular railway up to the Festung Hohensalzburg is one if the shortest full-time official railway lines in the world at barely 400m long! (1200ft)

Gender mainstreaming is a strategy that has been implemented since 1997 and aims to promote gender equality in policy development, research, advocacy/ dialogue, legislation, resource allocation, and planning, implementation and monitoring of programmes and projects. The global portrait of equality of women is very varied. Women in developed countries are given more equality and opportunities than women in developing countries who very few rights and are treated unequally to men. Whether in a developed country or a developing country there should be equal rights, responsibilities and opportunities for women and men and girls and boys.

Today some believe women are in fact treated equally, others feel women are given better opportunities than men, while it is also considered that in various sectors like business, politics and education women are unequal and will remain so in these male dominated areas.

When Darwin was younger, his dad wanted Charles to become successful and to do that Charles needed good grades. However, Charles was to interested in studying insects or observing animals. He later, met one of his mentors in the new school. His mentor also studied animals and collected bugs. Naturally, Charles became a teacher’s pet for that mentor. This ticked his dad off a bit. His dad started yelling at him about being only one of the teachers pets and that he should stop studying bugs and animals and start getting to the real stuff.

Before long, he was invited on to a ship going around the world. On the trip, they had heard about boy named Charles with and his interest in bugs and animals. Since they were going ’round the world and stopping on islands, they wanted Charles to study the animals along the way. Charles accepted because not only was he getting away from his dad, but also living out his dream.

Charles’s theory started when he spotted a bird with a thin beak and on the next island, spotted a bird of the same species with a thicker beak. He then began to study the same species on different islands. That’s how the theory of evolution started.

The theory states that certain differences provide benefits toward survival making it more likely those differences will be passed on to children. Now that evolution has been accepted as right, people are less ignorant of what’s happening around us every day. Each time something is born, it is different from its parents. Sometimes, each day it’s different; our taste buds change, our intelligence changes, everything about everything changes.

My cats have also evolved. Instead of having a regular cat’s paw, theirs have extra toes and claws. This makes them more efficient at hunting, grabbing stuff, climbing, and being sure-footed. Probably two decades later people will be playing video games with cats (if either last that long)!

Humans are evolving too! My eye doctor told me that more and more people in the world are needing eye glasses because our eyes are becoming more oval in shape, rather than perfectly round. Connecting this with the theory of evolution, I think it is because we are not really needing stronger eyesight anymore. People long ago didn’t have glasses and because danger was lurking at every corner, better sight made them more likely to live. We glasses and lasik for that now.

I liked this book very much and would totally recommend it.

Career Information Learning Theories, Warwick Fri  14  Jun 2013

This one-day course will provide all information specialists with the  opportunity to explore and synthesise different theoretical perspectives  and to formulate and articulate their own theory of career information  learning.

We will look at a range of theoretical perspectives and explore how these may be applied to and underpin our work as careers information professionals.

By the end of this course, participants should have or be able to:

• have an overview of the broad themes in traditional career development theories;
• be able to describe the benefits of using a theoretical basis to underpin the provision of    careers information
• understand how the acquisition of career knowledge can be described as a learning  process;
• be able to describe the four theoretical perspectives outlined in the training and to apply the process of ‘triangulation’.

Find out more

This is one of three new one-day courses run as a part of the Postgraduate Certificate in Career Education, Information and Guidance in HE (CEIGHE) under the AGCAS/Warwick Career Information module. Registrants must take all three courses as part of their certificate module. The other courses are Technology Update and Writing for the Web. ( also good stuff!)

So, I just watched Inception and I really admire it’s writer, Christopher Nolan, for creating such a great movie. Yes, I know, it’s a 2010 movie and most of you have already watched it, but for those who haven’t watched it yet, I recommend you to do it.

However, the ending of the movie really kept me thinking – did the top, his totem, stopped spinning and Cobb made it to the reality; or did the top kept spinning, Cobb never escaped Limbo and he’s only dreaming a happy ending?

Well, I had to do a little research to escape out of confusion and to make sure that my instincts are right, that he made it to reality. Here’s a post from another wordpress blog which explains the Inception’s ending:

source: http://funwithcole.wordpress.com/2010/07/24/inception-ending-the-top-falls-and-here-is-the-proof/

By titling this post “Inception Ending” it goes without saying we’re about to embark into Spoiler territory, but since I said it anyway, if you are a non-Inception watcher, put your earmuffs on.

Now then, the brilliant final shot of Christopher Nolan’s movie leaves us with the top spinning, though with a slight wobble. Then darkness. It’s up to you to decide how the thing ends. This leads us toward two conclusions:

1)      The top falls, Cobb made it to reality, has reunited with his kids against all odds and gets the happy ending.

2)      The top never falls, Cobb never escaped Limbo and has created a happy ending fantasy in which he is reunited with his kids.

I’m here to tell you the top falls, and to explain let’s observe something about each dream within Inception. Of course, I’m talking about all the scenes in which Nolan made it clear we are in a dream (as opposed to the theory that the entire movie is a dream, there is no such thing as dream sharing and Cobb is actually just an overweight insurance salesman who fell asleep on the bus. I casual dismiss this theory because I don’t believe Nolan would make a movie in which nothing happened as to say, “It was all just a dream. BOO!”). Now if you look at every “dream” you’ll notice they are populated by only two types of people: the dreamers and the projections. Now think back to the Saito mind heist. When Arthur is awoken from Nash’s (the first architect) dream, he disappears. Dreamers don’t stay in the picture once they have awoken. In the end, when Cobb is walking through the airport, Nolan’s camera ponderously pours over each face of Cobb’s team, almost as if to say “and you were there, and you were there and you too” (a nod to another movie about a dreamer awakening). We know Cobb’s team got out because we saw them get their kicks (so to speak).  In no other part of the movie does Nolan allow people the dreamers know into the dreams unless they are dreaming as well. The exception here is, of course, Mal but she represents Cobb himself, or at least his subconscious trying to pull him down to Limbo where he can live without the guilt of his wife’s death. If a dreamer could just conjure up the people he knew, why would Cobb need a team? He could create dream versions of Arthur and the rest. The answer is you can’t, not by the rules set up in Nolan’s shared dreaming universe.

A lot of people get hung up on this fact. Real dreams are chaotic and non-linear, but Nolan’s shared dreams have structure, rules and order.  The truth is, though it talks a lot about dreams, Inception isn’t really about dreams at all. Not the ones you and I experience at least. It might have alleviated confusion if Nolan left the word “dream” out of the movie and just called shared dreaming what it really is: invading other people’s mind. But then Nolan would have had to call the movie Mind Hackerz, and that’s just stupid.

Still not convinced? How about this, if Cobb is in Limbo, living out the fantasy of his happy ending, why isn’t Mal there? After all, Limbo is a place where, if you succumb to it, allows limitless delusion. It doesn’t really matter how he justifies her return, maybe her suicide was itself a dream, maybe she bounced or maybe he doesn’t justify it at all. Point is, if he has dreamt up his ultimate happy ending, then Mal would most certainly be there.

Other quick thoughts:

It’s been pointed out that Cobb wears his wedding ring in all the dreams, but never wears it in reality (kind of a cold move, but okay). In the final scene Cobb is not wearing the ring.

If he was in Limbo, and the totem is designed to never drop while in a dream state, why would it wobble at all?

Now, I’ve already written about how the purpose of Nolan’s ending is to leave the viewer in doubt (an anti-conclusion that imparts a message of its own), but as you can see, by observing the rules and structure created for dream sharing, he has left us breadcrumbs to find the ultimate truth.

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Here’s another link for more information about the movie: http://screenrant.com/inception-spoilers-discussion-kofi-68330/all/1/

First, why would you be allowed to do this? The Thieves Guild is great. It’s home to some of the best quests in the game. Well, so is the Dark Brotherhood, and the point is that if you’re playing a good guy, you would destroy the Dark Brotherhood, especially since a good guy would kill the headmistress of the orphanage anyway (she  tortures the kids — I’m not joking, walk in there and listen to what she tells them ,then check out the torture room, it’s at the far end of where they sleep) and this would lead to you being offered to join them.

Second, what makes me think it was ever intended that you would be allowed to? I have four things I have discovered so far, in the game alone, without the use of the Creation Kit (which I do not know how to use).

1. Corruption in Riften. When you first get to Riften, you cannot enter the town. The doors are locked and you are told to go around to the other side. At the other side, you are asked to pay a visitor’s tax. I always choose the response that says, “This is a shakedown. Let me pass,” or something like that, and they always tell me to hush and go on in.  I’ve done this at very low levels with no points in the Speech skill, so I assume it always works. When you first approach the Jarl’s steward, she blurts out that she doesn’t know anything about any corruption in town. The ability to report the corrupt guard, or to pursue this line of conversation with the steward, is awkwardly absent from the game.
2. Mjoll the Lioness. Depending on the time of day you come into Riften, you may walk past Mjoll the Lioness, a Nord warrior, and her boyfriend, Aerin. She will be complaining about the Thieves Guild, and Aerin will apologize for Mjoll, saying the city really gets to her, and that it’s her personal goal in life to clean up Riften. That Riften is like her baby and she wants to protect it. You can do a quest for Mjoll to find her lost glass greatsword, Grimsever, which sets Mjoll at the second-highest disposition level to you. She considers you a best friend at this point. You can additionally marry her (right out from under Aerin, and nothing is said about this!), raising her disposition to the max. At neither level is the option to help her clean up Riften. If a dragon slayer and a mean Nord warrior can’t clean up a thieves guild, what’s wrong with them?
3. The merchant guild. Almost every merchant in Riften hates the Thieves Guild. The Guild shakes them down for “protection money.” Bersi Honey-Hand., the proprietor of the Pawned Prawn (Riften’s general merchandise store) has a couple dozen or so pamphlets in his safe downstairs calling for a rebellion against the guild, saying any store wishing to participate should mark their store. These pamphlets are never distributed. No stores are ever marked.
4. The Ragged Flagon’s escape tunnel. The Ragged Flagon is a bar in the sewers under Riften. It features what looks like a dock, on what looks like a wading pool. This pool is ankle deep, if that. If you’re on the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, ankle deep is all it ever is. However, if you’re on the PC, you can enter the developer code “TCL” (Toggle CLipping), and you can go under the floor, and see that the “wading pool” in the Flagon is actually quite deep. And at the very bottom… is an escape tunnel! But it goes nowhere. It’s just a dead end. The supports for the dock go all the way down, and the steps that go into the wading pool go about six feet down (not even halfway). Why is there an escape tunnel to the Ragged Flagon?

Third, how would destroying the Thieves Guild work, if the feature were completed? My best guess is that the quest would start at the Pawned Prawn. Asking any merchant about the Thieves Guild would get you directed there. Asking Bersi Honey-Hand about it would get you instructed to pass out the pamphlets. You would only be given one for each vendor. There are way too many in the safe. There are three vendors in the square (plus Brynjolf’s, but he doesn’t count). There’s the food cart. There’s Balimund, the smith. There’s the bar, and the bunkhouse. The Meadery also doesn’t count, because Maven is in with the Thieves Guild. There’s also the alchemy shop on the lower level. That makes eight. Nine if you count the court wizard, but she’s an airhead, and she works out of the Jarl’s place, so let’s just call it eight.

At this point, all the shops are marked (except perhaps a couple holdouts) and since the Pawned Prawn is at the center of it, Bersi asks you to stay the night and guard the shop. The guild sends the unnamed Thief (the guys in brown who get killed every other time you’re in Riften) to hit the Prawn, and you kill him. Mjoll would be strictly optional, and I would guess that she would not even work with you until you brought her her sword. She is just a wild card and I don’t know how she would fit in, so I can only assume she would be an optional ally.

At this point or after a couple attacks, you would go to the Jarl, who would refer you to her steward. The steward would brush you off and send you packing, and then Maven’s brute (Maul) would  threaten you. You could fight and kill him for a key to Maven’s, or you could ignore his threats, and break in later. Telling Bersi about this would have Bersi send you to Maven’s home to look for clues. You would break into Maven’s home, and find a document incriminating her — something from Mercer Frey, perhaps, or Brynjolf.

Returning to the Jarl, now with proof of her steward’s corruption, the steward and Maven would both be arrested, and the Jarl would give you the option, at this point, to rid Riften of the Thieves Guild once and for all, also pledging a small group of Riften town guards to assist. Now, I’m thinking either the main entrance to the Flagon is barricaded, and you would have to enter via the escape hatch at the bottom, or, my original thought is that a lot of fire is used (not explosives, it would bring the whole center of town down) and you escape through the hatch to save your life — and the escape hatch leads to the lake, and out of town.

The reward for destroying the Thieves Guild would be, you are instantly Thane, you have max disposition with every vendor in Riften, and who knows what else. Maybe a big cash reward. Maybe the Jarl just gives you Honeyside (the home you can purchase in town). Destroying the Thieves Guild would be the best thing to happen to Riften. You would be a hero.

Fourth, what would be the consequences? So far as I can tell, they would be minimal. The Dark Brotherhood, if not destroyed, would send you to the Thieves Guild to appraise a necklace. But there are many jewelers in Skyrim, including one right in Riften. But if you’re destroying the Thieves Guild, aren’t you also going to destroy the Dark Brotherhood? Also, the limited collectibles, the Unusual Gems, or later revealed to be Stones of Barenziah, are appraised by a Thieves Guild member. Again, these are jewels and could be appraised by any jeweler. Oh, and a Thieves Guild member sells you furnishings for the Dark Brotherhood lair at the end of the quest, but that could fall to any general store.

Lastly, if you seriously want to destroy the Thieves Guild, you can do so with this mod, but I have not tried it, and thus cannot vouch for it. Read the readme carefully, this mod has a ton of stipulations. And the Ragged Flagon escape tunnel is not utilized, nor is Bersi’s merchants guild. It’s just a quick n’ dirty way to destroy the other evil guild, for lawful good characters. But again, the Thieves Guild is a lot of fun, and if you’re looking for motivation to do it with your good character, I would recommend using this mod to start in Riften (starting off owning Honeyside, the home in Riften), then joining the Thieves Guild straight away. Go kill Grelod the Kind while you’re at it (she’s a real bitch, and she tortures the children) and get into the Dark Brotherhood. Do nothing else in the game until those are complete. Then go to Helgen and witness Alduin flying away — this starts the main quest. Then, begin your “redemption.” (The developers even spoke of doing something like this in the behind-the-scenes documentary Beyond the Wall, actually saying that a good character could start off bad and then be redeemed by saving the world.)

cuz this dawg likes digging for the facts

one of the things about being a thoroughly under-educated, formally untrained student is that you tend to value learning from first principles. and since i have great TheoryLove, i keep trying to read even instructional design theory in original form, ie, read the actual publication in which the theorist proposed his or her hypotheses and proved it.

in a recent phase of relative joblessness, i nerdily decided to check out keller’s ARCS model because i’ve seen it being invoked a couple of times, but never convincingly used. so i read this paper. and oh boy, was it an educational experience.*

what we generally get to know of ARCS:

most people i know seem to learn about id theories by reading websites which explain a bunch of ‘em, or through on-the-job ID training sessions. either way: it’s pretty much like chinese whispers (“she said that he said that it’s about…”).

there’s a huge level of interpretive gunk that’s passed on, and a lot of original information is wildly distorted. in this case, for instance, a typical distortion is that keller says in his paper that ARCS is actually a model for classifying motivation-related theories. after the chinese whispers about ARCS, we get to know that keller is advocating 4 components to include in our learning design, namely A-R-C-S.

what Keller overtly says in the paper: 

• ARCS is a model for classifying motivation theories.
• he recommends a 10-step design process to be followed to incorporate elements that learners will find motivating

which i suppose is hunky-dory, only you see, i have a nasty suspicious mind that totally mistrusts people – specifically instructional designers – who presume that learners can be manipulated like puppets. so i read the paper critically…

what makes me skeptical:

Keller says:

The ARCS model is based on a synthesis of motivational concepts and a problem-solving approach to design, rather than the application of specific motivational solutions that are advocated without regard to the specific characteristics of a given situation.

man, those are some pretty fancy claims (‘synthesis’ and all!). alright… so a model, by definition is something that helps you understand better the subject/thing that you’re modelling. ARCS certainly doesn’t do that.

then, under the excuse of not wanting to claim a one-size-fits-all solution, he doesn’t offer any solution. what he does offer is a 10-step process in which you basically ask learners what motivates them, and then do that. if you like, the 1987 paper gives you also vague instructions like ‘bring in alumni of the course as enthusiastic guest lecturers’. uhm… not very profound an approach, and certainly not worthy of being called a theoretical perspective, no?

then you read on, and you realise while this dude is talking about motivation (publishing papers on the topic and telling educators what to do about it), he never actually explains how you measure motivation or gauge the impact of what you’re doing to boost it. he seems to treat motivation as a binary state like pregnancy (ie, you are or you aren’t) while the reality is that there are degrees and different behaviours associated with motivation. isn’t that ridiculously simplistic a picture to paint? any time he actually can provide even a reasoning or insight into what may be tied to motivation is through other people’s theories on the subject. in terms of original contribution, i found ARCS deeply unimpressive.

and then, this is all about learner motivation. he cited 3 studies to claim the ‘multinational validity’. one of the three cited studies was by… keller. digging around yielded the information that his study had teachers as the test subjects. no input from the learners themselves at all. you tell me, is it convincing to hear that a bunch of teachers, who have vested interests naturally in claiming teaching competency and that they’re doin’ it right, are vouching that things are sorted and working awesomely? (i snorted so hard i almost bust a capillary.)

i could go on for a coupla more paragraphs but basically, these are some things that i really think should have been there:

• ‘motivation’ has so many states and manifestations and can lead to varied behaviour. this needed to be explored.
• ‘learners’ are the focus: there are as many different types of learners and learning behaviour as people, so this complexity and dimension has to be acknowledged.
• ‘learning’, ‘attention’, ‘relevance’ … none of these terms have a single cut-and-dry meaning: definitions should have been stated clearly (not to mention, how these are gauged and monitored in studies should most certainly be defined).

what the abstract of the paper stated authoritatively, the subsequent pages took away until all that there was was chaff blowing in the wind. that this came to be a widely accepted and spouted instructional design theory leaves me gobsmacked. it’s a really bad joke.

it also breaks my heart: all you theory-dislikers, don’t go by this: it’s not good theory!

*hmm, wonder what keller would make of that  

Read More… http://whatthegovernmentcantdoforyou.com/?p=26827

A while ago, I came up with this theory. One morning I was pondering the existence of everything…of myself. And then this thought came to my mind. A thought I was so sure of, it makes complete logic to me even now.

The thought: Life is a dream. We are all really dreaming I believe, we are not really alive. So perhaps reincarnation is truly real? I just think that God has us resting someplace, but has our spirits reliving life all over again, perhaps to give us another chance, and realize the mistakes we made so that we can try to get it right again. Maybe that’s why we have feelings of Déjà vu and stuff like that, because we really did live these scenes once before. And then when we die, we are not really dying, because we were already dead. It’s just us waking up now, and realizing…it was all one big dream.

A dream…or this miserable nightmare that we were trapped in for years and years.

“In a Wonderland they lie, Dreaming as the days go by, Dreaming as the summers die:
Ever drifting down the stream- Lingering in the golden gleam- Life, what is it but a dream?”-Lewis Carroll (Through the Looking Glass)