logic

I have a job interview tomorrow. I mean today. But as has been happening for the last two weeks, out of no apparent reason, I found myself awake at 2 in the morning. Attempts to get back to sleep are always in vain.
When I find myself awake I try to do puzzles in my head so that I get tired enough to sleep. Today what must have started out as a puzzle has turned into a full blown post.
Here goes. What if computers had emotions? Like if you pressed the wrong key repeatedly or you hit the monitor or you spill your juice onto the keyboard, it refuses to work until you do something it considered apologetic. But computers can't have emotions can they? Not like you and me. They are logical. I suspect that this is due to their coding. For computers it's either 1 or 0. Could therefore emotions be contained in the infinite numbers between 0 and 1? Is this how we humans think and thus is this how computers should 'think' in order for them to rule the world?
Let's take examples. How do you decide that you love one person and not the other assuming them both having the same physical attributes? You ask yourself a series of questions; is this person the best candidate for procreation? Can he take care of his offspring to ensure the survival of his species? Can he protect me from aggresors? Basically that's what you're subconsciously thinking but this is all wrapped up in nice little neurotransmitters that make you feel good whenever the answer is yes. So I dare say that like a computer you break down a problem into it's most basic questions which can be answered using yes or no. 1 or 0.
Is there a God? The most logical minds will tell you no, that there is no God. The basic question would be has anything been reported that is unexplainable by physics? But this question is biased because it is constrained by how much of our physical world we know and how much is known. But adherents will tell you, yes there is a God. Faith. There is no logical explanation (yet) of why they feel that something supernatural is working around us. Is it psychological? Our need to try to explain the unexplainable, hope that there is something that doesn't follow the laws of physics. And that this entity has human emotions, character and face.  Thus it follows that faith is logical. And we're back to being the same as computers. Only that we are programmed (by God?) to eat, mate (and get offspring) and to survive for as long as possible.
I think that the reason why the computer doesn't have emotions is because we haven't programmed it complexly enough. We haven't put in enough basic questions and most important of all given it reason to do anything on its own ie neurotransmitters and structures that 'feel good' when it does something. In fact this might be the most important element; motivation to act.
***********************
In other news what would happen if we stopped using a base of ten in everything. Like 2 multiplied by 5 would be equal to 13 when you use a base of 7. Is it even called a base?
PS:Much love cardiac mellitus.

Starting an Agrovet

I will share with you the experiences that I had when I got this crazy idea to start an agroveterinary shop in Kenya. Before starting a business you have to think of the financial, legal and environmental (business) conditions that you will have to fulfill. Disclaimer: This is not legal advice.

What's in a name?

You have to come up with a unique name for your business and ensure that it is not already taken.

This is done at sheria house. You write a letter to the registrar of companies asking him to search his files in order to find out if the name you wish to register is available. If it is available you then have it registered. Its a process that takes at least 10 days and sets you back 800 shillings.

It is however important to note that specialised businesses like veterinary ones require that you attach proof that you are qualified and licensed to conduct them. Well and good! You are feeling proud of yourself now that you can think of an original name and have it registered.

Where's my money bitch!

A good business must have a bank account. So next you go to your favorite bank in the whole wide world and open an account for your agrovet. Here you'll need that business registration certificate that you are so proud of and photocopies of your scarlet letter (I mean your ID) and a few shillings. The amount of money depends on your bank.

Death and taxes

The government must have its cut. If your business is a sole proprietorship then all you need to have is your personal PIN number. If you don't have this rush over to the super fast (hehe) KRA website and get it. While there you can also muse over the fact that if you expect your business to make over 5 million shillings a year, then you’ll need to apply for a VAT number. But of course your wonderful business is going to make more than five million shillings, right?

Kanjow!

Well if you don't want to be closing your shop everytime that you hear council inspectors are in your area then you have to apply for a license from your county council. This will you set you back at least 5000 shillings. It can be much more depending on where you want to set up shop. I am not talking about Kiambu. Of course in their infinite wisdom the expiry date for all councils licenses is 31st December and you have to pay the full amount of charges whether you register in January 1st or on December 1st.

Location Location Location.

You have to find a premises to conduct your affairs (this means to sell your stuff in proper English).  You have to put a lot of hamsters on this, peddling away like crazy in your head. Do your research,know what competition you have, the size of the market, visibility and other business terms that you may want to know the meaning of. In most premises you'll be asked for rent, a few months rent deposit, electricity deposit, water deposit, oil deposits and many other kinds of deposits, some illegal in Mombasa. Some tips for you; make sure the premises is of permanent nature, has adequate sanitary facilities, has water, well ventilated, is large enough and has a good waste disposal system. You'll find out why later.

Quacks everywhere!

Do you plan to use your veterinary knowledge to make some money? Then boom! In comes the veterinary surgeons and veterinary paraprofessionals act of 2011. You have to be registered with the Kenya veterinary  Board. For a veterinary surgeon this will take you back about 7000 shillings (association and board fees). In addition if you are planning for your shop to be the base for an ambulatory service then add another 5000 shillings inspection fee. “What will the inspectors be looking for?” asks the kid at the front of the class. Well check this out (http://kenyavetboard.org/index.php/standards-for-ambulatory-services).

Feed me!

Do you plan to sell animal feeds and plant feeds (fertilizers)? Then boom! The fertilizers and animal food stuffs act Cap 345.  No money that you have to pay here but ensure that your products are in accordance with this act.

Tick toc

Do you plan on selling pest control products like acaricides? BOOM! In comes Cap 346 laws of Kenya. Your premises must be inspected and licensed by the Pest Control Products Board. This will set you back 1000 shillings. “What will they look for?" the same kid asks. Well find out here (http://www.kenyalaw.org:8181/exist/kenyalex/sublegview.xql?subleg=CAP.%20346

You don’t know Jack

Do you plan to sell seeds and magic beans? Small boom without exclamation mark. Cap 326, the plant protection act. You have to be licensed by the Kenya Plant Health Inspectorate Service. This will set you back 500 shillings.

“Please?” “No!” “Pleeease?” “No!”

We come to the biggest issue. Do you plan on selling veterinary medicines in your agrovet?  Hiroshima type boom! You can't. All medicines are regulated by cap 244, the pharmacy pharmacy something something act of God knows when.

In short, to be registered as a pharmacist you have to have a bachelors degree in pharmacy. To open up a retail pharmacy you have to be a registered pharmacist. To sell veterinary drugs you have to be a a licensed retailer. This law allows veterinary surgeons to dispense or supply drugs only in the course of veterinary treatment. The clincher is that, even though the pharmacy and poisons board is the one mandated to regulate veterinary pharmacies (read agrovet) they haven't come up with the regulations yet.

But as I write this the veterinary medicines regulations (of the VSVP act) are awaiting signature by the cabinet drawer. I mean the cabinet secretary. These are a bit more friendly to the veterinary surgeons (whew, that was close).

And there you have it. All that I know.

Next I'll blog about how to make round and soft chapatti.

See you!

For a more serious version of this article complete with speculative tone, citation and bibliography, press 1 now.

Boom and associated exclamation marks are the property of TruthBomb inc. A subsidiary of Alkaeda networks.

Conspiracy Theory Number 1: They don't want us to prosper!

Over the next few years I am going to share with you some of my crazy paranoid thinking in the form of conspiracy theories.

I theorize that there are government units whose sole job is to keep the poor poor and the rich rich. These gate men control who makes it to the higher society, which country becomes rich and who prospers.

Proof of concept:
Imagine this; that every one and every nation had an equal chance to prosper, to become rich, to become powerful, to become a superpower. Would it happen? Would everyone and every nation be successful? Of course! Every nation and every individual has either one or both of two things: brains and opportunity  at some point in their lifetime. And a big percent of them go for it.

So imagine that every one had an equal chance to prosper and they did. We would have many super powers, countless rich nations, numerous successful people. We would have very few poor manipulable people who have no hope. So say good bye to making people do what they want so that you can give them scraps from your table. Say good bye to a labor force that doesn't demand for better working conditions, say good bye to control.

Control
You have to keep the poor poor or make them poorer. You have to remove opportunities from their pathways in life. And you have to ensure that any thought by the intelligent ends up no where.

How do you do this. Simple, create a group that will drive this agenda in secret or entrench this kind of thinking into those you control. With enough intelligence and information you can control what nations and individuals do. You can remove all opportunities from their path, make them loose hope. You can make any trial they make end up in failure. You can make people fight each other, create incurable diseases, influence leaders to make wrong decisions or install the wrong kind of leaders. All these and more are in your arsenal.

Hypothesis
Rich nations have special groups to make sure poorer nations never prosper.

Individual nations have special groups to ensure that certain people or families never make it to power.

Fear

Time for my occasional rantings on life A.K.A blogging. Fear runs the world. From the smallest of personal decisions like what to wear today to momentous decisions affecting countries and regions.

Self protection is one of the outcomes of fear. In this the individual percieves that he/she has a weakness, something wrong with him. He/she thinks that he is not clever enough, beautiful enough, tall enough and that everyone around him/her notices this. And thus out of fear of their weakness being exposed they attack and lash out at people. These kind of people are the hardest to get along with. Beneath it all they are just people ruled by the fear that they are not good enough.

Hiding is another outcome of fear. These kind of people abhor being noticed. They hide within the crowd, never wanting to stand out. They hate being put on the spot or being asked to be responsible for something. Underneath it all is a deep fear that they are not good enough, that their  ideas have already been thought of. They do their things in secret, at night when there is no one to see them fail.

Fear causes paralysis. Have you ever woken up in the middle of the darkest of nights and been sure that someone was in the house? Did you feel fear coursing through your body and when you tried to wake up you couldn't and no matter how hard you tried you couldn't scream? And then you woke up to realize that it had only been a dream? Some people live that every day. Fear paralysis them whenever they are faced with big decisions. On the surface it may seem that they are buying time while in reality they are terrified.

Fear causes malleability. A person with fear is always looking for safety. And thus will do anything that they are told by a person who they consider to represent safety. Governments know this, terrorists know this, the church knows this and your father knows this. So they create things for you to fear so that they can control you for their own selfish needs. The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear-the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety (Henry Louis Mencken).

So how do you conquer fear? Face your fear, understand your fear, seek truth when you are told lies, know and appreciate yourself. All this so that you'll never find yourself blogging about fear..

Some further reading http://www.quotegarden.com/fear.html

To All Graduates

If you are graduate and every evening and weekend you are drunk, you are the reason Kenya is poor. If you are a graduate looking for an 8 to 5 job you are the reason Kenya is poor. If you are a graduate and you have not done something innovative you do not deserve that degree.

Kenya is not the richest country regionally because of us intellectuals! No, the bitter truth is that while we sit in our comfortable chairs in our offices and banks, and take our kids to private schools and shop in malls and go to the leisure clubs, the hard working high school dropout is opening up a hawking business. The poor, high school graduate is engineering a plane down in Murang’a. As we sip our coffee, the standard 8 graduate who has worked as a mechanic for 2 years is thinking of opening up his own garage or a posho mill. Yes! Kenya is rich because of them, not because of us with our fancy degrees!

If you are an engineer where is the contraption that will help covert our raw produce to finished products? Must we wait for technology from India and Europe? Where is our Kenyan made car, aeroplane, tractors and oil rigs? Why are our roads muddy and dusty? Why are some areas in Kenya still remote? Where are our space flights and satellites?

If you are a medic, where is the cure for AIDS? Are you waiting for western nations to come up with it when it is most beneficial to us? Where is the vaccine for Malaria? Have you become so embroiled in nonsensical short sighted research while forgetting the real problems facing us? Or is your work to strike every day demanding for this or that?

If you have a degree in literature where are your words scorning our lethargy? Inspiring us, making us see the ill of our gluttonous lives? Where are our oral narratives written down? Where is our culture as Africans or are you in cahoots with our enemies who want us to forget who we are?

If you are a veterinarian, like myself, why can’t all Kenyans afford meat? Why are large swathes of prime land unutilised because of trypanasomiasis? Why do we still slaughter each other while trying to steal livestock? And why does 84% of Kenya lie idle when in Saudi Arabia cattle are kept in the desert?

If you have a degree in music, why are we still listening to sexually explicit, ear splitting, and nonsensical imported music? Where is our reggae to the Jamaicans? Where are our traditional musical instruments and songs?

If you are a computer scientist, where is our African made operating systems and softwares for our African made technologies? Why do our industries still use manual equipment or imported technology and associated software?

If you have a degree in mass communication, where are our Kenyan made cartoons? Why do we still prefer and watch foreign soap operas and movies? Where are our intellectual articles and pieces in our newspapers or do you think all we want to see are politician’s shenanigans?

If you are a political scientist why aren’t you promoting ideologies? Where are selfless leaders who are only concerned about the welfare of their people and not about lining their pockets with the poor man’s cash?

As a graduate what are you doing to help those hard working Kenyans who sent you to school? Where is the innovativeness in your field? Where are the Nobel or Pulitzer prizes?

You see they want us to remain lazy. Keep us dependent on their aid. Keep looting our resources until they are depleted. Keep giving us loans until they control everything we do. Keep sending us corruptive songs and movies to replace our values. Keep stealing off, frustrating or killing our innovative minds. Keep sending our scientists in circles on blind ended research.

Yes they are using you. Until you stand up and say no!

Growth

When faced with a new situation, there are different levels of thought that each person goes through. From something being new to understanding it perfectly, making it better and finally asking yourself, can something different  be done.
Everything that happens starts off as a need. This imbalance in life (as is with nature) must be corrected or adapted to.
WHAT IS HAPPENING?
As humans, once faced with a need we look to how our fellow human beings are dealing with it. What s happening around us usually determines the next step we take to rectify our need? We ask ourselves how are others doing it and can we do it the same way to satisfy our need? We end up looking for how someone more experienced than us is doing it and copying it.
HOW IS IT DONE?
The next step is trying to perfect what we have seen happen and have been doing for a while. Can you do what you are doing perfectly? Is it yielding the result you wanted?
WHAT CAN BE DONE?
The next step is asking ourselves, apart from how we are doing it, are there other ways to do the same thing? In this phase you research far and wide for other ways to do what you are doing. You may be seeking to improve your process or simply to have choice in your methods. Or you have encountered situations in what you are doing and by correcting them you have discovered newer ways to correct any mistakes that were occurring in your work.
WHICH IS BETTER?
After you have known and researched on the many ways and improvements to your process, you ask yourself which among these ways is the best. For this phase you may come up with comparative tests between different methods or you may hypothesize on newer ways and subject them to tests to gauge their efficacy. In this phase you will have already mastered the different ways to do something and with these ways in mind you test newer ways to see if they perform better or worse.
WHAT IS NEEDED?
This is the final step for many people. You already know all the methods to do something. You might have even discovered newer and better ways to do something. You have already discredited many ways that cause problems. Now you ask yourself, to get what is needed in general is it necessary to go through this method that you have studied so diligently? Or can other methods bring about what you are seeking and may be resolve another need that is present?

Wifmann XFC

We would like to introduce you to "Wifmann XFC'. The latest quality product from our award winning factories around the world.
Her features will get you foaming at the mouth.
With the new state-of-the-art audio system you get complains and nagging in stereo. Forget the sulking and silences at the dinner table. Our new product promises texting, cyber stalking, show-up-at-your-work-place-with-a-kitchen-knife fun!
And that's not all. An added feature to our product; 'Radicool' means that no matter how hot you she is, she turns to ice at the first wrong word you say. Is this great or what!
Expect the unexpected. With our new circuit board our product promises to go into a rage at any time, for any reason and even when there is no reason at all. Talk about exhilarating!
The real experience is not buying one. With smooth curves and free standing accessories at purchase, Wifmann XFC promises to grow huge, fat and floppy as you continue using it.
Don't worry, with our completely fake money back guarantee, you can return your old product back to us in exchange for a completely new product! Talk about economic sense!
So look around. Don't get left out. Get yourself the new Wifmann XFC now!

Terms and conditions apply. Wifmann XFC may kill you, kick you, burn you with hot water or make you the happiest man alive. Do not use Wifmann XFC if you are using any other similar product. Wifmann XFC is provided on an 'as is basis.' You cannot use two Wifmann XFC at the same time. In case of malfunction, excessive growth rate, mood swings, randomly embarrassing you or putting a hit on you, our company is not liable. Only God can help you.