Some Knowledge

A dead animal was found on a beach near Montauk New York on July 12th. A picture was posted on the Internet. There was speculation that the creature might be some kind of a shell-deprived sea turtle or an experiment from a nearby government facility gone horribly wrong.

I saw a picture of the creature on a website. It is nothing but a big dead dog. Honestly, if people are so stupid that they can not tell a dead dog when they see one, I don’t know. It’s a popular search today on Google, which is how I found the information in the first place. Maybe some people need help in identifying common pets when they die and wash up on shore.

The Monster of Montauk is a dead dog. Mystery solved.

A meme is a thought or idea unit.  The term was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 to refer to ideas that spread through human society like genes spread through a population.  Dawkins also uses the terms “mind virus”  or “thought virus” to describe what he refers to as memes.

Memes have become very popular these days.  There are many Internet meme trackers.  Social bookmarking sites are basically sites to track websites in relation to the ideas expressed on them.  It is becoming popular to think of ideas as viruses that spread from mind to mind as if they were contagious diseases.  In many cases the meme in question may indeed be like a toxic disease.

There are many aspects of society that can be thought of as memes.  The idea that we need leaders is certainly an old meme.  Language itself is a vast collection of memes in the form of words that convey an agreed upon meaning.  Without the meme system of language we would not be able to share ideas or information.  Of course, the main way memes spread is through language.

Popular trends and beliefs spread by memes throughout society.  The idea of a meme, the word for it, was only coined in 1976.  The meme meme has become more widespread through society because it was published in a popular book and taken up by others and used in discussions and the mass media.  Meme is really a pretty useless term.  It is in fact nothing more than the older term “idea.”  Ideas have been spreading through human culture since long before recorded history.  The idea of using fire, making tools and weapons, living in shelters, hunting animals, and many other things were spreading through the human populations for millions of years.

One meme that is very popular is the idea of money.  Memes are being used to make money in the modern world.  People in marketing are constantly trying to start trends for consumption of new products.  Marketing is basically thought engineering.  If you can start a popular trend, it will spread by word of mouth everywhere.  This is the goal of marketing, to get as many potential customers for some thing as possible.

With the instant communication potential of the Internet, the future for new memes is bright.  A person can think up some new idea and post it on the web, and millions of people will latch onto the thought and think it themselves.  This can be good or bad, depending on the idea.  In the modern age people will have to learn to discern good ideas from bad ideas using their own judgment.  In the end, it is not ideas themselves that are good or bad, but the actions that people do based on these ideas.

To start an online bookstore, go to Amazon.com.  Sign up for the affiliate program.  Pick out the books you want to sell and get the code for the affiliate link to these books.  Now, go to your website.  Write a short review of the book you are selling and then post the link to the book on the same page.  If you are a good enough sales person, people will read your copy and click on the link to take them to Amazon and buy the book.

You will need to direct a lot of people to your page, as many people browse for books but few will actually buy.  Do some PR.  Get your site listed in directories and make sure Google and Yahoo know you exist.  One book does not a store make.  Keep writing blurbs and setting up pages.  Eventually you will have thousands of links leading to Amazon.  When people purchase these books through your link, you get a commission.

In this example of an online book store, you are working as both sales person and publicity.  Your site should attract a bit of attention.  If you read some of the books you are trying to sell, you can write more useful reviews.  You have to have interest in what you sell if you are going to get people excited about your offerings.  Use your website to post unique information about your products that will be of use to people.  You should be able to get some information about these books from Amazon as well as writing your own reviews.  If your website is set up like a blog it will be easy for people to post comments and recommendations about the books you are trying to sell.  Use the power of web 2.0 to help you boost sales.

Now, here’s the mysterious part:  Why would anyone looking for a book not go directly to the Amazon site instead of clicking through on your affiliate link?  Well, maybe they don’t know they need this book until they read about it on your site.  If you can post useful information on random subjects that is likely to attract people to your pages, you might well get them interested in reading something you recommend.  It’s all about communication.  If you can write an article about how you read this book and it really helped you out in some way, then you are one step closer to making a sale and getting some cash.  Business is all about selling stuff.  To sell stuff you have to get people interested.

You don’t have to limit yourself to selling only books.  There are many affiliate programs available on the web.  It takes some time to set up accounts with some of these places, but the more stuff you put on your site, the more people will wander by to look at what you have.  The Internet is becoming more and more like a bazaar with little advertisements for shops everywhere.  Setting up an online store is as simple as copying some code, writing an ad, and setting up an account with a retailer.

I spent most of the day doing gardening work.  We had to get some water on the garden.  I drove posts for the sprinklers, ran hose, got sprinklers ready, then went to prime the well pump.  The well pump leaked.  The pump casing was cracked from an early freeze.

Dad had to go to Tractor Supply and get a new pump.  I took the old pump off the well, then got the new pump hooked up when Dad got back from the store.  We finally got the sprinklers running.  The garden has water now and the tomatoes won’t wither and die.

I’ve spent the afternoon just reading various stuff on the web.  There’s no end to different things people write and post on the net.  I read about some idiotic get rich website where they sell you a site to sell their sites for $197.  I’m not about to give anyone money to set up a site to sell their products.  I suppose I could go to clickbank myself and use this blog to sell products.  That would be stupid.  I looked at the stuff they sell on clickbank.  I wouldn’t buy any of it.  I’m not about to be selling overpriced worthless products to anybody.

I’ve been keeping this blog for months now.  Traffic is still between one and two hundred page views a day.  Maybe I should write more popular articles.  Stories about me replacing a well pump do not sell anything.  Maybe I should go political.  Politics attracts a lot of attention.  That would mean I would have to approve of politics, which I don’t.

It’s a hot, humid, sunny summer day today.  There is a bit of a wind going this afternoon as well.  If I had solar cells and windmills I would be making power right now just from the energy that lands on the earth from space and the wind that comes from the earth.  Of course, it would take a lot of money to set up a wind and solar power station.  Maybe some rich person would invest in my idea.  Maybe I should just invent a thermonuclear reactor and make money selling real reliable power to all the earth.

I’ve been thinking of writing a book lately.  I have no idea what I want to write though.  I was leaning towards fiction, but my imagination is tired.  Maybe I will write a self-help book about how to be happy when the world is falling apart.  Then Oprah would invite me onto her show and I could make millions selling millions of books to unhappy housewives.  The key to happiness is giving some of your money to me for this book.  What an evil plan.  Maybe I will get to work on this Monday and see where it goes.

Here is an interesting site about the concept of pronoia.  I’ve been reading this for the last half hour or so and it is very uplifting.  Pronoia is the concept that is opposite to paranoia.  Paranoia is when a person thinks there is a conspiracy against him to do him harm.  Pronoia is supposed to be a conspiracy of the universe to make a person happy and well-off.

Apparently the word pronoia was made up by one of the people who used to write songs for the Grateful Dead.  There is a book about the concept written by Rob Brezsny, who also writes the website above.  I think it is interesting that there are other people in the world who are sick of the way the modern world drives people crazy.  I find a lot of the concepts talked about on this website to be inspirational.  If you are bored and want to check out some alternative outlooks on life, check out this site.  There’s a lot of material there, and it’s free.

Honestly, I can’t think of a good reason for this kind of organized idiotic behavior.  I can see why there are wars, governments start them by invading or otherwise attacking another country.  Leaders start wars even within a country because they want power.  Power is the main reason behind war.  Some people want to control other people.  Look at Hitler.  He wanted to control everybody, so he went on the attack.  How such a deranged person managed to convince millions of people to follow his orders is a mystery.  No reasonable person thinks war is good.

Politicians are the main reason there are wars in the world.  Politicians are people who want to lead and control other people.  Look at the Black Sabbath song “War Pigs.”  Even a person with drug-induced brain damage like Ozzy Osborn can see that it’s governments who orchestrate war.  Why do people tolerate such violence from their leaders when it would not be tolerated on a personal level from the man in the street?  We lock up and execute people who kill other people in society.  There are laws against murder.  Why is there not a law against war?

The earth is divided up into many different countries, each with a set of politicians in control.  When leaders have disagreements, they send their peons, armed to the teeth, to settle things.  There needs to be some means of international control in this world.  There should be some binding law that governs the behavior of governments.  If one country attacks another, the rest of the world should jump on them and put the leaders of the country who tried to start a war in jail.  Do we live in a civilized world, or on a lawless planet?

The twentieth century was the bloodiest period in the whole history of the earth.  The world wars and the conflicts were all caused by governments, sometimes by a single person in power.  When will the people of the world wake up and refuse to let governments order them to commit antisocial acts?  War is shameful and ridiculous.  Now that the scientists have given us nuclear weapons, it is also suicidal.  War is a symptom of the collective insanity of humanity.  There is no sane reason to stockpile weapons and raise armies.  The people of the world do not have to kill each other off to save resources.  When will the world heal itself and realize that cooperation is better than competition?

People are brainwashed to be violent from an early age.  Television is mostly one long stream of violent programming.  Even kids shows like Power Rangers are about fighting.  I grew up watching Bugs Bunny.  Those cartoons were always dropping anvils on each other and shooting each other’s faces off.  What kind of society do we live in where depictions of murder and violence are entertainment?  It goes far back in history.  The Romans had their arenas, we have our video games.  The mass media brainwashes people into becoming pawns for the government.  Literature is all about getting people to think like killers.  Look at the Illiad, the first epic of Western literature.  It’s a bloody, gory poem about a stupid, pointless war instigated by one person.  This is good?  Brainwashing.

In the modern world where any two people can find some way to communicate with each other over continually evolving computer networks there is no reason to have violent conflict.  The world needs to get its act together and reform from its demented ways.  All people need food, water, air and shelter.  We do not need guns, tanks, bombs, warships, and idiotic politicians telling us to kill people because they are different from us.  They are not different.  We are all humans and need to get along.

The way to make money is to sell something.  It’s simple.  You sell something to somebody for more than you pay for it.  The difference between what you buy an object for and what you sell it for is your profit.  It is important to sell your offering for more than you pay for it.  If you sell at a discount for less than you pay for something you will not make money, you will lose money.  Total profits will be the amount you make on each item multiplied by the number of items you sell.  The math is very simple.

There are hidden costs in selling items.  You might have to pay shipping for items you buy to sell.  You might have to pay some salesman to sell your items.  You might have to package your items before you sell them.  All these costs should be added to the price of your item.  Then you add on a profit margin.  If you do not account for the costs involved in selling items you will lose money.  It is very simple.  You need to sell items for more than it costs you to purchase the items and handle them and package them.

There are other costs to doing business.  If you sell items over the internet you will need to pay for your web hosting.  You will need to pay the government taxes on your sales and profits.  You may need to pay wages and benefits to workers who do the actual work in your sales business.  If you manufacture the items you sell, it will involve a whole slew of costs such as running a factory and buying raw materials.  You need to account for all these costs in your price.  You may need to hire promotional people to generate a hype for your product.  You may need to hire tax accountants to keep the books.  You may need to do a lot of running around to get the best deals on the stuff you sell.  All these costs add up and need to be taken into account when you sell your offering.

Of course, you can only jack up the price of your items so much before people stop buying them.  There is also competition from businesses selling the same type of item.  You will need to set prices at the right level to maximize your total profits.  This may take some trial and error.  You may have to get sales data at different price levels to see how well your product sells.  Of course, this is going to be a big operation and a lot of things can go wrong.  Maybe nobody wants your expensive optional decorative product.  You may end up losing a lot of money instead of making money.  You need to do some research and planning before you decide on what you want to sell.

You make money by getting people to give you more money for some thing you are selling than what it costs you to supply to them.  To get rich you will need to make a lot of money.  More importantly, you will have to spend less money than you make.  This allows money to accumulate.  If you spend more money than you make you will lose money and not get rich.  No matter how much money you make, if your outflow of cash exceeds the inflow you will have less than nothing and end up in a lot of debt.  You do not have to be a miser, but you have to watch what you spend.  Your business will be the biggest expense.  It costs a lot of money to run a business.  Still, if the business makes more than it costs this will be a source of income for you.

To make money and get rich you will have to run some kind of business.  Unless you get lucky and win the lottery there is no other way to make a fortune.  There is a lot of competition in business.  You will have to sell your products for less than the competition if you expect people to fork over their cash for your offering.  This is how an economy operates.  There is no magic formula to getting rich.  Sure, you can always invest in other people’s businesses by buying stocks and bonds.  Of course, you will have no control over how other people do their business and if you lose money there is nothing you can do about it.  You will also need a lot of money to invest if you try to make a fortune this way.  In the end, it is still some business making or selling some product to people that is generating the money.

Even if you become a rock star or a famous author and make your fortune this way you will still have to do some work.  Nobody is going to give you money for nothing unless you are a politician running for office.  If you work for yourself and take all the risks in your occupation you will be the one to benefit from your efforts.  Of course, you might also fail and lose all the money you had to start with.  Business is like gambling.  There is always the chance of failure because of factors you can not control.  That’s life.  There is no reason you can not start over and try something else if your first idea does not pan out.  Find something you can sell for a profit and get busy.  If you work hard and are lucky and don’t spend all your profits, you too might become rich.

I haven’t done much blogging lately.  I’ve been reading about horror.  There is not as big a market these days for horror fiction as there was in the 1980’s.  I have to really look around for book stores that still sell this kind of book.

I bought a horror novel a couple days ago.  It’s not very horrible.  The book is more like a murder mystery with greusome characters.  It’s a fast read and fairly entertaining, but the thing is it is not scary.  I guess I am jaded or something.  Fictional descriptions of dead bodies and visits from annoying demons do not scare me.  Still, it is an interesting book.  I think I will study it to pick up on some techniques that make for a best seller.

Every once in a while I will buy a book that is a best seller.  I do this to pick up on technique.  There tends to be a lot of action in a best selling novel.  A lot of stuff happens to the characters.  Characters do not sit around thinking a lot in a good book.  I guess if you want a lot of people to read your book a lot of stuff has to happen.

So, I haven’t been looking around for things to add to this blog recently.  I did not even turn on my computer yesterday.  I hooked up this morning after riding my exercise bike for a while.  I spent some time updating my virus checker and deleting email.  The Internet is becoming a chore to do.  I think I will wander off and read a few things on the net this morning.  This is not much of a post, but then, maybe nobody will read it anyway.  Soon everyone will have a blog and nobody will have the time to read what other people write.  Wouldn’t that be funny?

It takes a lot of time and work to write a novel.  These books can be anywhere from 75,000 words on up.  If you can write 2,000 words a day you might actually write a novel in a couple months.  The thing about writing is that it is work.  It takes effort to come up with a story that is interesting to read.  It also takes a lot of practice to become good at writing.

A novel needs a cast of characters.  These characters should have human traits and idiosyncrasies.  There is little quite as dull as reading a novel where all of the characters think and act the same.  You need to have some conflict going on between characters to make for interesting plot.  This conflict can come from conflicting views of the world.  The classic is the mystery novel, where some criminal does some crime and a detective tries to solve the case.  Conflict is built into this scenario.

Every novel takes place in some setting.  This might be an area you are familiar with, or a foreign country.  Take some time to do a bit of research on the scene for your novel.  If it is set in a city, find out what kinds of places are in this town and what the streets look like so you can put these little gems of information into your book.  If you can both entertain your reader and enlighten them with new information so much the better.

It is the usual practice in writing a novel that in the end, the good guys win.  Few people want to read a story where criminals get away with murder.  This is just the standard practice in plotting a story.  The happy ending has become standard.  Years ago there used to be things called tragedies.  Hamlet is a tragedy, because in the end the hero dies.  People still like Hamlet and many movies have been made from this play, but, in our sugar-coated world, tragedy is the exception.  There are some tragic elements in horror movies, but even in these films there is usually an end scene where the killer gets killed.

It is important that in the course of your novel the main character is changed in some way.  This may be a change in outlook or behavior, or just an attitude adjustment.  Change is what makes life interesting.  A person sitting on a rock all day meditating is not an interesting character for a novel unless in some way he changes and becomes able to levitate or something for all his efforts.  If nothing happens in your book, why would anyone read it?

The important thing to remember when you start to write a novel is that it will take a lot of time.  It takes days just to read a novel, and reading is easily ten times as fast as writing.  Take your time and make sure the characters and plot twists all make some kind of sense.  Even if you are writing something fantastic, there has to be some reason things happen.  Readers are looking for meaning in a novel and it is important to have plenty of interesting ideas in your work to keep a reader going to the end.

Certain things will kill a novel.  If your main character suddenly does something so stupid that the reader loses sympathy with him your book will be a failure.  Once the reader stops caring about a character there is little you can do to regain trust.  Still, your characters need to have some kind of problems to overcome or there will be no action in your book.  Each character should also have some outlook on the world that is unique so that the reader can see the story from different perspectives.  Sometimes a problem that is impossible for one character will be easily solved by another.

It is not impossible to write a novel.  Thousands of these books are written by various people each year.  Once you have your novel written and revised, you will have to try and sell it.  There are a couple ways to go about selling your novel to a publisher.  One way is to get a Writer’s Market at the local book store and send out the first two or three chapters to an editor at a publishing company that publishes novels that are similar to your own.  This method is haphazard and not guaranteed to produce results.  Still, many popular novels were rejected many times before they were finally published.

The other way to get your work published is to find an agent.  Agents work for a percentage.  Find an agent that does not charge you a fee to read your work.  There are many nefarious persons in the publishing industry who make money off authors.  In the real world of legitimate business, the author makes money off the publishers and agent’s work.  Beware of vanity presses who charge you money to print your work.  You want to sell your novel and make money from your hard work, not pay some persons to print up copies of your book so you can store them in your garage and try to sell them yourself.  An agent can help you sort out all the nuances of the publishing business such as contracts.

If you are desperate for people to see your work and don’t care about money, you might post your novel somewhere online.  A blog is one way people publish their work.  You can also set up a free website to host your novel.  If a lot of people read your novel, you might put advertising into it to monetize your work.  Electronic publishing is still in its infancy, so you might end up doing a lot of work for nothing.  If you want to make money and you think your novel is good enough to sell, paper books are still the way to make money off your work.  In the future electronic formats might be profitable if a pay-per-download site is set up, but for now, books still rule.

Writing a novel takes a lot of time and effort.  Writing a good novel can take years.  If you enjoy reading and wonder what it takes to produce a good work of fiction, jump into the water, fire up your computer, and start typing.  People are even writing novels on their cell phones in Japan, some of which sell thousands of copies.  There is a lot of room in the world for entertainment.  If you can think up stories that excite and please people, there is no reason you can not make a living as an author.  Like any other art form, however, there are no guarantees your work will sell.  The vagaries of the market will often determine success or failure.  There is no way to tell if you have what it takes for success if you do not jump in and get working on your project.

The key to having an enjoyable life is doing the things you like to do.  This does not mean you should sit on the couch drinking beer and watching the game on TV all the time, even though this is enjoyable.  This means you should find some way to enjoy the things you have to do every day.

If you have a job, you should think of some way to enjoy working.  This might be hard if you clean out sewers for a living.  Still, nothing is stopping you from getting a better job.  Even if what you do is boring, just think about how many cents you are putting in your pocket each minute.  Doing the best you can is one way to enjoy your work.  Finding interest in your occupation will make your work more enjoyable.  Look at the challenges that come along every day as proof of your worth as an employee of your company.

You do not have to go on long expensive vacations to enjoy your life.  A person can be quite happy at home if they have other people to interact with.  Instead of arguing with your family about stuff that doesn’t really matter, try talking to them as friends.  Look at meals as a cooperative effort to make an enjoyable experience.  Find programs on TV that everybody can enjoy watching.  Talk about what you read online during the day.  Discuss the news.  If you don’t have a family, make some friends.  There are many things a person can do to have a social life.

You do not have to go out to the clubs at night to have a good time.  It is entirely possible to do things that are fun in your own neighborhood.  You might want to take a walk around the block after dinner.  You might want to sit on the porch and watch traffic go by on the street.  You might want to get a bike and go to the park and ride on the trails.  Plan some fun activities and enjoy yourself at least once a week.

Reading interesting books is something I enjoy.  I go to the book store every week or so and find a new book to read.  Reading not only passes the time but it educates you as well.  Think of how much a college education costs.  Books are the source of knowledge for all college courses.  Cut out the middleman and educate yourself.  Even if you can’t remember everything you read you will still be exposed to concepts you might never see in school by reading books.  Movies and TV are fine for passing the time, but you will become more knowledgeable by reading books.

The key to enjoying life is finding some way to enjoy everything you do.  Trying your best at any task and realizing that you are making your life livable are ways to find happiness in doing almost anything.  Even if you are just taking out the trash, you are making your home cleaner and a better place to live by doing this.  Improving your lot in life should be enough to make anyone happy.