Electric cars may soon be powered by autonomous “metal snakes”

If you were to take all of the inconveniences that come with owning an electric vehicle and make a list of them, I’m sure having to plug the vehicle into your wall when you come home would be somewhere at the bottom. Nonetheless, this miniscule inconvenience is still an inconvenience, which is why Elon Musk has taken to Twitter to announce that Tesla Motors has the solution.

Tesla vehicles can charged by either plugging them into a wall outlet using an adaptor, which is the most common option, or by quickly juicing them up at one of the automaker’s “supercharger” stations that’re scattered across North America and Europe. However, Musk expressed his dissatisfaction with the first option and promised that the adapter would automatically hook itself up to Tesla vehicles in the near future.

“Something I’d like to do, which I think many of our engineers will be hearing this in real-time, is have the charge connector plug itself in, articulating sort of like a snake, like ‘Metal Gear Solid’ or something,” said Musk during the unveiling of the upcoming Dual Motor All Wheel Drive Model S and autopilot feature.

This kind of outlandish feature is exactly the kind of thing that we’ve come to expect from Elon Musk, who has a well-deserved reputation for bold and innovative ideas. Even as the company continues to work on the upcoming Model X, Tesla has been improving the technology of its existing vehicles. This “metal snake”, which is expected to be compatible with existing Model S vehicles, is just the latest of these improvements.

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It’s All Going Mobile. We Get It. Now What?

When I finally stopped counting, I found 43 articles posted this week on various publications proclaiming that everything was going mobile and that marketers and businesses need to make the appropriate adjustments. All of the articles had two things in common: they gave reasons why we needed to market to mobile users and they didn’t give very good ways other than the basic or generic methods for doing so.

Well, I’m here to give you some good ways to do it. That’s all. No need to convince you that you need to do it. If you’re reading this article, you already know. If you’re not reading this article, you probably already know. Now, let’s get away from why and start really digging into how.

Build Everything for Mobile

Everything. I didn’t say most things. I didn’t say “everything digital” or “all of your advertising”. I said “everything” and I mean it.

Signs. Billboards. Television commercials. Radio spots. Newspaper ads. PPC campaigns. Social media posts. Your website. You employees’ apparel.

Pretend like people will be either carrying around smartphones and tablets with them everywhere they go. Pretend like their primary method for interacting with businesses is not the phone, not their email, not their laptops, and not coming to see you in person. Pretend like they’re on the verge of using their mobile device even when they’re in your store. Now, stop pretending because all of that is already a reality.

Watch your customers if you have a physical location. How many of them check their phones during the visit? If you don’t have a physical location, check your analytics. Look at the devices through which they’re viewing your website.

Now, give them the opportunity to have a mobile experience with everything you have. Once you have the opportunities in line, give them the reason to act. For example:

• Forget about paper coupons. Put virtual coupons at your store if they download your app or go to the “In-Store Customer Discount Page” on your website.


• Restaurant owners, post videos and articles about particular recipes showing how you cook your signature dishes. You don’t have to give away the whole recipe if it’s secret, but you can get your visitors interacting with your food, even sharing this content on social media before, during, and after they have eaten it.


• Let customers post to your site, community, or social profiles. In fact, encourage them. Give them incentive to do so. Tell them if they post a selfie with your sign in the background, they’ll get 10% off. Images posted to Facebook or Twitter are much better than checkins on Yelp.

I could spit out ideas for hours, but we’re writing an article, not a book. Think of ideas for yourself. What can you do with everything you have to make it part of the mobile experience.

A Mobile-Only Website Would Work

All too often, we build a website for the company and make it really pretty on a desktop, but we neglect to put the same effort in for mobile. Whether you’re using responsive, adaptive, mobile-ready, or full-site only platforms, make sure that your website is designed specifically for mobile.

In fact, if your primary website mimicked a mobile experience, you’re better off than if your mobile website mimics a desktop experience. At some point in the near future, we will begin to see more websites that appear like mobile websites even when viewed on desktops. This is a good thing. Those who start doing it early will be ahead of the curve.

Social is Mobile

For a while there, it was looking as if Facebook would be able to become the only web presence. They faltered, then interest dropped off, but they got close. Now, we’re still stuck with our standard online presence and our social presence.

But wait! It doesn’t have to be so partitioned. Social media sites, Facebook in particular, have very powerful mobile connections. By drawing as many people in as possible to engage with you through their mobile devices on social media, you can start to bridge the gap and work towards a unified web presence. This is much trickier than what I can explain in a short article, but the strategy is one that we’re implementing for clients now.

If you think social, think mobile. If you think mobile, make it work with social. Both can be made local, thus the SoLoMo concept that has been so popular at marketing conferences for a few years now.

Erase All Desktop and Analog Thinking from Your Mindset

This is the most important thing to do. We’ve hammered it so far in this article with everything we’ve said. Now we’re going to push it all the way through to the other side.

You don’t have a mobile website and a desktop website. You have a website. You don’t have social media fans on mobile and social media fans on desktop. They’re all on mobile (or will be eventually). You don’t have customers walking through your doors who aren’t seconds away from having their phone in their hand. Embrace it.

Buzzwords like “showrooming” and “competitive shopping” are real but pretty much meaningless until you have a purely mobile strategy for everyhing you do. Keep that in mind next time you’re looking at your advertising and marketing budgets. If an expenditure doesn’t assist in taking advantage of a mobile society, consider letting it go.

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Philippians 4:13 – all things through Christ

Philippians 4:13

I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.

It is such a simple verse, yet one that is so profound. Regardless of the task, great or small, important or trivial, Yeshua is there for us as our guiding light, not only to have the strength to do these things but also to know which things we are supposed to be doing in the first place.

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Sony Does Not Represent America. At Least it Shouldn’t.

Sony pictures did a bad thing. Then, they did a worse thing. Unfortunately, America will likely suffer as a result of both actions.

There has been tons of commentary, plenty of celebrities, and even a President who has expressed deep annoyance at Sony pictures for being bullied by North Korea. We don’t need to rehash that or why it’s wrong. Let’s take a look at their original misdeed and then discuss what this means in the larger scheme of the current American direction in the world.

First, the movie itself…

The Interview is American Entertainment Gone Amok

The first thing that Sony did wrong was to make The Interview in the first place. America has taken the lead for several decades in using our media might to expose wrongdoing internally and around the world. Our journalists risk their lives to bring the world the stories of persecution and abuse. Documentary makes take similar risks diving deeper into evils that the world needs to see.

Hollywood has been trending for a long time in the opposite direction. I’m not talking about the individuals that make up the industry but Hollywood as an entity itself. It embraces the sins that other countries use to condemn us. It paints a picture of a morally and ethically suffocated society that likes loud explosions, gratuitous sex scenes, and cultural superiority disguised as patriotism.

The Interview as a movie represents the most immature and uncaring aspects of our entertainment-driven culture. This isn’t exposing the terrible environment that the people of North Korea exist in throughout their lives. One only has to watch the trailer and have experience with the previous works of thespians like Seth Rogen and James Franco to know that this is a raunchy comedy that attempts to push the limits of decency in order to fill seats and get chuckles.

It’s not even true parody. They created a fictional world with real elements in an egotistical attempt to remove boundaries of decency. “We’re Hollywood and we can say what we want. The world needs to lighten up.”

America needs to be the ideological leaders of the world. Unfortunately, Hollywood is one of the biggest representations of America with reach that far exceeds our journalists, activists, and leaders. More people around the world see the debauchery and self-announced grandeur that comes from Hollywood than any of the good things the people of this country do abroad.

This movie epitomizes the worst parts of Hollywood and should never have been made in the first place.

Facing the Unfortunate Reality of Today

A nation is represented by its people. There was a time not too long ago when the majority of what America represented based upon the actions of the people was admirable. Today, it seems like we’re on the verge of becoming what our detractors worldwide have been calling us for decades: glutinous, spoiled, and dangerous.

There are millions of Americans who represent the concept of America properly. In fact, I would go so far as to say the vast majority of Americans are living the right way. However, those with the greatest reach and loudest voices are the ones that are seen by the outside world and their message is not the right representation of what the American people want.

We aren’t a country that promotes spying on our allies or the innocent people in the country and across the world, but the NSA has unwittingly made others believe that we are.

We aren’t a country that makes light of persecution or suffering, but Hollywood has told the world otherwise.

We aren’t a country that turns its back on the religious principles that helped to mold us from the start, but many of our leaders and members of the media paint that very picture.

This list of sins and crimes against humanity could go on and on, and none of them are true representations of what the majority of Americans embrace, but the powers that be do very little to represent us to the world properly. We must stop our politicians from misrepresenting us. We must not support Hollywood’s attempt to paint us with the brush of debauchery and callous indulgences. We must make the media report our perspectives properly rather than based on an erroneous, agenda-driven ideology that is held by the few rather than the majority.

Sony should not have made the movie. However, they did even worse by painting us as a weak nation that can be bullied by terrorists.

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The Unaddressed Evolutionary Challenge of the Eye’s Origins

The debate about the evolution of the eye has been a flashpoint of passion since evolution was first proposed. Debaters on both sides have focused on the concept of irreducible complexity, single- versus multi-source origins, and biochemical gaps that seem to jump in either explicable or inexplicable ways (depending on which side of the argument one is on).

There’s something that you don’t hear about very often. It lies in simple logic, even common sense. There’s no reason for the evolutionists to consider it because it’s a flaw in their thinking. It’s harder to understand why creationists have not discussed it more deeply and after much research I haven’t found a very good exploration. The idea surrounds a question, one that doesn’t ask how the eye was created but rather why it was initially brought into being.

How can something evolve to detect the presence of light if there was nothing prior to know that light existed in the first place?

This is not going to be an in-depth exploration into the question. That, I’ll leave for those who have more time and focus. We are not here for apologetics. We don’t try to “prove” creation or the existence of God. However, it’s interesting how this topic has not been addressed more fully.

At first, I figured there must be a simple answer that I missed, one that is well-known in evolutionary circles to combat this issue, but after exploring the topic and discussing it with many, I found nothing. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I “stumped” evolutionists I discussed, but responses were very mixed and clearly concerning from their perspective.

Science can trace back the origins of they eye to basic photo-receptors on simple organisms designed to give them understanding about the directional source of light. However, it has not given a reasonable explanation for how this amazing trait spawned in the first place. It cannot be dismissed to the evolutionist’s favorite trick, mutation. There is a tremendous gap between not having and photosensitive cells and having them because it requires multiple simultaneous complex mutations to form the most basic light-detecting organs.

A common argument is that the detection of light evolved from an inherent ability to detect heat, but this concept has many flaws as well. Light and heat are only loosely associated in a pre-historic world where gravity is the easier concept for simple creatures to sense. There would not have been a need to detect heat through the presence of light when going against gravity in the prehistoric goo of an evolutionist’s worldview would bring creatures closer to the warmth of the surface.

To generate the evolutionary need for creatures to detect light and therefore develop photo-sensitive cells, they would have needed to understand that light existed in the first place. With nothing to let them know that light existed, there would have been no need for photo-receptors to evolve in the first place. Eyespots are the earliest stage of the evolution of the eye. You can trace it all back to eyespots. However, there is no explanation for why eyespots came into being.

It’s not as elegant as the argument against the evolution of flight or the metamorphosis dilemma, but it is an argument that evolutionists have never been able to reconcile and is therefore a valid point of discussion.

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