apologize or else

the conservatory law of memory

2012-01-15T04:43:00.000-08:00

Wandering in a conservatory recently, I became nostalgic for the time I used to visit Kew Gardens quite frequently as it was just a 20 minute train ride away from my home.

It occurred to me that perhaps there is a conservation law of recall. Perhaps you can only recall things so many times. Perhaps, just as with Computer Solid State memory, and with rechargeable batteries, human memory can only take so many "read/verify/rewrite" cycles - after all, as we now know, memory is not a vault. It is active, and conserved by being used. However, it is not immutable - usage makes it alter (see the Julian Barnes novel A sense of ending for a very fine evocation of this.

So entropy applies. This means that too much nostalgia will lead to dementia. Perhaps the rise in Alzheimer's is not really due simply to people living too long, but is a side-effect of having the ability to recall so much so easily at the tips of your fingers on the interweb. Perhaps nostagia is killing the past, a piece at a time - perhaps the Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind is not a fiction, but an epidemic.

synaesthesia of a different kind

2011-08-02T01:28:00.000-07:00

I spent a hundred lengths swimming in Malaga last week confused about the first 5 primes and the 5 vowels

sort of like mad math version of
voyelles

he Long Tail of Research, Full Economic Costs and Government Cuts - Journalists see here (FIA?)

2011-01-19T05:57:00.000-08:00

Research value in the long tail is an interesting idea - so industry and shorter term pressures on results do produce applicable ideas, but it seems to me that not only is it harder to attract such funding from industry for longer term (5-50 years) research, but that it is way way harder to predict (and to attribute/measure impact after the event) results, which is why government funds things.

So if we look at the distribution of funding over individuals in Universities (or labs that do long term research), it too is heavy/long tailed.

Now with the cuts in funding to many areas in the UK, the thing that goes first is the thing with least measureable outcomes. And money concentrates at the top of the curve.

A while back, UK universities agreed to seek Full Economic Costs for each and every thing they do, from all funding sources possible. What effect do you think this has had? Well, my guess is it has made it even harder for long term basic/foundational researchers to get funded, and easier to get money for short term people (like me:). Now, an interesting question is "how has long term research survived recently, then"?

Answer. FEC is being recovered at >100% for the people in the short term areas, and siphoned off for cross subsidy for long term. i.e. we're doing something he government used to do by stealth.

However, this is probably not legal - certainly if you bill more than 100% to EU, even if you deliver the work, you are working more hours than european law permits (almost certainly true for most UK universities, and other large state systems like the NHS, and education in general).

But worse. It is distorting, and creates an incentive for the government to go on under-funding long term work, because they don't see it vanish quite so fast as it is kept limping along under cover of succesful short term work.

Some journalist (THES maybe) should ask for the costings for some universities research projects and the charges made by PI name (under an FIA request) and see how often the time adds up to > 100%. Note, some of those PIs are supposed to be doing teaching as well. Some of them don't even actually cost any money at all, if their posts are endowed, or they are emeritus.
(If you think that the funding agencies would do this, think again - the EU and UK National agencies aren't going to be swapping data bases, for lots of ok reasons).

Footnote:
It is noteworthy that (rumour has it that) Intel has decided to shut down its "embedded" lablets (Seattle, Berkeley, Pittsburgh) after a successful decade of interesting research, but few results that benefited the corporation mission/goal/objectives, even if the ideas did see a lot of cool publications and may well have been useful elsewhere. And other such labs funded by other temporarily enlightened corporations may have benefitted Intel in turn . Despite its best ever financial quarter, it isn't that surprising that Intel finally called time on this disruptive experiment started so nicely by David Tennenhouse. It is the job of governments and state subsidy really, and why we charge profitable outfits like Intel tax. ANd why we give them tax breaks when they donate money to long term research.

more newspeak from uk coalition

2010-12-20T04:47:00.000-08:00

"The ministers pointed out that the new fees regime, under which students could be charged up to £9,000 per year, could mean the government increased its investment in the higher education sector." - in
bbc report

i love this - they cut tax for the rich, cut welfare for the poor, and then claim that requiring universities to charge the public more amounts to more investment! the universities (they seem to forget) are not civil service organisaions - they are independent by charter so "government investment" is ONLY that money that goes from the treasury to the university, and that has decreased. Fees are not investment either - they are just part of the cost of delivering the service - investment would imply expanding the service, which is exactly the opposite of what is just starting to happen. I wish the press would stop reporting stuff as fact when the government issues statements, and simply report it with words like "claim" and then put the facts next to the government-speak

Some libdems claim the vice chancellors are to blame for high fees. hmmm - blaming random parts of your constituency is usually the sign of a government on its way out - these guys sure have started early given their modest "majority" - here's how we're going to "increase" teaching to poor people:- I've another idea have them all join the polis for a year, and get paid to beat up students, then they can afford to go to Uni, and furthermore, could defend themselves...

i'll say it again: blaming your constituents for problems is a sure sign of a government on its way out. and they don't exactly have a true "majority" either.

talkin bout a revolution...

Age and Class

2010-11-26T00:52:00.000-08:00

Age:-
- Young people have nothing to look back on, and everything to look forward to
- Middle aged people have nothing to look back on and nothing to look forward to
- Old age people have nothing to look forward to, and everything to look back on.

Class:-
- Working class people don't look up to no-one, don't look down on no-one either.
- Middle class people look down on working class as they have no aspirations.
Middle class people look down on upper-class people as they got there unfairly. Middle class people are so up-themselves.
- Upper-class people don't look at middle class people and don't even see working class people.

with apologies to Barker, Cleese and Corbett.

The Silent Soprano, a Comic Opera in 3 Acts

2010-10-17T10:42:00.001-07:00

The plot.

The younger sister of the phantom of the opera takes revenge on the lead singers, by stealing their voices and selling them to a troop of monkeys who are in town for the annual fair.

The monkeys, now possessed of speech, find gainful employment as bankers and the financial service sector sees a huge turnaround.

The opera singers find that without a voice, they stop bitching and backstabing and cooperate to try to get work - the prima donna decides that the show must go on, so they start to perform the world's first Opera in Mime - it is a tremendous success.

However, yearning to be heard, a young understudy baritone succeeds in stealing the voices back from the monkeys, wreaking havoc with the world's economy, and re-introducing turmoil and strife at the Opera House.

He is universally condemned and in the final scene, he is forced to give the voices back to the monkeys and then beaten with blank music manuscript paper until the staves and clefs leave indelible marks on his face and hands.

The tunes.

Phantasmagoria I&II from Jeff Buckley.
etc etc

The Libretto

short, and sweet- the monkeys could, for example, recite lines from the Enron trial transscript.

roll over linaues

2010-10-09T05:11:00.001-07:00

john daugman informs me that
In the 'Celestial Empire of benevolent Knowledge'(c.f. Jorge
Luis Borges in Book of Imaginary Beings
animals are taxonomised thus:
(a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame,
(d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous,
(g) stray dogs,
(h) included in the present classification,
(i) frenzied, (j) innumerable,
(k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
(l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher,
(n) that from a long way off look like flies.

much better than Fire, Women and Dangerous Things

maybe bass players are actually cool?

2010-09-15T22:24:00.000-07:00

a lot of famous bands split up and their constituent parts can never capture the quality in their subsequent outings - what has johnny marr done since the smiths, or john squire since the stone roses? some ok stuff, but nothing quite so cool

but think about paul simenon post clash, jah wobble post PiL, mani, post stone roses, or jaco pastorious post weather report.....some very respectable work with the good/bad/queen, solo albums, primal scream, joni mitchell, etc etc....

so maybe we should stop being rude about bass players...

economics 4.0

2010-08-07T08:39:00.000-07:00

just reading a review of a slew of new books apologizing for the collapse of the "free" market and having just seen sight of a new paper by Andrew Odlyzko, outling some thoughts towards a model of Gullability and a talk by Michael Mitzenmacher about
Information Asymmetries in Pay-Per-Bid Auctions: How Swoopo Makes Bank,
I'm not only more and more convinced that Economics is sub-dismal in terms of science, but I am increasingly hopeful that a new discipline is emerging that sits on the intersection of modeling (computing/maths), social networking (including game theory, but allowing for opinion dynamics), and that it might have prescriptive consequences that are based in explanatory descriptions of how the economic world actually, operates and what the real, effective levers are for altering its behaviour in favour of humans who inhabit its spheres.

The behavioural economic models are half way there but lack predictive value. The old free market, Adam Smith fictions are demontrably nonsense (humans are not selfish rational players, and no market in reality is efficient or transparent in terms of information for many obvious reasons) - the two papers/talks above explain why people start to behave less and less the way market-nutters would like them to, just at the worst possible time. They also explain how systems can operate no-where near clearing price (marginal profit) without needing insider trading or other things regulators would like to think are necessary but worse, sufficient to keep the world turning on its monetary axis.

No, there's hope. Not much, and its possible no-one is listening, but maybe .....

torrid content providers

2010-07-19T22:50:00.000-07:00

just read this note about who publishes what on bittorrent portals and why

much like a lot of the dark underbelly of the internet, its a bit of a sordid mess...

if it isn't fake content by copyright protectionista, it's likely to be
self-advertising by big sites or porn or malware perveyors....

http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.2327

Incurably informed

2010-05-20T07:02:00.001-07:00

is it possible for a news item nowadays to be anything other than
plain dead or hysterically reported?

we've seen the gadzooks reports about Climate Change (or not), about banning flights during the Icelandic Eruption/Ash Cloud, and now its the H1N1 pandemic - the metareport is that it was over-reaction

Ask yourself this:
If climate change is true and we dont do anything, and Manhatten and Amsterdam are underwater in 2050, what will the papers say then?

Ask yourself this: if one single plane crashes with ash-clogged engines, and the airline goes broke under a class action because their insurance wont pay up, and everyone who flew on other planes sues because f post-traumatic stress, what then?

And given H1N1 is replacing the other flu virus as the most likely candidate for the seasonal flu this coming winter, what if we hadn't prepared at all? What would the public, the community or journalists write?

Anyhow, the lesson is this - we now have a global media which has positive feedback loops between components all around the planet. There is simply no mechanism to break the loop so that any story that has the least interest simply magnifies in the echo-chamber, the hall fall of mirrors, the lasing chamber that is the Inter-web.

This is bad - there's only the next story, and the next that kill previous stories, not any refutation or simple boredom.

In some cases (e.g. reporting suicides) there used to be reporting conventions (started by the CDC) because it was recognized that epidemics of suicide were triggered by over-emotional reporting. This has (fairly recently in the UK) died, and in fact in the case of terrorist suicide bombing, it was always largely ignored despite ample evidence that the poor dim, over-hormoned moody adolescent boys who were most the early recruits to this terrible plague were victims - care in reporting has never been more important, and never been more absent.

We need to fix this - I have no idea how (short of Chinese censorship which has other problems:(

3 strange election "threat" stories/lies

2010-04-25T02:06:00.000-07:00

Lie 1. a hung parliament will lead to economic disaster
This is trotted out by labour and tories alike and their lackies (or paymasters) in the press in some attempt to alter people's voting. This is bizarrely misguided.
I dont see why I would chose to vote for a scaremonger who said this,
or if I had already decided to vote libdem because
I can see Cameron for the sleaze he is and
am fedup with Brown's bumbling,
how is this _general_ statement going to alter my personal _specific_ decision?

My vote will be cast primarily because of selfish belief
in what policies might work for me
(including likely ones in a blanaced or libdem led parliament),
and partly because of the particular candidate
I am presented with in the constituency I vote in.
The line in the papers today (and much of the last week)
about not voting libdem because of the worry of
noone having a clear majority is more likely to make me vote libdem
(I wasn't going to - I usually vote green)
now just because it shows how stupid the alternatives are.

Lie 2. libdems will screw up the economy

Cameron, in a fairly mild Paxman interview, asserted with absolutelyu no arggument of substance, that Vince Cable is not the soothsayer. Excellent - I don't want a soothsayer in charge of the economy - thak you Cameron. Thatcherite/Reagan style laissez-faire governance, and Blair's refusal to reverse the trend of no-go regulation have led to the mess we are in - this is down to Cameron and Brown to present an alternative - neither of them have said anything whatsover to make a claim to fixing the underlying problems. Please go away and let someone new have a go - they actually cannot do worse than either of you and your legacies.

3. Cuts in health/education will not harm "frontline" services

Labour are brining in cuts already in health and education. Tories want to accelerate them. This is neither necesssary, nor is it possible without actually harming the health and education, and therefore economy, of the nation. The so-called efficiencies are not there to be made - we have had nearly 25 years of market driven efficiencies in the state health and education areas, and they are lean, mean, slick machines (unlike the government itself). If there is a place to make savings, it is in Whitehall, not in Hospital or School.
But I dispute savings are needed. Sell off the now largely owned state banks, and
think about sustainable economics instead. There are people up for election (clue: not red or blue) who have some ideas here that need trying.

political posters for your home

2010-04-24T02:59:00.003-07:00

This site is useful (thanks to Bad Science for pointing it out!):
http://politicsposters.co.uk/pdf/Holborn-St-Pancras-policies.pdf

concentration camp

2010-04-15T01:43:00.000-07:00

so I'm reading an amazing novel called Redemption Falls by the Irish novelist, Joseph O'Connor (it makes the Road look like a Bing/Bob road movie)...set just in and after the american civil war (there's a beautiful oxymoron - no war is civil, but civil wars seem to make other wars look like street fights) - in it, there's reference to
Andersonille prison camp

now I was always told that the lovely british invented concentration camps in South Africa during the Boer war, but it is clear that the chap who ran this camp shared a lot with the Nazis (he was hung, but claimed he was "only following orders"). I suppose people might claim the people in the camp were PoWs, not civilians....but it was a civil war, so what's the difference?

nosegay stories

2010-04-08T00:57:00.000-07:00

thinkin about Wallace and Gromit for a moment, I have to say that I think the story is a cover for an old gay couple - just look at Wallace for a second and think about it - he dresses up in funny old clothes, pretends to be a giant rabbit, has gentleman lodgers and his "relationship" with the (admittedly bi-) Gromit is never made that clear is it - ok so they have separate rooms, but so do lots of hetero- old couples I know:) - Wallace even has a fling with Feathers McGraw but then goes back to his faithful Gromit (who also has a fling with Fluffles of course in A Close Shave, but its clear to me even then that she is really just Gromit's bit of Hollywood star type poodle...

it is clear that when Wallace is "attracted" to female like Wendolene, she is a mother figure and when he falls for Lady Tottington (in "The Curse"), she is actually a guy in drag (you've never seen a real woman talk like that, have you? :-) And as for Piella Bakewall (reference to the "thinking man's crumpet" of the 1960s), she is also obviously a drag act - really

the whole thing is as plain as the pie on your face...

Why I shan't be voting labour (not that I did before)

2010-04-05T02:46:00.000-07:00

Like many people, I suppose, I was quite excited when after the Thatcher/Major misery years, Labour finally took over under Blair. I hadn't voted for them (I generlaly vote for an MP not a party and there were good other candidates both Lib Dem and Green in my area) but I wished them well - as fellow travellers with apparently at least some common goals.

Ha. That was a gross, baroque and grotesque misunderstanding.

We now have a worse divide between rich and poor, we have used ill-gotten gains to boost the NHS and higher education, but the root cause of ill-health and societal ills (poverty, ignorance)are wosened because of the divide.

The underlying model of the economy was even more extreme laissez-faire free market than under Thatcher. This is now laid bare in all its stupidity, but noone is actually revisiting the alternatives or coming up with any novel approaches.
But there's worse.

Without any real justification, fundamental rights have been massively eroded by these idiots. Under Elizabeth the first and during the 2nd world war, the existing habeus corpus and right to not be held without charge was sufficient, but for obscure and ill-argued reasons, the UK now has one of the worst systems in the so-called civilized world of weeks of detention without trial.

The same sort of stupid technophobic and illogical thinking has led to a plethora of tiny right-erosions including annoying things like the digital economy bill and acts of moronic proportions like the loss of private data through criminal (well it ought to be) incompetence in government agency handling - despite this, a constant push to more and more centralisation of data and control.

We colluded with the CIA in torture - not only unethical, but counter-productive since it lends our enemies an actual justification (see under just war)

We continue to contribute to an unjust war in Iraq, and a pointless war in Afghanistan.

The list goes on and on, and just gets very depressing.

The Tories represent no alternative whatsover - their economic ideas are pathetic (see the recent chancellors-in-waiting debate on TV for how daft they are). They are clueless on class, and irrelevant on Europe.

I'd encourage people to vote with their conscience - we might gt a hung parliament, that might lead to a change in the voting system which might give a chance to some fresh blood to work its way into the moribund system.

We need some massive overhauling in society, economics and environment - none of the main parties has the ability or structure to tackle any of these other from the tired old postures of the past.

Time to die.

city of music - 4 books on rock music & cities (especially London)

2010-04-03T02:27:00.000-07:00

This is my view of these 4 books I just read about music - I love music- also I love london - I have lived in london (mostly) for 50+ years - I am from Camden Town - I went to Gospel Oak primary school - I went to the ROundhouse every sunday for over 10 years. I saw Dingwalls come and go and the Electric Ballroom at its ska best, and the Music Machine at its metal worst,, and all the pubs (hawley dublin castle, underworld etc etc) and dives and market nonsense and fun. Its still fun. Its still a live wire - don't believe any old farts who say "it aint like it used to be" - god, william gibbson namechecks it at the start of his fairly recent Pattern Recognition, even, because of the (serious - i.e. games, computing) new media design links -

Of these 4 books, Gillett is about why rock music comes out of cities and sounds the way it is and is scholarly, respectful and true.
Du Noyer's book is very good, but a tiny bit patchy (understandable - a complete work of this scope (entire history of london is more than 2000 years!) would be 10 times the size, but has some gems of much older links between east end music hall, via mime and the gay scene to glam and new romantic (think lindsay kemp, bowie, spandau) and on - this is a lovely cultural piece which is very london.

Barry Miles piece is fantastic - my mother used to go to the Gluepot woth BBC people in 1948, so it is awesome that this guy can mention that in the same breath as the Blitz and Heaven. I also LOVE that he has such a positive outlook on counter culture and its longevity. One thing about Gillett and Miles is that they both actually DID something (not just write) - Gillett of course was a great world music advocate and apparently relentlessly nice guy. Miles did Indica books (which ended up as Compendium in Camden, but now alas gone) and arranged many serious counter-cultural events too. Du Noyer and Kent are (mostly) journos, but both with v. good writing credentials.

I was very disappointed in the Apathy book - aside from it being an interesting personal piece, it is just that - it doesn't give a lot more insights into the stars that Kent hitched his rise (and fall) too (reminds me of Neil Gaiman:). He also admits without realising it to completely misunderstanding the different parts of london and the way they affect the different people (Stones, Bowie, Siouxie and the Banshees, Dr Feelgood) and why they are different from people from Manchester who he adopts at the tail end, and Bristol, who he seems ignorant of, or NY or the Laurel Canyon gang he fell in with for a while. Nevertheless its worth looking at if you were here or there then and can remember some of it.

But in reading preference order, I'd have them:

barry miles - london calling

paul du noyer - in the city

charlie gillett (rip) - the sound of the city

nick kent - apathy for the devil

category errors

2010-04-02T09:12:00.000-07:00

when sam harris (e.g. see the google talk uses examples of religious groups
making immoral decisions, I think he is making a category error of the same kind that Nick Kent does when write about rock music (e.g. see this review of his apathy)

it isn't religion - its something anthropologists could easily describe and is a behavioural pattern.

it isn't rock music - its a lifestyle thing - basically NME in 1972-1977 was a lifestyle magazine - those of us who liked music (often the same bands, e.g. CAN, Zep, Pistols, etc) had criteria that we shared - critics like Kent were bewitched by personalities - sometimes, the personality was necessary for the individual to make that kind of music - often not - like the myth of van gogh's madness (in his letters to his brother he frequently described how it GOT IN THE WAY of his art), the destructive behaviour of the various megastars and burnouts he described is interesting, but not because it led to the music or the music was about it.

just so, the behaviour of cultures or social groups (e.g. to oppress women or to encourage suicide bombers) is not a feature of the religion - the religion is window dressing, life style etc - the decisions are made for social reasons

as a scientist, it behoves sam harris to do better - telling people that rational objective thought might lead to better moral decisions doesn't really help - it is like telling keith richard that giving up smack might make his playing in the stones more reliable. it is completely and utterly irrelevant.

it is beside the point.

it is a blues in Eb minor with lyrics from the koran and an album cover with photos from prophets in hell

it is bankers telling the government that increasing tax or NI is a bad idea.

it is beyond the pale, round the bend, up the wall, and thoroughly so.

this blog is now going down for repair

2010-03-04T01:11:00.001-08:00

I can't safely post in the UK anything that might be construed as "menacing"
by some arbitrary (literally) putative reader, so there is now no longer
any point in this blog - see this fine article in
The Lawyer for why

it's another sad day for the UK

adultery is a two way street...so

2010-02-16T03:18:00.000-08:00

so why in primative cultures (dare I say religions)
are women stoned for adultery?

most of these cultures (dare i say religions)
women are regarded as goods and chattels

so how can they be responsible?

surely, the men who commit adultery
are the only ones who could
be responsible
as they are the one
who have strayed

and, if the women are as cattle
have not the men committed a worse sin
than merely stealing another man's goods?

It'd be nice to here
a cleric's response
even if only
to laugh instead of cry

dismal letter

2010-02-14T02:42:00.000-08:00

20 "eminent" economists tell the government to do something about deficit asap or else.

why do we listen to economists?
why have we let them out of purgatory?

they got us in this mess with their advice on free markets...

until they have a root and branch clearout,
I'm putting them in a box with blair's cabinet for iraq/bush support,
and with thatcher for destroying a generation of lives in mining communities,
and that's a pretty bad place to be

frankly, the CRU guys incompetence at keeping data and analysis and personal comments sqeeky clean is a blip on the radar compared to these bozos and bastards.

beyond belief

2010-02-07T04:56:00.000-08:00

post chilton the blair apoligist supremo is pursuasive that his leader didn't mislead (so to speak).

Come on - you cannot have it both ways - if he didn't, then he sure was incompetent taking such poor intelligence advice.

once again:- either blair and his gang are guilty of gross negligence in not taking more care over such important decisions, OR they were unethical in extreme.

That is the reason people are slack-jawed in amazement once again at the parade of
war-apoligists.

afghanistan - sure - necessary - almost as clear cut a case as the falklands.
iraq - unnecessary, disastrously planned in any case for the aftermath, and
an appaling waste of lives and opportunities, now leading to a less safe world.

there's no point flogging a dead horse over this any more tho - basically
you are either pro-blair or you are with us. you are either wrong or right.
you're preaching to the deaf or the converted...

UK gov trains us to think the unthinkable, daily

2010-01-24T04:00:00.000-08:00

One of the reasons that the Chilton enquiry is getting some press, I think, is the whole "45 minutes to launch WMD" story - the problem with the story in the first place is that it was written by politicians and civil servants from a generation of people bought up under the threat of armageddon - but this was the first generation to experience this chilling thought, that a finger on a button in Moscow or DC could end the world.

Now, people are routinely hearing about "horrifying" or "terrifying" things on the news (natural, like Tsunami or Haiti quake, or human, like Bhopal or Beslan)- far from becoming completely numb to these things, rather, the population that bothers to think can now think in terms of plausible risks and limits to damage. This means that the general, critical thinking part of the population doesn't just freeze, when some bogey-man alleged threat is invoked - they stop to consider it compared to other threats (e.g. did saddam hussein have missiles that could reach beyond the middle east? nope.) and rank it in their thinking - as Martin Amis said on TV in the 30th anniversary shindig for Newsnight, "more americans drowned in bathtubs last year than in all the terrorist attacks on the USA" (I'm not sure he's right, but he's certainly in the ballpark).

No, fact is: governments better get used to the fact that anyone under 50 can consider a spectrum of armageddons, ranging from the War with the Machines from T2, down to a couple of pre-teen kids torturing a couple of other kids nearly to death, and seperate out reality from fantasy, and rank the risks.

We don't stop thinking anymore when we hear "armageddon"
This isn't the Cold War, and this isn't the Middle Ages.

redistribution of wealth in the UK under labour

2010-01-22T05:53:00.000-08:00

appears to mean
take money and jobs from the people
and give the money to the banks and the jobs to other countries.

when asked (e.g. on QUestiontime on TV this week) why does the government let
Royal Bank of Scotland (80% state owned) lend money to Kraft to buy cadbury
government ministers (and of course tories) say
"oh, but if we intereed in what the banks did, it would mess up the free market and financial service industry which is so succesful at creating wealth and blah blah blahh

well
1. they messed up the free market by borrowing 150billion pounds from china and putting it into failing businesses (those banks)
2. those banks were not sucesful at creating national wealth, only wealth for a small number of people. other countries that didnt do this had JUST AS MUCH wealth increase
and had a better distribution of that increase over the population.

this is proof positive that the government are unfit to govern since they don't represent the people, not even as shareholders in the banks they bought "on our behalf".

anyhow, if i was (say) a rich bastard who owned a steel mill and a bank, would I let the bank invest money in a competitor steel mill and have it buy my steel mill at a knock down pice, asset strip it, and move on? no i wouldn't. so why did Gordon Brown and Alastair Darling let RBS do this?

The answer is they are too scared to do ANYTHING - they even looked like frighted rabbits in the headlights nowadays.

maybe they will copy Obama, now he's moved on from healthcare to wealthcare reform ....but i'm not optimistic.

billy bragg is right - the government and RBS are irresponsible, imoral, unethical, lying, short term thinkers behaving like robber barons.

2010-01-20T04:22:00.000-08:00

Billy Bragg protest about RBS bonus is absolutely justified

value chain:-

sell of Cadbury to foreigners (just for 1 example) - make more people unemployed - sell of their houses - some of them to foreeign investors - some of them probably to MPs who use them as second houses and claim them as expensies.

profits (abroad) made by bankers, go to their bonuses so they have more money to buy more assets from the more unemployed layed off b the richer government in cuts in public services - banks bailed out by public momey

look, RBS is about to announce 1.5 billion in bonuses - this is the amount the government is cutting higher education&research this year. How short term, bone headedly stupid is that.

UK PLC - bollocks - we aren't a PLC - the government is not taking any liability, and is selling off our assets as if they belong to a private sector and rich minority, a sector that proved itself incompetent and corrupt many times over

now we see RBS is asset stripping British companies, selling them off to the US, and then making a fast buck to pay its bonuses - how stupid is this - an 80% UK taxpayer owned company is helping make UK taxpayers redundent (i.e Cadbury's workers), so they can't pay tax and the other ta payers will be supporting them on social security
so the bastards at RBS can get bigger bonuses.

billy is right to be angry. so am i. i predict a riot.

HR, worse than cockroaches

2010-01-14T03:44:00.000-08:00

worse than lawyers and estate agents (realtors, for US reader), HR people makework
and they make pointless work

a friend of mine is applying for lots of jobs in charities - they seem to be completely infested with HR - Bullshit - basically, all the "job specifications" are 99% boilerplate and only 1% actually talk about the actual work - i.e. what is involved in terms of day to day activities and what is required in terms of specific skills - the rest of it, stuff that anyone who could actually carry out the activities and had the requisite skills and knowledge would, by definition, be able to do in their sleep, makes up 9% plus of any form, and is all boilerplate (i.e. required zero effort by the HR person responsible, zero thought, zero knowledge of the actual domain, zero skill, probably even involved copyright theft since a lot of them look the same so are probably nicked form other companies or other sites on the net) - its shocking - I've seen this creeping madness in staff appraisal schemes in academia and industry, but now it pervades the whle lifecycle.

It must be stamped out - these folks don't even deserve a berth on the B-Ark.

HR = Hateful Reflux

taxing patience, taxing bankers...nowhere to run

2010-01-12T03:44:00.001-08:00

boris johnson (erstwhile mayor of london) claims 9000 bankers will leave london because of a) 50% tax, b) tax on bonuses.
So where will they go? certainly not china or india, who wouldn;t have them, and probably not america now that Barack Obama is thinking of introducing the same thing
(see NY Times today) or gernany or france where merckl and sarkozy both think Brown's tax is not such a bad idea at all

I like this - the banks thought they could get away from national regulation by being global - they forgot the G7/8/30/blah are global too - we can follow you, anywhere, even through solid air.

taxes on stupidity really need to be made more coherent too, though - we need to tax people who run large miliatry budgets, and tax exports from regions running (real) piracy
I can see a whole new emergence of control by the "outland revenue service" (ORS:)
tracking down miscreants (a bit like Al Capone, jailed in the end for tax evasion rather than just being a gangster

after all, what is the difference between organized crime and merchant banking?
(that's a rhetorical question, btw, but if you want me to answer it, the answer is
"absolutely zero").

holding on to longevity by fingernails?

2010-01-12T02:09:00.000-08:00

so its generally acknowledged that all mammals have the rough same number of heartbeats in a lifetime - seems to be a result of the physics of scale Iguess

but what about the number of times you shed/replace skin, or grow new claws/ fingernails?
is that an invariant too?

I think we should be told...

US healthcare update

2010-01-09T06:03:00.001-08:00

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/mlm/healthscatter2.png

seems pretty simple to me..

why don't birds freeze?

2010-01-04T05:19:00.000-08:00

given their altitude and wind chill, I'd expect them to fall out of the sky and land on someone's head...but they don't do that very often - they have very little mass and therefore little heat capacity - how do they not just turn into a lump of ice eh?

Pere Ubu (well, the singer, David Thomas) said "I think the birds are a good idea" and he wasn't talking about the band either, but are they? I think they are as innumberable as bees and as indecipherable as
cryptozomes.

how to make flying safe and pleasant again

2009-12-31T02:08:00.001-08:00

I think we just need to remove the USA as a flight destination, and everything will be fine - or else route ALL USA flights via Israel...

you could have a fleet of giant aircraft carriers 12 miles off shore (with gambling, prostitutuin and other legal off shore activities) and fast connecting boats to the shore in LA, NY, Boston etc....then a network of TGV/Bullet trains across the US - after all, the fear is the plane as weapons - so make the flyover country a no-fly country and problem solved - or alternatively franchise the israel hub idea as an economic regeneration for Gaza - the Gaza landing strip....

some sense from schneier on the topic

ethics - half way between Essex and Airfix

2009-12-14T05:20:00.001-08:00

sounds like it anyhow - having just submitted my first application for an experimental protocol, for approval by an Ethics Committee, I am feelin like I glued it together with Airfix cement, and drove through the lowlands of Essex to get it there.

Now we await with a bated breath...

climategate - how to tell what is science?

2009-12-11T01:41:00.000-08:00

so the discourse of scientists in public and private is different - just like anyones.
So when you see a bunch of leaked emails of discussions between people about writing, presenting and reporting results and about reviewers and editors, necessarily, you see a very different side to people than when they are finally reporting things in a formal publication - this is because scientists like to suppot the myhtology aboiut how science is done...

how can you then tell (as a lay person in a given subject) what stuff on the net that you find is sensible or not?
well, I don;t have a perfect answer - crowdsourced wisdom (what used to be called Delphi)
is nt necessarily sense (c.f. the fear of MMR vaccine in uk( - on the other hand, when you see the invective in an article like
this one, then it does make you think

If the CRU were like the Chiropractors or Homeopaths they could sue these folks for libel:)

let he bankers go

2009-12-07T02:48:00.000-08:00

there seems to be an inordinate fear of taxing people that earn silly money based in the theory that when you have a higher tax bracket for bigger earners, they will go elsewhere and take their money and skills with them.

Firstly, there isn't a lot of evidence for this - we've had different tax rates in different countries at different times - I dont see any correlation between GDP or quality of life of a nation and whether it has high tax for high earners - people choose to stay or go based on many factors. secondly, there's plenty of evidence that countries like Ireland and the UK (and probably the US) that give huge tax breaks to the ultra rich, actually end up in a state of hopeless corruptin in the financial services area with government implicated alongside it (see Fintan O'Toole's excellent "Ship of Fools" recent book about the Celtic Tiger trainwreck).

Of course, there's a risk of losing businesses, if you tax an industry significantly more than elsewhere, if the industry isn't just geo-politically tied to an area (i.e. isn't goods, services, housing, transport, energy, food, for the local people). Of course things like financial services are about as virtualised and non-local as you can get - so in this global economy, we want the services here, but do we care who runs them? do we really believe that if we tax bankers (see
bbc report) then all the "talent" will leave the sector?
1/ what talent?
2/ where are they going to go if the services stay "here"?
3/ lets try it and see :-)

falconer on question time....

2009-11-27T02:03:00.001-08:00

last nite on bbc 1 on questiontime, falcolner defended tony blair about the decision to invade iraq

why doesn't anyone actually ask the question
"Since invading Iraq, we've had 7/7/ and we've had shoe bombers and liquid bomber plots in the UK and this has been caused by this deciison - aren't the people who made the decision going to admit they are not only probably guilty of a crime by starting an illegal, and certainly unjustified war - they also are guilty of causing otherwise loyal British citizens to become terrorists in their own country and therefore cause the death, harm and misery for many people" - i.e. even if tone wont atone for the deaths in Iraq, why can't he say sorry for screwing things up for his own people?

iraquriy wont help one bit, of course.

withouthoppair

2009-11-27T01:46:00.001-08:00

so we can't all save as much carbon emission as we'd like - maybe we have gas guzzling cars and planes - so how could we reduce our feetprint?

one way would be to turn off lights - this would obviously be quite dangerous, but it would certainly save fuel - but (a bit like going round plugging in lots of plugs to stop electricity leaks, but then unplugging all the phone chargers to stop wasting electricity) it is "in the noise" (as david mackay's excellent book explains so clearly)

A better solution (as outlined in aforementioned book) would be to stop using brakes - lots of stopping and starting is what messes up your engine efficiency (and requires you to push all that air out the way, especially when doing take offs, or pullin away with both turbos on the 5.8 liter engine spinin on max) - so we just need to drive (or fly) at crusin speed all the time

what about intersections? No problemo - all that happens is after a few days of mayhem, darwin will eliminate all the drivers and pilots with poor timeing, and then the total number of vehicles on the road (or in the air) will be far less anyhow, so then we will have succeeded globally and locally in optimising the greenicity of the world's car and air transport networks....

simple, doncha see?

john barleycorn - subversion NOT cautionary tale

2009-11-12T03:11:00.000-08:00

I'm definitely very slow - after 11 zillion listenings to the old standard folk tune
John Barleycord, I finally figured out it is an
instruction manual on how to make booze, NOT a warning about its risks...viz

There were three men come from the West
Their fortunes for to try,
And these three made a solemn vow:
"John Barleycorn must die."

They plowed, they sowed, they harrowed him in,
Threw clods upon his head,
'Til these three men were satisfied
John Barleycorn was dead.

They let him lie for a very long time,
'Til the rains from heaven did fall,
When little Sir John raised up his head
And so amazed them all.

They let him stand 'til Mid-Summer's Day
When he looked both pale and wan;
Then little Sir John grew a long, long beard
And so became a man.

They hired men with their scythes so sharp
To cut him off at the knee;
They rolled him and tied him around the waist,
And served him barbarously.

They hired men with their sharp pitchforks
To pierce him to the heart,
But the loader did serve him worse than that,
For he bound him to the cart.

They wheeled him 'round and around the field
'Til they came unto a barn,
And there they took a solemn oath
On poor John Barleycorn.

They hired men with their crab-tree sticks
To split him skin from bone,
But the miller did serve him worse than that,
For he ground him between two stones.

There's little Sir John in the nut-brown bowl,
And there's brandy in the glass,
And little Sir John in the nut-brown bowl
Proved the strongest man at last.

The huntsman cannot hunt the fox
Nor loudly blow his horn
And the tinker cannot mend his pots
Without John Barleycorn.

jobs and houses - how to take up slack?

2009-11-11T01:01:00.000-08:00

1st capital connect didn't run any trains this sunday- reason? no drivers wanted to work overtime!

note there are a million able bodied people looking for work in the uk

similar - there are a million empty houses and a million people looking for somewhere to live

what government intervention would fix this without "distorting the market" too much?
in these times, I am not a fan of pure Adam Smith.....gimme some new deals, and some homeless bankers

what's not to like if you are the army?

2009-11-06T03:25:00.000-08:00

"A US major is under guard at a Texas military base as officials investigate what prompted him to shoot dead 13 people."

spunds like he was doing his job, just a bit early - he was about to be shipped to the "eastern front"....

Unversities versus Lord Mandelson

2009-11-05T03:21:00.000-08:00

One good news measure of our economic impact -
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8340552.stm

The report is well worth reading as it puts a bottom line
(and an impressive one) on our economic impact
and explictly excludes the societal impact (which I believe
would be a trivial case to make)

On Mandelson and turning HE into a 1960s
Comprehensive System....
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8339454.stm
as part of his higher ambitions (viz
http://www.bis.gov.uk/policies/higher-ambitions
if you were having a hard time finding it)

I really think we dont handle these guys very well - obviously
we don't "just rely on A levels" when doing admissions -
that would be stupid -
its the government that are stupid to say so,

Why don't we have a Alastair Campbell type press person
to fight our corner in the public eye -
the government press office gets away with
repeatedly reporting complete and utter balderdash
(witness their attempts to trash the Cambridge report on primary education,
let alone their wilful ignorance in attempting to
supress other science advice recently).

Why do we listen to politicians when they don't listen to us?

We should take our case direct to the public more.

For example,
fundamentally, if someone is disadvantaged by a
state education in getting to university the
solution is not to disadvantage children of wealthy parents
by displacing them from university by people with lower achievements
which would be obviously 100% unethical,
reducing the quality of education for everyone,
but to put the resources into fixing
secondary schools.

every time some good university
catches "criticism" from Mandelson,
for a low %age of state school kids
(e.g. UCL, Imperial, Cambridge, Oxford)
we should look at the list of
schools where we rejected people from
and say
"so what are you doing
about these useless schools,
Lord M?"

and pass this on to the applicants and their parents to
go to their LEA and ask what they are doing with the tax money...
and the subsidy they are getting from people who send their kids
to private school and still pay tax but don't put load on the system
(oh, ok so the private school gets teachers....well if the state school was god, and more state schools are getting people in to uni than private, so more are, by this definition good) then they will attract good teachers - and they do - its just naff schools that don

comprehensivising the universities will screw them up just the way
it did to english 2ndary schools for a couple of decades - solution is
let the teachers do their job and resource it properly (like pretty much any where else in europe(including scotland for example) except england)

and lay off -if you cut university income, you are cutting a profit center - no-one who has "business" in their job title, vuts
profit centers.

as with economics, so with science - british government refutes expert advice

2009-10-31T04:26:00.000-07:00

the latest fiasco in british government denial of expertise involves drugs - but why should we be surprised when this is a government that since Tony (technophone) Blair, has been run by people whose only training is legal and who subscribe to medieval superstitions (e.g. religion)
and prefer the advice of marketeers and gurus than doctors and scientists (or even people who just do business properly!).

shocking if it wasn't actually going to also do harm, which makes it bordering on criminal ignorance.

Poppys and stuff

2009-10-28T06:53:00.000-07:00

last day in october (a hallow's eve!) you're "supposed" to wear a poppy - well I suppose I wont because although I respect and am in awe of people who go fight to defend me, I am not enamoured of the folks that decided the last two times to send these guys "in my name" - no you didn't - and there's no way for me to unbundle this in a poppy without insulting people.

meanwhile, wallace and grommit should do a movie called
12 Angry Dogs

also recently, it occurred to me that the Cambridge Man-o-Science center should build a very small homunculus - that would be their crowning achievement..

to a first approximation....

2009-10-27T07:02:00.001-07:00

to a first approximation....the second approximation
isn't any more accurate...

blairite society

2009-10-26T02:18:00.000-07:00

ASBO - anti social-behaviour orders
sound like something you get in a restaursnt - like
anti-pasti -

waiter, here's my order for some SBs before we get on to the main event

the main event will be 42 days without Al Dante - this is just sufficient as every good Tuscan knows, to cure the most obstinate Florentine Ham...

I suspect Tony BLair wasn't a closet catholic at all - he is an afficionado of that ancient secret society of the lodge of flock wallpaperers, whose rituals include
stripping all the old varnish from their law degree certificates and prostrating themselves before a bowl of steaming pasta - the flying spaghetti monster rears her ugly head one more time...

you can tell I've been reading Dan Brown..

why is there no Wiipedia yet?

2009-10-21T06:05:00.000-07:00

everythign you want to know about gestures...?

UK's proposed Research Evaluation Framework and "Impact"

2009-10-20T06:36:00.000-07:00

One of the problems with this debate is that we are all so self deprecatory as
a community that we miss some important things about the big picture.

RCUK are trying to justify their budget to the treasurey and lord Mandelson
(both roles may change in the next 1-2 years:)
about science spending - note Joe Public is not in this debate - we are not being asked to
justify our existence in the wider arena -

my view is that in the last few years,
public appreciation of science has been very high
(note I say "appreciation", not "understanding")
due to efforts of great popularisers like
Attenborough and Jones and Hawking and many others.

I think it would be quite easy to win the fight that
science research is worth doing in public - that's not the problem - the
"adversary" we have to convince is the senior civil service and
the government in power (as Anthony Finkelstein correctly implied, and
Ross Anderson indicated)....

So what are we looking at in the changing evaluation framework...

1. transparency - is each project (or person) worth funding?
2. scale - is the total budget defensible? (the REF)
3. efficiency - are peer review and the REF/QR mechanism
good ways to assess how to allocate money, and which is better...

A Lot of what is going on is we
are being groomed in a concerted campaign
to believe that this is finely motivated,
(this grooming reminds me
of the way marxism, and free market philsophies
were put over on societies at points in history,
or wars are justified to populations) ...

The peer review system already is quite transparent
(if quite expensive) -
What I dont know why the same word is used
in the new project form 2 page impact statement,
as is used in the HEFCE Proposed REF ...

but what is obvious is that impact at the REF level is to do with QR,
so should be assessed on aggregates,
not on individual fine grain, and also
should be assessed on long time scales (not 10-15, but 15-50 years).

There are two obvious reasons for this
1. research high impact events are black swans.
2. however, the rare events considered as some time series
(probably self similar)
are in fact products of a large aggregate of work in reality
(indeed large deviation theory about such time series come
from collection of feedback processes over
multiple time scales) -

the lower impact work
that may have very low biblimetric impact
for example (typically drawn from some zipfian distribution)
are far from irrelevant - they are the background from which emerge
the succesful results - without all the searching,
we wouldn't get the significant events. (this is not simply
about negative results - its about predictability of impact).

What should be done in the REF?

I propose we accept the _collection_ of fine grain data,
but we object to the simple formual used -

the impact needs to be attributed,
and that is where the formula is clearly silly -

attribution of work in research is hard to do,
and the longer the time scale, the wider you have to look -
but we have quite a well known algorithm for attribution -
its called
pagerank.

jon

p.s.
I quite like things like pagerank,
satnav, cell phones, wii games controller/console,
PVRs with online programme guides, engine management systems,
programmable dishwashers, washing machines, ovens,
etc as examples of CS impact...we should get a big list together and
divy it up amongst us...there's plenty to go around...

p.p.s. at the other extreme
economic impact is rarely large, but some cases can justify an entire programmes
existence - for example, DARPA programme manages used to enjoy telling US congress
that 1 single tax year, cisco paid enough tax to justify the entire ARPA research budget
developing the Intenet (on the order of 600M dollars)...

p.p.p.s.
if you're interested about the problems of research assesment,
one interesting source is the analysis of programme ctte
reviews from a number of conferences - for example, see
http://www.usenix.org/event/wowcs08/tech/full_papers/anderson1/anderson_html/

Science fiction title fashions

2009-10-18T06:36:00.000-07:00

short:
space
grass
sparrow

long:
The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Adrift Just Off the Islets of Langerhans: Latitude 38° 54' N, Longitude 77° 00' 13" W

good:
The City and the Stars
Altered Carbon
Vurt

bad:
The Neutronium Alchemist
The Difference Engine

ugly
woken furies
maul
flood
chrysalids
more than human

pretty
childhood's end
the goblin reservation
more than human

word splay

2009-10-15T03:26:00.000-07:00

Esplionage is a word I accidentally uttered yesterday...it could be
swimming in a sea of meaning, if it was esperanto, but it isnt - why don't you tell me what it might mean? :_

When looking at Chelsea tractors delivering kiddies to school in and around Cambridge each morning, narrowly avoiding being crushed by one of these farm vehicles set loose in the narrow streets of this ancient city, I wonder at the marketing wisdom of the automotive industry:-

Rage Rover
Free Loader
Porsche Crayon?

i dunno

Detente and MAD

2009-10-14T01:55:00.000-07:00

used to be about mutually assured destruction of capitalism v. communism

now we have capitalism v. the biosphere
or mammon v. gaia

who will win? well we'll never know.

just reading Stephen Baxter's "Flood" which is quite depressing, really.

Real reason for Polanski's arrest is....

2009-10-11T10:13:00.000-07:00

...to suppress the release of the movie The Ghost, based on Robert Harris' fine book, a thinly disguised story about Tony Blair's memoirs, which has some fairly devastating material about the war, and a really shocking denoument - my guess is (conspiracy theory alert!) that Tone asked Obama to tell the Swiss to get Polanski before the edits were done

its clear the film is on hold, at least until they find someone else to finish the thing, which could be some time - time enough maybe for Tone to become first European President???

market dogma and impact

2009-10-02T01:58:00.000-07:00

so reading more about herding and cascades - interestingly enough, cascades can be demonstrated to happen without appealing to behavoural economics - but behavoural economics means that they happen sooner because of herding behaviour....oh well.....another nail in the coffin for the dogma of markets - the more i read of the 1980s BS people wrote, the more it looks like the old Marxist style rants - one big hammer so everything looks like a nail. sad sad sad.

meanwhile, having an impact is an interesting problem (to which UK government funded researchers anre now required to address themselves) _ looking at the Mcleod fine book on the history of inventors, it is very much a matter of hit or miss whether some one thing out of millions is the one that succeeds - many people had a go, for example, at making telegraphs work, and radio work, and so on, but the guys that get their name on the thing (Edison, Morse, Marconi, Bell, etc) are just ones that got lucky, really...although in some cases, they were also extremely fine (and possibly ruthless) business minds as well as (maybe) being creative in the tech. arena. Its part of what I said before here - "realizing the applicability of an invention" is crucial, in both senses of the word "realize" -

1/ intellectually grasping the commercial or social benefit the "new" idea will have.
2/ building it and getting it out there as a product or service in the Real World (TM)

driving licenses for everything

2009-09-30T05:45:00.001-07:00

so we have these European Computer Driving Licenses, which are supposed to make sure you don't do anything dangerous on the net. I propose extending the scheme to other walks of life - obviously we should have a
European Voters driving license
to make sure people don't vote unless they actually have a) a clue about the candidates and b) a clue about politics, economics and society
and a
European Genitalia Driving License,
for obvious reasons - this would let us fine people for
being drunk in charge of a penis, for example.

all the sad young men

2009-09-28T03:39:00.001-07:00

what is so sad about this is that it isn't just about geek guys 'n gals - its about most boys and girls and it doesn't have to be a notebook - it could be a paperback or a hat.
and this too...

white van drivers, eh?

2009-09-16T04:00:00.000-07:00

cycling down the road, i go thru a red light - hey, i'm a cyclist - this is my god given right

anyhow, at the next light a white van pulls in front of me, and pulls right over to the cuber and then into the greenbox (for cyclists only), so i pull out round him and go as the other lights go red (but before "ours" go green)...so then he pulls in front of me and stops in the middle of the road and shouts at me about going through red lights.....

he broke 3 laws and was dangerous to others v.
i broke 1.5, and was only dangerous to myself - n.b. I had carefully checked there were no pedestrians within a zillion miles - hey, we're not even talkin about 4-ways here - these were just crossings....

where do these people get off on thinkin they control the universe coz they've got a gearstick? bozos.

US healthcare reform proposed solution

2009-09-12T07:33:00.000-07:00

and the answer is: the US should outsource it to the EU - there's lotsa different systems to pick from and almost any of them are better than the US's or cheaper, or both. this would stimulate competition from the US healthcare industry to get its price/performance in shape, and that would in turn do the same the EU systems - proper global capitalism...clearly Americans will find many objections to this, which is just fine, as I really don't care what they do provided they go away from our tv sets and stop being so **** embarassing.

data points (always disputed by defenders of the status quo)

US spends twice OECD average (16+% GDP)
US has worse than OECD average healthcare(WHO)
Medicare + Medicaid are expensive
Private healthcare is even more expensive, and not significantly any better, and getting more expensive (see
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8160058.stm
for example)

US fear of big government (possibly correct in their case given military and healthcare and other costs) means local solution counter-indicated.

Solution: shop abroad.
(for anglophobes who love to kick the NHS, note we are allowed to buy healthcare
from EU - for people that hate state provided soliutions, noone's stopping you buying private, but it might get cheaper AND better if there's proper competition - if you like a free market, then the common market is for you:-)

only kidding...can you imagine americans having to go to a french hospital?

why do I care?

1. old fashioned middle class middle england anglican guilt about poor
2. i like most americans and wish them better
3. hospitals are like airports - people only remember the bad things that happen, and then they leave - few people look at the good stats.

when did britain start scorning engineers?

2009-09-11T05:52:00.000-07:00

it was a truth universally acknolwedged that a chap in possession of a neat idea (possibly patent pending) could rise through the ranks of Victorian SOciety, yeah unto the Lors (viz Brunel, or read about the New Victorians in the Diamond Age, or the old ones in the steam punk literature)....

so when did this turn around...? its a very english disease (i dont think its true in scotalnd, or wales) - when did you get asked to check the oil in someone's car if you said you disigned airplane engines for rolls royce, or to fix someone's printer if you said you wrote VMs for citrix?

what went wrong and why?

is it the dominance of Oxford PPE/Greats educated politicians in parliament who thing
NatSci/Engineering geeks from Cambridge are "beneath" them?
Why doesnt the eminence of the Royal Society and Academies fix this?

Time for a techno-vanguard lead revolution!!!

parochial americans

2009-09-07T23:30:00.001-07:00

most the americans I know are cool

but from time to time, i come across the most contrary people,
not that there aren't such people in other parts of the world, but
it's just more fun to rant about the richest country in the world (and shouldn't they know better after throwing their weight around the planet for the last 50 years and not even winning a single war in that time (think: korea, vietnam, chile, somalia, afghanistan, iraq, etc etc)

anyhow, what occasions this annoyance? you guessed it: healthcare

I have the temerity to get involved in what I think is an open debate (its online and not in a private mail list) on this, so I inject some comments
1. data from US medical pub
2. comment that there are many models for funding national provisioning of healthcare

Note: I did not venture an opinion, except to say that I accept that the UK NHS Is
a) not an exemplary model to follow (actually it isn't bad, but see next):
b) the conditions for setting up a system whereby the state employs all medical staff in a country are almost certain never to arise anywhere or anytime again other than in post war england which had some very odd pre-conditions and some timely money (thanks to Keynes) from the USA.

anyhow so I sugges that one might look at some of the other systems in the world that do better (or cheaper, or both) and take components of them for a revised US system - note that (as in the UK) this does not preclude people using private insurance based healthcare, just provides for a scaleable, cost effective, and lawyer/insurance company free syse that sets a better operating point for the majority (and therefore average) person - actually, evidence shows its better for rich people too whether they opt in or go private, but that seems to be too political for some people )though why evidence based medicine is political is a mystery to me - perhaps people prefer their pinions to be based in mythology and rumour rather than fact).

I drew an analogy with music where record companies often recently have their heads in the sand ignoring both old (e.g. live music, like the grateful dead used to perform or the rolling stones still do) and new (e.g. subscription, pay per item, or paid through adveritsing, as in lastfm, itunes and spotify models) - this was purely to point out that often there are many workable models and some beliefs that the incumbent model is best and futureproof may be weak under even the mildest scrutiny.

ANyhw, no sooner do i say this than I get accused of all sorts of things. I dunno, I gave up being involved in the "discussion" - but it depressed me that
the debate had sunk so low and that people that lived in such a great country could have their views distorted by the massive vested interests wheeled out and repeatedly given preferential coverage in the media - the majority voted for Obama, but the healthcare mafia are sure fighting to beat him down - the massive failure for constitutional democracy that this will represent is as bad as many things Bush did with virtually no mandate.

Some of the discussion bordered on the surreal type of conversation one used to have with white racist south africans during Apartheid, 10% reasonable on any topic under the sun except one.

I talked to a friend from microsoft who'd had a similar experience on a different topic (guns) when on a long visit to the US - note neither of us actually expressed a particular opinion as to one "side" or another, just put in some comments and datapoints....what is annoying about this is that there are lots of discussions on the healthcare model in the UK (and elsewhere) due to ageing population, recession, advances in pharma etc, and so an informed discussion is of global interest/relevance. Of course, I undersrtand that some americans have a distaste (hatred?) of "big government" and that this colours their views of anything a government might do - biut it is monomaniacal to reduce every debate to this (at the least, an hypothetical "good" government might do somethign better - indeed, as exemplified in germany, france, scandinavia, greece, ireland, and quite a few other places, they do. for much less money. allowing for differences in how data is counted (e.g. infant mortality etc) - do you think WHO and health practioners are morons and don't know how to do statistics? certainly the majority of widely circulated US press coverage doesn't present data - indeed, laughable errors "Stephen Hawking would have died if he depended on the NHS) are propagated daily.). Articles are written by people who havnt practiced for 30 years or are not actually on the medical front line, or have zero knowledge of economics.

I used to admire the US education system in its ability to instil a sense of open discussion from high- school on - perhaps many people still acquire this, but the rapid domination of any discussion by a small number of hyper-aggressive, sociopathic, parochial few makes engagement in any important topic completely pointless.

so there.

p.s. on a minor note, I got "told off" for suggesting that the US government had supported the IRA. well, from JFK until Reagan, successive US presidents courted Irish-American votes (much as they courted, or at least didn't offend Cuban-American voters) and went to so far as to claim their "oirish" ancestry - during this time, you could go into a bar in Boston or NY and see collections being made openly for the IRA, a proscribed organisation in the UK at the time (and the UK was allegedly supposed to be an Ally of the US). If that isn't government support, it is as close as needs be - certainly it wasn't until Senator George Mitchell's fantastic missions to NI to help the peace process that anything actually constructive towards solving the situation was attempted. One hopes his contributions in the middle east have even 5% of the impact. one wonders how the US would have felt in 10/11 if someone had gone round arab restaurants in the Edgware Road part of london collecting for al qaeda.

we live in financial times...however, not everything is rational...

2009-09-07T04:02:00.000-07:00

for example, on Mill Road on friday I observed a Pizza Hut shop which would not sell me a hut of any description and a penguin dry cleaner which did not remove stains from a single book or flightless bird no matter how much money I offered them....worse, none of the gadget shops in Cambridge can offer me a device to separate a drawer full of tangled thumbtacks, paperclips, rubber bands and treasury tags - this is surely a business case begging for some serious Venture Capital

this is why we have to put up with airport nonsense

2009-09-04T03:49:00.000-07:00

bbc reports so far jury has spent 11 days deliberating on the "drinks for bombs" case

At the very least, we know that the defendants claims (that they wouldn't have actually blown up a plane) are objectively true - the chemistry tells us so - of course, they could be naive (like the shoe bomber, the glasgow airport idiots, and the second lot of london underground wannabe martyrs). nonetheless, proving intent to do someting that isn't scientifically possible is going to be tricky

"West" "versus" "Islam"

2009-08-27T03:18:00.000-07:00

just finished reading the amazing
The Wasted Vigil, by Nadeem Aslam. Essential reading for anyone attempting to understand Afghanistan. and a lot of the relationship between the different shades of Islam AND the different shades of western culture (it is a complex tale spanning the soviet invasion and the american revenge for 9/11 and has english, russian and american characters as well as a range of "locals")

basically, this is totally against reductionism - the idea that there can be much of a meeting of minds in this book is really quite scorned, and the lament for the lost greatness of the past of the region is unbelieveabally tragic.....

it is, by absolutely no means whatsoever, a pro-western book either

economics and thatcher/reagan

2009-07-31T03:27:00.000-07:00

I was reminded recently of the "Tell Sid" campaign to get the public to engage in share trading when THatcher was privatising British Telecom, Gas and other utilities.

So here's the questions I'd like to see numerical answers to
1. How much did the great british unwashed public actually buy?
2. How much did they gain in reduced tax or increased services as a result of the new capital and tax revenue the treasury got from the previously state owned businesses
3. how much did we just lose in the recent debacle/creditcrunch/recession

really, was it all a complete waste of time and money (and some lives, viz railway accidents after track privatation)?

basically, did sid sell his birthright for a mess of potage?

what do the following books have in common?

2009-07-26T02:30:00.001-07:00

A secret history (donna tartt)
A fraction of the whole (steve toltz)
Special topics in calamity physics (marisha pessl)
The virgin suicides (jefffrey eugenides)

Answer: no idea but amazon and friends all recommended them to me in the space of a week recently, even though they've mostly been out for a few years...

free plotware foundation sf plot device #17

2009-07-25T06:32:00.000-07:00

what if there was a total eclipse of the earth, which was visible no matter where you stood, on earth?

spooky...

lets say it lasted 6 minutes - now, imagine the repurcissions for science and religion...

3 scams, a daft idea and a bad pun

2009-07-24T01:59:00.000-07:00

1. we should all buy 50 quid cars with a year's mot?tax - we can cash them in for 2000 pounds off a new car in 1 year for scrappage...

2. we should all claim our tamiflu, and then send it to africa (or anywhere else they can't afford to stockpile this stuff) - ditto the vaccine when its out....

3 zittrain (see >article) claims the internet and the PC are generative - well, what about
generative LAW then, eh? bout time!

4. There's a points just south of cambridge where the line splits to Liverpool ST and King's Cross - L&K _ perhaps the people down each side are like the Morloks and the Eloi (Orcs and Elves, or even Daleks and Kaleds, there's an archetype if you like:)
The L and K (live and kill?)....

5. w should start a Cambridge University Breaking and Entering society (CUBE, known as C.U. Jimmy, to scottish members).

NANOG of the north saves us all

2009-07-22T13:29:00.000-07:00

according to zittrain

well doh....

working time directive/ethic & political disengagement

2009-07-03T06:04:00.000-07:00

I am now abslutely certain that it is Whitehall dogma to ignore the European working time directiove as much as possible and to keep the UK employed population working as many hours, days, weeks, months, years, as possible.
just so as they don't have time to think, or get engaged in politics in the slightest regard

once upon a time, there were alanded gentry, who had lots of time, and they were tories, then there was the English working class movement, which a bunch of self-educated and principled people who engaged in society and cared about things that matter in their segment, formed - partly churchmen, but also womens movements and other movements - these two elements of british society meant we had serious engagement with both self interest, and interest in the larger pictiure for these two mutually dependent facets of a complex whole.

now, noone has time to engage, except a bunch of overpaid, overcompensated career politicians (and many of them are part timeers) and civil servants - how many people actually know a local councillor, or have ever been to ther MPs surgery or even written?

we need to break this down to the way it used to be and one surefire way to do it is to give people time and inventives to use that time, to engage in running things for ourselves....

cromwell on parliament - quoted in guardian review of book today

2009-06-20T08:33:00.000-07:00

"Ye sordid prostitutes, have you not defiled this sacred place, and turned the Lord's temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redressed, are yourselves become the greatest grievance."

couldn't say it much better could you...?

liberty in the age of terror

2009-06-19T03:29:00.000-07:00

new fine book by AC Grayling - Liberyy in the age of terror - essential reading

2 things struck me while reading this (and I'm not talking about pieces of a flying suicide bomber or a policeman's truncheon:)

1. "nothing to hide, so nothing to fear" - why is this bogus

well one reason is actually that hte elasticity needed in a multi-cultural society needs space between differences - in some sense, ignorance (not in the sense of not knowing of something's existence, but not wanting to know the gory details) is bliss - while
I hate the things some people do in their privacy of their homes, I defend to the utmost their right to do those things - but in private. I'm squeamish...the only way this works is if we don't shine a spotlight into every corner of the world (panopticon/prison/bentham style). you need some grey areas, some slack, some DMZs in life....

2. the "what if the bad guys take over" is a weak argument - a more direct argument is that a surveillance state requires a lot of eyes - those eyes have absolute oversight, which means they are tempted. If you tempt enough people, you will systematically corrupt some of them (c.f. MPs expenses) - this is an all too easy intro into the "absolute power corrupts absolutely, but the technology is not magic - surveillance, control and so on will attract large numbers of the exact wrong types of operators, and they will misuse their positions and without guardians to guard them, nothing will stop rapid mission creep (police action during recent G20 demos etc etc)....the better solution is to ring fence their powers in the first place and time limit any special powers (as Grayling proposes)....otherwise we don't need to wait for the BNP to become national socialists,. we will simply be training our own everywhere

contrariwise

2009-06-11T01:41:00.000-07:00

so in my usual bombastic way I overstated a couple of things in conversations with people yesterday

thing 1 was the size of the english language/vocab - if you get any
english/foo v. foo/english dictionary, you can see the asymmetry in the vocab
(for french, spanish, german, italian etc) - i think that english (according to OED) just made its 1 millionth word....

but when i say this, people assume I am making some moral superiority claim - I'm not - its just an observation - there is a cultural point (english survives by adaptation and laguages who have defense organisation like the Academie Francaise are doomed)

thing 2 was that a program which proves something cannot be patented and shouldn't and given in some senses all programmes are of this nature, then this should stay true - again someone decided I had some political agenda in saying this - i was merely commenting based o na shed load of law case transcripts I've been reading recently that it would be nice if the law wasn't just the product of a random walk through the set of cases that those people who can afford to bring against each other, and was, instead, actually thought out

british politics are now truly a fight between 4 or 5 dysfunctional families

2009-06-08T08:33:00.000-07:00

having completely lost trust the tories and whigs can go jump - i blame them equally for the fiasco we now have of nazis and losers like bnp and ukip "representing" us
in europe

what a bunch of low life scum....and the bnp and ukip aren't a lot better either.

simon singh's libel problem...

2009-06-06T09:55:00.000-07:00

In general, I support the idea that a medical (i.e. scientific) claim should be supported by objectively verifiable (or falsifiable) evidence, and that claiming some nostrum is bogus should not give rights to someone to declare open season on the critic - the normal laws applying to arguing whether something is true on a balance of reason, should suffice - whereas libel law quite clearly reverses the burden of proof in a weird way

however, I think there's another, stronger reason that one should support simon singh against the chiropracters (well, specifically, the British Chiropractic Association):-

unsupported medical claims endanger lives. there's a process which has a bunch of checks and balances for deciding which therapies are appropoved - sure, there are complimentary therapies (mostly they have some sort of value if you believe in them), but there are serious problems claiming a therapy will address something (e.g. asthma) which can have deadly consequences, when there are mainstream medical producedures which have efficacy, nd yo umight take attention away from them.

I would claim that false claims about an alternative treatment, just as false claims against an established treatment (e.g. MMR) are actually a crime, since they are effectively 1. appropriating medical expertise which the claimants don't have (this is a crime in the UK) 2. could be construed as criminally negligent, if they do not position the claim correctly in the ranking normally afforded to different current scientific theories

so aside from the possibility the Judge has made a mistake technicall in the current finding (that is being appealed) AND aside from establishing a new set of legal stuff in and around science, I think one could counter sue the BCA for risking peoples' lives - I am not a lawyer, but last time I looked at something similar, I asked a lawyer and was told that this was in principle do-able.

see sense about science for the background and lots of details.
usefully primary source is the article, annotated with primary sources and the BCA's press releases

Note that wikipedia's entry on Chiropractic clearly claims it is "not based on solid science."

So is the BCA going to sue wikipedia too?

Tai Ping - martial art with pen&paper

2009-06-03T02:37:00.001-07:00

with nothing more than pen and paper we can wage war on a welter of witless with
mish-takes (a cornish pasty of concrete like rigidity) and agile use of the tittle-tattle-tottle (an ancient essex version of the namchuk)

Voodoo History and Slow Time

2009-05-28T22:09:00.000-07:00

to summarise david aaronovitch's fine book on conspiracy theories, then,
conspiracy theorists are losers,
who develop paranoia as a way to gain (or believe that they have gained) attention

you can detect a conspiracy theory by (at least these) two failings:
first, failure to apply occam's razor (principle of parsimony) in choosing between the official story and the alternative;
second, failure to develop falsifiable theories (i.e. insufficient self-criticism or adversarial argument).

Common other failings: ellipsis (turn a blind eye to inconvenient facts); repetition of early erroneoys data; beggaring belief ("there is no evidence" == "there is a cover-up").

on the other hand, "In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed", by Carl Honore, confuses speed with synchrony - the problem for socieity of time is the problem of synchronising disparate activities and places - wander, jitter and skew in a large system lead to inefficencies which are pleasant for humans, whereas the lockstep mechanism of clocks on all railway stations so that the UK became the first synchronous society was the real culprit behing the "sense of urgency" in modern society.....

I think we need to start a campaign for bad time-keeping

voodoo history and imagination

2009-05-27T01:27:00.000-07:00

i used to love watching tales of mystery and imagination - now I am reading the very good Aaronvitch book about Voodoo News (conspiracy theories) and it is clear that a lot of people who sustain conspiracy theories by writing best seller books that take them seriously are basically wannabe scientists and novelists who fail in some way to be either - but there's a legitimate genre here - a bit like SF< detective and horror genres, where writers lack some specific skill (famously, characterisation in SF), in these pseudo-science pieces, which are after all massively popular, whether docu-drama, or "historical" fiction like da Vinci Code, obviously have some of the requisite skills but just not all. And while Aaronovitch's book will do quite well, I bet he doesn't sell any where as many copies as all the Monroe doctrinaire - and that;'s sad as he actually can write:)

Meanwhile, I think that "imagination" (as portraied by Arthur Clark or Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett) is clearly in fact a sign that someone's mind is bing controlled by a vast eldritch distributed articifial intelligent force from the other side of the lesser Megallanic Cloud - the origins of AI meets Cloud Computing...and intelligent design

lashback MPs - insulting our intelligence

2009-05-22T03:30:00.000-07:00

so i continue to watch MPs try to defend their positions with increasing astonishment - viz question time on TV twice now

don't these fools realise we are both their employer and their customer so criticising us for criticising them
is about the biggest career limiting move that they can possibly make.

the data

doh!!!

so if (as some apologists have argued) this happened as a "stealth" pay rise, then why don't they pay tax on it like the rest of us would? If it is expenses, then how come it isn't supported on a receipt only basis, and only justified for costs incurred as a result of the job that would otherwise not have been incurred. these guys want it both ways and are surprised everyone else doesn't see it their way, and yet (as we know) many MPs also have other jobs where such behaviour would be audited and quite possibly erported to HMRC and the police if they engaged in it, so the idea that they didn't know it was an unusual practice is also bogus....

i've been saving up some insults for people like this
e.g.
may your mother's milk be long life
or
may you lie on your mother's grave

etc etc

I mean like get a load of this dude who clearly is some kind of dinosaur!
what an insufferable basterd, to parafrase Tarentino

counterfeit novels...and other forgeries

2009-05-19T21:59:00.000-07:00

steve toltz' very excellent "fraction of the whole" contains the alarming observation that while people forge paintings, they never forge novels.

in jazz, a lot of us use the "Real Book" which is a huhe tome with the words , chords and melodies of lots of "standards" (songs from the classic era's of jazz from dixie to swing to beop and cool and back again) - far as I know, the "real book" is a massive breach of copyright - luckily, nowadays, sheet music is not the Evil EMpire that it used to be when a) there wasn't P2P file sharing MP3 recordings to blame and b) people used to play the latest hits themsevlves on the piano in the "drawing room" - so slack has the copyright protection on sheet music become that people can get the "Fake Book" whcih is an "illegal" photocopy of the real book!
[bill bruford, in his amusing and interesting autobiography, cites some muso-socio-journalist as wisely pointing out that the "value" in music moved from medieval times being vested in the player, through vitorial times being vested in sheet music, to the 20th century being locked up in frozen recordings - a recent article in the guardian talked about new models of direct composer/player to audence via the web, which may be a final reversion to the oldest model, but usng the newest tech, which is a fine thing in my opinion)

in the world of software, you get things called "counterfeit" copies of Windows - but more interestingly, you get reverse engineered programmes...which actually involve some skil and are, basically, legal...

so why is the same set of law applicable to all these walks of life? weird.

george soros on recession &behavoural economics 101

2009-05-19T00:09:00.000-07:00

so geo. soros, a man who has several cles, has a new edition of his book on "a new paradigm for financial markets" out - along with lots of other people he is saying "I told you so", although the original publication's date actually gives him provenance / prior art proof that he did so

but is his message so new? not really - basically he says that the model used by economics is flawed because it doesn't account for what he calls "reflexivity" - basically (my interpretation) this is that the idea that there is a "ground truth" to a value for goods/servies doesn't work with financial services since the "ground truth" is based in himan estimates - the humans doing the estimation (who think that laws of supply/demand and game theory based on a) those laws and b) rational selfish players) actually are flawed and unlike traditional goods and services, the financial instruments are all as much of a figment as the supply/demand figures.....

this is philospically a bit like Heisenberg (the observer perturbs the system so the observed value may not be what they thought) but is extremely familiar to psychology researchers (and therefore to peopel who do behavoural economics) since it is encountered daily in their experiments (tell a human that they are a subject, and they modify their behaviour - surprise - this is know to GPs who offer a DIY blood pressure test in the UK - some patients systematically produce a very high reading even when perfectly well - known as the "White Coat" reading, as their presure is raised by being in the doctors practice and about to see their GP...)

anyhow, the book is a good read for people that want to understand

meanwhle, I wish I lieved in a high tax country like sweden, finland or switzerland where they seem to have industry and be weathering the storm ok, and not everyone leaves the country at the drop of a hat - some sort of patriotism can be good (e.g. based in love of the culture and place one is from) and is not conditional....
and some industry (e.g. volvo, saab, nokia) doesn't seem to walk away from being created in countries which believe in progressive taxation and social servies.

National Treasure de-moated

2009-05-17T22:31:00.000-07:00

Stephen Fry appears to have annoyed a few journalists - the guardian contained a particularly stupid piece claiming that the news had made him a "national treasure" and how he was "not getting it" about public anger over MPs bogus expense claims.

there are two things almost all the "angry of fleet st" articles on this topic tellingly omit from Mr Fry's remarks

1. he started by saying (and listing) some more important things in the world we should worry about that MPs did wrogn (the SAME MPs) - so he wasn't letting them off the hook on this - just saying that if we want to take them to task, lets start on something more serious (this is not the same as saying that this isn't serious - just that life&death might be more so)
2. he pointed out that journalists (who are the people drumming up more news about this than, say, Sri Lanka, where there are matters of life and death) are prone to exactly the same sorts of claims - he also tried to defuse any accusations of getting off the hook by pointing out that he too fiddled claims (and he is, in the main these days, a journalist)

I think the "national treasure" backlash folks should be VERY VERY careful - we will want to see your expense claims in detail real soon AND ask why you don't actually do the journalism job of reporting things that actually matter most, first

conservation of imagination

2009-05-07T07:28:00.000-07:00

it is clear to me that there is a conservation law for imagination

the more there is somewhere, the less somewhere else

there may even be a field connecting the two in some way

the underserving rich

2009-05-04T05:48:00.000-07:00

there's this lovely phrase about the working class which shews a marvelously British contempt - the "undeserving poor" - the "great unwashed" is another term of abuse for people that keep things like rubbish collection, primary school teaching, nursing, taxi driving, and other essentials working.

so i have a new one - the undeserving rich

this is not people in senior surgical jobs, or people that wrote a great tune or acted well in a great movie, or invented a cool new thing (for work or play)

these are the ultra rich and the people that inherited everything and added nothing.

this is to clarify - I am not against people becoming (or being) wealthy

this is to declare my utter contempt for those people who degraded a generation, and in the process, took the spoils. These guys would embarass Atilla the Hun or Ghenghis Khan
let alone Bill Gates or Frederick Sanger. Or even Paul McCartney or Steve McQueen (either actor or artist:)

Those are the people that should be paying 99% tax after the first 5500 pounds

the other guys deserve every penny - well quite a lot of them anyhow....

talk radio for the deaf - reminder

2009-04-29T22:46:00.000-07:00

this is a reminder to people who read this (i know there's two of you, including me)

this is not my cambridge blog - thats the clog one;
this is not my net blog - thats the true history one;
and none of the three are to do with the university work i do.

this is my rant blog - if you take stuff here seriously, more fool you -
(as geo. bush junior so wisely said "fool me once...")

oh, and people accusing me of being a commie, pinko, liberal, socialist, leftie, etc:
you have no idea how completely and utterly wrong you are, you capitalist lacky, you:)

Deconstructing Wellington Boot

2009-04-29T01:17:00.000-07:00

Wellington Boot is an interesting choice of nom de guerre - I think it behoves us to think about what a person is trying to convey by using such a moniker.

1. I don't think they mean they are claiming falsely to have invented soemthing (e.g. Duke of Wellington's claims to have invented a type of boot - sandwiched between the Earl of Sandwich's claim to having invented structured snack food and the Edison Lighthouse Family's claim to have invented the invention).

2. I doubt they intend to be a UK pharmacy in an antipodean city.

3. So do they want to inherit the dubious kick-ass honour of having routed the french?
odd? or do they mean that they are "booting wellington" i.e. kicking "brit" ass?

clearly they subscribe to some theories about economics. This is a bit like subscribing to private eye - amusing and occasionally informative, but hardly a fit activity for someone who asociates themselves with or against the british aristocracy of the early 19th century. Oh, wait - Wellington was a "west brit" (allegedly irish) and an anti-parliametary reform....no- that doesnt work

hmm - weird pseudonym. oh well...

hate the rich

2009-04-28T03:40:00.000-07:00

seems like I am not allowed to tax the rich without hating them,
so let's cut to the chase and just hate them without bothering to tax them.

as long as there's no tax on hate, of course.

obviously we should get rid of government, state services and so on
and have zero tax and then use pure hatred to get trickle down to work
(if it doesn't get maundy money, it might at least extract blood from the stones).

meanwhile, those of us who are quite rich will use fear to combat the hate and trickle down - this will create a dynamic tension (so loved by Charles Atlas)
and build a fitter society.

of course it will.

Ayn Rand, I love you and your funny name. I love the politics of envy. I love the smell of revolution in the morning. So much healthier than starbucks.

This has been a lay brother's leveller rant, part 2
A self-hating rich guy:)

references:
Smith, wealth of nations
Marx: Das Capital
The Spirit Level; WIlson & Pickett
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes
Naomi Klein, No Long (according to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman
a malevolent thinker - so that is ok by me)
Collective Choice and Social Choice, Amartya Sen

expect more

tax the rich

2009-04-23T01:26:00.000-07:00

there's some serious lies going on to protect the rich - during the budget analysis yesterday, several people wih unstated but obvious vested interested said that there's no point in taxing the rich as you don't get much money, and you should raise the base rate of tax as that way you get much more.

are they completely stupid?

do these people actually believe that we can't look at graphs of wealth and see quite plainly that most of the wealth in the country is concentrated in a small number of hands (famously 7:84 is a ratio that has hardly changed in centuries)

the fact is that if you want more tax revenue, then you can get more of it without causing tax avoidance by taxing the great unwashed PAYE public, but the potential revenue is in the rich

what is more, during a world-wide recession, they have nowhere to run, especially with Obama et al closing down the havens.

no - i am sick of this - Labour?Darling did right to raise the tax tier to 50% above 150k - but as the liberals pointed out (especially the increasingly useful Vince Cable) he could haev done more (e.g. progressibvely higher tax on unearned income and earned income rising to (say) 90% at 1M per annum.

some people say this gets rid of incentives. well if people only do a good job because of money that is sad but there are two big errors in this statement anyhow
1. the highest paid people (directors, bankers) didn't do a good job, so its wrong
2. professionals (doctors, teachers, farmers, carers) do a good job despite not having great pay, so its wrong.

no, it's wrong and its a lie.
taxing the rich is fair and works - we just havnt tried it often and long enough.

(as per other postings, more level socieities are better for everyone anyway.)

I'm not sure about being a Leveller, but I'm sure starting to head that way.

update:- the nice thing about being a blog owner is I can change it. SO lets look at the evidence that increasing taxes reduces the wealth of the nation shall we. Ok, so tax burdens in much of europe over the last 100 years went from 0 for the poor to on the order of 20% and from 0 or close to for the rich to in the range 40-90% depending where you look. Did wealth decrease? did it?

so in the countries where state provision of services is high (lets say scandinavia)
how do they fare in average quality of life? how well does that correlate.

Maybe we need to ignore the USA as a pathologically weird part of the world. perhaps we need to ignore the frightened squeals of people who are wrong.
oh, no, wait, the US - now quality of life in Mass or Cal?

let me re-cite
the spirit level
which contains a wealth of evidence.
instead of ranting in a datafree way.

The history of tax might give some intersting indications about whether increasing the steepeness on the slope of progressive taxation (whether on income or on property or on goods and services) actually makes people move wealth elsewhere - it is fairly clear also that things have changed a LOT in the last 100 years - see the
HMRC's brief history in the uk
for a light read. US has similar figures - indeed, it seems to reflect the social moves from agricultural based population to an urban/industry or post-industry based one.

Certainly, raising a shed load of money purely by increasing slope of progressive tax on "earned" income is limited - but note there are many sources of income and repositories of wealth (and of unfairness) - Countries have redistributed wealth in lots of ways and I don't see a correlation with the sum total evaporating - of course you can get it wrong - that is irrelevant - we're arguing from a standpoint that the market model is bogus (always was - it just got lucky for a short time - gambler's streak) and its proponents are intellectually, morally, and probably sometimes economically bankrupt:)

lets move on...

why not arrest all foreign national students on arrival

2009-04-22T05:33:00.000-07:00

see bbc story: about students held for 11 days without trial

we might as well save hassle and arrest all students as they arrive in this country and give them a brief spell in jail - many of them will then go home in disgust, freeing up places for all the unemployed 25 year old and younger who now need a place to study...
and the ones that stay wont need arresting abgain, saving many embarassing moments for policemen carrying secret documents openly or hitting them on the head in demos with riot shields...

we could call it speculative anti-terrorism

a modest proposal, #123

apologists for official torture and police violence

2009-04-21T02:37:00.000-07:00

so cheney now says torure works and the uk police chiefs defend handling of G20 demo

are these people completely stupid?
do they think the world is a static, passive, punch ball?

do they think the "other side" is a fixed point with fixed behaviour?

they
a) create more enemies
b) escalate the violence the enemies are prepared to commit

how do we fire these people?

this is not about appeasement. it is about us taking control of our servants and
not letting them screw things up beyond all recognition.

If we don't reign in the dogs, we will deserve what we get.

I think Obama should get Mossad to assassinate Cheney

why we havn't seen any alients yet

2009-04-19T03:08:00.000-07:00

there's this theory (conjecture/hypothesis) attributed to lots of different people that there cannot be any aliens else why havn't we seen any yet.

My explanation is that we are actually in a corner of the Universe that is an area of outstanding national beauty, and tourists are not allowed to visit here anymore
(viz, antarctica

why wouldn't they want to talk to us humans, I hear you cry.
why? would you?

E-mail smears handling defended

2009-04-14T05:44:00.000-07:00

sounds like some sort of mud slide/rugby tackle kind of scenario

smears handling - hmm - maybe not - maybe this is marketing fr a new web based laundry service?

truth fairy

2009-04-13T03:54:00.000-07:00

as often, A Softer World is so true...

G20 police state

2009-04-09T01:31:00.000-07:00

so journalists and police behaved equally (almost) appallingly at the G20 demo - first off, around 30 photographers surrounded the guy throwing stuff the the RBS glass window - not one tried to stop him while 1 demo guy (the ONLY other one there) did try and reason with him

then 30 police surround an "innocent" bystander and knock him to the ground (and the only visible demo guy there is trying to help the chap on the ground, but none of the polis do) and he dies. like it would have been ok if he was on the demo, maybe, or brazillian:-(

if this was a python sketch, his dying words might have been
"...I didn't expect the IDF..."

see
bbc for various video links...including lovely police medical help and
culpable by ommission journalists.
In this video you can clearly see the chap trying to stop the yoofs bustin up the RBS window....

now we have this woman being slapped in face with glove then hit with baton

this is not proportionate behaviour by the police - it is assault.

fictional biograph of the mayor of london...

2009-04-08T03:18:00.000-07:00

entitlted
the risable rise of Mayor Johnson - Tragic Tory

first sentence,

like gollum, boris was a creature of Hobbit...

three elephants in the G20 room

2009-04-02T02:33:00.000-07:00

so the lovefest between Mr Brown and Mr Obama continues - but they seem to be completely ignoring the real problems - they are truly in lala land

the lessons of the Bush era are at least threefold

social capital is more important than banks

religion and terrorism go hand in hand

expansion and environment are incompatible

yet they are not doing anything about equalising the differences between rich and poor,
improving the education of masses so that religion is revealed as a distraction, and every statement about economy is about getting back to the expansionist days - what is wrong with them? they'be learned the superficial story and are treating the symptoms, not the cause.

frankly, I think we should have days where we
a) turn off the stock exchanges for 24 hours at random
b) anti-sabbath days where it is illegal to go to church/synagog/mosque
c) turn off the electricity grid for 12 hours at random to encourage people to lag their houses and fridges better.

Drugs Tests for Bankers

2009-03-29T10:27:00.000-07:00

its time we instituted this = we need sober, level headed people in the financial world
and so we need people that don't down a bottle or two at lunchtime.

noone should be in charge of the world's future who isn't as sober as a judge...
[oops:=]

actually, someone sent me this article in the FT on
10 principles of Black Swan avoidance which looks pretty sane

clocks v. teardrop

2009-03-28T06:18:00.001-07:00

massive+
coldplay

side by side - worth a remix, anyone?

the randomness of fish

2009-03-17T10:10:00.000-07:00

so how come every country in europe has a different word from a completely different root for every type of european fresh and salt water fish except salmon and trout?

i mean ask a grek, german, french, or whatever for the word for
Bass, Bream, Cod, Dogfish, Hake, Haddock, Herring, Lemon Sole, Whitebait, etc etc
and you get a totally different answer

obviously the norman french in england didnt eat much fish or at least in english we'd have the same words (as we do for the meat of animals) as the french....

Taxing Bankers Bonuses - simple proposal

2009-03-16T23:55:00.000-07:00

so how about we propose a very high tax on bonuses which were not earned.
to determine if they were earned should be easy -
case 1 - the company is in profit (i.e. profit share)
case 2 - company is moving into profit from loss (incentive)

case 1 is trivial - indeed both cases would be covered if bonuses were simply shares and people were patient, and paying stock as a bonus was only taxed as income.

In the counter example, senior staff at companies like AIG or RBS who made a massive loss AND only exist because of bailouts, would be taxed at (say) 90% on income over (say) 1M pounds. This would leave incentives intact, but recoup money from poor decisions by early shareholders meetings. at least to the government. who is, um, the biggest shareholder now.

bankers enbezzling

2009-02-27T02:53:00.000-08:00

enbezzeling is like embezzelling only its the opposite, and thinner - just as an
en is thinner than an em, and it takes n en's to make 1 em.

lovely headline in the metro today - picture of said baker's waste bin with apparently discarded cardboard box for a piggy bank!! given their ability at the job, I am surprised the bin wasn't just full of 50 pound notes.

Meanwhile, the row about Sir Fred's pension rolls on and on. There seems to be some confusion in the world - people claim :-

i) you have to pay people this much to get good people. well the banks got idiots, so the pay is obviously not the key to attracting able and smart individuals
ii) you can't take away his pension.

well, yes you can - its called tax. we could have a 99% tax for unearned income - given RBS went broke, he obviously didn't earn the money - this would be neat as it wouldn't impact bonuses for people that actually increased the value of a company

Finally someone said (many times) we can't have a high tax, low income economy as we would drive the smart people away. How come Sweden has Saab and Volvo and Ericsson and so on then? THey have high taxes, plausible income, and still make stuff.

Ah, I know what it is thatcher and major and blair and brown wanted the right kind of
stupid bankers who don't make anything useful (not even trickle down). You can't get those in a country that just wants to build stuff people want and provide good health and education. oh no.

digital britain misses the point

2009-02-26T06:50:00.000-08:00

lord carter's report on digital britain misses the point.

If it doesn't make stuff (buildings, food, entertainment, heat/light, transport)
more, or cheaper, or both, then it is no use.

services are out. manufacturing is in.

digital is just an enabler.

hall of shame for economists, think tanks, bankers

2009-02-25T03:52:00.000-08:00

we really need a sort of "amnesty international" site for all the bloody economists, advisory think tank and quangoes, government treasury officials and especially bankers who got us in this mess. a sort of fc for these bozos.

it is so clear that beneath the veneer of fancy maths (and a few people that might actually get it but know their limitations), things like black swan, etc, the reality is that there is no economic theory of value whatsoever. all that talk about stopping boom/bust by controlling interest rates, and rate limiting computer based automatic trades on the stock market to keep the system stable, and similar things are superficial - fundamentally, the root of economics that seem to support the free market idea was
the Chicago school, rooted in Nash Equilibria and game theory - but these assume rational players - as we know, people aren't rational selfish, they can be barking mad, they can exhibit herding and they can be altruistic - all of these mean that a market doesn;'t operate - Behavioural economists try to capture this, but once you open the door to including a "psychological" element to your model of the market, you have to admit that it is essneitally not a predictive model any more - it is just descriptive - and you have to agree that not only are the arrival processes of information/value heavy tailed (i.e. hard to predict rare events happen when you don't expect - so large deviation theory models, but doesn't help you contain the rare large event) but also synchronised irrational behaviour is hard or impossible to predict - some of this behaviour includes paranoia (i.e. non sharing of information) which means that the market doesn't operate correctly (e.g. bankers don't pass on risk information correctly)

all of this means that we should be haning out all the free market morons to dry in the cold cold wind.

bu alas, noone in positions of power seems to have the guts.

my proposals

1. let all the banks go broke -
get their acount information details, and bail out all indivudal savers only.
let all debtors off the hook.

2. institute a usuary-free world, worldwide - lenders can
lend for
i) share of profit only (sharia style - or just like venture capitalists, amusingly)
or
ii) as mutuals
and
iii)
all risk assesment must be published. non secondary trading (i.e. you are not allowed to sell or buy money)

of course, all the people that gave money to the democrats, republicans and tories and labour would then be broke - so?

carp ark

2009-02-19T03:16:00.000-08:00

this is what caused the willy-measuring excercise recently under the deep atlantic when the french and english navy tested the soundness of their nuclear subs....thee captains were momentarily distracted by a passing Carp Ark.

on the train recently , a joking driver said "please remember to take all their belongings with you ,and keep your seatbelt buckled at all times

meanwhile, Popco by scarlett thomas is an excellent book - it is the first time I've read a fictional work which has crypto jokes down to the main characters being called Alice Bob Carol, Dave, Esther etc....

I have to ask you, dear reader, are you an uncle or an aunt?