Quirkology #101 - 2 more e.g.s

so airport abbreviated names are good - I just went between two
spanish cities, known as Bar y Mad :-)

I wonder if this affects pilots' judgement?

meanwhile, the exchange rate between pound, dollar and euro continues to amaze - but, and here's a question worthy of Dr Wiseman,
does it affect people's judgement of other metrics - specifically, do distances in
europe in Kilometers seem longer to people from the UK and US now that their pound and dollar don't get them as much mileage with the Euro?

I think we should know:)

Al Qaeda on the run, CIA say

according to the BBC today the CIA think they are winning the war on Al Qaeda

well, how would they know?

remember, this is the organization that didn't detect the threat in the first place.

Frankly, I think they'd do better to worry about the fact that all the candidates for the next president of the US of A are more concerned with what the US's mad mullahs (oops, sorry, Christian Fundamentalist preachers) are saying about them behind their backs (when allegedly supporting them) than about economic stability, prosperity, health, education and other things. Time to overthrow the future government from within before they even get in, that's what I recommend. It never stopped the CIA in the past (or MI5 in the UK for that matter - viz spying on Harold Wilson).

A Peer of the Realm - escaping the Internet Balkanisation via technology

so imagine instead of an Internet, we had a network of networks.

oh, yes, so that was what the Internet was.

but now we have broken it into little fiefdoms and we need to reconnect it.

so the classic thing to do is to build an overlay. IPv6, with tunnels to get you around - think of the tunnels like phone lines which glued together the original IPv5 intenret -stafeful, but soft stateful (soft, as in democracy, as opposed to hard state which is like royalty:)

another way to do this is to provide address translation rather than encapsulation - realm specific IP - getting between realms needs either a small number of nodes which are intra-realm reachable, but also have globally reachable addresses, or else a mapping service and a ream naming system (think IPNL _ use Fully Qualified Domain Names and map them to places -) - this COULD use a hash function for each realm - indeed the set of nodes that get you between realm A and realm B could just be a DHT.

You could put the info in border routers, and combine this with a scheme to get better scaling of addressing and routing and still retain multi-homing, but providing mapping, encapsulation and a service to find the nodes that will get you between the above. If the map is from an end system identifier (IPNL used FQDN but you could just use, say, realm specific or legacy IPv4 addresses) and a location identifier (also known as a route hint), then maybe LISP is your friend:
http://www.lisp4.net/

Perhaps, although for me, the protocol overhead in LISP looks a bit messy - you could use my mad idea of sending multiple packets with different addresses to punch your way through the address translation points (TNA - see
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jac22/talks/tna.ppt
for a daft take on this:)

but this is mostly so i can use the phrase
Peer of the realm:)

(this should really be on my internet blog, or compsci blog, but i liked the balanisation political aspect too much:)

aposite street names in spain

well, only two
but
Diagon Alle
in Barcelona (cf. harry potter)
and
Calle Luna, in Leganes/Madrid (street with a Mental Hospital on it!)
will serve as a start

cult's and initials

apparently it is offensive in the UK (in terms of the legal definition of insulting a religion) to refer to Scientology as a cult.

this is very odd. cult, when referring to a religion, is (in all the dictionaries I referred to) explicitly not insulting - indeed it simply refers to the set of practices that aren't part of the formal church for example.

It is potentially insulting to call something a cult that
is not a religion, since in that context, it has the implication of being outside the mainstream - of course, for some adherents of non-religious cults (e.g. cult followers of rock bands like the grateful dead) this is not an insult at all. Indeed, being recognized as outside the mainstream (e.g. goths, punks, skins, etc) is the entire point.

So if someone is insulted by being called a cult, then they are either confused or not religious. If they are confused, this is not a fault of the person using the term. If they are not religious, then the UK law about insulting does not apply.

If the church of scientology is not a religion, then it has some interesting questions to answer about charitable status and other matters.

I personally have no opinion about this one way or the other. I just found L. Ron Hubbard's pre-Dianetics writings to be marginally worse than EE "Doc" Smith's.

If you want to start a religion, or a cult, get a poet (Arthur C Clark would be great as he has initials, and is poetic, and is also dead, but of course he would never have signed up to anything like a religion, so I guess I will just have to start a cult in his name:)

Update: Apparently, the Crown Prosecution Service realized they were on to a lose-lose scenario with this and have dropped the case against the student - but what a stress on poor person who was only using their right to comment on things in a fair and reasonable way.

obama sin laden?

what's in a name? heavy with the burden of something
the possible, chrstian, future democrat president of the
united states of amerika sometime will have to stand
half naked....

i really think there should be an opera - i can see the production already -
Andrew Lord Webber with lyics by Mohammed Bin Elton...

an instant hit in bradford

yech or perhaps not yech

This increibly sentimental exhibition of britishness might just, just possibly be a Cure for Cynics

burma tweak

sitting on my garden bench I notice that it is made of teak from burma (which is nice)
but then i have to think of all the people sick and tired and dying
to get rid of their insane government - how can one use that word "govern"
for an organisation whose sole goal appears to be self enrichment at any cost
to the ostensibly "governed" population?

I guess it is bordering on autogenocide what these guys are up to right now - you know
they are charging import duty on aid workers food deliveries?

there's sometimes got to be an excuse for ignoring sovereign rights and just wading in their and taking these guys out of office....maybe John McCain could propose this as part of his presidential new sweep:(