boycottaging academia in all its worst pendantry and pretentious forms

so the UCU has decided to discuss the proposals for an academic boycott of israel

so the israeli foreign minister and the usual zionististas wade in with a "counter threat" to boycott british goods. bloody hypocrits - the UCU boycott is not fact, its a phantasty propossal which was voted out last time in line with democracy in the union -= the counter "threats" by israelis and academic US supporters are an attempt to suppress a public debate by, just that, threats. who is making gestures of no impact?

facts are 1/ its a stupid ignorant idea of a UK academic union to boycott israeli academics because they are one of the strongest sources of sanity in said sad country
2/ its out of order for a middle class over educated essentially liberal union to act like it has a mandate to do something purely political instead of its day job (getting better working conditions and pay for employees in tertiary edication in the UK)
3/ its a matter of personal conscience

But the retaliation before the fact is hysterical, ignorant, and counter productive. I am sick of middle eastern aggresive mode of debate - the only form of defense is attack - what good has it actually done them (when i say middle east, i mean all the folks there - i can't see a whole lot of cultural difference between the hassidim and hammas in the way they treat each other or 50% (women ) of their own side - these facts matter more than whether people let a few token folks into their universities or conferences.

why are people so up in their own view of their own importance that they think either UK (or israeli) academia matter that much - or the UK or israel - places that things are happening that are much worse abound (sudan, saudi arabia, the US of A, etc) and failing to deal with things with a sense of proportionality is a classic sign of insanity.

amazoned out

so amazon's recommendations to me are really quite interesting - they appear to intersect about 75% with stuff I bought from them and they know this as if I go to "my store" I can see how much I can sell the same stuff for.

so is this a concurrency/consistency problem or is a cunning ploy to get me to buy stuff from myself, gaining them a second profit in delivering it to me, from me?

clever? not half:)

lies, damn lies, statistics and citation impact

nature reports that most impact rankings are flawed - depending how you sort things, you can swap oxford and cambridge (we knew that anyhow:-) - see
article on flawed eval for details - full table is the thing that matters!

god causes cancer!

Scientists have recently found strong evidence that God causes cancer - prolonged exposure to God over a lifetime leads to a significant increased risk of dying, especially of cancer of the brain. Professor Richard Dorkins and Lord Robert Winsome said in a press release associated with their paper in the world renowned Nurture&Seance Jounal that their findingers were beyond a shadow of a doubt - "95% confidence limits were used, and there was a 3% increased risk of death by God than for atheists, and a 1% increase for agnostics", claimed the famous pair.

Fellow scientists quickly rushed to defend the pair saying "we do not know which God is the principle cause yet - whether it is Yaweh, Allah, or indeed God in generally Abrahamic Gods, or if it is perhaps the theistic tendancy that is the underlying root of this scourge". Further research is required

In the mean time, the Health Projection Agency has issued a warning that people that worry about this a lot should stay away from Mosques, Churches and Synagogues until
further results are confirmed, and a cure or treatment are found.

One preacher was found who said "I've known this ever since I discovered a funny callous on my knees from praying".

celebrate what's good

Just went to see Loz Speyer's Time Zone at the Pizza Express on Dean St - excellent band, excellent CD, excellent venue - people should celebrate the fact that we have such excellence in the world! Cuban Rhythms meets cool tunes and great arrangements, with very fine set of musicians able to play ensemble and impro with brio!

misery guts books

I just read these three tomevs this weekend:
Burning Bright by tracy chealier (the gurl with the purl earing) - what a load of sentimental tosh and manipulative childish rubbish!

On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan, how miserable does this man have to get!

Tomorrow, by Graham Swift, tak about a suspension without cause - stephen king, for all his (many faults) could have written this book better in 3 days.

shocking - i want my money back:)

be careful wat you wish for now blair is out

the effect will no doubt not be what you expect, even allowing for the effect of blair's departure not being what you expect, especially if you don't expect anything at all, or something in particular.

brown noses ahead?

Q: What's the difference between Blair and Brown?
A: The Ayes are too close together.

anti-americanism for USA-philes

the beeb reports on the OU debate on regrettign the existence of the USA

a lot of the backchat is about antiamericanism. one of the things that is most annoying about americans is that they assume criticism is anti-americanism - something a lot of Israelis dotoo by the way - you are not allowed, apparently, to like America conditionally, like you are not allowed to like Israelis without disagreeing, even though a lot of the things non american's say when criticising america are said by americans themselves (ditto Israel). For example, when most people attack "america" over (say) Vietnam, Iraq (or other middle east policy) they are explicitly disagreeing with american forein policy, which they have as much (or more) right to do as americans, and they are explicitly disagreeing with what the US Federal Government is doing "on behalf of american people" - yet most of these areas are also ones in which many many americans either massively disagree with their own government (a Good Feature of america is their innate distrust of government), or else one where the vast mass of people don';t care (how many can find Palestine on the map ? :-)

The debate at the OU wasn't about the existence of North America as a contenient. It was implictly about who governs it, and by implication, what the policies are of those who govern it. This is a legitimate cause for debate as much outside as within the borders of the USA. As to whether people in the mid west should use Aluminum siding (and learn to spell Aluminium properly) or folks in Louisiana use white picket fences, well that would be something that is None Of Our Business.

Electronic traffic War Den

so yesterday as a nice May Day holiday present, I came out of the house to find
a parking ticket on the car - ticket said "failure to display a valid parking
permit"
so we have a residents parking permit, which is an electronic (RFID?) tagged
blank card that you stick o the windscreen.
the traffic warden (who was still there and was very nice) said "oh, its expired,
the computer says so". we said "but we don't have that computer, and there's
nothing printed on the card, and we didn't get no notice to say it expired". and
he said "ah, well you may be OK, and i didn't tell you this, but the council
appears to have forgotten to continue to remind people when it switched last
year to electronic parking permits so just pay the fine and then appeal...
personally i think the idea that we didn't "display" a valid permit is wrong and
that the ticket is dodgy even if we had been reminded (which we weren't -
i went to the town hall and their record was of an e-mail reminder, but the email
address they had was wrong:) - doncha love modern technology !

actually, to be fair to the council, their system was pretty damn cool - i was v.
impressed that i could see scans of all the docs I'd used to register originally
for the permit, and they came up on displays(real displays) in the town hall with
almost realtime response...plus the people were all rather nice, which was a bit
of a surprise... oh, and the new permit (now i have one) was issued electronically,
but with a peel off sticky on the receipt that has the expiry on as a reminder to put
on the back of the electronic tag in the car! really quite thought out now (they now
post a reminder as well as emailing and fixed the email address too!!!)

may day, may day, blair didn't resign

why not? surely he's got other phish to phry now that the geese have come home to roost on the NHS, MI5, Iraq, Schools, Europe, the "special relationship" we don't have with America, and so on. If it wasn't for a vaguely ok economy, I think one would take a dim dim view. Oh to live in scotland (except for the weather, mostly).

Things can only get battered.

captain over

walking, as one has to do for miles and miles these days, as well as waiting in lines at least 4 times (checkin, passport control, security AND boarding) in Dublin airport, i passed many, many, many white courtesy telephones

I was terribly tempted to pick one up and just say "good day to you kind sir" as a courtesy, but for some strange reason, i refrained.

meanwhile, why are there 4 lines? why can't they do all the checks in one line?
why not have the crew at the security line, check the ticket, bags, passport/photoid,

what is their problem? are the stupid or something?

not for prophet, guns and cell phones

so with virginia tech, who needs al quaeda? as for the NRA, words fail me.

so what is weird about this is that there was no community of people txting/emailing and making cell phone calls - is there no cell phone coverage on the campus, and are there no people with laptops and wifi access?

yet again a failure to use the technology to provide _information_ in a timely way to warn each other of impending disaster and avoid it...(viz tsunami, and katrina and so on).

meanwhile, if I were a moslem in some of the poorest countries in the world, i'd ask what it is that is so great about islam (just like christianity) that it fails its believers so badly. like all religions, it is a palliative for poverty, and a poor excuse for not fixing things.

oleagenous spondoliciosity

winston v. dawkins - marvellous spectacle of taking two great men and reducing a fine argument to irrelevance - the fundamentalists must be laughing all the way to the weapons salesmen

listen, kilgore trout's come unstuck in time

I'm surprised people didn't notice how much Douglas Adams owed to Kilgore Trout, the fictional (yet somehow real) SF writer in several of Kurt Vonnegut (RIPs) novel and short stories- quite a few of the plot outlines Vonnegut sketches are pure DNA - this is not a bad thing - Adams did fine things with his ideas (if they came from there - if not, then great minds think alike).

There is that one book "authored' by Kilgore Trout - I heard it was ghosted by Philip Jose Farmer. Nevermind, its fairly terrible (sub Bill the Galactic Hero stuff).

Vonnegut memorably deconstructed the true message of the New Testament:
"Don't sarcfice people, because you never know how important their Dad might be".

No longer punctual, Vonnegut, Like Adams is now late, and spread out over the ample memory of many people as if he too, like Winston Niles Rumfoord III had entered a Chronosynclastic Infundibulum, just to see what it was like. Thank heavens his brother didn't really discover Ice Nine.

Bush's Possion d'avril on Blair was...

to reset the GPS signal from the satellites above Ira[nq] to fool the brit sailors into sailing into Iran's waters embarassingl blair into an apology/climbdown, and cunningly stabailizing the rtegion by allowing the Iranian Premier to sound sane, and humane...

would be a great consipiracy theory, but its TOO CLEVER BY HALF and no way could the Yank foot-in-mouth president pull it off....

oh well...

[for non francophones, Poisson d'avril is the french name for an April Fools joke)

Expedia (Expletive Deleted) Ripoff Artists

we booked a flight for 500 quid on a mainstream US airline
on Expedia for an aunt called (lets say)
Marie Gleeson

we then notice her given name on the passport is (lets say)
Anna-Maria Gleeson
(though everyone knows her as Marie)
and ask Expedia if they'll change the ticket.
Answer: "No: you have to cancel, no refund, and buy a new one."

We ask the US airline - someone says - that should be ok, but then later someone else says
"no its too much of a change". This is an electronic ticket.
We have not been asked for a passport number at this point,
so its not to do with security as the ticket was paid for by a third party with a completely different name their credit card.

This is simply an arbitrary Expedia "policy".
I'd happily pay some (even outrageous) admin fee for re-doing the booking, but I cannot believe this BS from both Expedia and the Airline -
in fact we are emailing (and writing to, how old fashioned)
Watchdog, the Office of Fair Trading and the Ombudsman,
as its clearly bad business practice

(yes, their web page says they won't change names, but what is a "name" ?
it is clear the main purpose is to stop arbitrage and transfer of ticket,
when its obvious we are not doing that.
It is also clear that one could risk showing up with a ticket in the name
M Smith but be called MA Smith on the passport -
why would the airline care so lloing as only 1 smith showed up?
(note I have travelled on a passport with Jonothan Smith on it,
but with tickets saying Jon Smith for donkeys years without problems -
I assume J Arthur Rank had no problem booking as J Arthur Rank,
but showing up with a passport that said John Arthur Rank...)

Frankly, we are pointing them at the watchdog programme
(and have complained to the credit card company about this)
c.f they already had a programme item about this just last week
watchdog on airline ticket name change
and its clear that it is shoddy practice, even if "legal",
which I doubt in UK fair trading law.

Note
1. we tried to change the name _same day_
(there were still other tickets at the same price -
this is a ticket for july being booked in april.
so we just booked another ticket at that price in the right name to prove our good intent
(and to make sure aunt could travel!)

2. this is an e-ticket only and they do not have passport number,
so the name is an arbitrary thing at this point
(i.e. only later when someone shows up with the
booking reference at the airport would the actual ID matter. so "post 9/11" arguments are
nonsense, esp. given its a relatively common name.

3. the person paying is a 3rd party, so the name is arbitrary, however, why would we do all the above if we were trying to get a ticket at one price and then sell it on to someone else?

i.e. from this you can infer :
i) we are not trying to transfer the ticket
(just make the name accurate w.r.t passport)
ii) there's no security check going on so its nothing to do with that
(since they only have a name, and a relatively common one at that.
iii) these are the only reasons I can think of
(other than that perhaps their software is rubbish that a name change between now and 3 months from now would not be possible, for Expedia, or the US airline)

580 quid - if it was me I'd just turn up and blag it,
but its our 70 year old aunt, and i do not think it is fair, reasonable, and from now on I will
not use Expedia and will recommend none of my friends ever use Expedia, and will make sure that such stories about Expedia are well known. I have for example just told 100 people at
a conference we have today in Cambridge this story. They all could not believe it either. (well they could believe it but thought it extremely bad behaviour by aforesaid company). These 100 people were estemeed academics from all over Europe and the US who travel a lot. hint hint.

So long, Expedia, and thanks for all the phish.

Global "positioning" system... ... ...

Where 15 sailors and Marines were when they were seized by Iranian forces on 23 March appears to be the subject to a dispute. Given all sides are military organisations, and presumably have access to the most accurate positional system information, it aint exactly heartwarming to see them dispute the location accuracy +/1 more than 1 nautical mile - indeed, Longitude was determined more accurately than this by many sailors even before Harrison won the prize for measuring time accurately enough - but wait, these guys were all only a few miles off shore so ground based radar would have located them trivially too...what goes on here ? it aint plausible - and to think these folks all have (or soon will) nukes - if they can't get to the nearest meter, how they gonna deploy weapons in any kind of scary way, eh?

two gedanek experiments on the middle east

so I have two not incompatible solutions for the problem of palestine/israel

1/ we give the palestinians the Internet,
in exchange for gaza and jerusalem

the internet wont get used up so its much more useful than oil and makes more money
and then we can stop arguing about governance, and on the internet, no-one appears to care what your land claims are and everyone has the right of return.

2/ we give the israelis the entire border between USA and mexico. they'd turn it into productive farmland, move a lot of Intel chip design and fab theer, and do a much better job of policing it (maybe even build a big wall along it, or perhaps just employ a lot of mexican chip designers)
and frankly, what else is the land good for - and they have no historical argument with the peoeple on either side.

didja ever order something off the net and then discover...

...that it didn't work - for example, i got this book by richard dawkins on the God Delusion, and frankly it wasn;t about god at all - it was about people being deluded - i had the idea that it was one of those zen things about creation was a delusion of god, and in fact she was still sitting in her primeval cave ulling over some big pot full of magic herbs, and had fallen asleep and dreamed the whole think, woken up in the belief that that was the day of rest that was done, and here was a whole new world she'd just built from scratch -

no - its all about people fooling themselves 17 million different ways that there is no god.

by the way has he never stopped to think that 17 million wrongs don't make a right?

i mean just because all those the proofs that 1!=1 are wrong, doesn't prove that
1==1



I WANT MY MONEY BACK!!!

otherwise I might have to write a book about
The Dawkins Delusion, where someone writes a book about god not existing in the belief that people who agree, care, and that people who disagree will notice, and not kill him.

of course, most the fictional books one buys are wrong - for example, they have endings (there are worthy exceptions, but few) - whoever heard of an ending?

then they lived happily ever after ......no they didn't - they might have been happy, but not if there wasn't anything ineteresting happening before they die, and if there was, why didnt the author write about it eh? I want my money back - either its wrong, or its a lie or both, or maybe neither - can't remember....

shoplifting for fun and profit

I want to encourage people to shoplift in ways that are good - for exampe,
dress up as a server at Mcdonalds and go in with a friend, go behind the counter, serve them, take their money, and leave. that way you get lunch. for poor people this would be much better than stealing sweets. It would also deprive someone else of the Big Mac, which is probably good for them, and would keep people from thinking of actually taking a job at McDOnalds too....

no, really...

oh, ok, i dont want to encourage peple to break the law - no not really. but think about it - peer-to-peer burgher sharing networks - so much better htan music piracy!

bronte, what were u thinkin, gurrl?

the tenant of wildfell hall by anne b, so whats that about then eh? what a reacionary load of twadle dressed up as proto-feminism!!! i mean really. I cannot believe the smug senitmental, annoying Mrs Huntingdon - frankly, made me wanna throw up both my hands,
make me wanna ...rockets, moonshots, spend-it-all, have-nots - natural, fact is, man's gotta pay his, taxes etc etc

no, the eyre affair is an entirely more satisfactory snare - and to think i used to know bronte (a branwell descendent in la belle france, by way of sloan square) - what is the world comming to - currying favour with bells on!

back to the myth of the black book, and the mystical significance of the number 23 for me, before i get lost in all that uber chick lit again!!! rehab is just a state of mind!

a short history of dangerous ideas

last nite i saw the lite - there was part i of a fine program about (superficially) modern politics - the programme was in fact much more fundamental going back to the ideas that are roots for conservatism, reactionary concepts and revolution - essentially, the "left" and "right" in their crudest defintions differ mainly in the belief that people are fundamentally cooperative, or fundamentally selfish. This goes back thousands of years - patriarchy, religion, state intervention, all stand as proposals based in the idea that, when left to themselves, cooperation will not work to organmise a society of individuals. The programme is clever as it identifies the most dangerous idea of all that: given rational selfish behaviour, an ideal society will emerge. This is bullshit of the smelliest sort for a HUGE number of reasons - not the least, the Nash model (and others) of optimisation requires (i) perfect information for a "market" (read, ecosystem) to optimise and requires ii) perfect rational selifhs behaviour - a spec of obfuscation./secrecy, (even just DeLAY in getting information) and a spec of irrational behaviour (c.f. stock market "panics") and it all goes pear shaped - apply this to personal relationships and see just how far you get - mass schizophrenia. as with other dangerous ideas, it is pusuasive as it has an elegant, powerful simplicity - like monothesism, nazism, and the divine right of kings. It is a ubher-meme that is hard to shake off. How do we (syndicalist anarchists of the world unite) combat this? with an anti-meme, or a better meme?

a major problem with uber memes (the dominant idea-gene of the pool) is that not only are they infectiously persuausive, they are hard to counter because they are meta-stable - they create a self fulfilling profit-base (sorry, prophesy) - as the programme rightly portraits, people adapt (they are neurolignusitcally programmed) to the newspeak and newthink - cooperation emerges from tribes/herds and predator/prey relationships, but a tribe can be crteated for whch cooperation does not emerge - how fragile and brittle is that, eh? eh~?

the problem with Blair and his gang , as with Thatcher before them, is that they are second class thinkers who are suckers for Big but Stupid ideas. And their are first class bastards out their with Big Stupid ideas to sell.

fashion war, war fashion

Dolce & Gabbana pro matria posey
is all i have to say today

tragedy of the commons, comedy of the lords

the real tragedy of the commons is that its full of people who are so common, but not full of any common sense

the comedy of the lords is that they don't lord it over anyone, and there's
logical or involved either

is religious extremism a form of autism?

this idea struck me yesterday - a lot of the "failure to communicate" or empathise with the other of religious extremists (whether flyover state fundamental christians, or jewish settlers or suicide bomber islamic nutters), is very like the behaviour of autistics....discuss:-
i
litanes, chanting, nodding head etc etc look a lot like people disengaging and not managing human relationships properly - a lot of the other things (obsession/compulsion with detail, completeness, interprestation, trainspotting) is very like the stamp collecting mentality of the extreme asperger....

perhps its genetic ? maybe it is treatable

richard dawkings should talk to the sanger institute to see if they can find the "got god gene" and remove it:)

mappa mundi - topographics of meaning

so it seems to me that there is some sort of principle of conservation of obscurity with maps - looking over the map room in any good museum, you find what appears at first sight to be increasing knowledge about the world - the accuracy of the outlines of coasts, rivers and so on, improves visibly over the centuries, no matter what culture and history you survey.

however, this is at a cost - it takes people to survey areas and logistical support, and a reason to want to survey an area - typically, this means that a population is growing into an area (or a culture is invading it), and the complexity of views of what the area is for must necessarily grow exponentially with each consciousness that forms a view on what "this land is for". Indeed, this works equally well in cyberspace - as we map the Internet better and better, we add more compute resources, and they hold ever more data with ever more logical interactions, so that, no matter how accurate a physical model we form of the net (or the planet) is, the logical, virtual, social, economic, political, and other human maps will more and more dominate.

This explains, for example, why drawing lines on maps to solve political problems (viz Ireland, Israel, Palestine, Serbia, CIS etc etc) is a pointless excercise - a line is the shortest distance between two mistakes.

conspiracy theory #101

clearly the US presidential elections have been controlled by Al Qaueda for the last two terms - how else would you explain them being handed Bush on a plate?

All super-villains need a superhero, and, as in the so-so movie, unbreakable, if the superhero aint their first, the supervillain has to create one. Ergo, Fiat Bush!

joan baez and george bush

I can't decide who is more evil - joan baez is so triumphally smug that she has an opponent - personally, i think that that is a really really weird reaction. I think i will have to go back to listening to the klaxons really loud...that or else the good the bad and the queen

bah humbug

Gene Patent

I didn't think i'd find myself agreeing with Michael Crichton, but in his new book
Next, there is an authors note with some remarks on the state of modern research in botech, and an appeal to repeal the Bayh-Dole act in the US, as well as comments on Gene Patents which I thoroughly recommend!! just do it! madness must end!

apologize or else

The fact that someone is too stpuid to know that what they say is racist, does not get them off the hook - the fact is it makes them a stupid racist.

Jade and her two chums are both incredibly offensive human beings, but the people who make big brotther should be taken to court for inciting racial hatred, especially since they probably are all posh tv producer people with degrees and educations which means that they ought be able to tell the difference between irony and literal bone headed hate.

apologize or else

I just bought Neil Young's newish album, Living with War, since I
a) like Neil Young's songs (both the folksier goldrush, and the grungier weld)
b) was interested to hear that it was virulently anti-war, but still very patriotic (in the odd way Neil Young is patriotic about the US of A whilst being originally Canadian, but lets leave that aside:)

I like the songs and the 100 voice choir takes a bit of getting used to but melds in quite well BUT:
there's never heard, not a solitary word about the real victims of war - the iraqi civilians - there are admittedly a few thousand dead and maimed american soldiers who never bargained to be fighting like this. but there are, by conservative estimates, 50,000 and more likely 350,000 iraqi dead and most of their families probably dont think its a very good price
to pay for getting rid of saddam... ... ...

still, i don't blame Neil for missing part of the story - at least he's singing strongly about another part in the right direction:)

reading Hotel California (about laurel canyon in the late 60s and early 70s of the "me" generation of singers and songwriters, and he's pretty central (along with joni mitchell and the usual other suspects) but was surprised not to see the new riders of the purple sage mentioned at all - and very little about tim buckley and his crowd, or the links between joni and the jazz scene in LA (e.g. LA Express, and onwards to crusadaers and weather report etc) or the links from the dead (and airplane) to the art scene...oh well, thats what you get if you read books by an english public school boy who was a tad to young to have been there:)

apologize or else

Pit Stop Terror

so yet another kid dies because some stupid white trash macho man has to have a dog that is so dangerous it hosptialises an adult trying to stop it kill a 5 year old. Why do people want dogs like that? well if you ask me (and I know you didn't) its same reason redneck morons in the US want guns: its a bigger willy type thing. certainly people i know that have dogs because they _like_ them, pick dogs for company - dogs are pack animals and normally trate humans as the pack leader, even kids smaller than themselves - only some breeds designed (yes, genetically selected by breeders) have aberrant behaviour and are cosntantly o na hair trigger to try to become alpha male - not great comapny unless you want to keep excercising your ego in re-imposing will power over the beast - what kind of ego boost is it to someone to triumph over a small animal like a pit bull? obviosuly, its a sad expression of superiority which really represnts an inferiority to the rest of the human race, from which these folks should be evicted for a few years to learn their lesson.

apologize or else

Jeremy Clarkson is a pouf - we all know this of course (made you look:-)

No really, he says cyclists are cheating coz they ride on the roads and don't pay road tax.
Well, Mr Clarkson, you seem to forget that a lot of cyclists have cars too (e..g this one) and DO pay road tax for the car, but don't trhen use that as a reason to use it every avaialble congested occasion.

SO when I cycle, and give you road space in your stupid fat polluting, overused, metal death machine,
I have MORE rights than you (and more courage:-)

Jerwemy Clarkson is not a pouf, of course, but he does talk almightly offensive bollocks frequently.
On the other hand, I find him very amusing, and (like Earth in the Hitchikers Guide) mostly harmless....(and cannot rteally complain, coz I don't _have_ to watch him or read him) - I just wanted to be annoyingly pedantic, like most bloggers... ... ...

apologize or else

Just started reading the new book by Ayaan Hirsi Ali after a review in the guardian today - its interesting, and the review talks about the difference between radical anti-islam in the netherlands (viz van Gohh's movie/assasination) and the UK - this set me to thinking about the 7/7 bombers in england that summer.

My review is that they are not symptomatic of very much about the UK at all, and it is very sad that the people that carry out radicalisation of young men exploit a well-known psychological weakness in them, to completely irrelevant ends - neither did it cause significant backlash (as such attacks in netherlands and france have done) nor did it do as much to cause more muslims (or any otherreligious group) to become more radically religous (fundamental), not even as much as, say, Jack Straw talking about the veil. The fact that 50+ people died including these bombers has become like roadkill, rather than martydom - its just not the same part of the landscape that Guy Fawkes, or the Miners striking (and some dying) against Thatcher, inhabit. Perhaps its partly the british phlegmatic nature, or just the sheer SIZE of the multiple cutural and religious groups in the UK - it would take a huge, protracted incident to make long term impact - we dont do stuff that way.

Meawhile, the plight of women in Islamic nations and Socieities from Somalia, Afghanistan, Iran, and the wrong parts of palestine and syria is really quite depressing, and enough to put me of my pea and ham soup.

culture of blame: take responsibility!

so apparently muslims are blaming the attack on a Mosque in Eccles on
MInisters' comments about the Veil (or Niqab -not sure why we can't use the perfectly good english word). Well frankly
this is bogus as blaming it on the weather - if some racist idiots decide to attack
another bunch of idiots, that is THEIR decision - what other people SAY isn't a reason or an excuse
except for people not prepared to take responsibility for their own actions. This applies as much to any party - Muslims that threaten violence to cartoonists are criminals. W People that attack anything or anyone whether a pub or a mosque or a synagogue or a pig farm or an abortion clinic or a
person, are criminals. Other people's words (whether in the Koran, Bible, Torah, Sun Times, Hansard) are irrelevant - words cannot be sufficient provocation. period. words, cannot be reason enough to lose reason.

why do such people abnegate responsibility for actions in themselves or in other people?

well, my belief is that there's three reasons.
1. they are exploiting liberal fear - bad idea - remember we got the guns
2. they've never been required to take responsibility for such actions,
often because a fascist priest or a liberal government have taken away that requirement, or else because they think they wont get caught.
3. they are repressing something.

oh wait, maybe they are just plain STUPID. you know, lots of crims in chokey apparently claim that "they don't know why they did it" - their "hand moved of its own accord" or "their brain went on holiday". No it didn't. they were bad AND stupid.

Listen, Marx said "combat liberalism". This applies to the other side of the coin too.
tough on liberalism - tough on the opponents of liberalism.
Freud talked in his work on "beyond the pleasure principle" about the darkside. he was wrong. there's no fun in this, not even peverse.

god I am starting to sound like some kind of libertarian - if you read this, I'm not:) I am a syndicalist anarchist (but its damn close:)...

Region Enforcement should be done by Death Penalty

Cookie-cutter region-enforcement

net neutrality and regionalisation are pretty much the same thing - larry lessig has a lot to say on this - personally , i dont see the problem - clearly people that do cross-border arbitrage should be hung:

Many companies are faced with the awful prospect of reduced profits
due to globalisation, where the price they set in the poorest plaecs
on the planet isntantly becomes the price everywhere - products from
DVDs, MP3s, and completely innocent things like AIDS drugs and http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.spell.gif
automatic weapons and ammunition are available at knock down prices in
places where the rich should be fleeced for every penny (e.g. Saudi
Arabia, USA and other friendly states).

We propose the use of embedded, lat-long sensitive nano-tech cookie
cutters within the product wrapping so that anyone trying to open
their new xmas prezzy to
fire on the insurrectionists, or treat the unwitting HIV victim, to
the accompaniment of the sounds and vision of the latest hits, will
have to make sure they are in the right place at the right time, else
its "bye-bye skin and bones".

suitable nano-technology would have to include GPS and Galileo
receivers which might make it quite bulky, so one thing to do would
be to desing some sort of decentralised mimo sensor net GPS receiver
that would collaborate over a number of wrappers and products - after
all, where there's one M16/AK47/AZT-dose, there's probably 100.

You know it makes sense: price discrimination isn't unfair at all. No
it isn't, really

I don't have a emoticon for massive irony, so you'll just have to figure out for yourself if I am serious above....

Many people are incensed by Internet Censorship

The sois-disant Great Firewall of China, for example, is designed to
prevent people within PRC accessing information from certain sites
via various search engines such as Google, based on various keywords
deemed to be subversive by the Chinese government. (Actually, the
mechanism is much simpler than that, but the effect is as described).

Of course, other countries, and many commercial organisations
implement mechanisms to limit users' access to various kinds of
information. Many of these are merely extensions of censorship
to New Media, that makes sure there is consistency- for example:

In Germany (and several other countries)
holocaust denial is illegal (even criminal) and just as much on the Net as
in other forms of media. Many search engines (such as Google) filter
such content for users from those countries. It is still possible for
users to obtain the information by masquerading as users from elsewhere,
just as one can buy censored books from foreign bookstores, and risk
shipping (or carrying) them back.

In the UK, what constitutes pornography is rather more strictly
controlled than in many countries (in Europe, but even the US for example)
and many Internet Service Providers implement filters that censor such
content.

In most commercial organisations that use the Internet extensively,
staff are often prevented from misusing the network resource by limiting the
sites they can reach. This is largely no different than limiting the access
that telephones can be put to (e.g. think student lab phones not having
international access). Of course, some industries go further and log all use
(including all e-mail content and web access) and check for abuse. This might
be regarded by some as an invasion of privacy, but others would say that you
choose where you work.


So we must ask why this topic is such a hot button to press with many people.

I think there are three reasons:

Firstly, the Internet was not originally censored (much, if at all -
and I have been using it since 1981, so I have a fairly good idea of its
origins). Thus when it first appeared as a service in many parts of the
world, it could be used to access information that was previously difficult,
expensive or impossible to obtain. This international (or global) nature of
communications happened before national or international law could comprehend
the effects. This is still largely true. As an aside, we should note that it
is almost impossible to police the Internet by location perfectly.
Identifying server, content, and client by Internet address is insufficient.
Mechanisms such as anonymising, peer-to-peer, and encryption all undermine
any centralised attempts to impose control.

Secondly, anyone can provide information on the Internet. It removes
intermediaries (newspaper and other media magnates), and democratises the
information providing processes. Even powerful presences
such as the BBC or CNN are not providing as much information as the end user.
In some cases, the immediacy of this information makes it more valuable that
traditional sources. In other cases, the provenance and accuracy of the
information make it less valuable. It is not clear what the balance is, but it
is clear that censorship may be arbitrary, and remove more valuable information
than otherwise.

Thirdly, the Internet provides information about diversity just as
much as being a tool for uniformity or globalisation. Many Internet users form
their own communities (whether youth users such as MySpace or YouTube, or
language and culture based). Censorship threatens to lead to so-called
balkanisation of the Internet, where these groups are completely disjoint,
whereas today, they are simply ways to organise subsets of users and
interests, and do not represent actual boundaries.

In conclusion, many people are incensed by Internet Censorship. Technology is
not terribly effective at enforcing the arbitrary and local rules: our global
society needs to develop new social and legal processes to which we all have
input, so that the "baby luck" we have had in gaining the low cost advantages
the Internet brings is not thrown out with the "bathwater" via high-cost dodgy
and false content control mechanisms.

I would propose to start by refining two principles, those of
freedom of speech, and freedom from persecution.

Both of these principles are already subtly different depending whether
the means of expression is spoken or written (e.g. libel versus slander), and
indeed whether the spoken or written (heard or read) material was communicated
privately or publicly. What the Internet does is to introduce at least a 3rd
type of communications channel, which needs to be comprehended by its users
(recipients as much as transmitters). The Internet provides the ability to
distribute information at nearly zero cost to arbitrary (unforeseen) users.
[Aside: this is why Internet piracy is so attractive too].
Indeed, the receiver may have chosen to hunt and retrieve the information.
This is a very different world from the traditional channels of printed or
broadcast words, or even of private letters and telephone calls.

For writers, a refined version of the principle of "freedom of speech" should
include a middle ground in terms of consideration of audience, and in terms of
channel. A blog is nothing like a TV or Radio item or a newspaper article. Nor
is it directed like a letter. It has soem of the elements of a pub
conversation.

For readers, what is retrieved on the net should be subject to a refined
version of the principle of "freedom from abuse or persecution". What was
written on a blog may well have been put there in a different culture, with a
different readership in mind. Sense of humour and cultural conventions vary
across the world, and normally, physical difference isolated receivers from
witnessing these differences. Downloading offensive material is a matter of
choice, and not of the authors' intent. Cartoons satirising Islam in poor taste in a dutch newspaper would not normally appear on the street in a village in Sudan.

Between these two refined principles, there still has to be room for
respect and negotiation, no different from the application of the principles
in the more traditional channels and media.

Of course, there are parts of the world when these principles are not
respected even in the traditional form. Nobody's perfect.

apologize or else

Richard Dawkins
has written widely on the (non-)existence (probable) of God.

In his latest tome, I believe he commits 3 errors of argument, and several mistakes in terms of the tactics he uses, as well as
potentially leading us strategically down a dead end. While I don't disagree with some of his goals or many of his conclusions, I just wanted to point this out (amongst all the other noise:)

Firstly, there's a tendency to be unimaginative about alternative possible universes. There is a lot of material in the God Delusion dedicated countering arguments about
the existence of God from the complexity of the Universe. Understandably, given Dawkin's background, the argument that complexity emerges from the (simple) evolutionary (selection/crossover) processes is used widely, and reasonably. However this begs the question: why is the universe suited to the hierarchy of systems that allowess complexity (counter-intuitievely, negative entropically etc etc) to emerge? there are LOTS of alternative organisations that one could imagine of the laws of physics upwards that would not lead to such a possibility. The fact that energy, time and matter are organised arccording to a remarkably simple set of rules that do allow this is, obviously, remarkable - it doesn't prove the existence of god, but it is very very hard to argue about the probability of laws being this way rather than another way - we don;t have necessary priors to do the Baysian inferencing - we don't even have the level of evidence that SETI folks use in arguming about the probability of intelligenyt species on other planets (in other solar systems tec etc) _ we don't have alternative physical universices to look at except in simulation, and precious few (even in Sci Fi literature) have the ability to cook up
viable alternatives and examine their relative likelihood in the "best of all possible random choices". [footnote:- there was a competition in the New Scientist, I think, a few years back to see who could achieve most for the human race with the smallest change to the laws of physics - the winner was someone who observed that altering the speed of light by a very small amount could make the threshold for fission and fusion bombs impossible to achieve on earth, but let all of chemsiitry and important physics liek the stable fusion process in stars, continue largely undetectably the same. More please:-]

Secondly,there's a failure to look at a LOT Of anthropology literature - a common failing of Oxford academics (Penrose is similar in lapses of citation of colleagues elsewhere:) which addresses the question both of diversity and numbers of (e.g. languages, but also) religions. There are reasons why diverse languages evolve rapidly, and they are to do with increased survival of the gene pool (in line with Dawkins' own theories). A good summary of some of the ideas behind this is in
"Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language" by
Robin Dunbar, which referenecs a lot of evidence anthropologists haev gathered on the topic (not just nice headline grabbing stuff about potlatch or cargo cults).

Thirdly, Dawkins says that children may be natural thesists - well I'd love to know his evidence (admitedly, there is the Israeli study, but Jewish studies conflate culture, race and religion, and so are not good at pulling out any inate religiosity, imho) - anecdote: a Latin teacher tried to claim a bunch of religious views as fact to a class of ten year-olds that I happened to be in. The class objected - he said "you are too young to decide not to believe", to which they ALL retorted: "So are we not too young to believe, by the same argument" - this was in a church school - yet the children were able to see that "default off" was just as good as "default on" in the face of no evidence - I bet there's plenty of evidence that default behaviours are established by culture VERY early by peer pressure and example (c.f. gender role/behaviour etc).

I believe that Dawkins does no favours to his case by including a tactic that too often includes ad hominem remarks - for the examples of ludicrous behaviour (e.g. televangelists), he will preaching to the deaf or the converted. For some other examples, we may (or may not) know who is talking about:)

More seriously, I question the entire strategy behind writing the God Delusion. While I see there are many dangerous religious extremist groups trying to set global agendas today, I feel that taking them (that is to say, the extremist components) seriously at all (and taking them alongside the moderate reglious) is an error - as John Sladek said (quoted) in Roderick at Random, if there's somethign more dangorous than a disbelief in the existence of intelligent robots, it is too much of an unhealthy belief in their existence.

Finally, a note on humour. All the humour in Dawkins' work is quoted - does the man actually have his own sense of humour, or just the ability to recognize it in others? Douglas Adams wasn't just funny: He was also succinct:)

Vonnegut said that the true message of the New Testament is not
"turn the other cheek". It is that people should check who the Mr Big is behind someone before they plan to crucify them. There's lots of simple examples like this that Dawkins could also use to stengthen his arguments through simplicity. Or not.

Joke: what if life was just a hologram of a french 19*19 board game - Le Go d'Illusion ? :-)

clog

mad, bad ideas abound in the world, and here are a few of mine.

however here is an even worse one:

so i've been thinking about applications and usability

a feature of handsets is that there are limited resources
but the famous success of handsets is SMS - so the
popularity of txt messageing is sometimes attributed to its use
not as a tool for information, but as a channel for emotional
communication - studies (e.g.
http://research.microsoft.com/sds/papers/Harper_IEEE_05.pdf
http://research.microsoft.com/scg/
etc)

so is there a case to be made that we should design
oppprtunistic applications' UIs very badly
to FORCE users to think outside the box (ie.. play the
hacker/workaround game) to find the ways of using our applications
in new and creative ways

i.e. is there a case for the
Really Stupid Interface design paradigm?

(RSI is not just a conincidence:-)

apologize or else

1. An islamic policeman is let off from guarding the Israeli embassy in London in case his relatives in the middle east are threatened

MP jack straw doesn't want to let women wearing a veil over their face into his castle (sorry, i mean constituency meetings)

The british army want to give their soldiers a tax break/bonus
for fighting in Iraq

This is all very odd, since these people are all essentially evading the job they are PAID to do. obviously, the solutions are simple and is an example of the type of joined-up-thinking this government claims but fails so visibly to employ:
1. the british army should guard the israeli embassy, and the british islamic policemen should be required to fight in Iraq, but wearing a veil to avoid being recognized.
2. jack straw should be required to wear suspenders, high heals and a bra (and nothing else) when seeing men in his constituency
3. Tony blair should retire immediately and take over running afghanistan, as he is so good at sorting out people's disagrements.

apologize or else

apologize or else

silly of me, of course: B-Arkers, all of them...

apologize or else

apologize or else

blair, brown, bush, bagdad, basra, bah - what is it with B anyhow? behtlehem, brighton, baby, bathwater, blog, bulgaria, beirut.

boy am i glad i am in cambridge:-)

apologize or else

apologize or else
whenever anyone criticises another religion (including atheists), extreme members of said religion threaten the critic - whether it be a cartoonist or a pope quoting from 500 years ago.

I get very disappointed when the critic then apologises - the _point of both of these criticisms was that there are extremists in religions (and elsewhere), not that all members of said group are extremists - if you listen to the threats from the extremists, and respond, you are _appeasing_ extremists.

Do not appease people that use religion as a cover to threaten you - i dont care if its muslims or the israeli defense force, the pope or bush - if I say they did something wrong, and I believe I am right, then I don't see why I would change my view about a subset of them because of threats - seems like bordering on hypocrisy.

Of course, the Pope (and the catholic cheurch) have a history of apeasement (e.g. Nazis in second world war), so I guess one shouldnt be surprised:( Before anyone starts protesting in the UK (or most of europe) they ought to remember that most EU countries are secular, and the pope speaks for very few people - next time the muslims protest about something the pope says, do it in africa or south america where most of his followers are as it will have more effect -

of course, its hard for religious states (esp. extreme ones under sharia law) to understand that there are secular states, let alone states where any individual can say what she likes about stupid muslims, israelies, chrsitans, zoroastrians and agnostics, and not represent anyone else or any organisation or even any consensus - we are allowed to talk rubbish if we like - if you listen to it, and worse, react to it, it reflects more on you then on the speaker:)

apologize or else

criticizing israel takes some Chutzpah, because the
only model that many of its citizens and friends have for
defense is attack. This starts with words, and slips rapidly
into actions, and shows an amazing lack of adaptability. While one understands
the historical reasons for dropping the fatal passivity that led many to the gas chambers
of the nazis, there are alternatives to simply assaulting the person who has another viewpoint
in this world - I wonder how long it will take for the culture, which has had several generations
now since the 2nd world war, to develop a bit more range of response.Of course, the large numbers of
people from other cultures without any real culture (viz escapees from the collapsing ussr)
that exploited the right of return don't help as their model of the world doesn't include any
idea of society let alone multi-cultural society. Tolerance, integration, cooperation, co-existence,
all sorts of ways for differing groups to live side by side have been tried succesfully (visit Toronto if you want to see one of the widest range of peacefullly co-existing groups - entire cities-worth of Chinese, Russiam, Italian and so on with many different styles of interaction).

In the long run, the survival of the once radical society in israel depends on the evolution towards some of these capabilities - but there's little signs of this - the current trend reminds me of Harry Harrison's
doomed inhabitants of the deadly planet in Deathworld...read it and weep...

Of course, I get shouted at by israelis every time I say this sort of thing, but I am used to this and have learned to ignore it - like many essentially arab socieities, the jews have only 1 volume setting: loud:-(

apologize or else

apologize or else
israel eyeless in gaza again - basically,
aside from all the usual rubbish talked by either side
about justifiable war, and disproproportiate responses,
with regard to the tanks rolling into gaza and
missiles falling on bridges and other infrastructure,
all to "rescue" one "kidnapped" israeli soldier
(kidnap? he aint a kid, he is a _prisoner_).

what amazes me, though. is
that a nation appears capable of the same pathological behaviour
as an individual human, viz:
victims of child abuse are most likely to become child abusers.

israel, a state (re-)made for explicitly for victims of attempted genocide,
appears to be embarking on the same doomed course itself to the palestinians.

this cycle is familiar too in other conflicts (balkans etc) and is generally solved
by long term concerted peaceful conciliatory action - nelson mandela's scheme in south africa
was a remarkable example of renouncing vengence, even when it mgiht be vaguely justified
simply because it is counter productive.

israel: you want long term security? you just threw it away for yet another generation.

apologize or else

apologize or else

So the network broke in London on 7/7. Gosh, well TETRA Isn't going to help much is it - surely people have learned from this - you cannot expect the unexpected but the cell phone system really is a crock - the slotted aloha channel allocation would fail far less gracefully under high call arrival rate/attempt, and call gapping is TOO LATE - what you need is wideband cdma, but also what you need is diversity (wifi skype phones all over) AND whayt you need is delay tolerant networking.

apologize or else

Apparently, Madonna's latest gig had her on a cross - apparently
this is offensive to chrstians. They seem to have missed her previous shows
and perhaps failed to spot the clue in her chosen stage name -they
are all meant to be fairly annoying to people who have no clue, no sense of humour
and probably are a bit wobbly in their faith.

Or perhaps the people compllaining have shares in her company, and are just boosting her publicity
(which of late was flagging a bit)

Perhaps Madonna could do a Da Vinci tour? Perhaps the people who spend so much time complaining about
troivia like movies and music could get a life and look at things that people of allegedly christian beliefs
are meant to like aid in darfour, or peace in the middle east or something that actually MATTERS for a change.

Jesus, these guys are hipocrites.

A True History of the Internet - Virtualising Handsets and cars

Xen is quite useful in providing
ways to dice and slice a server (farm) at different granularity from
processor, core, or thread, and for its isolation, migration, and
multi-OS support. To date, its targetted at Intel and the desk/server side.

What we desperately need is to virtualise handsets and also processors in cars.
Right now, the tussle between the various service providers to create walled gardens has led to a disaster which is that there are now far more OSs (and even just incompatible variants of OSs) in the handset/pda world than any other computign world - linux, symbianos, windows mobile smart phones, nokia, ericsoon and samsung ownbrand OS and re-badged symbian and java and other OS - despite ample resources (CPU and memory in a typical 2006 phone is more than an internet host or router of 1990), these folks produce bluetooth and wifi and camera APis that are stunted, they don't ship location services, or p2p/manet tools, and basically have NO clue- in the interest of short term profit, they misunderstand that the LONG term profit will be bigger if the service*network is bigger (see Metcalf's law, or dave reeds version of it) - killer apps wont "appear" for 3G or wifi enabled phones unless the community can program them. Frankly, its an embarassement.

Don' even get me started on in-car devices... ... ...

So if we para-virtualized them, we'd take these problems away -= application writers could write to a single platform, instead of 11, and know that that platform would work on the VM on any phone - since many phones use either ARM or (a few) xscale, the processor is pretty friendly, so the lower level of a "xen-like" system, would be not too bad - the page sharing stuff in Xen 3.0 would allow a lot of efficiecies too so the memory footprint of running n variants of Symbian OS and Linux and windows smart phone OSs, would not be n-times - it would be a fraction more...

show me the money:)

apologize or else

Da Vinci, Da Vinci, we all fall down

protests from religious fundamentalists about the da vinci code movie and book, only made worse by the movie hype, are yet another symbol of the corruption of thought in reglious groups. A well trained jesuit would never misunderstand the difference between fictional entertainment, and blasphemy. Frankly, the christians are very very lucky that the dominant religion in the west is not (say) orthodox judaism where the portrayal of humans (since they are in the image of god) is forbidden.

More importantly, where to they get off objecting to a speculative, amusing, and quite well made movie (but terribly written book)? Look at the bible - its full of inaccuracies - for example, the commandment translated by Christians as "Thou shalt not kill" is an incorrect rendering of the Aramaic which meant "Thou shalt not murder" - I will defend my right to the death to _talk_ gibberesh, and christians have by the own rules, given up that right, so they can go away and sulk in the corner and turn the other bloody (==by my lady) cheek.

Gosh, they never complained about Dogma (very amusing film with Alanis morisette as god), or Time Bandits (very very amusing film with Ralph Richardson as God). What is wrong with a religion that has a terminal sense-of-humour failure? Read the Name of the Rose and weep:)

apologize or else

apologize or else

So now it looks like Conencting for Health have put the ball back in the court of the academics and other signatories of the letter asking for a review of the
programme - viz
CFHfIT
say, ok so you want a review, please describe its terms of reference. Good call.

My take is that the review should be _by the people, of the people, for the people_ - i.e. it should be user centered. This means NHS employees and healthcare customers should define its contents, without fear (so some form of anonimity, which ought to be bread and butter to an NHS IT project should be assured for people who wish to be critical but are worried about their jobs- however, care should be taken that this doesn't lead to un-verifiiable whinges - this also, should not be beyong the wit of medical researchers to define:)

apologize or else

apologize or else

Why would anyone want to review the NPfIT ?
FAQ
1/ its just a waste of time
2/ its going fine (see the websites)
3/ if it doesn't deliver, we don't pay
4/ any other reasons?

1. having an independant review of a large project doesn't typically increase project times - actually ,its a chance to improve documentation, and to get low cost objective fedback so you can re-factorize and change priorities. Aside from any accountability questions (and if the project fails, and we don't pay, we are left with a god almighty mess AND waste of NHS resources - time of training of medical and admin staff to use a failed system wouyld represent a massive sink of effort - the project must not be allowed to fail unless there's somethign crucially wrong with it, but it must also be bought in reasonably close to budget - this is not impossible, but I don't believe a self-monitoring programme has ever done that.

2. the website and other data on the programme are extensive, but so is the NHS - 14,000 siginficant sized sites with 1M employees - The story of how well its going down to grass roots is not captures through a few case studies and glossy PDFs or even some (laudible) Best Common Practice material. An _evaluation_ of the programme progress, and SWOT analyiss mid point should be public (the last annual report is not deep.

3. If the project misses part of its deliverables, the affect on not only the NGS but the suppliers is going to be fairly bad (think share price, think sunk cost, think committed opex as well as capex) -

The negative response to what is essentially an offer of help is suspicious.
The public will respond with "so what have they got to hide". Thats not helpful.

On the other hand, it might be good if an industrial conortium did an independant review (on the other hand, several of the candidate companies didn't bid for the NPfIT because thye assessed it as infeasible.)

apologize or else

apologize or else

So having spent some time to look through as much of the documentation on the NPfIT website as I could (most, exlcuding a few documents where links were broken) I Have to say that it is really impressive. I think there is ample evidence that the programme will deliver a lot of useful pieces (e.g. electronic presscriptins, picture arching and comms) and that is a fine thing - the pieces that look less likely to work for a while, to me, are the ones where policy is embedded in technology (.i.e. public facing systems), but they may yet work. The cradle to grave ambitions of the original NHS, translated into cyberspace, are clearly there, and the progress monitoring/reporting and visibility of a lot of the work is clearly also being carried out with the best intent. I wonder, just wonder, if this might not succeed? It would be very nice if the folks involved manage it (what would they do for an encore?).

A True History of the Internet

A True History of the Internet
Recent conversations about the
National Program for IT in the NHS or NPfIT, make it clear to me that the public understanding of academic computer science contributions to the world is sparse.

I've been an academic since 1981 (and even before that worked teaching remedial math in High Schools in Toronto, and spent 2 years as a systems/program advisor in North London Polytechnic. In all that time, I've observed that academics in CS like to build stuff. In fact, as part of both teaching and researching computing, one tries things out. Oftem the things one tries out are new (as thats more fun to teach and learn or because its research) - sometime later, you find lots of people using the thigns you built, often unaware of the origins of the stuff- the Net, the Web, lots of Unix stuff, sure, but what about more "commercial" systems? well, cisco, sun and google all started as stanford University EECS department internal projects. Microsoft's first TCP stack was done as a C port of a macro-11
stack that UCL worked on, and then handed via Spider Systems, Mentat and other companies to end up in Windows (since re-written, some of the re-write, e,.g the mobile IP code based on work by microsoft research with Lancaster University. There's a LOT of examples like this - it wouldn't surprise me if a significant fraction of software today didn't start out in a university lectuters spare time project. Some of the really "odd" theory things some folks in cambridge do like theorem proving are done using theorem proving programs. These programs turn out to be quite useful.

Some day, we'll do some cyber-archaeology and trace the family tree of software systems and discover whether my conjecture is even half way right. In the meantime, if you use ADSL to access the Internet, you have more than a 50% chance of using a modem with a chip in it designed by a colleague of mine here in the University. Oh, there's only about 6 million of you in the UK alone:)

Now, do we have the right to call into question whether the NPfIT programme should have due diligence (i.e. progress report/study, etc) done? Not only do we have the right, we have the duty AND the skills. One of the folks who signed the letter
asking for this to be done _invented_ software engineering.
Another, while he has written a quite good book, has also worked _in_ banks IT departments. Qualifications (real world or ivory tower)? well, it seems they wear them on their sleeves for all to judge, which is fine, so what is wrong with asking for another government group to do the same?

apologize or else

apologize or else

I wonder if it is Philip Gould who wrote some rather inaccurate
statements about my fellow academics on
Naughty Academics for daring to suggest the NFS National Program for IT might need to haev some transparency about its plans and progress, just like ANY well run project ought to

It has the same aggresive assertive style one associated with said person - see a response by a frend of mine,m which I thoroughly endorse - I don't know any academics in ivory towers any more, least of all in hothouises of technocracy such as Cambridge from where Ross ANderson hives, where most Computer Scientists have worked with industry and have to produce results to get funded, and have done more useful things for the world in their lunchbreak than any Government Department in a decade.

apologize or else

apologize or else

I wonder if it is Phillip Gould who wrote some rather inaccurate
statements about my fellow academics on


It has the same aggresive assertive (and factually wrong) style one associated with said person - see a response by a frend of mine,m which I thoroughly endorse - I don't know any academics in ivory towers any more, least of all in hothouises of technocracy such as Cambridge from where Ross ANderson hives, where most Computer Scientists have worked with industry and have to produce results to get funded, and have done more useful things for the world in their lunchbreak than any Government Department in a decade.

apologize or else

apologize or else

now then now then whats all this about - so dan brown lifted the idea for the da vinci code from someone else? amazing- if I had been plagiarised by such a poor writer, i wouldn't be drawing attention to the fact:-)

Note, more importantly, the basis for the post-structuralist framing of such books is that they are "true" - so basing it on other works is STANDARD PRACTICE - people that do research and expect people not to use their results need to learn what their trade is about - i cannot believe how someone could be so transparently greedy as to claim they had really come up with something that dan brown used to make lots of money - if they had such a good idea, how come their book didn't sell so well, eh? probably because it wasn't as readable - so why is his book worth a lot and theirs not? because the public vote with their purses. that doesn't mean much...

A True History of the Internet

A True History of the Internet

I started this thing ages ago but only bloggized it recently - see:
the original equatorial gadget page for more info - the goal is
to be goalfree.

apologize or else

apologize or else

According to the UK government, one has to make allowances for British Troops behaviour in Iraq, as they are under tremendous pressure.

Ha! They're soldiers - did they join the army to go collecting butterflies and make cucumber sandwiches on a spring day in the Loire Valley? I think not.

What kind of excuse can you make? they have permission to shoot people dead who shoot at them (something british police aren't allowed to do except to Brazillions). They routinely beat each other up in training - why do they need to beat up some random civilians as well? to chill out? Ha! I think not. Nope, its just plain sadism and racism,. same as always.

A True History of the Internet

A True History of the Internet

In the future, the Internet will be mainly hard to find. This is because instead of using expensive heavy electrons, the Internet will mostly be made of photons. These are hard to see as they are very fast, and also don't weigh anything (as far as anyone can tell) so they zip along in straight lines without falling to earth, and then they're gone - whereas electrons fall down any potential well they pass.

apologize or else

apologize or else

Guantanamo Bay of Pigs...

So right wing (libertarians) often lsah out at liberals and say "How come you are always criticizing America - what about all those other bad people".

Well, what I say is they should take a look today (or ANY day) at
http://news.amnesty.org/
Where you find Sudan, Iran, Congo, Brazil, Nepal,
as well as the US and UK in the news for violation of human rights. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance - criticizing the US exclusively is dodgy, but those of us that care, care about injustice ANYWHERE, whether its Bush or Mugabe or whoever.

A True History of the Internet

A True History of the Internet

y'know, this is not the greatest medium since paper, let alone sliced bread.

A True History of the Internet

A True History of the Internet

The March of Time, or the Time of March? Hare and Tortoise. Whichever came first (how do you race a chicken across the road? Egg it on?)....

Mad stuff

A True History of the Internet

The Physics of Super Heroes

I am maissively disappointed in DC and Marvel Comic spinout movies - its quite clear that they are using SFX and CGI instead of real people and stunt doubles nowadays, because the physics is all wrong - after all didn't Isaac Newton say that for every action there is an equal, and opposite, reaction? well he didn't of course, he wrote it in latin, but anyway, a true card carrying geek like me cares about this stuff - at least Gene Roddenbury had the nerve to pretend that the physics of star trek made sense. Even Dr Who has a _sonic_ screwdriver (I hope he never has to use it to fix the hedgehog). But what about Spiderman or Superman or the Fab Four eh? where's the opposite reaction, eh?

apologize or else

bogus moral equivalences
so according to some folks retaliating for cartoons of the prophet by publishing cartoons of the holocaust is just the same. No it isn't. The former is insulting to Islam if you believe in Islam. The latter is insulting to anyone killed ina a genocide, including Rwanda, Eritrea, Armenia, etc etc - many people were kiled by the Nazis were not jewish - there were a lot of russians killed, many Romany, a lot of gays etc etc. Plus this was a deliberate national policy.
No, sorry, making fun of a religion is not the same as making fun of the victims of genocide. However, in this country (the UK) it is not currently illegal to deny the holocaust (although some letter writers in the papers seem to think it is) - because we believe in freedom of speech, including the freedom to talk rubbish (e.g. sput on about some religion or other).

Frankly, the amount of rubbish talked about this on all sides just goes to prove that the main risk of freedom of speech is spam.

apologize or else

apologize or else

consider this. whiel the UK still has an )obsolete) law of blasphemy, most europe doesnt. We don't, bevause reliegions are a matter of faith, not state, and insults to a religion by non believies are irrelevant to believers. Of course, insults on racial or other prejidicial grounds are not tolerable, but religions are, by definition, matters of choice in our community. As a non-muslim, I cannot blaspheme Allah - nor can I offend Yaweh or the god of christians, if I do not believe in them. I can deny them. If I use this as a basis for not employing people, I would be breaking the law. But if I simply am rude about the religion, it is like being rude about a football club. I'd be stupid to do it at the wrong time and place, but its not anyones business otherwise.


is an interesting document that has a bunch of examples of increibly offensive cartoons about jews.Someone on the BBC newsforum website made the point about the descruction by taleban of the Bhuddist statues in Afgahnistan.

So its interesting that we havn't had the guts to boycott arab OPEN oil, given the absolutely rabid anti-christian and anti-jewish press in Saudi and other countries that unfortunately for the oil-hungry west, control our lifestyle choices - viz we should be boycotting the products from these countries that burn our friends' embassies, and carry illegal placards glorifying terrorism in London. They aren't just offensive - they are criminals.

Oh, by the way, when they showed those cartoons on Al Jazeera, I hope they'd paid for the copyright :-)

fundamentalist satisists

apologize or else

PUT DOWN THE PEN AND STEP AWAY FROM THE DRAWING BOARD

The cartoonish sheepishly puts down is tool, and puts his hands in the air, and "assumes the position".

"What can I say? It's a fair cop - you caught me - satirising Islam. Yes I have WMD (Weapons of Muslim Defamation). You can try and me and cut off both my hands, and then my head in a public execution in the Champs Elysee, to be broadcast on Canal +"

What a load of bull. Islamists beware - there is a fundamentalist right to take the piss out of anything in countries with free speech, and WE WILL KILL anyone who tries to interfere with it. We wont mess with your oppressive regimes in your countries even though they oppress the women and poor, but if you mess with us, believe me, you will reap the whirlwind and we already have the nukes. How stupid can you get - if you push us too far, sure, we'll stop being liberal - but last time Europe did that, what did they become? Did the Nazis like Muslims? I think not. God, how completely moronic can you get playing with such fire. We don't care if you don't buy Danish bacon - hey, don't by danish newspapers either. Hey, dont go live here if you don't like it - you have that choice - but you don't have the choice to remove OUR choices.

apologize or else

apologize or else

So I just read "Is it just me or is everything s**t" by a couple
of Working Class Neros called Lowe and Mcarthur. Quite a musing and a few gems, but it does harp on every now and then about toffs - a couple of comments on rich rock stars gives away the fact that these blokes (contributers to Q magazine and ex _students_) suffer from inverse snobbery and working-class-cred-envy problems

so I read the history of the english working classes and other romantic writings of EP Thompson as much as the next middleclass overeducated geek-class-warrior, but frankly, since the begining of the 20th century, I don't buy that the working class has achieved a whole lot on behalf of anyone else in Blighty - in fact, there's precious little of it left since 60 years of decent free education and healthcare - sure there's an underclass, but pretty much anyone else from Builder to barworker has some aspirations and stuff that simply don't fit the mould.

And what else?

A list of things actually middleclass kids (like the sex pistols are really) did for us:
Rock Music (aside from bits stolen from african-american liberated slaves
Logevity
Anti-racism
Women's liberation
Decent rock festivals and raves

stuff I think is destructive, hypocritical, rubbish and is white english trash product:
Class war/crass
racism
oppression of women and violence
street death
poor personal hygiene

I come from a mixed bag of yorkshire working class and posh - I don't have pride in either class - only in indovidual ancestors who were admirable. I think that people that do have class loyalty are tantamount to people with race loyalty - they have one big problem, and I would happily throw then in the river and drop all my old bicycles on top of them.

The Free Plotware Foundation

so what if aliens were'nt intelligent at all - in fact they were just
highly effective physical creatures (viz Alien, the movie etc)?
and wht if they invade a planet of disembodied intelligences
and trap the disembodied intelligences in the alien body to form a
more effective creature?
and what if that planet was earth?
origin of the garden of eden legend, or perhaps of the
story of lucifer falling from heaven, or both?
Planet of Trapped Souls, coming soon to a Holodeck near you!!!
...This has been a Free Plotware Foundation missive...


----------


What about adding some "sliding doors" flavour to this scenario:
If the next good thing to happen to you is revealed to you beforehand it
does not eventually happen (and this is only due to the revelation itself).
E.g. if it is revealed to you that you are going to win the Nobel prize you
don't eventually get it although you were initially destined to do so (the
observation alters the result of the experiment).
Now imagine being persecuted by people who intentionally tell you all good
things that can happen to you only to eliminate the possibility of anything
good actually happening.
Would be good as a plot for an Italian film with the "Fantozzi" character...


-----

Subject: from the free plotware foundation

remember in hitchiker's guide, there's this truck driver who gets
rained on everywhere he goes, and he's eternally grumpy - but never
catcches on that he is, in fact, the rain god
what about a curse you could put on someone so that no matter what
they do, the next ecciting thing to happen to them is revealed
e.g. sitting n top of bus o nthe way to the cinema, they hear the
ending of the film
someone sends them an email congratulating them on winning the nobel
prize (only they havnt heard yet)
they turn off the tv to avoid hearing the baseball results and go and
read their email and someone has a gloating .sig they've just updated
with the score...
etc etc
a new kind of hell?


remember in hitchiker's guide, there's this truck driver who gets
rained on everywhere he goes, and he's eternally grumpy - but never
catcches on that he is, in fact, the rain god
what about a curse you could put on someone so that no matter what
they do, the next ecciting thing to happen to them is revealed
e.g. sitting n top of bus o nthe way to the cinema, they hear the
ending of the film
someone sends them an email congratulating them on winning the nobel
prize (only they havnt heard yet)
they turn off the tv to avoid hearing the baseball results and go and
read their email and someone has a gloating .sig they've just updated
with the score...
etc etc
a new kind of hell?
jon



beneath the planet of the bicyclists

so early in the 21st century, this guy invents a warp speed bicycle
and on his first test run, it goes otu of control when he is struck
by an odd sub-light speed vehicle that looks a lot like the train at
the end of back-to-the future
anyhow, he wakes up in a street at dusk, and sees a bunch of nasty
looking critters in some rusty old vehicles - gist of the plot is that
these are all mutants who live on a new atmospherre of methane and gas
fumes...and have extra large lungs and weedy legs just fit for pushing
down o nthe gas pedal - he esapcves down a dusty subway where he is
led to safety by some other odd critters with ultra-powerful lergs and
very thick craniums.....
near the end of his journeys, he discovers and old reel-to-real movie
and manages to play it by strapping it over the cogs on an old
bike...and finds that , yes, he is on planet earth - in fact he is in
paris, where the year is now 17890 AD; the human race has split into 4
parts
moto-reests
and
bi-psych-leests
are the main two species - the former are evolved to cope with the
intense heat and poor lite in nightime, whilst the latter are now able
to withstand 30Mbps impact from the former's vehicles....
two further subspecies exist where there is a marked gender
dominance in the mixture - in london, it is said that the moto are
dominant male.....
rumour has it that in far off california, hot-air-balloneests
have evolved whilst a strange cult of creatures from the area aroudn
the tigris-euphrates valley have started getting around by
WALKING ON THEIR HIND LEGS
again....
to be continued


----------
from the free plotware foundation, another chiller
Were-house
By day, its a storage facility
By night, once in a blue moon, its a frat house,
scene for Scream 3...
coming to a small scream near you real soon now...

-----------------


I thought a nice structure for a really nerdy (read "cult") book would
be about someone debugging shareware code found on the net, finding a
message hidden in a comment, which refers to some consipracy, e.g. by
some large software house to impoverish all the world by locking all
the users into using some large development program all centered
around a single OS ( e.g. generic theme of shrinking gene pool)
but secretly about to release a completely different OS with a new set
of apps (end of dinosaurs)....meanwhile the book would be structured
like a structured walk through and re-design (and would itself suffer
fro msecond system syndrome).....it would abound with references to
secret organisations (the dia, mossad, npd), and would have lots of
spurious website links (a few of which might work occasionally as part
of the promotion of the book)
like snowcrash, it would be essentiual to have a happy ending (perhaps
the earth enters a solar flare which renders all computers useless for
example...)

from the Free Plotware Foundation, another short series of
science friction minitales...
1/ in Georgia State University, scientists working in the Human Genome
project discover the gene that causes the terrible disfiguring disease
common amogst humans that makes their skin coloured - the state
government immediately siezes the work on the basis that removing
this from the race would elimiate the supply of low cost farm
labour...
2/ in Boston University, scientists working in the Human Genome
Project discover the gene that causes the terrible disfiguring
disease common amogst humans that makes their skin white. two of the
noble researchers test a treatment based on it on themselves but
are arrested for vagrancy while on vacation in south carolina.
3/ in the University of California at Berkeley, scientists working in
the Human Genome Project discover the gene that causes the terrible disease
common amogst humans that makes them racist, but refuse to release it
on the grounds that there are some people who might add this gene to
the race rather than eliminate it.
4/ in the university of life, nature finds a way to elimiate the gene
from the human race that causes people to work on genetics....

---------------->

perhaps the problem is that everyone who does a prototypical
implementation does it on linux or netbsd or freebsd, which gives us 2
or three (usually source code avaialble ) reference implementations,
but what most people in business and the home and entertainment need
is an IOS, solaris, windows or playsos implementation (TM-
"implementation" is a trademark of the Free Plotware Foundation, a not
for profit global conspiracy of internet illuminati:-)
the problem is that the competent foks that contribute these free
reference implementations often vehemently refuse to work on some of
the aforesaid military strength and intelligence operating system
platforms....

Is this really a problem? Typically it's not that hard to move
something from Linux or FreeBSD to a commercial OS like Solaris. For
certain kernel-level issues it might be an issue, but for protocols
implemented user-level, it's a complete non-issue.
My experience is also that if there is a widely used free
implementation, even if commercial vendors have to (horrors!) pay
programmers to write a version which works with their own propietary
kernel, it's much easier to satisfy interoperability concerns if there's
a free version of the protocol to test against.


>>> I posit that this very same requirement for multiple, independent
>>> implementations is our very best defense against the kinds of attacks
>>> on "commodity protocols" contemplated by the Evil Empire in that memo.
>>> I, for one, will defend this requirement to the death.
>>Perhaps we coupld strengthen this defense by bringing the "multiple
>>implementations" requirement earlier in the process.
originally, we didn't specify operating systems in this requirement
perhaps the problem is that everyone who does a prototypical
implementation does it on linux or netbsd or freebsd, which gives us 2
or three (usually source code avaialble ) reference implementations,
but what most people in business and the home and entertainment need
is an IOS, solaris, windows or playsos implementation (TM-
"implementation" is a trademark of the Free Plotware Foundation, a not
for profit global conspiracy of internet illuminati:-)
the problem is that the competent foks that contribute these free
reference implementations often vehemently refuse to work on some of
the aforesaid military strength and intelligence operating system
platforms....


-------------->

reading `breaking the code` and 'talking it over' by julian barnes, the
following possible application of the extreme power of automatic
brute force computing to code breaking occured to me:
suppose one had enough examples of coded messages (note, coded, not
enciphered) so that statisitcal analysis made it possible to make
analyses of the kind:
"this was coded using shakespeares "romeo & juliet" where 1 = letter
1 of word one of scene 1 etc...(for instance)
well, suppose one went further, and was able to make statistcal
statements like:
"today is tuesday and they always use MacBeth on tuesdays for codeing"
well, taking this one step further, one day, someone discovers that
although the messages from the "enemy" are correcvtly decoded, it is
quite clear that "Othello" is not by shakespeare (at lest not by the
same shakespeare as the other codebooks were"
:-)
this has been a free plotware foundation donation to the colective
subconscious...


I thought a nice structure for a really nerdy (read "cult") book would
be about someone debugging shareware code found on the net, finding a
message hidden in a comment, which refers to some consipracy, e.g. by
some large software house to impoverish all the world by locking all
the users into using some large development program all centered
around a single OS ( e.g. generic theme of shrinking gene pool)
but secretly about to release a completely different OS with a new set
of apps (end of dinosaurs)....meanwhile the book would be structured
like a structured walk through and re-design (and would itself suffer
fro msecond system syndrome).....it would abound with references to
secret organisations (the dia, mossad, npd), and would have lots of
spurious website links (a few of which might work occasionally as part
of the promotion of the book)
like snowcrash, it would be essentiual to have a happy ending (perhaps
the earth enters a solar flare which renders all computers useless for
example...)
anyone wanna read it?

--------------

from the Free Plotware Foundation, another short series of
science friction minitales...
1/ in Georgia State University, scientists working in the Human Genome
project discover the gene that causes the terrible disfiguring disease
common amogst humans that makes their skin coloured - the state
government immediately siezes the work on the basis that removing
this from the race would elimiate the supply of low cost farm
labour...
2/ in Boston University, scientists working in the Human Genome
Project discover the gene that causes the terrible disfiguring
disease common amogst humans that makes their skin white. two of the
noble researchers test a treatment based on it on themselves but
are arrested for vagrancy while on vacation in south carolina.
3/ in the University of California at Berkeley, scientists working in
the Human Genome Project discover the gene that causes the terrible disease
common amogst humans that makes them racist, but refuse to release it
on the grounds that there are some people who might add this gene to
the race rather than eliminate it.
4/ in the university of life, nature finds a way to elimiate the gene
from the human race that causes people to work on genetics....

-------------
from the free plotware foundation, another chiller
Were-house
By day, its a storage facility
By night, once in a blue moon, its a frat house,
scene for Scream 3...
coming to a small scream near you real soon now...

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

beneath the planet of the bicyclists
so early in the 21st century, this guy invents a warp speed bicycle
and on his first test run, it goes otu of control when he is struck
by an odd sub-light speed vehicle that looks a lot like the train at
the end of back-to-the future
anyhow, he wakes up in a street at dusk, and sees a bunch of nasty
looking critters in some rusty old vehicles - gist of the plot is that
these are all mutants who live on a new atmospherre of methane and gas
fumes...and have extra large lungs and weedy legs just fit for pushing
down o nthe gas pedal - he esapcves down a dusty subway where he is
led to safety by some other odd critters with ultra-powerful lergs and
very thick craniums.....
near the end of his journeys, he discovers and old reel-to-real movie
and manages to play it by strapping it over the cogs on an old
bike...and finds that , yes, he is on planet earth - in fact he is in
paris, where the year is now 17890 AD; the human race has split into 4
parts
moto-reests
and
bi-psych-leests
are the main two species - the former are evolved to cope with the
intense heat and poor lite in nightime, whilst the latter are now able
to withstand 30Mbps impact from the former's vehicles....
two further subspecies exist where there is a marked gender
dominance in the mixture - in london, it is said that the moto are
dominant male.....
rumour has it that in far off california, hot-air-balloneests
have evolved whilst a strange cult of creatures from the area aroudn
the tigris-euphrates valley have started getting around by
WALKING ON THEIR HIND LEGS
again....
to be continued



beneath the planet of the bicyclists
so early in the 21st century, this guy invents a warp speed bicycle
and on his first test run, it goes otu of control when he is struck
by an odd sub-light speed vehicle that looks a lot like the train at
the end of back-to-the future
anyhow, he wakes up in a street at dusk, and sees a bunch of nasty
looking critters in some rusty old vehicles - gist of the plot is that
these are all mutants who live on a new atmospherre of methane and gas
fumes...and have extra large lungs and weedy legs just fit for pushing
down o nthe gas pedal - he esapcves down a dusty subway where he is
led to safety by some other odd critters with ultra-powerful lergs and
very thick craniums.....
near the end of his journeys, he discovers and old reel-to-real movie
and manages to play it by strapping it over the cogs on an old
bike...and finds that , yes, he is on planet earth - in fact he is in
paris, where the year is now 17890 AD; the human race has split into 4
parts
moto-reests
and
bi-psych-leests
are the main two species - the former are evolved to cope with the
intense heat and poor lite in nightime, whilst the latter are now able
to withstand 30Mbps impact from the former's vehicles....
two further subspecies exist where there is a marked gender
dominance in the mixture - in london, it is said that the moto are
dominant male.....
rumour has it that in far off california, hot-air-balloneests
have evolved whilst a strange cult of creatures from the area aroudn
the tigris-euphrates valley have started getting around by
WALKING ON THEIR HIND LEGS
again....
to be continued

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

post-deconstructing the code?

reading `breaking the code` and 'talking it over' by julian barnes, the
following possible application of the extreme power of automatic
brute force computing to code breaking occured to me:
suppose one had enough examples of coded messages (note, coded, not
enciphered) so that statisitcal analysis made it possible to make
analyses of the kind:
"this was coded using shakespeares "romeo & juliet" where 1 = letter
1 of word one of scene 1 etc...(for instance)
well, suppose one went further, and was able to make statistcal
statements like:
"today is tuesday and they always use MacBeth on tuesdays for codeing"
well, taking this one step further, one day, someone discovers that
although the messages from the "enemy" are correcvtly decoded, it is
quite clear that "Othello" is not by shakespeare (at lest not by the
same shakespeare as the other codebooks were"
:-)
this has been a free plotware foundation donation to the colective
subconscious...