titus andronicus redux

goths versus romans
chaos v law:

chaos is represented by the Goths;
law is the romans

chaos is crows;
law is the lark

chaos is headless - loss of heads is chaos;
law is hands&writing - loss of hands is loss of law

all the images above
(lark v. crow, heads v. hands,
goths v. romans, law v. chaos)
occur explicitly many times

some images also related - caterwauling versus singing ;
(also relates obviously to the raven/crow versus the larksong)

everyone dies.

Amy, Madge and Men

Amy has her Blake
Madge has her Man

Ma Blake, and Ma Donna?

end of the line for open system macro economics?

so here is my theory
most the macro-economics worked ok in a system that was to all intents
and purposes
infinite (in the sense of unbounded).

what has finally happened is that the expanding economics of US, Asia,
south america and europe finally coupled in a complete, bounded system

the bounds put completely different conditions (in the sense of
boudnary conditions) on the behaviour than in a system that expands -
basically ,you can get all sorts of oscillations from "reflections"
and so on...

bail me out here

so bank B won't lend to bank A
because it things bank A is lending
to people C who constitute
too great a risk,
so bank A starts to lose business
(lending people money) to somewhere (not sure where if this is a global problem, but
somewhere - oh, ok, so they are not "expanding" so shareholders start to panic)

so the US and UK governments propose to
i) borrow money from somewhere (bank B) and
then ii) themselves lend it to bank A

now let me get this right: the government has a better credit ranking than bank A
so I can see why it might lend it more money. But, surely, once the government
starts doing risky things like lending to bank A, then bank B will downrate its credit
rating, and around we go again, except this time, there's nowhere left to run

right?

oh, and say this is not purely about perception rather than reality, and bank A was always ok, but B was poor at judgement and believes correctly
that the government is magically better than bank A.

this might make sense if the government is going to pay bank B
a) a higher rate of interest
or
b) will successfully cause bank A to collect debts from people C
more successfully (or aggresively)

right?

bail me out here.

really really obsolete newspapers

so the current financial turmoil shows how pathetically obsolete printed newspapers are - the rate of change of circumstance is so far adrift from the 24 hour cyclic report/print latency, that it really looks daft to spend so many resources on so much
out of date rubbish - of course, we already new most the news is just a re-hash of wht is sent out by industry and government marketing departments (see the Flat Earth News
book for details of statistical studies of the percentage of actual "fresh" journalism present in a typical daily)....but the situation in the last few days makes even the editorial aspect of the "posher" papers ludicrously outdated.

pundit

at a party yesterday, someone I hadn't seen for 20 years said they'd heard me on the radio and that I seemed to be a pundit:-) at the same party, someone pointed me at the fact that their band from 1983 was now on youtube
(see yip yip coyote)
which i think is 11 gazillion times more cool.

Going for broke...

I think the US is right to not do the bail out

1. the moral hazard is too high to reward bad banks
2. some banks go bust - so?

in this scenario, my understanding is that
someone will realize their assets
by acquiring them cheap -

that organisation will not foreclose on all their
customers mortgages because
a) if anyone does that to a significant size of hosuing stock, the
price will fall so fast they wont realize much money
b) the people they foreclose mortgages on will then buy the property
for cash cheap

instead, they will foreclose on hopeless caes, extend the loan on
others and quite a lot of people will find themselves renting
accommodation they were formerly trying to buy, but without a debt.

the price for buy/rent, and the confidence level in remaining loans
will stabilize....

making the organisation that acquires the bust banks,
the government makes no sense to me at all. bailing out broken lenders
makes even less sense.

alternative: make usury a crime as well as a sin:)

scientific ad hoc disease

as gregory bateson commented in one essay in the seminal work "Towards an Ecology of Mind" a lot of science is deployed in a very ad hoc way - so one example of this is the treatment of scizophrenics by use of electric shock therapy - it was noticed that
monkeys that were schizoid and epileptic had a reduction in symptoms of psychosis after a fit. it was noticed that shocks induced fits - so some bright spark (pun intended) had the idea of shocking human psychotics in the vain attempt to cure them. the rest is a sad sad history

there are other examples where the arbitrary relationship between symptoms is used, metaphorically, to establish a bogus cause/effect, which, at first, has the appearance of effectiveness...

they should all be fired.

all sexed up and nowhere to go

i just finished cherie blairs memoir/autobiography, and quite an interesting read it is

I wonder if all the folks involved in or connected to government at the time of the
gilligan/kelly "sexed up" weapons of massed destruction dossier (which the hutton report and others found to be "unsexed up" but was nevertheless simply wrong:(
have conspired to make sure their story of events is consistent? Certainly Alistair Campbell's diaries and Cherie Blair's bio are what a lawyer on a tv copshow might call
"remarkably" consistent - so if one does evntually find something wrong about their memories of events, and their reports are consistent in the error, would that be reasoanble evidence to doubt the veracity of their entire version of events?
[wouldn't that be ironic:- to catch out a bunch of legal types:-) of course it won't happen - it is much more likely that the dossier was rubbish because the secret service (and US) were rubbish at their job, than it is that they faxed it - frankly, if they faked it, then theyd have known that they'd get into all saddam's secret places and fail to find any WMD and they'd have pulled the whole mission to avoid that later embarrasment - so its more likely that they just believed bad info....especially since the US couldn't actually get a competent level of covert info out of the middle east since allegedly, the CIA wasn't able to persuade people to work there due to the food/climate etc:)

I found BLair's early life much more interesting than the later stuff - the tories about liverpool and her parents and other older relatives were fascinating, whereas most the later stuff is well documented in too many other places - and I dont care for the politically correct reportage on the royal family, the bushes, the pope, etc etc....
but the Booth and other earlier characters in this fable are definitely worth readin all about...

how long ago the world was created

so here's a question (apologies to isaac asimov who wrote that amusing story about the last trump and the problems of figuring out when Ragnarok should really be).

why do creationsts say the world was created in 4000 BC? why not in 1900? why not in
2001? that would get rid of all sorts of problems surely (like the millenium bugs).


Indeed, if, as Sarah Palin says, god created the world with dinosaur fossils intact already hundreds of millions of years after the alleged Jurassic, who is to say that he didn't create the world last tuesday, and that Sarah Palin is a figment of our imagination (or God's or both).

Solipsists unite. We need to be revisionist about creationism every nanosecond.

Richard Dawkins is disingenuous because....

because his timing for the attack on religion is atrocious in terms of clear targets

he is disingenuous because he thinks that the "madness" (delusion) that possesses people is separable from politics and yet religion is likely to be about to be the biggest political
cause of problems for a long time - the problem is not the fundamentalist Muslims - the problem is the continuing ascendancy of the American fundamentalist christian, but the problem is not their religion, but the politics that it aspires to - contrariwise, the politics many muslim's aspire to might actually evolve to be harmonious (i don't count jihad as politics - perhaps thats a bit naive of me since it is often used as a method to enlist the poor by failing leaders in failing economies) - the difference, I suppose, is that jihad is so far a flea, whereas the worlds markets tumble and fall and trash entire economies - and yet these people that think that dinosaur fossils were created 4000 years ago as the devil's lizards, are in the driving seat.

well doh - i suppose they think a hedge fund is for the plants by the white picket fence outside their house, and that a derivative is a poor copy of a Tammy Wynnette song.

why the US thinks everyone else hates them, when really , we love them, but tough!

here's a theory about why the US may perceive everyone as critical

I've noticed that in outher countries i've been in recently (e.g. France, Italy,
Spain, Greece) it is rare to make a big deal out of doing something positive -
perople don't really celebrate success in the way I have noticed in the USA (e.g.
my brother-in-law's family) do - when someone "does good" everyone
ring sbells claps hands and CELEBRATES it - which is good. but when this happens
in the UK, everyone mutters "pretty good" and gets on with things

I've noticed this in professional life too - people are always getting awards in
the US for best teacher or best researcher or best paper - this is almost frowned
on in much of Europe in my experience

so it is entitrly possible that people like myself are guilty of only every
emitting critical remarks and never saying congratulatory remarks on the plus
things that the USA has done for itself and everyone else, and so, very much like
newspapers (and TV news) we are seen as only commenting on (reporting) negative
things.

this reminds me of the scene in Life of Brian when the people's republic of judea
(or whatever) are moaning - "so what did the romans do for us"...and one says
"well, good roads" , "oh ok, roads. but apart from roads what did the romans do
for us", "well,, law" - "oh, ok apart from roads and law, what did the romans ever
do for us..." etc etc...

------

meanwhile, given we all have to pay for oil in dollars, and the exchange of other
currency for dollars is subject to charges, I think this is a tax - so since I am
a US taxpayer, how come i don't get a vote? eh? eh? this weas a founding
principle and principal cause of the indepenence of the USA from England :-) :-)
:-)

sarah palin seperated at birth from...

sharon osbourne - uncanny similarity - see
sarah and
Sharon

do we really want the apparent sister-in-law of a bat eater as possible commander in chief of nuclear family USA?

my mum says Palin is "common" - explaining this to americans, i said, by contrast, McCain has class - class=katherine hepburn, common=shirley temple - bizarrely, it turns out they were in one film together - viz
American Creed, which it is hard to tell if is a horror movie, a religious tract, or a documetary about a Native North American Tribe (are there any differences in these three subjects,either?).

meanwhile, BBC had a nice article on
rednecks
which is quite helpful:)

last word on arthur c. clark - The Last Theorem

i just read the not very goood last book (called the last theoren) by arthur c. clark (with frederick pohl) - i'd love to know how much ACC actually put in to this - it has some typical arthurian moments, but is in general not great - i was also dismayed at the (airport edition) number of typos - two things struck me
1. the use of the term "oxcam" to describe a 4th generation indian-uk immigrant's accent - oxbridge, surely? and the phrase "arab republic of egypt" - i wasn't aware egpytions called themselves arabs...oh well (wikipedia claims similar)

but worse was to come - despite Wiles' proof of Fermat's last theorem, one of the author's claims that there will perhaps never be a "short" proof (in the sense that Fermat probably thought he had found, as the problem might be allegedly "undecidable".
That's plain wrong, since we have a proof, we can terminate any checker on another proof. Does the author mean that the existence of a shorter proof is undecidable, perhaps? that might well be true...or do they mean something more subtle?

metrics for balance in journalism - disproportionate warfare and reportage

so whenever someone is killed on one side of a war where each side claims the other is terrorist, or another there's a demand by the other side for balanced reporting.

However, what really constitutes balance? is it number of events, or body count?

certain lobbies exist to make sure every event is balanced by a report of all the events of the other side. However,. recently, sides have complained about "disproportianate responses" in war. However looking at recent press on Georgia and Russia (and Ossetia etc), and older events in Ireland, South Africa, Israel, and many others, one can surely say that asymmetric warfare is carried out just as much in the information domain as in the real world, and not necessarily (ever) in a correlated way between the two domains/worlds. Indeed, one expects since many clashes happen in the edges between the tectonic plates of 1st, 2nd and 3rd world, and that asymmetry in weaponry and information/media power are not simply connected, one might expect to see big seismic shifts between the two ways of shooting your neighbour and shooting your mouth off.

good site for this is cardiff journalism:http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/jomec/research/researchgroups/mediatizedconflict/fundedprojects/index.html> which has great stuff about iraq for example

towards a theory of bums

on the nudist beach in Paleochora, I cannot help noticing the remarkable similarity between men's bums and their faces - i wonder if one can read the character of a man by his bum - loosely caricaturing, a bum is basically an inverted 'T' _ ffeel that the width of the T is corrolated with the man's compassion, and the depth/height with his intelligence - I think this could be a new form of phrenology...

also, one cannot but help notice that nudists stand around a lot doing nothing but pont their schlongs at the sun. people wearing bathing costumes dont do this - they play batball or build sandcastles or whatever - perhaps a nudist's intelligence is left in their trunks?

personal and collective revisionism

modern historians are (apparently) taught to interpret - so
every decoding is an encoding - i.e. each time we re-visit the sources of
"true" information and we write our interpretation, we translate (with errors and biases and so on) - as with post structralism, the reader also introduces distortions

so this is also the current view of how humans remember scenes from their lives - typically, each recall is more than just a "read-only memory" access, but entails re-interpresting and even writing back to memory a new strucure, context, and so on

thius we all live in an imagined universe, of our own, and each others' making

and it is dynamic, continually changing and refreshing and moving forward

applying this sort of view to the web, then, or to news stories, why should we be surprised that wikipedia is no worse (and no better) than Nature or Science, or that a blogger in bagdad or a georgian government agency is no better (or worse) than the BBC or the Voice of America?
is there no absolute reality (echos of the argument about absolute morality)?

well yes there is - the closes thing to objectivity we migh thave would be to base information on our own 2 eyes (modulo above) - at least we could all agree that this is somethign we can agree about (except that what we see is different:) - next, we can extend this via our social network, using a model of trust (those closer to us in family or friendship are closer in trust to those more distant acquaintences and friends of friends, and so our viewpoint could be then that a collective, socio-centric view of the world is at least a wider (and possibly more trustworthy) objective reality than just what we see with our own two eyes.

of course, once upon a time, primative societies and these social groups, and news and information were all the same thing - now, we extend our information gathering to many places far and wide, and our trust diminisheth, exponentially quickly - and the revisionism (the rapid shifting sand of what constitutes collective understanding of reality in different places) changes ever faster.

olympic doping competition

i think just liek they have the parolympics for people with missing limbs, they should have the metolympics for people that take drugs

that way one could get what one is paying for and have ones cake (!) and eat it
if you see what i mean

[1]: cake: fictitious drug introduced in Brasseye in a notorious spoof tv mocumentary format that fooled some unwitting famouss celebs who were interviewed about it:)

new neocon con

so the rampant anti-russian propaganda sduring the current georgia/ossetia/abkhazia
crisis is interesting -

Here's my 2 cents:

the neocon agenda has failed. this plan (abandon the Munrow doctrine and create the american empire)
didn't include problems of the rest of the planet just not liking americans as much as they like themselves.

plan b was to distract people's attention from that by declaring war on Islam (oops, sorry, terror) This failed as Islam controls the west's oil supplies.

plan c: revert to the cold war. This too wil fail. Reasons economic: there are not only 2 superpowers - there's the EU, India and China - these are each nearly as big as the US or wil lbe within 10 yeare- the US depends on EU already and wil ldepend on the others more and more - this is not a 2 legged stool anymore. reasons military: there are other nuclear powers and the US has demonstrated repeatedly that it cannot win (outright) remote wars. reasons political: people are not stupid

assuming the russians are stupid (like bush seems to) is stupid - they did what they said they'd do - the georgians tried to take compelte control of the two semi-independant areas of southern ossetia and azkhabia by force - these guys (at least a sizeable fraction of them) didn't want this - the russians called ht georgians bluff and sent the military in - basically the georgians
can't play poker. note the russians understand the EU depends on them, and aren't going to risk their current growth (9%) for the sake of empire building - they know that - what the russians want is a stable border and contro lover oil/gas delivery.

realpolitik is alive and well in the 21st century

A very good article about this says much the same but with lots of juicy nato details

USA :- can you not say "Cuba" ???

gregory bateson - ecology of mind FAQ

what is mind? - no matter
what is matter? - never mind

writing about music is like
dancing about architecture

qed

final destination part 13

the earth is about to be hit by a giant asteroid, and the human race builds a huge spaceship to escape.

a teenage girl is about to board with all her friends, but she has a vision in which the spaceship is subject to a massive inter-space hyperspace pileup and everyone dies horribly. she pusuades her friends not to board

the last 10 humans are on earth, and death is stalking them, one by one...

(with apologies to douglas adams and Final Destiantion 1-3, and john carpenter's
assault on precint 13)

darwin award

eponymously, surely the most deserving case for a darwin award ever?

I'd love to be the polis man arresting them " you have the right to remain stupid, and anything you say will be taken down and used in evidence against you, year unto the ultimately low IQ ever for a mighty international fraudster - not even woodyt allen in "take the money and run" was this dumb. not even dumb and dumber or dumbest. not even raising arizona llustrates the heights of daftness to which your miserable failure of an excercise raised itself"

just awsome

dance, dance, dance in NY city

I'm currently in Manhattan for a couple of meetings (the ITA project "bootcamp" and a Cisco shindig on how to do all things Mobile properly for IP in the future:)
and staying in the comfort inn - this is a stones throw from the currently being re-de-un-meta-furbished entire (oops, sorry, empire) State Building and a mere hop and a skip and a jump from CUNY's Graduate center (at the amazing address of 365 5th Avenue! way cool!)

anyhow aforementioned hotel is undergoing entirestatement, no sorry, refurbishment - my room is on 11th floor, but i chose to go down the stairs today to avoid the ultra slow elevators (lifts would be a misuse of english - more like "tugs") - all the floows from 10-5 seemed to be empty - I say seemed - in fact it was occupied by a number of refugees from the novels of Haruki Marakami

Needless to say, I ran - I ran pursued by the wind-up black sheep of the family, through a forest of Ikea furniture to the tunes of strawberry fields, down below three glitterballs turned sinisterly, while all the time my phone kept randomly playing snatches of different thelonius monk tunes as if trying to find the most fitting ring tone with which to knell the parting day.

The Pitch is Back - with apologies to Elton John

Once again, going forward with nothing on her mind but
the idea of showers, our product evangelist has decided to
incentivise the workforce to meet the
challenges of picking the low hanging fruit with an
holistic, cradle-to-grave approach,
looking under the bonnet in this space,
sprinkling our magic from the get-go,
thinking outside the box about
pre-preparing ourselves for
360-degree thinking,

She'd like you to step up to the plate and
capture your colleagues, cascading daily paradigm shifts
four our already really cool train set.

A the close of play, let's touch base about this offline,
to ensure that the door is open on the issue,
where we can feed through the sales and delivery pipeline
and loop back, auspiced by gettting all our ducks in a row,
not letting the grass grow too long on this one.

We realize that 110% is not enough bandwidth to
wrongside the demographic with
the requisite granularity and unyielding integrity
for the key stakeholders, the service users climbing the
strategic staircase from negative territory
before drilling down impactfully.

eric clapton-by-name-and-nature

i saw this picture of eric ("god")guitar hero claptop nthe other day on
youtube and he looked like a constipated meerkat. - i wonder what thought he had while straining on the loo or with that whole-tone-bend in the blues...

unsearch engine

so i'd like a search engine that ooks for the web pages
least relevant to my query
for a change

for fun...

Memorial to Suicide Bombers - victims of the God Delusion

I think it is time we had a memorial to Suicide Bombers- probably without listing their names- just their victims, but they are victims too.

As the UN unveils a memorial to reporters killed in the line of work (I won't say duty, but at least they were trying to inform the world, not destroy it), it is time we had a way to record the numbers of people that die because of a sickness in the head. It is clear when you look at many (not all, but many) suicide bombers that they are targeted by people more ruthless and selfish, and less courageous (and dim) than themselves, and then programmed to blow themselves up in some greater cause. How many times have suicide bombers done other than prolong the misery of their own side, let alone have a significant impact on the outcome of a war or action? I can't find one in history. From Kamikaze pilots, to Iraq, it seems like it is now part of the wallpaper of modern life. The impact on the victims is not a lot different if the perpetrator dies in the doing, than if it was a bomb from 10000 meters.

No-one is impressed any more. especially since the bombers usually come from a society where life is "cheap". It isn't as if there aren't peopel that blow things up and walk away to fight again.

No. we need a memorial to remind everyone of how many victims there are of the bastards who pull the strings and push the buttons on naive, usually young, almost always male, deluded,sad and confused weapons of mass destruction, for no useful end whatsoever.

I wish someone would silence that T

so reading the story about the mad 16yr old who wants to sail around the world, I cannot help but notice the use of the phrase "treacherous cape" when talking about the famous two southern tips of continents he has to negotiate.

Why "treacherous"? since everyone knows they are bloody dangerous, what is wrong with just saying "dangerous"? It's not like he wasn't forwarned...

Same goes for "tragic" - tragedy (whether ancient greek or shakespearean or modern) refers to a subtle concept irony - irony refers to the dissonance (actually, lets not be poncy- it refers to superiority of knowledge by one group over another - e.g. audience (and author:) over character, or in ancient classical Greece, Gods over mortals). When a family burn to death, this is NOT tragic. It is bloody awful, but it isn't tragic - actually, this topic was covered superbly by ed byrne (see Ed Byrne's hysterical routineon how Alannis Morissette misunderstands the word Ironic (probably proxying for a lot of americans, oh ok, she's canadian - well THATs ironic:)

Terrorism:- um, don't get me started on the abuse of the word.
"We won't negotiate with terrorism" is basically a substitute
for "We won't negotiate with you, coz you're winning and we need to stop
making it clear in the news" so then the only difference between a tterorist and an enemy combatant is negotiation. Now, lets speak plainly here.
Saying "We wont negotiate with them" on TV is a negotiating position for god's sakes.
Like putting your hands over your ears and saying to someone "I'm not talking to you", it is a communication of a kind. obviously.

and another STUPID phrase that drips from journalists pens like it was nectar, but is basically pooh: "now we are at the crossroads" - so after the Irish voted against the euro-constitution a BBC wit used this gem. we were at the crossroads BEFORE ireland voted - now they've made a decision noone else had the gumption to make, we have gone down a particular road (to use another cliche) - we aren't at crossroads any more

idiot.

doh

A sharp wit that is wafer thin

paper cuts - painful, but harmless

like political humour - requires sharp wits, but no depth.

fire women and dangerous things

men: when they are born, women chase after them to save them from dangerous things

as they reach adolescence and buy fast cars, they chase after women in dangerous things

when they get older, they just want to sit by the fire and have women bring them a cup of tea and talk about when they were young and dangerous

george lakoff clearly didn't understand what this was all about. :-)

accelerando europe

i've been living and traveling in contintal europe the last 8 months and fascinating it is (earlier this week, I was on a train between two london airports and there thinkly disguised was Cate Blanchett -my ability to recognize faces is (for some weird reason) completely useless, but when she got off, a couple of people sitting next to me said "wow, what's she doing on the gatwick train getting off at East Croydon?")

Anyhow, what is interesting is, coming from the UK where post thatcher, we have now been the subject of around 25 years of free market everything, and anyone active (i.e from just voting first time, to near retirement age) has spent alnmost the bulk of their existence in a world where the varieity of models for markets (whether utilities, retail/wholesale shops, online goods and services, financial services) is second nature, I see countries like france and spain only slowly stsarting to understand the rhetoric, let alone the realities. fasciniating

Accelerando is an "extreme" sci fi book where the far future is predicated on humans being better and creating new market models faster than alients - if those humans are from the UK, this is probably assured. if the future is franco-hispanic, don't bet on us beating the borg at all:)

Quirkology #101 - 2 more e.g.s

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

I wonder if this affects pilots' judgement?

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

I think we should know:)

Al Qaeda on the run, CIA say

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

well, how would they know?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

aposite street names in spain

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

cult's and initials

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

obama sin laden?

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

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

an instant hit in bradford

yech or perhaps not yech

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

burma tweak

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

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

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

retro-viral psychology

was reading new book by Melvyn Bragg why only yesterday which features psychoanalysis splitting up a couple fatally - one aspect seems to be that there's a generational aspect to the efficacy of therapies - they work for a while, then the neuroses and psychoses evolve to be immune to such and such a treatment, then a new treatment comes along - maybe the meme for behavioural problems is really a prion, but perhaps it is also really a collection of virtual retro-virus and is just mutating under pressure

freud->klein->lacan->laing->self....

Post Ironic Democracy

What is it with Democracy?

First we have Bush (whacked twice)

Then the Russians elect Putin

Then the Zimbabwans can't elect anyone unless he's called Mugabe

Now the Italians vote Berlusconi back again.

and we have the nerve to tell the Afgans, Syrians, Cubans that they can't run a free society.

run that by me again...
on second thoughts, don't - don't even blink - the Angles stole the Ballot Box.

can blue women sing the whites?

so the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band once asked the gender-prejudice version of this
question "Can blue men sing the whites?" as a spoof on the terrible self-chastisement
that used to go on in the Brit blues scene when people like Eric Clapton and
John Mayall used to play all that poor Afro-American slave music...

but what is interesting (for me) is that there were (still are) a lot of great women
singers of blues (r'n'b in the old sense, and bordering on jazz) in the UK scene
some were absolutely stellar - much better than (say) Jagger or whoever - for example
before they became glam, or just died, or got waylaid by their lesser male partners
in the band, I would claim that
Elkie Brookes (in Vinegar Joe), Carol Grimes,

Jo-Ann Kelly, Charlene Spiteri, Pauline Black, Alf,
Julie Driscoll (note I am not straying across the pond to
Janis and gang)
were all frabjous - indeed, Sarah Jane Morris, and
lets not even talk about Adele, Amy Winehouse
(dare I add Joss Stone, who I think aint half bad)
or Big Beth (Watsername from the Gossip)
and Bats-for-lashes, or Siouxie Sioux etc etc, although now
I am a darker shade of goth-off-topic... ... ...

notice how many of these were "with" someone (Brian Auger and the dreadful Trinity
or the Selector), often someone not too bad (e.g. a spot of OK slide guitar, or the Banshee's bass player (nay, nay, not the drummer or the various guitarists with suicidal tendencies long before the fashion caught on with the Manics)
but not in the same really stellar league as the singer in question

there's some sort of eternal tragic truth in here trying to get out...

alive and kicking

I was taught by this absolutely brilliant teacher at school called Jim Cogan, who, sadly, just passed away (see http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article2680308.ece
for a good obit).

I had no idea that one of his slidelines was this really great idea for a charity called Alive and Kicking, where local materials and labour are used to make sports kit, especially footballs, which then have (virally) ingenous health advice slogans on them....now THATs cunning, useful, and awesomely fair

while cycling in paris...

...i noticed that the streets have rivets going thru them - it occurs to me that perhaps paris is floating on a sea of Dadaist flotsam and jetsam and is permantnely in danger of being washed down the Seine into the Atlantic, so has to be held down strongly by bolts and rivets...

this also explains the driving...

I have some pictures to prove it....but they are too big to fit in this
water margin

meanwhile, I've decided that while English has the biggest vocabulary in the world, this means that meaning is diluted compared, say to french, where every word is dripping with implications and significance....the weight of a single utterance in french can compete with the entire logos of the ancients of Athenian Greece in its overwhelming resonance. n'est ce pas?

from acton to padington by bike

so thios morning i dropped a car at one of the extremely far-and-few-between subaru approved garages and then cycled to kings cross - the garage was in acton, so i cycled thru harlesden and neasden and harrow and down on thru to padington....aweome - now i know why I hate west london - what is weird is that some of these places are quite nice, but only if you arrive at them from somewhere else (like from camden town) ratehr tan seeunbg them in successon coming on down the old ewst london dosser route..

'arrow-on-the-'ill
it ought to be called...

padington looks really rank when you see it arriving from under the A40 flyover ("westway") - truly the road to hell is paved with tarmac and suburbs

postcards to the edge

I'm sort of jaded about people living out there in extremis (out here in the periphery, here where the creatures live, out here where there are no grassy knolls, no death nolls, we are oliver soned, un-imacculate; out there, out of luck, out to lunch, out of limits, out of my mind, out of pure spite, out of change, same difference, plus ca change), not in the palace (jade or limestone, or limey tone, or lame), then when they get lost little girl, they try to come back ,and they write those sad sad stories

good therapy for them.

but if we were decent, we'd have sent them stories of RL, to lure them back sooner -
we would have written to them about breakfast and warm rain, and hugs, and sunlight on the pool by the beach, and dancing straight, and a beer with friends...we'd have written

postcards to the edge

cherie blair is a CIA agent...

made you look, made you look, made you look:)

anyhow, read Ghost, By Robert Harris - very good if you like a sort of
"revenge by fiction" that the novelist seems to be achieving - I think he is a very good thriller writer - the NY TImes review seems to regret that it wasn't a John le Carre book, but that is missing the point - it is meant to be more populist and the intellectually clever framing - the story is told by an anonymous narrator who is ghosting the thinly fictionalized brit ex prime minister's memoirs, and tries to get "under the skin" of a main who appears really just to be a cypher (pun intended). This is a neat way to pretend neutrality in the face of horrendous tales of rendition and waterboarding and daily suicide bombings on the streets of london and N, apparently a direct result of the "war" on "terror".

The quotes from a ghostwriter's manual that start each chapter are tartly ironic. The
events unroll slightly Tom Clancyesque towards the end, although, for me, that was more a result of Harris' very professional writing skill simply picking up the pace (as you do) when the plot gets more physical...

good stuff..if only it were true...

madman dreams of turing machines

Just finishing this fine book
A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines
by Janna Levin - lovely description of
Vienna coffee houses and mad math circle with Goedel
and also nicely captures early turing existence in Sherborne
school and in Cambridge pre-war, lying in Shepp's Green
thinking of unravelling a chess board into a tape,
and thence into a store and fsms and all the rest

bonkers...

camden town is burning down, burning down

so we made the LA times! which, like everyone else, reported that my fave pub, the Hawley is frequented by Amy Winehouse...well I dunno, but I prefer to remember Ian Dury there.

Anyhow watching the smoke and orange glare from our terrace was kind of amusing, but the complete chaos caused by closing chalk farm road last nite is and will continue to be a Big Pain in the Backwater.

One thing I don't get is the actual progress of the fire - it appears it started in the crappy garages behind the Hawley - so I don't see that it made it across to the stables (main lock/original markey/dingwalls area) since most the decent photos on news sites are _from_ there and I guess the fire peeps would have shut that down if it was in trouble....also they taled about threat to residential bits, but there aren't any on the left (west) side of chalk farm road - I suppose all will be clear in the cold light of day - time for a stroll along the canal, maybe to see!

My guess is that it aint as bad as it looks, at least not as extensive...and reports were that noone was hurt which tends to imply things didn't get too out of control.

I would take a modest bet that this was caused by a smoker going outside a pub and droppng a still lit cigarette (given it happened at peak pub arrival time...)

So the BBC managed to completely xcrew up their reporting - claimed the Hawley was a night club - this AFTER half a dozen websites had correctly shown pictures of the
pub and correctly classified it - doh - another example of Flat Earth News - indeed, people as far afield as Hong Kong and Vancouver emailed me asking if I was ok - proving that it is a Very Small World....

eurostarturnoff

yesterday on the usually reliable and pleasant eurostar, from paris to london, the train, about 1 hour out of paris, suddenly stopped. then the lights all went out. then
eventually they came on again and the "train manager" announced that there had been a tremedous electrical failure, and that the train would have to go back to paris.

several people said "huhn? if the lectrics have gone, how can we go at all", and "if we can go back, why can we not go on?"

some amusing explanations were forthcoming from various passengers- one elegantly dressed frenchman said " hon hon hon - eet eez because it eez a french train and it prefers to go to paris that to england". some english person said "I bet its just the driver left his phone charger at home and wants to go back and get it". My theory is that we had set off on the wrong line, and they realized that the passengers would notice that when th train arrived, it was brussels, not london...

strangley, the train only took 20 mins to get back to paris from where it had stopped after 1 hour....then, even more strangley, they told us all to get on to the next train using old seats- this slightly disrupted the passengers who had originally been destined to take this second train....thus causing twice as many annoyyed people pointlessly - the offer of a free return ticket was met by incredulous folks with remarks like "you want me to do all this again, again? what is this, groundhog day"

most unusual....

carbon fingerprints

accordin to the bbc news site Very Important Peeps Meeting in Hawaii (so easy to get to without incurring a major hit on the jetstream)
"will be looking to forge common ground between "old" emitters like the US and Europe and the "new" polluters, such as China and India.."

forge, as in fabricate, fake, counterfeit...

war

aside from the Edwin Starr song
("war: what is it good for? absolutely nothing")
and the Bob Markey song (based on the speech
by Haile Sallasie - "until the philosphy that holds one man
different from another, inferior, is finally, and utterly
discredited, everywhere there will be war"...etc etc)
I didnt realize that einstein and freud had ever collaborated
until i read this:

http://realhumannature.com/?page_id=26

english, as she is spoke

he sipped his aperitif, as the soiree wore on,
because it was the soigne thing to do
"my pensee du jour" he started
with faux naivitee,
"is that my metier manque
was definitely not les objets trouvees"

"dumpkopf" his hostess exclaimed
without a little schednfreude,
"dont blitz us with your sub-freudian
traumatic zeitgeist"

"nein, nein, mein libher herr"
he retorted, "lets have some chai, and improve our karma"

"you complete anorak", commented his older brother, mycroft.

smuggling up to the thought police authorities

so i've been traveling between england and france fairly frequently in the last 4 months and waiting for the point when some random customs person asks me why...in line with the old joke about the chap riding donkeys between mexico and the US for decades and cycling back each day, I will explain that my work involves
smuggling french words into england, and in exchange, english jokes into france

i hope there is no vat to pay (I can't see any value that I am adding:)

A true history of Pain and Chocolate, by Umberto Econot

this is true

I met a man from eurostar today who told me about the gentleman who travelled from
Quebec to Brussels to clinch a deal for the sale of surreal bicycles (one of the rare
quebcois products for which there exists a large belgian demand).

However, he flow into london, and then took the train, which is where things went
horribly wrong (or was it). Ce monsieur, this gentleman didnt notice that he took the
wrong platform (9 instead of 10) and the train was for paris, not bruxelles.
On arriving in said city, without putting on his glasses, he ran for a taxui,
and called out a hotel (Hotel de la Paix), and of course there was one in Paris too,
so the driver took him there. As luck would have it, when he arrived, and checkedin
there was a reservation in his name (his name, oh, Louus vuiton or something common enough)
so he still did't notice anythign amiss - of course, being quebecois, he didn't notice the difference in the french accent between France and Belgium either.

In the morning, he ordered another taxi, and went off to the customer, one
Lady O'France; of course, the taxi driver misheard him and took him to Radio france,
where there was a panel of surrealists and cyclists discussing the perfect breakfast.
Cyclists shouted "Chocalate", surrealists called out "Pain", the Quebecois, quietly
spread the chocolate into a croissant - a silence fell over the studio. THen applause
burst out.

He went home, not realising that he had created Pain au cholcat, but moaning ove the
weird way that belgians do business. It wasnt like this with Eddie Mercxx and
Magritte, in may father's day, he complained to his friends.

post jungian review of da vinci code

so the recursive matrioshka like nature of eve and jesus cannot be under contemplated, with birth after birth seen compressed over time as if, as if, a sequence of nested beings being unwrapped, or indeed, played out, like a turing machine, revisiting the same place on a coiled tape, with only slightly modified state - but the male nature of da vinci code must also be commented on what with fast cars and bald albino monks, there is something of the rat, something of the michael jackson, post willard, post billie jean, revealing in the end that god does play dice, but only with alannis morrisette

why did the mountaineer go to heaven?

everest climber has passed on presumably, to higher things :-)

patent blasphemy

so here's a mad idea: for most (abrahamic/of the book) religions in their purist (purest?) forms, it is a sin to try to compete with god - indeed, representations of humans are forbidden because "who are we to try to make something in our image so imperfectly, which god made in hers so perfectly"?

knowledge is similar - our knowledge is a pale shadow of the true, deeper knowledge.

so intellectual property (copyright, patent) is a form of idolatary, and therefore immoral and blasphemous under fundamental christian, judaic and islamic law

surely?

just as is usary...

the politics of privacy, the privacy of politics

one thing I think seems to have slipped by the britpopliticians in their mad rush to get all of our lives into government databases. we get all their lives too...

we know where you live, my brown, and the color of your cars, and your bank account details, and your tax return status, and... ... ...

surely you;d think that'd make them more afraid than us - after all,we know they have something to hide, whereas they can never be sure about us...

a fairytale of New York - PC Madeness

So PC (as in political correctness not Police Constable) Madness temporarily reigned at the Beeb when some bozo of a censor decided that various words in the glorous Pogue's xmas song, a fairytale of new york, had to be bleeped out as they (e.g. strumpet, fagott) were offensive - as one fan said "isn't this just about christmas food:)

the song is fabulous because it is so resonant - even the fact that it appears to be a love song between a couple of drunken homeless crusties, whereas the singer Kirsty MacColl couldnt ever have really be described as anything other than glamorous (alas she passed away in a bizarre scuba diving accident), and Shane McGowan[1] is alarmingly still alive even though he is a drunken crusty m just adds depth to the duet (Shane sings
"Well, I could have bin someone", and Kirsty retorts "well, so could anyone" - perfect punk ethos, and delicious in that they are both someone, but both "someone of the people"

so the Beeb moron who decided to ban the offensive bits in the lyrics (despite them being a little bit Olde Worlde archaic uage, and not even words in contemporary slang) was obviously not aware that, and how ironic is this (shades of that oirish standup routine about Alannis Morisette's crap "how ironic" ditty) - the band, the Pogue's full name is the Irish phrase "pogue mahone" which means "kiss my arse". Shane must be laughing all the way to the next pint of martini.

Kirsty (RIP) was once known as the Electric Land Lady (after Jimi Hendrix ELectric Ladyland:), but also, according to many, including Billy Bragg (who's beautiful song St Swithin's day she also sang beautiflly), was an angel....she sure was.....

[1]Shane's punk credentials don't seem to be dented by the fact that he went to a very posh school (this is not hearsay - i was at the same school at the same time, Westminster, and vaguely new Shane there; of course, I certainly have no punk credentials at all, despite playing in a band called Intensive Care Unit:) Perhaps this was coz I was let go from a band run by Matthew Seligman (very good bass player)...)gratuitous, Little Feat style extraneous parenthesis....()

I was kindly given a copy of the history book, Thunderstruck (signed by the author, erik larson, thank you kindly, sir!), by Rex Hughes at a luncheon to celebrate his recent doctorate. In this book is a marvellously rich, deeply researched history of the twin tales of the mild murderer, Crippen, and the seminal entrepreneur, Marconi, and how their lives (like many later) were entwined by long distance wireless communication!

but more to the point, there is a description of london in the late 19th and early 20th century - around that time, italian and french anarchists were highly active (see Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent (filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as Saboteaur) - apparently, half the houses on Charlotte Street (near UCL, in London) were under surveillance by the New Scotland Yard and the Surete (interesting that the victorian and edwardian british let the french secrete service operate within london) - there was of course a famouse bomb at new scotland yard, amongst others

so today's hysteria by UK (and other) goverment agencies saying there's a "new threat from terrorism" and we must reduce rights so that terrorosts can be tracked and caught, is yet again shown to be completely bogus- there was always such a threat, and, of course, we need eternal vigilance, but that doesn't mean there's a change such that we need to relax habeus corpus or other (inalienable?) rights

oh, the way the marconi wireless telegraphy (sometimes beatifully known as "space telegraphy - prescient of Vint Cerf's Interplanetary Internet:), was used to warn american police of Crippen's imminent arrival on a boat, is eerily reminiscent of the way that cell phones were used to track the 2nd lot of london bombers to....italy, where Guilgemo Marconi came from...

are all novelists high functioning autistics?

was thinking about this - one thing that very intellectually smart but empathically challenged folks on the autism spectrum do, is apparently, to run simulations of what other people might be feeling...rather than actually experiencing empathy - isn't this what novelists do?

mohammed bear

so the teacher in sudan who entertained a classroom of kids with a nice
engaging game of "lets pick a name for the bear" is set free - and "pardoned".
(see, for example bbc report on this, amongst zillions of others).

frankly that is not good enough. frankly, the people that accused her are unbelievable hypocrites, and should be comdemned - the religious teachers who should have told the kids in the school that perhaps naming an inanimate doll after the prophet was inappropriate, they are the ones who are guilty - the teacher who was clearly very good at her job, and popular, was a victim of prejudice, and the appropriate thing would be for a trial under sharia law of those who levelled false accusations against her out of jealousy and bigotry - they clearly lacked understanding, let alone compassion. As has been made obvious by the (majority) sane part of the muslim community, this was an unjust case in the first place. So who will be tried for hiring the "rent a mob" people who cried out for her to be whipped? You know, I'm not a christian, so I'd be happy to throw the first stone. What is the punishment for lying in Islam? For threatening jihad/violence without justification? The sudanese religious leaders need to think very hard about just what they stand for, and how much the rest of the world will stand for them talking this sort of gibberish.

saint pancreas internationale - critique

so i've now arrived in st pancras international from paris 1ce and departed 1ce - and though the station is (imho) a marvel comic to behold, the arrantements are not as good as waterloo or gare du nord for travellers in 2 regards

1. where do i put my bike in st pancras, eh? this has already been protested about but it is a joke to have 22 bad ground level weedy bike loops for a really big station...

2. there's 1 cafe 1ce you go thru registeration/passport and it has 2 people serving AND they wont let you bring coffee in from outside (thats new!)

for a 7.30am train, this leads to a MASSIVE queue, which is ludicrous...where's the "retail experience" in that then, eh

so 11/10 for architecture, but 3/10 for green, human facing stuff...

coming from paris, where there is velib, this is a bit annoying - see
geo. coulouris report on the joys of the system, even during a metro strike....

hmm - so i take some of it back - in just a few days, they have put a BUNCH of bike racks in the eurostar car park - much better than the adjancent King's Cross ones, and the cafe situation seems a tad better - well done!! very fast improvement AND the train has been early (just over 2 hours and 5 minutes, TWICE!)....impressive - indeed, it has been late by 5-7 minutes twice, but due to delays on the french (shared track) side

Rashomon 2.0

so (and I am sure kurosawa though of this anyhow) one thing one could do in a Rashomon re-make in a post-modern era is to have the same person tell ALL the stories (after all the film is a fiction, and there is only reall the narrator and the audidence) but the story would change depending on the audience

this is a bit like human memory and behaviour - each time you "recall" something ,actually, you re-tell the story a slightly different way- but imagine its a story (memory) that matters a lot to you - you will certainly recall and retell it differently to your lover, mother, father, daughter, son, policeman, lawyer, doctor, judge, teacher ...etc etc

that would be a fun story to write (and maybe to read, a few times) a few times

shut the haburger joint or the smiley dame gets it

walkin round the louvre this weekend with my 10 yr old, we concocted this plan
to kidnap the Mona Lisa and hold it to ransome - the fee - france has to close
ALL the McDonalds branches, or we will cover La Jaconde with "special sauce"

no, really....oh, ok, not...

Fire and Rain and the Governator

If http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7057888.stm#map>this was a movie, then the governator would have built a Time Tunnel and conencted the waters of the mississippeee to the fires of california and put the poor of New Orleans and the Rich of Malibu out of their misery at one swell foop. But it isn't a movie, so Joni's friends will all be saved, while Sachmo's legacy was washed away when the levee broke (again). Maybe Zepplin could do a special gig and play that one extra loud? Maby Dick wil happen.

Gore Blimey with Science

Some people seem to criticise the Gore film and Peace Prize (and global warming arguments) because
of inaccuracy (sometimes deliberate, sometimes accidental) - I think it is clear that if
someone makes up a completely false argument to reach a completely false conclusion,
then that would be pretty bad but I think theres a misunderstanding of the role both of
of science, and of the public understanding of science here.

No science is 100% accurate - anyone who claims so is a religious fanatic:)
Science (and its apparent progress) is a series of successive approximations
to more useful predictive rules about how the world will operate based on the past,
with a set of public instructions on how you can verify the rules yourself,
or see other people do so.

Occasionally, rules are even overthrown, although usually, they are "improved"m giving rise
to the unfortunate idea that they are converging on some sort of accurate model of the true
(or "platonic ideal") universe, although most scientists would make no such claim.

The errors in the Gore movie are well known and do not detract from the overall argument -
a recent court case in the UK about showing the movie in schools as part of education
was wo in favour of the movie, provided the discussion of the errors is part of the
presentation:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7037671.stm

THis is entirely a Good Thing, since the general argument, but also the fallability of scientists
is an important lesson. But more so: the fact that Nothing is ever 100% proven, but that a
statistical argument has to be made "on balance" is an even more important lesson. Systematic
as well as random errors are part of any science - indeed, in biology (as well as in Computer Science)
both systematic (mistaken assumptions, methodological errors) as well as random errors
(noise, stochastic variation in the environment - e.g. users:), are a fact of life,
so deal with it:)

Monkeying about with the Internet in Myanmar

So how an the Burmese Junta oppress people so much and even suppress the use of the net
pretty effectively, when similar uprisings (e.g. in former USSR to support Gorbachev during the abortive coup) worked so well using "underground" networks?


1. wasn't the top level design goal for IP was ever thus (attack proof/survivable)??

2. Yes, but what changed was it got embedded into infrastructures by incumbents
(dont care if its cisco, microsoft, isps, telcos, governments, organised religion, power, water, whatever)

3. Most people working in dtn and extreme (e.g. developing world) wireless have your
architecture and goals in mind...but we aren't there yet, sorry t say...

4. read "The 9 billion names of god", before you say that monks are part of the solution.

buddhist soldiers maybe...

Also, imho
the reason the grassroots net worked in russia during the attempted regain of cntrol by central forces resisting GLasnost and Perestroikia
was that RUsiians could not "organise a piss up in a brewery" so despite 70 years of the kremlin, the kgb and politburo had a completely useless idea of
things like telephones and other means of organised resistence

despite cold-warriors insistent ranting, this is not a feature of communism - it was is strong cultural feature of _russia_ - they've been like this under
Tsars, Mongols and post CIS - other communist/fascist regimes, or sorry, military dictatorships (China, and, alas, Burma, and, alas North Korea)
are well organised and can control modern technology to use it
as yet another means of oppression (oh, and lets not forget Saudi Arabia...)

interestingly enough, the US probably has quite a robust set of alterantives to the centralised control of internet/telephone (e.g. cb radio etc)
so if Bush goes completely mad and invokes special powers to stay on instead of letting Hilary return to the WH, maybe you'll see
decentralised armed resistence once again for the first time since you kicked "us" out (I use the term "us" loosely since back thenm my ancestors were
being disorganised in Russia, Poland, deepest Yorkshire and Scotland...
so didnt have much to do with British colonies, thank you very much).

Blair through Blur - an interesting companion piece

A weird experience reading Alex James' Bit of A Blur (his autobiographical
recounting of the rise and rise of Blur) and Alastair Campbell's Diaries: The Blair Years, back to back - a bit like a history teacher of mine who insisted on reading the Morte D'Arthur acccompanied by Sibelius 4th....complimenarity, eat your heart out!

for example, Alex is astounded at meeting famous (really famous) people like royals
and the Old Brigade/royalty of rock, and Blur are a bit downhearted when they go to tour america to support the release of an album the day kurt cobain blows himself away and Grunge comes to town - Campbell seems similarly besotted with Diana, and famous US Clinton type people, and is upset when the press dont report his beloved T.B.'s wonderful works in favour of some lurid tabloid tale. Oh, and both feature silly abbreviations of names (everyone in Blur-land is reduced to one syllabul, every one in Blair to Reggie Perrin's style dual-initials). Oh, and people namecheck awfully the whole time, and hang out in Camden (the awful Good Mixer - knackerish pub I used to avoid near Arlington House (doss house), or the Camden Brasserie (knackerish faux-french place which is always full of people trying to sit next to famous people).

One difference (and this may be key to Blur getting my vote over New Labour every time) - Alex expresses remorse at his bad behaviour but admits that a) it was fun and b) rock musicians are MEANT to behave this way - its their job. Hey, and Blair had the poor taste to invite Oasis to No. 10, not Damon:)

There are loads of other parallels, and i wont spoil either book by reciting them here, but suffice it to say that Blur didn't go on to invade Iraq, and Zlex dance music taste isn't bad...

advices and queries...

don't come much better than this from Geo. Fox, 1656:

"Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come, that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them; then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one."

UN-anticipated

I strongly believe that the neo-cons deliberately have had a policy (since the war in former Yugoslavia) to discredit and undermine the UN because it would have been a possible source of world government, which obviously goes against purely selfish US interests - they've cast the UN as incompetent - I am surprised they didn't try to claim it was communist (and therefore obviuously the axis of evil of the old kind) but its clear to me that the US has been (as chomsky put it) the only real Rogue State since the fall of the other "super-power" - the fact is that most of the situations the UN once might have helped in (aforesaid balkans, somalia, darfur, sri lanka, peru, middle east) where they are the only potentially neutral agency, the lack of resource engineered by the US has meant the UN is not seen as much help - fact is that neither has the US been any help in any one of them - history will tell, but if we were to write about Good and Bad Empires, I don't think they'll be a phrase "Pax Americana" anywhere in the books
UNless
UNtil
UNambiguous

The Muddle East (again) & commentating

1. so there's this book about the excessive influence that the israeli lobby has in the US, just being touted around (e.g. guardian blurb) - the interesting thing is that
no-one ever really comes out and says the two important sides to the equation:-

i) any vaguely anti-zionist text is a great way to flush out all the zionist loons and so identify the people to ignore in the real debate - lightning rods are useful...

ii) the real debate for israelis is that withotu the 3billion a year in US aid, not only would their country be bankrupt, but they would probably all be dead and the country overrun with fairly hardcore islam - this would also not be v. nice for the palestiniains (most of whome historically are educated moderate) or some of the neighbours (lots of the lebanese and all the other groups in neighborouing states that don't subscribe to some of the extreme debate (Egypt, obviously not being arab, but also baatist syria, oddly).

On the other hand, one could imagine a 3rd party sponsor of peace if only !

2. meanwhile, also in recent press is the US handwringing about pulling troops out of Iraq - here's a mitigating thought aboute how the chaos that ensues could be excused as not a result of the US (&UK) intervention, but (at least eventually) would have happened when saddam died (say of old age) - the Sunni-Shia civil war (which is what is really going on) was just on the horizon one day - perhaps making it happen sooner rather than later is not necessarily a good thing, but is it a reason to continue to support a mess that has 3+ parties instead of just two (three party problems, like 3 body problems, being intractable)???

3. The guardian has a nice recent article on how politicized islam now a stable state that we have the US (and UK) to thank for.

scambled eggs (porridge): are they really worth the hassle?

yet again i find myself scraping clean an allegedly non-stick pan after cooking scrambled eggs to go on sunday breakfast toast, and i find myself asking:

where they really worth the bother?

answers on a blogsite near you now!

here's today's bizarre error message (from blogger:)

in KAIST today, tried updateing a blog entry and got the following two errors (the second one looks like it is from some local proxy though)

---

We're sorry, but we were unable to complete your request.

When reporting this error to Blogger Support or on the Blogger Help Group, please:

* Describe what you were doing when you got this error.
* Provide the following error code and additional information.

bX-9z85b6
Additional information
blogID: 19062127
host: www.blogger.com
postID: 608001519340849006
uri: /post-edit.do

This information will help us to track down your specific problem and fix it! We apologize for the inconvenience.

---

HTTP Status 400 - Invalid path /post-create was requested

type Status report

message Invalid path /post-create was requested
description The request sent by the client was syntactically incorrect (Invalid path /post-create was requested).
Apache Tomcat/4.1.31

---

How useful:)

iraq cheney prediction thing

I finally got around to looking at Cheney's 94 interview about why not to go into iraq, and now there's nothing more to be said on the matter.

what's all this talk about peace, love and underwater

glastonbury was awash with wet, and rumours of wet (apologies to marley brothers:) but then it appears reading
aint a lot better and not bein wetter though
fuji
looks green without bein a drain

what's all this talk about global warming, i just want to set the world on fire:)

Comparing Iraq to Vietnam is like comparing Bush to King Minos

Obscure joke (King Minos ran the minoan empire who worshipped bulls! Bush&Bull - Bull is what Bush mostly talks) - anyhow, to cut to the chase:

So, the Wall Stret Journal and Financial Times battle it out to
see who can win the argument over Bush's typical confused
comparison of the "success that could have been vietnam" argument on why to stay
in iraq

WSJ and
FT and
more FT comment on Bush's recently fabulously insulting speech about how Vietnam informs Americans about what to do in Iraq (or what not to do:-)

Fascinating stuff all this albeit completely irrelevant to any possible
useful way of finding an effective way forward.
Reasoning by analogy has always been a very poor intellectual tool.
If one can relate iraq to vietnam, answer me these simple questions, by way of an
excercise in thinking about this mode of debate:

Who is the equivalent of China, or more generally, is there
an equivalence between the Sunni/Shia fight, and some internal
communist/capitalist debate?

(more close to home for me:-)
Who is the equivalent of France's role in Vietnam, in Iraq?
or
Who was the equivalent of Syria's role in Iraq, in Vietnam?

Why did the UK send troops to Iraq, but decline to support the US in
Vietnam?

Is 9/11 some sort of deep metaphor for the the Cuban Missile Crisis, and
the march of world socialism supposed to be a plugin for Islamic Jihad/Al Queda?

Frankly, this all looks like high school kids debates, and for me really doesn't
do any more than show what a skewed view of the world journalists and politicians
have, and how little interest ether have in solving things.

Most worryingly, it continues the US-centricism which is just going to piss off
more people in the region, as usual.

No it is clear to me that the nearest lesson in history to the US role in Iraq
is Ancient Rome's role in Carthage. Or maybe, the Bay of Pigs fiasco:-)

Saddam is Fidel. Viva la Revolucion!

Consused yet? no more than Geo. W. Bush, illiterati supremo!

paleochora is fractal

wheer i am right now, a small town in south west crete, is compressed in an interesting way - unpacking it is very amusing, and can, effectively take forever - i just found this pic of my oldest kid visiting here on the site
of a rather fine (*but surreally english run*) calypso restaurant!

floods of tears, veils of rain

all i can say is that its damn lucky no african americans live in tewksbury or oxford and that the country is not run be neo con texans

utopic vision and religiousity in world leaders

I just finished reading "Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia" by
John Gray which is quite persuasive in its argument and evidence - one interesting thing about the illusion of progress is that initial conditions matter so much - witness guns, health care and education work very differently in different cultures - so a lot of socio-politico-"science" is about bogo-hypotheses that are supposed to explain how one progresses (how a market or a welfare system operates etc). In reality, we can see from the examples that actually cultural pre-determination might be far more important -

for example, guns: there are as many guns as adults in switzerland and crete, yet gun related crime is virtually un heard of - the UK has some of the toughest antigun law in the world, and yet gun related crime is on the increase - would Gun Law in the US have a beneficial effect or not? i dont pretend to know.

for example, health care -the UK has one of the largest state run/funded free healthcare systems in the world (actually eyesight and teeth and prescriptions are no longer free, but so long as you dont need drugs, aren't short sighted, and are a descendant of slave trade, you're fine:) - some liberal countries (Denmark) leave it up to local decisions whether to have private or state provison of health-care - the state underwrites insurance for the poor, but refuses to pay unreasonable prices - since there are a lot of poor, the state is the biggest customer and gets to have good control of both private and state provided health-care seems to work - what doesn't work is America but i dont see why. I dno t pretend to me Michael Moore (is he related to dickless brit sci fi writer?)

for example, education - private education in the UK is increasing in price at 12% per year in the last 5 years - despite competing against a state system that is improving, and universities that bias against private school kids - no i can;t explain it - its cultural -

the point about these (and I could say a lot more about each and how they operate in practice in many other cultures differently) is that there is no evidence of "progress" towards some improved (asymptotically platonic ideal) state - there's just a bunch of different systems which operate well or badly, and yet what determines which operate well or badly is outside the scope of any traditional "explanations" offered - its arbitrary - its pragmatic, dummy

UK-US special dysfunctional relationship

render unto bush that which is anti-american, but will he even notice that the brits help him? will he heck.

the "special relationship" that this portraits is one of a bully and his victim, where the victim keeps sadly going back for more as its the only kind of attention they get. why is it after countless evidence that most people in the US (government/population, you pick) don't even know where england is let alone who blair and brown were and are, that UK government persist in relying on a special relationship which is thin air?

There used to be some trade advantage, but there's precious little britain makes that the US would want. we have the old commonwealth and new euro partners - why do we care - let the US go sink, as far as I am concerned:) but is so sad and pathetic to be part of this abusive and degrading dependancy that seems to obsess people in whitehall. would we have had the bombs in london of 7/7 if we had taken more of a laidback approach to defending the US right to defend themslves without helping them to attack random innocent (in the sense of not being the perps of 9/11) other targets like iraq?

who knows, but the one-sidedness of the security forces "trade" reports above(we help them, they take our citizens to guantanamo, and don't actually help us catch our own bad guys) is surreal and begs for us to leave it and find a self house for abused nations - who knows, we might form a club there :)

pocomoco, neopomo, momo, and plain nono

so its becoem de rigeur to deconstruct the slightest post modern, semidiotic piece of media (scream, dr who, fake steve jobs, whatever) and reveal that it is, of course
un peu mot dit, or pomo for short - that aint nutthin to do with Dune, y'know, but everthin to do with fouccault (was ever there a name that sounded like a french person saying fuck off) and derrida (he who derides).

watching the really fabby jekyll on the telly recently, i was struck by how formulaic the pomo tendancies have now becoem - this is not to deride or f-off the very very fine writing of this work, but to point out that if something is now so much part of the wallpaper or tools-of-the-trade, it can't be very post-anthing anymore - its
current (cumo), and not very neo or meta, or uber at all. in the words of amy whinehausfrau, it aint gone to rehab, no-no.
"Look, Dr Jekyll, you can run, but you can't Hyde" :-)

Harry Potter - the End, or is it?

"know this, harry potter. I am your father"
"No you aren't - that's Darth Vader and he's Luke Skywalker's father"
"look out, behind you - a Dalek"
"no, voldemort, that's Dr Who, and you don't look much like david tennant"
"But harry, all i have left is these tears in the rain"
"nope, that's the replicant, batty in do androids dream"
"speak, friend, and enter"
"no, gandalf"
"look at me ma, i'm on top of the world"
"jimmy cagney, public enemy no. 1"
"look harry, after 500 years of peace, all hogwarts ever produced was the damn cuckoo clock"
"nope, harry lime, the third man"
"prepare to die"
"inigo montoya, the princess bride"
"I don't think I can do that harry"
"Hal, 2001"
"you know how to whistle, harry, you just put your lips together and.."
"lauren bacall, to have and to have not - hey, voldy, are you by any chance, uh, gay"
"I thought you'd never ask"
...exeunt off to the sunset (well, the club, heaven) pursued by sundry daemons and other long running Unix programmes.

Poles apart

So I'd heard about the polish arrival in dublin (estimates vary, but on the order of 250,000 apparently) but what was truly impressive today on going between DUblin Airport and TCD in the City Center is that the only language I heard on public transport was polish, and the first newstand I saw in O'Connell St was selling polish papers alongside the Irish Times - Europe works:)

Our friends eclectic

Aye, Dis Pie's Good
or , perhaps, I dispise good?

The Ants are my friend,
he's blown in his win

from earcorn to giant toke, treee!

i'm insulted by islam so there

so some people in some islamic groups feel insulted that salman rushdie was knighted for his contributions in literature. so what. I'm insulted by their treatment of 51% of the world's population _every day_. i don't want them ignored except when the spout rubbish about what happens in other countries - i want people to take action against them in their countries. we wouldn't tolerate slave trade jsut because of sovereignty, so why to we tolerate the inhuman treatment of women under sharia law? i think we need a fatwah against them in the name of humanity.
Groups that hate half the population have n moral authority - groups that show no compassion (threaten to kill people for mere words (rushdie) or film (van gogh) - have no right to tell us (look, we just lock up people even when they try to blow up hundreds of people - at least we don't stone them or cut their hands off)


such an asymmetry of applied ethics tells us something - it tells us there's a fundamental incompatibility, and that one side in this "debate" is wrong.

I think the UK government appears to be changing its tone a bit perhaps towards the line that
australia is taking

NHS healthfair state

I am sick to death of people saying "you need to charge fo health care
otherwise people a) don't understand its cost/value/utility, and can ask for arbitrary amounts more" - this belies a fundamental truth about large deviation theory and how humans are really bad at comprehending risks that arrive in a self-similar fashion - the way to fund health care _requires_ either that you shift peoples' understanding of risk over non-normal time frames (i.e/ you need to insure for an uncertain future, when you may either be sick for a long time, or drop dead unexpectedly, or else live longer than you thought and need more pension than you planned) or you need to _spread_ the risk over multiple people (the purpose of public, tax funded healthcare) or both - since the cost/benefit and outcome of health-care itself is a product of rapidly advancing research and technology, you cannot expect individuals to judge this correctly, so all the libertarian and right wing views on this are, frankly, bollocks.

NHS trying to kill us all

I keep having a vision of the London Eye raped with dead bodies and the capsules full of people having a masqued ball

so my mum went in to hospital (UCH) to have a fairly routine procedure which involves putting a tube down the oesophagus (i.e. your throat) to look at her insides - unfortunately, (3% chance) the procedure resulted in a puncture which means she is unable to eat or drink for 2-6 weeks (depending) - 3 weeks later, after visiting almost every day, I am shocked at the appalingness of the NHS today (and UCH is supposed to be one of the better hospitals). The nursing at nighttime is largely done by people that hardly ever speak to patients and do not respond to calls from patients - sure they have a large ward to look after but this is a bad scenari o - in many cases it is clear that there is a significatn "jobsworth" attitude going on, particulalry amongst people who take advantage of the NHS massive overeas recruitement just to get trained in the UK then head home - they often do not even speak english well enough to have a conversxation with an elderly person with poor sight and heating - in some cases they tried to offer food/drinks/drugs despite a large sign o nthe bed saying "Nil by Mouth".

continuity of knowledge amongst doctors visiting the bed was por - often they spent less than 10 seconds (3 times in my sight) looking at the patient notes and relied on the patient - a bad idea with an 85 year old person with problems with sight and hearing.

The fact that the patient was only there because of hospital error (no I am not blaming them completely, but it ought to be a factor) should mean they are ALL aware that they ought to be extra careful - the only times I've seen them act profrssionally is when I (as an ex UCL professor) mention my affiliation or my sister (a doctor) show up. That is unfair on other patients, but also means that the bar for adequate care is simply way too low to be acceptable.

Other problems - the wards are not that clean (not as bad as the Free (also run by UCL) where my father died of MRSA, or Addenbrookes, where I was with a broken leg, treated very very well, but not much good compared, say to my bathroom at home, and I am not a OCD about cleanliness:)

Problem is that everyone is spending (visibly) significant time on management processes (forms on PCs and paper) rather than listeing to patient, family and colleagues - the silo-mentality is obviously driven by the constant re-org;s the NHS has had to undergo - I don't hold much hope out - I havnt seemn Michael Moore's SIcko movie yet about US healthcare, but I would be interested in a comparison...the TV documentary recently on trying to clean up UK hospotials was quite amusing, but there are far more fundamental problems, if UCH (which is suppsoed tobe good) is anything to go by. The NHS connecting for care and NPfIT programmes are irrevant, and infinite sink of dosh whoch should be used to fix personnel and medical professional morale and community immediately or the system will spiral into complete irreperal position.

whats the different between wily coyote and a terrorist

so the weird thing about wily coyote that always puzzled me is that every time he tries to catch the road runner, he tries out a new, insanely baroque device (always acquired faster than amazon can ship, from ACME, for some reason - i wish I could buy things on the net from them!) but why, when you see how it always goes wrong in some equally baroque way, does he not refine his method and try again with the same weird gadget? Why oh why?

on the other hand, the recent terrorist attacks in the UK have been monotonously similar, and yet have failed - are they even more stupid than wily coyote? They certainly seem to be darwinianly challenged in terms of blowing themselves up, or catching fire, or using cell phones to call all their mates while on the run. luckily for (most of) us...

meanwhile, do NOT mess with glaswegians
ever

end to end arguments in social engineering

so edge versus core seems to be a political position as much as an (internet) article of technical faith but its founded in some naive model of the way humans, societies and network technologies work - either extreme, fully centralised or fully decentralised, suffer from an absolutism which I find amazing - command economy or networks are rigid, fragile and dont scale in safety, security, responsiveness etc. anarchic systems are resilient, but don't harness resources to any particular goal - why would you want to run any system by either extreme? what is wrong with a middle ground?

the smart network = communism
the dumb network = free market

neither really ever existed or worked. time for something more plausible

terrorist cell

my mobile phone is a source of attacks to my peace of mind - it is far more scary than people putting bombs in busses, tune trains and Mercs that fail to go off - i am thoroughly terrorised by my cell phone - it is a terrorist cell. what can i do about it? call me and offer me advice - i wont charge you, even if my cell phone provider does:-)

my number is....oh, no, you're not getting it that easily...

Glastonbury 2007

The Good

(beeb has the recordings online for another few days at
glastonurial ground

amy winehouse (yes, she is actually amazing despite being half soused ) and one hell of a great gig - the band were good, the weather just about held out, and (at least in the pyramid set) her voice and singing get classier and classier

lily allen + the specials re-union! up town top skanking - lily has actually gottne way better as a singer (throws her voice around a bit - e.g. on cover of blondie heart of glass) - i actually think she may be the next kirsty maccoll...one day! all this and the sun came out!

rufus wainwright in drag and torch songs - but before that, a lot of his recent normal fare, with a fabulously tight backing band

eric bibb, gospel blues with dignity and charm - fabulous


seasick steve - very "authentic" whatever that means, but seriously good hardcore electro blues

bat for lashes, the gossip, kt tunstall - all in fine voice and fettle too, as was dame shirley bassey who bought serious glam

kids reported that the Marley Brothers were ace, Maximo park fine, iggy and the stooges (orlando went on stage with them in the end!) awsome, and also that Rodrigo Y Gabriela and Mr Scruff were jolly good and rather different - Bjork, the Who and the Kaiser Chiefs did what was expected of them, and very Big it was too...

oh, the kids field was extremely good (we had an 8 and a 9 year old to keep happy) - particulalry the puppetry/theatre by DNA, but all the people working there were good.(especially the mad nuns and the tardis!)

oh, most the beer tents had Wherry, which was very pleasnt given the weather (as well as usual somerset cider)

The mud
was slightly annoying plus (arise sir michael eavis and take note)

The not very good:

the arrangements for coach+ticket were REALLY annoying
1. we had no choice when to go/return - given proximity of A-levels to glastonbury, this had us nailbiting about whether we'd be able to bring some folks as we didnt know coach time til last second
2. coach dropped us far side from the (better) family field, and NOONE on the gate had a clue whether there was any space left there - given they had radios, this was careless of them - give n we then had to walk 2 miles in rain and mud on thursday night then find a space in the dark and given the extra people the family fields were pretty much full, this was UNFAIR on people allocated tickets with coachs

luckily, 2 14 year olds we bought with had a lot of gumption and just moved two empty tents a couple of feet further apart so we could fit between.

3. the return coach ride arrangements were bollocks, frankly - the place to wait at 2am in the rain weas crowded and had no cover and nowhere to sit and NOONE had a clue which coach was for whome.


4. two other (minor) wines and moans (as lily would say):-
a) I cut my hand on a loo (my fault I admit) and the folks on the nearest security thing had first aid kit with NO antiseptic - brilliant, not.
b) we wanted to donate 1 of our tents (we had about 12 people in all in 3 + tents over several places as well as our cramped familiy field setup) - but we found you had to lug it to the farm. why? why not have pickup points in each field- we packed it up, but we were gonna walk the OTHER way to get to our bloody coach, mr eavis, so this was not a sensible offer.

however. music, PAs, food, Lost Weirdness (sorry, vagueness), Trash City, and many other fine things were as usual, well worth it.

but please fix the coach setup for next time (give people some choice or at least rpough preference for when/where) and sort out tent donations

Footnote: the older kids came back the next day by train - apparently there were zillions of abandoned tents, so they boght a few extra home with them...makes up for
my lost boots (20 year old fine hiking boots finally disintegrated under the assault from the damp - the screws rusted!, and my sandels finally fell apart ofter 3 years of walking in seawater and mud)

so just found the nme video blog which definitely sums up the whole thing very well indeed.

Anti-Airport-Bogus-Security Rant

I am so sick of the absolute moron behaviour in airports - here's today's (gatwick)
complaints
1. the whole re-sealable transparent plastic bag thing - there was never any evidence that the alleged attack woudl actually work, and so there's this bogus waste of time, but worse - why re-sealable - whats that about eh? so you go thru security and every now and then they pull someone out who has a few tubes of cream (face cream, toothpaste) and have failed to put it in a clear resealable plastic bag and they are sent bag and given the choice : bin it, or check it. why? why would the clear re-sealable bag make it safer? what a load of complete bogus tosh.
2. why do i need to show my boarding pass when buying a bottle of water in Boots? there aint any duty free out of euro flights any how and I wasnt gettign a duty free price it was thhe high street price, and they don't do a discount for non EU flights)
3. why do the currency exchange places still swipe credit cards, as well as asking me for my PIN? surely this is a massive potential identity theft opportunity? (e.g. set up a fake currency exchange place for a bit, mine a few credit card magstripe data +PIN, scaper and use).
4. so they're still asking most people to take their shoes off - but if I am wearing sandels (e.g. by preference or for vacation in sun), this means I have to walk over a public, extremely busy section of the airport floor in bare feet. What are the chances I catch some foot thing off someone (or they off me)? surely Health and Safety people ought to care about this?
5. Why do they still ask those stupid questions at check in ("are you carrying any weapons of mass destruction", "do you have any A level chemistry experiments in your bags", and "do you have 175 kilos of fertilizer in your pocket, or is that just the foot infection you got from your last trip"?)

as usual, none of this is actually going to do real security much service but it is causing more than just inconvenience.

Oh and smug americans can't laugh - their airport "security" stinks - I've been through US airports twice post 11/9 (sorry, that's the rational date order) and been asked by security staff to hold someone's coat while that person is searched.

Bozos

econovation: expiration of money

what if money expired? what if coins and notes and e-cash had a "use by" date?
what would happen to an economy based on time-limited currency?
hoarding cash would be silly, obviously. so is this an idea worth kicking around?
I dont think i've seen it before

there are examples of things like this (air miles, air time on cell phone contracts etc) so why not just apply it to the base exchange tokens themselves?

new religion, new computer game or new drug

to paraphrase NS's snow crash gag about snow crash, so if i _really_ wanted to make a lot more money than being an academic or a Sci Fi writer, I might invent a new computer game or a new drug, rather than, say a religion like
scientosophy or scientography or scientogeny
or whatever.

or cold fusion, perpetual motion, and 1 year cell phone battery lifes

any of those would be better than having to take money from hollywood

boycottaging conferences in all their highest carbon footprint

carbon feetprints are all the rage: so how about we declare the carbon footprint of major conferences (INFOCOM in Anchorage must take the biscuit) - but we want the "total cost of ownership" model of carbon footprint - so if people choose to have the PC meeting in Perth, the Conference proceedings for 11,000 people printed on unrecyclable 18 point acid paper, and distributed by motorbike messenger in bundles of two copies each, then it might be high, wheeras the internet's first virtual conference on plagiarism is just a web site with a load of URLs so it ranks very well in low carbon emmissions

academic metrics are all the rage too, so can we combine google scholar impact with carbon offsetting perhaps to come up with a lean, green, intelligent machine?