"West" "versus" "Islam"

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

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

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

economics and thatcher/reagan

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

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

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

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

what do the following books have in common?

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

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

free plotware foundation sf plot device #17

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

spooky...

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

3 scams, a daft idea and a bad pun

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

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

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

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

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

NANOG of the north saves us all

according to zittrain

well doh....

working time directive/ethic & political disengagement

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

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

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

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

cromwell on parliament - quoted in guardian review of book today

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

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

liberty in the age of terror

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

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

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

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


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

contrariwise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

simon singh's libel problem...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So is the BCA going to sue wikipedia too?

Tai Ping - martial art with pen&paper

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

Voodoo History and Slow Time

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

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

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


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

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

voodoo history and imagination

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

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

lashback MPs - insulting our intelligence

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

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

the data

doh!!!

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

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

etc etc

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

counterfeit novels...and other forgeries

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

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

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

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

george soros on recession &behavoural economics 101

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

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

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

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

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

National Treasure de-moated

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

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

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

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

conservation of imagination

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

the more there is somewhere, the less somewhere else

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

the underserving rich

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

so i have a new one - the undeserving rich

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

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

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

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

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

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

talk radio for the deaf - reminder

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

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

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

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

Deconstructing Wellington Boot

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

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

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

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

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

hmm - weird pseudonym. oh well...

hate the rich

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

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

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

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

of course it will.

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


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

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


expect more

tax the rich

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

are they completely stupid?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

lets move on...

why not arrest all foreign national students on arrival

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

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

we could call it speculative anti-terrorism

a modest proposal, #123

apologists for official torture and police violence

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

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

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

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

how do we fire these people?

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

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

I think Obama should get Mossad to assassinate Cheney

why we havn't seen any alients yet

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

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

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

E-mail smears handling defended

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

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

truth fairy

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

G20 police state

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

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

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

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

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

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

fictional biograph of the mayor of london...

entitlted
the risable rise of Mayor Johnson - Tragic Tory

first sentence,


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

three elephants in the G20 room

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

the lessons of the Bush era are at least threefold

social capital is more important than banks

religion and terrorism go hand in hand

expansion and environment are incompatible

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

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

Drugs Tests for Bankers

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

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

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

clocks v. teardrop

massive+
coldplay

side by side - worth a remix, anyone?

the randomness of fish

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

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

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

Taxing Bankers Bonuses - simple proposal

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

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

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

bankers enbezzling

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

digital britain misses the point

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

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

services are out. manufacturing is in.

digital is just an enabler.

hall of shame for economists, think tanks, bankers

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

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

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

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

my proposals

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

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

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

carp ark

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

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

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

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

what do comedy, music, video have in common?

answer: beat

a beat is a pause to elicit a response - musicians use a pause (breath)
and comics use it, and videos use it - even xkcd uses it:)

when bonuses for maing money exceed profit...

is that what they call the "tipping point" ??? :-) :-):-)

bbc news uncritically shows israeli politician redefining war terms

yet again, western media allows an Israeli politician slightly to the right of le Pen, get away with claiming all the children killed in gaza were human shields used by Hammas.

Just as with the american redefinition of people to get away with locking up
random suspects in gitmo (neither civilian nor army), the israeli right are basically redefining "civilian in the way" to be "shield". unfortunately for them, despite not letting in western press, there is not only plenty of evidence of (and witnesses to) cases where the children killed weren't actually in front of anyone, but there are also plenty of people who aren't stupid - if you invade another territory, and its urban, then if you don't give the people a) a place to go and b) time and means to get there and c) make sure they have gone, then when you drop bombs on it, you are killing civilians - it doesn't actually matter that you might also kill people in the army of the "other side" - of course, if the "opposing army" was about to fire a rocket that killed a zillion of your side, you might make some sort of Hiroshima-like judgement call. But you better have a pretty strong case - since this is blatantly not the case, then the only interpretation is that this is a war crime.

of course, the Hamas charter doesn't really help matters, given its fairly insane repetition of 80 year old nazi distortions of reality.given the nazis would have very happily gassed the palestinians alongside the jews, (given they're all semitic and un-aryan) its fairly suicidally stupid of the author's of Hamas charter to mention this B.S.

but that isn't sufficient excuse

meanwhile (pace, godwin) Hamas aren't exactly doing themselves any favours with this self inflicted harm

banker bonuses - what's the problem?

in the tech. area, when you want to give someone a bonus, you give them stock - this strongly incentivizes them to think about
a) working for the company
and
b) working for the long term

why are banks different? why do they get cash bonuses? bogus.
give them stock and let them rise or fall by their own success/failures:)

bad science in the news again.....more mmr (but also copyright)

see for the whole shebang - I think it is tricky to post more than a small extract of audio (ditto text from writing) in copyright aw, no matter that it is hard to see how really stupid the Jeni thing is without hearing the entire thing. I suspect, legally, there's no argument (the copyright infringement will trump the right of the public to discuss the abuse of media to give wrong medical advice)

one simple solution is to take THEM to court for risking kids lives, and then the evidence will be part of the court case, and in the public domain ...

it turns out that fraudulent medical advice is criminal...

meanwhile, the times reports that the report that started this whole sorry saga was (probably) based on fudged data

legarchy - new (wrong) type of government...

so the government behaviour (in US and UK) in the current banking crisis and economic woes and excuse making (without any sorry) reminds me of the previous woes (iraq war, no weapon of mass destruction) and the NHS IT Programme, and other unapologetic massive mistakes of judgement and strategy that have gone on in the last 12 years.

Basically, the way the government(s) have gotten off the hook is by arguin the minutiae, like they are in court (indeed, actually in court when it came to the death of david kelly).

The minutiae aren't the point. they are lawyers tricks to distract people from the real
problem - huge failures of ethics and gigantic misunderstanding of the limitations of intelligence and market economics.

its like since Blair and Bush, everyone can get off "on a technicality" even though we all know they are guilty.

time for less credulous jurors.

wildlife in an urban winter garden

on saturday, at 11am, in quick succession, we had a large grey squirrel, a big black&white cat, a VERY large wood pigeon, and a huge fox, sitting in the garden.
I hope they are
a) all ok in the snow we now have
and
b) are not about to test the food chain

the squirrel looked to fast for the fox and too big for the cat - the pigeon was about right for the fox, but probably too big for the cat - i have no idea whether a fox would go for a domestic cat (I doubt it but it would be a big meal).

socialism 2.0 v. depression 2.0 - maybe governments will topple?

All over Europe (and elsewhere) people are starting to express their anger at the financial mess and it looks like the population at large (the great unwashed people that havn't stopped working harder and harder for the last 20 years, and can't see why they have to pay more tax to bail out banks whose bosses retire on multimillion dollar bonuses despite screwing up) are finally starting to demand some sort of significant change - one small aspect of this is the recent complaints about migrant workers taking local jobs - c.g. brown telling workers they are wrong to complain about people being moved 1000s of miles to provide cheap labour

The only reason this can work is that those people are coming from an area that
a) is in the EU (otherwise the availability of local labour would rule out work permit)
b) an area in the EU that has very low housing cost (otherwise the people moving would be paying for local housing and for housing their families back home)
c) apartment rent must be very low in the worker site compared with local labour's housing cost - if you move enough people, this will also impact local housing costs
and finally there is no allowance for carbon costs (let alone social cost) of moving people around peridocally

there's a short term argument (like shortselling shares) that this is just adjusting the labour market. but it doesn't allow for long term market (like transport and housing and so on - e.g. schools etc - if a person moves to Doncaster from Warsaw to do some work, then where do their taxes go to pay for infrastructure (schools, hospitals, police).

No sorry, this is not as simple as Brown likes to think it is and in the current climate, using free labour market arguments is really really going to annoy a lot of people.

interestingly the latest news appears to indicate the government has realised that allowing companies to move people from EU country A to B and to exclude employees who are from country B is not exactly the intention of "free" markets in anything...just dodgy company behaviour!

Davos - clueless - possibly as evil as Dr Who's Davros...

RIP John Martyn

jonny too bad - saw him at a bbc "live" recording once where he was supposed to do just 3 songs - he was skining up and asking bob harris (compere) for a light all the time, and after the 3 for the beeb, he played an hour and a half of requests for the audience

mostly stuff from solid air or before - unbelievable - what is cool is how he worked out the timing for his breathing so he could sing these very long lines, with all sorts of vocal trickery, while still playing a mean guitar (whether just straight acoustic like in Spencer the Rover or May you never or glory of love, or with fancy echo/slap effects as in Inside Out or Dealer or even a mix in a slow song like Dancing or One World ...)

sad day to see him go...says pneumonia - unnecessary - and that he was just starting a project with pharoah sanders - what might have been (recalls that hendrix was about to start recording with Miles Davis...when he passed away)

BBC not showing the DEC Gaza relief appeal

so i suppose one might just about argue that the "news" that the BBC won't show the
DEC's Gaza appeal on TV today has made the appeal more newsworthy - indeed, the BBC's website has had updates (e.g.) on the BBC's position on this every day since the DEC first said it was going to run an appeal, and one suspects more people have seen that than would watch a "live tv appeal" nowadays.....


ironic really

on the other hand, the BBC's position on neutrality is completely bogus in this case.
ANY appeal for help surrounding a war will be seen by some as partisan. The point of the DEC is that they are very specifically neutral in what the conditions for relief are. The BBC has a public duty to report this, and license payers should complain if they don't.

If I was into conspiracy theories, I'd say it was yet another example of the power of the Jewish lobby (board of british deputies) in the UK. I'd point out it has backfired (see first point in this post), and would refer people to Avi Shlaim's fine letter in the guardian today

Note that the Beeb's senior people made at least one provably false claim when saying that audeicens might confuse footage used during the DEC appeal with BBC coverage of the "conflict" - Israel didn't allow foreign journalists in to cover the conflict, so we know all the BBC footage during the conflict was from outside Gaza. The DEC footage is from AFTER the conflict and is obviusly not during wartime (you can see this clearly in the appeal on TV today). So the beeb are immoral and bad at lying too.

atheist bus driver...

so this guy refuses to drive the bus with the atheist bus slogan on it - i wonder if he refused to drive buses with adverts for jobs in the army (given he's an evangelical christian, shouldn't he have problems with the "shall not" and "kill" thing?)

perhaps he should also read
this

the whitehouse agenda

is public - see
obama's agenda

lots of good stuff - especially support for science and technology and
re-build programmes

but i still say he should re-paint and re-name it the Black House...

my only disappointment is his unequivocal support for Israel on the same page as talking tough about Pakestan and Iran (but he does say specifically good things w.r.t Palestine)

doesn't seem too joined up there to me:(

gitmo closure will be its own epitaph

basically it will be impossible for any of the remaining prisoners in guantanamo
bay to get a fair trial anywhere n the world - evidence obtained by torture, distortions by their captors and the risk to them in their own contries are all factors - this is why Bush was so DAMN stupid having hte place setup, as there's no doubt amongst this lot, were some bad guys- but how will they ever be filtered out? what a mess

the whole point of european and US justice systems is that they evolved a number of checks and balances over the last 1000 years to give a good chance of catching bad guys, a low chance of false conviction of good guys, and incentive alignment (so police/government aren't incentivised to cook up false evidence or torture people) - this stuff stood up for 1000 years despite despots, revolutions, wars, terrorism and so on - even nazi war criminal accuses after Nuremberg were handled carefully, despite all the massive complexities of getting witnesses (alive, not taken into darkest russia etc)

then a bunch of jumped up no-good redneck pig-ignorant (sorry, pigs) newbies who have NO discipline and do not understand this, think they can idly change the rules over night.

morons.

bush (and blair)'s legacies: crap justice; crap security; crap governments; crap economics.

meanwhile, see the slate for a report on the first inkling that there might be legal cnsequences for bush's administration - I wonder if Blair can be got similarly (or extradighted to the US for trial) because of contrituting via the extraordinary rendition (aka abduction).?

so i suppose the real explanation of gaza is...

....that the israelis need a holding position for when they cease getting the US support (8 days from now) that Bush has been giving (even to the extent of overruling Condaleeza Rice recently on the UN vote where the US abstained).....

so this is the ultimate cynical pre-emptive strike...

Irony used to be part of native jewish humour

so the repeated cant that Hammas are terrorists
holding innocent victims in front of them while the israeli army has to shoot them to stop the missiles is based in a model of Hammas as some invading force in Gaza rather than a representative government (however dodgy)
the recent demo by pro-israeli supporters in london led by England's chief rabbi in trafalgar square repeats this sadly incorrect view of the world, which is simply not going to help anyone understand where to go next.

the sad irony is that the british army viewed early israeli settlers just before the declaration of the state of Israel as terrorists - indeed it is pretty hard to see how the Stern Gang's blowing up of the King David Hotel which killed 92 people (significantly more than the last 3 months of Hammas missiles) could be viewed as anything other. Yet the british went on to embrace the state of israel only 2 years later.

one more point: pro-israeli apologists like to say that Hamas cause the civilian deaths by hiding their weaponsmasters behind women and children - aside from the absurd contradiction inherent in this (Hamas are a govnemnet in gaza - they can go anywhere they like - the IDF choose to shoot at them, and could equally choose not to. the Israeli's kill palestinian civilians and must take 100% of the blame. But more critical still, the Israeli's 300,000 settlers in the westbank are doing EXACTLY the same thing (hiding a settlement behind civilians) and then getting a certain level of IDF support (bulldozoing any homestead of a Palestinian daring enough to object with actual action).

perhaps the israelis learn something new again from their own history. in particular, they should learn how long the memories are of victims, since that's where they start from themselves.

IDF cowards - goliath versus david...

so the striking thing about the current conflict in israel/palestine is the inversion of the old story - when the 6 day war happened, everyone looked at the Israeli's as the underdog - and the brace "david" fighting the mad arab invaders. Indeed, up until the recent fights in Lebaonon with Hezbollah, this was still somethigng the IDF could coast on

nowdays a new generation of wishy washy 3rd generation israeli soldiers don't cut the mustard and the image is one of a lumbering Goliath of Zion, ironically against the brave david of Gaza....

now we have a classic inversion

what a shame to make a mistake of such biblical proportions. I used to respect them

the final figures (1300 dead to 13) are basically proof of a crime. Olmert was quoted as saying that this was "inevitable" again (seems like the Israeli propaganda machine only has one word) and that a lower death count of Palestinians could only have been achieved at a higher death count of Israelis. Not true - if israel had kept previous agreements to open up borders (as per Egyptian brokered deal in summer 2008) then Hammas might have fired less missiles - and no deaths. Typical distortion of realty.

How many dead palestinians does it take to change the equation "X wants Y totally destroyed" from X=Hamas and Y=Israel, to X=Israel and Y=Palestinians. ?

When would you start to call it genocide?

bendy buses, boris johnson, bikers

I still havn't met anyone who admits for voting for boris for mayor of london - I never understood how his "policy" of getting rid of bendy buses was going to attract the (generally alt) biker community anyhow

i think some people thought they were voting for the elizabethan Playwright, Ben Jonson
(author of the aptly titled "the devil is an ass" :-)

mullah versus moulah [b|w]ankers

this is the replacement for the cold war - the new crusade will be capitalism versus islamism....i suppose lotsa people have said this, but it seems more and more obvious - even Obama's US seems to be aligned this way during current events...

madness

the word "banker" used to be a euphemism. now wanker is too polite for them.

no alternatives to war crimes in gaza?

Israeli Defense Minister Tzipi Livni claims that there is "no alternative" to bombing Hammas and associated diverse innocent bystanders back to oblivion.

Well there is - there is doing nothing. she claims Hammas will just go on lobbing missiles over the border. sure - at the current rate it would take them a year to kill as many people as Israel has done in 5 days. But would they? how does she know?
And what will they do as Israel goes on killing? does she think that support for Hammas (a US and Israeli supported democractically elected government in Gaza) will suddenly evaporate because of the assault? at which deathpoint will this happen? at what point will the death level and support level be "right" for Israel? what if she is simply wrong and the support for missiles is _proportional_ to the number of Gaza strip inhabitants killed? then what she is doing is not "the only alternative" - it is (as many people propose) the cause of the problem.

basically, as I've said often before, the state of Israel right now is behaving like one of the two optional behaviours for victims of child abuse (if you figure the Holocaust as massive chld abuse) - abusers either become extremely withdrawn, and difficult/autistic people, or else they become abusers. They perpetrate abuse. and they are perptetrating it on Gaza, and what will Gaza do in response? most likely, exactly the same thing again.

alternatives? Lizvni and her like do not understand the meaning of the word. this is fairly typical for fascists.

the latest in this line of control is that Israel won't let reporters into the area. They were happy to show off the "missile" (more like firework) damage caused by Hammas over the last few months, but are unhappy to let people around the world see the massive destruction they are wreaking on a re-nascent nation state. This is against Israeli law (by the way). I note that the Israeli primeminister is well versed in the art of misrepresentation ("how many rockets would be proportionate?", he asks. Well, doh, how many deaths/lives might be the question. "they shouldn't have started it" he says. well doh, how about not blockading their airspace and shoreline, so they can trade, get middle class and stop being terrorists then!).

what amazes me is that Israeli's vote for their stupid long-term suicidal governments instead of waking up and smelling the coffee ("Hell") and reading the writing on the wall (it's in their holy book) and crossing the rubicon.

here's what hammas has. fairly pathetic inaccurate, 10lb of fertlizer bomb.
in contrast, the IDF's kit includes 3rd generation laser guided kit at least as powerful as the old bolt which had 750lb of high explosive.

the IDF also has antimissile missiles and good radar. oh, and controls 100% of the sea and airspace in, around and above Gaza. oh, and UAVs. This is called a "killing ground".

yeah, Hammas should declare that Israel has a right to exist - co-exist might be a better way to put it- as that would kind of hint at reciprocation (e.g. rights for Palestinians in Gaza to live according to norms like abilty to travel, trade etc freely - the BBC have your say sight asked what should be done to get peace - as usual a bunch of ignorant right wing nutters dominate the contributions with calls for Hammas to "do something first". oh well - asking the public was always a stupid idea:)

Gimme Shelter - Gaza's just a shot away

Israeli's like to bang on about how small and fragile Israel is - one factoid oft mentioned is that it is a rifle shot across (from the occupied west bank to the meditterranean).

Well, how do they think people in Gaza feel? its narrower still, and blockaded and bombed.

The continuing hypocrisy of Israel's use of the history of the holocaust as a blanket excuse for perpetrating current war crimes (300 people so far in response to 1) is really astounding.

I don't like petitions, but this one
http://www.avaaz.org/en/gaza_time_for_peace/?cl=161516404&v=2605>from Avaaz seemed as worth signing as others.

Why are western "leaders" so muted in their condemnation?

science versus faith

there is more meaning in entropy than religion
and
there is more entropy in religion than meaning.

go figure

Campaign for Real Money.

I expect everyone is getting thoroughly sick of yet more financial service downturn news
whether its Madeoff-with-it, sub-prime, short-selling, etc etc

While I don't have a concrete theory to offer to underpin the idea, I would claim that economists are intellectually now as bankrupt as their concrete bemodiements of their ideas and the time has come to get rid of all this stuff they have produced - we (as medics, scientists, engineers) have MADE stuff that works (better longer lives, more cheaper travel, safer food and water, more sources of entertainment, even self-generated entertainment, communications, safer cheaper nicer buildings you name it) - a century of stock markets are NOT why this all worked - we exponentially improved medicine and technology - the market returns go up and down, up and down, and lurch into criminally in competent (or just plain criminal) collapse at the drop of a hat - Ben Goldcre's wrath at nutritionists and liberal arts journalists and so on could easily be redirected (by me:) at economists - they have been proven WRONG - their models dont work - why do governments seek to bail out the market ?

SHUT IT DOWN. NOW. FOREVER. do something new based on new thinking. Hey, we have the compute power - maybe a combination of Sharia Law Venture Capital, and central planning and barter would work

Vote for a new system - down with the old....out with a 100 years of rubbish!!!!!

MMR-- => measles++ and autism??

So one thing occurred to me reading the chapter in Bad Science on the MMR fiasco.

We can thank Wakefield for causing the UK to do one experiment no
ethics committee would have let us do - which is to massively decrease
the level of vaccination against measles, mumps and rubella, and see
how long it takes for the diseases to pick up abgain in the
population. This must be a source of invaluble data for
epidemiologists.

But (I didn't see this in the book, maybe its there and I was
laughing at the funny bits too much to spot it) we also ought to be
able to detect any other changes - crucially for example, if the
MMR-gang were a tiny tiny tiny bit right, then the drop in MMR levels
(proved by the current measles outbreak) would lead to a drop (or
slowdown in increase) in Autistic spectrum kids....has anyone done
this study? [I know I know it shouldn't be necessary) - hey though, what if autism went up even more and it appeard MMR protected people slightly from autism or else the people that worry about things like MMR are more likely to have autistic kids and some element of the way the kids are treated or the spectrum is diagnosed or whatever other effect) could be fascinating to find nothing or something!

how to stop people wearing hoodies

start a rumour that they are all people on the sex offenders lists (i.e.
"All Hoodies are Paedos" maybe write a letter to the Sun and Mail about it
that ought to see if go out of fashion faster than Guy Ritchie britgangsta movies... :-)

today's random 3 thoughts before jetlagged breakfast

1. there should be celebrity celebrity charts

2. we need to have counterfeit economists

3. sex is basically a programme for recursive replicating meat machines

4. Heroes is Lost (I mean that televisually, literally , and metaphorically)

black holes and recessions

There's a black heart
at the center of the Galaxy and
at the center of the Economy

surely some connection?

The Bicameral Nativity

with apologies to xkcd and Julian Jaynes

Mary had a real friend (Joseph) and an imaginary friend (the Holy Spirit)
and she oscillated between them until one day, she underwent a singular transformation
on the plane of Gallilee
and finally wound up in a stable relationship.

No-one, not even the shepherd, could figure out the problem of the three wise bodies.

I got the "no blues" blues...

in wisconsin
all gods children
cannot play the blues

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=yfjTrrBE_eI

intelligent design proved

the bbc reports that religious people are shunning nanotechnology. Aside from the idea of shunning technology being rather surreal ("LCD TV, I refuse to talk to you - I am sending you to Coventry with the iPhone"), stranger still is the idea that people who need all the help they can get would avoid any evidence that intelligent design is actually feasible...

I suppose the same thing might be true of GM too...

i think the indicator lights on mercedes are fake

i think people thqt buy mercs and beamers have spent so much of their hard won dosh that they can't afford fitting s like indicator lights

otherwise why else is it that these cars never signal on turning?

i mean we can excuse poor cyclists as they can't even afford 4 wheels...

I knew I had a buggy upbringing

That the direction of travel as a baby affects affection should be obvious really...

cell phone as ID card...

I quite like the idea of my cell phone being an ID card for 2 reasons

1. if I lose it, the government can help me find it - i think we should demand mandatory tracking of id cards for this reason.

2. there's a really strong incentive for people not to nick it as it is a way worse crime than just nicking a phone.

all sorts of benefits accrue from this, including really accurate driver (rather than car) based congestion charges, and all sorts of useful tricks in emergencies (instead of broadcasts on trains saying "is there a doctor on board" one would just ask the doctor to go the the right carriage).

why on earth would any honest people object to these advantages just because of some sentimental attachment to some fictional notion of privacy?


:-)

living in a newspaperbound world

so i've noticed commuters, even on heavily overcrowded trains, will open up a broadsheet newspaper as a means of establishing their space, and as a barrier to intrusion on their patch - this supports what I suppose we all know that people that read those papers (times, guardian, telegraph, FT, indy) are smarter than people that read tabloids:)

its a sad day when they ban happy hours...but there's light...

so i pubs are not allowed to have happy hours by this puritanical scots led government, can I propose a solution:

haev 23 sad hours, and one not so sad hour.

game over.

democracy and advertising

the US democrat mantra reminded me of a brilliant advert/logo
for the Metal Box Company - it just says "we can"

meanwhile, change sure gonna come - but maybe small change, and maybe it'll get rained on with its on 38 if their aint some fast moves in the middle east and on the economy

igpay atinlay and council bans on use of

English is the Lingua Franca of the World

which is Latin for french language, but is meant to mean
"the language used everywhere between people that otherwise might
speak other, different languages"

on the other hand, English is a union of pretty much every language,
hence when someone invades or immigrates into England, rather than make them learn
English, we just glom their language onto the base, and everyone else has to learn to grok it.

If it was "vice versa", then the amount of work,
"pro rata", would be the same, but would be
"via" the immigrants, rather than the indigenous peoples.

Although it is an "ad hoc" arrangement, and leads to
"ad lib" creativity, the "quid pro quo" is that English
is a richer language than any other in the world, although
it is fair to say that in some sense or other, it isn't a
"bona fide" language, more a meta-language.
with many e.g.s of weird juxtapositions
such that geeky literati anoraks
will frequently incur schadenfreude amongst
naive readers of their utterances.

hence councils should not ban the use of any weird bits
viz bbc article on same
is silly:-)

"QED"

Gruelty, thy name is Woe, Man

Too Gruel to be kind, he was washed up
on the shore of the Gruel Sea, where
he pitched up at the Salvation Navy
only to be served a thin soup
by a Gruel Sister.

"We Grew L-shaped bannanas back in
the Generous Isles" he moaned.
"Grr. You'll just have to put up
with this thin soup" she retorted,
measuring it out with a retort.

"grate", he described

the customer is always wrong

as a frequent railway traveller, i am bombarded with signs by networkrail
about how "we take very seriously assaults on our staff"

why? i mean why the "on our staff" bit? I dont see why the employment role of the victim affects the seriousness of the assault - it is always serious, and don't the railway companies and operators have an equal duty towards their customers, who are paying after all, to give them a safe and pleasant journey in all regards?

I have frequently been dealt with by abusive staff, and I dont see why the companies, by implication, think I am in a "second class" role in the relationship. This is a dodgy culture - see how it influences staff behaviour in airlines, where the customer is basically treated worse than cattle, under constant threat, stress and even danger.

no, the customer is always right was always a good motto; but when someone assaults someone else, whatever the relationship, that is wrong. the two situations are orthogonal.

i want 5% of my license fee back

at least 2 shows I wanted to see have been pulled due to the BBC "suspension" of My J.Ross. Given they are not going to pay him 1M pounds, that means they've saved money - however, tonight they are showing Speed (an old movie I've seen many times) and this is an unacceptable replacement for the J Ross show (which was to have had David Attenborough and Frank Skinner). Last night they showed an episode of Buzzcocks without Russell Brand, who had been billed as going to appear - it was the most boring episode of that usually very funny programme I have every seen.

This is not good enough, and I want my money back

y'know some people that should know better have written about this - today(saturday nov 1) guardian said that what went wrong is that ross/brand picked on the weak, "breaking the first rule of comedy" - well, doh, y'know I could have sworn that the first rule of comedy was "be funny".

have a go nazi "have your say" commentators - spinless, clueless bbc

to the 27000 people who in the last 24 hours complained on the bbc "have your say" feedback site about a more than 1-week-old bbc radio 2 broadcast which only had 2 complaints on the day:

sheep

thats not "your say" - that is following the lead of sky and the mail and other media fascists who tell you what to think

shame on you

you know of bbc radio 1 listeners interviewed (and prepared to say to someone's face, rather than anonymously on a wen site) 6:1 were in favour of ross and brand staying on the beeb and don't understand what the sense-of-humour failure is all about

well i understand - its about ownership of channels and if you are a follower of the complaint lobby, you deserve to be locked in a room with american cable tv and fast food for a year to understand what you are really "voting" for

idiots. there are over 4000 articles on the net about this - this is more than google finds about Barack Obama's TV ad 5 days before the final voting day for the US presidential election.....so what does this tell you about the media's priorities ? or ability to do a professional job in interpreting what is important for the public? frankly, I think the media at large are hipcritical, incompetent and corrupt, and their overreaction is many many many times more dubious than the original actual event.

the bbc doesn't help with its on bland blandishments...

not only that, but the bbc believes other people's interpretation -for example, newsnight reported "27000 complaints" on have your say -actually at that point in time, there were 27000 comments - many were not complaints.

and treating people it pays to be outrageous like naughty public schoolboys , "suspending" them while it "investigates - what is that suposed to mean - we all have the audio of the radio programme - we've seen sach and his gradndaughter interviewed and we've seen apologies - what is "suspend" anyhow? what does their employment contract say? surely it says they were doing their job; they ddnt break the law; they didnt bring the bbc into any more disrepute than they had already or were likely to again...

today Brand is suposed to be headin up a team on never mind the buzzcocks, a fairly "in your face" (but very funny) programme, as well as a ppearing on channel 4 later on another show. ross is supposed to be doin his friday nite thing, which had attenborough and also frank sinner (another risky but much funnier comedian)

here's my view - if the bbc pulls those programmes, I want my money back. these aren't obscure late nite or mid day soaps - these are 3-4M viewer programmes. what the hell is the beeb doing responding like it is running some sort of 1950s boarding school, instead of a 21st century broadcasting empire with a duty to all its paying customers, not to freeloading morons who type rubbish at have your say, which is full of vitriol - some lovely "recommended" comments there like
1. "sack them coz they cos the license fee payers millions of pounds - actually, popular programmes like they are both in get sold to the US and subsidise a lot of other stuff
2. claims that they make racist/homophobic comments! frankly, have people actually looked at their shows? what fantasy world are these commentators and people who "recommend" their comments living in - russel brand is bi- - ross has a gay piano singing group -

this bboard is supposed to be "moderated" - i don't see any evidence it is even checked for factual accuracy, let alone moderation of opinions. it frequrntly contains homophobic, mysoginisitic and racist comments (e.g. about US presidential candidates)
and this is supposed to be a source of "evidence" that the viewers disapprove of popular (tasteless, admittedly, lowbrow, for sure) entertainers.......

if there were actually statements like that in any of the radio or tv shows, then there would be a case for legal action, but it wouldnt be a subject for a nanny-state reaction like the beeb has......

stop being so defensive bbc - attack back.

puhlease!

why should we listen to complaints when they are press led?

the "press" is full of complaints about a certain Ruseel Brand and Jonathan Rss
tasteless item recently - see this news item for some of the back story (althoguh it is lamentably bad reportage in terms of actually tracking down precisely who is in control of pushing this item, understandably given it is from the bbc, and therefore by definition, on the defensive:(

But what you need to look at closely is who is leading the attack - as usual, someone on the far right is desperate to find big sticks to hit the BBC with - why? because their paymasters are the same people that want to dumb down tv (yes, Sky) and the easiest way to do that is to remove the subsidised competition (namely the BBC) that still sets a minimum standard that some broadcasters (e.g. channel 4) attempt to meet, but some cannot be bothered.

while the quality of material is variable, the best is very good - the constant whingeing by the incredibly rich people that own private vertical near-monopolies like sky is purely self-serving and nothing to do with public interest at all. while the "humour" ross and brand perpetrate is hit and miss, it is popular, and, partly because it is risky, offensive to some people - that is the nature of humour - deal with it. if someone has a legitimate legal complaint, they can take it up in court - they don't need the right wing press on their side- they can have have the right wing judges and barristers who have a whole lot more sense and less prejudice, if there is a case. if there isn't, GO AWAY.

life and politics

so how come US pro-life anti-abortion are often
pro- capital punishment, eh? and I am talking
self-proclaimed christians here....

bizarre (frankly, string 'em up, is what I say - but I never claimed
to be against abortion - in their case, we should extend it to post-birth,
a la Philip K Dick satire:(

religious hypocrisy, rights, obligations etc

so an interview in one of the papers about the
Atheist Bus camapaign, contained thinly veiled threats from a religious "christian") spokesperson - things like "if yo uput signs like that up, you've gotta expect retaliation" - well, excuse me, but I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition. I thought there was an moral imperative, an ethical framework, and indeed, a simple rule of thumb, that Christians "turn the other cheek" - what is more, the campaign doesn't even actually explicitly attack religious groups specifically.


THe fact is that we (the campaigners) have not only a right to free speech, but we have a right to expect other groups who disagree with our speech to follow their obligations not to threaten other people who are not threatening them.

I think un-transubstantiated threats by self-appointed religious spokesmen under a wafer-thin veil of obscurity should be investigated by the church as a matter for excommunication, frankly. Where are their principles (or principals)?

who's to blame for this financial mess we're all in?

So i've seen a zillion posts on the web and newspaper articles and tv discussions
in Europe and the US (particularly, in UK and US) and it is really sad to say that
people are really really o na hiding to nowhere blaming "the other side" politically, whatever side they are on, simply because no-one saw it coming, at least no significant warnings were given (since we have the web going back to 1992, we can trawl old articles without having to go to newspaper print archives etc, and this is just clear).

Lets just take the classic Cameron argument that Brown let it happen in the UK because of de-regualtion. Well, firstly this de-regulation started with Thatcher's de-mutualization of the mortgage lenders, and then went on to deregulation of markets, but secondly, the tories applauded Brown's hading over of power over interest rates to the bank of england. No. Sorry. Doesn't wash - they are all equally to blame. I've read a similar line of argument (republicans blaming Clinton policy), but exactly the same thing applies - the entire lot of them are as much or more to blame as the greedy idiots on Wall Street and in the City, who are really just trained monkeys when it comes down to it.

so after Cameron, the Scottish parliament leader jumped on the "let's bash brown" bandwagon - what is especially grotesque about this all is that the financial crisis was obviously global - US, plus most of Europe, Russia, and Japan, and even, slightly, China and India - to blame this global turmoil on one local (albeit G7) country's behavior is pretty surreal - i'd assert that people who do this (and didn't say anything about it for the last 11 years) are both hypocrits, and incompetents.

in the meantime, I noticed an old guardian article from 1 week ago listed banks in trouble in each country in Europe, with a comment from the Swiss government that there was "no problem there" - hah - tell that to UBS:(

denial, denial, everywhere is denial

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