Quirkology #101 - 2 more e.g.s

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

I wonder if this affects pilots' judgement?

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

I think we should know:)

Al Qaeda on the run, CIA say

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

well, how would they know?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

aposite street names in spain

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

cult's and initials

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

obama sin laden?

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

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

an instant hit in bradford

yech or perhaps not yech

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

burma tweak

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

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

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

retro-viral psychology

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

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

Post Ironic Democracy

What is it with Democracy?

First we have Bush (whacked twice)

Then the Russians elect Putin

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

Now the Italians vote Berlusconi back again.

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

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

can blue women sing the whites?

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

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

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

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

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

alive and kicking

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

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

while cycling in paris...

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

this also explains the driving...

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

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

from acton to padington by bike

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

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

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

postcards to the edge

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

good therapy for them.

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

postcards to the edge

cherie blair is a CIA agent...

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

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

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

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

madman dreams of turing machines

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

bonkers...

camden town is burning down, burning down

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

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

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

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

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

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

eurostarturnoff

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

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

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

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

most unusual....

carbon fingerprints

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

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