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

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

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

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

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

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

------

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

sarah palin seperated at birth from...

sharon osbourne - uncanny similarity - see
sarah and
Sharon

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

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

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

last word on arthur c. clark - The Last Theorem

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

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

metrics for balance in journalism - disproportionate warfare and reportage

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

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

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

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

towards a theory of bums

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

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

personal and collective revisionism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

olympic doping competition

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

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

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

new neocon con

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

Here's my 2 cents:

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

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

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

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

realpolitik is alive and well in the 21st century

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

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

gregory bateson - ecology of mind FAQ

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

writing about music is like
dancing about architecture

qed

final destination part 13

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

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

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

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

darwin award

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

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

just awsome

dance, dance, dance in NY city

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

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

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

The Pitch is Back - with apologies to Elton John

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

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

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

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

eric clapton-by-name-and-nature

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

unsearch engine

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

for fun...

Memorial to Suicide Bombers - victims of the God Delusion

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

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

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

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

I wish someone would silence that T

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

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

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

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

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

idiot.

doh

A sharp wit that is wafer thin

paper cuts - painful, but harmless

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

fire women and dangerous things

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

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

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

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

accelerando europe

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

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

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