darwin award

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

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

just awsome

dance, dance, dance in NY city

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

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

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

The Pitch is Back - with apologies to Elton John

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

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

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

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

eric clapton-by-name-and-nature

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

unsearch engine

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

for fun...

Memorial to Suicide Bombers - victims of the God Delusion

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

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

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

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

I wish someone would silence that T

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

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

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

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

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

idiot.

doh

A sharp wit that is wafer thin

paper cuts - painful, but harmless

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

fire women and dangerous things

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

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

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

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

accelerando europe

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

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

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

Quirkology #101 - 2 more e.g.s

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

I wonder if this affects pilots' judgement?

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

I think we should know:)

Al Qaeda on the run, CIA say

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

well, how would they know?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

aposite street names in spain

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

cult's and initials

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

obama sin laden?

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

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

an instant hit in bradford

yech or perhaps not yech

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

burma tweak

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

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

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

retro-viral psychology

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

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

Post Ironic Democracy

What is it with Democracy?

First we have Bush (whacked twice)

Then the Russians elect Putin

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

Now the Italians vote Berlusconi back again.

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

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