Category: Uncategorized

I’ve been wondering about what the meaning might be of second-order probabilistic statements like the following, which I hear quite often. I suspect they are nonsensical.
I probably might be able to find them.
It’s probably definitely going to happen
It’s probably not very likely

The mafia is very much alive:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7057413.stm

On Wednesday, George Bush is due to attend a ceremony at the US Capitol where the Dalai Lama will receive a Congressional Gold Medal, a top US civilian award.
Tibet’s Communist Party Secretary of Tibet, Zhang Qingli, lambasted the exiled spiritual leader for trying to “split the motherland”.
“We are furious,” he said. “If the Dalai Lama can receive such an award, there must be no justice or good people in the world.”
Loonies…

I’ve often wondered whether anyone has looked at time decimalisation. I finally got around to searching for some initiatives.
Here’s one:

I’ve been working on reputation systems (security of) recently, which has got me thinking about the possibility of portable reputation. Here is a quick sketch of a reputation exchange format (and underlying model of reputation). I’d like to see something like this become the norm.
Download document
Any comments welcome. (No grammar nazis please.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin’s_law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammar_Nazi

I’ve noticed a proliferation of marketing slogans and brand names which are variations on the theme of Life, Alive, Live. E.g. Windows Live Messenger, Vodafone Live, and many more. Going on my theory that advertisers target things which people feel they lack (e.g. Freedom, Romance, security, spontinaeity, popularity ), regardless of the product they are trying to sell, this would appear to suggest that people are tending to feel more dead – i.e. they lack the spark of life. Feeling alive is an emotional thing, it’s not just about Mr Negri (Movement, Respiration, Nutrition, Excretion, Growth, Reproduction, Irritability) – one can have all these things and still feel dead inside. I think this trend in marketing is a definite sign of an increase in living zombies

The question “What is x” in an email reply has become more or less redundant now that Wikipaedia is so good.

The idea that there are only 5 senses is completely wrong.
Here’s a quick count of the ones I can identify. They are all sources of experience/sensation. Seems to add up to between 8 and 11:
1. Smell
2. Touch
3. Hearing
4. Vision
5. Taste
6. Temperature
7. Kinaesthesia (knowing where your body parts are)
8. Balance (knowing your orientation WRT gravity)
9. Gravity/acceleration (astronauts report that this is a distinct sense which you only realise when you’re deprived of gravity)
Borderline:
———–
9. Thought
10. Pain
11. Bodily feelings which are neither touch, nor pressure, pain etc… (e.g. emotions)

The problem with global warming and the Al Gore stuff is that you really have NO way of checking if this stuff is true. And let’s face it, we’ve been had royally in the past (e.g. 1970’s energy crisis) Even if you read the actual scientific papers (where can you find those anyway) rather than journalistic/political boil-down , how do you know that the scientists are not being paid by self-interested politicians?
I find the psychology of why someone would fake this stuff the most persuasive thing.
Why would someone want to fake this stuff? There are arguments on both sides – profits from Green products, do-goodism, scare-mongering journalists wanting to sell papers – or on the other side, Oil profits, laziness and wanting to be elected. To take another example – the Church says your kid goes to hell if he isn’t Christened and you do if you don’t go to church on Sundays (NB not Saturdays). If seen as the attempt of Roman Emporer, part time fratricidal maniac and first head of the church, Constantine to control a failing Roman Empire, subsequently propogated through the generations by fear-mongering and clever viral marketing techniques like christening, completely loses any credibility and in fact looks distinctly dodgy. In other words seeing the obvious hidden motives behind an argument or movement can help you to see its likely validity independently of its content.
The book Collapse by Jared Diamond goes into why people tend to be myopic in their use of resources and how this has led to the collapse of various civilisations in the past, despite the fact that these people obviously knew the consequences of their resource use. I found it very persuasive.
So overall, even though I don’t trust media reports at all, I tend to believe the Global Warming hype.