If they just added the ABN to credit card receipts they wouldn’t have to print two receipts for every transaction; one from the bank and one tax receipt from the shop.
They could halve the paper consumption…. just like that.
Photographing the receipt below it occurs to me that I could snap all my receipts and throw them away.
Why didn’t I think of this before? Slow.
Be the change that you want to see.
It occurs to me that a good fraction of brain function is focused on absorbing sensory information and instantly processing it.
Given the amount of information that we process the brain is a remarkably quick analog computer. Not only does it process all that incoming information on the fly, it also does a large fraction of decision making on the fly. There is virtually no lag between incoming signals and outgoing decisions (e.g. move that leg, scream at cabbie, etc).
But there is a more complex and much slower digital part of our brain that does post-processing. We call this ‘thinking’. In this case we take in all the information and do off-line and much slower processing in order to do decision making.
It does not surprise to me that the best off-line processing is done during sleep hours. There must be parts of the digital brain that multi-task and when we are asleep these parts of the brain can be dedicated to the post-processing tasks at hand.
What we call intuition, id or gut-feel is the instant, analog decision making processes. These must be rules- and pattern- based; essentially we have in the analog parts of our brains great big decision-making flow charts that allow us to make instant decisions for certain scenarios. These flowcharts must be HUGE.
And then we must have a function, the ego, that checks the integrity of the use of these flowcharts and that automatically flick-passes a decision-making process across to the digital side of the brain, the super ego, if the set of external conditions does not match the flow chart conditions closely enough (which would result in errors in decision making).
Its the highly evolved digital part of our brain that differentiates us from the lower animals that probably are almost entirely analog.
Education seems to be all about exercising and training the digital processing part of our brain. Without education it seems that many people simply can’t be trusted to use this part of their brain to make decisions.
I wonder if we inherit the flowcharts? I guess we must. Which means that DNA must also be a memory technology. I wonder how many gigs we get?
I also wonder if we can transfer proven digital processes across to our own analog flowcharts. I bet we can, through practice. But do we pass these onto our kids? I bet we do – that is, we get to add content to all of our descendants. Hence our need to mix up the gene pool; to spread the new flowchart components.
‘Living in the moment’ means shutting down the digital thinking part of your brain and living instinctively. Whereas meditation additionally tries to slow down the sensory input hence slowing down the analog flowchart side of your brain.
p.s. in this entry ‘analog’ and ‘digital’ are metaphors
What I have learned tonight?
Only that my intuition needs to be trusted.
All is never what it seems but rather it is what I feel.
As if I didn’t know this.
But the world as presented keeps trying to deny this fact
It’s as though I have to live with x-ray googles on.
And I do.dle.
At the moment the average campaign cost for catholic sanctification is $250k.
That factoid brought to you courtesy of the Economist.
I guess that time is money and the cream is homogenized.
In the interests of leaving nothing interesting out of this blog, the link below was brought to my attention by a local rag in Melbourne. It was simply too good not to research…
http://ezinearticles.com/?Sperm-Taste—10-Simple-Tips-For-Better-Tasting-Semen&id=164106
It seems like a very healthy diet simultaneously improves a man’s health and also the culinary experience.
Which is the opposite of most diets.
It’s a shame the culinary experience is a second order effect; reduces the incentive somewhat.
How’s that for PC?
If everyone learnt not to care about the opinions of others there would not be a marketing industry.
Someone needs to come up with artificial turf complete with brown patches and weeds.
This came with my hamburger…
can’t be fucked trying to figure it out in my hungover state.
You gotta think that this effort was the result of a gen Y committee.
I was tempted to suggest to this lot of gen Y’s that the grass was greener on both sides of the footpath.
But I know they wouldn’t have understood…
Is it mean to selectively practice chivalry based upon certain value judgments?
Possibly it is. But there’s nothing more comforting than nurturing certain closely-held prejudices.
We all have them; cyclists, rats, politicians, parking police, lazy women that trade on their appearances, you name it.
I am aware and I don’t care. Unless of course it really mattered and then I would flip in a snitch.
Regression. Not to the mean but to the teen.
Late last night my nephews took me out drifting in the industrial suburbs of western Melbourne.
What we used to do at 100 -150 kmh on dirt, they do at 200-250 kmh on asphalt.
There is nothing like having your 700 kW and 750 kg car flicked at 250 kmh only to find yourself going backwards at 200 kmh in a continuous wheel spin.
The smoke of burning tyres obscures all vision and the turbocharged 6 litter V8 engine with no muffler drowns out all noise.
Bliss.
It was either beautifully done in the first place or beautifully maintained in the meantime.
If Pavlov had tried the bell experiment on cats they pretty much would have told him to fuck off.
Cats don’t salivate for no one, for no food and certainly for no bell.
Classical Conditioning is a dog of an idea.
Seated early, in an aisle seat, it was almost impossible not to watch a very good looking young woman pretend to get her large and heavy carry-on into the overhead bin.
She had a weather eye out for a chivalrous porter that never arrived. Ultimately the hostie executed the charitable labour.
The blonde then sat one across from me and proceeded to complain loudly to the old bag next to me about the lack of gentlemen in her universe. The old bag agreed.
Just quietly I thought, ‘check your bag in like the rest of us and stop trying to transfer your inconvenience to us’.
I am very happy to be chivalrous when the recipient deserves it. And there is nothing less deserving than a lazy attractive woman trading on the same.
My cabbie, a lovely young guy from Pakistan, told me that his mullah says Australians, if they became Muslims would be the best Muslims in the world.
This because we, the Australians, are so free of corruption.
I suggested that our lack of shame might counter-act the proposed benefits.
We both agreed to ponder the subject further.
I wonder if Pavlov wanted his pussies to have free will.
I was accused of being a business ‘pirate’ the other day.
I suppose it didn’t help that I was wearing a t-shirt with the skull and cross-bones on it.
But in truth I am a privateer not a pirate.
This because, at various time I am authorised by, or paid by government.
And I have wondered why I always say ‘yes’ to government.
On one hand I know they will have an allergic reaction to me so the approaches won’t be too frequent.
So I have no fear of being sucked into their universe.
I had assumed that I say yes to them so that I can understand one of the enemies.
But no, it is to legitimise my piracy. I am a privateer. Happy today.
One of the journals that I regularly contribute to emailed it’s authors today re-asserting it’s copyright ownership of our efforts.
I didn’t have the heart to tell them that unless there is an executed assignment deed all such assertions are meaningless.
In truth their journal has a small professional readership that get the journal free of charge as part of their membership. The journal should be freely published under creative commons.
Nothing would be lost except maybe the sneaky income they get from the e-journal database service providers, which they don’t tell their authors about.
The same e-journal databases are under the illusion that the journal is selling content for which they own copyright.
Possibly the greatest unnecessary handicap to carry through life is a sense of entitlement.
If you don’t understand this then you are probably suffering from the same.
I am finding that all my bad habit are dropping away one by one.
And I have achieved this by the practice of gluttony, i.e. practicing these habits until the behavior bores me.
And it works. But sometimes it takes longer than may be healthy. But still.
Its a great alternative to therapy or abstinence
And a lot more fun.
But it only works if the brain is switched on and self-analysis is ripe.
I just had to explain to the cabbie this morning that he is a shit driver.
Because he was appalling.
And it’s a good thing I did because he thought he was pretty good and no one had ever said anything before.
It was very amicable as I took him through the long list of his bad habits and skill-free zones.
We left it with him promising to practice and be a better driver.
Today I have been labeled a ‘good dad’ by the mother.
You have take them when you can.
It is eminently possible to automatically email every credit card receipt to the buyer. Or just store these in a cloud service.
My insurance company charges me 5% more for monthly payment versus yearly payments.
This is the opposite to other service providers because the yearly payment is in advance not arrears.
This would imply that their cost of capital is between 3.5% – 4%.
That is, if they invest the proceeds of annual payments (from me) into their own business (in reality don’t have to borrow this amount) it’s worth the 5% discount.
The long term cost of capital of the global insurance industry is 5.5% which matches nicely but post-GFC it has gone up slightly to around 9% and probably dropping.
So why can my Australian insurance offer such a low premium for annual payments? Why is their cost of capital so cheap?
We must be a very stable environment where they can pass all costs onto their customers and their customers just suck it up.
Although they are in the business of managing our risks they aren’t taking very many risks themselves.
So why is there even competition among insurance companies? Why do they waste profits on marketing? Why is market share important?
You can imagine that there is a lot of competition for profitable business that is essentially risk free. For the money-hungry types it would be the equivalent of being kids in a chocolate factory.
But oh so boring…
So how did the nanny state arise?
My gut feel is that the nanny state was always going to happen as (a) Western society got affluent enough to afford this luxury, and (b) the birth rate dropped to the point that each child is super precious.
But I also think that the feminization of politics since the 1960’s may have accelerated the adoption of nanny state principals.
But since the nanny state has been adopted, my own principals would tell me that it is the best economic solution for our society even if I can’t see why.
Which is another way of saying that if we ever enter into a social or economic policy cul-de-sac then that cul-de-sac will wither and die over a decade or two if it isn’t a good and proper general solution (financially speaking).
I can’t see the nanny state going anywhere. The value in engineering risks out of our lives is obviously very high when we are spending so much time and energy training our little geniuses.
The ‘price’ of the adoption of the nanny state is only high for those who have known otherwise and these guys (me for example) won’t last forever.
Since the last world war there has been a continual rise in the role of woman in the workforce as well as in politics.
Its now hard to believe that there was a period when, in economics terms, most countries were limiting their effectiveness by ignoring half of their gene pool.
But because they were all doing it there was no competitive disadvantage.
Which is my way of saying that the best way to get social change adopted, whatever it is, is to link it as closely as possible to national economic or company competitiveness.
Money rules, above even the retardedness of the most conservative moral types. As soon as one country or company gets ahead because it has adopted a new approach, it is almost inevitable that others will follow. Because if they continue not to adopt beneficial new practices then after a period of time they become obsolete and then fall out of existence.
Money rules. And there are only a few pockets of people who avoid this rule and survive – the North Koreans, the Amish and a handful of others. But even these groups, to a large degree, live off the goodwill of others who do believe in money.
At a practical level, if you have a change you want to see in the world that you are passionate about then you are best advised to find the most lucrative financial or economic outcome of the adoption of that change and focus your efforts there. Call it a ‘beachhead’.
Once initial adoption is achieved because of that proven financial or economic benefit then you can broaden the efforts elsewhere.
Bugger the ‘be the change you want to see’ rubbish.
I read that if you go seven days without sleep you will die, but an autopsy will reveal no cause of death.
It’s a scientific mystery but maybe this info is a boon for would be murderers?
The Australian accent and it’s tortured diphthongs scramble the iambic pentameter, methinks.
Lola was telling me all the things she might like to be when she grows up.
She threw in the career choice of an ‘artist’.
I suggested that she had better get training because in ten years time no doubt one will need a three year degree and a license to practice art.
I said if hairdressers and paddle pop people needs licenses, why not artists?
She asked what’s in it for the government to do such a thing?
I said:
1. Increased revenues from the license fees and fines for non-licensed artists etc.
2. Increased employment for all the unemployed artists (i.e. all of them) – they can be teachers
3. Possibly (and this is a stretch) better art
4. More employment in the bureaucracy and therefore lower unemployment in general
5. Its all just part of the nanny state which gives the government control over our every day lives
6. More entrepreneurial artists hell bent on earning income and repaying their HECS debt, and also less likely to be unionized and left leaning
She wondered if there would be an exclusion for kindy kids, or would there be police raids on schools looking for unlicensed artists?
What I miss most these days is a lazy Sunday with a book.
I was just explaining to Lola that by the time we are twenty we lose most of our prepubescent memories.
That shut her up for a minute or so. Then she asked why.
And I said ‘No idea, but maybe it’s to forget the pain of being taught a lesson. Remember you are one of the first generations to grow up without so much as a single slap on your bottoms.’
Thinking of those odd perfect moments I have had in my life.
These moments have been when there is rare combination of:
1. Total and (usually) temporary lack of responsibilities
2. Usually a very relaxed environment away from everyday city life
3. A combination of very enjoyable events and no stress that allows me to live in entirely in the moment
4. Often one or more of music, alcohol, drugs, smells, sex, surf, sun, heat, daytime sleep, hangover, smokes, yarning, road trip, …I will think of more
Then I sometimes ruin it by thinking about it. D’oh.
Having my Gen Y nephew stay at my place for a month scared the bejesus out of me.
He was sent to test the brain… and the conclusion that I came to was…
I am actively trying to wind back the clock and be a 1970’s style parent.
Attached below is a sample of the modern day school report.
Basically every subject is broken up into achievement and effort, and everyone gets the same coarse grading level unless there is at least two standard deviations from the center of the Bell curve.
Together with the cut and paste commentary and accompanying parent teacher interview, I learned nothing.
It strikes me that the modern school report is protecting three separate parties:
1. The kids and their self esteem
2. The parents and their self esteem
3. The school from parents and their warranty claims
Updating mum’s laptop to Microsoft Windows 8.1.
4 gigs of download, 4 hours and 5 restarts later I get this…
Yep. Just got on eBay and bought three pairs of sunnies. First world solution.
Scene…I am in the gym doing weights. There are four televisions but no sound. Sound is reserved for the treadmillers and their headsets.
The three commercial channels are playing pretty much the same news.
Someone broke their back diving into a pool, a car accident, a shed burnt down, a tornado in the US, a drug courier got caught and thrown into a Balinese jail, etc. Not a thing about global political, economic and social events that could come to haunt us.
It strikes me that watching the misfortunes of others probably makes your average viewer feel temporarily better with their lot. Over time the news has drifted to this format, pushed by ratings feedback which drives advertising revenues.
And the genuine news is these days probably beyond the viewers’ comprehension and hence their interest. They must trust in the system to protect their interests. Besides the real news would just depress them.
Good citizenship blog entry…
I was asked about sealing jam jars in my capacity as a scientist because the internet is full of misinformation on the subject.
The idea is to put the lid on while the jam is hot.
So long as you have a seal, as the jam shrinks whilst it cools (roughly ten percent in volume I guesstimate), you will create a low pressure air gap in the jar.
A vacuum is over-stating things. At best you will have half the atmospheric pressure. That is, the air that you sealed in the jar occupies around twice the original volume
This is enough to invert a thin metal lid which is a good indicator that the gas tight seal remains functional.
I should note that the pressure differential over the seal actually helps keep it tight; it pulls and pushes the flexible polymer into the glass if the seal is properly designed.
In these conditions bugs and excess moisture cannot get to the jam. And the air and water in the jar was hopefully sterilized prior to sealing by the high temperatures. Therefore the jam should last quite a while.
Self can do no wrong…
This is the outcome of over indulging children. And the fact that the gen Y’s grew up sans criticism and critique, so as to preserve their self esteem.
The big birds of NZ had no native predators until the Maoris turned up. As a result they just gullibly hung around whilst they were slaughtered. Similarly a gen Y will not recognise criticism even if it should for it’s own benefit.
They have never known the concept of doing wrong. They feel no shame. They genuinely don’t know what it is. And it worked, they always have great self esteem no matter how useless they are.
Good help them and us.
Simply the best way to get a lazy carnivore out of bed.
The art of apology…how to get it into Lola’s head?
She just woke up grumpy and told me she missed the school disco last night because she is at my place.
I said “I am sorry you missed the disco”.
She said “yeah right”. And then something to the effect that she is only interested in solutions. Time machine?
In fact she finds it impossible to apologise if she thinks she is in the right. And it’s just difficult for her to apologise otherwise. It’s going to be a tough twenty years ahead for her
Last night we were talking to the grumpy old Irish neighbour. He was complaining about the “kids” that smashed his car mirror. I happen to know that he did it himself whilst driving past a truck the other day; he didn’t notice.
I told Lola the story. She said “that’s lying”.
I said “No its not – it’s just withholding the truth. If I had told him he would have been upset with himself, maybe me and he may not have believed me. And he still would have had a broken mirror to fix”.
I think this set of interpretations represents two sides of the same coin.
Lola currently believes in absolutes. She hasn’t fully comprehended how much we really live in the grey.
All you can really do as a parent is tell them what you have learnt and believe. And then wait for life to catch up with their prejudices.
The good news is that Lola is already bending the truth for her own ends. Incipient analog life philosophy!
Most of the ringtones that are commonly available for incoming calls really start to annoy me after a while.
So I got clever and now use the lovely sound of Australian magpies.
The trouble is, there’s a lot of magpies in Sydney. I can hear one as I write this.
Is meditation the opposite of “being present”? If you hybridize the two are you are dead or just normal?
Last weekend I caught Lola designing a robotic teacher.
I suggested that she add a remote control with a mute and pause button. She liked that idea.
Like me, Lola is a very abstract and non-linear thinker. As a result she is incredibly bored and frustrated with the school system, which despite decades of efforts to the contrary is essentially a linear sausage factory.
Hence the image of the robotic teacher.
I tell Lola that we live in a world dominated by linear thinkers and, as painful as it is, she is best advised to figure out her own Rosetta stone by enduring the 15 or so years of schooling.
Does gushiness mask superficiality or is gushiness just superficial?
You can take the girl out of the suburbs but you can’t take the suburbs out of the girl.
A root cause analysis for sausages suggests squeamishness.
A hipster is a gen Y with a beard.
The service still sucks.
Car manufacturers generally market the power and torque of their engines.
However the boy racers, after working over a car, only care about the power that gets to the road.
Which they measure with a dyno, which is a sort of a treadmill for cars that measures the power and torque at the rollers that are rotated by the car wheels.
Similarly, I often meet very intelligent people with powerful brains (engines) but fuck-all ability to get that power to the ground.
They would fail the dyno test.
Passionfruit and mangoe are my two favourite fruits.
Or is that passionfruits and mangoes are my two favourite fruit?
Or passionfruit and mangoes?
The more I look at the word fruit the more it seems wrong.
The bats don’t seem to have a problem with any of them.
The word prototype derives from the Greek πρωτότυπον meaning “first impression”.
The word stereotype derives from the Greek στερεός meaning “solid impression”.
They forgot the word monotype meaning “single impression”. It does have two useless technical meanings in printing and biology.
Odd that the first version of product is a prototype but the final version isn’t a stereotype.
Similarly a well-entrenched racial profile is a stereotype but a new one isn’t a prototype.
My monotype of the stereo-type is that its a prototype of a mistype.
Today The Australian government “accidentally” released names and other details of asylum seekers in detention and in the community.
This puts lives at risk for families of asylum seekers that are still in their home countries.
I don’t believe this was an accident at all. Our government agencies are mad about it security so a leak like this looks very suspicious.
It’s akin to our navy “accidentally” drifting into Indonesian waters. With multiple redundant global positioning systems this is also very unbelievable.
It looks as though our government is prepared to risk international relationships and people’s lives in the interests of local political gain.
When did our conservatives become so absent of morals? Or have they always been so? Whichever, they have my condemnation for a lack of morals and/or the lack of a duty of care.
Sans conscious thought, if prompted, if I would have said cannibalism followed death or murder.
Not so.
It’s the consumption of body parts. There’s nothing in there suggesting that the donor is dead.
So when Kay Bilson served up a blood sausage constructed from her own blood…does that make me a cannibal?
What about the common sharing of bodily fluids through the oral channel.
It has me a little confused. Maybe we need an Australian standard on this.
Reading wiki on the subject I learn this very disturbing fact; in Melanesia they used to have body-parts food markets.
One of my young colleagues introduced me to his girlfriend this morning.
The thing I noticed, amongst other things, was that she has incipient stumps for legs.
Should I say something?
I love surface tension. And surface tension loves me. Doodah.
How many light bulbs does it take to change a human?
One very fucking bright one.
I have had more than nine near-death experiences. It’s a good thing I am a Gemini because that gives me 18 to play with.
Is it a infinitely small dot or a non infinitesimal time sequence or a bloody event?
English is odd. Period.
apology + excuse < apology
Me and the world’s largest kale plant.
It’s a race between me and the bats for the mangoes.
The bats are the night shift and I am the day shift.
They eat the mangoes up the tree but invariably the mangoes drop half way through each mini-feast.
So every morning there is half-eaten squished mangoes all over the yard.
Plus lots of orange bat poo.
Nice.
Who knew that society puts us all into one of two boxes, man or woman?
I had never thought about this until just over-hearing a conversation in a cafe, mainly from a woman who prefers to be a man.
Apparently we have all fallen into the trap of viewing each other through the lens of reproduction. A view gleaned, ironically, from studies in feminism.
We humans only do what we do by having little sand castles of complex hypotheses that enable fast and effective decision making.
God help the odd angry exception.
That’s 1338.
One of the most annoying thing about men, according to women, is that they won’t properly listen to a woman’s problems.
Apparently all men want to do is fix things. And they get frustrated with the dialog if they can’t.
But turning this around girls, if a man is depressed or down, all you have to do is give him a problem to solve.
If you are the cause of his depression then make sure the problem is about you.
That’s a two-fer.
All my life I have wondered why people suffer what I call “hypotheses feedback bias”.
Basically it is when people make up a hypothesis, act as though it’s true, and then get some positive feedback.
This then convinces them that they were right and brilliant to guess it so in the first place.
Try and convince your average person with this feedback bias that there may actually be a more useful hypothesis than the first so guessed, and you are generally wasting your breath.
Medical practitioners and data analysts come to mind.
Waiting for Lola….outside the newsagent in the mall.
An older couple walk past.
The woman spits (per the poster below) “Emma Thompson is looking very blonde these days”.
She sorta huffs off leaving the old bloke to peruse the poster. Which he does for some considerable time.
He then walks in and buys the mag. Apropos of nothing that I understand.
And besides I didn’t even recognize Emma in the photo. I smell rats, miss.
I have a shopaphobia.
Only unjust water torture from, say, a mother will drive me into, say, a kid’s shoe shop.
I was asked to guess what the humidity was.
And I said 76%.
And it was.
Serves ’em right.
How does one extrapolate from the loss of two pairs of sunnies to a life philosophy, as some would call it?
Too much behaviorally reinforced abstraction. Blog diary stops in April.
I lost two of my favorite pairs of sunglasses yesterday. Both to mechanical failure. What’s that about?
Once upon a time I had one pair of sunnies at a time. Now with increased affluence I have a dozen pairs, maybe more, hanging around.
This makes moments like these non-issues. And yet is this a good thing?
Possibly life should be a series of little crises. Rather than just plain sailing until, totally unprepared, you hit a rock.
Quote….”It is a margherita … except for the salmon, bocconcini and the capers”
He who has the least to lose probably will.
Two odd incidents today…
A complete stranger just bailed me up and suggested I go to the Hillsong church across the road because it’s ‘very good’. I blanked out and just ignored her totally. Unlike…
A fellow cyclist this morning literally abused me (nasty names) for having the temerity to go through a red light, very carefully after slowing down to check that there were no cars.
I rode off ignoring him. But after the lights went green he caught up to give me a second dose of vile.
So I decided to king hit him. Total regression to the childhood hood. You should have seen him panic when he realized what I was up to. He had gears and I did not. So he escaped.
The media would have loved that one. Road rage – cyclist rammed and king hit by another cyclist… it’s got everything.
To be fair, if I accuse our unions of being in-bred rent seeking dinosaurs then the same must be said of our corporate-sector owners and managers.
A pox on the lot of them.
The corporate fuckers think they are being clever to get their goons in Canberra to drive a stake through the heart of the union corpse, via a royal commission into union corruption.
But once the unions are gone these fine fellows will be exposed for what they are by their lack of performance and lack of other excuses.
They are setting up the guillotine for the unions, but they themselves will be next up the steps.
Over the last 25 years union participation had fallen from 40% to 20% of the Australian workforce.
This is usually ascribed to the decrease in unskilled labor and an increase in the aspirations of the middle classes. Plus a very aggressive anti-union media.
A good fraction of the service jobs in Australia are artifacts of government legislation and bureaucracy. This is a great way to distribute our wealth even if it’s at the expense personal freedom and happiness… (joke).
A great many jobs which used to be considered unskilled are now requiring university degrees, primarily driven by government. I always thought the incentive was to keep unemployment down by keeping youngsters in Uni and out of the workforce.
But it just struck me that the ‘skilling up’ of the service industries also drives these workers away from unions. These guys don’t aspire to the perception of lowly paid uniformity.
Unions need to rebrand themselves as industry associations. Which makes sense since everyone wants to be a successful contractor.
As Industry associations they can focus on wealth creation in the sector as well as wealth distribution in the sector. That would be far more helpful.
Buy how painful will it be? Generations of in-bred rent seeking…that’s a tough habit to break.
This is a worry. Or is it a boon for those silly BBQ discussions?
“The precise Gregorian times and dates for the Zodiac vary slightly from year to year as the Gregorian calendar shifts relative to the tropical year”
One of my favourite flowers is Viper’s Bugloss. Its all over the dry parts of the South Island of NZ. A noxious weed to the locals.
The viper part of the name came about from a perceived resemblance between the seeds and a viper’s head. The bugloss part is of Greek origin, meaning an Ox’s Tongue, which was correlated to the roughness and shape of the leaves.
But note its Viper’s Ox Tongue, not Ox Tongue’s viper. Apparently the plant often grows near large patches of marijuana which probably explains the odd name with more clarity.
In the middle ages Viper’s Bugloss was thought to be a useful antidote to snakebite based on the fanciful logic that the appearance of a plant indicates its use to humanity.
Now there’s a great example of why all hypotheses should be carefully tested.
More recently, statistics and soccer have met head on.
In the nineties stats were used to find correlations between players and their habits, and winning.
But all the attention was on the ball. How many times a player touched it. When they did, what they did with it. Etc.
Then some genius correlated winning to the habits of players off the ball. He found strong correlations to all sorts of things like how many kilometers a defender ran in a match. This helped them hire defenders.
Obviously the coach and ref are next. Then the crowd.
When this is over they will be able to simulate the whole thing in computers and we won’t know the difference.
The latest big insight amongst the intellectually challenged US venture capitalists is survivorship bias. Geez they make me giggle. I was in a meeting with a handful of Silicon Valley idols discussing this concept. You might have thought Einstein had just dropped in with the missing tablets from the mount.
Just for the record this is the example they used for their seance. A study had been made of the damage to returning bombers in WWII and it had been proposed that extra armour be added to those areas that showed the most damage. Some guy had the insight that the holes from flak and bullets on the bombers that did return represented the areas where they were able to take damage and that extra armour should be added to where the returning planes had no hits. It worked.
This evening I picked 120 mangoes off the tree. There are hundreds more up there. Fuck me, how to get rid of the things?
Sometimes the universe has a way of surprising the hell out of you. In a nice way. Such a thing happened today.
And then I glance at the AFR and purview the most asinine commentary I have seen for some time.
Parsing…. Toyota leaving Australia should be a wake up call for or federal pollies to put more money into NICTA.
Really…that just just about ruined my day. Ignorance and greed rule my country.
One form of planned obsolescence is where the cost of repairs is comparable to the market value of a product. Note the market value and the replacement cost are very different things. When the market value is less than the cost of a single repair many people simply buy a new & improved replacement, whether that is a car, a laptop or a mobile phone.
An example is my spare laptop which could be purchased, in its current crap condition and age, on Ebay for about $100. I just fixed the battery latch issue on this laptop with cable ties whereas Toshiba’s service agent had quoted me $300 for the job.
These battery latches are an example of rubbish engineering; they have been a problem in Toshiba laptops for a long time and there must not be a feedback mechanism to the engineers. I say ‘rubbish’ because the problem can occur in the first week of ownership which is not good for brand reputation.
However, any close observer will know that a heavily used laptop is unlikely to get past 2-3 years before niggling or fatal issues prompt the owner to replace the device. I know, for example, that when a laptop starts displaying certain characteristics (like blue screening, hotspots, excessive fan use, etc) there is little use getting it fixed. Its a goner. This despite the fact that ‘repairing’ usually means replacing whole slabs of it’s guts (like the motherboard).
But to be fair the cost of a new laptop is very low. High production volumes have enabled the investment, by manufacturers, into product development of billions of collective dollars. Unconstrained by product life issues or repair-ability, the focus has been on getting cost out (near to incoming material costs), weight and footprint down, and specs up.
I wonder how much extra people would be prepared to pay to have a device which is infinitely repairable? Given the rate of technology improvements people would also need infinite upgrade-ability of key functional components. But even then they would be the victim of ageing style. You can see the problem.
The only real solution is to put a price on both non-renewable carbon and other diminishing and unrecoverable resource inputs, via a tax, and let the ecosystem figure out the best solution.
If love can be a series of tick boxes then is it any surprise that life can be a series of purchases?
Is the term politically correct thus because politicians were the first to display such behavior?
Wiki says sort of.
Various communist parties were in the habit of creating the correct social policy positions and the term was created by their witting but variably willing constituents.
When a mathematician develops a model that can be tested against experimental data then we have in our midst a very old school scientist.
It’s probably just a figment of your imagination. Or it is a climate change engineer busily over fitting the data.
When a mathematician develops a model that can never be tested against experimental data then we have in our midst a philosopher.
Loves knowledge but truth is a first year ethics debate.
This entry is very mundane and posted in the context of good netizenship.
My spare laptop is an oldish Toshiba. Now these Toshiba’s are good and robust laptops except in one regard; they have battery latches that are prone to disappearing of their own accord. Whence they go, nobody knows.
Losing one latch of the two is only annoying since you only really need the one. But when you lose the second one you are in trouble since the battery can fall out at any time.
You can try gaff-taping the battery into place but this won’t keep the battery power connector in place in a reliable enough fashion. You will find that you have no charge even though you were plugged in all night.
The latches are tricky to install and normally replacement of one of the two latches requires that the laptop needs a whole new cover since the latch is so-integrated.
When you talk to Toshiba and get a quote you quickly find that the repair costs about 3x the current market value of your old laptop.
So I turned to the trusty old cable ties. Two holes in the (extended) battery case and two cable ties as per the pictures below. Voila.
It must be said that cable ties are probably the most useful fix-it item of all time.
My last word on the subject…
Some dude, who probably should be in a wheelchair, has a hypothesis that everything in the universe is connected, but to maintain the connections requires energy. To find an energy minimum, he claims, the dimensions of connection collapse down to our familiar three.
He is mostly wrong. Everything is connected but only because it is all always the one and same thing.
Our perception of the dimensions and time is an artifact that only exists in an imaginary set of dimensions that are a self-fulfilling mirage.
Essentially our imaginary existence couldn’t exist if we truly understood that God is all of us and we are all the same.
But our imaginary existence is just as real as the singular one. And there are many more realities than these two that we can not even imagine.
I am fairly sure that we are too limited by our own perception of reality to perceive this infinite set of alternative realities with any clarity worth owning.
I am actually a relatively slow learner. But I learn very well; in the sense that I can do more with knowledge and skills than most.
At the Grounds in Alexandria. I just left America only to return to it immediately.
100% contrived. And the acoustics are shrill, and blonde.
The Americans have discovered acrylamide in everything.
The monomer is a neurotoxin but the polymer is harmless. Maybe they just need to figure out how to polymerize it in situu
Now this would drive the suburban mothers quite mad…
After 3 hours sleep and with a force 8 hangover (care of the IMF) I thank the god of vacated seats (are youThor?) for his magnificence and fucking benevolence.
The question arose as to how the finance and corporate sectors manage to pay their senior management so highly?
I know how it works… it’s a club of self serving and like minded types patting each other’s backs.
But as to how it emerged? The opportunity was always there but over time, since the ethical revolution of the sixties, moral responsibility in business has contracted to the legal minimum requirement. And the same guys have even been able to influence the legal requirement.
It wasn’t always thus. It happened gradually as greed (the motivating force) drove incremental changes in behaviors. In order to remain competitive everyone was dragged along, again incrementally.
Four decades later and we have the situation where the maximum personal gain is extracted from asymmetries in control and information.
However I do think the process is nearly at its peak. The internet will eventually disintermediate the asymmetries. One should expect troubles when the toys are removed from the children though.
The view out of the window of my Singapore hotel bellies the absence of authenticity in this city state.
I learn that the IMF is a sheltered workshop for academic economists, masquerading as a second-millennium style investment bank for sovereign states.
M&A activity is limited but quite entertaining when it does occur.
Oh to roam where the doodlers groan…
offshore westerly 