Still alive

Judge not

Who would be a judge?

It can’t be fun enforcing inconsistent laws made up by functionally corrupt politicians, randomly enforced by illiterate police and rabidly defended by amoral legal pirates.

A sense of justice would make the job intolerable.

And you would hate yourself on your bad days.

If you believed in god you would be dreading the pearly gates.

Unless of course you cross-referenced Somalia and emotionally divorced yourself from responsibility for the outcomes. Which would require psychological brain surgery.

Destiny

You can’t change destiny so you may as well believe in it.

Bike bag

About five years ago I bought this great bike bag in San Francisco.

A bike courier that I used to drink with contemptuously told me that it would be lucky to last a couple of months.

I have used it every day since. It is still going strong and a not hint of wearing out.

Beware the opinions of the professional amateurs!

Rights

My neighbor is sending toxic corpses my way. Whyfor the chemical warfare?

Should I put up with this? Note, I didn’t say ‘should he be able to do this?’

Lawyer

We finally had a good lecturer at the traffic offenders intervention course. And of course, of course the horse was a lawyer.

Self portrait

Bedlyam we

Isn’t it odd that we Australians treat our chooks, or at least some of them, better than our asylum seekers.

And chooks can’t even drive cabs.

Chook

New business concept…

Sponsor an organic chook. Sorta like sponsoring a Nigerian child.

Input. Weekly cash withdrawals from your bank account.

Benefits. Weekly organic eggs from very your own chook delivered to your door.

It comes complete with a smart phone app with “chook-cam” (attached to the head of each chook) so you can log on and see what your chook is seeing.

And you can cross reference the veracity of the organic sea side nature of your chook’s environment.

About life

[scene] About Life, Rozelle. Upmarket and expensive organic food supermarket.

Great organic free-range eggs from happy hens fed with organic hand-milled grains and living on the Fraser coast seaside. It’s a surprise they haven’t hand painted the hen’s names on the eggs.

There are also many unhappy women in leotards; hard not to notice. I had to dodge the negative radiation. The organic eggs aren’t helping.

What they need is an in-house tantric shaman. Bugger the chook eggs; we need to work on the homo sapien eggs.

They probably also need to lose the jobs, husbands, private school mother mates, BMW X5’s (or similar) and mortgages. But keep the kids, although they need reprogramming.

Expenses

Craig Thomson gets a 12 month sentence for ‘stealing’ $24k off his union. Actually he abused his expenses. His crime? Firstly he held a seat for labor in the last minority government and he spent the money on prostitutes instead of food, hotels and travel for his wife.

I have seen CEO’s of public companies (that I have reported to) blow this amount on a first class air ticket to London. And then double that amount when they got there on hotels and entertainment. And then they would have one meeting of very dubious value.

Our politicians can simply pay the money back if they get caught abusing their expenses. As Tony Abbot was forced to do.

Craig is the victim of hypocritical and moral witch hunt … after listening to the magistrate rabbit on with moral BS when sentencing, if I were Craig I would have immediately hired a PI to ferret out the magistrate’s abuses of his own expenses for subsequent publication on the web.

Suburban dreams

A Facebook missive from a former friend that has retreated to the suburbs and motherhood, and who is now well over forty.

Is she wants to be like Quentin then she is twenty years too late hitting the government committees for a living.

Boys night

Boys night out last night. Half straight and half gay, so admittedly probably not a representative cross section.

All totally bemused by knights and dames. It seemed to have lodged the weirdo hat on Tony Abbott just that much firmer.

It was pointed out that Dame Quentin managed to fuck up her legacy right at the last hurdle. Wonderment as to whether Bill was asked for his opinion.

Scratch a pensioner and you will find a monarchist.

There was a debate as to which would come first, Gay marriage or a republic. General consensus that Gay marriage will win.

Gen Y’s were discussed as a near permanent barrier to the republic since it appears they simply don’t care and would not vote for any changes they don’t understand. It was pointed out they wouldn’t vote at all if they had the choice.

Then we moved onto more important issues such as which was the best HBO series ever.

Positive stats

I read in the micro broadsheet that a statistician once mused, nay even proposed, that the quality of a marriage could be measured by the number of roots in a period of time minus the number of arguments in that same time period.

The trick to avoiding divorce is to keep the measurement greater than zero at all times.

And there was no specific mention of where the roots were attained.

Grumpy

Tiger Air and a hangover do not mix well.

Monopolies

Our federal government wants to sell off a bunch of assets.

One rationale is to plug a budget hole.

Another is more philosophical; the argument runs that governments shouldn’t regulate a market and also compete in that market because it would be unfair (when did that ever stop them?). This argument might work for Medibank Private which has competition but not so well for Australia Post, a virtual monopoly.

Lobbyists also push hard for selling assets since they tend to enrich the buyers. This is a primary motivator!

A counter argument is that public monopolies are by definition break even or cash flow positive. Why sell something that has no risk of not generating profits forever? When valuing these assets there is no need to discount the cash flow.

Also the benefit to the public can be simplicity. When Australia Post is sold our postage options are going to get as complex as our phone bills. As are our energy bills.

What value can we place on the simplicity that government monopolies provide?

Weirdo

At a recent event held for the wealthy family investors in our lovely country I found myself chatting to some weirdo from the Australians for a Constitutional Monarchy.

I suggested to him that I would fully agree with his and their position but only if we had an Australian monarch.

Apparently that is an abhorrent suggestion. No argument why though.

8 hour movement

Ever heard of the eight hour movement?

A nineteenth century labor movement that promoted a daily work day routine of:

8 hours work
8 hours sleep, and
8 hours recreation

What happened to that win eh? Now it’s more like:

16 hours of LCD display
6 hours sleep
2 hours commuting

Argument

I reckon an argument goes like this…

happy
less happy
blame someone else
blame someone close
argue
maybe apologize
wait
repeat

The only way to break this cycle is if both parties agree to a resolution after each argument where they both concede or agree to do something new or some such.

If one party insists the other does the changing/resolving it doesn’t work, even if the insisting party is convinced he/she is in the right. 

That is, mutual resolution must be a pre-agreed principle and not discussed on a case by case basis.

Instinctively slow

Instinct mostly comes from the Id but also from the abstract part of the super-ego.

Which means when you are trusting your instinct you should not act immediately if you have a choice.

Wait at least a day to let the abstract part of the super-ego run its calculations.

Yacht club

I tried to explain to Dave that a yacht club that advertises itself as prestigious probably isn’t. Just unrealistically expensive.

Advice

I just gave a young nephew some advice at his request on the subject of women. Specifically how does one pick a partner?

I suggested that at his young age it’s best to trust your instinct. But before committing check the specific model using an elder that he trusts. Which will be me .

The paradox here is that by the time one has the skills to do this cogently one is possibly too old.

The opportunities to bond and grow together, while the personalities are still developing, would be lost.

Knunts

What odds Johnny Howard gets a knighthood?

Postscript…. Johnny Howard reckons he doesn’t want one…. but if Quentin accepts then Johnny oughta be a pushover.

TOIP

[Subject] traffic offenders intervention program… Pseudo compulsory remedial courses for serious driving offences…..

Given the costs to society of, eg drink driving, I don’t think the reactive TOIP courses are what is really needed.

Preventative courses are needed where all drivers are required to attend at license renewal time. Cars need annual rego checks but not drivers? WTF? Drivers are more dangerous than their cars these days. Cars have got pretty safe and reliable.

And PowerPoint doesn’t cut it. There needs to be drink driving and speeding simulators (otherwise known as PlayStation 4) and graphic 3-D movies etc.

I wonder how the legal Industry that has sprung up around all this lucrative activity would respond to that?

And while they are at it they could, on an annual basis, assess technical skills which we can all admit are getting appalling out there.

Eight signs of madness

There’s a bridge coming up in the nanny state.

Tradeshow

Possibly the best Chinese ad I have ever seen.

Ad

China just keeps giving.

In machina amet

Don’t fall in love with the barista
The barista loves the machine

The machine belongs to Ollie
But Ollie just loves money

Reference

Useful info from the herald which I am saving for a future pub debate. I can’t see any trend here.

Ad of the day

Suburban dreams

Dad

Well fuck me, at 79 years of age my dad has finally uttered an opinion betraying deep thought.

He suggested that in the old days the reason why elders were revered for their wisdom is that they weren’t very old. He told me that 50 was old in the pre-industrial societies and at 50 you still have all your mental faculties (implying that this isn’t the case at 79).

I added the thought that in a society, sans change, age equated to increased accumulation of current knowledge. Whereas in our society of constant change getting old signals redundancy for old knowledge. And it also gets harder to adapt to change as one gets older. Double whammy.

Agreement all around. And then we retired for his half-full skim-milk extra-hot half-sugar latte and my double mac.

Private school

I find it sad that many people I meet, in this fair country of ours, desire in life exactly what they have always been entitled to.

Maybe they climb a little up the greasy pole or earn a sinecure, but the outcome is much the same.

Imagine desiring entrapment in a glass pyramid of corporate entitlement.

Maybe the mass of people in there is obscuring the view of the surrounding country side.

Jesus

The sales brigade for Jesus turned up on my doorstep this morning.

This time it took an interesting twist.

I don’t know why but I told them that I thought I might be the next prophet but not yet revealed to the masses.

You’d have thought they’d be interested in another product line. But nuh, just a general retreat towards the street.

I yelled after them that they should be wearing hats. It is a hot day after all, and ‘sin’ was actually a mistranslation of ‘skin’.

Cross

Lola hates me right now.

Selfless

I explained to them that a selfie can’t have two people in it.

Right before I took the phone off them.

For Deb

Dots reinterpreted.

Molecular piracy

Cynical not

I have been labeled as cynical… let’s see…

cynical. ˈsɪnɪk(ə)l/
adjective
1. believing that people are motivated purely by self-interest;
2. distrustful of human sincerity or integrity;
3. concerned only with one’s own interests and typically disregarding accepted standards in order to achieve them.

I think not for 1 but I am always wary.

Re no. 2, not at all. In most cases people fool themselves and not others.

Finally, on no. 3 I am concerned with the interests of all and much less so my own, but typically disregard accepted standards in order to achieve my goals.

I suspect that I am a realistic idealist with a touch of egomania chucked in.

MH370

There are over 1,000 geo-tracking and spy satellites up in space and yet we can still manage to lose a commercial aircraft with almost 300 people on-board.

Every ocean going yachtie and extreme adventurer has an EPIRB, many which auto activate, but not an airplane nor anyone on it. Really?

Misplacing your keys is one thing…. but a plane?

Bugger liquid, aerosols or gels. They are so reactive and stupid that it hurts to read this stuff.

It’s a failure of will and not an absence of means. Or a total pack of lies.

China

Who wouldn’t want to live in China?

Bimodal terminology

‘I hate flying’.

Well there’s a statement…

Is he scared of flying or just disgusted with the process?

In this context it’s the same word for the emotion from the id and the belief from the super ego.

Fangio

I struck the jackpot, again.

My current Shanghai taxi driver is Fangio reincarnated.

At low speeds in traffic he makes holes where they can’t be.

He is ambidextrous when it comes to driving on the left or right.

On the freeway he is happy at 200 k’s in a 15 year old Toyota shitbox without seatbelts, dodging all the fade outs.

My solution? To spend the whole trip with my knees braced against the front seat waiting for the inevitable.

Which as you know didn’t happen.

Madness solved

Define sanity! No one can because we are all insane to some degree and that degree might change from observer to observer.

Imagine trying to treat people with psychological issues with other people (e.g. therapists)? Since they are both imperfect and slightly insane the whole process is definitely insane. No wonder it hardly works.

A much better approach would be to get a machine to ask questions and a massive friggin’ computer to parse and process the answers. That is, we should pass the problem over to Google and some large evolutionary algorithms.

This would have two benefits. First people are far more likely to be honest when talking to a machine, and, second, by combining all the results of all the people we could start coming up with genuine definitions of psychological issues.

Of course these definitions would be contextual so the solution to a genuine issue might be therapy, drugs or a simple change of environment.

Even the treatments themselves could be tested by the same algorithms for efficacy and a process of continuous improvement instigated.

There are some problems that are simply too complex for people and their simple models – we should hand them over to the computers now that we have them.

Hypo thesis

Hypothesis; these days not many scientific PhD theses strongly focus on testing concepts or developing new solutions to unexplained data.

If true, the majority of theses have not earned the conjoined adjective, ‘hypo’. Whence shall our theories arise?

Human symmetry

One of my favourite subjects in undergrad chemistry was Symmetry. Chemistry has a whole maths and nomenclature focused on the the symmetry of molecules. In order to get into this subject you have to have Asperges syndrome. Which I don’t and therefore my surprise (to this day) at my enjoyment of the subject.

That last paragraph was an attempt to enforce my credentials on what I am about to posit. Which is to say the lady is protesting before she even starts.

Here goes; have you ever noticed that we humans are supposed to be symmetrical on the outside but inside we are far less symmetrical? For example various organs are placed to one side or the other; the heart is on the left side, the right lung has more lobes than the left, the stomach and spleen lie to the left, and the liver has a single right lobe

As an aside, there are rare people who are ‘flipped’ and have these organs on the opposite side. A surgeon’s nightmare.

My suspicion is that the benefits of social cohesion have enforced external symmetry – it is easier/quicker to recognise a symmetrical friend or family member, and throughout history this benefit must have been enforced through the usual evolutionary processes.

No such benefit applies to internal organs so they have been free-er to wander about the body looking for the most efficient arrangement, but somewhat constrained by the external symmetry requirements.

Head flash

Many people get a yearly check-up from their GP.

But do you know anyone who gets an annual check-up from a psychologist?

No, we all either avoid them assiduously or wait until we have a problem that we can’t live with.

Possibly this is because one person’s issue is another’s pet.

And the science of the brain is really an art; for example, there aren’t any clinical tests for partial insanity of any sort.

However this must represent a great commercial opportunity. All that has to be developed is some non-threatening set of tests for a rego check-up for the brain. The trick will be to remove the subjectivity out of the interpretation of the results.

March flies

My daughter marched in March with her mother and her mother’s friends.

I chatted to them (the adults, afterwards) and, this is being nice, they have a  desperately weak grasp of the grab bag of issues that they were protesting. It’s seemed like more of a social occasion with falsetto anger.

I asked my daughter what issue caught her eye. She said ‘save the sharks’. Being a surfer I told her that I’d prefer it if they nuked the sharks. I said this to open the door to her mind; I would like to see her think and not just follow.

The march in March people had many issues, most of them centered on the policies of our federal government. In particular they dislike Tony Abbott. I am not much of a fan myself.

And yet, their rather uneducated playing of the man, and not the ball, makes me quite uncomfortable. It’s not a crowd that I would like to be in.

I guess it was always thus on both sides of our political cartel. The anger and intent is real amongst all colors of the rent-seeking cargo cults of club Australia.

They literally don’t have the imagination, intelligence nor motivation to be truly constructive. And they won’t be until they are forced by circumstances beyond their comprehension.

Linearly abstract

I am sitting here wondering how the concepts of linear and abstract thinking come into the brain model.

It looks like there are two sides to the super ego, left and right sides, logical and artistic, or whatever you want to call them.

The linear part must really be driven by logical processes and work only in conscious mode.

The abstract part is I suspect massively parallel processing with lots of little hooks into the id. It’s probably running zillions of complex scenarios and simply can’t be run in conscious mode.

An odd suggestion…

Driving

Nix all the car projects. The truth is that I hate driving. So now that I am car free I intend to stay that way.

City driving I hate due to the congestion, cameras, agro and hypocrisy. Freeways I hate because they drive me to narcolepsy.

The only driving I like is on the old school country roads.

Holden

I’m thinking that the coalition government decided not to continue supporting the local car industry because they were sick of being driven around in stretch conformadores.

Bring on the black Audi’s, BMWs and Mercs.

And you thought they were being economically dry!

I don’t

Quote of the day.

“What part of I don’t understand don’t you understand?’

Toxteth

[Scene] Toxteth Hotel Glebe

Pub dude: “Want to buy a ticket for the meat raffle?”

Me: “Is it organic?”

Sydney gems

Cabbie having a smoko.

Pensioner hogging the bike line and having a smoko.

Spoon

This is the Sydney spoon.

Just sayin’

There is a lot of hostility to cyclists out there on the roads.

An example; the fuckwits who keep putting cycle lanes right next to parked cars and then make the cycle lanes exactly one car door-width’s wide.

Sorry

Regret is what Johnny Howard said he felt for the stolen generations and other crimes against aborigines by the white fellas.

Except he didn’t feel it. Regret is a belief not an emotion. The only emotion Johnny felt was anger at being forced to say he had regret. And happiness that he wasn’t forced into offering an apology.

An ‘apology’ is a belief emanating from the super ego whereas a ‘sorry’ is an emotion coming from the id.

Kevin Rudd said sorry to the aborigines on behalf of all Australians but that too was false. ‘Sorry’ is a personal emotion and you can only say sorry on your own behalf. You don’t know how others truly feel.

Empathy is an emotion as well; it’s feeling how another is feeling. Whereas sympathy is the ‘belief’ analogue of this.

You could argue that Kevin was displaying empathy when he said sorry on behalf of all Australian. Wrong answer. He could only have sympathy when he apologised on behalf of all Australians.

And here’s why. Firstly, on this subject, empathy would be reserved for the victims. Secondly, empathy requires one-on-one interactions and Kevin hasn’t met all Australians. Thirdly, a good slab of Australians didn’t feel the need for an apology or a sorry. Fourthly, Kevin is so egocentric that he likely incapable of empathy.

Footnote: it’s just possible that the ‘sorry’ should come from the head of state rather than the PM since she supposedly represents us all, as well as the poms that did all the original damage. She could say sorry on her own behalf and apologize on everyone else’s.

Disappointment

Disappointment is an emotion that emanates from the id.

It’s an attempt by the id to get the ego to atone for failure.

The super ego will either agree or disagree, and the subject will either withdraw or go another round.

Grief

In an argument if one party points out that the other party is in the wrong then even if they are right, especially if they are right, they might have won the argument but lost any chance of resolution.

General practioner

Your local GP is informed and not educated.

They are also fantastic dogs, in the Pavlovian sense.

They know that their income is directly related to short appointments and the random prescription of drugs.

Misdiagnoses simply increase their income due to repeat appointments.

Someone must have once suggested that if there are ten possible causes of a set of symptoms it might be more efficient to treat all of them in a linear fashion until one works. Or not.

Still, I generally bail them up and ask for their chain of deduction. Whereupon it all degrades into a pissing competition with no prize.

Hipster

Looks like I was thirty years too early with the hipster look.

Science

A science degree is an odd beast.

An undergraduate degree simply provides one with a lot of information but it does not make one a scientist.

For that a research degree is needed.

Even with a research degree there are many that can only call themselves scientist in a small silo of activity.

The better scientists can apply themselves in many fields.

Unlike undergraduate degrees, post graduate degrees aren’t graded. You either get one or you don’t.

They badly need grading.

Hammock

This is me just before the war. I had just come back from traveling after my third year of Uni.

I had been talked into doing an honors year of research in my science degree and I was reading my very first academic paper as prep work.

I did not understand a single word of it. And yet I wasn’t worried in my usual ‘she’ll be right’ approach. I should have been.

Homework

Here’s a sample of my homework quiz from the TOIP course.

Flabbergasted

Now I have seen it all: plain clothes coppers on bicycles without helmets, making an arrest (the girl) just outside the projects.

Lest we forget

Age shall weary them and the years shall condemn.

Rod at twenty and forty seven…

Rhodos

Time to think unimpeded: it’s so rare. No work. No phones. No anything.

I once spent a whole winter camping on a beach in Rhodes.

Together with these blokes we built a shack out of beach debris and scrounged a living.

A lot of time doing nothing but thinking and talking shit.

Twilight zone

Just recently I have had a spate of weird coincidences.

I write, say or think something and then I have been seeing or hearing the same.

Just then I wrote ‘Tuscon’ and the guy next to me in the cafe started taking about buying a house there.

One of these I can handle but about 5 in a month is weird.

CIA

This is me with a senior CIA operative in a small pub in the middle of Death Valley.

They were doing something dodgy out there. Lots of trucks and satellite dishes etc.

We, me and my brother, just wandered in.

I have had good luck with this mob. I have partied with them in Tucson and San Jose as well. No photos those times.

In the US I tend to attract spy agencies and trust funders. Go figure.

Bond

During my student days I had a bad habit of painting the walls of the terrace houses that I variably lived in.

It meant I had to skip out before there was a general exodus and the return of the bond became an issue.

Iron ore

Ah the herald again…

Let me point out the ways:

1. Nothing astounding about 12%. it will drop a lot more than that as China cools down and their efforts to get alternative supplies kick in
2. ‘Could’ isn’t ‘will’
3. By ‘budget’ they mean federal government tax income. The govt doesn’t pay tax so income and revenue mean the same thing to them. The ‘budget’ is what they intend to spend and is mostly unrelated to what they earn.
4. It’s possible that ‘experts said’ but they tend to lack that sort of harmony. Nuh, I reckon it was just one and it wasn’t an expert
5. ‘As much as’… that’s zero to $4b. A bit of wriggle room there.
6. I am sure the $4b was pulled out of someone’s arse.

And that’s just the first sentence. And it took two of them to fuck it up so much.

Games

I don’t why but I have always hated backgammon.

Honey

Apropos of fuck all, except that I am sitting here with a bowl of yoghurt, fresh walnuts and Cretan honey.

I once worked on Crete for a while, in a little village, loading fruit trucks from dawn through to lunch time.

We would drive little utes up into the mountains to get tomatoes, eggplants and cucumbers off the peasant farmers and then, back at the village, load them onto a semi-trailer heading off to Northern Europe.

After lunch I would wander off with the boys, older men mostly, to play cards (for money), drink ouzo and coffee.

By about dinner time we were all fucked.

Every night I was taken back to someone’s house or farm for dinner. I was the get-out-of-jail card for the boys! ‘Skippy’ was popular with the wives.

Then, on my motor scooter, I would zig zag back to my one room apartment by the sea.

My main legacy from this period is a passing knowledge of the Cretan version of the Greek language and an addiction for Cretan honey and baklava. Nothing else comes close.

Hypocrisy Index

Yeah baby, as I said before the Hypocrisy Index is correlated strongly to GDP per capita and even more strongly to the spread in wealth within a country.

In poor countries you have straight-out illegal corruption. In rich countries you have legalised corruption, aka hypocrisy.

For example, in Australia we have two major supermarket chains, two political parties and four banks and a number of other segments with limited numbers of key players. We have allowed sole import distributors to gouge us for decades. And why?

Because we have legalised corruption. The entrenched players simply garner influence through a zillion means (lobbying, brown paper bags, legislation, marketing, etc) and get our legislators to create barriers to competition on the basis of all sorts of hypocrisy.

For example, health and safety concerns, environmental concerns, Australian standards, Australian jobs, straight out marketing bullshit via tabloid media, you name it. And we certainly don’t have anti-trust in our constitution…the only thing we trust in is hope, luck, kangaroos, emus and the Queen, maybe God and the odd trout.

Transparency is very opaque and hypocrisy reigns. No wonder the poor buggers on the boats think this is an asylum.

Gym

[Scene] my gym.

This girl spent five minutes weighing herself.

One foot. Two feet. Jump. Repeat.

No matter what she did it came back the same. 72kg.

As they say, a good sign of madness in a person is that they keep asking the same question hoping for a different answer.

God’s children

One doesn’t control one’s emotions, one controls one’s reaction to them.

Do they rule you or do you rule them?

It is a mistake to believe that someone in control of their reactions to their own emotions doesn’t feel the emotions as strongly as those without said control.

What they don’t feel is all the secondary emotions such as shame, fear, anxiety etc.

The Hillsong Church

I have noticed that there is a correlation between a harmonic belief in God and cellulite in young women.

Cause & effect, non-causal correlation or sheer coincidence?

Personally I think it is a shit diet of junk food, a certain lack of rigorous thinking, an inability to control their diet, a lack of exercise, a Gen Y’ish lack of shame, and an environment where blokes don’t get much so they can’t get too picky.

Basically the girls aren’t at an evolutionary disadvantage so long as they are all the same and the blokes don’t leave the cult.

And who said God doesn’t have a sense of humour?

Instincts

It is a mistake to confuse empathy for love.

Easy to do because they are both emotions originating in the id.

One is a feeling of what the other person feels, instinctively. The purpose is to provide society with healers.

The other is instinctively feeling good because of the presence of the other. The purpose is to reproduce.

See that’s different!

Empathy requires a belief in the status quo in order to get the required intuitive reaction to negative change. Empathetic people do not like change.

Model idea

It appears that I have a working model for the brain. It’s probably all wrong but I like it. In any case all other models don’t seem to have much efficacy whereas mine does, for me.

My guess is that:

1. Layers of hypotheses don’t sit well with complex systems.

2. It’s difficult for a PC or a brain to understand how it (itself) works in a cognizant manner. We might be breaking the laws of thermodynamics here, or up against Schrödinger’s pussy again, or similar (in Hertz speak).

3. The complex physical structure of the brain might be leading the researchers astray. Besides the academics all have brain damage, the poor little dears; it’s called Silo Thinking Syndrome. They are all practised at one thing and unaware that they are useless at anything else. Unravelling the brain is a job for polymaths….who?

4. Who gives a shit anyway?

Linear

Query…after writing this blog for a almost a year have my thoughts become linear?

Not really, but I have developed a much more rigorous linear co-processor that turns my abstract thoughts into linear equivalents for the purposes of written translation.

And this in turn has enabled two unexpected outcomes:

1. I see new ‘solutions’ that I would not have otherwise seen. Linear ones. Directly.

2. I am able to communicate my position in ‘real time’. This because only the linear position seems to be understood. This has helped me not be the helpless abstract victim of the quagmire of brains not thus. That is, I win a lot more arguments and I assert my position more readily.

Convicts

Cafe incident…

“Can I steal this chair?”

Only in a former penal colony would this be considered normal.

TOIP

I have just sat through my first Traffic Offenders I(?) Program; not sure what the I is for.

We all know there is a whole industry built around government sanctioned gambling. Well that is also true of traffic offences now.

Apart from the fines, which are getting bigger (yeah they’re getting bigger) there is a host of service providers sucking off the tit, like the TOIP course. It cost nothing to produce but lots to attend! 50 people by $200 = $10k for last night’s effort. It’s like being robbed all over again.

Then you have the police, courts, lawyers, etc – it’s a full-on industry. Once you get an industry surrounding some odd bit of government legislated monopoly or artefact its bloody hard to remove it.

In the case of driving offences no one really wants to solve the problems because it’s far too lucrative pretending to do something.

And there is no fear that their measures might actually work – the increasing numbers of drivers and journeys ensure the accidents and fines keep rolling in. Besides, they keep turning minor offences into major ones, and previously non-offences into offences.

Unlike the gambling industry these guys also have the high-ground moral argument to run. Last night they even tried to get me to feel sorry for the police and the traumatic stress they get in their job. Really!

The course itself was woeful. The actual presenter didn’t show; she is apparently a victim of a car accident with head injuries etc. So part 1 on head injuries was given, by proxy, by the PCYC boss who didn’t know anything, and part 2 on police was given by a 19 year old Gen Y retard. Sorry for the language, but she was so bad she should have been too ashamed to speak in public. Giggling, inappropriate jokes, poor grasp of subject matter, no apparent genuine interest in the course, etc. Unfortunately Gen Y’s feel no shame.

There was about 50 working class blokes and 4 women….that’s a stat! The four women were all furiously taking notes. Not one bloke was except a couple of Asians who were happily taking phone snaps of each powerpoint slide.

The rest of the blokes, including me, were relying on their great memory and Google to complete the homework quiz. In truth none of them wanted to look girly.

I befriended two, Norm and Mick, and we went to the pub after for a beer primarily to co-join in our ‘homework’ efforts; yes, we get questionnaires which we have to fill in. We just had one beer though, since we had just sat through the course and we are right on top of responsible driving.

Norm and Mick have learned to suck it all up. They don’t believe a word anyone says. They can see right through the bullshit. They know they have no choice. Sad really.

Flying

Mum asked me if I am worried about flying into China next week.

What?

In the context of some plane going missing etc etc.

Well, I say, my odds have just improved. No probs.

Who woulda guessed?

Wide boy is a British term for a man who lives by his wits, wheeling and dealing.

So, when being associated with a certain Rake I get this; “He is a Sydney wideboy. Loves his league, women and pretends a type of amorality when what he really hates is ‘can’t’ (as in a dislike of hypocrisy and dogma). There are some similarities.”

As much as I have, in the past, hated hypocrisy (except my own of course) I have learned to live with it, almost contentedly. This is important since it appears to be the de facto currency of the new millennia.

Bugger the Big Mac index; bring on the Hypocrisy Index. Hypocrisy is correlated strongly to GDP per capita and even more strongly to the gap in GDP per capita within a country.

It’s almost as if human nature automatically turns to hypocrisy as the motivating force to unequally divide up the spoils of unnecessary wealth.

And getting in the way of human nature is almost as dangerous as getting between an academic and a research dollar.

Case-Study; Anxiety

Anxiety is an emotion originating in the id. It’s a normal emotion designed to get one aware of impending danger.

Impending danger is sensory input that is funnelled by the ego into the id.

The id then processes the inputs and immediately sends the alert back to the id via the emotion of anxiety. Red alert.

Now occasionally for some people the id fucks up and keeps a person in a constant anxious state for minimal input.

This is where the super-ego steps in and tries to wade in with alternative beliefs (i.e. its all OK). The super-ego tries to wrest control of the ego from the id.

These beliefs can be constructed solely within a person’s mind, or learnt through external input, e.g. therapy.

The role of the beliefs is to help the ego either actively over-ride the id on an ongoing basis or, even better still, re-program the relevant part of the id.

For some poor souls the id doesn’t just control the ego, it even gets to control the super-ego. In these cases the beliefs are aligned with the emotions of anxiety and it is doubly harder to cure the person of their anxiety.

The super-ego may try to discredit the id during sleep time by producing such stupidly anxious dreams that the ego finally starts to doubt the flight or fight messages it is getting form the id.

I suspect that the cause of ‘errors’ in the id that lead to, say, anxiety are just that, digital bits that have been scrambled accidentally. For example, by a period of extended non-sleep where the nightly data re-fresh of the memory just did not occur; you might think this is most likely to happen in a period of genuine anxiety and hence why anxiety is a common problem. These errors can even be passed on to subsequent generations.

Knowing this, what is the best solution…?

1. Dream therapy might be a good one where we give people hallucinogenics while they sleep to maximise the probability of the id being discredited by the ego as the super-ego makes up even weirder dreams.

2. ‘Anxiety’ therapy might also be a good approach. This could be constant simulation of very frightening circumstances in say an Imax theatre, followed by no harmful physical impact. Again the idea is to discredit the messages coming from the id in the eyes of the ego.

But both of these rely on ‘beliefs’ trumping ’emotions’ in the ego. But how to re-program the id so the shitty emotions, the errors in the great flowchart, are removed?

I can’t answer this for now since I need to ponder how the ego sometimes gets to re-program errors in the id. Noting it can also re-program errors in the super-ego, or beliefs, as well.

Earrings continued

Lola has decided that the best ‘product’ to sell, in the interests of a sales and marketing campaign for the acquisition of holes in her ears, is the very model of the very old fashioned model child.

An alien has inhabited my daughter. Cleaning, cooking, gardening, no whining, requests for more jobs, and always pleasant. This for three hours now.

She tells me she is going to keep it up until she gets her ears pierced. She isn’t quite there yet…. even after watching Groundhog Day last night.

But to be honest this model child is driving me crazy.

Rolls

My next most likely car project is as below…

Citroen

My ideal car, and I may get around to this, is a Citroen Traction Avant.

But with the engine and drivetrain replaced with modern bits and the addition of power steering and airco.

Correlation

I find that people who have troubles apologising also have troubles accepting the apologies of others.

Fiction

Quite appropriate that the Google android onboard dictionary doesn’t recognize ‘spoilt’.

No probs with ‘WTF’ though.

Yup

Careful what you wish for…. episode 3 of the sales campaign for earrings.

Earrings

Lola asked me for the thousandth time if she can have earrings.

My ‘no’ was followed by the usual pointless negotiations.

I suggested that she stop negotiating and start developing the product first.

Then I said she needs to come up with a sales and marketing strategy that involved getting other adults to work on me

She is onto it.

The best way to teach kids is when it matters to them. The antithesis of school.

Blokes

My mate, who does mixed martial arts at the place next to my weights gym, just accused me of having ‘play’ muscles.

I counter claimed that he therefore must have a ‘real’ gut.

1-0 to the goodies.

BMW

I just sold my M5.

What’s the point of having a car that can do 300 km/h when 50 km/h is vmax on a good day?

Sydney on a Saturday…. you’d have to be lobotomized to drive around here, happily

Porsche

“I like that red Ferrari”

“That’s a Porsche”

“Whatever. All cars without rooves look the same”

Not my daughter.

Eggs, miss

I just spent four minutes watching eggs boil.

To avoid the boredom I penned this entry.

Where possible, our precious time on this earth needs to be well considered.

Bentley

I just saw my old boss from my first startup driving a big black, new and shiny, Bentley.

Half a million bucks worth.

This from the man who once told me that ‘money is just a badge of honor’.

I guess you can only wear so many badges.

Proxy not

My golden rule of negotiating is to only negotiate with the person that has the authority to execute the agreed contract.

I tell all puffed-up proxies to fuck off. Nicely or otherwise.

Manyana

Advice to women trying to catch a bloke.

We men are incredibly (double that) astute bird watchers.

We can spot a woman that exercises, and one that doesn’t, at 100 paces at sunset with a bag over our heads.

There is a bias against shacking up with the type that doesn’t exercise, even in their teens, because we know what’s coming.

I am not sure how big or prevalent the bias is, but it does exist.

And before the sky rains down on my head, yes I know there are double standards at play here.

I am not condoning this, just observing.
Or just saying, as they say now.