Monthly Archives: August 2016

R.IP.

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Recent figures from IP Australia show that 70 per cent of local intellectual property protection filings in Australia come from SMEs.

This was then commented upon:

“It’s a sobering indication that start-up companies are failing to get on the front foot early enough to lock down their most valuable asset – their IP. Given the level of innovation in Australia, we would expect to see a higher proportion of IP filings by our innovators in smaller and start-up businesses, rather than the current dominance by established SMEs.”

Geez that confused me until I realised that the author was distinguishing between startups and SMEs in Australia; not something that I do. 

For mine, our startups are just unprofitable SMEs.

In any case there’s no inventions in our startups so why would they file patents?

All inventions are innovative, but very few innovations are inventive. Doo dah…

As for trademarks, copyright and registered designs, well the internet has killed them and the internet startups boys are the ones actually doing the killing.

Armageddon

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Article 2; a totally incomprehensible rant by two American academics on the Australian government’s so-called innovation policy .

Basic premise; innovation is bad because (a) it has wreaked havoc on all the good old ways of doing things, (b) governments should focus on meat and veg issues liked health and education, (c) it only benefits the few, and (d) although it had brought us productivity gains, it will also bring us Armageddon.

They seemed not to have noticed that the government’s innovation policy is just an advertising campaign and that the innovation is restricted to the new idea of promoting an innovation policy where the innovation is just the promotion itself. Quite innovative!

I wonder if the deluded professors, if so informed, would be outraged by the empty innovation policy? I guess so; their own thesis is happily devoid of logic. But it obviously keeps them fed.

Serpent

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Stuck in flying death machine once again, with nowt to read except the Saturday Paper. On a Sunday.

Article one is a beauty. Ostensibly it’s an obituary on the still living Roger Neave, prompted by his concern for his legacy. Never heard of him before.

It’s an interesting read, both for the historical facts and the semi-delusional interpretations. 

Subject matter; the historical rise of neoliberalism in Australia and elsewhere. Greed has trumped all; sensing change in the seventies, the greedy got organised and took over the wheels of government.

Their primary goals were twofold; one, to open up trade and remove protectionism in order to increase overall consumerism, and, two, to create a trickle-up effect by transferring wealth into selective private hands through the public purse and control of policy.

My suspicion is that they don’t mind the idea of an underclass either.

And it worked a treat! But now the party’s over.

Climate change, technology driven unemployment, debt driven growth; these are all fundamental issues that by themselves will screw the current status quo.

But there’s a darker serpent lurking; the motivator of all this is fear-driven greed which has worked to undermine our sense of communal kin-ship.

I’m not saying it can’t be reversed. I’m just not seeing any signs that anyone’s trying to figure out how to do so.

Wandering

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I won’t name her, but she’s a certified fruit loop that pretends to be a writer and a journalist.

But there’s no point in writing, absent material worth reading, aka lipsticking the pig.

Today’s example came to me through circumstances unusual in the extreme. Stuck somewhere in the hell that is eastern Melbourne, waiting for my nephew to finish a job, the Weekend Australian is my only saviour from the LCD. Paradox alert…

Thesis; women can’t just wander around cities for meditational or artistic temperament purposes because men look at them all the time, spoiling the Zen. Indeed male partners don’t let them anyway. But she can now because she’s old and ugly and that’s a good thing. True freedom.

As I said, fruit loop. Ignoring the fact that her thesis contradicts itself 10x in one page, she seems not to understand that to be observed one must care. It takes two.

Yep

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Where there’s a market need the product will follow…

It’s no surprise that the world’s first driverless taxis are in the city with the world’s worst taxi drivers (after Sydney that is).

They don’t drive that badly but the Singapore taxi drivers have no peripheral vision making them incapable of picking up passengers anywhere but the rank.

Technology to the rescue.

Tinsel

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The good thing about a blog is that you can write about some thought that is endlessly circling around your head; one that you know is a demon that just confuses and confounds. Once crystallised in writing, the absurdity often become apparent and the demon exorcised.

Bonkers

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I am forever amazed at the will power of parents that spend their weekends ferrying the kids around from one sporting event to another. In Sydney traffic, no less. It’s a formula for mental illness.

I met one today, an Uber driver. He works as a chef and Ubers on the side for extra cash. And the weekends are otherwise taken up with the free Ubering of his four kids to swimming, nippers, surfing, soccer, ballet, and a couple of others I can’t recall.

He admitted that he lives in a state of absolute tiredness and boredom on weekends (since only soccer and surfing hold any interest for him).

I queried the motivation behind the free Ubering of the kids.

After a little dialog, and he was a very chatty and nice fellow, we discovered that his supposed motivation was that his father hadn’t spent much time with him as a kid, and he wished that he had.

I countered that my dad hadn’t spent much time with me either and it had never occurred to me to (a) wish that he had, and (b) wreak revenge upon my own child henceforth.

The excuse, the one about his father, seemed a little canned to be honest. Well practised, if you like.

I prefer to believe that he and his wife simply want to keep up with all the other mad parents that measure their worth through association with, and mimicking of the mad parents of their kid’s friends.

I am totally convinced that the whole driving/parent/mortgage belt of Sydney is completely bonkers.

Nice people almost to a fault and yet they seem to hate themselves in a very passive aggressive fashion.

Collectively, it’s as if they are racing towards some clearly defined anti-Buddhist state of communion.

But I don’t think that a single one of them truly believes there is any alternative. I don’t know why they travel overseas if they don’t learn anything from dropping into other cultures.

Maybe it’s all those vaccinations that have done certain parts of their brains in. There has to be an explanation.

Lord Roberts

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Stream of consciousness…

6 beers in. Various constituents.

Sitting in a cafe in Stanley St by myself having a double mac, an Italian biscuit, listening to Mr Bojangles…

The incredible joy of being free and yet voluntarily engaged; it’s as good as it gets.

Love you.

People & Opinions

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I’ve been accused of being fickle with my opinions and even (gasp) holding more than one conflicting position on a subject at one time.

I explained to my adversary that the most efficient way to improve one’s understanding of a subject is to have other people push back against your half-arsed assertions.

The more the merrier; people and opinions.

It seems to work, doesn’t it?

Viagra

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The Voynich Manuscript is a book written in Europe in the early 15th century containing text and images that have yet to be deciphered, despite many efforts.

In fact they can’t even figure out what the subject matter is.

The first section is all about herbs. The second section is astronomical with many nude woman. The third is biological, again with many nude women. The next is cosmological and contains a map or diagram, with nine ‘islands’ or ‘rosettes’ connected by’causeways’ and containing castles, as well as what might be a volcano. The final two sections are about pharmaceuticals and recipes.

My guess; it’s all about medieval Viagra and a little Kama Sutra, written in code so as to avoid condemnation and garroting by the church.

It’s the volcano that clinches it.

Centrality

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Wiki says that altruism is acting out of concern for the welfare of other people. It is derived from the French word autrui, simply meaning “other people”. Some folks have expanded the definition to include greyhounds, carrots and the odd rock.

It was put to me that another way of defining altruism is acting as if the self isn’t the centre of every concern.

In order to consider these two definitions I have reverted to the very useful Venn Diagram approach, despite reproach.

Imagine if you will (well you don’t have to; I have drawn it below) two circles in a Venn Diagram with one circle representing the concern for oneself (red) and the other, the concern for others (black).

Under this vision, Altruism is represented by the area of intersect of both circles.

No altruism; no intersect.

A little altruism and you’re amongst the majority, but with varying levels of overlap.

100% altruism just implies that someone has just as much concern for others as they do for themselves.

Someone that acts solely in the interests of others is a martyr or completely mad; no altruism there.

One Nation below is egoism. The opposite is the Martyr. True altruism is Ghandi where the centre of concern is equally the self and others.

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Woes

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Possibly the least true statement that I’ve ever read.

Apart from Australia’s new-found tactic of letting the Kiwis run straight through the middle, for a decade now the All-Blacks have been scoring exactly the same try out wide that relies on the fact that Australia’s backs slide like turtles in defence.

Charity

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Try and find the subset of your feelings and truths that are shared with those of one other person.

At any moment there will only be a few pixels in the eye of the Venn diagram.

Now try that exercise simultaneously for all 8 billion people.

Possibly the only truth that they will all agree with is that there isn’t any universally shared truths or feelings.

But their feelings on the subject may vary.

So, um, yes; if you’re concerned with the welfare of others then you have a problem.

Having different feelings and truths, their concept of their own welfare will invariably differ to that which is in your head.

Which is why altruism, the concern for the welfare of others, should be treated as a wobbly vibe of the thing, and not some absolute or ideal state of being.

Unless of course the altruism is actually projected at yourself but reflected off the rest of them. 

Here all the feelings and thoughts are in the eye of the Venn and welfare works a treat.

However, arguably this is just veiled egoism otherwise known as charity. Self interest is the foundation of morality.

But that’s just my truth and feelings on the matter.

Reductio ad Absurdum

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​According to the theorists ideal altruism doesn’t exist. 

There’s genetic altruism, feelings that lead to favours exchanged between kin, and reciprocal altruism,  thoughts that lead to favours exchanged between non-kin, but no ideal altruism.

Laughingly, the development of reciprocal altruism was powered by the artificial concept of expanding who was kin. Think religions and countries and you get the idea.

Ideal altruism is just a stretch target used by those attempting to increase the reach of reciprocal altruism, the basis of modern society.

Ever heard of Zeno’s Paradox? You can get closer but there ain’t ever no cigar.

There’s no way the peoples of this planet will ever consider everyone else as kin. Unless of course we get attacked by some nasty aliens.

Banana Study

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A woman has been banned from attending AFL matches for life because she threw a banana at an aboriginal player.

The ban is for the racial implications of her effort. 

Her dad says she was just frustrated because her team was losing. 

I’ve never seen anyone take a banana to the footy so this excuse seems lame; there’s a good chance it was pre-meditated.

Even if not, why would anyone think it’s ok to throw anything at a player? 

Ban her. And charge her for attempted grevious bodily harm. Then make her take part in some academic study on fuckwitidness, anger and racism.

It’d be fascinating to see what’s flipping around her brain, and why.

PS this was a Port Adelaide fanatic, watching her team lose, quite predictably, to Adelaide. The Goodes incident was by a Collingwood fan. 

Query; is there something wrong with people that associate with footy teams with magpies as their animal mascot?

It’s a mystery that sort of makes sense but I don’t know why.

Inboxed

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I got to say this…

For productivity reasons I have just switched to Inbox by Google and, hence, away from Gmail.

This move requires the abandonment of ‘tasks’ and the adoption of ‘reminders’. Which is a good thing in many ways.

It is also the first step away from an email-centric work practice. Just the other day I was being lectured on the power of ‘zero email’ only to discover that email is well on it’s way to being just another way to receive messages.

In essence, once they are done (and in Google’s weird way, they will do it over some time), there will be a message/action-reminder centre with a coarse sense of time (days) which is the Inbox, a calendar showing actions-reminders with a highly resolved time frame, and eventually they will also need a ‘Project’ view (it will develop out of Keep) which allows the user to aggregate actions as part of larger projects, again with a coarse sense of time.

Messages will all be treated the same, no matter where they come from – email, SMS, any messenger app, or carrier pigeons.

Reminders-actions are created directly from a message or as added to either the Calendar or yet-to-be-created Project view; these reminders will show in all three views.

Back to the present; just figuring out how to get the Chrome version of Google Calendar to display ‘reminders’ took me half an hour of research, trawling through forums.

And fuck me, wasn’t the switcheroo button buried in the least obvious place known to mankind….

Those software engineering millennials, I wouldn’t let them anywhere near a UI.

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Jones’s Troops

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Circumstances variably labelled as a puncture, unexpected rain and some good advice, resulted in me taking my bike on a train for the first time ever.

Between Central and Redfern the old biddy opposite me snarled;

“Are you allowed to bring those on a train?”

“Dunno luv, whadyareckon?’

Silence. Gaze averted; suddenly she found the rail map very interesting.

It just goes to show there’s no upside in proffering unsolicited opinions, even if they’re posed as questions.

Five BHAGs you never knew you needed

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Our gub’ment, of the feral variety, has put up some BHAG grants for SMEs to tackle five major issues, selected after late-beer interrogation of senators of the National Party and One Nation flavours.

Why five? Well it’s the current magic number in Cnbra. I think the pollsters have decided that ten is too hard for your average Australian to get its head around. I suspect the right hand is used to count the fingers on the left and is thus unavailable for adding to the total.

To the glorious challenges themselves;

On-the-spot technology for measuring pyrethroid surface residue. This means they want to measure pesticide residues on crops without lab assistants, i.e. put more scientist out of work. The obvious solution is to train all those recently unemployed greyhounds to do a lick test. The challenge is to have the fuckers out and about without their muzzles.

Tracking the effect and value of information products. Quite obscure this one. I suspect it’s a plea for someone to solve the Census problem. That is, how to collect all the information they ever wanted on the subject of the discrete us’s without us knowing or minding. And the answer, of course, is to buy it off Google and Facebook.

Digitally enabled community engagement in policy and programme design. A reality TV show set in the Australian Parliament where the viewers get to vote the morons out of the house, one by one. When there’s a single productive winner, we get to fill the house up again with an election. And do it all over again, ad nauseum.

Improve transparency and reliability of water market information. Farmers know how to surreptitiously use pumps so there’s a big gap between how much water there’s supposed to be in our rivers and dams and what’s actually in them. There isn’t actually a solution to this problem but, hey, they never said the information had to be accurate, just transparent and reliable, so they may as well just publish the reliably shit info that they already have in an app.

Sharing information nationally to ensure child safety. The easiest of the lot; we just put prisoner tracking devices on all priests and private school teachers, and publish the data on a website and in an app, in real time. Sort of the like the rain radar site, only the contour maps are the real-time and local risks of your kids getting molested.

Royal Commission Anyone?

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As reported previously, I made an ill-advised attempt to dial into the Olympics broadcast only to be defeated by the feathers disguising the absent meat.

The primary culprit was the endless advertising of banal products targeted at a denominator so low, no body knows.

One such alliterated effort was by the NAB, insinuating their ‘backing’ of a start-up that was developing a bicycle light.

Coincidentally I have such a project underway; 4 engineering students from the UTS are currently beavering away at a spec which can be found buried in this blog.

I can assure you that, if successful, the NAB and it’s compatriots would not give any subsequent company a single cent of risk capital unless personal guarantees were given that would completely cover all subsequent losses.

Fools on both sides the equations, right there. The startup for risking fully owned assets on a speculative business. And the bank for exposing themselves to accusations of rape and pillage.

Investments in risk requires deep knowledge, apprenticeship and experience, something that our banks probably never had.

Promoting their capability in the space to an audience that hardly cares, and that hates them with a passion, for no possible gain just beggars belief.

I can only sigh.

As per below, it can be seen that the NAB simply provided banking services to the company. Of course, if they’d gone with the CBA, Westpac or ANZ for their banking services, they’d have have been totally fooked.

As an aside, I happen to know the bike light company’s CEO. They weren’t exactly a start-up. They were a well established industrial design contracting firm that after 25 years of ripping off the dreamers finally worked up the courage to do their own product, Knog.

Their products have some good points but brightness is not one of them, nor security. It’s an odd niche that buys their products, probably the same one that watches all those NAB ads and buys expensive pushies, only to leave them to rot in the garage.

DNR

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Resulting from cooperation with the exception to the CNN rule, as it applies to patent attorneys, I’ve decided to rewrite it such that all the ‘fails’ fall into the DNR rule; dickheads, nuggets and retards.

KMT

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One very odd finding in Sydney’s Chinatown.

A KMT building, not only dating from 1921, but still going!

Why on earth did the KMT set up a building in Sydney just a year after their reformation and well before they got funding from the Soviets?

Administrative Blues

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I’d hate to be in the public service these days. Well I always would have, but that’s beside the point of this narrative.

They, the bureaucrats, have been nastily sandwiched between rampant control by politicians and the fast-moving technology era.

Rabbits in the headlights with no wherewithal to flee or fight. It’s an adrenaline free zone sans muscle tone.

And for that we’re all paying the price. And will continue to do so.

A strong state needs the adminstration to be an opposing power to the politicians and the legal profession. It’s the trilogy that we lack.

Eventually it will bite us in the bum, probably in the upcoming economic downturn when our resources parachute will fail to open 

One novel solution; we nationalise all those corporate oligarchies, then in each sector aggregate them into single bureaucracies, and put them in charge.

The only thing that would change is the distribution of the profits. Oh, and they’ll tell our fuckwit politicians where to get off.

Only joking…

A more practical solution is not to nationalise but to corporatise the whole bureaucracy.

The eternal problem, the one that the Royal Commission into banks will face, is how to get corporates to serve all of society rather than just those that can afford their shares.

U2T

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Of late I’ve seen a marked increase in emails from Chinese manufacturers looking for B2B customers.

They’re all using industry specific email addresses, so it’s not outright spam.

But it’s a sure sign that they’re running out of customers for all that excess capacity of commodity products.

The world’s cheapest finance scheme is running out of investors, us.

The adjustment is not going to be pretty.

(The photo’s Korean just to confuse you. They’re not doing much better in fact. That’s the trouble when you remove systems, namely business exposure to P&L, that quickly correct faults in business strategies).

Losing Grip

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Have you tuned into the Olympics on channel 7?

In decreasing order of airtime you will see and hear advertisements, background stories, studio commentary, field commentary and, finally, actual Olympic events.

Which makes me wonder why Channel 7 spent so much money acquiring the rights in the first place?

They could do all of the same, sans the events, and I’m guessing no one would notice.

It’s sort of like anti-reality TV. They spend all their time analysing, discussing and backgrounding something which is real, without actually showing the real thing.

Whereas in genuine Reality TV they do the same but there’s nothing real that they don’t have to show. And, perversely, they do show a fair bit of it anyway.

It’s all quite confusing. 

Why do people tune in to view something that they hardly see and which they think they care for, when they obviously don’t?

I can only assume that their presumed interest is due to all that advertising which ironically is the very instrument that prevents them from seeing it.

Somewhere behind all this is the addictive ‘loser’ mentality that is drummed into folks by advertising.

It’s the misleading and deceptive conduct of advertising that first creates a deep feeling of unworthiness which can be temporarily relieved by one form of consumption or another.

I call this the loser mentality because: 

(1) Studies have shown that, when exposed to gambling systems with no inherent losses (no ‘house’ fees), gamblers lose interest because the regressive mean results in them having no long-term losses, and therefore,

(2) It’s the pain of losing that is so addictive to gamblers, and people in general when this hypothesis is expanded to other activities.

My view is that a sense of reality is just one of the collateral losses caused by the exploitation of the loser mentality.

“Trees, Miss, big fuckers!”

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You seriously have to think that the people at Qantas are morons. Or they think that we are.

For a flight between Brisbane and Sydney they claim that I can pay them $1.04 to be carbon neutral.

Say there are 200 people on the flight, that’s $208.

In Australia I am guessing you could plant a couple of trees with that, by the time you factor in land costs, labour, materials, licenses, OH&S, accounting services, legal costs, carbon consultants, certification, etc etc.

Those two trees, over their expected life, are supposedly going to capture enough carbon dioxide to offset that emitted by your one and a half hour flight.

That is, you create the carbon dioxide now and in two hundred year’s time the trees have captured it all back. That is, until they die and release it all back into the atmosphere.

The missing bit of logic here is that we need emissions to drop right now, in the next ten years.

They should be planting enough trees to capture all that carbon dioxide back in this calendar year. Then the offset cost would be around $200 per passenger. 

That is, the cost of the fare; don’t fly in fact!

My guess is that Qantas’s customers wouldn’t want to know this; they would prefer to feel as though they are doing the right thing but then to pay the minimum cost to do so.

And right there is the issue we face. Even the concerned folk, the one’s that want to preserve the conditions on this planet that make our existence viable, would prefer that someone else is inconvenienced by the effort to do so.

STEM

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Is mathematics a science?

I asked myself that question since various self-serving academic types are promoting STEM education, implying that science and maths are divisible.

And yet mathematics departments are almost always nestled in the local science faculties.

Historically, scienctists have used maths as a tool by which to help model the natural world. Any theory, enshrined in maths and accepted as true, was ultimately expected to be shown by new data to be false, or a limiting case of a more general theory.

And mathematicians in the past were intent on increasing the number of ways in which equations could be used to explain puzzles that could formulated in a numerical format, thereby expanding the number of weapons in the mathematical toolbox.

But of late, many scientists have turned to invention, using maths as an engineer would; not to test models but to help instruct efficient work output.

Mathematicians themselves have largely become applied, variably using maths. But rarely for expanding their field in a conceptual fashion.

I would therefore conclude that, on average, the modern scientist, mathematician and engineer differ only in their intent, but not their practice.

Checksum

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The Turing Test is a test for intelligence in a computer, requiring that a human being should be unable to distinguish the machine from another human being by using the replies to questions put to both.

But consider this, what do you call a human being that fails the Turing Test?

The Anti-Turing Test is a test for intelligence in a human being, requiring that another human being should be unable to distinguish the human being from a machine by using the replies to questions put to both.

We’ve all met one or two people that would fail this test, right?

As I’ve said before, being human isn’t just about being intelligent.

You have to add the concepts of sentience and consciousness. But the ‘fails’ would pass these tests too.

What they lack is:

(1) Perception as to how others perceive them, which means they are crap at gathering data, and

(2) An inability to deviate from what appears to be a completely logical approach to considering a matter.

Which is a double whammy when you think about it. Solving problems solely in a logical fashion, based on a limited data set; now that’s a formula for disaster.

Indeed, back in the sabre tooth tiger days, this lot never even got to breed. It’s only latterly that they’ve begin to multiply.

Human intelligence is based on an innate awareness that the data set is just about always flawed.

Decisions and solutions are usually derived from precedents using our as-yet barely understood bio-organic database.

And I suspect that logic is just used as a checksum.

Jamivern

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I haven’t read up on this but I’m suspecting that running your mammals at a constant temperature allows for more efficient chemistry.

Most chemical reactions are hugely impacted by temperature, in terms of efficiency. Arrhenius and all that.

So those reptiles must be all over the place with respect to their chemicals. In order to deal with this they must be simple and robust creatures.

Just like your old air cooled motorbike.

We mammals, on the other hand, have the equivalent of a liquid cooled engine running at a constant temperature, allowing for far more complicated and efficient chemistry.

Complexity in the chemistry allows for sophistication of function. 

You’d never see a reptile blogging, f’rinstance.

Lorem Ipsum

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A new messaging app idea; one with a minimum of 800 words per message. I will call it ‘Lttr’. The kids will think it’s weirdly cool until they have to write the 800 word letters. Who knows, the world might be ready for pondered missives.

“Dear fuckwit

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, vix ex fabulas pertinax, eum elit dicant electram et. Adhuc constituto contentiones eam te, sint maiestatis ea sed, suas constituam has cu. At graecis eloquentiam disputationi vix. Pri an agam animal aliquam, ferri mutat qui ea. Ea mei eirmod saperet nostrum, summo sanctus vim at. Duo cu nonumes perfecto.

Postea commodo corpora te eam, eu elit latine sed. Civibus eleifend expetendis pri et, in virtute minimum est, usu accusata disputationi ut. Eam tation propriae signiferumque no, ei principes gubergren vel. Id simul utamur sea, vim expetenda constituam ex, no mel inani dictas. Semper accusata corrumpit et quo, vidit possim legimus nam in. Pertinax assueverit et pro, an duo legere fabellas definitionem.

Nulla philosophia ius ea. Ne usu evertitur adolescens. Offendit referrentur no vel, modus explicari similique et eam. Et vim nostro conceptam. Vitae dolores iudicabit mel cu. No qui veri lorem, ut qui mandamus persecuti accommodare, erant erroribus in duo. Nam suscipit interesset ea, ne pro nostro imperdiet quaerendum, in animal imperdiet per.

Duo id ludus eloquentiam ullamcorper, ex graeco vulputate constituam mel. Habeo viderer definitionem est id. Qui falli homero indoctum ex, cu ferri apeirian erroribus eum, mel quidam deterruisset an. Eu vis copiosae facilisis sententiae, id eum legere nusquam. Ullamcorper philosophia ad sit. Et essent docendi omittam eum, consul tritani quo no.

Eum vidit molestie cu, te cibo legere causae his, audiam dissentiunt his cu. Elitr homero scribentur eos ei, vidit cetero instructior has eu, ea vel habemus insolens suavitate. Mei eu vide deseruisse. Mei ut viris noluisse, sit ex graecis suavitate hendrerit.

In summary, you’re a cunt!

Yours truly”

Don’t Squeeze Them Please

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Is there is another food product like it?

Lucky Dip, that’s a better description.

Yes I’m talking about the avocado.

I’d say there’s a 1/3 chance it’s got overripe black bits in it.

Another 1/3 chance it’s an avocado shaped brick that rots after you put it back in the fridge, all humpty dumpty like, to soften.

Maybe I’m being generous with the thirds; when I get an unblemished and just-ripe specimen I get all thankful to the vegetable gods.

At the local supermarket there’s even a sign that says ‘please don’t squeeze them’. How then are we to filter the over-soft and the blocks?

I’m pretty sure that people don’t want a tube of green stuff that may or may not contain traces of avocados, nuts, dairy products, emulsifiers, preservatives and reconstituted greyhounds. 

Surely an opportunity for the technically minded?

Catch 22

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Quote from the former ISP co-owner that appointed Wyatt Earp as the Minister of Innovation, mate;

“I want to assure Australians that the unequivocal advice we have received from IBM, from the ABS, from the Australian Signal Directorate, is that their Australian census data is safe, it has not been compromised,”

Well I feel very comforted that IBM, the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and the other lot are looking after our data. Top team, and all that.

As I’ve said before there’s absolutely no way in the world to keep your data private in the modern era.

The only thing to do is to create so much false data that none of it can be used against you in a legal context.

To wit, I’ve lost an opportunity to complete the consensus form with complete trash, as a future insurance policy.

But then, as Joseph Heller predicted, said data would be assumed to be true, no matter how absurd.

Damned if you do.

Dogs & Bugs

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Anthropomorphism: the attribution of human characteristics or behaviour to a god, animal, or object.

Personally I think the dogs are a victim of anthropomorphism.

The dogs in question being the 17,000 racing greyhounds per year in NSW that will never see the light of day now that there is no incentive to breed them.

It all started with the industrial revolution.

People left the farms and headed to the cities. Increasingly they became insulated from the processes whereby their meat was killed and chopped up. It was all so yucky.

Let’s call it Carnivore Dissonance.

Step 2 was Bugs Bunny and his ilk. Cartoons led the anthropomorphic attribution of human qualities to animals in particular.

The final nail in the coffin was ever increasing social ethics which gave us the nanny state.

Killing people is bad, for any reason. 

Dogs are people now. 

It’ll be hot dogs next, even though we all know there’s no meat in them.

Peak Madness

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The bike’s at home because I flew in this morning.

5km; that’s all I had to travel, for an after work meeting.

40 minutes to walk it. 

Public transport wasn’t an option due to the circumferential nature of the traverse.

Uber it was.

45 minutes of Sydney traffic … I should have walked.

At least I had plenty of time to explain to my driver why I don’t drive in this city.

On one hand he understood me and on the other he did not.

Let’s call it a dissonance based on a financial incentive that irrationally depends upon people not wanting to drive, and then getting driven and subject to the same conditions they are avoiding.

Dissenting isn’t the same as prevention

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See below – maybe this is an opportunity for Fitbit? A smart watch that measures key vital signs, sends these to an app on your phone and then decides when you’re in the consenting zone. That’d take the uncertainty out of the situation!

My guess is that Clemetine only relents to consent, reluctantly, and then with regrets.

While I’m on the subject I did not consent or even relent to fill out a census form last night. To be honest I completely forgot and in any case I had decided that I’d rather pay a fine than do the work for a lazy government department that would have been better placed to get the data off Facebook, Google and the ATO.

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Shower Techno

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got one of those instant gas hot water heaters for the shower that has 1 degree increments for temperature adjustment.

For no good reason I have plotted how I adjust the water temperature with respect to the seasonal changes in air temperature (the Sydney monthly average at 9am).

In the plot below the blue dots show the air temperature, the red dots my blood temperature, and the green ones the shower setting.

I’m still struggling to see why this is interesting. But it is.

A little googling later; it’s reasonable to suggest that the water delivered at the shower head is 1 degree colder than on the dial.

Also, over the 6 foot drop (yeah, yeah I’m mixing units) the water temperature will cool by about 4 degrees or so by the time it hits your feet, depending on so many factors that they aren’t worth noting.

Assuming the head and shoulders are near the centre of your temperature perception, let’s say the water delivered is 2 – 2.5 degrees colder than the that shown on the shower dial.

Surprisingly, the shower is used as a cooling device for a good fraction of the year!

I guess this makes sense; our bodies are adapted to maintain temperature with air that is usually cooler than our blood temperature. Therefore, so should the water be.

The required temperature gap between the water and the body is less than the temperature gap between the air and our body because there is much more efficient heat transfer between and liquid and a solid, as compared to a gas and a solid.

It’s all consistent.

All of this since it’s easier to maintain body temperature at a value which is at the higher end of the regularly experienced air temperatures because the body’s internal heating systems are very good. They work by various exothermic chemical reactions going on in the organs.

However the body’s cooling relies entirely on heat transfer at the skin surface; a much more problematic proposition.

In total, it’s much easier using a temperature on the high end of the atmospheric values if, say, one were going to design such a human system and insist it had a stable temperature.

A final note – an invention of the day. A shower unit which automatically adjusts the temperature as per the plot below. Minor adjustments could be made on a daily basis and an initial calibration could occur to allow for differences in piping, roses and personal preferences. The plot could be used to automatically adjust the temperature and could be created according to the local climate, or, better still, the temperature adjustment unit could even just measure the current temperature and humidity, and adjust the temperature accordingly. This could even change during a shower as the room saturates with hot, humid water vapour and heats up.

That’s actually a good invention!

Uber Fashion

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I just got picked up by an Uber that was a Ford (spit) Falcon.

The driver tells me that it’s the only car banned by Uber. His was registered into the Uber system before the ban.

Uber wants distance itself from taxis in respect to the allergic reaction that people have to Falcons.

His problem is that, between the factory gas, the low purchase price and the cheap parts, that Falcons are by far the cheapest car to run as an Uber or a taxi. And hence also as a private car.

His current one which has a year to run before it hits it’s age limit cost him $5k. A reflection of the complete undesirability of the beast.

So he’s going to go and bat against the Uber machine so he can run another one. They are still making them but he plans on buying a used one.

Reluctant note to Uber drivers that are inattentive to car fashion; maybe the gas powered Falcon is an interesting, if uninspiring option.

But of course, the issue with the Uber ban has to be dealt with first.

Mash Up

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Metaphysics is  an old-school branch of philosophy that chews on the big issues that can’t really be solved, thereby allowing debates to rage for centuries.

Abstract concepts such as being, knowing, identity, time and space; these keep some academics metaphysically enthralled for their whole lives. Or so they claim.

What has metaphysics got to do with physics, you may ask?

Well, according to Wiki, meta is a prefix that is used to (a) indicate a (b) concept which is an (c) abstraction from (d) another concept, used to (e) complete or (f) add to the (g) latter concept.

BTW I added the indices there just to highlight how fucked up that definition is. It’s a sort of circle that manages to disappear right in front of your eyes, just as you are contemplating it.

And still no light is shed on what metaphysics has to with physics; the domain of equations, things and, more latterly, non-things; practised by people that have trouble communicating and selecting clothes.

I’d say that this is a case of trademark infringement hiding behind a facade of a linguistic mash-up that wouldn’t even get past first base were the practitioners of the same willing to stop and contemplate their very own augmentation.

Worth noting is that, from time to time, the odd physicist, that has run out of mathematical juices, metamorphoses into a metaphysicist.(that’s two metas in one sentence!)

Think of that bloke in a wheel chair with very bad teeth, or that other one that is valiantly trying to squeeze god into textbooks, or even that old bloke way back, with the bleached medusa of a hairstyle who peaked at the age of 7 or thereabouts.

Right there, I suspect, is where the term metaphysics originated.

Try this out; a metaphysicist is a dishonestly retired physicist that has checked out and is now publicly pondering life, the universe and everything and, by their very means of communications, they imply that their random musings are an abstraction from their former discipline of physics, and therefore useful for placing all that physics into a useful context for all those non-physicists and physicists alike.

Once these guys started attracting attention I suspect that others started doing the same without first doing the physics. A much simpler approach that avoided all those wasted years of physics, and they did a better job.

Not that anyone noticed or cared.

CNN

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I meet my fair share of dickheads in daily life and I always mentally place them into one of three buckets – Cunts, Nerds & Nuggets.

CNN.

T’were I ever, for whatever inexplicable twist of fate, be compelled to start a patent attorney firm I’d call it CNN IP because it’s damned hard to find one that doesn’t fall into one of the three buckets.

Metaphysics and the Dog Lover

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I just had one of those conversations with an individual that is all for the ban on greyhound racing.

The main argument proposed was that 17,000 dogs are killed by the industry for one reason or the other, every year!

I suggested that if the industry had been banned then those 17,000 dogs would never have existed. And won’t in the future.

Thin grey smoke, cogs a-clunking, spatial dissonance of the eyes; it appears that you can’t mix metaphysics and the dog lover.

Ballard of Lola Maxwell Walker

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In Paris a few weeks ago I had arranged to hire a convertible (an Alfa Romeo in fact) for the day.

The idea was to ensure that my daughter, at the age of 13, had ridden through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her hair.

An unnecessary and paradoxical inoculation against future alienation from the self, derived from the slavery of consumerism and poverty of the heart.

Then she caught the cold from which I had just recovered, and I had to cancel the booking. She spent the day in bed.

The next day we had to fly back to Australia, so that was that.

Yet another example of well-meaning social engineering going up the wazoo.

If there is a moral to the story, it is this:

They have to live their own lives, for better or worse. Any attempts to engineer specific outcomes are battles against social entropy. All you can really do is equip them with the precursors to wisdom.

Diversity Down

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The image of Hilary Clinton below has been covered up by the artist after the local Melbourne council deemed it not in keeping with their “stance on gender equity”.

The full statement: “We believe that this mural is offensive because of the depiction of a near-naked woman, not on the basis of disrespect to Hillary Clinton, and it is not in keeping with our stance on gender equity.” 

An interesting proposition this one, given that they undoubtedly have bikini clad models on billboards, just up the street.

Taken at face value the implication is that gender equity can’t really exist and can only be approximated by a complete cover up.

All power to the artist for his obviously pre-meditated 1-2 punch.

Ideas Man

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From a Linked-in blog entry:

“At 35 years old, Dr Marjorie Aunos was known internationally as a leading practitioner-researcher and advocate for parents with intellectual disabilities. Soon after, her car slipped on ice, leaving the mother a paraplegic. She talks about her experience of moving from being an “outsider” to an “insider” as a disability practitioner-researcher at a special Sydney Ideas lecture.”

All I take out of that is ‘don’t live in cold climates’. Oh, and that Sydney Uni’s social marketing folks can’t string a simple sentence together, nor can they construct a rational construct.

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Twain Talk

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The New-Ager’s often talk about ‘archetypes’, as in the ‘female archetype’, or even more obscurely, the ‘divine feminine’.

What they mean by an archetype is usually derived from Jungian psychology and generally treated in a positive way.

If it makes you (my sane readers) want to throw up then it’s an example of the positive, such as “10 Female Archetypes and Leaders to Inspire You.”

However, of late, I have seen and heard a few references to unhappiness associated with the promotion of archetypes.

For example, men searching for their female archetypes are dooooomed to fail. She doesn’t exist mate, and apparently near enough isn’t good enough. You’ll be miserable so let her go. And such forth.

Upon reflection I think Jung might have got this all slightly askew, and the well meaning morons that followed after him certainly did.

When someone is chasing an archetype, whether that is a man, a woman, a politician, a dog turd, or whatever, what they are really seeking (most of the time) is:

  1. The groovy feelings associated
  2. Perceiving that
  3. Other people
  4. Known to them or otherwise
  5. Perceive that
  6. They (the feeling person in point 1) have a lifestyle that
  7. Implies that
  8. They (the feeling person in point 1) have nailed life
  9. With respect to
  10. Achieving the cuddling up to a bunch of archetypes
  11. At least more than others have
  12. So there

I can see at least half a dozen ways to stick a spoke in that wheel and thereby easily disengaging from the injurious habits of chasing 19 archetypes.

However, pondering further, maybe we should carry these moon missions around with us, just so we can toss them overboard when we really need to; for when we are really in trouble.

‘She was a sinking vessel, with no freight in her to throw overboard and lighten ship withal.’

Diodes Down

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See headline below.

The trade minister of Australia, or the minister for trade as he prefers to be called, says: ‘I understand that a number of people feel alienated by globalisation.’

Not so mate.

There are a bunch of people that are pissed off that other people have more houses, cars and TVs than they do.

But it’d be quite accurate to say that not one of these people feels alienated. At best they feel that there are aliens amongst them.

Globalisation is also not a term they generally use. Nor do they have a proxy for it. Indeed, in a round about way, they blame all their woes on the gub’ment of the day.

I suspect the artful minister is craftily positing that ‘I understand that a number of people feel pissed off by by the aliens amongst us that are from other parts of the globe.’

It’s the trade in people that the C-grade gluttons misdiagnose as the root cause of their delinquency.

Noting the absence of functioning diodes between the rabble, there isn’t a politician in the country that feels compelled to correct them.

It’s so much easier and more fun to direct tax receipts away from them and towards more rewarding pigs.

I don’t think it’s the goods and services themselves that all these people (the A thru C grader gluttons) desire.

No, it’s the relative quantity of these compared to other people; this is what really matters.

The eternal mystery for me is why anyone bothers at all. It’s just looks so exhausting.

And completely bonkers…