These experts and amateurs all started with $100k. Three weeks later cash is in the lead since the stockmarket is retreating. Regression to the mean, anyone?

The Pacific oyster is a marine feral pest, on par with the rabbit on the land. It was introduced to Australia, on purpose, by that wonderful institution, the CSIRO. I bet they won’t be advertising that one in their fight to survive future budget cuts.

The only hope for getting rid of the Pacifics is the Pacific Oyster Mortality Syndrome. I didn’t make that up.

Breakfast at the Tropicana. My favourite!

“If he had wanted to be a boxer in a previous life, he could have given it a go”.

I do love the sports pages. The only thing this one is missing is a third-person selfie.

Apparently there is a little confusion as to why animals sleep. Indeed, you have to go a long way down the food chain to find critters that don’t need to sleep.

My view is that it’s hard to make an animal that is both nocturnal and diurnal. Evolution favours one or the other.

And then evolution also gives us sleep so that we don’t go mad doing fuck-all for a few hours every night; it leads to homicide. It makes sense to me.

According to some experts the Americans are fat because they eat shitloads of glucose–fructose corn-syrup which is a cheap-arse supplement for sucrose. The use of the glucose–fructose version apparently screws their pancreases and makes them get fat very easily.

Not that they should be eating that much sugar anyway but its hard to avoid because it is used as an unlabelled food additive in just about everything, even where sugar isn’t needed. Its like they have a collective Jonestown pact going down.

When you properly ponder it, a lot of people are pretty close to mad, in one respect or another. However there are also many coping mechanisms which function to disguise madness.

A majority of people seem to want to be ‘sane’ or at least seen to be sane. This is where dishonesty comes into play.

If we could just be honest about our madness and drop the mask of sanity methinks the human condition would be much improved.

I will take your money but don’t expect me to respect you in the morning.

The technology journalist at the BRW, when I showed him a silicon wafer, said “that’s surprising, it looks just like metal”. Seriously?

[In a plane watching Hollywood movies]

These movies are dangerous; the story lines are these weird reduced-dimensional versions of life. And also extreme in both good and mad ways. The overall pitch leaves the impressionable imprinted with a subconscious fear of the gap.

There are things we know and then there are hypotheses. Opinions are just stories for the entertainment of others.

I just met a lovely middle age couple. They were open and friendly but slightly provincial. So far they have had it all good; life has been kind to them on the corporate north shore of Sydney.

As a result they are open, at ease and not at all on guard. This makes traveling outside the first world dangerous for them. And if the shit hits the fan they will be the first up against the wall.

The mind and the heart are very analog. What goes inside of us is a zillion shades of grey.

Actions are however very digital. You can choose to do, or not to do, things. And that is it.

A happy person had a very efficient and trustworthy analog to digital processor.

It’s impossible to really know what another person is thinking because they themselves rarely know. People are just so complex.

Indeed, what is really important is what they are going to do, not what they think or feel, or what they think they feel.

To figure what they are going to do, you need to trust and train your intuition and instincts. And to allow for confidence limits around any decisions based on these.

One of the weirdest things in dingbat land; I am just watching a web version of a show I missed on TV tonight. And they have removed the ads! By themselves and voluntarily. Whadaya?

I don’t believe in wild goose chases, senseless puzzles nor guileless mysteries. Why waste time unravelling the vacuous complexities of the leisured classes?

The ad says “So many features, there’s never an uncomfortable moment”.

Geez, firstly that comma should be a semi-colon. Secondly, uncomfortable moments in a car are related to NVH engineering and the skill of the driver, and not to “features”. Thirdly, it’s a lie.

Semi-morons anyone?

The NGO’s have introduced me to the concept of the ‘standard monetary valuation of life’.

Parsing; it costs money to save lives and NGO’s have limited resources, so they need a mechanism for choosing which lives to save. In order to do this, and amongst other factors, they use a measure of the relative value of various people’s lives, and this is done by the ‘standard monetary valuation of life’.

The highest value lives are in the wealthier countries (roughly the monetary value of life is a multiple of the GDP per capita). The other key factor is the expected average extension in life expectancy as a result of the interventions by the NGO’s – the longer the increase in life expectancy, the greater the impact on the standard monetary valuation of life.

Wouldn’t you hate to be in charge of making these decisions? Moral hazard 101.

Today I had a chat with a journalist from the BRW who was trying to entice me to go on the record. I resisted, with ease.

Off the record, I noted my own negativity when reflecting upon the Australian technology and start-up scene.

One needs to recognise when it’s time to exit….

Physics….it’s really easy to understand why there is no enlightenment there.

Physics is the study of an infinite set of onion rings, and there will always be more hidden details behind the ones they are exploring now.

I get the feeling the god-particle people think there is a stop-point whereupon all the details will be known and when they get there all will be revealed. 42. Nix.

Worse still, the journey of physics teaches one nothing because it is anti-human. Success reinforces the behaviors of left-brain introverts; and you can’t think these guys have much to do with the prophets.

It’s an illusion for the deluded.

I suspect that very few of the people who have ever reached any serious level of enlightenment have ever bothered to communicate any of it. The prophets must have been the odd minority, maybe not even the most enlightened.

Have you ever noticed the prophets all talk in riddles? I suspect there is a reason for this and it is not laziness.

Firstly, just giving answers doesn’t work because the point is the journey and not the end-point.

Second, the answers would be misinterpreted anyway if they were just flopped on the table in black and white.

Third, there really aren’t any answers in any case; there is just an understanding of what isn’t important and what is.

Finally, it takes quite some time to become aware of the important and unimportant things;they aren’t all there in front of your face, just requiring a little indexing.

Didymo amaneta methane; ciao to the green frogs and the people too.

The fact that very few people really fully agree with each other on matters of note should make us rethink the concept of truth.

Truth may simply be the minimum working set of agreements amongst a minority that leads to useful outcomes for humans.

That is, truth might be the outcome of a learning machine (evolutionary) process. There might even be some maths that describe it.

Even if it’s worth saying ad nauseam you may be annoying the hell out of others. Be warned.