“Dad, I can predict the past”

[Scene] Melbourne Zoo in the school holidays.

No one does bogans like Melbourne.

I was at a large family function yesterday.

Some of the women spent hours preparing food while the menfolk watched the worst game of football, all time.

At the end of the day a couple of the more intelligent blokes spent a good five minutes in a showy effort of cleaning up.

I overheard the cooks generally praising these good blokes for their efforts.

‘Why are you laughing?’ they asked. Genuinely perplexed.

Pondering. Subject; personal IP.

Phone apps are a means for us to put a lot of personal information into the databases of US corporations for exploitation against our good selves.

We in Australia could pass a law, for example, that makes all our personal information subject to copyright.

Then the US corporations would lobby the American president who would then threaten not to protect us against China or Indonesia.

The Abbott of the day would promptly kill that copyright law.

Another scenario is that the elite get to keep their copyrights and the rest do not. Imagine a society divided by ownership, or lack thereof,  of your own metadata? Sounds like a great science fiction movie.

There are companies like Facebook, Tinder, Viber and dozens more that are billions of dollars into the red. All that they have to show for this effort is huge databases of what we have done, what we feel and what we think.

They will all be trying to monetise those databases and the obvious one is targeted advertising. But sales margins are already slim, consumers are maxed out on purchasing budgets, these markets are over subscribed with new technology, and there isn’t a lot of overhead for more cost of sales.

My guess is that these companies will all move away into other areas. Like selling personal info to governments and the like.

It will get messy when a third party has more rights to your ID than you do.

Who is you?

At a base level a nation is a collection of self interested people that gang up to protect a region full of resources for their own use.

And that is it.

Islamic idealists such IS (formerly known as ISIS) are effectively fascists, especially considering their blurring on the concepts of state and religion (i.e. to them its all one and the same thing).

Leon Trotsky actually wrote a book entitled ‘Fascism, what it is and how to fight it?’ The presumption is that there is always a large group of disenfranchised people (workers in his world view) within a Fascist state that need to educated, armed and incentivated to fight back against the Fascists.

There must be large groups of people within Levant that are horribly disenfranchised by IS, such as the mild, the sane, the women, anyone without a beard and a mad and bad attitude. But how to get them organised and angry? Bombing the crap out of the country is probably counter-productive since it will just create an enemy of everyone when they become a victim.

What is needed is an alternative mad group of revolutionaries that believe in a separation of state and religion. In the old days these used to be called communists. But we have run out of sponsors for communism so maybe the US has to reconsider their aversion to the concept. Only communists have ever had the guts to fight Fascists from within.

I can’t see a mad group of US-style mildly-religious shopping mall consumers having a chance in hell in the Levant.

And if the US simply bombs them into submission the Fascists will just re-emerge, angrier than ever, when the US finally pull out of their occupation of the place. It’s a plan to nowhere.

There’s Muslims under the bed.

Q: What do you call a [insert Australian city name] Angel Investor group?

A: A rotary club without any money.

Today, based on two data points, I have decided that, if pushed, I would prefer hypocrisy to stupidity.

It’s great being back in Australia.

Three times today I have had female gen Y’s serving me for [beer/coffee/something else] and in each case they:

1. First didn’t understand me
2. Even after they heard me repeated it to make sure

So.

‘A schooner of new, thanks’

‘Eh?’

‘A schooner of new’

‘A schooner of new?’

‘Yes that would be great’

‘One or two?’

‘One thanks, [Under my breath] how fucking hard is that?’

And not a smile to be seen. Sour puss face. I would never have hired her when I ran pubs. If I had inherited her I would have sacked her. Either the managers have no choice or they have no idea.

Finally back in oz. After China this place feels alarmingly boring. Uninspiring for blog entries. Some random hypocrisy will emerge pretty soon I am sure. The trouble is that most of it will be first world problems.

Right now I am in entitlement central – ‘About Life’ in Rozelle. The last thing exciting that happened here was some bloke arsoned the building down a block, killed some people, and kept the tabloid media afloat for a few days more (than they are entitled to be).

Everyone here looks fairly healthy and vaguely fit. Their gear is even fitter. The women are amazingly well preserved; I put it down to formaldehyde or some help from their specialists.

The miracle cure-all right now is kale juice. Some dude tried to get me interested in a marketing taste on the basis of its nutritional content. I suggested that this would depend on the soil quality and there is no point quoting random numbers at me.

There are jars as far as the eye can see full of herbal medicines and supplements. I try to explain to people that we are engineered to get what we need from our food but no one I know believes me. They want to hand over the cash to salve their self inflicted vicissitudes.

Fortunately there’s a pub next door.

Due to negative publicity about the suicide of some of their workers Foxconn has built safety nets around their buildings to catch the jumpers.

With over half a million employees my host pointed out that you’d have to expect the odd depressive.

He claims their suicide rates are less than the general population and the whole thing is a media beat up.

Now the penalty for attempted suicide has been commuted from the death penalty to an hour on the trampoline. And a permanent role as the Apple client manager.

The largest bank note in circulation in China is worth less than $20.

No fifties and no hundreds in a country that runs on cash.

The government, although it is denying it, is printing money hand over fist to give to the banks, in order to keep the system liquid with business loans.

I suspect the banks have a lot of underperforming loans which just get rescheduled to eternity.

I was told yesterday that the plausibly undeniable printing of cash has led to inflation, which is strongly denied.

Printing 500 or 1000 RMB notes would be akin to acknowledging inflation.

But you can’t fool the people; just look at the price of chickens they say.

The wealthy are simply placing family members in Australia (and similar) under the cover of studentship, and funneling their cash out and south. This is a wedge against a meltdown in the Chinese economy.

Will it meltdown? Nobody knows but the policy makers are leading the charge in exporting their wealth so you would have to give it some finite probability.

More useful information from my hosts.

It has occurred to me that, in the era of You Tube, we will never see the likes of Mark Twain again.

People will write and there will be great proponents of the art but, just like boxing, standards will slowly drop.

In the old days boxing was a top spectator sport, there were no health concerns and many saw it as a wormhole out of poverty.

Not any more. 92 year old Fred tells me (I am paraphrasing here) that an average Sydney boxer of the 1930’s would be a world champ now.

That bit of information would have taken me all of a Saturday afternoon to receive.

People will always read but the need for the witty and insightful commentator is attenuated when you can watch the events for yourself.

And the number of people wanting to become the witty and  insightful commentator will also fade as the audience turns their attention to the viral similitude.

They will instead become handy with the electronic zoom.

The Chinese are a people that badly need milk crates.

1.5 billion times, say, 10 each per annum, times $1 per unit. That’s a TAM of $10.5 billion just hanging there.

Or if they adopt the Australian model it’s a -$10.5b market.

After my Japanese nut dinner my hosts tried to bundle me into a cab. In Shanghai on a Saturday night this can be hard to achieve.

Lacking patience I said I would walk the ten kilometres. In truth I wanted to see the old city at night.

My Chinese were horrified at the prospect of such an exertion. I suspect they were considering an ambulance as option two.

I assured them that I am fit and have a freakish sense of direction. I won the debate and set off. Stopping only when I saw an interesting bar or similar.

There’s a shit load of bars in Shanghai.

I got in at dawn. None the wiser. A few acquaintances richer. Many RMB lighter. Lost without battery. And fucking tired.

It turns out that the old bridge at the north end of the Bund, and within spitting distance of my Juliette balcony, is a magnet for bridal couples and their photographers.

I spent more of my day watching them than bears consideration. It was very morish.

The Chinese, despite their vocal disdain for the original shaky islanders, are going very Japanese in matters weddings. Zany rules.

The highlight was the couple, in full wedding regalia, roller blading with a jogging photographer in tow.

This is the middle of the road mind you, which in Shanghai cannot be considered the safest of environs.

And they were, at best, moderately competent in the arts skiller.

Coming off the bridge the mild slope got the better of the soon-to-be Mrs and away she went, out of control, towards me.

Horror was written on her face as she realized what every beginner belatedly discovers; no brakes.

Eventually she came a cropper in the middle of the intersection. Torn dress, grazes and tears.

Every onlooker within a 2 km radius came to her assistance and the ensuing melee went on for half an hour.

By which time the traffic jam had radiated away from the intersection as far as my eyes could see. And I was up on the third floor with pretty good visibility.

It’s likely that the butterfly effect affected all of Shanghai, all 6 zillion square kilometres of it.

I don’t have any Chinese but I think it’s fair to say that the odd opinion was being shared by the crowd. It sounded like a football match from my vantage point.

Eventually the cops came screaming up on their 125 cc Yamahas (a tad embarrassing you would think) with sirens blazing.

Half an hour of shouting and screaming later the masses were dispersed and the bride carried off in a taxi.

The moral to the story, if there is one, is to those of you females considering getting married; roller blades and wedding dresses should not be imagined for the same day.

I might just warn my eleven year old daughter, along with the advice to never wear white jeans. You never know.

(Very unlike me I forgot to take a good photo of the events…it was too exciting to go and get the phone…here’s the bridge anyway).

Dinner tonight in Shanghai is at a Beatles inspired Japanese bistro in the French concession.

Imagine ‘I am the walrus,…’ on the tannoy, Chinese waitresses in Japanese schoolgirl uniforms, all in a Balinese inspired timber pavilion housed in a 150 year old French colonial number.

To my delight they have given me a nut that I have never seen before.

It looks like a cross between a chestnut and a pistachio and tastes nothing like either of them.

Roasted and salted the unexpectedly yellow interior has the consistency of a friable over cooked mussel and a neutral taste with a bitter high note.

I ordered blindly so I have no idea what they call them. Google doesn’t exist here and I am not chasing these things down on Bing.

Life is too short for that shit.

Oh and the food was fantastic. Better than any Japanese I have had in Australia.

Stuck in internet hell behind the great firewall of China I have resorted to using Bing (O) since it actually functions whereas Google does not.

Looking past the dodgy fonts and crappy design, I think they need to look at overhauling their ad placement technology.

Seriously struggling to differentiate the super model from the other 750 million.

Not.

After a late arrival I woke up this morning and belatedly began to explore my dilapidated but formerly glorious Shanghai accommodation. 

I am in room 307. I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried.

Waiting at the traffic lights there is almost 100% certainty that they will change, eventually.

But at any moment there is a feeling of near zero probability that that time is now.

It’s a form of Zeno’s paradox.

The Chinese have solved this non-problem by adding green and red countdown timers.

Who would have thought that a red certainty could feel like an eternity?

And a green certainty is just an incitement to speed.

Before

After

I just meet Dr Lu Pi. And he was.

I am somewhere in China where Google is a flaky and unused service provider, thanks to the Chinese government.

Just  about all my services are Google so this means good battery life for my phone.

To be honest I would prefer they just blocked Google outright and then I wouldn’t have to hope for the odd rathole to appear in the great firewall.

Maybe there is an android app opportunity here. The Google rathole for visitors.

Recently my daughter had to write an essay for her Year 5 class, answering a series of questions and on the subject of any one of the Prime Ministers of Australia in the last 30 years.

Initially she chose Andrew Fisher. When I pointed out that he was Prime Minister about a century back and that this didn’t match the criteria she went into a little spin, pointing out that most of her friends were doing Gough Whitlam (probably the choice of their Clovelly-located NIMBY parents) and that he also fell outside the 30 year limit.

Eventually, favouring orthodoxy rather than precedence, we settled on Bob Hawke after I promised her that he was the most interesting of the lot. This was quickly proven true by YouTube, with clips of a drunken Bob Hawke re-telling ribald jokes. You simply can’t imagine a modern politician even dreaming about getting away with what Bob got away with.

Answering one question about the achievements of the Bob in office we got to the dot point of ‘floating the dollar’. She couldn’t imagine why anyone would knowingly wet their money and she doesn’t even know that back in 1983 this would have been fatal to the cellulosic version of the day.

I explained that when one goes to Disneyland that, at the airport, you buy American dollars and that you are very unlikely to get one American dollar for each of your Australian dollars. She asked why not. And I said because different countries have different expectations of what their dollars will buy.

I then said that before 1983 the government set the exchange rate but when it was floated the exchange rate was set by the ‘market’ in a similar way that shop keepers get to put any price on lollies that they want. I explained that there is always a consensus for the price range for exchange because people charging too much won’t get any business, just like people will go to the next shop if they find that the lollies in one shop are over-priced and can be got cheaper elsewhere.

I also explained that the government prints as many dollar notes as they feel like and that printing too many reduces the price of them because people get sick of them. Just like they might stop buying lollies when they have too many because they bought a lot of them very cheaply. And then the shopkeepers have to drop the price even further to get rid of them.

The final question was ‘what would you say to [Bob] if you met him?’ She answered ‘why were you so mean to Hazel?’. She really didn’t like the look of Blanche at all.

I occasionally write articles for ‘the conversation’ which is an online news and opinion journal populated by the unrefereed and vaguely cited madness of academia.

The journal is very particular about the conflicts of interests of their authors, and disclosures of same.

But the contributions are gratis and published under creative commons.Therefore there is no legal requirement for disclosures of conflicts of interest; it’s really just driven by the self interest of the journal and the related avoidance of emotional conflict from their outraged academic readers.

As an aside they could add a universal disclaimer for their academic authors as follows;

“The author has in the past been known to consider themselves a world expert in xxxxx and any writing by the author has a primary purpose of expanding that feeling to all subject matter in the known universe”

America’s most admired philosophers are the self made billionaires.

The internet is full of profound quotes from the likes of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

The latest from Warren;

“Honesty is a very expensive gift; don’t expect it from cheap people”

Irony from a man who made his fortune by withholding valuable insights.

Yesterday I sent a thoughtless email to a friend and colleague for which I had to apologise. What worries me is that I wrote it and sent it without thinking to filter it for likely impact. I do often write or say ‘Rake-ish’ things but always with awareness and often when I am bored, or sick of the hypocrisy of the environment, or just wanting to have some fun. But this was an occasion where I had no idea until it blew back on me. Admittedly I was harried and up to my neck with the incompetence of others but that is no excuse. One apology later and I hope it is sorted – but I know how I work; I forgive but I do not forget and I suspect other are the same. From past experience it is 10-100x harder to remove a negative data point in the mind of others, than it is to put it there in the first place. I learned this during my PhD by borrowing and not returning tools from the workshop – a long story only suitable for a beer conversation. In the meantime the filter is going to get more processor time for a while until I can feel it can be safely run on autopilot again, in the background.

For those in the patent space there has been a bit of fuss lately over the ‘Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International’ case.

It has told us two things – one, that it’s going to be harder to get and/or enforce US software patents that implement activities that were already known prior to implementing them in software, and, two, judges make shit philosophers.

The judges tied themselves up in knots about concepts such as abstract ideas, algorithms, laws of nature and tools of discovery. Behind it though you can sense them protecting the vested interests of the now mature software and internet companies; the power of lobbying. And the beginning of the end of the bubble.

It is actually really easy to figure out if a software patent application is inventive; just ask me. If I have no idea how they did it, then it’s inventive.

What I am trying to say, tongue in cheek, is that inventiveness in software is in the the implementation and not the function. And that is where it should stay.

The very uncomfortable thing about software ‘patent law’ in the US is that there is an implied distinction between the finite and binary nature of code and the supposedly true and infinite analogue universe where true invention exists. There is even a school of thought that algorithms exist before someone first ‘innovates’ them. If they don’t watch out they will end up reducing god to the matrix – I suspect that the American people will have a meltdown when this is all said and done.

The other little wrinkle on the horizon is quantum computing. By adding quantum uncertainty to processors it might be possible to simulate true discovery in code. And discovery might lead to true and unexpected invention.

But the truth is we already have code that does discovery. Learning algorithms for example find results that we struggle to find as humans. Its a process that is innovative by law but outperforms our efforts to invent the same outcome.

Which is to say that we are well on the way to inventing ourselves into an innovative cul-de-sac where we are redundant.

I thought my cabbie was quietly taking to herself. Mad woman I thought. Then I realised that it was her GPS talking quietly to her. Mad man.

Gotta love a meeting in Maxwell Chambers on Maxwell Road. Didn’t learn a thing of use.

Conflicts of interest situations can all be placed into this radar plot – below.

Self-interest is when one uses self-interest to resolve a conflict of interest. This can sometime be dressed up as, say, what’s in the best interest of the client. But at the end of the day it’s about your own reputation and repeat business.

Legal conflict of interest speaks for itself. It is called when a lawyer judges one might be sued.

Emotional conflict is when someone calls a conflict of interest when what they are really worried about is someone being cross at them.

Any conflict of interest can be placed on this radar plot and it really helps debates on these issues amongst parties with different views.

© Ian A. Maxwell

There are 28,000 taxis in Singapore, owned by 6 companies.

They rent the cars to drivers for (on average) $150 per day. The drivers also cover petrol costs.

That’s a $1.5b per annum cartel.

The 6 companies buy the cars and maintain them. Their cost base is therefore around $0.5b, worst case at $20k per car per year.

That’s $1b profit less government fees and tax and their own inefficiencies.

Past tense – big data is usually about mining large databases for useful information after the fact.

I am more interested in instantaneously parsing large amounts of data for useful knowledge and then discarding the data.

This is what our brains do. Essentially known patterns are continuously compared to new data, and the patterns are adjusted if the data warrants it.

Knowledge is in the patterns not the data.

We are at the stage now where we are chucking out stolen goods, right there on the streets for all to see.

Putting aside the issue of the arrogance of our ridiculous affluence, it begs the question, can a milk crate be stolen twice?

Actually I need a couple of milk crates and if I don’t take them they will end up in the pyrolyzer, and then very wasteful ash and electricity.

But I would prefer black ones to be truthful.

Out of interest I checked up on Scotland and what happens if they vote ‘yes’.

My readings tell me they have gone ‘quiet’ on the head of state issue.

That is, if they vote for ‘independence’ they will probably still have the queen as the head of state. Just like Australia.

To me that would defeat the primary purpose of the whole thing – the ancient grievances and genuine independence.They would get economic and governmental independence, probably to their detriment, and hang onto the weird concept of a foreign head of state with reserve powers over parliament.

The Guardian has said that the queen might say no. Then they will be in a pickle.

It might have been easier for the Scots to take over England, Northern Ireland and Wales, and then give the Irish back a corner of their country, let the Welsh do whatever they want, and franchise England to the French.

For a few years there have been these great big billboards at Sydney airport for De Rucci beds, targeting the Chinese market (the Chinese characters give it away).

Mr De Rucci is easily the unhappiest looking bed maker I have ever seen.

Sydney siders, apart from stealing the buggers, see milk crates as either random stools placed there for their convenience or random rubbish bins placed there for their convenience.

It’s all a matter of orientation.

So there I was, at my least favorite function. Old, old friends.

A good half of them are still climbing the money tree. Long past the moment of wisdom that never came.

And half of the half are covering their doubts with good deeds.

Goodness comes in the form of board seats. Not for profits. Profit not the needle with its ever-seeing eye.

Western Sydney kids basketball league. Industry association. Opera. Blind drunk rabbits of Rooty Hill. Anything with indigenous in the title. Trade missions with junior ministers. Any club that will have them. Random shit.

Status and good deeds. Networks of fools.

“Are you on any not for profit boards Ian? You should be.”

Of course I am – I do Australian tech.

Time to exit stage left. Roll the dice and swear.

The silly morning herald has this offering today … see below.

Basic crux of the story is:

1. Someone got killed by a shark the other day in Byron Bay
2. People are, gasp, still swimming
3. Something should be done about it

Bike helmets? Ban swimming forever? Get everyone to sign indemnities before they swim? Compulsory wearing of garlic clove necklaces? “No sharks allowed” signs on the beach? Armored wetsuits? Piped music at the beach, say Air Supply?

My suggestion is that we use journalists and their editors for burley.

And we should return to culling sharks, hard. I really don’t understand why the GUFs* got behind sharks – even GUFs swim.

* – GetUp fuckwits

Tooling around the internet looking for info on the nappy plan I found this pearler below from a Chinese tiger mother.

It is clear that within ten years ALL of our doctors, dentists, vets and lawyers will be of Chinese heritage.

There’s got to be a way of monetising that knowledge. Ladbrokes?

I have just been going through my daughter’s NAPLAN results.

I think that stands for national assessment program – literacy and numeracy.

It’s an hilarious piece of political correctness. In each of the four reported results there are six bands and then a greyed out area which represents the middle 60% of the students in the year.

The grey 60% variably stretches across two to three bands so that tells me the bands probably aren’t statistically adjusted. They are probably representative of absolute results but the bands 5 and 6 stretch across around 20-25 marks each whereas bands 3, 4, 7, 8 are much smaller.

And yet they are labeled as band 3 to band 8, maybe to put us off the scent? These look like, and will be misconstrued as years three to eight in school. That’s what my daughter’s mum thought.

There are arrows at the either end of the bands suggesting that results could easily go off this chart. Funny but true. Maybe bands 1, 2, 9 & 10 are in the arrows. If so, the top and bottom little arrows must represent a tiny fraction of kids.

It’s designed not be reverse engineered. And to make most kids look near the average. Your kid could be right at the bottom 20% mark and still look OK.

I still don’t see what is wrong with giving us an absolute percentage out of one hundred. And also a position on the bell curve

I wonder if they are more worried about disincentivising kids on the lower end of the curve or copping blow back from their parents?

I seem to recall that these results have some input into school funding as well. In one scenario the better performing school gets more funds but that just increases the gap – like EPL. In the other scenario the poorer performing school gets more funding but that just encourages the wooden spooners to tank their games ahead of the draft to get the better picks. Nuh, it doesn’t work.

These results certainly do nothing to encourage my daughter to work harder. But nothing would anyway, so I can’t complain too hard.

A new wind tunnel study has shown that cyclists that shave their legs get between a 50 and 80 second benefit over a 40km time trial. Significant.

That’s at speeds over 60kmh.

I bet at speeds up to our fastest running speeds that hair hardly provides any drag at all. Evolution has it pegged.

It all goes to show that cycling is an unnatural act. But so too is the missionary position.

Women often shave their legs as well, regardless of whether they do time trials or not. It also is supposed to reduce the drag.

Back to the wind tunnel.

The sun is shining and the temperature is up.

Spring resolutions litter my morning bayside traverse.

I can’t figure out which is worse, the phone wielding pram pushers or the triple abreast fat butts.

Neither have any awareness of other users of the path or the concept of variable relative velocities.

The Universal Vampire Hypothesis explains three things that have been puzzling me of late.

An intelligent person simply has a less attentive, aka lazy, vampire.

And jealousy is the result of two vampires not getting on. They have found that inducing jealousy is a most effective means of getting their conjoined steeds to part.

Love, on the other hand, is just vampires getting on with each other.

My vampire must be drunk.

I really like the idea that we all have little vampires on our shoulders whispering in our ears and occasionally glamouring us when we accidentally spot the impossible.

It’s probably a symbiotic relationship where they take a nibble of blood from time to time and we get shielded from the insanity of infinity.

Being antisenescent, vampires must jump from host to host when we die. I will overlook the numbers problem here – they probably do all mammals. And daylight, not a problem – that myth was propagated by our jockeys to put us off the scent.

It would explain the old stories of the little devils on our shoulders and why some pirates and most women like to balance their load with the odd parrot or a handbag.

Me and my mate, Bry, just came up with a new cocktail.

The Aye Co-rumba is:

Two shots of dark rum, preferably Gosling’s Black Seal
On ice
Filled with carbonated coconut water
And a wedge of lime

All this by text!

© Ian Maxwell & Brylee McVicar

Hidden below Sydney’s streets there are tram lines, remnants of what used to be one of the most extensive tram systems in the world.

Occasionally they emerge when the bitumen is damaged. There is a stretch exposed on Glebe Point Rd – I think on purpose as some sort of open air museum.

There is another at O’dea Ave in Waterloo. And just the other day one emerged on Crown Street of all places. I know this because I almost came a gutsa on it, riding on my pushy in the rain.

Chatting to old Fred, 92 and going strong, he tells me that they rushed the decision to get rid of the trams in the fifties and just covered up all the tracks instead of ripping them out.

Despite the fact that the tracks were worth their weight in steel.

He tells me that the prevailing mood of the day was that eventually we would be able to get rid of all public transport once everyone had cars. The trams were just the first cab off the rack.

That worked out well didn’t it?

Never trust a NSW politician I say. They are either corrupt or just fucking stupid.

We should cover them in bitumen. Then feathers.

I have been informed by one my vampires that my MUSH theory already exists, sort of:

It’s called MUH – for mathematical universe hypothesis.

See http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis.

One difference to my effort is the focus of MUH on mathematics whereas I also included common sense and related observations.

I prefer mine – MUSH – the mathematical universe shit hypothesis.

It’s shit because you can’t do anything with this hypothesis, other than carve out a boring existence as an academic philosopher.

You can’t test it. You can’t use it to build time machines. There aren’t even useful limiting cases.

All it does it frustrate the idle thinkers.

And I suppose it could be useful over drinks one night if someone ever starts boring me with theories of life, the universe and everyfing.

Moving on …

And then it occurs to me that there aren’t any dimensions at all – its just one big infinite mush out there.

Our brains can’t deal with all the universal mush of data so the it filters it all into 5 ‘dimensions’.

That is the dimensions aren’t real they are artifacts of the brain’s limited signal processing capacity.

All of our maths, all of our physics and all of our common sense – it’s all only ‘real’ in our heads.

I suspect that we are programed to completely ignore any data that doesn’t fit into the 5 dimensional universe model.

That is we have an ‘instant amnesia’ model for the ‘impossible’ data points – we are carrying around little vampires that glamour us as needed, maybe on a daily basis.

It’s 730am and I haven’t been sampling the hallucinogens yet either!

Actually I think we live in a five dimensional world …

x, y ,z, t & $

Some things which are deemed impossible in the four dimensional universe that we perceive are in fact very possible in the five or more dimensional universe that we know exists.

By the time you get to the likely truth, that there are an infinite number of dimensions, I would say that just about anything is possible.

That is, nothing is impossible and our bias towards hope and destiny mighty not be that silly.

As a side note, our ability to perceive the other dimensions gets exponentially harder the further away we go from our perceived four dimensional universe.

So as a first order truth it is most practical to consider the four dimensional universe as absolute but to also allow for the odd wrinkle in the time space continuum.

Don’t panic.

The other day I was struggling to find an antonym for destiny.

And then I realized that what I was really looking for was the antonym for inevitable.

These are: avoidable, doubtful, escapable, fortuitous, preventable, uncertain, unlikely, and unsure.

All that this tells me is that the normal meaning of destiny is equal to inevitability plus some implicit spiritual plan.

Which is why the logicals have a reaction to destiny but not to inevitability.

The possibility for omniscience and/or omnipotence is the true culprit here.

Bread, paint and salt. 

In pre-industrial times they were, respectively, brown and gritty, soft and streaky, and grey and mushy. People, if they had the money, would pay a lot more for product that was, respectively, white and fluffy, hard and uniform, white and dry.

Come the industrial revolution and the diligent operatives, the technologists, slowly figured out how to make perfect bread, the perfect paint and the perfect salt. And they could make it just that much cheaper than the old rubbish.

Eventually some people got bored with perfection and a market was born for facsimiles of pre-industrial brown sourdough bread, milk paints and mostly-dried sea salts. But these cost twice as much, or more, than the perfect stuff.

And then the clever technologists started figuring out how to make the new-old stuff cheaply and everyone could get it, if they wanted it.

Like the Sneeches with and without stars, everyone forgot which was which and then got quite confused as to what they should be eating and painting. Fortunately there were lifestyle magazines and blogs to guide them every which way.

The moral to the story is this – if you see a market emerge for a new facsimile of an old product then jump on the opportunity to scale up its production and then you will be rich and you will be able to buy lots of whichever of the old or new, or new-old, or old-new stuff that you want.

[Scene: the back of Darling Harbour where they are building a new concrete cathedral of commerce]

Me, fluffing along on my single speed pushie, happily holding up a line of cars.

Normally I oomph along here so as not to be annoying but this morning I couldn’t be bothered.

At the next lights a Porsche, one of the cars I was holding up, pulls up next to me.

The window winds down and I hear this pearler:

“Aren’t you a bit old to be a cycling hipster?”

I contemplated “And you haven’t even seen my haircut yet”, but instead went with:

“Aren’t you a bit fat to get into a Porsche?”

I think we communed a mutual chuckle and motivated onwards, me left and up the tram tracks and he, straight ahead for his next assignment with red LED’s.

An advertisement of sorts below.

Next we will have police line tape at the scene of the disappearing milk crate crime scene.

When I come across a thorny subject I often find it is useful to think of ‘opposites’.

For example Google tells me that the opposites for destiny are “choice,  free will, volition”.

But are these accurate as opposites? I think not.

If destiny is something that is 100% likely to happen no matter what we do, the the opposite is something that has no chance of happening no matter what we do.

Suspiciously, we have no word for this. I think it’s because we don’t believe that anything is impossible.

We are biased towards hope and this is our destiny.

It seems that we are all destined to die and pay taxes.

I suppose that’s another way of saying that the likelihood of these occurring to each of us is 100%.

As we consider other things that might happen to us in life the probabilities drop below 100% but remain finite.

The problem with the concept of destiny is that it is so binary … it is assumed to mean that something is 100% likely to occur.

What’s wrong with a bit of uncertainty in our destiny? Or a bit of destiny in our certainty? Even if that is a certainty that there ain’t no destiny.

Cash was used in less than 50% of all financial transactions in Australia last year.

Ironic that, since cash is the one that doesn’t usually come with a transaction fee.

Today I had a blue screen, a green light, an orange alert, a brown out and a false alarm.

I went online to pay my mobile phone bill at Telstra and I had this message waiting:

“Due to the maximum number of services for an account being exceeded, the Bill Total Exclusive and Inclusive of GST for all services for the account will not be displayed.”

??

I have just heard, for the thousandth time, that female partners are more sexually attracted to their male spouses when the latter takes part in domestic duties.

This time on dumb-ass radio … ‘A study has shown that men are more likely to get sex if they make their partner a cup of coffee …(general fake laughter)’

What they mean is that someone has observed a correlation between the frequency of sex in a relationship and the levels of domestic duties undertaken by males. How meaningful the correlation is, we don’t know.

The cause of the correlation (if it’s real and meaningful) is probably women getting pissed off with their unfair workload and withholding sex in an emotive and self-punishing ‘carrot and stick’ effort to address the situation.

Men only see the stick. And it’s all downhill from there.

Young girls should be warned about the ineffectiveness of this approach.

Indeed, they should be warned off any sort of emotional blackmail in a relationship. It’s not a good foundation for anything real or lasting.

ps. that advice goes to both sexes – it’s just the example I had was this way around.

I have a friend that is passionate about the issue of illegal downloads. She believes that it is theft and carries on with emotional arguments about taking money off poor artists and the like.

Personally, I think she is deluded because and has bought the line that the large content providers have been peddling – hook, line and sinker.

I try to explain to her that in the new internet world all the middle men are redundant and this period of pain is necessary to break the old system and that it will eventually go away and we will have content makers and consumers communing directly.

(I don’t actually believe this – I suspect that all the current assholes in the distribution channel will be replaced with one big new asshole in the middle, like a Google or somesuch.)

This friend of mine must have 10-20 milk crates scattered around her home and property. Stolen, the lot of them, without thought. I am going to have fun with this one. She won’t return them to the streets so she will be forced to admit she has double standards.

I guess there are natural xenobitic substances and then the others that are either extra-terrestrial or ‘synthetic’ – the result of mankind’s diligent efforts.

I query whether the natural and terrestrial xenobiotics, even if toxic, can be considered to be truly xenobiotic since we evolved with their likely presence.

They might even be on the immune system’s list of ‘must removes’.

New terminology needed.

Two artistes are having a stoush over very, very large milk crates. One in Sydney and one in Melbourne.

First up though, they (the art works) are each described as ‘a generic milk crate that has been scaled up (three stories up) and sited on grass as a place for contemplation and repose’.

They (the artists) are clowns; here is their thinking:

Step 1 – take an everyday item that has been with us for ever and yet which everyone takes for granted

Step 2 – make it really, really big so we are forced to contemplate it

Step 3 – get either the Sydney or Melbourne City Council to waste some money and build it

Fucking genius. I have also seen this done to the Hills Hoist and other Australian ‘icons’. So no points for novelty.

I am not sure why a giant milk crate is an obvious place for contemplation and repose though? But what I can say is that the normal sized milk crate really is a place for contemplation and repose; normally with a beer or coffee and a fag in hand. Not in a park though – rather hanging out in the back lane.

Milk crates can be, and have been used for just about anything. I once joked that if the Chinese had milk crates they would made whole cities out of them. They don’t. 

Australians pretty much just steal milk creates. They make great storage units, bookshelves, kitchen bench supports, and all sorts of other household and portage functionalities. Lego for grown ups. 

Heading off to a music concert? Pinch a milk crate on the way for a viewing platform.

The point of the milk crate is that, like many things Australian, it is irony personified, On one hand we have the milk distributors doggedly making and losing them for half a century. And on the other hand we have us – happily stealing them and misusing them without ever thinking twice about the item itself.

So, firstly to the artists I say fuck off – we don’t need you popping our lovely bubble of pretence on this subject. It ruins the nice ironic in-joke.

Secondly, knowing that you artists probably have no truly good ideas and that you have to eat, if you have to make art works about milk crates can you at least make reference to their true role in society – the irony of misuse and theft, and our complete lack of gratitude.

I wonder how many xenobiotic substances there are in my body.

I suspect there are millions of different types of molecules. And then a few more types of metals, viruses, bacteria, molds and other simple organisms.

Every time I open my mouth to breath, drink or eat I am probably imbibing thousands of types of xenobiotic molecules.

In addition I have a few grams of titanium screws, the end of a graphite pencil, and 4 polymeric tooth filings.

Ignoring these, the total mass of environmentally- and food- absorbed xenobiotic substances in my body would probably be less than a gram, say 0.001% of total body mass.

A quick Google search tells me that the most toxic chemical is ricin (it is a protein but still a molecule as well) which is toxic to humans at 1 milligram.

Tetanus, a bacterium, can be fatal at 0.1 microgram.

Many other xenobiotic chemicals aren’t acutely toxic but do manage to kill us over time because they place an enormous load on the immune system, which is programmed to remove just about all unrecognised substances, just in case.

With our environment being full of xenobiotic substances that we can’t dodge, the result is that our immune systems are too busy removing these unknown (and probably mostly harmless) xenobiotic substances and therefore less able to fight off true invaders and the odd random and unwanted genetic expressions.

This is something I didn’t know until today – a xenobiotic substance is a foreign chemical substance found within an organism that is not normally naturally produced by or expected to be present within that organism.

So the ideal ‘organic’ lifestyle is axenobiotic. New word number 6-ish!

It appears that the casual and unthinking consumers of broadcast media are being softened up for an Australian commitment of troops to Iraq. 

The last time troops went into Iraq it was on the evidence of Weapons of Mass Destruction that turned out not to exist.

And that effort probably led to the current situation which we apparently ‘cannot not sit back and just watch happen’.

The odd thing is, there have plenty of cases of genocide in the last few decades where we, Australia, have just sat back and watched – Rwanda, Sudan and Cambodia come to mind (ignoring the after-the-fact peace keeping efforts).

The Guardian, in 2004, claimed that the true cause of the West’s military interest in Iraq was of course oil, what the Iraqis might do with it, and the impact of this on the value of the dollar, and its impact on US debt and economy and then also on all Western economies.

I suspect not much has changed. The uncertainty related to ISIS controlling large slabs of the middle east and the oil supplies must be scaring the bejesus out of Western policy makers. 

This simply won’t end until the oil runs out, whereupon I predict that the fighting will go on and on but we will hardly hear about it. Israel will then be on its own.

But before the oil runs out, and as it gets more valuable as a diminishing resource, the middle east is going to get even uglier.

Racing down the Lilyfield Hill on my bicycle I noticed a houso on the footpath about to launch onto the pedestrian crossing on his bicycle.

I kept going and copped my fair share of abuse.

My exact words were: ‘listen mate, you’re on a bike, I’m on a bike, there’s no fucking way I am stopping for you.’

Query moral, ethical and legal status?