Watching the gen Y dreamily serve three others at the bar ahead of my beer must have been the longest 5 minutes of my life.

When the first solar cell was made by Bell Labs they called it a solar battery.

This because when the sun was shining it acted like a battery and provided current.

Ironically people are now trying to store solar energy in real batteries.

I wonder how sustainable battery technology is in this context?

Assuming that the energy to make, deploy and recycle the batteries is all renewable the key question is whether the materials used to make the batteries are fully recyclable.

This requirement should constrain battery research efforts.

The difference between the middle age Chinese woman in the Camry who has just got her license and the bus driver is that the bus driver’s lack of courtesy is a choice.

Because this fascinates me, on and after the weekend, I pondered why “at” and “on” are both used ahead of a weekend. And afterwards, as well, it seems.

The former is used by the less self-effacing users of British English and the latter is used in America and Australia (with little pockets of try-hard “at” users).

The Cambridge Dictionary recognizes “at weekends” but not “at the weekends.” Fussy, fussy.

The reason for the use of “on” as opposed to “at” is related to the length of time of the subject. For example, we might say “what are we doing “on” Friday?” and “what are you doing “at” 5:00pm? “

Apparently if the subject is longer than one day some English speakers will depart for “on”. Others stay marooned at “at” primarily motivated by a desire to differentiate themselves from the departees.

And Cambridge, the reason that we need “the” is that “weekend” is ambiguous by itself. For example: “are you free on the weekend so we can get together? ” means this coming weekend or the implied weekend in reference whereas “are you free on a weekend? ” just means any old weekend.

Which so to say that “the” is imperative because “weekend” is a common noun, and to add specificity to it we use the article “the”. Hence “the” denotes a person(s) or thing(s) already mentioned, under discussion, implied, or otherwise presumed familiar to the listener or reader.

That clear?

What in its right mind would launch a transport card without an app?

I didn’t watch the Bledisloe on the weekend because I knew it was coming.

My personal opinion is that Australian Rugby is fucked for good.

Rugby is clearly the no. 4 football in Australia with TV ratings slipping back by 2/3’s over the last decade or so.

Too much of the sport was siphoned off on to pay TV for too long.

They continually screw up in player development.

Rugby management, nationally and internationally, is just useless compared to the other codes. They just can’t seem to get their act together and act in concert in the best interests of the code. Self-interest always wins.

The game is just so boring compared to the other three football offerings with stoppages usually outlasting time in play. When will they ever just introduce a 5 or 10 minute sin bin for ruck or scrum infringements with a tap restart (no penalty kick)? Never!

Penalties usually decide the game unless the Wallabies decide to lay down and give up like they did on the weekend. 

With relative money for player payments slipping, the good players will depart for distant rugby nations (and not be eligible to play for the Wallabies) or go to Rugby League.

The Wallabies will continue to slide. Support will wane. And the problem will get worse.

Time to disengage.

There is a case, for some people, for family intervention which results in a temporary suspension of their facebook license.

This morning I wandered, quite early, into my local supermarket.

It was perfect. Every shelf was fully stocked. The fruit was geometrically piled and glowing. People were scarce.

It made me think of the mountains of industry that enables the shelves to fill every day. Suppliers, growers, technology companies, distribution, and so much more.

At (heh heh) the weekend I was reading about ISIS, the Iraqi group. I was led to believe that they are robber barons that finance themselves by theft and stand-over tactics and keep their people fed through access to foreign supplies purchased on the black market.

I was told that, by themselves, they can’t keep any complex supply chain motivated. Apart from the killing machine that is.

The implication was that if we let them and their ilk succeed there won’t be any foreign supplies to tap into.

It will be back to pre-industrial times but post-apocalyptic due to the weapons and other residual technology.

There’s an unproven hypothesis that depression has evolved in humans to motivate us to stay away from situations that aren’t good for us.

Similarly boredom may have evolved in humans to keep us away from stuff that loops and loops.

It must be fun being an evolutionary biologist; all hypothesis and no testing.

In life’s experiences.
I don’t compare everything as it is happening.
That only happens after the fact.

But like a Pavlovian dog I remember.
And I catalogue.
And I contemplate.
And I behave.

The risk of doing this is that it will get harder.
The quest for new experiences, new knowledge and new awareness.
As your market shrinks.

But the risk of not doing it.
Is that you will be a goldfish.
Forever experiencing anew the same old.
And waiting for the little nuggets.

Is there an ‘it’, a target, a right way of being?
Of course not.
We just are.
It’s just a case of fitting into your box.
Or not.

That really is no such thing as a free lunch in life. However the more compassion that you have for yourself the less likely you are to screw up your kids. Them’s metaphors only.

Bloody random weekend so far.

Today’s cabbie, unlike yesterday’s, isn’t buying any of it.

He refuses to blame anyone for anything.

Clive, Tony, Barack, Israelites, Palestinians or Iraqis – they all get a provisional free pass

He says that if a majority of people reacted this way the issues would just flicker out, starved of oxygen

It’s a wonder they gave him his license.

The OECD it appears was designed to facilitate a global environmental disaster.

On the medical research fund.

Quote “the $20b will be counted as an asset and therefore will reduce Commonwealth net debt”.

WTF?

Is all that crown land and buried resources counted as assets?

Governments run on cash. They don’t pay tax to themselves. Balance sheet calculations make no sense. Debt providers can’t come in and take over the security.

If these idiots put $20b into a medical research bucket they may as well assume it’s been immediately pissed up against the wall.

And it will not in any way contribute to foreign debt repayment capacity

I think I need to look into this debt business. I should have guessed it’s all bullshit.

In an attempt to get their co-payment on Medicare through our government has proposed a $20b medical research fund to “cure diseases”.

And they even said, straight faced, that it will be an investment. That is it well return more than $20b to treasury.

This is an odd way to attempt to bribe Australian voters. Even they have noticed that there is no return, financial or otherwise, on investment in science and technology in Australia.

Even if there was they wouldn’t give a toss. It’s too far removed from their everyday concerns

Odd, odd, odd … coalition government this one.

Apparently the catholic church understands the difference between moral and legal standards, when it suits them.

Ethics? What’s that?

The Australian Tax Office issued a decision in March 2010 saying “Yes, the gains from financial spread betting are assessable income under section 6-5 or section 15-15 of the ITAA 1997”.

Similarly, any losses on financial spread betting contracts are deductible.

This has resulted in a much lower interest in financial spread betting in Australia than the UK where this is not assessable income.

Maybe the best way to encourage investment into tech businesses in Australia is to relax this ruling but just for spread betting on qualifying technology companies.

The bookies would then reinvest a slab of their profits making sure their are enough ‘horses’ running.

Combined with equity crowd funding it would actually work. Unholy yes, but practical.

If I ever hear myself say ‘I will keep an open mind’ I know it means I am struggling.

The best thing about equity crowd funding is that founders won’t have to talk to fuckwit private investors.

Of course they might miss out on talking to great investors that could offer them so much wisdom.

But this is a small price to pay for missing even just one discussion with an Australian angel investor, incubator, accelerator, investment ‘advisor’, government agent or ‘venture capitalist’.

If you go far enough south and then just keep going you get to north.

You can always spot a retard by their views on vaccination. Never fails.

I suspect that people who have their ‘shit together’ will be first against the wall when the same hits the fan.

Never look a gift horse in the mouth or trust an academic’s efforts at data interpretation.

In a recent study by academics at the University of Texas they found that:

1. For a period from 2000 to 2011 that

2. Large cap US listed firms (Russell 1000 companies) that

3. Were successfully sued by patent trolls

4. Spent, on average, $211m less on R&D and $49m less on acquiring ‘in process R&D’ (whatever that means) compared to companies that were sued, but unsuccessfully

5. In the years (actual number unspecified) following their being sued

6. Also, collectively, the firms that were unsuccessfully sued produced collectively 63.52 and 723.98 more citations. On average? they don’t say. And again they don’t say in what time period

They then went onto state that this data ‘strongly supports the idea that NPEs have a real and negative impact on innovation for United States firms’.

But where is the comparison to firms that weren’t sued at all?

What fraction of the average R&D and IP budget does $260m represent? Assuming it’s, say, 5 years of spend (the study went from 2000-2011), that equates to $52m per firm per year which is probably less than 10%, maybe less, of the total R&D and IP budget of the average of these Russell 1000 firms. I doubt that it is significant.

And what exactly did these companies do with the supposed $260m they didn’t spend on IP and R&D? Maybe they just used it to buy patents or buy into patent funds, and in doing so effectively transferred their R&D and IP development to more effective groups in other companies – large and small, start-ups and universities.

I cannot for a minute imagine that any CEO that is being sued by patent trolls says ‘Right, lets make ourselves more exposed to patent trolls by cutting right back on R&D and patent protection’.

People will see what they want to see in dodgy data.

Miranda Devine, a columnist in the Daily Telegraph (yesterday’s toilet paper for those of you not in Sydney) today suggests that:

“Almost every other ethnic group which immigrates (sic) to Australia becomes less religious in successive generations. But he (some supposed expert) says second and third generations Muslims here are more religious than their parents.

Religion is an act of protest against mainstream society, but also against their parents”

I am pretty sure Australia, as a secular state, endorses religious freedom. And also freedom of speech and protest. And it is perfectly legal to ‘divorce’ your parents for their crimes against children.

But I am fairly sure that Miranda is on the edge of an unlawful act here.

Firstly she will be wrong for some second and third generation Muslims and they may take offence to this suggestion.

She hid behind the third party expert for the first paragraph but the second paragraph is hers. Who, in their right mind, would take the religious path to protest against their parents? No one that’s who.

They should be offended and insulted by this effort and take her to Court under section 18C of the anti-discrimination act.

To their collective credit they will all probably say and do nothing. Who is the terrorist here I ask?

This morning I realised where Jung and Freud went wrong

They were looking at people’s symptoms – certain conditions like the Oedipus complex – and trying to figure out the causes for each condition as if these were medical conditions.

It never occurred to them that there is a matrix of conditions and matrix of causes and many, many criss-crossing lines between these sets

That is, one psychological condition (as defined by behaviour) can be caused by different experiences in different people.

Most of the common conditions involve some sort of sexual behavior. No surprise there; nature wants us to reproduce and probably sees these conditions as a good thing unless they impact the survival of the children to adulthood.

Because women’s sanity is most likely to affect a child’s survival it can be guessed that women are saner than men due to evolutionary feedback, at least during periods of child raising (and contrary to popular opinion). Maybe they save ‘crazy’ for times when they are not raising kids.

Words cannot properly convey my feelings on this.
But words created my feelings on this.
I just spent a captive night exposed to art collectors.
I wish for this not to happen again.

“It is unlawful for a person to do an act, otherwise than in private, if:

(a) the act is reasonably likely, in all the circumstances, to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or a group of people; and

(b) the act is done because of the race, colour or national or ethnic origin of the other person or of some or all of the people in the group.”

Such unlawful acts are pursued by the person or entity who is aggrieved, whereas illegal acts (crimes) are pursued by the police in order to punish the perpetrator.

In a court, in order to be found to have executed such an unlawful act you would need to have had an intent to offend, an awareness of what might readily offend, and a readily offendable target group out in public.

And the worst that can happen to you is that you pay court costs and make an apology that you don’t believe in. There is no criminal offense.

It doesn’t seem that onerous now does it?

Australia’s racial discrimination act makes it unlawful to offend or insult a person on the basis of their color, race or national or ethnic origin.

Which is why, I guess, the federal government is so keen to stop the boats from landing.

Crazy, like and truth and beauty, is totally subjective.

For example, not many crazy people accept that they are crazy, But you would have to be crazy to admit you were crazy.

The medical profession is so crazy that it doesn’t even accept that crazy exists. They have sliced and diced it up into a thousand sub-categories of crazy.

Most people would admit that everyone is a little crazy from time to time, and that for some people it’s a little more of the time than for others.

However to earn the full time monicker the periods of uncrazy generally have to retreat entirely to bed-time.

And yet someone who is only partially crazy can be shunned by others simply because it can be hard to deal with crazy.

This is because crazies act unexpectedly and this requires people to re-configure their brain in order to deal with them.

Preconfigured brains are the norm because this leads to processing efficiencies which in turn enable us to do more and more complex stuff, which is required for us to get more than our fair share of life’s goodies.

And it is in the shunning of the crazies where the objectivity creeps into the definition of crazy.

All we need is GoPro’s or Google goggles on everyones head, some cloud connectivity, some bloody brilliant algorithms to monitor the shunning behaviour, some real-time reporting (say green/orange/red alerts in the goggles) and our lives could be crazy free.

One thing is for sure, as innovation in technology becomes more and more software and internet driven, it will be access to capital and market share that drives corporate dominance.

Offer it for free and figure out the business model later. That is a tough business model reserved for sociopaths with  virtually free and unlimited capital.

Ideas are cheap and innovation is commonplace. Invention is hardly required. Business ethics are defined by the lawyers.

To customers, brand is increasingly becoming just a muted message of vague security. Switching is an everyday affair.

The ‘new’ means kicking out the ‘old’ as waking hours reserved for LCD screens saturate. It’s going to get tough.

Prediction 1: Very few of the globally successful modern tech companies will survive to the third generation of CEO’s. Its like the old family company- the founder creates it, the second generations grows it, and the third loses it. Sell your shares before there is a change in CEO’s and wait until it is clear that the new CEO knows what it is doing before buying back in.

Prediction 2: Its a good time to get into organic farming or anything that will be less volatile. Hedge

Prediction 3: The smart companies will figure out how to grow the web 3.0 products that don’t require user input – IOT – the more your products do not require LCD user attention, the greater the market size and the less the competition.

I am being punished for recent bad behavior.

The formerly mentioned elderly and senile mother and daughter reunion have made my trip hell.

The older one stinks for starters.

As the plane started descending the older one decided a toilet stop was necessary. It took her ten minutes to get out of her chair. I timed it.

I then spent yet another next ten minutes standing and eventually took her inside seat in the interests of public good – the seat belt sign had come on.

Now I am trapped … They are waiting for all to deplane before getting up and then I have another ten minutes waiting for enough energy to coarse through the aging muscular-skeletal system.

I have just suggested that she starts rising now. This irony was lost on them.

The government, our current federal pretenders, have just dropped their efforts to repeal some bits of the racial discrimination act – the bits that make it illegal to offend or insult a person on the basis of their color, race or national or ethnic origin

Why not go a step further and make it illegal to insult or offend anyone on the basis of any of their dearly held beliefs?

This would stop the discrimination within the discrimination act, which I find offensive.

[Scene] Qantas flight from Melbourne to Sydney.

Next to me is seated a very elderly and very senile old woman and her elderly and senile daughter.

They are arguing at the top of their voices due to the temporary stresses of travel.

However they clearly have contempt for each other. Too much time in mutual captivity.

It’s an argument for nursing homes.

I am an inventor on about 70 patent families. My feeling is that only a very small number of these is truly inventive.

Here is an example.

We were doing R&D on a new electrochemical bio-sensor blood glucose strip. The difference between ours and the ones that already existed was that we used a closed electrochemical cell versus an open cell.

We started off with the idea of using membranes where existing products did not. This serendipitously lead us to the idea of using a closed cell and we were good enough to see the concept hidden within the concept, and we then chucked away the membrane.

This high-level idea gave great new benefits (smaller sample size, less oxygen effect, shorter measurement time, etc.) but we then had to do a lot of R&D to make it work in practice at reasonable cost. Years of development and scale-up, with lots of practical problems to solve along the way.

In this process we came up with a dozen more ‘inventions’ because every time we had to solve a technical problem we patented the solutions. These solutions represented genuine new knowledge.

But I would argue that any good team working on this product would have come up with these ideas and therefore they are obvious. The only real invention was the original one.

Oddly though, the concept of an electrochemical cell with two close and opposing electrodes was certainly not new at all. The application of this type of cell to blood glucose measurement was however inspirational.

No new knowledge was created by the original idea other than the idea itself – it was a new application for an old technology.

The technology went on to become the core of two competing sets of multi-billion dollar products – one company even stole the ideas and was latter sued for patent infringement, And yet another start-up has licensed the technology for new applications and has gone on to a public listing.

The idea was so good that afterwards everyone said it was OBVIOUS.

Oddly this is a sign of true invention. People getting sort of mad at themselves for not having the idea themselves and then they tend to say it is obvious in order to discredit the idea a little, just to make themselves feel better I guess.

The great inventive ideas are always obvious after the fact.

True invention requires a number of things:

1. Serendipity or blinding insight, normally only by the highly trained – the ready mind

2. To others in the field It may be ‘obvious’ but only after the fact

3. One idea amongst an infinite set of possibilities and not one idea amongst a finite set of possibilities – the latter can be arrived at by systematic experimentation

4. And I see no requirement for new knowledge to be created other than the idea itself. When genuine new scientific knowledge is created it is often many years before someone has the inventive insight as to how to put that knowledge to practical use. For example the scientific community first heard about lasers in the late 1950’s but it wasn’t until many years later that industrial R&D types has product insights, followed by hard-earned improvements in performance and reductions in cost required for product release.

This may sound boring but after a slow start it gets better …

In order to get a patent four criteria must be satisfied: the invention must be useful, novel, non-obvious, and must meet what is known as the enablement criterion, meaning that it should have a detailed enough description that anyone working in the appropriate field should be able to make use of it.

The inventive step criteria is (supposed to be) assessed by what the skilled person would have found ‘obvious’ before the patent applications was filed, in the light of the common general knowledge.

When considering who is the skilled person one is supposed to look at to whom the patent specification is directed to and look for the reasonable and uninventive common man in the technical area and ask them, or imagine, what they might think about how obvious the supposed inventions are.

I think I could state with some certainty that this definition of inventiveness was put together by a dysfunctional committee of less than common men that was worried that the pub was about to shut.

In the annals of fuck-up-edness this is right up there.

In any case, the key is to consider who is the ‘one’ do the imagining?

When a patent is being drafted it is the patent attorneys that imagines what a reasonable and uninventive technical operative might consider obvious. Later on it is a patent examiner and if the patent is ever the subject of enforcement, a judge or a jury (in the US).

The ONLY party amongst this lot that may have any credentials to imagine what a reasonable and unimaginative technical operative might think is obvious is a jury member that by some fluke has worked in a technical area.

Judges, patent examiners and patent attorneys have rarely done anything other than law or patent law. They might have some undergraduate technical degree but that will count for nought.

When one is trying to properly imagine the mind of a reasonable and unimaginative technical operative the skills needed are quite remarkable. This mind will be ordered and dull; it will probably have an antithesis to invention; it may be bitter; it certainly will think it understands patents and invention when it does not.

In summary its opinion on the matter of invention will be wrong and therefore the judge or patent examiner should double-guess the bastard and go the other way.

But then patent examiners or judges would need a great big dose of empathy that they usually do not have in order to understand the dull technical operative in the first place. But even if by some fluke they had this empathy, without the experience of working alongside such dull technical operatives, they will never be able to see through the facade to the discontent of these types.

To put it another way, if one was to come up with the worst possible definition of invention this would be it. And in fact it is mostly ignored in practice. Patent attorneys and patent examiners just use precedents and prior art patents to make decisions on inventiveness – which is why there are so many useless patents.

Judges and juries do get to see the dullards giving witness in court from time to time. The problem here is that they rely on the opinion of the worst of the dullards, the ones that are prepared to stand up in court and sprout forth. This is their chance to right wrongs so you can be sure that what they think is not worth knowing.

I always say that its no use whining about something unless you have an alternative.

There are those that really do understand invention and it’s corollary, obviousness, and it is venture capitalists that happen to have a strong technical and entrepreneurial background. Their opinion on inventiveness is accurate so long as they have an appropriate understanding of patent law.

Why is this so? Well you have to remember that patents are all about money. The granting of one should lead to profit for the owner. And the technical and inventive types that are most attuned to profit are the characters that I have described above. This I know and they know true invention when they see it. Comparing these types to corporate technical types you have foot soldiers versus high-end mercenaries.

It would be an interesting study, to take a handful of patent applications and to ask all of the following – – a number of patent attorneys, patent examiners, judges, technical dullards and technically experienced VC’s that are former entrepreneurs – for their opinion on inventiveness using both (a) the current dullard proxy definition and (b) what they really think.

My prediction is as follows:

The dullards will be al over the place – for the same invention some will say its inventive and some will say its obvious. Some will imagine it just from their own point of view and, who knows, some may try to imagine what their peers think. In short the spread in opinions will discredit the dullards as a source of anything. Inaccurate and imprecise.

Similarly judges, even with the help of dullards, will be all over the place simply because they have no experience to help them make sensible decisions, other than their own experience making inexperienced decisions. Inaccurate and imprecise.

On the other hand, patent attorneys and patent examiners will all pretty much agree with each other because they will not really be imagining the mind of the dullard at all. They will take a sneaky look at the prior art in the patent literature in order to make their decisions. Some really clever operatives might even write an algorithm to automate this process. However they will inadvertently allow patents to be granted that are obvious – possibly because this is in the best interests of their livelihoods (more patents equals more employment etc). Inaccurate but precise.

Finally the genius entrepreneur/VC/tech gurus will have a much higher bar for inventiveness than all others if they use their own definition of the inventiveness. Because they are so clever, if they were forced to use the dullard proxy approach they will actually generate appropriately random results. But left to their own devices without the baggage of the imaginary dullard they will be both accurate and precise.

From wiki – “Linus Torvalds has criticized Richard Stallman for what he considers black-and-white thinking”.

One software engineer accusing another of being a software engineer. Hilarious.

Stallman is the grandfather of the open source OS world. He claims he is an atheist but I suspect that software is his religion. His main claim to fame is the creation of a free operating system called GNU which is compatible with Unix.

We all use it, often without knowing it, and it makes our use of the devices and the internet a little cheaper. Its cheaper because they built the OS and didn’t charge for it. It was an act of charity to the planet that hardly anyone cares about.

Stallman thinks that if we depend on securely compiled code then our lives are impure. Its just the vibe of thing and all that. Specifically there is a risk that the code will be able to control us or hurt us in some way due to the malevolence of the sort of people and companies that use copyright, restrictive software licenses and the like.

A side issue that upsets Stallman is intellectual property because of the risk that someone or something might try to assert the same against the open source OS and its use. IP is just a nuisance that should go away.

Well I guess it’s one scenario. It’s sounds a bit odd to me but so are most scenarios. We just get used to what is and we also think that the Quixotics and exotic, or mad, or both. I’m glad that there is someone out there pushing this barrow even if I think they are all mad.

I invite the open source software guy to discuss his views with me. He says:

“Given your decided lack of response to the matter of software patents and the damage to scientific inquiry that causes, I don’t think there is much else for us to discuss. Have a nice day.”

I reply:

“I am sorry to hear that. To be honest I didn’t understand your questions or statements and had to do some research to get the relevant background information.

Finally at gnu.org I found their description of why free software is important to them. Personally for me I get the greatest sense of freedom when I don’t use software (free or paid) at all – my ideal life would be sans any LCD screen.

Since you have all that free software can you explain what is the problem? Are there specific organizations trying to assert patent rights against the gnu developers?

Or is the issue with patents more philosophical?

On a practical note I would have thought that it’s very hard for patent owners to pursue any on-line open source organization – they can’t even shut down pirate bay. So my guess is you guys should be quite happy to just ignore patent rights. I would if I was you.

If the unwashed masses are uneducated and don’t seem to mind being controlled by patent owners then so what? It’s their problem.

cheers
Ian”

I really do find people odd.

I have got to the bottom of the open source software crowd … I found this:

“…most people, in advanced countries, now own computers (sometimes called “phones”) and connect to the Internet with them. Nonfree software still makes the users surrender control over their computing to someone else, but now there is another way to lose it: Service as a Software Substitute, or SaaSS, which means letting someone else’s server do your own computing activities.

Both nonfree software and SaaSS can spy on the user, shackle the user, and even attack the user. Abuses are common in services and proprietary software products because the users are not in charge. That’s the fundamental difference: nonfree software and SaaSS are controlled by some other entity (typically a corporation or a state), and the users have no say. Free software, by contrast, puts the users in control.

Why does this control matter? Because freedom means having control over your own life. If you use a program to carry out activities in your life, your freedom depends on your having control over the program. You deserve to have control over the programs you use, and all the more so when you use them for something important in your life.”

Boys, I know someone who thinks that freedom is freedom from ever using a device with a LCD screen. If you never use software then it’s harder for the big bad corporations and governments to control you. Get out of the Matrix!

Letter to a friend of the earth person who loves Philip Mirowski’s book “Science Mart”.

“Dear xxx,

I had a quick read of the IP chapter in the Mirowski book – in fact I just recalled seeing him talk at Sydney Uni on the subject of how the Pharma industry is one big Ponzi Scheme. Entertaining at best it was.

I would say that the IP chapter is a series of opinions, not right nor wrong, just opinions. His big lament is that the neoliberalists have ‘perverted’ science through a number of means, including the modification of the patent system etc etc.

This is one interpretation of the facts but I could think of other interpretations. The scientist in me refuses to assume one hypothesis is correct when I can think of more than one, and none have been tested.

Where this book fails is the view that the evil neoliberalists have perverted the cause of pure science. This nostalgic view of events is appealing to many because it shifts cause to an external group which avoids the scientific community having to face some uncomfortable truths.

I started my research degree in 1985 and was lucky enough to see the shift in the science community from the old regime to the new. And I am very observant!

My preferred hypothesis is that the primary cause for the shift in how science is practised in universities is the shift from the prior era of discovery to the modern era of applications research. Essentially by the 1980’s the core of much practical knowledge was complete – further discovery of nature’s secrets was being pushed to the edges of usefulness (e.g. big bang experiments) or to the sublimely complicated where the refinements in knowledge were not big news (this was explained to me by the laurete, de Gennes, over drinks one night – an example we discussed was colloid science where the fundamentals had been laid down in the 1920’s but in the 1980’s people were finding all sorts of complex colloids where variations had to be explained – de Genne called this science ‘flaws in the crystal’).

So scientists themselves started shifting from the discovery in complex systems to invention in complex systems. They themselves chose this path – it wasn’t forced on them. It was a natural result of the fruits of 300 years of knowledge creation being mostly complete, at least to the point where further efforts were dead dull boring. Try reading this article for more details on this – http://issuu.com/ianmax/docs/cia_march_maxwell

At the same time, grants for science became hard to achieve because of increases in the number of institutions doing research but not a concomitant increase in grant funding.

And then some government grants were carved off for more commercial outcomes.

Universities started dabbling in patents.

Universities started getting management fever as they became responsible for planning and reporting to government.

The response from senior academics and their influential societies? To look after their own grant ‘patch’.See http://issuu.com/ianmax/docs/what-is-happening-at-csiro

In the US (not Australia where they hardly did any research anyway) corporations decided to shut down a of lot their R&D and outsource it to universities. Academics embraced this opportunity for the funding it offered.

In short – all these things happened at once – but the driving force to more applied research was not, in my opinion, caused by these externalities – it was simply a result of the success of 300 years of pure research.

So I disagree with Mirowski in that, while it would be lovely to be an academic again in 1930, that model of pure scientific research simply isn’t needed any more. And indeed if the transition to a new model has led to unpalatable results then the scientific community needs to take a long hard look at itself rather than trying to blame third parties.

Take this Mirowski book with a very large grain of salt!

regards
Ian”

We don’t blink when someone ‘dials’ a number.

In twenty year’s time will we notice if someone still ‘googles’ something long after we don’t search using Google and they have joined IBM and Microsoft in the enterprise retirement home for software companies?

Here’s a patent spoiler writ large …

Yesterday I learned something that I already knew but had not taken in properly. There are those out there concerned about patents on ‘life’.

Now there are rules about such thing which vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but the basic principle is that one cannot patent a principle of nature.

That sounds clear enough but any linguist or any lawyer will tell you that this concept leaves a very wide door open for arguments as to what and what is not a principle of nature. And thus it is so in our courts.

We scientists have been working very hard to demystify life and in the process we are developing the tools to create and modify life. It’s as though living beings are just complex robots; which is exactly what they are to some, and not to others.

Are we just very complex robots? There are two types of people (and no animals or plants) that disagree – those that believe that we humans contain a soul and those that think we (and all living things in some cases) are ‘special’ even if we are just organic robots.

I am guessing that religious types often feel very uncomfortable with the idea of patents over say human genes, but possibly less uncomfortable with plant patents because plants don’t have souls.

Others may think that granting patents over genes will just encourage research corporations to fiddle with life and we shouldn’t do this because of the ethical and actual disasters that may follow. I have to chuckle at the concept of an ethical disaster – it would be all over the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald and not even mentioned in the Daily Telegraph.

Social justice is another motivator. Some believe that corporates automatically use and abuse knowledge and power against those individuals without means. This is a ‘fairness’ argument and people in this camp would prefer that certain genetic engineering technologies did not exist rather than these unfairly benefiting a few.

Financial dependency is another issue. Monsanto hasn’t done their position any favours by ruthlessly exploiting their technologies to the detriment of (arguably) the environment and a sense of personal and financial freedom of farmers.

In order to get a US patent four criteria must be satisfied: the invention must be useful, novel, non-obvious, and must meet what is known as the enablement criterion, meaning that it should have a detailed enough description that anyone working in the appropriate field should be able to make use of it.

In the area of genetics there are apparently four broad categories of patents filed; diagnostics, drugs that affect the functioning of genes, methods by which genes are extracted or manipulated, and finally, ‘composition of matter’ patents which are filed to protect inventions that generally stem from combining different genetic material and are typically filed for drugs and vaccines such as insulin and human growth hormone.

Putting on an inventor’s hat, in all four areas substantial R&D is required to create useful outcomes and through this lens I believe that it is reasonable to seek patent protection in order to get investment to do the R&D in the first place. Obviously there are others that think that this issue is not the most important.

In the US courts there has been all sorts of silly rulings about whether genetic material isolated in a lab has significantly different chemical make-up than when it is found inside the body and therefore if genes, once removed from the body, are a composition of nature or not. This is all Sophism in my books and if the debate is fought here the debate itself suffers from artifice and will be likely won by the party with the most legal fees or greater number of brown paper bags for political donations.

I am not completely sure where I fall on these issues. On one hand I believe in the requirement for patents to lower the bar for investment into technology and I do not believe that life is anything other than organic machinery. In any case patent rights are only for 20 years – a blink of an eye – so I can’t see the long term issue.

On the other hand, I question whether it makes sense to use a substantial fraction of our planet’s resources to artificially benefit a small minority through, for example, increased life expectancy via the use of intensely complex medical technologies.

On balance, I do not think there is a good argument to prevent patents in the field. However I wouldn’t be that unhappy if corporations couldn’t get broad patents in the area and as a result the pace of technology development was slowed substantially. This would allow the ethical and moral debates to catch up at least.

By the way, I think it’s very ironic that many who hate patents say that patents do not promote ‘innovation’ and yet on the other hand they are working very hard to stop patents over genes in order to slow down the pace of innovation in this area!

And finally, to the patent spoiler…

There are approximately 20,500 genes and 3.3 billion base-pairs in the human genome. There are databases for all known medical diseases that are continually being updated.

It would be relatively easy to write a few lines of code to concatenate the words that describe every single base-base and every combination of base-pairs with the words that describe every disease known to mankind. Indeed the same code could parse the combinations of base-pairs or genes and diseases into English-sounding sentences.

This could be done with the inclusion of phrases such as ‘diagnostic method for…’, ‘a drug for…’, ‘method for extracting…’, and ‘a combination of genetic material for…’.

Possibly billions of sentences could be automatically generated in a blink of an eye with just a few lines of code put together by a team of linguists, genetic researchers, software engineers and patent attorneys. Once published on a website they would represent prior art for every future patent in the area.

Oddly this may be an implementation of the Church Turing theory which states that a function is algorithmically computable if it is computable by a Turing machine. Which if it turns out to be true implies that we are in fact organic robots which would in turn remove some of the ethical arguments against patenting genes.

I would note that neither the computers nor the people would know which of the billions of automatically generated gene invention statements is true until they are experimentally tested. Which is an act of discovery not invention. Also any such experimentation could be automated so this doesn’t require human intervention or divine insight.

I would note that we already have combinatorial chemistry which is a stylised machine-driven approach to discovering new and useful molecules. Should the outcomes of such an approach be patentable?

More importantly if a machine can anticipate an invention then arguably it isn’t an invention. Which is a wonderful restatement of the Turing theory don’t you think? Possibly it is even better. How few believe that invention by a machine is possible?

Actually I do believe that machines can invent but generally they can only do so because of human input into their design. But I am not sure this will always be the case – and yet in an evolutionary sense computers only exist because humans once started designing and building them in the first place.

Maybe rather than limiting patents over principles of nature it would be more useful to (artificially) limit patents to inventions that could not be invented solely by machines – both experimental and computational machines. It might have the same outcome (because nature tends to follow ‘rules’ within constrained boundaries) but this new approach may be less prone to silly arguments.

Another deviation of thought; since all that we know of ‘nature’, in the biological sense on the planet earth, is just variations within a ‘bound’ complex system it could be argued that only discovery is possible within this environment, That is, invention requires the imagining of one idea from an infinite set of possibilities, and not from within a finite set of possibilities.

Back to patents – there is some requirement for prior art to be ‘enabled’ (that is, shown to have worked in practice) and yet I know for sure that 90% of, say, Google’s software patents have never been enabled. They are just ideas, diagrams and flowcharts. I would argue that in the case of the use of gene technology the approach to enabling any idea is so well-known and standardised, requiring trial and error within certain bounds, that any idea by itself is all that is needed for prior art. Of course this would be argued to death in the Courts.

Here is one definition of the US Courts’ opinion of the subject “Such possession is effected if one of ordinary skill in the art could have combined the [prior art] publication’s description of the invention with his [or her] own knowledge to make the claimed invention”. I think the automated gene invention machine could satisfy this requirement, especially if the knowledge itself to enable the invention is referenced by the invention statements. 

At the very least I would imagine that this style of high-level prior art forces patentees into claims of specific implementations of technologies which then allows other parties the opportunities of ‘work-arounds’. The right result in my mind.

I wonder if the ideas of this blog entry could have been patented? A method of automatically generating inventions from within a finite set of input parameters by (a) computing every known combination of input parameters as potential inventions, and (b) automatically testing every such potential invention for practical efficacy”. 

It makes you think doesn’t it?

I just said ‘see you later’ to the Chinese cabbie

He said he has always wondered why Australians say this when it’s likely not to be true.

I proposed that it is a left over from our convict days when there was only a handful of people here

He was good with that.

In her sixth year at primary school my daughters school, with a new principal, has finally threatened parents with banishment for kids with head lice.

I suspect that, apart from depleting resources and increasing pollution,  the greatest threat to modem society is complexity in our systems.

Fewer people can fully understand our complex systems whereas more and more hate them as the source of their ills. Complex systems are easy targets for the mentally disenfranchised.

Complex systems are also ready targets for exploitation by the cunning with resources. The more complex, the easier they are to exploit. Think of our tax system as an example.

So at one end we have the cunning with resources doing the raping, and at the other the cunning without resources sending up ground-to-air missiles.

The guileless masses with moderate resources are under threat and they hardly know it.

Bentham should have added an addendum. The greater good for the greater many with the minimum of complexity.

That is we need to cross pollinate Bentham and Occam.

It getting bigger – I am now getting hate mail based on my one little article published on patents.

I do believe that I am going to have to get to the bottom of this. And to do that I will have to write an article on patent haters.

But, ahead of genuine inquiry, I am wondering about the personality types that hate all things patents.

They are an odd thing to hate, patents. But I suppose they can’t punch back, nor are their promoters likely to punch back. Patent attorneys and their ilk are a gutless bunch in general. So it’s a safe target at which to vent. To be fair its much easier to puff up the silly examples of patented inventions, say one-click purchasing, than it is to explain the system-wide benefits from investment in, and communications of technology.

The haters all seem to be academics or software engineers. Isolated introverts, possibly seeking some externality to blame for life’s ills.

They see the patent system as something that threatens their implied right to do any research or engineering at a whim. Not that these guys will ever get the resources to do anything meaningful – one of their ills.

The patent system also threatens their implied right to exploit their work product – not that they have any. If they did they might be thinking patent rights were a good thing. Indeed many of them support free access to all technology so, logically, they could just give away their work product and many do in the form of code that hardly anyone cares about or papers that nobody reads.

They may be believing that they are acting altruistically – trying to pull down the scaffolding of the patent system for the greater good by making technology cheaper and more readily accessible. It’s here where the real argument starts – if there were no patents the key question is, would there be less invention? This is simply unanswerable and, I can assure you, we aren’t about to find out any time soon. So the whole argument is moot and the process is Quixotic.

As a colleague points out, this is the perfect breeding ground for esoteric arguments because there are so few people that really understand the whole patent system (including most patent attorneys). Therefore the academics can lament to their hearts content in the absence of anyone with the skills to rebuff them. Cleverness confirmed sans factual perforations.

It is possible that hating patents is a cover for hating their own lack of success in their endeavours. Or, getting ahead of the curve, making excuses before failure occurs.

To put it another way, their extreme hatred of an innocuous government mandated invention system suggests they are transferring self-loathing. And you can’t win arguments with people that are lying to themselves; they have a metaphorical glass eye and you will be confused as you follow the diverging optical paths of dissimulation.

For some of them the hating of patents is just a badge of entry into the clubs of the voluntarily disenfranchised. They probably have to wear scarves and black beanies and drink cider as well. One does have to look and feel the part in order to fit in. Fuck logic and individual thought, despite any pretences to the same.

Fortunately, for the rest of us, they reveal their nuttiness in their communications and are hence ignored by all policy makers and sane folk. Except of course the journalists – they love a short cut to interesting copy and usually have no genuine ability to adjudicate between useful and useless opinion.

Now I will go and talk to a few of them – they have self-selected themselves by sending me emails. I will use the above as a starting hypothesis and try to prove it wrong with first-hand data. This will be interesting. And fun.

Evil fucker…

All morons are people, including a couple that invented very useful things like the Hills Hoist and Fetta cheese.

Despite their sub-unity IQs, labeling a dog a moron is very insulting to dogs.

Dogs apparently do not value inventions (other than the plastic dog biscuit).

In fact they would make great open source software engineers if only they could type.

They having the whining down pat.

An article in the herald today is headlined “Australia’s young Einsteins get the red-carpet treatment”.

It then goes onto describe the work of a handful of young scientists nowhere near the calibre of Albert that have got invited to some scientific shinding somewhere, not here. And probably because they worked hard to get invited where others were not interested.

They are all working in areas of general interest – peptides to stabilise unstable drugs, epidemiology to understand infections in children, cancer research, treatment of depression, and the causes of Alzheimers.

Of course none of these scientist have had any inventions or developed any new knowledge that has led to breakthroughs in any of these areas; they are all still ‘gunnas’.

It depresses me somewhat that we in Australia continue to promote sexy ‘work in progress’ instead of genuine outcomes.

Because by doing so we are sending a signal to our scientists that results don’t matter – your egos will be satisfactorily stoked just for being active in a sexy field and by seeking publicity.

If we breach legal standards then that simply means that we got caught.

If we breach ethical standards then we may face peer and societal disapproval.

But breaching moral standards can have different effects on different people; they may feel uncomfortable, remorse or depressed so long as the moral standards are their own.

Breaching someone else’s moral standards generally has lesser impact, especially if one has no connection to the person with the moral standards.

A socio-path is either someone with no moral standards or a lawyer that equates ethical or moral standards to legal standards.

Anyone that attempts to assert that their own moral standards are actually ethical standards is an absolute bore that should be ignored.

Extremists go one step further and make their own moral standards the legal standards.

If I were forced to build a car it would be a mini moke without all the frills.

I think we need a ‘who cares?’ coefficient which ranges between zero and unity.

You take whatever value is placed on something and then multiply it by the ‘who cares?’ coefficient to get the real value.

My coffee in front of me has a coefficient of unity.

String theory has a value near zero.

Now you will notice that the value of coefficients for a particular item will vary from person to person and from time to time.

Which to me just confirms the value of the whole construct.

Foolish the scientist that believes in absolute value because they have no way of modeling or predicting this coefficient.

Back to the very privileged high school kid …

This kid’s parents are making massive financial sacrifices to send both of their kids to the expensive school that will reward them life’s benefits.

The mother is totally focused on her kid’s school existence.

This, I suspect, is the fly in the ointment because it must come with expectations and consequences.

Especially when a kid’s life choices tend in another direction not exploiting the benefits of such privilege.

The question is, how important is it that people get to make their own way in life, sans template?

Personally I suspect the whole deal is all askew because success is pretty much only measured by dollars. Everything else looks pretty second order.

This is a symptom of a culture living in excess. History, the stories of us, teaches us that societies in this state are overdue for a fall.

Maybe we should be teaching our kids extreme survival skills instead. 🙂

If William Shakespeare hadn’t written a play about him would Julius Caesar be just one amongst many rulers on ancient Rome that most people have never heard of?

Did Julius sneak into the consciousness of modern culture because of a quick decision made by William one day down the pub?

It just makes you wonder why certain information is held in high esteem. Possibly the cream rises to the top but maybe not. 2000 years after the fact there are no facts. Just stories.

Historians, if they were prevented from filling in the gaps with their imaginations and ramblings, would be quickly placed into the same importance bucket occupied by the SETI folk and them gravitational radiation seekers.

There’s just noise out there swamping any signal that may or may not exist. And not a voyeur in sight.

Happiness and madness co-exist; however they have opposite signs.

Contentment on the other hand is the reciprocal of the sum of the absolute values of both.

Excitement is the reciprocal of contentment and the equation of life is truly insoluble if you take notice of any of this.

I just spent an evening with an old friend who has a 17 year old sitting his final year at high school. The kid came along.

The 17 year old is privileged in every way imaginable.

Boarding at one of Sydney’s most expensive high schools with access to just about every activity known to mankind, from art history travel to France, charity work in the Solomon Islands, scuba diving on the barrier reef, building aboriginal housing in the NT, charity balls with sister schools, trips to international rugby matches in NZ, a zillion courses at school from drama, professional public speaking, and a tonne of other courses in addition to the demanded curriculum.

Academically, the school promotes great results through exploitation of the bizarrely complex scoring system that was actually dreamt up by one of the kid’s fathers – a well-meaning but deluded mathematician.

On the sports front they get to play everything under the sun, and rugby union; which is their main interest in life and will probably remain so until they die. In truth its just something to talk about with their mates in the absence of talking about anything meaningful.

The kid is lovely. Balanced in character. Caring because he been trained to be so. Careful in his pronouncements. Apparently wise beyond his years. Confident. And the list goes on. Any failings in his life and career are on his shoulders alone, given this head start.

I wonder whether this accelerated development is a good thing or not? We know that the slowly maturing wine eventually outperforms the yearlies. But on the flip-side, such great development while the mind is still pliable may be the opportunity to take advantage of.

The other thought that comes to mind is whether ennui is the curse of these privileged kids? Possibly the ‘new’ in life is all used up in the first 20-30 years and after that life becomes dull and repetitive. Can we actually teach people to remain motivated in the absence of substantive change or novelty? I suspect this varies from person to person.

I have noticed that the kids from these schools, in former eras, tend to keep close to their high school mates and have very few close friends that didn’t also attend their schools. It’s as if the experience was so intense that anyone that didn’t experience it can’t possibly understand them. Somehow this feels like a failure to communicate, emotionally. But maybe in the modern era they are onto this as well.

One thing that I am sure of on life is that there is trade-off between genius and contentment. These balanced and high-performing individuals will be smoothly-operating higher-end parts of the societal machine but they will lack the irrational and unbalanced motivating forces that drives lasting achievement. But so what? You have to be irrational and unbalanced to care about such things anyway.

Joy and excitement are irrational thoughts and feelings, and we encourage these with enthusiasm.

Don’t they also lead to depression when the pendulum swings?

Can you have your cake without eating it?

Arguing with open source software types about intellectual property is about as satisfying as arguing with born again Christians on any subject.

It’s good for a laugh but you have to wonder how any of their software ever works.

You’d expect their code to get stuck in infinite loops. And they are definitely prone to memory leaks.

In the end it’s a good thing they are open source because that gives the million monkeys a chance to bang away the keyboards until something works.

I have just published an article at ‘The Conversation’ which is an online ‘newspaper’ primarily populated with articles written by academics.

I had a bunch of comments from academics, mostly disagreeing with something I didn’t say in the article. Hilarious.

So my first observation is that academics are very bad at comprehension.

Secondly, they were all whining about this and that. They simply do not feel empowered to do something about what ails them. But they will happy whine for years about the same thing.

I think they need a collective crash course in assertiveness training.

And maybe someone should tell them that if they don’t like their environment then they should change jobs or careers.

Let’s hope that their whiny and useless ways do not rub off onto their students.

Coffee in the morning at Rocco’s; it is a great way to wake.

This morning there is, amongst the mix, a mother and two toddlers, one on a little push-along bike.

The bike has an air horn attached, activated by squeezing a pliable plastic bulb.

At some point the kids start squeezing the bulb and making a horrible noise, a high pitched squeaky number.

The mother, after quite some time, tells them to stop.

They ignore her.

Her solution?

To take herself, her coffee, and the kids outside into the cold and fog because the noise ‘might’ be annoying other patrons (I know this because she told Rocco).

Their lives together sure is gonna be rough, to loosely quote Dylan.

Try out this extract from wiki … how did anyone ever take Freud or Jung seriously? It’s so odd that I swear it must have been written by Hunter S. Thompson on a psychedelic trip to Cuba.

“The psychodynamic nature of the daughter–mother relationship in the Electra complex derives from penis envy, caused by mother, who also caused the girl’s castration; however, upon re-aligning her sexual attraction to father (heterosexuality), the girl represses the hostile female competition, for fear of losing the love of her mother. This internalization of “Mother” develops the super-ego as the girl establishes a discrete sexual identity (ego). The girl’s penis envy is rooted in biologic fact, without a penis, she cannot sexually possess mother, as the infantile id demands. Resultantly, the girl redirects her desire for sexual union upon father, and thus progresses to heterosexual femininity, which culminates in bearing a child who replaces the absent penis. Moreover, after the phallic stage, the girl’s psychosexual development includes transferring her primary erogenous zone from the infantile clitoris to the adult vagina. Freud thus considered the feminine Oedipus attitude (“Electra complex”) to be more emotionally intense than the Oedipal conflict of a boy, resulting, potentially, in a woman of submissive, less confident personality”

Where is the inflection point on the ‘bespoke to commodity’ continuum?

When the Chinese start making it, that’s where.

“Dear Parents and Carers,

the ‘Dutch Pancakes’ 20th August 2014, advertised in yesterday’s newsletter (Canteen Section) is now cancelled. This event conflicts with the Book Parade on the same day.

Apologies
Clovelly Public School
Canteen Committee”

Why do you reckon book parades and poffertjes are mutually exclusive events?

Where’s Bertrand Russell when you need him?

Lola asked me what I thought was the all-time worst girls’ name.

Upon reflection I went with Cheryl.

Her choice was Gertrude.

I pointed out that all the Gertrudes that I could think of were strong and intelligent women.

She noted that this didn’t influence her thinking on the subject one bit.

She asked me if I still liked the name Lola.

I said it has grown on me but I reminded her that I had nothing at all to do with it.

Indeed my choice would have been Wilhelmina.

Lola said the problem with this choice is that it would have been shortened to Will, a boys name.

I said no, in Holland it is shortened to ‘Mien’.

She said that wouldn’t work because she isn’t mean

This dissolved into a discussion of all the meanings of mean.

And eventually we agreed that English is weird.

I have this suspicion that teachers are biased towards making their own jobs easier and in doing so, educational outcomes are compromised.

And then the government wades in to create incentives for teachers to create better outcomes. But all they achieve is a high level of planning and reporting that removes the teachers’ attention even further from teaching.

My sister in law is a teacher in a country region. The head office for the 26 schools in the region has one hundred employees. Enough salaries to populate 4 more schools. And apparently they are all involved in planning and reporting to government.

And the odd thing is that most academics agree that high school graduate are, year by year, slipping backwards in quality.

Eventually it will be time to go back to the beginning.

My latest purchase is a bottle of organic peanut butter. There’s only peanuts in there and no added oil or salt.

Why no salt? Fuckwits. The body is almost 1% salt (almost 1 kg for me) and everyone has bought this line that a few grams in your diet is a bad thing. I demur.

In any case I just noticed it has come from the Netherlands. Now I used to live in Holland and I can assure you there are no peanut bushes in Holland.

Fishy.

I remember that we used to get to primary school at least an hour before the bell.

The motivation was footy.

We were code hoppers, variably playing soccer, touch, rugby league and even forcings back, years before Australian rules landed in Sydney.

We didn’t know what union was until high school and that was a laugh, learning all the silly rules. I can still hear the complaints “what we have to think while we play?” and “sir, he didn’t release the pill”.

Back to primary school. Occasionally we would skip the ball altogether and just get down to some pure unadulterated thuggery called British Bulldog.

I wonder when this was last played in an Australian school? Because one thing is for sure our little dears couldn’t possibly survive such an enjoyable pastime.

Get this, my daughter’s school has now banned running and ball games in the playground before school starts.

The rationale for this is the risk to the infants and general injuries amongst all.

Indeed, even when supervised the response to any minor injury in the playground is a temporary (a week or two) halt to all sporting pastimes. Maybe to teach them all a lesson?

Will this madness ever stop?

I went to the rugby final on Saturday. The game has a problem and it’s called penalties. The ref won on Saturday; for the teams playing I call it a draw.

At a stadium distance I couldn’t spot the exact cause of any one of the twenty plus penalties that ruined the game. Unless I watched the big screen; but for the price of the tickets I could have bought a new tele. So bugger that.

They need to do two things.

First, only penalize ruck and maul infringements if the infringement results in a turnover. And when that happens not only is there a penalty but the infringing player automatically gets ten minutes in the bin.

Second, they need to remove four players from the scrum. They are getting too heavy and the penalties are there to protect the players. Any penalty at the scrum should be a tap restart and again the infringing player should get ten minutes.

That is, reduce the whistle blowing and stoppages but make it really hurt when the whistle does blow.

PS avid fans of the game have Stockholm Syndrome; everyone said it was a great game because they are so used to seeing penalty shootout slug fests. Imagine soccer if the whole game resembled 90 minutes of penalty shoot outs intermingled with a bit of passing.

All liquid, no care.

WordPress and Scribd will go the way of the dinosaurs…

These guys led the charge but they are stuck in ‘1.0 paradigm’.

They just don’t get their customer’s needs and arrogantly rely on their market dominance.

My guess is that the management of these companies simply don’t use the products and never have. It’s one of the risk of using head-hunters to replace the founders – they find ‘analyst and investor’-friendly grey-beards that simply don’t understand the product. This is a guess but what else can explain it?

But they will be eaten up by 2.0 and 3.0 competitors in a flash.

Issuu is already eating Scribd’s lunch and Scribd’s reaction? To remove just about all author stats. Really?

WordPress is a byzantine tangle of interdependent code. Its laughably bad this spaghetti junction of sub-routines (it feels that old). Have you tried using the editor on a long document? Don’t – it just ignores you. There are half a dozen ways to look at your dashboard of control functions – each of them with different levels of control. In the end we all just get used to meandering through this rat-race in a way that works for us, but we daren’t try anything different.

Which brings us to Google…have you ever used Google+? Probably not – it’s rubbish for some undefinable reason..actually because it is an in-house development. Apart from search all their good stuff was bought as a working solution.

If you have a website you will have used Google’s admin and analytics tools. Sweet bejesus, it feels like there are dozens of admin pages that are all interconnected in some psychedelic fashion that only one geek in a dark cave at Google really understands. It is just so bad.

Google is inherently web 1.0. When they buy new stuff and bolt it on it really only depresses the value of the user experience because we all then have to use Google’s ‘integrated back-end’, i.e. arsehole, of an admin ‘system’.

Truth will out. Rant over.

A wooden facsimile of a milk crate. Life gets weirder every day.

Ever wondered why Facebook doesn’t have a ‘dislike’ button?

It’s a self affirmation society, that’s why.

If I posted this on Facebook I would probably get a whole bunch of likes.

Ahhhh, the email of month just came in on the last day…

“Hello, I have a patent, he is a Chinese, I want to sell it, you help me?”

Every day on my cycling commute I have a section of path which is co-shared with one Sydney’s best-known running paths.

Over the last 6 months I have noticed something very strange; the female running/jogging/walking population on the path have almost universally migrated to black three-quarter tights, away from a motley collection of short, tights, skirts, you name it.

The two things that puzzle me are:

1. How did they all decide, in such a short period, to adopt the same uniform?, and

2. How did over half of them get conned into this given that it’s not doing them any favours at all?

Have you ever wondered why there are so many articles on the web that begin with

“Seven things you need to know…”

“Ten things that…”

? (query can you put a question mark there just like that?)

Well research has found that people love this sort of bite-sized content. Concise and easy to digest, plus people know what they are in for before they start reading. It’s got to be better than getting interested in a paper only to find that the bastard is over 20 pages long.

Indeed this sort of ‘list content’ is close to ‘evergreen content’ – that is, it can stay up on a site and keep getting readers because it doesn’t get ‘old’ very quickly. It’s information not news. Also it can happily get re-published or re-blogged many times over; even if people have read it before they will forget they have done so.

I think we need an ‘Evergreen Coefficient’ for content. Ranging between 0 and 1 where a tweet has an evergreen coefficient of 0 and the bible has an evergreen coefficient of 1. Hopefully some smart dudes will figure out some algorithms to predict the evergreen coefficient of any new body of work and this will help authors pick their niche and get paid.

A journalist I know asked me about Elon Musk’s patent ‘strategy’. He wanted a call on the subject but I gave him an email instead and it is below.

“Hiya Brad

I will save you a phone call. Here is my summary

Elon Musk didn’t ‘give away’ any patents. What he said was very legally crafted, namely ‘Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.’

How this works is:

1. He did not define ‘good faith’ – it could mean a company must pay Tesla a reasonable license fee or else. Or it could mean not sue Tesla and give them a free cross-license. or many other things.

2. This statement is not a legal pledge – there is no such thing. That is anyone infringing a Tesla patent could NOT use this statement to reduce their risks of patent enforcement by Tesla against them. That is Tesla, the company, retains the right to enforce its patents. Imagine Musk leaves for example – the next CEO will just say ‘that guy…’

As to why he would do it:

1. Tesla is probably infringing thousands of patents from other automakers without paying any license fees. Because of Tesla’s low sales volumes and potential poor publicity none of them have sued Tesla yet. This will give them another reason not to. Nice move

2. There is a fair bit of ‘patent troll’ activity emerging in the auto space and Tesla is fairly exposed to this as a small company without too many legal and financial resources. Musk’s patent play might be seeking the public goodwill in this regard but it won’t make any difference to the trolls. If Tesla’s cars infringe a patent then they should pay a license fee or settle (end of story).

3. I feel that Tesla Motors is a daft company anyway. Car technology is over 100 years old. It is one of the most complex and expensive areas of technology to get into that one could imagine. Doing a start-up in this space and trying to get the company to scale is Quixotic on a grand scale…my guess is that they just cannot get volumes and profitability to where they need to be in order to get scale and thus get costs under control. So they either stay as a low volume exotic niche player whereupon the industry, when it sees fit, will just roll over them. Or they try and promote an ‘open-source’ play where competitors get ‘free’ access.The big guys aren’t going to fall for this – they will just take their time and do it right, their way. However there may be little car companies in say China who pick up the opportunity – who knows if Musk can get a handful of niche companies using his technology then he may be able to get his supply chain up to volume and down the cost-curve.

4. Which brings me to batteries. The batteries cost way too much. The only way to solve this problem is to build the battery Gigafactory that Musk is pitching to investors. This gets production to scale and brings the costs of batteries down. The trouble here is that Musk probably can’t build a viable business plan on even the most optimistic version of growth in Tesla’s sales. So he has needed to pull a rabbit out of the hat and say there will emerge another dozen or so manufacturers of similar cars due to his ‘open source’ plan and all them will buy batteries from the Gigafactory.

Where this ends nobody knows. Tesla’s survival seems quite improbable and my guess is that it will get picked up by one of the larger automakers at some point probably at a medium loss to its initial investors, if they haven’t already bailed. Musk may be planning to sell Tesla motors but hang onto the battery business if he can get it financed. The battery business is a much better business – the key component that one can focus on and corner the world market rather than the horribly complex business of building a whole car in a terribly competitive environment – it takes at least $1b to develop a new car model – you need a lot of sales to justify this.

So in summary I think the play here for Musk is to get the battery adopted as the ‘standard’ for all electric cars so he can milk that. I think the guys that run the large auto companies are some of the smartest people on the planet and they will only let this happen if there is no opportunity for someone to gouge that opportunity, i.e. Musk has no chance to do this.

Another aspect of all this that I found interesting is the emergence of the ‘anti-patent’ types – I read the blog on Tesla’s website after he made his announcement. It was mostly supportive and rabidly so.

1. There were some that were simply anti-establishment and also hate fiat currency, gun control, all government controls, etc – these guys would hate anything.

2. Then there were all the ‘open source’ techies that have this belief that patents block innovation. This attitude could only emerge amongst software engineers where there is virtually no requirement for R&D. They have never had to struggle to get funding to do the R&D so they don’t understand the ROI offered by patents that allows their R&D to get funded. Their views are like those of selfish children who don’t like being told ‘no’ – they want to be able to write any code regardless of third party patent rights.

3. Then I suppose there were bunch of people that read magazines on the web that do not have a clue what patents are and on balance and without any insight whatsoever have decided we would be better off without them. Simply deluded and ignorant.

What this did point out to me is that there are no ‘lobby groups’ for the patent industry trying to take control of the uninformed and mostly misinformed public discourse on the subject. Which is why Musk can get away with his banalities.

cheers
Ian”

Hitherto unknown fragment of information:

The smell of curry is incredibly off-putting whilst pushing weights.

Thinking about it I can’t ever recall seeing a gym in India.

Home alone
Imagining ghosts
Alone

If you can’t disprove it then it’s most likely untrue.

The most oxymoronic example of optimism that I have ever seen is a person that uses her anger and contempt in an attempt to get another person to change their perspective.

Sometimes when I’m driving, if I have the right light and the right angle, I get just a glimpse right up the exhaust pipe of the car in front, of a metallic sheen that suggests the entrance to the muffler. Lucky days.

What a conversation…

‘Do you believe in god?’

‘I have no idea. There isn’t enough data to make any definitive conclusion’

‘But what do you believe?’

‘That it’s not an important enough question to warrant a belief’

‘That’s pretty arrogant you know’

‘Really? You’re the one out on the street accosting strangers with your beliefs’

What I actually believe is that this bloke is a fuckwit.

It would appear to me that inflation cannot be sustained unless there is a federal bank somewhere in the background creating money, probably to buy foreign reserves as a hedge or as a means to impact currency exchange rates, to increase economic activity, or even just paying off dividends on government bonds.

A quick glance on-line reveals a whole cadre of commentators bemoaning the fact that our federal banks are ripping us off by printing money simply because the ensuing inflation means we cannot keep our dollars under the bed for retirement. Inflation forces us to engage with the economy, to invest our excess money; at the very least to place what excess we have of it in the local bank. I suspect it could be a lot worse; someone might rob the stash under the bed.

It is said that fiat money has to exist in ever increasing levels as economies grow otherwise there will be shortage of ‘liquidity’. However, I wonder what liquidity really means in the era of electronic money? Deflation, where goods cost less than before, doesn’t seem so bad so long as the reduced profits also have more purchasing power. I suspect that there is no real risk that lending will cease if there is mild deflation other than the risk of borrowers not having the means of repaying if the period of deflation is accompanied by depressed consumption. If so the lack of lending isn’t really a result of a liquidity crisis (shortage of fiat money), it is due to a poor economic outlook leading to a reduced capacity for repayments. Giving the banks cheap money to lend doesn’t seem to solve this problem; one of our previous Labor governments instead gave it away free cash (they didn’t print it but they could have) in the form of goods and services to consumers.

However if there is a serious shortage of currency then the unit of ‘money’ may become an asset, like Bitcoin has been. The trouble with this is that the value of assets are susceptible to price bubbles and speculation. And if you think inflation is a problem then losing out on a speculative effort on your local currency would be much worse.

Thinking about this further it would appear that the reason we have inflation is to drive productivity and consumption. It is probably the most effective means to drive individuals and companies to both consume and invest because our earnings or debts have the highest crystallised value when we first earn them. Thereafter we had better use them or suffer the consequences.

In fact it hasn’t been discussed much but I wonder how much the industrial revolution in England was successful because the bankers over there latched onto money supply and also caught onto the idea of low levels of constrained positive inflation as the key driver for a consuming, investing and high-growth society? In fact I bet if one plotted greenhouse gas build up with fiat currency growth there would be some very nice correlations dating back to 1700. That is a slightly over-supplied fiat currency drives consumption which consumes fossil fuels which increase greenhouse gases.

One almost inevitable side effect of a complex multi-nation system of countries with different currencies and open currency trading is that the system will be oscillate into periods of ‘instability’. Well, we see them as ‘unstable’ periods because it’s either very easy to invest to make or lose money. Anyone that has ever played around with complex mathematical modelling environments (a.k.a. kinetics) will know that systems often either settle down to a single steady-state, or they have oscillating and sometimes even semi-random behaviour between a number of steady-states.

The tendency towards the latter in our global financial system is helped by key inputs from humans, very few of whom are guaranteed to understand the systems they are using. This includes, I suspect, some of central bankers who are cargo-culters, i.e. playing their role according to some barely understood set of inherited ‘operating rules’ which apply in most but not all situations. The input by the truly uncaring and greedy business and political types certainly doesn’t help. But, hey, the system is self-correcting so it doesn’t really matter that much.

But here is the real problem. The idea of reducing our consumption of fossil fuels and diminishing resources is a real challenge with our current monetary systems which were designed to encourage consumption. The idea of a replacement trading system with different motivating impacts on our behaviour is a lovely thought but things will have to get pretty serious before such a thing occurs.

One alternative is to revert to bartering. Another is to use a finite resource as a trading proxy, e.g. gold or a bit-coin (which is linked to the high energy consumption used to create it). Whatever we do, the answer to our problems is probably not going back to pre-industrial days; well not without utter mayhem because a good fraction of the population would have to go in this scenario. In order to go forward peacefully we need a system that encourages productivity gains (a.k.a. technology) but only in areas where consumption of resources is either reduced (from current levels) or converted from consumption to ‘fair use’ (borrowed for use and not irrevocably consumed).

This needs much more thought.

Lie, liar, lying … bloody deceptive grammar. Probably invented to confuse invading Germans.

This is a quote from the introduction to a well cited psychology paper.

“The need, in borderline cases, of an increased focus on formation of the psychic apparatus rather than on the issues of desire, points to the very process of formation of thought. The thought inquires itself through someone who asks the question and enables its own constitution. Unlike the desire that, in principle, cannot be accomplished, the formation of mental apparatus through the presence of the other must be achieved. One can say that questioning and specially answering becomes the subject, as it provides him with contours and territoriality. This is something that is engendered in a constant attempt to completion: to think, as to desire, is constantly becoming.”

It’s like some weird sort of pseudo symbolic/linguistic logic.

The controversial bit was where the author wrote ‘one could say..’. Or not, as his academic nemesis would say.

I feel that these muppets have over-fitted their models out past the edge of the known universe without even noticing. Madness!

Maybe only the mad get interested in it in the first place.

The idea that the only truths are those with efficacy must be most true in therapy.

It doesn’t matter if the therapy is Freudian psychology, Witch Doctory, AcuEnergetics, Grandma’s Advice or Cognitive behavioural therapy, as long as it works for you then what was said in there must be true and also impossible to prove false.

People drag themselves off to therapy because they (or someone else) has identified a problem and success (for the patient) is the complete or partial removal of that problem.

However one person’s problem is another’s opportunity (generally the therapist’s). The treatment of the problem can result in changes in behaviour or, and this is much easier, a change in how one views the ‘problem’.

Most people that go into therapy are pretty marginal in their need for treatment – the true nutters that need complete re-engineering are rare. Most people, in reality, just need a yarn with an older, wiser, trusted and independent mentor that can gently point out how their lives can be a lot easier with a few tweaks to how things are perceived and to certain behaviours.

If withholding the truth is akin to lying then we are all liars simply because there is not enough time in the day to tell all the truths.