I am sure I have said it before, but we humans are generally ‘supposed’ to do all the things that we do.

At the end of the day our function here on this planet is to reproduce and to improve the race. The rest is fluff.

Infidelity for example is so common that it has to be part of our programming.

In which case all of the emotional causes for infidelity are also pre-programmed. Insecurity, power, joy, greed, lust, you name it. These emotions are nature’s way of ‘controlling’ our behaviour in line with our function,

And yet we fight infidelity, we challenge it, we emotionalise over it, and more.

So why are we also programmed to fight out basic instincts?

My guess is that it signifies the start of the end. Really.

Just like when a bacterial population gets out of control in a petri dish and eventually dies off completely, I think our numbers are now out of control in our own spheroidal petri dish and we are headed for a massive correction. Perhaps a complete wipe-out.

We have that the mechanisms of that correction built in to our programming already. All one has to do is measure the degree of internal emotional conflict in the average person over the years and you can see from whence our eventual demise will nucleate.

That is, the developments of increased brain complexity that have enabled us to become so productive also carry with them the necessary functionality to execute our demise.

If ever see an article, a post, or whatever we call something that we read these days, with CAPITALS used intermittently to STRESS certain points then I know that there is 99 chances out of a hundred that I am reading the maddened RAMBLINGS of a non-rigorous thinker, trained in the arts SUNDAY-SCHOOL.

You know, I thought I had written this up before but a quick search of my own blog turned up nothing.

And that was a Google search, not the god-damned awful WordPress search. Linkedin, Facebook, WordPress – it doesn’t matter what, you are better off searching them with Google.

I started riding daily to work in (a guess) 2003 – so over a decade ago.

The first three months was on old rattler I had had in storage (mum’s garage) since my uni days.

I then bought a second hand racing bike off a friend, an old steel number from the early 1990’s.

That lasted a couple of years or so until bike envy seduced me into building my own carbon fiber road bike with top of the range SRAM running gear. It weighs less than 7 kg fully loaded. I built it myself with parts sourced out of the back of the factory in Taiwan (the frame) and Ebay. It cost me less than $1,500 for a bike that would retail for $10,000.

That is bloody expensive paint that the cafe racers buy into.

A friend, a lawyer with an ego, was about to buy a bike and I warned him of the cost of the paint job. He went ahead and paid for paint anyway. When quizzed he argued that a more experienced cycling colleague (he is part of a weekend warrior pack) explained to him that the paint represents ‘quality control’ and this ensures that the frame won’t snap in two like the ‘no-names’ frame that I have. Geez, all these frames are from the same handful of factories in Taiwan that OEM them to paint-job brands!

The real reason he paid for paint is to be a proper paid-up member of the pack. Lycra, potbelly and all. It’s just so important to fit in. Or to not fit in to their Lycra, collectively.

Back to the point of this article. This carbon bike marked my transfer to cycling cleats. I love the things since you have so much more power due to the push and pull effect. In the interests of staying alive in Sydney traffic I used Bebop cleats which are about 10x easier to get in and out of compared to the generally available numbers.

After riding this bike for a number of years I developed a problem with my ITBs, achilles and calf muscles. To cut a long story short, the repetitive action (the cadence) was shortening certain muscles and I wasn’t stretching enough to counteract this. So I then started stretching and doing painful remedial massage, which fixed the problem. But it’s just one more thing you have to do in a day that you would rather not.

Moving on, about two years ago, for no apparent reason I moved to a steel single speed bike which is very highly geared. This added less than 10 minutes to my daily hour or so of cycling to work and back. The upside was a bike I could leave anywhere without fear of theft (outside the pub for example), more exercise and a bike which has virtually zero maintenance. Those dérailleur gears on road bikes need constant tinkering, and who wants to become a bike mechanic?

There was one very unexpected benefit of the single speed. I decided not to use cleats on it which means I am pushing only. Together with the requirement to stand on the bike up hills, it totally ruins your cadence. But that also means that none of your muscles get overworked and hence the daily stretching regime and remedial massage is not required hence pulling back the 10 minutes deficit on the road.

And you get more exercise for the same km’s, which I like.

Postscript: 13 years later I’m on my 5th single speed. There’s no chance I’ll move back to the gears.

Google has just updated their Android mail app for phones and it looks suspiciously like the Android Mymail app from my.com

Curious, I did some research and found that my.com is a Russian company with access the email contents of millions of Android users.

When you use a third party Android mail app like Mymail then both Google and my.com have your email data.

This is not necessarily better or worse than an American company, e.g. Google, having access to all your data.

Other than the fact the higher profile company is more likely to get caught out rooting around unethically with your data.

In all cases I can imagine that the local national government can co-opt all the data for any purpose that they want.

And the company itself can do the same, especially in efforts to use analytics to find information about you to on-sell to sales and marketing outfits.

I stay comforted in the thought that none of my emails are very interesting. And also that the best place to hide a body is in a cemetery. And I am mostly immune to advertising after a life-long effort to be so.

If there is a consumer device less fit for purpose than the Presta valve for bicycle tubes, I have not encountered it.

It has been around forever apparently and survives because it is the standard for road bikes and this is not an industry that likes too much change.

It also has the benefit of being very slender (6 mm) so the hole required in the rim for ingress does not impact rim strength too much.

But pumping these things is an ordeal. Just about every time I try to pump, no matter which pump I use, the thing flicks off, or leaks, or just doesn’t work. And they have a tendency to bend and break.

It’s so bad that I am sort of scared of the job and often ride around under inflated as a result.

You can screw on an adaptor (the Presta Valve Nut) which makes the job easier but that also makes the job take longer. And you have to keep track of the valve adaptor between uses.

In fact I just had an idea. I will screw on two valve adaptors to the two valves on the bike and just leave them there. Brilliant. I will report back.

Taxiing up to the new Canberra airport, I wasn’t in much of a hurry.

I didn’t have a ticket. My plan was to buy one there.

So you can imagine that I had all the time in the world to chase butterflies.

Or in this case get very distracted by the water sculptures.

Jumping to the end of the story, there are two water sculptures at the Canberra airport by William Pye.

William has spent his life doing high end water sculptures, aka fountains.

The one at Canberra is a doozy . Well, there’s two of them. They are both doozies.

It (the one I focused on) is a large man-sized glass cylinder overflowing with water. The excess water runs down the outside to the bottom of the cylinder where it is captured and recycled.

What makes it fascinating is that the cylinder also has a full vortex on the inside.

This must work by having a pump inside sucking out the water at the middle of the bottom of the cylinder and then recycling this water into the cylinder so it’s volume-neutral.

And then there must also be a secondary pump slowly pushing water into the cylinder thereby forcing water over the top edge of the cylinder, down the outside into the drain for recycling.

The effect was very compelling to this scientist. I stood up on the plinth to get a closer look and a few photos.

And of course that alerted security, two and half (the dog) of whom promptly came to see what style of terrorism I was engaging in.

To be fair on them, I was awfully tempted to put something into the vortex to see what would happen. I can count a number of such curiosity-driven disasters in my lifetime.

Eventually I talked myself out of incarceration, liberally quoting my interest in the arts.

In the end I suspect that they just wanted to get rid of me.

It was lucky that I didn’t have a ticket or I would have missed that plane.

Afterwards I researched the subject and found out the sculptor was William Pye and his website shows his efforts all around the world. http://www.williampye.com/

For his next effort I think he should simulate a water spout. Now wouldn’t that be a sculpture and a half; a nice mill pond in the terminal (say 10 feet across) with a working water spout above it.

Apparently water spouts don’t suck up water – they are small and weak rotating columns of air over water. Effectively they are whirling columns of air and water mist formed when the right conditions apply; the right cloud type and temperature, the right ocean temperature, the right wind conditions, the right proximity of the clouds to the ocean, and the right atmospheric pressure, temperature and humidity.

From what I see on the internet it seems that they are not fully understood and scientists are just starting to numerically model the buggers. A good opportunity for an artist to jump the gun I reckon.

I just emailed William this idea; watch this space.

In the patent world there is a thing called a “wish” claim which is also referred to as a “free beer” claim because free beer is something we would like to have.

This type of claim contains only the function of an invention and not any specific means to implement it – these tend to be detailed in subsequent dependent claims.

I love free beer claims. One of mine has just been granted in the US. I can’t say which one because it might prejudice future court proceedings when a bunch of people wake up to what has been granted. In truth there is so much relevant prior art that you have to think the patent examiner had a series of very bad hangovers.

At first glance I misread this as the ‘museum of small mushrooms’.

This is Phil, the American in front of me in the queue at the Hudson’s cafe at the Canberra airport.

I know his name is Phil because they asked for his name when he paid for his order.

He asked for a croissant in a fake Frenchish accent. It came out as ‘qwossant’.

I had to suppress my snort of laughter.

Post script … Have I broken any privacy laws in this post? No idea. Maybe an app opportunity to automatically warn people that their latest posting, blog, tweet etc is on the edge.

The modern trend in websites is long single page sites.

I suspect these emerged due to pads.

When things were more mouse-centric, multiple pages made sense since it is easier to click than scroll with a mouse.

But on pads scrolling is easier than clicking.

This trend to long single page scrolling sites puts into question Google Analytic’s ‘bounce rate’, which is the percentage of visitors that only look at your home page (implying a lack of interest to dig further).

Google tries to tell you that you have a problem if visitors only look at your homepage. But if your site only has a homepage then what is the problem?

All you really need to measure is the number of visitors that don’t get to the bottom of the home page – and call this the bounce rate, i.e. the number of visitors that don’t bounce off the bottom of your homepage.

This cannot go by uncommented upon:

“An analysis by researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has suggested that increasing demand for PV technologies mean that the production of input materials would need to be accelerated at a rate never before seen in the metals industry.”

Standard silicon PV requires silicon (from sand) and silver (mined in abundance) – no problems of supply there. Whereas all the other dopey thin film PV technologies use exotic metals like cadmium, indium, telluride etc.

The researchers found that:

“To meet even relatively small percentages of electricity demand by the year 2030, these thin-film PV technologies would require historically unprecedented [metals production] growth rates because In mining, CIGS and cadmium telluride are considered by-product metals, not mined for their own sake, but only accessible as byproducts of the mining processes for other metals, such as copper. Upping their production, therefore, is a cost-intensive process. “It is quite possible that the cost and availability of these critical elements will constrain deployment of otherwise game-changing technologies.”

D’oh.

They should have gone one step further and realised that in 2030 silicon PV will still dominate. But then that would have put into question all their dopey research into alternative PV technologies.

There I was staring at the hotel room ceiling where the avant garde designer had usefully placed slightly-psychedelic paisley black and white wall paper.

Well, ceiling paper in this case.

What did I notice?

First, that gravity is a fucker. The seams were lifting.

I then imagined a specialist handyman, the Michaelangelo of Canberra, going through all the rooms with a syringe with a special glue to re-submit the seams against the powers of entropy.

Then I bemoaned the unwanted intrusions of the two down-lights and especially the smoke sensor. A million dollars to the genius that designs a pretty smoke sensor. They don’t have to be ugly off-white plastic prosthetic aids now do they? One could do a flush fitting little chrome number. Anything.

In fact, I have always hated the little green LEDs that flash all night. Which dickhead committee thought it was OK to ruin every hotel guest’s rem/zen sleep? You really only need the LEDs to flash when there is a problem, like a low battery.

If it is absolutely necessary to have an ‘OK is powered’ notification then you could simply have a static notifier like the old US Telechron clocks that synchronised to, and ran off mains power. If they ever lost power a little static red indicator would automatically flick on. So the owners would then know the time showing was wrong due to a power outage at some time.

Moving past the extensions extending eccentrically from the ceiling paper, I then started imaging what the swirls were on the ceiling. Variably I saw sharks, birds, more birds, the odd jelly fish, and a few other animals. I am sure each of us would see it differently but few would admit such musings even to themselves, unless we were five years old.

And then I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if the ceiling paper ‘changed’ every now again? Using something like e-ink technology, every day the paper could slowly morph to give the owner (in the case of home installation) an ever-changing series of animals to spot.

In fact without the morphing paper I wouldn’t like this stuff above my bed and head. I would get frustrated at seeing the same animals over and over. And possibly even more so that I couldn’t see animals that I had seen previously. Eventually I would tear it down in frustration. And have you ever removed wall paper? It’s a fucker of a job that uses these special hand-held steamers developed by one of Lucifer’s off-siders. Doing it on the ceiling would be untenable.

The lovely thing about e-ink technology that could be used for the morphing ceiling paper is that it doesn’t consume power unless the display is changing.

Now there is a product worth developing.

Years ago (and I know I am now rambling) when I was working in Holland (early 1990’s) I was asked to help develop the e-ink technology when they first started their efforts. It involves the use of polymer colloid particles that move between electrodes and carries the pigment. It really is electronic paper.

I declined on the grounds that ‘it would never work in my lifetime’. Well that turned out not to be true. But to be fair it didn’t get into the e-book market, it’s first true application of merit, until well into the late naughties. I don’t have that much patience; actually I have bugger all, so I am still happy with my call.

You could imagine that morphing ceiling paper would very quickly be adapted for Gen Y’s to show their overnight facebook updates which they could read first thing in the morning. That would save them the phone grab until they had had a chance to wake-up a little.

Or you could add visual mood indicators to the ceiling paper, using brain sensors in the room, so couples could get a ‘heads up’ visual indicators of what they can expect off each other for the day. For example, ‘I feel like being stroked and cuddled this morning’.

And you could co-opt the technology for wallpaper too. Reaching back to my ‘wall of music’ idea you could have a wall of music albums that change daily or hourly so when touched you could hear new music all the time. That would keep the people that like listening to new music happy as well.

The possibilities are endless. ly. banal.

The gubment has just announced that they are changing the Golden Visa program.

Previously any $5m investment, farms or bonds or anything, would buy a wealthy Chinese an Australian residency.

Now that $5m investment is going to have to be into Australian venture capital.

This is so Machiavellian that I am disappointed that I didn’t come up with the idea myself.

In truth you’d be better off investing in Opera House lottery tickets than Australian VC, based on past performances.

There have been calls for forcing super funds to invest in Australian VC but that would be politically untenable. You can’t force people to lose money unless of course they are buying something valuable at the same time. Like a visa.

This is brilliant.

One or two things will happen.

First, subversion efforts will come to the fore. VC funds that are fronts for property trusts etc.

Second, someone might figure out how to harness this new sort of LP with it’s Chinese connections as a means to figure out how to do VC here. Probably in unsexy sectors like food and resources.

I can’t be the first to think of this – wouldn’t it be useful to have photochromatic or thermochromatic roofing?

Dark when it’s cold and white when it’s hot, in response to temperature or radiation. This would keep those heating and air conditioning bills down

The odd thing about this invention disclosure is that anyone that figures out how to do it can now only patent their particular way of doing it.

This prior art forever prevents a first (free beer) claim of a patent that claims a roofing material that changes colour with temperature or radiation levels to attenuate heat transfer accordingly.

This implies that a whacky idea is (only) sometimes a necessary, but never a sufficient, part of invention.

Between the whacky idea and diligent innovation there lies the unloved and misunderstood world of patents.

I had a long chat to a dero in Hobart.

It, the conversation, started with a critique of the choice of living rough in the coldest possible city in Australia.

It then drifted towards his cause major, the dreaded conspiracy theory with an emphasis on corporations and corrupt governments.

It took a while but I eventually extricated myself. Politely.

I walked away with the feeling that he was covering up for guilt. But guilt for what?

I sensed that he feels guilty for the abundance that, even in his chosen poverty, proffers no threat to life or limb.

Tooling around the vineyards surrounding MONA we came across this menage a trois.

Two ducks fucking and one pecking the fuck out of the fuckers. Fucker.

‘Fuck a duck’ now makes sense.

‘Eye muffs’ I exclaimed to the wide eyed Lola.

She said ‘Dad, why was …’

Groan.

Some time back I wrote an article for Chemistry in Australia entitled ‘Crowd Funding and Chemistry’. I must have been pretty bored at the time since this is not a great subject to write about and subsequently I wouldn’t recommend that anyone reads this article. In truth, chemistry is best left to the corporations.

In any case, last week I get this spurious email from the Indian ‘Chemical Industry Digest’. They just happen to be doing a whole annual issue on crowd funding and chemistry and wondered if I could contribute.

Now there is 99% chance that this is a scam. But it’s a pretty elaborate one at that. They must crawl through industry journals and extract the author’s details and the subject matter, and turn the latter into a form email. As per below.

I wrote back saying ‘yeah, would love to etc’. They wanted an article. I said they could have the one I already have for free. They tried to engage with me to get me to write a longer one. I told them to suck it up and take what they got for free. They decided I was hard work and went silent on me.

Ooh, I just got a linkedin request from a guy that I don’t know that is at a large insurance company.

His job title has me happy, so happy.

It’s “Chief Innovation & Disruption Officer”

Heh heh. I will sleep well for days now.

Norfolk, Suffolk – what happened to East and West?

Sussex, Wessex, Essex, Middlesex – what happened to North?

Those English folk and their compass bearings; bloody odd.

I have deleted every unwanted subscription and yet I still have thousands of spam emails a month.

I scan through the subject headings all of my spam because occasionally a real email gets trapped in there.

Here’s what I want …

Everyone that sends me an email for the first time goes through this process.

The first email gets held in escrow.

The sender gets a return email with a link they have to click through to.

On that link they need to prove that they are human by doing a Captcha  (or similar) after which their first email is released from escrow.

Thereafter they are on the whitelist and their emails come through all the time.

For the computer generated emails these are filtered as usual, as spam or subscriptions.

A subscription usually has some means to unsubscribe and gets held in a greylist.

I chose which subscriptions to let through from the greylist into my inbox.

And I can remove people from the whitelist at any time if I feel the urge.

This business could be managed by a meta-email app for a smartphone (with browser access as well) that links to any current email service.

The business model?

Not advertising – I hate that in email apps. Analytics? Well that doesn’t seem right if you breach privacy and that is hard not to do.

Maybe a premium service that manages the whitelist and provides the users reports on their email usage.

Also an encrypted service with no central record keeping to keep those that care out of the government metadata databases. But that would require using a special email service not the usual providers.

Personally I like the idea of using Captcha to interpret all of the old births, deaths and marriages docs. There’s a fortune to be made in automated genealogy.

Lola just offered me her life’s savings so long as I promise to shave.

My continuous three day growth makes me look ugly.

And also courtesy of MONA, don’t people hold tension in their lips?

It’s like an anxiety billboard.

You can really tell a lot about a person when they are trying to sing. Surprising how much.

This insight courtesy of this wall of karaoke singers at MONA with the music suppressed.

It would make a great filter for a dating site me-thinks.

A new nomination for the worst tourism destination in the world, the Cadbury chocolate factory in Hobart.

The factory has nothing to do with it. It’s just a shop at the factory.

It’s feels like a communist era shop with aesthetics to match

There is a bad video of the chocolate making process which costs extra, in addition to the four bucks they take off you for enduring the shop – really.

The fact that it’s full on this Monday suggests that Hobart really is short on things to do and people really are addicted to sugar.

New business idea.

Pick your album covers online and get your wall paper of choice delivered. See below.

It can be album-sleeve sized or CD-cover sized for a more dense collection.

The wallpaper has touch sensitive pads built-in with Bluetooth chips for comms.

Touch an album on the wall and it automatically plays through your HiFi setup or phone or whatever.

One touch to start, another to stop, and a swipe left and right for next track back and forth.

We just did a feasibility test with AC/DC, Lola and YouTube on my phone. Worked a treat.

There’s a huge market for this – a large fraction of the population just want to listen to the same music over and over and over.

Get this, the Swiss are about to have a referendum on increasing their gold reserves from 8% of their central bank assets to 20%.

That’s about 1800 tonnes of gold at a cost of over $70b. That’s over four times the cost of their post 2000 sell-off of gold assets.

Why? An emotional attachment to the yellow metal as a ‘real asset’ unlike electronic script over shares, derivatives and similar.

If they do this, the world gold price is expected to appreciate by around 20%.

I would advise them to mine it rather than buy it. Or just buy a big gold miner. Much more fun.

Worth quoting

“A number of studies have documented the loss of play opportunities for children over the second half of the 20th century and demonstrated a clear link with increased indicators of stress and mental health problems.”

Any tiger mothers out there? Good wines mature slowly…

See more at: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/discussion/school-starting-age-the-evidence#sthash.QqTS08Y3.WNmjJg8V.dpuf

A long term study of online cards and casino gambling shows that, for these games of true “chance”, unless they cheat, about the only way gamblers can win is to get lucky and then stop gambling.

That is, the house, which takes a cut of all transactions, always wins and the gamblers all revert to the negative (residual) mean. The longer they play the closer they get to the negative mean.

In a two year study in the US about 10% of gamblers at casinos actually made money – but they didn’t bet for the whole two years. They came in to the casino, got lucky and then took their winnings and ran. Everyone that stayed at the table eventually lost money.

On the other hand, a five-year Taiwanese study shows that 15% of day-traders on the stock markets consistently made money, whereas 85% did not.

This implies that the stock market is not a game of chance for some. There is enough predictability for 15% of these day traders to predict what is going, on average.

Horses, dogs, trots and the like are a sort of hybrid between a game of chance and a system with predictability built in.

The races are weighted by favouritism but with odds adjusted for same. The end result is supposedly a game of “chance”.

However it’s a charade. There is residual predictability due to two factors. First, no matter what the odds are, some runners are just better. Secondly, and probably more importantly, we have race fixing and adjusting – those activities, small and large, that shift the true “hidden” odds away from what the book says.

That small number of professional punters that consistently make money at the races simply have more access to this hidden information. It’s all about information asymmetry related to the delta between the true odds and the quoted odds.

I bet it’s well less than 15% of the punters. more like 5%, at the races that revert to a positive mean on their gambling.

So while the ATO says that financial spread betting isn’t a game of chance, they are probably partially correct for 15% of the players. But the same rule should apply to the 5% or so of track punters that have a positive mean. I still think the taxation of gamblers should be according to their mean return is and not what they are gambling on.

More interesting is the idea that there is a relationship between the degree of predictability in a gambling medium and the percentage of people that have a positive mean return on gambling in that medium, over the long term.

Just think how much information those successful punters are ignoring. They must have figured out that only certain data inputs are important but that the rest is ‘fluff’ designed to confuse your average mug punter.

At the races there has been generations of professional punters and you can imagine that there is an apprenticeship of sorts, passing down the know-how of which data to take notice of – these are outcomes of the human learning algorithm.

I can imagine developing learning algorithms to compete with professional punters but the problem is that we might not have access to the key data. They keep this stuff very much to themselves and we cannot assume that all the key input data is publicly available, even for day trading and financial spread betting.

Then there is a second order approach. Rather than trying to simulate the professional punter, all you have to do is keep an eye on their trades. Let them simply be living and breathing algorithms doing your work for you. The best way to capture their efforts is through an online betting platform.

However, one would be well placed not to over-use such information. By capturing the punts of the professionals and sharing this information broadly you would pervert the market and ruin the odds on the winners. This would force the market into a period of destabilisation until some punters figured out a new equilibrium where they could get a stable return.

By which time they will have figured out that they should avoid your online platform.

The ATO is quite confused about gambling.

Certain forms of gambling are deemed not to be gambling, on the basis that the winnings tend to be the rewards for skill and judgement rather than purely betting on chance.

Chance? There is no form of gambling that relies on chance.

An event that is being gambled on might appear to be of an uncertain outcome but at the end of the day there is always a small fraction of the gambling population that reverts to a positive mean.

The rest lose money.

Gambling is all about the smart taking money off the not-so-smart.

There is no chance in that.

So when it comes to income assessment decisions, the ATO needs to differentiate between types of gamblers and not the types of gambling.

If you revert to a positive mean then your winnings should be assessed as income.

If you are in the majority that loses money then you should get a income tax deduction similar to that received for other charitable causes.

An 18 year old girl just won a seat for the Republicans in the West Virginian House of Delegates.

She is:

1. anti-abortion
2. pro-gun
3. advocates for small business
4. and even smaller government
5. says that they should stop treating citizens like terrorists and terrorists like citizens
6. notes that America was founded on “Christian-Judean principles”
7. says marriage is the holy union of man and god
8. is anti-union
9. against the minimum wage
10. supports voter ID regulations
11. believes welfare recipients should undergo drug tests
12. and is pro-coal and doesn’t believe in global warming

How does one short the USA?

My daughter’s latest school newsletter contains a form-letter for those opposed to a rebuild of the local RSL club.

The before and proposed after shots are below.

It seems to me that schools really ought to stay out of these issues. It’s got nothing to do with education.

Or at the very least they should carry a form-letter for those agreeing with the proposal.

Personally I don’t have any issues with the new RSL club. RSLs are a much under-rated aspect of Australian culture.

In this case, I suspect the size of the rebuild is dictated by the requirements to make the thing financially viable.

The Bronte NIMBYs would prefer it just went away and was replaced with something more to their liking.

I sort of wish that the buggers had just stayed on the North Shore.

There is a fascinating article in the AFR today outlining how IKEA avoids paying tax here in Australia and many other places as well.

And Harvey Norman is worried about the unfair advantage of internet shops?

It doesn’t look like IKEA is breaking any laws and, really, it is up to the government to change them if there is a problem.

For me the fundamental issue is company tax – it makes no sense in these days of electronic money and hard-core fringe benefits tax.

What we need is a tax regime with two items only:

1. A consumption tax rate that increases with total consumption by an individual, and

2. A flat rate ‘holding’ tax for all electronic transfers of money out of Australia. If this was earned in Australia and is heading for overseas consumers then it would attract the top rate of the consumption tax.

Problem solved.

Yesterday I was chatting to a very senior exec in one of our four banks.

He was rabbiting on about how disappointed he was in the current government, suggesting that the bank’s interests were not being very well looked after.

I noted that there is nothing in our constitution that suggests that governments are there to represent anything other than the people, on a basis of (vaguely) one person, one vote.

Not possums, not banks, not the church, nor even retirement plans for politicians.

All of these causes are second order; only considered through the lens of the best interests of the people.

Then I laughed.

Gosling’s Black Steam Rum & San Pellegrino’s limonata on ice with crushed mint and a slice of lemon.

Forgot to photograph it.

The place is infested with them, innovation experts.

Everywhere I turn there is another one.

Forums, workshops, consultants, government agencies, articles, incubators; you name it.

The industrial revolution marked the start of systematic trial and error in business and technology. This was enabled by a shift in attitude towards a ‘disrespect’ of the past. Beforehand any efforts trying to replace the ways things had always been done were considered heretical.

This change towards systematic innovation was enabled by a slow build-up of skills and knowledge that enabled, on average, positive business outcomes from technology efforts. And some people were becoming more leisured so there was enough people with enough spare time on their hands to get into the innovation club. It became sexy and took off.

But it has been going for three hundred years now. Why, all of a sudden, is there a re-invention of innovation in the minds of many?

I can only guess it is because innovation is taken for granted, and many people get through their education and their lives without being aware of it. Ironically this is only possible because of the massive productivity gains enabled by three hundred years of innovation that allows society to ‘carry’ these unproductive people

The odd, odd thing though is that the innovation mantras that are being peddled by the ignorant are all askew. They know not what they teach. Essentially this is due to self-interest and a failing to understand the difference between cause and correlation.

Just in case you are interested:

1. Successful innovation requires deep experience in a field that can only be gained by continued effort, not all of which can be successful.

2. However, on average innovation is successful otherwise it would not survive in our economic system.

3. The key to successful innovation is risk management in all aspects of the game. This can only gained by experience.

4. If there is nothing risked then there is also nothing gained. Which is why direct government investment makes no sense – it encourages the wrong people.

5. There is very little relationship between those that do innovation and those that talk about it.

And that’s it.

Strangely quiet today … who would be a dry cleaner with a hangover?

I had a chat yesterday to the publican of the pub chosen for horse day.

It’s the local of a mate.

The publican is in the process of changing his beer selection.

We were chatting about this in the context of my ex-publican capacity.

Basically he is going ‘upmarket’, replacing the stock beers (Tooheys New for example) with white rabbits and other silly boutique beers.

His motivation is increased revenue and profit. He thinks.

But I know publicans. Running a pub is incredibly boring and they eventually just make changes to alleviate the same.

I asked him about his strategic marketing.

‘eh?’

‘Well it’s a hypothesis at best that selling higher price boutique beers will increase revenues. Margins will stay the same but on a higher per unit cost base, so that is all good. But you don’t know whether you will get more drinkers or not. You may even lose some of your regulars – many of them will resent the new beers. And the market for boutique beers is pretty over-subscribed; everyone is doing it.  And the people who drink this stuff only drink one or two on a night out. In fact it’s hard to drink too many of these things – they have too much flavour.’

Not fazed. At all. Boutique beers it is.

About 30%

Tooling around a geek forum this morning, trying to solve my home WiFi issues, I found this:

“Which router is good for connecting wifi between walls and obstacles? Currently using ASUS N56, first few months still good but after that the signal power dropped or excellent strength but data packet quality low. I cannot use TP-Link, Dlink or netgear router, always feel headache when turn on their wifi.”

“Maybe your brain is interfering with the signal?”

Up late.

My first two thoughts were a macchiato and this phone (well there was a third but I am keeping that to myself).

Foaming the milk, I realised that the phone was just out of reach.

I kept foaming.

At least I know which addiction trumps.

All you mad physicists, what if there are universes where our mathematical rules do not apply at all?

It’s imponderable; the probability of this being true doesn’t even exist.

Put down your pens and pick up the pills I say.

If one could turn lead into gold all you would do is substantially reduce the price of gold to a value around the price of lead, plus processing costs and a small margin.

On the LME lead is around $2k per tonne whereas gold is ca. $1100 per troy ounce. That is, lead is around 18,000 x cheaper than gold.

If the alchemists had succeeded we would be, inter alia, using gold on our roofs as flash flashing.

Those alchemist could do simple maths but they weren’t very good scientists. And they had not a clue about basic economics.

Lola (11) when I told her this idea instantly said “yeah but you wouldn’t tell anyone and you wouldn’t over do it”, referring to secretly not making too much gold and thereby not affecting the market price.

She intuitively understands trade secrecy, supply and demand, and price elasticity

Her school says she is an OK but not outstanding student. Once again I question the fundamental philosophies of our schooling system.

As a frequent traveler to China I can’t help but notice as to how focused they are on stats.

They love counting stuff like how many bikes there are in Beijing. As a result they are pretty good at it.

Chan, my old Taiwanese mate who is a home grown philosopher, reckons that this habit is very old and developed over millennia of centralised imperial rule.

They needed this habit because they were controlling a very large country in the days before instant communications.

The communist picked the habit up and further accelerated it.

Lately I suspect it is starting to fade. Maybe it’s a good thing to monitor for the ‘capitalisation’ of China.

Taking the chemical computer brain hypothesis one step further…

Do the chemicals that store memory and analytical solutions have to be in the body of one critter? Maybe not.

Maybe there is intelligence spread across ecosystems and the whole planet.

An alternative or ancillary explanation to Darwin’s and the divine.

I have always thought that evolution by positively reinforced random trial and error sounded a little dodgy, for two reasons.

Firstly, there is too much ‘long range structure’; similar traits developed independently in different environments for my liking. Yeah I know the counter arguments but …

Secondly, the time frame for evolution from the first prokaryote, 3.5 billion years (that’s a guess), is way too short for my liking. And, yeah, I can run the simulation of the simulation in my head …

My gut feeling is that it’s a little more guided or connected than that; the ‘divine’ may be the distributed chemical ‘intelligence’ in the ecosystem.

I reckon that there is less error in the calculation of how many light years there are to the edge of the universe than in the calculation of how many bicycles there are in Beijing.

I have thought about it and I find the idea of a beer slushie to be abhorrent.

When I was doing my PhD I was there right at the cusp of the shift towards heavy computing.

I was doing both theory and modelling work in physical chemistry and I had the benefit of being properly trained in both the new and old methods.

In the old ways, when a complex system was to be studied the first action was to develop a ‘model’ system. This was simple and well behaved experimental system – hopefully the simplest that was still within the set of behaviours of the complex system of true interest.

Then lots of experiments were performed to see how the model system behaved under different experimental conditions.

Thereafter, hypotheses were developed and translated to mathematical equations. Because easy-to-use and powerful computers didn’t exist the maths had to be solved analytically and hence the need for the simplest ‘model’ systems.

The analytical equations were used to predict how a new version of the complex system would behave. This was the goal – understanding and predictability within a wide set of pseudo-extrapolated experimental conditions.

In developing these analytical solutions, sometimes simplification were allowed, solely to allow analytical solutions to be achieved at all. This is called relaxing the requirements for an exact solution. Care was taken to keep track of these simplifications just to make sure they didn’t blow up into large errors.

Once the analytical models were developed they were tested over and over, for both improvements and errors, with further experimental data. This process would only stop when everyone decided that the models were a good enough approximation of what was really going on and moved on to more interesting things.

In the newer methods of scientific discovery the whole experiment, no matter how complex, is simply simulated numerically (usually with lots of differential equations) in a very complex software package that no one truly understands.

Having done both, in respect to modelling and understanding of the same complex experimental system, I can say that without a doubt that the old school approach provides us (the custodians of the human brain) far more learning. But the new approach is far quicker if you just want to show two lines, the experimental and the modelled, that match.

In fact the best way to get learning out of the numerical modelling approach is to drive it into unreal limiting cases hoping that something approximating a simple limiting case is observed. By aggregating limiting cases and looking at the difference between them, ‘understanding’ can be achieved.

Many of the scientists looking into how the brain works focus on the fact that there is massive neural network that represent an advanced computer of sorts. I have read articles comparing artificial intelligence to our brains, focusing on the number of processors and the interconnectivity between these.

The assumption by many is that we simply have an amazing Intel processor in our skull and the question is how do we solve all those equations so quickly. This puzzles most.

But the real question for me is, no matter how the brain-computer works, what problems are being solved and how?

I wonder if in fact our brain contains a large library of compiled ‘analytical’ solutions to ‘model’ systems, and also a simple solution solver that can apply any combination of these analytical solutions to a pertinent problem.

This would be consistent with the fact that a scientist working with analytical solutions learns so much more than the modern simulator.

An analytical solution can be a one liner in software and a handful of lines of code for inputting the data and exporting the results, just like the stuff we used to write in Basic on the Apple IIe when all this started.

I also don’t think the brain has ‘maths code’ floating around. So the analytical solutions I am talking about must be some analog of maths written in a chemical code. That is, the structure of the ‘maths’ and also the memory of the brain is stored in rules that are governed by chemical interactions.

Being a chemist I like that. Not binary, not quantum, not maths at all, but chemical. Chemistry has all sorts of rules about reaction, symmetry, interaction and transport of molecules; enough defined complexity to build a computing system capable of being us.

We humans can solve what look like intractable problems (e.g. NP problems) very quickly because we are using a collection of pre-solved and probably approximate ‘analytical’ solutions and one or more simple equation solvers. Possibly there are layers and layers of these all built on top of each other.

The brain must also have a large simulator chugging slowly away in the background looking for new analytical solutions. When found these are parsed into chemical code and then also passed down through DNA memory that encodes the chemical memory. This must be a ‘numerical’ simulator computer that looks for limiting cases that are ‘good enough’ and can be stored as analytical equations in the molecular system.

[p.s. this post is a draft; it will change]

I am not sure if this is a good story or a bad story. And whether I can consider myself lucky or not.

About an hour ago I ducked out of my office to get a Schnitzel sandwich at the mad Swiss guy’s cafe near my old office. These sangas are so good I would travel to Melbourne for one.

Rather unlike me I waited at the red lights, on my pushie, at the corner of Young St and Cleveland St (a very busy street).

There were simply too many cars to make it worth attempting a crossing against the lights especially since I was on the ‘pub special’ which could not be considered a gazelle amongst bikes.

Some dude in an old Falcon wagon then attempted to turn right into my street, squeezing into a gap of oncoming cars that simply wasn’t there.

A cabbie, another Falcon wagon, coming the other way T-boned him at about 60 k’s. He hardly had time to hit the anchors.

The cab drove the first Falcon straight at this gaping pigeon who was root and stocked to the ground in horror. The multi-Falcon ensemble stopped about a foot short of my presence.

And then I fell over sideways, away from the mangled Falcons. After the fact!

And no bloody photo – I had left the phone on the charger to recover from an interstate trip.

The only upside from the story is that the world has been further de-Falconed. Ford has announced that they will stop making them soon, so its only a matter of time before the world is rid of these things for good. And I will never have to step into a Falcon taxi again – lucky days.

I do believe that I am most motivated when influencing people with new ideas.

The postman problem, as posted by a friend, relates to the most efficient route for a postman to take for deliveries of mail. ‘Efficient’ in this context means the least time to achieve the delivery of mail to say 40 or 50 houses.

In the modern era we might solve this problem with a computer. A simple algorithm would be developed to calculate the shortest distance amongst all the options of routes; the variance between the routes being due to doubling back and the like as required to get to all the houses. I refer you to ‘The Bridges of Königsberg’ problem, solved analytically by Euler, if you are confused by this.

But a normal non-Eulerian human would solve this problem very differently. Maybe glancing at a map the postman would guess a route in a few seconds and then try it out. Over a few days with real experience on the ground he might re-calculate the route and improve on it.

It is possible that the human approach never quite achieves the computer-generated perfect solution. But then the postman knows that he gets paid by the hour and not by the inverse of the kilometre. So he doesn’t really care if he has the most efficient route.

Australia Post might employ some tech gurus to provide an internal service for route mapping using computers. But even so you would find that 9 times out of 10 the postie would find a reason not to use the most efficient route. There might be a great to spot for a smoko that is passed at the wrong time on the efficient route. Or it might entail going up a steep hill instead of down it. The people that own the computers would not recognise these factors as legitimate input into their software.

A human solves these problems very quickly by relaxing the requirements of the solution to reduce the complexity of the problem. And then feedback from trial and error is used in successive efforts to improve on the first guess. Humans sort of instinctively know where the Pareto rule is – that is, where the effort required to get a ‘better’ solution doesn’t deliver demonstrable extra ‘value’.

Or at least we used to. I have this suspicion that this type of common sense is being lost.

The description above skimmed over one critical point – the fact that a human can look at a map and guess a good (if not perfect) route in an instant. Whereas a computer would take much longer even if we relaxed the constraints of what a good solution is. How is this? Unlike a computer we can ‘see’ the whole map and visualise various routes superimposed on it and even estimate their differential length, all in a flash and in our heads.

The latest on the subject from some academics (which could be 100% wrong – it is still early days) assumes we are running algorithms in our brains, i.e. we are bio-computers, but they haven’t a clue what these algorithms are – all they know is which parts of the brains light up:

“Mounting evidence suggests that core object recognition, the ability to rapidly recognize objects despite substantial appearance variation, is solved in the brain via a cascade of reflexive, largely feed-forward computations that culminate in a powerful neuronal representation in the inferior temporal cortex. However, the algorithm that produces this solution remains poorly understood. Here we review evidence ranging from individual neurons and neuronal populations to behaviour and computational models. We propose that understanding this algorithm will require using neuronal and psychophysical data to sift through many computational models, each based on building blocks of small, canonical sub-networks with a common functional goal.”

This guy on the internet blogged about the (questionable) conundrum as to how humans can sometimes efficiently compute ridiculously difficult (i.e. NP) problems with ease, where computers struggle.

What followed was a torrid debate with comments at ten paces.

One thing missed by the anal retentive introverts that are interested in this shit is that computers are programmed to find exact answers.

Humans, on the other hand, go for ‘near enough is good enough’.

What we do is relax the requirement for exactness of a solution to accommodate for the complexity of the problem.

I just did it then.

Here’s a new tech business idea:

An escrow service for social media.

For example all contracted NRL or ARU players would have to sign up to this service as part of their contract.

All their social media feeds would go to the escrow service and at some fixed period afterwards (say an hour or a day) both the player and the organisation would both be required to authorise the release of a feed. If either one does not approve then the feed doesn’t go out.

So Paul Gallen, drunk on an island, tweets “Steve Noice [sic] actually cared about players from cronulla’s feelings. Couldn’t say that about any other cunt from Nrl.”

The tweet is escrowed for a period until sometime later when both Paul and the NRL have both approved it’s release. Or not approved it’s release – all it needs is one party to swipe left and it’s a goner.

For sure the NRL might have said ‘no’ to this one, and even Paul himself when he woke up the next day might have had second thoughts.

I am sure he still believes this is true, and the NRL might feel the same about him.

I am sure everyone knows this but we can’t say these things in public in case anyone thinks it’s true.

How does the brain computer work? Why can we easily solve problems that computers really struggle with?

For example, problems that when reduced to mathematical algorithms, run in exponential or even logarithmic time.

I think the answer is that we don’t use algorithms in our head. The brain isn’t a binary or a quantum computer, at least not entirely.

What it is, I don’t know for sure

The Turing test for artificial intelligence suggests that this is achieved when a computer can fool a human into thinking that it, the computer, is a human.

That’s arse about; it’s much harder for a human to convince another human that it, the human, is in fact a computer.

Which tells us more about humans than it does about computers. And when we can crack this we will know how the brain works.

As an example, was the article below (found in the silly rag this morning) written by a computer or a person?

Actually my guess is that it was a person (say, a gen Y journo) that was accidentally imitating a bad algorithm designed to automatically write news pieces from police bulletins.

There’s no algorithm involved, of this I am sure, in either the writing of the article or of this blog.

The ‘Equal Odds Rule’ says that the average publication of any particular scientist does not have any statistically different chance of having more of an impact than any other scientist’s average publication.

In other words your garden-variety scientist is subject to the same rules as a spinner in two-up. Each toss of the two coins has equal chance of landing heads-up and, similarly, each scientific effort has an equal chance of being ‘remembered’ or being heavily-cited as another. So any scientist wishing to enter into the hall of fame would be well placed to publish as much as they can.

This broad rule has merit but having worked with many scientists I would say that some, a very small fraction, have an active intent of wading out into ‘white space’ where innovation is more likely to be achieved, thus improving their odds of success. And others have a greater skill at recognising the accidental discovery; they have trained themselves not to ignore the unexpected results. And yet others have bigger budgets to play with which is critical to purposeful invention or discovery.

If we step over into technology entrepreneurship in start-ups, the Equal Odds Rule is almost not applicable. Most start-ups fail because of poor risk management. That is, they fail because of the inexperience of the team, which leads them to carry risks that others would recognise and avoid. This of course can extend to the choice of the original product idea.

But having said that, the required experience can only be learned by trying and failing, repeatedly. So in this odd way the ‘learning’ of the  Equal Odds Rule does apply to the start-up game; you need to doggedly keep going until you can manage all the risks.

So long as you have enough energy, by the stage of life where you can manage all the myriad of risks, your odds of success are far improved over the average punter – let’s call this the ‘Improving Odds Rule’.

The smart young entrepreneur reading this would realise that there is a short-cut and it’s called surrounding yourself with grey-hairs that already have the experience; investors, CEO’s, COO’s and board members. You have to sell them all on your energy and willingness to learn, be flexible, be not as mad as a cut snake, and be reasonable as to your expectations of the share in the upside.

So here is another start-up rule – the ‘Long Road Rule’. The successful entrepreneurs are either stupidly lucky and learn nothing from their one and only success, or they are great sales people with their ego in control and of possession of the ‘right stuff’ in the eyes of the grey-hairs looking for a young energetic person to back. Somehow I don’t think you can fabricate this ‘right stuff’ – its something that you are born with. And if you don’t have it then its the long road to grey-hairdom for you.

New word for the day – apression.

A state of apathetic mood and aversion to activity which does not affect a person’s thoughts, behavior, feelings or sense of well-being.

I was once used as a slave labour by the Scouts. Really.

At a Jamboree in Melbourne we were forced into making concrete bricks for days on end. When we should have been climbing ropes and swimming through mud.

I think they were putting up a building and saw the opportunity to save some costs on building materials.

I really didn’t like making bricks in the forty degree heat and now I wonder if shouldn’t ask them for back pay plus interest.

And this was after spending over 24 hours on a train getting there – our scout-filled special had the lowest priority on the track.

Actually there was very little about the Scout movement I liked – all knots, uniforms, chanting and other madness of the punishing super-egos.

Fortunately my local troop used the movement as an excuse to have some very un-Scout like fun. Even so, the mad hand of Baden-Powell lurked in every corner, urging us to excel at all things military, short of actual killing.

I got into the thing by the usual nefarious means of my parents – attempting to get rid of me.

How I got out of it, I cannot remember. I think I just forgot to turn up one year.

As Mark Viduka memorably said ‘I didn’t announce the start of my career so why should I announce the end of it?’

[Scene] convenience store

The guy in front of me is wheel chair bound. He can’t reach up to give his paper and chips to the cage bound sub-continental for scanning.

Without a comment I grabbed the goods and passed them up.

He says to the cashier:

“Ya see, not all able-bodies are cunts.”

There I was, standing in line, waiting for anything to happen.

Fascinated as usual by the random array of cheap Chinese goods for sale.

Without due consideration, in my distracted state, I did.

Just a little one, a bit of pressure release, quietly expelled in a controlled fashion.

Sociopath.

And it turned out to be a toxic bomb.

I ended up doing a good imitation of Basil Fawlty, looking around for the culprit.

Flying through the ether came this:

‘Ian, when was the last time you ate fruit?’

My mum.

‘Dunno. Christmas?’

Upon further reflection.

‘Tomato’s a fruit right?’

If you want a good laugh have a read of this from the silly morning herald today:

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/commercial-returns-to-fore-in-proposed-university-research-overhaul-20141028-11d44d.html

It is a summary of (a) a pre-release of some white paper from the Chief Scientist, an academic who happens to be Australia’s Chief Scientist (sic), and (b) a media release by the Minister for Industry (they mean ‘service sector’).

They have clearly been colluding – this should be stopped for a start.

The basic gist of the article is that the shrinking amount of funds that go to university and CSIRO researchers will be even further constrained by the need to show ‘commercial relevance’.

All this will do is create more angst for our academics in their efforts to get funds. But not to worry these buggers now have a primary skill at gaming the grant systems, so they will adjust quick-smart.

Of course there will no useful outcomes since:

(1) Academic research follows global trends where high citation counts can be achieved (e.g. in nanotech and other dubious buzz topics) whereas, since deregulation in the 1980’s, Australia’s economy has gone all ‘services’ with a little mining and farming thrown in for exports. The areas of cross-interest between current areas of global scientific activity and Australia’s economy would fit in a smurf’s pocket. Basically Australia’s scientists will struggle to find any Australian commercial partners interested in their research skills.

(2) Australian ‘Industry’ hates innovation unless it’s in marketing or tax reform. Our large oligarchies are quite happy with their share of the protected local services sector (which represents over 70% of our GDP) and have no interest in wasting dollars on developing technology. If they ever need new technology they just buy it off the shelf from overseas. See my paper on the subject – http://issuu.com/ianmax/docs/how_australia_can_invent_a_thriving

Until our large corporation are dragged into the world of technology development nowt will emerge from these efforts.

The sad thing is that the major players, although well intentioned, do not seem to know this. This is because they have a monolithic work experience in either academia or government; they simply don’t know what they don’t know.

I have written a couple of articles for ‘The Conversation’ – this is an online news website. This is what they say about themselves:

“The Conversation is a collaboration between editors and academics to provide informed news analysis and commentary that’s free to read and republish.”

In short, you need to be an academic to contribute, which I am through an adjunct professorship at RMIT, and you don’t get paid for your efforts.

The editors feel that mainstream news channels are continuing to slide in the quality of their content. This is because they simply can’t afford to pay for content anymore; the advertising dollars are getting sucked up by Google and their mates.

By corralling academics to write for free, a supposedly quality news outlet is created which solves this problem.

However I have noticed one thing about academics; they have this in-built belief that all problems should be solved by government. In fact over 80% of the articles are either (a) imploring a government to do something or other to fix this or that problem, or (b) analysing government actions.

It sort of makes sense that the institutionalised academics that are totally dependent upon the government tit would not be aware that there are other ways to address issues, or more interesting subjects to write about.

I think I just oxymoroned myself.

I couldn’t make this shit up.

On my morning cycling commute to work, whilst going around the Bay Run, I was pulled over by two cycle police.

This is a path shared with joggers, cyclists, dogs off leashes, fat women with prams, three fat women with prams abreast, the odd fisherperson, pedestrians, drunks coming out of the rowing club, etc.

The conversation with the cycling police went as follows:

“Do you know why we’ve pulled you over?”

“Not a clue mate”

“Well there is a 10 km/h speed limit on this shared path and you were well exceeding that”

“A speed limit?”

“Yes, there a new signs up everywhere”

“Mate the idea of riding a bike is so that you don’t have to read signs”

“Well it’s your responsibility to read every sign and follow the rules. Exceeding the speed limit is dangerous and we are taking this very seriously”

“I have just started riding – it’s all new to me”

They looked at my shaky red fixie and clearly chose to disbelieve this fabrication.

“You have to learn the rules. No one can speed here”

“What do you do when there is an emergency and you have to speed? Put on your siren so everyone gets out of the way?”

At this point they couldn’t help but laugh and I was let off with a stern warning.

I wanted to tell them that I haven’t got a speedo, but I couldn’t be arsed arguing further.

I know what’s coming. Compulsory speedos, indicators, bike helmets with airbags, ABS, bicycle licenses and even bikes that won’t let you engage gears unless you have your brake on.

Yikes.

How about a quantum computing algorithm that writes quantum computing algorithms?

That sounds like it conforms to an uncertainty principle. I would invest in that!

From the New Scientist, also known as ‘Godstrewth Mate’.

“Quantum computers should be much faster than ordinary ones, but only at tasks for which there is a quantum algorithm – software that takes advantage of the computer’s quantum nature. Without these algorithms, quantum computers are just regular computers that are much harder to build.”

And “Designing an algorithm that takes advantage of a quantum computer is tricky, so there aren’t many around.”

Fifteen to be exact.

The two most important are:

Shor’s algorithm – Given an integer N, find its prime factors. This is exponentially faster on a quantum computer. But a quantum computer is exponentially more expensive to build, so it’s ‘evens’ on a practical level for now.

Grover’s algorithm – searching an unsorted database with N entries in O(N1/2) time and using O(log N) storage space (see big O notation). This is only quadratically faster on a quantum computer.

The rest are curios:

Deutsch–Jozsa algorithm
Simon’s algorithm
Quantum phase estimation algorithm
Hidden subgroup problem
Estimating Gauss sums
Fourier fishing and Fourier checking
Quantum counting
Element distinctness problem
Triangle-finding problem
Formula evaluation
Group commutativity
Computing knot invariants
Quantum simulation

Let’s hope people come up with some more useful algorithms. Without these, the incentive to invest in scaling the hardware will be financially diminished and it simply won’t happen.

And it is important to note that the development of algorithms does not require a computer – it is all old-school pen, paper and the mad mathematician.

Worryingly, the rate of development of new quantum computing algorithms is not increasing. Just like successful new drug releases it seems to be slowing, suggesting that the easy algorithms were those first developed.

If I was a betting man I would bet that this technology will probably not get the massive private sector investment it will need to become anything other than a university curiosity.

Secreted away in Rocco’s little piece of Barcelona with my heart-starter double mac, I have been watching the ABC’s version of a morning show.

As per usual, it’s a couple – a man and a woman – doing a talkathon. But unlike the commercial channels she is not blonde. And they both look sort of odd for the role; the ABC marketing department’s attempt to promote the appearance of substance over appearances.

I can’t hear it (usefully, Rocco has ABBA’s greatest hits playing) but the closed captions are on, in all their wonderful mistake ridden glory.

This morning I have learnt that:

In any year 1 in 25 Australians will have a mental illness and 2 in 25 will suffer anxiety.

1 in 3 victims of family violence is male. Someone got the Victorian Australian (sic) of the year award for this. I disliked her on the spot – I can spot a self-deluded self-server a long way off; it’s in the smile.

1 in 4 Australians feel negative about a Muslim poll.

I get anxiety after my fourth double mac – so I am one of the 2 in 25. My daughter, when she is really mad, is happy to hit me (she always has). The habit is waning with age, but it does make me one of the 1 in 3. I don’t know what the Muslim poll is but there’s probably the dead hand of Alan Jones in there somewhere, so I feel negative about it without even knowing. So count me in the 1 in 4.

Ya see? Lies and damn statistics. Who would have guessed we would waste all our excess wealth and time on fear and anxiety instead of wine and women?

Here’s another stat that you can’t argue with. 1 in 1 Australians is a fucking Wally for buying this shit.

Brewers are getting ahead of the ‘plain packaging’ curve.

Years back, when rejecting the opportunity to use the technology of my first start-up (optical touch screens), Steve Jobs told me (very nicely I might add) that ‘we don’t do new hardware; we let others take that risk and we follow quickly’.

It seems that this wisdom has been lost at Apple. They were planning on using sapphire top glass on the iPhone 6 due to its improved hardness and scratch resistance. They would have been the first to do this.

The supplier of the sapphire manufacturing technology, GTAT and partners, had also lined themselves as the operating partner and they managed to screw it up.

They built a plant but couldn’t get the yields up in time and Apple eventually pulled the plug on the project. GTAT is now in Chapter 11. Apple is looking for a new operator and the reborn GTAT will be just an equipment supplier.

There is another bit of common wisdom lost in this story; never let a manufacturing equipment supplier become a BOO/BOOT partner. They generally suck at operations and their core skill is technology and manufacturing tool development which, culturally, is orthogonal to that of an high yield operating/manufacturing company.

The twain should only ever meet at the bar at trade shows where they can swap lies and dream that they can do each other’s jobs better than the other; which they cannot.

Footnote – I should have tried harder at Apple but this was before they released the iPhone and we didn’t have a crystal ball big enough to see the opportunity in front of us. We could have ‘given’ them the technology and retained the patents or 1% equity share and still done well out of the deal. Live and learn.

Anyone see the problem here?

This British data is interesting.

Cycling of about as dangerous as being a pedestrian

Our mob doesn’t even measure this stuff. They just count overall numbers of deaths and accidents but do not normalise it to distances travelled, or anything else for that matter.

Actually thinking about it, it isn’t the distance travelled that matters – its the time spent exposed to danger. Assuming that cars and motorbikes travel at an average of 50 km/h, bicycles at say 15 km/h and pedestrians at 5 km/h then in the UK:

Deaths in cars are at a rate of 70 per billion hours travelled.

Deaths in motorbikes are at a rate of 3610 per billion hours travelled.

Deaths for bicycles are at a rate of 326 per billion hours travelled, and

Deaths for pedestrians are at a rate of 130 per billion hours travelled.

That is, cycling is only 4.65 more dangerous than driving a car in a period of time.

Which is interesting because my cycle daily commute saves me about two thirds of the time because I can avoid a lot of traffic. Which means I am only increasing my risk of death by a factor of 1.55 using this UK data – which probably isn’t that different to Sydney.

Has anyone out there ever eaten a good party pie? Nuh.

Product opportunity beckons.

Data shows that riding a motorbike is 51 times more likely to end in death compared to driving a car, based on mortality rates per mile driven.

The obvious way to deal with this is with the so-called ‘plain packaging’ approach; enforce the painting of nasty deathly decals all over motorbikes to warn off the owners of these otherwise legal instruments of transport.

Oh, and tax the fuck out of them too.

On second thoughts, the decals idea might not work…

Human systems generally develop in an “evolutionary learning” approach.

For example capitalism evolved as technology and associated business skills became available for wealth creation. All our current western societal systems evolved to accommodate these new skill sets.

This evolution involved introducing new ideas into society one at time, and only keeping the ones that worked.

Occasionally some clown attempted to introduce an entirely new system, like communism, to replace the ones that evolved naturally.

This will never work because there are far too many variables to be considered for a synthetic system to be successful. And some of these variables are irrational, related to how people behave.

Even in much smaller systems we can see this, e.g. venture capital where the financing and deal structuring was developed over decades by trial and error. The bits that worked were kept and the bits that failed were discarded until we got a system that ‘worked’.

Recently people have been trying to invent new systems in venture capital such as incubators and crowd-sourcing. These will fail but the aspects that do work will be kept and merged into the existing system.

And so it is with all of society. A new system that fails simply delivers a few ideas of value which are quietly merged into the greater system. And a bunch of unhappy people wishing they had never been so duped.

Query: why are the skills required to de-risk technology implementations that drive processitivity/productivity gains (mostly) not hereditary?

My guess is that the skills required are:

1. Access to capital which can be hereditary

2. Intelligence which is sometimes hereditary

3. Education which also has an hereditary link through wealth

4. Risk taking – which is not linked to hereditary factors for some reasons

5. Successful risk management  – which is also not linked to hereditary factors it seems

6. Motivation – which might be counter-correlated to wealth inheritance

Points 4 and 5 are so important that they sometimes outweigh 1-3.

This then suggests that our education system in no way teaches risk taking or successful risk management. Because if it was, the hereditary link to wealth creation would be much stronger.

This proffers an opportunity to re-engineer our education system to focus on risk-taking and risk-management. But this would be counter-productive to society as a whole, in the context of driving consumption, because it would act to further concentrate wealth and hence reduce overall consumption.

Maybe this is what is happening at a high level since wealth disparities do seem to be stretching.

One of the blogs in the Sunday rag that I sometimes enjoy is called ‘all men are liars’.

In truth, all people are liars.

We lie to fit in. To some degree or another we are all chameleons – we sprout mushy half-truths that vary according to the social situation, and these ease the burden of co-existence.

I have a sort of built-in dislike of hypocrisy, which means that over time I have became more and more aware of the inconsistencies in my own half-truths. I was a great chameleon in my day, but I became more and more aware of the lies I was telling myself.

So I started merging my truths which creates another set of problems. It means that it is harder to fit into every aspect of the external environment. You get labelled as different or odd or difficult, or even as HFA by the unkind.

Also, some things break; you can’t fit into every situation if you are a monocoque personality.

The alternatives are to (A) perfect ‘project chameleon’ and go to your grave a happy hypocrite, or (B) invent a bunch of personalities and become socially multipolar; this only works if you can firewall all your personalities within your skull.

The latter approach has its risks too – sometimes the personalities clash or the external environment won’t allow you to have them all. And at some deep level the self-lies might be catalogued and start weighing on your conscience.

There is no perfect solution – it is the human condition.

Productivity is a misnomer – it should have been called processivity.

Products get cheaper when the processes to make them get more efficient.

The base raw materials don’t cost any more or less – they are just there.

The processes of extracting them, refining and transporting them have over time got much cheaper.

And so it flows, up the supply chain, to you and me, with our plastic entertainment.

Since the industrial revolution, processivity has continued to improve and in this process resources have been moved around the planet and they have mostly changed state along the way. Also the enthalpic value of a lot of stored energy has been converted to planet surface heat.

Wealth is a actually a measure of an implied ‘right’ to consume resources and energy

Until recently neither the quantity of resources nor the resultant enthalpic energy release of consuming them has been wealth limiting. In fact, the sharing of, and overall degree of wealth creation has been limited by something a lot more complex.

Processivity is driven by technology gains and the risks associated with the development and deployment of these – these technology efforts fail more often than they succeed. And there are more technology concepts than there ever is capital to deploy them. That is, technology is cheap and only the small fraction, the good ones, are worth more than their development costs.

The risks of failure of technology efforts in processivity gains has thus resulted in the requirement for risk management, patent systems, capital resources to cover risks, pooling of interests, disinterest by the risk adverse, and efforts to control the external world by legal and political structuring to buffer against these risks. A.k.a. Capitalism.

The risks in the development of processivity gains has been mirrored in society with a few people benefiting more from processivity gains through access to the means to reduce the risks of deploying technology for processivity gains.

Communism tried to socialise this access to the means of reducing technology risk only to find that they were disincentivising or not training the small fraction of the population that had the skills and talent to reduce risks. Comparatively they fell behind capitalism and failed due to that contrast. They might have failed anyway if the rate of processivity gains did not create enough wealth to underpin the required technology efforts.

The fascinating aspect of Capitalism is that the system was forced to drag along the masses, via tax systems and redistributions, in order to give them the means to consume the proceeds of increasing processivity. Concentrating all that wealth and consumption for the few was simply too constraining on the system – they would have hit the Pareto limit and run out of motivation (customers) unless the masses were included in the party.

And then it was discovered that the few, the potentially wealthy, the successful risk takers, were distributed across society. So there was a double benefit in including everyone in the processivity party, namely access to an increased fraction of people that could successfully manage the risks of processivity gains.

And therein lies the main differentiator between Capitalism and every other political system – the diminution of hereditary rights. Monitoring these would be a means of monitoring the ‘health’ of the planet (in a negative way) and capitalism itself (in a positive way).

The Chinese care so little about the designs that they have stolen that their products come with a ‘copy me’ blueprint.

Sometimes I feel that living in Sydney is like being addicted to porn.

A hippy with a smartphone ain’t a hippy.

If I was a cabbie for ten years, listening to Alan Jones, I wonder if I too would end up driving as if I had Tourretes?

A new phrase for the day:

‘Skull-fuckery’

A dissembling term used by women to describe what men supposedly and sometimes do to them.

Unfortunately we got Tier 1 Silicon Valley VC funding and things got out of hand.

Ok I admit defeat.

When, sometime back, I got myself a replica Aeron office chair I was hoping for better things.

It’s going.

The primary issue? I keep sliding down in it. Can’t stop it.

One minute I am perched in the Stepford position.

The next, my head is level with the desktop, visibility to the monitor obscured by a slab of Ikea.

I do plan to video myself because there is some sort of extra dimensional other-universe thing going down where I do not perceive the Euclidian transition.

I tried adjusting the thing and decided it was designed by a designer without consultation with either an engineer or an ergonomics expert or anyone with a shred of honesty (‘seriously Herman, it’s shit’). Or me.

Who let the dogs out of the Bauhaus?

Online I discover that I am not alone. Many hate the Aeron for a variety of reasons.

There is even a collective of fat American men that wear Chinos and have fat wallets in their back pockets that have found that the Pellicle material rips their pants. And, in their disgust, they have found each other! Thank Christ for the internet.

And then I was thinking – this problem represents a Gen Y product opportunity. The Y’s can overthrow this darling of the baby-boomer’s office obsessions.

Take a first world problem that few have noticed (particularly the sufferers), and then solve it with existing technology and a smartphone app, and then slap it on Kickstarter.

Here we go:

An office chair.

A bunch of electric motors in the seat for adjustment, borrowed from a car seat.

A battery to drive the motors.

An inductive charger receiver in the base of the chair to power the battery.

An inductive charger transmitter in a floor mat, plugged into mains power, to drive the inductive charger receiver in the base of the chair.

A smartphone app, connected via bluetooth 4.0 (low power) to the chair, for adjustment of the chair settings.

Sensors in the chair to monitor heart rate, body temperature, posture and the like. The app will then suggest improvements to the user such as ‘time for a break’, ‘time for some exercise’ and ‘straighten your back’.

The app can also be setup to measure daily calorie usage and then integrate with the user’s favourite exercise app and wrist-band monitor to measure and report on, and help control, a large fraction of the user’s daily activities. This technology can be extended to the user’s bed for 24 hour coverage.

A customizable feedback mechanism, vibration most likely, in the chair that the user can set up for alerts such as ‘get your hand off it’ or ‘your girlfriend is calling’.

Possibly also the user will be able to get, via the internet, alarms when an intruder has used the chair in an unauthorised manner. The sensors will detect use by a non-owner and alert the user wherever they are on the planet, so they can then phone or message back to the office for corrective action.

It’s a winner!

Cheap arse cafe table. Yes.

My daughter, the aesthete, likes all of me except my clubbed little fingers.

She demanded an explanation off her grandparents.

Mum said she asked when I was born and everyone shrugged.

Dad said he had never noticed. Sounds about right.

Suspiciously, both of their answers drifted a little upon being pressed.

Google says the 5% of the clubs that are congenital are of unknown origin although one group has looked for a genetic link.

The mystery remains. And I am in a club against my will.

Genius has a use-by date, a moment in the sun. Don’t miss it.

I just saw a cycling hipster on a fixie with a Ned Kelly beard and Elvis Costello glasses, cycling along while smoking a pipe.

I couldn’t get the camera working quickly enough. No image. Fucker.

Currently I am half way through Borgen – a Danish political drama.

Denmark has 5.6m people and a land mass 3.5x that of greater Sydney. It’s GDP is equivalent to the State of Victoria and less than 1/3 of Australia’s. There aren’t any states so their government runs everything – there is even a minster of traffic.

Politically, the Danes have an MPP style system, similar to the one New Zealand has recently adopted.

Which means there is always a coalition of parties in ‘power’ that pretty much hate each other. By skullduggery, after election they negotiate coalitions between themselves, and then appoint a PM and other ministers from the coalition with the most seats. It looks horrible.

The PM spends most of her time in dramas associated with keeping the coalition together. She has one ‘spin doctor’ and one ‘Humphrey’ to advise her, and one colleague from her own party that she vaguely trusts but who just got invalided out of the show.

Contrast this to the Hollowmen where our PM has a head adviser, another one, a private press office, and a spin team of about 10 people. All this despite the fact that we are only three times the economy of Denmark but minus all the state-run issues. And there are no coalition issues to keep them distracted.

I know which system costs its citizens more.

The Danes also have the lowest income disparity in the world. As dodgy as their MMP systems looks on television it might be worth considering – possibly the MMP system is less susceptible to the power of corrupt lobbying and media control than is our preferential two party system.

The enemy of art is bubbles.

With an old mate in Shanghai, a month back or so, we started plotting the world’s first racquet and bat sports pentathlon to be held in his elite gym in Shanghai.

We had tennis, squash, racquet ball, table tennis and badminton.

There are other wildcard options such as royal tennis, totem tennis, various beach bat sports with balls, and half court tennis.

Today I learn that there is another one called padel which is very popular in the Hispanic countries.

This might become a decathlon.

What I say to  conspiracy theorists is that we humans always have hidden agendas and we often take advantage of a situation. Collusion doesn’t seem that big a step does it? So why the outrage and surprise?

The Skunkworks says it will have a “working” fusion reactor within three years.

It’ll probably “work” for a femptosecond before consuming half of California.

Postscript; Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works launched a high-profile project in 2013 to build a truck-sized Compact Fusion Reactor (CFR). However, the company quietly canceled and halted the ambitious nuclear fusion development effort before 2021 due to insurmountable technical and commercial hurdles.