I don’t why but I have always hated backgammon.

Apropos of fuck all, except that I am sitting here with a bowl of yoghurt, fresh walnuts and Cretan honey.

I once worked on Crete for a while, in a little village, loading fruit trucks from dawn through to lunch time.

We would drive little utes up into the mountains to get tomatoes, eggplants and cucumbers off the peasant farmers and then, back at the village, load them onto a semi-trailer heading off to Northern Europe.

After lunch I would wander off with the boys, older men mostly, to play cards (for money), drink ouzo and coffee.

By about dinner time we were all fucked.

Every night I was taken back to someone’s house or farm for dinner. I was the get-out-of-jail card for the boys! ‘Skippy’ was popular with the wives.

Then, on my motor scooter, I would zig zag back to my one room apartment by the sea.

My main legacy from this period is a passing knowledge of the Cretan version of the Greek language and an addiction for Cretan honey and baklava. Nothing else comes close.

Yeah baby, as I said before the Hypocrisy Index is correlated strongly to GDP per capita and even more strongly to the spread in wealth within a country.

In poor countries you have straight-out illegal corruption. In rich countries you have legalised corruption, aka hypocrisy.

For example, in Australia we have two major supermarket chains, two political parties and four banks and a number of other segments with limited numbers of key players. We have allowed sole import distributors to gouge us for decades. And why?

Because we have legalised corruption. The entrenched players simply garner influence through a zillion means (lobbying, brown paper bags, legislation, marketing, etc) and get our legislators to create barriers to competition on the basis of all sorts of hypocrisy.

For example, health and safety concerns, environmental concerns, Australian standards, Australian jobs, straight out marketing bullshit via tabloid media, you name it. And we certainly don’t have anti-trust in our constitution…the only thing we trust in is hope, luck, kangaroos, emus and the Queen, maybe God and the odd trout.

Transparency is very opaque and hypocrisy reigns. No wonder the poor buggers on the boats think this is an asylum.

[Scene] my gym.

This girl spent five minutes weighing herself.

One foot. Two feet. Jump. Repeat.

No matter what she did it came back the same. 72kg.

As they say, a good sign of madness in a person is that they keep asking the same question hoping for a different answer.

One doesn’t control one’s emotions, one controls one’s reaction to them.

Do they rule you or do you rule them?

It is a mistake to believe that someone in control of their reactions to their own emotions doesn’t feel the emotions as strongly as those without said control.

What they don’t feel is all the secondary emotions such as shame, fear, anxiety etc.

I have noticed that there is a correlation between a harmonic belief in God and cellulite in young women.

Cause & effect, non-causal correlation or sheer coincidence?

Personally I think it is a shit diet of junk food, a certain lack of rigorous thinking, an inability to control their diet, a lack of exercise, a Gen Y’ish lack of shame, and an environment where blokes don’t get much so they can’t get too picky.

Basically the girls aren’t at an evolutionary disadvantage so long as they are all the same and the blokes don’t leave the cult.

And who said God doesn’t have a sense of humour?

It is a mistake to confuse empathy for love.

Easy to do because they are both emotions originating in the id.

One is a feeling of what the other person feels, instinctively. The purpose is to provide society with healers.

The other is instinctively feeling good because of the presence of the other. The purpose is to reproduce.

See that’s different!

Empathy requires a belief in the status quo in order to get the required intuitive reaction to negative change. Empathetic people do not like change.

It appears that I have a working model for the brain. It’s probably all wrong but I like it. In any case all other models don’t seem to have much efficacy whereas mine does, for me.

My guess is that:

1. Layers of hypotheses don’t sit well with complex systems.

2. It’s difficult for a PC or a brain to understand how it (itself) works in a cognizant manner. We might be breaking the laws of thermodynamics here, or up against Schrödinger’s pussy again, or similar (in Hertz speak).

3. The complex physical structure of the brain might be leading the researchers astray. Besides the academics all have brain damage, the poor little dears; it’s called Silo Thinking Syndrome. They are all practised at one thing and unaware that they are useless at anything else. Unravelling the brain is a job for polymaths….who?

4. Who gives a shit anyway?

Query…after writing this blog for a almost a year have my thoughts become linear?

Not really, but I have developed a much more rigorous linear co-processor that turns my abstract thoughts into linear equivalents for the purposes of written translation.

And this in turn has enabled two unexpected outcomes:

1. I see new ‘solutions’ that I would not have otherwise seen. Linear ones. Directly.

2. I am able to communicate my position in ‘real time’. This because only the linear position seems to be understood. This has helped me not be the helpless abstract victim of the quagmire of brains not thus. That is, I win a lot more arguments and I assert my position more readily.

Cafe incident…

“Can I steal this chair?”

Only in a former penal colony would this be considered normal.

Mum asked me if I am worried about flying into China next week.

What?

In the context of some plane going missing etc etc.

Well, I say, my odds have just improved. No probs.

Wide boy is a British term for a man who lives by his wits, wheeling and dealing.

So, when being associated with a certain Rake I get this; “He is a Sydney wideboy. Loves his league, women and pretends a type of amorality when what he really hates is ‘can’t’ (as in a dislike of hypocrisy and dogma). There are some similarities.”

As much as I have, in the past, hated hypocrisy (except my own of course) I have learned to live with it, almost contentedly. This is important since it appears to be the de facto currency of the new millennia.

Bugger the Big Mac index; bring on the Hypocrisy Index. Hypocrisy is correlated strongly to GDP per capita and even more strongly to the gap in GDP per capita within a country.

It’s almost as if human nature automatically turns to hypocrisy as the motivating force to unequally divide up the spoils of unnecessary wealth.

And getting in the way of human nature is almost as dangerous as getting between an academic and a research dollar.

Anxiety is an emotion originating in the id. It’s a normal emotion designed to get one aware of impending danger.

Impending danger is sensory input that is funnelled by the ego into the id.

The id then processes the inputs and immediately sends the alert back to the id via the emotion of anxiety. Red alert.

Now occasionally for some people the id fucks up and keeps a person in a constant anxious state for minimal input.

This is where the super-ego steps in and tries to wade in with alternative beliefs (i.e. its all OK). The super-ego tries to wrest control of the ego from the id.

These beliefs can be constructed solely within a person’s mind, or learnt through external input, e.g. therapy.

The role of the beliefs is to help the ego either actively over-ride the id on an ongoing basis or, even better still, re-program the relevant part of the id.

For some poor souls the id doesn’t just control the ego, it even gets to control the super-ego. In these cases the beliefs are aligned with the emotions of anxiety and it is doubly harder to cure the person of their anxiety.

The super-ego may try to discredit the id during sleep time by producing such stupidly anxious dreams that the ego finally starts to doubt the flight or fight messages it is getting form the id.

I suspect that the cause of ‘errors’ in the id that lead to, say, anxiety are just that, digital bits that have been scrambled accidentally. For example, by a period of extended non-sleep where the nightly data re-fresh of the memory just did not occur; you might think this is most likely to happen in a period of genuine anxiety and hence why anxiety is a common problem. These errors can even be passed on to subsequent generations.

Knowing this, what is the best solution…?

1. Dream therapy might be a good one where we give people hallucinogenics while they sleep to maximise the probability of the id being discredited by the ego as the super-ego makes up even weirder dreams.

2. ‘Anxiety’ therapy might also be a good approach. This could be constant simulation of very frightening circumstances in say an Imax theatre, followed by no harmful physical impact. Again the idea is to discredit the messages coming from the id in the eyes of the ego.

But both of these rely on ‘beliefs’ trumping ’emotions’ in the ego. But how to re-program the id so the shitty emotions, the errors in the great flowchart, are removed?

I can’t answer this for now since I need to ponder how the ego sometimes gets to re-program errors in the id. Noting it can also re-program errors in the super-ego, or beliefs, as well.

Lola has decided that the best ‘product’ to sell, in the interests of a sales and marketing campaign for the acquisition of holes in her ears, is the very model of the very old fashioned model child.

An alien has inhabited my daughter. Cleaning, cooking, gardening, no whining, requests for more jobs, and always pleasant. This for three hours now.

She tells me she is going to keep it up until she gets her ears pierced. She isn’t quite there yet…. even after watching Groundhog Day last night.

But to be honest this model child is driving me crazy.

My next most likely car project is as below…

My ideal car, and I may get around to this, is a Citroen Traction Avant.

But with the engine and drivetrain replaced with modern bits and the addition of power steering and airco.

I find that people who have troubles apologising also have troubles accepting the apologies of others.

Quite appropriate that the Google android onboard dictionary doesn’t recognize ‘spoilt’.

No probs with ‘WTF’ though.

Careful what you wish for…. episode 3 of the sales campaign for earrings.

Lola asked me for the thousandth time if she can have earrings.

My ‘no’ was followed by the usual pointless negotiations.

I suggested that she stop negotiating and start developing the product first.

Then I said she needs to come up with a sales and marketing strategy that involved getting other adults to work on me

She is onto it.

The best way to teach kids is when it matters to them. The antithesis of school.

My mate, who does mixed martial arts at the place next to my weights gym, just accused me of having ‘play’ muscles.

I counter claimed that he therefore must have a ‘real’ gut.

1-0 to the goodies.

I just sold my M5.

What’s the point of having a car that can do 300 km/h when 50 km/h is vmax on a good day?

Sydney on a Saturday…. you’d have to be lobotomized to drive around here, happily

“I like that red Ferrari”

“That’s a Porsche”

“Whatever. All cars without rooves look the same”

Not my daughter.

I just spent four minutes watching eggs boil.

To avoid the boredom I penned this entry.

Where possible, our precious time on this earth needs to be well considered.

I just saw my old boss from my first startup driving a big black, new and shiny, Bentley.

Half a million bucks worth.

This from the man who once told me that ‘money is just a badge of honor’.

I guess you can only wear so many badges.

My golden rule of negotiating is to only negotiate with the person that has the authority to execute the agreed contract.

I tell all puffed-up proxies to fuck off. Nicely or otherwise.

Advice to women trying to catch a bloke.

We men are incredibly (double that) astute bird watchers.

We can spot a woman that exercises, and one that doesn’t, at 100 paces at sunset with a bag over our heads.

There is a bias against shacking up with the type that doesn’t exercise, even in their teens, because we know what’s coming.

I am not sure how big or prevalent the bias is, but it does exist.

And before the sky rains down on my head, yes I know there are double standards at play here.

I am not condoning this, just observing.
Or just saying, as they say now.

Advice to men when it comes to wooing women.

Negotiation follows sales which follows marketing which follows product development.

A bloke has to have all these skills.

Oh, he also needs operations! Expectations must be met to avoid claims of false advertising.

Only in Australia can we expense our way to prosperity.

Everywhere else, they require investment.

We can defy gravity. Aren’t we great?

The herald again. There’s this odd habit of the fading north shore (and whatever the Melbourne equivalent is) white-bread petit bourgeoise.

When their elders die they clamor to get obituaries into the herald. No matter how obscure the dead folk.

I don’t know whether they, the living, pay for these adverturies or the income is simply amortised over accumulated subscription fees.

They are clearly not for our edification. A root cause analysis would suggest the motivation is an of mix of self-validation and self-esteem for the living.

The opinions of others…. yet again.

There’s not much point trying to deconstruct reality until we deconstruct the brain.

This because the organ we use to do the deconstruction may lead us astray.

Think of this as the same problem as an experiment where the method of observation actually modifies the result.

So. Brain first. Then we move onto reality.

My guess is that our brain is digital but not binary.

It’s probably based on ten states per operating unit or memory unit because we like that number so much.

For example, we choose ten as the  repeat unit, where we stick the zero onto the first number (one). There is no a priori reason why the repeat unit couldn’t have been after eight or eleven counts.

A Russian advertorial in the Sydney Morning Herald. I don’t understand.

And why would they lead with the Ukraine?

I really shouldn’t read the papers.

Our supposedly more intelligent micro broadsheet doesn’t bother labeling the x axis.

Even if not one of my hypotheses of the brain is correct, this is how I would construct artificial intelligence. It’s just so obvious.

Hypothesis on sleep…

I suspect that the thousands of gigs of RAM that make up the id’s flowchart are actually volatile memory.

That is, they need power (they aren’t  there after we die) and they have to be fully refreshed every night to prevent ‘errors’ building up.

Without the nightly refresh, after a few nights, we are screwed because we can’t even make simple instinctive decisions (e.g. lift that leg, pump that heart, etc).

Sleep…. Nightly refresh of volatile memory. All others processes of the id have to be shutdown while this if going on, hence sleep.

The super ego, however, plows ahead with its scenario making and efforts to discredit the id via dreams.

According to wiki the human brain has about 2500 Gigabytes of memory.

They are probably out by a factor of 100 -1000.

That’s a lot of memory but we have stuff stored in there from the start of life in this planet.

Our memory is full and the brain probably can’t increase in capacity at a rate commensurate with the ever growing complexity of our world.

Which I guess is what started the development of the super ego, to compensate.

Even so we still selectively replace memories in the flowchart of the id with new and more useful ones.

All my life ‘labile’ has meant a weak chemical bond.

Now the pop psychologists in my life use it to mean ‘prone to anger’.

Clearly my grip on the meaning of labile has been quite labile.

I have resigned myself to the fact that my Infinity seat isn’t going to turn up.

I think I will call Kickstarter the micro-loss site.

Dreams are an attempt by the super ego to discredit the id in the eyes of the ego.

Basically the super ego and id are in competition for the same action; control of the host.

Which is to say the smart thing is to ignore your dreams. They aren’t a secret message of truth, just the opposite.

Buy it was worth noting just how deceitful your super ego is.

In two hundred years time it is predicted that there won’t be any abalones left in the oceans because of increasing sea water acidification resulting from anthropogenic carbon dioxide build-up in the atmosphere.

The pen is mightier than the sword.

The keyboard is mightier than the gun.

The touchscreen is mightier than the drone.

Siri is greater than the ICBM.

Well not really.

Two parts Eros, one part Isos, no parts Hadeos.

Freud reckons that the two primary emotions (his idea) that the id uses to motivate our bodies (my idea), via the ego, are Eros and Hadeos. Love and hate.

Freud says all other emotions are built on these. Probably in the same way that all colors are built on the primaries. I guess the intensity of the emotions is just contrast; black and white.

Antidepressants generally suppress both Eros and Hadeos which is a pretty useless outcome.

The developed super-ego attempts to suppress the influence of Hadeos without losing Eros.

That’s bloody hard. Which is why it is taking millennia of evolution to achieve.

I have a suspicion that there might be one more primary emotion. This would better explain the huge color range of emotions and nature does tend to replicate itself in these sort of patterns. It’s probably “live” – the desire or will of the individual to not die and continue living.

The best name I can come up with for this emotion is Isos, after Isis.

If I cycle though all the emotions in my head I can easily construct them from Eros, Hadeos and Isos.

In this, it is important to recall that emotions aren’t “real”. They are just one way that the id controls the physical – the other being direct instinctive action. Emotions are a means to an end; part of continuous process improvement in evolution.

I just got a parking ticket from the world’s best looking parking police person.

I attempted to chat myself out of the already written ticket. Unsuccessfully of course.

Even so, I wasn’t the slight bit pissed off.

Double standards. I blame Eros.

The trick to ending war is not to attempt to remove the Hadeotic impulses (which is hard) but to fight war by proxy.

We are already doing this with drones and other automated technologies.

Ultimately, however, we can simulate war in computers. Well, we can already since it’s the favorite pastime of most computer nerds.

The trick is to get sovereign enemies to submit to the outcomes of the computer simulations. We can’t have the losing party spitting the dummy and  launching a nuke in spite.

One way we can get this to work is to get all human life into the simulation. Bring on the Matrix.

The other is to keep developing and in a thousand or two generations we might have developed the ego and super ego to such an extent that the Hadeotic impulses of the id are sufficiently suppressed.

But we have to survive that long without terminal war, of course.

Four

I am sort of forced to ‘intellectualize’ the mind-brain conundrum.

What alternatives are there?

The id is a mechanical donkey and there is no relief coming from that quarter. Only a very, very small fraction of people live totally intuitive and happy lives… and they probably have no idea how lucky they are.

The monks try and shut down the ego by reducing both the incoming signals and the outgoing actions. This makes me think of certain babies and their bathwaters.

No, I am left with the super ego that can do the thinking and then I will let the ego decide what to do with the subsequent beliefs. A little tension with the id (and it’s suggested actions and feelings) along the way is a good thing.

Today’s case study is anger.

The shambles that is yesterday’s hypothesis would suggest that anger, an emotion, is an attempt by the id to control the host body.

Some sensory input has gone into the ego and then been routed directly to the id for instant processing.

The dalek has responded with an ‘exterminate’. It has detected a threat and wants it removed, one way or the other.

However the ego also sent a supplementary signal to the super ego to do a bit of complex modeling on the side. It has come back with a likely scenario which suggests future sadness if the anger is not attenuated by the ego on the way out of the body.

Instincts versus beliefs. Actions and emotions.

General grinding of cogs… over heating…a bit of steam… ego pops a valve…host body decides to simply shut down all systems via the influence of alcohol and deal with this tomorrow.

I can’t help but think that, in the modern day, little of this has anything to do with survival. Are we doomed to play out the ghosts of evolutionary processes past?

The more I understand, the more my beliefs can moderate the ego. However my real interest is in doing a little surgery on the id.

Psychological issues must usually reside in the ego, the referee that decides how to process the incoming info. Either intuitively in the id or with delayed thinking in the super ego.

If the ego is wobbly then so will be your life because you will process stuff in the wrong part of your brain and that will mess up your actions, your beliefs and your feelings

As parents we need to pass onto our kids the training on how to use the ego well. To do this we have to be aware of our shortcomings in this regard which will help us bypass the generational replication of issues.

The mystery is how to identify and solve the problems with our ego using the same organ that it’s housed in?

No wonder it’s hard.

It makes me think that an automatic approach that relies on external response to stimuli (from our actions, feelings and briefs) might be a better way to iron out the bugs in the ego.

I suppose a therapist is a dodgy version of this.

Arrogance is a mask for insecurity.

In the bigger picture, I am fairly sure that my brain is not that good. I expect it’s big frog in a small skull.

It doesn’t worry me too much. I will happily try and solve my own mysteries in my own way.

I am not here for the amusement of people that I don’t know.

The super ego needs beliefs.

The computer in there needs to constrain it’s modeling options or else outcomes would take too long.

We keep a list of useful constraints and call them beliefs. We can inherit them, adopt them, and make them up.

Is much harder to lose them. Which is why this RAM looks more ROM-like.

Beliefs are the ROM of the super ego.

Feelings are just one of two ways that the id uses to controls it’s host body.

Actions come from both the id and the super ego, with the ego acting as referee.

All the outputs of brain processes can be broken down into binary units.

Decisions, actions, thoughts, emotions…etc; they call be broken down into tiny decisions to do or not to do, or to believe or not to believe, or to feel or not to feel.

That is, we make binary decisions in three dimensions. Every output of the brain can be modeled by these 6 options

There is nothing else.

It is surprising how much apparent complexity we manage to conjure up within this system.

The role of art is to fool both the id and the ego.

If the super ego gets involved it’s a ‘fail’.

I just figured out what thinking is.

The id, the intuitive ‘analog’ decision making process, uses inherited and learned rules to make instant decisions based on instantly processed sensory information.

The ego checks that the sensory conditions coming in match those under which the rules can be used.

Where required the ego transfers the decision making to the slower offline super ego. This ‘digital’ computer does the thinking.

And the reason it is offline and slow is because what we are doing is modeling (or simulating) a number of future scenarios in order to make decisions. This takes a lot of  processing power. We select the best scenario in order to make our decisions. We probably just keep modeling until we get a satisfactory answer.

Initially thinking must have developed as an emergency adjunct to the instinctive id. Over time we seem to have co-opted this part of our brain and we are well on the way to super-ego dominance.

And we have had to sculpt the world itself to allow us this luxury. For example we are engineering risk out of our lives because we know we are suppressing the id so much that our lives would be endangered if we did not.

Star-kids. That is the name of the ‘hand over your coins’ charity on Jetstar airlines.

The promo justifies the charity on the basis that the money will go towards ‘change’ for kids in some of the world’s ‘poorest’ communities.

By ‘change’ I wonder if they mean the coins. Do they just hand ’em over? We know they don’t.

No, ‘change’ means that the kids need to be more like us in the West. Consumers.

So we spend the charity money on professionals who train them how to acquire and exhaust wealth. ‘Poor’ isn’t  how little wealth you have, it’s how little you spend.

It’s not really charity; it’s more missionary. Money is our religion and we just need new customers.

Poor change for stark ids.

If they just added the ABN to credit card receipts they wouldn’t have to print two receipts for every transaction; one from the bank and one tax receipt from the shop.

They could halve the paper consumption…. just like that.

Photographing the receipt below it occurs to me that I could snap all my receipts and throw them away.

Why didn’t I think of this before? Slow.

Be the change that you want to see.

It occurs to me that a good fraction of brain function is focused on absorbing sensory information and instantly processing it.

Given the amount of information that we process the brain is a remarkably quick analog computer. Not only does it process all that incoming information on the fly, it also does a large fraction of decision making on the fly. There is virtually no lag between incoming signals and outgoing decisions (e.g. move that leg, scream at cabbie, etc).

But there is a more complex and much slower digital part of our brain that does post-processing. We call this ‘thinking’. In this case we take in all the information and do off-line and much slower processing in order to do decision making.

It does not surprise to me that the best off-line processing is done during sleep hours. There must be parts of the digital brain that multi-task and when we are asleep these parts of the brain can be dedicated to the post-processing tasks at hand.

What we call intuition, id or gut-feel is the instant, analog decision making processes. These must be rules- and pattern- based; essentially we have in the analog parts of our brains great big decision-making flow charts that allow us to make instant decisions for certain scenarios. These flowcharts must be HUGE.

And then we must have a function, the ego, that checks the integrity of the use of these flowcharts and that automatically flick-passes a decision-making process across to the digital side of the brain, the super ego, if the set of external conditions does not match the flow chart conditions closely enough (which would result in errors in decision making).

Its the highly evolved digital part of our brain that differentiates us from the lower animals that probably are almost entirely analog.

Education seems to be all about exercising and training the digital processing part of our brain. Without education it seems that many people simply can’t be trusted to use this part of their brain to make decisions.

I wonder if we inherit the flowcharts? I guess we must. Which means that DNA must also be a memory technology. I wonder how many gigs we get?

I also wonder if we can transfer proven digital processes across to our own analog flowcharts. I bet we can, through practice. But do we pass these onto our kids? I bet we do – that is, we get to add content to all of our descendants. Hence our need to mix up the gene pool; to spread the new flowchart components.

‘Living in the moment’ means shutting down the digital thinking part of your brain and living instinctively. Whereas meditation additionally tries to slow down the sensory input hence slowing down the analog flowchart side of your brain.

p.s. in this entry ‘analog’ and ‘digital’ are metaphors

What I have learned tonight?

Only that my intuition needs to be trusted.

All is never what it seems but rather it is what I feel.

As if I didn’t know this.

But the world as presented keeps trying to deny this fact

It’s as though I have to live with x-ray googles on.

And I do.dle.

At the moment the average campaign cost for catholic sanctification is $250k.

That factoid brought to you courtesy of the Economist.

I guess that time is money and the cream is homogenized.

In the interests of leaving nothing interesting out of this blog, the link below was brought to my attention by a local rag in Melbourne. It was simply too good not to research…

http://ezinearticles.com/?Sperm-Taste—10-Simple-Tips-For-Better-Tasting-Semen&id=164106

It seems like a very healthy diet simultaneously improves a man’s health and also the culinary experience.

Which is the opposite of most diets.

It’s a shame the culinary experience is a second order effect; reduces the incentive somewhat.

How’s that for PC?

If everyone learnt not to care about the opinions of others there would not be a marketing industry.

Someone needs to come up with artificial turf complete with brown patches and weeds.

This came with my hamburger…
can’t be fucked trying to figure it out in my hungover state.

You gotta think that this effort was the result of a gen Y committee.

I was tempted to suggest to this lot of gen Y’s that the grass was greener on both sides of the footpath.

But I know they wouldn’t have understood…

Is it mean to selectively practice chivalry based upon certain value judgments?

Possibly it is. But there’s nothing more comforting than nurturing certain closely-held prejudices.

We all have them; cyclists, rats, politicians, parking police, lazy women that trade on their appearances, you name it.

I am aware and I don’t care. Unless of course it really mattered and then I would flip in a snitch.

Regression. Not to the mean but to the teen.

Late last night my nephews took me out drifting in the industrial suburbs of western Melbourne.

What we used to do at 100 -150 kmh on dirt, they do at 200-250 kmh on asphalt.

There is nothing like having your 700 kW and 750 kg car flicked at 250 kmh only to find yourself going backwards at 200 kmh in a continuous wheel spin.

The smoke of burning tyres obscures all vision and the turbocharged 6 litter V8 engine with no muffler drowns out all noise.

Bliss.

It was either beautifully done in the first place or beautifully maintained in the meantime.

If Pavlov had tried the bell experiment on cats they pretty much would have told him to fuck off.

Cats don’t salivate for no one, for no food and certainly for no bell.

Classical Conditioning is a dog of an idea.

Seated early, in an aisle seat, it was almost impossible not to watch a very good looking young woman pretend to get her large and heavy carry-on into the overhead bin.

She had a weather eye out for a chivalrous porter that never arrived. Ultimately the hostie executed the charitable labour.

The blonde then sat one across from me and proceeded to complain loudly to the old bag next to me about the lack of gentlemen in her universe. The old bag agreed.

Just quietly I thought, ‘check your bag in like the rest of us and stop trying to transfer your inconvenience to us’.

I am very happy to be chivalrous when the recipient deserves it. And there is nothing less deserving than a lazy attractive woman trading on the same.

My cabbie, a lovely young guy from Pakistan, told me that his mullah says Australians, if they became Muslims would be the best Muslims in the world.
This because we, the Australians, are so free of corruption.

I suggested that our lack of shame might counter-act the proposed benefits.

We both agreed to ponder the subject further.

I wonder if Pavlov wanted his pussies to have free will.

I was accused of being a business ‘pirate’ the other day.

I suppose it didn’t help that I was wearing a t-shirt with the skull and cross-bones on it.

But in truth I am a privateer not a pirate.

This because, at various time I am authorised by, or paid by government.

And I have wondered why I always say ‘yes’ to government.

On one hand I know they will have an allergic reaction to me so the approaches won’t be too frequent.

So I have no fear of being sucked into their universe.

I had assumed that I say yes to them so that I can understand one of the enemies.

But no, it is to legitimise my piracy. I am a privateer. Happy today.

One of the journals that I regularly contribute to emailed it’s authors today re-asserting it’s copyright ownership of our efforts.

I didn’t have the heart to tell them that unless there is an executed assignment deed all such assertions are meaningless.

In truth their journal has a small professional readership that get the journal free of charge as part of their membership. The journal should be freely published under creative commons.

Nothing would be lost except maybe the sneaky income they get from the e-journal database service providers, which they don’t tell their authors about.

The same e-journal databases are under the illusion that the journal is selling content for which they own copyright.

Possibly the greatest unnecessary handicap to carry through life is a sense of entitlement.

If you don’t  understand this then you are probably suffering from the same.

I am finding that all my bad habit are dropping away one by one.

And I have achieved this by the practice of gluttony, i.e. practicing these habits until the behavior bores me.

And it works. But sometimes it takes longer than may be healthy. But still.

Its a great alternative to therapy or abstinence

And a lot more fun.

But it only works if the brain is switched on and self-analysis is ripe.

I just had to explain to the cabbie this morning that he is a shit driver.

Because he was appalling.

And it’s a good thing I did because he thought he was pretty good and no one had ever said anything before.

It was very amicable as I took him through the long list of his bad habits and skill-free zones.

We left it with him promising to practice and be a better driver.

Today I have been labeled a ‘good dad’ by the mother.

You have take them when you can.

It is eminently possible to automatically email every credit card receipt to the buyer. Or just store these in a cloud service.

My insurance company charges me 5% more for monthly payment versus yearly payments.

This is the opposite to other service providers because the yearly payment is in advance not arrears.

This would imply that their cost of capital is between 3.5% – 4%.

That is, if they invest the proceeds of annual payments (from me) into their own business (in reality don’t have to borrow this amount) it’s worth the 5% discount.

The long term cost of capital of the global insurance industry is 5.5% which matches nicely but post-GFC it has gone up slightly to around 9% and probably dropping.

So why can my Australian insurance offer such a low premium for annual payments? Why is their cost of capital so cheap?

We must be a very stable environment where they can pass all costs onto their customers and their customers just suck it up.

Although they are in the business of managing our risks they aren’t taking very many risks themselves.

So why is there even competition among insurance companies? Why do they waste profits on marketing? Why is market share important?

You can imagine that there is a lot of competition for profitable business that is essentially risk free. For the money-hungry types it would be the equivalent of being kids in a chocolate factory.

But oh so boring…

So how did the nanny state arise?

My gut feel is that the nanny state was always going to happen as (a) Western society got affluent enough to afford this luxury, and (b) the birth rate dropped to the point that each child is super precious.

But I also think that the feminization of politics since the 1960’s may have accelerated the adoption of nanny state principals.

But since the nanny state has been adopted, my own principals would tell me that it is the best economic solution for our society even if I can’t see why.

Which is another way of saying that if we ever enter into a social or economic policy cul-de-sac then that cul-de-sac will wither and die over a decade or two if it isn’t a good and proper general solution (financially speaking).

I can’t see the nanny state going anywhere. The value in engineering risks out of our lives is obviously very high when we are spending so much time and energy training our little geniuses.

The ‘price’ of the adoption of the nanny state is only high for those who have known otherwise and these guys (me for example) won’t last forever.

Since the last world war there has been a continual rise in the role of woman in the workforce as well as in politics.

Its now hard to believe that there was a period when, in economics terms, most countries were limiting their effectiveness by ignoring half of their gene pool.

But because they were all doing it there was no competitive disadvantage.

Which is my way of saying that the best way to get social change adopted, whatever it is, is to link it as closely as possible to national economic or company competitiveness.

Money rules, above even the retardedness of the most conservative moral types. As soon as one country or company gets ahead because it has adopted a new approach, it is almost inevitable that others will follow. Because if they continue not to adopt beneficial new practices then after a period of time they become obsolete and then fall out of existence.

Money rules. And there are only a few pockets of people who avoid this rule and survive – the North Koreans, the Amish and a handful of others. But even these groups, to a large degree, live off the goodwill of others who do believe in money.

At a practical level, if you have a change you want to see in the world that you are passionate about then you are best advised to find the most lucrative financial or economic outcome of the adoption of that change and focus your efforts there. Call it a ‘beachhead’.

Once initial adoption is achieved because of that proven financial or economic benefit then you can broaden the efforts elsewhere.

Bugger the ‘be the change you want to see’ rubbish.

I read that if you go seven days without sleep you will die, but an autopsy will reveal no cause of death.

It’s a scientific mystery but maybe this info is a boon for would be murderers?

The Australian accent and it’s tortured diphthongs scramble the iambic pentameter, methinks.

Lola was telling me all the things she might like to be when she grows up.

She threw in the career choice of an ‘artist’.

I suggested that she had better get training because in ten years time no doubt one will need a three year degree and a license to practice art.

I said if hairdressers and paddle pop people needs licenses, why not artists?

She asked what’s in it for the government to do such a thing?

I said:

1. Increased revenues from the license fees and fines for non-licensed artists etc.
2. Increased employment for all the unemployed artists (i.e. all of them) – they can be teachers
3. Possibly (and this is a stretch) better art
4. More employment in the bureaucracy and therefore lower unemployment in general
5. Its all just part of the nanny state which gives the government control over our every day lives
6. More entrepreneurial artists hell bent on earning income and repaying their HECS debt, and also less likely to be unionized and left leaning

She wondered if there would be an exclusion for kindy kids, or would there be police raids on schools looking for unlicensed artists?

What I miss most these days is a lazy Sunday with a book.

I was just explaining to Lola that by the time we are twenty we lose most of our prepubescent memories.

That shut her up for a minute or so. Then she asked why.

And I said ‘No idea, but maybe it’s to forget the pain of being taught a lesson. Remember you are one of the first generations to grow up without so much as a single slap on your bottoms.’

Thinking of those odd perfect moments I have had in my life.

These moments have been when there is rare combination of:

1. Total and (usually) temporary lack of responsibilities

2. Usually a very relaxed environment away from everyday city life

3. A combination of very enjoyable events and no stress that allows me to live in entirely in the moment

4. Often one or more of music, alcohol, drugs, smells, sex, surf, sun, heat, daytime sleep, hangover, smokes, yarning, road trip, …I will think of more

Then I sometimes ruin it by thinking about it. D’oh.

Having my Gen Y nephew stay at my place for a month scared the bejesus out of me.

He was sent to test the brain… and the conclusion that I came to was…

I am actively trying to wind back the clock and be a 1970’s style parent.

Attached below is a sample of the modern day school report.

Basically every subject is broken up into achievement and effort, and everyone gets the same coarse grading level unless there is at least two standard deviations from the center of the Bell curve.

Together with the cut and paste commentary and accompanying parent teacher interview, I learned nothing.

It strikes me that the modern school report is protecting three separate parties:

1. The kids and their self esteem
2. The parents and their self esteem
3. The school from parents and their warranty claims

Updating mum’s laptop to Microsoft Windows 8.1.

4 gigs of download, 4 hours and 5 restarts later I get this…

Yep. Just got on eBay and bought three pairs of sunnies. First world solution.

Scene…I am in the gym doing weights. There are four televisions but no sound. Sound is reserved for the treadmillers and their headsets.

The three commercial channels are playing pretty much the same news.

Someone broke their back diving into a pool, a car accident, a shed burnt down, a tornado in the US, a drug courier got caught and thrown into a Balinese jail, etc. Not a thing about global political, economic and social events that could come to haunt us.

It strikes me that watching the misfortunes of others probably makes your average viewer feel temporarily better with their lot. Over time the news has drifted to this format, pushed by ratings feedback which drives advertising revenues.

And the genuine news is these days probably beyond the viewers’ comprehension and hence their interest. They must trust in the system to protect their interests. Besides the real news would just depress them.

Good citizenship blog entry…

I was asked about sealing jam jars in my capacity as a scientist because the internet is full of misinformation on the subject.

The idea is to put the lid on while the jam is hot.

So long as you have a seal, as the jam shrinks whilst it cools (roughly ten percent in volume I guesstimate), you will create a low pressure air gap in the jar.

A vacuum is over-stating things. At best you will have half the atmospheric pressure. That is, the air that you sealed in the jar occupies around twice the original volume

This is enough to invert a thin metal lid which is a good indicator that the gas tight seal remains functional.

I should note that the pressure differential over the seal actually helps keep it tight; it pulls and pushes the flexible polymer into the glass if the seal is properly designed.

In these conditions bugs and excess moisture cannot get to the jam. And the air and water in the jar was hopefully sterilized prior to sealing by the high temperatures. Therefore the jam should last quite a while.

Self can do no wrong…

This is the outcome of over indulging children. And the fact that the gen Y’s grew up sans criticism and critique, so as to preserve their self esteem.

The big birds of NZ had no native predators until the Maoris turned up. As a result they just gullibly hung around whilst they were slaughtered. Similarly a gen Y will not recognise criticism even if it should for it’s own benefit.

They have never known the concept of doing wrong. They feel no shame. They genuinely don’t know what it is. And it worked, they always have great self esteem no matter how useless they are.

Good help them and us.