The less I fear the more I care.

Ticks all the boxes. Box tickers. Boxes. Ticks. My cat likes to hide in tick boxes. Boxes. Ticks. wtf?

The less I judge the less I fear.

The more I know the less I judge.

Proof of services tendered….I love Australia; we run on services rendered as required by regulations engendered.

I would say before any couple goes to counseling they should try rubbing bare skin together once a day as personal therapy. It may or may not lead to sex, but that is not the point

You do need to monitor your love of your work. If you get that pit in your stomach when you turn up in the morning then it’s time to look around. It can’t always be good, but it should never make you frightened or depressed.

Blokes in circles stand and yarn. One puts his hands behind his head and then so do a few others. It’s nice; they just all want to belong.

It is likely that just about any activity can justified in the US of A, so long as the effort is profitable.

The guys who make pokies have been studying the science of gambling addiction for decades. To wit, the bloody annoying music that the pokies make must actually work.

For non-gamblers the pokie music might just be about as annoying as sound can get. Does this mean that the gambling addiction part of the brain is sequestered away with the part that also processes music?

Just maybe, the best way to treat gamblers for their addiction is music therapy.

As a rule of thumb I never try to exploit asymmetries of information. An example would be trying to earn some money from one company or another just for making an introduction of sorts, even if it was an intelligent match making effort.

The reasons I do not try to exploit these situations for personal gain are; (1) once my knowledge is shared I have no role and no more information to leverage, (2) and this leads to other parties only being reluctantly willing to part with money, after the fact, for something they already have received, (3) which then means there is a complex contractual discussions with a dance of veils, all before the knowledge is shared: its all so silly I can’t be arsed, (4) there are any number of consultants running around this city (Sydney) trying to exploit information asymmetries and I really don’t want to be associated with them in any way, (5) once people understand that I freely give away hard-to-gain information then the deal-flow flows, my way. So I can sit there fishing away, for the price of bread crumbs, waiting for the big one to come along.

He said he was pragmatic but as it turned out that meant he didn’t think at any depth about anything in his life.

As a result he was ill-prepared for the personal apocalypse that came his way.

Pragmatism is a useful facade so long as that is all it is.

It’s the winter of my discontent and the condescension is dripping from the windows.

Like all curses, misogyny is rarely absolute: it being a dislike of, contempt for, or an ingrained prejudice against women.

Right at this moment our Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, has pulled the misogyny card in an effort to pull back some of the lost ground she has in the lead-up to the next election. Apart from this being very cynical politics that will barely work, it simply underlines the fact that she isn’t much of a statesperson.

Moving on the from the circus politics, she does has a point. Many of those men and women who are motivated enough to get into the game of politics, or those that feel the need to influence these clowns on behalf of their own self-interests, also have character flaws that seem to be be correlated with non-nonsensical attitudes such as misogyny and racism.

To dislike or act against another, or a group of others, just because they appear to be different belies a total lack of common sense, and also a fundamental sense of insecurity. And, specifically with regards to misogyny, to feel that half the population of people on the planet is ‘them not us’ is downright fucking stupid.

I have met enough misogynists to be able to assert that there are two types; those that have learnt this behaviour whilst young and if given counselling could unlearn it, and those that really and truly yearn for past days when women where servants or slaves or worse. This lot are downright dangerous and need to be ring-fenced.

Here in Australia we have an entrenched political system that is dominated by two sides of politics that, not surprisingly, have been around, in one form or another, since they themselves organised the system.

We have a conservative party that oddly calls itself Liberal. And then we have a Labor party, complete with American spelling, that supposedly represents what is left of the unskilled wage earners.

In reality they both serve whoever pays them the most. Politically they take notice of the swinging seats and that is the end of their genuine representative duties.

It sort of works because the country runs itself to a large degree. God help us though if we ever need genuine leadership in a crisis….

Just about every day I have another email from some young entrepreneur wanting to meet to meet me to discuss fund raising for their start-up.

There is a real problem out there, and the problem is that the early stage technology sector in Australia has been so unprofitable for so long that we have run out of fools willing to invest.

Except for the government of course!

The only way you will get me on Facebook is if there is a version that is secure (from government eyes) and is not-for-profit, and that also has technology to filter out all missives from the desperately lonely seeking to create the impression of not being so. It would also help if the interface wasn’t so daggy.

There are two key elements to empathy; first, you have to understand what the other person is feeling. And then you have to care as well. If either one of these elements is missing then so is empathy.

If a multi-billionaire really wanted to spend all his or her money and leave a legacy, then the way to do it is to buy up as much back-catalog content as possible (books, video and music) and convert it to commons.

Not only would it make the purchased content available for free, it would screw everyone else trying to exploit back catalogue content. And it would further legitimize bit torrent by swamping that market with free content.

Copyrights are simply way too long; incumbent interests have had their way yet again.

In the garden with the girls without angst, fears, addictions, uncertainties or discomforts. Is this how the Greek islanders spend their whole lives?

Birthday cake with the world’s all-time worst invention, the splade.

We need a Wikinews that works. Instant and daily news compress, by the people for the people. Less lies by the few, and more lies distributed over the many.

Since Wikinews is time dependent (unlike Wikipedia) it needs to be updated constantly. The current Wikinews model has failed for the want of a motivating force to give it real-time relevance. Also there needs to be a means to customise it for locality and personal interest.

I had to explain to Lola that there are a lot more people than there are things to excel at. By definition.

When I completely run out of angst, fears, addictions, uncertainties and discomforts, what the fuck is supposed to motivate me?

Really?

It’s rooted but I still refuse to believe that the term ‘design flaw’ can be used in the same sentence as ‘Ikea’.

Of all the sources of information, Wikipedia has the most random and least detectable set of lies and errors. I love it.

If you can’t make a sparkler that sparkles then there is something fundamentally wrong. China is a bubble.

If you always do things that you like then you won’t get very far.

And who said we aren’t wasting the world’s resources?

Approaching fifty: it’s become clearer to me how important it is to keep my body in good shape. Strength and flexibility, combined with aerobic fitness.

A really large fraction of the state of your mind can be traced back to the state of your body.

Lola says the passionfruit looks like a dead avocado. Nice colors. Tastes ok but. Odd aftertaste. Need to ignore the seeds. Struggling.

There’s no use apologising to me, love, if you are just going to keep doing it.

I got on the turps and went to bed without any water. I kept having these dreams about being thirsty and not finding water. Finally I woke up and, of course, I found water.

With this data I can hypothesize that waking hours represent ‘real’ life and dreams are there for other purposes but do not represent a genuine alternative reality.

People with natural tight curls prefer a sun visor over a cap because their hair bounces a cap off. Life’s mystery solved by yours truly.

You have to keep the simple things simple. No knives and forks for fish and chips…!

This is one chicken that should have stayed in Portugal.

Today, on my birthday, I am channeling Don Draper. 🙂

I told him I really wasn’t interested in a conversation about his kid’s schooling, golf, footy, renovations, partnership politics, cafe racing or the legs that just walked past.

It appeared that we were out of things to talk about.

You know we are living in an affluent society when nobody can be arsed knocking off milk crates.

It’s my birthday and I will cry if I want to. But I don’t want to.

Stories of me. Or you. Whatever, I can tell embellishment when I hear it. There is no need to cover up the holes for me. I don’t care enough.  Nor, if you knew me, would you want me to either.

The second saddest thing in life is not having a spare body for when you are on the durries.

Love, is there any chance you can stop for a breath any time soon? Broadcasting your fears as stories-of-you won’t help you at all. It’s like a drug addiction, heading backwards to the moment of truth. Or not.

Every since the enlightenment (which gave us the cause) and the industrial revolution (which gave us the means) we, in the West, have been striving to improve society through the introduction of rules and regulations. Its been a case of two steps forward and 1.9 backwards, but progress has been solid over almost three hundred years. To a large extent we are free of tyranny, our bodies are cared for and there are opportunities for those who want them.

The price we have paid is complexity. Every time there is a a problem to solve or an opportunity to grasp our political leaders, at our insistence, implement new laws and regulations. We are drowning in compliance.

Also the commercial world has kept up with the politicians by bombarding us with as many complex products and services as they can imagine; technology has allowed them almost infinite creative freedom in which to bamboozle us with bullshit.

Its got to a point that people are simply not coping with every-day complexity. We may be free of tyranny of the body and, on paper, we have freedom of thought and speech, but our souls and minds are now fully servile to levels of complexity that we can hardly deal with.

When I think about the food miles it’s madness that I drink Italian mineral water. Santa Vittoria or San Pellegrino.

The reason I drink it is for the minerals. I spend at least an hour a day on the bike and another hour either in the gym or on the squash court. I need the minerals otherwise I start getting cramps. And there isn’t another way of getting them that I like.

Why do Australian ‘mineral’ waters have no minerals in them? Odd

It is clear to me that kids in primary schools really miss inspirational teaching. Its just so much drudgery to them.

Occasionally some interesting person drops in to a class and inspires the kids, but this is a once-in-year event, if it happens at all.

Our teachers are over-worked and under-paid bureaucrats and we can’t expect them to turn on the inspirational tap on a daily basis, if at all.

Maybe we need to utilise our population of recent retirees and get the best of them to spend an hour or two a week with a class to pass on some life-education and some inspiration.

If they won’t do it voluntarily then maybe a tax break or two on their superannuation might do the trick. Once they start I think they would be hooked.

Then, of course, a quality control mechanism will be needed to filter out the less capable and less inspiring, and also to judge when the use-by date has been reached.

Now that I am having direct exposure to public schooling I can start to see why people are sending kids to private schools. The teachers seem to behave like they are in a bureaucracy and their level of commitment to feedback and responsibility appears very low. Now I have to temper that view with the knowledge that I work in the high-tech entrepreneurial world where everyone is highly skilled and highly motivated; the contrast is extraordinary.

This is a problem with so many layers its almost not worth worrying about, since I can’t fix it. It just means I will have to work that much harder to fill the educational gap for my daughter.

Ignoring that insight, I wonder if it would help if we paid teachers more and required them to do less? Obviously that is one solution. I am not sure it would work unless we also made teachers directly responsible for outcomes and treated parents like customers. That last one worries me for some reason.

The point of education is to lift people above the fog of bare existence, that is to give them more skills than are required just to cope with the complex world we live in. Ideally we want our kids to have the skills and confidence to solve problems and grasp opportunities. We want them to be good people and to treat others fairly. We want them to be able develop life philosophies too … the ability to position themselves comfortably into a personal world-view.

This is only going to happen if the teachers and parents cooperate because one or the other of these is not sufficient to create these outcomes. It seems to me that teachers, unfortunately, see parents as a necessary evil, to be avoided at all costs. Wrong answer – parents are the key partners in creating the educational outcomes that we all want to see. It’s a shame most parents are such dickheads.

I give the whole educational system in Australia (and I am including the home front here) a C+. Lots of room for improvement. However the current efforts to improve the system are focused on cost efficiencies and levelling of the opportunities, and not genuine across-the-board improvements (as I see them). The fundamentally flawed nature of education will not change.

Lola had three excuses for not wanting to do her homework; she was tired, hungry and bored (and the TV was on). We did it anyway.

My daughter, at the age of 9 and quite a bit, has discovered mortality and the fear of loss.

My job is now to explain that (1) she cannot let herself be crippled by these fears, (2) fear is there for a reason, and that reason is to motivate you to do something about preventing the things you fear from happening, and (3) fear is an emotion; you have to take the bad ones along with the good ones. Cutting yourself off from your emotions is not the answer.

Toe shoes certainly look different don’t they? A lifetime’s orthodoxy on the subject (shoes) proffers  me an immediate negative image. Even the US army had banned them for reasons of ‘image’!

Which means I have to try them. I am like a moth to the light, when orthodoxy is being questioned.

The Internet of Things describes the realisation (a few years back) that the majority of data flipping around the internet is generated by machines and not humans. Human-generated content includes emails, texts, photos etc. Machine generated content is everything else which generates information that is transmitted – a classic example is a sensor punching out information at a regular interval.

I think there needs to be two levels of further refinement to the concept of the Internet of Things:

1. Firstly, there needs to be a measure of how ‘far’ away from human intervention is the generation of certain automated data. For example if a sensor is designed by humans then although the information it generates is part of the Internet of Things it is only removed from human intervention by a first-order. What is more interesting is when the ‘machine’ that generates the data is further removed from human intervention, i.e. the product of machine learning or machine and/or software replication. And we will then see subsequent generations of machines, each further removed from human intervention. Pretty quickly our level of understanding and control will depreciate. Whether this will have any real consequences is moot.

2. Secondly, ‘silence’ in the Internet of Things is important. By silence I mean that humans will not be not required to see the data. Currently much of the data generated by machines in the Internet of Things is brought to the attention of humans. An example is some automatic sensor in a lighting system of a house which sends information and alarms to a smartphone app so the owner can modify various settings. Increasingly the use of the data will be automated and will by-pass humans, and thus appear silent to them.

Both of the trends described above lead to a very complex Internet, effectively a control system for the human ecosystem, over which humans have little control and understanding. We won’t have the luxury of turning off the Internet at any time (since we are already completely dependent upon it) either. We will just have to trust in the machines. Maybe some smart people can figure out how to model the whole thing.

Life in the West can now be divided in two by (a) time spent being marketed to, and (b) time spent not being marketed to. For some busy people, buried right in the middle of the corporate world, I wouldn’t be surprised if a time-and-motion study discovered that more than 50% of their waking hours are actually in the ‘being marketed to’ category.

In the physical world the great undiscovered opportunity is the Antarctic (which we haven’t raped for resources yet). In the soft-drink world coke thinks of its market share as the percentage of all liquids consumed. Similarly the great undiscovered marketing opportunity is sleep-time. Some marketing research group will finally realise that they need to target all hours not just waking hours.

Just trust your intuition a little more and stop intellectualising the issue. You are just driving yourself crazy and getting further away from taking the action that you need to take.

Oh why oh why didn’t I do this thirty years ago? In two months Ollie has my swing working. My forehand is lethal and my backhand is a thing of beauty. I am loving this.

The quickest way to get the traffic lights to change is to start tapping on your phone. It accelerates time. There, you have been warned.

I think you’re crazy. Beautiful crazy. I’m crazy for loving you. Patsy wins.

I was meant to write a book for Lola. We had settled on a title: “the little tart that fell apart”. It hasn’t happened yet and that is partly because writing isn’t living, now is it?

With affluence every succeeding generation has naturally tried to let their children be children for a longer period. It has got the point with the gen x, y & z mob that it’s likely, in some regards, that they may never grow up.

I once had the chance to lead a very large team in a corporation. Given the bullshit of the modern corporation it’s simply way too easy to destroy the spirit in people.  Unless you are a sociopath or you are actively lobotomising yourself, it can be a soul destroying experience.

I long for simpler times. But there really are no free lunches.

Yesterday’s sunset was unbearably beautiful. Fortunately it went away.

Good people do bad things and bad people do good things. You just need to stay on the right side of people.

[Coluzzi’s 6 am]

I just realised that I fit in perfectly. It has come to this…but, to be honest, I always knew this was coming.

One of the saddest things in life is not being able to be in two places at one time.

I told him I was 100% off-the-record. And there I am, quoted again. The next journalist that rings my phone is going to get get a fucking mouthful.

A mad woman needs managing. Only a mad man would try.

Great shoes. But their description of the materials is a little loose. Only a very, very small fraction of the matter in this universe is leather.

A great family circles the wagons when under stress. The other sort scatters, blaming family members for all their problems.

Why are organisations never held to account for driving the spirit out of talented people?

Because only the fuckwits want to run them. And only the fuckwits stay and put up with shit.

What do these have in common; hysteresis, hysterectomy and hysterical? Fuck-all.

And, get this, I can’t mow the back lawn any more since the dandelions are now classified as a food crop.

The Chinese really only care about money. They don’t seem to value much else. No wonder they revere their visions of the U.S.in the nineteen fifties.

They certainly do not value any source of innovation. All they want to do when they see innovation is rip it off. They think in the ‘personal’ and rarely in the ‘collective’, and with very little awareness of karma. Which makes them very bad candidates for communism.

The back garden used to be for lovers. Now it’s full of vegetables and is for livers.

She was dreaming of waking up just as I was day-dreaming of going to sleep.

In the U.S. the hard workers dream of starting a successful franchise. The lazy dream of inheriting one.

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

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

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

Breakfast at the Tropicana. My favourite!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[In a plane watching Hollywood movies]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Semi-morons anyone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s an illusion for the deluded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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