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.

Is EFTPOS the sexiest acronym ever?

It fascinates me that very smart people are enthralled by the philosophy of things. Let me explain.

Many people, mostly left brainers, think the answer to life, the universe and everything is in leaking universes, hidden bosons and beyond.

Why? Because these concepts represent obscure deviations from our so-called everyday Newtonian existence, are complex and hard to grasp, and because they can be measured by things.

By “things” I mean these people need their potential answers to be things that can be objectively measurable, at least in principle, by a machine (other things). They simply don’t trust or value measurements by a human, e.g. love, hope and intuition.

They are missing the point. Truth is subjectivity, and subjectivity is truth. And there ain’t no maths that can describe that formula.

Corporate bullshit at its best. The NRMA Insurance ad says “yesterday taught us how to make tomorrow better”.

Why O why does anyone bother? Clearly people are stupid, both the consumers and the idiots in the company. Of course they are the same people and that explains it.

Heathrow has competition. Charles de Gaulle may actually be worse. It’s simply one long conga line from the front door, via the Escher belt way, to the airplane. They are very competitive, the French.

Did someone think hard about calling the definite article the definite article? If so, I want a time machine so I can go back and [verb] the [adjective] [noun].

The best way to change a habitual and negative behaviour is not to block it, but to divert it. Take it somewhere, both good and least expected by the little bloke with the red horns and a little black cloud over his head.

Just one last word on this. It’s odd that the French care so much about their food but yet when it comes to coffee they only worry that the ingredients get into the cup. And that is it.

After all, cliche is a French word.

I have waited all my life to do a “Christo” and, bang, right out of the blue, it happens. What odds it’s the last time?

The first victim of authenticity is a sense of humor.

The desire to belong is often greater than the will to be different.

What to do, when all you are is not enough?

If you really want to keep a secret then don’t tell anyone.

Some friends require that you continually provide them with the benefit of the doubt. They generally take it too.

The Velopop payment system…

There is an old French saying which translates as “if you are going to fuck up then you may as well fuck up properly”.

It’s much more fun to corrupt the weak-willed than it is to educate the strong-willed

Some people, and we all know one or two of these, are like canaries in the mines. They realise and verbalize uncomfortable truths, and annoy the hell out of us with their chirping.

If you are going make a lot of noise can you please do it quietly.

Boys, I never said that about Bob exactly. I just knew that he was struggling with something and probably was going to lose that battle. And that there was going to be collateral damage. I just didn’t want any part of it.

Translating from the French, I think he said “we will request that your demand is processed”.

Less than an hour from the Italian border and they’ve never even heard of a macchiato. Or so they claim.

A very fat and ugly woman just walked past me with a t-shirt that said “thank you for looking”.

Historians are dreamers that take scraps of evidence, parse them through a bullshit bullshit filter, and then present the hypothesis as fact. They never agree with each other; that should be a hint. They should all be forced to take courses on stats so they can learn about confidence limits.

A part of me says ‘a pox on the people of this planet’. We are a pathogen out of control and the ecosystem will automatically rid itself of us. But then I am a father and I do care.

Wankers who aren’t worthy. Now, with what authority can we criticise the Chinese?

People have prophesied the arrival of the thinking machine for almost a century. I think it will just emerge, by surprise, out of the internet. With no cognisant human intervention.

People do talk rubbish. In order to have original thoughts you have to ration time spent with them.

An American, from Boston, explained to me that the Romans knew London as Londinium (which I knew). He then went on to say that it was amazing that, despite this, no one knows where the name comes from. Fuck me, I have some stupid conversations.

It’s become very clear to me that writing your thoughts down is a prerequisite to getting them right. I already knew that from my training as a scientist. So maybe I just needed to get them in order and I was biding my time.

I just sat through an hour and a half of an Al Gore talk to the global corporate venture types, here in London. They all loved it, the corporate suck-pigs, but tomorrow they will go back to the evil tit. Their appreciation doesn’t go as far as to considerations of giving up private schooling and golf.

It’s all good, the message of Al.

The only discordant clunk was the assertion that the USA is still the natural leader for mankind out of the moral and environmental morass, contradicted by his own statements on how tv advertising has totally polluted the political system in that country. The political system is being held captive by the self-same corporations he was talking to tonight, or at least their eager representatives.

My personal view is, since business and other special interest groups have got a hold of ALL national governments, that the revolution we need will be supra-national via the internet. It will be, by definition, illegal.

Blessed are the sinners because that’s all we’ve got.

People have this tendency to think. It fucking well annoys the pigs who prefer to sing.

Human systems really give me the yeeks these days. My tolerance of wank-a-thons is down to an all time low. Time to go off grid…

London is really just one big back-packers hostel. Even the finance sector is just the back office for currency exchange services.

When the second part of a sentence is describing the subject of the first part, one can choose to connect the two with a colon. It’s what they don’t say or do, Lola, which reveals the lie.

For some odd reason last night I dreamt that I was at a footy match. In the warm up before the game Wayne Carey kicked the ball into the crowd and I caught it, deflated it and pocketed it. Olé!

Heathrow is all you need to know about England. Crowded, dirty, inefficient, low ceilings, bad bathrooms, crap coffee, full of queues and done on the cheap.

Sometimes I have visions of another time and place, I think in the past, but not anywhere I ever was. It’s a good place and I need to find out where it is.

The philosophers were all mad. How could they spend so much energy arguing where reality and sanity reside? This side of their skulls, or that.

I dreamt of a metaphysical mask which had no slits for the eyes, but yet was made of gauze so I could see a heavily filtered, I hesitate to say, ‘reality’, maybe ‘vision’.

I have to stop this.

I can say this about Asia. Harmony is an urban myth, and irony doesn’t exist.

The old saying ‘healthy, wealthy and wise’ had a lot going for it. Those three items are a great head start to achieving contentment.

A day in transit with absolutely nothing to do and no one to see. Strangely blissful. It used to be called a Sunday.

It’s official, I am pathologically immune to real (as opposed to online) shopping. A lifetime’s efforts have effectively vaccinated me against the horror. Just as well since Singapore seems to be eBay plus 60%.

The first taste we had of the Y gens was, oddly, the Singapore taxi drivers. They were years ahead of their time in pure and unadulterated vagueness and self-absorption. And their field-of-view only extends to ten percent off center, totally at odds with their job description.

Now that solar energy is mainstream how long before governments start charging us for the use of “their” photons?

After all they already charge for the use of radio frequencies.

I prefer cars where there is no software between me and the wheels, the engine, the brakes and the gearbox. That is, not any car built this century.

I just know how many ways that software can go wrong.

Geez you think he can afford it?

What is the direct translation in Chinese, I wonder, for a Lazy Suzan?

You’re here for a short time and a good time. Don’t waste it on bullshit.

China insists on blocking websites such as Facebook, WordPress and random bits of Google. This could be construed as an attempt to block freedom of information but I doubt it since there are way too many unblocked news services.

No, I think it’s an effort to keep US-centric internet businesses from getting embedded here, which would represent a lost business opportunity for China and also a security risk.

We should follow their lead and block Facebook. And we should make foreign providers of key internet services come up with ‘Denial Of Service’ emergency plans as part of their license to operate.

On the front of the SMH website; “how did Angelina keep her double mastectomy a secret?”

For young people it is worth noting that there are seven intelligences not one. They don’t teach that at school Lola. Google it. And don’t be enthralled by retards who are only strong in one.

A lot of media focuses on China’s human rights issues. Well, compare the report below with Australia’s efforts….

The air hostess was genuinely shocked that I said “no” to a Cornetto.

Attitude is an assimilated elegance.

Communism was an attempt to curtail wealth. It was doomed for many reasons but one not cited is the fact that they didn’t re-think the concept of money. It was a virus in their system that they didn’t even notice.

It takes real strength of character to say no to both sugary food and modern affluence. One rots your teeth and the other rots your soul. They both make you fat.

Shanghai. May 14. 2013. 1304.

The birds of New Zealand had no fear of mammals. They had never seen one. The Maoris, when they first turned up, had it very easy.

Similarly the Chinese have no fear of cheap carbs.

I have been thinking about the three layers of ‘self’.

At the core is the social-human layer which encompasses you and your closest family and friends at the purely emotional level; some happy people live their entire lives here.

The next layer out is the ‘activity’ layer which includes all your life’s activities in wealth creation and wealth usage; in work, education & leisure. This is an externalised layer of ‘self’ that really only emerged after the industrial revolution and requires ‘free’ time (time spent not subsisting).

Finally there is the ‘abstract’ layer which is a purely model-driven thought-structuring of the world and the universe, typically reserved for the intellectual elite and only visited by the masses in moments of drug-induced clarity.

More on all this later after I have thought about it some more and have convinced myself it doesn’t need adjusting.

I have been flying since the early eighties. I can’t confirm this but I am sure there is much more turbulence than there used to be. What means this?

Our average productivity in Australia is very high. I know this because for the average person only a very, very small fraction of their working time is required to earn enough for subsistence. And I know this because near my office in Surry Hills there are a number of homeless-people hostels. It is apparent to me that in Australia, in order to subsist, that you don’t even have to work at all.

And yet there are people who work full time and produce nothing of true value; for example, a good slab of the public service and the corporate world. How is this possible? Where does the underlying wealth and productivity come from?

The answer is that we are surfing on the efforts of three centuries of technology gains, unsustainable consumption of both energy and resources, and also third-world serfdom. If I need to explain that to you then you won’t understand anyway.

No wonder so many people behave as though they don’t deserve their good fortune. And this also explains the filthy greed that many have in regards to stockpiling wealth; not feeling worthy they fear that it may all be taken off them.

As soon as money was invented to replace bartering, two further innovations emerged; financial debt and wealth. We will live to regret this. Actually, we already are.

Efforts to ban the provision of debt, or the accumulation of wealth have abounded over the millennia. Neither sets of effort achieved much other than to annoy people.

Ultimately, the planets’ limited resources will bring money to heel. But both debt and wealth will have to be curtailed simultaneously for there to be any real impact.

The public toilets in the new terminal at Changi airport are brilliant. They clowns from Sydney airport should take a look. Having said that the Singaporeans can’t do coffee for shit.

Early in the twentieth century Keynes predicted that the developed world would be moving towards an era of abundance.

He saw two options;  “we would consume ever more goods or we could enjoy more leisure”.

He never imagined that we would merge the latter into the former. Back then ‘leisure’ meant a break from manual labor, doing bugger-all and consuming nothing other than your own time.

Life falls so short of my ideals, in so many ways, that its a wonder I am not depressed most of the time. As a coping mechanism I have learnt to distance my emotional-self from my ideals, or at least from the the manifestations of life’s non-conformance to them. But I do know that this bridge needs to be crossed at some stage so I can take the next step on the journey. Yes, the journey.

As you age you generally build self-confidence. As a side effect it is harder to make close friends because self-confidence comes with a sort of detachment. Just another of life’s paradoxes.

How many BBQ’s do you see in chuck-outs? Right there is the place to start using legislation for the responsible use of raw materials. All we need is minimum warranty periods by product type. For example all BBQ’s would have to be sold with a twenty-five year full replacement warranty. That would keep the Chinese honest, and a bunch of Australians artificially employed to enforce the regulations.

I don’t even notice my tinnitus. I claim it’s because I grew up with cicadas. You don’t even notice the fuckers until they stop making a racket, and fortunately tinnitus never stops.

Strain, in popular vernacular, is life and the world pressuring you. Stress is how you respond to that strain.

Some people have more or less strain than others, in response to the same stress.

When you are feeling strained you have three options:

1. Suck it up
2. Remove yourself from the source of stress, e.g. leave work, go on a holiday etc
3. Figure out how to have a reduced stain response to a given stress, e.g. get Zen, get used to it, figure out some coping mechanisms etc