Psybertron Asks

Been watching a TV documentory about Australian management practices (can’t find a link for now … ) and was struck by a quote from a Harvard guy, that echoed with the one I keep using from John Z DeLorean – “Committees of moral men make immoral decisions.” The quote yesterday was “So many board members [...]

Saw the H2G2 film this evening. Remarkably good; story, effects and the point – all pretty true to the first book, as true as any screenplay adaptation. The John Malkovich character the only superfluous addition. The planetary construction scene is indeed impressive. Bill Nighy as Slartibartfast steals the show. The whole presentation seemed quite literal, [...]

One of the claimed opportunities for quantum information processing is highly secure private key encryption – here demonstrated in real time encryption and decryption of each frame of streamed video. I see from the linked stories, the other more interesting aspect, non-local entanglement over real world distances also demonstrated (1mm and 600m mentioned). The encryption [...]

Almost a week since I posted. Too many domestic (relocation to Australia) chores. Been active philosophically on MoQ-Discuss e-mail forum, trying to raise the bar as far as scientific explanation being more than “scientific method”. Since finishing David Deutsch and “The Rule of Four” I’ve been reading “The Two and a Half Pillars of Wisdom [...]

No one I spoke to in the club of the above name (in Northbridge, Perth) seemed to have heard of George Thorogood and his “Bad to the Bone”. Still … the place has live blues bands 5 nights a week, and tonight had two acts on. The venue has only recently organised itself to that [...]

April 25th, next Monday, is ANZAC Day here in Australia, commemoration of war dead, the particular date being that of the ill-fated landings at Gallipoli in 1915. I can’t think of Gallipoli without thinking of Shane McGowan’s baleful rendition of “And The Band Played Walzing Matilda” with The Pogues. [Post Note ... although the Pogues [...]

I’ve just spent several hours downloading software and registering with Real, Napster and MusicMatch on-line MusicStores as pointed to my MP3.COM so I can legally buy and download music tracks (rather than whole physical CD’s from the likes of good old Amazon). Each let me download, install, register and log-in before advising that their service [...]

Not quite sure what Jorn is saying in his link, but this review by James Wood in the Guardian of the recently deceased Saul Bellow’s work is certainly intriguing. Think I may have to sample a little to get the message.

An Indian community stripped of its main asset, water, with predictable consequences and a lot more besides, by a local Coca-Cola plant. This stuff is never rocket science, but how do things get like this. Committees of moral men making immoral decisions again ? [CounterPunch] [via Robot Wisdom]

Google.org that is … [Slashdot] [via Robot Wisdom]. Not to be outdone by Bill Gates, Larry Page and Sergey Brin – declare their philanthropic intent.

Well, actually, they already have … After the “Poetics” (in The Name of the Rose) you had the “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili” (in The Rule of Four, Princeton), now read the “Oxyrhynchus Papyri” (in real-life, Oxford University) – new technology allows reading of long lost classics – Sophocles, Euripides to name a few … [Independent Online] [via [...]

Neat idea from ZipCar (Can you tell I’ve been catching up reading the BBC site this morning ?) It’s just car-hire with technology used to increase time and space slicing efficiency – “public” (subscription) transport in on-demand packets – I’m sure we’ve all had the idea. The really neat part is the idea that “For [...]

Japanese official denial of Nanking as a significant tragedy, continues to justify anti-Japanese sentiment (and action) in (Mainland, People’s Republic of) China. I’ve just come back from a trip through Chiang Kai-Shek airport in (Taiwan, island Republic of) China. Can’t help thinking it is significant that the occupants of Nanking, Chiang Kai-Shek’s “nationalist” army and [...]

Sadly ironic to note in the story [via BBC] of the recently-convicted-for-life Algerian Al-Qaeda police-murderer and ricin-terrorist that, on the one hand, the police chief is playing down religion (99.99% of moslems are law abiding, etc), whilst the bereaved family is playing up it’s christian faith.

Football that is. Yeovil fan just walked up to me here in Changi, keen to check the Southend result from last night – they lost to Orient. That means if Yeovil beat Kiddy today, they’re in champions spot apparently. Interestingly Reading were interested in the defeat of Blades by Derby last night – now we [...]

… or maybe France … Gibberish, computer generated “scientific” paper is accepted for conference in Orlando [via BBC]. To be fair, it was passed unreviewed by default due to missing reviewing milestones. So no-one was actually conned by its content, unilke the French existentialist quantum genetics (?) example earlier, but Oh Dear. Perversely, I’ve just [...]

Finished reading Caldwell and Thomason’s “Rule of Four” in transit here at Changi. As I predicted in the previous post the theme becomes “Love Conquers All” – with the reminder of the double edged meaning in that aphorism – “mis-directed love destroys anything” is not a recipe for happy endings – though this book does [...]

Almost blogged this BBC news story about Hitachi’s new technology to shift disk storage up an order of magnitude a few days ago. But I needed to see (and hear) this from the Toronto McLuhan Message blog before I actually did it. Neat.

Browsing Gimbo, which has changed since I last looked (he’s got married ?) the issues being blogged seem higher level. Several good posts – the UK Government ID Card story, The TinyURL (risks) story, and the women in sport (world full of idiots) link. I was taken by the “risks” link simply because the link [...]

Matt at DoubleLoop has a new post on a survey of link collectors / organisers. As he says the common feature is Tags, Tags, Tags, Tags, but for me what is key is the semantics of Why, Why, Why, Why ? The thing I liked about del.ici.ous was that the links were to categories, and [...]

OK, so the inescapable key of David Deutsch’s world view is that the Everett / Wheeler idea of many worlds forming the multiverse, is … well … fundamental to all of reality. I’ve said twice – once after his introduction and again after reading the whole of his Fabric of Reality – that Deutsch argues [...]