Psybertron Asks

Interesting language from sports coach Dave Brailsford. Supporting the individual voice in how the team performs. Clearly not a job for a disciplinarian, from an alien culture with limited language skills, OK ?

Brilliant. Whether Capello is given the chance to manage the team through the next Euro tournament (or not) he himself should resign, if he cares one iota, and save the FA (ie fans of English football) having to pay to make a decision. BTW, never mind Roy Hodgson for Team Manager, we need people like [...]

An incomplete review, notes only from this excellent article. Hat tip to Sam Norton in his comment below. And some good links in the piece, eg to Stanley Fish. Explanation … avoiding reductionism. Terry Lectures on video – nb Terry Eagleton joke ? “It was I felt, characteristic of the delightfully informal nature of American society [...]

“The objectives of science may be objective, but science forms a fascinating topic for anthropologist’s case study. Social and political factors driving science are pervasive. Nothing fundamentally different in modes of “problem solving” thought between say engineers and scientists.” I had found the current Rees Reith lectures (last of 4 today) a little dull so far, [...]

I can’t be the first to suggest this, but is it too late to give Ireland their rightful place at the World Cup finals ? Could they get a team ready for the second half maybe.

Angela Merkel’s body language ? (Hat tip to Rivets) And another from Rivets … North Korean (DPRK) from a Russian site ? … politically composed images, but nevertheless some wonderful art in there. And SEOLOL I’ve seen before but worth having the link to hand when you need a laugh.

If computers had colons, they could make better decisions. Nice one from Dilbert. The problem is confusing brains with minds. You colon is part of your mind, even though it’s not part of your brain. Damasio has a word for it – Somatic Markers. (And yes it is all process. Process that is; not “a” [...]

One of my management adages is “Agreement in public, disagreement in private”. I was reminded of it by this quote collection from Kevin Kelly. (Here’s the permalink to the Scott Delinger quote.) It’s one of these things that get’s tangled up in open communications, freedom of speech mantras that so many people seem to think [...]

Spooky for reasons I can’t quite pin down yet, having picked-up on Compression yesterday, Compression is the initial subject of this Long Now talk from Brian Eno and Will Wright. In retrospect, I think the only connection with Owen Barfield is the mention of the Aeolian Harp as regenerative music. Oh, and receiving a mail [...]

It’s official, you get wiser as you get older, and here too. That is if you value multiple perspectives, possibility of change, flexible predictions, knowledge limitations, conflict resolution and compromise, then better ask a grey-beard.

Having concluded positively that Christopher Hitchens does know what he’s talking about in the faith vs science debate, I have to say that the rhetoric here is unnecessarily dirty. The prince is an easy target without coherent argument, or necessarily the expertise for such argument, but he is expressing a real concern for soulless scientism.

Or is that Stupidly Rational ? Neat. From Elizabeth Pisani. And morally rational ? A good one from Michael Sandel. Essential ethics at the core of difficult debate. (And Sandel’s Harvard teaching lectures from 2005 – and the ongoing online justice harvard resource – see also last year’s Reith lectures.)

True of much mainstream media in fact IMHO – infantilized – even apparently serious reporting of serious subjects.

Another sequence from Doug Hofstadter responding with scepticism to Ray Kuzweil at the Stanford Singularity Summit (2007 or 2009 ?) – singularity as in machine intelligence or machine aided intelligence overtaking human intelligence. Sceptical in terms of short predicted timescales, immortality, time travel, hockey-sticks, etc … losing credibility … but concerned that mainstream science is [...]

Never did get to Bonnaroo despite living pretty close to the site for 3 years. I guess it’s that time of year again. Anyway the name sticks thanks to a line in Tommy Womack’s Alpha Male and the Canine Mystery Blood track on There, I Said It. Strangely, in reading the NYT article a phrase [...]

BP & Deepwater Horizon will have massive ramifications – industrial and global macro-economic. This is no local difficulty as Robert Peston explains.

Currently topical in the day job beyond blogging, this discussion may prove interesting on whether splintering / undermining any unity is a real issue or just a little paranoia.

Is a meme. Dear Marge, … as a British male engineer of a certain age with 30 years experience in UK, Australia and the US, I guess I’m allowed to notice that here in Scandinavia there are more engineers that happen to be attractive young women – though incidentally many of them are not native [...]

Comparing GoDaddy with others in the comment thread.

(Old news from 2007, but …) The ingenuity, and effort, for the cleric to come up with the breastfeeding suggestion, in the face of the inconvenient rules, even if the mind boggles at the rules in the first place. (Rules being for the guidance of wise men and the enslavement of fools, after all.) More [...]

Think I just experienced an original band, Norwegian too. OK so the usual heavy grunge punk metal vocal delivery – indistinct monotonic screaming growl – I’ll never quite get. But visually & stylistically different. Again all blues based rock is “derivative” and original is always relative, but not many give me that same sense that [...]