Psybertron Asks

Just a list of headings from Alain de Botton’s TED talk. Religious vs atheist – some confusion of gods and religions? “There is no god” is just the start of the story. Ritual, moral, communal aspects – cherry-picking “the good bits” Shakespeare, Plato, Austen (etc) – cultural sources of morality tales. Universities have forgotten to [...]

I did quite a few jobs at The Coryton Refinery over the years in the Mobil, then briefly BP, days before it was sold to Petroplus. Interesting that it is the Swiss parent company that is actually going bust – wonder where the losses actually are? And I wonder what their ownership is  - oil [...]

All my posts go to twitter, and selected one’s are filtered by dlvr.it to facebook and linkedin (and a few other targetted channels). I’ve only recently – last 2 or 3 months – started actually following anything (#) or anyone (@) on twitter. (Since for me it was just a channel to other discussion spaces [...]

Since someone asked – where does IP fit with the MoQ ? First – IP is about (legal / contractual) rights to use copyright – not about property ownership per se. (See previous SOPA / PIPA threads especially the Kinsella reference.) In a world where democratic mixed-economy is already the evolved norm, then contracts are [...]

Excellent Edinburgh TED talk from Alain deBotton. Good on so many fronts, will need to comment more later. Even made BBC R4 Today programme this morning. Atheism2.0 I’ve always resisted identifying with the term “atheist” preferring non-theist or new-humanist, or maybe Spinozan pan-theist,  if I must choose a religious label. Mainly because atheism really has [...]

A nice meta-point from XKCD, via PsybertronJr.   [BTW an opportunity to link to one of my XKCD favorites - Tilting at Windmills.]

Thanks to Horse for this Register link “SOPA is dead, are you happy now ?” I’m for fair IP Copyright licensing. Fair is a tough question – but I’m for answering it. I’m against bad legislation – Duh, who isn’t, that’s what bad means, let’s improve it. There is already legal enforcement of copyright in [...]

Inevitable, despite the attempts to associate the iconic brand with digital products. [Yes, I know it's misspelt, but the brand wouldn't turn up in searches otherwise.]

Several people noted yesterday that it was significant that Wikipedia was joining today’s internet blackout – given the fact that Wikipedia are pretty hot on honouring IP copyrights. This Jimmy Wales interview reinforces that fact. I still despair at the rhetoric being traded – of course collaboration is needed to improve the wording of any [...]

Amazing that only (under) 2 years ago Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest, and now not only are full US (and other) diplomatic relations restored, but there are elections and Suu Kyi is running for office. BTW, when did Myanmar become Burma again, reverting to the old colonial spelling of basically the [...]

Interesting to contrast Dean Windass and Gary Speed, the day after Mancini aims to emulate Rooney – not even with any apparent irony. Mancini is the kind of superstar fashionista dipstick the game could do without, as opposed to Phil Brown, speaking up here for Deano. It’s a funny old game, more important than life and death [...]

This year’s Edge question 2012 is: WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DEEP, ELEGANT, OR BEAUTIFUL EXPLANATION? Many of the responses don’t really answer the question, but there are hundreds of responses on many subjects. These are a few that caught my eye – almost all mean further reading! Some are just interesting to see in this [...]

It was back in 2002 I read Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s work on the origins of cognitive science “The Mechanization of the Mind“. It was the first I’d heard of the Macy meeting in New York in 1946, and although I’d been on the systems engineering and information science track in my psychological research for some time, [...]

Being surrounded on three sides by a church graveyard and on the fourth by agricultural land is the setting for daily life here at our new home & office location. All life is here. In 5 or 6 weeks so far we’ve seen at least 3 burials, so we’ve been doing some calculations. The three [...]

Reading Kinsella as suggested by Victor in the earlier SOPA / PIPA thread … The usual “property value based on scarcity / replacement cost / value” doesn’t apply to IP since the creator / owner is not in any sense deprived of the IP however many copies others make. True, but the natural reduction in [...]

Yes, democratized web-publishing is a great force for change, for good. That’s why I blog. That’s why I use WordPress (and a dozen other social publishing tools). But that doesn’t mean SOPA / PIPA are a bad thing. Creative people publishing content can choose their preferred IP model. Creative musicians and artists can work outside [...]

Picked these up last September from Andy Martin (Author of Beware Invisible Cows) but also film-maker and lecturer at Cambridge Uni. The story 9/13 New York Board Meeting The film 9/26 New York Surfing Zen koans and a little religious experience, a subway ride from Manhattan. (Same gentle style as his Cambridge Languages promo film. [...]

In these days of mark-up languages believing they have made spreadsheets old-hat, I often point out that spreadsheets are a mark-up language, that they were invented by the ancient Egyptians and they still have a long life ahead of them. In fact it seems they were invented by Mesopotamian accountants before being taken across the [...]

Of course Abbott’s comment was racist. The point is was it racist with positive moral intent ? Or was it done with ignorance or negative intent ? Colour-blindness is a red-herring too. Sometimes race/colour is germane to the topic, sometimes it isn’t. Obviously her intent was positive and race/colour was more than just relevant, it was the [...]

They’ve got something wrong here, confusing quality with quantity. Why would you need assisted dying for someone given only a short time to live ? You’d want assisted living, to get the max out of remaining time. Assisted dying is a quality of life issue surely.

Interesting Garry Tan piece. Reminds me of a conversation years ago – and several since. A colleague reporting to myself and another manager simultaneously found herself conflicted. As an engineer whose job had nothing directly to do with producing software products, she announced she was doing a course on coding (some variant of C, back [...]