Category: Uncategorized

OK so another football story.

Relocating from the US to Norway, visiting in the UK along the way we’ve been a little out of touch without the internet until yesterday. We missed that Reading’s first away win of the season was Wolve’s first home defeat 3:0 last Tuesday, after the 4:0 win against Swansea last Saturday, and yesterday we caught the 3:1 win against manager-of-the-month Burnley on-line. We are in unheard of territory … goals-for averaging 3.5 per game, and the highest goal-difference in the Championship, now only 2 points behind Wolves and 3 off Birmingham in top spot.

We’ll be changing the club name from Reading Royals to Reading Irish next.

Twice in as many days … another footbal story, two actually.

Great to see Blades get the decision on the Tevez fiasco at West Ham two seasons ago and love or hate him, great to see Warnock happy. No amount of compensation fixes it of course, but justice is done. (I love the Warnock quote thanking the “independent” witnesses, explaining that whilst he gave his own evidence, he’d “got carried away”. No, really ?)

And the Reading “goal that wasn’t” story. Good news that the league didn’t recommend a replay – what a precedent that would have set ! Coppell said he would be OK if a replay was awarded, but Boothroyd didn’t actually ask for one, so fair play all round, almost ….

• (1) I don’t agree with the general ine of blaming the Lino, just because he admitted the error. The Ref is in charge, and when he conferred with the Lino (which he rightly did), about the ball crossing the line (the Lino was right to raise his flag, the ball did cross the line) the Ref should have asked the Lino to confirm and re-confirm when he thought the ball had crossed the line, not just his opinion that it was a goal … no one in play had claimed a goal … the ref had good reason to doubt his Lino. (But I am in favour of TV / Electronic tools for “ball in play” decisions, though ony when the ball is dead, if that makes any sense.)
• (2) The Reading players and management should have either persuaded the Ref he was wrong on Watford’s behalf at the time or, if they couldn’t convince him, gifted Watford a goal immediately afterwards. There are precedents for such sporting conduct on the pitch. Here’s hoping the fortuitous draw doesn’t prove decisive for either team in the end of season placings.

[Post Note – guess that would make more sense if I pointed out that we were long-term Reading FC season ticket holders (home and away), are life-time members of the supporters trust and still consider Reading as “home”. Like, we’re positively interested in Reading’s results.]

Just a quickie update.

I’ve pruned the overloaded side-bar – by using a simpler collapsible “previous posts” javascript, and removing a couple of dozen old, redundant or little-used blog-roll links. I’ve also moved the Pirsig / MoQ links to the newer [Pirsig] page, and added additional internal navigation links to that page. The original Psybertron Pirsig Pages are still there, but increasingly being absorbed into the re-organized page, where there is still more work planned. (There is a redirect on one of the old pages which should be invisible to the user … any problems let me know.)

The ongoing re-organization will next affect the [Manifesto] page, where I intend to add an editorial policy and an introduction to the newer projects. Time to move on.

PS – anyone detecting performance issues with the Psybertron site, please let me know. It seems to me that the active PHP & MySQL pages are rendering very slowly ? Still investigating.

Humiliated.

Headless chickens.

Privatisation of profits, socialisation of losses.

Staunching the flow of blood, but not fixing the wound.

A real downer from Robert Peston commenting on the (proposed) US bail-out of the banking industry, and a whole spectrum of comments from his readers. I’m no expert of international banking, but the scale of the numbers, means we need to understand where this might be leading. Since the markets already appear to have taken the bail-out into account, what if Congress rejects the proposal ?

Despite it being an important part of our lives, I suspect this is only the second post in the 7 year history of Psyberton on the subject of football (real football that is, played with the feet). I’m making this posting because this is a wonderful illustration of why objective logic is a useless decision making tool, which is of course a large part of my agenda here.

Circular (strange-loopy) arguments are so much better.

Notwithstanding Sir Alex’s paranoid reasoning, referee Halsey was indeed right to give “serious foul play” as his reason for Terry’s red-card / sending-off last weekend, and wrong to be persuaded to rescind it. It was an absolutely blatant so-called “professional foul” …. no-one at all seems to be arguing with that. It was so blatantly professional that clearly Terry’s and everyone else’s calculations (except Halsey’s) was banking on a yellow-card warning only, based on the “not the last man” defence.

Rules evolve, like everything else. As soon as the last man defence (post-rationlization) becomes part of the reasoning in the decision (a-priori) to actually make the “professional foul”, it moves on from simply being part of the rationale; onto a meta-level, another cycle of a strange-loop, to become part of the foul itself. It excludes itself from application of the new/old rule. The reasoning for applying the more lenient view arose in the days before the offenders had that objective rule available to them in making their cynical calculating rule-breaking decision, before that strange-loop had happened. Once it has happened, game over … and remember evolving psychology really is a game, just like football is a game … effectively the new (now old) rule has a new(er) interpretation / manifestation in real life, beyond the sterile realm of pure objective logic.

Rules are for the guidance of wise men, and the enslavement of fools. (Douglas Bader ?)

Wisdom comes from going round a few loops. Well done Mr Halsey; stand by your own gut feel, and help evolve the human species out of this mess.

I agree with Sir Robert Winston here. The Royal Society has miscalculated if it thinks denying opportunities to even respond to questions about whacky alternatives does anything for the understanding and credibility of science.

Turbulent times for global finances, but interesting take here from the BBC’s Robert Peston.

Talking of accidental shocks to the system. OK, so the wind and water of a hurricane like Ike can cause danger, damage and disruption anywhere it strikes, but why does modern Texas and Houston, have such poor infrastructure that recovery requires a week of city curfews and a month to restore power supplies ?

Just collecting this link to a BBC Story about txt msg style being used to convict. Liked the formal language of the expert; “powerful enough attribution to discriminate”.

A BBC Story.

Keep coming across things I blogged years ago, totally forgotten, usually prompted by cross-hit reports, that seem “good” – if I say so myself.

This is an example from 2004. Nothing new under the sun.

I really MUST do some consolidated writing – from the blog and from discussion-forum contributions.