This is the fourth anniversary of the weblog. If you look a couple of posts down you’ll see one about “year three”, meaning that I have not written much in the interim. Maybe my life’s boring, or maybe I lost the drive to share. Maybe I’m too busy, or not busy enough.

It’s the time of the PhD when people ask me what I plan to do next (as if the PhD is in the bag, which it isn’t). I say that I don’t know. This is the truth, not an attempt to weasel out of a lengthy discussion. The world is in the gutter, and who knows what will it look like in six months. Regarding my own short term future, I suppose that the best answer I can give is that I’ll go where the best opportunity is. (OK, I am weaseling here, because I’m not defining what kind of opportunity I’m after… I’ll leave it for some other time, though those who know me can probably guess ;)

As per tradition, I provide you with a picture of myself to cheer everyone up. This time I’m squinting and smirking at the Tatra mountains in Zakopane, Poland.

All the best to us all.

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Today at Tesco I was walking towards a woman carrying bottles of wine between her arms, close to the chest. A few steps between us, one bottle slipped over her arm. I remember this in slow motion… I look at the bottle falling, then her face, she cringes. Then I go back to the bottle and it bounces once, then hits the linoleum again and shatters in a surprisingly small footprint. While I am observing this, I take a couple steps back so nothing hits me. We both look at each other, and the people around us, turn, and vanish into an aisle.

I went and got my own bottle of wine, and then at the till the oddest thing happened. I got carded.

Till (old) man: Can’t let you buy the wine without ID*.
Me: Wow. I’m 33.
Lady (packing) in front of me: You should take it as a compliment.
Me (to till man): Thanks. But I don’t carry ID**. I’m 33, really.
Till man: OK, you’ve got white hair, so I’ll let you have it <wink>.
Me (to myself): Now you’ve ruined it.

* Legal drinking/purchase of alcohol in the UK is 18!

** This will change soon. As a foreigner in this country I’m being used as a test subject for their new and pointless ID card effort. That’s another story, though, so I’ll leave it for now.

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I break a near year-long silence for a rant. The restaurant was dimly-lit; a bit too dark, but manageable. Then, a group of about fifty thousand people came in to occupy the reserved table next to us; shoved a baby stroller next to me; prevented the waitress from accessing our table; and, finally, commenced to light up the place with their camera flashes.

The first ten flashes — each multiplied by plenty of mirrors it seemed — were tolerable. I was paying attention though, all ten were repeats because the picture just did not come out perfect enough. They were over doing it with the next ten I thought. So I asked one of the guys if they could stop it with the flashes… “b-b-but we’re having a party”… and I said “but you also need to be considerate to other people”.

Obviously, I wasn’t popular with that crowd but I don’t care… people who do not respect other people’s space should be told to tone it down when they overdo it.

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(By guest blogger Philip)

I was just reading F.A. Hayek’s speech upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1974 and he mentioned a book called Limits to Growth as a current (to 1974) mistake in the application of seemingly scientific method to complex economic phenomena. It led me to read about this book on Wikipedia and then, via Google, to a paper by Matthew R. Simmons called Club of Rome Revisited in which he attempts to rehabilitate the Club of Rome (widely panned in the years since) by showing how misguided its critics were and how correct its predictions were. I started to be more interested when I then browsed to Matthew Simmons’ site and found that he is a big proponent of Peak Oil. In fact he wrote a book I had heard plenty of but whose author’s name never stuck: Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy. It is referenced a lot by a certain type of paranoiac on the market bear boards I frequent (don’t ask what that says about me).
It was crazy to read an intelligent man, Matthew Simmons, summarizing the gloom and doom predictions for the future and saying “jeez! they were right! look how good their math was!” When in fact, whether or not their predictions were right, what Hayek so eloquently debunked was their math. It was a bullet-proof debunking. They tried to apply simple math to complex social phenomena to get any sort of prediction. Can’t be done. Wait, I am wrong. It can and is done all the time. It can’t be done accurately or with any hope of scientific validity. Read Hayek’s paper if you want an eloquent explanation of why. What amazes me is that this man, Simmons, is not ignorant of Malthus. In the intro to his paper he strenuously distanced himself from the blindspots and errors of Malthus. He then did his best to channel Malthus. I’d say if his Peak Oil scam doesn’t work out he should set up a scam as a medium because I’d have been willing to believe he was communicating directly with the long-dead British doomsayer.
I suppose it is mean to call it a scam since he is a victim of the scam before he is a perpetrator. Malthus is already serving an eternal sentence in the Halls of Shame for popularizing it. But just because the Club of Rome used an early supercomputer to distance themselves from the bad math doesn’t make their results any less shamefully unscientific and inaccurate. And just because Simmons noted that their predictions of the world population in 2000 were pretty accurate doesn’t get him off the hook for failing to note that everything else they predicted was way off. But more importantly, the accuracy of their predictions does not in anyway validate the methods used to generate them! If an accurate prediction is based on flawed analysis is the prediction still correct? Only in the most useless sense or to your balance with your bookie. The limit of what is knowable regarding the state of mind of the (accurately predicted) billions of individual actors in the world prevent math from being a tool to accurately predict the future of the world. As a phenomenon of organized complexity (see complex systems in Wikipedia) it is immune to this treatment. The complexity of human genius has allowed us to make a mockery of Malthus’ predictions of doom and exhaustion (though not his population numbers) and further to laugh at the well-intentioned but blinded-by-misapplied-science Club of Rome and now I suspect that Peak Oil is the third act in Malthus’ original play “Oh My God We’re DOOMED! or How I Misapplied Science to Scare the Children.” It continues to embarass the Keynesian central banks of the world and force senseless double speak from politicians and economists as they explain why their policies fail, their predictions are useless, and the unintended consequences of their actions dominate the intended ones. It just isn’t that kind of science. In closing, I hate you John Maynard Keynes =) =p

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Adobe does not like people using their product names as verbs, specifically, “photoshopping” is not allowed.

Trademarks are not verbs.
CORRECT: The image was enhanced using Adobe® Photoshop® software.
INCORRECT: The image was photoshopped.

(emphasis not mine)

Over the years I’ve grown to hate the bloated, often-crashing, slow going, Acrobat Reader. When my system (or browser) is slow, or not responding, the first thing I try is to kill the Acrobat process. That usually does the trick. It’s a poor product, to say the least.

So it occurred to me that as a response to their prohibition of the verbing of their product names, I’ll start using “Acrobat” in all sorts of new ways, like so:

“This product is a piece of Acrobat®!”
“I just Acrobatted myself. Acrobat®!”
“This plum tastes like Acrobat®.”
“He’s got Acrobats® for a brains.”
“Get out of here, you Acrobatting® piece of Acrobat®”
“I Acrobat® you not!”

Got some more?

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This was a great idea and a great interview. People are amazing. It is a shame the process of growing older tends to blunt so much of our ability. It makes you think everything might not be as bad as it sometimes seems if we could just expand our ideas.

http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-Wall.htm

Summary: An Indian entrepeneur exposes Indian slum residents to a free PC and internet connection with no training. The results are described and an interview with the entrepeneur follows. About 5 minutes reading.

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(By guest blogger Philip)

Should stupidity be legal? What about laziness? In the news today NY City and Chicago are working to ban trans-fatty acids. We are far too dumb to determine whether or not we should be eating a particular fat. While they are at it perhaps they should ban indolence. Oh, and how about a ban on not trying hard in school! That is surely bad for your prospects in life. Maybe a ban on headphones that will output volumes that are unsafe for your long-term hearing. You know, this banning stuff is fun and easy! I might be a natural for government. Think of all the lives I could save. Let me see… A ban on driving without a seat belt! Wait, they already got that one. Bike helmets? Already been discussed on this very forum. Alcohol! No more than one drink per customer a night at bars. Afterall that is the healthful limit. A ban on stressfull work. A ban on long nights sleep, as it turns out it isn’t good for you. Sleeping too much puts you at risk for heart attack, parkinson’s, and diabetes. A ban on sunbathing (skin cancer kills plenty). Maybe even a ban on red meat and dairy, prostate cancer and natural TSAs, you know? Think of the good I could do for man kind. After a life of helping my fellow man in this manner, when I die (though not of anything preventable) they will put on my tombstone “Here lies Philip, good riddance you damned busy body.”

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(By guest blogger Philip)

Or don’t. Probably better that way. I wondered about what I would write my first blog post of all time. But NPR answered that question for me when Michael Krasny decided to discuss the possible future secretary general of the U.N. candidates this morning. If there is one thing I can’t sit through it is a bunch of socialists talking about their plans for the U.N. Enter the caller from Berkeley. He didn’t have anything topical (i.e. about the potential future candidates for SG) but he was absolutely certain what the world needed: a U.N. tax on all citizens of the whole entire world. Thank you, Berkeley. Now I remember why I don’t call on you much, though you sit at the front of the class and raise your hand constantly.

Increasing the power of the U.N. is an idea that is an affront to the entire accumulated knowledge of human kind as far as it applies to government. Doesn’t human history scream out that power is abused? That centralization leads to extreme power? That even the best-intentioned governments eventually fail into corruption and self service? So now we ought to take an absurdly undemocratic institution (Brunei has a monarchy with absolute power to the sultan who appoints the UN ambassador, who therefore essentially has a personal vote in the UN; India shares one vote amongst its whole democratic populace) that spans the whole world (the British Empire only got halfway) and give it money (is power) so that it doesn’t even have to answer to the only people it currently answers to at all (the governments who fund it). Then it would be sure to further all of the noble goals set forth by its unelected representatives (mostly appointees of countries who rule themselves poorly) and better the lives of all us oppressed folk who previously only had our own democratically elected goverments to look after us.

Now, like communism, world government has fatal flaws that will prevent it from ever really working. But also like communism that wouldn’t stop it from maiming or killing hundreds of millions trying.

Let’s keep the U.N. poor and small and focused entirely on international ambassadorship. Let’s channel our international charity through our own home grown institutions. Let’s not throw out every bit of fear of government we have earned over recorded history just because we all wish for world peace, prosperity, and health. The U.N. isn’t the way.

I am sure I’ve made lots of new friends in class today by kicking the big fuzzy teddy bear that is the U.N. Please leave your love notes in the comments section.

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At one point or another we all fantasize about owning and/or operating a coffee-shop, restaurant, bar, pub, countryside inn and various other food/bev/service establishments. Everyone also thinks that they can do better than anything else out there. Fantasies are nice, but when you get down to the details, it ain’t so simple as it first appears. This short, insightful and well written article [slate.com] spills the beans (yes, intended) on what is the most likely outcome for you and your loved ones if you attempt at materializing this fantasy.

Looking back, we (incredibly) should have heeded the advice of bad-boy chef Anthony Bourdain, who wrote our epitaph in Kitchen Confidential: “The most dangerous species of owner … is the one who gets into the business for love.”

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Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a cold blooded killer 10 years ago in the center or Tel-Aviv. I remember exactly where I was when it happened and also the following day.

4/11/1995: I was in what is called an “after,” it’s a night-off from the service where you can go home and come back the next morning. I went to my girlfriend’s place in the vicinity of Tel-Aviv, fairly close to where the rally took place. We saw it unfold on TV. The thing I remember the most is Eitan Haber’s official announcement of Rabin’s death later that night. I remember the announcement and images but what is etched in my recollection of that night is the most chilling shriek from an unseen man crying “nooooooooo.”

To this day it is sad to recall what happened and why. It also makes me mad. People at the top say today that once that “killing-of-a-politician” barrier has been breached, more will follow. It’s a form of twisted legitimization or an elimination of a taboo.

Rabin wasn’t perfect, but he was a patriot who loved his country and defended (of fought for) it in any way he knew how from a very young age. He is missed.

UPDATE: You can see the announcement here.

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