2015 — 2 May: Saturday
I exchanged a couple of fascinating emails1 yesterday afternoon (my time) in which, not for the first time, the subject was kicked off by my interest in George Cogar and (in this case) the "diakoptic" programming language. I was left both a little wiser and a little better-informed. Not least about the prodigious beer-drinking abilities of a programming genius from the Land of the Midnight Sun whose name was new to me. It's always nice when that happens. I sometimes feel I joined the world of computers just a few years later than would have been ideal. But2 the timing of your conception is crucial. And not amenable to over-much control by the egg at the heart of the (t)issue.
Time for my...
... second throat-clearing cuppa, already. This, too, shall pass.
As will our small upcoming local spasm of democracy next week. I've just been reading the latest piece sent to me from Avaaz.org on "smear and loathing" displayed by the right-wing Press. Crikey. It seeks to assert that the terribly nice ex-Australian print and broadcast media baron may not, in fact, be quite so terribly nice after all. While I find this terribly shocking, and terribly hard to believe, I suspect people who "read" his newspapers will, when their lips stop moving, be essentially unchanged in their own view of reality.
"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal."
I first started...
... reading material (essays, mostly) assembled by John Brockman...
... some while ago. This is the latest — the transcript of a video interview — and I enjoyed it. Source and snippet:
For a long time fitness was equated in people's minds with reproduction, with having a large number of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. Bill Hamilton and others, but mostly Bill Hamilton, realized that you had to generalize that because, if what's really going on is working to pass on genes, offspring, grandchildren, et cetera, are not the only ways of passing on genes. An organism can work to enhance the survival and reproduction of its siblings, its nephews, its nieces, its cousins and so on. Hamilton worked out the mathematics of that...
I wonder if "Murdochian" will ever supplant "Darwinian"?
Oh, my goodness
Too rich for my taste:
Apple and Google don't have coercive power. District attorneys do, the FBI does, the NSA does, and to me it's very simple to draw a privacy balance when it comes to law enforcement and privacy: just follow the damn Constitution. And because the NSA didn't do that and other law enforcement agencies didn't do that, you're seeing a vast public reaction to this.
(My flabber is gasted. I need more tea.)
Nice piece
Good advice, too, from the Home of the Brave and the Land of the Free:
...every American could benefit from some time in jail, but in the event that you are yourself actually arrested and sent away, "there are certain practical aspects to keep in mind." First, dress warmly. Detention centers tend to be freezing cold, even in summer, and so if you happen to be wearing shorts or short
sleeves you're in for a spectacularly unhappy night. Second, carry no cash. "If you have money, they charge you a convenience fee," he explains. "If you don't have it, they don't charge you. The less money you have on you, the better." Third, memorize a couple of emergency contact phone numbers. On the
night of his first arrest he discovered he didn't actually know his wife's cell-phone number. He'd always phoned her by name from his cell phone's address book, but his phone was one of the first things they'd taken from him.
The fourth, and final, rule was by far the most important: Don't say a word to government officials. "The reason you don't," he says, "is that, if you do, they can place an agent on a witness stand and he can say anything."
I'm just, erm, shocked, I tell you. (I'm not really.)
It's been a while...
... since I mentioned this wonderfully scabrous examination of the rather stinky Chicago political machine as operated by the infamous Mayor Richard Daley and even longer since I last read it. I mention it because, in sheer entertainment value...
... it's just been surpassed — after four decades — by the TV show "The Good Wife". An amazingly entertaining deconstruction of many social, political (and even technological) issues in today's wondrous world.