Random revelations (G rated version)

1. I was crash tackled by one of Margaret Thatcher’s minders
2. I had to find Morrissey a place to urinate
3. I went on a selection weekend to be an intelligence officer. It wasn’t the job for me.
4. I was interviewed to be a document analyst at Goldman Sachs. I failed the selection test miserably.
5. The best day at work I ever had was working in the rooftop of the boiler room at the big day out while Underworld and Fat Boy Slim were playing
6. I once got on the wrong overnight train in the middle of winter in Poland but made it eventually.
7. I have been in charge of repossessing cars
8. I was asked by a senior Australian politician to leak the identity of the zodiac driver in the Rainbow Warrior bombing to the UK media. It was bit of a none-story as it was already widely known that he was involved. I didn’t bother passing the story on.
9. I hold the yellow (first) belt in Chinese style kickboxing and the green (second) in Thai style.
10. I once passed myself off a speaking Spanish in a Facebook IM conversation even though I was using Google translate.

Futurama - A very existential job offer

I have a job offer for you. Basic knowledge processing work, unlimited salary, unlimited travel benefits, any hours you want and amazing working conditions.

Interested? The only catch is that you will be placed in suspended animation by your employer on a feed of liquid nutrients and your job will exist entirely in a virtual reality world. A bad day or even the non leisure parts of your life can be wiped from you memory. It will be indistinguishable from real life. Any lifestyle that can be computer generated can be yours. You will be able to interact with other people in the system or with computer generated promiscuous blondes.

Science fiction or reality? Well still science fiction at the moment but in forty years it may be very possible. I predict that by 2050 some people will be living significant parts of their lives in these conditions. It could bring a better quality of life for billions of people.

So could we be happy in these conditions? We have no idea what human life would be like in a world of surplus. Indeed I don’t think that the years of plenty in early 21^st century western world made people any happier. Scientists say that it is relative wealth that makes us happy so could we choose to be a millionaire in a world of virtual beggars? It doesn’t sound very appealing to me. Perhaps the virtual world could chuck some challenges in to keep us on our toes? Or would we subconsciously generate challenges for ourselves? As a Buddhist I believe that suffering forms a gateway to enlightenment,

One of the benefits would be the reduced strains on our bodies. Computers would monitor every aspect of our health and nano-bots could keep us healthy. This would mean that the aging process could be slowed down remarkably.

This possibility of suspended animation does begin to make long distance space travel look possible. Someone can put the Sat Nav on and go to sleep for 8 years while they travel to Sirius. The high speeds and suspended animation would mean that virtually no physical aging occurs at all.

The possibilities, questions and things that could go wrong are endless.

Random - My guide to electronic decluttering

In case anyone is a hoarder of information like me try these tips.

1. Email - Sort by date and delete everything older than a certain age. I find 2 years for random stuff and 6 years for important stuff works fine.
   
2. Email - Unsubscribe from any mailing lists that aren't important or you don't read. Wine and travel mailing lists are my favourites but if you don't read every time you can probably do without it.
   
3. Email - Delete any contacts that you don't need. I mean go through your contacts and delete everything from the safe list except for the ten or so people most of us email on a regular basis. Anything inbound can be added back to the safe list when it comes back in.
   
4. Email -Switch any newsgroups to daily or weekly summary rather than individual emails
   
5. Browser - Delete any bookmarks that aren't on your quick list. If you actually need them the sites can be found again.
   
6. Facebook etc - Switch of any email alerts that you don't really really need.
   
7. Phone - Delete any contacts that you don't use. You aren't going to get back in touch with that venture capital agent from your business scheme 3 years ago, besides he has probably lost his job by now. Anyone whose identity is in doubt when you look through your phonebook must go.
   
8. Phone - Reply "stop" to any text alerts that you don't really need.
9. If that's not enough cull some Facebook friends and people you follow on twitter.
10. Run a merge on your email and phone address books to tidy up any duplicates

If you are like me you will feel a lot better after you have done this. Please add any more in the comment section

Brave New World - Is the war on drugs collapsing?

As I read the papers in the UK and scan the news from across the world I can’t feeling that we have reached a tipping point in the prohibition of drugs. 14 US states (Colarado, Alaska, California, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington) allow the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes. In the UK the issue has been brought to a head by the sacking of Professor David Nutt (Hilariously look for #nuttsack)

The amazing thing about the war on drugs is that it is so young. Their are a large group of people who have total moral certainty about the criminalisation of drugs but would have not idea that prohibition as we know it is far younger than, say, the aeroplane. The current legislation was framed by two United Nations agreements in the 1950s with local legislation dating back to the 1920s. To me the US driven war on drugs has always smacked of the political opportunism of Nixon and Reagan.

The greatest story of how the legal use of now illegal drugs affected the world is of course how the British Empire was built on the opium trade. In 1839 the Chinese were exporting so much and importing so little that the balance of payments was threatening British hegemony. China would only hoard silver in return.

Without making too much of the historical parallel the fact is that we are having the biggest economic crisis in 80 years. Add to that tolerance and decriminalisation in Canada, Portugal and Holland and dozens of other countries. It may very well be that drug reform is gaining near universal acceptance.

The real pinch point in the drug wars will be the Americas. It is telling that it is America's two land neighbours, Canada and Mexico, are crunch points. Canada is a modern pragmatic western democracy that is rapidly becoming marijuana tolerant. Mexico has probably paid a higher price than anywhere else to try to prevent the trade in marijuana trade, and, in conjunction with places like the California, is considering "all the options".

Brazil must also be desperate to rid itself of the street crime, violence and corruption that is coming with its inner city drug wars. The Brazilians are an open minded and pragmatic nation who must be aware of the rice the slums in Buenos Aeries and Sao Paulo are paying for a policy of prohibition. It is interesting to note that Brazil's former colonial power, Portugal, has quietly decriminalised the usage of all drugs.

So will this happen before or after the 2016 Olympics? My prediction is after, when the nation has gained enough confidence to escape from the clutches of US policy. I am sure that they can manage the Olympics without violence and do not want to become a drug tourism Mecca.

There is another point here. Once the forces of legal drug usage gain acceptance then there is a growing commercial incentive for nations to develop their hemp industries and their might be a growing race to gain a commercial foothold.

ATH’s prediction? From 2019 it will be possible to get from the Bearing Straight to Montevideo buying Marijuana in shop fronts legally all the way. The Irony is that it is virtually possible anyway. At this point what will the point of billions of dollars of law enforcement resources being spent to stop international trafficking? It will just look even more ridiculous. The war on drugs may very well disappear as quickly as it appeared.

WeirdScience - Graphs, a ball of string and Winos

>

That is the standard model of sub-atomic particles. Thanks to Wiki for the pics in this article. The thing that I like about science is how easily something as abstract as the above, possibly the most abstract thing known to man, can be represented on a simple two dimensional grid.

I have to wonder if the trick is not inherent in nature, that these are not so nice and organised but merely in our perceptions of it are able to organise it. The above data could be represented on a multidimensional shape, such as on a sphere, in a line, an irregular solid or a rotating model.

You could make a much less tidy graph by linking it up like this

A human can easily manage a three dimensional graph. A four or five dimensional graph, involving a colour and time variable, would be pretty easy to follow in certain circumstances.

Any multidimensional graph is merely a human representation of a tiny data set and of course is incredibly limited compared to the information that the universe holds.

The universe would seem to be a huge data set of multi dimensional information. A graph is a tiny representation of it. One would assume that there is an infinite amount of information in the universe as information is being copied all of the time and all previous information would be preserved.

However three things suggest that there is not an infinite amount of information in the universe. Firstly copied information is not new information but reorganised information. Secondly if we believe that there are about a google of electrons in the universe then there can only be a limited amount of information stored in them. Thirdly there is no reason to think that things that have occurred in the past are preserved as information. Brownian motion suggests that they are not and memory is really just a feature of biology rather than physics. Therefore without information about past events there can be no choices and the universe would be best modelled as a piece of string with information on it, rather like DNA. Unless it has an end the string would be a loop.
The apparent alternative to a string universe would look a lot like Wikipedia. Information linked to other information in a giant cloud, all interlinking. By definition a universe made up of interlinked information would be a cloud as the only links could be back into the cloud. If we could only follow one path of this interlinked information then we could never know if it was an interlinked web of information or a single string. Anything else, to a bio-aware organism, would simply be a theory.

A string model leaves us with a huge question. Is their only one piece of string, one set of possibilities that we can travel down or is it some bit of fluff with junctures everywhere? I like Stephen Hawking's model of the universe as something more like the inside surface of a balloon. I can't answer this of course but if memory is only a biological phenomena rather than a physical one then their is no reason for choices or memories to be physically real anyway; very Vanilla Sky.

For the one person or so who as read to the end, a Winos are the superpartners of the SU(2)_L gauge fields. The theoretical Anti-W particle and a prime candidate to be anti-matter.

Brave new world...so what is techno-anarchism and what is web 3.0?

I have had a lot interest in my comment made about my belief in techno-anarchism which I mentioned in passing on Facebook today.

So what is it? It is a belief that technology will give humans not only the power but the imperative to organise themselves from peer to peer without any real need for central organisation.

Web 2.0 is the starting point for this. It is possible to follow the news from peer to peer, for medical expertise can be shared between peers and turned into a volume of knowledge with only limited input from medical professionals and for music can be published from bedroom to bedroom with basic household technology.

WEB 3.0

I am on the look out for Web 3.0 - A much closer interaction between cyberspace and real world and real space. Virtual reality, both for games and other uses has made huge advances yet its potential is almost unimagined.

Non-conventional banking is a key area a for web 3.0. We can already lend money consumer to consumer and, while far from perfect, pay virtually anything online. The interesting thing is that there has been growing speculation about the benefits of virtual world currencies (second life dollars or whatever they are called). At the moment these currencies and all web transactions are generally transferred to the bank clearing system rather than remaining as credits flowing around the web. We have a situation where the private BACS network predates the public WWW network but innovation must mean that soon your clearing is more likely to be done by Google than Bank of New York. In a world where anyone could log into the bank clearing system the concept of money may become redundant, replaced by privately issued credits. Of course modern money isn't back by anything at all anyway. You have more rights claiming credit from EBay than you do the US federal reserve.

The biggest 3.0 link of technology and the real world is likely to be human labour. The software and hardware to allow any knowledge worker to work from home and have video conferencing, monitored work telephone etc etc is basically all in place. It will take an enormous culture change and for technical lock in problems to become sorted for this to become common place however its effect of the make up of our societies could be inestimatable. Knowledge Jobs will be able to be sent to rural India as more effectively than they can export garments.

Robotics as an application to allow us to interact with world while sitting at home. I'll send my robot to the shops with a bag of web credits to pick up a diet coke. Weird, of course but technically completely feasible. In fact it is already happening everyday in mining and the military.

Of course fixed line telephones, stand alone television and physical media such as DVDs are likely to go the way of the typewriter and the 56k modem as more and more integrates into web based applications and technology integrates into our physical lives. The key to this integration is appliances that can talk to each other. Fridges that can recognise RFID barcodes and send the information via a short distance radio system to your laptop and ask Sainsburys for a top up? Device which logs on the the electricity company to see how expensive power is at the moment before switching your laundry on? Not tricky at all.

Techno Anarchism

So how does this aid an anarchistic future. The web is a giant tool of co-operation. Its functionality has been virtually conflict free unlike real world economic and political systems. I believe that the web can be beyond the effective control of governments. They could cut of wires but we can use mobiles, they can jam mobiles and we can use satellite phones. Data the government wants to stop can already be easily hidden inside data that the government desperately needs to keep moving.

A huge number of cooperative and profitable systems will be able to run without the interference of governments. As more generations of cables are laid or the technology developed to send messages down electricity cables across the world to avoid political hot spots and cope with a billion home workers teleconferencing it will become imperative that governments make it even more unstoppable. Rather like DNA, the information needed to make it work is on the web, inherent to the its existence rather than stored externally.

Very very briefly

Google stats

• sane - 13.2m hits

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going to try and get another post up tonight

All purpose Daily Mail Comment

Every been outraged by a Daily Mail article but too busy to write your own comment. Simply cut and paste this (underlining the relevant sections)...


This is disgusting. It is political correctness gone mad. This is all the fault of the EU/24 hour licensing/Greed. This country used to be great but there are too many jobsworths/immigrants/welfare abusers.

My grandfather fought in WW2/Afghanistan/100 years war for this country that used to be great.

I am so glad that I emigrated to Canada/France/Zimbabwe. I hope Peter Mandelson/Harriet Harman/Charles Dickens is proud of him/herself. I am going to vote for the BNP.

WeirdScience - A disorder coming to a school near you?

I should stat making a note of who writes and publishes these articles I read. It would make me feel like a proper blogger and not just a bloke eating mackerel on toast for lunch while staring at the autumn rain out of the window.

Anyway the article I read was a very interesting one on dyslexia. It makes a few fundamental points about the disorder

• Reading is an invented/accidental process developed by humans. It bounces information off a number of different parts of the brain which were not designed for it.
  
• A small delay in any of these parts of the brain will cause a log jam of information known as dyslexia.

Reading a language takes a huge amount of brain power. This is especially true of phonetic languages (ie with charachters that represent sounds). A pictorial language with five characters can have five different words. A phonetic language with five characters and a maximum word length of five characters could have 3905 words. (This is the factorial of 5 I think). Obviously this is limited by pronunciation of the local dialect and the availability of verbal sounds etc but their are a huge number of possibilities.

The first phonetic language known to man, invented in Greece around 1100BC and known as linear B, was derived from Egyptian and Phoenician hieroglyphics. The advantages of a phonetic language are enormous, it is easier to learn, usable at a moderate degree of learning and almost infinitely flexible and powerful. The trade off is that it takes an phenominal amount of brainpower to use and this is where dyslexia comes from. Try doing some basic exponential equations in your head and you will get an idea of the type of thinking involved.

Something very similar to Linear B is happening to technology. We now have multi dimensional controls on mini-Ipods and think nothing of integrating web pages into each other. Many of latest inovations in the control of IT involve very similar mathematical models to the development of phonetic languages.

My view is that it will be very hard for some people to use this technology becuase they struggle to process these multi-dimensional controls. We all know someone who can't work the DVD player no matter how hard they try. It probably says something about the human brain that it is the elderly who struggle most.

I will invent the word "Distechula". While we face huge barriers in diagnoses due to professional inertia, differing systems and differing access levels I predict that within twelve years it will be a scientifically recognised syndrome that some people are not able to operate modern information technolgy effectively. You heard it here first.

"Welcome to Life Extension"

I was reading an article about the growth in life expectancy the other day. For wealthy westerners it is growing at an astonishing rate. The mathematics is a bit tricky because it talks about life expectancy at birth which is growing at about 2 months every year. A logical extrapolation means that something similar applies to those who are already alive. Therefore every year you live you loose one year off the grand total but add 2 months on due to improved health care nd wellbeing

This two months increase in life expectancy a year however, is not a static rate, but is growing by itself. For instance in a few years time it will be growing at the rate of 3 months per year. The article said this cannot keep growing for ever but I can see no reason why the increase in life expectancy will not grow at more than one year per year, which would mean that we were all getting further away from the end of our lives.

The article is correct to say that the rate of increase could not keep going for ever. They are correct, if only for one reason, we would all being living so long that it would be impossible to measure. The denominator would go to infinity.

It perhaps isn't beyond the realms of medical science to create a generation who will live forever.








*Thanks to Cameron Crowe for the title quote





Note
Here is the sort of stuff that I am talking about

Top Ten Authors

Hoping not to make too much effort I thought could take a lead from the David Letterman's lazy writers and rattle of a top ten list.

1. Haruki Murakami
   
2. George Orwell
3. Franz Kafka.
   
4. Jack Kerouac
5. Kurt Vonnegut
   
6. Aldous Huxley
   
7. Oscar Wilde
   
8. JG Ballard
   
9. Patrick Hamilton
10. Voltaire

As a bonus Leonard Cohen possibly not really an author so in at number 11 but loved Beautiful Losers.

9 things about me

1. I am a practising Karma Kagyu Buddhist. I will only blog about this incidentally as I am not qualified to teach people.
   
2. I suffer from severe Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder to the extent that it often makes organising new information impossible and I am sometimes very sensitive to crowds. Stimulant drugs on their way soon.
3. I believe in total responsibility and free expression for the individual, including sexual and pharmacological freedom. I believe that drug liberalisation is inevitable.
   
4. My favourite music is opera and trance. Both of these are types of music that are incredibly intense live. I struggle to pick a favourite composer.
   
5. My interests include freakonomics, bio-centric theory, weird science, anarchism and self organising systems.
6. My first novel is currently at 17,385 words.
7. You will be able to guess my favourite philosopher from the title of the blog.
   
8. I read constantly. I also play hockey, go to circuit training and kickboxing when I can. I also love travelling.
9. My favourite colour is yellow.