Peak Oil

The world is living through a period of declining oil supplies. All attempts by politicians, capitalists and Nazis to deny this are black lies designed to dupe the sheep population.
The graph below illustrates the catastrophic reduction in oil production that has been experienced.



Without whale oil we would have nothing to power our whale oil lamps. The sudden rise in darkness levels will cause people to commit crime and lead to a rise in illegitimate children. Also without baleen, which is used for stiffening clothing, gentlemen will appear dishevelled and unattractive and so no gentleman shall be able to attract ladies of good virtue.

The only measure available to us is to ban the use of whale oil lamps by individuals and to make everyone live in giant communes in tree top settlements. If we do not ban individuals from using whale oil we will end up with drastic price rises in whale oil which will end civilisation and reduce us all to using lights made from bugs kept in jars. Whale oil has already reached (in 1855) reached $1500 a barrel, what more evidence is needed that it is time to abandon capitalism and democracy then this?

The Future Rocks

“Each household appliance is like a new science in my town” Morrissey

We live in amazing times. My work toilet has gotten in a Dyson Airblade dryer. It feels like I am in Buck Rodgers. You go along and put your hands into it, which is quite unsettling as all new technology should be. This machine is just waiting to rise up when the robots decide to kick off, then it will dismember users by cutting their hands off with superpowered air.

The other thing is it looks genuinely futuristic. Most technology nowdays is designed to be unnoticeable. Which is crap, all the cool stuff should be easily spotted. Like hoverpants, I did not learn to cycle a bike till last year because I was convinced we would all travel by hoverpants at this stage.

I have become dangerously obsessed with using it. I have drank 10 cups of water already today just to get back to it. I went to the other bathroom and drying my hands with a towel made me feel like a fucking animal. You know like the sort of inbred pumpkin who wipes his noise on his sleeve. I cannot wait to lord it over anyone who has not used the handryer of the future.

The Christianisation of Yule

I tried to go out and buy my traditional pagan tree, holly and mistletoe last year to find that the price had been driven up by Christians. I mean really this parthenogenesis cult even steals babies with orbs. The Roman God Sol Invictus whose feast day was December 25th. He was also drawn with an orb around his head the same way Christ is portrayed. And on his feast day gifts were exchanged.

Are none of my beliefs sacred to these plagiarists?

Columbo Drinking Game

Drink when
1. Columbo mentions his wife. Columbo does not in fact have a wife but a harem of nubile wenches eager to debase themselves for his every trenchcoated whim.
2. Columbo turns up completely at random in a stalkery way (two drinks if it is at a sporting event).
3. When there is a close up of the bad guy looking smug (you know the look of “ah this crumpled fool he will never catch me for my fiendishly over complicated murder plot”)
4. When Columbo destroys evidence.
5. When he says “there is just one more thing”

Robot Wars

Wired is reporting on the advances in using robots in war situations. This raises moral issues because it becomes much easier to use force if you are unlikely to suffer as a result.

Say the robots works exactly as planned, i.e. does not attempt to find Sarah Conners. Now instead of having to invade a country and risk votes and lives you get to drop "rods of god" from orbit and clean up afterwards with the robots mopper uppers.
Cut to TV newsflash
"Today our great superstate of Freedonia neutralised a threat to this great nation in 5 minutes with no loss of Freedonian lives. The dangerous goat herders of darkydarkistan who the government has secret evidence were involved in one of the following
1. Drugs that we do not get to tax
2. Use of weapons which we sold them
3. Looking at us funny
have been brought freedom. Now back our attempts to sell you stuff between videos of your comedic accidents"

Tinky Winky has converted to Islam. Renamed himself Mohammed

Fans of the Teletubbies were left confused and cranky Monday when the new episode revealed an attempt to spread Sharia law. In the episode Tinky Winky beats the shit out of Laa Laa because she refuses to cover up her sinful flesh.

Dipsy was not allowed render medical assistance to Laa Laa due to his having male genitalia on his head. Po who has also converted to Islam could have helped but after hearing Laa Laa and Dipsy had hugged in public had an unlikely cooking accident where boiling oil was spilled on Laa Laa.

Rupert the bear said of his close friend Tinky Winky "I love marmalade sandwiches and killing teachers. Yes if some teacher tried to rename me I would hope she was stoned".

Fans await with some confusion the next episode of the Teletubbies "Lets hunt and kill Miss Piggy".

Gold Standard

Money only has value because other people think it has value. Other people can think money has value because it can be exchanged for something generally recognized to be valuable (gold) or because they believe that other people believe that it has value (dollars and almost all other currencies are like this). The problem with the later “monopoly” money system is that governments can print out more money whenever they get into debt. Think of it like an “IOU from the government” that everyone accepts. When this happens there is more money floating around able to buy stuff so people are willing to pay more for stuff so prices go up.

So is the government being able to print out money backed by nothing but a promise ever a good idea? Most non Austrian school economists (those that follow the Mundell-Fleming model etc) think that it can be. Occasionally people may switch from the normal state of save a little, spend most, borrow a little to one of two other states. The inflationary state of spend a lot, save a little, borrow loads. The deflationary state of spend a little, save a lot, borrow very little. It might be irrational for people to live in these two states but one individual will find it difficult to swim against the tide. In fact when other individuals move the economy to one of these states it is in the individuals interests to act this way too. The advantage of being able to print or burn money when you want to is that this change in the money supply can move the economy from one of these strangely attractive undesirable states.

There are problems with backing a currency by Gold.
1. Gold was very useful when you wanted something small you could hide from rampaging Vikings. In a world where Vikings have quit their rampaging and now sell us flat pack furniture some unit of wealth that fits more the needs of today’s society might be useful
2. Everyone hording their gold seems strangely reminiscent of Scrooge MacDuck swimming in gold coins crossed with Humphrey Bogart in Terror in the Sierra Madre.
3. Gold is useful for making overpriced audio leads and Jesus pieces. It does have an intrinsic value for making things and this leads to the employment of jewelers and such. If we lock away all our gold it cannot be used to clad rappers out in bling.
4. When a currency becomes backed by gold, gold will rise in price. So a load of people will go out and start digging up gold. These people could better use there time creating something that had an intrinsic value that was not altered by it being used to back the currency.

I hope we have moved away from an economy of fear (of Vikings) and hoarding to one where we can value things based on what they cost to produce. I will discuss backing a currency by the unit of production (the kilowatt) in the next article.

Coffee Inflation

There is no medium and large coffee anymore there is Tall and Grande. The words used to describe coffee sizes seem to be undergoing some bizarre exponential growth. At the current rate only astronomical terms will be able to be used for coffee sizes. I predict your order of coffee will change each year

Tall->Grande->Continental->Planetary->Solar->Galactic->Universe

Actually while I am giving out bullshit theories everyone needs a good end of the world theory.
I predict the world will end when India plays China in the world cup soccer final. Observing any event affects its outcome. And the more accurately observed an event the more you are likely to affect the outcome. The most watched thing to date was the moon landings but that was only a few billion people with bad fuzzy black and white TV. Now imagine how much observing will be done by 10 billion people using High Def big screen TV’s.
Now a shot goes in and everyone in the world concentrates on the position and the velocity of the ball. Some will concentrate on one the rest on the other. At this moment so many billion observations will be made that both the position and the velocity of the ball will be precisely observed. This is an impossibility and the universe will disappear.

Gaia theory extemophiles

Gaia theory posits that “living and nonliving parts of the earth are viewed as a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism.” This predicts that organisms will change their environment to improve its habitability to life. Darwinian selection says that organisms will adapt to their environment.

We only have one planet to observe Gaia on. Mars and Venus do not seem to have successfully carried out Gaia feedback mechanisms. Other extraterrestrial environments cannot yet be studied with enough detail to find life yet alone examine how life is altering it’s environment.

However there exists sealed off environments on earth where extremophile organisms have lived cut off from the general biosphere. If Darwinian selection is correct these organisms will adapt to their environment. This can be seen in cave animals losing the use of their eyes or in the case of bacteria such as Snotties that live on sulfur compounds. Another example of extremophiles found in gold mines that use radioactivity as an energy source

Do these organisms alter their environment is a way that is beneficial for life? Note that is beneficial for their life, they are adapted for living in these extreme conditions. Have these cave bacteria altered the cave environment in a way that aids their existence? Particularly you are looking for a symbiotic relationship between two forms of bacteria whose ratio alters in the environment depending on whether the dominant bactria’s byproducts are reaching toxic levels. The two forms of bacteria would be expected to be adapted to live ideally at one extreme of the conditions present in the cave but whose dominance would move the cave environment to the other extreme of conditions where the other form is better adapted.
These bacteria would have the roles of white and black Daisies in a simple daisy world model.

If Gaia theory is accurate you would expect to find that in any cut off cave biosystem (at least) two types of bacteria will coexist whose ratio will depend primarily on the environmental factors that the other type of bacteria has created. If such symbiotic cave biosystems are found then Gaia theory has another piece of supporting evidence.

Next and Prediction

This article describes the physical problems with prediction of future events.

One issue that is rarely dealt with are the computational problems of such predictions. By this I do not mean their complexity but the actual possibility that such predictions can be made.
Take Newcomb’s paradox, a description of which can be found here. Essentially it is a game where if the machine can guess what you are going to do you lose money.

Now say the predictor is a program that is feed with all sorts of information about you and then uses that to make a certain prediction. Such programs exist. Shannon made one that guessed which number you will pick next.

Now scared of how this first program will be used to rip you off you decide to figure out how it is going to guess. You get the same program copy it to make a second program. Then you find out what it is going to say you will do and you do the opposite. This is a similar idea to that used by Turing to show that you cannot tell in general using a program whether a program will terminate. Essentially his argument boiled down to if you could make a DoesTerminate() program then you could feed this program this input

If (DoesTerminate()==True)
Loop forever
Else
Stop

In the same way you could have a predictor P() and use it in your program
If (p()==2)
pick 1
else
pick 2

You could argue that the predictor could know you using a copy of itself and take this into account. Such arguments do not hold for the halting problem and they do not hold for the "prediction problem". This means that no computation can ever predict every action you are going to do.

1 million IQ points

How about aiming to make people smarter in a measurable way?

There are things that make your life better or at least easier. These include being good looking, being born in a country that is not overly corrupt. Another thing that helps is being smart. It is easy to get carried away here but essentially when people are smarter their lives tend to be easier.

Charities tend not to make their aims measurable. They tend to say “help the poor” rather then reduce “teach x number of people to read”. This makes it harder to tell what a charity has achieved. Because of this I think there is an advantage to having a declared measurable ambition.

The persons age or their smartness does not matter the aim is simply to make them smarter in a measurable way that helps improve their life. IQ is not a great measure of intelligence. But it is the best measure we have. For all its faults IQ does seem to be correlated to earnings and quality of life.
There are a few ways you can increase IQ. The easiest for me to do is to make the environment more stimulating. This has already (probably) increased the average IQ by 18 points in the last fifty years.

Is increasing peoples IQ a worthwhile aim?

The Taste Delusion

The industry based on separating out good and bad versions of a similar food stuff is a sham.

Experts cannot tell the difference between good and bad vintages of wine
People cannot even tell red wine from white wine.
They cannot tell single malt whiskey from blended whiskey
The place you drink coffee matters more then the coffee
Basically people will think anything fancy is nice even water from a garden hose if you dress it up a bit

Bog Body Business

Everyone wants to sponsor carbon sinks, but why just sponsor the sexy rainforest ones and ignore the bog ones?
There are hippy schemes where you can donate money to help preserve bogs.

How about a capitalist way that you can ensure a piece of bog is preserved? I want to do this by setting up a business that relies upon the continued existence of the bog you purchase. I am of the belief that just because you are dead does not mean you are no longer useful.

So I want to set up a graveyard for bog bodies. Your burial provides for buying a bit of bog that is kept as bog from then on. This preserves a carbon sink as well as your corpse. You get to decide how you are buried, so you can be happy that you get to mess with the minds of archaeologists in the future. I think I would get buried in a wedding dress surrounded by statues of Jimmy Saville.


Being a bog body the choice of gingers for thousands of years.

Deal or no deal

Watching this program makes me wish full on Charlton Heston biblical plagues upon the world.

This guy simply sums up the major problems

Playing the game boils down to
1. Do an average on the remaining boxes and expect an offer of this much.
2. If you get offered a small bit less then this but really need the money accept the offer.
3. Do not ask people who look lucky to help you when they open their sealed box. They have no effect on the box you idiot.

2. is interesting because it implies people who are poor sometimes have to accept sub optimal choices. By this I mean if someone offers me 1000 euro and I refuse based on the "correct" play I might feel annoyed but I will be ok, however if i needed the money to pay my rent I would probably have to take it.

However if I lost 1,000,000 playing correctly I would have acted like an idiot. Maybe this is to do with moneys marginal utility in that if you do not have much money a small amount can really help and if you have a lot even a large increase is of not that much benefit.

Taxing Cannabis

Due to the reduction in house sales there is a one billion deficit in the Irish budget. In order to make up this deficit the finance minister needs either to cut spending or raise taxes. I want to examine the effect of allowing cannabis to be sold and taxed by the government on this deficit.

The amount of cannabis usage can be estimated from the amount of seizures "Cannabis resin valued at €48.7m was seized". Between 10% and 5% of all drugs are seized according to internationally agreed figures. So this means that the current cannabis market in Ireland is worth conservatively around 500 million Euro.

This 500 million could make how much tax for the exchequer?
Profits on cannabis is unlikely to be as high as the 400 times mark up on heroin.
This can be evidenced by the lack of cannabis dealers shooting each other. Still as this is an illegal drug it is reasonable to assume the costs of the actual product are minimal.


So if the legal seller of cannabis took half the cost to create and distribute the product and the exchequer took the other half in tax (this is a conservative estimate of the possible tax take) then at a minimum 250 million Euros in tax could be gathered each year from current levels of cannabis usage.

Lotteries are stupid just like voting

The argument goes that lotteries are stupid because you have a very low chance of winning. So low in fact that you are more likely to die before you win then to win.

This argument is weird because we are encouraged to do more difficult tasks where we are even less likely to affect the outcome. Voting in an election takes more effort and time then buying a lottery but your vote virtually never decides an election.

There has been one case of a single vote deciding the election of an Irish TD. In the 2002 Irish general election, Dan Neville won a seat in the parliament by just one vote. There have been an average of more then 150 td’s in Ireland in its 27 elections. Each TD represents at most 30,000 people but say 25,000. So 27 elections of 25,000 people is one out of 101,250,000 total votes decided an election. You might argue “But if no one voted there would be no point having an election?” Well if no one bought a lottery ticket the lottery would not keep running for long either.

So the chance of your vote being the deciding factor in an election is less then your chance of winning the euromillions lottery.

How to pick good lottery numbers

There are three decisions that are used in deciding the numbers used in my lottery site

1. What numbers are rarely chosen
-An analysis of past winning results as described in this paper
-A simpler method is described in "maximum entropy parallel computation and lotteries"

2. What types of patterns are rarely chosen
A number of patterns are known to be avoided
-Picking numbers with the same distance between them. For example picking numbers that are always separated by 6 numbers
-Trying To Be Random in Selecting Numbers for Lotto
-The statistics of smallest space in lottery tickets

4. What specific patterns are rarely chosen
-Hot hand and gamblers fallacy
-Does the behaviour of lottery players consist Gamblers Fallacy? Evidence from Taiwan Market. I cannot find a link for this paper currently
-There are some numbers that are known to be chosen commonly. Previously winning numbers, certain patterns with low Kolmogorov complexity.

By combining knowledge from the research listed I have produced a lottery betting program that improves your average return

Fair Trade Heroin

I always wondered about fair trade. They take a product and pay above the market rate for it. This is done on the grounds that this extra cost improves the farmers standard of living and is thus beneficial to everyone because the buyer gets to feel like they are not exploiting poor third world farmers.

How much help to farmers get? Well they get about a third above the market rate.
“Fair Trade partners with cooperatives of subsistence farmers to ensure higher-than-market prices – they can usually guarantee cooperatives about $1.26 per pound of beans – 28 cents higher than the commercial market price.”

When these beans are then sold the mark up for the conventional coffee seller is about 5 times the original cost. For the Fair trade coffee company it is about 4 times. So essentially making 5 times the market rate is classed as immoral whereas making 4 times is more ethical according to the fair trade advocates.


Now here is what annoys me. The same standards that apply to fair trade commodities are not applied to other commodities produced by third world farmers. For someone to lecture you on the morality of fair trade they should not consume any third world produce (that has not been extensively processed) that has more then a 4 times mark up.

Heroin has a 400 times mark up. I believe and look for evidence that cocaine and marijuana have similar “price gouging” levels of mark up. So next time someone lectures you on fair trade coffee ask them if they have ever taken drugs and what was the fair trade efforts they made in this purchase?

Obviously a dealer cannot start a fair trade smack den, my point is that drug users should consider the production of their drugs in the same way they might with any other product. Also anti-drug enforcers should realise the effect their actions have on causing the exploitation of third world farmers.

Strangely this is both a pro legalisation and anti legalisation argument. What would the consequences of having heroin available at one eightieth the cost be? Junkies would no longer have to steal for heroin as it would be so cheap. But given the rules of supply and demand the use of heroin would soar.

Intelligent Picks of Lottery Tickets

When humans pick lottery numbers they tend to make certain mistakes
• Pick low numbers like birth dates. By Benford’s law most significant numbers in your life will be low valued (house numbers etc)
• Not picking two consecutive numbers. Consecutive numbers “look” non-random so people do not pick consecutive numbers.
• Hot hand and gamblers fallacy. They believe little plastic balls have memory.
• Other odd beliefs based on picking “shapes” dates and sports scores.
• Not picking numbers on the side of a ticket.

By analyzing how many people win when certain numbers come up you can tell how many people pick a certain number. I have done this for the Euromillions lottery and the result is here


The average return on the lottery is 50%. Bookies give about 85% and stocks on shares have an average return of greater then 100%. Non jackpot winnings are 30%. Using shunned numbers brings this value up to over 50% in our tests. This is because when you do win you share your winnings with less people. If jackpots increase by the same percentage this would bring up the average return to around 75%. The jackpot figures are estimates because jackpots are such rare events as to make calculations using them dubious.

Good Night and Good Luck

"After I shut the door and started back to the living room, he yelled something at me, but I couldn't exactly hear him. I'm pretty sure he yelled "Good luck!" at me. I hope not. I hope to hell not. I'd never yell "Good luck!" at anybody. It sounds terrible, when you think about it." The catcher in the Rye

I have stopped wishing people “good luck”. Luck does not exist and claiming it does is irrational. People who are what we think of as lucky are just more observant and open to new things. So instead of "Good luck" you really are just wishing for them "Be observant and open to new experiences".

Atheist Business

Pay for Prayer

This great website allows you to pay so that when you get sick you will be prayed for. Think of it like medical insurance but you do not get anything for your money.

I have a business idea. We get religious people to pay us to hang around with people they hate. Then when god sends floods, locusts and generally starts turning people into salt they will be beside us and so swept away in the godly wrath.

So we get Christians to pay atheists to drag their enemies into gods friendly fire accidents. If you are gay or a woman or any other group god hates you can probably get paid more as he must be more likely to spite you.

There is a guy who offers to deliver mail to any off your cursed friends after the rapture. Rather then complain about Christians being morons and how the church is just a giant confidence scam why not get involved in the fraud?

Clonmacnoise and New Orleans

People make mistakes. When they do they can throw good money after bad to fix them or they can admit their error and rectify the situation.
Clonmacnoise is a small monastery in Ireland that was once a thriving town it “flanks the east side of the River Shannon, in a shallow valley close to the flood plain”.



When over the course of many years the town kept flooding and the expanded settlements could not be protected people moved on. There were other places more suitable to live in. The same has happened in many locations. When people learned the area was prone to natural disasters they choose to live elsewhere. Sometimes it takes years to happen but sitting like king Canut denying the power of nature will result in you getting your feet wet eventually.

In some cases the cost benefit analysis is such that it is worth engineering your way around natural obstacles. Holland and London have both for the moment succeeded in keeping out tidal flooding.

New Orleans is underwater and sinking. You can pay billions to save areas that are underwater but would that money serve better helping those who were displaced from these areas? The argument that “The Bush administration actually wants these neighborhoods below sea level to die on the vine” is meant as a damning indictment but may actually be the factual and sensible policy of the Bush Administration.

Are the subaqua areas of New Orleans worth saving? Or is that throwing money into a hole. Money that should be spent helping the people who decided to live in an area that nature likes to beat up occasionally. Do these people want to live in that area anymore having seen first hand how Canut style ranting at the sea does nothing? At the end of the day a city is just a bunch of people, The people of New Orleans should be listened to to see what they want done with the money donated to help them.

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

This posits an interesting question. Would you take a million euro if
it meant that some random person you had never and would never meet in
China died? I would hope I would not. But would I buy a product that
cost 1 euro less if the money saved meant that the Chinese worker had
a 1 in a million extra chance of dying? I probably would or at least I probably do every time I go shopping.
This is an economic paradox. People make the same mistake about betting all the
time. But betting with peoples lives is wrong is it not?

An apology to Neanderthal man

The Danes have apologised for the actions of their ancestors 1200
years ago. Well it's a start but I think we need to go further.
Shouldn't Homo Sapiens apologist now to the homonids we wiped out in a
act of inter species genocide. Actually lets dig up the dinosaurs and
apologise that our rat ancestors ate their eggs into extinction.

Is God a conspiracy theory?

I just read this article by Bruce Schneier and he made two points about conspiracy theories
1. They seem to be cause because people want to believe that big
results must have big causes. So the human eye could not just be made
by "chance mutations"
2. Once people accept them all evidence is used to confirm them.
Contrary evidence is ignored or used to show how some grand conspiracy
is covering up the truth. So evidence that atheists commit less crime
becomes part of a scientific and media attempt to destroy theism and
such

So does theism follow any other patterns of conspiracy's or am I
overstretching an analogy?

Why do banks never prove their identity to you?

I Just had the following phone conversation. My bank phoned me up and then asked me to confirm I was me

Bank: We will just need your address there
Me: Sorry I cannot give you that unless you confirm you are my bank
Bank: Well if you give us your address we will confirm it here
Me: Well if you give me my address I will believe you are my bank
Bank: Did you get the letter we sent you last week saying we would be calling?
Me: No I didn’t but that letter would not prove you are the bank calling now anyway
Bank: Ok then it must be in the post we will ring you back later when it arrives

Unless the bank proves to you who they are, or that the ATM you are using belongs to them, how are you supposed to have trust?

What do you have to do to get dumped?

A WOMAN who admitted the attempted murder of her husband and three children has been given five suspended life sentences after her husband begged she not be sent to jail.

The 28-year-old - who cannot be named for legal reasons - set fire to the family home almost two years ago. Yesterday,

She set fire to your family home? Sweet imagine getting to break up with someone and not having to do the you are dumped talk, how cool would that be? no guilt or anything.

the court heard that despite almost killing her husband and children, she is now living back in the family home and has been forgiven by her partner.

Has this woman got a golden gee or something? What on earth could she offer that would be worth the risk of getting yourself barbequed? I know what your thinking but no even if she could cook like Nigella Lawson would you really trust her around open flames?

it was also revealed that she'd moved her things into a flat in Limerick the week before the fire, where four insurances policies were found, the largest of which was worth €180,000 if her husband had died.

Call me cynical but does the idea of a paranoid schizophrenics with such careful planning seem suspicious to you? I heard in the radio news that the woman believed that satan had told her the house was possesed and should be burned down. I never pictured satan as this Eddie Hobbesian figure of shrewd financial planning.

"Hi I'm Eddie Satan. Before you kill your family it is important that you lay plans for your financial future. I would fill out Hibernian life assurance form 1a6C" I never pictured delusional hallucinations as so helpful and informative.

The need for the toll

Why can't women understand some vital aspects of the male Psyche? For instance why we must have the toll fare ready.
There are grave consequences to arriving at the toll bridge without the correct change at hand. The toll roads authority have a big list of two types of people who will be rounded up when the revolution comes.

People who do not have the correct change ready. Sensors on the machines make sure the coins are at body temperature from being held in clammy hand sweating in anticipation of the pressure of completing the toll gauntlet correctly.

People who put in too much money. A rounded up coin are obviously too swish and should be rounded up at first available opportunity

Extra point are clearly given to anyone who sellotapes the coins together showing the forward planning that made this country great.

I hope to illustrate many of the apparently mysterious methods of the Irish male. Why do we park a mile away from a GAA ground "so we can get away quick", why do we leave one biscuit in the packet. why do we need to have a severed head before going to the doctor, why do sandwiches taste better when eaten from a boot and even for the posher folk why does Heino taste better from a CBG glass? All these questions will be answered

Irish Summer Tourism

I have been warning about the lack of investment in Irish tourism for years. All the investments in golf courses have left our industry wide open to the vagaries of the weather.
This summer is the rainiest in years damaging the sales of sun related products.
People are holidaying abroad. As Ireland has nothing to do in the rain. This need not have happened. In 1985 the rainy summer lead to an epidemic of moving statues.


If we had nurtured these young upcoming moving statues we could now be a Mecca for religious pilgrimages. Instead the Mexicans with their Jesus’ face in the toast and the fence with the Virgin Mary have cornered the market in workaday miracles.

So when the tourist industry complains about the lack of income tell them that had they invested in these statues and not let their gesticulation talents go unappreciated Ireland could have been the world capital of motile marble.

Should Rushdie be Knighted?

I have heard numerous arguments over whether Salman Rushdie should receive a knighthood. The arguments that say no seem based about three issues
1. Knighthoods are bad because the Queen gives them
2. His books are awful
3. We should lube up and bend over and take it from some Islamic nutjobs who are throwing a hissy fit because someone has insulted their imaginary friend.

I think it is important to recommend Rushdie for a knighthood for services to a particular set of individuals. The much maligned ugly bloke.

What hope it gives us that such a spectacularly ugly bloke has managed to marry a woman so insanely out of his league.


Chalk one up to the ugly blokes on this one. There has not been such an unlikely couple since Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts my only guess is this is another answer to my previous question of "are there other celebrities with giant extremities?"

For services in giving hope to ugly men alone he deserves a knighthood.

Pete Doherty's Hands

Did you see Johnathan Ross? They are giant,


I spend the night having nightmares that his giant hands were going to come for me. How can he play a guitar is it an oversized childs toy one?

His meaty farmer fists are about twice the size of his face, what is going on here are there other celebrities with giant extremities?

The Rise of the Irish murder

The trial of Rachel O’Reilly’s husband for her murder is the main headline on newspapers and the top story on news programs. Why is this case is so mysteriously gripping? In “the Decline of the English Murder” George Orwell summed up the ideal murder to grip the media watching public.

“The murderer should be a little man of the professional class…living an intensely respectable life somewhere in the suburbs, and preferably in a semi-detached house... He should go astray through cherishing a guilty passion for his secretary or the wife of a rival professional man, and should only bring himself to the point of murder after long and terrible wrestles with his conscience... The means chosen should, of course, be poison. In the last analysis he should commit murder because this seems to him less disgraceful, and less damaging to his career, than being detected in adultery”

Instead of poisoning with all the forethought and cunning that requires we have a brutal beating but otherwise the details seem oddly similar.

Orwell summed up the reason why these domestic murders so gripped people saying they were the “product of a stable society where the all-prevailing hypocrisy did at least ensure that crimes as serious as murder should have strong emotions behind them.” The hypocrisy was the belief that a murder was preferable to the shame of an affair and of divorce. No “why” has yet been proposed in the Rachel O’Reilly murder trial. The murders which gripped the public imagination in Orwell’s time were the type that people could in some way understand the motivations of lust and social standing behind them. What is frightening in this case is that the level of interest in it suggests that people can understand a crime that is seemingly without motivation.

The Feckin Vikings are back

They have recreated a Viking longboat and are sailing it towards Ireland. Right see you at the round tower. I told you that new Ikea store was just a ploy to sneak more Nordic people in to help invade.

The longship is due in Dublin by August 14, when celebrations are planned.

I wonder how many celebrations there would be for reruns of other invasions? I bet the Poles would love a rerun of 1939, my how they would chuckle merrily at that one.

If the longships were not bad enough these horn headed half wits drive around Dublin in military vehicles. The Viking Splash Tour might seem like some sort of touristy laugh but what other invasion would be rerun daily for tourists?

Wormhole energy

There is talk about using solar power in Australia to heat air make it rise and thus drive turbines.

Could you use wave power in a similar way. Think of the wormhole on the Inis Mor Aran island waves at the base crash into it and force air up the shaft of the hole. The wormhole is a handball alley sized shaft of about 12 m by 6 m. Say the average wave is a metre high and you get 12 a minute. So you have 70m^3 of air moving backwards and forwards constantly. This should be a lot easier then building a solar power tower as the tower part is already made by nature.
There are not that many wormholes like this around but there are plenty of cliffs. Could you use a cliff to make up one side of the tower and rig the other side of the tower off the cliff? The main problem with wave power is the force is so strong as to wreck everything. A strong see can pick up boulders and throw them through your machines. A system such as this avoids this problem by putting the turbines far away from the sea.
Using cliffs to turn waves to wind to power could it work?

Number Theory Hacking

Every now and again you I see a sum that I try and code up into a scripting language to see if my intuition about the problem is right.
So on page 237 of Pickover's "A passion for mathematics" is see an interesting problem.
Find x where y is an integer and x squared times 1597 plus one is an integer.
So I coded this up in Ruby as

puts "trying to find y=sqrt(1597xˆ2 + 1) problem"
y=0.1
x=1
while !y.integer?
y=Math.sqrt((1597*(x*x))+1)
x=x+1
end
puts y

The answer is a very big number. So big that using a static language is likely to lead to errors as saying int x or somesuch will lead to overflows. However ruby just keeps churning away without yet reaching an answer.
So my question is
1. How do you rapidly code up these number theory problems?
2. What language has the right mixture of rapid programming and speed of execution for doing so?

Change the scientific method

All programs used in the calculations for a paper should be open source

People make mistakes. Programs people make make mistakes. These result in the wrong results appearing in scientific papers. When this happens the scientists put their hands up and admit the mistake which has to require pawn shop balls. We need to change the scientific method so that these mistakes happen less often.
The scientific method changes as we learn new things. Double blind tests for instance come from about 1950. For details of changes in the scientific method listen to this

The time has come to change the scientific method to take the use of software into account. All programs used in the calculations for a paper should be open source. This means we are not just relying on noticing errors in a papers results but can gauge accuracy by examining the source code and running our own tests on it.

Leftie Greens

Why are the green party left wing? Should right wing conservatives not seek to conserve the environment?
Looking at the Green parties principles none seem left wing.

• All political, social and economic decisions should be taken at the lowest effective level.

Down right libertarian in fact probably slightly right wing as almost all these decisions can be taken at the individual level and so will lead to market effects.

• Society should be guided by self-reliance and co-operation at all levels.

hmmm oxymoronic

• The need for world peace overrides national and commercial interests.

Ever since the invention of nuclear weapons, and the development of the ability to kill everyone, everyone has recognized this to be true.

• The poverty of two-thirds of the world's family demands a redistribution of the world's resources.

This last one sounds left wing but it does not say how redistribution will occur. If it is we will take money from rich people it is left wing. If it is we will free up trade to allow poor people earn more it is right wing.

We Are For...
• A basic income for all citizens.

Left wing

We Are Against...

• The depopulation of the countryside and over-crowding in the cities.
Like Pol Pot? Left wing

• Control of industry by large national and multinational companies.

Most right wing people would support removal of subsidies on big business so this is not necessarily left wing

• Land and property speculation.

This is left wing.

Grim Thoughts

Who should get the few mechanical respirators that can mean the difference between life and death?

Why should you care about ventilators? Lets do the sum based on
How likely something is (In the next 50 years say)
How bad it is
How much you can do about it

So to take large meteorite strike of earth
Not very likely in the next 50 years
Massively bad
Not much. Ask that your tax money goes into investigating it is about all.

Take a bad car crash
Pretty likely
400 people a year in Ireland so not likely to wipe out society
Lots. Seat belts, speed limit, don’t drink and drive

Influenza Pandemic

Very likely
Very bad. !918 had over 50 million deaths.
A bit. At a personal level live healthy and maybe stock up on face masks. Ask that your tax money goes into investigating it. And I believe you can make real research steps.

Can you make a respirator to keep people breathing? Can you train up to care for people on respirators from your current skill set. Can you access medical records on the last influenza pandemic to help assess the general power of certain cures?

By this I mean that in the 1918 epidemic Americans found

Only one therapeutic measure, transfusing blood from recovered patients to new victims, showed any hint of success.

George Whipple
Did any researchers from other countries confirm this result?

It could be that ventilators are not the choke point in delivering care in an influenza pandemic the choke point could be something you know about. So think about it and see if there is anything you can do.

Ha Ha, I am not dead

A H5N1 pandemic has not happened yet so we should just forget about it?
Steps by public health car workers have meant that an influenza pandemic has not occurred. It does not mean that no influenza pandemic will occur.
As Dr Seuss put it “to us their gift was time”

Geological Porn

There is now a phone line that you can call to listen to a glacier melt.
I am told the phone line is constantly engaged. Which makes me conclude that people will do mind numbingly boring things in order to be made feel bad about the environment. Mind you the success of "An Inconvenient Truth" should have told us that already. Based on this idea I am going to start the following high toll services
1. Entropy Live: listen to static as the universe head towards heat death
2. Live images from the ozone hole
3. Extinct species webcam. Look at our skeleton of the dodo.

Also does anyone think the idea of geological features having their own sex chat lines kind of odd? What other Karst related 1890-wank lines will be created?
Glacial passage feels a flood pulse coming
Virgin passage needs exploring*
Listen to these filthy mud pools*


*warning no actual sounds are present in this recording

Grave Robbery

I am pretty sure it is wrong to have a ghoulish fascination with grave robbery but here goes. If you know any other famous corpses that have been dug up can you tell me?
Abraham Lincoln: Failed attempt to abduct honest Abe.

Benny Hill: Apparently they were trying to steal the gold and jewels he was buried with. Do you think they made that “de de de ditta de de de ditta” noise as they dug? Can you picture the police chasing them around the graveyard?

Gram Parsons

Oliver Cromwell: posthumously executed. These royalists really want to make sure a job is done don’t they?

Alistair Cooke had his bones stolen. This was nasty for him but worse for the people who got them put into themselves.

Most saints: the Catholic Church get all voodoo when it comes to bones of holy people.

Evolution

1. any process of formation or growth; development: the evolution of a language; the evolution of the airplane.

When the moderator asked nine candidates to raise their hands if they "didn't believe in evolution," three hands went into the air

By the dictionary definition you would have to believe in it. Who believes there is no process of formation or growth? Now it could be interpreted as a question about the theory of evolution but that is different. It is not just a quibble the difference is similar to "do you believe in justice" and "do you believe in justice in North Korea".

Suppose we asked a group of Presidential candidates if they believed in the existence of atoms, and a third of them said "no"?

What is the current view on this? do electrons exist when they are not being measured?

Glasses Fixing

Why do opticians fix glasses for free?
I have gone in a few times to a random optician with my bent pair on glasses. They always say that if they break them tough, or words to that effect, and then bend them into shape of put the lense back in for free. In what other business can you walk into a random shop and get your product fixed? A mechanic who fixed the car of anyone who came along for free would go out of business pretty quickly. Why do opticians offer this free service? Is it done in all countries?

Stand back I have got a word

Words are weapons ones so heinous we should keep them locked away. The military should make sonic grenades to stun people. These when thrown into a room containing a minority will say words so vile that they will be completely incapacitated.



Throw it at Irish people and when it says “Mick, Paddy” they will fall to the floor unable to move. Of course this only works if it is said with an English accent saying it in an Irish accent is completely inoffensive. This does lead to certain problems the “Ginger” grenade probably will not work as it is hard to tell someones hair colour from their voice.

It does not matter whether the word is used as a slur to humiliate someone it only matter who says it.

"There are no dirty words, only dirty minds." - Lenny Bruce

Duracell, ginger nuts, kipper, Carrot-top, copper-top

Gingers chill the fuck out. Kids are bastards, people are bastards you will be called names, now lets get on with our lives. No people should not call you names, but if we stopped people doing half the things they shouldn’t do life would be no fun. The sterile moribund infantile really fucking dull society that would result in everyone being insulted all the time is not a place I want to live in. If avoiding that means some moron makes a joke occasionally I will live with that.

And it is not the same as racism, homophobia or sexism. No one ever got hung from a tree or stoned for having red hair. Comparing name calling to racism is like comparing apples and thermonuclear warheads.

Take the whoremogering cripple Larry Flynt. He has the balls to be friends with people he disagrees with. People who sued him. This scumbag even went to jail so that you can get offended and no one else has to care. He fought to stop a situation where “All anyone would have to prove is that "he upset me" or "she made me feel bad." The lawsuits would be endless, and that would be the end of free speech”.

And you why don’t you grow a pair? You might get slagged over having glasses or being Canadian or being southern Canadian so what? No one is perfect, everyone is disabled in some way. Everyone is either too old too young too smart or too dumb. Suck it up, life is far to short to care about what other people think. Do you take offence at something I say? I do not care. I find it offensive that you expect me to change and hide my opinions just so you do not feel bad.

I think God is sending us a message: "If you can't take a joke,
go fuck yourselves."
--Woody Allen

Shopping line economics

Why do you let people with few items ahead of you in the paying line of a supermarket? Presumably it is more annoying to wait when you know you will take a short time to do your transaction. At what point do people decide to let someone ahead of them?
It would seem to be based on
1. Number of items they have
2. Number of items the person behind you has
3. The length of the queue. It seems that if the queue is long letting someone ahead of you is of less marginal return.

It is not in the supermarkets interest that queue skipping happens. Bulk purchases take less time for the amount of goods then small purchases. As in each item takes a second and the paying bit takes 30 seconds so you would like lots of items and few payments. So shops would prefer big purchases. Letting people ahead of you rewards small purchases by reducing the waiting time for them which supermarkets should want to discourage.

The must be some generally accepted graph of when it is expected for you to let someone ahead of you. If you have any evidence of when people are let ahead in a supermarket queue please comment.

Lismullen henge

I joined the green pen brigade today when I wrote a politician an email. I sent Dick Roche the minister for the environment the text below. He has the right to remove the newly discovered Lismullen henge. I think people and particularly politicians (who have five year life cycles) do not have the cognitive architecture needed to make such decisions.

I am writing to you in relation to the planned motorway in the Tara-Skryne valley. I would however like you to consider how your decisions will look to someone at the same remove from us as we are to the creators of the original megalithic monuments.
The Long Now organisation asks people to think about how their actions will affect the long term future. To illustrate how we can affect the future they are building a clock designed to run for ten millennia. This "clock of the long now" costs millions of dollars and will serve as a tourist attraction. The megalithic sites of Ireland are a form of clock of the long now that have already operated for over five millennia.

Economists describe the daily discount rate as the amount of consumption we are willing to put off today to save for later. Cats, who have a very low daily discount rate, will gorge and starve rather then ration food over a period of time. Humans however are capable of seeing how our decisions now will affect the future. It is rare that we make a decision that we know will have consequences more then a few decades from now. You however have a decision to make about preserving Lismullen henge in the Tara-Skryne valley that you know will affect the world for millennia. I ask you to consider the geological timeframe that the consequences of any decision on this site will persist.

Organ Donation

“A Dutch television station has provoked outrage after revealing that a new show will feature three ill contestants competing to receive a kidney.
The television programme will see a terminally ill woman select one of the three for the organ transplant operation.”
I am claiming on this idea.

“How about this for a show. We get 10 people on the transplant list one needing kidneys and a heart and another lungs etc. We then have a competition to see which one is killed to get organs for the rest of them. I know I am going to get a comment telling me this has already happened.”

Homemade ventilator 3

Could existing ventilators be modified to increase the availability of ventilation?
This paper “A Single Ventilator for Multiple Simulated Patients to Meet Disaster Surge” suggests that four people could use a single ventilator in a disaster situation

This blog suggests that the number of ventilators would need to be doubled to cater for a pandemic would be an extra 200,000 in the US. This would triple the current number. The paper above suggests it might be possible for current ventilators to cover this shortfall.

All these ventilators need to be manned by skilled personnel. These medical staff will themselves be affected by the flu pandemic. So the numbers of skilled staff to operate and repair ventilators and to nurse pandemic patients is still a constraint.

Homemade ventilator 2

Seems like this idea is actually being pursued by some one who knows what they are doing.
Pandemic Ventilator Project
They use a bellow design. I wonder how this is superior to a fan based system? The DIY Powered Respirator described here might be modified.
An estimate of the amount of energy required to breath is given here. Which back of the envelope is less then 20 watts. The fan in the DIY respirator is 13 watts so my sums are probably wrong.
So can a pc fan or a squirrel cage blower be made to operate for 3 seconds pumping 500 ml of oxygen into the lungs and then to allow this air to escape in 2 seconds? A microcontroller could be used to time this.

An alternative design is some sort of Iron lung. This gets around many of the nasty infection problems a putting a tube down your throat could lead to. However according to here
"This style of ventilator would be of no use in a flu outbreak, in as much as flu usually floods the lungs with fluids, and you have no way to remove the fluids."
So maybe homemade iron lungs are not the way to go?



Another thing that would be needed are sensors to
1. Signal when the machine failed to work correctly.
2. Signal when the patients gas exhalation or pressure were not normal.

Why might a DIY respirator be necessary? Some of the mathematics of ventilator shortage are on the Pandemic Ventilator Project site. And the cold numbers on survival rates without a ventilator are here.

Fight Like Apes

Whelans 24/05/2007
After having “Lend me your face” stuck in my head for the last week I decided to go see this band in case they were half as good as that tune.
The band consists of
Some beardy man who dances round like a monkey with a miniature symbol.
A scatological singer with the temperament of a spoiled three year old.
The worlds tallest bass player, but he is under investigation for use of performance enhancing afro.
An oddly normal drummer who might be on an exchange program from Kraftwork.

The songs sound like demented nursery ryhmes all bounce and menace. Which is a very good thing as hearing another sensitive singer songwriter just might send me postal. Top notch live band this, they jump around the stage, playing the piano with their heads eating the microphones and they have fans who do a dance that is like hares fighting. Do you know how many bands get their own dance? These things are rationed carefully.

So go see this band and if you live far away buy the ep tie people to chairs and make them listen to it. You can tickle them a bit to but not so much they wee themselves.

Great Islamists of Irish History

Again the sickening Islamofascist brigade has infiltrated Irish schools. A book promoting the ideology of Islamic rules of modesty is on the Irish leaving cert course.

A cunningly disguised Al Qaeda infiltrator called Peig Sayers formed a sleeper cell off the coast of Kerry and endured a life of peasantry, contagious abortion, “what’s wrong with the potatoes?”, an beal bocht and general malnourished red neckitude to persuade Irish women to engage in the wearing of traditional Muslim headscarves. Peig was never observed in public without the "traditional Muslim headscarve", the only explanation for this can be that she was a secret Muslim spy.





And now people want to wear these scarves around? Next people will want to be allowed wear immodest clothing. Worse they will try to decide what color patch we are allowed to make them wear.



A picture of Peig, probably planning a Jihad. Have you noticed that you never see her and Osama Bin Laden in the same place? Coincidence or something more sinister?

Meeting Gordon Brown

I was working in a shoe shop in Cape Cod when Kennedy overdosed on ocean. A few days later I see Gordon Brown wandering round the shop with some of his family. I point him out to the manager saying “He is going to be the next prime minister of Britain” I said this as they do not have a chancellor of the exchequer in the States that I know of and he goes over for a chat, no one else recognised him. Anyway later on Gordon brown starts queuing up with some shopping. He must have noticed that some of the people ahead of him were ripping out a coupon from one of those tourist leaflets that are left lying around. So he asks me If I have any of those coupon booklets. I grab one from behind the counter and give it to him. He really carefully tears out the coupon and hands it to me for his 10 dollar discount. Now someone who has to be earning 200K dollars a year delicately tearing out a ten dollar coupon is quite an odd thing to do. It is how you want the guy who controls your tax money to act though I suppose.

Road Safety Adverts 2

Have you seen the latest Irish road safety advert?

How pervy is that? Do you know what the vasoconstriction caused by having your legs crushed and the common results of a spinal injury are? An erection. Yeah the guy who gets pinned to the wall has a massive stiffy. Kind of hard to view the ad in the same way now isn’t it?
While on the subject am I wrong for staring at the tits of the girl in the Samantha Mumba body to body road safety ad? Check her out just before she gets loafed by her boyfriend, where she is flying through the air. Oh sorry is being turned on by a road safety advert not socially acceptable?

Baby on board

Thanks for telling me because I was planning on ramming you. I must remember to read the rules of the road section where it describes how to really drive safe in the case of the other car contains an infant. You know the bit that tells you to stop treating the road like a demolition derby and to let the most sober person drive should you realise an infant is on the road. These signs remind us that we should feel no responsibility to other road users , ones who do not drink breast milk, and that is a service to us all.

Pfizer are Pimps

Prostitution is illegal in Ireland and in most of the United States. Nevada (and not all of it) have legalised it. Making money organising prostitution is generally called being a pimp and legally is a crime called "living of immoral earnings" or something like that.

Prostitution is having sex with someone for payment. This behavior has been observed in many monkey species particularly the Bonobo chimpanzee.

Being a porn star is having sex with someone for payment. This means it is a form of prostitution. The organisers of the porn industry are thus pimps as they organize people to have sex for money. Yet porn stars are not arrested and the producers (strange term that) of pornographic films have channel 4 reality TV shows and awards dinners for them. Actors in non pornographic films engaging in full frontal sex "12 songs" is one example of such a film. These actors are pornstars with better dialogue.

Recently sex has become subject to investigation with people having sex in MRI scanners and TV documentaries. Also sex has been medicalised. Drugs such as Viagra have been created. These drugs have to be tested. This testing involves seeing if the drug does indeed aid sex to take place. People taking part in scientific trials generally receive a small payment. They are having sex for money. This makes them prostitutes. Pfizer and other drug companies profit as a result of these drugs which could only be brought to market because of these experiments. They are thus pimps.

Prostitution is the most hypocritical topic in our society. Sex is used to sell everything. But you are not allowed to sell sex.
A few objections arise
1. The sex industry is dangerous. Yes it is, follow that logic and ban wooden products and never use anything wooden again.
America's Most Dangerous Jobs
Job Number Of Fatalities Fatality Rate*
Timber Cutters 105 122.1
Fishermen 52 108.3
All Occupations 5,915 4.3

2. Sex industry spreads disease
A McDonalds worker is more likely to kill you then a whore. If you are worried about illness ban smoking, drinking and make people exercise.

3. It is a sin it says so in the bible. As is working in a bank but we allow that nowdays.

Bizarre Suicide Cult Hates our Freedoms

How crazy would you have to be to commit suicide for a cause? Actually how crazy would a cause have to be? Surely any reasonable cause could never condone such deliberate self harm?

When you hear of the suicide attacks or hunger strikes of Islamo fascist terrorists you can understand simply by these actions how barbaric and dehumanising the ideas they espouse must be?

So would you agree to some sort of rule?
"Any group which engages in suicide attacks or attempts to extort changes in the functioning of our Democracy through self harm (hunger strikes, suicide attacks etc) will not be considered part of the political process"
This is an idea similar to in Popper's in "an open society" and has been used by the Irish and British governments to combat the IRA.

Such explicit censorship may not be necessary, even if you do not have something as explicit as section 31 banning the viewpoint of these sorts of undesirables, more subtle bias carries out the same job, when was the last time you saw an al Qaeda representative being interviewed on the news?

There is a dangerous movement like this in this very country. Your co-workers, friends even family could be supporters or even activists in this group. This is not the Communists but something much more insidious. A dangerous movement called "the suffragettes" exists. They have taken part in Suicide attacks in hunger strikes and has as their stated aim the perversion of our democratic process. They attack us because they hate us because of our freedoms and they must be stopped.

Irish Skeptics Live

Disease, Decay, discover your destiny
Irish skeptics live are ready and waiting for you to call. Find out your destiny based on statistics and evidence.
Using 700 year old shaving techniques developed by a monk we can predict your future. Be shocked how your actions now can effect you more then planets millions of kilometers away. Be amazed at the secret steps that to a healthy happy life*

Why are psychics more in demand then well the truth? And while I am on the subject what sort of psychics "are ready and waiting" you think one advantage of being psychic is you would not have to wait around for people to ring.
"I am off to put 10 Euro on the winning horse in the 3:30 at Leopardstown. Then Bob will ring just after I get back."

*dramatisation not secret. Treat your body and your mind with respect and try to be happy. “People are just as happy as they make up their minds to be” Abraham Lincoln

Steve Irwin is dead

I am really upset by this. Not because of the ambiguous guilt of encouraging and rewarding dangerous behaviour, not because of the loss of a husband and father of a young family. Because it means one of the three good shows on television is gone. Instead of the human kinetic bouncing ball of enthusiasm, knowledge and just plain fun we are going to have a new reality TV show called “fornication island”. In this a bunch of self obsessed egotistical whiney worthless babies you’ve never seen before rut like caged monkeys passing on some sort of fame spreading STD.

How about this for a show. We get 10 people on the transplant list one needing kidneys and a heart and another lungs etc. We then have a competition to see which one is killed to get organs for the rest of them. I know I am going to get a comment telling me this has already happened.

Steve Irwin was a 100% top fuckin madman and it is a sad day that he is gone. I am off to the pub to get drunk lest I end up watching some television and wishing Armageddon upon mankind.

President Predator

Have you noticed that half the cast of predator hold elected office in America? Jesse "the body" runs skullfuck or some such state and the Governator runs California. Could it be that people really think that they need to be protected from cosmic hunting aliens?

What sort of alien is going to go hunting anyway? Hillbilly yokels that is who. Predator probably has a gun rack on his pickup, a pickup which plays General Lee when the horn is blown. It does indicate something odd with the psyche that the ability to handle a gattling gun against intergalactic rednecks is more highly prized then say IQ.

So start the campaign President Predator 08 for 24:7:365 Nascar and the return of the Dukes of Hazzard. Mind you it would be kinda cool to see those three dots appear on the head of whatever Frenchy they have at the UN next time.

Fat Positive Feedback Loop

Imagine you had to carry around an extra 10 kilos with you everywhere. You'd get skinnier pretty quickly? So how come being fat is not self regulating? I have a theory that will require some weighing scales and a tape measure to test.
We get a canteen, and get a bunch of people who all get the same meal served to them. We then weigh the meal and the people, also get there height, gender and maybe age. Now if your fat you'd want to get less food served to you, if however you get more then a thin person your going to gain more weight then the thin person.
If it turns out that fat people get more food maybe we have a cause of fatness. You happen to get more food one day, gain a bit of weight, This makes the food disher-outer give you a tiny bit more food the next day. And your in a positive feedback loop.
We get the sex of the eater because I've noticed that women seem to get less food served to them then men, which considering they pay the same price is pretty miserable. If we can get a perchentage maybe we can get gender prices on meals. Also while I'm on the subject why do airlines allow a set amount of baggage? I weigh 85 kilos and am allowed 20 kilos=105 kilos. Someone who weights 60 kilos has the same baggage limit. Why not allow everyone 100 kilos including themselves and pay for the excess.

Happy Forecast

How come we still watch weather forecast all the time? It quite important if you are a farmer but most of us are not anymore. Even the pollen or pollution counts only apply to a minority of us. Why do we not have forecasts for useful things, things that effect modern life?
Why not a happiness forecast. You could tell if people were going to be grumpy today, weather cutting people off and undertaking are more likely to get you beaten to death. Picture the forecaster "Storm fronts could reach suburban psyches by sundown. All major idports have been closed". You might say "But you cannot forecast mass human behaviour like that". I would retort
1. Insurance companies do
2. You cannot forecast behaviour of individual air molecules but overall weather forecasters do a good job.

This lead to a problem. Pressure, temperature, moisture level all these are epi phenomenon of large amounts of particles. Talking about one particles pressure does not make much sense. Maybe happiness is a phenomenon of individual people and for large groups we need a new language of characteristics.
So what would you want to see forecast after the news?

Gender Turing Test

From COMPUTING MACHINERY AND INTELLIGENCE By A. M. Turing

"The new form of the problem can be described' in terms of a game which we call the 'imitation game'. It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either 'X is A and Y is B' or 'X is B and Y is A'. The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B thus:

C: Will X please tell me the length of his or her hair?

Now suppose X is actually A, then A must answer. It is A's {p.434}object in the game to try and cause C to make the wrong identification. His answer might therefore be

'My hair is shingled, and the longest strands, are about nine inches long.'

In order that tones of voice may not help the interrogator the answers should be written, or better still, typewritten. The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating between the two rooms. Alternatively the question and answers can be repeated by an intermediary. The object of the game for the third player (B) is to help the interrogator. The best strategy for her is probably to give truthful answers. She can add such things as 'I am the woman, don't listen to him!' to her answers, but it will avail nothing as the man can make similar remarks."

Here Turing goes off to talk about computers but has his belief that you cannot tell gender differences ever been proved? If a man and woman cannot be distinguished then there must be no fundamental difference, other then physically, between them.

While I am on the subject I saw a program once where two cops went on instant messenger pretending to be children to see if any perverts would try it on with them. This would seem to prove that there is little psychological difference between children and adults because over instant messenger an adult can successfully convince another adult that he is a child. However it is possible to pretend to be someone who knows less then you. If I was pretending to be a dog or a chimp it would be hard for you to prove I was not over IM. If however I pretended to be Einstein you would quickly figure it out, especially if you were a physicist. So its possible to pretend to know less then you do but not to know more, particularly to someone who knows the answers to the questions they are asking.

There are lots of things that every physicist knows that I do not so I would fail a “physicist” Turing test. But are there things that everyone of a gender knows that the other gender does not? Can we in one simple experiment test whether different genders really come from the same planet?

Here is what I need
1. You to take part in the experiment

2. You to think up some good gender defining questions.

Questions like

1. How would you defend your house from a swat attack? Men could answer this.

2. What is the longest you have worn a pair of underpants for? If number of days is greater then four the person is a man.

3. When you bleed are there ever black clumps in it?

4. What is a good thing to say to a man in the urinal next to you? Men will answer "nothing".

Another drug doping scandal

Fans of music were outraged last night when it was revealed that many recording artists throughout the 1960’s took a performance enhancing drug called Lysergic acid diethylamide. The artists in question have been stripped of all the Grammys, spray painted records and other worthless crap they received. “We will retrospectively alter past records sales and remove any blowjobs these bands may have received from groupies” said the world anti doping agency in an offical announcement.

The new clampdown on the use of performance enhancing drugs has also lead to the discovery of Polymerase Chain Reaction to being removed from history as its inventor was off his mash on LSD at the time. All criminals convicted from genetic evidence will now be released.

Snakes on a plane

What a genius idea. You would not even have to pitch it to the big movie guy, Throw a suitcase through his window with a folded piece of paper in it. He reads the paper “Snakes on a plane” He fills the suitcase full of money to make the film and throws it out the window again.

I think I could start making creature feature disaster movies. You do not even need a script the title tells you everything about the film “Gorillas in the graveyard.” “Spider in side her” “piranha pool” “shark infested custard”.

“Gorillas in the graveyard” will star one of the tg4 weather bitches; you know the scaldy one who looks like she’d let you stick it anywhere. She plays the lab coated bespeckled totty with the hair in a bob. She lets her hair down when the characters hide out in an abandoned house.

Actually I’m getting a bit over excited I think I’ll just go lie down.

A Modest Proposal Concerning Air Travel

The wasteful and needless use of seating on planes is a topic that has bothered me for some time. Airbus seem part of the way to solving this most inefficient situation. I contend however that this plan does not go far enough.In comparison to standing passengers completely supine passengers have numerous benefits as will be described below.
By use of a general anesthetic on passengers they can be packed much more efficiently. Also unconscious passengers require little or no attention from airline staff members. Other advantages arise from unconscious passengers, Security risks are significantly lower in the catatonic.

Much needed medical procedures can be carried out using the period of docility created by the use of anaesthetics. In a similar way to tranquilizing wild carnivores allows for dentistry, immunization and sterilisation the period of unconsciousness could be used as a major public health resource ,one in which the unfortunate characteristics of conscious patients can be avoided.

Rather then the unpleasant and possible dangerous configuration of piling passengers on top of each other, some form of individual compartment is preferable. The size and luxuriousness of compartments can be used to separate passengers into cost categories to allow income maximization.
Here an optimization problem arises. For reasons of physics planes tend to be built in a shape resembling a cylinder. Humans as luck would have it also bear an approximately cylindrical shape. This fact means that instead of a wasteful coffin like compartment a more efficient and aesthetically pleasing cylindrical container can be used. This is not as efficient as a hexagonal configuration but aerodynamic and in the short term morphological constrains prevent this superior shape being used.
I have included an picture describing a sample configuration that could be used when packing passengers into plane.

I hope you consider my proposal and see the economic and social benefits to unconscious passengers.

The fathomless tragedy of Sesame Street

A quick run down of the cast of Sesame Street will illustrate what and appalling misery fest it is.
The Grouch is clearly mentally ill. He is homeless and in need of anti depressants. Laughing at a mad guy who lives in a bin is cruel.
Let us teach children the fun of numbers with a member of the undead, the Count. Why not teach grammar with a zombie if you think vampires are the cure for innumeracy. While I am on the subject how come vampire parties are always so cool? Blade, the Hunger, Vampiros Lesbos they really seem to know how to throw a party. Can you imagine the Count hanging round at one of these bashes?
Finally is a tale of Sisyphean woe. Cookie monster is a simple guy with one simple pleasure. He loves cookies. Not so hard to make him happy you would think, but every time he gets a mouthful of cookies he has to puke them up off to the side of camera. He is bulimic. He has no esophagus and so has to vomit up the one thing he really loves. Tantalus himself did not have this level of torture inflicted upon him. Here is a monster whose sole raison d’etre is being destroyed by his eating disorder.
Anyone else see hidden pathos in the works of Jim Henson?

Web 2.0 Laundry

Can we use the bleeding edge blue sky outside the box bullshit of Hype 2.0 in a real business? This is the Web 2.0 Laundry.
First thing is we do not charge for you to wash your clothes, that’s so last century. Instead when we wash your clothes we cover them in advertising. You get the free service you get the ads, bingo we have a business model.
Next we allow “donations” instead of expecting to get paid. This is the laundry’s almost traditional route of talking any money left in pants pockets. This donation is anonymous even to yourself so we advertise ourselves as cryptographically secure.
So far so good, but were lacking any “social network” buzzword bonus. Easy we give you someone else’s clothes. If you like these clothes the other persons karma is upped. In this way groups of people with similar interests cake, coke, and programming will form a unit and others with other similar interests bulimia, clenbuterol, and death will form another group.
Now we need to do something that works perfectly well at home and move it over to an unnatural habitat. Now clothes washing already qualifies for that but to make it really nonsensical like a chocolate kettle or an online isolation tank( actually forget I told you that I could get funding for that last one) we need to send the clothes on a really narrow network, pigeons trained to carry clothes is a good first start. Particularly as the pigeons shitting everywhere can only increase our profits.

So we guarantee to AJAX all your clothes send them off to random people who will using the hive mind form a social network , as soon as this reaches the tipping point our advertising revenue will 100% guarantee* that Google will wet themselves, then require our cleaning service and we will clean up.

*not a guarantee

Pimp My Bitch

My latest social network web 2.0 idea is a sure fire zeitgeist surfing IPO gauranteed* cert. PetPimp™ a social network of prostitute pets that you can hire. No hear me out on this one. We tag the animals by species, location, interests...we’ll I assume all dogs are pretty much into the same sorts of things, but you get the idea. We then link you up with other pets.

Poor old Spot is heading towards the end how about you let him have some fun before he goes? Would you be willing to let us introduce him to some like minded bitch? You could send off your treasured companion in style. See this is starting to sound classy already.

How immoral can it be to pimp out your pet to make a few extra quid on the side?
The bloodstock industry is worth billions, how is horses shagging a hot water bottle any different from our company. Ok Spot is hardly a thorough bred racehorse but does that mean he cannot get some little love in his life? Yes the pet sex isn’t intended to be procreative but who are you the Pope?
Ok you are not willing to go as far as getting a prostitute for your pet, how about some normal legal porn then? They do it for Pandas, why not get a mucky movie?
Ever year there is a spate of stories about the latest dog yoga or whatever pet related craze sweeping California, does PetPimp™ sound any less believable then dog psychotherapists?

*not a guarantee

How would Jesus be murdered?

Technology has moved on the "what would Jesus do?" slogan should be replaced with "how would Jesus be murdered?"

How old school is wearing a cross round your neck? Could we not update the symbol to more reflect the life of a semetic politician today rather then 2000 years ago? There unlikely to crucify him if he comes back today maybe we would have to wear a model explosive belt. How about a car being hit by missiles? Or someone out in a cafe getting ripped apart by shrapnel? Being crushed by a tank? being shot has been a consistent favorite maybe we can get gun necklaces.

Long Term Caving Project

What are you doing for the next 10 thousand years? There is a plan to build a clock that will keep time accurately for 10k years. The main purpose of this is to get people to think long term and perhaps alter there actions accordingly. The clock is being placed in a cave because it is believed to be the most stable environment available.

Danny Hillis is building this clock. He makes some good points about the construction.
If something becomes unimportant to people, it gets scrapped for parts; if it becomes important, it turns into a symbol and must eventually be destroyed.” f something becomes unimportant to people, it gets scrapped for parts; if it becomes important, it turns into a symbol and must eventually be destroyed. The only way to survive over the long run is to be made of materials large and worthless, like Stonehenge and the Pyramids, or to become lost. The Dead Sea Scrolls managed to survive by remaining lost for a couple millennia”

Long term man made experiments have been taking place for about one hundred years. Observations of things in caves long term include.
1. Temperature readings using stalactites layer analysis.
2. Mud samples are used to tell climate in the past.
3. Natural nuclear reactors in Gabon could be used to test for changes in physical constants over time.

Could we set up an experiment in a cave now that would gather results for the next 10k years?

The choice of cave is important. It should be geologically uninteresting, no earthquakes volcanoes etc . The cave needs to be geographically isolated i.e. High above sea. Adding permanent structures to caves is a fairly bad idea. Also there is little point doing this unless people see it. So a tourist cave would be ideal given that it is fairly extensively damaged already.

So what experiment could you think of that would give out answers for 10k years? Apart form the Gedanken experiment could any of these actually be set up?
There are a few physics experiments that have been running for over a hundred years
The reason for thinking like this is not so much the egomania of “we will have giant tombs to ourselves in a few millennia” just to remind us that our actions do have long term consequences. For instance Newgrange can be regarded as a clock of the long now build six thousand years ago. The construction of the new motorway near the hill of Tara to me indicates a lack of this sort of long term thinking. Do we have the right to alter ancient still undiscovered long now tools to build a motorway for a technology that will probably be obsolete in a few decades?