I learn the interesting news that David Aaronovitch tweeted to Joan Smith and Jenny Jones that I am:
“an angry and dangerous man who could as easily be on the far right as the far left”.
I had no idea I was on the far left, though I suppose it is a matter of perspective, and from where Mr Aaronovitch stands I, and a great many others, look awfully far away to the left. I don’t believe you should bomb people for their own good, I don’t believe the people of Palestine should be crushed, I don’t believe the profit motive should dominate the NHS, I think utilities and railways were better in public ownership, I think education should be free. I guess that makes me Joseph Stalin.
But actually I am very flattered. Apparently I am not just angry – since the invasion of Iraq and the banker bailouts everybody should be angry – but “dangerous”. If I can be a danger to the interests represented by a Rupert Murdoch employee like Aaronovitch, I must have done something right in my life. I fear he sadly overrates me; but it does make me feel a little bit warmer, and hold my head that little bit higher.
Carronbridge Hotel looks nice, as does the whole area. I’ll have to disconnect from Wales and re-connect with Scotland one of these days. The Belfast – Cairnryan trip is only two hours or so.
Last time I was in Scotland, I visited a private zoo in Oban, and had a 14ft python on my lap (and all around me.) I was trying (as I had been warned to do) to prevent the poor thing escaping out the door into the sunshine, something she desperately wanted. But in the process I pulled a muscle in my back (14ft pythons are very heavy) and the drive back to the ferry was agony. I haven’t been in Scotland since.
@Steve
“Didn’t get through. Surprise surprise…”
Glenn made quite a big deal, at Salon before he left, about the fact that he’d agreed with the Guardian that he’d keep control of his own comments section (as he had at Salon). I wonder if he hasn’t?
@Clark
“our consciousness might disconnect from reality when we sleep so that it can let wave functions expand and propagate for a bit, instead of the brain continually collapsing its own quantum states by self-observation”
I don’t even know what that means. So I wouldn’t dream of ridiculing it. 🙂
@Nuid
I’ve been pre-moderated on Glen’s Assange case articles no less than on any of the others in the Guardian. So my guess is hasn’t retained control of the comments section. I should add that although it could be argued that the reason they have not got through is because they have breached community standards, I am pretty certain this is not the case. Indeed, I have been pretty careful in the posts so as not to allow that excuse to be used by any moderator.
The posts are not appearing as “this post is being moderated” in the comments section prior to later removal (which is the usual form of moderation). They are simply not appearing at all. That is to say, they are being “pre-moderated”. So, if Glenn is using the former to see if his comments sections are being moderated without his consent, he would not be getting the true picture. He simply wouldn’t see a comment such as mine at all.
I see a MrEMole has made your point on CiF, Clark….discreetly.
There are some good comments on that page btw. AmityAmity puts his very well.
I think you’ve been getting a bit pampered in the last three years, Komodo.
By using a leaner, meaner distro? Hmmm. Unity looked like a crock of the proverbial, so I decided not to stay on the bleeding-edge of konsumer kool, that’s all. Meerkat curls up comfortably in my oldish box (which came with Vista, which I wiped as soon as I saw the grunting, sweating, bling-encrusted spyware in operation), and hasn’t crashed in two years, while delivering instant results on everything except a mobile dongle in a fringe area. Why change? Why on earth change Gnome? It’s terrific.
“So, if Glenn is using the former to see if his comments sections are being moderated without his consent, he would not be getting the true picture. He simply wouldn’t see a comment such as mine at all.”
He was online and responding to some of the earlier comments himself. If the above is going on, it’s a shame. But he’s far too bright not to find out eventually, I’d imagine.
“yes, we “defrag” during sleep”
Ah, now that makes sense to me.
Speaking of “expanding” a “wave function” – if you do that, you delocalise the particle concerned. That is, the uncertainty regarding its position/speed is increased. A system involving such particles would, I think, tend towards stochastic behaviour…IOW in your theory, dreams are just random in electromagnetic terms. But this is just as supportable in non-quantum terms….
lol.
@komodo
I agree about Gnome. Which is why I was initially appalled at the Unity interface in 12.04. however, I have since discovered not only how to drop it back to a facsimile of the gnome interface that comes pre-packaged with 12.04, but also how to re-install all of the other features of gnome that didn’t come with that pre-packaged facsimile. Thus, after some messing about, I now have an interlace that is essentially indistinguishable from Ubuntu 10.04. The last of the gnome-proper distributions.
I realize that above does rather beg the question of why I didn’t simply stick with 10.04 instead of forcing 12.04 to act like it? The reason is because 12.04 also has massively better compatibility with peripherals. This better compatibility does not get lost when you re-skin it with the classic gnome interface.
So, the best of both worlds.
Thanks, Steve. Probably useful to know.
Good work, Clark. Spread the Linux love.
As it happens, I was demonstrating the differences between Windows XP, 7, 8, Ubuntu and Mac OS in a college yesterday. The verdict was that Win 8 was clunky and unintuitive, even on a dual-core touch screen. Mac OS was the clear winner, with Ubuntu receiving special mention. But of course most people are forced to use Windoze for compatibility reasons on a corporate network.
The brain doesn’t “defrag”, as it doesn’t use serial memory storage. It is a massively parallel connectionist network, and going ‘offline’ occasionally (i.e. stopping the flow of sensory input) allows it to test and adjust connection strengths between different areas that might not normally be linked. The system self-organises towards a state of greater integration, allowing novel solutions (insights) to emerge via the interplay between embedded information. (In connectionist computing this process can be simulated by “annealing”.) Guy Claxton’s pop psychology book Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind highlights the benefits very nicely.
It seems like a plausible enough explanation of dreaming to me. I’d think an unproven and idiosyncratic conjecture relying on the mysterious behaviour of woo-woo wave-form wotsits has a rather superior claim to the term “radical”, wouldn’t you say? 😉
December 2010: The Independent:
“Informal discussions have already taken place between US and Swedish officials over the possibility of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange being delivered into American custody, according to diplomatic sources.
“Mr Assange is in a British jail awaiting extradition proceedings to Sweden after being refused bail at Westminster Magistrates’ Court despite a number of prominent public figures offering to stand as surety.
“His arrest in north London yesterday was described by the US Defence Secretary Robert Gates as “good news”, and may pave the way for extradition to America and a possible lengthy jail sentence.”
Continues here:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/assange-could-face-espionage-trial-in-us-2154107.html
Not news to us, but should have been known by many who are writing tripe about him.
The system self-organises towards a state of greater integration…
So not defragmentation then?
🙂
I can’t actually believe I left it this long before discovering Linux. It’s been such a success for me I will never go back to MS Windows.
I use a 16GB thumbdrive with Knoppix on it. That means I can use my Windows 7 environment for regular stuff, then when I need any Linux programmes (all those free apps that you could never afford on the Windows platform) I simply reboot [F11] from the thumdrive for a quick session in linux.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/08/29/uk-wikileaks-assange-ecuador-idUKBRE87S15N20120829
“It’s possible that Great Britain could seek to move forward with the guarantees, because they have repeatedly said that they don’t want to provide the safe-passage (so Assange could leave the embassy and fly to Ecuador),” Patino said.
“The option of the guarantees is possibly more feasible … We should get clear, written guarantees from the countries with which we’re negotiating.”
In an interview last week, Correa told Reuters he was sceptical the British and Swedish governments would shift their stance on Assange, but that it would be “perfectly possible”, in theory, for them to grant Assange the assurances he wanted.
Correa said that if Britain and Sweden agree not to extradite Assange to the United States, he would decline the asylum offer and hand himself over to Swedish prosecutors.
U.S. and European government sources say the United States has issued no criminal charges against Assange and that Washington has launched no attempt to extradite him.
(My bold – K)
Yet. Else why withhold the guarantee?
“The system self-organises towards a state of greater integration…” … So not defragmentation then?
Precisely not, as there’s no fragmentation and access is not determined by address locations. In an associative connectionist network all the units of meaning stay where they are, but the links between them adjust. It’s a very clever architecture.
We can thank Bill Gates and his degenerate DOS for mainstreaming fragmentation.
I still have an old XP partition for one single program; “3D Studio Max”. It’s a 3D modelling program I occassionally use to make 3D representations of garden designs for my customers (I’m a gardener). I also occassionally use it to visualise my own architectural and engineering designs, just for private pleasure. Although, I am as apt to do those designs on a drafting board as well. I think I just enjoy the act of putting pencil to paper.
However, There is a brilliant open source program on Ubuntu that I think is going to allow me to even do the above on there as well. It’s called “Blender”. It looks to be able to do pretty much everything that 3D max can do. It’s just a case of finding the time to get up to speed with it.
Peripheral support on ‘Doze can be pretty frustrating too. I’m talking backwards compatibility. Like running a USB – serial interface with a proprietory data-logging program “for” Windows which doesn’t work on 7 although fine in XP. Virtual machine time….
I use Virtual Box with xp for my wife’s iphone
Oh, ffs, Nextus. It’ll be network theory next. I wasn’t being serious. Or if I was, my quibble was semantic. Anyway, I maintain that defragmentation must be topologically equivalent to reintegration. Doesn’t matter whether you move the links or the files.
Laugh, damn you.
When we sleep, our brains go into theta waves! This site is quite helpful
http://www.web-us.com/brainwavesfunction.htm
Although it’s common to say that there are four levels of brain waves, there’s often mention of a fifth: gamma. And some people say there are as many as eight….
NB I’m using old ubuntu & have been for years & v happy with it – none of problems of the new version – but am being yanked (ha) back to Windows because my collaborators all work on Macs and it seems that unless you use soundcloud, which i trust not at all, you can’t save files from one to the other. which is a total norse.
Brain waves here too:
http://www.mind-your-reality.com/brain_waves.html#Part_2
including this:
The Delta frequency is the slowest and is present in deep, dreamless sleep and in very deep, transcendental meditation where awareness is completely detached. Delta is the realm of your unconscious mind. It is the gateway to the Universal mind and the collective unconscious whereby information received is otherwise unavailable at the conscious level. Delta is associated with deep healing and regeneration, underlining the importance of deep sleep to the healing process.
Komodo: defragmentation must be topologically equivalent to reintegration. Doesn’t matter whether you move the links or the files.
– That does not compute. The links aren’t “moved” during the process. Neither am I, for that matter.
Laugh, damn you.
> Undefined error! That function is not in my programming.
You have exposed the non-human nature of my intelligence, so it seems I have duly failed the Turing Test and must now return to the lab for reprogramming.
I thought you were meant to be cold-blooded, anyway? You are surely a highly-evolved lizard if you are able to indulge in a hearty chortle.
“And this indicates the state of play in the US, regardless of any subterranean intelligence products:
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/media/house-stealth.html
In which the appalling Illena Ros-Lehtinen figures prominently. Interesting that Ron Paul spots the obvious, that this is in terms of foreign policy, a complete train crash. No-one else does…”
……….
Well this is scary. What happens if Israel becomes part of NATO?
Nextus: I guarantee you don’t run under Windows, anyway. Too sophisticated…
Nato loses the tattered remains of any credibility it has not already thrown away in Afghanistan?
I had sent round this link to a small group saying that the Israeli nickname for a D9 was Teddy Bear which I found pretty disgusting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDF_Caterpillar_D9#Models_in_IDF_service
One of the replies which came back:
A most evil machine from the evil empire that moves to the purposes of the entity. ‘They’ tend not to show the scale of this 71 ton machine. The tiny bit on the ZBC ‘News’ about Rachel did not convey, I thought, its gargantuan nature.
{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IDF-D9R-Israel60.jpg}
This does. And if the woman alongside is 5ft or more it shows the D9 is about 18ft high. I have described them as ‘two storey’. Poor dear Rachel. Poor dear world. Incidentally, I am sure that some D9s were modified in Italy on their way to the Holy Land.
You will remember the driver of one in Jenin who crushed a house onto a paraplegic young man, killing him. Splatting him. He was drunk in charge.
I did not see the legless ex-Royal Marine coming down the zip wire into the stadium last night. **** could not see the triumphalism or the irony attached to the British contingent – that we were killing and wounding and disabling. as others were being congratulated in the UK. I told **** about the several million Afghans who fled in a bitter winter from the bombs raining down from B52s at 32,000ft at the start of an illegal war based on pretext. Many died in the mountains. Can we have strings of bones cascading down the zip-wire please to show the reality and not the illusion? The white would show up well.
Oh Krishnan – as the one Syrian competitor came past – ‘Syria, a country torn apart.’ Yes indeed Krishnan.
Depressing news from the Ukraine yesterday regarding Yulia Tymoshenko. For someone actually facing years in jail for their political beliefs and decisions, it’s barely been worth a mention here?
Our chief arms salesman took time off from Majorca, Cornwall and Stratford to host another one of the Bahraini dictators.
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2012/08/27/258330/uk-barbaric-relation-with-arab-dictators/
Pity 16 yr old Husam Al Haddad’s poor corpse cannot be brought to No 10. (See final two paragraphs) A dead young Arab would surely be ushered through those iron gates and the Hechler-Koch automatics without fear of ‘terrorist’ action. How the hell do we cleanse this world?