The Pope's Butler

The Pope's butler was found guilty of abusing his position to steal confidential documents. Interestingly, since the Vatican has no prison of its own, he is going to have to serve his sentence inside his own home.

He will not burn in hell, the usual threat of punishment for any transgressions that are reserved for the lesser of the Church's followers.

The state of the Internet

For those limited few interested in such stuff, this slide pack explores how the Commercial Internet has fared as it grows out of its teen years.

The Essential Scotches - a drinker's guide

I have no use for this guide, not now at least. But in the future, who knows?

Brian Cox teaches you to ask for the right Scotch drinks with The American Man's Scotch Pronunciation Guide, although you don't have to be American or male!

How Doctors Die

This is an intensely thought-provoking article.. How doctors choose to die is an American doctor explaining why, when faced with a terminal illness, medical professionals often opt out of life-prolonging treatment.

Man and Wild

This man and his croc are the best of friends.

The India Syndrome

Fascination with India's spiritual aspects draws a large number of westerners. This is a not so romantic inspection of this fascination.Death on the Path to Enlightenment.

Time

The ability to delay gratification is one of the best indicators of future success.

How big is Apple (AAPL) really?

According to BusinessInsider, Apple Represents 2.3% Of Global Equities. Per the graph, it's market capitalisation (number of shares * price per share) is more than the combined market capitalisation of all the listed companies in Italy, Portugal, Turkey, Chile, Peru, Austria, Egypt, Czech, Phillipines, Finland & Norway. 

A master story teller - Zakir Hussain

Ustad Zakir Hussain, the master of the tabla, enthralls his audience in Austin, Texas with a story of Lord Krishna

Twittering democracy

Is Twitter good for democracy, asks the BBC's Kate Dailey.

The Dementia Plague

The frontline clinicians treating the rapidly growing number of dementia patients see, among other things, a drug industry that has profited handsomely from expensive, marginally effective treatments sought by desperate families.

Syrian shelling of Turkish village

Never mind all those All-lies shellings of soverign nations (Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, etc etc). Warmongers at it again. Nato and Pentagon condemn Syrian shelling of Turkish village | World news | guardian.co.uk

Ways to Celebrate Banned Books Week With The New York Times

Ways to Celebrate Banned Books Week With The New York Times - NYTimes.com

Sharing the Big Screen from Your Smartphone - Technology Review

Sharing the Big Screen from Your Smartphone

The challenges of apartment living (or is that incentives?)

This particular apartment dweller has a peculiar problem - his neighbour lady loves to clean the house - without a stitch on on her bottom half.

I just walked 2,655 miles from Mexico to Canada.

I just walked 2,655 miles from Mexico to Canada. AMA. : IAmA

Unbelievable. It took him just four months!
Average 22miles a day (35kms)

Italian bicycle sales 'surpass those of cars'

Car sales in Italy have dropped back to their 1964 levels!

Reinventing Society In The Wake Of Big Data | Conversation | Edge

While on the subject of Big Data, from an earlier post, this interview with Alex Pentland is a riveting read. He explains what big data (or lots of data) really does for those who use it, at the expense of those who don't really understand the implications of their book-face posting & zillions of interactions online.

The Fears, and a Thrill of Big Data - NYTimes.com

Put any two random words together, & they form new meaning these days.
Big Brother, Big Government, Big Everything.
Big Data, too.

Incentive to exercise?

Enemy of the State - & it's not a movie

Weigh this.

A chap gets you to willingly share all your personal information, photos, friends list (at least those online), birthdays, location etc etc. He gets hailed as the best entrepreneur of the whatever period in history, multi-billion dollar valuations for his company. (Book-Face Zuckerberg)

Another lifts the lid on the criminal acts of a government who ostensibly commits murder of innocents in the name of democracy. He gets hounded by multiple governments, his own government denies any help to him, his news organisation is starved of payments, gets charged with sexual assault, & as finally gets labelled "Enemy of the state". (Julian Assange/ Wikileaks).

Whither justice? Or is it a figment of our collective imagination?

How dependent are you on online banking?

As more and banks plod towards the Internet of Banking, (& the less of "currency" that we see & touch), we put too much of trust in the "big" organisations to keep "our money" safe. Trouble is, they either don't  know, or care to, or both.

6 American Banks were impacted by a Denial of Service attack last week, which meant their customers couldn't get access to their accounts online or pay their bills.

Doctor Smartphone

As technology pervades every aspect of our lives (even if we don't want it to), here's an interesting perspective of how smartphones are taking over our "health checks".

Your phone will soon be your new doctor — Tech News and Analysis:

Links Of The Week - 2009-09-30

Deutsche Telecom is getting its US subsidiary T-Mobile to sell 7200 towers to Crown Castle for $2.4b!


A fascinating documentary on "decision-making" from the BBC Horizon. Runs ~50 minutes. How spontaneous or rational are you? If you don't have the time, go to 31:20 for how subliminal influences impact decisions.


What is a PhD, really? An illustrated example!


Here's a step by step guide on how to make a sandwich if you don't have arms. Inspirational!


A simple solution to the Apple maps vs Google maps fight. There is a difference between users, consumers & customers. Users use, consumers consume & customers pay!



Simon & Garfunkel at their Central Park Concert in 1980! or maybe you want to get a bass guitar lesson with Jaco Pastrious (if it catches your fancy).



A follow up story on Onion: It's Iran's official news agency that got duped this time round!



A picture of the largest umbrella in the world



Organ harvesting is in fashion, even when the donors may not necessarily be dead!


This story, No evidence of disease- an account of a disease that never was, sheds a different perspective!

Little blind fish -CPR

Things that go .... in the night

At about 2am last night, I awoke from deep sleep to a strange sound. I guess all sounds sound strange at 2am, but I'm not usually up at that hour to have any experience in the matter. It continued for what seemed like a long time, & then I realised what it was.. it was my wife, giggling away in her dream, well, it wasn't giggling as much as peals of laughter. Pointing to our 18month old lying next to her, from deep in her sleep, she repeated "Rapunzel!" a couple of times, & then woke up, but the laughter continued, for a good 5 minutes after.

I shush'd her, trying my 2am brand of logic - "the neighbors might complain of an abusive husband, & the wife cries every night, & I hate to have to explain to the cops that this is how you laugh in your sleep. Shut up & go back to sleep". It didn't work, as I found out this morning. "Do you think I'm Mrs. M?" (the caretaker who's lived with my wife's family for over 4 decades, & is a bit slow in all matters of the mind, but then again, that is what my wife says!).

And this morning, reciting the happenings of the night to my 6 year old daughter brought forth fresh peals of laughter from the young lady. The toddler, evidently liking the sounds from his sister, added to the din.

I know what Heaven must sound like!

:)

The medal race

I'm not an olympics fan - for various reasons.
What is interesting to me however is that China is off to a medal collecting race, already picking up 4 golds & 2 bronzes and no one on this side of the world (or any other media for that matter) is covering any of their athletes.
Bizarre? Or deliberate? (I'm no conspiracy theorist)

The Clutter Declutter

Note to self: this could be mighty useful
http://unclutterer.com/2012/07/23/whats-on-your-summer-to-do-list-organizing-your-closet/

10 Time Frames

http://contentsmagazine.com/articles/10-timeframes/

Another week gone by

This last week was an interesting week, fo' sho'!
If I try to remember what I had for lunch on Monday (& I sometimes get that question from the Home Minister), I can't usually remember. It's no different today. I can't remember lunch (or any other meal this week). What I do know however about food is that it is very nourishing. (It also is starting to show through my shirt).

I do remember that I met a few interesting people this week.
The first one began the conversation saying he had just returned from accompanying his wife to her first chemotherapy session. I haven't had many of such conversation starters, & I admit it took me a while to recover.
I got to see some of my colleagues in a very different light too. With great power comes great responsibility - is what I have grown up thinking. That was challenged this week. I shan't explain the details but I'm learning that it doesn't apply in a corporate setting. The responsibility bit, that is. The care factor, as they call it, is below zero.

The kids have been surprising me with everything they've been up to. The dude has been learning to climb up the kitchen high chair on this own, & of course, occasionally toppling over - thankfully without causing much damage either to himself or to the general surroundings. The dudette, of course, is on to her latest fad, writing. She wants to be a writer when she grows up. The dictionary is her favorite book these days, & a notebook is filling up fast with new words & their meanings. Language is blooming in the house, even in winter!

I found myself struggling to read even a page out of my planned reading of the Great Books (I'm up to Aristotle's book on Ethics. Fortunately for me, I stumbled across this page (site apparently not updated for a while) today, & this comment by the author "Whitehead describes philosophy as the "critique of abstractions"—the endless effort to drag the balloon of the mind back to the earth of actual experience. Aristotle (at least in the current selections) looks like a collection of balloons" - gives me some hope that I am not the only only struggling with this mammoth effort. There is light at the end of the reading tunnel!


I've added a few new blogs to my blogroll this week - discoveries made mostly on twitter (!!!). I have been back to my voracious reading - save the challenge with Aristotle above.


I've got to figure out how to create a linkblog on this site. Another item for the ballooning to-do list. 

Business schools

"Business schools don't create successful people. They simply accept them, then take credit for their success." — Josh Kaufman

What really matters with investments...

Too often, we’re caught up in the daily fluctuations in our portfolios. What really matters is what the investments are worth when we need them.

Revival

For what it's worth, I started blogging / linking to articles that I found interesting a few months ago.  While my wanderings across the Internet have continued, with a change in the primary device I use to do the browsing came an almost instant change in how often I'd post here. I've been issued a BlackBerry from work, & will all the IT restrictions on, I find it much harder to post links here.

My reading list has morphed significantly in the last four or so months. Through some article on GigaOm, I stumbled across Dave Winer, & through him to endless other bloggers: JP Rangaswami, Doc Searls, Joi Ito, among others.  More interesting to me, a non-techie, was a thread common to most of them - linking to other articles within their own, allowing the reader to explore at his/ her own pace, if interested, without distracting from the main idea they were writing about.

I'm trying to build that into my blog articles, while trying to give my own thoughts some pixels. Hopefully, I can get back to linking to articles that pique my interest.

The Productivity Scam

The Productivity Scam:
Originally published May 18, 1984


SEVERAL Sundays ago the New York Times business section had one of its recurring roundups of professional opinion on productivity. This is a live issue because publicists and politicians keep it alive. President Reagan and his retiring, but not bashful, chief economic adviser, Martin Feldstein, never tire of talking about it. The Atari Democrats also fancy the issue, though they began keeping their heads down once their advisee, Gary Hart, became a serious candidate for the party’s Presidential nomination. At least two White House commissions are supposed to have been working on the question for the past two or three years (no one knows the results, if any). Innumerable editorials have been written on it, and not a few books.
Yet the whole debate is an elaborate scam, because what is presented as a value-free examination by sober social scientists is actually a struggle over the distribution of the national income. Some (maybe most) of those perpetrating the scam may know not what they do. It is a scam, nevertheless.
As pseudo-science, the argument goes like this: Of the various factors of production, labor is the largest. Employees’ compensation-wages, salaries, bonuses, fringe benefits-comes to about two-thirds of the Gross National Product. That being so, it would seem plausible to take this largest factor as an index of the efficiency of the whole.
As the Times puts it, “A worker who produces 100 widgets an hour, for example, is clearly more productive than a worker who produces only 50 widgets an hour. ” There are many sleepers in the seemingly innocent example and the Times isaware of some of them: “the machines that are used, the worker’s education or skill, advances in technology, the working environment.” The worker can be praised or blamed for few of the items in this little list; most are someone else’s doing. That fact is not noticed by the judgmental types who complain that people don’t work as hard as they used to.
But the trouble with the Productivity Index starts with the GNP itself (see “Sinking by the Numbers,”NL, May2, 1983). The GNP has nothing to do with widgets, or with shoes or ships or sealing wax. The reason for this is obvious enough: You can’t add shoes and ships and sealing wax and widgets, any more than you can add apples and pears. All you can add is the prices of the widgets and shoes and so on, and you get a result in dollars that depends as much on the prices of widgets and shoes as on the numbers of widgets and shoes.
This is true for the economy as a whole, and it is true for the firms that make it up. Even the rare company that makes widgets alone judges its productivity in numbers of dollars rather than numbers of widgets. If it manufactures 100 widgets and can sell only 50, the remaining 50 are not products but waste. Companies that deal in a variety of products have no choice except to measure their total output in dollars.
Nor is this procedure necessary only in market economies. In the purest communism of our time, the brief reign of the Gang of Four in China, several streets in Shanghai were lined with thousands of boilers quietly rusting under the plane trees. Somebody had built them and no doubt got a commendation for exceeding his quota, but there was no use for them. They were waste, not products, and (if they’re not still there) they had eventually to be broken up for scrap.
The next difficulty with the GNP is as I argued last year – what it includes and what it excludes. The Times article provides a good example of the mischief that results. “Increased regulation,” says the Times, “aimed at such things as clean air and water and increased safety in the workplace . . . absorbed management time and business resources in the ’70s. Now that the pace of new regulation has slowed, if not reversed, business will be freer to concentrate its money and effort on other things, such as productivity.
“You’ve heard so much of this kind of talk that you may not be immediately struck by how fatuous it is. If you will read the passage again, you will notice the unstated (and unstatable) assumption that clean air and water and increased safety are worthless in comparison with more widgets or cheaper widgets or anything at all (a widget being the ultimate nondescript object). Well, there may be some things more important than clean air, but a widget isn’t one of them. In a rational world, what you produce is a more important question than productivity.
Productivity is a ratio (see “Productivity: The New Shell Game,” NL, February 8, 1982). So far we have dealt only with the numerator. The denominator is suspect in its own way. The figure usually used is the total hours worked by everyone in producing the GNP. This is a moldy fudge. Since you can’t think how to quantify (except in dollars, of which more later) the relative contributions of the designer of the widget, the operator of the machine that stamps it out, and the fellow who sweeps up the scraps, you sweep the problem out with the scraps and conclude that Gertrude Stein would have been right if she had said, “Hour is an hour is an hour.” Or as Karl Marx did put it, “We save ourselves a superfluous operation, and simplify our analysis, by the assumption, that the labor of the workman employed by the capitalist is unskilled average labor.”
On this basis, you’d have to say that if a skilled journeyman carpenter could increase his output 50 per cent by taking on an unskilled apprentice, the result would be a 25 per cent decrease in his productivity. In addition, you’d have to say that the apprentice’s productivity was equal to the journeyman’s. Worse still, you’d have to say – and people do –  that it’s better for national productivity to have millions of men and women unemployed than for them to be working and producing less than their co-workers. The Times, for instance, says: “The entry of 20 million new and inexperienced workers into the labor force during the 1970s acted as a drag on productivity.”
Any theory that makes you say things like that is silly, and any figures that lead to such conclusions are mischievous. Productivity, at least as everyone measures it, is a grievously misleading notion. If you take it seriously, you believe that clean air and water and increased safety are bad and should be opposed. You believe, too, that employing young people and women and blacks and others without experience is bad, and that therefore an unemployment rate of 8 per cent is not merely acceptable but desirable.
IT MAY OCCUR to you to wonder why the denominator of the productivity ratio is “hours worked.” Why not “workers’ compensation?” Then at least you wouldn’t have silly results like our journeyman-apprentice example or the all-too-real unemployment problem. Then you wouldn’t have to pretend, as the Times does, that management has been wasting its valuable time on the environment.
You would, however, be in danger of calling attention to one of the hidden aspects of the scam – that is, the place of management, especially top management, in the whole picture. For the chief executive officer of a company is a wage slave just like the operator of the widget machine. As long as you focus on hours worked, you meld his allegedly productive hours with the less valuable hours of the operator, thereby improving the index and demonstrating your scientific willingness to put the faltering American workingman in as favorable a light as possible.
You also diminish the risk of having someone point out that CEOs are often paid five or six thousand times as much as widget machine operators (I’ll say more about this in another column). Or of someone separating management productivity from working-stiff productivity and introducing a brand new ball game: It would no longer seem that the Japanese are catching up with us because their production workers are workaholics, while ours are goof-offs; the catching up, if any, would appear to be due to the fact that they have fewer managers, who have fewer Lear jets, stretch limousines, three-martini lunches, tax shelters, and golden parachutes.
The scam has yet another aspect. Labor may be the largest factor of production, but looking back on the others the Times mentioned (“the machines that are used, the worker’s education and skill, advances in technology, the working environment”), you will note that the first and last of these are supplied by capital, the second is largely the responsibility of the state, and the third is a joint activity of capital and the state. A capital productivity index would be at least as reasonable, therefore, as a labor productivity index. The numbers would not be markedly different, but they’d have a vastly different meaning.
You can carry this a step further. For although productive capital is not money, it is bought with money, and money has a cost, namely interest. The prime rate has gone from 1.5 per cent (really and truly) in 1947 to 12.5 per cent today, having had flings as high as 21.5 per cent along the way. In other words, with every dollar American industry now pays (actually, or as opportunity cost) for interest, it is able to buy only one eighth as much of capital goods as it could have at the end of World War II (and this is without counting inflation).
There is the real drag on the American economy, and on the world economy. As I said at the beginning, the uproar about labor productivity is a scam to distract attention from a massive shift in the distribution of the goods of the economy. The share of nonmanagerial labor is being reduced; the share of managerial labor is being increased; and the share of those who do no labor, who merely have money, is being increased most of all. This is what Reaganomics.
(or, if you will, Volckerism) is about, and the Atari Democrats have been gulled into going along with it.

            The New Leader

Filed under: The Dismal Science Tagged: 1984, Atari Democrats, China, Income Inequality, Karl Marx, Productivity, Reaganomics, Volker

on Facial Recognition Software

Yes, we should be afraid of facial-recognition software: via GigaOm

Table for Two

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2012/07/13/table-for-two/

Wonky Donkey

The last couple of weeks was school holidays.
However, they were no holidays.
Both kids were sick.
Taking turns, I am thinking.

One of those crazy nights, I came across this song on youtube.

Kept both kids & parents entertained.

I found myself humming the tune this morning!

Enjoy!!

The World as We Knew it is Over. Now What? - John Winsor

The World as We Knew it is Over. Now What? - John Winsor:

While the internet drives out inefficiencies in existing systems, it also causes the existing system to shrink, dramatically.

Something not usually thought about.

Chewbaru

Thanks to Robert Fulghum for the link! 

The Intention Economy - Doc Searls

 

Get yourself a copy of this book - as one of the reviews says, "Ten years from now, you'll be bragging about having read this book".

Thoughtful & insightful. Very.

Premature Elucidation

via the Cluetrain Manifesto

"Premature elucidation": the plight of men who come to answers way too soon.

an articulate call to action: hear ye bankers

Thanks to Dave Winer

Banking Reform will be good for business

Neil DeGrasse Tyson - Greatest Sermon ever

Do as I say, not as I do.

How convenient!
Not very surprising, though.

Christine Lagarde, scourge of tax evaders, pays no tax | Business | guardian.co.uk:

Robert Mugabe asked to be UN 'leader for tourism' | World news | The Guardian

Whatever last shreds of respect I may have had for the UN are gone with this choice of "ambassadors"
Robert Mugabe asked to be UN 'leader for tourism' | World news | The Guardian:

Never, Never, Never, Give in..

Coincidence?

via the Guardian
This is far too much of a coincidence - the same company that owns(ed?) the  Costa Concordia (remember that ship?? ) is now at the receiving end of a lawsuit for failing to rescue fishermen lost at sea, despite having been seen by passengers of the cruise liner they were travelling on, & having reported the sighting to the crew.

Great Books

About 3 years ago, I read / heard about the "Great Books" - a 54-volume set of books chosen by, besides others, Mortimer Adler.  Published originally in 1952, presumably at a time of intense fascination in the "intellectual circles" about the East, the idea was to have an education of the ideas that the Western Civilization has been built upon, an education that seemed to be fast disappearing. 


At the same time, I also read the various criticisms leveled against the set, about it not representing the East, no authors in the collection being women, & dozens others. 


I"ve been looking for these books since then. Of course, skinflint that I am, I wasn't willing to spend $1500+ for a brand new set, knowing very well, from my own experience that books are sometimes an on-the-spur-of-the-moment investment, never to be looked at again, unless it's time to move houses. I did find a few copies available on e-bay, but never managed to bid on time, so it was another item on my "I must do this someday" list. 

Perchance, two weeks ago, a google search brought up a listing on gumtree about a set of books available, for a knockout price of $100. I wasted no time, made a call, promised to pick it up at their earliest convenience, got help from my most helpful colleagues (colleges, as they like to call themselves!), & they're home now, occupying prime real estate in the limited shelving space we've got at home.  


I started with Volume 1, simply because I had no idea where else to begin. & as promised, it turned out to be a voice of reason: as pertinent for today as it was when written half a century ago. Two questions that stand out for me (phrased in my, not the articulate authors, words):
1. What is the point of an education, sending a child to "school" for 16 years? 
2. What's the point of vocational specialization, without any consideration to the hundreds of closely intertwined issues that are required to get a full appreciation of the problems that surround us?


The authors recommend several reading plans. I've chosen is the plan which selects  works from various volumes, in increasing levels of difficulty, taking about 10 years to read & comprehend the whole set. Pages 200-219 of Plato is the first of this journey. I've just finished reading those 20 pages, & am still recovering from the brilliance & simplicity of the ideas put forth. 


I think I might get the best out of my investment of time if in addition to reading it, I can write a synopsis for my own sake. I'll give it a shot during this weekend. 

Satchita - Playing for change

No money <> no life

The Man Who Quit Money — and Lived to Tell About It

Fading lines

More iPhones subject to search warrants, iPads too

Coasties with a sense of humor

Syrian President Assad could be tried for war crimes, says ex-peace envoy | World news | guardian.co.uk

An "ex-peace envoy" who goes around now advocating hatred?
What about the "war-crimes" that his masters perpetrate around the world in the excuse of making it a safer place? 10-year wars anyone?

Syrian President Assad could be tried for war crimes, says ex-peace envoy | World news | guardian.co.uk: "ex-peace envoy"

Great Family Routines!

on Art - Pablo Picasso

Art is the elimination of the unnecessary. -Pablo Picasso, painter, and sculptor (1881-1973)

Moral Certainty - H L Mencken

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure." -H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (1880-1956) 

A huge victory for Yes Toastmasters!!!

Yes Toastmasters club toastmaster wins Hawkesbury Division International Speech Contest tonight 22 Apr 2012 -- Yes Toastmasters (@YesToastmasters). Congrats Mathew Tonkiss

Man is the centre of the universe -NOT!

The world, we are told, was made especially for man -- a presumption not supported by all the facts... Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation? -John Muir, naturalist and explorer (1838-1914) 

Bushwalk #2 - Wondabyne to Pindars Cave

Wondabyne is short-platform train station along the Hawkesbusy River, on the Mullet Creek. Apparently, it's also the only train station in Australia that has no road leading to or from it!

My daily commute by train winds down the beautiful Hawkesbury River, showcasing the calmness through the scratched window panes. I often wondered what it would be to get off at Wondabyne, sit on the wharf, in solitude, in what seems like wilderness in the middle of the busy-ness of life.

I had my opportunity last weekend, when I accompanied my friend Anthony & his son 10 year old son, Nicholas on a bushwalk from Wondabyne to Pindar Caves. You have to be on the last carriage of the 8-car trains, & inform the guard of your intention to get off at Wondabyne. Three blokes in shorts, with hats & sunscreen, & carrying a bag with bottles of water sticking out, on a Saturday - the guard waved us on as we approached her - she seemed to read our minds!

The first thing that you notice when you get off at Wondabye, immediately after the train pulls off, is the deafening noise of quiet. Well, nothing except the sounds of nature. You can hear the mullet jump out of the water, & hear the tweets of birds (as opposed to the Twitter of Twats). The water gently laps at the one boat tied to the wharf. There is no one besides the three of us, which suits us just fine!

The trail climbs steeply for about 200 metres, before leveling off & joining the Great North Walk. We stop & take a break - well, I needed it rather than either Anthony or Nicholas, both of them fit & seasoned walkers. After a sip of water, we continue on our way.

Hawkesbury river

The trail is not maintained, so we had to elbow our way through at several places where the trail was overgrown. In some areas, we couldn't even find the trail, & it took some expert tracking by Anthony to get back on. We reached Pindar's cave just after noon, after over 4 hours of walking in pristine bush-land.


We saw some amazing wildlife on our way back - a 1.5 metre iguana basking in the sun, a brown snake, hundreds of birds & a zillion insects, not counting the one & only leech on Anthony's leg during the entire day.

My knee has been giving me some grief over the last few weeks - age catching up I guess. I had some pain relief ointment in the bag, which came very handy. It wasn't so bad on the return trip, getting better with each bit of exercise I've been giving it lately.

We missed the train by a few minutes at Wondabyne station, & the next train wasn't until an hour later. We sat down again on the wharf, & then jumped into the river to cool off. A beautiful end to a beautiful day's walk with two wonderful gentlemen. Can't wait for the next bushwalk, coming soon. I'll post some more pictures & a couple of videos soon.

Threads: Free rent?

Threads: Free rent?:

Geometry of sound visualised

The Geometry of Sound Visualized

Web to apps: whither, o internet?

Walled gardens look rosy for Facebook, Apple – and would-be censors

Rekindle

In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit. -Albert Schweitzer, philosopher, physician, musician, Nobel laureate (1875-1965

Asimov predictions..

Isaac Asimov Imagines Digital Learning in the Electronic Age … and Gets It Quite Right (1989)

an invocation for beginners - Ze Frank

There’s no need to sharpen my pencils anymore; my pencils are sharp enough. Even the dull ones will make a mark.

The (im)morality of taxes

via- the Guardian.

Tax Avoidance by the super rich is termed "tax planning" - legitimate use of available tax loopholes to minimize tax on absurd amounts of income & wealth (I refuse to be drawn into a pedagogic discussion about definitions of the two terms). This is a facility available only to a select few, couched as it is in legalese, defined & passed into legislation by the "chosen" few, & priced insanely out of the reach of the 99.9%.

I'm back (to paraphrase Syl Stallone)

March was a month of hibernation to blogging.
Come to think of it, so has April, until today.

I didn't feel compelled to share. Not greedy or possessive. Just not compelled to share. Fortunately, that was restricted to my online life activities.

In a way, it was cathartic (I heard the word again today, & felt compelled to use it somewhere, so here it is!). Doing something is as liberating as not doing something.

If that makes any sense.

There may be some posts soon. I've found some sources online that piqued my interest. Openculture was one.
I also my hands dirty (literally) with paving paint, turning our shabby garage into a cleaner play area for the kids.
I'm also preparing for my 10th speech out of the Competent Communicator's manual

Interesting stuff happening all around. Good, bad, who knows? Labels are just another way of getting a handle on things.

& yet, we continue poisoning ourselves..

Top Scientist: Fluoride Already Shown to Cause 10,000 Cancer Deaths

A not- insignificant win against creepy facebook

Students force Facebook to cough up more user data

Santiago's brain

http://www.rollingstoneme.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=897

The facebook generation

Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? - Magazine - The Atlantic

American individualism is a myth

Not just American. This is an universal truth..
American individualism is a myth

Big brother - not the tv show

What the web’s saying about UK internet snooping laws

Church schools shun poorest pupils

sums me up perfectly well!!

Licensed, not sold..

Edging toward the fully licensed world

Somalia, Oil.. hmmm

Oil discovered in Somalia [via  the Guardian]

I wonder how long the US & its All-lies have known about this...

Simplify

“The hardest thing in the world is to simplify your life. It’s so easy to make it complex.” – Yvon Chouinard

Dreamers & Doers

The world needs dreamers and the world needs doers.  But above all, the world needs dreamers who do.

~Sarah Ban Breathnach

"Laughter is beautiful" - Alice

Hot & Bothered - Kathy Coleman

Watch "Hot & Bothered - Kathy Coleman" on YouTube

Quran Burning

American apologies are falling on deaf ears in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan, where anger over the burning of Qurans is boiling over.


Really? Why don't they see this is just the tipping point, not the cause???.. When your nation's been invaded on the pretext of hunting down ONE man, & been occupied for over 10 years, & when you, a nation that's been thriving when not invaded (think a few centuries ago), is now struggling for survival, when you see the murder & subsequent desecration of your fellow citizens, & your constant worry the life for your little children (who by the way, are forced to pitch in to earn the pittance that can not even fetch you a single meal) lest they be killed by drones in the sky..
The one thing you turn to to give you some solace in the middle of this agony they call life is not spared either. Burned. Symbolically. 


& you, you are surprised they are angry?? 

Isabel Allende - Tales of Passion

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/es/isabel_allende_tells_tales_of_passion.html

Travellers Prayer - Slim Dusty

Investing in Education?

how about spending a little less on Offense & a little more on its own education system?

or maybe that is the whole point - we need dumbed down citizens who will unquestioningly fund our pockets with their blood sweat & tears?


http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/political-news/surplus-before-schools-as-gonski-report-decries-student-disadvantage-20120220-1tin1.html

Charge for Features. The Dilbert

Ten Bucks in the GloveBox - Sunny Cowgirls

Can't compete!

I had a sense of deja-vu this evening.
Very rarely do I make myself comfortable on the couch AND turn on the television.
I did today, & the "news" was on.
A report about how the manufacturing industries in Australia cannot compete with the rest of the world.
The usual suspect, China.
The unusual suspect? India.

What I heard from one of the owners caused me the sense of deja-vu.

"There's no way we can compete with manufacturing over there. They have the best technology, it keeps their costs down & their quality up. Their government gives the manufacturers subsidies for getting export orders".

Words I had heard so often growing up in India about the "developed" world.

Seems that the "developed" world has no more room to "develop". Ironic.

Copyright Infringement

Copyright Infringement


They used to be pedantic about definitions in law.
Now they just don't bother.
& most people just won't care either.

The Force be with you..

Innovation doesn't kill jobs, it creates it.

Illegally passed legislation does the killing of jobs.

Interesting read

Teachers? Or computers?

Students Computers

Home experiments

DIY science: should you try this at home?

Copious rights....

Rap Group

Buddy goode.. cougarville

Watch "Buddy Goode - Cougarville" on YouTube

There you are.. Willie Nelson

Migratory routes

Europeans migrate south as continent drifts deeper into crisis

Andy McKee..

Hollywood Gets To Party With TPP Negotiators; Public Interest Groups Get Thrown Out Of Hotel | Techdirt

Hollywood Gets To Party With TPP Negotiators; Public Interest Groups Get Thrown Out Of Hotel | Techdirt:

War Rhetoric rises

Iranian attack on America and allies increasingly likely – intelligence chief | World news | The Guardian:

The new face of Evil.

Spin a story, hope enough countries in the world fall for this nonsense, & give themselves the incredible "right" to "intervene" to solve a "humanitarian crisis".

In this day & age of information at their fingertips, I'm amazed that people still won't take the effort to see this for what it really is!

Shame.

Maybe, as Ben Franklin said, Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither.

The Thought Police are nearly here..

Program reads mind words (via The Guardian)

Not very sure what happens to all those pictures in my head, provided I agree to the implant required in my head..