james.lab6.com

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2004
November

Posts

1st
- US Election 2004 → Tomorrow, barring months of legal challenges, America will choose a president who hates and is hated by 50% of the population. Oh well.
2nd
- Reason → Interesting opinions on smacking here. Most people condone smacking, saying that kids “won’t listen to reason”. Seems fair enough, but it’s interesting to note that defenders of wife-beating say exactly the same thing. Reason is a dangerous thing to think you are in possession of.
3rd
- Windows XP is no longer viable → A few weeks ago a friend got disconnected from the university network for having a machine full of viruses and spyware buzzing away at its nefarious deeds. She reinstalled Windows XP and got reconnected yesterday. Before she could download and install SP2, Norton reported that the machine had 14 viruses, at least one of which [...]
- NHS + Microsoft = You’re feeling safer already! → Maybe it’s just the lingering memory of my previous post, but this Microsoft deal with the NHS can’t possibly be a good thing. And 33 billion pounds on IT systems? What unholy God-AI computer system are they building that could possibly cost that much? It’s about 1000 times more than it cost to build Google.
4th
- China being clever again → 10 things China rocks at. England has numbers 1, 8 and 9, and Brazil has numbers 4, 5, 7 and 10. The president of China in 50 years time will be someone who is currently growing up on a diet of Doom 3 and Reality TV. The only way to break totalitarianism is steady attrition from the [...]
7th
- Slackers → I got Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom out of the library and found it filled to the brim with scribblings. I estimate about 85% of the text is underlined in pencil, presumably to draw attention to the important parts. Is this a social science thing? Maths textbooks don’t attract notes in the margin, which could be [...]
9th
- Geography for Chefs → Top 4 countries named after food: Chile Turkey Greece Wales Disqualified: Hungary, Sweden
10th
- Sim City: The C is for Communist! → After finishing The Road to Serfdom, I left my brain ticking over for a few seconds waiting for the start of the period where I take all its lessons to heart (you know, the period right before you begin thinking critically) and become a true Hayekian. (Un)fortunately, as usually happens when I start idling, my [...]
- Must… protect… children! → (Warning! The following is baseless speculation! Digest with caution!) One of the great myths of the information age is that media has no impact on the minds of children (or adults). It’s a reaction against the equally mythical claims that “Doom turned my kids into Satanists!” No kid likes to be told his hobby is warping [...]
11th
- Death by Logic → I wrote yeterday that the Evangelical Religion meme can’t stand up to the Rationality meme. It’s worth mentioning that some might say the Rationality meme can’t stand up to a pure strain of itself, since a life of pure logic is not one conducive to wanting to stay alive.
12th
- Intravenous gaming → The art of the film and the art of the game is to convincingly draw you into its world. This is why I think hard drugs are the future of interactive entertainment. Thanks to the War-on-Drugs-inspired total blackout of research into psychoactive drugs, we mostly don’t have a clue what they do or why they do [...]
14th
- The evil of borders → Girl in pinata found during border check. (Via Boingboing) Inspectors at border checkpoints have seen it all: people rolled inside carpets, sewn into car seats and stuffed into washing machines, all attempting to be smuggled into the United States. But inspectors at the Tecate Port of Entry discovered a new twist recently when they encountered a little [...]
15th
- *-bomber → MSN sucks as a medium from which to copy conversation: J: i would say that the “feelings of inferiority” thing is a real phenomenon J: but identifying it with political leanings is not very useful J: as it’s by no means restricted to leftists etc. D: the only insane part of unabom is that he [...]
16th
- My lungs! The smoking ban - it does nothing! → Smoking ban proposed in England. Is it the case that about 87% of smokers are unpleasant people, or that about 87% of unpleasant people are smokers? Although the difference is statistically significant, I don’t intend to find out which is correct, since it seems quite obvious that there is at least a correlation between smoking and [...]
- Mini-reviews of recent watchings → Select the blacked out parts to reveal spoilers. If your browser doesn’t support CSS, you’re about to be spoiled! The Big Lebowski: Not sure what to make of this. Totally meandering plot. The point, if there is one, seems to be to show off the life of The Dude. Quite good fun, good music, well written, [...]
17th
- Mathematics Defined → A complete history and comprehensive overview of mathematics, in two words: Symmetry Detail When are things the same, and when are they different? That’s what mathematics is.
18th
- Tesco spam → I didn’t give Tesco my full surname when filling out the clubcard form, so now I get emails like this: Dear Mr T, Don’t leave your Christmas shopping until the last minute. …
19th
- The one you’ve all been waiting for: Reality TV → In the 1950s parents despaired of their kids corrupting themselves with rock’n'roll. In the 1980s those corrupted kids were parents themselves, despairing of their children wasting their lives on video games. Now the gaming generation has children of its own, and the new bogeything is Reality TV. It’s not uncommon to think of video games as [...]
21st
- UK zombie panic 2004 → To anyone who thinks zombie films are not vivid social satire, we have: The American ’super-cop’ brought in by the Home Office to cut Britain’s crime rate warned last night that the nation’s binge drinking culture was spiralling out of control and fuelling an epidemic of violence outside pubs and clubs that threatened to overwhelm the [...]