“What is the system that everything has to adhere to, if there is no god?”

Here is a very entertaining BBC documentary summarising the works of Cantor, Boltzmann, Gödel and Turing. Mathematics is full of a surprising number of good stories and, though I’m not too sure about some of the more dramatic claims, this film ties a bunch of them together in a very entertaining way.

Technorati Tags:mathematics, philosophy, Alan+Turing, Kurt+Godel

Dangerous Knowledge

Some great books that cover particularly Turing and Gödel have been written and some of these authors are talking heads in the film :

• Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
• Meta Math!: The Quest for Omega by Gregory Chaitin
• The Emperor’s New Mind by Roger Penrose

“[...] this desolate spot is a symbol of the impact of Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank and of the dire economic state of the Palestinian territories, where about a third of adults are without work.”

West Bank Boys Dig a Living From Settler Trash - New York Times

They care for neither Fatah nor Hamas; they are “from the party of bread”. Where do people go when they are stuck between the garbage of an oppressive, colonising neighbour and the inadequacy of their elected government?

Technorati Tags:
Israel, Palestine, West+Bank, middle+east

“[...] it’s great to know that you can just copy a table in Numbers and paste it into Tinderbox 4 and everything just works. The top row of labels maps onto a list of attributes. New attributes are created when appropriate, and old attributes are used when that makes sense. Each row becomes a note.”

Mark Bernstein: Tinderbox 4: Spreadsheets

While Tinderbox is brilliant at allowing the structure of your notes to emerge over time, and adding attributes (custom metadata for your notes) without having to design a schema up-front, sometimes you have some starting notes with a clear set of starting attributes and values. Adding each of these attributes in Tinderbox one by one can be laborious, but a simple way to add new user attributes and get the values for each entered at the same time is to create a table in Excel or the new Numbers application from Apple. Then you simply copy and paste straight into Tinderbox.

By doing this you can use a spreadsheet to sketch out a quick schema for notes in a Tinderbox document, and continue to use prototypes to develop and maintain the schema. This can be done quickly and easily after pasting from the spreadsheet:

• copy one of the new notes
• empty out the key attribute values
• give the new prototype a name
• set IsPrototype=true

So this is not simply another way to get data into Tinderbox but a way to get structure into Tinderbox and shows how Tinderbox is becoming just as comfortable with the quantitative as it has been with the qualitative.

Technorati Tags:
macosx, software, tinderbox

“Facebook, Stumble Upon, Flixster, Twitter, Hi 5…
You know what… I’m old school. Give me YouTube and a blog and that’s all the time I want to spend in front of computer when I’m not at work or doing something [...]“

I’ve added you as a friend on…

(Via Pezboy.net.)

Angry, passionate, often incoherent, but always “keeping it real”, Pezboy feels the pain that many people online are, with the never ending stream of new social networking sites.

I’m with you Pezboy; get a blog, post stuff and link to your friends. If you have something more private to say why don’t you email them or call them on the phone? Exactly, because you’re a dork.

/poor pezboy biatch imitate mode off/

PS I might have to twitter this post (which is picked up on my tumblelog) … it’ll show up automatically on my facebook profile …

Technorati Tags:
web, blog, twitter, tumblr

“[...] based on official data released by the Israeli government following a court order, 90 percent of the settlements sprawl beyond their official boundaries despite the large amount of unused land already allocated to them.”

Israeli Settlements Exceed Boundaries, Report Says - New York Times

These land grabs (70% of settler controlled, non-official land is privately owned by Palestinians) are carried out under the nose and protection of the Israeli Defence Force, still the governing force in the West Bank according to Israeli law and policy.

Technorati Tags:
Palestine, Israel, West+Bank

“Fatah faces defeat despite US backing”

Fatah faces defeat… - World - smh.com.au

How did that headline make it through the editing process?Could it be possible that Palestinians don’t trust US foreign policy? Ummm, gee, I dunno …

Technorati Tags:USA, Palestine, Israel

“… state electoral laws meant the party’s slate of 15 upper house candidates was barred from appearing ‘above the line’. This was because the SEP refused to allocate preferences to any other electoral group. NSW Electoral Commission official Terry Jessop spelt out the undemocratic implications of this regulatory catch-22 as follows: ‘If you run below the line, you will get very few votes’. In other words, the entire voting system is designed to force parties to engage in opportunist horse-trading over the distribution of preferences.”

Australia: Final votes counted in New South Wales election campaign

Why is this undemocratic and why are such specific processes important?

Quite simply, it restricts the discourse to those topics that major parties agree should be discussed. How is it possible that given the unprecedented demonstrations in opposition to the Iraq war, that Australian’s partook in - demonstrations that were not only large, but organised before the official launching of the war - we still have not had any elections, during which participation in the war, was an election issue of any magnitude?

These are the mechanisms which make such a thing possible; these details should be fixed if we are even slightly serious about democracy. Now think about this in respect to what we are supposed to be doing for Iraq and in the context of this ANZAC day.

Technorati Tags:
Australian+politics, NSW+election+07, democracy

“The Australian government has announced plans to outlaw material that advocates terrorism - a move designed to tighten its already strict censorship rules.
Books and films deemed to glorify terrorism will be removed from shelves and barred from entering the country.”

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Australia censors terrorism books

Not much to say about this; it’s just obscene. This sort of thing really could send me overseas for a long time.

Technorati Tags:
censorship, free+speech, Australian+politics

“[A laptop's architecture today is] … a little bit like an obese person having to use most of their energy to move their obesity.”

TED | Talks | Nicholas Negroponte: The vision behind One Laptop Per Child (video)

This talk is slightly old but it occurred to me that sceptics of this program that I have talked to, usually know nothing at all about computer architecture; and therefore, they don’t grasp why the details of such a project make it so exciting and plausible to someone who does.

It’s the details that are the reason that people excited about the project often want one of these machines for themselves.

Of course, the larger questions about this project have to do with availability of good mentoring, security and lots of other social issues; however, I still get the feeling, that people look at the infuriating machine on their desk and can’t understand how a $100 laptop could be of use to anyone, yet alone a poor child.

Technorati Tags:
computer+architecture, computing, OLPC, $100+laptop

“But intellectual property law is not the only way to provide such incentives. Ideas, for example, cannot be patented. Yet university professors churn out hundreds of thousands of publications each year that are full of ideas, both good and bad. The social norms in academia, among them citation requirements and plagiarism taboos, seem to work pretty well.”

Why That Hoodie Your Son Wears Isn’t Trademarked - New York Times

(Via cmdln.)

I wish someone would tell the proponents of software patents that ideas can’t be patented. What is the position of the majority of pro software patent people? Is it that ideas can in fact be patented, or is it what I thought it has been for a while; software is not an idea but something more akin to physical invention?

I’ve always had a pretty simple view of this question; if you consider mathematics to be a field of ideas that should not qualify for patent protection, software should also be safe.

Technorati Tags:
software, patents