On the 8 Spot

I know I’m getting bitter on one facet of my life, I pray that other facets are saved from this bitterness. I’m pretty much sure they are.

The main target of Bitterness (or Vitriol, as the doctor of my book preferred) is desire. People attacked by this evil begin losing their desire for everything and in a few years are unable to go outside their world – because they have used up enormous energy reserves building high walls for the reality to be what they wanted it to be.

When avoiding outside attack, they also limit internal growth. They continue going to work, watching television, complaining about the traffic and having children, but all that happens automatically, without really understanding why they are behaving like that – after all, everything is under control.

The great problem of poisoning by Bitterness lies in the fact that passions – hate, love, despair, enthusiasm and curiosity – also don’t appear any more. After some time, the bitter person has no more desire. They had no more will even to live, or to die; that was the problem.

via Bitterness « Paulo Coelho’s Blog.

I used to not care that much about the “Population Scare” this is because especially for our country we have tax rates that rival that of the more successful countries and countries that have substantially better social safety net. For me the Philippines problem was the money going into the coffers of the government is not used in a way that would help increase Investment and Capital, money/pork barrel/ira allotments were used for projects that were less helpful to the economic engine of the Philippines.I even defended in a blog post Sen. Manny Villar’s stance that population is not the problem, opportunity is. I believe this because we are doing so little to help people achieve what they can achieve.

What has changed since then to convince me of the importance of RH bill?

Two things:

• The increasing likelihood that there would be an HIV/AIDS epidemic in the Philippines
• Studying/Reading the lecture notes of Brad Delong on Industrial Revolution and Malthusian Economics etc.

I’m basically convinced that the Black Death/Wars/Spanish Influenza has helped in increasing the household wealth of Europe. This allowed consumption to rise and thus there was money for what industry produced.This started a virtuous cycle that has produced the stellar growth of world wealth that we enjoy today.

What this means is that I’ve basically given up on any help from the government to increase investment in useful industries and hope that the virtuous cycle of investment, and growth can be jump started by increasing the household wealth available to Filipino households and by creating pressure to increase wages because of a smaller population.

What this means is that people who oppose the RH bill are in essence ok with the status quo.

Anti RH Bill people are ok with double digit unemployment rates.

Anti RH Bill people are ok with us being an OFW nation. (The effects of which are still not truly apparent)

Anti RH Bill people are ok with people getting HIV/AIDS.

The problem is the asymmetry of the supporters. The Pro RH bill people must be heard. They must make themselves heard or the bullying few will get their way!!!

When the House reassembled on January 18, however, RH had disappeared from the Speaker of the House’s list of priority bills. Inquiries by proponents of the bill produced evasive replies from the House leadership. When the House adjourned for the elections on Feb 3, RH was dead. The reason, however, was painfully obvious.

In December, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) instructed the electorate not to vote for candidates who espoused RH. Alongside this decree had unfolded a massive campaign that involved systematic disinformation about the bill. Among the malicious allegations that were spread was that the bill imposes penalties on parents who do not allow their children to have premarital sex. Another was that the bill promotes the use of abortifacients or methods of contraception that induce abortion.

via How Mona Lisa Died – INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos.

read the whole thing. If you haven’t seen it google sixth sense computing ted talk watch the 2009 one presented in TED india. For me the iPad is a step towards having the sixth sense computer that is seen in that TED conference. It is the tool to of the rationalist wannabe to help make great decisions. I still remember how wikipedia/the internet in general, has changed conversations; I believe making it better. The advent of wikipedia allowed people to stop debating useless info because you can look at it at wikipedia and then you’d know. Now it has been a problem because sometimes the conversation stops because we have no way at looking at wikipedia.  This is what made the iPhone useful. The iPad is the next logical step. If it only had a camera it wouldn’t take a genius to create some of the sixth sense apps that was demoed in the TED talk. The iPhone/iPad/iTouch because of the app store has become the platform where we can build towards the sixth sense technologies that we I believe already need to traverse this ever complex world!!!!

The iPad is NOT a Computer, its a Briefcase w/Gizmos

Posted by Bruce Webb | 1/28/2010 01:18:00 PM

technology

9 comments

by Bruce Webb

Geekery below the fold.

Steve Jobs was a little hyperbolic in his language yesterday which led some people to laugh. Well there are reasons he is a self-made billionaire and you are not.

The key to understanding why the iPad and similar devices can change the world it to understand that it is not a computer without a physical keyboard, or a multi-media player, or a portable display, sure all of those are built in but they don't add up to what the iPad really is, which is a magic briefcase full of Gizmos.

What's a Gizmo. Well the online dictionaries have boring definitions but for my purpose a Gizmo is something that does something for you. A Gizmo generally isn't big and it mostly isn't multifunctional, it just does what it does in a fun and efficient way. The iPad is designed to be a repository for Gizmos along with Games and Books and Music and allows you to use all of them anywhere you go. Now it sounds silly to put it this way but it doesn't have to be, if you were a Building Inspector it might be nice to have one Gizmo to record your findings and another that allowed you to look up the International Building and Fire Codes on the fly, and maybe another to allow you to record your time on the job. And on a dirty, dusty or muddy job site it might be nice to have one in the same form factor as the clipboard you had been carrying rather than some clamshell lap top vulnerable to the environment.

via The iPad is NOT a Computer, its a Briefcase w/Gizmos | Angry Bear.

Prof Wiesel advices Pinoy academics that these S&T incubators will only deliver its promise if the academics themselves adopt a more daring interdisciplinary view of things. This would imply a major shake up of how university bureaucracies are run which at present promotes departmental isolation. He suggests that academic departments and even the various UP campuses be daring enough to set up shop at the technohub (which should facilitate departments to collaboratively how to hatch projects). He gives the example of UP Manila’s health sciences research units. Medicine should not limit itself to clinical research but look into the potential of basic science research which can be incubated as new medical technologies. The best place to do that is in UP Diliman’s technohub since UP Diliman is strong in the basic natural sciences like physics, chem, biology and environment.

via Merienda with a Nobel Laureate | Filipino Voices.

I believe we can do the same study for the natural gas in malampaya (I think I’m not sure but the one that pays taxes to the Provincial Government of Batangas). I feel that the results would be similar. I hope they are not.

The Dutch Disease Gets a Brazilian

By Paul Kedrosky · Saturday, January 23, 2010 · ShareThis

The Dutch disease – the economic hollowing-out and corruption effects of domestic resource exploitation – has an interesting twist when it happens in Brazil:

Oil windfalls and living standards: New evidence from Brazil

Francesco Caselli, Guy Michaels, 20 January 2010

Does the “resource curse” exist? This column presents new evidence from Brazil. Municipalities that receive oil windfalls report significant increases in spending on infrastructure, education, health, and transfers to households. However, the windfalls do not trickle down and much of the money goes missing. Indeed, oil revenues increase the size of municipal workers’ houses but not the size of other residents’ houses. [Emphasis mine]

via The Dutch Disease Gets a Brazilian.

First Round Capital 2009 Holiday Card from First Round Capital on Vimeo.

I’ve tendered my resignation a couple of weeks ago (…).  I am having this weird notion that my next job would only be for a tech-startup who wants to build something.  This could easily turn into a rant but my mood picked up thanks to someone. I just saw this video and decided to post it. It was weirdly inspiring to me.

The students were interviewed after the study and most appeared “genuinely flabbergasted” to learn that an experimenter swap had occurred, yet they still responded differently to the prostitution scenario compared to the control group. Proulx and Heine say these results are similar to other studies where people have been made to feel threatened before making a judgement: when threatened, people are harsher judges of others. The researchers suggest that the students implicitly noticed the change of experimenter, but since this type of a swap is unusual in real life, they never became conscious of it. Because of this implicit detection of an unusual event, the students behaved as if they had been threatened.

via What if you saw something that rocked your world … and you didn’t notice? : Cognitive Daily.

Read the whole thing it’s very intructive. I’d like to just say that we should try to understand other people’s predicaments. Some are just simply lonely/sad/insecure and that’s why they are acting like class A @$$h0135. There was this movie “Pay It Forward”, where in upon receiving a major blessing from another person, you Pay It Forward. I think we can make something different. I don’t have a gift for naming things so let’s just call it “It Stops Here”.

Whenever somebody is acting harshly towards you, take a few deep breaths and tell yourself “It Stops Here”.

Whenever some other driver cuts you off, You don’t go ballistic. Respectfully correct the driver , take a couple of deep breaths and tell yourself “It Stops Here”.

When you get home after a long stressful day at work, before entering your house, you take a couple of breaths and tell yourself “It Stops Here”.

See when we are insecure we go into defensively offensive mode.  If you really are the strong one, then you roll with the punches and make it stop where you are. We must make it such that there is a voice inside our heads that says “I would not be abusive because another person is abusive towards me.”,” I will not let my insecurity become the reason I shout at another person.” It’s the small things like this simple act that make the world so much more livable.

Take the loneliness test here: UCLA Loneliness Scale.

UCLA Loneliness Scale

Indicate how often each of the statements below is descriptive of you. Circle one letter for each statement:

via UCLA Loneliness Scale.

If I interpret this correctly I have low loneliness, but this is because I don’t feel lonely doing things alone (I love how this sentence rolls of the mouth).  I searched for the UCLA Loneliness Scale after reading this post by Gretchen of The Happiness Project. Loneliness was on my mind because of the study this article was based on. (Pointer From Jayson F.).

Hope we can all self-evaluate and if we feel lonely then connect with people. Loneliness can be debilitating.

Most of our happiness and productivity comes from the everyday details of our lives: the people we live and work with, the books we read, the hikes we take, the parties we attend, etc. But how do we choose these things? How do we know what to do, and how do know if we’ll like it? The obvious answer is that we do and like whatever the TV tells us to do and like. I’m not certain that's the best answer though.

By sharing more of our own thoughts and lives with the world, we contribute to the global pool of “how to live”, and over time we also get contributions back from the world. Think of it as “open source living”. This has certainly been my experience with my blog and FriendFeed. Not only do people occasionally say that it has helped them, but I’ve also met interesting new people and gotten a lot of good leads on new ideas. These are typically small things, but our lives are woven from the small details of everyday living. For example, I saw a good TED talk on “The science of motivation”, shared it on FriendFeed, and in the comments Laura Norvig suggested a book called Unconditional Parenting, which turns out to be very good.

via Paul Buchheit: Open as in water, the fluid necessary for life.

One of the many things that I miss in being a student is the access all the IEEE journals through UP’s academic access. Nothing seems more against the principle of the academe than the way that research isn’t propagated because of cost. See I am interested in alot of things , this is because of an intense curiosity that tries to seek out as much knowledge as my little brain can grok. One of the themes that continously arises is how much progress made in the sciences are due to lateral or expansive grasp of present knowledge.

I use lateral in the way that alot of progress is due to connecting various seemingly independet events into a theory that explains both. I put Einstein’s theories in this category.

The expansive grasp means knowing all the pertinent techniques with respect to your problem. If you read Feynman’s Nobel Lecture you see whaI mean here. He had a claim that(probably true) that he knew everything about the problem he was trying to solve, which help him connect the dots on the different approaches to the same problem.

Both of these are negatively impacted by the high cost of journals. The amateur/hobbyist is doubly affected , and what are most of us in fields that we are not actively trying to research further are we? Most of us are not experts in everything and some of us  (including me) are not even expert in anything.  How much progress is not being made because information is not readily available?

If this is a simple case of “It’s always been done like this!”, then I think we need to rethink this. In a way science has progressed. During the time of newton or darwin  they rarely collaborated with fellows, but we have progressed far faster because of openly available information. The thing is we are moving ever faster towrds an age where science would either stagnate or reach a point that people call a singularity. Stagnation means that there would be a return to malthus and that is something we cannot let happen, this for me means that we have a duty to ourselves and those that come after us to make sure that the future is aor near the singularity. This calls for cheaper if not free flow of information!

The ridiculous high prices of online journal articles.

I’m a lucky guy! I work for a major UK University and one of the perks of the job is that I (along with every other member of the University) get access to a massive array of academic journals and this is close to priceless as far as I am concerned. I’d rather take a salary cut than lose that particular perk (shhhh, don’t mention this to my bosses) and I don’t even do any formal research!

I have been blogging for almost two years now and one thing I have learned from the whole experience is that the world contains legions of amateur scholars – people who do research for personal rather than professional reasons. These scholars (and I like to think I am one of them) don’t want to publish papers or get qualifications, they simply want to learn about and discuss whatever subject takes their fancy. In my case I focus on subjects such as mathematics and physics since they are (and always have been) the subjects that float my boat and they are also the subjects I studied both at school and at University.

via Walking Randomly » The ridiculous high prices of online journal articles..