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rePost: This man is an island

from FP:

This man is an island

Mon, 06/23/2008 – 1:40pm

Stuart Hill, the owner of a small island off the coast of Scotland, declares he is no longer under British rule:

I have recently become the owner of a tiny island off Papa Stour, which itself (for the benefit of non-Shetlanders) is a small island off the west coast of Shetland. I am returning to the Nordic tradition by re-naming it Forvik Island – Island of the Bay of Sheep. On 21st June 2008, Forvik, by my Declaration of Dependence, reverted to Shetland’s true constitutional position – that of a Crown Dependency. Other Crown Dependencies include The Isle of Man and The Channel Islands.

Forvik Island, or Forvik for short, recognises neither the British Government, nor the European Union as its superior. Because of Shetland’s unique history, there can have been no legal basis for Shetland to have been involved with either. It recognises Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I of Scotland and II of the United Kingdom as head of state.

Hill is also inviting others to apply for citizenship. If you are not a resident of the Shetland Islands, you can become an “honorary citizen of Forvik” by forking over one Forvik gulde, a currency tied to the daily market price of gold at a rate of 13 percent. Honorary citizens get a share of the profits from land sales (the island is 2.5 acres in size) as well as “duty-free activities, company registrations, vehicle registrations and other activities.”

I wonder if was inspired by our primer on “How to Start Your Own Country in Four Easy Steps.”

(Hat tip: Reason)

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FP's top 20 public intellectuals (1-3)

FP’s top 20 public intellectuals 1-3:

FETHULLAH GÜLEN
Religious leader • Turkey
An Islamic scholar with a global network of millions of followers, Gülen is both revered and reviled in his native Turkey. To members of the Gülen movement, he is an inspirational leader who encourages a life guided by moderate Islamic principles. To his detractors, he represents a threat to Turkey’s secular order. He has kept a relatively low profile since settling in the United States in 1999, having fled Turkey after being accused of undermining secularism.

MUHAMMAD YUNUS

Microfinancier, activist • Bangladesh
More than 30 years ago, Yunus loaned several dozen poor entrepreneurs in his native Bangladesh a total of $27. It was the beginning of a lifetime devoted to fighting poverty through microfinance, efforts that earned him a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Over the years, his Grameen Bank, now operating in more than 100 countries, has loaned nearly $7 billion in small sums to more than 7 million borrowers—97 percent of them women. Ninety-eight percent of the loans have been repaid.

YUSUF AL-QARADAWI

Cleric • Egypt/Qatar
The host of the popular Sharia and Life TV program on Al Jazeera, Qaradawi issues w .eekly fatwas on everything from whether Islam forbids all consumption of alcohol (no) to whether fighting U.S. troops in Iraq is a legitimate form of resistance (yes). Considered the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Qaradawi condemned the September 11 attacks, but his pronouncements since, like his justification of suicide attacks, ensure his divisive reputation.

click through to view the whole list: list here:

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Worthy

We have only one life in this world let us not waste is! Always ask yourself:
Is What I Am Doing Worthy Of ME?
from Seth’s Excellent Post here:

Is being negative or bitter or selfish within reason in face of how extraordinarily lucky we were to have been been born here and born now?
I take so much for granted. Perhaps you do as well. To be here, in this moment, with these resources. To have not just our health but the knowledge and the tools and the infrastructure. What a waste.
If I hadn’t had those breaks, if there weren’t all those people who had sacrificed or helped or just stayed out of my way… what then? Would I even have had a shot at this?
What if this were my last post? Would this post be worthy?
The object isn’t to be perfect. The goal isn’t to hold back until you’ve created something beyond reproach. I believe the opposite is true. Our birthright is to fail and to fail often, but to fail in search of something bigger than we can imagine. To do anything else is to waste it all.

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No School Today!

Its been almost non stop rain for the past three days, but today was nothing but sunshine.
I wish I had a camera worthy enough to capture the beautiful sunset I am witnessing at the office.
Yes I am at the office, and wasting a beautiful day. (I am on break so forgive my quick post/rant)
The DECS (Department Of Education, Culture and Sports; a cabinet level department in charge of schools and other institutions in the Philippines that fall under its name) declared that there would be no classes today.
My beef is since I was in elementary school the DECS has always declared classes suspended “”a day late and a day long” (just love how you say the previous phrase).
Its been happening for  15 years and probably longer its really shameful how the DECS does their job too poorly.
In a related note. I can’t seem to stop shaking my head whenever I hear kids, young adults (college level students) wishing there was no class.
Let me qualify:
1. I can understand college kids dreading an exam or an oral recitation the next day.
2. I can understand small children wanting to spend time with their parents.
3. I can understand highschool kids wanting to hang out with friends.
What I can’t understand are the people who think of school as boring and worthless.
You control your lives, if the classes are boring you then cut classes and do something productive with your life.
Me and Chuckie were talking after watching Get Smart and the topic veered towards potential.
And I told him that “Its not about maximizing your potential, its maximizing what makes you happy” (I’ll write about this another time).
I just realize that my sentiments were incomplete. i should have said that “Its not about maximizing your potential, its maximizing what makes you happy, as long as you know that you are not modifying what would make you happy because of fear”.
It took me awhile before I finally got this, I hope you do to (Yeah whoever read my blog)

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Counter Hegemonic

hope we can start something like this in the Philippines where there seems to be extreme void in intelligent discourse !
from here:

(Counter)-hegemonic memes

Although the left invented the concept of cultural hegemony, they (we) have been pretty bad at practicing it. In many ways, it is the right’s preconceptions that are still hegemonic – for example, its use of “middle class” to mean rich, or its stigmatizing of single parents, welfare claimants, trades unionists or public sector workers.
Which raises the question. Shouldn’t we try to start an alternative hegemony?
This would not consist in more than just challenging the above preconceptions. Indeed, merely to challenge them is to lend them credence. To say “welfare claimants are not scroungers” is like a man saying “I don’t beat my wife.” It doesn‘t establish his innocence, but draws attention to suspicions.
No. What we need is something bolder, alternative memes. I’ll get you started with three quick ‘uns:
….
I offer this as a mere start. We can never tell which memes will take and which won’t, so it’s best to spread a load of them and see what grows.
The point of these, though, is not to be explicitly “radical“ or “transgressive.” Instead, it‘s to claim that we should take for granted certain things, which only idiots or extremists would challenge; this is how the right regards the above-mentioned claims.
And don’t be hung up by the “truth.” After all, the right wasn’t when it began those successful hegemonic memes.
The point about hegemonic memes is not that they are “true“: no simple statement about people or society is ever wholly true, a fact which usually only the most fatuous pedant points out. Instead, they act as default positions – things that are believed as a matter of course by many people, and whose challengers are regarded as marginal or eccentric.
So, what will be the new hegemonic positions?

June 22, 2008 |

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Interactional Expertise

More evidence of how crucial a choice our friends/seat mates/acquittance’s are to the decisions we can make. If this is true and my gut points me to the truth of this, we may be fast entering an age of great decision making. Why because usenet/googlegroups/yahoogroups or other conversational/ web 2.0 social interactivity interconnection technology is allowing us to be in the loop with the world’s foremost experts in the hard and social sciences. We (the early adopters) may be the first wave of people blessed with an Interactional Expertise spanning a large part of human knowledge.
the interview is from here:
How do you distinguish the people who can and can’t contribute to a specialized field?
 The key to the whole thing is whether people have had access to the tacit knowledge of an esoteric area—tacit knowledge is know-how that you can’t express in words. The standard example is knowing how to ride a bike. My view as a sociologist is that expertise is located in more or less specialized social groups. If you want to know what counts as secure knowledge in a field like gravitational wave detection, you have to become part of the social group. Being immersed in the discourse of the specialists is the only way to keep up with what is at the cutting edge.
Is this where interactional expertise comes into play?
 Interactional expertise is one of the things that broadens the scope of who can contribute. It’s a little bit wider than the old “people in the white coats” of the 1950s, but what it’s not is everybody. (Within science, lots of people have interactional expertise, because science wouldn’t run without it.)
You did experiments to test your theory of expertise. What did you find?
The original version we did was with color-blind people. What we were attempting to demonstrate is something we call the strong interactional hypothesis: If you have deeply immersed yourself in the talk of an esoteric group—but not immersed yourself in any way in the practices of that group—you will be indistinguishable from somebody who has immersed themself [sic] in both the talk and the practice, in a test which just involves talk.
If that’s the case, then you’re going to speak as fluently as someone who has been engaged in the practices. And if you can speak as fluently, then you’re indistinguishable from an expert. It’s what I like to call “walking the talk”. You still can’t do the stuff, but you can make judgments, inferences and so on, which are on a par.
We picked color-blind people because they’ve spent their whole lives immersed in a community talking about color. So we thought color-blind people should be indistinguishable from color-perceivers when asked questions by a color-perceiver who knew what was going on. And we demonstrated that that was in fact the case. Now we’re planning to do another imitation test on the congenitally blind to see if they can perform as well as the color-blind.

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Learned Today 2008 06 17 1536H

I’ve been a victim of this awhile ago, I think another side effect of this is that people with certificates automatically discount your knowledge because you lack the said certificate.
I’ve encountered this with managers from job listings for java programmer, web developer, database administrator and the like.
I sometimes had to restrain myself from correcting people who were interviewing me. Its a balancing act between not seeming arrogant whilst trying to correct a false assumptions. I find this often with people not that passionate with programming and the like.
as a disclaimer with everything I write: What Do I Know I Am Probably A Big Fool!

Dunning-Kruger effect

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Dunning-Kruger effect is the phenomenon wherein people who have little knowledge (or skill) tend to think that they know more (or have more skill) than they do, while others who have much more knowledge tend to think that they know less.

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Best Read Today!

from chris dillow here:
For me personally, introspection corroborates all this. I can easily imagine that, with even slightly different upbringing or luck, I would be either considerably richer and “successful” than I am now, or in prison. My “character” is of secondary importance, if indeed it exists at all. As Iris DeMent sang:

And I traveled to a prison; I saw my share of shattered dreams.
Were the tables slightly tilted I could be bound, they could be free.

I mention all this because it’s a big reason why I’m an egalitarian. When I see someone successful and respected, I see – as a tendency with exceptions – not an admirable character but merely the beneficiary of lucky circumstances. And when I see life’s other side – again, with exceptions – I see not bad character but bad luck.
And one reason why I am more attracted than most to the possibility of social change is that the long-run pay-off to greater equality and democracy is precisely the effect it might have in improving people’s behaviour.

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Feeling Foolish

Why Do I keep feeling this way??
I have a strange feeling that I may be the fool in the equation.
triggered by a quote seen in my feed reader, the quote:

Euripides

from Quotes of the Day
“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.”