names and power and magic, lack thereof

why is the nanoscience center on the edge of cambridge, not in the center, and why is it so big?

why does the Gates Building only have doors and windows and no white picket fence?

why is the CAPE building 40Km from the sea?


why does the Vet School no fish?

The Path to Software Adapation: Intelligent Design or Evolution, and also, Virtualiztupid

We know that there are many species of software - whenever a branch is made in the development, we get (eventually) specification (or is that a specious argument) - but the real question is: is this by design, or is it just random? Does the Xen Master play Dice? Is the Flying Spaghetti Monster Code better, or worse, than IBM's 10 lines a day of commands meant?

meanwhile, also, what is better or worse, intelligence (see the short story by Bruce Sterling about the short term survival value of intelligence) or stupidity?

virtualisation is a way to avoid making decisions (the ultimate random branch, if you like) since you just continue to run all old and new versions....however adapted they are (indeed, if enough of you do this, you effectively run all the eco-systems in history - i.e. world 0.1 alpha thru world 2.0 beta, in parallel universes (if oprah is anything to go by, at least as far as the Onion claimed today...)

so its clear that the virtualization thing is virtually stupid - it allows multiple isolated types of stupidity to co-exist, without learning from one another. This is a good thing (spreading stupidity is a Bad Idea) and a bad thing (clueful people would find easier to recognize all the stupidity if it was all isolated in one place rather than N places). Also, with remus, stupidity is now hilghly mobile and hard to eliminate with Denial of Stupidity attacks. Indeed, SANs (Stupidity Area Networks) with virtualisation mean that stupidity will come to dominate the cybersphere, if it hasn't done already. This, unfortunately is in line with many grand challenges such as Sustainable Stupidity, and Curatable Stupidity.

I am thinking of starting a project on CAS (no not compare-and-swap - Clutching At Straws) - campaign against stupidity
but I suspect I would just get stuck in dom0 an ignored by all the Guest Operating Stupids

Virgin Neutrality is a Load of Pollocks

So the head of virgin media says net neutrality is

a load of thingummybobs

Good for him. So as anyone will say, if you run a zero sum game, you better come up trumps. So if he intends to give more to people that pay more no matter where they go to, he better be prepared to explain why he is giving less to others. An alternative model of the world is to simple give people what
their line rate indicates they should get as a proportion of any current bottleneck,
like you get (mostly) today with TCP and the current IP world. Then there is the server side - I suppose virgin (like AT&T threatened to ) are goign to ask Google and Yahoo and CNN and BBC to cough up lots otherwise they'll throttle their traffic, and oh dear, where did all their customers go....

Of course, if you want to grab headlines, then making claims based in fantasy is great, but why not have a modicum of basis for them?

How about: "Virgin will give discounts to customers whose traffic was treated worse today"...?

that might take some business off of other ISPs...

what is humanist for "thanks"?

traveling europe (as I am right now) i notice that most peole have a word for
"thanks" which derives from christian belief (thanks be to god, grazie/gracias/grace of god, or greek: EuXpharisto) - this begs the question: what did pagans and pre-christians
say? maybe nothing?
what would/should a humanist say (should they say anything?:-)

10^10 arms, wow, thats entanglement!

so according to a recent article in memory of the BBC micro (which sold 1.5M, about 10,000 more than they expected), the ARM processor shipped its 10,000,000,000
sometime in 2008

thats pretty awesome for a small UK company...