Tag Archives: Personal

Five Things

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My fellow Talisian Ian Davis tagged me over on his blog, so here’s five things you might not already know about me.

  1. I’ve been playing Chess since I was around 5 years old. Even won a few competitions when I was younger. Although I don’t play as much as I would like I do often play online on ChessBase or try to solve those irritating Chess problems you see in newspapers, and I think I spend too much time playing and loosing against Fritz!
  2. Mixed Martial Arts takes up a lot of my time. I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea and some people have strong views against it as a sport but I love it, and it’s provided me with an outlet as well as inspiration at various stages of my life.
  3. I love reading. Anything from technical works, blogs to the classics and even comics. I’m a huge Sci-Fi fan and whilst I enjoy reading contemporary sci-fi I’m going through a phase where I’m reading many older works, I currently have a particular affinity with the works of Theodore Sturgeon as well as Isaac Asimov’s earlier writings. I even started writing my own story, it’s something I keep revisiting from time to time.
  4. Of all the places on earth I’ve visited I think Cape Town is still the most beautiful, it always feels as though I’ve left a part of me there … but that’s a whole different story 😉
  5. I struggle within myself to constantly evaluate and challenge the things I think I believe in … possibly in a futile attempt to try and better understand who I am, who I want to be and my place in this world … not sure how good I am at it but it doesn’t half complicate things.

I don’t really have five friends who blog, and since all the other Talisian’s have either been tagged by Ian or Rob, I’m going to tag the following friends:

  1. Alan
  2. Russell
  3. AndyP
  4. Dave Errington

"…you dumbass…" … dreams within dreams … and Descartes

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Had a terrible evening last night all started when I got on the wrong train at New Street and ended up in the middle of no-where. took me four hours to get home in the pouring rain. It was cold, windy and wet! I must admit I was a tad pissed off had all sorts of thoughts going through my head … stupid rain, stupid trains, stupid universe, … god must hate me well I’ll hate him back see how he likes that! blah blah blah.

Anyway as I neared my place I was actually pretty wound up and shivering, then suddenly this cat jumps out in front of me (makes me jump out of my skin!) and runs under this parked car to shelter from the rain I guess. Anyway I remember standing there momentarily looking up at the sky and laughing and saying out loud “oh well it, at least I’m not naked!” … ridiculous I know but it made me laugh, it’s a good job no-one was around I’d have sounded like a nutter!

Anyway I must have got home around 9:15, and figured I was way too tired to cook, and I was too tired to order anything in so I chucked a load of fruit, ice and milk into my really cool blender, 60 seconds later instant smoothie! Had that, thought about watching TV but decided I was too tired for that too so I trundled off to be around 9:45.

Anyway I had the strangest night. I had one of those really weird dreams where your actually having a dream within a dream within a dream. Not sure how or why that happens but its a bit bizarre. I don’t actually remember too much about the dreams, in terms of the details but its just the weird idea that I woke up from a dream to realise I was still in another dream, and then when I woke up in that dream I was still in another one! Finally when I did wake up I just lay there wondering whether I was going to wake up again … is it me or is that just freaky?

Curiously it got me thinking about something Descartes wrote in his Meditations on First Philosophy( which I still think is heavily influenced by Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, I know many who disagree with me on that but I think theres definitely strong parallels ). Descartes attempts to find a way undermine all of his own beliefs. He does this by considering whether he is mad, dreaming or being influenced by a powerful demon, the idea being that if any of these scenarios were the case then many of his beliefs would be false. Descartes writings are often fairly inaccessible probably because of the way his works have been translated .. however in modern philosophy Descartes little experiment is the basis for the brain in a vat thought experiment, which most people find far easier to relate to.


Image source:Wikipedia

The brain in the vat experiment, in simple terms, asks us to consider the questions a) how do we know that what we are experiencing is actually real. b) if what we believe is a result of what we experience, and we cant be sure if what we experience is real, then can our beliefs be true? The experiment asks us to imagine the scenario that a brain in a vat is connected to a computer that provides all the identical electrical impulses the brain normally receives. The computer would then be simulating a kind of virtual reality but the disembodied brain would never realise this. One of the better dramatisations of this relatively recently was the Matrix movie which I’g guessing most people have seen.

Anyway I think its interesting food for thought.

Oh yeah … as for the dumbass bit … well on the way to work this morning, as with most mornings, I tend to get on the same bus with one of my colleagues, Amanda. She asked me if I’d had a good evening and I told her about my 4.5 hour trip home last night to which she replied … “oh Nad … your such a dumbass” …gee thanks Mandy! I’ll remember that!

Emotion-aware teaching software tracks students

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Came across this interesting little article over at NewScientist.com. The basic idea is that students wear rings fitted with sensors that monitor heart rate, blood pressure and changes in electrical resistance caused by perspiration, which it then transmits to a computer that assesses the wearer’s emotional state – and judges whether they are interested and keeping up or bored and struggling.

I’m not too sure about this, whilst there is commonality in terms of the biological responses the body generates in all of us the extent to which these manifest vary from individual to individual so I’m not sure how accurate the system is going to be in widespread use. Reciprocally if it was accurate then what would the social implications be of a technology that could assess our emotional state and take remedial action?

"Computers are sequential, brains are associative" …

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In Alan’s latest blog posting he’s been discussing his thoughts around the power of sequential thinking. It was one of the topics we discussed when he came to visit me before Christmas., I’m glad he’s written his thoughts down, I remember struggling with some of the finer points when we were talking about it that evening. This entire debate originally began from the deliberately provocative suggestion Alan made to a collegue that the computational power of the complete internet is now roughly similar to that of a single human brain, something I mentioned in a previous posting.

His colleague like many people dismissed the hypothesis as impossible because computers are indeed sequential and brains are associative, yet as Alan describes in his posting the very nature of how the brain deals with sequentiality that is in itself amazing. Although our brains are massively parallel few of us can actually consciously think about more than one thing at a time. We think about one thing and then another but as our attention shifts so too do all the mental associations that we make and all of this happens incredibly quickly but the point is it’s still sequential.

I can’t help but think Alan might be onto something when he says:

… slower timescales that allow fuller webs of association to build and decay, but maybe there are other intermediate timescales of attention switching as well.
If this is right then the rapid sequential shifts of attention could be essential for maintaining the individual identity of percepts and concepts.

MMA: Quinton "Rampage" Jackson signs with UFC

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Don’t know how I managed to miss this … probably because I’ve spent most of the weekend in bed 😉 Anyhow it’s official Quinton Jackson has signed with UFC, and debut’s against Marvin Eastman on Feb 3rd. Jackson has spent much of his career competing in the Pride tournaments in Japan. What’s interesting about this move is that Jackson is one of only 3 men to ever have beaten the reigning UFC Light Heavyweight champion Chuck “The Iceman” Liddell. Liddell has already avenged his other two losses at the hands of Jeremy Horn and the iconic Randy Couture. I have no doubt that Chuck will want to settle old scores, and that the UFC will try to get this fight on for around September.

I haven’t seen Jackson fight in a while, but I remember watching their last encounter, it was an ugly fight, but Jackson TKO’d Liddell and the only other man to have ever TKO Liddell was Couture. As I recall Jackson slammed Liddell to the matt a few times where he ended the fight. Jackson is freakishly strong, an extremely good wrestler and like Liddell a vicious striker. I don’t believe Ortiz had the strength to force Liddell to the ground, but Jackson does, in fact he’s built his career around working opponents in the clinch and slamming them to matt with sort of high impact throws one expects to see in a wrestling ring and not in the Octagon. I’ll never forget watching him reverse a triangle choke by lifting his opponent into the air and throwing him out of the ring.

For those of you have not seen Jackson fight, or don’t follow Pride – I found this highlight reel on YouTube … it’s probably not for the feint hearted! In fact while I was looking for a highlight reel I found the footage of the first fight between Jackson and Liddell, you’ll need to sign into YouTube to watch it, to say it was a one sided contest is understating things.
2007 is going to an interesting year in the world of Mixed Martial Arts.

God, Inc.

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What if all the problems on earth weren’t caused by a spiteful deity, or karma, or even fate, but just office politics and the Peter Principle? That’s the idea behind this six part series on YouTube, which is set in the corporate offices of God. The series is the brain child of Francis Stokes a writer, film maker and evironmental guru. Only the first two episodes are currently available but after watching them I thought they were hilarious, if you get a chance do watch episode 1, and episode 2. Each episode is around 6 minutes long so it doesn’t take very long and they make for an interesting diversion.

U.S. Government to encrypt all data on laptops

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Was catching up on Bruce Schneier’s blog when I came across this posting. Immediately made me think of a conversation me and several members of our skywalk team were having on Friday over lunch at one of the local pubs. We were talking about the inadequacies of various types of security measures being considered by the UK Government, in particular the laughable ID Card Scheme. Rob made some interesting points about the government push of ID Cards in the UK and the relationship or lobbying for them by PKI vendors, im hoping he’ll blog about soon….anyway…

I remember rather anecdotaly mentioning during the conversation that whilst at aQtive Justin, Alan and myself briefly worked with a company called topsoft, who almost a decade ago had developed a full disk encryption system, which they were selling to other companies and the UK DoD. FDE systems have often been considered overkill, but encrypting every bit of information on a machine does mean that you dont need to rely on the user consciously choosing what to encrypt and what not to.

It is interesting that the US Government has decided to open up this selection of a product in the form of a competition … I find myself agreeing with Schneier’s assessment that:

It’s certainly a high-stakes competition among the vendors, but one that is likely to improve the security of all products. I’ve long said that one of the best things the government can do to improve computer security is to use its vast purchasing power to pressure vendors to improve their security.

But I’ve always been really wary of the whole idea of Key Escrow, the system just seems far too easy to abuse, and some of the worse violations of privacy, encroachment of civil liberties and indeed human rights have been perpetrated by so called patriots under the banner of “national security“.

Union of Concerned Scientists report on the tactics employed by ExxonMobil – spent $16 million to spread disinformation about gobal warming.

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Just came across this article over at the Union of Concerned Scientists. The UCS was an organisation that started off in the late 60’s comprised of students and faculty members at MIT. It’s since grown into an alliance of over 200,000 citizens and scientists, who are working towards a healthy environment and safer world.

I’ve been visiting their site from time to time my interest in it really began after 9/11 where scientists were discussing the plethora of security measures being proposed by governments as well the threats posed by different forms of terrorism. Their analysis was often more rationalised than the often hysterical or sensationalist reports that were fed through politicians and main stream media. However the topics they cover range from scientific integrity and ethics all the way through to specific scientific issues such as global warming or the debate on GM foods. If you have views on these issues, and others, then its definitely worth visting their site.

Anyway, this particular article relates to how ExxonMobil has not only adopted the same disinformation tactics used by the tobacco industry but also some of the same individuals and organisations, in an attempt to cloud the scientific understanding of global warming, delaying any action on the issue. They document how ExxonMobil has funneled almost $16 million to a network of 43 advocacy organisations to confuse the public on the issue of climate change.

The idealist in me hopes that the revelations in the report as well as the money trail it documents shows all the idiots who have blindly fallen for Exxon’s so called scientific arguments about how global warming isn’t happening, why and how they’ve all been played for chumps.

The cynic in me doubts that these revelations will change anything the reality is that its greed that drives politicians and big businesses to resort to these underhanded tricks because ultimately its their pockets that are being lined and for some reason they are either unable or unwilling to look beyond their quarterly profits and dividends.

I remember back when I was working at aQtive with Alan, on a hot summers day it started raining heavily, and the area around Edgbaston was flooded really badly. I commented on how freakish it was to have weather like that in the middle of summer, and I recall we had a short chat about global warming in which he stated the paradox around governments unwillingness to act on the issue was akin to watching some bloke saw through the tree limb he’s sitting on. I might be putting words in his mouth, but im pretty sure thats how he put it. It’s incomprehensible that governments are not doing more about the problem, or indeed as in the case of the US, wanting to completely ignore the issue. I often wonder if these politicians, particularly in the US, would be so closed minded on the issue if they weren’t so reliant on political contributions from the large oil companies.

Forgive my ignorance but can someone please explain to me what the difference is between a political contribution and a bribe?

Movie Review: Black

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It’s no secret that I rarely watch indian movies. I came to see my parents this evening, and whilst I was here my sisters put on the rather enigmatically titled Black. Normally that’s the point at which I go and find something else to do, but this time they convinced me to stick it out. The film stars Amitabh Bachan, Ayesha Kapur and Rani Mukherjee. What struck me was the raw emotion in this film. It isn’t one of those normal bollywood films, there are no dance sequences, no comic acts, and none of those badly choreographed, laughable, fight scenes.

It’s the story of darkness in the life of a a young woman, Michelle McNelly, who is portrayed as a child in the first half of the film by Ayesha Kapur, and the second half of the film by Rani Mukharjee. Michelle is blind and deaf and unable to speak, her world totally dark. Until she meets her teacher and mentor Debraj Sahai, played by Amitabh Bachan. Sahai has dedicated his entire life to teaching blind and deaf children to communicate. He takes it upon himself to remove the blackness from her life, the entire film is a journey between these two people as Sahai obsessively teaches Michelle how to sign, and how to live a dignified life, unaware that his own life will take an unfortunate turn in which Michelle will play an important part – when he becomes blind himself and finally looses his mind and its left to her to prevent him from harming himself.

It’s an incredibly moving film .. the kind twists your heart all the way through yet leaves you bathed in rapturous contentment as one critic put it. I can’t help but think it captures the same feeling of human triumph over incredible adversity and tragedy that films like The Shawshank Redemption have.

I never thought I’d ever recommend an indian movie to anyone but I do recommend this one. Much of the dialogue is in english, interspersed with hindi, whilst that might be offputting for some the movie is easy to follow and I think the emotions and acting transcend any language barriers. You dont just watch this movie you actually feel it.