Vocab traps

When I first got to college there was the usual mixture of people from all over Australia and different socio-economic backgrounds. Possibly due to these differences there was a noticeable effort from most people to blend in, which resulted, amoungst other things, in everyone picking up each others vocab. The most notable word that got both myself and a friend (Yes, Benjamin Waters was also bitten) was "dodgy". Dodgy is a great word, from where Benjamin and myself came from it was barely used and consequently had more of an impact when employed by us to make a point. It was also wonderfully ambiguous, I mean dodgy could imply that something was untrustworthy, or that you were skeptical of something, you could even manipulate it to indicate that something wasn't complete or it was just ill favoured. Whatever the reason I shortly found myself using dodgy in almost every sentence and equally alarming after a period of time it just started happening unconciously. I'd find myself having a perfectly interesting conversation but every single time there was a place that I could use "dodgy" I did, and those places were many. In a short space of time both Ben and myself found ourselves saying dodgy so much that it drove each of us mad and we broke each other of the habit shortly there after. Dodgy was a locallized college phenomenon, or so I thought.

Living in England there are a lot of idiosyncracies that I pick up as a foreigner that the Brits themselves don't even notice. Something that i at first put down to just an unusual expression was "To be honest with you...". It seems innocuous, used to possibly draw you into the trust of the person saying it, almost like you're being told something that others are not, but the implications are a little sinister. Obviously if the person is being honest with you when he / she says that it implies that they are NOT being honest with you the rest of the time. So initially it seemed a little odd to me but hey, it wasn't the only Brittish idiosyncracy that was strange. Recently though things have changed. More and more people from more and more different backgrounds (english speaking backgrounds) are starting to use the phrase. In fact it's gotten so bad that its at that endemic level that "dodgy" was for me at college. One of my work colleagues doesn't even notice when he says it anymore and when i started trying to break him of the habit by interupting with a "yeah, be honest with me" every time he said it, he initially freaked out at the frequency he used the phrase and now just subconciously filters out my response and keeps on using it. To be honest with you I expect that these kind of dodgy phrases are like fashion, they dodge in and out of popularity and in a few months time it will be something else, I'll let you know :)

I went to the farnborough airshow last weekend with Eachan. That was a very cool Sunday afternoon trip, though getting there, like travelling anywhere in England, was a serious pain despite the fact that Eachan only lived about 10km from it. It is easy to explain to someone how powerful a jet is in horsepower or some other means of measuring power, but that mental understanding / picture doesn't quite do it justice when it comes to the real thing. Imagine a tiny jet around 1km away on a runway with ~5k people on a field around me. Back another 1km or so is a carpark. Now the jet starts to taxi to the take off run way and the sound it emits is just incredible. People start to look at each other in alarm and begin to make motions about covering their ears. Now the jet finishes it taxi and starts to fire the engines up. Whereas before I was stunned by the sheer power and noise the jet was emitting now I'm just speechless as the seemingly impossibly large noise from before starts to climb up in truely mind numbing degrees. All the babies and children around me are now crying. The jet starts to move. Now all the adults are on their knees with hands clamped over their ears. The jet screams along the run way and takes off. Now every single car alarm in the carpark ~2km away from the jet simultaneously goes off. It's really hard to convey the kind of power that these jets have, your brain struggles to ascribe that much raw energy to the tiny little jet that is now kilometers up in the sky doing all kinds of acrobactic feats that seem to defy not only gravity but the nature of their own propulsion.

I'm not really into planes and the like but I really had an enjoyable day and it was very interesting to me to see that more and more these airshows are about UAVs. Looks like shortly wars will be faught by geeks like me controlling vehicles by computers rather then pilots actually in them. Working for the government would generally be a bad thing but with toys like that I must just be tempted one day :)

Law

I've been concerned for sometime about the increasing amount of pressure and control that religion is having on the societies that I live in. This article serves as a nice cautionary tale of the problems that start once you let religion start to dictate laws. I suspect a lot of the problem that many people have is that MOST religious doctrines are not too unreasonable, they are morally sound (by this I mean simply that most people will generally agree with the basic tenets of most religions from a moral perspective ie take the ten commandments) and generally seem to be comprehensible. For most people that is enough for them to give approval to religious ideology even if they are not really religious themselves. Unfortunately religion is not only about generalities but also a lot of specifics, the devil is in the detail as the saying says.

Fuel

I've had a few discussions recently about the viability of "alternative" power supplies. I know that a few years ago it simply wasn't viable and while the following article seems to indicate that it is still the case (actually I believe it was always going to be unless there was some fundamental technological breakthrough). That said it really doesn't cite many references so it's a little hard to get real data on the state of alternative power. Has anyone got any decent links / info?

Information Overload

I live hooked into the net, where most information is available in just a few keystrokes. In fact beyond that, now a lot of that information is automatically propagated to me in the form of RSS feeds or emails. For some time I've been struggling with the sheer volume of things being sent my way. There is so much information that I could spend all of my time just reading and trying to keep up with it, certainly it's distracting me from actually DOING things. Initially my response was to try and just ignore it all and batch mode my information acquiring, that is just spend 2 hours in a certain block each day looking up things. Unfortunately that didn't really seem to work very well. Next I thought about some way of tailoring the information that I get, this led to me thinking about trying to work out precisely what information i do want and how I normally go about getting it. Actually over the course of thinking about it I came to some interesting ideas about writing a kind of AI that would pretend to be me and sit on my computer automatically searching the net and then when I sat down in a morning present me with a list of interesting articles and prioritise my email for me to look at. Unsurprisingly others have already thought of such things though at the time of writing this, and from my brief investigations, there was nothing that really struck me as being too good. Still if anyone reading this has a recommendation please leave a comment!

A possible side effect of this information overload is lack of critical thinking. Recently it's struck me how many people are giving considerable amount of credence to fairly spurious arguments, often from the left (not that I think the entire lefts doctrine is spurious, simply that it seems the left are coming up with some increasingly dubious claims). In discussions with friends I stated that I believe this is because that people are so overwhelmed with information that whereas as a child most people are taught to "Get the facts then draw your conclusion" now there are so many facts that people also want the conclusion presented to them.

I feel that I'm starting to win the war on the information now. I'm a lot more selective about what I regularly read and once again the concepts behind open source are leading the fight. Enter reddit and other sites like it. Basically these are sites which users submit links to articles and things of interest that are then rated by all the other users / readers of the site. The higher the rating the higher up the list the article goes so that what you end up with is a self regulated filter of all the interesting things that appear on the net in a given day and the most amazing part about it is that it works. I've had more interesting articles and links of note from reddit in the few weeks that i've been using it then all the other rss feeds I was subscribed to before.

Sports

Working in a betting exchange means that I'm more exposed to sports then I have been in the past. Since giving up on my childhood dream of becoming a professional table tennis player I really havn't paid much attention to sports at all, though I will, given the opportunity, sit down and watch the best of any sport just to see what its like at the highest level.

Living in London, and I dare say anywhere in Europe right now, it's particularly hard not to notice the fact that the world cup is being played. The world cup involves, what most australians would call, soccer. Now I'm reliably told that the world cup is the single largest sporting event anywhere in the world and so you can imagine my surprise when after a bit of investigation I found some an amazing thing out, they don't use technology.

Imagine, in an age where IT is making inroads almost everywhere, in the largest sporting event in the world, there is nothing remotely technologically related. No 3rd umpire, no chips embedded into the balls, no video simulations, absolutely nothing. Now I'm sure the purists would say to me "that's the way it's meant to be Ben, real football", but it's these same purists that are screaming hatred and issuing death threats to the referees that make a bad call during the game causing their favourite team to be knocked out. Now given the seeming importance that soccer has you'd think that people would be using every possible thing that they could to ensure that the winner of the game was the team that played the best soccer rather then some random bad decision made by a single person (yeah and some touch line judges), but that seems to not be the case, in fact, it was suggested by Benjamin Waters that the reason that soccer is so popular is that there is a certain amount of "assyness" about it. I mean let's face it, any sport that decides the "champions" based off one game is more then a little suspect.

Actually where things get interesting is watching the way different sports approach this problem. Soccer, as mentioned, doesn't appear to be doing anything, and while I'm sure I'll get in trouble for saying it, soccer appears to be mostly a south american and european phenomenon, bear that in mind. Now compared to say soccer, we have cricket a typically colonial sport, originally introduced from England to all of its colonies and now generally one of the most popular sports in each of the colonies. Cricket has had a technological revolution in the last 15 years, led mainly out of Australia. New things brought into the game include the "third umpire", video recreations, microphones, additional cameras and sensors. All of these things have substantially, though admitedly not completely, reduced the likliehood of the outcome of a game depending on a decision of a fallible human. In fact Australia has led the way introducing technology to a number of sports, especially tennis. America as well has introduced a lot of technology into their sports, and it could be argued, have a more substantial reason to believe that the champions of their sport are in fact the best team due to often having a series of playoffs rather then it all being decided in one game. Now where this gets interesting is that in my experience if you look at the average level of seriousness in approach to sports Australia and America seem to be well beyond that of say south america and europe. By that I mean simply that the culture / society in Australia and America have less tolerance of losing anything and an expectation that they will win (rightly or wrongly). Thus it's my conclusion that it's likely to be true that most europeans don't want technology in their sports, not because it wouldn't be better but because it would take away a lot of the element of chance and consequently the best chance that most teams have of winning.