Replicating memes

I’m worried about the EURO’s M3 if a European version of the IMF (a EMF) is to be installed.

Nonetheless, I think the European community should do it just to strengthen Europe’s economy. I’m not satisfied by Europe’s economic strength: I want it to be undefeatable.

We must not let the IMF solve our problems. Europe might be a political dwarf, but we Europeans should show that we will solve our own problems. We’re an adult composition of cultures with vast amounts of experience. We know how to solve any imaginable problem. And let’s not, in our defeatism, pretend we don’t.

A EMF is a commitment to future member states: Europe often asks them fundamental changes; economic strength is what Europe offers in return. This needs to come at a highest price: Greece will have to fix their deficit problem. Even if their entire population goes on strike. Greece will be an example for countries like my own: Belgium has to fix a serious deficit problem, too.

An EMF comes at an equally high price, and that frightens me a bit: I don’t want the ECB to go as ballistic on money creation as the FED has been last two years. I want the EURO to be the strongest relevant currency mankind has ever created. No matter how insane the rest of the world thinks that ambition is: I believe that keeping the EURO’s M3 in check is a key to creating a wealthy society in Europe.

Politically I want European nations to negotiate more and more often. The European Union is a political dwarf only because finding agreement is hard. But in the long run will our solution be the most negotiated, most tested on this planet.

Together we can deal with anything. That doesn’t mean it’ll be easy; it has never been easy: just seventy years ago we were still killing each other. We’re all guilty of that one way or another. And before that it wasn’t any better. Today, not that many people still care: “it wasn’t me”, right? So stop being a bitch about it, then.

It’s time to let it be. It’s time to start a new European century that will be better. With respect for all European cultures, languages, nations, nationalities, values, borders and interests.

But also a European century with economic responsibilities for each member. It’s our strength: we figured out how to keep our population wealthy: let’s continue doing so in the future.

(More available at the flash preview widget’s page 21)

– Daniel Goleman, Working With Emotional Intelligence, Competencies of the stars. 1998

In Working with Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman explains several practical methods to improve the social skills of people. Before I bought this book a year or two ago, I read Daniel’s first book Emotional Intelligence. This weekend I finally started reading Working With.

I recommend the section Some Misconceptions. Regretfully ain’t this section available for display in the flash preview widget. Instead of violating copyright laws by typing it down here, I’m recommending to just buy the book.

You can find audiobooks online. The section about misconceptions is at track three. Track five talks about two computer programmers, which is very illustrative for many of my blog’s readers (and possibly myself). I hope you wont illegally download using torrents. Instead, buy the material.

Also very interesting is this lecture by Daniel:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Here you can also find a Authors@Google talk by Daniel Goleman:

What distinguishes Daniel Goleman from old line proponents of positive thinking, however, is his grounding in psychology and neuroscience. Armed with a Ph.D in psychology from Harvard and a first-grade journalism background at the New York Times, Dr. Goleman has authored half a dozen books that explore the physical and chemical workings on the brain and their relationship with what we experience as everyday life.

– Peter Allen, director of Google university, introduction to Daniel Goleman. August 3, 2007

I hope readers of my blog will shun away from pseudo science when it comes to emotional and social intelligence, but instead read and learn from authors like Daniel Goleman. I also (still) recommend the books available at The Moral Brain by for example Dr. Jan Verplaetse.

We would rather suffer the visible costs of a few bad decisions than incur the many invisible costs that come from decisions made too slowly - or not at all - because of a stifling bureaucracy.

– Letter by Warren E. Buffett to the shareholders of Berkshire, February 26, 2010

We both agree that Nigel Farage is a complete moron.

Perhaps we should put a damp rag like the one he mentions in his mouth next time he opens it?

Nigel Farage, you’re an disgrace to yourself. The European parliament is no place for personal attacks, and you aren’t fit to carry the title Member of the European Parliament. Please keep the honour to yourself and resign.

Every sensible person outside of the U.K. thinks you should. Even the Euro skeptics do. You’re an embarrassment for your country and its culture, so I hope for the people in the U.K. that they’ll kick you out of politics.

I fear you’re just playing the populist card, and that you’ll even get votes for this from other morons.

This is to let Rob Taylor and David Schlesinger know that they better start organizing S.M.A.S.H.E.D.

Not all discussions are easy. If discussions were to be easy, the bar wouldn’t be high enough for your bullshit filter to be effective here.

During dark hours of discussions the nineties syndrome of wanting immediate results plays its role among spectators: It’s not a popular job to be a dissident. It’s not popular to be critical about a (the leader of a) popular idea. This is illustrated by the intellectually absurd criticisms David Schlesinger receives.

Yet is the critic who monitors the organs of a society key to that organ either producing for its stakeholders, or failing and dragging the entire society it serves down with it.

In Western Europe we traded Kings and Popes for a government that is held accountable by an opposition. Many countries and cultures adopted this system of governance. That’s because it undeniably works. If you have a better system in mind, that can be put to the test, please come forward.

It is good that the GNOME foundation board has decided to increase the amount of surveys. But I have one request which I didn’t succeed in raising before the end of last year:

Although I accept the decisive role a group of leadership has to take, I want foundation board members and employees to be held accountable for the decisions they make. Especially the ones where they go against the results of such a survey.

But this is not up to me.

*edit* They are showing an old episode of Married with Children on TV, I’ll be back in half an hour!

Thank you for trying to forbid the burka. I hope my country will also forbid it. We need to protect (but not overprotect) the women of Muslim cultures, cultures who are massively migrating to Western Europe at this moment, against the oppressive anti-woman and religious nature of the burka.

I don’t believe, at all, that the burka is an expression of free speech. I believe it’s an instrument to oppress woman, and that this is its only purpose. There is no place for that in Western European culture. None. And we must be assertive about it.

I’d also like to ask Muslim countries to stay out of the debate: we decide about Western European values, you don’t. Equality between men and woman is a Western European value. If you don’t like that, sorry, it’s not negotiable.

Two posts ago I wrote that something like The Real news is quite unique in the U.S.’s completely broken media.

Today I found an interesting double interview on AlJazeeraEnglish by Riz Khan titled Has the mainstream media in the US replaced serious coverage with “junk news” and tabloidism?

Hello Astronomers

it is Solstice.

(this from Wiki)

Of the many ways in which solstice can be defined, one of the most common (and perhaps most easily understood) is by the astronomical phenomenon for which it is named, which is readily observable by anyone on Earth: a “sun-standing.” This modern scientific word descends from a Latin scientific word in use in the late Roman republic of the 1st century BC: solstitium. Pliny uses it a number of times in his Natural History with the same meaning that it has today. It contains two Latin-language segments, sol, “sun”, and -stitium, “stoppage.”^[2] The Romans used “standing” to refer to a component of the relative velocity of the Sun as it is observed in the sky. Relative velocity is the motion of an object from the point of view of an observer in a frame of reference. From a fixed position on the ground, the sun appears to orbit around the Earth.^[3]

To an observer in inertial space, the Earth is seen to rotate about an axis and revolve around the Sun in an elliptical path with the Sun at one focus. The Earth’s axis is tilted with respect to the plane of the Earth’s orbit and this axis maintains a position that changes little with respect to the background of stars. An observer on Earth therefore sees a solar path that is the result of both rotation and revolution.

The component of the Sun’s motion seen by an earthbound observer caused by the revolution of the tilted axis, which, keeping the same angle in space, is oriented toward or away from the Sun, is an observed diurnal increment (and lateral offset) of the elevation of the Sun at noon for approximately six months and observed daily decrement for the remaining six months. At maximum or minimum elevation the relative motion at 90° to the horizon stops and changes direction by 180°. The maximum is the summer solstice and the minimum is the winter solstice. The path of the Sun, or ecliptic, sweeps north and south between the northern and southern hemispheres. The days are longer around the summer solstice and shorter around the winter solstice. When the Sun’s path crosses the equator, the days and nights are of equal length; this is known as an equinox. There are two solstices and two equinoxes.^[4]

We used to observe and celebrate this event widely, the Romans moved the birth of Christ to Solstice to usurp it .

Now people celebrate fiction instead of fact ..unless your an Astronomer that is.

Praise the Laws and Happy Solstice.

– Ordono Mundi

ps. I think Solstice was yesterday, but oh well..

I would like to dedicate this moment to this version of Metallica’s Nothing Else Matters.

Jono, our Metal fan, probably agrees with me that even the toughest person in the world of Metal can be brought to his knees, crying.

It’s a moment of reconciliation. What is it that we want?

I think more than ever, we do understand each other.

I don’t know.

Looks like I found myself a book that I need to read someday:

– Hannah Arendt, The human condition (prologue)

While you guys are all wondering who he is, we in Belgium are wondering who’s going to replace Herman Van Rompuy as our prime minister.

He’s the only prime minister who managed to give Belgium non-chaotic federal politics, for a few months.

I fear that Belgium will now plunge into a new political crisis. Not because the former prime-minister, Yves Leterme, is a bad one, but because the Walloons simply don’t want him. We know they’ll do everything in their power to discredit Yves. Especially their media will. Le Soir already publicly said that they’ll “veto” Yves Leterme as prime minister. As if a newspaper elects ministers. Arrogance.

Anyway.

If the price for delivering the first president of Europe is that we must pay with a new political crisis, I guess that we are so used to politic crisis that it’s okay. We’ll survive. You guys can have him.

He’s quite intelligent. He’s not a media guy. We don’t know more about him ourselves. Use wikipedia.

The real bad thing about Herman is that in the past he let religion influence his politics. He was for example against abortion laws. And he is against Turkey joining the union because of religious differences.

However. For the people from the United Kingdom: fuck your conservative tabloid magazines. To the idiot editors of those tabloids: discrediting Van Rompuy was easy, still you guys screwed up with retarded articles about Belgium.

ps. I don’t care that you don’t want politics on planet.gnome. It pulls from my blog, so ask the administrators of planet.gnome to pick the right categories. I say this because I know that people will otherwise comment about it. I want them to know that I don’t care.

To be a Rubens, is to make paintings

Veel mensen beweren dat indien je de prijs van een product artificieel verhoogt dat je daardoor de producent ervan rijker maakt. Laten we melk als voorbeeld nemen om dit gesprek wat minder abstract te maken.

Europese overheden worden momenteel door belangengroepen en stakende boeren gedwongen om de prijs van melk artificieel te maken. Met andere woorden wordt de overheid gevraagd om het concept van vrije marktprijzen voor melk los te laten. Dus zelf maar te gaan bepalen wat de prijs voor melk hoort te zijn. Niet de markt maar wel politici en belangengroepen moeten dan bepalen wat die prijs zou moeten zijn.

Het probleem is dat volgorde van nut, van melk, niet wijzigt wanneer incompetente mensen een prijs vastleggen.

Met melk kan veel gedaan worden. Je kan er yoghurt mee maken, je kan het gewoon drinken, je kan er een kind een gezond drankje mee geven, je kan er kaas mee maken, je kan er chocolade mee maken, en zo verder. Zoals bijna alle producten is het veelzijdig.

Ieder individu heeft een voorkeurenladder voor zijn melk doelen. Tegenwoordig hebben we een ruilmiddel dat we geld noemen. Maar laten we voor de grap minuten werk gebruiken als eenheidsprijs. Je kan stellen dat een mens een zekere hoeveelheid werktijd over heeft voor ieder van zijn melk doelen.

Laat me een voorbeeld maken. Deze lijst hangt af van persoon tot persoon, maar kan slechts enkel objectief vastgesteld worden door naar handelingen te kijken. Niet door naar iemand zijn beweringen te luisteren. Stel dat we de volgende vaststelling doen bij de man:

• Zijn kind melk geven - 8 minuten werk voor over
• Zelf melk drinken - 6 minuten werk voor over
• Yoghurt eten - 4 minuten werk voor over
• Kaas eten - 4 minuten werk voor over
• Chocolade eten - 3 minuten werk voor over

Dit betekent dat de persoon 8 minuten wil werken om zijn kind een gezonde drank te geven. Hij wil echter maximaal 6 minuten werken om zelf melk te kunnen drinken. Yoghurt vindt hij wel lekker, maar minder belangrijk. Dus heeft de man 4 minuten werk voor yoghurt over. En zo verder.

We zullen om het eenvoudig te houden elk van deze handelingen gelijk stellen aan één liter melk. Dit is in werkelijkheid niet het geval maar het maakt het voorbeeld eenvoudig zonder af te doen aan de logica.

Stel dat we in totaal 10 liter melk hebben voor één man. Hij wil het kind melk geven en heeft daar 8 minuten voor over. Daarna wil hij zelf melk drinken. In totaal verbruikt hij nu 2 liter melk. Hij wil ook yoghurt eten. Hij wil kaas eten, en zelfs chocolade. Al die doelen zijn mogelijk want er is voldoende melk.

De man zal nu al zijn doelen invullen door de melk te kopen aan 3 minuten per liter. Met andere woorden koopt hij in totaal 5 liter melk voor 15 minuten werk. Er is een melk overschot van 5 liter. De producent heeft dus 5 liter teveel geproduceerd. Maar de producent heeft ook werkuren in die melk moeten stoppen. Hij zal dus niet toelaten dat de man oneindig laag gaat in wat hij over heeft voor melk.

Stel nu dat de regering bij wet vastlegt dat een liter melk niet 3 minuten maar wel 5 minuten werk moet kosten. We herhalen ons voorbeeld.

Hij wil nog steeds zijn kind melk geven. Daar heeft hij 8 minuten werk voor over. Daarna drinkt hij zelf melk, daar zou hij 6 minuten werk voor over hebben. Maar voor yoghurt heeft hij niet meer de prijs van 5 minuten werk over, dat is immers meer dan de 4 minuten die hij er voor over heeft. De persoon koopt dus géén yoghurt. Hij koopt ook géén kaas en hij koopt géén chocolade. Die producten kosten allemaal meer dan wat hij over heeft voor de liter melk die ze vereisen. In totaal heeft hij 2 liter melk gekocht voor 10 minuten werk en is er 8 liter overschot.

Door de prijs van melk vast te leggen zorgt de regering er dus voor dat bedrijven die yoghurt, kaas en chocolade maken failliet gaan en creëert het een nog grotere melk overschot.

Het kost ons allen belastingen om die melk op te kopen, en meer aan sociale zekerheid om werkloosheidsuitkeringen uit te betalen voor mensen in de sectoren kaas, chocolade en yoghurt.

Daarbovenop creëert men armoede in landen waar Europa de opgekochte overschot aan melk aan dumpingprijzen op de markt gooit. Hierdoor kunnen plaatselijke boeren niet concurrentieel zijn en worden ze werkloos. In tegenstelling tot werkloos zijn in ons land, wat werkelijk het paradijs op aarde is met brugpensioenen, gratis huisvesting, een legioen aan mensen die werk voor je zoeken en een royale uitkering, betekent het daarginds dat de boer, zijn vrouw en zijn kinderen sterven van de honger.

Dus wanneer we er dan toch ideologie bij roepen dan blijkt dat in een geglobaliseerde samenleving zoals de onze het vastleggen van prijzen door de regering immoreel is.

Ook de boeren die melk produceren gaan mee moeten opdraaien voor extra belastingen. Dat is het enige dat de regering heeft gedaan voor de boer: meer belastingen opgelegd.

Het is dus niet logisch te stellen dat wanneer je de prijs van melk artificieel maakt, dat de producent dan meer geld krijgt. Het enige wat wijzigt, is de omvang van de persoonlijke tabellen van doelen die mensen hebben die in aanmerkingen komen voor melk.

Heel wat leiders van belangengroepen, vooral socialistische, moeten hoogdringend enkele basis lessen economie volgen en moeten nog dringender ophouden met populisme. Zij maken ons land er werkelijk mee kapot en creëren armoede in andere landen.

Iedereen heeft het moeilijk, boeren hoeven geen voorkeursbehandeling te krijgen ten koste van anderen.

Being in free time mode today I decided to continue reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan book. Nassim Taleb is about as arrogant as I am, so I’m enjoying reading his book a lot.

I for example enjoyed reading how he’s pissed at today’s academic philosophers for having become exercisers in linguistics rather than getting to the point of thinking. Nassim Taleb himself needed about 350 pages of text to basically say that the Gauss curve is useless in extremistan, but usually useful in mediocristan, and that Mandelbrot’s fractals are a little bit more useful for extremistan. But not really.

Anyway, he also wrote things that we should consider thinking about. For example: We no longer believe in papal infal­li­bil­ity; we seem to believe in the infal­li­bil­ity of the Nobel prize winners. That’s a good point.

One more chapter and I’m relieved of this book. Apparently I enjoy the distress of reading Nassim Taleb’s books.

He’s going to tell me in this chapter how to deal with these highly improbable events that have a great impact, referred to as black swans. I have to congratulate Nassim Taleb for succeeding making me a hyperskeptic, which was a highly improbable event. But then again, being a software developer I’m into bottom-up acquisition of knowledge. Which means that for me it’s more easy to be Fat Tony, than to be Dr. John. You need to read the book’s chapter 17 to understand Fat Tony. I was quite a skeptic before I started reading the book. But not (always) about the kind of things Nassim Taleb asks us to be skeptic .

The Theory of Interstellar Trade. A paper by Paul Krugman, July 1978.

I try not to repeat myself too often, but I fail miserably. Don’t worry, I know.

I once wrote on this blog that the only rational conclusion a rationalist like me can make, is that there is no black and white. No idea, nor any fact, is a black and white issue. Except abstracted ideas.

I’m interested in an idea or fact, that is black and white, yet ain’t an abstraction.

Not even ethics, among the more important things in humanity, is black and white.

The only black and white ideas, in humanity, appear to be abstractions: “I imagine this abstraction to be ‘like’ a black and white model.” However. Is this meaningful at all? A lot of humans think they are geniuses for the mere fact that they can imagine abstractions. They think they are worth something just because they can make the difference between what is real, and what is abstract.

Every idiot who’s human can make a model, everyone can make an abstraction. It’s what differentiates us from animals. I’m pretty sure science will soon prove that animals too, can make abstractions. This ain’t the point.

You are zero special if you can (which is the point). And your imagined model doesn’t prove anything.

That model isn’t sufficient to convince an idiot, like me, that ‘your black and white model’ is meaningful.

Most of the readers of this blog expect some sort of relevance to GNOME or some other subject about opensource (yeah, they do. I know this is strange). Although I don’t necessarily think they deserve it, I will give them that:

A lot of the so-called “Free Software fans” have magically turned into a group of fundamentalists whom I, as a software developer, refuse to affiliate with. They decided to start thinking ‘black and white’.

ps. Don’t try to find too much meaning in this article. I just want to debunk ‘black and white’. That’s all.
ps. I fear this is one of those blogs that I will regret having posted. Oh well. Life is more than being certain about what you do.

“Now, we can finally replace Richard Stallman with a small shellscript“

– Alp Toker, Gran Canaria at the Igalia party, 06 juli 2009

I’ll write it in C#

public void ActCrazy () {
   while (true) {
      be incorrect about Mono
   }
}

For some people this post can be controversial. I added a category “controversial” to my blog for people who prefer to filter it.

We start a imaginary experiment where we start with a bottle filled up with food and room left for exactly two worms. We assume worms replicate at a doubling time of one minute. We observed in a previous experiment that the bottle is filled up in exactly one hour. They eat the food as they double themselves, etc (use your imagination).

At 11′O clock in the morning we place two worms in the bottle. At what time will the bottle be full (easy)? At what time will the bottle be half full? At what time is the bottle only 3% filled up?

Humans have a global population growth of about 1.2% per year. It’s about 1% in wealthy countries and about 2-3% in poor countries. If you want to calculate a doubling time you take 70 and you divide it with the growth percentage. Which means that at our current growth rate, we’ll double our total population in 60 years.

In 1950 we were with about 2.7 thousand million people, in 1990 we were with 5 thousand million people. In 2050 we will be with 10 thousand million people. Infinite growth isn’t possible with finite resources. In 2400 years, at current growth rate, the earth’s mass will in theory be roughly equal to the total amount of human flesh.

The main question is, how big is our bottle? Let’s go back to the worms. For the worms the bottle is about 3% filled up at 11:55. It’s half full at 11:59. It’s overpopulated at 12:00. When three new bottles are found and pipes are connected with the first, the three new bottles will be filled up at 12:02. After that will four new bottles be filled up at 12:03. After that you need eight new bottles to survive minute 12:04. In minute 12:05 it starts getting crazy proportions.

Even if our bottle is only 3% filled up now, then still at our retirement age we will inevitably be at 50% capacity. During those retirement years we’ll see the population grow at an enormous speed to maximum capacity within a few years.

I’m among the people who believe that we’re already at 70% capacity of our planet. I think we have about 30 years of finite resources left: doubling the population to 10 thousand million people, is impossible (not unreasonable to think). Moving to another bottle will take us at least several more centuries of top notch space science (so this solution is not applicable). And that’s assuming we can leverage the resources of another planet. Moving to another star is simply out of the question unless we invent technology that allows us to let a huge mass travel at the speed of light (again, the solution isn’t applicable).

A solution that I have in mind? Genetically modifying newborn humans to have an annual fertility frequency and having their fertility enabled at a mature age. Instead of based on the phase of the moon would women be fertile only once per year. And instead of at the average age of 12 would women start becoming fertile at the average age of, for example, 25.

Is genetic modification immoral? Being an atheist I don’t have any believe system that forbids me to tamper with species. It’s indeed still immoral because we don’t know what we are doing, yet. No, morality is not divinely injected by a God. Atheists are born with morals, too.

But if we have to choose between living with each other under the condition of having insufficient resources, or making a change to our species, I know which of the two I will prefer.

Now, if you do believe in a God, then you must also acknowledge that your God’s intention was for us to become intelligent enough to genetically modify our species. If not, why ain’t it stopping us? We, for example, have successfully been genetically selecting dogs for centuries. And we have started genetically modifying them (active modification: interfering with the egg and sperm cells).

Mankind will have to open this difficult discussion sooner or later.

Link for planets