Finding Money - A ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ analysis

Today I was in the library, and on my way to lunch I went to the bathroom. Sitting on a shelf above the throne was a wallet. I picked it up and checked it out. I.D in the flap section from an Asian student. About $300 in it. That’s quite a lot of money.

This leaves me with something to contemplate while I do my business. Do I take the wallet, take the money and chuck the wallet in the bin somewhere? Pretty risk-free exercise, free $300. Do I take the wallet, take the money and hand just the wallet in at lost property? Win-win situation. The student doesn’t waste a week canceling cards and getting new ones, I get $300. Consider the money a fee. Perhaps slightly more risk, but still pretty safe in the scheme of things. Do I hand the wallet in contents in tact? Above-board play by me, but what’s to say the librarians won’t just flog the money? Do I just put the wallet back on the shelf and have nothing to do with it?

Beijing Medal Tally Analysis

Something weird is going on with the Olympic medal tally. Being that only tiny fractions separate gold, silver and bronze winning athletes it seems to me that, over the course of an Olympic games, countries should collect roughly the same amount of all the medals. Naturally a country can get ‘lucky’ in terms of getting more gold than the other medals, or ‘unlucky’ by getting less. But a roughly equal spread should be expected. And, for the most part, that’s what you get.

Athens

If we have a look at the Medal tally from Athens we see my theory roughly playing out.

America (the highest medal scorer and hence the best sample space) is the prime example of what you should expect. 35G, 39S, 29B. The amount of gold is only 3% less than the average amount of silver and bronze. That’s exactly what should happen. If you scroll down the medal count to countries only winning a handful of medals, my system broadly remains true, but the small sample spaces make the stats less interesting.

They stole my petrol?!?

Fuel cap cover open

I got up this morning to head to work. Did my morning thing, walked out to my car and was met by an unlikely scene. The fuel cap cover was open and the air stank of petrol. I’m worried that my window would be smashed or the car damaged, but no. My petrol was missing, nothing else. About half a tank, maybe $40 worth. Sort of sad really. I phoned the police - they weren’t interested.

Fuel tank drain plug missing

Annoyingly, to siphon out the petrol, they removed the plug in the base of the fuel tank. So it’s not just a matter of refilling him I need to get a new plug - which isn’t easy for a car approaching its 20th birthday. Basically I need to make one myself or troll wreckers yards - I think I’ll go the DIY option.

I’m amazed by the desperation of this crime. People are stalking the streets at night looking for old cars with a specific design of fuel tank so they can steal the petrol from them. It’s not exactly a risk-free or easy crime, and they’re only making $40~ a go. Is the petrol price really that much of a crisis? Are people being driven to crime by a rise of 50c per L? And how do I stop it happening again?

I’m amazed. Not angry. Just stunned.

Follow up

Mended

I’ve been running around trying to mend the plug. Losing fuel isn’t that bad, but the plug is a pain in the arse. Lucky it was metric (Jap car for the win) so I found a similar thread on a long bolt. I shortened the bolt so it didn’t interfere with my fuel float inside the tank and got an aluminum washer to give me a good seal. A rubber one would be corroded by the petrol. That seems to be working a dream.

Only question now is how I stop it happening again? I’m considering filing the bolt so that its round or using araldite to stick it in place. Problem is that if I do that no one will ever get it out. I guess that’s ok?

Final Edit

I took my advice, rounded the bolt and Araldited it to the fuel tank. Perhaps I’ll also need to do some trick parking really close to trees so no-one can get to my tank. Let’s hope this is the final word!

Robot with a rat brain

I’m reporting on science news now - or am I?

Check out the New Scientist Channel on youtube. They upload very short daily videos with something cool from the world of science. Rat brains controlling robots is particularly cool, watch the embedded video.

Why is this so cool? Because neuroscience will soon allow us to do amazing things with our own brains. Transhumanism will be the biggest revolution mankind has ever experienced. A related study involves dismantling a rat-brain cell-by-cell and uploading the functionality and connections of each cell into a computer. The computer can then literally think, learn and experience like a rat. The rat they’re taking apart will be alive but no longer biological.

Being online (In the Heideggerian sense)

I’ve just spent some time making friends with the ‘next’ button. Essentially it jumps you randomly to another blog hosted on WordPress. There are a lot of blog on wordpress, I’ve only ever randomly jumped to a blog I’ve looked at before once. The reason I like the ‘next’ button is that around the next corner could be a great surprise. Someone that thinks like I do, or someone to converse with. That’s how I found some of the interesting blogs in my blog roll, mainly ‘Greetings Earthlings’ - which was actually quite an early discovery. Mike Poole is interesting because we’re on the same page about fundamental values and opinions, but we see different ways of realising them. That’s pretty much perfect, you get conversation without dogmatism. Hurrah!

WordPress as a per cent

Browsing around WordPress it seems blogs fall into some pretty generic categories. If you selected 10 blogs at random 5 of them would be expressly about religion. I don’t have anything to say to people who let religion consume their lives, so that’s not of much interest to me. 2 of those 10 blogs are in foreign languages. Again not much use. 1 will be by someone who is genuinely crazy, just sporadically and chaotically spamming words onto the page. If you imagine this breakdown as a pie chart, the remaining 20% includes a huge amount of diversity. Some business. Some photography collections. Some people keeping a diary. I try to leave a comment on the coherent ones.

Chinese child actor not good enough to sing in the opening ceremony

What an outrage that the beautiful girl who was used and exploited as the face and humanity of the opening ceremony wasn’t even allowed to use her own voice! Nine-year-old Lin Miaoke has been tricked and deceived into prostituting herself to the world’s media while secretly the voice Yang Peiyi was dubbed over her singing. How callous of the evil communist regime to shatter Lin’s self esteem by telling her that her voice is so awful that it’s in the national interest to not allow the world to hear it.

This frankly heartless act of denying people voice is obviously a metaphor for how China denies voice to most of its citizens. China’s ruthless censorship has been blatantly coupled with unabashed faking and deception of what the world sees of China…

Honestly, where do people get off? Have a look at the ABC news story here or essentially any newspaper. The ABC news story has open comments for some flavour of what punters are thinking. I’m just gob-smacked. Every lead roll in everything public has auditions that look at relevant attributes. How is it surprising that someone wasn’t chosen as the face if they didn’t have the most beautiful face people could find. Can I have a cry that I didn’t get to sing at the 2000 Olympics on account of being too ugly and too crap at sining? And why does everyone feel outraged for the girl who wasn’t let appear and is just ignoring the girl that wasn’t let sing (as I parodied above). Does anyone seriously think that Nikki Webster from the 2000 opening ceremony wasn’t chosen because she was a cute kid?

I’m adding this one to the growing pile of evidence that the Western media has invented the most absurd double standard for talking about China. If China does anything it’s evil and deplorable even if the West does EXACTLY the same thing without batting an eyelid, or even things that should be considered ‘worse’ by the standard.

Someone needs to invent a word for ‘double plus absurd’.

P2P Killed the Pop Movie Star - We Can Only Hope

Let’s project our minds forward into the future about 10 years. The P2P problem has been solved, either by a levy on P2P or by some amazing new business model. In this brave new world money is somehow moved from the bank accounts of viewers into the pockets of content creators. The transfer will probably occur on the basis of times shared, downloaded or viewed. I.e. the money from the levy is pooled and divided among the artists on a per cent basis. The key difference being that products no long have a price to be paid by a customer. In this new world one-man-bands who produce their own music are hugely superior to the Juggernaut that is the Movie and Music Industry.

Will things change things drastically?

Yes. Let’s look at someone like Charlieissocoolike from youtube. He’s one bloke with a camera who spends some of his time doing stuff for youtube. He’s getting about 400,000 views per video. He’s making about 2 videos per week. Let’s do some math. Imagine Charlie does his thing for a 2 years, which is roughly the production cycle of a feature film. By my math he’s going to get about 80 milllion individual ‘downloads’. Let’s take a movie like Shrek 2, the 4th biggest movie according to IMDB. It took about $450million in the US. Let’s double that to account for the rest of the world and DVD sales, and pretend each ticket cost $6, which is roughly the average. That gives us 150 million individual ‘downloads’. You see the problem?

Piracy and the New Frontier

We’ve talked before about pioneering new markets as the solution to piracy. New market advocates argue that fighting piracy is wrong and instead the music and movie industries need to ‘join’ the pirates and find a method of profiting from new distribution methods. My position is that the argument sounds great on paper, but big players have failed at new media distribution - specifically MSN and Yahoo! music.

The latest news is that Bit-Torrent’s own online store has folded. Torrent Freak have the story. Their position is that the music industry is forcing these online stores to sell music with DRMs, and that the DRMs turn off consumers. In fact, there seems to be general hate for DRMS, Ars is (always) angry at them in the context of games. But is it really sensible to blame DRM?

If you’re allocating blame for Bit-Torrent’s failure it is more sensible to point at users’ ability to obtain the product for free under the same banner. Starbucks doesn’t even bother to sell coffee on free coffee days - but Bit Torrent was trying. Blaming DRM is a long bow, and seemingly unjustified. Yahoo!’s problems with DRM only came up after the store failed.

Jumping back to games, DRMs actually enhance my gaming experience. I mainly play Steam games and MMOs. These games are heavily DRM protected, but the DRMs make my life better not worse. Mainly because the games automatically patch without me lifting a finger, and when something corrupts they automatically mend it. If I was playing a game without DRMs I’d spend all my time downloading patches and reinstalling to fix corruption.

Moral is that there is another nail in the coffin for the ‘new media distribution’ argument. We’ve learned that the big players from industry’s side of the fence can’t get it right. And now we learn that the pirates themselves can’t get it right. What I want to know is how the new distribution advocates address this seemingly huge problem.

Christians are Right - Atheist are Immoral (from an atheist)

I’m sitting in philosophy class and my professor is arguing that the problem with the internet and blogs is that people aren’t forced to address and respond to their critics. If someone presents a compelling argument authors simply ignore it. People merely preach to the choir. Therefore, he argues, the internet doesn’t further human knowledge. I think he’s wrong, most obviously because when I read my comments I find that most of them disagree with me. And I know that I’ve changed my ideas many times on the basis of a good argument.

In that vain what I’m going to do , as a staunch atheist, is argue that the theists have got something right. Atheists have no morality.

The problem with Human Rights

Human Rights are a nice idea - but they don’t work. Human Rights claim that we can derive first principles which humans broadly agree on. Once that standard is set, we can apply it to judge if people or countries are doing the right thing. Both of these ideas sound wonderful, but are grossly dysfunctional. I’ll explain why in two parts.

Part One: Agreed First Principles

“Human rights are a derived list of first principles which humans broadly agree on.”

The most obvious way to attack this is to say that humans don’t broadly agree upon alleged human rights. People argue that human rights are Western and individualistic and unfair to Eastern ideas of social obligations. People may accept the argument, but it’s not going to change someone’s mind about a core value. There are other options.