That Explains it!

I never thought I'd be so glad to have Prosopagnosia

Boring Trivia: Episode 1 - The Mime Menace

I picked my flatmate up from hospital yesterday. He was in overnight and I can tell you I really appreciated having some time alone. It's not that I have anything against interacting with human beings, it's just that one day a week is enough for that sort of thing in my opinion. Doing it every day just doesn't seem hygienic to me. I found that living in Japan suited me much better than Australia, as I could buy everything I wanted, including panties, from vending machines. And when I did interact with humans, our conversations tended to have a soothing, robotic quality.

Anyway, I arrived at the hospital to pick up my flatmate, and the room was very nice. So nice that I'm sure Dr Libertarian would say it was giving people an incentive to have an apple corer like biopsy probes shoved into their livers. Now personally, if someone offered me a nice room for a night in return for being stabbed with an apple corer, I don't think I would take them up on it, but who am I to question the wisdom of Dr Libertarian?

As soon as I arrived my flatmate started talking to me. Although I'd just had 24 hours to myself, I'm afraid that in less than a minute my conversation tank was full. I've explained to my flatmate that talking is mostly an adversive experience for me, but that doesn't seem to have any effect. I've tried to set a good example by miming a great deal of my communication, but that just makes her threaten me with apple corers and a variety of other objects, both sharp and blunt.

Anyway, I took him home where more conversation occurred. In general, I find talking to myself to be rather boring, even though I have an advantage over most people in that I don't actually know what I am going to say. Despite this, I do tend to find what I say marginally more interesting than what other people usually say. Unfortunately, my flatmate seems to feel exactly the same way about what she says, and so doesn't stop very often to let me say something or pay much attention to when I do say something. A great deal of human misery seems to result from this imbalance. Obviously there is a great untapped market out their for a drug that would make what someone else says sound more interesting than what the drug taker themselves says. The only drawback might be the violence that results from people trying to force others to take it.

Now you may have noticed that I described my flatmate as being both a he and a she. This is because sometimes people go into hospital one sex and they come out another. As a result, I have logically concluded that when a person is inside a hospital their sex must be indeterminate and I have reflected that in my writing.

MUST BURN COAL! 24/7!

I've been in communication with someone who appears very convinced that solar power won't reduce greenhouse gas emissions because coal power plants HAVE TO run at full capacity 24/7. I explained that, according to my admittedly limited knowledge of combustion, if you stop putting coal inside a coal power plant it will shut down, but he still seemed rather insistent that this wasn't possible. I'm afraid that he might have stumbled upon the horrible truth:

PLANT MANAGER: Terrible news! During the night someone installed 20 gigawatts of solar panels! It's an absolute disaster ! Fifteen minute spot prices are now below our marginal operating costs!

CHIEF ENGINEER: What? You mean electricity prices are now less than what the coal we're burning is worth? I guess we have no choice but to power down.

PLANT MANAGER: Power down? What do you mean, power down? Are you crazy! It's not one of his appointed holy days of maintenance!

CHIEF ENGINEER: What are you talking about?

PLANT MANAGER: You know exactly what I'm talking about!

CHIEF ENGINEER: You don't mean the stories the night shift workers whisper in the dark are true do you?

PLANT MANAGER: Every word!

CHIEF ENGINEER: So, if we don't... He...

PLANT MANAGER: Yes! If we don't keep the turbines operating at near maximum capacity, Gilgamax will arise and feast upon the carbon of the living! We have no choice but to keep this plant operating at full capacity and dump the surplus electricity into the grid and use it as a huge resistor! It will blow out every mains connected electrical device within ten klicks, but if we don't do it, those poor fools out there will loose a lot more than just TV and refrigeration!

CHIEF ENGINEER: Okay, I'm with you. I'll do it. I just pray to god it works. And I pray that he'll forgive those damn fools and their solar power! When will they ever learn!

There's gold in that there moon!

NASA, in its infinite wisdom, recently smacked a big chunk of rocket into the moon and examined what got blowed up. It was called the LCROSS mission. It appears that besides water there is gold on the moon. As a result, what with todays high gold prices, some people have suggested that it should be mined. Unfortunately even at today's prices it's still not worthwhile to mine the gold and send it back to earth. To get around this is has been suggested that the gold could be mined and then left on the moon and certificates of ownership could be sold instead. This would have the advantage of making the gold very resistant to theft. However, I don't think this plan will take off as a viable business model:

SALESPERSON: Care to buy a lunar gold certificate, sir?

CUSTOMER: What's the difference between this and a normal gold certificate?

SALESPERSON: It's just like a normal gold certificate, except that if you want the gold, you have to go to the moon to get it.

CUSTOMER: Err...I think I'll pass on that.

SALESPERSON: But it's just as good as a normal gold certificate!

CUSTOMER: Except for the whole moon thing.

SALESPERSON: But it doesn't matter! Hardly anyone ever hands in their certificate for real gold.

CUSTOMER: But the fact is I could if I wanted to, which is sort of the point. No one is going to buy lunar gold certificates when they can get a normal earth one for the same price.

SALESPERSON: How about I give you a discount?

CUSTOMER: By giving a discount you are making it obvious that it is not as good as a normal gold certificate. And how much of a discount do you think you would have to give for it to become worthwhile for people to buy them? Let me give you an earthly example. Would you want to buy a gold certificate that represents the gold in a billion litres of sea water? After all, the gold is definitely there, it's just really hard to get to, just like your moon gold. Currently, just like with sea water, the cost of collecting your gold is more than the gold is worth, this means your lunar gold is worth nothing.

SALESPERSON: Well then, can I interest you in some helium 3 futures, or perhaps some Czarist bonds, or possibly a time share on a nice bridge in Brooklyn?

CUSTOMER: No thanks.

SALESPERSON: If you cut me in, I could shift some of those sea water gold certificates for you...

Message to Icelandic President Olafur Grimsson on Default - U R doing it Rong!

Icelandic President and epic level D&D character, Olafur Grimsson, wants to put to a referendum whether or not Iceland should pay back money its banking system lost, as it agreed to long before billions of Euros in debt suddenly hove into view.

Now obviously the good and proper thing would have been for Olafur Grimsson to have taken his mighty axe and slain the evil financial wizards who were offering such ruinously high returns on cash deposits that obviously could only be sustained via the use of dark finance. But alas, the time for that is long past. He allowed himself to be seduced towards the selfish side and did nothing to prevent the sacrifice of Iceland’s virtuous credit rating upon the altar of the efficient markets hypothesis.

Now it may be that the best thing Iceland could do is default. However, I feel I should mention that at least part of Australia's prosperity is based upon the fact that we have always fulfilled our financial promises, no matter how freaking stupid those promises may have been. (What's that, Britain? You want us to pay for the privilege of sending a generation of young men to the other side of the planet to march slowly towards machine guns? Sure, we can do that...). And Iceland's promise to guarrantee bank deposits was not some crazy far out idea it came up with while high on magic 'shrooms and wode. It was a perfectly normal financial arrangement. But if Olafur Grimsson thinks the best thing for Iceland to do is default then he should take the responsibility onto his own shoulders and convince the government to just do it. This way if everything goes south (and face it, in Iceland that's about the only direction anything can go) he can fall on his sword for the good of the Icelandic people. (He has a sword as well as an axe.) But putting it to a referendum is axing the Icelandic people up the geothermal geyser. If Olafur Grimsson took responsibility people could say, "It wasn't our fault, we wanted to repay but he made us default. But now he's gone it's safe to invest in Iceland again. Please give us your money." But putting it to a referendum will make the Icelandic people as a whole look like deadbeats. Olafar Grimsson should Viking up and take responsibility himself if he believes that defaulting is the best thing for Iceland to do. If he doesn’t then his shift to the selfish side will be complete and he will be the villain of this piece forever more, and that’s a long time.

UPDATE: Daniel Davies explains the Icelandic default with epic level clarity despite relying on facts and years of financial experience rather than hallucinations as I do: http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com/

Avatar Concerns Race but is not Racist

Despite what some people have opined on the interwebby net, Avatar is not racist. I say this because after watching the movie I did not feel the slightest desire to go out and beat up Native Americans. In fact, the movie did not make me feel like going out and inflicting harm on any group currently or historically identified by race. I do not see how Avatar encourages anyone to do harm to any racial group or negatively portrays any racial group. The one group that appears to be portrayed negatively via proxy is the US armed forces, but they are generally not considered to be a race. Indeed, I would speculate that the reason some people are calling Avatar racist is precisely because something that might represent the US military is portrayed in a bad light and they don’t like it.

Avatar concerns race, but is not racist. Racism involves inflicting harm, either through action or inaction, to people on the basis of race. Encouraging people to inflict harm to people on the basis of race is racist, but Avatar doesn’t do this. People could say that the way Avatar handles race is a heavy-handed, unrealistic, incompetent, derivative, wish-fulfilling, colonialist guilt fantasy of The White Man’s Burden in 3D, and people are welcome to these opinions, but that doesn’t make it racist. It merely means the movie is not as good as the people who hold these opinions would like it to be. The good is not the enemy of the perfect.

Personally I find it encouraging at this point in history that the most expensive and potentially most successful movie of all time has the message that it is wrong to invade other people’s land and steal their resources. It is a simple message that a lot of people don’t seem to have gotten yet and so it bears repeating. I find this an encouraging development and one that James Cameron should be praised for. After all, it would have been very easy for him to have made True Lies Part II instead of Avatar.

Looking at his previous work I would say that Avatar has the most positive theme of any of James Cameron’s movies. Despite this, his other movies weren’t as heavily criticised as Avatar. The themes of his previous works were:

Terminator: Always use a condom when having sex with a man from the future.

Rambo First Blood Part II: Asian people can’t shoot straight and are vulnerable to having their armies defeated by one white guy with large muscles.

Aliens: It feels good to cheer a woman saving a human child by setting fire to alien babies. Also, despite being a different colour on the inside, androids are people too.

The Abyss: If you are in an environment that is known to drive people insane, make sure no one person has access to both the atomic bombs and the submarines.

Terminator 2: No matter how advanced the enemy killer robot is, your outdated killer robot can beat it as long as it has large muscles.

True Lies: Middle-Eastern people are evil unless they take orders from a white guy.

Titanic: Kate Winslet has a freakish liver that stores enough glygogen to keep her alive on a crate in the icy Atlantic despite spending hours having sex, running through an ocean liner and wading through freezing water.

Spiderman: Teenage boys who shoot white stuff at Kirsten Dunst shouldn’t be ashamed.

Maybe in the future I’ll write a post full of snide comments about how to me the movie Avatar seemed to be about a planet of blue elves being invaded by space hobbits. And how, now that indigenous Americans are finally starting to be portrayed sympathetically in movies, maybe in 400 years time Americans will start making movies in which Arabs are portrayed sympathetically. But for now, please don’t write or say that Avatar is racist. Instead, say that it didn’t deal with race as well as you would have liked and explain why.

China's Green Dam Youth Escort Program has all the porn busting power you need!

China's Green Dam Youth Escort Program has all the porn busting power you need to keep your country safe from the internet! With 3D monitor technology just around the corner, can you really afford to be unprotected and have something unexpectedly come through your computer screen and poke your eye out? But porn busting is not all it does! Green Dam Youth Escort Program limits the amount of time youth can stay on instant messaging and social networking sites to prevent addiction! Forcing them to go out on the streets and spend time with their compatriots such as Pigdog and Spider and their magic bags of white powder that chemically sooth the pain of internet withdrawal! And, in addition, as an extra bonus, Green Dam Youth Escort Program now contains a historical whitewash feature that removes all references to the Tian An Men square protests or the Fulun Gong crackdown. But for those of you who like mystically based martial arts protest movements, you can have all the Boxer Rebellion you like!

And what's more, this great new program will come completely free with every new computer sold in China after July the first! But wait, there's still more! It isn't even compulsory! You don't actually have to install it! Although it might be a good idea if you do, you know, for protection. You want to be protected, don't you? The internet's a dangerous place. Who knows what could happen to you if you went around unprotected. For example, a truncheon could fly out of your monitor and hit you in the kidneys when you have your back turned.

I recently spoke with the Chinese Minister of Industry and Information Technology, Li Ziying, who really isn’t anything at all like Joseph Goebbles:

ME: How do you respond to accusations that Green Dam Youth Escort program is part of a historical whitewash of the Tien an Men Square protests?

MINSTER: We don't. And we certainly don't put people who make such accusations under house arrest.

ME: I see.

MINISTER: And we don't approve of the term historical whitewash. When activated Green Dam will eliminate it from existence.

ME: Well the term certainly seems more appropriate when used in an Australian context. But what of allegations that the porn filter which detects skin colour is defective and blocks pictures of Garfield the cat while allowing pornographic images of people with black skin to get through? Isn't this likely to lead to the development of some interesting fetishes among the population that will boost African tourism?

MINISTER: Yes, but we believe the slight decrease in furries will make it all worthwhile.

ME: And what of reports that parts of the program were stolen from a US internet nanny program?

MINISTER: Lies spread by paper hyenas. And anyway, there wouldn't be any USA if we hadn't invented gunpowder, so they should cut us some fricking slack.

ME: And how do you respond to those who say that the program is just one more example of ham-fisted government censorship?

MINISTER: We totally disagree with the term ham-fisted censorship, as it is insulting to our Muslim minorities. Beef-fisted is a much more accurate term. However, in order to maintain good relations with India, the official term is now chicken-fisted. The term ham-fisted will be eradicated upon Green Dam's first update.


And there you have it. No doubt Green Dam Youth Escort Program will have many interesting economic effects. I for one am selling my Chinese language furry orientated web site and I'm starting a Chinese language Nigeria based mail order bride business.