We are living in hyperinflationary times
IEA
The US, with no more than 5 per cent of the world’s population, consumes 25 per cent of of the world’s oil. The US uses around 14 times as much oil as China on a per capita basis, and over 28 times as much as India. If per capita oil use in China and India were to increase to the current level in US, their oil demand would rise by a combined 160 million barrels a day- almost twice the present level of world oil consumption of around 87 million barrels a day. At this level, all know proven world reserve of conventional oil will be depleted in 15 ye
"It’s hard to write a good poem… It’s like this. You have to climb a mountain, find your way through a maze, get to the field that has the tree in it, climb up to the top of the tree and wait for a thunderstorm. Then it’s easy once you’re hit by lightning. You go through a lot of froufrou before you get there." —
Robert Pinksy
Richard Feynman musing on beauty
I have a friend who's an artist, and he has sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say,'Look how beautiful it is,' and I'll agree. And he says,'You see, I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you, as a scientist, take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.' And I think he's kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty he sees is available to other people and to me, too, I believe, although I might not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is. I can appreciate the beauty of a flower, and at the same time I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside which also have a beauty. It's not just beauty at this dimension, the inner structure.. also the processes. the fact that the colours in the flower are evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting - it means that insects can see the colour. It adds a queation - does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Or why is it aesthetic? There are all kinds of interesting questions which a science knowledge only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower.
The Chinese Room Thought Experiment
By John Searle
Imagine that you carry out the steps in a program for answering questions in a language you do not understand. I do not understand Chinese, so I imagine that I am locked in a room with a lot of boxes of Chinese symbols (the database), I get small bunches of Chinese symbols passed to me (questions in Chinese), and I look up in a rule book (the program) what I am supposed to do. I perform certain operations on the symbols in accordance with the rules (that is, I carry out the steps in the program) and give back small bunches of symbols (answers to the questions) to those outside the room. I am the computer implementing a program for answering questions in Chinese, but all the same I do not understand a word of Chinese. And this is the point: if I do not understand Chinese solely on the basis of implementing a computer program for understanding Chinese, then neither does any other digital computer solely on that basis, because no digital computer has anything I do not have.
This is such a simple and decisive argument that I am embarrassed to have to repeat it, but in the years since I first published it there must have been over a hundred published attacks on it, including some in Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained....The Chinese Room Argument—as it has come to be called—has a simple three-step structure:
Programs are entirely syntactical.
Minds have a semantics.
Syntax is not the same as, nor by itself sufficient for, semantics.
Therefore programs are not minds. Q.E.D.
a score is a group or set of 20.
Temasek banking stakes as of 24 July 2007
Bank Danamon 59%
Bank Internasional Indonesia 35%
DBS 28%
StanChart 12%
Hana Financial 10%
ICICI 7.37%
China Construction Bank 6%
E Sun Financial 6%
Bank of China 5%
China Minsheng 3.9%
Barclays 2.9% for S$7.5 billion
Pick a new name
The boxer Cassius Clay changing his name to Muhammad Ali is one of the greatest creative acts of the twntieth century. Cassius Clay was already the heavyweight champion of the world, but converting to Islam, throwing off the shackles of a slave name, and becoming Ali gave him an even larger identity for a much bigger stage. It helped make him the most famous person on earth.
Eric Blair --> George Orwell
Cicily Fairfield --> Rebecca West
Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski --> Joseph Conrad
On solitude
Subtracting your dependence on some of the things you take for granted increases your independence. It’s liberating, forcing you to rely on your own ability rather than your customary crutches.
There’s an American tradition of giving things up to foster self-reliance. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a man of the world who sought solitude and simplicity. Henry David Thoreau turned his back on the distractions of life in society in pursuit of a better and clearer life, and found a rich vein of inspiration and invention in the Massachusetts woods. Emily Dickinson lived as quiet and constricted a life as one can imagine, and channeled her energies directly into her poetry. All three sought lives apart from the hubbub of the city’s commerce.
