random thoughts

• I don't think the words "Agile" and "Gantt Chart" belong in the same sentence...
• monolingualism is an historical anomaly
• good ideas don't need champions, they need poets
• do not knight your heroes, lest when you discover their flaws you feel compelled to strike them down
• a charlatan spruiks his elixir; an entrepreneur pitches his technology
• the fisherman who credits his success to his own skill is the least thankful for his catch
• cryptocurrencies are like musical chairs; seats are fungible, no-one wants to miss-out on a seat, and they are worth nothing when the game is over
• the point of an advertisment is not to inform you about something you need; it is to fabricate lust for a product of which you have no need and envy of those who have already been beguiled
• a mirror doesn't reverse left and right, any more than it reverses up and down; what it does reverse is front and back
• if a tree falls in the forest and it is beyond render distance, does it make a sound?
• those who claim "you can do anything you set your mind to" may be underplaying the lucky advantages in their own life
• despite many facts and particulars being provided, it is not "informed consent" if the subject is being coerced
• 'ethnicity' from dna is a sham, if not concealed racism: it does not measure a percentage of ancestry dna from an ethnic group; instead that a fraction of those now (unevenly) sampled in a region have like minute variations… our human species has a tight-woven ancestry
• those who disparage schools for not rewarding their originality, might be the same ones who whined that their exams had questions not covered in class
• aiming for 100% efficiency in a hospital is like gratuitously removing one kidney because we don't need it at the moment
• an intuition oft abandoned, that the battery in a mobile phone ought to be replaceable with ease
• transparency of information requires that the data can be replicated or that the source is credible
• something with no value can still have a non-zero price... temporarily
• as one noxious Ponzi scheme withers, another germinates nearby
• just because no-one is interested doesn't mean you have privacy
• having an equal right to an opinion doesn't mean I am equally well informed
• if religion is the opium of the people, what would Karl have called Netflix?
• life is too precious to be rushing around
• I notice they never use leftovers on cooking shows
• reality television is the adolescent mutation of the "lets-pretend" games played by children
• it is easier to tear down trust than it is to build it
• a democracy is sturdy when those trailing in the polls are willing to cede power; the implicit compact is that victors must govern fairly for all minorities
• mild annoyance of the day: matrix transformations are (by convention) prefix operators, not postfix
• I'd like to patent the one click cancel order
• not every illness has a cure... and yet still we endure
• the outcome of a quantum 'measurement' is a bit like a Monty Hall problem
• a bullet list of pros and cons is more functional if one can assign a weight to each point
• obvious yet oft overlooked - proposing the solution is best done _after_ understanding the problem
• data is 'owned' by whoever can access it
• your partner's snoring is the reassurance that you are not alone!
• scarcity does not create value, it merely enhances the perception of value
• asset gains and losses would be better measured in millibels (mB) rather than percentages (%)
• rule of thumb - go with the first idea or choice which is better than your initial one
• the intention of the dark web is not to hide from the law, it is to hide from social mores
• the indifferent opinions of a hypocrite can sometimes be correct; the passionate opinions of a sincere person can sometimes be wrong
• home is the centre of our universe
• never underestimate the ability of humans to find meaning where there is none
• not everything is naturally stable when unregulated; if your car is drifting off the side of the road you do have to tweak the wheel a little
• pain is a qualia, provoking the organism to undertake voluntary actions to protect its non-concious component cells
• birdbaths are artificial puddles
• a meme is a joke which apparently you can tell twice
• a human is like an eddy on the surface of the universe, gaining and losing coherence
• in the idealized bureaucracy, no-one would know how to do anything, but everyone would know who to refer you to; it would be an oubliette of beadledom
• a democracy which forgets a minority has lost its ethical lucidity
• we cannot describe a nuclear war as 'unthinkable', when we have already destroyed entire cities of people as a deliberate strategy
• is "real estate investing" just a coy way to say "home scalping"?
• one of the functions of confession is to provide the priests of the cult with power over their adherents
• I believe in the power of a multitude of trivial rebellions
• being a house-cat is like living your entire life on a stage
• war is the expedience of a cynical grandfather, fought by a callow lad, sustained by an angry bereaved mother, and inflicted upon a tiny child
• the invention of money enabled the gamification of trade, reducing the idea of 'value' to a single unitless dimension
• there is a guest list at a wedding, but anyone can turn up to a funeral
• the well-being of ordinary people is of more value than doctrines or empires, creeds or institutions, ideologies or nation-states
• pacifism is not a part-time philosophy
• the older you get the fewer people there are who remember the context of your jokes
• randomness and regular patterns appear opposite, yet neither carry meaning; authentic meaning lies in the connections between other loci of meaning
• guns don't kill people, bullets kill people; any vandal can fabricate a weapon, but the mass manufacture of ammunition is technically challenging
• there is little point in defining 'free will' if one is unable to delineate the agent of that free will
• the considered position which dissents is more valuable than the trite opinion which feels correct
• the truth has two enemies: the person who is uniformly credulous; and the person who is obstinantly skeptical
• a rumour is a pronouncement with neither context nor empathy
• a musical is not a drama with songs added to it; it is an garland of music which, lyrically and non-verbally, tell a story
• life is better under a dictator until it isn't
• the second casualty of war is innocence
• I prefer to call them "conspiracy hypotheses"
• the thought experiments of philosophers were the first science fiction stories
• a cat is a device for generating entropy
• in the 21st Century, 'legendary' means a film was once made about it
• be wary of those that enthuses about a cause worth dying for; only later you notice they really meant it is worth taking the lives of other people for
• post-renaissance architecture appears focused on the 'facade', whether exaggerated or execrated
• our metastasizing economies are not driven by renewable resources but by renewable consumption
• describing someone's thinking as incomprehensible is lazy rhetoric; effective action comes through understanding the motives of an adversary
• science strives to predict the world, engineering aims to control it
• it strikes me that ChatGPT and DJT chats both have a similarly agnostic connection to factual reality