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9 October 2007

CITIZEN MURDOCH

After closely watching Rupert since the launch of "The Australian" I feel nearly qualified to comment on his strategies.

Everyone in media KNOWS that the public is a fickle hydra. Murdoch's genius is to combine that knowledge with the principle of reaction.

What is to be shrunken
Is first stretched out;
What is to be weakened
Is first made strong;
What will be thrown over
Is first raised up;
What will be withdrawn
Is first bestowed.

Although I must say, it's breathtaking to watch it in action.

Reportedly Rupert is currently playing with his newest toy, (WSJ in case you hadn't heard). Goodonyer mate, ida never seen it back in (was it '57?).

I think Johnny is not going to call the election this week. Following that thought, it would not overly surprise me if some rather radical democratic legislation was introduced next week.

19th October 2007

I seem to have the worst record for predicting Howard. He has called the election. Already the polls are moving his way. The Murdoch papers have stories about "70% of Labour's frontbench would be ex-union bosses". Rudd's defence is "scare tactics" to which Liberal responds "truth, not scare". He is correct, predicting something bad e.g. "rising interest rates" would be scare tactics, because it is something that people feel might do them harm, and is based on opinion, not fact. The threat of a unionised cabinet is not scary per se, it depends on people's perceptions of unionism, and is (I think) based on fact.


4 October 2007

STUFF of THOUGHT, ABMs.

THOUGHT (1)

So read Babel's Dawn, and Cognitive Daily, and even random Chomsky.

The question: where does language come from? The "wolf" or "feral" children seem on the one hand to predicate that language is a prerequisite for social thought.

Another strand theorizes a hardwired neural network. Kant introduced the concept "a priori propositions" which could not be derived. He proposed space and time. To those I would add the concept of "force" or "mass".

Experiments with cat neural networks shows that the first level of visual processing reduces the output of the eye to spatial frequency and orientation and (perhaps) intensity. These three are then integrated to produce the perceived universe. If this geometry recurs, then our brain is capable of integrating only three vectors.
Perhaps that is why wave mechanics and the Hubble universe are not susceptible to simple imaging.

Historical and modern attempts to organize the mind have three vectors. Fsu Xi found the trigrams. Freud saw Id, ego & Superego. Eric Berne posited Child, Adult, Parent.

Suppose the mind moves in four vector space. Then mind would be theoretically impossible to imagine. A characteristic of a four vector system would be that multiple true but seemingly contradictory statements could be made. (e.g. from wave mechanics: "light is both and neither wave and particle").

ABM

For many years (1) (2) (3) I have advocated the USA develop an ABM.

Drudge reported that the USA now has a workable ABM system.

Computers are revolutionizing so much twentieth century technology.

The Enigma machine was the first of the encryption algorithms that was near uncrackable. Now the Diffie Hellman, RSA and other algorithms provide uncrackable encryption, and the NSA and other security services must rely on inserting trapdoors in the encrypting software.

Copying of information is now so cheap that the whole of human writing up to the 10th Century could be held on my hard drive. As a result those people who previously made a living from copyright material should start looking for a real job about now. Prosecution of those that can be seen copying just wont work, because those who are copying will soon learn to move to untraceable copying methods.

And the development of a functional ABM has once again tilted the historic balance of power back to the defender. MIRV's cost orders of magnitude more than ABMs. I wrote back in July 2000 that

The ultimate ABM system is a cylinder about four feet high weighing a couple of hundred pounds that sits in a fenced off area of the town square. When it detects an incoming ICBM it takes it out.

I made the prediction back in 2000 that:

"Before another decade has passed individual US states will be able to afford to purchase their own ABM systems. The dollar cost will drop, and the effective cost (dollar cost of number of ABM's required to have a 95% probability of a hit.) will almost certainly drop even faster. Probably individual cities (SF, LA, NY, Chicago) would be able to purchase their own ABM systems"


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