Why yes, bugshaw has lent me her Love and Rockets, why do you ask? :-) Just a doodle playing with ideas and practicing and stuff.



Originally posted to Dreamwidth

This sounds like a construction from some economics paper, but it's actually an event which my grandmother used to attend.

Her church, which prohibited gambling and was generally down on ranking and the like, wanted to hold a bingo night for the old folk. Here's the system they came up with.

Each participant was to bring goods of a certain value and there were certain cultural conventions restricting the class of items which established that it was unlikely that an individual would have any strong preference for any one of them over another. These were then randomly permuted into a sequence of prizes. Each participant was then dealt a bingo card and balls were withdrawn. When "that's a bingo" the winner got the next prize in line. The balls were withdrawn until everyone had won (which has guaranteed finite and sensible termination). Everyone left with goods in the same quantity as which they had contributed; which, assuming all had gone well, they had strictly no preference compared to the goods they brought; and for which they had no preference over the winnings their co-players.

I can't help think that these church-going folk of the distant reaches of Lincolnshire were acting out something which was quite profound and also quite mad.

Originally posted to Dreamwidth

I've just discovered that on the 11th floor of the famously futuristic Lloyds of London building, 60 foot above The Lutine Bell, is an "an 18th century dining-room designed for the 2nd Earl of Shelburne by Robert Adam in 1763; it was transferred piece-by-piece from the previous (1958) Lloyd's building across the road" (!w Lloyd's building).

When I read this, I was reminded of this short clip from 2001 (and of the library in Solyaris). This must be what it's like to be one of those guys running a financial institution like Lloyds of London these days, or those guys at JP Morgan Chase I read about today.

Update: Here's the room!

When I read about "The Greeks" (not not the people in Greece, Delta, Vega, Theta, etc), it always seems a little antiquated to me and, well, Georgian. All those partial differentials between this and that, it's all quite thermodynamic: kind of has the air of post-Revolutionary France, in a way, Carnot, Laplace, Jacobians, all those folk who like drowning men grasp desparately at ever flimsier algebraic substitutions in a world of Chaitin's Constant, statistical mechanics and finite element analysis.



Originally posted to Dreamwidth

We read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy for book club.

In an odd way it's kind of like a masculine A Passage to India or even A Room with a View: a thing about secrets, friendship, betrayal, relevance, identity, the fall of the British Empire, &c. Maybe it's Brideshead Revisited with paperclips?

I've always liked George Smiley.

I've always had bouts of an intense sense of universal pointlessness and ridiculousness, which I guess are crying and laughing at the same thing. They've not really decreased as I've got older: I think you just learn to accept it and learn to continue functioning through. And I guess you learn not to try to prove those notions incorrect, just to accept them as awkward truths. There is so much coneit and fantasy everywhere, inside me and outwith, it's like trying to fight through the amazon with a butterknife. It's just so tiring.

Originally posted to Dreamwidth

(a response (of sorts) to rmc28's Enlightened Economist link).



Originally posted to Dreamwidth

A: Do you think he [Brevik] is mad?
B: Not mad, just a nutter.
A: What does that mean?
B: Just a nutter, you know, like people on the internet.

Originally posted to Dreamwidth

Personal Top 40 tracks by artist, Last 12 months (by number of plays). I'm putting this here because I wonder how different it will be next year:

Dream Disciples (No 40), Clannad, PJ Harvey, Massive Attack, Dream Disciples, Cocteau Twins, Amy's Ghost, Suspiria, Roger Waters, Cocteau Twins, Bauhaus, Rosetta Stone, PJ Harvey, No Bra, Kylie Minogue, Fatboy Slim, Dream Disciples, Cocteau Twins, Black Sabbath, Black Sabbath, PJ Harvey, Dream Disciples, Dream Disciples, Children on Stun, Brian Eno, Sisters of Mercy, The Prodigy, The Prodigy, Rosetta Stone, Nosferatu, Dream Disciples, Corpus Delecti, The Merry Thoughts, Flux Pavilion, Dream Disciples, Dream Disciples, Flux Pavilion, Underworld, Kylie Minogue (No 1).

(This is mainly because I don't read as many books as all my friends, so I can't do those books read lists. Though I listen to music for pleasure when others might read it's weirdly not nearly as improving is it? :-) I do read, but don't really enjoy the physical process, so it needs to be dens and have a high payback, which I guess is why I like poetry, plays, &c).

Originally posted to Dreamwidth

Following work today doing internationalisation, I draw the attention of passing geeks to the following Unicode character innovations:

• U+1F391 MOON VIEWING CEREMONY
  
• U+1F428 KOALA
  
• U+1F439 HAMSTER FACE
  
• U+1F4A9 PILE OF POO
  
• U+1F625 DISAPPOINTED BUT RELIEVED FACE
  
• U+1F640 WEARY CAT FACE
  

I look forward to seeing them in a font near me soon, :-).

Originally posted to Dreamwidth

There are rooks at work. This means I have a perpetual Reading a Book (embedded) earworm, transformed into Feeding a Rook.



Other recent earworms are Scissor Sisters' Mary and Return To Oz, Kylie's All The Lovers, Flux Pavilion's I Can't Stop, March Violets' Dandelion King and Front 242's Welcome To Paradise (aka "Hey Poor").

You really wanted to know that didn't you?

Update: It seems that a Madeira cake may be best for the crenelations of Nagorno Karabakh. I've not made one but it seems to mainly be a pound cake with slightly different proportions and stuff like Vanilla Essence and cherries, which are a good addition to anything. Madeira seems to have the structural integrity not to spontaneously cede cake crumbs to Azerbaijan.

Originally posted to Dreamwidth

There is the start of a plan for a Eurovision party among some ex-colleagues and friends and I've foolishly indicated I would try to bring along the disputed enclave of Nagorno Karabakh in cake form (as it's the only thing I know about Azerbaijan, the host country). I've just looked on Wikipedia and my goodness does it have complicated borders, :-(. It does have a flag, though, which will be good for the colour scheme. How do I do this. Why can't disputed enclaves be nice and convex, :-(.

Originally posted to Dreamwidth