Of means, and ends
I don't really understand my own mind. I watch my behaviour, as an ethnographer would, and try to infer intent from observed action. I perform experiments to test hypotheses. I'm sure other people don't do this — I'm sure other people don't need to do this.
Last weekend I rode my bicycle up to the cliff path. In part, I went to see whether there were any razorbills or guillemots nesting this year (there weren't, or, if there were, I didn't see any). But in part I went consciously to test how suicidal I was. If you really want to die, I said to myself, here's your opportunity.
A really interesting map of Scotland
I've blogged before — a number of times — on maps which show the systematic difference in political culture between Scotland and England, but here's a really interesting one. This map shows the early signatories to a petition against the 'rape clause'. Why, on this issue, should there be such a sharp divide between Scotland and the rest of the UK?
Yes, OK, the campaign has been led by Alison Thewliss, an SNP MP. Yes, Nicola Sturgeon did reference it in her barnstorming interview at the Women in the World summit in New York. But this is a clause which affects women across the UK, a clause so perversely evil that it must surely offend people of any gender across the UK.
Peer to peer post-scarcity computing
In previous notes on post-scarcity hardware (hereand here) I've assumed a single, privileged, main memory manager which maintains the canonical memory pool. All requests for memory objects go to that manager, and new non-private memory objects must be created in the address space managed by that manager. The memory manager thus becomes both a bottleneck and a single point of failure.
In the second note, I'd suggested that memory should be allocated in pages with each page belonging to a single thread. On true post scarcity hardware, that means that each page could physically co-reside with the processor on which that thread was run. That processor would be responsible for curating its own memory objects (which in essence means updating their reference counts, and garbage collecting them when they're no longer required).
The Contemptibles, Lackwit, the Literal-Deadbeats, and the United Kleptocrats and Idiots Party
Being depressed, my view on the world is bleak; it's not necessarily irrational. Here are bleak thoughts on the current state of British politics.
The Tories are a party for the greedy, the selfish, the narcissistic and the sociopathic; the LibDems for those several sandwiches short of a picnic. UKIP are a party for those who hate and fear, and for those who seek to foment and exploit hatred and fear.
The Right Honourable Liar Carmichael and the problem of Fake News
[This is my submission to the Westminster Culture Media and Sport Committee's enquiry into 'Fake News']
Before the 2015 General Election, a Scotland Office official leaked a story claiming that Nicola Sturgeon had told the French Ambassador, Sylvie Bermann, that she favoured the Conservatives to win. An enquiry was launched into the leak. Alistair Carmichael MP told that enquiry that he had not known of the leak until it appeared in the press. The election happened, and the Right Honourable Liar Carmichael was duly elected as member for Orkney and Shetland.