Recommended reading

Way out but worth it

Because I can, I will share here some weirder choices from my personal bookshelf. You may not agree with 'weird', indeed weird is the wrong word. Nevertheless I use it advisedly in the sense that I will cover subjects beyond literal truth. And I use truth advisedly as mathematics is the only provable truth. Everything else is either awaiting a mathematical proof or is a belief, a theory or an assumption.

Just to explain my thinking: you may believe in what you can see, hear and/or touch, and that's cool; but it's not necessarily a literal truth. Even if a thousand people see, hear and/or touch that thing it doesn't make it true. It may be real enough to the people concerned but it's not an incontrovertible truth. It may be an illusion. It may be a shared thought. It may be a shared assumption. It's something, but it's not a literal truth. To be a literal truth requires proof. To my mind we can only be certain of mathematical proofs, as I haven't seen any other proof that convincingly lives outside the mind or perception of man.

And I could be wrong about maths. Perhaps there is no independent proof? Ahhh, but that's an undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns....

So to the first installment of my 'way out but worth it' booklist, in no particular order:

• Bill Shakespeare's works in full. An essential lesson in the use of the English language, up there with Fowler's.


• The Elegant Universe (by Brian Greene. Post-Einstein string theory to get you thinking.)


• Anything by Richard Dawkins or Stephen Jay Gould. As I said, there are mathematical proofs and there are theories. Some theories are more compelling than others.


• The Torah (the Pentateuch, the Book of Moses: a lively read, basis for Judaism and the Old Testment and a fascinating read on any level)


• The Bible (Greek for 'Books'; The Old and New Testaments: basis for the Christian cults and a brilliant read)


• The Koran (Arabic for 'Recital': another excellent piece of writing and the basis for Islam. I have the Dawood translation)


• The History of Magic (by Eliphas Levi: a great, compelling read. Spot the a ha! 'Harry Potter' moments and see the footprints of Rowling's research)


• The Theory of Celestial influence (by Rodney Collin: immensely detailed, it wallows around trying to 'prove' a case scientifically but falls magnificently short. Can be heavy, clumsy and painful to read... but still worth it for the determined!).

That's just for starters. Let me know what you think.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006 at 9:51 am and is filed under No idea where this one goes, Writing, Religion and Essential Truths. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Latest written words

Sometimes blogging is all that write. I am working on a book and a play but that may take some time yet. So here are some snippets of blog-writing.

Why vote anyway?

August 10th, 2006

Love this campaign in the US urging people to vote (being a midterm election coming up and all). It’s cute. Here in Australia we shoot you if you don’t vote. Kidding. We actually pretty much do nothing – but we do ask you for a good reason like, ‘I was napping at the time’. They can fine you for not voting, or at least not turning up at the poll booth anyway. Not so in the US of A where apathy is your demo-o-cratic right!

The Frozen Peas video is cool.

Posted in Raves, Humanity | Edit | No Comments »

Toyota’s massive profit

August 10th, 2006

There’s money in cars, isn’t there? Carconnection.com reports:

Toyota Motor Corp. continued its unprecedented profit run by reporting a 39-percent jump in income for first quarter of its new fiscal year. Takeshi Suzuki, TMC senior managing director, said the results, which included a 13-percent increase in revenue from the same period a year ago, were the result on the plans for the growth the company had set in place. “We posted substantial increases in both revenues and profits, achieving record levels. We believe this is a result of the company-side efforts to implement the plans that we set at the beginning of the fiscal year.”

Wow. Over 11billion US dollars profit. I have some thoughts here.

One, how the mighty US car makers have crumbled. GM and Ford have been selling assets to prop up ailing businesses over the last few years. You look at their products and think: too fat, too truck-centered, too thirsty. Then you look at nimble, efficient Toyota. Able to match anyone with trucks, 4wds, big, medium or small cars…hybrids as well. They have the production processes, the speed of design and development and the low cost manufacturing needed to survive down pat. I suspect only a few car companies can compete, possibly only the Koreans, the Chinese and the Indians will have the wherewithal to survive in the global marketplace, with local markets aggregating into perhaps one or 2 European and US manufacturers, propped up with subsidies. Everyone else will go niche or go bust. There’s a lot at stake here, including national pride and loads of jobs.

Which brings me to my next thought. What if global climate change and the effects of rising water levels and fiercer weather can be proven, or at least sufficently so that a case against can be made? Will we see liability cases claiming damages against the big, profitable oil and automotive corporations for continuing to make ridiculously inappropriate products in the face of diabolical climate effects? Does this leave GM and Ford off the hook (as they are unprofitable, or look pretty shaky at best) or will such damages claims actually sink their collective ships?

Maybe Toyota will need its ‘war chest’ of cash to pay some future ‘social responsibility’ claims?

Posted in Global Warming, Motoring, Business | Edit | No Comments »

Oh please all wake up!

August 8th, 2006

Crikey just sent me an email, as they do. In part, it reads…”What generally prevents commodity shortages doing major damage to the economy is the price mechanism. As things get scarce, their price rises, and that provides incentives to (a) produce or discover more of them, (b) find or invent substitutes for them, (c) use less of them, and (d) recycle them or use them more efficiently. The combination of these effects minimises dislocation and allows us gradually to shift to different ways of doing things. But if governments are so short-sighted – or just plain stupid – as to try to keep petrol prices artificially low, then none of this will happen. Instead, we’ll continue happily consuming cheap fuel until we wake up one morning and discover we’ve run out, just as the “peak oil” people say.”

Well d’oh! It’s not that complicated, is it? So why are we waking up in 2006 to the need to price resources properly and avoid market distortions? We pump millions of public dollars into shared infrastructure like roads, seemingly unaware that this is subsidising road transport. We whinge about road tolls. We pay enormous sums in public medical care for car accident victims. We even (in Australia at least) make driving and leasing cars a tax saving!We are subsidising cars in the name of freedom, left right and centre.

The oil took aeons to make, it lies in pools underground. It was always going to run out sometime. Some of the pools are large, some small. Some are easier to get to than others. Some are dirtier, some cleaner. Some are on shore, some off. Some still pump at high pressure, some are losing oomph. More than likely we have found the easiest, cheapest places to pump oil and only with higher prices will it become profitable to extract it. As the price rises it gets cheaper to use not only harder-to-get-to oil but also smaller bodies, gas bodies and finally other alternatives like coal, oil shale and so on. With higher prices we can stretch this out 100, maybe 150 years?

Let’s not forget that it’s not just transport that uses oil. The petrochemical companies use it to make plastics, for instance. Indirectly but pretty importantly tourism is a big current user, too.
But the bottom line is that these are all fossil fuels. It’s not just that we may or may not have reached peak oil, we always knew that would happen. Nor is it that our governments are concerned about price hits and may do something silly like cut excise on the damned stuff. These are all climate-changing fuels. If we keep consuming and pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere we will dramatically alter our climate and wreak havoc all around – if we haven’t already done so.

Let’s not quibble about the economic effects of peak oil, let’s look at the bigger picture of our global addiction to cars, and probably air travel as well. Just making cars consumes energy resources, covers arable land in concrete and tar, and adds to the overall carbon problem – without even driving the damned things. We need to wake up and have a really good think about what we want here. And ask what’s sustainable. And price our resource use not just on what they cost to extract plus a margin, but on what they cost in terms of all effects, including climate change and biosphere damage. Unfortunately we are so dependent on selling complex manufactured goods, and cars are such a good employer of people and such a wonderful empowerer, that we all want one. (Indeed I guiltily have 3.)

But is there enough planet to go around?

Posted in Raves, Humanity, Global Warming, Business | Edit | No Comments »

Technology, evolution, string theory and religion

August 7th, 2006

Tom Yager, in his 2002 column “Losing My Religion”, called it technology attachment disorder: “an unshakable, impractical devotion to a brand, platform, product line, or programming language.” Such devotion is a kind of religion argument, like Windows vs Linux or Christian vs Muslim. It doesn’t have to be so, surely, but sometimes it gets aggro. John Udell comments on this subject (starting with the Mac vs PC debate) in his Infoworld blog and brings the philosopher Daniel Dennett into the story. Dennett’s recently been exploring religion as a product of evolutionary processes in the domains of biology (genes) and culture (memes).

As Udell notes, group performance of ritual song and dance is a central feature of religious activity. This may be rooted in oral culture, as Dennett apparently points out, where there was only such majority consensus available to provide any sort of accurate transmission of messages. To avoid the ‘Chinese Whispers’ effect. However I would suggest that the Greek and Roman orators had their own tricks in order to preserve stories intact – look at the story of Ulysses as just one example. It’s been handed down to us by word of mouth over many generations before being committed to the written word. It’s not necessarily just religion that needs or solves this problem. Indeed, all of our technology, our entire civilisation, was passed down the line in some oral way for thousands of years before writing was even developed or popularised. It wasn’t just religion that solved the accuracy problem.

Anyway, Dennett apparently builds upon Richard Dawkins’ thinking. Dawkins’ books have pushed the line that evolution can be usefully regarded as competition among genes as well as competition among the organisms they encode and that ideas, beliefs, or behaviors – also called memes – are the cultural analogs of genes. Dennett’s extension apparently – I’m relying upon Udell here – considers that the meme pool survives in the face of relentless selective pressure, just as does every gene and its phenotype. Thus every idea, belief or behavior must deliver an adaptive benefit or be lost. And whilst these memes may assist us, as in generating a fully formed living ‘religion’ and successfully passing on moral precepts generation after generation, sometimes only the memes benefit.

Udell likens this to successful marketing spin. For example where Macs are seen to “suck” and PCs are seen to be “cool.” It’s important to understand, he says, how this all works – it could be useful at least to unravel some of these meme-driven myths. Linux vs Windows. ID vs Evolution. Ford vs GM. Newtonian vs quantum physics. 11 or 13 dimension string theory? Our sometimes feral and driven attachment to ideas can seem pretty illogical at times. Is it our memes at work?

Posted in Raves, Humanity | Edit | No Comments »

OK, it looks pretty bad

August 7th, 2006

When Floyd Landis won that bizarre stage when he broke away and caught a bunch up ahead and then dropped them all, finishing alone, I didn’t think “drugs”. I thought “angry”. Angry at his own mistake the previous day, when he “lost” all chance. I also thought “stupid” as in ‘it is stupid letting him take all this time back’. Just at it appeared foolish when Oscar Pereiro’s breakaway was allowed 28 minutes or so. Now it was the making of Oscar and it appears to have been the unmaking of Floyd. But why testosterone? And why test positive just on that day?

It doesn’t make sense that testosterone would give Landis the boost he needed to make that one break. Testosterone is generally applied as a course over time to make longer-term physical improvements. One dose won’t do it. It may have given him a psychological boost, but not a physical one. Maybe it made him angrier, but not that angry, surely?

So has he been set up, or is he in denial? Is he lying? Is the lab wrong? Both labs, I mean. If he is guilty as charged then a look back through the records should reveal a longer term change in his testosterone levels. All the more reason to use baseline testing of athletes and their blood, so a longitudinal record is kept. Any change that shouldn’t occur naturally would then be investigated. There must be trust in the process and the labs, as well as the athletes. Alround, it’s just sad.

Posted in Humanity, Bikes and bike racing | Edit | No Comments »

I have been writing - really I have

Sometimes I'm just writing elsewhere. Like at my other blogs. This gives you a flavour of my 'daily drivel'.

Sunday, August 06, 2006

Brown wins Stage 4 in Germany

Graeme Brown finally delivers for Rabo (Cyclingnews quote and link): However, with 500 metres remaining, the field came back together, just in time for one last suicidal attempt from Jens Voigt (CSC). With that over before it even started, Australian Graeme Brown threw his bike across the line and took his first victory of the year, beating Schumacher and Zabel to the post.

What a relief! He's had his ups and downs, but he looks pretty happy about winning a stage of the Deutschland Tour. Renshaw was in the Top 5 and Zabel has taken the lead. Can he hold on over the mountains? You'd like to hope so, but with Vino one of many contenders just 48secs back, highly unlikely.

On Landis: It's hard to know who's clean, what with masking agents and autologous transfusions, and we have to trust the integrity of the sampling and testing procedure. So is it as robust as we'd like? Cyclingnews gives a rundown on the B sample result here:Christian Prudhomme, Director general of the Tour de France, said Landis is no longer considered champion of the 2006 event, but added: "Until he is found guilty or admits guilt, he will keep the yellow jersey. This is normal. You are not sanctioned before you are found guilty.

Saturday, August 05, 2006

Aussies in Germany and Denmark

A good result for 2 Aussies in Stage 3 of the Tour of Germany, as reported by Cyclingnews:
1 Gerald Ciolek (Ger) Team Wiesenhof Akud 4.56.22 (41.16 km/h)
2 Erik Zabel (Ger) Team Milram
3 André Greipel (Ger) T-Mobile Team
4 Luke Roberts (Aus) Team CSC
5 Mark Renshaw (Aus) Credit Agricole

And O'Grady takes yellow in Denmark, again reported by Cyclingnews:
Stage 3 - August 4: Kolding - Odense, 203.7 km Förster scores for Gerolsteiner, as O'Grady takes yellow

Friday, August 04, 2006

Aussies in Denmark

Some Aussies are doing well in the Tour of Denmark... stage 2 - see Cyclingnews for the report: 2 Stuart O'Grady (Aus) Team CSC 0.21, 4 Cadel Evans (Aus) Davitamon-Lotto 0.23, 5 Baden Cooke (Aus) Unibet.com, 14 Gene Michael Bates (Aus) Team L.P.R. 0.39

Monday, July 31, 2006

Other sports and doping

Because I can, I will comment on drugs, doping and what have you. It's just my opinion but I personally realised something was truly happening - as against being told by press or dodgy friends what "was" happening - when I spent time in an eastern suburbs gym in Sydney, building up for bike racing (more of a psychological boost than a physical one). This was the mid 1980's. These big, shiny, oily pimply guys were always there lifting massive weights (and gazing into mirrors) and they could sell you "stuff". It reminded me of 'under the stairs' deal at high school, actually, but different stuff. That other stuff you got at the pub and was detrimental to sports performance, or general sanity for that matter. (Not that I did, but some people did do that other stuff, anyway!)

So you could buy any sort of body-building drug at that particular gym, in my experience. Presumably other gyms as well. I also "knew" about the occasional cyclist's drink bottle ("bidon") that (it was suggested) contained alcohol, to give some sort of kick up hills or before a sprint. Don't know how effective it was, but a few people seemed to like it and claimed to "know". Bikes of course are build to carry bidons as well as riders and musette bags, but what about other sports?

'No-Doze' was also big in the '80s for that caffeine kick, and coffee itself gained notoriety in sports where being "aware" and awake was important. Again in cycling there were "special" bananas to be eaten just before a race finish. Now these were reputedly spiked with amphetamines, but who knows the truth? No-one did a laboratory analysis on this sort of stuff at the time and it may have been riders just bragging. But very, very few people were drug tested pre or post race, even at elite State level back then, so anything could have happened. (And I have yet to see a club-level drug test, even now. Tell me if you've seen one!)

So I can imagine, and it is just imagination fueled by innuendo and availability (particularly via the Internet), that some bike racers are using performance enhancing agents to "get noticed"; firstly at club level (basically weekly racing thoughout the year) and probably at State level. They would effectively get away with it. Testing remains something done at higher levels of the sport, not below. Not often, anyway, in my experience, would they get caught. On the other hand I have never myself seen a culture of drug use in cycling at first hand, beyond caffeine and stories of what other riders did. I heard about but didn't see the evidence.

Nevertheless we quite possibly get riders started on this stuff early and then they either chicken out, or get smarter. Or dumber? If there's money involved there's temptation. Of course cycling is not as "wealthy" as some other sports.

So what happens in other sports?

Sunday, July 30, 2006

Web resources - Roadcycling UK

An interesting take on the UK road and TT scene is to be found at RoadcyclingUK. Worth checking out. Here's a snippet on starting road racing in the UK:
Road Racing from scratch By RCUK "I could do that!" Almost invariably it's around the time of the three great tours that many occasional cyclists get so carried away by the unfolding drama, passion and competitive spirit of the Giro d'Italia,Tour de France and Spanish Vuelta that they picture themselves flying along in the midst of an illustrious bunch or riding with relative ease up steep mountain climbs with cheering crowds lining the road. At least that's what appears to be the case, even though you know that the apparent ease at which the riders are "flying" along at an average speed of 45k per hour is deceptive and the whole idea, in fact, may seem totally mad and completely and utterly out of my league - even more so as the prerequisite is incredibly hard training, unbelievable talent and a super-human physique. But cycling is all about sticking at it.