Year: 2005

You do what with peanut butter?

I sometimes get asked what I find most unusual or suprising about America. Now, between having been here before, getting lots of US TV, and growing up in a society not too unlike the US, I seldom find things very strange.

With one exception. Americans abuse peanut butter. Badly.

I have nothing against peanut butter. It’s great on toast. Not too bad on a sandwich. Great for nutritional value. And that should be where it ends.

It would seem, however, that I keep finding new things that people here put peanut butter on. It started with ice cream, cake, brownies, biscuits (cookies here), and all sorts of other desserts. This last weekend, though, it really went too far, with people suggesting peanut butter on apples, with all sorts of breakfast foods, and even on bananas.

Fools.

Kyoto Treaty takes force

Yesterday, Wednesday 16 February, marked the entry into force of the Kyoto Treaty, designed to control and reduce the global emission of greenhouse gasses.

Of course, the most noteworthy part of the whole thing is that the US, producer of about a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gasses, is not a signatory. Nevertheless, it’s great to see the EU, most notably, committed to controlling emissions.

There’s lots that could be said, and perhaps I will if people are interested. But for now, I’ll comment on the three most commonly used criticisms of the treaty: developing country exceptions; effects on economic growth; and effectiveness in reducing emissions.
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Supercomputing in your living room

Just read an article in the Economist, confirmed by many other sites, like say Eurogamer.net. It’s about the new processor released by Sony, IBM and Toshiba, called the Cell. It’s got a central processor that sends “packets” of code and data to each of the eight actual processing centres on the chip, or to nearby other Cells if multiple chips are included in the setup.

All this means it’s not aimed (at this stage) at PC’s, as it will only run code that has been split into this “packets”. So supercomputers with customised code are an obvious application.

But the other application is the Playstation 3. It looks like there may be 4 Cells per Playstation. Here’s the punchline: if it were released today, that would put each individual Playstation 3 in the top 500 supercomputers in the world.

Ah yes, remember the days when the rumours required (insert “Axis of Evil” country of choice) to have hundreds of Playstation 2’s to have a supercomputer…

Knots and different dimensions

It seems that most of the time these days, I being asked to think about things in a different number of spacial dimensions than 3 (up-down, left-right, forwards-backwards). Now, some properties follow through to additional dimensions quite easily, but I was thinking recently about one that doesn’t: knots — it’s a great example of the tricks that dimensions can play on one.

What’s a knot? Take a piece of string (an object extended in one dimension). Form a loop and feed it through the loop. The knot so formed cannot, by continuous deformation of the string, be “undone” without moving an end of the string back through the loop.

But knots only exist in three spacial dimensions.
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The government, taxes and charity

(Re-posting of a piece I originally posted on http://www.thought.co.za)

Recent forum topics have spoken about what giving to others should involve, and mentioned the government, etc. What I’ve thought for a while is that we sometimes miss the point when discussing these sorts of things, and often accepted ideas of charity are actually not all that useful for really helping people. So this post is about how I see the role of government, taxes and private giving fitting together. There aren’t many new ideas for what we should be doing, but maybe someone will find it interesting anyway. It’s also my opinion, so other opinions welcome!

Firstly, what is wealth/poverty? With the exception of retirement investments, simply having some money is a very poor measure of wealth. Rather, what matters is how much one earns. Very few people have more than a few months worth of income saved, and indeed most people are in debt for houses, cars, etc. In fact, the reason that they are able to have houses is not because they have money now, but because they are earning enough to have convinced a bank that they willl repay the loan. Many new businesses are also financed largely on loans, again because of the earning capabilities of those businesses. This is the economic background to the “give a man a fish vs teach him to fish” argument. Merely giving someone money will help in the short term (which can be crucial), but that person is still poor as they still earn little regular income. Someone can only really be said to have escaped poverty if he/she has a regular income, that can be documented and so used for loans, retirement saving, etc.
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