A few days ago in New Zealand, somebody dropped a concrete block on a car, killing the driver. What a terrible, reckless thing to do, to destory people's lives for no reason.

Also a few days ago, a child of 14 was arrested and charged with murder for this incident.

I have a real problem with this. Children push boundaries, take risks, and lack judgement and foresight. That's why we don't give them the rights adults have (such as to get married, vote, go to war, sign contracts). I think most of us can look back on something we did in our childhood and say something like, "well that was stupid — I could have killed someone." I canvassed some people I know a few days ago and collected a remarkable array of horror stories kids had done to other kids. Every now and then, "could have" becomes "did." Is that unlucky person much different from the rest of us? Kids take risks, including risks they have no right to take.

Of course, the idea that there's some magic age where we make the transition from childhood to adulthood is a fallacy, a legal fantasy. And, ironically, that's especially so in our Western societies with no rites of passage. You discover this as you get older: I'm pretty much the same person I was when I was 14 except I can cook better and speak in front of a crowd. I assumed being older would feel different in some way, but it doesn't.

Anyway, I'm not saying this child should be patted on the head and sent on his way. I am saying I don't understand the inconsistency when a child can be held responsible in one case (murder) but not in another (voting). Is it because voting's so much more complicated? Gee, figuring out which party is going to give you the biggest tax cut sure is technical, and then there's the calling talkback radio to whine about immigrants, which must also be challenging.

OK a little bitter and offtrack there. My point is that we have to remember that children are children, not that "children are children except when they do something so heinous we've decided they're an adult." That's not playing fair.

Somebody told me today that the child deserved to be charged, and probably came from a lower socioeconomic bracket, and those people aren't so bright. This offended me in so many different ways that I didn't point out the logical problem: if you're not bright enough to understand the consequences of your actions then you're not guilty. That's how the law works. (Or at least that's how it works on American TV.)

I can't help wondering if the engineer who designed the overbridge shouldn't be charged with criminal negligence for failing to erect a sufficient barrier to stop people throwing things onto cars. After all, adults (and engineers especially) have the foresight children don't have.

If you take a group of 23 people, there's a 50% chance that two or more of them will share a birthday. This is a good experiment to try in a standard school classroom, where your odds are even better. This situation is known as the birthday paradox (the paradox is that the mathematics defy intuition).

The maths used to solve this problem has been applied to counting fish in a lake. The idea is that you compare the number of fish you catch that you haven't caught before with the number you have caught and from this gauge the total number. This is called a mark and recapture study.

This is also the maths behind an interesting technique of evading unsolicited email. The idea is that you ask the sender's computer to perfom some arbitrary work. If the computer does so then you accept that the message being sent is not spam. The work involved will only take a fraction of a second, but this is enough to thwart many spammers who rely on sending tens of thousands of messages per minute. It's all about adding friction to the email process, and to quote Tim Finn, "there's a fraction too much friction."

So anyway, one technique is called HashCash. Hashing algorithms are designed to take arbitrary strings of data and turn them into a short "unique" string. This is handy for checking data integrity, caching data, and other uses. Of course there's a certain probability the hash is not unique, but it's exceedingly small. If you find two strings that generate the same hash, that's called a hash collision. The thing is that these are virtually impossible to find but very easy to check (you just hash the two values and see if the result is the same).  HashCash can't make the sending computer find a collision because it's just too hard. However it can make the computer find a partial collision, where a certain number of characters are the same. The more characters match, the longer it takes to find one, and the more friction, and the higher the score added to your email message by SpamAssassin, a leading spam filter.

So there you are. Interesting huh?

I think it's inappropriate for adults to shout and scream at each other in a debate in any situation. And I think it's particularly inappropriate for men to shout and scream at women.

I guess this could be construed as a reasonable comment if one ignores the simple truth that chivalry is simply the flipside of the misogyny coin. But when it's the comment made by the leader of the opposition regarding his handling of the prime minister (the woman in question) in a televised debate it's two things:

1. absurd — the idea that Helen Clark is fragile and needs to be protected from the vehemence of Don Brash's bluster is, frankly, achingly funny;
2. indicative that the leader of the opposition has some funny ideas squirreled away in there.

It seems to me that Don Brash's brain, along with his corned beef and frozen peas, is living in another decade. Leaving party choice aside, I want a leader with a little pizzazz: you know, somebody who knows how to cook and how to really treat women with respect (something about treating them as equals?). Not this old-school fuddy-duddery.

More from Don, just in case he wasn't clear:

Well, I think it's not entirely appropriate for a man to aggressively attack a woman and I restrained myself for that reason.

Had the other combatant been a man my style might have been rather different.

 

My winter project is dragging on — nearing completion. I had hoped to be done by 1 September but I think I'll have to settle for simply some time in September.

It's funny business, building an application: a long process where you have nothing to show for months, and nobody even really sees what you're up to until you're done. It must be a little like writing a book. I'm very conscious of the fact that I'm building something other people will use. My present is their future. It's like cause and eventual effect. You must get the same feeling architecting a house too: you make decisions others will live with in the future.

I've often thought songs funny things. Most of those songs you've heard a million times on the radio were actually recorded before the songs were famous or even known: they come from a world where the song didn't exist.

Frog noise tends to be spelt as "crrrrk" in Britain and "ribbit" in the USA. This difference is due to Britain and the USA having different species of frogs. — Wikipedia.

I couldn't help recalling those jokes about planeloads of lawyers as I peered around the cabin at the suited professionals with their deposition documents, justice commission reports, and yellow highlighters.

The woman next to me scribbled away at a sudoku puzzle and said odd things to me, like "they didn't even tell us what type of plane it is" (I handed her the information card from my seat pocket, which she read voraciously before returning with remarks of gratitude unnerving in their intensity).

Flights from Napier to Wellington go like this: board, buckle, view safety video, drink water, eat complimentary candy, unbuckle, disembark. There's little time for niceties like reading. Nevertheless I managed to turn a few pages. I was reading The Little Prince, a book about how grown-ups take themselves too seriously. I also wondered whether the bottle of Kaitaia Fire hot sauce in my hand luggage could be used as a weapon and how you would do it (I concluded the best technique would involve filling your mouth with the stuff and squirting it like an archerfish).

Somewhere around the arc's zenith, the cabin crew (as if to illustrate the point (the one about grown-ups, not the one about disarming terrorists — that one wasn't going anywhere)) handed out lollypops, which the bevy of lawyers duly declined (I spied one middle-aged man pocketing one for a golden-haired daughter or a dull board meeting). My seat-neighbour not only took one, but discussed flavour choices with the flight attendant. I selected a more conservative, more discreet candy item — you know: something without a handle.

Meanwhile, God overlooked the opportunity to do the world a favour, and we landed safely.

Here's a fascinating illusion that's so good, I spent several minutes convincing myself that t was in illsion at all. Basically, your eye compensates for what it percives to be shadows and gives you what it thinks is the "real" colour of the object minus the shadow.  

The creator of the illusion comments:

As with many so-called illusions, this effect really demonstrates the success rather than the failure of the visual system. The visual system is not very good at being a physical light meter, but that is not its purpose. The important task is to break the image information down into meaningful components, and thereby perceive the nature of the objects in view.

 

It has always seemed to me that popular musicians are generally overrated, while less popular musicians are underrated. Eddi Reader is a good example. She performed in Christchurch this past Friday. She was great value (literally: the tickets were only $30 or a mere 20 litres of petrol — not that you could pay in petrol: I just happened to wonder) and she clearly loves to perform. Being Scottish she uses a rich vernacular, and it was kinda like she was half-speaking in another language only it was a language where you could hear the words for the first time and know what they meant.

For me, her performances of Robert Burns songs were highlights. These eighteenth-century verses seemed remarkably alive. They don't mention the Internet, jet planes, or driving around in cars, but they are richly imbued with a warm heart and with imagery from nature. And there's something awfully charming in that. I guess in Burns's time nature was a place you live your life rather than a place you visit. Take this simple song for example:

The winter it is past, and the summer comes at last
And the small birds, they sing on ev'ry tree; Now ev'ry thing is glad, while I am very sad, Since my true love is parted from me.

The rose upon the breer, by the waters running clear,
May have charms for the linnet or the bee;
Their little loves are blest, and their little hearts at rest,
But my true love is parted from me.

 

$40 apparently. A few weeks back a woman knocked on my door asking for money to pay for the petrol she'd just put in her car before her card had been declined. I like to kid myself I'm a reasonable judge of character and she seemed earnest so I didn't think twice. We had to actually go to an ATM as I don't carry cash (I'd just spend it on lollies). And she promised to drop the money back later in the week after she'd been to Picton to somebody or other's funeral.

Well, gosh, I'm still waiting. Perhaps she forgot where I live. Or perhaps she's been really really busy. Perhaps I should have asked for her phone number. I don't know. It's kinda ironic now as I'm now filling my car on borrowed money.

Ah well, a fool and his money something something something. Still, if another person showed up on my doorstep (and I actually had any money) I'd give it to them again. That's the price of a decent society.

I know what you're thinking, but note the parenthetical clause above: I got nothin'.

This week on Doctor Who, 10 Downing Street was occupied by aliens who took over the bodies of the prime minister and his staff for their nefarious alien purposes.

I'm left wondering if in fact the writers are on the money. Not content to play lapdog to the Bush regime, the Blair New Labour government is busy dismantling democracy by threatening to roll back human rights provisions and democratic rights. We're living in special times.

Special? Why? Because people are dying? But people are always dying. Mary Riddell points out that 134 cyclists were killed on roads in the UK last year which is greater than the number killed by terrorism this year (granted the year's not over). The point is that leaving your house is dangerous, and that terrorism, spectacular though it is, does little to increase that danger. Staying inside, by the way, is even more dangerous: that's where most accidents happen.

So let's stop waging war of human rights and start waging war on slippery bathroom floors and really make the world a better place.

Or, as Mary puts it:

The Sun is wrong. Britain is not a lawless place. It is a civilised society trying to come to terms with great tragedy. It is also staring over a precipice. Government, and Parliament, have a choice. They can move to quell the first symptoms of hysteria. Or they can unleash the pandemic and watch it spread.

Further commenary here:

But the reality is that no society, liberal or oppressive, is immune from increasingly inventive forms of assault from those who live and happily die for terror.

Accepting that unfortunate fact is by no means an argument for inaction. It is, however, an argument against the temptation to unravel the rights-based model of democracy introduced by Blair just a few years ago, and which should be recorded as one of his most impressive legacies.

You ever have that nasty sensation while you're lying on the sofa watching crappy TV that you just missed your mouth, and red wine is currently forming a sea-dark puddle somewhere nearby. And did you ever think that it could wait until the next ad break?

Disregarding eagles and hawks, there are very few birds that make a good nickname. The Swans would be okay for a women's netball team but not for a men's team which play in one of the most physical competitions on the planet.

Women's netball isn't physical -- involves a lot of standing around, chatting, and drinking tea, I presume.