Not the naughties

"Oh Adso, you dolt," my alter ego corrected me,
"These first years of the century, they're not the 'zeros' or the 'naughties'."
"They're the Double-O's."
"And next year is '007!"

Undermining Sydney's food security

In the SMH this morning ("How do you cook Kellyville max?"), Elizabeth Farrelly points out that by creating the North West growth centre from Mulgrave to Bidwell, the NSW govt is encouraging developers to pave over Sydney's best food-growing lands.

Sydney is expecting maybe a million blow-ins over coming decades (though figures are revised downwards all the time) and they have to live somewhere. But here? In Sydney's vegie basket?

At the same time the Public Service Association reports that, following the recent resignation of Minister Craig Knowles, the NSW Government has decided to split the Department of Infrastructure, Planning and Natural Resources (DIPNR) in two. Ian McDonald will become Minister for Natural Resources (he's also Minister for Primary Industries) and Frank Sartor will take control of Planning. Should be interesting to see what strange policies will be borne of that arrangement.

Smarter computers

Rather than trying to understand people as computers, what if we reversed the analogy - not in order to wonder whether computers really think or feel (what sort of person wonders in this way about other people?!). When one sets that question aside, the most interesting difference between human agent-perceiving-deliberators and their silicon counterparts is the relative poverty of the world in which the latter live.

But how do we enrich the worlds of computers? How do we teach them to handle that enrichment? Then again, how do we enrich our world? How do we make sure future generations, or distant neighbours, can handle the enrichment?

How, in other words, do we "raise" "good" computers? How do we make computers so that they can be "well-raised"?

They make a wasteland, and call it peace

Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.

* Translation: They plunder, they slaughter, and they steal: this they falsely name Empire, and where they make a wasteland, they call it peace.

Tacitus, Agricola, ch. 30