Hummings of a Happy Hurkle

It is sometimes said that the most of the people who have ever lived are alive today. This is obviously not true (see below), but leads to the more interesting question: what fraction of all the people who have ever lived are alive today, and when will this figure reach its maximum?

This is not easy to calculate with any certainty. The raw data looks like this (best guesses, see http://www.prb.org/):

• Number of humans who have ever lived: 106.5 billion
• Number alive today (2008): 6.7 billion
• Births per year: 139 million
• Deaths per year: 57 million

Current percentage=6.7/106.5=6.29%

This percentage is currently rising, and will do so for the foreseeable future. It should reach 7% in 2019. It will not begin to drop until the net birth rate is far lower than it is now. It never has been and never will be anywhere near 50%.

An oldie but a goodie, with a few new additions.

• SOCIALISM: You have 2 cows, and you give one to your neighbour.
• COMMUNISM: You have 2 cows. The State takes both and gives you some milk.
• FASCISM: You have 2 cows. The State takes both and sells you some milk.
• NAZISM: You have 2 cows. The State takes both and shoots you.
• BUREAUCRATISM: You have 2 cows. The State takes both, shoots one, milks the other, then throws the milk away…
• TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows. You sell them and retire on the income.
• SURREALISM: You have two giraffes. The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.
• AN AMERICAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows. Later, you hire a consultant to analyse why the cow has dropped dead.
• ENRON VENTURE CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows. The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island Company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company. The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more. Sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States, leaving you with nine cows. No balance sheet provided with the release. The public buys your bull.
• THE ANDERSEN MODEL: You have two cows. You shred them.
• A FRENCH CORPORATION: You have two cows. You go on strike, organise a riot, and block the roads, because you want three cows.
• A JAPANESE CORPORATION: You have two cows. You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. You then create a clever cow cartoon image called ‘cowkimon’ and market it worldwide.
• A GERMAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You re-engineer them so they live for 100 years, eat once a month, and milk themselves.
• AN ITALIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows, but you don’t know where they are. You decide to have lunch.
• A RUSSIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You count them and learn you have five cows. You count them again and learn you have 42 cows. You count them again and learn you have 2 cows. You stop counting cows and open another bottle of vodka.
• A SWISS CORPORATION: You have 5000 cows. None of them belong to you. You charge the owners for storing them.
• A CHINESE CORPORATION: You have two cows. You have 300 people milking them. You claim that you have full employment, and high bovine productivity, and arrest the newsman who reported the real situation.
• AN INDIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You worship them.
• A BRITISH CORPORATION: You have two cows. Both are mad.
• IRAQI CORPORATION: Everyone thinks you have lots of cows. You tell them that you have none. No-one believes you, so they bomb the **** out of you and invade your country. You still have no cows, but at least now you are part of a Democracy….
• WELSH CORPORATION: You have two cows. The one on the left looks very attractive.
• AUSTRALIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. Business seems pretty good. You close the office and go for a few beers to celebrate.

Words that can have virtually opposite meanings depending on context.

As an example, the original/base meaning of to moot is to discuss or debate, as in moot court. Thus a moot point would be something to be discussed or debated, with arguments for and against, yet to be agreed.

As a contranym, a moot point is one that is worthless, uninteresting, of no practical value, indeed not even worthy of debate, best ignored.

Here are a few more.

• Certain: a certain person vs for certain.
• Left: those who are left vs those who have left.
• Original: the original spelling of a word vs a highly original spelling of a word
• Out: the lights are out vs the stars are out
• Below par can mean good or bad depending entirely on whether you’re talking about golf or not.

There are heaps of them.

“Agnotology, formerly agnatology, is a neologism for the study of culturally-induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data. The term was coined by Robert N. Proctor,[1][2] a Stanford University professor specializing in the history of science and technology.[3] Its name derives from the Greek word ἀγνῶσις, agnōsis, “not knowing”; and -λογία, -logia.[4] More generally, the term also highlights the increasingly common condition where more knowledge of a subject leaves one more uncertain than before.

A prime example of the deliberate production of ignorance cited by Proctor is the tobacco industry’s conspiracy to manufacture doubt about the cancer risks of tobacco use. Under the banner of science, the industry produced research about everything except tobacco hazards to exploit public uncertainty.[4][5] Some of the root causes for culturally-induced ignorance are media neglect, corporate or governmental secrecy and suppression, document destruction, and myriad forms of inherent or avoidable culturopolitical selectivity, inattention, and forgetfulness.[6]”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology

Sounds like a word that could really catch on!

A mathematician goes into a restaurant and is seated at a square table, which he notices is unstable. The table has four legs evenly spaced, but although the floor is smooth he can see it is quite uneven. As a result one leg of the table does not quite reach the floor.

The waiter offers to wedge a piece of folded paper under the table leg, but the mathematician quickly analyses the problem and comes up with a better solution. Without getting up from his chair, he quickly moves the table so that it is now stable. Can you find how he did it?

The puzzle is to prove that there is a way to move the table to a nearby location so that all 4 legs rest evenly on the floor, and to find a simple method to do so.

You can assume that there are no holes, obstructions or other artificial restrictions. The solution should be perfectly practical under normal conditions, and may actually turn out to be rather useful!

Solution
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Turns out the upgrade is far from smooth. They did something to the database to support a better structure for categories and tags. The result is that the conversion and database upgrade deleted the names of all my categories. It also did some rather strange name mangling.

That took a bit of database editing and some guesswork to fix. Thanks for nothing! I wonder what the next upgrade has in store…

The site has just been upgraded to WordPress 2.6. Very smooth, as long as it worked!

This is a test post, to test whether the –more– line in Scribefire works yet.

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Why is there something and not nothing? I know the answer, because Jesus and Mo told me.

http://www.jesusandmo.net/2008/08/01/silly/

Love those guys!

The question arises whether religion should be taught in school, whether it should be banned, or whether some middle position is preferred.

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Assuming Firefox…the best strategy I can find is this:

1. Set all cookies to be allowed, but discarded at end of session.
Tools | Options | Privacy | Accept cookies from sites | Keep until: I close Firefox.

2. Discard ALL your cookies.
Tools | Options | Privacy | Show Cookies | Remove All Cookies

3. Add exceptions sparingly for sites you need as you find them. Mostly this is just things like sites remembering you’re logged in. You can manage with no exceptions, but a few for your regular sites make life easier.

Navigate to the Login page for a site you want to make an exception.
Tools | Page Info | Permissions | Set Cookies: Allow.

I strongly recommend doing this for all “power” users. It cuts down a lot of the ability of advertisers to track where you go with virtually no impact on overall usability.