security for looks; Jakarta

We have security everywhere now in Jakarta but most of it's for show. Everyday we drive into the office complex and one or two of the 3 to 5 guys there run a metal detector through the back of the car just to make sure it's still made of metal I suppose. Only the Dharmawangsa Hotel (*****) has a chemical sniffing device.

Now since the Ritz bombing last summer various institutions like BP have set up a security guy at the respective building doors. He's got a metal detector wand that he waves over my backpack. The majority of the time it goes beeeeep as it detects my laptop or stapler, or laser pointer, or keys. Of course he/they don't really care why the wand goes beep or what it indicates. I hand em my backpack and tell him there's no bomb in it today -- Tidak ada kaboom ini. He just looks at me quizzically.

So now three months on since the Ritz bombing some friends and I are off to a dinner meeting at the ritz. Presumably they've put the glass back in around the restaurant. T'will be bummer if they haven't since it's rainy season (October - May plus or minus a month).

complexity is in the eye of the beholder.

Behold that the simplest answer must be the correct answer, or that a less convoluted solution must be closer to the truth. Yah know to me, that just doesn't sound very scientific and yet scientist love to use it. Furthermore isn't simplicity a rather qualitative measure? Where I come from simpleton is a put down. Simple is simple does. And just like one mans trash is another mans treasure. I say one man's complexity is another man's elegance. When was the last time you looked at the biology of the human body. It's no longer just ours but complex symbiosis of millions of microbes along with ours. It's worse that anything Gene Rodenberry ever dreamed up to infect the crew of the Enterprise. As if the human machine wasn't complex enough with all it's little organells in it's cells and that indeciferable gray matter. Surely breathing a little bit of the holy spirit into a lump of clay on a 6000 year old planet would have been much simpler. Do you believe that, well do yah punk. And yet I've met many a geologist that thing a 200 million year old bed of sand spread out over an area the Houston or Cairo should be simple. Simplifying is indeed a virtue but primarily for teaching, and selling a pitch to the bean counters. Afterall they have to simplify their spreadsheets into a picture in powerpoint for the geologist right. I don't intend that you go forth and look for the most complex crazy idea to be the most likely scientific solution, but don't kid yourself into thinking that simplicity versus complexity is measure of correctness or error.

as a late addendum. I've since come to realize part of the attraction to this theory of occam's is that people like to solve problems and people like the easy way out so this is sort of like being baptist and figuring that you get to live forever if only you believe some philosopher is going to save you post-mortem and protect you from everything you've done wrong because he was put to death two millennia ago.

Sailing Monkeys

Have you ever wondered how it is that there are monkey's in south america, africa, and madagascar, and yet primates first evolved 55 my (the prevailing theory of primates first occurrence). They're not found in India till the mid Miocene, they appear in Wyoming in the L. Eocene (~50my) and were last seen in NA in the Oligocene (~25-30ma). Primates don't appear in the South American (SA) fossile record till the oligocene, but the Tertiary of SA was pretty tropical and preservation has been poor there. North And South America were separated (by most account) from the Jurassic to the Pliocene when the Panama Isthmus reconnected the two after the Caribbean oceanic plateau pushed though door, but it's possible the two may have retained land bridges in places will into the cretaceous. Africa and SA definitively split up 100my, though it is possible some hotspot volcanic island chains like the Walvis ridge may have yielded some intermittent land bridges. Madagascar separated from Africa at least 145 my but it's possible that it took a while for it slip past Somalia on a north south transform, so perhaps it took another 20 million hears but that 70 my before they evolved. According to the most recent one of only a few papers to address this quandary, Monkey's must have rafted over on debris across the atlantic. They freely admit that there are issues with the theory and it may not seem palatable but it's their favorite theory among the solutions they could think of or cite. Yes indeed plenty animals raft and swim some rather great distances such as the Galapagos with their land tortoises. Usually animals that make it out to far flung islands were either good swimmers or flyers, or they rode the plate like a boat ferrying goods across a global pond. There are several islands offshore West africa that are populated with primates, but to my knowledge, they were connected in the pliocene and .... to be continuedShow all

I miss...

I live in Jakarta and It's a pretty good life. We've been here for 18 months (since March 2008). There's a few things I miss and few things I don't:

I miss boots, but I don’t miss republicans.
I miss easy shopping but I don’t miss regular trips to lowes.
I miss lots of smarts but I don’t miss egos.
I miss cheap alcohol, but I like having the time to drink it.
I miss freedom of driving anytime,….
I miss cool weather and seasons, but I love the excitement of exotic travel.
I miss Mexican food & Chipotles, but I love the fruit of SE asia.
I miss skiing but I love having white beaches and volcanoes near by.
I miss sailing, but I love paying three bucks for a professional squash partner.
I miss less trash, but I love being 4 hours from Perth and 1 hour from Bali.
I miss a bit of wood work, but certainly not the house work.
I miss a many things but it’s a fine life here and the only thing to really put you out is Dengue Fever and intestinal parasites. There’s a lot of adventure here and not much to trouble you. The Muslims certainly don’t and are not in your face, wish I could say the same for the Baptist! But I’ve learned to relax a bit more and get to relax a lot more.
We love our life in Indonesia, but it’s really not that far from Friesia!
-JCT-

What it is to think like an adhd adult -- sort of

I've had a busy day and come home late from work. The family is in bed and I've left the books I'm reading somewhere other than downstairs. So I microwave the pizza, pop open a bottle of wine and open up some journals from work. Without missing a beat I'm back at work, with ideas popping in and out. One thing leads to another and I'm no longer front of a computer and my mind turns to what goes on inside the mind of an ADHD person because I'm feeling like I've got some of the coolest ideas on the planet that if I could only organize, the world would be a little better. But Alas, I've got too many ideas rushing at me to ever really get them down and capitalize on them much less finish what I'm supposed to be doing or really nead to finish. But dammit there's other ideas...

Course there are days that I just want to chill out and watch a movie or go shopping for furniture and crafts. That's a whole-nether story -- the crafts shopping in Jakarta.

Anyhow I got to thinking what it is to have an ADHD brain. Sometimes I've thought it was to be a spas, or just smart, or mentally deficient, or the inability concentrate a end member of spectral autism among other thoughts. But I think I've had a brain storm and finally got it after 30 years. It's like having a computer chip that over-clocked -- like a 486 computer processor running at 2 gigahertz. Of course the exact power of the chip depends on the person. But the important bit is that the chip runs faster than normal and probably a little hotter than normal. One could say that it wouldn't take long to cook an egg on my temper. So the IQ or ability to understand Calculus and differential equations is not stippullated by the clock speed. Furthermore one could be good at processing graphics but missing out on the co-processor and thus rather slow at mathematics, or in my case spelling! Now one can overlay any number of issues ontop of ADHD such as the fear of processing, anxiety disorder; OCD, the tendency to start processing something and not be able to process anything else or the ability to work on processing the same thing for extended periods -- long after other software have crashed; or Bipolar, where your chip is running on 50 volts or 220 but supposed to run on 110, and when it's on 220 it runs at 200% it's intended clock speed. Then there's skitzo which I imagine might be like being hacked into or have a Worm virus tell you what to do.

Anyhow my chip is running a little hot and needs to be turned off to let the batteries recharge.

happy processing,

Josh