Children as pets

Creepy fetishes and overweight, lazy slobs aside, who ever decided that putting your child on a leash was acceptable? I’d prefer a French Bulldog as a pet but that’s probably because I’m weird—in comparison to these caring parents that is. Some suggestions for improvement:

1. Save yourself from having to carry heavy items by putting a bag on the leash; kids should earn their board and lodging.

2. For the crying types or those that eat anything in sight a muzzle is an effective means by which you can keep a child’s mouth shut tightly.

3. Save on water bills by reducing the number of times your child bathes weekly and buy them a flea and tick collar instead.

Global nothing-to-worry-about-ing

It is a part of human nature to establish causal chains in an attempt to explain the world around us. A problem arises when causality is confused with correlation.

I am not debating the existence of rising global temperatures nor increased carbon emissions; temperature fluctuations demonstrating periodic behaviour have spanned more than 10°C long before modern human existence. However multiple, compounded effects are responsible and it may be more scientifically responsible to attribute current rises to random oscillations and concentrate research on other areas.

Randomness of an event is often confused with an absence of causality. Instead it should be seen as such an abundance of causes that none can be pinpointed sufficiently to predict an outcome.

To paraphrase an analogy I read – “when an ancient man scratched his nose and it began to rain he attributed the rain to this simple act being unaware of the true source”. I recommend reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness.

The Vatican vs. global warming

After considering a post suggesting that global warming may be a mere random upsurge in temperatures rather than a result of human intervention in the environment (now postponed for a later date) I came across a CNN article regarding the Vatican’s new list of sins; one of which is pollution. The head of the Apostolic Penitentiary who “issues decisions on matters of conscience and grants absolutions” commented on the matter.

To the best of my knowledge at no point in time has a religious leader—of any faith—demonstrated credibility in a scientific field based purely on their theological doctrine. Why then is it so widely acceptable for them to pass judgement on such matters?

HIV self-eradication

Please excuse (and if possible correct) any ignorance on my part regarding the subject; I merely propose an idea and do not profess any knowledge of the complexities of the matter.

Propagation of HIV requires hosts and a transfer mechanism between them such as intercourse, contaminated needles (horizontal transfer) or mother-to-child (vertical transfer). Without antiretroviral treatment the sum of median progression time to AIDS (9-10 years) and median survival time with AIDS (about 9 months) is insufficient for children to reach an age of sexual activity, thus eliminating their chance for further vertical transmission.

With further transfers through infected infants removed, without medical intervention, the initial generation of infected hosts would pass on and deprive the virus of adequate host numbers for propagation—resulting in extinction. Ethically this is far from a viable solution but may prove to be an interesting exercise in mathematical modelling of the situation to determine necessary parameters for self-eradication.

I am more popular than Fidel Castro

When prefixed with the letters “fi” Google’s keyword suggestion provides as its first two entries firefox and find chuck norris; I am responsible for the latter. Fidel Castro claims 5th place.

If you haven’t seen it:

1. Go to Google
2. Type “find Chuck Norris” (without the “s)
3. Press “I’m Feeling Lucky”

And if you don’t believe that it was me have a look at the Shlog link at the bottom of the page.

Seeing as I have received so many emails enquiring as to how I managed to pull it off I wrote a (longer) non-technical white paper from a marketing perspective.

Read the paper here.