Miljenko's Blog

With a few days to gain some perspective and observe the reactions, I will "go there" about the phone call from Taiwan's President to Trump. I realized that everyone's reaction to it was first and foremost motivated by fear. Fear of China that is. It is kind of like that "problem Uncle" at Thanksgiving who gets smashed and then you never know which uncomfortable behaviour he is going to engage in next but there is always something. My own first reaction was the same - "Oh, shit, what will China do." And it is the same with other things about China - when I see 1 Million protesters on the streets of Seoul protesting against their President, I am not concerned that there will be some massive world altering blow up. If that happened in Shanghai, I'd be booking next available SpaceX ticket to get off this planet 'cause that wasn't gonna be pretty. I get nervous when 2 legislators in Hong Kong "behave badly" in a way that w...

With proliferation of protests of all kinds I think it is time to have some basic rules about them that everyone can agree on. The first is that if you are holding up a sign, you are required to be able to explain what the sign says. If it says "Climate Justice", in 3 minutes or less explain what that means. And the same for "#notmyPresident" or "Love Trumps Hate". The second would be that you absolutely cannot protest something where you had the opportunity to change something and you ignored it and now you don't like the result. Such as "#notmyPresident" protests where each protester should be required to say that they voted, and voted for Clinton. Some will lie but just being made answer the question will discourage many from showing up at all. Third, your protest has to be in "designated protest area" in the great tradition of ancient Greek public squares or the Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park. You absolutely cannot ride skate...

And time for another installment in the series "Common Sense, Uncommon Thinking". This time it is about good news on the Climate Change front and it is that if you are "against fossil fuels" then celebrate because their days are without question numbered. The very definition of fossil fuels is that they are not renewable, they are finite, there is some quantity of them still left and nobody is making any more of them. So the fossil fuels that exist today will be "brought up"  and burned sooner or later. There is no doubt about that so why waste time focusing on it and focusing on what is fundamentally a "self-correcting problem". There may be debate over where they get burned and over what period of time but used up they will be. And then they will be done, for a few Millennia at least. The relevant next question then is has the Earth already been "broken"? Has the planet already passed the point of no return and we are doomed t...

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Over the years I have grown to believe that various manifestations of sensitivity are connected or rather manifestations of one greater underlying sensitivity to stimulus. My observations go from being sensitive to heat whether that of a hot shower or a handle of a boiling pot to sensitivity to spices in food to non-physical sensitivity to emotions. When I think about it on a neurological level, it makes sense that the same receptors tuned to respond to one stimulus would respond to another at the same "setting" rather than being re-set among different stimuli. People with low tolerance for pain will therefore be more likely to prefer less hot showers and will be less able to regulate their response to strong emotions. And the reverse should also be true - people who need strong stimulus to feel emotions will also prefer very hot showers and be more likely to enjoy very spicy food, all other things being equal. The analogy I believe is to levels of dopamine that we ...

Blockchain technology as a fundamental re-ordering of infrastructure of money flows in global financial system is pretty much inevitable. Bitcoin or any other “crypto-currencies” such as ether  are unnecessary which is why they will remain marginal or disappear. Blockchain model accomplishes the objective of instantaneous and virtually cost-free transfer of money without the need to invent any new currency to do it. USD and EURO are perfectly fine as they are. The way it works in the physical world is that if Steve wants to give me $75 he looks into his wallet, takes out $75 in bills and gives them to me and I put them into my wallet. In the non-physical world, if he wants to do the same thing, he tells his bank to reduce the amount on deposit in his account by $75 and his bank in turns tells my bank that they should increase the amount on deposit in my account by $75. The intermediate step in the process is that the bank account that my bank holds with Steve’s bank or...