Miljenko's Blog

It seems almost inappropriate not to comment in some way on the 5th anniversary of 9/11. One of the things that I find most amazing about it is that 22% of Canadians to this day believe that the entire 9/11 incident was organized and implemented by the U.S. government. The depth of anti-Americanism that is required in order to take leave from logic which would make such belief possible is truly extraordinary. Either the 9/11 hijackers flew those planes or somebody else did. The identity of the hijackers has been established beyond any doubt. They have been identified on video; they have been identified by passengers; their voices are on recordings of conversations from the planes. Everything is known about their lives from where and when they were born to where they were issued drivers licenses to how much rent one of them paid for a room he rented in Germany 10 years ago. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/683026/posts If those were indeed the people who committed those acts, the ...

Both are political parties representing minority interests that are fervent and vocal. They have approximately the same representation in the respective country's parliament at 16-17 % of the total seats. Their positions are at odds with the general intent of the policies of the majority and therefore the country. It would be nice to be able to continue the analogy but differences start to loom large. Imagine a Bloc Quebecois which has a military arm that is being supplied by arms by, say, Mexico which has an ax to grind with the United States for other reasons. The Bloc's military then puts its missiles on the border and after first making an incursion into the US territory to capture a couple of Marines, it starts firing missiles across the border hitting Detroit. Oh, yes, and throw in the additional element of religion and the issue in principle that B Q says the United States should not exist as a country.

I don't think I have ever seen a picture of a monk laughing out loud in a belly-laugh kind of a way. I mean the kind where tears come to your face as when watching a Richard Pryor or an Eddie Murphy show. They smile some, wear contented looking faces a lot but never something beyond a thoughtful, far-away looking smile. In a book that I am reading by Lin Yutang he talks about 3 views of mankind - the traditional Christian, the Greek pagan view and the Chinese view. He adds - "(I do not include the Buddhist view because it is too sad.)" Is the relative absence of highs a fair price to pay for the relative absence of lows. Is it consistent with human nature.

Commenting on a guilty verdict against Ex-CEO of HealthSouth Richard Scrushy a lawyer representing the bondholders who lost money on HealthSouth said: "Even though it's not directly related, the folks we represent can't see enough hurt get on that guy. "

So if you say: "Is it within the power of the President to intercept enemy communications in times of war without the permission of a judge." the answer becomes pretty self-evident.

Received a request to participate in a survey called "Future Monitor" in which a whole bunch of presumably "thought leaders" around the world are asked to asses the likely future impact of certain trends. The trends they offer are anything from blogging to information security to aging baby boomers. One of the questions is when will the first nuclear weapon go off and several choices are offered. I picked "in 1 - 3 years". At the end they ask a more open ended question of which single trend we would single out as having the biggest potential impact. I chose nuclear proliferation and the first nuke to go off. There is no way of predicting with certainty when it will happen or even whether it will happen, but there is no doubt that if it does, it will have an impact far beyond anything else (such as "China" or proliferation of RFID devices). It will be like 9/11, everything will be different after it then before. The things to consider then is ...

In a book I just finished (and can't really recommend) "Damned Lies and Statistics" the author quotes what he thinks is the worst statistic ever. In a Ph.D. prospectus a student apparently said "Every year since 1950, the number of American children gunned down has doubled." This he apparently got from a scientific journal which in turn reworded a statement made by Children's Defense Fund in 1994 - "The number of American children killed each year by guns has doubled since 1950." Quite a bit different. The author points out the two blatant mistakes - one of geometric progression - if the number had truly doubled every year, it would by now be in the trillions. The other mistake is not really a mistake but an omission - the overall population increased 73% over that period or almost doubled and with higher proportion of overall population being children, the number of deaths caused by guns may not have proportionately increased at all.