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26.03.05
The British Childfree association
I like this:
http://www.kiddingaside.net
To me, the fact that our society is heavily biased in favour of people who choose to have children seem to violate the principle of equal opportunity.
By this I mean lenient treatment of absenteeism at work, higher salaries, even paying people to have children (Italy gives 1000 Euro for the second child, UK pays family allowance). They say that a reduced population is a disaster, but I'm not so sure. In the short term maybe, but in the long term, I doubt it.
Posted by Giles at 00:36 | Comments (1)
16.03.05
Various
No time for any extended entries, but coming up, I'm hoping to do::
Mobile phone etiquette. You're talking to someone face to face, why answer your mobile phone? Which is more important (barring potentially urgent calls), a real conversation or a conversation with someone on your mobile? Put your phone on vibrate when you're in a public place because we don't want to hear your "individual" ringtones.
The argument from design for the existence of God is rubbish if ever an argument for the existence of god was rubbish. Why do people even give it airtime? (Something is complicated -> someone created it - WHY?, even if this made any sense, why should it be someone with the characteristics of a christian God.)
Why don't we have a universal symbolic language like chinese:
If you accept the idea of a universal mental language (we have concepts independently of words), which I find to be the case, then I see the following advantage.
Normally to translate written language expressed phonetically, you need one of the following mappings to do translation:
Concepts <-> Written Language 1 <-> Spoken Language 1
Concepts <-> Written Language 2 <-> Spoken Language 2
Written Language 1 <-> Written Language 2
For each new language, you then need:
Written language x -> Spoken Language x
And
forAll(i)(Spoken Language x <-> Spoken Language i)
With my proposed system, you only need
Spoken Language 1 <-> Concepts
Spoken Language 2 <-> Concepts
Concepts <-> Written Language 3
And for each additional language,
Spoken Language x <-> Concepts
This cuts down the complexity enormously.
With everyone using English, of course, you only need:
Concepts <-> Written English <-> Spoken English
Which of course is the ideal, so my idea is only for people who like to maintain plurilingualism.
There were some more but I've forgotten them.
Here is an interesting PDF from the UK police magazine. How cheap is a life?
Posted by Giles at 18:38 | Comments (0)