Kleptocracy - where government steals from the public purse.

I came across this term the other day in a podcast from Econtalk in which Bruce Bueno de Mesquita discussed his most recent book, The Logic of Political Survival - a cynical look at how and why governments stay in power. It’s well worth a listen.

Richard and James have been having a little chat about the openness of information in markets and how this affects prices. This caused me to wonder about the recent alleged terrorist threat in the UK, and how this would affect plane ticket prices. The commonly accepted wisdom seems to be that there was a terrorist threat, that a certain amount of it still persists, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The current restrictions on carrying liquids on planes are also a serious inconvienience for people who do a significant amount of air travel.

As this is my 100th posting to this blog, I’ve decided to do a run-down of the five most popular postings so far:

1. Tesco Show What Innovation Is

2. Shaving and Carry-on

3. What is an ESB?

4. WebSphere Message Broker and WebSphere ESB

5. Blog Commenting is Weak

These rankings are provided by the Wordpress Popularity Contest plugin, which calculates them based on a weighted average of views, comments, etc. It’s almost endlessly tweakable - I’m trying to resist the temptation to fiddle. I don’t think the above numbers are particularly accurate right now, so they’re just a bit of fun, but hopefully the statistics will settle as the new plugin starts to record information.

In the world of business-oriented software, we use the phrase ‘business logic’ a lot. In my particular area (WebSphere integration products), a typical pattern is to delegate ’technical logic’ to mediation flows in WebSphere ESB, and to put ‘business logic’ in process flows in WebSphere Process Server. It doesn’t have to be that way, but that’s what many people encourage, as it seems to neatly match what the software can provide.

But what do we mean by the phrase ‘business logic’? Ultimately both business logic and technical logic come down to the same thing; instructions executed by the machine. I can implement both in mediation flows, Java, Perl, assembler, or shell scripts. So why the distinction? It really depends on one’s perception.

The Sixth Sense is a reasonable thriller with a good twist at the end (I genuinely didn’t know what it was; and I won’t spoil it for anyone else who doesn’t). Haley Joel Osment and Bruce Willis are both excellent, and the supporting cast competent. Osment in particular stands out - he has done well in other films such as A.I., and is one of the most competent child actors of the modern generation. The film drifts rather to start with, and by the time it gets going the end of the film is approaching. But apart from this mismatch of pace, this is an interesting film from M. Night Shyamalan, one of the most successful Indian film directors to break into Hollywood. Willis again proves that he isn’t just an action hero (see Death Becomes Her and Color of Night for other examples).

Ebay can provide a very good illustration of why trade is good for everyone.

Let’s say I have a Coldplay t-shirt that I was given as a present, have worn once or twice, but am ashamed of and want to get rid of. As such, it isn’t worth much to me - if forced to assign a value, I might say £1. I’ve just been given a phone, though, an older model, and want a spare charger for it.

Am I missing something, or is blog commenting still immature? I read about 80 blogs currently, and do it mostly through an RSS reader (Thunderbird), as it’s the only way to keep up with that volume. It’s straightforward to keep up with the posts themselves - they appear in a separate list for each blog, typically sorted by time posted (at least that’s the way Thunderbird presents them).

Commenting, on the other hand, is a different matter. On my own blog it’s not too bad: if someone posts a comment about one of my posts, or in reply to comments I’ve made, I get notified by email, because I’m the owner of the blog, and Wordpress (which seems pretty close to the state-of-the-art in blogging software) sends an email to tell me that’s happened. Even on my own blog, though, there is no notion of hierarchy to comments: they just appear in a stream (in other words, there is no notion of ‘replying’ stored with a comment). This can make pulling out longer threads of conversation tricky.

Perversion for Profit is a 1965 anti-porn documentary film. Very little footage is shown apart from the presenter in the studio: George Putnam. His didactic pronouncements, tone of voice, and Brylcreemed presentation would seem hilarious to many today, and this manner is constantly (and justifiably) parodied on TV - The Simpsons perhaps being a good example. Most of the facts Putnam presents are statements of opinion - connected without demonstrating correlation, much less causation. He doesn’t discuss the morality of censorship at all. It’s well worth seeing, though, as an example of propaganda - although less subtle than, say, Triumph of the Will, it’s still crisp, clean filmmaking.

A small example of innovation in the supermarket industry. I know that I should eat a variety of nutrients from fruit and veg, but it’s hard to find the time to study foodstuffs in detail. Tesco provide a rough-and-ready guideline on the shelf - at little expense to them, and some benefit to me. I hadn’t come across this before. It sounds like a generalisation that’ll have plenty of exceptions, but is still accurate enough to be useful.

Powaqqatsi: Life in Transformation is the sequel to the film Koyaansiqatsi: Life out of balance. Both films share a common style: most shots are of slow-motion or time-lapse (speeded up) photography. Although both are technically documentaries, the only narrator is a Philip Glass soundtrack. In both cases, this means the message is up for debate. The primary difference between the two is the setting: whereas Koyaansiqatsi is set primarily in the developed world, Powaqqatsi takes its themes mostly from developing countries.