Short Holiday in Hobart - Meeting David Walsh

It has slightly more than a year since I left Hobart. I did make some very good friends, back here and I wanted to come back and catch up with them. Especially the people at MONA and fellow Salsa dancers, as well as the motley crew at the Prince of Wales. So when I was invited to visit MONA and catch up with David Walsh, I jumped at the opportunity.

While living in Hobart I used to visit the museum every Sunday. Funny how only religions are associated with regular activities, I must have signed myself upto the religion of feasting sense on the weird.

I went through the museum and noted all the changes since I was last there. Listened to the chatter from visitors and made some notes which came back to bite me when one of David's guest picked up my notebook.

David has made his made his fortune gambling. He is not the James Bond sort of poker player, rather he is a mathematician and sort of a programmer. I have some theories about why we persist in gambling in spite of the apparent losses to individuals.

Gambling exists to redistribute wealth, preventing it from accumulating over generations in one family causing resentment and decimation of the family through revolt and aggression from the rest of the society. Though decimation of powerful families does happen in spite of the gambling habits as shown by the Russian revolution or even more recently the Nepalese royal family. The best way to stave of socialism and revolts is for the wealthy to voluntarily dispense of their wealth in gambles. Just means of justifying wealth accumulated by David, under the nose of ATO. Apparently David used to work for the ATO before he declared himself dead and quit.

The conversation drifted to light rails for Hobart and the need for personal ownership of assets i.e. cars vs public infrastructure such as rails. This debate has been raging on even recently in the roads vs rails talk. A psychologist was around outlining a Jungian experiments in a Victorian mansion, people participating dreamt of fires. There were some stories about table tennis diplomacy and frame dragging, and lots of conversations with constant backup from wikipaedia.

I was invited to dinner at David's place with take-away from his restaurant. David and his wife are pescetarian. Dinner was followed by a David Bowie variety hour on Youtube and hanging out with the MONA music co-ordinator who has encyclopaedic knowledge of the songs. I finally slunk away rather dazed by the days events.

Power of appearances - Peacocks and Pandas

Somebody once told me the only survival adaptations pandas have evolved is their cuteness. They eat hard to digest, scarce low nutrient food, move and breed slowly and are distinct and highly visible to predators. They have only survived because people find them cute.

Studying the appearance and optic manipulation performed to achieve the colours opens up a huge arena in the study of wave propagation. Peacocks achieve their iridiscent plumage through structural colouration. The quality of the colouration reveals a lot regarding the refinement of the genetic processes which create it.

Beauty is said to be in the eye of the beholder, it more like beauty is in the sensor and the heuristics attached to the sensor. With proper training you will find X-rays of ribcages and hyaenas beautiful (of course after you have spent a few years studying the subject for say a PhD). Beauty is often associated with a halo effect and positive attributes are lumped onto those who pass our physical beauty filter.

Rampant use of cosmetics has messed up our facial feature filters somewhat, soon we will be judging people by their bone structure (this happens a bit already among athletes), heat distribution or UV images. All the better for cyborg like optical implants or AR Goggles. I will keep performing full wave EM simulations in head and keep seeing things in Gigahertz range. With the anthropic principle in effect and metallic content of the known universe increasing due to fusion and the cosmic background being in this range, it might come in handy one day.

Things we do for money - beg, borrow and steal

When I was a child we used to catch the train every morning from Bali station to Howrah, you have to travel long ways at times to go to a good school in India. At the station there usually was a strange man sitting beside a very large pile of hay, gobbling it up. Hay is relatively cheap, but I am sure it is very hard to digest without 4 stomachs and a coterie of symbiotic bacteria. Yet day after day this man sat and ate hay, people were suitably amazed and gave him money to buy more hay. The same applies to performers of any kind, once our stomachs are full of suitably nutritious food (not hay), our minds seek fulfillment as well. We want to be amazed by something extraordinary, stay in touch with people we care about, gloat about the misfortunes of those we hate or envy. The brain feeds on these emotions and burns up the glucose we have consumed.

Fiat currencies have the great blessing of being pure invention, the state says let it be so and money exists - fiat lux. Since the Nixon Shock, currencies are disconnected from materials but attached to emotions and ideas. The society is a very large Markov network, with beliefs about value propagating through every conversation. True value or even truth itself is merely the best presented propaganda. The chinese are no stranger to the vagaries of economy having established the first known instance of paper money, and messed it up through hyperinflation and lack of sovereign discipline.

Content producers directly communicate with our minds through our senses and artists hold the strings to our happiness in their hands. We dance like grand marionettes to the messages being relayed through bands, movies, TV, radio, facebook, churches and Harry Potter novels. We spend money, a product of human ingenuity, on other products of human ingenuity. Last night I attended a small get together, Fee an artist and a friend is garnering support to travel around Australia generating content regarding digital culture. She is being shy about begging for money, but we had to point out to her that she is only begging for it from people who begged, borrowed or stole it in the first place. It is not even begging, it is only borrowing so that she can produce content which will engage people and keep them happy for years to come. We can have better stuff than "Hay" content.

If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.  - Yann Martel