Life as a Goldfish

It is often claimed that goldfish have a three second memory. Therefore, if you put two goldfish in a bowl, as soon as they turn around, they would forget about the other fish, and they would be obliged to say: "How do you do. It is a pleasure to meet you. Have you come far?"

Luckily for the goldfish that is just a myth. Goldfish can remember things for months. Just try to borrow money from one. I can guarantee that it will not let you do it a second time.

Now to the interesting part. Some adults actually have the mythical three second memory. They see another person do something silly, and the adult says: "is that not amazing, how silly he is?" Three seconds later, they see someone else do something silly, and they repeat: "is that not amazing, how silly he is?"

This can go on for ever. These adults simply cannot learn that a lot of people do stupid things.

It always amazes me, when I meet that kind of adult.

Business Advice

If you are taking a business decision or a political decision, and you think all the consequences will be good, you can be certain that there are factors you have forgotten.

If you are taking a decision and you think all the consequences will be bad, you are just silly.

The Right Selection

It is easy to stand back and scorn Bush and Blair for their misjudgement of their failure in Iraq. However, it is very likely that their original mistakes were perfectly explicable. They had a lot of high quality information from very good sources, which to a good part hinted that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The rest of us had much less information, and from that we judged that it was unlikely to be any WMD in Iraq. The problem was that our information was low quality. It turned out to be a very good selection of data, but the quality was low. CIA provided very good quality data, but unfortunately the selection was very bad.

Picasso's Inspiration

If one were to select the greatest of all the 20th century artists, it is very likely that Picasso would be on the top. He made a fortune of his genius in the later part of his life, and his family goes on doing so today, licensing his name to right and left.

However, if the laws of intellectual property of today had applied in the beginning of his career, it is very possible that he never would have made it. Cubism was created by him and Braque together. It is not unlikely that Braque would have claimed ownership of the style, won a law case and thereby prevented Picasso from ever using it again. Picasso would then not have been able to paint Les demoiselles d'Avignon or Guernica. He would never had risen to fame, and the 20th century would be one great artist short.

According to NPR, Shakespeare wrote only three original plays. The stories for the rest of them he stole from someone else.

Which means that the application of property laws of the 21st century would have killed off both Shakespeare and Picasso.

Which here is mentioned to anyone who thought the laws were there to support great art.


"Bastubadaren" by Tora Vega Holmström

Hooray for government power!

Once upon a time, it was thought that it was the responsibility of the government to make sure public services worked: roads, defence, and later on public communications like mail and phones.

However, in this brave new world of electrons no government, as far as I know, has taken the step that seems logical: to guarantee that we all have a free mail-account and server space to save our data.

Both the technology and the cost is now at a level where it would be very easy.

"It is not needed", you say. "There are plenty of free services out there already."

As far as I know, there is no free service, but there are plenty of ad-sponsored services. And I do not know about you. I freely admit that I do not trust my government very much to honour the confidentiality of my data, but I trust it much more than any commercial provider.