The US military has warned that surplus oil production capacity could disappear within two years and there could be serious shortages by 2015 with a significant economic and political impact.

Reminds me of a comment from another time:

Imagine for a moment, then, that we're discussing an experiment involving microbes in a petri dish. The culture medium in the dish contains 5% of a simple sugar that the microbes can eat, and 95% of a more complex sugar they don't have the right enzymes to metabolize. We put a drop of fluid containing microbes into the dish, close the lid, and watch. Over the next few days, a colony of microbes spreads through the culture medium, feeding on the simple sugar.
Then a mutation happens, and one microbe starts producing an enzyme that lets it feed on the more abundant complex sugar. Drawing on this new food supply, the mutant microbe and its progeny spread rapidly, outcompeting the original strain, until finally the culture medium is full of mutant microbes. At this point, though, the growth of the microbes is within hailing distance of the limits of the supply of complex sugar. As we watch the microbes through our microscopes, we might begin to wonder whether they can produce a second mutation that will let them continue to thrive. Yet this obvious question misleads, because there is no third sugar in the culture medium for another mutation to exploit.
The point that has to be grasped here is as crucial as it is easy to miss. The mutation gave the microbes access to an existing supply of highly concentrated food; it didn't create the food out of thin air. If the complex sugar hadn't existed, the mutation would have yielded no benefit at all. As the complex sugar runs out, further mutations are possible - some microbes might end up living on microbial waste products; others might kill and eat other microbes; still others might develop some form of photosynthesis and start creating sugars from sunlight - but all these possibilities draw on resources much less concentrated and abundant than the complex sugar that made the first mutation succeed so spectacularly. Nothing available to the microbes will allow them to continue to flourish as they did in the heyday of the first mutation. -- John Michael Greeg, The innovation fallacy

After Cameron shook the movie experience with Avatar 3D, movie studios have started jumping the bandwagon by adding an extra dimension to their shoots in post-production. The results are ugly! Have these people any standards at all?

Katzenberg, Bay and Cameron think that after-the-shoot 3D will so degrade the viewing experience that people will not want to pay extra for it. And since 3D is so expensive, without the extra income the 3D market could collapse altogether.

In other words, viewers will not buy shitty movies from late comers to the game, unless they movies are done right. Doh!

The strategy is simple: as viewer, watch Avatar once, then shun any production that is not "natively" 3D and of at least comparable quality. Studios and producers will get the point, and fast.

For what it's worth, I plan myself to wait 3-4 years before I visit a 3D screen again.

Disclaimer: this is a post about its author. If you just want to be entertained, you can skip reading.

One more page turning. While I have spent the official “big party time” of the year quite comfortably lying on a couch, watching TV and playing video games, the occasional greeting SMS compounded with heavy fireworks and an yearly summary e-mail from a close friend reminded me this is the time of the year to contemplate the time passing and make the best out of transitions.

So here is my summary.

The year 2009 was about growing up. I am officially an adult now. During this year, I have started: considering an actual career, caring for retirement plans, comparing health insurance plans, caring about world politics, contracting a mortgage, planning for future savings, considering the financial well-being of my family before making big spending decisions, planning to care for kids in a somewhat near future and — biggest one among the rest — contemplating and actually enjoying the prospect of getting older, especially turning 30 in the coming year. If I told myself how comfortable I would be with these “accomplishments” a mere 5 years ago, I would not have believed myself. 5 years earlier, I would have been down right suspicious and would have showed contempt. Time does wonders!

At the same time, I have been somewhat unsatisfied with the way I take care of the people who are more or less regularly part of my life. Many times per week, if not every day, I spend a few moment thinking about how much I respect / like / love / admire / am grateful towards the people I know, wondering how to inform them of my feelings. All my acquaintances have contributed in one way to another to the person I am, and for this I am routinely and genuinely grateful. I try to smile, interact socially and positively, send friendly words on cards, e-mails or facebook messages, be supportive. But I realize I have not taken the time to really get to know my entourage better and understand their existence as human beings outside of the pleasure I have interacting with them. In short, I often fear that I appear to act as if I was using my friends to entertain myself or acknowledge my own existence, and that I do not show them (often) enough how much I care about them. At the same time, I feel childish at the thought of more frequent tokens of appreciation; I fear I would come across as “bizarre” or “creepy” by overwhelming friends with tokens of affection, or come across as flirtatious or romantic instead of genuinely happy to know them.

And 2009 was also the occasion to take on bad habits. I have become cynical; I tend to see either stupidity or malice in all aspects of the world that I dislike, instead of considering that my expectations have become distorted by a lack of diversity in my channels to the outside world. In my efforts to move forward dutifully and fight procrastination, I have set up a routine where I pursue small goals one after the other — often losing sight of the big picture and overall direction I would like to go. And I have let work take away a lot of my free time, reducing greatly my opportunities for social activities and self-development. All these changes impact me negatively.

My own resolutions for 2010 area bout sharing and improving my contact with other human beings. I will try and learn to trust friends. I will interact more emotionally with the people I meet and try to understand who they are and what is important to them. And I will exercise more at enjoying my immediate surroundings, instead of worrying about remote issues that I have little impact over.

Recently: http://www.gilestro.tk/2009/lots-of-smoke-hardly-any-gun-do-climatologists-falsify-data/.

Simultaneously, found on the Independer:

Climate models, which is what the "scientists" use cannot produce evidence. They give a large number of "what if" scenarios. Picking one of these because it fits with the political message is snake-oil selling; not science.
Go check the meaning of "chaotic" in the mathematical sense. A dynamic, complex, chaotic system - Earth's climate - cannot be predicted with any certainty, because each element can undergo a small variation which can have a large effect on the whole. This means there are an infinite number of possible outcomes, none of which are any more certain than any other.
Further, climate models exclude two of the most important climate factors - behaviour of oceans and clouds - because computers lack the power to make the necessary calculations.
It is not possible to predict climate with any certainty at any point in the future.
To say scientists have produced evidence of what a 2C - or any other value - will do to the Earth's climate is nonsense.
The models are programmed with the assumption that CO2 can only have a strong positive forcing effect; which is not supported in the peer reviewed scientific literature.
The result of computer models which rely on an assumption cannot be used to prove that assumption.
In any case observation over the past 11 years shows the Earth's climate is not warming by the 0.2C per decade predicted by the IPCC - in fact it is cooling.
If you are interested in fact rather than fiction go here: http://rankexploits.com/musings/2009/hadley-november/

In the Netherlands, you should register via the Donor Register. In all countries, the most important is to tell about your choice to your friends and family! They will support your decision and/or accept the request to donate if you end up in a position to donate without being able to give your consent.

Of course, there are discussions about the lack of organ donors, on one side, and whether donors should receive compensation on the other side. The current system supports voluntary donations without compensations. This calls for discussion and thinking.

Seen on Metafilter this year and previously

In response to shortfalls in organ donation, policy is undergoing a serious rethink in several countries. In Australia, the government has just lifted a ban on animal-to-human transplants. In the UK, the Chief Medical Officer has called for presumed consent, while in Israel a new law gives donor card carriers a legal right to priority treatment if they should require an organ transplant. Many are looking to Spain, which leads the world, having seen the number of deceased donors per million people - a commonly used benchmark - increase from 14 in 1989 when a new system was put in place to 34.2 last year.

If you think that you or your family should get paid for your organs:

[…] Of the episode of the Twilight Zone where a family is given a little button to push. When pressed, someone they "don't even know" will die and the family will get a million dollars. Arguments ensue, but eventually they press the button. A man shows up to drop off the money and collect the button. The man assures them that the button will now be given to someone they "don't even know." Zing!
If you allow organ selling, you generate a market that will encourage harvesting.
If you imagine that you are not a member of the organ pool because you're middle-class, you're assuming the wealthy won't preferentially choose to buy well-fed, healthy organs for transplants.
In a world where white, newborn orphans get adopted first, that's just naive.
If people are allowed to shop for organs, you're putting yourself in the store display window right beside the third-world labourer. And you're pretty tempting - you don't have HIV, you probably haven't been exposed to poisons your whole life, you probably haven't suffered malnutrition or parasitic infection. You're organs are probably in very good shape compared to 90% of the planet. Furthermore, there's someone out there who:

1. Doesn't care who you are.
2. Has the money to buy your organs.

Register now, advertise your choice, donate later!

Today's conversation added to the list of concerns evolving around my mind at the moment:

• will China invade Siberia when oil becomes scarce? or Iran?
• what will be the form of the next conflict between Japan and China?
• who will end up controlling North Korea?
• why doesn't the ECB propose to invest in a deep and far-fetching solution for the American mortgage crisis? Why doesn't China propose either?
• How is the obligation to carry identity documents helping against “terrorism”?
• what will be the long term evolution of the current tendency of governments to alienate citizens into criminals and “protect” them against themselves?

The lastest project I'm involved into is trying to get into additional studies. The initial idea was to build a network of fellow Dutch students to 1) get some kind of educational "legitimacy" in the country and 2) hang out with the natives. Of course, I could use some intellectual challenges as well.

For this purpose, I will be visiting the TU Delft tomorrow afternoon and see what kind of education I can find there. No specific plans yet, I'll just be checking out what's available.

Then there are plenty of other projects I should be involved with as well. In addition to planning numerous travel plans (only part of which I will probably accomplish) I should be:

• creating a website for a new guest house in Burgundy,
• keeping in touch with the people who count,
• writing code, tests and documentation for a Python -based project of mine,
• reading the several books I received lately, including a Treaty of Government from John Locke and some algebra theory,
• preparing some language exams that I plan to take before summer,
• strengthening my general knowledge and culture, including possibly visiting cultural places in the country.

And on top of that I can't even manage to do my laundry on time… I'm a joke.

The following is a quote from a semi-official Usenet newsgroup for the French institution EPITECH where current and soon-to-be students can meet and discuss their past and future education in computer science:

moi chui pa un intelektuel mer g ete pri fo just avoir la motiv couz. moi jveu savoir c ki kisera dan ma class et si ya moy kon se voi avan la rentrer. au fet jven un psp ki li ler jeu graver.

A translation of this text in “traditional” French would read as follows: « moi, je ne suis pas un intellectuel mais j'ai été pris; il faut juste avoir de la motivation, cousin. Moi, je veux savoir qui sera dans ma classe et s'il y a moyen qu'on se voie avant la rentrée. Au fait, je vends une PSP qui lit les jeux gravés. »

Regardless of the content, which is of little value outside of the specific milieu where this quote belongs, I find it striking how the new French differs from the language of the “litterature.”

There are two interesting facts to be observed here:

• to my knowledge, most youngsters below 20 of age nowadays use this new form of the language when they type on keyboards;
• as time passes, without major cultural transformations we will see more and more language corpus generated with keyboards.

Combining these facts, I would expect that in little more than 10 years we will see French being gradually replaced and/or transformed for many uses, including business, services, education, information, correspondence and all places where the corpus is not intended to be archived. This will result in a cultural shift where two languages will be in use : classical French for literature, law, treaties and such other items of historical interest, and colloquial French for all the rest, radically different and more closely matching the spoken language.

For my part, I will be practicing the new style for the coming years. I intend to be able to mold into the new generation and not be left behind.