Empire

[peterbirks]

Rwanda has applied to join the Commonwealth. This must surely be the ultimate "stick it to the French" move ever. Rwanda, French-speaking, once of the French Empire, applying to join ex-subjects of Great Britain? Whatever next?

Of course, the French might say, you are welcome to it. When the next mini-genocide (a genoddle? minicide?) takes place, it'll be our moral obligation to sort it out. Au revoir Medecin Sans Frontieres, bonjour Croix Rouge.

To which we can simply reply; now they are with some responsible chappies, such things won't happen. We are British, after all.

Although Rwanda is not leading the way in non-Empire countries joining the Commonwealth (Mozambique did so a decade ago), it's the first Francophone country to apply.

Many reasons have been put forward for this, but to me the reason is clear. Rwanda saw the Kenyans play cricket (an English game), which involves propelling a fast round hard ball at your opponent as quickly as possible, and compared it with Boules, which consists of underam pansyish flipping of a hard silver ball about 10 meters into some sand, or gravel. Clearly the propelling of the red ball at your opponent is far more attractive to a country well-versed in the habits of slaughtering their enemies with whatever is to hand.

It was clearly cricket that gave the Commonwealth the edge.

+++++++++

Did you know that if you typpe the word Discount quickly you can end up with the phrase Discocunt?

_________

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Sometimes. Just everyonce in a while. This happens to be one of those. Nice.

[jaybee66.livejournal.com]

I think you will find that the Cameroon was the first Francophone nation to join the Commonwealth in 1995.

Au revoir Medecin Sans Frontieres, bonjour Croix Rouge. doesn't make sense as both Médecins Sans Frontières and International Red Cross are both based in Switzerland and have no political affiliations with France or the UK.

Has it been a long day?

JayBee. xxx

PS - Why don't you sit in front of the telly and watch dumb working-class females screw up a five figure offer on Deal or No Deal and end up walking away with pennies. It always brightens up my day.

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Then how come the ones at MSF always speak with a French accent, and the Red Cross boffins always seem to speak with an English accent? Ah HAH! Answer that and keep your corrugated iron roof on....

And you expect me to do RESEARCH before typing this stuff? Are you MAD? You're lucky to get any words at all, mate.

Deal or no Deal is doubtless riveting. Unfortunately I have never watched it, so the extent of its rivetingness will have passed me by. But I'm glad that it brightens up your day. Still thrashing them at Countdown?

PJ

[jaybee66.livejournal.com]

Then how come the ones at MSF always speak with a French accent, and the Red Cross boffins always seem to speak with an English accent?

Because Swiss people are annoyingly good at both languages?

I admit that French people did set up MSF but administer it from Switzerland. The IRC has always been Swiss and because of its affiliations with the UN uses the English language. Anyway, I am starting to do your research for you so I'll nip it in the...

I would have thought that Deal or No Deal would have appealed to your fascination with game theory. Watching people pushing their luck, getting a lower offer than the last and then just going all the way, come what may. The demography of the game is interesting. You can usually tell at the beginning of the game whether they are going to arse it all up or not. With working class females you may as well ask them to choose two boxes and cut to the end game.

JayBee. xxx

[jaybee66.livejournal.com]

PS - Aspergers prevents me from being any use at forming words but I always get the numbers game right whilst simultaneously recalling from memory the addresses of all the combinations of the numbers selected as phone numbers.

[jaybee66.livejournal.com]

PPS - I am referring to Countdown. I need a lie down. My head hurts.

Poirot Speaks!

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

I think you will find, M'sieur, that Rwanda eez, 'istorically speaking, an ex-colony of Belgium. (Cameroun being half-and-half French and British, or rather German, or indeed some bastardised form of Ashanti if you go far enough back.)

Sticking it to the French, therefore, this is not.

Re: Poirot Speaks!

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Bloody hell, where's the fun in sticking it to the Belgians?

PJ

[jellymillion.livejournal.com]

Account/Acocunt is my particular bugbear in this regard.

Oracularly Yrs, Humble Servant, etc

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

I got done by Larry Trask, of all people, when I checked out my blog post suggesting that Latin abbreviations in English do not require punctuation. (Thus, "ie" rather than "i.e." and so on.) Larry calls my usage "egregious," and I think on balance I agree with him ... not for the common abbreviations such as ie and eg, or even cf (which looks silly when punctuated), but probably for the more exotic fauna crossing over. I just feel that, since the Romans didn't have any punctuation to speak of, why should we? And I think that Larry's point is that we do have pre-existing punctuation.

In the case of Latin abbreviations, I suspect that we are going to slide sideways and miss it out, or else become so ignorant that we just substitute that extremely useful Valley Girl (circa 1978) abbreviation for everything: "Whatever." There is probably a texting short-cut for this, but to be honest I couldn't give a r@s rrs.

Attempting, as I am, to provide a spurious gloss on an end-to-end test written in many splendoured scripts of the Korn shell variety, and re-written by me in the ugliness that is Perl, simply because they made no sense then and they make even less sense now (it's a management leverage thin), I understand your particular bugbear. Mine is "system/manager."

What sort of fucking security is that?

Admittedly, it's better than you can get from HMCR, and I was hugely amused by the explication in the Telegraph today. Apparently, "encryption" is something you get when you jumble up all those little bitty things, and it's terribly hard to crack. "Password-secured" files, on the other hand, are trivially easy to crack, because, and to quote: "many hackers out there have programs that allow them to guess your password."

No, really? Ouchie. Ouchie, ouchie, ouchie.

Anyway, there's nothing wrong with sticking it to the Belgians. I have no reference point for the Flammisch, but, believe me, Walloon girls are the most entrancing francophone females you will ever meet. Which is saying something.

Re: Oracularly Yrs, Humble Servant, etc

[jellymillion.livejournal.com]

Gosh, I'd forgotten "system/manager". For some reason that triggered an association with "scott/tiger". Reasonable enough, I suppose.

Perl. Ugh. I'm now up to about three days a week of Ruby at full pay. Times change, sometimes for the more betterer.

Here's a useful password for you: KUJu4FLj
Just what you need for an intranet MySQL database admin account. Well, it'll save you guessing.

Re: Oracularly Yrs, Humble Servant, etc

[(Anonymous)]

I'm sure I'd just love to fuck your intranet MySQL account, Mike. Sadly, I have these two CDs here which require my immediate attention.

I've actually had to put "user=system" and "password=manager" into an ini file for my current Perl script, because one or the other varies according to machine, platform, database version, database instance, or whim. I don't see the point of this. At least everybody knows that scott/tiger (it's his cat, dummy) will prove that you can connect to the database, if not do anything useful with it. The only point to having easily guessable sysadmin names is that a reasonably well-trained person will restrict that account to serious things, like "SELECT FROM [schema:table_list] DROP ALL".

Changing the tuple to some other equally recognisable tuple helps nobody. But I guess that's why they pay security consultants the big bucks. (Let me tell you about this branch of BT in South Wales ...)

KUJu4FLj is indeed an interesting password. In fact, it is frighteningly similar to my password for source control/CVS (and please explain why anybody, under any circumstances, would need a password to CVS. Oh, wait. I'm on the renowned and secure LiveJournal site here, am I not?).

This suggests, to my suspicious mind, that there is some sort of auto-dimwit-password-generator program out there that enterprise cretins buy for $1000 a pop ... no, better, make that $1000 a seat ... and claim is safe.

I'm no expert, but I could write something to crack that password in around half a day.

Re: Oracularly Yrs, Humble Servant, etc

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

CDOs, of course, now strand for "Compact Disc Obligations" (as not followed by HMRC).

PJ

testing this one...

[(Anonymous)]

thanks for the GREAT post! Very useful...

Deal or No Deal

[geoffchall.livejournal.com]

Arriving late as ever, I'm shocked to find you're not a Deal or no Deal afficianado. It seems to provide a perfect example of a lot of your +EV/untility value of money type arguments, whether a fair offer is a mean or a median of the values that remains and just how far people can be bent by (a) a studio audience willing them on and (b) a very high utility value being placed on the first £10K of winnings.

Thus you'll find someone who, as my tall, upper-class friend Peter says, are often working-class and female, choosing to plough on with a choice of 1p, 10p, 50p, £1 and £100,000. An offer of £15K will not be enough to stop these people from continuing in the hope they'll win the £100K.

Re: Deal or No Deal

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

I think that you will find that the bank's offer is always negative EV (i.e., is less than the sum of the money remaining divided by the number of boxes remaining). Celador assumes a diminishing marginal utility of money (£100,000 is not worth 10 times as much to a contestant as £10,000).

Do you have concrete instances of the example that you cite (a woman ploughing on regardless)? My experience is that people usually take the bank's offer at some point. Under Tversky/Kahnemann theorising, however, contestants would be more likely to "plough on" if an event causes the bank's offer to be reduced (i.e., a large-value box gets opened after the contestant has turned down an offer from the bank). That would make a player more tempted to gamble his or her money back to the level previously attained. When that's (re)achieved, the player would psychologically be more likely to take the new offer.

The main reason I'm not a fan is that this is basically trivial stuff. Since the actual "winning" is pure chance, the only involvement is empathy with the characters and agreeing/disagreeing on whether you should take the bank's offer. I've never felt much involvment with "the characters", and my stance re the bank's offer simply depends on my own marginal utility of cash. There is no "right" or "wrong" decision. In other words, the whole thing is mathematically very basic, hence the need for the atmospheric music and the "group building" concept (the players spend a long time together in the filming) to create an atmpsphere.

PJ

Re: Deal or No Deal

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

I think that you will find that the bank's offer is always negative EV

Not absolutely always. +EV offers have been made to, and summarily rejected by, particularly risk-seeking (*) contestants. (I can dig up some concrete examples if I must...) There is a school of thought that suggests there is a deal of metagame to it in influencing the Banker to offer relatively good offers.

It's an awful, dislikeable show set up for one of the least veiled, most accurately quantified displays of schadenfreude for years, I agree. I doubt I have watched four full episodes and six fragments of episodes in the last two years. Yet for such a negative opinion, I don't half spend thinking more time about it than I should. It's the game show equivalent of the Crazy Frog.

(*) OK, I cannot remember the proper term for the opposite of "risk-averse".

Re: Deal or No Deal

[(Anonymous)]

Wrong friend, unless you quote some bizarrely tall Hutu or Tutsi whose acquaintance, sadly, we will never make, because we are all too old to play cricket against vicious genocidal maniacs.

I suspect you meant Jay-Bee.

"Upper-class?"

If indeed this was directed at me, I admit that I am no horny-handed son of the soiled balance sheet. In my general experience, however, "upper-class && born-in-Birmingham == null."

But thank you for playing this threads' episode of ... "Deal or No Deal!"

Discocunt

[(Anonymous)]

I've thought about this.

There are various words that I have equivalent problems with, but they mostly have a sort of sonata-like a-b-a flavour. Awkward positionings ending with "ement," for example, tend to bugger up the fingers.

Discocunt is something else. Either your touch-typing needs a refresher course, or there's soemthing wrong with your left-hand middle finger. (And to my shame, I find that I use the left-hand index finger for that key.)

Check with a doctor at once. You may well have pre-cancerous lumpiness of the cuticle.

Re: Discocunt

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Various suppositions come into play here:

1) That I was telling teh truth.

This is always a dangerous starting point. In fact, I had originally typed "Discopunt", which can occur when the third finger on the right hand is slightly off-centre when typing the 'o'. However, I felt that "disco punt" had less of a resonance than the second spelling. (In case anyone wonders why I do not spell this out, it isn't because of probity; it's because spiders search for such words and then add in spam links to pron sites.)

2) Even if I had typed it, various other, more likely, possibilities occur to me than pre-cancerous lumpiness of the cuticle.

The first would be a case of Tourette's Syndrome in the right hand. Clearly there is no reason why Tourette's should strike onl at the mouth.

The other would be a case of tremors -- perhaps a flash back to alcohol withdrawal, or signs of the onset of Parkinson's Disease.

PJ