Happy New Year to all those who visit the Perceptric blog. I wish everyone who reads the material on this blog the best for 2010. What will 2010 bring to the world? This is after all the time at which all pundits like to sum up the past and/or predict the future… We live in [...]

On Boxing Day I went to the movies…. Bad idea – so crowded it wasn't even worth queuing up to get a ticket. So went home… The day after, went to the movies again. This time left with enough time that I could get tickets and then stand in line waiting for the show to [...]

I wonder what analysis is being done of the memes that are growing day by day on Face Book. There are quite a few companies that are using various automated tools, and some human ones, to understand both quantitative and qualitative references to brand names and products. And these show up last time I checked [...]

On December 15th Nina Paley posted a video to You Tube called “Copyright Is Not Theft” with some video and lyrics and invited people to write music for it. Here it is: Within a day someone had provided a Gypsy Jazz soundtrack…. Here it is: By the 18th a growing number of remixes were being [...]

(Something a little different to amaze and amuse.)   We are familiar with the term the tyranny of distance. Although these days, it applies mainly to the long walk from the deplaning area to the customs and immigration counters and the queues awaiting.   In 1874, Jules Verne wrote a play, Eighty Days Around the [...]

From Wikipedia: The word Christmas originated as a compound meaning “Christ's Mass”. It is derived from the Middle English Christemasse and Old English Cristes mæsse, a phrase first recorded in 1038.   In the Northern Hemisphere, this time of year is recognised as the end of shortening days and the beginning of lengthening days. The [...]

Two Sundays ago I was in a shop in Bowral, Christmas shopping. I asked the lady who ran the shop how her Christmas trading was going. She said, “Well, it hasn't started yet. I'm hoping that it will start today….” Last Saturday I went into the local bottle shop in Berry, and asked Justin, who [...]

Yep, the other day, my partner brought home a newspaper from Franklins.I asked her, of course, “Why did you buy that?”“I didn’t” she replied, “They offered it to me free because I spent more than five dollars and I only got it so we could line the pet cages.”So there you have it. SMH has [...]

The following is from “The Value Of Nothing” by Raj Patel. The late Oxford philosopher Jerry Cohen concieved a thought experiment that helps us understand how money works, and the way that it intersects with the liberty offered by free markets. When the market rations goods on the basis of money, he argued, there's reason [...]

Prologue Has anyone noticed how cheap Home Media players are becoming? The latest price is $35.00 (hard-disk separate.) Available on Ebay.     Those chaps over in Hollywood must be a religious bunch, every Blockbuster film release is these days accompanied with the prayer shawls (being ironed)  the yamulkas being brushed and the nails being [...]