Abandon all hope

Luhmann writes that trust…

“always bears upon a critical alternative, in which the harm resulting from a breach of trust may be greater than the benefit to be gained from the trust proving warranted. Hence one who trusts takes congnizance of the possibility of excessive harm arising from the selectivity of others’ actions and adopts a position towards that possibility. One who hopes simply has confidence despite uncertainty. Trust reflects contingency. Hope ignores contingency”.

As an example, Luhmann says that leaving your child with a babysitter is not a case of trust but of hope.
I’m experiencing absolute uncertainty as to my selection between multiple interpretations.
What, I beg you, does he mean?

The World will have to do

The game center gets a writeup at BBCs The World. My attention was caught a statement by one Jonas Schmidt:

“It was weird to think that there would be some sort of payoff for all of the hours spent,” Smith says. “You know, telling our parents this, but they didn’t believe us. They should see this.”

The depth of wisdom within this one sentence, not to mention its daring position on the issue of internal coherence, boggles the mind.
In one of the pictures my office mate can be seen hard at work doing basic research.

But seriously, it’s a nice piece. There’s supposed to be a companion webcast but I can’t seem to find a working URL.

Wired News: New Tack Wins Prisoner’s Dilemma

Wired News: New Tack Wins Prisoner’s Dilemma
Southampton people have bested Tit-for-Tat in a repeated PD with a somewhat ingenious setup. Although they won fair and square, in a sense they didn’t respect the spirit of the game in which strategies are meant to compete (not their mastermind makers).
TfT’s original success was of course highly dependent on the actual setup of the tournament so beating it in some sort of repeated PD is not so sensational.

From the depths


Having other mysterious business in the basement my wife hinted that it might be time for my illustrious Amiga 500 to again see the light of day (as long as it happened somewhere else). So now it’s all packed and ready to make the (entirely manageble) trip to the ITU – complete with semi-functional RGB cable and all. I guess it would attract some streed cred to start of with “This dissertation was written on a pearly white Commodore Amiga“. Then again, maybe not. And it really isn’t all that pearly after all these years in the basement.
But at least we’ll finally get to see who’s the real Speedball II champion. Ice cream, ice cream!