Real Life worse than TV

Real life is apparently worse than Eastenders - a show that revels in its own miserableness.

Article here.

Trawling back through 18 years of fictional east London life, the magazine found that just two percent of the program's female characters and 1.7 of its men had an affair per year.

That compares to real life levels of 9 percent for women and 14.6 percent for men.

Men rarely pay for sex in Eastenders, with just 0.18 percent of the characters visiting a prostitute per year, compared to a national figure of 4.3 percent.

Unintentional Humour

I just saw a Discovery Channel advert on the side of a bus "The English: Nothing but a bunch of foreigners?" I assume it's about the fact that being English in fact means you're a mixture of Celtic, Roman, Angle, Saxon, Norman and probably a few other nationalities as well.

This is particularly funny because I'm in the middle of Scotland where the English are.... a bunch of foreigners.

Matrix Redux

Nice piece of speculation on the Simulation Argument here.

This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.

I like the idea, but one pointer against it is that if I were setting up an artificial reality and populating it, I'd make it a darn sight more exciting.