he Cyber Show has just responded to something I published about WHO and mental health. Knowing the text there is transient (the front page) or volatile, I wanted to reproduce it below, then comment at the end:

Bad work places turn you ugly inside

Roy at Techrights posted this reminder: “Saturday 10 October has been designated world mental
health day. The WHO defines that: Mental health is a state of mental well-being that enables
people to cope with the stresses of life, realise their abilities, learn well and work well,
and contribute to their community. It has intrinsic and instrumental value and is integral
to our well-being.

On mental health, Frank Zappa had some very important and insightful things to say:

The biggest problem in the world today is mental health. If
everybody had good mental health then all the other problems would
be solved. In order to take care of practical problems you have to
have good mental health. If people have motives that are not
worthwhile those motives are always going to creep into their
activities, and you see that every day from the way the political
people behave. – Frank Zappa

“There’s no reason to assume that my idea of what’s better would really be better. I resent it when
other people try to inflict their ideas of betterness on me. I doqn’t think they know. And I can’t
see any authority on the horizon that’s got any answers that seem worthwhile. Most of the things
that are suggested are probably detrimental to your mental health.” – Frank Zappa

All work that requires collaboration and disputation is demanding. Interpersonal relations
need working at but that should bring joy and connection to life.
That sounds like a fair definition of any group or community with clear social goals,
not run by “professional managers” or primarily for making money.

The best of Free Open Source people that I’ve encountered take each other seriously
as actual people. So let’s remind volunteer
developers out there who struggle to make sense of the
madness and pressure in tech right now – that you are loved and appreciated. Please
try to remember to only work for the
right intrinsic motivations of self-growth and never to supplicate the power structures
and ambitions that arise around the mission.

The WHO website also includes a section on mental health at work and
a list of causes of misery which include:

• under-use of skills or being under-skilled for work
• excessive workloads or work pace, under-staffing
• lack of control over job design or workload
• organisational culture that enables negative behaviours
• limited support from colleagues or authoritarian supervision
• violence, harassment or bullying
• discrimination and exclusion
• unclear job role
• under- or over-promotion
• job insecurity, inadequate pay, or poor investment in career development
• conflicting home/work demands

This is literally the blueprint and the aims of every crappy university
I ever worked in, all of which were bad places for mental health, for staff and
students. They may well provide a place for smart people to work, they also
stifle and frustrate intellectual growth and creative innovation. They
may educate a nation but also poison it with what Zappa would call bad
attitudes and ideas.

I previously commented, even in lengthy articles, about the deterioration of universities and academia.

To give one example, they’d give very mechanical, pointless tasks to people who are better off doing research and teaching.

It seems like the point of some of these tasks was to demoralise the staff.

This week I spoke to Daniel Pocock and his latest blog posts show that:

1. He has made Farage nervous
2. He costs Farage a lot of money
3. He has uncovered additional scandals
4. The mainstream media intentionally ignores (1-3)

He’s not done yet. Things will be getting hotter.

n some sense, today was a special day.

It’s about science, not football.

I did not watch this London match, I only followed the score, hoping both teams would lose points (more so Arsenal).

While keeping an eye on the score I noticed having been cited in a major publication. As it turns out, an old article of mine has just been cited in ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) and it’s about Gemini Protocol where my writings became more prominent in recent years:

Each time Garrett is called out on his lack of qualifications in security he’d post some circle-jerking self-praise and buzzword-dropping in social control media. To be clear, asserting that work on ACPI trains you at security like insisting that writing a CS thesis trains you to be a good physician.

The skills of physicians are very different. They need not write theses. Diagnosis is very important.

“It’s worse,” a friend has told me, as “the “security” degrees in the EU, even the PhD theses which I have seen, don’t cite any of the recognised, foundational articles or authors. It’s all a circle jerk of bullshit. But Microsoft likes it that way.”

Nowadays they call back doors “security”. Real security experts get marginalised.

Don’t claim to be what you are not. It won’t end well.

“If you have any questions at all,” one organiser told me ahead of the first such talk since 2018. “please don’t hesitate to reach out. We have several questions prepared for RMS during the Q&A, and if there’s anything you’d like us to raise as well, I’d be more than happy to include it!”

At the time I was too busy dealing with bullies.

To the host, Georgia Tech, there was a political burden. Quoting the organiser (definitely not a Cheeto fan): “P.S. I also really love that y’all hate on our Grand Cheeto Master. I know you’ve mentioned not being fond of air travel on your blog, which I completely understand – but if you ever find yourselves visiting the South, we would be more than happy to host you here at Georgia Tech for a session! Until then, we look forward to continued collaboration with y’all remotely – and, of course, welcoming the “devil” down to Georgia soon…”

“Thank you again for your time and support.”

I was not too far from Georgia on my last trip to the US, but that was 20 years ago and I don’t plan to come to the US again (not any time soon).

I hope RMS will visit the UK some time soon and preferably not too far from here (he was in Oxford).

consider Richard Stallman to be a sort of friend. It’s not like some person who lives next door and I play Chess with (or against). It’s someone with whom I share understanding and despite meeting him several times (in person, for chats and recording videos) I mostly converse with him over E-mail.

Richard Stallman has a behaviour many rightly regard as “different”. This is something that he openly acknowledges and deems to be involuntary.

History shows that some of the most brilliant people were “eccentric”, but their peers didn’t mind that and in some ways their eccentricity worked to their benefit.

People who blast Stallman over minor cues and micro’aggression’ are themselves a-holes. They say a lot about themselves, not about Stallman.

still remember finishing my thesis about two decades ago and working on experiments that compared my algorithms to those of Bill Crum. We used different approaches and compared them.

Bill was always nice to me and today I discovered that he has medical problems and he wrote a book about it. In a way, we sort of coauthored works (or collaborated with his division down in London). I hope he will find a way to cope with health perils.

New ONS data came out this morning (in Microsoft’s proprietary format, as usual). 9,867 England and Wales deaths in Week 13 of 2019 compared to 11,241 in the same week this year.

It’s like this almost every week, including the prior week (12). I check this every Wednesday (for years already).

Is it OK to ask my government what has caused this very sharp increase?

Does it make one a “crank” for asking?

HIS morning’s new numbers look like this:

It may not seem like that says very much until one checks pre-COVID-19 numbers for the same timespan. It was 11,660 in 2019 and about the same for prior years (average of 2014-2019).