David Balme

Software developer - mostly in the Java J2EE realm.

Graduated from Queen's University Kingston On 1993.

Life these days is spent between writing code, learning how to make new cuts (box joints, tenon joints lap joints) in wood (its a new hobby - not very good at it yet! ;-) ) and sailing and fixing (mostly fixing) my old 40 ft ketch rigged sailing boat (time and money consuming hobby :-) :-) ).

I have a diletantes interest in many things. Read that as I get interested in things at a relatively shallow level of knowledge. Or just enough to be opinionated but not enough to be well informed!! :-)

On that note: for awhile I become obsessed with ants (and termites) when I saw how they build their megatropolis's complete with convection based air conditioning and nurseries and indoor gardens - I was dumb-founded. These things have about ~250K neurons (compared to our ~89 billion neurons) and they construct these complex societies. Made me realize that the concept of emergent behaviour is a real concept and that true decentralized control can work so long as the basic behavours/actions of the components are correct.

That silly little insight about ants has had a profound affect on my ideas about organization structures, religion (or lackof) and society and also the concept of self or conciousness. The conciousness point is related to the idea that ant/termite colonies exhibit superorganism characteristics. We equate one neuron in a human to one ant in an ant colony - then our conciousness (our self) can be argued is the collective or net behaviour of our neurons. All half baked ideas.

Note sure why I chose to discuss the above to describe myself in this website - but I guess it's just what I chose for the moment. :-)