Here in the UK we have so many ways of pairing up that it can get a bit confusing. So to help me work out which one’s which I’ve put this little table together:

	Unmarried	Church marriage	Civil marriage	Civil partnership
Allowed to use the title marriage
Allowed to use religious wording during ceremony
Valid within religion
Full partnership rights under law
Next of kin
Right to be at partner’s hospital bedside
Annulled if not children produced
Allowed joint adoption
Allowable combinations

I hope that clears things up.

It seems such a long time ago that we were married. I know that our courtship was long and difficult, and that I wasn’t your first choice of partner; if you were to wed at all. I guess now, as our 300th anniversary itself passes into history, is a good time to take stock and decide if we’re right for each other now.

It is true we married, each of us, for very different reasons. I remember at the time you may have felt you had no other choice, and I was not a chivalrous suitor. I know you haven’t let those early hurts go; I’m sorry that I’ve never been able to make it up to you.

There comes a time in a country’s life, whether they’re ready for it or not, when they can’t force their partners to stay. I fear my time has come, when I realise that all those thoughtless little things I did will be held against me. I know that you’ve been drawing away from me a while now and you may think I just don’t care any more. Nothing however could be further from the truth: you’re more beautiful today than you ever were. And it has been with a heavy heart that I’m getting ready to let you go.

Please know that whatever you may hear, I do want you to stay. Not anymore to have dominion over you, I know that time has passed, but because I like your company, the way you laugh, and all those other little quirks only an old couple can know about you.

Yours, always

England

Following on from In search of no crime it seems reasonable to spend a little time peeling apart the crime itself.

After a little thought it was clear that a crime can be split into three sections:

1. Intent
2. Action
3. Outcome

For example, because the driver is concentrating on something else (intent), a car might be wobbling down the road (action) and hits someone (outcome).

What’s interesting here is that the criminal justice system, ostensibly in the UK, works the other way:

1. Detect outcome
2. Detect action
3. Ascertain intent

This is necessary because until we see an outcome from the crime, even if that’s just someone witnessing it, a crime cannot be judged to have occurred.

To understand the impact of of all of this it may be worth looking at taking the perspectives of the 3 groups in In search of no crime. Here’s a table showing what part each group plays in the 6 events from above:

How these different perspectives affect things is left to the reader.

Think of a game. Now, it’s likely that the game you’ve thought of has these three characteristics:

1. a winner
2. a loser
3. an end

A critical point seems to be that until the end of the game there is neither a winner or loser. For example, it makes sense to say “who won the 1997 boat race?”; yet it makes no sense yet to ask “who won the 2097 boat race?”.

Now, imagine a game with the following characteristics:

1. it only ends when the last player leaves
2. players can play individually and in any number of teams at the same time, and can change teams at any point
3. players time in the game is finite
4. players can be actively removed from the game
5. most teams take the removal of a member very seriously
6. a losing team always gets another move, even if a proxy carries it out.

It’s very difficult to see how one could ever win such a game, or in fact what winning would even mean in such a context.

Now, lets take a specific example of a specific game that most people would characterise with the fist list: a World War I. It seams to fit, there was a winner, a loser, and an end (11 November 1918). Except it didn’t, the loser’s kept on living and got another move: World War II. All real life conflicts like war, terrorism, gang warfare, or a dispute with your neighbour, are actually of the second type of game, not the first.

Which is unfortunate really; just when the winner basks in glory the loser makes another move. Pity the winner.

Just over a year ago I wrote the post entitled Yet Another Programming Language. That particular project hasn’t quite been finished yet. However, I have written a very small execution engine in Java named Flores.

Flores has the following features:

1. One data type - String. Well, two if you count the singleton null.
2. The while operator, complete with continue and break.
3. The if operator, complete with else.
4. The = operator.
5. All functions are defined externally in Java as static methods. These have to be added to a Flores engine object at Java runtime.
6. No functions by default. The developer needs to add them.

This may look like an odd features list, but there is method in the madness. I have often needed a small scripting lanaguage with one or more of the following features:

• Security. I want total control over a script’s access to the outside world. With Flores, if I don’t explicitly add a function, it’s not there.
• Maintainability. At 731 lines, including comments, there can only be so many bugs.
• Simplicity. I don’t want tail recursion or co-routines. When I say simple, I really mean it.
• Licensing. I need a license that’s business friendly, and for that, I’ve always found the zlib/libpng License reliable.

Flores is available here. If you have some of the same criteria that I do, hopefully you’ll find it useful.