The computer keypad is mightier than the sword?

I guess Amnesty is predicated upon the power of the pen - and now the computer keypad. (And I'm posting this here, of course, because these are all tools of information.)

This also gives me an excuse to plug a current Amensty campaign say no to 42 days

PS. As I said previously, partial quotations are a crime against context, and the context of the original is significant here:

True, This! -
Beneath the rule of men entirely great,
The pen is mightier than the sword. Behold
The arch-enchanters wand! - itself a nothing! -
But taking sorcery from the master-hand
To paralyse the Caesars, and to strike
The loud earth breathless! - Take away the sword -
States can be saved without it!

From Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy Edward Bulwer-Lytton 1839

Wise words of Solomonoff

I've been reading some of the work of Ray Solomonoff, having come across him in the context of Kolmogorov complexity/algorithmic information, and I like this (from The Discovery of Algorithmic Probability, Journal of Computer and System Sciences 55, 73-88 (1997)):

From Freud I got the idea of the unconscious mind: that
there were things going on in one's brain that one did not
have direct access to. Poincaré, made it clear that much of
his serious problem solving occurred in his subconscious,
and I felt this was very common in problem solving of all
kinds in the sciences and the arts.

This view was one important reason for my later rejection
of "expert systems" as a significant step toward artificial
intelligence. Expert systems were (at best) expressions of
peoples' conscious thought, which was, I felt, a very small
fraction of human problem solving activity.

Other implications: Memory is what you invent to explain
the things that you find in your head. Over the years, the
"facts" in this paper will be gradually revised as I reread my
research notes.

Explanations that people give for their own behavior are
not to be taken too seriously - including discussions in this
paper.

Financial crisis

I don't know I've anything significant to say about it, except to make the obvious point that money is information. It always has been, but more than ever it's obvious today. Money is numbers on spreadsheets and databases - bits stored in computer memory.

And, therefore, understanding money requires understanding information.