Quit your day job. Go on. I dare you.

Occam’s Razor is a concept in philosophy and science which states (kind of) that “All things being equal, the simplest solution is the best”. To me it means that if you’re trying find an explanation for something you don’t understand and you’ve got a couple of different ways to do it and both could be right, then the one that seems the most simple and relies on the least assumptions is most likely to be the correct one. If used along side the 80/20 rule the Occam’s Razor concept can help with the difficult process of deciding which 20% to focus on.

Occams Razor also happens to be the name of a radio program I listen to (by podcast) from Radio National in Australia (the aussie version of Radio 4). I used to listen to the program when I lived in Oz many years ago, and still do to this day. In fact I was looking at a transcript of one of the recent programs yesterday and found a link to a page about how to become a contributor to the program.

I think I might give it a go so I’ve been considering what my program might be about. And after discarding a few ideas I think I’ve settled on climate change. I’d like to try to apply Occam’s razor to the problem and see if I can come up with a theory of what will actually happen over the next 50 years or so. First step is some research. I think I’ll download ‘An Inconvenient Truth‘ - that Al Gore film, as a starting point.

A longer term project this one. Perhaps something to gestate for a few months and then get into in the Spring when inter-season comes around and I have a lot more time to play with.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 11:45 am and is filed under The interweb. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.