Week 44

"Amber Lambke and Allan Grinshtein start[ed] a group called the New York Nightowls, a sort of study hall for entrepreneurs, freelancers and software developers who gather at 10 every Tuesday night and stay as late as 4 a.m. “The goal is to come, get inspired, meet new people and get work done,” said Ms. Lambke, a creative consultant. “It’s six hours of uninterrupted, productive time where you’re surrounded by other creative people doing awesome things.” Although the New York group has been meeting only since April, the concept is catching on. [..] Participants say a spirit of collaboration and camaraderie percolates through the night, one that can be hard to come by during normal working hours [..].One big advantage of the late-night hours is that they are blissfully free of the distractions that clutter the daytime.

Even the Web goes quiet. [..] “When you don’t have your co-workers constantly interrupting you, fewer friends bored at work and on IM, it’s easier to get things done,” said Montana Low, a scientist.Yet another example of working habits, and the concept of work changing. People are finding it increasingly hard to work during regular hours, in regular offices, so instead, they form a group to work at night. But when we look at this structurally, people are working outside of work, it's obvious we have a serious problem. The system is wasting time and money by placing people into "work areas" with "people they do not want to be around with", making the option of going outside the system more tempting.We do not live in an industrial world anymore. People dont have to be "near unmovable things" such as factory machinery to be productive. Just like old style journalism, education, and politics collapse due to changes in production, the concept of work is also being redefined"

Note: There was an interesting dynamic around "cities" in TSN. As Paul Graham says, "[i]n a hundred subtle ways, [every] city sends you a message". New York tells you, above all: you should make more money, Boston (or Cambridge) says you should be smarter, Silicon Valley says: you should be more powerful. In TSN we saw a back-and-forth between all the above. FB CFO wanted to remain in NY (money), Zuckerberg did not agree. Zuckerberg "did not care about the money", and he says at one point in the movie that "people in Harvard were not impressed by money (because the message in Cambridge is about smarts, not money). Shawn Fanning in contrast is all about power. He talks about "bringing down music companies", wants Facebook to have "more users, reach all continents".

Eventually Zuckerberg finds himself closer to this and moves to West Coast.

Good movie... But the nagging question in my mind before and after the movie was "how much of it was actually correct?".

I believe there is a "good chance" that TSN captured the spirit of the Facebook story. How can we know this? Well, there are key moments that had to researched carefully, and had to be as close to truth as possible. For example the email correspondance between Winklevoss brothers (played by the same actor by the way) and Mark Zuckerberg cannot be faked. There has been a settlement between Winklevoss brothers and Zuckerberg, also between FB CFO Saverin, these are FACTS. Therefore starting from these data points you can project, then you watch videos of Zuckerberg, talking, giving speeches, and you can paint a pretty good picture of the kid. Surely the movie took certain liberties while trying to entertain, but these can be glossed over by the viewer while enjoying the movie.

TSN was fair to its characters. Also, in legal terms the settlement between Winklevoss bros and Zuckerberg has been FAIR in real life. Z. did after all steal their ideas a little; of course without Zuckerberg there would be no Facebook, but without that spark he received from W. brothers, Facebook might not have been Facebook as we know it either.

Overall, the Z. picture coming out TSN is a bright kid who wants to grow his product / creation at all costs. That is commendable. A business card that says "I am CEO bitch" is not that important, really. It's a joke, I could make a similar joke myself -- and you cannot create a whole evil empire image based on this little soundbite. Of course FB needs to be careful about privacy issues, but that is true for every company that handles your information, including credit card companies.

I liked the techno-speak, it's nice to hear such familiar words in a movie setting (Emacs rules!).

Great acting all around, Eisenberg, Timberlake did a fine job.

Quantitative Easing Explained

https://youtu.be/PTUY16CkS-k

Obama got what he deserved. After his big election win in 2008, he had to push for bigger changes, and when faced with resistence, take the fight to the populace, labeling the other side as "the ones stopping the change", and watch things develop from there.

Instead, what we got since 2008 has a meager health-care bill, meager reforms in economy, coupled with an utter inability to dissect what is wrong with education establishment. Oh, also some very odd comments about "saving newspapers' who are dinaseurs of the (previous) modern age.

Maybe there is a psychological block preventing Obama becoming the reformer he promised to be on the 2008 campaign trail. It's because he is black.

Hold your horses: this was no racist comment.

What I am saying is, as the first black president Obama might be thinking he is "representing", and if he fails, fails big, people will think it was "because he was black". So, he is not taking big steps, preventing big fail, but not accomplishing much, following pretty much other white men as an example that came before him. That's why we had a Clinton era economist, Bush era defense secretary, Clinton-era, well.. Clinton on the White House. Obama became an eclectic mix of white people before him, and this way, he guaranteed he would not be any worse than a white man.

But white or black, brown or yellow, the reality remains: We are going through changes that no person in any color has witnessed before. Americans elected Obama to do things different. If he fails, I am afraid he will not be a two-term president. But maybe, that's enough for him.

After all, it's no worse than a white man.

In the movie Armageddon we had a giant meteor coming to Earth, threathening to devastate life as we know it. The movie's answer to this problem was to send Bruce Willis to the said rock so he could blow it up.But scifi needs to get little more "sci", less "fi" and do little more research on these asteroid flicks. We need to understand that it takes an huge amount of energy for a large object to travel through space. Yes, yes, it has happened before; a giant meteor destroyed dinasaurs, which indirectly, allowed humans to evolve and come to its present form, bla bla. Right.But lesser known fact is how that meteor got here; it followed a route in space called the Interplanetary Superhighway (IPS).This is a relatively new finding in space research. Due to development in nonlinear dynamics, and the solution of the (restricted) three-body problem, we know that in the chaos (as in chaos theory) of gravity fields, certain "points" and "routes" exist that can act as steady points, and / or routes that take you NEAR ZERO ENERGY to travel through. That is, once you propel yourself with a big enough burst, you will fly through them as if you are in some kind of man made tube in space.That is how the giant meteor millions of years ago could reach Earth. It followed one of these "easy" routes through space. Then the message to makers of meteor-comes-to-Earth type of flicks is this:YOU DONT HAVE TO BLOW SHIT UP.If Armageddon script writers did little more research, they would know that you could simply "nudge" the rock to park it in one of the so-called "Lagrange points". These points are steady, and once you are in them, you stay there. Why would we want to "destroy" meteors anyway? We could mine them for metals and minerals. They are no danger, they are a big opportunity!IPS is no simple dream theory -- it has been in actual use. NASA Genesis mission used IPS to travel around Sun / Earth, and the same math managed to save Japanese Hiten Lunar mission.Discovery, National Geographic: A program on IPS would be nice.More details below.Ed BelbrunoMartin Lo Paper [PDF]Wikipedia

Toffler Associates released its predictions for the next 40 years to mark the 40th anniversary of Future Shock.

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More from Jones and Romer

As just one example, recall that the increasing returns to scale that is implied by nonrivalry leads to the failure of Adam Smith’s famous invisible hand result. The institutions of complete property rights and perfect competition that work so well in a world consisting solely of rival goods no longer deliver the optimal allocation of resources in a world containing ideas. Efficiency in use dictates price equal to marginal cost. But with increasing returns, there is insufficient output to pay each input its marginal product; in general, price must exceed marginal cost somewhere to provide the incentive for profit maximizing private firms to create new ideas.1 This tension is at the heart of the problem: a single price cannot simultaneously allocate goods to their most efficient uses and provide the appropriate incentives for innovation.

An important unresolved policy question is therefore the optimal design of institutions that support the production and distribution of nonrival ideas. In practice, most observers seem to agree that some complicated mix of secrecy, intellectual property rights that convey partial excludability, public subsidies through the institutions of science, and private voluntary provision is more efficient than any corner solution like that prescribed for rival goods. We are, however, very far from results we could derive from first principles to guide decisions about which types of goods are best served by which institutional arrangement.

I've been thinking about this for some time; the tension between sharing for public good, and incentivizing sharing of profitable ideas through a patent structure (and determining whether this is even enforcable in the near future) is a tough nut to crack.

Also education: today education provides many tasks at once, educating and providing credentials at the same time -- but articles such as this makes one think we are failing at that front too. Insant communication, and the availability of information allowed the rise of "knowledge mercenaries" who provide homework solutions, master's, even PhD thesis' in not-so-average universities.

This article is written by one such mercenary; basically for non-mathematical subjects, this guy takes your assignment (and money), sits down, Googles like crazy, and writes you a paper on a subject of your choosing.

There is a lot of work to do.

I see fools berating Wikileaks for releasing this much information. There is no need to worry. The Third Wave is coming, information, data wants to be free and will be free. There is nothing anyone can do about it.

Learn to like it.

Love it.

In order to manage this fast-paced, subsecond world we live in, we need more, not less data. "Oh but won't we be overwhelmed by a lot of data?". No you wont. Filters will develop, new techologies will spring up that you've never thought of. to handle this data overflow. Human society as a whole is a big whopping information processing machine.

One can argue that one of the reasons of 2008 crisis is we did not have enough data on the economy. If we knew every trade, every position, every detail about the economy, companies, one could develop monitoring software to sift through the data, raise alarms and report realtime.

My job was / is processing data in all forms; and I am telling you, more data is preferable.

So naysayers need to shut the fuck up and smell the coffee.

Protestant Reformation [had an] emphasis upon individualism, literacy and the patriarchal nuclear family, and the Enlightenment, with its emphasis upon rationality, faith in human progress, the development of the scientific method, etc. The period of modernity was characterized by a high degree of centralization of control of production, increasingly large scale capitalization of industry, and a high degree of routinization and standardization of products and processes. Modernity reaches one of its high points of development in the industrial practices of "Taylorism" (follow this link for a Wall Street Journal backgrounder on Taylorism archived on the Cool Fire Technology site) in which the worker's actions are segmented and standardized, effectively making each worker interchangeable, and "Fordism" (follow this link for Ruppert's account of Fordism by Mark Ruppert of Syracuse University) which adds to Taylorism a systematic attempt to control the workers' off-the-job life as well--hence Ford's planned communities, housing, control of media, adult education, etc

Does modernity = individualism? Short answer: No.

As it is stressed in the passage above, individualism has its roots in the Enlightement, but Modernity has to do with industrial production, Taylorism, Fordism.

Marxist literature does equate modernity with individualism but .. Marxists are morons. An obviously failed ideology cannot be used as a measuring stick for all other ideologies. Right?

In the post-modern, electronic cottage world we are living now, individuals have a tremendous amount of computing power, means of communication, and means of organizing, creating knowledge. This is real power and is the basis of all the changes we are seeing across the world today.

Mathematics Is Smarter Than I Am.

A mathematics professor uttered this sentence the other day, and is absolutely correct. I had trouble explaining this to people, but thanks to him, I have the right words now.

Mathematics is not a collection of symbols so you can "show off" how smart you are to your friends.

Mathematics is a technology. It helps you do things you would never be able to otherwise.

How does it work? Well, the "internal smarts" of mathematics comes from its collection of theories, rules, etc. While we are developing a model, the moment we connect our thinking with one of these prepared rules, we are getting something for free. These premade rules might take us to different form (using other rules) let us simplify things, and finally we reach a clean computational stop. These rules, statements that form the internal smarts are easier to remember than going back, say to number theory, and / or computing the first, obvious thing you see in front of you (the worst you can do in any problem is trying all solutions).

One of my teachers used to say "when you are stuck, just write something you know is true".

That is, take a mathematical statement out of your bag, write it down, and try to connect it with your problem. Try to find that entry point to the "internal smarts" of mathematics.

This is an upcoming program on BBC 4 presented by Hans Rosling. The example shown is basic plotting really showing correlation between two variables, but the animation through time is cool.

https://youtu.be/jbkSRLYSojo

Jason Fried: Why work doesn't happen at work

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We now know that Neanderthals were symbolic thinkers, probably made art, had exquisite tools and bigger brains. Does that mean they were smarter? Evidence shows that over the last 30,000 years there has been an overall decrease in brain size and the trend seems to be continuing. That's because we can outsource our intelligence. I don't need to remember as much as a Neanderthal because I have a computer. I don't need such a dangerous and expensive-to-maintain biology any more. I would argue that humans are going to continue to get less biologically intelligent.

In summary, earlier humans not only were stronger, faster than us, they were also smarter. But smart here means "Rain Man smart"; they had more computational power in their biology. After we created technology in its many forms, we could outsource intelligence, which then shaped our evolution. I write on a piece of paper, learn to study a different way, I change my thinking habits, this effects the next generation.

It is obvious our education system is badly organized and ill suited for post-modern world due to the adverse effects of the Industrial Revolution. But another effect on its organization could be stemming from our "Neanderthal Ideal" -- maybe we are trying to recreate the earlier Neanderthal, that is create an "ubermensch". We mistakenly assume people need to hold stuff in their heads, "survive in a jungle", be strong, be fast (this is especially pushed through competitive sports that are absolutely inappropiate for blood types A, B and AB by the way -walking, swimming, etc are fine-).

But as the passage above indicates, we evolved according to our technology, and this trend will continue. In that case, computers must be #1 item in any student's arsenal. We should not try to recreate a Neanderthal, instead, a new breed of thinker who can use today's technology to its utmost potential.

[1] An example of the Neanderthal Ideal in art is Superman story. Superman is basically a Neanderthal. But the more we move away from this ideal, because of our technology, the more irrelevant the story becomes. In fact, TV and Holywood dont know how to handle the typical Superman story anymore. Smallville took him to his earlier years (underdeveloped Neanderthal, fun to watch) while the movie Superman Returns bombed at the box office. But, stories of technologically augmented humans (Batman, Iron Man) are doing just fine.

It is no secret that China owes a lot to Alvin Toffler. The official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, People's Daily, classed him among the 50 foreigners who shaped modern China. But how did the Chinese follow Toffler's advice exactly?

Here is what they did: they took The Third Wave, and did everything Toffler said to not do.

My thesis is, Chinese learned industrialization from Toffler, he was describing the ills of modernity but Chinese were learning what modernity was all about from him. Among the pages of TW, the Chinese saw the industrialization process for what it is; a centralized, standardized, concentrated style of living, working, and most importantly governing. It was a match made in heaven -- Communist Party could still maintain its control while industrializing a nation.

But all of this had to take place in 19oos. Chinese were late to the party; they had to do all of this "late development" in a world of computers, the Internet, and cellular networks -- increasingly so after 1990s.

That is the main reason why Chinese politics and economy is the hybrid beast that it is today. Capitalism with no law, local democracy no national elections, and a slogan "pieceful rise" that is tantamount to oxymoron in international affairs. The reason for this mixed bag is you can only be Second Wave if you block certain parts of the economy to investment, to competition, to outside and internal "free forces". You produce, but dont consume, you get free enterprise only in parts of the economy geared for export. You have cheap labor, you export like crazy while insulating yourself from stuff that you dont want.

Looking at this picture, one can conclude China is nowhere near its final destination. It knows this very well because they understood those parts of TW as well.

Paul Romer has been talking about this for quite a while; and I like the idea. In some countries cities are very badly managed, and starting from scratch, in a carefully managed manner is a great idea. If we are entering (or, already in) an age of hyper-customization, it should be no surprise that the most important aspect of our life, the city we live in, can be customized to our needs. I imagine different "types" of communities around newly built charter cities mushroom all around the globe. One city might have a "single, scientists city" theme, another "married sports freak city" theme, and each could have buildings, structures, people that are appropiate for them. Entry requirements for each city would reflect their corresponding themes. I dont like to be around children, constant crying, screaming pisses me off, so I should be able to choose a city where there isnt a single child in sight. I dont give a flying fuck about historical buildings either, so a city with none would be a boon for me.

I hear of countries building such cities, such as in South Korea, and Hamburg; I could see myself moving to one of these cities if they mature enough, with lots of people in them.

Ants in a Death Spiral

Ants just follow the path in front of them... so they can get stuck in an infinite loop and die.

https://youtu.be/KHnkb-Lx1_sw