Week 12

Hillarious.. Zenga zenga means "alley by alley" in Libyan Arabic, obviously Gadhafi is talking about killing "dogs", "vermin" alley by alley -- by which he means his countrymen. Apparently these words now form the chorus part of this skillfully remastered "song".

Note: Gadhafi's image at his speech comes pretty close to Hitler's at one of his "rallies" which must be why the video was created by a Jew / Israeli. Arabs dont seem to care about this tho, as the ills of dictatorship knows no borders, or cultures.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlPHzck7InY

I overheard a lot of rap songs with lyrics containg words "bitch" and "ni..a". The other day, I heard a song titled "Bitch Ni..a".

Very creative..

I am at a loss for words.

Now that the Arab League called for a No-Fly zone over Libya, and it is known that the opposition inside Libya wants this, preferably after a UN Security Council decision, a no-fly zone over Libya should be enforced ASAP. It will be useful. I would not support anything more at this point.

Libya is different from Egypt, in that a million people going somewhere by foot, and staying there, and forcing change is not possible. Libya is a vast country, larger than Texas and populated only by ~ 6 million people. Then in case of civil unrest (war) the side with the best logistics wins, and that side is the incumbent forces I'm afraid.

"Douglas Rushkoff wrote in Life Inc. that our society is nothing more than an operating system upon which we (as software) live: "The landscape on which we are living – the operating system on which we are now running our social software – was invented by people, sold to us as a better way of life, supported by myths, and ultimately allowed to develop into a self-sustaining reality." [..]

We fail to see these things, or rather, we take them for granted because they are our operating system. Someone used to Microsoft Windows takes for granted that a desktop computer must behave like Microsoft Windows: they cannot suffer MacOS or Linux, at least initially, because it feels instinctively wrong. [..]

Science has an operating system as well. One of its building block is traditional peer review: you submit a research paper to an editor who picks a few respected colleagues who, in turn, advise him on whether your work is valid or not. By convention, any work which did not undergo this process is suspect. In Three myths about peer review, Michael Nielsen reminded us that traditional peer review is not a long tradition, and is not how correctness is assessed in science. Gregori Perelman by choosing to forgo traditional peer review while publishing some of the most important mathematical work of our generation could not have made Nielsen’s point stronger. [..]

In my previous post, I challenged public education. Some people even went so far as to admit that my post felt wrong. I suspect that this feeling is not unlike the feeling one gets when switching from Windows to Linux. “Where is Internet Explorer?” [..]

Challenging preconceived notions is difficult because your feelings will betray you. Radically new ideas feel wrong. The cure is to try to remember how it felt like when you were first exposed to these ideas. On this note, Andre Vellino pointed me to Disciplined Minds, a book so controversial that it got its author fired! It reminded me of my feelings as a student about exams, grades and teachers. [..]

So, the same way corporations and central currencies are not neutral, public education is not neutral. Kids are naturally curious. If you leave them alone, they will learn eagerly. Alas, they will also refuse to learn what you are telling them to learn. This is precisely what schools are meant to break"

The King's Speech: "This movie is on code. Western world's cultural fault line is between militarism and piece, Rome and Jesus, center and periphery. King's Speech pits the English monarch George VI, who has only has symbolic power aided by a "common man" against a centralizing, militaristic, fascist dictator (Hitler) who has all the power an industrial nation can give him.

I like to think every good movie has a moment which culminates the movie's entire message. And that moment for KS is George VI watching Hitler at one of his rallies, and commenting "whatever he is saying, he is saying it very well". The obvious contrast was made between him and Hitler -- on one side there is George VI a stuttering king on the defense, and a beligerent demagogue who soon will be on the offense.

The movie plays on the cultural fault line very well, and is smart, entertaining as well.

All those Nazi soldiers with their Roman, sorry Nazi salute walking past Hitler is a scary sight indeed, no matter how many times you see it"

Timeless words from the classic On Liberty.

If the general public realized how difficult it is to enforce the idea that every child must go to school and learn what is being taught there, they would not have to constantly discuss what schools should teach and how the schools should teach. If the government would make up its mind to require that every child receive a good education, it might not have to actually provide that education. It could allow parents to get that education for their children where and how they pleased, and only play the role of subsidizing the tuition of those who cannot afford to pay. The problem with government run education is not the requirement that children be educated, but that the government has decided that should do the educating. No part of education should be run by the government. Because people are different and have diverse personalities and diverse needs, education needs to be diverse as well, with many different options. Government driven education is really just a method of making people exactly alike one another. Every government has the desire to tell students what to think and how to think it and they will do so if given the opportunity.

Thanks to Education Outrage blog for the pointer.

Futurism Howto: At its core it's pretty simple really. Since technology is the main driver for societal change, you look at up-and-coming technologies and try to determine which ones will effect the individual and in what ways. Another technique here is looking at a niche, specialized technology that is used by few actors, e.g. military, big companies, and asking the question "what if everyone had access to this technology?".

You see mainframes in 50s, and as "what if everyone had computing like this on their desktops?". Then, in essence, you would be predicting our time now. Same goes for airplanes (what if everyone could fly somewhere?), or massive computing that was a niche thing to do, even during 90s -- now everyone has access to such computing through "the cloud".

That's how Toffler does it; he has a "grand tour" that includes research labs, individuals who work on cutting edge research. You do that, and ask the question "what if" and project to the future.

I hear the term "exponentially" being misused sometimes as it related to growth. Exponential growth label is appropiate if the growth in question depends on the current size of a certain population. For example human population growth "depends" on current size, more people will have more children, for the simple fact that people themselves partaking in the act of increasing the population (if you know what I'm sayin').

Mathematically the simplest version is dy/dt = \alphay, see the growth rate at time t is proportional to y, the current size y. The solution of this linear differential equation is in the form of y = Ae^{\alpha*t} the ^ sign means "power of". The "e" sign, e^x, is called the "exponential function", that's where the words "growing exponentially" comes from.

So if there is growth, but the growth rate at time t does not depend on the current size, dont say "grows exponentially".. The correct term is... "there will be more".

Toffler: "Anyone who thinks the present curriculum makes sense is invited to explain to an intelligent fourteen-year-old why algebra or French or any other subject is essential for him. Adult answers are almost always evasive. The reason is simple: the present curriculum is a mindless holdover from the past.

Why, for example, must teaching be organized around such fixed disciplines as English, economics, mathematics or biology? Why not around stages of the human life cycle: a course on birth, childhood, adolescence, marriage, career, retirement, death. Or around contemporary social problems? Or around significant technologies of the past and future? Or around countless other imaginable alternatives? The present curriculum and its division into airtight compartments is not based on any well thought out conception of contemporary human needs. Still less is it based on any grasp of the future, any understanding of what skills Johnny will require to live in the hurricane's eye of change. It is based on inertia—and a bloody clash of academic guilds, each bent on aggrandizing its budget, pay scales and status"

M-m-m-my Civilization.. What makes a civilization? Rites and rituals certainly don't. "Before we eat a meal, we form a circle and everyone first touches their ass, and barks like a dog".

No.

Or "we always start the meal with the right hand". Whatever. None of this stupidity imply a civilization at all.

What makes a civilization unique is the combination of info-sphere, socio-sphere, bio-sphere, and techno-sphere. If you are producing energy using cow dung, writing on stone tablets, have a farm based life you have one type of civilization. It does not matter if you are called Roman, Babylonian, or Chinese. You are the part of the same civilization.

If you are producing energy from renewable resources, communicate through high-speed networks, live in connected cities, do your computing on silicon based chips you are (or will be) a different type of civilization.

These categories are what is important in terms of social structure and power distribution in the society. They are the true foundation upon which a civilization is built.

All the rest are simply details.

This guy is batshit crazy.

Reuters: "I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been civilization on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet," Chavez said in speech to mark World Water Day.

If all you learned from Toffler's writings was that we are suffering from "change", and "transience of relationships", you haven't understood a goddamn thing.

Change, transience (of relationships, places) are merely symptoms of what is going on in today's world. We need to dig deeper for greater understanding.

Technology shapes the power structure, and the "kind" of technology we have is of utmost importance. Each breed of technology influences power structure differently. 19th century industrial, smokestack technology forced people to work in big numbers, caused a huge number of the populace to be mindless automatons, hence the power structure of that century. This structure allowed, caused "connectors", "integrators" to hold real power. Everything else flowed from there.

Today's technology empowers individuals directly. Then what does "change" mean? 21. century tech gives people more freedom (you have a laptop on your lap), you have more choices, starting with mobility. Take this increased freedom, scale it up to entire populace, the result is "accelerated change" we are witnessing today. When everyone is creating one way or another, the overall result is a maddening pace of change. When everyone moves / can move around because of new tech, what you get is increased transiance of relationships.

If we forget the root causes, that opens a gaping hole in future projections, and we cannot adapt to changing conditions. Let's remember this, and try to delineate clear boundaries on what today's world is, and what it is not, always taking the breed of our current technological infrastructure into account.

Let's not forget the chain reaction any solution creates in society. People love to copy, love to apply principles from one aspect of life to another. In our post Grading we saw how the grading system in schools essentially originated earlier in the factories, as a way of determining if the shoes, for example, made on the assembly line were "up to grade." Our schools, bureucracies, hospitals all copied their approaches from industrial production. The rest simply fell in line to allow the main parts of the system to operate -- families became "nuclear" because workers needed to be close to a factory. Education not only copied methods from industrial era, but provided trained bodies to the assembly line.

Seeing this will also let us see where, when and why our current system is obsolete. If we cannot identify problems properly, we will never be able to imagine new solutions. If we do not know school system is based on the obsolete industrial order, we will keep talking about "better teachers", which later will force us to achieve the impossible (like aiming for hundreds of thousands of quality teachers).