Week 28

I like Twitter's hashtag feature; it allows ppl to cluster around topics quickly. This is especially useful during events & conferences. When people visit a conference they start tagging their messages related to that conference with a hashtag, say #expo2011, then a follower can click on that tag and gets other messages under that tag.

No central authority defines the tag, it is not centralized. The tag simply emerges out of the interactions of people, it's not synchronized. It's not standardized, any word can be a tag, not concentrated either because a tag can be created by one, many people, and mushroom out to entire Internet, or not.

There it is -- the fall of modernity summarized in a simple hashtag.

"The Shuttle story should really be titled “Lost in Space”. About 210 billion dollar went towards a programme born of fantasy. The story came to an end because the American government finally accepted what experts realised at the beginning: strip away the drama of manned space travel, and the Shuttle is an expensive and complicated way to provide what should be a cheap and simple service [..].

“Apollo was a matter of going to the moon and building whatever technology could get us there,” writes the space historian Walter McDougall. “The Shuttle was a matter of building a technology and going wherever it could take us.” But where did it take us? After 133 missions, thousand of orbits and millions of miles, our old friend the Shuttle has taken us back to where we began 30 years ago. Despite all the excitement, drama and tragedy, we’re no nearer an answer about what to do in space"

Wired: "Well-known coder and activist Aaron Swartz was arrested Tuesday, charged with violating federal hacking laws for downloading millions of academic articles from a subscription database service that MIT had given him access to. If convicted, Swartz faces up to 35 years in prison and a 1 million dollar fine.Swartz, the 24-year-old executive director of Demand Progress, has a history of downloading massive data sets, both to use in research and to release public domain documents from behind paywalls. Swartz, who was aware of the investigation, turned himself in Tuesday.My $0.02? People should thank this guy rather than jail him. Dont Feds have better things to do than chasing someone who is trying to free stuff / research that was produced mostly by public funds to begin with?I wonder what the public would think, vote on, if freeing research was put on a referendum. Public officials or lawmakers deciding on this and that does not count because we all know representative system does not mean democracy.Paywalls around knowledge is wrong, unproductive and just plain immoral"

Rome Killed Jesus

"The story begins when the Galilean rebel Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey, deliberately fulfilling a prophecy in the Hebrew Bible about the coming of the Messiah. [..] The next day Jesus raids the Temple, the heart of the Jewish religion, and attacks money-changers for defiling a holy place. The leaders of the Jewish establishment realise that he threatens their power, and so do the Romans, who fear that Jesus has the charisma to lead a guerrilla uprising against Imperial Rome.

Caiaphas was a supreme political operator and one of the most influential men in Jerusalem [..]. Jesus threatened Caiaphas's authority [..]. Caiaphas' power base was the Sanhedrin, the supreme council of Jews which controlled civil and religious law [..] Sanhedrin only ruled because the Romans allowed them to and the way to keep the Romans happy was to maintain order in society. Caiaphas himself was a Roman appointment, so he needed to keep cosy with the governor, Pilate, if he wanted to stay in power and preserve his luxurious way of life"

FT: "Murdoch-bashing has, until very recently, generally been a disreputable activity, chiefly engaged in by the envious, the far-left, and the commercially uncompetitive, all almost incapable of disinterested comment – but not always. It is, on this subject at last, a time for truth. For decades Britain’s establishment professed to despise Mr Murdoch but appeased and grovelled to him, (“I thoroughly disapprove of Rupert, but I quite like him,” was the tedious refrain), as when it became clear that most of opinionated London expected him to prevail over the Daily Telegraph in the price war that he launched in 1993 [..]

Although his personality is generally quite agreeable, Mr Murdoch has no loyalty to anyone or anything except his company. He has difficulty keeping friendships; rarely keeps his word for long; is an exploiter of the discomfort of others; and has betrayed every political leader who ever helped him in any country, except Ronald Reagan and perhaps Tony Blair. All his instincts are downmarket; he is not only a tabloid sensationalist; he is a malicious myth-maker, an assassin of the dignity of others and of respected institutions, all in the guise of anti-elitism. He masquerades as a pillar of contemporary, enlightened populism in Britain and sensible conservatism in the US, though he has been assiduously kissing the undercarriage of the rulers of Beijing for years. His notions of public entertainment and civic values are enshrined in the cartoon television series The Simpsons: all public officials are crooks and the public is an ignorant lumpenproletariat. There is nothing illegal in this, and it has amusing aspects, but it is unbecoming someone who has been the subject of such widespread deference and official preferments"

"Reading about Aaron Swartz [..] I was also reminded of my own attempts at similar work, collecting and analyzing journal articles, patents, and various forms of metadata. I’ve lost count of how many hours I’ve spent sitting in basements of academic buildings, breaking federal laws in the pursuit of answers. And I was reminded of my colleagues who still spend their days painstakingly scraping data off the web–sometimes legally sometimes not–the name of academic inquiry [..]

None of us want to break the law. It’s simply that we don’t have a choice. The mechanisms for sharing academic discourse are broken. They barely even function as systems for connecting interested parties within existing disciplines. Ask just about anyone who spends their time writing or consuming scholarly work and you will hear a litany of complaints about how poorly suited the academic publishing industry is to modern day collaboration [..].

Tim Berners-Lee invented the web to solve this very problem. Twenty years later it allows us to do almost everything imaginable–except get unfettered access to scholarly communication.

It is not technology that holds us back.

Aaron’s arrest should be a wake up call to universities–evidence of how fundamentally broken this core piece of their architecture remains despite decades of progress in advancing communication and collaboration"

The state of our mathematics defines the state of our civilization. Before NASA could go to the moon, a crucial mathematical advancement was needed. The so-called Three-Body Problem calculates the path orbiting regularly around two objects, such as a spacecraft going between the Earth and the Moon.

The complexity of solving this problem stems from the fact that all three bodies pull on each other while moving, a total of six interactions. The problem is intractible in analytical form, that is, one cannot find a clean, algebraic solution. Mathematician Richard Arenstorf solved the problem in a special form, received the NASA Medal of Scientific Achievement. This orbit is the basis of a path going to the Moon from the Earth, such as the United States Apollo program.

Before leaving NASA [..] Arenstorf [also] mapped out an emergency rescue orbit, which was used in the Apollo 13 incident, in which a catastrophic malfunction forced aborting the Moon landing, [..] the astronauts ultimately returned safely to Earth without a major course adjustment.

Here is proof that we don't need spaceships, lasers, and giant robots for good scifi. The Man From Earth is built on one scifi assumption, that a caveman becomes immortal and is still living among us today. This basic framework is naturally ripe for the scriptwriters to explore and they do explore it skillfully. The movie is about the caveman's story being told through his eyes and we roll through hundreds years of history, culture, religion which is a fascinating and very personalized journey. Surprisingly, all of the storytelling takes place in one room. TMFE also successfully creates a campfire mood which is fitting -- given that the central character is a caveman.[SPOILER] But that is not all. We find out caveman became many things over the years, he studied with the Buddha, and then he became Jesus! My favorite part of the movie is when he butts heads with Rome: "[he came] into the Roman Empire. He didn't like what they became--A giant killing machine. He went to the near east thinking, "[w]hy not pass the Buddha's teachings on [..] So he tried. One dissident against Rome? Rome won".The movie is apparently on code, since Western worlds cultural tug-of-war is between Rome and Jesus, militarism and piece.

"A Google employee Steve Yegge quits his project on stage, and announces decision to delve into more math and science. Great"

[-]

#Google+

Google's chances of overtaking Facebook are not slim. Yes apps like Facebook live on the "network effect"; the more people use the app, the more useful the app becomes, hence it pulls more people in as a result, on it goes. The # of users create a "barrier to entry" for this market. On the other hand, FB doesnt have a lot of algorithmic add-on, it's a simple database app. As a result another big company with its own huge user base who has already figured out how to work on gigantic scale (hint: Google) can overtake Facebook. I'd rather they did actually. This space needs some innovation, and I'm tired of maintaining multiple accounts for multiple needs, "friends" are in place, "people I'd like watch" are somewhere else, and email in yet another. Google is also more developer friendly. If I ever come up with some algorithmic add-on for this space, I'd rather see it deployed through Google's services than Facebook's.

Note: It was kinda fun to watch Zuckerberg trying to respond with its own video thing -- brutha was sweatin' !!

The mere suggestion of it makes me shudder.

"My friend and former labmate Marcio von Muhlen recently wrote a thought-provoking piece on why we need a Github of science. My take on his central argument: our centuries-old system of for-profit academic journals and peer review could be vastly improved if it included aspects of modern Open Source software publishing tools like Github. For example, instead of relying on the opinion of two or three anonymous (and possibly unqualified) referees to determine whether my research belongs in a high-impact journal, I could post my paper on the “Github of science” and the entire community of my peers could weigh in on its strengths and weaknesses. Like quality hits in a Google search, well-regarded research rises to the top and is rewarded by additional visibility, and weaker research sinks to the bottom [..].

I’ve been thinking about a backwards approach [..] How horribly broken would Github become if we recast it in the image of Reed-Elsevier, Springer, John Wiley and Sons, and the rest of the for-profit scientific publishing companies?

First, we would need to put some locks on the doors. Access to our new Github is only available to subscribers, and it isn’t cheap. If your school or employer doesn’t pay for access, you’re probably out of luck. If you’re an unemployed coder using Github to learn a trendy new programming language, or a hobbyist coder interested in contributing to a project on Github, you’re not welcome anymore.

Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that. There’s one subscription for Github Ruby, another subscription for Github Python, another subscription for Github Java, and so on [these are all different comp languages, it's stupid to differentiate between them]. If you have a Github C subscription but you’d like to browse Github C++, get your credit card out"

Stable my ass..

This comment also pissed off Baradai at the time, and he lamented in an interview to Newsweek if I remember correctly. Look here is the problem, a sec state's coworkers are other government officials as well as his / her own. You develop relations with them, and want to keep working with them. That's natural. But this is not revolutionary material, not by a long shot. Plus, US governments foreign policy has always been an extension of its trade policy. Put all these together, while State Department looks less aggressive compared to some other US agencies and departments, it still is responsible for furthering US agenda abroad, however that agenda is defined by a central, concentrated government. Period. We need to remember what ex sec state Colin Powell told a French official before the Iraq War: "I am not who you think I am".

That actually could've been the title of this post.

"[Jan 25, 2011] U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also said that the United States believed that the government of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, in power for three decades, was stable [..]"

The popular TV show Entourage is back. The season premiere ends with a great remix of an Eminem song btw, they play it starting at time index 5:09.

The Murdoch thing, tho a nice development, seems like a well planned move to pressure Reps in US to agree on raising the debt ceiling (by pressuring Fox News, and conservatives). Goal #1 for The Integrators in US is the ability to get into more debt, so the charade can continue indefinitely. In their minds, whoever can get into more debt wins because at time t, they will always have the edge compared to other countries. You can spend more on military, R&D, pull more people, whatever, just because you are spending more than your equals. And the cycle continues. Believe it or not, living beyond your means is a strategic advantage.

But.. the music will have to stop at one point. The system is rotting from within.

The Economist: “A SAMURAI would never write software!” barked a senior executive at one of Japan’s biggest electronics firms, as drinks flowed at a dinner party. His view is widely held in Japan. Monozukuri (making things) is macho. From sword-forging in feudal times to machines and microchips today, real men toil tirelessly to make things you can see. [..] But [..] such attitudes are looking increasingly out of date. Writing business software is now a growing business in Japan. The country’s large electronics companies are buying into the sector [..]

Software firms typically make fatter profit margins than hardware firms. The best ones easily hit 30%; electronics firms struggle to reach 5%. The software business needs fewer people and less capital; handy for a country with a shrinking population and tight-fisted banks. Jobs at big electronics firms are scarce, and the work is sometimes boring [..].

Japanese code has tended to be inferior, says William Saito, an entrepreneur who sold his software company to Microsoft years ago. This is because it mirrored the shortcomings of Japan’s business culture: it was written in a hierarchical way that outsiders would have trouble building on, when the trend in America and Europe was exactly the opposite. A transition is under way, however"

It's useless to badger the US public with doom and gloom scenarios, and/or begging them to pressure officials. The public's current mood is one of apathy. They simply do not care. When officials say "raising the debt ceiling" the public hears "we want more money", and this is not a message that will get them out of their chairs to do anything. I feel similarly. I supported the first bail-out. I do not support raising of the debt ceiling now. Let the chips fall where they may.

Toffler: "We think of bureaucracy as a way of grouping people. But it is also a way of grouping "facts." A firm neatly cut into departments according to function, market, region, or product is after all a collection of cubbyholes in which specialized information and personal experience are stored. Engineering data go to the engineers; sales data to the sales department [..].

Until the arrival of computers, this "cubbyholism" was the main way in which knowledge was organized for wealth production. And the wondrous beauty of the system was that, at first, it appeared to be endlessly expandable. In theory, one could have an infinity of cubbyholes.

In practice, however, companies and governments are now discovering that there are strict limits to this kind of specialization. The limits first became apparent in the public sector as government agencies grew to monstrous proportions, reaching a point of no return. Listen, for example, to the lament of John F. Lehman, Jr., a recent U.S. Navy Secretary.

In the Pentagon, Lehman confessed to his colleagues, so many specialized cubbyhole-units had sprung up that it is "impossible for me or anyone at this table to accurately describe. . . the system with which, and within which, we must operate.""

Newsweek: "[Defense Secretary] Gates is also looking to cut the Pentagon’s civilian bureaucracy, which has added a thousand new staff since 9/11. Around the time of the attacks, Rumsfeld reckoned that 17 layers of officialdom lay between him and a line officer. A recent internal study, Gates says, found that “in some cases the gap between me and an action officer may be as high as 30 layers.” (In 1948, when the Cold War began, the secretary of defense had a deputy and a staff of three supervising 50 employees; today, he has 26 political appointees running a staff of 3,000.) The outcome, says Gates, is “a bureaucracy which has the fine motor skills of a dinosaur.”"

How Things Change

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.”

– Barack Obama, 2006