Week 48

Christmas markets are as much a part of German national life as the 14 July festivities are French (in Nice nearly 100 people died in a similar attack). That makes Monday’s attack seem like an unmistakable act of terror, apparently motivated by jihadism.

It may well turn out to be someone who had come to the country as an asylum seeker. But Merkel’s appeal at that subdued press conference was for the country to distinguish between terrorists and refugees, and to keep faith with her version of what it is to be German. “We will find strength for the life we want to live in Germany – free, united and open.”

In one sense, everything the chancellor said was intensely political. She faces elections next September, and her fate is a preoccupation for all of Europe. Yet there is a difference between conveying a potent political message and politicking; and not so much as a zephyr of politicking appeared to ruffle the trademark Merkel demeanour – reassuringly impassive as a dumpling, as always.

There was no overt concession to those colleagues who fear that her refugee policy, the subject of so much criticism on the right, is likely to eat savagely into her – and their – majority. Nothing explicitly betrayed the challenge she will face from her partners in government, the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), who are ramping up the pressure on her. There was certainly no nod in the direction of the far right’s charge that the casualties of Monday night’s attack were “Merkel’s dead”.

Merkel has established herself as the best and strongest voice of the values of a liberal Europe, and her steadfastness under pressure – at least her rhetorical steadfastness, for her policies have been modified to accommodate some of her critics’ concerns – is a beacon in a continent that is increasingly inward turning, nativist and afraid.

Yes, Indirectly

Through representatives in Congress or the Executive.

Not through monkey referandums.

"If most voters are uninformed, [should they] make decisions about the public’s welfare?"

Question

Are people better at deciding on people than issues?

Yes

There is especially some magic in the many choosing the many (campaign funding reform can improve the situation even better). Things can go awry in many choosing one, but still, you have to take the bad with the good, it works out in the long run.

Bill Clinton

[From My Life] Then we came to [a small town called] Center Point [..] a little place of fewer than two hundred people. The black notebook said the man to see was Bo Reece, a longtime supporter who lived in the best house in town. In the days before television ads, there was a Bo Reece in most little Arkansas towns. A couple of weeks before the election, people would ask, “Who’s Bo for?” His choice would be made known and would get about two- thirds of the vote, sometimes more.

Thought Leader, Old School

This is pre-Internet, but the dynamic has not changed. People nowadays find thought leaders through much more varied media, but they still find them. We like to outsource. We outsource mechanical tasks to mechanical tools, detailed, bean-counting computation to calculators, then computers. It's no concidence we outsource political thought to others.

This dynamic should not be poo-pooed. The town folk chose Bo, they must have seen some qualities in him. If Bo stopped exhibiting these qualities, he would cease to be their guy.

Fast-forward to today, is there chaff among today's thought leaders that are seemingly more varied? Sure. But they all comment based using the same backdrop, and they are not aliens. There aren't that many obnoxiously different conclusions you can arrive given the existing system on major issues.

Like this guy, Glenn Beck. This man used to do all kinds of conspiracy theories, talking non-sense on random stuff, and be bitch-slapped by Jon Stewart every other week because of them. Look at him now. Improvement?

Question

Any advice to movie makers?

Please stop blowing up parliament buildings by perps in Guy Fawkes masks

Lobby.

Trump picks climate sceptic Pruitt for environment chief

Not Good

CBS News

People who got their election news on Facebook might have been looking at more fake stories than real ones. Buzzfeed News concluded [..]

Sore Losers

A lot of news outlets are probably pissed to be losing so much revenue to Facebook. That is actually understandable, in a way. I don't believe fake news on FB is a big problem.

TechCrunch

[L]ast night Mark Zuckerberg published a response to accusations that “fake news” on Facebook influenced the outcome of the U.S. election, and helped Donald Trump to win.

The CEO claimed that at least 99% of news content on Facebook was “authentic.” Zuckerberg wrote:

“Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99% of what people see is authentic. Only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes. The hoaxes that do exist are not limited to one partisan view, or even to politics. Overall, this makes it extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election in one direction or the other.”

That's Probably Correct

HuffPost

Italy’s political troubles have deep economic roots. Much of the media, and the analysts on which it relies, have provided a misleading narrative on the current political problems in Italy, following Sunday’s “no” vote on a referendum on constitutional changes. It has been lumped together with Trump, Brexit, the upsurge of extreme right-wing, anti-European or racist political parties and “populism,” ― which in much of the media seems to be code for demagogic politicians persuading ignorant masses to vote for stupid things. “Stupid things” here is defined as whatever the establishment media doesn’t like.

Right

[Trying to argue against climate change] We get a lot of things wrong in the scientific community

Yes, but you are not part of the scientific community

Meyers made the point well.

Question

But scientists can take so many extreme (interesting!) positions.

They can

But scientists are driven by publish-ability of their ideas - you don't get published by repeating what the other guy says. These people's entire being is centered to live on the fringes, to push the frontier, to find what is new. They'll know the core really well, otherwise you cannot make the jump to the next best thing, but the core is not interesting to them. That is a different need from the needs of the policy maker. Policy makers cannot go around and throw out random ideas just because it sounds interesting, and/or "might lead to something".

I guess some also like to flirt with academese because it gives them some sort of imbecilic legitimacy - Gellner said it best - "[nation-states are based on a] a pyramid at whose base there are primary schools, staffed by teachers trained at secondary schools, staffed by university-trained teachers, led by the products of advanced graduate schools. Such a pyramid provides the criterion for the minimum size for a viable political unit ".

And everyone wants to imagine they are at the top of that pyramid, don't they?

News

Millions Mourn As Rocker/Activist Ted Nugent, Age 68, Found Alive

Ha Ha

Cory Doctorow

For decades Hollywood has treated computers as magic boxes from which endless plot points could be conjured, in denial of all common sense. TV and movies depicted data centers accessible only through undersea intake valves, cryptography that can be cracked through a universal key, and e-mails whose text arrives one letter at a time, all in caps. “Hollywood hacker bullshit,” as a character named Romero says in an early episode of Mr. Robot, now in its second season on the USA Network. “I’ve been in this game 27 years. Not once have I come across an animated singing virus.”[..]

It’s about time. The persistence until now of what the geeks call “Hollywood OS,” in which computers do impossible things just to make the plot go, hasn’t just resulted in bad movies. It’s confused people about what computers can and can’t do. It’s made us afraid of the wrong things. It’s led lawmakers to create a terrible law that’s done tangible harm.

Great

There are all kinds of misunderstanding on technical matters. Also on what and how scientists do what they do.

Holywood / TV Land keeps going back and forth between the Rainman model - the autistic savant that can compute but is anti-social, or hand-waving generalist, the "idea guy" who can't do anything on his own. There is something missing in both of these representations.

Scientists use mathematics to outsource their thinking. Math is hard but it's a language, you learn it, you use it. The optimal way to use it is through derivation, not memorization. Know the core, derive the rest. Know enough of these derivations, concepts, you can combine that at the right moment and produce something as though it came from memorization / raw computation. Scientists also focus intensely on details, but on the details of general concepts. There some bean-counting thinking, but you can't escape it all. Some is necessary.

Samsung Voice Recognition App

"You have to be connected to the Internet to use this app".

Seriously

The average smartphone today is at least 30,000 times faster than the one used on the Apollo mission which put a man to the moon. You are telling me you cannot code this thing to recognize simple voice commands?

Smartphones are about mobility, and mobility is about intermittent connections, not constant connections. Big IT companies may want to be part of the loop inside that user-app-service cycle, but that doesn't mean the coded up abomination (app) will necessarily have a good design. A smartphone needs to do most of its work, as much as possible, without connectivity.

BTW, the mapping app I mentioned here, I ended up coding it. Now I have an Android app that shows me where I am; with detailed streets etc. Swipe left, right, up, down you get maps in other directions. All city's maps, in PNG images, are in one zip file. It only took 20 MB to store them. No f***ing cloud connectivity needed.

Question

But isn't cloud computing useful / necessary?

Depends

For hosting, even providing corporate services over the Internet, it's fine. I am talking about consumer facing mobile applications which have little need for transmitting data. Rule #1 for IT development: put processing as close to data as possible.

The Atlantic

Are Democrats Wasting Their Time Taking On the Electoral College?

Yes They Are

Question

Does the US Congress in have enough say in governance?

It Does

The Congress is extremely powerful in US. The founders designed it that way and with good reason. There is less chance of getting it wrong through the many choosing the many than the many choosing one. The singular person, the executive can go insane, then what? Congress can override President's veto (happened once even to Obama), if things get really bad, President can be impeached.

Here is an interesting tidbit: some say JFK felt compelled to do something during the Cuban missile crisis, because if he didn't he was afraid he'd be impeached. Hah! I believe the whole thing was botched up from the beginning, with the placement of missiles in Turkland, etc. but.. anyway. The story shows how impeachment always looms large in a President's mind.. that's good. It's good they feel the fear of God a little.

Question

How about fake news on Facebook?

I'd Worry About This Guy More

That's Rupert Murdoch, and the paper he is holding is his. The headline reads: "Abu's Been Sleeping In My Bed".

24/7 mass-media seems to want to "generate" news these days when it can't find enough of it. This causes all sort of problems, I believe the dilution of parliament's power is directly connected to these fuckers looking for something new and shiny, central characters all the time, and turning the information flow into a popularity contest. Trump plays them well, always feeding them something to buzz over, but the entire process is screwed.

Question

How do you get your news?

With a little script

Here. That tiny program collects headlines from major sources, produces a clickable list of headlines, ~20 pages worth. You only need a few seconds of connection, and I have a file I can view offline. Done and done.

import feedparser, sys, codecs
import re, requests, random, os
import re, time, os
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup 

def strip_html(input):
    return BeautifulSoup(input, "lxml").text

def getnews(outfile):
    feeds = [
        ("Reuters (Top News)",'http://feeds.reuters.com/reuters/topNews',-1),
        ("Reuters (World)",'http://feeds.reuters.com/reuters/worldNews',-1),
        ("Reuters (Business)", "http://feeds.reuters.com/reuters/businessNews",-1),
        ('BBC','http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_world_edition/front_page/rss.xml',20),
        ("Independent, The", "http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/rss", 10),
        ("Bloomberg", "https://twitrss.me/twitter_user_to_rss/?user=business",15),
        ("The Atlantic", "http://www.theatlantic.com/feed/all/",10),
        ("Deusche Welle (World)", "http://rss.dw.de/rdf/rss-en-all", 15),
        ("The Guardian","http://www.theguardian.com/world/rss",10),
        ("Deusche Welle (Europe)", "http://rss.dw.de/rdf/rss-en-eu", 15)
    ]

    fout = open(outfile, "w")
    fout.write('''
    <html>
    <head>
    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/static/main.css" media="screen" />
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"/>
    </head>
    <body>
    ''')

    for name,url,lim in feeds:
        fout.write("<h3>" + name + "</h3>\n")
        d = feedparser.parse(url)
        for i,post in enumerate(d.entries):
            try:
                if lim > 0 and i==int(lim): break
                link = post.link; title = post.title
                summary = strip_html(post.summary)
                fout.write("<a href='%s'>%s</a><br/><br/>\n" % (link, title))
                fout.write("%s<br/><br/>\n" % (summary))
            except Exception as e:
                pass
    fout.close()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    dir = os.environ['TMPDIR'] + "/news.html"
    print (dir)
    getnews(dir)

Police union demands Amazon to remove 'Bulletproof Black Lives Matter' shirt.

Hell..

That's one shirt that needs to be bullet-proof doesn't it?

Question

What is this "data science" I keep hearing about?

It is Probabilistic IT

IT concerns itself with automating reporting, decision making, but its actions are deterministic. I move $100 from account A to account B, $100 gets deducted from A, added to B. Maybe there is a rule that says "if the amount is > blah do blah" - all these are predetermined.

With Probabilistic IT there is also reporting, decision making, but reporting, actions are probabilistic. A typical report could be "give me the clusters of customers", let's say 10 customer clusters are "discovered" and reported. Certain outlier customer could end up in one or another depending on algorithmic approach (hence the word probabilistic) but in any case, this is a report, we are trying to automate what an excellent marketing manager would come up with if s/he had 10 eyes and 10 brains to sift through all the data.

I believe in the future this Probabilistic IT will come to encompass all of IT and what is known today as IT will be "core IT". There is already a lot of skillset overlap between the two - both require a knowledge around how to handle a lot of data, interacting with databases, gazillion languages.

SO data scientists should not be treated as "scientists" - they are IT professionals, engineers.

Link

[T]he core issue in the [Israel / Palestenian] conflict has always been the refusal by the Palestinians and their supporters to recognize Israel’s legitimacy and negotiate in good faith a lasting peace deal. That was true in 1947-8 [..]

Incorrect

To be fair, the 1947 "good deal" is a myth.

But hey, the reality on the ground today is that Palestanians lost, and now the better way forward is, IMHO, one-state solution that treats all citizens equally. This is true whether it is in Turkey (for Kurds) or in Malaysia for bumiputera (which they managed well), or non-nationalists (or simply people who aren't inbred conservatives) in Poland. Whoever is in power needs to be accommodative. You can't get to the top job dragging all the petty grievances with you.

Comment

He is a baby-boomer that's why he is rebellious (said a person about someone else born in 1948)

He is not

Baby boomer generation is assumed to be between 1946-1964. But if one looks at the psych profiles closely, the real time window for those different attitudes is between 1951 and 1958. There are exceptions of course, the block is not entirely contiguous - Angela Merkel has it, Vlad Pute doesn't. A quick note: this character attribute is not about being "weird", it is about having an "earthy idealism" - knowing what will work, what can be, what is possible, what is not etc.

Ppl born in the larger window should not fret: they would have grown up / spent their lives around these change makers, and soaked all that up through osmosis.

Also there is another attribute that is close to the baby-boomer one, but shows up more randomly - this is the one Alvin Toffler had for example.

Comment

How do you know so much about the profiles of people?

That's right..

I. D. D. Q. D. mothaf--ka. Better believe it.

(Juz kidding...)

#santa

[-]

This could be a good reading for lefties - there is some nice gems in there.

#srnicek #book