Smári McCarthy`s blagoblag on Yaxic.org

New Years is my favorite of all festivals. There aren’t many I know who relate with the same fervor, but honestly, there are few events that make me as happy as the dawn of a new year.

Of course, the date for this festival is purely arbitrary. I feel it should be on the day commonly known as the 22nd of December, and I feel that the entire calendar should be offset accordingly. But that’s a bit … heavyset, I suppose. I mean, this has been our calendar system since somebody decided to use it. Oh, wait. There’s a thought.

Somebody did decide to use the calendar we’re using. That decision was made. There isn’t much reason to change a good and working system - if it works, don’t fix it - but still, we must remember every now and then that things like this were the results of decisions. Decisions made by people. People making hard choices. People who dared do that which needed to be done.

So for the next year, I think people ought to consider being more frank, more deliberate. I think people ought to go with their gut feeling more. Do that which needs to be done.

Make the year 2008 a year of prosperity, a year of progress, a year of change. Also, make it a year of decisions. Hard ones, easy ones, good ones. Come now. It’s about time we get some shit done.

The greatest tool we have is the propaganda of the deed, but this should be used peacefully. The true propaganda of the deed is doing magnificent things and being noticed. Furthering humanity. We’re worth the effort. Really.

In short, Happy New Year. Have a great year 2008. Cheers!

UNHCR is the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees. Their mandate is to “to lead and co-ordinate international action to protect refugees and resolve refugee problems worldwide”. It’s primary purpose is “to safeguard the rights and well-being of refugees. It strives to ensure that everyone can exercise the right to seek asylum and find safe refuge in another State, with the option to return home voluntarily, integrate locally or to resettle in a third country.”

In their publication The State of the World’s Refugees 2006, their first figure is a table showing the situation of the world’s refugee population:

First off, notice how there are no IDPs “of concern to UNHCR” in “Northern America”. Why they don’t use North America I do not understand, but this is probably to differentiate the Caribbean from the rest of North America, most likely to get Haiti out of the mix with the United States. Fair enough. Now, let’s see, 2006 came right after 2005, right? And in 2005 Hurricane Katrina destroyed thousands of homes in the US, sending tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people from Louisiana and Mississippi out searching for new homes. IDP’s are Internally Displaced Persons: Nationals of a country who, not having left the country, cannot be classified as refugees. Or, “persons or groups of persons who have been forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognized State border.” (my italics)

So. The United States did not classify their IDPs as IDPs. They did not solve the problem - and from what I’ve heard, there are still several people from the affected areas living as IDPs in the US. But what’s more, UNHCR - an international institution - hasn’t had the decency to list these IDPs. Amnesty International has complained, Amnesty America has complained. It wouldn’t be good for the US if word got out that “the most powerful nation on Earth” couldn’t solve its own IDP problem. Of course, strictly speaking, UNHCR can’t do anything about IDP’s. But recognition of their situation is imperative to the improvement of their living conditions.

This is a brief example of how the UNHCR conducts business. This shows that they do sway to political pressure. It also shows that they’re not willing to do whatever is necessary (e.g. pissing off a major financier) to fulfill their mandate. And that is dangerous.

Finally: I am complaining some years too late. By now most of the people displaced by the ineptitude of the US government’s response during Hurricane Katrina will have found themselves at least a semi-permanent place to live. Even if we’re just talking about FEMA trailers.

A standard RFC for human readable encryption keys apparently exists. RFC 1751 defines nice human readable keys. Not as deeply thought out as some of the stuff Vinay and I were considering this summer, wherein we were searching for sets of unique phonemes that were easily pronounceable and identical through a host of the world’s languages; the benefit of this being that a native speaker of Hausa and a native speaker of Malayalam can potentially exchange encryption keys verbally without any problems. But this is excruciatingly difficult to accomplish, viz-á-viz our success to date.

RFC 1751 is very Anglosphere-centric, as implicitly acknowledged by Daniel McDonald in the RFC. For the purposes of exchanging keys with other Internet users, who are predominantly English speaking at least as a second language, with a growing contingent of Chinese natives with less general understanding of English, this RFC is sufficient. But for the purposes of assignment and exchange of public/private key sets with, say, refugees at a refugee encampment, the assumption of English as a spoken language is faulty at best.

Why should people at refugee camps have public cryptographic key sets? There’s plenty of reasons. I should enumerate them. Not now. Later today, perhaps.

Marcin Jakubowski and his team at the Factor E Farm have made the prototype Compact Earth Block press. Check it out:

I talked to Marcin about it earlier,. Here’s a transcript

Smári McCarthy: Congrats on the CEB press. Pretty cool stuff. Could you give me a lowdown on the goals from here on in?
Marcin Jakubowski: The Grand Call To Arms is forthcoming. I’m expanding on the os tech pattern language in the proposal. Developing each tech, such as CEB, to in-house fabrication for earning. So forth. It will be detailed in the proposal.
SPM: What do you want the final version of the CEB press to be able to output, in terms of brick per minute?
MJ: 3-5 bricks per minute. That’s what we’re seeing.
SPM: How easy is it to build? What is needed in terms of tools and materials?
MJ: Drill press, torch, and welder. It’s $1k in materials, running of tractor hydraulics. It is doable without much skill, but you can’t have two left hands. That i, someone trained in shop will do it easily. For myself, I had minimal shop training. I picked up a welder for the first time to complete this device, and the welder ran off a tractor generator. The torch I just got. It cuts metal like butter. All these are unskilled tasks with respect to this device. I ended up torching out bolt holes later in the project, as it was much easier than doing it on a drill press.
SPM: Okay, so what about the Tesla turbine you’re working on?
MJ: It needs a lathe and drill press for the tooling. Rest is off-shelf material there. There is also a balancing step for the finished rotor: put the shaft on two rails, see if it turns. Turning means that there’s a heavier part on the disks, so you need to abrade it off with a grinder. After some of this, the rotor is balanced, so it won’t vibrate when spinning.
SPM: Okay, so what’s the predicted output and cost?
MJ: Boy, I explain this technology pattern language in my paper, I suggest you wait for that. <grin>

So enough about that. The rest of our chat we just discussed progress on Iceland’s first Fab Labs, including a meeting in early January I’d rather not say too much about just yet. We also went into some depth on the Tesla turbine front that isn’t really juicy, mostly just grant money politics and Cabalesque musings on how to get more people active.

In short: There is a LOT of stuff happening although I’ve admittedly been extremely lazy most of December. Early January I’m going to have to really push myself. And now that I’ve finished watching all the Battlestar Galactica (re-imagined) episodes that have been made, perhaps I’ll be able to focus. Being a Sci-Fi junky is hard sometimes.

The English word ‘milieu’ is interesting. It means surroundings or environment. It’s related to the Danish/Norwegian word miljø, which also means environment.

I traditionally use the winter solstice festival to catch up on reading, and using any downtime in my book-inhaling to watch movies. This year I’ve been wasting a disproportionate time playing on NES and Wii, but still, I’ve gotten some reading done…

Neil Gaiman wrote a rave review of Cory Doctorow’s new novel Little Brother, which is coming out early next year. Cory did a podcast of chapter 12 that really got me looking forward to reading it. Cory Doctorow’s novels so far have been superb, if a little bit shaggy on the sides - they have a feel to them that I don’t get from many other authors… it’s like a feeling of freshness mixed with a certain delightful naïvety that doesn’t actually stem from being mis- or ill- informed, but rather from the selectivity of ranting: much like myself and most of the people I care to associate myself with, Doctorow is a prolific ranter and he can hardly open his mouth without every utterance being firmly laced with his deepest political opinions. I like it. Most people don’t. Which is why he holds back in his fiction, and it’s refreshing. I suppose the only other author who’s had a similar texture is Nicholas Pelling, but the book of his I read (The Curse of the Voynich) is non-fiction and isn’t intended to feel that way… hmm.

Just a few hours ago I finished reading Clio Cresswell’s Mathematics and Sex, (which Hörður lent me, thx) a short but interesting yarn about that which the name suggests. She doesn’t go into any depth, remaining overly superficial for the benefit of the less mathematically inclined readers, and thus doing a great disfavor to people like me who actually know where most of this stuff is coming from. That said, the book helped me understand certain subtleties of the construction of experience-based differential equations to describe physical phenomena, and how to cleverly apply them to modeling things such as attraction. Picking up chicks is never going to be the same.

The other book I’ve finished since I arrived in Vestmannaeyjar is Charlie Stross’ Singularity Sky. It touches on several of my favorite subjects, such as political freedoms, digital fabrication and synergetics. It’s a must read for everybody who wants to gain a deeper understanding of the consequences of post-scarcity economics, physical cornucopia and the importance of the freedom of information. That said, not a lot can be said about the actual plot of the story without divulging a lot. Just read it. Seriously. (Oh, and I want to read the sequel, Iron Sunrise, I think it’s called)

At Halli’s recommendation I watched Sci-Fi Channel’s The Lost Room. It’s good. It contains several over-used plot elements and sticks a bunch of secret societies into the mix, but it pulls off the entire thing with a charm that’s been missing from reality-based Sci-Fi for quite some time.

I also finally managed to find time to watch Robert Rodriguez’ Planet Terror. Good flick. Nuff’ said.

I’ve got a lot more books to read, quite a few I forgot here in Vestmannaeyjar when I left last August…

… I had written up quite a bit more, but it got lost due to a flaky Internet connection. This is why normally I write blags into a text editor first. Damnit.

There is a morbid take on the rules of life:

1. You must participate
2. You cannot win
3. You cannot break even
4. You cannot quit

Although I love the futility for its own sake, I think there’s a loophole a lot of people have missed.

For the last hundred-or-so years, most production has been controlled by corporations, that function by leasing time from people they called employees and using that manpower to achieve certain goals, which were not necessarily the goals of the employees. Rather, the goal of the employee was to provide himself and his family with resources required to survive.

Employees do not care where those resources come from, although in recent years there has been a signifiant trend towards employees seeking job satisfaction: wanting to play a bigger part in their contribution to the corporate goals in exchange for greater rewards both physical and spiritual.

This has emphesised the flaw in the corporate economy: the corporate market was not designed for people but for companies, and to survive within it as individuals these ambitious people must sacrifice their beliefs and primary goals (i.e., feeding their family) in order to fulfil the corporate agenda.

But as we have seen with more modern corporations such as Amazon, Google and Facebook, there exists an innovative group of people, who collectively are known to each others as “hackers”, who strive to change the rules.

Kobayashi Maru: If you cannot win the game, change the rules.

These people have been circumventing the regular methods of corporate governance and dilligence, creating in their stead a corporate entity wherein the person comes first. They are still bound by the arbitrary conditions placed upon them by the legal framework they function within, but to an ever increasing degree they are free. The market is being taken over by people. Real people.

This leads us to a stunning conclusion: Not only is technology about people, markets are about people. In the words of the Cluetrain Manifesto: Markets are conversations. Markets thrive when their entropy is maximized, and their entropy is controlled by end user interest. That is to say, if there exists a product that nobody is interested in, there will be very little activity in the vicinity of that product.

Note I said “end user”. Calling any member of a market a “consumer” ignores the contributions that member makes to the market. No market could exist without end users, it’s true, but likewise no market could exist without producers. To wit, most end users are also producers.

We are taking over. The time of the corporation is ending. No longer will we allow all our time to be governed only by artificial needs. We are end-users, but we are also producers. We demand that corporations respect that. That they bow to the will of the people. Because in the end that’s all you are: a collection of people working towards a common goal. If you can’t get every unit within to agree on that goal and benefit directly from it, you’re going to lose a lot of very valuable synergies. And we don’t care.

Interesting campaign.

I just finished reading Velimir Khlebnikov’s Artists Of The World!, in Anastasia Skoybedo’s translation as published in the Pusteblume Journal of Translation. Link (PDF). There he makes the assertion that certain sounds have correlation with certain geometrical properties and attempts to sketch a table of these sounds and properties whilst calling upon the artists of the world to create a writing system that accurately depicts this correlation.

     “Thus, from our landing of the staircase of thinkers it has become apparent that the simple bodies of language—the sounds of the alphabet—in essence name types of space, and are an enumeration of instances of its existence. The alphabet, common to many peoples, is a concise dictionary of spatial world, which is so close to your, artists, art and to your brush.”

Although this experiment will need several iterations before it reaches fruitition, I believe he may be on to something - something many others have been on to as well. From Neil Stephenson’s Mediaglyphics to John Wilkin’s Real Character (odd connection there) and throughout the entire omniglot repository, people are always trying to take language and abstract it to a level of maximal entropy: get as much out of every glyph as you can. The Chinese writing system is a great example of success in this, but simultaneously fails in many respects, as it is neither simple, concise, nor transparent although several base symbols are. (viz the Chinese glyphs for paddyfield, ⽥, and strength, ⼒, that combine to make the symbol for man, 男.)

But the reading of Khlebnikov’s text reminded me of the classical synesthesia experiment of Booba and Kiki. After having read quite a bit about synesthesia, and having actively sought out written works by known Synesthates, I’m leaning very much towards Richard Cytowic’s idea that synesthesia may be inherent in humans but to a varying degree, much like skin pigment, to take a frequently cited example of the variety of humans.

In part due to Cytowic’s promotion of the condition of synesthesia it has become something of a pop-syndrome, so to speak, along with Asperger’s syndrome in certain naïve circles of impressionable geeks. But that doesn’t change the fact that most of these conditions are quantitative rather than qualitative, and that some people may simply be more something than other people. (Insert obscure reference to the well ordering principle here)

So is there a geometrical connection between language and sound? I think so. Try it: Which is “Booba” and which is “Kiki”?

When you’ve answered correctly - as almost everybody does - go read Khlebnikov’s essay.

Also worth reading (in this context):

• The Man Who Tasted Shapes by Richard M. Cytowic
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
• An Essay Towards a Real Character, John Wilkins

References:

• Pusteblume, Spring 2007 edition. Editor: Mathew Kelsey
• Codes, Ciphers and Other Cryptic and Clandestine Communications, Fred B. Wrixon
• The Kanji Dictionary, Spahn & Hadamitzky
• The Mathematics of Lewis Carroll, Smári McCarthy
• Synesthesia on Wikipedia

I’ll be popping over to Vestmannaeyjar later today to spend the midwinter celebration with my family. I’ll be back in Reykjavík on January 2nd, 2008. Until then expect only intermittent blag entries. (I’ve queued a few though that will appear at intervals…)