Smári McCarthy`s blagoblag on Yaxic.org

I took a few moments just now to translate the beginning of Practical Details in Equitable Commerce by Josiah Warren into Icelandic. I was out walking and reading as I often do, and the words gripped me.

Núverandi ástand samfélagsins, hvort sem við lítum til þessa lands eða annars, er ástand gremju og ringulreiðar. Þótt tíma og auðlindum, að marki sem reiknast seint, hafi verið eytt í tilraunum til að kenna og stofna til Réttlætis, Manngæsku, Trúar og FRELSIS, höfum við séð þess í stað sterkari tilhneygingu til að auðlindir og vald gegnsýri allt samfélagið, á þann hátt að Réttlæti, Manngæska, Trú, Frelsi og Líf er nánast hundsað.

Trú á löggjafarvaldið fer minnkandi. Sérhvert ríki heims fer þverrandi; samfélagið, eins og skip í dimmum stormi, er rifið og því kastað af mótverkandi kröftum; vald mannana við stýrið sekkur niður í veikburða tilburði barna; okkar mölbrotna samfélagsmynd er ekki lengur stýranlegt, og við virðumst fljóta að óþekktum áfangastað.

Frá öðrum enda samfélagsins heyrum við byltingarópin, og kjörorðið er FRELSI! FRELSI! FRELSI! Það er hljómur í hverri mennskri veru sem ómar með þessu heilaga hljóðan, en, Æ! bara með hljóðan! Hvar er frelsi í raun? Hvar er það skilið? Hvar er nokkurt samfélagsskipan sem leyfir tilvist þess? Bylting tekur við af byltingu, breyting tekur við af breytingu, öld tekur við af öld í baráttu fyrir Frelsi! FRELSI! hefur verið herópið, og f r e l s i ! síðasta orðið frá nötrandi vörum deyjandi píslarvotts–en þó er frelsi enn ekkert nema hljóðan. Það vísar ekki til nokkurs ástands í siðmenntuðu lífi; það hefur enga frumgerð í samfélaginu; en, líkt og fögur tónlist í næturró, það brýst fram að eyrum og tælir sálina, og deyr svo út, og skilur ekkert eftir nema minningu um horfinn hljóm.

I retained his capitalizations, italics, etc, even when in stern opposition to Icelandic spelling and grammar, so as to keep the voice in which he so passionately wrote this. His writing stinks most profusely of him having lived in the 19th century - he was born in 1798 and died in 1874. He lived in the United States of America, where he formed several anarchist colonies - the Village of Equity, Ohio; Utopia, Ohio (close to Cincinnati); and Modern Times, New York (on Long Island). What little I know of his life is, well, bleak. There is a strong sadness there, and I hope I captured it with my pithy translation.

I’ve recently been reading Ernest Rhys’ rendition of the Voyages of Captain Cook. I’ve been meaning for quite a few days to write up this passage:

These people appeared on the whole to be the outcasts of human nature; their only food was shellfish; and they were destitute of every convenience arising from the rudest art. Nevertheless they seemed content; so little does refinement or luxury promote happiness!

There. Done

I just started thinking… A couple of months ago I received the chapter from Brian Thacker’s new book, Sleeping Around, for reviewing. The chapter is about, well. Me. More or less. It’s about Iceland, with myself as the central character. Each chapter has Brian exploring a different couch in a different country, making what amounts to a very interesting look at the social movement that Couch Surfing, the Hospitality Club and Global Freeloaders is.

The chapter is hilarious, although I’m not sure I’d want anybody related to me reading it. I did show my brother the chapter, and he made a good humorous jab at me based on stuff from the book. There’s a few things that are… well. In the words of Jói (who also appears in the book): “Ömmmmm… SPES”.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing the book, whenever it comes out. Brian, consider this a poke.

If there’s any one thing you should do this weekend, it’s read Cory Doctorow’s new book, Little Brother (free download). It paints a very realistic (if exaggerated) picture.

Good books I’ve been reading the last couple of days:

• Out of Our Minds, by Ken Robinson
• Democratizing Innovation, by Eric von Hippel
• A General Theory of Magic, by Marcel Mauss (gift from Steinn E. Sigurðsson)
• State of Fear, by Michael Crichton

Actually, the last one in the list isn’t all that good. Hörður lent it to me after having implied that it would change my stance on global warming. About 130 pages in it’s far closer to changing my stance on Michael Crichton’s writing abilities from “not bad” to “oh dear” - it just isn’t very well written, unlike most of the Crichton stuff I’ve read before. There’s still 500 pages wherein he could change my mind dramatically, but… well. I just find it hard to write off something like global warming as a conspiracy of academics and tree huggers. The reason:

Cause → Effect

People didn’t start talking about global warming until they noticed signs of it. This cause-effect relationship is a strong one.

Anyway, stuff waiting to be read:

• Reaper Man, by Terry Pratchett (gift from Ester Sif Kristjánsdóttir)
• Overclocked, by Cory Doctorow
• Cellular Automata and Complexity, by Stephen Wolfram
• Critical Path, by R. Buckminster Fuller

I went to see The Golden Compass on Saturday with Alli and Simmi. Good flick, really entertaining, and Dakota Blue Richards really pulled off her role with flying colors that, well, most of the other lead actors mostly weren’t there to follow up on.

However, the mathematician in me awoke to one facet of the movie. The eponymous compass (pictured) shows 36 symbols on its face, and there are three hands that select the parameters of the question, and one hand that returns the “truth”. Okay. So this is a function f: Z₃₆ × Z₃₆ × Z₃₆ -> Z₃₆. Which basically means there are only 46656 questions in existence, and only 36 different answers.

Granting leeway for contextual interpretation, we understand these 46656 questions are indeed innumerable - but it also means that every conceivable question can be reduced to one of 46656 proto-questions, or that there are indeed 46656 different sets, and each question belongs to at least one of these sets and no question belongs to any set outside of these. Further, there is a many-to-one relation mapping each of these 46656 sets to members of set consisting of 36 elements, giving us a reduction factor of approximately the cubic root.I really wish life were that simple.

But ignoring that kind of thing… it was a good movie. I look forward to the sequel. I wouldn’t mind reading the novels either… but the book Interface by Stephen Bury (a.k.a. Neal Stephenson & J. Frederick George) entered the top of my stack today when I accidentally ambled in to Nexus with Alli. Whoops.

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.

Amazon Kindle was launched recently, selling out within 6 hours. I wasn’t even aware of it’s existence until Þór pointed it out to me, and I watched the associated video. And you know what? It’s awesome. But for totally different reasons than the video says.

The makers of the video were extremely subtle. They were smart. Hackish, even. Most people probably missed it.

The first page shown on the Kindle is a page from The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, one of my favorite books, if not my absolute favorite. And well, I found this to be quite the statement. Iff you’ve read The Diamond Age you’ll know that the alternative title, a young lady’s illustrated primer, refers to a nanotechnological book that the protagonist, Nell, acquires by accident. Here, the folks at Amazon are saying, “hey, you, pay attention, the future is here, this is the next step towards the primer.” And I’m pretty sure they’re right

And I think they’re not the only people who can make that claim. Having done a little bit of playing around with the Linux version of the Android SDK the other day and watching a couple of videos related to it, I’m tempted to select Android rather than Java ME as the primary development platform for the medical diagnosis project that I’ve avoided mentioning on this blog until now. Without going into any details, I’ve teamed up with Birita, Vinay, Jói and a few other people on building a cellphone based expert system for field first aid and triage. I’ve been calling the project Triage Regional Integration for Coordination and Organization of Rescue and Disaster Emergency Relief, as an bit of a pun, as the capital letters spell out the name of a fictional device for much the same purpose. I very much doubt it’ll be called anything close to that when the system leaves the draft form. I digress.

The project is already bearing fruit, perhaps most notably a working draft of an open XML standard for ontology definitions. And it’s attracted some (limited) attention from folks and organizations here and there around the world, even though the specifics are being kept in rather hushed tones so as not to raise any false hopes just yet. The primary problem, as I see it, is that there’s only one of me and my free time is being split rather brutally between the CNC project, this project and a few other things I’ve got up my sleeve.

The key reason not to use Android at the moment is it wouldn’t actually work on any real phones for some months, and it wouldn’t actually work on the two billion or so cellphones in circulation for years. The key feature of the first aid thing is vast distribution, but that can’t happen if there’s nobody who can use the software. But, there is another thing. Android is Java, which means that the core of the app could be written abstractly irrespective of the system, and then bindings be written for Android and Java ME explicitly. This would mean that we’d be able to participate in the Open Handset Alliance’s Android competition, which would mean a potential $25,000 award in March and a quite a bit more if it wins even further. On that bar, screw Java ME. On the other hand, Java ME needs attention. See my conundrum?

Regardless of how we end up solving the engineering and marketing problems, it is clear that with things like Android and Kindle, the Diamond Age truly is near. And if you’ve read the book, then you’ll notice that the theme calls for small scale democracy and large scale anarchy. Which is truly an amazing idea.

(note: Both the Kindle and the Android are based on Linux. Is Open Source winning? Clearly.)

In the months since my server went down and I became temporarily isolated from the Interweb and the Blagosphere, I’ve actually managed to get some reading in. Here’s the read list since I went offline:

• Iron Council, China Miéville
• The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell
• Freakonomics, Steven Levitt & Steven …
• The Road, Cormac McCarthy
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, JK. Rowling.
• Choke, Chuck Palahniuk
• The Long Tail, Chris Anderson
• Fragile Things, Neil Gaiman
• Survivor, Chuck Palahniuk
• Sjálfstæði Íslands 1809, … Briem
• How the Irish Invented Slang, Daniel Cassidy

No Internet Equals Increased Productivity?