Category Archives: Nerdy ruminations

Bow ties for self-confessed geeks

The traditional geek (or nerd) attire usually includes a bow tie, and since not many people wear them anymore (though some pretty interesting people did), I suppose any Internet as bowtiebow tie, taken seriously, is a geek bow tie. According to my good friend Bill Schiano, there are only four professions allowed to wear bow ties: Lawyers, physicians, academics – and circus clowns (more on this here.). Initially I wore bow ties in deference to my two academic mentors, Jim and Benn, the latter who refers to his bow tie wearing as a "cheap way of earning distinction" among other reasons. Now I wear them because, well, I got used to them. Beats fashion, and according to the New York Times, the bow tie is back this year. That’s the great thing about being obstinate about your wardrobe – sooner or later everything will be in vogue again.

Incidentally, the only real bow tie is a self-tied bow tie. Instructions here. Make sure you don’t tie it too perfectly, though – slightly askew is the thing, aim for rakishness bordering on the sloppy, an at all cost avoid the pre-tied curse.

As all geeks know, the Internet is shaped like a bow tie, which is another reason for wearing them. At least it used to be, though this figure is Web 1.0, created before blogs and social software became prevalent. I assume a more current version would have a beefier knot.

Anyway, for a true geek – where do you get your bow ties, and what kind? There are lots of companies, but most of them sell the boring formal ones, the preppy ones or things you would not be caught dead in. My personal favorite is the Beau Ties company, a small outfit in Maine which produces good quality ties in interesting patters. Here is a selection for the geekily inclined:

One of my personal favorites (actually, my favorite bow tie, adorning my web page) is based on the geekiest artist of them all, M. C. Escher (and if you don’t know why, that is because you haven’t studied the mandatory literature). This one is called the Escher blue, there are many other varieties, but I like the color as well as the intricate design:Escher blue pattern

Here is one for the Boingboing kind of geek/nerd, a space invaders pattern:

Space Invaders bowtie

More Escher, this is the classic fish-duck-lizard pattern:

Escher fish-duck-lizard pattern

Here is one called "greyhounds", also Escher:

Bowtie Escher greyhound

This one is a design based on a MOSFET diagram:

Bowtie Mosfet 

Lest this turn into a Beau Ties advertisement, here is an introduction to the weird world of the wooden bow tie (repeated piano warning). Shown below is a dark stripe version, made from maple/walnut and other woods. (Since this is not a self-tie, it is a no-no for me, though.) A few years ago there was a company selling bow ties made out of clear acrylic (kind of like plexiglass) with inserts in them (barbed wire, for instance), but they seem to have folded:

 

A side effect of bow ties is that they provoke people, something I have found to be true on panels and other discussions, even on TV. It helps your argument because your opponent is busy looking at your neckwear and you can surprise by being more reasonable than people thought possible. I may backfire if you take yourself seriously and get Jon Stewart as a visitor (video), but overall the effect is good, methinks. Besides, your students will remember you, even if you don’t.

retrogoogling

Here is goosh.org, a UNIX-like interface to Google. I like it – wonderful how a sparse interface can improve productivity. It is almost so I start to long back to the days of Desqview and all those other text-based multitasking hacks of the 90s. (Mind you, this is just an interface, no full Unix shell.)

(Via David Weinberger.)

You are what you eat, and we eat oil

Michael Pollan: The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, 2006

Michael Pollan is the author of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, where he basically took on the flood of diet advice and replaced it with “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” In this book, he discusses the problem of what to eat today, which is not something most species wonder about, either because food is scarce and they will eat everything they can lay their hands on, or because they are so specialized that they can only eat one kind of food (like koalas and eucalyptus leaves, of pandas and bamboo shoots and leaves.) This choice is faced by all omnivores, such as humans.

The book tracks down the history of three meals: One industrial, one pastoral (i.e., organically grown), and one personal, where Pollan had to make everything himself, including hunting down the meat. Or, in other words, one meal from industrial society, one from the traditionally agricultural, and one from a society of foragers. The further back you go, the more he has to fudge the experience (and the same goes for the producers/foragers, I suspect.)

The industrial part of the book talks about corn, a plant that supplies the basis for most of what we eat (from corn flakes to meat (cattle now eat corn rather than grass) to sweeteners). Corn is highly productive, but cannot exist without human intervention. The rather twisted logic here is that the productivity of the farmer destroys farm life, and may destroy food as well.

The organically grown part is based on an analysis of an organic farm (“small” organic as opposed to “big” organic such as Whole Foods) which relies on local markets, crop and species rotation, and quality rather than quantity for profits. Back-breaking work and battles with a regulatory regime set up for industrialized farming (for instance, the meat processing plant needs to have a bathroom specifically for the USDA inspector).

The foraging part, of course, verges into the artificial – Pollan hunts feral pigs, but does it by SUV and with a high-powered rifle with a scope. But it is fun, and allows for some pretty interesting discussions of our relationship to food.

The book is full of interesting viewpoints and facts, and tells you things that you did not know – for instance that “free-range” chicken means that the chicken have access to grass and air. However, since they only live 8 weeks and have access to grass and air through a door that they don’t dare venture out of, having always lived inside, this does not mean the chicken has had a life that much different from the fully industrialized chicken.

Here is one quote I liked (page 293): “The adult human brain accounts for 2 percent of our body weight but consumes 18 percent of our energy, all of which must come from carbohydrates. Food faddists take note […]”

In other words, the book is the supply-side prelude to In Defense of Food. I have not read that one, but it is on my list of books to read, triggered by Omnivore’s Dilemma. In the meantime, I listen to his talk at Google, and so can you:

How free is the Internet?

Semi-liveblogged notes from a seminar at the Nobel Peace Center, Oslo, arranged by the  Norwegian Board of Technology. I ran out of battery towards the end, and had to leave before the final session. (On the plus side, the Nobel center has free and available wifi, which I deem a Very Good Thing indeed):

Introduction: Bente Erichsen, head of the Nobel Peace Center: Parvin Ardalan, one of the founders of the One Million Signatures initiative to protest discrimination against women, could not come as her passport has been confiscated by the Iranian government and she is not allowed to leave Iran. Ingvild Myhre, Chairman Norwegian Board of Technology: Increase in state-sponsored censorship on the Internet.

Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet Law at Oxford and founder of the Berkman Center:

Filtering the Internet is hard compared to most other networks, because of the "best-effort" routing, otherwise known as "send-and-pray". Impossible to filter in the cloud, but at the point of the ISP you can filter. Examples include geographical filtering (movie releases, newspaper articles in the US about British law cases, Google.de removing neo-nazi material from the index, videos about various things at Google Video made unavailable by the uploaders (check-box solution)). In China, Google states that due to local law, some search results are withheld. ChillingEffects.com now gets the letters that Google receives with take-down notices. Microsoft implemented a filtering of their msn blogging system to satisfy the authorities (though it leaks like a sieve). This "check-box" form of filtering at the source is likely to increase. This not need to be measurable at the net itself: In Singapore, your expressions can cause you to lose our house to a defamation suit.

Much harder to measure surveillance than blockages. China has experimented with various measures. For a while, Google.com was redirected to a Chinese University search engine. Blocking access to content is a "parking ticket" offense, Various sites are blocked (drugs, pornography, religion, some political issues.) Saudi Arabia has a pretty clear filtering policy, quite open about it, not much fervor.

Filtering at the device. Access is shifting from PC to cell phone and other locked devices, and many of these new endpoints are controlled by vendors and thus open to pressure.

Many technology companies are at the horn of a dilemma here – witness Google’s dilemma going into China. Sullivan principles offers a middle way (started out with apartheid in South Africa), now written into American law (at precisely the time Sullivan repudiated them.) Are there ways to work with the government to concede to some of the restrictions while doing the ethical thing?

Many other services: Livecastr allows direct filming from cell phone, LiveLeaks, WikiLeaks, psiphon – allowing people to see Internet the way you see it. Automatic translation now at the point where it allows chatting between two speakers.

Jimbo Wales: Can Wikipedia promote free speech?

Wikipedia is a freely licensed encyclopedia written by thousands of volunteers in many languages. Now the 9th most popular website on the web. 12th most popular in Iran. How global? Follows Internet penetration, basically – large in English, only 15,000 articles in Hindi despite 280 mm speakers of Hindi.

Wikipedia in China: First block June 2-21, 2004, then September 23-27, 2004, then from October 19 2005 until now. Lately, BBC and Wikipedia in English has been unblocked, unclear why, probably Olympics. Wikipedia in Chinese has more than 170,000 articles, 12th largest of all Wikipedia. More Chinese speakers outside of China than there are Dutch people anywhere. Mistake to think of this as written outside China – the firewall is porous and of the 87 administrators, 29 are from mainland China.

Censorship in China is discreet and done at an industrial level, the aim is not at individuals. Most youngsters know how to get to Wikipedia. If you set up a mirror you will be shut down, but the Chinese authorities have avoided having sad stories about people being arrested for reading Wikipedia.

Core point: Wikipedia is free access. You can copy, modify, redistribute, redistribute modified versions, and you can do this commercially or non-commercially. Baidu redistributes Wikipedia (except the pages they censor) in China (though they put "all rights reserved" on it).

Quality? German Wikipedia compared to Brockhaus, in43 out of 50 articles, Wikipedia was the winner. Not an archive, not a dump, not a textbook. Not a place to testify about human rights abuses, but the place to document human rights abuses in a neutral way. Want to be an encyclopedia, access to knowledge should not be censored, therefore Wikipedia does not take the middle ground and refuses all kinds of censorship. Jim thinks Google does a huge mistake, but theirs is a considered decision and they are sincerely trying. As customers, we should put pressure on Google. Force Google to tell us what they are doing in China to change the policies they now have to abide by.

Every single person on the planet? Available in many languages, but many of them do not have many articles. Showed a video of Desanjo, the father of the Swahili Wikipedia, wrote day an night, recruited people, now 7000 articles. Have now started the Wikipedia Academy in Africa, will start many of them.

How do you design a space where people can engage in conversations? Make it open – like a restaurant that people want to be in.

Discussion: 

(I didn’t catch all of this discussion, partially because I participated in it. Notes a bit jumbled, will edit later.)

How powerful is Wikipedia? JW: More powerful than we like, especially a problem with bios of living people. We have the flag "The neutrality of this article is disputed", which I wish some newspapers would adopt.

Can you have a neutral point of view on human rights? JW: You can represent something in a neutral way, representing the different views. For instance, you can be neutral on abortion, saying that according to the Catholic church, this is a sin.

Things going in the right direction? Zittrain: Hard to say, social innovations such as Wikipedia tend to overcome attempts at censorship?

(My question, which was only partially answered.)What are the power implications over time for Google and Wikipedia. Both are on the ascendant now, profitable and popular, but does there need to be a different contribution model for a more stable wikipedia, and what happens when google no longer is running at a huge profit?

Mark Kriger: What worries you about the Internet five years out, at the edge of chaos? Zittrain: At the edge of chaos is suburbia: The tame, controlled online lives where things are OK, there is no reason that one bad apple can spoil everything. Jim Wales is now working on Wikisearch, more transparent about the search ranking. You don’t have a lot of investment in your use of Google, it is easy to switch, but that is not the case with many of the other services that are out there. Some regulatory interventions would be good about giving people the right to leave and easily take their information with them.

Citing Elie Wiesel: The opposite of good is not evil but indiffernence. Do not see the Internet as a shopping mall, keep it moving.

Part II: Ce
nsorship on the Net

In the absence of Parvin Ardalan, a movie from Iran about the million signatures movement was shown. It calls for equal rights for women in terms of judicial protection, divorce, inheritance and so on. A number of women have been arrested for collecting signatures. Parvin Ardalan was one of the organizers of this movement, and she has been arrested for this and has received a 2 year suspended prison sentence. She could not come, but the actor Camilla Belsvik delivered the speech for her:

  • Internet censored in Iran, but remain the most active medium for discussion of women’s issues. It has given women power, which has upset the power balance in families and between wives and husbands, and given them a mean of entering the public sphere.
  • On the Internet, women can connect and find a place for expression about their private lives. Especially for young women, using blogs, this has been especially important. They can talk about their romantic and family relationships, power structures, violence and sexuality.  This was a revolutionary development for them.
  • Some women have attained public identities even though they write anonymously.
  • Internet came to Iran during the reconstruction area in the 1990s and became more available during the reform years starting 1997. Women’s activism has been there, but in small groups. The reform period allowed more freedom of expression, but press permissions for women were few, especially for secular women. The reform period ended, and many were shut down. Many publications then turned to the Internet, as did NGOs were women were active.
  • Issues of feminism and sexuality are taken more seriously online. Gradually, filtering and blocking has become more severe. In 2004, the Ministry of Information technology ordered the words "women" and "gender" to be filtered, with the excuse of blocking pornography.
  • A large problem is self-censorship on politically and culturally sensitive issues. Women’s rights is politically as well as culturally sensitive.
  • There is a lack of laws, meaning that much of the censorship is arbitrary and haphazard. It is normally left to the judge to decide, since there are no clear laws on what is permitted and what is not.
  • The One Millon Signatures campaign was launched in august 2006. It aims to collect one million signatures on a petition to the Iranian government asking for equal rights for women in Iran. It has done much to focus the efforts on women’s rights in Iran.
  • The changeforequality web site has been blocked more than ten times, but each time a new domain name is registered and it continues publishing. Four of the activists have been arrested, but the struggle will continue. The action can serve as a model for movements in repressed societies everywhere.

Zittrain: Comments on censorship in Iran. (dicsussion with Helge Tennøe)

Pervasive censorship in Iran, web sites have to be licensed, many topics are not allowed, such as atheism. ISPs can be held responsible for criminal content. Very precise censorship, the ISP is responsible. The government is not monolithic, there are struggles inside the government, first they were excited about broadband, then you need a license to have anything faster than 128 Kbps.

Why do they have Internet in Iran at all? Very few states explicitly rejects modernity – Cuba and North Korea are some of the very few. Most states want the economic effects of the Internet. It is rather haphazardly enforced, though. Iran filters more stuff than China, but China tries harder to filter the relatively few things they filter.

The US government has actually contracted with Anonymizer, to provide circumvention software for Iranians, and for Iranians only. Rather primitive, and filtered, of all things, for pornography (the stop word "ass" means that usembassy.state.gov was filtered)

Radio Tibet – a radio in exile

Øystein Alme – started broadcasting in 1996, the Chinese have been jamming. Still the program is getting into Tibet. Øystein got involved as a backpacker many years ago, came back home and started reading up on Tibet, started Voice of Tibet. Now has fifteen employees, one in Norway, the rest is in Pakistan and India. Main channel into Tibet is shortwave radio, in China it is the Internet. Have spent a lot of time studying how to avoid Chinese jamming of frequencies, which are reserved for Voice of Tibet.

China is a repressive state, where the party dominates despite only having 6% of the population as members. (If you strip off those who are members because they need the membership to get a promotion in their job, not many remain). China has signed up to the articles on Human Rights, but break their promises with impunity.

Internet use in China is growing dramatically. China’s Internet police number 50,000, censoring made possible with foreign technology companies such as Google. One journalist, Shi Tao, got ten years for an article criticizing the government – and he was found thanks to information provided by Yahoo.

But the Internet is also the hope for change – with it we would not have the images from Tibet, for instance.

Discussion: Zittrain, Alme

Alme: Companies such as Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and others should join forces and together resist the policies of the government.

The Chinese government also use the Internet proactively, to push their point of view.

Zittrain: These companies could also offer business reasons for privacy, for instance offering encrypted accounts for business conversations.

Movie from Iran: a recording studio with bombs going off outside. During the Israeli siege of Lebanon, hit by 15000 missiles, a country of 4 million people under siege that we hear very little about. Zena el Khalil is an artist currently based in Beirut. Her blog from Beirut during the siege of Lebanon in 2006 was followed by a number of people as well as newspapers, who found it a valuable addition to official sources.

She talked about how her blog and others both changed the world’s perspective on the war and documented it: Lebanon is lacking in history since so much of it is rewritten by the warring parties. She also documented how Israeli attacks on a power plant created an ecological disaster, as oil spread as far north as Syria and even Turkey.

Here’s to hoping for a barren Mars

Nick Bostrom discusses the consequences of finding sign of life on Mars. Finding it would be a bad thing, he argues, since that would imply that the evolution of intelligent life starts easily and ends inevitably. Much better to find a barren Mars, indicating that we have already made it past the Great Filter of evolution and can look forward to a future for humanity.

(Via Tim O’Reilly.)

Canon LBP2900: Good personal workhorse printer

While I am on the subject of my technology setup, let me pause briefly to sing the praises of my Canon LBP 2900, a small laser printer which lives unostentatiously next to my home office desk.

It was cheap and  prints lots of pages before the cartridge runs out. I haven’t done the numbers, but it is rated at about 2,000 pages per cartridge. That means four packages of paper, and I am sure I have used much more than that on the first cartridge (since I print primarily text.) It is quiet and more than fast enough for personal printing (shared by about 5 computers, hitched to a workstation). Produces crisp printouts, but can be a bit tricky with envelopes (but I use a different printer for that anyway). The only real drawback is that it can take a while before it warms up and spits out the first page, but once it gets going, it is very quick.

One of those things that you buy and forget about (or, as Jerry used to say, it Just Works). Economical and reliable. Recommended.

Evernote interview

IT Conversations has an a conversation with Phil Libin about EverNote’s new memex. I installed Evernote a couple weeks ago and have become a loyal user – what a place to just dump every note you take, every picture or web address or whatever. The paid version (which I will acquire in due course) can recognize handwriting and writing in pictures. Evernote essentially duplicates those bound notebooks that people carry around to meetings to take notes in. I am getting an HTC TyTNII tomorrow. It runs WME and I will see if Evernote works there as well. Highly recommended.

We shall overcome AOL

Good article by Timothy Lee on how network neutrality sometimes can be forced on network companies through rapid technology development and sharing on the client side. As a long-time Trillian user I have personal experience of the example he uses. And anyone who has seen a teenager swap SIM cars in a cell phone will know that flexibility is not limited to developers.

Greatest teaching tool, ever

Imagine having this tool (from Umeå University) for teaching physics and math to children. Not to mention art, construction, mechanics, you name it…..

Via Ben Goldacre. 

Time and money

Thinking that time is money costs you time. And money.

OK. Gotta run to fix a few mistakes I made because I had to run.

MacWorld keynote in Twitter time

You can "listen" in via Twitter at http://twitter.com/macrumors, which now has 10000 subscribers. Talk about creating an fan following.

I am hoping for a Tablet version of the MacBook Pro,  preferably a 15-inch twist screen. That would make me a Mac customer.

Update post keynote: Well, Twitter had som hiccups, but macrumorslive.com has a good summary. As rumored, a very thin subnotebook, but not tablet, tough it does seem to have some of the iPhone screen controls. We’ll see, I just might go for it. The thinness and lightness seems a big plus.

Negroponte II

Ann Zelenka has a reflective review of Nick Carr’s new book The Big Switch over at GigaOM.

(The reference to Nick Negroponte is because of the term "switch" – back in the late 80s, Negroponte predicted that what was going through the air (TV) would go through cable, and what went through cable (telephone) would go through air, known as the "Negroponte switch".)

I, too, remain unconvinced that the move to net-centric computing will result in job losses overall. More people produce more content to be consumed by markets that previously did not consume at all or could only afford a little.

Have you sat down with your friends for a Youtube-based rock video night yet? I have. Would have cost a fortune just five years ago, now you can do with an old TV, a laptop with an S-video cable, and some $80 speakers.

Internet imminent death significantly exaggerated

The Economist posts a silly prediction about how the Internet is facing gridlock. Marc Andreesen (now, there is an interesting feed for the old blogroll) skewers them with relish, and Techdirt applauds.

In short, life goes on. With bandwidth.

Spamstopping

Bruce Schneier found this post about CAPTCHA implementations, which led me to this post on bot detection.

Unsurprisingly, there is no one solution – and it matters not as much what you do as how well you do it. 

(Yeah, I know – marginally relevant. Just teaching The Machine here.) 

Jipi and the paranoid chip

I just stumbled across this wonderful little story by Neal Stephenson: Jipi and the paranoid chip. Just the thing to assign to my students for the discussion of whether computers can be smarter than human beings some day.

In typical Neal Stephenson fashion, it has some of the meandering storyline of a shaggy dog story, with witty details on technology and economics. But fun, especially with the little twist in the penultimate sentence…

Better believe and be wrong than the opposite…

Stephen Fry (it looks like I will be pointing to every single one of his "blessays" analyzes global warming and basically says we should respond to the climate crisis even if we are not sure about whether it is true. This seems to me to be very much like the old saw about religion, that it is better to be mistakenly religious than mistakenly atheistic.

As for climate credentials, I am sorry to report that I drive an old car. But it is comfortable, and I think that what I pollute in terms of gas is made up for by the fact that I do not contribute to the deteriorating climate by driving up the demand for new cars, which are environmentally costly to produce.

So there.

Of course, there is the possibility that the debate itself is leading to global warming…. 

Profiling Astrology

Malcolm Gladwell exposes criminal profiling as astrology, seen as valuable because people remember the parts that were true and forget the parts that weren’t.

I have heard that Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter, used to say: "If you are going to predict, predict often." At some point, some of what you say will be right.

Leopard review

Good review of Mac OS X 10.5, commonly known as Leopard, over at Ars Technica. I am still pondering a new laptop – if only Apple would make a Tablet version of their Macbook Pro, then the decision would be easy….

Cleaning up the computer

Nifty little program: Duplicate File Finder. Works like a charm, allows you to delete, and looks at content rather than name and time. Highly useful for a quick spin-through. And delightfully devoid of "user-friendly" bells and whistles. (Incidentally, set a minimum file size of at least 1000 bytes – or you will find out how many empty files your computer contains.)

Firefox tracks phishing attempts

I normally have no problem weeding out phishing attempts, but today I inadvertently clicked on a mail (not a link) which opened a phishing page in my browser. Firefox was right on it, however, and this was the result:

Firefox phishing warning 

I rather like this functionality – which I didn’t even know Firefox had – and I really like the design of the warning: Shade the offending page, display the warning prominently, and give the user the option to decied (both for this and, optionally, for the future) whether this really is a phishing attempt or not.

Excellent!