Charles Hope and the Luminous Top

Conglomerate Yourself

(originally posted here on 9 Dec 2005)

Yahoo! buys delicious.

Yey, now my personal linkfarm will be analysed in order to make money with social network engineering. And I can’t even export my bookmarks to avoid an google/yahoo/generic-other-global-we-track-all-of-your-community-steps-actor service. shit!

Yahoo! makes the Flickr signup page look more Yahoo!ish.

I’m sure Yahoo told our Flickr buddies: “We love Flickr as it is and promise not to change it … much.” The Flickr folk were probably too busy counting the zeros on the check in front of them, and missed that little disclaimer. Sellouts.

Economies of scale. Is there any room in the future for small businesses in any industry? Chain stores are clearly outcompeting other businesses, reformating Manhattan into a copy of everywhere else. It’s a more advanced ecosystem, crowding out and dooming the others to obsolescence.

Is the condition for this bloom (its eutrophication) natural or artificial? In other words, is it a natural evolution of advanced economies, or are the game rules being skewed by Big Business to favor Big Business? Murray Rothbard observed

In short, the intervention by the federal government was designed, not to curb big business monopoly for the sake of the public weal, but to create monopolies that big business (as well as trade associations of smaller business) had not been able to establish amidst the competitive gales of the free market. Both left and right have been persistently misled by the notion that intervention by the government is ipso facto leftish and antibusiness. Hence the mythology of the New-Fair Deal-as-Red that is endemic on the right. Both the big businessmen, led by the Morgan interests, and Professor Kolko, almost uniquely in the academic world, have realized that monopoly privilege can only be created by the State and not as a result of free-market operations.

What is the fewest number of entities the Earth can contain? If everyone decided to throw all the planet’s capital into the pot of a single corporation, would that be a stable state? I can hear the argument now: democracies may or may not war against each other, but corporations certainly don’t war against themselves.

Blogging in E-prime

(originally posted here on 13 Oct 2005)

In a comment, Julie said:

The simple fact that objectivity is an impossible achievement for any human journalist is one of the main reasons why so many people have begun to question if tranditional media outlets really do have a monopoly on “the truth.”

It reminded me of E-Prime, a dialect of English without the verb “to be”.

The “A”-type statements (Standard English) all implicitly or explicitly assume the medieval view called “Aristotelian essentialism” or “naive realism.” In other words, they assume a world made up of block-like entities with indwelling “essences” or spooks- “ghosts in the machine.” The “B”-type statements (E-Prime) recast these sentences into a form isomorphic to modern science by first abolishing the “is” of Aristotelian essence and then reformulating each observation in terms of signals received and interpreted by a body (or instrument) moving in space-time.

I have found repeatedly that when baffled by a problem in science, in “philosophy,” or in daily life, I gain immediate insight by writing down what I know about the enigma in strict E-Prime.

E-prime and blogging achieve increased objectivity by revealing the narrator’s subjectivity in the transaction.

Thushara Delrokshi: exploited, dead, not forgotten

(originally posted here on 19 Aug 2005)

An 18 year old Sri Lankan maid hung herself early morning Wednesday, at her host’s house in Sidon, Lebanon.

Daily Star:

The victim was identified as 18-year-old Sri Lankan Thushara Delrokshi, employed by Hilal Nasser and Rima Faour just 20 days earlier, having only arrived in Lebanon on July 22.

As’ad AbuKhalil:

The lousy Hariri rag (Al-Mustaqbal) even mocked her death: they said that her love of her country has killed her.

thisisthepope :

I grew up in a household where Sri Lankan maids were treated worse than animals, sent to the “office” for disciplining, made to sleep in attics, made to eat leftovers, locked indoors with their passports confiscated.

Al-Jazeera:

They forced her to work impossible hours, giving foot massages until 2 am then rising at six to make breakfast. And for half a year, the Arab family that hired Lisa, a Filipina maid, paid her nothing.

I can’t stop crying.

Beatrice Fernando:

After I jumped off the balcony, I blacked out. I woke up later in the hospital, paralyzed. Eventually, I got a flight home to Sri Lanka . I didn’t speak much about what had happened to me.

maids-online.com:

We are a recruitment company that recruits housemaids from Sri Lanka and the Philippines to Lebanon and around the world. Please use the navigation menu on the top to browse through the site…

log4j.xml inside your jar

(originally posted here on 24 Jul 2005)

Ever wonder how to ship a jar with a log4j.xml inside it? In the jar’s main class, use

static // loads before anything else can
{
   /*
    * If log4j.configuration system property isn't set,
    * then assume I'm inside a jar and configure
    * log4j using the config file that shipped in the jar.
    */
   if (System.getProperty("log4j.configuration") == null)
   {
      URL url = ClassLoader.getSystemResource("log4j.xml");
      DOMConfigurator.configure(url);
   }
}

Aggregating Divergent content?

(originally posted here on 18 Jul 2005)

Sunstein is looking for an analogy between the information aggregation of free market prices, and Wikipedia. But prices take the form of numbers; content in a convergent language. Wikipedia entries are written in divergent natural languages.

We could say that the Wikipedia article converges upon the average, mainstream narrative, but in some cases, that doesn’t even exist.

Convergent Languages

(originally posted here on 18 Jul 2005)

Languages fall into two categories.

Convergent languages are Formal Systems; the words have well defined meanings, sentences are subject to deduction, and arguments can be proven. I call them “convergent” because historically, discussions carried in such languages tend to converge upon agreement. Examples of such languages are mathematics, computer languages, chess notation.

All other languages are divergent. Over time, discussions held in these tend to diverge as ever more sides argue over an increasing number of disputes. Natural languages obey this property, as religious, political, and philosophical discussions spawn more factions each century.

“Convergent” is a usually a good synonym for “objective”.

Stringent application of the Verification Principle of the Logical Positivist philosophers denies the concept of “meaning” to sentences written in divergent languages. (Upon reading this, the usenet troll was enlightened.)

Test-driven development turns the process of software design into a convergent activity, by establishing a method of verifying the meaning of the work.

Real-time prices for South African peasants

(originally posted here on 15 Jul 2005)

Textually writes:

Farmers in the rural community have become the first in South Africa to test a project giving them instant access to produce prices over their cellphones.

Real time prices are hot. So is cutting out the middleman. Those middlemen were not parasites, however. They were providing a useful service as information brokers, but no career in Information is safe from the disruptive effects of the silicon chip.

Good prices are more important than they seem. The failure of socialism is due less to its cliched neglect of human nature, and more to its inability to provide accurate prices! The most egregious example of a parasitic-seeming  information broker might be the Arbitrageur who makes millions simply trading dollars for yen, earning a profit on the differences in value, but also eliminating them and stabilizing the currency markets. And finally, here is a fascinating piece about the scuttled terrorism futures market and the fallacy that orange juice prices are a spookily effective predictor of crop weather. Prices are good, but they’re not quite that good!

A pathway to many abilities some consider unnatural

(originally posted here on 08 Jul 2005)

You know you want it.

The data starts dumb: a piece of plain text or a configuration file ending in .rc, .properties, or .ini. They are only simple lists with the most basic form of structure; the name/value pair. But that trivial step begins the enrichment process. Special sectioning codes may then be added. Perhaps comments are introduced to allow authors to enter notes to each other which the parser ignores. If the size of the document grows large enough, and values are repeated, the humans editing them get sick of using search and replace, and the specification expands to include some sort of variable. Once variables exist, it’s a short step to try to use them for conditionality so sections of the document are activated only if a variable is set to a certain value. Inclusions seem reasonable to support, allowing common functionality to be separated into commonly invoked files instead of requiring that each file stand independently.

Further usage will be eased by introducing looping mechanisms to eliminate the pointless repetition of large sections of content that differ slightly or not at all. And once loops are available, one already has a simple scripting language. At this point the pretense of the declarative format is dropped, and efforts to add power to the language are regarded as improvements. It might start to distinguish text from numbers, it might gain access to network or Operating System features.

If the new format is taken seriously, larger projects are created and require maintenance. The solutions depend on the era: the goto command could be censored for the ideal of Structural Programming, code could be isolated in objects that model real-world things, or, concerns could be isolated into interwoven aspects. Now this format — which began as a configuration file format — is a real programming language.

Perhaps no single entity has made the entire journey from properties file format to programming language, but there is a constant pressure towards greater expressive power. Real languages have evolved from rather humble beginnings. Macro lists for IRC clients have become scripting languages capable of authoring 200K applications. Microsoft Word’s scripting language only needed to introduce some small intelligence into text documents, but ended up as a layer with the capacity to support viruses. Linux firewall configuration files already support variables and simple execution flow control.

There are only two forces pushing in the opposite direction. With added power comes added complexity, and many scripting and programming languages are beyond the capability of the uninitiated. And, more complex languages often require processing steps between source and executable. But these are the only reasons. The final encoding for any information is a real programming language. The most advanced and general way to report the number “5″ is to cut to the chase past all intermediate stations and implement a method, in an object oriented language, which returns the integer value of 5.

“5″ wants to be code, and ultimately it will.

“Vishnu” is Slack

(originally posted here, 25 Jun 2005)

Whenever sacred duty decays
and chaos prevails,
then, I create
myself, Arjuna.

To protect men of virtue,
and destroy men who do evil,
to set the standard of sacred duty,
I appear in age after age.

Bhagavad Gita, chapter 4, verses 7, 8

---

In all its central planning, government is forever declaring the major combat operations are over, whether in foreign or domestic policy, only to discover that its real struggles and battles last and last. A good example is in the area of foreign trade. If a good or service is more efficiently produced abroad, the logic of the market will reassign production patterns until they conform. An attempt to protect domestic industry can do nothing to change this reality. Instead, protection only increases prices for consumers, subsidizes inefficient firms, and brings about ever increasing amounts of wasted time, work, and resources.

Working Around Leviathan, by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

---

Those who wish to change the world
According with their desire
Cannot succeed.

The world is shaped by the Way;
It cannot be shaped by the self.
Trying to change it, you damage it;
Trying to possess it, you lose it.

Tao Te Ching, verse 29