Here and Now

Cosmic savages?

2011-10-29T16:26:00.000-07:00

Imagine a prehistoric tribe of savages, who only recently became brave enough to get for themselves a fire that falls from heavens, bring it into their cave and domesticate. When it's cold and dark outside, they all huddle together around their helpful but dangerous protector, humming their proto-songs, fixing their proto-clothes and probably munching their proto-processed food until most of the tribe falls asleep and only the guards would spend their shift watching over the fire, lest it died or tried to spread too far around.

Now imagine that this tribe begins to be interested in establishing contacts with another tribes. May be they hope to kick the other tribe out of their territory and take their women and stocked mammoths, may be they are afraid that the other tribe would do the same thing to themselves, or may be they are just curious to meet new friends - who knows? In any case, how are they going to look for the new tribe? What would they be looking for?

I can only guess how the savages might think, but I guess that they would probably be looking for an inhabited cave (may be larger and cleaner than their own) with a fire in it (may be larger and mightier than their own). So any time they pick up some fire in the distance, they might send some scouts to find out, if there is any tribe gathered around this only possible source of energy.

Next question, what if somewhere nearby there is a little village where much more advanced civilization lives? (Let's not think how come that the more advanced civilization would not try to bring the savage one to their own level, if only for their own security, by tricking them into selling their savage freedom in exchange for cheap drugs and filling up the lowest possible niche in that other society, being simultaneously a recognized sore spot and a symbol of spiritual simplicity, etc).

This other civilisation, in any case, doesn't need to live near an open fire. They have their fires far away, called electrostations (nuclear or otherwise) and although some people have still work in shifts to watch over the big fire, lest it died or spread out, the majority of these more advanced people gets the energy via almost invisible wires and uses it to power their TV sets, microwave ovens, refrigerators and other devices without which no true civilisation is ever thinkable of.

Imagine a savage scout entering such village at night, when all lamps are out. He (or she, may be it's a matriarchal society) would see strange forms which are impossible to place, occasionally here and there some tiny fires which seem to be too little to warm up anybody, no half-eaten carcasses lying around, no caves with entrances covered by bear- or tiger-skins, no people gathered around a shaman humming some story about afterlife, nothing at all. Only darkness and those spooky lights.

I can suggest that such scout would later tell, "I have come to some dark places. It looks like they take the majority of the territory around us. It's nothing there we could recognize. We might be utterly alone all the way to the end of the world." - end of the world being how far they can go and return before running out of food.

The funny question: what if we are the savages and whatever we now call the dark matter is the infrastructure of some super-civilisation which we can't ever comprehend?

So far, we tried to find the tribes dwelling near the fires of big stars, just like us. But what if there are only the super-civilisations around, and they no longer have to dwell near stars, just as we no longer have to dwell near the open fire, because it would be too risky?

In that case, naturally, taking into account how more advanced that other civilisation must be compared to us, we'll probably spend aeons before ever finding out, all this time possibly being watched ourselves without ever noticing it.

This is completely speculative idea, but so is dark matter at the moment :)

So much for dark matter, as seen from science fiction prospective!

Babylon 5, Vorlons and their riddles

2011-06-17T06:54:00.000-07:00

One of random thoughts due to (re)-watching Babylon 5 (very decent SF series, thanks to Michael Straczynski, the author, keeping true to his policy of "no cute robots or kids" and having the arc of the whole story prior to starting the project - very recommended for those who are into this type of stories).

In the series, there are different alien races represented, some of them "good", the others "evil" (the notions of "good" and "evil" prove to be somewhat fluid). One of the most cryptic races are the Vorlons, who are always wearing space suits, looking like little moving fortresses, can take any appearance depending on who sees them (but would rather not to), do not talk a lot and when they do, it takes a while to understand what they actually meant to say. Every phrase sounds like a prophecy and most of the time the characters (and those watching them) are left to wait until time decodes the messages.

It may well be, that the Vorlons were speaking so little, and then always in riddles, because they haven't been supposed to be using spoken language while communicating with their own kind. From the series it follows that they were using some sort of telepathy to convey information not only between themselves, but also to those who were "enhanced" by them (like Lita, a human telepath; the human telepaths story, by the way, seem to be at least partially borrowed from Alfred Bester's book "The Demolished Man" and one of main human telepathic characters in B5 is also called Bester). Also, even the way the Vorlons looked doesn't suggest that they even had any organs capable of producing speech (which may be one of the real reasons for them always wearing space suits outside of their own quarters).

Therefore, when they used any language, they were literally struggling with the foreign media. Very clever of Straczynski to make the species who do not normally use language talking in riddles... one can imagine that if they were conveying information to each other directly, and if they all shared common source or generic knowledge (some Vorlon Wikipedia everybody could tap into?..), then almost the only issues they might be willing to communicate to each other would be their feelings and points of view. How else to describe the feelings but via metaphors? But how can the other understand, if they don't feel what you feel, and you are not accustomed to describing your thoughts?

Of course, Vorlons are imaginary subjects living in imaginary world, but one might start wondering, what would become of humanity if we will ever acquire ability to communicate with each other bypassing slow ~~http~~ speech protocol? Would we also, in the end, forget how to use speech properly? Would we have to translate old literature individually for every person, depending on his, her or _its_ neuron structure? Would there be any individualities left at all if everybody will always be connected to everybody, or the humanity will change into a sort of humanhill, superintelligent only as a whole?

2011-04-02T13:52:00.000-07:00

In English: "feeling blue" and "black dog"; in Russian: "green ennui" (тоска зеленая). What if the same book in different languages spawns different feelings, due to the different color perceptions of the readers - even if we assume 100% identical "to the letter" translation? (If one can talk about identical translation in this case at all)

It might be interesting to map the unconscious perception of the same text (e.g. from the colors mentioned in it and their associations) across different languages and see if that has any influence on how the book is received...

Speaking about positive associations: in Russian the word for "red" (красный) is also an ancient form of the word "beautiful" (прекрасный). "Красна девица" (literally: "red maiden") is a set fairy-tale phrase meaning "beautiful damsel". So everything which is "red" for a Russian speaker might unconsciously be perceived as positive, being associated with beauty. ("Light-blue" (голубой) has in fact several associations - some of them I won't elaborate upon - but none of them is linked with sadness at all.)

Positive aura of red in Russian is also spread on other red-like colors: "малиновый звон" (crimson ring/jingle, literally in fact "raspberry ring" because the word is derived from the raspberry color) is an expression describing the sound of many church bells around the time when the sun rises or sets (yes, there is a special expression for that) and is supposed to bring into mind the image of peace and tranquillity all over the world. I am sure every language has such very special phrases which can be explained, but not directly translated.

On the other hand, when you are called "white-handed" in Russian, you are accused of being too lazy (or at least, too cherry-picking).

The question is, in view of all that, is there any hope that one day two people speaking different languages and living in different parts of the world, would be able to understand each other fully, due to some arcane technology? As far as I can see, not without being able to place oneself in the other's mind... In any case: passive understanding of new or alien concepts, without any additional effort, seems to be very unlikely...

Robots, robots...

2011-01-15T16:42:00.000-08:00

Just imagine what sort of trouble might household robots bring to the real life, when they will be ubiquitous, connected to Internet and (very possibly) some of them running under Windows. Therefore, virus-prone. (Even if Windows will die under the layers of dust, some other OS might somehow become a virus farm).

Just lo and behold: some 14-year-old h@ck3r bullied by more physically advanced friends, as a revenge, decides to infect the automaton servants of the hostile household. Instead of vacuum-cleaning the carpet, one of the robots suddenly tries to vacuum-clean the kids of house owner, following them everywhere. A cooking robot sprinkles the steaks with 10 times the amount of pepper (let's assume it would not know where to get the laxative). And I would not even begin what the one armed with a lawnmower could do...

First law of robototechnics you say? Yes... only it might well be that the ubiquitous robots, when they arrive, would not be produced by clean and optimally conditioned Western enterprises. Instead, some snotty underpaid kids working their wits out on sweat factories in Eastern Asia (or may be, in Africa... no, that is out of the realm of science fiction already) will bless these devices with a gift of existence. What chances will be that no corners would be cut off in the all-encompassing race for profit? I remember myself walking around the electronic expo in Hannover several years ago. It was the time when navigation devices already started to become mainstream. There was zillion of Eastern Asian shops demonstrating the products which they have essentially copied, more or less well, from somebody else's work. They didn't like their stuff to be photographed, and some of these participants were kicked out after the holders of the original gadgets recognized their offsprings behind the turbid glass... Same happens now with tablets. You can buy a 7-inch sorta-tablet for sorta-money which will sorta-work. Robots will not be an exception.

Of course, the assumptions involving the current social structure are the most error-prone. Social changes are the most difficult to predict: most of fantasy or science fiction writers would rather desribe in as many details as possible the system of fancy clans in some parallel world or the structure of the spaceship having a warp drive at its core, than to go into details of how the society would change. (Stanislaw Lem is a great counterexample). May be in the future there will be no snotty kids providing the rest of the world with cheap devices, sweets and clothing. Or may be, spreading the virus working on robots would be considered a major crime, the graviest thing anyone can do. The human society quickly adapts to prevent itself from self-destruction, and until now it managed to survive...

Nevertheless... I have to confess, imagining the vacuum-cleaning prank made me giggle. Of course, I would rather not be hunted!

2010-12-06T15:13:00.000-08:00

Theoretically, it seems possible to run the social networks like Facebook or Twitter in a decentralized way. Much less so for financial payment providers, like Paypal.

In practice, though, only a small percentage of people are technically able to implement such network (or even just deploy), and only a small percentage within those could be able to do it without consulting Internet. Which does not render this idea very viable.

From the other side, we all already have absolutely decentralized and absolutely viable communication network: its protocol is called language. Every normally developed adult can support this network and even teach the others to support it.

Also, although many of us have never spinned wool or hacked wood, we can more or less confidently visualize how such things could be done, recognize when they are being done, and do them if in dire need.

When (if ever) the ability to make a radiotransmitter, a photocamera, or to establish a server for a social network will be like wool-spinning or wood-hacking, then the world would truly become a different place. Or so my wool-spinning-vaguely-aware mind figures.

Daemons and their powers...

2010-11-15T05:34:00.000-08:00

I have just come across an article on New Scientist site, mentioning Maxwell daemon and its possible real-life implementation.

One thing that bothers me about it (don't I see the obvious?..):

Conceived by James Clerk Maxwell in 1867, the demon exploits the random thermal motions of the microworld. It might watch a tiny ball on a spiral staircase, waiting for it to randomly hop up a step and then slam in a barrier to stop the ball moving down again. If the demon keeps doing this the ball keeps climbing. The potential energy of the ball could then be used to drive an engine.

and regarding the implementation:

Finally, enter the demon, whose eye is a camera and brain a computer that controls the electric field. Whenever the rotor makes some progress in turning against the torque, the demon shifts the electric field so that the rotor suddenly finds itself nudged onto the top of that "step". This keeps happening, and the overall effect is to gradually climb the staircase.

As it does, the rotor gains energy. Crucially, though, the demon need pump no energy into the rotor, only information about the position of the rotor, which it uses to switch the field.

Doesn't shifting the field or slamming a barrier also mean that you make some work? You need to spend some energy to move that barrier and then to lift it again. These two movements cannot cancel each other in the real world because of friction (unless we operate in a real vacuum). Same about the shifting the electric field... Do they really mean that we can disregard friction-like effects in that case?

Regarding e-readers...

2010-08-28T04:03:00.000-07:00

I had some other post in mind, but now I don't remember what it was, so I can at least write this one down :)

I think there are going to be the following use cases for e-readers:

manuals and other tech books (like the ones which can be currently read online at http://safari.oreilly.com ) - these are the books which need to be updated ASAP in case of errata, benefit a lot from having full-text search and community feedback, and many of them aren't relevant after 5 years or so.
Other thought regarding manuals - taking into account popular community projects like - I'll name two I had to look at recently - PHP manual or Programming Scala where community feedback essentially becomes part of the document itself - we can expect that the role of document author will be replaced by the role of project leader, who establishes the guidelines for the documentation and writes first draft, and then moderates the community feedback when necessary. It seems to be natural for a technical documentation to be that open-source.
Now, what else can be great content for e-readers, apart from tech or other manuals? (Foreign language ones can be a good fit also, especially if e-reader also has audio capabilities). I would suggest magazines. Many of us have this situation, when we are subscribed to this and that, we are getting the glanced-paper exemplars bi-weekly or monthly, read them (or not) and discard them afterwards. Daily journals are falling under the same category.
To the same category I'd also put so called "beach literature": the books which can be read only once, like some sort of canned conversation when you can't have one. It's a pity to spend expensive paper on those.

At the same time, I don't think that the paper books are going to die. After all, paper book has life span which is way longer than any e-reader, and it's a medium proven by millennia of human experience. But I do think that spreading of e-readers, along with internet, might significantly reduce the amount of printed information.

At the extreme end it might be even like that (and I would quite like it to be like that): everybody can access the whole body of human knowledge either absolutely free or for some fixed rate (may be a set of rates could be available for different sets of content), and everybody could order a certain book, magazine or journal to be printed out (which would cost extra) - in case he or she wants to have a hard copy. This could be the way to get the advantage of both worlds: not wasting paper on things which are expendable, but preserving information that feels like to be preserved.

Probably, under this model, the books which are ordered often, would still be printed en masse (thus being cheaper). The danger here is that some information might never be printed unless you happen to run across it and appreciate it, and we are losing the possibility to go to a bookshop and rumble through the books, discovering what we have never seen before. We might hope that some publishing houses will still be taking the risks of ordering hard copies of the literature works which they deem interesting. We also should hope that books, as such, will not become a luxury.

At least, I do. By the way, how many new books have you read the last month?.. ;)

Alice, where art thou?

2010-05-07T12:32:00.000-07:00

OK, been there, done that. Just have seen "Alice in Wonderland" (still have red traces upon my nose from the polarized spectacles). And what could I say, as a summary? One word: nauseating.

Obligatory warning: if you still want to see it for yourself, be informed that the rest of this article might contain spoilers.

First of all, there is almost nothing left of the original story, apart from some main personages and a handful of plot threads. As a compensation, there is a lot of the stuff which the author of the original book, I dare to think, would never put in himself. A Galsworthy-made-bigger-than-life kind of society; two stories melt together into one (imagine a first and a second course in one bowl); bits and peaces of fantasy from the previous years that the public has already gobbled down, so the risk of indigestion was probably estimated as low; and on top of all, in the afterglow of the story, a mention of the "wonderful" idea to open a business in China (with Alice and A Serious Guy peering at Maps of Real Wonderlands - was that the idea?). Surely one had to kill a Jabberwock to get to that? Did the Chinese have some share in this franchise?

One light spot in all this was Johnny Depp, of course. He just can't play in a boring way, and Mad Hatter is one of the roles which is almost especially tailored for Mr.Depp. So no complaints here. I can imagine that when the movie was finished he was murmuring to himself: "I was again the best actor in that bleak crowd, especially when the magic voice of Alan Rickman was not interfering with my aura". So be it.

But but but, where is the spirit of Lewis Carrol story in all this? Where is that world with the laws which are both like and unlike the laws of our own world, as if seen from more than one completely different angle at once? Where is the discretion and the subtleness, where is the reality seen as a giant playground rather than a battlefield, as we are so often learned to believe by so many other movies? (And utterly, with the one in question, too). Where are the paradoxes and the silly rhymes?

Some of that did survive, of course, but so strongly vinegared with "life-motivating" quotes and images ("It's only your choice to go to battle..." , the good white queen looking to much like a stuffed Galadriel, cherries in blossom - why don't I remember anything of that in the original books? - and some other cliches which I am too tired to mention).

Thinking about what I just wrote, I could finally summarize it thusly: the original stories written by Lewis Carrol didn't have any moral. At least, the moral was not spelled with big flashing letters on every page. In the film, it is. (I can even understand that - who would finance the movie with a high risk of being misunderstood and therefore financially unsafe? Mass culture, like a fairy tale, has some rules to obey.)

Not sure if I will even want to watch anything Tim Burton will do after that. Especially if he will again decide to tackle the classics. I am afraid for my digestion, you know.

Avatar: the goods and the bads (IMHO and spoiler-rich)

2009-12-20T09:50:00.001-08:00

Yesterday, I have seen the movie Avatar (IMAX version). Can't help compiling a little list of reflections on it (full of spoilers, so if you haven't seen the movie, may be you don't want to read it yet :) ).

GOOD: This was the first time I ever saw the whole movie (3 hours) in 3D. Visually, it was amazing: an alien world which didn't look the same as our own and had many interesting and thought-out details - strangely-looking animals and plants, mountains flying in the sky (hello Myst and Miadzaki), the biological civilization, all inhabitants of which are connected to each other and to their planet (Ursula K. Le Guin, Hainish Cycle, yes?..), flying dragons of different colors and styles bonded to their masters (I have a soft spot for dragons, provided that they fly well above my head ;) ), the technological wonders - skin-thin and semi-transparent tablets which seemed to be the laptops of the future, robots which would make their counterparts from Alien, Star Wars et cetera to cry from misery, glimpses of the spaceship which looked like a bit humanized version of Matrix, definitely with more money involved... yes there WAS something to watch at. THE WHOLE THREE HOURS of very beautifully drawn world.

Which immediately brings up something BAD: the movie was a bit too long. 3 hours, it's on somewhere at the limits of focused attention (_my_ focused attention, at least).

And then another BAD but of a different tint: the movie felt long because at some point, it stopped being logical - even for a fantasy movie (and this was a fantasy movie, in the same sense as Star Wars is a fantasy movie; the technology here only plays the role of setup, but the point of the story is not to test how some _scientifical_ hypothesis can develop, but just to tell a fairy tale which took place far, far away).

I'll elaborate a bit more on that. Fantasy is a realm with very strange rules which are different from our own. But nevertheless, they are present and they should be honored. "All things have rules", according to Neil Gaiman, the author of a movie Stardust which was much lovelier as a book, in my opinion. I have felt that somewhere in the last hour of Avatar, this rule has been broken and after that, the world ceased to be real in the sense of being inpredictable. To me, it happened after the main personage has taken that mightly red dragon who nobody else could have taken, using his own dragon for this (with whom, according to the rules spelled out short before, he should have been bonded for life).

How come? If this was possible, why didn't anybody of the locals try the same trick? Didn't have the vibe? Not a single person with ambitions on the whole planet? They were not supposed to be stupid, after all.

Some other things which felt wrong:
- The pilot lady which refused to comply with the orders and flew home. How come she was not sitting together with the other three guys in the same cell? (Or even worse?) Saying "this wasn't in my contract" sounds like a bad excuse and would not save her from being court-marshalled, had such situation happened in the real life.
- How come that she could still start the plane after she obviously has been stripped of the pilot rank? This seems to be a basic security breach. Can't believe that somebody like the guy who had all that army in his command could oversee such thing. He would have been dead long time ago in this case.
- Wasn't there any winter on the whole planet? (Now OK... this is fantasy so it can happen).
- If everybody was supposed to live in harmony with each other, why did they have warriors for? Why didn't they tame the animals to use for food? (Well OK again... may be it just was more fun to hunt them after all).
- The shamanic ceremony around The Tree of Souls looked very pathetic. I have to show this movie to my 11-year-old daughter to check her feelings, but I am afraid even she would not buy it.

Well, I don't want to finish it on bad note... As a show, it was good to watch. AND it's a real FANTASY movie made with a really BIG BUDGET (no cheating!) But the problem is, this movie didn't make me think about anything else apart from its inconveniences. I awe the hard work of the people who made it (their fantasy is truly amazing), but I hope next time when somebody tries to do a similar thing, they'll pick a plot with more interesting twists.

Dependencies, dependencies...

2009-10-28T16:51:00.000-07:00

Follow-up to the previous post...

People always have been creating works inspried by another works. After all, the books, papers and blogs are just the other modes of communication, and in the everyday communication we do react at something the others say.

Before internet era, though, things were different in the sense of how references have been maintained. If you have been writing a book, you would quote your sources. They were, in principle, localizable. Everything that has been printed has a number of attributes with which it can be more or less unambigously identified: the title, year of being printed, the name of the printing house; later, the ISBN number which is not the ideal solution, but it's fair enough solution to live with.

Therefore, if you read the book and the author is quoting his and her sources, it was always theoretically possible to locate the sources and to find out what the work has been based upon. It was not always easy (suppose the quoted source existed in one exemplar, or was not quoted directly, etc), but it was doable.

Now, we have Internet, and everything is supposed to be stored there forever.

As I write it, Internet is full of derivative work.

Most of the articles have links to the other articles, which in their turn have links to yet another articles, and so on. It's world wide web, so it's normal.

And these links are in fact as firm as the gossamer threads. May be gossamer threads are even better. Ever seen not working links? (I bet any article which exists in the web for more than one a couple of years probably has them, either directly or indirectly).

I can't stop wondering what will become of all this in several dozen years or so. Will there be a big pile of everything, to which every article that has been around long enough would be assumed to go? If somebody in 20 years would want to trace how ideas were spreading via internet, will it be possible to do? Will these sites still exist, will they still be pointing at each other? How to understand what somebody is writing about if his or her references are gone? Unless there would be a searching engine which would have a knowledge about the evolution of internet - may be it will be one more use case for Google or for some other company - temporal data mining :)

A pessimistic scenario is that, notwithstanding Internet, blogging et cetera, everything below a certain level of importance will have the same chance of getting completely into oblivion as the derivative work of earlier generations - or even a bigger one. The letter which the 8-year-old Babylonian boy would scrabble on the calfskin existed as an object, and would continue existing until purposefully destroyed or until the skin crumbles (which would take many years). The blogs which are hosted on a certain site are obliterated completely if the site closes down and nobody takes care of the content. (Theoretically, information still can exist hidden in the hard drives, but how quickly will the old hard drives be disposed of?)

I hope we will dedicate enough work in the near future to prevent the web from losing its structure with time. Keeping the dependencies will be quite difficult part of it... I am very curious how this problem will be solved. If it will be solved.

Blogs quoting blogs quotinig blogs... Once again, what about copyright?..

2009-10-28T11:21:00.000-07:00

As I see it now, it seems that quite some part of blogs around us is nothing else than a collection of links to some other blogs plus, optionally, some comments of the blog author and / or related blurb of the blog followers (which is actually the very essence of the existence of the said blog).

This is, per se, a great approach, although some can say, people are plagiarizing. (Well, some of them just do.) Nevertheless, all these links and images are in fact forming that very context which we are so often missing when talking to the other people. Now, the problem is solved: just look into his or her blog (if he or she took care to put one together) and we can, at the very least, figure out some more interesting conversation topics than weather or politics.

(In fact, a blog post without a link looks like a dead end, or like a book without pictures or dialogues... and I realize, I don't have any one in my mind right now... I guess I'm doomed!).

Two questions, regarding illustrations and dialogs:

1. Who owns the copyright for the pictures people quote?

2. Who owns the copyright for the dialogs (blog followers discussion)?

Both can be an issue.

First, the pictures.

Suppose I want to be a good one and post into my blog an image as a link to an original image which I liked (for example, the one from this page - at the time when my blog is written, this should link to a page with the largest treehouse existing now, I like those). I could have copied the image into my own place, of course, but this would be the copyright breach, so I don't.

Suppose NN years pass and my blog is still alive, but the blog to which I linked to is removed or restructured. Therefore, my link will no longer work, and the image will no longer be available. In the context I was trying to recreate there will be a hole... and as a matter of fact, this can happen any time - even at this very moment - only with different probability.

Moreover, may be the owner of that page has been forced to remove it because he or she could no longer afford the hosting and he or she in fact would not mind at all that people are still keeping the slices from the site? How could this be formalized easily? (It can but right now we don't have these mechanisms in place).

Now, the dialogs.

This is even more vague story.

First, in most blogs any reaction can be deleted by the owner (or edited beyond recognition). What will this make to the fabric of the dialog?

Some blog portals get around this by restricting the rights of the owners (not allowing them to change their replics at all, or allowing this only for a short time, or allowing deleting but not editing, et cetera...) No formalism here either. No guarantee that a sensible talk will not deteriorate with time into a set of chaotic remarks (it does not happen very often now, but there are all technical possibilities to make it possible...)

Am I again way too paranoiac? Well, would be glad if so!

...but I really, really would not want that in a couple of years, it would not be possible to understand what were the people writing about. Granted, Internet is supposed to be a living matter, like a living organism, some structures arise, the others die out... but isn't Internet also supposed to be a place to keep our memories and feelings (and the blogs are very good representation of them!)

Right now, all information appears to be around forever; but the truth is, it isn't. There is so much dependency everywhere.

There is the web archive, of course - but it doesn't keep the blogs as they were, only a couple of snapshots at most, and doesn't preserve the deep structure (like in forums)...

So the question still remains.

For all eternity...

2009-10-26T04:20:00.000-07:00

In memoriam

Eternity, that old Egyptian cat,
Is coiling in the corner for the moment,
Serene and calm, apparently off guard.

But in a whim, all might forever change,
A magic lamp of Chinese porcelain
Gets broken and the little spot of light
Is yielded to the memory, until
It also fades and darkness fills its place.
A swarm of dreams, a meshwork of suggestions
Is suddenly eternally promoted
To wishful thinking. Wait... what is "eternal"?
A handful dozen years, and then one day
They'll find your breathless - shall we call it "body"?.. -
Whatever you have left as parting gift
For others, who, with grief or with relief,
Will take the care of putting it away,
For all eternity.

And what of you?
What of that point, from which you could behold
The skies, and plants, and planets, and the people?..
The orphan web of messages in words
And dreams, reflecting light which is no more,
Is no good answer. Where could have you gone?
Eternally unknown. As they say,
When Universe gets tired of work and play,
We'll see each other at the other side
Of starry sky.

It's not to verify
For all eternity.

But hope remains.

Good-bye.

2009-10-18T03:33:00.000-07:00

There was once a person utterly devoted to God. It so happened that he was present at a ship which started sinking. Nevertheless, the person didn't panic, for he was confident that his Lord will see to his safety.
So here he was, in a cold water, when a boat passed by with some lucky survivors. "Hey, jump in!"- shouted to him the people there. - "No, thank you, my brothers!"- responded the person. - "God will not leave me alone!"
After a little while, a raft was getting closer, with more people who managed to escape the wretched ship."Hey, get up here, bro!"- called they cheerfully. -"No, thanks!"- was the response. - "My Lord will save me when needed!"
After some more time, a log was floating past our hero, who already started to feel cold and weakened, but still was firm in his faith. -"Get hold, quickly!"- moaned the wretched man who was also struggling against the water. -" With some luck, we'll keep up until they find us!" - But he, too, had to go further alone.
Soon enough, the person we talk about lost his last strenghts and drowned...
...and there he was, in the Paradise, among the angels playing celestial instruments and a cheerful crowd made entirely of those who went to church every Sunday.
Lo and behold, the Lord Himself was there, smiling in the way to get a thousand of Giocondas envious.
"Why didn't you help me down in the sea?"- was the first question uttered by the newcomer.
The Lord sighed.
"My dear son, I haven't anticipated that you are... how to put it... a little bit more slow-minded than I hoped for. For I have sent you help three times, and three times you have rejected it!.."

And now, the story.

It all started with the question, why is there an image - no, a meme - of "evil genius" which is so persistent in many human myths? And why, at the same time, his counterpart - a good hero - can have many great qualities, but quick or strong wits are not necessarily among them?

Speaking about the evil geniuses, Cain (the inventor or agriculture and the founder of the first city, also the ancestor of those who invented music - i.e. arts - and blacksmithery - i.e. technology) - is the first one on record in the Bible.

In the European (both East- and West-European) fairy tales, there is often an image of evil wizard who possesses great power and chooses to use it against humankind. Mind you, if there happen to be other wizards who are not that evil, the bad guy will undoubtedly be the smartest and most skilful of them. (Think about the Middle-Earth epic for the most generic examples - all wrong doers there, Morgoth, Sauron and Saruman - were always the best in their class).

And if the genius does not happen to be evil, he is often portrayed as the one who doesn't have all his nuts in one box. A weird scientist who can figure out how to build a time machine, but will be utterly helpless outside of his comfy technological lair. As if from the three - being fit, being smart and being good - you are only allowed to pick two!

Well, what happens when the good heroes do need some wisdom to get by? They all tend to get it by some miraculous chance - be it by finding for themselves a wise fiancée or by coming across some wizard-in-disguise to whom they do a favor (strong guys are often so naive that they don't mind helping the others without expecting anything in return ;)) et cetera. I can't remember many tales which would start with the story of some diligent master who acquired a great skill in something and never was tempted by the dark side of the power. (The quickest example springing to the mind - Star Wars, a modern epic which might be related to some older myths- the always-good Obi-Wan is excelling at swordplay, whereas a villain-in-the-making Anakin has started as technology prodigy...)

It seems to be reiterated so many times in so many forms: people, don't tinker with technology, it might bring you into trouble before anything else happens and it is not even needed for your well-being!

One other Biblical story comes to my mind: this of Mariah and Martha, when Martha is busy doing the cooking and cleaning the house and the only thing Mariah does is sitting near Jesus Christ and watching him lovingly. Martha feels like she's left alone to struggle, she starts to scorn her sister and gets mildly rebuked by Jesus, who tells that her sister has chosen "the better part".

Isn't Martha here an embodiment of our technological, scientific and other activities? Then the Bible says very clearly: people, that's not what you need.

Isn't it a bit puzzlying?

Why create a world with a set of complicated rules just to say that those who chose to explore these rules are not doing the better part? Are all these rules just a disguise, and the real rules being hidden? (Bible appears to hint that the real rule is to love God - and therefore his creations, people among them - and nothing else than that).

Is God a being who has problems with self-respect? That could be a good pretext for the creation of the sophisticated world with the only purpose: to find out how many persons will discard all pleasures of that world and go searching for its Creator, full of love and devotion. (Make sure the pleasures won't last long, otherwise what if nobody would?)

I am not an atheist, by the way, but I can't explain this luddism, this mistrust in science and technology lurking behind so many theories. (Ancient Greeks were free from it, by the way - Hefaestus was a good inventor and Prometeus was a suffering hero who wanted the mankind to get better).

May be this resistance is supposed to be the force opposing the progress to keep the humanity from rushing along too fast? This can make sense...

Nevertheless, I wish there will be more space for the Greek way of thinking, especially now, in the XXI century. If we are drowning, we are allowed to use whatever comes at hand, why not? And if we aren't, then what was the whole point of these things coming by in the first place?

...

2009-10-15T02:01:00.000-07:00

All that recent turmoil around the "headscarves and handshakes" reminds me about the joke where a drunkard late in the night tries to find his keys under a street lamp. Not because this was where he dropped them, but because this is the only illuminated spot.

2009-10-14T00:25:00.000-07:00

I feel in the mood for somewhat darken forecasting today. Let's see if there is enough gunpowder left to make it happen...

Do you remember a SF movie (for teenagers, of course - who else is more eager to buy every little hint that the world can be different than their parents so dully insist?) called War Games? In this movie, a socially inept, but cute-looking little prodigy accidentally (with the help of second-hand modem and duct-tape coding efforts) gets connected to Pentagon super computer, has no simple idea what he is getting into and doesn't care (being a teenager's mother I totally believe that bit!) and starts a game which appears to be a nuclear war scenario run for real (this bit is the greatest assumption in the movie, but we'll come back to that). He is going chased down with half of the US armed forces, but miraculously escapes them, somehow tracks down the way to solve the problem and saves the world in the latest moment. Happy end, and the young nerd-in-making even managed to get himself a cute girlfriend as a bonus.

30 years later, Gary McKinnon, another no-longer-kid (still looking rather cute, by the way) tries to research whether US armed forces are holding back some information about alien visits to Earth (I think there was a SF movie with a similar plot!), breaks into Pentagon computer system (not as far as the kid from that earlier movie though) and, cutting long story short, now he is facinig extradition to US and spending rest of his life behind the bars. No cute girlfriend here, only a desperate mother going all possible routes to save her poor prodigy from all that. Very sad story with a very uncertain outcome.

To me, this sounds like an explicitly clear message from the governments involved: listen, cute and smart guys and girls, Internet is no longer your playground and computing machines are no longer your toys. We use them for real; don't mess with us, or else.

It is not the first time. Remember the story of Kevin Mitnik? He got away relatively easy, in comparison to Gary, but the message was essentially the same.

My bet is, this message is going to be reiterated again and again. But that is not all.

How about blogs and all information we put into them? Right now, it is very unregulated.

Everybody can blog under any persona, imagined or real, without legal problems;
A blog provider can shut down the service, is not obliged to ensure that the created content does not get lost and can even claim their rights over the content we create;
There a grey area whether the information found in blogs can be used as a legal evidence.

Legal people being the first ones concerned to keep their jobs intact, I expect this might change,, sooner or later, possibly along the following routes:

There can be introduced a licence for being a "information pool provider" (or call it as you like) for those who run a service allowing the public to create and upload their own content;
The registered providers will have to comply with the law which will, sooner or later, come into being. Among the requirements there can be:
Preserving the content and going through legal motions before shutting the service down to decide what's going to happen of it;
Providing the official structures any data access they require in a number of situations (no doubt they will be scrupulously described);
Providing the means to verify the identity of those who create the content.

It's the identification bit I am mostly interested about. What will it become when it settles? Will there be some smartcard like the banks use? Wireless implants? A universal ID bound to social security number?

Of course, there will always be unverified blogs but they can also be demoted in the public opinion into the area where good people don't go... every city has those, we are passing through them briefly or for fun but no person in his or her safe mind would choose to live there, right?

Am I paranoiac in thinking about all that?..

Abstraction versus Reality...

2009-10-12T02:46:00.000-07:00

The need for abstraction comes from a simple fact that no single human mind can hold the whole endlessly complex picture of anything. Therefore, at some level we all have to cut off.

Whatever is hidden below, will be all thrown together and represented as a set of simple interfaces at that lowest possible level which we still can access (colored dots, lines and planes, mnemonic set of rules, or whatever else you prefer). How these interfaces are really implemented, and what lurks deep within, we often have no idea, and in most cases, don’t even want to know for fear of losing the “whole picture”.

As a consequence, because our internal representation still remains incomplete, we will sooner or later tamper with those unseen dark whirls, folds and clouds too much. Then they raise above our cut-off level and bring the unpredictable chaos along.

And this will be the system talking to us.

2009-10-04T16:48:00.000-07:00

If our understanding is organized in layers, then:

- whenever there are too many layers for us to build, the presented concept would appear too cumbersome;

- if there is nothing new to add to our internal webwork or ideas, we label the text as boring and/or trivial;

- “nice reading” is when we can use whatever is at our disposal to get the meaning and to add one or two new festoons to our own mind’s garments without much effort;

- and “fascinating” or “encouraging” is when the concepts presented, even if we can’t get them immediately, lure us into building yet another layer of meanings for ourselves, just in order to be able to finally decrypt the message which those strangely beautiful reverberances of somebody else’s mind seem to be holding within.

2009-09-13T06:10:00.000-07:00

Found a remarkable piece in The C++ Standard Library of Nicolai M. Josuttis (very useful book, by the way) in the beginning of the chapter dedicated to valarrays:

The valarray classes were not designed very well. In fact, nobody tried to determine whether the final specification worked. This happened because nobody felt "responsible" for these classes. The people who introduced valarrays to the C++ standard library left the committee a long time before the standard was finished. For example, to use valarrays, you often need some inconvenient and time-consuming type conversions...

How many bells did it ring to you, dear software development experts? And we are talking about C++ standard here :) (More revelations about design flaws and omissions could be found in the chapters about the other Standard C++ library components, - bitsets,for example).

By the way, the book has been written 10 years ago and it's still relevant because not many things have changed there. The work to introduce a better C++ standard is going anything but quick.

This probably explains, at least partially, at least to me, why younger folks are turning to the other languages (I mean Java-based crowd) which are largely feedback-driven, with the ability to adapt and/or evolve quickly, and which don't have a gloomy committee overseeing the Grand Design in the authoritative way...

Confessions of a newbie ereader user

2009-09-03T14:42:00.000-07:00

It is 2 days now since I have received my first ereader device. This one. Cybook OPUS. I have spent quite some time of these 2 days trying to come to terms with this thing... probably it's good time to put all this experience together, until it's safely forgotten / moved into the realm of the unconscious.

What do I like about the toy? (In no particular order)

1. It is cheap. 250 euro is not that much.
2. The screen quality is not bad at all. 200 dpi, 800x600. And the eyes don't get tired because there is no backlight. Just like a book.
3. It has 1 GB of internal memory. Wow!
4. The connection with the PC is not too painful. When the device is connected with USB cable, it is seen as an extra storage (even Vista doesn't mind, although it keeps prompting that it might be necessary to scan/fix it every time I connect the device ;) ). Putting files on it and getting files from it does not seem to be a problem.
5. They give away the source code under GPL. Seems to be a nice move.
6. The device has native PDF support.
7. Accelerometer, which allows to reorient text automatically when you turn the screen. There are issues though.
8. You can have any amount of books "open". When you "open" a book the next time, it will be the last page you have read. Nice!
9. There is out-of-the box support for 20 languages, including Russian. That also means one can have the UI in any of those languages. And the directory names. And the file names. Nice! Apart from that, Bookeen (the producer) claims that Chinese, Korean etc can be available for text files once you put the proper font into /Fonts directory but I haven't checked. Besides, there seem to be an issue with text files... now, is it time for booes? Yes, it is.

What I do not like that much? (In no particular order either).

1. The screen size. 3x4 inch is a bit too small for PDF's. Well, not _extremely_ small as you can have 70% of original size (not without some tricks, though, if the original article has side margins), but I would prefer to have 80% instead. But then, I am highly miopic and it feels even with lenses, so may be those who don't have problems with eyes would not really mind.
2. Bug #1. It doesn't recognize UTF8 text files. As simple as that. I have tried to read a Russian text file saved as UTF8 and Cybook thinks it's ASCII. I have tried UTF16 format too, same result. How did they check that they can read text files in other languages? Which encoding they used? I wish I knew. Definitely not these I've mentioned.
3. Bug #2, discovered today. If you switch accelerometer off, use the device for a while, then switch it on again and quickly turn the device upside down, the thing stucks. It stucked so profoundly that RESET (hidden under the battery cover) didn't help. The only thing that helped was to disconnect the whole battery and connect it again (the image on screen still appeared frozen, but after I switched the device ON, it obeyed).
4. Speaking about PDF scaling, why keep the left margin on scaled down PDF's? I have solved this problem - removing the margin from a PDF I just wanted to read - (it was this one, which is a bit above my humble understanding abilities, but still seems to be as interesting as a fairy tale in the language I pretent to know;)) via GSview (you can get one from here if you didn't know it already). This resulted in zooming to 70% instead of 56% which I could achieve using the device own option "adjust to the width". Believe me, it does feel as an improvement.
5. EPUB files are read just fine. Unfortunately, there are not really many formats the device can understand: PDF, EPUB, TXT and that is all. (They claim they can read HTML, I didn't succeed with that, may be my HTML files were not created the right way? From the other side, EPUB is nothing more than a zipped XML + CSS...) What about DJVU, FB2, PRC and other pocket reader formats?.. (BeBook can read all of these, by the way, and is a tad larger with its 6-inch screen; I am considering buying it too as I am not the one in our family who likes reading...) I will say a bit about conversion options later.
6. The file names in the browser seem to come from the internal properties of the file (for a PDF, it will be "Title"). Noticed issue: if you replace a PDF file on the device with another one having the same name, the device will show the "name" corresponding to the"Title" of the previous file. Apparently it never gets deleted somehow...

All said, the biggest problem, for me, is the screen size. Why are most ereaders released in Europe so small? Even 6 inch is not that much. There is IREX with 8.1-inch screen but it costs 2 times more!

A couple of tricks & more whining:

1. About conversion. I have tried Calibre, wanted to create a ePUB from an FB2 file. Dont do that. At least, don't do that if you have a non-ASCII file (French, German and Swedish people don't think it will not affect you with all your diacritical signs :) ) The thing is, if you have a file with Unicode characters, you are supposed to have Unicode fonts. And these fonts have to be embedded into ePUB file. Calibre either doesn't do that, or I don't know how to switch it on. Besides, it produces rather messed-up xml.
2. The best solution I have found for fb2 conversion: Google conversion tools. They also have doc and rtf to ePUB converters there, but I haven't tried them yet.
3. For the text files, here is an interesting link: http://web2fb2.net/ .
4. For the djvu, the way to convert seem to be via one of the free PDF printing utilities: FreePDF or doPDF. Then you can print your file and specify one of those as the printing destination. As a result, PDF file will be created; quality is more or less OK but the pages with pictures might be blurred when seen in smaller size, and the resulting PDF will be bigger than the one produced with Acrobat itself.

A really crazy wish!

I wish somebody would be brave enough to release a eReader combined with a multilanguage dictionary.

Now, it's probably not all, but I am tired :) Hope it was not all competely in vain, and thanks to the people who responded to my tweets regarding the matter!

Thinking about thinking...

2009-07-31T07:35:00.000-07:00

Humanity, if we give it a half of a thought, is such a loosely-coupled system. The evolution of human thought goes forward in leaps and bounds because every single "thinking unit", in order to produce _anything_ more or less valuable, should first spend some amount of time picking up the existing knowledge (and nevertheless, there are still endless rows of reinvented bicycles in any chosen area). No guarantee that the knowledge you or I pick up is exactly the very knowledge we need. Thanks to Internet and searching engines, what used to be an art (remember the stories involving a scientist or writer looking for a key, spending nights in libraries and then accidentally glimpsing upon the very reference he or she needed to break through?..) becomes more and more a technology, a routine.

Is it good or bad? Every time a certain activity becomes more predictable, it looses some of its charms. Learning how to produce the fire at dawn of human history might have been a thrashing experience, an adventure in itself, a part of a rite passage into the realm of the adults. No adventure in lighting a match or a lighter nowadays (unless it's a child who accidentally puts the house on fire, of course - but safety devices evolve as well!) So, is it already written upon the invisible walls that there will be no adventure in scientific research, either? So much that we will be able to give it away to the machines, let them chew information and milk them for the useful results? What about us, the self-proclaimed kings of nature? Lots of confusion arises as soon as more and more people begin to realize that more possibilities will bring not only quantitative, but also qualitative changes in the way we live.

Will it mean that the way humans are evaluated will change? Why do we have a high estimation for philosophers, writers et cetera? Because of their possibility to evaluate information and make links between pieces which have not been obvious to the rest of us, until those enlightened have pointed it out? Because of them creating works of art which create a strong resonance in the recipients? How much of this will get "outsourced" to the artificially created information processing units?..

Of course, there is one thing which is never unnecessary to point out. The machines ,both hardware and software, are not a manifestation of an alien mind. They are nothing more than a summary and a quintessence of our own mind, - we are those who created them all. Nothing more than a codified experience of humankind, the very experience which until lately have been transferred only via painful learning process for every single human being.

Still, it concerns me that the young people of today learn how to use Google for their schoolwork bypassing the own thinking about the results. It can bring a scary situation, with the young generation becoming like monkeys using the machines where the experience of an older generation is stored, without actually understanding it. How real is this threat, is difficult to tell. There is no similar experience in human history; we can try to produce mental models of the possible outcomes in the novels and movies, but in the reality the only thing we can do is to observe, to think, and, may be, to act if we will feel like it...

Will all people become eventually united into a sort of huge network, therefore making sure that not a single experience gets lost? But how to ensure that this experience is passed on? To read about something will not produce an adequate responce unless you had a similar experience yourself - the words are often used as reminders rather than descriptors. Is it a reason why history tends to repeat itself from time to time? Would there be a chance to eliminate it (with virtual reality experiences, for example? What are our dreams -especially the "scary" ones - as not a sort of virtual reality experience either? And yet the dreams can influence the way we live...)

Still, it feels so interesting to see where the things are going...

On translations, the choice of words, and software development :)

2009-07-12T12:26:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago, I have received a link to an interesting article about the woes of translation (in Russian) - thanks to Dmitry Reznitsky for it. For those who can't read Russian, it is about the funny consequences of the fact that in Russian almost all words have a gender prescribed by the grammar rules. Therefore, when a gender in the original language differs from a gender for the same word in Russian... Houston, we might have a problem.

And a problem indeed. Take the well-known fairy tales. In Winnie-the-Pooh, the one who had to undergo a gender-changing procedure, was the Owl (every Russian kid knows that the Owl is an old ladylike creature in lacy bonnet who desperately tries to appear wise, but can't because of her sclerosis or something - thanks to the very popular cartoon). In Alice in Wonderland, the Caterpillar, the Dormouse and many others had to become women, too. (The author of the article rightly notices that some scenes become completely absurd as a result). And then, well, The Jungle Book and the brave warrior Bagheera who, in its Russian version, is a charming and fetching slim black panther (this fact is noticed to the English Wiki because of yet another Russian cartoon which was, believe me, not bad at all, even with a female Bagheera mutilating the originial plot :) ) The translator could have chosen another word, at least in this case (the word "leopard" which means the same has masculine gender in Russian), but it didn't happen, and now it would be extremely difficult to correct this mistake, because the existing translation is sort of canonical, because every Russian from the age of 4 couldn't help having seen aforementioned cartoon zillion times already, et cetera...

So, this is a good demonstration of how the choice words can influence the meaning.

Now I would like to have a couple of words about sailing. I have been participating in the short sailing trip a couple of months ago. What was the most revealing experience is how important the work correlation is when you are on the boat. Everybody must somehow work together, otherwise you won't go anywhere. All crew has to be, so to speak, in sync. More to that, the other boats should also take yours into account, as well as you should keep them in view and react in the way that is beneficial to the others. There are rules defined with that philosophy, and you should honor them. You just can't not to. Also, it is worth noticing that the crew always has a clear purpose - to get somewhere - and it is always possible to say whether this purpose has been achieved or not. If it has been achieved, all crew gets the credit; if it hasn't, all crew failed (from inside, of course, you always can organize scapegoat hunt, but the outside world can't see them on their own).

Very different from footbal, for example, or baseball, or rugby, where not only the purpose of the team seems to be nothing else but to win from the other teams (keeping to the rules just as much as not to be punished for not keeping to them), but any particular team player can be competing with the other team players for the recognition from the public. The team doesn't create anything. The team is here to win, that is all. If they win, the good guys are rewarded, and the losers are eventually sent away.

The third example of human collective which I know about is a choir. I sing in one myself. The philosophy behind choir singing is, once again, different, but it seems to be closer to the philosophy of a boat crew, than to the philosophy of a team. The choir has to be in sync. The choir has a clear purpose (to deliver a song). And this purpose is achieved only if everybody manages to work together and the conductor can establish proper rapport with the choir.

Now, finally, what does it all has to do with the software development?

I'll try to explain.

Usually, when one speaks about software development, one speaks about "teams". "Teams" are doing "tasks" with the purpose, apparently, to participate in the process of creating something useful in the end.

I have got the impression that the team metaphor doesn't fit very well. If the purpose is to deliver something, rather than just "win", then it seems like the SW command should be a "crew" or even a "choir" rather than a "team".

Team metaphor means there can be losers and winners within a team, and that the outside world knows about it too. Also, it means that if the team loses, they might have an inclination to find the reason for their failure in the fact that some outside authorities were too harsh to them. And of course, there is a lot of competition: with the other teams as well as within the team itself.

May be we would be better off emphasizing the need of the team (or crew) members to find the ways of cooperation with each other and to concentrate on keeping a goal in focus (like the people on the boat should do). I sometimes feel that too much energy is spent on nitpicking the microstrategies and sometimes it goes at the cost of the things which really matter.

May be I'm terribly wrong in all that, but I am sick of the talk about "teams". As simple as it is. We are not writing software only to win from those who might be writing the same software, but had less luck. We are writing software to create something really useful. How can we create something really useful, if the main emphasis is on competititon rather than cooperation?

I really would like to be off from the analogy of a team, in sweat and soap, which tries to win at any cost, even if that means changing the goal or bending the rules in other unpleasant way. Cooperation and synergy is what we should be aimed at. Things which help achieving this for the particular environment, are good. Things which hinder the process, are bad. And one can never say in advance what will work for this particular... crew, collective or how else you decide to name it. A collective consists of people; there are no two people alike, how there could be two collectives alike, then?

That's all banter I have to deliver on this, for the time being ;)

Twitter Haiku (well, and some micropoetry too)

2009-07-09T14:06:00.000-07:00

The ones (till July) which I find more interesting:

little flocks of birds / in azure transparent sky / not a day to die

You cannot enter same river twice / flip over 'to come' and you'll read 'to go' / let the memories take your place / while they still grow

the poetry flows / from cracks in the souls / it takes to be blessed / to write when not stressed

sky that's full of stars / and the chaos that's within / we are in between

it seemed like a voice / I've reached and found a wall / beautiful echo

Feel wordless tonight / my wandering thoughts forgot / return to my mind

turmoil in the soul / either the heart is too quick / or the mind too slow

вся душа вразнос / сердце мчит без тормозов / разум не дорос

hard-resetted phone / and destroyed all my past / what an easy fix!

birds sing in the dark / before the light ever came / there was a music

the words draw contours / the actions add colours / the purpose brings life

love wakes up in the heart / like a child almost ready / to be born / kicking from inside / and smiling already

ducklings in channel / males already advancing / on stupid females

3 knots at its best / sun splinters in the water / murmur of silence

bottom of the night / wind is dancing outside / carefree and wild

reaching deep within / what is flickering therein? / neither Yang nor Yin

I left the haven / few scratches that's all it took / the sea is all mine

Покинула порт / Что мне пара царапин? / Все море - моё

сырое небо / деревья замирают / в объятьях бриза

the sky is all wet / the distant trees are trembling / hugged by the breeze

thunder far away / wants to mark the passing day / bright instead of grey

гром гремит вдали / день, который мы прошли / светится в пыли

pointers to functions / do-it-yourself hand grenade / just point and throw

the world is music / you want to participate? / try singing in tune

color of the wind / and the touch of kindred soul / nothing more than that

the waves try to reach / my feet - but - shy or tired / they keep retreating

the world stays in blue / mixed with gray clad in rain / missing the sunlight

night stitched by lights / from cars lamps stars and windows / from wishful thinking

garden of passions / if not tended properly / turns into jungle

child peering at me / from behind a green train seat / mischief managed!

the sweetest tales / are woven with blood and tears / from stinging nettle

once in a while I have funny feeling / that words can be used to recover the meaning :)

crouch the railway / oh train / but slowly, slowly

pale lights quick shadows / light dreams dim reality / all intertwined

plane rumbling above / for a moment outcries / a desperate heart

рёв самолета / лишь на миг заглушает / сердце в разладе

chilly taste of despair / sultry waves of desire / iceberg on fire

the understanding / starts when I question myself / who I truly am

driving in the heat / dozing off when try not to / dream within a dream

noli me tangere / I'm afraid to disappear / into thin air

at the sunlit roof / doves are tapping messages / with their beaks and feet

you want me to land / on the runway of your hand / make me understand

The verb 'to love' makes little sense / both in the past and future tense

birds try their voices / and make the morning sparkle / with jewels of haiku

at the crossroads / only the moon from all signs / looks into my face

на перекрестке / из знаков только луна / мне смотрит в лицо

the stars are dancing / to the rhythm within my heart / murmuring their songs

my words intertwine / with the phrases of others / and cease to be mine

you're not the wizard / you do your magic from books / but don't give up yet

a quiet morning / my room is bathing in light / like a crystal cave

ты не волшебник / ты колдуешь по книгам / но не сдавайся

тихое утро / комната светом полна / как грот хрустальный

piano playing / whirl of red and yellow leaves / dancing in the sky

whirl of sparkling words / whatever sky it brings me / there's no place like home

words are just symbols / footprints of reality / or blueprints of dreams

the rain is dancing / barefoot on biking lane / only for itself

eternal cadence / from hope to desperation / life as usual

self-referring dream / endless sticky Möbius strip / waiting for the flies

twilight in chaos / no longer trust my own thread / it's part of this maze

night tiptoes around / shy to tell it's time to sleep / and she waits for you

singularity / from darkness to dance of light / from chaos to love

bicycles swarming / around railway stations / catching sun glimpses

The rest is here :)

A long banter about learning and getting tired

2009-05-05T11:32:00.000-07:00

Everybody wants to be effective nowadays. That means: do the most in the least availble time. So many things to do, so little time for this. Unfortunately, the capacities of humans are very limited. From time to time, we need rest. If we are tired or if there are too many distracting things, our attention gets lost. As a result, nothing really gets done.

I am an easy victim of all that, which tries to do her best and become effective. Recently I have learned about the technique of self-micromanagement called Pomodoro, which, to put it roughly, means you plan your day ahead, prioritize what are you going to do, split all these things into ~25-minute chunks and see how many such chunks (they called "pomodoros" because that was how the kitchen timer of the author had looked) you can do in a day. At the end of a day, you do a retrospective and give a thought what could have been done better.

In essense, it is an agile methodology of sorts, but applied on individual basis and not necessarily for the activities related to software development... although, I have to say, while software development is quite suitable to "pomodorize" or to make it agile in any other way, other activities might be more stubborn to handle like this. The key in such techniques is your ability to estimate beforehand how much efforts you (or your team) will spend on a given task / on a "standartized unit" of efforts. Of course, you are supposed to develop better estimating skills with time. In addition, it is expected that you will get some demonstratable result at the end of every chunk of activity. Otherwise it's all nonsense.

For now, I am convinced that while it is feasible to do this in the fields where your activity is predictable (more or less), the more place is left to to creativity in your work, the more difficult it becomes to estimate when you will be finished. Can you plan creativity? It comes unexpected. The workaround is not to include creativity into the estimations, I am afraid. If it comes and makes things easier for you, OK; if not, there should be a plan B to finish the job, may be in less elegant way. But when you are writing a poem or a musical piece, you can't stop after 25 minutes are gone, otherwise you'll lose it forever. So in these cases the structure does not apply.

But I am distracted already :) What I have noticed is what happens when you are more or less tired (it becomes more visible then). Not sure if it is a common phenomenon, but in short words, I see the following: the more tired I am, the less "quanta of new information" I can get from one activity without a tendency to switch. When I am very tired while trying to do something (e.g. reading an article which I know I have to read, but it does not go easily), then I tend to switch off _after very first piece of new info which I have processed_. If I am less tired, the amount of "new info quanta" will be more but the "moment of saturation" is always very distinct.

How to mitigate that? One technique I have found useful is to make side notes. This way, the brain does not have to keep the new data in the short-term memory (probably) and you can keep on reading for longer; besides, making notes and reformulating the information in your own way is a very helpful exercise when you are learning new stuff. And it is great for retrospectives, if you will be in state to make them afterwards :)

Therefore, it makes sense to estimate the difficulty of the text when planning to read it. For one type of information, it might be 1-2 pages, for the other type of information (e.g. which is not entirely new or which is not perceived as very important, so that the strain to remember everything as exactly as possible is less) it might be 10-15 pages or more in 25 minutes. I guess for the same book it will be more or less constant or the difficulty might be increasing as you go (for example, the excellent textbooks for theoretical physics written in Soviet Union by Landau and Lifshitz were notoriously known for a high gradient of difficulty - the influence of a genius Landau of course - which made quite some of my fellow students - who were tired all the time almost by definition - to use Feinman course instead, which had a smoother gradient).

The most difficult of learning activities, it seems to me, is learning language; in this case, you _are_ supposed to put all this stuff into your own head and nowhere else; that makes even the drills a hard effort when you are tired. I have found that if I did not have enough sleep, I would be OK with reading email, twittering or discussing life with friends or kids, but concentrating on the forementioned Rosetta made me half-slumbering in 10 minutes or so. The brain was sending frantic signals that it was overheated. In such situation, I think only two outcomes are possible: either to stop all activity and go to sleep or, if for some reason you can't, to do it in very small chunks: 10 minutes or so - so that you get 3-4 such "quanta" and no more.

I wonder if it would ever be possible to measure the "informativeness" of a given text relative to a given person. Even to measure an "absolute informativeness" could be interesting. Suppose some time in the future every book or article will have an "information value" printed on the cover or below the title? Or a matrix of values relative to some areas of knowledge? Might be considered as an insult by some authors probably...

Well, that's all for now, thanks for the reading, and I hope the information value of this piece of text is positive :)

2009-04-27T14:35:00.001-07:00

Ideas, thoughts... rushing at you, like gusts of the wind at the cobweb, and coming through, and all you are left with is some filmsy patches with threaded edges...

Long time ago, the nights used to be black-and-white. Now what we see, or at least what you can see walking along the channels at night in the centre of Amsterdam, are different shades of ochre against dark blue sky. Little neon lanterns, starring into the night with a miriad of orange eyes, did that trick. Orange and blue are psychodelic colors. The night in Amsterdam is psychodelic by definition.

Still, Amsterdam, the center, is one of the most beatiful places at night. Walking down the quiet streets along the channels with the dark glistening water, along the big trees with spacious crowns made from fresh spring leaves, passing here and there little cafes and restaurants, brightly lit, with the late public quietly talking at the outside, near big mansions huddling together along the channels, just like 200 years ago...it feels almost like being in love; may be, even better, for Amsterdam will always give you some love back - you can be certain of that...

I feel myself almost helpless now, playing with bits of pieces at the entrance to the big and misterious grotto of the English language... it's all what I can do...

My train is coming to my destination. Thank you, Amsterdam, for a beautiful night.

2009-04-19T12:39:00.001-07:00

Years and humans, folks and heroes,
All will run away for good,
Like the streams from thoughtless flood.
In the Nature´s vibrant mirror
Stars are fishnet, we are draught,
Gods are wights from mirky naught.

from Velimir Chlebnikov

Rosetta Stone: the goods and the bads :)

2009-04-15T14:30:00.000-07:00

As I am almost finishing the complete Rosetta Stone language course (I took Spanish levels 1-3) I think I am in a position to more or less summarize my experience, the goods and the bads, so to say.

The goods (in no particular order):

- once you've got a subscription, you can access the course from every computer, every operational system which has sound input/output and graphics;

- you can train your pronunciation for the given language;

- the learning sequences are created in such way that you really barely need any explanation while learning new words and even phrases;

- you'll get a good (although very basic) set of really "common denominator" words and standard phrases, including everyday vocabulary (e.g. basic colors, parts of the house, furniture, body parts, common activities etc);

- you will pronounce, hear and read the same words and phrases so often that you will definitely remember some. Repetition is the mother of learning;

- with some luck, you'll be able to pick up some grammar features: tenses, cases (if applicable), mood etc.

- at the end of the course (complete 3 levels) you'll seem to arrive somewhere in between A1 and A2 levels (see explanation of them here). You will be able to understand basic stuff and even utter some very basic sentences. Of course, if you will stop using the language every day, you'll forget it very quickly, but that's another story.

The bads (also, in no particular order):

- The context. The principle of Rosetta Stone (hence the name) is that all languages are treated exactly the same way: you'll get learning sequences describing the everyday situations in the context which is supposed to be standard Western life environment, but to me, it seems that it is US urban life environment in particular. I mean, it doesn't look European enough :) Jokes aside, you are learning the language completely separated from the native language context. It is OK to have this knowledge if you are going to talk to, for example, French or Chinese people who have emigrated to US, probably. But expecting to use it in the land of the given language seems to be a bit far call.

- Logically follows from the previous one: you learn the very standard vocabulary, no colloquial words or phrases, and practically no synonims. That's enough to make yourself understood but not always enough to understand (unless the other person is ready to help) - exactly the description of A1 language competence level.

- "No explanations" principle doesn't work well for the grammar (especially for the complicated parts, like tenses and moods of the verbs). As I've already mused in my previous post, you'll probably create some system based on what you have been exposed to (and it's way less than the real child would be exposed to in the real life!) but there is practically no guarantee that this system would correspond to the real grammar 100%. Remember, when you have been a child you went to school and got grammar lessons in your own language. And even before that, when your mother or father spotted what they perceived as a systematic mistake in your speech, they not only corrected you, but probably also tried to explain the rule behind it (e.g. "when you talk about what one person does, put an "s" at the end of the action word: Pete reads but we read" - or something like that; I do not know exactly how English-speaking parents do it, but I am almost confident that they do it.).

- The clarity of the course seems to dwindle by the end, plus the learning curve becomes too steep (not enough data for the real osmosis, see above). You simply don't have time to figure out how on Earth all these tenses and mood are constructed. As a suggestion for improvement, I would propose adding formal grammar reference in some form.

- You don't really exercise in speaking (i.e. in creating phrases yourself): you are always supposed to create phrases according to very rigid patterns (which does not require extremely advanced speech recognition software, as far as I know :) ) - no synonyms, changing the order of the words even if it's valid, etc. A bit boring.

Summary: Rosetta is a reasonably acceptable tool for getting the very basics of the language and/or memorizing some everyday vocabulary. If you want anything more than that, you have to get it from somewhere else :) E.g. if you want to get a feeling of the language, you need to try putting yourself into the context (and if we are talking about "osmosis like a child does it", books for little kids are a great resource). Otherwise you'll learn a projection of the real language into a different context, if that's what you need, fine, but you'll encounter the limits as soon as you try to get beyond social trifleties and start speaking/reading/thinking about Stuff That Matters.

Important: The price of 6 months subscription for Rosetta Stone is 180 euro (last time when I checked). It is a bit at the high side but still not skyhigh. I've got the subscription through my employer though.

2009-04-04T15:30:00.000-07:00

I have just started to read the book "Language Instinct" written by Steven Pinker. The beginning of this book, and my recent experiments with Rosetta Stone course (I have been following Spanish course and almost done with it by now...) have inspired some thinking.

First, I really don't like Rosetta's principle to rely to full osmosis, when it concerns the grammar. I'll try to explain why.

The point of Rosetta Stone system is that every human being, when he or she was a child, has learned his own language via osmosis, therefore if you try to (very roughly) simulate the environment in which the child learns the language (as much as the structure of the computer program allows it) you can teach an adult person the new language without actually explaining anything, just by trial-and-error method.

Well, to some extent, it works. It is a great way to remember the meaning of words. But but but!.. The grammar!.. Don't you have to go to school for the grammar lessons in your own mother tongue?.. And if you don't, will you be speaking properly? (You know the answer - chances are big that you will end up speaking some dialect but not the language the way as it should...)

Now, Pinker comes into picture. He mentiones there the interesting phenomenon known as "creolization". The schema is the following:
- first, many people from different cultures are brought together; they don't know each other language and have to choose some "common" language (historically, those chosen languages happened to be English, French, Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese) to commicate with those who brought them (the bosses) and the other coworkers (the peers).
- as a result, "pidgeon English" (or whatever) comes into being - not a language, but rather a crude simulacrum, most importantly without a consistent grammar; you need lots of nonverbal help to understand those who speak it;
- then, as soon as there are the children who get to know this language at the age of language acquisition (below 6 years), they will create the "right" grammar and make the language suitable for communication; this, according to Pinker, is how the Creole languages were created;
- same process took place in other situations (for example, Pinker describes the development of the languages deaf people use in US and in Latin America).

What is the point? Well, for me, one very important point is that if you don't get a formal education in the language you speak,you end up creating dialect which will mirror the way _you_ understood how the grammar works. Examples: the Creole languages; the dialects of ethnic or social groups; may be, even the Roman languages (which have all, more or less, stemmed from Latin long time ago) initially could fall into this category.

The explanation is also quite simple: a language (real language) is a fruit of labor of more people then any dialect. This gives the mainstream languages their finesse and beauty. A small group is just not capable to do the same - it does not have the resources for that. A dialect can be nice but that's all you can say about it....

Which brings the following conclusion: if even in the content-rich real life environment without any additional education you might never really master the grammar of the language you learn to speak, in the extremely meager learning environment you won't get perfect grammar, either. Which is fine with me because I would not be using Rosetta Stone as a single point of reference for language learning (can't help remembering the words of polyglot Ilya Frank: learning language is like assembling little threads into one huge ball; you should get these threads from all possible places to succeed). But they really shouldn't claim that their method is the only thing needed to master the language.

Nevertheless, as I have already noted, for memorizing basic vocabulary and grammar constructs Rosetta is great. But there are several things you have to take along: a good grammar reference (with exercises), plenty of books (starting from simple ones) and then, live speech examples (e.g. radio or podcasts). And all this won't save you from very clumsy way of communicating until you create your own little collection of set phrases and canned responses :)

Still, learning language is great. It would be even greater if a system for language learning would have been an open-source one, with the possibility for everybody to add new modules, and with the dictionary which would also show the context usage of requested words. But for now, it looks like a dream... (and it's high time to go and get some :) )

2009-04-04T06:45:00.000-07:00

Language belongs to everybody, because it can't exist without everybody's input to it. Therefore, it can never be copyrighted. (Which is good) But the works created in this language can and do get copyrighted. Where is the line that distinguishes between part of the language and a creative work? Is an aphorism produced by a person copyrighted? Will it no longer be copyrighted if everybody starts using it on regular basis, and just become part of the language? (Which is actually true). How about longer pieces of work? If anybody would now create a work which is a spinoff from a Shakespeare tragedy would he or she have to pay money to Shakespeare's heirs? (Apparently not). And if this will be a spinoff from a Harry Potter book? (You know the answer). It's only an arbitrary law which distinguishes these two situations from one another, which tells that you have to wait a given number of years after the author dies to be able to freely play with his/her ideas; doesn't it actually hinder creative process?..

Back to the topic: I wonder whether one day the right to learn a language would not be considered one of the basic human rights. I also wonder whether the same would be applicable to translations, and if true, what will happen to all those companies which are producing language courses, dictionaries and the like. Will they become fed from the public money? (If there will still be money at that point in time...)

2009-03-16T04:48:00.000-07:00

I wonder how is the knowledge of the outside world is represented in the current AI models?..

Just had a thought that we, internally, don't represent separately the "data" and the "actions". Rather, we see the world as "objects", where data and possible actions are combined.

For example, an apple:

- is a member of a class "fruit", and as such, it can be: ripe, unripe, good, rotten; we can eat it, peel it (if it has a property "detachable skin"); cook it (if a property "cookable" is on, according to our representation of this class), slice it;
- it is also a member of another (sub)class "small round object"; as such, we can throw, catch it, pick it up, lay it down, etc;- it is a member of a class "objects with a value", so it can be sold and bought;
- ...
- last but not least, as a member of a class "real object" it can be seen and touched, etc...

This pretty much the same in every language, and it will not pose a big problem in translation to most of the languages originated on Earth (at least, to these which speakers have seen apples on routine basis).

Now, there is a second part:
- "Apple of discord" could be understood only if you know some Greek mythology;
- "Adam's apple" requires yet another piece of cultural knowledge
- "Apple a day keeps a doctor away" is a set phrase in the English language, and its meaning would be certainly understood by any other reasonable human being, yet (for example) no Russian speaker (if he doesn't know English) would say something like that - Russian language doesn't have this knowledge incorporated as a set phrase! (The closest one which I could remember has a bit different meaning, but still represents the idea of escaping the guys and girls in the white coats the following way: "If you want to stay healthy, stay away from them doctors!" No apples or other means are mentioned though)

There are plenty of other connotations for an apple, involving various fairy tales, stories, movies and pictures. Some of them belong to one language, another require some cultural or social background to be understood. This is the most difficult part when it comes to conveying the meaning, in my opinion.

Apart from that, "apple" in English rhymes with "grapple" (I'd also try to use "ample") and it's a 1-syllable word (as far as I understand). "Apple" in Dutch becomes "appel" (2 syllables), and in Russian "yabloko" (same origin, 3 syllables. Not sure about Dutch, but in Russian it does not easily rhyme with anything. This can pose a problem but problems of this sort might, technically, be tried to get solved by brute force, provided the translation engine has enough knowledge of both target and source languages and instructed to look after the words with similar sound pattern (but there is no guarantee that such solution would exist).

When I am thinking about the second part, I feel a sort of despair. How could we correctly get the meaning of more complex utterances than mere descriptions of an outside world across the language barrier?

It seems to be that in order to understand an idea in more or less the same context as was intented by the person who expressed it, the recipient has to be made aware of the context (to the necessary extent). To achieve this, the translators of old times (and good translator of new times) have been adding to the books dozens of comments and explanations, where they thought them to be necessary for the average consumer of their work. It will still require some conscious effort on the recipient's part, of course.

Another approach was to translate the context so that the recipient will get "the same idea" but in the context to which he/she is accustomed. This has been mostly done in children literature. The most prominent examples in Russian are completely "localized" versions of Pinokkio (known as "The adventures of Buratino", where there is a capricious blue-haired doll instead of the Blue Fee and the little wooden boy doesn't want to become a real boy at all!) and "The Wizard of Oz" ("The Wizard of Emerald City", which was so popular that the author of the translation/migration wrote 6 sequels to the story; as to my knowledge, nobody it Russia is much interested in the original even now). The more recent attempts of this approach manifested in various coutries for the translations of Harry Potter series (having translated them up to letter with miriads of comments would have definitely spoiled the fun for the little readers).

The summary is that up to now there is no predefined procedure to decide which approach to undertake in every particular case, and no measure of success for any particular translation. After all, sharing the same native language is not enough to correctly understand the other person; social and cultural context is equally important. What do we want to share: the ideas which we came across, the emotions which we feel, something else?.. Will we ever be able to share both the ideas and the emotions in the adequate way, so that the language barriers become transparent? That would be the good AI usage for me...

2009-02-17T11:52:00.001-08:00

Among all social applications, the one ¨social¨feature I miss is ¨social dictionaries¨.

I hope they will be coming sooner or later. How I see it, is to be able to see for every word how often it is used, not only on average, but also for particular social groups (for example: different age, different education level, different location / countries where he/she lived, profession... ) A lot of statistical data which would be impossible to collect before and which, in this time of overall obsession with statistics, seems to be more or less feasible to collect. This could help a lot to learn the usage of the words in the foreign language correctly. For example, if I know that there are two words with roughly the same meaning, but one of them is mostly used by teenagers and another one often surfaces up in the official documents then I have less chance to make a mistake with these two words.

Of course, this is a very rough example... the definition of the social groups is per se a separate topic. I could imagine having a number of parameters and a possibility to combine them for a definition of a group.

The big question is: how to collect this information? OK, more and more people are now present in the Internet. How do we know to which group a person belongs? We don't want to have tags on ourselves, do we?..

From the other side, there are already a lot of social networks and their users do provide some information about themselves by themselves, while also providing the content for the public domain. Could it be possible to use this content somehow for such "social dictionary"system?

Of course, this leads directly to the questions of privacy. I wonder if there are already some thought about the evolution of the concept of privacy in the digital world. There is some anxiety about whether we will have much left to ourselves at the end. People tend to have secrets and people are submitting more and more data into the network. There are some mechanisms in development aiming at privacy protection though. That means there will be always some part of the content hidden from the public domain. One might wonder how much difference it can really make for the sort of "social tagging" proposed above.

In the meantime, I miss the "social dictionaries", because I am not content with having a row of synonyms and no clear clue how to distinguish one from another.

Even more precise approach would be to describe each meaningful word or phrase using some formal language (as each word or phrase is actually describing some point in the space of ideas which we all share). Then we could see how closely two words from the two different languages match. May be the same space is covered by one language (or dialect / argot) more densely than in the other one, and these subtleties are chipped of when the text is translated. (There is a well-known example of many varieties for the word "snow" in some Nothern languages, but it's already an exotic variety, there could be more interesting ones, for example describing people's feelings or actions in this or other area).

If we could find a way of mapping any text into this multidimentional space of lexical invariants, then many things could be possible. Comparison of the translations for the well-known texts (books etc) into different languages. Comparison of the different texts and finding similarities between them. Finding the associations, too (we can see with which words/phrases this particular word/phrase is often combined, and we can see if some words / phrases sound alike and therefore could be associated one with another... finding the words which sound alike is feasible with soundex algorithm already). Finding out if the texts of a particular author share some specific traits (specific vector families in this lexical multispace).

Then of course, any text is just a more or less successful attempt to express the thought. Words cannot be trusted as they are just labels for the reality which we chose to share between ourselves. But it is a fascinating area nevertheless.

...

2009-01-27T00:20:00.000-08:00

Long time ago, people used to believe that the Earth has been the center of the world, and everything else has been revolving around our little planet.

To the naked eye, it seemed reasonable and didn't contradict the everyday / everynight experience.

Then the telescope has been invented. It allowed (at least, to those who have taken the trouble to get one) to see not only the Sun, Venus and Mars, but also some more distant planets. Apart from that, people were becoming more and more skilled in math, and started trying to use their math skills to predict the way the planets move.

So began the trouble.

It just so happened that the planets moved in quite tricky ways. Instead of just rolling in giant circles along the sky, it seemed to the Earthlings that the planets were revolving in circles around the circles (it was the only possibility to bring at least some harmony into these so unexpectedly stochastic movements). For these weird paths, the special name has been coined: epicycles. But why the planets behaved this way? Probably there existed some theories on that behalf. For the reason explained just below, only the people who are interested with history of science, and of astronomy in particular, might still know a bit about them.

The reason is now well known: somebody happened to get another idea, namely that the planets have been indeed revolving, but not around the Earth. The Sun appeared to be the real center. And if you would accept this idea then there were no need for these complex epicycles, because the planets were simply moving along nice circular orbits (which is way better and simpler to calculate). Later on, it appeared that these orbits were actually a bit elliptical, but this is another story.

There has been some struggle around this idea, and other subsequent ideas which shifted the center farther and farther away from our little habitat, but finally, the people had accepted that the Earth is not the center, the Sun is not the center and even the center of our Galaxy is not the center of everything. Because it helped to simplify the representation of the world, and the simplicity is the key to beauty, and the beauty is appealing to the humankind way more than complexity. (We can go on and on from here).

The point of this is very simple, but has to be stressed now and then: if your world starts getting way too complicated, it might be time to shift your point of view.

2009-01-19T13:55:00.001-08:00

Open-source seem to be a good candidate for the next round of tech-related hype (just after the dotcoms and web2.0). Ideas which have been implemented more or less quietly by a bunch of enthusiasts (like Wikipedia, for example) are already cloned (Google's Knols) - open-source is a philosophy which allows to grab the ideas of others and reimplement them, as long as you don't forget to mention the original authors (if they can still be traceable)...

Several things which I can't help noticing:

1. I can't understand how the old patent system and open-source approach to the copyright are going to coexist together. For example, Google is now actively promoting their new mobile phone, Android, and encourages young, enthusiastic and (often) not-well-paid-yet guys and girls to write new, exiting, and no doubt, open-source applications to promote Android even further (the best ones are getting the blue ribbons indeed). What about the patents for these ideas? Who is going to hold them at the end? These guys (I have asked one of these winners at the Android Developer's camp in Amsterdam) seem to never think about this.

2. What about the data? Who owns the data collected by Wikipedia? Who owns the data collected by e.g. TomTom (my previous employer) via MapShare technology? Who owns the data collected by OCLC (my current employer) via WorldCat? (This one is actually the flamebait right now, the other two have not been discussed, or I don't know about it). Who owns the data collected by Google via their system of blogs (like this one :) ), webmail, etc? Is it possible to talk about the data ownership in this case, or only about the ownership of the data maintenance structures and the right to use the data because of that?

2a. Don't forget, "data maintenance" should include data verification and systematizing, which is not the work for novices and requires quite a strong discipline, like every necessary routine . It also implies guaranteed all-time access to the data (which means hardware issues), and these parts are not that easy to open-source. Distributed computing is one of the answers to that, but the payoff is performance. If the responce time is supposed to be critical, then you need to have some dedicated hardware and it has to be supported, therefore somebody is supposed to get paid for it.

3. Open-source, in itself, is not a silver bullet. If you compare an open-source solution and a closed-source one from the point of actual costs you spend to get what you want, the result might be quite surprising: fixed costs for closed-source solution (price of the software + maintenance costs, which is usually agreed upon beforehand) versus open costs (nothing + salary of the guy or guys who are going to support this piece of software for you).

4. Software is not good or bad because it is open- or closed-source. It is good when:
- it is clearly documented;
- it is well tested;
- it is well supported;
- it is written well.

All of this can go wrong for open-source project as well as for closed-source one, but in the case of open-source project, if you happen to be the client and the project dies, you are left with nothing because nobody has been responsible. The documentation is not the thing programmers like to do; you won't find much documentation even for Mozilla (one of the longest and extremely popular open-source projects). The wider scope the open-source project has, the more important becomes the question of organizing the "crowdforce"; it is more difficult than to order around guys who are reporting to you because, after all, these enthusiastic guys and gals work for fun!.. If you spoil the fun, they'll go!

5. The term "crowdsourcing", to be honest, makes me remember the work of José Ortega y Gasset called, in English, "The Revolt of the Masses". The point of this work is that unorganized masses are actually the reactionist force. The crowd, if not organized, is less smart than any single member of it. What is needed for open-source project to succeed is the organized crowd, so that it really becomes the whole where various parts play various roles for the common good. If the project leaders manage to achieve and keep this state, good for them. If they also know what they want to achieve with their project and can share their vision with their team and get their support in return, excellent. That is how it should be. But there is no guarantee that it will always be like that.

6. "The human factor" becomes extremely important. People have emotions. You never know what makes the other one explode until you are swooshed away by the blast. If the project becomes big enough (on the order of several dozens of active participants) the conflicts will be inevitable. The project leader has to be prepared to solve them, sometimes by force, and to have enough self-confidence, so that the others would not question every decision he makes. This is a tough part.

7. Finally, the disclaimer: I am quite enthusiastic about the open-source approach, but that is why I can't stop thinking about the ways how it can fail. It would be a real pity if open source, as a result of the coming hype, becomes an "anti-buzzword", like these dotcoms of the past century.

Update: Open-source has its charms, there is no doubt about it. It allows the developers to become experts in the areas they like, and to stay experts no matter what their official affiliation is. It makes the workforce more mobile, because your expertise with (the development of) open-source products is often easier to take along to the next assignment than the expertise with (the development of) closed-source products. Therefore, it makes the work for the developers look more like hobby, which is good for the morale. That is why it is so important to make sure that open-source initiative, now that it came into open light, will stay healthy.

2009-01-15T15:37:00.000-08:00

The gist of Goedel's theorem seems to be found in the fact that our language becomes a pitfall when it is used for self-reflection. Any formal system which we could have thought of (till now) has the same flaw.

No human-made formal system appears to be capable of self-reflection; yet any human can do it.

Why are our brains "made" in such peculiar way? As if there is a blind spot which prevents us from seeing the source of light. Will we be able to develop a workaround this spot? If the answer is yes, what sort of "language" will be used for such purpose (i.e. the formal system for which Goedel proof does not hold)? Will it be a "language" at all? What is, after all, the definition of the concept of "language"?

2009-01-06T01:10:00.000-08:00

Continuing the translation-related stream of thoughts...What is, ultimately, the purpose of translation? According to Hofstadter, a thought could be seen as the specific itinerary via the (sub)network of active symbols (with all traffic scrupulously recorded). Along with this, we have to realize:
- there is no other network like this one;
- the author of the thought (be in in the form of a novel, a piece of poetry or even a phrase) does not necessarily perceive in all detail what was the purpose of all this and what the implications might be;
- ultimately, if to take this utterly seriously one will find himself / herself in the situation of S.B.Odin from Strugatsky's book 'Monday begins on Saturday', who, as we remember, knew how to perform every possible miracle, but was not able to really do anything, because it was never possible to satisfy all conditions!

Therefore, we can never expect the translation to be ultimately perfect. It simply cannot be, because no two human beings possess the same symbol network. The interesting question therefore is, what is the threshold of the information loss. How much information can be preserved when transmitted from one human being to another? How much information should really be preserved? (What if the noise is part of any thought, like virtual particles cloud is part of any "real" particle - sure we don't have to translate the noise?..)

2009-01-05T14:32:00.000-08:00

Reading Hofstadter's GEB, I've come to the point, where he cites "Jabberwocky" in English, German and French and compares the beginnings of the three translations of "Crime and Punishment" into English. This, and subsequent episodes, have provoked some response in my symbol network, which I am going to try to pin down.

First, regarding Hofstadter's remark of the French translation of the word "slithy" ("lubricilleux"), he wonders if using the Latin-based word where its analogue in English is non Latin-based would trigger the additional sense of "alienness" of this word in the French reader which was not the intention in the original. I am not the ultimate expert of this subject but I have the impression that the French perceive the words with Latin roots simply as their own (French, after all, is a Roman language while English is not). Therefore, the translator's choice was probably quite fitting one. It is the fact that French has so many words in common with English (first, thanks to the fact that the English originally also used to be a Roman colony, and second, because the English have been conquered by the French later on) which obfuscates the difference between these two languages, but I wonder why Hofstadter did not mention it (could it be that he did not meet many French people at that time? ;) )

Second, regarding the Dostoevsky's translation. In the first phrase, there is a name of the street (S.Pereulok, abbreviated from Stolyarny pereulok). One of the translators just left S.Pereulok as it was, the other one changed it to S.Lane, and the third one called the little street "Carpenter's Street". Interesting that Hofstadter is against the translation No.3, because to him, it makes all thing sound like one of Dickens' works which could take place in London and in this case, why read Dostoevsky, asks Hofstadter, instead of reading Dikkens who is the ultimate translator of the same ideas into English?..

This is an interesting point. Could it be that different persons would require different flavors of translations for their minds to accept them as most suitable? The one example which immediately surfaced to my mind is the Russian translation of "The Wizard of Oz", which, as almost any Russian speaker knows, is called "The Wizard of Emerald City", has six follow-ups which wander far, far away from the original story (which already has been altered "to get accepted by the Russian children better"), and which is, as far as I know, far, far more popular than the more accurate translations of the original.

From the other side, the most popular Russian translation of Alice in Wonderland is not the one of Nabokov, who tried to do similar trick, substituting English realities with the Russian ones, but either the one of Boris Zakhoder, who preserves the "Englishness" of the book but does makes all the word plays and puzzling paradoxes comprehensive, so to say, or the one of Nina Demurova (who is assumed to be, in any case, the best translator for the little "Jabberwocky" piece)...

Thinking about the connotations and associations which exist in one language and do not exist in another looks per se both puzzing and endlessly interesting, but there are lots of traps where it is so easy to fall. For example, a simple English phrase "one another", at the first glance, seems to be literally translated into Russian as something like"friend-a-friend" (друг друга). But then, the word "друг" here can be an abbreviation of the word "другой", which literally means "other, another". But then again, isn't the word "другой" related to the word "дорогой" (dear), by the rule of making longer Russian words from the shorter Ancient Russian / Church Slavic words? Anyway, the words "friend", "another" and "dear" seem to be related in Russian, if only by the power of alliteration and pseudo-ethimology. What a nice thought can be drawn from this fact - that in the language itself, it is encoded that all the other persons are, by default, our friends, and they are, by default, very dear to us! (Incidentally, the word for "enemy" (враг, ворог) seems to be close with the word for "doing (evil) magic" (ворожить) - which can, if one is in the proper mood, be explained as that our only enemies are those who are doing the magic. It actually fits, if one takes the definition of magic as the attempts to overturn by the force of individual will the laws of nature - such persons could be indeed potentially dangerous!)

Enough for today.

2009-01-04T11:02:00.000-08:00

В кои-то веки я наконец узнала, что лопух - это то же самое, что репейник. Для меня всегда это были два разных растения!

Википедия - это сила :)

2009-01-02T17:47:00.000-08:00

Текст, переведенный с другого языка (если только переводчик - не Переводчик с большой буквы), отличается от текста, созданного на этом же языке, как посмертная маска - от работы, сделанной скульптором (даже если он - разгильдяй-недоучка) с живой натуры.

Поэтому я многих современных англоязычных фильмов и книг в русском переводе не воспринимаю. Хорошие переводчики, конечно, никуда не делись. Просто плохих стало чересчур много.

Кстати, случайно попался на глаза неплохой (англоязычный) пост с рассказом о переводе и переводчике. Там даже упоминается соответствующая книжка Хофстадтера, которую, кстати, сам автор считает гораздо более важной, чем ГЭБ.

Когда мы наконец додумаемся до технологии более-менее адекватного перевода, мир здорово изменится. Возможно, это даже произойдет в ближайшие лет 10 - если, конечно, человечество не бросит свои силы на очередную глупость вроде мировой войны. С другой стороны, предыдущей мировой войне мы обязаны возникновением компьютеров... Но лучше бы все-таки без катаклизмов. А то и разговаривать будет не с кем.

2008-12-25T07:21:00.000-08:00

Anteater: ...If an effort is initiated, perhaps at random, by a few ants in some locale, one of two things can happen: either it will fizzle out after a brief sputtering start -
Achilles: When there aren't enough ants to keep the thing rolling?
Anteater: Exactly. The other thing that can happen is that a critical mass of ants is present, and the thing will snowball, bringing more and more ants into the picture. In the latter case, a whole "team" is brought into being which works on a single project. That project might be trail-making, or food-gathering, or it might involve nest-keeping. Despite the extreme simplicity of this scheme on a small scale, it can give rise to very complex consequences on a larger scale...
(C) Douglas R.Hofstadter - Goedel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid.

This description appears to be perfectly applicable to the open-source projects, too ;)

2008-12-21T14:37:00.000-08:00

Разум подразумевает самосознание: возможно ли вообразить разумное существо или группу существ, не обладающих понятием "я"? (Пусть даже это "я" пчелиного роя или мыслящего океана).

С другой стороны, все мировые религии учат, что просветления достигают только те, кто каким-то образом поднимается над этим "я" в себе.

И что тогда? Открывается некое иное, высшее "я"? Или же вся Вселенная - это одно большое "я"? Если это так, то что тогда "не-я"?

Old is the new new :)

2008-12-08T06:13:00.000-08:00

Путеводная нить Ариадны или клубок, с которым Иван-Царевич свою лягушку искал - это примеры personal navigation devices with augmented reality interface :)

Про яблочко, которое каталось по золотому блюдечку и показывало страны заморские, я думаю, и объяснять не надо. Mobile broadcasting.

А смерть Кащеева была скрыта за семью файрволлами :) И вообще все они были персонажами стимпанковской эрпэгэшки :)

2008-12-07T13:53:00.000-08:00

60-е годы во всем мире, похоже, были временем мечтаний о счастливом будущем. Последствия войны были более-менее заглажены, уже заработали на полную мощность порожденные этой войной компьютеры, благодаря чему человек смог увидеть свою планету в круглом окошке космического корабля, и, наверное, всем казалось, что это - только начало времени чудес.

У нас в это время был написан "Понедельник начинается в субботу", - книжка, благодаря которой целый легион бестолковых фантазеров (включая и меня) подался "в науку".

У них в то же самое время проходила выставка под названием Futurama 2, которая, в свою очередь, была реминесценцией Futurama 1, проходившей в конце тридцатых (если подумать, то и тридцаты тоже были эпохой открытий, хотя и с другим оттенком... именно тогда Гедель представил миру доказательство своей теоремы, а товарищи в разных частях света раздумывали о том, как расщепить атом и что из этого может получиться... но это так, к слову...). И у них тоже писали книжки о счастливом будущем (или "тоже" - это у нас?)

Интересные воспоминания о том времени - от тогдашнего 8-летнего мальчишки.

Книжка, которую он описывает, мне сильно напоминает Гуревича (которого я примерно в том же возрасте просто зачитывала до дыр :) )

2008-12-04T15:05:00.000-08:00

"To understand something" means to substitute something lumpy and complicated with a more or less orderly pattern of trivialities.

"To have experience in something" means the ability to build the way to the distantly looming and fuzzy goal from the building blocks of trivial actions,plus the ability to prove that whatever appeared from the distance as looming and fuzzy and whatever the way has lead us to is exactly the same thing.

2008-11-22T00:10:00.000-08:00

Trodding over the Propositional Calculus, I've nearly stumbled at the Switcheroo rule:
" and <~x implies y> are interchangeable".

The rigorist in me (which was probably born back during my freshman year in the MSU, when I've got the lower mark for my calculus exam for forgetting to state the condition which seemed obvious) only agrees to accept this rule together with the condition that x≠y. Otherwise it doesn't make sense. Yet Hofstadter seems to just assume it by default!

I am a Tortoise, sort of :)

PS. That is what the "Ganto's ax" tale might be about, by the way: in Tao, everything is assumed to be the same, therefore the rules of formal logic (or at least, this rule) wouldn't apply, and their implications wouldn't apply either.

2008-10-31T21:49:00.000-07:00

Thought while reading a preface to GEB and trying to sum up for myself what it was about (which is a strange loop per se, by the way!):

The main criterion of self-conscience (of intelligence, if you want) is the ability to create models of the environment (outside world) in which the conscientous being eists (believes to exist, find oneself existing, to be utterly precise) and to use these models to guide one's existence in that world (which is also some sort of experimental verification / fine-tuning for these models). It's that simple. Turing test describes exactly this, but from the point of human, and taking the world where only humans are considered to be legitimate intelligent beings, as a premise.

So simple.

Upd: but it is also something that animals do. The essence of intelligence (I've just read the next chunk :) ) is that it can model its own way of modeling the Universe, and then model this modeling, and so on. This is called "self-reference" and this is something that divides inteligent beings from merely sentient ones... something that makes what is already alive even more alive, so to say. The deeper the reflection can go - according to GEB - the higher is the intelligence level.

But what about finding patterns where they are not present, then? (which is the common sign of mental illness...) How does this fit in there?..

2008-10-26T16:39:00.000-07:00

"A miracle" is just a description for the parts in the clockwork of the Universe which we still cannot access, or even notice. Ergo: there exists a valid reason for every miracle, but may be we are not always supposed to get informed about these reasons ;)

2008-10-17T15:42:00.000-07:00

Nice reading . If you are nerdy enough, of course :)

Say "NO" to TV in the background if you want to be creative ;)

2008-09-01T07:35:00.000-07:00

Teresa Belton, a research associate at East Anglia University in England, first got interested in daydreaming while reading a collection of stories written by children in elementary school. Although Belton encouraged the students to write about whatever they wanted, she was startled by just how uninspired most of the stories were.

"The tales tended to be very tedious and unimaginative," Belton says, "as if the children were stuck with this very restricted way of thinking. Even when they were encouraged to think creatively, they didn't really know how."

After monitoring the daily schedule of the children for several months, Belton came to the conclusion that their lack of imagination was, at least in part, caused by the absence of "empty time," or periods without any activity or sensory stimulation. She noticed that as soon as these children got even a little bit bored, they simply turned on the television: the moving images kept their minds occupied. "It was a very automatic reaction," she says. "Television was what they did when they didn't know what else to do."

The problem with this habit, Belton says, is that it kept the kids from daydreaming. Because the children were rarely bored - at least, when a television was nearby - they never learned how to use their own imagination as a form of entertainment. "The capacity to daydream enables a person to fill empty time with an enjoyable activity that can be carried on anywhere," Belton says. "But that's a skill that requires real practice. Too many kids never get the practice."

www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/08/31/daydream_achiever

Alastair Reynolds / Century Rain

2008-08-14T15:00:00.000-07:00

Finally, I have finished this book off (and I must confess, last 3/4 went pretty quickly - it only took me some hours during the last weekend to do it).

I rather liked it (as most of the stuff Reynolds writes). Pity this sort of things does not seem to make it onto wide screens! I would love to see the movie made after it, or after other Reynolds' stories... may be it would convince some folks to go into science?..

The beginning of the story was a bit slow, at least for me, but once I got hooked onto it (after several chapters) I became more and more immersed.

As usually, it is about the future, and as usually in Reynolds' books, there are several fractions of people who seem to follow different philosophy in life. In this case, ones of them enjoy the progress (they are called Slashers - tribute to /.) and the others are rather careful about it (and they are called the Threshers, from the word "threshold"), especially where it comes to nanotechnology stuff. You see, in this world our beautiful Earth has been cleared from people by the nanobots who went out of control. What is worse, at some moment all electronic information storage (keeping memories of the past) collapsed, for some reason, so the humanity lost most of the memories about the history. If they want to retrieve some, they have to come down, to a very hostile Earth, and try to dig something out from under the ice there (if the machines would not eat them alive).

That is just a set-up. As the story will unravel, there will be: a snapshot of our world in 1940 where Second World War did not take place, a network of hyperspace tunnels, a love story (it's a space opera after all...) and some war scenes in space, too. There are two protagonists: one of them a divorced woman from the near-Earth world, archaeologist devoted to her job, another of them a troubled man from the alternative Paris in 1959, which is not actually on Earth but in some other world, which look like Earth from the inside, but from the outside is some sort of hermetically sealed sphere where you can only get via an irregular wormhole (interesting description of the wormhole travel there). Naturally, they will meet and do some interesting things together (nothing cheesy, it is rather the spirit of the original Star Wars than the prequel), and... well, I wouldn't put a real spoiler by telling how it ends.

I'd recommend this one, even if it seems to be a bit more sad than I would have wanted (but this is typical for Reynolds anyway). But it is a good story and it has been told lovely.

2008-07-25T01:13:00.000-07:00

Luxury items are not necessarily the ones which are better than the cheap stuff; quite often, it is exactly the other way round. It is the fact that certain artefacts are difficult to obtain that turns them into luxury.

Imagine the situation when teleportation has been invented. It will be a luxury to get oneself teleported. But then, it appears that teleportation is way cheaper than moving around by oil-consuming transport. Everybody starts getting teleported everywhere. No travel time is assumed for the employees, no excuses over the late train, flat tyre or even broken heel.

What a luxury might it become then to explore the outside world by car, by bike or even by foot, especially while going to work or back!.. A precious time spent just to relocate yourself physically from point A to point B!..

2008-07-20T23:35:00.000-07:00

If you feel the need to help somebody, check this story.

On Vox: Орѳографiя-2

2008-03-24T10:10:00.000-07:00

Для желающих:
Систематическій сводъ правилъ русскаго правописанія.
Раскладка клавиатуры с "ятями" и "фитами"
Как кодировать "яти" и "фиты" в HTML

Originally posted on ashalynd.vox.com

On Vox: Орѳографiя

2008-03-22T16:49:00.000-07:00

Случайно забредя на дискуссию о тонкостях правописания в русском языке, наткнулась на упоминание о весьма любопытной статье, в которой очень обоснованно и с многочисленными примерами (они в конце статьи - обязательно рекомендую тем, кто будет читать, дойти до них) объясняется, почему отмена дореволюционной орфографии не была таким уж благом для языка. Впечатлилась. Думаю, не перейти ли на дореволюционную орфографию (правда, для этого ее сначала надо выучить).

Основная мысль - упрощение орфографии породило огромное количество омонимов, которые на самом деле таковыми не являются:

Смыслъ: у насъ имѣется еще продовольствiе...

Правописанiе: «пока у насъ еще есть, что ѣсть...».
Кривописанiе: «пока еще у нас есть, что есть...».
Безсмыслица: мы имѣемъ то, что имѣется въ наличности.

Единственная проблема - в том, что для большинства читателей уже неясно, какое написание соответствует какому значению: откуда человек, всю жизнь употреблявший новую орфографию, знает, когда пишется "есть", а когда - "ѣсть"?

Однако, меня зацепило :)

Originally posted on ashalynd.vox.com

2007-12-30T03:44:00.000-08:00

Перечитывая "Хроники Амбера" Желязны (часть вторую, про похождения айтишника Мерлина), постоянно натыкаюсь на производные от фразы "What is the girl like you doing in a place like this?"

Честно скажу, мне эта фраза запомнилась после просмотра одного очень неприличного мюзикла по мотивам "Алисы в Зазеркалье" ("What is the girl like you doing on a (k)night like this?") Однако и там это была цитата - а про оригинал нашла упоминание тут - это классическая фраза для соблазнения юных девиц из песенки соответствующего содержания.

В переводе эта прелесть, конечно же, утрачена, как и многое другое. Вообще, читать Желязны в переводе - это извращение. Мне не попадался ни один хороший - начиная с первого "грузинского", где "Мамаша Кураж" стала "Матерью Отвагой", кончая пресловутым Яном Юа, где название песенки Never Wed a Hendrake Lass ("Не след жениться на драконице") перевели как "Никогда-ни-за-что незамужняя драконья девица". Проявления кулинарного невежества из того же перевода можно еще простить, но вульгаризацию языка (Джилва: "Срань драконья!" - по поводу появления Дары; в оригинале - "Oh, dear!") - никак.

Учите языки, если есть возможность... полноценного перевода с возможностью получать референсы на контекст, к сожалению, удостаиваются лишь немногие книги.

Эти маленькие различия...

2007-04-18T13:42:00.000-07:00

Сегодня на одном часто посещаемом мной веблоге снова вспомнили про язык Пираха (Pirahã). Оказалось, что на английской Википедии этому удивительному языку, в котором нет ни чисел, ни цветов, посвящена целая страничка, с довольно подробным описанием грамматики и фонетики.

Немного повосхищавшись тем, как из двенадцати звуков, один из которых при чужестранцах не произносят, потому что стесняются, как он звучит, можно создать вполне функциональный язык, да еще и привить говорящим на нем нежелание создавать религию, задумываться о причине всего сущего и даже рассказывать небылицы, я заметила, что, наряду, с английской Вики, на ту же тему уже создана голландская страничка, почти полный сдироскоп с английской, но все-таки - потрудился же кто-то, перевел...

И тут вдруг я обнаруживаю маленькое, но любопытное расхождение:

Английский вариант:Pirahã and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

Without numerals, the Pirahã do not count. They use only approximate measures, and in tests were unable to consistently distinguish between a group of four objects and a similarly-arranged group of five objects. When asked to duplicate groups of objects, they duplicate the number correctly on average, but almost never get the number exactly in a single trial.

Being (correctly) concerned that, because of this cultural gap, they were being cheated in trade, the Pirahã people asked Daniel Everett, a linguist that was working with them, to teach them basic numeracy skills. After eight months of enthusiastic but fruitless daily study,the Pirahã concluded that they were incapable of learning the material, and discontinued the lessons. Not a single Pirahã had learned to count up to ten or even add 1 + 1.[1]

Everett argues that test subjects are unable to count for two cultural reasons and one formal linguistic reason. First, they are nomadic hunter/gatherers with nothing to count and hence no need to practice doing so. Second, they have a cultural constraint against generalizing beyond the present which eliminates number words. Third, since numerals and counting are based on recursion in the language according to some researchers, then the absence of recursion in their language predicts a lack of counting. That is, it is the lack of need which explains both the lack of counting ability and the lack of corresponding vocabulary. Everett does not claim that the Pirahãs are cognitively incapable of counting.

Голландский вариант:Pirahã en de Sapir-Whorf-hypothese

Pirahã tellen niet, ze gebruiken benaderende maten, en in testen bleken ze niet in staat om consistent een groep van vier objecten en een gelijkgeschikte groep van vijf objecten te onderscheiden. Wanneer ze gevraagd worden een groep objecten te dupliceren, dupliceren ze het aantal gemiddeld wel correct, maar bijna nooit wordt het aantal objecten bij de eerste poging goed uitgevoerd.

Doordat ze (terecht) bezorgd zijn dat deze culturele omissie ertoe leidt dat Pirahã worden opgelicht in de handel, hebben de Pirahã een taalkundige die met ze werkte, gevraagd hen de beginselen van nummers en getallen uit te leggen. Echter, na acht maanden van enthousiaste maar vruchteloze dagelijkse studie, concludeerde de linguisten dat de Pirahã niet in staat waren zich dit aan te leren, en zetten de lessen niet voort. Er wordt verondersteld dat in deze acht maanden niet één Piraha erin slaagde tot tien te leren tellen, of 1 + 1 op te tellen. Echter, het gebruik van snoep als beloning doet de vraag rijzen of de Pirahã wel bij de lessen waren om te leren tellen.

Перевод с голландского:Пираха и гипотеза Сапира-Ворфа

Пираха не считают, они используют приблизительные размеры, и во время тестов оказываются не в состоянии систематически различать группу из четырех объектов от подобным образом расположенной группы из пяти объектов. Когда их просят воспроизвести группу объектов, они воспроизводят их количество только приблизительно, но с первой попытки это им почти никогда не удается.

Из-за того, что они (не без оснований) подозревали, что этот культурный недостаток приводит к тому, что племя Пираха обманывают при торговле, Пираха попросили лингвиста, который с ними работал, бъяснить им принципы чисел и счета. Однако, через 8 месяцев полных энтузиазма, но бестолковых ежедневных занятий, лингвисты пришли к выводу, что Пираха не в состоянии этому научиться и прекратили уроки. Говорят, что за эти 8 месяцев ни один член племени Пираха не смог выучиться считать до 10 или складывать 1+1. Впрочем, использование сладостей в качестве вознаграждения заставляет задаться вопросом, действительно ли Пираха ходили на эти занятия, чтобы научиться считать.

В английском варианте уроки прекратились по инициативе обучаемых, в голландском - по инициативе обучающих. Да и cultural gap vs. culturele omissie тоже как-то царапает...

Похоже, что рабовладельческое прошлое не всех еще тут отпустило :(

2007-03-18T09:26:00.000-07:00

С Чарльзом Строссом я познакомилась, кажется, по наводке с http://www.sfsite.com или какого-то подобного сайта. Первой прочитанной его вещью был роман Singularity Sky, за которым последовало продолжение Iron Sunrise. Прочитанное мне понравилось - не в последнюю очередь потому, что описанные там личности были более-менее живые, а идеи, ради которых и были написаны книги, подкупали своей проработанностью в "житейском" плане. Чарльз Стросс - один из немногих фантастов, готовый дать подробный ответ на вопрос типа: "А на какие, собственно, шиши Люк и Лея финансировали свое Движение Сопротивления?" (Впрочем, у него сюжеты другие).

Accelerando - это роман-предсказание: до чего способен довести человечество научно-технический прогресс в ближайшую сотню лет, если темпы ускорения развития технологий (именно так, двойная производная по скорости) не снизятся. Если верить Строссу, нас еще на протяжении нашей жизни ждут великие чудеса - и великие потрясения.

Начинается роман где-то в десятых годах 21 века, а заканчивается - лет через 100. Формально он составлен из десяти новелл, каждая из которых отстоит от предыдущей на 10 лет. Все они объединены тем, что в центре каждой новеллы находятся члены одного очень недружного семейства (это еще мягко сказано). А также их электронная кошка. Собственно, к концу романа довольно трудно понять, кто же там был чей.

Прогресс у Стросса движется просто в сумасшедшем темпе. Где-то на середине повествования происходит так называемая "сингулярность", когда развитие убыстряется настолько, что его темп становится просто невозможно оценить. Если в начале истории обстановка вполне узнаваемая (она начинается на Центральном вокзале Амстердама, который все еще очень похож на нынешний), то в конце, когда человечество частично рассредоточилось по независимым космическим колониям, соединенным между собой каналами для мгновенной передачи информации (ну и материи, соответственно), а частично - переродилось в компьютерный планетарный разум, мало общего имеющий с человеческим в нашем смысле этого слова. Было там и воскрешение давно умерших исторических личностей, и проблемы с раздвоением личности, когда двое оставшихся в Солнечной системе людей поженились, произвели на свет очередного представителя этой сумасшедшей семейки, а потом ушли из этого мира, потерпев поражение в борьбе с компьютерной Экономикой 2.0, а вернувшиеся из путешествия к межзвездному рутеру их эго-копии вовсе даже не интересовались друг другом, и не желали иметь со своим эго-потомком ничего общего... И возможность, например, прожить собственное детство несколько десятков раз, каждый раз в новом месте и времени, потому что заботливые родители ресетили жизненный экспириенс своего чада, добиваясь развития оптимального, с их точки зрения, характера...

Само изображение Первого Контакта сильно отличается от традиционного: наших путешественников, электронные копии которых мчатся к рутеру в системе Альфа Центавры в "космическом корабле под солнечным парусом, размером не больше кока-кольной баночки" (впрочем, это и у Бакстера было), встречают не всевидящие и всезнающие сверхмудрецы, а всего лишь космические спамеры, обещающие, к счастью, не слишком наивным землянам доступ к хранилищам неведомых им знаний "как древние первооткрыватели сулили дикарям яркие бусы"...

Что касается эволюции компьютерного разума, то, по Строссу, все большие и малые чипы рано или поздно должны объединиться в единую всепланетарную, а затем - и все-солнечносистемную структуру - точнее, конгломерат структур, вложенных одна в другую, словно куклы-матрешки (это все так и называется - "матрешечный мозг"). Естественно, при этом от внутренних планет Солнечной системы в конце концов мало что останется, да и с внешних людям рано или поздно придется убираться подобру-поздорову - что и произошло к концу книжки. Зато сам компьютерный сверхразум оказывается не очень мобильным, ибо расширяясь, теряет свою цельность - информация-то передается с конечной скоростью. Правда, во Вселенной Стросса есть неведомо кем сделанный космический интернет с узлами вблизи "коричневых карликов", которым можно воспользоваться для передачи этой самой информации, но и до самого узла ведь еще надо добраться...

Честно говоря, эта завязанность на интернете и соответствующей терминологии и взгляда на жизнь, по моему мнению, является достоинством, переходящим в недостаток. Почему-то вспомнился Чернышевский с его "Снами Веры Павловны", в которых везде кругом был алюминий: и посуда из алюминия, и стены из алюминия, и ковры, и мебель из алюминия! Ну, алюминиевую-то посуду мои сверстники успели еще застать в школьных столовых :) Так и тут: интернет, кругом один интернет...

Далее, по ходу романа его герои несколько раз были замечены в желании "сделать что-то правильно". "Что-то" могло быть чем угодно: от прогулки в качестве туриста по Гонконгу до первого интимного свидания - в интернетных глубинах под масками аристократов семнадцатого века или даже в старом отеле в центре Амстердама... Правда, можно списать это в качестве попытки автора продемонстрировать психологию подростков и молодых людей, но почему-то меня не покидает ощущение, что это вылезли его собственные тараканы...

Естественно, как и во всякой уважающей себя вещи, написанной в стиле киберпанк, в Accelerando не обошлось без секса с извращениями... тема, в общем, раскрыта, но не впечатлила.

Характеры героев, честно говоря, тоже не особенно впечатлили, хотя общая идея развития сюжета довольно неплоха. Но ощущение картонности преодолеть не вполне удалось - за героев того же Бакстера, не говоря уж, например, о Ниле Стивенсоне, переживаешь куда как сильнее.

Резюме: читать стоит, если интересно пофантазировать о том, до чего могут развиться технологии в ближайшее время (хотя в этом плане трилогия Стивена Бакстера "Многообразие" (Manifold), в частности, ее первые две части, несколько более реалистична). Будет много специфического компьютерного жаргона, так что к этому надо быть готовым.

И, справедливости ради, не могу не заметить, что многое из того, о чем пишет автор, похоже, так или иначе проклевывается в нашей реальности. Конечно, потеряв сейчас свой любимый наладонник, ты не теряешь три четверти своей сущности, как случилось с главным героем где-то на третьей-четвертой узловой точке романа... но внутренний дискомфорт, особенно в случае, если нет резервной копии всех телефонов и хранимой там информации, безусловно, обеспечен... Да и трехмерные принтеры уже появились - пусть пока что они не работают с нанотрубками, как у Стросса.

В общем, будущего, какое бы оно ни было, бояться не надо - утверждает Стросс. Оно не будет легким и безоблачным. В нем не исчезнут, например, деньги и необходимость их зарабатывать. Зато в нем появится больше возможностей. А, значит, жизнь станет полнее и в ней можно будет больше успеть. Что, конечно же, неплохо :)

2007-03-16T04:21:00.000-07:00

Вот нашлось: Дуэльный кодекс 1912 года.

Подробно, скрупулезно расписанные правила вызова на дуэль и проведения дуэли.

Например, такой момент:

Выстрел в воздух

486. Стрелять в воздух имеет право противник, стреляющий вторым.

487. Противник, выстреливший первым в воздух, в случае если его противник не ответит на его выстрел или также выстрелит в воздух, считается уклонившимся от дуэли и подвергается всем законным последствиям такого поступка.

488. Другой противник, стреляющий вторым, имеет полное право ответить на первый выстрел противника, обращенный в воздух, действительным выстрелом, причем в таком случае дуэль считается истекшей по дуэльным законам и противник, выстреливший первым в воздух, не подвергается законным последствиям.

Вот оно как, оказывается. Не захотеть убить - тоже оскорбление. Ответить на выстрел мимо выстрелом в цель - спасение чести противника. Закон отрицания отрицания, как всегда, торжествует.

2007-03-08T16:53:00.000-08:00

Милостию божиею преидох же три моря. Дигерь худо доно, олло перводигерь дано. Аминь!

Потрясающий текст.

Две мысли пришли:

1. Это, видимо, первый запечатленный в литературе пример речи русскоязычного экспата (первая письменно зафиксированная квеля!).

2. Почти дословное цитирование мусульманского символа веры наводит на мысль о том, что, либо, утверждая о своем непринятии ислама, Никитин чего-то недоговаривает, либо это переведенная на арабский христианская молитва. В этом случае Никитин - лингвистический гений, раз сумел все это так аутентично перевести.

Но сдается мне, что принял-таки он мусульманство, возможно, решив для себя, что Бог и в самом деле один, только выглядит для всех по-разному.

Еще он там же пишет, что и праздники и посты справлял вместе с местными, потому что свои все равно вычислить не мог. Думаю, что такой подход, на самом деле, совершенно логичен. Вот если бы его забросило к папуасам, евшим людей, то ситуация была бы другая. Но в такой ситуации двести с лишним лет спустя оказался другой наш путешественник - Миклухо-Маклай - и людей он все-таки не ел, да и дикарям отсоветовал, и, в отличие от Джеймся Кука, сам съеден ими не был.

В связи с этим еще одна мысль пришла, про интеграцию русских экспатов.

Наши люди, конечно, очень разные, но, в отличие от китайцев или турок, они все-таки стремятся не полностью изолироваться от окружающей чужеродной культуры в мелкий анклавчик, вроде китайского квартала, а, восприняв какие-то внешние признаки новой культуры (отсюда отчасти, возможно, эта страсть примешивать в разговоре к русским словам иностранные, коим не находится точного аналога в своем языке), все же сохранить нетронутым некий внутренний инвариант.

Те, кто этого внутреннего инварианта не сохраняют, просто растворяются "в среде" и русскими быть перестают, даже если и не забывают полностью родного языка. Я, правда, своими глазами видела такое только у детей (не своих).

Почему так? Можно, конечно, сказать, что из-за своей географической расположенности Россия, с одной стороны, рассматривала и восточные и западные народы как соседей, с которыми надо как-то ладить, перенимать что-то полезное, посмеяться над чудачествами, а не как на непонятных варваров, которых можно только подчинить себе или превратить в свое подобие. Не последнюю роль, возможно, сыграло и то, что Россия не смогла заиметь ни одной настоящей колонии, кроме Аляски, да и ту продала. Отсюда психология русскоговорящего человека - не противопоставлять себя "чужим", а мирно сосуществовать...

С другой стороны - в английском языке, например, подобные вещи называются подобными же словами. Например, военачальников Чингис-Хана в научно-популярной статье вполне могут называть "лейтенантами". У нас такое невозможно в принципе. Может быть, невозможность полностью интегрироваться, не теряя при этом "русскость" - тоже отсюда.

2007-02-05T07:49:00.000-08:00

Найдено лекарство против рака? Речь идет о молекулах дихлорацетата, которые, оказывается, восстанавливают митохондрии в раковых клетках, в результате чего митохондрии убивают эти самые раковые клетки, как отклонение от нормы, и зловредная опухоль уменьшается. Идея в том, что раньше считали, что разрушение митохондрий является результатом деятельности раковых клеток, а оказывается, что они не разрушаются, а подавляются, и что это не результат, а причина распространения опухоли... Интересно...

2007-02-02T02:47:00.000-08:00

В своем любимом New English Bookstore, который находится на стыке торговой улицы Kalverstraat с площадью Muntplein, я купила недавно полное собрание сочинений Вильяма Шекспира за 10 евро: напечатанное чуть ли не на папиросной бумаге и убористым но вполне читаемым шрифтом. Люблю такие омнибусы.

И вот ведь что интересно: Шекспира вполне даже легко читать. Если не считать всяких thou hast, его язык не отличается от современного английского настолько, чтобы его нельзя было воспринимать без комментариев, обширных знаний о вышедших ныне из употребления грамматических структурах, словах и так далее. Текст прозрачен и легко читается.

То есть, во времена Шекспира английский литературный язык был уже, в основном, сформирован.

Недавно на французском мы разбирали одно стихотворение, которому было лет 500. Там конечно, были малоизвестные слова (поскольку описывалось, как рос хлеб, крестьяне убирали урожай, а потом поле заросло сорняками, и проводилась параллель с падением Римской империи), но в смысле грамматики все опять же было довольно понятно. И слова были именно малоизвестные, а не вышедшие из употребления.

Я спросила преподавательницу: а что, французский за это время так мало изменился? Та даже удивилась: а почему, собственно, язык должен был сильно измениться?

То есть, Вольтера или Монтеня тоже, получается, можно спокойно прочесть?..

По контрасту: попробуйте взять в руки что-нибудь написанное на русском языке 400-летней давности (если найдете) и сравнить с современным вариантом русского языка.

Весь русский язык, как мы его знаем, начинается с Жуковского и Пушкина... Державин и Ломоносов уже сложны для восприятия (ну, допустим, примерно как Шекспир), а дальше начинаются дебри, гулять в которых без палочки могут только филологи - специалисты по древнерусской словесности.

Интересно, почему же так получилось?

Возможным логичным вариантом ответа на этот вопрос может быть резкое изменение русского языка в 18 веке - за счет реформ, которые начал Петр, а потомки, волей-неволей, продолжили. Что привело к появлению в языке гигантского количества новых реалий, с которыми старые языковые нормы справились только путем скачкообразной мутации. И в результате "на выходе" (к концу 18-го века, когда все более-менее устоялось) мы получили совершенно другой русский язык.

Отсюда следует, что если нынешние перемены в России сравнимы по степени влияния с начатыми Петром, то "на выходе" русский язык тоже может сильно измениться по сравнению с тем, на которым говорили, например, в 50-х годах прошлого века или до Октябрьской революции. Может статься, что все эти чмоке, картинке и кросавчеги через пару десятков лет станут грамматическим стандартом... (ну, это все-таки, надеюсь, шутка)

Но если серьезно, то подобные процессы возникают не только в русском. Японский, например, английскими словами забит сейчас до отказа (и я так понимаю, что эти слова в него пролезли в основном в 20 веке). И, видимо, такова судьба языков, принадлежащих народам, которым резко пришлось "подстраиваться" под другой образ жизни. Англичанам тоже приходилось это делать (когда их завоевали римляне и нормандцы) - в результате у них бывает три набора слов для одних и тех же понятий: слова с латинскими, нормандскими и "родными" корнями. Но после нормандцев им "повезло". Французов, не считая тех же римлян, вообще никто не завоевывал, поэтому многие древние конструкции у них остались неизменными, только сильно упростились на слух. Поляков, чехов хоть и рвали на куски все кому не лень, но завоеватели заставляли эти народы говорить на собственном языке, а польским и чешским не интересовались вообще... поэтому, может быть, западно- и южнославянские языки в чем-то лучше "сохранились", чем русский.

Интересно, японцы - они тоже не могут читать старые, неадаптированные версии, например, "Повести о Гэндзи" или "Повести о Доме Тайра" без помощи филологов?А арабы могут ли читать Хайяма?

2006-12-13T10:42:00.000-08:00

Amazing story illustrating a simple principle: if you know exactly what you have to do, you do not need to employ a neural network when automating the process. Just hard-wire the algorithm in.

And a couple of conclusions one can derive from the story:

1. (The notorious one). Some people are convinced that the more expensive the solution, the more reliable it is.

2. (The pessimistic one). May be the only reason we want to create Neural Networks and stuff is because we do not understand how things work, and relay on the unconscious to do the job. Which implies a lot of wasted resources because it is, more or less, a 100-monkeys-behind-the-typewriters approach plus the reward for the monkeys who managed to accidentally come up with the first sentence from "The War and Peace". Is it really the way to go?

George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946

2006-11-24T03:44:00.000-08:00

Замечательная статья, взята отсюда. Видимо, неприязнь к новоязу у автора появилась еще задолго до того, как был написан 1984.

А ведь то, против чего Оруэлл тогда так протестовал, сейчас называется politically correct language...

Процитирую довольно большой кусок:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

"While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement."

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find -- this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify -- that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

Насчет русского он стопроцентно прав - я, к счастью, так и не научилась вылавливать смысл из речей и докладов на разнообразных съездах. Хотя по сравнению с ними тексты из 40-50-х годов выглядят образцом живости и непосредственности.

Почему люди переходят к эвфемизмам? Это ведь давняя традиция - еще Конфуций, тысячи за две или больше лет до Оруэлла, говорил об "исправлении имен". Практически в любом обществе наступал момент когда "словно пчелы в улье опустелом, дурно пахнут мертвые слова". Оруэлл отвечает на этот вопрос так - люди стремятся завуалировать смысл своих высказываний, чтобы сбить собеседника с толку и исключить возможность (негативной) реакции на сказанное. То есть, общение сводится к минимуму. Оно и не нужно, когда общество отлажено и все и так выполняют предназначенные им функции.

В связи с этим приходят в голову несколько иные мысли, по поводу современности. С развитием компьютеров, интернета и онлайн-шоппинга необходимость в общении сократилась еще больше. Раньше, чтобы заказать, например, тур в теплые края, надо было обязательно найти агента по продажам этих туров, поговорить с ним, рассказать о своих планах, разобрать варианты, выбрать подходящий. Теперь ничего этого не нужно, потому что все варианты можно сравнить онлайн, выбрать нужный, расплатиться и получить билеты по почте.

Почти повсюду, где бы мы ни были, существуют готовые интерфейсы, минимизирующие "человеческий фактор" и необходимость обмениваться словами. В то же время в интернете, где общение анонимно, люди общаются довольно активно (хотя и тут есть формализм). Создается ощущение, что окружающий мир медленно, но верно превращается в подобие Данелиевского Плюка, где свои "задние слова" каждый хранит при себе (может, плюкане тоже чатились друг с другом, а каждый пепелац стандартно оснащался выходом в гипернет?) Создаются фильмы "по схеме" (сериалы на ту или иную тематику), книги "по схеме" (женские романы, детективы и т.д.). Удивительная информация, после поглощения которой ничего не остается, потому что ничего нового зритель или читатель не получает, но поглощает все это просто по привычке.

Из-за этого тяжело общаться (особенно на чужом языке): оба собеседника одеты в сто одежек традиционного политеса, а поверх еще и в смирительную рубашку взаимно доступных речевых конструкций и слов. И смотрит один человек на другого через толстое, мутное, почти звуконепроницаемое стекло.

2006-10-21T16:40:00.000-07:00

Very thoroughly described bilingual experience (Japanese - English): here.

These parents score extra points with me because they do not like TV and comic books. Not so typical stupid Americans some people like to depict. And one of the children was adopted. This story looks a real heart-warmer to me, and a nice reminder that this world can be made a better place to live in.

А вдруг...

2006-10-12T23:55:00.000-07:00

В Индии (точнее, в Индийском океане) нашли руины огромного города.

А что, если там 9-10 тысяч лет назад и впрямь была ядерная (или еще какая-нибудь страшная) война? Тогда европейские (да и арабские) сказки о жутких монстрах-получеловеках, живущих на покрытом мглой Востоке, приобретают вполне конкретный смысл - последствия радиоктивного заражения... Не оттуда ли и джунгли, которыми до сих пор покрыта большая часть Индии?.. (Хотя такое же и в Латинской Америке есть... А, может быть, и там тоже что-то случилось...)

2006-04-06T02:22:00.000-07:00

A language is just a surface for us to project our thoughts onto (not necessarily a plain one).The better is our ability to guess what the original figure was, the better the translation.

2006-03-16T06:11:00.000-08:00

Забавно: старая шутка про опечатку в одесской газете по поводу коронации Государя Императора (сначала было что-то вроде: Его Императорскому Величеству возложили на голову ворону, а в следующем выпуске коррекция: Вместо "Его Императорскому Величеству возложили на голову ворону" следует читать "корову") замечательно переводится на английский! Так замечательно, что поневоле задумаешься, а не возникла ли она изначально именно в Британской Империи...

Iain Banks, "The Algebraist"

2006-03-05T11:23:00.000-08:00

Все прочитанные мной книги Бэнкса (включая и эту) объединяет одно: первые 2\3 (3\4, 7\8) книжки идет что-то вроде расстановки декораций. И только в самой последней части и начинается То, Ради Чего...

То есть нельзя сказать, что никаких событий не происходит: они происходят, но цель у них одна-единственная - подготовить читателя к адекватному (по мнению автора) восприятию финала.

"Алгебраист", хотя и является фантастикой, существует вне бэнксовской "культурной серии" (в одном обзоре предположили, что речь идет о параллельной вселенной... вполне законное предположение - антураж повествования и отношения героев друг с другом не больно-то отличаются от "культурных" романов - хотя, надо признать, выглядят пореалистичнее). В целом развитие сюжета можно сравнить с "Мудрецом из страны Оз" (или "Волшебником изумрудного города", кому что ближе) - девочка Дороти (или Элли, или - в данном случае - юный, но уже далеко не наивный, джентльмен по имени Фассин Таак) попадает в Волшебную страну (или внутрь газового гиганта, где живут некие Обитатели, которые "появились вскоре после Большого Взрыва" и каждый из которых живет миллиарды лет) с некой целью (у Элли - вернуться домой, у Фассина - найти то-не-знаю-что, но очень важное и как можно скорее). После ряда сногсшибательных приключений и знакомства с хорошими и плохими существами, оказывается, что вожделенный ответ большую часть путешествия был, так сказать, прямо под носом, но чтобы его наконец увидеть, надо было это путешествие совершить. Пустая черепушка вместо великого и мудрого волшебника Гудвина там в некотором роде тоже присутствует, о волшебных туфельках я уж и не говорю.

Кроме того, в книжке есть несколько эпизодов, которые можно счесть данью Оруэллу и его рассуждениям о том, что "свобода это рабство", а также Великий и Страшный Злодей, который не совершал 100 ошибок злого властелина, но все равно просчитался. Абсолютного хэппи-энда, впрочем, не произошло - конец получился такой, что Фассина, наверное, впору все-таки сравнивать с Фродо, а не с Элли или Дороти.

Обитатели, нравы и привычки которых автор старается описать как можно подробнее, хоть и напоминают каких-то созданий то ли из "Путешествий Ийона Тихого", то ли из "Путеводителя по Галактике", но прорисованы очень подробно и не слишком шаблонно. По крайней мере, представители супердревней цивилизации, каждый из которых обладает индивидуальным супердолголетием, не выглядят усталыми от жизни нежитями - одно это уже радует. Устройство их общества довольно сбалансировано, однако его трудно назвать утопией. Поскольку все это описывается глазами наблюдателя, то все возможные претензии к некоторой поверхностности повествования можно отмести - the beauty is in the eye of the beholder, что видел, про то и написал...

ИИ (AI) также действует в этой книжке, но, в отличие от "культурной" серии, в этом мире создания, наделенные искусственным интеллектом, попали в немилость и безжалостно уничтожаются представителями нерукотворной разумной жизни сообща. За исключением некоторых, не поддающихся промывке мозгов, мыслящих особей... Вообще, надо заметить, что говорить от лица ИИ Бэнксу удается едва ли не лучше, чем от лица кого-нибудь еще - его электронные герои неизменно наделены чувством юмора и воспринимают окружающую действительность гораздо живее, чем собственно живые персонажи. Невольно задаешься вопросом, кто же кого создал?..

В целом, книжку можно рекомендовать к прочтению тем, кому нравится "космическая опера". Мир создан зримый, даже жалко с ним расставаться...

Why Turing test?..

2006-01-13T10:39:00.000-08:00

Why should the computers pass the Turing test as a proof that they are intelligent?I

f a human intelligence is only a subclass of intelligence as such (and we do not even have a proper and generally accepted definition for it) why do we require a computer to be able to pass for a human as a measure of its (his? hers?) ability to be an intelligent being/entity?

And if we do create an AI that would be able to pass the test for being a human without actually being a human, would we not effectively create a psychotic intelligent being, trying to pass for somebody who he/she/it is not?

Then, let's get this thought to the next level. Are we, as humans, getting psychotic (each in our own ways) when we try to be God-like (whatever definition of goddess we have in our mind) whereas we are, physically, no other than humans and will stay that way? Or is this quest, in the end, going to take as to change ourselves physically? Will the Turing-wise robots have a desire to become human (like in that stupid AI movie)? Or is that just a reflection of our own state of mind?

Funny dreamlet

2005-12-27T05:17:00.000-08:00

Just in the middle of the morning nap I've seen a quirky dreamlet: I was browsing through a book which I've read recently (I cannot remember now clearly but it was either George Martin's "A Feast for Crows" or (more likely) Babel-17 of S.Delany... I am not 100% sure which one but those were the 2 latest books I've read), and suddenly, I've encountered a chapter written in Japanese, and some mathematical formulae later on. I knew in that dream that it was all readable and made sense, if only I would have understood all that stuff. Then I started waking up because suddenly I remembered that in the real book there was no such chapter. Funny experience though, and very amusing.

Yesterday I have been thinking about language-related issues. I've stumbled upon some interesting almanacs published by Cambridge Press, dedicated to the studies of language recognition and acquisition, etc., and how the language affects other aspects of human activity... this is something that really entices me a lot, I now realise. How many psychological aspects are encoded in the language(s) we learn?

There is a big web of everything that could be expressed with the language: objects, actions, properties of names, properties of actions, numbers, placeholders for objects and actions, emotional outbursts, and so on. Yet every language chooses its own set of primaries in this big web. If our memory starts with learning a language then our conscience is inevitably wound up around it. If the child forgets his first language and learns another one, what happens to his earlier memories then? How could we provide an adequate translation from one language into another and not to ruin subconscious associations that are created by the sound of words we are using, by the roots those words have, by the other words that are closely associated with the chosen words?

Непричесанные мысли на тему языка

2005-12-12T02:23:00.000-08:00

Интересно было бы представить себе общество (планетарного масштаба), в котором Вавилонская башня так и не была построена... то есть, на всей планете был бы один-единственный язык, и все. Придумывали бы жители этой планеты искусственные языки (например, для целей шифрования секретной информации)? Рассказывали бы они сказки, в которых звери тоже бы разговаривали? Наконец, что бы испытали эти люди, если бы вдруг к ним на планету прилетел космический корабль с планеты вроде нашей Земли... да вообще, при столкновении с цивилизацией, представители которой не говорят на их Языке? Насколько велик оказался бы шок?

Например, можно представить такие варианты развития событий:

- вообще не принимать пришельцев за себе подобных, раз те не умеют нормально разговаривать;

- потратить бездну времени на то, чтобы понять друг друга (если еще и язык у этих людей оказался бы устроен на каких-то совершенно иных принципах, чем земной, так что методы нашей лингвистики бы не работали, а их собственные лингвисты никогда не ставили себе подобной задачи);

- испытать комплекс неполноценности из-за того, что, оказывается, всю жизнь говорили на "неправильном" языке;

- привить землянам комплекс неполноценности из-за того, что Земля - единственная планета, где имеет место быть такое чудовищное многоязычие (а вдруг?..);

Впрочем, даже отвлекаясь от проблем взаимоотношений с пришельцами... Насколько проще было бы жить в подобном мире? Ведь там не существовало бы объекивных барьеров, например, для миграции, - и значит, могло бы и не возникнуть такой чудовищной "разности потенциалов", как на Земле... хотя язык - далеко не единственный барьер...

Наверняка если бы там и выдумывали искусственные языки, то относились бы к этому занятию примерно так же, как у нас относятся к рассуждениям фантастов по поводу того, что у жителей других планет может быть по двадцать пальцев на руках, жабры или крылья...

Насколько быстро бы эти существа смогли преодолеть шок после столкновения с многоязычной культурой? Если бы вообще смогли? Является ли множественность языков чем-нибудь еще, кроме дополнительного барьера для понимания друг друга?

Или еще: представить себе цивилизацию, представители которой общаются друг с другом не по текстовому протоколу, а просто передавая напрямую нужную информацию, так сказать, в первозданном виде? Они с людьми общаться смогли бы?

С другой стороны, если проводить аналогию с обменом информации по сети, текстовый протокол самый безопасный... может быть, поэтому язык и возник? А телепаты все - или почти все - вымерли из-за "информационных вирусов"? (Сия тема часто поднимается в фантастике, посвященной телепатии).