I have to confess that I rather dislike the modern attitude of adding "girl" to the words describing activities in supposedly "male" domain, that girl programmer, girl scientist or girl whatever. Why emphasize gender? One of the best Russian poets of the XX century, Marina Tsvetaeva, has never called herself "a poetess" and was fiercely opposing those who tried calling her that, preferring the generic term: a poet. And what was good enough for a poet, should be good enough for an engineer, a scientist or a jet pilot. Isn't it?

Cosmic savages?

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

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?

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...

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!

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...

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...

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?

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)

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...

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?..

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...

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.

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?

...

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.

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...

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.

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.

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

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!