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.

...

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.

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.

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"?

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?..)

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.

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 :)

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.

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 ;)

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 :)

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 :)

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 :) )

"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.

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.

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?..

"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 ;)

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

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

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

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.

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!..