2006
371 posts under this date.
Here’s the beginning and end of Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder, a 1996 talk by Richard DawkinsWP on the wonders of science, transcribed and made available online on Edge (which I’m reading a lot these days). What can I say—breathtaking.
You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world. You also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues.
I’m not saying you’re more intelligent than Aristotle, or wiser. For all I know, Aristotle’s the cleverest person who ever lived. That’s not the point. The point is only that science is cumulative, and we live later.
It’s often said that people ‘need’ something more in their lives than just the material world. There is a gap that must be filled. People need to feel a sense of purpose. Well, not a bad purpose would be to find out what is already here, in the material world, before concluding that you need something more. How much more do you want? Just study what is, and you’ll find that it already is far more uplifting than anything you could imagine needing.
This is, I think, a pretty good glimpse of one of the roles I want to play the next decade—don’t give up on me! :)
Something else is going on here. To a large extent, value on the Internet is not being created by businesses, as much as they want all kinds of credit and money for creating this wonderful value. Inventors, folks who are coming up with new tools, are creating it. Some of them are well harnessed by businesses, but it turns out that businesses don’t have to exist for them to harness themselves with the Net and get these things out there. For example, the person who created Eudora is a University of Illinois fellow who did it basically for himself and people he knew. In terms of quality, Eudora is visibly beyond any other email program. It makes you wonder what’s wrong with companies, what prevents them from doing the right thing when a random person puts his exquisite tool out on the Net for free. This happened with Eudora, and later with Mosaic, which led to a commercial version, Netscape Navigator.
The inventors of these tools are not crazed codgers in basements. They are, by-and-large, young people with a sense of social and cultural responsibility who want things to be better for everybody. They are as valuable as our snazziest scientists, but are not accorded the respect or rewards of the snazzy scientists. They are taken for granted more than they should be. Something is wrong if we think inventors are a lower order of being than theoretical scientists.
When I was 8 years old, my family was in a terrible car accident, and my older brother almost died. The next night, as I lay scared and sleepless on my paternal grandmother’s living-room couch, she softly explained to me who was to blame. Not my father’s Aunt Estelle, a dour, aging wild woman and devout Baptist, who, as usual, was driving recklessly fast. No, the reason Estelle’s station wagon flipped over and Joe was thrown out the back window was this: my father had stopped going to church the previous year, and God was very, very angry.
Dear old Grandma June. A compelling lack of evidence for any sort of Higher Power may have steered my mind toward atheism, but she put the heathen in my heart.
<insert wry, sad smile here>
When they arrived in his office and Abir explained the concept for what is now called the decoder, Carbonell was floored by its elegance. “In the few weeks that followed, I kept wondering, ‘Why didn’t I think of that? Why didn’t the rest of the field think of that?’ Finally I said, Enough of this envy. If I can’t beat them, join them.”
I’m floored too. (And envious!) What Meaningful Machines lyrically calls «flooding» in a recent Wired article, Me Translate Pretty One Day, is a stunningly beautiful translation algorithm, baffling in its simplicity.
Though if it’s simple to state and understand, it’s only because it relies on operations on a terrifying (computational, mathematical) scale. (Like the first time one invokes inside a theorem, say, the set of all possible sets, there’s a mixture of fright and awe—we can barely believe our moxie to write such thoughts.) In a very real way, the algorithm is written in Moore’s law language and if it escaped us all it’s mostly because our words are so shy, so inadvertently constrained by past assumptions.
Ah! How exciting! Machine language translation is on the horizon.
 Something made me cry in Harriet Brown’s One Spoonful at a Time —a long, personal story on anorexia from last week’s New York Times. I’ve been unbelievably emotional these days but blame it rather on it being a superbly written account (“The rough days were predictable only in the sense that they kept coming.”) by an extremely intelligent, rational, and honest mother trying to cure her daughter’s anorexia —and that it manages to be a fairly deep, scientific intro into the eating disorder (“Anorexia is one of the deadliest psychiatric diseases; it’s estimated that up to 15 percent of anorexics die, from suicide or complications related to starvation. About a third may make some improvement but are still dominated by their obsession with food. Many become depressed or anxious, and some develop substance-abuse problems, like alcoholism. Almost half never marry.”) while still being punctuated at every paragraph with raw, emotional portraits of desperation (“I woke with my heart pounding, full of rage and hatred for Not-Kitty, the demon who lived on air, who wore my daughter’s face and spoke with her voice.”) and hope.
In what is to date my longest translation I’ve put the story into Spanish: Una Cucharada a la vez. Please pass it along to someone who might need to read it.
Ah, the ever-recurring techno-myth: a dirt-cheap educational contraption to revolutionize third world children’s education. I can’t even remember when I heard about it first. I was thrilled though, enthused. But then with the undelivering years went my excitement. For one thing, the deployment plan is based almost entirely on governments, which is a nonstarter. More importantly, there might be better options. Cellphones are already a phenomenal worldwide success, even in the poorest countries, and that’s because they’re tangibly, immediately useful. A recent Economist article, Splitting the Digital Divide, mentions other less obvious but intriguing options.
And yet, reading yesterday’s New York Times article, For $150, Third-World Laptop Stirs Big Debate (yup, there’s been some price adjustment), made me think again of the amazing possibilities that can unfold from a personal mobile computer in the hands of a child. Blame it on Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond AgeAM with its amazing book-machine, the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer —every self-learner’s wet dream.
At any rate, it seems to me that (save actual existence and deployment) the crucial factor for success will be software and so, for what it’s worth, here’s a promise: If and when Negroponte’s brainchild ever sees daylight, I shall stop whatever I’m doing, for three months, to develop mindblowing educational software for it. There, I said it.
 Milton Friedman WP, E died 9 days ago, November 16, and though I wanted to write about it that day, I dared not. I had mostly read only about him, his life, his reputation, and reverberations of his arguments; I had bought but not yet read two of his booksELZR; treasured a sentence (“The free market is the only mechanism that has ever been discovered for achieving participatory democracy.”) found in the only thing I had read from him (the prologue to Hayek’s Road to SerfdomAM ); and deeply admired his son, David FriedmanELZR. In other words, I could only lay claim to love the idea of the idea of the man (2nd degree platonic love, common personal affliction). I knew I’d fall in love with him, I only needed time, and so I didn’t dare write an obituary that Thursday—but I’m gonna.
I’ve downloaded Friedman’s Free to Choose series (also available as a free stream) to watch as I read the sametitled bookAM and the first episode has already confirmed Friedman as a most worthwhile man. Far as I can gather from a sample of 1, the series consists of a brief, excellent documentary narrated by Friedman, followed by lively debate with a group of economists, politicians, and businessmen. As much as I’m lately having serious misgivings about arguing in general, it’s a pleasure to watch him passionately refute and belie his often downright frightening partners in debate (“It’s demagoguery, if you’ll pardon me, Michael Harrington…”).
Seeing those suited men from the seventies I couldn’t help but think of what future debates on the subject will be like. One of the intriguing things about Milton Friedman is how his ideas have been carried on by his children. Himself the greatest XXth century defender of capitalism, he still didn’t dare (?) take the leap to anarchism (he couldn’t have put it more bluntly at the debate from Free To Choose’s first episode: “I am not an anarchist. I am not in favor of eliminating government. I believe we need a government.”). His son, David Friedman ELZR, is on the other hand the most prominent anarchocapitalist alive, and David Friedman’s son, Googler Patri Friedman, wants to homestead the oceans in turn.
One can only wonder what little Tovar Miles Friedman will come up with.
Hace unos dias ya que Ben me aviso que, justo despues de un roce con la muerte, Daniel DennettWP acababa de escribir una carta, Thank Goodness!, en la que respondia a sus amigos que le preguntaban si en algo se habia afectado su largamente publico ateismo.
La carta me impresiono muchisimo inmediatamente, porque atendia varias preguntas que me estaba haciendo en ese momento (recuerdo que ese mismo dia le decia a mi hermana Chepe en el cafe, medio en broma y medio no, que si realmente no queriamos morir por que no nos volviamos doctores (como Chemito!) y nos poniamos a investigar?) y porque me emociono tremendamente el estilo conciliador pero firme, tan brillantemente elegante, de Dennett. En cierta forma la carta es una buena y sosegada continuacion a la carta elegiacaELZR de Eliezer Yudkowsky a su fallecido hermano Yehuda—aquella carta que tanto me marco en su momento, que tanto ame por su cruda rabia y su descarnado optimismo, y que traduje al Español casi por reflejo (reflejo que fue muy gratamente reforzado cuando mi primo Paco me dijo que le llevo la traduccion a sus alumnos de prepa).
He traducido, tambien casi por reflejo, esta carta de Daniel Dennett y se encuentra disponible aqui, como una hoja aparte: Gracias al bien!. Fue una traduccion mucho mas dificil por aquellas oraciones increibles y barrocas de Dennett asi que por favor dejen un mensaje si se les ocurre cualquier forma de mejorar la traduccion. (Gracias, por cierto, a Chemito por asesoria medica en la traduccion.)
Ojala lo lean, ojala los haga pensar y ojala nos veamos en los proximos dias con sus opiniones. (Para ser escritas, las mias tendran que esperar todavia unos dias a que aterrice el desorden de ideas que traigo—esta carta de Dennet me condujo al movimiento de los brightsWP, a las ultimas ediciones de Wired, Time, y Newsweek, a los escritos de Dawkins, a Edge, a leer ciencia, a discusiones, coming-outs, y a muchos, muchos pequeños repensamientos propios).
I feel — numb. Distant. Detached. Separate. Futile. Tepid. Coward. Been on a media breakdownELZR for too many days now—ScrubsWP, NausicaaWP, The Economist, The New York Times, porn, (Ben Shneiderman’s) interface design articles, Wired, (so many) books. Unprecedented amounts of physical exercise sprinkled throughout (bizarre, I know). Much been thought, outcomes uncertain (to put it hopefully).
Only 30 pages into Finite and Infinite GamesAM I think it’s the best book I’ve read. ”Seriousness,” it says, ”is a dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility. To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself.” Been far too serious in my life lately. Too scared.
Stupid death won’t go away. Seems my (maternal) grandfather has lung cancer—most likely metastatic. Brutal prognosis. He’s been staying here at home and I’ve been escaping it all—so far away. So serious.
And yet I’m hopeful now. I can never force myself to post something until I’m hopeful. Until I’ve a plan. Until I’m back. (Too scary otherwise.)
Gonna play.
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