Below is a section I just ran across that I imagine will resonate strongly with the people involved in Occupy Wall Street. I’ve long been fascinated to watch how power tries to maintain itself by attempting to enforce isolation and to restrict information flow, and, on the contrary, how increased information flow between the subjects of power naturally undermines this basis. Awareness of these opposing forces, even if not explicitly understood, is what I think accounts for the tenacity and ferocity on both sides of the OWS (and many other) movements, even (especially) when the movements are still only tiny. The occupiers experience the surge of energy and determination and self-identification that comes from solidarity, while those in power recognize the danger and act in heavy-handed ways to try to crush it, usually after trying to ignore and then ridicule. The consistent characteristic of the reaction against these movements, as Steinbeck notes, is that those in power do not understand what’s going on. So in their efforts to snuff out the protests they instead fan the flames, which they then have to react even more violently to. It seems an extraordinarily difficult task for power to successfully manage to defuse a popular movement without resorting to extremes. Hence the absurd justifications of needing to clean (often already cleaned – by the protesters) public spaces, to make the public spaces once again available to the public, etc. Disperse, ridicule, isolate. If the gentle pretenses do not work, then we’ll do what we can to get rid of or evade the media (in all its forms), and then come in and beat the shit out of you.

So for all those out there in the OWS camps around the world (don’t forget there were protests in almost one thousand cities worldwide), and especially for those in the US, here’s some beautiful Steinbeck:

One man, one family driven from the land; this rusty car creaking along the highway to the West. I lost my land, a single tractor took my land. I’m alone and I am bewildered. In the night one family camps in a ditch and other family pulls in and the tents come out. The two men squat on their hams and the women and children listen. Here’s the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep these two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. Here is the anlage of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here “I lost my land” is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate — “we lost our land.” The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one. And from his first “we” there grows a still more dangerous thing; “I have a little food” plus “I have none”. If from this problem the sum is “we have a little food”, the thing is on its way, the movement has direction. Only a little multiplication now, and this land, this tractor are ours. The two-men squatting in a ditch, the little fire, the side-meat stewing in a single pot, the silent, stone-eyed women; behind, the children listening with their souls to words their minds do not understand. The night draws down. The baby has a cold. Here, take this blanket. It’s wool. It was my mothers blanket — take it for the baby. This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning — from “I” to “we”.

If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into “I”, and cuts you off forever from the “we”.

The Western states are nervous under the beginning change. Need is the stimulus to concept, concept to action. A half-million people moving over the country; one million more restive, ready to move; 10 million more feeling the first nervousness.

And tractors turning the multiple furrows in the vacant land.

Image: Villa San Michele

In 1928, Axel Munthe, a Swedish physician living on the isle of Capri, published The Story of San Michele. Munthe’s villa on the slopes of Mount Barbarossa stands on a site chosen almost two thousand years earlier by the emperor Tiberius, who from tiny Capri held sway over the entire Roman empire. Extraordinarily beautiful, the island passed at various times through the hands of the Greeks, the Romans (Caesar Augustus was captivated), the Dutchy of Naples, the Saracens, the Longobards, the Normans, the Angevins, the Aragonese, the Spanish, and the Bourbons.

On completing his medical studies, Munthe was the youngest physician in Europe. The Story of San Michele describes his time in Paris and Rome, his years as the physician to the Swedish Royal family and later his years as private physician to the queen of Sweden, who had also taken a liking to Capri. Written in English, The Story of San Michele, which remains in print, was an instant success, becoming the best-selling non-fiction book in the U.S. in 1930. Munthe’s novel approach to medicine and the book’s mixture of adventure, treasure, and royalty continue to inspire. The Story of San Michele was the mysterious target of one Henry Arthur Harrington, a petty thief who crisscrossed the UK, stealing 1,321 copies from second-hand bookstores before his eventual arrest in 1982. Even in 2003, Munthe’s contributions are the subject of learned attention: the Second International Symposium on Axel Munthe’s life and work will be held in Sweden tomorrow (September 13).

With the rapid success of The Story of San Michele, the book was a natural target for would-be translators. Editions in several languages were soon completed. Given its origin, it was odd that such a popular book was not more quickly translated into Italian.

Patricia Volterra, living in Florence, was fascinated by the book and was eager for her husband Gualti to read it too. A minor obstacle: Gualti did not speak English. Undeterred, Volterra set out to translate the book into Italian. She wrote to John Murray, the publisher, requesting permission. To her surprise, she received a reply directly from Munthe. According to her diary, he wrote that

the book had already been translated into several languages and was selling like wildfire. To date he had refused offers for it to be translated into Italian as, he wrote, this language, when written, was apt to become too flowery and overloaded and that he had written the book in an extremely simple style which he wished to retain. However, he continued, he suggested I should translate the last chapter, which he considered the most difficult, and send it to him to the Torre Matterita at Anacapri. He would then let me know whether he thought he could permit me to translate the rest.

Volterra sent off her translation of the final chapter and spent several weeks waiting for an answer. Finally her manuscript was returned “with an extremely complimentary letter from Munthe, telling me to proceed to do the rest.” Later she wrote that at that time nothing seemed impossible to her but that now she wouldn’t have even considered the translation.

While working on the translation, she had lunch with Munthe in Rome when Gualti, an Italian concert pianist, was playing at the Augusteum. Munthe was staying at Villa Svezia, the Queen of Sweden’s residence on the Via Aldovrandi. When Munthe saw her he exclaimed ‘My goodness, how old are you?’ She: ‘Twenty three.’ He: ‘And you are translating San Michele!’ Munthe was over 70 at the time.

Volterra sent the work to an Italian publisher, Mondadori, who refused her. “Their great loss,” she wrote. Another, Treves, accepted. Munthe “had decreed that the entire royalties should go to the Society for the Protection of Animals in Naples.” Volterra was to sell her translation for whatever she could get for it. This amounted to the equivalent of 50 pounds sterling for 8 months work.

Later that spring, Volterra traveled to Capri. In a horse-drawn cab they drove to Anacapri where they visited San Michele. From there on foot through the olives to the Torre di Materita to have lunch with Munthe. A variety of his dogs scampered round his heels as he showed them the old tower which was then his home. They had a vegetarian lunch served by Rosina, so affectionately mentioned by Munthe in his book.

The Volterra translation ran quickly into 35 editions and was still selling well when she left Italy in 1938. Mussolini was so impressed by La Storia di San Michele that he passed a law prohibiting the shooting of migratory birds on Capri.

Volterra saw Munthe one final time, in Jermyn Street, London. Munthe died in 1949, leaving the villa of San Michele to Sweden. Owned today by the Swedish Munthe Foundation, it is home to an ornithological research center and is open to the public.

[Continued in part two, "Bob Arno".]

Image: ABC Tasmania

For the last seven years, I’ve kept a web page full of people’s email about street scams they’ve been involved in (as victims) in Barcelona.

In the beginning I just wrote down brief descriptions of things that I saw or was involved in soon after moving to Spain. I’d seen hardly any street crime in my (then) 33 years and I found it fascinating to watch for. It certainly wasn’t hard to find. Often it came right to my door or to the street under my balcony. Before long I began to receive email from others who had visited or lived in Barcelona, each with their own story to tell. I put the stories onto the web page and they soon outnumbered my own. I continue to receive a few emails a month from people who’ve read the web page (generally after being robbed, though sometimes before leaving on a trip). I don’t often reply to these emails, apart from a line or two to say thanks when I put their messages on the web page, often months after they mail me.

For whatever reason, I’ve never been very interested to meet these people, though I’ve had plenty of chances to. In general I don’t seem to have much interest in meeting new people – it’s quite rare that I do. I should probably be more sociable (or something) because once in a while the consequences are immediately extraordinary.

Among my email, I get occasional contacts from people in the tourism industry. Lonely Planet, Fodor’s, people writing books or running travel services or web sites. Mainly they want to know if they can link to the web page, or to use some of the content in their own guides. I always agree without condition. After all, the main (but not the only) point is to help people be more aware, and besides, the majority of the content was written by other people who clearly share the same advisory aim. With this attention from various professionals who are trying to pass on the information, I began to wonder how many such people there were. Maybe there were other people with web sites devoted to street crime. So once in a while I’d do a web search on “street scams”, or something similar, just to see what came up. It’s usually interesting.

On July 30th 2001, I went looking around for similar web sites and ran across Bob Arno. I took a quick look around and fired off an email to say hello, and offered to buy him a beer the next time he was in Barcelona:

    Hi Bob

    I was just having a wander around the web when I ran into your
    pages about pickpockets. They look good, very useful.

    You might be interested to see a page of my own: http://jon.es/barna/scams.html

    All about things that have happened to people in Barcelona. It's
    not too well organized, but there's a lots of it. Most of it falls
    into well known classes of petty crime. Things are getting worse
    here, with the most recent tactics being strangulation from behind
    and squirting a flammable liquid onto people's backs and then, you
    guessed it, setting them on fire.

    Let me know next time you're in Barcelona and I'll buy you a
    beer. I'm also in Manhattan very often.

    Regards,
    Terry Jones.

Bob looked very interesting, and we seemed to have the same point of view on street crime. He’s a seasoned professional, a Vegas showman, and is constantly traveling the world studying many forms of crime and passing on his knowledge. Check out his website.

I sent mail to Derek, passing on Bob Arno’s URL. I said a little of how funny and random it seemed to me, of how over all the years of doing different things and meeting any number of famous and high-powered academics and intellectuals etc., and not really having much interest in any of them, that I’m sending email to this Bob Arno guy suggesting we meet up.

The next day I read more about Bob’s exploits and interests and I guessed that we would probably get on really well. I sent off a longer email with some more of my observations about Barcelona:

    Hi again.

    I sent off that first email without having looked at more than a
    page or two of your web site.

    It's very interesting to read more. I spend far too much time
    thinking about and watching for petty thieves in Barcelona. I've
    thought about many of the issues touched on in the interview with
    you by your own TSJ. The whole thing is very intriguing and lately
    I've begun to wonder increasingly what I can do about it, and if I
    want to do anything about it. I have tended to act to try to stop
    pickpockets, but I've also seen things many times from a distance
    or a height, read many things, seen freshly robbed people weeping,
    talked to many people who have been robbed, thought of this as an
    art (I'm interviewed in a Barcelona newspaper under the headline
    "Some crimes are a work of art" - I'm not sure if they understood
    what I meant), etc. I've never tried filming these people. But I
    know how they look at you when they know they have been spotted,
    how their faces look when the wallet hits the floor, how they prey
    on Western or "rich" psychology, and so many other things.  My
    focus has been Barcelona, after coming to live here 5 years ago
    and (at that time) having an apartment 1 floor up about 100 meters
    from Plaza Real. If I had had a net I could have caught people
    several times a day.

    I recently got a video camera and was thinking of interviewing the
    woman on my web site who was strangled here earlier this month. By
    the way, the papers reported up to 9 cases of such stranglings in a
    single day. I wasn't quite sure what to do with the tape. It hadn't
    occurred to me to film the thieves, but it would be so easy.  In
    Barcelona it's trivial to spot these people, and also feels very
    safe since many of them have been arrested literally hundreds of
    times.  There is basically no deterrent. There are undoubtedly more
    sophisticated pickpockets here too, but there is little in the way
    of evolutionary pressure to make them improve their methods. The
    tourists are too many and too unaware, the police are too few, and
    the laws are too slack. Why would you even bother to improve or
    think?

    I also know the boredom that comes with professional acts. I used to
    do a lot of juggling and unicycling, practicing 6 hours a day for a
    long time. But I could never stand to have a canned show that I did
    time after time - it was just too routine to have a routine. So I
    refused and eventually drifted into other things.

    How can I get a copy of your book? It doesn't seem to say on the web
    site. Also, the menu of links at the top left of your pages looks
    extremely garbled under my browser (Opera).

    Terry

As it turned out, my timing was perfect. I got a mail back the next day from Bob’s wife Bambi (yes, really). She said they’d be in Barcelona in just 5 days time and that they’d love to meet up.

And meet up we did!

They came to our apartment and we all hit it off immediately. As I’d thought, we did have a lot in common, both in terms of what we had done and in outlook. They told me they also get lots of email through their web site and hardly ever reply. Ana and I took them out for food. We sat outside at the nearby Textile Museum. Later, Ana went home to look after Sofia, and I stayed with Bob and Bambi. In the end I was with them about five hours and I had a really good time. We arranged to meet the next day to go hunting for thieves on the Ramblas. In one sense, “hunting” isn’t at all the right word: the thieves are typically very obvious to anyone who’s actually paying attention. But there’s a lot of subtlety in tracking and filming them, so it really is something like a hunt. I’ve since spent many hours, on several occasions, in action with Bob and Bambi in Barcelona. But that’s another story.

After getting home that first night, I went back to Bob’s web site and read more of his pages. He’s had a pretty colorful life. Actually, it’s extraordinarily colorful by almost any measure. “Who is this Bob Arno?” I wondered. Fortunately, Bob has a “Who is Bob Arno?” page, which I finally got around to reading.

Halfway down… unbelievable… I want to cry.

    Born in Sweden, Bob Arno is a great-grandson of Dr. Axel Munthe,
    who is most famous for his novel The Story of San Michele.

Patricia Volterra was my great aunt.

Here’s another. It’s Faulkner’s address upon receiving the National Book Award for fiction in 1955. Taken from William Faulkner Essays, Speeches & Public Letters. Random House 1965, pp 143-5.

It makes me think about what I consider Faulkner’s crowning masterpiece, Absalom, Absalom! and the effort that must have gone into its creation. It also puts me in mind of Tim O’Reilly’s exhortation to entrepreneurs to “work on stuff that matters”.

By artist I mean of course everyone who has tried to create something which was not here before him, with no other tools and material than the uncommerciable ones of the human spirit; who has tried to carve, no matter how crudely, on the wall of that final oblivion beyond which he will have to pass, in the tongue of the human spirit ‘Kilroy was here.’

That is primarily, and I think in its essence, all that we ever really tried to do. And I believe we will all agree that we failed. That what we made never quite matched and never will match the shape, the dream of perfection which we inherited and which drove us and will continue to drive us, even after each failure, until anguish frees us and the hand falls still at last.

Maybe it’s just as well that we are doomed to fail, since, as long as we do fail and the hand continues to hold blood, we will try again; where, if we ever did attain the dream, match the shape, scale that ultimate peak of perfection, nothing would remain but to jump off the other side of it into suicide. Which would not only deprive us of our American right to existence, not only inalienable but harmless too, since by our standards, in our culture, the pursuit of art is a peaceful hobby like breeding Dalmations, it would leave refuse in the form of, at best indigence and at worst downright crime resulting from unexhausted energy, to be scavenged and removed and disposed of. While this way, constantly and steadily occupied by, obsessed with, immersed in trying to do the impossible, faced always with the failure which we decline to recognize and accept, we stay out of trouble, keep out of the way of the practical and busy people who carry the burden of America.

So all are happy—the giants of industry and commerce, and the manipulators for profit or power of the mass emotions called government, who carry the tremendous load of geopolitical solvency, the two of which conjoined are America; and the harmless breeders of the spotted dogs (unharmed too, protected, immune in the inalienable right to exhibit our dogs to one another for acclaim, and even to the public too; defended in our right to collect from them at the rate of five or ten dollars for the special signed editions, and even at the rate of thousands to special fanciers named Picasso or Matisse).

Then something like this happens—like this, here, this afternoon; not just once and not even just once a year. Then that anguished breeder discovers that not only his fellow breeders, who must support their mutual vocation in a sort of mutual desperate defensive confederation, but other people, people whom he had considered outsiders, also hold that what he is doing is valid. And not only scattered individuals who hold his doings valid, but enough of them to confederate in their turn, for no mutual benefit of profit or defense but simply because they also believe it is not only valid but important that man should write on the wall ‘Man was here also A.D. 1953, or ’54 or ’55′, and so go on record like this this afternoon.

To tell not the individual artist but the world, the time itself, that what he did is valid. That even failure is worth while and admirable, provided only that the failure is splendid enough, the dream splendid enough, unattainable enough yet forever valuable enough, since it was of perfection.

So when this happens to him (or to one of his fellows; it doesn’t matter which one, since all share the validation of the mutual devotion) the thought occurs that perhaps one of the things wrong with our country is success. That there is too much success in it. Success is too easy. In our country a young man can gain it with no more than a little industry. He can gain it so quickly and easily that he has not had time to learn the humility to handle it with, or even to discover, realise, that he will need humility.

The new approach is simply to divide the number of hours that have passed since In Search of Lost Time was published by the number of people who’ve ever finished it. That average is a crude measure, but it may be nevertheless quite accurate and it’s irresistibly interesting to me to see how it compares to my original 2006 estimate of 2.19 hours.

So, assume 2B people were alive in 1927 when the final volume was published, and 6.4B alive at the end of 2006 (source).

Assume that no-one alive in 1927 was still alive in 2006 (obviously not the case, but not unreasonable and not a significant error). I.e., there were 4.4B births in those 79 years. Note: This is ignoring a significant number of people who were born after 1927 and who died before 2006. But it is including everyone born from 1990 onwards, essentially zero of whom would have read Proust by 2006.

In my original post I estimated that one person in 10K actually finishes the whole book. So that’s 4.4B/10K = 440K people who read the book during the 79 years.

79 years is 28,835 days, or 692,040 hours. Doing the division, 692,040 / 440,000 = 1.57 hours.

I.e., by the above rough reasoning, someone, somewhere on earth, finishes Proust every 1.57 hours, on average.

I find the closeness of the two estimates quite remarkable. There’s only one shared assumption (1 in 10,000 finishes). Both estimates are quite crude, yet there’s only about a 30% difference in the answers. I was expecting them to be much more divergent.

Below is one I encountered a few days ago. Can you place it? You can find the answer on Google in a flash.

The glamour of youth enveloped his parti-coloured rags, his destitution, his loneliness, the essential desolation of his futile wanderings. For months — for years — his life hadn’t been worth a day’s purchase; and there he was gallantly, thoughtlessly alive, to all appearances indestructible solely by the virtue of his few years and of his unreflecting audacity. I was seduced into something like admiration — like envy. Glamour urged him on, glamour kept him unscathed. He surely wanted nothing from the wilderness but space to breathe in and to push on through. His need was to exist, and to move onwards at the greatest possible risk, and with a maximum of privation. If the absolutely pure, uncalculating, unpractical spirit of adventure had ever ruled a human being, it ruled this be-patched youth. I almost envied him the possession of this modest and clear flame. It seemed to have consumed all thought of self so completely, that even while he was talking to you, you forgot that it was he— the man before your eyes— who had gone through these things.

There were lots of oracles in classical Greece, and elsewhere.Of the Greek oracles, the Delphic Oracle was, and still is, the best known. People (kings, dictators, emperors, wannabees) would send questions like “Should I invade Persia?” to the oracle and receive typically ambiguous or cryptic responses. We have a large number of famous oracular replies. Herodotus recounts how Croesus decided to test the various oracles by sending them all the same question, asking what he was doing on a certain day. The oracle at Delphi won hands down. Croesus then immediately put more pressing matters to the Delphic oracle, famously misinterpreted the pronouncements, and was duly wiped out by the Persians.

Imagine yourself in the position of the Delphic oracle. You’ve got all sorts of rulers and aspiring rulers constantly sending you their thoughts and questions, asking what you think. You’re in a unique position, simultaneously privy to the most secret potential plans of many powerful rulers. You really know what’s going on. You know what’s likely to succeed or to fail, and why. You get to give the thumbs up or thumbs down. By virtue of your position and the information flowing through your temple, you can direct traffic; you can shape and create history. You might even be tempted to profit from your knowledge. Your successful accurate pronouncements invariably reap you rich tribute.

OK, you can see where this is leading…

Sequoia Capital, and other well-known venture firms, have a somewhat similar position. They have thousands of leaders and wannabee leaders bringing them their detailed secret plans, proposing to mount armies, found cities, build empires, to attack the modern-day Persians, etc. By virtue of their unusual position they probably have a pretty good idea of what might work, and why. Using this knowledge, but without necessarily revealing sources, they can cryptically but assuredly state “oh, that’ll never work” or they can encourage ideas that are new and which they can see will somehow fit and succeed. If company X has consulted the oracle, disclosing a detailed plan to go left, and company Y plans to attack from the right, well…. why not?

Entrepreneurs beg an audience, get a tiny slice of time to make their pitch, and occasionally receive rare clear endorsements. Much more frequently they are left to scratch their heads over cryptic, ambiguous and unexplained responses (and non-responses). You can bet the Delphic oracle didn’t sign NDAs either.

It’s stretching it too far to seriously claim that Sequoia is the modern-day equivalent of the Delphic oracle. But on the other hand, over 2500 years have elapsed, so you’d expect a few changes.

I don’t have anything much to say, but thought I’d include a few fragments while I still have this volume (which belongs to Russell).

We’re lucky to have 1984 at all. Orwell was quickly running out of strength when finishing it, and was reduced to working about an hour a day. He then had to type the whole thing up himself, in bed and on the sofa. Towards the end he was barely capable of any physical activity at all – even getting out of bed to walk around. It’s amazing to look back at his struggles to bring the book into existence. He couldn’t even get a stenographer to Jura to type it for him. What a trivial amount of logistical help and money it would have been to get someone up there to help him, if only anyone had known what he was preparing and how desperate his condition was becoming. He thought 1984 might sell 10,000 copies. Until just before it was done he was still trying to decide between the name 1984 and “The Last Man in Europe”.

There’s some controversy over the influence of Yevgeny Zamyatin‘s novel We on 1984. I don’t think there’s any skulking around the literary woods, in least in the case of Orwell. He reviewed the French translation. He also mentions We in several letters, and had arranged to review the English translation in the Times Literary Supplement (but the translation didn’t happen or wasn’t published). He also wrote suggesting Zamyatin’s widow be contacted to see if there were more manuscripts that could be published. In another late letter he talks about We having an important place in the “chain of utopia” novels. So it seems very clear that Orwell had nothing to hide on that front. I also find it interesting that Wikipedia quotes Orwell as saying Brave New World “must be partly derived from” We. In fact, Orwell’s letter to Fred Warburg of March 30 1949 says “I think Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World must be plagiarized from it to some extent”. That’s a rather stronger word. Maybe Huxley’s apologists are keeping close watch on Wikipedia.

One late essay I really enjoyed was Writers and Leviathan. From which:

And most of us still have a lingering belief that every choice, even every political choice, is between good and evil, and that if a thing is necessary it is also right. We should, I think, get rid of this belief, which belongs to the nursery. In politics one can never do more than decide which of two evils is the lesser, and there are some situations from which one can only escape by acting like a devil or a lunatic.

I guess I’ve been in something like this position just once, and the best that can be said is that I ended up with a couple less enemies than I had expected.

From a letter to Michael Meyer in Sweden:

I always thought Sweden a dull country, much more so than Norway or Finland. I should think there would probably be very good fishing, if you can whack up any interest in that. But I have never been able to like these model countries with everything up to date and hygienic and an enormous suicide rate.

From extracts from a manuscript note-book:

It is now (1949) 16 years since my first book was published, & abt 21 years since I started publishing articles in the magazines. Throughout that time there has literally been not one day in which I did not feel that I was idling, that I was behind with the current job, & that my total output was miserably small. Even at the periods when I was working 10 hours a day on a book, or turning out 4 or 5 articles a week, I have never been able to get away from this neurotic feeling, that I was wasting time. I can never get any sense of achievement out of the work that is actually in progress, because it always goes slower than I intend, & in any case I feel that a book or even an article does not exist until it is finished. But as soon as a book is finished, I begin, actually from the next day, worrying because the next one is not begun, & am haunted with the fear that there never will be a next one—that my impulse is exhausted for good & all. If I look back & count up the actual amount that I have written, then I see that my output has been respectable: but this does not reassure me, because it simply gives me the feeling that I once had an industriousness & a fertility which I have now lost.

This resonates strongly with me too.

From a letter to Richard Rees (3 March 1949) after trying to follow one of Bertrand Russell’s logical arguments regarding the antithesis of the statement “some men are tailless”, and suggesting “all men are tailless”, he concludes:

But I never can follow that kind of thing. It is the sort of thing that makes me feel that philosophy should be forbidden by law.

Which is similar to my feelings about the pursuit of Artificial Intelligence.

That’s enough for now. There’s so much more. You’ll have to go read it for yourself though, I guess.

I’m wearing glasses today, for the first time in 6 years. It’s really really weird. They’re “progressive” bi- or tri-focals. It turned out one of my eyes was great for distance, one great for close ups, and both with an astigmatism. The glasses fix everything – provided you look through the right part of the glass, which also implies turning your head more than usual. I’ve tried wearing them around, and it’s very odd. Among the oddities is a huge improvement in depth perception. Everything seems so 3D, especially things at a distance. But the buttons on my Mac UI seem to be popping out of the screen too.

I’d forgotten how many pan-handlers there are in San Diego. I sometimes give money to people, and sometimes quite a lot: $150 once, $80 once, over $20 several times, and I once gave a homeless guy my bicycle to his great surprise. But 99% of the time I say no and keep walking. You can’t give money to everyone. They need it, but I need it too. Once a guy used to follow me and get a couple of dollars every day on my way to Sydney Uni, back in ’84 or so. I eventually changed routes to avoid him.

I went to Border’s books on 6th and G. I bought Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq by Michael Scheuer, The Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man: A Biography by Christopher Hitchens, and a boxed set of 5 Jigsaw Jones stories by James Preller (to read to the kids).

I read Scheuer’s then-anonymous Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror and enjoyed it. I know I own, and think I also read Through Our Enemies’ Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America. He’s certainly no shrinking violet liberal! I learned a lot about Afghanistan reading his analysis. Russell knows ten times more than I do about almost everything, and agrees that Imperial Hubris is good. We also both like Hitchens a lot. Give me someone who thinks clearly, sincerely tries to weigh evidence, writes well, and speaks his mind any day, no matter how controversial their opinions are. The more the better, in fact. And so I enjoy Orwell, Gore Vidal and Robert Hughes.

I keep meaning to go see the Bonobos in the San Diego zoo. I like Bonobos. There’s a good TED video here, though with an annoying voice-over and somewhat manipulative-sensationalist background music. I’ve been here multiple times, and I lived here for nearly a year, but have never made it to the zoo.

A brief excerpt from the latter:

The whole point of Christmas is that it is a debauch—as it was probably long before the birth of Christ was arbitrarily fixed at that date. Children know this very well. From their point of view Christmas is not a day of temperate enjoyment, but of fierce pleasures which they are quite willing to pay for with a certain amount of pain. The awakening at about 4 a.m. to inspect your stockings; the quarrels over toys all through the morning, and the exciting whiffs of mincemeat and sage-and-onions escaping from the kitchen door; the battle with enormous platefuls of turkey, and the pulling of the wishbone; the darkening of the windows and the entry of the flaming plum pudding; the hurry to make sure that everyone has a piece on his plate while the brandy is still alight; the momentary panic when it is rumoured that Baby has swallowed the threepenny bit; the stupor all through the afternoon; the Christmas cake with almond icing an inch thick; the peevishness next morning and the castor oil on December 27th—it is an up-and-down business, by no means all pleasant, but well worth while for the sake of its more dramatic moments.

Teetotallers and vegetarians are always scandalized by this attitude. As they see it, the only rational objective is to avoid pain and to stay alive as long as possible. If you refrain from drinking alcohol, or eating meat, or whatever it is, you may expect to live an extra five years, while if you overeat or overdrink you will pay for it in acute physical pain on the following day.

Wow.

And apropos. I was out drinking red wine and having a great time on Monday night. Then last night I was invited to a dinner and so finally got to spend some time talking to Jeff Jonas after we’d spent the last year missing each other at various places.

Me: I bet you were always the class clown at school.
Jeff: School??? I didn’t go to school.

Point conceded.

We were in a fancy fish restaurant. So I ordered the filet mignon, done rare. It was a large unadorned cube of semi-cold meat. I thought briefly of all the warnings against eating too much red meat, and tucked right in.

I’m still making my way deliberately slowly through Orwell’s essays. I’m halfway through the final volume. There’s something like 2200 pages in total. I probably read just 5 to 10 pages at a time. That means I get to sit down to pleasures like the above hundreds and hundreds of times. Who would you rather share breakfast with?

That’s all for now. It’s somehow wrong to blog so imperfectly and so soon after reading As I Please.

She and her husband/partner Bob Arno have hundreds of true tales of their extraordinary, amazing, adventures all over the world.

They hunt thieves. They travel constantly. They get into all sorts of hot water. Bambi wrote a book: Travel Advisory! How to Avoid Thefts, Cons, and Street Scams While Traveling. And, of course, they have a web site.

I have an interesting literary tale of how I met Bambi & Bob, and our subsequent adventures. But those will have to wait.

Meanwhile, go sign up for Bambi’s blog, Thiefhunters in paradise. I hope it will be a big success. Bambi & Bob have so much engrossing content that they could put online by simply documenting their everyday lives. Lives that I think regular stay-at-home folks will really enjoy experiencing – from a safe distance.

In London a couple of weeks ago I pointed it out to Russell as we wandered through a Waterstones. He picked it up, flipped it open, and immediately began to make deadly and merciless fun of it.

For me this is the kind of book I know I’ll want to read if it’s any good, and which I know I’ll (try to) read in any case because these days I’m meeting the kind of people who like to refer to this sort of book. Not wanting to look like I’m not up to speed on the latest popular science, I’ll read for as long as I can bear it.

There are lots of books in this category. E.g., The Tipping Point, which I enjoyed, Wisdom of the Crowds, which I found so annoying and bad that I had to stop reading it, and A Short History of Almost Everything which was semi-amusing and which I made myself finish despite having much better things to read. There’s also Everything is Miscellaneous, which I enjoyed a lot, and Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, which I’ve yet to get hold of. You know the type.

I went to bed early (3am) the other night so I could read a bit of the Black Swan before I went to sleep.

I got about 2 pages in and found it so bad that I almost had to put it down. The prologue is a dozen pages long. I forced myself to read the whole thing.

It’s dreadful, it’s pretentious, it’s vague, it’s silly, it’s obvious, it’s parenthesized and qualified beyond belief, it’s full of the author’s made-up names for things (Black Swan, antiknowledge, empty suits, GIF, Platonicity, Platonic fold, nerdified, antilibrary, extremistan, mediocristan), it’s self-indulgent, it’s trite. It’s a painfully horrible introduction to what I’d hoped would be a good book.

It was so bad that I couldn’t believe it could go on, so I decided to keep reading. This is published by Random House, who you might hope would know better. But I guess they know a smash hit popular theme and title when they see it, and they’ll publish it, even if they know the style is appalling and for whatever reason they don’t have the leverage to force changes.

Fortunately though, the book improves.

The guy is obviously very smart and has been thinking about some of this for a long time, he has an unconventional take on many things, and he does offer insights. I am still finding the style annoying, but I have a feeling I will finish it and I know for sure I’ll take some lessons away. I’m up to page 56, with about 250 to go. I suppose I’ll blog about it again if it seems worthwhile.

If you’re contemplating reading it, I suggest jumping in at Chapter 3.

I’m off to read a bit more now.

Here’s something about 5000 years older. As a bonus there’s a deep connection with what Fluidinfo is doing.

Alex Wright recently wrote GLUT: Mastering Information Through the Ages. The book is good. It’s a little dry in places, but in others it’s really excellent. I especially enjoyed the last 2 chapters, “The Web that Wasn’t” and “Memories of the Future”. GLUT has a non-trivial overlap with the even more excellent Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger.

In chapter 4 of GLUT, “The Age of Alphabets”, Wright describes the rise of writing systems around 3000 BC as a means of recording commercial transactions. The details of the transactions were written onto a wet clay tablet, signed by the various parties, and then baked. Wright (p50) continues:

Once the tablet was baked, the scribe would then deposit it on a shelf or put it in a basket, with labels affixed to the outside to facilitate future search and retrieval.

There are two comments I want to make about this. One is a throwaway answer to Jimmy Guterman’s request, but the other deserves consideration.

Firstly, this is tagging. Note that the tags are attached after the data is put onto the clay tablet and it is baked. This temporal distinction is important – it’s not like other mentions of metadata or tagging given by Wright (e.g., see p51 and p76). Tags could presumably have different shapes or colors, and be removed, added to, etc. Tags can be attached to objects you don’t own – like using a database to put tags on a physically distant web page you don’t own. No-one has to anticipate all the tag types, or the uses they might be put to. If a Sumerian scribe decided to tag the best agrarian deals of 3000 BC or all deals involving goats, he/she could have done it just as naturally as we’d do it today.

Secondly, I find it very interesting to consider the location of information here and in other systems. The tags that scribes were putting on tablets in 3000 BC were stored with the tablets. They were physically attached to them. I think that’s right-headed. To my mind, the tag information belongs with the object that’s being tagged. In contrast, today’s online tagging systems put our tags in a physically separate location. They’re forced to do that because of the data architecture of the web. The tagging system itself, and the many people who may be tagging a remote web page, don’t own that page. They have no permission to alter it.

Let’s follow this thinking about the location of information a little further…

Later in GLUT, Wright touches on how the card catalog of libraries became separated from the main library content, the actual books. Libraries became so big and accumulated so many volumes that it was no longer feasible to store the metadata for each volume with the volume. So that information was collected and stored elsewhere.

This is important because the computational world we all inhabit has similarly been shaped by resource constraints. In our case the original constraints are long gone, but we continue to live in their shadow.

I’ll explain.

We all use file systems. These were designed many decades ago for a computing environment that no longer exists. Machines were slow. Core and disk memory was tiny. Fast indexing and retrieval algorithms had yet to be invented. Today, file content and file metadata are firmly separated. File data is in one place while file name, permissions, and other metadata are stored elsewhere. That division causes serious problems. The two systems need different access mechanisms. They need different search mechanisms.

Now would be a good time to ask yourself why it has traditionally been almost impossible to find a file based simultaneously on its name and its content.

Our file systems are like our libraries. They have a huge card catalog just inside the front door (at the start of the disk), and that’s where you go to look things up. If you want the actual content you go fetch it from the stacks. Wandering the stacks without consulting the catalog is a little like reading raw disk blocks at random (that can be fun btw).

But libraries and books are physical objects. They’re big and slow and heavy. They have ladders and elevators and are traversed by short-limbed humans with bad eyesight. Computers do not have these characteristics. By human standards, they are almost infinitely fast and their storage is cheap and effectively infinite. There’s no longer any reason for computers to separate data from metadata. In fact there’s no need for a distinction between the two. As David Weinberger put it, in the real world “everything is metadata”. So it should be in the computer world as well.

In other words, I think it is time to return to a more natural system of information storage. A little like the tagging we were doing in 3000 BC.

Several things will have to change if we’re to pull this off. And that, gentle reader, is what Fluidinfo is all about.

Stay tuned.

So instead, I went out wandering and found a pizza place, ordered a margarita, drank a couple of Italian beers and took my time savoring more of Orwell. It’s such a pleasure, as with Gore Vidal essays or Proust, to read his thoughts on all manner of things. I’ve been taking my time, slowly working through the 4 volumes of Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (that link is to volume 1).

Here’s the last piece I read tonight, the May 19, 1944 As I Please column. Maybe you wont find it extraordinary, but I do. It probably helps to have the context, to have read the previous volumes (I’m in the middle of vol. 3).

In the last twenty years western civilization has given the intellectual security without responsibility, and in England, in particular, it has educated him in scepticism while anchoring him almost immovably in the privileged class. He has been in the position of a young man living on an allowance from a father whom he hates. The result is a deep feeling of guilt and resentment, not combined with any genuine desire to escape. But some psychological escape, some form of self-justification there must be, and one of the most satisfactory is transferring nationalism. During the nineteen-thirties the normal transference was to soviet Russia, but there are other alternatives, and it is noticeable that pacifism and anarchism, rather than Stalinism, are now gaining ground among the young. These creeds have the advantage that they aim at the impossible and therefore in effect demand very little. If you throw in a touch of oriental mysticism and Buchmanite raptures over Gandhi, you have everything that a disaffected intellectual needs. The life of an English gentleman and the moral attitudes of a saint can be enjoyed simultaneously.

And there’s more.

I just did a quick count of the O’Reilly titles on my shelves: I have fifty five.

And you?

The same books are available on Amazon.co.uk for a total of £28.35, plus shipping to Spain of £5.97 and VAT of £1.37 for a grand total of £35.69 or USD $71.15.

So you can pay $51 to have the books shipped (in theory) from the US, or pay roughly 40% more and have them shipped (in theory) from the UK. The difference in shipping time isn’t much either, in practice. Even if the price of mailing in the UK were free and there were no VAT, it would still be cheaper to have books sent from the US.

The dollar hit a 26-year low against the pound in April of this year (2007). If it keeps falling and Amazon don’t adjust their pricing, I might start a side business in literary arbitrage.

One could argue that it’s not in their interests to offer you a second book that you would buy later anyway at its normal price. (Yes, you can argue that it’s implicitly in their interest because it creates goodwill.)

At least in this customer’s experience, they do a great job of offering me things that I might want but never offering me anything I already know that I want. You might think that that’s because I always immediately buy everything I want, but that’s not true.

Today they slipped up and offered me something I knew in advance that I also wanted. I went to look at Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages, and after I clicked to see the book, I wondered if they might just maybe offer me Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. And… they did.

That’s a first for me. I buy lots of books on Amazon, and I’ve never been offered something I knew I wanted.

Of course it’s also in their interests to occasionally slip up like this. Then people write blog posts praising them and saying how good their algorithms are.

At least for me, Amazon’s “better together” is almost pitch perfect. They consistently land tempting titles just outside the small ring of books I’ve already decided I’m going to buy at some later point. (Note that making special offers like this is very different from the far simpler “customers who bought X also bought Y” – which is just a lookup.) It’s easy to imagine Amazon’s algorithms trying to figure out what I’m almost certainly going to buy anyway, and what I might well buy but probably wont, and picking something tantalizing and just over the edge, just out of reach. What a great way to push readers’ boundaries while making more sales and not leaving money on the table.

Whatever’s going on, and whatever you think might be going on, it’s clearly not simple to keep customers happy and enthusiastic via special offers that do not sacrifice money the customer would in fact spend anyway.

One is that people often warn each other that articles are long, or apologize for writing long blog entries. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. When it turns out though that these items are just a couple of screenfuls, you start to wonder what we’re all coming too. And yes, I know, it’s the 21st century, we’re all living at internet speed now, who’s got the time, etc.

OTOH, a word like “long” can be used to convey information. You can look at the word “long” and form some idea of just how long the long thing might be. And these days, it ain’t very long. Maybe we’re in the middle of a transition in which a word comes to mean its opposite.

Marc Andreessen recently began to blog, and the blogosphere is all abuzz. He writes tolerably well, and he’s got interesting comments on many things, but there’s a real down side: his posts are really long. Here’s a random example of someone who agrees.

That’s weird.

From where I sit, if someone writes well and is interesting or otherwise provocative, you wish they’d write more, not less. You want it to be long. Half a dozen web pages is not long. I read In Search of Lost Time last year. It took me 6 months and at 4300 pages or so, I think it qualifies as long. I’m reading Orwell’s letters, essays, and journalism. At 2200 pages, it seems fairly long too. I wished Proust was longer. I’ll probably wish Orwell was longer too. I tried reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (3500 pages), but the 7-volume “leatherette” set I bought stinks of old cigarette smoke and I couldn’t bear it.

How did we get from “long” meaning something like War and Peace (1100 pages) or Anna Karenin (850 pages) all the way to a 6-page (single narrow column) blog posting (with plenty of white space)?

What word should we now use for things that are longer than 6 pages or that require more than 5 minutes to read? Epic?

Today I was reading an Orwell review of three T. S. Eliot poems. I’m not into Eliot and I’m not into poetry. Like Gore Vidal’s, Orwell’s reviews are wonderful – balanced and surgical skewerings. Anyway, I came across the following, which I enjoyed enormously and decided to post:

But the trouble is that conscious futility is something only for the young. One cannot go on ‘despairing of life’ into a ripe old age. One cannot go on and on being ‘decadent’, since decadence means falling and one can only be said to be falling if one is going to reach the bottom reasonably soon. Sooner or later one is obliged to adopt a positive attitude towards life and society. It would be putting it too crudely to say that every poet in our time must either die young, enter the Catholic Church, or join the Communist party, but in fact the escape from the consciousness of futility is along those general lines. There are other deaths besides physical death, and there are other sects and creeds besides the Catholic Church and the Communist Party, but it remains true that after a certain age one must either stop writing or dedicate oneself to some purpose not wholly aesthetic. Such a dedication necessarily means a break with the past:

every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.

Apart from the fact that I am much too impatient to read poetry, one of my problems is that I never have any idea what it’s about. But at least the above is clear. It wonderfully captures the inevitable progression from the troubled search for meaning of existential youth to the amorphous struggles of the serial entrepreneur.