Terry Jones

I read more of Orwell over breakfast. Specifically, the As I Please articles from December 13 and December 20 1946.

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.

My good friend Bambi has finally begun to blog in earnest! Fantastic.

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.

I got a copy of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable for xmas.

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.

Jimmy Guterman recently called Marcel Proust an Alpha Geek and asked for thoughts on “what from 100 years ago might be the hot new technology of 2008?”

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.

I’m in Paris for the Le Web conference. Tonight is the party, at La Scala, which looks like exactly the kind of place I hate. I never understand why people go to loud clubs.

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).

One of several things I admire about Orwell is that he doesn’t pull any punches and he turns his guns on all comers. Here’s a nice passage from a 1943 review of Beggar My Neighbour by Lionel Fielden.

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 like O’Reilly technical books. Back in 1987 I put together some notes to write a book on the vi editor, and later considered submitting the idea to O’Reilly. I used to think I knew just about everything there was to know about vi, at least as a user, and I spent a small amount of time fiddling with its code to fix some limitations. Of course now being a hardened emacs user, it’s a good thing I didn’t blot my career early by writing a book on a crappy editor like vi.

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

And you?

The two books I just bought on Amazon.com cost me $37.74, plus shipping to Spain of $13.47, for a total of $51.21.

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.

Amazon, intentionally or not, have done a great job with their special offer feature that suggests a second book to you and offers you both at the same time for a discount.

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.

There are a few things that bug me on the internet.

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?

I like George Orwell. A tired fool got me started on the four-volume collection of Orwell’s essays, journalism, and letters. It’s great. Among many things I could say, one is that you know you’re reading someone damned good if you’re fascinated by their thoughts on something you formerly had no interest or experience in. There’s the essay on Dickens that I mentioned earlier, essays on cheap vulgar postcards, boys magazines, and much else besides. Gore Vidal is similarly compelling, and I think I would take his collected essays even over those of Orwell. Christopher Hitchens is similarly provocative but not in the same class as a writer. Very few are.

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.

I’ve not read a single word of Dickens. I don’t know the plot of a single book, apart from superficial knowledge of Oliver Twist. For a long time this has seemed like a major hole in my reading. I’ve occasionally considered doing something about it.

But I have just finished a 50-page essay on Dickens by Orwell. I’ve read the obvious Orwell but never knew anything about the man. I like Orwell. The Dickens essay is good. After reading it I have even less interest in reading Dickens. Of course I should probably make up my mind about Dickens from reading him first hand. But life is short. Orwell strongly confirmed my suspicions. And so I’ve decided to skip Dickens completely. Forever.

It’s nice to have the hole, and to now know that it’s permanent. It has strategic value. Plus I have the good fortune that my hole happens to be Dickens. He wasn’t worth reading anyway.

In her keynote at PyCon a few minutes ago, Adele Goldberg just mentioned Mitch Resnick’s book Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams. I wrote a review of the book for the Complexity journal in 1994 or 1995:

There is an important trade-off between realism and understanding in the construction of models of complex systems. At one extreme, a model may be so realistic that it allows no increase in understanding of the modeled system. At the other, the model may be precisely understood but be so divorced from reality that this understanding cannot be related back to the original system. The construction of a model requires that difficult choices be made about what aspects of a system should and should not be modeled, and about how abstractions, simplifications and generalizations are to be justified and implemented. Any unchecked tendency to include more than is absolutely necessary can soon result in a model that, at least aesthetically, feels somehow bloated. It is easy to underestimate the difficulty involved in these decisions, and in the requirements of good judgement and taste in the construction of models.

It was with great pleasure then that I read Mitchel Resnick’s “Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds” (1994, MIT Press). Resnick’s StarLogo system achieves a balance between simplicity and realism that it would be difficult to improve on. This is an accomplishment in itself, but Resnick takes us much further. His StarLogo is not a single model, but a platform for exploring a wide range of decentralized systems. The StarLogo system deals so effectively with the trade-off between realism and understanding, that at times one tends to forget it is an issue.

The most provocative situation in modeling, and a sure sign that a model has dealt with the trade-off well, occurs when an apparently simple model produces unexpected results. At these times, the potential for increased understanding is at its greatest. The probability of explaining the surprising results is high, because the model is apparently simple. The decentralized systems constructed and described by Resnick repeatedly produce surprises of this kind. The delightful simplicity of StarLogo makes it possible to understand what is happening, and why our expectations were incorrect. These systems, few and far between, offer the highest returns for the effort we must invest to understand and use them.

In five short chapters, Resnick guides us through thinking about centralized and decentralized mindsets, the StarLogo system, and reflections on psychology and education. The “Explorations” chapter describes simulations (or, as Resnick prefers, stimulations) of Slime Molds, Artificial Ants, Traffic Jams, Termites, Turtles, Frogs, Forest Fires, Geometry and Recursive Trees. Resnick guides us through the thinking behind the construction of these simulations, presents alternative ideas for their construction, and argues well for decentralized views of these systems. Resnick offers the reader challenges, surprises, insights, and simple heuristic guidelines that he developed as a result of these explorations. It is remarkable that Resnick includes the entire StarLogo programs for these systems in the text of the book. The code, only once slightly over two pages in length, is clear, instructive, and incredibly simple.

Resnick’s book is a little treasure. Though much of the book is presented in the context of high-school education, any temptation to discount it on this account should be resisted. Resnick has something to teach us all. If it has a failing, it is the modesty of its presentation and claims, which may retard its recognition in “higher” academic circles. Virtually every aspect of this book should be instructive to researchers involved in agent-based modeling and simulation, especially to those in biology and artificial life. To the many scientists interested in agent-based computational modeling who are, however, not computationally inclined, read this book. It is an example of someone getting a set of deceptively difficult problems absolutely right. There are many ways in which to appreciate “Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams.” It is an important book.

I finished reading In Search of Lost Time early last (Northern hemisphere) summer. It took me six months, reading an average of 20 to 25 pages a day. Russell took much longer, after I sneakily distracted him by buying him a beautiful 7-volume copy of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – which he then read, putting Proust aside, unsuspectingly letting me sail past him and into the record books. There aren’t too many books on which you can blow a 1,500 page lead and still lose by 1,000 pages.

A few hours after Russell finally finished, he sent me mail. I speculated on the number of people that had finished it since he did. In other words, how often, anywhere on earth, does someone finish Proust?

Here’s an estimated answer, with plenty of assumptions:

Assume only one person in 10,000 actually _finishes_ the whole thing.

Assume it takes an average of a year to read it all.

So you’ve got 6,000,000,000 / 10,000 = 600K people currently on earth who will read it.

Assume that people’s ages are uniformly distributed, and that everyone dies at 75.

Assume that no-one finishes the book before turning 16.

So the people who are currently 0-15 have not started the book yet. So only (75 – 15) / 75, or 80%, of the 600K (= 480K) alive who will read it, might finish in the next year.

How many will finish in the next year?

Assume that half the people who will read it have already done so. That leaves 240K who will finish it at some point in their remaining lifetime.

Finally, if we assume these people finish at uniform ages, you’ve got 240K finishers finishing over 60 years, or 4K finishers per year.

There are 365 x 24 = 8760 hours in a year, so we have one person finishing every 8760 / 4K = 2.19 hours.

Here’s a nice paragraph from Illywhacker (Book 3, ch 59, p572 in my paperback faber & faber edition):

I sat in my chair and watched the hessianed goanna dropped into the boot. I knew, that day, that God is a glutton for grief, love, regret, sadness, joy too, everything, remorse, guilt – it is all steak and eggs to him and he will promise anything to get them. But what am I saying? There is no God. There is only me, Herbert Badgery, enthroned high above Pitt Street while angels or parrots trill attendance.

What a great name, Herbert Badgery.

I’ve had Peter Carey’s Illywhacker high on my to-read list for a couple of years, following a glowing recommendation from Bambi. I started it two days ago and…… it’s great.

To the two faithful readers of this blog I say “thanks” and “what about you Russell?”