Social Signs

Transferring Blog Posts

2011-06-02T07:57:00.001-07:00

I had started transferring posts from my Sun Microsystems blog some time ago but the task became gigantic because there was no good tool to map my blog entries and categories into my various blogger blogs. I myself don't have time to compose such a tool. If you run into one, please let me know.

A Mother's Love

2009-05-16T16:46:00.001-07:00

I originally wrote this entry on October 5, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

A mother's love belongs to the same field of same-ness of which Mencius speaks.

The Taboo against Political Discourse

2009-05-08T22:56:00.001-07:00

I originally wrote this entry on September 22, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

The taboo against political discourse can presumably lead to a more stable society but it can also lead to a society that keeps making serious (and the same) mistakes because it can afford to do so in the absence of any true democratic deliberation or costs. This risky behavior, which often causes huge losses for others, rarely sees those losses come back to haunt it.

Here's what Lawerence Lessig says about this taboo against politics--a taboo which surrounds us at work, in our neighborhoods and even at our schools:

Democracy means rule by the people, but rule means something more than mere elections. In our tradition, it also means control through reasoned discourse. This was the idea that captured the imagination of Alexis de Tocqueville, the nineteenth-century French lawyer who wrote the most important account of early "Democracy in America."

. . . [Today] for most of us for most of the time, there is no time or place for "democratic deliberation" to occur.

More bizzarely, there is generally not even permission for it to occur. We, the most powerful democracy in the world, have developed a strong norm against talking about politics. It's fine to talk about politics with people you agree with. But it is rude to argue about politics with people you disagree with. Political discourse becomes isolated, and isolated discourse becomes extreme. We say what our friends want to hear, and hear very little beyond what our friends say.

Free Culture (p. 42)

Lessig believes that the architecture of blogs solves one part of this problem by engendring a public form of asynchronous communication, which can "increase the opportunity for communication". Hubert Dreyfus would say that cyber-communication (particularly when asynchronous) will not by itself lead to trust, which is required for joint action and engagement. Face to face, embodied communications (which are usually "synchronous") must complement (and are superior to) cyber-communication. Hence, the many bloggers' meetings that are spontaneously organized in most urban areas on the globe.

In fact, we have had several such meetings ourselves here at Sun Microsystems Inc.

[Note: I don't find the "synchronous" vs. "asynchronous" distinction in communication as a very revealing dichotomy in descriptions of human communications. The "embodied" vs. "cyber" dichotomy is probably more important. More on this later.]

Addenda:

Jan. 31, 2005: Here is a commentary in Japanese.

Open Source Society

2009-05-08T00:36:00.001-07:00

I originally wrote this entry on September 19, 2004 and published it on blogs.sun.com.

We (and this does not include just the U.S.) are already an open-source society to a very large extent. Information is widely available for those who care to find out and some have proven it possible to do so by their own example.

However, open dialogue matters well above and beyond open source.

Mixing, on the importance of which to innovation Lawerence Lessig has built a whole case, is simply an instance of open dialogue.

Open-source (widely available) information might be a pre-requisite for substantive dialogue but it neither replaces or guarantees it nor leads to it.

Finally, there're those who believe that what matters most is not cyber-dialogue but committed, emboddied dialogue and responsible action, as Hubert Dreyfus has noted in his analysis of the Internet.

Digital Walls

2009-03-26T22:50:00.001-07:00

I originally wrote this entry on September 14, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

Dan Gilmore points to Steve McGookin's article "Bloggers and Blinders" and notes McGookin's view on the echo-chamber effect:

Our tendency to visit the sites we agree with, rather than seeking out information and opinion that might change our outlook.

That's quite common. People stick to what they know. For example, how many people, even in the Bay Area, struggle to read IRIB.IR or IRNA.IR. Our minds have been filled with suspicions that make these foreign news sources lose any value that they may actually have.

People are generally more comfortable with what's more familiar to them, and the concept of some abstract, scientific and provable Truth gives them comfort as long as it is the Truth that is most comfortable. In contrast, dialog seems to provide the only way to any shared Truth.

The idea that we can broaden our scope by simply going to a different web site seems rather unfounded to me. Unless one experiences another culture from close-up and cares to engage in a constructive dialog and exchange, there's no hope of inter-cultural understanding . . . even with the Web. In fact, the web could make it harder because there's no need for exposing or experiencing any vulnerabilities, a requirement for any exchange that could lead to greater understanding and trust.

Walls do not need to be visible or built in bricks and cement. They can be digital and mountains high.

Thought Leadership vs. Dialogue Leadership

2009-03-26T22:49:00.001-07:00

I originally wrote this entry on September 11, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

We often hear of "thought leadership" or "moral leadership" but we rarely hear of "dialogue leadership." Why?

"Thought leadership" is about leading through a mostly solitary activity that has been had. We have had some thoughts, at best involving a small clique of people, and then we go out and try to "lead" with those thoughts.

"Dialogue leadership" is about creating opportunities to think together creatively and to learn from each other.

If you want to learn more about the distinction between thought leadership and dialogue leadership, I highly recommend William Isaacs' Dialogue (and the art of thinking together).

Unfortunately, theories of interaction that emphasize asocial conflict have dominance in many peoples' thinking. See, for example, these two highly-recommended books that do a very good job of summarizing these theories: Thomas Schelling's Strategies of Conflict and Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff'sThinking Strategically. These books are often used to teach business strategy, economics and social interaction.

Theories of interaction that search for a more social approach to fostering exchange have been sidelined. See, for example the distinguished economist Oliver Williamson's The Mechanisms of Governance. (I have to admit that I've seen references to Williamson's work in corporate strategy chapters of some strategy books such as Robert Grant's Contemporary Strategy Analysis.)

Ranked-Choice Voting in San Francisco

2009-03-26T22:43:00.001-07:00

I originally wrote this entry on September 8, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

I'd written earlier about the mathematics of elections, with particular attention to Condercet or ranked-choice voting. Now, Professor Lawrence Lessig has pointed his readers to a demo for San Francisco's upcoming ranked-choice voting experience.

I wonder whether a reduction in the number of available rankings (say from the number of candidates for an office to only three choices, as has been done in San Francisco) diminishes the probability of cyclic ambiguities.

San Francisco's ranked-choice voting system was passed as proposition A in March 2002, and the first ranked-choice vote for local offices will be held during the November 2nd, 2004 election. It will be a great time to look and see how Condercet voting does in practice in Northern California.

In the text version of the official San Francisco ranked-choice voting demo, we read:

The Department of Elections cannot predict the date on which it will begin the process of elimination and transfer. The Department will do so as soon as possible, after all provisional and absentee ballots are processed. The Department intends to report final election results no later than 28 days after election day.

The "28 days" of waiting for election results seems awefully long. It could be that old counting machines are used for a physical implementation of the various elimination algorithms. As I wrote earlier, some computing power and already-implemented algorithms could help with the counting and the elimination process in ranked-choice voting in cases of result ambiguities.

The Edison Audio and Motion Picture Collection

2009-03-26T22:42:00.001-07:00

I originally wrote this entry on September 7, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

The Library of Congress has been hosting a stupendous collection of motion pictures and audio recordings by companies associated with Thomas Alva Edison.

These recordings are truly great in scope, interest and quality.

One of my favorites is the Buffalo dance, peformed by Last Horse, Parts His Hair, Hair Coat. Now, I don't know about the level of authenticity of this dance but it looks as authentic if not more authentic than some I've seen performed in the last 25 years.

Another one of my favorites are the motion pictures of the Sutro Baths: 1, 2. I remember visiting the ruins of these baths on coastal walks in San Francisco in the 1980s and 1990s.

How many intelligence organizations?

2009-03-26T22:23:00.001-07:00

I originally wrote this entry on August 23, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

Judge Richard Posner has written about breaking up the CIA.

The most important benefit of multiple intelligence organizations is a certain fault-resilience that they together introduce into the system. That fault resilience will be lost in a single organization.

If there's a single organization, and that single organization gets things wrong, lives could be ruined. Multiple organizations add ability to view facts from multiple angles and with different attitudes. They are also harder to subject to a single political force.

The problem of U.S. security is not one of organization but one that is caused by a global posture that breads enemies through the carnage it unleashes. (The intentions are almost irrelevant.) To minimize backlash, we need to reduce the asocial, conflictual attitude in dealing with the world and build an attitude based on "commerce" and "exchange."

East Asia and Europe seem to be the masters of that transformation.

The importance of multi-lingualism

2009-03-22T13:31:00.001-07:00

I originally wrote this entry on August 19, 2004 and published it on blogs.sun.com.

I have already written about the importance of multi-lingualism and multi-cultural living as a response to some who have written about Balkanization on the Web, the inadequacy of automatic translation and the promise of universal, artificial languages.

I accompany a farmer from Vila Dara hot springs, Ardabil Provice, Iran, July 2004, on the foothills of Mount Sabalan. Language: Azeri and Persian.

To become truly multi-cultural, you actually have to live the lives of different cultures. There are people who do that and who have no trouble crossing linguistic boundaries because they have lived both sides, if not more than two sides. Young people, children in fact, do it all the time. We just don't foster it as a society, and we should have arrangements that encourage such living at a global level. Where I live, there are already children of Western European and South Asian descent, who are going to bilingual, public-private elementary schools that cater to an already large Chinese population. Many people in California already speak Spanish.

Also, to appreciate other cultures and languages, one doesn't necessarily need to be a very competent writer in multiple languages although there are many who can do that, very proficiently.

As an example, while I know of many great multi-linguals who speak, write and read many very diverse languages (not all of which are Indo-European), I can only speak competently in three languages and quite badly in two others, read in six different languages, three of them quite competently and three with various degrees of competency, and can write competently in two and quite badly in the rest, if at all. (Competency in reading or speaking can generally be accomplished in a larger set of languages than competency in writing.) I certainly cannot speak all world languages, or all "important" world languages but I can connect with more people because I can speak, read and write in more than one language.

This expansion effect is always true, no matter how large or a small the linguistic community.

So, opportunities for diversity are much better and more rewarding than the opportunities for an invented, uniform global language, which will often lack a living culture, rich literary history and tradition. (By the "living culture" of a language, I mean the culture of communities that primarily speak that language.)

Diversity comes at a well-spent cost. It requires dedication and hard work. I doubt anyone who's neither tried to learn nor read nor written Chinese and has not learned or lived it could translate (not literally, but figuratively speaking) that living, that history, that tradition in full into some other language, whether Esperanto or English.

Poets learn other languages because they know the difficulty of translating the music of each into the other, and also because they want to boraden their poetic horizons.

Musings on Mass Culture

2009-03-22T12:44:00.001-07:00

I originally wrote this entry on August 5, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

In his 2003 Aspen Institute information technology roundtable comments, John Seely Brown draws a distinction between mass and popular culture. As summarized by rapporteur, David Bollier:

In mass culture, meaning is generated and disseminated centrally, through television, radio, and film, for example. In popular culture, however, meaning is actively generated through a dynamic social process in which everyone can participate. People appropriate and change meaning as it suits their needs, tastes, and circumstances—a process that cultural anthropologists have called bricolage. The new forms of social participation and collaboration enabled by the Internet are creating new structures of identity and meaning.

I will try to write about Brown's ideas on a later occasion, but here are some immediate musings, not necessarily last thoughts, that follow along the lines Brown has set up.

The development of personal identity depends on social participation. Pure, non-participatory consumption creates only mechanical beings lost in the world.

Mass culture assumes, creates and regenerates consuming machines.

Popular culture requires participating creatures.

Andy Warhol's work celeberated mass culture and its icons but also tranforms them through a kind of participation which may, today, raise copyright issues. I'm not sure if such issues were raised when Warhol produced his work, for example, his Micky Mouse images.

Writing of weblogs is certainly a participatory activity but of course the possibilities and realities of disembodied communities and their resilience is a different matter all together worthy of a real dialogue.

As an example of popular culture, consider Tai Chi, as I saw it in Daqing, Harbin, Bejing, Chengdu, Xi'an, Kunming and Shanghai. People wake up in the morning, meet friends, do Tai Chi, have tea, walk to work, home or finish breakfast. One does all of this with no payments necessary and as the city walks by, or at least, that used to be the case in 1990 - 1991, when I lived and worked in China's north eastern provinces.

As an example of mass culture, consider aerobics exercises to the music of Britney Spears with the required equipment and the payments made to your local club. (I have to admit, I could be totally wrong with this particular example. There may be a real feeling of participation and community involvement that one feels when one joins these exercises or clubs for at least a short period while in the club. I doubt the feeling extends when one goes out into the city. In any case, there's nothing in the commercial activity of the usual clubs that would facilitate that. I'm basing my observation on limited personal observation as an outsider, not any real involvement of my own.)

When the producers of mass culture become overzealous in the perpetual protection of their revenue streams from cultural products, they lobby for laws that effectively banish to oblivion other cultural material. Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture describes this very salient point.

The trouble is that the vast majority of the U.S. public rely on non-participatory television, the greatest instrument of non-participatory mass culture, as a source of news and views.

Free Culture

2009-03-17T22:02:00.001-07:00

I wrote this entry, originally, on July 6, 2004.

In the very beginning of his book, Free Culture: How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity, Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford Law Professor and reknowned Internet intellectual seems to be taking a rather narrow approach when describing the sense of the word "free" in the title of his book: Free Culture.

Although I may be mistaken, in the following passage from the preface, Lessig seems to be confusing "free" with the freedom to put the past behind, to become free of its control over us.

A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a "permission culture"--a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past.

Let us first attend to the question of "permission" and then to "freedom".

It is hard to see how creators of the past could give any "permission" one way or the other. It appears as if Lessig is taking some poetic license with the word "permission". So, perhaps my whole enterprise of interpreting his definitions in any serious way is just off the course … but I have to assume he is somewhat serious about his definitions … and go on giving my own interpretation of them …

Turning to freedom "from" the control the past exercises on us, I would like to observe that we don't have any such freedom.
We only imagine we do.

The freedom we do have is a freedom to review, interpret, re-mix and learn from the past and move towards a possible future, disclosing its various aspects and possible realizations. I think later on in his book, Lessig is really focusing on that type of interpretive and creative freedom. So, it is a pity that he defines "free" as he does in the first few pages of Free Culture. I find that definition at best unnecessarily narrow and at worst inconsistent with the force of the rest of his argument.

As Heidegger has pointed out in his Was heißt Denken?, rootedness is the very essence of meditative thought. Without rootedness it is impossible to grasp the past, the present or the future in a context that relates to our being. So, to state that "free culture" is about freedom from the "control of the past" is to confuse the very meaning of the past and of culture.

A rooted culture, e.g. the Shiite Muslim culture, is not to be confused with a culture where only what the old version of that culture has permitted receives expression. On the contrary, a free culture has a capability to re-interpret what has gone on up to the present moment. In fact, elsewhere in his book, Lessig gives expression to this understanding of what "free" means.

Lessig should have defined "free culture" as one where:

… follow-on creaters and innovators remain as free as possible to re-interpret the past, and do so for all of the past, not just a selected portion of it that is perpetuated by commercial activity protected by copyrights …

Furthermore, the opposite of "free culture" is not a "permission culture" but a "shackled culture," where the past is shackled either by neglect (or otherwise by purposeful forgetfulness) from being re-interpreted in creative ways. A "shackled culture" or a "culture of slavery" only allows certain interpretations and ideas to survive. All other ideas are banished into the abyss of silence and fall forever out of reach. In a free culture, all ideas have an opportunity to florish and be interpreted anew.

It is that sense of "freedom" that the rest of Lessig's book is about.

Finally, to what extent big media is involved in purposefully using "technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity," as Lessig's book title suggests, is open to question. While big media's use of technology and the law in pursuit and protection of their commercial interests may lead to such lock-down and control, it is the job of policy-makers and the government to set the rules of the game to strike a sustainable balance between private property and free culture. If the giants of media business care little about Free Culture, that lack of care is more a by-product, not flowing from their direct intent, but a derivative consequence of their calculative, profit maximizing mode of being. One may still argue, from an economic point of view, that a shackled culture is bad for profit in the marketplace of ideas but that requires a separate, more in-depth consideration.

Note: I wrote this note on July 5th while waiting in the Mumbai International Airport for my flight to Frankfurt. I had just flown in from Bangalore and had to wait until 2:55 am, July 6th, to get on my flight to Frankfurt. It would be 19 hours in total before I can make it from Bangalore to Frankfurt. I entered it as a blog while sitting at 54f offices in Darmstadt. 54f is an architecture company my brother and three others from Darmstadt University founded some time ago . . . More on 54f to come later.

Alzheimer Epidemic and Being-in-the-World

2008-07-11T22:23:00.001-07:00

I am one of those very rare Americans who rarely watch T.V.

In fact, I watch TV so rarely that some people have argued that I'm not even an American. (Some other people have reached the same conclusion from wildly differing points of origin but that's a different matter.)

Why am I sharing such odd facts with you?

Well, there are those rare times that I do watch TV, for example when I'm traveling for business, say for a visit to one of Sun's telecommunications partners in Europe or for an Open Mobile Alliance working group meeting, as was the case this past week.

That's how I ended up glimpsing through parts of a PBS program on the epidemic and growing spread of Alzheimer in the U.S. while resting in my hotel room in Kona. (My best other alternative, perhaps from an anthropologist's point of view, was KWHE TV 14, a religiously inspired TV station running long ads for vacations to Israel, interdispersed with news casts about evil deeds of various Muslim governments. Why does that remind me of the case of the Holy Land Foundation?)

Obviously, most neurobiologists, neurosurgeons and other scientists and clinicians pay a great deal of attention to what happens to the brain, physically, when one is afflicted with Alzheimer. In other words, they look at the brain and they see synaptic and neural atrophy with an onset of fibrous bodies within the neurons. I'm summarizing things here and certainly don't claim to know very much in this field of scientific enquiry although I did take as much biology, organic chemistry, biochemistry, embryology and physiology as any pre-med student, if not more, when I was an undergrad and then a grad student. In those years, I even took a graduate course on physiology of language, with some real human brains used as instructional material.

In any case, what's the problem with the conventional scientists' approach to the study of Alzheimer's Disease?

In my view, the conventional "scientific" enquiry is missing a whole set of possible reasons and sources for the epidemic affliction of short-term memory loss followed by Alzheimer's devastating degradations.

The "scientists" seem to be looking primarily at the symptoms of something that may be much deeper. In their efforts, they are trying to correct those symptoms head-on, delay their onset or biochemically alter their operations.

But handling symptoms directly rather than seeking the root causes of the physiological changes and afflictions could be putting the cart before the horse. According to a proper method, root causes should not be claimed to be known unless we have a proper and a well-understood explanation connecting cause and effect.

Well, what are the causes of Alzhemier?

I'm not a doctor, and what I write here are my own views and are based on a quick philosophical analysis of the problem with some informed understanding of some of the biology involved. So, instead of directly answering the question, I'd like to share some hypothesis regarding short-term memory, how it is stressed and how it may be damaged. [Note: From a conceptual point of view, the damage to our short-term memory organs can be operating very much like how our inner ear's cochlea can be damaged and rendered useless for particular sound frequencies. However, in the brain the various "frequencies" or "duration" organs of memory are much more integrated and networked than the organs of sound frequency audition in the cochlea itself. In other words, any damage in the brain will probably spread much more easily than any damage in the cochlea.]

Martin Heidegger has effectively said that "being" is "being-in-the-world," and that we're the only being (among the rocks, animals and other inanimate and animate objects that surround us) whose being is a concern for itself. In other words, the lion in the forest may not be so concerned about why it, i.e. the lion, is, but we are. That's what distinguishes us as a being-in-the-world.

Now, how do we come to be a being-in-the-world? How do we absorb the world? (I'm coining "absorb the world" as a phrase to use here.)

Let us look at two cases: In the first one, we're walking in the Henry Cowell State Park in the Santa Cruz Mountains, here in California. In the second case, we're driving between between 60 and 70 miles per hour (or say 70 - 90 miles per hour when in Europe) on a stretch of freeway where we see a variety of cars and other objects passing us at a dizzying speed.

How would you absorb the world (the physical environment) in each of these cases?

Of course, absorbing your physical environment is simply an instance of "absorbing the world" not the whole experience involved when you "absorb the world." (For example, when you absorb the "world of physics" or the "world of high-performance computing," there is something more than simply absorbing some physical environment.)

In any case, the point I'm trying to make is that short-term memory is crucial for absorbing the world through the gradient of variations that pass the field of our perception.

If the gradients in the field of our perception are sharp, for example when objects pass our field of vision very quickly with no chance for us to integrate them into a larger experience, we lose the connection to the world, we cannot absorb and interpret it within the context of our experience. We cannot build on a sequence of sensations. Our short-term integrative cognitive apparatus is strained. (Why do people listen to soothing music in their sound-proof luxury cars while driving at dizzying speeds on the freeways of the Silicon Valley? Could a will towards continuity in the field of auditory perception in order to counter-balance the sharp gradients in the field of visual perception provide a possible answer?)

A fast-paced life--a life of constant and unpredictable change in the perceptual world--drastically increases perceptual gradients and reduces our ability to properly absorb and integrate what goes on around us. This is a true malady and must have some physiological consequences. However, I don't see any of these questions being raised or asked by the Alzheimer researchers, whether those conducting behavioral or biochemically rooted research.

With the absence of such alternative research approaches, we may be missing many interesting questions which could be tackled in the way I've just described. Such an enquiry may conclude that we may have to do something to the way we live before we can root out early onset of memory loss and Alzheimer's Disease.

Thank you for listening !!!

The importance of multi-lingualism

2008-07-11T22:22:00.001-07:00

I accompany a farmer from Vila Dara hot springs, Ardabil Provice, Iran, July 2004, on the foothills of Mount Sabalan. Language: Azeri and Persian.

Also, to appreciate other cultures and languages, one doesn't necessarily need to be a very competent writer in multiple languages although there are many who can do that, very proficiently.

This expansion effect is always true, no matter how large or a small the linguistic community.

Poets learn other languages because they know the difficulty of translating the music of each into the other, and also because they want to boraden their poetic horizons.

Who's Right? Who's Wrong?

2008-05-03T01:53:00.001-07:00

Tehran, Iran (Nov. 2006)
Originally uploaded by M.Mortazavi

Who's Right? Who's Wrong?

The papers, some say, have it all.

Some philosophers saw them as a menace.

On Internet . . . Disembodied "Life"

2008-04-07T00:07:00.001-07:00

For those of us who believe that any significant part of life can be fulfilled through an Internet-ridden existence and experience, Hubert Dreyfus' book On the Internet (2001) may be a necessary remedy and a good wake-up call.

Yes, he is the philosopher who shook the AI world by publishing his What Computers Can't Do (1972), updating it with What Computers Still Can't Do (1997).

I studied with Dreyfus for about two years, mostly focusing on philosophy of AI and a bit on Heidegger. This was during the seven years I spent studying Logic and Methodology of Science at Berkeley. It was a pleasant surprise to see his On the Internet come out. With about one hundred pages of text, it is a very tight extension of his philosophical analysis to the world of Internet.

Talking

2008-01-25T00:18:00.001-08:00

Wiesbaden, Germany (Summer 2007)
Originally uploaded by M.Mortazavi

Yes, they are sitting.

... but they are also talking ...

What are they talking about?

The Porter

2008-01-21T01:46:00.001-08:00

Tehran Bazar (2005)
Originally uploaded by M.Mortazavi

This porter still carries the ancient porters' back brace, made to drive goods through the narrow allies of the bazar.

He could be 60 or seventy but he still carries the load for any customer who is willing to pay.

Women are his primary customers although he shies not from the men either.

His profession is an endangered one.

Displaying One's Goods

2008-01-21T01:40:00.001-08:00

Tehran Bazar (2005)
Originally uploaded by M.Mortazavi

The art of display is the art of life.

We display our skills, our devotions, our hopes, emotions and fears.

Often, display decides who buys what where and when.

Learning Together

2008-01-20T18:14:00.001-08:00

Tehran Bazar (2005)
Originally uploaded by M.Mortazavi

Their ages tell the story.

The younger learns form the older and the older from the oldest.

There's much to learn, even in this narrow shop, selling trays, in the summer, when the schools are out.

A shop, even a small one, can be a microcosm of the whole world.

How many people can sit in a shop this small and learn about the world?

Or should I ask "how many generations"?

Sometimes Pictures ...

2007-08-10T22:51:00.001-07:00

Sometimes, pictures can tell or cover-up whole stories—more than any news report or any press conference can.

In the English-speaking world, John Berger, more than any art critique I know, has shown how pictures and looking can disclose a great deal about events, people and places. (See his Ways of Seeing and class of the same name by Professor Lori Landay at UC Berkeley.)

When I write this entry, i.e. during lunch hour on August 8, 2007, two of the three pictures above are less than 24 hours old.

What do the pictures tell you?

A "Strategy" for Iraq

2007-08-10T22:49:00.000-07:00

Thus, writes David Gardner of Financial Times ("America's Illusory Strategy in Iraq," August 9 2007):

But US commanders seem to have no trouble detecting the hand of Tehran everywhere. This largely evidence-free blaming of serial setbacks on Iranian forces is a bad case of denial. First, the insurgency is overwhelmingly Iraqi and Sunni, built around a new generation of jihadis created by the US invasion. Second, to the extent foreign fighters are involved these have come mostly from US-allied and Sunni Saudi Arabia, not Shia Iran. Third, the lethal roadside bombs with shaped charges that US officials have coated with a spurious veneer of sophistication to prove Iranian provenance are mostly made by Iraqi army-trained engineers – from high explosive looted from those unsecured arms dumps.
Shia Iran has backed a lot of horses in Iraq. If it wished to bring what remains of the country down around US ears it could. It has not done so. The plain fact is that Tehran’s main clients in Iraq are the same as Washington’s: Mr Maliki’s Da’wa and the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq led by Abdelaziz al-Hakim. Iran has bet less on the unpredictable Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi army, which has, in any case, largely stood aside during the present troop surge.
So, in sum. Having upturned the Sunni order in Iraq and the Arab world, and hugely enlarged the Shia Islamist power emanating from Iran, the US finds itself dependent on Tehran-aligned forces in Baghdad, yet unable to dismantle the Sunni jihadistan it has created in central and western Iraq. Ignoring its Iraqi allies it is arming Sunni insurgents to fight al-Qaeda. And, by selling them arms rather than settling Palestine it is trying to put together an Arab Sunni alliance (Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia) with Israel against Iran. All clear? How can anyone keep a straight face and call this a strategy?

Transitions

2007-05-21T22:22:00.000-07:00

Everything transitions from one form to another through stages. In a play, a character may transition from hope, to frustrated ambitions to bitterness and despair. Death itself comes as a transition. Thus, does Leonardo da Vinci describe, in his Notebooks [as quoted by Lajos Egri], the transition to death:

... And this old man, a few hours before his death, told me that he had lived a hundred years, and that he did not feel any bodily ailment other than weakness, and thus, while sitting up on a bed in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova at Florence, without any movement or sign of anything amiss, he passed away from this life. And I made an autopsy in order to ascertain the cause of so peaceful a death, and found that it proceeded from weakness throgh failure of blood and of the artery that feeds the heart and the other lower members, which I found to be very parched and shrunk and withered, and the result of his autopsy I wrote down very carefully and with great ease, for the body was devoid of either fat or moisture, and these form the chief hindrance to the knowledge of its parts ... The old who enjoy good health die through lack of sustenance. And this is brought about by the passage to the mesaraic veins becoming continually restricted by the thickening of the skin of those veins and the process continues until it affects the capillary veins which are the first to close up altogether; and from this it comes to pass that the old dread the cold more than the young, and that those who are very old have their skin the color of wood or dried chestnut, because this is almost compeltely deprived of sustenance.

What is in this description that makes it such a more revealing read that today's medical treatise on aging and death?

The Fear Machine

2007-04-07T00:37:00.001-07:00

Thus, writes the national security advisor to President Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski:

Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue.
...The terror entrepreneurs, usually described as experts on terrorism, are necessarily engaged in competition to justify their existence. Hence their task is to convince the public that it faces new threats. That puts a premium on the presentation of credible scenarios of ever-more-horrifying acts of violence, sometimes even with blueprints for their implementation.
...That America has become insecure and more paranoid is hardly debatable. A recent study reported that in 2003, Congress identified 160 sites as potentially important national targets for would-be terrorists. With lobbyists weighing in, by the end of that year the list had grown to 1,849; by the end of 2004, to 28,360; by 2005, to 77,769. The national database of possible targets now has some 300,000 items in it, including the Sears Tower in Chicago and an Illinois Apple and Pork Festival.
...The entertainment industry has also jumped into the act. Hence the TV serials and films in which the evil characters have recognizable Arab features, sometimes highlighted by religious gestures, that exploit public anxiety and stimulate Islamophobia. Arab facial stereotypes, particularly in newspaper cartoons, have at times been rendered in a manner sadly reminiscent of the Nazi anti-Semitic campaigns. Lately, even some college student organizations have become involved in such propagation, apparently oblivious to the menacing connection between the stimulation of racial and religious hatreds and the unleashing of the unprecedented crimes of the Holocaust.
...A case in point is the reported harassment of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) for its attempts to emulate, not very successfully, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Some House Republicans recently described CAIR members as "terrorist apologists" who should not be allowed to use a Capitol meeting room for a panel discussion.

There is more. Read the full text in the online edition of The Washington Post.

Children, Rich and Poor

2007-02-14T23:17:00.000-08:00

UNICEF has released a report on the condition of children's lives in rich countries. (The Child Poverty in Perspective report can be found here.) The report, which ranks the U.S. and the U.K. at the very bottom of a list of 21 industrialized nations, starts with the following note:

The true measure of a nation’s standing is how well it attends to its children – their health and safety, their material security, their education and socialization, and their sense of being loved, valued, and included in the families and societies into which they are born.

You can also view the UNICEF's The State of the World's Children 2007.

This includes a little report and video on Zahra Yaghobinezhad's activities in Iran's Persian Gulf port city of Bandar-e Langeh. There are also other stories on activists from the U.S., Romania, Ethiopia, Brazil, Chad, Bangladesh and Indonesia.

Pay for Propaganda or Propaganda for Pay

2007-02-01T22:23:00.000-08:00

Even as papers have gone far in changing their business models to accommodate to digital media, the paper editions remain superior to their digital versions targeted to desktop readers not only because of the technological qualities of paper but also because of the design of the paper editions.

Everything from font face and size of the headings to the arrangement of columns and stories on the print pages guide the reader to the intended destination. Take a paper edition of Financial Times, and you'll know what I mean. (Note that Financial Times has not yet broken the folding symmetry, which The Wall Street Journal did break on Jan. 1, 2007, by reducing its columns from an even to an odd number.)

Of course, I cannot help write about the paper edition without mentionting that while the designer of Financial Times does a good job, its opinion columns and editorials remain what they are as is expected in all papers with editors.

For example, one of the Financial Times opinion columnists, the slate.com editor Jacob Weisberg, seems to be on a solid contract to write a regular but a rather poor column on Iran in every so many issue. While the intent of Weisberg's column reminds me quite a bit of Michael Ledeen's "work" on the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal back in 2002 - 2003 era (before he got caught with the blank lies he kept stringing together almost at will), Wiesberg may yet prove to be a better poetic writer with a better sense of dramatic art (as in plays) and has taken upon himself to offer somewhat more fanciful strategum.

In all this, what surprises me most is that these people actually get paid to feed propaganda to their hapless readers and write with confidence and an air of authority about topics they know so very little about.

We can think of this nauseating activity in two apparently distinct ways: Propaganda for Pay or Pay for Propaganda. Take your pick but you need to pick one. Why does the first seem a bit more shameless?

In the same vain, I really truly wonder and am quite curious to know whether Weisberg's dreamy columns on Iran actually get the light of the day in the European print edition of Financial Times or whether only we, the American readers of the print edition, have the honor of being regularly subjected to the drama in his columns.

The topics captured in the above paragraphs remind me again that in the world I live, form continues to matter way more than substance.

jUploader and Flickr

2007-01-29T00:06:00.000-08:00

jUploader works quite well with Flickr on Mac. No intrusion into the iPhoto world. Simply drag and drop from iPhoto into jUploader. I'm using a 1.1.2 which still supports JDK 1.4. The author says he is moving it to 1.2 and JDK 1.5.