I believe that Wiki Creole is going to be a grand failure. Which is a shame, because from what I know of them, I like a lot of the people involved and I want to see people enthused by wiki-projects.

But they've set themselves a hard problem. Glancing at the current discussions it looks like they've already tied themselves in knots : eg. using * for bold and list items - and then having to go back and change their minds, and then changing them again.

I don't like the Creole syntax at all. Probably for stupid, selfish and ideosyncratic reasons.

But these are the kind of reasons that count.

OK. Here's a video.

That's Microsoft's XWand project from 2002. Even though it's probably not state of the art, it's shiny. Want one. Want one. :-)

Meanwhile, another bonus link. OrangeCone on magical thinking

And did I mention this multitouch video?

Kind of like I was assuming, people are definitely thinking about a magic wand metaphor for physical user interfaces.

This is something I'm finding a lot more plausible than user-interfaces based on sophisticated 3D graphics derived from game technology. And I'm going to be reading OrangeCone regularly from now on.

I wonder how hard would it be for DragonMother or Alferian Gwydion MacLir to put a simple LED in a wand?

gisel, armed
Originally uploaded by interstar.

I put some more photos of Recife Carnival up on Flickr.

The future of software development is component stream management

Purple Wig, Olinda 2007
Originally uploaded by interstar.

What can I say?

Scary Kids, Olinda 2007
Originally uploaded by interstar.

Bataria, Olinda 2007
Originally uploaded by interstar.

Olinda, the old Portuguese capital of Brazil is now a picturesque borrough of Recife. And another centre of carnival.

Frevo, Olinda 2007
Originally uploaded by interstar.

The "boneca" is demonstrating a typical Frevo dance move, complete with little umberella.

Frevo is one of the big musical styles of Recife - a kind of weird high-energy, big-band jazz.

In the streets it's a rag-tag mixture of batteries of African drums and a few delinquent trombones and trumpets playing the same few riffs over and over.



On record, its stylings and texture could be anyone from Louis Armstrong to "trad" fakesters like Chris Barber. But listen more closely and you notice how frenetic the whole thing is. The riffs and stabs continuously remind you of the last 50 years of "latin" dance and "jazz" and yet there's something strange about it. The rhythm section rattles along at around 170 bpm. The melodies are unexpected - infected by same Brazilian melancholy that touches Chorinho and early samba - then lurching into something like German cabaret with the singers theatrically whooping and putting on funny voices. But there's no "blues" as you would expect from North American music.

Frevo de Bloco is more leisurely with a stronger melodic connection to olders styles. A chorus of women sing sentamentaly about Recife and that life without Frevo is mere pain and suffering.

Old Recife, 2007
Originally uploaded by interstar.

Maracatu, Recife 2007
Originally uploaded by interstar.

Recife claims to have the best carnival in the world. That's probably a hotly contested claim, but it's certainly the biggest popular street carnival in Brazil.

Obviously Rio's schools of Samba are even more stunningly spectacular, but these are highly planned and formalized parades in a competition which takes place over two nights.


Of course, Rio has its popular street carnival as well, but I've seen nothing like Recife - which claims to have something like a million people in the streets. Carnival begins informally on Thursday night, opens formally on Friday, and was still going strong when we left late afternoon Tuesday.

OK, back from Recife, photos soon,

Meanwhile, back to work tomorrow. :-(

And, as part of the very slow, incremental upgrade of my online life, there's a new OPTIMAES blog, the aim of which is to replace the OPTIMAES wiki as the main place to talk about OPTIMAES. (Despite the overall wonderfulness of wiki, blogs seem to be better at holding a conversation.) I'll also do more of my general writing about alt.money there. Previously I did it on Tribe, but that now seems to be hidden from non-members.

IMG_0245[1]
Originally uploaded by interstar.

Sorry ... couldn't resist ...

:-)

Gone to Recife ... back after carnival.

Update on the pen computing obsession.

I found and downloaded the trial version of Ideogramic Ideas.

Verdict after a quick play : it does what it says on the tin. It's exactly how I want to draw diagrams. What it's missing is the next stage : ways to infer other kinds of information from the diagrams. So, the simple diagrams remain a novelty and not much else.

I wonder what's up with this company. No news on the web-site since late 2002.

Cool. Finally Blogger seems to have got a decent search facility.

Consider some interesting searches on this blog :

Semantic Web

Money

Iraq

Cool

There's tagging too, but that almost seems superfluous

German local money

Rio Body Count modelled after the Iraq Body Count counts people killed in Rio's gang wars.

I'm not a gadget freak. I'm too poor, and too anti-consumerist to obsessively spend my time reading Gizmodo et. al. and lusting over the latest gear.

However, this weekend I bought myself a present.

As you can see from the reviews, this pen-instead-of-a-mouse is at the decidedly cheap and cheerful end of the market. Nevertheless, I'm enjoying using it. I've played with the paint program and it's fun. And I'm adapting myself to using it instead of a mouse for all activities.

Why?

Well, last year I did get very impressed by this interactive whiteboard demo. And here's something even more spectacular. Obviously a pen-mouse isn't in the same league as cool interactive whiteboards and giant touch-screens, but the important common element is the use of fluid gestures in your interface.

And that is something you can't really explore with a mouse but you can begin to with a pen. Flying around Google Earth with the pen feels different from the mouse. Whereas the mouse involves basically waggling the wrist, the pen brings in the forearm and elbow too.

A mouse is normally only about going to a place and selecting it. Typically, objects which are static and visible on the screen. A pen can be about how you go to a place. The dynamic movement of the body. A gesture is something which can be always available at your finger-tips without cluttering up screen-space with a visible representation. (OK, that makes it harder for the naive user, but can make the UI more clean and elegant.)

I loved teaching with a whiteboard (and never used PowerPoint). Whiteboards work even more of your body. I guess the Wii controllers are going to make the body the issue in video gaming too. The hype almost guarantees that this will be a big theme of this year.

Last year, I started doing "Bamboo", a kind of locally developed mixture of yoga-like stretching and climbing exercises. I'm still a fat, lazy, geek hunched over my computer, but I'm starting to become more conscious of my body and its movements.

Even I'd like to have my computer require more physical movement. I'd like to be able to program the way I scribble on the whiteboard in front of a class or in a meeting. I don't have cool giant touchscreens but at least I can get a cheap pen and start to play with the idea of gestures in my software.

OK, I'm back ...

hopefully ...

watch out for some new stuff ...

And some cute stuff ...

here ...

and here ...

and here ...

and here ...

and in even more places that you don't even know about yet :-)

Electric Sheep

Geostationary Banana Over Texas

BBC NEWS | Saddam Hussein executed in Iraq

Hmmm. I guess there'll be a load of gloating round the warbloggers today. Obviously I'm not in favour of the death penalty : no humans have the right to kill others. So I'll line up with the British government on this.

Pragmatically it seems a pretty stupid move - it's the Shi'ite government playing to it's own people and further alienating the Sunnis. OTOH, it probably won't make things dramatically worse at this point. There's already a civil war going on in Iraq.

BBC NEWS | What happened at Haditha?

I got caught up arguing about women, porn and IT over at Ian Bicking's.

Scala looks interesting.

5 Things a Java developer needs to know about Scala - David Pollak's Blog

Beautiful kitsch animation on a (I guess) kid's web-site.

Discussion at Brad De Long's about Pinochet's legacy.

I'm in São Paulo. Gisel is launching her book here tonight.

Amazing food ...

Sometimes I feel it's necessary to thank God (or whatever provedence you prefer) for Tim Lambert.

Hmmm

Yeah, fantastic. (Thanks Guillaume)

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Climate insurance urged for poor

Could you use insurance for this kind of crisis? It's nice in theory, and maybe for a few high-profile, feel-good early experiments. But once the insurers set their actuarial scientists to sit down and do some serious analysis, the premiums will go way up. (Although maybe still cheaper than

Also, aren't some of the disasters we're talking about, actually the kind of acts of God that insurers wouldn't touch?

Congratulations to the US electorate.

Thought for the day : I wonder if refrigerators breed bacteria which can survive at lower temperatures.

Surreal spam of the day :

We're used to spending a lot of money on power-adders, but do they really add power? One way to find out is to strap your ride onto a dyno at a dynamometer facility and see how quickly the Do you have to visit the mansion?

The software is compatible with Nology's PDA Dyno software, which enables users to download data from their PDAs and view it on their laptops with the Laptop software. But if they had bad breath it would be a real turn-off.


What turns you on? What turns you on about a guy?

Therefore, dynos taken at the beach and the mountains cannot be compared without applying a What kind of music are you into? I love unicorns and Ligers In addition, friction-reducing measures were taken throughout the engine to further increase ...

We did another location for that shoot

Q : Where's Phil?

A : Seems to be working around 12 hours a day, doing nothing but having various meetings, scheduling things for other people to do, and jetting backwards and forwards to Sao Paulo for yet more meetings. Then falling asleep.

At least, that's how it was last week. Normal services will be resumed ...

... we hope.

Scary!

Tories get a decent communication strategy complete with screaming kids and ums and errs.

The telling moment comes at the beginning, when Cameron warns that he's in competition with the BBC and ITV. Of course he is : the most profound and fundamental shift in democratic politics over the last 100 years is the shift of power from political parties to the media in determining who will get into government and what they will do when they get there.

Political parties must learn to route around mainstream media if they want to regain control of elected governments.

Amazing story about closures in Java

Aparently Bill Joy wanted them from day 1.

But the evidence that the human species is in a whole heap of trouble keeps piling up, like the research work in Amazonia (referenced in the Lovelock article) that suggests the world's largest rain forest is extremely sensitive to drought, and that many of its tree species probably can't survive more than three years of it. (Most of eastern Amazonia is currently in the second year of the worst drought on record.) If trees start to die en masse, the ground will be exposed to direct sunlight, which will dry out the soil, which will cause the understory to die, which will, within a very short period of time, create either an African-style savanna or a moon-like desert, depending on the amount of aluminum silicate in the soil.

If Amazonia dies, the enormous carbon reserves currently trapped in its biomass will be released -- adding, perhaps, to the enormous quantities of methane being untrapped in the arctic as the permafrost melts and vast, prehistoric peat bogs start to decay at an accelerated rate.

This, in turn, could accelerate the melting of the north polar ice cap, allowing darker water and rock to absorb more of the sunlight that snow and ice reflect back into space, warming the permafrost even more, releasing more methane, heating the earth even more, causing cause more tropical rain forests to dry up and/or burn, releasing more Co2.

We're talking, in other words, about a cascade effect, in which various natural processes all feed into each other in a series of massive positive feedback loops, quickly driving the global mean temperature higher -- much more quickly and far higher than most existing
ecosystems can tolerate or adapt to.

Whiskey Bar: And People Call Me a Pessimist

Contrary Brin: The REAL Road to 9/11...

Billmon :

But I personally don't think the record of the past half decade (or the current condition of Ground Zero) really justifies that kind of self-serving, self-justifying pablum.

Do you?

Paintball imams spread militancy - Sunday Times - Times Online

That's still a bit too complicated. Let me try and make it even simpler. Globalization creates wealth at the cost of the social, the cultural, and the human. 2.0 creates wealth by amplifying the social, the cultural, and the human. For the next wave of entrepreneurs, this will be the market gap where profits are to be discovered.

Bubblegeneration

Anyone missing me? For some reason I don't have an internet connection at home any more, so posting / answering emails / skype will be sporadic until this is fixed.

phil

A great, must-read article on the effect of demographic factors on the economic success of countries and companies.

Cute dancing robots

Someone's solving the broadband to the beach problem.

Possibly the best reason evah to write a Java application.

Brazil's Road to Energy Independence | MyPeakOil.org

Update : Some scepticism, and more buried in here..

And Greg Palast debunking peak oil. Or, rather, the abuses of the idea thereof.

Geekier readers of this blog may be interested my latest post to Platform Wars

Austin Bay Blog : the global war on corruption

Hmm.

I threw out my somewhat convoluted "functional" experiments (see yesterday's posts) and went back to a more pythonic OO style. Why? When things aren't working, it's bloody difficult to put in a bunch of print statements to find out where and why.

This difficulty of debugging more than compensated for any benefits I could see.

I'm still using higher-order functions (ie. ones that take other functions as arguments) where it makes obvious sense. Eg. the tree copying routine is generic and accepts both its copy and filter criteria as arguments. But the other stuff is gone.

I'm writing my new Python program in a much more "functional" style than I used to.

I'm using a lot of closures and whatever it is you'd call it that's like a closure but you return an "inner class" from a function, holding on to some of the context. As the contextual things I'm passing in tend to be constructors and basic toString routines, I'm not really sure if this is winning me anything over using inheritance. But it's an interesting exercise. It feels a little bit "wholesome" or cool. Although it's probably deeply unpythonic.

What I am starting to discover is some of the downsides.

Here's the basic situation. I define a TreeMaker function which accepts two arguments. A constructor function and a str.

Inside it, I define a Tree class, which calls the constructor and initializes some infrastructure management stuff (like a list of children, the parent etc). Then there's a bunch of other methods.

Finally I return the Tree class from the TreeMaker function.

def TreeMaker(construct, str) :

    class Tree :
        
        def __init__(self,*args) :
            construct(self,*args)
            self.children = []
            self.parent = None

        ... more functions 

    return Tree

I can now create new Tree classes by defining their constructors and toString routines and calling TreeMaker :



MyTree = TreeMaker(myConstructor, myStr)

mt = MyTree(blah, blah2, blah3)



MyTree is a new class. mt is a new instance of the class.

It's not clear yet if this buys me much over simply defining Tree as a base-class (or mixin) which would call a "construct" defined in the subclass. Or even using a traditional sub-class that would just call the super-class's constructor explicitly. But I'm going to persevere for a while to see.

There are some issues. Most obviously, the name "MyTree" is just a variable name. If you do mt.__class__ it returns "Tree", knowing nothing about MyTrees as types within the system. All these parameterized versions of Tree really *are* nothing but Trees so you won't be able to tell them apart.

Another issue is how the code is more distributed and diffuse than using classes. If I'm debugging the behaviour of a traditional MyTree subclass of Tree, then it's pretty clear where to look for that behaviour being defined : a) in the MyTree class, and b) in the Tree class. In my system that behaviour could be in the Tree or the constructor or the toString function. Or one of several other free-floating function-factories I'm using to run around the trees.

Here I've seen some more interesting wins. This function takes a copy-function as an argument, and runs around a tree, building a second, isomorphic tree, who's every node is some transformation of the equivalent node in the first.

def TreeProcessor(copyFunc) :
    
    def copier(otherTree, parent=None, filter=lambda x : True) :

        if filter(otherTree) :
            this = copyFunc(otherTree)
            if parent != None :
                parent.addChild( this )
            for x in otherTree.children :
                copier(x, this, filter)
            return this
        return None    
    
    return copier

But is this an improvement on having TreeProcessor be a class, and copier be a method which takes copyFunc as argument?

37 !!??!!??!

Quicklinks

Hezbollah's SysAdmin

Cool, unusual business of the day

Hey! Dr. Chadblog links two new online currencies.

If you haven't read yet : John Robb, being pessimistic.

Read the comments too.

Billmon : ... since it was a political war (much to the genocidal dismay of Right Blogistan) it's inevitable everybody involved would end up spinning like dervishes to make the senseless slaughter of human beings look like "victory."

John Robb : Laptops and planes

Interesting discussion in the comments.

Huh? Why?

Skype Help:

Your Skype Credit balance remains active for 180 days after your last successfully-connected PSTN phone call.

Skype Credit balances on accounts with no activity during a 180 day period will be lost.

From the horse's mouth : As Israel's leaders once understood, the Washington-Jerusalem strategic partnership has always been nurtured by a steady stream of Israeli successes, both in defending its own security and in advancing American interests.

Haaretz

Meanwhile, Blair and co. demonstrate that they are no longer on this planet by bigging up a ceasefire that was negotiated without one side in actual conflict being involved. Having decided among themselves that Hezbollah will stop fighting and disarm (surprise, surprise), they now intend for a UN peacekeeping force to monitor it. Except Hezbollah have said they'll do no such thing, so I guess the expectation is that the UN peacekeepers are going to go in and make them do this by, presumably, not-so peaceful means.

Yeah, right!

Meanwhile, events in Britain and Pakistan confirm what you could call "Fighting Terrorism in One Lesson" :

Police : Yes! Soldiers. No!.

If you're in the business of creating a connected, stable, world where crazy groups don't go round slaughtering thousands of innocent people, then you do that by investing in, nurturing and trying to build collaborative and co-operative relations with others, not by throwing as much random destruction around as possible in the hope that you make them more disconnected than you.

The reason the latter doesn't actually work is because humans are connected animals. We're social by nature. To be human is to be enmeshed in language, wrapped in a cocoon of family and friendships and alliances and collaborative projects mediated by whatever circulating object link comes to hand.

The problem with naive Barnettism is that it thinks that our rule-sets are the only wones that matter. But people will make links of whatever they can. If not transport and trade and legitimized political connections, then religion and ethnicity and shared suffering. By attempting to spread disconnection among its enemies, Israel only succeeds in cutting itself off from them. By spreading disconnection within Lebanon and Hezbollah, it burns its bridges to them, making then rely more heavily on, and strengthen, their connections with Syria and Iran.

Great photo.

Another example of right-optimism on Lebanon.

Meanwhile, Juan Cole gets with the OilWar theory.

I guess, on the bright side, if there is going to be a third world war, South America is probably the best place to sit it out. :-(

Gideon Lichfield : When I discuss such questions with Israelis, as we peel off the layers of reasoning and approach the core, what I most often meet is a kind of crude Pavlovian determinism. The Palestinians, the Lebanese, the Arabs in general—they understand only the language of force. Not showing force is a mistake. Ehud Olmert, Israel's prime minister, summed up the thinking well this week in his speech to the Knesset: 'Our enemies misinterpreted our willingness to exercise restraint as a sign of weakness.'

Wrestling with the logic of force

Must Read from Billmon.

Of course, it might not actually come to this -- or if it did it might not come quickly. But the fact remains that the U.S. Army is the only significant force standing between Iran and it's closest allies, and thus between Iran and Israel. If, as it now seems, Washington and Jerusalem both perceive Iran as the primary threat (and/or target for aggression) in the region, then there is no real distinction between America's occupation of Iraq and Israel's intended re-occupation of southern Lebanon. They are, in essence, both part of the next war.

It seems increasingly probable that that war will come soon -- perhaps as early as November or December, although more likely next year. Israel's failure to knock out Hizbullah with a rapid first strike has left the neocons even deeper in the hole, enormously ratcheting up the pressure to try to recoup all losses by taking the war to Damascus and Tehran.

In other words, it's almost time for the ultimate "flight forward" -- the one that finally pushes the Middle East into World War III.

Big news! Wikipedia are upgrading their "talk" pages. LiquidThreads

That's what's missing from traditional wiki, a way to organize dialogue. You can have dialogue around wiki. But the "tyrany of structurelessness" of it all loses some of the value of structured conversation.

Web 2.0 or Star Wars? :-)

What does "Synaesmedia" really mean?

A Portmanteau word made from Synaesthesia and "Media".

More tightly bound, more intertwingled than mere "multimedia". A single thing that encompasses the dimensions of sound and colour and movement. Like, say, Gbloink! :-)

But now there's Master Foo to tell us about the true way of mashups.

Which is, incidently, the best defintion of Synaesmedia I never wrote.

In southern Iraq, a British soldier was killed in a mortar attack on a base in Basra during the early hours of the morning.

He is the first soldier to be killed in an attack on a UK military base in Iraq.

BBC NEWS

So there's some rumour going round that Cuba has oil.

Let's see if the US suddenly finds some urgent reason to send the troops in.

Wooster Collective: Amazing Car Dust Art via Sokari

Gabriel Kolko : Is a Global Economic Deluge Increasingly Likely?

Exchange vs. gift economies : Las Vegas is thought to be the first to explicitly make it an offence to feed the poor, says the New York Times.

BBC NEWS |Vegas puts lid on soup kitchens

John Robb : Things have spun way out of control.

Pat Lang explains Israel's air-power strategy :
which holds that crushing the "Will of the People" is the correct objective in compelling the acceptance of one's own "will" by an adversary or neutral. With that objective in mind, all of the target country is considered to be one, giant target set. Industry, ports, bridges, hospitals, roads, you name it. It is all "fair game." In this case the notion is to force the Lebanese government and army to accept a role as the northern jaw in a vise that will crush Hizballah and subsequently to hold south Lebanon against Hizballah.

John Robb calls it a mashup.

Explanation and justification of Israeli attack on Lebanon.

Meanwhile, I'm buying shares in the prediction that the attack will re-open civil war which will be running until at least 2008.

Wow! This has gotta be one of the most beautiful video-games I've ever seen.

Christopher Allbritton : Why, oh, why do people with access to really big bombs continue to think they can change people’s loyalties by dropping those big bombs on their homes and families?

That is the question.

Meanwhile, sensible commentary from Chet Richards.

He he! As I'm now into prediction markets, I started playing the Yahoo / O'Reilly mashup Buzz Game

I just created an account, went through buying up all the stuff I think is cool. And had the salutory experience of having already lost about 11 virtual dollars. (Within the first minute.) The guilty underperfomers : RSS, OPML, SocialText and Laszlo.

Huh?

So what's up? Bloody noise-traders? O'Reilly subtly biasing the system against Dave? People who just don't get the big picture dumping their RSS stock in favour of fashionable nonsense like ... erm ...

Update : No I just bought some more, and I now seem to be 1 dollar 46 cents up. Thanks, I suspect, to Eclipse.

Anyway, let's actually see how my predictions are.

A couple of thoughts.

I'd like to predict categories rather than particular products. I think wiki is just going up and up, but I don't necessarily have an opinion of JotSpot vs. SocialText. (Actually, maybe I do. If SocialText were smart to bring in WikiCalc, I should be buying them.)

Obvious missing categories / products :

• Ning (and similar)


• Thingamy (and similar)


• Voted news (Digg / new Netscape)


• Prediction markets :-)

I can't believe Ron Chrisley has been podcasting since May and no-one bothered to tell me until now!

Zby asked a pointed question in the comments to something I wrote bigging up Ning

The question here is how does it differ from the core concept of Open Source.

To which the answer is, it doesn't differ. But it automates it.

And this prompted me to another flight of fancy about the programmers' Cockaigne.

Even with something like Rails or TurboGears you still have to "manage" them in an old-fashioned way. You download the language, download the libraries, run scripts, find the newly generated files on your file system, open them and edit them in the editor etc. Once you are working on your application, managing it is your responsibility. If it's a web-app you have to worry about managing the web-server, making sure it finds the application, making sure the paths are right, the configuration info is right etc. etc.

Now imagine that you could develop an application on something like Ning : simply start by cloning an existing prototype, change only those bits that need changing, and then "compile" it (ie. export as a stand-alone package to the server of your choice) Even compile it down to run on clients like phones or set-top boxes.

I think we could be less than a decade away from a world where something like that is the norm. Where the current situation of programmers having to do their own sys-admin of their development environment, looks as outdated and inefficient as them having to do their own memory management using malloc and free.

Lind says something strange in his analysis of Hezbollah's attack on Israel and the consequent Israeli reaction against Lebanon.

For the first time, a non-state entity has gone to war with a state not by waging an insurgency against a state invader, but across an international boundary.

Isn't that exactly what Al Qaeda did to the US?

Lind goes on ...

In response, Israel has had to hit not Hezbollah but the state of Lebanon. Israel’s Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, referring to the initial Hezbollah raid, said, “I want to make clear that the event this morning is not a terror act but the act of a sovereign state that attacked Israel without reason.” This is an obvious fiction, as the state of Lebanon had nothing to do with the raid and cannot control Hezbollah. But it is a necessary fiction for Israel, because otherwise who can it respond against? Again we see the power 4GW entities obtain by hiding within states but not being a state.

(My emphasis)

And isn't that mutatis mutandis the same as the response to 9/11 from the US? Attacking the states of Afghanistan and Iraq in lieu of having real state enemies to go to conventional war with?

I'm still enthralled by the StrategyPage prediction market.

As of writing, there are 950 points of investment piling on behind my bet that Afghanistan is going to get worse. And no contrarians claiming an improvement. OTOH most people think the US casualty rate will fall in Iraq. Are they expecting things to get better? Or the US to pull out? Or maybe Iraqi factions to be too busy killing each other to bother with Brits and Americans?

The majority also think that the Israeli push into Lebanon is going to hurt Hezbollah. Yeah, right!

I'm struck by a couple of other things too.

It's clear that we can't expect the market itself to ajudicate a disagreement.

Or can we? If the market is shown, statistically, to be reliable, does that mean that you can actually appeal to its opinion to "prove" things? Erm ...

Another question of ajudication is "who decides if a prediction comes true?" Some bets are fairly concrete : casualty rates are either up or down. But what do you make of "America will succeed in creating a stable democratic Iraq." which I'm betting against (at least by the close-date of end of 2007) How will "stable and democratic" be defined? Is there currently a civil war in Iraq or not? Is it currently stable and democratic? In the case of StrategyPage it will be the site's owners who have to make the judgement call.

I'm not saying that this detracts from the value of the market. The point is not to win, but to take part (admittedly with a rational, self-aggrandizing behaviour) and see what comes out of the collective intelligence. But it's an interesting question.

Meanwhile, while we're on the subject of accountability of predictions ...

This is a genius political advertisement.

So just when you thought it couldn't get worse, there's a full scale disaster going on. :-(

And I'm kind of tired of arguing with all these kids with their enthusiasm for total war in the Middle East.

The more shocked and hurt and confused they get, the more they call for a cathartic release that will just burn the enemy off the planet for once and for all. "Make it go away. We don't care how! We just don't want to have to deal with it any more."

How do you start a conversation there? With no shared world-view and no shared moral convictions?

Well. There is one thing : to appeal to facts. What does the evidence actually show us? Do much trumpeted military operations have the expected effect?

The problem is that the evidence can always be spun. Can always be reinterpreted. There is no pure experience data that isn't shaped by our conceptual framework.

So how do you find common ground for communication?

Well maybe markets can help. Markets simplify communication to minimal binary oppositions : profit / loss, buy / sell. Surely there is a basic world-view so simple that some kind of common understanding can be reached, a shared channel through which some kind of signal can be squeezed.

The simplification of communication in markets is the source of both their great good and their great evil. The good is that the simplified communication protocol lets the market scale. Only markets succesfully incorporate and co-ordinate the work of billions of humans. And those co-ordinated billions achieve great things together.

At the same time, the simplicity strips those interactions of almost everything that is worthwhile about being human. There's no room for empathy or rich experience or tenderness or laughter or recognition of the other as a full person. That narrow bandwidth is filled with nothing more than simple : worthwhile / not worthwhile signals.

Markets are usually praised by their supporters for the first. And damned by their detractors for the second. But we can surely recognise that both claims are true, and that markets can, but should, be used pragmatically.

I'm suddenly very excited by prediction markets and particularly this StrategyPage one.

Prediction markets are traditionally celebrated for their power to integrate information from many sources. Now I wonder if their simplification might also help break through the barriers of communication. Disagree with someone's opinion? Why waste time arguing past each other when you could both just buy shares on opposite sides of a prediction? After a set amount of time, you'll know who was right.

It's very easy to write a blog post ranting about how X is going to happen or Y won't. And next year, who's gonna remember? Not you. Probably not your fans. Nor your opponents who gave up reading you because you were obviously wrong the one time they bothered to look at your blog.

But in a prediction market, things are different. It creates a fairly cheap and straightforward sort of accountability for the opinions you express. It keeps track of your predictions and how they actually turned out.

Your bets are open for everyone to see. Even though there's no real money, there's a reputation reward for being right. In fact, statistics could be produced showing all sorts of interesting things about your positions. How closely does your behaviour tended to follow particular trends or social clusters? Are you easily led astray by certain kinds of claim? You, and everyone else, can see whether biases are leading you to make many erroneous predictions. And, if so, what those biases are. The market won't let you hide this from yourself or others.

This is highly entertaining.

Cool new blogger alert. Hadn't come across Steve Yegge before. He writes some nice stuff. Eg ...

Software Needs Philosophers

(Not) Managing Software Developers

etc.

What will "they" think of next?

Did you realize that Scribe is a great photographer?

SdiServer screenshot

SdiServer screengrab
Originally uploaded by interstar.

Don't get too excited. This is just eye-candy at the moment. :-)

But it is what you think it is ... a page from an SdiDesk PageStore served by a web-server (I'm using web.py), and viewed in Firefox with some cute graphic tabs.

Just a note. As I get to grips with new job and interviewing. Don't lose sight of SdiDesk too. :-)

New Phil!

OK, so it's been quiet in all my usual haunts. But I've been totally busy over the last few weeks. I started a new job (which is meant to be part time until the term and my teaching finishes at the university) but in fact I'm already being asked to work days which I'm not scheduled.

The new job is probably the most corporate place I've ever been : a small Brazilian company selling an e-procurement solution, that's been swallowed by a larger international company which does supply-chain management stuff. And who are now selling, customizing and supporting it on Brazil. This could be dull as ditchwater, but long-time Phil-watchers probably know I have an interest in this kind of activity.

It's also an alien world of proprietory software, specialist programming languages, formal documents, waterfalls, VPNs and Microsofty stuff. Let's see what I can do to subvert things a bit ;-) At least I can start a new blog. (After all, three blogs ain't enough, not even if you add in the wikis. And notice I've experimenting with WordPress.)

The other new project I'm starting, is the fruition of a month or so of mailing complete strangers, asking if I can interview them over Skype. The result will (hopefully) be a series of political interviews with people I've discovered who have interesting world views. The emphasis is on getting them to explain themselves rather than for me to try to argue them out of their opinions. And I've been looking for a range of very different perspectives.

Hopefully, this is going to create a space for people to listen to, and understand, each other's opinions. And to create a rich composite picture of how the world works. That project involves further free accounts for podcast hosting, blogging and wiki. Best place to start is probably the accompanying blog. (After all, four blogs ain't enough ... )

Right. Now this is all public, let's go get some sleep ... :-)

US designing new nukes.

Proponents of the project say the U.S. would lose its so-called "strategic deterrent" unless it replaces its aging arsenal of about 6,000 bombs, which will become potentially unreliable within 15 years. A new, more reliable weapon, they say, would help the nation reduce its stockpile.

I wonder what's going to happen to all those old, unreliable nukes in 15 years time? Can you recycle the uranium? Landfill?

Brazil is about to start playing its first match of the World Cup ... the world is going crazy, with people driving around the area doing wheel-spins, blasting air-horns and letting off firecrackers ...

BBC NEWS : Zarqawi killed in Iraq air raid

This is the crucial test of the Global Guerrillas theory vs. some of the sceptics.

If the "insurgency" / "bazaar" remains as healthy as ever, then it looks like the GG model is corroberated. Otherwise, the optimists may have their day, yet.

Update: John Robb writes an obitury of Zarqawi.

Brazil landless storm parliament (or at least a bit of it.)

Benefits of a demotivated workforce.

Here's another good blog I found.