Hindsight + Taking a new Approach

I have had this blog online for a bit over a year, and comparing the experience to my expectations before starting, I can say that some questions have been answered, some lessons have been learned, and some hopes were not realised.

First, to pat myself on the shoulder a little bit, the greatest successes. they are, each in a different way, the first post on this blog, and the last post before this one. The first one because it has helped me argue the point for distribution effectively, and the last one before this because, by getting posted on Hacker News, and bringing about 1500 visitors to this blog, it helped me realize the size of the audience out there. Experiments that produced interesting results. Oddly, neither of these posts are what I set out to post in this space. This is not to say that the other posts have not been enjoyable.

On with the self-criticism. For one thing, the content that I have produced is too little, and too disjointed. I chalk this up to my bizarre mix of perfectionism and eclecticism. Especially the perfectionism blocks me from posting, and this is not a good thing. While my list of ideas on what to write here has grown to number 557 items, my posts are much, much fewer, numbering just 16. Also, the blog tends to mix geeky applied topics with highly abstract thoughts. And, as a result, this blog has not fostered an audience that can carry discussions. Which is perfectly reasonable given the lack of any form of consistency in posting rate or topic.

So I am going to be making some changes to the material I post here. The goal is to have a steady stream of articles with a rough consistency regarding their topic. The geeky stuff will move to a new location, and I will possibly make (yet) another blog for research-related issues. I will cross-link or cross-post the articles between blogs if necessary. This space will remain for the introspective discussions and attempts at philosophy.

Secondly, out with perfectionism. The high threshold of quality I have set for posting here must be demolished. By posting less, I learn less, I practice less, I think less, I hear less from you, which at the end of the day means I produce worse content even if I devote significant time.

To sum up, I will set out to write short-ish frequent posts, consisting mostly of thoughts and observations that have been in my mind for a while. A sort of brain-dump if you will. What the result of trying this will be, I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Using Dropbox as a Host for Static Websites.

I have been a huge fan of dropbox for a while. What they have acheived is nothing short of amazing. I recently had an epiphany that may make the implications of their synchronization paradigm even more interesting.

What if I could use dropbox as a host for a static website?

Dropbox has a feature that allows you to make some files public simply by dropping them on your 'public' folder. It turns out, that placing interlinked html files works just fine. Case in point:

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/117449/page1.html

I presume images, etc. would work just fine as well.

What makes this observation interesting is that combined with the synchronization infrastructure of Dropbox, this means that you can keep your static website right in your desktop, edit it with your favourite editor (WYSIWYG if you have to), and have it instantly available online. It may not be the best idea for everything, but for a number of basic uses, it might just be a massive step forward. One of the most difficult steps for beginers to muster, is the need for FTP. Dropbox-as-a-host completely sidesteps that and lets new users easily build their websites.

Of course, once a nice little hack is found, the next thought is to consider what can be improved and streamlined:

Can we incorporate dynamic elements to this scheme?
Can the ugly URL be replaced with something better?

I gave myself very little time to write this post, opting to write it now rather than postpone, so these and many other potential questions, my dear readers, I leave as excercises for you.

The Open Business - An Oxymoron or The Future?

I routinely hear that businesses are not open enough. Even companies that were once renowned for their openness, say, Google, bump up to accusations of intransparency eventually. Then again, in a world where the openness poster child named Wikipedia is accused of being run by a secretive elite, who can be safe?

I happen to believe that these accusations have merit. Google is not as open as it should be. It withholds its search algorithm and its advertising revenue distribution formula. Is this for a good reason? Perhaps. But if you were to grade google on openness, these would be black marks on the score chart. How about Wikipedia? Well, its secret discussions in unofficial IRC rooms and mailing lists are no longer rumours. They are real. Are they serving a real survival purpose? Who knows. That is the problem with intransparency. Nobody knows what happens behind closed doors.


There are many voices that claim openness is a solution to many of the world's problems. The claim is that by increasing openness, all kinds of creativity are released and 'the community' provides solutions. On the other hand, attempts to build businesses on top of open foundations invariably bump up against a trade off. How much openness can we sacrifice without losing the community? How much do we need to sacrifice in order to become profitable? It seems the trade-off is exchanging profit for openness.

So my question is the following: Can there really be a completely open/transparent business or is this a contradiction in terms?

In order to answer this question, we need to answer some more elementary questions. What does an open business look like? Let's take things to extremes. Let's say all conversations between founders are publicly available. Let's say that all company e-mails are also available to the public, along with all chat logs etc. All employees are encouraged to have a blog and of course have no restrictions on what they can say. All code is of course open-source. (AGPL v3 or BSD?) Essentially everything the business does and thinks is out in the open. Anything anyone could imagine to ask about the company is already available. Every involved party of the business has active conversation with the community. It feels a bit like a reality show, but this is how a business designed with transparency as the #1 goal would look like. Nothing more for anyone to ask. Of course, while the past and present are open for anyone to see, future actions are still the monopoly of the owners. We are not discussing a democratic or crowd-sourced business. The public can communicate with the owners and contribute in ideas and code, but ultimately the leverage of initiative belongs to the owners. This of course is just my idea of an open business and not something complete or final. Let's consider it a working hypothesis.

The next questions are: What are the pluses and what are the minuses of a business like this? This is a much larger discussion. I would assume community input and support as well as trust would be much greater. Assuming the employees and owners are competent, this would be obvious to everyone who follows the dealings. The drawbacks are also many: Inability to surprise the competition, a lot of pressure by the community at all stages of development of an idea, difficulty in communication when everyone feels watched, etc etc.

However the killer question is this: Is there even one, small, tiny, extremely slim niche that a business like this could be successful and even advantageous? Remember, this is a for-profit business so profitability is still the goal. The open business just tries to accomplish this without maintaining the secrecy requirements. If a single idea, with a single business model can be found, where an open business could be successful, then the open business concept has a lot to teach us.

The concept is still in its infancy, it has just been expressed for the first time, so it will probably go through a lot of evolution. I am eager to hear your feedback. What is your definition of an open business? Would you become its customer? Do you believe it could ever be profitable?

Which Question?

Out of the myriad of potentially interesting questions, how do I decide which ones I am interested in? There are many times I think: good question but I am not interested right now. There are lines of argument I never follow. How do I make the choice? What set of principles guides my selections?

It’s a scary thought because now I know that something exists there, it is plausible I could be under the control of some belief or theory (or being?) that I am not aware of.

On encountering a new question, it seems I make an instinctive value judgment on the expected benefit answering a question will yield me. But how can I evaluate what I don’t yet know? One alternative is that I am interested in things I know just enough about to approach them, or feel like I could approach them. And initially I learn because I have had to. So I am basically interested in the questions in or around the area of knowledge I have already been exposed to, feel relatively secure around, an area that was seeded by things I have had to learn in the first place, perhaps for other reasons.

Maybe falling in love with someone will make me more open to listen to and learn from them. Maybe being in a life-threatening situation will open the mind up to rapid assimilation of knowledge. After learning, a number of questions become appealing as I struggle to make all my knowledge consistent. So maybe the search for consistency is a major driving force. To do that, I may have to learn more and read more and think more. But if I never had the knowledge to start with, if the accident had not happened, would I have had the questions that followed?

An improvement to my thought process that I have recently put to action is to write down any thoughts I have even if they are not complete, partially out of stressing that I will forget them. This way I free my mind to think other things while keeping a record of what I found even a little interesting at any point in time. This allows me to later group and add these thoughts gradually using them to better define the questions, even finding and recording some answers. I have been surprised to see how these seemingly random thoughts cluster into groups, areas I am interested in but did not know I was. I see this as a great improvement in the organization of my thought, perhaps even my intelligence. But this does not answer the question. It merely makes it less pressing as I can now reflect on a wider set of questions. Alternatively, it may make it more pressing as I see the value of thoughts I would have otherwise discarded. What else do I discard, that I do not know about? What knowledge do I forego?

An interesting observation is that knowledge and observations lead to questions as well as the other way around. It is this dance of succession that iteratively leads us to decipher the world around us or at least go as far as our resources of time, courage and patience allow us. This sheds some light, but still I have no satisfactory answer: how do I decide which roads of thought to walk on? How do I measure that which I do not yet know? In geek-speak: What is my search algorithm? Can I examine it? How do I know it is any good? Can I improve it?

Of course making progress is by itself is a good thing. It is perhaps reassuring that all knowledge (we know about) seems interconnected. So starting from anywhere can get you anywhere, as long as you persist long enough. Assuming the knowledge is there to be found, it will, eventually, be found. But maybe not in my lifetime. This is then a question of efficiency. How do I make sure I do not waste time by learning derivative knowledge rather than going for the basic and more valuable knowledge? How do I make sure I am spending my thinking-time efficiently? Learning all the possible weapons available in World of Warcraft is certainly knowledge, but its value seems comparatively low. Maybe this is a good principle by itself, aiming for the higher level of knowledge possible. Why spend time learning something that someone else who doesn’t know it but knows something else can absolutely contain? Why not go for the higher level knowledge in the first place?

This seems to be a good algorithm but I still don’t know if it is mine, I don’t know how to read mine and I don’t know how to change mine. I guess I have to observe myself a bit longer and see what comes up. It is a fresh though afterall. This is an interesting question my criterion selflessly but suicidally judges. At least I now know it is not selfish, otherwise it would not question itself.

Tribute to Alan Turing

There are few people I would consider myself a fan of. The Beatles are great but it is demeaning to call myself a fan. Ditto Radiohead. I just can't see it happening. But there is one person whose fan I can easily declare myself to be.

What if I told you that someone laid the foundations for all modern computers, set the stage for artificial intelligence and also was the most important scientist in breaking the German cryptography in WWII? Doing any one of these things would surely be an accomplishment beyond the imagination of us mortals. But all three? Where do I sign up and get the t-shirt?

Unfortunately his life was not all fun and games. Convicted of having sex with a man, he was asked to choose between imprisonment and probation conditional on undergoing 'hormone therapy', which caused him several side effects including breast enlargement. As homosexuals were considered a danger for entrapment by the soviets, he was also stripped of his security clearance and therefore his ability to do the work he loved. He was found dead at the age of 42, apparently poisoned by a cyanide-laced apple.


Some say he was reenacting his favourite fairy tale, Snow White. Others say he was making a reference to the forbidden fruit. Others still, say he wanted an ambiguous way to kill himself so his mother would not believe he did. I just see the parallel with another great man who was led to suicide for the crime of being too far ahead of his own society, Socrates. Yet this being so close to our time, I cannot contain the level of ingratitude he received. The thoughts of his last moments, abandoned and disgraced, pondering his last moments touch some string deep inside me, one not commonly vulnerable in everyday life. This tragic failure of human society is so shameful that i cannot help but be filled with pessimism for this ungrateful race of ours.

This scar and thought and picture will always be with me, to what end I do not know.

On Beauty

I love french noses. Red hair. Round faces. Green and blue eyes. Smooth skin. Well-defined cheekbones. And so many other things. When we meet someone, especially of the opposite sex, we usually make a 'hot-or-not' judgment within milliseconds. I know I do. And it puzzles me. What is it about bone structure and flesh distribution that makes some people stand out from some others? Is this not some form of racism?

What I am talking about is beauty. But what does this word mean? It is certainly slightly different for each one of us, but some objective criteria persist, generally relevant to symmetry. Also different cultures consider beautiful what is thought to be healthy. We perceive beautiful people as being more likeable than less attractive people. If we accept that there is no fundamental correlation between external appearance and personality, what are we looking for in beauty? Why would we consider a person with asymmetric facial characteristics as having a worse personality than someone who has a perfectly balanced face? In fact, due to this beauty bias, the opposite could be argued. A person who is considered beautiful would be more prone to let us down since they are spoiled by the positive evaluations they receive by default. A person who has to work for the evaluation they receive would be more likely to value it. But we still persist in our bias towards beauty, in fact today's culture may place greater emphasis on it than the culture of generations before us.

If we see humans as evolved animals, there must have been some usefulness for the beauty factor. We know that malnourished organisms have less energy to expend on superficial concerns such as external appearance. They are too preoccupied with survival. Animals go through great trouble to advertise their energy surplus by developing aesthetically pleasing but otherwise useless features (think peacocks). Similarly, male birds develop elaborate singing techniques to make their call to the females. This energy surplus essentially signals a well fed animal, hence a good fit for the current environment, an animal that can provide both good genes to and be strong enough to protect its descendants. So beauty is a great evolutionary mechanism in areas where natural selection applies great pressure.

Out of this elaborate instinctual interplay, little is relevant in today's human society, at least in the developed world. We are not under pressure for survival, individually or as a species in general. I'd venture so far as to say that most every woman in today's developed world would be an absolute stunner in the eyes of a primitive human of 10,000 years ago. We just have a way more resources at or disposal, we have a much more varied and complete diet than the average human of ten millenia ago. But what about relative attractiveness? What does the difference in attractiveness between two females of the same culture tell us? Some things such as skin quality and height might be indicators of genes and upbringing. Other things, think nose shape or hair colour, may have nothing to do with fitness at all. In many cases, our obsession with beauty is nothing than an evolutionary heuristic, gone wild. if this is true, it harms us more than it helps us in choosing potential partners when personality factors may after so much more in building a healthy, sustainable relationship. I assume soft external factors such as 'style' may imply something about personality but that can only go so far.

I guess what I am trying to say is that I am disappointed at myself for not being able to see past beauty. And I've tried. I fail to be attracted to people who I personally don't consider externally pleasing although I am well aware how little this actually means. I wish I could choose potential partners filtering for other criteria than beauty since in pragmatic terms it limits my choice based on seemingly irrelevant factors. At the end of the day it decreases my possibility of finding the best available partner, since I am looking at more or less the same place that everyone else is looking and disregarding the same people that everyone else is disregarding. Maybe an amazing person that I would automatically classify as a friend for lack of attractiveness for example.

On the other hand there is something inside me that would like to believe that beauty has meaning, it just 'feels' right. But what is it? Is beauty a distraction for the beholder, an instinct gone bad, or something we should actively look for in our potential partners?

Hypothesis #4, Monk Occam and White paper worldviews

This is a continuation from the previous post where I wrote about my 3 fundamental hypotheses. To summarize:

1. I can trust my senses and therefore my observations.
2. This is not a huge Truman show-style play by all of you.
3. Nature will keep responding as it has until now.

Thinking about these three, I realized there was a 4th one I was forgetting. which is:

4. The past is not a lie

What if all the world started 3 minutes ago? Imagine all memories, evidence, fossils etc were planted to create the illusion of a past. A variation of this is some times claimed by 'young earth creationists' to explain various proofs that is brought forward that the universe is several billion years old. They claim that all evidence was 'planted' by God. Is this falsifiable? Not really. But it wouldn't be nice of Him now, would it? So as with the other hypotheses, we assume #4 holds.

But why do we make such huge leaps and accept these hypotheses, you ask? For one thing, if they don't hold, the truth may be literally anything. We have no leg to stand on. But there is a simpler justification for all this, offered by a 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar called William of Ockham. Odd trivia, Ockham, the location, is apparently a 9 mile drive from where I currently live. Exciting! Back to the principle, to quote the wiki-gods:

"The principle is often expressed in Latin as the lex parsimoniae ("law of parsimony" or "law of succinctness"): "entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem", roughly translated as "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity".

This is often paraphrased as "All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best." In other words, when multiple competing theories are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selecting the theory that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities. It is in this sense that Occam's razor is usually understood."

So we accept that these hypotheses hold, because it is the simplest explanation. Yes we could theorize that all this is a huge conspiracy by a mad elephant genius who has imprisoned all our minds in a virtual world. We could make any number of hypotheses that lead to the same observations we are making now. Yet we accept the simplest one, that is the principle we go by, and it seems to have worked out pretty well until now. Is it perfect? Of course not, but it's what we have. To paraphrase a greek saying, "It's the least obscene scenario".

So we covered #4 and Monk Occam. What about the white paper? A closely related set of thoughts I have had recently relates to a reccuring fear that I have. What if all civilization disappears in a mad max/lost kind of scenario? What if I no longer have access to computers and technology in general? In fact, what if all expertise is lost for some reason say, a mass amnesia disease. I postulate that the truth should be recoverable, given time. This means that I do not accept any kind of text that claims to be divine revelation of knowledge. If it cannot be independently recreated from white paper by an independent observer of reality that lives in an isolated environment, it is worth very little to me and I suspect it contravenes Occam's razor. It is not a simple theory if I am required to accept an entire book as being infallible without proof, no matter what that book is. That's why philosophies like Zen are attractive to me. They are recoverable and not bound to a specific text. One of their main messages is that you can see everything in anything. If you become expert enough in fishing for example, you can draw basic principles that can be applied in other areas. I guess that's why sayings and parables are so effective.

To summarize, I try to build my worldview based on the simplest explanation I can come up with, given my observations and having in mind that this should be re-creatable from the ground up if I was to open my eyes and find my self with no memory, in an unknown world. I think these thoughts conclude what I wrote in my previous blog post, although I am sure I will find more to write soon enough.

Until then, take care.
Alexandros