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The Bed of Procrustes

Ted Ted
February 22, 2011
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Just received my copy of Nassim Taleb’s latest book The Bed of Procrustes. Excellent hardcover edition, beautiful typeface, and that’s not mentioning the sharp writing Taleb is famous for*. The aphorisms in the prelude already set the stage –

An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion

– and it only gets better from there. The very idea of basing the book on the myth of Procrustes is brilliant. As Taleb points out in a footnote, the Procrustean myth isn’t just about the obvious allusion to an arbitrary frame into which everything must fit; it is also about changing the wrong variables when things don’t work. The same idea is captured in a poem by Bertold Brecht:

Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

*Although I think the earlier Fooled by Randomness is sharper, more focused, more merciless, and altogether better than the more famous The Black Swan.

Internet of Things links

Ted Ted
February 21, 2011
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The Internet of Things is slowly but surely becoming an unevenly distributed reality. Early precursors – a number of sites dedicated to creating accessible crowdsourced data-clouds for everyday objects. After being created, each data-cloud is accessible through scanning a printable tag which can be downloaded from the site. The information I upload into the cloud together with the image/video can be as trivial as ‘this is my writing desk’, or as arcane as the travails of family heirloom. It doesn’t matter – most of the data will be useless, but the potential of object socialization is immense because of a/ the ability to create semantic depth where until now there was none, b/enfolding the rich dynamics of space and time in objects, c/ merging physical reality with the net.

Object stories: Tales of Things, Itizen, StickyBits

Architecture intermediaries: Pachube, Mbed

While object stories are the easiest path of entry and therefore probably where the majority of participation will occur for now, a project like Mbed has massive potential as it ultimately may do the for the internet of things what blogspot and the likes did for self-expression.

The big lesson from the Egypt internet shutdown

Ted Ted
February 19, 2011
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On January 27th, Thursday, in the midst of huge anti-government protests, internet traffic to and from Egypt went from 3 gigabits per second to zero. In other words, Egypt was completely cut off from the wider internet, or as the NYT phrases it – “Egypt pulled itself off the grid”.

The suddenness and rapidity of the take-down (or pull-off) set the net buzzing with talk of an ‘internet kill switch’. The suspicion was that the Egyptian government had exercised some sort of technical capacity to shut down connectivity. The fact the event coincided to the day with the re-introduction of  a legislation in the US Senate granting ‘internet killing powers’ to the US president no doubt excited the interwebs even further.

As a metaphor, the internet ‘kill switch’ conjures images of a big red button tended by serious-looking men in military uniforms quietly shouldering the weight of their responsibility. No doubt, that was also its intended thought-trajectory. After all, one cannot expect decades of Hollywood indoctrination to go to waste.

As it turns out however, what really happened is much simpler, banal and of a variety that technically-inclined people usually find very hard to fathom.  As IT World explains, all it took was a government phone call to each internet service provider with an offer they could not refuse.

“It was individual, craftsmanlike, one-intimidation-at-a-time thuggery, plain and simple.”

What is the lesson in this? Contrary to technical opinion the net is very easy to shut down and you don’t require any complex routing equipment, coding, or legislation for that matter. All it takes is for the state to exercise its one and only true prerogative – violence.

And the Droids march on

Ted Ted
February 1, 2011
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The 4th quarter sales figures for the worldwide smart phone market in 2010 just came out and according to Canalysis Google Android is practically destroying the competition. As the graph below illustrates, the Android platform seems to have attained a market leader position with roughly 33% market share globally (to Apple’s 16%). Whatever the current market share, the most impressive figure is the year-on-year growth in the last column – this is just phenomenal growth considering that Android is barely 2 years on the market and has had minuscule advertising compared to the iPhone. The growth generated by the Android clones should be the final proof that open access platforms beat closed gardens, and the impending explosion in Android-based tablets should make these figures even more one-sided.

Full text of the analysis below:

Martin Jacques: Understanding the rise of China

Ted Ted
January 29, 2011
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An insightful TED talk on the rise of China by Martin Jacques, author of When China Rules the World. He is tailoring the message and examples to the audience of course, but two of the points he makes I have never encountered so well enunciated before. First – that virtually all Western analysis of China is predicated on a very artificial perspective of how the world can possibly develop (in the footsteps of the West); and second – that Western conceptions of China remain at best locked in a rationalized version of this paradigm, and at worst (much more common) in a state of total parochial ignorance of the entirety of Chinese civilization – ignorance which is not reciprocated on the other side. First-hand experience and conversations with ordinary Chinese across different provinces confirm both observations for me.

Finally! (more or less)

Ted Ted
January 29, 2011
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Finally settled in Wollongong, more or less, and as luck would have it the weather has been humid, gloomy and very un-summerlike compared to Perth. Surprisingly to me, even though the place is practically a suburb of Sydney, all business is done extremely s-l-o-w-l-y, and the paperwork required to achieve something is in direct geometric relationship with the time it takes to achieve it. The wonderful, almost circus-like ineptness of the property agents here deserves a special mention.  On the other hand, and in the spirit of fairness, it must be mentioned that it has already taken three different gas companies (AGL, Energy Australia, Origin) more than ten days to decide which one of them owns the gas connection at the place we are staying, and there is still no eureka moment on the horizon. Of course all three consider it beneath them to keep us mere paying customers informed of their deliberations, and I haven’t called a fourth simply out of fear its presence will prolong the process according to some no doubt equally confused formula. Don’t even get me started on what it takes (and how much it costs) to register a car which was perfectly roadworthy, comprehensively insured, and fine for Perth. Alas, enough. Rant over. After all New South Wales is a bankrupt state and deserves our condolences and tender understanding.  The long break is over, let a thousand musings bloom.

Christmas + move break

Ted Ted
December 23, 2010
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It’s Christmas around the corner, and to top it up we are moving across Australia – from Perth to Wollongong (just south of Sydney), so the posts here will be far and in between until we are settled, which should hopefully happen by mid January.

Happy  holidays!

The inexplicable

Ted Ted
December 8, 2010
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There is a theory that once the Universe is figured out, it will instantly transform into something even more bizarrely inexplicable. There is a second theory that this indeed has already happened!

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