New era

Finnish presidential elections

2012-01-21T09:16:00.000-08:00

The biggest foreign policy question facing Finland is the future of Eurozone.

Our elected representatives ~~can guarantee junk bonds with 20% of our GDP~~ have already pledged 26% of our GDP to junk bond funds, and allow European Central Bank to create 5% inflation with bailouts and quantitative easing.

The politicians can also say "no" to worst excesses, and keep Eurozone as a group of countries which are small enough to default individually; that is a stregth. Greece default means more evolution through trial and error and fewer single points of failure.

EU and euro have been positive forces thus far, but now I see more threats than opportunities in tighter integration.

During Finland's EU negotiations, Paavo Väyrynen demonstrated both ability to oppose EU and also pragmatism (unlike Timo Soini) to admit defeat after the vote had been cast against his views and join again the negotiation tables where decisions are made.

Helsinki, a nest of vice

2012-01-07T17:34:00.000-08:00

Today I met a streetwalker for the first time in Finland, when walking in Helsinki city center at 2 am. After identifying her from stockings and small pants despite -7 Celsius, I made eye contact. "Hello little one", she said with thick accent. I grumbled "hello." She continued "is the little one feeling cold?", at which point I was already past her. Motherly context may not be the most effective at rousing the flames of passion, but probably she knows something I don't about the kinds of persons who actually pay up.

Someday, I'll lose my virginity after paying for it. I won't report it here, because maintaining privacy requires reciprocal silence. It won't solve my social skills developmental task, but it is actionable and it is remotely possible that I'll learn something useful in the process.

Review of 2011 and goals for 2012

2011-12-31T16:25:00.000-08:00

Review of past year's goals

Lose weight to 55kg (BMI 20.7): Failed. The weight bottomed at 56kg. Then I moved to Helsinki, fattening to 60kg during the 2 months I travelled 5 hours a day, leaving little energy for exercise and gulping beer on evenings to wash out the "can you be so pissed off you die" feeling.

Main events:

Got fired.
Got a new job from Helsinki.
No longer working with a dying technology.
Bought an apartment.
Got cynical, noticing that the only effect from 4.5 years of work was the balance on my bank account.
Studied investing to find out how to increase the balance without working.
Made progress in pole dancing during the 3 non-work months.
Had fun during 3 summery non-work months, and unparalleled amount of social interaction by participating in The Club's event. No new social skills milestones reached, though.
Wrote a very early prototype of a teaching game for Chinese, and an unpromising business plan for productizing it.
Noticed that I'm too lazy punk to develop it while holding a job, abandoning it.

Overall, I'll remember 2011 as the year I studied investing, it is the only change which will still have effect in 2021. Nothing much lost or gained in other fronts.

Goals for the next year:

Diet to 55kg.
Re-establish social life in Helsinki.
Start a regular sports hobby to stay fit.

Drum'n'bass evening@Venue

2011-12-25T15:31:00.000-08:00

The biggest difference between Tampere and Helsinki rave parties are in security arrangements. At Venue, there were 4 security guards present, one of them huge freezer-refridgerator combination with tattoos. They had radio phones. At one point in the evening, one of them pimp walked into the bar room, shoulders wide, his whole body language screaming "I guard here!"

In Tampere, there were less guards, they tended to be regular guys - just taller, they didn't have special equipment and they mainly stayed on the background.

When exiting the bar at 03.45, police patrols and guards were visibly present around Kamppi. I took a taxi home, since the night routes of buses were cancelled for Christmas. When I mentioned the taxi driver about tighter security at Venue, he first emphasized that in his opinion any conflicts should be solved primarily by talking. Immediately after that, he played his part in reifying the badass violent reputation of security guards by telling how the steroid beasts have very short fuse, how a customer died in the hands of a security guard, and how he the taxi driver himself had 4 years of karate training.

Probably Helsinki night is more dangerous, as all night shifters feel the need to emphasize their capability for violence. I have to admit that I don't like Kamppi and railway station late at night. I wonder if it is due to diversity, or because larger density of people directly means larger amount of scum per square kilometer.

Happy Solstice!

2011-12-21T11:33:00.000-08:00

The move to Espoo is now complete.

2011-11-27T15:23:00.000-08:00

The most important piece of furniture has been erected:

The picture is blurry, because using lightning is not possible in front of a mirror. The room had supersize, 230cm x 170cm mirror already installed to living room wall.

6.66%, the number of the Italian 10-year bond yield

2011-11-09T14:10:00.000-08:00

Story thus far:

Fundamentals:
- Italy amassed public debt 120% of GDP
- Berlusconi focused on organizing bunga bunga parties
- Feeble attempts to balance the budget were met with mass demonstrations and political opposition

Market mechanics:
- MF global went bankrupt because their Italian bonds lost too much in mark-to-market value (value, which someone is ready to pay if they sold the Italian bonds now on market). MF used criminal ways and took reckless risks, so without Italian bonds they would have eventually found another tree to hang themselves.
- Jefferies, a financial firm, was suspected to be fatally exposed to Italian bonds. They disclosed information about their Italian bond ownership and also sold them. They turned out fine.
- Fire sales of Italian bonds to avoid scrutiny. Nominal Italian bond yield explodes. At least temporarily, yields are past the point of no return, after which savings and cuts no longer solve the problem, as interest accumulates too fast.

Rejected solutions:
- Italy balances budget - if they could, they would have already done that
- EFSF: European countries just don't have enough money to bail out Italy while staying solvent

Next steps:
- ECB prints money and causes high inflation
OR
- Eurozone turns into nineties depression historical re-enactment society
OR
- Italy converts debt to liras and devaluates

Simo jumps out of burning platform

2011-10-20T11:23:00.000-07:00

Got a job from Helsinki. Death cab for Qt now chugs on without me. I travel to work on rails (=by train) to work on Rails (=a web programming stack.) Now I have provable regular income to get a mortgage and actually move to Helsinki.

Finally, a picture of Ruby:

A true story of grit in education and life: The complex analysis class of 1999

2011-10-02T17:13:00.000-07:00

Summary: Grit is the character trait of persisting in the face of hardship. My high school class faced an unintentional test of grit. Life outcomes differ starkly between the 4 who passed and the 12 who didn't.

The grit scale

Duckworth's grit scale is a short self-assessment quiz for persistence, with questions like "I finish whatever I begin" or "I often set a goal but later choose to pursue a different one." It has been tested to work immensely well in the military:

Duckworth and her collaborators gave their grit test to more than 1,200 freshman cadets as they entered West Point and embarked on the grueling summer training course known as Beast Barracks. The military has developed its own complex evaluation, called the Whole Candidate Score, to judge incoming cadets and predict which of them will survive the demands of West Point; it includes academic grades, a gauge of physical fitness and a Leadership Potential Score. But at the end of Beast Barracks, the more accurate predictor of which cadets persisted and which ones dropped out turned out to be Duckworth’s 12-item grit questionnaire.

(HT: Steven Hsu, Aretae)

The complex analysis class of 1999

Päivölä is a math-oriented high school. Before entry, candidates are screened for mathematical aptitude. Students graduate in 2 years instead of the normal 3.

The special sauce of the school were university-level math courses. Initially all 16 of us attended unimath. The school was still in formation: We were just the second boarding year-class there. Teaching was a bit shaky and there were few exercise sessions. Consequently students kept dropping out of unimath. The school was designed to teach the top as much as they could handle, so little was done to address this. It was an unintentional test of grit: persisting despite woefully inadequate background and few exercise sessions.

In the last spring, there were 5 people in unimath: me, Vesa, Tuomas, Mikko and Jussi. The final course taught complex analysis. I was the last one who dropped out of unimath. At that point, 1/3 of the course had passed and I was completely blacking out at lectures, not understanding much anything.

It was preceeded by 6-month limbo of linear algebra and calculus. During the limbo, lack of preliminary knowledge and mathematical maturity meant increasingly severe blackouts. The first completely blacked out lecture was about QR decomposition and numerically more stable way to solve linear equations, so complex analysis blackout was anything but surprise or whim.

This divided the class into 4 who passed the grit test, and 12 who didn't. It was not just about talent, because everyone had been screened at entrance.

The wall of abstraction

CS lore describes programming students "hitting the wall" during teaching. Some understand the subject swimmingly, while others struggle even after explanations. Some consider this "IQ in action": Either you have innate ability to get it, or you don't, in which case you need a lot more exercise to learn it.

Little research has been done about this. Dehnadi and Bornat assumed that setting a variable is one such wall. They measure one's grasp of assignment with questions like below.

The students had not yet been taught programming, so it was enough to use any consistent mental model. For example, the mental model "assignment moves the values from left to right" produces answer "a=10, b=10". The consistently wrong need to learn just one thing to get all correct.

44% answered the test consistently, and the test predicted well if the students would pass or fail their first programming course(*):

(*) Some attempts to replicate failed to find correlation, and a meta-analysis with improved test protocol found clear but weaker correlation.

Hitting the wall

The first time I hit it was at a physics lecture. A visiting Russian lectured about mechanics. Unlike in earlier lecutres, there were no numbers involved: the masses of the objects were m and M. I had all the required background (high school mechanics; math problems without numbers) but still couldn't answer a single exercise. Afterwards, I heard others commenting happily that at last someone was lecturing things properly. Before that, I had always been on the other side of The Wall, delighted to skip slack.

What happened in that 6-month limbo is that others had the innate ability, while I was hitting the wall, and would have needed much more exercises to stay on the wagon.

Life outcomes

Out of the 4 gritty and talented ones, 75% are now in managerial roles. Vesa is a vice president at Pohjola Insurance. Mikko has worked for 6 years in various managerial roles in Nokia. Tuomas is an assistant professor and has 30 publications. The only remaining professional is Jussi, but he is quite short (under 160cm). Jussi still has a PhD degree, so he is not a total loser even by the yardstick of this group, unlike me.

Only 17% of the remaining 12 ones have done well in career. Jani already had industrial-strength programming skill when he entered the high school at age 15, so he was right to ignore the class. Tarmo is the only true exception who defies the complex analysis cutoff limit.

Too lazy to work, too chicken to steal

2011-09-12T12:46:00.000-07:00

Summary: This post tells a formula for deciding when to quit your day job.

First we define Enough money. It is the monthly sum, which allows you to buy most things you want, so that not working increases your standard of living more than extra income from your day job.

Mortgage is such a huge factor that we exclude it from Enough and account it separately as Debt Costs. It covers both interest and repayments.

Secondly, we assume that investments are the basis of your new income. Investing is the only way to pay once and get money back for the rest of your life with minimal effort, either as dividends, interest or rent. Historically 4% withdrawal rate has proven robust. Even after you spend 4% each year, your pot still grows enough to resist inflation. We also assume 25% tax rate, which is the average of dividend and capital gains tax rates.

You can quit your day job when:
Debt Costs + Savings / 12 * 0.75 * 0.04 + Side Income >= Enough
Debt Costs + Savings / 400 + Side Income >= Enough

Notes about the formula:

You need to own 400 euros to get 1 euro of monthy income. 400 comes from multiplying the constant factors. Only with compound interest and lots of waiting is it realistic to get these kinds of multipliers.
To get there quickly, you need side income schemes. For example €100 of monthly ad income from a blog corresponds to €40000 of savings. While writing interesting content is hard, it is probably easier than to save €10000/year for 4 years.
Side income schemes also provide cover, if you have to explain, what you did for the past few years.
Cheaper apartment speeds up the plan by years. There can be €100000 difference in apartment prices between Helsinki and Oulu city centers. If you value big city life, you probably prefer working to idle life in Oulu. Debt Costs depends very much on your lifestyle.
If you are near retiring, you can withdraw more. Multiply your monthly pension by 400 to see how much less you need to own at retirement.
If side income raises the sum past Enough, you should save the difference to gradually phase out the necessity of side income schemes. Otherwise, you either are not lazy enough for this plan, or have set Enough sum too low.
Enough sum raises with inflation.

Work and idleness 4/4: Individualist take

2011-09-04T16:43:00.000-07:00

If it's not personal what you do for 40 hours a week, then what is? Individualism has two sets of attitudes towards work.

The ideal condition is to do what you love. This is based on the idea that you should express yourself and reach your potetial. Your unique life is an identity project, where you work towards reaching your highest potential.

For the rest of us, work is just a way to earn money. Self-actualization is pushed to leisure, for example holiday trips. Work is a little despicaple sign of slave mentality and lack of wealth, visible in phrases like "office drone" or "grease monkey". It is the opposite of life. How tough guy you are is measured by how much money you get, how much ass you kick and how little you give to others.

For both earners and self-actualizers, the impact of work on others is irrelevant.

Individualists admire people who have found "cheat codes of reality" and don't need to work, for example poker professionals, and also people who game the system to distribute income to them.

Problem: Free riders

Societies embracing individualist attitudes run into problems, when having a work ethic becomes contemptible. Not everyone can be idle.

Most people seem to follow individualist work ethic. Citizens vote governments, which allow them to free ride on social benefits, which are never high enough. Governments take debt to fund social spending. Sovereign debt crisis follows.

Work and idleness 3/4: Transhumanist take

2011-09-04T16:39:00.000-07:00

During the last 200 years, technology has lifted the Western masses from rags to affluence. The logical end of this trend is Iain Banks' Culture, where robots do all the work, but we are not there yet. Work should maintain and improve the standards of living and guard against risks like nuclear war, which may stop us from reaching singularity. Workers can be classified based on whether they advance this goal.

Maintainers keep the system running at current level. For example postal workers maintain capability to send packets, and soldiers guard against foreign army burning down the nation. We would notice very soon if these people stopped working.

Improvers make technological and political progress happen. For example researchers may develop a cure for cancer, or a politician may remove a wasteful regulation. We would notice big difference in 20 years if these people stopped working.

Leeches neither maintain or improve other people's standards of living. This includes not just people who live on income transfers (it doesn't matter if it comes from state or from dividends of inherited wealth) but also workers who have little impact. We wouldn't notice any difference if these people stopped working.

In the long run, more and more people can neither maintain nor improve standads of living better than robots. In that case it's ok to relax and take it easy, but anyone reading this blog can't use stupidity as an excuse.

Virtues: Efficiency and enlightenment

Technology enables "hard" efficiency, for example food production no longer requires 50% of the workforce to labor at farms. This frees resources also to "soft" wants and needs, like better human rights, social safety net, education, healthcare etc. No matter if your values are hard or soft, efficiency powered by technology delivers it. (But it doesn't deliver relative wants, like being wealthier than the Joneses.)

Politics must ensure that greater efficiency does not translate into more efficient slaughter in gas chambers, etc.

Enlightenment and knowledge help spot opportunities to organize things differently.

Problem: It's not possible to be the only transhumanist around

It is practically impossible to talk with most people about transhumanist impact of work. It is too abstract topic for someone who usually talks about cars and apartments. Also most people only care about how much they and their ingroup get, making it heresy to talk about outgroup's interests. People with a mortgage and a family to provide for couldn't care less if a project produces nothing and it is clear from day 1.

Nowadays transhumanism is to me mainly quiantly naive idealism of the youth.

Funny charts from Zero Hedge

2011-08-24T08:05:00.000-07:00

In this chart, analysts estimated the change in Philly Fed index, forming a nice bell curve. Just one problem: it is wrong by 8 standard deviations.

These cute little sine waves appeared in the price of a bond bear ETF (upper chart) and natural gas (lower chart). Some high frequency trading algorithm made the price oscillate. I don't understand why anyone would want to do that, but the commentors speculated that it drives out human investors. Oscillations make stop losses explode. For example, if someone owning a stock has a stop loss order saying "sell if price goes below 26.60" or someone shorting a stock has a stop loss order saying "buy if price goes above 26.90", then oscillations explode those limits, driving out human investors.

Still haven't bought any stock

2011-08-24T06:55:00.000-07:00

Summary: This post tells a formula for deciding if you should postpone purchases in times of a looming crisis.

Update: Added a paragraph on probabilities.

After I finished reading Saarion sijoituskirja, the Arvopaperi OMXH index showed that Finnish stock prices had moved -10% since 1.1.2011. I postponed purchasing stocks because of the following calculation. It had two scenarios:

(1) Greece crisis becomes acute with probability P(crisis).
(2) Orderly recovery happens with probability P(recovery) = 1 - P(crisis).

Let the change in stock prices be C(crisis) or C(recovery). We should postpone purchases if

P(crisis) * C(crisis) + P(recovery) * C(recovery) < 0

When Lehman Brothers collapsed, the prices decreased by 40%. Let C(crisis) = -40%. By contrast C(recovery) = 10% - 20% since recovery is usually slower.

Avoiding probability estimates

We can pick stock price changes from historical data. Regarding probabilities, let's look at the equation at 0 when it doesn't matter whether we postpone investment or not.

P(crisis) * C(crisis) + (1 - P(crisis)) * C(recovery) = 0
P(crisis) * C(crisis) + C(recovery) - P(crisis) * C(recovery) = 0
P(crisis) ( C(crisis) - C(recovery) ) = - C(recovery)
P(crisis) = C(recovery) / (C(recovery) - C(crisis))

With C(recovery) = 15% and C(crisis) = -40%, the equation gives P(crisis)= 15% / 55% = 27%. This means that we should postpone investment, if we estimate that P(crisis) > 27%. We should invest now if we estimate that P(crisis) < 27%. It doesn't matter if we invest or not if we estimate that P(crisis) = 27%.

How it turned out

What in fact happened was that Greek crisis materialized but it was an orderly restructuring and prices collapsed only by 20%. The debt and the budget deficit are still simmering.

The situation now is almost the same, but the 'risk scenario' is 2008-style banking crisis. Only this time, goverments are part of the problem and no longer part of the solution. I'm still postponing investment.

If stock prices recover from current -30% to -10% in the next 3 months, then I suck at predicting and am better off investing to index funds. Stock traders divide profit to 'alpha' and 'beta'. 'beta' is the profit from market. You get beta profit from index funds, because stock prices on average rise with economic growth. 'Alpha' is the profit from skill. It is negative if you suck at predicting. Finding your own alpha by making successful and failed predictions is called alpha discovery.

S&P lowers US credit rating

2011-08-07T16:02:00.000-07:00

Now Kaalimato has higher credit rating than US.

Dagong International decreases USA's credit rating

2011-08-03T14:21:00.000-07:00

This article is from Hexun.

Dagong International: United States' right to set it's own credit rating is unreasonable and illegal

Hexun News

After United States raised it's debt ceiling, the whole world waited for the three big rating agencies to decide if they would lower USA's credit rating or not. However, when Hexun interviewed Guan Jianzhong, the CEO and chairman for the credit rating agency Dagong International Ltd, he said that USA's right to tell it's own rating is illegal and unreasonable. After 1985, USA became a debtor nation, and later a net debtor. Actually based on the theory of relationship between a creditor and a debtor, USA should not have the right to announce credit ratings. The creditor should evaluate the debtors rating. Now it is the other way around.

Three reasons to decrease USA's national credit rating

3.8.2011 Dagong International formally announced the lowering of USA's credit rating from A+ to A, with negative outlook. There are reasons why they chose to lower the rating at this point. As early as 14.7.2011, Dagong placed USA on negative watch list. They thought that USA's ability to pay back debt was critically decreasing. Guan Jianzhong believes that USA's decision to raise debt ceiling is a turning point in it's decreasing ability to mind debt.

Guan Jianzhong gave out 3 reasons:

Firstly, the struggle between the Democratic and the Republican Party on raising USA's debt ceiling fully exposed the negative impact of politics towards the economic foundations. It demonstrated that from the creditor's point of view, the political and economic system does not offer any safety mechanism.

Secondly, they only reached some consensus on raising the debt ceiling and reducing the budget deficit. But they didn't agree on fundamental approach to deal with USA's sovereign debt crisis and avoid the vicious circle of low economic growth and low tax income.

Thirdly, while raising the debt ceiling avoids default, it also demonstrates decreased ability to pay back debt. USA's debt grows faster than tax income. Dagong estimates that in the next 5 years USA must reduce the budget deficit by 4 trillion dollars to maintain abilty to handle debt on current scale. If it can't do that, then it will likely continue to raise the debt ceiling and will trend towards irreversibly decreasing ability to pay back debt.

The article goes on about how the current rating system should be discarded, but I couldn't make sense of it.

Prize for screening out mass killers

2011-07-28T16:14:00.000-07:00

Legal weapons were used at Jokela and Kauhajoki school shootings and Oslo attack. Permitting process provides a single point of contact for screening out potential mass killers. Currently no effective screening tests exist; therefore a prize for creating one is needed.

~~The Finnish permitting process already screens out 2/3 of the criminals who would kill.~~ Genetic information already improves estimates about propensity to violence.

Update: The author of the linked article got his statistics wrong. He compares people with gun license killing with guns they own against kills by people without gun license using all methods. Gun kills are just a fraction of all kills, so it is an apples-to-oranges comparison.

The prize would be based on pessimistic assumptions:

There are going to be more mass killings. Ways to prevent them are not known.
Special brain function is needed for the monstrous lack of empathy which enables mass killings without war trauma, or delusionality where the murderer thinks he is an action hero tasked with saving the world by killing masses of nameless goons.
This brain damage may show up in hormone levels, genes regulating brain function, etc.
Effective screening paves the way for responsible and sane armed population. Should mass killers move to illegal guns (most regular gun kills are already done with illegal guns in Finland) then damage control through concealed carry permits is the only effective measure.

Rules for the tests:

The tests can be based on any set of physiological measures like blood sample, genetic profile, saliva, urine, body height, etc.
The tests consist of a scoring algorithm for calculating pass/fail and a list of physiological features.
The tests can announce false positive for at most 10% of the population.

How prize money is granted:

After a mass killer is caught alive or dead, available physiological measures are taken. This enourages tests, which can be performed on the dead like blood samples, genetic profiles etc.
After each killing incident, 20% of the prize money is given for each test which was positive for the killer.
The number of false positives is inversely proportional to the prize money. For example, a test flagging 0.01% of the population earns 100 times more than a test flagging 1% of the population.
Because of moral hazard, any research team with any links to the killer can't get prize money.

The institute administering the test would have to be international to get adequate sample size. It would also publish all physiological measures about the mass killers, and preferably also from other violent criminals and some voluntary controls without criminal record.

Finally, what can be lost by implementing this proposal?

About The Book

2011-07-26T08:23:00.000-07:00

Summary: Breivik's book contains several fabricated statistics. This casts doubt on the truthfulness of his autobiographical claims.

ABB did not just reach wrong conclusion - namely, that political terror works. It doesn't. Even the Soviet communists who fought a civil war to gain power found terror strikes counterproductive.

His book is also worthless as a reference on the state of Islam and moral decay in Europe, as it is full of fabrications and factual errors. This is a pity as I'd very much like to see a well-researched "big picture" overview without liberal "don't worry, everything is ok" head-patting. I cross-checked some statistical claims about Finland.

The first claim which caught my doubt was the claim in p. 1173 that 35% of Finns get a sexually transmitted disease in their lifetime. Turns out that 15% of Finns had contracted an STD in their lifetime in 1992. Chlamydia was just as high in 1987 as in 2003, gonorrhea almost vanished and others are too small to meter, casting doubt on that 35% figure.

At p. 564, a table lists the Muslim share of the population for various European states. It claims that in 2009, 2% - 3% of people in Finland were Muslims. Wikipedia puts the estimate at 0.8% in 2006. This is a horrible mistake, as the whole book is about the Islamization of Europe

At p. 719, there is a discussion of social capital and trust, and claim that Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland top the list. This claim is true.

At p. 735, there is a table quantifying the levels of multicultural indoctrination in each country. The chapter doesn't tell how the numbers were calculated nor cite references. Conclusion: fabricated.

In p. 923, they put the level of Muslims in Finland at 2% - 4% of the population rather than 0.8%.

In p. 972, there is oil production amounts in different countries. The figure
is in line with an online source. Also other figures in this chapter seem factual.

At p. 1190, he claims that the "historic concentration of the Nordic genotype" in Finland was 85% at 1900, 75% at 1950, and 55% at 2010. Again there are no references or description of what is "nordic genotype". I seriously doubt if the genetic makeup of Finns has changed by 30% in 100 years. We haven't had that much immigration.

At p. 1223, there is a table listing countries in order of GNP. While the list seems genuine, it is interpreted wrong. He says "The International Monetary Fund ranking of the countries with highest GNP shows that the top 10 list is dominated by countries with an exceptional degree of social cohesion." The real conclusion from the table is that there are many ways to get high GNP per capita. 3 couuntries have oil. 3 countries have high social cohesion. Good capitalist economy has brough US and Singapore to the list. US is the antithesis of social cohesion and still on the list.

Conclusion: 2 figures don't match with official ones, 2 figures seem outright fabricated as there is no methodology mentioned, 1 is true but sloppily interpreted.

Social proof

What about his autobiographical claims? In his communication tips, he emphasizes the need for social proof and looking good: "...it should be a priority to appeal to a broadest selection of European males. Resistance leaders/cell commanders or individual cell operatives must prioritise to arrange and book a professional photo session prior to operation for one or all involved. Resistance leaders of larger networks should also arrange photo sessions with female patriotic models to use in online marketing/recruitment campaigns."

And he sure looks good himself! It reads like straight from Mystery Method. He was a leader of men, running a software company in early 2000s and a distinguished WoW raiding guild in 2005. But the guild he named was actually established only in 2007.

His tribe was also preselected by women: "Although I have had a change of mentality a majority of my friends have not. My stepfather Tore, one of my best friends Marius and my more distant friends Kristoffer, Sturla and Ronny are all living manifestations of the complete breakdown of sexual moral. All five have had more than 300 sexual partners (two of them more than 700)."

Finally, he's protecting us, his loved ones, from the threat of Islam.

Work and idleness 2/4: Conservative take

2011-07-23T14:04:00.000-07:00

Someone needs to keep the wheels of modern society running. In conservative ideology, work is a burden and everyone has a duty to carry their fair share. This is achieved by (1) stigmatizing free riders and social bums, (2) exalting work and and by (3) making work tolerable and pleasant with institutions (for example work regulations enforcable in court) and social norms (for example 40-hour work week).

Warning Against Idleness in Saint Paul's 2nd letter to Thessalonians illustrates (1) and (2) perfectly:

... keep away from believers who are living in idleness and not according to the tradition that they received from us. ... we were not idle when we were with you, and we did not eat anyone's bread without paying for it; but with toil and labor we worked night and day, so that we might not burden any of you. This was not because we do not have that right, but in order to give you an example to imitate. For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: Anyone unwilling to work should not eat. For we hear that some of you are living in idleness, mere busybodies, not doing any work. ... Take note of those who do not obey what we say in this letter; have nothing to do with them, so that they may be ashamed. Do not regard them as enemies, but warn them as believers.

The problem with the conservative position is that it no longer matches reality. The Finnish employment rate - the percentage of people aged 16 - 64 who work - was 69% in 2010. Let's assume that nobody under 16 or over 64 works, and that all age brackets contain just as many people, and that the average lifespan is 80 years.

We get that [ 16 * 0% + (64 - 16) * 69% + (80 - 64) * 0% ] / 80 = 41% of Finns work.

It is bullshit to claim that 59% of Finns can't work. My sister was getting paid for watching children as a young teen. I got my first IT summer which included some programming at age 18. But if you ask the credentialists, both work tasks absolutely require a college degree. Also in the countries where pensions are low, old people sure find stamina to work for some supplementary income.

People have made a collective decision to work less as most people get a nice standard of living anyway.

Work and idleness 1/4: The story of AZ

2011-07-17T14:34:00.000-07:00

In Soininvaara's blog, alias "AZ" poked a beehive by admitting that he bums on last resort income out of his own choice, without any sickness or attempt to become employed. When reading this, my first reaction was "why in the hell am I slaving away at the company for 40 hours a week, when he gets for free 960e a month, which is less than I sometimes spent in the most busy months!? What's in it for me in being employed?"

In June, the housing benefit + last resort income was 959,11 euros. The rent 540. For spending 419,11 euros remain. The electricity bill is fully paid by social service agency. Water is included in rent. There are no medical costs, but they would naturally be fully compensated.

With 119 euros you can eat well foodstuffs like porridge, rye bread, carrots, pea soup, soy sauce, pasta etc. If I want to save for something, only those are necessary. It only costs a few euros to buy soap or bags for the vacuum cleaner. What could possibly be necessary expense for those extra hundreds of euros? What's so superhuman in saving them? In my opinion it would be alarming, if a healthy person couldn't live like that for a few months. I'm not addicted to cigarettes. In two months I saved 600 euros. That's a royal sum for example for wandering in Lapland, as I already have equipment from the previous trips.

I have so much experience on what it means to live on the above mentioned benefits and even with reduced benefits down to 250 euros a month that without some specific health issue which the state refuses to refund I simply cannot sign the claim about extreme material poverty of those who live on benefits. It simply isn't true.

The last resort income requires that you don't have significant property, ~~for example a house~~; however, you can own a house. This is a possible lifestyle choice for someone who has paid his house already, and wants to drop out and commit hikikomori, expecting that life won't offer many opportunities anymore, for example for me if I fail to up my seduction skills by age 40.

Az says he has Asberger's syndrome and his explanations about philosophical research task reek mild crazines; this tunnel vision phenomena is familiar to me from the days of Finnish Annotator. Watch carefuly for it's cunning, devious bite if you ever become idle for extended periods.

Simo the unemployed

2011-07-10T11:38:00.000-07:00

The writing was on the wall since Elop's announcement. Back then, the number of projects had already decreased. I had plenty of time to sketch scenarios. The only surprise was timing: the customer was still paying my salary when I got laid off last week.

Plan A: Get a Java programming job from Helsinki

Why Helsinki? My brother and sister moved there within a year. There are 10 times more open programming positions in Helsinki than in Tampere.

Why Java? It was already going strong in 2007 when I was searching the previos job. It is likely to stay relevant also to 2015. Even if Java becomes obsolete, the whole web stack from SQL servers to browsers won't change in one punch. Java is my second strongest language after POSIX C / Symbian C++. The wanted skills in the job ads are suprisingly similar as in 2007 - SQL, Hibernate, Spring, JSP, JSF and various application servers are still going strong - and only Liferay and jQuery are completely new.

Actions taken: Sent job applications, got some books on jQuery and J2EE.

Plan B: Play time by starting a company

The basic idea is to warm up some leftovers from the website I developed in 2005-2006, but with much clearer goals and much better focus on what I am going to sell and to whom. The software would be distributed as an applet which runs in browsers.

The first phase is to develop a free prototype with limited content, to put it online and advertise it a bit. This way, I would find out the number of users a month. With reasonable assumptions about the conversion rate (how many visitors would buy the full version) this gives an estimate of market size and income potential. Is there enough demand for me to make a living out of it?

If there is no demand, then I would get a real job. If there is mediocre demand or the data is ambigous (most probable scenario) then I could spend 6 - 12 months developing the full version. The upfront initial investment would be paid back over many years as a trickle of side income. This way, I could play time until the Finnish IT job market clears out after 1500 laid-off Symbian engineers from Nokia and comparable amount from subcontractors.

Because of Plan B, I have almost no incentive to get a new job quickly. The only thing I want but can't do on income-based unemployment benefit is to buy a house in Helsinki.

Actions taken: I've been unemployed for 4 days and have been developing the prototype in 3 of them.

Important announcement

2011-07-03T12:57:00.000-07:00

I have nothing to say, and I'm drunk saying it.

I am also self-centered as I write mainly about things concerning my own life and myself, probably a mild narcissist or a mild psychopath.

True satanic black metal

2011-06-28T15:25:00.000-07:00

Although this video proves the worst nightmares of Ironmistress, these guys are our last, best hope against the imminent coming of Islamic theocracy!

Trip to Norway

2011-06-26T04:59:00.000-07:00

A fountain in a park near National Theater.

A street in Oslo.

A haunted soul was trapped to the wall of National Theater subway station.

Flytoget between Oslo and Airport was new and shiny.

When I arrived at 01.00 AM to Oslo railway station, the demographic I saw around me was 50% non-white, mainly young middle eastern and black faces. Why would any country opt to let in such amounts of immigrants from Africa and Middle East, when they are known to increase crime, welfare payments, white flight and in the worst case neighbourhoods where the police can't enter? Especially as demographic changes can never be rolled back once they have happened.

In the daylight it was a beautiful Nordic city, with lots of scenic spots I had no time to tour because the schedule was very busy.

The oil money was visible everywhere. The prices were expensive: The train from Oslo Airport cost 22e, and a tram ticket cost 5e, which is quite much. The train had screens displaying news and stock prices. The train seats had misleading investment ads, where a silver vendor told that silver has produced the highest return on investment during the last few years. There are many investment banks in Oslo.

Compound interest

2011-06-18T14:52:00.000-07:00

Early retirement is not my goal, since I don't have these kinds of sums to spare. However, it is a common goal in many investment blogs and a fun scenario to speculate.

This calculation is from Coder's investment blog. You save 10000€ each year and get the historical stock market average return of 8%. It doesn't take inflation into account.

1. year: 10 000,00€
2. year: 21 600,00€
3. year: 34 128,00€
4. year: 47 658,24€
5. year: 62 270,90€
6. year: 78 052,57€
7. year: 95 096,78€
8. year: 113 504,52€
9. year: 133 384,88€
10. year: 154 855,67€
11. year: 178 044,12€
12. year: 203 087,65€
13. year: 230 134,67€
14. year: 259 345,44€
15. year: 290 893,08€
16. year: 324 964,52€
17. year: 361 761,68€
18. year: 401 502,62€
19. year: 444 422,83€
20. year: 490 776,65€

Notes about the series:

In the end, the yearly gain is 40000€. The tax percentage is about 27% (assuming 1/3 dividend income with tax percentage 20% and 2/3 capital gains income with tax percentage 30%.) This is quite well-off.

In the beginning, savings dominate. The faster you can save the first 100000€, the better. Speed up the process by living with austerity for some years.

In the end, interest dominates. Around year 10, interest and savings provide equal boost to capital. At year 15, you might just as well stop saving and concentrate on researching means to increase interest.

If you take inflation into account, you have to wait a few more years. A comment in the original blog suggests 2% inflation, which would require waiting 4 more years to get the same real income.

After 10 years, you can already live on 1000€ a month. Then again, social benefits allow that much faster at the next round of layoffs if that is what you want to do with your life.

At around year 15, getting laid off is a lottery jackpot. With income-based unemployment benefit and stock-market gains together, you earn the desired yearly sum much earlier while waiting the compound interest to work its magic a little slower.

If you plan to retire to a low-paid meaning-of-life work, the right time to switch is around year 12. At that point, the main thing left to do is to wait. Saving has little effect. You might just as well start the lifestyle adjustment, as long as you don't touch the capital.

If you are near retirement, you need less. After retiring, you only need to make (desired income - pension). Before retirement, you can eat on capital as long as you still have enough at the point of retirement.

Why this is not my way

Social deprivation and lack of externally imposed structure would drive me crazy. I experienced some of it during the two summers spent writing my own website. I talked to other people once a week and went to sleep at 6am. I am the kind of dog who needs a little whip sometimes.

This calculation horrifies me and falls to the category "be careful what you wish for, since you might get it."

Riches and bitches

2011-06-12T04:42:00.000-07:00

Summary: This post investigates myths and anecdotes, which link male wealth to sexual market value.

Suppose I found a way to get wealthy, but it required huge amounts of work.
Would it be worth it? Would it be progress towards my long-term goals in life?

Mere correlation is not enough

Ice cream doesn't cause drowning despite both being common during hot weather. Similarly tallness and good social skills help both popularity among women and promotion prospects to better paid jobs. Instead of correlation, we need to find out the mechanism through which wealth affects marrigeability. That are better described in anecdotes rather than statistics.

You can buy status symbols with wealth

The traditional claim is that wealth enables you to buy status symbols and status signals attract women. This does not stand much closer scrutiny.

On the small scale, signaling wealth by buying women drinks in a bar labels you as an exploitable dupe. I have noticed it myself that I am instantly dubious towards people who insist on giving things away, asking myself "What does he want in exchange? Am I now in an unwritten agreement, where he expects something unreasonable from me, starting drama when he doesn't get it?" Ritualized, reciprocal giving like a house party host making food to guests is an exception.

There is some evidence that big houses are beneficial. Years ago there was an article in NY Times where women rejected potential boyfriends after seeing their apartments. In a later chapter there is a personal anecdote about deriving benefit from a summer cottage.

Regarding cars and watches which lose half of their worth the moment you walk out of the shop we have another type of signaling problem.

Do you signal wealth or future time orientation?

People have different financial future time orientations (FTO). On the one end are the spendthrifts who live from hand to mouth. The other contains millionaire-next-door types who save most of their income and never spend it in their lifetime. Jantunen described the shades of grey last year.

According to research, couples with similar financial FTO have least arguments about money. Although short-FTO and long-FTO persons are attracted to each others as they remedy each others' weaknesses, their marriages are unhappy. If you become wealthy by being a tightwad, it is stupid to signal wealth by flashy cars and expensive clocks, since it attracts attention from wrong kinds of people.

	Short FTO	Long FTO
What to signal?	Wealth	Future time orientation, since wealth comes to the working thrifty in the long run.
What new cars, iPhones, etc. signal	The person is wealthy as he can afford it.	The person will not become very wealthy, if he wastes mediocre income on expensive consumption.
Used car, using coupon codes	The person is too poor to afford a better car.	The person is not wasting money when just as good cheap alternative is available.
Company having headquarters in run-down area	The company is not doing very well.	The company uses its money productively rather than on shiny surfaces.

This chapter concluded that signaling wealth by buying expensive items and services is a sucker's bet, so striving for wealth for this purpose is useless to begin with.

Personal experiences about the wealthy

Once I was in a meeting of relatives, where about 30 persons from three generations gathered for a weekend in a summer cottage. There were two millionaires present. Self-made man was an entrepreneur who had found a company and grown it organically to over 100 employees. His wealth was measured in tens of millions. Nokia millionaire had had a hard life when young. During post-war poverty he had learned the motto "Don't buy what you need, buy what you can't do without." Millionaire-next-door lifestyle enabled him to get into Hymy (a Finnish scandal sheet) list of Nokia millionaires in 2000. He wasn't a fool who puts all his eggs into one basket, so he probably owns a million euros now.

The self-made man also had alpha personality; he hosted the meeting in his cottage, and showed various expensive items in there (which he could well afford, as they took so small % of his income) and was also one of 2 skilled musicians in gathering. Before getting introduced to his wife, I first though she was one generation younger, so much effort she had seen to stay slim and good-looking.

The Nokia millionaire didn't seem to use his wealth to buy anything you couldn't get on average industrial worker's salary. His wife is fat and their relationship is not that good.

It seems that wealth increases sexual market value if you use it to play yourself into higher status positions, for example by hosting a party. Having wealth to put into apartments and summer cottages is an advantage, but we still have no evidence that non-real-estate spending increases male attractiveness. Without social skills, wealth is useless.

Wealth as an abstract measure of human worth

OkCupid Trends is a blog which posts data mining articles about the dating site OkCupid. They showed a correlation between male income and unsolicited contacts. Also in this Feissarimokat article high income in itself is an argument for male fitness. ("Mika tekee yli 100 000e vuodessa plus Nokian bonukset. Kummatkaan eivät olleet mitään tyhjäntoimittajia toisin kuin pari lusmua joita en nyt nimeltä mainitse...")

This is a genuine riddle: Women seem to value high income in itself, while not valuing "beta providers" who use that high income to buy them things.

Maybe what women really value is "millionaire personality" which is characterized by learning alpha behaviour from young age and working at management jobs which both pay well and signal high social skills. This would mean that wealth has to be accumulated at young age in order to have any effect on personality. This is in line with my personal experiences about the wealthy.

You can buy sex with wealth

This post is about attracting a spouse into a long-term relationship, so buying sex for an hour doesn't count.

According to Roissy, paying for sex because you can't get enough for free signals low attractiveness. Done regularly it definitely is a huge waste of money.

However, women's preference for preselection complicates the picture. Married men are twice as likely to visit prostitutes than singles. (Sources: A Finnish prostitute wrote that 75% - 80% of her customers are married while only 56% of men aged 30 - 65 in 2006 were married) It is possible that some character trait both makes men visit prostitutes and also makes them better at attracting spouses.

It definitely isn't wealth, as married men always say that family takes all their money. The character trait may be a well-developed dark triad. Or maybe not being fully dependent on wife for sex makes the husband less needy, making the marriage last longer.

Millionaire couples

Thomas J Stanley gathered statistics and interviews from American millionaries for his book. He found out that 90% of them are married. Marriages have lasted on average for 28 years.

This research is the polar opposite of Roissy. The couples co-operate to accumulate wealth and the men say that they couldn't have amassed the fortune without help from their viwes. It also confirms that the truly wealthy have long-FTO lifestyle rather than need to signal wealth. Instead of dumping the loser, the women tough it out with their men in times of hardship, leading to success in the long run. This is so different from what I hear from other sources that I doubt the honesty of this source.

Conclusions

The link between male wealth and marrigeability is highly muddled. Character traits which enable high earnings seem more important than the money itself. Different signaling systems for short and long FTO compilicate the picture further. Becoming a millionaire seems to get you married with 90% probability, but the anecdotes sound too good to be true, casting doubt on the reliability of the source.

We have cookies

2011-06-04T18:24:00.000-07:00

Before entering corporate world I thought that programmers build the systems of the information society. That the software I develop would have users. This way, my skill and work would have a positive impact on society. It wouldn't be glamorous but it would be meaningful.

Looking back at the last 4 years, only for 4 months did I worked on systems, which were delivered and had reasonable usability. Other projects were discontinued, kept going on and on without shipping date or were prototypes to begin with. One 8-month project was delivered, but with so lousy usability that people probably used other means to access those features.

This means that on average 1 month each year was spent on productive work. The only trace from the remaining 11 months are the numbers on my bank account.

Work with no external impact produces a nasty ethical implication: The duty ethic where you get paid for doing your job becomes meaningless.

Since I am a leech on society's resources anyway, I might just as well leech for maximal personal advantage: raising the generous Finnish unemployment benefit, learning how to transfer logical talent (talent in the biblical sense: advantages which God gave to you at birth for implementing His will on earth) from value-creating positive sum skills into zero sum stock market gambling while listening to satanic black metal and blowing the dividends on frivolous and inappropriate pole dancing hobby. This way, I would become one of those sinister "market forces" which make your life miserable with demands for efficiency, privatize gains and socialize losses, destroy the environment, spike your food with E-codes, make the police shoot demonstrators in Spain and worsen your salary and working conditions in the race to the bottom.

2011-05-29T12:23:00.000-07:00

Summary: This post compares stock investing to mortgage.

This week I've been reading Saarion Sijoituskirja and considering investing into stock market.

First some background. I can't buy a house now for two reasons. Firstly, I expect to be laid off during the next year into a tight job market filled with 1500 Symbian programmers from Nokia and a comparable amount from subcontractors. This may mean a move to another city or country, creating a "push factor" away from Tampere. Secondly, there is a "pull factor" as my two siblings have recently moved to Helsinki.

My first lesson in investing

In September 2008, HEX index had collapsed 35%. I was going to an offshore assignment. I decided to buy stocks when they are cheap and moved a small apartment nest egg to a stock fund. The next week Lehman Brothers crashed, wiping away 40% of my nest egg.

I concluded that stocks are too volatile way to invest a nest egg, no matter how great average ROI they offer in 20-year timeframe.

In the hindsight, I made the right move for the right reasons, and the nest egg has recovered most of the melted value. Only timing was wrong: I should have spaced the purchases in 6 month intervals instead of trying to guess when the downturn is at the bottom.

Comparing stocks and mortgage

The biggest revealation I've learned from the book is emphasis on dividends. In the long run, the value of the stock is the time-discounted sum of dividends (price is something completely different). Companies pay on average around 5% of their share price in dividends. Dividend perspective also catches growth companies; they typically pay increasing dividends each year. This changes the picture in the following ways:

You don't have to sell the stocks to use them to pay mortgage. Instead, you can use dividends for mortgage payments. Typically you want to buy a house during downturn and sell stocks during boom. Dividends can bridge the time gap.

Temporary nest egg wipeout is not catastrophical. Debt-free companies continue paying dividends. Others resume after recession. Prices recover. In fact, selling stocks is strictly optional for a long-term buy-and-hold investor who is in for dividends and mortgage-length (20-30 years) timeframe. Of course, it is great for your wealth if you can sell high and buy cheap, outsmarting seasoned professionals, but don't count on it.

Both houses and stocks "pay dividends" and "increase in value". In house, the 'dividends' come from lower living costs. Value increases typically in pace with inflation, at good locations faster. Statistically stocks produce a little more in the long run; then again, in the long run we are all dead.

Additional factors attracting me to stock gambling are:

They have cute little numbers you can play with. Simple back-of-the-envelope calculations are a second nature to me. I do them almost instinctively. For example I "annualize" all costs by estimating, say, how many times a month I eat out and what is the cost per meal and how large % of monthly income goes to eating out.
It is a game of skill and luck. It is possible to raise your net worth faster than the statistical stock market average. For example for J it gives good profit per hours spent researching. Then again, J can invest in companies he has visited in his water engineering projects. I don't visit customer companies. It is unclear if there is any game of skill for me. The only way to find out is to try.
It is more leniently taxed than salary income. For dividends, 70% of dividend income is capital income for which you pay capital gains tax. The final tax is 20% of dividend's value. This is less than half my marginal tax rate on salary (if I would get 100e more salary, the tax man would take over 40e). Now you may say that there is double taxation on dividend income: the company paid taxes and you pay taxes. However, there are also side costs for employing people. As a rule of thumb, salary + side costs = 1.6 * salary. The 26% corporate tax is smaller than side cost percentage.
It makes you a better writer and person. Both J and Mangan invest, and their investment posts are consistently high quality: betting money on being right makes you consider your opinions. Investors have personal interest to know what happens in the world as it impacts their lives.

Money is a huge taboo, for example not a single person has ever told me his monthly salary. Outside immediate family, only two persons have ever admitted owning stocks. I am aware that writing about money is not necessarily wise in Finland, will be careful about not disclosing anything, and will stop as soon as I start to notice strange remarks in face-to-face discussions.

Finnish debt debate

2011-05-21T18:40:00.000-07:00

My heart was filled with hometown pride when I read that in 2010, Tampere city turned a projected -80m€ operating loss into 38m€ profit. They achieved this by raising taxes and cutting costs. ~~As a result, the whole Tampere froze as unions and tax-averse citizens organized a general strike for months.~~ Unfortunately, the municipality still increased debt because of investments.

In capitals around Europe, national decision-makers are smoking something that comporomises their ability to balance budgets. This year Finland and Portugal take debt for 4.3% and 4.6% of their respective GDPs. Only the amount of earlier debts differs.

IMF estimates that Portugal's debt is 83% of its GDP. When the collapse of Soviet Union pushed Finnish economy to abyss, our debt rocketed to 85% of GDP. But we decreased it down to 30%.

Inflating debt away

Finland has one of the better run state economies. Still, debt payments were just 1/3 of our debt reduction, when we reduced the GDP% of debt from 85% to 30%. The other 2/3 was achieved by inflation and GDP growth. This is consistent with Alan Greenspan's claim that democratic politics make it difficult to balance budgets and inflation is THE politically palatable solution to debt. Recently Sauli Niinistö proposed the same solution to excess amount of injected money and owed debt.

If inflation and growth are the only solution, then:
(1) There is no quick solution to state debt crisis. It will linger on for the next 10 years, requiring politically unpalatable support packages.
(2) Eurocrats will have to divide PIGS into two sties: Some pigs are "like Finland after Soviet Union's collapse" and will pay back debts, but need time to inflate them away. Other pigs are "like Argentina" and will collapse anyway. Loaning money to them just delays the inevitable.

SDP: We'll solve debt by turning water into wine

It is questionable if government policies can create jobs at all anymore. Market participants have better information on what sells. Earlier, state intervention was needed for capital-intensive industrialization projects, but nowadays even nuclear plants can be built with private money. Roads and other networks are pretty good. Sure, government can pay people to dig holes, but they will have to collect the salaries later as taxes, taking money away from consumption that actually increases people's quality of life.

Now that elections are behind, National Coalition is preparing cutting lists to balance the budget. SDP is talking about increasing growth, employment and tax income instead. For me that translates into "let's solve budget deficit by turning water into wine".

Alan Greenspan: Why interest rates are so low

2011-05-10T14:51:00.000-07:00

A year ago I wrote complete bullshit about the Greek crisis, claiming that joining euro decreased the interest on Finnish debt from 7% to 4%. In reality, interest rates have decreased all around the world. After Finland got out of the 90s recession, the gap between the German and Finnish yields has stayed small. Joining euro had no measurable impact. Even during the worst recession, the gap between Finland and Germany was at most 4%. This is the absolute maximum of "stability yield" of euro during extreme peacetime crisis.

Alan Greenspan's Age of Turbulence speculates about the disinflationary forces, which keep interest rates down:

Wage inflation has decresed, because hundreds of millions of new workers have entered global workforce. This constrains the demands for more pay in developed countries. This happenes now because only during the last 20 years have citizens in Eastern block and China gained enough economic freedom to have global effect.
Savings rates in China and Eastern block are exceptionally high. On the one hand, they must save more because they lack social safety nets and institutions of credit. On the other hand, they are developed enough that these savings are a globally significant sum.

The funniest royal wedding video

2011-05-08T15:37:00.000-07:00

This dance video uses some principles I described in Visual style of parapara:

Moves are synced to the rhythm.
Dramatic peaks in dance routine are synced to dramatic peaks in music.
There is a priorization choice to use only easy moves. Only the jump at 2:10 is demanding. In parapara, this "easiness leeway" makes the dance accessible to masses of people at clubs. This video harnesses easiness leeway to focus on body language and role acting.

There are also two explicit signs of parapara. At 1:24, there is a full sweep. At 00:30 - 00:45, the girl group performs "girlified parapara" - instead of doing symmetric X:es, they only do only one line of X. Instead of doing a straight, geometric lines as far as their hands reach, they keep hands bent. This makes the move smaller in size and more relaxed, resulting in more feminine and less dominating body language.

Status signaling

There is a clear hierarchy among the 4 young men. In the very beginning, the two young men display alpha devil-may-care attitude by throwing away the speech papers and by unharried pimp walking. Faster speed expresses higher relative status: higher-status men run circles around others.

There is just one explicit dominance/submission scene at 2:10. Elsewhere already-high-status alphas voluntarily and autonomously carry out their roles to serve even-higher-status ones.

In the end, the groom softens his touch with some vulnerability game. At 1:54, he hurries to his princess to save her from the sternous effort of walking, but backs off at the last moment with a mischievous slap on vaginal area.

Alan Greenspan: Inflation inevitable

2011-05-01T12:40:00.001-07:00

The inflation pitbull of Fed for 20 years considers inflation as inevitable. The Faustian bargain has to be accepted as long as maintaining a social safety net is seen as government's task, as politicians can't be expected to balance the budget.

Before this excerpt [1], Alan marvelled at the gold standard's ability to keep inflation at zero before 1930s when people had different ideas about government's role.

...the gold standards does not readily accommodate the widely accepted current view of the appropriate functions of government - in particular the need for government to provide a social safety net. The propensity of Congress to create benefits for constituents without specifying the means by which they are to be funded has led to deficit spending in every fiscal year since 1970, with the exception of the surpluses of 1998 to 2001 generated by the stock-market boom. The shifting of real resources required to perform such functions has imparted a bias toward inflation. In the political arena, the pressure to make low-interest-rate credit generally available [WTF? Aren't interest rates lowest when inflation is lowest?] and to use fiscal measures to boost employment and avoid the unpleasantness of downward adjustments in nominal wages and prices has become nearly impossible to resist. For the most part, the American people have tolerated the inflation bias as an acceptable cost of the modern welfare state. There is no support for the gold standsrd today, and I see no likelihood of its return.

[1] Alan Greenspan: Age of Turbulence, s.481

No posts for April

2011-04-03T13:26:00.000-07:00

Nothing to write and several things keeping me busy.

PUAs and discursive social psychology 1: Speech acts

2011-03-27T15:27:00.000-07:00

In my early twenties I read some social psychology to improve social skills, which I already knew to be a problem. The books didn't aid me, as they were very abstract or focused on leftist goals of dealing with social problems, for example by analyzing interactions between a government agency and a victim group. However, they made me familiar with social constructionism, a postmodern sociological theory guiding modern social psychology.

Back then, this blog was named Rakentumistyömaa, a construction yard for the social construction of reality. (In Finnish, the work rakentaa means physical construction of buildings and the word rakentua means the social construction of reality.)

One thing that appeals to me in Roissy's writing is that it fits perfectly to this earlier understanding of social life. I can leave my fundamental ideas unchanged and merely supplement them with extra chapters on how women behave and what I should aim at to get where I want to go.

Austin's theory of speech acts [1, s. 14]

The parts of the long quote that matter have been bolded.

Words as deeds: speech act theory
...
It is important for a clear understanding of Austin's ideas to have some indication of the situation in phiolosophy which he was both reacting against and commenting upon. His main target was the logical positivist view that sentences which cannot be verified, that is sentences for which there is no way of checking whether they are true or false, should simply be treated as meaningless. From this view points, for instance, the statement "God does not exist" should be treated as nonsensical since the truth of the statement can never be validated. In addition, Austin's argument was directed at a wide swathe of views of language which take it to be an abstract system whose central function is the description of states of affairs. What Austin set out to do was to undermine the notion that an understanding of 'truth conditions', states of truth and falsity, is central to an understanding of language.

Stating versus doing

Austin began with the observation that there is a class of sentences which are principally important for what they do, not because they describe things. For instance, the sentence

I declare war on the Philippines

is not a description of the world which can be seen as true or false but an act with practical consequences; ... Austin called sentences of this kind performatives. ... Austin contrasted these kinds of sentences with others whose primary role did appear to be the description of states of affairs, naming them constantives.

The general theory of speech acts

The general theory does not distinguish between sentences which do things and sentences which say things, between performatives and constantives, but casts this distinction in a different way. The fundamental tenet of the theory is that all utterances state things and do things. That is, all utterances have a meaning and a force. In fact, Austin suggested that with any utterance a speaker is simultaneously doing three sorts of things.

First, the speaker is uttering a sentence with (1) a specific meaning - it has a certain sense and may refer to specific events, persons or objects. Second, the sentence is uttered with a particular force. We know what the words 'shut the door' literally mean, but they can be used with (2) the force of an order, a request or even a question. Force is thus an element of utterances which is dissociated from their meaning, although it is often indicated by the use of a certain verb: promise, order, state, and so on. The third feature refers to (3) the effects or consequences of the first two. The sentence 'shut the door' may be uttered with the force of an order but it may have the effect of making the hearer shut the door or it may simply make the hearer annoyed.

Speech acts in seduction

For example, Roissy recently wrote about The "I can leave you if you want" shit test. He met a girl at a nightclub and teased her about her accent. The girl feigned indignation and asked "Do you want me to return to may friends?".

According to speech act theory,

The meaning of the sentence is to ask about his mental state; whether he prefers her to return to her friends or not.

The force of the sentence is either a question or a show of indignation

The effect of the sentence is to execute a shit test. If he is eager to keep her close, then he considers her presence an exceptionally good deal and he has a weak negotiation position. If he eagerly advices her to indeed return to her friends, then he is used to the company of girls like her and has a strong negotiating position.

In Roissy as in discursive social psychology, all utterances are speech acts. What matters are the deeds and effects people want to achieve with them.

[1] Potter and Wetherell: Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour

Methane blasts in Pakistan coal mine kill 6, trap 46

2011-03-20T03:22:00.000-07:00

source

A methane gas explosion in a coal mine in southwestern Pakistan killed at least six miners Sunday and trapped 46 others, a top mining official said.

The mine, which is located in Baluchistan province, was declared dangerous two weeks ago, but the warning was ignored, said Iftikhar Ahmed, a top mining inspector. The mine is owned by the state-run Pakistan Mineral Development Corporation but leased to a contractor, he said.

Rescue workers were trying to reach the trapped miners, but methane gas was hampering their attempts, Ahmed said.

"We are trying to make a path, but the presence of gas is restricting the rescue effort," he said.

The mine is located some 25 miles east of the provincial capital, Quetta.

If gas explosion collapses a mine, would it have withstood a 9.0 magnitude earthquake?

Tampere Film Festival: My Village in 2007

2011-03-17T15:11:00.000-07:00

Village Documentary Project distributed filming equipment to 10 rural villages for amateur filmmakers, including Zhang Huangcai, a 50 years farmer at Shijiazai village. His third documentary My Village in 2007 shows what life is like in a very backward village. What makes the film special is that the storyteller has lived there his whole life apart from doing odd jobs in cities. The lifestyle is normal for him, while being utterly alien for Westerners viewing the film at Tampere.

The village was so backward that the film had just 3 motor vehicles: a car, a harvester and a motorcycle. They still collected hay by raising it manually to drying poles. In the scene where they went to a city to sell handicrafts, they walked. By contrast, in rural India motorcycles are widespread.

The villagers subsisted by farming corn. The houses had big bunches of corn drying on their walls, suspended with ropes. Apparently they were well nourished, as there weren't any excessively short people in the film.

My father lived his youth in Tuupovaara, a settlement in Eastern Finland in the middle of forest and tens of kilometers from the nearest city. He said that they lived practically in subsistence economy, by fishing and farming, rather than in money-based economy. Logging and construction were ways to get some income. When he visited Haiti, he was a bit shocked from seeing how life was there and said that in no situation would their life in Tuupovaara be that bad. Getting basic needs met does not depend on technology, it depens on how people organize their lives. In Shijiazai as in Tuupovaara, poverty does not mean malnourishment or exploitation. Rather, it means hard manual work, little education, shoddy houses and thrift.

Talking about education, the film didn't touch literacy directly, but stacks of books and magazines were nowhere to be seen. Another factor which hinted at low reading fluency was lack of imagination. All topics discussed in the film were very concrete and practical. There were some memories from cultural revolution and a few mentions of work gigs in the cities. Other than that, they only talked about things that happen in the village.

Social porn does not turn on healthy people. This film managed to pull off the hard trick of describing backward life as normal. The film had low technical quality - it was more like a collection of home videos without plot, exposition of background etc. It was still the best out of 4 films who described rural workers in China, because it had insider's perspective.

Overall, about half of the films in Made in China series were designed to raise awareness of various social issues. It mirrored Western mass media's bias of seeing China primarily as a collection of human rights violations, third world poverty and totalitarian oppression. This bias nowadays irritates me after seeing what overseas Chinese write about their country themselves.

Nothing happened, except for news artificially fabricated by media

2011-03-06T14:36:00.000-08:00

Creaders.net contained two eyewitness reports about scheduled jasmine strolls. The main news in Shanghai was that 15 foreign reporters were arrested for 3 hours. One of them reports that "The actual scale of the movement is very small. At the door of the cinema there were some tens of people, they didn't carry slogans or loudspeakers, only calmly stood there."

In Beijing, a reporter went to a nearby bookstore and saw nothing but a lot of policemen and a few foreigners who looked like they were waiting for something to happen.

An eyewitness said that the commotion two weeks ago was basically about foreign reporters gathering to a busy street after hearing the rumors about jasmine strolls, and curious people who flocked around the foreign reporters, expecting something to happen.

Ye Xiaowen calls jasmine strolls "performance art"

2011-03-05T15:10:00.000-08:00

CPPCC's yearly conference started on Wednesday. In one symposium, Ye Xiaowen emphasized that the Communist party has nothing to fear from jasmine strolls, because 30 years of economic development demonstrate the superiority of Chinese institutions. This is notable, since elsewhere all things jasmine are censored.

"Jasmine? What a joke. China has developed rapidly in the last 30 years, and the common Chinese people support this development, no? If the want this jasmine revolution and starve, are they going to take jasmines to their coffins? Unlikely to happen. What a joke! This is all basically just performance art."

This matches international opinion: Bai Xia, a French sinologist sent a similar message in a Deutsche Welle interview:

"Many international observers believe that the 'jasmine revolutions' in Middle East can't reach China, because the economic development has been fast, recently China's economy became the second biggest in the world. Therefore social contradictions and unrest should not cause too many legitimacy problems for the regime. But Chinese officials are not that confident after discovering that some factors of jasmine revolutions, like corruption, unemployment of univesity students, people's rights being violated etc. exist also in China. Therefore the most outstanding feature of jasmine strolls is the tense insecurity of Chinese high-level authorities."

Chinese officials have arrested over 100 human rights lawyers, democracy activists, dissidents and intellectuals in an attempt to "kill one and scare hundred".

To avoid giving authorities excuses to suppress rallies violently, china.molihua advises participants "not to shout slogans and not to carry signs or torches". China.molihua compares jasmine rallies to East Berlin's Monday demonstrations in 1989 which started with a few hundreds of people and expanded during several months up to 320000 people, ending in the collapse of Berlin wall.

Chinese documentaries at Tampere Film Festival

2011-03-03T14:10:00.000-08:00

A collection of modern Chinese documentary films.
One each day 9.3 - 13.3.

Schedule (in Finnish)

I'll go there with the attitude "let's see well-chosen movies I would never have heard about otherwise", and will not read movie descriptions in advance.

A foreign reporter was beaten at Wangfujing, diplomatic commotion ensues

2011-03-02T14:09:00.000-08:00

Bloomberg news agency says that one of their reporters was beaten by 5 plain-clothes policemen last Sunday in Wangfujing. His camera was taken away and he was detained in nearby store. Afterwards, he was taken to the police station and subsequently released.

White House press secretary Jay Carney commented that "we have heard reports about foreign reporters being detained and treated roughly. These reports cause us worry. We request Chinese government to respect foreign reporter's right to work, and urge law enforcement to guarantee their safety against illegal harassment and threats."

Yu Jiang, The spokesman of Chinese foreign ministry, turned tables by blaming the reporters. She asked why so many reportes gathered in the busy street (there were mainly foreign reporters and Chinese policemen present), and asserted that the policemen were only carrying out their legal duty by clearing the way. She also asked who gave the reporters instructions to come there, implying that it was an anti-Chinese conspiracy.

In Japanese newspapers, this was compared in ridiculousness to Gaddafi's statement that Libyan opposition consists of Al Qaida terrorist cells.

Third wave of rallies scheduled for 6.3.2011, but by whom?

2011-03-01T14:41:00.000-08:00

Original article published 1.3.2011 by creaders.net.
China.jasmine calls for rallies in hundred cities, is asked to identify himself

Mingpao newspaper reports that the scent of jasmines is spreading to China. Someone calling himself "the originator of jasmine revolution" put a new announcement online that the third wave of rallies will be next Sunday, covering over 100 cities. He also asserted that "we will reveal our identity at suitable moment." At the same time, account names like "Jasmine Revolution News Center" and "Operation Jasmine" emerge in overseas websites like Facebook and Twitter. This indicates that the number of netizens answering the call is increasing and the scale of rallies will expand.

The Chinese "jasmine revolution" rallies have continued already for two Sundays and gained international attention. French News Agency reports that the self-titled originator of the movement announced that on last Sunday, in up to 100 cities people took part in rallies, far more than the previously announced 27 cities. "Our local organizer can already feel that it is the season when jasmine blooms".

Accusation: Hunderds of thousands of people attack overseas websites

The announcement claims that Chinese authorities are mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people to attack foreign websites in order to stop the smell of jasmine. Boxun site already stopped forwarding rallying places etc. information, because it couldn't endure attacks. Proponents therefore opened accounts to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google Blog and so on which are stable and secure. The spokesman said that the third rally will be codenamed "Two Conferences" [Note: this is a tactic to prevent the use of Great Firewall, as the real Two Conferences - the yearly meetings of CPPCC and NPC - are held at the beginning of March.] and also asserted that he will reveal his identity when the time is right. Little after this announcement, a list of rallying places for 35 cities circulated online. The place of Bejing rally moved from Wangfujing to another vibrant suburb, Xidan. The list also included Shenzhen, Lhasa in Tibet and Hohhot in Inner Mongolia.

Some people call 6.3.2011 "Three chuckles"

At the same time, the number of "jasmine" accounts increases. Some of them forward news about rallies, while others are suspected pranks. A Google Buzz account named "Jasmine Revolution Information Center" called the 3.6 meetings with code word "three chuckles", calling citizens to participate in rallies by "taking a walk, standing in circles and laughing heartily three times". Some people worry that it is a honey trap, while others supect it to be a practical joke which puts people in danger.

Jasmine revolution in China

2011-02-28T13:14:00.001-08:00

The Chinese jasmine revolution has thus far been quiet shadow boxing. The protesters shout their calls for action through open social networks, enabling the government to anticipate and counter them with surgical countermeasures and displays of force. There is little action but a lot of tension - about 10% of articles in creaders.net are about the Chinese jasmine revolution.

Original article
26.2.2011
Wangfujing selead with plates, jasmine revolution unable to blossom in Beijing

According to "Apple Daily", the netizens called for the second wave of "jasmine revolution" for today. The local officials heard the enemy coming and even dispatched extra guards to parts of the city. One of the central meeting ares, the gates of McDonald's in Wangfujing [a suburb in Beijing], were sealed with plates because of "sunken earth holes". When netizens shifted the place to Wangfujing's Kentucky Fried Chicken, even the word "Wangfujing" became a sensistive word in sina.com, impossible to search.

As online calls for protests have expanded to 23 cities, local officials hear the sound of the horn and are making preparatory moves. Reports indicate that Beijing has already brought troops to the city and increased the surveillance of communications. "Red armbands" are guards, which consist of voluntarily patrolling citizens. Earlier, they have only been used during the Beijing Olympiad and the "Two Conferences" (the yearly meetings of National People's Congress and Chinese People's Political Consultative Committee.) Many patrol cars of Ministry of Public Security are stationed in the main street of Wangfujing, and anyone who takes photographs is promptly questioned.

Boxun [US based] website, which for several days has been the news platform for jasmine revolution, announced yesterday evening that it has difficulty operating because of intense pressure and repeated attacks. Because of current conditions, "Boxun unfortunately has to stop publishing related [to jasmine revolution] information."

Online reports indicate that domestic officials have intensified pressure on anyone who might participate in gatherings. Dissidents are being taken away, and a retired professor of Shandong Univeristy, Sun Wenguang was escorted away by Public Security. Some netizens claim that merely saying the word "jasmine revolution" will bring Public Security to the doorstep.

In the biggest domestic social network, sina.com, it is still impossible to search with sensitive words "jasmine revolution" or "meeting". Yesterday also "Wangfujing" became prohibited, producing announcement "Because of certain legal stipulations and policies, the search result can not be displayed."

2011-02-27T08:21:00.000-08:00

If I chose my sport according to what appeals to women in general, I would train martial arts.

Mystery says that to appeal to women in general, you should project an image of being a leader of men, preselected by women and protector of the loved ones. Martial arts push the "protector of the loved ones" button.

Many online dating announcements call for a traditional, real man. Training capability for violence is consistent with that. Also romantic fiction contains a lot of protector figures.

However, only once in my adult age have I been in a violent situation. The skill would be practically useless, therefore I have no interest for it.

By contrast, the effeminate undertones of pole dancing are likely to be a big turn-off for many women, so it definitely isn't something to be done to appeal to women. However, since I'm practising it anyway, it's reasonable to ask how to present it in a light which is consistent with my goals in other areas of life.

More doom and gloom

2011-02-23T14:43:00.000-08:00

Talking about bad scenarios, one I want to avoid is living 50 years alone. Many friends have reached the middle class bliss of having a wife, a mortgage, a spacious car, 2.5 kids, and thou shalt not forget the golden retriever. I want it in the same trivial sense which Jane Austin meant with the opening sentence of "Pride and Prejudice": "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." The only question is how to actionalize the goal - what series of steps to perform to make progress towards it. Here's my current actionalization:

Participate in events of The Club to develop social skills and meet people.
Answer personals in Deitti.net and OkCupid in the rare instances when something interesting pops up (my sister and her husband found each others through Deitti.net and have since reached middle-class bliss.)
Read seduction material like Game for Omegas or Roissy or Mystery Method.
Practise pole dancing in order to have a hobby which appeals to the target group.

The pole dancing part needs a little explanation. Dance classes are definitely not places to meet women - rather they are places where girls team up to invent cruel and unusual shit tests to poke at your weaknesses. In fact, I've only had one 10-lesson card (and won't buy a new one until I finish dieting.) Going to those lessons was always a little disturbing.

However, dancing is currently my only interest with any appeal to women, and since I've decided to exercise regularly anyway, the time investment is quite low.

If I ever get to a level where I can make videos or performances without embarrassment, it should increase the number of first contacts that start with positive expectations. Avoiding embarrassment means, among other things, grounding the style in some visual tradition which is not feminine or gay. In that case, the skill is quite comparable to Mystery's magic tricks.

From the perspective of my goals, it doesn't matter if pole dancers are hot or not. What matters is how the target group, non-pole-dancing plain Janes, react to my hobby. At best, pole dancers can be a useful test group or act as social proof, giving me preselection points when I mention them.

Among men, the dominant view is that social skills are like poker: you should hide your goals and intentions while reading other people for their weaknesses. This way you gain or lose advantage from asymmetric information. Many years ago I broke it by mentioning desire for more friends in this blog, and The Scientist metioned privately that he wouldn't admit such things. After that I have been a good boy and followed this principle. Now where is my fucking prize?

The more I look, the more I see signs that relationship are almost a perfect-information game like chess or go for the sharpest females that matter most. For example Roissy's seduction performance didn't drop from describing openly what he did as he did it. Here is how Aretae describes his wife:

Sickness by skin color variations, 3 days ahead of time ("Start superdosing your vitamin D now, you're getting sick"). 10:1 she knows more about what you're feeling than you do, if she can see you (even if your back is turned, and you're wearing a heavy coat). And if she hears you [not me] say "hello" to your wife over the phone, she knows if your wife is ready to cheat -- by means of emotional echoes in your response, whether or not you do. Still pictures of popular trial defendents tell her whether they're guilty.

In the pole dancing school, at least one teacher is really perceptive. For example, once I had difficulty getting a series of moves right. The first time I got it right, she noticed it from the opposite end of the class, probaly without looking at me. Thinking that you can hide your sexual thoughts in a dance class is as foolish as hoping that in a go match, the other player won't see a move. At least some of them can read everthing that matters from your gestures. If you assume otherwise, they will confuse and startle you by showing you your own reflection in snappy comments. But there is one thing they can't turn against you - self-knowledge and confidence that comes from knowing why you are there, what you want out of it and acting consistently and decently.

Currently, none of the 4 actionalizations produces results. The best they can provide is general practise in social skills and a diagnosis of what I need to do differently to find an approach which works.

Päiväkäskyni viimeinen: Kusessa ollaan!

2011-02-12T01:26:00.000-08:00

Now that Nokia has decided to use Windows, the question for Finnish IT industry is: Who will do the work?

Ominously, Nokia Finland is not recruiting Windows, C# or Silverlight programmers (Silverlight is the plaform for making 3rd party applications to Windows Phones). In monster.fi, Silverlight jobs are either in the non-mobile industry or in the multiplatform field, where all mobile platforms are listed.

For example Abhinaba Basu in Hyderabad, India works in a team with Windows Phone and Silverlight competence.

In the past, Finnish developers moved between Series40, Symbian and Meego. There is no sign that they will be moving to Windows except for Elop's words.

Moving phone OS development out from Finland would be a tectonic shift in the Finnish IT industry. A HS artice mentions 3100 Symbian and Meego developers in Tampere and Oulu. There are more in Salo, Helsinki and in Nokia's subcontracting chain. Quick layoffs will create a glut of unemployed, resulting in hundreds of applicants for each open position until the industry has restructured, which would take years.

Mauri Pekkarinen uttered the unfamous words "we are from the government and we are here to help." He talked about managed handling of the structural reform. Based on what I have heard about TEKES projects, I hope that they will do as little as possible and stick to existing mechanisms like income-based unemployment benefit and start-up grant. Finnish state financed with debt 25% of its costs last year. We don't need more of that.

Technology perspective

Symbiatch raves about the high quality of C# language and Microsoft tools in Desktop. But Windows Phone is not a desktop OS.

A colleague recently investigated porting a multiplatform client to Windows Phone. The application runs in the background. He found out that WP7 didn't allow background operation to 3rd party applications, making the port difficult and maybe impossible. Also the first comment to Symbiatch's raving is the lack of socket interface, a fundamental low-level network technology necessary for many serious applications. If Microsoft refuses to give enough levers to pull, easier programming is useless. Angry Birds may be a lottery win for Rovio, but it is not a business application and the hype hides the long tail of apps producing nothing.

WP is just one of Microsoft's many income sources. If Nokia demands improvements to WP OS, they can afford to say "Stop whining, boy! Nobody forces you to use WP if you don't accept the terms." Let's hope that Nokia is big enough player to pressure Microsoft into necessary changes.

Economic perspective

Symbian proliferated years ago as a counterstrike to Windows. Mobile phone manufacturers feared they would become Dell-style commodity hardware manufacturers with tight competition and thin profit margins. Simultaneously Microsoft would reap profits from just copying bits after the initial development effort. Since Microsoft holds iron grip over WP and 3rd party applications, these old threats resurface.

Another force working against Nokia are network effects. Silverlight is not popular outside WP. Java midlets are popular in many different mobile platforms. Meego is compatible with Linux kernel, enabling vast amounts of Linux applications to be ported to N900 with reasonable effort. It depends on Nokia's ability to open WP whether the network effects will be positive or negative. At best, Nokia will get Windows developers into more open WP. At worst, obstacles around WP will make it as isolated as Symbian was before Qt and C API.

Tomorrow at 12.00 is popcorn time for anyone interested in Nokia's future

2011-02-10T14:22:00.000-08:00

Last year I wrote that Symbian has so fundamental issues that the platform is unlikely to produce hit software anymore. Thus far data has supported my predictions. Nokia's share in smartphones (where Symbian is used) decresed 6.7 percentage points despite the publication of flagship N8. Nokia refused to publish the sales figures for N8, which hints that the figures don't support the narrative of dramatic recovery after a new broom swept clean the sins of the past.

Against my predictions, Nokia lost market share also in stupid phones.

Bits are eternal

2011-02-06T03:37:00.000-08:00

Last week I mentioned Kari and Esa, two informatics medalists interested in Haskell and category theory. This week Kari started a blog. His topmost science fiction story is an accessible summary of those themes.

The key paragraph is this:

Long ago, the program logic for computers was saved in monolithic ways, which made it difficult to reuse existing functionality for new purposes. Companies rationalized it with the need to protect their source code. On the other hand, computing capacity was also billions of times more scarce, forcing people to meticulously design all kinds of algorithms. Ancient software nowadays qualifies as a kind of art, when you looked at their painstakingly polished details and routines fine-tuned with clocksmith's precision, aiming to save every cycle and every bit of memory. Uki sighed while trying to remember what those primitive days felt like.

The Loom of Culture was a method to extend imagination as far as possible without breaking the sense-muscle interface [Note: The character, Uki, is embedded in a virtual reality where digital input fills his senses. His muscles also move him virtually. The sense-muscle interface connects his "body" to the virtual world.] All logic in the loom consisted of separate, abstract construction rules and restrictions as well as metadata, which made it possible to automatically combine the rules and restictions. The user could create contexts on the fly and combine, inherit and duplicate them. Each context had a set of objects it was working on and building. The user could add or remove assumptions, modifying the end result while the loom automatically reached logical conclusions based on type information, pruning impossible branches with restrictions. If the loom couldn't deduct some necessary feature from assumptions, the model offered the most probable default value in the same way as human vision fills blind spots with the best guess based on available information.

The loom had a basic context of general knowledge. The user could add more contexts from trusted sources. Typically each user started with a standard environment, supplementing it with libraries of his own hobbies as well as personal adjustments. The power of the system was its ability to make the knowledge in the models interact and build a massive amount of possibilities by combining simple, relative rules and pruning them with restrictions. Using it was much easier than you would think from this description, since the standard context could interpret thought, movement and speech to guide the loom. The difference to an artificial intelligence was that the loom didn't have its own intentions and it didn't act automatically, it only extended the imagination of its user.

Uki gestured to open the standard context, looked at the empty space ahead of him and said in his thoughts "Open the music library and let us assume Devil's Sonata by Tartini and the memes of popular music in the 1900s." The composition memes were made of functions. Some of the functions took other compositions as parameters, producing new compositions. For example "repeat" might be a function A ↦ AA and fade(X) produced a verion of X, which faded to silence in the end. These building blocks operated mainly on notes and concepts like "pitch", "volume", "duration" and "instrument". The memes themselves had been filtered with a genetic algorithm. The compositions were located at a timeline, and were "phenotypes". The genetic algorithm searched for the shortest set of functions to generate a composition. This program was the "genotype" of the composition, which generated the "phenotype". The idea of searching for the shortest composition was that it distilled the essential and abstract structural ideas from the compositions, relative to the current meme pool. In addition, whole compositions contained a kind of conceptual network, which described how often each block had been used as input for another and how long various patterns typically last. In addition to building blocks, the library contained information about harmony. The algorithm also increased the score of the composition if it contained several short genotypes, making it a kind of compact crossroads for several ideas. This could not completely model creativity, but it approximated it reasonably, as ideas interacted in the composer's head with other areas of life.

The next paragraphs explain what this has to do with programming.

Programming as meaningless, aimless busywork

Once I presented the character drawing software for N900 for a person in the company I work for. He commented that it was a nice competence development project. This represents a mindset where programming is meaningless, useless activity which aims to get money from the customer. Competence development is the only other imaginable reason to code. Programming to implement features is unheard of alien blasphemy.

For those people, programming as a kind of schoolwork assignment. It is impossible to talk with them about programming in any higher level of abstraction than which function call does what, since only losers talk about homework assignments unless they need hints to complete one. In school, the primary goal of reifying the status hierarchy goes far ahead of learning. Similarly at work, there is no debate about the purpose of writing software. Consequently, people are often as alienated about the nebulous goal of programming as they were in school about learning specific course content.

Making machines obey human will

In Kari's (and my) opinions, programming is all about making machines obey human will. Non-programming methods like creation wizards and cofiguration files are just as fine, but rarely enough. The short story shows programming without writing code and calling functions. The loom of culture is likely still Turing complete.

In the hierarchy of low-level and high-level languages, the loom of culture is the highest imaginable one. The programmer to expresses exactly the core requirements. The machine generates everything else by logical deduction and reasonable default values.

Programming languages are becoming more and more abstract, enabling the programs to shrink. Languages typically improve by placing low-level restrictions. This allows more guaranteed abstract features on higher levels. For example C language does not allow direct stack manipulation. This enables modular function calls.

Haskell is the current peak of this trend. Despite several attempts to learn it, I can't code in it myself. But Haskell has the reputation of producing the smallest implementations for various features. It also has the strictest low-level restriction in any language - namely, that you can't set a variable. This restriction makes it mainly an academic language which little industry adoption.

The loom of culture also has an interface which matches human intuition. Kari once described writing Haskell as the closest thing he has seen to writing what you think. Languages development requires insight into human intuition, and there is some empirical evidence that setting a variable is unintuitive.

Category theory is a branch of mathematics which is relevant to understanding Haskell and a source of inspiration for improving the state of art. I didn't understand the content of Esa's and Kari's debate at the time, and now Kari moved to Helsinki, but it was about developing even better languages. Esa says that type system is at the core of the effort, and indeed type-level restriction are mentioned in the loom of culture. Usually the word "abstract" is a rhetorical device ("This is like, totally abstract and general!") but in language development they must face it head on.

Kari and Esa are both talented, experienced and driven people, and they understand programming on some higher level that is inaccessible for my IQ and programming experience. The loom of culture is just one glimpse of it.

Positive agendas

2011-01-30T13:16:00.000-08:00

One reason I wrote so much about CALL is that it is a positive agenda. A positive agenda fulfills the following 4 requirements:

CALL development has a clear goal, namely, the production of better language-learning software.

In contrast, most busywork people do to earn money doesn't have any goal.

CALL has justification for why the goal is worth reaching. People have to learn languages anyway, one way or another, at least in Europe.

For example training, competing and winning is not a positive agenda, unless people plan to use the trained skills for some further goal. There must be a justification for why the training is worth the effort.

CALL has a tradition outlined by prior art, current popular software and to lesser extent books and journals. Tradition tells what works and why, what doesn't work, and what has been tried in the past with variable success. Finding a tradition to attach to is a big boost in any effort.

CALL has a working approach which tells you how you can put in hours to make progress towards the goal. You develop better CALL by writing software and collecting and filtering data sets. This approach is something I can perform.

For example in Roissy-style game, there is a clear goal (pickup), justification (pleasure or happy relationship), traditon (Mystery method) and approach, but the approach is not something I can yet apply. Therefore game is not a positive agenda for me.

Few people around me have any positive agendas in any area of life, and when I spot one it is fascinating to watch. Last summer, when go circles in Tampere organized the European Go Congress, it was a positive agenda. The goal was to arrange the tournament. The justification was to enable European go players play together and find out the European championship. The tradition of yearly go congresses had been around since 1957. The approach was to organize it the same way as past congresses and local events. But usually go circles don't have any positive agenda, since justification is lacking.

When Esa and Kari talked about Haskell and category theory, it sounded like they had a positive agenda, although I didn't have the background to understand what they were talking about.

My sister's child was baptized

2011-01-16T06:35:00.000-08:00

11.11.2010 my sister Sanna and her spouse Panu had a child. Yesterday he was baptized and given the name Lauri.

Sanna and Panu are as swipple couple as it gets. Panu runs an environmental consulting firm. Sanna studies art at university, and has had numerous galleries. (My brother has had galleries displaying fractal art, and he is one of the founders at a struggling startup. I'm the only grey and boring normo with an nine-to-five job.) All food was vegetarian, there was a token black couple from Mozambique present, and the priest was female. I didn't ask why they were discriminating against LGBT minorities by not inviting them.

During the ceremony, I learned new things about baptism. Godparents (kummit) are supposed to take responsibility of the religious upbriging of the child. Also, parents are supposed to tell about the baptism for the child when he grows up. One reason I dislike atheism is that atheists seem to be bashing a straw man, as people are very good at simply ignoring religion.

Priest's talk was solidly conservative, emphasizing God's desire that the parent stay together and take good care of the child, aided by godparents, even when the child is not always cute and adorable. Church is one of the few institutions that still dares to say "single parenthood is wrong." Feminine tones like God's loving embrace was featured many times in the sermon, so it was clearly left-conservative.

Only Sanna belongs to Church, and she said that they hesitated for a long time before deciding to baptize instead of just giving a name. The priest emphasized that baptism creates a lasting tie between the child and God, but the parents will likely talk against any attempts to introduce him faith into God.

Game of Talking in science

2011-01-08T13:39:00.000-08:00

Isegora writes about a group performance study. The study investigated if group ability is "sum of its parts" or "more than sum of its parts". They both measured the individual IQs of the group members, and also looked at the interaction in the group. Group dynamics overwhelmed individual ability.

One result was that the whole group dynamic suffers if one asshole insists on blabbing and blabbing and blabbing in order to win the Game of Talking by big margin:

...neither the average intelligence of the group members nor the person with the greatest intelligence strongly predicted how well the group did.

Other tenets of group success also seemed to fall by the wayside: A group’s motivation, satisfaction, and unity were unimportant. Instead, the researchers found that when a group had a high level of collective intelligence, the members tended to score well on a test that measured how good they were at reading other people’s emotions. They also found that groups with overbearing leaders who were reluctant to cede the floor and let the others talk did worse than those in which participation was better distributed and people took turns speaking. And they also found that the proportion of women in the group was a predictor of collective intelligence — a factor they believe was likely influenced by women’s generally superior social sensitivity.

Hat tip: Aretae

Dieting

2010-12-29T04:48:00.001-08:00

A body mass index of 23.7 is normal weight, so I haven't been on a serious diet ever before. However, it is too much stomach fat for pole dancing, so next year I'll diet from 63kg to 55kg, resulting in 20.7 BMI.

The problem with mere physics-based diet of eating everything less it that it increases hunger, devastates ability to concentrate and produces relapses. Cutting out just starch (pasta, potatos, rice) seems to alleviate these side effects. Full ketogenic diet would require too much cooking. Keeping weight stable is much easier task: just weight yourself every morning, and eat less for a day if your weight crosses your Alarm Barrier. Body has some internal weight-stabilization mechanism, which makes this easier by controlling appetite.

Actually I already started on December 1st, first losing 1.5kg by dieting. Then a puke disease on Christmas days with vomitting and diarrhea took another 1 kg away, apparently permanently, despite me eating as much as I could keep inside, and sometimes a bit more, triggering The Symptom. Although the figure on the scale decreases, this is bad news for dieting. First of all, bed rest wastes muscles, so relative strength doesn't increase. Secondarily, the bacterial ecosystem in the guts still haven't recovered to the point where stool doesn't resume liquid form from a bit heavier exercise.

Merry Christmas, your last one

2010-12-22T06:41:00.000-08:00

Twas the night before Yuletide and all through the hole
Not a creature was stirring, not even a Dhole
Aldebaren hung at the right place at nine
In the hopes that Great Cthulhu would come out this time

The Fungi from Yuggoth, all snug in their caves
Were plotting to turn all the people to slaves
The Deep Ones in Rlyeh, the Ghouls in their graves
Were dancing and singing and acting depraved

When what do my wondering eyes should appear
But a mouldering sleigh and eight corpselike reindeer
With a horrible driver so leprous and reeking
I knew right away that my fear was unspeaking

The reindeer were gross, as they flew up from hell
And It hoarsely whispered and chanted a spell
Ia Shub Niggurath! Cthulhu ftagn!
Nyarlathotep! I summon you on!

As decomposed flesh before the charnel stench rise
And meet with the open air polluting the skies
Up to the housetop the horror it rose
And the gangrenous odors assailed my nose

And then in a slopping noise heard on the roof
The lumbering clomping of octopoid hoofs
As I drew in my head and was turning around
The horror lurched into my room with a bound

Its eyes how they pulsate
So bulbous and gory
This blasphemous creature
So noxious and hoary

I was frozen by fear, my feet woudn't run
I threw up my cookies, this wasn't much fun
It whispered my name and said "You come with I"
I tried to refuse and it said "Then you die."

It came at my throat with its grim claws extended
But a miracle saved its victim intended
I had three Elder Signs in a slot in the floor
It screamed with a fiendish sound and went out the door

It sprang to its sleigh, and its team gave a surge
And away they all flew to the sound of a dirge
I heard it exclaim as it flew out of sight
"You're lucky this time, for the stars weren't right."

This joke gets old quickly, but there's always the first time you hear it...

Follow-up on the goals for 2010

2010-12-20T14:19:00.000-08:00

Summary: What's the point of setting goals, if you don't track them?

Cleaning up this blog. Completed except for a few removed posts and the status signaling post, which I didn't know to be provocative. The burst of negative feedback in the summer was probably just a sign that the posts were relevant. Status and sexuality are still a bit mysterious, so unavoidably some posts miss the mark. The best option is to write so clearly written and understand the subject so well understood that everyone agrees with the posts. However, if some rabid psychobitch chooses to keep on insisting that I'm too young to walk 10 km without being accompanied by my mother, no amount of rational explanations can possibly ever resolve that, and that's why the comments are nowadays moderated.

Year of bodyweight training. Completed. Got that push-up from headstand to handstand in October. Not planning to continue bodyweight training, it neglects feet and gets monotonous.

Get Chinese to completion where active study can be replaced by reading news and blogs in relaxed way. Completed for newspaper text only. Also, Chinese Language Group revealed that writing and speaking skills need a lot of work. However, there won't be Chinese goals for 2011. I'll integrate writing practise to other activities, like writing journal partly in Chinese.

More active social life. Completed. Been participating in events of The Club, pole dancing events and in organizing Go Congress in the summer.

Last year I wrote that physical instincts give valid raw data, but social insticts give only bad advice. This has changed. Now also social instincts give correct raw data, and the bottleneck is acting on those instinctual situational assessments.

In Pole Debut 2010, I had a 15-minute chat about pole dancing with a previously unknown girl. Overcoming bitch shields used to be impossible for me, but now it happens once every 3 months when strong context is available. Further progress will hopefully enable that more reliably with less context (for example in concerts). That is still a far cry from Roissy's or Finndistan's level, where they can talk with pretty much any girl without any context in nightclubs. However, even modest progress shows that the approach works and the direction is right and that there is no reason for despair despite me being 10 years behind my peers in social skills. Advanced methods like negs are still far, but the few written negs I've tried have produced good results. The option of just magically getting great social skills overnight is not on the table. Gradual progress is, and it is happening.

Simo the Crank

2010-12-15T14:35:00.000-08:00

This quote is from Emanuel Derman's My Life as a Quant

When I was a graduate student at Columbia in the 1970s, physics was the great attractor for the aspiring scientists of the world. Bearing witness to this was the large box of documents kept near the entrance to the physics deparment library. We referred to it as the "crank file." The box contained the unsolicited typewritten letters, manuscripts, and appeals that poured steadily into the mailbox of the department's chairman. Eccentric though the documents were, they made fascinating reading. There were eager speculations on the nature of space and time, elaborately detailed papers refuting relativity and qunatum mechanics, grandiose claims to have unified them, and farfetched meditations that combined physics with more metaphysical topics. I remember one note that tried to deduce the existence of God from the approximate equality of the solid angled subtended by the sun and the moon when observed from the earth, a remarkable circumstance without which there would be no solar eclipse.

None of these papers had much chance of getting past a journal referee. Few of the writers had much hope of even getting into graduate school. They may not have wanted to. The letters were mostly a cri de caeur from isolated and solitary physicist manques all over the world.

Most of my classmates laughed at the naivete of the letter writers, but as I skimmed through the crank file I found it hard to feel superior. Instead, peering into the box of manuscripts, I always saw my pale reflection. Out there, beyond academia and industry, were people like us, similarly in thrall of the same sense of mystery and power that lay behind the attempts to understand and master the universe with only imagination and symbols. ...

Old madness took a grip of me for 2 months. But this dark side needs to be processed somehow, merely denying it as in 2009 is not the right answer.

Slow maybe

2010-12-03T18:42:00.000-08:00

So I found a contact person from Tampere University and met her on Tuesday. She's a practising teacher, which means that she has visibility to the frontline trenches of computer-aided language learning. The 30min discussion that we had already clarified many things.

The primary difference between educational establishment and the Chinese/Japanese self-study scene is that the educational establishment is content-rich (they have paid, experienced and talented professionals writing content) and algorithm-poor. By contrast, the Chinese-Japanese self-study scene is content-poor (they have few good databases like EDICT/CEDICT for vocabulary) and they squeeze the last ounce of juice from those by applying high-quality algorithmics.

AFAIK The flashcard senetence deck which I used was created by simply searching example sentences for each HSK character from Juku. Also MDBG annotator work by searching the characters from the one extensive free Chinese vocabulary that there exists, namely CEDICT, despite the fact that it doesn't even break the words into several meanings. This way, algorithmics take full use of the few available databases.

By contast, in educational establishment we have professionally collected dicitonaries where each entry give plenty of information about phrases and alternative meanings, but where the algorithmics are controlled by companies who have no interest to do Firefox extension plugins, flashcard programs or annotators. The difference is even bigger in textbooks.

It seems to me that the teachers on the trenches don't need another slow and difficult site like the translation sentence site. Instead, they get far with customizations to existing tools. Let's hope that my contact person has patience to meet week after week and months after month to discuss needs and uses of technology in language teaching. It will be like peeling onions: I need to peel their needs layer after layer by small customizations (at most 1 week) which give them what they want.

In the long run, to get a thesis topic I need to find out an area where longer computer science effort is needed to implement useful features to CALL tools. However, getting from small customizations to that level will take months. Let's hope that the teaching/language contact person has patience to go through the technology mapping discussions instead of getting impatient for the apparent lack of concrete results.

I'd rather spend months in analysis paralysis, considering various rerearch topics, rather than to pick a research topic only to find out years afterwards that my research output is completely useless, because I failed at due diligence in the beginning. That nightmare scenarion actually happened with Finnish Annotator. I'd rather spend months doing due diligence, only to find out that there is no CALL research topic, thatn start and waste effort prematurely.

Check your assumptions at the door

2010-11-23T10:19:00.000-08:00

Finishing graduate studies is hard. At Tampere University computing science department, there are about 100 graduate students. Every year about 5 of them graduate. This means that every PhD thesis requires about 20 student enrollment years. For every student who makes it, about 2 others fail. What makes me think I can do it despite not working on it full time?

What are my strengths and weaknesses?

The worst weakness is that I plan to work while doing graduate studies. This restricts available time.

My stregth is that industry experience has given me solid programming routine. Any research plan should rely on this strength in order to be realistic. Competitive disadvantage has to be balanced out by a competitive advantage. Otherwise risks grow.

How will I find time and energy?

A few years ago starting regular exercise increased my energy levels permanently. Thus far I have poured this extra concentration only into Chinese. However, Chinese is moving from the active study phase to the slow and steady vocabulary build-up phase. This liberates the time for graduate studies. Without a clear plan how to use this time, I'll just waste it, getting nothing in return.

Minimizing the amount of work is the second path. Both computer-aided language learning and bioinformatics are fields, where it is important to cross the cultural gap between two disciplines. Relatively modest skill in programming and mathematics is enough compared to pure computing science topics like model checking. This means that smaller number of hours is enough to produce new discoveries.

How will I benefit from graduate studies?

First of all, I don't expect to get paychecks from university. Applying for a university position would be a bad choice since industry salaries are bigger than researcher salaries. Getting a good salary from research requires a teaching position. You have to prepare for that already while studying by working as a teaching assistant. When I studied, I prepared for industrial work.

Getting a PhD degree will make it possible to apply to new kinds of jobs with higher pay. If I am able to come up with a popular CALL website, it will continue to mill small amounts of advertisement income for years. Setting up such a site requires a big initial effort but little maintenance effort after that. It creates an economic incentive to make the site high-quality from the start.

Chinese character exercise for N900

2010-11-22T10:52:00.000-08:00

Summary: This post introduces Bezca, a CALL software prototype for training Chinese characters. It showcases that (1) the technology in Finnish Annotator can be modified to many different purposes, (2) having a day job does not prevent me from writing CALL software with realistic goals, and (3) context is fairly easy to integrate to any CALL software, as long as you take an uncompromising attitude towards the need for context.

In Bezca, you train Chinese characters by drawing the strokes with a stylus, finger of plectrum. Correctly drawn strokes appear to the screen as you draw them:

If you don't remember the character, you can look at the hint which also tells the next stroke:

Clicking "Show Examples" displays dictionary words and examples sentences which use the character in question.

In the example browser, if you don't know some word in an example sentence, you can just click on it and enjoy further examples about that word. This way, you can browse examples in an endless chain, Wikipedia style.

Bezca also contains a spaced repetition system. Pressing "This was easy" shows the exercise again in a week. Pressing "This was hard" shows it again in a day. After that, it uses exponential time gaps to decrease or increase the period based on user responses.

In the beginning, the program calibrates difficulty to suit the student's skill level. It shows some characters and asks the user to say if they are suitably difficult or too easy. This way, students can go directly to material which is new for them.

This is a prototype and not yet mature enough to be distributed. It contains only 180 characters. Installing requires a memory card. I don't currently have any plans to take it further, because demand is likely to be small, the use of CEDICT would make it a copyright violation to ask for a price, and it would take a lot of effort to input 1000 characters. However, I'm happy to demonstrate it face-to-face to anyone, especially CALL researhcers.

Action points and plan B

2010-11-05T08:58:00.000-07:00

1. I've been working on an N900 port of the character drawing exercise.
It demonstrates that FA technology is still valid and can be reused. Spend 2 week finalizing the proof-of-concept prototype.

2. Post an introduction to the N900 port.

3. Write a plea for CALL research partners into this blog.

4. Make a list of CALL researchers by browsing the researcher lists in Finnish university web pages.

5. Write cold call mails for CALL researchers, tell them about my track record in CALL, and ask if they want to talk about research. Add links to my thesis and blog.

If step 5 produces no contacts, it means that cold calling doesn't work (what a surprise.) In that case I have to use personal contacts to get a research topic for graduate studies in 2011. Usually people don't talk about their work, including researchers. This leaves me with few options.

6. Contact Yoe to ask for a research topic in bioinformatics. This post hints that she might have a suitable topic for someone trained in math and programming. I don't know Yoe, so to avoid cold calling, I would ask recommendations from Vera and Janka. ("We have tracked Simo for years and he is what he claims to be. If you have a suitable research topic in bioinformatics, you'd probably benefit a lot from assigning it for Simo.")

Good: Bioinformatics has reputation as down-to-earth and useful branch of applied researh. I'll learn new things because of the 'bio' part.

Bad: No earlier track record. Not enough background to evaluate if the research topic would pass the scrutiny in Hamming's advice.

If 6. fails:

7. Ask The Scientist for an applied research topic in model checking based on this post.

Good: I know The Scientist personally. Also FA already made me familiar with finite languages and state machines. For example, I implemented deterministic state machine minimization to make some vocabulary state machines faster to handle, while The Scientist is working with algoritms to simplify nondeterministic state machines.

Bad: When studying, we hade a course about DisCo and temporal logic of actions. While the theory part was a fun trip to a different worldview, DisCo toolset left a really bad taste in my mouth. It had "ivory towery" feel: it could never become useful for solving practical problems, no matter how well the researchers reach their research goals.

I'm aware that The Scientist doesn't work with DisCo, and it's just my stupidity that I don't understand the field. After all, he does writes more often, for more readers, about a wider range of topics and so on. But that does not change the fact that it would be insane for me to do research in an area where I don't understand the big picture.

Asking The Scientist for a research topic may lead to a very embarrassing situations where I have to say no even if he gives me everything I ask for.

If 7 fails:

8. Write a plan for 2011 which does not include graduate studies.

Blueprints for a translation sentence website

2010-11-04T11:52:00.000-07:00

Summary: The previous post pointed out a huge gap in CALL: there are no tools to practise writing. This post addresses it by proposing a translation sentence website.

Why translation sentences?

When people start writing in a foreign language, they first form sentences in their fluent language and then translate them piece by piece. This component behavior can be conditioned. This lowers the barrier to write as the student is already fluent in syntactic structures and only needs to slot in the phrases from his domain area.

Aretae, says that consructivism is the most overlooked aspect of teaching.

Take martial arts for a couple years, and watch how much the Sensei DOESN'T explain...but rather makes you practice until you have an internal representation of the system...then adds 3 words to clarify your mistakes.

Translation sentences are constructivist in the sense that if you have problems with syntax, they teach you syntax. If you have problem with prepositions, they teach you their correct use. If you have problem with word inflection, they improve that area.

Checking correctness

Translation sentences have multiple correct answers. It takes someone who is fluent in the language to classify answers as correct or wrong. Simple string matching is out of question. Finnish Annotator had an option to answer flashcards by writing, and string matching was insufficient even for words. In the end, the site normalized away substantive and verb articles (a, an, them, to) and used edit distance to ignore typos in known-language words.

First of all, instead of listing correct answers there should be word-level regular expression notation to denote different options. This avoids combinatorial explosion when, say, one slot has 3 correct phrases and another has 5.

Since many phrases have synonyms, the site can make sentences more ready from the first try by supporting them. For example, sentences "There is plenty of snow" and "There is a lot of snow" are both correct. This could be denoted with "synonym:'plenty of'".

There should also be a list of wrong answers, which contain common errors. This enables high-quality constructivist feedback.

Preparing for unknown

Nobody can guess all correct and interestingly wrong answers to a translation sentence. The site should deal with it instead of denying it.

First of all, it needs a social web interface for fine-tuning the sentences. This means adding new acceptable answers and new explanations for wrong ansers. This interface is open for authorized users whose language skill has been verified. The site saves all unclassified answers to translation sentences and sorts them by frequency. If many students give a similar wrong answers, explanation should be added.

This social aspect also means that it is not enough to solve the technical challenge of building the website. Before a single line of code is witten, there must be confirmed support from a steering group of CALL researchers. Writing such a site is a big effort and makes the programmer blind to simple but obvious shortcomings in it. The research group would review and criticize away such defects. The group would also kickstart sentence writing and introduce it to students until it reaches a critical mass of having enough sentences to be useful. The same people would be adding correct and wrong answers.

Automatic ways to prepare for unknown

Finnish Annotator used edit distance to ignore typos. This can be applied to translation sentences in two ways. Firstly, correct sentence structure can be verified even if songle words are mistyped when edit distance is used to compare words.

Secondly, sentence level edit distance can point out added or missing words after identifying the closest correct or wrong answer. Missing words are always errors, since problem authors should mark optional words as optional.

Added words may be errors, but they may also be just a symptom that the sentence is new and not enough variations have been added. The site should prepare for it by making a list of words, which are usually innocent when added. This list may need context restriction, so that certain added words are known to be innocent in certain contexts.

Replaced words benefit from similarity comparison. The error is likely to be small if the word is a verb both in a correct answer and the student's answer, especially if the verb is inflected in the same way.

In 2006 I browsed some books about syntactic parsing, where a sentence is converted into a parse tree. The methods looked very difficult to implement, because syntax is much more complex than word inflection. For example the following sentences have the same meaning, but sentence-level parsing is necessary to identify it automatically: "If it rains tomorrow, the party is held inside." and "The party is held inside if it rains tomorrow." Sentence parsing is also useful for rating wrong but unclassified answers: answers which can be parsed into a parse tree are less wrong than syntax-violating sentences.

What kinds of sentences to train?

Simple sentences, which deal with one topic at a time. The topic may be some syntactic structure, preposition, time phrase etc. Simplicity leaves less room for unexpected variation, therefore giving better feedback.

Prior art and differences to flashcard programs

I'm not aware of any significant academic prior art since PLATO, a groundbraking CALL system from the 70s. Unfortunately the details of PLATO's translation sentence engine are not available. Their technology may be obsolete, but the people making it faced the same challenges as we face today. They were not stupid, and most importantly they established a feedback loop where they improved based on experience, while I'm just theoretically speculating.

The main difference to flashcard programs is that a single translation sentence is "difficult and slow" while a single flashcard "easy and fast". Therefore Goproblems.com, a site for training tesuji skills in a board game, is better prior art than Anki. Also for goproblems.com, you hear anecdotes where people voluntarily bang it for hours, stopping only when the remaining problems are too easy or too difficult.

Goproblems.com has an automatic rating system for both users and problems. Problems are rated based on how many people get them right. Users are rated based on how many problems they get right. The rating scale is given in kyu/dan level so that problems and users should have similar rating.

Item response theory tells the mathematical formulas for implementing such ratings, although I don't know which exact method goproblems.com uses. The previous chapters have dealed with methods to distinguish grave errors from small typos and errors in problems themselves. Rating system based on item response theory benefits from having more information than just pass or fail.

Chatbots and communicative language teaching

How could each translation sentence also be meaningful communication? One way is to give the student a communicative task, for example "order a flight ticket to Melborne", and to write a chatbot to hold the other end of the conversation.

This would explode the number of correct reactions. The user could start by greeting. An order for "ticket to Melbourne" could be formulated in tens of different ways.

The details about time window, passanger class etc. could be given right away or the chatbot would have to ask them. It is no longer enough to just parse inflection and syntax, we need to pay attention to meaning. Hard-coded ontology would be needed for each chatbot.

In the last post I said that CLT is nice to have but comes with an expensive price tag. Chatbots are a good example. Each one would take a long time to write. Their feedback would have inferior quality compared to translation sentences. Most importantly, they would not scale to cover large amounts of material.

They would not be enough to train students to write.

Current state of Chinese CALL

2010-10-31T17:01:00.000-07:00

Summary: This very dry post summarizes which areas of Chinese learning are adequately covered by CALL tools, and which areas still need better tools and content.

Hamming's essay for choosing research topics describes CALL spot on, if you replace "research paper read by thousands" with "learning system used by thousands". Finnish Annotator would have passed Hamming's scrutiny, since annotators had already proven useful in Japanese and Chinese, but none was available for Finnish. It aimed at the core of Finnish reading comprehension.

The downfall of FA was partly due to inadequate openness, feedback and networking. This was also predicted in Hamming's essay:

Some people work with their doors open in clear view of those who pass by, while others carefully protect themselves from interruptions. Those with the door open get less work done each day, but those with their door closed tend not know what to work on, nor are they apt to hear the clues to the missing piece to one of their "list" problems. I cannot prove that the open door produces the open mind, or the other way around. I only can observe the correlation. I suspect that each reinforces the other, that an open door will more likely lead you and important problems than will a closed door.

Let's take Hamming's advice to the conclusion and make a list of important problems in computer-aided language learning. This list only covers Chinese, which has the special challenge of learning the characters. It also ignores collaborative learning methods and concentrates on single-user teaching machines.

Why ignore collaborative learning?

The currently dominant learning theory is Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). People use language to achieve communication goals like buying a ticket or describing a problem. CLT claims that also in teaching, each sentence should be part of a speech act with a communicative aim. Modern first-year language textbooks achieve communicative context by describing situations, where tourists achieve communication goals.

CLT is trivially true in the sense that sooner or later you have to move from isolated sentences to communication, for example talking, email exchange or searching for information (and not just reading for the sake of language). However, you have a long way to go before you can read books or write blogs. Before CLT forces itself through the door, you have to bootstrap the language skill somehow. I'm not at all convinced that CLT is necessary in the initial phase. The situation I see on the ground is that the Japanese/Chinese self-study scene is blithely unaware of CLT and still achieves good results.

Don't get me wrong: communicative context is nice, and the best kind of context you can have. But it is hard work to achieve communicative context. You have to make compromises in other areas. CALL scene is nowhere near the level where the presence or absence of communicative context would make a difference.

Finally, a word of warning if you try to achieve communicative context by collaborative learning. B.F.Skinner, the father of behaviorism described the problems of collaborative learning methods already in 1953. What's the point of making CALL tools at all, if you just digitize the same old problems?

Skinner's children were growing up. When the younger was in fourth grade, on November 11, 1953, Skinner attended her math class for Father's Day. The visit altered his life. As he sat at the back of that typical fourth grade math class, what he saw suddenly hit him with the force of an inspiration. As he put it, "through no fault of her own the teacher was violating almost everything we knew about the learning process." In shaping, you adapt what you ask of an animal to the animal's current performance level. But in the math class, clearly some of the students had no idea of how to solve the problems, while others whipped through the exercise sheet, learning nothing new. In shaping, each best response is immediately reinforced. Skinner had researched delay of reinforcement and knew how it hampered performance. But in the math class, the children did not find out if one problem was correct before doing the next. They had to answer a whole page before getting any feedback, and then probably not until the next day. But how could one teacher with 20 or 30 children possibly shape mathematical behavior in each one? Clearly teachers needed help. That afternoon, Skinner constructed his first teaching machine.

Summary

Area	Status	Method is
Reading, 0 - 1000 characters	Jury is still out on correct approach	Mixed
Reading, 1000 - 3000 characters	Solution is known but not implemented	Spaced repetition systems with immersive sentence decks
Reading, 3000+ characters	Solution implemented, room for improvement	Reading natural texts through an annotator and using example sentence search for new characters and phrases
Writing	Not even started	Translation sentences, chatbots (neither exists)
Listening	Solved	Listening internet radio or simplified podcasts
Speaking	Solved	Talking face to face or through Skype

Beginner phase: 0 - 1000 characters

First of all, beginners and advanced students should use very different methods. When advanced students learn a phrase, it integrates naturally with their existing knowledge. They can immediately use the word in different contexts. Beginners are only forming those knowledge structures.

For valid historical reasons, current CALL tools are not very good for beginners. In many cities elementary courses are available for Chinese and Japanese, but courses stop after that. Beginner phase also lasts for shorter period. Therefore there is less demand and less tool development for elementary tools. In the intermediate and advanced phase, it is important that the tools scale and can teach large amounts of phrases and accommodate different skill levels. This also means that a software package only needs to implement one scalable method well, for example dictionary search or flashcards.

For beginners, my unjustified gut instincts is that learning games like Slime Forest Adventure are the way to go. (1) Beginners forget things more quickly, since their knowledge structures are just forming. Therefore intensive teaching methods are good and immersive approaches which give little time to forget are preferable. (2) Beginners need to look at the language from several different perspectives (sentence comprehension, syntax, word inflection, communication) all of which are completely new to them. Game programming has the tradition of subgames, which have their own set of rules. I don't see such tradition of variability in other types of software.

Reading comprension in 1000 - 3000 characters

The software is there, but content has plenty of room for improvement. Annoatotrs enable reading easy texts and spaced repetition systems with sentence decks are good for learning characters. Regarding content, I haven't seen any easy reader texts except in Chinesepod. The sentences in my HSK deck were pretty random: they were ripped from the example sentence collection in an online dictionary and then automatically classified by difficulty.

3000+ characters

At this point you can read natural texts and start to read for content. An annotator and example sentence search are all you need. They already exist.

Writing

I haven't met any CALL tools for training writing skill. The only method is to "jump to the water and swim" by just starting to write emails and blog posts. This is comparable to practising reading comprehension by just taking a dictionary and a foreign-languge book. Sure, you can do that, but it requires a lot of motivation and willpower.

Listening

There are many free radio stations available, and Chinesepod offers easier dialogs. You can listen to them while you clean or cook. There is nothing to improve, since we are already at zero time commitment. This is the ultimate in efficiency.

Speaking

Speaking is the only way to learn to speak. I don't see how CALL tools could play any role in this. Skype already works.

In Tampere University Alakuppila cafe ther are regular meetings, where Chinese exhange students talk with Finnish language students. For those who live in less forutnate places, there are various commercial services, some of which offer free samples.

Dying embers of lost passion: Post-mortem of Finnish Annotator

2010-10-24T22:13:00.000-07:00

What Finnish Annotator?

Finnish Annotator was my CALL website, developed around 2005-2006. In those years, I was finishing my studies and spent summers writing the website. The site featured an annotator for Finnish and Chinese, a flashcard program and a character-drawing exercise. I took it down in 2008 as it had no users.

Annotator is a "text dictionary", which decodes the inflection and searches explanations for all words in a copy-pasted text. While Google Translate is free, annotators are more useful for language-learners. You can read the text as long as you completely understand it, resorting to hovering your mouse over annotations only when you have to.

The entry page shows how it annotated Chinese text. It also describes how you could turn a copy-pasted text into a flashcard deck. The post about the fundamental problem of flashcards mentioned that my website tried to solve it by taking example sentences from the annotated text. Indeed after you you press "show answer" it showed annotated example sentence where "kun" was used.

The Finnish vocabulary contained 1000-word test vocabulary. The demo page used to work on all browsers, but currently crashes Firefox. Being acutely aware of the need for context, the word definitions contain well-split meanings and example phrases, and sometimes even comparison and contrast to related words.

At the bottom of the Chinese entry page there is a screenshot of the character-drawing exercise, where you move the brush with your mouse and the stroke appears if you are moving the brush correctly. This mayseem similar to Skritter, since both programs took influence from WriteChinese, a piece of prior art from the nineties.

Morphology engine and master's thesis

About half of the code in the website deinflects Finnish words. Finnish inflection is very complex: for example substantives can have 4 different types of postfixes. The site used two-level morphology and state machines to decode the words. These were a bit obsolete methods to handle morphology, but they were provably successful for Finnish and clearly described in Koskenniemi's book. Modern methods would have required access to commercial state machine libraries, which I didn't have.

My thesis described the algorithms in the morphology engine. It used athematical notations and also contained a few proofs. When I returned it, it got full points.

The algorithm for compiling two-level inflection rules contained a minor simplification. Thesis inspector said that it was actually publishable research, but I didn't follow up on that, since I was not planning to return to school. Anyway, it kind of demonstrates that I already know how to do research, I just don't know how to identify it and wrap it into form, which can be sent to conferences and journals.

How it failed

Since I consider myself economically rational and didn't work for two summers, I had to rationalize away the congnitive dissonance somehow. My feeble excuse was that I was doing a semi-commercial system, which would continue to mill extra income after intial setup effort. In practise, what I did was closer to a mild for of hikikomori.

Firstly, I didn't tell about the system to many people, thinking that I'll publish the product when it is ready. Therefore not a single person becase interested enough in it to give feedback and criticize away obvious weaknesses which were easy to correct but for which I was blind, having spent too much time doing it. For example the need to log in first was such a weakness.

Also, in those days I had not yet discovered the Game of Talking and I kept getting bad outcomes in human relationships without really understanding what the hell went wrong. When I wrote last year "Most people develop these surfacial skills as young adults. Unfortunately, you can't skip the development of social skills. If you fail to complete this developmental task as a young person, it will continue to haunt you and drag you down until you solve it.", I meant also Finnish Annotator. This severly limited my ability to get feedback on the system.

The system was quite close in function not just to MDBG annotator, but also to Lukutulkki, a commercial system for annotating English text to Finnish speakers. Had I presented it right, some CALL researchers should have become interested in it.

The most damaging hit from commercial mindset was my reluctance to use gray copyright vocabularies. It was also a question of quality, as dict vocabularies didn't have split meanings nor example phares. I actually started to collect my own Finnish vocabulary. In the end, it had inflections for about 5000 words and meanings and example phrases for somewhat over 1000 words. At that point, Google Translate published Finnish translation, so I thought that no way in hell am I going to get the vocabulary collected before free services offer better than what I have. Since the system had no users, I took it down. It was really idiotic move to start to collect vocabulary from scratch. I believe now that Takkirauta's talk about Manstein's matrix has a seed of truth, and if you notice that you are doing a lot of repetitive informational work (like vocabulary colllection), you are probably doing something wrong and should stop to ponder different options. Don't just do something, stand there!

The main lessons I learned from it are the importance of social skills and awareness that I am prone to obsessive-compulsive tunnel vision which makes me exert a lot of effort when the right solution would be to look at different options.

What parts of it are still useful

Before I can apply for graduate studies, I need to find a research group. Finnish Annotator is my main merit for persuading others to include me in their work and publications. Next, I'll list examples of how the technologies and components in FA could contribute to CALL research.

The character-drawing engine can be modified to train students to write Russian or Arabic characters. In the first Arabic course I participated, learning to read the script was a huge part of the course. Speeding it up with spaced repetition system, which gradually introduces new material after ensuring that the student has mastered dependencies could make a big enough difference for a publishable paper.

Since the two-level morphology can handle Finnish inflection, it can deal with almost any language. Annotation works best when embedded to other services. FA didn't just annotate copy-pasted text, it also annotated any example sentences in the flashcards. Annotation can be integrated to boost any existing research ambitions in CALL.

Free beats commercial in CALL (computer-aided language learning)

2010-10-19T00:20:00.000-07:00

ChinesePod is the only commercial language learning service which I have used. In 2009 I subscribed for one year. I was quite satisfied with it. Their service consists of textbook-style lessons. Each lessons is independent and covers one theme. The easiest lessons are targeted at beginners; the hardest one take their text from outside source and assume that the student can read it without aids. They publish several lessons a week.

Textbook chapters are annotated by hand. This way, annotations are correct even when words have several meanings or meaning depends on the context. In addition, there is spoken dialog for each chapter.

In the autumn 2009 I discovered Anki and 20000-word HSK sentence deck, and just stopped using Chinesepod despite having paid subscription. At the time, character recognition was the main obstacle preventing me from reading natural texts, and free tools addressed this problem better. Spaced repetition system was superior to the lessons of Chinesepod.

Service	Free or commercial	Rating
Chinesepod	Commercial	Good, but not as good as Anki + MDBG
Skritter	Commercial	Inferior to pencil and paper
Slime Forest Adventure	Semi-commercial	Good for the very limited purpose of learning hiragana and katakana
Anki	Free	Great way to increase character recognition count
MDBG	Free	Great way to make sense of sentence deck sentences and increase reading comprehension after you know enough characters

Companies can put more resources into finalizing their CALL tools. Therefore they have higher quality content. Free CALL tools have two advantages. Firstly, they can use "grey copyright" databases, which are de facto free, although license prohibits commercial use and sometimes also other use.

Secondly, two unrelated individuals can contribute to free tools. Both in Anki and MDBG this plays crucial role. In MDBG, Paul Denisowski initiated the CEDICT vocabulary collection and then disappeared. Someone who prefers to stay anonymous maintains MDBG. Anki was written by Damien Elmers while the 20000-sentence HSK deck was written by Brian Vaughan.

The semi-commercial tool, Slime Forest Adventure, would become better if it was open-source - sooner or later, someone would address the fundamental problem of flashcards and turn it into another great tool. But it possibly wouldn't exist without the profit motive.

Slime Forest Adventure

2010-10-17T03:58:00.000-07:00

Summary: This post points out what is novel and good in Slime Forest Adventure, a teaching game for learning Japanese. It also compares spaced repetition systems to games.

Teaching games have somewhat bad reputation. Typically, an enthusiastic teacher chirps "Children spend hours and hours playing WOW. We should make games which harness this to advance learning! Kids learn best when they are motivated and have fun!"

The result is something like Memory Cards or Hangman, which are not really learning games nor learning games, and the teachers are suprised to see that kids continue with WOW. To see why those are not learning games, imagine you have to learn 50 words for a test in 2 days. You have them prepared both as a word list and as a Hangman game. Would you use Hangman to memorize them? Hell no, it would take way too much time without any benefit on learning. To see why they are not really learning games, we need to ponder the very definition of "game".

What does it mean for a software to be a game?

Patterns in Game Design by Staffan Björk and Juusi Holpainen lists 200 patterns, which are commonly used in games. The patterns deal with the subjective experience of playing rather than structuring of game code. Patterns have names like Game World, Levels, Boss Monster, Score, Lives, Resource Investments, Combat, Ability Losses, Storytelling, Alliances, etc.

Hangman and Memory Cards implement just 3 of these patterns. They have Score, namely, how many guesses you have to do before all cards are paired or the whole word is visible. Hiding the words is an example of Asymmetric Information. The games also have a Goal.

Spaced repetition systems as games

Reports where people bang thousands of cards with spaced repetition systems are quite common. In some people, flashcard programs create gamelike ability to maintain attention. This is exactly the feature of games which teachers envy, so let's use our new yardstick to measure how gamelike spaced repetition systems are.

Firstly, they implement Score (how many cards you have mastered) and Asymmetric Information (it shows the card only after the player has tried to guess). They implement goal two times. There is the Goal of remembering a single flascard, and also the Committed Goal of flashing certain number of flashcards each day or week. The player set that goal themselves. This makes flashcard programs at least as good as Memory Cards or Hangman.

Chapter 12 in Patterns in Game Design deals with balancing. Spaced repetition systems implement Right Level of Difficulty and Smooth Learning Curve, since spaced repetition algorithms are all about showing difficult cards more often than easy ones and taking controlled doses of new difficulty.

Right Level of Difficulty

That the level of difficulty experienced by player is one intended by game design.

For the challenges in games to be interesting to players, they need to have the Right Level of Difficulty. If the challenges are too easy, players may be bored while if they are too difficult, players may give up playing game.

Example: Adventures that (sic) can be bought for many types of tabletop roleplaying games are categorized after which levels the players' characters should have. Although a Game Master may use any adventure for any group of characters, the Right Level of Difficulty will most probably only occur if the players have the right levels.

Using the Pattern: Although the difficulty of a game is individual to each player, games can be designed so that players can progress according to their own learning curve. Setting the Right Level of Difficulty in games can either be done by making challenges easier, by making challenges more difficult, or by controlling which challenges players have to meet.

Challenges can be made easier, either by providing information about how to solve the challenge or by making the actions of overcoming the challenge easier to perform, for example, by the presence of Achilles' Heels. Information can be given by Clues, Traces, Extra-Game Information, or by letting players discover it themselves through Experimenting. Making challenges easier usually requires some form of Tradeoff for players and can be done through Selectable Sets of Goals or Supporting Goals. Having to choose one goal from Selectable Set of Goals where the different goals have Varied Gameplay allows the player to choose the goal with the perceived Right Level of Difficulty but makes the other goals impossible to complete. The Right Level of Difficulty in a game can also be created by Varied Gameplay to require the players to use different competences. Supporting Goals, for example, trying to find Easter Eggs, do not have to make other goals impossible but take extra time to perform and may deplete Resources for the player.

Making challenges more difficult can be done by introducing opposition or by making the required player actions more difficult to perform. Opposition can take the form of Enemies or Preventing Goals of Agents or other players in Multiplayer Games.
... (goes on and on) ...

Consequences: Providing the Right Level of Difficulty in games allows players to feel Tension as there is a risk that they may fail, while giving the Empowerment since they have a Perceived Chance to Succeed and Illusion of Influence. If the Right Level of Difficulty is continuously provided for players, it gives them a Smooth Learning Curve and increases the likelihood that players progress to having Game Mastery. If this Right Level of Difficulty is due to Competition, the learning is enforced by a Red Queen Dilemma.

Moreover, people who use good flashcard programs notice the difference in their reading skill. This introduces Game Mastery. In learning games, Game Mastery is all about scalability. Players notice a boost in language skill if learning is quick and there is enough content to make a difference.

Now we have concluded that flashcards programs win Hangman and Memory Cards 7 - 3 in gamelikeness. It is debatable if Hangman and Memory Cards are games at all when they lose so easily to programs, which are nothing like games.

Making flashcards more immersive

Patterns in Game Design is not just a yardstick for measuring gamelikeness but also a cookbook for increasing gamelikeness. Sentence decks could be made more gamelike by making sentences form a terse story full of sex, drugs, violence and cliffhangers. That would add Storytelling and Narrative Structure. Cliffhangers would be Hovering Closures (events which are about to occur and can be clearly observed by players.) Desire to see progress in plot would add Anticipation (The feeling of being able to predict future game events in the games to which one has emotional attachment) and Surprises.

Slime Forest Adventure

Since spaced repetition systems are already gamelike, why not integrate one into a game? Slime Forest Adventure (SFA) does this by using an SRS as a combat system.

In the combat, you hit slime enemies by typing the correct hiragana, katakana or kanji. SRS ensures that combat is always suitably difficult. When you learn to consistently remember a group of characters, you can move to new areas as your skill is sufficient to fend off the slimes. This way, plot advances.

I was going to write that Slime Forest Adventure fails to address the fundamental problem of flashcards, making it a factlet memorization game rather than language learning game. However, the athor has added word recognition tasks for hiragana and katakana, offering very limited contextual integration. SFA could and should offer much more context to becomde a real language game.

Anyway, SRS integration makes it best-of-the-breed learning game, since competitors don't even try. SRS combat is a novel innovation, which unfortunately has not been copied elsewhere. Slime Forest Adventure is copyrighted from 2003, so this isn't even new.

Conclusion

Current hegemonic paradigm in teaching games is utterly flawed and provides neither immersion nor learning. This post introduced two ways to attack the problem: (1) to use SRS as a combat system as in Slime Forest Adventure, or (2) to make flashcard programs more gamelike by adding elements from Patterns in Game Design. Properly done, these approaches achieve both immersion and better learning. These approaches are old but remain unexplored.

Supernerd warning!

2010-10-12T15:49:00.001-07:00

The posts about computer-aided language learning may cause anxiety in sensitive people who are used to following unwritten rules on which topics you are and are not allowed to discuss. If their nerdiness makes you anxious, you can simply close the tab in your web browser and the monsters will disappear.

Recent progress in computer-aided language learning

2010-10-12T15:41:00.000-07:00

Summary: This post tells why Anki and sentence mining are important steps forward in the computer-aided language learning scene. Both steps have happened during the last 3.5 years.

Background: The fundamental problem of flashcard programs

When studying languages, flashcard programs show you a word and ask you to give the translation. In recognition task the program shows the foreign word and asks for the English meaning. Production task tests your ability to spell out the foreign word. Flashcard programs are called spaced repetition systems because they contain timing algorithms which ask easy questions rarely and difficult questions often until they become easy. This ensures that the material is on average suitably difficult.

The fundamental problem is that you don't learn the word by remembering its translation. If you now memorize that Telugu word "adivaramu" means Sunday, you'll just forget it in a few weeks. Spaced repetition systems can delay this to months by reminding you about the word. But to permanently learn a word in the sense that Finnish English speakers know that "Sunday" means "sunnuntai", you need context. You need to see the foreign word in tens or hunderds of sentences, so that it integrates with larger data structures in your head and is no longer just a factlet like "the circumference of earth is 44000km".

This problem is specific to spaced repetition systems, because it is already solved in the analog world. Language textbooks provide the context in the text chapters. Filogists who train to be interpreters and translators mainly read books to expand their vocabulary. In that situation all words are in context.

I first realized this problem after I banged through 1000 Lojban words with Logflash only to forget them all in 3 months.

My first conclusion was that you should only flash cards for which you have text. This worked great with Practical Chinese Reader I & II. First I flashed the words and then I read the text. Thanks to spaced repetition system I could go through chapters much faster.

When I started to build my own language-learning website, I fully realized the importance of tackling this problem. I was using MDBG annotator. It can turn any text into decent study material, unless the text is much above your level. My first approach was to grab the context from the same source as the words. My website had a feature which turned a copy-pasted a Chinese text into a flashcard deck, which contained all words in the text. It also had an easy interface for removing familiar words. The word flascards had context attached: After you gave your answer, it showed the sentences where the word appeared. It also annotated the sentence MDBG-style: When your mouse hovered over any unknown word in the sentences, the meaning of the word appeared.

This solution had a shortcoming: The sentences were too long and difficult, and having just one sentence of context was not enough. I also realized that the real learning happened when studying the sentences, and that they were at least as important as the words being flashed.

My second solution was to collect a database of translated easy sentences and to automatically match them to flashcards. I never properly implemented this, because it required HUGE amount of database collection. Anyone who has ever written example sentences knows how slow it is. The best I achieved was to type enough sentences for an elementary course in Chinese. The material contained Skritter-style character drawing exercises for 200 characters and simple, clear, translated example sentences for them all. This produced adequate quality but it didn't scale. This lack of scalability made it a toy site. Shortly after that, I graduated and stopped developing the site.

Sentence-based flashcards

During the last 3.5 years, an ingenious solution surfaced to the Fundamental Problem: Sentence mining. The idea is that sentences are the basic unit of flashing, not words. Just like gymansts train whole-body movements and just trust that individual muscles get stronger, in sentence flashcards you just trust that you also learn words while flashing sentences.

This is a new developement, as Xamuel's artice is written September 2009 and the Chinese sentence deck I now use was written in 2008. I stopped working on SRS in 2007. This idea is so simple that it makes me ashamed that I didn't notice it. I had already diagnosed the problem and was trying different solutions to it, but somehow failed to take the last step of imagination and to fully move to sentence-based cards.

My own experience confirms that it works like dream. During my Chinese study, I've periodically benchmarked my character count with Clavis Sinica's character test. During the first 4 years, I reached the weekly average score of 2200. During 10 months with sentence deck, the character count exploded to 3000. I could have reached the current skill level a full year earlier, had I known about this method. Now I no longer use the sentence deck, because it has been so efficient that the bottleneck has moved away from single Chinese characters and more context-heavy methods like reading texts with MDBG are more appropriate.

Anki

The rise of Anki is the second big step forward in the computer-aided language learning (CALL) scene. Anki does not contain anything revolutionary, but it combines all good features from all previous flashcard programs into one consitent and easy package. It is so good that if I entered into CALL scene again for the purpose of doing research for graduate studies, I would scrap my old website, which included a spaced repetition system, and use the superior, refined and open-source Anki instead as a basis.

Conclusion

Although my own CALL efforts failed, recent developments in CALL field demonstrate that I was tackling the right questions: How to get context for words in flascards, and how to construct a good spaced repetition system. Progress happened when these problems were addressed. I've witnessed the superiority of the result myself with Anki and 20000-card HSK sentence deck.

MAOA and reconvictions

2010-10-06T16:01:00.000-07:00

Helsinki University recommends that the decision to free a murder or keep him in jail should use genetic information among other data. If this is implemented, it is the first time that personality estimates based on genetic tests determine a person's future.

When a man is convicted to life in prison in Finland, he can only be released by pardon. Estimates about his danger to society are used when deciding about pardon. The existing method is to use PCL-R scale to estimate how psychopathic the person is. The steak of the new research is that MAOA gene + PCL-R score together provide even better estimate.

MAOA gene comes in high-activity and low-activity variants. Among convicts with low-activity MAOA, there is no link between PCL-R score are reconviction rate. Among high-activity MAOA convicts, each extra point in PCL-R increases reconviction rate with about 7%.

In many studies MAOA has been linked to depression and psychopathy, but the results are full of "ifs" at best and mutually contradictory at worst. If a person with low-acticity MAOA is exposed to childhood violence, it increases the risk of becoming a psycho. Links between MAOA and depression are contradictory. Individual studies have linked MAOA to economic risk taking and voting: People with high-activity MAOA prefer to take risk and use their vote, while low-activity MAOA carriers prefer to take insurance and vote less often.

-----

Should I start graduate studies next year, I should prepare for it already this year. The first step is to find a research topic. Bioinformatics seems like a good source of research topics. There are new results and new types of data coming out every year, so it should be possible to make solid research by merely applying standard computing science methods to some new problem. In this kind of applied research, the strong programming routine from industry background should be an advantage. This way I could avoid the need to catch up with 30 years of algorithm development history, a burden which handicaps for example state machine or graph theory research. Instead of developing those algorithms, my task would be to pick and combine algorithms and adjust them to the problem at hand. It is not easier, but it is more skill oriented and less memory oriented. Another advantage of applied bioinformatics research is that it has concrete goals to strive at. This does much to avoid buzzword-heavy, bullshitty basic research from which you can see straight away that it is never going to produce anything useful, which makes it extremely demoralizing for people working on it.

"Do you visit this planet often?"

2010-09-30T16:05:00.000-07:00

Recently a new planet, Gliese 581g, was found. From all planets it is the most earthlike thus far. It has a gravity around 1.1g - 1.7g.

Until it is confirmed if it contains ice and water or not, we can have wet fantasies about this planet next door. The distance is only 20 light years, but thanks to time dilation, once we develop near-light-speed travel, people will be able to travel there and back without dying of old age in between. Only their relatives at Earth will all be gone.

So here's my suggestion: let's put TEKES funding into a big technology program which aims at manned space flight to Gliese 581g. That should produce more tanglible results than the current projects.

As FuturePundit points out, this is also a question of global security: When will the invasion space ships from Gliese 581g arrive overhead and begin planetary bombardment? Robert Heinlein taught us in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress that the side which can drop stuff from planetary orbit has a huge advantage. In this case, attack is the best defence. It is either us or them.

One side of the planet is always in the sunlight, while the other is always in the dark. This is because the planet rotates around its star in the same cycle as it rotates around itself. The most habitable zone is guessed to be somewhere between scroching sunlight and eternal darkness, in the interim region called the terminator.

Who should we send there? Let's offer Arnold Schwarzenegger a promotion from governator into gliesenator ask him once more to step in the terminator. When he'll be back to earth, his muscles will be once more in prime shape after living 24 hours a day in heavier gravity and telling "hasta la vista, baby!" for any pretty green femme fatales who try to seduce him into the dark side, controlling the horizontal and the vertical in the outer limits.

Pole dancing criticism

2010-09-09T22:12:00.000-07:00

Pole dancing is frivolous waste of time

Regarding age-appropriate activities, men in their 30s should be doing graduate studies, starting families and companies, learning martial arts and investing, but not dancing. Dancing in the nightclubs is appropriate for people in their early twenties.

Therefore I emphasized the fitness angle: Since you have to put in the hours anyway to stay healthy and fit, pole dancing is just as good way to do it as any.

Male pole dancing is for homosexuals

Let's face it: most male pole dancing clips in YouTube are damn gay. I prepared for probing questions about my sexual orientation by using opportunities to emphasize heterosexuality, the last time being 5 posts ago. Fortunately pole dancing is so unknown that this never came up. It is much easier to convince that I am not a 20 years old stripper girl than to explain "No, I am not gay despite having abysmal sexual track record and being interested in dancing."

Nobody forces you to send stripper vibes by doing deep squats, rubbing yourself against the pole and removing your clothes. Also nobody forces you to send gay vibes by dancing topless and spreading legs clothed in Latex pants while high-pitch disco music plays in the background. There are plenty of other styles. It's all about what you want to express.

Pole dancing is what strippers do

The most common counterargument goes something like this: "Once I saw a movie where a stripper was leaning against the pole for support while doing deep squats and shaking her ass, with thick wads of cash portruding from her mail stamp sized strings and fuck me boots in her feet. What are YOU doing among THEM!?"

First of all, the single message which pole dancers try to get across to broadcast media reporters is that pole dancing is not striptease. This is visible in various What Is Pole Dancing pages, which invariably emphasize its roots in Chinese circus acrobatics.

I wonder if these people have never gone to a strip club to demolish the glamorous and sexy images which movies attach to striptease by seeing how grim and frivolous places they are in practise. Or have they patronized porn bars often enough to see performances which are actually good? Anyway, my experience is that and you can be lucky if you see a few elementary level pole dancing moves. Strippers end up looking sexy in the same way as Anssi Kela is touching: They are so blatantly manipulative that counterreaction exceeds intended reaction.

What you won't see there are gymnastics and acrobatics which are typical to pole dancing:

Visual style of parapara

2010-09-05T03:52:00.000-07:00

Summary: This post lists the rules which give parapara its distinctive look. The rules are described on a level of abstraction where they can be applied to pole dancing.

Parapara is a japanese dance style which emphasizes hands. Various organizations publish official parapara routines for dance songs popular in Japan. Everyone dances the same way. Some dance clubs hold parapara evenings, where people gather together to dance the song routines, which they have practised among friends or at home from official videos.

In parapara, the primary goal is to synchronize moves with music. Dancers do similar moves when similar musical patterns are repeated in the song. The moves closely reflect the rhythmic structure of the song.

This maximal synchronization has been achieved by emphasizing choreography for the whole song. Each move is precisely timed, for example "the next full sweep will last for 4 beats".

The moves are very simple. Simplicity is a priorization choice. It enables rhythmic synchronization, since simple moves can be done quickly. It also enables emphasis on routine for the whole song, as dancers don't need to practise individual moves. The moves don't need strength or flexibility. Speed requires some practise. You may not be immediately able to reproduce all moves from a video, but when someone shows them in slow motion face-to-face, not a single move poses any challenge.

Parapara moves have lots of straight lines, round swirls and symmetry. Usually either the moves are symmetric along vertical or horizontal axis, or they are followed by 'mirror moves' which complement symmetry.

Finally, parapara moves have the same clarity as a single beat of a drum. Sometimes you can see if a move is correct or wrong, just like you can hear extra beats among repeating drum pattern.

In parapara, human body becomes a visual rhythmic instrument which complements musical rhythmic instruments.

It is a mystery for me, why most dancers ignore the rhythmic struture of their songs. It seems to be a kind of 'dog whistle' which is hard to see for some, while for others it is an elephant in the room.

For example in SubTV's Dance program, Turo Kankaanpää's dance moves are well synced to the rhythm, and one commenter notices it. However, the judges didn't comment on it at all, even if one commented positively about the immersion and appeal it created. In Dance, the first round can result in 3 outcomes: rejection, pass or a second try in group choreography round to get more data. Turo went to the choreography round.

In some dance traditions, sync is so secondary that the song can be just switched to another at will. This would be unthinkable in parapara. Also when talking about parapara, for example Paula doesn't get it:

Paraparaa tanssitaan yleensä eurobeatin, trancen tai muun jumputuksen tahtiin, mutta oikeastaan sitä voi tanssia mihin tahansa rytmikkääseen musiikkiin. Paraparassa ei ole tarkoituksena sheikkata peppua ja näyttää seksikkäältä - päinvastoin! Tarkoituksena on oikeastaan vain heilua puolelta toiselle ja käsillä viuhoa sarjan mukaan.

What would it mean to apply the rules of parapara for pole dancing?

Search for positions like the half flag or pole sit, where hands and feet are free to do parapara-style patterns.
Practise how to do easy moves with accurate timing (for example a fireman spin for 4 beats).
Practise how to do a series of quick transitions between easy positions.
DON'T practise sexy & lusty move from striptease tradition as they are not in line with parapara's abstract & flirty body language.
DON'T waste time in practising individual difficult tricks.

Fireman spins

2010-08-21T08:36:00.000-07:00

Went to my first pole dancing class. There the sharp-witted Iina taught various spins, including the fireman spin. At home I had only tried climbing and static holds, so spinning was new to me.

The poles in the studio are static chrome poles. I have a titanium pole, which has both static and rotating mode. The friction is different in different poles. Chrome has linear friction: the harder you grip the better your hold. This makes spinning quite easy from the very first try. On the contrary, the friction in titanium is binary - either the grip holds or you slide quickly to the ground. I just can't do any spins on static titanium pole at home. Luckily rotating titanium pole is the easiest option of all.

Status 4/4: When status signaling utterly and completely fails

2010-08-01T01:41:00.000-07:00

A child is not considered competent to evaluate himself if he is thirsty or hungry. He should obey orders from any familiar adult. This true story tells how a group of people used invisible status signals to reduce me to a child's subject position.

Two months ago The Club organized a short forest walk (vaellus). It lasted 4 hours. There were 6 of us. We walked to a sleeping place, grilled some sausage and returned. I'll tell the events from status perpective. Here DHV means demonstrating high value (superior status) and DLV means demonstrating low value (low status).

The only participant which I knew beforehand was Mikko. I had seen him in The Club's monthly bar evening. There he told that Pulse will hold a concert the following day. I joined him there, thus DHVing (obeying) him.

Another participant was Veikko. Since neither me nor Mikko had a car, Veikko took us from the bus station to the starting spot of the forest walk, thus DHVing himself and DLVing me and Mikko.

Earlier, I got drunk at a metal concert. I was hung over and had slept for only 4 hours, which made me very grumpy. This DLV:d me, since I was in no position to play the Game of Talking competently. Already in the car I yapped way less than 25% of the chit-chat.

The first warning sign happened when we left the car and were about to leave. Mikko told me that I should put my jacket to the bag, because we wouldn't stop during the journey. I DLV:d by putting my jacket to the bag.

The second red flag emerged when there was a pool of water in the path. Mikko told me to cross the pool from the right side. This confused me: he acted as if I needed advice in crossing a pool of water! I rejected his offered subject position firmly put politely by using the other side. I thought that this represented only his opinion, to be met with zen-like calm and indifference, not realizing that vultures had already smelled blood and were circling in for a kill.

When we held a pause, Mikko offered me water. Starting to see a pattern, I rejected. Mikko no longer believed my "no" even after I had repeated it 10 times and emphasized that I had done comparable blueberry picking trips many times before. He insisted that I should take some water. After a few more repetitions he believed, commenting that he can't force me to take water and it is my own fault if I dehydrate or get a sunstroke.

In the grilling place the same thing happened again with Veikko and sausages. It ended only when Veikko shouted with semi-angry tone "Take the fucking sausages now!" and I complied. After 30 seconds, I put them back to his sausage packet and he finally understood that he can't force me to take them.

Somehow, Mikko and Veikko had conspired to put me into a child's subject position - of someone whose word is worthless, who should take orders from anyone on trivial matters like crossing a pool of water, and who can't evaluate if he is thirsty or hungry. They reached their consensus with signals which were completely invisible to me.

One reason why I want to learn status signaling is to avoid these kinds of total collapses of social fabric, where all assumptions of normal conversation are cancelled. Earlier, I used to be scared shitless by these incidents and withdraw from social interaction for weeks, thinking that I did something bad to deserve then. After going to gym, my personality changed so that now I am merely angry at people who conspire against me and motivated to learn how to execute the right game moves to avoid these kinds of accidents.

Status 2/3: To ignore or not to ignore, that is the question

2010-07-12T15:12:00.000-07:00

Old opinion on status

Earlier I thought that mainly upper class persons have status. Marketing men take advantage of people's natural drive to improve their lot. Lower and middle classes buy status symbols because companies like to sell overpriced goods by associating them with high status. Status is a ruse to separate the gullible from their money.

There is an old saying that money does not bring happiness, but it's better to be unhappy in a Lexus than in a Lada. When we consider status as a ruse, it would be better for those people to sell their Lexus and save or invest the money, Ilkka style. If they retain the Lexus, they are bleeding money when its price depreciates month by month, while getting only hallucinations in return. The only exceptions are people who are so dirty rich that the cost of the car is neglible.

Seen this way, status matters only for persons who need to make a good impression on many others, like salesmen or celebrities. The 1% of people who get 50% of visibility benefit from status symbols. This strengthens the illusion that status is more important than it really is.

New opinion on status

Reading Roissy and paying attention to the Game of Talking has made me realize that there is a special kind of status, psychosocial dominance, which is tightly vowen to everyday interaction and orthogonal to economic status. If I want to have a sex life and settle down at around age 35, I must learn the ropes of these status games.

This does not make the old opinion obsolete. Rather, I need to complement it so that I can express status enough to come across as a desirable sexual partner, while still being able to avoid getting stiffed by marketers.

Status 1/3: Economics and status in programming work, rabbit-duck edition

2010-07-11T14:09:00.000-07:00

Summary: Programing work can be seen from two angles. The "economic" angle is that programming aims to produce software. The "status" angle is that in any big bureaucracy, the internal dynamics make status the primary aim.

Economic view

Alistair Cockburn defined software development as a co-operative game of invention and communication. The primary goal is to deliver useful, working software. The secondary goal is to prepare for the next game.

In this naive view, programming is just one type of work which aims to deliver customers something they are ready to pay for in order to keep the organization afloat.

A good software developer should know technology and economics and to have earlier experience about similar software.

This view is in line with transhumanist ideology, where technological progress is a driving force which enables new and better things, when people get more tools to implement their will and can afford more and more slack.

Status view

The status view emphasizes hierarchy and influence inside a bureaucracy. The primary game is how to gain influence through office politics.

From status view, programmers have two millstones in their neck. They are at the lowest level of their hierarchy. Secondly, they have a bad reputation for not being experts in gaining Roissy-style psychosocial dominance by talking.

In status view, shipping working software is irrelevant, unless failure to do so threatens the very existence of the organization. The only relevant question is if your back is covered if something goes wrong.

A good developer should know marketing, be extroverted and slightly narcist.

Technical knowledge is important only to the extent that you don't lose your face. Technical knowledge has a half-life while social skills don't. Therefore technical ways to solve problems are inferior to other ways. People who know too much technology are losers who play the wrong game.

The four post-Marxist social classes

Half Sigma divided people into 4 social classes. The two higher classes are the college graduate class and the value transference class. Here, the economic view uses the values of the college graduate class and the status view uses the ideals of the value transference class.

This post was about the conflict between economic and status-based worldviews. The video is about the conflict betwen scientific and religious worldviews. In both cases, reality can be interpreted in two equally justified ways.

Christian take on human nature

2010-07-03T16:18:00.000-07:00

lyrics

The difference between social democrats and transhumanists

2010-06-29T06:38:00.000-07:00

Genetic testing tells some people that they have a high risk of disease. They can prepare for it if they hear about the illness years before its onsalught.

FuturePundit predicted in 2007 what actions people will take when genetic tests reveal information about their future:

But which risks will be worth testing for? Those you'll be able to do something about. Suppose a genetic variation makes Alzheimer's inevitable at middle age and that diet has little influence on when you'll get it. Well, I guess you could decide to avoid taking on family responsibilities that you won't be around to fulfill. But initially the biggest potential for doing something about a risk will involve risks that can be influenced by diet or exercise.

...

What you should do when you discover 5 or 10 years hence that you have high genetic risk of a disease: Write your elected officials and argue for more research on the disease you are on course to get. Lobby for cures for diseases that will otherwise kill you and your loved ones.

This is exactly what Sergey Brin did when he discovered by genetic testing that he has a hereditary risk for Parkinson's disease.

The article also contains a description of social democratic attitude, where people are considered helpless victims rather than players who execute moves to improve their position in the go board of life:

In the study, a team of researchers led by Robert Green, a neurologist and geneticist at Boston University, contacted adults who had a parent with Alzheimer’s and asked them to be tested for a variation in a gene known as ApoE. Depending on the variation, an ApoE mutation can increase a person’s risk for Alzheimer’s from three to 15 times the average. One hundred sixty-two adults agreed; 53 were told they had the mutation.

The results were delivered to the participants with great care: A genetic counselor walked each individual through the data, and all the subjects had follow-up appointments with the counselor. Therapists were also on call. “People were predicting catastrophic reactions,” Green recalls. “Depression, suicide, quitting their jobs, abandoning their families. They were anticipating the worst.”

2010-06-24T15:18:00.000-07:00

This is a wrong place to debate Nokia's technology policy, since NDAs make it impossible to recite evidence.

The previous post got a lot of attention, but unfortunately you won't see similar topics in the future. This blog will continue to be about my private life and interests.

Nokia, the next Geoworks?

2010-06-20T14:32:00.000-07:00

Summary: Nokia gave a profit warning, because their high-end phones do not sell well. This post compares the problems of Symbian, Nokia's high-end phone OS, to Steve Yegge's analysis of why Geoworks went bankrupt.

What Geoworks?

Geoworks was a software company which wrote a windowing system and applications in assembler. In the end, it went bankrupt in the end of nineties. When Steve Yegge wrote about the benefits of high-level languages, he used Geoworks as an example how using low-level languages takes a toll on business.

His argument is that low-level languages make optimization impossible and implementing features slow. After the system reaches a critical point in complexity, usability starts to suffer. User see sluggishness, bugs and lack of features.

...But it's because we wrote fifteen million lines of 8086 assembly language. We had really good tools, world class tools: trust me, you need 'em. But at some point, man...

The problem is, picture an ant walking across your garage floor, trying to make a straight line of it. It ain't gonna make a straight line. And you know this because you have perspective. You can see the ant walking around, going hee hee hee, look at him locally optimize for that rock, and now he's going off this way, right?

This is what we were, when we were writing this giant assembly-language system. Because what happened was, Microsoft eventually released a platform for mobile devices that was much faster than ours. OK? And I started going in with my debugger, going, what? What is up with this? This rendering is just really slow, it's like sluggish, you know. And I went in and found out that some title bar was getting rendered 140 times every time you refreshed the screen. It wasn't just the title bar. Everything was getting called multiple times.

Because we couldn't see how the system worked anymore!

Which is higher-level language, C or C++?

One benchmark of language level is how many lines of code are needed to implement a feature. In high-level languages, the compiler does more work. The programmer has to write less code. This means that implementation is faster. There are also less bugs, since the lines of code which were not needed don't contain bugs, and because debugging is easier in small haystack.

C language is infamous for being low-level. Therefore it's paradoxical that Symbian Open C is a advertised as a productivity tool. But sadly it really is a productivity tool compared to Symbian C++.

The examples below demonstrate why. The snippets below read a configuration variable from a file. The scenario is that we want to run automatic system tests on a communication protocol and to automate the selection of an access point. It is stored in format "accesspoint=Winsock". The important thing here is the length of the listing, not the exact content.


// Read a configuation variable with 35 lines of code.
_LIT8(KAccessPointId, "accesspoint=");
TBool ReadAccessPointNameL(const TDesC& aFileName, TDes& aResult)
    {
    RFs fs; // File session
    RFile file; // File handle
    TBool apNameFound = EFalse;

    // Connect to file server    
    User::LeaveIfError(fs.Connect());
    CleanupClosePushL(fs);

    // Open file for reading
    if (file.Open(fs, aFileName, EFileWrite) == KErrNone)
        {
        CleanupClosePushL(file);
        // Read the file to memory (we can't use line-by-line
        // reading with TTextFile, since it can't handle 8-bit text)
        TInt size = 0;
        User::LeaveIfError(file.Size(size);
        HBufC8* content = HBufC8::NewLC(size);
        User::LeaveIfError(file.Read(content->Des());
        
        // Find the start and end of the access point name.
        TInt start = content.Find(KAccessPointId());
        if (start > KErrNotFound)
            {
            start = start + KAccessPointId.Length();
            TInt end = start;

            // Find the next newline.
            do  {
                end++
                } while(end < content.Length() &&
                        (*content)[end] != '\r' && 
                        (*content)[end] != '\n');
                }

            // Save the result.
            aResult.Copy(content.Mid(start, end - start));
            apNameFound = ETrue;
            }

        CleanupStack::PopAndDestroy(content);
        CleanupStack::PopAndDestroy(&file);
        }

    CleanupStack::PopAndDestroy(&fs);
    return apNameFound;
    }

The same in C:


// Read a configuation variable with 20 lines of code.
const char* access_point_id = "accesspoint=";
char* read_access_point_name(const char* file_name)
{
    char* result = NULL;
    // Open file for reading.
    FILE* file = fopen(file_name, "r");
    if (file) {
        char line[200];

        // Read line by line and search for access point variable.
        while(!result && fgets(file, line, 200)) {
            if (strstr(line, access_point_id) == line) {

                // Remove newline.
                int len = strlen(line);
                while (line[len - 1] == '\r' || line[len - 1] == '\n') {
                   line[len--] = 0;
                }

                // Get the value of the variable.
                reuslt = strdup(line + strlen(access_point_id);
            }
        }
        fclose(file);
    }
    return result;
}

Symbian C++ was written before people really knew how to do object-oriented programing. They completely botched all the APIs. The horrible descriptors were designed to counter memory overflows, which C functions don't check. Nowadays they just clutter the code. Symbian takes pride in being a microkernel OS, so they require the programmer to connect to servers to start sessions. This adds further lines. The exception handling with cleanup stacks vomits more useless lines. And if you think this is ugly, you haven't seen anything, like the use of active objects in the socket interface.

One C++ selling point is the syntax for classes. Well, Symbian has a 68-page coding convetions which gives very explicit rules how to name classes and which functions they should at least have. This nitpicking makes classes heavy structures, and decimates any advantage from syntactic sugar. Virtual functions are the only part of C++ which wasn't assaulted. Even templates were banned as too error-prone.

So Posix C really is a higher-level language. Just for comparison, here is the same in Ruby.


# Read a configuration variable in 9 lines of code.
def readAccessPointName(fileName)
  file = File.open(fileName, "r")
  file.each_line do |line|
    if (line =~ /accesspoint=(.*)/)
      # The (.*) in regular expression caught
      # the access point name to $1.
      return $1.chomp
    end
  end
  raise 'No access point name in file ' + fileName
end

So it is unsurprising that App store contains 225000 appplicaitons while Ovi store contains just thousands.

GeoWorks attempted to get third party developers but was unable to get much support due to expense of the developer kit — which ran $1,000 just for the manuals — and the difficult programming environment, which required a second PC networked via serial port in order to run the debugger. (source)

But it's the user experience that counts...

Symbian phones are famous for having equal features but lower usability than iPhone. To demonstrate how difficult programming is visible in usability, I'll tell you about usging the file browser to read log files. The plain text viewer has several defects. If you open a large log, it announces out of memory error and shuts down. It underlines randomly some content which it thinks might be a link. It can't choose a small font to show lots of content, so you only see a few lines at a time. Luckily, there has been some progress in plain text viewer. Earlier, it used to crash with medium-sized files. Now it either shows it or announces error.

The way I see it, these defects reflect the difficulty of the programming platform. Usually programmers have some professional pride, which makes them fix errors and usability defects with time. What could be stopping it? We can only speculate.

Customizing the UI component which shows text would require too much work, since platform doesn't support dynamic loading and presentation.
Low level language necessitates big project sizes. This dilutes responsibility so that no one is responsible for the plain text viewer in the "buck stops here" sense.
There is a culture of fixing only showstopper bugs and leaving others there, since there isn't time to fix all bugs, as fixing a single bug is slow.

This way, we get "multimedia computers" which can't display plain text.

It doesn't have to be this way

Nokia does fine in low-end phones, which use the closed Series40 OS. Also the Maemo/Meego platform is promising, however the phone in N900 is still fresh software, creating issues in sound quality and usability. They haven't had time to finalize the phone. In compatibility with major desktop operating systems, Maemo's Linux kernel runs circles around Symbian. This will show up in usability sooner or later. You can always strip down the user interface to produce a simpler phone which is easier to use, but you can't put the solid Linux infrastructure to a Symbian phone.

In the long run, I'm optimistic about Nokia's future. Once they finalize the phone on Maemo and scrap the Symbian platform, they'll be fine. If you want to capitalize on this, the right time to buy Nokia shares is just before they start selling their next Meego phone. However, make sure that the press agrees that Meego has good phone, battery life and usability - if they botch them on Meego, they won't recover. However, I'm not putting my money where my mouth is, because I have enough economic Nokia risk in my life already.

FTO inverses the meaning of some symbols.

2010-06-14T15:04:00.000-07:00

In some circles, owning an iPhone is a symbol of waste and disorganized life.

Naturally, people who advertise iPhones aim to associate different images with their product, and they are very successful at it since it sells so much. Don't ask me what it signals for those who buy them.

Neither group is "countercultural" in any way. They are both as mainstream as it gets.

5 spheres of being human

2010-06-06T13:39:00.000-07:00

People are similar in their vulgar tastes and different in their refined tastes. Below I list 5 things which are common to most people. The viewpoint here is how people can connect by talking, or alternatively to appeal to masses, despite knowing little about each other.

1) Humans are physical beings. They eat food to get fuel and nutrients. They must exercise to stay healthy and fit.
2) Humans are sexual beings. We are sons and daughters of people who fucked.
3) People are social beings. Most of us can imagine ourselves to other people's shoes. Few prefer solitude to other people's company in the long run. We have instincts which analyze our status and role in the group.
4) People are thinking beings who imagine, anticipate, analyze and read and write texts.
5) People are mystical beings who have tendency to search answers to religious, spiritual and supernatural questions and experiences.

Unifying and separating spheres

Sphere	Role
Physical	Unifying
Sexual	Unifying
Social	Mixed
Thinking	Separating
Mystical	Separating

In unifying areas of life, people undestand and believe what you say unless there is sepecific reason to doubt. For example if you say "I don't want to do it since it makes my back hurt" or "I'm horny" or "It would be so embarrassing", others believe unless they have specific reason to doubt you. For example, if a stripper wears a shirt saying "Mun tekee mieli", people know that she's doesn't mean it but manipulates you to separate you from your money. Social sphere is mixed, because it is common to question social evaluations ("There's nothing embarrassing in it").

When I say that thinking is a separating sphere, I mean that people doubt you if you say "believe me since I know this thing better than you do". Appeals to Thinking are credible only if the others agree already or the person has high social status, and even then they provoke resentment. Thinking filters people to narrow tranches which are on the same wavelength - for example most text-only blogs have few readers, and they appeal mainly to Thinking sphere.

By mystical exprience I mean a sense that some supernatural being is sending you a message or channeling itself through you. Believers do this when they aim to channel God by implementing His will on earth. You may interpret this metaphorically to mean a state of increased mental clarity or perception where your brains send positive feedback for getting into right condition. Outside religion, people have hard time even describing their mystical experiences, and those who can describe them have trouble interpreting what they mean.

Balance between spheres

Unfortunately blogs concentrate too much on Thinking and this may produce illusion that it is somehow more important than the other areas of life, more deserving of attention and analysis. During last years I have grown to hate this bias.

You are missing out much in life if you don't do any sports, if you don't have a sex life, if you don't have meaningful weekly social interaction, if you don't have any intellectual hobby or if you vehemently deny the possibility of mystical experiences. Two of these 'lacks' are pretty unavoidable: In the sexual sphere, not all men are needed, and nobody is interested in old women. In the mystical sphere, the experiences are rare.

There are lots of insults on people whose development is uneven in various spheres. "Meatheads" concentrate too much on physical. "Wankers" neglect sexual. "Wierdos" don't have their social instincts in place.

Eurovision songs

2010-05-28T22:34:00.000-07:00

Je Ne Sais Quoi by Hera Björk has very good opening, where intensity rises gradually during the first 60 seconds. The facial gestures and hand gestures are exactly right, expressing newfound joy and self-confidence after life takes a positive turn.

The music oscillates between serene synth parts and energetic beats, which combine at 00:38. Beats reach their maximum vital force at 00:50, after the dramatic revealation that the singer has found love.

After 1:00 the songs just stops and nothing happens anymore. But 60 seconds of excellence is exceptional for an Eurovision song.

Apricot Stone by Eva Rivas is the most balanced combination of music, vocals and message. The message is basically more feminine and greeny version of Satakunnan kansa. Maybe the other songs are devoid of message or maybe it's a matter of wavelength that I'm not getting any message from other songs.

Milim by Harel Skaat is the kind of music which I don't listen and don't really understand, but it sounds like the performer knows what he's doing.

Sweet People by Alyosha, the Portishead of Ukraine, wallows in emotions like no other.

Playing With Fire, a duetto by Paula Seling and Ovi, concentrates on stage peformance and looks like a scene out of some Bollywood movie.

Euromaiden hallitusten valinta

2010-05-12T11:33:00.000-07:00

Kreikan tukitoimien arvioimiseksi pitää muistella, miksi euroalue luotiin. Euro tehtiin ison talousblokin vakaaksi valuutaksi, jotta investoijat olisivat valmiita lainaamaan matalammalla korolla. 5 miljoonan asukkaan Suomi on altis taloudelisille shokeille, kuten Venäjän kaupan romahdus, joka tuhosi 13% bruttokansantuotteesta. 300 miljoonan asukaan euroalue on vakaampi eritysesti, jos maat tukevat toisiaan poikkeustilanteissa. Myös valuuttariski poistuu, kun Suomi voi etsiä isolta alueelta lainoittajia, jotka lainaavat euroissa.

Valtion korkomenot jaettuna velalla. Lähde: Tilastokeskus.

Euron ansiosta Suomen valtionvelan korko on pudonnut n. 7%:stä n. 4%:iin. Vuonna 2009 Suomi maksoi 2.3 miljardia euroa valtion velan korkoja. Jos emme olisi euroalueella, valtion täytyisi verottaa vajaat 2 miljardia euroa enemmän.

Kreikan signalointiongelma

Jos muut euromaat eivät tue Kreikka yhtään, niin sijoittajat katsovat jatkossa pienten eurotalouksien olevan oman onnensa varassa. Tällöin Suomen velalle vaaditaan korkempaa korkoa vastineeksi korkeamasta riskistä. Tämä on huono lopputulos. (Mahdollisesta pankkikriisistä myöhemmin.)

Jos muut euromaat antavat Kreikalle kaiken ja katsovat säästöohjelmasta lipumista sormien läpi, niin särmien maiden rahoille riittää ottajia kunnes ne loppuvat. Tämäkin on huono lopputulos.

EMUn haaste on löytää keino signaloida sisäistä kuria ja ulkoista vakautta. Tällöin euromaat voivat jatkossakin nauttia ison valuutta-alueen vakauden suomista eduista joutumatta maksaman tolkutonta laskua muiden sikailuista. Ongelma on siinä, että jos-suhteiden signalointi on hankalaa, ja signalointi tulee uskottavaksi vasta pitkällä aikavälillä. EMU on uskottava, kun Kreikka on monen vuoden kuluttua leikannut alijäämänsä pois ja alkanut vähentää velkaansa. Se on uskottava myös, jos Kreikka laitetaan monen vuoden elvytysyritysten jälkeen velkasaneeraukseen toivottomana tapauksena. Joka tapauksessa ukottavuuden hankkimiseen menee vuosia.

Suurusluokka

Suomi on hyötynyt eurosta. Jo pelkästän matalammat valtion velan korot ovat maksaneet Kreikan lainasumman moninkertaisesti takaisin.

Toisaalta pelotellaan, että Kreikan velkasaaneerauksesta seuraisi pankkikriisi ja lama. Viime vuonna Suomen bruttokansantuote supistui laman takia 13 miljardia euroa. Tämäkin on paljon Kreikan lainaa suurempi summa.

Kreikan laina on vasta ensimmäinen näytös pitkässä gambiitissa, jossa testataan euromaiden kyky puhaltaa yhteen hiileen ja laittaa sikailijat ruotuun.

Every cloud has a silver lining.

2010-05-04T14:49:00.000-07:00

Each Finnish taxpayer is lending 300e for the Greek government without guarantees. Others are better informed to write about the loan itself, so I offer a few positive notes about the debate.

Greek voters have double handicap on future time orientation. Firstly, they are a Southern country. Therefore memories of long, harsh winters and the need to prepare for them are not circulating in their bloodstream. Secondly, their average score on a specific list is the lowest of all Euro countries.

Usually such nations get preferential treatment in public debt debate (example). Scrupulous Western imperialists and capitalists get the blame. With Greece, the blame for nonpayment is finally placed where it should be - on the borrower who refuses to pay. Finally the common taxpayer walks on the loaner's shoes.

The Greek have darker skin color than Finns. Despite this, the racism card has not been played. Finally skin color does not give people freedom from the consequences of their actions.

Many people say that Greece should not have joined Euro in the first place and the banks should not have given them loans, and these financing options prolonged the crisis and made it worse. When we talk about Finns, it is acceptable to say that instant loans and credit cards cause trouble for some, although for the majority they provide a valuable service. Finally we can say that some countries are too immature to handle loans like grown-up Western democracies.

Media is full of reports about demonstrations and strikes where the Greek people oppose the cuts on their benefits and tax evasion options. These get nothing but condescension and laughter. Usually there is a double standard where the feeblest complaints from victim groups are valid and should be accommodated. Finally the double standard is breaking down.

Despite the cost to the man on the street, we are not seeing attacks or hate speech against the Greek people. Finally the public debate contains a recognition that despise towards some group's lower performance does not mean hate, violence nor discrimination.

In short, when Finns deal with their own money their public debate is much sharper. Let's hope that these same honest attitudes spread to rhetoric about developing countries, ending the monopoly of the compassion industry.

Movie: Dear John (full of spoilers)

2010-04-24T12:32:00.000-07:00

Dear John tells about a soldier named John who falls in love with a college student named Savannah during his vacation from the army.

This chick flick is the first sob story which I have seen on the silver screen. The audience was 3/4 female, with a few token boyfriends in tow. In the most intense scenes of loss, you could hear sniffs from several directions.

Why did I pick this film? I just walked in the theater and chose the least descriptive film name. "Haikein terveisin" won. If I try to choose a 'good' movie I usually end up watching crap.

The best part of the movie is the beginning where John and Savannah meet. John has just finished a day of surfing in the beach and is walking topless. OkCupid profile picture research supports that males showing muscles is attractive.

From Mystery Method's three big value-demonstrating character traits (leader of men, preselected by women, protector of the loved ones) John hits heavily on protector of the loved ones from the very beginning. There are no other women involved. His absence of leadership is balanced by painting him as a lone wolf with dark and mysterious background.

From the game perspective, John does not demonstrate much psychosocial dominance. Others talk more and Savannah decides the next steps all the time. However, there are many scenes where other men crumble when placed in conflict against John. It is not about John having great character, rather it is about other men around Savannah having terrible character. John is a bit simple athlete who has gone through rough places and made it alive.

One theme in the movie is the autism of John's father. Frankly, the person who is supposed to play autistic seems merely introverted to me. There is only one scene where he loses his nerves and escapes and is clearly crazy. Then again my own standards may be twisted, since I had very weak emotional connection with my father when I was young.

If I could change one thing in the movie, the final hour would contain more scenes where communication breaks down and characters can't agree on a common frame of reference. Instead, they would laugh at each others, question their views, change the subject and blame the other for overreacting. It would have been better acted by amateur actors who can't deliver a single line of dialog right, since people under strong emotions can't punch straight verbal blows either.

Apocalypse. Now.

2010-04-15T11:43:00.000-07:00

Smoke blots out the sun, creating eternal night
gone is humanity, trampled to the ground
suffocated by the ashes, utopia of thy design

Long, hard and 5 cm thick

2010-04-10T15:13:00.000-07:00

The newest addition to my collection of bodyweight training toys is a dancing pole. It is an order of magnitude more versatile than a pull-up bar - that's why there's no such thing as pull-up bar dancing.

It is also much heavier. If you don't exert any force against the pole, you will be sliding downwards. By contrast, to stay on a pull-up bar you only need to keep your hands curved.

Thus far, I've been mainly climbing the pole upwards - and it took months before my hands learned to use the force they already have for this purpose. As expected with new moves, I've found some 'pole dancing muscles' from my body, which don't get much exposure during regular gym training and get sore when gripping the pole puts disproportionate stress on them.

My weightlifting book is written by a coach, whose profession is to train university athletes in the weight room. The book aims at thoroughly strong, functional physique. During training, 'realistic' moves like shoulder press or pull-up are preferred, so that the strength is functional. The point is not to get as strong as possible, but to get moderately strong and train away all weak points. This brings resistance to injury when your body is strained from an unusual angle. The main ingredients of it's recipe are:
- Favor free weights and positions, where you don't get too much artificial support. This way, you can exert comparable force in real situations. For example bench press is just barely kosher - it is good for training strength but has too much artificial support to be a valid measure of strength. Practical situation where your back is against a wall and you press with hands are extremely rare. Shoulder press or squat are paragons of functional strength.
- Upper body exercises are not divided by muscle groups, but into 4 categories - vertical/horizontal push/pull. The individual muscles will get trained on the way. If weightlifting is not you main sport, exact muscles don't matter. What does matter is that the muscles are used to working together.
- Exercises are variated, for example between narrow and wide grip, between pronated and supinated grip, and between dumbbells and barbells. This way, choosing a wrong basic exercise does not leave any point of your body untrained.

If I manage to avoid all injuries with the pole, I can thank this piece of advice afterwards. Now they are just hypotheses which sound reasonable. In one year, I'll have experimental data about the validity of the hypothesis in one case.

Illiterate institutions

2010-03-30T15:40:00.000-07:00

Societies develop institutions which enable the majority to live their life well. Good institutions take advantage of the average man's stregths and alleviate his weaknesses. Different ethnic groups have big differences in average ability. Different groups need different institutions to enable daily life.

In Andhra Pradesh, a state in South India, the literacy rate is 60%. This is a weakness to be alleviated by traditions. The country is also quite overpopulated: it has 15 times more people for every km² than in Finland. Also even in the countryside people like to live near each others: while Finns like to scatter their houses and surround them by plains, the farmers in Andhra Pradesh live in central villages which are surrounded by uninhabited plains. This further concentrates population. This is a strength which can be exploited.

If a Finn wants to go to a new place, he uses a map. Maps are widely available and people are trained to use them during physical education classes when people go to forest to orienteer.

If an Indian in Andhra Pradesh doesn't know the way, he asks a bypasser. Even professional taxi drivers who earn their living by driving do so. Thanks to warm climate and dense population, there are always locals in the street, walking or idling. Therefore asking the way is possible thanks to the strength of dense population. Also since maps are hard to find (for example in Hyderabad, we had to find a big bookstores before we found one; by contrast in Budapest airport a free tourist leaflet contained a map) and many people couldn't read them anyway, a different way-finding institution is necessary because of the weakness of illiteracy.

In literate Finland, there is a stigma attached to talking to strangers. People don't do it naturally. If a stranger in the street comes to talk to you, he probably tries to sell you stuff, beg money or convert you to his religion. The stigma is useful, because it discourages interaction where you can only lose and where there isn't even any reciprocal advantage. The reciprocal help scenario, for example begging money to a bus ticket back home, is too rare to make it to the top three of stranger interactions.

In Andhra Pradesh, people are in general frighteningly extroverted, because they simply have to do more stuff by talking as writing isn't an option. There is less stigma attached to random talking.

This is one reason why Finland should be careful not to let in large numbers of third-world immigrants. They may seem like us hen you talk with an individual person for a few minutes, but they are not like us. Our institutions won't be able to handle large colonies of people with very different average abilities. The institutions (for example fire-fighting) will break, and will be replaced by something we don't like.

Reciprocality and development aid

2010-03-18T22:37:00.000-07:00

The biblical golden rule, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you", is the simplest way to justify development aid with reciprocality. Now I'll develop two improved reciprocality arguments, which are rigorous enough to say what policies are not justified by reciprocality. The golden rule has large cultural impact but it is too vague for supporting or opposing policy decisions.

John Rawls and the veil of ignorance

A way to justify development aid is to say that the gap between the rich and the poor countries is unjust. In Theory of Justice, John Rawls estimates the justness of social organizations with the veil of ignorance. We imagine ourselves as souls in heaven who have not yet born. We don't know in which country we will be born. What kind of development aid policy would we formulate? I'll use Finland and Nepal as examples.

It does justify aid which increases economic growth. Finland and Nepal have 30-fold difference in GDP per capita. If Finland gave 1% of GDP for development aid, it would add 10% to Nepalese GDP. If this is invested for growth with reasonable ROI (for example, better education enables the Nepalese to work in higher-value jobs) we can get 20% difference in 20 years. Surely the souls in the sky who don't know where they will be born would prefer to be 20% richer Nepalese or 1% poorer Finns.

It does not justify aid which does not have effect. Why would the souls in the sky choose to shed 1% of their income as Finns, if the Nepalese can't build lastingly better society with it, instead using the money for corruption?

Now we notice that we need an assumption about people before we can deduce if the veil of ignorance justifies development aid or not.

If we assume that people are fundamentally the same everywhere, then the differences in the standards of living are historical coincidences. With proper education and economic opportunities, the Nepalese will become just like Finns in a few generations.

My opinion is that the people in different nations are fundamentally different. If you meet a Nepali, he is probably polite and his behaviour is within the range of variation which you have seen among Finns. However, if you take 10000 Nepalis and Finns and look what kind of society they will build in 20 years of freedom and democracy, the results differ like night and day.

In a way, Finland is 'fully developed'. This means that there are no low-hanging fruits which external benevolent institutions could pick to cause permanent growth in Finland. Finns further their own interests and the interests of their loyalty groups effectively, since Finns have enough education, access to information, freedom and ability to raise capital for genuinely profitable pursuits.

The 'people are different' assumption can be taken forward to oppose development aid even under veil of ignorance by saying that the Nepalis are fully developed in the same sense. The differences in standards of living originate from the fact that society consists of people, and with people like the Nepali you can't build a society like Finland.

Nepalis in fact do get 10% of their GDP as remittances from Nepalis working in foreign countries and also as development aid. Still, they continue play in the bottom league of the poorest countries. This is strong data to support that they just can't build better society even if given more money.

Alien civilization

A problem with the veil of ignorance is that we can't imagine what it's like to be an illiterate goat herder. Therefore we need to imagine ourselves as the inferior race. Let's imagine an alien civilization with average IQ is about 150 and less measurable character traits like emotional maturity, future time orientation and language skills just as developed. Their behaviour is comprehensible for our xenoanthropologists, and their xenoanthropologists have learned to read and write factual sentences (which are not dependent on human intuitions) in English. For the sake of universe's biodiversity, they let us live, and some of them consider it a fun pasttime to uplift us. What would he want from them?

We would not want them to build us schools or hospitals. That's something that we do quite well ourselves. Better buildings wouldn't even improve the quality of services.

We would not want to copy institutions from them. Institutions which work for them would rest on assumptions which are not valid for us.

We would want their science and technology, preferably packaged into easy-to-use tools. The closest comparison is exchange students who come to Western countries to study, Western companies which sell tools and infrastructure to countries with otherwise low level of technology.

We would want them to decode our genome with their super tech. The closest comparison is malaria research, etc.

We would want to maintain monopoly of violence on Earth, even if we knew that they could blast us to extinction with antimateria bombs anytime. They may be too indifferent to care if, say, Iran used it's nuclear arsenal, or too enthusiastic to meddle, or probably both.

The answer

2010-03-08T15:00:00.000-08:00

Death proof

2010-03-02T11:56:00.000-08:00

Saw Inglourious Basterds in the weekend. Can't recommend it to anyone, though. Like Kill Bill, it was a purebred genre movie which didn't reference anything real, just other movies in the same genre. While Kill Bill was fun, Inglourious Basterds was just filled with cruel violence that was unnecessary for the plot.

There was one good scene in Inglourious Basterds though - the opening scene. It includes a long conversation during which nothing happens except two people talk politely with each others, but which is full of suspense anyway.

One criteria for good art is that it tells facts about reality. In this sense, realistic, long conversations can be art. Many important things depend on vapid chit-chat in small groups. The devil is in the details and in subtle signaling. The blogs of pick-up artists tell stories how vapid chit-chat determines the success of seduction, and also deal with relationship game. Families are one fundamental building blocks of society, and their formation and stability depends much on vapid chit-chat. It also determines very much how various professional and hobby groups get stuff done or don't.

The only TV program which takes vapid chit-chat seriously is Big Brother, and it is hugely popular around the world.

Death Proof is another Tarantino a movie, where the first hour consists entirely from vapid chit-chat. It even lacks proper suspense, as things start to happen only afterwards. It is both boring (nothing happens!) and ingenious (at last they film the stuff that social reality is made of!) at the same time.

Pay raise to Finnish soldiers in Afghanistan

2010-02-22T12:47:00.000-08:00

The video describes the challenges faced by embedded tactical trainers (ETTs). ETTs are American soldiers who are training the Afghan army to mind their own backyard. The video mentions complete lack of discipline, rampant drug use, corruption in promotions and wrong kind of soldier material as main problems.

When the Finnish or American soldiers exit Afghanistan, in five years the locals will revert back to their own ways. It's insane to believe that you can just train them into Finnish ways like any Finnish conscript. Their background, culture, institutions and genes are very different from us.

The foreign military presence will hopefully give them enough time to establish stable institutions and rebuild infrastructure so that Afghanistan will continue as a democracy, instead of sliding back into being a fundamentalist totalitarian state (or was it feudal warlord anarcy?), and that's a huge improvement. But they are going to stay half illiterate, corrupted, drug-addled and poor no matter how much military support and development aid is wasted on them. Western presence is a light, passing breeze compared to the internal logic of 30 million Afghans.

Jyri Häkämies increased the pay of Finnish soldiers by at least 500e per month, which is money well spent on valuable work.

Those who oppose wasting taxpayer's money should remember that there are less than 200 Finns there, so multipliers stay small. Also, they will be brought back to Finland - it's not a permanent black hole for taxpayer's money like suggestions to raise development aid to 1% of GNP.

Intelligence and memory

2010-02-16T12:36:00.000-08:00

Last year I was deeply disillusioned with intellectual approaches to life, as you could see from this blog which was restricted to sports and socializing. To turn a new page in my life I went to Mensa test, thinking "Let's face it - I'm not smart. My life outcome is thoroughly mediocre. I'm much better off with stupid approaches like sports and surfacial skills. After math high school, I haven't had success in anything intellectual."

To my surprise I passed the test with the same score as BB-Esa A. I also joined the club because it supports my New Year's goal of getting a more active social life. Within one month, I have done the following:

Seen the movie 2012 and talked about it.
Listened to how a Tampere city planner lectured about developing public transit and city center.
Went to a Pink Floyd cover concert by Pulse and talked about the music (a person in The Club recommended the gig).
Went to the monthly bar evening and talked with two cute girls who are a few years younger than me, among other members.

The Club has 300 members in Pirkanmaa. However, I've seen only 20 of them in any event, so mostly the club doesn't appeal even to its members. However, it fits perfectly to my current life situation, where improving social skills is a proprity. The people are in the same wavelength in some subtle manner - I'm not an introvert in their events.

To summarize, The Club is an organization of well-rounded slackers. The events are versatile. The age of the active members varies from 20 to 70. Occupations are also versatile - a sheep farmer gets regular publicity in the "members in the news" page. In the same way as my past fraternity Luuppi brought out The Drunkard and go club brings out The Nerd Intellectual, Mensa events bring out The Well-Rounded.

Now people who have followed the human biodiversity debate may want to know how the folks inside Mensa talk about it. Overall, they don't. Instead, they cultivate self-depracting humor, which is otherwise just like metodinen alemuudentunto, but more restricted:

Tuuli: When I was young, I had a Rubik's cube and I couldn't solve it.
Kari: So your intelligence emerged only after you joined the club?
Tuuli: I'm still waiting for it to emerge.

Naturally, taking the test doesn't change anything in me. I still have 10 years of life experience as an independent adult to show that I'm nothing special in intellectual pursuits. High IQ is not so much an unfair advantage as it is a bargain with the devil - and the price I pay is that my memory is wiped clean every 5 years from stuff which has not been used recently.

The Scientist wrote about general knowledge of facts as well as reading.

When I was younger I used to read quite a bit, things like Enid Blyton (Viisikko, Seikkailujen sarja) and The Girl Detective. The funny thing is that I remember absolutely nothing from them. The same is true for all children's books. Not a single plot has stuck to my mind, while many people remember even details. (Earth Search is one of the almost forgotten ones.)

About 5 years ago I tried to civilize myself by reading about each European state, and ended up finishing about 10 books. The traces are pretty non-existent.

But there is one type of knowledge which does stick - information linked to skills. Maybe the best examples are programming skill which I started to exercise at young age and math high school where I went as a teenager. Both are skills to be trained rather than knowledge to be assimilated. They do involve lots of details, but remembering those is not a problem.

I remember so little facts from books that for me it is primarily language practise. Nowadays I hardly read at all, as Finnish and English don't need extra practise and Chinese is still on the verge of usefulness.

The only question about Ridge Forrester which I could answer is "In which TV series there is a character named Ridge Forrester?" All I know about Rocky is that it is a wrestling movie which made "Eye of the Tiger" a hit song.

Update: The post was completely rewritten.

Peacekeepers to Afghanistan

2010-02-08T11:43:00.000-08:00

Instead of importing refugees to Finland, it is better to mind the crisis where it happens. So let's pay well to the brave souls who voluntarily risk their lives to make godforsaken hellholes livable.

Recently HS reported that low salaries made Finnish officers reluctant to go to Afghanistan. On the other hand, there are 2000 Aghans in Finland. Most of them live by social benefits - the latest statistics from 2005 tell that their unemployment percentage is a whopping 64%, and this counts only those in the labor force. This does not mean they are poor - according to today's MOT program, many Afghani families get benefits which are comparable to a Finnish worker's salary.

It's an insane result of the leftist obsession of victimhood that people who risk their lives to maintain rule of law in Afghanistan hardly benefit from it, while refugees who cheat their way here get a handsome increase in living standard for being idle. The opposite way would be better.

Update: A substandard post was rewritten into tolerable.

Finnish Eurovision Song 2010

2010-01-30T19:36:00.000-08:00

In pop music, the listeners expect to hear a riff in the first 20 seconds. Good composers know this, and they use this expectation by implementing it, breaking it or gaming it in creative ways. Fundamentally music is communication. These expectations make the song comprehensible.

First I'll prune the contestants based on the riff in the first 20 seconds. Here are the criteria:

Riff is established. 1 point.
Riff is decorated. 1 point. When the riff is repeated, some instruments play differently in the background.
Riff variation. 1 point. When the riff is repeated, the riff ends differently.
There is a transition between the riff and the first verse. 1 point. Transitions are short bursts of less composed playing. They signal that the song is moving to another phase. They demonstrate communication by expectation.
Demonstration of speed. 1 point. In general, good composers and musicians are used to quick play. This makes slow play a conscious choice to express simple and clear message. After demonstration of speed, the listener takes slow portions more seriously.

These additional criteria flunk the song as too strange:

Drum challenged. Rhythm is really important for me. If there are no drums nor other rhythmic instruments, there's no point for me to rate the song, as it works on channels which I don't hear.
Alien style. Communication is not getting through.

Round 1 - Drum challenged or alien style

Nina Lassander: Cider Hill. Drum challenged, but a good song anyway. Goes to final round.
Antti Kleemola: Sun Puolella. Alien style. I've never understood these kinds of ballads.
Pentti Hietanen: Il mondo e qui. Drum challenged, sounds like music for people with sleeping disorders.

Round 2 - Pruning by riff

Kuunkuiskaajat: Työlki ellää
0 points, fails to establish riff. The first 25 seconds are musically just blank white paper, and then it starts to repeat the verse until the listener is bored out of his skull. You can see that when the girls emphasize the futility of working, they practise what they preach during composition work. I wonder what the girls "trade" as their hourly wage is so high that they get rich with it.

Heli Kajo: Annankadun kulmassa
1 point. Establishes a riff. Too much repetition.

Amadeus: Anastacia

2 points. Establishes a riff and decorates it at 0:13. Overall this is
too repetitive. It is amateurish to repeat the riff 8 times and then forget transition.

The dancers have prepared a fine choreography. Too bad that the video director had to cut it to pieces.

This is the only song where the first 20 seconds don't tell the whole truth, as the song gets quite intense towards the end.

Linn: Fatal Moment

4 points. Riff, decoration, transition and demonstration of speed are there. The first 10 seconds are quite good. The only room for improvement is that the second rep of the riff could introduce new musical elements. The rest of the song is somehow too slow and Alien Style so I drop it at this round anyway.

Sister Twister: Love at the First Sight

5 points. Great intro. One minus point for lacking riff variation, but one plus point for gaming listeners expectations at 0:07 - 0:14 (before riff), complete with a nice transition to riff.

Maria Lund: Sydän ymmärtää

6 points. The first 10s have all elements of a good riff. Extra point for Maria Lund for using her voice as a rhythmic instrument in the "pappa, pappa, padappaa" phase.

Eläkeläiset: Hulluna humpasta

7 points. One extra point for humppa-style opening in the first 2 secs. Another extra point for playing with listener's expectations by introducing the riff only after singing the verse once.

Round 3 - Whole songs

3th: Maria Lund - Sydän ymmärtää
Maria Lund is a great performer and musically this is good, though it should introduce new musical elements also after the 1:00 mark. However, the words are just plain wrong. For example, it says "The best men worship and understand a woman / if you find one, you won't need another kind.", while all seduction blogs warn against pedestalizing women, and also a female blogger (Vera) mentioned that signs of worship are major red flags.

2th: Eläkeläiset - Hulluna humpasta
Musically ingenious and humorous performance. But let's face it - we've been hearing Eläkeläiset since 1993.

1th: Sister Twister - Love at the first sight
The music is strong. The other areas are ok.

Honorary Mention: Nina Lassander - Cider Hill
Good but very different from others. I'll have to listen to it 20 times to find out what's the name of the game here. Can't make up may mind about it yet.

Mobile phones in Haiti

2010-01-27T13:58:00.000-08:00

Telecoms Sans Frontiers was one of the first crisis aid groups to reach Haiti. They work to restore telecommunications. Hat tip to Marginal Revolution for linking to this story.

Mr. PAUL MARGIE (Representative, Telecom Without Borders): They would go and they carried a satphone with them. And again and again, the people wanted access to that satellite phone even more than the clothes or the food that they were bringing. And so they changed and they said, let's make an organization that focuses on the communication.

The traditional argument against transhumanist solutions to speed uneven development is that those people need clean water, nutritious food and economic development, and only no-life tech nerds could suggest that geek toys like mobile phones matter. However, communication is very basic human need and also important to those who live for a few dollars a day. The quoted story about how the founders of Telecoms Sans Frotiers discovered the need for their organization illustrates that.

In Hyderabad, we had local mobile phone SIMs (they worked more reliably and were much cheaper). They were prepaid SIMs. We loaded time by visiting a phone shop. The shops also logged the bought balance to written books (no idea why), and there you could see how people had bought talk time a few euros at a time. Mobile phone operators have strong incentives to run their profitable business also in countries where average incomes are extremely low. For this reason, mobile phone service is available in many areas where no foreign aid group has ever visited.

The top 4 roadside ad categories I remember where construction cement, apartments, IT courses and mobile phone operators.

Mobile phones are as close to transhumanist technology as we have today - the only reason we are not amazed by telepathic ability to talk with anyone anytime is that we have lived with the technology for 15 years, and we had fixed lines before that. Privacy is the only reason they don't implement clairvoyance, where you input a GPS coordinate and see an image stream from the closest observation camera.

People in the developing world also grow from genetic blueprints, so transhumanist solutions are going to play new roles in the future.

Shooting sprees are good for Finland, because we are now more recognized.

2010-01-19T11:17:00.000-08:00

According to a Haitian consul in Brazil, the earthquake was good for Haiti, as it made their country more recognized. Finland is more developed country also in this respect, we can make global headlines by killing just 6 people rather than 60000.

He also blamed the ills of his country on the fact that every place where there are Africans is fucked.

The last frog that leaped from his mouth, that the practise of macumba and muti and other witchcraft has brought a curse on Africans, is actually an excellent metaphor for the fact that no matter where they go and no matter how much development aid they get, they still can't build a civilized country.

As long as we exclude imperialism - importing enough smart fraction from outside to keep the countries out of trouble - no one has the social technology and knowledge to solve their problems. So it is anything but a joke to talk about illiterate goat herders at the same time as benevolent superintelligences and uplifting and genetic engineering - transcendental technology really is needed before their societies can organize themselves to provide what we consider basic human rights.

To cut the consul some slack, most of his relatives live in Haiti and he hasn't heard about them since the earthquake, and he thought he was talking off record. Who wouldn't be out of his mind in such situation.

2010-01-16T09:10:00.000-08:00

In Haiti, a recently failed state is setting new standards in just how dysfunctional a government can be in the face of a crisis. Based on HS reports they don't seem to be doing much anything.

Functional states have an institution called army which is supposed to be a master of logistics in hostile terrain. Not in Haiti. They are not getting excavators to collapsed buildings. They are not getting injured people from streets to faraway cities with free hospital beds. Nor can rescue aid squads get transported to needed locations - HS reported that only 6 out of 27 squads had actually reached Haiti.

Fortunately, civil society is stepping in to maintain order - but not by rule of law but by rule of gun for the few minutes it takes to grab the valuables and run.

HS follows a crisis relief squad which carries a few Finns. They expect a few Haitian soldiers to join them in the border to protect against threat of robbing, which has happened to some food convoys. In some other country, those soldiers would be doing crisis relief by themselves.

My father visited Dominican Republic some years ago, and also Haiti for one day. He said that there were security guards with shotguns at every corner of the public enterprises, indicating very low trust and very low rule of law.

Next opportunity to see the top pole dancers of Tampere

2010-01-11T11:38:00.000-08:00

This time in more classy setting, and without misleading advertising. Hat tip: Ashta.

Videos don't need cutting

2010-01-06T04:58:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I saw the special effects movie 2012. Having watched too much Youtube videos where the same shooting angle lasts for 5 minutes, I found the cuts confusing. It did contain spectacular scenes of destruction (but no mosques were harmed while the film was made). The effects would have been even more spectacular had they not been cut every 5 seconds.

For example in this video the singer clearly has a choreography for hands, but frequent cuts make it hard to match hand movements to musical patterns and dramatic peaks. Half the time hand movements are cut away or too far to be seen. No cutting at all would have been better.

High-budget movies made by pros contain a lot of cuts while amateur videos often contain none. This does not make cuts any less distracting.

2010

2010-01-02T13:39:00.000-08:00

Some main goals:

Clean up the blog. A year ago, this blog had about 5 readers, most of which I could name. There were no consequences whatsoever from writing embarrassing stuff. Quite the contrary, writing produced clarity and I got some valuable advice on a difficult area of life. (A difficult area of life is one where you make mistakes, so it is embarrassing almost by definition. On the other hand, a difficult area of life benefits most from extra clarity.)
During 2009, this blog took first steps as a channel from which people hear about me for the first time. So embarrassing posts should be restricted a bit.

Year of bodyweight training. Hopefully by the end of this year I can do some headstand-to-handstand push-ups. If not, then it's time to move back to iron. I pretty much stopped going to gym after the post about one year training diary.

In the intellectual hobbies front, I should get Chinese to some kind of completion. This means that there is no longer need to set goals and allocate time for it - instead, I'll just read Chinese news and blogs and books in relaxed manner, slowly strenghtening vocabulary and routine. Currently that is not the case, but it's close as I've already started to slowly read Chinese trash lit.

More active social life is in my wishlist, and I have 2 promising approaches to get it. Should both ones fail (it always depends on other people too, so it's not possible to set fixed goals) I'll have to consider postgraduate studies as a way to make progress and use leisure meaningfully.

Last year:

Year of gym. Got my first spell of healthy lifestyle.

Year when going to India had fucked with my head. Fortunately it's over now.

Year diagnosing the problem. The problem is losing in the game of talking. Didn't make any breakthroughs solving it, though.