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

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)

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

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!

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

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

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?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

lyrics

The difference between social democrats and transhumanists

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.”

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?

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Recommended reading

Learning Diary of an Israeli Water Engineer. Some of his posts are about his work in various water engineering projects, and some are about his investments and economy. This gives the whole blog a nice no-nonsense "thoughts have consequences" attitude, and it spills out to his general commentary.

Movie: Dear John (full of spoilers)

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.

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

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

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

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

Death proof

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

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.