No posts for April

Nothing to write and several things keeping me busy.

PUAs and discursive social psychology 1: Speech acts

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

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

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

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"

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

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

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?

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

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."

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...