Archive for the 'Internet' Category

[ cross-posted from Zenpundit ]

Foreign Policy has had two articles up in the last couple of days with somewhat similar headlines:

Links: Twitter – WikiLeaks

The site which specifically tracks WikiLeaks on Tunisia is TuniLeaks:

My rosette for best tweet of the week goes to Galrahn and all those who RT’d him:

What a world, eh?

[ cross posted from Infocult ]

For your ghoulish winter entertainment…

[ cross-posted from Zenpundit ]

I for one am delighted to know that we can now play around with the iridology of the sciences, using the software available on the Science-Metrix Ontology Explorer site to view which fields have journals which cross-link to journals in other fields…

Seriously — that lower image is of the Field Citation Wheel that you can find, suitably enlarged for easy viewing, on that site.

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And it’s heartening for me to know, for instance — taking a closer look at the segment of that image that’s roughly east north-east — that scientific journals do have some links on their pages to works of theology or philosophy:

Engineering, you’ll notice, has more links than history, philosophy, theology, the social sciences (even counting them twice), economics, business, the arts and humanities combined.

My own field, theology, has to share its thin segment with philosophy, and you can guess how small the number of links to articles on Islamic apocalyptic probably are…

Which is, in part, why I wonder whether a project like the ETH’s Living Earth Simulator will really manage to map such things as, well, a possible outbreak of global jihadist Mahdism and its consequences.

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But then I look at another gorgeous graphic from the same source, focusing in on a part of the network of knowledge that interests me, and I can just faintly make out, lower left, entirely isolated, the field of music…

What splendid isolation! That’s all of Bach, mind you – and all the Beatles, too.

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Seriously, though:

• It’s fascinating to be able to see how the various branches of knowledge cross-reference each other.
• Visual data representation is a gorgeous, fantastic, field.
• Mapping the all-of-everything is an irresistable lure for keen minds
• I’m betting the humanities will prove to be at least as good at it as the sciences.
• And I recall, not without a pang of regret, the time when my beloved Theology was Queen of the Sciences, and one might converse with Abelard on the streets of Paris…

[ cross-posted from Zenpundit ]

This is a follow-up to my earlier post on Zenpundit and ChicagoBoyz, picking up on some comments made on both sites, explaining my own interests, and taking the inquiry a little further.

On Zenpundit, Larry said, “Your need to destroy Assange is getting embarrassing. Why not make lemonaid?” and JN Kish, “The real story here should be about the data – and who is helping Assange – not Assange himself.” Meanwhile on ChicagoBoyz, a certain Gerald Attrick commented, “Ah, but as we say in in art crit: Deal with the Art and not the Man…”

To Larry I would say, I think that my post WikiLeaks: Counterpoint at the State Department? — in which I point up the irony inherent in the same State Department spokesman celebrating World Press Freedom Day and chiding Assange for “providing a targeting list to a group like al-Qaida” on the same day — could as easily be read as pro-Assange as today’s post, Martyrdom, messianism and Julian Assange can be read as calling for his destruction.

More generally, it seems to me that there are a whole lot of stories to be told here: the ones I wish to tell are those where I have a reasonably informed “nose” for relevant detail, and which tend to be overlooked by others — and thus have the potential to blindside us.

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My own main interest is in tracking religious, mythic and apocalyptic themes in contemporary affairs, where they are all too easily overlooked, misunderstood or dismissed. Thus I have posted on Tracking the Mahdi on WikiLeaks, and added related material in section 1 of my post today.

I am also interested in concept mapping, games and creative thinking — interests which led me to post WikiLeaks: Critical Foreign Dependencies and The WikiLeaks paradox, and more lightheartedly to take an amused sideways glance at WikiLeaks in The power of network visualization.

And I certainly find Assange himself an interesting figure, and have done what I can to illuminate his background in mythology, religion and games in Wikileaks and the Search for a Cryptographic Mythology, again in Update: Wikileaks and Cryptographic Mythology and (again light-heartedly) in A DoubleQuote for Anders.

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Let me be more explicit: I have no wish to lionize Assange, nor to feed him to the lions — I would like to understand him a little better.

Read the rest of this entry »

[ cross-posted from Zenpundit ]

Martyr and messiah are two of the more intense “roles” in the religious vocabulary, and unlike mystics and saints, both martyrs and messiahs tend to have an impact, not just within their own religious circles but in the wider context of the times.

Martyr and messiah are also words that can be bandied about fairly loosely — so a simple word-search on “messiah” will reveal references to a third-person platform game with some gunplay and the white messiah fable in Avatar, while a search on “martyr” might tell you how to become a martyr for affiliate networks, just as a search on “crusade” will turn up crusades for justice or mental health – my search today even pointed me to a crusade for cloth diapers.

1. Martyrdom and messianism in WikiLeaks

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, both terms crop up occasionally in WikiLeaks, with the Government of Iraq, for instance, banning use of the word “martyr” for soldiers who died in the war with Iran, and US diplomats wiring home a report by an opposition psychiatrist to the effect that “Morally, Chavez [of Venezuela] combines a sense of tragedy and romanticism (a desire for an idyllic world) to project a messianic image.” Indeed, the whole paragraph is choc-a-bloc with that kind of imagery, and worth quoting in full:

Ideologically, Chavez wants to project an image of a “utopian socialist,” which de Vries described as someone who is revolutionary, collectivist, and dogmatic. In reality, de Vries argues, Chavez is an absolute pragmatist when it comes to maintaining power, which makes him a conservative. Coupled with Chavez’ self-love (narcissism), sense of destiny, and obsession with Venezuelan symbolism, this pragmatism makes Chavez look more like fascist, however, rather than a socialist. Morally, Chavez combines a sense of tragedy and romanticism (a desire for an idyllic world) to project a messianic image. De Vries, however, said Chavez is a realist who uses morals and ethics to fit the situation.

PM Netanyahu of Israel was using the term “messianic” with a little more precision when he described the Iranian regime as “crazy, retrograde, and fanatical, with a Messianic desire to speed up a violent ‘end of days.’”

2. Julian Assange in the role of martyr

The words martyr and messiah, then, carry a symbolic freight that is at the very least comparable to that of flags and scriptures – so it is interesting that both terms crop up in the recent BBC interview with Julian Assange.

My reading of the interview suggests that it is Assange himself who introduces the meme of martyrdom, though not the word itself, when he answers a question about the impact of the sexual accusations against him, “What impact do you think that will have on your organisation and what sort of figure do you think you, Julian Assange, cut in the face of all this. How will you be regarded? What will it do to you?” with the response, “I think it will be quite helpful for our organisation.”

In the follow up, interviewer John Humphrys twice uses the word “martyr” explicitly:

Q: Really? You see yourself as a martyr then?
 
JA: I think it will focus an incredible attention on the details of this case and then when the details of this case come out and people look to see what the actions are compared to the reality of the facts, other than that, it will expose a tremendous abuse of power. And that will, in fact, be helpful to this organisation. And, in fact, the extra focus that has occurred over the last two weeks has been very helpful to this organisation.

and:

Q: Just to answer that question then. You think this will be good for you and good for Wikileaks?
 
JA: I’ve had to suffer and we’ve had incredible disruptions.
 
Q: You do see yourself as a martyr here.
 
JA: Well, you know, in a very beneficial position, if you can be martyred without dying. And we’ve had a little bit of that over the past ten days. And if this case goes on, we will have more.

3. Julian Assange in the role of messiah

If the role of martyr implies, at minimum, that one suffers for a cause, that of messiah implies that one leads it in a profound transformation of the world. Both terms are now found in association with the word “complex” – which applies whenever a individual views himself or herself as a martyr or messiah – but a “messianic complex” is presumably more worrisome than a “martyr complex” if only for the reason that there are many more martyrs than messiahs, many more willing to suffer for a cause than to lead it.

It is accordingly worth noting that it is the interviewer, John Humphrys, who introduces both the word “messianic” and the concept of a “messianic figure” into the interview, although Assange makes no effort to wave it away…

Q: Just a final thought. Do you see yourself… as some sort of messianic figure?
 
JA: Everyone would like to be a messianic figure without dying. We bringing some important change about what is perceived to be rights of people who expose abuses by powerful corporations and then to resist censorship attacks after the event. We are also changing the perception of the west.
 
Q: I’m talking about you personally.
 
JA: I’m always so focussed on my work, I don’t have time to think about how I perceive myself… I had time to perceive myself a bit more in solitary confinement. I was perfectly happy with myself. I wondered what that process would do. Would I think “my goodness, how have I got into this mess, is it all just too hard?”
 
The world is a very ungrateful place, why should I continue to suffer simply to try and do some good in the world. If the world is so viciously against it ,why don’t I just go off and do some mathematics or write some books? But no, actually, I felt quite at peace.
 
Q: You want to change the world?
 
JA: Absolutely. The world has a lot of problems and they need to be reformed. And we only live once. Every person who has some ability to do something about it, if they are a person of good character, has the duty to try and fix the problems in the environment which they’re in.
 
That is a value, that, yes, comes partly from my temperament. There is also a value that comes from my father, which is that capable, generous men don’t create victims, they try and save people from becoming victims. That is what they are tasked to do. If they do not do that they are not worthy of respect or they are not capable.

4. Julian Assange, martyr and messiah?

I think it is clear that both Assange and his interviewer are in effect reframing the religious terms “martyr” and “messiah” in non-religious, basically psychological senses — although I don’t suppose Assange is exactly claiming to have the two “complexes” I mentioned above.

Here’s what’s curious about this reframing, from a religious studies point of view:

Assange’s implicit acceptance of a “messianic” role undercuts the specific force of the role of “martyr” – one who gives his life for the cause. “Everyone” he says, “would like to be a messianic figure without dying.” Assange wouldn’t exactly object to being a martyr without dying, too.

[ cross-posted from Zenpundit ]

The most interesting part of the WikiLeaks-posted State Department Request for Information: Critical Foreign Dependencies, it seems to me, is the part that ties in with Zen’s recent post Simplification for Strategic Leverage.

Zen referenced Eric Berlow‘s recent TED talk to the effect that sometimes a complex network can be made effectively simple by reducing it to the graph of nodes and links within one, two or three degrees of the node you care about and wish to influence.

“Simplicity often lies on the other side of complexity”, Dr Berlow says, and “The more you step back, embrace complexity, the better chance you have of finding simple answers, and it’s often different than the simple answer that you started with.”

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This resonates neatly with a few things I’ve been thinking and talking about for some time now.

1. There’s the need for visualization tools that don’t operate with as many nodes as there are data points in a database like Starlight — I’ve been wanting to reduce the conceptual “load” that analysts or journos face from thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of nodes, to the five, seven, maybe ten or twelve nodes that the human mind can comfortably work with:

What I’m aiming for is a way of presenting the conflicting human feelings and understandings present in a single individual, or regarding a given topic in a small group, in a conceptual map format, with few enough nodes that the human mind can fairly easily see the major parallelisms and disjunctions, as an alternative to the linear format, always driving to its conclusion, that the white paper represents. Not as big as a book, therefore, let alone as vast as an enormous database that requires complex software like Starlight to graphically represent it, and not solely quantitative… but something you could sketch out on a napkin, showing nodes and connections, in a way that would be easily grasped and get some of the human and contextual side of an issue across.

2. There’s the fact that the cause is typically non-obvious from the effect. In the words of Jay Forrester, the father of stocks and flows modeling:

From all normal personal experience, one learns that cause and effect are closely related in time and space. A difficulty or failure of the simple system is observed at once. The cause is obvious and immediately precedes the consequence. But in complex systems, all of these facts become fallacies. Cause and effect are not related in either time or space… the complex system is far more devious and diabolical than merely being different from the simple systems with which we have experience. Though it is truly different, it appears to be the same. In a situation where coincident symptoms appear to be causes, a person acts to dispel the symptoms. But the underlying causes remain. The treatment is either ineffective or actually detrimental. With a high degree of confidence we can say that the intuitive solutions to the problems of complex social systems will be wrong most of the time.

3. There’s the need to map the critical dependencies of the world, which became glaringly obvious to me when we were trying to figure out the likely ripple effects that a major Y2K rollover glitch – or panic – might cause.

Don Beck of the National Values Center / Spiral Dynamics Group captured the possibility nicely when he characterized Y2K as “like a lightening bolt: when it strikes and lights up the sky, we will see the contours of our social systems.” Well, the lightning struck and failed to strike, a team from the Mitre Corporation produced a voluminous report on what the material and social connectivity of the world boded in case of significant Y2K computer failures, we got our first major glimpse of the world weave, and very few of the possible cascading effects actually came to pass.

I still think there was a great deal to be gleaned there — as I’m quoted as saying here, I’m of the opinion that: “a Y2K lessons learned might be a very valuable project, and even more that we could benefit from some sort of grand map of global interdependencies” – and agree with Tom Barnett, who wrote in The Pentagon’s New Map:

Whether Y2K turned out to be nothing or a complete disaster was less important, research-wise, than the thinking we pursued as we tried to imagine – in advance – what a terrible shock to the system would do to the United States and the world in this day and age.

4. That such a mapping will necessarily criss-cross back and forth across the so-called cartesian divide between body & mind (materiel and morale, wars and rumors of wars, banks and panics):

You will find I favor quotes and anecdotes as nodes in my personal style of mapping — which lacks the benefits of quantitative modeling, the precision with which feedback loops can be tracked, but more than compensates in my view, since it includes emotion, human identification, tone of voice.

The grand map I envision skitters across the so-styled “Cartesian divide” between mind and brain. It is not and cannot be limited to the “external” world, it is not and cannot be limited to the quantifiable, it locates powerful tugs on behavior within imagination and powerful tugs on vision within hard, solid fact.

Doubts in the mind and runs on the market may correlate closely across the divide, and we ignore the impacts of hope, fear, anger and insight at our peril.

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Getting back to the now celebrated WikiLeak, which even al-Qaida has noticed, here’s the bit — it’s really just an aside –that fascinates me:

Although they are important issues, Department is not/not seeking information at this time on second-order effects (e.g., public morale and confidence, and interdependency effects that might cascade from a disruption).

It seems to me that the complex models which Starlight provides, and Eric Berlow pillories, overshoot on one side of the problem – but avoiding all second-order effects?

One cause, one effect, no unintended consequences?

What was it that Dr Berlow just said? “if you focus only on that link, and then you black box the rest, it’s actually less predictable than if you step back, consider the entire system”…

Avoid all second-order effects?

If you ask me, that’s overshooting on the other side.

[ cross-posted from Zenpundit ]

[ note: all links are to youtube videos ]

The pianist Glenn Gould is celebrated for his ability to bring the different and at times positively oppositional voices in a fugue by Bach to our attention, so that we follow each one separately while hearing all at the same time as a single whole. What is less known is that he liked to sit at a table in a truck stop and listen to the different conversations at the other tables and booths, mentally braiding their pale or brightly colored threads of human together into an analogous tapestry — one voice harmonizing with or conflicting against another, here a new subject introduced, there an echo of an earlier idea heard in a fresh context, with the murmurings of waitresses punctuated by the kaching! of the cash register, the hydraulic hiss of a door closing — conversation as counterpoint.

Organizations and individual alike, we all have different and at times dissonant voices, and strive to bring them to some kind of resolution. The many stakeholders debating an issue in town halls, blogs or letters to the editor, the many drives within each one of us, idealistic, hopeful, defeated, paralytic, angry, evasive, sluggish, vengeful, curious, alert, defiant, all have voices, all constitute an experience of polyphony, a “music of many voices”, in point counter point.

One of my interests is to find a way to score these many fugues, these musics of meaning.

My DoubleQuotes, then, can be considered as two-part inventions, attempts to show the multiple tracking of the mind — whether of a single individual, as in this case, or of a group, a community, a world divided – so that something of the music begins to be visible, and some of the dissonances can move towards necessary resolution.

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I believe there is unresolved irony between these two statements, made on the same day by Philip J Crowley, the US State Department’s Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Public Affairs – but each has its reasons, and there are arguments to be made for both transparency and opacity, diplomacy and publicity, secrets and revelations.

Between them lies the possibility I think of as a virtual music of ideas.

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Bach published a series of two-part inventions, BWV 772–801, and wrote of them that he intended to offer them as an honest method

by which the amateurs of the keyboard – especially, however, those desirous of learning – are shown a clear way not only (1) to learn to play cleanly in two parts, but also, after further progress, (2) to handle three obligate parts correctly and well; and along with this not only to obtain good inventions (ideas) but to develop the same well; above all, however, to achieve a cantabile style in playing and at the same time acquire a strong foretaste of composition…

Later comes the Art of Fugue.

[ cross-posted from Zenpundit ]

Jean Rosenfeld of the UCLA Center for the Study of Religion just posted a comment on an earlier Zenpundit post of mine, opening up a topic which may interest some readers here: that of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s mythological associations.

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Jean had earlier pointed me to Assange’s use of the name “Marutukku” to describe his encryption program, and a little fishing brought me to these two Assange-related documents:

One Man’s Search for a Cryptographic Mythology
Enuma Elish

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I’d been idly wondering about cryptographic mythology myself, as it happens, nudged by vague memories of a cache of porno images tweaked by jihadists as encoding devices for steganography.

Steganography is the cryptographic – or is it kabbalistic? — art devised by one Abbot Trithemius, whose 1518 Polygraphia is the first work on cryptography printed in Europe, and whose Steganographia was known in MS to such hermetic philosophers as Cornelius Agrippa, Giordano Bruno and John Dee. Jim Reeds captures the ambiguity of Trithemius’ work nicely in his paper, Solved: The Ciphers in Book III of Trithemius’s Steganographia, when he asks:

Is it [the Steganographia] primarily an exposition of cryptographic techniques disguised as angel magic, or is it primarily a magic work disguised as cryptography?

Readers of Frances Yates and Ioan Couliano will be somewhat familiar with these matters.

And jihadist steganography? The technique itself is described in the al-Fajr Information Center’s Technical Mujahid magazine of Feb. 2007 according to a Jamestown Foundation Terrorism Monitor piece, but the reports of actual jihadist use of the technique may turn out to be fabrications.

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But it was Julian Assange‘s bliss we were trying to follow, right?

Assange sidekick Suelette Dreyfus wrote The Idiot Savants’ Guide to Rubberhose — which is the manual for Assange’s crypto program… but this business of naming the program gets complicated, eh?

Dreyfus explains:

If you’re wondering about the name of this program, Marutukku is the internal development name (it’s spelled Ru-b-b-e-r-h-o-s-e, but it’s pronounced M-a-r-u-t-u-k-k-u)

In case you didn’t get it, there may be a play on Lewis Carroll there, and the exchange Alice has with the White Knight in Through the Looking-Glass as to what the name of a certain very sad song is called.

Alice aside – and such detours are in fact the very method of discovery in non-linear thinking – Dreyfus offers as an epigraph to her piece the following quote:

The third name is MARUTUKKU, Master of the arts of protection, chained the Mad God at the Battle. Sealed the Ancient Ones in their Caves, behind the Gates.

which she attributes to “The Akkadian Creation Epic”. That would be the Enuma Elish.

Assange, in his One Man’s Search for a Cryptographic Mythology, attributes his choice of the name Marutukku to a conversation he had with a friend concerning the Enuma Elish, telling us (after much other curious and wandering stuff) that his friend recommended the god Marduk’s third name to him, saying

The third name is MARUTUKKU, Master of the arts of protection, chained the Mad God at the Battle. Sealed the Ancient Ones in their Caves, behind the Gates.

Assange liked the idea, observing, “Even the very word MARUTUKKU looked like it had been run through a product cipher”.

A little later in the same document, he quotes from the Enuma Elish, and the phrases given above appear in the quoted excerpts from that text – although they are not present in the version “Based on the translation of E. A. Speiser, with the additions by A. K. Grayson, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, third edition, edited by James Pritchard (Princeton, 1969), pp. 60-72; 501-503, with minor modifications” that Assange offers us on the sibling-page at Enuma Elish.

As Dr. Rosenberg pointed out to me, “the quote — if it is a translation — differs from other translations I found on the Internet. It is more specific and extensive and ‘mythological.’”

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Okay, I’ve kept what may be the most practical (ie 21st century) “creative leap” made by my skittish and wandering mind for this, my penultimate paragraph.

Oxford’s Anders Sandberg blogs today about Assange’s application of network theory to conspiracies, quoting Assange as saying:

Conspiracies are cognitive devices. They are able to out think the same group of individuals acting alone Conspiracies take information about the world in which they operate (the conspiratorial environment), pass it around the conspirators and then act on the result. We can see conspiracies as a type of device that has inputs (information about the environment) and outputs (actions intending to change or maintain the environment).

And Anders’ summary of Assange’s position? “In short, conspiracies are a kind of collective intelligence enhancement.”

[ admission: I associate the name Anders Sandberg with some brilliant early net writings on role-playing games and the hermetic tradition – I'm hoping this is the same guy ]

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Finally, let’s go back to that enhancement of the Enuma Elish text. That phrase, “Sealed the Ancient Ones in their Caves, behind the Gates” struck me, too – it reminded me of the Chthulu Mythos of HP Lovecraft, and its apocalypse:

That cult would never die until the stars came right again and the secret priests would take Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild, and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.

And with that quote from Lovecraft, courtesy of Erik Davis, we have returned by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to the hermetically sealing and revealing world of John Dee.

And I don’t want no pussyfooting. You can’t succeed in tech by playing it safe, by taking baby steps. If you could, Sony and Microsoft would rule digital music. But they don’t, because they were so worried about rights holders, they forgot about users. And it’s all about users.
 
The users used to be excited about music.
 
Now they’re thrilled with offers on Groupon.
 
Shopping has become exciting!
 
Music is boring.

-Bob Lefsetz

[ cross-posted from Zenpundit ]

It’s easily missed. It’s part of the “small print” that most small-format paperbacks carry on the copyright page:

The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed.” Neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for the sale of this “stripped book.”

Here’s the picture that AQAP took of the copy of Dickens’ novel Great Expectations they inserted into one of their bombs recently – which they then published in issue 3 of their English language magazine Inspire:

And here’s the explanation that accompanies that photo, in a piece titled “The Objectives if Operation Hemorrhage” by their “Head of the Foreign Operations Team”:

This current battle fought by the West is not an isolated battle but is a continuation of a long history of aggression by the West against the Muslim world. In order to revive and bring back this history we listed the names of Reynald Krak and Diego Diaz as the recipients of the packages. We got the former name from Reynald de Chatillon, the lord of Krak des Chevaliers who was one of the worst and most treacherous of the Crusade’s leaders. He fell into captivity and Salahuddeen personally beheaded him. The name we used for the second package was derived from that of Don Diego Deza, the Inquisitor General of the Spanish Inquisition after the fall of Granada who along with the Spanish monarchy supervised the extermination and expulsion of the Muslim presence on the Iberian Peninsula employing the most horrific methods of torture and done in the name of God and the Church. Today we are facing a coalition of Crusaders and Zionists and we in al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula will never forget Palestine. How can we forget it when our motto is: “Here we start and in al-Aqsa we meet”? So we listed the address of the “Congregation Or Chadash”, a Gay and Lesbian synagogue on our one of our packages. The second package was sent to “Congregation B’nai Zion”. Both synagogues are in Chicago, Obama’s city.
.
We were very optimistic about the outcome of this operation. That is why we dropped into one of the boxes a novel titled, Great Expectations.

They may not have read the book or seen the movie, as Ibn Siqilli comments at the link above, but they do have long memories and/or a taste for history, and they are indeed sending signals with small details like the fictitious names of their addressees.

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This is in line with one of the basic premises of Islamic thought: that the world we inhabit is a world of ayat or symbols (the singular is ayah, and the word is also used to refer to the verses of the Qur’an, each of which is viewed as a symbolic utterance). Here, for instance, is a passage from Fazlun Khalid’s paper, Islam and the Environment, from the website of Jordan’s Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought:

The Qur’an refers to creation or the natural world as the signs (ayat) of Allah, the Creator, and this is also the name given to the verses contained in the Qur’an. Ayat means signs, symbols or proofs of the divine. As the Qur’an is proof of Allah so likewise is His creation. The Qur’an also speaks of signs within the self and as Nasr explains, “… when Muslim sages referred to the cosmic or ontological Qur’an … they saw upon the face of every creature letters and words from the cosmic Qur’an … they remained fully aware of the fact that the Qur’an refers to phenomena of nature and events within the soul of man as ayat … for them forms of nature were literally ayat Allah”. As the Qur’an says, “there are certainly signs (ayat) in the earth for people with certainty; and in yourselves. Do you not then see?” (Adh-Dhariat, 51:20, 21).

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BTW, I don’t think Penguin (or, for that matter, Charles Dickens) got paid for that book… whatever their expectations may have been.

[ cross-posted from SmartMobs ]

One little detail caught my eye in a Foreign Policy AfPak Channel blog report yesterday.

Whether their first language is Kashmiri or Farsi, the internet makes English the language of choice for protesters.

Kashmiris are slowly harnessing the power of the internet to create a communal digital protest and to forge a voice for themselves in the democratic realm of cyberspace. In 2010 Kashmir’s Generation Next, those who were born or young during the turbulence of the 1990s, found their voices. Unlike Kashmiri youth of the 1990s who were silenced given India’s media, U.N. and NGO blackout of Kashmir, new technologies and social media have made it possible for Kashmiris to begin to tell their own stories, to have a voice and a narrative that can reach beyond the Valley and into international consciousness. Facebook and You Tube have been transformative, creating a cadre of citizen-journalists and more artistic expressions in which Kashmiris create video montages set to music and images, providing a voice whether in Kashmiri or English, such as Kashmiri-American Mubashir Mohi-u-Din’s take on the Steven Van Zandt song Patriot.
 
This summer Kashmir’s youth have learned two lessons from other international struggles for justice: Iran and Palestine. In 2009 Iranian youth and social activists harnessed the power of social media as young Iranians took to the internet and street in the face of state suppression. Iranians demanded “where is my vote?” — the slogan, appearing curiously and ubiquitously in English, was meant for an international audience, to raise attention to the struggles occurring within the Islamic Republic of Iran after the results of the presidential election were called into question. Similarly, “I protest” cries out in a language that is not native to Kashmir but has united Kashmiris globally as they seek an international audience.

It is a bit peculiar how the left seems to be fond of terrorists. Bill Ayres and his wife, of course, are prime examples but not the only ones. Some of them have adoring books written about them. Naturally, Sarah Jane Olsen had become a “community activist” in her new identity.

Now we have a new example disclosed today by Andrew Breitbart. Bradblog is a left wing blog that has become very successful while attacking such people as James O’Keefe of the ACORN tapes, and it has spun numerous conspiracy theories about the right and election fraud, etc. It turns out that one half of the blog, which has received over $1.3 million in donations from such sources as Teresa Heinz’s Tides Foundation, is a convicted murderer and terrorist. His name is Brett Kimberlin although he was once known as the “Speedway bomber” as he terrorized a town in Indiana. He was also a drug smuggler and dealer and he eventually ended up with a 50 year prison sentence. He was paroled after only 13 years but, when he refused to make any payments to the widow of one of his victims who had won a civil suit against him, he went back to prison for four more years.

Today he is a prominent figure on the left and his story of how he went to prison, a total fabrication, has made him even more of a hero. It’s pretty interesting reading.

“Small Wars Journal has kicked off our first fundraising campaign.”

So to better serve you, the small wars community of interest, we are in the unpleasant but necessary position of coming to you, hat in hand, in an NPR-like scenario. We are counting on your contributions, coupled with support from grants and foundations, collateral income (advertising and referrals), and volunteer contributions of effort and content, to help us do more of what you seem to value and want us to do.

I learn a lot from the SWJ community and the folks that gather in the comments section. Sort of like the Chicago Boyz community and comments section. Hmm – thanks, CBer’s!

Not my boss's phone

Per Lex’s request, on this, the day America laid siege to Boston, MA, interrupting the otherworldly disputations of many a Brahmin:

Noted American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick once observed:

The ultimate in paranoia is not when everyone is against you but when everything is against you. Instead of “My boss is plotting against me,” it would be “My boss’s phone is plotting against me.”

My boss’s phone is rather nondescript. It’s color is a few shades darker than full oppression gray. It whimpers with the soul draining anonymity of the standard corporate VoIP phone design. It has a gray LCD, gray buttons with obscure functions, and an incomprehensible gray user manual.

It frequently finds itself on sales calls.

If it was a person, it would have no face.

My boss’s phone lacks the personality of the door from Ubik:

The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”
 
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”
 
“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”
 
In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
 
“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.
 
From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door.
 
“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out.
 
Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”

Of course the motives of doors are usually open and shut. The hang ups of boss’s phones are more cryptic:

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So, I bought this little iPhone app called “Sleep Cycle alarm clock“.

It’s an interesting idea. It uses the iPhone’s accelerometer to monitor the motion of your bed while you sleep. Like so:

It uses the motion of the bed as a proxy measurement for your REM states. When you’re not moving much you are more likely to be deep asleep and when you move more it means you’re more likely nearly awake. You set a 30 minute time window in which you wish to awake and the app wakes you up when your motion peaks so you wake up alert instead of dragging yourself up out the depths of REM and starting the day feeling vaguely stunned.

It’s a neat idea and the basic idea is scientifically sound but that’s not what I’m blogging about.

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A small, single-engine plane has crashed into a building here in Austin. It’s national news being covered on all the cable networks.

The site of the event is about five miles to the South of my house. I’ve driven by that building literally thousands of times…

… but for all that the crash directly affected me it might as well have been on the other side of the planet. Had my spouse not called, I wouldn’t have know about it until I did my lunch-break scan of Instapundit. I can’t even see the smoke. Everything I know about the event comes from the TV news.

In short, I have as much information about this local event as does someone elsewhere in America or, indeed, even the world.

Prior to the Internet, most news was local. An event such as this would have been known to the local population via the local media, and then only an abbreviated story would make it to the national news and no one outside the country would ever have heard of it.

What are consequences of this delocalization of news? Any individual only has so much time to spend consuming news. If we spend time consuming reports from all over the world, that means we displace our consumption of local news. We end up in the perverse situation wherein we know more about a community on the other side of the world than we do our own.

Will this further decouple us from our local communities? I know that in recent years I have paid less attention to the local news than I did pre-Internet. Will we grow more concerned about distant problems over which we have little to no input, and neglect local problems that we could actually fix?

I don’t know what the future will bring but this event feels very surreal.

If you use Gmail you may have noticed a new feature called “Buzz”, which is Google’s attempt to create something like Facebook.

Email and Facebook-type social networking services are different in function and in their users’ privacy expectations. Google erred by 1) assuming that users of email, the less intrusive service, would want to be signed up by default for the more intrusive social networking service, and 2) configuring the privacy settings of the social networking service in a way that can casually expose a user’s private information before the user has a chance, or even knows, to change the relevant settings.

Here is an example of the kinds of problems Google’s new scheme caused.

Here are instructions for restoring the (relative) privacy of your Google account.

Google will probably correct its blunder soon if it hasn’t already. But it’s interesting that they blundered in this way in the first place. They showed a Microsoftian level of cluelessness about privacy and security. It’s as if the Google offices were a monoculture of young computer geeks for whom clever new features are first and foremost cool toys with business upside and no downside, rather than complex systems that sometimes interact in unexpected ways and may have the potential to harm people who have something to lose. Oh, wait…

Google’s “don’t be evil” motto, always a cynical joke, deserves at least as much ridicule as does the DHS terror-threat color code. People in China learned this some time ago.

Don’t be stupid. Don’t trust Google or other free Web-service providers with information that you can’t afford to make public.

UPDATE: An attorney offers scathing and insightful critique of Google here and here. The second linked post gives additional advice on deactivating your Buzz account, including a link to Google’s own instructions for doing this.

Whether you love Wikipedia or hate it, if you have strong opinions about just about anything you are very likely going to want to go over there at some point and give them a piece of your mind. If you don’t prepare beforehand, you’re very likely going to be ignored or called names. Here’s how to avoid that fate.

1. Register for an editor’s account.
2. Pick two or three topics you’re interested in that are a bit off the beaten path and tend not to be controversial.
3. Create some solid, boring edits in your non-controversial topics, at least 10 edits if you’re not running an anonymizer or 100 edits if you’re coming in through an anonymizer like TOR.
4. Put up a basic description of yourself on your user page that’s noncontroversial.

Once you’ve done these things and your account has a bit of longevity to it you’ve passed the participation hurdle of Wikipedia and you’ve paid your dues. The classic Wikipedia excuses that are used to not listen to new users don’t quite apply to you. If a page is semi-protected, you can still participate in the discussion and any voting.

You also might consider continuing the non-controversial edits, just for fun. Outside hot button topics such as politics and furry webcomics (really, don’t ask), Wikipedia actually does very good, neutral work on a whole host of topics. If more people were involved, especially in underrepresented groups like conservatives, it would be a better tool for everybody.

One truism on Technology is that the initial media splash and the early adopters skew trends by making them seem to have more impact than they actually do. It is often the slower, longer “tail” of a trend that causes the most significant change, even if by then the media has passed the story by because it is no longer “hot”.

Two items happened last week that show a profound technology advancement that is by now ubiquitous and thus rarely commented on by the media. These two items are 1) the vast scope of online gaming and 2) Craigslist and its impact on retail.

While watching the Bears get killed on Sunday during half time, my nephew put on Call of Duty – Modern Warfare 2 which just got released in November, 2009 for Xbox. Already, there were masses of individuals online playing the game – there were over 800,000 users online AT THAT MOMENT. He joined a game, which was simple, and the intelligence split up the team members based on their levels so that the two teams were balanced. It is just amazing how easy it is to join these games and play infinitely, against other human opponents – this used to be hard to do (Dan and I played online a long time ago) and now it is not only a snap but there are hundreds of thousands of opponents ready to play a huge variety of missions at any time day or night. Also, Xbox, which was viewed as behind Wii and PS3, is now a leader in online gaming which is a huge differentiator against the other consoles, while this wasn’t viewed as a critical factor at the time the consoles all emerged.
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I usually read articles about business management the way my dog watches us eat dinner: with hope – never quite crushed, no matter how seldom fulfilled – that some toothsome morsel will come to me. This one was a nice meaty steak, fresh from the grill. If you have anything to do with corporate IT, whether as a member, manager, or customer, read it. The premise is that geeks value competence, logic, and contribution, and reward these attributes with respect. Looking at that statement logically, you can see that the contra-positive must also be true: if you are not getting respect from your IT department, you should look to yourself to see why not. If you ask a good IT person to do something dumb, illogical, or counter-productive, he will object. If you force the issue, you may get compliance but you will certainly forfeit respect. This is where a good IT department will start to rot. IT people tend to view management incompetence as a bug, and if they cannot fix it, they will come up with a work-around. If the bug is in corporate management, the IT department will pursue paths that they believe are better for the company’s interests than what they were told to do. If the bug is in IT management, there will be subversion, factionalism, and low morale, since the IT staff knows that IT management is not effectively representing them to the rest of the company. Either situation causes a split between IT and the rest of the company which may not even be recognized until there is a major failure.

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Popular Science bitches and moans about how the rumored Apple Tablet could ruin computing. [h/t Instapundit]

The Apple Tablet is rumored to be a cross between a laptop and an iPhone. The iPhone isn’t really a cell phone, rather, it is a handheld computer employing a touch interface with a cell phone built-in. It uses a slimmed down version of Apple’s MacOS X operating system that Apple uses on all its computers. This makes it easy to make an actual laptop-like device that uses the iPhone’s operating system complete with the special cell-phone associated attributes of the handheld.

In PopSci’s thinking, this is a problem because the iPhone’s default setup only allows people to use software written by independent developers but approved by Apple installed exclusively by being downloaded from Apple’s App Store. According to PopSci, this is bad because if this model spreads to all computers, people wouldn’t have the same level of flexibility to run any software they please on the new type of computer as they do on current ones.

PopSci needs to rethink that because without a new business model to pay for the creation and distribution of software, there won’t be any software for people to run. You can’t make money anymore writing and selling software using the current business models. PopSci isn’t saving freedom for end users, they’re killing it. Apple is saving the freedom of end users by making it possible for software developers who aren’t giant corporations to make a living at writing software.

The iPhone and its App store recently convinced me to return to writing software directly for end users and I am far from alone in doing so. The iPhone app store has ignited a renaissance in software development and PopSci shouldn’t be trying to abort that. We don’t need a software Bonfire of the Vanities.

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But beyond humor that misses, with some audiences or with all, what characterizes snark? Two things, I think. One is that it is an appeal to emotion – it is a statement with a particular affect, and the affect is an appeal to an attitude in which both writer and reader participate, but they participate in an exclusionary way. This is what makes it a branch of irony. Instead of arguing to everyone on the basis of shared reason so that, at least in principle, everyone could be included in the shared sentiment, snark depends upon exclusion. It is a refusal to offer a public argument, with the possibility of reasoned inclusion, and instead depends upon prior shared views that merely exclude because snark does not make an attempt to persuade. It is ‘affectively exclusionary’ in the language of moral psychology.
 
[...]
 
Two, because snark depends upon a prior shared commitment, it is a form of question-begging argument. Not precisely a form of argument, because it is about affect, not reason. So, more precisely, snark is the affective cognate of a question-begging argument, in which the sentiment of the conclusion assumes the sentiment of the premise. It assumes that one already shares the attitudes necessary to … share the attitudes.

-Kenneth Anderson

A recent article in the NY Times titled “Blogs Falling In An Empty Forest” described the apparently common phenomenon of people starting blogs, and then abandoning them. Per the article

According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned

The article went on to describe some common situations; a stay-at-home mom trying to earn some money from her blog, or talking about their personal beliefs and such. The blogs seemed to promise profitability, but didn’t deliver, even if they had a reasonable amount of page views.

The writer of the article was clearly a journalist and not an economist – the economist would have immediately proffered the explanation for why this occurs

The marginal revenue for this product ultimately will be equal to the marginal cost

And what is the marginal cost for setting up a blog? Why it is roughly zero, of course. And with millions setting up blogs and “chasing” (or not, in the case of LITGM and many other blogs we know and like) page views and advertising dollars, the market was instantly overloaded with choices and soon became a mass of abandoned blogs.
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Obama has nominated Cass Sunstein, who he knows from the University of Chicago, to be “regulatory czar.” Apparently, Sunstein has proposed that web sites be required to link to opposing opinions. He has argued that the Internet is anti-democratic because users can choose to view only those opinions that they want to see, and has gone so far as to say:

A system of limitless individual choices, with respect to communications, is not necessarily in the interest of citizenship and self-government,” he wrote. “Democratic efforts to reduce the resulting problems ought not be rejected in freedom’s name.

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I have stumbled across a couple of musings on the MSM from different perspectives that throw into sharp relief a lot of the problems with our present media that we regularly discuss on this site. First, from my friend Jim Wright comes an insider’s view of the biggest Alaska story to hit since Sarah Palin: “Alaskan Middle School Students Scare Moose to Death“. Read the rest of this entry »