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2003-08-31

One Small Voice

What's in a name.

Since I launched this weblog on September 13, 2001, its title has been the same as the nickname I use on Jabber: "stpeter". After two years, I've decided to finally give it an official name. The name I've chosen is "one small voice", which is in part an ironic reference to Ellsworth Toohey's New York Banner column in Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead, and in part a serious attempt to capture the fact that I speak only for myself, as well as to honor the most important minority of all: the individual. It's all about the power of one.

Posted on 2003-08-31 at 22:19. File under personal.

~ link ~

2003-08-29

More Guns, Less Crime

Understanding crime and gun control laws.

Last night I read John Lott's book More Guns, Less Crime. Lott exhaustively analyzes crime results for all 3,054 counties in the U.S. and the effect of gun ownership (and concealed-carry laws) on those rates. Without exception, crime rates go down when gun ownership goes up. The most significant impacts are found among urbanites in cities larger than 500,000 people, among women, and among minorities -- the groups that, paradoxically, tend to be most in favor of gun control.

Two details especially caught my eye. One is that U.S. gun control laws were originally Jim Crow laws: they were enacted to keep guns out of the hands of black people in the South (see, for example, Cottrol and Diamond, "The Second Amendment: Toward an Afro-Americanist Reconsideration", Georgetown Law Review 80, December 1991). The other is that, despite all the worries about accidental gun deaths among children, statistics show that many many more children die each year from automobile accidents, drowning, and such than from accidental gunshot wounds. In fact, about twice as many children die each year from drowning in bathtubs than die from gun accidents.

Posted on 2003-08-29 at 07:52. File under society.

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Remembrance

Four years ago today.

It was four years ago today that my father died. I still remember.

Posted on 2003-08-29 at 07:03. File under personal.

~ link ~

2003-08-27

Open Academy

MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative.

Wired has a great article about OpenCourseWare, a completely free website that provides course materials (handouts, video, quizzes, etc.) for numerous classes offered at MIT. Although most of the article focuses on 6.170 (Laboratory in Software Engineering), I note that the most popular course is 24.00: Problems of Philosophy. Yes, the eternal questions always beckon. :-)

Posted on 2003-08-27 at 21:29. File under technology.

~ link ~

It's the Economy, Stupid!

The link between freedom and prosperity.

Back in March I noted the existence of a fascinating study by Nigel Meek of the Libertarian Alliance, which investigated the correlations between economic freedom, civil freedom, and material prosperity. Today I found a similar if more focused report by the Fraser Institute (Canada) and the National Center for Policy Analysis (USA), in which the authors analyzed the relationship between economic freedom and economic prosperity for all American states and Canadian provinces.

The sad news for Canadians is that, except for Alberta, all provinces score below even the worst American states (such as West Virginia, Montana, Maine, and North Dakota) on both freedom and prosperity. "Fiscal federalism" (i.e., transfers from wealthier provinces to poorer provinces) seems to be mostly to blame, since it tends to punish economic freedom and prosperity in any one province.

Differences between American states can be quite pronounced. Low-ranking states on economic freedom tend also to be poor, and when freedom goes down, wealth goes down as well (cases in point: Montana and Oklahoma). By the same token, rising freedom leads to rising wealth (for example, Massachusetts). Little Delaware consistently leads American states on economic freedom, with Colorado, Tennessee, Indiana, South Dakota, and New Hampshire following close behind.

For those libertarians in the Free State Project, the choices are rather stark. Four free state candidates score near the very bottom of the state and local rankings: Alaska, Maine, Montana, and North Dakota. Idaho and Vermont don't do much better (sandwiched between Oregon and New York!). Wyoming is in the middle of the pack. Delaware, South Dakota, and New Hampshire all score near the top. The only area pulling NH down is "labor market freedom": minimum wage laws, government employment as a percentage of total employment, and occupational licensing. Since New Hampshire does well on the government percentage score (IIRC), it must do poorly on minimum wage laws and occupational licensing. Something for those freestaters to work on should New Hampshire be chosen (which I still think is the most likely outcome).

Posted on 2003-08-27 at 21:10. File under society.

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London Calling

Wherein I join the (Libertarian) Alliance.

Today I received an email from Chris Tame of the Libertarian Alliance, a leading British libertarian organization based in London. It seems that they'd like to republish some of my essays, which I'll gladly oblige them since I have great respect for their organization and their high-quality publication series. So now I'm reviewing and (where necessary) editing the essays they've requested. It's been years since I've read some of them, so it's quite possible my perspectives have changed over time -- after all, I never promised to agree with what I've written in the past. :-)

Posted on 2003-08-27 at 20:14. File under personal.

~ link ~

2003-08-26

The Wild West?

Crime in Europe vs. America.

Seems there's quite a conversation going on out there about relative crime rates in Europe vs. America. Many Europeans like to think of America as the wild west, with lots of shootouts, guns blazing, high noon, and all that. The statistics show that property crime (such as home break-ins) is higher -- often much higher -- in many European countries, including England, Sweden, and Spain. American murder rates are higher, but are just about the same as those in most of Europe if you exclude one population of Americans: young black men from the inner cities. Overwhelmingly, blacks are killing each other ("Between 1976 and 1999, 94% of black murder victims were killed by other African-Americans." -- USA Today). The same USA Today article notes that "nearly two-thirds of black homicides were drug related" during that same period. And young black men are not killing other because they're stoned or high, but because they're involved in the selling of substances that have been made illegal, thus astronomically increasing the price, leading to turf wars rather than the kind of marketing techniques that are normal in a free society. The standard response to U.S. murder rates is gun control. But in general guns are not the problem -- what raises American rates above the expected averages in other Western nations is the brutal mix of the war on drugs and an inner-city culture of ignorance and despair (in which a large part is played by the decrepit state of schools in the inner cities -- but that's a topic for another post). Don't you think maybe it's time to consider real solutions?

Posted on 2003-08-26 at 22:01. File under society.

~ link ~

Blackout Redux

The true picture.

Someone emailed me a JPG showing the extent of the blackout area, similar to the earth at night images I blogged about before I had a blog. It turns out that the blackout image was doctored (yes, it really was too impressive to be true). Snopes has the story. (Thanks to GeekPress for the link.)

Posted on 2003-08-26 at 11:44. File under society.

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Why Computer Viruses are Good

A special thank you to all virus writers.

Zone-H has a fascinating interview with Professor Samuel D. Forrester, one of the foremost immunologists in the world. His conclusion is that virus writers perform a valuable service to the Internet community by continually strengthening the Internet's "antibodies". As Nietzsche once said: "what doesn't kill me, makes me stronger". (Thanks once again to DizzyD for the news tip.)

Posted on 2003-08-26 at 11:38. File under technology.

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i18n

The pleasures of being a server admin.

One thing I love about Jabber is the ability to chat with people all over the world in real time. I get more opportunities to do this than most, since I'm a prominent member of the Jabber community. In addition, I'm a server admin on the jabber.org server, which means that I receive lots of test messages that new users send to the server. I just received a message from one such person, who turns out to be a professional musician from Portugal. His name is Pedro Carneiro and his website is here -- pretty cool stuff.

Posted on 2003-08-26 at 11:06. File under jabber.

~ link ~

Questions

To FOAF or not to FOAF?

Dizzy poked me earlier via Jabber about a blog entry from Shelley Powers detailing some concerns about FOAF. Absorption in progress.

Posted on 2003-08-26 at 10:56. File under jabber.

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2003-08-24

Aristotle's Man

Speculations upon Aristotelian anthropology.

Last night I finished reading Aristotle's Man: Speculations Upon Aristotelian Anthropology by Stephen R.L. Clark. It's been some time since I've read such a hardcore treatment of peripatetic philosophy. Clark's account of Aristotle's views on human nature (usually called "philosophical anthropology" in academic circles) and related topics is sympathetic. At times too sympathetic, if you ask me: there is very little I can respect in notions such as the Prime Mover, since they are so far removed from the evidence of the sciences or even common sense. Aristotle did better in his biological works than in his cosmological speculations, and Clark argues convincingly that there exist important connections between Aristotle's biological investigations and his ethical views. I also enjoyed the comparisons he draws between Aristotelian philosophy and Neo-Confucianism (they must strike most philosophers as exceedingly odd, but my study of Chinese philosophy indicates that there are valid parallels to be drawn here). All in all a stimulating read.

Posted on 2003-08-24 at 18:08. File under philosophy.

~ link ~

Guns

Moving from ignorance to knowledge.

Although I think that human beings have the moral and constitutional right to keep and bear arms, and that (as John Lott has shown) more guns mean less crime, I am not a gun owner. Yet. This weekend I started educating myself about handguns. I've found the Handgun Information Page (created by Chuck Hawks) to be extremely useful, with helpful pages about good guns for beginners, a guide to gun types, information about buying used guns (I always prefer to buy major items used if at all possible), and much more. Janis Cortese's handgun info page is also good, though less thorough. Hawks makes a compelling argument that a good target gun (.22 LR caliber) is the place to start, even though such a gun is not the one you'd want to be using in a defensive situation (the first priority at the beginning is to learn to shoot straight!). The Ruger P512 and KP512 seem like good target guns based on my research. Handguns from Glock get uniformly high reviews; though it seems they don't make a .22 caliber target gun, they do make fine weapons in higher calibers (both full size and compact). Massad Ayoob recommends .45 caliber handguns, such as the Glock 21 and Glock 30, but it seems that's not the place to begin given the recoil of large-caliber handguns. I've also started looking into training courses such as those offered by Colorado Safearms Academy and Fred Behnken (who seems to come up to Denver from Albuquerque). The NRA maintains a list of such training courses, too.

I'm still mostly ignorant when it comes to guns (as it seems most people are), which is a shame considering the importance of knowing how to defend oneself. But at least I'm slowly making progress in moving from ignorance to knowledge.

Posted on 2003-08-24 at 17:58. File under personal.

~ link ~

2003-08-22

Mini

Let's motor!

The new Mini Coopers are way cool! And the Mini website is awfully fun, too.

Posted on 2003-08-22 at 21:55. File under personal.

~ link ~

Blackout Babies

Urban legend or lived reality?

Supposedly it is an urban legend that birth rates go up nine months after events like blackouts and blizzards. This page at snopes.com has links to original speculative articles from the New York Times about the repercussions of the 1965 blackout in the New York City area, as well as a follow-up study from Demography magazine. The power went out on November 9, 1965 and, according to Lyle B. Borst, the height of the baby boom in the NYC area occurred on August 7, 1966. Urban legend or not, I can't help but notice that I was born on August 6, 1966 in Nassau County, Long Island (just outside New York City). Merely a coincidence? Perhaps. :-)

Posted on 2003-08-22 at 21:53. File under personal.

~ link ~

Stop the Drafts!

I-Ds yet again.

Today I submitted updated versions of four XMPP Internet-Drafts. When it rains, it pours. ;-)

Posted on 2003-08-22 at 21:44. File under jabber.

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2003-08-21

Conceptualism in Abelard and Rand

Some hardcore philosophy.

For those of you who like to mainline your epistemology rather than receive it diluted in the form of RDF and XML schema and such, I've just posted an essay of mine on conceptualism in the theory of knowledge. This paper was first published in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies last fall, so I figured it was about time to post it on the web.

Posted on 2003-08-21 at 22:14. File under philosophy.

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The Trouble With Triples?

RDF, the meta-utopia, and you.

Diz links to a apologia for RDF by Edd Dumbill, who in turns links to What is RDF? by Tim Bray. None of these three link to the skeptic's view, best expressed by Cory Doctorow in a rant entitled metacrap. RDF uses XML syntax, but is built around the notion of "triples", which should be familiar from logic class (you did take logic, didn't you?): "property P of resource R has value V" (or "entity E has a dimension D whose value is V"). Examples: "the author of JEP-0045 is stpeter", "the blog-URL of stpeter is http://www.saint-andre.com/blog/", "one friend of stpeter is dizzyd". We can often express these in terms of relationships: "stpeter authored JEP-0045", "dizzyd knows stpeter" (should be familiar from the foaf:knows element). In RDF, every resource (or entity, if you prefer that terminology) can be addressed as a URI (HTTP address, mailto, JabberID, what have you). And a value can be (but need not be) a resource. It's the property that captures the relationship. So if you can think in terms of relating a resource to a property by means of a specific value, you're halfway there.

But not all the way. RDF provides a model, but we still need to define the properties and relationships. That's where specific vocabularies like FOAF come in. While there are some missing pieces in the FOAF story, those pieces are being defined and refined over time, which I think will result in a fairly complete language for defining meta-data about people, entities, and their various relationships on the network.

One of the big questions is whether Doctorow's skepticism is warranted. Both Doctorow and Bray seem to be thinking mainly about a web of documents. Doctorow rightly claims that many people are too lazy to define metadata about their web pages, while Bray seems overly pessimistic regarding the ability of brute-force searching (his article was written before Google) and overly optimistic regarding the feasibility of spreading metadata throughout the document web. But the document web is not the whole network. In particular, FOAF concentrates on something new on the network: finding not information but people. Lo and behold, Jabber is mainly focused on people, too. And one thing we've been missing on the Jabber network since day one is a triumphant way to find people (and chatrooms, news feeds, pubsub nodes, etc.). Imagine that you create a Jabber account, provide some information about yourself (or upload an existing FOAF file), including your interests as well as URLs or mailtos for some friends -- and immediately you receive invitations to a chatroom or two, subscription requests from friends who've been waiting for you to create an account, notification of news feeds of interest, and the like -- that is the way we'll truly build a Jabber web.

Posted on 2003-08-21 at 22:12. File under jabber.

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Perennials

Classic bestsellers.

Book Magazine has published a list of classic bestsellers. Once can quibble with their criteria (I'd hardly classify Clan of the Cave Bear as a "classic"), but the list makes for interesting reading nonetheless. It's amazing that books like The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird continue to sell around 500,000 copies a year (someone's heirs are raking it in). My old favorites Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead come in at #19 and #35 (in 2002 they sold 130,000 and 81,000 copies respectively). No wonder the Ayn Rand Industry keeps growing. (Thanks to Eliot Landrum for the link.)

Posted on 2003-08-21 at 21:00. File under society.

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IM 1, Hollywood 0

Novel uses of instant messaging.

Who ever knew that instant messaging would foil movie marketing plans? The cluetrain just keeps on chugging! (Thanks to Ben Schumacher for the link -- sent via Jabber, of course.)

Posted on 2003-08-21 at 15:18. File under technology.

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2003-08-20

Location, Location, Location

A new JEP.

No, I'm not supposed to be thinking and talking about Jabber this late in the day (not according to my new regimen of life balance), but I had fun writing a new JEP today that enables a user to publish his or her current location. This kind of thing might be useful on college or corporate campuses, while cruising downtown with friends on a Saturday night (not that I do such things), etc. Plus it's yet another form of "extended presence" (a la moods and activities) that we're building on top of pubsub (thus closing any remaining gaps between XMPP/Jabber and other IM protocols). These little pubsub JEPS (I think I'll do one on "current song" next) are fun distractions while I'm trying to figure out how we'll solve much bigger problems of the kind that Diz blogged about last night.

Posted on 2003-08-20 at 21:36. File under jabber.

~ link ~

A Reminder

Some wisdom from Davy Crockett.

Also thanks to Claire comes this story about Davy Crockett. After his pioneer days and before his Alamo days, Crockett was what Robert Heinlein would call a congresscritter. Amazingly, he even learned to respect the Constitution in that job, thanks to a farmer named Horatio Bunce. Well worth reading, or re-reading as the case may be.

Posted on 2003-08-20 at 21:12. File under politics.

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PLUs

Comfort vs. diversity.

Jay Manifold points to an interesting article by David Brooks in The Atlantic, in which Brooks observes that Americans pay lip service to diversity, but don't actually care about it. Rather, we prefer to spend time with "people like us" (PLUs) -- whoever "us" happens to be. Subcultures abound. Greenies hang out with greenies, libertarians want to migrate to their own state, evangelical Christians have their own network of bookstores and radio stations and such, urbanites never leave the city, rural folks think the cities are dens of corruption, and most folks don't know how the other 95% live or think. Was it always this way? Perhaps. And perhaps it's not even a bad thing -- perhaps people are happier spending time with PLUs, perhaps a lack of diversity leads to societal harmony. But the cognitive dissonance of praising diversity and living in segmentation may not be healthy.

Posted on 2003-08-20 at 21:08. File under society.

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A LEAP

A hopeful sign.

Americans like to wage war, it seems. When we're not waging a real war, we're waging a "war on poverty" (back in the sixties) or a "war on drugs" (the currently popular campaign). Yet wars result in casualties, many of them from "friendly fire", and the results are by nature destructive. The war on drugs is no exception: it has poisoned farmers' fields in South America, sent millions of non-violent (mostly black and Hispanic) "offenders" to American prisons, increased crime, driven otherwise peaceful people into the black market, and artificially driven up the prices of certain psycho-active substances (but not others, of course, since alcohol and nicotine are still legal, not to mention yuppie drugs like Prozac), with predictable economic and societal results. Now a group of current and retired police officers has come out against the drug war. That, at least, is a hopeful sign. (Thanks to Claire Wolfe for the link.)

Posted on 2003-08-20 at 20:57. File under politics.

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Anti-Politics

A case against interest in the state.

Saith Nietzsche (Schopenhauer as Educator, section 4):

Every philosophy that believes that the problem of existence is touched on, not to say solved, by a political event is a joke-philosophy and pseudo-philosophy. Many states have been founded since the world began; that is an old story. How should a political innovation suffice to turn men once and for all into contented inhabitants of the earth? ...

Here, however, we are experiencing the consequences of the doctrine, lately preached from all the rooftops, that the state is the highest goal of mankind and that a man has no higher duty than to serve the state: in which doctrine I recognize a relapse not into paganism but into stupidity. It may be that a man who sees his highest duty in serving the state really knows no higher duties; but there are men and duties existing beyond this -- and one of the duties that seems, at least to me, to be higher than serving the state demands that one destroy stupidity in every form, and therefore in this form also. That is why I am concerned here with a species of man whose teleology extends somewhat beyond the welfare of a state -- with philosophers, and with these only in relation to a world which is again fairly independent of the welfare of a state: that of culture.

Nietzsche's anti-politics does not make him an anarchist. Far from it: for even the achievement of a society without the state would be "a political event", which ipso facto could not solve the problem of existence. Some who ascribe to the ideology of libertarianism seem to think that a libertarian revolution (or evolution) would suffice to turn men into contented inhabitants of the earth. Yet the truth is that such a political innovation, absent changes in outlooks and attitudes and philosophies and practices, would not result in universal human felicity. There are duties more fundamental than serving -- or fighting -- the state.

Posted on 2003-08-20 at 19:58. File under politics.

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2003-08-18

Standards

No, we're not talking about the IETF.

My musical tastes are, shall we say, eclectic. I like everything from Palestrina to the Police, and I've been known to listen in short succession to music as disparate as Bach's Art of the Fugue and Professor Longhair, Chopin and Spock's Beard, or James P. Johnson and Bob Marley. Way before the late-90s swing revival I was happily listening to Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, and the like. I've been playing that kind of music for quite a while, too, so I'm thinking I might record some of my renditions of classic jazz and show tunes once I buy some recording gear. Here are some songs I've got in mind:

• I'm Beginning to See the Light (Ellington)
• I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart (Ellington)
• Don't Get Around Much Anymore (Ellington)
• They All Laughed (Gershwin)
• Summertime (Gershwin)
• Stormy Weather (Arlen)
• Let's Fall in Love (Arlen)
• Over the Rainbow (Arlen) in this cool arrangement I've made for solo guitar
• I'm Crazy 'bout My Baby and My Baby's Crazy 'bout Me (Waller), which I first heard on the great Satch Plays Fats
• The Nearness of You (Carmichael & Washington)
• All of Me (Simons & Marks)
• Them There Eyes (Pinkard, Tracy & Tauber)
• Brother Can You Spare a Dime (Harburg & Gorney)
• Bird Alone (an amazing song from You Gotta Pay the Band by Abbey Lincoln)

Probably much work to be done on arrangements for tunes like this, though...

Posted on 2003-08-18 at 21:57. File under music.

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The Last Ideology?

More civilizational reflections.

Yesterday I posted about some of my musical pursuits, which I hope will distract me from working on Jabber all the time. My other major extracurricular interest is, of course, philosophy (supposedly musicians and philosophers scored highest on the old IBM Programmer's Aptitude Test -- maybe someday I'll translate my presumed aptitude into competency). The other day I received the latest issue of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, which contains the results of my research into Yevgeny Zamyatin and his influence on Russian-American novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand. I've got a short essay forthcoming in the next issue, too (some comments on Chris Sciabarra's paper regarding Rand's place in the philosophical literature on progressive rock music). In addition to a brief report on aspects of Rand's literary style (much ignored by most commentators in favor of writing about her ideas), I'm working on a number of other Rand projects (all of which I hope to bundle into a book at some point), including long papers on her political philosophy and aesthetics, in-depth explorations of her Aristotelian and Nietzschean influences, and some speculations on Rand's place in intellectual history (past, present, and future).

Although Rand has inspired much of the modern libertarian movement (and provided the impetus for my initial interest in philosophy), I'm coming to the conclusion that she will eventually be seen as a relatively minor figure in the history of ideas. Her philosophical insights are less suggestive than Nietzsche's and less foundational than those of someone like Aristotle, many of her essays are too topical to be of enduring interest, and I'm afraid that (to paraphrase Gertrude Stein) there's simply not enough "there" there when one digs into her philosophy. (This is not to speak of her novels: I continue to think that The Fountainhead will long be considered a classic of twentieth-century fiction.)

From a civilizational and historical perspective, Rand is a fascinating mix. She was culturally Jewish and socially bourgeois, born and raised in the Westernizing capital (Petersburg) of the core state of Orthodox civilization (Russia), came of age intellectually in the tremendous ferment of life after the world's first communist Revolution, was strongly influenced by the most individualistic (even pagan) of modern Western philosophers (Nietzsche), escaped to America at age 21 to make her fortune in the heart of the capitalist West, and fought some of her hardest battles in America not against the Left but against the Christian Right (who agreed with her anti-communism but loathed her atheism and egoism). Given her experiences, it's not surprising that she formulated an ideology to oppose both communism and convervatism. In many ways, I see her philosophy (and its offshoot, libertarianism) as the "last ideology" of the highly ideological twentieth century. The other ideologies -- communism, fascism, existentialism, and all those other "isms" -- have faded from the scene. Far from presaging "the end of history" and the triumph of humanism, liberalism (in the old sense), and capitalism, the collapse of those ideologies has brought new tensions (mostly intercivilizational). Ideologies seem increasingly out of date, and in my opinion Rand's "Objectivism" is looking shopworn as well.

That doesn't mean principles are out of date. Some of Rand's principles are core principles of Western civilization: respect for reason and for the individual, freedom of thought and action, and the like (though there is more to Western ideas than one finds in Rand: for example, she gives short shrift to phenomena such as cultural and political pluralism). But I think principles (and principled action) are more important than intellectual hygiene and ideological purity anyway. In addition, I'm coming to see that civilizations are bigger than philosophies: they are not just words, but consist of whole structures of practices and attitudes and technologies; if successful (as I think Western ones are), such structures and their constituent parts can exercise an irresistable pull on individuals throughout the world. More than abstract philosophy or ideology, the West became such a powerful force in human history because of things like economic freedom, legal competition, choice in marriage, efficiency in timekeeping, eminently practical and often downright fun technologies (eyeglasses, guns, printing presses, washing machines, phonographs, telephones, computers, and who knows what next), forms of entertainment such as sports and theatre and movies and popular music, fast means of travel (including the invention of tourism), freedom first for slaves and then for women, and in general a culture that makes personal fulfillment not just a distant possibility but a lived reality for the vast majority of the people in Western countries (and a growing number elsewhere, whether you call it "modernization" or "Westernization").

Compared to the juggernaut of Western civilization and modern ways of living, specific ideologies such as Objectivism and libertarianism (even if consistent with much of "the idea of the West") seem cramped and parochial to me right now. I'm glad that they are one ingredient in the stew, but I can't ignore all those other ingredients, as well. I guess that's why pluralism is such an important value in Western civilization.

Posted on 2003-08-18 at 21:23. File under society.

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2003-08-17

Some Notes

Musical musings.

Hi, my name is Peter and I'm a workaholic. For the last few years I've worked especially hard, since I'm blessed to play a leading part in the Jabber community. Unfortunately, working 60-80 hours a week leaves little time for other interests and pursuits, of which I have many. One of the longest-running for me is music. I started playing guitar and bass when I was 12 or 13, and I've been writing songs and instrumental pieces since I was 17 or so. I've never found the time (or money) to record my music, nor do I have that real performer's personality or a hunger to be up on stage, so my musical pursuits are not very public. But that doesn't make them any less important to me. Earlier today I had a longish talk about music with my friend Eric Nolte, who is a much more accomplished musician than I am (he is a pianist, violist, and composer when he's not flying airplanes for a living). Talking with Eric has renewed my dedication to becoming more actively involved in music. So I've just requested a number of music theory books from the Denver public library, as well as songbooks for Hoagy Carmichael, Yip Harburg, and writers of several other songs I've been meaning to learn. Eric pointed me to musictheory.net, which looks like a great resource. I'm doing some more research on home recording equipment (still leaning towards a Tascam 428 since supposedly it's Linux-compatible, and I'm still lusting after a Warwick electric bass). I need to force myself to participate in the next songwriter's open stage at Swallow Hill (on Thursday, September 11 -- not an auspicious date, I must admit), at which local songwriters can sing two or three songs of their own creation (I think I'd sing Center of the World and either Pre-Emptive Strike or She is Woman). I'm thinking I might attend the songwriting workshop being presented by Wendy Waldman on October 24 at Swallow Hill (I'll be at her concert that night, too -- she is an awesome songwriter). Since returning from vacation last week I haven't worked a single night or weekend, and I'm striving hard to keep that up so that I can give some time to my musical (and philosophical) activities. Yes, even a workaholic like me recognizes that balance is important...

Posted on 2003-08-17 at 20:55. File under music.

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2003-08-15

Looking Forward

Civilizational prognostication.

Thanks to Diana Hsieh, I just found the weblog of Stephen Den Beste (his last name means "the best" in Dutch). Lots of insights into North Korea, Europe's future (or shall we say European decline), and much else besides, all in prolific detail (how does he have time to type all those words?). His points are especially interesting from a civilizational pont of view; with regard to Europe, he seems to be arguing that Europe and America are diverging in significant ways, perhaps even to the point that their commonalities as bearers of Western civilization will sooner or later be overcome, with Europe turning to autocratic centralism (can you say Brussels?) and with American remaining more decentralized and vibrant.

Some of this sounds like Old Europe vs. Young America (which goes back at least to 1776), but on the other hand it's hard to argue with the evidence that Den Beste and Karl Zinsmeister cite: (1) economically, Europe is not nearly as dynamic as America with regard to productivity, job creation, and innovation; (2) militarily, Europe is positively supine; (3) demographically, Europe is facing an impending implosion, from which it will be extremely difficult to recover. The populations of countries like Sweden and Italy are actually declining, and that of Russia (admittedly not part of Western Europe) is falling precipitously, as is that of Japan. Falling populations mean more pensioners, fewer workers, and a lack of dynamism. Of course, current U.N. forecasts indicate that overall world population will begin to decline around 2040 or 2050, which will have interesting implications for the human race as a whole; but Europe, Russia, and Japan are at the leading edge of those trends. The only way that these three formerly dynamic parts of the world will regain their edge is through much higher fertility (unlikely) or massive immigration (nearly impossible in Japan, highly unlikely in Russia, and threatening to the very culture of Europe given that most of its immigrants come from Islamic civilization and that Europe does not have a strong track record of integrating immigrants into European culture). Any way you slice it, the future does not look bright for Europe, Russia, or Japan, and their role as world powers will increasingly be taken by China, East (and perhaps South) Asia, hopefully Latin America, and perhaps some more dynamic Islamic countries such as Indonesia or Turkey (if some Islamic countries can figure out how to transform their burgeoning populations into economic dynamism -- don't hold your breath).

Not that America is guaranteed to stave off demographic decline, autocratic centralism, and economic stagnation, either. But its immigrant heritage, federalist political structure, and fairly competitive economic system mean that its chances are better.

Posted on 2003-08-15 at 21:34. File under society.

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The Evolution of Freedom

More to read.

I simply must read Daniel Dennett's new book Freedom Evolves -- Simon Blackburn's review has me salivating! Thanks to Will Wilkinson for the link.

Posted on 2003-08-15 at 20:47. File under personal.

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FOAFing

The conversation continues.

Dan Brickley published a new FOAF spec yesterday. Well done, Dan!

Concurrently, DizzyD and I have continued our conversations about how to adapt FOAF to Jabber (or perhaps adapt Jabber to FOAF?). RDF, of which FOAF is a particular vocabulary (or set of vocabularies), has more similarities to Jabber than it might at first appear. In Jabber, everything above the level of XML streams and the three core XML "stanzas" (<message/>, <presence/>, and <iq/>) is built using child elements that are in other XML namespaces. If your client or server or other application doesn't understand that namespace, it's no great disaster -- you can just ignore it or (in the case of first-level children of IQ stanzas) return an error. This makes it easy for Jabberites to extend things and provide new kinds of information. Much the same is true in RDF-land, though even more explicitly than in Jabber.

Diz and I are still wrapping our heads around the RDF philosophy, details of the FOAF vocabularies, and various integration points between FOAF and Jabber (or, more widely, RDF and Jabber). There's a lot to chew on here, but I continue to see four main pieces:

1. describing profile data
2. publishing profile data
3. discovering profile data
4. setting permissions on who can view which bits of data

The existing FOAF vocabularies pretty much handle #1 (although there are various bits that need to be added in my opinion for minimum functionality, and a number of extensions that would be nice to have). In the FOAF world, it's widely assumed that HTTP takes care of #2, but on the Jabber network there are alternative ways of publishing information about yourself (the main ones right now being disco and pubsub, although other mechanisms are possible). It seems to me that discovery is sub-optimal in the HTTP world, though a number of folks in the FOAF community are writing "scutters" that scour webservers for RDF files; in Jabber I think we could do better, especially if we use existing contact list (roster) information to connect people together and thereby build out webs of people and other entities. The permissions issue simply must be addressed before I'd feel comfortable deploying user profiles on the Jabber network, since (e.g.) I might want my JabberID to be world-readable but allow only certain people to know my cellphone number. How do we define those "certain people"? We could base access decisions on roster groups, individual JIDs, trust relationships, community membership (e.g., everyone in a certain members-only chatroom), etc., along the lines of the privacy rules protocol in the XMPP IM Internet-Draft.

Something I said in conversation with Diz today struck me as true: that the Jabber community has created a network, but not (yet) a web. FOAF and RDF may provide the tools for building a true web of people and entities that "speak Jabber".

The conversation continues.

Posted on 2003-08-15 at 20:09. File under jabber.

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2003-08-14

The West

Thoughts on some recent readings.

Of late I've read The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order by Samuel Huntington (something of a modern sequel to Carroll Quigley's classic investigation The Evolution of Civilizations) and two books by Bernard Lewis on Islam: The Crisis of Islam and What Went Wrong?. Huntington argues that "The West" is in decline and has been for decades, whereas other civilizations (especially Sinic civilization centered on China and Islamic civilization) are ascendant. Given the importance of his thesis, it's surprising how little evidence he adduces for his claims. Certainly the West is less dominant than it used to be -- that makes perfect sense given that many parts of the world are modernizing fast thanks to Western innovations (though, as Lewis shows, the Islamic countries are mostly not in this group). But a funny thing often happens on the way to modernization: lo and behold, people's attitudes become more Western! Yes, every culture and civilization is different, and to a large extent we live in a multicivilizational world; but Huntington's notion (ascribed to Westernizers) that uniquely Western ideas like individualism could triumph unaltered in any other culture is a straw man, and does violence to the spread of ideas. Those who wish to maintain their own cultural traditions like to say that they are "modernizing" instead of "Westernizing", but in reality the border between the two is nonexistent. Thus the absurdity of (for example) Western clothing being considered good "modernization" for men in Turkey or Iran, but bad "Westernization" for women. Lewis notes that things like watches and clocks, printing presses, and competitive sports were all once considered Western (bad) in the Islamic world, but are now accepted as modern (good). Similarly, there are no longer any Islamic defenders of slavery, even though anti-slavery advocates were once considered apostates. Times change and so do ideas -- and the ideas that get accepted turn out, more often than not, to be Western. Could it be that's because so-called Western ideas are better? What a radical concept!

Posted on 2003-08-14 at 22:01. File under society.

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2003-08-12

Back

In the saddle and catching up.

Yes, I've returned from wonderful Red Lodge, Montana. Today I read (or at least scanned) many of the 5000-odd email messages that were waiting for me, posted some cool news stories at jabber.org, and incorporated changes to a few XMPP Internet-Drafts. So expect lots of blogging Real Soon Now [tm] about my travels and recent readings.

Posted on 2003-08-12 at 17:34. File under personal.

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2003-08-01

Outta Here

Montana bound.

Heading up to Red Lodge, Montana early tomorrow morning for some R & R. I'll be back on August 12. See ya then!

Posted on 2003-08-01 at 15:33. File under personal.

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