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2005-12-27

The Conceptual Nature of Art

Thoughts on the aesthetic theory of Ayn Rand.

I've just posted an essay of mine entitled The Conceptual Nature of Art, which contains the fundamentals of my interpretation of Ayn Rand's philosophy of art. Although I originally submitted it to The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, I've decided to remove it from consideration since the anonymous reader's comments requested a thorough overhaul and I simply can no longer muster the energy and enthusiasm to work that hard on interpreting Ayn Rand. So I present it as-is, and in the public domain. Enjoy!

Posted on 2005-12-27 at 19:05. File under philosophy.

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2005-12-20

A Little Red Reading?

Making me ILL.

According to a report in the Standard-Times of New Bedford, Massachusetts, a student at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth was visited by agents of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) after using inter-library loan (ILL) to request a copy of Mao's Little Red Book (which, supposedly, is on a DHS "watch list" of subversive material, especially because the student asked for the unabridged version). While it's not clear if the story is a hoax (doubts have been raised), the standard response is to recommend buying potentially subversive books with cash (though who could take Mao seriously these days?). My response is just the opposite: I have just requested that very edition through inter-library loan (at least I think I've requested the right edition -- perhaps I'll contact Brian Glyn Williams, one of the student's two history professors, about it) and will wait to see if DHS shows up at my door. Yes, even ILL can be a small vehicle for civil disobedience.

Update: Yes indeed, the story was a hoax.

Posted on 2005-12-20 at 12:03. File under politics.

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2005-12-19

JJ #25

Finally, another Jabber Journal.

I've just published Jabber Journal #25. Enjoy!

Posted on 2005-12-19 at 20:45. File under jabber.

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2005-12-18

Protestantism and Industrialism

Some historical speculations.

In a recent post about the causes of the industrial revolution, I asked:

Max Weber tried to explain the exit by reference to the Protestant work ethic. But why did the peoples of northwestern Europe (English, Scots, Dutch, Germans, Danes, Swedes, Norwegians) become Protestant in the first place?

In Plough, Sword and Book (pp. 106-107), Ernest Gellner provides the following reflections on Weber's thesis:

A Protestant world is one in which the sacred is absent (hidden) or, if you prefer, in which it is evenly diffused. Hence there are fewer bounds and prescriptions surrounding economic activities. Existing practices, and the combination of elements which they embody, cease to be hallowed. So the way is free to innovation and growth by means of new devices, by new combinations of elements. Instrumental rationality becomes more common and acceptable. The diffusion of moral authority, the stress on the internalized voice within each believer, rather than on the special authority of some, means that Protestant respect for codes of conduct is less dependent on public enforcement, on the anticipation of reciprocation. Hence it becomes more genuinely trustworthy, and thus more conducive to the flourishing of economic activity.

Trust becomes far more widespread, and less dependent on external sanctions. Those governed by inner sanctions will behave in a trustworthy manner without first waiting to make sure that others do so as well. This breaks the vicious circle of distrust, and sets off a kind of moral multiplier effect. If a man's motive for economic activity is the desire to demonstrate his saved status and to fulfil his calling, he is less likely to cheat than if he is activated by the desire for gain. His rectitude is not at the mercy of his anticipation of the rectitude of others. Thus Protestantism has a double (and somewhat contradictory) role: it makes men instrumentally rational in handling things, and non-instrumentally honest in their dealings with each other.

The dominant morality is one of rule-observance rather than of loyalty, whether to kin or patron, and whether political or spiritual. The spiritual egalitarianism leads to the participatory self-administration of the sect. This sets a political precedent, and provides training for participatory and accountable politics. The stress on scripturalism is conducive to a high level of literacy; scripturalism and an individualist theology lead naturally to an individualist theory of knowledge. This suggests the sovereignty of the individual consciousness; the right, and duty, of the individual to judge for himself, and to refrain from passing on responsibility to some external authority. Claims to truth are to submit to the bar of individual and symmetrical judgement: neither claims nor judges can claim special, unequal privilege.

Gellner emphasizes that, historically speaking, these attitudes are quite out of the ordinary. But which came first: the Protestantism or the free inquiry, innovative economic endeavor, diffusion of moral authority, widespread trust, non-instrumental honesty, inner rather than outer sanctions, scripturalism, rule-observance, spiritual egalitarianism, self-government, and sovereignty of the individual consciousness? Did the Germanic peoples already possess some of these attributes (perhaps in attenuated form) before adopting (or, rather, creating) Protestantism?

Consider the following story, related by Paul Johnson in A History of Christianity (pp. 125-126):

On 23 December, in the year 800, a lengthy meeting took place in the Secret Council Chamber of the Lateran Palace in Rome. Among those present were Charlemagne, the Frankish leader, the Pope, Leo III, Frankish, Lombard and Roman ecclesiastics and generals, and two French monks from Tours, Witto and Fridugis, who represented their abbot, the Yorkshireman Alcuin....

Since the disappearance of the last 'western' emperor in 478, the Christian West had acknowledged the emperor in Constantinople as the sole international authority. But his power, if legitimate, was in practice now virtually non-existent west of the Adriatic. Italy, Gaul and Germany, and Rome itself, were in the possession of the Frankish armies. Was it not an axiom of common sense, as well as a proposition endorsed repeatedly by the Scriptures, that a sovereign should rule as well as reign? Was not the great Charles the effective master of the West? ... There was, therefore, a strong case for Charles to be accorded some form of imperial dignity. He was undoubtedly the greatest monarch in the West, perhaps in the entire world. As Abbot Alcuin, who was in effect his chief adviser, had pointed out, the English had evolved a system under which the most powerful and successful of their many kings was given the title of bretwalda, and exacted homage and obedience from the others. This argument, which presented the imperial idea in Germanic terms which Charles could grasp, was again put forward by Alcuin's two delegates at the council. And it appears to have proved conclusive. Charles agreed to become western emperor, and ceremonies of homage seem to have been carried out on that day.

Two days later, in the great basilica of St. Peter's, Charles and his generals celebrated Christmas, and the Pope insisted on performing a Roman ritual under which he placed a crown on Charles's head, and then prostrated himself in an act of emperor-worship, the crowd of Romans present calling out a monotonous series of ritual acclamations. Charles was taken aback by this weird, eastern enactment, which was completely alien to anyone coming from north of the Alps, with a Germanic background. And it seemed suspicious to him that the crown, which he had won by his own achievements, should be presented to him by the Bishop of Rome, as though it were in his gift. Charles said afterwards that, if he had known what was to happen, he would have refused to attend mass in St. Peter's that day.

Here we have a telling difference between the Germanic attitudes of the Franks and the Mediterranean, almost eastern, attitudes of the Romans -- presaging in some ways the future emergence of Protestantism north of the Alps (although before then the Frankish element of French society would be submerged into more Roman ways of thinking and living).

While in part these attitudes of the Germanic tribes probably preceded their exposure to Christianity, in part they may have derived from the fact that most of the Teutons were first converted not to orthodox Christianity but to the Arian "heresy" by the fourth-century missionary Ulfilas (the OED contains a quotation to the effect that "all the other Teutonic kings [other than Chlodwig] were Arians"). As Paul Johnson notes (p. 128), "this fact quickly became the chief differentiation between the 'barbarians' and the Romans, who accepted the Trinitarian doctrine worked out by Augustine." The southern tribes were eventually de-Arianized (although one wonders if the Arian legacy of the Visigoths in southern Gaul partially resurfaced later in the form of the so-called Albigensian heresy propounded by the Cathars), but the Arian beliefs of the more northerly tribes (especially the Goths and Lombards) lingered for some time and may have combined with existing Germanic attitudes to predispose those areas to their later break with Catholicism. Among the Germanic tribes the Franks were unique in converting directly to orthodox (Nicene or Trinitarian) Christianity rather than first to Arianism -- does that difference also presage the later fault line between French Catholicism and the Protestantism of Germany, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, England, and Scotland? Only further research will tell (much of this is purely speculative on my part).

(Cross-posted at Albion's Seedlings.)

Posted on 2005-12-18 at 20:11. File under society.

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2005-12-16

Politically Homeless

Life on the long tail of politics.

I'm politically homeless -- part of what Arnold Kling calls the long tail of politics. Although my political philosophy is generally libertarian or Jeffersonian ("that government governs best which governs least"), I stopped supporting the Libertarian Party several years ago because it is a feckless, corrupt organization. Yet the issues that are important to me -- reforming eminent domain, ending the War on Drugs, eliminating corporate welfare and trade barriers (especially with the so-called Third World), maintaining reasonably open immigration, encouraging greater cooperation within the Anglosphere (e.g., sojourner status for citizens of the English-speaking nations), freeing education by giving the schools to the teachers, ending occupational licensing and other restrictions on making a living, safeguarding the right to self-defense, pushing as much power as possible down to the local level, etc. -- are not important to the Republicans or Democrats. These days I tend to follow Kling's advice to vote against incumbents, though I doubt that does much good. Better, I think, to support organizations that are focused on particular issues (e.g., the Castle Coalition on eminent domain reform). Too many people associate politics with electoral politics, which is a hopeless arena because of gerrymandering and the sheer size of electoral districts. I hold out more hope for initiatives, referenda, and judicial activism (cf. the Institute for Justice). While I think it would help to split electoral jurisdictions into smaller, more manageable units (along the lines of Jefferson's call to divide the counties into wards, Kling suggests local governments would best represent at most 3,000 people), even that reform would be limited in its effectiveness without a change in how we fund government (now, if those local governments collected all the taxes and fed them up the line to regional, state, and federal governments, we might get somewhere).

Further, as I mentioned the other day, most places get the government they deserve. Translation: culture drives politics, not the other way around. Which implies that if you really want to change the political scene, fundamentally you need to change the culture. I happen to think that part of changing the culture is finding common ground among those in the Long Tail and supporting political changes that will change behavior in healthy ways (e.g., strengthening civil society, encouraging volunteerism, reducing dependency on government programs). But such changes are not always (or even are seldom) palatable to the general public (and certainly not to politicians), thus the need to change underlying cultural attitudes as well.

I tend to think of it this way. Progressives love the slogan "If you want peace, work for justice." But what is justice? Progressives think of it as so-called social justice: redistribution of wealth and such. Those in the Jeffersonian tradition tend to think of it as freedom of opportunity, equality before the law, etc. So back in my salad days as a libertarian I used to add a second slogan: "If you want justice, work for freedom." Catchy, eh? But what's it mean? Doesn't that just reduce you to what Ayn Rand called a "hippy of the right"? I think I stopped being committed to the Libertarian Party the first time I saw a television advertisement for Harry Browne, whose campaign slogan was "Freedom Now!". How petulant! How adolescent! That's no better than the damn labor unions chanting "What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now!" out on the picket line, or the multiculturalists with their cries of "Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go!"

So my old friends the Randians would supplement my second slogan with a third and a fourth: "If you want freedom, work for individualism." and "If you want individualism, work for reason." (since Rand and her followers reduce everything to philosophy and by god we've got to get everything down to metaphysics and epistemology or we're just not being radical enough, always in the good sense of focusing on root causes of course). Yet the more history I read the more I see that philosophy is not the cause of everything, or even of much. Consider some of the most significant transitions in history: human beings did not change from hunter-gatherers to farmers because of a philosophy of "agriculturalism", from farmers to engineers and factory workers because of a philosophy of "industrialism", from oral to literate because of a philosophy of "chirographism", from the written world to the printed word because of a philosophy of "typographism", from the printed word to the electronic word because of a philosophy of "digitalism", etc. These developments were long-term secular trends -- driven not only or primarily by ideology (religion and philosophy) but by a wide range of environmental, intellectual, technological, military, political, economic, and social factors -- what we can broadly call cultural factors. Thus I'd agree with my old Randian friends that "If you want freedom, work for cultural change" -- but I no longer think that cultural change is a monolithic process rooted in philosophical-religious ideas. The reality of human history is much more complex than that.

I liked being a Randian and a libertarian. If social psychology teaches us anything, it is this: it's comfortable and comforting to belong to a group. It's much easier to be a member of a group (even a group of individualists!) than it is to stand alone. Many people are happy to identify with groups as amorphous as Republicans or Democrats, as if that were the extent of the political spectrum. Others define themselves as members of smaller groups within the Long Tail (Greens, libertarians, socialists, Trotskyites, or what have you). Yet if you remain true to your own uniqueness, you will find that you have similarities to (and differences from) most of those groups, that you can work together with their members on certain issues and part ways on others, and that the opinion that matters most is not that of some arbitrary amalgamation but the one small voice of your own conscience.

Repeat after me: "I am an individual." :-)

Posted on 2005-12-16 at 20:51. File under politics.

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Bill of Rights Day

Celebrating American freedom.

Yesterday was Bill of Rights Day, which celebrates the day in 1791 when the American Bill of Rights was ratified.

(Poster courtesy of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership.)

Be sure to celebrate by exercising your rights. Choose from the following:

1. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
2. A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
3. No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
4. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
5. No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
6. In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.
7. In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.
8. Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
9. The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
10. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

Note especially Amendment IX -- the rights of the people are by no means limited to those listed in the Bill of Rights -- and Amendment X -- the Federal government has only those certain powers granted to it by the Constitution and reserves all other powers to the states or to the people. In combination, Amendments IX and X mean that individuals are to be fully respected in their persons and property and that a very limited government exists only to serve the people. Would that it were still true...

Posted on 2005-12-16 at 19:27. File under politics.

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2005-12-15

Jingle

Jingle all the way!

Today we (i.e., the Jabber Software Foundation) released Jingle, a set of XMPP extensions for negotiating peer-to-peer multimedia sessions between Jabber clients. The first session type is Jingle Audio, which will enable voice over IP (VoIP) on the Jabber network. Future session types (still to be defined) will include video, file sharing, app casting, gaming, and who knows what else. Additional specifications are forthcoming that will define how to gateway from Jingle to SIP, H.323, and IAX.

Jingle came about because Joe Hildebrand and I received quite a bit of feedback on TINS, and most of it was not positive. :-) So we holed up in a conference room for a week, explored use cases, and started mapping out a protocol. The result was an early draft for a better way to do multimedia negotiation over XMPP. After I announced this effort on the Standards-JIG discussion list, Scott Ludwig of the Google Talk team contacted me and said Jingle was quite close in spirit and even syntax to their VoIP signalling protocol and would it make sense to merge efforts? That seemed quite sensible to me, so Scott and I got to work on harmonizing the protocols. Joe Beda contributed a lot of great feedback as well, so I added him as a co-author. We've been working in semi-private mode for the last two months or so, and decided it was finally time to go public, resulting in the specs published today.

Folks may wonder why we need Jingle. Why not just use SIP, H.323, IAX, or some other open signalling protocol? Once we realized that TINS was not the answer, we concluded that two approaches were possible:

1. Tell developers to write dual-headed clients (probably XMPP and SIP).
2. Write a real XMPP signalling protocol.

Option #1 turns out to be harder than you might think, and we specifically received feedback from a large company that had implemented such a solution that it was not a good solution, and that they wanted something like Option #2. That feedback fueled the fire, so we got busy on the XMPP signalling extensions. The rest, as they say, is history. ;-)

Naturally there is still a lot of work to be done -- these are just version 0.1 specs and we'll work hard to refine them over the next few months (join the conversation). But I think Jingle gives us a strong foundation not just for VoIP but for video, gaming, file sharing, app casting, whiteboarding, and a whole range of other multimedia session types. So stay tuned for more exciting developments...

Posted on 2005-12-15 at 11:51. File under jabber.

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2005-12-14

Over Extended

Why XMPP trumps SIMPLE.

The other day I was trying to describe to someone why XMPP is a better technology than SIMPLE not just for instant messaging but for a whole range of real-time collaboration applications. Here's the way I see it:

1. SIP is a complicated technology.

2. SIMPLE is a set of fairly complicated extensions to SIP for basic messaging and presence.

3. In order to build really interesting applications with SIMPLE, you need to extend it even further since it supports only basic messaging and presence.

4. But by the time you extend the extensions, you're overextended -- and no software developer wants to be overextended because that means a long time to market and unnecessary application complexity (if you can even build what you need in the first place).

By contrast, XMPP has flexibility, extensibility, and simplicity built into the core. XMPP is a simple but powerful XML routing technology, and XML is the lingua franca of modern application development. The result: it's damn easy to extend XMPP so you can build the kind of interesting applications that produce competitive advantage for your organization. Competitive advantage means you are successful and your competitors aren't. It doesn't get any more simple than that. ;-)

Posted on 2005-12-14 at 16:15. File under jabber.

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2005-12-13

Getting a CLUE

LUGging again.

Around four years ago I gave talks about Jabber at all the local Linux User Groups. Now it seems that I'm making the rounds again. Tonight I'm giving a talk at a meeting of the Colorado Linux Users and Enthusiasts in Denver and I just received an email from the good folks at the North Colorado Linux User's Group in Fort Collins asking me to present there sometime in 2006. If you're in Colorado and are interested in Jabber, feel free to stop by and say hello. :-)

Update: I'm now scheduled to speak at NCLUG on January 10.

Posted on 2005-12-13 at 09:13. File under jabber.

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2005-12-09

The Not So Great White North?

What happens when you don't have the Second Amendement.

Canadian Prime Minister (for at least a little while longer) Paul Martin wants to ban handguns. It seems that he is not familiar with the research of John Lott.

Posted on 2005-12-09 at 08:37. File under politics.

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2005-12-08

Dreaming

America still beckons.

Going back through some old bookmarks, I came across an article by Joel Kotkin about the continuing European migration to America, especially among the most energetic, creative, entrepreneurial of Europeans. The phenomenon doesn't bode well for Europe, but it's a testament to the continuing vitality of American culture.

Posted on 2005-12-08 at 21:59. File under society.

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The Gift of a Common Language

Churchill on English.

Herewith a quote from Winston Chuchill (speech at Harvard, 1943):

The great Bismarck -- for there were once great men in Germany -- is said to have observed towards the close of his life that the most potent factor in human society at the end of the nineteenth century was the fact that the British and American peoples spoke the same language.

That was a pregnant saying. Certainly it has enabled us to wage war together with an intimacy and harmony never before achieved among allies.

This gift of a common tongue is a priceless inheritance, and it may well some day become the foundation of a common citizenship. I like to think of British and Americans moving about freely over each other's wide estates with hardly a sense of being foreigners to one another. But I do not see why we should not try to spread our common language even more widely throughout the globe and, without seeking selfish advantage over any, possess ourselves of this invaluable amenity and birthright.

Posted on 2005-12-08 at 21:43. File under language.

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Exit Strategies

Wealth and poverty.

Jim Bennett points to an interesting and important article by Arnold Kling that asks: what causes prosperity? I'm currently reading The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David Landes, which seeks to answer the same question. No one really knows. Kling points out that poverty does not have a cause: it has always been the default state of humankind. What requires explanation is wealth. Specifically, why did northwestern Europe (led by England) begin to break out of the endless cycle of poverty around 500 years ago? Ernest Gellner calls this "The Exit". Max Weber tried to explain the exit by reference to the Protestant work ethic. But why did the peoples of northwestern Europe (English, Scots, Dutch, Germans, Danes, Swedes, Norwegians) become Protestant in the first place? Landes puts great weight on the scientific outlook that emerged first in Italy but that passed by southern Europe and passed to northwestern Europe beginning with the burning of Giordano Bruno, the trial of Galileo, and the Inquisition. But why were the English and Dutch much more predisposed to scientific inquiry and open publication of new ideas? Others point to the corruption of the Portuguese and especially Spanish (who originally dominated the Atlantic trading area) because of the influx of gold from the New World and the overwhelming presence of slave labor on the plantations of Brazil and the Caribbean. But why were the Spanish and Portuguese empires more susceptible to these corrupting influences than were the English and Dutch empires? Everywhere you look, causes are not ultimate but can be pursued further back into history, until the evidence becomes less and less substantial although all the more tantalizing. (I suppose that's what makes history so fascinating.)

Yet this exercise is not of merely historical interest. No people on earth want to remain in poverty (even if their government wants to keep them there). Most countries would love to replicate the success of northwestern Europe and north America if they only could. Some countries, such as Japan and Korea, have pretty much succeeded. Other countries, such as China and India, are trying hard to do so. Other countries, such as Argentina and the Philippines, have tried but not succeeded very well. Other countries have not even tried (vast swaths of Asia and Africa). Yet there is no one formula for success. All we know is the Anglosphere social model seems to work extremely well, and that social models that are similar to the Anglosphere model in certain ways (high trust, open minds, mostly open markets, etc.) tend to work well enough to produce significant, sustainable wealth. But there is no magic bullet. As a long-time libertarian I used to think that removing government impediments was the answer, but that approach seems awfully simplistic to me now. Government emerges from culture and social life, which means that unfortunately most places get the government they deserve (corrupt in low-trust cultures, hegemonistic in traditionalist cultures, etc.). Just changing the government from the outside (cf. Iraq) or, for you anarcho-capitalists, removing it altogether (cf. Somalia) will not result in prosperity in the absence of a culture of trust, individualism, high risk-tolerance, entrepreneurialism, respect for work and education, open inquiry, literacy, science, and technological innovation (or at least most of those, and probably more). How many cultures can lay claim to even half of those attributes? Sadly, not nearly enough.

David Landes, too, stresses the importance of culture. The countries of northwestern Europe got a head start on everyone else in the modern industrial world because of their distinctive cultural traits, and Britain got a 100-year head start among those nations because of the Anglosphere social model. Latin America mainlined an Iberian culture of (at the time) militarism, corruption, and Inquisition -- a legacy it has found hard to shake even today. The Islamic world has lacked the traits of open inquiry, commercial trade, and learning from other societies for hundreds of years, and was not helped more recently by the so-called scientific socialism of post-colonial elites. Most African nations are even further down the ladder of civil society, honest dealing, education, and health -- a whole continent plagued by misfortune. Since the end of World War II the only real exceptions to a growing divergence between the West and the Rest have been in East Asia, led by Japan, joined by Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and more recently places like Malaysia and China. Landes ties the East Asian success stories to hard work, serious thrift, clear-thinking honesty (both to recognize one's plight and communicate about how to change it), extreme patience, and tenacious perseverence.

These are not pleasant conclusions to have to draw. We'd all like everyone to be rich and happy. Furthermore, tying wealth and poverty to culture seems to personalize it in ways that are simultaneously triumphalist and demeaning (we're better off because we're better, and you're worse off because you're worse). Easier, then, to avoid hard evidence and difficult conclusions. Yet, no matter how you slice it, culture matters. Thankfully, people have free will and can choose to face reality, understand their problems, work harder, save and invest more, focus on production over consumption, demand better governance, criticize in a constructive way, set higher goals, and work to achieve them. The painful experiences of economic deprivation, military defeat, ecological disaster, and the like can provide means to focus the mind and inspire effort; so can the image of a better life to be had by emulating those who blazed the path to modernity -- not following them, but joining them as equals in moving humankind forward scientifically, economically, technologically, and culturally.

None of this is going to get any easier. We understand more than we ever did about the role of cultural traits in societal success, but that does not necessarily make cultural change a breeze: it is still a tough, confusing slog. And the fact that life gets faster all the time may make it easier to leapfrog into modernity, but also harder for cultures to adapt. Instead of the centuries it took Britain and Europe to create modernity, cultures such as Korea, China, and India have only a few generations to do it. And even though human beings are deeply flexible, it's an open question whether people can change that fast. The coming Singularity revolutions in info-, bio-, and nano-technology will increase the pace of change even more, to levels that right now seem inconceivable. Those changes will challenge all cultures and civilizations, the Anglosphere included.

May you live in interesting times...

Posted on 2005-12-08 at 21:37. File under society.

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Academic

Why I generally don't like academics.

After attending an academic gathering recently, I got to thinking about why I generally don't like university professors. It's not just that most of them have an ego the size of Canada, think they're morally and intellectually superior to us mere professionals, and have political views somewhere to the left of Fidel Castro. No, I realized it's because they are so insulated from the market yet so disdainful of the very market economy that makes it possible for them to have their cozy little existence safely ensconced within the groves of academe. Heck, even the free-market professors I respect tend to teach at large, government-run institutions of higher learning -- it's not as if they are educational entrepreneurs out there exposing themselves to market forces by starting small, innovative, or for-profit schools.

Posted on 2005-12-08 at 18:45. File under personal.

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This and Next

A consistent temporal confusion.

The temporal distinction between "this" and "next" can be confusing to those who are learning English, as I found out today by trying to describe it to someone. Consider the following exchange between two co-workers on the morning of Thursday, December 8:

Do you have time to meet this week? [Translation: Thursday or Friday, December 8 or 9]

Nope, I'm booked up, now about next week? [Translation: Sometime between the following Monday and Friday, December 12-16]

That won't work, I'm at a conference in New York all next week. How about the week after next? [Translation: Sometime between December 19-23]

OK, the week after next works for me, let's talk next week to set up a time.

Got it? This week means "the week we're in right now". Next week means "the next week that will happen after this week we're in right now". The week after next means "the week that will happen after next week".

I think we talk this way because we divide time into weekends and weeks. So this week is the Monday through Friday of the week we're in right now, but "this weekend" is the weekend that directly follows this week -- in our example, Saturday and Sunday, December 10 and 11. By contrast, "next weekend" is the weekend that directly follows next week -- in our example, Saturday and Sunday, December 17 and 18. (Just like "this year" is the year we're in right now whereas "next year" is the year that follows this year -- thus the silly habit of saying "see you next year" on December 31.)

It may be confusing, but at least it's consistent.

Posted on 2005-12-08 at 18:29. File under language.

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Matrix

Comparing the features of Jabber/XMPP and SIP/SIMPLE.

I've started to work on a matrix that compares the features of Jabber/XMPP protocols with SIP/SIMPLE protocols. It's a rough draft so far, but feel free to send flames to my preferred contact addresses and I'll incorporate feedback into the next version.

Posted on 2005-12-08 at 11:54. File under jabber.

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2005-12-07

Hypocrisy?

No public on the transport.

A while back I started taking bus and light rail to work when I don't ride my bike (and with a high temperature today of 3°F -- that's -16°C for you non-Americans -- I wasn't about to ride my bike!). One thing that mystifies me is the lack of a public on public transport. Last night, during an admittedly cold and snowy commute, but in the middle of the normal rush hour, I was the only person on the bus headed east from the light rail station. Where are all those enviro-conscious folks who voted for FasTracks? I'm sure my neighborhood is full of them, but they're not riding the bus. So who's more hypocritical: someone who voted for a massive government-funded public transport project but doesn't use public transport, or someone who voted against said project but uses public transport?

Posted on 2005-12-07 at 20:50. File under politics.

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2005-12-05

Sieve

Standardized email notifications via Jabber.

I've just submitted draft-saintandre-sieve-notify-xmpp-00 (see here), which defines a standardized method for receiving notifications about new email via Jabber/XMPP, using the Sieve email filtering language. The method is a profile of the Sieve extension for instant notifications being defined in the Sieve working group. Just one of those fun little side projects we all need to keep us sane...

Posted on 2005-12-05 at 21:34. File under jabber.

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