The Compulsive Explainer

Unstable Human Societies

For hundreds of thousands of years humans lived in stable societies. But with the advent of Civilization, this changed abruptly. Civilizations came and went in endless succession. There have been no shortage of reasons for this, but none has even come close to being satisfactory. 

The reason for this is probably because human societies are extremely complex and difficult to understand - or in computer terms: difficult to model. Large numbers of feedback loops, both positive and negative, with different timings, and with different interactions, are in action at the same time.

Consider something much smaller: The Military's Plan For The Afghan War Surge, In One Giant Chart. Click on the image to get a full-size version. Five minutes looking at this, or even five seconds, will make you doubt Obama's war plan - if he even has one. You have to give the Pentagon credit though, for even trying to understand the problem. If it really tried to put it into operation, with some way to monitor what was going on in all these loops, I would be even more impressed. 

My next course from the Learning Company, my Christmas present to myself, will be Understanding Complexity. I did take the class on Chaos Theory, which is also useful. It says chaotic systems which had been considered unpredictable, actually actually are predictable, but in some strange ways: they tend to flip back and forth between different stable states. 

In human societies, these would be periods of increasing power, followed by disintegration and loss of power - and often even existence. The Babylonian Empire is been long forgotten, along with many others. 

Firefox is no Longer Compatible with Google

This is bad news for you Firefox users - including me. I have a lot of bookmarks, really too many, and they were more than the Firefox could handle. Then I heard about GMarks, a Google add-on for Firefox, that worked great. I had the best of possible worlds: Mozilla (Firefox) and Google. But all of a sudden GMarks on Firefox stopped working.

I was desperate, and did a hurried search to find out what was wrong. Google Groups help was no help. Finally, I found this link (using Google, of course): Google Launches Bookmarks Syncing With Chrome, After Killing It on Firefox Shit, man, I been screwed again!

So I opened Chrome, and sure enough, there were my bookmarks, as pretty as could be! I am going to be forced to move to Chrome, whether I like it or not. 

The Pirate Party

I have heard of this, off and on, but not really looked into it. The party, a Swedish organization, has three objectives:

• Reform of copyright law
• An abolished patent system
• Respect for the right to privacy

All of which I support fully. Based on the feedback I have received so far, I doubt if most of you agree - if you have even thought about it.

Wikipedia says more:

The Pirate Party (Swedish: Piratpartiet) is a political party in Sweden. Founded in 2006, it is now the third largest party in Sweden in terms of membership. Its sudden popularity has given rise to parties with the same name and similar goals in Europe and worldwide, forming the international Pirate Party movement.

The Party has intentionally chosen to be block independent on the traditional left-right scale^[2] to pursue their political agenda with all mainstream parties.

Google has recently acquired EtherPad, and online collaborative editing service, which it intends to use in its Wave service. But it has released the EtherPad code as Open Source, which was promptly used by the Pirate Party to host its own PiratePad service. It also has its Tor Network, to which I (and my computer) belong.

Here is a Google translation of these announcements.

Islam in Europe

Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words. This photo clearly shows the contrast between two worlds: secular Europe and religious Islam. A naked young woman, who likes showing off her body, and a religious young woman who wants to be covered up entirely. I don't have to tell you which I prefer - or which my mother would have preferred. She once said "No decent woman would ever expose her navel."

The article, from the December 17 New York Review, also draws the similarities between Islamic fundamentalism and Christian fundamentalism - both quarrelsome Abrahamic religions. 

Two books are reviewed, one, by a Britain, seeing the Islamic immigration problem in the worst possible light, and one by an Islamic scholar, trying to make them look nearly perfect.

America has a similar problem: Hispanic immigration: millions of Latinos desperately trying for a better life. Here again, there is a cultural clash, a fast-growing, culturally underdeveloped people who have no appreciation of American culture, but who are determined to get ahead - and who are sometimes violent.

Americans can no longer cope with living in America

This is obvious to the American young. They know the older generation is hopelessly out of date. You may reply that this has always been the case. But you are wrong. For most of human history the old were respected as embodiments of their culture and teachers of the young. The generation gap has only appeared because our culture is changing so fast we cannot keep up with it. We cannot teach the young how to cope with life in America because we cannot either.

What is the solution? As always, the first step is recognition of the problem. We have to admit we have bungled it completely, and be open to some fundamental change. Humility is always the beginning of wisdom - something we sorely need.

Best Man Rigs Newlyweds' Bed To Tweet During Sex

The Washington Post

My more straight-laced friends will not be interested in this - but I doubt I have any such friends.

But basically, this guy was watching his friend's house while they went on their honeymoon and he placed a device under their mattress. This device, which is similar to the one found here, is a pressure-sensitive pad that tweets out when sexual activity starts, when it ends, the force of the "action," and a "frenzy" rating.

Weight Loss Report

I had my monthly meeting with my nutricionista yesterday. She went through the usual measurements: I had to take off my shoes and socks, stand on a special scale, and hold a bar straight out in front of me. She took some readings from it, measured my waistline, did some calculations, and and was satisfied with the results. I had lost some fat and gained some muscle.

My weight loss has slowed down. The first month I lost one kilo a week, the second month only a kilo every 10 days (a kilogram is 2.2 pounds).

I asked her to explain the reasoning behind her diet, but I was unhappy with her answers. When I showed her my food scale she said "cool!" but could tell me nothing about how to use it. 

So this morning I got on Google. I found there are two types of dietary opinion: the scientific types, who know what they are talking about, and the food faddists, who don't. They later outnumber the former by far. I grew up in a food-faddist atmosphere, some of it religious-based (we were Missouri Mormons), so this sounded familiar. 

The MedicineNet site had some solid information. It says there is no advantage to eating either three meals a day or six meals, and debunks the 3-Hour Diet. So much for that. I found it impossible to always restrict myself to eating five times a day, but I could cut back on my overall intake.

One thing everyone agrees on: breakfast is important. But I have to be careful here, and not eat too much.

Egocentric Organizations

This is another posting about the religion I grew up in. Although I realized fifty years ago that it wasn't important, influences from one's childhood are difficult to deal with - and this issue is not different.

I am learning a lot from Images of Organization by Gareth Morgan, and these are from pages 219 - 221:
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Many organizations encounter great problems in dealing with the wider world because they do not recognize how they are part of their environment. They see themselves as discrete entities faced with the problem of surviving against the vagaries of the outside world, which is often constructed as a domain of threat and opportunity..

They have a rather fixed notion of who they are or what they can be and are determined to impose or sustain that identity at all costs. This leads them to overemphasize the importance of themselves while underplaying the significance of the wider systems of relations in which they exist.

As a result of the egocentrism, many organizations end up trying to sustain unrealistic identities...they tend to see survival as hinging on the preservation of their own fixed and narrowly defined identity rather than on the evolution of the more fluid and open identity of the system to which they belong.
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This was the Church I grew up in, exactly. In the Fifties it began to realize that its act was not working, and it tried to change. But it did such a clumsy job of this, it ended up not much better than it was before, in my opinion. It had lived in its own little world for so long, it had no feel for the wider world it was in.

I am the only ex-church member I know of that takes such a dim view of its attempted change. Most are not even aware that a reform was attempted - have kept the faith of their childhood - and expect the Church will still save the earth.

The Democrats are not Strong Enough to Govern

Joe Conason in Truthdig

By bowing to Sen. Joseph Lieberman and his obstructive pals in both parties on health care reform, President Barack Obama has confirmed what Republicans always say about Democrats: They simply aren’t strong enough to govern.
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While observing the worst expressions of Lieberman’s character, the public has learned about the president’s defects, as well. Three years ago, Obama supported the Connecticut senator when few liberals would and then defended his senatorial privileges this year, even after he had endorsed and campaigned for John McCain and Sarah Palin in 2008. Now Lieberman has repaid those favors with spite—and that smart, tenacious, cool leader in the White House did nothing but flinch.

The Moral and the Aesthetic

From Poetry Magazine

Each of these passages contains distinct aesthetic and moral casts of mind, and I want to consider how and with what consequences poets seem to be weighting the two. The terms “moral” and “aesthetic” are philosophically slippery, but I suspect most poets (and certainly these poets) have a strong intuition for the two domains: the aesthetic is sensuous and the moral abstract; one tends to description, the other to prescription; one hews to percept, the other precept.

The trajectory of the aesthetic is to deepen and bloom, without regard for its earthly use (it is said to be “non-instrumental”). The moral, one senses, is beholden to something beyond pleasure and so may ramify in unpredictable and potentially off-putting ways. The terms are commonly connected to “delight” and “instruction,” but I will use them here to refer to the more fundamental matter of the writer’s focus.