Category: Uncategorised

Productivity and secrecy don’t go well together.

I’ve been slow to accept this, because my private emblem of productivity is the neurotic workaholic. I find it most comfortable to imagine people driven by self-hatred, flinging themselves into creative obsessions to justify lives they would otherwise consider unacceptable, or as a diversion from the emotional wildfires and the social obligations which would otherwise pursue them.

This, of course, says more about me than about the outside world. Sad-but-productive has always been a figure of hope for me, alongside all those people who claim to ride out emotional troubles by burying themselves in work. It’s appealing precisely because it’s never worked for me — because my ability to get

anything

done evaporates when I’m down. I’d love to clap my hands and believe that if I just learn to mope in the right way, I could be simultaneously sad and productive.

Because the alternative model of productivity — the stronger one, the one built around self-expression rather than self-loathing — is even harder to picture myself in connection with. But this is the more internally coherent kind. It comes from treating everything you encounter with open acceptance, welcoming all of life as material for creation. From not (as I do) ramming 90% of life into the closet, and trying to show people the remaining 10%.

Using your entire life in this way necessarily means abandoning the old pseudo-Romantic lie that each lifetime tells only one story. It requires saying “I am large. I contain multitudes”

Pseudonyms form one escape. Remember Weimar’s cluster of insanely prolific intellectual streetfighters, people such as Kurt Tucholsky. Most of them were forced to write under multiple aliases. Partly this was for political reasons, partly to deal with the sheer volume of their output. Also, though, it was (was it?) to allow free rein to the different parts of their personalities, without running everything through one brand. Multiple personality as lifestyle choice, 70 years before Grant Morrison.

Surprising to read in BldgBlog about jet engines being used to put out fires in coal mines.

The engineering field of putting out coal fires has intermittently intrigued me since I

heard

that they (supposedly) account for as much CO2 emission as all road vehicles in the US. Putting out these fires is an incredible engineering challenge, and one that even the most narrow-minded environmentalist couldn’t object to.

So I can’t help daydreaming about the kind of organization that could put out the fires. A band of idealistic engineers — top graduates from Caltech and IIT, grizzled mechanics who’ve spent decades underground, geologists whose morals wouldn’t let them stay in the oil industry. They’re funded by a philanthropic tech billionnaire, or perhaps just from carbon offsetting. Together they cross the world, dragging exotic equipment and wrangling McGyver-like contraptions to deal with each mine. One day they land Thunderbird One in Centralia, point the engines down one of the shafts, and finally put out the fires that have been burning for decades.

It’s an interesting compare-and-contrast question: why have parts of the CIS been resolutely pro-American, while the Middle East has largely not? Presumably in part it’s the effect of living under unpleasant Soviet rule, to which the USA was always the most visible opposition. But that effect can’t last indefinitely; will there ever be a mass turn towards anti-Americanism in eastern Europe, the baltic states or the caucasus?

In Central and Eastern Europe, the countries of the former Warsaw Pact followed more or less that script. But in 2004-06, when Condoleezza Rice tried to extend the model to Iraq, Egypt, and Palestine, she got a rude shock. Citizens in those countries, given anything resembling a free vote, tended to support strongly anti-American candidates.

— Helena Cobban

I’ve just been working in a cafe whose wifi blocks outgoing email. So I had to figure out how to send mail through an ssh tunnel. That is, hussle it through the firewall by sending it encrypted to a server elsewhere, and send the email outgoing from there.

For future reference, and in case it’s useful to anybody else, here’s how. This is assuming you are running ubuntu on your own machine, and have ssh access to a server somewhere else that’s capable of sending mail.

We use ssh to set up a SOCKS proxy, over an ssh tunnel. This establishes a port on the local machine (here, port 1234). any traffic sent through that port will emerge from the server at the other end:

ssh -D 1234 username@server.net

Now, install tsocks. This lets you run another program, with all outgoing connections sent via SOCKS

sudo apt-get install tsocks

configure tsocks to use the tunnel you’ve set up

sudo vim /etc/tsocks.conf

look for the default server settings, at the bottom. Edit so that:

server = 127.0.0.1 
server_port = 1234

Now start your mail program under tsocks

tsocks evolution 

In order to make external mail sending work under this setup, I had to turn off TLS in evolution. I’m not sure if this is a problem inherent to the socks/ssh setup, or just with my particular situation.

more info: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=791323

Timothy Garton Ash

the professional members of the US foreign service have very little to be ashamed of… what we see here is diplomats doing their proper job: finding out what is happening in the places to which they are posted, working to advance their nation’s interests and their government’s policies.

In fact, my personal opinion of the state department has gone up several notches. .

K-punk on UK student protests:

the ruling class are counting on the street militancy fizzling out as suddenly as it flared up. We have an opportunity here, not only to bring down the government – which is eminently achievable, (keep reminding yourself: this government is very weak indeed) – but of winning a decisive hegemonic struggle whose effects can last for years. The analogy that keeps suggesting itself to me is 1978 – but it is the coaltion, not the left, which is in the position of the Callaghan government. This is an administration at the end of something, not the beginning, bereft of ideas and energy, crossing its fingers and hoping that, by some miracle, the old world can be brought back to life before anyone has really noticed that it has collapsed.

I’d never realised the massive importance in Greece of the name of Macedonia. Wikileaks cable:

Regarding Macedonia, Errera said the GOM underestimates the seriousness of the name issue for Greece and that the U.S. should not make the same mistake. France will not pressure Greece on this issue. Furthermore, if Athens were to give in on the name issue, the Greek government could fall

The terrorism threat in Germany has been being hyped recently, through warnings from the Interior Minister and a false alarm over a bomb on a plane in Namibia.

German politicians have been impressively willing to call bullshit on this, in some cases openly suggesting that it’s fearmongering as a political tactic.

In particular, the idea is already widespread that it’s an attempt to build public support for increased surveillance and for weakening of privacy laws.

This wikileaks cable from February gives more fuel to that view. It shows that the US

links German support for privacy with the lack of terrorist attacks

in Germany: “

the German public and political class largely

tends to view terrorism abstractly given that it has been

decades since any successful terrorist attack has occurred on

German soil

“

Also, a little schadenfreude at the US saying that “

We need to also

demonstrate that the U.S. has strong data privacy measures in

place so that robust data sharing comes with robust data

protections

take a large sample of text. Run it through NLT, looking for passages with multiple adjectives describing the same noun. or, to keep it simple, just passages like a *big*, *strong* man.

For each such coincidence, record a link between the two adjectives. big and strong go together

[my initial thought was to do this geometrically. imagine an n-dimensional space, where n is the number of adjectives in the english language. Place each word at 1 in its own dimension, and for every other dimension/word at the point given by some function of how often the two co-occur.

but that seems silly. It’s more like a standard regression data-mining kind of thing.

Anyway, a project for a rainy day. And there’s still need for some usable dictionary/thesaurus based on data-mining

Stock trading and the like have always been at the forefront of data-mining — though not often sharing their techniques, for obvious reasons.

The current trendy data-mining topic* is sentiment analysis based on social media — guessing what the world thinks about a topic by searching for positive or negative opinions about it on twitter &c. Roughly, searching for “I love X” versus “I hate X”, and interpreting that as a sign of general opinion.

There are surely traders basing decisions on sentiment analysis. It’s anybody’s guess how many, or how seriously, but it’s going to grow over time.

So when is the spam coming?

Go short on company X. Spam twitter with ‘X sucks’ messages. Wait for other traders to use sentiment analysis, see X is unpopular, and dump their shares. Buy cheap. Profit.

You maybe couldn’t affect a major company like this — the market isn’t *that* stupid. But suppose you know another trader is using sentiment analysis, and have a hunch that you can make her buy or sell by dumping enough positive or negative opinions online? Isn’t that a strong incentive to spam?

[this inspired by a post suggesting that you predict layoffs by seeing whose employees are updating their CVs on linkedin — an idea so sensible that it’s probably already being used by a dozen companies]

* or rather, trendy among in the world of starry-eyed startups — there’s somewhat less academic interest. Probably because it produces results which are (a) easy to interpret, and (b) utterly unreliable.