Heh. I’m also a little baffled by the love of Betahaus, which in the end is Just An Office. But even stranger is the terror people seem to have at absolutely safe parts of Berlin:

Das Betahaus liegt zudem abseits neben einer Autowerkstatt und ist eine ansonsten unvermietbare (imho) GSW Immobilien. Absolut keine Gegend wo man Abends alleine durchgehen möchte (Kottbuser Tor ist nicht weit).

The Kyrgyz government was overthrown last week, something I’ve not yet mentioned here. Partly for obvious lazy-blogger reasons, partly because I was moving house (again) at the time. Partly also because Edil Baisalov, a key figure in the interim government, is also something of a man-about-the-blogospere, and I’m not sure how to correct for the sense of him being a nice guy.

Mainly, though, because I have no answers to the main questions, and no confidence in finding them by churning through online wire reports. Is this a true change of regime, or just of personnel? What reforms will affect anybody beyond the political cliques? Which people are wielding the power, and which are just names on paper? What behind-the-scenes manouvering got this putsch accepted so quickly by the main powers inside and beyond Kyrgyzstan? Will there be any kind of military opposition in the South? How will Bakiyev’s supporters rebel, or run campaigns of protest and civil disobedience, or contentrate on the elections XXX is promising? When the election happens, who will accept the results?

I have a lot of sympathy for the now-victorious rebels. They’ve all tried to engage in democratic politics for many years, and been kept out of the way on trumped up grounds. It was worse under the Akayev regime — it used the old Soviet trick of forced hospitlization to keep Baisalov away from a political meeting, and excluded Otunbayeva from elections because — as ambassador to the US — she had been out of the country. Bakiyev’s government wasn’t much better: now Baisalov was banned from elections because he posted a photo of a ballot box. The assassination attempt in 2006 was just icing on the cake.

And yet, as Sean Roberts writes, it’s hard not to look at these events as just one more link in a chain of coups that will keep going for years or decades to come.

The news coming out of the country looks all too similar to that which we saw in Spring of 2005, only more violent. In general, the events of the last several days taken together with those of March 2005 suggest two things about this country in the twenty-first century – 1) that the Kyrgyz people, unlike most former Soviet citizens, are unwilling to allow a corrupt government to stay in power through its control of the political system and are ready to risk personal safety in order to prevent this; and 2) the elite of Kyrgyzstan has yet to demonstrate that it is capable of establishing a viable government that meets people’s demands and moves Kyrgyzstan’s development forward.

I’m cautiously optimistic about the possibility that this time round things will improve slightly. But it can’t be long until Bakiyev’s supporters attempt some kind of counter-protest, and it’s hard to build an open society while looking over your back for the next coup, especially when you don’t have any source of democratic legitimacy.

Since hearing it mentioned on In Our Time, I’ve been entranced by the start of Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks:

A great many things keep happening, some of them good, some of them bad

. The inhabitants of the different countries keep quarrelling fiercely with each other and kings go on loosing their temper in the most furious way. Our churches are attacked by the heretics and then protected by the Catholics; the faith of Christ burns bright in many men, but it remains lukewarm in others; no sooner are church buildings endowed by the faithful that they are stripped again by those who have no faith. However, no writer has come to the fore who has been sufficiently skilled in setting things down in an orderly fashion to be able to describe these events in prose or in verse.

Alas, that seems to be more-or-less an invention of the translator. The Latin text begins:

Decedente atque immo potius pereunte ab urbibus Gallicanis liberalium cultura litterarum, cum nonnullae res gererentur vel rectae vel inprobae…

Which This translation renders more literally

With liberal culture on the wane, or rather perishing in the Gallic cities there were many deeds being done both good and evil

ah, well, it’s still a glorious opening line, regardless of authenticity.

I’ve

previously mentioned

Wang Hui, as a particularly interesting Chinese intellectual. Now he’s being accused of plagiarism — which might be politically-motivated, or could be a gase of someboy finding him with his pants down. Or both.

A worrying example of how brittle and centralized a lot of our culture is:

A recent wave of takedowns affecting many of the Hitler “Downfall” parody videos has resulted in their removal from YouTube.

I’m going through a period of over-the-top enthusiasm for unconferences — they’re just at that confluence of anarchism and practicality where you can imagine the possibility of improving the world by worming our way out of the zombiefied social rituals which usually trap us. Apparently, actually attending one that doesn’t quite live up to the ideals isn’t much of a damper on this.

Just wish I could find a calendar for the things…

Here’s a thought. If you’re developing something that relies on an open-source project, one of the big uncertainties is what is going to happen to the community in the future. Is this project going to wither away next year?

We could gather a lot of data on this. Mailing list use, code commits, blogposts, google hits, etc, etc, etc. Then we can try to see characteristics which are correlated with growing/declining projects, and develop a quantitative prediction of the likely future of a project.

Currently at the Berlin Open Data Hackday. Mentions David Eaves, who has just launched a Canadian government data transparency project

The Three Laws of Open Government Data:

1. If it can’t be spidered or indexed, it doesn’t exist

2. If it isn’t available in open and machine readable format, it can’t engage

3. If a legal framework doesn’t allow it to be repurposed, it doesn’t empower

I’m not entirely convinced by this focus. Data-mining is good, but there are plenty of other important areas that will only be identified by a competent journalist or activist asking the right questions.

Hebrew/greek confusion:

In Hebrew the word YHWH looks like this: יהוה — read from right to left. But by the time of Jesus Hebrew had become virtually a dead language even in Israel. Someone encountering this Hebrew word in a Greek text might well have thought it looked like the nonsense Greek word πιπι — read from left to right, that’s pipi. According to St. Jerome this is exactly what happened

Sean Roberts, unsurprisingly, has a decently-informed take on Kyrgyzstan:

The news coming out of the country looks all too similar to that which we saw in Spring of 2005, only more violent. In general, the events of the last several days taken together with those of March 2005 suggest two things about this country in the twenty-first century – 1) that the Kyrgyz people, unlike most former Soviet citizens, are unwilling to allow a corrupt government to stay in power through its control of the political system and are ready to risk personal safety in order to prevent this; and 2) the elite of Kyrgyzstan has yet to demonstrate that it is capable of establishing a viable government that meets people’s demands and moves Kyrgyzstan’s development forward.