Attabad Landslide

Close enough

 Amazing photo set:  On January 4th, 2010 in the remote Hunza River Valley of northern Pakistan, a massive landslide buried the village of Attabad, destroying 26 homes, killing 20 people, and damming up the Hunza River.

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/06/landslide_lake_in_pakistan.html

Google+ names and reputation

Martin Nowak's work on the evolution of cooperation imply that large communities are likely to be destroyed by free riders without  mechanisms for creating and advertising personal reputation.   This is a result based on solid mathematics and validated by simulation experiments.  I regard these kind of results as a lot more robust than listening to the opinions of the day.  (Anyone who is interested should read Nowak's book, Supercooperators, for a review of his and others work in this field.)

In practice, the negative effect of the lack of a reputation process is clearly present on the net.  We only need compare the average quality and civility of anonymous versus named commentators on blogs for a vivid demonstration of this.  Outfits like eBay use reputation to weed out crooks and incompetents and we have probably all seen the strenuous attempts of eBay sellers to protect their reputation.  This is the theory of cooperation in living detail.

Google's policy seems to me to be fundamentally good for the future of the Internet.  I expect to see a time where groups will only allow interactions with people who have a good online reputation, for example, discussion groups only open to people with a G+ or similar validated identity and history.  In future, I see systems evolving that allow a reputation to receive negative and positive points and for those attributions to be sourced to known individuals, so that an attribution is rated by the reputation of the giver.  The maths and the systems are complex and will need to evolve but the potential benefits are enormous, and probably essential.  The members of a traditional village can learn each other's reputation and protect and extend themselves appropriately for the interaction; a global village requires more sophisticated mechanisms.

As for the supposed attack on liberty, I'd say this:  Liberty won't survive without good systems to protect it.  Free riders will always have payoffs to rort large open systems unless they are detected and advertised.  Google's real name policy does benefit Google but in the long run these approaches are critical for us punters too.  I'm happy for the monitoring and limiting of Google's use of our identities (and, despite the target size, I'd generally rate Google's behaviour at the pretty good) but mechanisms of reputation are intrinsic to the survival of liberty.  We all want the abilty to free ride when it suits us, and generosity is required for cooperation to persist, but it should be given by choice, not taken at will.

[repost of comment to The Register; http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/30/google_plus_anonymity_ban/]

Pas d'armes

The pas d'armes or passage of arms was a type of chivalric practice that evolved in the late 14th century and remained popular through the 15th century. It involved a knight or group of knights (tenans) who would stake out a travelled spot, such as a bridge or city gate, and let it be known that any other knight who wished to pass (venans or "comers") must first fight, or be disgraced.

Why not?

High arousal positive v Low arousal positive

Rock climbing or walking in a glade?
Sex or read a book?
Dancing or cup of tea?
Pary or dinner party?


If you chose mostly the second option, you may tend to prefer low arousal positive (LAP) emotional states. In other words, you like to feel relaxed, calm, and peaceful.  If you chose first options, you may tend to prefer high arousal positive (HAP) states, like enthusiasm, excitement, and elation.

Differences can be personal but for populations they may derived from cultural ideas.  Asian cultures tends to be LAP, American is HAP.  Some psychological scales appear to rate LAP preferences as depression.

From Psych Your Mind Blog

Steven Pearlstein blames the corporate lobby, I agree.

Somewhere along the way, however, this effort took on a life of its own. What started as a reasonable attempt at political rebalancing turned into a jihad against all regulation, all taxes and all government, waged by right-wing zealots who want to privatize the public schools that educate your workers, cut back on the basic research on which your products are based, shut down the regulatory agencies that protect you from unscrupulous competitors and privatize the public infrastructure that transports your supplies and your finished goods. For them, this isn’t just a tactic to brush back government. It’s a holy war to destroy it — and one that is now out of your control.

[My emphasis]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/steven-pearlstein-blame-for-financial-mess-starts-with-the-corporate-lobby/2011/08/08/gIQA3zMlDJ_story.html

I couldn't agree more.  I'm happy with just about any regulation lobbyists short of public hanging.

Personal names around the world

A guide to different personal naming conventions around the world:

http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names

eg,

Mao Ze Dong = Mao (family) Ze (generational) Dong (given)

Friends would use the generational name and the given name: Hey, Ze Dong, fancy a game of backgammon?

3 virtues of a programmer

According to Larry Wall, the original author of the Perl programming language, there are three great virtues of a programmer: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris

Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it.

Impatience: The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to.

Hubris: The quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about.

Sonority and Sex!

The idea is that sexual inhibition discourages speaking with a wide open mouth.
why-smaller-communities-are-louder