P. S.: Post Scriptum

This morning I received a mail from Copenhagen. It was very moving, and describing a situation of chaos, strong commitment, and braveness. It told the story of people fighting with non violence, and shouting that they want change.

And I am afraid all this is useless. I feel once again what I felt looking at Iran insurgency. But stronger.

Let’s focus on Copenhagen. The sensation is that there is a lot of people on the street asking for a strong carbon tax. Count me among them. But there is more. I am afraid people have ideas, and those ideas are not being heard. And then people assume the worse, and assume the world leaders, the ministers, and everybody who is inside is on the pay check of some big corporations. And then they demand change. But now they do not focus any more on the small change. The key point. Now they want a huge change, that will not happen. And then there are rallies, and people pushing, and the police resisting. And violence. Yes police violence should not be there. And I feel this is not the way. It is not by shouting “Shame on you”, that you win the heart of the police men. It is not by shouting to people that you get yourself heard. As it does not change if I write this in normal letters or in CAPS LOCK. It is the content that matters And when you are shouting, when you are polarized, you are already making violence. This is not the way.

Now, there are people who work hard to negotiate among different positions. The Center for Non Violent Communication is probably one of the best. It was created by Marshall B. Rosenberg. One of the student of Gandhi (or so I remember from his book. The wikipedia page does not seem to mention it). Now Marshall has worked in the past as a negotiator between groups, and I am sure there are a number of very good negotiator working inside the conference to negotiate between the  key people. What I don’t think there is, are negotiator between the people in the conference and people outside.

It is like all the effort is concentrated in getting the communication going between those big players. But no work has been done to get enough communication between the inside of the conference and the outside. The assumption seem to be that either there are no good ideas outside or it is just impractical to engage them. I think both of those assumption are wrong. Yes, we still need to develop the tools to make an efficient brainstorm with millions of people. But the idea of having everybody writing their own ideas, and voting on the ideas they like is already a good start. Why is there no system like this to harvest the ideas from the people?

I was just looking at a youtube cnn conference where people sent questions, and voted on the questions. Again there is the assumption that normal people are just ignorant. This is not true. Not anymore (if it ever was). Not with the internet that let anyone study any topic.

In all those situations we need to set up systems where people can chip in their ideas. While it is happening, can read each other ideas. And the most voted ideas emerge from the noise to the people who are making the discussion.

I wonder how Caine would have commented David Carradine’s death. Especially the modus operandi.

I can see it. The light dissolves, and a new scene is in front of our eyes:

Master Po walks. Young Caine is thoughtful…

-What’s the matter, Grasshopper? Continue reading In memory of David Carradine, what would Master Po say?

It seems to me that Twitter, Google, and Wolfram|Alpha, are really not competing at all, but are instead providing complementary services. I would go farther by adding wikipedia (and blogs?), and suggest that the 4 services really represent the digestive process of our information society. From the first Churning to the Backbone

Wolfram|Alpha represents the deeper part. It includes only what is really known inside out from our society. What has been fully digested. FOr something to be in W|A it needs to be known, semantically known, beyond doubt. And notice that I am here speaking about a deeper Wolfram|Alpha than what you have seen here. The Wolfram|Alpha as it should be, once we learned hot to interrogate it proprtly, and once it has epanded with the rest of the knowledge we have.

At a higher level we have wikipedia. Wikipedia permits much more stuff to be present. You have actors, and theories, and stories, and a lot of other stuff.  You also have discussions and point of views. In short you have a lot of stuff that is not being digested anymore, but is also not the bones of our society. It is more like the muscles. The limit of Wikipedia is that since it does not allow for new research, by definition it is limited to what has already been discovered. Although not in a definite way as in Wolfram|Alpha.

And then we have Google. Google is really part of the digestive process. It has new stuff coming in every few days. But is is also less clear. You need to work to get to the results using google. But you can also find new threads. Things that are still not known. There is real food here, waiting to be digested.

And Twitter is the more superficial tool. Twitter has second to second update. It has multiple links in different forms that point to the same resource. Information is not organised in any way, shape or form. But it is information nevertheless. It represents the edge of the knowledge wave of our civilization. It is deeply alive, unpredictable, full of possibilities. You never know how it will react. It is the most alive part of the constant discussion that is going on in our civilisation. It is the civilisation equivalent to the constant chit chat that is going on in our head. Although it has memory, it is not really good with it. Anything that is in Twitter can be true, can be false, can be anything in the middle, neither or both at the same time.

If you are an alive and creative mind that wants to participate in the constant flow of creation of this society you will probably end up interacting in twitter in some ways. But if you want your creation to be grounded in reality you need to use the other levels as well. They are really not competing.

And Blogs? Blogs are ways with which we store personal longer stories. The untwittable (as Chris Anderson from TED called his). They work between the google level and the Twitter level. Letting information move between those levels, and letting complex information be churned before is ready to go deeper. Similarly you have journal articles (and books) working to bring the information to the wikipedia level.

As many of you know, I eat in Primal Diet from a long time. It is at least 3 or 4 years. I was very ill when I started, and feel much better now. I often look around to see when new articles appear on this diet, and I was very happy to read that a mainstream newspaper was writing an article about it. Too bad that the title was not very flattering: “The Primal diet: the silliest diet ever?“. The article was even worse. The worse set of factual errors, that newspaper has ever written. According to this article being in primal diet means to eat for 95% meat, and for most of it “high meat”. High meat is well off meat. Meat that has been kept in the fridge for days, weeks or months. I personally have never eaten high meat. But also people in primal diet who do eat high meat, do that very sparingly. Maybe a little bit, every 2 to 6 months to promote the response from the body. (FYI, this part of the diet is inspired by how some tribal people do eat some eat in their original diet. Confront on this Vilhjalmur Stefansson report on Eskimo diets).

After reading the article, I wrote a comment saying that the article contained factual errors, that I was on primal diet from a few years, and that it is simply false that people in primal diet eat so much high meat.

Guess what? The comment never passed the revision process. My comment was just before the comment of “Chris, Neath”. Yet it never appeared.

I find this behaviour from an online very dishonest, and feel the need to point it out.
We should all watch out from newspapers that censor informations that challenge them.

Pietro

I have been using mindmaps for quite some time. Wherever I go I am known as the mindmap person. My whole website was build using MindManager’s export-to-HTML function. But those where the times of Windows. Now I have moved to Mac and I have left behind MindManager. Now I use Freemind, and iMindMap.

I recently expressed my choise pubblicly on a twitter:

@gtdguy with all respect mindmanager sucks on mac. There I use freemind (4 speed) and imindmap (4 beauty). But neither makes HTML maps good!

I was then contacted by Michael Deutch (”Mindjet Chief Evangelist”), who asked me:

@pietrosperoni Buon giorno Pietro. What features / capabilities are you looking for in MindManager Mac? Thanks for sharing

The answer was too long for a tweet, so instead I decided to blog it, and tweet a link to it.

Dear Michael, thank you for your question.
I was undeniably in a great desire to share what I think about the way mindjet was treating Mac.
I use to use Minmanager many years ago, when I had Mindmanager 2002. Now Mindmanager for Windows runs version 8, Mindmanager for Mac runs version 7, and version 7 for Mac is sensibly worse than version 2002 for windows, from 6 years ago. As you can imagine I am pretty pissed off, and you might have to make a huge work to evangelize me.

Nowhere is the discussion about Mindjet product for Mac more focused than on the Mindjet Forums themselves. So please let us go there. In particular in the MindManager 7 for Mac. And to really pinpoint the issue, I would like you to read the Board: Is Mindjet really serious about the Mac?. It is 45 posts, 16 months long, so far, and is the one place where we frustrated mindmanager users, who were used to have a Windows version vent our anger.
Please read it, I’ll wait. (By the way, the authors “psdf” is me)

The shortest answer to your question is that we need MindManager for Mac to be as good as the Windows version for us to take it seriously.

We need the same functionalities as windows, and we need them at about the same time. A few weeks later is acceptable. Few months is bad, and years after is enough for us not to use your software. But not to implement them, is unacceptable for us to even considering hearing someone speak good about mindmanager without feeling an incredible urge to chip in our experience. Especially from a company that pretends to be Mac friendly.

I personally need to be able to upload my old .mm files, from mindmamager 2002. I need to have an export to html with embedded in the image links as there is in all other versions of mindmanager. I am particularly angry with Mindjet because that functionality, the possibility to have links embedded in the map, is only present from mindjet products. This makes me suspects that you might have patented this functionality, effectively denying any Mac user from being able to have it. I will actually have to restructure my whole website because of this. And this because I refuse to run a Windows system just for a program.

I have deleted MindManager 7 for Mac long time ago so it is now too late for me to make a side by side comparison. Plus I don’t have a Windows computer with a MindManager program running inside. But please, I plead you, you are in Mindjet headquarters, take a laptop with a Windows MindManager 8 on the one side, another with a Mac MindManager 7 on the other and run them side by side. And then, in all honestly, tell me if you are not disgusted by the Mac version. It is a stub. Now run it against MindManager 7 for Windows and see if you do not feel the same way. Run it against MindManager 2002 (I am sure you must still have a copy somwhere), and tell me if you don’t still feel the same way. Run it against freemind. Run it against any other mindmap program for Mac and tell me if you do not feel just the same way: Mindmanager for Mac is a joke!.

On top of all this, it was mindnumbing to see how bad were Mac users being treated on your own website, with mindjet ignoring Mac users requests, pleads, protests; Mindjet employers do not post in the Mindjet Mac forum anymore. Worse than that, if Mac users share with other users outside their forum what is going on they get deleted:

Hi All,
Well, I actually posted on the PC MM7 forum about the poor service that Mindjet have given the MAC community and how in a world of migration from PC to MAC that this is a bad thing for IT managers. It got deleted. Perhaps by posting here I am risking being banned from the the forum altogether but I wanted people to know that things are not all well at Mindjet (I own 3 mindjet licenses + JV Gannt etc) . However, I encourage you to do the same and not lie down and take the fact that Mindjet have taken your money and ran. Perhaps this mail will be deleted before anyone sees it. Poor, disrespectful service to a long time customer.

We are now using that forum to share tips about competing softwares. What else can we do?
We tried to mail for support, and the answer we got were:

Thank you for your interest in MindManager. At this time, we do not have an exact date in place for an upgrade for Mac users. Please check our website http://www.mindjet.com for updates.

Best regards,
Susan

and

Sent: Saturday , August 30, 2008 05:21 am PDT (GMT-07:00)
Subject: What about the new MAC version?

Do you have a general date? Like 4th Quarter 08?? I won’t hold you to it.

September 3, 2008 11:08:19 AM EDT
Update for Case #59656 – “What about the new MAC version?”

Unfortunately, we do not.

Best regards,
Susan

Susan Kozak
Customer Service Representative

Mindmanager is being too well treated from Apple. In Apple shops MindManager for Mac is being sold and presented in nice views on stands. That’s where I bought mine, that’s where I brought it back (with my feedbacks) the next day. Eventually we are going to get your products out of Apple stores. It just does not belong there.

Now, the number of Mac users is growing. I come from academia, and I can assure you that almost everybody there is using Mac.

Can Mindjet really afford to have this growing black hole of disaffectionate users grow and erode your base?
I don’t think so.

Best Regards,
Pietro

Pietro Speroni
Ex Mindjet costumer, Ex MindManager user.

P.S. if by any chance the pages in the mindjet forum got deleted (you know, thos damn hackers are everywhere), just mail me, and I will send you a copy of them.

ADDENDUM:
Michael’s Reply:

@pietrosperoni Thanks, will share your feedback with our team! Lots of win users migrated to mac last year!

[crossposted on the moblog, and the facebook notes.]

One of the leit motif in spirituality is to reach an integration among the various parts of oneself. There are many important reasons for this, which I am not going to enter right now. Becoming One is not seen in Taoism as a spiritual goal, but as a spiritual prerequisite. It is not school, it is preschool. Until you are one you cannot really get involved with spirituality. It is like if in your family you decide to build a house, but not everybody agrees on that. Then one part of you builds it in the morning, and someone else of the family will destroy it in the evening. Maybe using the bricks for something else.

The idea that we are many, that each of us is many, is quite common. In psychology is common, Junghian Psychology, if I recall well. Again, in Taoism it even reaches the point of believing that this is true in a litteral point of view. Each of us, is seen as a patchwork of different spirits (shen). And when you die each spirit will then go its way. As such in Taoism until you have reached a real integration between your parts of yourselves (your spirits), you cannot even have reincarnation unless you have developed a unit which is integrated enough to go through the trauma of death without shattering in a 1000 little pieces.

And another idea that is very common (you have it in Taoism, but also in Christianity, for example), is the idea that one day, one time, at some point we will all get together. Christian say “sit by the father”. In Taoism the idea is that any person who have showed a spark of interest for spiritual work will eventually join together in some place beyong space and time, a sort of heaven. And the joke then is if people are following the 1 lifetime program, the 10 lifetime program, the 100 or 1000 lifetime program, to reach it. And the faster it is, the rougher it is.

I have to say I am amazed by how well is Facebook helping in this integration work, for me. I have many friends, on facebook. But more importantòy I have friends from different groups. Each friend knew a different Pietro. Some were from my spiritual life (taoism, tai chi, meditation, …), some from my academic world (artificial life, mathematics), some are Go-brothers, others people I knew from childhood, or from high school, or middle school. And with each of them I was a different person. And now they are all together. All in the same place. And the internet does indeed feel a little bit like this place beyond space and time. And I read of many of them. But what is more important, is that, as I write about my life, I am forced to write in a way that is acceptable for both my academic side and my spiritual side. I can only write in an integrated way, because I know that friends from both worlds will read me. In this sense facebook is catalysing an integration in me. Is helping me to become one.

I know many people are having problems with facebook. I think a lot of the problem is that they are not ready or willing to have this integration. For me Fb is pretty easy: to become my friend you need to know me. With very few exceptions I do not add anyone who is not someone I personally know. But if I have met you, and you want to befriend me, then you are in. I don’t keep people that I know out of the door. Because that would be equivalent to keeping some part of myself out of the door, the part of me that interacted with them. You are all invited to the party. I sometime even go back in time, and look for people I once knew. People that were important in my life. Or people I wished I had the time to know better. Maybe now we have another occasion. But then on my status, in my notes, in the caption of my photo, I try not to speak thinking about one in particular (I might have done it, but mostly I try to avoid it). I speak to all my friends at the same time. And if anyone comments, I answer that person, personally. The answer is personal, but anybody can see it, and thus the integration goes deeper. I write in English and in Italian, because those are the languages with which I live, work, chat, play and love. My inner dialogue is sometimes in Italian and sometimes in English, depending where I am, what I am thinking of doing. And my facebook reflects that.

Most of you know that I use facebook pretty frequently. I update the status often, sometimes more than once a day. But what some of you have not realised is that I do not do much less on facebook. I avoid facebook applications. I only use the ones that are truly useful, that add functionalities that were not there, and are truly helpful. If I want to wish to my friend Happy Chinese New Year, I will do it in person, or through the status. Not through an application. In this way the integration proceeds. I very rarely invite people to use applications. I only do so when I think an application is very very good. (The “skip this” button is my friend). I invited my friends for the geo tagging application. I would do it for the “cause” application. Maybe the iRead could be another one, and the application to play Go online. Here you go, this makes it 4. And when I invite people I only invite people I think will appreciate it (or should, they know it or not ). I consider the other applications to be equivalent to spam. I try not to spam my friends. When a new application arrives (elves, and pirates, etc…) , I usually just block it. If an application is requiring me to send invitation to let you proceed, I report it (because it is breaking the TOS, and ruining the party for everybody), delete it and block it. With absolutely no pity, whatsoever.

I see often people who get tired of facebook. But very often those are people who are not using facebook as a tool to interact with friends that are far away (in space or time), but as a game. Those are the friends that use more of those facebook useless applications. They get tired, but what they are really getting tired are those useless applications. They are right in getting tired. They just need to use facebook, instead of be used by it. And then fb will stop being a toy, and become an instrument. You will forget about facebook, and think about your friend.

Keeping the application to the minimum necessary.
Speaking to everybody. Inviting all your (real life) friends.
It is fairly easy to let facebook help you in the integration process.

In the article:
Tweeting the terror: How social media reacted to Mumbai
it is explained how twitter, blogs and social networks gave mixed results in during the Mumbai massacre.
I particular it is said:

As Twitter user “naomieve” wrote: “Mumbai is not a city under attack as much as it is a social media experiment in action.”

But then,

as is the case with such widespread dissemination of information, a vast number of the posts on Twitter amounted to unsubstantiated rumors and wild inaccuracies.

and finally:

As blogger Tim Mallon put it, “I started to see and (sic) ugly side to Twitter, far from being a crowd-sourced version of the news it was actually an incoherent, rumour-fueled mob operating in a mad echo chamber of tweets, re-tweets and re-re-tweets.

Well, this could easily be avoided if we agree to just write the source of the information.
Just write (yourname) if you have seen something yourself.
(cnn) if you are repeating news from cnn, and so on.

Something that permits to track the spread of info to recover the original source could possibly be done directly at the twitter server level.

Another revolution is about to happen.

A revolution that is many times in size and importance bigger than the music revolution. I call it the e-book revolution.

In this moment a number of technologies are coming together:

On the one side OCR technologies are reaching a level of sophistication, where it is nearly as easy to photocopy a book as to make an ebook out of it. Do you remember when you would go to a photocopy shop, and ask them to make a copy of the book. Now it is that easy to have the ebook version of it, if you know how to do it. This means that more and more books are available in ebook format.

But the difference between the ebooks now, and the mp3, back then, is that when the mp3s came out, a song (5 minutes of fun) was about 5 MB. And since the internet was slower back then, it would take quite some time to download those 5 minutes of fun. Now a book, is often between 1 and 10 Mega Byte. And it can permit you to read it, study it, but also just to consult it.
More about this later.

I thought there were few ebooks around. That mostly you could find some old classics, but nothing really interesting. I was SO wrong.

Here is a collection available for download from pirate bay with more than 1000 ebooks, all on computer science. Here another with practically all of the ebooks from the “* for dummies” collection.

Those are not just some old classics. Those are good new books.

But why are users going through the whole work of digitalizing a single book to post it online? I guess this text will explain us: Continue reading Ebooks, the next revolution. But this time is BIG!

The two talks I gave at the: International Workshop on Challenges and Visions in the Social Sciences, this summer, are now available at videolectures.net.
Not the best talks of my career, and hopefully not the last either. But the guys at VL did a great job in recording them.

One of the talk was about Tags, and the second about Democracy of the 21st Century.

In the one about Continue reading My first 2 talks available online: Tags & 21st Century Democracy

This is quite interesting. According to this very unscientific statistics, with way too few data, but enough to start showing some trends, we discover that people who just completed elementary school has way more sex than everybody else.

Elementary school 24
Junior high / middle school 11
High school 10
College 11
College – post graduate 12

source

So, either those people are lying on the number of partners, or they are lying on the education they received. Or it is all true, and we need to assume that the less you study the more you fuck. But also who would have done only elementary school? I mean, in most countries by now middle school is compulsory. So if you only completed middle school chances are you are quite older. And so you had more sex just because you are older.

I am still looking for some real good statistics on the number of sex partners, breaking it down by age, education, wealth, sex, location, sexual preference, and anything else you can think off.

One think in positive is that they clarify very well what they intend with sex:
“This includes vaginal or anal penetration. This does not include oral sex. ”
Is very common for women to agree only to do oral sex with one night stand partners, and then when you go and look at the statistics, the man claim thay have had sex, and the women deny it.

P.S. for some serious study please refer to this.

The problem is not that there are too many elections for Europe, but too few. And the people feel they are not controlling a process that is bigger than them.
When people vote No at the battlecry: when in doubt vote No, how else would You interprete it?

Now, it can be that the United States have given a help, under the table, to finance the advertisments against the treaty. After all they have all to gain from being the only superpower. But the advertisments found a fertile land to sprout.

When 95% of the irish parliament said to vote Yes, and the clear majority of people voted for No… something must mean.

Calderoli for one time (the only!) is right in noticing how from when Europe had to ratify its constitution have lost every time.

Now, here, they want to call again for a second referendum, and again, and again, until the Yes wins. Strange that the constitution permits it.

I am not against voting again, but I think it should be done right.

When there is a referendum, and the result expressed is more than 20% different from what the parliament has suggested, it is obvious that the parliament is no more reppresentative of the people. And so it should be considered automatically delegitimised. New elections should be called immediatly, to renew the parliament. And after this a new referendum should be called. Referendum at which the new parliament should give indications of vote. And again if the results are more than 20% different, we should vote again, and so on. Until the fracture between the people and its representatives has been healed.

This would mean that the power truly belongs to the people, and the parliamentaries truly represent the people.

With the new technologies we could have one new election every other day, and a new referendum in between. Within one week we would have a new parliament, and a result of the referendum, that agree with each other.

I think I found a bug in the E 90 comunicator.

I don’t really know where should I tell, and who should I ask for support, so please if this is not the correct place, just adress me to the correct place. In any case I will copy my post in my blog to be a warning for people looking to buy an E90, until it has been solved.

I will tell the whole story, even if this might be long, because I am not sure what exactly make the bug appear. As it doesn’t appear immediatly, every time you use the phone, but only some time…

I live in Europe, and the situation in europe is that each country has different telephone companies. Since for work I travel a lot, I have a number of sim cards. About 5. One for each country a work in, except for Ireland where I have two. All this will become important.

So, I bought the E90 in Christmas in Italy. And I started using it with my Italian TIm card. When a few days later I left Italy, by car through France, the Tim card stopped sending messages. Eventually I discovered that there was a
“call barring>International calls exept to home ctry.” activated.
For: messages.

The Tim card would be barred even when I would move it through other phones (Nokia 6630). It seemed a problem of the card.

Now I had this sim card from ages, and I never used Pin or Puk, so I had no password. I thought that it was my own mistake. I might have pressed something wrong. I accepted that when I went back to Italy I would get a new card, with a new pin and Puk. But I was wrong…

Some days later I was in Ireland, and I was using a Vodafone Ireland sim card in the phone. Eventually I used up all the credit of the card. I tried to send more messages, but of course it was not possible.

When the next day I recharged the card
THE SAME BARRING WAS IN THE VODAFONE CARD.

Now I have two cards, one from Vodafone Ireland, and one from Tim (Italy). Both barred against sending International messages.

But it gets better. This VOdafone card is absolutely new, and as such I have all the Pin, Pin2, Puk, and so on. So I tried to use them, and I found that while I had no way to add (or delete) any barring in the Tim card, I could do so in the Vodafone card.

The password was actually the Pin1 number. I moved that to the Pin2, to test it and it worked. (The same thing in the Tim card was not permitted).

So I then tried to take off the barring…
and it didn’t work. I tried with the Pin1, I tried with the Pin2.
I tried putting all the barrings and then taking them all off at the same time (there is a special command).
I tried to do all this from another phone.

Interestingly enough there are 5 different barrings that can be added to the
“call barring>International calls exept to home ctry.”
Of this “Messages” is only one. Still I can activate them all. But when I deactivate them all, the “Messages” one remains. I cannot (there is no way, no command) to fine grain activate only one or the other.

So the end position is that unless I find a way to undoe what has been done from the E90 to those SIM cards, it has effectively ruined 2 cards. I will have to re buy those cards, which is about 20 euro. Bad, but not terrible (athough I think Nokia should pay for that).

But what more warring is that now I have no desire to use the E90 anymore as a phone, since I can see how it would ruin one card after the other. If I cannot use it as a phone I now question its usability in general, for if I was looking to buy a palm top, I would surely chose another model. And sending sms messages is my primary way of comunication, since I am all the time abroad.

Now, I don’t know who to tell about all this.

If I go to the SIM shop (vodafone or tim), they will say that is a NOKIA problem, and they would be right.
If I go to the NOKIA shop they will say that I need to get the password from the Telephone people, and of course people who sell those phone in the Nokia shop just don’t know things at this level of details.

If I am looking for Forum from Nokia there is a lot of them, but somehow none seem to be the right one. None is a
“forum for users who found a bug in a Nokia new phone, and are looking to give information, get it fixed, or get back the money.”

Who should I speak to? Who should I ask for support, before I put all in a big box, and I send it back to Nokia with written broken.

I am just back from the airoport.
I bought some time ago a return ticket with Rayanair to Rome, going on the 4th August, and return on the 19th of August. Well, long story short I needed to change my going there ticket. I am no longer going with Ryanair to Rome, but to Athens, passing some time in Greece and coming back still with Ryanair on the 19th.

So I tried to move my first flight to another date. I know for sure I will go to Rome for Christmas, so moving it to the 21st of December seemed the best thing. You can’t actually do it online because the system would not accept a going ticket (21st of December) later than the return part of the ticket. I thought, fine, it sounds like something that really needs an operator.

And the operator just confirmed me the same thing. We can’t move a going part of a flight later. We can’t twist a flight around making what was the coming back the going, and adding a flight after while deleting the first.

Those things make me boil, it sounds like machines are in charge.

The crazy thing is that if I had bought the ticket as two separated flights I would have paid the same and had the possibility to change them. Crazy, eh! And ths limit is a total nonsense imposed by some wanker programmer, who imposes on other useless limitations.

So the first take away message is: when you buy a ticket alway buy each separate flight as a stand alone flight, and never buy two tickets as a return ticket. You never know when you might need to change the ticket.

As I was discussing the issue with my collegues, I was further told that when you buy a return ticket you still pay double taxes on each credit card transaction, so you are really paying the same. And then I was told other stories of how Ryanair handled everybody much worse. From mother who are required to submit the babies trolley as a “outsized” package. While in all other companies they can go with the trolley up to the plane and are then uploaded in a place where they can easily taken back. How then they have to walk with baby, handluggage and baby carseat to the plane (which in Dublin is about 1 km, sweet). And so on.

So generally the agreed wisdom from the office is:
never fly with Ryanair when you have a choise, and if you don’t have a choise wonder if your flight is really necessary.

I know I haven’t written anything in ages. And maybe it is a good thing. Part of it is due to the fact that this blog has become so serious, so high level, that I felt I did not have anything worth enough to write on it. On the side my other small blog, the one on which I presented pictures of my life has come to a stall too. This happened long time ago, when I left Italy, as connecting to the internet through the mobile in Germany was just too costly. For some time I kept on posting pictures on Flickr by hand. That stopped partially as I got annoyed to Yahoo behaviour who required me to pay for the service (while they also put ads on the side), and when I went for a visit in Buchenwald. The wight of those last pictures prevented me from adding anything.

So little by little I stopped recoding my use of life and my internet life. I did not stop having a life, I just stopped speaking about it.

Those days I am mostly on facebook. In my life I left Jena, submitted my thesis, and went to Dublin City University, to work with Barry McMullin’s group, in the Artificial Life Lab. It is a one year contract that is now 4 months through. And I am actively looking for what to do next.

Funny enough my father is blogging way more than me, those days. He blogs in Italian with a short summary in English. If you can read Italian it is quite interesting.

Some time ago I remember reading a comment.

La Repubblica, one of the first italian newspaper, holds a big internet website. As part of their initiative they have La Repubblica TV, which is a sort of television, just recorded for the net. You can download it when you want, and see it at your leisure. It includes everything: advertisments, opening music, interviews, etc.
Well the comment was discussing how that internet TV is quite dumb. Not really using up the powers of the net.

It took me as a really smart comment, and later I thought that also the lessons from the universities who are being recorded and released are still part of the old way of doing things.

And today I saw something which I thought might be part of the new way: The lessons on history from Lars Brownworth,
12 Byzantine Rulers.

Lars is a professor at a private high school, and if I got it right not even a professor in history, but history is his passion, and so in his free time he started investigating the middle ages. His lessons in pocast format really had success, and now his podcast is among the most followed on the net.

Why do I think his podcast is part of the new wave of education, and not part of the old wave:

• The lessons are not produced by a University. He did was not advertised as being an expert, and yet his succes came because of how interesting they were. How often have we followed a lesson at the university (or at high school), thinking the professor was not that good, and probably some students were actually better. Universities need to cover every class. But with podcasts there was no class to cover. He was an expert in something, he spoke about that.
• There is a great desire for real high quality content. We all recognise the power of the internet, but experts that blog about their area of expertise are still few. It is easy to find blogs and discussion forums where many amateurs discuss a topic. We are moving toward a time where the real experts start to use the internet to share about their topic. This will take away space to the amatour (it was nice to be the expert in a Taoistic forum, but am I really an expert), but real knowledge will start to flow more easily.
• It uses podcasts, and website. Cheap but high quality technology. Available to everybody
• His expertise was so great that he manage to induce an interest even in people who had no natural interest for the subject

And the conclusion of all this is that more and more material will start to flow. Up to now we have mostly seen amatours discussing subjects. While the experts would write books in the old fashion way, copyright them, and make themselves unavailable. Essentially putting a higher and higher distance between them and their public. Now an expert can teach, and if he is really good he can share not only his knowledge, but his burning passion too. The tools are available, and soon the best lessons on a subject will not be from the universities, but directly from the expert website. At that point universities will start pointing to them, and this will induce a great change in society. Maybe we might even reach the point that some website will offer lessons worth a certain number of credits. A fully decentralized university.

We seem to have made it.
The website is now hosted on different servers, at dreamhost.com.
Of course what could not be done was to resurrect the wiki, which now should instead be recreated from scratch. And, much worse, the mindmapping tool. The page from which it was possible to make a mind map of a delicious account. Right now I have unfortunately no time for much, as I am in the last months of my Ph.D., yet I hope to find at least the time to put back the program to make the mindmaps. So at least people will be able to make the mindmaps themselves. Apologise to all the spammers that sent me spam in the last 2 weeks. Knowing that all the latest comments were going to be lost anyway I avoided to mark them (about a thousand messages) as spam. Please don’t feel ignored, just sent your message again and I shall trash it asap.

I just came back from the vacations to discover that my website is now a mess.

All the delicious mindmap data have been deleted, and so did the MySQL data of the wiki.

I am not really sure how it could happen, but I am just not going to investigate.
I am, more pragmatically, moving my website to another host. It will take some days, and a lot of the data will in any case be lost.

Please if you came to my page looking for any of the previous services: the delicious mindmap, the wiki aggregator, have patience.

As soon as the transfer have been made, I shall post a new message.
So if this current message is the last one, you know that we are still using the old host.

Pietro

Paolo Rossi, an italian comedian, made a wonderful job, in taking an old discourse from Pericles, and presenting it to the modern public as part of his personal show: Il Signor Rossi e la costituzione (mr. Rossi and the constitution- but, as Rossi is the most common italian name, could be translated as mr. Smith and the constitution). The speech is so precise, so moderne, that it was censored by Berlusconi controlled state television. After confronting the italian version from Paolo Rossi, with the original which we have in the project Gutenberg, I translated Paolo Rossi’s speech in English, trying, as much as possible to use the expression of the original translator in English. What follows here is first the translation, then the whole original speech is copied, with the parts that have been taken by Paolo bolded, to clarify the context in which they originally were. In the translation there is also a phrase in italic, it is a phrase that was absent in the original text, but that fitted perfectly both in the original text, and in the italian situation. It was inspired to Paolo Rossi by the ex-prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Here in Athens we do like this, our government favours the many instead of the few; this is why it is called democracy.
Here in Athens we do like this, the laws, here, afford equal justice to all in their private differences; but we never ignore reputation for capacity.
When a citizen has shown himself worthy, he will be, upon others, favored to serve the state, not as a privilege, but as a reward for worth, and poverty doesn’t bar the way.
Here in Athens we do like this. The freedom which we enjoy, extends also to our ordinary life.There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbour for doing what he likes. We are free, free to live exactly as we please, and yet are just as ready to encounter every legitimate danger. An Athenian citizen does not ignore public affairs, when he is following his private life, but, upon all, never uses public affairs to solve his private problems.
Here in Athens we do like this: we have been taught, to respect magistrates, and we have been taught to obey the laws, and never to forget those who have been injured. And we have been taught to respect that code which, although unwritten, is based upon the universal feeling of what is right, and cannot be broken without acknowledged disgrace.
Here in Athens we do like this: we see him who takes no interest in public matters not as unambitious but as useless, and although few are able to originate a politics, we all athenians are able to judge it. We don’t look on discussion as a stumbling-block in the way to democracy.
We believe that happiness originates from freedom, but freedom only originates from courage.
In short, I say Athens school of Hellas, and that every Athenians shows in himself a happy flexibility, self trust, and readiness to face any situation. And this is why we throw open our city and never by alien acts exclude foreigners.

What follows is the original discourse from Pericles, from The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. Continue reading Here in Athens we do like this

Some of you might remember that I wrote a post about the long tail of the ruling class. The post was in Italian and got translated in English by blogger Phil Edward. I took the translation copied it in my blog (with a link), but said that I did not fully agree with Phil understanding of my post. I didn’t enter more into details. And then there was silence, and in the silence I decided it was easier to just ignore the whole discussion. But a few days ago Nicholas Carr from Rough Type wrote a post on how the long tail permits to the service the puts in touch people to make massive amount of money, but to the people who produce the actual content not much money. Absolutely true, and this is why you don’t see google advertisments in my blog. But this is a very different problem from what I was discussing when I was speaking about the long tail of the Ruling Class. Mainly because I was not speaking about the ruling class but about the ‘classe dirigente’. Which is not exactly the ruling class, although I still can’t find a better translation. Ruling class smells a bit too much of kings and queens and prime ministers. And I was actually speaking about ‘classe dirigente’ as people who have authority over a certain field.

So when Phil commented on Nick post:

I blogged on this last year, in response to Pietro Speroni:

I felt I had to answer. Because my post was all about a multidimensional space (all our interests), which gets mistreated as a unidimensional space (money). Poor chap! For a multidimensional space to be treated as a unidimensional one is fairly common, but never fair. And the general excuse is ‘to understand better’, or ‘to simplify a bit’. But I suspect that multidimensional spaces might take it personally, bacause if you treat them bad, they can become quite convoluted, if you know what I mean. Maybe I should write a long post on the importance of not making models (even mental ones) with too few dimensions. But I think I shall leave it for some time next year. And then I can say that it was long due.

In any case I decided to copy my comment to Nick post here. Continue reading Where life is and money isn’t

And gets offended when it’s treated as such.

Let’s face it, google is such a mighty search engine. Can you imagine the spiders going around the world, the results gathered and indexed. And every time you make a search those data are confronted and pages of results are returned. Well, maybe you don’t, but here in the office, when we want to find the correct way to spell a word we just look it in google. Along side with its more probable variations.

Much was my surprise when looking for perturbed
google gave me as third fourth and fifth hit:

Which sounded pretty much like saying: I am not a bloody dictionary. I hope you do realise that you are using the most powerful engine in the world to find how to spell.

I am sorry, I won’t do it again .

It is 2.30 am and I just woke up. I went to bed at 2.05 am.

I am not crazy. Not yet, not anymore, at least not more than usual. I am just trying a new sleeping technique. It is called polyphasic sleep. I actually wanted to become polyamorouse, but I got confused during the googling process, and now it is too late.

What follows is a brief intro to polyphasic sleep for the general bear audience. Continue reading Polyphasic Easter

It is now the time to present the next project we have been working to: TagBay. And I say ‘we’, because is this project I am not alone. I did it with a friend of mine, Derek, who accepted, very patiently to code, some of the idea I have been tinkering around in the last year or so. I am speaking about how tags, and tag clouds, and distance between tags, and so on.
So, in brief we made a web site to tag material that is being sold on e-Bay. Anybody can tag any object that is being sold. Not only can any object be tagged but you can tag sellers, too (oh, we are not responsible for offensive tags, eh!).
Tags on objects can be made private or public, and you can also search among your tags, among everybody else tags, and eventually (when we code it) it will be possible to search among the tags of another user, like in del.icio.us.

Now that the summary for the people who have no time has been done, let’s try to explain the idea in the details for those who have a bit more time.

Pages:
On TagBay, right now, there are 3 type of pages: e-Bay Search Pages, TagBay Tag Search Page, TagBayUser Tag Search Page, Item Page, and Seller Page.

• Search Page: It is possible from inside Tag Bay to make searches on e-Bay on specific keywords. The user can then add tags to each object that came out, store the tags added all at once, or store the tags of a single object. The same thing can be done in the Tag Search Page
• TagBay Tag Search Page: In this page the user gets all the results for a single tag that someone have used. Nothing fancy (for now). Items where the tag only appears as a private tag will not appear here.
• TagBayUser Tag Search Page: In this page the user gets all the results for a single tag that he have used. If the user is logged in and is looking at his own tags, also the items tagged in a private way will appear.
• Item Page: Each object has its specific page. From such page any user can see what are the public tags that other users have used for that page. Also they can define their personal tags for that object, if their tags are going to be private, and the tags of the seller.
• Seller Page: And then there is the seller page, and in the seller page any user can tag any seller. The use of tag for sellers is still limited, but will be increased in the future.

The natural use of the site

• For a seller or for a shop A seller might want to use the site to tag all the objects that he is selling, giving for each object all the tags related. Thus increasing the possibility for it to be found. We suggest to list the tag in the order of importance, as soon we are going to use the order consider the importance in the search page.
  Also, if a person wants to make a cool list of objects, they can tag exactly those objects, with a tag they never used, and then link to the page in their directory of this tag. Thus creating on the spot, their lists. Also sellers will want to tag their objects, and people making searches will tag objects to make lists of objects they want to follow, before jumping on a transaction. We think there is more than enough material to generate interesting behaviour. It doesn’t have to be exactly the same emergent behaviour that we are used to see. After all we are just exploring the possibilities of social folksonomy.
• A shop To the possibilities before, a shop who is selling on ebay might be interested to make sure that the shop itself (remember that you can tag sellers, and not only shops) have all the tags related to the merchandise that they are selling
• Someone buying Our suggestion for someone who wishes to buy, on e-Bay, would be to first look under the tag search, to see if there is anybody who has already tagged any object that they are interested in. This does not necessarily be someone else who is buying, but also someone who is selling. Then tag the objects they are interested themselves, to have it in their own list of objects. Then they could go to the search e-Bay page with the necessary keywords, and add the chosen tag to all the objects interesting. At that point a first selection have been made, and all the possible objects have been tagged. At this point, he could choose one or those objects, change the tags to private, and start betting on it.
• Someone suggesting And finally if someone is just trying to suggest some possible objects, he could search e-Bay for those objects, tag them with a unique tag and present the url of the list to whoever is interested.

There are many other ways to use TagBay. In a sense TagBay is a toy, and not a game. And as every good toy it can be used for many different games. We suggest here only some of them. Also TagBay itself is rapidly evolving. We have tons of stuff we are interested in including, and if you have been reading my blog, you know how my problem is always to find people to code my ideas, more than to find them. And this is why I am so happy for Derek work!

Difficulties that we found:
There were a number of issues that came out when we started developing this program.

1. Public vs private tags:
   Why would someone tag an object if they are interested to buy it? After all aren’t they making it easier to others to find it, by adding those tags?
   This was a serious doubt that we had, and finally we decided to give the possibility to users to tag objects privately. Yet there have to be a balance between private tags and public tags, as public tags are necessary to generate the emerging folksonomy that we wish to use. So we decided for a compromise: public tags can be done from the search page, but private tags requite you to go to the specific object page. In our view (but we are ready to be proven wrong) someone would go to the search page, tag all the entries where he might be interested. Then chose one, and tag that one in a private way.
2. Limitations due to the temporary nature of the objects
   Considering that most object exist on ebay only for few weeks before being sold, wouldn’t this be not enough time to make a tag cloud and let all cool emergent properties that folksonomy induces, appear?
   Maybe, but sellers also can tag the objects they are selling, thus giving a fresh start to all the objects. Also side by side to tagging object we are giving the possibility to tag sellers. Which eventually should survive each transaction and build up an interesting tag cloud.
3. I spoke about sellers tagging their own objects, but wouldn’t this invite people to spam your site? After all, wouldn’t it be much better for a seller to add many tags to be present in many searches?
   Ah ha! You think tag clouds can be spammed. This is false. Tag clouds cannot be spammed, and no one understand this. And we shall use this site to prove it. We have nothing against spammers, they are absolutely welcome in our site and spam it as much as they feel. Add all the tags they want to each object they sell. It will make ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENCE in the search page. Tag clouds are unspammable. And our engine will use tag clouds as its base. Everybody else uses tag sets. And this makes them easily spammable. So, no we don’t fear spammers. In fact we hope that spammers will come to our TagBay site. They are just people trying to sell their stuff, we are trying to make sellers meet with buyers. Wouldn’t be bad to single out spammers just because they are spammers.

TagBay is obviously still in beta, and there are many things that need to be coded. If you have any idea on how to make it better please do not hesitate to contact me. If you want to make a difference on what the final product will be now is the time to do it. Also all new suggestion implemented should be listed in a special page with links to the original suggester home page.

In the last weeks I have been interested in polyphasic sleep. Polyphasic sleep is a sleeping pattern where the person does not sleep in one big chunck, but in many roughly equivalent pieces throughout the whole day. The first time I heard about it was from my father, some twenty years ago. The pattern is sometimes used by solo sailors, who travel through long oceanic trips. My father has always loved to sail, and read many books on the subject; so that’s how he knew about it. According to thos books Leonardo Da Vinci was a polyphasic sleeper, sleeping some 15 minuites every 2 hours.

But I don’t want to discuss in this post about polyphasic sleep. I want to describe everything else I know about sleep, so that at a later post I can say: “And this has totally blown off everything I knew about sleep” (with a link!). It’s like when in go you play a stone, that is not that important, but such that later you can link to it. You build your framework.

And if all I said in the rest of this post will sound like pseudoscience, is because mostly is. It comes out of personal observations, some lessons explained, learned, and integrated, but no scientific work that I know off (or that I searched for).

My knowledge about sleep originate from a lesson I received some sixteen years ago. At the first yoga class I went to. The teacher explained to me that not every hour is equally important to sleep. There are some moments that are definitly more important, and others less. Some time between Continue reading Sleeping patterns: when is it better to sleep

So, here is the quest. You need to discover the password of your best friend. Although this might seem morally reprehensible you are moved by nobel and deep reasons. You need to check in his email and discover if he is having an affair with your wife. You can’t just confront him if you are not sure. Nor can you run the risk of confronting your wife before you are sure.

We will assume that you have access to your best mate computer. After all he trusts you, right. And with reasons, you would never do anything against him… normally. But this time it’s different. If he has been seducing your angel, he deserves the worse.

We will also assume that your best friend is really into security, and since firefox is a more secure system, he uses firefox. Daily. And as a final assumption we shall assume that since he keeps his mail on the web, and accesses it through the browser. Let’s assume it’s on Yahoo.

This is what you need to do:

1. Get his computer, in a moment he is out for launch (with your lady, bastard!), and lock yourself for the work. You will need privacy for this. If you are confronted you can always say Continue reading Reading your mate passwords in Firefox