Ben Stein is a smart guy and in his March 2, 2008 column in the New York Times attacks Barack Obama’s idea that Exxon Mobil’s huge profits ($12B last quarter) are going into the hands of–his words–”some cabal of reactionary businessmen”. The company, he say, is owned by “ordinary Americans” such as poor elderly folks who depend on its dividends to buy their “oxygen tanks”.

This argument is surprisingly easy to refute. First, ExxonMobil pays only a small fraction of its profits out in dividends–the most recent figure is 19.54%. Second, the “ordinary Americans” Ben refers to are predominantly rich investors who are using the dividends to buy yachts, not oxygen tanks. Third, Stein claims that “when ExxonMobil earns almost $12 billion in a quarter, or $41 billion in a year, as it did in 2007, that money does not go into the coffers of a few billionaire executives quaffing Champagne”, but nearly $500M did exectly that in the obscene payout to the recently retired CEO Lee Raymond. .” This applies to Big Oil. Its profits are our income. Its employees are overwhelmingly not millionaires — and, by the way, it’s not illegal or evil to be a millionaire. They are our neighbors and the people who get us the gasoline to run our cars and trucks and the oil to heat our homes.

And, after expenses, the money hauled in by Exxon Mobil and other companies like it goes vastly more toward exploration and finding new ways of delivering oil and gas to us slobs in our cars than it does to well-heeled oil executives. It may be a scary fact, but we need the oil companies.

Meanwhile, all over the world, from Russia to Venezuela to Africa to the sands of the Mideast, nations with large oil reserves are making it harder for American energy companies to get their hands on oil and gas. If they succeed and re-cartelize the price, current prices may look cheap.

We should not be beating up Exxon Mobil and its brethren and making them cry uncle to Uncle Sam. A better policy might be to keep making sure they have no role in price-fixing, and then to encourage them to go after and lock up as much oil and gas as they can for us to burn up. We would be better off with stronger oil companies that can serve our energy needs for the long haul than with weak and overtaxed oil companies that cannot deliver the needed juice.

Finally, envy is simply not good economics. It has never led anywhere except to trouble, and we have enough divisions in this country already. As I said, Mr. Obama is a smart man. And Senator Clinton is a smart woman. I have worked in politics and with politicians. I know they have to say crowd-pleasing things (just as Republican leaders have to say that cutting taxes raises revenue).

But I respectfully suggest that they might want to reconsider their attack on Big Oil. After all, Big Oil is big us. And we need us.

I had never heard of Dr. Greenberg before. His books, such as “Indo-European and its Closest Relatives”, sound a bit intimidating to the casual reader such as myself.

Dr. Greenberg’s focus was apparently finding relationships between languages and placing them into groupings. He grouped most of the world’s languages into 12 superfamilies.

Most interesting: Dr. Greenberg postulated that the world’s original, ancestral language contained the word “tik”, Its reflection in the Indo-European language group includes the words “daktulus”, “digitus”, and “doigt”—Greek, Latin, and French for finger, as well as in the English word digital.

What other words from the human Ursprache did Dr. Greenberg deduce? Could “tik” have been the first word spoken by humans, and if so is it a coincidence that it in its “digital” form it defines a leitmotif of our culture 100,000 years later?

Not coincidentally, the US leads the entire world in incarceration rate and total number of people behind bars. We put about 7 times as many people in prison as Canada, and 12 times as many as Japan. Studies show that the rise is due less to an increase in crime and more to lengthier sentences (partially due to mandatory sentencing guidelines) and harsher parole policies. The longer sentences are gradually turning our prisons into nursing homes with bars; the percentage of inmates my age or older has doubled over the last ten years, and for these grayhairs, costs of medical care can be triple. That is if the systems bother to spend the money; in California last year medical neglect and malpractice killed inmates at the rate of one per week. The longer sentences have also, perversely, increased recidivism, as have picayune parole violation policies. By race, one out of eight black men between the ages of 25-29 is in jail; in some states incarceration rates for blacks exceed that for whites by a factor of ten. At the same time, prison costs are busting state budgets such as that in California, which spends over $10 billion a year on its correctional system, and that excludes new construction of $7.5 billion to be built with borrowed money which today’s Californians’ children and grandchildren will pay back. The fiscal 2008-2009 budget now being prepared is expected to slash school funding and spending on state parks as part of across-the-board 10% cuts, while spending on corrections increases

by nearly 10%. The correctional system is so big now that the guards’ union, a key element of the so-called “prison-industrial complex”, is a major force in state politics. Spending on prisons is expected to exceed that on higher education by as soon as 2010.

For instance, when the Supreme Court rules on virtual child porn as it did recently ( ), you see that the real issue goes far beyond Photoshopping some kidpix. For those not following this case, it revolves around the so-called PROTECT Act which was designed as a delicate dance around pesky First Amendment Issues. The basic idea, which the men in black robes OK’d, is that it’s still illegal to deal in child porn if the seller thinks, or tricks the buyer into thinking, it’s real.

What the Act, and the justices, are basically saying: virtual reality versions of bad things are illegal if they are convincing enough .

Well, in the future, virtual reality versions of things will be very convincing. Kurzweil thinks the technology involved will be swarms of nanorobots forming objects before our very eyes, and even interacting directly with us . VR kiddie porn will be so convincing that no-one will ever need to molest real children, which one would think would thereby solve the real problem–the exploitation of children–and make everyone happy, I predict America will not be so easily deterred from its Puritan ethic in banning things it finds repgunant .

Sakiko has started a blog at . Expect lots of cat pictures.

Why would I have been surprised that he went to the web? After all, that’s where you go for answers to almost anything these days. Sites like will help you with everything with to how to how to   to additional tens of thousands of topics you would have to live a dozen lifetimes to even think about, not to mention care about.  will provice guidance on that with your boyfriend. Other sites will even help you with how to believe in God.

So the web is changing the way we as a culture pass on critical insights about our lives .

I now better understand the importance of focus on web-based systems to manage and report of authority. After all, if we’re going to be making life-changing decisions based on something we found on the web, we should insist on it having at least some nominal level of credibility.

The first way to establish that credibility is to base it on the author’s credentials or experience. But that can be easily exaggerated or faked altogether. The second way is based on some kind of voting or popularity system. But what’s the value of the votes of a thousand members of the unwashed masses who can’t spell, much less think? And centralized systems of credentials or popularity will inevitably end up being gamed to a fatal degree.

A “dialog” with the web about our personal problems is really a “unilog”, a plaintive one-way cry of cyrptic search queries responded to by frozen text on the screen, incapable of either understanding our problem or explaning itself in more depth. It leads, in the end, to horrible decisions such as the one my acquaintance ended up taking–to put himself through the wrenching process of leaving the company he had joined a mere two weeks earlier.

It’s great this issue is being raised, and not in the tired old “God vs. the atheists” cartoon fashion. This is one of the few times I’ve seen a mainstream media treatment of the issue actually distinguish between religion and spirituality. Unfortunately, Brooks confuses matters by trying to bring in God as an aspect of the spirituality side, which he redefines as “the unknowable total of all there is”. This means nothing. He goes on to say that the cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going to end up challenging faith in the Bible. No doubt about the latter, but any useful concept of God is not about faith, it’s about experience; and the God that Brooks apparently is referring to is so different from the God of the Bible as to be unrecognizable.

Brooks states that

over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development. Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment.

I’d beg to differ. Although certainly the simplistic brain-as-computer models have been discredited, at its heart the brain remains a computing device , albeit one with a highly unique and massively parallel architecture. Leaving aside the odd conflation of “meaning” with “belief” and “consciousness”, it’s absurd to claim that there’s “momentum” towards thinking that any of those things emerges mysteriously–there is simply increased awareness of the holes in our understanding as we peer in more closely. Emotions may be squishy but are nevertheless controlled by increasingly well understood neurochemical processes. And how does the fact that researchers are trying to understand universal moral intuitions have anything to do with a shift away from “hard-core materialism”? They are trying to understand them within materialistic frameworks such as evolutionary psychology.

Particularly odd is Brooks’ treatment of Newberg’s research; he interprets the finding that transcendent experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain as showing that “scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states.” But what could be more materialistic than the attribution of transcendent experiences to brain processes?

Finally, it is odd that Brooks manages to completely ignore the work of the Atran’s and Boyer’s of the world. People’s belief in the white-bearded sort of God that created the earth in seven days will not melt away after they read one article on how the brain facilitates transcendent experiences or hear their brother-in-law talking about it. Changes in belief structures of this sort require time on a microevolutionary scale–generations.

Having said that, as a civilization we could do much worse than to move in the direction Brooks suggests we will, towards a broader concept of personal spiritual development bolstered by ever more insightful understanding of the biological processes underlying them.

This is a rich potential mechanism for describing interaction of nature and nurture in general, but in particular the progress of spiritual development associated with ongoing practices such as Zen meditation. Simply put, meditation practice could have chemical effects such as attaching methyl groups to genes, which quiets the gene by interfering with the ability of the RNA-based transcription mechanism. Or it could attach acetyl groups with the opposite effect, letting the genes express themselves more easily.

This is an intriguing supplement or alternative to other explanations of the long-term effects of meditation, such as neuroplasticity, but what is the gene, or genes, in question? Such a hypothesis will be a prerequisite for experimental design in this field.

Image of chromatin created by Nicolas Bouvier; courtesy of Genevieve Almouzni, Curie Institute, Paris, France.

Hofstadter’s treatment of Zen in the book is emblematic of its problems. In a dialog between “Strange Loop #641″, a believer in the ideas of I Am a Strange Loop (such as they are), and “Strange Loop #642″, a doubter, he has them saying:

SL #642: Taoism and Zen long ago sensed this paradocical state of affairs and made it a point to try to dismantle or deconstruct or simply get rid of the “I”.

, which was then picked up by the New York Times in its “Reading File” column, dealing with Bob’s recent obsession, the Singularity. I’ll let the reader draw his own conclusions from the original interview, but I can’t avoid pointing out some of the more absurd things Hofstadter says:

I am a deep admirer of humanity at its finest and deepest and most powerful…I find endless depth in such people…I’d hate to think that all that beauty and profundity and goodness could be captured — even approximated in any way at all! — in the horribly rigid computational devices of our era.

But what does “admiration” and your subjectively perceived “depth” have to do with anything? Humanity will not be approximated in the computational devices of our era, but those of the next.

Do I still believe it will happen someday? I can’t say for sure, but I suppose it will eventually, yes. I wouldn’t want to be around then, though. Such a world would be too alien for me. I prefer living in a world where computers are still very very stupid.

He manages to impugn on of the leading futurists of our time with psycho-pop ad hominem arguments:

Ray Kurzweil is terrified by his own mortality and deeply longs to avoid death. I understand this obsession of his and am even somehow touched by its ferocious intensity, but I think it badly distorts his vision. As I see it, Kurzweil’s desperate hopes seriously cloud his scientific objectivity.

and goes on to call not just Kurzweil but also luminaries such as Marvin Minsky “overgrown teen-age sci-fi addicts.” Just out of curiousity, Doug, can you name a conclusion of Kurzweil’s that you think has been clouded by his “desperate hopes”?

]]> http://www.numenware.com/article/586/feed 3 http://www.numenware.com/article/590 http://www.numenware.com/article/590#comments Fri, 16 May 2008 15:14:54 +0000 admin http://www.numenware.com/?p=590 Italian neuroscientists have that bombarding mice with easy listening music increases levels of brain-derived neurotropic factor ( ), in their hypothalmus specifically. However, levels of another neurotropic factor, NGF (nerve growth factor), declined. The findings suggest, according to the authors, that physiological effects of music, such as lowered blood pressure and heart rate or mood improvements, “might in part be mediated by modulation of neurotrophins.”

]]> http://www.numenware.com/article/590/feed 0 http://www.numenware.com/article/594 http://www.numenware.com/article/594#comments Sun, 11 May 2008 19:18:35 +0000 admin http://www.numenware.com/?p=594 I am pleased to announce the print availability of “First Dogen Book”, a brand new book containing extensively annotated translations of selected fascicles from Dogen’s Shobogenzo.

First Dogen Book is available for $19.95 from:

• , the publisher

The fascicles included are:

• Bendowa (Dialog on the Way of Commitment)
• Genjo Koan (Truth Unfolding)
• Uji (A Particular Hour)
• Soshi Seirai I (Why the First Patriarch Came from the West)

These translations balance accessibility and readability; accuracy and fidelity; and style and expressiveness. Although no translation is perfect, and in particular there are aspects to the beauty of Dogen’s prose that simply defy reproduction, I hope the reader will find that the research, analysis and thought devoted to each word of the translations bring new light to the meaning and relevance of these old favorites.
The annotations, by the way, are not meant to be a teisho-like elucidation of the essays’ deeper meaning. Dogen can speak for himself if only given the voice to do so. Rather, the focus is on pointing out interesting or challenging aspects of Dogen’s prose and possible alternatives for interpreting or translating it, including those taken by past translators. The annotations also present historical and cultural background to enhance the reader’s understanding.

Those of you who have encountered previous versions of my translations of any of these fascicles may be interested in knowing that the translations here have been extensively revised.

Here is a paragraph from Bendowa:

This enlightened world circles back to directly but imperceptibly sustain the people of zazen, that they might completely leave behind the body/mind distinction, disconnect from random, impure perceptions and thoughts, affirm and enter into the intrinsic truth of Buddhism, raise up the teachings at countless places of practice, share the chance for transcendence widely, and proclaim its law. As they do, soil and earth and grass and trees, fences and walls and tiles and pebbles throughout this world exude holiness. Blessed by the wind and water at the wellsprings of this outpouring, and graced by the incomparably subtle and inconceivable teaching, they soon arrive at enlightenment. Those taking up this water and fire endow themselves and everyone with whom they live and speak with endless virtue by spreading the teaching of original awakening, their efforts imbuing the entire universe, within and without, with inexhaustible, indestructible, inconceivable, and immeasurable truth.

Excerpt from Uji:

This particular hour, however, unfolds uncaged. Heavenly monarchs and their subjects, now unfolding to the left, unfolding to the right, are, even as you read this at a particular hour, brimming with our energy. On land and sea unfolds a particular hour for these masses, now filled with strength. Light or dark, man or beast, we form this particular hour into the present with every drop of our power, we step it through the flow with every fiber of our being. Were it otherwise, know that not a single phenomenon or object would unfold or stepflow whatsoever.

]]> http://www.numenware.com/article/594/feed 1 http://www.numenware.com/article/578 http://www.numenware.com/article/578#comments Sat, 10 May 2008 06:52:28 +0000 rtm http://www.numenware.com/?p=578 In the middle of Genjo Koan, Dogen introduces an analogy involving fish, birds, sea, and sky. This was actually the first bit of Dogen that I ever translated.

Swim as they may, fish find no end to the sea; fly as they may, birds find no end to the sky. Yet fish and bird still remain in the sea and sky as they have for ages…birds would perish instantly if they left the sky, fish would perish instantly if they left the sea.

This all seems rather understandable by Dogen’s standards. But just when we’re ready for some kind of insight or conclusion, Dogen launches into an opaque series of Chinese anagrams:

以水為命しりぬべし、以空為命しりぬべし。以鳥為命あり、以魚為命あり。以命為鳥なるべし、以命為魚なるべし。

What do they mean?

It turns out there is a very precise and symmetrical structure here. To see how, let’s line it up like this:

以水為命 しりぬべし、
以空為命 しりぬべし。
以鳥為命 あり、
以魚為命 あり。
以命為鳥 なるべし、
以命為魚 なるべし。

i-sui-i-mei shirinu-beshi,
i-kuu-i-mei shirinu-beshi.
i-chou-i-mei ari,
i-gyo-i-mei ari.
i-mei-i-chou naru-beshi
i-mei-i-gyo naru-beshi.

Nishijima translates this as:

So we can conclude that water is life and the sky is life; at the same time, birds are life, and fish are life; it may be that life is birds and life is fish.

And Tanahashi has:

Know that water is life and air is life. The bird is life and the fish is life. Life must be the bird and life must be the fish.

Unfortunately, the only correct things about either of these translations are the nouns life, bird, fish, water and air. Both translators have missed the meaning of the central construct 以 A 為 B, translating it as simply “A is B”. The alternatives are hardly better; Waddell/Abe has “A means B”, Genku Kimura “A constitutes B”. Jaffe comes a bit closer with “because of A there is B”.

The Japanese are getting confused by the old kanbun habit of reading Chinese as Japanese, which in this case ends up as “A wo motte B wo nasu”. But actually the construction here is a common one in Chinese, for example 以海為田, which is something like “the sea as one’s breadbasket” or “from the sea one’s daily bread.” The 以 basically indicates something instrumental, and the 為 for (the benefit of). The entire phrase has an almost perfect English translation in the form of “A sustains B”. The sea sustains life.

Not content to merely mistranslate the central repetitive structure, the leading translators proceed to also mistranslate the modifiers on each phrase. The modifier on the first two is しりぬべし (shirinubeshi), which is neither Nishijima’s “So we can conclude” nor Tanahashi’s “Know that”–it simply indicates that this is something everybody knows. After all, when translated correctly as “the sea sustains life”, it is indeed something everyone knows.

The modifier on the next two phrases is あり (ari). This one Tanahashi simply ignores, and Nishijima invents “at the same time”. Actually, they indicate a declaration by Dogen; he is telling us something he believes we don’t know, and that is actually quite startling: that we can switch gears and think of birds and fish as being sustainers of life as well.

The final modifier is なるべし (narubeshi), which quite clearly means “it must follow”. One can’t imagine where Nishijima gets “may be” from this.

This whole section, then, is not some muddle of random Zen-like equivalencing of birds, fish, sea, sky, and life, but a carefully constructed syllogism, building upon what came before. First, there’s something we all know: that the sea and sky sustain life. Then, there’s something new Dogen is telling us: that the birds and fish also sustain life. Finally, there’s the startling conclusion: that life sustains birds, and life sustains fish, and life sustains, in the context of the overall analogy here, our very selves.

Taking a bit of poetic license and substituting “nourish” for “sustain”, we have:

You know the sea nourishes life;
you know the sky nourishes life.
I say the bird nourishes life;
I say the fish nourishes life.
Thus must life nourish the fish;
thus must life nourish the bird.

At the nitpicky level, should it be sky or air, or sea or water? Well, in the preceding part Dogen spells out “sora” (sky) in hiragana, so the corresponding character 空 in the section being addressed here can legitimately be translated as sky, rather than air. The Sino-Japanese character for “water” is used throughout, but by analogy with “sky” we prefer “sea”.

But I’m left with one nagging doubt. Is it not possible there was a transcription error that was never caught, and that the second pair should refer to bird and fish nourishing sky and sea? It would seem to make much more sense if it read (substituting “nurture” for “nourish”):

You know the sea nurtures life;
you know the sky nurtures life.
I say the bird nurtures the sky;
I say the fish nurtures the sea.
Thus must life nurture the fish;
thus must life nurture the bird.

And the cycle is complete.

]]> http://www.numenware.com/article/578/feed 5 http://www.numenware.com/article/572 http://www.numenware.com/article/572#comments Sat, 10 May 2008 05:57:52 +0000 rtm http://www.numenware.com/article/572 2006 postings to Numenware are now available in book form for the low, low price of $19.95. What better belated Christmas present for your loved one or even yourself to read in the tub.

From the intro:

2006 was the year with the greatest density of neurotheological content on the blog, and these articles, taken as a whole, would I hope represent a meaningfully significant, if somewhat quirky, overview of the field.

Loyal readers of Numenware who read posts as they went up may have missed the discussion in the comments section, many of which are extremely informative. These comments have been included in the book, typos and all.

Buy Numenware 2006 from Lulu.com now . 140 pp., with an extensive (10 page) index. Digital version available for three bucks and change.

]]> http://www.numenware.com/article/572/feed 0 http://www.numenware.com/article/571 http://www.numenware.com/article/571#comments Tue, 06 May 2008 19:23:07 +0000 rtm http://www.numenware.com/article/571 The word must be out about what Daddy’s interested in because under the tree for me at Christmas-time were two, count ‘em, two books by Andrew Newberg, MD , namely “Why We Believe What We Believe” and “Why God Won’t Go Away”. Picked up the first one and started in on Chapter 1, “The Power of Belief”. The first story was about a guy for whom a cancer drug worked when he believed it would and didn’t when he didn’t. That seems a little off-topic–the book’s supposed to be about “Why We Believe”, not “What Belief Does”, but hey, let’s give Andy the benefit of the doubt. But then he undercuts his own case by quoting estimates that such spontaneous remissions occur only one in 3,000 or perhaps as few as 100,000 medical cases. And that’s even before you’ve eliminated spontaneous remissions not associated with “belief”. Why exactly are we supposed to be so concerned with something that might, or might not, be responsible for healing some infinitesimally tiny fraction of sick people?

Now we jump:

Hundreds of mind-body experiements have been conducted–including placebo studies and research on the power of meditation and prayer–but few scientists have attempted to explain the underlying biology of belief.

the real robin hood the movie good quality

Notice the huge logical gap here? The intro about the miraculously cured cancer guy was talking about the biological effects of belief. Now suddenly we shift gears and are talking about the biological underpinnings of belief. The two certainly could be related and may form some kind of feedback loop, but certainly it’s not correct to completely conflate them.

This type of confusion continues throughout the first chapter and the entire book. It’s almost as if Newberg dictated the book and never bothered to proof it. We’re told, for instance, that the book will propose a “practical model of how the brain works that will help you understand your own beliefs and the nature of reality”. Understanding my own beliefs sounds good, but also understanding the nature of reality? This is just muddle, with no idea where the boundaries between “you”, “brain”, “belief”, and “reality” might lie.

Next Newberg switches into a pseudo-New Age rap:

If we understand the neuropsychology of the brain [sic], our beliefs will be able to grow and change as we interact with others who have different views of the world. It is my hope that as we become better believers, we will exercise greater compassion in our search for meaning and truth.

This is gobbledygook pure and simple. Our beliefs grow and change completely independent of any meta-level “understanding” we may have of neuropsychology or anything else. The concept of “better believers” is puzzling in the extreme–is Newberg trying to say that someone with an intellectual understanding of the phenomenon of belief, not that we’re going to get it from this book, is a “better believer”?

In discussing prejudice, skepticism and doubt, we are told:

Neurologically, such prejudice seems rooted in human nature, for the human brain has a propensity to reject any belief that is not in accord with one’s own view.

The muddiness of the logic here is astounding. I guess it goes something like this: “People tend to get attached to their beliefs and not accept new ones. Since people are their brains, or controlled by them, or something or other, then it’s actually the brain that has the propsensity to reject contradictory beliefs. And, since the Greek prefix “neuro” refers to the brain, let’s use the big word ‘neurologically’ and then claim that the prejudice is neurologically rooted in human nature.”

Next we jump to the interesting but completely peripheral issue of whether animals can have beliefs. What quickly becomes apparent is that Newberg has completely neglected to do the simplest categorization of types of belief. There’s Mr. Wright believing the cancer drug would work; there’s people believing in God, or political parties; and now we’ve got animals who supposedly have beliefs in the sense that they have an “ability to form new assumptions about their environment”, like dogs who “believe” their master will return. Geez, even amoebas have “beliefs” formed when they’re shocked. This is madness. My cat believes that when he ascends the stairway he’ll be on the second floor, or that in the morning Daddy will come down and pet him. For that matter, I “believe” that when I type a key on the keyboard the corresponding letter will appear in this blog entry. Whether or how those “beliefs” have anything in common with a belief in the Virgin Mary is the real point and the one that Newberg studiously avoids.

But wait, there’s more. Maybe inaminate matter–such as rocks–have beliefs! Because if their “smallest subatomic particles could have some form of self-volition or consciousness” then that would be sort of like a kind of belief! And if they did then all things in the universe would be connected in a great circle of consciousness! Just like the Native Americans believe! And the best thing is that believing in belief, believing that there’s all those beliefs out there, can bring us a sense of peace and equanimity!

Newberg cannot end the chapter without one final, confused segue, this time to beliefs as really cool things, with all kinds of benefits, that we should have more of, attributing to them tautological miracles such as “giving us our sense of ourselves” (we have beliefs, and we believe we have those beliefs, and we believe that we are the person who has the beliefs we believe we have, maybe?) and “helping us regulate the emotional centers of the brain”. Mine aren’t too regulated, and that’s due, I now believe, to me just not having enough beliefs!

]]> http://www.numenware.com/article/571/feed 0 http://www.numenware.com/article/576 http://www.numenware.com/article/576#comments Tue, 06 May 2008 15:46:05 +0000 rtm http://www.numenware.com/?p=576 Douglas Crockford is the oracle of Javascript and holds the right position on Javascript 2.0. He also writes the quirky Department of Style blog. Here’s today’s post:

Once upon a time there was a small toad named Nathaniel. Nathaniel was despised by everyone who knew him. Not because he was a toad, or because he pulled the wings and legs off of flies before he ate them, but because he could not be trusted.

One day at the forest tavern, where all the small forest creatures went nightly to get drunk, Nathaniel announced that he was never going to pay back the money he had borrowed from his little woodland friends. And he borrowed large sums of money from just about everyone.

So they killed him. And then they pulled his legs and arms off and ate him.

]]> http://www.numenware.com/article/576/feed 1 http://www.numenware.com/article/589 http://www.numenware.com/article/589#comments Sun, 04 May 2008 21:26:47 +0000 admin http://www.numenware.com/?p=589 Branching sequences are common in real life. For instance, a recipe can be represented as a sequence of steps, with branches corresponding to variations. Games of go or chess , of course, are the classic example of branching sequences, where branches handle the “could have/should have played there” comments. Branching sequences can even be used to handle linear text , with branches used for optional or alternate material.

If we have complete control over the programming environment we can implement branching sequences in any way we want, most of them quite obvious. But in today’s web-based world, there are good reasons to represent such structures using XML (for transformations, interoperability, or even storage in XML databases) and HTML (for display). What is the best way to do so?

It seems obvious that the sequential aspect of branching sequences should be represented by a sequence of XML siblings:

<elt>step 1-1</elt>
<elt>step 1-2</elt>
<elt>step 1-3</elt>


So how do we handle the branching aspect? We have only one more dimension to work with, going down in the child dimension. So we might try:

<elt>step 1-1</elt>
<elt>step 1-2
<elt>step 2-2</elt>
</elt>
<elt>step 1-3</elt>

The problem with this is that node 2-2 comes after 1-2 in traversal order. Put another way, an element that is not in branch 2 comes in between step 1-1 and its follower in branch 2, which is 2-2. We could try to solve this problem by placing the branch as the child of the preceding node:

<elt>step 1-1</elt>
<elt>step 2-2</elt>
</elt>
<elt>step 1-2
<elt>step 1-3</elt>

But now we have the odd asymmetry that the successor of step 1-1 in branch 1 is found as its sibling, whereas its successor in branch 2 is found as its child. This is going to result in more complicated logic than necessary to walk, subset, or transform the branching sequence.

Another alternative is to explicitly represent branches and/or sequences with special tags such as <branch> or <seq>. But this will have the effect of muddying our data representation by mixing structural and content tags.

The solution is surprising and elegant: use the parent-child dimension of XML data structure to represent sequences, and the sibling dimension to represent branches. The “next” element in the sequence is always the child of the preceding one. The “next” alternative is always the following sibling of the preceding one. All alternative steps are cleanly represented as a group of children of the node corresponding to the preceding step:

<elt>step 1-1
<elt>step 1-2
<elt>step 1-3</elt>
</elt>
<elt>step 2-2</elt>
</elt>

This structure has a number of satisfying properties. First, any sequence on any branch is represented by one unique path of parent-child relationships; in XPath terms, the sequence ending at element END is precisely $END/ancestor::elt. Second, transformations using systems such as XSLT are extremely clean, as can be seen in the following program to extract only the main branch:


<xsl:template mode="copy" match="elt[position() > 0]"/>


Third, the structure works well with CSS, where properties are inherited along the parent-child axis. For instance, to terminate the display of the sequence at elt X (display only up to element X) requires nothing more than setting the class of that element to LEAF:

.LEAF elt { display: none; }

This approach might strike some as counter-intuitive, since a sequence of any meaningful length will result in a hierarchy as many steps deep as the sequence is long. But that should not pose a problem for any but the most poorly constructed processing agents.

We’ll call this design pattern SCAS, for “successor as child, alternative as sibling.”

]]> http://www.numenware.com/article/589/feed 0 http://www.numenware.com/article/585 http://www.numenware.com/article/585#comments Sun, 04 May 2008 14:31:53 +0000 admin http://www.numenware.com/?p=585

The magazine IEEE Spectrum is running a Special Report on the Singularity . Well worth glancing at.

]]> http://www.numenware.com/article/585/feed 0 http://www.numenware.com/article/570 http://www.numenware.com/article/570#comments Fri, 02 May 2008 05:51:40 +0000 rtm http://www.numenware.com/article/570

According to a post to the computer-go mailing list, Tei Meikou 9-dan (pictured; GoBase bio), known for his expertise in computer go, characterized the Monte Carlo-style go program Crazy Stone (earlier post ) as “at least 1-dan”, based on its winning performance at the First UEC Cup Computer Go Tournament. This is a huge milestone. Tei characterized moves 86 and 88 as “almost professional level” (see SGF game record).

]]> http://www.numenware.com/article/570/feed 1 http://www.numenware.com/article/592 http://www.numenware.com/article/592#comments Sun, 06 Jan 2008 16:45:07 +0000 admin http://www.numenware.com/?p=592 TechCrunch had an about why MySpace and Facebook are failing in Japan.

I had a glimmering of Facebook’s potential problems in Japan when I noticed that my son Ko was spending the great majority of his time online on Japanese social networking site . He even pays money for the service, although only a few dollars a month. Imagine how many Facebook subscribers would remain if they had to pay.

The reason given in the post for Facebook’s failure is its lack of cultural sensitivity and late entry. But the broader reason is simply hubris, or more kindly, a poor analysis of its real strengths and how to leverage them in Japan. The hubris extends in a number of directions. First, hubris that their US success is due to them being really really smart, as opposed to mostly being lucky. Related to that is the hubris that the brilliant thing they’ve built is the best social networking platform on the planet and will work for everybody, except for the little fact that it’s in the wrong language, which is something real easy to fix (since they’re so smart) with a bit of crowd-sourced translation. Third is the hubris that they can successfully clone the Microsoft go-it-yourself model, ignoring the historical cycles of Japan entry strategies, driven by the way platforms and applications are changing over the decades. Fourth is the hubris that they are so good that they can take their own sweet time playing in the US sandbox and then come in whenever they please and blow away the supposedly lame domestic competition.

The TechCrunch post claims simplistically that you have to partner in Japan to be successful. Actually, those with longer memories know that things are not quite that straightforward. That was definitely the case up through the 1970′s, due simply to the closed nature of the Japanese society and business world. To put it a bit crudely, the price the Japanese levied for admission to their party was a share of the pie for themselves. But as the country opened in the ’80s and ’90s, this was no longer gospel. It became possible to hire Japanese staff into a fully-owned local presence, and Japanese clients opened up to foreign products. The notable example, of course, is Microsoft, who quickly took control of their own destiny in Japan and established a virtual monopoly first with their OS and then, somewhat more painfully, with applications. Part of their success was due, of course, to the same hard-knuckled tactics they were famous for in the US. But it’s also the case that an OS has less cultural dependency than a software application or even a bulldozer. Microsoft’s difficulty in capturing the applications market was due partly to the fact that applications are tied more closely to the culture, but they were helped greatly by their clueless competition such as Just Systems, possessed of febrid visions of becoming the Microsoft of the East, with their own entire GUI OS and application suite, and then virtually spent themsevles out of business trying to realize them.

Yahoo! is often presented as a successful example of a partnering strategy. And indeed Yahoo! Japan is arguably more successful than its American parent, and much more so than US search companies and portals who did not partner. But it’s unclear that the price Yahoo! paid for the partnership was absolutely necessary for its success; to put it another way, to the extent they partnered, the success is no longer really their own to fully enjoy. The search side of the equation, including advertising, it is a horizontal technology which is to a large extent culturally transportable, assuming the obvious language-related technology tweaks for search and business-related marketing tweaks for advertising. The case can be made that in fact Yahoo! Japan is now a millstone around Yahoo!’s neck, and in fact some of the discussions around a potential Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo! explicitly called for a divestiture of their Asian assets. Amazon, which can also be considered a horizontal technology, did just fine with a go-it-alone approach. Partnering in their case would probably have just slowed them down, as hide-bound traditional book distributors told them all the reasons that this or just couldn’t be done over there.

The traditional partnering process is often fraught with confusion on both sides. US companies typically come in with the poorly concealed attitude that they want the Japan side to localize the damn thing and then sell the hell out of it, then wait for new versions from the US, and by the way don’t pester us with all sorts of odd new feature requests. The purity of the main software branch must be preserved at all costs; in many cases the Japanese are not even allowed to touch source code, although of course confidentiality concerns also come into play there. Often there’s even a subtly racist tinge to the way the US side talks down to their Japanese partners. There are implicit comparisons to Europe: “we localized and rolled out in Germany in four months and look at sales there now, so what’s wrong with you guys! You know you can be replaced.” Of course, the same dynamic can play itself out equally well even with a fully-owned local subsidiary.

It all goes back to the question of how accurately the American side views their strengths. Many companies don’t consciously ask this question, simply assuming that their strengths range across the board from their superior raw intellect, to their marketing strategy, to product design, to their code base. A more accurate perspective would be that the major American strengths are usually (1) their high-level understanding of marketing trends, since it remains the case in general that the US is ahead of Japan by six to twelve months in the way markets develop; (2) their access to funding (in many cases); and (3) their code components (as opposed to the complete application level).

Given this, it’s time for a new kind of partnering. One is for the American company to simply invest intelligently in their own sector, the one they know best, taking advantage of their headstart in market understanding. A variation of this to invest widely, in a sort of Darwinian or VC-like strategy. Unlike pure VCs, the American company can also share its views of the global market and some of its code components with the Japanese investee. Another strategy is to throw the code base across to a Japanese subsidiary or JV and let them radically fork it. This leverages the value of the existing US code while unleashing the creativity and local market savvy of the Japanese partner.

But wouldn’t this destroy the global integrity of the product? And, in the case of social networking, prevent people from connecting across country boundaries? In practice, people do not network internationally anyway, especially not between languages. There’s no particular advantage in having the US Facebook and Japanese Facebook share the same platform. What typically happens when this is attempted is counterproductive anyway. The US makes half-hearted changes to their v1 to create v1J, then proceeds with v2 ignoring the v1J fork, then has to reintegrate the v1J changes and yet additional Japanese features to create v2J, which hits the market months after it needs to. Especially in this day and age, where net-level APIs can tie together disparate platforms easily where necessary, a monolithic code base should be the lowest priority.

Granted, Microsoft did eventually get to a single code base for Windows and Office, and is in a much better position globally now for having done so. However, the years of effort and hundreds of millions of dollars required to accomplish this should not be underestimated.

Given where Facebook stands now in Japan, taking any of these options would cost exponentially more than one or two or three years ago, but it’s still not too late. I’d take a stake in a half-dozen fledgling social networks at various stages of development from seed to commercially viable, offering to share expertise and code, across a variety of verticals such as women’s, business, and music. And I’d fork the Facebook code now for Japan, and hire the best engineers not to localize it but to rebuild it. The same strategy should work not only for MySpace, but for late entrants such as LinkedIn as well.

The bonus for the new style of partnering is that it takes far less management time and emotional energy on the US side. And the upside is incomparably greater.

]]> http://www.numenware.com/article/592/feed 2