New blog for my pics

Best pics of my flickr account here:
http://freetraderpics.blogspot.com/

See you!

library and read update

In 2009 gelezen boeken:
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/freetrader&deepsearch=r2009


Deels gelezen boeken:
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/freetrader&deepsearch=p2009


In 2009 aangeschafte boeken:
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/freetrader&deepsearch=b2009

Support voor Koch

Oh, nee, voor mijn interpretatie.
NRC van 6/11/09 meldt dat in Italië een agressieve man van de rechter minder straf kreeg opgelegd vanwege de aanwezigheid van een bepaalde specifieke genetische afwijking. Ofwel, de a-moralisering van het individu.
Zie ook
http://www.sciencepalooza.nl/?p=957
http://www.nu.nl/opmerkelijk/2116085/moordenaar-met-agressie-gen-krijgt-strafvermindering.html

Koch / Het Diner

Ik geloof niet dat dit boek over een moreel dilemma gaat, of dat Serge uiteindelijk verrassend de goede keuze in dit morele dilemma zou doen. Het gaat eerder over wat je doet om je gezin te beschermen als er een ramp plaats vindt, in een samenleving waarin moraliteit een achterhaald begrip is.

Voor dat laatste lijken me de bewerkingen van het filmpje op youtube te staan (met applaus ed.). En iedereen die daar wel eens kijkt, weet dat er genoeg van dit soort filmpjes te zien zijn. Boodschap: we leven in een samenleving die weinig medelijden met de zwakken heeft.

Daar doet de morele verontwaardiging via Opsporing Verzocht helemaal niets aan af. Het is lekker makkelijk om vanachter de TV moreel verontwaardigd te zijn: ook dat is eerder een vorm van geweld; jezelf eens goed opzwepen over de slechtheid van de wereld en een gevoel van gerechtvaardigde boodsheid krijgen.

Ik denk niet dat we echt nog geloven in schuld&boete en een samenleving waar de rechtvaardigen aan het langste eind trekken. Boete die inhoudt dat je zoon een paar jaar in een jeugdgevangenis terecht zou komen. Wie gelooft nou echt dat ie daar beter van zou worden? Ik denk dat er maar weinig mensen in mijn omgeving zijn die niet zouden denken dat daar een ander slag mensen thuis hoort en dat ze er zelf alles aan zouden doen om hun kroost eruit te houden.

Bij deze interpretatie is de presentatie van het geweld als veroorzaakt door een aantoonbare ziekte dan ook helemaal geen ontkrachting. Die ziekte staat voor een medicalisering van de persoonlijkheid; voor alles wat afwijkend is, wordt vroeg of laat wel een gen of iets anders chemisch/biologisch gevonden. Met als resultaat dat moraliteit betekenisloos wordt.

Daar komt nog bij dat mensen alleen een moreel bewustzijn kunnen ontwikkelen als ze de kans krijgen om zelf na te denken en met afwijkende meningen te komen (Kant / Verlichting: heb de moed je van je iegen verstand te bedienen). Maar als je dat doet, wordt er niet op argumenten ingegaan of de principiele vrijheid van denken, maar wordt je vader bij de rector geroepen, in een sfeer van politieke correctheid.

Kortom, of je nu wel of niet vindt dat de samenleving voorbij goed en kwaad is, dit boek gaat m.i. in ieder geval niet over morele keuzes.

Review of John Kotter - Our Iceberg is melting

Our icebergs really are melting

Latest predications are that within ten years the North Pole will be free of ice in the summer and free of ice around the year only ten years after that. Luckily for them, penguins live on the South Pole.

The message of this story about the penguins seems clear to me. Don’t wait until everyone understands / is willing to understand what is happening and what we should do about it. We need a Leninist vanguard party that understands the objective interests of humanity and organizes the saving of the world in a ruthless way. Any resistance to this vanguard party will be identified as coming from ‘class enemies’ and has to be neutralized. The vanguard party is allowed to do this, because it is working for the good of mankind.

For this vanguard party to operate, democracy as it is does not have to be abolished; it is enough that the vanguard party takes control of it. The only question that remains is: who is going to organize the vanguard party, where are the charismatic leaders that will take hold of the situation? I think at one time the people of the Club of Rome where willing to do this.

To wit, this is if you believe in unconstrained social engineering, and have no doubt about the facts. Personally I don’t doubt the facts, but I think the 20th century has proved that an unconstrained believe in social engineering in all cases leads to totalitarianism. So, probably it is either that or us falling from the earth in the next century or so.

This is the last part of the review, a 4 page review you will find here on Scribd.

redirection notice :-)

---> OLD -- i'm back again!


As of now i will be blogging from a different location.
http://blogger.xs4all.nl/vstekst/
But i will stay your trusted freetrader.

Sorry for the inconvenience!
(i won't give you the url of this one, it's in a different star system alltogether)

See you soon.

natural magick

At the dawn of modern science in the 16th/17th century intelectuals were used to reading, commenting and - if they were really adventurous - writing books. So it has always been a matter of some mystery how the experimental side of science came about. What were its rootes?

Now John Henry claimes that these roots lie for a big part in the practice of Natural Magick.
Henry makes it clear that in a sense Natural Magick was just the medieval term for experimental science. It is because this experimental science operated under a paradigm that seems very misguided to us now, that the experiments sometimes seem a bit wacko. (I talk about turning lead into gold of course).

The paradigm is that of the Great Chain of Being, complemented with lemma's about Signs (of God). Under this paradigm it makes perfect sense to expect almonds to have effects on the brain (remember how the inside of almonds look).

Natural Magick became very popular with intellectuals during the 16th/17th centuries, due to the discovery of a Natural Magick book (Corpus Hermeticum) that claimed to be both very old and showing christian characteristics. It was believed to reveal ancient - Adamic - wisdom. So, I think John Henry points to the right direction.

My point is however, that this means that all books on the history of science I've read so far tell only half the story, since they fail to recognize the influence of Natural Magick.

So, do you believe in magic?

home library (in defense of)

OK, I'm no Thomas Jefferson, but yes i have a home library. Or rather, i'm forever in the process of creating one.

You see, I tended to buy quite some books of non-fiction from the age that most boys are spending money on soft porn pulp magazines. And of course I haven't read all the stuff that's on the shelves. And of course people sometimes asked about this and I felt a vague guilt about it.

But now that is over. And that's because i reinvented the now somewhat impopular concept of the home library and used it to redefine my personality (a little bit). I'm now the official owner of a home library and feeling great about it! Without false feelings of shame I can buy books to build my collection.

You see, sometimes I actually read a book. And then it is quite pleasant to go to other books in the library and see what is written about some of the things you read about. And sometimes I'm just musing on ideas and then it's also very nice to see what others have written about it.

Of course the home library reflects the particular idiosyncracies of its owner. In my case e.g. a lot about the philosophy and history of science, but also on Buddhism.

Maybe you should create your own home library?

pumping meaning through the network

As long as books have been written about Data Processing and Information Science, those books begin with making a distinction between Data and Information.

Take the popuplar Joe Celko in one of the first pages of his 1999 Data And Databases, Concepts In Practice:

Information is what you get when you distill data. A collection of raw facts does not help
anyone to make a decision until it is reduced to a higher-level abstraction.

Now, this conception seems to me heavily biased by the practice of Management Information systems and Data Warehouses, where the distillation process is indeed of prime importance. But as I have been working in the context of Health Informatics and the Electronic Patient Record (EPR) a very different focus is in order.

In the EPR, data about patients is stored and used by actors with different roles in the healthcare process. Phycians of different specialties, nurses, administrative personel etc. The ideal (one of several) is that the patient data can be shared by this community, in order that each of them gets a more complete picture of the patient.

The problem here is that data entered by x as having some meaning to person x, will be retrieved by y and can have a very different meaning to y. This because of the different contexts of the actors, their different cognitive backgrounds etc. This is actually OK as long as the different meaning y attaches to the data is not a misinterpretation of the data.

Unfortunately such misinterpretations happen. The question is: can the EPR be designed and implemented in a way that makes it more robust against misinterpretations of the data stored in it?

Clearly, something can be done. If someone is recording the patient history and has two fields
Diabetes (yes / no) and Startdate (date), it would be wise to make absolutely clear in the record structure of the EPR that the fields belong together and that the date doesn't belong to Stopped Smoking (yes/no).

This is all common sense, but can easily be forgotten with the nice GUI´s one can construct these days. It´s a matter of minutes to give actor x a form with the said fields on them. And putting the Diabetes and Date field together or even putting a box around them, makes their relation to each other immediately clear to actor x. But this relation can get lost in the database and someone constructing a nice form for actor y has to know about their relation in order to reconstruct not only an apparently meaningful but also a correct form.

In what is perhaps a somewhat overstated metaphore, we see that the meaningfull ´living´ information of actor x gets ´burried´ in the database as ´death´ data and has to be ´resurrected´ to meaningfull ´living´ information again for actor y.

I think you will see by now that this is a different viewpoint on the data - information duality than that of Joe Celko. I'd like to call this the problem of Pumping Meaning Through The Network.

carnal knowledge

When thinking about Knowledge most of us think about books with difficult theories in them. And - with some justification - sociologists and philosophers ask us if that knowledge has actualy anything to do with the world. They talk about knowledge as being a social construction.

But then again I think at least our bodies have knowledge about the world in a very realist sense. We know how to survive in the world, not in the sense of fighting wars, but in the sense of eating and breathing. Our bodies know what to do with the stuff that enters it from day 1 of our existence, it is able to metabolize it and let us live.

Our bodies know a lot more. Our visual system is build to recognize straight lines etc. Our braines. Let's not even begin to speak about the way they are well adapted to this world.

It is evolutionary knowledge our bodies have. Those who didn't have it are no longer alive...

A book about knowledge and evolution that I quite like is Henry Plotkin - Darwin Machines and the nature of knowledge.

law of horizontal planes

Fully known as the Fundamental Topological Law Of Horizontal Planes For Domestic Spaces.
It states:
Any well defined horizontal plane in a domestic space can and will be completely covered by two and / or three dimensional objects.
I'm sure you will have noticed this in your own domestic space, or the ones of other people you have visited.
It is one of those obvious but hard to prove fundamental laws. A bit like the one for hairy persons, stating that they always have at least one naked spot where the hairs are parting.

So, can you provide either a proof or a counter example?

internationalization of the proletariat

The next fifty to hundred years will see the true internationalization of the proletariat.
At least in the objective sense, hopefully in the subjective sense.

Due to the forces of neoliberalist globalization the position of workers around the globe will tend to a low average. In the end this will be destructive even to capitalism itself, as the infrastructure (educated and healthy people, roads, telecom etc) will detoriate. But capitalism will not be able to do anything about it, as the cooperation needed for this is far beyond the logic of short term survival in competetive markets.

OK, I admit my indebtedness to John Gray - False Dawn (Delussions of Global Capitalism)
So where's the actor that will put an end to this?

metabolism for ALife

Played around a bit with Artificial Life software some time ago. Animals grazing fields and ants developing their sight.

The essence of it being like this:
A gene codes for the 'eye', with a parameter coding the distance the ant can see. The genetic algorithm creates new ants of which some can better survive than others, because they have the right 'sensitivity' to the (simulated) environment.

A few questions about this:
- What is sensitivity. It seems to require the 'physics' of the environment to be the same as that of the sense organ.
- No new senses can develop in this way, they are not encoded in the gene.
- Somehow this relates to 'embodiment'. Senses develop in a body because the body itself is sensitive to its environment that has the same physics as the body. The distinction between a body per sé and a specialized sense organ is a relative one.
- How is it that the body has the same physics and thus sensitivity? Because it is made out of the environment by a process called metabolism.

So, basically ALifers should attend more to eating and shitting.