Prodi - You must be joking!?

This is off-topic somewhat, but the government of my adopted second home is planning something which I find deeply disturbing, disheartening, but somehow typical. A law is being tabled to provide for the Registration of Blogs.

I'm no peddler of 'bloggers rights' - it simply appears to me that the current Italian government, having taken a blog-based hammering from Beppe Grillo (who in my opinion is nothing more than another example of a long Italian tradition of opportunistic polemicists) now thinks that discouraging bloggers will solve their problems. Italian politicians are (again in my opinion) amongst the most far-removed from the people they serve: they know little of ordinary life, floating along as they do on cushions of state-paid benefits ("feeding from the public trough", as I have heard such things described), enjoying some of the highest political salaries in Europe, offering (often cynically) some of the more absurd policies, demonstrating time and again a level of ignorance and indifference that shocks even the likes of myself who lives in the quirky peripheral European state of Bertieland.

In the finest Berlusconi tradition, they are embarrassing the entire country by their actions. Public servants doing their usual disservice to their public. Sorry for the bitterness in my tone. I watched Le Iene last night (entertaining political exposé show on Mediaset) and it always leaves me feeling particularly angry with the Italian ruling class.

As they (apparently) say in Rome er più pulito c'ha la rogna (even the cleanest of them has scabies).

More Nerdiness: Google Mashup Editor and Trip Map

I've been playing with Google Mashup Editor recently, with the transparently lame excuse of putting together a map of our trip that is driven from the trip's Google Calendar. Like any software engineer I'm allergic to doing anything more than once (in fact, to doing anything even once, if truth be told), and I didn't see why I should have to update a trip map and a calendar when there was everything a map could need already in the calendar.

GME is a bit of fun, but only the most basic of results can be achieved if you don't know (or want to know) how to write JavaScript code. I'm buggered if I know how it actually works in detail, but what it feels like is a specialized markup language that allows an easier alternative to the Map/Calendar JS API. Presumably it's all being converted into JS behind the scenes anyway.

The effort I put together reads the trip calendar, displays the entries in a list, and for any entry that has a 'Where' value, it tries to plot it. Given the amount of similar (but not quite the same) examples of GME code provided, it was quite straightforward. I've added a button to see where we are based on today's date, and I'll add another one later on to show where we will be on any given date.

At the moment the map's speech bubbles just show some placemarkers, but eventually they will be links to blog entries and images that are tagged with that location. It should make a good overall dashboard for anyone interested in following our movements. Here's where you can go to take a look (I've removed the itinerary map from the bottom of this blog and changed the Itinerary link on the right to point to the mashup).

PS: My wife Letizia is going to start blogging very soon (in Italian and English). I'll pass along the URL when it's up and running.

Review of I Am A Strange Loop, by Douglas Hofstadter

I Am A Strange Loop, by Douglas Hofstadter


Read this review to see why reading I Am A Strange Loop will change the way you read this review (to see why reading I Am A Strange Loop will change the way to read this review (to see...))

The CPU of my laptop is humming away as I type these words (well, the fan is humming, so I guess the CPU is busy too). It knows nothing of the download that I am making from the organic processor in my skull, but then again how could it? It's just a computer it only understands integer arithmetic, and cannot even begin to comprehend the stream of English that I am typing, undoing, retyping, as I try to find the best combination of words to allow you, the reader, to extract the same meaning from this text as I am trying to inject into it.

It has no idea, because it has no strange loop.

The computer is a universal machine - with the right instructions it can be made to represent any problem or perform any job. The power and depth of simple integers is enough to support a rich symbolic system where words, fonts, undos, files, hierarchies, images, conversations, rules, commerce, relationships, humans can all be modelled to some degree of useful granularity. As I type, I'm not thinking about the encoding of each character into binary representation, or the i/o system that supports the notion of directories and files under which those binary values will be stored. I don't think twice about the electromagnetic physics that lies behind that storage mechanism, or the the conversion of these stored integers into electrical or optical pulses to be sent along copper and fibre optic cables between my laptop and wherever the corporate abstraction called Google decides to keep it (I'm using Google Documents). In fact as I try to descend into these details, in order to write the last few lines, I find it difficult. It feels unnatural for humans to leave our world of the virtual, and think about its physical nature! We must be unnatural creatures.

Some people (most perhaps?) believe that we are in fact supernatural creatures. In a sense I can believe it. The prefix super- has the following dictionary definitions:

1. something larger, stronger, or faster than others of its kind.
2. over, above, on
3. exceeding the usual limits
4. a more inclusive group or category
5. in addition to, over and above
6. greater in size, quality, number, or degree, superior

We humans have a soul that is larger than those of other sentient species on planet earth, which sits on, and usually reigns over the natural infrastructure that supports it. We exceed, in good and bad, the limits that confine our fellow species, and include in our virtual realm of ideas everything that we can directly perceive around us, and sometimes distant particles and concepts that arrive to us only very indirectly. In addition to the duties of basic survival and reproduction, we strive to create, to work, to understand, even to love. When we suceed in this, - even when we fail and collapse into destruction, apathy, ignorance or hate - we do so on a level that is superior to any other organism on earth.

But our virtual super-nature sits on a natural physical substrate as surely as the abstraction of this file sits on one of Google's estimated 126,000 integer-arithmetic CPUs and 5000Tb of memory*. And while a degree in computer science allows me a glimpse and a glimmer of how a machine that only knows arithmetic can serve me in writing and publish an article like this, there are just too many abstractions between my self and the brain that underpins it, for me to comprehend how this self can have these thoughts in the first place. I am trapped at this level of abstraction.

Every now and then, however, someone comes along with the imagination to think about thinking, and the communication skills to rattle the bars of this abstraction cage, and offer a slightly longer glimpse at the architecture of the soul. Douglas Hofstadter is such a soul, and I Am A Strange Loop is a book which, even if it doesn't change your life, will at least offer you an insight into why, sometimes, books can change your life.

We now return you to the normal programming schedule.

* Just to be clear: I don't believe for a moment that my brain is architected like a Turing or Von Neumann machine. I don't think that some morning Google will give birth to Skynet. I don't believe that I'm 'just' a computer.

Rated 5/5 on Oct 15 2007 by Brendan Lawlor

Review Tags: book, hofstadter, philosophy

Rate this review or write your own at LouderVoice

Bought the ticket!!

We have to go now. Just spend most of the SSIA on the RTW ticket. Came in a few hundred shy of 10 thousand Euro for the 4 of us, and that includes the Australian visas which the travel agent has offered to organize.

It's an e-ticket, which is handy - one thing less to lose/get stolen. Letizia had a bit of a brainwave at the last minute. If the ticket allows, we'll take a flight from Sydney to Cairns and drive down from there to Brisbane, rather than driving from Sydney. There were a thousand miles or so left over on the ticket so this seems like a good way to use them and see a bit more of Oz.

Sinéad in ForeignAFares in Carrigaline did a great job. Really knows her stuff and has been very available to us.

Easiest 10 grand I ever spent!

Reading ahead

Arthur Frommer says that the biggest mistake that most travels make is to not do a little bit of background reading before visiting a country. Well, he would wouldn't he, being in the travel writing business for the last 50 years or so. But it's hard to argue with this opinion. The first time I traveled around mainland Europe I found myself going from one gothic cathedral to the next. Well, you do, don't you.


But if you haven't understood the social, political and religious circumstances that led to their construction, and therefore don't get why it is that there will hardly be a comparable age again, then by the time you visit your fifth cathedral you won't give a flying buttress about anything except where the nearest bar is.


I promised myself a while back that I wouldn't read another book that wasn't to do with the trip. I broke it almost immediately of course. But I have been doing so little bit of research.


I've read a number of books on historic and modern China now, and I've moved onto some more about Australia. If anyone out there can recommend any books on New Zealand, Fiji, Chile, Bolivia, Peru or Argentina, then I'd love to hear back. In particular if there's anything that touches the three main themes of family, music or ecology, all the better.

My alternative laptop

There it is - my alternative laptop. The Nokia N800 Internet Tablet, with a foldable Freedom Universal bluetooth keyboard (folds to half it's length). I've added a pen to give an idea of scale (it's a one-meter long pen, though - naaah, just kidding).

I spent an entire weekend trying to follow instructions on how to install the driver for the keyboard, but they are now working nicely together.

The screen has a terrific resolution which makes a big difference in terms of usability. There are dedicated buttons to toggle in and out of fullscreen mode, and to zoom in and out as well. The habit of reaching for a mouse is unlearned quickly thanks to the combination of the fullsize keyboard (with important shortcuts) and the touch screen. There is also a choice of two styles of on-screen keyboard: my favourite is the larger of the two - it takes up nearly all the screen and allows you to thumb the keys easily, or even quasi-touch type.

The built-in browser is Opera, but it's possible to replace the rendering engine with a Mozilla one. I've done this, and now I can use Ajax-based websites very easily, including Google Documents - an important part of out planned travel software solution. And of course it works well for blogging too. The next blog entry I write here will be from the N800.

As for memory, I plan to spend some money on MicroSDs. My camera takes Memorystick Pro Duo and the N800 takes SD. So the most convenient way of transferring from one to the other (for the purpose of viewing, blogging, or uploading to Google Pictures) is to transfer MicroSD cards from one to the other by means of MicroSD-to-SD and MicroSD-to-ProDuo converters. I guess it beats hauling a hard disk around with me. I'll have to keep an eye out for a convenient microSD container to hold a large number of them together. They seem particularly fragile and easy to lose.

It's not a laptop, and there's no point in pretending otherwise. It'll seem slow and hard to read compared to the normal laptop experience. But it comes in at less that 500 euros including the keyboard, can (and will!) be carried in a jacket pocket, and also runs skype. An excellent travel communication and journaling kit, all in all.

Speaking of communication, I've just bought a SIM from a new Irish service called MaxRoam which will keep the phone bill way down both for ourselves and anyone who wants to contact us. I'll blog on this later this week.

What could possibly go wrong?

Plenty...Go straight to Katie White's entry on this Freakonomics blog entry.

But what the hell. We can deal with it. Right?