metaburbia

I while back I bought a Sony PRS-505 eBook reader. I’d contemplated the slowly growing eBook market for a while, I’d heard good things from the US about the Kindle, and I thought it about time I dipped a toe in the water.

After reviewing the eBook landscape I plumped for the Sony. The Kindle was still pricey and didn’t have a separate UK store; The Nook hadn’t been released; Sony used ePub, an open XML-based standard. The touch screen Sony PRS-700 had just been released but was getting somewhat mixed reviews, with some users pointing out that pushing greasy fingers over a surface you’re supposed to read was bound to cause a few problems, so I opted for the Sony PRS505 which had had very good reviews when it first came out.

Since then I’ve been disappointed with it for the following reasons:

• Speed
• Display
• Lack of integration with store

Taking them in turns:

Speed

The page turn isn’t fantastically quick but it’s quick enough not to be a problem. However. My PRS-505 can be unbelievably slow to display the index of books when it first starts up after being switched off and it can also be very, very slow when loading a book. It didn’t take quite as long as the time needed to make a coffee but it was getting on for that. If you change the font size of the display then the book would be repaginated and I would experience that very long wait again.

Display

The e-ink display was supposed to be about the best around when I bought the device but it is still disappointingly grey. I don’t suppose this irritation is confined to Sony eReaders

Lack of integration with store

I buy my books from Amazon. But Amazon was competing with Sony and had the Kindle so I couldn’t buy books from Amazon to read on the PRS-505. I didn’t want to open another book-buying account with another seller; and then, Google announced the availability of thousands of freely downloadable ePub books which Sony made accessible but only through their US store, at least to begin with. That was frustrating. I reinstalled the Sony software and claimed to live in the US just to be able to access the free classics Google was making available.

And now the new Kindle is out. It’s significantly reduced in price. It has WhisperSync, which allows you to pick up reading where you left off on different devices; it has free 3G and WiFi to allow you to contact the Amazon store wherever you happen to be, whenever you want to buy a book. It’s Amazon – and that’s where I buy my books. It’s a smaller device, it looks smarter, it has better battery life, the display is better…and Amazon will allow non-DRMd eBooks to be sold in their store if that’s what the publisher wishesl Sony won’t. And it uses Amazon as a permanent store for all your books.

So it’s the new Kindle for me. I might be just as disappointed by Christmas with the Kindle as I was with the Sony; but I think this iteration of the device might be the the one that tips me over into buying the bulk of my books as eBooks in future. I hope so.

Gource is a version control visualisation tool that supports Git, Mercurial and Bazaar – but you can use it with Subversion with a bit of additional messing about. Here’s a visualisation of activity on the Ruby on Rails repository.

Must get this working with our SVN repositories at work…how can I pass that off as a worthwhile activity…?

The @cdarwin Twitter account has been trundling along for over a year and I’ve finally added geolocation information to some of the tweets. Thanks to @Murat_Gulsacan for the prompt.

Now, when it’s possible to accurately identify where Charles was, I’ll be adding latitude and longitude information so that you can follow his progress on a map.
to

If you click on the ‘from here’ with the little icon, you’ll see a map showing you where Darwin was at the time of the Tweet.

Happy following.

I saw the original of Caspar David Friedrich’s painting, Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer‘, (‘The wanderer above the sea of fog’), or a painting very like it, several years ago, in a travelling exhibition in Edinburgh titled, ‘The Romantic Spirit in German Art’ (which I’d misread as, ‘The Romantic Shirt in German Art”).

This particular Romantic Shirt painting by Friedrich is used on the front cover of my battered old copy of ‘Ecce Homo‘, Nietzsche’s collection of engagingly barmy essays published shortly before his permanent breakdown and the final 10 or 11 years of silence from him, which I bought and tried to read long ago in a bout of moody teenage autodidacticism. I understood … not very much of Nietzsche’s excited ranting but I was quite taken with his little aphorisms and strange snippets of advice. I very much concur with his recommendation about walking in the open air, in the mountains:

Remain seated as little as possible … put no trust in any thought that is not born in the open to the accompaniment of free bodily movement..all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking

A while ago, for example, walking on the fells (the hills) of the Cumbrian Lake District, Helen and I got into a conversation about the Mind and Brain, during which she produced the best knock-down case against epiphenomenalism I’ve ever heard.

Every year, Helen teaches a new intake of more-or-less interested pupils a little about the philosophy of consciousness and the Mind, taking them on a quick tour of dualism, monism, eliminative materialism, qualia and the other members of the exotic bestiary. Although the course module, Freewill and Determinism, contributes relatively little to the final grade, the cleverer students, who will almost never have come across the debates and ideas before, find it fascinating.

One of the supposed explanations of Mind, mental states, and mental events is Epiphenomenalism, the position that mental events are not causal. Although this is a rather improbable claim on the face of it, it has attracted some support because it tries to get around the problem of dualism by denying mental events the capacity to effect behaviour. The commonest brief analogy to help people think about the idea is to liken mental events’ relationship with behavior to the froth on waves. The notion has received a little fillip in recent years following the experiments by Libet which have been taken by some to imply that unconscious neuronal activity precedes apparently volitional acts that experimental subjects believed had been consciously inititiated.

Helen’s objection points out, quite simply, that we are the products of evolution and although there might well exist several, or many, human characteristics that are spandrels, in the accidental, circumstantial, contingent sense that Stephen Jay Gould argued for, and against which Dan Dennet took issue, it would be nonsensical to suggest that consciousness could be such a non-adaptation, needing no explanation. Yet if consciousness – Mind – the sense of volition – is purely epiphenomenal then it could never have been selected for through Natural Selection because its existence or otherwise would have no phenotypic effect which could be operated upon by the forces of evolution.

It seems a very clear and irrefutable argument.

For the past year or so the Twittering @cdarwin has been travelling up and down the coast of South America (in @cdarwin’s world it’s currently February 1834). To compile the tweets in advance I use mostly  ‘The Beagle Diary‘, the subsequent book by Darwin, ‘The Voyage of the Beagle‘ and Darwin’s letters brought together in the excellent Darwin Correpondence Project.

One of the charges made against the real Darwin by Creationists and assorted anti-Darwinists is that he was a racist and an originator of the late 19thC – early 20thC Eugenics movement. Knowing Darwin fairly well now, I believe that to be rather unfair. Whatever you think about eugenics and the Social Darwinism of Spencer and others, Darwin can’t really be held to be responsible for faddish movements claiming to draw inspiration from the bare facts of evolution by Natural Selection.  As for Darwin himself, he was from a famously anti-slavery Whig background and his Beagle Diary is peppered with remarks on the conditions and situations of non-Europeans that display a great deal of compassion, concern and understanding.

Then I saw this tweet from ‘@aTexasAttitude‘

RT @cdarwin: The Indians are half civilized. They talk a good deal of Spanish & some English. Their appearance is though rather wild ~BIGOT~

This was in response to a further adventure by Darwin, Fitzroy and The Beagle to the cold, rainy, wind-whipped southern island of South America, Tierra del Fuego.

Obviously, a reasonable person wouldn’t dream of judging people who lived 150 years ago by the contemporary standards of a confused Western  liberal minority – possibly, in this case, a minority of precisely one.  Darwin displayed many of the customary prejudices and assumptions of the educated English gentry of the 1830s. But he also wrote and acted in a way that set him apart from, for instance,  the Captain of The Beagle, the High Tory, Fitzroy.

Darwin’s journey around the globe on The Beagle underlined for him the inhumanity of the slavery he witnessed at first hand:

…every individuall who has the glory of having exerted himself on the subject of slavery, may rely on it his labours are exerted against miseries perhaps even greater than he imagines.

how weak are the arguments of those who maintain that slavery is a tolerable evil!

and he wrote with admiration of many of the non-Europeans and indigenous peoples he came across. On the other hand, he described the European middle classes of Uruguay with disdain:

The character of the higher & more educated classes who reside in the towns, is stained by many other crimes. — partaking in a lesser degree in the good parts of the Gaucho character; he is a profligate sensualist who laughs at all religion; he is open to the grossest corruption; his want of principle is entire. — An opportunity occurring not to cheat his friend would be an act of weakness; to tell the truth where a lie might be more serviceable, would be the simplicity of a child. — The term honor is not understood; neither it, nor any generous feeling, the remains of chivalry, have survived the long passage of the Atlantic.

The remark to which ‘@aTexasAttitude‘ so objected was made about the the indigenous inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, Darwin described their miserable condition and desperate existence. Here he writes about their near-starvation diet and resort to cannibalism:

…at night, five or six human beings, naked and scarcely protected from the wind and rain of this tempestuous climate, sleep on the wet ground coiled up like animals… if a seal is killed, or the floating carcass of a putrid whale is discovered, it is a feast; and such miserable food is assisted by a few tasteless berries and fungi…when pressed in winter by hunger, they kill and devour their old women before they kill their dogs: the boy, being asked by Mr. Low why they did this, answered, “Doggies catch otters, old women no.” This boy described the manner in which they are killed by being held over smoke and thus choked; he imitated their screams as a joke, and described the parts of their bodies which are considered best to eat. Horrid as such a death by the hands of their friends and relatives must be, the fears of the old women, when hunger begins to press, are more painful to think of; we are told that they then often run away into the mountains, but that they are pursued by the men and brought back to the slaughter-house at their own firesides!

And today, despite the benefits of a more sophisticated understanding of indigenous cultures and a wariness of cultural absolutism, who honestly could not sympathise with Darwin’s description of them as ‘half civilized’?

Deciding how to slice and dice the world  – how to categorise things, how to classify – can often be more of an art than a science. As Dawkins points out there is, in at least one sense, a  single correct method of classifying living things: the One True Tree of Life he calls it. Even so, you might wish to distinguish animals according to their edibility or their propensity to eat you.

My favourite taxonomy  comes from Borges (or, as Larkin is supposed to have said, ‘Who is Borges’). The unfortunate tendency of some Western academics to leap on this list in the belief that the fictional encyclopaedia described by Borges was real, or at least based on real Eastern sources, has been taken by some as an example of the degeneracy of the Western academy, much like the Sokal Hoax.

Here it is. The classification of animals according to the The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge:

• those that belong to the emperor;
• embalmed ones;
• those that are trained;
• suckling pigs;
• mermaids;
• fabulous ones;
• stray dogs;
• those that are included in this classification;
• those that tremble as if they were mad;
• innumerable ones;
• those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush;
• etcetera;
• those that have just broken the flower vase;
• those that at a distance resemble flies

I recently attended a day-long Project Management course. Building a lego tower made an enjoyable change to my daily routine but  our trainer made one or two claims about psychology and personality theory that I doubted. Living with a Psychologist sometimes isn’t easy.

For example, I was surprised at the uncritical claims made by our trainer for the work of Jung. This is the Jung who, as a follower of Freud, had no problem with the idea of an unconscious mind (rather than unconscious mental processes), who contended that alchemical symbols had a direct relationship to the ‘psychoanalytic process’, whatever that may mean, who believed in a Collective Unconscious shared by everything with a nervous system and who suggested that flying saucers were  an expression of an archetype.

Given all this, I tend to be sceptical of claims of truth rooted in Jungian theory. I become doubly sceptical when the person making the claim, faced with perfectly natural incredulity about some counter-intuitive assertions, simply appeals to authority. And when that authority is Jung, well, then I need to go and check the facts.

In this case the claims were for the efficacy and accuracy of a theory of personality types based on a 2-factor model:  personalities could be assigned a position in a 2-dimensional space using the supposedly independent axes of Assertiveness and Responsiveness. Our trainer incorrectly stated  – and incorrectly restated   -  that these axes and the personality inventory we had all completed before the day began were designed by Jung. They weren’t. This Social Styles model derives from the work of David Merrill.

the 2 dimensions of Merrill’s social styles model

This model can hardly be seen to derive from even a simplification of  Jung’s basic attitudenal axis of intraversion-extraversion, combined with his four functional types  – Thinking, Feeling, Sensation and Intuition  – and to describe it as directly and specifically the work of Jung is clearly incorrect.

And what is it worth? It’s extraordinarily popular on the web but is there much to a categorisation of people in this 2-dimensional space? What evidence is there that these two factors are orthogonal? That they are fundamental?

It seems unlikely that the salient features of everyone’s  ‘social style’ could be adequately described in such a simple model and the ready availability of other models using different factors and different numbers of factors suggest that this particular model might not have much purchase in reality. Goldberg has a 5-dimensional model; Eysenck has three; Holland has six; Allport names three levels of traits; Cattell, two tiers of sixteen and five factors respectively.

These models all suffer from the well-known criticisms of all trait-thories: of being essentially descriptive rather than explanatory; of being over-simplifications; of being superficial; of ignoring situational dependencies; and of being statistical generalisations that do not correspond to individual behaviour. I certainly wouldn’t base my decisions on them or alter my behaviour because of them.

The next contentious assertion made by our trainer was about Mehrabian‘s studies that appeared  – to our trainer – to suggest that only 7% of communication was in the content of what was spoken, with – according to her -  38% provided by ‘accent’ (presumably Mehrabian’s ‘tone’) and the remaining 55% by bearing or posture (Mehrabian’s ‘facial expression’).

This was simply a misunderstanding, or misrepresentation of Mehrabian’s studies and conclusions, surprising for such an experienced trainer who had some edcuation in Psychology. It’s a very common misrepresentation amongst management consultants, sales trainers, and suchlike.

Mehrabian’s studies asked participants to judge the feelings of a speaker by listening to a recording of a single word spoken in different tones of voice. That was it. Mehrabian himself has become sufficiently exasperated to publish a warning on his website :

Please note that this and other equations regarding relative importance of verbal and nonverbal messages were derived from experiments dealing with communications of feelings and attitudes (i.e., like-dislike). Unless a communicator is talking about their feelings or attitudes, these equations are not applicable.

and he goes on to say:

I am obviously uncomfortable about misquotes of my work. From the very beginning I have tried to give people the correct limitations of my findings. Unfortunately the field of self-styled ‘corporate image consultants’ or ‘leadership consultants’ has numerous practitioners with very little psychological expertise

None of Mehrabian’s concerns, or the critiques made by other researchers, were mentioned by our trainer.

Still, the lego was fun.

To make the most of the run-up to our holiday I knocked together a simple newsletter that aggregates various sources of information.

So, the weather information I’m pulling from Google RSS feeds
(eg: http://www.google.com/ig/api?weather=Portland,Oregon).

Photos of the area, I’m pulling from Flickr – for example,
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=Oregon,Landscape

News feeds are being pulled from a variety of sources – one, for example, is the The Montana Standard (RSS for the local area news at http://www.mtstandard.com/?rss=area).

And, of grim fascination, the exchange rate for Sterling to the Dollar is being scraped from a simple Google query.

The whole lot is compiled using a cron job once a day, and a prettified email  including a dynamically generated countdown image is sent to me and my partner, Helen.  The finished thing looks something like this: