Alexander Chalkidis

Author: alexanderchalkidis

  • The precursor to Facebook groups 450 years ago worked much better

    A ridotto was pretty much like a Facebook group.   It gathered like minded people around a topic.   It was private, like a club.   Any of you who have visited Florence might have seen the plaque commemorating the Camerata, a ridotto which met at the house of Giovanni Bardi di Vernio.   They argued and talked, and gossiped and had flame wars.   I assume pretty much like people do in forums or Facebook groups.   They repeated themselves, they clashed, some member came and some left.   But in the twenty years that this group met at this house, they did something much more important:

    They made the first ever opera.

    Because – unlike most Facebook groups – the ridotto channeled the energies of its members around a theme.   They were concerned with the nature of musical expression.  Vincenzo Galilei (father to the famous Galileo), based on the conversations in this house, made scathing public attacks on the madrigal, the “pointless pop song” of the time.  But they didn’t just post pictures on their common timeline.   They didn’t stop at making fun of the ridiculous repetitiveness of madrigal technique.   They developed and refined specific theories to explain why the artificiality of the madrigal was useless for human expression.   They didn’t just make a facebook fan page for Girolamo Mei, the scholar who was their guru, they developed his ideas further:   one singer, simple accompaniment, clear wording, natural declamation, no dance rhythms on the words, music to express the emotions of the singer.

    The Florentine Camerata staged “Daphne” by  Rinuccini and Peri in 1598.  Other members of the ridotto and Monteverdi soon followed. The world has had opera ever since, the musical genre which has survived without interruption ever since.   That in itself is quite a success in a world which has been shaken by everything from the Renaissance, to the Industrial Revolution since.

    Now get back to your Facebook tab.   Yes, I know you have it open!   Check out the content, especially in pages or groups organised around a particular topic.   Do you think there is ever a chance they will produce anything close to a new musical genre?  If it happens, it won’t be with any help from the technology.  The members argue about the same topic at regular intervals, yet there is no way to organise the arguments like at http://debatepedia.idebate.org .    People nitpick about the exact meaning of specialized terms yet there is no specialised dictionary being built.   Heck, you can’t even easily find an old discussion!   But most of all, you have no sense of actually building on something.   It is unsatisfying, confusing and ultimately a waste of time.

    This is ridiculous given the technology at hand.   Most Facebook groups are built around a cause.   It would be quite easy to almost automatically make some of the content in a good online spat, end up available online for the public.   To intelligently build around a mission statement.   To make members feel they are actually achieving something.   So, since Facebook is so obviously intent on staying in the “timewasting” part of the market, I ask of everyone else to make the plug in technologies to get the job done.   An app to get content out of Facebook and into a blog maybe.   Another to find unusual terms or specialised words and compile them into a dictionary for new members (or the public).   Just scroll down the timeline of a Facebook group you are a member of and loads of other great ideas will come.

    In fact I think I will setup a ridotto for people that want to work on this idea.

    [soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/50690875″ iframe=”true” /]

  • Climbing Mount Improbable with Professor Varoufakis

    Climbing Mount Improbable is one of many books by Richard Dawkins.   The author of “The Selfish Gene” fame.   Because that is what popular science is all about.   Finding a good analogy, or making a new one that catches on.   It’s not about science.   It’s about communication.    I remember raving about one of his books to a zoologist friend who simply noted that “you know, it takes thousands of other works of solid research for him to cherry pick and make those books such good reads for you.”   It is true.  Much as I love reading popular science I realise that it is a bit like enjoying the introductory course for university entry in any topic.

    But Richard Dawkins has turned into the global symbol of the fight to protect evolution as a theory from naysayers around the globe.   Which led him to become the main event at massive atheist gatherings.   It doesn’t really matter if he chose it, or the role chose him.   I am one of many people that think he is great.   As I do of Steven Pinker.   For making such enjoyable introductions to topics I may have never wrangled with otherwise.   Mainly on language though his most recent book comments on the history of violence.   Reminds us of Noam Chomsky, who Wikipedia succintly describes like this:  ” In addition to his work in linguistics, he has written on war, politics, and mass media, and is the author of over 100 books.”  I can personally testify to the fact that the ones on media (my Masters topic) are way too simplistic.   He was out of his league, applying a simple theory to a complex problem.  Even if it is true, it is not useful.

    It is probably anathema to most readers that I even include Yanis Varoufakis in an article after these great thinkers.  But it is the only way I can rationalize his behavior.   Here is a Professor of Economic Theory whose most recent book concludes that  “while economics has scientific pretensions, it is primarily an ideology that supports the interests of the rich and powerful, and in the process, confers prestige, influence, and money on its practitioners.”   Which is a bit like a high priest writing a book which concludes that religion has no claim to any Holy source but is simply a scam for high priests to get money from poor people”!   And I didn’t even need to fish around for that quote.   He has put it on his blog himself!

    That part is fair enough.   If you are looking to sell popular science books, self promotion is of course part of the set up.   Twitter, Blog, articles anywhere and everywhere.   I even read an interview he did about the island of Aigina simply because he spends a lot of time there.   A nice tidy article in Wikipedia which I am guessing he wrote himself is nothing to be ashamed of.  Quite the opposite, all scientists or public figures would be wise to pay attention to theirs.    And taking a public position in the recent elections in terms of being openly for one party and against others is also an admirable trait in my opinion.   As is submitting a “Modest Proposal” about the future of the Euro Zone.

    Mr Varoufakis does a pretty great job at spreading his views.  The BBC (though I am not sure they were happy with his take on their “censorship” of the interview) , BSkyB, Max Keiser and even CNN host his views.   The man is a rarity by Greek standards as he speaks and writes in very good English, and is obviously always available for any media opportunity.   So he can get away with ludicrous generalisations like this one in an article for CNN: “Whereas in the past we were divided between Left and Right, between pro- and anti-Americans, nowadays America is being seen by almost everyone here as a kindred spirit…”

    Really?  And you write this Professor Varoufakis on what authority?   A journalist with a finger on the pulse of Greek society?   A political scientist with some similar claim?   A sociologist with some supporting research data or even simply a supporting theory?   We could of course blame CNN for not being more careful in their choice of contributor.   Or of not editing it out.   If you think like the sort of people who follow him you could even make up a conspiracy theory and assume that he never wrote it.   (The CIA must have added that sentence…knowing wink…)  But this is a small example of a very big problem.

    Lacking any sort of communicational skills on a political and diplomatic level, this is what Greece has been relegated to.   What our pathetic and wimply academia doesn’t have the balls or ability to do as they are too busy saving their own jobs and fighting to stop anyone from actually judging their performance.   We have a part time economist and full time self promoting author “representing” Greece abroad.   I wouldn’t mind if he was not so good at it.   I don’t dislike what Mr Varoufakis does because it is unclear where he stands.   Is he a budding politician?   Mainly an author?   A media persona on any topic?  (Heck, let’s run around the world to the seven dividing lines and do some artsy installations!)  Nor because he is taking advantage of his claim to science on one hand to make more persuasive his pretty weak arguments on the political level.  (A sin not uncommon to people as great as Noam Chosmky at times – especially when he delved into Media analysis.)

    So it is not because Mr Varoufakis is “wrong” that he ruffles my feathers so much.   In this day and age, and especially in Economics “wrong” and “right” are not even part our vocabulary.  Nor is it simply that it seems rather irresponsible to me that he doesn’t take into account the consequences of his attitude.   Spreading fear of an imminent Eurozone collapse most obviously increases the chance of it happening.   Doomsayers have always had this advantage.   Even with their wishy washy vague language, a quick retrospective look at their work usually indicates how little their predictions bear a resemblance to reality.

    No, what really annoys me about Mr Varoufakis is that my country hasn’t got anyone better to represent us on the global media stage.   Rather like pine trees gain a foothold in our mountains and sea gulls or goats are the only animals that survive in a lot of our much troubled natural environments.   A once wondrous complex country, with natural and intellectual complexity second to none is being turned into a one question entity.   And that is the doing of people like Mr Varoufakis.

     

  • Google and the nation state

    I was 17 years old when I first looked North from the peak of Smolikas.   At 2637 meters it is the second highest peak in Greece.   The sun was setting and all I could see was a sea of mountain peaks in the haze.  My head was full of heroic stories from the 2nd WW, but no, you can’t see borders from up there…

    A few years ago I was walking at Prespes lakes, a point where three Balkan countries meet.  We were stopped by the then newly assigned border police with their fancy jeeps, guns and night vision equipment and forced to leave our camp site.   I later learned that the reason was that they take a sizeable percentage from the contraband in the area…

    During my military service I was stationed in Thrace.  Even during a one day leave I would cycle North to the mountains.   I had to go through a police check which was then operational to control (and oppress) the very small Muslim population up there.   Friendly people, we shared a coffee or two and a few times I had crossed the borders with Bulgaria by accident.   There were no clear markings…

    Most Greeks have never actually been to Thrace.   That doesn’t stop them from pronouncing that Turkey somehow wants to take it from us though!  Most Greeks haven’t travelled to Skopje, even though the road from Thesaloniki is very easy and quite beautiful.   That doesn’t stop them from insulting everyone online regarding the name of “Macedonia”.   And most Greeks have been to Bulgaria only for skiing.   Still, some continue to spread a fear that Bulgaria wants to take part of our country for access to the sea…

    This post is in English because I want to apologize.   It isn’t our fault.   Politicians have fanned up the “Macedonian issue” pretty much since Greece was established as a modern country less than two hundred years ago.    Google today dedicated a doodle to the independence of “Macedonia” but luckily there are no street riots like the massive one some years ago.   For those of you that haven’t noticed, we are in the middle of a massive economic crisis.   Not cooperating with other countries, and even more so neighbooring countries is almost suicidal.   It’s not just about tourism (though many Americans reading online disputes will assume that we are a war zone!) but all kinds of collaboration.

    The online fights are endless.   As if history is objective.   As if Alexander the Great was somehow “Greek” in the same way that modern Greek are.   We selectively forget that Athenians hated his guts, that he and his father had to physically and violently fight against the other city states in order to unite the enough to go away against the Persians.   The logical fallacy of the history crazed argument is that it is impossible to draw a direct connection between the pretty short lived empire of Alexander the Great and the modern Greek state.   The fact that his father imported the best tutor of the time (Aristotle) isn’t enough.   Southern cities considered Macedonians  “barbarian”.   You will never get a “definitive” answer regarding the “Greekness” of Alexander the Great.  (And I haven’t even started about his mother!)   It is a great topic for conversation over wine and cheese.   Not politics and not online.

    We are living on a truly globalized planet.   National identity, much like religion is a dwindling part of our self image.  “Self” image.  That means something you keep to yourself.   Nobody can touch it and you don’t go around messing other people’s self identity.  When we get to practical matters and collaboration between people or countries sure, we need rules.   Simple, practical rules, not insults in capital letters and bad English!   You can call a country “Macedonia”, “Macedonia2” or “Macedonia.com” for all I care.   If the Kalash in Pakistan (descendants of Alexander the Great according to some) want to become independent and call themselves “Macedonia”, be my guest!   If Alexandria in Egypt wants autonomy and wants to draw from it’s past for a name, you can be “Macedonia3”!   Heck we can give all countries a number, it would save us time and data space!

     

  • Twice a stranger: the children of Lausanne

    Whether we like it or not, those of us who live in Europe or in places influenced by European ideas remain the children of Lausanne; that is to say, of the convention signed on a Swiss lakeside after the First World War which decreed a massive, forced population movement between Turkey and Greece.

    A bold opening, to what is one of the best books I have ever read by Bruce Clark.  Put it on your list for understanding the modern history of Greece and beyond.  …there are still many people inside and outside the Balkans who would like to see the ‘Lausanne principle’ reapplied; for example, by allowing Bosnia to break up into one or more states, or by dividing up Kosovo.

    It is a serious legacy.

    For the remainder of the century, the memory of the giant Greek-Turkish exchange was a powerful influence on policy makers all over the world. It was taken as proof that it was possible, both practically and morally, to undertake huge exercises in ethnic engineering, and proclaim them a success. Massive population exchanges, agreed by governments over the heads of the ordinary people, became a conceivable and often attractive option for world leaders. As the history of the 20th century shows, the temptation to use such methods is especially strong in certain types of political or geopolitical situation. For example, it can arise where one form of imperial authority (from Soviet communism to British colonial rule) is collapsing; or when a new nationalist power wants to consolidate its authority; or when a new strategic order is being created in the aftermath of war.

    The beauty of the book is that after shooting off these bold claims, the author takes a quite different tack.

    All over Turkey and Greece, you can see the physical remnants of a world whose component parts seem to have been broken apart, suddenly and with great violence. On remote hilltops in the heart of Anatolia, there are gutted shells of stone whose original, sacred purpose is revealed only by a few streaks of ochre paint on an inside wall; the last remains of a Christian fresco. In a nearby village, amid the wandering livestock and muddy tracks, you can often find a sturdy building of two or three storeys, now used as a hayshed or stable but clearly designed for some nobler purpose. On enquiry this turns out to be the remains of a school where Turkish-speaking Orthodox Christians were taught to be a little more Greek by teachers dispatched from Istanbul or Athens. And in the stark, featureless towns of northern Greece, the evidence from buildings is equally startling and puzzling. 

    And he doesn’t just cover the topic with flowery prose.  It is the human stories that make it real for the reader:

    Believers in a traditional Hellenophobia-Turkophobia would have stared at the sight of the Mytilene Greeks spreading farewell meals for their departing neighbours, and later accompanying them to the quay, where Christians and Mohammedans, who for a lifetime had been plowing adjacently and even sharing occasional backgammon games at village cafes, embraced and parted with tears. Then, seated on their heaped up baggage, with their flocks around them – the women weeping, the children hugging their pets, the gray-bearded babas all dignity, as is their wont – the Mytilene Muslims set forth for unknown Turkey.
    – National Geographic magazine, November 1922

    The book has the magical ability to transfer us from the touching episodes between people, to international diplomacy in the same page:

    At the beginning of October 1922, a young Turkish officer called Kemaleddin went down to the harbour of a deserted Aegean port and bade an emotional goodbye to a distraught Greek woman. As he did so, he murmured the name of one of his three sisters who had been killed recently by the Greek army in his home town of Bursa. He also promised the Greek woman, Agape, that he would do whatever he could to ensure the safety of her eighteen-year-old brother, Ilias, who was one of the 3000 Greek men and boys from the town who had been taken prisoner, supposedly to engage in forced labour. This encounter between Kemaleddin and Agape, recounted by her many years later, was the culmination of a poignant human story which unfolded against the background of the momentous, and for many people, unspeakably painful events which took place that autumn on the western edge of Anatolia.

    If schools in both countries were serious about education, this book would be compulsory reading.  For a Greek it is shocking to read about the masses of Muslim populations and their expulsion, yet:

    In today’s Ayvalik, there are not many people with detailed knowledge of that period. If a local person wants to talk history, it is more likely to be the history of Crete, and of what it was like to be a Muslim there. Among Cretan Muslims, the memories they cultivate most strongly are almost a mirror image of those cherished by the Orthodox Greeks. The moments which official Greek history celebrates, they lament – and vice versa. In their collective memory, the advance of Greek nationalism is an unfolding tragedy.

    Clark not only has a great understanding of modern Balkans but a unique capacity for empathy:

    These deportees were given no choice in the matter. Nobody asked them whether they would have preferred to stay put, with all the attendant risks of being a small minority in a state where the majority was bent on affirming its domination. Nobody asked them how they felt, or to which nation or community they felt most attached. The personal feelings of the people involved were the last thing considered by the politicians who decreed the population exchange. What they wanted – and this was not an ignoble desire – was an arrangement that would be durable and minimize the risk of further war, either in the immediate future or in a subsequent generation.

    As if this coctail was not good enough, the author also has an uncanny ease in attaching the past events to current developments:

    Religions, languages and national traditions that used to co-exist now live separately, because no new terms of co-existence could be found. For better or worse, the Sultans provided a sort of shelter under which Muslim sheikhs could receive the faithful in Salonika, and Christian mystics could work their miracles in the villages of Cappadocia. When that authoritarian roof collapsed, people on both sides of the religious divide had to flee for their lives.

    The sad fact is that multinational empires have given way not to multinational democracies but to sharply defined nation-states; and the process of redefinition has often been a violent one. 

     

  • Does the stock market work better than journalism?

    The bias of stock market movements and the psychological phenomenae that affect it have been pretty well documented.   The purposeful ways of manipulating it less so, though with every new scandal we learn – usually retrospectively – something new.   As a person with some history in technology, what never fails to impress me is how tech journalists get carried away.  A recent example is Facebook.   Glowing reports and hyperbole, dotted with a few lifestyle titbits and dashed with vague futurological questions was all we got for years.

    And then came the IPO.

    Suddenly we learnt all about its internal management issues.   Guess what?   A major percentage of  Facebook’s users (that enormous number journalists flouted about in the titles) is fake accounts.   Oh my, what a surprise!   We learnt about Zuckerberg’s lack of skills for the job.    The huge problems in the business model, the enormous questions about the kind of advertising it sells.   The possible impact from legal action in relation to privacy concerns.

    All this was either non existent in the press before, or glossed over.   But when it comes to paying good money to buy a stock, we are obviously more careful than we are when choosing what to read.

  • Apple won’t sue Google and Cook is a better manager than Jobs. Which is bad.

    Of course Apple won’t sue Google!   Getting a positive verdict when fighting a foreign company in a US court is one thing.   Going up against Google is quite another.  Even without the closet of Motorola patents, Google wouldn’t lose.   It would be like going up against the water utility company; they just leave you to die of thirst while you wait for the verdict.   And even if you win, you will always worry what they might put in your water…

    And Tim Cook, unlike Steve Jobs, is a good manager.   He doesn’t take chances like that.   He doesn’t believe in hocus pocus quack medicine.  He has made Apple a much more “normal” company.   After almost two decades of irrationality, he finally gave out dividends.   He actually talks to investors.   After a decade of forcing slave labor in China he finally decided to look like he is doing something about it.    Employees in the US no longer live with the fear of a Jobs’ attack on them; they actually have time to drink coffee now.

    There is more formal organisational structure; without Jobs, other people actually get some real responsibilities.   Around 53% of the employees who reference “MBA” on their Linked in profile have been at Apple (non retail)  less than 22 months.  After a lifetime of closed garden design …hey, OK, he can’t change everything all at once!   There might be a few chinks in the armour but it is still a secretive company.  Only problem is, we are less and less interested in their secrets anymore.

    Apple is based on the wow factor.   Tim Cook will make the best of disappointments like the iPhone 4s.   The company will of course not remain as succesful as it has been in the past years.   But it will not fall down all of a sudden.   He is milking the brand carefully.   But making it a “normal” company is obviously a very…unApple thing to do.   Normal companies don’t perform like Apple did under Jobs.

    So don’t hold your breath.   Some people say “let’s wait and see the new product launches before we decide”.   I don’t think you need to wait for anything.   It won’t be a spectacular success.   And it won’t be a spectacular failure either.

    Normal.   Heck, they might even start giving away more than 1$ a year to charity…

     

  • Purple rain, Obama and Jesus Christ

    “The sky is purple.”   As you create the mental image of a deep purple colored sky, you might walk across to an open window.   You will see a blue (or grey!) sky.   The mental image is shattered and replaced by reality.   Congratulations, your brain is working.  Or, to put it more accurately, the part of your brain that checks other parts of your brain is doing its job.   When you dream you might be able to fly, lift airplanes or be a millionaire; when you wake up it all goes away.

    Modern brain research has shown us that a charismatic person can temporarily take that ability away from us.   Much like our defences are softened when we sleep, we allow a gifted speaker to put thoughts in our heads without examining them.  If you are good at presentations or sales pitches you may have had one of these moments:  the audience is taking it all in, it is going great and then someone reacts.  “Hey, wait a minute…”   He has noticed that he was getting carried away and is trying to snap out of it before you close the deal.   (Charismatic Leadership: An Exploratory Investigation of the Techniques of influence – George A. Sparks)

    In terms of brain activity is much like hypnosis.   A state whereby you are more susceptible to suggestion.    Cult leaders often use it to achieve a mass dellusion.   Marshall Applewhite managed to get 39 people to commit the largest ever mass suicide in the U.S.  Max Weber considered charismatic leadership as a phenomenon attached to an age where people believed that the leader was uniquely connected to the supreme being.  Before the “legal-rational” age.  (Three Seasons of Charismatic Leadership – Tamás Czövek & Carl E. Armerding)   Research has moved forward since then and the leader-follower interaction (LMEX theory) has provided a good framework for more multi faceted thinking on the topic.    It also produced simple “to do” lists such as setting an example, challenging the status quo, visioneering, providing moral support and empowerment of followers.   (Social Construction of Charismatic Leadership – Timothy P. McMahon)

    The image of a fearless leader running ahead in “battle” (whatever business, political or athletic battle that may be) is almost hard wired into or brains.   Yet, as we head into the information age, the evidence mounts that it is baggage we need to leave behind.   In an age of Wikipedia and collective intelligence, can we really assume that a single person can interpret reality for us?   What we probably need are people that can help create the right context for solving problems as a group.    Indeed even the leadership process needs to constantly justify its existence.   Much like an electronic forum.   We occasionally need administrators.   We always need contributors.   We seldom need leaders.

    So a word of advice to budding political, business or religious leaders: the game has changed.   If you are going to rely on those few which are still looking for a magic button saviour, you will soon be out of business.   We need leaders, but they need us more than ever.

    A good overview of how management thinking has evolved on this topic is in “Charismatic Leadership in Organizations” –  Jay A. Conger, Rabindra N. Kanungo

     

  • A great introduction to modern Greece

    It could almost be a travel guide but it has a story as well.   “Eurydice Street: A Place in Athens” by Sofka Zinovieff is a great answer to all those Greeks which get over excited about anything in international media even remotely negative about this country.

    Athenian friends had told us we were mad to want to bring up our children where they were bringing up theirs. ‘Greece is good for holidays but not for living,’ they said. ‘It’s impossible to work, and it’s unbearably hot.’ I recalled various British friends who just thought that Athens was hideous and polluted.

    Yep.   Indeed a common start to any conversation.   Ι will pack some copies next time I go abroad on business to answer them.  Her international experience and eye for detail puts it all in perspective.

    Athens may be an ancient city, but it is also uncompromisingly modern. And there’s hardly anything else in between the two extremes. It’s almost as though the Athenians went straight from carved marble to reinforced concrete, skipping the intervening centuries. 

     The vehicle is perfect.   Her husband is Greek and she has two daughters to explain Greece to.   So it reads less like a pedantic travel guide and more like a novel.   From the beginning it is amusing:

    Searching for somewhere to rent quickly got depressing. We enjoyed the fireplaces disguised as the Parthenon and the plaster caryatids and classical columns that were scattered around brand new houses like icing sugar decorations on wedding cakes. And we laughed about the ubiquitous and horrible, dungeon-like room known euphemistically in Greek as the playroom. But we didn’t want to live in these places. Friends from the more traditional, inland suburbs of Kifissia, Maroussi and Psychiko, in northern Athens, were sardonic. They told us pointedly that the seaside areas we were exploring were especially popular with ex-basketball players, the nouveaux riches, and Russian mafiosi.   We’d never get through a winter there, they said.

    She doesn’t always manage to blend in.   But even the failures show the limits of differences:

    Even I (who have always needed my sleep) was becoming accustomed to going out to dinner at ten or eleven p.m., and staying up until three a.m. or later. I remembered, somewhat ashamedly, how I had once requested to meet some friends for dinner at eight-thirty. I had been howled down:

    ‘What do you take us for, Germans?’ 

    The author does love Greece.   But not in the exaggerated way some foreigners do.   She always has a deep reason and a simple fact to illustrate things:

    As I walked down into the centre of town, I marvelled at how Athens has managed to keep so much charm in spite of the abuse it has suffered. Even in the most modernized districts there is often a sense of neighbourhood. You still have the same neighbours, even if you now see them across fourth-floor balconies instead of on the front door steps, and the local kiosk, grocery, coffee shop and church still hold central positions in daily life. 

    I assume this new breed of Grecofanatics will find some bone to pick in one of her descriptions.   But as far as I’m concerned they are almost always spot on.   Insightful in ways that people living here can hardly understand, particularly since everybody is cutting down on international travel lately.    Here she walks into the civil service:

    He invited me to see his office one day, and we walked through the old, scruffy building which was just about to be renovated. Long, dusty corridors gave onto rooms where civil servants sat drinking the ubiquitous frappe (iced Nescafe), smoking furiously, and playing patience on their computers. They were perhaps the bureaucrats known as ‘chair-centaurs,’ who are supposedly so inseparable from their desks that they seem to be welded to their chairs, as the centaur’s human top is joined to his horse legs. 

    And the author’s anthropological background obviously comes in useful.   Admire this succing description of the most popular of Greek words:

    They insulted the boys by using the word for ‘wanker’, malakas, and became highly adept at using this astonishingly versatile and common epithet. It is not only a slur on somebody ignorant or incapable, but is used by friends as an affectionate equivalent to the English ‘mate’. Thus, teenage boys can interject ‘ela malaka’ (‘Come on, you wanker’) between every other word, but it is still strong enough to be used as a satisfying insult by an angry driver or an abandoned girlfriend.

     In some ways, as I look at the quotes I chose, I am not sure anymore if this is “a great introduction to modern Greece”.  The economic crisis is changing most of these carefully painted portraits.   But if anyone can do a good description of the next phase of Greek life, my vote goes to Sofka Zinovieff.

  • Why Greeks evade tax and my car lies to me

    It is now 2012 and one piece of equipment regularly lies to me.   Your $300 smartphone will tell you where you are, it has a compass, a GPS and all sorts of fancy sensors.   Yet your $40,000 automobile lies in your face.   The speedometer never, ever shows your actual speed.

    Most people assume this is a design glitch.   Maybe it just can’t get the speed onto a round interface accurately.   But in this day and age of electronics, it doesn’t seem to make sense.   Surely, at least with electronic dashboard, the speed reading would be accurate?   Actually it isn’t.   Ever.   And it’s not a technical issue.

    By law, automobiles are allowed to lie up to 10%.   Depending on the country and local variations that is.   In most cases they are fined if the car ever shows less than what it is doing.  Which is my point.   Governments force the auto industry to err on the side of showing that you are going faster than you are so that the police can arrest you if you go to fast.   And you won’t have an excuse.   You can’t claim that your speedometer was showing less.  It is an artificially created cushion; a widely accepted movement of reality as understood by our technology.

    But since my GPS, or even simply timing my car on the motorway for a few miles shows me how wrong my speedometer is, why don’t they actually make an accurate one?   Theoretically, variations in tyre size could affect the accuracy speedometer.   Not much, unless you turn your sports car into a monster truck that is.   Couldn’t a car company actually make an accurate speedometer?   A couple of models (mainly hybrids) are pretty close already.   It isn’t a technical problem.    Cars are full of pixie dust.   Half the speedometer is dedicated to speeds you will never attain, often speeds the car can’t even reach.

    Maybe one day governments will finally do away with this parody.   Law enforcement agents don’t book you for going 51mph on a 50mph road anyway.   Even if your speedometer was inaccurate to a small degree it wouldn’t matter.   It is still analogue so you would be hard pressed to be that steady a driver to be able to drive with one eye on the dashboard at exactly the speed you want anyway.   The whole idea when driving is that you take care to be safe and fit in with the current conditions on the road.   Speeding tickets should be concerned with a mismatch between driving behavior and driving conditions anyway.

    So in this day of smartphones and accurate sensors, law enforcement agencies in both traffic and tax should adapt I think.   Depending on the country and the state of technology, this gap between what government says it is doing and what it clamps down on costs honest people time and money.   Transparency please.

     

  • Oscar Pistorious, Olympic cheating, mobile phone processors and the PC upgrade problem

    When I first read that an athlete was using “blades” I thought they meant servers.  Blade servers are rack mountable computers.   For anyone involved in computing infrastructure part it is part of the everyday lingo.   You try to find the best combination of CPU power, SSD storage if you can and other nerdy things that will end up making a difference when you crunch or serve data.   So maybe this guy was analyzing his technique with the help of multiple servers like I have seen them do in swimming or other competitive sports at the highest levels.

    Turns out he is using prosthetic limbs.   Which possibly give him an unfair advantage.   His lower leg is more than 2kg lighter than his competitors.  Others focus on aspects where he is slower due to these blades.   My question is really quite simple:

    What if the company making Oscar Pistorious’ blades give him a new model which shaves a second of his time?

    Suddenly he would be scoring olympic gold and possibly breaking records.   The same body, with just a small tweak in the prosthetics, would be able to produce much different results.   What if he and others decided to start at the high jump?   Suddenly we would all be discussing the technology in their blades rather than the athletes.   What if he started to run 1500m instead of 400 and he always started really slow but then steamed ahead in the second part of the race as his competitors (without blades) got tired in the lower part of their legs but his blades continued as always?

    Progress in sports results follows a pretty linear path.   (With the exception of certain sports in Mexico due to the altitude.)  As the human body reaches its limits this tails off.   In technology we have Moore’s law but in fact, the perceived benefit to the user of a PC is tailing off.   For more than a decade Intel has been worrying about this, Microsoft has been trying to think of CPU intensive tasks we would really find useful enough to justify constant upgrades.   Mobile phones is where the action is, where you see adverts for “dual core” or “quad core” processors and actually care.   These pocket wonders playback HD video with ease, do voice recognition (with not so much ease) and multitask pretty effectively.   Some of us rely on them to actually get work done, so speed is crucial.   We are willing to pay for it.   When netbooks appeared, people groaned about the puny Atom processors.   Zoom forward, repackage the same thing as a tablet and nobody cares!  It is the job of the user interface to hide the technology.

    It is clearly not a good long term strategy for the Olympics to allow athletes like Pistorious in the Olympic Games.   Unlike mobile devices which cross over boundaries, competitive sport is a show, a spectacle, an idea.   If my next mobile phone opens up documents twice as fast I will be happy.  If it responds as fast as a real secretary to my voice commands I will be ecstatic.   But if Pistorious’ next blades get him halving some Olympic record the whole planet will be annoyed.

     

    Note:  Just a few weeks after I wrote this post, Oscar Pistorius affirmed my conclusions in the worse possible way.   After losing the 200m race in the Paralympics he complained that his opponent “cheated” by using different blades than he did!  If you see the race, the way the Brazilian caught up with him was indeed rather ridiculous;  which simply highlights the problem I was writing about.