Market forces

I just registered myself to Blogshares, a fantasy stock market for weblogs. When you register you are awarded $500 of fictional capital to invest in "blogshares." These are shares in a particular blog, whose value corresponds to the number of links to that blog.

It's a neat concept because blog linking is probably more determinant upon social and cultural forces rather than macroeconomic ones. So it'll be interesting to analyse how this stock market will differ in operation from the usual capitalist markets. Perhaps regular blogs might even be influenced by the Blogshares market and begin behaving like normal free market commodities?

I can't wait to try and make my first $10⁹. Buy, buy, buy Epicycle! :)

Knot

So this morning I found myself invigilating the first exams of the year for the students of the Department of Computing at Imperial College London. There is nothing more mentally and physically demanding than invigilating undergraduate exams. Nothing! Not even sitting the paper itself (in this case a natural language processing paper) could be such a calorie burner. It's so tedious and boring! Just sitting there for 2-hours watching examinees in order to ensure that they aren't cheating or causing anarchy or some such. I wouldn't wish exam invigilation upon my worst enemy! Urgh!

Anyhow, one of the rules of the exam procedure is that if an examinee uses any supplemental answer books to answer their papers, then they have to tie them to the back of their main answer book using a piece of standard issue examination compliant string.

I got pretty bored during this morning's 2-hour extravaganza and foundmyself considering this rule. Like suppose you lived in a culture which had no concept of knots. A culture that had no idea that the ends of a piece of string could be tied together using this thing called a "knot". What would that culture be like?

If you came from such a culture, would you automatically be disadvantaged by the exam rules of Imperial College London? Would pastimes such as the Boy Scouts or sailing be entirely different without knots? What would the subfield of mathematical topology, known as knot theory, be like? Would it even exist? How long would a piece of string be to such "knotless" societies?

All this pondering about knots made me realise how important they are to our culture. Like I said: I wouldn't wish exam invigilation upon my worst enemy. Unless of course, I would. ;)

Reflective excuses...

I haven't written for a while, I know. There used to be a time where I felt like I had to somehow catalogue my life in immaculate detail. I was never one for keeping a journal so this habit would usually be fulfilled by a handful of e-mails to friends and family around the universe, telling them of my day, my thoughts and anything else I felt it was important to record. I'm not sure why I felt like I needed to that. Not so much the aspect of sharing my life, but for feeling obliged to commentate it in literal form. I guess it was, for me at least, a way of somehow preserving the adventure. I don't know.

These days I find myself e-mailing less and less. And I think that is partly why I began this blog -- to takeover where the philosophy of e-mailing left off. But the lack of a blog entry in the last fortnight or so, seems to imply that this isn't working. Doh! I guess part of the reason for this is because I don't have the time to write like I used to. But also, I feel less compelled to write for some reason. Less compelled to preserve the adventure, or necessarily share it with other people. I don't know (answers on a postcard to ...) Sorry.

Anyhow, excuses aside, I have this in my head.

Where do we go from here?
The words are coming out all weird,
Where are you now, when I need you?

Alone on an aeroplane,
Fall asleep on against the window pane,
My blood will thicken.
[ The Bends -- Radiohead ]

Zero Circle

Today I found myself in Waterstones. That was a mistake. I'm such a book junky, I only went in there to look for Barabasi's Linked, but ended up spending an hour just browsing. An hour! Just browsing. Just looking at each and every shelf, seeing what I've read, what I'd like to read and what other people are currently reading. I found myself ooh-ing and aah-ing over the latest fiction and non-fictional delights, thinking of people I know who might read them or might like to read them or might have probably read them already.

There is something about books that you don't get from other media such as the net, the television, the radio, or even the print media. I'm not sure what it is, whether it's because of the physical manifestation of the book itself: information encoded (hopefully in a language that your brain is able to decode) and solidified in large chunks (books are SO digital!). Or is it that feeling of being transported and suspended in the author's own dimension? The ultimate virtual reality. I don't know.

Anyhow, my time in Waterstones wasn't completely wasted. I ended up buying two books (2 for £10 -- Woo-hoo!). I'll tell you more about them later (probably once I've finished them) but in the meantime I just thought I'd share a neat poem with you, that I found in Ten Poems To Change Your Life:

Be helpless, dumbfounded,
Unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come from grace to gather us up.

We are too dull-eyed to see that beauty.
If we say we can, we’re lying.
If we say No, we don’t see it,
That No will behead us
And shut tight our window onto spirit.

So let us rather not be sure of anything,
Beside ourselves, and only that, so
Miraculous beings come running to help.
Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute,
We shall be saying finally,
With tremendous eloquence, Lead us.
When we have totally surrendered to that beauty,
We shall be a mighty kindness.
[ Zero Circle -- Jalaluddin Rumi ]

Isn't that kewl? Rumi was a 13th century Sufi poet who lived in Afghanistan. I like the way he uses the concept of zero (a largely unknown entity in the West at that time), and the closure of the circle (the Arabic symbol for zero is actually a dot) as a metaphor for a state that is completely neutral. Such a state, he says, will allow you speak with "tremendous eloquence" despite being "mute". "We shall be a mighty kindness," he says. Wow. Good stuff!

Iraq Body Count

Whilst googling the web this morning, I found this "alternative" to all those webcounters you find dotted around the net: the Iraq Body Counter.

I have a huge distrust for the statistics that are presented by normal webcounters, and no doubt the results of the Iraq Body Counter are questionable too, but I have more faith in it simply because maximum and minimum limits are provided, as opposed to hard numbers.

And just look at those numbers! Call me cynical, but I wonder if the war will stop once the number of Iraqi civilians killed exceeds the number of people killed in the 9/11 attacks? :P

Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates.

There's a great article by Arundhati Roy in today's Guardian, where she brings together alot of anti-war sentiment.

I didn't much like Roy's God Of Small Things because her prose was so embelished, and this made it hard for me to follow. So I never finished it. But her emotion (and sarcasm!) comes through graphically in this article, which makes it thought provoking and readable, whatever frequency of the war-spectrum you happen to be tuned to. I highly recommend it.

And now this talk of bringing the UN back into the picture. But that old UN girl - it turns out that she just ain't what she was cracked up to be. She's been demoted (although she retains her high salary). Now she's the world's janitor. She's the Philippino cleaning lady, the Indian jamadarni, the postal bride from Thailand, the Mexican household help, the Jamaican au pair. She's employed to clean other peoples' shit. She's used and abused at will.
[ Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates. -- Arundhati Roy ]