It’s day three already, and though I initially intended that I’d blog about each day at its end, but somehow, we got to day three without me ever finding time to settle down and write up the experience. WhatTheHack is entirely amazing – there’s so much to do, and everyone’s friendly, interesting or even both. Only the climate is a bit crappy – in the first night, I made the mistake of leaving my backpack with all the clothes out in front of my inner tent, where it got soaked by the night’s rain, leaving me with only wet clothes. However, the heat of the day fixed that up quite nicely. The only major problem with nature that remains is spiders – there’s way too many of them, and they invade my tent all the time because I can’t really seal it off that well, considering that it has network and power cables going into it. They seem harmless, so far, but I discover a new kind almost every day, so I constantly have something to be afraid of when I fall asleep.

The conference program is great – there’s lots of great talks, and also a number of less-interesting ones (to me, of course) that provide breaks to relax, eat, drink and talk. The highlights of Day 1 were two-fold. The first thing was Kevin Warwick‘s "Cyborgs: Practical experimentation" talk, describing his experimentation on direct interfaces between the human nervous system and computers. Let me say this: that man is seriously crazy – he’s got a wireless sensor interface to his median nerves implanted into his arm, and he uses it to transmit his motions to robot arms, receive data from an ultrasound sensor as touch sensation or exchange his touch sensations with his wife’s. The research is highly interesting, and Warwick is a brilliant speaker, too. He showed a number of video segments and added some wry background commentary to each, all great fun.

The other highlight was of a more unplanned, Discordian nature – in the afternoon, we wanted to attend the "Electricity consumption in your home" talk. We arrived a few minutes late, and just at the start of another monsoon shower. For the first five minutes, nothing at all was understood between the speaker‘s rather heavy British accent and the noise of the rain hitting the tent’s roof. We somehow gathered that there was no talk per se, but the guy on the podium was asking for questions already. Since we had obviously missed the talk, we didn’t have any questions to ask, but some others filled in, and our confusion mounted – a guy who asked about the amount of power his UPS was probably wasting got "Four. Perhaps up to eight. Or maybe three. But not more than eight." as an answer. At that point, I was still under the impression that I had just missed some piece of information that would make it make sense, or that it was just power geek jargon to omit units. However, when the speaker launched into a five-minute aside on "water and power don’t mix very well", even I started shaking my head in disbelief and trying to figure out what was going on. Subsequently, new heights were reached during the speaker’s incantation of "Rain, Rain, Go Away" (with an invitation to the audience to join in, which went largely unfollowed, thank Eris…) during a lull in questions, and his final admission of "I don’t really know anything about power. It comes out of the wall – I guess it’s a bit similar to smoke or something" before fleeing the stage. When we had finished assuring each other that it had just really happened, we went to talk to the guy and it turned out that the intended speaker for the talk just hadn’t shown up, and so he and his anthropologist friend had just used the opportunity to do a little experiment to point out how our perception is altered by the perceived authority of the speaker – highly instructive, because in retrospect I could see myself totally filling in the blanks in his bullshitting and simply assuming that he’d be talking some sense. The anthropologist guy claimed it was "very deconstructive" – if so, it was my first encounter with postmodernist philosophy that hinted at how it might actually be quite an interesting subject.

Later on, we met up with some people I had met on HAL 2001, but never seen in the mean time, and a geeky good time was had over some beers in WhatTheBar. Thus ended the first official day of HAL, and it was great fun. I intermittently found time to migrate my gory old shell-scripted picture archive to Gallery – it’s just nice to add captions and tags to the images, and the old archive wasn’t particularly well-adapted to fixing image orientation, either. See here for my WTH pictures. I’m tired of writing now, so the rest will come later (and rest assured, it’s been two rather interesting days). Look at the pictures and make up your own stories in the mean time…

After a short night’s sleep, we ventured forth from Hotel Turist at about 06:00, making our way to the 61 bus and on that to the airport. I was pleasantly surprised that my backpack wasn’t deemed overweight, so we proceeded upstairs to have some coffee while we waited for check-in to start. I got into trouble at the security check, when they discovered that my SwissCard Lite was too dangerous to be allowed on the flight. I had to give it up, never to be seen again. Damn airport paranoia.

The flight was uneventful – we were informed that weather in Amsterdam would be typical (cloudy, drizzle), and we didn’t see a bit of Amsterdam from above since we couldn’t see any ground until about two minutes before touchdown. Next was an odyssey through the halls of Schiphol Airport, where they make you walk several kilometers just to get your baggage back. Of course, since Bratislava is outside the Schengen zone, there was also a break inserted for joining the passport control queue and getting looked at strangely for the tattered state of my passport. I have a growing suspicion that the system is deliberately broken so that they don’t have to hurry so much when extracting people’s luggage from the plane.

Upon entering the train station attached to the airport, we unsuccessfully tried to figure out how to get to Boxtel from the strange Dutch departure tables and my Nederlands map. Since we discovered that we had missed the train we suspected of being the right one already, we decided to go and ask the nice lady at the information counter, who promptly told us the way and even wrote down all the stops we needed to change at. Since there was some time left before the train would depart, we decided to go to Burger King and have kind of early lunch/late breakfast meal. Inevitably, I managed to misplace the piece of paper with our train information somewhere between Burger King and us getting on the train, so we were left to reconstructing the plan from memory. We apparently got it right at the first change, but then we weren’t sure when to change again and resolved to asking the conductor. He told us to get off at s’Hertogenbosch, which we did. In the ensuing chaos, we tried to figure out the right train to Boxtel from the departure tables at the platform, and somehow ended up on the same train that we had just exited from.

That turned out to be a half-correct choice, since the train went to Boxtel alright, it only didn’t think of stopping there, so we got to stay on until Eindhoven, where we finally guesstimated the correct train and got back to Boxtel station. The whole episode was a bit unsettling, but we only fell 15 minutes behind the original schedule, so it didn’t cost too much time. Even so, when we arrived at Boxtel, we ran into a number of people waiting for the WTH shuttle who had been there since the last train had arrived – which probably means camp arrival time would have been the same anyways.

We took the shuttle to WTH, registered and dragged our stuff to the main camping area. I found a huge empty tent (what later became What The Bar), plugged in my crappy fifteen minute battery life ThinkPad and attempted to established contact with the people we were trying to meet up with. I finally reached them via Jabber, and we decided to talk things out as soon as I could catch someone with a DECT phone. The nice barkeeper let us use his, so we arranged to be picked up and escorted to our camping site (the fancy technical solution failed, since I never got the text message that should have given me the GPS coordinates of our target – I’m still waiting, ten hours after it was sent).

Building the tents was sweating hell – the weather might accurately be described as tropical, since it managed to be both hot and extremely humid, without a single breeze anywhere (fortunately, it has since started raining and the temperature has dropped to an acceptable level). A short round trip led us to the conference tents, which were already unbearably hot when empty – I sure hope it rains tomorrow, when the big opening commences and there should be about 1500 people in there… To my dismay, I discovered that most of my baggage was rather superfluous – the 100 meter network cable wasn’t required since we were close enough to a Datenklo to have access anyway, and the 25 meter power cable wasn’t really necessary, either. Only the nine additional extension plugs that I brought were really a useful addition. Also, the rubber hammer and light were already present in versions far superior to anything I could have lugged here on my aching back. In the mean time, though, we’ve already loaned the network cable to a group of people who are uplinking through us. We also debugged a number of spurious power failures, caused by the combination of unprotected connectors and the Dutch weather (ie rain). Everything seems to be running rather reliably now.

This year’s micro-village (let’s call it the at.linux village, for lack of a better term) is a lot more professional than its previous incarnations – mainly because our Tyrolean friends brought a carload of stuff, including two nice 3x3m pavilions that are now linked together and form a nice refuge from the intermittent rain.

If you feel like dropping by, our coordinates are around 51.554029N, 5.338775E… Google maps for this area is nowhere near as useful as it was in Bratislava, so I’ll skip the link this time. If you’re not at WTH, I’ll post a few pictures for you to stoke your envy with real soon now.

I’m en route to WhatTheHack, this year’s hackfest. The plan is to fly from Bratislava to Amsterdam (using SkyEurope and go to the destination Boxtel by train from there. It was not quite the cheapest route to take, but the evening in Bratislava already proved that the detour was entirely worth it.

We booked a room at Hotel Turist, a rather cheap but acceptable place, discovered via Wikitravel’s Bratislava page. They lost my online reservation, but we got a room anyway, and they even fixed the light bulb in the bathroom immediately after we reported it broken. There’s also, erm, free WLAN internet at least from the balcony of our room…

So far, Bratislava is an amazing place. Some observations:

• Public Transit: The transit system is fine. My city map of Bratislava didn’t make it immediately obvious how many stops we needed to take from A to B, but there is a rather good density of busses and trams. The ticket machines, however, are pure evilness. They only take coins, and coins are not that easily obtained. We got SK 1000 notes from the ATM, and, rich as they make you, you can’t buy bus tickets with them. Begging the girl at the snack shop got us SK 70 in coins, which was enough to obtain two bus tickets and get to the hotel. The way back to town for some observation required us to technically violate some Slovakian law, since our tickets expired two minutes before leaving the bus, and we weren’t able to obtain more coins from anyone.
• People: I don’t know their language, I can’t say I know anything about natives. There’s some things I noticed, though… First: there’s an amazing number of British tourists around. We met the first couple of them in the hotel lobby and were immediately impressed by their language (that guy used "fuck" in his opening sentence three times, for fuck’s sake…). Later, in town, we ran into the same people again, and we also stumbled across some Irish-looking people (fat, loud, green-white scarves), and a lot of fun was had just observing them and trying to understand just anything from their converstaion. Second: It’s entirely possible to discern tourists from natives here. That’s because natives usually look like the people you see in model shots in EUian magainzes, while tourists are their own well-nourished selves. I might sound like a character from a Streets song, but believe me: it’s true. When my roommate Joel fell into ravings about the unusual beauty of Eastern European women, I just discounted it as overly romantic banter, but now that I’ve been here for an evening, I kind of have to agree. Third: Somehow, centra Bratislava seems to have an obsession with Spanish/Mexican culture. The ration of Spanish/Mexican style places to all others is roughly 1:1. I seriously don’t get it.
• Prices: I was generally aware of the fact that stuff is cheaper around here. However, it takes some time for the abstract notion to sink in. We ended up taking our first meal at The Dubliner, where prices are rather inflated. Still, a meal and two beers, one of ‘em a Guinness, cost us less than EUR 10 each. Then, in an obviously less touristy place (but still in the middle of town), we discovered the joy of the sub-Euro beer. A large beer is SK 35, and in an entirely nice place, too. For the smoking bunch, a 20 pack of Marlboros is SK 70 here, or about EUR 1.75.

In other words, it seems like this city will definitely receive a return visit for some more exploration. This time, however, our flight is leaving in about six hours, so I need to get in some sleep… Watch this space for updates, I’ll at least throw in some pictures of the evil ticket machines.

In other news, I bought myself a Navilock NL-202U GPS receiver for my laptop. I couldn’t get it to work from my Vienna apartment, but it seems to work nicely from my hotel room in Bratislava. It claims I’m somewhere around here (click “Satellite” on your own, I’m too tired to figure out the query parameter) at the moment. Yay for technology!

Remember the BBC’s Greatest Philosopher vote? Karl Marx won, and pretty decisively at that. Well, at least we have Popper and Socrates in the top ten.

If you’re looking to waste time, I can definitely recommend not pron. I’ve gone through the first 25 levels in about three days’ time, but I can’t seem to figure out 26, so I figured that spreading the frustration to a wider audience might help. Enjoy yourselves, fools.

Back in ancient history, I noted that I didn’t much agree with Morgan Spurlock blaming capitalism for obesity. Turns out that there’s a guy so incensed with Spurlock that he started his own blog, Morgan Spurlock Watch, which is quite an interesting read. Spurlock hardens the impression that he’s a bit of a confused leftist, after he commits stuff like

Right now, I’m planning a trip to Cuba. I want to experience the coutnry and its people before that Pandora’s box is opened there. Because you know after the day Fidel dies, the shipments of American consumer crap will come flooding in. (p. 65)

to print. Spurlock Watch’s response is pretty much all that needs to be said. I do have to admit I enjoy what I’ve seen of 30 Days so far, though most of the entertainment value is in the (probably thoroughly doctored) footage introducing the pre-transformation backwater Americans.

I just upgraded the nanoblogger version this runs on. The upgrade didn’t run all that seamlessly, and the existing upgrade documentation is, to put it plainly, wrong. After unsuccessfully trying to upgrade for an hour, I just gave up and contacted nanoblogger’s author. He pointed me to this post that has a comment with the actual complete upgrading instructions.

My main reason for upgrading was the hope that stuff would be a bit speedier – on my P4 ThinkPad, it takes 37 seconds to add a new post to the blog at the moment, and that was getting a bit tedious because I normally did spell checking and XHTML validation in the browser and afterwards refined the blog post in the editor again, so I did it (at least) twice. Well, the amount of time it takes to do standard tasks in 3.2.3 is almost identical. Still, I like it that there’s now the addition of tidy, a small program that checks the XHTML and character set of the generated files and spits out indications for what’s wrong. Also, the style sheets are a bit more polished than the old ones, so I could drop some of my customizations.

A favourite rant topic of mine for the last few years has been the wide-spread ignorance of economics, not only in everyday people’s beliefs, but also in politics and among people who are terribly smart and otherwise believe in science.

Today, I found this post by the ever-interesting Michael Stastny, pointing me to Paul H. Rubin‘s highly interesting paper "Folk Economics"

Rubin might be a bit pretentious here and there,

Theories competing with neoclassical economics are incorrect (if they are not, then I as the author and you as the reader of this paper are in the wrong business)

but the paper is very, very interesting. His basic idea is that there is an innate model of economic behaviour "wired" into our brains that evolved when humans still lived in hunter-gatherer societies. Because these societies lacked important features of modern society, our intuitive understanding does not reflect the current situation very well. From the summary:

The principles of folk economic evolved when our ancestors lived in environments with small societies (25-150 individuals) and little in the way of specialization, division of labor, capital investment, or economic growth, although exchange and shirking, and the monitoring of shirking, were important.

The beginning of the "Analytic Implication" section mentions all the frequent though puzzling opinions that I keep running into:

The implications of this analysis are that for many economic problems, folk economics will get the wrong answer. Moreover, the answer will be wrong in predictable ways.

[...]

The most prominent example is the naïve understanding of international trade. We would expect naïve individuals to focus on the effect of trade on jobs, not on production and consumption. This is of course what we find.

[...]

Newcomb refers to the public view that the benefits of an industry are the jobs involved, rather than the value of its output.

[...]

The SAEE indicates that the public believes that taxes are too high, but also that business gets too many tax breaks, so the implication is that personal taxes are too high and business taxes too low. Business taxes are not perceived as effecting individuals, as would be consistent with folk economics.

[...]

This survey finds that the mean estimate by the public of profit rates is 46.7% while the correct value is 3%.

Of course, this is a very tempting paper for the self-righteous me, since it pretty much condemns competing theories to the realm of stone-age intuition, but it’s still a formal explanation for something that I frequently observe and that had me puzzled. As an aspiring scientist, I have a hard time not feeling excited about this and letting my critical faculties be numbed by sheer joy of feeling smarter than most people. So, let’s consider some things that might be wrong with this.

First, the concept of "brain modules" that innately determine the way we think is hotly disputed. I am only passingly acquainted with the dispute, and as always, I adhere to the "a bit of both" point of view. Then again, even if Rubin’s guess as to the source of folk economics is wrong, I’m quite convinced that the phenomenon exists as described – I meet its manifestation quite often. Second, Rubin (quite sensibly in the context of the paper) takes neoclassical economics as a given and assumes it works better than folk economics. There’s an interesting field of study in applying his argument to the development of a modern economy – how did we ever get this far if most people’s understanding of economics is so flawed? Of course, the paper gives a number of examples of how economic training tends to alter the behaviour of learners, so it’s not unlikely that a more complex version of economic understanding was transmitted culturally.

I’m definitely venturing far into the realm of speculation, though, so I’ll just relax and feel smug for some time. Corrections are, of course, welcome, since we all know that CITOKATE…

So, the terrorists have struck again. I’m not entirely surprised. Here’s an overview of stuff I stumbled across:

Where wanderlust leads is just back from Iraq:

So London is panicking in response to the bombings
this morning. The Tube is closed, buses are stopped, and the roads in
and our of central London are blocked. One of my co-workers even
complained about "risking his life to come to work".

Jesus, people, haven’t you ever been bombed before?

Global Guerillas analyzes tactics:

The selection of the Circle line was likely due to its centrality to the
Underground network (a postmortem network analysis will demonstrate the
validity of this).
[...]

This is a direct replay of the successful Madrid bombings and
follows the pattern of system disruption we see emerging globally. As
we know, a single series of attacks on this scale will not harm a
city’s economics (see Urban Takedowns
for more) in a lasting way. A “terrorism tax” that deflates the
economic equilibrium of a major urban environment requires a series of
attacks over a period of months that changes basic behavior.

A commenter wonders:

The first thing that came to my mind about the attacks in London was the UK’s current love affair with security cameras and panoptic surveillance. Regardless as to whether the extensive network of cameras in London aids in the capture of the individuals involved in the bombing, would this attack be seen as a failure of that network?

I’m waiting to see anyone figure out that cameras don’t save anybody from being blown up, but I’m not holding my breath.

Wannabe Everything has this to say: Even though I am very much against the people who claim that we need to build a police state in order to defend against attacks like these, I’m also disgusted by both these people’s aims (see Wikipedia for a write-up) and their choice of method. I have no sympathy whatsoever with the perpetrators of the attacks, and I hope that they’ll be brought to justice. Be very careful, however, not to construe this as support for any specific initiatives that are likely to follow – I’m sure there’ll be plenty of misguided authoritarian posturing and more calls for more surveillance, more police powers, more intelligence sharing etc, and most of them will be as ineffectual as their predecessors have been.

I fear that as long as there’s such a large part of the world’s population living in ignorance and poverty, this kind of stupidity will be with us. The most promising path seems to be eroding the terrorists’ support base by dealing with some of the major sources of contention and generally integrating Arab society more into the way the Western world works. This will, of course, not be achieved overnight, so I’m throwing around pipe dreams rather than proposing direct solutions here.

The BBC‘s radio program "In Our Time" is running a vote to determine The Greatest Philosopher. I stumbled across this because for a time it seemed like Karl Marx was winning, and a number of sources from The Economist to a billion bloggers expressed their dissent.

Marx or no (definitely no, thank you, for me), it’s a fun site to click around on. The quiz is also fun – I managed to score 4/12, which can only be explained by piss-poor guessing, since I knew three of the answers.

Here’s my assessment:

• Thomas Aquinas – I can’t really relate to the medieval theologists. Their thoughts seem to revolve way to much around this all-powerful and infathomable "God" concept. It’s admirable what they manage to build from their flawed base (and understandable that they didn’t start from a sounder base, since science in the modern sense was non-existent then and you pretty much had to have some concept explaining the workings of the world), but ultimately, I consider them tragically misguided. Thumbs down.
• Aristotle – his contributions to logic provided the framework for almost two millennia of philosophic inquiry, so he’s definitely made the shortlist for a reason. I’m not familiar with any of his "applied" works, but he manages to draw some criticism from Karl Popper in "The Open Society And Its Enemies" (which, in turn, is criticized by others). Abstain.
• Rene Descartes – not familiar with any of his works, so I’ll just keep my mouth shut. Abstain.
• Epicurus – I don’t have any particular criticism, but I don’t see him as such a major influence, either. Thumbs down.
• Martin Heidegger – a complete thumbs-down from me. Heidegger represents a branch of philosophy that I could never really relate with – I don’t think it’s necessary to expend so much effort on concepts like "existence" or "being", since these things are pretty much unknowable in any known epistemological system. Going with Korzybski, I like to label this "an interesting case for psychopathology". Thumbs down.
• Thomas Hobbes – thumbs down, too. Hobbes’ outlook on humanity is deeply pessimistic and conflicts with most everything I believe. Thumbs down!
• David Hume – The Economist recommends Hume. I haven’t read anything directly, but Hume’s role in the liberal tradition is indisputable. Thumbs up!
• Immanuel Kant – I admire Kant’s contributions to epistemology, though I have a hard time with his writing. On the negative side, Kant’s attempts to define norms for ethics or aesthetics are much less convincing to me. Abstain.
• Søren Kierkegaard – I’m conflicted again – I think Kierkegaard’s focus on the individual is admirable, but his fixation on God and Christianity is much less impressive, so I wouldn’t really vote for him either. Thumbs down.
• Karl Marx – thumbs down, defintely. I don’t see what people still see in Marx. Marxist economics are be thoroughly discredited with five-second examples, as well as by a huge historical experiment.
• John Stuart Mill – unfamiliar, sorry. Abstain.
• Friedrich Nietzsche – though I’m all with him on the rejection of religion and the existentialism, the whole "will to power" thing sounds more like an angry young man than a recipe for society. Thumbs down.
• Plato – it’s hard to exaggerate Plato’s influence on philosophy as we know it – but many of his ideas (for example, the one mentioned in BBC’s summary, "that all things on earth are imperfect copies of their perfect archetypes in another realm", or basically anything in The Republic) have been harmful because they were used to justify tyranny. Abstain.
• Karl Popper – I’m a great admirer of Popper’s work, for a number of reasons. First, Popper’s work is very, very accessible. He goes as far as outrightly condemning philosophers who speak and write in jargon, analyzing how the Hegelian/Marxist tradition of obfuscated writing is used for confused reasoning. Second, I consider Popper’s epistemological work to be highly important to modern science. Third, Popper’s cautious approach to rationalism and his ideal of the Open Society were highly influential on my world view. I could easily vote for Popper as my favourite philosopher, but I don’t think he’s the “Greatest Philosopher” since his contributions, though influential in science, have probably had comparatively little effect. Abstain.
• Bertrand Russell – I have very little to say about Russell, since I don’t know him too well. I really like the Liberal Decalogue, but that’s hardly his main work – the Principia Mathematica were tragically invalidated by Gödel, and I’m not very impressed by Russell’s left-leaning social ideas. Abstain.
• Jean-Paul Sartre – I’m thorougly unfamiliar with Sartre’s work, but my impression is that part of the criticism that I leveraged against Heidegger can be applied here, too. Thumbs down.
• Arthur Schopenhauer – I value Schopenhauer as a critic of Hegel, but I don’t see sufficient evidence of "Greatness" to justify voting for him. Abstain.
• Socrates – the prototypical philosopher, he embodies the basic virtues that define philosophy in my view. His ultimate insight was realizing the vastness of ignorance that he shared with his contemporaries (and their heirs to this, of course). This was the first kick to send people questioning the simplistic belief systems that tradition dictated, and the spirit and style of argument associated with him live to this day. His tragic death in defense of his ideas served to make him an immortal symbol to freedom of thought. Thumbs up!
• Baruch Spinoza – I admire Spinoza’s courage in challenging the common beliefs of his era, but nevertheless, determinism and Pantheism just don’t do it for me. Abstain.

Well, these are my almost entirely unsubstantiated opinions – don’t take them too seriously, don’t flame me too much for them, but by all means go and vote, the ballot is still open until midnight…