NYTimes: (Middle) East Meets West

I recently saw the film "American Hustle" (quite good, I would recommend it), in which there's a con involving an Arab oil magnate in Atlantic City, and I thought of this New York Times article about Middle Eastern investors doing business in the West:

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/12/25/islamic-banks-stuffed-with-cash-explore-partnerships-in-west/?hp

I find the crossroads of disparate cultures fascinating (possibly because I occupy one such intersection myself). There's always a certain contentious power dynamic, no matter how seamless each side wants their dance to be -- it's simply a matter of navigating cultural differences, and where there's difference, there's compromise to be reached.

In the cases mentioned in the above article, it's a matter of Islamic law, which to Westerners accustomed to separation of Church and state, seems antiquated and alien. Of course, considering that American bills still have "In God We Trust" printed on them, we're not 100% secular either. The United States is just a less homogenous society, which means that it's much harder to enshrine any particular religious practice as law without provoking backlash from other religions. In the Middle East, on the other hand, Islamic tenets -- such as the prohibition on interest payments, for example -- are so ingrained in the legal system, in everyone's day-to-day operations, that it would hardly seem out of the ordinary for Islamic companies to request certain religious accommodations as part and parcel of doing business.

Each side tends to think of itself as "normal" and everyone else as "other." That's just how we're wired--it was an evolutionary advantage, to be sure, and we've remained so long after our species abandoned the "small tribes roaming the Serengeti" lifestyle. It's a product of genes ensuring their own survival, methinks, and it has been the root cause of a lot of conflict through the centuries (and even today). But in a world where it is generally acknowledged that outright war between states is undesirable for all states in question (with certain notable exceptions, many of them precipitated by stateless organizations or religious factions), I suppose a lot of that cultural distance gets sublimated into power plays in negotiation (and similar, otherwise constructive enterprises).

I expect we'll see more and more of this in our increasingly globalized world. Today, it's not just governments that engage with each other -- it's entire populations that have to reconcile "us" and "them."

BuzzFeed: The Strand Proves That Bookstores Are Not Dead

The Strand is one of my favorite New York bookstores, so I was especially pleased to see it featured in this holiday piece:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/regajha/the-86-year-old-strand-bookstore-just-proved-that-bookstores

There's been so much media buzz about "the death of the bookstore" in the wake of e-commerce gaining marketshare, but I think there's something to be said for a well-stocked, well-curated neighborhood bookstore with a friendly and helpful staff. Also, their Twitter is fun and their rare books room is wonderful. (I'm guessing that the Christmas shoppers weren't there for the rare books room, but nonetheless...)

Just a bit of holiday cheer for bibliophiles. :-)

BBC: Royal Pardon for Alan Turing (Finally!)

Two days ago, fifty-nine years after he was driven to suicide by discrimination and the overwhelming solitude of misunderstanding, Alan Turing finally received a royal pardon for violating the so-called "gross indecency" laws of his time:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25495315

Though his downfall was perhaps not as well-publicized and posthumously noted as that of Oscar Wilde in the century before his, it was no less a travesty for humanity. (And to think that society had not budged an inch on homosexuality between 1900 and 1954!) Turing was one of the finest cryptanalysts in history, as well as one of the founding fathers of modern computer science, and he was just forty-one years old when he died. One can't help but wonder what great and wonderful things he might have accomplished in his later years had he lived.

I am reminded, somewhat, of the story of Johnny Gunther, immortalized in his father's memoir Death Be Not Proud. Gunther was another extremely promising young man who died even younger, as a teenager, after a valiant struggle with brain cancer. Untimely "early" deaths, like those of Turing, Wilde, and Gunther seem especially tragic because of the injustice of the situation (particularly with Turing and Wilde, whose deaths were entirely preventable) and the abruptly curtailed possibilities of their later lives. Entirely due to human stupidity and prejudice, Turing was never afforded the opportunity to reach his full potential. I can only imagine, for a person brimming with ideas, curiosity, and the drive to contribute meaningfully to the sum of human knowledge, to hold in his hand the poisoned apple and think that such an exit was preferable to the future that lay before him...

The royal pardon is too little, too late, but at least some six decades later, we recognize and regret the human cruelty that hounded Alan Turing to his death, and move forward as a society with an awareness that we did not have before.

Cover-a-Week #34: "The Engine Driver" by The Decemberists

It's been quite a long time since I last posted one of these -- I completely stopped making these videos during NaNoWriMo, and during the period of catching up with my life afterwards. But here's a new one!


http://youtu.be/svuvxbpSmR8

Also, just noticed that I now have two videos with over a thousand views; "Finite Simple Group (of Order Two)" just hit four digits. Yay!

Christmas Tree!

Today we decorated our Christmas tree! It looks like this:

And here it is in the dark, with all of its multicolored, flashing lights:

It never quite feels like the holidays are upon us until we've put up our tree. Every year, my sister and I petition for a larger one, and every year, my mother insists that we buy a smaller one. This year, we compromised at "just a little taller than my father."

Even though I'm a "real adult" now, having a Christmas tree with some presents underneath never fails to make me feel like a little kid again. It's good to be home for the holidays. 

io9: Clever Cosplayers Sued for Carpet Costumes

This seems like a hilarious take on camouflage/your usual Con cosplay:
http://io9.com/cosplayers-threatened-with-legal-action-for-hotel-carpe-1366152096

I can't say I'm terribly surprised that the cosplayers were hit with a cease-and-desist... I imagine that the hotel was, copyright infringement aside, probably afraid that the next DragonCon would see an entire regiment of cosplayers crawling about on the floor like that! (A shame it won't happen, though -- it would have been fun to see!)

Upgo.info, a Parody

Upgo is a project I did with some friends while in California last week. It was a Christmas present for a friend of ours who founded a startup, is an impressive Go player, and has an affinity for all things Japanese. The premise basically arose from someone's attempt to give me the quick-and-dirty description of this friend's startup -- I thought it sounded like The Hunger Games for software engineers. Ergo, we decided to film a parody startup video:


http://youtu.be/v_1Cj0jQ9IQ

We did it over the course of one night in Lucas's living room. The jokes are from all three of us, the video editing was Brett and Lucas, the bones of the script (and the Hunger Games references) was mostly me, the logo and font were Brett, and the website was Lucas.

We even made fake business cards as the physical souvenir (note: the friend for whom we were making the website/video is also named Lucas):

Definitely one of the most fun projects I've done in a while!

The Economist: The Dream of Interstellar Starships, or, the Hows and Whys of Technology

I'm in California, hanging out with a lot of techie folks whom I met at university. We've talked about things like Amazon drones and Elon Musk's proposed hyperloop... and naturally I was reminded of this article, which I saw in The Economist a month or two ago:

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21588349-if-starships-are-ever-built-it-will-be-far-future-does-not-deter

Scientists have been contemplating interstellar travel for as long as science fiction authors have been writing about it (indeed, these two groups have a significant overlap). The above article catalogues some of the problems facing any space-adventuring hopefuls, most notably that of propulsion. It also asks the important question of why.

I was just discussing with a college friend the differences between the humanities and the sciences. It's engineers like them -- like the people I know who work at tech companies up and down the Bay -- who give us the means to achieve what could scarcely be imagined a few generations ago. The sciences answer the question of how. But for what purpose? To what end? Those are the questions the humanities hope to answer -- but we have too few people asking, and too few caring to ask.

There's always hype about the next great "disruptor" in the marketplace, the technology that no one ever imagines he needs, but which he soon finds indispensable (see Henry Ford and Steve Jobs, for example). But I can't help wondering: what kind of society do these visionaries hope to create with their revolutionary ideas? (There's Google's "Don't be evil," but that's hardly descriptive. It's not proscriptions, but rather prescriptions that build a new future.) Beyond the often nebulous concept of improving quality of life, how do inventors imagine their products shaping our society? (Interstellar travel, a la Star Trek, would irrevocably change the way we live and our understanding of our place in the universe.) As the article points out, "Because we can" is not a sufficient reason--it doesn't tell us why.

Some food for thought. I'll likely revisit this topic after my trip.