Fluxology : the rate of contextual cohesion across a unit area

Scooter and the shell shock sham

2011-03-19T12:55:00.006+01:00

"Combat stress reaction, in the past commonly known as shell shock or battle fatigue, is a military term used to categorize a range of behaviours resulting from the stress of battle which decrease the combatant's fighting efficiency. The most common symptoms are fatigue, slower reaction times, indecision, disconnection from one's surroundings, and inability to prioritize."

Subject: Thanks for a great 28 years
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010
From: Scott McNealy
To: [all Sun employees]

Gang,

When I interviewed many of you for employment at Sun over the years, one commitment often made was that things will change above, below, and around you faster than any place you have ever been. Looks like this was one area we exceeded plan for 28 years. While it was never the primary vision to be acquired by Oracle, it was always an interesting option. And this huge event is upon us now. Let's all embrace it with all of the enthusiasm and class and talent that we have to offer.

This combination has the potential to put Sun, its people, and its technology at the center of yet another industry and game-changing inflection point. The opportunity is well-documented and articulated by Larry and the Oracle folks. Not much I can add on this score. This is a very powerful merger. And way better than some of the alternatives we were facing.

So what do I say to all of you, now this is happening?

It turns out that one simple message to the large and diverse Sun community is actually quite hard to craft. Even for a big mouth who is always ready with a clever quip. The community includes our resellers and customers, our current and former employees, their friends and families who supported our employees on their mission to change the industry, our investors, our supply and service partners, students and educators, and even our competitors with whom we often collaborated.

But let me try. Though nothing I could write comes close to matching the unbelievably strong and positive emotions I have for you all. See, I never was able to master dispassion. I truly loved starting, running, and living Sun. And the last four years have not been without serious withdrawal. And the EU approval rocked me more than it should have.

So, to be honest, this is not a note this founder wants to write. Sun, in my mind, should have been the great and surviving consolidator. But I love the market economy and capitalism more than I love my company.

And I sure "hope" America regains its love affair with capitalism. And except for the auto industry, financial industry, health care, and some other places (I digress), the invisible hand is doing its thing quite efficiently. So I am more than willing to accept this outcome.

And my hat is off to one of the greatest capitalists I have ever met, Larry Ellison. He will do well with the assets that Sun brings to Oracle.

What we did right and wrong at Sun over the years might make for interesting reading. However, I am not a book writer. I am a husband, father of four, and a builder and leader of people who want to make a difference.

But spare me a bit of nostalgia. Not of the mistakes we made, and lord knows I made a ton. But of the things we did right and well.

First and foremost, Sun innovated like crazy. We took it to the limit (see Eagles). And though we did not monetize our inventions as well as we could have, few companies have the track record in R&D that we had over the last 28 years. This made working at Sun really cool. Thanks to all of you inventors and risk takers who changed how we live.

Sun cared about its customers. Even more than we cared about our own company at times. We looked at our customer's mission as more important than ours. Maybe we should have asked for more revenue in return, but our employees were always ready to help first. I love this about Sun, which I guess makes me a good capitalist, if not a great capitalist.

Sun did not cheat, lie, or break the rule of law or decency. While we enjoyed breaking the rules of conventional wisdom and archaic business practice, and for sure loved to win in the market, we did so with a solid reputation for integrity. Nearly three decades of competing without a notable incident of our folks going off course morally or legally. Not all executives and big companies are bad. Really. There are good companies out there. Special thanks to all of my employees for this. I never had to hide the newspaper in shame from my children.

Sun was a financial success. We paid billions in taxes, salaries, purchases, leases, training, and even lawyers and accountants for devastatingly cumbersome SOX and legal compliance (oops, more classic digression). Long-term and smart investors made billions in SUNW. And our customers generated revenue and savings using our equipment in countless ways. Many employees started families, bought homes, and put them through school while working at Sun. Our revenues over 28 years exceeded $200B. Few companies make it to the F200. We did. Nice.

Sun employees had way more fun than any other company. By far. From our dress code ("You must!") to beer busts to our April Fools' pranks to SunRise to our quiet enjoyment at night of a long, hard, well-done day of work, no company enjoyed "work" more than Sun. Thanks to all of our employees past and present for making Sun such a blast.

I could go on for a long time reminiscing about the good and great stuff we did at Sun, but just allow me one last one. We shared. Not the greatest attribute for a capitalist. But one I could not change and was not willing to change about Sun while I was in charge. We shared in the success of Sun with our resellers. With our employees through stock options, SunShare, beer busts, and the like (for as long as Congress would allow) and through our efforts to keep as many of them on board for as long as possible during the inevitable down cycles. With our partners through the Java Community Process, through our open-source collaborations, and licensing strategies. With our customers through our commitments to low barriers to exit. Sun was never just about us. It was about we. And that may be a bit of the reason we are where we are today.

But I have few regrets (see Sinatra's "My Way") and will always look back at Sun and its gang with only pride. Enormous pride. You are the best this industry ever had, though few outside of Sun recognized it.

And what we are about will live on in Sparc, Solaris, Java, our products, and our spirit. Well past everyone's recollections of what we did together. I will never forget, though.

Oracle is getting a crown jewel of the technology industry. They will do great things with Sun. Do your best to support them, and keep the Sun spirit alive and well in the industry. Our children will be better for it.

Thanks for the off-the-charts support to everyone who ever carried a Sun badge, used our products, or helped our company through the years.

And thanks to my wonderful wife, Susan, who gave this desperado (see Eagles) a chance to choose the Queen of Hearts before it was too late.

Someday, hopefully, you will all get to see or meet her and my other life's works named Maverick, Dakota, Colt, and Scout. If you do, perhaps you will understand why I stepped back from the CEO role four years ago. And why I feel like the luckiest guy in the whole world.

My best to all of you, and remember:

Kick butt and have fun!

Scott

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity

2011-03-09T14:03:00.006+01:00

time atom

2011-02-19T15:57:00.000+01:00

space atom

2011-02-19T15:56:00.000+01:00

lang gewacht, nooit verwacht, maar toch gekregen...

2011-01-23T14:50:00.000+01:00

This is called the Wu Zang (five organ) meditation for energetic protection
The yellow emperor classic said that all doctors should do this before treating any patient of any kind and before entering the treatment room
It surrounds you with a strong field of protective energy (wei qi)
It focuses on the six directions
Front, back, left, right, up, down
Or south, north, east, west, heaven and earth.
Its purpose is to extend each of the 5 organs energy far into the horizon to gather chi

Focus on the center of your body (about 3-4 cm below the navel) and then imagine opening up the top of your head
Start pulling chi from the heavens in thru the top of your head
Imagine it as bright shining divine light from the heavens filling your body and saturating it
Feel the body radiating this divine white light energy
Eventually when done more often the body will supersaturate and glow.

Now imagine this energy beginning to coalesce in the center core of your body that extends from the perineum to the top of the head. (if you sit straight this is a line/tube in front of your spine)
Forms an energetic tube of heavenly energy. This center core will begin to vibrate and resonate with the divine white light energy

Now imagine a golden yellow mist of chi arising out of the center of the earth and filling your body
As it fills your body it connects with your spleen and makes the spleen glow with golden yellow energy
Next feel this golden light earth energy swirl and envelop the center core of the white light divine energy. Merging together and synergizing
This represents the energy of your Intention to root and stabilize your power.

Now begin to focus on your heart.
Feel two whirlpools, a golden one enveloping the earth and directed in front of the spine, and another silvery white one from heaven down.
They form a kind of apple shape formed around a central tube just in front and along the spine.
Shape and widen the core so it is as wide as your hips, to amplify the amount you are running.

Now focusing on the heart and imagine a portal or gateway opening.
Then imagine the chi flowing of your heart like a red swirling wind in front of you. Full of power.
The red energy is the phoenix which represents your innate spirit, alive, graceful, yet powerful. The firebird protects you with your Spirit and fire

Now focus your attention to your lower back, the kidney area
Imagine a portal opening and the chi flowing out of your back like water.
Out of this water grows an enormous dark blue turtle whose shell protects you like a mighty shield .
Its shell is like it is on your back, for positioning purposes though. It will be behind you but not directly on your back. The looking is like eyes in the back of your head
This is the energy of your will power and the essence and will power of all your ancestors backing and supporting you

Focus on the lungs and visualize a portal opening on the right side of your body under the right ribs.
Imagine the lung chi flowing out to the right side of your body like steam, forming a white tiger as strong as steel.
This is your body's animal nature. It guards and protects you. with an animal passion for survival.

Focus on the liver and visualize a portal opening on the left side of your body, under the left ribs.
Imagine your liver chi flowing out of the left side of your body like steam forming a green dragon. Resilient and as sinewy as bamboo
This represents the body's divine nature. Guarding and protecting you with a spiritual passion for victory.

Each animal begins to rotate to the left. Protecting, stalking and defending the previous animals position.
Slowly begin to circle these energies counterclockwise and begin to increase their speed. Like a mighty wind around your body
The wind circulates around you faster and faster. Blending the colors into a rainbow of an energy bubble or into one big tube with mother of pearl color
(You can have the sensation that the turtle rolls around and jumps, the dragon extends and shortens... phoenix flies like an arrow, and the tigress runs, jumps and walks, but tends to fly too)
After you have your protective bubble around your body. Draw all the energies in thru the top of your head pulling it in now. Then return the energy of each color back to its original organ.
red to the heart.
dark blue to the kidneys
white to the lungs
green back to the liver
As the color flows back to each organ imagine that steam (white light) flowing out of the pores and filling up the energy bubble created by the animal rotation
(here you can see all kinds of little phoenixes, tigers, turtles and dragons.. hundreds of them.. )
This forms a solid connection between the body's internal organs and the body's external energy field.
Energy seems to keep on looping around, from the organ into the bubble, via the crown back into the organ and back again.

Imagine over your head a sprinkling of light, like stars...the Big Dipper and zoom in on the North Star. ( Can happen that you feel that the star becomes immensely large like a blanket spread over the horizon, shiny silvery white, which makes sense as it lies aligned with the earth's axis in the middle of the corona. )
Using your imagination you've just connected with the North Star and the result of your meditation is 'stored'. So now you should be able to call on the organ protection energy any time you need it instantly.

true by accident

2010-12-02T18:33:00.004+01:00

``Very nice,'' I said. ``But why did you bring me up here?''

``It's time for you to see the fnords,'' he replied.

Then I woke up in bed and it was the next morning. I made breakfast in a pretty nasty mood, wondering if I'd seen the fnords, whatever the hell they were, in the hours he had blacked out, or if I would see them as soon as I went out into the street. I had some pretty gruesome ideas about them, I must admit. Creatures with three eyes and tentacles, survivors from Atlantis, who walked among us, invisible due to some form of mind shield, and did hideous work for the Illuminati. It was unnerving to contemplate, and I finally gave in to my fears and peeked out the window, thinking it might be better to see them from a distance first. Nothing. Just ordinary sleepy people, heading for their busses and subways. That calmed me a little, so I set out the toast and coffee and fetched the New York Times from the hallway. I turned the radio to WBAI and caught some good Vivaldi, sat down, grabbed a piece of toast and started skimming the first page.

Then I saw the fnords.

The feature story involved another of the endless squabbles between Russia and the U.S. in the UN General Assembly, and after each direct quote from the Russian delegate I read a quite distinct ``Fnord!'' The second lead was about a debate in congress on getting the troops out of costa Rica; every argument presented by Senator Bacon was followed by another ``Fnord!'' At the bottom of the page was a Times depth-type study of the growing pollution problem and the increasing use of gas masks among New Yorkers; the most distressing chemical facts were interpolated with more ``Fnords.''

Suddenly I saw Hagbard's eyes burning into me and heard his voice: ``Your heart will remain calm. Your adrenalin gland will remain calm. Calm, all-over calm. You will not panic. you will look at the fnord and see the it. You will not evade it or black it out. you will stay calm and face it.'' And further back, way back: my first-grade teacher writing FNORD on the blackboard, while a wheel with a spiral design turned and turned on his desk, turned and turned, and his voice droned on, IF YOU DON'T SEE THE FNORD IT CAN'T EAT YOU, DON'T SEE THE FNORD, DON'T SEE THE FNORD . . .

I looked back at the paper and still saw the fnords. This was one step beyond Pavlov, I realized. The first conditioned reflex was to experience the panic reaction (the activation syndrome, it's technically called) whenever encountering the word ``fnord.'' The second conditioned reflex was to black out what happened, including the word itself, and just to feel a general low-grade emergency without knowing why. And the third step, of course, was to attribute this anxiety to the news stories, which were bad enough in themselves anyway. Of course, the essence of control is fear. The fnords produced a whole population walking around in chronic low-grade emergency, tormented by ulcers, dizzy spells, nightmares, heart palpitations and all the other symptoms of too much adrenalin. All my left-wing arrogance and contempt for my countrymen melted, and I felt a genuine pity. No wonder the poor bastards believe anything they're told, walk through pollution and overcrowding without complaining, watch their son hauled off to endless wars and butchered, never protest, never fight back, never show much happiness or eroticism or curiosity or normal human emotion, live with perpetual tunnel vision, walk past a slum without seeing either the human misery it contains or the potential threat it poses to their security . . .

Then I got a hunch, and turned quickly to the advertisements. it was as I expected: no fnords. That was part of the gimmick, too: only in consumption, endless consumption, could they escape the amorphous threat of the invisible fnords. I kept thinking about it on my way to the office. If I pointed out a fnord to somebody who hadn't been deconditioned, as Hagbard deconditioned me, what would he or she say? They'd probably read the word before or after it. ``No this word,'' I'd say. And they would again read an adjacent word. But would their panic level rise as the threat came closer to consciousness? I preferred not to try the experiment; it might have ended with a psychotic fugue in the subject. The conditioning, after all, went back to grade school. No wonder we all hate those teachers so much: we have a dim, masked memory of what they've done to us in converting us into good and faithful servants for the Illuminati.

Free as in censorship

2010-10-08T10:23:00.002+02:00

All,

I am very sorry things have come thusfar.. Having done some 60 projects with the SeeBeyond and Sun toolsets during the last 10 years, I would have preferred a brighter future.

It is clear that Oracle is merely hosting OpenESB and isn't in the business of investing valuable resources into maturing a promising toolset. On the other hand, Oracle hasn't shown any malice towards OpenESB and related initiatives despite many people feeling the need to alarm us on pending shutdowns of hosting facilities, which, when checked are up and running as usual. But it also doesn't seem to add much to realizing the potential of OpenESB, Mural, IEP and related technologies like OpenPTK, Keychain, OpenDI, Sailfin, OpenMQ.
Although there appear to be quite some developers and US based companies working along with Oracle on OpenESB. So, this is a rather fuzzy kind of situation which I would love to get more input on.
Something's got to give however..

Just forking or re-hosting this under the fire of argumentation using some very eloquent rethorical soundbytes of several previously unkown community members is not only ethically challengeable but also fatal to the community at it's current stage. I realize that, if such is ones purpose, one needs to move quickly now, because the merger of Sun (and its many high potential projects) into Oracle is finalizing day by day, surprising us with announcements we are not supposed to expect from an Oracle. But we're playing with impressions here, just like answering emails with non-sequiturs will gradually over time makes one think that the one answering has been giving valuable advices, while all they really did was stand close to a question often enough. Such are the intruiging workings on e.g. the "confirmation bias", one of human's many irrational mechanisms of reasoning.

Now, why do I think it is fatal, is related to Monty's struggles at the EU in trying to obtain the name MySQL again.. the goodwill, the reputation, all the traffic and associated support and maintenance income. Let's leave it in the middle if he 'deserves' this after having received part of a $1.000.000.000 payment (which wasn't paid in Sun stocks..), maybe it was right, maybe it was wrong, but he doesn't seem to be getting MariaDb off the ground in the similar way as with MySQL, nor is there a flight of disappointed customers moving his way. But we have seen this with other Open Source projects in the past, as well as the recent ones where finally the plug was being pulled after a major investment. If the owners of the intellectual property, the actual developers mindshare, have for the most part left the community move along and if the remainders choose to detach OpenESB from its originators.. how much of an investment is it going to take to revatilize it all. Enthusiasm is one thing, budget and scale are another.
And that leads me to think the proposed actions, despite its almost theatrical build-up during previous months, is simply hitting a law of nature.. which I would like to ask here. Are the benefits of Open Source Software dependent on the size of the community as well as the complexity of the software?

I can't escape the impression the benefits as listed on http://open-source.gbdirect.co.uk/migration/benefit.html are not realizable if the community isn't large and/or active enough. In fact, I think it's at a certain size and level of activity, the benefits implode and instead of the self-filtering assumption of "Open Source" we encounter a level of inbreeding which also involves effective lock-in for the end-customer. No vendor lock-in, but lock-in by ones solution provider.. as geo-political boundaries, the level of complexity, methodologies like SCRUM lead, along with recession induced cheap projects, effectively lead to implementations where only the original provider has any proficiency in maintaining it. Is this the goal of Open Source ? I very much doubt it so.

If I look at the number of people in the "OpenESB Users" on nabble.. there are actually some 1136 users. Of course some accounts are counted double. LinkedIn shows several groups, "JCAPS (Formerly SeeBeyond)" with 438 members, "Open ESB Community" with 573 and "Java CAPS" with 578.. So let's take the average and say there are some 681 users..
Now, only about 5% of these users were present in Brussels, and a percentage of these 5% are now positioning themselves "in the best interest of THE community" whereas the number of names indicates this only to be about 1% of the community.

The OpenESB Governance model has been set up in quite a meritocratic way, ".. projects within the OpenESB community have a very flat, lightweight governance structure. Decisions are made in public discussion on public mailing lists. There are few formal roles -- an individual's word carries weight in accordance with their contribution to the project. Decisions are preferably made by consensus, rather than voting--most decisions are of interest only to members of the community who will be affected by it. The combination of public mailing lists and consensus ensures that any person who could be affected by a decision both finds out about it, and has a voice in the discussion." - https://open-esb.dev.java.net/Governance.html
Yet if we look at the names listed and try to match with the top 20 posters according to Nabble.. as if this is a measure of proficiency of contribution, but that's another matter, we are left with 2 persons, both providing support to other mailers to the extend of their experience and capabilities. One of which clearly doesn't agree with the course of events. So, we have 0.15 % of the contributive users present at the summit, and taking the lead in speaking in name of THE community..

But if I read http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2010/10/rehost-and-carry-on/index.htm or http://www.forgerock.com/openesb-faq.html then we seem to be talking about the same community? I mean, this OpenESB community, not even the larger SeeBeyond-l on IT Toolbox or STC-User on Yahoogroups.
And why this course of actions? To whose benefit? The source is available.. one can automate a download every night to ensure always having the latest bits and pieces for the event that some *actually* happens. And if one looks deeper into the agreements.. the arrangements are similar to MySQL, or more adequate MySQL AB.. which was about Open Source, in some way, but also a slick company with a lean and agile business model which kept most development inhouse. Just like Sun did, and why this whole community has so much trouble in switching roles from relative passive user to active contributor. Maybe that is going to happen, maybe not, but with tearing down a struggling community I don't think anyone is done a favour, not the companies that built Binding Components, not the original developers of the core features, not the original mindshare and lessons-learned from SeeBeyond which significantly helped in shaping these products.
May it is meant well, but "Hell is paved with good intentions", and are we, the remaining 99% of THE community that blind that we do not notice ?

I would like to take a closer look at something.. Open Source is about "Free as in Freedom", it is about Liberty and not about Gratis, however the latter seems to prevail. Freedom actually has two sides, which have been proposed in the 1960's by philosopher Isaiah Berlin, positive and negative liberty. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/
Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. One has negative liberty to the extent that actions are available to one in this negative sense. Positive liberty is the possibility of acting — or the fact of acting — in such a way as to take control of one's life and realize one's fundamental purposes.

I think it is pretty clear, that what we have been experiencing is a display of 'negative liberty'. And I think Open Source Software is about 'postive liberty'.
As it happens, for gathering some seed capital today I was giving a presentation on the workings of propagation of emotional credentials within social networks, how this works, grows, and proven. This involves goodwill, reputation, adherence to promises, resolution of ambiguity and most importanly trust. Trust is very eery, and important.. and as a last note I like to share the definition used; "The attitude of expecting good performance from another party, whether in terms of loyalty, goodwill, truth, or promises. The importance of trust as a kind of invisible glue that binds society together is most visible when it is lost. Trust involves an element of risk, and epistemologists can have trouble categorizing it as rational, since it works best in advance, for example to motivate performance on occasions when defection may be to the advantage of the person trusted. Economically trust is precious, enabling parties to bypass the costly precautions and safeguards needed in transactions with parties whom one does not trust. Trustworthiness is a virtue, subsuming varieties such as truthfulness and fidelity."

Although Oracle representatives haven't been as involved as I would like them to be, they have only been disappointing. But I kind of got used to that after 2005 already.. But what I am seeing with the summit.. this has me loose trust in this community, if it can be hijacked that easily.
If anything, as I responded already I would like to see Oracle explore a co-sourcing and gradual merger of OpenESB with OW2 Petals, which is likely the only road ahead for a revival. OW2 appears to be morphing in quite a haven for Open Source initiatives seeking less politics but global opportunities. Any other course of events is just about postponing the start date on maintenance contracts for unsupported and dying software solutions. I have no vested interest in any direction whatsoever. This is just my personal opion, and when decisions influence other people's life I prefer dealing with facts, not just impressions, so I invite anyone as a souvereign individual to speak up.

As the American writer Oliver Wendell Holmes accurately observed;
The hydrostatic paradox of controversy. Don't you know what that means? Well, I will tell you.
You know that, if you had a bent tube, one arm of which was of the size of a pipe-stem, and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would stand at the same height in one as in the other.
Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way.
And the fools know it.

Take care,
Paul Peters
Fluxology SA

My Yiddishe Mama

2010-09-06T14:15:00.002+02:00

Mothers matter! High social status and maternal support play an important role in mating success of male bonobos

ScienceDaily (2010-09-05) -- The higher up a male bonobo is placed in the social hierarchy, the greater his mating success is with female bonobos, researchers have found. But even males who are not so highly placed still have a chance of impressing females. A new study finds evidence of direct support from mothers to their sons in agonistic conflicts over access to estrous females. ... > read full article

The diamonds are fake, but the chasms are real..

It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards

2010-08-14T14:27:00.002+02:00

Goedel's US citizenship and the loophole in the Constitution

Mussolini's revenge - l'Africa comincia a Südtirol

2010-08-12T15:03:00.006+02:00

Artificial Art

2010-05-09T14:15:00.003+02:00

Made by my phone, itself... facing upwards on the kitchen table.
Suddenly heard the sound of the camera shutter.. and behold.
But is it art?

Dr Merkwürdigeliebe's newest in impression management: neuromarketing

2010-03-21T11:27:00.006+01:00

Duke University. "Brain Scans Could Be Marketing Tool of the Future." ScienceDaily 21 March 2010. 21 March 2010 .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromarketing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming#Applications
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_mind-computer_interface

All evil starts with 15 volts..

NeuroMarketing - Top 7 Insights To Unlocking Your Customer's Brain For Instant Sales by Denise Corcoran

Rise of the Pink Flamingos

2010-02-28T15:31:00.005+01:00

DICE 2010 Design Outside the Box

and why not..

2010-02-24T18:38:00.001+01:00

Hi everybody,

i'm working on an idea to establish a labelling system which can easily demonstrate a seller's environmental footprint.
To make such a label obvious for the critical person to use, along with chain-accountability upto the 3rd degree in the supply chain, it will have to display an indication of improvement measures. Likewise with a farmer switching to bio-agricultural, it will take a number of different steps to get there. Such steps ought be rewarded, a system based on punishing "bad" deeds is not effective here, not something i want to advocate.

I do think the results from Copenhagen are not farfetching enough, i don't think our political systems are adequate to carry such initiatives and i don't expect politicians or political organisations to change. I don't think it is good enough.

The last 90 years have seen an increased effort in shaping us humans as consumers. Well, there are a lot of things i would rather not buy, use, eat or get treated with if i were to know where it came from. The recession of the last two years shows a large many people are ethicaly bankrupt or just overwhelmed by the magnitude of the issues we're facing. Our value systems seem unfit for the challenges ahead and the means we have at our disposal. But maybe we start off small, and use our collective power as consumers to turn the issue inside out. I am hoping to get a consumer and academic movement going.

The last two years I’ve seen the international academic world having a surprising impact on local level without any intervention of national politics, and this has been in a very realistic pragmatic way such as avoiding overfishing of certain species. Likewise, this label can have a simple start mapping interdependencies, possible alternatives, consolidate different rating systems and get something as simple as Fair Trade.

I'll give it a shot this year to get this moving, and hope enough people will join in to make this worthwhile.

Take care
Paul

http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=2796240&trk=anet_ug_grppr

add water and stir

2010-02-16T15:28:00.004+01:00

Situations have the power to do 3 things:

inflame hostile imagination to perpetrate evil
inspire heroic action
render most people ‘passive bystanders’ and guilty of ‘the Evil of Inaction’

7 Social Processes that grease the slippery slope of Evil

Mindless taking of the first step (carelessness)
Dehumanisation of others ("them")
De-individuation of self (anonymity)
Diffusion of personal responsibility (someone else's problem)
Blind obedience to authority (true believer)
Uncritical conformity to group norms (groupthink)
Passive tolerance of evil through inaction or indifference (apathy)

The Lucifer Effect: understanding how good people turn evil
Philip Zimbardo

Manufacturing Consent. The Banality of Evil

2010-02-14T18:10:00.006+01:00

Manufacturing Consent

The Century of the Self

The Power of Nightmares

The Trap — What Happened to our Dream of Freedom

So ist der Lauf der Welt

2010-02-12T13:07:00.002+01:00

Once upon a time there lived a vain Emperor whose only worry in life was to dress in elegant clothes. He changed clothes almost every hour and loved to show them off to his people.
Word of the Emperor's refined habits spread over his kingdom and beyond. Two scoundrels who had heard of the Emperor's vanity decided to take advantage of it. They introduced themselves at the gates of the palace with a scheme in mind.
"We are two very good tailors and after many years of research we have invented an extraordinary method to weave a cloth so light and fine that it looks invisible. As a matter of fact it is invisible to anyone who is too stupid and incompetent to appreciate its quality."
The chief of the guards heard the scoundrel's strange story and sent for the court chamberlain. The chamberlain notified the prime minister, who ran to the Emperor and disclosed the incredible news. The Emperor's curiosity got the better of him and he decided to see the two scoundrels.
"Besides being invisible, your Highness, this cloth will be woven in colors and patterns created especially for you." The emperor gave the two men a bag of gold coins in exchange for their promise to begin working on the fabric immediately.
"Just tell us what you need to get started and we'll give it to you." The two scoundrels asked for a loom, silk, gold thread and then pretended to begin working. The Emperor thought he had spent his money quite well: in addition to getting a new extraordinary suit, he would discover which of his subjects were ignorant and incompetent. A few days later, he called the old and wise prime minister, who was considered by everyone as a man with common sense.
"Go and see how the work is proceeding," the Emperor told him, "and come back to let me know."
The prime minister was welcomed by the two scoundrels.
"We're almost finished, but we need a lot more gold thread. Here, Excellency! Admire the colors, feel the softness!" The old man bent over the loom and tried to see the fabric that was not there. He felt cold sweat on his forehead.
"I can't see anything," he thought. "If I see nothing, that means I'm stupid! Or, worse, incompetent!" If the prime minister admitted that he didn't see anything, he would be discharged from his office.
"What a marvelous fabric, he said then. "I'll certainly tell the Emperor." The two scoundrels rubbed their hands gleefully. They had almost made it. More thread was requested to finish the work.
Finally, the Emperor received the announcement that the two tailors had come to take all the measurements needed to sew his new suit.
"Come in," the Emperor ordered. Even as they bowed, the two scoundrels pretended to be holding large roll of fabric.
"Here it is your Highness, the result of our labour," the scoundrels said. "We have worked night and day but, at last, the most beautiful fabric in the world is ready for you. Look at the colors and feel how fine it is." Of course the Emperor did not see any colors and could not feel any cloth between his fingers. He panicked and felt like fainting. But luckily the throne was right behind him and he sat down. But when he realized that no one could know that he did not see the fabric, he felt better. Nobody could find out he was stupid and incompetent. And the Emperor didn't know that everybody else around him thought and did the very same thing.
The farce continued as the two scoundrels had foreseen it. Once they had taken the measurements, the two began cutting the air with scissors while sewing with their needles an invisible cloth.
"Your Highness, you'll have to take off your clothes to try on your new ones." The two scoundrels draped the new clothes on him and then held up a mirror. The Emperor was embarrassed but since none of his bystanders were, he felt relieved.
"Yes, this is a beautiful suit and it looks very good on me," the Emperor said trying to look comfortable. "You've done a fine job."
"Your Majesty," the prime minister said, "we have a request for you. The people have found out about this extraordinary fabric and they are anxious to see you in your new suit." The Emperor was doubtful showing himself naked to the people, but then he abandoned his fears. After all, no one would know about it except the ignorant and the incompetent.
"All right," he said. "I will grant the people this privilege." He summoned his carriage and the ceremonial parade was formed. A group of dignitaries walked at the very front of the procession and anxiously scrutinized the faces of the people in the street. All the people had gathered in the main square, pushing and shoving to get a better look. An applause welcomed the regal procession. Everyone wanted to know how stupid or incompetent his or her neighbor was but, as the Emperor passed, a strange murmur rose from the crowd.
Everyone said, loud enough for the others to hear: "Look at the Emperor's new clothes. They're beautiful!"
"What a marvellous train!"
"And the colors! The colors of that beautiful fabric! I have never seen anything like it in my life!" They all tried to conceal their disappointment at not being able to see the clothes, and since nobody was willing to admit his own stupidity and incompetence, they all behaved as the two scoundrels had predicted.
A child, however, who had no important job and could only see things as his eyes showed them to him, went up to the carriage.
"The Emperor is naked," he said.
"Fool!" his father reprimanded, running after him. "Don't talk nonsense!" He grabbed his child and took him away. But the boy's remark, which had been heard by the bystanders, was repeated over and over again until everyone cried:
"The boy is right! The Emperor is naked! It's true!"
The Emperor realized that the people were right but could not admit to that. He though it better to continue the procession under the illusion that anyone who couldn't see his clothes was either stupid or incompetent. And he stood stiffly on his carriage, while behind him a page held his imaginary mantle.

The Betrayal of Tradition

2010-02-11T15:37:00.005+01:00

Essays on the Spiritual Crisis of Modernity

homo homini loopy

2010-02-07T15:10:00.004+01:00

Most people are other people.
Their thoughts are someone elses opinions,
their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
~ Oscar Wilde

They copied all they could follow
but they couldn't copy my mind
so I left them sweating and stealing
a year and a half behind.
~ Rudyard Kipling

Jacques Vallée.. “You can't change the past, but you can ruin the present by worrying about the future”

2010-02-07T10:40:00.008+01:00

Information, Occasions, Spacetime

Another interesting facet of the UFO phenomenon concerns information theory. According to modern physics, and in particular to Brillouin, Bagor, and Roghstein, information and entropy are closely related. The relationship has been expressed clearly by Brillouin:
Entropy is generally regarded as expressing the state of disorder of a physical system. More precisely, one can say that entropy measures the lack of information about the true structure of the system.
No information can be obtained in the course of a physical measurement, then, without changing the amount of entropy in the universe, the state of disorder of the cosmos.
Now the physicist is faced with a new challenge: how to define disorder. And the task, as R. Schafroth has pointed out, is not easy:
Some scientists pile up papers and books on their shelves in apparent disorder, yet they know perfectly how to find the document they want. If someone restores the appearance of order, the unfortunate owner of these documents may be unable to locate anything. In this case it is obvious that the apparent disorder was in fact order, and vice versa.
Speculating on the relationship between these physical quantities, French physicist Costa de Beauregard wrote, "It must be in the nature of probability to serve as the operational link between objective and subjective, between matter and psychism." He points out that, in precybernetics physics, observation was regarded as a process without mystery, requiring no explanation, whereas free action, on the contrary, was "regarded as a physical impossibility and a psychological illusion." In modern physics these ideas have been revolutionized.
Most theories advanced to explain paranormal phenomena borrow the standard concepts of space and time dimensions from physics. These concepts seem obsolete to me. They are not appropriate for understanding telepathy, or the moving of objects at a distance, or ghosts, or UFO abductions. I have always been struck also by the fact that energy and information are one and the same thing under two different aspects. Our physics professors teach us this, yet they never draw the consequences of that teaching.
Perhaps it is proper to shake from our theoretical ankles the chains of spacetime. Space and time coordinates derive their convenience from graphic considerations. The theory of space and time is a cultural artifact. If we had invented the digital computer before inventing graph paper, we might have a very different theory of the universe today.
The remarkable story of Cardan's dialogue with the two sylphs who disagreed about the nature of the universe summarizes the problem well. One of the sylphs believed the world had been created of all eternity. The other sylph expressed a theory closer to Islamic occasionalism: the universe is a world of events. This book you are reading is only an occasion of the book I wrote. Can you be certain that it is identical to all the other copies? The pen I am using to write these words is not necessarily the same pen I was using a minute ago; it may be a new instance, a new occasion of the same pen.
Time and space may be convenient notions for plotting the progress of a locomotive, but they are completely useless for locating information. The apparent exception is the library, but anyone who has tried to find something in a modern library with its flat shelves along vertical walls will recognize the predicament in telling order from disorder in cartesian coordinates.
Modern computer scientists have long recognized that ordering by time and space is the worst possible way to store a lot of data at high speed. In a large computer-based information system, no attempt is made to place related records in sequential physical locations. It is much more convenient to sprinkle the records throughout storage as they arrive, and to construct an algorithm for retrieval based on some type of key word or on "hashing," a procedure where the record index is randomized. Probability serves as the link between something objective, the record location, and something subjective, the request for retrieval.
The synchronicity and coincidences that abound in our lives suggest that the world may be organized like a randomized data base (the multiverse) rather than a sequential library (the fourdimensional universe of conventional physics).

Creatures of the Multiverse

If there is no time dimension as we usually assume there is, the human brain may be traversing events by association. Modern computers retrieve information associatively. The user "evokes" the desired records by using key words, words of power. For example, if he requests the intersection of "microwave" and "headache," he may find twenty articles whose existence in the literature he never suspected. If we live in the associative universe of the software scientist rather than the sequential universe of the spacetime physicist, then miracles are no longer irrational events. The philosophy we could derive from this line of speculation would be closer to Islamic occasionalism than to the Cartesian or Newtonian universe. And a new theory of information would have to be built. Such a theory might have interesting things to say about communication with the denizens of other physical realities, creatures of the multiverse. It might throw new light on the experience of the UFO abductees.
Should we believe the witnesses who describe their experiences aboard UFOs? As I have pointed out throughout this book, there is no reason to doubt their personal integrity, their sincerity, and their honesty. The words of Dr. Simon about Betty and Barney Hill are still clear after twenty years: "The experience, undoubtedly, was real to them."
Does this mean we should take their recollections literally? I do not think so. These events took place in a reality we simply do not understand yet; they had an impact on a part of the human mind we have not discovered. I believe that the UFO phenomenon is one of the ways through which an alien form of intelligence of incredible complexity is communicating with us symbolically. There is no indication that it is extraterrestrial. Instead, there is mounting evidence that it has access to psychic processes we have not yet mastered or even researched. In the face of such interaction at the symbolic or mythical level, all the hypnosis sessions and the searches for implants may well be as futile as the questions of the inquisitors to the witches returning from the sabbat and the frantic search for the devil's mark on their bodies.
Until we have much more evidence about the physical nature of the UFO phenomenon, I find myself repelled by the indiscriminate probing of the witnesses' minds by amateur hypnotists who believe strongly their particular theory of extraterrestrial visitation and are eager to obtain confirmation of it at any cost.
These witnesses have had a real, traumatic experience. They are weakened by it and ready to believe any explanation provided to them by someone in authority. Under the highly suggestible state created by hypnosis we can easily convince them of any half-baked interpretation of the phenomenon. This process is unethical and certainly unscientific.
In a few cases (like the Hill episode) when hypnosis was used carefully, under medical supervision, and without leading questions, what was the outcome? We learned nothing useful about extraterrestrial life. But we learned that our current concepts of space and time were wrong; that a larger reality, other dimensions, existed; and that the time had come to challenge our current views about the universe.
Let us speculate even more boldly. The subject invites many troubling, fundamental questions. If energy and information are related, why do we only have one physics, the physics of energy? Where is the physics of information? Is the old theory of magic relevant here? Are the writings of Paracelsus, with his concept of "signatures," a neglected source of inspiration? Until these questions are explored, it may be impossible to address what French physicist Costa de Beauregard calls "the truly fundamental problem," that of the relationship between psyche and matter. Even if we consider only the operational aspects of a piece of information, if someone learns something from it, physical theory dictates that the entropy of the universe must have changed.
These are highly speculative questions. But at a time when we are beginning to suspect that ancient challenges are brought to light by high technology, creative speculation is necessary. Can a path be found toward realities that are not situated on faraway planets, but are right around us, outside our normal consciousness? Is this what happened to abductees like Helen and Kathy, or Travis Walton? Rather than a physical occurrence inside a spacecraft, did they experience a temporary translation of their consciousness into an altered reality followed by visions of archetypal creatures? Is it possible to promote coincidences and peculiar effects of apparently paranormal nature by creating physical structures shielded from everyday noise and serving as informational singularities?
If the world around us is a world of informational events, the symbolic manifestations that surround UFO reports should be viewed as an important factor. If we regard the physical world as an associative universe of informational events, consciousness is no longer simply a local function in the human brain. Instead, I propose to define consciousness as the process by which informational associations are retrieved and traversed. The illusion of time and space would be merely a side effect of consciousness as it traverses associations. In such a theory, apparently paranormal phenomena like remote viewing and precognition would be expected, even common, and UFOs would lose much of their bizarre quality. These phenomena would be natural aspects of the reality of human consciousness. I submit that reports of alien "contact" must be studied at this level, even if we are a long, long way from being able to channel our speculations into the formal equations of a new physics.
For many years, UFO phenomena have served as a support for human imagination, a framework for human tragedy, a fabric of human dreams. We react to them in our movies, our poetry, our music, our science fiction. And they react to us. They are not trying to communicate with a few individuals, with any group, with any government. Why should they? The phenomena function like an operational system of symbolic communication at a global level. There is something about the human race with which they interact, and we do not yet know what it is. They are part of the environment, part of the control system for human evolution. But their effects, instead of being just physical, are also felt in our beliefs. They influence what we call our spiritual life. They affect our politics, our history, our culture. They are a feature of our past. Undoubtedly, they are part of our future.

earthgazer

2009-07-12T12:51:00.003+02:00

Arlen Riley Wilson – Our Lady of Outer Space

Reach down for the sun, reach down
for the stars, reach deeper for the secret
places of the body of her the stars adorn.
You are lost and found in her embrace.
There is nowhere else for you to fall and
no escaping from her love for she is
black and pulsating source,
her million twinkling nipples
nurse all life,
her jewelled ardent body
twines around you always
and there is no place
to go but
home
to
her

Fluxology Alliance - appendix

2009-04-22T22:45:00.004+02:00

Fluxology Alliance

View more documents from Paul Peters.

Fluxology Alliance

2009-03-30T01:21:00.004+02:00

Sun founder Bill Joy is attributed to have said "most of the smart people work at some other company." When Sun Microsystems was founded, it was thoroughly understood Sun would live or die with it's partner network and as such set on to become a very partner-centric company.
By any standard, and even more so the American as we know it from afar, such a non-hierarchical, open and collaborative approach is unique. Sun Microsystems was open before Open Source became a popular concept.
Come and go the dot-com bubble , Sun is still very much about openness, however painful that may be with everyone else being an expert on economics and technology after reading some blogs and buying some stock options..

Given a choice, if you're a bit of a geek, a freak or just a workaholic, how would you make your work more interesting? You try to work on something challenging with really smart people.. Such people aren't only rare, but they are usually caught up in something else, they are individuals with their own plans, and often a high sense of freedom and drive to accomplish something. Now.. how to work together. Well, one way is to have a company such as Applied Minds, but still then you're trying to hire people who are hardcore individualists. Might work in the US due it's different labour ethos, but unmanageable in Europe..
A consortium of some sorts should do, a way to facilitate working with smart folk while acknowledging their individuality and personal agenda. A global non-equity strategic alliance, an open joint venture, proved the appropriate format.

So, that's that. During nearly two years of contacted people and companies with certain characteristics, experience, expertise, hard and soft skills, we now have launched a partner network around Sun's software stack.
Starting around the SOA/BI offerings, and extending into Identity Management and beyond, we're also getting involved with the Cloud offerings as far as Sun's offerings goes. Adding even more value we have streamlined and prepared certain specific technology partnerships, so to stretch current technological means beyond the average and pave a pathway into the future towards "the adjacent possible" in both business relations and information technology

Currently referred to under the nomer of "Fluxology Alliance" for the sake of simplicity, once reaching the critical mass of required momentum, proven cohesion, and adequate harvest of the intrinsic quality levels, every participant is free to represent the network and spread the cooperation further in the areas of joint delivery, sales, training and solution development.

Along with the partner networks, "unit 42" and "n-simplex alliance", Fluxology offers open-ended and packaged services, training, solutions, frameworks and technologies to take OpenESB to the next level. Our global partner network of senior experts currently involves some 135 senior experts ranging from 1 to 16 years of experience with the Sun/SeeBeyond toolsets, projects, architectural styles and management approach.
Our extended network, as well as a recently started "partner-of-a-partner" modality can leverage unequaled value in any direction.

We're very happy to announce the launch of this partner network.
These go to eleven...

universality and the odd case of conformity..

2009-03-21T21:24:00.007+01:00

With the current economic slowdown now that monetarist fundamentalism is recalibrating with Keynesian reality, the lack of boldness appears rather surpising. On a large scale companies are postponing decisions to engange on projects. While waiting their providers loose valuable time and resources, and as a consequence may spiral into bankruptcy depending on their scale, general policy, or stage of development. Enthusiast voices advocating doing things smarter are held back by this hopefully temporal caution. Again, initiated by the monetarist tendencies, the stock market, or other forms of financial agenda driven company policies such as anal retentive CFO's, companies seemingly awaiting financial results for the first quarter of the calendar or financial year, take a deep breath of relief when noticing that the economy itself has not collapsed, nor has their company, and engage on projects and avoid a downward spiral where the left hand is waiting for the right hand, and vice versa..
Some companies will move forward before this quarter is announced, some just after, and of course some may wait out the whole financial year following the forecast the whole economy will bounce back sometime September 2009.

Sounds reasonable, but the amazing thing is that it's not so logical as it seems.. psychologically in emergency situations some 15 % of people will turn into leaders, some 15% will turn completely irrational, and the rest will follow either one of these groups. But companies have already filtered people out within their organisational hierarchy, so the people in charge are more or less made up of the 15 % leaders. Studies in creativity also show some 10 % of people have a capacity for unbriddled creative productivity, the upper ten if one prefers to apply a vertical oriented yardstick. Considering unproductive people don't so much bubble to the top of a company, disregarding the level of competitive politics a company pervades, again the people in charge should be in the group of the most creative. Ok, have dealt enough with middle management to know this is highly idealized, although it doesn't quite say in which direction these people are creative leaders..
So howcome if it's recognized things need to be done smarter, that it actually can be done smarter without much extra effort, howcome companies are just waiting it out..
Here we get into some an odd aspect which seem to pervade modern day society, self empowerement. People have this tendency to confirmity, to fit in, and show that they do. Which is pretty odd, in the sense that people tend to overdo it. Pick two random humans and they are the same for more than 99%.. they will point out the same bluest blue, and the same reddest red, if having migraines they'll see the same circular forms appearing.. If they have their ears open they'll get swept away by the same music. The same brain areas will be triggered for the semi-religious experience involved with advertising of the new iPhone...
Likewise, apart from the financial industry getting a welldeserved beating up, although many of the affected banks who received a governmental injection still produce profitable figures, go figure, practically everyone seems to be talking about a slowdown instead of a crisis.
But if this slowness continues, a real crisis will result.. as innovation happens at the bottom, and if these small companies and individuals aren't pampered into proving themselves via projects, then there goes the spiral again..

So, maybe it's time to ditch the fashionable echo-ing of authorative opinionators, the trend to scatter around spineless quote as if standing on the shoulders of giants, and just get to work. And hopefully a bit smarter as well?
Echos get so hollow when resounding too often, and so does this slowdown.

Simple, ain't it ? It's springtime, go flourish.

emtpy, empty, happy, happy

"Money cannot buy you happiness, and happiness cannot buy you money. That might be a wise crack, but I doubt it." - Groucho Marx

2009-03-11T01:18:00.003+01:00

The Warrior Tradition: Conquering Fear
by Chögyam Trungpa

When we bring together the ancient spiritual traditions of the West with those of the Orient, we find a meeting point where the warrior tradition can be experienced and realized. The concept of being a warrior is applicable to the most basic situations in our lives-to the fundamental situation that exists before the notion of good or bad ever occurs. The term “warrior” relates to the basic situation of being a human being. The heart of the warrior is this basic aliveness or basic goodness. Such fearless goodness is free from doubt and overcomes any perverted attitudes towards reality.

Doubt is the first obstacle to fearlessness that has to be overcome. We’re not talking here about suppressing your doubts about a particular thing that is taking place. We’re not talking about having doubts about joining an organization, or something like that. We are referring here to overcoming a much more basic doubt, which is fundamentally doubting yourself and feeling that you have some kind of shortcoming as a human being. You don’t feel that your mind and body are synchronized, or working together properly. You feel that you are constantly being short-changed somewhere in your life.

When you were growing up, at a very early stage-perhaps around two years old-you must have heard our father or mother saying no to you. They would say, “No, don’t get into that,” or, “No, don’t explore that too much,” or, “No, be quiet. Be still.” When you heard the word no, you may have responded by trying to fulfill that no, by being good. Or you may have reacted negatively, by defying your parents and their no, by exploring further and being “bad.” That mixture of the temptation to be naughty and the desire to be disciplined occurs very early in life. When our parents say no to us, it makes us feel strange about ourselves, which becomes an expression of fear.

On the other hand, there is another kind of NO, which is very positive. We have never heard that basic NO properly: NO free from fear and free from doubt. Instead, even if we think that we’re doing our best in life, we still feel that we haven’t fully lived up to what we should be. We feel that we’re not quite doing things right. We feel that our parents or others don’t approve of us. There is that fundamental doubt, or fundamental fear, as to whether or not we can actually accomplish something.

Doubt arises in relating with authority, discipline and scheduling throughout our life. When we don’t acknowledge our doubt, it manifests as resistance and resentment. There is often some resentment or a reaction against the sitting practice of meditation as well. The moment that the gong is struck to signal the beginning of meditation practice, we feel resistance. But in that situation, we find that it’s too late. We’re already sitting there on the cushion, so we usually continue to practice.

However, resistance in everyday life provides us with many ways to manipulate situations. When we are presented with a challenge, we often try to turn away rather than having to face it. We come up with all kinds of excuses to avoid the demands that we feel are being put on us.

The basic NO, on the other hand, is accepting discipline in our life without preconceptions. Normally, when we say the word “discipline,” it comes with a lot of mixed feelings. It’s like saying “porridge.” Some people like porridge, and some people hate it. Nevertheless, porridge remains porridge. It is a verystraightforward thing. We have similar feelings about discipline and the meaning of NO. Sometimes, it’s a bad NO: it is providing oppressive boundaries that we don’t want to accept. Or it could be a good NO, which encourages us to do something healthy. But when we just hear that one word, NO, the message is mixed.

Fearlessness is extending ourselves beyond that limited view. In the Heart Sutra, it talks about going beyond. Gone beyond, gate, is the basic NO. In the sutra, it says there is no eye, no ear, no sound, no smell-all of those things. When you experience egolessness, the solidity of your life and your perceptions falls apart. That could be very desolate or it could be very inspiring, in terms of shunyata, the Buddhist understanding of emptiness. Very simply, it is basic NO. It is a real expression of fearlessness. In the Buddhist view, egolessness is pre-existing, beyond our preconceptions. In the state of egolessness everything is simple and very clear. When we try to supplement the brightness of egolessness by putting a lot of other things onto it, those things obscure its brilliance, becoming blockages and veils.

In the warrior tradition, sacred outlook is the brilliant environment created by basic goodness. When we refuse to have any contact with that state of being, when we turn away from basic goodness, then wrong beliefs arise. We come up with all sorts of logics, again and again, so that we don’t have to face the realities of the world.

We run up against our hesitation to get fully into things all the time, even in seemingly insignificant situations. If we don’t want to wash the dishes right after we’ve eaten, we may tell ourselves that we need to let them soak. In fact we’re often hoping that one of our housemates will clean up after us. On another level, philosophically speaking, we may feel completely tuned into the warrior’s world. From that point of view, we think that we can quite safely say, “Once a warrior, always a warrior.” That sounds good, but in terms of the actual practice of warriorship, it’s questionable. “Once a warrior” may not always be a warrior if we disregard the beauty of the phenomenal world. We prefer to wear sunglasses, rather than facing the brilliance of the sunshine. We put on a hat and gloves to shield ourselves, fearing that we might get burned. The colourfulness of relationships, household chores, business enterprises and our general livelihood are too irritating. We are constantly looking for padding so that we don’t run into the sharp edges of the world. That is the essence of wrong belief. It is an obstacle to seeing the wisdom of the Great Eastern Sun, which is seeing greater vision beyond our own small world.

The ground of fearlessness and the basis of overcoming doubt and wrong belief is to develop renunciation. Renunciation here means overcoming that very hard, tough, aggressive mentality which wards off any gentleness that might come into our hearts. Fear does not allow fundamental tenderness to enter into us. When tenderness tinged by sadness touches our heart, we know that we are in contact with reality. We feel it. That contact is genuine, fresh, and quite raw. That sensitivity is the basic experience of warriorship, and it is the key to developing fearless renunciation.

Sometimes people find that being tender and raw is threatening and seemingly exhausting. Openness seems demanding and energy consuming, so they prefer to cover up their tender heart. Vulnerability can sometimes make you nervous. It is uncomfortable to feel so real, so you want to numb yourself. You look for some kind of anaesthetic, anything that will provide you with entertainment. Then you can forget the discomfort of reality. People don’t want to live with their basic rawness for even fifteen minutes. When people say they are bored, often they mean that they don’t want to experience the sense of emptiness, which is also an expression of openness and vulnerability. So they pick up the newspaper or read anything else that’s lying around the room-even reading what it says on a cereal box to keep themselves entertained. The search for entertainment to baby-sit your boredom soon becomes legitimized as laziness. Such laziness actually involves a lot of exertion. You have to constantly crank things up to occupy yourself, overcoming your boredom by indulging in laziness.

For the warrior, fearlessness is the opposite of that approach. Fearlessness is a question of learning how to be. Be there all along: that is the message. That is quite challenging in what we call the setting-sun world, the world of neurotic comfort where we use everything to fill up the space. We even use our emotions to entertain ourselves. You might be genuinely angry about something for a fraction of a second, but then you draw out your anger so that it lasts for twenty-five minutes. Then you crank up something else to be angry at for the next twenty minutes. Sometimes, if you arouse a really good attack of anger, it can last for days and days. That is another way we entertain ourselves in the setting-sun world.

The remedy to that approach is renunciation. In the Buddhist teachings, renunciation is associated with being nauseated by the confused world and the pain of samsara. For the warrior, renunciation is slightly different. It is giving away, or not indulging in, pleasure for entertainment’s sake. We are going to kick out any preoccupations provided by the miscellaneous babysitters in the phenomenal world.

Finally, renunciation is the willingness to work with real situations of aggression in the world. If someone interrupts your world with an attack of aggression, you have to respond to it. There is no other way. Renunciation is being willing to face that kind of situation, rather than covering it up. Everyone is afraid to talk about this. It may be shocking to mention it. Nonetheless, we have to learn to relate to those aspects of the world. We have never developed any response to attack-whether it is a verbal attack or actual physical aggression. People are very shy of this topic, although we have the answers to these challenges in our warrior disciplines, our exertion and our manifestation.

In the warrior tradition, fearlessness is connected with attaching your basic existence to greater vision or what we call the Great Eastern Sun. In order to experience such vast and demanding vision, you need a real connection to basic goodness. The key to that is overcoming doubt and wrong belief. Doubt is your own internal problem, which you have to work with. But then beyond that there may be an enemy, a challenge, that is outside of you. We can’t just pretend that those threats never exist. You might say that your laziness is some kind of enemy, but laziness is not actually an enemy. It would be better to call it an obstacle.

How are we going to respond to real opposition that arises in the world? As a warrior, how are you going to relate with that? You don’t need a party-line logic or a package deal response. They don’t really help. In my experience of how students usually relate with conflict, I find that they tend to freeze up when someone is very critical of them. They become non-communicative, which doesn’t help the situation. As warriors, we shouldn’t be uptight and uncommunicative. We find it easy to manifest basic goodness when somebody agrees with us. Even if they’re half agreeing with you, you can talk to them and have a great time. But if someone is edgy and negative, then you freeze, become defensive, and begin to attack them back. That’s the wrong end of the stick. You don’t kill an enemy before they become the enemy. You only slash the enemy when they become a 100% good enemy and present a real 100% challenge. If someone is interested in making love with you, you make love to them. But you don’t rape them. You wait until the other person commits themselves to the situation. Working with your enemy is the same idea.

When a warrior has to kill his enemy, he has a very soft heart. He looks his enemy right in the face. The grip on your sword is quite strong and tough, and then with a tender heart, you cut your enemy into two pieces. At that point, slashing your enemy is equivalent to making love to them. That very strong, powerful stroke is also sympathetic. That fearless stroke is frightening, don’t you think? We don’t want to face that possibility.

On the other hand, if we are in touch with basic goodness, we are always relating to the world directly, choicelessly, whether the energy of the situation demands a destructive or a constructive response. The idea of renunciation is to relate with whatever arises with a sense of sadness and tenderness. We reject the aggressive, hardcore street fighter mentality. The neurotic upheavals created by conflicting emotions, or the kleshas, arise from ignorance, or avidya. Ignorance is very harsh and willing to stick with its own version of things. Therefore, it feels very righteous. Overcoming that is the essence of renunciation: we have no hard edges.

Warriorship is so tender, without skin, without tissue, naked and raw. It is soft and gentle. You have renounced putting on a new suit of armor. You have renounced growing a thick, hard skin. You are willing to expose naked flesh, bone and marrow to the world.

This whole discussion is not just metaphoric. We are talking about what you do if you actually have to slash the enemy, if you are in combat or having a sword fight with someone, as you see in Japanese samurai movies. We shouldn’t be too cowardly. A sword fight is real, as real as making love to another human being. We are talking about direct experience and we’re not psychologizing anything here. Before you slash the enemy, look into his or her eyes and feel that tenderness. Then you slash. When you slash your enemy, your compassionate heart becomes twice as big. It puffs up; it becomes a big heart; therefore you can slash the enemy. If you are small-hearted, you cannot do this properly.

Of course, many times conquering the enemy might not involve cutting them in two. You might just turn them upside down! But you have to be willing to face the possibilities.

When the warrior has thoroughly experienced his or her own basic rawness, there is no room to manipulate the situation. You just go forward and present the truth quite fearlessly. You can be what you are, in a very straightforward and basic way. So tenderness brings simplicity and naturalness, almost at the level of simple-mindedness.

We don’t want to become tricky warriors, with all kinds of tricks up our sleeves and ways to cut people’s logic down when we don’t agree with them. Then there is no cultivation of either ourselves or others. When that occurs, we destroy any possibilities of enlightened society. In fact, there will be no society; just a few people hanging out. Instead, the fearless warriors of Shambhala are very ordinary, simpleminded warriors. That is the starting point for developing true bravery.

The Path

The starting point on the path of fearlessness is the discovery of fear. We find ourselves fearful, frightened, even petrified by circumstances. This ubiquitous nervousness provides us with a stepping stone, so that we can step over our fear. We have to make a definite move to cross over the boundary from cowardice to bravery. If we do so properly, the other side of our cowardice contains bravery.

We may not discover bravery right away. Instead, beyond our nervousness, we find a shaky tenderness. We are still quivering, but we are shaking with tenderness rather than bewilderment. That shaky vulnerability contains an element of sadness, but not in the sense of feeling badly about ourself or feeling deprived. Rather, we feel a natural sense of fullness which is tender and sad.

It’s like the feeling you have when you are about to shed a tear. You feel somewhat wealthy because your eyes are full of tears. When you blink, tears begin to roll down your cheeks. There is also an element of loneliness, but again it is not based on deprivation, inadequacy or rejection. Instead you feel that you alone can understand the truth of your own loneliness, which is quite dignified and self-contained. You have a full heart, you feel lonely, but you don’t feel particularly bad about it. It is like an island in the middle of a lake. The island is self-contained; therefore it looks lonely in the middle of the water. Occasionally, ferry boats carry commuters back and forth from the shore to the island, but that doesn’t particularly help. In fact, it expresses the loneliness or the aloneness of the island further.

Discovering these facets of fearlessness is preparation for the further journey on the warrior’s path. If the warrior does not feel alone and sad, then he or she can be corrupted very easily. In fact, such a person may not be a warrior at all. To be a good warrior, one has to feel sad and lonely, but rich and resourceful at the same time. This makes the warrior sensitive to every aspect of phenomena: to sights, smells, sounds and feelings. In that sense, the warrior is also an artist, appreciating whatever goes on in the world. Everything is extremely vivid. The rustling of your armor or the sound of rain drops falling on your coat is very loud. Because you are so sensitive, the fluttering of occasional butterflies around you is almost an insult.

Such a sensitive warrior can then go further on the path of fearlessness. There are three tools or practical guides that the warrior uses on this journey. The first is the development of discipline, or sila in Sanskrit, which is represented by the analogy of the sun. Sunshine is all-pervasive. When the sun shines on the land, it doesn’t neglect any area. It does a thorough job. Similarly, as a warrior, you never neglect your discipline.

We’re not talking about military rigidity here. Rather, in all your mannerisms, every aspect of behavior, you maintain your openness to the environment. You constantly extend yourself to things around you. There is a complete absence of laziness. Even if what you are seeing, hearing or perceiving becomes very difficult and demanding, the warrior never gives up. You go along with the situation. You don’t withdraw. This allows you to develop your loyalty and connection to others, free from fear. You can relate with other sentient beings who are trapped in the confused world, perpetuating their pain. In fact, you realize that it is your duty. You feel warmth, compassion, and even passion towards others. First you develop your own good conduct, and then you can extend yourself fearlessly to others. That is the concept of the sun.

The second guide on the warrior’s path is represented by the analogy of an echo, which is connected with meditative awareness, or samadhi. When you try to take time off from being a warrior, when you want to let go of your discipline or indulge mindlessly in some activity, your action produces an echo. It’s like a sound echoing in a canyon, bouncing back on itself, producing more echoes that bounce off of one another. Those echoes or reflections happen all the time, and if we pay attention to them, they provide constant reminders to be awake. At first, the reminder might be fairly timid, but then the second, third and fourth time you hear it, it’s a much louder echo. These echoes remind you to be on the spot, on the dot.

However, you can’t just wait for an echo to wake you up. You have to put your awareness out into the situation. You have to put effort into being aware.

Becoming a warrior means that you are building a world that does not give you the setting sun, or degraded, concept of rest, which is purely indulging in your confusion. Sometimes you are tempted to return to that cowardly world. You just want to flop and forget the echo of your awareness. It seems like a tremendous relief not to have to work so hard. But then you discover that this world without even an echo is too deadly. You find it refreshing to get back to the warrior’s world, because it is so much more alive.

The warrior’s third tool is actually a weapon. It is represented by the analogy of a bow and arrow, which is connected with developing wisdom, or prajna, and skillful means, or upaya. In this case we are talking about the wisdom of discriminating awareness, which is experiencing the sharpness of sense perceptions and developing psychological accuracy. You can’t develop this kind of sharpness unless some experience of egolessness has manifested in your mind. Otherwise, your mind will be preoccupied, full of its own ego. But when you have made a connection with basic goodness, you can relate with both the actual sharpness of the arrow and with the skillful means provided by the bow. The bow allows you to harness or execute the sharpness of your perceptions.

The development of this discriminating awareness wisdom also allows you to accurately detect the enemy. A real enemy is someone who propagates and promotes ultimate selfishness, or ego. Such enemies promote basic badness rather than basic goodness. They try to bring others into their realm, tempting them with anything from a cookie up to a million dollars.

In the Shambhala warrior tradition, we say that you should only have to kill an enemy once every thousand years. We mean here the real enemy, the basic rudra principle, which is the personification of Ego-hood, of ego run wild. You can work with other enemies by subjugating them, talking to them, buying them out, or seducing them. However, according to this tradition, once in a thousand years a real assassination of the enemy is necessary. We’re talking about someone who can’t be reached by any other means. You might use a sword or an arrow, whatever means you need to overpower them, so their ego is completely popped. Such an assassination has to be very direct and personal. It’s not like dropping bombs on people. If we pop the enemy, and only then, they might be able to connect with some basic goodness within themselves and realize that they made a gigantic mistake. It’s like having rotten teeth in your mouth. Eventually you have to have all your teeth removed, replacing them with false teeth. After that, you might be able to appreciate the teeth that you lost.

Overall, these three principles-the sun, the echo, and the bow and arrow-are all connected with the natural process, or path, of working with our basic intelligence. Beyond that, they describe the fundamental decorum and decency of the warrior’s existence. A warrior should be capable of artfully conducting his or her life in every action, from drinking tea to running a country. Learning how to handle fear, both how to utilize one’s own fear and that of others, is what allows us to brew the beer of fearlessness. You can put all of those situations of fear and doubt into a gigantic vat and ferment them.

The path of fearlessness is connected with what we do right now, today, rather than with anything theoretical or waiting for a cue from somewhere else. The basic vision of warriorship is that there is goodness in everyone. We are all good in ourselves. So we have our own warrior society within our own body. We have everything we need to make the journey already.

Fruition

Fearlessness has a starting point, it includes discipline, it makes a journey, and it reaches a conclusion. It is like the Great Eastern Sun: the sun rises, it radiates light, and this benefits people by dispelling the darkness and allowing the fruit to ripen and the flowers to blossom.

The fruition of fearlessness is also connected with three analogies. The first is that fearlessness is like a reservoir of trust. This trust arises from the experience of basic goodness, which we have already discussed. When we feel basically good, rather than degraded or condemned, then we become very inquisitive, looking into every situation and examining it. We don’t want to fool ourselves by relying on belief alone. Rather, we want to make a personal connection with reality.

This is a very simple, straightforward idea. If we accept a challenge and take certain steps to accomplish something, the process will yield results-either success or failure. When you sow a seed or plant a tree, either the seed will germinate and the tree will grow, or they will die. Similarly, for the inquisitive warrior, trust means that we know that our actions will bring a definite response from reality. We know that we will get a message. Failure generally is telling us that our action has been undisciplined and inaccurate in some way. Therefore, it fails. When our action is fully disciplined, it usually is fulfilled; we have success. But those responses are not regarded as either punishment or congratulations.

Trust then is being willing to take a chance, knowing that what goes up must come down, as they say. When a warrior has that kind of trust in the reflections of the phenomenal world, then he or she can trust his or her individual discovery of goodness. Communication produces results, either success or failure. That is how the fearless warrior relates with the universe: not by remaining alone and insecure, hiding away, but by constantly being exposed to the phenomenal world and constantly being willing to take that chance.

The reservoir of trust is a bank of richness from which the warrior can always draw conclusions. We begin to feel that we are dealing with a rich world, one that never runs out of messages. The only problem arises if we try to manipulate the situation in our favor. You are not supposed to fish in the reservoir or swim in it. The reservoir has to remain unconditional, unpolluted. So you don’t put your one-sidedness, your bias or conditionality, into it. Then the reservoir might dry up.

Normally, trust means that we think that our world is trustworthy. We think that it’s going to produce a good result, success. But in this case, we’re talking about having a continual relationship with the phenomenal world that is not based on either a good or bad result. We have unconditional trust in the phenomenal world to always give us a message, either success or failure. The fruition of our action will always provide us with information. Such trust in the reservoir keeps us from being too arrogant or too timid. If you’re too arrogant, you’ll find yourself bumping into the ceiling. If you’re too timid, you’ll be pushed up by the floor. Roughly speaking, that’s the concept of the reservoir.

The ancient Chinese Book of Changes or I Ching often talks about success being failure and failure being success. Success sows the seeds of future failure, and failure may bring a later success. So it’s always a dynamic process. As warriors, fearlessness doesn’t mean that we cheer up by saying, “Look! I’m on the side of the right. I’m a success.” Nor do we feel that we’re being punished when we fail. In any case, success and failure are saying the same thing.

That brings us to the next analogy, which is music. Music is connected with the idea of continuously being joyful. The feedback, or the result, that comes from the warrior’s practice is never a dead end. It presents another path. We always can go on, go beyond. So while the result of action is fruition, beyond that, the result is the seed for the next journey. Our journey continues, cycling between success and failure, path and fruition, just as the four seasons alternate. There is always a sense of creativity, so there is always joy on the journey, joy in the result.

Why are you so joyful? You are guided on the path by the disciplines of the sun, the echo, and the bow and arrow. You have witnessed your basic goodness, taking joy in having nothing to hang onto. You have realized the fundamental NO. You are free from doubt and you have experienced a sense of renunciation. So whether the situation brings success or failure, it brings an unconditional good understanding. Therefore, your mind and body are constantly synchronized; there is no deficit of any kind in the body or the mind. Your experience becomes like music, which has rhythm and a melody that is constantly expanding and being recreated. So the sense of celebration is constant, inbuilt, in spite of the ups and downs of one’s personal life. That is continuously being joyful.

Having developed trust and appreciation, you can finally conquer fear, which is connected with the analogy of a saddle. In the Buddhist teachings we talk about developing such a good sense of mental balance that, if you become mindless, your awareness automatically brings you back, just as in the process of skidding on the ice and losing your balance, your body automatically rebalances itself to keep you from falling. As long as you have good posture and a good seat in the saddle, you can overcome any startling or unexpected moves your horse makes. So the idea of the saddle is taking a good seat in your life.

An overreaction or an exaggerated reaction to situations shouldn’t happen at this level. You have trust, you are constantly being joyful, and therefore you can’t be startled, either. This doesn’t mean that your life is monotone, but rather you feel established in this world. You belong here. You are one of the warriors in this world, so even if little unexpected things happen, good or bad, right or wrong, you don’t exaggerate them. You come back to your seat in the saddle and maintain your posture in the situation.

The warrior is never amazed by anything. If someone comes up to you and says, “I’m going to kill you right now,” you are not amazed. If someone says that are going to give you a million dollars, you think, “So what?” Assuming your seat in the saddle at this level is achieving inscrutability, in the positive sense.

It is also taking your seat on the earth. Once you have a good seat on the earth, you don’t need witnesses to validate you. Someone once asked the Buddha, “How do we know that you are enlightened?” And he touched the earth in what is called the earth-touching mudra, or gesture, and said, “Earth is my witness.” That is the same concept as holding your seat in the saddle. Someone might ask, “How do we know you won’t overreact to this situation?” You can say, “Just watch my posture in the saddle.”

Fearlessness in the warrior tradition is not a training in ultimate paranoia. It is based on training in ultimate solidity-which is basic goodness. You have to learn how to be regal. Trust is like becoming a good citizen, celebrating the journey is like becoming a good minister in the government, but holding your seat in the saddle is finally assuming command. It is how to be a king or queen.

At the same time, conquering fear is not based on blocking your sensitivity. Otherwise, you become a deaf and dumb monarch, a jellyfish king. Sitting on the horse requires balance, and as you acquire that balance in the saddle, you have more awareness of the horse. So when you sit in the saddle on your fickle horse, you feel completely exposed and gentle. If you feel aggressive, you don’t have a good seat. In fact, you are probably not even riding the horse. You don’t put your saddle on a fence railing. You have to saddle a real horse.

In this case, riding the horse is riding somebody else’s mind. It requires a complete connection. In the Buddhist tradition, this is called compassion, or working with somebody else. You are completely exposed in this situation. Otherwise, it’s like a medieval knight encased in his armor. It’s so heavy that he has to be cranked up onto the horse. Then he rides off to battle and usually falls off. There’s something wrong with that technology.

Often, when someone tells us we should be fearless, we think they’re saying not to worry, that everything is going to be all right. But unconditional fearlessness is simply based on being awake. Once you have command of the situation, fearlessness is unconditional because you are neither on the side of success or failure. Success and failure are your journey.

Nevertheless, sometimes you become so petrified on your journey that your teeth, your eyes, your hands, and your legs are all vibrating. You are hardly sitting in your seat; you are practically levitating with fear. But even that is regarded as an expression of fearlessness if you have a fundamental connection with the earth of basic goodness-which is unconditional goodness at this point.

a rather not so intelligent design...

2009-03-08T16:23:00.011+01:00

"Our enormously productive economy... demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption... we need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate."
Victor Lebow - Price Competition in 1955

Sometimes, some little thingie puts us back a step to behold life in a slightly different perspective. The Story of Stuff is a nicely fastpaced documentary clearly pointing out some sobering facts. Not that the information is all that new to me at least, or the bleek prospects, but it was a surprise this ruthless consumerism is by design.. but what to expect from a country which used foreign aid to increase it's international power...
Other sobering news forwarded by an old colleague and friend, just strengthens the perception of ruthlessness, even despite this company's potential in face of a particular fact-based vision of the technological future ahead.

Howcome so much of Western businesses have a top management that is inhuman? Why do investors stick with them? Common sense makes it so obvious.. and it's not even hidden in euphemisms and other forms of modern-day "soft language". They have no heart, no heart means no life. That can only head for destruction, either of themselves or, as they appear to have been doing for the last few years, of the company they "lead".. Are things only so clear when being an animist ?

Scorpion wants to cross a river, but he can't swim. Goes to the frog, who can, and asks for a ride. Frog says, "If I give you a ride on my back, you'll go and sting me."
Scorpion replies, "It would not be in my interest to sting you since as I'll be on your back we both would drown."
Frog thinks about this logic for a while and accepts the deal. Takes the scorpion on his back. Braves the waters.
Halfway over feels a burning spear in his side and realizes the scorpion has stung him after all.
And as they both sink beneath the waves the frog cries out,"Why did you sting me, Mr. Scorpion, for now we both will drown?" Scorpion replies, "I can't help it, it's in my nature."

What can i say.. "Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not"..
Have you ever heard of insect politics? Neither have I.

Quantifying elegance: Godel's arithmetization of syntax, simplicity and efficiency in regulatory intuitionistic complexity ..

2009-01-11T22:21:00.011+01:00

but i do love to read his EWDs..

EWD Archive
Discipline in Thought

sic transit axis mundi

2009-01-03T03:37:00.004+01:00

The winter solstice, or Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, usually offers small opportunities for contemplation. Or maybe it’s just the gradual fallout of colleagues whose good intentions got frozen in time for whatever reason... In that sense, working in IT is both a blessing and a curse. No other profession requires such level of continuous learning and the joy of working with smart people. Yet no other profession seems to be so overwhelmingly overhyped with new technologies, methodologies, paradigms shifts and whatever else. And like no other profession i’m seeing people’s smarts being used against them, by others or by themselves, and that seems mainly to do with a strange want that people are fundamentally rational.

After several years in the spotlight of our attention, SOA seems on it’s way out, at least on the popularity rankings. Feels a little like studying at university, that at the moment the whole landscape made sense and offered an abundance to make the right decisions, game over. Although considering tools like OpenESB the SOA approach is becoming undetectable mainstream and exceedingly powerful. Not that i’m going to miss the SOA pooha clutter, but it’s kind of typical for the state IT is in considering the addictive urge for things new.

Now, OpenESB touches on something. Having worked with it’s commercial predecessors for some 8 years i have always been a bit suspiscious about the promise of Open Source. As ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’ points out eloquently factors like instant ego gratification play an important role in Open Source communities, which is also it’s limitation. Now that might be old fashioned Open Source, but what i’m seeing with OpenESB is a rapidly accelerated iterative development process where openness allows for instant feedback, clarification and improvement. An assembly line modeled by M.C. Esher.. If this openness is a sign of the future, then i’m all for it. This is ‘free as in freedom’, http://www.faifzilla.org/ch00.html, in a new business model, a SOA organisation as Anne Thomas Manes so clearly foresees. It reminds me of what Taiichi Ohno meant for Toyota, which involved reverting back of the production process to it’s human measure. Simply put, if leaders merely "implement techniques" without fully developing people, their system has no heart. Having heart is rather important in Japan.. Heart is spirit and having that indicates a ‘system’ is viable.

Maybe this is what books such as Peopleware aim at, but i just haven’t had enough time to look into that one.. In recent years innovation has become a popular subject for study, and what is rather amazing is that there is a strong tendency away from the human factor to stress the ideas of collective intelligence. Of course the legend of the lone genius, flashes of insight and such are rather exaggerated, but might it just be there’s a mix between the context and the persons involved ? Maybe some people are more susceptible for contextual feedback and rise above the lowest common denominator to do grand things during the right circumstances. What proof is there collective intelligence will rise above the mean ? Amazon’s book suggestions surely don’t indicate such. Maybe some ants within the entire ant colony are called Einstein.. Just expecting the system to self-organize is as unrealistic as expecting the European Union would result in lower prices while willfully ignoring economical models such as ‘increasing returns’. But maybe it’s just the friction between control and trust that many businesses prefer to hear about abstract methodologies harvesting human potential which can rule out any dependency on key figures.
Anyways, back to OpenESB and Sun, if Sun manages to keep the current momentum in the software area while making a suitable transition away from hardware, maybe very soon we can speak about the very first real SOA company, a company that lives and organizes the same way as what the Java Enterprise System is foreseen to enable. Not just composite applications, mock-ups, facades, but federated dynamic assembly of semantic applications. Workflow-as-a-Service, on steroids. Let’s give it a go.

Even more so, let’s give it a go, so eventually i can work out some a-life ideas with the current illustrious codename of ‘cotropous gauge maze’, freely based on Hamilton’s quaternions... And on that note a couple of quotes for the new year from EWD who, knowingly or not, has worked on that wonderful area where mathematics and physics so deeply coincide and intertwine, IT. Bugger it if he and Godel had gotten together and formulated something Wolfram is point to..

John von Neumann draws attention to what seemed to him a contrast. He remarked that for simple mechanisms, it is often easier to describe how they work than what they do, while for more complicated mechanisms, it is usually the other way around.
Edsger Dijkstra, Trip Reports, 213

...Simplifications have had a much greater long-range scientific impact than individual feats of ingenuity. The opportunity for simplification is very encouraging, because in all examples that come to mind the simple and elegant systems tend to be easier and faster to design and get right, more efficient in execution, and much more reliable than the more contrived contraptions that have to be debugged into some degree of acceptability.... Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.
Edsger Dijkstra, The Tide, not the waves; in Denning/Metcalfe: Beyond Calculation, Springer-Verlag 1997

... while we all know that unmastered complexity is at the root of the misery, we do not know what degree of simplicity can be obtained, nor to what extent the intrinsic complexity of the whole design has to show up in the interfaces.
We simply do not know yet the limits of disentanglement. We do not know yet whether intrinsic intricacy can be distinguished from accidental intricacy.
Edsger Dijkstra, Communications of the ACM, Mar 2001, Vol. 44, No. 3

Il ritorno di Don Camillo

2009-01-03T01:56:00.004+01:00

Italy is as close to heaven as it gets. For living that is.. not for work..
Since the “mani puliti” action in the early 90’s the Italian economy has been declining. Government spending, incomprehensible inefficient business laws, a suffocating tax system and a banking climate from the Middle-Ages don’t seem to make Italy rise on the global competitiveness indices.. In fact in these areas Italy performs worse than, say, Guatemala.

This is the only rich country i know where it costs a hell of a lot of money in notary costs to go bankrupt.. but this is also the only rich country i know where effectively going bankrupt that doesn’t seem to matter. Time is something measured in eras here.. as if it is of vital importance for a country to have the legal documents of company formation and dissolvement stored in a huge safe inside one of the Alps.

Italians will say Italy is a special case.. that is so but it is just extremely protective of maintaining the status quo. And while doing so the administrators of the Imperium Romanum smother every innovation which is where the real power of Italy lies.
Whereas Italy is known for it’s corruption my experience does not correspond with that, on the contrary actually.. but maybe Italy still needs to learn the Northern-European practise of “if you can’t beat it, legalize it”. Maybe learn from Holland with it’s separate business and criminal law systems, where drugsdealers pay tax and bribes are tax deductable, and it isn’t even ‘corrupt’..

So, why the moderate rant.. i mean, Beppe Grillo does a much better job at ranting, and still it’s a pretty useless act without much action..
Well, after 4 years of trying to expand an international business based in Italy i have had more than enough. So i am moving my business to Switzerland to enjoy a business climate based on common sense, and taxation is about 1/3^rd of Italy. The best of two worlds.. live in Italy, work from Switzerland. Then, maybe i can enjoy laughing about the joke of Italian politics, with currently the 62^nd government since the World War II, just like all those tax evading Italians who are responsible for storing an estimated 65-70% of the nation’s capital in Switzerland.. which by many means should make Italy one of the richest countries in the world, no ?

As Dutch writer Gerard Reve once said concerning his view on politics; “It is better to have a government of thieves than a government of killers”. The following is taken from Catch 22, Joseph Heller:

"America," he said, "will lose the war. And Italy will win it"

"America is the strongest and most prosperous nation on earth," Nately informed him with lofty fervor and dignity. "And the American fighting man is second to none."

"Exactly," agreed the old man pleasantly, with a hint of taunting amusement. "Italy, on the other hand, is one of the least prosperous nations on earth. And the Italian fighting man is probably second to all. And that's exactly why my country is doing so well in this war while your country is doing so poorly."

Nately guffawed with surprise, then blushed apologetically for his impoliteness. "I'm sorry I laughed at you," he said sincerely, and he continued in a tone of respectful condescension. "But Italy was occupied by the Germans and is now being occupied by us. You don't call that doing very well, do you?"

"But of course I do," exclaimed the old man cheerfully. "The Germans are being driven out, and we are still here. In a few years you will be gone, too, and we will still be here. You see, Italy is really a very poor and weak country, and that's what makes us so strong. Italian soldiers are not dying any more. But American and German soldiers are. I call that doing extremely well. Yes, I am quite certain that Italy will survive this war and still be in existence long after your own country has been destroyed."

Nately could scarcely believe his ears. He had never heard such shocking blasphemies before, and he wondered with instinctive logic why G-men did not appear to lock the traitorous old man up. "America is not going to be destroyed " he shouted passionately.

"Never?" prodded the old man softly.

"Well..." Nately faltered.

The old man laughed indulgently, holding in check a deeper, more explosive delight. His goading remained gentle. "Rome was destroyed, Greece was destroyed, Persia was destroyed, Spain was destroyed. All great countries are destroyed. Why not yours? How much longer do you really think your own country will last? Forever? Keep in mind that the earth itself is destined to be destroyed by the sun in twenty-five million years or so."

Nately squirmed uncomfortably. "Well, forever is a long time, I guess."

"A million years?" persisted the jeering old man with keen, sadistic zest. "A half million? The frog is almost five hundred million years old. Could you really say with much certainty that America, with all its strength and prosperity, with its fighting man that is second to none, and with its standard of living that is the highest in the world, will last as long as... the frog?"

"Well, frankly, I don't know how long America is going to last," he proceeded dauntlessly. "I suppose we can't last forever if the world itself is going to be destroyed some day. But I do know that we're going to survive and triumph for a long, long time."

"For how long?" mocked the profane old man with a gleam of malicious elation. "Not even as long as the frog ?"

"Much longer than you or me," Nately blurted out lamely.

"Oh, is that all? That won't be very much longer then, considering that you're so gullible and brave and that I am already such an old, old man."

"How old are you ?" Nately asked, growing intrigued and charmed with the old man in spite of himself.

"A hundred and seven." The old man chuckled heartily at Nately's look of chagrin. "I see you don't believe that either."

"I don't believe anything you tell me," Nately replied, with a bashful mitigating smile. "The only thing I do believe is that America is going to win the war."

"You put so much stock in winning wars," the grubby iniquitous old man scoffed. "The real trick lies in losing wars, in knowing which wars can be lost, Italy has been losing wars for centuries, and just see how splendidly we've done nonetheless. France wins wars and is in a continual state of crisis. Germany loses and prospers. Look at our own recent history. Italy won a war in Ethiopia and promptly stumbled into serious trouble. Victory gave us such insane delusions of grandeur that we helped start a world war we hadn't a chance of winning. But now that we are losing again, everything has taken a turn for the better, and we will certainly come out on top again if we succeed in being defeated."

Nately gaped at him in undisguised befuddlement. "Now I really don't understand what you're saying. You talk like a madman."

"But I live like a sane one. I was a fascist when Mussolini was on top, and I am an antifascist now that he has been deposed. I was fanatically pro-German when the Germans were here to protect us against the Americans, and now that the Americans are here to protect us against the Germans I am fanatically pro-American. I can assure you, my outraged young friend"- the old man's knowing, disdainful eyes shone even more effervescently as Nately's stuttering dismay increased-"that you and your country will have a no more loyal partisan in Italy than me-but only as long as you remain in Italy. "

"But," lately cried out in disbelief, "you're a turncoat! A time-server! A shameful, unscrupulous opportunist!"

"I am a hundred and seven years old," the old man reminded him suavely.

"Don't you have any principles?"

"Of course not."

"No morality?"

"Oh, I am a very moral man," the villainous old man assured him with satiric seriousness, stroking the bare hip of a buxom black-haired girl with pretty dimples who had stretched herself out seductively on the other arm of his chair. He grinned at Nately sarcastically as he sat between both naked girls in smug and threadbare splendor, with a sovereign hand on each.

"I can't believe it," Nately remarked grudgingly, trying stubbornly not to watch him in relationship to the girls. "I simply can't believe it."

"But it's all perfectly true. When the Germans marched into the city, I danced in the streets like a youthful ballerina and shouted, 'Heil Hitler!' until my lungs were hoarse. I even waved a small Nazi flag that I had snatched away from a beautiful little girl while her mother was looking the other way. When the Germans left the city, I rushed out to welcome the Americans with a bottle of excellent brandy and a basket of flowers. The brandy was for myself, of course, and the flowers were to sprinkle upon our liberators. There was a very stiff and stuffy old major riding in the first car, and I bit him squarely in the eye with a red rose. A marvelous shot! You should have seen him wince."

Nately gasped and was on his feet with amazement, the blood draining from his cheeks. "Major - de Coverley!" he cried.

"Do you know him?" inquired the old man with delight. "What a charming coincidence !"

Nately was too astounded even to hear him. "So you' re the one who wounded Major - de Coverley!" he exclaimed in horrified indignation. "How could you do such a thing?"

The fiendish old man was unperturbed. "How could I resist, yon mean. You should have seen the arrogant old bore, sitting there so sternly in that car like the Almighty Himself, with his big, rigid head and his foolish, solemn face. What a tempting target he made! I got him in the eye with an American Beauty rose. I thought that was most appropriate. Don't you?"

"That was a terrible thing to do!" Nately shouted at him reproachfully. "A vicious and criminal thing! Major - de Coverley is our squadron executive officer!"

"Is he?" teased the unregenerate old man, pinching his pointy jaw gravely in a parody of repentance. "In that case, you must give me credit for being impartial. When the Germans rode in, I almost stabbed a robust young Oberleutnant to death with a sprig of edelweiss."

Nately was appalled and bewildered by the abominable old man's inability to perceive the enormity of his offense. "Don't you realize what you've done?" he scolded vehemently. "Major - de Coverley is a noble and wonderful person, and everyone admires him. "

"He's a silly old fool who really has no right acting like a silly young fool. Where is he today? Dead?"

Nately answered softly with somber awe. "Nobody knows. He seems to have disappeared."

"You see? Imagine a man his age risking what little life he has left for something so absurd as a country."

Nately was instantly up in arms again. "There is nothing so absurd about risking your life for your country!" he declared.

"Isn't there?" asked the old man. "What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for."

"Anything worth living for," said Nately, "is worth dying for."

"And anything worth dying for," answered the sacrilegious old man, "is certainly worth living for. You know, you're such a pure and naive young man that I almost feel sorry for you. How old are you? Twenty-five? Twenty-six?"

"Nineteen," said Nately. "I'll be twenty in January."

"If you live." The old man shook his head, wearing, for a moment, the same touchy, meditating frown of the fretful and disapproving old woman. "They are going to kill you if you don't watch out, and I can see now that you are not going to watch out. Why don't you use some sense and try to be more like me? You might live to be a hundred and seven, too."

"Because it's better to die on one's feet than live on one's knees,"

Nately retorted with triumphant and lofty conviction. "I guess you've heard that saying before."

"Yes, I certainly have," mused the treacherous old man, smiling again. "But I'm afraid you have it backward. It is better to live on one's feet than die on one's knees. That is the way the saying goes."

"Are you sure?" Nately asked with sober confusion. "It seems to make more sense my way."

"No, it makes more sense my way. Ask your friends."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_state

2008-10-18T00:06:00.001+02:00

There's two bulls standing on top of a mountain.
The younger one says to the older one: "Hey pop, let's say we run down there and fuck one of them cows".
The older one says: "No son. Lets walk down and fuck 'em all".

Postmodern dadaist collage in text space. An exploratory Semiotic Oriented Alphabet primer

2008-08-29T21:44:00.025+02:00

Well, well, well. Three holes in the ground.

Seems like someone at ZapThink suffered from a dose of vacation stress, went into warp speed and whilst popping into a superluminal process of thought produced a post on semiotics which, after reading it a second time as a reality check, appeared to be suspisciously close to a brain fart. Usually i like the ZapFlashes a lot due to their thought provoking nature, but this one had me scratching my head searching for significance.

Semiotics is an area of study i find quite interesting because of it's fundamental nature, the meaning of signs. Like any of such concepts it applies on different levels of human experience, the social, psychological and even the physical. Likewise i find the appreciation of art spanning a similar spectrum, some art has social significance, some art touches on the boundaries of perceived reality. The question "but, is it art", i think, besides it's salonfaehig connotation, is irrelevant unless such art goes beyond craftsmanship and proves to be an ontological exploration balancing on the verge of the bio-physical. I know of a paintress whose work reacts on light the same way plants do.. the paintings are in some rudimentary sense alive, or 'begeistert' as it's adequatelly called in German.
Anyway, semiotics and it's companion syntax are something quite fundamental in science, computer science as well as linguistics. And their significance may very well increase even more when AI and ALife systems will grow in their categorization capabilities. If it hadn't been for the place-value system for numerical notation, how we use the alphabet to construct words and sentences, or simple bits and bytes, technological progress would likely have been of a much lower degree. Even Godel's incompleteness theorem dives deep into the fundamentals of the structure of numerical notation, it's direct relationship with functions, and how a logically complete system of rules will lead to results that cannot be proven within the system itself.

There is something odd going on with semiotics.. Semiotics and SOA. Semiotics is not just simple visualization of a service, it is also how the service is implemented, how they are expressed, or pragmatically speaking, with what technology. Semiotics as elements of meaningfull expression and semiotics as fragments of syntax. It's not just some graphical meta-tag used to identify some service as a concretization of something abstract, the service itself is it's own description. How does a e.g. time registration of worked hours get expressed from an HR perspective, an invoicing perspective, project administration, project planning, resource allocation ? There are many contextual assemblies which can make use of the same service and give it a different meaning. Is that abstract or concrete ? Or might it be a reduced degree of a priori subjectivity ? Semiotics is something much more important in the advent of the semantic web.

Yeah, silly me, i thought the ZapThink article was going to be about things like that.. As SOA is a vital ingredient for the semantic web. Maybe a proposition for a semiotic alphabet for SOA, or, as the SOA model is of a fractal nature, some exploration along the lines of buddhist semiotics or even deep research such as a cognitive abstraction inference induction machine which is surpringly similar to a semantic web when abstracting the concept of machine to a structured assembly of functions, or services for that matter..

Well, what can i say.. the SOA that can be spoken of is not the true SOA..

Beware of fire. Learn from water.

2008-08-23T20:26:00.009+02:00

Was reading some interesting articles on the history of Russian martial arts, in particular Systema, and it's roots in the orthodox Christian monasteries. Systema, surviving the communist era by being adapted by the Spetsnaz, as well as being practiced outside of Russia, is an extremely effective fluid combat style. Hitting and kicking methods are backed up with deep bio-mechanical knowledge as well as using acupressure points which will disrupt an opponent's conscious control of his/her body.
Now, in the more 'internal' martial arts movements, techniques, stages of development, mentality, are often associated with different elements. Bujinkan techniques are roughly ordered according to earth, water, fire, wind and sky/emptiness, the Godai, leaving out the sixth element of consciousness which is more the realm of esoteric buddhism. Arnuad Cousergue, a fantastic French teacher of Bujinkan arts, has translated these in the more understandable concepts of absorb, block, counter, deflect and evade, which roughly equates with sky, earth, fire, water and wind. Although of course any of these concepts can be associated with any of the elements depending on context, as so many of these systems are slightly fractal in nature. Great simplification of possible strategies though.
Systema is primarily water and wind style, water being associated with the physical movements, and wind with the spirit.

A funny thing popped into my mind while reading about the monasteries. Dating back to the Byzantine empire as well as a favored (tax free) position during Mongol rule, during the centuries most towns across the Sovjet union developed alongside rivers and were constructed with a common place, the monastery, at it's center, or a monastery was established and gradually a town developed around it. Being part of trade and traveling routes many facilities such as protection were arranged from these monasteries. Also, knights returning from battle and other soul-searchers would often spend several years or the remainder of their life, so as far as protection goes there was room for much cross fertilization, leading to e.g. fighting monks, as in the above context.
Quite a contrast with modern-day "shareholder value" i thought.. shaking off a mild grudge towards much of the bluff-infested money grabbing business mentality so often encountered these days, and i recalled an article from Master Nan Huai-Chin about modern-day and future business and his lovely goal-oriented taoism. Yet, it's an integral vision he has on businesses, both social, cultural and economical. Something like Green IT or the "house of the future" initiatives, but much more all embracing.
It reminded me of the advice of the world's oldest business, a 1400 year old construction company in Japan, when it bankrupted in 2006 and was transferred into the Takamatsu Corporation. "Beware of fire. Learn from water" was their advice after 14 centuries and some 40 generations..

The long term view on SOA as advocated by Ann Thomas Manes of Burton Group, a fairly complete, embracing, corporate culture altering approach on IT projects, what does a business want with their systems on the long run ? They want flow. They don't want a bunch of ivory towers or a mega-mainframe containing all the business rules, but which makes it impossible to react quickly. Flow, smart use of wind and water, Feng Shui, "the ancient Chinese practice of placement and arrangement of space to achieve harmony with the environment" as it's eloquently described a well known open-opinion encyclopedia.
Good SOA is about company flow, about natural movement of information and functionality, to create the ability to deflect, evade and absorb. And to avoid blocking and counters, which is so often the result of short-term agendas or the pervading hierarchical military style of organization early Western companies were based upon.
Beware of fire. Learn from water. Don't buy SOA. Do SOA.

Service Oriented Argus

2008-08-07T18:59:00.002+02:00

SOA is one of those terms i am hesitant about using. The main reason being because it is such an obvious technical style to use for certain integration initiatives. And it's so easy to fail in matters of style, especially when it is being over hyped by software vendors to an stunning degree. SOA is a strategic discipline in the area of Enterprise Architecture to gradually transform the application landscape in such a way they can be used as simple building blocks for purposes of interoperability and assembly. Being such a discipline it requires a well-balanced approach of vision, business analysis, audience, methodology and management. Just like large scale integration projects require.

Now, besides the reluctance of stating the obvious, or 'kicking in an open door' as it's called in Holland, what abhors me is the incredible self-fulfilling marketing hype around SOA especially when it comes to web services. As if using a search engine which returns results based on popularity and sponsorship, a 'free internet encyclopedia' infested with Astroturfing, on-line applications cycling through a stage of perpetual beta, as if all this isn't enough, there seems to be a large misconception at the CxO level confusing the market-driven enterprise with the marketing-driven enterprise..

I find it mind-boggling how interwoven the hypnotizing kaleidoscope of marketing and advertising has become in an industry where opinion was second to scientific honesty and how it has been taking over an evolutionary movement equal to the introduction and acceptance of databases. Old man Dijkstra would not have been amused.. it reminds me of a story of his where business people objected one of his computer designs because in their perception he had, kind of, been cheating because he had the freedom to choose smart people to work with.. which seems to get to the mis-conceptual core as 'user-friendliness' suffers from. Biased information is bombarded onto us in such large amounts we start believing it, we start many things anew whereas talking with a 50 or 60 year old engineer will teach you some amazing stuff from the times when computers and languages were custom-built, the same thing of which we are more than capable of nowadays but just don't see or allocate time for, because we must keep up with the flow, the endless propagation of what is now and new.

On the other hand, this widespread tendency to take credit on the future has caused a large and reasonably well-defined movement in moving away from isolated monolithic applications towards.. towards what ? Towards another uber-monolithic clutter of ill-defined web service spaghetti ? Towards high-performing lego-style applications with well-defined interfaces for business functions ? Considering economical path dependence and the evolutionary aspect of acceptance of technological innovations, the large majority of initiatives will end up with spaghetti, spaghettini and spaghettoni, which may be more than fine for the issues addressed, but please don't call it SOA. Select a project that is challenging and worthwhile from both business and technology and just start applying SOA as a discipline. Use email, message queues, web services, ftp stations, database level ETL, paperware, whatever, just build an integrated solution and do it architecturally elegant.
Wittgenstein, that nice and logical buddhist from Austria, had this nice dictum, 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent'. Don't talk about SOA, just do it.

Human Potential - SNAFU

2008-08-05T22:10:00.003+02:00

"At a point in space, the human potential is the potential energy per unit of charge that is associated with a time-invariant human field. It is typically measured in awareness, and is a Lorentz scalar quantity. The difference in human potential between two points is known as consciousness."

Humans are funny creatures.. One of the things my ol' sensei shared an interest in was military research in telepathy. Over here in Europe we don't hear much about that, but in the US, with it's military-industrial complex several decades of valuable applied research has been done by several government agencies. Pioneered by Ingo Swann a methodology, Controlled Remote Viewing, has been constructed that will enable (normal) people to learn how to use a certain type of cognition. Together with Russel Targ and Hall Puthoff at the Standford Research Institute they had been trying to sift through the different phenomena and get to a better understanding. During the mid-70's funding for the research program moved from the CIA to the DIA, and in 78 a Remote Viewing program was started by the Department of Defense.
The methodology is very intriguing in the sense that it appears similar to signal processing with human consciousness, it contains ways to enhance a signal, to steer, to recognize too much interpretation (Analytical Overlay) and different stages people go through when working honestly following the methods.
Needless to say results were convincing, and Remote Viewing has been used for nearly two decades as a source of Intelligence gathering. Politics and human nature eventually caused the program to seize, but all the more interesting in 1995 the CIA declassified portions of the program.
Gradually, once the word started spreading, Remote Viewing was picked up by the large community of psychic charlatans which inhibits American society and nowadays the term is being used for any kind of synaptic activity completely unrelated to the methodology. Luckily the coin has another side, and also former members of the army programs have come forth to teach the methods. Paul Smith, author of Reading the Enemy's Mind is moving mountains of work to get the word out, and the methodology taught. Lyn Buchanan is running a successful company that specializes in training and 'services', and using an evaluation and feedback construct, as well as recognizing and applying viewer's strengths and weaknesses, is able to deliver results with a success ratio of some 90%. That is quite something different than a 50-50 chance..
Paul Smith runs both the Remote Viewing training and consultancy firm RVIS as well as the International Remote Viewing Association, IRVA, which organizes conferences and events.
Tamra Temple, my ol' sensei's former wife, has done an incredible effort in going through the declassified files, sorting them, scanning them, and has made them available as a set of CDs on www.stargate-interactive.com.

Now, why would i post about this. For one, sometime in the nearby future when i have more people working with my company, i would be rather averse of management training, but would like to present them with a training like this. Just for them, to get in touch with a higher degree of human potential, and accessing these skills just because we live in this wonderful universe. It will open doors for them that might remain closed when they would conform to a semi-robotic suit-and-tie culture somewhere else. It is a human skill, and what they learn from it they can apply in life or business, whichever is their choosing.

On another note, that fact that telepathy and precognition are proven subjects, that kind of sets certain things i'd like to move forward with upside down. How artificial will aLife be when human consciousness doesn't stop at the skull ? Of how much value are the large number of statistics research reports when disregarding something like this ? Wouldn't statistics be a flat-world scenario when assuming a 50-50 chance when tossing a coin ? And shouldn't it benefit from a kind of Minkowski space background to better reflect certain tendencies ? Like an earlier post paraphrasing from Gulliver's Travels, the assumption that human creativity can easily be surpassed by a raw number-crunching machine, not just to defeat a chess player by sheer brute force, but to replace the free flow of ideas humans are capable of. I don't think so, but then again i also view intelligent awareness as something inherent to everything..however rudimentary it might be with modern day computing, or a scratch on something being it's 'memory' of whatever made the scratch, so that places some interesting bets on aLife and it's future, but not just from the simple fact of emerging properties when a whole is constructed from parts, but also of something bigger where the parts are influenced by the whole. That remains something i miss in the research on complexity at e.g. the Santa Fe Institute, however interesting i find it all.

One thing Remote Viewing also showed in it's early stages with regards to selecting people, in usual research one tried to select Joe Average and present him/her with a large set of very boring tests, usually without any positive or negative feedback. For selecting the early candidates for Remote Viewing however, there was a simple suggestion which can be expressed as 'select people that have shown to be successful when confronted with a new subject matter'.. and make things challenging, and provide appropriate feedback, not with loads of insincere cheerios but just honest appreciation. That works.
So, one of the things i'd like to develop once is an incentive-driven evolutionary computation engine which will steer it's little self-categorizing adaptive agents towards building applications. Nice and freaky.. a bit like John Holland's ECHO project but with more cybernetic feedback loops, paving the way to a future where materials can be programmed, or a house can be grown from the seeds of a tree. In due time.

Fluxology new website

2008-08-04T22:22:00.003+02:00

Free interpretation of http://camelcase.blogspot.com/2008/08/fluxology-new-web-site.html:

Since early 2008 Maurizio Turatti and i have been working together via my company The Fluxology Office s.r.l..
Being far too busy with customer's projects and day by day activities, we weren't able to dedicate enough time to create at least a decent presentation web page for the company.
Putting the much needed C of communication back in ICT, here we are.

The website will be enhanced soon with descriptions of the more challenging projects we've been involved with, and our experiences with JavaCAPS will gradually full up our blogs.
We are very excited about the new Sun technologies, the openness shown by the Product Management group around JavaCAPS and the whole of JES, but we are also very aware to address business needs, methodologies and how a long term strategy solidifies into part-projects. Projects stand or fail by the style of it's approach. SUN is gaining a large momentum around consolidating their software and supporting it, and the technological direction of JavaCAPS and related technologies can count on our vote. Of course, the question arises, where do you go for expertise to get the most out of this immensely flexible toolset as well as avoiding any pitfalls. That is why Maurizio and I are working long days to set up a network of business partners and harvest the (dog)years of our practical experience with Java, Open Source, Integration Solutions and what can be done when putting everything together.
SOA, BPM, BAM, ESB, these are all nice buzzwords, but only just part of a new movement. In our experience the act of integrating applications has emerged from the realm of middleware and can now only be seen as totalware, it is not just merely about linking applications together, these applications get submerged into a new system built with an integration toolset. This area is both as old as the term 'Information Technology' and so young we see customers and even SUN struggling to comprehend the business possibilities and the long term impact.
Apart from enabling expert level consultancy, we are therefor working on several designs hooking into and around the JavaCAPS toolset which we are aiming to move into reality during the coming years, exploiting our close connections with JavaCAPS Product Management.
The game has just began.

Prabuh made a great presentation on the new features and some of what lies ahead for JavaCAPS 6 and beyond.

Finally, after some 6 years waiting there is another Horizons event in Munich - Germany.
We expect you there.

tendrel travel company..

2008-08-02T01:49:00.001+02:00

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out indefinitely in all directions…. A single glittering jewel at the net’s every node, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number…. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that the process of reflection is infinite.
-- Avatamsaka-sutra

long overdue ode to an ol' sensei

2008-08-02T01:31:00.002+02:00

Eyeball In My Martini

Went out to eat the other night
Picked up my girl at eight
In my soup I found a fly
...beyond my plate
Was an eyeball in my Martini
An eyeball with a twist
A worm in my Martini too
I said "There's somethin' wrong with this"

Eyeballs, eyeballs, eyeballs
Eyeballs everywhere
Eyeballs, eyeballs, eyeballs
Floating through the air

Went to the 'musement park
To ride the Tunnel of Love
But when I went to hold her hand
There was an eyeball in her glove
We went to Lovers Lane
Scan for U.F.O.s
Just imagine what I saw
When I pulled down her pantyhose

Eyeballs, eyeballs, eyeballs
Eyeballs everywhere
Eyeballs, eyeballs, eyeballs
Floating through the air

I look my baby home
For a juicy goodnight kiss
But there was an eyeball starin' at me
Between her parted lips

Eyeballs, eyeballs, eyeballs
Eyeballs everywhere
Eyeballs, eyeballs, eyeballs
Floating through the air

I went to the institute
And asked the doctor there
In the department of eyeballs
"What's this burden that I bear?"
He said "You ain't crazy"
He said "You ain't insane"
"It's just you got an eyeball
In the center of your brain"

'Cast a cold Eye
On Life, on Death.
Horseman, pass by!'

Hoshin ikan

Sensory deprivation blues (in F Minor)

2008-06-21T13:18:00.020+02:00

Ok, so 'you should blog' and yada yada.. Now, i never felt much push to publicize ever evolving opinions, but i was impressed by Edsger Dijkstra conviction that it's a scientist's duty to maintain a lively correspondence with his scientific colleagues. Not that i'm an outspoken Dijkstra devotee although there's an odd synchronicity going on in recent weeks, nor do i find blogging of much scientific relevance or that my daily working can make such claim, by anyway.. what not better to start blogging than to write about things close to the heart, or in this case the liver.

So, roughly 11 years ago i made a choice to pursue a career in information technology. It seemed a kind of challenging endeavor enveloping both mathematics, physics and engineering at it's foundation and things like psychology and commercialism making up the branches. Working at a small Internet-oriented company, early on a particular programming paradigm caught my attention early on, mobile agents, and i was very intrigued by the possibilities where distributed computing systems would start having biological characteristics, something touching on artificial life.
Being rather ignorant, off i went looking for work that would utilize such paradigm, which with my lack of knowledge on computer science seemed an obvious stage of the industry's evolution, and of course it would soon be so.
A clear signal should have been an early application at a famous company referred to with a TLA, where it should be noted the abbreviation stands for it's hardware product and not it's consultants. Having scored a rather flawless result (of course language was scored badly) on the intelligence test used as a little entrance exam for the interview, i was invited, yet after discussing for some 10 minutes the interviewer was honest and openhearted enough to say i could not get the job as i was "too smart", the work they had to offer was too boring and politically sensitive and the TLA company would not afford investing in such a risk. Alas the nearest R&D facility was in Switzerland which proved an unmanageable jump at the time.

Looking back the subject still intrigues although i still haven't worked with such subject matter. But the way people behave.., i'm not so sure.. let's just say i haven't worked with artificial life on computers..
Dijkstra calls for the computing community to be unmasked as a "Secret Society for the Creation and Preservation of Artificial Complexity", which is a nice way to put it, although the current state of affairs do remind me of Gulliver's Travels where a very technically advanced society aims to create an engine which closely resembles some implicit management objectives..

Every one knew how laborious the usual method is of attaining to arts and sciences; whereas, by his contrivance, the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.” He then led me to the frame, about the sides, whereof all his pupils stood in ranks. It was twenty feet square, placed in the middle of the room. The superfices was composed of several bits of wood, about the bigness of a die, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender wires. These bits of wood were covered, on every square, with paper pasted on them; and on these papers were written all the words of their language, in their several moods, tenses, and declensions; but without any order. The professor then desired me “to observe; for he was going to set his engine at work.” The pupils, at his command, took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty fixed round the edges of the frame; and giving them a sudden turn, the whole disposition of the words was entirely changed. He then commanded six-and-thirty of the lads, to read the several lines softly, as they appeared upon the frame; and where they found three or four words together that might make part of a sentence, they dictated to the four remaining boys, who were scribes. This work was repeated three or four times, and at every turn, the engine was so contrived, that the words shifted into new places, as the square bits of wood moved upside down.

Now, above seems to be one of the earliest descriptions of a certain type of computer. But it also touches on the very discrepancy between scientific and technical reality, and business expectations. What i encounter with a rather shocking frequency is managers and more specifically sales and marketing people tend to confuse the hundredth monkey effect with the theory of infinite monkeys.
Many customers encountered in recent years have an "aggressive planning" which usually means that a 2-3 year project is to be delivered within 3 to 6 months, or they engage on the SOA route without employing a centralized team and methodology, or they assume open source equates to lower costs in the long run while that label is mostly an excuse to mature buggy tools at the expense of early adopters, or they have been off-shoring much of the activities in an effort to exploit the saddening 21st century slavery movement as a cost reduction to most often accelerate their own career in exchange for the poor fellow that needs to follow up on this as well as a highly compressed economical growth program noone at the Worldbank could have envisioned, or a combination of the above.

Yet, this does seem to be emergence in action, the 100th monkey effect applied to managerial expectations, albeit not directly with computing itself... but how it's usage is perceived. And although no amount of typing monkeys, or in modern day soft language, alphabet architects, will ever produce the works of Shakespeare this does kind of correspond with a recent insight that emergence is coupled to scope, not level which in this context would translate into how more often skewed information is provided, the more it will shape reality. The ideas pervading the current world of information technology, with a high concentration of unrealistic short-term stock market driven blah, which only seems to become more prevalent, it still doesn't confront a simple formulated principle, nine women can't make a baby in one month.

Why so much nonsense can prevail so easily touches on what i miss so much in the current world of information technology, maybe it's just a lack of integrity as Feynman put it, i don't really know. Most people don't seem to be doing the thing they really love doing, they haven't chosen for spending most of their daytime on something they find worthwhile, they are just trying to fulfill a role, prescribed by an intricate web of skewed perceptions and expectations, by some bureaucratic system without someone being ultimately responsible for it. Why don't most people do what they feel is right instead of doing what they are expected to do ? Why don't people follow their own bliss ?
Why is it so much an uphill battle to follow mine ?

Maybe the emergent intelligence of crowds has the rudimentary smarts of a single-cell life form, maybe the military organisational model underlying most companies doesn't stimulate the best in most people or maybe RAW had put his finger on something painfully right..

.. "I am also puzzled," Sam Three Arrows said finally. "I worked, long ago, in New York City, in construction, like many young men of the Mohawk Nation. I found that whites were often like us, and I could not hate them one at a time. But they do not know the earth or love it. They do not speak from the heart, usually. They do not act from the heart. They are more like the actors on the movie screen. They play roles. And their leaders are not like our leaders. They are not chosen for virtue, but for their skill at playing roles. Whites have told me this, in plain words. They do not trust their leaders, and yet they follow them. When we do not trust a leader, he is finished. Then, also, the leaders of the whites have too much power. It is bad for a man to be obeyed too often. But the worst
thing is what I have said about the heart. Their leaders have lost it and they have lost mercy. They speak from somewhere else. They act from somewhere else. But from where? Like you, I do not know. It is, I think, a kind of insanity." ..