The rate of publication has decreased. Prior to the last evaluation, 55 posts had been published – about one per week. Since then, only 22 new posts have been added. This is partly because I’ve had more academic tasks to carry out, a condition that is set to intensify gradually from here on, and partly because I tried to change my standards for what I wanted to blog about (in some vague, as of yet unspecified way).

Scala is still a very popular topic to blog about, and rightly so, but I no longer feel that I should write about it for the sake of doing so. Others do a much better job of writing about Scala than I could do, because they spend all their time more time with that language. Incidentally, I’m delighted to see that companies are still switching to Scala quite eagerly, and that Martin Odersky and others launched the company Typesafe to help others with the transition. Learning Scala has honestly been one of the most empowering experiences I’ve had as a programmer, and I believe that there is a vast space of possibilities that has yet to be explored in the language. Maybe it’s not a language for everybody (I postpone my judgment on this for now), but if it were in the hands of the right teams with the right discipline, the world would be in a better state. Also, the Scala IDE for Eclipse has been vastly, vastly improved since 13 months ago, at which time it could barely be used.

I’ve become more and more interested in philosophy over the past 18 months or so, and this started to show up in the blog during this interval, with more and more entries tentatively trying to delineate philosophical questions or positions. Initially I was focussing almost only on Nietzsche, but recently I’ve also been reading a lot of Foucault, as well as some others. I’ve probably not been very pedagogical in writing down my thoughts on these topics, but I fear I will never be a pedagogical writer unless I go through some initial struggling attempts. The ideas I’m most interested in currently are causality (I believe that we don’t understand it at all) and free will (I believe that its existence is highly questionable, but very fruitful to criticise and reason about).

Popularity. By far my most popular post has been this little note on Nomura’s Jellyfish. If I put Google adwords on just that post, I would probably make a lot of money without annoying any other readers. For some reason Google directs a lot of people googling jellyfish to this site. As if programming and philosophy are not more interesting things to Google. Other than that, the Scala posts have been very popular, and following them, Continuous computing, Type theory and Politicization of mathematics… were able to attract some attention.

From now on, until early next year, I have to focus more and more on finishing my Ph.D. studies; it remains to see how this will affect my blogging.

Life goes on: Yesterday I had a few drinks with my friend. A lot of places were closed, but some bars are still open. There’s both fewer customers and less electricity to go around at the moment. There was an air of calm bravery and defiance among the customers at the bar.

Some books I had ordered from Amazon arrived this morning. I used the trains as usual to go to the lab, where I worked on my research. This evening, before I left the lab, power saving efforts were intensified, since it’s been getting very cold the past few days, and more electricity is needed for simple heating. Before I left the lab I looked out the lab window. I had never before seen the skyscrapers in Marunouchi, around the Imperial Palace, so dark at night.

The situation is not completely under control yet. The big story today has been about the attempts to cool the reactors with water. Because of intense radiation immediately around the plants, it’s necessary to approach the plants by helicopter and dump water from above. Lately, they have also tried shooting water at the plants from trucks at a distance.

Even though the general concern is rising even among Japanese people, the  ”foreign consensus” and the “Japanese consensus” are still strikingly different. Many countries are arranging tickets for people to go out of Japan, and even more of my friends have taken refuge in the Kansai region. This is a completely fair decision and there is no harm in taking precautions. Personally I try to keep a close watch on the radiation levels and the news. Recently many more measuring stations have been added to this geiger counter map. If the levels go up too far, I would definitely consider getting out of the Tokyo area for a while. But I consider myself attached to Tokyo, I live here, and I have projects I want to finish here. Right now, I don’t want to flee without good reason.

Since radiation is something invisible that we cannot see, smell or touch, and since nobody can go near the plants to look carefully at them by now, any understanding of the situation necessarily contains a lot of interpretation. Nobody fully knows what the current state of the plants are or what is going to happen. Clearly there are big risks. But I think it is fair to say that the stories circulated by foreign media do not reflect the situation in most of Japan. Those near Sendai or near the power plants have suffered terribly and are facing great risks. But the vast majority of Japan is experiencing little outside of power shortages. Those who have relatives in Japan should take this into account when they read the news.

My friend Jacob Ehnmark, who used to live in Sendai, is blogging about his escape from Japan and his impressions here.

1. I am fine, and there is no immediate danger to me personally. When the quake occurred, I was in Sapporo, and I came back to Tokyo on Saturday night.

2. There was huge devastation in the affected area in Iwate-ken, Miyagi-ken, Sendai and so on. Many people are still missing in those areas.

3. Ever since the tsunami, Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) has struggled hard to  cool down its nuclear power plants in Fukushima. Here is one of many articles that summarise the situation. Useful graphics from Washington Post. Various incidents have happened, such as explosions (apparently not in the reactor core, but as a result of hydrogen and oxygen being released) and a fire in one reactor, which has now been extinguished. Elevated radiation levels have been measured near the reactors and people in a 30 km radius are asked to stay indoors or evacuate.

3.5. The water level inside some of the reactors’ so-called second containments was too low at certain points, exposing the fuel rods, and it is likely that fuel inside was melting. Supposedly, even if it melts, it is meant to be collected in a container underneath the core.

4. Tokyo is 250 km from Fukushima, and the radiation levels are far lower here. Some Geiger counters (in Tokyo) are available online (also on map). While the radiation levels near the reactor are now at dangerous levels, in Tokyo, so far they have not gone above harmless levels.

5. Accounts of the disaster vary widely, from careful, measured fact reporting to doomsday predictions. Foreign media are generally playing up the disaster angle quite a lot. For example, this article from Der Spiegel. What is reported in Japanese media still sticks mainly to observed facts and public advisories, although there is a sense of increasing exasperation with the lack of information from TEPCO and the government.

6. If the radiation level keeps going down, the biggest risks to us living in Tokyo should be the risk of a strong aftershock following the initial quake, especially if there is an associated tsunami. However, as time passes, this risk is written down.

7. Across Japan, people are trying hard to conserve electricity because so many power plants have been shut down. Parts of east Japan are having a controlled power outage on a rotational basis. Trains run less frequently than usual, but as of now, in central Tokyo, daily life is basically still normal.

One of the central ideas of the manifesto is that our relation to music is dependent on physical presence and responsibility. Physical presence as opposed to the illusion that distances and places are made irrelevant by the internet and digital communications. Responsibility as opposed to the idea of mindlessly shuffling through a very large or infinite archive of recorded music. One of the ways in which music conveys something is when I choose music to play to somebody else, and I take responsibility for the effects of the music on that person or on a group of people.

Fleischer constructs the idea of a “postdigital situation” and holds it up as a model for how music is to be valued, critiqued, understood, and, essentially, how it is to take place, or come to matter. The postdigital situation is constrained by a physical space where music is being performed and listened to, where responsibility relations exist and evolve, and where bodies are set in motion. The digital world, the internet without boundaries, can be a means of gathering people in such a space and informing it, but it does not replace it. The “postdigital” goes beyond the naive idea of the digital, which ignores places and crowds.

Olle Olsson at SICS has also discussed this book in English. More to come!

Much later, when I was a student in London, I was subject to budget constraints and went for the cheapest flight whenever possible. Accordingly I found myself flying with an Irish airline, Ryanair, quite a lot. This enterprise is marked by its grisly yellow and dark blue colour scheme and continuous experimentation in lowered flight standards, comfort and safety, all for the sake of lower prices. For a 1-2 hour flight between England and Sweden it was fully acceptable.

Recently I have been flying between Japan and Sweden quite a bit. The intercontinental flight can last more than ten hours, and takes on quite a different character from short flights. Some of the essential absurdities of any flight journey become increasingly difficult to ignore during this time period.

Firstly, there is the fact that the airplane that more than a hundred passengers ride in is a sealed off, highly fragile, mobile cross-section of society and a habitat for human beings. Airplanes need continuous replacement, draining and replenishment of food, waste, excrement, water, fuel and electricity. The air pressure and temperature inside the cabin are artificially maintained. The similarities with an imagined future biodome on the moon are not a few. What happens if an airplane has to land on a tiny island in the middle of the ocean and doesn’t have enough fuel to fly back, or there is some kind of technical problem? All of these buffered flows which the airplane must always replenish would be interrupted, and our very lives are hooked up to those flows.

In addition, hundreds of people are placed very close to each other for an extended period of time with minimal lateral separation (although there is some longitudinal separation in the form of seat rows). A certain neuroticism is provoked. We become hyper-aware of our neighbours and what they do, what they talk about, how they dress and what habits they have. We try our best not to notice. And this lattice, this packing of people, is surveyed from above by the panoptic eyes of the flight stewards and hostesses. Observation not only from above but also from peers becomes essential in maintaining order in a closed-off society where governmental violence cannot reach and the usual norms might easily be violated. Security breaches are to the greatest possible extent preempted by the pre-flight security theatre, and what remains of risk is contained by observation and observability effects.

This pressurised air and pressurised micro-society is spiced up, or muddled, slightly by the increasingly confused roles of the stewards and hostesses. In the jet set era, the air hostess was an object of attraction, an apple of the eyes of businessmen, an icon of liberty who had authority but no doubt also a certain intoxicating effect which helped to pacify. Today she is more clearly authoritarian, but the old role has not quite been erased from people’s minds. Something oedipal threatens to take place. Is this person who serves me food a nurse, a security guard, a mother as well as a possible lover? The neuroticism of the family extended into international airspace. All authority figures merged into one. Male stewards only slightly less confusing.

Fortunately airlines are very happy to serve up small doses of wine and beer to take the edge off the situation. Flying is absurd, but for the moment we have no other way of getting around.

A more advanced approach is selective forgetfulness. Humans cannot go on with their lives if they do not forget memories and experiences that are irrelevant and useless. They become unable to set and act on new targets. I think that a slightly less naive digital life would contain a measure of deletion. Deletion of files, old e-mails that have probably become useless, “friends” on social networks who are mere acquaintances or even less, and so on. Taking away the old makes space for the new. It can be especially powerful to see the number of files in your home directory reduced from 50 to 5. A lot of confusion and ambivalence is immediately removed.

Part of taking the next step step deeper into the digital age should be deciding, each for themselves, what one’s personal thresholds and principles of deletion are. What should be deleted, when and why? In our brains it has been managed by evolution for us. Now we must manage it by ourselves.

1. Enumerate the constraints

2. Find an initial solution that feels right but doesn’t quite work, based on previous knowledge of the domain

3. Use the information contained in the constraints to adjust the solution, so that it works

4. Either you have succeeded, or new constraints came out of the process => go to step 1 and repeat

It’s been just over a year since I started studying for my Ph.D. — formally, I entered the program in April 2009. With at least two years to go, how do things look with some hindsight? What do I think it means to obtain the Ph.D. degree, or, more specifically and usefully, to be a researcher in computer science?

Much of what I’m noticing are things that sound obvious and natural, like everyday truisms, when expressed with words, but the idea I have of it goes a little bit deeper than that. For instance, we all get told over and over throughout our lives, starting in high school, that we have to become good communicators. So it’s not going to be a surprise to anyone when I say that I think the process entails becoming a much better communicator than I’ve ever been before. Maybe what’s different is that I am trying to communicate things that haven’t been communicated before, things that I invented — or things that have hitherto been communicated only by a very small number of people. (Most of the communication I did prior to becoming a Ph.D. student may not have been terribly original.) Basically, reading and understanding a large amount of scientific papers, and understanding them with a particular use in mind, either having or getting a sense of how they fit into your own work. Then, writing your own papers, and communicating, somehow, what you thought, and what you were the first person to think, so that somebody else might read it like you read the works of others, and use it similarly. Then, presenting research, discussing it, and understanding what is being presented and discussed by others — similar challenges in speech instead of in writing.

I can’t speak for other fields, but in computer science ( I work with programming languages and software engineering), I find that a lot of this, for me, has been about building up a certain mental dexterity with formalisms. Understanding the implications of formalisms as you read about them and seek to apply them. Communicating formalisms to others. Some of this is still difficult, in particular the “communicating to others” part, but I think I am achieving things in this regard.

Communication, then, where does it take us? One of my mental images of academic knowledge is a big directed acyclic graph (a tree) where papers reference other papers. A surprisingly big part of writing a paper is ensuring that your work can get assimilated into this graph easily — placing it well, referencing the right things, making sure that you can be referenced easily. Also: defining the boundaries of your work extremely well — here’s where it begins, here’s where it ends. We assume precisely this and arrive at precisely that. It really seems that these things can never be made clear enough.

Which leads to another mental image of research: the paper/unit of work as a building block. The more solid it is, and the harder and sharper its surfaces and edges are, the better structures can be built from it (though I think there are other kinds of valuable works too). That’s one direction I think I need to be aiming for as an aspiring researcher.

I thought I’d make a list of software I consider absolutely essential on any new computer, and it became longer than I thought.

General use:

NetNewsWire for news reading

DropBox for file syncing

OmniFocus as a task organizer (the GTD methodology actually works — it has liberated me from reciting a long list of things to do in my head all day long)

CircusPonies Notebook for note taking

iStat Pro for system monitoring

If I want to develop software:

Eclipse

Fink and MacPorts so I can get various unix tools (I can’t settle for one or the other, since some tools are in one of them only, but normally Fink is nicer since the packages are precompiled)

Apple’s developer tools

If I want to read and write papers:

TeXShop

Mendeley Desktop

So these are the “absolute essentials”. Of course web apps like gmail count too, but they require no installation. Anything I’ve missed?

One thing I do not install, but perhaps should, is Apple’s MobileMe. Considering how fruity my environment is, there ought to be some benefit. But between Dropbox, my own DAV server for calendars, and built-in syncing of apps like OmniFocus, I can make things stay in sync anyway, so MobileMe is probably not worth the cost… I think.

The morning has turned into a game. It’s me against the city layout, me against my memory, me against entropy and the temporal degradation of my cognitive faculties. The ludic dimension has entered my life again. And soon enough, I find the place I was looking for.

When we have a sense of competition, that a victory against something or someone is possible, our awareness of life is heightened in every way. We pay more attention, we notice more, we become more here and now. The endless simmering chatter in our heads, nearly meaningless thoughts that usually refuse to yield anything meaningful, gives way to absolute focus.

It occurs to me that a society where everyday tasks can be carried out like they are games, victories to be won, might be a more moral society, with greater happiness and life awareness for everyone. In such a society, even if you lose a particular game, you win something else.