Yes, it’s faaar from perfect, and I missed some notes in the bridge, but I can’t stand recording yet another take, so this is the one I’m submitting. Also, I’m pretty satisfied with the theme that I open the solo with.¹

And by the way, what Coursera does here is absolutely magnificent. It enables me (and thousands of others) to do something I always wanted and never believed to be possible: to study jazz improvisation with no other than Gary Burton, the greatest vibraphonist alive, and one the greatest improvisers in the world. And it’s for free. So then even if he kicks me out, I’ll have something to tell my grandchildren about.

So here’s the thing: I didn’t want to read this book. It’s been on my girlfriend’s shelf for a while, and even though the younger me would certainly read it eagerly, the current me avoids such titles. I read it though, and even worse, I’m writing a review.

The problem with books like ‘Cosmos’ is that you can either give 5 stars or 2 (or perhaps even 1). Giving 5 makes you a pretentious intellectual, giving 2 means you didn’t understand the book and you’re trying to rationalize it by saying you don’t want to be a pretentious intellectual. Fair enough. I’m giving 5 stars primarily because it’s been the first book that I managed to read almost in one seating (with interest and joy) in a long, long time, and of course because I am a pretentious intellectual.

This book is about the relationship between language and meaning, reality and thought. It’s a story of two young men visiting the Polish countryside somewhere in Tatra mountains, trying to get away from problems they have in Warsaw. The narrator is a paranoid fella who obsesses over dead sparrows and disfigured lips, and as the story progresses, over his own thoughts and phrases. This is what Cosmos really is about: an illusion of oppression created by human mind, a paranoia fueled by words, sentences and phrases. There is no other plot here, it’s essentially a plotless story. While some may find Gombrowicz’s style annoying and tedious, I found it absolutely brilliant. It serves the purpose of creating an atmosphere of absurd paranoia perfectly well, and manages to create tension (and humor) out of thin air.

‘How many sentences can one create out of the twenty-four letters of the alphabet? How many meanings can one gleam from hundreds of weeds, colds of dirt, and other trifles?’

(I read the Polish original, so if you’re reading the English version you should probably try to get Borchardt’s 2005 translation)

Google Now is about giving you just the right information at just the right time. It can show you the day’s weather as you get dressed in the morning, or alert you that there’s heavy traffic between you and your butterfly-inducing date—so you’d better leave now! It can also share news updates on a story you’ve been following, remind you to leave for the airport so you can make your flight and much more. There’s no digging required: cards appear at the moment you need them most—and the more you use Google Now, the more you get out of it.

via Official Blog: Google Now on your iPhone and iPad, with the Google Search app.

Ok, as much as I admire Google for making such a thing work, I am seriously creeped out.

I got used to the fact that (some of) my phone apps know my location¹, but Google Now knows so much more. It learns my habits by analyzing search history (on every device on which I’m logged in), it extracts information from my emails (flight tickets and such), and in general provides me with information it knows I might be interested in. And all this from one of the biggest advertising companies in the world.

The fact that Amazon starts to know what kind of music I might be interested in better than me is one thing, but what Google Now does is just a bit too scary for me. My friends think I’m nuts because I’m using DDG as my search engine, and I pay for my email service instead of using free GMail, but somehow I’m starting to feel those were good choices…

\newenvironment{compprob}[1]{\smallskip\noindent\textsc{#1:}}{\smallskip}

and it seems to work pretty well:

But perhaps there’s a better way to typeset it? An obvious problem with mine is that it’s not a theorem-kind of environment, and there’s no way of referencing it with \ref{}, but then again you usually reference computational problems simply by their name. Anyways, suggestions for making it better are welcome.

The anxiousness that was once concentrated on how you’re going to make new friends, adjust, and master the nuances of the language has become the repeated question “What am I missing?”

via What Happens When You Live Abroad | Thought Catalog.

Good post, good observations. As an ex-pat since around 2008 I’d like to add a few of my own.

Firstly, something weird happens to my “national identity” sense. I feel Polish of course, and that means I’m interested in what happens in Poland, I read Polish newspapers online, and I’m very much interested in Polish culture¹, but I no longer use Polish on a daily basis², I no longer feel that the political situation of my home country affects me in any way, and I really don’t see a situation in which I’d decide to move back to Poland. At the same time I hardly feel Norwegian, and I don’t really think I’d ever become one even if I lived here for 30 years. So I feel somewhat stateless.

Secondly, I think the whole “mastering a local language” thing is a myth. Yes, when all the signs suddenly become meaningless and you can’t say if what you’re looking at in the grocery store is actually butter or margarine, it’s an obstacle of sorts. Most foreigners I know here in Norway attended courses of Norwegian as a foreign language (at least to some degree), but of all of them only one speaks Norwegian fluently (and it’s a somewhat special case, because this person wanted to stay in Norway permanently since he got here). The rest is able to have a basic conversation about how the weather is bad and how beer is expensive, but that’s it. Interestingly, it seems the amount of work put into studying matters little. While it’s obvious that I can’t speak Norwegian (finished only level 1, with a strong D), all my other friends that finished all the possible levels of the course still don’t speak the language (even if they’re German). Same goes for Karolina – she completed all the levels of Dutch, but she still doesn’t speak it. We all use English because it’s so natural, convenient and easy. And there’s always someone around who doesn’t understand Norwegian at all, so what’s the point? That’s why I find the observation made by Thought Catalog so spot on: ex-pats gather in communities regardless of their origin. I hang out mostly with Norwegians, but at the same time with folks from India, Canada, Germany, The Netherlands, Slovakia, Ukraine, Russia, South Africa, Algeria and China³, and we all speak English fluently. Perhaps this is what happens in Scandinavia simply because the average level of English fluency is so high, and I guess this wouldn’t happen in France, Spain, Italy or Germany (or any Eastern European country for that matter). Then again I’d still expect ex-pats from many different countries hanging out together, regardless of their country of origin.

Finally, I wonder how different my experiences would be had I not stayed in academia. Academic environments are naturally diverse when it comes to nationalities, and unfortunately most contracts are short and tied to some grant money. This means most people won’t consider investing time and/or money in learning a new language. I’d expect this to look differently in the so-called industry.

The complaint has been heard. In postings to the Dell Community site and to Dell Web Vertical Director Barton George’s blog, Dell has announced that as of today, the XPS-13 Developer Edition will be equipped with a “1080p” screen.

via Dell’s Linux Ultrabook gets more pixels, European availability | Ars Technica.

If Dell’s offering was present back in 2010, I probably wouldn’t have defected. Project Sputnik brings something the open-source community always wanted: a high-end ultraportable laptop with a high-resolution screen and full linux support from Dell. Now available in Europe as well.

It is a thorough historical and anthropological investigation into the nature of money and, nomen omen, debt. Across about 400 pages Graeber analyzes all aspects of these: moral, economical and philosophical. He lays out a fresh and somewhat bold view that challenges classical economic theories, namely that debt has been the true essence of human economies for at least 5000 years now, and provides lots of compelling evidence to support this claim. His original analysis is very thought-provoking, and makes the reader wonder about the very foundations of our society, global economy, and certain aspects of human nature (like greed and love).

To a reader unfamiliar with economics and anthropology (such as myself), Graeber’s book is also an eye-opener when it comes to explaining how the world works, and even more, how it has been working for the last couple of thousands of years. The author is a true erudite in how he manages to show numerous connections between religion, economy, history and human nature. And through last chapters, where he relates his historical presentation to present day and the financial crisis of 2007–2008, it is also a bit scary to read (again, to a poorly educated person such as myself) about how global economy ‘works’.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in economics and history of money and markets, but also to those who’d like to read about the history of the world from a different perspective.

I started adhering to Rule 12 and bought another bike. This time it’s a classic Dutch Gazelle from the 70s. Barely working drum brakes, beautiful brown paint-job with extra rust and a weight of circa 16 tons, but nothing beats the comfort of an opafiets. And you can get it all for only €40 (plus €20 in repairs) from certain philosophers in Groningen!

If you’re running Emacs 24, you can get the package from MELPA repository. Otherwise you can get it from Erik’s bitbucket, put it somewhere in your load path and load it with (require 'latex-pretty-symbols). There, happy TeXing!

(also, you can make similar tricks with Haskell mode and have all your lambdas displayed properly).

I did. I created Sound and Complete, a blog in English, and hosted it on WordPress.com. I tried writing about more technical subjects (linux and free software and the like), but quickly realized there’s a ton and a half technical blogs on the internet written by people closer to interesting communities (in my case free software communities), with deeper knowledge, and more engaged into certain projects. Obviously I could have become one of those people, but I was just about to start a PhD in logic, so my efforts concentrated more on modal logic, model theory, recursion theory etc. I figured that perhaps I could write about academic subjects, but I ran into trouble. With academic subjects (and logic/mathematics especially) you can either write introductory posts about things you know/you’re learned (but that’s a bit boring and not really something people want to read; modal logic is not as exciting as quantum physics, so it’s hard to become Brian Cox), or you can try publishing posts about details of your work. The latter is definitely more tempting, but in practice not really feasible, because it requires looong texts, lots of technicalities and it’s best suited for academic papers. So I ended up writing about everything again, just like in college. And that’s in principle ok, as long as there aren’t as many social network users as there are today.

The other day I took a good look at my blog’s archive and realized that out of a ~140 posts published here, about 15 is of decent quality.^[2] The rest are either links to other material on the web or personal entries that would work much better as Facebook updates or tweets. Linking to other sites is, as Guy English writes in the 1st issue of The Magazine, specialty of a certain well-known blog, and imitating it isn’t easy. Some tech bloggers find their own formulas, but I wasn’t able find mine. I’ve tried many platforms, from WordPress through Posterous, Octopress and Tumblr to Squarespace, and even Medium^[3] or Branch, but it didn’t really matter — my blogging was never not good enough.

I once asked my friend Szopa why he doesn’t blog anymore^[4], and then he said something I remember very well — he said he doesn’t blog, because he wouldn’t read his own blog. Whereas I used to treat my own blogging very lightly for many years, I’ve recently tried looking at it the way I look at texts in The New Yorker, The Magazine^[5], The Economist, or simply the harsh^[6] way I review academic papers. Szopa was right — I wouldn’t read my own blog if it wasn’t my own.

This is not to say there were never any good entries here. No, some of them I actually find insightful, others are helpful, and others interesting even though personal. That’s why I’m keeping them here, but there seldom will be any more posts, unless I really have something to say (i.e. more likely there’ll be something long-form). You might be wondering why wouldn’t I simply leave the blog as it is. Well, my website used Squarespace lately, and Squarespace is a paid service. That’s why I decided to simply move my homepage as a static html file, put it in a Github repository and leave some of the posts I find valuable here as static html as well. That’s not to say I won’t write anymore, but it does mean posts will appear only a couple of times a year.