This is rather fascinating:  http://www.bumptop.com/   Watch the demo video.

Will this be the future of UI?  Maybe it ought to be but I rather doubt it will. People are just too naturally risk averse and slow to change. Bumptop will just look so daunting and complicated at first that people will probably be turned off.   Still, maybe some of its ideas will find its way into other products over time.

Modern society, at least in the US and its imitator states, equates expertise with leadership and leadership in turn with success. We all know that there is no natural correlation here. If anything leadership and expertise are diametrically opposed. To be a leader requires broad understanding whereas to be an expert requires depth. To be a leader requires expanded awareness and the ability to take in lots of different pieces of information and pick out the relevant ones, whereas to be an expert requires the ability to focus single mindedly upon one subject to the purposeful total exclusion of other potential areas of interest. The expert looks at one thing at a time with piercing focus and then you move on to the next and then the next, the leader looks at everything and understand it all just enough in order to be able to proportion work unto his or her team. As you can see their entirely different, at least if these classical myths of  what constitutes leaders and experts hold any truth to them.

Now we could challenge these perspectives but let’s not. Let’s assume our basic understanding of the skill sets needed for expertise and leadership is at least partially grounded in reality and consider what it means to have a society that strives to create leader-experts.

Of course if you succeeded your society would be at a huge advantage. These leader experts training other up to be leader experts would be able to advance their various areas of expertise at a very rapid rate. Who would be more capable of assigning a task to a set of underlings than a person who not only is a master of understanding the people with whom he or she works but also intimately familiar with the field to the point that given enough time he or she could do all the tasks him or herself. Then the division of work loads would truly serve to free up time amongst any of these leader-experts to innovate and dream and plan on a larger scale which of course they have the expertise to do.

Now I don’t claim that leader-experts don’t exist. They do. In particular areas at least. I call this a kind of genius, though of course not all genius manifests in this form.  Still, for the vast majority of people such a level of leadership and expertise is simply beyond reach. So what happens to them?

The leaders amongst them find themselves pressed to strive for a deeper and deeper understanding and their leadership skills suffer. The experts amongst them are pressed to expand their perspective and interrelate and their time to focus is lost. Ultimately you can expect a frustrated expert to become a recluse and a frustrated leader will become a liar and a deceiver constantly trying to pretend to knowledge he or she knows he doesn’t have the time or the inclination to obtain.

Such a conflicted society is unstable. I believe it will inevitably tilt one way or the other. Which way do we tilt in the US? In the past, perhaps towards expertise, but in the present? There’s no question that we tilt far far far and away toward leadership. Our colleges are obsessed with leadership, our recruiters more so.  Managerial skills  are the focus of seminar after seminar and the number of MBA’s we graduate is extraordinary. Even in academia it is as important to be a good leader of researchers and students as it is to be a good researcher onesself.

Why would we have tilted toward leadership do you suppose? I think there are a number of factors, but none more important than the way we socially have come to deliberately equate the leadership one achieves with the degree of success one has. The classic success story we tell is about working your way up from the ranks and becoming supervisor, team leader, manager, regional manager, vp, president, ceo, etc. etc. Someone who successfully manages his own shop is trumped by the guy who manages a whole chain of shops. The truck driver does not remark with as much pride for his ability to get his goods to their location on time as the guy who controls and manages an entire fleet of trucks. There are other factors, like the growth of expertise in competitor countries, the slow adaptation of public schools to modern needs, and the way in which modern entertainment mechanisms encourage breathe of awareness more than focus of attention or deep thought, but by and far the biggest influence I honestly do believe is the way we talk about leadership, or rather the way we fail to give as much credence to the experts.

Expertise is shunned in everything from the way we disparage “nerdiness” to the way we look down upon the workers of crafts and manual laborers, to the very nature of the stories we tell. Who are the leading figures? Not the followers, not the recluses. Almost always the leaders take the primacy of the stage and we assess them the bulk of our praise.

But there are some areas where expertise is still praised beyond leadership. For example, theoretical mathematics seems to be still a rather expert driven discipline, probably due in large part to the inaccessibility of the subject matter to the masses. An area not so esoteric that is still ‘expertise’ driven is fictional writing. At least we have not to my knowledge gotten to a point where teams of writers work together to produce most fiction novels, though ironically lots of other art forms that used to be expert driven have gone more the leadership route from movie making, to video game creation, to comic book writing, to most music to playwriting and dance.  But even in those there are still very expertise driven areas. Because of the fundamentally personal nature of what we get out of the arts it is no surprise that it is slower to become assimilated into a team and leadership philosophy.

A society driven far more by leadership than expertise is also unstable unless it pulls expertise from elsewhere. The risk of leadership driven society lies in the nature of the competition. Fundamentally there can only be so many leaders for an organization in order for it to run efficiently. Too many heads on the beast and nothing gets done. Bureaucracy can ultimately result in any society where everyone fancies himself the leader and it gets even worse if everyone also thinks he or she is the greatest expert as well.

So what does all this mean for regular people like you and me? Well for me, since I refuse to be a leader as I despise the thought of being responsible for another’s actions, it probably means I am doomed to obscurity. But for the rest of you, if you choose to be a leader be sure to foster the experts amongst the people you lead without pushing them into leadership positions  if they don’t want them but never forget that expertise is and will increasingly become the scarce resource not leadership. For everyone else, do as you will, and try to train your children to want to be leaders but to be devoted to expertise.

Bored I went to see the 300, I am glad I did. Although in some ways it was silly, overall the move was awesome!  For pure epic war story you can’t get much better than this. It has all the classic elements of the battle of the underdog against an evil overwhelming empire. It reminds me a lot of Braveheart in this respect. The action is quite well done but the best part is the underlying story of hope and inspiration brought by sacrifice. It’s classic. Nothing original here, but enjoyable nonetheless. It is a complete story that leaves you with a triumphant feeling at the end, as if something very important has been achieved.

** begin spoilers ***
Of course, it’s a good thing this story as taken from truly ancient history. That largely enables you to disregard the baggage that comes from an understanding of the reality of the world we live in today and simply accept the story at face value. We don’t need to really care that the Spartans were probably a lot crueler than we see and the Persians probably not quite so monstrous. Of course we don’t really know anything so it could all be true. It is pretty truthful to the known history except for some obvious dramatic changes.All we really need to care to know is that there was a battle at Thermopylae, it did involve the Spartans, they were vastly outnumbered, and the Persians were in fact the aggressors and lead by a tyrant.  That’s enough for us to suspend our disbelief and accept this over-dramatization enough to at least enjoy the story.  Though it does bother a little to see a story dramatizing the evil of the “persians” in this day and era. And it bothers me evil more the continuation of the glorification of ancient greek culture through the language used by the Spartans to rally their forces. But then this is normal for all cultures and probably accurate for the time period too. In war it is not uncommon to speak to your soldiers of the “fight for freedom” and the importance of “honor” and “glory” and “death through battle”. Modern cultures use it as much as the ancients probably did. Nothing has really changed.

I think it is funny how in the movie it almost looks like the 300 Spartans are doing all of the fighting all by themselves which is pretty absurd I don’t care how narrow your opening. The actual Greek army numbered 7000. The 300 Spartans may well have lead them, but it is incomprehensible that they wouldn’t have relied heavily on those other 6700 troops as well in the fighting, if only to give them time to rest. They were fighting a force of anywhere from 100,000 to 2.5 million depending on which estimates you believe.

The one thing that annoyed me the most was the portrayal of the traitor Ephialtes who is made into a hunchback wanna be Spartan who not only manifests the typical stereotypical conjoining of deformity with malevolence and inconstance but also manages to almost appear to validate the grotesque Spartan child rearing policies. I’d have no problem with it though it it were at all true or supported by the hsitorical record, but asides from him being a traitor there’s just no evidence of the rest of his characterization.

My favorite part on the other hand is the characterization of the storyteller character. The one eyed man who tells the exploits of the 300 and spreads the word through the country side allowing the massive army from the city states to assemble at last to crush the enemies. Really this is the aspect that makes the story good. The way we learn of the 300 through his powerful rhetoric leaves a lasting impression upon us. I loved it.
** end spoilers **

Anyway, overall a great and fun movie I recommend to anyone. It figures a good movie would be based on Graphic Novel.

Here is a fascinating documentary on global warming I watched today: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4520665474899458831

It’s pretty well put together, using all the neat documentary tricks that I am becoming used to and I can see how it would easily convince someone who isn’t  well versed in the subject matter and hasn’t seen or read any of the other relevant material. I can also see how it will at the very least sew confusion and uncertainty amongst even those who have a little bit of knowledge and understanding but are not experts and rely upon the reports of the media to guide their thinking.

I gave this movie 1 star.  To be fair I gave it one star after having read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Global_Warming_Swindle
and this
http://www.jri.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=137&Itemid=83
and this
http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/climate_change/article2326210.ece
and this
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/swindled-carl-wunsch-responds/#more-417
and this
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article1517515.ece
and this
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/swindled/#more-414
and I also listened to this which is mostly hilarious:
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/downloadtrial/radio4/thenowshow/thenowshow_20070316-1830_40_st.mp3
The part about the documentary doesn’t come up until pretty late in the program but lots of other parts of the program are funny too. Probably the funniest part actually has nothing to do with climate change but about the military.

Probably had I not read and listened to these things I would have given it 2 stars… maybe… Generally I give people the benefit of the doubt and I assume that a person making a movie like this is expressing his honest beliefs and not trying to mislead anyone.  Unfortunately after reading the above I cannot help but find myself not just skeptical of their conclusions but disgusted with their behavior. It is beyond my comprehension how anyone could be so immoral as to deliberately try to mislead people about something so important. I don’t have any problem with the disagreement itself. It is perfectly reasonable to believe that global warming isn’t really caused by humankind and perfectly acceptable to present evidence to the contrary, but it makes no sense at all to distort the data that is available in order to trick people into believing that global warming isn’t real. That’s grotesque. I wonder how such people are able to live with themselves.

But the thing that bothers me the most is the thought that most people who watch this aren’t going to read or listen to anything of the things I posted above. Most people will accept it at face value. Why shouldn’t they? It sounds reasonable enough. Most of the things said seem to follow rationally from the premises of the piece. Nothing seems out of the ordinary really, though you might find yourself being a little skeptical since the work is so very one sided, still you’re likely to believe that it at least hold some truth to it.

Really believe in any side of any argument by non-experts depends entirely on the degree of trust you have of the persons presenting the opinion. If I really think hard about why I really think global warming is real, it isn’t my scientific knowledge as I’m not a scientist, and it isn’t my personal experience since I know that an individual’s experience means next to nothing on the global scale. It isn’t even the light research I’ve done because most of that I did after I had already been pretty convinced and only provided evidence to solidify my convictions.

No, the reason  believe is actually rather simple. The people who are arguing against climate change are by and large people that I have found to be untrustworthy in the past. They are the exact same people by and large who advocate absurd disgusting policies, preemptive war, torture, deportation. They are the very same people who seem to have mislead us in the past, whom you almost can’t help to find regularly lying or distorting information if you ever bother to double check what they are saying. They are the same people who when lacking in facts and information always always without exception will resort to name calling and base attacks on character that should be considered shameful amongst any civilized communications. In other words, I so strongly don’t trust their words that I find it difficult and distasteful to even consider putting myself on their side of any issue.

But no one is wrong or deceptive 100% of the time no matter how evil so it could be that on this issue these people I distrust are actually correct, so I have to weigh my distrust for them as much against the degree to which I find the opposite side trustworthy.  What is the opposite side in this case, a plethora of institutions devoted to unbiased pursuit of knowledge through science and the dissemination of that information to regular folks like us. To put it quite simply, I have no reason to distrust these institutions. They were created for a purpose and to me knowledge I cannot recall them ever deliberately trying to mislead me. In contrast to the bloggers, radio show hosts, and tv pundits who espouse their anti-global warming rhetoric between rants of hate speech against whatever group happens to disagree with them at the moment the record of the scientific community is pristine.

Of course, I have little doubt that the people who vehemently disagree with climate change being caused by man, at least the ones who are honest and truly believe what they are saying, are likely similarly convinced in part by their degree of trust or distrust for the parties involved. For example, whenever I talk to people who are opposed to climate change I frequently hear numerous arguments about how “untrustworthy” Al Gore is. Indeed it soon becomes largely clear that a lot of people who disagree with the science of global warming do so in large part because they don’t trust the messenger. Likewise they tend to have a good deal more trust and faith in the various pundits and radio hosts and bloggers whom I have come to distrust strongly. I think their trust and distrust is founded on lies, but I don’t begrudge people their beliefs. It could very well be that I am the one being lied to.

Any reasonable person must acknowledge the possibility that they could be wrong, that they’ve bet on the wrong horse in this case. And I will not hesitate to do so, but if I do I find that I am wrong, that global warming really is a myth and a vast conspiracy I still will not believe that I was wrong to have bet on the side that I did. I believe that betting on global warming being real and really caused by humans is the rational bet to make even if you aren’t a scientist and don’t have the knowledge or skill to be able to navigate between competing scientific rhetoric that all sounds esoteric and incoherent to you. On top of the issue of trustworthiness of the messengers, there’s the vast difference in consequences should one side prove wrong than the other. A radically changed planet versus a few industries not making as much money as they like pretty much sums it up. I don’t believe in accepting concensuses simply because they are the concensus, but I prefer to believe that our understanding as a species of the way we impact the world in which we live is constantly improving rather than believe that science is a great sham full of greedy competition to convince people of a various untruths in order to gain wealth. If it turns out that the latter is true, and scientific research in this field has been grotesquely distorted by bias, money, and conflicts of interests, well then I will gladly struggle with all my worth to try and reform the way science is done in this world to ensure that such a thing can never happen again. And I strongly suspect and hope that most scientists would be just as devoted to doing the same thing. I think it is reasonable for now to give them at least a little of the benefit of the doubt. The world may regret it strongly if we do not.

Do you ever look back and examine the things you’ve done that are wrong? I do it all the time, but what I wonder is that nothing ever comes of that examination. I don’t alter my behavior. I don’t try to make up for what I’ve done and I rarely find the courage to apologize for it. I don’t change my thinking and sometimes with ongoing acts of wrongness I keep on doing it unwilling to break my stasis by exerting sufficient will.

Now I haven’t done anything all that. I’ve never killed, raped, or maimed anyone. I’ve never even beaten anyone up. I haven’t engaged in overt mental or emotional abuse nor molested anyone. I haven’t cheated on anyone or on my taxes, or threatened anyone in violence or betrayed the secrets of my country to foreign powers. Heck I can probably count the number of times I’ve cheated someone or stolen something on one hand (ok maybe two hands, ah the stupidity of childhood – magic cards are expensive). Of course I am defining theft based on the classical definition of the term not that absurd nonsense  that some label ‘piracy’ but seems a lot more like charity to me. I’ve only ever had two parking tickets both when I was much younger and not a single speeding ticket. I’m even in this country legally. I mention that since as you know according to morons on the news these days being an illegal alien makes you the most morally reprehensible being on this planet.

If you defined morality only in the terms of what doesn’t break the law then I must have grown into a saint in my adulthood. But alas, I think a code of morality extends far beyond just those things that the law recognizes and I don’t think there is any good standard text that can tell you what is right and what is wrong. The bible and the Qur’an are both wholly inadequate as are probably all religious texts and all codified laws. This makes some sense since societies probably don’t want to be in the business of punishing any wrong doing whatsoever. Imagine if you had to ticket anyone who ever told a lie? The expense would be beyond imagination.

But I still think there is a reasonable and rational understanding of the concept of right and wrong that pretty much everyone can understand in which I come across as not very moral at all really. And I am not merely talking about the fact that I have no real qualms about lying, exaggerating, or making stuff up. I don’t even think those are really all that wrong especially as most of the time when I do them there is no malice involved, and a lot of times there isn’t even self-interest motivating the decisions. I think truthfulness is a real virtue and I honor those who can exhibit it while still living a moral life but I don’t think a lack of truthfulness is immoral.

Rather, the things that bother me and I examine that strike me as really disturbingly wrong are a little more subtle. There are words I’ve said and statements I’ve made that have caused great harm to others or damaged their perception of me. Often I don’t even know why I said it. Was it some inner cruelty streak or internal jealousy I had? Am I self destructive or do I want others to think badly of me? Sometimes I’m not even sure if the person I said it to took offense or if the words even had nearly the significance to them that it does to me. Nevertheless, I would give my right arm to take those words back. I may not even remember the exact words I spoke, but don’t think I’ll ever forget the feeling I got after I realized I had said something so cruel and unjust and wrong. The moments stick out in my mind like a sharp nail pounded into my skull.

On the other hand, I think I am probably even more guilty of failing to speak when there was a great need. Letting someone not know what I think or feel or failing to intervene when I perceive an injustice occurring around me. Failing to foster relationships or grow trust or failing to help people who are in need even when it would cost me nothing more than a few words of encouragement or kindness. Yes I am massively guilty of that too. I would give a great deal to go back to those moments again so that I can say the right thing, the thing that was needed and assuage my soul. But to be truly honest, I doubt that if I went back I would be able to say it anyway. I’d need maybe like a thousand rehearsals then maybe I could be comfortable enough to speak words true.

But my greatest failing is probably simply the failure to act. This perhaps is the one that bothers me the most on a daily basis because it seems so imminently fixable. I can’t go back in time and relive moments to take words back or insert words in to the conversations I’ve had, but when I fail to do something today, and I fail to do it yesterday, and the day before, and the day before on and on for months or years on end, I can still always just do it tomorrow!  There are all kinds of things like this, like the failure to express my thanks to someone, or the failure to congratulate someone or the failure to apologize to someone or the failure to return something to someone or the failure to communicate with someone or the failure to explain something to someone though I had promised to do so, or the failure to visit someone or the failure to acknowledge someone whose personage I respect or the failure to pay someone back a debt that is owed, and so on and so forth.  Why do I not do these things? That is the question isn’t it? It’s not like I’ve forgotten.  I probably think about a dozen of them every day. Sometimes I wake up resolving myself to work one or another of them today, and then I go to sleep at night wondering why I didn’t do it. I have no answers that I am honest enough with myself to give.

Sometimes on rare occasion I do break the stasis and do the things I feel are right. But often it is so long after they would have been most just and right to do them that they’ve lost all meaning. Often it is after the other parties involved in my action have long sense cast me off as an immoral cad who fails to do even the simplest acts of justice that any idiot would know to do. But more often I don’t, and I fail and fail again. With each passing day I ask, well how can I do it now? It’s far too late. If I crawled on my belly and groveled in apology I don’t think it would be sufficient to satisfy my own sense of shame at the dishonor of these failures of inaction. Yet how can I not do it now? For it is still the right thing and I will never feel peace until I do them.

Why do I suffer from this weakness of will? Will I ever overcome it? I played a game once of trying to write everything I ever considered writing and even emailing a good portion of it out to people whom I know sharing it with them. I retrospect I think I thought this would help me to conquer my akrasia. Prior to that period I was not inclined to share much of anything with anyone. I think I benefited greatly from doing that and I am a different person now for having done it, but if I thought it would make me more bold, it didn’t work out that way at all. I would feel better for having written the works, but never better for having bothered to emailed it out. I hope and would be glad to find out that the people who read them gained from the reading, and I would always be quite pleased if I can play the role of an advisor helping others to see things that they didn’t see before or generating new ideas that other people don’t necessarily frequently consider. But none of that really helps me change me.

Magic solutions and crazy rituals don’t do anything but waste your time. If you believe that all of a sudden you’ll radically metamorphize  into the person you want to be or a person that can accept the person who you are then you’re setting yourself up for a lifetime of being less than you want to be. The only solution is incremental progress toward the goal of being a better person, correcting your wrongs and doing what goods you know you need to do and making yourself do a little more of both with each passing day. Everything in life takes practice. This point is so obvious a three year old could probably lecture me on it. Yet even knowing it rationally doesn’t mean I really understand it or will ever be able to do it.

Haha. You know what, I was actually going to write an entirely different entry today. I was going to write about the concept of “making up for” your wrong doing and how I think that’s a pointless pursuit because moral entities don’t have equivalents in terms of moral entities. That is to say there’s no numeric hierarchy you can really use to compare one event to another and opinions differ radically. This talk about what constitutes morality and the nature of my own immorality was only supposed to be the prelude.  Oh well, I think what I’ve written here is probably more important anyway so I’ll just end it at that.

- Clef