Leaderlog

Marginal Revolution has two posts on the uniqueness of art objects, and what is to me the obvious fact that their uniqueness is wholly contingent on current technology. What’s bizarre is the divergent but equally odd views regarding how great art is ‘enjoyed’ -

The handful of private collectors who are able to own great art describe a wholly different relationship to art, one that the rest of us can barely imagine: coming back again and again to the work, contemplating it in different moods, seasons, and lightings; sometimes sitting alone with it, sometimes enjoying it with friends; absorbing its layers and meanings slowly and incrementally; the work becoming an integral part of their lives. (Charles Murray)

I think most people would find it oppressive to live with “great art,” as that concept is traditionally understood. They prefer the inferior rendition. They like the ¤¤¤¤ they put on their walls. So there is less of a mass market here than meets the eye.(Tyler Cowen)

It’s very doubtful that rich collectors enjoy their collections any differently from a student enjoying their poster of Guernica, or that everyone who has a Van Gogh print has a preference for flat reproduction over a bit of impasto. Markets will continue to exist for originals in the same way as markets for first editions or manuscripts, bound up in social signalling rather than aesthetic value. Which reminded me of another Franzen quote:

One reason that attendance at art museums has soared in recent years is that museums still feel public … how delicious the enforced decorum and hush, the absence of in your face consumerism. How sweet the promenading, the seeing and being seen.[p150]

Psychological, social, and economic drivers rule market valuation and collectors - reproductions allow the freest play of truly aesthetic judgements.

And the book with sand between its pages this season is How to be Alone by Jonathan Franzen:

…any reader capable of decoding my subversive messages does not need to hear them.[p73]
…

To the extent that novelists think about audience at all, we like to imagine a “general audience” - a large, eclectic pool of decently educated people who can be induced, by strong enough reviews or aggressive enough marketing, to treat themselves to a good, serious, book. We do our best not to notice that, among adults with similar educations and similarly complicated lives, some read a lot of novels while others read few or none.[p75]
…

The educated single New Yorker who in 1945 read twenty-five serious novels in a year today has time maybe for five. As the modeled-habit layer of the novel’s audience peels away, what’s left is mainly the hard core of resistant readers [of literary fiction], who read because they must.[p84]
…

The Elitism of modern literature is, undeniably, a peculiar one - an artistocracy of alienation, a fraternity of the doubting and the wondering. Still, after voicing a suspicion that nonreaders view reading “as a kind of value judgement upon themselves, as an elitist and exclusionary act,” [Sven] Birkerts is brave enough to confirm their worst fears: “Reading is a judgement. It brands as insufficient the understandings and priorities that govern ordinary life."[p175]

The earnestness is mostly as refreshing as it is annoying, but he does have a tendency to signpost every insight in a rather plodding fashion. If he’s right that the general audience is a myth, the reader of translated literature would have to be a yet rarer subset composed of those who read a lot of translations. I wonder if this is true, or if readers tend to have loyalties to regions or countries, rather than to ‘foreign literature’ in general.

I haven’t read it, but have received a publicity release about it. There will be meetings at SSEES in London (either 24th or 25th of May, date to be decided) and at 18:30 on 29th May at 20 Fitzwilliam Place, Dublin:

Imagine a lively, intelligent young girl – not yet six years of age – whose home and whole world, a thriving farm in Volhynia (South-East Poland) are within one day lost for ever and whose own life is “changed utterly”…This was the fate of Felicja Konarska (nee Tais), the youngest of five children of devoted, caring parents and member of a happy, well-to-do family, highly respected in their community, when, on 10 February 1940, NKVD officials, pursuing Stalin’s orders for the “ethnic cleansing” of the Eastern borderlands of Poland, knocked on their door and gave the family just two hours to prepare themselves for deportation.

The commencement address delivered by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn at Harvard University:

Western society has chosen for itself the organization best suited to its purposes and one I might call legalistic. The limits of human rights and rightness are determined by a system of laws; such limits are very broad. People in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting, and manipulating law (though laws tend to be too complicated for an average person to understand without the help of an expert). Every conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the ultimate solution.

If one is risen from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be right, and urge self-restraint or a renunciation of these rights, call for sacrifice and selfless risk: this would simply sound absurd. Voluntary self-restraint is almost unheard of: everybody strives toward further expansion to the extreme limit of the legal frames. (An oil company is legally blameless when it buys up an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: after all, people are free not to purchase it.)

I have spent all my life under a Communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society based on the letter of the law and never reaching any higher fails to take full advantage of the full range of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man’s noblest impulses.

And it will be simply impossible to bear up to the trials of this threatening century with nothing but the supports of a legalistic structure.

Today’s Western society has revealed the inequality between the freedom for good deeds and the freedom for evil deeds. A statesman who wants to achieve something highly constructive for his country has to move cautiously and even timidly; thousands of hasty (and irresponsible) critics cling to him at all times; he is constantly rebuffed by parliament and the press. He has to prove that his every step is well founded and absolutely flawless. Indeed, an outstanding, truly great person who has unusual and unexpected initiatives in mind does not get any chance to assert himself; dozens of traps will be set for him from the beginning. Thus mediocrity triumphs under the guise of democratic restraints.
(more…)

The strangely addictive discussions regarding the Moveable Type licensing have started to become a bit more reflective, including Bernie Goldbach on the relationship of social capital to venture capital, and reminded me of this Businesspundit post on transparent businesses and this Economist article on naked corporations. Six Apart are under a disproportionate level of scrutiny, where their users expect immediate communication, and their every post and comment is pored over in minute detail. This must be a more than stressful experience for former hobbyists to have to deal with.
All this has reminded me yet again of Richard Sennett’s the Fall of Public Man, that the lack of an impersonal space damages the abililty to engage in constructive instrumental relations. Blogging is founded on disclosure of the intimate, of revealing oneself (and one’s company) in psychological terms:

How is society damaged by the blanket measurement of social reality in psychological terms? It is robbed of its civility. How is the self injured by estrangement from a meaningful impersonal life? It is robbed of the expression of certain creative powers … which require a mileu at a distance from the self for their realisation.

Yes!

Cygwin seems to work just as well as WinAxe, although I had to fiddle a bit with it as follows:

- take care to install all the right packages
- always ssh using -Y (not -X), so ssh -Y -l username computername
- running xhost ip address of cygwin machine on the remote machine may have helped

I’m working on my Linux desktop remotely using WinaXe, and it’s really impressive to be able to flip between a Windows and Linux desktop at the flick of an alt-tab, to run programs or change settings on Linux while remaining in Windows. A great program, and, it worked first time.

I recently added Jon Udell to the blogroll after hearing him on IT Conversations (which also has a good interview with Bruce Schneier), and now he’s giving XBRL a gentle kicking:

Uh-oh. I thought BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services) was a brain exploder, but it’s a walk in the park compared to this stuff. The XBRL spec describes how the parts of an XBRL instance interrelate, using state-of-the-art XML technologies such as XLink and XPointer. And it talks at length about the syntax and semantics of “taxonomies” that abstractly define chunks of financial reports. No sign of any actual financial data, though. And the link to a sample page at xbrl.org, returned a “404 Not Found.” I’m not surprised. The poor bloke whose job it was to produce that sample must have suffered a polymorphic recursive brain meltdown.

This isn’t what the authors had in mind when they endorsed XBRL. They’re right to point out that financial data published on the Web today in HTML and PDF formats resists transformation and analysis. And they’re right to say that “XML permits the tagging of individual data elements, and thus allows the users to rearrange or manipulate them.” But you can’t get from the Model T of today’s HTML and PDF reports to the intergalactic cruiser of XBRL in one turn of the evolutionary crank.

Consider RSS. In 1999 I published my first RSS feed. It was (and is) an XML format so simple that I could (and sometimes still do) write it by hand. Five years later, RSS is wildly popular, as XML formats go. But hordes of people who should be using it have yet to figure it out. If the RSS spec looked like the XBRL spec, nobody ever would — except vendors who regard Sarbanes-Oxley compliance as a growth industry. If we really want transparent data flow, let’s keep it simple.

The coverage over the weekend on cultural aspects of Enlargement has been pretty positive, although with a fair few casual inaccuracies which give a good indication of the amount of ignorance to be overcome in the coming years (a Hungarian writer was referred to as typically Slav, even Eva Hoffman (or her copy editor) gets Magdalena Tulli’s name wrong). As a teenager just moved to England, I was routinely asked whether Dublin was in the North or the South of Ireland, so I suppose it’ll be some time before Slovenian and Slovakian confusions finally disappear.
As usual Slavoj Zizek gets to the heart of the matter:

This, then, is perhaps the “contribution” to Europe of Slovenia and the other accession countries: to cause us to ask the question that lies beneath the self-congratulatory celebrations: what Europe are we joining? And when confronted with this question, we are all in the same boat, “New” and “Old” Europe.

Except of course that the “New” will always know more about the “Old” than vice-versa, and thus may have more interesting answers.

I’ve added (and am testing) a Polish related RSS feed.

I just received a press release from the Mayor of London:

Poems on the Underground will be helping to welcome Poland into the European Union and celebrating the forthcoming State Visit of Polish President Kwasniewski at a special event at Westminster Underground station on Tuesday 4 May at 1400.

Foreign Office Minister for Europe, Dr Denis MacShane, will join the Polish Ambassador to London, His Excellency Stanislaw Komorowski in a short ceremony during which Dr MacShane will read “And Yet the Books”, by Czeslaw Milosz. To set the scene the Apollo Chamber Players will perform works by Chopin.

The ceremony will take place in front of a special display featuring the poem to be read by Dr MacShane. “And Yet the books” will be distributed by Poems on the Underground to libraries across London, courtesy of the Embassy of the Republic of Poland.

I suppose the metro-themed Esse was too obvious.

As a public service to any fellow cheapskate in the same position, googling on this item: I bought a dodgy ‘refilled’ ink cartridge for my deskjet about a month ago, but today it was not producing any ink despite being nearly full. The trick: immersion in hot water and a quick dry off. Now it’s working fine with no smudges or other effects.

Fistful of Euros new design is extremely pretty (press reload for a range of European views).
Via their Living in Europe, I’ve discovered Leonardo, who has a substantial blogroll of good Polish blogs. Leonardo wants more bureaucracy in Poland:

To, czego Polska potrzebuje przede wszystkim, to struktury i procedury. Prawdziwa siła państwa leży w sprawnej i kompetentnej biurokracji. Tak, biurokracji, która niezależnie od opcji politycznej - wygrywającej wybory i wytyczającej kierunki - zapewnia ciągłość funkcjonowania państwa i skutecznego wypełniania jego zadań. Chyba jest dość oczywiste, jakie ten kraj ma z tym problemy. Ministerstwa są pełne niekompetentnych urzędników, którzy nie potrafią pisać ustaw i rozporządzeń, nie są w stanie wykonać prawidłowo i w terminie wielu kluczowych projektów, nie przestrzegają procedur ani zasad bezpieczeństwa, a co gorsza często w ogóle brak jest tam skutecznych procedur - do tego tradycją nie do wykorzenienia jest ręczne sterowanie polityków na każdym szczeblu.

One of my most hoped for side benefits of the (now sadly curtailed) mobility of Poles around Europe is a reduction in their collective inferiority complex, as they realise it’s just as bad everywhere else.

Hannah Arendt:

The rather uncomfortable truth of the matter is that the triumph the modern world has acheived over necessity is due to the emancipation of labour, that is, to the fact that animal laborans was permitted to occupty the public realm; and yet, as long s the animal laborans remains in possession of it, there can be not true public realm, but only private activities displayed in the open. The outcome is what is euphemistically called mass culture, and its deep-rooted trouble is a universal unhappiness, due on one side to the troubled balance between labouring and consumption and, on the other, to the persistent demand of the animal laborans to obtain a happiness which can be acheived only where life’s processes of exhaustion and regeneration, of pain and release from pain, strike a perfect balance … For only the animal laborans and neither the craftsman nor the man of action, has ever demanded to be ‘happy’…. [The Human Condition, p134]

Arendt suggests that the real meaning of a consumer society is to manage to treat everything as if it is an object of consumption (clothes, cars, houses), likely to spoil if not immediately enjoyed, like an orange. Put this concept of spoilage next to signalling and social pressure and you gain a lot of explanatory power as regards the social structures, but this explanation of how it all leads to make happiness itself evermore elusive is very persuasive. The critiques of consumption as being spiritually, socially and environmentally damaging, as a form of moral failure on the part of the consumers, mainly seek to replace one form of private-activity-made-public with another. Arendts analysis is more uncompromising, and possibly more useful.

Linux is a long way from being ready for normal desktop use, and it’s bizarre that so many people are willing to spend hours effectively recreating what can be done in 5 minutes by the average consumer with their installation disk. Still, the pleasure when things finally work, plus the amount of stuff you learn on the way seems to make it worthwhile. So this is my experience for anyone else struggling with the same configuration:

I have an SMC2635W Cardbus Adapter, which I wanted to add to an ad-hoc (peer-to-peer) network consisting of two Compaq cards of the WL110 orinoco type who share an ADSL internet connection using Sygate Home Network. All of which works first time in a mixture of Windows 2000, Windows XP Home and Windows Me, so I wanted to see if I could run Linux (Fedora Core 1) on one laptop in the configuration to access the Internet connection share provided by Sygate (i.e. not Windows ICS which I have never got to work for me).

Bascially, forget about using the drivers here, although I learnt a lot about tainting kernels and compiling from source. Compiling worked with no errors with the ADM8211.o driver in the right place. It seemed to work if I pulled the card in and out (a common experience based on some message boards), but the packet loss when I tried to ping the gateway was 66%. This made for an internet connection slower than a phone modem.

The answer was ndiswrapper, which utilises the Windows drivers so that they can be used by Linux. It has easy to follow installation (it needs all the driver files, however, not just the .inf) and I now have 0% packet loss on pings and a fully highspeed wireless connection.

The FT via Transparency International:

As Congress and Pentagon investigators delve into the often opaque contracting process, they are revealing a scarcity of auditors supervising the private companies retained to carry out vast projects such as restoring Iraq’s oil sector or rehabilitating its schools.

The latest indication comes in a report last week from the Pentagon’s inspector-general, which found there was “little or no government surveillance” on 13 of 24 rebuilding contracts awarded at the outset of the war and that contacting officers failed to support price estimates on nearly all those assignments.

…

Since the 1990s - when both parties promised to shrink the federal government - the Pentagon has pushed to outsource tasks that do not involve direct combat.

However, at the same time that it has entrusted ever greater amounts of work to private companies such as Halliburton, it has also reduced the trained personnel to oversee them.

From 1990 to 1999, for example, the defence department’s accounting and budget personnel fell from 17,504 to 6,432. During the same time, the ranks of the defence contract audit agency, the Pentagon’s auditing branch, fell from 7,030 to 3,958.

And his Lessig audiobook, I heard the following which is well worth noting:

It looks like there’s about two to three million recordings of music.
Ever. There are about a hundred thousand theatrical releases
of movies, . . . and about one to two million movies [distributed]
during the twentieth century. There are about twenty-six million
different titles of books. All of these would fit on computers that
would fit in this room and be able to be afforded by a small company.
So we’re at a turning point in our history. Universal access is
the goal. And the opportunity of leading a different life, based on
this, is . . . thrilling. It could be one of the things humankind
would be most proud of. Up there with the Library of Alexandria,
putting a man on the moon, and the invention of the printing
press. [Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive quoted on p.113]

Anthony Sampson in the Observer, promoting Who runs this place?. Like Richard Hoggart or Richard Sennett, he provides the valuable perspective of being able to fully recall and describe the extent to which social reality has changed in the space of a generation:

The new rich of the twenty-first century are beginning to look more like the plutocrats of the Edwardian era a century earlier, as they ostentatiously invade the territory of the old aristocracy, acquiring status and respectability while removing themselves from their own modest roots.

The 76 years from 1914 to 1990 are beginning to look like a temporary aberration in Britain’s social history. The First World War undermined the immunity and confidence of the rich. After the Second World War, they faced continuing austerity, higher taxes and fears about socialism and communism. Later, taxes were lowered, and the end of the Cold War brought an expansion of the global marketplace which allowed investors to benefit from the world’s resources, on a scale which the Edwardians could only dream of.

Today’s rich can detach themselves more thoroughly from the problems of their home countries, as they fly between houses and hotels across the world. In Britain, they can enjoy the comforts of country houses in privacy, without long-term commitments to large staffs of indoor servants or local communities.

They can separate themselves from the lives of ordinary people, while the gap between them widens. The new poor in Britain, the immigrants from Asia and Africa, can remain out of sight and out of mind.

And the rich can feel politically more secure. New Labour has proved more sympathetic to big business than any postwar government except Margaret Thatcher’s. Tony Blair is careful not to mention inequality, enjoys the company of business leaders and holidays in the houses of rich friends. Gordon Brown is never publicly critical of the rich.

Wealthy individuals and corporations no longer need representatives in Parliament or government to safeguard their interests and swing votes. A few rich men sit in the Commons, including Archie Norman, the former chairman of Asda supermarkets, and Michael Ancram, heir to the Marquess of Lothian, while the billionaire Lord Sainsbury of Turville (below) is Minister for Science. Yet most can rely on lobbyists and pressure groups to push their cases for reduced taxation, regulation or planning restrictions, while multinational firms hardly need to make the point that if they are not granted special terms they can take their money out of Britain.

New Labour is especially mindful of the need to oblige rich individuals as donors. The explosion of personal fortunes has made all parties more dependent on a handful of individuals than on company donations.

Above all, the rich feel much less need than their predecessors to account for their wealth, whether to society, to governments or to God. Their attitudes and values are not seriously challenged by anyone. The respect now shown for wealth and money-making has been the most fundamental change in Britain over four decades.

The database user tools in Open Office with the myODBC (in this case on Windows) gives an Access-like GUI. This is extremely handy for playing with databases to be used later in a linux/web environment.