Abstracting networks to find a true nugget of knowledge.

As human knowledge of our surroundings has increased, so has the level of abstraction of that knowledge. However, the abstractions have led us to some interesting findings:

Detailed maps of the Internet have unmasked the Internet's vulnerability to hackers. Maps of companies connected by trade or ownership have traced the trail of power and money in Silicon Valley. Maps of interactions between species in ecosystems have offered glimpses of humanity's destructive impact on the environment. Maps of genes working together in a cell have provided insights into how cancer works. But the real surprise has come from placing these maps side by side. Just as diverse humans share skeletons that are almost indistinguishable, we have learned that these diverse maps follow a common blueprint. A string of recent breathtaking discoveries has forced us to acknowledge that amazingly simple and far-reaching natural laws govern the structure and evolution of all the complex networks that surround us.

(Barabási: pp. 5-6)

Does that get us any closer to a theory of everything? Perhaps. Network science is still too young to tell. In any case, it is already uncovering certain facts that we completely ignored until we started adopting this new paradigm, just as it happened when the structuralists renewed the social sciences back in the 1960s. For the time being, all we see is the correlation between disparate fields. We still don't understand the real reasons why they behave in such similar ways. That's precisely the challenge now.

Linked. How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life.

Albert-Lászlo Barabási describes an intellectual adventure that tries to prove how social networks, corporations and living organisms are more similar than previously thought. This introduction to network science guides us through the fundamental concepts underlying neurology, epidemiology, Internet traffic, and many other fields united by complexity. A very enjoyable book that makes difficult concepts easy to understand by the regular reader.

Technical description:
Title: Linked. How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life.
Author: Albert-Lászlo Barabási.
Publisher: A Plume Book. Penguin.
Edition: First Plume printing, New York (USA), May 2003 (2002)
Pages: 294 pages, including index.
ISBN: 0-452-28439-2

The beauty of a simple design.

Now, here is a question people have been struggling to answer for quite sometime now: what is a good design? How do we recognize a good design? Lots of companies would give plenty of money to answer those questions in a simple manner. Well, Graham gives us the answer:

It seems strange to have to emphasize simplicity. You'd think simple would be the default. Ornate is more work. But something seems to come over people when they try to be creative. Beginning writers adopt a pompous tone that doesn't sound anything like the way they speak. Designers trying to be artistic resort to swooshes and curlicues. Painters discover that they're expressionists. It's all evasion. Underneath the long words or the "expressive" brush strokes, there's not much going on, and that's frightening.

When you're forced to be simple, you're forced to face the real problem. When you can't deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance.

(Graham: p. 133)

Yet, somehow one gets the impression that most companies wouldn't buy that answer. Why not? As Graham says, we still associate the term good design to original and artistic and, in turn, we also associate those to something overly complex, cool. We fool ourselves. In reality, what we like is what's simple and yet it works, what helps us achieve our goal in the most sensible manner. While most geeks tend to despise the end-user as a simpleton, in reality simplicity is one of the most difficult things to achieve in design. Few people get it. That's why Steve Jobs makes the big bucks. That's why Apple still kicks butt and, in a different order of things, that's also why GNOME and Ubuntu have been winning the battle on the Linux front.

On how hacking and painting are quite alike.

For quite sometime (perhaps since computer science became a subject taught in our colleges) programming has been viewed as software engineering (i.e., a somehow scientific discipline that can be learned and applied in a methodical manner). We just have to find out its intrinsic rules. Graham, though, strongly disagrees with this approach. To him, programming is actually hacking and, therefore, its' more like an art than like a science. Yes, the programmer has to use a series of techniques to put things down in the form of a program, but that's no different than the way an artist does things:

Hacking and painting have a lot in common. In fact, of all the different types of people I've known, hackers and painters are among the most alike.

What hackers and painters have in common is that they're both makers. Along with composers, architects, and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things. They're not doing research per se, though if in the course of trying to make good things they discover some new technique, so much the better.

(Graham: p. 18)

If Graham is right, this concept of the programmer as an artist should also effect the way we view programming languages:

Realizing this has real implications for software design. It means that a programming language should, above all, be malleable. A programming language is for thinking of programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen.

(Graham: p. 22)

This takes Graham down a path where he clearly prefers "hacking languages" to the researcher's favorite tools, beautiful in their perfection but almost completely useless for real work. After all, what good is the best programming language if nobody writes programs in it? Researchers in their ivory towers don't appear to care about a language's malleability but rather about its internal logical consistency or originality. After all, academic research prizes that over anything else. The real world, though, cares about flexibility and ease of use. In that realm, a language that's highly malleable is far more important than a perfectly consistent but highly abstract paper. It shouldn't surprise us, really. It's no different when it comes to natural languages. How many times have people tried to design and new perfect human language without much success? We continue relying on our old, patchy languages.

Why nerds are unpopular.

The first chapter of the Hackers & Painters is an excellent essay on why nerds are unpopular (a complete transcription of the chapter can be found on the author's website here). A text that has become widely quoted over the last few years. To Graham, the core issue is popularity:

The key to this mystery is to rephrase the question slightly. Why don't smart kids make themselves popular? If they're so smart, why don't they figure out how popularity works and bear the system, just as they do for standardized tests? (...) The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be popular.

(Graham: pp. 1-2)

Now, that sounds strange, doesn't it? Who doesn't want to be popular? Everyone, of course, if we put it in those simple terms. However, Graham realizes that being popular, like anything else in this world, requires some effort and, as a matter of fact, most kids are willing to make that effort into becoming the most popular kid in the school. However, nerds weren't born that way:

They also have to put an effort towards it. They have to make sure they set the trend, wear the right clothes, sound cool, mind their attitude... all that requires work. Therefore:
Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school.

(Graham: p. 3)

Or, to put it another way, nerds (and, by extension, geeks too) want to be popular or, at the very least, accepted into the larger community. The problem, of course, is that they care more about other things. If the price they have to pay for becoming popular or integrated into the larger student community is to give up their love for puzzles, challenging problems and abstract ideas, then they aren't willing to pay it. It's too high for them. And, like it or not, in spite of all the suffering, perhaps they make the right choice. After all, it would require for them to turn against their true personality and who is the parent who supports that idea? Don't we tell our kids all the time that they have to grow to develop their own true self? Well, that's precisely what geeks and nerds do. They don't care what society all around tell them about what's acceptable and what's not, what can be done and what's simply impossible. And that's precisely the reason why it's nerds and geeks who guide us forward. They refuse to accept the world as it is and, in so doing, are already building our future while the rest of us waste our time playing the popularity game in high school.

This chapter of Graham's book is definitely a classic. He points out what's wrong with the American high school system and even manages to make a few recommendations on how to fix it (namely, make it more like college, where students can behave more like adults with a purpose, instead of like kids full of testosterone hanging around a secluded environment without any particular aim). This essay is definitely well worth a read, especially if you are a parent.

Hackers & Painters. Big Ideas from the Computer Age.

Hackers & Painters is a collection of essays written by Paul Graham about hacking and how this activity may relate to art (specifically painting). The individual pieces cover a wide range of issues: why nerds are so unpopular at school, the importance of startups, programming languages, heretical thinking, the process of wealth creation, etc. The title essay provides an interesting look at hacking and how it may relate to artistic activities in general, and painting in particular. A very suggestive book, judging by the reviews and what I could gather after quickly browsing through its pages.

For more information, check out the author's own website or O'Reilly's page for the book.

Technical description:
Title: Hackers & Painters. Big Ideas from the Computer Age.
Author: Paul Graham.
Publisher: O'Reilly
Edition: First hardcover edition, Sebastopol, California (USA), May 2004 (2004).
Pages: 258, including index.
ISBN: 978-0-596-00662-4

Stereotypes of Europe & London.

The following could also be said about the idea many Americans (and Europeans) still have of England:

Kumiko knew the Sprawl from a thousand stims; a fascination with the vast conurbation was a common feature of Japanese popular culture.

She'd had few preconceptions of England, when she'd arrived there: vague images of several famous structures, unfocused impressions of a society her own seemed to regard as quaint and stagnant. (In her mother's stories, the princess-ballerina discovered that the English, however admiring, couldn't afford to pay her to dance.) London, so far, had run counter to her expectations, with its energy, its evident affluence, the Ginza-bustle of its great shopping streets.

(Gibson: p. 142)

Talk about stereotypes. Yes, sure, we all know that London is one of the most important financial centers of the world, but the assumption is that it remains so due to the past vigor of the British Empire more than anything else. Yet, the reality is that British society is quite dynamic and diverse. Due to the influence of popular media, when we try to think of a diverse, lively, dynamic, changing multicultural society, New York City pops up to mind almost immediately. However, London can also be described with the very same words. To some extent, the same applies to the overall image most Americans have of Europe. Many still view it as a group of monolithic societies but things have changed too much in the past two decades.

A futuristic but familiar world.

Gibson portrays a futuristic world that, nevertheless, feels quite familiar and plausible:

A soapbox evangelist spread his arms high, a pale fuzzy Jesus copying the gesture in the air above him. The projection rig was in the box he stood on, but he wore a battered nylon pack with two speakers sticking over each shoulder like blank chrome heads. The evangelist frowned up at Jesus and adjusted something on the belt at his waist. Jesus strobed, turned green, and vanished. Mona laughed. The man's eyes flashed God's wrath, a muscle working in his seamed cheek.

(Gibson: p. 67)

It's one of the things that makes Gibson's type of science-fiction attractive: it feels close enough, realistic, something waiting for us just around the corner. The characters are as flawed as we all are, and for the most part are driven by the same motives (greed, ambition...). They just live and act in a different context.

Sixteen and SINless.

A picture that's starting to look more and more real, even in the Anglo-Saxon countries where there was no tradition of using a national ID:

She was sixteen and SINless, Mona, and this older trick had told her once that that was a song, 'Sixteen and SINless'. Meant she hadn't been assigned a SIN when she was born, a Single Identification Number, so she'd grow up on the outside of most official systems. She knew that it was supposed to be possible to get a SIN, if you didn't have one, but it stood to reason you'd have to go into a building somewhere and talk to a suit, and that was a long way from Mona's idea of a good time or even normal behavior.

(Gibson: p. 64)

If anything, what I find most peculiar is the fact that it's precisely in those countries where there was no tradition of national ID that the governments are perhaps the ones who have gone the furthest making an excessive use of their powers in order to preserve national security: the United Kingdom allows for the Government to interfere with any sort of private communication, the United States does that and it also creates an international prison in a legal no-man's zone in Guantanamo Bay... Only a decade ago, these very same countries proudly emphasized their commitment to the liberties and pointed their fingers to continental Europe as an example of overgrown Governments gone wild. Ten years later, one could hardly believe the things most American and British commentators wrote about Germany or France when it comes to these issues. It's almost as if the pendulum swung from one extreme to the other. Let's just hope that, sooner or later, it stops somewhere in the wise and sensible middle.

An early description of cyberspace.

William Gibson is well known for coining the terms cyberspace and matrix to describe a virtual reality accessed via computers or some form of technology. The same idea is very nicely developed in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash novel, among many others, but the seed of the idea is already present in the Sprawl Trilogy without a doubt:

There is no there, there. They taught that to children, explaining cyberspace. She remembered a smiling tutor's lecture in the arcology's executive creche, images shifting on a screen: pilots in enormous helmets and clumsy-looking gloves, the neuroelectronically primitive "virtual world" technology linking them more effectively with their planes, pairs of miniature video terminals pumping them a computer-generated flood of combat data, the vibrotactile feedback providing a touch-world of studs and triggers... As the technology evolved, the helmets shrank, the video terminals atrophied...

(Gibson: pp. 55-56)

We are still a long ways from the cyberspace described in the cyberpunk novels, but we're definitely getting there pretty quickly. As a matter of fact, with the success of Second Life, we just need a leap forward in the commercialization of already existing immersive technologies coupled with yet another little push in hardware performance. However, that holy grail of the 1980s and 1990s science-fiction seems now within reach. The global reach of the Internet is now a reality in our daily lives. People work from home, share ideas, pictures, videos, watch TV shows and movies and talk to distant relatives thanks to the Internet. All of this would have sounded like science-fiction fantasy to anyone in the first half of the 1980s.

A nightmarish genetic manipulation.

As science has evolved, it's become a commonplace of contemporary science-fiction to portray the nightmarish consequences of genetic manipulation gone wrong. Yet, in the case of cyberpunk —even more so perhaps in the so-called biopunk genre— it is all presented to us as a given:

Like the time she'd screamed about the bugs, the roaches they called palmetto bugs, but it was because the Goddamn things were mutants, half of them; someone had tried to wipe them out with something that fucked with their DNA, so you'd see these screwed-up roaches dying with too many legs or heads, or not enough, and once she'd seen one that looked like it had swallowed a crucifix or something, its back or shell or whatever it was distorted in a way that made her want to puke.

(Gibson: p. 34)

What I find peculiar about this approach is not so much that the author defends genetic manipulation, but rather the fact that he presents it matter-of-factedly as something normal, common, part of the daily routine. Yes, Mona pukes when she sees the genetically deformed cockroaches, but she doesn't show any surprise at all. She doesn't display any sort of deep moral qualms about what she sees, which some may consider quite scary. And yet, my guess is that this is far more realistic than the deep philosophical and/or theological musings that we see in other books. If we take a look back at our own History, most leaps tend to happen in this manner, bit by bit, inadvertently. After all, isn't it true that most people just a few decades ago would have considered a national ID something more typical of dictatorial regimes than of advanced democracies? But here we are.

Cities with history: a blessing and a burden.

One of the things that I found interesting about Americans was their obsession with History and, in general, cities (and peoples) with a History behind them. I suppose it makes sense coming from a relatively young nation. Gibson puts it in the mouth of Kumiko when she is pondering about London:

This was nothing like Tokyo, where the past, all that remained of it, was nurtured with a nervous care. History there had become a quantity, a rare thing, parcelled out by government and preserved by law and corporate funding. Here it seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone and brick, uncounted strata of message and meaning, age upon age, generated over the centuries to the dictates of some now all but unreadable DNA of commerce and empire.

(Gibson: pp. 11-12)

To be clear, living in a society with deep roots in the past is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it provides some sort of default identity, something to hang onto when one feels disoriented. But, on the other, it often feels oppressive, like a heavy weight upon one's shoulders, a common set of assumptions about what one should think, how one should behave, what one should like and dislike. In this sense, American cities have it easy: they can redefine themselves without fear. They can look into the future without a need to worry about the connections to their "true self", their "real identity". American cities —American society in general— are naturally postmodern. They don't have an identity set in stone. On the contrary, they get to choose their own identity.

Mona Lisa Overdrive.

The final part of William Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy, following Neuromancer and Count Zero. Clear example of cyberpunk literature. As it happened with the previous novels, this story is also formed from several interconnected plot threads involving a few characters that also appeared in previous books: Mona, a young prostitute who looks like Angie Mitchell, a famour superstar, and who is hired by a few individuals who intend to kidnap the star; Kumiko, a Japanese girl, daughter of a Yakuza boss sent to London from a gang war involving a few Yakuza leaders; and Slick Henry, a convicted car thief who lives in a vast wasteland, and who is hired to take care of Bobby Newmark, also known as Count Zero.

Technical description:
Title: Mona Lisa Overdrive.
Author: William Gibson.
Publisher: Harper Collins Publishers.
Edition: Paperback edition, reprinted ten times, London (UK), 1995 (1988).
Pages: 316 pages.
ISBN: 978-0-00-648044-0

Sobre el concepto de belleza.

Interesante digresión sobre el concepto de belleza:

En otras ocasiones y en otros sitios vi muchos scriptoria, pero ninguno conocí que, en las coladas de luz física que alumbraban profusamente el recinto, ilustrase con tanto esplendor el principio espiritual que la luz encarna, la claritas, fuente de toda belleza y saber, atributo inseparable de la justa proporción que se observaba en aquella sala. Porque de tres cosas depende la belleza: en primer lugar, de la integridad o perfección, y por eso consideramos feo lo que está incompleto; luego, de la justa proporción, o sea de la consonancia; por último, de la claridad y la luz, y, en efecto, decimos que son bellas las cosas de colores nítidos. Y como la contemplación de la belleza entraña la paz, y para nuestro apetito lo mismo es sosegarse en la paz, en el bien o en la belleza, me sentí invadido por una sensación muy placentera y pensé en lo agradable que debería de ser trabajar en aquel sitio.

(Eco: p. 106)

No está de moda ni mucho menos afirmar los conceptos universales, pero eso precisamente parece hacer aquí Umberto Eco (o, cuando menos, el personaje en cuya boca pone las palabras aquí citadas). Desde que se extendiera el postmodernismo por las sociedades industriales avanzadas, se lleva más bien lo relativo, contrapartida quizá inevitable de aquello que Vattimo denominara el pensamiento débil. No es que a uno le parezca mal del todo subrayar la presencia de lo relativo, la verdad sea dicha. Demasiado tiempo nos llevamos durante nuestra Historia afirmando lo absoluto y matando en su nombre. Sin embargo, un exceso de relativismo le deja a uno también un mal sabor de boca, todo hay que decirlo. Sencillamente, no es posible ir por la vida como barco sin rumbo, dejándose ir con la marea o allá adonde sople el viento (¿o quizá sí pueda uno hacerlo?). En todo caso, a uno le parece que debemos anclar de cuando en cuando en unos cuantos valores esenciales que deben ser, eso sí, pocos y amplios: los derechos humanos básicos, el respeto mutuo, etc. No son pocos los estudios científicos que parece demostrar que, en efecto, tenemos un concepto de belleza que todos compartimos, por mínimo que sea. Se trata de un concepto que incluye elementos tan esenciales como la simetría o la atracción de lo simple. No puede decirse, por consiguiente, que sobre gustos nada esté escrito, como a menudo nos han contado. Todavía quedan muchos estudios por hacer en este ámbito, pero lo que he leído de momento promete bastante... y va precisamente en la línea de lo que el personaje arriba citado indica.

En la lista de libros prohibidos del Opus Dei.

Por una de esas casualidades de la vida, me tropecé recientemente con una versión algo anticuada del índice de libros prohibidos del Opus Dei y resulta que El nombre de la rosa está incluida en la lista. Conociendo a esta gente, no me extraña lo más mínimo, claro. Eco trata indirectamente demasiados temas escabrosos de la historia de la Iglesia que no tienen más remedio que tocar una fibra sensible, sobre todo en el caso de aquellas personas poco dispuestas a tolerar opiniones discordantes con las suyas propias. Basta con presentar a miembros de la jerarquía eclesiástica como meros seres humanos, con todos sus defectos, ambiciones y luchas de poder, para que los integristas católicos consideren a una obra como clara muestra de herejía ponzoñosa. De todos modos, merece la pena echarle un somero vistazo a la lista completa, que incluye libros de la importancia de Las metamorfosis, de Apuleyo; Camino de perfección y El árbol de la ciencia, de Pío Baroja; varias obras de Balzac; El segundo sexo, de Simone de Beauvoir; unos cuantos libros de Norberto Bobbio; El Aleph, de Jorge Luis Borges; varios libros de Albert Camus y Alejo Carpentier; La Colmena, de Camilo José Cela; Erasmo de Rotterdam; Emile Durkheim, Paulo Freire, Erich Fromm, Gadamer, Gabriel García Márquez, Hermann Hesse, Heidegger, Husserl; El proceso, de Kafka; D. H. Lawrence, Maurice Merleau-Ponty; Misión de la Universidad, de Ortega y Gasset; Fortunata y Jacinta y Tristana, de Benito Pérez Galdós; Karl Popper, Rousseau, Sartre, Max Sheler, Stendhal, Teilhard de Chardin, Valle Inclán, Mario Vargas Llosa, Zola, Max Weber y hasta Ludwig Wittgenstein. Vamos, lo más granado de la cultura del siglo XX. Uno se pregunta cómo diantres serán capaces los miembros de "la Obra" de familiarizarse con cualquier disciplina del conocimiento a la luz (más bien debiera decir "sombra", obviamente) de esta lista.