Avalon AI @ Entrepreneur First Demo Day

After a busy 6 months of honey-badgering, we've seen the light of day at the Entrepreneur First Demo Day:

We've since been mentioned in Forbes and featured in the Huffington Post.

Now we are starting our fundraising round. Stay tuned!

Cooperative bank, why so uncooperative?

I've always been a proponent of ethical banks, so as I planned to move to the UK, I decided to apply to the main ethical bank in the UK, "The Cooperative Bank".

I applied online and just opened the 2 letters they sent me to the UK address I specified. The two letters are from consecutive days.

The first one is hopeful, asking me for proofs of identity/residence:

 The next one, dating on the next day is less so, saying that "after careful consideration", they won't open an account for me.

This lack of cooperation has certainly annoyed me. It only exacerbates the typical "catch 22s" in the industry, where immigrating workers are supposed to provide one or more proofs of address in the UK before having a bank account, complicating the entry of skilled workers into the country.

Then again, I should not be surprised, as I had once before tried to switch to them in my Cambridge days, only to be told that they cannot create an account for me because my "name is too long".

For those entrepreneurs amongst you with an eye on the financial sector, this "service industry" lacks service so much that it's clearly ripe for disruption. Any bank that can provide decent service and ease the process of creating a bank account by accepting more foreigner-friendly proofs of legitimacy (e.g. proofs of address, bills and bank statements from their home country), would get a lot of business.

Enterpreneur First: Unconference on "Beating Propaganda"

As some of you will know, I've been accepted to a startup program in London called Entrepreneur First. I thought I'd share the content of the presentation I made during the final interview stage, which included an "unconference" and mentioned in the Wall Street Journal blog.

The topic of propaganda is near and dear to my heart, and is so extensive and far spread, whether on the topic of Ukraine or on the "health benefits" of tobacco and the effect of burning unprecedented amounts of fossil fuels. As someone mentioned, I seem to care a lot about the Truth. Well, I do.

---

Hi, I'm Sasha, and I'm originally from Ukraine. You've probably heard about my country. Back in the good old days, many people barely knew where my country was. Now everyone knows, because there is a war going on in the Eastern border regions of Lugansk and Donetsk, where my grandfather grew up.

This war, to a great extent, has been started and fuelled through the extensive use of propaganda. Propaganda has selected, distorted and even created fictitious information.

While the example I have given you is, I hope, compelling, it is not the only one. War has been waged with information and disinformation since long ago, and goes on today. The Cold War is a prime example. But to me, the Ukraine is closest to my heart, and the information war within it shocks me the most.

Perhaps the most disturbing story that circulated many of the main Russian channels was of a child in Sloviansk who was allegedly crucified by soldiers of the "evil Kiev junta". Other similar outright lies involved alleged promises to give two slaves and a piece of land to Ukrainian servicemen.

Not less harmful were news statements saying that the new government would ban the Russian language and arrest or kill infringers. And we should not be surprised that people who did not know better, that countless people in Kiev still speak Russian, would take arms to protect themselves from "fascists".

Less blatant, but even more effective has been the campaign of misinformation around the tragedy in Odessa on May the 2nd 2014. Kremlin media have effectively depicted the event as a murderous arson of the Trade Union’s building by “fascists” leading to the death of 40 people. These accounts generally ignore the preceding injuries and deaths of pro-Ukrainian activists by gunfire, and the passiveness or controversial acts of police tasked with upholding order. This distorted version of events has been a key catalyst in bringing Russian volunteers to fight in Eastern Ukraine.

So strong is the effect of propaganda that after the shooting down of the MH17, an educated friend of mine living in Russia shared a blog post, which wondered if the people on the plane might have been the corpses of the MH370 passengers, planted there by the CIA. A Dutch friend is convinced that the plane was shot down by an Su-25 fighter plane that can't operate at the height of a Boeing 777. Many other versions of events of varying fantasy circulated the web, each creating an alternative reality of the events.

All this disinformation comes from a wealth of channels. For Russian speakers, state-owned TV channels like Zvezda, Channel 1, LifeNews and paper and internet newspapers like Argumenty i Fakty or Pravda.ru. With viewerships in the millions, they influence most of Russia's public and adjacent states, like the Baltics, Belarus and Ukraine. For the wider world, online news and analysis resources like Russia Today, Sputnik International and the Centre for Research in Globalisation attempt to influence a wealth of Western readers. And closer to the physical realm, fake conferences and exhibitions like “Material Evidence” in New York.

These are but some of the many examples of lies and distortion that have kept this conflict alive and the volunteers, from both Ukraine and Russia, coming. This concept is not new of course, states always have demonised their enemies and appealed to their fear to make them fight. But the Internet has given the information war far greater power.

Just like the physical war, the information war is sustained by both volunteers and regular recruits. “Troll factories”, like the “Internet Research Agency” one recently exposed in St. Petersburg. The Agency, for instance, has some 40 rooms with professional “trolls” who post blogs and comment in support of the Kremlin, while posing as regular citizens of not only Russia, but also Western countries.

One of the greatest dangers of information wars, is that they are nearly invisible. On the one side, it does not cause direct physical damage as a mortar or a tank may do. On the other, their indirect impact makes defense more difficult, since one often does not realise he is being attacked. They divide people into parallel realities, breaking communication, and inciting fear and submission.

I could not help myself but be reminded of George Orwell's 1984, where rewriting of history is the norm, where thoughts are policed even more than actions, and war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength. This is not the future I want to live in, and the simplest alternative, closing the internet, even if it were possible, would come at the expense of the freedom of speech, so how can one fight back and where?

So far, one of the better examples that I have seen in fighting propaganda has been the Ukrainian site StopFake. They have been analysing the largest sources of misinformation and debunking them. However their effort has relied on considerable manual analysis and fact checking, rendering it slow and selective.

Similar to Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks in the West, some whistle blowers have attempted to expose the Kremlin's involvement in the East, by discovering or collecting information about the war. Lev Shlosberg who spoke of secret funerals of Russian servicemen. Boris Nemtsov, who gathered publicly available information into a report linking the Kremlin to the war in Ukraine. The trouble with such efforts is that they are not merely manual, but are also dangerous to perform. Snowden is a fugitive, Shlosberg was beaten by thugs and Nemtsov was murdered next to the Kremlin.

Another example has been a webapp called TrolleyBust, who try to block trolls on Facebook using crowdsourcing of opinions and the analysis of communication with known propagandists, leading to a sort of recursive clustering of trolls. However their platform does not appear to be very robust and only targets one social platform.

Despite the great volume of propaganda circulating the Internet, this medium, in contrast to radio, TV and paper press, has a distinct advantage: Availability. We can gather, analyse and react to a great wealth of data.

Also, given the volume of propaganda, it is difficult and expensive to fight it through pure human labour. Machine learning perhaps the main way forward, for surely, if we can accurately classify spam vs. non-spam, why should we not be able to classify propaganda?

But to do so, we will have to leverage a wealth of different information, ranging from social networks, news articles, maps, books and images. And then we must combine it all. Not to mention surmounting the defenses that propagandists hide behind, such as IP proxies.

This is a great challenge with currently few ready answers, but hopefully we can start asking the right questions.

MH17 to 1984

I am to this very day still amazed and bewildered at how many people (many Russians, yet some west Europeans also), actually believe in the propaganda that the MH17 was shot down by Ukrainian SU-25s.

While sites like Pravda.ru and RT have removed all mention of these news after the event, several official and/or government-owned Russian newspapers still contain the news of the "AN-26 transport plane" shot down over Torez by the separatists of the ДНР/DPR ("Donetsk People's Republic") around 16:00 local time (14:00 UTC). The same place, the same day, the same time that the MH17 fell.

Never again have we heard of this mysterious AN-26, nor have the news disappeared or been "corrected". For some examples, see and take the effort of at last google translating some of the following articles:

http://itar-tass.com/mezhdunarodnaya-panorama/1325017

http://ria.ru/world/20140717/1016409306.html

And even in obviously pro-Russian blogs, even going to cite Strelkov's site in VKontakte (Russia's Facebook) writing "We warned you - don't fly in our skies", eventually removed from the site.

http://topwar.ru/54473-an-26-ukrainskih-vvs-sbit-bliz-toreza-opolchency-zayavlyayut-i-o-sbitoy-sushke.html

Other channels like LifeNews, has tried to change the time of the event to 17:30 local time,

http://lifenews.ru/news/136801

and removed the original video, which cites 17:00 Moscow time (16:00 in Ukraine), to be seen clearly here from approximately 0:47 (if need be, ask a Russian-speaking friend to translate):


Welcome to George Orwell's "1984", today. Where people are brainwashed to believe that chocolate rations double from 8 grams to 4 grams and 2 + 2 is 5. I will probably not prove anything to these very people, those who I wish would read and think, and that's the most frightful thing. That today's propaganda still works just as well as it did in Nazi Germany and Communist USSR, even when the truth is within such easy reach.

So why did I bother?

Because I am a naive idealist, who selfishly writes for his own peace of mind...

Meryl's Master's ceremony speech

I couldn't be there for my former Master's student graduation, so I wrote her a speech that was delivered today by her other supervisor, Branka. Wishing her a fantastic future wherever she may go :-)

--

Meryl Varadinov is awesome.

A 5 minute speech will not do her justice, unfortunately, but we will have to make do.

By the way, I'm not her supervisor. Sasha, Meryl's supervisor, wrote this cheeky speech from the cold depths of Estonia, and he apologises profusely for not being able to be here to give it in person. Although, on second thought, he could have done it over Skype, especially since that company is from Estonia. Anyway, it probably would not have worked because of Murphy's first (and last) law - the toast always falls on the buttered side, and video-conferencing always breaks at the most crucial moment.

Anyway, back to Meryl. You now know she is awesome. However, some of you might not know why.

Meryl is awesome because she fiercely believes in great science. Great science is where it does not matter whether your p value is above or below 0.05, but what matters is the truth. Someone once said that in war, the first thing that dies is the truth. You could not substitute Meryl for war, because Meryl is too honest to compromise. You can tell from her sarcastic comments in the face of adversity, and in the face of her supervisors, like me (well, not me, but the guy in Estonia).

Meryl is awesome because she is greater than her work. She's not just a scientist, but she's also an activist for peace, democracy and all the things that matter in this world. Which means she's also an activist for lolcats. She's battled for truth in the streets of Sofia. That's in Bulgaria for those amongst you who are crap at geography, like her supervisor. If you are not crap at Latin as well, you will know that "sofia" means wisdom in Greek. And Meryl is wise beyond her years. She reads between the lines when she reads the news, and watches between the pixels when she watches TV.

Meryl is awesome because she keeps on getting better and better every day. By the end of this speech she will be uber-awesome. She's never stuck in one place, she absorbs knowledge and skills like a sea sponge absorbs sea water and water pollution. Except that knowledge and skills are good and sea pollution is bad. When she started her master's degree she could not program at all, but in a few months she learned to do it like a pro. She still has to earn the rest of the letters in "professional", but I'm certain she will be one of the most awesome programmers in the building by the end of her PhD.

Meryl is awesome because she managed to turn a bearded mad scientist project starring Gwyneth Paltrow, and analysis code filled with "mews", "woofs" and other animal sounds into a "great success". As Doge would say: Much Hippocampus activation. So Multiple Comparison Corrected. Wow. And that's even more amazing when you realise that Gwyneth Paltrow is on Meryl's most un-wanted list...

Meryl is awesome because of a 1001 more reasons. Yes, one thousand and one, not nine, as the speech is not written in binary, but in the decimal system. Anyway, you will have to make do with the above four reasons. Here's the abstract, which you always write at the end: Meryl is awesome because of her scientific integrity, her passion, her intelligence and her motivation.

Given how solemn and serious a graduation event is, her supervisor should have probably written a solemn and serious speech for her to "celebrate her merits and accomplishmens". Please read the bit between bunny ears with a posh British accent. Oi, you are not supposed to read this bit! Anyway, a serious and solment speech can't do Meryl justice, because she's not just well rounded and generally excellent. She's also awesome.

Now guys, what are you waiting for? Give her the applause she deserves.

Kill your dragons

Today I was back at my old school, the International School Hilversum. 10 years after my graduation I was to give a keynote for students who were graduating themselves.


Kill your dragons

Before I start, let me get this out of the way. I'm not the best person to give an inspirational speech to you. For one, I get awfully anxious in crowds. And especially because I see my life as more complicated than inspirational. Especially today.

You will surely understand what I mean when I tell you where I am from. I'm from Kiev, Ukraine. This last year has been tough on us. From the Euromaidan demonstrations last November to the current Anti-Terrorist Operation in the east, many innocent people have died. Holland has suffered too, since the atrocious downing of the MH17. Most of us know innocent people who have died. It would seem as if things can’t get any worse…

Uncertainty and change rule these days, and not only because of the mad things going on around the world. Many of you may feel lost, wondering what you will do with your diploma, your gap year, your career, your life. Some might be certain of where you want to go and how to get there. I hope I can speak to both of you.

You are probably wondering, how can this guy relate to us? He’s already finished university, has landed a job, he has it all figured out. I don’t now and I didn’t back then, when I was sitting where you are. So what can I give you then? All I can give you is my story.

I don’t come from money, though half my family are doctors. In the Soviet Union doctors earned rather little unless they took bribes. So my family were the poor kind of doctors. Growing up in Spain we became even poorer, up until I was 9 years old my parents and I slept together on a small mattress. I remember dreaming of going to University and saving my family, so I saved up my pocket change and gave it to my mother to put it in a savings account. I wish someone had told me to invest in Google then… My father, one hard step at a time, worked us out of poorness and things changed for the better, we then moved to Holland when I was 15. During my adolescence I had a myriad careers planned, from writer to doctor. Eventually I applied to Durham university to read Natural Sciences, since it was the broadest course I could do. But I also applied to Cambridge knowing I would not get in. Knowing this, I went to the interview wearing jeans, a leather jacket and sports shoes. I neither had a suit nor knew I should have had one, until I saw my elegant competitors. Surprisingly I got in, and doubted between doing cell biology and chemistry and psychology. Eventually, I stayed on for a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience, might as well try and find out why my brain works the way it does. I didn’t. So I found work as a postdoctoral researcher at the Donders Centre in Nijmegen. But I learned little about the brain, of which we truly know almost nothing. But I did learn that I did not want to be in academia, but rather to apply my knowledge. How, I don’t yet know…

Right now I’m where you are, at a huge crossroads. I might look stable, maybe even confident, but that is not how I feel. I feel vulnerable and that’s ok. I do not know my direction, but what I have learned gives me a compass. You have a compass too, and it should be your own.

Your compass has grown during these years of education. Hopefully you will have learned a great many things about languages, sciences and humanities. But much more importantly, hopefully you have learned to think better, to be critical of the world. To not take anything on face value, but to test if it is true. Philosophy, or “Theory of Knowledge” as they call it here is far more useful in the “real world” than any bit of knowledge. Because to learn facts is far easier than learning how to learn.

Today this is more important than ever, when everyone around you wants to convince you of something or get you to buy something. Every single thing a person says or writes sits on top of a fragile house of cards of assumptions and prejudices. My first advice to you, be *sceptics*. Be as critical of mainstream media as you are of conspiracy theories. Be as critical of the left as of the right. Be as critical of yourself as of others. Remember that we cannot touch the truth, and yet, we should try and get closer to it.

And getting closer to truth, you will start to reach to your true calling. This will be hard, it will be awfully painful and you will need to change to get there. Success is not an end, it’s a “path with a heart”, as Carlos Castneda once said. Don’t be afraid of the pain. It will reach you whether you like it or not. Joy, on the other hand, I have only experienced in the moments that I felt fearless.

Many of you will have seen or even participated in our Argentine Tango workshops some months ago. So you will know that my joy is dance. I found my joy when I was 23 years old at the behest of my best friend, and I had no idea of what it was like. The dance, the music, the embrace, the improvisation. I knew nothing of that, imagining exaggerated music and a rose in the mouth. Instead of cliches, what I found is a sort of “meditation”, a space without words or thoughts that is mine and mine alone that is simply present and feeling and love. I could have given in to the fear of looking ridiculous, feeling uncomfortable, I was so very shy I could barely ask a girl to dance. If fear had won, I would have never known this joy. A great composer, Anibal Troilo, once said “Tango awaits you”. Sometime you will find your joy, if it has not already found you. This is my second advice to you, find the *courage* to try new things, assume nothing, be brave enough to change your life for it.

And whatever you do, help those around you find their joys, whatever these are. Each one of you is different. You are privileged in experiencing so many people who are different from you, who hail from other countries, and have other beliefs or who feel differently. I told you to be sceptics, but this does not mean you should not be tolerant. I told you to not fear pain, but do not help create it. Don’t rush to judge a person by their skin, their wallet, their gender or their sexuality. I know what I speak of, one friend was called a liar and denied justice for being a woman, another friend in mind a man but in soul a woman hid her true nature, yet another’s friend skin made people say he was meant to pave roads rather than build dreams. My third advice then: *accept* and love them as they are, and accept and love yourself, even as you change.

Be tolerant, courageous sceptics, and you will change the world if you so wish. But remember, you can only do so when you embrace change yourselves. There is no other way to change the world than to change the world is to change ourselves. There is no shortcut…

Let me finish with a story from a Soviet film. The plot is simple, a descendent of Lancelot enters a town terrorised by a great three-headed dragon. As is usual for knights, he sets to rid the town of the dragon and save the girl. But the townspeople, instead of helping Lancelot, sabotage him. They give him a copper tray for a shield and a butter knife. They try to kill him with a poisoned knife. Against all odds, Lancelot obtains a sword, a balloon and a hat of invisibility from a handful of dissidents and slays the dragon. When he returns, the townsfolk excuse themselves before him. He tells them to kill the Dragon within themselves, to stand up for themselves. Instead they kneel before him. Frustrated, Lancelot walks into the snow, only to find the dragon alive and kicking, playing amongst the children. “Now the real fight begins” he says.

Kill your dragons.

Binary is for robots

I see a worrying trend online, of people who appear to see a binary world, where there are "goodies" fighting against "baddies". Naturally, it follows that if they classify one side as a "baddie", then the other side must be a "goodie". Let me take an example that is close to heart, given my roots, that of recent events in Ukraine.

Today this is most obvious when you see cultured people declare things like:

• "The United States is an imperialist warmonger [therefore] Russia is just defending its interests"
• "Western media is biased [therefore] I trust the Russian news more"

Both leading to...

• "The US and Western media say that the MH17 was downed by pro-Russian separatists [therefore] it must have been downed by the fascist NATO-led Ukrainian junta".

This does not compute.

I'm by no means a "supporter" of the foreign policy of the United States. But surely when two imperialist countries fight a cold war, it makes no sense that one of them must be "good and trustworthy" simply because the other is "bad and untrustworthy".

To put it in scientific terms, the two hypotheses (of "goodness") are not mutually exclusive. This logical fallacy comes from a false dilemma, a forced choice between two poles.

Similarly, when you see bias in mainstream media (yes, I'm looking at you, Fox News, Russia Today, etc.), why should you rush to poorly documented websites that are:

1. rife with conspiracy theories
2. have no credible sources
3. describe events in terms of "fascists",  "nazis", "juntas", etc.

Instead, perhaps try to find sources that are:

1. independent international agencies
2. bloggers who are on the ground at the events
3. in different languages if at all possible

And importantly, start asking yourself questions, some of these, for those who support Russia against the "annexation by NATO and the EU" are:

• Why is Russia's annexation of Crimea acceptable?
• How exactly were Russian people oppressed or hurt because of their language in Donetsk and Lugansk, or elsewhere?
• Why are the separatist leaders Girkin and Borodai Russian nationals, rather than Ukrainian, as well as many of their soldiers?
• Where do all the tanks, heavy artillery and rocket launchers that these men use come from?
• Why the noble Russian mainstream media post lies about crucified children, conspiracy planes filled with corpses (i.e. MH17) and spanish flight operators?

And a final note, this post does not mean that I approve of every decision made by either the EU, USA or Ukrainian governments, nor that I trust every Western media outlet. Nor does it mean I hate Russians (amongst whom I still have many friends), or any other nation.

All it means is that I oppose lies and imperialism in all its guises. It means that I believe Ukraine should decide its own fate, without the interference of any foreign power. It means I seek truth and peace.

Access to Understanding 2014

It's been a while (almost 5 years) since I've participating in any sort of writing contest. I applied to the Access to Understanding contest where you have to summarise (abstract out) a scientific article. Curiously, the winning entry did the same article as I did :-)

I did not quite make the shortlist this time... I hope I'm not losing my magic touch! Anyway, here's my take:

Beat it!

I dare you to start listening to “Michael Jackson’s” song “Beat it” and resist its rhythm. Don’t tap your foot. Don’t drum your fingers. Don’t nod your head. It is hard to help it, and even if the beat does not invade your body, it still assails your mind. Our urge drives us to follow the rhythm, something we do effortlessly, almost unconsciously.

We cannot say that this capacity is uniquely human, as anyone surfing YouTube for “dancing parrots” can attest. However, it seems to be fairly rare in the animal kingdom. Clearly, being able to hear the beat helps when we are listening to music and let us to move in synchrony to music, maybe even dance. Importantly, our capacity to perceive and produce a predictable beat might even form the foundations of language itself, structuring the words we hear and the way we speak.

But how does our brain process the beat? Some very ancient brain structures appear to be key to beat perception. These are the basal ganglia, a conglomerate of deep brain structures that is located, you guessed it, at the base of the brain.

The putamen (pronounced pyu-tah-men) is a round subpart of the basal ganglia. It is named after its shape, Latin for the shell or husk of a fruit kernel. Previous studies have shown that this region becomes more active when people are listening to predictable beat sequences than non-beat sequences. However, what is unclear is whether the putamen is involved in finding the beat in the song, or in predicting how the beat will continue once it has been found.

Investigator, musician and TED speaker Jessica Grahn decided to answer this question together with James Rowe. To do so, they used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). This technique looks at how blood flow increases or decreases as brain regions that become more or less active. People of various musical backgrounds lay in the MRI scanner while listening to different beats. They heard sequences of sounds with either a predictable beat at different speeds, or similar sequences but without a predictable beat. Occasionally, after hearing a sequence, they had to press a button to say how well they could hear the beat.

Grahn and Rowe expected that the putamen predicts a sequence once the beat has been found. If so, the putamen should be more active when the next sequence is either the same, or at least has a similar speed, since the beat prediction does not change. If instead the putamen helps us find the beat, we should expect the opposite. It should become more active when the beat changes speed, as it would have to search again for the correct rhythm.

They found that people could easily distinguish beat and non-beat sequences. The participants clearly felt the beat, even when the speed of the sequences changed. Also, they found that the putamen was more responsive to beat sequences than non-beat sequences. Other brain areas were also activated by beat sequences, such as the supplementary motor area and left premotor cortex. These brain regions often act in concert with the basal ganglia, perhaps forming a conscious movement or body-based representation of the beat.

Non-beat sequences instead activated regions involved in precise timing, like cerebellum, and areas that are involved in difficult mental tasks, like parietal and inferior frontal cortex. These results were in line with Grahn's previous findings.

Critically, they also saw that the putamen was more active when the previous sequence was of a similar speed, compared to when it was faster or slower. This confirmed their suspicion that the putamen was engaged in predicting the beat, rather than finding it.

Curiously, they found that the putamen was similarly active in the first and second half of the experiment. Even though the sound sequences became more and more familiar, this did not change how the putamen reacted to them. Also, their findings were not related to musical expertise. Musical experts with more than 6 years of musical schooling did not engage the putamen any more or less than people with little or no training.

Why does this research matter, you might ask. If understanding our capacity to hear music is not enough, you should know that such research is key to understanding complex motor diseases. For instance, Parkinson’s disease affects the same beat-sensitive structures, the basal ganglia. Besides being unable to move fluidly, patients with Parkinson's also find it difficult to distinguish between different beats. But crucially, rhythm can have healing power. The power of the beat can restore movement to Parkinson's patients, who break free from their motionlessness when they hear music. If we are to beat the odds of brain disease, we'll need all help we can get.

English, motherfucker, do you speak it?

Communication, the critical skill of our day and age. Sadly, it suffers a fatal lack of clarity while showing no beauty whatsoever. Elegance is missing.

I could say education pays little attention to communication, but I would be (mostly) lying. Teachers do not ignore writing skills, they simply teach them dead wrong. We teach kids they must sound "professional" and "educated". We tell them that to appear intelligent, they must present their ideas to make sure only a handful of people can understand them. People fear and revere what they cannot comprehend. The elites of every profession speak their own secret language. Doctors, lawyers, economists, programmers, scientists...

Scientists are some of the worst. I would know, I am one. In the last 9 years I've read enough academic writing to know that reading academic writing is a one-way ticket to long-lasting migraines. It sins in making simple ideas complicated, describing them in confusing terms. Sometimes, reading an article, I wonder if the writer speaks English...



The same scientist who wrote the same article that reads like Hebrew or Greek will often, when you meet them personally, describe the same idea in simple words. Most academics can communicate clearly and simply, but choose otherwise because they believe they won't be respected if they communicate their ideas simply. Sadly, they are correct.

"You exaggerate!", you might exclaim. If you don't believe, find a few scientific abstracts and test each of them for complexity (e.g. using the Gunning Fog index, or the Writer's Diet test) to estimate how many years of schooling you need to read it and whether you will die of a heart attack reading it. Often, an abstract will require over 20 years of education (i.e. Elementary school + High School + Bachelor degree + Master + PhD + ...). Congratulations, dear scientific colleague, you made sure that even if scientific articles end up being available to the public (as they should be), they will never, ever be understood by anyone outside your field.

I know, I ask for the moon, men of letters. I ask you to be "concise and precise".

p.s. I'm not [always] a hypocrite :-)
Gunning Fog Index: 9.707 years of schooling to understand this blog post.
Writer's diet rating: "Fit & Trim" ("Lean" even on "Nouns" and "Prepositions")

ASN bank, the ethical (sic) bank

I'm a great believer in ethical banks. When I lived in the UK I repeatedly tried to join the highly ethical slightly unethical Cooperative Bank, but because of my exceedingly long surname, was denied entry. I'm not joking. I finally managed to switch from an exceedingly unethical bank (Barclays), to a fairly unethical bank (Lloyds). Still, that was not enough for me, so soon after arriving in the Netherlands, I switched to ASN bank, which I joined in April 2012, almost 2 years ago.

I've promoted ethical banking on my blog and Facebook because I believe it's one of the most powerful steps you can make to effect actual change in the world (put your money where your mouth is). However, my bank has been swindling me on International Charges, charging me €15 for transactions and being non-transparent about it.

How does this look? It looks something like this...

The total is displayed in this manner, but it does not mention that you will pay €15 more when you finalise the transaction by clicking "Verzenden" (Send in Dutch). The charge is effectively hidden.

I challenged this non-transparency with angry (I get annoyed when I feel something is unfair, but you can see that my letter is civil) correspondence to my bank:

and obtained the following reply:

The information to the charge is available, of course. 2 pages prior in a half-hidden link to an Adobe .pdf document in Dutch. Yes, it is a Dutch bank, but they do translate documents less important to their customers (see this for an example, and another, and some more).

As we speak, I prepare another letter ramming home the lack of transparency in the payment confirmation screen.

UPDATE (28/01/2014):

I sent them a response letter 8 days ago:

Still no reply, time to visit their Facebook page...

Occupy mass consciousness

Here is a brief thought in support and opposition to the Occupy Wall St. (and other places) Movement...

...so the good, wholesome kernel of the idea is right: The current wave of increasing inequality between the rich and poor can only lead to decadence and the erosion of happiness (and the economy too). Financial institutions now have an iron grip on not only the governance of states, but also on the possibilities and mindsets of people, much akin to the Catholic church, except that now the object of worship is money. Civil liberties are also being stripped away, and rights like free speech or assembly will soon have all but left. We do need to protest, if only to exercise these rights, but this will not be enough.

...the bad implementation of this protest is that a majority's wish (the 99%) being protested by a minority (e.g. only a 0.99%) will not be noticed. The Orange Revolution in Ukraine brought up to 2-3% of the population out in protest, and years later, it is merely a memory. So I believe, will be the Wall Street protests, unless they scale up to unprecedented levels, ones that a government could not blanket over, even with mass control of the media.

...but the ugly truth is that a protest is only a beginning. The financial world cannot simply be changed today by standing in the street shouting "we are the people". To change this toxic climate, it is necessary to squeeze them where it hurts. You guessed it: their pockets. We protest that we live in a consumeristic society, yet we can use our consumer power for the good for once by "voting" with our money against the unethical institutions we don't wish to endorse. A business that is squeezed this way, will have to adapt to the wishes of the populace, or perish a painful choking death. We must create financial institutions with ethics that stand proudly before profit, instead of crouching in the sidelines. So what's catch of this simple solution? It is that we must lead by example, and change our mindsets before we can expect the world to change for us... That, ladies and gentlemen, is the hard¹ bit.

^{1 Note: this might involve cutting up your credit card and foregoing retail therapy. Proceed with this solution at your own peril.}

Piping down the hangers wild, piping shirts of pleasant glee...

Inspired by a blogpost at Other Blog, I decided to fashion myself a clothes hanger made from galvanised steel pipes.

The first step is of course to obtain some pipes and some connecting elements. Do try to have them delivered to your home, rather than to your work, unless you enjoy the physical challenge and the bemused looks of complete strangers as you pass them by on the street... Luckily I do!

The next step is to assemble and clean your components, only to discover that they are marked with painted or relieved with industrial writing and vertical and horizontal lines.

Finally, assemble the rack...

...and decorate it with your elegant clothes.

If you are not entirely satisfied with the outcome, or if you are not quite that much into industrial fashion, stand by for Part II, where we shall decorate the rack with Mithril paint and mystical eldritch runes of eerie geometries...

The assassination of Henry Ford by the coward Sebastian Thrun

It all began with a conversation with my friend D.K. back in my shabby, office green carpeted apartment room with retrofitted kitchen and toilet. It was her who mentioned the Google Driverless Car project. Recently watching an overview of which you can see being given by Sebastian Thrun on TED, I was struck by the irony that his main drive was to save people's lives lost to car accidents but that its true impact may be much more profound...

There's three points to this, an ecological one, an economical one and a cultural one.

Ecology: Take a small revolutionary business project like Streetcar and merge it with the Driverless Car. What you get is a "perfect" public transportation system. It's fast since it requires no schedules (you could book a car as you book a taxi). It's cheap to operate having eliminated the expense of chauffeuring. It's efficient since it would deliver a vehicle of the right size for the transportation job. Imagine the convenience of having transportation at your disposal at any time without actually needing to "own" a car, pay its insurance, parking/garage, etc. If we join with a system where people go to work at staggered time intervals, we could make traffic jams a thing of the past and speed up transport with a car fleet many times smaller than we have today. The fall in pollution- and stress-related death and disease could easily outweigh the impact it has on motor accidents.

Economy: The system outlined above would save vast amounts of natural resources: The saving in energy is by itself worth the trouble, but so are the savings of raw materials such as metal, as well as the man-hours wasted by individuals driving to work, truckers, taxi-drivers and so forth. It is time we left routine jobs to machines, instead devising and expanding industries that make better use of human intellect and creativity.

Culture: In such a utilitarian state of affairs, car ownership becomes a mostly antiquated concept, and with it our affluenza could start to be eroded, and a different sort of status symbol could arise. Perhaps we might even start caring more about how much "happiness" we earn, and how much of a positive difference we make in other people's lives, rather than how much money is in our bank account.

So, shall we one day kill the roaming ghost of communism Henry Ford? I hope so.

Predicting the future: engineering and technology 30 years after...

In connection with my essays for the Bosch Technology Horizons Award, I've had a small article published in an industrial magazine called "Process & Control", published by "Connecting Industry" here. For the magazine and article itself, go here. Here's the published article and the original unabridged article:

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me a toast tonight, 1st of January 2040, to mark our passage into the decade of quantum photonics.

We've travelled far, having pushed micro-computing as far as it would go, compressing circuits into ever tighter spaces until we could compact the tangle no further. Cloud computing helped us weather the storm thereafter, doing away with the personal computer as we knew it, replacing workstations with terminals of limited personal power yet drawing infinite might from the collective cloud of processing power. But it was only in recent years that the promise of nano-computing came to fruition, and we started to bypass the limits of simple electronics.

Nanotubes and single electron transistors became the flesh and bone of the modern circuit. Instead of painstakingly crafting each organ of our creation, we delegated our jobs to workers far more capable. Nano-robots catalyzed the raw materials into intelligent matter: self-assembling chips whose properties fell down to the choosing of our minute workers. Machines were no longer rigid but transformed in shape, size and colour according to our needs and wants, from wristwatch to telephone to full-fledged computer.

Yet the past pales in comparison with where we stand today, at the dawn of a paradigm shift. The ghost in the machine, the electron has been superseded by the photon. We have harnessed it into our microchips, using its quantum power and velocity to multiply the speed of computation a myriad times. The photon's efficiency nearly eliminates the need for energy, which is harvested directly into our devices from the bountiful sunlight at our disposal, slowly yet surely weaning technology from our carbon addiction.

Discovery began with the light of Prometheus' fire, and to feed it we burned our world piece by piece. We can finally stop.

"Normal" people and the normal curve...

I recently had a discussion about what normal people are. It reminded me of the incredible intolerance that pervades society, and for most of us is keenly felt from childhood in one way or another. Do normal people exist, then? My answer is maybe, but they're very few.

Why? The answer lies in a weird and geeky approach: Mathematics defines "normal" in terms of an average and probability of being there. Let's say that for each characteristic we imagine, we can draw a scale that ranges from something negative to positive, or bad to good (for simplicity, let's ignore times where there can be "too much of a good thing"). In our imaginary world, there is a majority of people in the good normal range, and a 5% of people who have a negative "difference" or fault. In the normal curve it looks like this:

In simple terms, for any one characteristic, the story looks like this. 95% "normal" and 5% "weird":

However, when we have more than one characteristic, things begin to become complicated. As we increase the number of traits, so do we decrease the number of people who are "perfectly normal" and who do not have at least one fault or weirdness. If we have barely 14 traits, the number of "different" people becomes greater than that of "normal" individuals...

...and once the number of traits hits 59, the tables turn, and it's the so-called "normal" people who are outstripped by the rest of us, the "weirdos". I'm sure we can find these 59 traits, or more (if you'd like to contribute, leave a comment :-).

The take-home message is that we should be tolerant of people's wierdnesses and faults, as well as our own. The inevitable result is that we'll be better and happier for it.

Nada más

"No quiero nada, nada más
que no me dejes, frente a frente, con la vida."
Juan D'Arienzo and Luis Rubinstein

The hall was filled with music and life. Nothing more.

Everything within was part of those two axioms, the dim light had become a mere sound and the dance revealed itself the essence of living. She stood stoic as a pillar, a stance of serene readiness only softened by a faint, but blindingly honest smile. I embraced her at the edge of the floor and stepped onto the solidity of wood, away from a carpeted floor that could hold the weight of D'Arienzo's beat no more. As I stepped down I felt, more than realised, that something had changed, as if my mind had been left behind, unceremoniously tucked away inside the shoe bag. Within me remained feeling, and the dewy voice of Alberto Echagüe permeated me. Nothing more.

"Cuánta nieve habrá en mi vida
sin el fuego de tus ojos!
Y mi alma, ya perdida,
sangrando por la herida,
se dejará morir.
Y en la cruz de mis anhelos
llenaré de brumas mi alma,
morirá el azul del cielo,
sobre mi desvelo
viéndote partir."

Following the song's tale, I bled my soul onto the dance floor, but curiously it was not lost, but uplifted by the emotion of this curiously tragic song. In short, I danced as if I were in love. Nothing more.

The Dragon's Daughter

I offer you the transliteration, more than translation, of another Ukrainian folk story recorded in the book "З живого джерела". I have taken the artistic liberty of changing some elements of the story and elaborating on some others.

Once upon a time, a wealthy man travelled to a distant realm to trade. But water was scarcer than precious stones in that kingdom, so the merchant turned thirsty as death. Desperate, he went to the Tsar, who surely must have water. How could he not? For he was not only lord of all that land, but also a Dragon and a skilled sorcerer.

"Sir. If you give me that which you have at home, I shall let you drink the water of my well," said the Tsar, smirking.

"Except my wife, I will part with anything," replied the man and signed the vow. But he did not know that soon after he set out, his wife bore him a son, and one such that words can't describe! Swift as grass he grew and strong as an oak. When the merchant returned home, a boy ran to embrace him, saying: "I am your son, Ivan."

Hearing this, the man first rejoiced but, remembering the vow, started weeping.

"Why do you cry, papa?" asked the boy.

"Never you mind."

Time passed and the boy quickly became a young man. One day, as father and son were building a cattle shed by the river, Ivan spotted a scrap of paper hidden in the dam. Unfolding the paper he discovered the vow made between the merchant and the Tzar.

"Papa, why did you not tell me that I'm given to the Tsar? Prepare me for the journey, for I will go to the Tzar."

The father and the mother dressed their son in his dearest clothes and their direst tears - as many as they could muster - their liquid sorrow could quench his thirst in that desert land.

When Ivan reached the Dragon's palace, he was greeted by the lord himself and his three daughters. The youngest one loved him at once.

"Ivan," the Dragon spoke. "This night my river must be dammed and my field ploughed, the wheat sown, grown, ripened and reaped, threshed and winnowed, the grain milled and a bun baked for breakfast."

The boy walked away heavy-hearted, but on the way to his quarters encountered the Dragon's daughter again.

"Do not despair, Ivan, all will be well!" she said to him. "Go and rest until the morrow."

As great a mage her father was, his power was still shadowed by hers. When darkness fell, she whistled, and before her loomed two wispy servants. She whistled again and they flew to the field in a flurry. When Ivan woke in the morning, a hot bun lay ready on the table. This he took to the Dragon, who ground his teeth in rage, for he had failed to abase Ivan. Curbing his fury, he spoke:

"Ivan. This night my best horse must be tamed; it stands in my stables, behind twelve doors."

Ivan was a good horseman, and eagerly made for the stables, but his way was barred by the Dragon's daughter, who warned him:

"Ivan, don't be fooled. This task is harder yet than the last! The horse within is Father, and as soon as you approach him, he will trample you to death." Then she thought, and added, "It's too late, I will help you. Go and rest until the morrow."

As soon as all lay to sleep, she whistled and her airy servants appeared. She whistled once more and they soared into the stables, squeezing through the twelve gates and they grasped the horse's mane and rode upon it through the night until it was winded and so wetted with sweat that it seemed it had been drenched in water. The wild horse galloped and galloped, but eventually stood still. The servants took the fatigued horse back to the stables and vanished.

In the morning the Dragon called Ivan and spoke to him, the cold sweat on his brow barely concealing his choler:

"This eve you must come to me!"

As soon as Ivan left the court, the Dragon's daughter appeared to him and urged him:

"Ivan, if you go see Father, he will strangle you! You and I must flee."

Quickly they gathered their things and left the palace.

They walked and walked when suddenly they heard a rumble. The Dragon's daughter pressed her ear to the ground and whispered:

"They are pursuing us. We must hide."

She took a blade of dry grass and ripped it in twain, and at once she became a field of wheat and Ivan its watchman. Soon arrived a horseback host, the Dragon's servants, who asked Ivan the watchman:

"Did you not see a boy and a girl running past?"

"I did see them run past when this field was sown."

Discouraged, the servants returned to the palace, where the Dragon enquired:

"So, did you overtake them?"

"No, we did not."

"Did you not see anyone?"

"No, only a guard keeping ward over a field of wheat."

"That was them! Had you but torn the smallest kernel of wheat, you would have grasped her very head. Go forth once more, and catch them this time!"

Soon again they were on the heels of Ivan and the girl. Hearing their hoofs hitting the ground, she took a pebble from the road's side and broke it in half, whereupon she became a church and Ivan a priest upon the porch. The horsemen, having reached the church, asked the priest:

"Did you not see a boy and a girl running past?"

"I did see them run past when this church was built."

The irresolute riders returned to the palace, where the Dragon scolded them once more:

"It was them once more! Had you but clutched the knocker, you would have held her very neck." With this, he rose from his throne, climbed to his highest tower and called to his servants, "fetch me my pitchforks!"

He propped each of his eyelids with A fork and, as he watched the horizon he caught a glimpse of his daughter and Ivan. He spread his wings and dashed after them. Hearing the whistling of the wings, the daughter gasped:

"We are lost, Father is after us! But there's still one chance. Do not let him drink of me."

She then took a tear from her eye and tore it in two, turning herself into a well, and Ivan into a Cossack, a sabre at his waist. Soon, the Dragon reached the well and asked the Cossack if ever he saw run past a girl and a boy.

"Never did I see" replied Ivan.

But the Dragon glanced in his eye and realised the truth at once, so he said to the Cossack:

"Let me satiate my thirst!"

"You may not. From this well only the Ataman¹ may drink."

But the Dragon did not take heed, and instead stooped over the well. As he took the bucket to his mouth, Ivan, in one swift stroke severed his head. The well turned back into a girl, and the Cossack into a boy, who together walked back home and idled in wedding feasts.

^{1 Cossack chief.}

Dancing with Gardel

"Volver,

con la frente marchita,

las nieves del tiempo

platearon mi sien.

Sentir,

que es un soplo la vida,

que veinte años no es nada..."

Carlos Gardel

"The Mute" sings better every day. Yet no-one dances when the Thrush of Buenos Aires calls. He's probably rolling in his grave, his elegance twisted by a feeling of unfairness. Some say it is a sign or respect to not dance to the dead man's baritone, yet is it not sacrilege to let his memory fade in the milongas where he was an accomplished dancer. Let us speak with him then, echo his words with our hearts, their beat reverberating softly between our feet and the earth beneath.

So let him return, his forehead wrinkled, his temples silvered by the snows of time.

And let us feel, for life is but a breath, twenty years a trifle...

a Dream is a Dream is a Dream

I write inspired by the madness of the Friday eve, its petty decadence of aimless men and women, sleepwalkers on cement lubricated by brew, spit and sticky sweat. Do they know they are dreaming? You never know until you wake up...

I dreamed some nights ere of a young woman who answered by the name Ferre, yet whose true name is lost in the dream, known only to Morpheus. She found herself standing in the midst of a spacious chamber, of tall pastel coloured walls broken only by a staircase, steep as only Dutch mountains can be, winding its way round the room. At its highest point stood something that can only be described as a Lovecraftian abomination, of barely defined shape, texture and colour. Yet impression cannot resist description, and my memory of it is of an entity a little like a starfish moving as a mockery of man; bearing the rocky, brittle texture and colour of charcoal, its darkness broken only by the edges of it shape, so sharp that they nearly glowed. As it started descending the stairs, slowly, Ferre woke up from her dream, shaking and sweating.

She found herself within the very same chamber, now darker in tonality, a tranquil, dark olive. Beside her stood her friend, whose name is, perhaps, Galla. She soothed the trembling Ferre, as she thought of the time before the nightmares, before the pills. Were the capsules the cause or merely the catalyst of dread? She looked at the container standing on the squat night table, her hand grasping what her eyes could but touch. Holding the flask by her heart, to the bewilderment of Ferre, she unscrewed the cap and dropped one copper coloured capsule, a miniature metallic egg. Confusion gave way to terror when Ferre saw Galla take one pill and place it into her mouth. They gulped in unison.

Sleep pulled at her eyelids, dragging them down, but Galla would not concede before a curtain call to her pupils. Her eyes endured the constant assault of sand, searing but unyielding. And since Galla would not go to the Dreamworld, It would come to her. Between the grains stuck to her lashes she saw a familiar shape still on the spiralling stairs. Before it even quivered, she had dashed to meet it, her feet swallowing the stairs in pairs and triads until they stood beside it, their hunger quenched. Then sluggishly, painfully even, their languid legs moved in unison up the last handful of steps to a tall door. Galla tentatively taped the door ajar and stood aside, letting the leviathan lump its way within while she motioned Ferre to scale the steps and follow her fear into the room.

Ferre closed her eyes briefly to gather courage and found herself before the frame. As soon as she had stepped through it, she found herself back in the same room, dizzy with the knowledge that her dread had departed forever. Another memory surfaced soon after, a shadow of a dying girl, leaving His side. But who was He?..

Too late. I awoke confused, nagged by a prophetic feeling. I stood and went in search of Father, he would know. I found him in the dressing room and recounted him my dream and collected my thoughts.

"The strange thing is..." I added, only to be interrupted by his brisk departure. The thought was broken by the bang of the door.

Distracted, my attention fell on a set of emerald garnments hanging from a rack. A mess jacket reminiscent of a Matador's. A suit, tainted by a dark stain under the left clavicle. Some trousers...

...and Father returns and looks into my eyes, concerned. Bloodied and tired despite the rest...

...I wake yet again, woken by Galla's kiss, a deep flow of liquid tenderness, but it's not enough. I look at Ferre and ask her. Her fleshy lips don't even quiver, her short hair a helmet isolating her, keeping her warm in her coldness. As I wake again, some machine measures the coordinates of my thought: "Where are you Ferre?"

Sex, lies and statistics...

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

Mark Twain

Not all things can be a gender issue. After seeing an article claiming that women were more promiscuous than men I had to laugh. I laughed again when I saw one claiming the opposite. Where the articles were written and who took the time to carry out the "research" is immaterial, so let us leave those issues aside. Also, since most of these articles are driven by an agenda to either showcase men as womanisers or women as "manisers", let's only consider the heterosexual population.

My argument is the simple fact that, on average, no gender can be any more promiscuous than the other. Let's just consider the population of an imaginary world called Miscu. Its population is composed of two genders, the "pro" and the "iti".

In Miscu, each sexual union "is" a real union, for establishes an unbreakable bond between the participants.

In the above example, both individuals have engaged in sex with one other individual. The sexual bond is not directional so both individuals, and hence genders, are equally promiscuous. Since the number of men and women in our own world is approximately equal, both genders must be equally promiscuous by definition. If you don't believe my simple example above, look at this more complex one below, where 10 individuals are involved...

In the example above, the number of links between individuals (9, precisely) remains the same for both the "iti" and the "pro" genders. Both genders are still equally promiscuous, on average, meaning that the mean is still meaningless. This leads to a more interesting point though: despite the fact that both genders have an equal number of sexual partners, the distributions of these bonds in each gender are different in a number of different ways...

• The promiscuity of the "pros" is less variable, ranging between one and two partners compared with a range between zero and five in the case of the "itis".

• The median number of sexual partners (i.e. the middle number in the distribution) is smaller for the "pros" (2) than for the "itis" (3).

• The mode (i.e. the most common number), on the other hand, is greater for the "pros" (2) than the itis (0).

• I won't even start writing about the skewness and the kurtosis, as by now you'll probably have seen my point :-)

This point is that statistics at its simplest can be a dire tool of deception and delusion, but if used properly, can give us much information. So let's just go beyond our simplistic gender biases and past the typical "itis are more promiscuous than pros" headline and try get a little closer to the truth...