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.