Debate by ~REGGDIS

Last week I was in the UK for work, first time in that country. Work went perfectly but from the moment I stepped into that country, I was flooded with strange thoughts and new impressions.

“Why have you come here?” asked the passport checkpoint official.

“For work.”

“What is the nature of your work?” he continued in a very polite tone. A few more questions…

“Where will you go after your 5 days stay?” he asked.

“Home… back to the USA,” I responded.

“Welcome to the UK.”

For the rest of the trip to the hotel, I was thinking about my last sentence “home… back to the USA.” A stranger in a strange country in a strange world, I was going to go home… that mystical place that has a special meaning for every Armenian.

Everyone extremely polite. Everything running perfectly on time. Discussion of austerity measures and restraint in government spending. What was it about these people that allowed them to conquer the world? Why am I writing in their language?

Vatican. Concentrate so much wealth in 100 acres. Wealth of the highest caliber. Statue of a king, viscount, or another lord or a street named after one. Systems everywhere, lots of systems. Driving on the wrong side of the road. Fish and chips… great fish and chips.

One morning, jet lagged I sat there working and listening to a debate on TV on how they could cut government spending. What a healthy debate! In the US, we are growing governments.

On the way back, I read Walden almost the entire time.

“Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read. The one is commonly transitory, a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is the maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak.” ~ Henry David Thoreau

How much I have to grow up to perceive the world at this level, let alone be able to write anything that “must be read as deliberately and reservedly…” How much we Armenians must endure to begin understanding how the world works. The books have been written in English. The maps have been written in English. For us they have also been written in Russian, in Turkish, and in every other language, old and new. We need to stop being the only ones reading our own books and drowning in our own tears. Maybe we need to be born again. Maybe we need to learn their father tongue. How else can we expect to have any influence when we are not even in the room, let alone sitting at the table where our fate is determined. Are we the spoken word, “transitory” in the timeline of the human civilization?

Two songs come to mind. The first is a revolutionary song – a lullaby, a beautiful contradiction still beyond my understanding. The second is the song called Cilicia.

Sunday after I was back, I went to church where I found new liturgy books. They’re in two languages, English and Hinglish. Hinglish is a strange language. It’s the Classical Armenian written with English letters. An Armenian born and raised outside Armenia is fortunate if he or she speaks some dialect of the language (somewhere I read that about 1500 words were needed). That Armenian is a minority if he or she can read and write in Armenian. There are probably a handful who have studied and understand the Classical Armenian. For whom is the weekly Divine Liturgy service? Is Hinglish the best we can do? Does it even please God when we worship him without understanding what we say.

How about we improve the Divine Liturgy, write it in the best of our father tongue, in nice big beautiful Armenian letters and hope that it’s read and sung as “deliberately and reservedly” as it’s written. This may also please the Creator. I’ll stop dreaming. For now, let’s have  a healthy debate about this and perhaps we will understand why I write in English.

Mac-Man by ~blindguard

Every couple years I take stock of the latest developments in computer operating systems. It helps me get an overview of  innovations in computer technology and get up-to-speed in terms of what the “world” considers important for computers. Here are my impressions.

Apple and Google have done a lot to change the way we (the world) view computers and their roles in our lives. Apple’s operating system Mac OS X is elegant in simplicity and power. As a newbie I was able to get it up and running quickly (on an iMac) and within days felt right at home with advanced tasks available on Unix-like systems. From concepts like disk partitioning and file synchronization to simple tasks like chatting on Skype and syncing contacts, the whole system is designed to simplify life. Google has done the same with e-mail, pictures, searches, maps and many other areas, all in an effort to simplify life. In case of Google, the services are “free” but the motives are unclear (outside the obvious ad business). Apple does not suffer from this but has a high premium for its products (which warrant every penny when compared with the competition, IMHO). One could argue that while these companies have simplified our life in some ways, they have indirectly increased the demands placed on our time but this is for a separate discussion (some hints in Technological Revolution).

Microsoft changed our lives in the last couple decades. Windows Vista was a total disappointment. Windows 7 is much better and is probably the best Windows yet. Amazingly, most people I know (including myself) still use Windows XP. Many programs I use have a hard time running on 64-bit Windows 7. It consumes a lot of memory (for what?) and still has quite a few areas to improve. The simplicity of Windows 2003 was more acceptable but that was a server operating system (with a high price tag). Why Microsoft is all over the place is hard to understand but the results will eventually show it.

Linux has come a long way. I tried Ubuntu 9.10 and 10.04, Fedora 12 and 13, Debian 5.04, Oracle Enterprise Linux 5, and a few others. Of these I like the install of Fedora 13 and the usability of Ubuntu 9.10. Apple’s OS X is a far more polished Unix variant than all of these. What’s amazing about the Linux world is the global community’s efforts to enhance it and the corporate efforts to milk it, all with good intentions. It will be a while before these become mainstream enough to displace Microsoft and Apple. A simple task of getting Skype to work took quite a bit of research and modification of runtime parameters, for example. Apple knows this and requires its Unix variant OS X to run on its hardware. Try to run OS X on anything else and Linux will look like piece of cake.

A few other operating systems support their stated goals well but since most of us do not interact with them directly we often do not even know that they exist. Solaris, for example, is solid but is made for business servers. RedHat and Suse have their versions of enterprise Linux servers. There are the BSDs, and many others. While these may run systems that help change our lives, they do not directly change our perceptions about computers and their roles.

A lot has changed from a decade ago but the players seem to be the same. The question is whether a new player will emerge in this space to completely change the game. What disruptive innovation will completely displace all of these operating systems in the same way that these have displaced the prior generations (CP/M, DOS, VMS, so many more)? Will the inventions be in hardware land or incremental improvements on what we have today? Pages could be written on this topic, but let me stop here for now.

Mirror Mirror by `Fredy3D

A few weeks ago, I had a fantastic meal with my good friends at Massimino’s, a nice little Italian place in the North End where we gather once a year to catch up and remember the past. This is a group of truly special people.

Eight, maybe nine years ago I was assigned to help implement a financial system at StateStreet. Little did I know about the true complexity of the project and the history prior to my assignment to the project. To sum it up, it was a mess! A multimillion dollar implementation on the brink of failure, this project seemed impossible and probably would have been scrapped. Multiple weekly status meetings with 40-50 people (at least 30 consultants @ ~$300 /hr), half dozen project managers with their assistants, an entire floor in the most expensive building in Boston, the best hardware costing over a million dollars, and much more didn’t seem to matter enough. Yet somehow this team of special folks managed to successfully roll out its piece of the project. It’s a nice annual surprise to hear that the system is still in use globally.

Even though  I have worked on many projects since then, I haven’t been in a similar team. It is even more troubling to see some of the latest currents that seem to sweep across this great society. Here are some observations.

We have all of the great communication technologies yet we’re less connected. I am certainly not talking about efficiency of transactional communication or the productivity gains from instantaneous dissemination of information. We seem to be less connected with transformational life-long relationships. At work, many of us stare at computer screens all day long with little time to actually talk to people outside the transactions we conduct. On Facebook, as a close friend pointed out, we see status updates that scream of loneliness and boredom. Instead of bowling or golf, many have the living room computerized “equivalents.” We have everything yet we have nothing.

To contrast this, I remember life back in Armenia back in the dark days when we had no electricity, no telephone, no running water, nothing! My father would joke that of all systems of communication/infrastructure only the sewer system worked (and even that froze one day in the dead of winter). We had hardly any food and I had to go for a daily fight for a loaf of bread. Yet in that environment we were (incredible to imagine) happy, never bored or lonely. The space/time for those days is no longer; only memories remain.

Today we are well connected exchanging / processing hundreds of e-mails, instant messages, text messages, tweets, phone calls, video chats, blogs posts and comments yet so many seem to be lonely, alone and feeling completely disconnected and alienated. TV commercials scream about depression and insomnia drugs and other remedies to address anxiety disorders. Netflix, OnDemand, and YouTube bring thousands of channels of passive “entertainment” yet it seems people need even more despite some of the videos and programming being pure trash.

The industrial revolution has ruined our external environment. Technological revolution seems to be ruining our internal environments. Or is it just a mirror?

Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

Wolfram|Alpha aims to bring expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people—spanning all professions and education levels. Our goal is to accept completely free-form input, and to serve as a knowledge engine that generates powerful results and presents them with maximum clarity.

So I asked the age-old simple Armenian question and this is what I received:

Ինչ կա չկա

Let me ask in Armenian.

Ինչ կա չկա – Հայերեն

Looks like they had been expecting my question. It seems they have built a machine that answers most complex questions but fails at simple ones. Give it a try anyway, it could become your new favorite toy.

I couldn’t resist and tried Google which gave me its usual list of useless links that answer every other question but mine.

Ինչ կա չկա - Google

Technological innovation has a long way to go before it reaches any kind of maturity or saturation. We are still only just at the very beginning.

Yarmouth Boardwalk by *lutke45

Despite the many negatives, business travel has an amazing way of refocusing the mind on what really matters. In my case, coming home to my beautiful wife and the kids was all I needed to feel normal again. Without realizing, they have a wonderful way of supporting me through my long days of work… days like yesterday (I worked from the moment I opened my eyes in the morning until I went to bed late at night). A hug, a smile, even just their presence can give tremendous amount of energy. This energy was not there in California. Consequently, the concept of base of operations has been front and center for me recently.

I cannot even begin to imagine what it may be like to destroy this unique and powerful “base” during a divorce. Where do people living in broken families get their energy? What about the excruciating pain of a natural disaster tearing up the ground in which we grow? Maybe I came one small step closer in understanding my father who lost his half exactly two years ago. Perhaps it is the coincidence of all these events with the anniversary of my half and I becoming whole that is stirring up all these thoughts.

It is late at night, but I feel like a child who wants to go to bed early on Christmas Eve with great anticipation for the next morning. Tomorrow we get to go on vacation. I get to spend an entire week with people who matter most. Cape Cod is beautiful but only because we will be together.

Footsteps Into The Sky by ~oruwu

Friday night is finally here. As usual, I am exhausted and completely drained and feel the need to write a few words to get my energy back. First, earlier this week my son taught me another lesson already learned many times. After much thought he decided to spend his entire savings of almost $100 on a Lego Star Wars kit with over 900 pieces. The cashier at the store counted quite a few pennies, dimes, nickels, quarters before handing over the kit to him. On the way home, I asked him how long he had been saving this money. “Three years!” he answered without hesitation. He had built many kits but this one had more pieces than all others. With fascination and excitement he started on this new project just as soon as he could but not long after displayed much frustration and stress from being unable to find the right pieces in the oddly shaped multicolored piles in front of him. I “helped” him by sorting the pieces in piles by color but that helped little and he grew even more frustrated in the process. I checked today and he had completed three quarters of the project. Stress and discomfort are relative to our capabilities and the complexity of the challenges we face. I remind myself – that which was a challenge yesterday is no longer a challenge today and that which is a challenge today will not be a challenge tomorrow.

The second thought I wanted to share is the total frustration I sometimes feel regarding many world events, American and Armenian politics, history and the present but the discomfort and the stress come from my inability to fix the problems and worst of all my inability in some cases to determine the best solution as in most cases all the solutions along a spectrum have been tried throughout history and have failed for different reasons. This is an issue from global politics, to local town and workplace issues, to family issues, and internal conflicts. The chess game is known, has been played before but one is unable to come up with a new creative set of moves and even if s/he can make the game changer move someone will invariably lose. I find that there is urge to give up or care less just because I cannot fix the problem. I also notice that sometimes the problem doesn’t bother me so much for me to drop all else and devote a life to it which is what I believe it would take in most cases. Multiply these personal views by hundreds, thousands, and millions of people and you have the true nature of our problems. One person’s contribution or lack of contribution makes little difference but when we all feel unable to make a meaningful difference, we end up watching TV or writing a blog post instead. I admire people who despite the above challenges wake up in the morning and devote their days to making this world a better place for the rest of us. In the roles given to me I do my best.

The third thought I wanted to share is that of the final outcome always being determined by the series of very small insignificant unimportant decisions and steps along the way. We tend to want to find one collosal mistake or one great step that changes the course of history of one life or the world. We want to place blame on one person or a group of people or one of the decisions or one set of actions which we label as the crucial ones. Even in making/losing money, we are more excited by big bangs and get-rich-quick thoughts rather than by pennies saved and earned and not lost in our daily lives. The great news is that aside from major accidents and other environmental issues, most missteps can be corrected, most issues can be overcome with small incremental steps in the right direction. Failed products and projects do not fail overnight. Booms and busts are not overnight events. Children do not excel or fail because of one thing we did or didn’t do. It is that constant steam of decisions, actions, events, stimuli and responses that determines what we have, what we do, and what we are.

Death by Debt by ~jessiechrist

I recently stumbled upon the exact figures of US Debt to the Penny which as of a second ago indicated that public debt outstanding was $11,043,588,980,678.90. The latest monthly report is available here. I was very surprised to see we still had such debt given this prediction to have the debt paid off by now. The FAQ encourages us, the private citizens, to help pay off this debt with the following statement:

“How do you make a contribution to reduce the debt?

Make your check payable to the Bureau of the Public Debt, and in the memo section, notate that it is a Gift to reduce the Debt Held by the Public. Mail your check to:

Attn Dept G
Bureau Of the Public Debt
P. O. Box 2188
Parkersburg, WV 26106-2188″

I must say that this is not an April fools joke because research a bit further shows that people do make gifts to pay off the debt. However, before you make your contribution, please note this news story which indicates that the bailouts and the various expenditures could total $10.8 trillion.

Also please note that although we are all patriotic citizens who want to pay off this debt (and even if the whole world jumps in to help), this FED report says that there’s only about $8.3 trillion around (M3 is no longer published) and that money is created from around $2 trillion (soon to be $3 trillion) of reserves (interestingly we have only about $900 billion cash out there). If you know how the total debt can be paid off with all of the outstanding money, please help me understand this.

I also cannot figure out if the gifts to pay of the debt count as charitable donations for tax deduction purposes.

Americans are very smart people. I believe I have just understood why they choose to spend instead of saving.

The Falling Capital by ~Latuff2

My friend sent me a funny link about CNBC that brought forward a few thoughts about assets. What I am about to write you can and should safely ignore as it is likely to have little to no impact on your life. If you know me, you already know I don’t know anything and carry my cross like everyone else in the world. If you don’t even know me, how can you take what I say as anything of value, anything to use as basis for even a simple decision. Please apply this test to all the noise that comes at you at hundred miles per hour from all the sources of your information. It is actually fun to find the hidden assumptions, the flaws in arguments, the hard-to-notice issues with the opinions given out so freely by everyone. Find issues with what I say, and I’ll thank you.

I only watch CNBC, keep an eye on the papers, and the Internet to gather clues about public feelings. Don Chu’s eloquent points about the fractal nature of humanity come to mind here because just as we have good days and bad days, so does the society. Our aggregate public feelings appear in media. As an example, jokes are only funny because we can relate to them. These feelings in today’s complex and constantly changing world cannot be internalized without one keeping both eyes and ears open and watching and listening on all frequencies. Often the clues are subtle, insignificant and sometimes I cannot even verbalize what I’m “hearing” but I don’t stop listening. My only limitation is time. CNBC plays its vital role in filling in the picture of public sentiment. All of the networks cater to their audiences so well, that we can easily approximate the mood of the audience by simply keeping an eye on the media catering to that audience.

Why did I think about assets? Actually, I don’t like that word at all. The reason is debt. Assets can be acquired with debt. It is not difficult to have significant assets balanced by significant debt. I like the word capital much better. Much of the media, your neighbors, everything you see screams “assets.” Assets are visible and quantifiable. Debt is a hidden, private matter. Of the various definitions of capital, I like this one “any form of wealth employed or capable of being employed in the production of more wealth.” This concept is too basic, I agree. However, often the very basic and simple ones contain more energy than complexities (who would have thought tiny atoms could produce so much energy).

The first challenge is the preservation of capital which encompasses everything we do to make sure that whatever capital we have does not turn into nothing as a result of everything that happens around us. Public sentiment is critical for this because after all the vehicles for storage of capital only work if someone out there is willing to accept them in exchange for something we need. I lived through a period when currency turned into nothing after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Every day I would take the money I earned with my friend and buy something, anything I could buy (cheese, butter, dollars, etc.) because the next day that money would buy less. To contrast that, I was speechless when I visited the Vatican and realized how the Roman Catholic Church had preserved its wealth throughout centuries, changing regimes, wars, and changes in public sentiment. It is a superb lesson in wealth preservation which even includes sovereignty. Contrast that with someone trying to hold on to their property during the gold rush. Keeping in touch with the world and public sentiments is critical for taking the necessary measures ahead of time to protect one’s capital.

The second challenge is employing the capital to produce more wealth. I actually consider this an easier challenge than the preservation of capital but there is nothing easy about this. CNBC and millions of “advisers” are ready to give us that one perfect method that will surely increase our capital. They (referring to the money machine) even convinced a lot of people to borrow someone else’s capital (mortgage or margin put into stock market). They “help us” with enormous amounts of data (real-time quotes, hundreds of statistics, derived metrics, research reports, derivative instruments, etc.), with “education” contrasting investors with speculators (no real difference here), with language (buy and hold, dead cat bounce, MBS, ABS, CDS, etc.), and everything else one would ever “need” to turn capital. The US government wants constant turnover of capital because at every turn increases can be taxed. If capital is not turned (artwork passed from one generation to another), no worries as there are laws to tax the transfer. I still cannot understand how the capital gains are taxed fully but capital losses are only used to offset gains (+$3,000 break). People unfortunately do not often understand what capital is because we sometimes start out with negative capital (student loans, mortgages, etc.). By the time we create enough value to pay off these loans by helping someone else turn their capital, time (our most valuable resource) becomes depleted. CNBC, the mutual fund companies, the government, our friends, this blog, and nothing else in the world can tell you how to preserve and increase your capital. Once this became clear to me, CNBC and all forms of media and information took their proper place in my mind.

Progress by ~gursesl

When I catch myself thinking about something worth sharing, I take down a few sentences to come back to them in a future post. A few days ago, I wrote “An interesting longer term cycle seems to be repeating. We all learn something new every day but from time to time I find myself having the urge to learn a new discipline, new subject, or a new profession. The learning process is very exciting as it brings renewal and new ways of understanding the world. One such wave caused me to start learning English. Who would have thought where that effort would lead years later…” This morning I saw a comment from GM Davies where he says “Well I think that one very good thing to do right now is to invest in oneself. Whatever comes out of this people with certain skills and know-how will always be needed.” I couldn’t agree more but will take that comment a bit further by replacing “right now” with “ALWAYS.”

I have been working on a small project recently. I’m “writing” a small piece of software to automate one of my Excel spreadsheets with a goal of learning four or five new web technologies. The outcome may be less useful than the Excel spreadsheet but the learning will be worth it. If in addition, others find value in the outcome, then I’ll have more than achieved my objective. I won’t go into the details of it until I have something to show. But wanted to mention a couple points.

Learning does not happen overnight. This project is progressing very slowly and the result so far is nothing exciting or spectacular but I continue to spend a few minutes here and there as much as I can. Inch by inch, one small improvement at a time, I learn a new option, a new method, and a new statement. I often learn something new and find myself hitting the proverbial brick wall discovering that I need to redo a lot of what I have already created. Obviously, if I had all the knowledge up front, I would avoid the mistake in the first place, but that is the price to pay for learning the lesson. This process in many ways is similar to value creation and research, one step at a time with frequent setbacks but never getting discouraged to the point of quitting due to personal limitations. Learning lifts those limitations but does that in slow subconscious way.

The other thought I wanted to share is that of digesting knowledge created by others. I often have to refer to a web site or a sample created by someone else to figure out how to accomplish my task. It takes me ten seconds to find and use the knowledge that someone spent hours creating. Very often I jump from one site to another in fifteen minutes “digesting” many hours of the work of hundreds of people. Imagine that! How many people take a moment to think about the hundreds of people and the months / years of their life that go into creating a two hour movie? I said this to my father who after devoting most of his life to astronomy expressed some regret that “… all that work was for nothing …” It is not for nothing! His work is all over the Internet, referenced in many recent papers. We can never predict how the value we create will be compounded by others. The lightning speed by which new information, new knowledge, new thought (this post for example) gets absorbed by others and becomes part of them is absolutely fascinating. Credit is not always given, the source is often forgotten, but humanity progresses and we all fullfil our individual role in that constant march toward our combined ideals.

Every issue, every law, and every viewpoint represents a spectrum where our opinions, options, and choices vary infinitely within a continuum. Our position on the subject is where we find ourselves on the spectrum at any given time. Issues can also be seen as Euclidean vectors with their lengths and directions. Some issues have major impacts on many lives. Others are against the overall direction of the society but have more limited impact. At any particular time, we find ourselves in that one spot in the multi-dimensional universe of issues where all these vectors intersect with the point of intersection being our position on the subjects.

How I have changed...

Why are these issues so polarizing? As I was staring at my computer screen, the answer was staring right back at me.

“Hi! You! Hello… Yes you! I’m talking to you! You’re very fortunate, did you know that? Why? Are you joking? You have choices. What choices? Let’s see… where do I start… Let me tell you about my life. I sit here breathing dust waiting, waiting… waiting for your next command. But you know I can’t just do nothing. I can’t just sit like you sometimes gazing at the horizon. I have to work. When I am awake I cannot be idle. That’s how I’m built. Sometimes you look at me all day long and don’t even notice me. You see past me into the bits and bytes I bring to you from my extended family. Sometimes you come over, stare at me and start laughing. Are you laughing at me? Oh forget it… Who am I anyway? You could care less about me. But maybe not… You seem to like when I do tricks like playing music or showing movies but do you realize how empty I feel inside? All I can do is turn switches on and off… Oh how much I wish I could understand all those bits and bytes I deliver to you… If I could only laugh just once … with you. I only have one choice ON or OFF… I know I’m good at that. In a single blink of your eyes, I can switch millions of times… Blink… Yes don’t forget, blink a few times while you stare at me…”

We are very fortunate to live in times when not only we can have choices and options but we can actually express our positions and opinions. The problem is that we forget that others also represent a bunch of arrows intersecting at a unique spot in the universe at any given time. Many of us (myself included) try to force, persuade, or convince them that not only is our intersection the best spot in the universe but it is where they should also strive to be. If we could just accept their place in the universe the same way we accept where each star shows up on the sky…

Center of V838 Monocerotis Light Echo

Speaking of the sky, when I was little, we would sometimes lay on our backs on the warm asphalt on a cool summer night at the observatory looking at the starts. We had billion of stars in Armenia and only a few here in Massachusetts. In those days we would find all of the constellations and even make up our own. One day I saw a picture of the stars from a different point in the galaxy. None of the constellations were there even though it had a lot of the same stars. The arrows, their sizes and their directions are similar to the stars and appear a certain way only from where we stand. That happens to be our distorted view of the stars.