No Censorship! ...ah..wait... Do Censorship!

Hello dear reader, here I am for one more fast existence. This is supposed to be like a talk, sorry for the citations. I could not help but provide some minimal bibliography.

When asked about censorship people always agree with myself. They say a big NO. It is pleasant to be defended by the majority, ah what a feeling. You know what I am talking about, the somewhat ignorant feeling that something you believe is right, just because people agree with it.

But it stops right there, answers and reasons of why they should not censure points out the freedom of speech and other freedomlities. Right? Not my point though. I do not like censorship because it turns ourselves into machines with a limited set of things we can see and understand. Or in other words, it dumb us down. There is a big difference in defending something because you want freedom and defending something because it makes you idiot.

The points of the governments are that "considered to be excessively disrupting of social order". They really think people are going to start killing others or doing any other thing because they saw it on tv or in a book. Nonsense. Are they based on last century psychology or something?

The real reason is structural (AS ALWAYS), instead of censuring, what they should do is showing people a way through life. I always liked the idea of creating socio-cultural groups to teach the families, very simple and easy talk, which can do wonders! Close dialog. Ah well, we are on the time of cellphone and internet right? We (myself included) forgot how it is to talk head to head and discuss a good point about the way of living. We have too many things to do right? Many things to buy, many things to read, too much information. Government could pay people to teach us how to live, instead of censuring what he does not want us to do (what in some form incentive the action of doing it \cite{pepitone1967change} ).

We dont want to face it. But censorship is trying to avoid the inevitable and hiding the symptoms instead of treating the disease. For the Japanese that are so much more cultural favorable to preventing diseases than hiding the symptoms, I was shocked by some political movements http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2010-12-10/10-manga-publishers-to-boycott-tokyo-anime-fair ).

Well, but thinking more about it... I may be missing something....wa-wait.....I can even accept Censorship. More than that, it is clear now that censorship is awesome, it is Great!

No, I am not going to defend the attitudes of the politicians, or anything I disliked before. I am in completely agreement with what I said before. I still hate attitudes such as censuring or confiscating the economist (the best journal to be read nowadays). I just happened to like their game, I will play their cards... my way though. My style.

My censorship is for the good! And for that, I will censure everything, every tv channel, every movie, every book, every board game, every shampoo.... everything. If people make protests I will put an end to it, just like the Chinese. My censorship way though is rather obtuse, for doing the censorship I will contract the people who are behind the "Festival of Cannes" and "Berlin Festival" for ranking the movies and tv channels and if they fall below a certain grade, it is censured. For the board games, I will call the people behind "Spiel des Jahres" from Germany. And they will do the same as with the movies, but with the board games. And the same logic applies to other products.

The people could even exchange old censored products by new ones not censored. For the censored products, they are not allowed to sell. And that is it.

In a year, only high quality products will be sold on markets. In a 100 years people here will fill the more important positions, in 300 years, we are going to receive all the nobels (maybe we will lost the nobel of peace, because we do not like war) and the major journals on all fields.

If you are worried about the international investment and the consume (internal market). You are right, there will be problems. The mass market is a fragile cake, if they are not predictable and easy to sell the economy gets all fragile and a new crisis get caught. An economic crisis is not a sign of bad news, but a sign of change. Nobody likes it, because the main aspect of a crisis is its unpredictability, but in short, since lot of people are losing money lot of them are gaining.

I was just poking fun with their game of censorship, but of course, the roots are elsewhere and this will not solve realistically the problem. I would say that the problem are on the industry which end ups influencing the education (take a look at the Spiegel article in German, where they talk about the university becoming a fabric of knowledge for the industries... this article is awesome. I have even the original journal - here is a comment also in German). No, I am not talking about the education, not at all. Education is a mere consequence of our cultural conduct and market behavior. My point will become clear if you read the article, maybe in another blog time I will write about the Lernfabriken (German for knowledge fabrics).

@article{pepitone1967change,
title={{Change in attractiveness of forbidden toys as a function of severity of threat}},
author={Pepitone, A. and McCauley, C. and Hammond, P.},
journal={Journal of Experimental Social Psychology},
volume={3},
number={3},
pages={221--229},
issn={0022-1031},
year={1967},
publisher={Elsevier}
}

Understanding Science - for dummies like me

Well well, just to oppose my last opinion, I will explain exactly why the problems appear on science, which was the reason of writing the last post. In other words, I will explain a bit of this huge emergent mechanism called Science.

Summarizing, the last post was about 2 things, one is the lack of ingenuity and the other is the lack of integrity. And both of them was questionable respectively on the grounds that people in general do not wish to work with imprecisions and to unite or approve the union of knowledge (because of lack of knowledge itself).

But those things are slightly explained if we think of Science as a mechanism, trying to survive the huge amount of garbage it receives day after day. And it is not about being logical, it is about surviving the intense flow of knowledge.

So ingenuity is very similar to absence of knowledge, which makes it sound like the garbage, so it normally does not pass the filter. Simple like that. Although, if you are powerful enough, you can make people hear your ingenuity or garbage (as we have to learn a lot of unuseful and sometimes even illogical knowledge). Here I am complaining again... hehe. But, dont take those complains in vain, I salient those points in order to bring a solution to all of them altogether. I made a proposition before about a new type of educational institution, but it still has some problems, which I wish to rewrite in the next 20 years and make it solve all those "complains".

This way, the ingenuity could only be passed to Science homeopathically in a logical darwinistic way (a way focusing on the survival of Science and on the maintenance of its represented logical properties).

And what about the lack of integrity? Well, the Science survives by use, not only by logical sense. We normally cannot reason under things and arrive at a common conclusion (maybe it is a lack of educational processes, but I am assuming this as an axiom here), therefore everything is built with comparisons. Which makes more important than logic, the ability to integrate the science with our own results.

That is, the fundamental basis of Science and somewhat invisible, is the communication. Exchange of information and not logics. Therefore, a small lack of integrity comes in exchange for easy communication. And the integrity is done by Reviews, instead of astonishing papers with groundbreaking logics (which are rare and more often than not mere false presumptions).

Science is but a natural emergent mechanism with the objective of surviving while uniting a logical ground among all his fields and subareas. Its fundamental pillars are, rather recursively the communication logics themselves.

The Big Problem of Science - The lack of ingenuously and integrity

Hi,

It is somewhat interesting the fact that science, like culture, have lot of difficulties in learning. And in science, things get even more slow and hard to change.

First, I will talk about Integrity.

It is pretty normal these days to find someone telling that there are too many information to read and how hard it is to collect the most important ones. But, what I would like to talk about is how difficult things can get, even when you did a good job at collecting the best information. To make things simple, I will give an example:

Suppose there is a guy named Jone, who happened to read around 500 articles to find the most important ones, from which he would like to create his PhD project. Now, when he compiles (integrates) everything in his new project, making the research proposal full of references and following a logical path of thought. From which he ingenuously thinks to be going deep in the science and doing a work worth of it.
His project undoubtedly has some small errors, but overall it is very promising and bringing innovation from various branches of science to propose something that is at the same time innovative and logical. Poor Jone, he may be good at this work, but he is a newbie in science.
As soon as he sends his work to be reviewed he finds out. No a single person could understand what he wrote, he may not even get it. But the reason why this happened is a consequence of the lack of integrity, because when someone integrates, the other people lacks the complete understanding of the whole to follow the process.
But Jone is unstoppable and not yet understanding the illogical rational processes of the human beings, he send his proposal to a bunch of professors, which is kind of a desperate movement, but that may somehow explain why there is nobody understanding a simple path of thought connecting different areas with well established articles.
And this was when, a professor named Claudio answers with a positive understanding. Even commenting on improvements and possible obstacles he may be wanting to study more. And then Jones gets even more perplex, why would one person understands? why not the others? what is happening?
Complicated questions and one big strange thing was that Claudio not even researched the same field that Jones was proposing to work into. So how can that be? Jones could not guess, he then asked Claudio:
- "How could you understand my project, when no other person in my area could even grasp?"
Claudio answered:
- "In my research I do not focus in your area, that is right. But we are trying here to solve complex large scale problems, which happens to be the same problems that you want to solve. And differently from other researchers, I read a lot of different approaches to solve those problems (my approach is not chosen randomly or by status, but clearly justifiable logically). Therefore I can understand well your thoughts, also when they are not the same as mine. But it is normally hard to find researchers that follow an area with the integrity of the whole."

In other words, the more you integrate logically the science the less people can understand you. And if science is this bunch of branches without a connection, what you are doing is much superior than science.


Second, "the more knowledge one has, the better it gets in a job" is true. But researchers fall in the same error as all the people on a job. Because to innovate, to create is not to get better, but sometimes also to get ingenuous.

Einstein was pretty ingenuous at his questions and by trying to answer them, he got big important theories. People usually think of the science as the truth, one of the reasons is that it was based on a logical principle of precision and truth (which seems very different than the logical behind animals). That is, not the only logic and by no way the best one.
Maybe only the easiest one to understand and reason.

Ingenuousness has been normally seen as the opposite of Knowledge. This may even make sense in the most used mathematical logics, but there are plenty of other mathematical logics that would see them as complements and supplements.

A Letter to the Wise Man

"Gott wuerfelt nur."

God only plays dice.

An answer to the famous quote from Einstein - "Gott wuerfelt nicht". In my opinion, the universe is only made of stochastic functions and any deterministic ones are only an approximation to it.

Or even, the universe might be made of deterministic equations, but we are cursed with a limited precision in our sensors (biological or not) that we will never see it the way it is.

That can be extended to problems, that is, if you happen to solve a problem in all situations, it might only be that your samples are limited.

It is very human to try and adopt systems where the certainty is 100%, or in other words, it is easier to develop and understand systems where the functionality is not under some noise conditions, where mistakes could not occur internally or externally and when the results expected are clear and not under a great number of trade offs and unclear multi-modal complex functions.

However, the real world seems to prefer the systems that are more adaptive rather than the ones that solves everything 100% correctly, under some precise conditions.

It might only be that our understanding of the world, as of today, is a bit ankward and much attention is paid into developing the certain than discovering the uncertain, leading to very few progress. It is no wonder, even Einstein that could figure relativity could not accept a probabilistic model of our world. It is that hard and it might be our big unability.

I would even say that stochastic systems are the evolution of mathematics, but given its high complexity, it is underused.

Though, things are changing, mathematics is not the same as it was before, it was reinvented by the advance of technology and nowadays it might even be easier to understand and tame stochastic systems as it once was with the deterministic field.

I will go further and give an example, if you would like to calculate the pi, there is a very easy to understand way of doing it using a simple stochastic system. Imagine that you have a square and a circle inside of it. If you get a random variable x,y and put it inside the square, there is a chance it falls inside of the circle. This chance is directly proportional to the area of the circle that is pi*R^2.

Now if you divide the number of samples from x,y that falls inside the circle by the total number of samples, you will get an approximation to the following: pi*R^2/((2*R)^2). That is, the result is proportional to pi/4.

The more you collect samples the near the result and it is very easy to program and understand. No complex at all, but try this without a computer and you will see how difficult it is to imagine the result.

I dare say, if mathematics is the deepest science of the world from which every other science depends, computer science is the tool to understand mathematics and therefore the base of science in a technological world.

But changes are not easily accepted in the cultural world, it is even harder to occur in a educational system. Though some guys are luckily experimenting programming before mathematics and things are getting much easier and clear. No wonder they are called sometimes as geniuses, hackers, and so on. But truth be said, the wheel is invented, it is here and there, they are just the unique humans that use the wheel appropriately.

I am sure you know Mathematics was once a forbidden and secret society, that people were once afraid of using a vehicle that travels more than 100km/h, and etc. Therefore, it was the same with mathematics, other sciences and discoveries, no reason to be different now.

A thing about C portability, or why you do not need to leave the C side when someone says they work with Java, Python or anything

I am not used to write about programming here, but this fact really got my attention nowadays at work.

I was required to pass my algorithm to Java and a bit reluctant about the intensive workload which would result in two codes with twice the maintenance time. So I decided to challenge myself again and try a different solution, that is, why not interface the C code to Java?

Well I have nothing against programming in Java or anything. But porting code is a terrible straightforward thing that should never be done by humans, or at least, not by myself.

So I found a challenging, entertaining, useful and much better solution. To interface!

My task was a little difficult from only calling a library and so on, because my library must use a function defined by the user and this way Callbacks are a must. I was a bit scary at first if all this would end up nice, because JNI (Java Native Interface) did not seem to have much followers on the net and if it was CNI I would have dropped the subject, because it would be certainly lack either documentation or efficacy... but Java is another world, not better not worse, just another. And most of the things done in Java, although too complicated, they are not done by third parties.

And at the end, I just got a pretty system working well under Java and using the C++ shared library :).

Most people would probably port code and would end up with duplicate maintenance. I am really happy to have worked until now with 2 managers that really understand and accept better solutions. I know there are a bunch that only wants simple and fast solution.

All this happened once before when I worked in Nokia and they used scripts in a proprietary system, I just needed to compile a DLL from my C code and it all end up nice as well :). But I should say, that time things was much easier than this time around.

The Idiosyncrasy of our Languages

Here goes myself with the English language again. But what if I wrote this sentence in German, would this phrase retain its meaning?

I think most people would answer yes, it is just logical if we think in phrases as a code or mathematical formula ready to be transmitted. And we clearly know our logical analysis is the same in all remote places.

But are we only propagating logical expressions? I think there is more than meet the eyes, much more.

You may be thinking about feelings and all the related expressions of social relationship. Because you probably noticed that people are passing information with a clear social objective. For example, to cause fear or to create compassion.
And this could of course be passed in all languages, although in different ways, right?

Wrong! There are expressions that could not be translated and I dare say, most of them are not. For example, if you say God in a catholic country you have one meaning, but try saying this word in a atheist country or in a country with a different prominent religion. They have very different meanings and feelings related and you will certainly get different results.

There are numerous funny situations related, but what I want to write here is about what we don't usually perceive. For example, you might translate from the German "mir fehlt das DDR" to the English "I miss the DDR".

This is almost the same, but if you take a deep look, we are missing lot of German culture in the English phrase. What is DDR? Ok, lets translate this to: German Democratic Republic. Hmm, but the Germans know how it was there, so we can put... and this goes on and on. Sometimes it just means lot more than what it is written.

You may think it is a classic example of historic culture differences only, so let me get to one more example: German: "Das gibt es gar nicht!" could be translated to English: "I can't believe it". Or in other words, it cannot be translated to English, it is an expression of something surprising or very wrong. I got this example because the idea of right and wrong in German is clear, strong and very natural. But there is not the case in Portuguese, Spanish and English.

The problem is that all words, though similar, have different meanings. Fight in American english is more about violence, and in German "Kampf" is more about perseverance to achieve an objective. I know some of the people understands what I am talking and even know this already. But have they thought the consequences?

One side of the consequences is the conflict. There is a strong conflict from countries trying to understand each other and trying to reach diplomatic positions. People judging other countries on pre assumptions based on their own culture.

Iraq is a good example of sourveignity problem, that is really hard to understand. And yet, we want to solve their problems. Is not it?

Making things simple, there are hundreds of interpretations for each phrase we write, but those hundred interpretations, if this phrase is translated, would differ a lot from language to language probabilistically.

But at the other side, the languages also create islands of culture and permit the survival of plenty of cultures at the same time. Ideologies alive that coevolve together.

And what is really interesting about those cultures is that we can somehow understand the evolution of culture by analysing the expansion and evolution of the languages. The graph of Indo-Europeian languages for example.


This graph teachs alone an intense europe history. The civilizations who died and the ones that survived, along to the ones that let a legacy.

I would say that this graph does a good job in separating the similarity in cultures. And it also goes deep in our day to day life, because who ever thought we were using a legacy of our ancestors, something that tells so much about ourselves as a civilization and country.

Something so precious and delicate that we would hide if we could, but we unconsciously speak.