Category: Personal

Emotional (and social) intelligence

It was the dawn of the 1970s, at the height of worldwide student protests against the Vietnam War, and a librarian stationed at a U.S. Information Agency post abroad had received bad news: A student group was threatening to burn down her library.

But the librarian had friends among the group of student activists who made the threat. Her response on first glance might seem either naïve or foolhardy — or both: She invited the group to use the library facilities for some of their meetings.

But she also brought Americans living in the country there to listen to them — and so engineered a dialogue instead of a confrontation.

In doing so, she was capitalizing on her personal relationship with the handful of student leaders she knew well enough to trust — and for them to trust her. The tactic opened new channels of mutual understanding, and it strengthened her friendship with the student leaders. The library was never touched.

(More available at the flash preview widget’s page 21)

— Daniel Goleman, Working With Emotional Intelligence, Competencies of the stars. 1998

In Working with Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman explains several practical methods to improve the social skills of people. Before I bought this book a year or two ago, I read Daniel’s first book Emotional Intelligence. This weekend I finally started reading Working With.

I recommend the section Some Misconceptions. Regretfully ain’t this section available for display in the flash preview widget. Instead of violating copyright laws by typing it down here, I’m recommending to just buy the book.

You can find audiobooks online. The section about misconceptions is at track three. Track five talks about two computer programmers, which is very illustrative for many of my blog’s readers (and possibly myself). I hope you wont illegally download using torrents. Instead, buy the material.

Also very interesting is this lecture by Daniel:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Here you can also find a Authors@Google talk by Daniel Goleman:


What distinguishes Daniel Goleman from old line proponents of positive thinking, however, is his grounding in psychology and neuroscience. Armed with a Ph.D in psychology from Harvard and a first-grade journalism background at the New York Times, Dr. Goleman has authored half a dozen books that explore the physical and chemical workings on the brain and their relationship with what we experience as everyday life.

— Peter Allen, director of Google university, introduction to Daniel Goleman. August 3, 2007

I hope readers of my blog will shun away from pseudo science when it comes to emotional and social intelligence, but instead read and learn from authors like Daniel Goleman. I also (still) recommend the books available at The Moral Brain by for example Dr. Jan Verplaetse.

Invisible costs


We would rather suffer the visible costs of a few bad decisions than incur the many invisible costs that come from decisions made too slowly – or not at all – because of a stifling bureaucracy.

— Letter by Warren E. Buffett to the shareholders of Berkshire, February 26, 2010

The Euro skeptics and pro Europeans are finally united in an opinion!

We both agree that Nigel Farage is a complete moron.

Perhaps we should put a damp rag like the one he mentions in his mouth next time he opens it?

Nigel Farage, you’re an disgrace to yourself. The European parliament is no place for personal attacks, and you aren’t fit to carry the title Member of the European Parliament. Please keep the honour to yourself and resign.

Every sensible person outside of the U.K. thinks you should. Even the Euro skeptics do. You’re an embarrassment for your country and its culture, so I hope for the people in the U.K. that they’ll kick you out of politics.

I fear you’re just playing the populist card, and that you’ll even get votes for this from other morons.

Please don’t rewrite softwares (that are) written in .NET

This (super) cool .NET developer and good friend came to me at the FOSDEM bar to tell me he was confused about why during the Tracker presentation I was asking people to replace F-Spot and Banshee.

I hope I didn’t say it like that, I would never intent to say that. But I’ll review the video of the presentation as soon as Rob publishes it.

Anyway, to ensure everybody understood correctly what I did wanted to say (whether or not I did, is another question):

The call was to inspire people to reimplement or to provide different implementations of F-Spot’s and Banshee’s data backends, so that they would use an RDF store like tracker-store instead of each app its own metadata database.

I think I also mentioned Rhythmbox in the same sentence because the last thing I would want is to turn this into a .NET vs. anti-.NET debate. It just happens to be that the best GNOME softwares for photo and music management are written in .NET (and that has a good reason).

People who know me also know that I think those anti-.NET people are disruptive ignorable people. I also actively and willingly ignore them (and they should know this). I’m actually a big fan of the Mono platform.

I’ll try to ensure that I don’t create this confusion during presentations anymore.

SMASHED at FOSDEM?

This is to let Rob Taylor and David Schlesinger know that they better start organizing S.M.A.S.H.E.D.

Tumbler

Last few weeks I have been working on the new thumbnail infrastructure for future Maemo products.

Last year I made a specification for requesting thumbnails over D-Bus. Afterward I made a quick prototype and replaced the hildon-thumbnailer library of Maemo with it. This prototype will be deployed on the standard N900 image. It’s too late to replace Fremantle’s thumbnailer with the new stuff. It takes time to properly test it.

While I was developing both the specification and the prototype XFCE developer Jannis Pohlmann contacted me about rewriting my prototype for use in the XFCE project. Tumbler was born.

The nice people at Nokia are more interested in working with upstream projects instead of maintaining own products separately, so I shifted my focus from hildon-thumbnail to contributing to Jannis’ Tumbler project.

We realized that we needed different kinds of schedulers so while Jannis was developing Tumbler I kindly asked to consider abstracting scheduling a bit. Tumbler now has two schedulers. The background one sets I/O and scheduler priorities to IDLE and processes its thumbnail tasks in FIFO order. The foreground uses LIFO and will instead of grouping Ready signals together, emit them immediately after each single thumbnail is finished. Default is of course foreground.

We also realized that thumbnail flavors are going to be platform specific. So we added some support for this in the DBus APIs that we further fine tuned and versioned.

Congratulations and appreciation to Jannis who made Tumbler’s code and design really nice. Also thanks a lot for constructively considering our requirements and helping adapting Tumbler’s code to cope with them.

I know you for example worked one long night on this stuff, so I officially owe you a few beers and/or cocktails next conference.

How about FOSDEM?

Found this while surfing the internets

The Theory of Interstellar Trade. A paper by Paul Krugman, July 1978.

It should be noted that, while the subject of this paper is silly, the analysis actually does make sense. This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics.

Pat Condell on ultra tolerant liberal left people

Not watching youtubers very often I almost forgot about Pat Condell’s video blog. Today I decided to take a look at his latest video material.

Pat Condell is, just like me, an outspoken atheist who enjoys exercising his freedom of speech to criticize various religions. Fairly often he criticizes Islam.

Before I continue I’ll remind people that, like Pat Condell, I have nothing in particular against Islam. I don’t have anything against peaceful people in general. Christian, Muslim, atheist, Buddhist or whatever: I don’t care that much. I don’t believe any of those fairy tales, but it’s your freedom to do! I do care about it when, in for example Western countries, countless Christians try to expunge you from society because “you don’t believe in anything”. For many of them not believing is worse than believing in the wrong God, or being a Satanist, or being a sadist. I want to criticize religions and I want to stress the importance of having the right to criticize religions.

Pat takes on the ultra tolerant liberal left people in this video. Just like Pat I used to be on the liberal left. And just like Pat, because I believe in things like social justice, tolerance and respect, I am no longer on the liberal left. Here’s a quote from the video:

You people have certainly reminded me , as if I needed reminding, why my political views have changed in recent years. You see.. foolishly, perhaps, I used to take freedom for granted.

But now thanks to ultra tolerant self hating-multicultural lemmings like you, I don’t.

Politically I used to always be on the liberal left. Because I believe in things like social justice, tolerance and respect. You know, the good things in life. I still believe in those things, which is why I’m no longer on the liberal left.

Apologists for evil

In this video Pat talks about banning the burka. Given that wearing a burka in Western countries is most definitely only done to make a pathetic political statement, I think it is indeed a good idea to ban burkas. Besides you’re not allowed to wear ski masks when you enter a bank either. You’re not allowed to walk naked in the streets. Yet countless people are trying to claim that these women should have a right to wear burkas. Framing it that way is of course utter bullshit: the debate isn’t about women rights at all. Claiming that it is, is being intellectually dishonest. The debate is about the right for a Islamist husband to claim ownership over a woman or a girl. This isn’t a right in Western countries. The fact that it isn’t, is a good thing.

Pat also points out that Western feminists are rather silent about women rights in Islam. Usually feminists are assertive and confident but this time, apparently, feminists are muted on the issue. Why is that? Where are they?

Ban the burka

For the person who recently debated religion with me (you know who you are): I recently read “Letter to A Christian Nation” by Sam Harris. Very interesting read. I recommend it!

A ridiculous small shellscript

“Now, we can finally replace Richard Stallman with a small shellscript“

— Alp Toker, Gran Canaria at the Igalia party, 06 juli 2009

I’ll write it in C#

public void ActCrazy () {
   while (true) {
      be incorrect about Mono
   }
}

FWD: Entrepreneurs can change the world

Link for planets

And a thank you to Sally Shapiro and Johan Agebjörn

Thanks for your music Johan Agebjörn and Sally Shapiro.

It’s wonderful!

Hey Karoliina, Sally Shapiro sounds a bit like the stuff you make. I don’t know, maybe it’s a completely different style. Who cares?

When is your next song ready, by the way? Aha! Train Tracks. Listening.

Don’t stop making music! We addicts need our drug.

Utilitarianism

Introduction

In a discussion some concluded that technology X is ‘more tied to GNOME’ than technology Y because ‘more [GNOME] people are helped by X’ due to dependencies for Y. Dependencies that might be unacceptable for some people.

This smells like utilitarianism and therefore it’s subject to criticism.

Utilitarianism is probably best described by Jeremy Bentham as:

Ethics at large may be defined, the art of directing men’s actions to the production of the greatest possible quantity of happiness.

— Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation

A situational example that, in my opinion, falsifies this:

You are standing near the handle of a railroad switch. Six people are attached to the rails. Five of them at one side of the switch, one at the other side of the switch. Currently the handle is set in such a way that five people will be killed. A train is coming. There’s no time to get help.

  • Is it immoral to use the handle and kill one person but save five others?
  • Is it immoral not to use the handle and let five people get killed?

The utilitarianist chooses the first option, right? He must direct his actions to the production of the greatest possible quantity of happiness.

Body of the discussion

Now imagine that you have to throw a person on the rails to save the lives of five others. The person would instantly get killed but the five others would be saved by you sacrificing one other.

A true utilitarianist would pick the first option in both exercises; he would use the handle and he would throw a person on the rails. In both cases he believes his total value of produced happiness is (+3) and he believes that in both situations picking the second option means his total value of produced happiness is (-4) + (+1) = (-3). The person who picks the second option is therefore considered ethically immoral by a true utilitarianist.

For most people that’s not what they meant the first time. Apparently ethics don’t allow you to always say (+4) + (-1) = (+3) about happiness. I’ll explain.

The essence of the discussion

Psychologically, less people will believe that throwing a person on the rails is morally the right thing to do. When we can impersonificate we make it more easy for our brains to handle such a decision. Ethically and morally the situation is the same. People feel filthy when they need to physically touch a person in a way that’ll get him killed. A handle makes it more easy to kill him.

Let’s get back to the Gnome technology discussion … If you consider pure utilitarianism as most ethical, then you should immediately stop developing for GNOME and start working at Microsoft: writing good Windows software at Microsoft would produce a greater possible quantity of happiness.

Please also consider reading criticism and defence of utilitarianism at wikipedia. Wikipedia is not necessarily a good source, but do click on some links on the page and you’ll find some reliable information.

Some scientists claim that we have a moral instinct, which is apparently programmed by our genes into our brains. I too believe that genetics probably explain why we have a moral system.

The developer of X built his case as following: My technology only promotes happiness. The technology doesn’t promote unhappiness.

It was a good attempt but there are multiple fallacies in his defense.

Firstly, in a similar way doesn’t technology Y promote unhappiness either. If this is assumed about X, neither promote unhappiness.

Secondly, how does the developer of X know that his technology promotes no unhappiness at all? Y also promotes some unhappiness and I don’t have to claim that it doesn’t. That’s a silly assumption.

Thirdly, let’s learn by example: downplaying the amount of unhappiness happens to be the exact same thing regimes having control over their media also did whenever they executed military action. The act of downplaying the amount of unhappiness should create a reason for the spectator to question it.

Finally, my opinion is that the very act of claiming that ‘X is more tied to GNOME’, will create unhappiness among the supporters of Y. Making the railroad example applicable anyway.

My conclusion and the reason for writing this

‘More’ and ‘less’ happiness doesn’t mean a lot if both are incommensurable. Valuations like “more tied to GNOME” and “less tied to GNOME” aren’t meaningful to me. That’s because I’m not a utilitarianist. I even believe that pure utilitarianism is dangerous for our species.

To conclude I think we should prevent that the GNOME philosophy is damaged by too much utilitarianism.

Just a quote …

Thinking must never submit itself, neither to a dogma, nor to a party, nor to a passion, nor to an interest, nor to a preconceived idea, nor to whatever it may be, if not to facts themselves, because, for it, to submit would be to cease to be.


La pensée ne doit jamais se soumettre, ni à un dogme, ni à un parti, ni à une passion, ni à un intérêt, ni à une idée préconçue, ni à quoi que ce soit, si ce n’est aux faits eux-mêmes, parce que, pour elle, se soumettre, ce serait cesser d’être.

— Henri Poincaré, Nov 1909 Brussels

Hey mr. Obama

Here’s an idea if you want to inspire the generation that voted for you:

Let’s go to Mars.

Mutual respect for other’s opinions

If I would have been a U.S. citizen, I would have voted for Obama now that Ron Paul was no more candidate. Although back then I didn’t know enough about Ron Paul to have voted for him instead of Obama.

That doesn’t mean I must somehow dislike McCain, although at the end of the race I didn’t like how he campaigned. He has regained much of my respect after his concession speech. I really hope both Democrats and Republicans will listen to what he told you guys in that speech.

A lot of what Europeans think is wrong in America is exactly the kind of black and white thinking that must be overcome and that McCain & Obama have seemingly tried to address in both their speeches. Although we have our share of black & white thinkers too, sure.

Wrong & right, evil & good, right or wrong: none of these concepts really exist. They are just models. I convinced myself that of all candidates, Obama understands this most. He will listen to you, especially when you disagree, he said.

It’s in disagreement that we humans learn most from each other. It’s in cooperation and mutual respect that we make most progression.

The only rational conclusion a rationalist like me can make is that there’s no black and white. There are many shades of gray and on top of that there are many eyes who all have shades of different opinions. War, is something that turns eyes into black and white.

I conclude that the moral of respect for other opinions is still a successful meme: we saw McCain shush his audience when they were being disrespectful for the outcome of the election, we saw him giving a brave and gentleman concession speech. I repeat that I consider this meme to be the most important one humanity ever got convinced of. And for this reason, McCain has regained my respect.

Today, I’m happy that I visited the Boston Summit this year. I was in America when there was hope, now I can visit it again when there will be change.

Right?

They say the grass is greener on the other side,

… but maybe it’s the sheep who have been telling me lies

ps. Marked as ‘extremely condescending’, since it is condescending for the sheep on the other side.

Moral indulgence

In the last few days people seemingly implying a descent from superiority of moral highground to me, have called upon me (in private conversations) to decide for my readers if the content that I write is morally acceptable for planet.gnome.org. Their reasoning is that I should feel an implied responsibility for the content of that website.

If I don’t take the responsibility that readers have themselves already, I’m to be considered a coward. That’s because, according to these people, I avoid the moral responsibility to uphold an imaginary highground reputation of the organization behind said website.

It needs no illustration that this is just the opinion of a group within the GNOME community. Not the entire community. Nonetheless this seemingly moral superiority is not to be mistaken with a condescending circus show.

The moral of respect for other opinions is a meme that for the last decades (and I hope in future too) has been a very successful one. I consider this meme to be the most important one humanity ever got convinced of.

Moral superiors do not need to present empirical proof of correctness in their Sophia. The truth of their moral values are unquestionable.

Let’s assume this to be the case: it’s immoral to only assume that your readers will make up their own minds about ideas that appear on websites like planet.gnome.org. Instead, it’s a necessity that each and every author of a blog, from which planet.gnome.org pulls content, is required to have a “responsibility of content”.

I conclude that it isn’t necessary that the audience of that website gets an honest illustration of who we are: human beings who are sometimes geniuses and sometimes idiots.

Instead it’s necessary that we are portrayed as good role models. Concepts such as good and bad are of course defined by the superiors. Those concepts are unquestionable.

Let me be clear that I disagree with this.

I questioned whether only intent can either be good or bad, but that question was refuted as irrelevant. For it’s the beholder who matters. Not the producer.

The reason for this irrelevance being that an audience doesn’t take the responsibility of trying to understand intent. I disagree with this conclusion. I think the audience does understand intent.

I have decided to tag my future posts as “condescending” in case I feel the content might be interpreted as showing superiority. Don’t be surprised if the majority of posts will be tagged as such.

The freedom to choose is morally more important to me than the necessity to mark responsible content. Therefore I ask my audience, and planet maintainers, to decide for themselves.

Pro-vagina voting!

The shift of female voters going from Obama to McCain once Palin got appointed as running mate for McCain basically shows that the pro-vaginas voters in the United States want a vagina in power.

Do these voters also care about having people in power who actually know something about foreign policy? I mean, a lipstick pitbull? Seriously … what the fuck? The more I find about this person, the more her no-knowledge about politics makes me cry. This is clearly a “election” running mate: a running mate to steal as much as possible pro-vagina voters away from Obama. Not a “real” running mate.

The sex organs of an individual, and if you are a real feminist you’ll even agree with this, shouldn’t matter when voting for a president and his/her running mate. No matter how pissed you are about Obama having less female-looking sex organs than Hillary.

This is just ridiculous.

Unlike the vast majority of the Hollywood movies doesn’t the real world guarantee a happy ending. I hope McCain realizes this, now that he decided to turn this election into a Soap like Beverly Hills 90210.

New music by Karoliina

Karoliina just E-mailed me to tell me that she just finished her new song.

This one sounds more like Vangelis than I have ever done before. It combines some symphonic elements (some (sampled) instruments from symphonic orchestra were used) with synthetic sounds.

— Karoliina Salminen

The song

A video with the song as background showing the cathedral in Mechelen (filmed by Karoliina and Kate during Akademy)

I like it!

Russia

My naive opinion on the current strategy for dealing with Russia

Maybe Cold War organizations like NATO don’t see it, as their people are indoctrinated by the need for a unified strategy against a common enemy (keep Russia out, Germany down and the United States in).

But the world has changed since 1989.

Whenever the Soviet Union was stubborn, it was also predictable. Today’s Russia is not predictable. It is and has been pushing its real goals in a rather subtle way (even if you think the Georgian crisis was not subtle, the real Russian goal is). You can no longer just contain Russia. Neither can you easily engage with them. You need to ‘negotiate’ your relationship with it.

By kicking Russia out of treaties and organizations, all you will achieve is that Russia will start doing business with individual European countries rather than with the European Union. Which means different market rules will play. Less control over mutual interests in Europe: more competition among the individual European countries over Russia’s resources and market, sharper differences between Western -and Eastern Europe.

In the long run the result of that will be a split of Europe into Western -and Eastern Europe. This would be followed by a decline of Western power over Eastern European countries. Strategically seen, this would be a perfect outcome for Russia. A dream come true, for them.

Without the wealthy Western Europe, both the economy and industry of many of Eastern Europe’s countries are still underdeveloped and not yet ready to compete, on their own, against three major economic powers. As a result would Eastern Europe become yet another unstable region in the World.

Russia conducting the Orchestra of opposition politics in those countries, and Russian media influence, will for many sound like an answer to their dissatisfactions.

I think it’s for that reason that keeping Eastern Europe within the group called “Europe”, is something you want to strive for. A split with Western Europe would inevitably mean major influence from Russia in these Eastern European countries and regions.

It’s in fact already taking place here and there. If you take off your by propaganda blinded glasses and go look for the facts, you’ll see.

My own naive proposal

Russia’s regime is doomed the moment the Russian elite looses its European legitimacy. Russia’s future wealth depends on Europe’s willingness to continue doing business with them. This business must be in both directions. Just selling gas yet remaining isolated from the World markets means that for example your currency can easily be devaluated outside of your borders. Meaning that you are selling your resources too cheap or that the actual price that you got for it depends on the politics of other nations (like petrodollars). Replace currency with any other valuable resource located within your own borders.

The Russian elite who keep people like Vladimir Putin in power are the same people who are doing business selling Russian gas to Europe. If we want a peaceful world, we can seize the opportunity of doing business with these Russian elites to convince them of at least certain of European’s values. Values like free markets. Especially as we integrate our European businesses into Russia and especially if Russian elites start seeing the benefits of that (wealth), will European values further influence Russian politics.

If we kick them out of our organizations, they’ll just continue doing business with individual European countries. Making it harder to keep Europe united. They very well know that Europe needs energy. They know individual European countries will continue buying gas from Russia.

It would be insane because if we don’t, China will. And then China instead will get a strategic partnership with Russia. Pushing their values and culture. Rising new economies are the circumstances of today. Containment is not an answer to changed circumstances.

Europeans want a multipolar World, right? This is the opportunity to have Russia, China, United States and Europe as different economic powers (I simplified it, I of course know there are more economic centers).

My naive conclusion

A new kind of World is coming towards us. Although the history book on the shelve is always repeating itself, all we can do is learn from the past.

Learning however, is not the same as maintaining a strategy designed for completely different past circumstances. We are called humans because unlike many other species we can intelligently adapt ourselves. Let’s consume that capability.

In order to succeed as a people, as a nation and as a culture you have to synchronize your strategy with today’s circumstances.

It’s our time and our generation, to cope with them.