Today I received the following email from Amazon:

Dear Publisher,

We noticed your blog (listed below) has not updated for more than 60 days. Kindle customers expect to receive frequent updates for blogs and news feeds to which they subscribe. Because blogs should update at least once per month, we are cancelling blogs that have not updated in more than 60 days. Accordingly, if you do not publish new updates within 7 days, we will remove your publication from the Kindle Store.

Blog Title: MobKool | Blog ASIN: B002IKLLRG

Sincerely,
Amazon Kindle Team

Of course, by publishing their email, i dodge the bullet.

False Spring 1

Too close to my end

You awoke feelings long dead

Best we never met

False Spring 2

A single branch

blooms amidst the frost

Then, freezes

I’ve been attending the Semantic Technology 2010 conference this week. My attendance has only solidified my belief that RDF is the data format of the future for the web. There is a constantly increasing amount of unstructured data available on the web, and RDF provides the easiest way to pull it all together and relate it. For more on SemTech, go to the SemTech website.

The official version of the ZDNet Chrome extension that I adapted from the Google sample, is available here: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/plmjgigefjbepajlfhohlhhnlmhjnlde

UPDATE: Here are the SmartPlanet and TechRepublic extensions.

The other book I read this weekend was Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. This book explores some of the themes of loss, commitment, and Catholicism that later show up in The Comedians, but it’s less mature in many ways. The story is less believable, and the rushed ending is irritating. Overall, though, it’s a an extremely moving account of love gone badly wrong. Many people group Greene with fellow Catholic novelist Evelyn Waugh, and After the Affair is often compared to Brideshead Revisited. But, Greene was temperamentally far better equipped to realistically write about sex than Waugh, and this book shows it. There are some hauntingly beautiful passages in the book, particularly the diary excerpts that constitute the center of the book’s plot. My favorite quote, though, is the following passage on unhappiness and happiness:

“The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem to be aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egoism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity. The words of human love have been used by the saints to describe their vision of God, and so, I suppose, we might use the terms of prayer, meditation, contemplation to explain the intensity of the love we feel for a woman. We too surrender memory, intellect, intelligence, and we too experience the deprivation, the noche oscura, and sometimes as a reward a kind of peace. The act of love itself has been described as the little death, and lovers sometimes experience too the little peace. It is odd to find myself writing these phrases as though I loved what in fact I hate. Sometimes I don’t recognize my own thoughts. What do I know of phrases like ‘the dark night’ or of prayer, who have only one prayer? I have inherited them, that is all, like a husband who is left by death in the useless possession of a woman’s clothes, scents, pots of cream . . . And yet there was this peace . . .”

For my thoughts on The Comedians, see my post Let Us Go Up to Jerusalem and Die with Him

I read Anthony Everitt’s Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome on Sunday. It’s a pretty conventional biography of Hadrian. Overall, I’d say it’s about the same quality as his work on Augustus (Augustus: The Life of Rome’s First Emperor). But, that’ s not saying much I’m afraid. In the end, there’s no substitute for Suetonius’s The Twelve Caesars.

“We proceed in step-by-step discussion from inference to inference, whereas He conceives through mere intuition. Thus, in order to gain insight into some properties of the circle, of which it possesses infinitely many, we begin with one of the simplest; we take it for a definition and proceed from it by means of inferences to a second property, from this to a third, hence a fourth, and so on. The divine intellect, on the other hand, grasps the essence of a circle senza temporaneo discorso (without the use of the profane reasoning) and thus apprehends the infinite array of it’s properties.”

— Galileo quoted in An Introduction to General Systems Thinking (Silver Anniversary Edition).

What Galileo discusses in this quote is the human inability to conceive of two properties at the same time. Similarly, we are incapable of thinking about two causes acting simultaneously. Instead, we are forced to break them out and think of them one at at time. Incidentally, this was a primary factor in my dissatisfaction with history. By our nature, humans are incapable of writing a coherent history of any event. Instead, we can merely contribute one of many complementary views. But God, as Galileo notes, is defined by his ability to conceive of a thing as a whole; rather than by a sequential consideration of properties. Now, what Galileo defined as Godly, will soon, I believe, be true of computers. One day, machines will have a richer view of the world than humans do, and will think of it in ways we cannot.

Recently, I’ve been reading An Introduction to General Systems Thinking (Silver Anniversary Edition). It’s a fascinating book, with insights on almost every page. Here’s the author’s thoughts on the problems of interpreting observations:

Whenever we observe a state that is both conspicuous and improbable, we are faced with a quandary. Do we believe our observation or do we invoke some special hypothesis?
…
Conservatism is introduced into the scientific investigation by the very assumption that observations must be consistent with present theories. An observation is more likely to be discarded as “erroneous” if it is out of consonance with theory. … The complete substitution of theory for observation is, of course, not scientific. Even worse is going through the motions of observing, but discarding as “spurious” every observation that does not fit theory.
…
This, then, is the problem. Raw, detailed observation of the world is just too rich a diet for science. No two situations are exactly alike unless we make them so. Every license plate we see is a miracle
…
“A statue is a situation which can be recognized if it occurs again.” But no state will ever occur again if we don’t lump many states into one “state.” Thus, in order to learn at all, we must forego some potential discrimination of states, some possibility of learning everything.
…
Science does not, and cannot, deal with miracles. Science deals only with repetitive events. Each science has to have characteristic ways of lumping the states of the systems it observes, in order to generate repetition. How does it lump? Not in arbitrary ways, but in ways determined by its past experience — ways that “work” for that science. Gradually, as the science matures, the “brain” is traded for the “eye,” until it becomes almost impossible to break a scientific paradigm (a traditional way of lumping) with mere empirical observations.

Now, if the issues outlined in the above quote are a problem for the hard sciences, they are a disaster in fuzzier disciplines like history, economics, and politics. They also have implications for business. Most of the time, you will find, that there is no widespread agreement among your co-workers on the state you are facing. And, if you all do agree, it’s probably just that your viewpoints are not really independent, not that you are all correct.

Insertion sorts are good when your data is already partially sorted, or if you have a small collection to sort. That’s about the best I can say for them. Here’s two versions in PHP. The first uses two functions:

function insertion_sort($a)
{
for ($i=1; $i < count($a); $i++) { inserter(&$a,$i,$a[$i]); } }

function inserter($a,$pos,$a_value)
{
$temp = $a[$pos];
$i = $pos;
while($i >= 0 && $a[$i-1] > $a_value)
{
$a[$i] = $a[$i-1];
$i = $i-1;
}
$a[$i] = $temp;
}


The second uses one function:


function insertion_sort($a)
{
for($j=1; $j < count($a); $j++) { $temp = $a[$j]; $i = $j; while(($i >= 0) && ($a[$i-1] > $temp)){
$a[$i] = $a[$i-1];
$i--;
}
$a[$i] = $temp;
}
}


To test them, use the following code:


$haystack = array(1,5,6,3);
insertion_sort(&$haystack);
print_r ($haystack);