Category Archives: Science & Technology

In search of the European blog

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I was all ready with my thesis as to why there are no blogs in Europe, why nobody here even knows what a blog is, when I decided I should perhaps search for the odd French or Italian blog just to prove my point. I now regret this bout of empiricism. A day’s worth of euroblogging later, my theories lie in shambles.

I will now have to write about why the Anglophone world doesn’t know about European blogs. But because I am my own worst editor, and this is my blog, you first get to read all about my reasons why there are no blogs in Europe. I’ll be brief…

  • Biased European papers: European papers are biased. Unlike in the US, there is no Chinese wall between the op-ed pages and hard news. But this is a a selling point; you know that if you read De Morgen you will see the world from a socialist perspective. A typical article in Corriere della Sera or Le Figaro is a long meandering affair, where the reporter doubles as opinion leader, admittedly in love with his own self importance, taking on the hauteurs of an auteur, not above the personal jab, or shamelessly tilting the perspective to suit his agenda. But does this description not fit Andrew Sullivan like a glove? Yes, European papers are paper blogs, and have been so for ages. Hence, went one of my theories, European blogs face stiffer competition from established brands of opinion mongering. And the brands make sure their offerings are edited, and because the reporters are paid, you can expect quality.

  • Languages used to access Google.
    Source: Google Zeitgeist.    Language: English is the lingua franca of the current age, English is understood by far more people than other European languages, including Spanish or Portuguese. This makes writing in English potentially much more rewarding than any other language. Is this kind of network effect not a disincentive to blogging in French?
  • Culture: Are there cultural differences at work? Are Europeans less prone to exercising their freedom of speech? Or, more kindly, are they less likely to feel the need to foist their narcissistic little lives on others? Do they possess the prudence of those who know they know nothing, a trait middle America is painfully lacking?
  • Technology: Perhaps Europeans are just the usual 3 years behind in adopting a new technology. In which case, they should discover blogging just… about… now.

    • We think Europeans don’t blog because we don’t read their blogs. We can’t read their blogs. It’s the language barrier, stupid. Yet blogging is done by educated elites and schoolkids on both sides of the Atlantic — and not by anybody else. There are fewer blogs in all of West Virginia than in the West Village; this I am sure of. Much as we wish it to be true, blogging is not as ubiquitous as TV, neither in the US nor in Europe. We build blogs, but only other bloggers come.

    I start my tour with the Francophone equivalent of the Bloggies: Les Blogs d’Or. The cynic in me immediately hones in on the categories. Best Belgian blog? But only if it’s in French? Potverdekke. No chance of blog@stefangeens.com competing. I delve into the current event blogs category. The quality is very high, but I am eventually reminded of I first read this essay in his book Mortal Questions. Gist: No amount of reductionist gymnastics is really ever going to really let us know “the subjective character of experience” of being a bat. Why a bat? Any animal will do, but bats have sonar, and Nagel hammers home his point by asking you if you can really know what it is like to be that animal if you cannot even perceive the world as it does.

    Thomas Nagel’s famous essay, What is it like to be a bat? These blogs have a different taste, a different feel, one that i suspect would not survive translation. And then it occurs to me that the entirety of Anglophone blogs have a different such subjective character of experience too.

    This is the best I can do to explain: A language’s blogs collectively tend to have similar assumptions about what the reader brings to the blog, and these assumptions in turn are distinct from those of blogs in other languages. Francophones seem more able to widthstand long, navel gazing neo-Baudelarian rants Francophone blogs also have a penchant for really small text. Maybe it’s because they have low res monitors still…by authors who have themselves photographed smoking cigarettes. Italians are more pragmatic; and their posts tend to be far shorter, and more concerned with media personalities than anything else.

    But in one way Italian blogs are much more accessible. Italian blogs do a far better job of linking to familiar Anglophone sites in addition to their homegrown offerings, Before you bash the French, tell me how many links to French blogs your site has.while the French seem to be more autonomous in their linking.

    I think I will go survey Swedish blogs next. An early entrant, a runner-up in the Bloggies no less, is How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons.

    I would love to hear of any favorite non-English blogs you frequently read.

    Obligatory meta-content post…

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    No posts for over a month because in my mind, BLOG@STEFANGEENS.COM had aquired lame-duck status qua design. This involves a non-trivial amount of manual labor porting over comments, as well as media, and it is not yet done, so no complaining if your acid-lined gems of old have temporarily disappeared.
     
    Also check out Text Pattern, another promising content management system for blogs.    Ever since I had decided I was going to change my content management engine from Blogger to Movable Type I saw little use for adding new writing to a soon-to-be obsolete system. Also, I needed a break. Not from blogging, but from the constraints that the blogging format was beginning to impose on me — or so I felt.

    So I redesigned the site. Site design is to me what I imagine gardening is to some people. It just pleases me to do it.

    For this latest iteration of BLOG@STEFANGEENS.COM, I decided to focus on readability. Specifically, I hankered after the simplicity of the page in a book: black, serifed text on white space. My inspiration came from Robert Bringhurst’s excellent The Elements of Typographic Style, which has become the typographer’s bible since it was first published 10 years ago. Question: What is the ideal amount of characters on a line of text? Answer: 66It is an immense pleasure to read, because it constantly practices what it preaches.

    But Elements gave me another idea. It uses marginalia copiously, to great effect. For the web, marginalia seems a natural addition: It breaks off from the narrative’s one-dimensional thread, but does not quite amount to the radical break of a link. It’s an extra half dimension of freedom, allowing short diversions that would otherwise be heaved into brackets, distracting from the flow of the text.

    1.618034… or 1 plus the square root of 5, divided by 2.How wide to make the marginalia? I went with the Golden Mean, that naturally pleasing ratio. We’ll see if it works. This site will need a few weeks to mature yet. But welcome back in the meantime. I have plenty to write about.

    The universe as Greek salad

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    A Greek physicist decided to use some of her mother’s cuisine tactics and may now have discovered the theory of everything. Fotini Markopoulou Kalamara has developed a framework for combining relativity and quantum theory that is much more elegant than string theory, because it does not presuppose space and matter but instead gives rise to space and matter, as we’d hoped all along a theory of everything would do. (Her original paper is a humbling experience). Also, it’s testable. And it’s based on the work of Roger Penrose, who is a bit of a colossal genius.

    But the most interesting bit, which is not stressed in the Scientific American article, is that her solution is functionally equivalent to calling the universe a quantum computer, and that is awfully close to what Wolfram has been braying about in A New Kind of Science.

    So it’s plausible that it’s all finally coming together now, and that soon we can all die happy.

    Personally, I would be very pleased for a Greek to end up discovering the theory of everything. This would more than make up for the 2 millenia of wrong science that was inflicted upon humanity by her fellow compatriot Aristotle. And I was wondering if anyone has her phone number.

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    The importance of being Ernst

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    I’ve just finished Boo Hoo, the story of the rise and fall of boo.com, written by its CEO, the Swede Ernst Malmsten. I think he was too nice to everybody in the book, himself included. Basically, it was nobody’s fault, he says, just bad luck with the timing of the dot com collapse. He never ever questions the basic business premise–that people are eager to buy such a non-commodity as a fashion item over the internet. Gap clothes, yes, they are a commodity, and I could see myself order another 2 pairs of khakis size 34, or The Great gatsby from Amazon, especially as it is cheaper, or a ticket to Sweden. But a North Face jacket, with no discount? Never. I’d have to try it on, and I can do so down the road. Meanwhile, the entire opposite sex and Felix actually relish the tactile shopping experience.

    I remember encountering boo.com through the Industry Standard articles and dismissing it then for precisely those reasons. Ernst seems not to see any difference between catalogue vendors such as L.L. Bean (online or otherwise) which peddle practical goods to rural types, and his target customer, the New Yorker who can pop around the corner to Urban Outfitters at 7pm on a Sunday.

    Meanwhile, I learned yesterday that the 3rd partner, Frank, also wrote a book, alas only in Swedish, telling his side of the story, one in which Ernst is portrayed much less flatteringly. Another great reason to learn Swedish, ja?

    If I had millions I don’t think I would have invested in boo.com. But then, this was way back in 1999; they hadn’t even invented blogs then. (To be fair though, sighs.com has existed since 1995, making it the world’s first blog way before the term was coined, replete with last articles at the top and all. Wouldn’t want to take anything away from the people responsible for sighs.com)

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    Die-ts

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    Bad eating habits and no exercise are worse for your health than smoking, according to a study. The Israelis seem to know this instinctively; they smoke up a storm, but there is not a superfluous ounce of fat on them. Countless lives could be saved if only the US would press-gang its obese into 3 years’ worth of military service, cigarette rations and all. The exercise and the diet alone would do wonders, not to mention the mental discipline gained.

    Searching for meaning II

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    I’ve always maintained that a belief in God is the result of a failure of the imagination: But in Simon Blackburn’s review of John Polkinghorne’s latest attempts to scientifically prove the existence of God, this argument is put a lot more articulately:

    When we act and think, we are not conscious of the multitude of causes in the brain or outside it that make our acting and thinking possible. The illusion is to project that lack of awareness onto the universe: to think that instead of being unaware of causes, we are aware that there are no causes. Our own actions and thoughts then become little exemplars of divine self-sufficiency. If we can have minds and make thoughts, just like that, why can’t God have a mind and make worlds, just like that?

    It is a melancholy thought that so much of mankind’s long affair with religion springs from an illusion infecting our conception of mind: the illusion that when we do not know what causes us to act and think, we know that nothing causes us to act and think. But it is only this illusion that sustains the argument from design, and it is only the argument from design that sustains belief in a self-sufficient divine agent.

    The whole article is worth reading.

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    Apple's (jail)bait and switch campaign

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    Oh how the fates conspire sometimes. One of Apple’s new Switch ads has the blogosphere abuzz. Ellen Feiss, a student, explains why she switched to a Mac. (“And then, like, half of my paper was gone…. Bummer”). Apparently, a lot of people think she was totally stoned when they shot the ad. It never occurred to me when I first saw it–I know a few people who are like that all the time. You decide.

    Of course, with Apple recently deciding to charge a fee for what was previously free email, and a full price for the new upgrade to their operating system, some clever guerilla marketers decided to have a field day spoofing this switch ad.

    Andrew Sullivan watch

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    Andrew Sullivan wrote in the Times of London, regarding the AIDS epidemic devastating the Third World:

    Why not simply rip off the formulae of existing drugs and provide them to the developing world for free? One answer is that theft is theft. Another is that such an approach could actually lead to a resurgence of HIV.

    The reason?

    […] You […] destroy the financial incentive to come up with new drugs, kill off the investment capital that keeps HIV research going, and leave the next generation of people with HIV with next to nothing in the pipeline.

    But today in his blog he has second thoughts:

    To be perfectly honest, my column last Sunday, though heartfelt, has been troubling my conscience. Perhaps this is one of those instances where prudence needs to be set aside. But judging whether that is appropriate demands a particular kind of prudence as well.

    Well, here is a way for Andrew Sullivan to be conscientious and prudent:

    Drug companies do not have a market in the Third World for full-cost AIDS drugs. The wealth simply isn’t there. But developing drugs is like developing software; development is expensive while production is cheap. So why not institute an ability-to-pay regime for the intellectual property component of AIDS drug costs? First World countries would pay for AIDS drug research and production, Third World countries would pay for production only.

    The argument that this approach would confiscate drug companies’ profits is disingenuous: Drug companies have long been budgeting drug development for their First World markets only. The Third World has never figured in their revenue model.

    On the contrary, an ability-to-pay regime is a good business decision for drug companies. It is in their long-term interest to allow cheap copies of their AIDS drugs to flood the Third World, because winning the battle against the AIDS epidemic is now a prerequisite for the development of the Third World, and their ability to become profitable markets in the future. Not to be macabre, but you can’t sell drugs to dead people.

    And yes, it isn’t lost on me that this arrangement would amount to an increase in aid to the Third World, paid for by First World consumers of AIDS drugs (and their insurance companies/governments). But this aid is analogous to Microsoft donating their software to poorer schools–with the upshot that more kids will have opportunities to grow up to be consumers of Microsoft products. It’s time drug companies do the same.

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