I find it very difficult to engage in debates about national politics because the average citizen has so little influence over these matters. I think that it’s much more worthwhile to get informed about and involved in local politics, because that’s where someone like me can actually have influence.

Nevertheless my own answer to the question is that it’s probably not a good thing. There’s this high-dimensional landscape of issues that people care and have different ideas about - reproductive rights, gun control, immigration, education, social programs, the size of government, taxation, the list goes on and on. Yet that gets projected down to this one dimensional line with just “Left” and “Right” with optional “far” and “center” prefixes.

And, sadly, the common consensus is that on election day you have only two possible boxes to check. A single decision. One bit. 0 or 1.

The Democrats and Republicans are playing a small concessions type of game. They sort of shuffle around slightly to appeal to enough of those voters who aren’t already automatically voting for them. If you only vote for one or the other, they have no reason to change - they already have your vote.

Voters in safe rarely contested states, have the unique opportunity to vote their conscience without fear¹. When I twittered about Obama’s support for the FISA Compromise, Philip, a disappointed California voter replied: “our voting system forces us to vote strategically and i’ll be voting obama .” This doesn’t make any sense to me! Obama will carry California. Democrats almost automatically get California² .

So why give in? You’re not happy with the Democratic candidate³, the candidate who will carry California regardless of how you vote, yet you still feel unable to voice your disapproval in the electoral arena. David wrote: “I’m not going to throw away my vote on the green party,” but aren’t you just throwing away your vote to the democrats, instead?

The role of third parties is to emphasize new and different ideas, to bring folks who’ve given up hope back to the table, and to make the major parties shift in MEANINGFUL ways. Here are some great YouTube clips on the role of third parties in the US: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five.

If you still have doubts about voting for a third party candidate and/or you live in a swing state - consider the votepact.org proposal: find a fellow kindred heart on the other side of the political spectrum who’s also unhappy with the candidate on their side, and together vote for a third party (fill out your absentees together over coffee).

1. Electoral College: bug or feature?
2. The only way the Democrats might not get California is if Arnold runs as VP for a moderate Republican, and that just is not happening this year.
3. There are more reasons to not be happy

I want to thank Curt Siffert for granting me permission to use his song “All Aboard (v2)” which you can download (for free) here. This is the first video¹ I’ve ever made, but I’ve wanted to make films for as long as I’ve been writing² (even before Sally said “Hey guys, I’m going to make movies!” and then did), so I’m glad I’ve finally started.

I put this together for a video contest here at I-house. You can see all of the videos for the contest here, the winner was Life At I-House, A Glimpse by KirstyandEliana.

1. yes, okay, it’s more of a slideshow with an intro, but my brother Mike told me that Ken Burns would be proud
2. creatively, which would be 1999 - warning: link contains some extremely cheesy content, including an early version of what evolved into this journal

I’m about to give this Lightning Talk at SHDH20.

I went to Linux World Expo today and played with one of these upcoming One-Laptop-Per-Child project’s XO-1 laptops at the Creative Commons booth.

Photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid (cc)

While OLPC is a noble effort, I think it still feels like another example of trying to solve a problem with technology where technology is not the bottleneck. For example, I was bummed that they took away the hand-crank power-supply a while back because I think this severely limits who’ll be able to eventually use these. The UI and networking stuff is pretty novel, but my overall impression is that it’s too gadgety. I felt pretty lost in all just the buttons on the keyboard, but then again I only used it for 20 minutes and this wasn’t made for me. With that said, I’m not holding my breath, but it could be a great thing if this takes off. I say “could” because technology by itself just isn’t enough¹. This is a point I keep coming back to again and again.

1. A point the OLPC project acknowledges in their vision.

23:37 May 10th, 2007 Thursday

So what good is all of this if we don’t engage one another - on a very real level? “Only a Sith Lord deals in absolutes,” man - so let’s get off the condescending trips and the polarizing anti-discourse. Let’s use our full range - zero, one, two, five, seven, eight, ten, etc and not just on or off - there’s an infinitude of wonder in between and out in every dimension.

I resolve to hesitantly dip my toes in, from time to time, instead of being all in or all out. Talk to a beat stranger - but not every beat stranger. Give up some left over food to the guys on Bancroft and Telegraph (the Shattuck hobos are too hip for me - but I hope they aren’t for someone else — I know they aren’t). I can just eavesdrop on the world from time to time - I can’t always be wide-eyed gulping from the fire hydrant of information flowing at 100 terabits per second eyes glazed over passed out exhausted gasping for a sense of self disoriented head-spun hours or days later. Just a drinking fountain or a tap and a few cups or liters a day would be fine. No need to parch yourself and dry up like a raisin all the time. It’s ok to wrinkle and shrivel - and you don’t need to burst, either - just be uncomfortably sincere.

I think I’m going to try that.

Related brief thought:

17:36 June 22nd, 2007 Friday

Bumper Sticker Activists (Telegraph in Berkeley)
The last thing we need is more Bumper Sticker Activism. Wearing a clever T-shirt does not constitute civic participation.

The basic gist of the book is that knowledge is no longer tied to the physical (e.g. books), which used to limit how one went about organizing and finding it (e.g. Dewey decimal system). Now we can attach as much metadata as our hearts desire, which technology helps us sift through to help us find what we want. Instead of each book having a particular place, as in a warehouse, or a relative position (alphabetical within a subject), an individual leaf of information lives on a multitude of trees simultaneously, and the trees themselves are dynamically created and rearranged for each user on the fly.

The first few chapters focused on how knowledge has been historically organized over the centuries. I did skim through a few of the middle chapters, it seemed to be pretty straightforward commentary on the digital lives most of us now lead - user created content, social tags and lists, auto-recommendation, etc. Some over-simplified, in that sometimes unavoidable awkwardness that comes out of describing something neat and complex yet obvious to those leading digital lives. It was refreshing to read about the downsides of scientific publications like Nature and Science (e.g. good science isn’t enough² to publish because of how few articles get in, the research has to be “sexy”) and how the new comer PLoS One aims to correct these shortcomings. Because this was just the topic that was discussed at the Neuroscience retreat last year (in a lecture about the then-upcoming PLoS One), scientists care about this stuff and it comes back every so often.

Although I never considered it myself, I totally got it when Danae started her Master of Library Science. I would argue that more than anything else, what we’re producing most of in the world today is information. Perhaps capture and disseminate is a more appropriate description. Information, by itself, is agnostic to how it gets used (or abused). But the Cliff Stoll-ian side of me says that we should be weary of the exponentially growing amount of information, and not just for the obvious Big Brother / privacy reasons (e.g. “Plate reader draws objections of ACLU“).

The non-obvious threat of information is that we’re drowning in it (my claim). Here I’m glad Weinberger mentions Cass Sunstein’s book Republic.com³, the basic thesis of which⁴ is that with more and more information out there, we can all end up listening, watching, and reading only that which reinforces our world view - drowning out everything else without even having to plug up our ears and going “LALALALALA”, but by finding podcasts, channels, and blogs where others are doing the “LALALALALA” for us.

In many ways, this leads to huge portions of the population nonsensically parroting something like “Evolution is just a theory” to one another. Scientific theories both explain observed phenomena (why living organisms share so much of their DNA) and make predictions about future observations (my niece’s hair color based on that of her parents, or maybe one you don’t hear about so often: regular use of antibacterial soap might be a bad idea, placing evolutionary pressure on the bacteria to evolve immunity to the soap). Moreover simpler or more elegant, straightforward theories are preferred (aka Occam’s Razor). Which is why Intelligent Design is on par with Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, not science. But this has been better described in other places and elsewhere (suggestions welcome). The point is that I’m worried that there’s no way anyone get through to the people that end up isolating themselves in their own feedback loops. I worry that not enough people engage enough to think on their own. Technology can’t fix this problem. No amount of metadata will ever be enough⁵.

In this entry, I’ve linked to Wikipedia a few times, and while I agree it should not be regularly used for primary research, I also welcome the explicit uncertainty inherent in a publicly editable wiki, as it reflects the tentative nature of information, and I think we should be somewhat skeptical about a great deal. I have also been recommended, though I have not yet read Manuel Castells’ The Internet Galaxy, though perhaps it is more topical for a future post I’ve been brewing for a while. Has anyone read it? …Anyway, this is my first pass at processing this stuff, hope it’s not too scatterbrained⁶.

1. In three evening sittings at Moe’s Books
2. some might even argue “isn’t required”
3. Republic.com starts with a succinct vignette: “the daily me“
4. on my quick skimming at the UCD bookstore this past Picnic Day.
5. a point I think the book misses
6. Cory Doctrow does a better job reviewing the book.

So I finally bit the bullet and put up my own blog. It was just one of those wait and see things for a while, but now I find myself reading most things via rss feeds, so I really had no excuse not to move on from my livejournal. I was afraid of abandoning my lj-friends - but Yuan found a happy medium with cross-posting back to her lj (though now that she has an rss feed I read her entries first in Thunderbird, sometimes days ahead of visiting my friends page)

I’m still getting settled in, so this isn’t quite live yet.

Anyway, I’ve had a couple of entries on the back burner that I’ve been working on, and they feel serious enough to warrant having their own place, instead of being a part of a corpus I started almost six years ago (in high school, no less). More and more people I know host their own blogs and it’s always nice to have a fresh start (though I’ve reposted a hand full of my most recent LJ entries to get a running start).

last year and this year.

After watching the videos, you can play with Gapminder yourself as it is a web-based tool.

More info and tool links at gapminder.org.

View of the Golden Gate Bridge from I-house Cafe

Oh yeah, feel free to drag the little man around the blue highlighted streets, and then rotate / zoom in the overlaid photo. Here’s the official demo (cheesy video).In San Fracisco, almost every street is completely covered. They also did much of Mountain View, Palo Alto, San Jose, and all of Manhattan, that I’ve checked.

Rediculous.

The practical: After getting lunch with Robert and Jon on Saturday, I got the chance to hear recent UCSB alum Logan Green talk about Zimride, this new cool webapp he’s just put together. Carpooling made easy and safe. Here’s what it looks like:

Zimride integrates with facebook, so you actually get to know something about your potential drivers/hitchers, and they might even end up being someone you know! Moreover, you can advertise your ride via those facebook stalker feeds.

worst. planning. ever.
(…and I don’t buy their propagnda - next to the green arrow on the map above, you could be on N W Temple, between W N Temple and W S Temple [or is it E S Temple?])

I imported these pictures using F-Spot, which has a decent tagging interface that I should make use of to catalogue a bunch of old photos. F-Spot also happily resized and exported them to Flickr, tags and all (other stuff also supported). Hopefully this also means I’ll start taking pictures again.

I-house is a pretty fun place to live (I’m off on the right side).

P.S. с наступающим старым новым годом! happy old new year!

Sure, there’s a changelog that tells me all the neat bug fixes from the last version, but what good does that do me if I can’t tell whether the software was last updated 8 years ago or 8 days ago? It’s such a simple thing, but I can’t believe at the number of projects out there that have no mention of release dates on their website.

… changing topics… Anyone have a gui svn client they particularly like? I’ve started playing with eSvn (0.7.0 testing version), it’s clean and simple (someone else came to the same conclusion). It looks like this:

Subcommander has a neat looking log graph (bottom), and kdesvn has a history browser, anyone use stuff like that?

I’ve also tried subclipse. Yep, I finally bit the bullet and started trying Eclipse and other GUI stuff, like Inisght (gdb gui), although I continue to live in Vim (which has an CVS/SVN integration plugin I’ve found useful)

It became a really familiar place, the same classical music, the same new book smells. I never really had to talk to anyone, or say anything, so it very much became a place where I could go and clear my head, just sort of process my thoughts. Then it went out of business and closed, which really made me sad. Luckily, Tower Books, nearby, had just started operating, and though it didn’t have as large of a selection, I migrated over there, and got used to the music, atmosphere, and the staff there. So Tower, too, became familiar with time, and they were open till midnight, which suited my fancy more. Going down there at night became a ritual, whenever I was feeling uninspired, I’d just head over to there and immerse myself in some new book, if only for a few hours. I think I’m kind of different that way. If you’ve ever been in a bookstore with me, you’ll know that I always want to stick around for a while, even though I usually have no specific book in mind, I just like to go and sit and read something new for a while. For example, I always like to drop by Borders whenever I’m on University in Palo Alto, but also usually overlook that whoever it is that I’m with, whether it’s Elaine, or Philip, or Jon, doesn’t have the same approach to visiting bookstores.

Cody’s Books on Telegraph closed earlier this year, though Moe’s is still around. Now Tower’s closing up shop, I just walked around the all of the empty shelves and saw very few books that’d be of any interest to me. Ended up picking up two DVDs: Before Stonewall, and Брат (Brother) for $6 each. It’s really makes me uncomfortable and sad knowing that I won’t have that little place to escape to, anymore. I’m not a big fan of changes like these.

I’ve started getting involved with the (currently small) Campus Greens organization (which meets Mondays at 7:10 in 200 Wheeler).

So today I heard Todd Chretien, Green senatorial candidate speak to a group of about 30 as part of the ASUC Speaker Series. Todd titled his talk “Why Students Should Never, Ever Vote for the Democrats,” which I think is somewhat unfortunate. Todd has an eloquent platform and I share a lot of the same views, but I also think that the title incites the type of reaction that eliminates any possibility for reasonable discussion or discourse.

I think that people don’t want to listen to you if you insult them, or just say something shocking - the novelty (if any) quickly wears off (it’s taken me a while to figure this out, but I think I learned the difficulty in trying to actively engage those who support the Democrats when talking (ranting?) to Janet on the streets of Brussels over the summer).

I think that we need more boring nitty-gritty politics, because no one will hand over the helm to people with big ideas (even if they are the right ideas). The big picture is important, but it has to be negotiated with real, tangible, local progress.

Todd gave a short run through of his top three issues ( war in Iraq, education, the two party system), and then opened it up for Q & A. In answering the questions, he covered a lot of ground in both domestic and foreign policy, but I felt like it was a discussion of issues larger than those someone who admitted he had no chance of winning could hope to influence….

So as the last question for the night, after expressing these sentiments I asked what we could do locally, that’s within our power, mentioning current choice voting efforts in Davis and Oakland. Unfortunately, Todd stuck to his anti-war protest-in-the-streets approach (even taking an outlandish pot shot at proportional representation by mentioning something about Hitler getting elected).

Most of my life I, too, have been a big ideas person, but I can’t say I’ve accomplished much with them, which is why I’m trying something new…

Until I came to UC Davis, I had never realized that there *could* be different voting systems. Choice voting is a way of reaching a majority (greater than 50%) consensus.

Choice voting allows everyone to vote their conscience without the fear of having your vote “wasted.” After the polls close, if your top-ranked candidate, Alice, has the least amount of votes, she is eliminated and your vote transfers to your next choice, Bob, in your order of preference. This process (”instant run-off”) continues until candidates reach enough votes to be elected (the threshold). This consensus building mechanism ensures that the elected officials will represent the greatest possible proportion of the voters.

Contrast this with the current system: candidate Mallory and Minnie, representing a minority of the population could get elected when multiple similar candidates (Alice, Bob, Chris, and Debra) representing the viewpoints of the majority of the population split the vote between one other.

This would not happen under choice voting, because when Alice is eliminated, those votes would go to the next choices of her supporters. This would provide more votes for the remaining majority candidates, ensuring that one of them gets elected.

I encourage Davis voters to vote yes on Measure L this November so that the City can continue looking into this effective system.

Paul Ivanov
UC Davis Class of 2005

(cute choice voting promotional video)