Category: All

All posts across the whole website belong to this category. They might also belong to some other categories as well, but this one holds all of them. Hence the descriptive name – All.

Back from Amsterdam. Overview.

I am back from my trip to Amsterdam, Netherlands.  It was as good as I expected and sometimes even better.  I really enjoyed my time over there, met a quite a few interesting people, established a few useful relationships, saw some interesting technologies, photographed a beautiful city, tasted some nice beers, and more.

I brought back a few hundred photos, which took me a few hours to sort through.  Now that I am done there are just over a hundred pictures which I hope you will enjoy once they are all uploaded.  I also have quite a few posts backlogged. They are mostly in a form of notes right now, so I’ll need to expand them a bit and will publish in the next few days.

Just to give you a few highlights:

  • Amsterdam is a beautiful city.  I hope I will have a chance to visit it again.
  • I didn’t manage to visit a coffee shop, red lights district, or any of the recommended restaurants.  I was having enough fun without following any of recommendations.  Probably will do so next time.
  • People over there are tall indeed.  Very tall.
  • People over there ride bicycles even when it is cold and raining.  The city infrastructure is very supportive of cyclists, but I need to read some more about their traditions and history, because current bicycle penetration in the population is much deeper than just city infrastructure.
  • I haven’t seen any cops on the streets.  Not even traffic police.
  • There is lots of fighting with tobacco smoking.  Many places (like my hotel for example) completely ban smoking and don’t even have places for smoking.  Very nice.
  • I’ll need to write a separate post about trains.
  • It was interesting to see canals and so much water transport in operation.
  • The conference was a success.  I met a few interesting people, saw some useful technologies, and brought back a few thoughts on how things should move on.

As you can see, there is a lot to post about.  Stay tuned.

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Tomorrow morning I am leaving for The Next Web Conference, which will take place in Amsterdam, Netherlands.  I spent a few minutes in Wikipedia, reading about both Amsterdam and Netherlands.  Here are some interesting highlights (direct quotes from Wikipedia):

  • The Netherlands is often called Holland. This is formally incorrect as North and South Holland in the western Netherlands are only two of the country’s twelve provinces. As a matter of fact, many Dutch people colloquially use Holland as a synecdoche, being well aware of the widespread use of this name.
  • The Netherlands is also one of the most densely cabled countries in the world; its internet connection rate is 87.8%, the 2nd highest in the world.
  • A remarkable aspect of the Netherlands is its flatness.
  • The people of the Netherlands are amongst the tallest in the world, with an average height of about 1.85 m (6 ft 0.8 in) for adult males and 1.68 m (5 ft 6 in) for adult females.
  • There is a tradition of learning foreign languages in the Netherlands: about 70% of the total population have good knowledge of English, 55– 59% of German and 19% of French.
  • Amsterdam is the 5th busiest tourist destination in Europe with more than 4.2 million international visitors. The room occupation rate is the 2nd highest in Europe in 2007. Tourists can choose from 350 Hotels, 17 of which are fivestar hotels. 18,000 rooms and almost 45,000 beds are provided.
  • Amsterdam’s largest religious group are the Calvinists followed by Islam, mainly Sunni Islam.
  • Amsterdam is one of the most bicycle-friendly cities in the world and is a centre of bicycle culture with good provision for cyclists such as bike paths and bike racks, which are ubiquitous throughout the city. There are an estimated one million bicycles in the city (total population is 742,884 people, as per January 1st, 2006). However, bike theft is common, so cyclists use large secure locks.

    The Last Samurai

    I am not a big fan of Tom Cruise.  In fact, I passively try to avoid his movies. He is not a very good actor and there is something negative about the guy.  When I saw the trailer for the “The Last Samurai” in the movies back a few years ago, I didn’t like it, and missed the movie on purpose.  I though it would be some historical non-sense about an American getting into Japan, learning centuries of samurai traditions and skills in a couple of month and then showing them how real people fight.  Or something along those lines.

    Today I rented the film because I was really bored, because there weren’t much else to rent, and because I thought the time has come to finally watch it.  Once again it seems I missed watching a really good movie on a big screen.  Boomer!

    There are quite a few things that would have made the experience so much better for if I went to see it in the cinema.  First of all, the battle scenes and all the small fights.  Secondly, some really amazing scenery and photography.  The film was shot mostly in New Zealand, which has been proven many times to be one of the most beautiful countries.  At least, on the big screen.  Thirdly, this film has an excellent soundtrack and it would have been a bigger pleasure listening to it in something other than a pair of cheap headphones.

    I also really liked the story in the film.  Not that it shows something that I haven’t seen or heard of before, but it rather reminds of quite a few subjects which are very good to be reminded of.  The film has its way around such topics as honor, discipline, loyalty and friendship.  These should be talked about more often in the movies for the sake of making the world a better place. (Yes, the whole world, including yours truly.)

    Being a complete moron in history, cultures, and traditions, I can’t judge the historical truth of the film.  However, Wikipedia, as usual, has an excellent article which describes how the story is relevant to the things that took place in real life.

    Overall: 9 out of 10.

    Humans in image recognition

    It looks like humans aren’t all that useless when it comes to technology.  There are still a few areas that we do better than machines.  Image recognition is one of them.  TechCrunch runs the story about one company that seems to be using humans in image recognition process.  Comments to that story also mention Google doing the same.

    To me it feels like a problem with timing.  There is a need to tag and search a whole lot of images.  But there is no good automated solution available.  So we are falling back on humans.  It’s easy to come up with a few other areas, in which there is a need today for solutions which won’t even be here tomorrow.  Technology needs help, I guess.

    The art of the argument

    Paul Graham wrote yet another excellent essey – “How to Disagree“.

    The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and increasingly they do—in comment threads, on forums, and in their own blog posts.
    Many who respond to something disagree with it. That’s to be expected. Agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing. And when you agree there’s less to say. You could expand on something the author said, but he has probably already explored the most interesting implications. When you disagree you’re entering territory he may not have explored.

    He then proceeds with identifying a hierarchy of disagreements.  In his view, the forms of disagreement are:

    • DH0: Name-calling.
    • DH1: Ad Hominem.
    • DH2: Responding to Tone.
    • DH3: Contradiction.
    • DH4: Counterargument.
    • DH5: Refutation.
    • DH6: Refuting the Central Point.

    Paul’s post reminded me of something – a course of formal logic back in college.  One of the things that course covered was a list of fallacies, which are often used in arguments either intentionally or not.  Of course, the complete list of fallacies is much longer and will take more time to memorize and understand.  But, if you wish to win and rule online (and offline) arguments, you should at least get familiar with those.

    Paul organizes hist list of disagreement forms into a hierarchy. He says:

    Indeed, the disagreement hierarchy forms a kind of pyramid, in the sense that the higher you go the fewer instances you find.

    It would be nice to see a similar, hierarchy organization for the longer list of fallacies.   Which ones are the most frequent in online discussions?  Which ones are easier to create and why?  How to recognize and respond to them?