25 October 2015

Yasunari Kawabata – Vechiul oraș imperial

in Bucharest, Romania
Yasunari Kawabata - Vechiul oras imperial

În Kyoto, viața tinerei Chieko pare a se desfășura lin, între adorația părinților pentru unicul lor copil, treburile casnice în magazinul de țesături tradiționale al tatălui și numeroasele sărbători și festivaluri care animă periodic străvechiul oraș imperial. Deși apropiată de vârsta căsătoriei, părinții îi lasă libertatea de a‑și alege un soț, cu toate că starea precară a afacerii ar beneficia de un ginere cu fonduri. În ciuda cumințeniei și frumuseții, unele gânduri tulbură seninătatea existenței ei, stârnite de locul ei în familie: a fost un copil găsit și crescut de Takichirō și Shige cu toată grija și dragostea unui cuplu lipsit de urmași naturali. Iar când se aștepta mai puțin, la serbarea de vară a templului Gion, întâlnește o fată care‑i seamănă leit și se declară sora ei geamănă, dintr‑un sat de tăietori de lemne din munți.

Pentru un cititor obișnuit cu literatura occidentală, cartea de față reprezintă probabil o anomalie ca stil și ritm. Majoritatea romanelor au în centru un conflict bine definit, o cantitate necesară de dramă ca să mențină interesul ridicat – și nu sunt puține romanele japoneze care apelează la metode similare. Aici asemenea elemente sunt disimulate, mascate de politețea personajelor și împinse în planul secund de spectacolul orașului, de estetica japoneză a florilor de cireș, a vârfurilor înzăpezite de munte și acelor verzi de pin. Frumusețea efemeră răsare la fiecare pas, de la două tufe stinghere de viorele crescute în adâncitura unui bătrân arțar, la păduri de cedri drepți, destinați să devină bârne de templu, îndemnând la introspecție și meditație asupra propriului eu, nu la dileme mondene și practice.

22 October 2015

Upgrade Notes for iOS9

Apple’s most recent update for iOS has been released more than a month ago, but I haven’t rushed to update. There weren’t many interesting features included and I tend to be cautious about new major releases, which can introduce ugly bugs, as we saw on iOS as recently as last year. In the same line of thought I stayed away from iCloud Drive and postponed upgrading to the new Notes when prompted during the restart when I finally installed iOS 9.

A couple of days later I noticed a minor problem in Notes, namely the sharing extension for OneNote has gone missing. Since I don’t own other Apple devices, I use the local notes usually for quick, disposable notes on the go, and store more important information in OneNote. It’s a nice convenience to be able to send notes directly instead of copying the text and pasting into OneNote, but I tried to fix it nonetheless. One possible issue was that I hadn’t upgraded Notes, so I tried to do that, but unfortunately neither the app nor Settings showed any indication of how…

18 October 2015

Nnedi Okorafor – Binti

in Bucharest, Romania
Nnedi Okorafor - Binti

Născută în mijlocul triburilor din deșertul Namib și crescută în tradiția strictă a poporului Himba, tânăra Binti are un talent excepțional pentru matematică, care o califică pentru admiterea într‑o instituție prestigioasă, Universitatea Oomza. Însă asta înseamnă să‑și părăsească căminul, abandonând munca și tradițiile și familia, și să traverseze spațiul la bordul unei nave pline de străini. Binti se decide să accepte ocazia și fuge de acasă, dar pe drum nava este atacată de Meduze, dușmani de moarte al oamenilor Khoush, toți ceilalți pasageri fiind uciși instantaneu. Singură pe o navă controlată de inamici, va reuși Binti să scape din această situație imposibilă și să ajungă la universitate sau să se întoarcă la familia ei?

Am observat de numeroase ori că e mai ușor să critici o carte proastă decât să lauzi una care ți‑a plăcut, și povestirea de față cade clar în prima categorie. Problema principală din care decurg restul este că încearcă să înghesuie prea multe idei și evenimente într‑un spațiu prea strâmt – mai scurt de 100 de pagini – și drept urmare povestirea suferă la capitolul personaje și plauzibilitate. Multe dintre aceste idei sunt reciclate din restul literaturii SF, amestecate aici cu un aer local african și gândire magică alături de care nu se potrivesc.

Inconsistențele încep imediat ce începi să privești mai în detaliu contextul din care provine Binti: un trib tradițional din deșert, dar care cumva deține monopolul producției de astrolabi, un fel de telefoane inteligente cu numeroase funcții. E greu de imaginat cum reușesc Himba să confecționeze echipamente electronice de mare finețe în condițiile în care tradiția le impune să‑și acopere constant întreg corpul cu mâl provenit din deșert; aparatele nu sunt afectate deloc de impurități? Ba mai mult, la un moment dat se afirmă că toate cunoștințele necesare sunt transmise pe cale orală de la părinți la copii, o idee cel puțin la fel de greu de înghițit. Însăși ideea unei societăți ultraconservatoare producând tehnologie de vârf e dificil de reconciliat – tehnologia are nevoie de evoluție și îmbunătățire continuă pentru a rămâne competitivă, ceva ce rareori rezultă dintr‑o mentalitate prinsă în obiceiuri și ritualuri.

16 October 2015

The Guardian: “How the banks ignored the lessons of the crash”

Financial system domino

Sometimes I feel as if finance has reacted to the crisis the way a motorist might after a near-accident, said the City veteran at a small credit rating agency whose wife had almost chucked his phone into a lake at the height of the panic. There is the adrenaline surge directly after the lucky escape, followed by the huge shock when you realise what could have happened. But as the journey continues and the scene recedes in the rear-view mirror, you tell yourself: maybe it wasn’t that bad. The memory of your panic fades, and you even begin to misremember what happened. Was it really that bad?


Perhaps the most terrifying interview of all the 200 I recorded was with a senior regulator. It was not only what he said but how he said it: as if the status quo was simply unassailable. Ultimately, he explained, regulators – the government agencies that ensure the financial sector is safe and compliant – rely on self-declaration; what is presented by a bank’s internal management. The trouble, he said with a calm smile, is that a bank’s internal management often doesn’t know what’s going on because banks today are so vast and complex. He did not think he had ever been deliberately lied to, although he acknowledged that, obviously, he couldn’t know for sure. The real threat is not a bank’s management hiding things from us, it’s the management not knowing themselves what the risks are.

He talked about the culture of fear and how people are not managing their actions for the benefit of their bank. Instead, “they are managing their career”. He believed that the crash had been more “cock-up than conspiracy”. Bank management is in conflict, he pointed out: What is good for the long term of the bank or the country may not be what is best for their own short-term career or bonus.

Joris Luyendijk

Worrying conclusion to the article, foreshadowing more severe financial crises as the banking system has failed to reform enough to prevent and contain shocks. It’s encouraging that the issue is being at least picked up in the US Democratic presidential debate, but nevertheless it will take a long time until campaign speeches can materialize into concrete measures.

13 October 2015

Nieman Journalism Lab: “Get AMP’d: Here’s what publishers need to know”

As I said, AMP is full of terrific ideas. It really does speed up load times.

But that success comes with tradeoffs. For most publishers, you’re being asked to set up two parallel versions of your stories. (Unless you really think you won’t need to ever do anything outside what AMP allows on any page, which is unrealistic for most.) That takes significant time and resources. You’re being asked to set aside most or all of the ad tech and analytics that you use. You’re trading in open web standards for something built by Google engineers who, despite what I don’t doubt are the best of intentions, have incentives that don’t line up perfectly with yours. And you’re becoming an disempowered actor in a larger Silicon Valley battle over ad tech. (Google advocating something that blocks enormous slices of contemporary ad tech can’t be viewed in isolation from the fact Google is the dominant force in online advertising, and as interested as any company is in extending its power.)

Joshua Benton

Not long after Facebook and Apple entered news distribution, here comes Google’s reaction. The trouble is, Google likes to paint itself as the ‘open alternative’ to the closed platforms of competitors, without actually being open in the more sensitive areas. That seems to be the case with AMP as well: instead of relying on open standards, Google is asking publishers to use its custom version of HTML, where Google gets to decide what external content is allowed – including tracking scripts and advertising. Just like Facebook and Apple, Google is trying to control the user experience around news and promote their own competing platform – and in the end to reap larger profits from advertising. Ultimately, the choice comes down to who do you trust more: Google, Facebook or Apple?

11 October 2015

Tad Williams – Sleeping Late on Judgement Day

in Bucharest, Romania
Sleeping Late On Judgement Day by Tad Williams

După ce și‑a petrecut ultimele luni fiind fugărit prin diverse nivele ale Iadului doar pentru a fi tras pe sfoară în final de Marele Duce Eligor, e de înțeles că îngerul Doloriel este destul de deprimat. Nu numai că nu a reușit să‑și salveze iubita-demon, dar a pierdut cu ocazia asta singurul atu care‑i permitea să negocieze cu un demon de talia lui Eligor și a iritat mai mult decât e recomandat puteri angelice cu mult deasupra lui, inclusiv îngerul misterios care fondase A Treia Cale și declanșase astfel toată tărășenia de față. Așa cum îl sfătuiesc toți, de la prietenii de pe Pământ la șefii din Cer, ar fi bine să se potolească o vreme, să stea cuminte în banca lui fără să atragă noi necazuri, cel puțin până se liniștesc apele. Dar, între aburii beției și chinurile disperării, în creierul lui Bobby încolțește o nouă idee, și mai nebunească decât expediția clandestină în Infern: să pună mâna pe celălalt chezaș al târgului secret între Kephas și Eligor, cornul demonului aflat în posesiunea lui Kephas. Din frânturile de informație strânse în Iad și‑a făcut o idee cine se ascunde în spatele lui Kephas, dar de aici până la a pune efectiv mâna pe corn e o cale lungă…

He was still staring at me.

But you… you are an angel? How can this be? I am not a Christian!

That’s okay, Mr. Malhotra. I’m not a Christian angel. I’m just an angel.

08 October 2015

Schneier on Security: “Volkswagen and Cheating Software”

My worry is that some corporate executives won’t interpret the VW story as a cautionary tale involving just punishments for a bad mistake but will see it instead as a demonstration that you can get away with something like that for six years.


This problem won’t be solved through computer security as we normally think of it. Conventional computer security is designed to prevent outside hackers from breaking into your computers and networks. The car analog would be security software that prevented an owner from tweaking his own engine to run faster but in the process emit more pollutants. What we need to contend with is a very different threat: malfeasance programmed in at the design stage.

We already know how to protect ourselves against corporate misbehavior. Ronald Reagan once said "trust, but verify" when speaking about the Soviet Union cheating on nuclear treaties. We need to be able to verify the software that controls our lives.

Bruce Schneier

An important aspect of this scandal that hasn’t been discussed as much as it should. While Volkswagen is certainly to blame for cheating, the people designing the tests, those in charge of quality control, are equally to blame because of their poor standards and predictable procedures. For sensitive matters such as pollution and health we need to have independent methods to double-check the approval process; otherwise similar situations will keep happening and faking results will become more widespread and potentially harder to uncover.

03 October 2015

The Guardian: “Hitler’s world may not be so far away”

A misunderstanding about the relationship between state authority and mass killing underlay an American myth of the Holocaust that prevailed in the early 21st century: that the US was a country that intentionally rescued people from the genocides caused by overweening states. Following this reasoning, the destruction of a state could be associated with rescue rather than risk. One of the errors of the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the belief that regime change must be creative. The theory was that the destruction of a state and its ruling elite would bring freedom and justice. In fact, the succession of events precipitated by the illegal invasion of a sovereign state confirmed one of the unlearned lessons of the history of the second world war.


Though no American would deny that tanks work in the desert, some Americans do deny that deserts are growing larger. Though no American would deny ballistics, some Americans do deny climate science. Hitler denied that science could solve the basic problem of nutrition, but assumed that technology could win territory. It seemed to follow that waiting for research was pointless and that immediate military action was necessary. In the case of climate change, the denial of science likewise legitimates military action rather than investment in technology. If people do not take responsibility for the climate themselves, they will shift responsibility for the associated calamities to other people. Insofar as climate denial hinders technical progress, it might hasten real disasters, which in their turn can make catastrophic thinking still more credible. A vicious circle can begin in which politics collapses into ecological panic.

Timothy Snyder

Fascinating article, linking the twisted logic of the Nazi movement to modern issues such as the fight against terrorism and climate change. The author argues – pretty compellingly – that some of these problems can be kept in check by the state, the political structure that can and should protect the rights of its citizens against racism and xenophobia, but also from long-term, harder to grasp threats like climate change.