I am writing this post to rant against subscription popups. I've been on the Internet long enough to remember when this was a thing: a window would open up and ask you to enter your email address. We went from that time, through all the technical, stylistic and cultural changes to the Internet, to this Web 3.0 thing, and the email subscription popups have emerged again. They are not ads, they are simply asking you to allow them into your already cluttered inbox because - even before you've had a chance to read anything - what they have to say is so fucking important. Sometimes they ask you to like them on Facebook or whatever crap like that.

Let me tell you how to get rid of these real quick. Install an ad blocker, like AdBlockPlus or uBlock Origin. I recommend uBlock Origin, since it is faster and I feel works better than the older AdBlock. Now this is something that anyone should do just to get rid of ads. I've personally never browsed the Internet from a tablet or cell phone because they didn't allow ad blockers. I can't go on the web without them.

What you may not know, though, is that there are several lists of filters that you can choose from and that are not enabled by default when you install an ad blocker. One of my favourite lists is Fanboy's Annoyances list. It takes care of popups of all kinds, including subscriptions. But even so, if the default list doesn't contain the web site you are looking at, you have the option to pick elements and block them. A basic knowledge of CSS selectors helps, but here is the gist of it: ###something means the element with the id "something" and ##.something is the elements with the class name "something". Here is an example: <div id="divPopup" class="popup ad annoying"> is a div element that has id "divPopup" and class names "popup", "ad" and "annoying".

One of the reason why subscription popups are not always blocked is because beside the elements that they cover the page with, they also place some constraints on the page. For example they place a big element over the screen (what is called an overlay), then a popup element in the center of the screen and also change the style of the entire page to not scroll down. So if you would remove the overlay and the popup, the page would only show you the upper part and not allow you to scroll down. This can be solved with another browser extension called Stylish, which allows you to save and apply your own style to pages you visit. The CSS rule that solves this very common scenario is html,body { overflow: auto !important; }. That is all. Just add a new style for the page and copy paste this. 19 in 20 chances you will get the scroll back.

To conclude, whenever you see such a stupid, stupid thing appearing on the screen, consider blocking subscription popups rather than pressing on the closing button. Block it once and never see it again. Push the close button and chances are you will have to keep pressing it each time you visit a page.

Now, if I only had a similar option for jump scares in movies...

P.S. Yes, cookie consent popups are included in my rant. Did you know that you can block all cookie nagware from Blogspot within one fell swoop, rather than having to click OK at each blog individually, for example?

The Brain that Changes Itself is a remarkable book for several reasons. M.D. Norman Doidge presents several cases of extraordinary events that constitute proof for the book's thesis: that the brain is plastic, easy to remold, to adapt to the data you feed it. What is astonishing is that, while these cases are not new and are by far not the only ones out there, the medical community is clinging to the old belief that the brain is made of clearly localized parts that have specific roles. Doidge is trying to change that.

The ramifications of brain plasticity are wide spread: the way we learn or unlearn things, how we fall in love, how we adapt to new things and we keep our minds active and young, the way we would educate our children, the minimal requirement for a computer brain interface and so much more. The book is structured in 11 chapters and some addendums that seem to be extra material that the author didn't know how to properly format. A huge part is acknowledgements and references, so the book is not that large.

These are the chapters, in order:

• Chapter 1 - A Woman Perpetually Falling. Describes a woman that lost her sense of balance. She feels she is falling at all times and barely manages to walk using her sight. Put her in front of a weird patterned rug and she falls down. When sensors fed information to an electrode plate on her tongue she was able to have balance again. The wonder comes from the fact that a time after removing the device she would retain her sense. The hypothesis is that the receptors in her inner ear were not destroyed, by damaged, leaving some in working order and some sending incorrect information to the brain. Once a method to separate good and bad receptors, the brain immediately adapted itself to use only the good ones. The doctor that spearheaded her recovery learned the hard way that the brain is plastic, when his father was almost paralyzed by a stroke. He pushed his father to crawl on the ground and try to move the hand that wouldn't move, the leg that wouldn't hold him, the tongue that wouldn't speak. In the end, his father recovered. Later, after he died from another stroke while hiking on a mountain, the doctor had a chance to see the extent of damage done by the first stroke: 97% of the nerves that run from the cerebral cortex to the spine were destroyed.
• Chapter 2 - Building Herself a Better Brain. Barbara was born in the '50s with an brain "asymmetry". While leaving a relatively normal life she had some mental disabilities that branded her as "retarded". It took two decades to stumble upon studies that showed that the brain was plastic and could adapt. She trained her weakest traits, the ones that doctors were sure to remain inadequate because the part in the brain "associated" with it was missing and found out that her mind adapted to compensate. She and her husband opened a school for children with disabilities, but her astonishing results come from when she was over 20 years old, after years of doctors telling her there was nothing to be done.
• Chapter 3 - Redesigning the Brain. Michael Merzenich designs a program to train the brain against cognitive impairments or brain injuries. Just tens of hours help improve - and teach people how to keep improving on their own - from things like strokes, learning disabilities, even conditions like autism and schizophrenia. His work is based on scientific experiments that, when presented to the wider community, were ridiculed and actively attacked for the only reason that they went against the accepted dogma.
• Chapter 4 - Acquiring Tastes and Loves. Very interesting article about how our experiences shape our sense of normalcy, the things we like or dislike, the people we fall for and the things we like to do with them. The chapter also talks about Freud, in a light that truly explains how ahead of his time he was, about pornography and its effects on the brain, about how our pleasure system affects both learning and unlearning and has a very interesting theory about oxytocin, seeing it not as a "commitment neuromodulator", but as a "demodulator", a way to replastify the part of the brain responsible for attachments, allowing us to let go of them and create new ones. It all culminates with the story of Bob Flanagan, a "supermasochist" who did horrible things to his body on stage because he had associated pain with pleasure.
• Chapter 5 - Midnight Resurrection. A surgeon has a stroke that affects half of his body. Through brain training and physiotherapy, he manages to recover - and not gain magical powers. The rest of the chapter talks about experiments on monkeys that show how the feedback from sensors rewires the brain and how what is not used gets weaker and what is used gets stronger, finer and bigger in the brain.
• Chapter 6 - Brain Lock Unlocked. This chapter discusses obsessions and bad habits and defective associations in the brain and how they can be broken.
• Chapter 7 - Pain: The Dark Side of Plasticity. A plastic brain is also the reason why we strongly remember painful moments. A specific case is phantom limbs, where people continue to feel sensations - often the most traumatic ones - after limbs have been removed. The chapter discusses causes and solutions.
• Chapter 8 - Imagination: How Thinking Makes It So. The brain maps for skills that we imagine we perform change almost as much as when we are actually doing them. This applies to mental activities, but also physical ones. Visualising doing sports prepared people for the moment when they actually did it. The chapter also discusses how easily the brain adapts to using external tools. Brain activity recorders were wired to various tools and monkeys quickly learned to use them without the need for direct electric feedback.
• Chapter 9 - Turning Our Ghosts into Ancestors. Discussing the actual brain mechanisms behind psychotherapy, in the light of what the book teaches about brain plasticity, makes it more efficient as well as easier to use and understand. The case of Mr. L., Freud's patient, who couldn't keep a stable relationship as he was always looking for another and couldn't remember his childhood and adolescence, sheds light on how brain associates trauma with day to day life and how simply separating the two brain maps fixes problems.
• Chapter 10 - Rejuvenation. A chapter talking about the neural stem cells and how they can be activated. Yes, they exist and they can be employed without surgical procedures.
• Chapter 11 - More than the Sum of Her Parts. A girl born without her left hemisphere learns that her disabilities are just untrained parts of her brain. After decades of doctors telling her there is nothing to be done because the parts of her brain that were needed for this and that were not present, she learns that her brain can actually adapt and improve, with the right training. An even more extreme case than what we saw in Chapter 2.

There is much more in the book. I am afraid I am not making it justice with the meager descriptions there. It is not a self-help book and it is not popularising science, it is discussing actual cases, the experiments done to back what was done and emits theories about the amazing plasticity of the brain. Some things I took from it are that we can train our brain to do almost anything, but the training has to follow some rules. Also that we do not use gets discarded in time, while what is used gets reinforced albeit with diminishing efficiency. That is a great argument to do new things and train at things that we are bad at, rather than cement a single scenario brain. The book made me hungry for new senses, which in light of what I have read, are trivial to hook up to one's consciousness.

If you are not into reading, there is an one hour video on YouTube that covers about the same subjects:

[youtube:sK51nv8mo-o]

Enjoy!

After a month of trial with no one to complain of HTTPS issues, I've decided to set the blog to redirect normal connections to the secure URL. Let me know if you experience any problems.

Democracy, like any other system of government or political system, is designed to keep the powerful in the driver's seat. It's not about the good of the people, unless they hold power. It was invented and implemented at times when having a large group of people supporting you meant something, gave you the ability to do things. Any other system: theocracy, tyranny, feudalism, communism, fascism... they all do the same thing and fail when the group they support fails to maintain power. Democracy is not about the little people, it's about how fast a system can adapt to changes in the structures of power. It is just the "agile" version of the same old thing. By declaring its ruling group "the people", democracy can survive any political change. The system outlives groups and groups of "people".

Consider the present, where we are split more than ever into voters and the indifferent. Does democracy help the young disillusioned people who more and more refuse to vote for anything? No. That's not a bug in the democratic system, but nor is it a fault or a consequence of not voting; instead it is a realization of a truth, that young people are a minority that is segregated from the old by technology, new ways of communication and networking and ultimately, completely different goals. In this image, the young are the indifferent, but there is a reason for that: they are not the powerful - democracy doesn't work for them either way.

Imagine you are part of a group of three people, each with equal voting rights. Every time you try to influence a decision, the other two vote differently. Will you continue to play the voting game or will you recognize it for what it is: a waste of time? Now imagine you are the king of the three people. How long will you maintain your position when the other two outpower you? Democracy helps the stability of the three-body system, but it does nothing for you. Suddenly, one of the three people starts to like you (or dislike the other) and he starts voting with you. Now you are part of the powerful and your decision matters. Conflict is again averted and stability preserved because as soon as the balance of power changed, the ruling party changed accordingly. It would be stupid for the weak single man to try to fight two, so he grumbles and complains, but does nothing.

In this day and age, there are so many different types of power: military, mediatic, technical, administrative, economic, etc. Democracy doesn't help the many anymore, because they lost their power. Having a lot of idiots in your group doesn't do much. Smart people, they start to realize it and also to understand that the game is rigged. Some try desperately to shift the perspective of the dumb amorphous masses, but if you could do that, you would be in power already because you already have it. Mathematical algorithms are being created to diagnose the health of a network, to determine the influential nodes, to determine the best outcome when the simple "wisdom of the crowds" fails miserably. They could work online, locally, maybe, but in real life? Never.

The Internet itself started as the true hope of mankind to evolve and change. A place where people meet on equal footing, have access to information, can connect and discuss and decide together. What happened? Same thing. A few companies and a few people hold the power to sway the vast hordes of connected people. When that doesn't work, legal pressure is applied from "without", from the real world. People clump together by interest and information source; essentially they become one voice, but one blinded, dumb and ignorant, yet convinced of its own truth. It is a sad moment when we realize that the monopoly of Google, Facebook, Microsoft and the like is better than the complete anarchy of a disorganized web. Do you even remember life before Google? When you would use different search engines to find something? When 99.99% of everything was spam or malware?

But all of this just underlines a very ironic fact: democracy is, in itself, redundant, even circular. It legitimizes itself, it graciously grants power to the ones that already have it. It's a game that covers a truth as old as the world itself. Its only purpose is to minimize unrest by permanently governing the weak. The only true enemy of democracy is not communism or terrorism, it's asymmetric warfare: the rapid accumulation of power in small groups. When a single hacker can challenge the status quo, when a "lone wolf terrorist" can cause much more damage than we can cause them, when software allows you complete anonymity to gather, think and plan something the powerful cannot supervise, that's when democracy fails. That's when the powerful become unsure of their power.

And we know what happens when power is fearful: abuse of power. Beware power, because it makes you an enemy of the state. Not because of shadow cabals or government conspiracies, but because of direct logical consequence. And when I say "state" I mean the whole state (of affairs). It means your neighbors, your friends, your city and only at the end, some sort of authority which, ironically, acts as the perfect agent of a democratic government. It is actually not at all different from the original meaning of the term, coined by ancient Greece, where every citizen could vote, but not all people were citizens. How many sci-fi movies show superpowered individuals being chased by government agencies? Why is that? Because governments are evil? No, it's because unchecked power is illegal. You are allowed power, you never generate it yourself unless you rule.

I predict a moment, not far from now, where democracy as we know it completely fails. Not because it is a bad system, but because we become too fast. Power would shift faster than the system could adapt. We already see glimpses of this in the fashionable "Facebook revolutions", where political outcomes thought to be known change over night because of one rapidly spreading trend. The system will desperately try to adapt and it will succeed, but in doing so will become something akin to the stock market. It will be automatic, it will split society into algorithmically equal sides, holding power for inconsequential amounts of time, having no meaning. Radical movements will gain ground, not because they inspire something, but because they are a little brighter than the bland hemispheres of the political system. I believe at this time the entire political system will crash, like markets crash when they get to this point. Corruption will be the only thing keeping politics together so when the system crashes, it all spews forth like black tainted blood. The new revolutionaries will be vindicated by this and gain a flimsy amount of power that will ultimately fail. Then, as with the Internet, maybe the corporate system will gain ground. Or maybe political capital will move just like economic one, being sold and bought transparently. Who knows?

What I am certain of, though, is that politics - as it is now - is doomed to fail. Not because we become smarter, but because we become too unpredictable.

I started reading the book knowing nothing of its author or contents or, indeed, the publishing date. For me it felt like a philosophical treatise on revolutions in general, especially since the names of the countries were often omitted and it seemed that the author was purposeful in trying to make it apply to any era and any nation. Only after finishing the book I realized that Darkness at Noon was a story published in 1940, by Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian-British author who was briefly part of the German Communist movement before he left it, disillusioned. The main character is probably a more dramatic version of himself. As an aside and a fun coincidence, in July 2015 the original German manuscript of the book was found. All the since published versions are based on an English translation after Koestler lost the original. Even the published German version is a retranslation from English by Koestler himself.

The book is difficult to read because it is packed with deep philosophical and political thoughts of the main protagonist. Like a man condemned to purgatory, Rubashov is a former party leader now imprisoned by the very regime he helped create. While waiting for his interrogation and sentencing, he maniacally analyses his life's work and meaning, trying to find where the great revolution failed and why. One of the last survivors of "the old guard", he realizes that the new version of the party is a perversion of his initial ideals, but a logical progression of the principles he followed. He remembers the people he himself condemned to death and tries to understand if he had done the right thing or not. Still faithful to his views that tradition and emotion should be ignored and even eliminated, progressing by logical analysis and cold decisions, he tries to collect his thoughts enough to find the solution, not for himself, but for the failed revolution.

Darkness at Noon is a relatively short book, but a dense one. The author makes Rubashov feel extremely human, even as he remembers his own moments of monstrosity. Repeatedly he reveals to the reader that he thinks of himself as an automaton, as a cog in a machine and that he feels little about his own demise or success, but greatly about the result of the thing bigger than himself in which he believes. Yet even as he does that, he is tormented by human emotion, wracked by guilt, pained by a probably imaginary toothache that flares when he feels his own mistakes and regrets his past actions. He never quite gets to a point to where he is apologetic, though, believing strongly that the ends justify the means.

I liked it. It is not a political manifesto, but a deep rumination on political ideas that the author no longer adheres to. While I am sure many people have tried to use it as a tool against Communism, I find that the book is more than that, treating Communism itself just like another movement in the bowels of humanity. It is almost irrelevant in the end, as the story goes full circle to trap Rubashov in a prison of his own mind, with many of the characters just reflections of parts of himself. In the center of it all stands a man, an archetypal one at that, the book raising his fleeting existence higher than the sluggish fluctuations of any revolution or political ideals.

I read on Wikipedia that Darkness at Noon is meant as the second part of a trilogy, but from the descriptions of the other two books they don't seem to be narratively connected. I certainly didn't feel I missed something discussed in other material. Highly introspective, the story is often thought provoking, forcing one to put down the book to think about what was read. It is, thus, very cerebral: the emotions within are not the type that would make one read feverishly to get to the end and the end itself is just a beginning. I warmly recommend it.

In the last few days I've read several articles that all seem to say the same thing: computer algorithms we use today are biased towards wealthy white men, because they are made by companies in wealthy countries and predominantly by white male developers. Therefore they are inherently racist, misogynistic and wasteful. Nice journalistic metaphors were used such as: "Sea of dudes", "discriminatory code", "green algorithms", etc. I call bullshit!

Computer algorithms need to be, most of all, money makers. If Facebook or Google tweak an algorithm one way or another, the result is immediately apparent in the bottom line because of their huge user count. It may be possible that somehow, by cosmic coincidence, wealthy white males would also be the ones making most purchases, moving the most money, and thus the algorithm may appear biased. But it's not. The algorithm performs as it was supposed to. If a face recognition algorithm classifies black people as gorillas, Asian people as blinking, etc, it's not because the algorithm is racist, but because the data it was provided pointed to that result. If looking for a movie title you get torrent links rather than the official web page of the movie it's because that is what people want more. It's not a glitch, it's the way a machine understands reality. An algorithm is no more racist than the Nazi ovens or the Hiroshima bomb.

What I am trying to say is that code, especially now when it is becoming more and more embedded with machine learning (which is a much better term than the terrible misleading "artificial intelligence"), represents an intersection point between specifications, people biases and data biases, to which you add horrible bugs. Algorithms, just like the way pieces of your brain work, are but elements in a puzzle.

"Well, of course, and to make the entire puzzle more socially responsible, we need to make all pieces socially responsible!" That's stupid. It's like working on the paint of the car to make it go faster. Sure, you can use some over engineered paint to reduce drag, but the engine and the wheels are still going to be more important. Male developers don't decide to tweak an algorithm to make it disregard women any more than a human resources female employee doesn't decide to hire developers based on how much they value women. Owners, managers, money ultimately are what lead to decisions.

Stop trying to appear politically correct when you don't know what you are talking about. If a complex computer algorithm that uses math as its underlying mechanism shows a bias, it's not because statistics are racist, but because the data it was fed was biased. The algorithm in question doesn't reveal the small mindedness of the white developer or of the male mathematician, but a characteristic of the world it sees. Even with people feeding them the wrong data, algorithms are more objective than humans - that is a fact - because often you start developing them before you know what you are looking for; a person always works the other way around. Why not use code to show us where we are wrong, or biased, or angry at how the world is, or plain stupid? We have such a wonderful tool to make judgements from formal principles that we can actually tweak and, instead of scrutinizing the principles, you go nitpicking against the developers and the algorithms. I find it especially humorous to see random data introduced into a generic algorithm producing results that are considered biased because you don't like what you see.

Bottom line: want to change the world and make it better? Here is an algorithm for you: take the world and make it better.

And BTW, I find that constantly accusing developers of being white and male is a form of sexist racism. What do you want me to do? Turn black? If you would truly be unbiased you wouldn't care what is the social structure of your IT department. It's only now when computers matter so much that you are bothered of how much the geeks are getting paid.

I have created a Facebook page for the blog, so if you are tired by my Facebook ramblings and only need the updates for this blog, you can subscribe to it. You may find it here.

Also, I've discovered a bad bug with the chess viewer: it didn't allow manual promotions. If you tried to promote a pawn it would call a component that was not on the page (an ugly component) and then it wouldn't promote anyway because of a bug in the viewer. Hopefully I've solved them both. It mainly affected puzzles like the one I posted today.

White to move. Can you draw? Can you win? What would you do? Try - I know it's fucking hard, but do it anyway - to think it through.
[FEN "5kB1/3p1P2/7K/2Pp1P1P/p6p/4P3/7P/8 w - - 0 1"]
1. Kg6 a3 2. h6 a2 3. h7 a1=Q 4. h8=Q Qxh8 (4. .. Qg1+ 5. Kh5 Qxe3 (5. ..
Qg7 6. Qxg7+ Kxg7 7. Kxh4 d4 8. f6+ Kf8 9. c6) 6. Qf6 Qf3+ 7. Kh6 Qf4+ 8.
Kh7) 5. f6 h3 6. Kg5 d4 7. c6 dxc6 8. exd4 c5 (8. .. Qxg8+ 9. fxg8=Q+ Kxg8
10. Kg6 Kf8 11. f7 Ke7 12. Kg7) (8. .. Qh7 9. Bxh7 Kxf7 10. Bg8+ Kxg8 11.
Kg6 Kf8) 9. d5 c4 10. d6 c3 11. d7 c2 12. d8=Q# 1-0

Here is the video for it, from very good channel ChessNetwork:


Enjoy!

Clippy is back, thanks to this nice project. So what else could I have done than add it to my blog? Just go to Menu and choose your "Assistant".

If the assistant is set, the messages from the blog come from the assistant. It also follows the mouse as it moves around and does various gestures depending on what one does or reads. Have fun!

I will give you this as a puzzle, so please try to figure out that White's move is going to be. This and a lot of cool other puzzles are presented by IM Andrew Martin in the following video.

[Event "Ch URS"]
[Site "Moscow"]
[Date "1956.??.??"]
[Result "1-0"]
[White "Tigran Vartanovich Petrosian"]
[Black "Vladimir Simagin"]
[ECO "A53"]
[PlyCount "95"]

1. Nf3 Nf6 2. c4 c6 3. Nc3 d6 4. d4 g6 5. e4 Bg7 6. Be2 O-O
7. O-O Bg4 8. Be3 Nbd7 9. Nd2 Bxe2 10. Qxe2 e5 11. d5 c5
12. Rab1 Ne8 13. f3 f5 14. b4 cxb4 15. Rxb4 b6 16. a4 Bf6
17. Kh1 Bg5 18. Bg1 Nc7 19. Rbb1 Na6 20. Nb3 Ndc5 21. Nxc5
bxc5 22. exf5 gxf5 23. g4 fxg4 24. Ne4 Bf4 25. Rb7 Nc7
26. fxg4 Ne8 27. g5 Qc8 28. Re7 Qh3 29. Rf3 Qg4 30. Qd3 Bxh2
31. Rxf8+ Kxf8 32. Rxe8+ Rxe8 33. Bxh2 Re7 34. Nxd6 Qxg5
35. Qf1+ Kg8 36. Ne4 Qh4 37. Qe2 Rg7 38. d6 Qh6 39. Qd1 Qh4
40. Qe2 Qh6 41. Qf1 Rf7 42. Qg2+ Kf8 43. Ng5 Qxd6 44. Qa8+ Kg7
45. Bxe5+ Qxe5 46. Qh8+ Kxh8 47. Nxf7+ Kg7 48. Nxe5 1-0

Did you find it? I have to admit I did not. The game is Tigran Vartanovich Petrosian vs Vladimir Simagin, played in 1956.

[well, no following video, because YouTube just randomly removes content without any way of knowing what it was]

Every Heart a Doorway started well. Here is this girl that arrives at a specialized institution for "wayward children" - runaways, boys and girls that somehow don't fit into the slot their parents have prepared for them. Like many young adult stories, the main protagonists are young people into a place that accepts them as they are, but is still formal, with strict boundaries. In this case the idea was that the youngsters each have found the door to another world, a world that not only is completely different from ours, but is perfect for them. They have spent some time in it, only to accidentally leave or to be thrown out, with no way to return. After some times years in that place, changed to their deepest core, it is difficult to readapt to the real world, which makes their parents send them to this kind of institution.

From here, though, Seanan McGuire just piles up the tropes, while the careful writing style and setup from the beginning of this short 173 page story decays into a rushed and inconsistent ending. Just like Hogwarts, the house is managed with ancient British style rules, fixed meals, absolute authority, etc. There are children and there are adult teachers. The headmistress is someone who went through the same thing and decided to help others, but outside of that she's just as certain of her point of view and as self righteous as any of the parents that abandoned their offspring there.

And there is this... style, this way of describing the interaction of characters, which annoyed the hell out of me, without being bad as a writing style. You see, the young girl that arrives at the institution is time after time met by people who finish her sentences for her, show her that they think they know better than her, and she accepts it, just because she's the new girl. With that level of meek submission, I wonder why her parents ever wanted her gone. Her perfect world - a place of the dead where she was a servant of royalty and the skill she had learned best was to stay completely still for hours lest she upsets the lord of the dead - was also about total submission, and she loved it there. Most of the people that explored other worlds were similarly bonded to dominant characters that have absolute control over them.

In the end, children start to get killed and the response of "the authorities" is to hide the bodies and instruct youngsters to stay in groups, while the main characters suddenly can use their skills in the real world, as it was completely normal, but fail to use them properly to find the obvious killer. The scene where a skeleton tries to tell them who the murderer is - even if that should not have been possible in the real world - but can only point a finger, so they give up after one attempt of communication is especially sour in my mind.

So yeah, I didn't like the book. I felt it was a cheap mashup of Harry Potter and 50 Shades of Grey, polluted by the author's fantasies of submission and not much in the way of plot or characters. And it's too bad, since I liked the premise immediately.

I've quickly finished the second volume, Metro 2034, by Dmitry Glukhovsky, in the Metro series of books, after reading and being captivated by Metro 2033. To me it felt more geared towards the sci-fi and the writing lore than towards the social satire from the first book. It felt less. There are fewer main characters, fewer stations, less character development, less monsters. The few people that do populate the book are so archetypal that even the author acknowledges it in the guise of a character nicknamed Homer, an old guy that searches for stories and sees his entire adventure an odyssey to be written in a book and his companions filling up the roles of Warrior and Princess and Bard.

Don't get me wrong, I liked it a lot, but I felt that the first book acted as a caricature of current society, with its many stations that each adhered to some philosophy or another, while the second veered quite a large distance from that and went purely towards the catacomb sci-fi thriller. There is still enough philosophical discourse in Homer's musings and it is interesting to see the post apocalyptic world seen through the eyes of someone that lived before as well as with fresh eyes: a girl that only knew one station her whole life. But the book was tamer and I am not the only one to think that.

Now, I scoured the net for some Metro 2035 love, but to no avail. I found a Polish audio book, but nothing else. It is ridiculous how much one has to wait to get a translation of a book written in Russian or how difficult it is to get even the original Russian text.

I've heard of Metro 2033 from a movie link that said Hollywood wants to adapt the book as a feature film, which in fact is really ridiculous: not only is the book famous, it has several sequels, it spawned a video game franchise and many authors have join to write inside a shared Metro universe. So how didn't I know about it? The reason, of course, is that it is written by a Russian: Дмитрий Глуховский. The book was published in 2005 in Russia, but only in 2010 was it published in the US, similar to how Japanese movies or other culturally different art trickles to the predominantly English culture. Meanwhile, the concept has grown so much that there are more than thirty books written in the universe. It's like falling down a rabbit hole. I used to love Russian sci-fi when I was a child and I have not realized how much I missed it until I started reading this book: simple people yet complex characters, with deep philosophical concerns, problems that are rarely solved through sheer force, depressing settings where everything falls apart yet makes people strong and interesting and puts them in the foreground.

Metro 2033 describes a parallel universe where World War III has happened and the few Russian survivors have hidden in the large network of the Moscow subway system. Radiation, biological weapons and other factors have turned the surface into a toxic place, filled with monstrous mutants and terrible creatures, while underground each metro station has developed its own unique culture and mythology. The beauty of the book is that it reads more like a satire of the history of the world and less than a post apocalyptic story. There are religious fanatics, fascists, communists, people who have rejected technology and others that value knowledge and books more than anything else, traders and mystics and people with strange powers. I felt that the author himself didn't really mean to create a credible after war world, as he didn't linger on where the power comes from or how the food is grown or other such technical details, instead focusing on the human spirit, the many myths created to explain the state of the world and radiographed the world in this pathetic microcosm made of barely surviving people.

Somewhere in the middle of the book I got a little bored. I have to admit that the long paragraphs and the many details of some scenes make for difficult reading if you are not in the mood. I loved the book while reading it at night, but had trouble focusing when trying to read on the street or when walking the dog. Yet by the end I am really glad I read the book. I can't imagine reading next anything other than the sequels and I lament the very real possibility that I might delve into the other dozens of books and short stories written by other authors in the same world.

In order to explore the world of Metro 2033, you may start at the Metro2033 web site, of course, where there are beautiful 360 photos of the current Moscow subway stations. Also, you may try the game, which feels a bit dated from the promotional videos, but apparently has a good plot. Of course, exploring the book universe sounds like a better idea, yet most of the spinoffs have not yet been translated into English. Perhaps this is a good opportunity to start reading in Russian...

It became obvious to me that one of the most popular and common ways of "winning" consists in changing the definition of what that means. See capitalism for example, boasting that a group will benefit if each of its members attempts to improve their lives. The "winners" will pull everything up and will expand while the "losers" will just fade gently into the background. Allegedly, the greatest demonstration of this is the victory of capitalism over socialism and communism. But it's all a fallacy, as their reasoning can be translated as follows: "We measure success in capital, others don't. In the end, we have more capital, so we win". It's not who is better, but how you ultimately define "better". I find it disturbing that an economic model that attempts to optimize happiness has not emerged at any point in history.

This not only happens at a macro level between countries or economic systems, it happens between people as well. "Successful people" proudly announce their recipe for success to people who wouldn't really consider that a good thing. See people that cheat and corrupt and kill to "get ahead". One might covet their resources or power status, but how many of the "losers" would actually condone their behavior, take the same risks or appreciate the situation you get when employing such tactics? Same applies to heroes. We want to save the world, but we are more afraid of trying and failing. Heroes go past it, maybe not because of courage, but because that is their set goal.

Yet competition is the engine of evolution. Doesn't that prove competition is the solution? I say not. Look at the successful animals in nature: they are perfect for their niche. Crocodiles spend huge amounts of time motionless just beneath the surface of the water only to jump and snatch their prey when coming to the watering hole; cheetahs are faster than anything with legs, catching their prey in a matter of minutes; sharks roam the water, peerless in their domain. And yet all of these creatures are far from perfect. They age, they get sick, they don't build anything lasting more than their own lives, their only legacy are offspring just as flawed as them. And guess what? All of these creatures are getting less and less because of humans: weak, pathetic, inoffensive hairless monkeys who can achieve more than any others just by banding together and sharing their resources and their results. If competition would be the ultimate solution, then there will be a creature strong, tough, intelligent and immortal. Yet there isn't one.

I submit that competition is great only if two elements are fulfilled: a) you have the ability to evolve, to improve. b) there is someone better or at least equal to compete against. If b is not available, complacency will turn competitivity towards the weak. Instead of getting better, you will stop others getting to where you are. It's a simple application of available force. If point a is missing, you will be the one that a stronger competitor will stifle. And yet, what I am describing is not competition, but having a purpose. Behind the appearance of competition, when you try to catch up with someone better, you actually set a goal for yourself, one that is clearly defined. It is irrelevant if the target is a person or if they even consider themselves in competition with you. One might just as well choose an arbitrary goal and improve themselves by reaching it.

Why am I writing about this? For several reasons.
One is to simply make evident that if you envy someone for their success it is either because you can't get possibly there or because you won't - you have determined that to take that path would take away something that you value more. For example comfort. People envy the position of others less so, but they basically are not prepared to make the effort required to get there. Yet laziness doesn't disappear. Why? Because one reaches a goal after many attempts and failures, not in a straight line. Only once someone got there, it is much easier to follow their path sans the potholes, the setbacks and the mistakes.
Another is to show that the purpose defines the path, not the other way around. Setting a goal defines both success and failure and that is why many people with responsibility prefer to not set one. However, without the goal, people just stagnate, go around in circles. Look at space exploration: each successive US administration comes with another idea, abandoning what their predecessors did, going nowhere. When did they do anything that mattered? When they had a clear goal of doing better than the Russians. If someone were to go and colonize Titan and start living there, they wouldn't find it so expensive and pointless to go to the Moon, asteroids and Mars. Without someone to do that, though, they don't do anything.

Laziness is in our nature. Evolution is lazy. Competition is ultimately lazy. You can get comfortable in your lead, while occasionally shooting other racers in the foot when they get close enough. The opposite of laziness is not work, but direction. Once you set a goal, you know how far you go and how fast you get there. A group benefits more when all its members work towards a common goal. Funny enough, in such group scenarios competition between members is often cancerous. I find it also amusing that there is always someone better or at least equal to compete against: yourself.

I have been using Disqus as a commentator for some time and yes, it is a bit bloated and yes, it writes all kinds of errors in the console, but it has a big advantage that you have all your comments and replies in a single place. When you go to a Disqus enabled web site you see a warning that you have unread messages. So from now on, my blog is using Disqus as its comment engine. While doing this, I've also updated some layout and code, so let me know if anything is wrong.

So there it is. Tell me what you think! Preferably in the comment section.