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2003

Ni un dia sin poesia!

So, finally. After many adventures I ultimately arrived in Madrid. I am staying with a bioinformatician friend of mine called Alvaro over the weekend and on Monday I will move into my own room in Plaza de Espana.

Adventures I did have. After leaving Bradford, arguably one of the least pleasant places, I traveled to unquestionably the most beautiful places on Earth: south of France, Costa Brava, Barcelona and finally Madrid.

My first stop was sunny Barcelona, where I was to spend one night. The city welcomed me with a scene from an Almodovar film. A ride on a train from the airport to the city accompanied by classical music and beautiful, rested, full of live Spaniards and curious holiday makers. All bathed in surreal colors of Catalan sunshine. I left the train full of hope and joy, took out my hand-drawn plan to direct myself to Kabul Hostel, where I was to sleep. At this point however Providence decided to teach me a lesson and send me on a heedless trek in the opposite direction to the one I was to follow. After about half an hour I realized my mistake and had to turn back... Finally after about an hour and a half I arrived at the hostel, but after dragging my 30kg suitcase for so long I had blisters on all my fingers, on some fingers more then one, and three of them already burst :|
This was not a good start to my journey and on top of that the hostel was fully booked. Thankfully I found another, but after all that I had not much energy to go site seeing. I slept for a while and walked only a few hours before really going to bed.

The next day I traveled to France -- to Perpignon and then to a small town nearby called Elne. There I was welcomed by Marcus, a relative of Dean my Bradford boss. What a wonderful person he is, wonderfully disorganized and passionately in love with the South of France. I understand him fully however, as over the few days I stayed with him he showed me some places which were so breathtaking that no words of mine will do them justice. Cliffs hundreds of meters high dropping straight into the blue-green Mediterranean sea, small villages where life is a constant appreciations of infinite beauty. I chanced to be there on the 14th of July, the French independence day, when each of these villages had a fireworks display. We watched one and then drove back to Elne surrounded by the Pyrenees and brightly illuminated colorful sky... I will also never forget swimming in the Mediterranean and looking back on mountains forming the background of a coastline covered with palm trees. Amazing. It is no coincidence that so many famous painters come from this area.

Marcus is a painter and our long talks about life and art awoke a curiosity within me which I hadn't realized was dormant for many years. I have not picked up my sketchpad yet, but I would really like to try drawing... Maybe someday.

On one of my days in Elne I took a ride along Costa Brava to Figueras. There I visited the Museum of Salvador Dali, rightfully named 'the largest surrealistic object in the world'. The museum is constructed as a sanctuary for Surrealism and it was designed in its entirety by Dali himself. As you enter you see a car standing in the room ahead of you. As you enter that room you realize that it is a beautiful shining black Cadillac, filled with plants and algae covering a motionless plastic driver. The Cadillac forms a pedestal for a 10 meter high column made out of car tires atop of which a statue stands. This statue is reminiscent of the ancient Gaia mother-figures and she stands there with open arms, naked, covered only with gold. Behind all this on the wall is a gigantic version of one of Dali's paintings... You really would have to see it to believe it :)
The museum is filled with Dali's paintings, drawings, objects, holograms, stereoscopic paintings, jewelry... I saw there one of my favorite Dali paintings, Leda Atomica and others: Galatea of the Spheres, Poetry of America, The Specter of Sex-Appeal, Portrait of Picasso, Soft Self-portrait, The Specter of Sex Appeal just to name a few of the more famous ones. The most amazing exhibit was Dali's jewelry however. Made out of gold and precious stones, basing on motives from his paintings. In this jewelry his painted surreal dream visions materialize and come into life in our world. And they come to life, because they move, pulsate, they live, the Royal Heart actually beats.
Oh and by the way, the room which looks like the face of Mae West... it's on floor two :)

Reluctantly I finally left beautiful Catalunya and came here. Of Madrid I will now only say two things. For one, until you live here, you just don't know what living in a city can be like, and two: I think I'm falling in love... with Madrid.

So...It happens again. Again I

So...
It happens again. Again I will move. New people, new faces, new places.
I'm moving to Madrid tomorrow, well with a couple of stops along the way...

It's a strange feeling to leave a place, knowing that you will probably never come back again. Even if it is miserable Bardford. All the people you were starting to get to know will suddenly be distant friends on the other side of the e-mail...

Oh well, such is life if you want to travel. Tomorrow I will forget my sentimentality and embrace adventure.

Moving on to bigger, better things. Always.

Cinema is still art, isn't it?

There is a certain mode, a tendency in the American cinema with which we are all too familiar. All the films regardless of gender are supposed to have Great Actors, who don't act; fine scripts in which everything is explicitly laid out; an emotional scene with high pitched violin music to make you cry and a happy ending. These movies I no longer can watch, they stopped having a meaning for me some time ago. Their predictable stories and superficial morals or dumb-witted humor make me feel disgusted, self-conscious and shamed.

There are exceptions to the rule however. Fine movies are still made, despite their apparent commercial failures. Those are the ones which make us think again, the ones which make us feel something new. They are the ones which people often refer to as ambitious, but I would venture to claim they are anything but. Ambition assumes a desire for distinction, wealth or fame. The directors making those movies are aware that they will most likely receive none of these. They will not attain wealth or fame, and the only distinction they may get is from the few people who still appreciate cinema as art.

I have hunted for these films in the past years and will attempt to make a list. This list shall contain only new films (from the past 5 years, say), which clearly went beyond the set schema of Hollywood and ventured into the unknown.

Let me start with films I have seen this year.

2002
Solaris (Steven Soderbergh)
Punch-Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson)
About Schmidt (Alexander Payne)
Adaptation (Spike Jonze)
The Hours (Stephen Daldry)

Films, as any other art form, philosophy or school of thought, depict and map our mass-consciousness. The above movies are true to this ideal, and yet if you watch them you might notice that they all share a common characteristic. They all talk about people who are losing their sanity. Why this is, I do not know, but in a world, which is starting to look more and more orwelian, we should be aware of it.

Older films include:
2000
Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aronofsky)

1999
Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson)
Titus (Julie Taymor)
American Beauty (Sam Mendes)
Cube (Vincenzo Natali, non-hollywood, independent and good!)

Meanwhile in Europe...
2000
Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier )
1999
All About My Mother (Pedro Almodovar)
Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer)

This list shall be continued and updated whenever I rememer anything else. If you think that a film should appear on this list or if you think that something doesn't deserve a nomination, then let me know and I will consider it.

Help me out... what other fine films were there?

Credit, where credit is due

Reading my blog, you might get the impression that I am anti-american. What a wonderful term, abused right up there with WMD and terrorism, the term anti-american is used by people in Washington to describe and discredit anyone who dares to voice an opinion out of step with the administration.

I am not anti-american however, and I want to praise the strength with which the Bush administration supported the Middle East 'road-map' to peace. Today Israeli forces pulled out of Betlehem! This is a major step towards a withdrawal of Israelies from territories under the Palestinian Authority and thus a major step towards peace between two countries. My hat is off today for Colin Powel, Condolezza Rice, and even Dubya himself.

Unfortunatelly I cannot end this on such an optimistic note. The fact that I am not a hard-headed anti-american doesn't make me incapable of criticizing the Bush administration for its mistakes. And what I heard today is hair-raising. We all know that the administration does not support the International Criminal Court, but today it issued a statement saying that it will not give any military aid to countries which did not sign an exemption bill, which would exclude american citizens from prosecution by the ICC in the country. 5 countries in the EU accesion group would be effected and even more so Columbia, which normally recieves aid from the US.

The long-term importance of the ICC and the International Court of Justice cannot be overestimated in our global world. It is shortsighted, foolish and egotistic(imperialistic) of powerful countries not to recognize a need for international institutions.

In any case, keep up the good work America, but stop being such ass-holes when it comes to other issues!

Next step for P2P

Next step for P2P

The struggle of RIAA to control P2P is a truly fascinating battle to follow. First they shut down Napster (and Audiogalaxy), the P2P community responded by creating decentralizd networks. Then they tried flodding the networks with "fake" files, the community counterd with hashing.

Now they want to go after individual users!
But fear not, the developers have an answer up their sleeve. The way the RIAA tries to go after users is to obtain their IPs and then their identity from the ISPs.
The internet is based on the TCP/IP protocol, which requires both sides to know their IPs in order for any information to be exchanged. There is no way to really hide or mask your own IP, except one...

Distributed proxying
In order to mask your IP you need to go through a PROXY server. This means that you send your TCP request to a server, which then sends it on its way, recieves the answer and sends it back to you.
Unfortunatelly, in this case the owner of the proxy server could be held responsible by the RIAA....

Alas, there is an answer: incorporate the proxy software into the P2P client.
If you do that, then you can assign every user a unique number (call it the session number) and make him anonymous. The user would send all his requests not directly to another user, but to a randomly chosen user nearby. The request would wonder a little trying to find the user with the appropriate session number and then come back the way it came. It would be P2P2P2P rather then P2P :)

The process would have to be optimized of course (maybe by incorporation of super nodes), and even then the speed of the network would fall. But just remember how dramatically the initial decetralization of P2P networks slowed them down. Network bandwith is going up and will continue to do so, eventually these obsicles will be overcome.

Moreover, a session number does not have to be constant. It can change everytime you restart your program, or even more often, making you an untraceable moving target.

I am not sure how much of this is already being done by Filetopia, but my advice is: If you are in USA and you share a lot of files, switch to Filetopia until the other networks incorporate some distributed proxying.


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Buddysta i Kapitalista

"W końcu to ludzie zamożni robią znacznie lepszy użytek ze swoich funduszy niż rządowi biurokraci."
-RAYMOND J. KEATING (IHT)

Otaczają mnie meble, komputer, telefon, za oknem droga, sklepy, samochody. Wszystkie te rzeczy są dla mnie dostępne, są gotowe służyć mi pomocą, gwarantować wygodę, bezpieczeństwo. Za każdą z tych rzeczy z kolei stoją niezliczeni ludzie, którzy poświęcają swój czas i energię by rzeczy te były zawsze w zasięgu moich rąk. Jakże nieskończone jest ludzkie dobro otaczające mnie każdego dnia, jak łaskawi wszyscy ludzie...

Ten buddyjski sposób patrzenia na świat jest raczej obcy nam, ludziom zachodu. Jesteśmy bardziej skorzy dopatrywać się chciwości niż dobra w motywach otaczających nas ludzi. After all, business is business. Który z tych sposobów patrzenia na świat jest lepszy lub bardziej inspirujący to temat na długą dyskusję, ale kto ma tu rację?

Patrząc racjonalnie na postawę Buddysty i kapitalisty możemy łatwo dość do wniosku, że racji nie ma ani jeden ani drugi. Wynika to z prostej przyczyny, mianowicie takiej, że niektórzy kierują się bardziej wyrozumiałością, a niektórzy głównie chciwością. Nikt jednak, a tym bardziej żadne społeczeństwo czy cywilizacja nie kieruje się tylko jednym.

W takim razie, co jest motorem decyzyjnym napedzającym współczesną gospodarkę? Jest nim to co ekonomiści lubią nazywać "niewidzialną ręką rynku". Jest to łączny skutek wszystkich decyzji podejmowanych przez zarządy korporacji, rządy i osoby handlujące akcjami. Zrozumienie działania rynku okazuje się bardzo trudne, a przewidywanie gdzie niewidzialna dłoń zabierze nas w przyszłości (nawet niedalekiej) jest praktycznie niemożliwe. W 2002 roku Daniel Kahneman otrzymał nagrodę Nobla za wykazanie, że ludzie będący odpowiedzialni za decyzje finansowe często zachowują się irracjonalnie, więc modelowanie rynku na podstawie racjonalnych przesłanek jest niemożliwe.

Jedno jest jednak pewne, kto ma pieniądze ma władze. To właśnie ludzie bogaci, a szerzej, ich korporacje decydują gdzie i kogo zatrudnią, od kogo będą kupować, z kim będą współpracować, a z kim nie. Te decyzje mają namacalną wartość dla ludzi, gdyż oznaczają one możliwość znalezienia pracy lub jej brak.

A więc kto powinien mieć pieniądze? Pan Raymond J. Keating twierdzi, że najlepiej spisują się one w rękach bogaczy, a nie w rękach rządów. To, że rządy potrafią pieniądze marnować wiemy wszyscy. Z doświadczeń komunizmu wiemy, ze jeśli jedynie aparat władzy dysponuje kapitałem to skutki są opłakane. Ale z drugiej strony spójrzmy na Afrykę. Ten kontynent jest tak biedny, że trudno mówić o pieniądzach posiadanych przez tamtejsze rządy. Pieniądze którymi dysponują te zadłużone kraje są tak niewielkie, że kilka większych korporacji mogłoby je wykupić, gdyby tylko im się to opłacało. Decyzje podejmowane przez świat biznesu często oznaczają być albo nie być dla państw Afrykańskich. Mamy więc wspaniały model tego co dzieje się gdy naprawdę rządzą korporacje. Te międzynarodowe giganty często zapewniają wielkie zyski i zatrudnienie swoim amerykańskim lub europejskim oddziałom, ale z Afryki importują tylko surowce narzucając ceny o jakich nie mogłyby marzyć w domu.

No więc komu dać te nieszczęsne pieniądze? Czy powinny one pozostać na kontach bezdusznych przedsiębiorstw, czy trafić do kieszeni biurokratów? W naszym demokratycznym świecie nie możemy pozwolić na to, żeby władza pozostawała w rękach nieobieralnych władz – zarządów wielkich firm. Moim zdaniem, podatki powinny być tak niskie, żeby nie dławić gospodarki, ale nie niższe. Aby demokracja była rzeczywiście władzą ludu, a nie "niewidzialnej ręki rynku" podatki muszą być wysokie. Tylko w ten sposób za decyzjami podejmowanymi przez obieralne gabinety, stać będą środki konieczne by je realizować.

Polsce jeszcze daleko do podejmowania takich decyzji. Musimy najpierw rozkręcić naszą gospodarkę, obniżając podatki i redukując biurokrację na którą nas nie stać. Tym nie mniej, kiedy to już się uda, to przyda nam się państwo opiekuńcze, które zapewni nam edukację, zdrowie, drogi, dynamiczną kulturę, etc.
Musimy też myśleć w większych skalach. Wkraczamy do opiekuńczego super-państwa jakim jest Unia Europejska, niech nam wyjdzie to na dobre. Afryka jednak pozostaje biedna, wiec potrzebne są jeszcze większe, globalne struktury, które dbać będą o zachowanie zasad fair-trade. Czy doczekamy się uczciwej konkurencji dla Światowej Organizacji Handlu?


At five in the morning...

I have not yet progressed very far in my meditations.
The only concepts I have fully realized are two. One, how precious this life is and how important it is to create good karma by trying to live the dharma; and two, the unreality of existence.

The latter concept has always been fascinating for me philosophically. I have long ago decided that 'the world does not exist' and I lived accordingly, selectively contemplating only the desirable experiences, while not dwelling upon the unpleasant.

Physical world is unreal, subjective. You experience it only through your senses, which vary with your mood, attitude, prior experiences. What you see is different then what others see, so how can we talk about any reality beyond the subjective, or inter-subjective at best?

But if I punch the wall, the wall seems very real, causing pain in my hand. This is because my hand is also a part of this world and as such is equally unreal as the wall. My body is a part of this unreal system, and a system it is. Despite it's subjectivity, the physical world is consistent. Due to this fact rational science can exist.

At some point I embraced solipsism but was fighting it's main argument: "I think therefore I am". For if all is unreal, why should my self be exempt from this law?

A consciousness (or Ego) is the sum of one's experiences, feelings, memories. All of them are equally subjective, equally unreal. My ego is a sum of unreal thoughts. How do I know this? Because when I don't think, my ego ceases to exist!
However I am still here. Or am I not here? Here is equally unreal, therefore I am everywhere...

You noticed I use the words subjective and unreal interchangeably. The reason for this is my long struggle with the concept of 'Truth'. The truth is that which is objective, real and therefore absolute. There is no such thing in the world!

In this world we may only have inter-subjective or subjective half-truths. Three kinds of these half-truths exist: scientific claims may be valid, subjective experiences may be beautiful, inter-subjective morals may be good. No statement can be absolute, none can be true.

The absolute is only beyond the world, it is inside each being.

Reductio ad absurdum

Reading Wilber, I begun to contemplate an old problem, which he mentions a few times in his book. The problem is that of "What is consciousness?"
I remember talking about this years ago with friends, when I was arguing the body-mind duality, while one of my friends took the rational, reductionistic stance by which he claimed that our consciousness is but a byproduct of biochemical reactions in our brains. Many scientists seem to believe that this is the correct approach to studying the mind, and claim that one day we will be able to view, explain and control a person's experiences by manipulating their neurons.

In his integral postmodernism Wilber tries to do away with such reductionisms and talks about the brain and the mind as two aspects of one holon (indivisible entity). The brain is the outside aspect of this holon (existing in what he calls the "it domain"), while the mind is its inside aspect (in the "I domain").
He claims there is no way to experience another mind, because it will always be on the other side of another "I". Because holons are indivisible, we cannot dissect another person’s brain in order to get into their mind. In fact any dissection will destroy both the brain and mind, leaving us with a collection of neurons (also holons in their own right).

I'd like to affirm this view, because it seems quite obvious and dissolves the original problem, making both brain and mind equally real in their own domains. The mind may be correlated with the inner workings of a brain, but it is not those workings. Just take a very simple nervous system, of an earthworm for instance. If I remember my biology, this creature possesses only a small number of neurons, correlated into a simple network, which allows it to respond to such stimuli as heat, mechanical stress, physical and chemical composition of its environment. We may very well explain and control it's reactions (ergo experiences) by manipulating these parameters, but we will never be able to be say what it feels like to be an earthworm. We shall never fully understand what it's experiences are, we can only observe the reactions. We can only access it's surface, never it's depth.

People often rejected claims that simpler organisms have any consciousness. I do acknowledge, that they may not posses self-consciousness, intelligence and other aspects of our mind, but they do have their minds of their own. To deny this is an all too human chauvinism, which I hope will die along with modernity.

What a day this has been.

What a truly incredible day this has been for me. So many things happened and each one was grander then the former. I am exhausted, but very happy, very alive :)

It all started early in the morning, when I was lying sleeplessly in bed (after a coffee too strong too late) having read quite a bit of Wilber's 'Brief History of Everything'. Right then, in the early hours of the morning I had a brief flash of realization, which allowed me to order his integral approach to cognition and consciousness into a 4 dimensional hyperspace geometrical model. Then reducing the four dimensions, to what he refers to as The Big Three, I was able to comprehend a postmodern integral ethics. I know, this means nothing so far. It's just my shorthand for what I read, but I promise to write an essay about it soon.

Later, after a few hours I awoke and went to what was supposed to be the gist of today -- a Meditation Retreat Day at the Kashyapa Buddhist centre here. The day consisted of three meditations, each of which had a lesson for me. The first one (On the precious human life) reminded me how fortunate I am to be alive, well and able to lead a good life with a pure mind. The second (On death and impermanence) had a very personal message for me. It made me realize what is the greatest obstacle on my spiritual path, namely self-grasping. The last meditation (On the law of Karma) made me realize, that putting the integral ethics (the early morning idea) into practice could guide me on my path and give my actions meaning for the benefit of others. It was a truly beautiful and inspiring retreat.

After leaving the centre I walked to Lister Park, a place I had previously heard of, but never visited. Upon entering I realized that this is exactly what I was missing in Bradford: a park with water, a botanical garden, a water-garden and a gallery. The Cartwright Gallery, situated in a very nice Victorian (I think) building, houses quite a nice collection of art -- mainly of Indian origin (!).
Unfortunately I got there only a half an hour before closing and I only had time to fully contemplate a temporary exhibition, entitled 'Made in India'(!). Quite an interesting exhibition, that, consisting of objects made by Indian peasants out of used tinfoil. Fascinating, yet disturbing. We truly live in different worlds.

When I left the gallery I started to head for home, but as I wondered through the park I noticed a gigantic slim tower in the distance. My curiosity got the better of me and I headed to explore an unknown part of Bradford. What I discovered took my speech and breath away.
I came to the Manningham Mill. Imagine a building which stretches as far as your eyes can see, full of broken windows through which sky evidences a lack of any roof. Imagine a metal staircase on one of the walls, leading from one level to another, but without any stairs. Imagine the emptiness of a building which takes you minutes and minutes to walk around. Imagine birds as its only inhabitants, flying freely through it's vast open spaces. Imagine finally looking up at the gigantic tower and realizing that it is a chimney of a colossal furnace which boiled water for the mill's mammoth steam engine. Imagine low passing clouds above the chimney vaguely suggesting that this monstrous decaying corpse was once a living entity in which hundreds, maybe thousands of people worked every day.
And suddenly I was there. I was there, back in 1870 when the mill opened, I was one of the people brought in from India to the heartland of the Empire. I worked in the mill everyday, I saw the sweat the pain, the tears and blood of hardworking men and women in the mill. The Mill. It remembers the anguish and hope, the happiness and joy of this new found home, new found luxury, new found life in the Empire.
And then, just as suddenly I was back in 2003. The Mill was dead, but the people still live here, impoverished, ashamed. Some still remember the glory days of Bradford's textile industry. Some probably still come here to watch and pay their deeds to this rotting carcass of industrial modernity.
This adventure was my karmic reward for diligent meditation, but karma is not without it's sense of irony. As I gathered my breath and regained my composure, I walked back toward the homeward street... only to pass Endy -- a brand new shop selling textiles imported from India.

All this was quite enough for one day of any mortal, and yet this was the day of the European referendum in Poland. My eyes filled with tears of joy as I watched pictures from my home town and heard the news that over 80% of my countrymen voted in favour of joining the EU, with attendance of almost 60%. Poland is finally coming back to Europe after over a century of banishment.

What a day this has been.

Strobe life

Strobe life

(pub)
(party) (music) (party-music)
(people) (flashing ligts) (screens)
(drinks) (drink) (cigarettes)
(words) (stobe conversations)
(friends?)
(party or die)
(another pub)
(more partymusic) (partypeople)
(intercourse of disconnected realities)
(would you like to be a celebrity on a box of margarine?)

What if i don't like it? What if it means nothing?
Stay home, rest, wait.
Find reality within others or myself, but not at this party.

"Go to another party
and hang myself
gently on the shelf"