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So, the day has ended and we’ve seen many protests around the world. Did it help? Well, a bit, but don’t hold your breath right now.

European citizens are still being sued by the American government and being extradited to the US because their sites had links to copyrighted material. So, in a way, what SOPA and PIPA stands for is already reality, but it takes the US government a lot of effort and money to do so. With SOPA and PIPA, enyone in the world could end up in Guantanamo Bay, as easy as any American.

While I welcome the protest, and feel that Americans did a good job converting 30 more senators to their cause (it was 5, now it’s 35), it’s far from enough. I think people still haven’t realised that this is not an American issue. Just like American copyright laws have bankrupted creativity around the world (think Mickey Mouse effect) and the American patent system has destroyed technological advancement (patent trolls, et al), SOPA and PIPA will spread throughout the world and be the icing on their cake.

The people that are so desperate to preserve their profits by breaking the rest of the world are the people that already have more than anyone. Last year, Viacom’s CEO had a 50mi raise in his salary. Not a bonus, mind you, a raise. To protect those people’s profits, we’re letting them destroy the entire world, stop technological advancements (that don’t give profits to them) and kill all the artists in the process.

If you, like me, are outside of the US, please make sure your government stops short of bending to the US government, as they always do. Europe, and particularly UK and France, has been America’s puppet for far too long. The US is not the only country in the world, and nowadays, it’s not even the most important one. We need to change the world to multi-polar and promote countries like China, Russia, Brazil, India. Not that I like any of them, but we must not put all our coins into one crazy country, we need more crazy countries to re-balance the world.

Now, for some of the protests

Apart from the obvious Wikipedia, Google, WordPress, there were some others I’ve seen that are worth mentioning.

• FightForTheFuture had a very interesting video explaining the whole thing.
• Ars Technica published only SOPA/PIPA articles, and very good ones at that.
• Bruce Schneier, security legend, also joined the protests.
• Avaaz, always alert, started a petition and already got more than 1.5mi signatures.
• People that live on content (in theory, the ones affected by piracy) also had their say: XKCD, Abstruse Goose, Basic Instruction.
• Last, but not least, The Daily WTF has a very interesting piece about how bad it already is, and supporting PIPA so we can go back to the BBS era that was much more comfortable!

It was not just that, some people actually went on to the streets (NY and SF) and it seems most senators’ phones and websites went dead for the traffic. It’s working, but this is not the end, nor this is just about copyright. This is about freedom of thought, freedom to share, freedom to be a human being. Stopping SOPA/PIPA is just the first step, we need to undo most of what the media/war/oil/tobacco industry has done for the past 80 years, unless you like dictatorships, of course.

The concept of privacy is born from the antagonism between individuality and the desire to belong to a group. The instinctive drive to form groups – for protection, mating and warmth – is much older than the human race itself. It’s an instinct of almost every animal, and a successful characteristic or many plants and fungi. Individuality itself comes from pride and greed, two characteristics more specific to higher animals (such as felines, canines and primates).

Pack animals, like zebras, benefit a lot from being indistinguishable from each other (this is why they have stripes). Other animals, such as most felines, have leaders and there’s a succession line (much like royalty, but favouring physical strength). However, even on hierarchical species, the people is just the people, and they’re fine with it. Even on primates, you seldom see identification of one’s work or specific concerns with privacy. You can see them mimic privacy (if you beat them when doing something you wouldn’t do in public), but that’s Pavlov’s conditioning more than anything else.

Communism

However, group behaviour’s strengths and benefits if applied to the human race are quickly dismissed as communism.

There was a lot of group psychology in Marx’s political views (and a lot of Marxism in Pavlov’s ideas), hence, there was a strong rejection of any conditionalization of the people impose by the state or any strong enough body, on the capitalist side of the world.

The individual entrepreneurism of modern capitalism (as opposed to the original binary model from Adam Smith and co.), borne during the colonisation of America (no rules, no government), has been revamped by communism fears during the cold war, Cuba and now China.

Faith

As with any faith, the belief that individuality is the landmark of the human race brought its own problems.

First, individuality goes against most of other values we have as humans. My right to fart in a bloated bus goes against the respect I should have for others. My right to eat my pudding goes against the compassion I should have to spend the same amount for the mains of an impoverished child. My right to press the tooth-paste in the middle goes against my love for my wife.

Putting individuality higher than other important human values, such as respect, compassion and love, makes it a lot harder to live in societies. And given that we are now passing the 7 billion people, it’ll be a lot harder to be alone. But faith has no boundaries, nor logic. People were raised believing their individuality is more important than anything else and they die for it.

Biting the hand…

But life has it’s ways of being ironic, and deeply satisfying at it, for the bystanders. Extremely capitalist countries (like UK and US) have figured out long ago that such freedom cannot be. There is no society based on individuality (they’re antagonistic, after all). Worse still, a society that is purely based on individuality is a society without government. That, whose people have the right to do whatever they please. For this society to thrive, people would choose the right thing to do more often than not. That apolitical society has a name: anarchy. I don’t believe any government would like that!

To control people without telling them they’re being controlled, you have to resort to subversive techniques, extensively described in Orwell’s 1984. For centuries, both sides of the Atlantic have resorted to such measures, but today, no country is more Orwellian than the US.

Countries in Latin America or old USSR are failed nations (in the ayes of the American Government), where people know how bad it is and, well, live with it.

West European countries have, to a certain extent, succeeded in creating a more stable, if somewhat socialist, government. People still have their own liberties, but the government is strong and has it’s strong hand (NHS, public schools, social security, etc.). While they could do much better on many things, people know the failures and, well, live with it.

But the US is a special case. And the critical elements in the country’s history of the aggressive capitalism (internally and externally), individualism and greed, is biting the hand that fed it. For decades now, the government is increasing the grip on people’s freedoms, while increasing the liberty of major industries such as media, software, pharmaceutical, weapons on its grip of the government. After all, the recent breakdowns (like the one in 1929) of Enron, the Internet bubble and now the housing market and the financial crisis are signs that capitalism still has a lot to go wrong if unrestrained.

And still, the government gives more power to those same companies every year. The social reform Obama promised is yet to be seen, the technology-savvy campaign he did turned out on a technology-moron government, failing to understand basic concepts of day-to-day life that most Americans already know for ages. And since the US has such a power on the world’s economy, they’re spreading their chaos to Europe, as they did with Latin America for centuries (ever since Monroe Doctrine).

Recent court battles in EU for copyright infringements, the three-strike laws (rushed in by puppy Sarkozy even before the US) and all the prosecutions over Europe regarding software (Microsoft) and stupid hardware patents (Samsung vs. Apple), shows that stupidity took over the world, for good.

SOPA

After the recording industry successfully convincing underpaid musicians that they were being robbed by piracy, and the successful creation of the the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, making legal things such as DRM (and illegal to have the right of privacy), and crippling their own patent system with useless patents (giving birth to a whole new industry, called patent trolls), the US government now is superseding itself by creating the Stop Online Piracy Act, the new idiocy that goes beyond any idiot boundaries any human being has ever gone.

The US government has consistently and strongly reminding us, the rest of the world, of countries like China, where people don’t have the right to freely access the internet (due to the Big Firewall of China), and how much better is the freedom that capitalist countries give you. That freedom, ultimately linked to individuality and the greed to make more money that your peers, is what makes the American capitalism thrive. But every action, every argument has been destroying this dream, for more than a decade already.

Of course, as with any decent Orwellian government, they don’t tell you your freedoms are being displaced. And people that do say that, like Richard Stallman, are tagged as crazy lunatics, in spite of what GNU has done for society in the last 30 years. Anyway, the government’s arguments are, actually, promoting freedom. The freedom for the companies to make pornographic profits at the expense of the population’s freedom.

We, the people

But the people is not fooled. Recent movements to occupy Wall Street and the increasing mention that capitalism is failing in the alternative media (blogs, independent media channels, etc.) are clear indications that the nation’s mindset is changing.

A recent survey has shown that 75% of the Americans disagree with the outrageous fines (or any fine at all) for copyright infringement. Actually, most of them are knowingly infringing copyright themselves.

So, how does this happen? From a nation that valued their individuality and community to a nation of filthy pirates that don’t give a dime about other people’s property? Well, nothing has actually happened. To the people, I mean. But two things have, indeed, happened to the government.

First, the notion of property, individuality and respect, that were never meant individually, are now showing its colour. Second, the greed in which people were bred made them respect so much their individuality that other people’s profit is not as important as their own comfort. While this is the driving factor behind the population fight against the failed patent and copyright system (a fight that I do support), it’s for the wrong reasons.

Respect

My view is that the patent system, copyright, the media industry, the firewall of China, etc. fail on a basic respect level. Not only individualism, mas also the sense of society and community. Respect is by far more important than individualism or community. It’s a concept that, when applied correctly, can derive communities that do respect your right to individuality and privacy, at the same time that it stops abuse short of damaging others.

Respect is not perfect, nor equal to everyone. There are always those that abuse of the system and people will get hurt, or killed, before the community can do anything about it. But isn’t it true to every kind of community? Do you really believe that SOPA will stop piracy more than harm loyal customers? Did DRM? Did DMCA? Did the Terrorism Act really stopped more terrorists than it locked up regular air travellers?

All those solutions were direct infringements of privacy, the right to defend yourself (ex. Guantanamo Bay and patent trolls), the right to share and give away (DRM), the right to use your property where and how it’s meant to be used (DRM). Now, the US is also losing the right to use the Internet. And don’t think that this is staying within their borders… it’s most definitely not!

Expect Cameron and Sarkozy to be adhering to that idea sooner than the Americans do…

About 15 years ago, when I was working on a dodgy Brazilian firm, I had a conversation with an older programmer that I never forgot. He said something along the lines of:

Medicine is way easier than computer science. Doctors are still using the same books, written decades ago, while we have to buy only the latest ones. Our reality gets rewritten every five years or so, and by the time you leave university, you’re already outdated.

There is a lot of merit in this argument. Even though the common cold’s strain changes every week, its symptoms are exactly the same. Cancer, HIV, malaria, Lupus and other big diseases are treated more or less the same way as they were when first treated, and GPs still give you aspirin/paracetamol/ibuprofen for any kind of pain.

Human anatomy, physiology and psychology doesn’t change at all. Broken legs, runny noses and swollen tonsils are the same on every person and they require the same treatment for everyone.

While doctors kill one patient when they do make a mistake, developers can kill hundreds if they happen to introduce a bug on the Airbus fault-tolerant fail-over system.

But recently, I had to re-think this through, and I have to say I’m not 100% in agreement any more.

When programmers change jobs, they get a few weeks to get used to the new system. They might get months to actually be productive as their peers and will mature within a few years working with the same piece of software. Programmers can run tests, regression tests and usability tests, unit tests, etc, which is something a bit complicated with human beings.

When a doctor gets a new patient, it’s like getting a new programming job. It’s the same language, but the system is completely different. It might take you weeks to start getting the prognosis right, and in a few months you’ll be able to get it right before your patient even tells you the symptoms.

The similarities are remarkable

Consultant programmers get new systems to work on every week. Like ER doctors. They do what they can, with the time they have and the solution is most of the time acceptable. A more stable doctor or programmer might look at the job and cry, but the job was done, the fire was put off and the “patient” is out of the door.

Family doctors, that were there when you were born, know you better than yourself. They know when your symptoms are only psychological and what cause that and when it’s going to go away. They rarely touch the “system”, but normally fix an unrelated bug and you’re good as new.

But not everybody is lucky enough to have such doctors. They are expensive, and there aren’t enough good doctors in the health system of any country to account for every family. Even if the doctor share a hundred families, it’s still very far from enough.

This is the reason that systems fail, and get half-fixed, and why most GPs will send you home with a paracetamol unless you’re dying in front of them.

If doctors and programmers had such a different world, the emergent behaviour wouldn’t be that similar, I believe.

No, not the one everyone is talking about. The one that actually made it all work.

Not the one that was worried about uniforms and style, the one that actually designed and develop the foundations of modern society.

Not the one that enclosed people into a dungeon of usability, but the one that created the tools to enable everyone’s freedom.

The one whose work made possible the computer revolution in the 70s, the micro-computer revolution in the 80s, the open-source revolution in the 90s and the mobile revolution this last decade. Without Unix and C, and their simplistic but elegant design, the stronghold of modern society, none of this would be possible. We’d still be fighting over who invented the bloody pipe.

Rest in peace, Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie and may your wisdom embedded in the world today, linger as much as possible in our minds.

UPDATE: (Wired) Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders Steve Jobs Stood On

Ever since Moore’s idea became a law (by providence), and empires were built upon this law, little has been thought about the need for such advancements. Raw power is considered to many the only real benchmark to what a machine can be compared to others. Cars, computers and toasters are all alike in those matters, and are only as good as their raw throughput (real or not).

With the carbon footprint disaster, some people began to realise (not for the correct reasons) that maybe we don’t actually need all that power to be happy. Electric cars, low-powered computers and smart-appliances are now appealing to the final consumer and, for good or bad, things are changing. The rocketing growth of the mobile market (smartphones, netbooks and tablets) in recent years is a good indicator that the easily seduced consumer mass has now being driven towards leaner, more efficient machines.

But, how lean are we ready to go? How much raw power are we willing to give away. In other words, how far goes the appeal that the media push on us to relinquish those rights bestowed by Moore? It seems not so much, with all chip companies fighting for a piece of the fat market (as well as the lean, but).

What is the question, anyway?

Ever since that became a trend, the question has always been: “how lean can we make our machine without impacting on usability?”. The focus so far has only been on creating smarter hardware, to a lesser extent (and only recently) reducing the unneeded fat of operating systems and applications, but no one ever touches the fundamental question: “Do we really need all that?“.

The questions is clearly cyclic. For example, you wouldn’t need a car if the public transport was decent. You wouldn’t need health insurance if the public health system was perfect, and so on. With computing is the same. If you rely on a text editor or a spreadsheet, it has to be fast and powerful, so you can finish your work on time (and not get fired). If you are a developer and have to re-compile your code every so often, you need a damn good (in CPU and memory) computer to make it as painless as possible. Having a slow computer can harm the creative process that involves all tasks around it, and degrade the quality of your work to an unknown quantity.

Or does it?

If you didn’t have to finish your work quicker, would you still work the same way? If you didn’t have to save your work, or install additional software, just because the system you’re working on only works on a particular type of computer (say, only available on your workplace). If you could perform tasks as tasks and not a whole sequence of meaningless steps and bureaucracy, would you still take that amount of time to finish your task?

Real world

Even though the real world is not that simple, one cannot take into account the whole reality on each investigation. Science just doesn’t work that way. To be effective, you take out all but one variable and test it. One by one, until you have a simplified picture, a model of reality. If on every step you include the whole world, the real world, in your simulations, you won’t get far.

There is one paper that touched some of these topics back in 2000, and little has changed since then. I dare to say that it actually got worse. With all these app stores competing for publicity and forcing incompatibility with invisible boundaries, has only made matters worse. It seems clear enough for me that the computing world, as far I can remember (early 80′s) was always like that and it’s not showing signs of change so far.

The excuse to keep doing the wrong thing (ie. not thinking clearly about what a decent system is) was always because “the real world is not that simple”, but in fact, the only limitation factor has been the greed of investors who cannot begin to understand that a decent system can bring more value (not necessarily money) than any quickly designed and delivered piece of software available today.

Back in the lab…

Because I don’t give a fig to what they think, I can go back to the lab and think clearly. Remove greed, profit and market from the table. Leave users, systems and what’s really necessary.

Computers were (much before Turing)  meant to solve specific problems. Today, general purpose computers create more problems than they solve, so let’s go back to what the problem is and lets try to solve it without any external context: Tasks.

A general purpose computer can perform a task in pretty much the same way as any other, after all, that’s why they’re called “general purpose”. So the system that runs on it is irrelevant, if it does not perform the task, it’s no good. A good example of that are web browsers. Virtually every browser can render a screen, and show surprisingly similar results. A bad example is a text editor, which most of them won’t even open another’s documents, and if they do, the former will do all in its power to make the result horrid in the latter.

Supposing tasks can be done seamlessly on any computer (lets assume web pages for the moment), than does the computer only computes that task, or is it doing other things as well?

All computers I know of will be running, even if broken, until they’re turned off. Some can increase and decrease their power consumption, but they’ll still be executing instructions to the world’s end. According to out least-work principle (to execute tasks), this is not particularly relevant, so we must take that out of our system.

Thus, such a computer can only execute when a task is requested, it must complete that task (and nothing else more), and stop (really, zero watts consumption) right after that.

But this is madness!

A particular task can take longer to execute, yes. It’ll be more difficult to execute simultaneous tasks, yes. You’ll spend more cycles per particular task than usual, yes! So, if you still thinking like Moore, than this is utter madness and you can stop reading right now.

Task Driven Computing

For those who are still with me, let me try to convince you. Around 80% of my smartphone’s battery is consumed by the screen. The rest is generally spend on background tasks (system daemons) and only about 5% on real tasks. So, if you could remove 95% of your system’s consumption, you could still take 20x more power consumption for your tasks and be even.

Note that I didn’t say “20x the time”, for that’s not necessarily true. The easiest way to run multiple tasks at the same time is to have multiple CPUs in a given system. Today that doesn’t scale too well because the operating systems have to control them all, and they all just keep running (even when idle) and wasting a huge amount of power for nothing.

But if your system is not designed to control anything, but to execute tasks, even though you’ll spend more time per task, you’ll have more CPUs working on tasks and less on background maintenance. Also, once the task is done, the CPU can literally shut down (I mean, zero watts) and wait for the next task. There is no idle cost, there is no operational code being run to multi-task or to protect memory or avoid race-conditions.

Problems

Of course, that’s not as easy as it sounds. Turning on and off CPUs is not that trivial, running tasks with no OS underneath (and expecting them to communicate) is not an easy task, and fitting multiple processors into a small chip is very expensive. But, as I said earlier, I’m not concerned with investors, market or money, I’m concerned with technology and it’s real purpose.

Also, the scaling is a real problem. Connection Machines were built and thrown away, clusters have peak performance way above their average performance levels, and multi-core systems are hard to work with. Part of that is real, the interconnection and communication parts, but the rest was artificially created by operating systems to solve new problems in an old way, just because it was cheaper, or quicker, or easier.

Back in the days…

I envy the time of the savants, when they had all the time and money in the world to solve the problems of nature. Today, the world is corrupted by money and even the most prominent minds in science are corrupt by it, trying to be the first to do such and such, protecting research from other peers just to claim a silly Nobel prize or to be world famous.

The laws of physics had led us into it, we live in the local minima of the least energetic configuration possible, and that’s here, now. To get our of any local minima we need a good kick, something that will take us out in a configuration of a more energetic configuration, but with enough luck, we’ll fall into another local minima that is less energetic than this one. Or, we we’re really the masters of the universe, maybe we can even live harmoniously in a place of local maxima, who knows!?

As a postal worker, Mark had plenty of time to wonder in his head about things. Being in the post was not the most boring job ever, but wasn’t also complex that would put his brain cells to work that much. A bit of letter sorting and route planning was more than he needed to perform his job well and, even though he had a few neurons to spare, that actually didn’t help with his boss’ appraisal.

Not that Mark’s boss didn’t welcome a bit of thinking, it’s just that sometimes, too much thinking can do more harm than good. Nevertheless, Mark had that job for a few years now, and no plans to actually make a change. He had no family to care for, nor any massive debt to pay out and wasn’t particularly good looking to actually have a girlfriend.

But all that averageness wouldn’t help Mark to stop thinking about those things. Things that would make him loose his job. Things that always made him awkward when talking to women. Things that nobody else could understand, and nobody cared for that matter. Probably the very reason why he was thinking about it again this morning…

Spam

Between delivering some spam to a semi-detached family house and dropping a small box to a bungalow with lots of rubbish on the pavement, he thought how hard it is to do what people expect you to. Why do we have to deliver spam to half the country? Why can’t he just skip the spam, since nobody wants it anyway, and just deliver the good stuff? Would they really know if he’d delivered the spam in the first place?

For a few minutes that day, people walking down the pavement were somewhat annoyed with the presence of a motionless postman holding a few flyers. He was thinking… If they were actually paying attention, people on that street, that day, would see a perfectly regular postman sorting through his delivery quota in his bag with anger, until all the flyers were in his hand. He opened the green bin of that bungalow, and dropped them all in there.

To be honest, one mother coming down the high street, immediately after dropping her daughter at school (and the usual chat with other parents), actually saw all that happening. But her head was so full of problems, her daughter’s performance in school wasn’t that good and her husband, if you can call that husband, wasn’t being particularly nice that day. She dismissed the whole scene as another common madness of the world.

Mark was anxious, waiting for someone to say something, to reprehend him or to cheers for his bravery, but nothing really happened. It was exactly the same village as he was just a few minutes ago. A very radical move from his part had no damage whatsoever on the course of man kind. It was in that moment that he decided to do that every day.

For 3 years he put all the flyers in random bins (there weren’t that many, but he managed to hid some other on random places, too). To no surprise, absolutely nothing happened to any one. Local business were still working, Tesco was still full of people buying the same chicken wings on sale and the brand new chip shop had a very good clientèle, despite all their spam going to the bin every day.

With great power…

His success was a bit disappointing. Not only he managed to keep doing for so long, but nobody ever cared. Now, people were actually used to seeing him dropping flyers, no matter how extravagant were his moves around green bins. People would even greet him good morning while he was doing it. But he wasn’t a normal fellow, and his sense of righteousness put him on track to reform society. Small changes for a small man, but nevertheless, changes.

He decided to do every right thing where a wrong thing was expected. He delivered letters to doctors on the same day, even when a second class stamp was used. He’d slack off during most of the afternoon to deliver the big packages during the evening, when everybody was at home. He even delivered letters to people he knew while shopping and one day he replied to a letter himself.

It was a letter to a marriage lawyer firm on the postbox next to school. The letter was a bit crumpled and had a very shaky hand writing. He knew exactly from who that was and why. He replied:

Dear Mrs. Wife,

Your husband is a crook. He gambles the unemployment benefit, he hits your daughter and has an affair with more people that I’d dare to say.

You don’t need a lawyer, you need to slap him in the face and throw him out of your house.

Regards,
The postman

If that ever helped, nobody knows, but how that made him feel better, is inexplicable. The good feeling was taking over his life. He was less tense, had a few dates with the bakery attendant and even sent a letter to his mother. But all that feeling was stopped dead by a call from his boss. Apparently there were some complaints that the postal service was a bit erratic and some letters were not reaching their destinations.

Mark’s boss reassured him that he trusted Mark, but wanted him to know that there would be some investigations and questions to all members of staff. As it turned out, another postman was unhappy about his work and stopped delivering anything and went to the pub for the few last days. After a weekend delivering more letters than usual, everything went back to normal.

Happiness is ethereal

During the next few months, Mark managed to have a sound relationship with Emma (the bakery attendant) and they were actually happy. After the year’s end, Mark got a raise and could now afford a cable TV subscription. He didn’t get the sports pack, since Emma wanted the entertainment one, but all was fine as long as she was there, with him.

However, as it couldn’t be different, Mark started to wonder… He was really happier now than some years ago. The whole city seemed to have accepted his behaviour, no matter how odd. Even Emma ignored the issue after Mark told her during one of their first dates. It really wasn’t that important. How is that possible?

Can he, then, do whatever he wants? To what extent will bending the laws imposed by the people actually go before people start noticing, and doing something about it? How can some people do so little and go to jail, while him, with such a radical take on life, gets completely ignored. What would he have to do to be noticed?

In whatever group you are, Mark realised, as long as you don’t interfere with its natural course, you will be ignored. He learnt from the one of the documentary channels that this is true with every animal. Man is not more than any other animal. Society is not more than any other group. Not only you can do whatever you want, as long as that doesn’t interfere with the group, but everything you do will be completely ignored and, when you die, forgotten.

Obviously, Mark’s new take on life put some dents in his relationship, but he managed to suppress his thoughts while Emma was around. He wouldn’t want to loose her, not after so much trouble to get her. He also agreed not to talk weird while her friends would come over, and that took their relationship to a marriage, and life went on as you know it.

…

To be honest, I never heard of a postman named Mark, but according to his own theories, he could very much have existed and you’ll never know it…

I’m cycling to work now and found that by being stored and unused for so long, my bicycle’s gear box (or whatever that’s called) was a bit damaged. Not a total loss, but I lost one front gear and one back gear, which makes it a 12-gear bicycle instead of a 21. It made me wonder about the gears in the bicycle, and how much I have really lost. Since there are obvious similar gear-ratios and impossible configurations in those supposed 21 gears, the 12 I still have could account for more than 12/21th.

I counted the number of dents in the gears, front and back, and came up with the following (approximated) table or ratios:

If you count the rations in order, you’ll see that there is an average distance of 0.15 between most of them. Some have more (1.12-0.82=0.30), some less (1.75-1.74=0.02). So, if you group those with less than 0.07 as one ratio, you end up with 12 possible combinations!

Furthermore, I can only change gears one at a time. With good training, maybe I can change both at the same time, one up and the other down, to minimize the switch. So that, represented in the table above, would be a grid with vertical and horizontal changes and the eventual diagonal change, but the diagonal has to be 45-degree angled (one change on each side at one time).

Since my 28-dented gear went busted, as well as my 14, I can only use 38/48 in the front and 16-34 in the back. Removing the first row and column, we’re left with the following ratios table:

which, when grouping close ratios, gives us 8 usable rations, instead of 12. That’s just a bit less reduction in the number of ratios. But also, that helped me understand my gears more easily (I’m not that well versed in bicycle matters, as you can see) and plan my changes with more accuracy.

Since two of the ratios in the two remaining rows are the same and in impossible changes (more than two columns apart), I don’t have to jump over a similar gear. The ratio change from increasing the rear gear is not constantly increasing (but reasonably similar), and the ratio gain from changing the front gear is reasonably close to 0.50 (aprox. 3x the change in the rear gear), so that gives me enough information to know which gear I have to change and when.

Of course, everyone learns that just by cycling, but I need to use my head while I cycle, and so I did this…

Nothing to do with the topic of this blog, you are right, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the reality England faces regarding football.

All these years watching a mediocre football, even in the Premier League, where Cristiano Ronaldo is the top player and where Robinho can’t play football made me wondering what’s terribly wrong with the nation’s love for the sport. Not just passion, but the English people were the ones that invented the sport. Here in Cambridge its very first rules were written and the first match with those rules played in Parker’s Piece in 1848.

With more than 160 years of football history you would imagine that they’d have a bit more skills… Recently I have found a perfectly good reason why this happens.

Another English passion, maybe even more important that football, is lawn. Not cricket, not complaining, not political jokes: lawn. Mediocre football is all right, mediocre grass is a crime. But, grass and football are very much connected, probably the very reason why they loved to play it in the past, but as priorities are laid, lawn apparently comes first. In my recent visit to my son’s new school, with very impressive lawns, bigger than an official football pitch. The “football pitch”? It’s made of asphalt, which is also used as car park some times…

Baffled as I was, when I asked the children about football, they said they were allowed to play, but they had to bring their own balls. So far so good, but then it came reality: there is a recommendation to use foam or rubber balls, to avoid injury. Question is, what does more injury, proper footballs or asphalt?

In Brazil, children as young as 1 year old play football with anything. Coconuts, food cans, socks rolled into a ball, even stones. And they usually play barefoot, on dirt, or even asphalt. Health and Safety is important, but not to the point of removing completely the fun of being a child. If a child doesn’t get dirty, it won’t learn to clean itself, to avoid the situation in the future and, more importantly, to understand the pain of living and how good that feels.

European football? Never heard…

First time we went back to Brazil, besides the 40 degrees heat at nights and family discussions about how much more time we spent at the other aunt’s, it was no big deal. So the idea the second time we not to plan better and not to spoil the family any more. That time, there was little discussion, but we forgot to check for the little one’s passport and spent two weeks on queues at the federal police to get it, involving sending his documents over from UK via Fedex (thanks Guto!).

A lot of time (and planning) later, we decided to go, our style, and check all documents before flying. It was wonderful! Besides the usual family fight, all went well. We went to the beach and it was sunny and fantastic. On our way back from the beach I said: “We did it! Nothing went wrong this time, eh?”. It came out as a relief, but turned out to be a curse! At the exact moment I said that, a giant pool of lava decided to come out into existence, as if feeling my moment of joy, just to spoil it. It was a masterpiece, from a Norse god or something.

Wednesday, 14th April 2010

All flights stopped, and on Wednesday itself I knew ours (on Sunday) would be included. As business continuity planning (BCP), I coordinated with my company, my family and KLM to get the most out of the zillions of different news flashing on Twitter, Facebook and BBC.

I have to say that we were a bit disappointed with Eurocontrol. They stopped all flights for safety reason (quite reasonable) but they sat and waited until the volcano would stop spilling lava. As if that would solve anything, even after all geologists said it could take months, or even years, to stop.

Friday, 16th April 2010

Feeling the pressure of $200mi a day each, all airlines got their planes flying with no passengers. Some flew at lower altitudes, most at regular and some even got right into the ash, just for fun (and results). And even with all results negative, Eurocontrol delayed days to slowly restart flights.

Monday, 19th April 2010

We were still stranded in Brazil, with two hyper-active boys, mum without her medicines and dad without his nerves in the right place. We were offered a flight back, but KLM warned it was only to Amsterdam, so we didn’t take it. I said to the advisor to only book us if the flight was all the way to London.

Tuesday, 19th April 2010

We were booked on the same flight as before, but, according to KLM, all the way to London. I was amazed. KLM had done some flights to London already and I thought we were going home, much easier than I had foreseen… how naive.

At the Guarulhos airport, KLM said they couldn’t guarantee both flights, which came as a surprise. But with all the chaos, I thought it was only fair to accept their apologies and proceed with our travel back.

Wednesday, 20th April 2010

But it was only when we got to Schipol that I really understood what chaos really meant. There were a few thousands of passengers queueing for no apparent reason, going in random directions, being directed by random people in random uniforms, working for random companies, pointing to nowhere in particular.

One guy, dressed with a KLM suit, said I should get information directly from KLM (I didn’t ask). Another said that, in order to get info, I should take the queue that would take approximately 2 hours. When I finally got to the electronic ticket machine and had difficulties, the helping person told me she could not help because the machine was not helping.

In the end, we found out that our flight to London (KL1017) never existed. There were other flights to London (KL1019), but they were all full, and there were no confirmed flights in the next day. I had to queue to know that, too. Nowhere to go and no flight to take, we decided to rent a car and head to Calais to get the ferry. We got a big car, put all the bags in and headed south.

Holland, Belgium and finally France, we got first to Dunkirk to check for ferries. There was only a very stupid lady that refused to answer me if there was a passenger ticket, just because I was not in the queue. Of course I would get the queue if there was, but what would be the point to get the whole queue if there wasn’t? Well, there wasn’t. Another fine lady answered me in 3 seconds, and it didn’t even hurt.

We headed to Calais, broken, hungry and without a single Euro, we could only find MacDonalds in Belgium and Holland. But we made it. After several U-turns along the way (the car got no satnav nor AVIS had any), we eventually got there. Now, it was just a matter of dropping the key back and get the 4 hours queue to buy our tickets to cross the channel…

As the sunset began, the cold that was already there began to show its face. The temperature dropped quickly, my hands froze and Renata and the kids went inside. No panic, as it was just a matter of waiting… how naive.

Reaching the tickets office, I checked passports, bags and wallet… wait, where’s my wallet?! Desperately looking in all bags, I called Renata, who kindly reminded me it was in the car’s arm pocket… But I had already gave the car keys already back, in the night safe.

When I got inside the building (3.5hours later), I ask them to stay in the queue and we decided to look for a way to get the wallet back. A French staff wanted to break in with a rock, but I reminded him there were hundreds of policemen around, British and French. It’d be harder to explain than to come home without the documents.

After almost an hour looking for a way to retrieve the key, with no avail, they decided to call the AVIS guy, who arrived after half hour, and he also wasn’t in his best mood… Well, who would? Finally, we made it to the boat, with all bags and children and documents… But our car was still parked on the Long Stay at Heathrow airport, 3 days due.

Thursday, 21st April 2010

When we finally reached Dover, we found that there were no cars to rent, buses were full and the next train would be only hours from then. To make matters worse, the only taxi big enough to carry us didn’t know where Cambridge was…

The Travel Centre in Dover was the key. Not only I could withdraw money (using my credit card, as my account was blocked), but someone gave me a list of telephones to call for a taxi. After a few attempts, one of them got the call and had a car big enough. We agreed on the price and he came to pick us up.

It took around 2 hours to get home, all of us (including the driver) trying to stay awake, but we finally got home around 3am, and after firing the usual emails (family, work, friends) to signal our arrival, we went to sleep.

After 2 days without sleeping (yes, I didn’t sleep a second), it was a miracle I could wake up at noon. We had a minimalistic breakfast (there was no food at all at home) and, without so much of a shower, I headed south, to Heathrow airport, via train.

The train was fine, but the underground train decided it didn’t want to go all the way to terminal 4, so it stopped at Northfields and spat everyone out. I got the next train, which also didn’t go to terminal 4, and politely asked us to leave to get the next train yet, which finally took us to terminal 4.

3 hours after I left home, I was inside our car. All working, I just forgot the ticket, which was easy to work around since I had the booking confirmation and they opened the gates for me. I was expecting some traffic on the M25, which came as sure as rain in England, but my tiredness was so great that I couldn’t stay awake for too long.

I stopped at the A1 services, and had a light meal and a quadruple-espresso that I mixed with a heavy-chocolate milkshake and swallowed in a few gulps. It was yet another hour or so, almost falling asleep, that I finally got home… after 7pm.

All of us, safe and sound, and I had all the time in the world to sleep comfortably in a nice bed. There was only one detail.. During all that adventure, both kids slept like angels through the long boring parts, so they weren’t tired at all!

It is only now, three days after we arrived, that I feel I’m getting back my energy.

A long time ago I read an article about some dangerous psychological studies in the 70′s. It’s funny to think that, at that time, things that we don’t even consider doing, were acceptable.

Can you imagine yourself with a periscope counting the seconds some truck drivers take to piss in a public toilet? Or pretending to rape a girl and risk getting shot (especially in the US)? It’s not just ethically incorrect, it’s dangerous!

Recently, I read an article about some students monitoring 350 million mobile calls just to figure out if the callee’d call you back. Not only in the 70′s that would be nonsense, but people would explode in rage, as it’d be just enough to prove all conspiracy theories at that time (not to mention the cold war).

This is not the first research using “unnamed” data from carriers or websites, nor will be the last. I myself proposed something similar to Yahoo! when I worked there to get the trends and act on the average (rather than tag individuals), and I see now that it’s becoming acceptable to allow research groups to openly read entire databases that before was considered private.

I don’t particularly dislike such type of research, especially when they’re done by universities, but the slight paranoia feeling creep up my spine sometimes. I guess that’s one of the issues that is dividing people into two very distinctive groups: those that ignore completely the privacy for the sake of comfort, and those that ignore comfort for the sake of privacy.

I am in between the two groups, but I can’t say I’m exactly average. I think I’m an extremist on both sides. I don’t mind storing my private emails on Google but I disable all Facebook add-ons and restrict access to all my personal data. I pay everything on the internet with my credit-card but I’ll refuse to the end of my days to use the biometric passport or iris recognition at airports.

There is no logic, really, it’s just the kind of thing you stick with. It is true that governments have more power to dig your data when they want, while Amazon will probably only have my credit-card number. But it’s also true that no government in the world can dig everyone’s data all the time, so it’s pretty improbable that someone is monitoring how many times I cross the Heathrow border.

In the end, only one thing makes out as logic in the whole scene: during the recent years, it was far more likely the government loosing all banking details of everyone in the country than some hacker invading Amazon to get my credit-card. Maybe that’s what’s keeping me from accepting IDs and biometric passports… or maybe I never will…

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