Moon Free of Shadows

The release of the first edition of the Michelin guide for Tokyo coincided with my vacation in Japan, so I could follow the controversy from close-up. The news were also covered on a wide range of Western news sites and by the Financial Times. If you haven't heard about it, you can get a Japanese perspective by reading these English-language articles in the Yomiuri Shimbun and the Asahi Shimbun.

The issue boils down to whether the criteria that the Michelin guide purportedly uses to evaluate restaurants all over the world do justice Japanese culinary ideals. Seemingly, nobody has a problem with a French guide book rating French restaurants in Tokyo, but when they start pontificating on Japanese ones, well, some feathers get ruffled. You know trouble is in the air when the word "wabi-sabi" appears in print.

From my limited (but not-so-limited) experience of the two countries and their cuisines, I'd find it impossible to trust the Michelin guide with the final word on the subject of Japanese food, although its target audience of Western gourmets won't be disappointed. I should also mention that I checked out the complete list as published in the Asahi Shimbun and it turns out that I've been to one of the sushi places that were awarded one star by the Michelin guide: It was one of the best meals of my life, definitely worth every yen.

So what did a sushi master have to say about the ratings?

"I have done my best each day with what fish is available. I've never dreamed of these stars, and I feel I must keep studying." (Jiro Ono, celebrated sushi chef at 82 years of age, as quoted in the Asahi Shimbun)

From the New Yorker:

[American tycoon and famed wine collector] Bill Koch told me that he owns wine that he has no intention of ever drinking. [...] He would hesitate before consuming the harder-to-come-by vintages, because to do so would render the set incomplete, and also because the rarest old wines often come not from the best vintages but from the worst. Historically, when good vintages were produced, collectors would lay them down to see how they would age, Koch explained. But when renowned vineyards produced mediocre vintages people would drink them soon after they were bottled, making the vintage scarce.

So the collectors who did not drink the good bottles back then, in addition to passing up on the best vintages, ended up leaving to their descendants less valuable bottles than those they might otherwise have left them, all out of greed. Consequently, rich collectors can now drink the most amazing wines with impunity, while the (relatively) bad stuff sits in a safe somewhere and fetches the highest price at auctions around the world.

On the other hand, I imagine most people have had the experience of saving a good bottle of wine or champagne for that special occasion which never comes, so maybe greed was not the main factor. As it often happens, contrarians and/or completists got the last laugh, or rather their heirs did.

I wonder whether invoking Gresham's Law is appropriate in this case; probably not, since the dramatic change in relative value between the different vintages took place over a long time span. Or does bad wine drive good wine out of circulation?

Two weeks ago I got to spend four days in Munich, Germany. I went there to attend a meeting of the JCP Executive Committee, on which I serve as Sun's alternate representative.

The city was as pretty as I remembered it from my last visit, which dates back almost thirty years. It just looks smaller now, but that's to be expected, as nothing can compare with the memories of a child who meets the world for the first time.

There is a long-standing joke that my hometown of Milan is the southernmost German town and Munich is the northernmost Italian one. Certainly I found the atmosphere in Munich very congenial, and I can very well picture myself living there at some future date. In comparing the two cities, one cannot help noticing the enormous difference in infrastructure, from airports to public transportation to the development of semi-peripheral areas. The comparison is made more poignant by the similarity between the respective regions: Bavaria and Lombardy have comparable populations and per capita GDP, yet they get to reinvest locally very different percentages of the wealth they produce. Clearly on the Southern side of the Alps few of the people in charge have read Jane Jacobs's analysis of the role of cities in economic history.

Architecturally, I'm not sure that Milan has much in the way of German architecture, aside from the enormous Gothic Duomo, but in Munich buildings of Italian influence abound. Probably the most striking example is in Max-Joseph-Platz. At one end stands the Opera House, which like all neo-classical buildings owes a lot to the Pantheon in Rome.

Then, on the right-hand side when staring at the Bayerische Staatsoper, we find a building which is a transparent homage to Brunelleschi's Spitale degli Innocenti in Florence, a building of immense historical importance for its role in kickstarting Renaissance architecture. You can compare them in these two pictures, both taken by me in the last four months and soon coming to my Flickr account.

Finally, on the left-hand side, the massive Residenz, whose facade is just as openly evocative of Palazzo Pitti in Florence.

On Saturday I had to choose which of the many world-class museums in Munich to visit. After a long and agonizing process, I went for the underdog, i.e. the Neue Pinakothek. (Please realize that the Neue Pinakothek can be the "underdog" only when compared with the Deutsches Museum and the Alte Pinakothek next door.) They were showing a special exhibit called "Views of Europe" which brings together 150 paintings from multiple German museums. If you want to go see it, you need to rush: it closes on September 2nd. Lately I've been reading a book on classical Chinese painting, so I found it interesting to compare what I had read there with the treatment of the man-nature relationship in early Romantic painting, one of the central themes of the exhibit. I also got to see for the first time one of the five famous Totelinseln paintings by Arnold Boecklin, which turned out to be very impressive (the one on Wikipedia I linked to, hosted in Leipzig, does not appear to be the one that is currently in Munich).

Many other famous paintings which are part of the permanent collection of the Neue Pinakothek are depicted on its Wikipedia page. Among those not listed there which most impressed me, I'd mention Gustav Klimt's Die Musik and Paul Cezanne's Still life with commode. Here they are for your enjoyment, and too bad if they throw off the design of this blog.

As generally uninterested in beer as I am, being in Bavaria I couldn't help myself running a little comparison of four different brands of Dunkles Weißbier on four different nights. (I fully realize it would take most people two hours to do that, but as I mentioned I don't drink much and anyway I needed to find something to do while in Munich.) I thought I'd write my preferences here, but then I noticed that the beer I liked the best was also the one I drank on the warmest night, and my least favorite came with the best food. So, completely confused by the outcome of the comparison, I'd like to propose to call the whole thing a tie and drink away!

Where I do have a clear favorite is in the dessert department. My fellow fellow sweet-toothed gourmets, especially those of you with a permissive cardiologist, the dessert to eat in Munich is Kaiserschmarrn. Although commonly described as a pancake, due to its high egg content I'd deem it closer to a custard, albeit one firmed up by a substantial input of flour. Cooked in a pan, mine came covered with sliced caramelized almonds and apple puree (which for some reason I can't bear myself to call applesauce) and with a side of fresh fruits. My only mistake was eating it as dessert at the end of an already filling meal; on the bright side, I didn't have to eat again for fourteen hours. In fact, its caloric content is so high that in my rough estimation a single portion could have fed all of Wallenstein's army for a month, sparing Bohemia from some wretched plundering. Before some reader points it out, I should note that Kaiserschmarrn is an Austrian dish, popular in former Imperial lands (hence the reference to Wallenstein). I certainly wish that Milanese gourmets had adopted it in centuries past alongside the now classical Wienerschnitzel.

In recent years, the issue of nuclear proliferation seems to have become a permanent fixture in the media, fueled (no pun intended) by a number of regional crises. An interesting article in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine talks about the activities of former Senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga) in this area, following his retirement from Congress back in 1995. The most visible one was founding the Nuclear Threat Initiative organization (NTI), a non-profit devoted to "strengthening global security by reducing the risk of use and preventing the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons".

A few months ago, the NTI announced a proposal to form a Nuclear Fuel Bank under the auspices of the IAEA. In the words of Mr. Nunn,

A country´s decision to rely on imported fuel, rather than to develop an indigenous enrichment capacity, may pivot on one point: whether or not there is a mechanism that guarantees an assured international supply of nuclear fuel on a nondiscriminatory, non-political basis to states that are meeting their non-proliferation obligations. We believe that such a mechanism can be achieved, and that we must take urgent, practical steps to do so.

Depending on your inclinations, knowing that Warren Buffett pledged $50 million to this initiative may spur you to read the whole article. The pledge is conditional on the establishment of this "bank" by the IAEA and the contribution by one or more governments of $100 million in cash or low-enriched uranium within two years.

Tomorrow Hollywood celebrates itself at the annual Academy Awards ceremony. As is often the case with a show that looks like the parody of itself, there is really nothing left to celebrate. After reading online an article in the New Yorker praising the sophistication of the movie "Babel", I was about to run here an elaborate argument on why the studio system has become irrelevant, when I realized that a lot of what I meant to say appeared just this week in Newsweek and was echoed just a few hours ago in the Blogcritics online magazine. Rather than go through the whole argument, I'll limit myself to a few points.

The New Yorker article by David Denby that I mentioned earlier points to an increase in sophistication in movies. But "Babel", a candidate for Best Picture Award, is hardly the best example: muddled and pointless, it's significantly inferior to director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's previous efforts, especially his fine first movie, "Amores Perros". The only sequences in which he manages to capture some of the earlier magic are those across the San Diego-Tijuana border, a context certainly more familiar to the director and writer (Guillermo Arriaga) than Morocco or Japan, the other locations of the movie. One can't help wonder if an infusion of cash from the studios, plus some added star power (Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett), hasn't simply lead him astray, causing the story to grow in expanse, at the price of narrative coherence and freshness. But the most questionable part of Mr. Denby's thesis is that it fails to account for the vastly more impressive increase in sophistication and, yes, artistry that took place in television in the last fifteen years.

I side with Devin Gordon in Newsweek in affirming that television, in its time-shifted, cable-based, commercial-free version, is a much more developed medium at this point. Its episodic structure and timely delivery matches the characteristics of present-day discourse, making television fully engaged in our cultural life and allowing it to cross over successfully to other media, like the Internet, and back. Conversely, for all its skilled writers and budget, Hollywood has trouble putting out anything that people talk about: The studio system has become irrelevant to the public discourse. Far from requiring a complex sociological argument, this truth can be appreciated by simply listening to our very conversations. Movies are at best mentioned in passing, with no connection to our lives. Sometimes an independently produced movie will rise to a higher status, like "An Inconvenient Truth", but it does so by contributing to a compelling existing narrative, rather than establishing its own. Effectively, not only is nobody listening to Hollywood, nobody even expects Hollywood to have anything to say any more.

One interesting side-effect of the loss of cultural influence of the movie industry is its retrenchment to serve its core audience, which unfortunately happens to be predominantly composed of teenagers. Hence the wretched series of movie releases we witness every year, with sequels, prequels and parodies of other movies, all necessarily relevant to this particular subpopulation. Every other constituency is second-class. In a way, I find this phenomenon similar to the fall of network television's evening news programs in the US. They too do not contribute in the least to the public debate. They too have retrenched behind a core audience, creating a product tailored to its needs. The result is that they are completely irrelevant: nobody talks about the evening news; nobody cares about what was stated there; they could disappear any day without leaving behind the faintest trace, as nobody even expects anything to come out of them. The occasional reference happens at the meta-level, e.g. the hiring of a new anchor. In truth, there's nothing left to anchor: the discourse about political and current events goes on in other places, ranging from newspapers to weekly magazines to the net, bypassing the evening news altogether.

In my opinion, the studio system is in a dire predicament of their own making. I believe their attention to teenagers may explain why their position on DRM, recently epitomized by the "DRM in Vista" outrage, is so narrowly focused on the threat posed by the Internet, ignoring its potential. The prototypical "enemy" that they picture is the teenager movie collector, always trying to assemble the largest possible number of artifacts for no other reason that bragging about it. (You can have a preview of this type of character by navigating to one of the many celebrities boards and looking for those pathetic messages in which some extraordinarily bored youngster attempts to raise his status by posting his entire collection of pictures of a given celebrity, usually ranging in the hundreds of specimens.) No analysis happens, no choices are made, most of the times the product is not even viewed: it's collecting for its own sake, in an odd rerun of the antiquarian frenzy that possessed the wealthy in the Late Roman Republic. But what are the effects of this policy toward the general public, and how does it affect the relevance of movies in our society? It's also worth considering how the appalling, MPAA-run movie rating system, so effectively described by the documentary "This Film is Not Yet Rated", plays into the teenager-centric agenda of the studios, all while accelerating their decline by preventing fresh creative forces from rescuing them. Is it surprising then that cable television is attracting more and more gifted writers and directors?

I don't want to give the impression that all is lost for cinema as an art form; rather, it's one particular way of producing movies that is on the way out. My critique notwithstanding, every year I look forward to new movie releases by some of my favorite directors: David Lynch (who transformed television with "Twin Peaks"), Francois Ozon, Wong Kar Wai, Yoji Yamada and others. None of them operates in the studio system. A few years ago, I stopped expecting Hollywood to deliver anything worthy of my attention, much less of my conversation, although I still allow myself to be pleasantly surprised when it happens.

When you look at the celebrity-studded red carpet in front of the Kodak Theater on Sunday, remember that the emperor has no clothes.

Recently, I discovered the existence of needleless acupuncture, a mighty new entrant in the pantheon of oxymorons. The context was a wellness event for the benefit of our office neighbors. In a swirl of holistic and alternative techniques, needleless acupuncture stood out, bringing the benefits of thousand of years of Chinese medicine to the squeamish.

I first noticed it because my brain registered it as "needless acupuncture", which sounded like an occupation for hypochondriac masochists. A closer look revealed its nature as a magnetic treatment of some kind, not simply acupressure. The best explanation I found on the net is here (the concept of "best" being very relative). I am particularly fascinated by the claimed connection to herbal osmosis, as if its very mention would persuade anybody to try this cure. The entire article pulls words out of a hat at a rapidly increasing pace, in a meteoric rush to engulf the reader into bigger and bigger images of supernatural healing powers.

Perhaps the problem lies with the word "acupuncture" itself. Whereas to this native speaker of a Romance language it simply means "to prick with a needle", I suspect that the word sounds a lot more dramatic to native English speakers, latinate words being somewhat cold and clinical and "puncture" being associated with catastrophic damage to tires and lungs alike. An informative detour through wikipedia while investigating the original Chinese form (鍼/針灸) took me to moxibustion, a practice frequently mentioned in Chinese and Japanese literature of which I knew next to nothing except that it involved heat.

I'm tempted to point out how the notion of replacing real acupuncture with its patently superior simulation would make Jean Baudrillard proud, but that view is best reserved for collective phenomena, a prominent contemporary example being the displacement of normal wine consumption by the ritual of wine tasting which, in its highest form, involves spitting out, i.e. not actually drinking, the precious liquid. But that's better left to another post.

Last year I broke the 40000 miles barrier: I flew 41009 miles in 16 legs. That's a pretty good average (2563 miles per flight), which coupled with the fact that I was nearly always in coach, explains why the ailments affecting my knees are starting to resemble those of the fabled 1982 San Francisco 49ers team. Even more remarkably, just 8% of those miles were flown for business purposes, thanks to a nearly-complete collapse in the number of meetings of the W3C WSD Working Group and the fact that I had to pass on a conference speaking opportunity late in the year. So, better disposed towards flying for recreation purposes, I ended up visiting Europe, South America and Asia, all within three months.

Of the new places I've been to, Buenos Aires is my favorite. The secret is out now, as I hear more and more people rave about their stay there, so there is no point in hiding that it's a great destination: a friendly, sophisticated, cosmopolitan city with a great night life and excellent food, all at bargain prices. I'm not much of a red meat eater, but the beef in Argentina was sublime, with perfect taste, color and texture. The only glitch is that the portions were immense. Inevitably, staring at those piles of delicious food I couldn't possibly finish, my thoughts wandered to the stereotypical friend (we all have one) who cannot refrain from finishing off whatever items are left on the table, barely excusing himself as he swiftly moves from plate to plate, devouring leftovers with the inevitability of Chronos. You know, the kitchen sink type, from now on to be designated as the ideal dining companion for any trips to Argentina. Thankfully, in Buenos Aires there are also great vegetarian restaurants, like Bio, to help one recover between oversized servings of meat products.

Without a doubt, my least favorite destination was Rio de Janeiro: sorry guys, I won't be back, ever. The city is just not safe, customer service is very poor and cab drivers are permanently trying to scam the tourists. More importantly, since my idea of a vacation is not to get shuttled around from tourist site to tourist site in an armored car, I tried to break the pattern but in the end I found traveling around Rio on my own as a conspicuous foreigner too unsettling. No amount of lore from the 1950's can make up for the degradation in its urban environment that this city has endured. I should also add that the Houston Chronicle writer who had the chutzpah to put his name on this article should be banned from writing on the tourist pages of a newspaper ever again. "I get lost looking for Pousada Favelinha and end up in an adjacent slum that has yet to be pacified" he writes -- definitely not Sunday newspaper material. Should you go to Rio anyway, make sure not to miss the bonde ride through Santa Teresa, preferably on the longer line that takes you close to the Corcovado, ideally in the late afternoon, when the light is just perfect and the experience unforgettable. Don't bring any valuables.

On a different continent, I once again experienced the exquisite hospitality of Japan. Many thanks to my friends there for the pleasant time spent together. As any Italian could attest, it was entirely surreal to make an appointment to meet a friend on the 7:03am Ginza Line train from Shibuya, but in the orderly world of Japanese trains and subways, it worked out just fine.

Most surprisingly, during an intermission of a Kabuki play at the famed Kabuki-za in Tokyo, a middle-aged lady from Shikoku came over to talk to me and offered me a mikan to go with the food in my bento box. (Incidentally, makunouchi bento (幕の内弁当) originated at the kabuki, as the name hints.) She even stopped by later to ask me how I liked the fruit, if I was enjoying the show, where I was from, etc. Naturally, I am not aware of any Japanese expressions appropriate for refusing the polite offer of some food from a complete stranger in such a setting -- assuming they even exist, I shudder at the thought of the convoluted verb endings they would involve, and this at the kabuki, where actors routinely use forms like でござりまする -- so after some valiant attempts at turning it down, I dutifully ate the mikan, which was excellent. Perhaps the mesmerized expression on my face as I watched the shosagoto (所作事) tipped her over, or maybe it was the fact that I was the only foreigner in the orchestra area not escorted by Japanese businessmen; at any rate, I really appreciated this most unusual gesture.

Finally, it was good to see a different kind of old friend. After a hiatus of over ten years, on December 30th I went back to Venice and visited the Palazzo Ducale, which must rank as one of the five most beautiful buildings in the world. In fact, I probably spent half of the available time on my day trip to Venice walking around, inside or by the palace, until the thick evening fog made any further activities pointless. Thinking about it, in 2005 I got to visit for the second time another site on my personal top-five list, the Ginkakuji in Kyoto (in the Fall, no less), so I'd better plan something for this year too. Luckily, I know of a destination that is close to my planned itinerary.

Yesterday the New York Times Magazine published a great article entitled Unhappy Meals in which Michael Pollan, the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, traces the evolution of nutritional recommendations all the way to the present state of madness. I don't want to give away the whole story, but among his recommendations you'll find this one:

Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.

It appears that when the rich and powerful met in Davos last week, one of the topics for discussion was restarting the Doha round of trade negotiations. I hope that, besides placing gag orders on journalists they had themselves invited (you can read John Battelle's clarification on this matter), these Great Men took advantage of the available brainpower to assemble a marketing dream team to address one issue: how to sell the Doha round to the world's public opinion. Because, let me tell you, I don't think that the old explanations will work this time around.

This is not an isolated case. A trade round in which agricultural policies are one of the top items is not the only instance of a Big Issue that needs a fresh set of supporting arguments. Just off the top of my head, I can think of a few more current or semi-current ones: the European constitution; the admission of Turkey as a EU member state; the "surge" in Iraq. On all these matters, the public has been subjected to a barrage of poorly reheated arguments which fail to capture the specific aspects of each issue. To stick to the Doha round, I don't see how anybody can think of dismissing the issue of food by appealing to a blanket trade argument, or an argument by authority, or some calculation resulting in variously fuzzy estimates of GDP increases. I hope it's clear why I care about food more than about steel: I do not eat steel three times a day; I don't have steel recipes passed down from my grandmother; I don't sit with my friends around a table to partake in steel, and in those occasions the conversation is not for over 50% about present, past or future steel consumption.

There is no question that large distortions exist in the markets for many agricultural commodities, sugar being one of the prime examples. In this specific case, I certainly would not object to liberalizing the trade in sugar, e.g. by reducing corn subsidies in North America and sending sugar beet production in Europe the way of the continental blockade that originated it. But I'm very skeptical on the overall effect of a large trade deal.

For starters, it's not clear to me that people in developing countries, which are often quoted as the prime beneficiaries of such a deal, stand to gain all that much, even discounting the demands from developed countries for a reduction of their tariffs on industrial products. What's going to happen with schemes, like the infamous "terminator seed" one, that seem to go against the idea of helping farmers from developing countries get out of poverty? How fairly will the revenue from agricultural trade be distributed in the end? Does the example of a widely traded agricultural commodity like coffee support the overall thesis? What about the skewing of production towards varietals whose main qualities are trade-related, like the well-known case of the Cavendish banana? Maybe there are better ways to lift whole populations out of poverty. As the example of African countries skipping fixed phone lines and embracing cellular phones shows, historical progressions don't have to be mimicked step-by-step in all cases.

There is just as large a number of issues when we look at their counterpart at the negotiation table. For example, if we examine the list of countries that spend money on expensive agricultural subsidies, we find places like Italy, France and Japan. It so happens that I hail from one of them and have traveled extensively in the other two. In my experience, the quality and variety of widely available food items there is extraordinary. I don't claim to have made a scientific comparison, but I'm pretty much convinced that food of comparable quality here in San Francisco requires whole paychecks.

This fact, by the way, is not unique to those countries: I'm persuaded that purchasing power parity calculations with respect to food are seriously faulty, at the very least because they fail to reflect certain externalities, like the effect on health of a certain diet, which are then captured by statistics like life expectancy or health spending as a percentage of national GDP.

Now, if we go back to Mr. Pollan's article, we recognize that quality and variety are intimately tied to the dictum of "food that looks like food", exactly the kind that is in constant danger of being displaced by heavily processed food items. This issue and its relationship to trade intersects the "local food" controversy, a complex topic in itself: see the Wikipedia page on local food for a few starting points. What I'd like to point out here is that the answer is by no means obvious.

In the interest of brevity, I've decided to come down with a simple statement on this matter: Dear WTO negotiators (and politicians who would like to win my support for it), I'll approve of a new trade deal if you can show me how it will result in more food that my great-great-grandmother would recognize as food to reach my table. Simple enough?

Now that we entered a new year, I resolved to publish some thoughts inspired by some of the events of 2006 and by one of the best books I read last year. If you are the kind of person who finds the mere mention of Middle East politics offensive (and I completely understand your position, given the violent history of the region -- I have a few hot buttons myself), please do not even bother reading. In the interest of disclosure, I should state that I've never set foot in the Middle East, which makes me an armchair observer at best.

In July, the Washington Post published a piece by former President Jimmy Carter with the remarkable title We Need Fewer Secrets. The argument made therein is straightforward and compelling: "a free flow of information is fundamental for democracy".

A more elaborate argument is made in Arthur Schlesinger's classic book, The Imperial Presidency, which I had the pleasure of reading last year. Incidentally, this book goes a long way towards showing that executive privilege is a very complex doctrine with a long history and some remarkably subtle aspects, something that you won't find out by listening to TV pundits shouting hasty accusations at each other, preferably when the counterpart cannot reply.

Among the surprising revelations in Schlesinger's book, there's one directly connected to President Carter's article. In 1970, the Pentagon set up a Task Force on Secrecy, which turned out to be "refreshingly skeptical about classified information". They went as far as saying: "more might be gained than lost if our nation were to adopt -- unilaterally, if necessary -- a policy of complete openness in all areas of information". Schlesinger comments:

The idea of no secrets at all was arresting. [...] The abolition of official secrecy might even diminish international tension by making it harder for one power to place the most sinister possible interpretation on the intentions of another. Ignorance made it easy to suppose the worst, but the worst might not always be the most accurate. (p. 363)

Ultimately, as Schlesinger's book details, the Task Force "regretfully concluded [the abolition of secrecy] to be impractical".

Is there a part of the world plagued by more secrecy than the Middle East? Just consider how several of the main actors in the region, Iran, Syria, Israel, the United States and the Palestinian Authority, to name five, either (1) have no or limited diplomatic relations and virtually no trade relations or (2) they are linked by secret agreements and tend to operate with the help of covert, non-state organizations. Due to the paucity of reliable intelligence that comes from limited infiltration capabilities, all these agents proceed relatively in the dark as to the opponents' aims and level of advancement towards them.

This is a recipe for disaster. It's hard to see how the many disputes in the Middle East could ever be solved unless relations are first normalized. By normal, I mean the kind of diplomatic, commercial and human relations that characterize most countries elsewhere, especially neighboring ones. It should be possible to come to recognize and interact with other states all while keeping some disputes on the table. What is not at all conducive to a solution is to create a single, inextricable bundle out of diplomatic recognition, border agreements, trade agreements, travel and/or free passage agreements, foreign aid, energy and oil policies, nuclear programs, water rights and everything else, forming a veritable Gordian knot.

Perhaps the most damning feature of Middle Eastern politics is the lack of open channels through which the main actors can communicate and operate to relieve the tension. This in turn reduces the options available to each side to the barest, most brutal ones, thus strengthening the hawks on all sides. By the way, I'm sure there are many more channels than the public is aware of, but again we encounter a deeply rooted lack of transparency and accountability.

It should then be in everybody's interest to come to a more normal state of affairs. In this respect, the (debatable) success of Hezbollah in the latest bout is a significant step backwards, because it strengthens a non-state actor. Although not as effective as we may like, there is a framework in place in the international community that defines what normal relations between states are and how disputes should be addressed. With non-state actors, that framework is completely missing, which makes untangling the crisis even harder.

Ultimately, if all interested parties fail to put in motion a process of normalization of relations, they will only guarantee that the seemingly endless cycle of misery that has characterized the last fifty-plus years of Middle Eastern life will go on forever.

I got tagged by Marc with the "five things you don't know about me" meme. It's actually quite interesting to see which things people choose to divulge, and in how many words, so I'm not ready to break the tradition yet. Here's my list:

1. Three days after my 18th birthday I bought a spanking new blue electric guitar. The necessary, enormous sum of money was provided by a savings account set aside by my grandmother, who had passed away twelve years earlier to the day.

2. I worship art deco architecture.

3. My favorite song is The Beatles' Come Together, always has been.

4. Depending on the day, I'm either a gnostic or agnostic.

5. I enjoy reading Postmodern Sass. I thought you should know that, Gentle Reader.

I shall tag Max, Glen, Sakuraba-san, Jerome, Umit.

It looks like the free television I talked about a few days ago will be here real soon. From Wired: Zudeo Announces Deal with BBC.

BBC television shows and original productions will be distributed to users of Azureus' new Zudeo file-sharing service in the United States

Zudeo uses the BitTorrent protocol to distribute high-definition TV programs using P2P technologies. And of course the Venice Project I mentioned as another potential distribution channel is now open for beta testing (apply here). Here are some screenshots.

Comcast stock is up 65% for the year, gotta rethink that efficient market theory. There are more accounts of the effect of Skype (VoIP) on telecom revenues than I can link to (sample). How much will you be paying for TV in ten years?

Disclosure: I don't have a position in Comcast stock, except maybe indirectly as part of some fund or another (note to self: check now!)

I read in the Economist that the biggest obstacle faced by the new wave of English-language news television channels (e.g. France 24, Al-Jazeera English) is "getting distribution in America". Quoting the article:

[...] France 24 will be available in America only in New York and Washington, DC, and cable and satellite companies have declined to carry AJE, so Americans can watch it only by paying for its internet service.

I don't need a business degree to tell them how to get noticed by being disruptive: stop charging for streamed internet service and put all videos online in high-quality, especially any breaking news. Offer decent indexing and do not take clips down ever. Strive to become the site that bloggers link to whenever they write about current events. "But all that bandwidth is going to cost us money!" I hear them whine. Then make a phone call (ahem, Skype call) to Niklas Zennström and talk about his Venice project. At the recent Web 2.0 Summit he impressed me (and I'm sure a lot of other people in the audience) as being fully capable of taking on traditional television distribution companies and turn the TV industry on its head. After all, if you are France 24, you are not going to succeed by copying CNN with a mere twenty-six years of delay, especially in the face of a highly uncompetitive cable market. But perhaps I'm asking too much of a state-financed channel?

Recently I read the second public draft of a paper on the history of the Haskell programming language (the final paper will be submitted to the 2007 History of Programming Languages conference). Even abstracting from its most technical aspects, which will be mostly of interest to people already well-versed in the language and perhaps active in its community, this paper contains a wealth of interesting observations on the evolution of programming languages and computing in general.

Functional programming has been getting more visibility lately, with Haskell and Erlang at the forefront. One of the initial drivers was a presentation by Tim Sweeney on The Next Mainstream Programming Language. Hint to programming language creators looking for distinction: associate your latest creation to gaming.

Back to the paper, a couple of things caught my eye. The first one is near the end of section 9.1, where the authors describe the addition of a "Core Lint" typechecker that ensures that at each optimization pass the necessary typing constraints are satisfied. Quoting from the paper:

Furthermore, catching compiler bugs this way is vastly cheaper than generating incorrect code, running it, getting a segmentation fault, debugging it with gdb, and gradually tracing the problem back to its original cause. Core Lint often nails the error immediately.

This is a pretty dramatic testimony as to the effectiveness of static typing when the type system in use is tailored to the application. I was reminded of Gilad Bracha's Pluggable Types paper, and especially the slogan "multiple type systems for different needs".

The second noteworthy item is the discussion of monads (section 7). Incidentally, the mathematically oriented reader will be happy to know that, thanks to the efforts of its authors, a very good, out-of-print book on monads, Barr and Wells' Toposes, Triples and Theories is now available online. (The "triples" of the title are monads. Don't ask.) At any rate, while reading this section, I was struck by the idea that monads are a third, distinct, major paradigm useful in structuring programs.

Now I have to explain why I said "the third". The other two models I have in mind are macros and objects. The former exemplifies linguistic abstraction, ubiquitous in Lisp and Lisp-related languages. In this approach, one proceeds by introducing new forms into the language, until the program at hand can be tersely expressed. Objects, on the other hand, work very differently; they promote a behavioral view, in which entities respond to messages of a certain kind and programming boils down identifying the relevant actors and building up their natural (or so one thinks) vocabulary. Of course, one can switch between the two modes to a certain extent and do e.g. object-oriented programming in Scheme or language-oriented programming in Ruby, although whether this works in practice is more a reflection of the syntactic qualities of the two languages than anything else. In my opinion, the two books that best capture these two approaches are Paul Graham's On Lisp (free online) and the Smalltalk Blue Book (Goldberg and Robson's Smalltalk-80: The Language).

With this premise, we can consider monads as a third approach, in which one strives to capture the notion of computation best adapted to the task at hand. Combinator libraries (see section 11.1 of the paper) then seem to arise naturally when one tries to identify computational building blocks and composition rules in a monadic environment. Although combinators have a strong linguistic aspect, I'd assert that the basic step of identifying the correct monad for the job is substantially different from what goes on with macros or, for that matter, objects (the link here is that monads can be used to encapsulate state too).

Regrettably, I don't know of any single book that captures the idea of monads as a program-structuring device in sufficient depth to produce the kind of "ah-ha!" moment that the two other books I mentioned earlier managed to trigger. The paper by Hutton and Meijer on monadic parsing goes in that direction but what's missing is a more in-depth treatment to help folks (me included!) bridge the gap from parser combinators to, say, the intricacies of the Haskell XML Toolbox. A monadic version of the classic Scheme book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs might do the trick, especially if written with the energy that Paul Hudak put into his wonderful introduction to Haskell for multimedia.

Now that I'm starting to recover from the euphoria of winning the World Cup for the fourth time, I'd like to comment on the tournament.

Italy played a style of football that I like a lot, with a combination of strong, fast players and clever passing to get through the midfield, where a lot of the present-day game bogs down. Seven of the eleven players on the pitch were outstanding for the entire tournament: Buffon, Zambrotta, Cannavaro, Materazzi, Grosso, Pirlo and Gattuso. Although you can find a few players in other teams that played at a similar level in those roles (e.g. Marquez, Lahm, Mascherano), the Italian block was superb. In fact, the whole team was remarkably in tune, with no sign of internal strife; most likely, this was responsible for the unprecedented (for Italy) conversion rate on penalty kicks in the final game. Kudos to our coach (Marcello Lippi) for holding the team together and for adapting his views to the realities of the tournament. Although Lippi likes to play with three forwards, the poor shape of all Italian strikers forced him to be more pragmatic and field for the most part a 4-4-2. It doesn't happen often that a team without an inspired striker goes on to win the cup, but Lippi should be praised for doing a very un-traditional thing in Italian football, i.e. injecting fresh attacking forces as the game progressed. Upfront, Gilardino seemed the sharpest of the bunch, with excellent and unselfish play in the box. I'm sure we'll see him again at the next World Cup (he's only 24).

A few teams fell to their coach's inability to create a functioning midfield. England and Brazil were the prime victims. Beckham, Gerrard and Lampard should not have been on the pitch at the same time. With respect to Brazil, all I can say is that I wouldn't leave a player as dominant in the midfield as Emerson on the bench for a second. Argentina had a stellar midfield right until the last eighteen minutes of regular time in their match with Germany. Having been in that situation before, I can share the pain of Argentine fans in seeing their dream crumble in eight fateful minutes.

African teams played exceptionally well, showing a much improved passing game and some solid goalkeeping. To make it into the top flight on a regular basis they just need to improve their defensive play. I'd recommend them, and for that matter anybody playing football, to watch all seven of Italy's games and take notes on how the Italian defense positioned itself on set pieces: I have never seen a defense being so dominant in these circumstances, which strongly favor the attacking side. Buffon should have gotten a prize for the number of times he left his goal line on a free kick or corner kick, walked up to a fellow player and dragged him exactly where he wanted him to be. And for all the shouting too: A quiet goalkeeper is a sitting duck.

As to what FIFA could do better: use whatever electronic devices are needed to reliably tell apart goals and near-goals, detect offsides and review carding decisions. Basically, if two billion viewers can get a pretty definitive answer to any disputed event by watching TV, there is no point in having the referees be kept in the dark. I appreciate FIFA's effort in upholding the traditions of the game; still, I find their insistence that World Cup referees do their job with pretty much the same tools afforded to an amateur football league referee entirely preposterous. Well, at least FIFA took steps to fix their world rankings, which for years screamed "I don't know the first thing about football". Now, if we could get a more forward-looking ranking instead of a lagging indicator, things would be even better. How about taking into account results from the FIFA World Youth Championship?

In terms of results, one fact that I find significant is that seven of the eight teams that made it to the quarter finals represent countries with a population of at least ~40M, Portugal being the only exception. This seems to indicate that it takes a significant pool of players to find 23 athletes capable of performing at the required level -- definitely bad news for small countries and for large countries with a smallish player base.

Rather than ramble on forever, let me tell you what the most depressing bit of the World Cup was: seeing a gifted 21-year old player, Portugal's Cristiano Ronaldo, be all cynical (and even clinical) in getting other players sent off and in diving in the box like there is no tomorrow. I think that, at 21, he should be on top of the world and run around the pitch having a blast and enjoying the game. In other words, he should shed the cunning, calculating persona and play with the exhilaration and childlike merriment of Messi or Gattuso. Those are the players we fans love, even on the rare days when they let us down.

Some rhyme, some ching, most of them are clockwork

Let's go in the other room and make them work

Syd Barrett passed away today. You can read about him in The Guardian and see and hear him on YouTube.