The Lair

It’s not every day that I can claim to being woken up by the sound of explosives. Exploding, as it were. So today was different. It didn’t sound like a flat tire (there was no whooshing exhalation at the end), it didn’t sound like some clumsy construction worker dropping a paint bucket. It sounded like a bomb and that’s what it was. At least in this instance, the paranoia about explody business turned out to be true.

A few glances out the window - traffic was stacked up on the bridge, but that’s not unusual for just before 0700 on a Monday morning. No ambulances. I opened up one of the large pane glass windows, just to hear the noises of the street below - but the blaring bus horns and traffic noises drowned out any other noises that I had expected to hear (like sirens).

No radio in the house. No TV either. The family had officially moved to the boondocks the day before and I was playing night watchman of sorts. Bare house. I was quite relishing the solitude. But voluntarily becoming a hermit in the urban sprawl has its drawbacks when there are flowerpots exploding nearby.

Wondered if I had imagined it all. No one seemed very alarmed that I could see.

First hint of something that might have gone wrong - vehicles on the northbound lane into Colombo were reversing out of the jam and taking alternative routes. Not the buses of course. The buses had no choice but to stick on the main road. But smaller vehicles were mounting the center island and doing frantic U-turns in the middle of the road in order to escape.

Couple of military vehicles head towards the traffic lights. They are moving unhurriedly, the soliders inside seem relaxed. The military vehicles are heading up the wrong side of the street, adding to the chaotic jam of vehicles streaming away from the main road. Couple of uniforms perched on top wave away the oncoming vehicles, but their effort seems desultory. There is no urgency.

I wonder aloud (on the phone) if I am possibly mistaken. Maybe it was a falling bucket of paint after all. Yes, the mobile phones still work, which adds to my suspicion that I had imagined the whole thing. A couple of minutes later, I got another call confirming an explosion.

Someone’s Monday morning had started off in the worst possible way.

I had an insightful, interesting (screw it, who am I kidding? it was painfully uncomfortable) conversation with a relation recently. Said relation has offspring of a certain age. I’ve written about the offspring before, specifically in the context of how they tend to like playing role playing games on the internet with total strangers (ancient history)

Anyway, said relation had been chatting over the watercooler with others and had (belatedly) come to the realization that the internet is, as they say, srs bzns. And now, having hunted down my email address with all the determination of a parent who figures that their precious snowdrop needs protecting, she wanted to know how she could “block all those nasty sites. You know, like porn and hacking sites and things like that“.

Pause. Deep breath. Roll eyes and refuse the chance to take a swipe at the hacking vs cracking debate, part eleventy billion. Tell her that this isn’t possible.

But you’re practically a [insert qualification here] in Computers. Surely you can do something?

No. I really can’t. *sigh* People need to stop watching stupid movies. Seriously.

And if anyone needs me for the rest of the week, well - I’ll be playing with KDE for Windows. As astonishing as it sounds, I like individual K-apps (Kopete, aKregator, Cervisia, Konqueror). I’m looking forward to this, broken though things probably will be on Windows.

In this story, a scientist (or several thousand) huddle in a dusty laboratory somewhere. After years of hard work (aided and abetted by a manservant with a Slavic name and questionable clothing tastes); the scientist finally makes a breakthrough discovery. “It’s alive, [name of Slavic origin]”; he shrieks in triumph. Only the discovery happens to be something that turns around and does him in.

Frankenstein? Almost. This little discovery is called personalization.

A couple of weeks ago, I read The Polarization of Extremes - arguing that the internet makes it incredibly easy to self sort, or find a website/news outlet which caters to precisely the editorial slant that you prefer. In the old days, this was considered a good thing. Your news, your way. The article, however, paints a very different picture. It is now possible to swan from one site to another without ever seeing a dissenting or alternative point of view. If your push button issue happens to involve the birth of someone two thousand or two thousand five hundred or however many years ago, if you believe that the aliens will take us all away, if you believe that the Bush dynasty is good, bad or something other than ugly - well, there’s apparently a site or two dozen on the internet just for you.

Is this a bad thing? Well, if it stopped there - then maybe it isn’t. However, there is another interesting effect described.

The creation of enclaves of like-minded people had a second effect: It made both liberal groups and conservative groups significantly more homogeneous — and thus squelched diversity. Before people started to talk, many groups displayed a fair amount of internal disagreement on the three issues. The disagreements were greatly reduced as a result of a mere 15-minute discussion. In their anonymous statements, group members showed far more consensus after discussion than before. The discussion greatly widened the rift between liberals and conservatives on all three issues

So, what they’re really saying is that people actually discuss things within their own group and come to a consensus. Not bad, huh? Or, I suppose left unsaid, they leave the group and find somewhere more amenable. But it doesn’t end there either.

A key consequence of this kind of self-sorting is what we might call enclave extremism. When people end up in enclaves of like-minded people, they usually move toward a more extreme point in the direction to which the group’s members were originally inclined. Enclave extremism is a special case of the broader phenomenon of group polarization, which extends well beyond politics and occurs as groups adopt a more extreme version of whatever view is antecedently favored by their members

Does this sound familiar? Having observed a few online communities, it certainly struck a chord with me.

Clearly, despite its fairly recent lack of popularity, holding an extremist position is not all bad - the article cites a few instances where holding an extremist, contrary position was a good thing (ie:, the antislavery movement). Then again, a counter example can be found in the actions of some of the more militant environmental campaigners. Even a good stance can be diluted, dismissed or simply made easier to ignore by the actions of extremists. (Use your own examples here. There are lots).

The problem is, can people who have held an extremist position change? Dunbar’s Number seems to indicate that, the larger the community - the less likely the chances of change.

There are times when three hours of fascinating clicking on Wikipedia links can produce something useful. This is most likely not one of those times.

Update: I found this link which I really really like - it breaks down and quantifies Dunbar’s number into other spheres of activity.