In other news the new roadmap to version 0.2 shows a lot of promise. It looks like they’re planning on integration with the awesome bar and eventually standalone desktop integration. Enso is dead, long live enso!

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

The great thing about ubiquity is how incredibly easy it is to write new commands. For example I was frustrated the other day at work switching between development, testing and production environments in my browser. I was getting bug tickets with a link pointing to issues on the testing server which I then had to manually modify to point at my development server (by changing a subdomain and port).

So, http://test.foo.com/long/path/to/file.jsp?with=query&string=too became http://dev.foo.com:8080/long/path/to/file.jsp?with=query&string=too.

Now this wasn’t an incredibly onerous task to be sure but it’s repeatable…and we have computers for those sorts of things. So I cooked up a little ubiquity verb called switch which does just that. Subscribe and then you can just type switch this to <subdomain> port <port> and you’re done!

Here’s the entire source in case you’re interested:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50

var custom_mappings = { "local" : ["timd0","8080"] };
 
CmdUtils.CreateCommand({
    name: "switch",
    author: {name: "Tim Disney", email: "tim.disney@gmail.com"},
    license: "GPL",
    description: "Switch the subdomain and optionally port of a url",
    help: "This command switches the subdomain (eg 'www' in www.google.com) and optionally port to whatever you like. This is particularly useful if you have multiple environments differentiated only by the subdomain that you would like to quickly switch between (ie development, testing and production environments)",
    takes: {"URL to switch": noun_arb_text},
    modifiers: {"to": noun_arb_text, "port": noun_arb_text},
 
    _switchUrl: function(url, env, port) {
        var reUrl = /(http[s]?:\/\/)([^\/]*)[\/]?(.*)/;
        var matchUrl = reUrl.exec(url);
 
        if (!matchUrl) { return ""; }
 
        var protocol = matchUrl[1];
        var host = matchUrl[2];
        var path = matchUrl[3];
 
	// pull out domain, subdomain, and port
        var reHost = /([^\.]*)([^:]*)(.*)/; 
        var matchHost = reHost.exec(host);
 
        var domain = matchHost[2];
 
        var subdomain = (env != null) ? env : matchHost[1];
        port = (port != null && port != "") ? ":" + port : "";
 
	/* special case in any custom subdomain/port mappings */
        if (env in custom_mappings) { 
            subdomain = custom_mappings[env][0];
            port = ":" + custom_mappings[env][1];
        }
 
        return protocol + subdomain + domain + port + "/" + path;
    },
 
    execute: function(url, mods) {
        var switched = this._switchUrl(url.text, 
			 mods.to.text, mods.port.text);
        CmdUtils.setSelection(switched, {"text": switched});
    },
 
    preview: function(pbody, url, mods) {
        pbody.innerHTML = "switch selected url to: <em>" 
	  + this._switchUrl(url.text, mods.to.text, mods.port.text) + "</em>";
    }
});

How then do I seek You, O Lord? For in seeking You, my God, it is happiness that I am seeking. I shall seek You, that my soul may live.

–Augustine’s Confessions Book X-XX

He also makes a distinction between happiness and joy:

Far be it, O Lord, far be it from the heart of Thy servant who makes this confession to Thee, far be it from me to think that I am happy for any or every joy that I may have. For there is a joy which is not given to the ungodly but only to those who love Thee for Thy own sake, whose joy is Thyself. And this is happiness, to be joyful in Thee and for Thee and because of Thee, this and no other.

–Augustine’s Confessions Book X-XXII

To Augustine there are many things in life we can rejoice in. Not all of them are ultimately good and happiness is found by rejoicing in God.

What’s fascinating to me is that he identifies the idea of happiness as universal and grounded in memory. It is a thing we all seek after in various ways. And Augustine sees it as us chasing a memory.

I think it is safe to say this is a constant theme of Augustine’s writing and probably best summed up in his famous quote:

For Thou hast made us for Thyself and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee.

Thus happiness is known to all, for if they could be asked with one voice whether they wish for happiness, there is no doubt whatever that they would all answer yes. And this could not be unless the thing itself, signified by the word, lay somehow in their memory. –Augustine’s Confessions Book X

What I find fascinating here is that Augustine is describing the pursuit of happiness as the pursuit of a memory. It’s a state of being we are trying to get back to. A state we are rarely at but always long for. A place we remember.

Can we say that all of life’s pursuits are in search of a memory? Since how could we pursue something we have no knowledge or experience (memory) of? Are we always trying to regain the bit of paradise, joy, happiness we once experienced? And once we attain it, seek it again and again?

When people come to understand how big the universe is and how short a human life is, their hearts cry out. Sometimes it’s a shout of joy…for most of us it’s a cry of terror. The terror of extinction, the terror of meaninglessness. Our hearts cry out. Maybe to God, or maybe just to break the silence. — Robert Charles Wilson Spin

To borrow the line from Hitchhiker’s Guide, space is big. Really big. So big it’s pretty much impossible for our minds to comprehend how big it actually is.

Wilson’s characters in Spin are confronted with immensity in both time and space. The basic premise is that the earth is wrapped up in a temporal field which causes time to slow down on earth. For each second that passes on earth, ~3 years pass in the outside universe. This means that within a generation the universe will age 4 billion years.

There have been few SF book that dealt with immense time, it’s mostly about the vast distances of space. Wilson is able to play with some fascinating ideas like using time to terraform mars (send over a few bacteria, allow evolution to work over a few million years and presto! A livable world within a few time dilated earth years) or the immanent destruction of earth (within a human lifespan the sun will expand to consume the earth).

Wilson’s characters are forced to deal with the immensity of the universe. As the quote alludes, some of them respond with shouts of joy (one character devotes his life to understanding and dealing with the spin) and others with a cry of terror (another character winds up in a dangerous christian millennial cult). But respond they must in the face of the immanent immensity of the cosmos.

What is fascinating to me is that even though our conception of the universe has expanded so quickly (it wasn’t until the 1920s that we started to realize the universe was bigger than our galaxy) our ability to deal with its immenseness has not. To a certain extent this makes sense, the immediate here and now is more pressing, but I believe that our smallness and the universe’s bigness should inform how we live our lives in the here and now.

Carl Sagan can put it better than me:

But then Mike Wesch of The Machine is Us/ing Us fame changed my mind with An anthropological introduction to YouTube. It’s a bit long (50 min) but definitely worth it if you are at all interested in web culture. What’s amazing here is he has gone beyond the trivial examples of YouTube (while still embracing what most of us consider trivial — he dedicated the video to Gary Brolsma aka the numa numa guy) and show us the community that has formed through vlogs. He has some pretty profound statements about how that culture is shaped by the medium (webcams) and how if reflects the wider culture as a whole.

Great stuff and well worth a watch.

As an added bonus it was produced online entirely outside of the big studios which Whedon has good reason to be weary of after they axed what was perhaps the best shows ever made for television (granted that’s not necessarily saying a lot…but Firfly was amazing!). If Dr. Horrible is successful (and it’s definitely worthy of success) than maybe we can start seeing more shows created outside the “system”. This would be nothing but good to my mind.

As soon as a mathematical formula is applied to a situation in the world outside the mathematician’s mind, it ceases to be certain. In Polanyi’s summary, only statements that can be doubted make contact with reality. In other words, the mark of an indubitable statement is that it makes no contact with reality. If we are to make contact with reality, we must have the courage to make statements that can be doubted. There can be no knowing of reality without the courage to affirm what can be doubted and to act on the affirmation.

– Lesslie Newbigin Proper Confidence

To continue on with my last post on Polanyi, Newbigin has something to say as well. I just recently started reading Proper Confidence for the second time, it had been so long I’d forgotten most of it. It primarily deals with (as the subtitle gives away) “faith, doubt and certainty in christian discipleship”. Basically this means he writes a lot about Polanyi. If you want an nice easy overview of Polanyi’s thought without actually having to read Polanyi, you can’t go wrong with Proper Confidence.

In the quote I found last time, Polanyi was asserting the personal component to mathematical knowing. Here however, Newbigin is saying that certainty is only found at the expense of contact with reality. Pure mathematics existing solely in the mental realm can make statements that are absolutely certain…and yet have nothing to say about reality (that is, the reality that exists outside of the mind).

Newbigin’s eventual conclusion is that we must embrace doubt in our thinking. Not the paralyzing doubt that rejects any hope of knowing, but a kind of critical realism that recognizes the limits of certainty. This middle ground between the unthinking certainty of fundamentalism and paralyzing nihilistic doubt is appealing.

We can now turn to the paradox of a mathematics based on a system of axioms which are not regarded as self-evident and indeed cannot be known to be mutually consistent. To apply the utmost ingenuity and the most rigorous care to prove the theorems of logic or mathematics, while the premisses of these inferences are cheerfully accepted, without any grounds being given for doing so, as ‘unproven asserted formulae’, might seem altogether absurd…if the acceptance of any proof requires the acceptance without proof of some presuppositions from which the proof is ultimately derived, it follows that the principle of rejecting any unproven statement in mathematics implies also the rejection of all proven statements and therefore of all mathematics.

The solution lies in rejecting the rule which denies acceptance to unproven statements, by admitting that our belief in logically anterior maxims of mathematical procedure is based on our previous acceptance of the procedure as valid…we should declare instead candidly that we dwell on mathematics and affirm its statements for the sake of its intellectually beauty, which betokens the reality of its conceptions and the truth of its assertions.

– Michael Polanyi Personal Knowledge p. 191-192

Ah Polanyi! For those of you who aren’t familiar with him, he was a scientist turned philosopher (of science) in the middle of the last century. His work in general and Personal Knowledge in particular is an attempt to remove the “cult of objectivity” from science. He wanted to replace the idea of science as impersonal with the recognition that the scientist is personally involved in the “art of knowing”.

So, this particular quote is interesting because Polanyi is extending his argument to mathematics, a branch of science that is in a sense easy to regard as the purest and most objective of all (XKCD believes it too). The theorems and proofs of mathematics are not things that can be turned out mechanically as if through a machine (well, not usually). They are statements of “intellectual beauty” that are affirmed by the personal commitment of the mathematician.

The popular understanding (and indeed my base understanding still) of mathematics is that of bits of freewheeling truth that we can derive if only given the right axioms and enough time. While it may still be in some sense true, the process (at least according to Polanyi) is much more subjective since it must always involve a subject (aka the mathematician).