Catalansplaining
A friend asked me about Catalonia and I was trying to summarize the main things that are going on there right now.
Hoping that it will serve as a helpful-ish short introduction to someone, here it is:
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Referendum in Catalonia
There's quite a lot to say about it, and I fear that if I try to touch all the relevant points I will never write this post.
But I want to write something, and I would like to highlight what I consider to be the most important.
Most of the people in Catalonia want to vote. They don't necessarily want to become independent, but they do want to vote about it. There's little magic in knowing that, we don't lack polls, and the numbers are all around 80%. That's not a voice to silence. And from Catalonia they have demanded it for a long time. Yet, there's absolutely nothing in the horizon that suggests that's going to happen in our current system.
It should be obvious that's unfair and antidemocratic.
Prokofiev and Fireworks
A picture of today. That was enjoyed with Romeo and Juliet, plus picnic and friends. If only for that, it was a good day.
Name day
One of the stupidest traditions in spain (and there are no few to choose from) is to celebrate someone's “name day”. That is, a day of the year that is tied to a name by the arbitrary decision of some religious guys.
It plays the role of a birthday, which in its way it may be a bit silly, but at least it has the nice properties of being personal (in the sense that it marks something specific that actually happened to you) and universal (in the sense that everybody has one, independently of their name or religion).
In any case, one day of the year that has a particular excuse for making people remember you and throwing a party sounds like a good thing to me. But making such day a “name day”? So, what if your name is not any of the standard ones that have a day assigned to them? All your friends would have one and you don't, that's pretty crappy. Plus, what is your actual relationship with the saint whose name you are celebrating? Absolutely none.
When I was a kid we would celebrate both birthdays and name days. To be fair, name days are in the decline and have been for a long time in spain, but I find people reminding me of name days annoyingly often. And thus my entry of today.
I don't care. I couldn't care less for such a religious and arbitrary impersonal day. Since I was a kid I found them distasteful, and time has only strengthened such opinion. Name days are, at best, ridiculous.
So I don't plan to celebrate them in any way, obviously. Whenever I get greetings for my name day, fortune had it that it's also the “day of the book”, so I can happily accept the good wishes for the books and wish back a good day of the book to everyone.
Happy reading!
Azpiri
See you soon.
Entropy
Today I was trying to see the relationships between information, entropy, cross entropy, conditional entropy, the Kullback-Leibler divergence and all that fuzz.
As a quick reminder:
- Information content (of a random variable): $I(X) = – \log(P(X))$
- Entropy (of a random variable): $H(X) = E[I(X)] = E[– \log(P(X))]$
- Conditional Entropy (of a random variable on another): $H(X|Y) = E{PY}[H(X|Y=y)]$
- Cross Entropy (between two probability distributions): $H(p, q) = Ep[– \log q] = H(p) + D{KL}(p | q)$
- Kullback-Leibler divergence (from probability distribution $q$ to $p$): $D_{KL}(p | q) = H(p, q) – H(p)$
The Kullback-Leibler divergence is surprisingly useful in many places. For example, it can be something to maximize (its expected value), as a criterion for experimental design. I wish I had known more about it during the time of writing my thesis.
I wish I'd write about the interpretation of $D_{KL}$ as a measure of the information gained when one changes from using the probability distribution $q$ to $p$. But if I do, I'll never click the “Publish” button :)
Speed limit
Why nothing can go faster than the speed of light? (Light traveling in a vacuum, that is).
The thing is, it has little to do with speed, and even less with light. It has all to do with the fact that space and time are not separate entities. What the hell do I mean?
Possible retake
Isn't it unsettling that whenever you make the firm statement that you are going to do something that you were more-or-less already doing, it is then when it is more likely to stop?
It's something I have seen countless times in websites when they talk about their updates. And I am no exception.
To me, it is the feeling of being read that puts me off most. Plus simple and pure procrastination.
I'm pretty sure there must be a name for this, and it must be a well-known thing that every psychology student has seen from their first year.
Anyway, this is a possible comeback, and in any case let me talk about this very cool thing I've recently discovered: https://hypothes.is/. It is an extension for the main browsers that allows to annotate webs and pdfs, and share those annotations collaboratively. It has already many of the things that I wanted as a project to make web annotations. And it is free software.
Hypotes.is has many cool features, but for my interests it lacks the possibility of seeing the annotations in a more hierarchical/scored/transitively-interest-oriented way, so even with an immense amount of annotations per page one could easily see the main ones for her. Well, I can collaborate with them.
WorldPride Parade
So colorful! I've walked past a ton of trucks filled with people and music celebrating the pride of being gay (lgtb). Much better, a ton of people celebrating, in small or big groups, smiling and having fun. Openly acknowledging an inclusion that should already be there.
If only because of the concentration of smiles, it was worth having it.
I'm still a bit surprised about the high I get by just walking by the streets. It's great. Crossing paths with many people, seeing cool places, feeling being a part of the city... Yes, I want this.
As a plus, in this not-exactly-small city, it often happens that I get to cross paths with people I know and like. Today it was Ilan who spotted me first. He came back from Ibiza a few days ago, and him and his Uruguayan group of friends were walking by in the opposite direction as I was. I joined them for a while, walked and talked and saw the event together. I love when you randomly get to know nice and interesting people. Later on, I also met Jorge from the Go club, a really cool guy I hadn't seen for a couple of years. Always cool to catch up, even if shortly.
What about the town hall? Dressed with a changing rainbow of colors, you could feel it was not merely standing but participating of the pride. Kudos to the local govt.
Even though I support the orgullo crítico (critical pride), I don't see it as a contradiction at all with respect to the pride parades. On the other hand, I think the parades are the lion's share of what goes into the consciousness of everyone, especially the people that would not have been exposed to the idea of a lgtb community with equal rights. I really, really like it.
A beautiful day.
Librerouter and community networks
This morning I've been talking to my friends Nacho and Adri, about their very cool project to make calls available in a convenient way to isolated communities.
It is done in the context of wireless networking in the developing world, and they are trying to leverage technologies such as ionic to create an app that facilitates the communication.
The prototype will be deployed in Zenzeleni: http://zenzeleni.net/
More to come in the near future, hopefully.