Every now and then, you come across some text in which the author expresses things which, deep down, you just know to be correct. You feel as if someone was saying what you always wanted to say; sometimes, it is written more elegantly than you could ever hope to acheive.

Such texts are slightly useful, because they allow you to discover what it is that you believe.

Every now and then, you come across some text in which the author expresses things which, deep down, you just know to be plain wrong. You feel forced to refute every single sentence, don't always manage to do so, and you feel uncomfortable when the author, following some apparently sensible line of reasoning, managed to reach conclusions which are undoubtedly complete nonsense.

Such texts are quite useful, because they allow you to discover what it is that you believe and why you believe it, and because they sometimes force you to question and eventually change those beliefs. They may make you different, in the sense that you can look at your former self and realize how wrong you were.

Every now and then, you come across some text in which the author expresses things which are just weird. The text is just puzzling, because it is written in an unexpected way, about some unexpected thing, with an unexpected angle, or for an unexpected purpose. It seems as if the author is either crazy or not living in the same universe as you.

Such texts are immensely useful, because they allow you to discover things and ways of thinking about things which you didn't even envision before. They allow you to discover the sheer diversity of human nature, and may suddenly and radically change your perspective about the world. They may make you different, in the sense that you can look at your former self and realize that, for some undefinable reason, you aren't the same person anymore.

When you design a cryptographic system, you don't say "Believe me, it's secure", but "I did everything I could to ensure that you don't need to trust me". See for instance the Stamper FAQ (an interesting service, by the way): It would be very easy for me to try and say what a reliable and trustworthy sort of a fellow I am [...]. This would not be good enough!!!

Compare with politics, in which candidates for any sort of political office are precisely trying to convince you that they are reliable and trustworthy... Imagine how it would be if there was a politician whose main electoral promise was total transparency to ensure that you don't need to trust him...

Microblogging services such as Identi.ca (the one I use) and Twitter (the one I avoid because it is uselessly centralized) have an interesting feature: when you have an account on them and choose to subscribe to someone's feed, that person knows that you are following them.

However, I fear that people may become accustomed to this feature, and may come to believe that they will always know who is following them. Of course, this isn't true: for the many users who publish their microblogging entries to everyone, people can just follow the RSS feed without even having an account on the microblogging platform you're using.

The bottom line is that it doesn't make much sense to ask somebody to stop following your feed. The content of the feed is most likely public, and they can just silently follow you. If the problem is that you do not want to advertise them in your followers list, it's your job to manage the list properly, and remove the people you don't like without having to ask them to leave.

Sometimes, when I interact with other human beings, I realize that their way to think about the world is radically different from mine. To put it differently, I have a few weird opinions with a long chain of logical consequences which I take for granted, and I sometimes discover that people just don't think that way. I tend to be quite surprised when it happens, all the more so because superficially, other people and I tend to behave in the same way and can communicate quite easily. I'm always amazed by the fact that human beings probably all have a very different view of the world, but still manage to implement with very few glitches the interface required by society.

Hence this blog: by explaining things which seem obvious to me, and trying to find out why they seem to be so, I hope that, perhaps, if you believed them to be not obvious but plain wrong, you will think them out and realise that they could be true (because they are, since, as I perhaps forgot to mention, I'm always right). This is, of course, a reasonable goal: it is a well-known fact that people tend to change their basic mental beliefs by reading some random twenty-line ramblings.

Information should be distinguished from its support, but most people seem unaware of this distinction. Here are two examples:

Books.

When someone says that they love a book, it can indifferently refer to a sequence of letters with some interesting properties, or to a pretty object with a nice leather cover and a pleasant smell. A book with blank pages can be a very pleasant object; likewise, you can read and enjoy a literary masterpiece even if all you have is a cheap paperback edition. The advent of ebooks will probably force people to understand this difference...

Postal mail.

People indifferently use mail to move physical objects around and to transmit information. While the first activity probably won't disappear any time soon, the second one has been obsolete for quite some time now, because sending beams of light through optical fibers or pushing electrons through wires is incredibly more efficient. Yes, I am aware that the postal service has an unexpectdly large bandwidth if you use it to move hard drives around, I don't mean to criticize the rare people who might be using it in that way; the thing I find depressing is that even today, massive important services like the government still need to carry pieces of paper across the country to send me data. (I am also perfectly aware of the security and reliability shortcomings of email, thank you, but there are ways to make things work.)

Interestingly, what I'm saying doesn't apply to music and movies anymore; people seem to have understood that these things can be stored in a hard drive rather than in a pile of physical artifacts. The same should happen for paper mail and books some day...