N’Ko first moved from hand-copied manuscripts into the digital age two decades ago. In the early 1990s, Diané, the teacher of N’Ko at Cairo University, was collating an N’Ko text in a copy shop when he was approached by an employee. “Why are you killing yourself?” the man asked him. “Don’t you know about DOS?” The employee explained to Diané that using computer software, he could write a new script and generate as many copies as he wished. Together with information-technology experts at Cairo University, Diané developed a rudimentary font to use on his own computer. But creating a font that anyone could use was a much more complicated task. …

Digital technology has already transformed how [Ibrahima] Traore [the protagonist of the piece] communicates with his family. When his father died in 1994, his family in Kiniebakoro sent news of the death to cousins in Ivory Coast by going to the bus station and looking for a passenger heading toward their city; the cousins then mailed a letter to Traore in New York. It took two months. Now communication with Kiniebakoro takes a day: Traore sends an e-mail in N’Ko. His nephew, who works in the nearby town of Siguiri, checks his e-mail at the town’s Internet cafe, prints Traore’s letter and then goes down to the dock where canoes ferry people across the Niger River to Kiniebakoro. He asks someone on the boat to take the letter to Traore’s family’s house.

For Traore and others, the most pressing reason for making N’Ko available to Mande speakers is that only a small percentage of Guineans can read and write. The United Nations puts the rate of adult literacy at 39 percent, but that figure counts mostly those who live in major cities — in rural areas, it is much lower. Schooling in rural Guinea is often conducted in the open air, with no chairs, perhaps a blackboard, maybe one book. But most discouraging to students, it takes place in French, a language they don’t speak at home.
“The only hope for literacy in Guinea is N’Ko literacy,” Traore says. For Mande speakers, he says, N’Ko is extremely simple to learn. He and his fellow N’Ko advocates have sponsored hundreds of informal schools throughout Guinea that teach in Manden languages and N’Ko. This year, for the first time, N’Ko will be taught side by side with French in an official school — the pilot program will be in Kiniebakoro, Traore’s hometown.

N’Ko first moved from hand-copied manuscripts into the digital age two decades ago. In the early 1990s, Diané, the teacher of N’Ko at Cairo University, was collating an N’Ko text in a copy shop when he was approached by an employee. “Why are you killing yourself?” the man asked him. “Don’t you know about DOS?” The employee explained to Diané that using computer software, he could write a new script and generate as many copies as he wished. Together with information-technology experts at Cairo University, Diané developed a rudimentary font to use on his own computer. But creating a font that anyone could use was a much more complicated task. …

Digital technology has already transformed how [Ibrahima] Traore [the protagonist of the piece] communicates with his family. When his father died in 1994, his family in Kiniebakoro sent news of the death to cousins in Ivory Coast by going to the bus station and looking for a passenger heading toward their city; the cousins then mailed a letter to Traore in New York. It took two months. Now communication with Kiniebakoro takes a day: Traore sends an e-mail in N’Ko. His nephew, who works in the nearby town of Siguiri, checks his e-mail at the town’s Internet cafe, prints Traore’s letter and then goes down to the dock where canoes ferry people across the Niger River to Kiniebakoro. He asks someone on the boat to take the letter to Traore’s family’s house.

For Traore and others, the most pressing reason for making N’Ko available to Mande speakers is that only a small percentage of Guineans can read and write. The United Nations puts the rate of adult literacy at 39 percent, but that figure counts mostly those who live in major cities — in rural areas, it is much lower. Schooling in rural Guinea is often conducted in the open air, with no chairs, perhaps a blackboard, maybe one book. But most discouraging to students, it takes place in French, a language they don’t speak at home.

“The only hope for literacy in Guinea is N’Ko literacy,” Traore says. For Mande speakers, he says, N’Ko is extremely simple to learn. He and his fellow N’Ko advocates have sponsored hundreds of informal schools throughout Guinea that teach in Manden languages and N’Ko. This year, for the first time, N’Ko will be taught side by side with French in an official school — the pilot program will be in Kiniebakoro, Traore’s hometown.

N’Ko and the Manding languages face an uphill struggle. In the zone of the Manding languages, where millions of native speakers outnumber native speakers of English and French hugely, the Latin script and the English and French languages brought to West Africa enjoy huge benefits: very large numbers of speakers worldwide in wealthier countries, a superabundance of literature, even a technology geared to the reproduction of these languages in their native scripts. How many N’Ko computer keyboards are there? Even languages with established traditions of literacy–Romanian in the 19th century, Turkish in the 20th century–shifted from their original scripts (Cyrillic and Arabic, respectively) to Latin thanks to modernizers who thought that the adoption of Western norms in written language would help the languages’ associated nations. It’s probably not a coincidence that N’Ko is, at least according to the Internet, a script strongest in Guinea, a country that under its first president Ahmed Sékou Touré engaged in a particularly fierce disengagement from the French post-colonial sphere of influence.

A few languages and even fewer writing systems dominate the world, whether because of a language community’s wealth, its cultural influence, and/or the sheer numbers of users. What costs are imposed on people who belong to radically disadvantaged and relatively marginal language communities, like the ones associated with the Manding languages and the N’Ko script? To what extent will the knowledge and cultural capital of these people be marginalized, even wasted, because it’s not available?

As a child, I only saw my paternal Grandparents once a year or so because we lived so far apart. Their visits, however, meant walks home from school, Grandma’s famous French toast, and, especially, Grandpa’s stories. Grandpa, who passed away in May, spent roughly twenty years in the navy straddling World War Two. I wanted to know all about it. My love of Grandpa’s personal stories never waned, either.

Grandpa’s stories were short, self-contained, and generally had a lesson of some sort. Occasionally, a punch line. They were not all completely true, but as he said, at his age nobody could tell him that he was wrong [1]. As I got older, I became increasingly aware that the stories contained little flesh. They were parables, full of simple lessons espoused by a man who was quite wise but never completed high school. Of course, this did not bother me as a child. I grew up, however, and my historical training matured. I wanted more. Grandpa told stories. I wanted history.

I encouraged Grandpa to write his stories down. He had serious trouble typing. A destroyer captain’s failure to sound the warning bells before firing depth charges led to the partial loss of two of his fingers. Thankfully, the destroyer squadron’s lone physician was on his ship. The men he commanded later determined that if he pointed at you with his good hand, you were all right, but if he pointed with his finger nub, you were in deep trouble. The real reason he did not write down his stories, though, was a lack of interest. He was a storyteller. I was busy conjuring up Tolkien-esque stories at the age of ten with dreams of becoming a famous author. I could not understand how anyone could desire not to record such good stuff.

The one element Grandpa’s stories never included were people. His stories were full of individuals, of course, but they were never people. Even those who he loved never received proper development. Undoubtedly, this situation was due to two factors: first, Grandpa never wanted to say anything bad about anybody. The captain directly responsible for Grandpa’s damaged hand (which could have killed him) was simply new to the job. He was a good man. One of Grandpa’s favorite sayings was “a compliment doesn’t cost you anything,” and it is one I try to remember although I am not as successful as he was. However, it is impossible to flesh out a character without criticism. Second, his stories were all self-contained. I only knew anything about the repeating characters because I was related to them.

My Grandparents traveled by plane for the last time to attend my college graduation. One of my favorite undergraduate professors had recently completed and published a small monograph that came from a family history he conducted on his own far from his nominal area of expertise. Feeling inspired, I sat down with Grandpa and an old cassette recorder that required a constant change of batteries and interviewed him. I kept my questions simple and many of the stories were the old standards. I did take the opportunity to pry a little deeper, though, and I learned some new things. For example, Grandpa, born in the United States, knew almost nothing about his parents’ homeland in the Russian Empire; they wanted to forget those dark memories. He listened to the UN vote on Israel in 1948 on the radio. He observed some of the little changes that came with the desegregation of the armed forces while stationed in North Carolina. I would have liked to interview Grandma too, but she had no interest. Grandpa was the storyteller. I still got my French toast before they returned home.

I thoroughly enjoyed interviewing my grandfather but I had no idea how much it meant to him until a few weeks later. He informed me and my father that he intended to record his memoirs. My cousin set him up with a cassette recorder – as befitting a storyteller, he intended to record them orally – and Grandpa began talking. He enjoyed it so much that Grandma complained to me on several occasions that, instead of spending time with her, “he’s always talking to that stupid machine.” He joined a memoir-writing group at his retirement community and proudly noted that while everyone else read their printed-out papers, everyone looked forward to Grandpa playing his tapes. I believed him.

Grandpa wanted me and my father to type up and publish his memoirs. Unfortunately, much as I pushed him to flesh out the stories, to look back more and not just re-state the outlines of his memories, the stories were little different than what I enjoyed growing up. There were just more of them. They remain an important part of my family history, but they are not memoirs. Because he dedicated himself to the project, he covered a lot more ground than he ever had during his weeklong trips to visit us. He reached 1950s by the time Grandma got sick and the project was put on indefinite hold.

In order to encourage him to pursue something more akin to a memoir than a series of short stories, albeit in a manner that would still fit his style, I suggested to Grandpa that he start a new tape and not worry about chronological order. He should of all the important people in his life and describe everything he could about them. He never got around to it. He was more concerned about remembering stories that he had missed earlier. My father and I assured him that we could always fix the order. Having the stories was most important.

During my last visit that included new tapes, Grandpa announced that he had something he wanted me to listen to[2]. I did not know it yet, but it was also the last tape he recorded before Grandma’s illness and his worries overwhelmed his time and his energy. He hit the play button, and I heard his voice saying, “How did I get to be ninety….” It was, finally, something that one outside the family might consider interesting enough to listen to (not to say worthy, a word choice that would devalue what his memories mean to us, his family). What I heard was not quite candid introspection, but instead emotional reflection. His answers on reaching such an advanced age in such good health – primarily good, loving family – would surprise nobody who knew him. I could imagine the short monologue as the pinnacle of the various stories thrown together, all the little life lessons rolled into one. He could have said that all the different individuals – fleshed out or not – and all the different stories thrown together make up a man’s life (he did not say this). He would have agreed that a man defines himself by his actions in life – his stories – and the family surrounding him. How did he get to be ninety? Good family. Loving family.

After burying all of his siblings, Grandpa prided himself on being the patriarch of the family. All of the grandchildren (and grandnieces and grandnephews) graduated from college. Three beautiful great-grandchildren. With some harrowing experiences in his past, Grandpa loved how everyone in the family got along and were willing to trust each other. The memoir project itself was a family project drawing in his son and two grandchildren. We have taken Grandpa’s lessons to heart and made them our own. My father and I fancy ourselves storytellers to some extent, although I make my home in the distant past. My father does not enjoy telling his own stories as much as Grandpa did, but he has no qualms about telling stories about other people, especially his children. The kinds of embarrassing stories that Grandma and Grandpa were, sadly, never willing to tell my brother and me.

Grandpa added one more story to his queue of standards late in life. Even though the other retirees enjoyed his spoken works, they encouraged Grandpa to beef up his stories. Not the same way I prodded him to, though. “They told me I should embellish my stories more,” Grandpa liked to say, slowing down and emphasizing embellish. “I looked up the word embellish in the dictionary. Do you know what it means? It means to lie.” A simple yet powerful message. And, as always, a simple truism.

[1] I know which stories are not completely true, and I’m not telling you.

[2] I know that ending a sentence with a preposition is wrong, but Grandpa loved to expound upon the difference between hearing and listening. He wanted me to listen.

The international solidarity which emerged during the Abyssinian War did eventually spark a modest international volunteer movement. The Pan-African sentiments of the time are well-known, and the foreign military men who ended up serving in Haile Selassie’s ranks included the former Ottoman general Wehib Pasha and White Russian colonel Fedor Evgenievich Konovalov. The potential Finnish recruits were regretfully given no opportunity to satisfy their desire to fight against Mussolini. According to Jarl Ahrenberg, the consul of Abyssinia in Helsinki, the number of these Finnish volunteers eventually reached four hundred – many of whom were willing to pay for their travel expenses – but the Abyssinian visa ban, issued after the outbreak of the crisis, made it impossible to organize any recruitment, even if Ahrenberg had been interested in such an undertaking.

Although the Finnish volunteer movement failed to materialize, the small Nordic country did support the distant Empire in East Africa on a more official basis. A fundraising campaign organized in November 1935 yielded over 150 000 Finnish Marks, and the Finnish Red Cross also equipped an ambulance unit to provide humanitarian aid for the Ethiopians, following the example of Sweden and Norway. This was a high-profile undertaking, and the initiative came directly from no less a person than marshal C. G. E. Mannerheim, who was, at the time, the chairman of the Finnish Red Cross. The ambulance was headed by the internationally-renowned surgeon Richard Faltin, Mannerheim’s very old friend, whose profile is engraved in the memorial medal portrayed below. Faltin was already 68 years old, and his former feats as a practicing physician had involved an attempt to save the life of Russian Governor-General Bobrikov thirty years before. The close friendship between Mannerheim and Faltin was demonstrated as the marshal cordially informed driver Birger Lundström that he would be “directly answerable for professor’s security on this expedition”.

The Finnish Red Cross Mission consisted of five men. Faltin was accompanied by his two colleagues; dental surgeon Severin Tigerstedt, who had performed jaw operations for Russian soldiers in the Eastern Front during the First World War, and doctor Arvo A. Seppälä, who had served as Faltin’s assistant. Aside driver Lundström, the expedition was also joined by author Arvid Håkan Mörne, whose task was to act as the official war correspondent of the group, as well as an unofficial jack-of-all-trades. The expedition was well-equipped, and the three lorries had all the necessary gear required to set up a surgical field hospital with fifty beds. With two X-ray machines and a generator, the Finnish ambulance unit dispatched to Abyssinia was a genuine mobile surgical hospital of its day.

The Finnish ambulance unit reached Abyssinia at the beginning of February 1936. The disorderly atmosphere and the African weather caused a major culture shock to Faltin, who was a man of strict discipline and dictatorial tendencies. Even worse, the first few weeks were spent merely providing ordinary medical care for the local civilians. Even though treating dysentery and parasites was valuable work, it was not much of a challenge for the three highly-competent Finnish surgeons, who had prepared for far more serious and demanding tasks. By the end of February, the Finnish ambulance unit – which was operating in the town of Degehabur in the present-day Somali region of Ethiopia – was nonetheless doing its part in the campaign. At this time, the Finnish expedition was providing ambulatory polyclinical aid for approximately one thousand people, most of them soldiers of the Ethiopian Imperial Army, suffering from dysentery and other diseases. As the days passed, Faltin’s attitude began to soften, and he developed a considerably more positive opinion of the Africans, while simultaneously becoming more and more critical towards the European colonial powers.

At the beginning of  March, the Finnish ambulance moved to Jijiga, the capital of the Somali region, where it operated together with a detachment of Egyptian Red Crescent mission, headed by Prince Ismail Daoud. The two medical teams decided to divide their tasks, with the Egyptian mission concentrating on the everyday health care of the local population and the Finns setting up a field hospital for more demanding operations. By this time, however, things were starting to get serious on the Harar front. On March 22nd, right after Faltin and his team had managed to convert the local petrol station into a surgical hospital, the Italians launched an air raid on the locality. The Regia Aeronautica continued to bomb Jijiga for three days, destroying not only the Finnish hospital, but also most of the town itself. The desperate inhabitants took refuge in the countryside, and Jijiga was desolated.

After the mid-April, the Finnish ambulance returned to duty, this time together with the Swedish Red Cross Mission in Harar. During the following six weeks, which witnessed the decisive Battle of the Ogaden, Richard Faltin and his two colleagues performed 211 operations and provided polyclinical aid for 1350 patients. By May 1936, the Italian forces of Rodolfo Graziani – supported by Libyan colonial troops – finally captured Harar. The last Ethiopian soldiers in Ogaden now began a desperate guerrilla war, which was to last for five years. The Finnish ambulance unit was evacuated to the French Somaliland, and started its journey home from Djibouti in May 20th, returning to Finland by the Midsummer.

For Richard Faltin and the other doctors of the Finnish Red Cross mission, the Abyssinian War provided the first experience of a ruthless, modern, total war, where helpless civilian population and international organizations were also targets of military operations. Only a few years later, the Republic of Finland became a victim of a similar, although considerably less severe, totalitarian aggression which had fallen upon the ancient African Empire. After providing aid and relief for the Lion of Judah, it was time for the Lion of Finland to fend for itself.

Bibliography:

Finnish National Archives, Helsinki.

Rainer Baudendistel, Between bombs and good intentions: the Red Cross and the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935-1936. Berghahn Books, 2006.

Hagai Erlikh, The Cross and the River: Ethiopia, Egypt and the Nile. Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002.

Richard Faltin, Sotakirurgi ja Punaisen Ristin työntekijä (Military Surgeon and an Employee of the Red Cross). Otava, 1967.

Håkon Mörne, Afrikansk oro : upplevelser i Abessinien, Somaliländerna, Sudan, Egypten och Palestina. Natur och kultur, Stockholm 1936

Gunnar Rosén, Sata sodan ja rauhan vuotta: Suomen Punainen Risti, 1877-1977 (Hundred Years of War and Peace: the Finnish Red Cross, 1877-1977; Revised Edition). SPR, Helsinki, 2002.

The military units which had been assembled for the Russian punitive expedition included also the Finnish Sharp-Shooter Battalion of the Imperial Guard. I have previously written extensively of the Finnish Guard’s campaign in Poland at Noel Maurer’s blog (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) as well as in academic publications (1, 2), so in this particular blog post, I shall settle merely for a small commemoration on this forgotten anniversary.

Below, you can see two excerpts of the Finnish Battalion’s journal, preserved in the War Archives in Helsinki. Written in September 8th and September 9th, 1831, they provide a short, official description of the experiences of the Finnish sharp-shooters during the preceding days. As you can see, this Finnish military unit of the Russian Imperial Guard still kept its records in Swedish and followed the Gregorian calendar. The entries are signed by “Öfverste Ramsay” – colonel Anders Edvard Ramsay, a Finnish nobleman of Scottish descent, who subsequently arose to the rank of General of Infantry and was appointed to the Russian Imperial War Council. Ramsay has dutifully recorded with his elegant handwriting the casualties which his Battalion had suffered in the storming of the Polish redoubts in the previous day.

The list of the casualties begins from the bottom of the first page and continues to the second. The Battalion had lost four men dead in the assault against Warsaw; adjutant, lieutenant Johan Fredrik Schybergson, and three rank-and-file soldiers from the 4th company. Carl Qvick, sharp-shooter no. 91, Elias Enqvist, sharp-shooter no. 53 and Adolf Nyman, sharp-shooter no. 111.

The records seem to be a bit vague at this point, since they don’t match with the official Muster Roll of the Battalion. Elias Enqvist, who was 25 years old and born in the province of Vaasa, did serve on the campaign with the same exact number, but his two other comrades are somewhat more mysterious. Adolf Nyman may have been Adolf Nygren, the 22-year-old soldier from the southeastern Kymi county, who had originally served in the 3rd company. It’s possible that he was reassigned a new number in a new company, as the Battalion was undergoing constant reorganization with the companies shrinking down to platoon strength due to the cholera epidemic. Carl Qvick is a particularly problematic case. According to the Muster Roll, the sharp-shooter no. 53 in the 4th company was not named Carl Qvick, but instead Anders Qvick, who was 29-year-old blacksmith from the town of Loviisa. However, the Genealogical Society of Finland informs us that sharp-shooter Anders Qvick was not killed in action at the gates of Warsaw, but instead returned to Finland, where he perished from chickenpox on the New Year’s Eve, 1836.

Lieutenant Schybergson’s death is nonetheless well-recorded. Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Vilhelm Lagerborg, who served as Ramsay’s second-in-command, described the event in the subsequent letter which he sent to Johan Albrecht Ehrenström. Lagerborg’s original letter has apparently not survived, but Ehrenström has provided a detailed reference of the text in his other correspondence (Rilax collection, 602:51, folder 10, Finnish National Archives). Lagerborg’s description provides a vivid picture of the fighting on the ad hoc fortifications in the Polish capital; he mentions “palisades, barricades, retrenchments and redoubts”, and describes how the Polish defenders had tried to turn their capital into “a new Zaragoza“. After successfully storming the redoubts of Rakowiec and Szczęśliwice in the southwestern parts of Warsaw in the morning of September 7th, the Finnish Battalion spent six hours exposed to a strong crossfire from three Polish batteries. Before the day was over, lieutenant Schybergson was killed by a cannon shell, and Lagerborg, who was standing next to him, was wounded for the second time in the campaign.

After the conquest of the Polish capital, lieutenant Schybergson’s belongings were sold at an auction and he was buried in Warsaw. The lieutenant did, however, receive also a more permanent commemoration. His name was engraved in the black marble plaque of the Finnish Cadet School in Hamina, as a hero who had fought and died “for the Emperor and the Fatherland”. As for the other three fallen soldiers, the text in Ramsay’s journal states their legacy plainly enough: “afföres ifrån rullor” – “removed from the roster”.

Aside those Finns who were killed in action in the Polish capital, four of their compatriots were wounded. Gustaf Lindqvist, sharp-shooter no. 134 from the 1st company; sergeant major Gustaf Grahn; 2nd lieutenant Achates Ferdinand Gripenberg; and, as mentioned, lieutenant-colonel Lagerborg. Gripenberg was awarded with the Order of St. Anna, whereas Lagerborg was bestowed with the Order of St. Vladimir. Approximately forty Finnish soldiers who had been taken prisoners-of-war in the battles of Mazovia and subsequently transported to Warsaw were also released from Polish captivity. For the Grand-Duchy of Finland, the participation in the suppression of the Polish uprising had ensured the possibility to secure and extend her self-government by a pronounced loyalty to the Russian Emperor in the subsequent decades.

In the meantime, the Poles were crushed. On the midnight of September 7th-8th, the Polish capital was evacuated and abandoned to the Russian army. The remaining Polish forces in the vicinity of Warsaw were surrounded in the fortress of Modlin. Shortly afterwards, the last strongholds of Polish resistance, the fortresses of Modlin and Zamość, surrendered to Paskevich. As the contemporary French cartoon below noted, order had been restored in Poland once again.

Everything I’ve written here about information it’s predicated on the beliefs that preserving information matter and that preserving as much detail as possible matters. Yes, that’s in part an emotional reaction of mine to my own personal circumstances, but it’s something that works very well for me from the perspective of scholarship. Detail does matter; everything counts.

My 2004 post on the non-existence of Eurabia was a product of my idle curiosity and my desire to seek some distraction from graduate school. Later, as I became more aware of what Eurabia was starting to do, I became more concerned, more strident. Breivik’s massacre was the sort of thing that I’d expected to eventually happen; I felt guilty, frustrated, despairing that this had happened. If the mass of details describing reality don’t register, what’s the point of any of it?

Jussi’s approach is best. Friend of the blog Jim Belshaw helped with this comment he posted at A Bit More Detail in response to my Eurabia-themed question wondering how you reach people who believe in unfounded things. Selected elements are below.

2. You can’t change people’s minds by direct attack on their views. You have to come at it indirectly.
3. Don’t deal in universals. Eurabia and Muslims have become universals, labels to which other things are attached. Each time you use them as universals, you carry other people’s labels with them. At a purely personal level I try to avoid the use of the world Muslim unless I am speaking about a faith with all its varieties.
4. Recognise diversity. Within Europe each country, and sometimes parts of countries, are different. Australia is different again.
5. Attack intolerance, but do not attack the validity of views on which that intolerance may draw. Precisely, recognise them and address them independently as different issues. Avoid culture wars. Don’t confuse issues.

Thanks, Jim, for the reminder. The details will reappear, here and elsewhere. It’d be an honour if you’d join us all here at History and Futility for the ride.

Breivik was involved in this same political dynamic which has swept across the European Continent in recent years. He had a background in the Norwegian Progress Party (FrP), the second-largest political party in Norway, which has adjusted its anti-tax populist ideology more and more towards the direction of an openly anti-immigration platform. Eventually, Breivik resigned from the party, convinced that democratic methods could not yield the results he hoped for, and began hatching a plot for outright political violence.

Following the modus operandi of all publicity-seeking mass murderers, Breivik wrote a manifesto where he openly stated his motives and clarified his political opinions in detail. Published in the internet, the “European Declaration of Independence” – which can be downloaded from here – is essentially a grotesque compendium of blog posts and columns, tied together with Breivik’s own narrative. The quoted writings all have in common an openly islamophobic, anti-immigration theme. According to Breivik’s twisted, but coherent logic, the “multiculturalist Marxist establishment” is attempting to convert the European Union into a “Marxist superstate, the EUSSR”; these “cultural Marxists” are also responsible for the “mass Muslim immigration” and “islamization” of Europe. Breivik is, in other words, a true believer in the so-called “Eurabia”-predictions previously discussed also on this blog, and he also believes that an open discussion of these threats was impossible due to the pervasive European “political correctness”. In his own words, Breivik was using the mass murder as means to “send a message” to the “Marxist, multiculturalist elites”. His chosen method was to wipe out the next generation of the left-wing politicians whom he saw as the culprits of the immigration policy and the destruction of his cherished European civilization.

What’s important to remember is that Breivik’s ideology was not original, and his sick ideas were not of his own making. In essence, he was a product of the internet age, a dedicated consumer of the radical anti-Muslim political propaganda which has circulated around the websites and weblogs ever since the 9/11 attacks and the controversial Muhammad cartoon episode. Breivik maintained a lively interest in the most notable anti-Islam bloggers, such as “Fjordman”, with whom he occasionally seems to have corresponded, advertising his book project; one example of their dialogue can be found here, in the comment section. The title of Breivik’s book, “Declaration of European Independence”, is actually borrowed from a column which “Fjordman” wrote for the cultural-conservative “Brussels Journal”-blog. Breivik describes his ideology by the name “Vienna School of Thought”, which is a reference to another well-known paranoid anti-Islam blog, “Gates of Vienna”.

This internet sub-culture where Breivik spent his pastime has not been without political significance. The very same post-modern, radical, fanatic cultural-fundamentalist atmosphere which produced Breivik has made serious inroads to the mainstream politics in the Western World, basing its success on populism and fear. The writers who inspired Breivik included known Muslim-baiting hate-mongers such as Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller and Daniel Pipes, and he was fascinated by the Tea Party movement. Geert Wilders, the head of the Dutch PVV and the producer of Fitna, was among Breivik’s heroes, and his book even mentions – in one of the quoted posts from “Fjordman” – Jussi Halla-aho, a Finnish anti-Islam blogger who was elected as an MP of the populist “True Finns” party in the last elections and became the chairman of the parliamentary committee in charge of police, border guard and the immigration affairs. Breivik’s book endorses several “anti-immigration, cultural conservative organizations”, ranging from the Sweden-Democrats to the Polish PiS, all of which he saw as the possible salvation of the Continent from the supposed evils of multiculturalism and immigration. The only thing which made Breivik special was his conviction that this parliamentary political activity needed to be supplemented with direct action, and he saw himself as the man who could provide it.

The links between his sources of inspiration are clear enough; indeed, the anti-Islam bloggers habitually cross-reference each others, as testified by the above-mentioned hat tip given by Fjordman to Halla-aho. Breivik may be considered as a fanatical psychopath, but judging by his own writings, there was nothing unusual in his political opinions, which have infested the Web for several years. The online propagation of hatred, fear, paranoia and pessimism merely reached its final, logical end in the actions of one dedicated adherent.

Not surprisingly, those who have ideologically most in common with Breivik have already decided to adopt denial tactics, showing no self-criticism whatsoever. In Finland, the chairman of the youth organization of the “True Finns”, Simon Elo, merely commented that Breivik’s manifesto was “very confused” – this in spite of the fact that the contents of Breivik’s manifesto and Elo’s own blog which he hosts as a youth politician clearly represent the same exact paranoid variety of “criticism of multi-culturalism”, tainted by fears of Islam and suspicions towards the Left. Elo has also uncritically praised Professor Timo Vihavainen’s controversial work “Fall of the West”, which certainly had a very similar tone to Breivik’s writings and was, unsurprisingly, also favourably referenced at Breivik’s favorite hangout in the blogosphere. So, in spite of the denials, it is very difficult not to see the ideological connection.

What is more worrisome is that similar statements which pushed Breivik over the brink are today not only passively tolerated in the European mainstream politics, but sometimes even echoed by the traditional political parties and supposedly moderate politicians. It should be noted that Breivik and his actions were a result of the very same political dynamic which has been manifested in the hyper-strict immigration policies in Denmark, dismantling of the Roma settlements in France and comments on the “failure of multiculturalism” in Germany. All that Breivik did was simply to pursue this dynamic to its ultimate, most extreme conclusion.

Thus, although the actions of Breivik may be considered unique, a pessimist might also state that they are symptomatic of the present-day atmosphere in Europe. The historical precedents are ominous enough. Just as in the inter-war era, the 21^st century Europe has already witnessed a massive economic crisis, together with the new rise of racism and xenophobia. Today, the equation is complete with random, full-scale massacres of people who are considered as political opponents.

Facilis descensus Averni.

The whole thing has been fascinating, not only from a sports perspective but from a cultural perpective. Hockey, its problems with credibility and takeup and growing competition from other sports notwithstanding, can be plausibly called the Canadian national sport. Certainly hockey has proven its centrality in Canada now.

* The growing strength of the Canadian economy–and dollar–relative to the American has created an economically plausible case for the expansion of the NHL back to Winnipeg and Québec City. Winnipeg actually has taken over the Atlanta Thrashers, bolstering civic pride.
* The long-standing and expensively-funded desire of Québec City to get back its NHL team has not succeeded yet, but it has been the trigger for the implosion of the Parti Québécois just a month after the annihilation of the Bloc Québécois in the federal election.
* Finally, the Vancouver Canucks’ success has revealed interesting things about intra-Canadian solidarity. Writers for the Edmonton Journal and Torontoist have both refused to support the Canucks as a Canadian team versus the Bruins, arguing that in terms of the nationality of its players the Bruins are more Canadian than the Canucks. Atlantic Canadians, meanwhile, have come out in support of the Bruins based on century-old ties between New England and–what I would call–its hinterland in Atlantic Canada.

The NHL finals have been fantastic. And, now, here I go back to watching the game.

As the graph shows, while the number of active editors shot up from 2005, the retention rate of editors, those who are still active a year later, shot down. So there are more editors, but they quit editing earlier. Which in turn means that you have a hard core of longterm, dyed in the wool editors who know how to game the system and a much larger mass of people who discover Wikipedia, start editing and usually drop out in a couple of months, either because they lose interest or because they’re driven out by the hardcore. Editing Wikipedia is not fun anymore.

Three reasons for this is: notability, verification and rules lawyering in general. It used to be that Wikipedia culture was fairly tolerant of people following their own interests, putting up entries on lesser known webcomics say and appreciated their efforts. But just when Wikipedia really took off, in 2005-2006, the rules started to change and anything that couldn’t be found in the Encyclopedia Brittannica was suddenly not noticable enough to be in Wikipedia either. The balance in Wikipedia culture switched over from erring on the side of inclusiveness to “when in doubt, delete” — with quite a few editors seeing it as a holy mission to get rid of “fancruft”, insulting and alienating just those people who would’ve made good recruits.

At the same time, responding to a couple of scandals (some more so than others), editing existing articles became harder as well, as verification became the magic word. Every fact had to be verified, linked to some source that proclaimed its truth. It’s not an unreasonable rule, it’s the way it has been used that’s the problem. Too often new editors have had their their heads bitten off for innocently adding facts without verification, or using “suspect” sources, or for using sources not easily verificable or for just happening to disagree with a particular editor’s hobby horse. And verification, like notability is also increasingly used in editor fights, as disagreeing editors nitpick each other’s editors.

I would like this to be corrected. I still resent the disappearance of Wikipedia’s page on soc.history.what-if.

Not only have a lot of people who re-tweeted the post, but we are also collectively re-tweeting it as if it is focused on the the good things in our field – that we value information literacy. Of course we value information literacy. But The Chronicle’s article is actually troubling because it explains plainly that many of our peers in academia don’t understand the value our work in teaching and learning. And it’s even more troubling that we are re-tweeting the article as if it shines a glowing light on our work in the academy when many people don’t know what we do, how we do it, and why.

Like I said at the beginning of this post, I’m not sure how to write up my thoughts right now. On the one hand, I want to comment on the fact that we value our work but that not everyone else does. But on the other hand, I’m compelled to talk about way we’re re-tweeting this article as if it says good things about our work. I admit it – I could be quibbling since The Chronicle did report on some good things, after all. But I still think we should spend more of our energy thinking about ways to shrink that 37% difference of opinion on the librarian’s role in teaching and learning as opposed to giving ourselves a pat on the back and calling it a day. This isn’t about talking about ways to just get in to the classroom. It’s about convincing the other 40% of teaching faculty (and that 3% of library directors) that we actually do make a difference.

Go, read them both.

The central dogma [of information theory] says, “Meaning is irrelevant.” Information is independent of the meaning that it expresses, and of the language used to express it. Information is an abstract concept, which can be embodied equally well in human speech or in writing or in drumbeats. All that is needed to transfer information from one language to another is a coding system. A coding system may be simple or complicated. If the code is simple, as it is for the drum language with its two tones, a given amount of information requires a longer message. If the code is complicated, as it is for spoken language, the same amount of information can be conveyed in a shorter message.

The renowned American engineer Claude Shannon, in Dyson’s telling of Gleick’s book, is responsible for devising a theory of information and for our current early 21st century information abundance (surfeit?).

Claude Shannon was the founding father of information theory. For a hundred years after the electric telegraph, other communication systems such as the telephone, radio, and television were invented and developed by engineers without any need for higher mathematics. Then Shannon supplied the theory to understand all of these systems together, defining information as an abstract quantity inherent in a telephone message or a television picture. Shannon brought higher mathematics into the game.

When Shannon was a boy growing up on a farm in Michigan, he built a homemade telegraph system using Morse Code. Messages were transmitted to friends on neighboring farms, using the barbed wire of their fences to conduct electric signals. When World War II began, Shannon became one of the pioneers of scientific cryptography, working on the high-level cryptographic telephone system that allowed Roosevelt and Churchill to talk to each other over a secure channel. Shannon’s friend Alan Turing was also working as a cryptographer at the same time, in the famous British Enigma project that successfully deciphered German military codes. The two pioneers met frequently when Turing visited New York in 1943, but they belonged to separate secret worlds and could not exchange ideas about cryptography.

In 1945 Shannon wrote a paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography,” which was stamped SECRET and never saw the light of day. He published in 1948 an expurgated version of the 1945 paper with the title “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” The 1948 version appeared in the Bell System Technical Journal, the house journal of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, and became an instant classic. It is the founding document for the modern science of information. After Shannon, the technology of information raced ahead, with electronic computers, digital cameras, the Internet, and the World Wide Web.

According to Gleick, the impact of information on human affairs came in three installments: first the history, the thousands of years during which people created and exchanged information without the concept of measuring it; second the theory, first formulated by Shannon; third the flood, in which we now live. The flood began quietly. The event that made the flood plainly visible occurred in 1965, when Gordon Moore stated Moore’s Law. Moore was an electrical engineer, founder of the Intel Corporation, a company that manufactured components for computers and other electronic gadgets. His law said that the price of electronic components would decrease and their numbers would increase by a factor of two every eighteen months. This implied that the price would decrease and the numbers would increase by a factor of a hundred every decade. Moore’s prediction of continued growth has turned out to be astonishingly accurate during the forty-five years since he announced it. In these four and a half decades, the price has decreased and the numbers have increased by a factor of a billion, nine powers of ten. Nine powers of ten are enough to turn a trickle into a flood.

In 1949, one year after Shannon published the rules of information theory, he drew up a table of the various stores of memory that then existed. The biggest memory in his table was the US Library of Congress, which he estimated to contain one hundred trillion bits of information. That was at the time a fair guess at the sum total of recorded human knowledge. Today a memory disc drive storing that amount of information weighs a few pounds and can be bought for about a thousand dollars. Information, otherwise known as data, pours into memories of that size or larger, in government and business offices and scientific laboratories all over the world. Gleick quotes the computer scientist Jaron Lanier describing the effect of the flood: “It’s as if you kneel to plant the seed of a tree and it grows so fast that it swallows your whole town before you can even rise to your feet.”

What is there to be done? Not one thing. Dyson ends by quoting Gleick quoting from Jorge Luis Borges’ famous short story “The Library of Babel”. I agree with Hirschman in that the two men misread the short story subtly, in that the library really isn’t a library–an organized, systematized information space–in that it isn’t indexed.

The Library of Babel shows that information is not simply in the possession of statements, texts (facts), but rather in the structure that maps between them (and is missing in that ill-fated library). The Library of Babel is a misnomer – a collection of every possible book is not a library, but rather an unordered chaos in the guise of shelves and books. It is the opposite of a library. This is a universe with too little information, not too much!

The way forward, as Dyson would have it, is through the mass of individuals’ efforts in trying to systematize all this information, through systems like Wikipedia which through masses of data together with masses of individual critics who compete to produce some order. (I confess, here, that I do have a Wikipedia account of my own, although I’m not very active on it at al.)

Among my friends and acquaintances, everybody distrusts Wikipedia and everybody uses it. Distrust and productive use are not incompatible. Wikipedia is the ultimate open source repository of information. Everyone is free to read it and everyone is free to write it. It contains articles in 262 languages written by several million authors. The information that it contains is totally unreliable and surprisingly accurate. It is often unreliable because many of the authors are ignorant or careless. It is often accurate because the articles are edited and corrected by readers who are better informed than the authors.

Jimmy Wales hoped when he started Wikipedia that the combination of enthusiastic volunteer writers with open source information technology would cause a revolution in human access to knowledge. The rate of growth of Wikipedia exceeded his wildest dreams. Within ten years it has become the biggest storehouse of information on the planet and the noisiest battleground of conflicting opinions. It illustrates Shannon’s law of reliable communication. Shannon’s law says that accurate transmission of information is possible in a communication system with a high level of noise. Even in the noisiest system, errors can be reliably corrected and accurate information transmitted, provided that the transmission is sufficiently redundant. That is, in a nutshell, how Wikipedia works.

[. . .]

The rapid growth of the flood of information in the last ten years made Wikipedia possible, and the same flood made twenty-first-century science possible. Twenty-first-century science is dominated by huge stores of information that we call databases. The information flood has made it easy and cheap to build databases.

[. . .]

The explosive growth of information in our human society is a part of the slower growth of ordered structures in the evolution of life as a whole. Life has for billions of years been evolving with organisms and ecosystems embodying increasing amounts of information. The evolution of life is a part of the evolution of the universe, which also evolves with increasing amounts of information embodied in ordered structures, galaxies and stars and planetary systems. In the living and in the nonliving world, we see a growth of order, starting from the featureless and uniform gas of the early universe and producing the magnificent diversity of weird objects that we see in the sky and in the rain forest. Everywhere around us, wherever we look, we see evidence of increasing order and increasing information. The technology arising from Shannon’s discoveries is only a local acceleration of the natural growth of information.

“As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information”, Dyson ends his text. Indeed. It may not be everything, but it’s something–a list of somethings, even.

Humans are really bad at this. We judge decisions based on the results. This would make sense if results were strictly dependent on our decision, but they’re not. There’s a whole world of other forces that come into play. The important insight is that if you take a bet and lose, that does not retroactively make it a bad bet. It was a good or a bad bet at the moment that you made it, and the outcome does not change this fact. (Correspondingly, if you make a bad bet and win, that doesn’t retroactively make it a good bet.)

It is possible for the outcome to shed additional light on your bet, perhaps by highlighting a force or factor that you had failed to account for, but otherwise, outcomes don’t reach backwards in time to change the status of decisions. When you make a risk management decision, you are dealing with many worlds. When you are living with the consequences, you are dealing with only the one you ended up with. The fact that in 60% of the other worlds you are drinking champagne from a trophy is cold comfort.

Saturday:

In the early days of Twitter, when people were still making jokes about sandwiches and that media was conducting positively embarrassing interviews with the founders, there was a lot of discussion about what Twitter was for. The vision that Twitter settled on was to be the pulse of the planet. And so they set themselves to the task of getting real good at providing us with realtime information exchange.

The unexamined assumption is the same as in live TV reporting, that real time information MATTERS. I submit that it doesn’t, it really, really doesn’t in most contexts. Japan’s nuclear problem is like the story of Gabrielle Giffords’ changing health status and the soul searching that the media did afterwards. It does not matter that we had bad information for 30 minutes. It does not matter that Giffors was briefly thought to be dead and then turned out to be only mostly dead. Because for most of the world, that information does not matter within the granularity of the time that it was bad information.

At this moment, the current status of the nuclear plants in Japan matters for about 200,000 people in the world. This is the number of people who can do anything about it. Most of those 200,000 people can only decide whether or not to flee further away. They need information at the 15-minute scale probably. A very tiny minority of the people need information at the moment to moment scale. This is the team of people tasked with bringing the reactors under control. For the rest of us, we need information at the daily scale or less. Because the ramifications of Japan reactor situation IF THEY MATTER AT ALL matter in regard to decisions made at the scale of decades and centuries.

Sunday:

Neal Stephenson’s Anathem imagines a setting where monks who seal themselves off for a year, decade, century, or millennium are listened to with great intensity. Their practice is called the Discipline. When they emerge every year, decade, century, or millennium it is for 10 days and it is called Apert.

It would be an interesting practice to conduct a series of mini-Disciplines, with mini-Aperts. Perhaps disconnecting for 6 out of 7 days. It would be even more interesting to layer the Discipline with informational relevance. Imagine setting up sets of feeds such that each one had a schedule of windows when you could check in on it and topics were linked to the appropriate schedule. Imagine having little homunculi that were smart enough to sort news for you, passing off what your loved ones were up to moment to moment but holding information about the stock market at bay for 5 years, then giving you the best information for the brief period that you needed it. Maybe you need to know about what’s going on with the reactors in Japan on a weekly or monthly basis. Maybe your neighbour who is involved in CANDU reactor safety inspections needs daily updates.

To some degree, the need for different time scales of information is known. It’s why most democracies have two houses with representatives that hold office for different lengths of time. It’s why there are specialist presses and then more generalist news organs. But there are obvious points of failure. 24 hour news networks, and the corresponding political tactical unit, “the news cycle” are one. The misinformation echo chamber and the routine failure of corrections to catch up with shocking headlines is another.