Author: Omer Zak

I am deaf since birth. I played with big computers which eat punched cards and spew out printouts since age 12. Ever since they became available, I work and play with desktop size computers which eat keyboard keypresses and spew out display pixels. Among other things, I developed software which helped the deaf in Israel use the telephone network, by means of home computers equipped with modems. Several years later, I developed Hebrew localizations for some cellular phones, which helped the deaf in Israel utilize the cellular phone networks. I am interested in entrepreneurship, Science Fiction and making the world more accessible to people with disabilities.

Action movie with Israeli setting

Yesterday at night, there was an action movie in Israeli TV Channel 2 – “The Order Secrets”, starred by Jean-Claude van-Damme. What was so special in it was that at last I got to see a classical action movie, with life-disruptive car run-down in Israeli streets, and with involvement of Israeli policemen.

Viewing the movie felt like seeing a James Bond movie in Israeli setting. The protagonist was not womanizer the way James Bond was. Women were not figuratively harmed during the narrative, and he combined exploiting & falling in love with the same woman.

However, most of the run-downs were in central and east Jerusalem, and my childhood was in west Jerusalem. Oh well, it would have been cool to catch a glimpse of one of the houses, in which I lived during my childhood, in one of the car run-downs.

Another remarkable feature of the movie was that it did not shed sympathetic light on the Israeli police. There was a corrupt police officer, who looked like a hired gun; and a woman police officer, who defected to the “other side” (even though the “other side” was the morally right one).

There was also the cliche of dressing like an Hasid in order to escape Police and gaining the collaboration of true Hasidim for this purpose. I am not happy with the grain of truth, upon which this cliche is based.

Yesterday MICHA's 50th year celebration and fundraising event

Yesterday I was in the “Positive Step” fund raising event for MICHA (another link). The event was held at this time because it has been 50 years since MICHA was founded. It was held in Joshua Gardens, north Tel Aviv.

Admission fee to the event was 20NIS, which was transferred as donation to MICHA. There were lots of advertising, so I assume that companies sponsored almost everything which costs money there – including free ice cream from Nestle.

At entrance, we got free hat and a small bottle of water to drink as we walk. There were lots of white shirts and white & green balloons (blue balloons are apparently reserved to the memory of Ron Arad, MIA).

Before walking, we were treated to a dose of the inevitable “zionut” – boring political speeches. MICHA is well-connected, so the speakers included also Danny Naveh, the minister of health, and Zevulun Orlev, the minister of welfare. Near the end, also Reuma Weizmann, the wife of Ezer Weizmann, a former Israeli President, spoke. She has been member of the managing committee of MICHA for forty years and reminded us to drink a lot of water. She apologized that she will not be joining us for the walk, because they are to celebrate her husband’s 80th birthday. Erez Zino, the CEO of Ozicom Communications Ltd. and also a “graduate” of MICHA Tel Aviv, did not speak this time.

All speeches were made accessible by combination of a notetaker and Sign Language interpreter (far cry from the era during which Sign Language was taboo at MICHA).

After the speeches were over, those who had balloons were asked to release them to the air, and then we started walking.

There was a famous (although I do not know him) basketball player, who came to the event, and walked together with us. Several people utilized the opportunities to be photographed together with him.

There were Disneylandesque people with costumes of cartoon heroes. Only the heroes were from commercials, such as the Baby of Bamba and the Violet Star of Cellcom.

And, oh yes, I saw almost all workers of Ozicom Communications Ltd. there, some of them with their families.

Petah Tikva is to be more accessible to the deaf now

During the last two years, the Petah Tikva municipality has been operating the “Accessible Community” project for improving accessibility to people with all types of disabilities in the city. In the framework of this project, the municipal hotline, which is accessible by voice phone number 106, has been prepared to accept also FAX messages from people, whose disability precludes their use of regular phone.

This evening I was in a meeting, in which the manager of the hotline told us about the project. They accept for forwarding also FAX messages for the police, Magen David Adom (the Jewish/Israeli counterpart of Red Cross) and the firefighters. The FAX number is (03)9040304. We also got a form, which can be filled quickly in case of emergency for FAXing to the hotline. About fifty deaf people (1/4 of the total deaf population in Petah Tikva) participated in the meeting. The opportunity was utilized also by a representative of the Israeli Social Security, who told us about the vocational rehabilitation services provided by Social Security. The Web site of the municipality of Petah Tikva (http://www.petah-tikva.muni.il/) is not accessible to the Mozilla browser, which I used, due apparently to use of a IE specific extension at the home page. However, http://www.petah-tikva.muni.il/htmls/hebrew/moked.html gets you directly to the municipal hotline center (the page is written in Hebrew). I sent a complaint to their Webmaster, emphasizing the problem of blind people, who absolutely must use special browsers to browse Web sites.

Venus Transit

Yes, I have seen* it!

*given a suitable definition** of “seeing”

**It is not advisable to look directly at the Sun under any circumstances. Therefore the Venus transit can be safely viewed only via some instrument such as a telescope. I saw it via a more complex instrument, which consisted of a telescope, camera, Internet connection (http://www.astronomy.org.il/) and my PC. The fact that I did not see it at real time does not really matter.

Misfits and Revolutionaries in Utopia

When designing an Utopia, one needs to consider also how people who do not fit in are treated in the Utopia.

One way in which someone may fail to fit in is by being unsuccessful when trying to play by the Utopia’s rules.

In capitalistic regimes, unsuccessful people are poor, hungry, have poor health and bad (or nonexistent) housing. They then have a good reason to try to overthrow the present regime, in the belief that in a better regime they will have higher quality of life.

Another kind of unsuccessful people are those, who do not have the patience and long attention span to build their wealth slowly and on solid base. Such people indulge in various get-rich-quick schemes. They typically become real estate and insurance agents. They start the classical makework businesses. They do not consider the benefit to society when planning their business, only how it can funnel money into their pockets. Such people are behind business scams and Enrons.

A third kind of people are ones, who are better at organizing (i.e. influencing) people than in creating something. They become salespeople and politicians. They are the ones, who might believe that their personal success would come from organizing poor people to overthrow the present regime.

The real test of an Utopia is in how it deals with all those kinds of people and how can they find their opportunities in it without harming other people.

At any case, there will always be some people, who feel very dissatisfied with the Utopian regime, and who would try to overthrow it, or at least get it to change. Such people are necessary for the future evolution of the Utopia and for updating its workings according to the changed times. Those people would be good at pointing out abuses of the establishment and at getting it to change before it is overthrown.

Makework in the gift economy

I wrote elsewhere my suggestion that people be paid to study, if they don’t currently have a job.

The gift economy concept fits with the above approach.

When people compete for status from having the greatest & biggest skill set for coping with emergencies, or for having made the best contributions to scientific research, or for having had contributed to the coolest software projects – rather than for having the most expensive car or the biggest house or expensive jewelery – the world would be a better place to live.

There is equivalence between expressing large numbers and compression

There is an interesting discussion about large numbers in the Wikipedia and in Robert Munafo’s article.

Munafo describes several notations for concise expression of very large numbers. The basic idea is to define special operators (symbols) to allow one to express a very large number using a small number of characters (digits, operators/punctuation marks). Since a short string of characters, which represents a very large number, can be represented in a small number of bits (say, 16 times the string’s length in characters) – what we are really doing is an attempt to implement an “hash function” from large numbers into their representations, while doing this in inverse.

In other words, a mathematical notation for concisely expressing a very large number corresponds to a data compression algorithm, like the algorithms used in gzip or bzip2. I am not saying “equivalent” here, because I cannot demonstrate a way to derive a compression algorithm from a mathematical notation definition or vice versa. The data compression algorithm takes, as its input, a string, which represents the very large number in some straightforward form. The algorithm’s output is another string, which expresses the same number by means of a suitable mathematical notation.

It is well known that every compression algorithm compresses a subset of the strings presented to it, but expands another subset of the potential input strings. The point of using a compression algorithm is that the strings, which interest us, get compressed, while only “garbage” strings get expanded.

Therefore, for any mathematical notation for representing very large numbers, there is a subset of numbers, whose representation in that notation is shorter than a straightforward form; and a subset of numbers, whose representation is longer.

What if?

Let’s say that the straightforward form, which I mentioned above, is the base-2 representation of a number. The corresponding representation, using a mathematical notation, is a string of N characters. We can consider it to be a base-2 number which is 16N+1 bits long (the extra bit is needed to guarantee that the number starts with ‘1’).

Let’s try a new way to represent very large numbers. We take a number, say 42, and represent it as binary number. We interpret the binary number as a mathematical notation, and translate it into the represented number, typically a very large number. An equivalent way of saying this is that we uncompress the string, which is the binary representation of 42.

Then, we take the very large number and read it as a mathematical notation, which denotes another very large number. In other words, we uncompress again the binary string. We can iterate this process several times.

The following questions, for which I don’t have answers, follow from the above discussion:

  1. Are there sequences of infinite length? Or do such iterations always repeat the same strings after a sufficiently long cycle?
  2. What is the largest number, which we can reach from 42 using this approach? What mathematical notation (uncompression algorithm) would allow us to reach the largest number from 42 by means of a finite (but very large) number of iterations?
  3. Can a similar methodology be applied also to transfinite numbers?

Other people complain about makework economics, too

Makework = what you need when you perpetuate an outdated, pre-automation 1940-era workweek discuss another way to deal with the makework problem.

They propose to “timesize” jobs i.e. reduce the number of hours per work week.

However, they don’t address the real problem: many work hours are not needed anymore to operate and maintain the means of producing the basic human necessities. On the other hand, the only way to sustain an economy in the long range is to reward people in proportion to the quantity and quality of work they put in.

Thus, there is a dilemma.