Blixa – The Symbolism of Lightning and Disruption as Creative Order

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The name Blixa is related to several cognates that go back to the Proto-Germanic *bl?kan?, from Proto-Indo-European *b?ley?-. In Swedish Blixt and Blixtra are derived from Blixa, in old-English blican is used, and the forms are related to the Dutch verb bliksemen, or noun bliksem, and the German blitzen, all meaning lighting flash.

Lightning is a natural phenomenon consisting of electrostatic discharges occurring through the atmosphere between two electrically charged regions. One or both regions are within the atmosphere, with the second region sometimes occurring on the ground. Following the lightning, the regions become partially or wholly electrically neutralized.

Lightning involves a near-instantaneous release of energy on a massive scale (between 200 megajoules and 7 gigajoules). The air around a lightning flash (30,000°C, 54,000 °F or 30,273.15 Kelvin) rapidly heats to temperatures of about five times hotter than the surface of the sun (5,500°C, 9,900°F or 5,800 Kelvin). An emission of electromagnetic radiation across a wide range of wavelengths occurs, some visible as a bright flash. Lightning also causes thunder, a sound from the shock wave which develops as heated gases in the vicinity of the discharge experience a sudden increase in pressure.

Blixa Bargeld is a German musician who has been the lead singer of the band Einstürzende Neubauten since its formation in 1980. Bargeld was also a founding member of the Australian rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, from 1983 until 2003. What’s most interesting about Bargeld as an artist is his deeply intellectual interpretation of art and the organic experience of his performances, combining the deconstructive, mystic ideas of total theater and Dadaistic happenings of Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), the nihilist, pessimistic, decaying views (to be or not to be/being there or not being there) of Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran (!911-1995) and the mystic rational views of German Jewish Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), to break down not only the walls between artist and spectator, but place the temporal and ephemeral of creation so at the center that destruction is the nirvana state and mechanism of creation. These Schopenhaueran and Nietzschean ideas are deeply rooted in post-modern European existentialism, and it’s a perspective on life that I grew up in and determined my experiences in life. To disrupt becomes the essence of creation, like a lighting shift emission.

The logo of the band Einstürzende Neubauten goes back to a Monadic symbol also found in John Dee’s “Monas Hieroglyphica” (1564) and “The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz” (1616), the best known of the three anonymous manifestos of the Rosicrucians.

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The Legacy of Fencing and Duelling in the European Identity

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Fencing is to European culture, what Archery is to Confucian culture. Fencing is not just a martial skill, but also a spiritual and ethical discipline that defines a man’s character. Fencing and duelling are deeply rooted in the chivalric codes and aristocratic honor that define West European culture and history.

Going back as far as the Roman Empire, duelling developed through the Middle Ages and reached its peak days during the 17th and 18th century. While initially fought with swords, duels in the late 18th century transitioned primarily to pistols.

Duelling codes, or Code Duello, developed alongside with strict, highly formalized sets of rules during the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Defamation and libel laws and the ethical belief that a person’s public standing and dignity must be legally protected from malicious untruths is a direct evolution of this duelling mindset.

Duels also play a key role in European literature, from “The Sorrows of Young Werther” (1774) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to “The Brothers Karamazov” (1879-1880) by Fyodor Dostoevsky and “Eugene Onegin” (1825-1832) by Alexander Pushkin.

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Moments in History – Many is Man

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Many is man, Prigozhin said. He chewed on a carrot stick, which had snapped off from its stem held in his right hand, his mouth gaped open, his thick underlip protruded sadly, the ring of his mouth opening and closing repeatedly, while with every bite he gently squeezed his buttocks together in tight harmony, as flighty words and sweet carrot mingled into half reason, half prime. Many is man, he repeated. The ring begins Prigozhin said, quiet, listen. The water of the Rhine rippled from its source, barely audible, quietly swelling, from the Lake Toma at the Oberalp Pass. You have to see to hear it, only then to rise to waves and flow around the castle of man. Prigozhin was a boor, but don’t be fooled by his simple, crude appearance, he was sophisticated. Many years later, I would think back of this scene, as Prigozhin had risen and he had long forgotten about me or the carrot he had chunked on quietly, but I remembered it indistinguishably like a great silent moment in history, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings.

Open Source driving Security, DevOps and Infrastructure Automation

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If you are an Application Developer, DevOps engineer, Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) or otherwise interested in Cloud Native and application modernization, you will see a lot of action in the fields of security, automation and devops areas on Cloud Native. Venture Capital is investing heavily in devops automation and security, recruiters are aggressively hunting down talent, new job openings are being posted every day, new startups are funded, open source projects and Kubernetes extensions launched with no end.

There are also a lot of really boring companies and technologies, capitalizing on the surge in adoption of cloud native without inspiring vision, like anything with “data-driven”, “single-sign on”, “insights”, “utilizing AI to optimize”, “future of cloud engineering” or “AI driven” makes me fall asleep fast. But there are also some really exciting initiatives, especially in the field of “everything is code”, automation of infrastructure, security and Kubernetes extensions and standardizations.

One thing, that IBM always got right in my opinion, is the decades long strategy to lead innovation by open sourcing technologies and creating community governed foundations to govern the open source standards for it, from the Apache Foundation, the Linux Foundation, Node.js Foundation to the more recent Cloud Native Computing Foundations (CNCF), CD Foundation to Open Cybersecurity Alliance (OCA).

The technologies and startups that I am most excited about, and which I recommend to let your long term career choices and direction be guided by all follow the same model and objectives: to build a service organization, to open source their core technology and to aim to be promoted to foundation projects. Just to name a few startups:

  • env0, two rounds of seed funding in 2020 of 6.8M
  • Snyk, added 200M investments in September 2020 and went from Series A to a $2.6BN valuation in 2.5 years
  • Harness, added 60M in series B funding in 2019, acquiring Drone.io in 2020
  • Pulumi, raised $37.5 million in Series B funding
  • Ambassador, formerly known as datawire.io 4M funding in seed funding in 2019

Or some interesting open source projects,

  • Ansible. Ansible is too widely adopted and established to really mention here, but the reason why I include it here, is because it too keeps innovating to adept to the growing complexity of cloud native architectures and still driving and inspiring a lot of the above mentioned startups probably, for instance with Ansible Molecule and Ansible AWX.
  • OpenSCAP, I am personally very interested in the automation of so-called business controls and compliance with regulatory requirements. OpenSCAP is one of the best tools out there, especially with image, container and NIST scanning. But there are also super exciting developments in the field of Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
  • kustomize, if you are used to Helm to configure your Kubernetes deployments, you will find Kustomize fun to play with. There are other tools like Source-to-Image (S2I) for instance that are similar.
  • skopeo, the longer I work on Cloud Native, the more I find myself drawn back to the basics of managing containers, skopeo is a great tool for this.
  • podman, also a bit out of line here, but if you are interested in security and hate to be stuck with only a single tool in the toolbox, Podman is a great alternative to Docker to build your images, and comes out of the SELinux corner with a much better security design.

Separation from the Past

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A step into the presence you could call it, or a separation from the past, but every long-term migrant will experience a similar process. The first step in a migration is the physical move from the old land to the new land. In its trail follows a long, slow shadow that drags out in the foggy dawn of a migrant’s newly rising persona. This long trail is a largely invisible transition which change you recognize best under the light of hindsight. 

Fifteen years after my migration to the new land, the United States, or rather New York City, I can say today, I look backward and see the new dawn around me. I was born into my Dutch heritage like a fish that moves around in the water and my upbringing is the land on which I crawled, but I see that what was my right by birth, Holland, has now become my past. What has settled and rooted so deeply in who I am, has been separated from me, like a ship that disappears past the horizon out of sight. I am afloat, have become my own buoy.

In sight, only the rails of the ship and a horizon all around still are. Above the clouds, below the waves and the play of light and shadow drifting on the water. Today, there is no lifeline back, no road back, no home to return to, any direction is equally random past this point. Of course, one always has direction, and the water itself, spacetime if you will, always holds a steady course for a certain amount of time. There is no clear separation of past and future, the present is a long continuum that shifts slowly, gently, fastly.

Where lies my future now? Heavy wheels were set in motion, a new seed planted, roots intertwined, a wind blows, a stream flows.

Complexity and Economics by NAF-Biz NY (Nov 16, 2017)

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On November 16, prior to the 2017 Peter Stuyvesant Ball, the Netherland-America Foundation (NAF) organized this year a lecture about Complexity and Economics. The lecture, at Baker McKenzie in New York, was a high level overview of complexity principles for public policy by speakers Dr. Roland Kupers, among other associate fellow at the University of Oxford, and via a pre-recorded video by Prof. Lex Hoogduin.

On forehand, I was very excited to attend this talk as I deal with the topic more or less as a developer advocate for IBM either via the IBM Data Science Experience (DSX), Machine Learning and IBM Watson (cognitive computing, having some experience in R programming, data science, machine learning, calculus, and 20+ years of software engineering. The evening was certainly not un-interesting, but I was a little disappointed by the lack of depth of the presentations, and neither of the speakers touched on machine learning, statistics, or mathematics which have my immediate interest. But nevertheless, the two talks touched upon enough topics for further inquiry to make the evening inspiring.

Kupers’ talk relates to his publication entitled ‘Complexity and the art of public policy’ (2016) in collaboration with David Colander. Kupers is a physicist by training with experience in the field of fractals, then switched to economic policy early in his career, being a consultant now, who among other advised the NWO (Dutch organization for scientific research). Continue reading →

Salman Akhtar, Selma Kramer, The Seasons of Life (1997)

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Salman Akhtar, Selma Kramer, The Seasons of Life (1997) 183p

Salman Akhtar (1946-) is a Indian-American psycho-analyst, born into a Muslim family in Khairabad (Uttar Pradesh, India), who was a former pupil of Margaret Mahler (1897-1985). I previously read ‘Immigration and Identity (1999)‘ by Akhtar. In academia, your success often depends greatly on the favor and serendipity of your professor. Akhtar’s chance was to work with world famous child psycho-analyst Margaret Mahler. Mahler is renowned for her pivotal role in the study of normal development of child psychology. Her famous work ‘The psychological birth of the human infant (1975)’ defined the process of separation-individuation in child psychology.

Akhtar’s ‘The Seasons of Life’ is essentially a literature study of articles and works by subsequent psychologists supporting the view that this separation-individuation continues throughout life.
Anni Bergman worked closely with Margaret Mahler and researched the individuation that continues after object constancy throughout life and how this development of the autonomous self impacts later phases of development and later life conflicts and crises.
Calvin Colarusso argues that the lifelong separation-individuation process comes with an inherent threat of object loss in every stage of growing independence, which can be translated into ongoing negotiation and control during the middle years.
Stanley Cath focuses more on the third phase in life, where older individuals balance between ongoing losses and the restitution in anchoraches that hold the self together. Colarusso uses the example of Mr. Holland’s Opus () to demonstrate the conflicts between family loyalties versus career aspirations or aspirations of the self.

Ionic2: if … else … template blocks in Angular2

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Angular2 supported an if-condition via the *ngIf directive.

<div *ngIf="edit == false">
VIEW
</div>
<div *ngIf="edit == true">
EDIT
</div>

Since Angular2 v4, the ngIf directive was extended with an ‘then.. else..’ syntax, in which you can reference the identifier of the HTML tags to include.

<div *ngIf="edit; then editDiv else viewDiv"></div>
<ng-template #editDiv>
EDIT
</ng-template>
<ng-template #viewDiv>
VIEW
</ng-template>

Another way to control HTML input-tags to be editable or disabled, is to use the [attr.disabled] syntax.

<input [attr.disabled]="edit ? null : true">

When using Ionic2, this translates to the following code.

<ion-input [disabled]="!edit"><ion-input>

In the TypeScript component, then in the control the ‘edit’ boolean variable.

I use the [attr.disabled] syntax for instance to display a detail page of an object in view (Read) or edit (Create/Update) form, and adding a Delete option to the view modus to complete a CRUD option. This simplifies my application development, imo, cause now the navigation in my application is mostly from List to Detail pages.

See also: NgIf Else lands in Angular 2.x+/4.0, Ashish Singh (Dec 18, 2016)