⚓ My career

This is all about me. It’s unvarnished navel-gazing. You’ve been warned. It’s a sunny day after rain and I walked to a coffeeshop in flip-flops and a four-day fuzz, and I’m in a certain kind of mood.

I was doing taxes and got to thinking. Here’s what I’ve made money at since a year ago:

• System administration
• Web and database development
• Web design
• Essay writing
• Editing and copy editing
• Child care (toddler to preteen)
• Event photography
• Art photography
• Reselling a rare book I happened to notice underpriced

I may be forgetting something. And of course here and there I’ve picked up some barter and free dinners for small things like math tutoring and personal computer repair. I’ve also put time into things that are kind of like work but don’t pay: some GIS (mapping) projects for my own amusement, a pre-launch web startup with friends, a fiction project, a photoblog (spottily), an as-yet unlaunched geography blog, and a probably DOA podcast. I have a parody Twitter account, which led in a strange way to a guest post – about being a manny – on a mommyblog. I did a bunch of reading on text compression and implemented a toy version of bzip. And a couple other things too fragile to talk about yet. And I carry on a fair amount of correspondence. I spend a lot of time in the Library of Congress photo archives, and have something like a hundred placemarks on interesting things in Google Earth. I try to bring whatever I can to my time with my friends. We’re not even getting into stuff more than a year old, remember. Today my non-work time so far has been spent writing this and working on a geolocated tweet analysis project:

The last things I put on this blog were shoreline photos, reviews of articles on conflict studies and anthropogenic climate change, a explanation of how to generate colors of relatively uniform brightness, a tiny reading of Cosmos as an Anglo-Saxon epic, and a story about a toddler being cute.

My most viewed Flickr image for the last month, by a factor of 30, is an abstract pattern created by integer overflow while rendering a gravity field. The next highest is the Columbia River drainage basin. My highest-voted Reddit comment for the last month, by a factor of 10, is a 1500-word attempted explanation of why Kony 2012 offended many people, how certain kinds of racism operate in the world today, and where to begin to approach the complexities of contemporary Central African politics. The next highest is a clarification of what’s wrong with acting as if we’re post-gender.

Late yesterday night I was kidsitting. All three of them were heaped in bed. The last one awake and I were telling stories about our friend Flying Shoes Bob – mainly the time he went to Angel Falls, freaked out the people at the visitor center by falling upwards, roller-skated on the jungle canopy, moved some fierce panthers to where their population was depleted, and caught piranhas by noodling them as he hung upside-down over the river from his flying shoes. In the course of telling each other about Bob, we covered a lot of physics, geography, biology, and the rules of the road (because Bob liked to hook his shoes under the dash and fly his blue van right over traffic).

The mom came home and overheard. She was magnanimous after a rock show and I think happy to hear her kid storytelling with such commitment. Maybe she’d also seen the drawings we’d been doing downstairs. You’re so creative, she told him, you’ll turn out like Charlie! The kid blinked woozily and asked, Charlie, what do you do? The mom scrunched her brows. Yeah, what do you do? And I stuttered and said I do stuff with computers. And then I knew I’d be writing this.

It must be kind of amusing from the outside, but it’s worrying to live inside. The haphazardness that’s cute to you is scary to me. I think I’m spread too thin. I don’t do all these things because I’m Göthe and I’m good at all of them, you know. There’s nothing these days that I’m doing better than everyone else. Nor am I quickly getting better at anything. That’s a tough feeling.

I think about this when I get attention. Take Twitter. (Please.) A few months ago I gave a talk about how I visualize my GPS fixes and picked up some new Twitter followers. A couple weeks ago, that elbowy gripe about Facebook etc. got passed around by some writers I admire, and I got some more. And but so sometimes I’m reluctant to babble too much about whatever I’m into at the moment, because I don’t want to bore the socks off programmer friends when I’m talking about environmental stewardship, or writer friends when I’m debugging graphics code, or mesh networking friends when I’m thinking about Sam Abell’s photography.

Again, let’s be clear: I’m confessing, not bragging. More is not better. I’m not an amazing polymath. As the list of cool things I’ve tinkered with gets longer and longer without hitting anything that’s actually been useful to anyone, it doesn’t get cooler, it gets sadder. I don’t want to be entertaining (or, worse, inspiring – shoot me); I want to have some kind of coherent internal life that’s reflected in some kind of coherent external life. It worries me that if I didn’t have a lot of the exceptional advantages that I do, I’d probably be in big trouble by now. And however much it seems like taking the king’s shilling, there’s this sense that I should have a career – a central project of projects, something to invest in and build stability around. I have money for a lot of relatively nice things today, but it would be better to have health insurance and a reasonable expectation of supporting a family someday.

I don’t have a clear answer. I don’t think my strategy of no strategy can work for someone who isn’t in their twenties and as privileged as I am at the moment. I don’t think it would be a good idea to overcompensate for this diffusion by trying to, like, find the highest-paying field I can work in, get a master’s degree in that, and do it single-mindedly. I would have a disastrous midlife crisis.

Probably my effort here is best spent giving more respect to people who pay attention to me. I get frustrated when I think people are narrowing themselves when they don’t have to, but then I do it too. I should not worry about scaring Twitter followers. (Twitter is mostly a metaphor here.) I should trust their tastes or ignore them.

Two essays I’ve enjoyed very much lately are Erin Kissane’s Incept Dates and Craig Mod’s The Digital–Physical. One thing I like about both is a superfluidity of reference, a noetic Rollin film. Kissane is not shy to talk about Blade Runner and her personal life. Mod is willing to drop Lish and Carver. If I hated these pieces, I would say they were full of bathos, self-seriousness, and chaos. And I would be right. And I would be missing the point that these qualities are what make two quite different essays both brilliant to me, because even when I resist their points, they push me along axes that I did not know to look for. This would not happen if they told me what I already knew of.

What they say matters to me because they have become vulnerable by putting things in their own terms and risking overreach.

There’s a famous tweet by _why:

when you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.

It irritates me. I don’t like the idea that tastes only narrow. I think tastes can be wonderful: they can be ways of getting to the edge of what you know. Tastes order your perceptions in ways that you can swim with or against, and so they make you pay attention to the world. And they tell you when you’re making something good. And then I realize that I’ve come around to arguing _why’s side in different words. The tweet unsettles me because it’s a kind of true that I have to work for.

I thought of that when I read Teju Cole responding to nitpicking:

An essay isn’t a tally of correct points. It is a way of placing new bits of language, and thus new thoughts, into the minds of others. I read the piece and I seem to have some good points. But I wouldn’t say I agree with me 100%.

I’m reading stuff like this to convince myself to relax. Somehow, and I don’t know how, it’s connected with learning to concentrate better – as opposed to more.

I participate in certain subcultures where a lot of weight is put on being smart and getting smarter. But it seems to me that for an awful lot of people trying to do good things, IQ is not a limiting factor. If you are smart but ignorant or smart but lack empathy, you are only better at coming up with justifications for the ways in which you are wrong. I know people who can argue loops around me in defense of something that plainly is not the case, and I do not wish I were them.

I’m more likely to admire someone for having one life: for being the same person when they’re being smart as they are when they’re being nice. And when I’m envious, it’s because they are the same person when they’re making money as when they’re playing. Probably a different side of the same person, of course, respecting context and conforming to different norms as appropriate – but still the same, the way a multilingual person is one person. Not every register is used in every situation, but every register is available. Ethical faculties, knowledge of Australian politics, ability to ride a bike, dirty jokes, memories of childhood, vegetarian recipes, political identity – they can be left in the bag, but not denied.

You’re responsible for what happens because of you. What mostly matters is what you mostly do. Your hopes and fears are not important by themselves. I want to be a good person not by putting my hope in the idea of a perfect vocation but by making everyday things better than they have to be. I don’t know how to handle this.

⚓ Washington shoreline photos

The Washington State Department of Ecology Coastal Atlas has photos of most of Washington’s coast. These are really useful if you’re tracking things like development, erosion, or kelp growth. But it’s also a lot of fun for casual browsing. I recommend the images from the 70s, which are huge (click view larger). Here are a few that I’ve shrunk and color-balanced a little to account for haze and film degradation, linked to the originals:

The port of Tacoma.

My family lived in the large farmhouse in the field on the beach at the right edge in about 1989–93.

See the yellow patches? Those are stands of scotch broom (Cytisus scoparius), an invasive shrub. Mom and Dad had a small garlic field to the upper left of the patch on the left. I spent a lot of time (as perceived by a small child) on that beach.

Some are most interesting to me just for their esthetics. This is a patch of beach near Seaview.

The dendritic estuary at the mouth of the Skagit near Stanwood.

⚓ Three serious things

I’ve just seen three outstanding articles on serious subjects, all reasonably clear to the lay reader, and in celebration of this coincidence I now enumerate and commend them to you:

1. The Body Counter, a profile of Patrick Ball by Tina Rosenberg. Ball is one of a few people doing real statistical analysis of mass violence. People often treat this as gross – maybe by association with the disgusting things it diagnoses, or maybe because it seems to deny suffering by quantifying it. That is magical thinking, and the ignorance it enables in turn enables a lot of harm.

   Rosenberg shows that Ball’s work, besides its humanitarian virtues, is applied epistemology. Even if you only care about about truth in a relatively abstract way, he finds interesting ways to approach it. And if you like not just truth but also the reconciliation, justice, and peace that it can bring, the story is that much more compelling. It’s like Snow’s cholera pump map.

2. Dangerous tales, a paper by Séverine Autesserre in African Affairs. (Full text not there but easily found.) Autesserre made a big splash in Central African studies a year and a half ago with The trouble with the Congo, a book-length argument that interveners after the Second Congo War (e.g. the UN) missed many important chances by ignoring local conflicts. This paper is a slice or microcosm of that project.

   Autesserre says that outsiders of the Democratic Republic of Congo have come to think that the long-term crisis there (1) is caused by mineral exploitation, (2) has rape as its main symptom, and (3) will be solved by more central government power. Each of these suppositions is reasonable but badly incomplete, and together they tell a pat story that satisfies what should remain an active curiosity. Donors and policy-makers at a distance learn to ignore information that doesn’t fit the 1-2-3 narrative, and so with the best of intentions have taken actions that pretty clearly caused unnecessary suffering.

   Autesserre’s prose is unpleasantly French and academic, but everything else about her work is wonderful to me. This paper is (as far as I can say) a respectful and intellectually vigorous response to a particular situation. But you can also read it as a summa for a sane postmodern worldview. Like Ball, Autesserre isn’t just finding facts, she’s showing us how truth does and should operate in the world. She is looking at the problems of arbitrating village-level land disputes, yes. But she is also looking for ways to tell ourselves stories about the world that improve rather than narrow our contact with the real thing.

3. Greenhouse gases, climate change and the transition from coal to low-carbon electricity, a paper by unethical plutocrat Nathan Myhrvold and climate scientist Ken Caldeira in Environmental Research Letters. What are the net consequences of shutting down a coal power plant and building a wind farm? No one knows exactly. This paper, though, presents the best estimates yet. It’s strange how any uncertainly about how bad things are, even when the error bar is entirely in the we must to act now range, seems to let people temporize. I hope this kind of analysis, which is still fuzzy in absolute terms, will help us focus a little. The conclusion is not surprising, but has more force here than ever:

   It appears that there is no quick fix; energy system transitions are intrinsically slow. […] Despite the lengthy time lags involved, delaying rollouts of low-carbon-emission energy technologies risks even greater environmental harm in the second half of this century and beyond. […] Achieving substantial reductions in temperatures relative to the coal-based system will take the better part of a century, and will depend on rapid and massive deployment of some mix of conservation, wind, solar, and nuclear, and possibly carbon capture and storage.

We knew this, but now we know it with clearer charts and better-documented methods.

These must seem a bit dark – an article on climate collapse and two on war. The point is that they give us new tools. We already know one thing about these awful subjects: with the situation that we have now, in the universe where ordinary people in the rich world don’t read about these problems and try to refine our understanding, a lot of killing and greenhousing happens. That’s our only datum so far. We should experiment with a different strategy: one where those of us who have the resources spend a bit of them on getting just as far as understanding the nature of some hard problems.

⚓ On rainbows

(Halfway through writing this I double-checked that the techniques it shows were actually new – and, trying different search terms, found that Jim Bumgardner, a Processing expert, had already explained them perfectly well. With his encouragement I’m publishing this anyway.)

Here are two techniques for picking useful colors for data visualization: a rainbow function and a generator of distinct colors.

A rainbow function

Let’s say we want to turn a one-dimensional value into a color: something like rainbow(n mod 1) → 8 bits × RGB. This is useful to show information on a circular scale, for example time of day, longitude, or angle, and can be lightly abused for many other purposes. (Keep in mind, of course, that about 1 in 25 people is colorblind.) The usual solution is to use n as the hue of an HSV color with S and V both at the maximum. In python 3, that might look like this, cribbing from Wikipedia:

def HSV_vivid(h):
  h %= 1
  h *= 6
  c = 1
  x = 1 - abs((h % 2) - 1)
  rgb = ()
  if   h < 1: rgb = (c, x, 0)
  elif h < 2: rgb = (x, c, 0)
  elif h < 3: rgb = (0, c, x)
  elif h < 4: rgb = (0, x, c)
  elif h < 5: rgb = (x, 0, c)
  else:       rgb = (c, 0, x)
  return (int(chan*255) for chan in rgb)

Which we can visualize thus:

The white line in the graph is the sum of R, G, and B, at the same scale. Assuming that you perceive each channel as equally and linearly bright,✼ you’ll see different points on this color wheel as having brightness varying by a factor of 2 between (a) the troughs at the three angles where one channel is at max and two are off and (b) the peaks at the angles bisecting those. This is why most digital color wheels have spokes.

✼ Which you don’t: greens and yellows are easier to distinguish than blues, which compounds the problem. On a typical monitor, the point at 60° is often hard to distinguish against white, while the deepest blue at 240° seems almost as dark as charcoal gray. So we can’t use HSV like this when we want the colored elements to have equal visual weight against any solid background.

To make something better, notice that the HSV function is based on a single sharp, mesa-shaped curve. It’s repeated, evenly offset and wrapped around the color wheel (in other words, modulo’d by one rotation), for each channel. We could use a replacement for the mesa curve such that evenly offset-and-wrapped copies sum to a constant. When I wondered aloud about this, Sam immediately pointed to sin². It looks like this:

def sinebow(h):
  h += 1/2
  h *= -1
  r = sin(pi * h)
  g = sin(pi * (h + 1/3))
  b = sin(pi * (h + 2/3))
  return (int(255*chan**2) for chan in (r, g, b))

The first two lines are just setup to start the 0..1 cycle on red and run in ROYGBIV order clockwise, and π appears because the sine function works on radians. (If you’re into micro-optimization, you can see ways to refactor for constant folding and FMA here, but let’s keep it readable.) Here’s classic HSV again, plus a sin² version:

Depending on your eyes and monitor, the difference could be large or small, but it should be clear that the sine-based one is smoother. Its colors are relatively muted, but only relatively, and they look consistent. Compare 0° with 180° in each wheel, for example. To me, the HSV’s looks like rich, candy apple red v. pale, robin’s egg blue, while the sinebow’s is a much more balanced contrast of medium red v. medium turquoise. We lose the sharp, daffodil yellow at 60° and the deep, inky blue at 240° – but that’s exactly what we set out to do: they may be fine colors, but they aren’t team players. The sinebow gives us a set of colors that really do seem to vary only in hue and not in saturation or value.

Case closed, as far as I’m concerned. I’d replace HSV with the sinebow pretty indiscriminately.

Incidentally, the sinebow in its most natural form has no branches. This makes it suitable for GPGPU, while a textbook implementation of the classic HSV function has to run each of the 6 cases serially.

Color sequences

Suppose we want a sequence of m distinct colors, for example to distinguish the layers of a map, the handles of people in a chat room, or objects in a game. To give them equal perceptual weight, we can take them from the sinebow’s color wheel. We start at 0 and move 1/m of the way around to generate the next color. This is simple, fast, and effective. But there are two things we might want that it can’t give us: (1) even where m is large, each color in the sequence should be easily distinguished from its dozen or so sequence neighbors, and (2) we should have a way to deal with situations where we don’t know m when we set up the generator, for example in a chat room that an arbitrary number of people can join.

Here’s a scarecrow: use random numbers. This actually works fairly well in practice, and it’s certainly simple. But it’s irritating to know that nothing but the odds are protecting us from, like, five successive indistinguishable colors.

We could use some kind of interleaving scheme involving bit-shifting, angle bisection, or prime numbers, but if you pursue this even briefly (as I did), you’ll find yourself dealing with an awful lot of computational complexity or saved state just to pick colors. It would be nice to have an algorithm that’s firmly O(1) in time and space.

We could get fancier with randomness and place a point uniformly somewhere in the half of the wheel across from the last point. This is better, but it doesn’t protect us from runs of alternate identical colors. And if we go further on the path of narrowing the window(s) in which we place points randomly, we’re only working toward placing them deterministically, which we can’t do without repetition.

Actually, no. What we can’t do without repetition is use a rational ratio as an angle. But there is certain ratio✼ which, when used as a stride around a circle, minimizes total point nearness as the point count increases. It’s the same constant that many plants approximate for the analogous problem of phyllotaxis, or placing leaves around a stalk so they don’t block lower leaves’ sun and dew: φ, the golden ratio. As an angle, it’s about 137.507°. There are a lot of boring, pareidolic claims about φ having special esthetic properties and such, but all you need to believe here is that it’s the most irrational number. Therefore a sequence of colors that are φ apart is as far from repeating as possible in the long run.

(✼ You might know the punk/funk band A Certain Ratio from various songs like Life’s a Scream and Anthem. Their name is taken from Brian Eno’s The True Wheel, possibly the least accessible track of Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), an album named after «智取威虎山», one of the eight model plays approved for performance during the Cultural Revolution. Here’s the most famous film version. In America, the best known of the eight is probably the ballet The Red Detachment of Women, because it was performed for Nixon on his famous visit. This is fictionalized in Nixon in China: in a scene where a woman is whipped, Pat Nixon (represented as a kind of friendly moron), apparently forgetting that it’s fiction, objects and steps onstage. Jiāng Qīng (a kind of needy monster) is provoked by this and sings the famously disturbing aria I Am the Wife of Mao Tse-tung, using the actors as props to praise Máo and prefigure her betrayal, in the Gang of Four, of Zhōu Ēnlái in the second half of the Cultural Revolution – in some versions coldly, in others shrilly – and it all gets very hammy and subtle. For me, it’s the creepiest part of a creepy opera, and it carries a lot of the larger interpretation. In any case, I think Eno claimed the lyrics of The True Wheel came to him in a dream or something, but out and about on the internet one certainly sees people assuming the phrase a certain ratio has numerological significance.)

Here’s an animation that helped me visualize this:

And a good answer to someone’s questions on seeing this.

You can write the code as a very small class or generator. All you have to do is keep adding φ ≈ 1.61803 revolutions (≈ 2.39996 radians ≈ 137.50776°) to your last number. Or, of course:

def nthcolor(n):
  phi = (1+5**0.5)/2
  return sinebow(n * phi)

Let’s see what this looks like compared to some other strides:

1/5

π

random

φ

QED.

⚓ Carl Sagan as the hero on the beach

In the last century, the concept of the oral tradition came into mainstream Western academia. Philologists – halfway between modern scholars of linguistics and literature – had wondered in their Victorian way whether Homer was real, and when they looked at living myths of comparable complexity they found that they had no single authors but were reinvented a little in every telling. This helped explain a strange feature of the Homeric poems: the poetically void repetition of epithets, the adjectives interchangeably attached to often-mentioned things, say godlike Achilles and lion-hearted Achilles. These suddenly made sense when seen as ways for a poet, thinking while speaking, to push and pull within the hexameter and make room for more spontaneous phrasings in the rest of the line.

In 1960, D. K. Crowne published The Hero on the Beach: An Example of Composition by Theme in Anglo-Saxon Poetry, saying that there was a larger and more abstract kind of formula, a kind of thematic epithet, and used as the type specimen a situation in Beowulf and elsewhere: the warrior-hero (or equivalent) standing on a beach (or equivalent) in the presence of his companions (or equivalent) and a notable light or brightness (often flashing or sparkling).

There was a wave of enthusiasm for this idea, and many scholars identified it and other repeated situational themes in the Anglo-Saxon and other oral traditions. Then there was a trough, and in 1987, John Richardson published The Critic on the Beach, which argued that the spotting criteria of the hero on the beach had so much wiggle room that it was basically unfalsifiable, and all it really said was that main characters go through transitions near other characters and vividly described things. This is hardly news – in almost any interesting story, oral and Anglo-Saxon or not, there’s something that can be taken this way.

I don’t know. The theme of the hero on the beach could be real or imaginary. But I do know that Carl Sagan at the beginning of Cosmos stands on a beach surrounded by nature and life and hope while the sunlight sparkles on the water.

⚓ The time we met a train-track builder

Yesterday the niece and I took the tram eastbound. We admired the view of the water city, as she calls it (look, it have biiig river ’n’ lots of bridges for cars, see?) and the construction work on the various South Waterfront projects. On the way back to downtown, we found ourselves walking next to someone in PPE.

Niece (suspiciously): Heeey, that’s a builder!

Stranger: That’s right, sweetie!

Niece: You build-a-ing you the all the things? ’N’ dig the hools [holes]?

Stranger (pointing at the streetcar rails): Well, I mainly laid this track.

Niece (looking like she’s not sure whether she just met Santa Claus): What?

Me: She made the train tracks. She put the tracks together in the ground.

Niece (delighted): Wow!

Stranger (delighted): Yep!

Me: Should we say thanks to her for making the train tracks so the train can go?

Niece: Thank you! Wow! You did it! Good job!

⚓ The time the BBC cited me to myself

I have a lot of respect for the BBC. They dig deeper, even in routine stories, than most of their competitors. For example, my last post here was a transcript of an interview with an important man whom I did not find interviewed elsewhere. The closest was two days earlier in an AP story:

Back during the country’s civil war, the FN rebels also received help from a Liberian faction — this one allied with Taylor. One ex-Liberian combatant from Taylor’s disbanded army told The Associated Press he was now serving as a “field commander” in Ivory Coast for Ouattara’s forces.

“What we are doing here is no secret,” said the man, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. “They all want to see Gbagbo give out power to the man elected.”

I suspect this is Blagbe(?), and it speaks well of the BBC by comparison that they got him to chat and presented more than a few words of it to their listeners.

Anyway, as I said in the post, I was very unsure of my transcription. I couldn’t pin down the name of the man being interviewed nor many of the towns he mentioned. That was embarrassing. So I went to the BBC’s podcast contact subsite and waded through about a dozen warnings that they don’t generally provide transcripts. While I understand that they aren’t in the transcript business, a lot of their programs are reading-based, and for many people (e.g., people with difficulty hearing) a script clearly marked as non-authoritative would go a long way. In any case, I hoped either that someone would have the time to fill me in on the names or that Blagbe(?)’s speech would have a surviving transcript because it was voice-overed, so I used their slightly poorly designed contact form to ask.

Today I got this e-mail from bbc_podcast_website@bbc.co.uk, in which I have redacted a few identifying details:

Dear Mr Loyd

Reference [reference number]

Thank you for contacting the BBC iPlayer support team.

I understand you want a transcript for the podcast of ‘Africa Today’ broadcast on 09 March featuring interview with J.Pelele as you would like the spellings of proper nouns which were mentioned on the show.

Please note that transcripts are expensive to produce and are not automatically made as part of the programme making process. However, I can assure that your suggestion has been forwarded to those responsible for maintain the service.

You can find text of the interview at the below link and hope it provides the information you are looking for:

http://basecase.org/env/battle-commander

This link will take you to a website outside bbc.co.uk. The BBC is not responsible for content or software downloaded from external sites.

Once again thank you for contacting BBC iPlayer.

Kind Regards

[name]

There you have it. My guess-filled transcript is apparently the BBC’s own best source for what they broadcast three months ago.

(On later re-reading, this comes across a trifle braggy. But I have nothing to brag about here; I got nothing right. The respectfully frustrated point is that the BBC acted like it couldn’t do any better. Thank you for listening, and keep those letters coming.)

⚓ A BBC interview with a Liberian “battle commander” in Côte d’Ivoire

I’ve been advised not to write about the incipient civil war in Côte d’Ivoire (on account of it’s depressing and such) and I’m short on time, but here is a transcript of part of today (9 March)’s Africa Today podcast (2:11–5:35). You might want to follow along on Google Earth and Wikipedia.

(Proper names marked “(?)” are ones I could not verify quickly on the web and have left as best guesses. I would be grateful for corrections, especially of the name of the man interviewed here; I searched the web and Google Books for every spelling I could imagine and found nothing. Young is a reasonably popular first name; gbàgbé is a common Yoruba word for forget, but the news reader distinctly uses the L sound, so I’ve gone with Blagbe even though Google very much doubts it. In any case I assume from context that it’s a disposable nom du guerre.)

(If you work at a news organization and already have a transcript of something you broadcast in audio, for example because you needed to read over bad sound, please put it on your web site. Thank you.)

News reader: […] a former Liberian fighter and commander, Young Blagbe(?), phoned our Monrovia correspondent, Jonathan Pelele, to say he was actually commanding troops, including Liberians, to fight in support of Mr Ouattara. Jonathan put it to him that Alassane Ouattara may not be happy to see him fighting in Ivory Coast despite his claim to the presidency.

Blagbe (voiceovered; his audio in the background seems to be at least mostly English, but over a very noisy line): I don’t think he will not be happy, because he is the leader that won, and if someone wants to go against him directly, we should help put the situation under control.

Pelele: How many towns are your people occupying now?

Blagbe: The major towns in the highway we fought in heavily include Begwe(?), Tiaple(?), Zoguine (or possibly Zouan-Hounien, or Zagne), and from there we fought in Kouepleu(?) and then captured Toulépleu. Toulépleu is now under Ouattara’s men – men of the renowned government that is standing. Some of the people we defeated crossed into Liberia. I captured fifty heavy weapons and seventy-five light weapons, with one hundred and fifty boxes of AK-47 rounds from them.

Pelele: What do you intend to do with the ammunition that you captured?

Blagbe: I will report them to my commander. I even have two captured trucks with seven jeeps that I will turn over.

Pelele: You and the New Forces – rebels – are working together? Are you all working together?

Blagbe: Exactly. But I don’t call ourselves rebels, because Ouattara we’re fighting for is the president of this state, Ivory Coast, for now.

Pelele: Right … but do you people hear from Mr Ouattara himself?

Blagbe: I am taking direct orders from my commander, a captain.

Pelele: How many Liberian fighters can you account for on your side?

Blagbe: Roughly – I can’t tell, because I am the field commander here. I am controlling too [sounds more like so in the original] many people. But I have some people from there who volunteer to come here to fight. My bodyguards alone are seventy-five. I’m not talking about the fighters.

Pelele: Do your people know the terrain, really, the terrain in which you are fighting – do you know the area?

Blagbe: Sometimes the Ivoirians lead us into other places that we don’t know.

Pelele: Have you lost any of your troops in combat?

Blagbe: Since I started fighting I have lost only one man in a fight, from Tiaple to Toulépleu. [Zoguine audible in original, probably not in place of Toulépleu.]

Pelele: What is happening to civilians in the area where you are fighting?

Blagbe: Some fled, and as we get them we bring them back home. The only place they are waiting to be captured for them to return to is Toulépleu, and the town has been captured. And I give you two days from now I will be in Goleken(?). From there I will be heading for Abidjan. I want to see the living body of Gbagbo.

Pelele: The concern that people have back home in Liberia is that the war in Ivory Coast should be left to Ivoirians to fight. Why are you people there?

Blagbe: Myself, I have a background in Ivory Coast, from a town called Bampleu on the border. And during Charles Taylor’s days, we were paid to join Charles Taylor and go and fight in Liberia. I was a chief of staff and a lieutenant colonel during the regieme of Charles Taylor. But later I was downsized – belittled – and I had no job. So with this thing happening here, I have to fight for my country, just the same way I fought for Liberia.

This worries me ten to twenty times more than Libya does.

Update on 30 May: I’m tremendously relieved that this didn’t turn into a full civil war. However, as an example of what was happening, here’s a Human Rights Watch report dated the same day as this interview called Côte d’Ivoire: Ouattara Forces Kill, Rape Civilians During Offensive. To my embarrassment, I haven’t got much further on the proper names.