I read an article a few days ago about the discovery of codes in Plato’s writing. For those not up on their Greek History, Socrates was executed (forced to drink poison Hemlock) for heresy, so it makes sense that Plato, his student, felt the need to disguise ideas that could upset the State. The codes, which were just recently cracked, contained knowledge centuries ahead of his time. Plato’s idea that nature was ruled by the laws of Math rather than the laws of Gods, for example, didn’t gain popularity until Newton’s work 2000 years later.

Think of the advancement we’ve made as a civilization in the last 100 years. In 1910, many homes didn’t have telephones (or indoor bathrooms,) the automobile assembly line had just been invented, and public television was a distant dream. Now, even 10 year olds have cell phones with Internet connectivity and you can cross the world in an airplane in about 12 hours for a week’s salary. Try to imagine what it would be like right now if Plato could have publicly discussed his ideas - if our society could have advanced by another 2000 years by now.

Plato was no where near the first or the last to be censored for ideas that have the potential to advance humanity. When his ideas were finally re-discovered in Newton’s time, we were no more evolved in our acceptance of ideas. Newton’s contemporary, Galelio was forced by the Catholic Church to “admit” he didn’t “really believe” in the idea that the Earth revolved around the Sun. We’re still not nearly cured of this disease today. Less than 10 years ago, the Taliban destroyed ancient Buddhist Statues in Afghanistan with artillery, showing we’re still not good at being open to ideas that conflict with how we see the world.

What this comes down to is pure ego. The ruling class of any society seems to have a huge emotional need to squish out any doubt about how they present the laws of existence - a need to be right about how the universe works. People who take such action in the name of religious beliefs are guiltier of an even bigger ego. You have to be pretty big-headed to presume you have a complete understanding of the inner workings about how your god created the world - that you understand all the mechanisms of your god’s creation.

If not for the ego of ruling classes, we’d have been led into the Scientific Revolution 2000 years sooner by Socrates and Plato. Maybe that would have freed up Newton and Galileo to invent space travel or renewable energy sources. From this angle, we have to admit that ego looks like a very destructive force, powerful enough to retard the progress of the whole human race by several thousands of years. Perhaps this is the root of why many moral codes preach humility as a virtue. Perhaps a little humility can produce a lot of progress.

I was slow to catch on and missed out on Grand Central, but I managed to get an invite to Google Voice fairly early. The two great things you get with Google Voice is a free phone number and Google style Voicemail. If you’ve never seen it, you don’t know what you’re missing. Your voicemails are listed in a format almost like emails, with the full might of Google put to work to transcribe your voicemails into text. The transcription is almost never perfect, but it’s quite often good enough for you to know what the message is. If not, you at least know who it’s from, and listen to it is as easy as clicking play.

Being a geek, the first thing I wanted to do with with a free phone number is forward it to a SIP url. You’d think Google would love to dump your call off to some url rather than send it to a PSTN number, since that would be pretty much free for an Internet giant like them, but there’s not option for that inside of the Google Voice settings. The only option they offer is to forward your calls to a Gizmo5 number, a SIP service that had close ties to Grand Central before Google bought them. This time I was ahead of the curve, and signed up for a Gizmo5 account a few weeks before Google bought them and closed registration.

There are lots of guides around to forward your Google Voice number to SIP for those that don’t have a Gizmo5 account, but they typically involve signing up for services like IPKall to get another free phone number. I can’t find out any information about who owns IPKall or why they are willing to give out free numbers, and that makes me nervous. Besides, I already have a free phone number from Google Voice, and I’d like to use it directly. So, I went about figuring out for myself how to use Gizmo5.

Now, the goal of this whole endevor was to forward my Google Voice number to my Andorid G1 phone through SIP. “Should be easy,” I thought, “this is the future of telepony, and surely Google is already there.” Turns out… not so much. So, the premeir SIP client for Android is Sipdroid. I was able to easily configure Sipdroid to register with Gizmo5 and receive calls placed to my Google Voice phone number. The only problem was that it sounded terrible over 3g, which sorta ruined the whole point for me at the time. The developers of Sipdroid recommend you use it with pbxes.org. Pbxes supports a few features that give you better call quality over 3g and less battery drain. I tried to configure pbxes for my phone, but their web-based configuration is famously confusing and the examples in their documentation don’t have enough detail to be of much help. I floundered around a bit and then gave up for a few months.

Last week, I decided to give it another shot. This time, I was eventually able to get pbxes configured after some trial and error. I finally got it setup so that I could dial my pbxes extension from another SIP phone and it would ring through to my Android phone. “Game over!” I thought. All that’s left to do is to forward my Gizmo5 account to pbxes. Actually, the fun was just beginning. After I got forwarding setup, all my test calls went to voicemail.

To try to see what was going on, I set up an Asterisk sever and forwarded my Gizmo5 account to Asterisk. I register another client to the Asterisk box and sent all calls from Gizmo5 to the client. That worked fine, so I knew Gizmo5 was fowarding the calls correctly. Next, I directed calls coming from Gizmo5 to my pbxes extension. Again, I got voicemail. Taking a look at my sip logs, I could see the call come in from Gizmo5 and get sent out to Pbxes, but Pbxes responded with 487 - Busy Here. Hmmmmm - the plot thickens.

My next troubleshooting step was to register for one of those suspicious IPKall numbers. I figure it can’t hurt too much as long as I don’t use it much. I set up the IPKall number to go to my Asterisk box, and from my Asterisk box to my pbxes extension. I called my IPKall number and it worked - my Android phone rang and I established 2-way audio. I Googled around for a reason why calls from Gizmo5 to pbxes might be failing, and all I found was that pbxes had blocked Gizmo5 some time back for supposedly not including the correct copyright notice on the open source software that pbxes had written and Gizmo5 used. It seemed to be a misunderstanding that got cleared up, and the block had been lifted, yet calls from Gizmo5 to Pbxes continuously failed for me with a 487 response code even when every other combination worked perfectly.

Fine then, if this is how the game is going to be played, I’ve got some tricks of my own. Fortunately, Asterisk isn’t just a SIP Server, it’s a complete telephony solution, and one of its features is conference rooms. I configured it so that when a call comes in from Gizmo5, the dialplan kicks off a macro. The macro calls my pbxes extension, and when I answer, it dumps that call leg into a conference room. The macro exits back to the dialplan which dumps the Gizmo5 call into the same conference room. Eureka! Test calls ring through and 2-way audio establishes immediately.

I’m not sure why pbxes is behaving like this. It’s unfortunate that their odd behavior and shotty documentation make their service difficult to use, and I won’t be signing up for their paid plans (to enable HD voice and other features.) Fortunately, Asterisk put enough tricks in my bag to work around it. I considered not using pbxes at all, but they do have the killer features of better audio over a 3g connection and less battery drain on standby, which made it worth the chase.

The percieved strength of the economy has weakened in investors eyes. Stocks have started to trend down, with many market observers (including some I respect) viewing last week’s break in the neck line of the head and shoulders pattern showing on all the major indexes as a sign that stocks are headed down in the medium term. The target given by the head and shoulders formation is about 850 on the S&P500, which would be another 20% down from here. This technical confirmation arrives at the same time several of the leading fundamental economic indicators such as the Baltic Dry Index, Residential Building Initial Starts, and Hours Worked per Week have turned down for the first time since 2008.

While gold’s main use is as ancient money, with only a small amount going to jewelry use, silver is seen as an industrial metal. It is used in a lot of electronics manufacturing, so a weakened economy might decrease demand for silver. While silver was outperforming gold during the recent rally from February to early May, the gold / silver ratio has been roughly flat since the stock market turned down in May.

Since it seems reasonable based on both technical indicators and the leading fundamental indicators of the economy that the stock market will see weakness for the next several weeks, we can also expect silver to continue to under-perform gold. While I still think silver is a great investment, I’ll be moving some of my most aggressive investments away from silver and towards gold as this begins to play out.

It occurred to me tonight that the recession we’re in was caused entirely by inflation. And it could easily turn into a depression.

See, in 2001, Greenspan dropped the Fed rate to 1% to try to paper over the fall-out from the tech bubble crash. When he did that, our currency began to loose value, also called inflation. We know this because Gold began rising in value off 30 year lows and continues in an upward trend today. The falsely-low interest rates created by inflation caused a credit bubble, which eventually manifested itself as a bubble in the Real Estate market. Eventually, the credit bubble ran out and the inflation drove commodity prices up too far, so consumers had to slow their consumption (gasoline was the most-discussed example at the time.) This consumer slow-down is typical recession-type ebb and flow, but it caused the bursting of the real estate bubble.

Now, in an effort to mop of after this crisis, interest rates are lower than they’ve ever been and gold is moving to all-time highs. At the same time, state and local governments are facing massive deficits because they all boosted spending massively during the bubble and haven’t been able to cope with the recession.

Here’s where the IMF comes in. They are the supposed world economic experts. Their typical advice to any government facing economic weakness or government deficits is to raise taxes and cut spending. The problem is that both promote recession, especially raising taxes. Countries that follow the IMF’s advice tend to fall into a self-destructive cycle where taxes and spending cuts cause a recession, which causes tax revenue to go down and deficits to increase. To fix the deficits, they raise taxes and cut spending, and the recessionary cycle repeats down into a depression.

The IMF has a terrible record of doing this to countries. We followed the same logic ourselves in the 1930’s and The Great Depression was the result. Greece is working hard right now to play out this IMF death spiral. Several other countries in Europe are getting on the same train. It seems like I hear a lot of talk from our politicians eying that path for the US as well.

Even if we do avoid an IMF death-spiral, interest rates are still at historic lows and gold is climbing faster than ever. How long until the next bubble bursts? And what damage will that one do?

Seems like the ride could get a little bumpier from where we’re at before it gets better.