Monday, December 29, 2003

 
I should be so Loki

Between the Ears - Silent Key
'The cards I left with were QSL cards. The functional message-carriers, the hard-copy proof of the urge to communicate. The need to log, record, jott things down.'

Epicurus's Hooked Atoms: Poincaré's extended Metaphor
"Poincaré describes habitual thinking as anchored in an inertial frame represented by the spatial metaphor of walls to which thoughts are hooked. He describes liberated thought as the product of entropic processes capable of spontaneous re-orderings once those thoughts are unhooked. Its hard to believe that he would stoop to such a conceit, but clearly, he characterizes the substance of thought in terms of the physics of reversible and irreversible systems. Clearly, Poincaré means to apply these physical references as tropes for thoughts swarming through the boundaries of conceptual systems. While he says that "My comparison is very crude, but I cannot well see how I could explain my thought in any other way" (Science and Method 62), he expects his readers to take this correspondence seriously. This tactic is especially fascinating since he implies that tropes constitute a linguistic limit to his ability to explain something crucial about his own thinking.
Moreover, he seems to ascribe to these entropic thought-swarms the capacity to self-organize in a way that would make the return of those atom-thoughts to their original positions on the walls impossible. These swarms may indeed overwhelm their containing structures, may even require the reorganization of the sedentary structures of the walls themselves." Martin Rosenberg

Work in Progress: Four Complications in Understanding the Evolutionary Process
"[...] The real problem for the evolutionist is not to explain the kinds of organisms that have actually ever existed. The real problem for the evolutionist is how it is that most kinds of potential and seemingly reasonable organisms have never existed. The problem is to explain the location of the empty spaces in the clustered assemblage of occupied points. It is easy to describe organisms that have never existed. There are snakes that live in the grass, but there are no grass-eating snakes. Birds perch in trees, yet, aside from a few exceptions, they do not eat all that greenery around them, but rather spend a great deal of energy searching for food. So why are there virtually no leaf-eating birds?" Richard C. Lewontin

Innovation in Natural, Experimental, and Applied Evolution
"The state space for a mathematical theory of innovation is necessarily infinite (otherwise all possibilities can be enumerated in advance). Researchers will explore, therefore, mathematical representations in which the state space itself is constructed dynamically as populations evolve upon it, e.g., through the combinatorial assembly of fundamental building blocks of rules or forms, embodied in generative construction rules.
A theme running through much if not all of the mathematical thinking on these matters is that of the topological structure of maps from one space to another. For example, the replicative process maps genotype to genotype; genotype is mapped to phenotype via development; phenotype is mapped to fitness via interactions with the environment, broadly construed. The underlying spaces support a natural notion of distance, e.g., the number of point-mutations from one genotype to another, so these maps can exhibit discontinuities, mapping points nearby in one space to points quite distant in another. These features are known in mathematics as bifurcations ..."

A Thousand Plateaus - Deleuze and Guattari
SPACE is central to D&G; it dominates much of the postmodern conversation. The "plateaus" of their title are borrowed from Gregory Bateson (STEPS TO AN ECOLOGY OF MIND. NY: Ballantine Books, 1972, p. 113). D&G say: Bateson "uses the term *plateau* for continuous regions of intensity constituted in such a way that they do not allow themselves to be interrupted by any external termination, any more than they allow themselves to build toward a climax.... A plateau is a piece of immanence. Every Body Without Organs is made up of plateaus. Every BwO is itself a plateau in communication with other plateaus on the plane of consistency. The BwO is a component of passage." (p.158)

BBC - Radio 3 - Silent Key
A lesser known history of radio via cards and collage. Silent Key is an audio-field diary investigation into the history of radio enthusiasts and short-wave hobbyists recorded and assembled by David Ellis. "It's also about making radio without a handbook."

Theoretically Thad is Compelling...
"In their seminal work A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari posit the argument that:
"Thought is not arborescent, and the brain is not a rooted or ramified matter. What are wrongly called 'dendrites' do not assure the connection of neurons in a continuous fabric. The discontinuity between cells, the role of axons, the functioning of the synapses, the existence of synaptic microfissures, the leap each message makes across these fissures, make the brain a multiplicity immersed in its plane of consistency or neuroglia, a whole uncertain, probabilistic system ("the uncertain nervous system"). Many people have a tree growing in their heads, but the brain itself is much more a grass than a tree. "The axon and the dendrite twist around each other like bindweed around brambles, with synapses at each of the thorns." The same goes for memory. Neurologists and psychophysiologists distinguish between long-term memory and short-term memory (on the order of a minute). The difference between them is not simply quantitative: short term memory is of the rhizome or the diagram type, and the long-term memory is arborescent and centralized (imprint, engram, tracing or photograph). Short term memory is in no way subject to a law of contiguity or immediacy to its object, it can act at a distance, come or return a long time after, but always under conditions of discontinuity, rupture, and multiplicity. Furthermore, the difference between the two kinds of memory is not that of two temporal modes of apprehending the same thing; they do not grasp the same thing, memory or idea. The splendor of the short-term Idea: one writes using short-term memory and thus short term ideas, even if one reads or re-reads using long term memory of long term concepts. Short-term memory includes forgetting as a process; it merges not with the instant but instead with the nervous, temporal, and the collective rhizome. Long-term memory (family, race, society or civilization) traces and translates, but what it translates continues to act in it, from a distance, off beat, in an "untimely" way, not instantaneously." (pp. 16)
There is much to unpack from the above argument, but I find the statement "short-term memory includes forgetting as a process" particularly relevant to my concerns about the psycho-somatic impact of wearable computing."

s t r a n g e a t t r a c t o r - A Cosmic Theophony - 18 June 2003
Featuring illustrated talks by Erik Davis and Ken Hollings and music from Jo Thomas.
Erik Davis, contributing editor to Wired magazine and author of the seminal Techgnosis, and Ken Hollings, author of Destroy All Monsters and regular contributor to The Wire magazine, considered the history, technology and meaning of the music of Outer (and Inner) Space.
The night's programme was an extension of Silent Key, a 45 minute radiogenic work 'assembled' by writer/producer David Ellis and broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on the 23rd of February 2003 for the series 'Between the Ears'. [The original programme] was described as "an audio-field diary investigation into a lesser known history of short-wave radio, Danny Kaye's anxious children's songs and 19th century table-rappers".

Tricksters on the Margins - Marshall Soules
"A Canada of Light (Coach House, 1993) is a passionate meditation on Canada as a "communication state." In it, author B.W. Powe argues for an inclusive and accommodating vision of the "discontinuous" Canadian identity:
"I believe that Canada has a hermetic past: its meanings are concealed in private whisperings and interrupted signals, in insoluble arguments about unity and misread messages, and in quiet resistances to the pressures to join into one supreme political system. I suggest that Canada has a discontinuous character. I mean that without a single purpose or predetermined historic goal -- no violent creation and imposition of a political myth or ideology -- Canadians have lived with, invited and responded to many stories, moods and visions, and many different kinds of people." (68-9)
Central to Powe's vision of the discontinuous national character is a recognition of our complex reliance on communication technologies -- "The only way we can live in this country is through advanced technologies of communication." And we are thus forced to live with the paradox that "these technologies do not solidify individual identity... Electricity scatters individual memory, conjuring ghosts and simulations." Communications technologies have forced -- and allowed -- us to accept this paradox into our national consciousness:
"... electronic technologies spur and excite questions, allow for multiple points of view, add to the strange feeling of fusion with world events and confusion about significance and intent. Communications technologies threaten us, summon us, immerse us: they appear to be capable of dehumanizing our lives and of enhancing our awareness, sending out images and reflections of ourselves everywhere." (67-8)
Powe thus takes his place within a tradition of Canadian media theorists who have articulated an evolving theory of communications and media which addresses not only the Canadian national character but, more significantly, also the role of the global citizen living in a media-saturated culture."

The Character of Loki by Johannes Persson [via Tons-o-Trickster!]
"Loki as the Provider is in many ways connected to his function of being a trickster/culture bringer. He does not only provide the Aesir (and hence mankind) in general with the net but he also provides three Aesir in particular with the attributes that constitute their functions in Dumézil's tripartite system: Tórr with the hammer, Ódin with the spear and Freyr with the golden boar."

BBC News: Magazine: The loser's guide to getting lucky
"Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there
rather than just what they are looking for.
My research eventually revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four principles.
They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophecies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good."
Professor Richard Wiseman - University of Hertfordshire

spiked: In defence of bad luck by John Adams
"A society that cannot accept the concept of luck is one that seeks to attach blame to every undesired outcome. Unless we can accept bad luck we are destined to be governed by a risk-blame-litigation-compensation culture that suffocates initiative."

The Psychology of Luck - Are you feeling lucky?
Why do some people lead happy successful lives whilst others face repeated failure and sadness? Why do some find their perfect partner whilst others stagger from one broken relationship to the next? What enables some people to have successful careers whilst apparently similar others find themselves trapped with jobs they detest?

Kenan Malik's paper 'In defence of human agency'
"[...] At the heart of the scientific methodology is its view of nature, and of natural organisms, as machines; not because ants or apes are inanimate, or because they work like watches or TVs, but because, like all machines, they lack self-consciousness, foresight and will. Animals are objects of natural forces, not potential subjects of their own destiny. They act out a drama, [they do] not create it.
Humans, however, are not disenchanted creatures. We possess - or believe we possess - purpose and agency, self-consciousness and will, qualities that science has expunged from the rest of nature. Uniquely among organisms, human beings are both objects of nature and subjects that can, to some extent at least, shape our own fate. We are biological beings, and under the purview of biological and physical laws. But we are also reflexive, rational, social beings, able to design ways of breaking the constraints of biological and physical laws. We are, in other words, both immanent in nature and transcendent to it.
The very development of the scientific method has exacerbated this paradox of being human ..."

Building my Zen Garden
&
Breaking the Second Law
In Nature, 23 July 2002, Ed Gerstner says:
In some ways thermodynamics is like gambling. The first law - that energy cannot be created - tells us 'you can't win'. The second says 'you can't even break even'.
In other words, there is nothing unusual about winning a single game of blackjack, but over many games the house always wins. If a player keeps playing, they must eventually lose. And in thermodynamics, you're not allowed to leave the casino ...
Law enforcement
The first and second laws of thermodynamics are considered so fundamental that the United States Patent and Trademark Office will not consider patent applications that claim to violate them - unless a working model is provided with the application.
But violation of the second law of thermodynamics by small ensembles of particles within larger systems is not a new idea... In 1878, the physicist James Clerk Maxwell wrote in a book review for Nature: "The truth of the second law is ... a statistical, not a mathematical, truth, for it depends on the fact that the bodies we deal with consist of millions of molecules... Hence the second law of thermodynamics is continually being violated, and that to a considerable extent, in any sufficiently small group of molecules belonging to a real body."
For larger systems over normal periods of time, however, the second law of thermodynamics is absolutely rock solid.

Joseph Dillon Ford - Has the Arrow of Time Missed its Mark?

posted by Andrew 12/29/2003 05:26:00 PM

Friday, December 26, 2003

 
The Porlock Syndrome

Robert Luke - Signal: Trace, Technology, and the Self In Formation

Jacques Derrida writes: "To write is to produce a mark that will constitute a kind of machine that is in turn productive, that my future disappearance in principle will not prevent from functioning and from yielding, and yielding itself to, reading and writing."

Rhyme and treason: John Sutherland reviews Pandaemonium

"America operates according to the logic of interruption and emergency calling. It is the place from which Alexander Graham Bell tried to honor the contract he had signed with his brother. Whoever departed first was to contact the survivor through a medium demonstrably superior to the more traditional channel of spiritualism. Nietzsche must have sensed this subterranean pact, for in the Genealogy of Morals he writes of a telephone to the beyond."
Avital Ronell - The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech
(University of Nebraska Press - 1989)

Humphrey Jennings: The Man Who Listened to Britain
"One of the most notorious innovations of modern industry was the division of labour, which turned multi-skilled humans into single-task automata. Jennings saw the horrors of that process, and the sheer range and variety of his creative work can be seen as a living rebuke to the inhumanity of the division of labour and specialisation."
Kevin Jackson

Karen Engle - The Post of the Post
"[...] What better switchboard for thinking through postal physiologies than tapping into the ghost of Nietzsche? Heeding the spectral message of his telephone to the beyond, a call placed in the context of Wagner and aesthetics, Nietzsche's ass-ethics begs the question of technology. Plugging in to this voice from the beyond, we can consider telephonic logic in relation to parasites and postal bodies. Avital Ronell argues for the telephone as a "synecdoche of technology," showing how "technology has broken into the body (every body: this includes the body politic and its internal organs, i.e., the security organs of state" (The Telephone Book, 13; 109). Highlighting the "invasive force of the call" (106), Ronell hooks up notions of toxic invasion with the transmission of language:
The telephone connection houses the improper. Hitting the streets, it welcomes linguistic pollutants and reminds you to ask: 'Have I been understood?' Lodged somewhere among politics, poetry, and science, between memory and hallucination, the telephone necessarily touches the state, terrorism, psychoanalysis, language theory, and a number of death support systems ("The Worst Neighborhoods of the Real," 225).
Reiterating postal anxieties over trust and trustworthiness, the telephonic body, as receptacle for the improper, dials up all the static on the line extending between self and other: "telephonic logic means here, as everywhere, that contact with the Other has been disrupted, but it also means that the break is never absolute. Being on the telephone will come to mean, therefore, that contact is never constant nor is the break clean" (230)."

No War Machine - Stuart Moulthrop
"As Robert Coover has noted, hypertext purports to be the end of "the line," that monologic episteme of insistence that enjoins us to produce novels, essays, films, TV dramas, and other forms of projectile assault (23)."

Deleuze and Guattari + Five Propositions on the Brain
"The brain itself is much more a grass than a tree."

Derrida's Signature Event Context
"Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the usual sense of this opposition), ... can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely non-saturable fashion. This does not suppose that a mark is valid outside its context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring. This citationality, duplication, or duplicity, this iterability of the mark is not an accident or an anomaly, but is that (normal/abnormal) without which a mark could no longer even have a so-called normal functioning. What would a mark be that one could not cite? And whose origin could not be lost on the way?"
Jacques Derrida - "Signature Event Context" - translated by Alan Bass
from 'A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds' - edited by Peggy Kamuf
(New York: Columbia UP, 1991, pages 82-111, at page 97)

Poetopology: Folded Space, Traversal Machines and the Poetics of 'Emergent Text.'
Beressem advances three propositions about a number of questions concerning the 'hypertextual field': 1. Space - Drawing on Deleuze, he proposes the figure of 'folding' - rather than 'linking', 'surfing' or 'navigating' - as a way to think of textual movement; 2. dynamics of hypertext - Beressem applies Aarseth's definition of cybertext; 3. 'emergent text' - Beressem considers some of the problems and possibilities surrounding the creation of 'autopoietic texts' through specific programmings of the 'traversal' hypertextmachine.

Terry Harpold - The Contingencies of the Hypertext Link
"Derrida has suggested that a history of writing in the West would require first a history of roads. This essay is not the place to take on the massive philosophical tradition that joins the language of travel, expedition and navigation to the practice of writing. It is, however, important to recognize that the lexicon of hypertext writing (or reading) as modes of voyage can't be disassociated from that tradition, in forms as diverse as the Sophists' tours through the halls of memory, the Romantics' promenades solitaires and Leopold Bloom's circuit between the headlines of the "Aeolus" episode of Ulysses."

The shadow of history + Causal Space
"The dilemma posed to all scientific explanation is this: magic or geometry."
René Thom - Structural Stability and Morphogenesis

Velocity
Tom Potter contends: "Epicurus (342-270 BC), who originated the concept of atoms, postulated a tangential velocity, he called atomic swerve, to explain how atoms maintained their integrity. Today, Epicurus' atomic swerve, divided by "C" is known as the fine structure constant."

Interruption scopes a channel, gauges apparel, a panel woven, floating a speech-trial balloon.
Information scoops a channel, gouges out and traces a peer-shaped room.
Roverandom travels ...

Equipped with open and palpable links, bathyscape through the eyes of memory;
catalogical sanguinivorous reels ring hosts of chance [in camera narrativo].
Parasite acts leave pixel casts, change encounters clips of leviathan footage.

Siren swims in the cavern where I dream; a softwar hybrid slumbers
in headline screams and posters. Unplugged and lashed to the mast
I'm frozen between promises, entranced by watching-machines that
dimly mask a transparent eyeball behind one blind kaleidoscope wall.

Recirculate the anonymous string, unmuffling a Sibylline reading ...

Latest release of a scandal-sheet - report of a ready-made-being found unfolding
thoughts out of season and brownian motion shot and enclosed within reason
webbing rhythm and figure-ground rhyme in an unbound book.
Hamavec, Withnail, Linus & I hook atoms.

Physics of the Mundane
"Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry." Richard Feynman

Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers - Order Out of Chaos (1984)
"Stability is no longer the consequence of the general laws of physics. We must examine the way a stationary state reacts to the different types of fluctuation produced by the system or its environment. In some cases, the analysis leads to the conclusion that a state is "unstable" -- in such a state, certain fluctuations, instead of regressing, may be amplified and invade the entire system, compelling it to evolve toward a new regime that may be qualitatively quite different from the stationary states corresponding to minimum entropy production.
Thermodynamics leads to an initial general conclusion concerning systems that are liable to escape the type of order governing equilibrium. These systems have to be "far from equilibrium." In cases where instability is possible, we have to ascertain the threshold, the distance from equilibrium, at which fluctuations may lead to new behavior, different from the "normal" stable behavior characteristic of equilibrium or near-equilibrium systems.
[...] Sometimes, wrote Lucretius, at uncertain times and places, the eternal, universal fall of the atoms is disturbed by a very slight deviation -- the "clinamen". The resulting vortex gives rise to the world, to all natural things. The clinamen, this spontaneous, unpredictable deviation, has often been criticized as one of the main weaknesses of Lucretian physics, as being something introduced ad hoc. In fact, the contrary is true -- the clinamen attempts to explain events such as laminar flow ceasing to be stable and spontaneously turning into turbulent flow. Today hydrodynamic experts test the stability of fluid flow by introducing a perturbation that expresses the effect of molecular disorder added to the average flow. We are not so far from the clinamen of Lucretius!
For a long time turbulence was identified with disorder or noise. Today we know that this is not the case. Indeed, while turbulent motion appears as irregular or chaotic on the macroscopic scale, it is, on the contrary, highly organized on the microscopic scale. The multiple space and time scales involved in turbulence correspond to the coherent behavior of millions and millions of molecules. Viewed in this way, the transition from laminar flow to turbulence is a process of self-organization. Part of the energy of the system, which in laminar flow was in the thermal motion of the molecules, is being transferred to macroscopic organized motion."

Michel Serres Conference 1999 - Hanjo Berressem Abstract
"After tracing - very broadly - the parallel development of a chaotics and a (neo)materialism in the history of the soft and of the hard sciences respectively, the paper follows some 'Serrian' references in poststructuralist thought (Deleuze, Foucault) and in chaos theory (Prigogine). After this general introduction, the paper provides a detailed analysis of Serres' use of the Lucretian clinamen ...
Serres sees in Lucretius' text a premonition of 'postmodern sciences'; notably chaos theory - of which he considers De Rerum Natura a 'first' example and in whose reference he reads the clinamen - and the theory of complexity. To have linked atomism to chaos-theory and to the theory of complexity is one of the most seminal of Serres' theoretical contributions. Through references to chaotic and complex systems such as the weather, the clouds, the bifurcations of lightning, and aquatic or atmospheric vorticisms, he asks philosophy to address and answer to complex systems of becoming and of self-organization. As almost all of these references have to do with the clinamen, La Naissance de la Physique should be seen as a central text in Serres' work. In a third step, the paper develops from the analysis of the Serrian clinamen (in a reference back to Lacan) a theory of trauma that rests on the concept of chance (Aristotle's differentiation between necessity on the one side and tyche and automaton on the other). The infinitesimally small and contingent time of the clinamen designates the time of the traumacore, even while it heralds the birth of complexity. (The birth of the world from the spirit of trauma). In conclusion, the paper gives a short outlook on possible uses of Serrian thought in literary studies. The paper argues that chaos theory, literature and 'poststructuralism' - and Serres is probably the most important, and yet to be discovered, hinge between these fields - all attempt to think new alignments of order and chaos and new translations between the 'two (or more) cultures.' It also argues that in this endeavor, Serres' work might, or rather should become a major reference."

PhillyTalks #17 - October 3rd 2000 - Featuring: Lisa Robertson, Steve McCaffery (pdf)
Steve McCaffery: "The atom enjoyed a tremendous come-back in the 19th and 20th centuries. Marx did his dissertation on it in 1841 concluding that the atomic swerve is emblematic of free-will and self-sufficiency in the form of independent self-consciousness. Alfred Jarry adopted the clinamen as one of the two fundamental concepts of 'pataphysics (the other being the szygy or momentary conjunction of two planets in opposition) and it occurs again in the form of the periplum, Odysseus' wandering path through Pound's Cantos. Derrida also finds a place for it in his "differential typology of forms of iteration," where it's seen as basic to any event of citation."

Jacket 20 - Rod Mengham - Bourgeois News: Humphrey Jennings and Charles Madge

LOCKE sank into a swoon;
The Garden died;
God took the spinning-jenny
Out of his side.
William Butler Yeats - Fragments - [via HG Poetics & Understanding Media]

Friedrich Nietzsche: "A labyrinthine man never seeks the truth, but only his Ariadne."

Tête de taureau - Pablo Ruiz Picasso

posted by Andrew 12/26/2003 08:09:00 PM

Saturday, December 20, 2003

 
bull cycle and verbomotor

Exposing the Nerve: Notes on Memory, Hypertext & Poetry
"Ted Nelson's utopic vision of the "docuverse" represents no more than the culmination of our collective hope to inhabit a universe of externally perceived memory, where once an invisible memory inhabited us, silently directing our thoughts and actions. Nelson envisions nothing less than a new storage system which "will represent at last the true structure of information ... with all its intrinsic complexity and controversy, and provide a universal archival standard worthy of our heritage of freedom and pluralism" (0/12). Quite fittingly, Nelson's name for his "framework of reunification" is Xanadu."
William Marsh - Witz 5.2, Summer 1997

A Group has No Head: Conceptual Frameworks and Systems for Supporting Social Interaction (pdf)
Gerhard Fischer writes: "Distributed cognition [Norman, 1993, Things That Make Us Smart] emphasizes that the heart of intelligent human performance is not the individual human mind but groups of minds in interaction with each other and minds in interactions with tools and artifacts. It is important to understand the fundamental difference of distributed cognition as it operates for the aided individual human mind. Distributed cognition between the individual human mind and artifacts (such as memory systems) often function well, because the required knowledge which an individual needs is distributed between her/his head and the world (for example: an address book, a folder system of e-mail messages, a file system). But a group has no head -- therefore externalizations are critically more important for social interaction. Externalizations (1) create a record of our mental efforts, one that is "outside us" rather than vaguely in memory, and (2) they represent situations which can talk back to us, critiqued, and negotiated."

Wired 3.06: The Curse of Xanadu by Gary Wolf
"[...] As with everything else in his life, Nelson's conversation is controlled by his aversion to finishing. There are no full stops in the flow of his speech, only commas, dashes, ellipses.
"And I remember thinking about the particles in the water, but I thought of them as places, and how they would separate around my fingers and reconnect on the other side, and how this constant separation and reconnection and perpetual change into new arrangements was - "
Suddenly, the monologue stopped, and Nelson reached into his cache of equipment. He retrieved his own cassette recorder, tested it, and turned the microphone toward himself. "OK, I'm at The Spinnaker," he continued, "talking about the old hand-in-the-water story and how the sense of the separation and reconnection of the places in the water made such an impression on me, and how all the relationships were constantly changing - and you could hardly hold onto it - you could, you could not, you couldn't really visualize or express the myriad of relationships."
[...] Xanadu, the ultimate hypertext information system, began as Ted Nelson's quest for personal liberation. The inventor's hummingbird mind and his inability to keep track of anything left him relatively helpless. He wanted to be a writer and a filmmaker, but he needed a way to avoid getting lost in the frantic multiplication of associations his brain produced. His great inspiration was to imagine a computer program that could keep track of all the divergent paths of his thinking and writing. To this concept of branching, nonlinear writing, Nelson gave the name hypertext.
[...] Nelson has never catalogued his thousands of hours of audio- and videotape. This would be impossible, since they are coextensive with his waking life, and it would also be unnecessary, since he has no intention of viewing or studying them. He rents several storage spaces [...]
Nelson records everything and remembers nothing. Xanadu was to have been his cure. To assist in the procedure, he called upon a team of professionals, some of whom also happened to be his closest friends and disciples.
In the end, the patient survived the operation. But it nearly killed the doctors."

Body Odysseys of the Famous
The world famous composer, Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) had his head stolen. Fortunately, he was dead at the time.

GYNA SAPIENS
Sex, Time & Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution by Leonard Shlain
Reviewed by Julie Mayeda in The San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday 17 August 2003
"In his 1998 book, "The Alphabet Versus the Goddess," Shlain, a Mill Valley author and chief of laproscopic surgery at California Medical Center, argued that the invention of writing reconfigured the human brain and initiated the reign of patriarchy. That book alone would have reserved him a spot in the Audacious Thinkers' Hall of Fame, but the vascular surgeon turned master synthesizer was not done. Next, he mind-traveled beyond the invention of the alphabet to the time when Homo sapiens emerged as a freshly minted species. Shlain returned with a fascinating story in tow, replete with another audacious hypothesis ..."

Meet Stelarc, the face of artificial intelligence
Garry Barker reports: The head is a 3000 polygon model wrapped in a graphical skin texture copied from Stelarc's skin. The eyes move, the mouth synchronises with its speech, it smiles, raises its eyebrows and creases its brow. While it does not "learn" from the questions it is asked, its database is growing so it can produce a more informal response to questions. "It has some knowledge of Melbourne - Flinders Street, ACMI and so on," Stelarc said. As for public reaction: "Some people get totally engrossed in their conversation with it. I went in a while ago to talk to my head but there was a crowd there," he said. "I walked away feeling that I had been beheaded; suffered prosthetic loss."

How do you take a snapshot of a contradiction?
Terry Eagleton reviews the Mimesis of Erich Auerbach: "[...] Bernard Shaw's plays may be radical in their content, but their stage directions portray a world so solid, familiar and well-upholstered, all the way down to the level of the whisky in the decanter on the sideboard, that it is hard to imagine ever being able to change it. In this sense, the realist form usurps the radical content. Besides, representational art is from one viewpoint the least realist of all, since it is strictly speaking impossible. Nobody can tell it like it is without editing and angling as they go along. Otherwise the book or painting would simply merge into the world. No sooner had the English novel embarked on its celebrated rise in the 18th century than Laurence Sterne reminded his literary colleagues of the crazed hubris of the realist project. Determined not to cheat the reader by leaving anything out, Tristram Shandy represents so much material so painstakingly that its narrative collapses."

The late Hugh Kenner's theory of everything
John Wilson, writing in The Boston Globe, celebrates the life & mind of chain-smoking alien Hugh Kenner:
"[...] The "rich, chaotic world" of painter Romare Bearden's collages, the surprising efficiency of a messy desk, the design of mazes: wherever he looked, Kenner found meaning, held in an intricate system of stresses like a sonnet or a geodesic dome.
He was himself a "pattern recognizer," as he described inventor Raymond Kurzweil in the December 1990 issue of the pioneering personal computer magazine Byte. (Kenner was surely the only writer ever to serve at the same time as a columnist both for Byte and Art & Antiques.) "A 'Kurzweil,'" he wrote, "that would be a pattern recognizer. Examples: a machine that can read books aloud to the blind; another machine that can type to human dictation; yet another that combines acoustic patterns so accurately that professional musicians have thought they were hearing a $400,000 concert grand."
In his masterpiece, "The Pound Era," published in 1971, Kenner had given another example: the "patterned energy" of a poem, transferable from Greek, say, to English or Chinese. As a rope makes a knot visible, Kenner wrote, so the Greek text "makes Homer's imagined realities apprehensible." But "the poem is not its language. Hence Pound's reiterated advice to translators, to convey the energized pattern and let go the words. To tie the knot you need not simulate the original fibers."
"The Pound Era," Kenner said, was a book he'd been trying to get started for years. What enabled him finally to pull it together was the insight that the great writers of the early 20th century and their kindred spirits in the arts and sciences shared a common awareness of "patterned integrities" -- the knot that exists apart from the rope; the gist of Homer -- that make up "a universe of ordered dynamisms." For Kenner, the Oxford English Dictionary's sequences of citations, T.S. Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," and the revolutionary cinematic montage of the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein were all aspects of the same great enterprise ..."

Popular Science: The Mod Squad by David Kushner
"The culture of mod making grew out of what author Steven Levy famously described as the hacker ethic, which predated the explosion of Internet culture and emphasized "sharing, openness, decentralization, and getting your hands on machines at any cost." When it came to software, games were ideal hacking material: creative objects whose DNA was ripe for sharing and mutation."

A Critic Whose Scholarship Gleamed With His Writing
An Appreciation from The New York Times - Saturday 29 November 2003
Benjamin Ivry pays tribute to Hugh: "Kenner studied mathematics early on in his native Canada, and with informed enthusiasm for the machine age, in 1984 developed a computer program, Travesty, that scrambles literary texts, highlighting idioms and structures within. In another book, "Geodesic Math and How to Use It" (1976, recently reissued by the University of California Press) Kenner explicated the domes invented by the ecological designer Buckminster Fuller more lucidly than Fuller did himself.
For Kenner, computers furnished a partial solution for the hearing loss that afflicted him from early childhood, along with a thickened and often difficult to understand speech. The possibilities of written communication online, bypassing the need for hearing or speaking words, thrilled Kenner, who told a college computing symposium at St. Olaf College in Minnesota in 1983 that computers were destined to affect education in a way comparable to "the invention of the alphabet that made writing possible."
The development of educational software in the subsequent 20 years has proved his point. In the mid-1980's Kenner assembled his own pioneering Heath/Zenith Z-100 computer and wrote a guide to the machine."

LRB - Peter Campbell : Reading the Signs
"The city has become a print-substrate, an almost anonymous structure which you read by way of notices, badges, signs, logos and banners. The battle between one message and another has escalated."

Tim Adams encounters Noam - the 'Devil's Accountant'
"On the railings outside my local train station at Harringay, in north London, someone has carefully placed a series of small white stickers. The stickers, all at eye level, are designed, I suppose, to be the first thing you see on the way to work and the last thing you see on your way home. They are all neatly typed with two words: READ CHOMSKY. Most mornings I find myself wondering for an instant whether the words are an imperative ('If you do nothing else today...'), or a swaggering boast (along the lines of some of the station's other typical graffiti: 'Shagged Karen', say).
[...] Chomsky works from within the empire, in one of its more rigorous outposts, at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. MIT has none of the marginal, down-at-heel feel of a British university. Its pristine campus, all smoked glass and soaring marble, across the Charles river from Boston, has the sheen of a hi-tech business park. MIT advertises itself as 'America's ideas factory', and nowhere does the production line work as efficiently as in the offices of Professor Chomsky."

Humanity? Maybe It's in the Wiring [also here]
"Neuroscientists have given up looking for the seat of the soul, but they are still seeking what may be special about human brains, what it is that provides the basis for a level of self-awareness and complex emotions unlike those of other animals.
Most recently they have been investigating circuitry rather than specific locations, looking at pathways and connections that are central in creating social emotions, a moral sense, even the feeling of free will.
There are specialized neurons at work, as well -- large, cigar-shaped cells called spindle cells."
Sandra Blakeslee

Working in Movement - Uniquely Human
"The spindle cells aren't present at birth and develop during infancy and childhood.
Humans are unique in their ability to sense themselves and process the complex emotional states that often arise from this sensory ability. But you don't have to have a person under an MRI machine to know this. As movement educators see every day, just observing the way a person uses themselves in movement tells you a lot about the whole person. Putting hands on them is even more revealing." Tom Landini

Au commencement était la peau
The anthropologist Margaret Mead speaks about the "shock of the skin".

Reith Lectures 2003 - The Emerging Mind - Lecture 1: Phantoms in the Brain - Q & A
Anthony Gormley asks: "Hi Rama, yes, I'm just absolutely fascinated by the way tonight has unfolded because in fact what you seem to be doing is folding the brain back into the body and I had never heard about the Penfield homunculus but I suppose my question is, well where do the other brain functions come from, that have as it were, nothing to do with bodily perception? Can there be a consciousness of consciousness itself?"

BBC Radio 4 - Reith Lectures 2003 - The Emerging Mind - Lecture 1: Phantoms in the Brain
"The entire skin surface, touch signals, all the skin surface on the left side of the brain is mapped on to the right cerebral hemisphere on a vertical strip of cortical tissue called the post-central gyrus. Actually there are several maps but I'll simplify them and pretend there's only one map called the post-central gyrus. Now this is a faithful representation of the entire body surface. It's almost as though you have a little person draped on the surface of the brain. It's called the Penfield homunculus, and for the most part it's continuous which is what you mean by a map, but there is one peculiarity and that is the representation of the face on this map on the surface of the brain is right next to the representation of the hand on this map, instead of being near the neck where it should be, so it's dislocated. Now nobody knows why, something to do with the phylogeny or the way in which the brain develops in early foetal life or in early infancy, but that's the way the map is."
Vilayanur S Ramachandran

Dr Stephen Juan - Can we talk to the unborn?
"In experiments conducted by Dr. [Frans] Veldman, it was discovered that during the final trimester of pregnancy, if a father places his hand upon the bare abdomen of his pregnant wife an extraordinary thing happens. Watching under ultrasound imaging, the unborn child "responds to the invitation to relate, moves itself toward his hand resting on the mother's belly and snuggles up into it." When the father's hand is taken away, the baby moves away. In any case, there is a distinct desire for the unborn baby to establish communication contact."

PhillyTalks #17 - October 3rd 2000 - Featuring: Lisa Robertson, Steve McCaffery (pdf)
In the course of an email correspondence with Lisa Robertson, Steve McCaffery quotes a slightly modified form of his own essay ["Blaser's Deleuzian Folds," printed in The Recovery of the Public World: Essays on Poetics in Honour of Robin Blaser, edited by Charles Watts and Edward Byrne (Vancouver: Talon, 1999), pages 373-392], as follows (in part):
"The double helix of our DNA is actually a procedure of the "superfold." There is also the becoming-fold along an ogive trajectory or planar crinkle. All these choreographies of folds and detours lead back to the skin, that most quotidian and insistent organ, enveloping us. Above all, the fold is anti-extensional, anti-dialectical and intransigently inclusive. Baroque folding comprises an "inside as the operation of the outside" returning surfaces to a topographical paradox in which "an interiority ... constitutes liberty itself." Folds being monads cannot be points. For instance, Baroque logic must treat the syllogism not as a resolution of points and counterpoints, but as the folding of a single discursive proposition. And while conceding to Plato's Socratic dialogues the potential to seduce, an erotics of the dialectic is rare. However, there must be a constant eroticizing within the fold whose differentiating agency repudiates antagonism and opposition as the basal coordinates for change."

Mediamatic: Omar Muñoz-Cremers reviews Germinal Life by Keith Ansell Pearson
"It is the French philosopher Bergson who convinces Deleuze that philosophy has the capacity to go beyond human experience and simultaneously is able to deepen it. As Pearson makes clear, this implies a radical reorientation of philosophy which makes use of a new logic of nuances in place of antitheses."

Neurology of Phantom Limb Pain
Andrew Austin: "In the 1950's Canadian neurosurgeon, Wilder Penfield, demonstrated areas of the brain that map out bodily sensation and perception in the parietal lobes. A schematic model of these areas representations became known as the Penfield Homunculus.
In 1986, Wain tested the efficiency of hypnosis in treating phantom limb pain."

Mastering the Pain by Michael Gliserman - Maisonneuve Magazine, November 2003
"Pain. The mere mention of the word makes us cringe. Albert Schweitzer once called pain a more terrible lord of mankind than even death itself. Dr. Ronald Melzack, internationally renowned professor of psychology at McGill University, has made Schweitzer's dark lord his life's work. [...]
With Hebb as his thesis advisor, Melzack's first experiments focused on irrational fears in dogs. He noted how they recoiled from skulls, umbrellas opening up, and balloons being inflated. He also noted, when he lit matches, that the group of dogs raised in humane isolation would -- after sniffing and recoiling like any normally raised dog -- return repeatedly to sniff the flame."

What is Cyberculture?
"A Stanford hacker named Donald Woods discovered a kind of game on a Xerox research computer one day that involved a spelunker-explorer seeking treasure in a dungeon. Woods contacted the programmer, Will Crowther, talked to him about it, and decided to expand Crowther's game into a full-scale "Adventure," where a person could use the computer to assume the role of a traveler in a Tolkienesque setting, fight off enemies, overcome obstacles through clever tricks, and eventually recover treasure. The player would give two-word, verb-noun commands to the program, which would respond depending on how the command changed the universe that had been created inside the computer by Don Woods' imagination."
Steven Levy - Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
(Anchor Press / Doubleday, New York, 1984, page 192)

Virtual Reality as the End of the Enlightenment Project
"With geography filled up, and the dreams of space colonization less viable every day, the drive to the frontier has collapsed in on itself. The space remaining for colonization is the space of the technology itself. No longer the tool by which the frontier was defined, the body of technology is now itself under exploration. Back in the early 60's, one of the pioneers of computer graphics, Ivan Sutherland, declared that the goal was to "break the glass and go inside the machine." More recently, Jaron Lanier has said of VR that: "the technology goes away, and all that's left is the cultural component." The technology 'goes away' because we are inside it."
Simon Penny - March 1992

Hypertext: Exposing the Nerve
William Marsh - Witz 5.2, Summer 1997
"Once again, we're in front of the mirror, at first blushing but later admiring and celebrating the intricacies of a vastly externalized human cognition. However, we are nowhere near knowing how to inhabit the reflection - despite claims by celebrants that computerized hypertext marks just such a change in habitat."

The knight in the mirror by Harold Bloom
"Herman Melville blended Don Quixote and Hamlet into Captain Ahab (with a touch of Milton's Satan added for seasoning). Ahab desires to avenge himself upon the white whale, while Satan would destroy God, if only he could. Hamlet is death's ambassador to us, according to G Wilson Knight. Don Quixote says his quest is to destroy injustice.
The final injustice is death, the ultimate bondage. To set captives free is the knight's pragmatic way of battling against death."

[ash] Imagined Cities
at some point i realized that all i ever dream about is cities. covered concourses, underground caverns filled with people, a branching network of platforms over the reservoir, and of course those stairs that go upward forever. but nothing that isn't of the metropolis. no trees, no grass, no lake, no birds, no sky.

Mediamatic: Manuel DeLanda: Homes: Meshwork or Hierarchy?
"It may be, as philosopher Andy Clark has suggested, that our minds are a kludge (or bricollage) of different kinds of intelligence: some intelligent abilities arise out of decentralized and parallel processes, others from centralized and sequential ones.
One useful way to think about this is to view the evolution of the human mind as involving a similar process as symbolic AI, only in reverse. Let me explain. When the first AI programs were written, programming languages and computer hardware were very hierarchical and sequential. In the 1970's when symbolic AI switched to the creation of expert-systems, the need for flexibility forced them to create programing languages which simulated parallel processing even while running in sequential hardware. Andy Clark's idea is that our evolution may have involved a similar, though opposite, solution: we began with a highly parallel and non-hierarchical hardware (like birds) and at some point our brains began to simulate a sequential and centralized mind: the stream of linguistic consciousness with which we are familiar through introspection."

Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities
"Zoe is the place of indivisible existence. But why, then, does the city exist? What line separates the inside from the outside, the rumble of wheels from the howl of wolves?"

Invisible Natures: On Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities (pdf)
"Artificial nature is invisible, yet it weighs on us. It weighs us down through its universal excess: the sources of images and information produce overdoses of news and fictions originating from all corners of the planet and on all possible subjects. [...] Information, knowledge and news are diffused in a near-instantaneous and unpredictable fashion, via the "electronic word-of-mouth" which characterises the networks of which the invisible natures are made. In the traditional media -- television, radio, newspapers -- information essentially flows one way only. In the new networks, information flows with the tide, and everyone can act on it, receive it and pass it on ..."
Virgílio Fernandes Almeida

Gamasutra - Features - "Turning a Linear Story into a Game: The Missing Link between Fiction and Interactive Entertainment"
Paul Warne writes: For [Lebbeus] Woods, breaking down bureaucratic hierarchies is the only way to truly advance not only architecture, but the human condition as well. Some might call it anarchy, but Woods likes to think these constructs are products of an assemblage of "heterarchies", a term he borrows from cybernetics which Woods defines as "a spontaneous lateral network of autonomous individuals; a system of authority based on the evolving performances of individuals (e.g. a cybernetic circus)."

Italo Calvino and Stones and Arches
Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone. "But which is the stone that supports the bridge?" Kublai Khan asks. "The bridge is not supported by one stone or another," Marco answers, "but by the line of the arch that they form." Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: "Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me." Polo answers: "Without stones there is no arch."
Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities

posted by Andrew 12/20/2003 07:36:00 PM

Monday, December 01, 2003

 
introducing the absence of the work in progress

Vegetal and mineral memory: The future of books [via ALD]
"A hypertext can give the illusion of opening up even a closed text: a detective story can be structured in such a way that its readers can select their own solution, deciding at the end if the guilty one should be the butler, the bishop, the detective, the narrator, the author or the reader. They can thus build up their own personal story. Such an idea is not a new one. Before the invention of computers, poets and narrators dreamt of a totally open text that readers could infinitely re-compose in different ways. Such was the idea of Le Livre, as extolled by Mallarmé. Raymond Queneau also invented a combinatorial algorithm by virtue of which it was possible to compose, from a finite set of lines, millions of poems. In the early sixties, Max Saporta wrote and published a novel whose pages could be displaced to compose different stories, and Nanni Balestrini gave a computer a disconnected list of verses that the machine combined in different ways to compose different poems ...
All these physically moveable texts give an impression of absolute freedom on the part of the reader, but this is only an impression, an illusion of freedom. The machinery that allows one to produce an infinite text with a finite number of elements has existed for millennia, and this is the alphabet. Using an alphabet with a limited number of letters one can produce billions of texts, and this is exactly what has been done from Homer to the present days."
Umberto Eco

Edmund Carpenter's - Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me!
The Universe as Book
"It was a commonplace in Scholasticism that God created two books: the world and the sacred Scriptures. Life was thought to follow the format of the book and the book became the organizing principle for all experience.
Even as a written manuscript, the book served as model for both the machine and bureaucracy. That is, it encouraged a habit of thought that divided experience into specialized units and organized these serially and causally. Translated into gears and levers, the book became machine. Translated into people, it became army, chain of command, assembly line, etc.
By organizing society in the format of the book, the ancients organized specialists into elaborate social machines capable of building pyramids or colonizing conquered lands.
The book served as model and impetus for many of Western man's most basic thoughts. Certainly the book was ideally suited for presenting a number of these. "History," says George Steiner, "is a language-net thrown backwards." More specifically, history is a book.
Theories of evolution and progress belong, almost exclusively, to book culture. Like a book, the idea of progress was an abstracting, organizing principle for the interpretation and comprehension of an incredibly complicated record of human experience. It arranged events in a line, causally: the individual was thought to move along that line, like the reader's eye, towards a desired goal.
Nearly all experience, all reality, it was thought, lay within the confines of language. Language, in turn, was structured by the book. Thus, nearly the whole of Western culture was organized around one sense: the eye; expressed in one medium: language; and structured according to one model: the book.
The all-seeing eye of God, believed to control all celestial bodies and all life, was really the eye of literate man. Western civilization synchronized nearly all experience, all perception to this single model and organized the universe according to the book.
Literate man lived in a universe, not a bi-verse or a multi-verse, but a verse obedient to a single drummer. "Whether in the Amazonian forest or on the ridge of the high Andes," wrote Alexander von Humboldt, the great geographer, "I was ever aware that one breath, from pole to pole, breathes one single life into stones, plants and animals and into the swelling breast of man."
Monotheism in religion and uniformity in classical science were mild dictatorships compared to the dictatorship of the eye. In fact, both may have been by-products of it. Alfred North Whitehead said science could have come only out of the strict monotheism of Christianity, but it seems more likely the primary source was literacy, not religion."
Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me! by Edmund Carpenter
(Paladin Books, Great Britain, 1976, pages 43-44)

Fish's Sixth Sense Could Help Robots Navigate Oceans
"Fish and many amphibian animals find their way through even the murkiest of waters, navigate raging torrents and spot obstacles, predators and prey, using a sensory organ known as the lateral line system.
Sometimes known as the fish's sixth sense, the lateral line is a system of thousands of tiny hair cells that run the length of the fish's body. The lateral line responds to fluid flow around the fish and allows it to detect obstacles and sense the movement of water even in complete darkness.
Now, electrical engineer Chang Liu, entomologist Fred Delcomyn and their colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed an artificial lateral line that could give underwater vehicles and robots a sixth sense."

First Chapter: Life's Solution by Simon Conway Morris
"It is obvious that the entire fabric of evolution is imprinted on and through our bodies, from the architecture of our bony skeleton, to the proteins carrying the oxygen surging through our arteries, and our eyes that even unaided can see at least two million years into the past - the amount of time it has taken for the light to travel from the Andromeda Galaxy. In every case - whether for hand or brain - we can trace an ancestry that extends backwards for hundreds of millions, if not billions, of years. Yet, for all that, both the processes and the implications of organic evolution remain controversial. Now at first sight this is rather odd, because it is not immediately clear what is being called into question. Certainly not the fact of evolution, at least as a historical narrative: very crudely, first bacteria, then dinosaurs, now humans. More specifically in terms of process, Darwin's formulation of the mechanisms of evolution is not only straightforward, but seemingly irrefutable. Organisms live in a real world, and evolve to fit their environment by a process of continuous adaptation. This is achieved by a constant winnowing through the operation of natural selection that scrutinizes the available variation to confer reproductive success on those that, by one yardstick or another, are fitter in the struggle for survival.
So is that all there is to say?"

A Message to the Fish
In 'History as a System and Other Essays Toward a Philosophy of History' Ortega y Gasset writes: "Darwin believed that species equipped with eyes have been forthcoming in a millennial evolutionary process because sight is necessary or convenient in the struggle for existence against the environment. The theory of mutation and its ally, the Mendelian theory, show with a certainty hitherto unknown in biology that precisely the opposite is true. The species with eyes appears suddenly, capriciously as it were, and it is this species which changes the environment by creating its visible aspect. The eye does not come into being because it is needed. Just the contrary; because the eye appears it can henceforth be applied as a serviceable instrument. Each species builds up its stock of useful habits by selecting among, and taking advantage of, the innumerable useless actions which a living being performs out of sheer exuberance."

'Life's Solution': It Had to Happen - Review by Elliott Sober
"When two species are similar because they inherit traits from a common ancestor, the similarity is said to be a ''homology''; when they are similar because their ancestors independently evolved the same novel features, this is convergence. The camera eye found in vertebrates has independently evolved in other groups -- in squid, some marine worms, jellyfish, snails and spiders. In addition to such standard examples of convergence (like the remarkable similarities that unite placental and marsupial mammals), Conway Morris presents scores of fascinating examples that are less familiar. The lesson is clear. The living world is peppered with recurrent themes; it is not an accumulation of unique events."

Evidence that a Ribozyme Evolved Multiple Times
Laboratory experiments designed to evolve new catalytic RNA molecules, called ribozymes, have demonstrated that a type of self-cleaving ribozyme found in highly divergent organisms might have evolved independently multiple times.
"Since the hammerhead is a very simple motif, if any structure was going to arise independently multiple times, it would be something like this," said HHMI investigator Jack W. Szostak.
The evidence for multiple origins of the hammerhead ribozyme, which is found in organisms as diverse as plant viruses, newts, schistosomes and cave crickets, was published in the November 1, 2001, issue of the journal Nature by HHMI investigator Jack W. Szostak and Kourosh Salehi-Ashtiani at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Boxes and Arrows: Forgotten Forefather: Paul Otlet - Alex Wright [update]
"With the faceted philosophy of the UDC as backdrop, the Traité [de documentation] posited a universal "law of organization" declaring that no document could be properly understood by itself, but that its meaning becomes clarified through its influence on other documents, and vice versa. "[A]ll bibliological creation," he said, "no matter how original and how powerful, implies redistribution, combination and new amalgamations."
While that sentiment may sound postmodernist in spirit, Otlet was no semiotician; rather, he simply believed that documents could best be understood as three-dimensional, with the third dimension being their social context: their relationship to place, time, language, other readers, writers and topics. Otlet believed in the possibility of empirical truth, or what he called "facticity" -- a property that emerged over time, through the ongoing collaboration between readers and writers. In Otlet's world, each user would leave an imprint, a trail, which would then become part of the explicit history of each document."

IBM/Collaborative User Experience Research Group - history flow
visualizing dynamic, evolving documents and the interactions of multiple collaborating authors: a preliminary report.

Toward a Brain-Internet Link - Technology Review November 2003
"A few weeks ago i was brushing my teeth and trying to remember who made "La Bamba" a big hit back in the late 1950s. I knew the singer had died in a plane crash with Buddy Holly; if I'd been downstairs I would have gone straight to Google. But even if I'd had a spoken-language Internet interface in the bathroom, my mouth was full of toothpaste. I realized that what I really want is an implant in my head, directly coupled into my brain, providing a wireless Internet connection."
Rodney Brooks

We Can Remember It For You Wholesale by Philip K. Dick
He awoke -- and wanted Mars. The valleys, he thought. What would it be like to trudge among them? Great and greater yet: the dream grew as he became fully conscious, the dream and the yearning. He could almost feel the enveloping presence of the other world, which only Government agents and high officials had seen. A clerk like himself? Not likely.
"Are you getting up or not?" his wife Kirsten asked drowsily, with her usual hint of fierce crossness. "If you are, push the hot coffee button on the darn stove."

Selling you a new past - The Independent 21 October 2003 [via matt jones]
"You've eaten a chocolate bar and you didn't really like it. Can a commercial afterwards persuade you that you did? 'Memory morphing' could be a powerful weapon for advertisers."

From Our Own Correspondent: When images and reality merge
Peter Day says: "Much have I travelled already, but a new global project has just sent me round the world for the first time. In quick succession, I visited America, Japan, South Korea and Thailand. And my frazzled conclusion is that most of the urban world is morphing into a television screen."

Biology gets digital in Maryland
Meeting tackles how computers should integrate research data.
Helen Pearson reports: At the moment, it is a struggle to link a patient's genetic profile with their brain scans and the latest clinical studies. It's like a primitive PC running incompatible word-processing, e-mail and spreadsheet programs, says Erik Jakobsson of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, who helped to convene the meeting. "We're way behind in making it all work together," he says.

The man who sold his brain
Keats has registered his brain as a sculpture which he created thought by thought.

Wired 11.12: The Key to Genius
Steve Silberman writes: "[...] For most of the 20th century, intelligence was viewed as an all-purpose, monolithic power, christened g by psychologist Charles Spearman. Creativity was believed to be a side effect of a high level of general intelligence - a mark of big g. The father of the standardized-testing industry, Lewis Terman, created the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale to quantify this power. He launched the longest scientific study in history, Genetic Studies of Genius, to track the accomplishments of highly gifted grade-school children through the course of their lives.
His hope that an impressive IQ score would augur groundbreaking accomplishments in science and art, however, didn't pan out. His young Termites, as he affectionately called them, did end up earning slots at better universities and getting hired for executive positions, often with help from Terman. They gave the world two memorable inventions: the K ration and I Love Lucy. (Both Ancel Keys, who perfected single-meal pouches for the US Army, and Jess Oppenheimer, the creator of the popular TV show, were Termites.)
For the most part, however, real genius slipped through Terman's net. None of his prodigies won major scientific prizes or became important artists, while two students excluded from the study for having insufficient test scores, William Shockley and Luis Alvarez, went on to earn Nobels.
Howard Gardner rallied the anti-Terman forces in 1983 with his influential book Frames of Mind. In place of g, Gardner proposed seven modular faculties in the brain, each with its own stronghold of competence. Savants seemed to be the living proof of his theory: In the case of Nadia, while her linguistic intelligence was impaired, her spatial intelligence was highly developed. Gardner compared these separate but equal modules of intelligence to highly tuned computational devices.
But, like Terman, Gardner missed something: the difference between computation and creativity. If a bottomless literal memory and a set of algorithms were enough to make us significant artists and composers, our iPods and museums would chronicle a history of savant breakthroughs. The computational abilities of savants may give them glimpses of the world as it really is, as Snyder says. But creativity is also the ability to imagine the world as it is not - to make conceptual leaps and refine the raw data of experience into abstract ideas, meaning, and insight."

Reclaim your brain by Brian Wheeler
"[...] Professor Kendrick casts doubt on the idea that all the extra information in the world is using up valuable brain space. Apart from anything else, the brain does not necessarily have a finite capacity. "The potential for the brain to memorise is enormous. No one wants to put a final limit on it," he says.
The mind does not store information in a cold, clinical way like a computer. Memory is strongly linked to emotion. So although we are bombarded with information all the time, we are unlikely to remember much of it. The problem is not the amount of information you take in, but what your brain does with it, Professor Kendrick says."

Think Again: How Much Give Can the Brain Take?
"[...] Earlier experiments had begun chipping away at the certainty that the ban on adult neurogenesis, as it is called, is absolute, at least in lower vertebrates or in the human brain's more primitive regions. (Birds apparently generate neurons to encode new songs.) But the Princeton findings went further: Dr. Elizabeth Gould and Dr. Charles G. Gross found that thousands of new neurons a day were being formed in the brains of monkeys, migrating to areas including the prefrontal cortex, the seat of intelligence and decision-making.
If a steady stream of fresh brain cells is continually arriving to be incorporated into new circuitry, then the brain is more malleable than hardly anyone has realized. Memories may be formed not just by forging new synapses between old neurons but by weaving in new ones as well.
No one really knows what these new neurons do. Stuck at the end of the Princeton paper is an arresting speculation: that the continuum of new neurons, arriving in one batch after another, might be the brain's way of storing memories chronologically, forming the pages of the neurological book of life."
George Johnson - The New York Times 24 October 1999

Slashdot -- How Much Give Can the Brain Take?
JPMH says: "... even if Dr Gould and Dr Gross are right that there are always new neurons migrating to the pre-frontal cortex, it seems they can't always be integrated."

The Myth of the 10% Brain by David A. Morton
"The types and numbers of brain cell connections, along with the time-dynamics of their interactions modified by numerous neurotransmitters, results in a complex chemical and electromagnetic environment in the brain. However, that is no argument that we are not using our full brain capacity. While it is in our best interest to try to continue to learn and, if possible, to think more accurately in relation to the physical world and more appropriately in regard to our social world, it may be that we are struggling at or near our limits in regard to the capacities of the brain-mind of the species. This is not pleasing to our self-concept, but it still may be true.
If we are functioning at our mental limits as a species, can we do anything about it?"

Exposing the Nerve: Memory
William Marsh - Witz 5.2, Summer 1997
Language, according to Merlin Donald's Origins of the Modern Mind, was initially used "to construct conceptual models of the human universe. Its function was evidently tied to the development of integrative thought -- to the grand unifying synthesis of formerly disconnected, time-bound snippets of information" (215).
From the beginning, then, the circular
language - memory - concept - language ...
by which the "snippets" are bound, integrated, networked.

IAwiki - Shape Of Information [via The Document Triangle via Interconnected]
"The concept of shape assumes that an information space of any size has both spatial and semantic characteristics. That is, as well as identifying placement and layout, users directly recognize and respond to content and meaning."

Lingua Franca - In the Beginning was the Word...
"As a lexicographer I was keen to see the material associated with the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, especially Dr Minor's citation cards. Dr Minor, the insane murderer, best-known to us from Simon Winchester's book The Surgeon of Crowthorne. Would his cards reveal something of his personality? They appear to be the cards of a sane intellectual, the cards of the man who strolled in the gardens of Broadmoor prison with the dictionary's editor, James Murray, discussing dictionary matters. There was evidence here of something that is not in Winchester's book, a strange sense of the written word speaking out from the past."
Bruce Moore on Treasures from the World's Great Libraries.

MIT Team Mines For New Materials With A Computer
"A computational technique used to predict everything from books that a given customer might like to the function of an unknown protein is now being applied by MIT engineers and colleagues to the search for new materials. The team's ultimate goal: a public online database that could aid the design of materials for almost any application, from nanostructure computer components to ultralight, high-strength alloys for airplanes.
The technique, known as data mining, uses statistics and correlations to search for patterns within a large data set. Those patterns can then be used to predict an unknown."

How Much Information? 2003
This study is an attempt to estimate how much new information is created each year. Newly created information is distributed in four storage media -- print, film, magnetic, and optical -- and seen or heard in four information flows -- telephone, radio and TV, and the Internet. This study of information storage and flows analyzes the year 2002 in order to estimate the annual size of the stock of new information contained in storage media, and heard or seen each year in information flows.

Where do stories come from?
A Kansas plant geneticist, a man by the name of Wes Jackson, in a book titled Altars of Unhewn Stone, wrote an essay called "The Information Implosion." Jackson offers a striking value claim. For though conventional wisdom holds that we are in the midst of an information explosion, more careful consideration must surely convince us that the opposite is true. Jackson notes, in particular, a species extinction rate of 1000 per year including the loss of plant species through the genetic narrowing of crops in his own research. According to Jackson, wheat seed "variety" is a misleading term referring only to a single seed species developed out of a much larger genetic variety -- the new seed is a truncation or reduction of species inventory rather than an expansion. The problem is larger. According to Jackson, the loss in cultural information from the depopulation of the rural areas alone in the period from the 1930s until today is greater than the sum of information given by science and technology in the same period."
Collin Hughes

World drowning in oceans of data [via A Welsh View]
US researchers estimate that every year 800MB of information is produced for every person on the planet. Their study found that information stored on paper, film, magnetic and optical disks has doubled since 1999. Paper is still proving popular though. The amount of information stored in books, journals and other documents has grown 43% in three years.

Web guru fights info pollution - BBC News 13 October 2003
"[...] Information pollution is information overload taken to the extreme," Jakob Nielsen told BBC News Online while in London for the Nielson Norman Group User Experience Conference. [...]
"The entire ideology of information technology for the last 50 years has been that more information is better, that mass producing information is better," he says. But the net [...] has mutated into a "procrastination apparatus", which spews information without much prioritisation, Dr Nielsen argues.

Tower of Babel by Peter Krapp
"Babel is one of the prime narratives of architecture as social event."

Sabbah's Blog: Knowledge Management Archives - 31 October 2003
The equivalent of a 30-foot pile of books of data is produced for everyone on Earth annually, a study finds.

Boxes and Arrows: The Sociobiology of Information Architecture - Alex Wright
"Much as we may like to think of ourselves as belonging to a uniquely privileged species, the fact is that every complex organism on this planet is engaged in a shared struggle with information overload."

Information overload - The Guardian (Saturday November 15, 2003)
Graham Farmelo gets to grips with Information: The New Language of Science by Hans Christian von Baeyer
"... Shannon's theory clarified the role of noise in communication. In a marvellous passage, Von Baeyer explains why clear communication depends on the presence of some noise because, without it, our senses would be overloaded by measuring or observing a single physical quantity. He likens the world to a complex and sharply detailed landscape, with the noise functioning as "a thick blanket of snow that softens contours into large, rounded mounds we can perceive and sort out without being overwhelmed"."

Clays May Have Aided Formation of Primordial Cells
October 24, 2003 - Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) researchers have discovered that clays may have been the catalysts that spurred the spontaneous assembly of fatty acids into the small sacs that ultimately evolved into the first living cells.

Cuneiform Press - Charles Olson
At Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, Olson's next stop, he was at his outgoing best for the first few days of a week-long reading/lecture visit, helping a young but receptive student audience though his latest mythohistorical Maximus run by airing his views on the poet's role as mythmaker -- reformulated, he said, following discussions a few days earlier with Dartmouth French poetry expert Ramon Guthrie. (Guthrie had pointed out to him that the medieval French verb trobar meant to find, allowing word-root fanatic Olson to link the troubadour poets with Herodotus, Homer, and himself in the tradition of the investigative storyteller, "the man who finds out the words.") But by the end of the week, both the poet himself and his wife [Betty Olson] had been summoned before the college Judiciary Committee, reprimanded for taking part in a wild drinking party on campus, and sternly "told to abide by community laws while there."
Tom Clark - Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet's Life

Q&A: The Geneva accord

posted by Andrew 12/01/2003 06:09:00 PM

Sunday, November 23, 2003

 
war anti-war and peace in the global village

Lecture by Marshall McLuhan - Florida State University - 1970
"One of the strange implications of the phonetic alphabet is private identity. Before literacy, before phonetic literacy, there had been no private identity. There had only been the tribal group. Homer knows nothing about private identity, Homer's world of the acoustic epic, the tribal encyclopedia of memorized wisdom, which Eric Havelock has reported so ably in his Preface to Plato, the Homeric epics were part of this acoustic wisdom that preceded literacy and which were phased out by literacy. Homer was wiped out by literacy. Homer had been the educational establishment of the Greeks for centuries. An educated Greek was one who had memorized Homer, who could sing it to his guitar or harp, and perform it in public. He was a gentleman and a free man. Along came the phonetic alphabet and Plato seized upon it and said: Let us abandon Homer and go for rational education. Plato's war on the poets was not a war on poetry, but a war on the oral tradition of education. Now today everyone in this room is being subjected to a new form of oral education. Literacy is still officially the educational establishment, but unofficially the oral forms are coming up very fast. This is the meaning of rock. It is a kind of education based upon oral tradition, an acoustic experience which is quite strangely remote from literacy. I will be glad to come back to the whole problem of rock and its relation to the modern city and the modern society. It's a very big subject and it is not very much studied. But rock is not something that is merely stuck onto the entertainment card as an extra item. Rock is a kind of central oral form of education which threatens the whole educational establishment. If Homer was wiped out by literacy, literacy can be wiped out by rock. We're playing playing the old story backwards, but you should know what the stakes are. The stakes are civilization ..."

Empire Falls - How Master and Commander gets Patrick O'Brian wrong
"The summa of O'Brian's genius was the invention of Dr. Stephen Maturin. He is the ship's gifted surgeon, but he is also a scientist, an espionage agent for the Admiralty, a man of part Irish and part Catalan birth - and a revolutionary. He joins the British side, having earlier fought against it, because of his hatred for Bonaparte's betrayal of the principles of 1789 - principles that are perfectly obscure to bluff Capt. Jack Aubrey. Any cinematic adaptation of O'Brian must stand or fall by its success in representing this figure."
Christopher Hitchens

Peter Krapp - Virilio on the Time of the Future
"In the dozen or so "dromology" books that Paul Virilio has published since 1976, he develops the thesis that if speed used to be the essence of war, today speed IS war. This war, however, is not led against an enemy, but against the materiality of the world."

Marshall McLuhan - War and Peace in the Global Village
War and Peace in the Global Village is a meditation on accelerating innovations leading to identity loss and war. McLuhan wrote this book [more than] thirty [five] years ago and following its publication predicted that the forthcoming information age would be "a transitional era of profound pain and tragic identity quest".

Close to the edge
"I think social and moral disengagement is repugnant. In the book [Hey, Nostradamus!] the opposite of labour is theft not leisure. And that's very much how I feel but there is part of me that wants to leave everything, like now. And I kind of fight that every day. The rational part of me says no you have to stay and engage in the culture and if you don't you're a coward."
Douglas Coupland

Sandra Blakeslee - How Does the Brain Work?
"In the continuing effort to understand the human brain, the mysteries keep piling up. Consider what scientists are up against. Stretched flat, the human neocortex - the center of our higher mental functions - is about the size and thickness of a formal dinner napkin.
[...] Researchers are finding that emotions arise from body states as well as brain states, confirming that the supposed distinction between mind and body is illusory.
Others are delving into individual differences. What makes one person empathic, another mean or shy or articulate or musical? How do genes relate to temperament and how is a baby's brain constructed from early experience? Specialized cells called mirror neurons seem to help babies imitate the world to learn gestures, facial expressions, language and feelings.
Brain chemistry is no longer the study of neuromodulators as "juices" that make us feel good or awake. Substances like serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine play crucial roles in learning, updating memories and neuropsychiatric disease.
The question of free will is on the table. Some of our behavior is conscious, but most of it is notoriously unconscious. So although we make choices, is free will mostly an illusion? And what is consciousness? In seeking an explanation, a new mystery has emerged. Many scientists now believe that the brain basically works by simulating reality."

What does it mean to be me?

"The quest for point zero in astrophysics, for the ultimate foundation of organic life in molecular biology, has its counterpart in the investigations of the human psyche. Freud himself privileged the comparison with archaeology, with the methodical excavation of successive strata of consciousness. Depth-psychology, in the Jungian programme, seeks to go even deeper. Its image could be that of probes into those marine trenches in the ocean floor, vents into the final deeps from whose turbulent volcanic heat emerge anaerobic life-forms and proto-organic shapes. We sense that the prehistory of the first person singular, of the organization of the ego, must have been long and conflictual. Autism and schizophrenia, as we now know them, may well be vestiges of this uncertain evolution, markers of a complex beginning as are background radiations in cosmology. Myths are replete with motifs which point towards the prolonged opaqueness of the individual self to itself, to the fragility and terror of the borderlines to be drawn between the 'I' and the other. In progressive interplay, neurophysiology, genetics, neurochemistry, the study of artificial intelligence and psychology, analytic and clinical, are edging towards the earliest sediments of mental being. The subconscious, even, conceivably, the outlying regions of the unconscious - of that first long night in us - is being drawn towards observation. This rising out of chaos is mimed perfectly in the celebrated initial chord of Wagner's Ring, whose resonance, simultaneously radiant and ominous, poses the question: as we comb the deeps, what monsters are we trawling?"
George Steiner - Grammars of Creation (Faber, 2002, pages 10-11)

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
In her Foreword to the Hesperus Press edition of 2003, pages vii-viii, Helen Dunmore writes:
"The evil of Mr Hyde is beyond doubt. It is florid, brutal, terrifying. He is identified with the snake and with the ape, and yet there is a cunning in his cruelty which is all too human. Descriptions of him are tense with fascination : Hyde moves 'with extraordinary quickness', he gives 'a hissing intake of the breath', he tramples calmly over a child's body 'like some damned Juggernaut'. He is evasive and he must be hunted. Indeed he must be hunted out, for the good of the tribe. In Utterson's words: 'If he be Mr Hyde, I shall be Mr Seek.'"

The Sign of Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Chapter 1 - The Science of Deduction
"Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle and rolled back his left shirtcuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction."

The Crime of the Sign: Dashiell Hammett's Detective Fiction
"Now I'm a detective because I happen to like the work ... And liking work makes you want to do it as well as you can. Otherwise there'd be no sense to it. That's the fix I am in. I don't know anything else, don't enjoy anything else, don't want to know or enjoy anything else. You can't weigh that against any sum of money."

Liquid Narrative
Narrative is one of the fundamental means by which we organize, explain and understand our own experiences. Aspects of narrative play a central role in our learning, our communication, our social interaction, our arts and our recreation. Why, then, isn't the structure of human-computer interaction designed to exploit our common orientation towards narrative?

Visualization as Interpretive Practice: The Case of Detective Fiction
Andrea Laue: "Cognitive narratologists are interested in the relation between the material artifacts we call texts and the interpretive practices enacted as we realize texts. Texts become series of cues which prompt activities in the reader, and it is these activities which give form to narrative."

Todd Gitlin reviews "Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just"
The American Prospect, Vol. 11 no. 3, December 20, 1999
"Eric Hobsbawm has argued that all revolutions - including the failed and the fatuous - generate a Puritanical streak that cannot abide unruly sex. He might just as well have added unruly beauty. Totalist politics tend to be greedy for the soul. Lenin is said to have deplored Beethoven's baleful influence, which made him want to stroke the heads of his enemies."

Does beauty really equal truth?
"And the word injury and the word injustice are the same word."
Elaine Scarry

Salon.com - 8 October 2003 - Blame it on Rio
David Ng writes: On June 12, 2000, a gunman hijacked a Rio bus in broad daylight and held a dozen passengers hostage in a five-hour standoff with the police. Ordinarily, such a routine act of violence might not have generated much public fascination, but due to police carelessness, the entire ordeal was caught live on national television, becoming Brazil's closest approximation to the O.J. Simpson freeway chase. This media orgy enabled the hijacker, a 21-year-old street kid named Sandro do Nascimento, to seize control of the situation and become an instant superstar in the process. (The broadcast scored the highest TV ratings in Brazil that year.)
Director José Padilha sifted through more than 24 hours of video footage to reconstruct the events of that surreal day. Supplemented by interviews with cops, social workers and the street kids with whom Nascimento spent much of his life, "Bus 174" mounts an ambitious investigation into the origins of urban violence. We learn that as a child Nascimento watched as gangsters gunned down his mother on her doorstep. [...]
José Padilha says: "Eleven people in Rio are murdered every day. Those are the official records. If you take into account that some murders are not reported, maybe the number is 20 for a day. If you add these numbers for a whole year, more people are murdered in Rio in one year than all the people who've been killed in the whole of the Israeli-Palestinian intifada since it began."

Roger Ebert reviews Bus 174
"Sandro do Nascimento is not merely poor, or hungry, or doomed to poverty, but suffers from the agonizing psychic distress of being invisible. Yes, says the movie, literally invisible: Brazilians with homes and jobs go about their lives while unable to see people like Sandro, who exists in a parallel universe."

In Our Own Image: A New Tribal Self
How do our media of communication work to create and recreate our individual and collective self? Chris Dunning wonders: "Can the split in our consciousness, the self/other construct that is the basis of all oppression, finally be mended?"

Donald Kalsched - Trauma and daimonic reality in Ferenczi's later work
Journal of Analytical Psychology (Vol. 48 Issue 4 Page 479) September 2003
"Jung and Ferenczi made independent discoveries of an 'archaic' (Jung) or 'primordial' (Ferenczi) layer of the psyche that shone through the 'basic fault' in the psyche opened by childhood trauma. This paper explores those parallels through an extended vignette of Ferenczi's work with Elizabeth Severn, known as 'R. N.' in the Clinical Diary. A remarkable inner object known as 'Orpha' appeared in the patient's trauma experience and saved a seed of personality from total annihilation. Ferenczi's speculation about this 'daimonic' object is cited along with his discussion of a trans-personal immaterial reality that Orpha makes visible, and that links the patient's ego-experience with a spiritual/material unity not ordinarily available to consciousness."

Floyd Merrell explores the ideas of Charles Sanders Peirce
It Becomes a Matter of the Self and Its Others:
"[...] For Peirce the self does not attain a state of self-awareness -- awareness of its other self -- until it has erred regarding its perception and conception of the Other "out there." When this occurs, the self artificially extricates itself from everything else in the universe which leads, residually, to what it is not as an objective realm set in the context of time and space -- and the Cartesian split suffers its first birth pains. Yet this move is necessary, though it need not necessarily be taken to its extreme manifestation. That is, there can be mindfulness of self and/in the Other rather than self pitted against the Other. Indeed, this relationship, which can be written self/other//Other, is a double binary which generates a triad, and what is most significant, a complementary relationship."

Citta Violenta by Oliver Craner (Friday, 14 November, 2003)
Crisis Management, Cold War-style.
"LeMay had formidable military credentials. In the final stages of World War II he he was put in charge of bombing Tokyo. To this end, LeMay devised a mean innovation. He stripped his B29s of guns and loaded them with incendiaries and explosives which he delivered in low-flying, night-time raids (in contrast to the accepted Strategic Air Command tactic of high-altitude bombing in the middle of the day). The tactical switch was devastating: Tokyo lit like a pyre, 100,000 died in 6 hours, temperatures at ground zero reached 1800 degrees Fahrenheit, canals boiled and metals melted. Despite the barbarity - and illegality - of the attack, LeMay's raid was acclaimed and the airforce adopted his technique wholesale. By 1945, 75% of the bombs dropped on Japan's 63 remaining cities were incendiaries, apart from Nagasaki and Hiroshima, which were nuked. After the war, LeMay took charge of the incompetent Strategic Air Force, building from scratch an airforce of unprecedented strength and reach. An American military icon - respected, feared, ridiculed and idolised in equal measure - his path to Air Force Chief of Staff was assured. Once there, he was - even compared to his belligerent colleagues - outspoken, aggressive and hard-hearted. Kennedy considered him typical of his type: unhelpful, absurd, almost inhuman, if effective during conflict. LeMay's own nuclear warplan entailed dropping 80% of the US stockpile in one operation, wiping out 70 Soviet cities in 30 days, killing 2.7 million people, and inflicting 4 million additional casualties. Airforce strategists called this plan "killing a nation".
When Robert McNamara took over as Secretary of Defence and advocated General Maxwell Tayler's doctrine of "flexible response" as opposed to "massive retaliation," the stage was set for a final showdown between civilian government and the Pentagon Chiefs of LeMay's stripe. This happened in 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis."

Friedrich Nietzsche - Human, All Too Human
About friends. [from Section VI. Man in Society]
Just think to yourself some time how different are the feelings, how divided the opinions, even among the closest acquaintances; how even the same opinions have quite a different place or intensity in the heads of your friends than in your own; how many hundreds of times there is occasion for misunderstanding or hostile flight. After all that, you will say to yourself: "How unsure is the ground on which all our bonds and friendships rest; how near we are to cold downpours or ill weather; how lonely is every man!" If someone understands this, and also that all his fellow men's opinions, their kind and intensity, are as inevitable and irresponsible as their actions; if he learns to perceive that there is this inner inevitability of opinions, due to the indissoluble interweaving of character, occupation, talent, and environment then he will perhaps be rid of the bitterness and sharpness of that feeling with which the wise man called out: "Friends, there are no friends!" Rather, he will admit to himself that there are, indeed, friends, but they were brought to you by error and deception about yourself; and they must have learned to be silent in order to remain your friend; for almost always, such human relationships rest on the fact that a certain few things are never said, indeed that they are never touched upon; and once these pebbles are set rolling, the friendship follows after, and falls apart. Are there men who cannot be fatally wounded, were they to learn what their most intimate friends really know about them? By knowing ourselves and regarding our nature itself as a changing sphere of opinions and moods, thus learning to despise it a bit, we bring ourselves into balance with others again. It is true, we have good reason to despise each of our acquaintances, even the greatest; but we have just as good reason to turn this feeling against ourselves. And so let us bear with each other, since we do in fact bear with ourselves; and perhaps each man will some day know the more joyful hour in which he says:
"Friends, there are no friends!" the dying wise man shouted.
"Enemies, there is no enemy!" shout I, the living fool.

John Knoblock: An Introduction to Friedrich Nietzsche

Michel de Montaigne: "There is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others."

Colin Burrow reviews Michel de Montaigne's Essays
"Montaigne above all does not seek to inculcate principle. Through their mingled musings, exemplary tales and character sketches, the Essays present not a clear set of values (although they do attach great weight to mercy and friendship) but a shifting pattern of dispositional preferences extended through space (more than a thousand pages) and time (more than two decades).
[...] Montaigne's thought processes and his shifting attitudes to his sources, his sudden frisks from what he has experienced to what he has read and back again, these are what the Essays are. They enable you to read dispositionally rather than methodically; that is, you build as you read a sense of the habits of mind underlying the associative trails, the jolts and starts, of each essay's progress."

Review: Godard by Colin MacCabe
"At the end of the book we find MacCabe acknowledging that 20th-century efforts to link avant-garde art to progressive politics have been dismal failures, Godard's included. Cinema has not changed the world, at least not for the better. All that remains for Godard is individual witness: collective work, presumably, being belatedly recognised as a delusion. Godard claimed recently that he now makes films for 100,000 friends around the world who can appreciate his difficult work. For those of us hoping Godard will make a snarlingly self-serving autobiographical blockbuster called A Shit is a Shit any time soon, this is disappointing news."
Stuart Jeffries

Loving Enemies, Loving Friends - [Book Review] Cross Currents, Winter, 1999
John P. Cleveland says: Just as Nietzsche stood at the end of the nineteenth century announcing through the mouth of the prophet Zarathustra a new humanity, capable of loving the friend who is distant and radically other, so Derrida stands at the end of the twentieth century announcing the possible arrival of lovers of humanity (arrivants). By loving at a distance a new kind of democracy is announced: a Nietzschean democracy! This new political "community without community", this "bondless bond", constitutes "friendship without memory itself, by fidelity, by the gentleness and rigour of fidelity, bondless friendship ... for the solitary one on the part of the solitary" (Jacques Derrida - Politics of Friendship, Verso, 1997, page 295).

Islam perverted: The Islamists have got it wrong
Islamism - a late 20th century totalitarian ideology that violates Islamic principles.
Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi writes: Islamists draw on modern European models that posit a scientific revolutionary movement, an elitist scheme of ruling society by means of secret cults that act behind the scenes, and a manufacture of consensus by means of propaganda. They reject those aspects of the Islamic tradition that do not fit with this political outlook.
Theirs is, in fact, an extremist ideology; they consider their organisations and militants as custodians of the projects for Islamising the world, and whoever criticizes them (be he a Muslim or a non-Muslim) is immediately accused of being anti-Islamic, "Islamophobic," and so forth. Unwilling to be ruled by non-Islamist Muslims, Islamists adopt an approach characterised by political supremacism.
Like other totalitarian ideologies, contemporary Islamism is blindly utopian. It implies a wholesale denial of history; the Islamists' model of an ideal society is inspired by the idealised image of seventh-century Arabia and an ahistorical view of religion and human development. It is based on anachronistic thinking that rejects modern concepts of pluralism and tolerance. And it ignores a history of Islam that is rich in models of heterogeneous social organisation and adaptation to the times.
[...]
In traditional Islam, military jihad and all other forms of material jihad constitute only the external aspect of jihad, while the inner dimension of jihad is the struggle that a Muslim undertakes to purify his soul from mundane desires, defects, and egotism. Jihad is not limited to the military arena but denotes striving hard toward a worthy goal. According to some sayings of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), "the best jihad for women is performing a valid pilgrimage," while "the jihad for someone who has old parents is taking care of them." According to a well-known tradition, after coming back from a military expedition, the Prophet Muhammad said, "We have returned from the lesser jihad to the greater jihad" (raja'na min jihad al-asghar ila jihad al-akbar). The Prophet was asked, "O, Messenger of Allah, what is the greater jihad?" He answered, "It is the jihad against one's soul."

Politics of Friendship (book review) by Colin MacCabe
[Initially published in The New Statesman, October 17, 1997]
"Political thought in the west is dominated by Hobbes and Rousseau, both of whom offer contractual accounts of the social -- dystopian or Utopian according to taste. Aristotle and Plato are read backward from this perspective.
Derrida rejects all such accounts, which presuppose a pre-contract identity, and neither Hobbes nor Rousseau rate a mention. Instead, Derrida focuses on the Greek tradition of friendship as the fundamental social relation and attempts to tease out the implications through a prolonged meditation on Aristotle's famous phrase, "Friends, there is no friend."
This paradoxical greeting is productive grist to the Derridean mill, not least because it does not appear in any of Aristotle's texts but only in an account of him by Diogenes Laertius, author of Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. It is thus, from the start, deprived of an "origin" which Derrida would have to deconstruct.
The book displays Derrida's astonishing interpretative powers to their fullest and he persuasively demonstrates how notions of friendship and enmity are crucial to any understanding of the social ..."

Networks, Netwars, and the Fight for the Future
David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla write: "The netwar spectrum also includes a new generation of social revolutionaries, radicals, and activists who are beginning to create information-age ideologies, in which identities and loyalties may shift from the nation state to the transnational level of "global civil society." New kinds of actors, such as anarchistic and nihilistic leagues of computer-hacking "cyboteurs," may also engage in netwar."

Salon.com News: Why the antiwar left must confront terrorism
William Schulz, director of Amnesty International USA, says: "In the face of a new kind of force in the world that is detrimental to human rights, the human rights community has been slow to adapt to that new reality, in both its understanding and its tactics."

Fueling Poverty - The Curse Of Oil - [Plastic.com]
"Thirty years ago, a Venezuelan Oil Minister and founding member of O.P.E.C., Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo, gave a strange if compelling speech to his fellow countrymen: "Ten years from now, 20 years from now, you will see, oil will bring us ruin. It's the devil's excrement. We are drowning in the devil's excrement." According to a new report (full PDF here) published by Christian Aid, Alfonzo's speech was depressingly prophetic. Rather than bringing benefits and enrichment to the citizens of oil producing countries, it has in fact, condemned the vast majority of them to poverty, corruption and oppressive governments. An earlier study by Professor Michael Ross of the University of California produced the startling evidence that in a typical Third World country with an oil industry, each 5% point rise in oil exports was matched by a 1% rise in child malnutrition," chatsubo writes. Christian Aid seeks to explain such an apparently counter-intuitive fact by outing four interconnected factors ..."

Making Oil Transparent - Op-Ed
The New York Times 6 July 2003
"It is a widely noted paradox that striking oil can be disastrous for a poor country. In Nigeria, Sudan, Angola, Venezuela and many other places, oil and gas have brought corruption and strife. Some of the reasons, such as oil's distorting effects on exchange rates, trade balances and credit, are hard to combat. But around the world, governments and oil companies are beginning to embrace a simple change that can help: strip the secrecy from the deals.
[...] Last year, the British government started the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, which seeks to persuade companies to disclose voluntarily their payments to resource-rich countries."

U.S. Renews Ties With Equatorial Guinea
Nov 17, 2003, DAKAR, Senegal - report by Todd Pitman: "Equatorial Guinea's president had his opponents imprisoned and tortured, had his presidential predecessor executed by firing squad, helped himself to the state treasury at will. State radio recently declared him "like God." Teodoro Obiang might seem an unlikely candidate for warmer relations with Washington, except for one thing -- his tiny West African country's got a tremendous amount of oil.
[...] Obiang keeps state oil proceeds a secret, and critics accuse him and other top officials of funneling hundreds of millions of dollars of oil money into private accounts in foreign banks.
[...] "If you talk to anybody in Equatorial Guinea, they'll say, 'We don't have access to that oil wealth," said Marise Castro, a researcher at Amnesty International in London. The country is so poor that many of its people live off what fruit they can yank off trees and what meat they can kill in the forests. Commerce outside the capital is largely limited to hunters lining dirt roads, selling charred bush-meat on sticks."

Dick's Special Interest in $87 Billion - The Nation
John Nichols reports: "Cheney aides claim all the talk about the Vice President's ties to Halliburton are a "a political cheap shot." But as the details of Halliburton's sweetheart contract, its overcharging of the U.S. government and the ever expanding value of its contracts with the Pentagon are revealed, what Cheney aides call a "cheap shot" is starting to look like a smoking gun."

More U.S. Families Hungry or Too Poor to Eat, Study Says
WASHINGTON, Nov. 1 (AP) -- Despite the nation's struggle with obesity, the Agriculture Department says, more and more American families are hungry or unsure whether they can afford to buy food. About 12 million families last year worried that they did not have enough money for food, and 32 percent of them experienced someone's going hungry at one time or another [...] Some 34.6 million Americans were living in poverty last year, 1.7 million more than in 2001, according to the Census Bureau.
In the United States, 65 percent of adults and 13 percent of children are overweight, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Barbara Laraia, an associate professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said hunger and obesity could coexist because many hungry families buy high-calorie foods that are low in nutrients.
"They're dependent on foods that are going to make their bellies feel full, rather than on nutrients," Ms. Laraia said. "The diet is compromised." Many families will spend their incomes on fixed expenses before buying food. "Food is the most elastic part of the budget," Ms. Laraia said, "meaning that's what households will compromise on when they have fixed payments such as their rent and their utilities."

Ubu goes to Africa - The Guardian (Saturday August 9, 2003)
Alfred Jarry viciously satirised the grossness and greed of the French bourgeoisie. Nobel winner Wole Soyinka explains why his play is perfect for modern Zimbabwe [...]
"We have of course been here before, not once, not twice, but perennially, and each tyrant had his impeccable logic to floor all detractors. Mobutu Sese Seko, the couturier of leopard-skin machismo in his heydays, flung the cult of the African authenticité in the face of his opponents whenever he ran out of productive ideas - which was all the time. Every act of Mobutu was trumpeted as being undertaken in the cause of the restoration of the African past, of African condemned values, a contestation of the European negation of an African authentic being and the dignity of the black race. Virtually single-handedly however, Mobutu methodically looted his nation's resources, pauperised the inordinately endowed nation of Congo/Zaire, turned himself into a multi-billionaire with holdings in Switzerland and Belgium in a rampage that beggared even the insatiable rapacity of his erstwhile colonial master, King Leopold of Belgium, proprietor of the obscenely named Congo Free State."

James Joyce - Finnegans Wake (Book 1 Chapter 4)
"Toties testies quoties questies. The war is in words and the wood is the world. Maply me, willowy we, hickory he and yew yourselves. Howforhim chirrupeth evereach - bird! From golddawn glory to glowworm gleam."

A Finnegans Wake Gaarden - M
A reference guide to the allusions to plants and trees, apparent and supposed, in the Wake.
"Joyce promotes his tree fertility theme after declaring 'the war is in words and the wood is the world' by parodying a counting out rhyme."

Animal Farm by George Orwell
"Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend. And remember also that in fighting against Man, we must not come to resemble him. Even when you have conquered him, do not adopt his vices. No animal must ever live in a house, or sleep in a bed, or wear clothes, or drink alcohol, or smoke tobacco, or touch money, or engage in trade. All the habits of Man are evil. And, above all, no animal must ever tyrannize over his own kind. Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers. No animal must ever kill any other animal. All animals are equal.
And now, comrades, I will tell you about my dream of last night."
George Orwell - Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (Penguin, 1951, pages 11-12)

Orwell Alone, Patron Saint of Inconsistency
Writing in The New York Times on the 9 November 2003 Benjamin Schwarz states:
In pointing up the unspoken political and social assumptions behind cultural artifacts and works of literature, [George Orwell] practically invented what we now call ''cultural studies.''

George Orwell: Politics & the English Language

"In Burma the issue had been quite simple. The whites were up and the blacks were down, and therefore as a matter of course one's sympathy was with the blacks. I now realised that there was no need to go as far as Burma to find tyranny and exploitation. Here in England, down under one's feet, were the submerged working class, suffering miseries which in their different way were as bad as any an oriental ever knows. The word 'unemployment' was on everyone's lips. That was more or less new to me, after Burma, but the drivel which the middle classes were still talking ('These unemployed are all unemployables', etc. etc.) failed to deceive me. I often wonder whether that kind of stuff deceives even the fools who utter it. On the other hand I had at that time no interest in Socialism or any other economic theory. It seemed to me then - it sometimes seems to me now, for that matter - that economic injustice will stop the moment we want it to stop, and no sooner, and if we genuinely want it to stop the method adopted hardly matters."
George Orwell - The Road to Wigan Pier [originally published in 1937]
(Penguin, 2001, pages 138-139)

George Orwell: Politics & the English Language

"Orpheus recognized and glorified the Muse; in gratitude she lent him her own magical powers, so that he made trees dance -- "trees," in ancient Europe, being a widely-used metaphor of the poetic craft."
Robert Graves - Mammon and the Black Goddess (Cassell, 1965, page 159)

A Portrait of the Artist's Troubled Daughter
"She was the light giver, the "wonder wild," James Joyce wrote of his daughter, Lucia. She was what Joyce scholars call the "Rainbow girl" in his masterpiece, "Finnegans Wake," Issy the temptress, who magically breaks up into the colors of the rainbow. Lucia had a mind "as clear and as unsparing as the lightning," Joyce once wrote in a letter. "She is a fantastic being."
But for the most part Lucia has been a marginal figure in her father's biographies, a sad girl with a crooked eye who was rejected by Samuel Beckett, her boyfriend and her father's secretary, and who died in an asylum in 1982. But now a new book, "Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), by Carol Loeb Shloss, a professor of English at Stanford University, argues that not only was Lucia an extraordinary artist in her own right, she was also central to the creation of "Finnegans Wake," perhaps more so than her mother, Nora, long seen as the main inspiration for the female characters.
"Lucia was a centrally important muse to Joyce, who inspired him and whom he depended upon," Ms. Shloss said in an interview. Their relationship "helped to change the course of modern literature," she said.
[...] Dinitia Smith's article in The New York Times on 22 November 2003 continues:
"In the early drafts you can find Joyce using names of Lucia's boyfriends," Ms. Shloss said. "We find Lucia's dance teachers sprinkled all through there. Once you see the creativity of the child, you see the father learning new things about the world through her. The very language of 'Finnegans Wake' " -- words in perpetual motion, Ms. Shloss said -- "is a reflection of Lucia's interest in dance."
James Joyce's Daughter, Scars and All

all my eggs are broken, all my dreams are stolen, I am adrift ....
crater fender on a ship of fools

Jan Svankmajer: Alchemist of the Surreal
Fresh out of Water:Message to the Fish

The Use & Abuse of Violence by James Bowman [via Dr. Weevil]
"G. K. Chesterton once pointed out the intellectual legerdemain involved in the prohibitionist case against "alcohol." Nobody, Chesterton observed, drinks "alcohol," and nobody wants to. People drink beer and wine and whisky and brandy and frozen daquiris and pina coladas. "Alcohol" is merely some chemist's fancy, an attempt to render uniform drinkers' diverse behavior by identifying a common ingredient in what they drink. This is not a trivial point. We may not understand why someone chooses to drink, but it is a step away from understanding to deny that he has made a choice at all and instead to buy the chemist's story about how a mythical monster called "alcohol" has enslaved him.
The same thing is true, mutatis mutandis, of "violence." The word is torn from its natural context and made to stand on its own as a new bugbear to haunt the liberal imagination. Who commits "violence" -- still less its evil twin "senseless violence"? The expression merely reinforces the implicit assumption of "violence" alone: namely that, like "alcohol," it is a ravening monster with a life of its own whose motivations are inscrutable. I think this monster is even more a chimera than "alcohol." People rob and assault and rape and kill each other not for the sake of the violence but for some other end. And sometimes, as in the case of self-defense, violent acts are justified."

George Orwell: Politics and the English Language
"Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks."

Charles Fort suggested: "... if there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte. One measures a circle beginning anywhere."

Sartre Redux - Scott McLemee [via ALD]
"The creation of a world in which basic needs are met -- in which no one's freedom is subordinated to the "systemic violence" of dehumanizing privation -- is, for Sartre, the ultimate horizon of any meaningful notion of freedom."

JG Ballard: Prophet With Honour: SPIKE magazine
David B. Livingstone writes: Ballard views his years in the camps as a painful education in the barbarous capabilities of humankind. "I don't think you can go through the experience of war without one's perceptions of the world being forever changed. The reassuring stage set that everyday reality in the suburban west presents to us is torn down; you see the ragged scaffolding, and then you see the truth beyond that, and it can be a frightening experience. The war came, I spent three years in the camp, and I saw adults under stress, some of them giving way to stress, some recovering and showing steadfast courage. It was a great education; when you see the truth about human beings it's beneficial, but very challenging, and those lessons have stayed with me all my life."

Atalanta fugiens emblems 21 - 25

Letter from Marshall McLuhan to Ezra Pound (June 22, 1951)
"This is not set down in pique, nor extenuation. I am an intellectual thug who has been slowly accumulating a private arsenal with every intention of using it. In a mindless age every insight takes on the character of a lethal weapon. Every man of goodwill is the enemy of society. Lewis saw that years ago. His "America and Cosmic Man" was an H-bomb let off in the desert. Impact nil. We resent or ignore such intellectual bombs. We prefer to compose human beings into bombs and explode political and social entities. Much more fun. We want to get rid of people entirely. And it is necessary to admire the skill and thoroughness with which we have made our preparations to do this. I am not of the "we" party. I should prefer to de-fuse this gigantic human bomb by starting a dialogue somewhere on the side-lines to distract the trigger-men, or to needle the somnambulists. In London 1910 you faced various undesirable states of mind. Since then the word has been used to effect a universal hypnosis. How are words to be used to unweave the spell of print? Of radio commercials and "news"-casts? I'm working on that problem. The word is now the cheapest and most universal drug.
Consider the effect of modern machinery in imposing rhythm on human thought and feeling. Archaic man got inside the thing that terrified him - tiger, bear, wolf - and made it his totem god. To-day we get inside the machine. It is inside us. We in it. Fusion. Oblivion. Safety. Now the human machines are geared to smash one another. You can't shout warnings or encouragement to these machines. First there has to be a retracing process. A reduction of the machine to human form. Circe only turned men into swine. Our problem is tougher."
Letters of Marshall McLuhan (Oxford University Press, 1987, page 227)

Robert Hooke wrote: "The footsteps of Nature are to be trac'd, not only in her ordinary course, but when she seems to be put to her shifts, to make many doublings and turnings, and to use some kind of art in indeavouring to avoid our discovery."

posted by Andrew 11/23/2003 05:42:00 PM