Friday, July 25, 2003

 
dreams go on branching out

Tjebbe van Tijen: Ars Oblivendi
"The landscape is a collective memory device that maps stories of the past in actual space ... Tales and stories can thus be remembered as one walks along a trail. Similarly the nomenclature of streets and sites in villages and cities, and topographical naming in general have a function to remind us of the past -- of historical figures, events, and sentiments. In principle any landscape, any build environment, whether rural or urban, is a living representation of time in space. Where landscape features are eroded or erased, where the juxtaposition of various building styles from different periods has given way to a dominant form of build environment, this memory function has diminished or is lost. Then it is only remaining pictorial representations and written records that can tell what came before. One has to dig "down through layers of memories and representations toward the primary bedrock, laid down centuries or even millennia ago, and then working up again toward the light of contemporary recognition." Simon Schama - Landscape and Memory - (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995, page 16)

Adam & Eve threw God out of Eden
'They threw God out of the Garden'
Letters from Gregory Bateson to Philip Wylie and Warren McCulloch
Greg Bateson writes:- "Mind is not like an iceberg. But the vulgar scientist talks and plans as if mind resembled iceberg. He plans and acts upon his plans."

Matt Jones - Mark this bee, and mark it well...
Causality, confluence and coincidence are things we suspect are becoming fathomable ...

Richard Eyre - Houellebecq's unstable Platform
... the Dixielanders of Sicily ... played "Tiger Rag" and seemed, if only briefly, to challenge the Houellebecqian universe: "We live in a world in which there are no links. We're just particles." I don't think so.

"Extensible Minds": Will XML Affect Human Consciousness?
"Layered markup hierarchies help solve the "platypus problem" caused by the egg-laying mammals that constantly beleaguer fixed taxonomies."
Ivan Schneider

Permalinks and trackback are the key to the semantic web - David Galbraith
So what are the limitations of permalinks as they are currently implemented ...

Jie-Hong Morrison - Understanding information taxonomy helps build better apps
"The term taxonomy was originally borrowed from the life sciences discipline, where a plant or animal is placed in a single spot describing its hierarchical relationship to other plants and animals. Taxonomy is essentially a type of conceptual framework. It is not a product and has no direct relationship with sales or revenue. When used in the context of the Internet, taxonomy refers to the effective structuring of content within a defined scope to facilitate easy and accurate access."

Culture and Usability: Will Design Patterns ease Problems of Context? - Ann Light
Speaking at the 2nd HCI and Culture Workshop at the University of Greenwich last month, Chris Lawson at the University of Luton described his work, supported by Shailey Minocha and Pat Hall of the Open University, comparing the usefulness of guidelines and design patterns for developing artefacts over different cultures.
'The [developer] organisation will simply wish to make the least amount of changes possible to make the existing product acceptable to the target culture,' he said, explaining the background to his evaluation.
He then quoted Shneiderman and his eight golden rules of interface design that Shneiderman claims are 'applicable in most interactive systems'. The first of these is to strive for consistency. However, Lawson pointed out that guidelines were themselves a product of a particular culture, and that consistency was a construct likely to be identified and to appeal in America, which is the second most universalist culture in the world (according to research by Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner).

Technology Review: Master of Design - June 25, 2003
Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, spoke with Technology Review Deputy Editor Herb Brody about the process and the philosophy that goes behind fitting technological advances to human needs and habits.
TIM BROWN: The naive view of designing is that it's purely an additive process, about adding more and more and more. Actually, design is a funnel-shaped thing. It becomes an editing process: What is appropriate? What can be stripped away? So design is a holistic way of thinking. It's about being able to create the whole of something, and in such a way that somebody who's using that product, whether for the first time or the tenth time, understands it, can interact with it as seamlessly as possible.

McGee's Musings - Weblogs and knowledge management
The simplicity of weblogs is the central reason for their success and their promise as a tool for making knowledge work easier. That same simplicity also makes weblogs (and wikis for that matter) a hard sell into organizational settings.
Technology vendors do not make money by demonstrating easy solutions to problems. Managerial wisdom in organizations is about learning to apply the 80/20 rule ruthlessly. Technology developers love to solve the tricky problems and handle the edge cases. Technology vendors have all learned to sell against one another through feature wars. No one wants to invest the time to learn how to use the tools at hand to solve the problems at hand.
Knowledge workers have limited capacity to absorb new ideas and practices into their already overfull lives. You can suck up that limited capacity in learning the ins and outs of some fancy new knowledge management tool or you can use that capacity for examining individual and group work practices and adapting them. Weblogs and wikis let you dial in that balance in a different, and potentially better, place than more complex tools.
Here's a bit of design wisdom that is particularly important now as we seriously begin to think about how to blend technology and organizational practice to get to better knowledge work:
"In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away."
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

InfoWorld Interviews - Paul Saffo
Adler: Let me quote one of my favorite lines of yours, and ask you about it. You said that "progress isn't built on the spires of successful technologies; rather it's built on the rubble of failed technologies that went before." I'm curious as to what might be some of the currently fashionable technologies that are likely to supply the rubble for the next generation.
Saffo: The very best example is Jaron Lanier's observation about standards. Jaron talks about something he calls "karma-vertigo." He says that we are all preoccupied with trying to get standards established, and that's a good thing. But few people realize that once standards are established they stay around for vastly longer than we would wish and are used for purposes we never intended. And that's where vertigo comes in because if people realized the consequence of the standards karma they would be completely immobilized.
A good example of technological rubble is e-mail. When you send an e-mail, think of the stratigraphic column of standards that your piece of e-mail is sitting on top of. There's the simple mail transfer protocol, and then some operating system stuff. Below that is ASCII, and ASCII is a good case of a limiting technology. It doesn't do compound letters that other cultures need, so everybody has to modify it to fit their needs. And ASCII was not even intended for e-mail. It was invented in the 1950s for a machine that never quite existed. And yet there are layers below that. There's grammatical convention and at the very bottom is the alphabet.
So the idle musings of a bored Babylonian farmer sitting by a canal many thousands of years ago, pressing a stick into wet clay, provided some of the inputs that determine how we use keyboards and computers today. But it really is a stratigraphic column built of the rubble of older standards that were just packed in and built on top of.
Adler: So what you're saying is that they're never discarded, but they truly are built upon, layer upon layer?
Saffo: Yes, but built upon and changed and selectively taken and used for new purposes... I mean, by saying that the new technologies are built on the rubble of the old ones, what I'm saying is nothing does go away, but it stays around in unexpected ways.

A Talk with Brian Eno
"As long as culture is talked about as though it's a kind of nice little add-on to make things look a bit better in this sort of brutal life we all lead, as long as it's just seen as the icing on the cake, then people won't realize that it's the medium in which we're immersed, and which is forming us, which is making us what we are and what we think."

Robotic Nation - Marshall Brain
"The iceberg looks like this. On that same day, I interacted with five different automated systems like the kiosks ... "

Culture and Usability: ATMs and the Mumbai Story
"Perhaps most interestingly, those with ATM cards would share them in small groups of friends. It would be made available to anyone who needed it and so the PIN would be widely known - raising a new set of security issues."

"Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as in an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside."
Marshall McLuhan - The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Future Paradigm
In Search of the Paradigm Shift

In Search of Serendipity
"Although Google is automated, it exploits information painstakingly collected by thousands of individuals ... Google ... can only identify characteristics that match up perfectly with key words that people use to search for information. It can't infer any attributes that aren't precisely spelled out and loaded onto a web site. Moreover, it can't make subtle, creative connections between descriptions and attributes, and it can't find information that is hidden in the text."

Circadian Shift
Somewhere between pattern recognition and cognitive dissonance

The Global Mind - Mark Pilkington
" ... as the Egg network grows, so too does the enigma surrounding its data."

Standard of truth - Disenchanted
"Professional scholars have lived next door to libraries since the ancient Greeks, but even as recently as the early 1990s when multimedia encyclopedias on CD-ROM were all the rage, the average among us never exploited the sum of human knowledge, even when it was right there in front of us."

Kevin Kelly: The Web Runs on Love, Not Greed
"The Internet is less a creation dictated by economics than it is a miracle and a gift."

The Doric Column - William Hoffman - January 18, 1999
We may think that we are realists -- that a rose is a rose is a rose, that you can see it, feel it, smell it, and hold it in your hand, that it has an existence independent of your perception of it. But Borges would describe us as "inveterate nominalists" in the view of Floyd Merrell, author of Unthinking Thinking: Jorge Luis Borges, Mathematics, and the New Physics (Purdue Research Foundation, 1991).
"In medieval times the debate concerning the relationship between words and their referents became the realist-nominalist controversy -- found at the core of Borges 'metaphysical narrative,'" Merrell wrote. The magic of the spoken word, dominant in Greek, Roman, and Medieval civilizations, reigned supreme "until the age of the printed word, when the visual linguistic image gradually became the image for assimilating knowledge."

Quantum - and Textual - Interconnectedness - by Floyd Merrell
"Matter and empty space, the full and the void, constituted the dichotomy of atomism from Democritus to Newton. According to general relativity, in contrast, the two poles cannot be separated. Wherever there is a massive body, there will be a gravitational field manifested by a curvature of space around that body; all matter is inseparable from space as independent parts of a single whole. Neither is there an absolute distinction between matter and energy. According to field theory, a material particle such as an electron is merely a small domain of the electrical field, within which the field strength has assumed values of enormous magnitude, indicating that a comparatively large field is concentrated in a very small space. Such an "energy knot", which by no means is clearly delineated against the remaining field, "propagates through ... space like a water wave across the surface of a lake; there is no such thing as one and the same substance of which the electron consists at all times" (Weyl 1949, 171). The field exists always and everywhere, and a part of it cannot be effectively isolated from the whole. It is the carrier of all material phenomena, the "void" out of which "particles" emerge and fade. In ordinary life, we are not aware of this unity; we divide our surroundings into separate objects and events. This division is practical and necessary, but it is not the fundamental nature ..."

Digging for Googleholes - Google may be our new god, but it's not omnipotent
"We're wrong to think of Google as a pure reference source. It's closer to a collectively authored op-ed page -- filled with bias, polemics, and a skewed sense of proportion -- than an encyclopedia."
Steven Johnson

Searching for Cyberspace: Joyce, Borges, and Pynchon - Davin O'Dwyer
The 'memex' machine mooted by Vannevar Bush in the pages of Atlantic Monthly magazine, in 1945, is often heralded as the original conception of hypertext. "A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory? It affords an immediate step, however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing."
It is the 'trails' between relevant documents, then, that constitute the 'memex'; the trails in effect become the document....
Joyce's work reflects the urge to map the universe, to write the book of books, to capture all meaning in creating Finnegans Wake. One aspect of his technique is not dissimilar to that of the Internet, for in his frantic compression of language and forging of words, he demands the reader make hyperlinks in his mind."

posted by Andrew 7/25/2003 01:46:00 PM

Saturday, July 19, 2003

 
world knot found

'Imagination is the true fire, stolen from Heaven, to animate the cold creature of clay'.
Mary Wollstonecraft

A �maybe� state of mind
A regular study group meets at Wilson's house to discuss his two favorite authors, James Joyce and Ezra Pound about whom he is currently writing a book "Tale of the Tribe."
"They're very important writers for our times," he said. "They were both writing multiculturally, and we really need that. Everywhere you go are people with the same dumb superstitions and the same urge to transcend them."

Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal
"No normalist has yet produced even a totally normal dog, an average cat, or even an ordinary chickadee. Attempts to find an average Bird of Paradise, an ordinary haiku or even a normal cardiologist have floundered pathetically. The normal, the average, the ordinary, even the typical, exist only in statistics, i.e. the human mathematical mindscape. They never appear in external space-time, which consists only and always of nonnormal events in nonnormal series."
Robert Anton Wilson

Answer to the mystery of life is four
" ... the heart of every mammal beats roughly the same number of times in its average lifetime - around 1.5 billion times - regardless of whether it is a dog or a human, a mouse or an elephant."

Mind, Brain and the Quantum - David Pearce reviews Michael Lockwood's book
"Does introspection grant us privileged insight into the intrinsic nature of the stuff of the world? Michael Lockwood's startling answer is yes. Quantum mechanics may indeed supply a mathematically complete formal description of the universe. Yet what "breathes fire into" the quantum-theoretic equations, it transpires, isn't physical in the traditional sense at all."

Occulture Festival 2003 - Brighton occult and esoteric festival - Performance
The New York City Tattoo Convention
Winged Migration

"To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself."
Soren Kierkegaard

Everything is illuminated - Painted Labyrinth
" ... the Celtic wheel cross, the most obvious symbol of Celtic Christianity, has recently been shown to have been a Coptic invention ..."

Jo Nash reviews 'Cognitive Models and Spiritual Maps'
"If we can explain eventually the cause and development of spiritual experiences neuropsychologically, then will we be able to call them 'spiritual' in future? My answer would be yes ... "

separation of state and science - [frogcircus]
I ran across an interesting quote this morning while reading Paul Feyerabend's Against Method:
"Such a balanced presentation of the evidence may even convince us that the time is overdue for adding the separation of state and science to the by now quite customary separation of state and church. Science is only one of the many instruments people invented to cope with their surroundings. It is not the only one, it is not infallible and it has become too powerful, too pushy, and too dangerous to be left on its own."

An Interview with Amory Lovins
" ... as Edwin Land (inventor of the Polaroid camera) said, in order to have a new idea we need to stop having an old idea ... "

Unsnarling the World-Knot
The mind-body problem, which Schopenhauer called the "world-knot," has been a central problem for philosophy since the time of Descartes. Among realists - those who accept the reality of the physical world - the two dominant approaches have been dualism and materialism, but there is a growing consensus that, if we are ever to understand how mind and body are related, a radically new approach is required.
David Ray Griffin develops a third form of realism, one that resolves the basic problem (common to dualism and materialism) of the continued acceptance of the Cartesian view of matter.

Nature Has a Mind of Its Own
"Award-winning novelist Daniel Quinn once said that we don�t just tell our stories, we enact them. In other words, we live our stories, and we change the world accordingly."
Christian de Quincey

Problems and Prospects of World Governance at the Beginning of the XXI Century
Deep and thorough social transformations, such as the ones occurring in the age of globalization, nurture the need for new concepts, new theories, and new narratives. In the XVII and XVIII centuries, a scientific revolution took place alongside the economic and political revolutions, first in the physical and natural sciences and then in the social sciences. Today, the speed of scientific and technological innovations and the scope of social changes have not been matched by a parallel development of new paradigms and theories of the social world. Some think that the main cause of this state of affairs is the fragmentation of knowledge, while others focus on the lack of confidence in the interpretative capacity of social scientists themselves. The result is that the sociological imagination often gives the impression of lagging behind and being inadequate to confront the scope of transformation. Beck exaggerates in pointing out that most contemporary sociologists work with "zombie-concepts", but it is true that we have to modify our perspective and follow Rabelais' Gargantua's advice to avoid "the building of the new with dead stones."
Alberto Martinelli

Lone cells reflect mind's eye
New research has shown ... that a significant proportion of the same neurones fire when people recall objects, faces, patterns and so on, as fire when people actually see these things. For vision, as for recall, different neurones fire depending on what is being processed - a face, or a map, say.

sympathy for the kernel

"It is us he inhabits, not the underworld, nor the stars in the sky. The spirit who lives in us makes those." Agrippa von Nettesheim, Epist. V

The Role of The Humanities in Global Culture: Questions and Hypotheses - Mikhail Epstein
Interrogo ergo cogito

Is that a fly in your pants, or are you just happy to see me - Metafilter
Not with a bang but a whimper

Mistah Kurtz�s New Job
"There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky ... "

Preparing for War, Stumbling to Peace - via Best of the Blogs
The military's sprint to Baghdad initially vindicated Rumsfeld's prime directive to transform the U.S. armed forces into a lighter, more mobile force. It shortened the war, probably prevented many of the disasters the Pentagon had been planning for and saved lives during the takeover of Iraq. One senior Central Command official said the still-classified battle plan called for as many as 125 days of combat. Baghdad fell in just 20.
But the quick victory also created what Franks called "catastrophic success."

Soldiers Stuck in Baghdad Feel Let Down
U.S. civilians are weak link in Iraq reconstruction effort
via The liberal bias media

No flies on Bush
"My distinguished former colleague, the dean of Canadian columnists David Warren, brilliantly characterised what�s going on in Iraq as 'carefully hung flypaper'. In other words, the US occupation of Iraq is bringing Saudis and other Islamonutters out of the surrounding swamps - and that�s a good thing. If they�re really so eager to strike at the Great Satan, better they attack its soldiers in Iraq than its commuters on the Golden Gate Bridge."
Mark Steyn - probably wrote this at home

"The flattened dome of the sky and the hundred other visible things underneath, including the brain itself - in short, the entire world - exist, for each of us, only as part of our consciousness, and they perish with it. This enigma wrapped within a mystery of how subjective experience relates to certain objectively describable events is what Arthur Schopenhauer brilliantly called the "world knot."
Gerald M. Edelman & Giulio Tononi - 'Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination'
(Penguin, 2001, page 2)

Mind Games - Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi dodge the question of free will
What [Schopenhauer] calls the "world knot", in 'On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason', is "the identity of the subject of willing with that of knowing".
Steven Poole

Osiris Murdoch

Enthusiasm Re-enacting Easter Rising
"Today, it is almost impossible for us to realise what the old Greeks meant by god, or theos. Everything was theos; but even so, not at the same moment. At the moment, whatever struck you was god. If it was a pool of water, the very watery pool might strike you: then that was god; or the blue gleam might suddenly occupy your consciousness: then that was god; or a faint vapour at evening rising might catch the imagination: then that was theos; or thirst might overcome you at the sight of the water: then the thirst itself was god; or you drank, and the delicious and indescribable slaking of thirst was the god; or you felt the sudden chill of the water as you touched it: and then another god came into being, "the cold": and this was not a quality, it was an existing entity, almost a creature, certainly a theos: the cold; or again, on the dry lips something suddenly alighted: it was "the moist", and again a god. Even to the early scientists or philosophers, "the cold", "the moist", "the hot", "the dry" were things in themselves, realities, gods, theoi. And they did things.
With the coming of Socrates and "the spirit", the cosmos died. For two thousand years man has been living in a dead or dying cosmos, hoping for a heaven hereafter. And all the religions have been religions of the dead body and the postponed reward ... "
D.H.Lawrence - Apocalypse (Penguin, 1995, pages 95 - 96)

The Teachings of Iamblichus
Minotaur & Sniggle Theory

"There is an active imagination in the mind, of which figuration is a part, by means of which we create the world of our experiences. We have for so long buried it under our rational, intellective faculties that we have fooled ourselves into thinking it does not exist, but it continues to flourish, with or without our notice. Goethe was acutely aware of it and sought to make it the basis of science as well as art. Coleridge placed it at the core of his whole philosophy. Rudolph Steiner put it into practice in a radical new approach to medicine, agriculture, education, and spiritual enlightenment. Einstein felt it in the very creation of a new science. Nor is it the exclusive possession of the genius, nor the private property of the individual. Our creative, intuitive imagination is something we all share and through which we collectively project our reality."
Roger S. Jones - Physics as Metaphor (Abacus, 1983, page 202)

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time - The Apocalypse
Our understanding of history itself owes much to the apocalyptic way of thinking.

Daddy of DNA bids to unlock mysteries of the brain - Deborah Smith
The man responsible for the most important scientific discovery last century has no doubts about the biggest challenge in this one.
"If I was 19 again my focus would be on the brain," said James Watson, the Nobel Laureate who helped work out the double helix structure of DNA 50 years ago. "It's a wonderful puzzle."

Final frontier to be conquered this century
The final frontier of genetic science, understanding what makes the human mind tick, will be conquered by the end of the century, one of the founding fathers of genetics predicted yesterday.
Nobel prize-winning scientist Sir John Sulston led the project to sequence the entire human genome, which was finalised in April and is one of the star attractions at the Melbourne congress.
Sir John said he disagreed that deconstructing the "I" of the human mind was impossible and destructive. "Some say that this is impossible, that there is no way a thinking machine can understand itself," he said.
"In my own personal homespun philosophy I rather doubt that. I think actually we will be capable of understanding it - perhaps not grasping it as a whole but certainly understanding how each part interacts. At some point, very likely during this coming century, we're going to say, 'Yeah, now I see how thought works, now I understand what consciousness is'. "

Edge 69

"This division of art and science is temporary. It didn't exist in the past, and there's no reason why it should go on in the future. Just as art consists not simply of works of art but of an attitude, the artistic spirit, so does science consist not in accumulation of knowledge but in the creation of fresh modes of perception. The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained".
David Bohm

posted by Andrew 7/19/2003 03:42:00 PM

Wednesday, July 09, 2003

 
towards a democracy of the senses

seeing with tongues
"The gear I'm wearing was invented by Paul Bach-y-Rita, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Bach-y-Rita has devoted much of his career to a single, revolutionary concept: that our senses are interchangeable. The brain, Bach-y-Rita and many other neuroscientists believe, is an organ of astonishing plasticity ...
"We don't see with our eyes," Bach-y-Rita is fond of saying. "we see with our brains." The ears, eyes, nose, tongue, and skin are just inputs that provide information."
Michael Abrams

synesthesia, in which a person's senses are mixed, creates surprising brain changes
Sensory information within the cerebral cortex was thought to flow from lower to higher stages of processing: the lower, or earlier stages are thought to simply process elementary features of stimuli while the higher, or later, stages are believed to integrate the bottom up flow of sensory information with behaviorally relevant, internal state-dependent, components of tasks. The early cortical areas are generally believed to passively reflect changes in the environment, showing limited plasticity even to changes in sensory input.
"Our work overturns this view," [Mriganka] Sur says. "We show that neurons in the primary visual cortex, the very first stage of visual processing within the cortex, rapidly alter their responses when non-visual inputs such as those related to reward are altered. In similar behavioral experiments, we show that visual discrimination is similarly altered. Thus, neurons early in the visual pathway can quickly acquire information about reward conditions and then change their responses (and visual perception) depending on the expectation of reward."
The results suggest that rapid plasticity in the visual cortex may combine with slower, more persistent, forms of plasticity observed in the higher brain areas in order to modulate behavioral decisions.
In the work on synesthesia - the unusual phenomenon of seeing sounds or seeing specific colors upon seeing specific numerals ...

Neuroscience and Thomas Aquinas
The task Aquinas assigned to the "interior sense" sensus communis -- the ability to synthesize input from the various external senses -- is now studied by neuroscientists as "the binding problem."

Paul Buhle - The New Scholarship of Comics
"Comic books were, after all, overwhelmingly our first reading matter ... "

Andrew O Baoill - Slashdot and the Public Sphere <> Drucilla Cornell - Enlightening the Enlightenment
"Immanuel Kant's ironic claim that - "if I have a book to have understanding in place of me, a spiritual adviser to have a conscience for me, a doctor to judge my diet for me, and so on, I need not make any efforts at all" - was part of a clear case in favour of the use of rational thought in decision-making, protected from the influence of church and state."

Bruce Bower - Science News Online, May 24, 2003
Scripted Brains: Learning to read evokes hemispheric trade-off
"From childhood through adolescence, budding readers display gradually intensifying neural activity in parts of the brain's left hemisphere that discern relationships between sounds and letters ..."

Michelle Goldberg reviews 'Persepolis' & 'Reading Lolita in Tehran'
"To assert your humanity in a totalitarian regime is to risk having it snuffed out. To not assert it is to risk the same thing."

'Do I Have Life? Or Am I Just Breathing?'
"Dearest Manna,
... Do you remember when we were [both] in Iran we always complained how our story, our reality was narrated by someone else: the Islamic regime, the Western academics or journalists .... It is important that we tell our story, no matter how dark, no matter how filled with despair. I think the first step toward our liberation is to take back our voices from those who have confiscated [them]."

transcodex

One of the pleasures of "Blue Cats" is that Duffy lavishes time on details that a lot of her nonsynesthete predecessors failed to properly appreciate. She doesn't just mention that letters have colors, she analyzes how those colors blend and mutate when they find themselves side by side in a word. She explores the way many synesthetes organize the world spatially. Numbers, for instance, are often fixed in space on what she calls a "number trail."
Alison Motluk

Orhan Pamuk's - 'My Name is Red' reviewed by Conor O'Toole
"An artist should never succumb to hubris of any kind, he should simply paint the way he sees fit rather than troubling over East or West."

Kristanna Loken on Terminator 3
Is it fun to be bad?
Yeah, it is. It is fun because you get to do things that in your real life you�d never get to do.
You don�t have a bad side?
Yeah, I do, but I�m not shooting children. Not that I want to be doing that, but isn�t there a time when you wish you could just pull your .45 out of your handbag and just, you know, on the freeway.

Coming Soon
Dirty Harry, Beatrix Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
Crime Scene Memories
"Memory is a creative event, born anew every day," says Elizabeth Loftus, a University of California, Irvine, psychologist who is a leading expert on the malleability of eyewitness testimony. "You fill in the holes every time you reconstruct an event in your own mind."
Ah, Pezdek
"Most sensory information never really moves into storage at all. Like shapes drawn with a flashlight in the night air, the great mass of input from our eyes and ears fades almost immediately. Actively paying attention can buy you another 15 to 20 seconds of accurate recall by moving sensory input into short-term memory. Language appears to play a crucial role in moving memory into long-term storage, which is why the socially adept repeat the names of those they've just met. Without the "translation" of language, bits and fragments of input may make it into storage, but pulling those bits together for, say, testimony at a trial may prove problematic. When the brain can't find an intact memory, it does the next best thing - it builds one."
Jessica Snyder Sachs

A Universe of Consciousness
"At the turn of the [19th] century, the psychologist Edward Titchener was attempting to identify the "atoms" of consciousness. Red, blue, pain, and the like were obvious candidates, but he attempted to cover the entire phenomenology of consciousness in terms of elementary sensations. His students were therefore assigned such tasks as determining the elementary atoms involved in sexual excitement, bladder distension, and other bodily functions. As may be expected, they were not successful."
Gerald M. Edelman & Giulio Tononi - Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination (Penguin, 2001, page 163)

Remembering the Present
"Contemporary neuroscience is confirming the findings of ... Cambridge psychologist Sir Frederic Bartlett, who in 1932 published his classic work Remembering: 'Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces,' he wrote. 'It is an imaginative reconstruction or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude toward a whole mass of organized past reactions or experience.' Remembering is an active, dynamic process, which, like perceiving, recognizing, and imaging, is based on past experience but takes account of the current situation and current needs.
Bartlett rejected the atomistic-associationist psychology that preceded him with its over-mechanical notion of 'memory traces' and introduced the far more flexible concept of schemas, which he borrowed from the neurophysiologist Henry Head. By schema Bartlett implied a mental structure, built up over time, which is responsible for the active organization of past experiences in the light of current events. This idea has been taken up and greatly extended by Gerald Edelman ..."
Anthony Stevens - Private Myths: Dreams and Dreaming (Penguin, 1996, pages 108 - 109)

Movies are not recordings, they are projections
"Perception is not a passive mirroring of a world outside like a color photograph; rather, incoming informations are, by a creative act, organized into a universe."
Ludwig von Bertalanffy

Brainysmurf - On the differences in brain processing among languages
"It seems, according to a new study, that native speakers of Chinese when listening to their language use both sides of the brain, whereas native speakers of English use only their left side. This shouldn�t really be surprising. The right side of the brain is used to decode music and melody, and since Chinese has four tones that are essential to understanding, it only makes sense that brain power would be divided in some way amongst the parts of the brain that specializes in such processing. Since English has phrase-specific intonation but not monosyllabic tones, it�s not difficult to see why the brain keeps its processing on one side.
So where does this indicate that Mandarin is officially or otherwise more difficult than English?"

Scanning reveals the brain processes different languages differently
"Sophie Scott, a psychologist at the Wellcome Trust, and colleagues from hospitals in Oxford and London performed brain scans on volunteers as they listened to their native languages.
When English speakers heard the sound of Mockney, Mersey or Geordie, their left temporal lobes lit up on screen. When Mandarin Chinese speakers heard their native tongue, there was a buzz of action in both the right and left temporal lobes.
"We were very surprised to discover that people who speak different sorts of languages use their brains to decode speech in different ways, said Dr Scott. "It overturned some long-held theories."
The left temporal lobe is normally associated with piecing sounds together into words; the right with processing melody and intonation.
In Mandarin, a different intonation delivers a different meaning: the syllable "ma", for instance, can mean mother, scold, horse or hemp according to its musical sound.
"Speech really is a complex sound," said Dr Scott. "As well as understanding words, the brain uses the way in which words are spoken, such as intonation and melody, to turn spoken language into meaning. This system has to be robust and flexible enough to deal with variations in speech sounds such as regional accents. We think Mandarin speakers interpret intonation and melody in the right temporal lobe to give correct meaning to the spoken words."
... The study suggests that language itself might affect the way the brain develops in a young child."
Tim Radford

Beijing weighs up, then rejects, invasion of North Korea
"China asked its military to study a quick intervention in North Korea but decided that its relationship with the United States was more important than propping up the Stalinist state, with which it shares a border."

Chinese thinking skills - from Better Living Through Software
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis ridiculed & Emily Eakin chided

Writing Systems and Scientific Breakthroughs
"Why should learning a particular writing system have a greater impact on how people think than whether they use telephones?"
J. Marshall Unger

Bhutan's psyche satellized, gross domestic happiness disrupted
Do we become the product of what we watch?

The Medium's Messenger
"The family circle has widened. The worldpool of information fathered by electric media - movies, Telstar, flight - far surpasses any possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage."
Marshall McLuhan - The Medium is the Massage (Penguin, 1967, page 14)

The Complexity Threshold
Serpens nisi serpentem comederit non fit draco [the serpent does not become a dragon save by first eating the serpent]

Nature's Magic - Peter A. Corning
"Two are better than one, because they have good return for their work: If one falls down, his friend can help him up. But pity the man who falls and has no one to help him up. Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken."
Ecclesiastes 4:9-12

Use your nous & make common sense

One word frees us
'The eyes, those silent tongues of love' - Cervantes
"It begins to be evident that "touch" is not skin but the interplay of the senses, and "keeping in touch" or "getting in touch" is a matter of a fruitful meeting of the senses, of sight translated into sound and sound into movement, and taste and smell. The "common sense" was for many centuries held to be the peculiar human power of translating one kind of experience of one sense into all the senses, and presenting the result continuously as a unified image to the mind. In fact, this image of a unified ratio among the senses was long held to be the mark of our rationality, and may in the computer age easily become so again."
Marshall McLuhan - Understanding Media (1964) - Chapter Six - Media as Translators

Crystal remembers sounds
"Lithium niobate seems to store acoustic energy temporarily, rather like a compressed spring stores mechanical energy. How is not clear ... "

An Interview with James Hillman
London: In The Soul's Code, you talk about something called the "acorn theory." What is that?
Hillman: Well, it's more of a myth than a theory. It's Plato's myth that you come into the world with a destiny, although he uses the word paradigma, or paradigm, instead of destiny.

What Can We Know, and What Can't We? by Sharon Begley
What if stalactites could talk? If these icicle-shaped mineral deposits somehow preserved the sound waves that impinged on them as they grew, drop by drop, from the ceilings of caves, and if scientists figured out how to recover the precise characteristics of those waves, then maybe they would also be able to use stalactites like natural voice recorders and recover the conversations ...
In cosmology, one seemingly unanswerable question is whether our little universe is embedded in a "multiverse," a frothing sea of universes bobbing like bubbles in the sea. In principle, contact between universes is impossible. "But who knows?" asks Prof. Hut. "Just as wormholes might allow you to go from one point in the universe to another more quickly than light [by taking a shortcut, not by breaking the universal speed limit] maybe we'll come up with a way to communicate with other universes."

Ariadne's Clue
Symbolism is the most powerful and ancient means of communication available to humankind. For centuries people have expressed their preoccupations and concerns through symbolism in the form of myths, stories, religions, and dreams. The meaning of symbols has long been debated among philosophers, antiquarians, theologians, and, more recently, anthropologists and psychologists. In Ariadne's Clue, distinguished analyst and psychiatrist Anthony Stevens explores the nature of symbols and explains how and why we create the symbols we do.

Could it be time to take the "memory" of water seriously?
"Aware of homeopaths' claims that patterns of hydrogen bonds can survive successive dilutions, Rey decided to test ... "

Francisco Varela - The Emergent Self
"Why do emergent selves, virtual identities, pop up all over the place, creating worlds, whether at the mind/body level, the cellular level, or the transorganism level? This phenomenon is something so productive that it doesn't cease creating entirely new realms: life, mind, and societies. Yet these emergent selves are based on processes so shifty, so ungrounded, that we have an apparent paradox between the solidity of what appears to show up and its groundlessness. That, to me, is the key and ... "

The late Francesco Varela postulates that organisms have to be understood as a mesh of virtual selves -- a bricolage of various identities.

Hey meester. You go away in the middle of love?


posted by Andrew 7/09/2003 02:13:00 PM

Wednesday, July 02, 2003

 
Cogitating Environments

The Veil of The Temple - by Sir John Tavener

"Worlds are created by brains. At a simple level, bees, migratory birds, dogs and even limpets, which return to a particular spot after feeding, contain internal maps of their surroundings. Humans, who think abstractly, create more complicated inferential maps going beyond their known surroundings, to include the world, celestial objects, real and hypothetical beings, and the past and future as well as the present."
Alex Comfort - Reality & Empathy: Physics, Mind, and Science in the 21st Century
(State University of New York Press, Albany, 1984, page xiii)

Cults and Cosmic Consciousness (pdf)
"The core curriculum for global education should be comparative religion."
Camille Paglia

The Clay Bird [Matir Moina]

alma, almah \ a. Arab. , almah, adj. fem. 'learned, knowing'; f. , alama 'to know' (because they have been instructed in music and dancing). Cf. Fr. alm�e.

Boxing the kangaroo
As the Downing Street campaign demonstrates, the bias of the BBC isn't a narrow right/left ideological bias. It reflects a much wider worldview that positions the U.S. and its allies as an evil force in the world.
Denis Boyles

You report, we kill you - Metafilter

"I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters."
Frank Lloyd Wright

The One remains, the many change and pass ...
"The collective unconscious is simply the psychic expression of the identity of brain structure irrespective of all racial differences. This explains the analogy, sometimes even identity, between the various myth motifs and symbols, and the possibility of human communication in general."
Carl Jung - Alchemical Studies (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983, pages 11-12)

AlterNet - The Invisible Writers
"Their only qualifications to literary authenticity are their writings and their desire to write. Often the only time they have is stolen time, and their private scrawls end up on cocktail napkins, penciled in the margins of receipts ...
If every sentence that was written was printed and bound we would drown in a sea of words - as it is, thousands of books are hastily published, barely read and forgotten. Writing itself is the aim, for it is writing, not publishing, that transforms individual human experience."
Tai Moses

"Fiction completes us, mutilated beings burdened with the awful dichotomy of having only one life and the ability to desire a thousand."
Mario Vargas Llosa

Tacit Knowledge - Writing a Book
Blogs have already had quite an impact on journalism. What kind of impact will they have on the cultural world?

AlterNet: Q&A: Anita Roddick's Kind of Revolution

Primal Matter
"Although common prejudice still believes that the sole essential basis of our knowledge is given exclusively from outside, and that "nihil est in intellectu quod non antea fuerit in sensu," it nevertheless remains true that the thoroughly respectable atomic theory of Leucippus and Democritus was not based on any observations of atomic fission but on a "mythological" conception of smallest particles, .... the psyche supplies those images and forms which alone make knowledge of objects possible.
These forms are generally supposed to be transmitted by tradition, so that we speak of "atoms" today because we have heard, directly or indirectly, of the atomic theory of Democritus. But where did Democritus, or whoever first spoke of minimal constitutive elements, hear of atoms? This notion had its origin in archetypal ideas, that is, in primordial images which were never reflections of physical events but are spontaneous ..."
Carl Jung - The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 2000, page 57)

A binding thread of light

"The De Rerum Natura of Lucretius is the first great work of poetry in which knowledge of the world tends to dissolve the solidity of the world, leading to a perception of all that is infinitely minute, light and mobile. Lucretius set out to write the poem of physical matter, but he warns us at the outset that this matter is made up of invisible particles. He is the poet of physical concreteness, viewed in its permanent and immutable substance, but the first thing he tells us is that emptiness is just as concrete as solid bodies. Lucretius' chief concern is to prevent the weight of matter from crushing us. Even while laying down the rigorous mechanical laws that determine every event, he feels the need to allow atoms to make unpredictable deviations from the straight line, thereby ensuring freedom both to atoms and to human beings. The poetry of the invisible, of infinite unexpected possibilities - even the poetry of nothingness - issues from a poet who had no doubts whatever about the physical reality of the world."
Italo Calvino - Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Harvard University Press, 1988)

From the Desert, a Wellspring of Ancient Manuscripts
"There's a lazy habit, among people who think history began with the Greeks and ended with Americans, of thinking of African "civilization" as a thin ribbon of cities and cultures running along the Mediterranean Sea and down the Nile. Conveniently, it is the same Africa that was most engaged with Europe and the Near East. But that Africa was also intimately connected with Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa. And cities like Timbuktu, where an important overland trade route joined canals leading to the Niger River, weren't backwaters or outposts of North Africa; they were the centers of their own civilizations, which reached even further into the center of the continent.
Although they are written in Arabic script and many of them deal with Islamic law and religion, the Timbuktu libraries aren't filled merely with copies of Arabic texts that circulated throughout the Islamic world. Rather, they contain a full, rich and particular history of another Africa, with its own kingdoms, literature and history."
Philip Kennicott

The Desert Libraries of Timbuktu
As many as 5 million ancient and recent manuscripts may lie unexplored in West African private libraries and hidden underground ...

Ancient Egyptian library reborn in modern form
"Rebuilding the Library of Alexandria is a dream of mine for decades and a dream of humankind for a millennium," Mr. [Brewster] Kahle says. "In the early days, they used papyrus. Now we can use digital technology. The idea of collecting all knowledge of all the people of the world is now within our grasp."

The Man Without a Past [Mies Vailla Menneisyytta]
"We have a dead man here."

The Man Without a Past has intimations of the skid-row internationalism found in 1920s European proletarian novels like B. Traven's The Death Ship or Victor Serge's Men in Prison.

Bridging generations
"Subject both of science and art, the landscape functions as a mirror and a lens: in it we see the space we occupy and ourselves as we occupy it."
Jeffrey Kastner and Brian Wallis - Land and Environmental Art (Phaidon, 1998, page 11)

The Concept of Space in Twentieth Century Art
Frank Stella states: "But, after all, the aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live."

On Permalinks and Paradigms...
"There are some things that become so ubiquitous and familiar to us - so seemingly obvious - that we forget that they actually had to be invented."
Tom Coates

Whoishe whoishe whoishe whoishe linking in?

posted by Andrew 7/02/2003 05:37:00 PM