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{Saturday, September 27, 2003}

 
remembering, amongst others, ilya prigogine

Slim Dusty receives Australian state funeral
Darren Moosha, 42, who is part Aboriginal, travelled to the funeral from Broome, in northwest Australia.
"It's that Australian-ness that's neither black nor white," he said of Dusty's appeal.

Singer Robert Palmer dies
Rock journalist Paul Lester, from Uncut magazine, said Palmer rose from northern clubs to become "elegant and sophisticated" and the master of several styles.
"He was kind of a pioneer of blue-eyed soul, which is white men doing black music and R&B pretty well. He had two or three careers," Lester told BBC News Online.

Robert Palmer dies aged 54
The singer, whose real name was Alan Palmer ...

Writer George Plimpton dead at 76
A native of New York, Plimpton held the parallel identities of insider and outsider ...

Ilya Prigogine, 86, Nobelist for Study of Complexity, Dies
"In an interview in 1977 after the announcement of his Nobel Prize, Dr. Prigogine explained his research in terms of an analogy with two towns, one walled off from the outside world, the other a nexus of commerce. The first town, he said, represents the closed system of classical physics and chemistry, which must decay according to the second law of thermodynamics. The second town is able to grow and become more complex because of its interactions with the surrounding environment."
Kenneth Chang - The New York Times - 30 May, 2003

16 July 2002 - PhysicsWeb - Small systems defy second law
A deviation from the second law of thermodynamics has been demonstrated experimentally for the first time. Denis Evans of the Australian National University and colleagues have shown that entropy can be consumed - rather than generated - in small systems over short periods of time.

PhysicsWeb - Viscount Ilya Prigogine 1917-2003
"Prigogine is best known for extending the second law of thermodynamics to systems that are far from equilibrium, and demonstrating that new forms of ordered structures could exist under such conditions. Prigogine called these 'dissipative structures' because they cannot exist independently of their environment. According to the second law of thermodynamics, ordered systems disintegrate into disordered ones. However, Prigogine showed that the formation of dissipative structures allows order to be created from disorder in non-equilibrium systems. These structures have since been used to describe phenomena such as the growth of cities and the physics of car traffic."
Belle Dum�

Vicomte Ilya Prigogine - The Daily Telegraph - 5 June 2003
"At the heart of Prigogine's work was an attempt to reconcile a tendency in nature for disorder to increase (for statues to crumble or ice cubes to melt, as described in the second law of thermodynamics) with so-called "self-organisation", a countervailing tendency to create order from disorder (as seen in, for example, the formation of the complex proteins in a living creature from a mixture of simple molecules).
Prigogine's theories centred on the idea that, in certain circumstances, the second law of thermodynamics (which predicts the relentless increase of disorder - entropy - within a given system) might be broken. He proposed that, in conditions which are sufficiently far from equilibrium, fluctuations of order and disorder could suddenly stabilise. The resulting "dissipative structures" - the most obvious of which is life itself - could last indefinitely, taking energy out of the chaos around them and "dissipating" entropy back into it.
Prigogine's controversial reinterpretation of classical thermodynamics was revolutionary because it suggested that the universe was not necessarily doomed to a long, slow slide into "heat death" in which all useful energy would be lost in random motion."

Doctor Who returns to BBC1 screens
Following a long-running campaign from fans, time traveller Doctor Who is to clamber back into his tardis and return to BBC screens ...

Ilya Prigogine - The Guardian - 18 June, 2003 - Dan Brennan
Prigogine sought to challenge the rigidity of classical physics and chemistry, specifically the second law of thermodynamics, which states that in any isolated physical system order inevitably decays.

Ilya Prigogine: Wizard of Time
Interviewed May 1983 by Robert B. Tucker
Omni: You were a nonconformist, a dissident. How did you muster up the conviction to go against the prevailing ideology?
Prigogine: I would say, again, this probably corresponds to a deep psychological element that isn't easy to make explicit. The attitude of Einstein toward science, for example, was to go beyond the reality of the moment. He wanted to transcend time. But this was the classical view: Time was an imperfection, and science, a way to get beyond this imperfection to eternity. Einstein wanted to travel away from the turmoil, from the wars. He wanted to find some kind of safe harbor in eternity. For him science was an introduction to a timeless reality behind the illusion of becoming.
My own attitude is very different because, to some extent, I want to feel the evolution of things. I don't believe in transcending, but in being embedded in a reality that is temporal.

The Poet Of Thermodynamics
(Byline: Martin Weil - The Washington Post - 31 May 2003)
Ilya Prigogine, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who applied intellect and imagination to some of the most fundamental questions of nature, leading him to be called the "poet of thermodynamics," died May 28 in Brussels. The cause of death was not reported. He was 86.
In his work, which included research at the University of Texas, Prigogine offered new ways of approaching and attacking broad questions that have intrigued humans for centuries: such matters as order and chaos, the evolution of the universe and the meaning and direction of time.
He was credited with providing new ways to interpret the second law of thermodynamics, which has been considered a powerful scientific doctrine with applications ranging from explaining chemical reactions to predicting the fate of the universe.
But as Prigogine explained it in an interview with Omni magazine in 1983, the famous second law takes a mechanistic, deterministic view, which does not always adequately correspond with the complexity and unpredictability of nature.
It applies to systems that have already reached equilibrium, at least in their totality.
But, Prigogine told interviewer Robert B. Tucker in Omni, "we (on earth) are not going toward equilibrium."
He decided to place more emphasis on evolving systems, where processes occur that do not settle into equilibrium, that dissipate energy and are irreversible.
The irreversible processes, sometimes likened to the squeezing of toothpaste from a tube, provide a means of distinguishing between earlier states and later ones. In that sense, they are sometimes considered, in a metaphorically appealing way, as representing "time's arrow."
The irreversible processes, Prigogine said in his Nobel lecture, are the ones that lead to the "one-sidedness of time."

Ilya Prigogine - Autobiography
"Filtrate music out of noise; the unity of the spiritual history of humanity, as was stressed by Mircea Eliade, is a recent discovery that has still to be assimilated."

Philip Ball - Molecules of life come in waves
"Physicists have watched biological molecules become waves in a dramatic demonstration of the effects of quantum mechanics.
It's not clear that biological molecules act like quantum waves in this way as they go about their business in living cells. However, physicist Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford, UK, and psychologist Stuart Hameroff of the University of Arizona in Tucson have proposed that consciousness might arise from wave-like quantum-mechanical effects involving protein filaments called microtubules in nerve cells."

Chemistry guides evolution, claims theory - New Scientist
That enduring metaphor for the randomness of evolution, a blind watchmaker that works to no pattern or design, is being challenged by two European chemists. They say that the watchmaker may have been blind, but was guided and constrained by the changing chemistry of the environment, with many inevitable results.
[...] Harold Morowitz, an expert on the thermodynamics of living systems at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, says these ideas are very exciting. "It's part of a quiet paradigm revolution going on in biology, in which the radical randomness of Darwinism is being replaced by a much more scientific law-regulated emergence of life."

Bacteria 'message' to each other - BBC News
It is known that bacteria exchange messages by releasing substances into the fluid in which they are growing, but new research suggests they can send signals through the air.
It is the first time airborne communication has been identified, say the team ...

BT ponders bacterial intelligence
BT is hoping the living habits of bacteria will bring order to future communication networks.
Researchers working for the company are studying bacterial colonies to help develop communication networks that will self-organise and self-configure.

Self-organisation
Although almost blind, army ants deploy pheromones so they can establish traffic lanes. Laden ants returning to the nest occupy the central lane while the ants setting out use the two outer lanes.
BBC - Radio 4 - Frontiers - Wednesday 7 May 2003

Lab Studying Science Behind Traffic Patterns - Alan Sipress
[The Washington Post - Thursday, 5 August, 1999]
Chris L. Barrett, the scientist who convinced Los Alamos that traffic was a matter of grave national security and now heads its transportation project, said: "Traffic is particles with motive. I think it's cool as hell."

Studying the Ebb and Flow of Stop-and-Go
Los Alamos Lab Using Cold War Tools to Scrutinize Traffic Patterns
"The research in New Mexico is the latest chapter in the romance between traffic and physics, a relationship that has lured some of the century's sharpest minds to apply natural laws to the flow of cars along a highway. Physical Review Letters, a premier scientific journal, averages one article on the topic each month.
These scholars, moreover, are employing their theories where rubber meets the road: suggesting concrete solutions, from ramp metering lights for ironing out highway traffic to simulations that can forecast the benefits of specific road improvements.
Through the eyes of a scientist, motorists trapped in a seemingly inexplicable Capital Beltway backup are actually prisoners of rules that are obscure from behind the steering wheel. The patterns can be analyzed and, perhaps before long, even accurately predicted.
Yet despite some tantalizing progress, reaching a full understanding of traffic jams has been slow going. Scientists said they are closer to comprehending the birth of the universe than the daily tie-ups along Interstate 66."

Bill Katovsky: "... pack journalism resembles those nature films of the Serengeti Plains in Africa in which massive herds of antelope or wildebeest all of a sudden move in a thundering different direction."

The Poetics of Traffic Jams - Slate
Dear Jodi,
... The story in today's papers that caused me to mentally brake to a halt was a front-page piece in the Washington Post by Alan Sipress about how the Los Alamos National Laboratory is now busily researching traffic patterns. Since we have all marveled (maybe grumbled might be a better word) at the way bottlenecks appear and disappear with no apparent cause, I sped through the story in hopes of discovering a telling insight. Alas, all that the scientists at Los Alamos and in Germany seem to have come up with is a series of new metaphors to describe traffic jams. Are they like "water molecules freezing into ice"? Or is traffic movement akin to "the remarkable darting motion of a school of fish"? The article, though, did have one memorable bit of deadpan humor. A scientist, Chris Barrett, is described as the man "who convinced Los Alamos that traffic was a matter of grave national security." Unmentioned in the Post was that Dwight Eisenhower used the same flimsy national-security excuse to build the interstate highway system.
Walter Shapiro and Jodi Kantor

Traffic Zoology - CheeseburgerBrown
There is a secret zoo that runs encaged along the roads.
They are liquid, semi-visible goliaths that rage through the streams and chunks of ordinary traffic, with the effervescent tendrils of mile-long tails whipping behind them like Chinese dragons. Though composed of hundreds of pounds of steel, glass and plastic, they are able to pass through solid objects. They are bound by the laws of the highway, but not by any conventional notion of time or space.
They are Aggregate Traffic Animals: a menagerie of emergent beasts drawn from the interacting behaviours of many individual human beings driving many individual cars with many individual goals, their collective activity giving rise to something with greater presence, power and purpose than the sum of its constituents. They take on a host of different forms, each to serve a different end.
They are real, and they drive among us.

American Scientist Online - In Search of the Optimal Scumsucking Bottomfeeder
"Five years ago a column in this series titled "How to Avoid Yourself" described the geometry of paths traced out by a random walker who refuses to set foot in the same place twice. Soon after the article appeared, I received a letter from Mark A. Wilson of the College of Wooster, who pointed out that some of my computer-generated paths were anticipated by millions of years in the fossil record of early life. He referred me to the Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology, an immense multivolume work sponsored by the Geological Society of America."
Brian Hayes

Smallest circuits show quantum effects
Quantum means "lump" and is the basis of a theory that deals with matter and energy coming in discrete quantities. In the main, quantum effects only show themselves at the atomic level and smaller. Quantum theory shows us that the world of the really small obeys rules that in our experience seem illogical, like sub-atomic particles being in two places at the same time.

Patterns from Nowhere - Sid Perkins
Natural forces bring order to untouched ground
"In remote regions of the Arctic, Antarctica, and the Australian outback, an explorer can trek across bleak, uninhabited landscapes only to suddenly stumble upon ground decorated with weird patterns. These lonely sites feature ankle-high and meter-wide donuts of gravel; mazes, stripes, and polygonal networks of pebbles, sand, or ice; and sometimes ice crevasses in perfect geometric patterns. The enigmatic configurations, seemingly created without human influence, call to mind the mysterious phenomenon of crop circles, except that the puzzling structures are made of rocks or ice instead of trampled corn or wheat.
Scientists studying so-called patterned grounds have developed geological models for how some of these varied landforms have arisen from the influence of only soil, water, and sunlight."

Biological Utilisation of Quantum NonLocality
Brian D. Josephson and Fotini Pallikari-Viras
"The perception of reality by biosystems is based on different, and in certain respects more effective principles than those utilised by the more formal procedures of science. As a result, what appears as random pattern to the scientific method can be meaningful pattern to a living organism. The existence of this complementary perception of reality makes possible in principle effective use by organisms of the direct interconnections between spatially separated objects shown to exist in the work of J.S. Bell."

Telepathy - Mark Pilkington - The Guardian
"At last week's British Association meeting, Professor Robert Morris of Edinburgh University's Koestler parapsychology unit announced that his team's experiments continue to suggest the reality of telepathy.
While Morris avoids the T word, preferring the broader "anomalous cognition", his team's research is merely the tip of a very ancient iceberg."
Thursday 18 September, 2003

Performance

"I never knew my maternal grandmother, but I vividly recall the events surrounding her death. It was my first - and only - experience of extra-sensory perception. My mother, Claire, is Canadian and was born in the west of Canada. When she emigrated - re-emigrated as it were - to England after she met and married my father, my grandparents remained there. My mother was very close to her mother and, because we didn't have a phone in those days, used to write to her on an almost daily basis. I can still remember my grandmother's blue airmail letters dropping through our letterbox by return of post.
One night, when I was about five years old, I was woken up by a huge commotion on the landing outside my bedroom. It was in the early hours of the morning, but all the lights were on in the house. I opened my bedroom door to see my mother pacing rapidly up and down our narrow landing, my father alongside her, his arm around her shoulders. Mum was in a terrible state and I was frightened. I could see my older sister, Liz, who was nine, standing outside her bedroom crying. I had never seen my mother in near-hysterics. She kept saying she was seeing dreadful images, that something terrible was happening, that my father's mother, Kitty, was seriously ill. She was so convincing that my father put on his dressing-gown and walked up the road to a nearby public telephone box to call his parents. When he got through to them in their Shropshire farmhouse, his father - who must privately have wondered what on earth was wrong with my mum - said everyone was fine, and we should all go back to bed.
Fat chance. When Dad returned to the house, Mum remained inconsolable. Something terrible, she kept insisting, had happened to someone in the family. Don't think my mother was prone to this kind of thing; it's never happened before or since. She was beside herself. In the end Dad had to go to the phone box again to call out our family doctor. When he arrived, he gave Mum a sedative. And finally, at about five or six in the morning, she drifted off to sleep and everything calmed down.
A couple of hours later, there was a knock on the front door. It was a boy with a telegram for Mum from Canada. Her mother, it said, had collapsed and was desperately ill. The message - from my mother's kid brother, Bailey - didn't mince any words. The gist of it was, 'She's dying. Get on a plane.'
Today I don't have a shred of doubt that my mother picked up a human distress call that night, transmitted from one brain to another. It crossed three thousand miles of Atlantic Ocean and got a little scrambled on the way, but it was a full-on case of ESP all right.
Mum flew to Canada that day and remained there until her mother died just two weeks later, of cancer. A few years after that Mum's father died of it too. But as I never saw them except as a tiny baby, they were effectively unknown to me, sweet-faced strangers looking out from a photo album."
Richard Madeley in 'Richard & Judy: The Autobiography'
(Hodder and Stoughton, 2003, pages 6-7)

Matters of Life and Death - The Wire, 1299
Ian Penman interviews Diamanda Galas
[...] She will readily engage in discussing microphone technology, unafraid of spilling a little demystification as she goes. More interesting, maybe, is not what she says about it but how her voice immediately changes in the telling, flowers, splits into a happily daemonic cast list (nasal, vaudeville, impish, Ethel Merman), as though she only had to say 'microphone' to trigger a metamorphosis already underway. The same happens during long gossipy phone sessions "in which I become extremely vicious and sarcastic and if that goes on too long I tend to get into this nasal register. The phone tends to amplify one part of the voice."

New York magazine quoted Frank Sinatra as saying, "The microphone is the singer's basic instrument, not the voice. You have to learn to play it like it was a saxophone."
Tony Schwartz - Media: The Second God (Doubleday, 1983, page 107)

Stop-and-Go Science - Peter Weiss
"Armed with powerful mathematical and computational tools, scientists interested in traffic patterns have flooded the literature with creative representations. "You have a whole zoo of models," says Michael Schreckenberg of the University of Duisburg in Germany. "It seems that every second paper defines a new model," he jokes.
Computer-based traffic models simulate virtual vehicles that motor by the hundreds or thousands through an artificial highway network. The simulations emerge from a more general category of computer models known as agent-based systems, or cellular automata."

Replication + Reproduction

Memes are brutes of information cut across the jolting seam
grate the social-control machine, open & steam the
packs of shrink-wrapped writing

Lichens and other likenings
A dream led David Freedberg to the first visual archive of the natural world. He tells how science began with nothing more than a paintbrush ...

posted by Andrew 9/27/2003 07:08:00 PM


{Thursday, September 25, 2003}

 
archive supper

Science as Democratizer - Robert Lawrence Kuhn
Does the pursuit of pure science make sense in a world of scarcity and strife?

In Search of a Scientific Revolution
Controversial genius Stephen Wolfram presses onward - reports Peter Weiss
"... Wolfram has spun off a lot of exhilarating ideas about where this new approach can lead. For example, rather than needing Darwinian evolution to explain the complexity of living creatures, Wolfram says that a biological computation process based on a few simple rules could do the trick. In physics, Wolfram's approach suggests that space itself may not be a continuous entity but rather some sort of network of interconnected fragments."

Passage Beyond Modernity: The Possible Universality of Solitude
"That best fruit of modernity, the free individual disposed to stand alone against corporate dictation - what is he standing for? And what is he standing on? He is standing for his right. But note: he is not standing for his private interest under the specious flag of "my right"; for what he claims as his right he claims for all others similarly placed. This is the precise difference between an interest and a right. Further, for the justice of his claim he is prepared to call others - disinterested - to witness."
William Ernest Hocking - The Coming World Civilization (George Allen & Unwin, 1958, page 21)

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky - fUSION Anomaly
Notions of intellectual property and copyright law, are brought into question as the communal reception of music takes on the significances of being the sonic equivalent to alchemy. The mix speaks to you of the bricolage of a place where the "self" exists as a deployed network of personae (the latin root of personae means "that through which sound enters"), music created out of a particular scene or social grouping and it shows the inexplicable mutability of sound as different people share the memories brought about by the same songs. It demonstrates the uncanny power of metamorphosize, through audio alchemy, the passage of sound into a kind of unspoken story, that like its predecessor, the oral tradition, can pass on "tales" of songs.
In the electronic milieu that we all move in today, the DJ is a custodian of aural history. In the mix, creator and re-mixer are woven ...

Music and Technology: A Roundtable Discussion
[Philip Glass, Morton Subotnick, Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky), John Moran, Michael Riesman]
Philip Glass moderates a discussion with four composers about digital technology's impact on new music
Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky): I think of technology as an extension of what's already been going on for a long while. Compared to the notational symbols of European classical music or the rhythmic patterns of West African music, a computer is a formalization of those same processes. The computer makes all that was formal and structurally oriented become implicit in the basic form of the interface. I think about how John Cage used to just stare at the piano in his silence pieces. The instrument was a jumping off point -- an interface that had so many routes available.

Erin McCarthy - The Space of the Self: An analysis of the notion of subjective spatiality in the philosophy of Watsuji Tetsuro
"Watsuji's study of ethics as ningen, he explains in Ethics, is to get "away from the misconception, prevalent in the modern world, that conceives of ethics as a problem of individual consciousness only." "The locus of ethical problems", he tells us, "lies not in the consciousness of the isolated individual, but precisely in the in-betweenness of person and person." In other words, ethics is the study of human beings as ningen, as individual and as social in the betweenness among selves in the world. I'm going to take just a few minutes ..."

Thinking and Creativity - Jozef Tischner
"Since thinking creates no beings but at the most only knows them, and since to know means first of all to let them be, it is often claimed that thinking is not creative ..."

'This Age's Most Uncertain Hour': Postmodernism and Hermeneutical Anxiety in the 'New South Africa' - John Bottomley
"[Robert] Pirsig believes that most Western societies are still dominated by the Enlightenment doctrine of scientific disconnection. According to this positivist perspective, all cultures are unique historical patterns, which contain their own values and cannot be judged in terms of the values held by other cultures. There are no absolute moral laws and value patterns that can be applied globally. According to Pirsig, this hermeneutical fallacy has led to social catastrophe.
Scientific disconnection is not possible, Pirsig argues, and we cannot understand other cultures without taking into account differences of value; cultures can only be defined as a network of social patterns of value."

Interpreting Vaclav Havel - Walter H. Capps
"As Masaryk saw it, nineteenth-century science had usurped the authority previously accorded to faith and reason, and the moral and ethical repercussions were catastrophic. In Suicide as a Mass Phenomenon of Modern Civilization, Masaryk traced the reversal of moral progress which had accompanied the loss of religious faith. For him, science was both mechanistic and materialistic, and, in these senses, substituted dysfunctionally for an awareness that human life belongs to an ordered moral universe. Following Brentano, Masaryk believed it crucial that human beings return to the world of primary experience, there to be reconnected with a vital sense of good and evil."

Al Franken and Don Simpson - The Gospel of Supply Side Jesus
A Buzzflash Guest Contribution

Toward a New and More Ancient Paradigm - Jack D. Elliott, Jr
"As participants we play complex roles in which we both observe and shape history while history shapes us. Furthermore, as participants, we can know history to a certain degree, yet its overall origin, destination and context lie in a mystery that transcends our understanding; as with tadpoles, the world outside their pond is an incomprehensible mystery. As the physicist Max Planck observed: "Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of Nature. And it is because in the last analysis we ourselves are part of the mystery we are trying to solve" ..."

The End of What? - History and Identity in a Postmodern World - Bjornar J. Olsen
"Existentialist queries of identity ("who we are?"), can hardly be answered by the past."

Alfredo Jaar 7

Indigeneous Multiculture
"We can now live, not just amphibiously in divided and distinguished worlds, but pluralistically in many worlds and cultures simultaneously. We are no more committed to one culture -- to a single ratio among the senses -- any more than to one book or to one language or to one technology. Our need today is, culturally, the same as the scientist's who seeks to become aware of the bias of the instruments of research in order to correct that bias. Compartmentalizing of human potential by single cultures will soon be as absurd as specialism ..."
Marshall McLuhan - The Gutenberg Galaxy (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962, page 31)

Beyond Interface: Net Art as Theater of the Senses
"[...] branching discourse eventually alters our sense of the authorial center, a dissolution of self. Mark Amerika's mantra, "I link therefore I am," aside from the Cartesian allusions, seems strangely ..."

"Perhaps the world resists being reduced to mere resource because it is -- not mother/matter/mutter -- but coyote, a figure for the always problematic, always potent tie of meaning and bodies ... Perhaps our hopes for accountability, for politics, for ecofeminism, turn on revisioning the world as coding trickster with whom we must learn to converse."
Donna Haraway - Simians, Cyborgs, and Women

Rimbaud: Poetic Annihilation
"In a letter dated the 13th May 1871 Rimbaud writes to George Izambard from the maze of poetic delirium and the loss of self-possession ..."
Adrian Gargett

Eric Duyckaerts - Self Determination/Body Politics - A reaction
"The pronoun "we" can often be taken as a putsch or a coup. For instance, if I begin a sentence: "We, artists, think that ...", I'm sure to include in that "we" people who don't want to subscribe to my further statement, and artists who consider that I'm not an artist! For this reason, I prefer to limit my reaction to the "I", leaving the "we" to collective action, to my behaviour as citizen involved in "we-movements". It must be understood that the "I" who speaks here and now is a set which has an intersection with the set of the "I" citizen: this intersection is not empty, but both sets do not coincide.
"Self, Selbst, Zelf" are words addressing the sameness, the identity. Historically, self-determination was a "we-concept", popularized by De Gaulle ...

From transfusion to infusion - Gavin Jantjes
Paul Ricoeur writes: "When we discover that there are several cultures instead of just one and consequently at the time that we acknowledge the end of a sort of cultural monopoly, whether it's illusory or real, we are threatened with the destruction of our discovery. Suddenly it becomes possible that there are just others, that we ourselves are an "other" among others. All meaning and every goal having disappeared, it becomes possible to wander through civilizations as if through vestiges and ruins. The whole of mankind becomes an imaginary museum: Where shall we go this weekend -- visit the Angkor ruins or take a stroll in Tivoli ..."
Paul Ricoeur - 'Universal Civilization and National Cultures' in History and Truth - translated by Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965)

We are the heterogeneous others - 'Strangers to Ourselves'
*Flying Saucers and the Human-Ecological Unconscious*
"The more deeply we penetrate the nature of the psyche, the more the conviction grows upon us that the diversity, the multidimensionality of human nature requires the greatest variety of standpoints and methods in order to satisfy the variety of psychic dispositions."
Carl Jung - The Practice of Psychotherapy - Collected Works, Vol. 16, page 9

Daniel R. White & Alvin Wang write:
... To paraphrase Pogo, "We have met the aliens and they are us."
This realization merges the evolutionary unconscious with the ecological one in a new morphogenic picture of self and other. It is out of this mirror that we hear the alien voice exclaim: "Wake up - the world is alive!"

Lacan: The Mirror Stage
"All humans are paranoid insofar as we are haunted by the sense of an "other" who influences our thoughts and actions. We need the image of ourselves in order to establish relationships with other people and in order to negotiate the physical and social reality of our world -- in our imaginary map of the world, our "I" is the "dot" that indicates our location.
[...] As the "dot" on our mental map of reality, the image of our "I" serves as a bridge between the internal world -- the German word is Innenwelt -- and external reality -- the Umwelt, which also translates to "environment".
Unlike many animals, who soon after birth are able to move about and find food on their own, human beings are born "prematurely". Our development into relatively independent individuals is at once a physiological process of maturation in which we gain coordination and strength, but it is also a psychical process which confers on us the internal images which we use to orient ourselves in our reality. In Lacan's view, this psychical development does not so much overcome our initial helplessnesss as it gives us ways to cope with what Lacan calls the "dehiscence at the heart of the organism" which persists throughout our existence. The word "dehiscence" has particular applications in the fields of botany and physiology: it means to gape open or to splay, as when a seed pod bursts or when an ovary ruptures to release the egg. Significantly, these are stages in developmental processes, and for Lacan the term is not strictly metaphorical, but refers to the primordial nature of the human subject as physically uncoordinated and psychically split.
Lacan again turns to the domain of biology to claim that the human brain contains an organic component that serves to register the human organism's image of itself -- a mirror inside the mind."

Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki - The Angel Cycle
"The alchemical hermaphrodite, symbol of the coincidentia oppositorum already prefigures and incorporates the angel as winged Hermes. Messenger according to Greek etymology ..."

Jorge Luis Borges & the plural I by Eric Ormsby
"It was ironic of fate, though perhaps predictable, to allow Jorge Luis Borges to develop over a long life into his own Doppelganger. In a 1922 essay entitled "The Nothingness of Personality," Borges asserted that "the self does not exist." Half-a-century later, an international personality laden with acclaim, he had to depend on wry, self-deprecating quips to safeguard his precious inner nullity. "Yo no soy yo" ("I am not I"), wrote Juan Ramon Jim�nez; this was a proposition that Borges not only endorsed but also made a fundamental axiom of his oeuvre. In his story "The Zahir," written in the 1940s, he could state, "I am still, albeit only partially, Borges," and in "Limits," a poem from the 1964 collection aptly entitled The Self and the Other, he ended with the line (as translated by Alastair Reid), "Space, time, and Borges now are leaving me." By 1980, however, to an interviewer who said, "Everyone sitting in this audience wants to know Jorge Luis Borges," he would reply, "I wish I did. I am sick and tired of him." On the lecture circuit, Borges, playing Sancho Panza to his own Quixote, perfected the sardonic stratagems that would keep his huge prestige at bay. Not fortuitously perhaps, his renown grew as, after 1955, his final blindness deepened: fragile and vaguely Chaplinesque in his rumpled linen suit, he emanated a prophetic aura, a shy Tiresias enamored of the tango."

Susan Wise - When the poet says I
"Arthur Rimbaud's famous "Je est un Autre" is not describing a methodology, but simply claiming the fact of the poet's migrating from unknown self towards another ...
Let's follow Rimbaud - he also writes:
"The key to the ancient feast, that might give me back my appetite. Charity is that key. (That inspiration proves I was dreaming!)"
Despite the ironic parenthesis, he is serious. The ancient feast is the one shared by men and the gods, now separated. The two essential words here are appetite and charity. The latter is not to be interpreted in its modern sense of "doing good", but in the original sense of cherishing (caritas, caro). This love is bound to desire, ever-renewed desire."

Edward Said, Leading Advocate of Palestinians, Dies at 67
He was an exemplar of American multiculturalism, at home both in Arabic and English, but, as he once put it, "a man who lived two quite separate lives," one as an American university professor, the other as a fierce critic of American and Israeli policies and an equally fierce proponent of the Palestinian cause.
Though a defender of Islamic civilization, Mr. Said was an Episcopalian married to a Quaker.

Edward Said ou l'identit� multiple - Le Monde.fr
[...] Et pourquoi ce pr�nom so british, Edward, dont il va "d�tester l'identit�", auquel s'oppose tout son "�tre int�rieur, plus authentique, libre, curieux, sensible"? Edward, "cr�ation de [ses] parents" si d�sireux d'�tre coopt�s dans les cercles o� domine l'aristocratie coloniale britannique. Edward, pr�nom symbole du "moule" dans lequel on veut le couler de force et auquel il r�siste comme il peut. Aujourd'hui, il assume ces identit�s multiples, sans vouloir les r�concilier, sans chercher une impossible synth�se. Il revendique cette "polyphonie" qui l'autorise � nouer les fils de r�seaux divers, � se laisser porter par les flux des "forces exiliques, des �nergies marginales, subjectives, migratoires de la vie moderne" ...
Sylvain Cypel et Daniel Vernet

The Guardian - World-renowned scholar Edward Said dies
Salman Rushdie once said of Said that he "reads the world as closely as he reads books".

LRB essay - Edward Said - 'We' know who 'we' are
"The initial step in the dehumanisation of the Other is to reduce him to a few insistently repeated simple phrases, images and concepts." Edward Said
[...] "Both the Arab world and the US are far more complex and dynamic places than the platitudes of war and the resonant phrases about reconstruction would allow.
As someone who has lived my life within the two cultures, I am appalled that the 'clash of civilisations', that reductive and vulgar notion so much in vogue, has taken over thought and action. What we need to put in place is a universalist framework ..."

Edward Said - A window on the world
"By humanism I mean first of all attempting to dissolve Blake's "mind-forg'd manacles" so as to be able to use one's mind historically and rationally for the purposes of reflective understanding. Moreover humanism is sustained by a sense of community with other interpreters and other societies and periods: strictly speaking therefore, there is no such thing as an isolated humanist."

The problem with cultural theory is not wilfully impenetrable language, argues Terry Eagleton,
but a shamefaced reticence about truth and morality: "... For Aristotle, ethics and politics are intimately related. Ethics is about excelling at being human, and nobody can do this in isolation ... The creature who emerges from postmodern thought is centreless, hedonistic, self-inventing, ceaselessly adaptive. He sounds more like a Los Angeles media executive than an Indonesian fisherman. Postmodernists oppose universality, and well they might: nothing is more parochial than the kind of human being they admire."

Dennis Miller - "Live" with TAE
TAE: You've become more conservative over the years. How do you explain this shift?
MILLER: I'm not as sure of my guesswork anymore. To be on the Left, you have to be amazingly certain about things you're guessing at, and I felt like a phony. I was looking for ideas, and all I was getting from liberals was, "We'd like a little more of your money, and we're kind of reticent to protect you from bad guys." Really? That�s all you're offering? I gotta go! I can't stay anymore. Also, when I kept hearing liberals equating Giuliani with Hitler - that's when I really left the reservation. Even before 9/11, I'd travel to New York and say, "Wow, this city certainly seems to be running better." Giuliani is the kind of leader I admire. When it's five degrees below zero and you arrest somebody to get him inside and off the street - that's not something Hitler would do. It made me realize that I was with the wrong group if that's what Hitler looked like to them.
TAE: Where do you see the danger in that?
MILLER: I always wondered how Hitler happened. I even went so far as to read William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I read all 1,200 pages and at the end of it I remember thinking, "Yeah, but how does Hitler happen?" Part of it has to do with the Left mislabeling people as Hitler. It's like Pierce Brosnan at the end of the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair. He dressed everybody up in the same Bowler cap and overcoat, and then he walks right through the middle of them without being noticed. The Left is so busy saying John Ashcroft is Hitler, and President Bush is Hitler, and Rudy Giuliani is Hitler that the only guy they wouldn't call Hitler was the foreign guy with the mustache who was throwing people who disagreed with him into the wood-chipper.

Wielding the moral club by Ian Buruma
"To prewar cultural conservatives (Evelyn Waugh, say), America was vulgar, money-grubbing, rootless, brash, tasteless, in short, a threat to high European civilisation. Martin Heidegger had much to say about "Americanism", as a soulless, greedy, inauthentic force that was fatally undermining the European spirit. To political conservatives, especially of the more radical right-wing kind, the combination of capitalism, democracy and a lack of ethnic homogeneity was anathema ..."

Pursuing the 17th-Century Origins of the Hacker's Grail
Did Hooke really glue a live fly near his ear so he could discover the frequency of its wing beats by sounding a vibrating string?

posted by Andrew 9/25/2003 05:17:00 PM


{Wednesday, September 17, 2003}

 
on resonance and messaging

Don Tapscott looks further ahead to a wireless digital jukebox: [via blogcritics]
"Instead of clinging to late-20th-century distribution technologies, like the digital disk and the downloaded file, the music business should move into the 21st century with a revamped business model using innovative technology, several industry experts say. They want the music industry to do unto the file-swapping services what the services did unto the music companies - eclipse them with better technology and superior customer convenience.
Their vision might be called "everywhere Internet audio.'' Music fans, instead of downloading files on KaZaA - whether they were using computers, home stereos, radios or handheld devices - would have access to all music the record companies hold in their vaults. Listeners could request that any song be immediately streamed to them via the Internet."

We Got Rhythm; the Mystery Is How and Why [via INReview]
"Dr. Dunbar believes that the much larger human groups, of 150 members or so, overcame the grooming barrier by developing a new kind of social glue, namely language. Group singing, or chorusing, may have been an intermediate step in this process, he suggests. He has preliminary evidence that singing in church produces endorphins, a class of brain hormone thought to be important in social bonding, he said in an e-mail message."
Nicholas Wade - The New York Times - 16 September 2003

With E-mail Dying, RSS Offers Alternative - Steve Outing [via Gil Friend]
"How does it work? Simply, RSS allows potential readers of a Web site to view part of its content -- typically headlines and short blurbs -- without having to visit the content directly (unless they want to click through to it). Viewing is done with a piece of software separate from the Web browser, the RSS aggregator, which the consumer uses to subscribe to "feeds" produced by favorite Internet publishers. The feeds are constantly updated as the publishers add new content."

Forget Work, IM Is for Scheming, Flirting, Gossip - Bernhard Warner
"Flirting with colleagues, scheming against the boss and gossiping about co-workers are among the most common Instant Messenger, or IM, missives circulating around the office, according to a new survey ...
Because many users believe it cannot be monitored by the boss, many freely fire off messages ranging from cruel cracks about a colleague's hair to sensitive information about major corporate projects.
"Businesses don't really monitor IMing," said Nigel Hawthorn, European marketing director for Blue Coat Systems, a Web security firm that conducted the survey of over 300 firms in the United States and Britain, the world's two largest IM markets.
"If you're leaning forward and typing away at your machine, who's to know what you're typing about," he added.
The preponderance of personal chatter leaves companies open to sensitive corporate leaks and even lawsuits, Hawthorn said.
In the UK, 65 percent of the 204 respondents said they use IM for personal purposes during work hours, the survey said.
Half the UK respondents admitted to peppering their IMs with abusive language; 40 percent used IM to conspire on colleagues during conference calls and nearly one-third confessed to "making sexual advances" in the easily disguised dialogue box ..."

*In a comment on the Warner report Dina Mehta says: "What hit me as i read this - more than the statistics - is the tone ... which suggests that the organization management and the survey company are both operating out of fear of loss of control. Can you really stop employees from flirting, or gossiping or scheming by telling them they're monitored - they're bound to find other ways of doing it. Can you stop the water filter or canteen buzz? Can you really stop someone who wants to leak company information? Or make a personal call? Or take a couple of hours off to get some personal work done, or quickly meet a date?
And if you attempt it - are you not perpetuating closed systems that are so contrary to the way the world is moving today. Some years ago, could you have said no telephones for employees to ensure no-one was scheming, gossiping or flirting? Some years ago could you have said no email access or connectivity? Look at the new generation of employees - they're growing up on these systems, including IM. Are you saying to them "toe the line ... or else"? Are you also implying they cannot be responsible employees without policing?
Sometimes we forget trust begets trust, responsibility begets loyalty.
And then this letter, in a different context - Don't kill P2P because of a few bad eggs .....
a sigh of relief ..."

Skype and social networking
Jim Ley writes: "Stuart Henshall thinks Skype could be a good online social networking tool, I don't agree, Skype is a one at a time (currently one to one) communication mechanism. You can only talk to one person at a time, and whilst you're in that conversation you're out of communication with everyone else, even if they develop an answerphone system, you'll still have to listen to each message. Speech is a very slow medium of communication, and it requires full attention."

Skype: Voice vs. Text
Ulises Ali Mejias says: "I want to address Stuart's question of whether or not "we should talk", in other words, whether or not we should adopt voice (Skype) over text (IM) as the foundation for online social networking technologies.
Does it have to be either/or? We are talking about two different technologies with two distinct sets of characteristics, and potentially two different uses. Expecting that people will "leave AIM, Yahoo and MSN for Skype" is overlooking some of the features that text-based IM affords that voice-based communication doesn�t. For example ..."

New VOIP App. Profiled - Slashdot

Stuart Henshall comments further: "What's inspired me to keep plugging away and digging deeper on Skype is it's base architecture. All the other systems use some form of centralized directory. Centralized directories create control and incur costs. Decentralized directory systems and input systems appear to create new markets. eBay never decided what should be auctioned, only how to auction it. eBay facilitates connectivity between buyer and sellers - flow and thus trade. I suspect if Skype or an open source substitute comes along it too will facilitate connectivity and create new markets around new very low cost voice exchanges.
If nothing else Skype is changing perspective on VoIP."

Acoustic Cyberspace
"... the larger environment of electronic arts or information culture ... remains for the most part centered on the lingering dreams of visual space ...
Typically, people relegate acoustic dimensions to the "background" -- a soundtrack or score that "accompanies" a primary visual experience. But in an immersive acoustic environment, you might hear all the sounds you would hear on a street corner, spatially organized in real time, surrounding you. This is much, much, stronger than a visual experience, which tacitly distances you, places you in a transcendent, removed position, rather than embodying you at the center of a new context."
Erik Davis

Feedback - fUSION Anomaly
Daybreak topped off my mug with more tea. "When the Buddha spoke of control, he wasn't talking about clamping down on our urges, but about cultivating a homeostatic sense of feedback, an ethics of constant modulation. Shakyamuni once compared meditation to a musician constantly tuning a string that keeps going flat or sharp. That's the trick -- constant negative feedback. A Buddhist gun-freak I knew likens zazen to the flight of F-14s, which are aerodynamically unstable. Computers must constantly adjust the surfaces of the plane's wings and fuselage in response to atmospheric conditions in order to keep the plane aloft. That's the Middle Way. The trap is the vicious escalation of positive feedback, whether it's a barfight or the arms race or consumer culture. For Buddhists, satisfying ordinary desires is like a thirsty man drinking sea-water. More positive feedback. But what if we introduce a minus sign into the loop? What if we become the minus sign? Rather than respond to anger with more anger, what if we can realize that there is no human being there to be angry at, just the resonance of countless molecular machines producing the complexity of life?"
Selections from the notebooks of Lance Daybreak -
curated by Erik Davis in 'Shards Of The Diamond Matrix'

Replay: The Recall of Experience
"Replay is more than a toy, a trick we perform with a piece of tape. Instant replay is, in fact, one of the more important developments in human history.
In pre-literate societies, tale-telling was the earliest form of replay. But tale-telling was slow and subject to distortion, since whoever repeated the tale was apt to embellish it or forget significant incidents. Then came the epic poem, the liturgy, the lay of the minstrel, and the ballad, all of which acted as mnemonic devices. Rhythm or rhyme in a poem or ballad helped ensure accuracy in subsequent retellings. "Columbus sailed the ocean blue in fourteen hundred and ninety ... seven"?
The printed word makes accurate replay possible for anyone who can read. Rereading (that is, replaying) a series of words on a page, we can go over the same thought or message as many times as we please, savor passages that engage us, ponder over a complicated idea, or discover in the words nuances that we missed on first reading. The ability to replay the printed word made possible great leaps forward in science and history.
We are largely unaware to what extent replay has enriched our lives. Don't think of replay only as television repeating a shot of a third baseman miraculously spearing a line drive. All records, photographs, movies and videotapes are replay. We see most of the news on television in the form of replay. The retail clerk who takes your credit card uses a form of instant replay in checking your personal credit standing through a telephone data bank."
Tony Schwartz - 'Media: The Second God' (Doubleday, New York, 1983, page 20)

Acoustic spaces can create different subjectivities
"What made early radio so exciting, in terms of the technical, the social, and the imaginative, was its openness: it was a space that wasn't entirely defined, wasn't totally mapped. More than that, I think, it was an acoustic space, which opened up a different logic. And that's happening again: the acoustic dimension of electronic media, and particularly of the Internet, offers an opportunity that is very different than simply providing more information, or making more web sites, or more entrancing animations. Or even making cheap phone calls."
Erik Davis

Joris Evers - Kazaa's Makers Turn to Net Telephony
Skype developed a new "Global Index" technology to enable IP telephony and IM on a decentralized peer-to-peer network in which computers drop online and offline without notice. The Global Index technology sets up a multitiered network of hubs, or supernodes, on the peer-to-peer network to mimic a central directory, according to the Skype Web site.
Skype routes calls through the most effective path possible and keeps multiple connection paths open, preventing call interruptions when a node on the route signs off. All calls are encrypted, preventing eavesdropping by nodes the call passes through, according to Skype.

Roots and Wires: Polyrhythmic Cyberspace and the Black Electronic
Erik Davis (abstract of speech from the Fifth International Conference on Cyberspace - 1996)
As we grope for models of cyberspace that elude the Cartesian coordinate system, we should recall Marshall McLuhan's distinction between visual and acoustic space. For McLuhan, visual space was a linear, logical, and sequential environment constructed by alphanumeric characters and, more recently, by Western Renaissance perspective. We know it from Descartes and William Gibson: the simultaneous appearance of an objective grid and an individual controlling subject.
McLuhan believed that electronic media were subverting visual space by creating "acoustic space": a psychic and social environment that resembles the kind of space we perceive we hear: multi-dimensional, resonant, invisibly tactile, "a total and simultaneous field of relations."
... Though any pat generalizations about "Africa" are dangerous, the structural properties of most African drumming -- polymeter and cross rhythms -- are an excellent and overlooked model for the kind of distributed, multi-centered, hybrid consciousness associated with the networked mind.

Resonance - fUSION Anomaly
"Resonance" can be seen as a form of causality, of course, but its causality is very different than that associated with visual space, because resonance allows things to respond to each other in a nonlinear fashion. Through resonance in a physical system, a small activity or event can gain a great deal of energy; for example ...

Art-Void: Textual Supplement
History is recorded. The method of recording will influence what is remembered.

Is Ma Microsoft calling? - CNET News.com - 12 June 2003
Jim Hu writes: "This summer, Microsoft will unveil its much-hyped server software ... officially joining the race to give office communications their biggest makeover since the arrival of e-mail.
Microsoft will begin by offering corporate instant messaging and "presence" features, competing with longtime rivals such as IBM and Sun Microsystems in a hot new communications niche. Presence technology lets IM users detect whether or not a contact is online and is moving onto other platforms such as wireless devices."

Message in a bottleneck - CNET News.com - 13 March 2003
Jim Hu writes: "A couple of years ago, Sprint's information services department was thinking about blocking streams of instant messages that were punching holes in its corporate firewall and causing headaches for PC technicians.
Until some of the telecom giant's top executives intervened.
"A number of execs and upper management were using AOL Instant Messenger. They viewed it as a tool to communicate with peers, board members and to communicate with one another because e-mail was too slow," said Doug Utley, who was on the information services team at the time and is now product manager for Sprint's Web services conferencing unit. "When that started happening, it became more acceptable."
To Sprint and many other companies, instant messaging has evolved from a teenage fad to a valuable communications tool that is central to everyday business. Companies are using IM not only to send real-time messages, but also to collaborate on projects, exchange data and create networks linking all types of Internet devices."

What's all the hype with Skype?

"In auditory-based cultures, the flow of information is analogous to the dispersal pattern created by dropping a pebble in a bucket of water."
Tony Schwartz

Voxilla.com - A user's guide to the communications revolution - 'Rebels Without Cause'

"In the oral tradition, the myth-teller speaks as many-to-many, not as person-to-person. Speech and song are addressed to all ..."
Edmund Carpenter

Shirky on Henshall on Skype as a social platform

"Language is a storage system for the collective experience of the tribe. Every time a speaker plays back that language, she releases a whole charge of ancient perceptions and memories. This involves him [or her] in the reality of the whole tribe. Language is a kind of corporate dream: it involves every member of the tribe all of the time in a great echo chamber."
Edmund Carpenter - They Became What They Beheld
(Outerbridge & Dienstfrey, New York, 1970)

Where do you stand?

"By the same process whereby [we] spin language out of [our] own being, [we] ensnare [ourselves] in it; and each language draws a magic circle round the people to which it belongs, a circle from which there is no escape save by stepping out of it into another."
Wilhelm von Humboldt

Marshall Soules - Resonant Media
"Tony Schwartz addresses the limitations of the transportation model [of communication] ...
With the advent of electronic media, we experience a return to an auditory-acoustic communications environment reminiscent of oral cultures. In this environment, communication strikes a "responsive chord."
Both Schwartz and McLuhan ... assert that ... electronically-mediated information is patterned like auditory information ...
With film, the brain does not "fill in" the image on the screen -- it fills in the motion between the images. [We interrupt this post to link to Glancing & Gazing]
... A listener or viewer brings far more information to the communication event than the communicator can possibly put into the program, commercial, or message. In communicating at electronic speed, we no longer direct information to an audience, we try to evoke stored information out of them, in a patterned way. The contemporary person has a huge psychic reservoir of impressions that can, in effect, be played like an instrument."

Re-Play
"Technologically, video has evolved out of sound ... the video camera bears a closer original relation to the microphone than to the film camera ...
Synaesthesia is the natural inclination of the structure of contemporary media. The material that produces music from a stereo sound system, transmits the voice over the telephone and materialises the image on a television set is, at the base level, the same. With the further implementation of digital codes ... there will be an even more extensive common linguistic root."
Bill Viola - 'The Sound of One Line Scanning' - 1986, in: Dan Lander and Micah Lexier (ed.), "Sound by Artists", Toronto, Banff, 1990.

Utopia and Thanatos
Agnes Ivacs reviews the book 'Radio Rethink - art, sound and transmission'
"Two of these ... I think, represent the dualistic character of radio: a paradox described rather poetically in an essay by Gregory Whitehead: "I have been struck by radio's profoundly split identity. Into one ear plays the happy folk band of Radio Utopia, brainwaves and radiowaves mixed into a grand electromagnetic community. Whilst into the other ear, a different band marches on, the trigger-finger crash band of Radio Thanatos, straight into oblivion. Most forgotten are the lethal wires that still heat up from inside out, wires that connect radio with warfare, brain damage, rattles from necropolis. When I turn my radio on, I hear a whole chorus of death rattles: from voices that have been severed from the body for so long that no one can remember who they belong to, or whether they belong to anybody at all."
The cherished dream of the avant-garde imagined radio as a force that creates a universal community on the basis of freedom. Brecht saw radio as a Babelian confusion, as an agora in virtual space where everyone can send and receive messages. Khlebnikov thought that radio would be the central tree of mankind's consciousness, and the main Radio station, where clouds of wires cluster, should be protected by a sign with a skull and crossbones in order to avoid any disruption which might produce a mental blackout all over the world. In his manifesto La Radia, Marinetti anticipated a network of live broadcasting that would unite the world through which the language "liberated" from syntax, the utopia of the wireless imagination could be realized."

Do different writing systems involve distinct profiles of brain activation?
A magnetoencephalography study
(ScienceDirect - Journal of Neurolinguistics - July-September 2003, Pages 429-438)
Receptive language-specific cortical maps have been repeatedly verified through normative and clinical magnetoencephalography studies. However, different writing systems may entail distinct neuro-anatomical substrates, hence different brain activation patterns for reading the various types of script. The project presented here is an attempt to describe the brain mechanisms mediating printed word recognition in languages with complex writing systems, such as Japanese, in view of the implications for a neurolinguistic model of language processing.

The Glory of the Human Voice
The human voice in every form, song, speech, screaming, whispering, purring, overtones, tones from the larynx, traditional, experimental, popular, unknown, undiscovered ... a subjective selection.

Resonance - VoiceOver: Anthology
"Palongwhoya, travelling throughout the earth, sounded out his call as he was bidden. All the vibratory centres along the earth's axis from pole to pole resounded his call: the whole earth trembled: the universe quivered in tone. Thus, he made the whole world an instrument of sound, and sound an instrument for carrying messages, resounding praise to the creator of all."
Hopi Indian myth of the creation of the First World
from Bill Viola - 'The Sound of One Line Scanning'

Wireless == great jukebox in the sky?
"While aggregated wireless music collections won't provide everything to everyone everywhere, they do have some interesting qualities that are worth exploring."
Robert Kaye
Anonymous concludes a comment with the thought: "Canarie, who developed Canada's Ca*Net3 network, have done experiments making an optical network act like a nation-wide optical storage device, 8000km in diameter. Rather than storing data on traditional hard drives, the data is kept spinning around the network at the speed of light.
I wonder what the RIAA would make of files which are simultaneously everywhere and nowhere?
Am

Remembering Walter Ong

posted by Andrew 9/17/2003 05:04:00 PM


{Sunday, September 07, 2003}

 
embedded togetherness

"You and the world are embedded together."
Gerald Edelman
quoted by Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch in
'The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience'
(MIT Press, 1993, page 200)

Encyclopaedia Autopoietica: Autopoiesis & Enaction Compendium

"Our central nervous systems are not fitted to some absolute laws of nature, but to laws of nature operating within a framework created by our own sensuous activity. Our nervous system does not allow us to see the ultraviolet reflections from flowers, but a bee's central nervous system does. And bats "see" what night-hawks do not. We do not further our understanding of evolution by general appeal to "laws of nature" to which all life must bend. Rather we must ask how, within the general constraints of the laws of nature, organisms have constructed environments that are the conditions for their further evolution and reconstruction of nature into new environments."
Richard Lewontin - The organism as the subject and object of evolution
Scientia 118: 63-82 (1983)

The morphological study of pattern
"If Hegel projected a historical pattern of figures minus an existential ground, Harold Innis, in the spirit of the new age of information, sought for patterns in the very ground of history and existence. He saw media, old and new, not as mere vertices at which to direct his point of view, but as living vortices of power creating hidden environments that act abrasively and destructively on older forms of culture."
Marshall McLuhan - Foreword to 'Empire & Communications' by Harold Innis
(University of Toronto Press, 1972, page v)

BBC - Radio 4 - Electronic Brains

"When this is, that comes to be; with the arising of this, that arises. When this is not, that does not come to be; with the cessation of this, that ceases."
Buddhist steps to an ecology of mind

"What you are you do not see, what you see is your shadow."
Rabindranath Tagore - 'Stray Birds'

Harold Adams Innis: The Bias of Communications & Monopolies of Power by Marshall Soules
"A medium of communication has an important influence on the dissemination of knowledge over space and over time and it becomes necessary to study its characteristics in order to appraise its influence in its cultural setting. According to its characteristics it may be better suited to the dissemination of knowledge over time than over space, particularly if the medium is heavy and durable and not suited to transportation, or to the dissemination of knowledge over space than over time, particularly if the medium is light and easily transported. The relative emphasis on time or space will imply a bias of significance to the culture in which it is imbedded.
Immediately we venture on this inquiry we are compelled to recognize the bias of the period in which we work. An interest in the bias of other civilizations may in itself suggest a bias of our own. Our knowledge of other civilizations depends in large part on the character of the media used by each civilization in so far as it is capable of being preserved or of being made accessible by discovery as in the case of the results of archaeological expeditions."
Harold Adams Innis - The Bias of Communication
(University of Toronto Press, 1971, page 33)

Sex Tips for Animals -- A Lighthearted Look at Mating
When the male honeybee ejaculates, he explodes and his genitals tear from his body with an audible snap.

Sponge builds a better glass fiber
Scientists say they have identified an ocean sponge living in the darkness of the deep sea that grows thin glass fibers capable of transmitting light at least as well as industrial fiber optic cables used for telecommunication. The natural glass fibers also are much more flexible than manufactured fiber optic cable that can crack if bent too far.
"You can actually tie a knot in these natural biological fibers and they will not break - it's really quite amazing," said Joanna Aizenberg, who led the research at Bell Laboratories.

Embedded.com - Is it time to move beyond zeroes and ones?
If the semiconductor industry starts dabbling in multi-valued logic systems, will engineers be willing to abandon binary in favor of ternary logic?
Bernard Cole writes:
"Theoretically, SiGe [silicon-germanium] could be used to build devices that move beyond simple 0/1, on-off based binary logic. Such structures can reliably generate multiple signal levels that are easily discriminated. They could be used to build 3-base, 4-base, and higher logic functions, effectively increasing a device's information density without further shrinking the transistor structure."

Steven Strogatz - How the Blackout Came to Life - [via Tesugen]
"When our own immune systems are performing at their best, they orchestrate their defenses through countless chemical conversations among T-cells and antibodies, enabling these defenders to calibrate their response to pathogens. In the same way, the thousands of power plants and substations in the grid need to be able to communicate with one another when any part of the system is breached, so they can collectively decide which circuit breakers should be tripped and which can safely remain intact.
The technology necessary to achieve this has existed for about a decade. It relies on computers, sensors and protective devices tied together by optical fiber so that all parts of the grid would be able to talk to one another at the speed of light - fast enough to get ahead of an onrushing blackout and confine it."

The Sensor Revolution - by Heather Green
"Duck Island is a laboratory for a new stage of computing known as sensor networks.
... While the last 50 years have been dominated by a march to ever more complex computers, the next few decades will see the rise of simple sensors -- by the billions."

Sensors of the World, Unite!
Ember CTO Robert Poor on turning wirelessly interconnected networks of sensors into a ubiquitous reality.
"There are microcontroller chips everywhere. During 2001, DARPA figures that there were 150 million CPU class chips sold. But during the same period of time, 7.5 billion embedded microcontrollers were sold. There are about 50 in your car. You probably have 100 around your house right now, just in little things like your toaster and your VCR controllers. Those are all candidates for being networked, because if the last two decades have taught us anything, it's that connectivity, not computation, makes something valuable. I could give you the fastest computer in the world with no Internet connection. How useful is that?"

Computer scientists unveil architecture for embedded single-chip supercomputer
August 27, 2003
Dr. Doug Burger and Dr. Stephen Keckler at The University of Texas at Austin have announced the design of an adaptive, high-performance microprocessor that could revolutionize computing. In collaboration with IBM, they are constructing a prototype system based on this architecture.
This new architecture, called TRIPS (the Tera-Op Reliable Intelligently Adaptive Processing System), is designed to provide supercomputer performance on a single chip ...
The TRIPS design uses a novel approach called "polymorphism" that permits unprecedented flexibility for running different types of software. The hardware includes a flexible grid of arithmetic circuits that exploits the natural flow of data within a program. The grid can be morphed so that the single piece of hardware can obtain high performance on a wide range of applications. This polymorphism allows TRIPS to support desktop, signal processing, graphics, server, scientific and embedded applications efficiently. This flexibility will allow a single TRIPS chip to be used in many different processor markets, replacing the current approach of having a unique and specialized processor for each market ...
The prototype will contain up to four processor cores, each capable of executing 16 operations per clock cycle, and a uniquely partitioned cache structure designed to offer higher performance than traditional approaches. The chip will contain more than 250 million transistors and will operate at 500 megahertz. The scientists' goal is to demonstrate the feasibility of a full-scale industrial development that could offer a 10-gigahertz chip capable of executing more than a trillion instructions per second.

Smart Dust
Autonomous sensing and communication in a cubic millimeter

Eye Spy - Rob Edwards writes for The Ecologist
"By 2010, [Pister] predicts that micro-electro-mechanical systems, or MEMS, will make possible ten-cent radios, one-dollar three-colour laser projectors and sensors that will scream when anyone tries to remove valuables from your house.
Sand-sized devices will tell you if your baby stops breathing, fine-tune your central heating and guide you through busy traffic to a parking space. In 2020 tiny sensors implanted around your body will warn you when you are about to come down with a heart attack, cancer, or the flu. 'MEMS sensors will be everywhere, and sensing virtually everything. Scavenging power from sunlight, vibration, thermal gradients and background radio frequencies, sensor motes will be immortal, self-contained, single-chip computers with sensing, communications, and power supply built in,' Pister forecasts."

Wearing Wires - Malcolm Beith reports on i-textiles
"The worlds of fashion and technology now seem to be converging on one man. Sundaresan Jayaraman, an engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Textile and Fiber Engineering, is not a particularly flashy dresser, but he may have hit on just the thing to make high-tech clothing hip. Five years ago Jayaraman invented a way of making a kind of electronic fabric -- a supple mixture of natural fibers and gossamer-thin wires and optical fibers. He's been tinkering with it ever since, and now it�s almost ready for prime time ...
Jayaraman's fabric is, he says, a kind of wearable motherboard."

Bend the Rules of Structure - Metropolis Magazine - June 2003
A Brooklyn metalworking shop with an unlikely name may hold the key to 21st-century shapemaking.
"Any skin under some sort of force wants to take on a natural pattern. These patterns have some morphological laws. We are working with that idea and applying it to metal."
Haresh Lalvani

This Designer Sees the Cool Light - by Jane Black
Architect Sheila Kennedy is at the forefront of weaving new flexible and efficient lighting technologies into structures.
"Unlike traditional light, which is created by heating an incandescent filament until it throws off light-producing photons, cool light is made by using natural light or electricity to "excite" molecular crystals embedded in luminescent pigments or special light-emitting diodes.
One advantage of cool light is that it's much more efficient than the traditional man-made variety: Like a firefly, it gives off nearly 100% of its energy as visible light. By comparison, a light bulb gives off 10% light and 90% heat. And because cool light is, well, cool, it can be embedded into architectural materials such as fabric, glass, wood, acrylic, and plastic -- creating new interfaces between the physical world and digital technology.
"Cool light represents a new paradigm in illumination," says Kennedy. "It's the end of bulb culture."

Nature's Magic
Jellyfish that give off an eerie glow, fireflies that flicker in the dark, electric fish that can stun, or leeches that suck the life-blood from their victims. They all delighted and horrified our scientific forefathers. Now these same extraordinary natural phenomena have been harnessed by modern scientists to push medical science to new limits.

Trickster at the Crossroads by Erik Davis
In our monotheisms, God's information is distant, except for the occasional prophet, and the rest of us are lost in babble and books. But Legba is always traversing that region of babble, and embodies the hope and the peril of a more open channel: hope, because he allows us to speak with the gods and for them to speak with us; and peril, because he tends to play tricks with the information he has, to keep us perpetually aware that he oversees the network of exchange. His nickname is Aflakete, which means "I have tricked you."

The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
from Dialectic of Enlightenment by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer - 1944
" ...[Radio] is democratic: it turns all participants into listeners and authoritatively subjects them to broadcast programs which are all exactly the same. No machinery of rejoinder has been devised, and private broadcasters are denied any freedom. They are confined to the apocryphal field of the "amateur" ... "

The New Amateur Journalists Weigh In - Emerging Alternatives: Blogworld
"Every significant new publishing phenomenon has been midwifed by a great leap forward in printing technology. The movable-type printing press begat the Gutenberg Bible, which begat the Renaissance. Moving from rags to pulp paved the way for Hearst and Pulitzer. The birth of alternative newspapers coincided almost perfectly with the development of the offset press. Laser printers and desktop publishing ushered in the newsletter and the 'zine ..."
Matt Welch

Life Without a Wick
"Gas-light meant a public connection between private spaces which allowed for the first time an entire city to be blacked-out. An explosion at New York's lower east side Gas Works in 1848 (resulting in the simultaneous failure of all the city's gas-lights) plunged the modern metropolis (for the first time) back into the chaos of the night: "The city that night was thrown into confusion. People stumbled through darkened streets falling into holes and colliding into objects."(12) The nature of gas-lighting meant that now the population of a city was bound together, for good and ill, by a shared technology."
Duncan Faherty

In Frayed Networks, Common Threads - by Seth Schiesel
(from The New York Times, 21 August, 2003)
Taken together, the blackout and the worm underscore a far-reaching challenge in managing modern technological societies: the difficulty of reaping the benefits of networks - railroad networks, airline networks, telephone networks, power networks and computer networks, among others - while minimizing their vulnerabilities.
"All of these events demonstrate that network effects, which are generally good in most situations, can go the other way,'' said Bruce Schneier, chief technical officer at Counterpane Internet Security in Cupertino, Calif., and author of "Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World'' (Copernicus Books, 2003). "Networks are meant to connect disparate systems, but as they become larger, now you can have power outages that affect half the country, Internet outages, and broader sorts of problems.''
As Darryl Jenkins, director of the Aviation Institute, a unit of George Washington University, puts it: "The plus of a network is that everything is connected. The minus of a network is that everything is connected.''

(Weblogs and) The Mass Amateurisation of (Nearly) Everything...
"The whole of the mainstream media has started to look towards an undercurrent of individual amateur creation ..."
Tom Coates

This is your life - snapped, stored and sent in a moment - [via No Sense of Place]
Two trends converge, a revolution looms. Camera phones will change the way we record our lives, writes Sue Lowe.
"Until now, popular interest in photography has been in the long-term preservation of memories in treasured family albums. But with camera phones, the focus is more on sharing than storing."

Japan Media Review - Camera phones changing the definition of picture-worthy
Unlike the traditional camera, the camera phone is an intimate and ubiquitous presence that invites a new kind of personal awareness, a persistent alertness to the visually newsworthy that makes amateur photojournalists out of its users.

Waxy.org: Daily Log: Double Dee and Steinski's "The Lesson"
In 1983, Tommy Boy Records held a remix contest ...

Robert Christgau writes: "[Steinski]'s just a perpetually disillusioned optimist who still assumes that the sounds and images rippling through the American consciousness are, forget copyright, every American's birthright -- that we're all free to interpret and manipulate them as we choose."

Media and Cultural Change
"One can say of Innis what Bertrand Russell said of Einstein on the first page of his A B C of Relativity (1925): "Many of the new ideas can be expressed in non-mathematical language, but they are none the less difficult on that account. What is demanded is a change in our imaginative picture of the world." The "later Innis" who dominates The Bias of Communication had set out on a quest for the causes of change. The "early Innis" of The Fur Trade in Canada had conformed a good deal to the conventional patterns of merely reporting and narrating change. Only at the conclusion of the fur trade study did he venture to interlace or link complex events in a way that reveals the causal processes of change. His insight that the American Revolution was in large part due to a clash between the interests of the settlers on one hand and the interests of the fur traders on the other is the sort of vision that becomes typical of the later Innis. He changed his procedure from working with a "point of view" to that of the generating of insights by the method of "interface," as it is named in chemistry. "Interface" refers to the interaction of substances in a kind of mutual irritation. In art and poetry this is precisely the technique of "symbolism" (Greek "symballein" - to throw together) with its paratactic procedure of juxtaposing without connectives. It is the natural form of conversation or dialogue rather than of written discourse. In writing, the tendency is to isolate an aspect of some matter and to direct steady attention upon that aspect. In dialogue there is an equally natural interplay of multiple aspects of any matter. This interplay of aspects can generate insights or discovery. By contrast, a point of view is merely a way of looking at something. But an insight is the sudden awareness of a complex process of interaction. An insight is a contact with the life of forms. Students of computer programming have had to learn how to approach all knowledge structurally."
Marshall McLuhan - Introduction to 'The Bias of Communication' by Harold A. Innis
(University of Toronto Press, 1971, pages vii - viii)

Cyberspace as a paratactic aggregate
"So the virtual worlds constitute a strand of thought that stretches back through history ..."
Matt Webb

Test: The Web as Symbolic Form
" ... if we're looking to understand the web as Symbolic Form, we need to appreciate that it has never *really* occupied a hermetic 'virtual' space, but that even in its earliest forms, it has contained echoes and reflections of pre-existing modes of representation. Even more importantly, these modes of representation are continually being mutated, built upon and erased by its users - sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously."

On the virtual: cognitive science meets cultural theory
" ... Matt is really on to something when he suggests (and please tell me if I am reading too much into this) that cyberspace is a peculiar conflict of representation and performance ..."
[PurseLipSquareJaw] Anne Galloway

"Space and time, like language itself, are works of art, and like language they help condition and direct practical action. Long before Kant announced that time and space were categories of the mind, long before the mathematicians discovered that there were conceivable and rational forms of space other than the form described by Euclid, mankind at large had acted on this premise. Like the Englishman in France who thought that bread was the right name for le pain each culture believes that every other kind of space and time is an approximation to or a perversion of the real space and time in which it lives.
During the Middle Ages spatial relations tended to be organized as symbols and values."
Lewis Mumford - 'Technics and Civilization'
(George Routledge & Sons, 1946, page 18)

Alexander von Humboldt
"Languages are not really means of presenting an already known truth but, rather, of discovering a truth unknown until that moment."
Alexander von Humboldt

Where exactly is the painting I behold?

Humboldt's Echo
Language is ... creative process[ual] ... activity ...
"If we regard language not as pure ergon, but as energeia, we can drift from the pathologoanatomic point of view to the live reality. Humberto Maturana, in the 20th century, coined a very good word for this: languaging. He compared language activity, or languaging, to dance, calling it a dance or coordination of behaviors ...
... a language philosopher of the so-called neo-Humboldtian trend, Fritz von Mauthner, at the turn of the two previous centuries also used to repeat in his writings that language is movement ...
Fritz von Mauthner compared language with the bed of the river. The movement of the flow is languaging and the bed itself is the residue of this flow. Recurrent schemes of activity act like attractors (a mathematical term), they shape the everyday languaging in continuous echoing and re-echoing. They emerge like meanders, the recurrent paths of flowing rainwater on the glass ...
It is not for the sake of pure theory that we have to consider the essence of language activity. If language is reified, if it is regarded as a thing, or a collection of things, then another myth takes the floor: the myth of rules and exceptions, together with the myth of additive learning ...
'... The process of speech cannot be compared with simple transfer of material. The hearer, as well as the speaker, has to re-create it ...'
Nothing is actually transmitted or received, no material is transferred in communication, it is produced by the receiver according to the echoing pattern. Individual and social actions unite in a transient equilibrium of communication, they create the human sphere which inevitably becomes objective environment for every new individual to enter ...
Autopoietic systems create and re-create themselves in recurrent patterns of activity (Humberto Maturana, 1995). Two hundred years ago, long before any ideas of cybernetics or general system theory were formulated, [Wilhelm von] Humboldt considered languages to be "self-regulating and developing sound systems". The idea of echoing, or re-creation can also explain the phenomenon of understanding ...
If language as a whole is an emergent phenomenon, which does not exist in the material sense of the word, then how is understanding, or similar action or attitude, possible?
... Each human being ... uses his own system of "linguistic movements". Communicating ideas and understanding occurs as far as these systems intersect. Humboldt's metaphoric explanation uses the idea of two cones. Understanding is the more appropriate, the deeper the tips of these cones plunge one into the other. Complete understanding is thus an illusionary ideal.
Individual linguistic acts form the domain of joint linguistic actions. It is this domain that we traditionally call language ...
Using modern terminology, which has become popular after Barthes' and Kristeva's interpretation of Bakhtin's work, the consensual domain of language activity can be regarded as an intertextual activity. What we use in speech has already been used by previous speakers ... Even innovation is intertextual, since every new reading of a text is a new interpretation of its meanings ...
Language has no territory of its own ."
Viatcheslav B. Kachkine

Humberto Maturana - Metadesign

posted by Andrew 9/07/2003 02:38:00 PM

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