Sunday, November 23, 2003

 
war anti-war and peace in the global village

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does it mean to be me?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Knoblock: An Introduction to Friedrich Nietzsche

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

George Orwell: Politics & the English Language

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

George Orwell: Politics & the English Language

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Atalanta fugiens emblems 21 - 25

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

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

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

Tuesday, November 18, 2003

 
ventilating data-chains with an act

Letter from Marshall McLuhan to Harold Adams Innis
"One major discovery of the symbolists which had the greatest importance for subsequent investigation was their notion of the learning process as a labyrinth of the senses and faculties whose retracing provided the key to all arts and sciences (basis of myth of Daedalus, basic for the dreams and schemes of Francis Bacon, and, when transferred by Vico to philology and history of culture, it also forms the basis of modern historiography, archaeology, psychology and artistic procedures alike.) Retracing becomes in modern historical scholarship the technique of reconstruction. The technique which Edgar Poe first put to work in his detective stories. In the arts this discovery has had all those astonishing results which have seemed to separate the ordinary public from what it regards as esoteric magic. From the point of view of the artist however the business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication whether in the press, in advertizing, or in the high arts is towards participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts. And this major revolution, intimately linked to technology, is one whose consequences have not begun to be studied although they have begun to be felt."
Letters of Marshall McLuhan (Oxford University Press, 1987, page 221)

2003 Blogger Con: The Rule of Links by Dave Winer

Q: Are we re-invented by our own extensions?
"The instrument constructed intelligently ... reacts on the nature of the being that constructs it; for in calling on him to exercise a new function, it confers on him, so to speak, a richer organization, being an artificial organ by which the natural organism is extended. For every need that it satisfies, it creates a new need; and so, instead of closing, like instinct, the round of action within which the animal tends to move automatically, it lays open to activity an unlimited field into which it is driven further and further, and made more and more free."
Creative Evolution - Henri Bergson (1911)

"Mankind always sets itself only such problems as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation."
Karl Marx - A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)

DM Review: The Link is the Thing, Part 1 by Richard Hackathorn
"In many physical and social systems, the important characteristic is that it is composed of a loosely coupled network of interacting autonomous elements. It is not a homogeneous mass. The whole system behaves quite differently than that of the individual elements."

R. Buckminster Fuller's Synergetics

Mental Mouthfuls & Ventilated Prose
"Out of multi-overlaid experience patternings there sometimes emerges an awareness of what we may call a coincidence pattern - a localized thickening of points. These emergent patterns of frequency congruence... [Folds infusion]
Each [post] card appears to be chaotically patterned with holes."
R. Buckminster Fuller

PressThink: What's Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism?
Jay Rosen writes:
Ten Things Radical about the Weblog Form in Journalism:
[...]
9.) In journalism classically understood, information flows from the press to the public. In the weblog world as it is coming to be understood, information flows from the public to the press.
10.) Journalism traditionally assumes that democracy is what we have, information is what we seek. Whereas in the weblog world, information is what we have - it's all around us - and democracy is what we seek.

"We don't know who discovered water but we're pretty sure it wasn't the fisk."
Annual McLuhan Lecture + NFB: McLuhan's Wake
"A pervasive medium is always beyond perception."

When words have failed us
"The challenge is, as [George] Steiner sees it, to discover how to shape the legacy of language so that it is capable of yielding fresh meaning. In Grammars of Creation, he argues that what is required is nothing less than a new "grammar" of creativity, a new set of rules, to articulate the riches of language in freshly constructive ways that match the ethos and beliefs of our complex, anxious, information-overloaded world."

Copyrights: A radical rethink - The Economist, January 23rd 2003
"Copyright was originally the grant of a temporary government-supported monopoly on copying a work, not a property right. Its sole purpose was to encourage the circulation of ideas by giving creators and publishers a short-term incentive to disseminate their work. Over the past 50 years, as a result of heavy lobbying by content industries, copyright has grown to such ludicrous proportions that it now often inhibits rather than promotes the circulation of ideas, leaving thousands of old movies, records and books languishing behind a legal barrier. Starting from scratch today, no rational, disinterested lawmaker would agree to copyrights that extend to 70 years after an author's death ..."

Three Essays + The Death of the Author
"We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. Similar to Bouvard and Pécuchet, those eternal copyists, at once sublime and comic and whose profound ridiculousness indicates precisely the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them. Did he wish to express himself, he ought at least to know that the inner 'thing' he thinks to 'translate' is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely; something experienced in exemplary fashion by the young Thomas de Quincey, he who was so good at Greek that in order to translate absolutely modern ideas and images into that dead language, he had, so Baudelaire tells us (in Paradis Artificiels), 'created for himself an unfailing dictionary, vastly more extensive and complex than those resulting from the ordinary patience of purely literary themes'. Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt: life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred."
Roland Barthes - Image-Music-Text
(Flamingo, 1984, pages 146-147)

Wired 2.03: The Economy of Ideas by John Perry Barlow (1994)
Digital technology is detaching information from the physical plane ...

On several planes at once
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."
Thomas Jefferson

Mark Pesce - Europa, Europa (The Sensuous and the Visible)
"Our eyes are the most amazing things, little bits of the nervous system loosed from behind the thick case of skull bone and turned outward to face the world. There is little question that, in overall flexibility, the human visual system stands unparalleled among the planet's species. Blake wrote, "As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers." Man precedes the eye, or did, until Marshall McLuhan turned this tidy little formula back onto itself. As the eye sees, McLuhan believed, so the man is. The reflexive nature of this philosophical theorem leads immediately to the conception of human as an informational system, sending messages both forward and back, positive and negative feedback working in concert with biological imperative to produce a coherent, autopoetic unity."

In A Noisy World, How Can The Senses Project And Receive Information At The Same Time?
April 1, 2003 (Bethesda, MD) ? How do we hear when some of us chatter all day? When we sing in the shower, why doesn't the active voice smother the rest of our body's sensory systems? The answer to these questions may be found in the simple male cricket (Gryllus bimaculatus), which sing for hours at over 100 decibels sound pressure levels (dB SPL) in order to attract females.

Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980)
"If a technology is introduced either from within or from without a culture, and if it gives new stress or ascendancy to one or another of our senses, the ratio among all of our senses is altered."
Marshall McLuhan - The Gutenberg Galaxy (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962, page 24)
Leon Surette asserts: "This remark contains the essence of McLuhan's originality: the notion that cognitive processes themselves reflect the processing properties of our sensory organs, particularly of the two symbolic organs, the ear and the eye. [...]
McLuhan's strong claims for the consequences of print and the alphabet are a mirror image of Jacques Derrida's argument a decade later for the priority of writing over speech. Where McLuhan saw alphabetization as destroying the tribal world of dialogue and face-to-face contact, Derrida sees the Christian privileging of the spoken over the written word as generating a "logocentrism," to which he attributes the same centralizing, hegemonic properties that McLuhan attributes to print culture."

Marshall McLuhan: New Media As Political Forms
"Whether it be Holmes or Marlowe the sleuth is an alienated man, but he is one who uses the communication network of the metropolis as a kind of musical instrument. The appeal of detective stories is not least in the power of the sleuth to control the city as an instrument of expression. He turns the city into poetry.
What Joyce has shown us is how to do for the whole of existence what the sleuth does with the keyboard of the city. Today we are compelled by the quantity of available social and political facts to learn a new visual language for swiftly mastering the inner dynamics by the outer carapace of facts.
Perhaps nothing more bespeaks the hypnotic and irrational pressure of the book-page than the scant attention it has received as a form. In the 16th century it required an effort to read print comparable to the effort today exerted to master symphonic scores or mathematical pictograms. Moreover a passage of Greene, Lyly, or Nashe is not prose in the 18th or 19th century sense. The focus of attention has to be readjusted for changes of tone and attitude in every sentence. Print had not yet imposed its massive mechanical weight to level off the oral and colloquial features of prose. Even punctuation was not for the reading eye but the speaking voice - a fact lost on the 19th century editors of Shakespeare. The triumphs of 20th century editors of Shakespeare have mainly consisted in abandoning the habits of rigid perspective induced by three centuries of print-hypnosis."

Disconnected Urbanism - Metropolis Magazine - November 2003
Paul Goldberger writes: "The cell phone has changed our sense of place more than faxes and computers and e-mail because of its ability to intrude into every moment in every possible place. When you walk along the street and talk on a cell phone, you are not on the street sharing the communal experience of urban life. You are in some other place -- someplace at the other end of your phone conversation. You are there, but you are not there. It reminds me of the title of Lillian Ross's memoir of her life with William Shawn, Here But Not Here. Now that is increasingly true of almost every person on almost every street in almost every city. You are either on the phone or carrying one, and the moment it rings you will be transported out of real space into a virtual realm."

Unspooled by Hank Stuever - The Washington Post, 29 October 2002
In the Digital Age, The Quaint Cassette Is Sent Reeling Into History's Dustbin
"Someday music will be only air. There will be no objects to hold or fetishize and people will simply collect lists. No disc, nothing spooled or grooved, nothing to scratch or break, no heads to clean, no dust to wipe, no compulsive alphabetizing. Nothing to put away in shoe boxes in spare closets and be embarrassed about.
The end of hiss.
The end of the sound system as furniture.
The end, on some strange and intellectually picky level, of the crucial dialectic between Side A and Side B, and the idea that songs talk to one another and take you someplace."
[...]
Hank Stuever continues: "The cassette was invented to make sure that you would not have to listen to your mother, in any environment, but especially in the car, from the ages of 13 to 15.
Please take off those headphones.
I'm not going to tell you again.
I was talking to you and you weren't even hearing me.
Can you hear me?
Nor would anyone have to listen to people on the bus, on the street, or in hallways, or anywhere.
So-called Generation X, the people born between 1964 and 1981, who don't get credited for much in history, can at least take solace in the fact that they saw the entire lifespan of the cassette. It was born, lived and died in their era. They made it happen, one cassette at a time."

Conceptions of conception - Hugh Lawson-Tancred
"A spectre is haunting the study of the mind: the spectre of neuroscience.
[...]
We may be in the late afternoon of a culture, no longer at ease with the self-definition of our species by the dignity of speech, but a mutation is subterraneanly taking place. In Paris, London, Berlin, Washington and a myriad other centres the work of archiving and garnering the past is proceeding apace and a kind of ultra-Alexandrian preoccupation with the shoring up of every scrap is leading inevitably, through the medium of the Internet, to a quantum change in the core triadic relationship of author, work and readership. Technology precedes metaphysics."

Dead men walking: How detective fiction changes with the times
"The human brain is wired to make sense and stories out of life's confusion. Those drawing-room conundrums of between the two World Wars were one kind of artistic response.
[...] Once all the parlourmaids were dead, a more egalitarian generation of British readers was drawn to the American detective vision -- of a good man alone, shedding light in the darkness. Raymond Chandler, whose laconic, lonely hero unmasked mobsters and treacherous hussies with sadness in his heart, made the detective at home with uncertainty: "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid."
But now these tough white guys are dead too. Suddenly, the detective agency has discovered diversity."

Scarpetta & Sherlock by Dalya Alberge
"He is an old-fashioned bachelor with a liking for pipes. She is a role model for feminists with a line in high heels and Italian cuisine. Now Sherlock Holmes, Britain's most famous detective, has lost out to Kay Scarpetta in a survey of the nation's favourite sleuths.
Scarpetta was a genrebusting figure when created by Patricia Cornwell a decade ago. The heroine, who digs up scientific evidence to help police to catch killers, heads the list of popular characters, with 23 per cent of the vote."

A Tokyo Novelist Mixes Felonies With Feminism
In The New York Times - 17 November 2003 - Howard W. French explores the work of Natsuo Kirino:
... Manchuria was a place of fantastic dreams for many Japanese socialists, liberal planners and technocrats, who were allowed to live out their utopian ideals there on the Asian mainland during the most reactionary years of Japanese militarism.
After years of footnote status, that Japanese colonial period is now in vogue among Japanese historians, and Ms. Kirino thinks she knows why: the "anything is possible" atmosphere that pervaded the colony mirrors the giddiness that her generation experienced during the financial bubble of the 1980's, when denizens of Tokyo drank the most expensive wines and sprinkled gold flakes on their deserts to celebrate their wealth.
"I am part of that generation, which felt that money would allow us to do anything," Ms. Kirino said. "Now we are flooded with desire and don't know how to deal with it. Manchuria was a land of illusions, too, and I want to see what happened to those people, and to their dreams."

Pete Dexter's L.A. Noir
John Smolens - The Invisible World

Of Time and Mathematics
"Time, that mysterious something, that flow, that relation, that mediator, that arena for event, envelops us and confounds us all. What is time? The answer of St. Augustine has become famous: "If no one asks me the question, I know; but if one should require me to tell, I cannot." Two millenia later, two revolutions in physics later, we can still sympathize with this answer. Our shelves are filled with formulas and speculations, and we still cannot say what time is; we cannot agree whether there is one time or many times, cannot even agree whether time is an essential ingredient of the universe or whether it is the grand illusion of the human intellect.
There are thus two conflicting opinions about time, and they have been around since antiquity. According to Archimedes (and to Parmenides earlier still, for whom ultimate reality is timeless), one must eliminate time, hide it, spirit it away, transform it, reduce it to something else, to geometry, perhaps. Time is an embarrassment. According to Aristotle (and to Heraclitus earlier still, for whom the world is a world of happenings), one must face time squarely, for the world is temporal in its very nature and its comings-into-being are real.
Modern science has largely followed the path of Archimedes rather than that of Aristotle."
Philip J. Davis & Reuben Hersh - Descartes Dream: The World According to Mathematics
(Penguin, 1988, pages 189-190)

Original bliss
In the beginning...

"A crime is like a crack in reality, and it is the author's role to explore those cracks."
Natsuo Kirino

posted by Andrew 11/18/2003 04:46:00 PM

Thursday, November 06, 2003

 
The sixth sense of Henry the Sleuth

Counting Coots - By Corey S. Powell and Paroma Basu
"The coot - a clumsy bird so unloved that its name is a synonym for an eccentric old man - has a remarkable ability to recognize and count its eggs, says behavioral ecologist Bruce Lyon of the University of California at Santa Cruz. Coots need to be crafty because of the unusual way the animals compete: One coot will slip eggs into another's nest to trick the host into raising the interloper's eggs. But nest owners use their wits to fight back, Lyon finds."

The Big Question: Does the Universe Follow Mathematical Law?
In The New York Times - 10 February 1998 - George Johnson writes: " [...] In "The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics" (Oxford University Press, 1997), Stanislas Dehaene, a cognitive scientist at the National Institute of Health and Medical Research, in Paris, marshals experimental evidence to show that the brains of humans -- and even of chimpanzees and rats -- may come equipped at birth with an innate, wired-in aptitude for mathematics.
[...] Leopold Kronecker, a 19th-century mathematician, once said: "The integers were created by God; all else is the work of man." Albert Einstein, taking a different view of whole numbers, wrote that "the series of integers is obviously an invention of the human mind, a self-created tool which simplifies the ordering of certain sensory experiences."
In "The Number Sense," Dehaene went even further. The integers -- the smallest ones, anyway -- are hard-wired into human nervous systems by evolution, along with a crude ability to add and subtract. Mathematics, he believes, is "engraved in the very architecture of our brains."
"Because we live in a world full of discrete and movable objects, it is very useful for us to be able to extract number," he argued in a ... forum published ... by the Edge Foundation. "This can help us to track predators or to select the best foraging grounds, to mention only very obvious examples."
[...] While people are born with an understanding of the rudiments of arithmetic, [Dehaene] contends, going beyond that requires learning and creativity. Multiplication, division, and the whole superstructure of higher mathematics -- from algebra and trigonometry, to calculus, fractal geometry, and beyond -- are a beautiful improvisation, the work of human culture."

Salamanders can do maths - Nature 3 May 2003
Amphibians hint that number skills evolved early. Hannah Hoag writes:
"The addition of salamanders to the list of animals with natural mathematical abilities hints that some notion of number evolved at least 28 million years ago. "It may be more ancient than we thought," agrees Marc Hauser, who studies primate math at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But Hauser and Leslie caution that different processes may be at work in amphibians and primates."

Monkeys Have Numerical Abilities, Two Columbia Psychologists Report [also here]
Ms. Brannon and Prof. Terrace believe that arithmetic and language evolved separately, and that number skills preceded human speech. "Language is a complex social skill, whereas counting can be learned by the individual," Prof. Terrace said. "Counting is useful in foraging for food, assessing a group of predators or ordering the number of dominant males in one's group."
Science Daily - 26 October 1998

ABC News Online - Counting coots mystify scientist
"The ability of females to count only their own eggs in a mixture of eggs is a remarkable feat that provides a convincing, rare example of counting in a wild animal." Bruce Lyon

BBC Science/Nature - Counting lions roar for help
A scientist based in the UK says she has proved that lions can count.
Biologist Karen McComb of Sussex University used a big loudspeaker and recordings of lions in various numbers to experiment with African lions. She then recorded the number and type of roars that came back from lions around.
"What they did was closely controlled by how many were roaring from the loudspeaker, and how many of themselves there were," Karen McComb of Sussex University explained to BBC World Service's Science In Action programme. "Their likelihood of approaching increased as their own group size increased - and also decreased as the number of intruders roaring from the loudspeaker increased. Their behaviour was best predicted by a variable that we called odds, which was the ratio of number of defenders to number of intruders." In other words, the lions were making decisions by working out the numbers they potentially faced.

Lab tricks show dogs can count - New Scientist - 31 July 2002 [& BBC report]
Hazel Muir writes: "Dogs can count, new work on mongrels reveals. Dogs are descended from wolves, which not only have a large neocortex - the brain's centre of reasoning - but live in large social groups. So their mathematical ability could, in evolutionary terms, have been useful for working out how many allies and enemies they had in a pack, the researchers think.
Animals such as birds and rodents can tell when one pile of objects is bigger than another. But to count, an animal has to recognise that each object in a set corresponds to a single number and that the last number in a sequence represents the total number of objects. Many primates have this basic mathematical ability. But Robert Young, an animal behaviour expert at the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, suspected that dogs do too.
To test the idea, Young and his colleague Rebecca West of De Montfort University in Lincoln, UK, borrowed a technique that has been used to show that five-month-old babies can count."

Coot Birds Can Count, Study Says
James Owen reports for National Geographic: "Many animals apparently have a brain-wiring that in the right circumstances can support competent counting without verbal symbolic representation of numbers," said Malte Andersson, from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. "Lyon's findings provide a fascinating example of how this capacity is put to good use in the wild."
"The study raises some very interesting questions about just how animals are able to assess the number of young they have - and which ones are theirs - and adjust their parental care accordingly," [John] Eadie said.
Lyon believes visual egg-counting could be a skill common to many birds.

Crow Makes Wire Hook to Get Food

Fingerprints
"A squire was determined to shoot a crow which made its nest in the watch-tower of his estate. Repeatedly he had tried to surprise the bird, but in vain: at the approach of man the crow would leave its nest. From a distant tree it would watchfully wait until the man had left the tower and then return to its nest. One day the squire hit upon a ruse: two men entered the tower, one remained within, the other came out and went on. But the bird was not deceived: it kept away until the man within came out. The experiment was repeated on the succeeding days with two, three, then four men, yet without success. Finally, five men were sent: as before, all entered the tower, and one remained while the other four came out and went away. Here the crow lost count. Unable to distinguish between four and five it promptly returned to its nest."
Tobias Dantzig - Number: The Language of Science (George Allen and Unwin, 1962, page 3)

How to count in oil and stone
"Numbers unfold their peculiarities to people who think about them as individuals, instead of as anonymous markers on a notched line leading to infinity ... There is a certain truth to the habit of sticking to smaller numbers, since the unaided human mind can rarely hold more than three or four ideas at once. (According to the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan [Sokal hoax], the numbers zero to six are a special key to the psyche because the unconscious can't count beyond six.) The basic idea of this book is a duality (painting and alchemy), and as I write I might be able to keep a half-dozen of its themes in my head at once. But no one except the odd number genius has theories that depend on 1000 or 1729 ideas."
James Elkins - What Painting Is (Routledge, 2000, pages 42-43)

Edge 82

"Man thinks in two kinds of terms: one, the natural terms, shared with beasts; the other, the conventional terms (the logicals) enjoyed by man alone."
William of Ockham

What Is a Number, that a Man May Know It?
"The numbers from 1 through 6 are perceptibles; others, only countables. Experiments on many beasts have often shown this: 1 through 6 are probably natural terms that we share with the beasts. In this sense they are natural numbers. All larger integers are arrived at by counting or putting pebbles in pots or cutting notches in sticks, each of which is - to use Ockham's phrase - a conventional term, a way of doing things that has grown out of our ways of getting together, our communications, our logos, tricks for setting things into one-to-one correspondence."
Warren S. McCulloch - Embodiments of Mind (MIT Press, 1988, page 7)

I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
Yeats

A problem squared
Marcus du Sautoy finds poetry has links with calculations in Imagining Numbers: Particularly the Square Root of Minus Fifteen by Barry Mazur
"If mathematics is an art then it is art created under huge logical constraints. This is perhaps what makes poetry or music, with boundaries of metre or harmony, good analogies for the mathematical creative process. But ultimately what sets mathematics apart from other creative disciplines is the fact that ambiguity is anathema to the mathematician, while it is one of the joys of poetry."

John Burnside - Journey to the centre of the Earth
"On an open stage in a meadow above Kafjord, northern Norway, in July, Muscogee poet Joy Harjo and her band, Poetic Justice, have the whole crowd up and dancing ..."
[...]
John Burnside continues: "I listen and watch as a group of Kamchatkan dancers perform a dance that is as close as I can imagine coming to a living enactment of the Orpheus mystery, a shamanic tale of dismemberment and renewal that acknowledges a darkness present in the song of the earth and in our own hearts and minds.
All the time, what I am listening for is something I can barely talk about. A shared sense of home, yes; but also the acknowledgement that, while it perplexes and disturbs us, the darkness is both necessary and good. A passionate and truly rational invocation of justice, but also an acceptance of the provisional nature of human existence. By contrast, where I come from, home means something that mistakes itself for permanence: it means possession, it means consumption. Where I come from, darkness is "evil". Where I come from, we want everything, especially our own lives, to last for ever.
So while I don't want to romanticise this, Riddu Riddu, a small festival on the rim of the Arctic tundra, has revealed to me that I belong to the wrong world."

Multiple Versions of the World
"What bonus or increment of knowing follows from combining information from two or more sources?
[...] Von Neumann once remarked, partly in jest, that for self-replication among machines, it would be a necessary condition that two machines should act in collaboration.
Fission with replication is certainly a basic requirement of life, whether it be for multiplication or for growth, and the biochemists now know broadly the process of replication of DNA. But next comes differentiation, whether it be the (surely) random generation of variety in evolution or the ordered differentiation of embryology. Fission, seemingly, must be punctuated by fusion, a general truth which exemplifies the principle of information processing we are considering here: namely that two sources of information (often in contrasting modes or languages) are enormously better than one."
Gregory Bateson - Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (Fontana 1980, page 89)

Diversity: Multiple ways of knowing & multiple worldviews by Shamim Bodhanya
"Bohm's causal interpretation of quantum physics, rivals the more dominant ... Copenhagen interpretation of Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and others. [David] has indicated that there is only a single undivided wholeness in the universe. It is we, as observers that fragment the world through the categories that we impose. He uses the metaphor of the hologram to describe this undivided wholeness."

Hedy Lamarr - an engineering pioneer

posted by Andrew 11/06/2003 04:24:00 PM

Wednesday, November 05, 2003

 
Detective Gold forks on Ardour Street

Art and Science Meet With Novel Results - by Emily Eakin [also here]
"Radiant Cool" has the makings of a gripping noir thriller: a missing body, a tough-talking female sleuth and a mustachioed Russian agent mixed up in a shadowy plot to take over the world. But the novel, by Dan Lloyd, a neurophilosopher at Trinity College in Hartford, is also a serious work of scholarship, the unlikely vehicle for an abstruse new theory of consciousness.
Lured in by the sinister atmospherics (a possible murder victim turns up on Page 1) and clipped, Sam Spade narration ("He was a fool and a moron, but I never wanted to see him dead"), readers soon find themselves enrolled in a heady tutorial on Husserl, phenomenology, neural networks and multidimensional scaling.
Mr. Lloyd says that embedding his theory of consciousness in a novel was essential for making his scholarly case. "I'm trying to show the way that consciousness is personal and idiosyncratic and especially bound up with time," he said. "If you put those factors together, you end up with a novel as a way to express those ideas."

James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879)
Scottish physicist, widely considered by twentieth and twenty-first century physicists to have been one of the most significant figures of the nineteenth century. His work fundamentally changed conceptions of electromagnetism and introduced the basis of field theory. He is also known for his work on thermodynamics ...

In Our Time - James Clerk Maxwell - BBC Radio 4
"He took the first colour photograph, defined the nature of gases and with a few mathematical equations expressed all the fundamental laws of light, electricity and magnetism - and in doing so he provided the tools to create the technological age, from radar to radio and televisions to mobile phones. He is credited with fundamentally changing our view of reality, so much so that Albert Einstein said, "One scientific epoch ended and another began with James Clerk Maxwell".
But who was James Clerk Maxwell? What were his ideas, and does this nineteenth century 'natural philosopher' deserve a place alongside Newton and Einstein in the pantheon of science?"

The go of it
Gillian Beer reviews The Man Who Changed Everything by Basil Mahon
"Maxwell changed the field of thought by his insistence on statistical methods and on probability rather than mechanical explanation. His work in optics (he took the world's first colour photograph), in field theory, on automatic control systems, on how to use polarised light to show structural strain patterns, and much else, developed alongside his three fundamental papers over a period of nine years from 1855 on electromagnetic waves.
To a wider audience today, Maxwell's name is probably most recalled by his pithy thought-experiment "Maxwell's Demon" (not his own title), in which an intelligent molecule-type creature could make heat flow from a cold gas to a hot one, against the laws of thermodynamics."

The Fight Against the Second Law of Thermodynamics

"The word processor is one of the most remarkable products of our mathematized age. It may very well change our concept of a book. In the past, an author would write, rewrite, correct, and edit, and finally a book would appear. It might go through several editions. In the word processor era, a book is a dynamic thing which can be continuously updated by the author or his literary heirs. The reader, on line, calls for today's version. A book is converted from a static object to a living institution with all the strengths and weaknesses of such institutions."
Philip J. Davis & Reuben Hersh - Descartes Dream: The World According to Mathematics
(Penguin, 1988, page xviii)

James Clerk Maxwell once asked: "What if the book of nature were really a magazine?"

"The difficulty lies not in new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones."
John Maynard Keynes

Mallarmé and the "End of the Book" by William Barker
"It is not the page that Mallarmé employs as his material base, but the opening represented by a pair of pages. That is, the poem is now to be read across the fold, and the page is now seen as part of a larger entity. Designers, from the middle ages onwards, have understood the visual force of the opening in the codex, but few writers have written for this bifurcated space. Mallarmé recalls that small company of pre-modernist writers - Geoffrey Tory, Laurence Sterne, William Blake, Charles Nodier, who understand the force of the opening as an aesthetic unit. For Mallarmé, in an essay on the symbolism of the book, the fold represented the location of the dark meaning of the text."

El Lissitsky writes in the Gutenberg-Jahrbuch of 1926: "There are today two dimensions to the word. As sound it is a function of time; as exposition, of space. The book of the future must be both. This is how to overcome the automatism of the contemporary book. A world-view which has become automatic ceases to exist in our senses, so we are left drowning in a void. The dynamic achievement of art is to transform the void into space, i.e., into a unity conceivable for our senses."

Squaring the circle: Stéphane Mallarmé by John Simon
"[...] By now the father of a growing girl, Geneviève, Mallarmé came to realize that excessive intellectual activity to the exclusion of everything else was extremely harmful. "To be truly human," he wrote Lefébure in 1867, "you have to think with your entire body." Yet it is at this point that, transferred to Avignon with its pleasant climate, he writes one of his most rigorously cerebral poems, the notorious "-ix sonnet," beginning "Ses purs ongles très haut dédiant leur onyx." It is based on the decision to have one set of its rhymes in -ix, no easy feat in French. Millan does scant justice to this sonnet; he does not even quote the important passage from the annunciatory letter to Lefébure: "I may write a sonnet, and as I have only three rhymes in -ix, do your best to send me the true meaning of the word ptyx, for I'm told it doesn't exist in any language -- something I'd much prefer, for that would give me the joy of creating it through the magic of rhyme." But the word does occur in Greek, where it means a fold or a shell, of the kind that pressed to the ear suggests the sound of the sea."

Geometry and Abjection by Victor Burgin
"In the 'postmodern' period, the speed with which space is traversed is no longer governed by the mechanical speed of machines such as aeroplanes, but rather by the electronic speed of machines such as computers and video links, which operate at nearly the speed of light. A mutation in technology therefore has, arguably, brought the technologism inherited from the spatial perceptions of modernist aesthetics into line with the perceptions of modern physics. Thus, for example, Paul Virilio writes that 'technological space ... is not a geographical space, but a space of time'. In this space/time of electronic communications, operating at the speed of light, we see things, he observes, 'in a different light' - the 'light of speed'. Moreover, this space seems to be moving, once again, towards self-enclosure. For example, David Bolter, a classics professor writing about computer programming, concludes, 'In sum, electronic space has the feel of ancient geometric space.' One of the phenomenological effects of the public applications of new electronic technologies is to cause space to be apprehended as 'folding back' upon itself. Spaces once conceived of as separated, segregated, now overlap: live pictures from Voyager II, as it passes through the rings of Saturn, may appear on television sandwiched between equally 'live' pictures of internal organs, transmitted by surgical probes, and footage from Soweto. A counterpart, in the political sphere, of the fold-over spaces of information technologies is terrorism. In the economic sphere it is the tendency of multinational capitalism to produce First World irruptions in Third World countries, while creating Second World pockets in the developed nations. To contemplate such phenomena is no longer to inhabit an imaginary space ordered by the subject-object stand-off of Euclidean perspective. The analogies which fit best are now to be found in non-Euclidean geometries - the topologist's Mobius strip, for example, where the apparently opposing sides prove to be formed from a single, continuous surface.
Space, then, has a history."

Topological Ordering in Cyberspace by Jeanette Hofmann
"The purpose of addresses is to localize and identify things and people. At the same time, however, addresses generate a spatial order. My talk revolves around the topological order created by Internet addresses. How are things located in the immaterial world of cyberspace? And related to this question: What is space? How do we imagine space?"

Envisioning the World Wide Web 1999
Fractal Complexity of a CyberCity 1998
Modelling Cyberspace 1997

"Joined together, the great mass of human minds around the earth seems to behave like a coherent, living system. The trouble is that the flow of information is mostly one-way." Lewis Thomas

The World-Wide Web as a Super-Brain: from metaphor to model
"[...] In the human brain knowledge and meaning develop through a process of associative learning: concepts that are frequently used together become more strongly connected (Hebb's rule for neural networks). It is possible to implement similar mechanisms on the Web, creating associations on the basis of the paths followed by the users through the maze of linked documents. The principle is simply that links followed by many users become 'stronger', while links that are rarely used become 'weaker'. Simple heuristics can then propose likely candidates for new links: if a user moves from A to B to C, it is probable that there exists not only an association between A and B but also between A and C (transitivity), and between B and A (symmetry). In this manner, potential new links are continuously generated, while only the ones that gather sufficient 'strength' are retained and made visible to the user. This process was tested by us in an adaptive hypertext experiment, where a web of randomly connected words self-organized into a semantic network, by learning from the link selections made by its users. [See Bollen & Heylighen, 1996, for more details about learning algorithms and experimental results].
Francis Heylighen & Johan Bollen

On Societies as Organisms
"A solitary ant, afield, cannot be considered to have much of anything on his mind; indeed with only a few neurons strung together by fibers, he can't be imagined to have a mind at all, much less a thought. He is more like a ganglion on legs. Four ants together, or ten, encircling a dead moth on a path, begin to look more like an idea. They fumble and shove, gradually moving the food toward the Hill, but as though by blind chance. It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits."
Lewis Thomas - The Lives of a Cell (Futura paperback, 1976, Pages 12 - 13)

Stéphane Mallarmé : a portrait of the poet as a spider

Stéphane Mallarmé : "A silent white ant, I dig and work."

Stéphane Mallarmé, un coup de dés...

"A regular journal carries from one research worker to another the various ... observations which are of common interest ... A typical scientific paper has never pretended to be more than another little piece in a larger jigsaw - not significant in itself but as an element in a grander scheme. This technique, of soliciting many modest contributions to the store of human knowledge, has been the secret of Western science since the seventeenth century, for it achieves a corporate, collective power that is far greater than one individual can exert."
John Ziman - Information, Communication, Knowledge,
Nature Magazine, Volume 224, Pages 318 - 324, 25 October 1969

The World as a Blog + The Map of Literature

"The invention of a mechanism for the systematic publication of fragments of scientific work may well have been the key event in the history of modern science."
John Ziman

Tetrads, or, The Four Laws of Media
"McLuhan has stated that all technology we humans create is an extension of some human sense. Each new technology introduced to our culture is accompanied by a host of services, and paid for by the ensuing disservices.
The services and disservices are the hidden ground within which the figure of the artifact resonates. This hidden ground is the ambient environment we live in, but may not always be consciously aware of.
We tend to follow a path derived from familiarity with our environment. Introduction of new technologies alter our sense ratio with which we experience the world, and forces abandonment of the old mental imprint. Loss of identity and violence can be the repercussions. When new technologies alter the ground continuously, McLuhan says that constant change demands pattern recognition.
How do we respond to such rapid environmental changes in our society? How can we perceive a pattern?"

SearchDay - Information Wants to be Valuable - 27 June 2001
Chris Sherman writes: "One the greatest myths of our time is that "Information wants to be free." The Internet corollary is "You can find anything on the web." Sure. Just try to find most original science, technology or medical research with your favorite search engine, and you'll quickly see how absurd these myths actually are.
In fact, publishing original science, technology and medical (STM) research is a huge business, estimated to generate annual revenues of nearly $10 billion. Unless you're willing to shell out serious shekels for access to proprietary information systems, or have privileges in a library that pays for them, you're not likely to find much STM content online.
This tight control of information has spawned a Napster-inspired rebellion among the ranks of the principal users of STM content -- librarians and scientists. Libraries must purchase as much of this literature as possible to fulfill their role as infomediaries. But library budgets are under constant pressure, and most libraries can only afford a small number of the journals they would like to provide.
This has the consumers of this information -- namely, scientists -- hopping mad. Not only are they denied access to crucial research, but their own output doesn't get the widespread dissemination that enhances prestige and leads to career advancement.
Scientists and librarians are revolting against the control exercised by STM publishers. The Public Library of Science has published an open letter that urges publishers to allow the research reports that have appeared in their journals to be included in electronic archives and to be read and used without obstruction. More than 24,800 scientists from 166 countries have signed the letter.
Many librarians are also fighting back, throwing their support behind a Napster-like peer-to-peer file sharing system called Docster. The primary purpose of Docster is not so much to avoid paying for journals but rather to complement existing delivery systems found in libraries, schools and other research-intensive institutions.
Publishers aren't taking these challenges lightly. They argue that the value they add to research justifies the expense of scholarly journals. For example, most are peer-reviewed, edited by specialists, and are advertising-free. Many are published by non-profit societies that use subscription revenues to fund other activities of the society.
So how did we end up in this mess? It's instructive to look at the origins of the "information wants to be free" concept.
Stewart Brand was probably the first person to use the phrase. Here's what he said to the first Hacker's Conference in 1984: "On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."
Brand's words deftly illustrated the dramatic distinction between the value of information and the cost of distributing it. Over time, one side of the equation was left out. "Information wants to be free," at least to many people accustomed to searching the web or downloading music with Napster really grew to mean "I want information to be free."
STM content never really migrated to the web, remaining firmly in the grasp of publishers who closely guarded the content. But scientists and librarians took note of the power of the web to widely distribute information, and began to question the value of the cartels that controlled the distribution of STM content.
The journal Nature has taken the debate online ..."

posted by Andrew 11/05/2003 03:38:00 PM