Wednesday, February 25, 2004

 
I am a knot not a bullet

fUSION Anomaly. Monolith
This is a pre-recorded briefing, made prior to your departure. For security reasons of the highest importance, it has been known on-board during the mission only by your computer.

Monolithic Form [vide Endless Discovery]
Definitions: A monolith is, strictly speaking, a form consisting of a single stone (mono = one, lith = stone). A multilith is a form made from a number of parts. These two form types might simply refer to the way a thing is constructed; is it carved from one mass or is it an assemblage of many?

Jed1 + Jed7 = The Raising of the Djed
"The Djed Pillar derived originally from the image of the tree with lopped-off branches. But what is especially interesting is that this original tree-image was fused with an image of Osiris' sacrum, the lowest joint of the backbone. This part of the dismembered Osiris was believed to be the immortal seat of the god's virility. Its position at the base of the spine corresponds significantly to the 'root-chakra' of Indian yoga, where Kundalini, the vital energy, resides."
Roger Cook - The Tree of Life : Image for the Cosmos
(Thames and Hudson, 1988, page 14)

Powerdigms of the Multimedium
"An A-life creature named Aleph is found consuming cycles from the CyberSpaceShip's central computer following a tumultuous ride into an uncharted region of Cyberspace, known only by legend as the Multimedium. Aleph offers navigational assistance. In exchange, he asks the crew (read audience) to help him locate his creator, a renaissance woman in search of absolute truth. As Aleph and crew explore the Multimedium, questions arise concerning Aleph's creator: What does it really mean to be a scientist? To be an artist? What does being human mean?
The quest for answers leads the crew to the discovery and experience of their first Powerdigm: science and art are flip sides of the same coin - both rely on mental models to span the chasm between abstract ideas and concrete experiences - science primarily moves one way across this chasm and art the other - and to be human is to move freely in both directions. The crew becomes empowered - each member directly experiences their own mind performing as a scientist and as an artist. They can understand. They can create. They have the wherewithal to venture forth with Aleph into still deeper questions of reality, meaning, and truth - in search of new Powerdigms."

The rough with the smooth
"It is not the things that are difficult to make, but to put ourselves in a condition to make them."
Constantin Brancusi

Alchemical Kubrick : 2001 A Space Odyssey
"Kubrick had originally planned for the planet in the film to be Saturn but the special effects department could not make the rings look realistic enough. Kubrick then abandoned Saturn for the easier-to-create Jupiter."
Jay Weidner

Backup Data on the Moon? [via Nocents Network]
A private company plans to send servers to the moon for data backup by 2004, linked to the Earth by broadband laser communications. The plan addresses the threat of a natural disaster, such as a small asteroid hitting the planet.

Wired 8.08: Street Cred
Mark Dery: In our age of runaway acceleration, dreams of deceleration sit side by side with counterstrategies for becoming one with the blur. For every digital refusenik like David Shenk bemoaning "life at hyper-speed," there's a speed freak like US Air Force Captain Joe Kittinger, the Icarus in a partial-pressure suit who became, in 1960, the only human to break the sound barrier with nothing but his body. He leaped from a balloon at the very edge of Earth's atmosphere and proclaimed, "I am a bullet."

I Am a Bullet : Scenes from an Accelerating Culture
Lesley Reed: In 1960, Captain Joseph Kittinger jumped from a helium balloon almost 20 miles up, with 99 percent of the earth's atmosphere beneath him. He plummeted at 614 mph, but strangely, felt nothing. Until his senses reoriented themselves, he thought he was floating.

Killing Time by Mark Dery
Life lived at Net speed means sitting at a computer, our thoughts racing, our bodies unmoving. I call it "terminal inertia": the sensation, experienced daily by millions in our wired society, of overflying infinite landscapes of information while sitting still. In a sense, we've arrived in the future foretold by J.G. Ballard in his short story, "Memories of the Space Age." The protagonist's sense of time becomes increasingly attenuated until he ends up embalmed in a "small installment of forever," having accelerated into "a world beyond time": the utopia of the frozen moment. It's Blake's mystical vision of "eternity in an hour," updated for the age of "Doc" Edgerton's strobe flash. Ballard imagined the moment --- our moment --- when the headlong hurtle of the modern age finally reached terminal velocity. The image of speed --- "blistering speed" --- in the first year of the 21st century, is a human being in a chair, staring at a screen, going nowhere at a billion bits an hour.

Brad Grimes: TeraGrid supercomputer goes live
"The National Science Foundation has launched the first phase of its TeraGrid project, making 4.5 teraflops of distributed computing power available to scientists across the country. The TeraGrid project is part of a long-term effort to build and deploy a supercomputing grid infrastructure that will be used for open research. The systems in production are the first of two deployments. Under the current plan, the completed TeraGrid will provide more than 20 teraflops of computing power."

Aseem Deshpande: The Role of Linux in Grid Computing
"Today, applications are developed to be geared toward a specific platform or hosting environment, for example Linux, Windows 2000, various UNIX flavors, mainframes, J2EE, Microsoft .NET and so on. Such computing tends to operate within a monolithic framework in which applications contend for resources as and when they're made available for that single platform. For a platform with limited resources, the resource availability starts decreasing as the demand for service grows. At such a time, if resources from other systems could be used or, in turn, the requirements could be serviced by resources from other systems, the strain on the native system would reduce considerably and the quality of service being offered would improve. It is this objective that grid computing wants to meet. The objective of grid-based computing is to virtualize, manage and allocate distributed physical resources (processing power, memory, storage, networking) to applications and users on an as-needed (on-demand) basis -- regardless of the resources' location. Grid networks transcend physical components, organizational units, enterprise infrastructure and geographic boundaries. Naturally, software plays a vital ..."

Cyber Sailor & Shiva

Artaud: "Enough language games, enough syntactical tricks, enough word-juggling and phrase-making! We must now seek the great Law of the heart, that Law which is not a Law, not a prison, but a guide for the Mind lost in its own labyrinth."

antechamber
Labyrinth, Maze. Labyrinth, originally; the name of an edifice or excavation, carries the idea of design, and construction in a permanent form, while maze is used of anything confused or confusing, whether fixed or shifting. Maze is less restricted in its figurative uses than labyrinth. We speak of the labyrinth of the ear, or of the mind, and of a labyrinth of difficulties; but of the mazes of the dance, the mazes of political intrigue, or of the mind being in a maze.
Origin: L. Labyrinthus, Gr. Labyrinthos: cf. F. Labyrinthe.
Source: Websters Dictionary

Node by Node : The Web We Weave

"Me, what's that after all? An arbitrary limitation of being bounded by the people before and after and on either side. Where they leave off, I begin, and vice versa."
Russell Hoban: Turtle Diary

Francis Bacon's Instauratio : Bacon and Baconian Science

"After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?"
Russell Hoban: The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

Michael Tomasello - Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition
Harvard University Press, 2003
"Drawing together a vast body of empirical research in cognitive science, linguistics, and developmental psychology, [Michael] Tomasello demonstrates that we don't need a self-contained "language instinct" to explain how children learn language. Their linguistic ability is interwoven with other cognitive abilities.
Tomasello argues that the essence of language is its symbolic dimension, which rests on the uniquely human ability to comprehend intention. Grammar emerges as the speakers of a language create linguistic constructions out of recurring sequences of symbols; children pick up these patterns in the buzz of words they hear around them.
All theories of language acquisition assume these fundamental skills of intention-reading and pattern-finding. Some formal linguistic theories posit a second set of acquisition processes to connect somehow with an innate universal grammar. But these extra processes, Tomasello argues, are completely unnecessary -- important to save a theory but not to explain the phenomenon.
For all its empirical weaknesses, Chomskian generative grammar has ruled the linguistic world for fourty years. Constructing a Language offers a compellingly argued, psychologically sound new vision for the study of language acquisition."

Religions of Lusitania. Loquuntur saxa by José Cardim Ribeiro
"The religious phenomenon, in its historical aspect, has been the object of many interpretative approaches. We have only to recall Frazer and the comparative comprehensiveness, Lévi–Strauss and the structural archetypes, Dumézil and the functionalist schemes, Eliade and the universality of the symbolic. Still, there is nothing more brilliant than the brief metaphor engendered by the Englishman Murray, and immediately taken up and developed by Dodds in his irreverent study on Greek culture and the irrational: the religious phenomenon reveals itself, in all epochs and regions, to be like an "inherited conglomerate". And Dodds comments: "The geological metaphor is a happy one because religious growth is [...] agglomeration more than replacement". That is why, when we nowadays study the religions of the past, we do not seek only to know our distant cultural roots better, but rather deal with something which is still present - although partially and sometimes subjectively so - in our present existence as Homo religiosus, which, (whether we like it or not) we all are."

Language's Source: A Particularly Human Confluence of Hard Wiring and Soft
"By answering the evolutionary question of how to take advantage of a new foraging trick, our ancestors unwittingly turned the tables of natural selection so that social evolution could reshape the brain in its own image. We reflect on this from the other end of an extensive co-evolutionary process, where the indispensable uses of symbolic communication as a social organizing tool were long ago relegated to being only one among a multitude of selection pressures mutually converging on making this communication more and more efficient. Two and a half million years of sustained selection in an unprecedented socioecological niche, maintained by unprecedented communicational and cognitive tricks have taken us far from these beginnings in both the physical changes in the brain that resulted and in the mental and cultural world that coevolved with them."
Terrence W. Deacon - The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain

Poetry should be made by all!
From hypertext utopias to cooperative net-projects

Hyper-Writing-Machine : Rhizome - Network
"Through nomadic wandering in telematic networks, centralized systems (like the branching model of trees and roots) are converted into de-centralized systems, "in which communication is established between neighbours, in which streams and channels have no previous existence (...)" (Deleuze/Guattari 92, 30). Writing in the network has nothing to do with literature in the classical sense -- as in the system author-work-meaning-market -- but rather with surveying virgin land in the telematic domain, establishing landscapes of text, even to understand writing and reading as a nomadic act of wandering through text-networks! The additional dimensions of the hyper-textual tailoring of random text particles that circulate among various mailboxes through permanent up and downloading, liberate the mental effort of producing texts as a social network.
These text particles can be interrupted, ripped apart, altered (and sent again) in any position - while being simultaneously held together in a variable network while constantly referring to each other. We are thereby attempting to try out a paradigm of net-work-utopias (perhaps difficult to implement socially) on a model of interconnected text production/reception: To establish relationships (between texts/authors/readers), that don't go from point to point, from word to word (linear reference: signifier/signified), but rather allow crossings, superimpositions, layerings: many different lines of writing, to form a central meaning -- the written nets of various text-tours pile up layer after layer on top of one another and are connected "at each moment with the collective, time and nerve Rhizome" (of the other network-participants) -- the Art of writing everywhere ..."

The Eye [PDF]
"The word retina means net in Latin; visually, the retina has the appearance of a cobweb with thin filaments. The retina is the soft, semitransparent, purplish light-gathering membrane of the eye. This is the innermost layer of the eye. It is composed of 10 distinct layers that detect and process light. The most important layer is known as Jacob's membrane, which contains the rods and the cones."

How the Retina Works by Helga Kolb
Much of the construction of an image takes place in the retina itself through the use of specialized neural circuits.

Lifting the Veils of Autism, One by One by One
Erica Goode reports for The New York Times - 24 February 2004
"[...] In a series of experiments to find out why it is so difficult for someone with autism to function in the world, the Yale team, including Warren Jones, a research associate, developed a device for tracking eye movements that could be mounted on the brim of a baseball cap. Then they had subjects, who either had autism or did not, watch a video clip from the 1967 film "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" and monitored their gaze. The normal subjects closely tracked the social interactions among the actors in the films, focusing especially on the actors' eyes. In contrast, people with autism focused on objects in the room, on various parts of the actors' bodies and on the actors' mouths. In one scene, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor kiss. The subjects without autism looked at the actors' embrace; the autistic subjects' eyes went elsewhere: one man stared at a doorknob in the background.
Such research suggests that from birth, the brains of autistic children are wired differently, shaping their perception of the world and other people. "In normal development," [Dr. Ami Klin] said, "being looked at, being in the presence of another, seeking another -- most of what people consider important emerges from this mutually reinforcing choreography between child and adult." If this duet cannot take place, Dr. Klin said, "development is going to be derailed."
Studies using brain scanning techniques like fast M.R.I. lend weight to the idea that for people with autism, perception molds behavior. "There is a deep relationship between what we see and what we know," said Dr. Robert Schultz ..."

Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science, and the Spiritual
"Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, a strange and exciting new world came into focus -- a world of microorganisms in myriad shapes and colors, prehistoric fossils, bizarre undersea creatures, spectrums of light and sound, molecules of water, and atomic particles. Exploring the Invisible reveals that the world beyond the naked eye -- made visible by advances in science -- has been a major inspiration for artists ever since, influencing the subjects they choose as well as their techniques and modes of representation."

GIANTmicrobes Exotics : Owls have 'surround sound'
New Brazilian Owl Named for Intel Founder

Microbe-processors (The Boston Globe - 1 July 2003)
Jascha Hoffman writes: "Life has been in the information-processing business for billions of years, and has its own ways of storing and passing vital information. Even the simplest single-celled life relies on a vast range of chemical reactions strung together in a host of precisely-calibrated networks. Biologists have been studying these complex ''chemical circuits'' for a long time, but only recently have they tried to actually hack into cells and program them. ''Trying to program [cells] is a first step in trying to learn to 'speak their language,'" said Michael Elowitz of Rockefeller University."

The Great Invisibles
Man is perhaps not the center, the focus of the universe. One may go so far as to believe that there exists above him, on the animal level, beings whose behavior is as alien to him as his own must be to the mayfly or the whale. There is nothing that would necessarily prevent such beings from completely escaping his sensory frame of reference, since these beings might avail themselves of a type of camouflage which, no matter how one imagines it, becomes plausible when one considers the theory of form and what has been discovered about mimetic animals. This idea surely affords a wide field of speculation, though it tends to reduce man, as an interpreter of the universe, to a condition as modest as the child conceives the ants to be in when he has overturned the anthill with his foot. Considering perturbations like the cyclone, in the face of which man is powerless to be anything but victim or witness, or like war (on the subject of which notoriously inadequate views have been advanced), it would not be impossible, in the course of a vast work, which would be constantly presided over by the boldest kind of induction, to succeed in making plausible the complexion and structure of such hypothetical beings which obscurely manifest themselves to us in fear and the feeling of chance. I should like to point out that I do not here perceptively depart from the statement of Novalis: "In reality, we live inside an animal on which we are parasites. The constitution of this animal determines our own and vice versa." I am merely asking with William James: "who knows whether, in nature, we do not hold as small a place besides beings whose existence we do not suspect, as our cats and dogs living in our houses at our sides?"
André Breton: Surrealism (1942)

Soul searching by A S Byatt (The Guardian - 14 February 2004)
"[...] Balzac wrote his Human Comedy as a modern form of Dante's Divine Comedy. In his foreword to it, he compares its organisation to the organisation of animal forms and functions studied by the physiologists, Georges Cuvier and Étienne Geoffroy St-Hilaire. He uses Geoffroy's phrase for anatomical patterns - "unity of composition" - for his own work, and declares that "there is only one animal. The creator used the same pattern to make all organised creatures." It is true that Balzac still needs and uses the idea of a creator - but the world of his novels is a world of animal body-minds, and his characters feel their emotions along their spines and in their veins, their visions and decisions are the result of electrical storms in their brains. Paris is a jungle of animals, including the humans.
[...] Marshall McLuhan said we live in a social world of prostheses, things added on to the body - telephone, television, cameras - which drastically change our human relations and perceptions of each other, and ourselves.
[...] In novels in general - and also on the television - we do live in a world where bodies is what we are."

The Winchester Festival of Art and the Mind
5-7 March 2004, The Theatre Royal, Winchester

"In 1932, the year that Lacan published his doctoral thesis, the US government funded a study of mimicry, the propensity of animals to take on the colourings of their habitat or the appearance of other species. Opening up the stomachs of some eighty thousand Nearctic birds, the principal researcher McAttee found that the insects that could disguise as landscape fared no better than those that couldn't.
Mimicry failed to increase one's chances of survival in a cruel world. A zebra might feel safe in Bridget Riley's garden, but its chances were actually no better than anyone else's. So if it didn't help you to look like a rock or a twig or Op Art, why bother?
Today, evolutionary explanations of mimicry are dominant, but in the 1930s there was some excitement about what seemed to be an anomaly. One of the more fanciful theories appealed to a general law of imitation: we become like our habitat, and this becoming is a law of nature. Humans and animals are similar according to this view. We ... blend in, we identify."
Darian Leader - Stealing the Mona Lisa: What art stops us from seeing
(Faber, 2002, pages 22-23)

Net-religion, a War in Heaven (1995)
Peter Lamborn Wilson: "All technology is a religious phenomenon: Why? Because unless you belong to the human condition, you cannot have technology. What is the human condition? What makes a human being different from an animal? I would say consciousness or self-consciousness, perhaps. Not awareness though, we know that animals are aware, but what we don't know is whether they are conscious. And we certainly don't know whether they are self-conscious. One of the symptoms of consciousness, or self-consciousness, is technology and it is impossible, structurally or historically, to separate technology from consciousness when we try to imagine what it is to be human. As soon as we see in the archeological record evidence of a simian or a similar creature that we could identify as human, then the only reason why we do so is because there are some broken stones next to the bones, that look like they may have been intended to be tools. What separates animals from humans is technology. From one point of view, that is religion.
Because you cannot have technology unless you can extricate consciousness outside the body. If you cannot understand that consciousness is something which projects outward into the world, you cannot create the prosthesis, the extension of the body, which is technology, be it a broken stone or a computer.
Because there is this intimate relationship between technology and consciousness, technology itself is always threatening to take the place of religion. Technology is always becoming confused with religion. The Marxists used to call this reification."

A Cyberspace Odyssey : Arthur C. Clarke
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Technological Singularity
Vernor Vinge: The Singularity
Vernor Vinge on the Singularity
Staring into the Singularity 1.2.5
Technological singularity - Wikipedia
The Coming Technological Singularity
Singularity Watch (Understanding Accelerating Change)

"Whatever the situation may have been in the past, today the supernatural as a meaningful reality is absent or remote from the horizons of everyday life of large numbers, very probably of the majority, of people in modern societies, who seem to manage to get along without it quite well. This means that those to whom the supernatural is still, or again, a meaningful reality find themselves in the status of a minority, more precisely, a cognitive minority -- a very important consequence with very far-reaching implications.
By a cognitive minority I mean a group of people whose view of the world differs significantly from the one generally taken for granted in their society. Put differently, a cognitive minority is a group formed around a body of deviant 'knowledge'. The quotation marks should be stressed here. The term 'knowledge' used within the frame of reference of the sociologist of knowledge always refers to what is taken to be or believed as 'knowledge'. In other words, the use of the terms is strictly neutral on the question of whether or not the socially held 'knowledge' is finally true or false. All human societies are based on 'knowledge' in this sense. The sociology of knowledge seeks to understand the different forms of this. The same quotation marks apply to my use of the adjective 'cognitive', of course. Instead of saying that societies have bodies of knowledge, we can say that they have cognitive structures. Once more, this in no way implies a judgement of the final validity of these 'cognitions'. This should be kept in mind whenever the adjective is used in the following argument. Put simply, the sociologist qua sociologist always stays in the role of reporter. He reports that people believe they 'know' such and such, and that this belief has such and such consequences. As soon as he ventures an opinion on whether the belief is finally justified, he is jumping out of the role of sociologist. There is nothing wrong with this role change, and I intend to perform it myself in a little while. But one should be clear about what one is doing when.
For better or for worse, men are social beings."
Peter Berger - A Rumour of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural
(Pelican, 1973, pages 18-19)

William Germano: 49 Words for Snow
"There's a terra incognita linguistica -- a set of words we don't yet have -- to name the activities that we call reading. The Oxford English Dictionary has plenty of words, but not even a professor, a madman, and thousands of researchers have captured all the meanings we need. The job might better suit Dr. Seuss who, you will remember, unveiled the letters after number 26 in On Beyond Zebra. The good doctor was on to something. Maybe there aren't 49 words for snow, but there are at least 49 words for reading, even if we only know a couple dozen so far."

Raoul Vaneigem: A Cavalier History of Surrealism

posted by Andrew 2/25/2004 04:36:00 PM

Tuesday, February 17, 2004

 
Probably a Cognitive Minority Report

Language Log: 46 Somali words for camel
Mark Liberman: "My list is somewhat more reliable than the unchecked serial exaggeration of Eskimo snow vocabulary originally documented by Laura Martin, and later popularized and extended by Geoff [Pullum]. At least it's an actual list of alleged words. However, no one should take it as gospel truth."

A History of Linguistic Thought

"We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impression which has to be organized by our minds -- and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it this way -- an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees.
This fact is very significant for modern science, for it means that no individual is free to describe nature with absolute impartiality but is constrained to certain modes of interpretation even while he thinks himself most free."
Benjamin Lee Whorf -- "Science and Linguistics"
The Technology Review, Vol. XLII, No.6, April 1940

Universal Grammar and Linguistics
"We may think of the language faculty as a complex and intricate network of some sort associated with a switch box consisting of an array of switches that can be in one of two positions. Unless the switches are set one way or another, the system does not function. When they are set in one of the permissible ways, then the system functions in accordance with its nature, but differently, depending on how the switches are set. The fixed network is the system of principles of universal grammar; the switches are the parameters to be fixed by experience. When these switches are set, [a person] has command of a particular language and knows the facts of that language: that a particular expression has a particular meaning, and so on. Each permissible array of switch settings determines a particular language. Acquisition of a language is in part a process of setting the switches one way or another on the basis of presented data, a process of fixing the values of the parameters."
Noam Chomsky - Language and problems of knowledge: The Managua lectures
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988, pages 62-63)

Danny K. H. Alford: Demise of the Whorf Hypothesis
"The way you understand the meaning bonds between people and events and things in the world has a lot to do with the way you truly understand your world, how you "see" or "feel" it makes sense. And because you associate with certain people today, and certain people raised you in a family, and you went to certain schools, and you've had certain experiences -- using language all the way to reach agreements about what the reality is that you are going through at any instant: your view of the world, your world, is highly unlike the meaningful world of, say, a typical Hopi Native American."

Candy Science: M&Ms pack more tightly than spheres [via Cheek]
Peter Weiss: "Pouring M&Ms into a bowl leads to a marvel of packing efficiency, a team of sweet-toothed scientists reports. Using bench experiments and computer simulations, the team has found that squashed or stretched versions of spheres snuggle together more tightly than randomly packed spheres do. This surprising result could help scientists better understand the behavior of disordered materials ranging from powders to glassy solids, says Princeton University chemist Salvatore Torquato. The finding could also lead to denser ceramic materials that might make for improved heat shields for furnaces and reduced-porosity glass with exceptional transparency. [...] Why is random packing denser for ellipsoids than for spheres? The team proposes that the asymmetric ellipsoids can tip and rotate in ways that spheres can't, so an ellipsoid nestles close to more neighbors than a sphere does. Indeed, the team finds that as many as 11 neighbors touch an ellipsoid, whereas each tight-packed sphere typically has only 6 adjacent neighbors."

EmptyBottle.org: Linguistic Relativism and Korean
"The amount of time and energy that's been expended on arguing about how vocabulary effects cognition surprises me, frankly. I think there's a much more interesting discussion about grammar and deeper structures here ..."

Complete Translation Services - Language and The Internet
"A different language is a different vision of life." Federico Fellini

The cafe universe by Jonathon Delacour
Mick Underwood: "Wittgenstein said that he was once asked by one of his colleagues whether Germans think in the order they speak in or think normally first and then mix it all up afterwards."

Six degrees of Auf Der Maur
Dorian Lynskey meets the Kevin Bacon of rock

Mark Newman: Gallery of network images
Detecting Patterns in Complex Social Networks
The structure and function of complex networks
Marvel Universe looks almost like a real social network
Slashdot: Detecting Patterns in Complex Social Networks

Captain America wins superhero networking crown by Philip Ball
"Ricardo Alberich and co-workers at the University of the Balearic Isles in Spain, are tracing the evolution of the Marvel Universe in detail. They hope to understand which non-random features of real social networks are a consequence of the way people interact, and which follow from more general principles about network growth."

In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson by Bette Bao Lord
In Bette Bao Lord's wonderful In The Year Of The Boar And Jackie Robinson, Shirley Temple Wong recites: "I pledge a lesson to the frog of the United States of America, and to the wee puppet for witches' hands. One Asian, under God, in the vestibule, with little tea and just rice for all."

One Writer's Malapropisms - Sallie Mattison Young

"Columbus Day was a very brave man. He wanted to sail around the world. "I can give you three ships, Mr. Day," said the Queen." Charles Schulz

Wired News: The Russian Nesting Doll of Games
"For the uninitiated, The Sims is the most successful line of games ever. It started in the late 1980s with SimCity, a game in which players take the role of a powerful mayor who creates and modifies a city to keep citizens happy. About 10 years later, Electronic Arts, the publisher of the series, released The Sims. In this game, the best-selling title of all time, players control the lives of virtual people, called Sims, and determine their daily activities to keep them content.
Now the series has come full circle. The plug-in from Simslice, called Slice City, lets the Sims in the game play a video game in which they create mini cities. So, along with the many things that Sims can be instructed to do -- such as going to work, playing guitar, cooking, socializing and dating -- they can blow endless hours creating small urban environments.
"Basically, I wanted to create a game within a game, where a Sim could remain unemployed and make a living 'farming' a mini city that is complete with buildings, houses, offices, parks and even little citizens scurrying around," says Simslice designer Steve Alvey. "There had to be consequences not only for a Sim's actions but also their inactions." Thus, just like in The Sims, attention to detail breeds success and reward, while inattention breeds disaster."
Daniel Terdiman

Words that survive the test of time - 30 December 1999
"This century has been a good one for terms of abuse. "Wonk," the 1954 term for someone obsessed with details of some specialized activity, accompanies 1951's "nerd" - someone "socially inept" and "annoyingly studious." In Britain the cognate is "anorak," from the hooded jacket that nerds customarily wear there. "Wonk" underwent further evolution in the 1980s, when American contempt for governance found its expression in "policy wonk," suggesting contempt for officials who make an effort to know what they are doing.
There may be something to that contempt: It was, after all, public officials who gave us "safe haven" during the Persian Gulf War. Someone apparently grafted the "safe" from "safe harbor" (not all harbors are safe) onto "haven" (by definition, a safe place). The creation of this obnoxious pleonasm (from the Greek "pleon" - "more" - meaning redundant) illustrates the bureaucrat's familiar combination of self-importance, pretension, and ignorance."
John E. McIntyre

Diamond star thrills astronomers
Twinkling in the sky is a diamond star of 10 billion trillion trillion carats, astronomers have discovered. The cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallised carbon, 1,500 km across, some 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus.

Moon-sized crystal revealed in star's heart
"Astronomers led by Travis Metcalfe of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, studied the white dwarf BPM 37093, the only known pulsating white dwarf in our galaxy thought likely to have produced a crystal core. They used a worldwide network of telescopes to keep the white dwarf constantly in sight for about two weeks, and then studied how the star dimmed and brightened by about one per cent every five to 10 minutes. The pulsations, caused by convection in the outer non-solid part of the star, are the only way to determine directly if the core has solidified. As the star cools and the crystal core grows, the period of the pulsations gets smaller.
Researchers compared models of the crystal core to the observations to determine that 90 per cent of the white dwarf's mass, similar to that of the Sun, appears to be a giant, single crystal."
Maggie McKee

MSNBC - Have experts found Darwin's famous ship?
Hull buried in English mud may be remains of HMS Beagle

Darwin and the Barnacle by Rebecca Stott [via BBC Shropshire]
Why did Darwin delay publication of his evolutionary theories? Rebecca Stott argues that for his theories to be accepted in a climate of scepticism and creationism Darwin needed to establish his credentials as a methodical scientist beyond question. What allowed Darwin to network with a worldwide community of marine researchers was the newly improved postal service and an expanding railway network.

Essay: A Moth, a Butterfly, an Elegant Merger of Science and Art
"There was a world of hidden dimensions in these structures, a treasury of abstract art to be explored, pointillist in design, elegant in coloration, and infinitely pleasing. There was proof in these images that science and art, while dwelling separately in our consciousness, may well merge in that vague undecipherable domain of the subconscious that guides us in our passions."
Thomas Eisner

Topics in Personal and Collective Memory
John F. Kihlstrom: Memory plays an especially important role in the shadowboxes and other constructions of the American surrealist artist Joseph Cornell (1903-1973). Influenced by Victorian mementoes, Cornell created small specimen cabinets or memory theatres in which various objects were laid out inside a frame, and covered by glass. As Robert Hughes writes in American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (Knopf, 1997, page 499), "To others these deposits might be refuse, but to Cornell they were the strata of repressed memory, a jumble of elements waiting to be grafted and mated to one another."

A Valentine rose from the Cosmos
A telescope in space has sent back a cosmic Valentine picture - a stellar nursery resembling a pink rosebud.

Pierre Lévy: The Language of Collective Intelligence [PPT]
The Human Cultural Heritage will be the "rosebud" of the Noosphere.

H-Net Review: Arthur L. Morin on Pierre Lévy
"The cinemap is a moving mosaic in a state of permanent recomposition, in which each fragment is already a complete figure but one that, at each instant, only assumes its full meaning and value within the general configuration. Behind each sign-point, hypertexts and messages provide additional information, encourage deeper investigation, detail the resources needed for navigating the knowledge space. The cinemap enables us to explore a dynamic macro-singularity consisting of many, individual singularities."
Pierre Lévy - Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace
(Plenum Press, New York, 1997, pages 191-192)

The Micropolitan Museum [via Dublog]
"For several centuries artists have depicted the human figure, still-lifes, landscapes or non-figurative motives. One subject has been widely neglected all those years: Micro organisms!
The Micropolitan Museum finally exhibits these often overlooked works of art which are only visible with the aid of the microscope. Curator Wim van Egmond has collected the finest microscopic masterpieces nature has ever produced during eons of natural selection and other life-sculpting mechanisms."

John Robinson - Music of the Spheres

"By collage, nowadays, we mean a kind of paste-up -- a configuration composed of various materials pasted in their respective positions on some kind of support. Generally speaking, a collage has the surface characteristics of a painting: it is flat. An assemblage, in the accepted connotation of metropolitan America of the 1950's and 1960's, is a three-dimensional additive sort of sculpture -- either relief or sculpture in-the-round. It is accomplished by gluing, nailing, welding, tying, wiring, or keying together parts, often of other things, to form a new ensemble.
If one started out consciously and by design to create collages or assemblages, as I did not, I suppose one would begin by getting a lot of stuff and things and parts of things with which to work. In my case it seems I looked up one day about two years ago to find that, indeed, I had en passant amassed a great variety of stuff and things and parts and splinters. But truer, perhaps, would be that I had been "unsystematically" but continually amassing a great variety of particular things over a long period of time, slowly, as if for some purpose."
Donald L. Weismann: The Collage as Model (1969)

Chaos, Creation & Collage : House
"The normal unconscious knows how to make itself at home everywhere, and psychoanalysis comes to the assistance of the ousted unconscious, of the unconscious that has been roughly or insidiously dislodged. But psychoanalysis sets the human being in motion, rather than at rest. It calls on him to live outside the abodes of his unconscious, to enter into life's adventures, to come out of himself. And naturally, its action is a salutary one. Because we must also give an exterior destiny to the interior being. To accompany psychoanalysis in this salutary action, we should have to undertake a topoanalysis of all the space that has invited us to come out of ourselves."
Gaston Bachelard: The Poetics of Space (1958)

Dream Anatomy: Gallery: Tashrih-i badan-i insane

"There are a few further points which we ought to note. In the first place, we must remember that we live our childhood as our future. Our childhood determines gestures and roles in the perspective of what is to come. This is not a question of the mechanical reappearance of montages... [The] gestures and roles are inseparable from the project which transforms them... For this reason a life develops in spirals; it passes again and again by the same points but at different levels of integration and complexity."
Jean-Paul Sartre: The Progressive-Regressive Method: Search for a Method (1960/63)

Search For Tomorrow : The Washington Post - 15 February 2004
"Specific predictions are usually wrong. But a general trend has emerged over the course of centuries: Information escapes confinement. Information has been able to break free from monasteries, libraries, school-board-sanctioned textbooks, and corporate publishers. In the Middle Ages, books were kept chained to desks. Information is now completely unchained.
It has a life of its own -- and someday perhaps that won't be just a metaphor."
Joel Achenbach

The Impossible Microworld Museum : Owl in a Needle

"Ulysses is for me the prototype of man, not only modern man, but the man of the future as well, because he represents the type of the 'trapped' voyager. His voyage was a voyage toward the center, toward Ithaca, which is to say, toward himself. He was a fine navigator, but destiny -- spoken here in terms of trials of initiation which he had to overcome -- forced him to postpone indefinitely his return to hearth and home. I think that the myth of Ulysses is very important for us. We will all be a little like Ulysses, for in searching, in hoping to arrive, and finally, without a doubt, in finding once again the homeland, the hearth, we re-discover ourselves. But, as in the Labyrinth, in every questionable turn, one risks 'losing oneself.' If one succeeds in getting out of the Labyrinth, in finding one's home again, then one becomes a new being."
Mircea Eliade: L'Epreuve du Labyrinthe (1978) translated by Paul Ricoeur in "Narrative Time" (1980)

Jacques Attali - Les labyrinthes de l'information

"If each of us thus is Mind-at-Large, to repeat Huxley's formulation, the ultimate task for human creativity is not to create and invent ab novo, but to find. Bergson already has stated that the function of the brain and the nervous system is eliminative, not productive. The right attitude may then be compared to that of a hunter or fisherman -- usually, one does not go out to hunt one particular stag, or catch one particular fish, but one goes into the appropriate preparations to ensure maximum likelihood of hunting down stags or catching fish in general. "Be the spider, not the fly," is also one of the advices given by Buddhism. If creativity is primarily finding, a holographic theory of mind would also provide a basis for the definition and explanation of social (or collective) creativity. Groups of people would then be capable of finding more information, of becoming more creative, in an evolutionary context." Erich Jantsch - Design for Evolution: Self-Organization and Planning in the Life of Human Systems (George Braziller, New York, 1975, page 147)

My LEGO computer at work

posted by Andrew 2/17/2004 03:30:00 PM

Sunday, February 08, 2004

 
A Data-Dandy, an Extra-Textual, and an African Grey

BBC News: Parrot's oratory stuns scientists by Alex Kirby
The finding of a parrot with an almost unparalleled power to communicate with people has brought scientists up short. The bird, a captive African grey called N'kisi, has a vocabulary of 950 words, and shows signs of a sense of humour. [...] When he first met Dr Jane Goodall, the renowned chimpanzee expert, after seeing her in a picture with apes, N'kisi said: "Got a chimp?" [...] When another parrot hung upside down from its perch, he commented: "You got to put this bird on the camera."

Referential Communication with an African Grey Parrot
"Bye. You be good. I'm gonna go eat dinner. I'll see you tomorrow." I hear these words most nights as I close the door of my laboratory. Such a series of vocalizations would not be surprising if they were to come from the lips of my graduate or undergraduate students, but they come from a beak ... the beak of my research subject, an African Grey parrot.

Irene Pepperberg: The woman behind the most famous parrot in the world
"In 1977, Pepperberg moved to Purdue University with her then-husband, an assistant professor of electrical sciences and neurobiology, and set up her first lab in a corner of the biology department. She chose the African grey parrot as the animal with which she would try to bridge the interspecies communication gap. German scientists who had done limited work with the birds in the 1940s and '50s had already proven grey parrots were intelligent. She began to call around to find a pet shop that sold African greys and eventually purchased a year-old bird at a store 122 miles away in Chicago.
"I generally tell people that if they're going to buy a pet bird, they should get it from a breeder or a pet store that does its own breeding so they know where it's coming from," says Pepperberg of her decision to go the pet-store route. "But I had to show that Alex was not a specially-bred bird. He had to be chosen at random so I could show there was nothing special about him."
Pepperberg named the young bird Alex, for Avian Learning Experiment."

New Scientist: Are aliens hiding their messages?
If we are not alone in the Universe, why have we never picked up signals from an extraterrestrial civilisation? This long-standing puzzle is known as the Fermi paradox. Two physicists have come up with an intriguing solution.

The Data Dandy and Sovereign Media (1994)
"The data dandy, who I wish to introduce here, falls under ADILKNO's category of "potential media figures." In The Media Archive, which ADILKNO published in Dutch in 1992 and in an expanded German edition in 1993, a series of potential media and potential media figures are collected under the denominator of "Unidentified Theoretical Objects," or UTOs. These compact texts are purely speculative."
Geert Lovink

Thomas R. Pynchon: Is it O.K. to be a Luddite? (1984)
" Since 1959, we have come to live among flows of data more vast than anything the world has seen. Demystification is the order of our day, all the cats are jumping out of all the bags and even beginning to mingle. We immediately suspect ego insecurity in people who may still try to hide behind the jargon of a specialty or pretend to some data base forever "beyond" the reach of a layman. Anybody with the time, literacy, and access fee can get together with just about any piece of specialized knowledge s/he may need. So, to that extent, the two-cultures quarrel can no longer be sustained. As a visit to any local library or magazine rack will easily confirm, there are now so many more than two cultures that the problem has really become how to find the time to read anything outside one's own specialty.
What has persisted, after a long quarter century, is the element of human character."

George Landow: Twenty Minutes into the Future

Printed books are technology, too
"We find ourselves, for the first time in centuries, able to see the book as unnatural, as a near-miraculous technological innovation and not as something intrinsically and inevitably human. We have, to use Derridean terms, decentered the book. We find ourselves in the position, in other words, of perceiving the book as technology. I think it no mere coincidence that it is at precisely this period in human history that we have acquired crucial intellectual distance from the book as object and as cultural product. First came the distant hearing - the telephone - then the cinema and then the distant seeing of television. It is only with the added possibilities created by these new information media and computing that Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Jack Goody, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Alvin Kernan, Roger Chartier, and the European scholars of Lesengeshichte could arise.
Influential as these scholars have been, not all scholars willingly recognize the power of information technologies upon culture. This resistance appears in two characteristic reactions to the proposition that information technology constitutes a crucial cultural force. First, many humanists assume that before now, before computing, our intellectual culture existed in some pastoral nontechnological realm. Technology, in the lexicon of many humanists, generally means "only that technology of which I am frightened." In fact, I have frequently heard humanists use the word technology to mean "some intrusive, alien force like computing," as if pencils, paper, typewriters, and printing presses were in some way natural. Digital technology may be new, but technology, particularly information technology, has permeated all known culture since the beginnings of human history. If we hope to discern the fate of reading and writing in digital environments, we must not treat all previous information technologies of language, rhetoric, writing, and printing as nontechnological."
George Landow - Hypertext 2.0 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997, pages 25-26)

Hyper-Reality - Virtual Originals & Postmodern Panic
Rachael: "Do you like our owl?"
Deckard: "It's artificial?"
Rachael: "Of course it is."

"No less a figure than Benjamin Lee Whorf took Fabre d'Olivet as the starting point for a series of reflections on the curious subject of 'oligosynthesis'. He was wondering about the possible applications of a science capable of 'restoring a possible common language of the human race or [of] perfecting an ideal natural tongue constructed of the original psychological significance of sounds, perhaps a future common speech, into which all our varied languages may be assimilated, or, putting it differently, to whose terms they may be reduced' (Whorf 1956:12; see also 74-6). This is neither the first nor the last of the paradoxes in our story: we associate Whorf with one of the least monogenetic of all the various glottogonic hypotheses; it was Whorf who developed the idea that each language was a 'holistic' universe, expressing the world in a way that could never be wholly translated into any other language."
Umberto Eco - The Search for the Perfect Language
(Fontana Press, 1997, page 113)

Tina Hesman: The machine that invents [via gyre.org and hakank.blogg]
"Thaler's technology was born from near-death experiences of dying computer programs. Its foundation is the discovery that great ideas are the result of noisy neurons and faulty memories.
The invention began to take shape in the 1980s. By day, the physicist worked at McDonnell Douglas Corp., where he wielded a powerful laser beam to crystallize diamonds. He built elegant computer simulations, called neural networks, to guide his experiments.
But at night, things were different. Shirley MacLaine and her ilk were all over the TV and on magazine covers talking about reincarnation and life after death and near-death experiences. It made Thaler wonder: "What would happen if I killed one of my neural networks?"
Neural networks can be either software programs or computers designed to model an object, process or set of data. Thaler reasoned that if a neural network were an accurate representation of a biological system, he could kill it and figure out what happens in the brain as it dies.
In biological brains, the information-carrying cells, called neurons, meet at junctions, called synapses. Brain chemicals, such as adrenaline and dopamine, flow across the junctions to stimulate or soothe the cells. In the computer world, there are switches instead of cells. The switches are connected by numbers or "weights."
So after work, Thaler went home and created the epitome of a killer application - a computer program he called the Grim Reaper. The reaper dismantles neural networks by changing its connection weights. It is the biological equivalent of killing neurons. Pick off enough neurons, and the result is death.
On Christmas Eve 1989, Thaler typed the lyrics to some of his favorite Christmas carols into a neural network. Once he'd taught the network the songs, he unleashed the Grim Reaper. As the reaper slashed away connections, the network's digital life began to flash before its eyes. The program randomly spit out perfectly remembered carols as the killer application severed the first connections. But as its wounds grew deeper, and the network faded toward black, it began to hallucinate.
The network wove its remaining strands of memory together, producing what someone else might interpret as damaged memories, but what Thaler recognized as new ideas. In its death spiral, the program dreamed up new carols, each created from shards of its shattered memories.
"Its last dying gasp was, 'All men go to good earth in one eternal silent night,'" Thaler said.
But it wasn't the eloquence of the network's last words that captured Thaler's imagination. What excited him was how noisy and creative the process of dying was. It gave Thaler ideas. What if, he asked, I don't cut the connections, but just perturb them a little?
Thaler built another neural network and trained it to recognize the structure of diamonds and some other super-hard materials. He also built a second network to monitor the first one's activities.
Then he tickled a few of the network's connections, and something began to happen. The tickling, akin to a shot of adrenaline or an electrical jolt in the brain, produced noise. In this sense, noise is not sound, but random activity. And the noise triggered changes in the network.
The result was new ideas. The computer dreamed up new ultra-hard materials. Some of the materials are known to humans, but Thaler didn't tell the network they existed. Other materials are entirely new ..."
(From The St.Louis Post-Dispatch - 25 January 2004)

That Gibberish in Your In-Box May Be Good News
(From The New York Times - 25 January 2004)
"If you could sit back with Zen-like detachment and observe the dross piling up in your electronic mailbox, the spam wars might come to seem like a fascinating electronic game. Like creatures running through a maze with constantly shifting walls, spammers dart and weave to sneak their solicitations past ever wilier junk mail filters. They are organisms, or maybe genomes, grinding out one random mutation after another, desperately trying to elude the Grim Reaper.
[...] Dispiriting as it is to start the morning with a hundred of these orthographic monsters crouching in your in-box, there is reason to take heart. Measured in bits and bytes, the sheer volume of spam may not have diminished. But advanced filtering software, which learns to recognize the mercurial traits of junk e-mail, is having an effect. The spammers' messages are becoming harder and harder to decipher. Sense is inevitably degenerating into nonsense, like a pileup of random mutations in an endangered species gasping its last breaths.
[...] A recent e-mail message making the rounds promised "Leacatharsisrn to make a fortcongestiveune on eBay!" (A Web link inside led to a site with information on a money-making auction scheme.)
Increasingly the subject lines convey no meaning at all: "begonia breadfruit extempore defocus purveyor." For the spammer, the hope, slim as it seems, is that a few curious souls will open and read the e-mail, which begins, "I finally was able to lsoe the wieght" and goes on to offer a product "Guanarteed to work or your menoy back!" Read out loud, the message sounds a little like HAL the computer in "2001: A Space Odyssey" sinking into aphasia as its synapses are severed one by one.
In what may be their final death throes, some spammers have begun sending messages consisting of a single image or a one-line sales pitch - "picospams" - with a link to a Web site. Often appended at the end, in an attempt to flummox the filters, is a scrap of Dadaist poetry - "feverish squirt feat transconductance terrify broken trite fascist axis stultify floc bookshelves." Sometimes this "word salad," as it has come to be called, is rendered in invisible ink - white letters on a white background - or hidden inside an embedded formatting command.
No matter. The filters learn to adapt. If the spammers want to stay in business, ultimately they must convey at least a hint of meaning. After all, you cannot send a completely random message - or one that is blank - and expect many people to click the link."
George Johnson

Jozef Kelemen: On the Post-Modern Machine
"We are born trusting. Some theologists even consider the primitive trust stemming from the initially very bodily relationship between the child and its mother as a basis for our later need to believe. We acquire fear of others, just like hope in others, love for others, belief in others, or hate, i.e. experiences that make it possible for us to live, through massive interaction with our environment, in human society. Wouldn't it be possible in some of these very opposing experiences to find the roots of our contradictory relationship to our own self, to our own body, which we, whether in a certain subconscious or conscious projection, relate to machines too?"

New Scientist: AI and A-Life: The creativity machine
"Unlike conventional computers, which are programmed in painstaking, step-by-step detail, neural networks can be trained." Bob Holmes (20 January 1996)

Can robots make good models of biological behaviour? by Barbara Webb (2001)

The Unfolding Mind: Death and Transfiguration
"One of the most surprising of recent discoveries is the fact that death, on a massive scale, plays a crucial part in the development of the brain, long before the child is born. Some weeks before birth there are far more cells in the brain than there will be in the newborn child, and their connections are more widespread too. The death of nerve cells and the removal of connections both play vital parts in the perfection of the brain. The genetic program that orchestrates the construction of the nervous system seems to play safe by building in extra cell divisions and by encouraging the immature neurons to form exploratory connections to distant parts of the nervous system. Both the unneeded cells and the unwanted connections are eliminated as the brain becomes refined to its ultimate state.
The factors that regulate the death of cells and the rearrangement of connections are numerous. Some of the changes seem to be written in the inbuilt blueprint of the genetic code, a code that can kill as well as create. But others depend on the individual battle fought by each growing fibre for space in the crowded brain. The optic nerve of a monkey, some weeks before birth, contains more than 2 million fibres; twice the number that it will keep as an adult. If one eye is missing at this stage, the remaining eye retains more nerve cells and more optic nerve fibres than usual. Presumably fibres from the two eyes normally fight with each other for space on their target cells in the brain - a deadly game of musical chairs in which the losers die.
The literal death of neurons is not the only mechanism that the developing brain employs to remove unwanted connections. Some cells, especially in the cerebral cortex, send out their fibres to unusual targets but then, at some specific stage in development, withdraw those connections and make new ones instead, without the cells necessarily dying. Giorgio Innocenti at the Institute of Anatomy in Lausanne discovered that this process of switching connections plays a major part in the development of the corpus callosum, the huge cable of millions of fibres that connects together the hemispheres of the brain. In rodents, cats, monkeys and human beings, the corpus callosum contains a vast excess of nerve fibres in the fetus, joining together parts of the two cerebral hemispheres that do not remain connected in the normal adult.
All this attrition of cells and axons is far from the wastage that it seems to be. It is a clever trick that Nature has devised to sculpt the perfect neuronal machine from an over-abundance of cells and an excess of interconnection."
Colin Blakemore - The Mind Machine (Penguin, 1994, pages 23-24)

The Internet as an Organism + WaterBird: A Metaphor for the Net

"The best material model of a cat is another, or preferably the same, cat."
Arturo Rosenblueth & Norbert Wiener

George Dyson on the reality of cats and apples [vide Edge #128]
"The latest manifesto from Jaron Lanier raises important points. However, it is unfair to attribute to Alan Turing, Norbert Wiener, or John von Neumann (& perhaps Claude Shannon) the limitations of unforgiving protocols and Gordian codes. These pioneers were deeply interested in probabilistic architectures and the development of techniques similar to what Lanier calls phenotropic codes. The fact that one particular computational subspecies became so successful is our problem (if it's a problem) not theirs.
People designing or building computers (serial or parallel; flexible or inflexible; phenotropic or not) are going to keep talking about wires, whether in metaphor or in metal, for a long time to come. As Danny Hillis has explained: "memory locations are simply wires turned sideways in time." If there's a metaphor problem, it's a more subtle one, that we still tend to think that we're sending a coded message to another location, whereas what we're actually doing is replicating the code on the remote host.
In the 1950s it was difficult to imagine hardware ever becoming reliable enough to allow running megabyte strings of code. Von Neumann's "Reliable Organization of Unreliable Elements" (1951) assumed reliable code and unreliable switches, not, as it turned out, the other way around. But the result is really the same (and also applies to coding reliable organisms using unreliable nucleic acids, conveying reliable meaning using unreliable language, and the seemingly intractable problem of assigning large software projects to thousands of people at once).
Von Neumann fleshed out these ideas in a series of six lectures titled "Probabilistic Logics and the Synthesis of Reliable Organisms from Unreliable Components" given at Cal Tech on January 4-15, 1952. This formed a comprehensive manifesto for a program similar to Lanier's, though the assumption was that the need for flexible, probabilistic logic would be introduced by the presence of sloppy hardware, not sloppy code. "The structures that I describe are reminiscent of some familiar patterns in the nervous system," he wrote to Warren Weaver on 29 January 1952.
The pioneers of digital computing did not see everything as digitally as some of their followers do today. "Besides," argued von Neumann in a long letter to Norbert Wiener, 29 November 1946 (discussing the human nervous system and a proposed program to attempt to emulate such a system one cell at a time), "the system is not even purely digital (i.e. neural): It is intimately connected to a very complex analogy; (i.e. humoral or hormonal) system, and almost every feedback loop goes through both sectors, if not through the 'outside' world (i.e. the world outside the epidermis or within the digestive system) as well." Von Neumann believed in the reality of cats and apples too."

The New York Review of Books: In the River of Consciousness
Oliver Sacks: "How, then, are the various snapshots "assembled" to achieve apparent continuity, and how do they reach the level of consciousness? [...] Whatever the mechanism, the fusing of discrete visual frames or snapshots is a prerequisite for continuity, for a flowing, mobile consciousness."

Mathematics and Language by Tony Brown
[...] As with Saussure (1966), Derrida sees the signifier/signified duality as inseparable. But as with Lacan (1968), Derrida sees relatively stable signifiers being associated with a fluid underbelly, comprising a signified field which sweeps out to occupy the whole of consciousness, and indeed, the unconscious. Both presence and absence are located by the signifier. The loss incurred in the attempt to articulate remains attached to the signifier seeking to replace it. Meanings are derived only through retrospective examination of the flow of signs. The component signifiers do not have implicit meanings, only relational associations with other signifiers in the chain. There are no independently existing meanings in the chain since any attempt to frame in words, any attempt to "mean", creates a gap between "being" and attempts to explain it. Lacan speaks of an indefinite sliding of meaning to convey the "impossibilities" of attaching one word with one meaning. We have no truths to provide orientation apart from those generated through this system of differences. Derrida (1981, translator's introduction, p. ix) suggests that self-present meanings are illusions brought about through repressing the differential structures from which they spring. However, as a note of caution Derrida seems to have back-tracked a little from the extreme way of thinking many associate with him:
"... it was never our wish to extend the re-assuring notion of text to a whole extra-textual realm and to transform the world into a library by doing away with all boundaries, all frameworks, all sharp edges."
(Jacques Derrida - Living on the Border Lines, in Kamuf, P. (Ed.) A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, Columbia University Press, New York, 1991, page 257)

An Inuit on the Underground
Ros Coward: "Over the years, Brody has lived with and studied several hunter-gatherer societies. He has become convinced that the hunter-gatherer world-view contains important lessons for humanity's future.
He devotes much space to discussing Inuit language in addressing these issues. It is the language, he claims, that 'reveals different ways of knowing the world'. Anaviapik introduces him to Inuit not as a collection of words but as a culture. When Brody learns about seal hunting, he is shown not only how to hunt but how to talk about the hunt to other community members. He also learns there is no generic word for seal, only 'ringed seal, one-year-old ringed seal, adult male ringed seal, harp seal, bearded seal'.
It is a well-known academic curiosity that Inuit has no generic word for snow either, only a vast array of different snowy conditions. For Brody, these are far from idle academic points. They expose how hunter-gatherer languages 'express and celebrate the importance of detailed knowledge of their natural world'. They demonstrate a complex and profound respect for their land and the creatures they hunt. Far from the miserable subsistence existence imagined by colonists, Brody meets an almost spiritual connection to the land. Many hunter-gatherers feel there's a porous connection between the natural and spirit world."

Enviro Digita

posted by Andrew 2/08/2004 07:28:00 PM

Wednesday, February 04, 2004

 
It's Mulder on the dancefloor

Philip Pullman Webchat: BBC Radio 4: His Dark Materials
From Graham King
Q: Did you base the alethiometer on Ramon Lull's medieval art for seeking the truth, his Ars Combinatoria, based on three circles each divided into topics or symbols which can be individually turned to produce endless connections?
Philip Pullman
A: Well, how interesting. I didn't know about this. My source for the alethiometer was partly the emblem books of the Renaissance and partly the memory theatre as described in a wonderful book by Frances Yates called The Art of Memory. I was aware of Ramon Lull but not about this Ars Combinatoria, which sounds extremely fascinating. Thank you for telling me about it.

Jodi Dean: Theorizing Conspiracy Theory: Theory & Event 4:3
"As the global networks of the information age become increasingly entangled, many of us are overwhelmed and undermined by an all-pervasive uncertainty. Far from passively consuming the virtually entertaining spectacles of vertically integrated media, we come to suspect that something is going on behind the screens. What we see is not what we get. The truth may not be out there, but something, or someone, is. Accompanying our increasing suspicions, moreover, are seemingly bottomless vats of information, endless paths of evidence."

Cabinet of Dr Glas
We are the cut, the never smudged ...
Scissorhands clutch.
Hatch the scrolls of Delight House.
Post to post (to disc)
at the click of one mouse ...
Audi, Cogito, Etymo, Echo
*
Pulling our lego-babel from the hearth,
projecting trailers for the memory
sparks an odyssey.
*
A sputnik orbits a pearl, a time-ghost world:
Somewhere over on the other side of Eden
Perhaps & Maybe attend a cannibal reading,
a gift-wrapped, extended, & phantom pane
"Literature Please, Let's have your glasses"
& witness-reports of a walled magazine.
A Pilgrim's Vorsprung durch Technik ...
*
Replay the footsteps between media [via beat telemetry]

Darrin M. McMahon: Conspiracies so vast (The Boston Globe, 2/1/04)
"[...] Fears of the Illuminati, for example, still invoked to this day, were originally fed by the discovery in the 1780s of an actual conspiracy led by a Bavarian professor at the University of Ingolstadt, Adam Weishaupt. His brotherhood of "enlightened ones," the Society of the Illuminati, aimed to infiltrate established Masonic lodges throughout Europe with the goal of disseminating republican and anticlerical beliefs. The conspiracy was discovered long before it could have any real effect. But this did nothing to stem the alarm that spread in its wake.
Fanned by the terrible upheavals of the French Revolution, tales of the Illuminati flourished, taking their place alongside the dastardly accounts of "Monied Interests," Masons, Jacobins, Rosicrucians, Jesuits, and Jews. When the President of Yale, Timothy Dwight, preached a sermon before alarmed undergraduates in 1797, warning of the machinations of the Illuminati conspiracy in the New World, he was merely adding an early Yankee voice to what would soon become a full-blown national panic. The American Bavarian Illuminati scare of 1798-1800 swept up the likes of Alexander Hamilton, and brought the country to the brink of civil war.
Dwight and Hamilton were in good company. From Voltaire and Rousseau to David Hume and Edmund Burke, some of the century's finest minds were ready to countenance conspiracies of one form or another. That fact makes it difficult to dismiss the Enlightenment's fascination with these dark developments as simply irrational aberrations. On the contrary, as the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gordon S. Wood has argued, Enlightenment conspiracy theories may have represented a transitional step on the way to a more nuanced and "scientific" understanding of the world.
For an age in the process of demystifying Nature, to attribute cause and effect to magic or Fate, the Devil or the hidden hand of Providence was no longer sufficient. Searching for rational patterns to explain the laws of humanity as they explained the laws of the natural world, Enlightenment observers ran up against the complexity and contingency of human affairs.
Large-scale phenomena like the transition to capitalism, or the American or French Revolutions, did not readily lend themselves to simple patterns. Conspiracy was a way to ascribe order to the seemingly chaotic, make an irrational world appear rational without ascribing agency to nonhuman forces."

Guido Cavalcanti

posted by Andrew 2/04/2004 07:08:00 PM

Monday, February 02, 2004

 
Intelligence? What intelligence?

The Onion : God Angrily Clarifies 'Don't Kill' Rule
News flash: 'God's will' equals 'Don't murder people.'

BBC NEWS: Programmes: Newsnight: Terror network
"Mullah Krekar has been of concern to intelligence agencies around the world. They tracked his labyrinthine trail across Asia and Europe. The Dutch had found Krekar with what looked like an inventory of Ansar's fighting capabilities. They had "enough supplies for five or six months of warfare on the front or two years or more for fighting as guerillas." Back in Norway, Krekar was acquitted of a subsequent terrorism charge on the grounds that his group was waging war and thus couldn't be considered terrorist. From Oslo, Khalid Ahmed runs an Islamist website. Norwegian prosecutors believe his brother, Mullah Krekar, has been doing the same, but he's been using the internet to command Ansar terrorists. The Norwegians are holding Mullah Krekar in connection with two Ansar bombing attempts in Northern Iraq. They say they've plenty of witnesses, most notably this young would-be suicide bomber who was thwarted before he could self-detonate. As well as demonstrating his failed technique, he's made a lengthy confession saying he was trained and inspired to kill by Mullah Krekar. Before the cameras his mother heaps her wrath on Krekar."

MediaGuardian.co.uk - Media: Crisis? What crisis?
"Though the Gilligan affair reflected badly on the BBC, it should be seen as a hiccup, not evidence of a breakdown in its culture. Campbell knows that too: in an unreported speech at a function last week he said with great sincerity how much he respects the BBC. That really is an example of drawing a line and moving on."
Roy Greenslade

BBC News: Politics: Campbell takes centre stage by Brian Wheeler
"Then the impossible happened. The first question from the audience left him lost for words.
Did he think his obsessive nature was due to the fact that he had been an alcoholic. Was he, in fact, a "dry drunk"?
Campbell took a drink of water."

Dissent Magazine - Winter 2004 - A Friendly Drink in a Time of War
"The left doesn't see because -" thump!-"George W. Bush is an unusually repulsive politician, except to his own followers, and people are blinded by the revulsion they feel. And, in their blindness, they cannot identify the main contours of reality right now. They peer at Iraq and see the smirking face of George W. Bush. They even feel a kind of schadenfreude or satisfaction at his errors and failures. This is a modern, television-age example of what used to be called 'false consciousness.'"
Paul Berman

AlterNet: Waging War on the BBC
"I'm not a disinterested by-stander. My most important investigations, all but banned from U.S. airwaves, were developed and broadcast by BBC Newsnight, the program where Watts works.
Will an iron curtain descend on the news?"
Greg Palast

Comfort of strangers - David Sexton
"The most intriguing literary event last year wasn't the arrival of Harry Potter No5, or the waste of the Booker Prize on DBC Pierre, nor even the potty elevation of JRR Tolkien in The Big Read. It was the rise of the literary weblog.
All weblogs boomed last year - but literary weblogs boomed to more purpose than most. "So far the internet is behaving more like a print medium than television, which seems to make it especially attractive to writers and readers," says one Canadian blogger, Alex Good (goodreports.net). And as publishers and the mainstream media become ever more obsessed with bestsellers and celebrities, book blogs are now an essential antidote for many readers.
A year ago I rarely looked at blogs. Now I do most days - not only are they highly informative, they also create a sense of odd community across continents and time zones. Reading is a fundamentally solitary activity, which is why readers seek other readers, trying to create a sense that they are participating in a shared activity."

My So-Called Blog
"[...] Back in the 1980's, when I attended high school, reading someone's diary would have been the ultimate intrusion. But communication was rudimentary back then. There were no cellphones, or answering machines; there was no ''texting,'' no MP3's or JPEG's, no digital cameras or file-sharing software; there was no World Wide Web -- none of the private-ish, public-ish, superimmediate forums kids today take for granted. If this new technology has provided a million ways to stay in touch, it has also acted as both an amplifier and a distortion device for human intimacy. The new forms of communication are madly contradictory: anonymous, but traceable; instantaneous, then saved forever (unless deleted in a snit). In such an unstable environment, it's no wonder that distinctions between healthy candor and ''too much information'' are in flux and that so many find themselves helplessly confessing, as if a generation were given a massive technological truth serum.
A result of all this self-chronicling is that the private experience of adolescence -- a period traditionally marked by seizures of self-consciousness and personal confessions wrapped in layers and hidden in a sock drawer -- has been made public. Peer into an online journal, and you find the operatic texture of teenage life with its fits of romantic misery, quick-change moods and sardonic inside jokes. Gossip spreads like poison. Diary writers compete for attention, then fret when they get it. And everything parents fear is true. (For one thing, their children view them as stupid and insane, with terrible musical taste.) But the linked journals also form a community, an intriguing, unchecked experiment in silent group therapy -- a hive mind in which everyone commiserates about how it feels to be an outsider, in perfect choral unison.
For many in the generation that has grown up online, the solution is not to fight this technological loss of privacy, but to give in and embrace it: to stop worrying and learn to love the Web. It's a generational shift that has multiple roots ..."
Emily Nussbaum

Marshall McLuhan - Understanding Media (1964)
"The principle of self-amputation as an immediate relief of strain on the central nervous system applies very readily to the origin of the media of communication from speech to computer.
Physiologically, the central nervous system, that electric network that coordinates the various media of our senses, plays the chief role. Whatever threatens its function must be contained, localized, or cut off, even to the total removal of the offending organ. The function of the body, as a group of sustaining and protective organs for the central nervous system, is to act as buffers against sudden variations of stimulus in the physical and social environment. Sudden social failure or shame is a shock that some may "take to heart" or that may cause muscular disturbance in general, signaling for the person to withdraw from the threatening situation.
Therapy, whether physical or social, is a counter-irritant that aids in that equilibrium of the physical organs which protect the central nervous system. Whereas pleasure is a counter-irritant (e.g., sports, entertainment, and alcohol), comfort is the removal of irritants. Both pleasure and comfort are strategies of equilibrium for the central nervous system.
With the arrival of electric technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate and suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism. It could well be that the successive mechanizations of the various physical organs since the invention of printing have made too violent and superstimulated a social experience for the central nervous system to endure."

Don't look now, Louise, but somebody's hacking your neural net
"The Avatamsaka Sutra speaks of Indra's Net. This cosmology portrays the universe as a vast net or web with a jewel at each of the innumerable nodes -- the intersections of each strand of the net. Each jewel mirrors every other jewel in the infinite cosmos, so that each node contains all moments of time -- past, present, and future -- and all of infinite space. This is of course a religious concept, but it also happens to be a pretty darn good ...
McLuhan's theory of media is that each extension of our body is a medium. The shoe, and eventually the wheel, is an extension of the foot. Print is an extension of the eye. Clothing is an extension of the skin. His use of the term "medium" is rather extensive. Now ... he says, we have managed to extrude our central nervous system [...] This helps to explain some of the dislocation and disorientation we experience ..."
Ross Bender

Control/Anti-Control: Technology & Intelligence by Adam Wygodny
"Observation is one of the most important facets of intelligence and Sun-Tzu long ago advocated using spies to observe the strength and organization of one's adversaries. Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary traces the root of the word 'intelligence' back to the Latin intellegere, which means to realize or understand; which is a derivative of the stem 'lego' that denoted the making of a deputy or the delegation of authority. However, another use of the stem lego includes the actions of collecting or gathering. Yet another use of the stem can mean to pass through, traverse, or coast along a place; and a final use of the stem has the meaning of selecting or choosing (Cawley). One can then conceive of intelligence as an understanding by delegated authorities achieved through the collection of information or the traversing of a place."

There is no Maginot Line of the brain
"I have spoken of machines, but not only of machines having brains of brass and thews of iron. When human atoms are knit into an organization in which they are used, not in their full right as responsible human beings, but as cogs and levers and rods, it matters little that their raw material is flesh and blood. What is used as an element in a machine, is in fact an element in the machine. Whether we entrust our decisions to machines of metal, or to those machines of flesh and blood which are bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations, we shall never receive the right answers to our questions unless we ask the right questions."
Norbert Wiener

Dragon Flying through the Clouds
"Hidden in the caverns of inaccessible mountains, the dragon awaits the time when he slowly rouses himself to activity. He unfolds himself in the stormclouds; he washes his mane in the blackness of the seething whirlpools. His claws are in the forks of the lightning, his scales begin to glisten in the bark of rain-swept pine trees. His voice is heard in the hurricane which, scattering the withered leaves of the forest, quickens the new spring.
The dragon reveals himself, only to vanish."
Okakura Kakuzo

Italo Calvino + Hammorabi + Alamut

"We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves. A pattern is a message, and may be transmitted as a message. How else do we employ our radio than to transmit patterns of sound, and our television set than to transmit patterns of light? It is amusing as well as instructive to consider what would happen if we were to transmit the whole pattern of the human body ..."
Norbert Wiener - The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society

la matièreréflexive + Socio-Cybernetics and Norbert Wiener

"The fact that we cannot telegraph the pattern of a man from one place to another seems to be due to technical difficulties, and in particular, to the difficulty of keeping an organism in being during such a radical reconstruction."
Norbert Wiener - The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society

Cybercities
"Images, imagination, and memory of cities are intimately linked, and thus I want to turn to descriptions of two different types of artificial memory, so that they may give us some insights into our contemporary crisis of representing invisible cities. The "classical art of memory," as described by Frances Yates, depended on the mental construction of an imaginary but complex architectural setting that contained a series of places, or loci. In these places, vivid images or icons symbolically representing what was to be recollected were mentally stored. In order to remember the parts of a speech, for example, the orator imaginatively followed a path through the sequence of rooms, or topi, where the symbols had been placed, encountering the images one by one and recalling the ideas or arguments that the images represented.
Yates also describes another, lesser-known art of memory. Developed by Ramon Lull, it differs considerably from the classical method in that there are no striking images, and there is nothing to excite recall though resemblance or similitude. Instead, the concepts were designated by letters; it was, in other words, an abstract art of memory. Movement and change were introduced into this static system not by mentally reenacting a promenade through a fixed and memorized spatial container of icons, but instead by using a set of revolving concentric circles marked with letters standing for concepts, which enabled a recombinatory play of these concepts. In this mathematical art of memory, the meaning thus changed with respect to the level of the circle on which a given letter was located -- that is, the context that was being used. It required memorizing the principles and procedures of Lull's art and then investigating the combinations through a series of questions and answers. These two arts of memory can help us explore the question of the imageability of cities in the age of electronic communication."
M. Christine Boyer

AS Byatt on the lure of the fairy tale [via BBJ]
"An all-important part of our response to the world of the tales is our instinctive sense that they have rules. There are things that can and can't happen, will and won't happen - a prohibition is there to be broken, two of three brothers or sisters are there to fail, the incestuous king will almost always dance at his daughter's marriage to the prince in whose court she has found refuge as a kitchen slave, or a goose girl. Lüthi brilliantly compares the glittering mosaic of fairy tales to Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. As a little girl I compared it in my mind to the pleasures of Ludo and Snakes and Ladders and Solitaire played with cards, in which only certain moves are possible and the restrictions are part of the pleasure. As an adult writer I think that my infant synapses grew like a maze of bramble-shoots into a grammar of narrative - part of the form of my neuronal web as linguistic grammars are - and mathematical forms."

Reflections by Daniel Dolinov
In a lecture delivered in November of 1967 in Turin, entitled "Cybernetics and Ghosts," Italo Calvino talks about the totality of human activity vis-à-vis language: "The number of words was limited, and, faced with the multiform world and its countless things, men defended themselves by inventing a finite number of sounds combined in various ways." (From "Cybernetics and Ghosts" the first in a collection of essays called "The Uses of Literature" by Italo Calvino published in 1986 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, page 3)

Italo Calvino and hypertext

"Literature is a combinatorial game that pursues the possibilities implicit in its own material, independent of the personality of the poet, but it is a game that at a certain point is invested with an unexpected meaning, a meaning that is not patent on the linguistic plane on which we were working but has slipped in [...] The literature machine can perform all the permutations possible on a given material, but the poetic result will be the particular effect of one of these permutations on a man endowed with a consciousness and an unconscious, that is, an empirical and historical man. It will be the shock that occurs only if the writing machine is surrounded by the hidden ghosts of the individual and of his society.
To return to the storyteller of the tribe, he continues imperturbably to make his permutations of jaguars and toucans until the moment comes when one of his little tales ..."
Italo Calvino - The Literature Machine (Picador, 1989, page 22)

Perforations: Hypertext Narrative by Michael Joyce
"Hypertext narratives become virtual storytellers and narrative is no longer disseminated irreversibly from singer to listener or writer to reader. It exists instead as a cycle in which readers become co-authors and artificially intelligent systems "read" their responses. At the moment, most interest centers on the machine side of this cycle, focusing on hypertext or virtual reality systems and intelligent agent/navigators that can structure or generate narratives. However, even in a system which generates narrative, interaction is the assumption of authority over the replacement of one writing by another. Thus the human side of the cycle demands primary attention.
To do so, the primacy of the text must be marginalized. The reader declares independence from the software agent and the contingent structure of the virtual reality alike. If the reader is programming, the reader is programmed. Hypertext narrative asserts the authority of the individual reader, no longer privileged and centralized by the system of the text but rather by her reading itself. "Once we have dismantled and reassembled the process of literary composition, the decisive moment will be that of reading" says Calvino, "even though entrusted to machines, literature will continue to be a 'place' of privilege within human consciousness, a way of exercising the potentialities contained in the system of signs belonging to all societies at all times."

Hypermedia and the three labyrinths by Lucia Leão
1.2.3. The active reader
"The concept of flexible text requires and creates an active reader. As Quéau says: "new forms of mental navigation will be necessary to reencounter oneself in the informational labyrinths in constant regeneration".(7) In the hypertextual systems, every reader is also the author of what he is reading. We talk about active readers, regular authors, works in permanent change. We may, more than ever, review the question of the classic dichotomy subject-object.
Pierre Levy dissolved this dualistic division in a very interesting way when he sketched the program of a Cognitive Ecology. (8) If we consider the intelligence, or cognition, as the result of complex nets in which a great number of actors interact (human, biological, and technical), the scenario of interactions allows more complex reading. The hypermedia systems allow us to builds a paradigm of theoretical possibilities.
2. The organization of complexity
The hypermedia systems represent an excellent example on the paradigm of complexity. We will use the term complexity as described by Morin, that is, as something, which is woven as a whole. (9) What defines the weave of the complexus cloth is that it is formed by a circular game in which the binomials order/disorder, chance/determination, interaction/retroaction are conjugated in an infinite and simultaneous way.
Thus, in the concept of complexity, one cannot exclude the "simple". This is one of the most interesting paradoxes to be observed in the hypermedia systems. Each knot of the net, each "home page", each page of a CD-ROM must be conceived from the principles of clearness, coherence, strictness, order, precision. In this sense, simplicity and clearness are constitutive elements, passage bridges to a greater complexity. A hypermedia system presents as reality the articulation and organization of complexity. We may say hypermedia is only accomplished when there is interaction between the conjugated pairs."

BBC News: Magazine: Media studies: The next generation by Jonathan Duffy
As the number of media studies students rises again, children as young as three could soon be taking lessons in "media literacy". What will they be learning?
Media studies, the butt of many a joke about declining standards in academia, is more popular than ever in the lecture halls across the country according to new figures. Last year saw a rise of 15.8% in the number of students on such courses. In future however, children as young as three may be learning in the most basic way the sort of skills that are taught on such courses.
Media literacy is the buzzword. Already part of the national curriculum in England for older children, the government also wants primary school pupils to have a greater understanding of the hidden depths of TV, films and other media. More than ever before, children are immersed in a media-saturated world and exposed to television in particular. A third of children under the age of four have a TV in their bedroom, as do more than half of under-16-year-olds. On average, children spend two-and-a-half hours a day watching the box.

Hypermedia and Synesthesia by James C. Morrison

Words are not signs
"Thought is nested in speech, not in texts, all of which have their meanings through reference of the visible symbol to the world of sound. What the reader is seeing on this page are not real words but coded symbols whereby a properly informed human being can evoke in his or her consciousness real words, in actual or imagined sound."
Walter Ong - Orality & Literacy (Routledge, 1989, page 75)

Matt Webb: Thoughts on hypertext

"Mallarmé wrote his most difficult poem, Un Coup de Des, in newspaper format. He saw, like Joyce, that the basic forms of communication -- whether speech, writing, print, press, telegraph, or photography -- necessarily were fashioned in close accord with man's cognitive activity. And the more extensive the mass medium the closer it must approximate to our cognitive faculties."
Marshall McLuhan - The Medium and the Light (Stoddart, 1999, page 161)

Children of the Code
"When we read, we are taking a code and we are getting instructions from that code to do a series of cognitive processes. And so what we are actually doing is enacting a cognitive performance in response to a set of instructions."
Johanna Drucker

Art21 - The Alphabet Synthesis Machine (Introduction)

"Every orientation presupposes a disorientation. Only someone who has experienced bewilderment can free himself of it. But these games of orientation are in turns games of disorientation. Therein lies their fascination and their risk. The labyrinth is made so that whoever enters it will stray and get lost. But the labyrinth also poses the visitor a challenge: that he reconstruct the plan of it and dissolve its power. If he succeeds, he will have destroyed the labyrinth; for one who has passed through it, no labyrinth exists."
Hans Magnus Enzensberger - Topological Structures in Modern Literature (1966)

DagZine: Positions, Poetics, Populations + Kristin Thomas: Spam Poetry

"Just as entropy is a measure of disorganization, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization. In fact, it is possible to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability. That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Clichés, for example, are less illuminating than great poems."
Norbert Wiener - The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society

Dr Strangelove's Game reviewed by Roger Frantz
"The book begins with the Greeks and Romans, and then moves to Judaism and Christianity, but also includes Islam. It covers traditional topics such as the mercantilists and physiocrats, the classical economists, American Institutionalists, money and business cycles, and Keynes."

Electrolite: "Weapons of mass destruction-related program activities"
Kevin J. Moroney comments: "Back on the question of who inspired Dr. Strangelove, I'm quite surprised that no one here nor in the alt.movies.kubrick FAQ mentioned John von Neumann, who spoke with a thick Eastern European accent, attended Atomic Energy Commission meetings in a wheelchair, and advocated nuclear first strike against the Soviets on game-theoretical grounds."

Guardian Unlimited Film: Interviews: Cinema's subversive librarian
"The history of cinema is really the history of music," says Figgis. "If you look at Hitchcock and see what Bernard Herrmann is doing, you become aware that the whole European avant-garde had made its way, through the refugee movement, from Europe to America and from America to Hollywood. You will hear an atonal piece of music in a thriller that is highly effective because it bypasses a cliched romanticism of conventional harmony. You listen to Bartok's Music for Percussion, Strings and Celeste, which Kubrick used, and it's frightening and powerfully eerie. A mainstream audience will be enthralled and happy to be listening to this avant-garde music, but they wouldn't dream of buying a piece of music by, say, Charles Ives. That is one of the more interesting subversive possibilities of film."
Should there be any time left at the end of the working day, it seems that Figgis might indulge in a spot of filing. "Billy Forsyth said to me: 'Everything we do now is about highly advanced filing clerk techniques.' He's right: if you don't develop your own filing system you can't function in the digital world, and now I have an arranged marriage between my computer and a stock of high-quality notebooks. You've got to catalogue your ideas. We're all librarians at heart, aren't we?"

Beauty and the Beast
La Belle et la Bête

Is that you, Clarice?

Au Lecteur
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat

posted by Andrew 2/02/2004 05:16:00 PM