Friday, January 30, 2004

 
Trust me, I'm a Doctor

Under the cover story by Jim McClellan
Unlike music, the book business's core demographic is older and female and not drawn to piracy. But the fear of "Napsterisation" has led to rather stringent DRM measures in e-publishing.
[...] Thanks to the spread of MP3 players, digital audio books are beginning to sell. According to Jonathan Korzen, spokesman for Audible.com, the leading player in the field, they offer obvious advantages. You don't have to struggle with loads of tapes. The audio version of even a long novel can be downloaded pretty quickly. You can store several at once on the average MP3 player. [...] In line with founder Donald Katz's idea that the net lets you sell a wider range of spoken word products, Audible.com now sells audio editions of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, available to be downloaded in the morning.
The company has also commissioned original audio content from the likes of comedian Robin Williams. "We are not competitors to the traditional audio book publishers, we're their partners," says Korzen. "We introduce more people to the spoken word and audio books than we 'cannibalise' sales from traditional audio book publishers."

John Woodford - Newspapers need to adopt multi-media strategy, says editor
"The main financial danger looming before newspapers specifically is that "we could cannibalize ourselves," [Ellen] Soeteber said. Such an outcome is possible, she said, if classified advertising "migrates out of newspapers" into one of the other media formats, which could cost newspapers "from a quarter to a third" of their revenue.
Soeteber also pointed to another worry, the fragmentation of TV viewership under the pressure of "nascent online usage." Emerging broadband technologies that amalgamate print, audio and video pose yet another challenge."

Discovery Channel: Incan Counting System Decoded?
"Recent studies are investigating the hypothesis that elaborated knotted strings known as khipu contain a hidden written language stored following a seven-bit binary code. Nobody, however, had been able to explain the meaning of these geometrical tablets known as yupana.
Different in size and shape, the yupana had been often interpreted as a stylized fortress model. Some scholars also interpreted it as a counting board, but how the abacus would have worked remained a mystery.
"It took me about 40 minutes to solve the riddle. I am not an expert on pre-Columbian civilizations. I simply decoded a 16th century drawing from a book on mathematical enigmas I received as a Christmas present," engineer Nicolino De Pasquale said."
Rossella Lorenzi

John M. Unsworth - The Next Wave: Liberation Technology [via MGK]
"Since the beginning of Internet time and before, Liberation Technology has been intertwined with and opposed to another ideology. Call it Command and Control. You see Command and Control at work in the military roots of the Internet, in the Recording Industry Association of America's prosecution of file-sharing college students, and in Microsoft's doubly possessive and oddly revealing slogan ("your potential, our passion"). Liberation Technology wants to keep information free; Command and Control wants to make the Internet safe for private property.
To be sure, not all proprietary operations oppose open inquiry, but the key to the business success of open-source products like Linux is that they allow people to make money by selling them, without allowing the seller exclusive control. Especially with information goods, the notion of nonexclusive commercial rights is key."

Media, Attention, and the Colonization of Consciousness: A Buddhist Perspective
"In fact, our indecisiveness about whether the media really cause behavioral changes or simply reflect them is rooted in the metaphysical blind-spot that results from insistently excluding the middle ground between what 'is' and what 'is-not'. If we accept the Buddha's claim that 'is' and 'is-not' are the twin barbs on which all humankind is impaled, the belief that we can and should distinguish between these different (at least, possible) manifestations of the media is precisely what keeps us from being able to see how the media institutionalize suffering and what we might do to resist.
[...] Like the species in a zoo or the goods in a shopping mall, we co-exist with one another, but are no longer fully interdependent. We have forfeited the dramatic commons on which we are able to immediately contribute to one another's welfare -- the signal characteristic of any diverse community or environment. And, for the most part, we have done so quite willingly, insisting that it is an exercise of our freedom." Peter D. Hershock

The Tyranny of Copyright? by Robert S. Boynton [via Copyfight: the Politics of IP]
[...] Lessig is one of the most prominent and eloquent defenders of the Copy Left's belief that copyright law should return to its Jeffersonian roots. ''We are invoking ideas that should be central to the American tradition, such as that a free society is richer than a control society,'' he says. ''But in the cultural sphere, big media wants to build a new Soviet empire where you need permission from the central party to do anything.'' He complains that Americans have been reduced to ''an Oliver Twist-like position,'' in which they have to ask, ''Please, sir, may I?'' every time we want to use something under copyright -- and then only if we are fortunate enough to have the assistance of a high-priced lawyer.
[...] One of the central ideas of the Copy Left is that the Internet has been a catalyst for re-engaging with the culture -- for interacting with the things we read and watch and listen to, as opposed to just sitting back and absorbing them. This vision of how culture works stands in contrast to what the Copy Left calls the ''broadcast model'' -- the arrangement in which a small group of content producers disseminate their creations (television, movies, music) through controlled routes (cable, theaters, radio-TV stations) to passive consumers. Yochai Benkler, the law professor at Yale, argues that people want to be more engaged in their culture, despite the broadcast technology, like television, that he says has narcotized us. ''People are users,'' he says. ''They are producers, storytellers, consumers, interactors -- complex, varied beings, not just people who go to the store, buy a packaged good off the shelf and consume.''
[...] The future of the Copy Left's efforts is still an open question. James Boyle has likened the movement's efforts to establish a cultural commons to those of the environmental movement in its infancy. Like Rachel Carson in the years before Earth Day, the Copy Left today is trying to raise awareness of the intellectual ''land'' to which they believe we ought to feel entitled and to propose policies and laws that will preserve it. Just as the idea of environmentalism became viable in the wake of the last century's advances in industrial production, the growth of this century's information technologies, Boyle argues, will force the country to address the erosion of the cultural commons. ''The environmentalists helped us to see the world differently,'' he writes, ''to see that there was such a thing as 'the environment' rather than just my pond, your forest, his canal. We need to do the same thing in the information environment. We have to 'invent' the public domain before we can save it.''

Dan Gillmor's eJournal - Needed: A Joan Kroc for Open Technology and Public Domain
"A thought: Clearly, peace, poverty and health care matter more than other issues, but I'd like to see someone of similar financial stature [to Joan Kroc] make it a life mission to push for reform of the "intellectual property" system. This would include fixing the broken patent system, pushing for open source development so technology is more affordable to everyone -- not held in cartels -- and promotion of the public domain in a general sense."

Dan Gillmor's suggestion [writes Johnny Lovestocking] elicited numerous astute comments including those of David H. Rothman whose blog is here TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Rogue State 0 : Elephant Corporation 3

A Whodunit for the Digital Age by Kari L. Dean
"Cybersnoops, aspiring Web detectives and electronic voyeurs searching for a new kind of fix might find it in an emerging form of e-book fiction with a twist: the digital epistolary novel, or DEN.
Created by Greatamericannovel.com, a DEN reveals its story line through a series of simulated e-mails, Web pages and instant messages. "E-books spend too much time looking like paper; they need some device," said Eric Brown, a former literature professor and founder of Greatamericannovel.com. "This is the story of stuff we expect to see on the screen. It's compelling and fun."
Upon downloading a DEN from Greatamericannovel.com, a reader advances through the story by clicking through chains of e-mails between main characters. The reader also witnesses instant-messaging conversations in progress, sees which websites the characters visit, and views the wireless text messages they send and receive. Through these simulated communications, the events of the story unfurl.
"I thought of how we go back and forth on e-mail, and sometimes misinterpret, but yet reconnect," said Brown, current president of Communications Associates, a Memphis, Tennessee, consulting firm that also operates the DEN website. "I started with the idea of the missent e-mail, wrote the story and gave the interface I envisioned to a programmer," Brown said. And so the DEN, a new e-book genre, was born."

Forbes.com: Philips Unveils Ultra-Thin, Flexible Display by Charles Choi
Flexible displays not only could replace bulky computer monitors and rigid flat screens, but also supplant paper in books, newspapers and elsewhere in print.
"There aren't enough trees in China to make enough schoolbooks for their kids. And kids are trudging around in their 40-lbs. backpacks here," said Michael McCreary, vice president of advanced research at E Ink of Cambridge, Mass., the company whose electronic ink technology is the imaging layer for the Philip's flexible display. "You could just have a single electronic book with a flexible display that gets updated each year."
All the world's newspapers, which are printed and read once and then go to landfills or are recycled, could be replaced, McCreary told UPI. "You could have the entire Library of Congress on the fraction of one bookshelf."

New Scientist - Most flexible electronic paper yet revealed [via gizmodo]
"The most flexible electronic display yet developed has been revealed by researchers at electronics giant Philips. The company says it plans to begin mass producing such displays within a few years.
There are many projects aiming to develop "electronic paper". Such a display could, for example, be used create a fully updatable newspaper which could rolled up into a coat pocket. Flexible displays could also be used to create new mobile phones and other easily collapsible gadgets.
Philips's new display was made possible by the development of a way to print organic electronics onto a thin plastic film - previously, it was only possible to print these components on glass. However, after experimenting with various different plastics, Philips now has a technique that works on polyimide film.
Precise details of the fabrication method have not been revealed due to their commercially sensitive nature, says the company. But the process has enabled the company to produce a screen that can be rolled into a tube just two centimetres in diameter - the most flexible electronic display ever made."
Will Knight

The Vigenere Square cipher + Simon Singh's The Code Book Reviewed
"Coding goes hand in hand with the alphabet."
Melvyn Bragg

CommsDesign - Philips unit unveils 'rollable' displays
"By 2005, the rollable displays, which can now be used to read e-mail, could initially be used in military applications as electronic, updatable maps on the battlefield, van Rens predicted."
Junko Yoshida

World Wide News in English : Java Image Map Applet : hypermap.com

posted by Andrew 1/30/2004 06:41:00 PM

Wednesday, January 28, 2004

 
rhizomatic bifurcation

On Plagiarism


Parenthesis
Look mate you hike, unlike
mossy stumps and bark.
*
If vile jelly perceives just distribution
& is content with unhoused heads
& unfed sides, who will remark it?
Why, this is the world's soul.
*
My extended family forest
squats in the dark.


Sun 'sheds its skin like a snake'
"The fact that the Sun's outer layers are bubbling, and that the Sun rotates faster at the equator than the poles, and faster on the inside than on the surface, results in a solar dynamo that, over 11 years, becomes increasingly wound up.
So at some stage during the magnetic cycle the Sun has to somehow shed its old, contorted magnetic skin, and allow a newer, less troubled one, to emerge."
Dr David Whitehouse

posted by Andrew 1/28/2004 05:35:00 PM

Thursday, January 22, 2004

 
Dude Wears My Tutu

Heckler & Coch are skeleton keys
terrella chambers and strawberry hints
on the lips of a stranger.

Northern Lights

posted by Andrew 1/22/2004 07:07:00 PM

Saturday, January 17, 2004

 
Free as Air, Free as Water, Free as Knowledge

Linton C. Freeman: Visualizing Social Networks [via M2M]
"[...] Without computers, the use of factor analysis in the early 1950s was extremely cumbersome. It did, however, have a clear advantage over earlier procedures. It employed a standard procedure and therefore it did produce results that could be replicated; different investigators, using the same data, would produce the same image.
By the 1960s computers were generally available. That provided the opportunity for the use of more elaborate computations. Laumann and Guttman (1966) used a computationally demanding procedure, multidimensional scaling, as a device for locating points from a network analysis. And they were the first to produce an image that was designed to give the appearance of three dimensions."

Alchemical Manchester - The Dee Connection Explored
"Dee was fundamentally concerned with geography, as a mystic study. He supervised the making of the maps which helped Drake, Frobisher, Davis, the Gilberts and Raleigh on their overseas explorations. One of Dee's first visitors after he settled in Manchester in 1596 was Christopher Saxton, the mapmaker, who stayed with Dee from June to July."

social circles - marcos weskamp [via socialfiction]
Social Circles intends to partially reveal the social networks that emerge in mailing lists. The idea is to visualize in near real-time the social hierarchies and the main subjects they address.

Seedlings & Sprouts - IMing your family
"Sure I've sent a few e-apologies in my time, but there's nothing like looking in the eyes of one you love and saying you're sorry. Nothing like getting a hug, a kiss and a look of grace in return."

Susan Spano - What in the world is up with these radical maps?
But maps aren't as definitive as we think, which is important for a traveler to remember. There are many ways to show the world, each with its own virtues and deficiencies.
Allen Carroll, chief cartographer for the National Geographic Society, says that the best and truest representation of the world is a globe. But you can't put a globe in your pocket or, at a reasonable cost, make one big enough to be seen by the young geography student in the back row.
Cartographers have been pondering for centuries how to turn the three-dimensional globe into an image on a two-dimensional piece of paper, which is like trying to flatten an orange peel.
"Something has to give," says Jeannine Schonta, a Rand McNally cartographer. "You can't show the world as it truly is. There are always some distortions."

That Parent-Child Conversation Is Becoming Instant, and Online
In The New York Times of 3 January 2004 John Schwartz writes:
While even quicker than e-mail, instant messages also have the advantage of not actually being instant, Ms. Parsonnet said, because the medium at least gives the user time to compose his or her thoughts and comments before hitting the button.
"You know all the times you wish you'd counted to 10 before you said something?" she said with a laugh. With instant messages, she said, "You have a built-in counting-to-10."

Power Laws: Hype or Revelation [via matt jones]
"From sexual networks to filesharing, genetics to leaders of business organizations, researchers have started to recognize a pervasive characteristic of networks across a variety of disciplines. The term "power law" has come to describe the organizing principle that very few nodes will maintain a large percentage of the links in a network. The ubiquity of power laws has been interpreted as a revelation that touches almost all fields; as a result a large number of papers have been written on this topic in a short period of time. This class aims to review the literature central to the study of power laws and give attention to the question of whether this theory is here to stay." Sandy Pentland, Nathan Eagle and Cameron Marlow

Carvings set off debate about early alphabet by Salah Nasrawi
"The invention of the alphabet revolutionized humanity by extending the ability to read to the common person. Before that, only scribes and rulers had the time to memorize the multiple meanings of hundreds of images in pictographic writings."

Caver Finds A Brave New World, And Brave New Creatures In It
"Hose's team ... travel[ed] to southern Mexico to delve into the Cueva de Villa Luz, or "The Cave of the Lighted House." This unique cave has been used for centuries by the Mayan people, and their descendants the Chol, for religious ceremonies."

ScienceDaily: Alphabet Originated Centuries Earlier Than Previously Thought

"Like Petrie at Sinai, John Coleman Darnell wasn't looking for the alphabet; he was looking for Egyptian relics."
David Sacks - The Alphabet (Hutchinson, 2003, page 34)

Interactivist Info Exchange: The Promise of a Post-Copyright World
"Copyright is an outgrowth of the privatization of government censorship in sixteenth-century England. There was no uprising of authors suddenly demanding the right to prevent other people from copying their works; far from viewing copying as theft, authors generally regarded it as flattery. The bulk of creative work has always depended, then and now, on a diversity of funding sources: commissions, teaching jobs, grants or stipends, patronage, etc. The introduction of copyright did not change this situation. What it did was allow a particular business model -- mass pressings with centralized distribution -- to make a few lucky works available to a wider audience, at considerable profit to the distributors.
The arrival of the Internet, with its instantaneous, costless sharing, has made that business model obsolete -- not just obsolete, but an obstacle to the very benefits copyright was alleged to bring society in the first place. Prohibiting people from freely sharing information serves no one's interests but the publishers'. Although the industry would like us to believe that prohibiting sharing is somehow related to enabling artists to make a living, their claim does not stand up to even mild scrutiny. For the vast majority of artists, copyright brings no economic benefits." Karl Fogel

snarkout: the hallucinatory encyclopedia [via leuschke.org]
"If there's a real analog to the History of the Land Called Uqbar, it's the Codex Seraphinus, that remarkable traveller's sketchbook of an alien world. However, it was created by Italian designer Luigi Serafini in 1981; for a hallucinatory encyclopedia of more uncertain province, cast an eye on the Voynich manuscript. It is full of strange drawings: of bathing women, zodiac figures, astrological diagrams, and curiously half-recognizable plants. (The fact that human figures are naked makes something as simple as dating the document difficult, as no costumes are depicted.) The alphabet it is written in only vaguely resembles anything ever known in Europe. Is it nonsense carefully designed to look halfway legible, a sort of sixteenth-century book from the sky? Investigators "lack decisive tests for distinguishing between nonsense babble, crafty cipher, and language," but the manuscript seems not to be simply random characters. Statistical analysis, the domain of computational linguists and information theorists, shows it to more closely resemble language, albeit ..."

"West of Thebes, Egypt's ancient capital on the Nile, beyond the Valley of the Kings, the burial ground of pharaohs, ancient tracks lead up over an escarpment to the bare, brown gebel, the hills and valleys carved into the Western Desert by centuries of wind and rain. In 1990, a young Egyptologist from Yale, John Darnell, was working in Thebes as Senior Epigrapher for Egypt's Epigraphic Survey, based in Luxor. He had been there the previous season and had become intrigued by the tracks. A German expedition at the end of the nineteenth century and ..."
John Man - Alpha Beta: How Our Alphabet Shaped the Western World
(Headline Book Publishing, 2001, page 69)

Chasing our Tails by Mark Bernstein
"Cycles in hypertext create and explain structure. Through measured repetition, we bring order to what might otherwise become an endlessly varied (and thus endlessly monotonous) line of argument. Just as phrase and cadence clarify the structure of music, cycles clarify the structure of hypermedia."

Tele-Synaesthesia: presentation of a hypothesis by Doctor Hugo
At present, the concept of synaesthesia is connected with the time-honored notion of the 'Gesamtkunstwerk', the category of the theatrical, the attack on the sensorium commune (the central point of convergence of the nervous system). We know that one stimulation of the senses automatically leads to another by means of association. Therefore, synaesthesia is an important factor in every creative act and each form of interpretation. The same goes for mediums, but, in this case, it takes place on a meta-level: Cybermedia. They blur the boundaries between internal and external spaces (a quintessential point of this concise thesis, is the postulate that this blurring of boundaries can be considered as a question of subtle synaesthetic graduations) and, because of the blurring of differences (between what is here and what is there), our senses become tele-senses. Virtual worlds have already emerged in a great many divergent domains. As of yet, one could find applications in the field of the arts, scientific visualisation, virtual universities, cinematographic animation and simulation, teleconferencing, tele-jobs, virtual voyaging, virtual museums, virtual sports, virtual robots, teleshopping, tele-medicine, tele-studying and the like. Virtual reality does not only make the inconceivable quite conceivable, but equally makes it functional. The latter in order to demonstrate that these new media do in fact bring about a synaesthetic effect.
M. McLuhan and B.R. Powers offer an explanation for this phenomenon in their publication: Global Village: "If man is able to transpose the workings of his central nervous system into electronic circuits, he will be on the brink of externalizing his consciousness in the computer. One could conceive of consciousness as a projection [to the outside of an inner] synaesthesia, which in general coincides with the traditional description of common sense. Common sense is this specific human ability to translate [one kind of experience of one sense into] all other senses and to present the result of this process as one global mental image."

Multimedia - From Wagner to Virtual Reality

Unifying Ratio of the Senses is a Mark of ...
"All individuals, their desires and satisfactions, are co-present in the age of communication. But computer banks dissolve the human image. When most data banks come together into a reciprocating whole, our entire Western culture will turn turtle. Visualize an amphibian with its shell inside and its organs outside. Electronic man wears his brain outside his skull and his nervous system on top of his skin. Such a creature is ill-tempered ..."
Marshall McLuhan & Bruce R. Powers - The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century (Oxford University Press, 1989, page 94)

Caerdroia - Labyrinth Typology by Jeff Saward
"The earliest labyrinth symbols so far discovered are all of the same simple design - the classical type - which has persisted to this day. A history spanning some 4000 years. During this time the basic Classical labyrinth has developed into a number of closely related forms, often in particular geographical regions, by means of simple adjustments to the "seed pattern" that lies at the heart of its construction."

The Voynich Manuscript - Muse Log
"An ancient text written in a language no one understands and displaying unfamiliar constellations, the mysterious 'Voynich Manuscript' intrigues astronomers and code breakers alike. The 200-page tome is housed at the Yale library. The manuscript is written entirely in a mysterious, unknown alphabet that has defied all attempts at translation. It is written in a language of which no other example is known to exist. It is an alphabetic script, but of an alphabet variously reckoned to have from nineteen to twenty-eight letters, none of which bear any relationship to any English or European letter system."

Voynich Manuscript Resources
"And that is what you are going to tell the FBI?" Marcus Brody asked, as he and Indy passed through the double doors of the Museum of Antiquity. "That there was nothing to any of it? The Tomb of Hermes does not exist, Voynich is gibberish, and the philosopher's stone is simply a dream?"
Indiana Jones and the Philosopher's Stone (1995)

Thinking Robots: Bruce Sterling (1992) [via Masanjin & The All-Thing]
" [...] It seems to me there's something direly wrong with the Information Economy. It's not about data, it's about attention. In a few years you may be able to carry the Library of Congress in your hip pocket. So? You're never gonna read the Library of Congress. You'll die long before you access one tenth of one percent of it. What's important -- increasingly important -- is the process by which you figure out what to look at. This is the beginning of the real and true economics of information -- not who owns the books, who prints the books, who has the holdings. The crux today is access, not holdings. And not even access itself but the signposts that tell you what to access -- what to pay attention to. In the Information Economy everything is plentiful -- except attention.
That's why the spin doctor is the creature who increasingly rules the information universe. Spin doctors rule our attention. Never mind that man behind the curtain. No, no! Look at my hand! I can make a candidate disappear. Watch me pull a President out of a hat. Look! I can make these homeless people disappear in a haze of media noise. Nothing up my sleeve. Presto! The facts don't matter if he can successfully direct our attention. Spin doctors are like evil anti-librarians; they're the Dark Side of the Force.
Librarians used to be book-pullers. Book-pullers. I kind of like the humble, workaday sound of that. I like it kind of better than I like the sound of "information retrieval expert," though that's clearly where librarians are headed. Might be the right way to head. That's where the power seems to be. Though I wonder exactly what will be retrieved and what will be allowed to quietly mummify in the deepest darkest deserts of the dustiest hard-disks."

posted by Andrew 1/17/2004 01:46:00 PM

Friday, January 16, 2004

 
seed-teeth

BBC Radio 4: In Our Time - The Alphabet
At the start of the twentieth century, in the depths of an ancient Egyptian turquoise mine on the Sinai peninsular, an archaeologist called Sir Flinders Petrie made an exciting discovery. Scratched onto rocks, pots and portable items, he found scribblings of a very unexpected but strangely familiar nature. He had expected to see the complex pictorial hieroglyphic script the Egyptian establishment had used for over 1000 years, but it seemed that at this very early period, 1700 BC, the mine workers and Semitic slaves had started using a new informal system of graffiti, one which was brilliantly simple, endlessly adaptable and perfectly portable: the Alphabet. This was probably the earliest example of an alphabetic script and it bears an uncanny resemblance to our own.
Did the alphabet really spring into life almost fully formed? How did it manage to conquer three quarters of the globe? And despite its Cyrillic and Arabic variations and the myriad languages it has been used to write, why is there essentially only one alphabet anywhere in the world?

UB Professor Works to Unravel Mysteries of Khipu: Colored, Knotted Strings Used by the Ancient Incas
"Deciphering the mysteries of the khipu, which consists of a primary cord from which hang pendants of cords, depends upon researchers discovering a Rosetta Stone of sorts that would allow them to decode the meaning of the cords and knots."

Chimeras by Gerard de Nerval
Eh quoi! tout est sensible!
Pythagore

Alan Watts - Lecture On Zen [also here]
Once upon a time, there was a Zen student who quoted an old Buddhist poem to his teacher, which says:
The voices of torrents are from one great tongue, the lions of the hills are the pure body of Buddha.
'Isn't that right?' he said to the teacher. 'It is,' said the teacher, 'but it's a pity to say so.'

bemushroomed - european pagan heritage

"A twelfth-century Jewish scholar, Moses Maimonides, described the Kalam - the beliefs of Islamic theologians - with horror. He noted that instead of accepting Aristotle's proof of God, the Muslim scholars turned to the atomists, Aristotle's old rivals, whose doctrine, though out of favor, managed to survive the ravages of time. The atomists, remember, held that matter was composed of individual particles called atoms, and if these particles were able to move about, there had to be a vacuum between them, otherwise the atoms would be bumping into one another, unable to get out of one another's way.
The Muslims seized upon the atomists' ideas; after all, now that zero was around, the void was again a respectable idea. Aristotle hated the void; the atomists required it. The Bible told of the creation from the void, while the Greek doctrine rejected the possibility. The Christians, cowed by the power of Greek philosophy, chose Aristotle over their Bible. The Muslims, on the other hand, made the opposite choice."
Charles Seife - Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea
(Souvenir Press, 2003, page 73)

Alan Watts - The World As Emptiness
"Nirvana is the goal of Buddhism; it's the state of liberation corresponding to what the Hindus call _moksha_. The word means 'blow out,' and it comes from the root 'nir vritti.' Now some people think that what it means is blowing out the flame of desire. I don't believe this. I believe that it means 'breathe out,' rather than 'blow out,' because if you try to hold your breath ..."

hypertext poetry : muse log

"The Definition of a Net: Anything made with interstitial vacuities."
Dr. Samuel Johnson

Lux Lucre's Shavian Page

"It could be that the evolution of the belief in a single god was dependent on an ability to record that belief and make it accessible; and that both recording and accessibility were dependent on the invention of the alphabet. In this view, god was not just the god of Israel; he was the god of the Alphabet. A sceptic may conclude that the Christian and Jewish god was invented because the technology had emerged to define this belief and implant it in its culture. A believer may say that god in his wisdom allowed himself to be revealed through this new mode of communication. Whatever the cause, it seems that both new god and new script worked together to forge a new nation and disseminate an idea that would change the world."
John Man - Alpha Beta: How Our Alphabet Shaped the Western World
(Headline Book Publishing, 2001, page 129)

Andrew Lawler - Writing Gets a Rewrite - Science, vol. 292, no. 5526, June 2001
BAGHDAD -- "The inventor of writing, according to Mesopotamian legend, was a high priest from the great city of Uruk who one day began making marks on wet clay. Five thousand years later, German archaeologists triumphantly discovered the oldest examples of writing -- called cuneiform -- 200 kilometers south of here in a long-buried Uruk temple, providing what seemed to be scientific confirmation of the ancient myth.
But that heroic story is quietly being shelved by scholars as new finds in Egypt and Pakistan over the past decade, and a radical reinterpretation of clay objects found in Mesopotamia's heartland and its periphery -- today's Iraq, Syria, and Iran -- have necessitated a different account. Most researchers now agree that writing is less the invention of a single talented individual than the result of a complex evolutionary process stretching back thousands of years before the first hard evidence of writing surfaced in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus River valley about 3300 B.C. "The prehistoric communication revolution began some 9000 years ago," says Joan Oates, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge, U.K., who spoke at a recent conference here. "In a sense, writing appears as the last step in the long line of evolution of communication systems."
The revised text on writing's history, however, is far from complete. Scholars say they are hampered by a lack of fresh data from Near Eastern sites, the reluctance of museum curators to allow potentially destructive testing of critical artifacts, and the limitations of radiocarbon dating. Moreover, the 1989 discovery in Egypt of an ancient and sophisticated writing system has fueled a new debate: Did Mesopotamia's literacy trigger that of Egypt, as is traditionally supposed, or was it the other way around -- or neither? More recent finds showing that the Indus script likely was evolving around 3300 B.C. -- at about the same time as its Near East counterparts began to coalesce -- have deepened the mystery. Some researchers, pondering the near-simultaneous appearance of seemingly separate protowriting systems in three distinct civilizations, suggest that they may have developed independently in response to similar circumstances."

Cuneiform Inscriptions of the University of Minnesota
How did these inscribed artifacts find their way to the University of Minnesota?
Edgar James Banks is the dealer who sold the University many, if not most, of its cuneiform tablets. He was very active in the first few decades of the twentieth century, and is responsible for most of the small cuneiform collections at universities, seminaries, and museums around the country. Banks led an interesting life, a summary of which can be found in the excellent article, "The Forgotten Indiana Jones," by Dr. Ewa Wasilewska in The World and I Magazine Online.

Alan Watts
"Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth."

Antéros + Weebl and Bob

Composer, writer, artist, mushroom expert and Italian TV quiz-show celebrity, John Cage
Uncaged

posted by Andrew 1/16/2004 03:03:00 PM