synthetic knowledge

2011-06-20T05:11:00.010-09:00

A HARVEY SACKS LEXICON

I have been reading the early lectures of Harvey Sacks and thought I would share my synthesis of his ideas. Sacks, who died in a car accident in 1975, is best known today as being the founder of conversation analysis (CA). Conversation analysis is a method of analysing recording of naturally occurring conversations, that is conversations which are not the product of social science experiments. To its critics, CA is a method that is obsessed with triviality at the expense of considering the wider themes of sociology. I think what Harvey Sack’s early lectures show is how ill judged that criticism is. Anyway, the lectures in book form are prohibitively expensive so I hope that by giving a platform to some of his ideas on the internet that may be able to bring them to a wider audience.

http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/b_resources/sacks_lexicon.html

2010-11-15T09:04:00.000-09:00

And so it came to pass....

2010-09-01T03:58:00.000-09:00

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

2010-06-29T01:29:00.001-09:00

I recall a paper by Roman Jakobson entitles "The Sex of the Heavenly Bodies" which, after analysing the gender of the words for sun and moon in a great variety of languages, came to the refreshing conclusion that no pattern could be detected to support the idea of a universal law determining the masculinity or the femininity of either then sun or the moon. Thank heaven for that!

Teresa De Lauretis, (1987). Technologies of gender: Essays on theory, film, and fiction. Theories of representation and difference. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. p4

2010-06-23T23:10:00.004-09:00

If I had to get 'ink done', it had better be something astonishing on my arm. This would design be a strong contender. Amazing!

2010-06-18T01:24:00.001-09:00

2010-04-12T13:34:00.009-09:00

The myth of digital versus analogue

Digitisation changes media not materially but at the level of the code. For example a digital video camera works in the exactly the same way as an analogue video camera, in that the light rays travel through a lens and strike a charge couple device where they are converted into electricity, it is only then that these electrical signals are digitised (that is to say turned into binary code: whereas analogue video signals are transmitted or stored in electronic for as fluctuations in voltage). Those who wish to emphasise a categorical distinction between digital and analogue media should consider that digital transmission and analogue transmission both use radio waves, and that digital and analogue recordings both user electromagnetism.

Kress and van Leeuwen (2001, 97) and Bolter and Grusin (2000, 105) to name but two sets of the best new media theorists who into this trap, talk about differences between digital and analogue in terms of ontology: there are different kinds of media. For example Kress and van Leeuwen state that the primitives that make up an analogue photograph (silver halides) are different to the primitives that make up a digital photograph (pixels). While at one level and dimension this is true, what is also true is that the material composition of the primitives do not radically alter the nature of the image itself since a photograph is about the image not about the material means of realising that image. (For if it were otherwise digital photographs would have a different quality and the technology would not have been such a good candidate to replace analogue). This confusion derives from a misdirected analytical scrutiny that looks at the material rather than the code, however, a photograph is not meaningful because it is made of silver halides its meaningful because the patterns of light and shade be they created by silver halides of in pixels are interpreted as images.

It is not hard to mistake, for instance a digital image with an analogue image; usually digital images are found on computers whereas analogue images are found on walls in the form of painting or photographic prints. It may be argued that a digital image can assume this form also. But if this is so, then they are no longer digital image (because it exists in print-form on paper not on a computer. Conversely, an analogue photograph may be digitised, in which case it is no longer an analogue image but a digital image that exists on a computer.

The real confusion emanates once media has been encoded and printed out to be distributed or transmitted as mass media. A photograph that has originated digitally when it is seen in a newspaper or on television cannot be distinguished from a photograph that has originated using analogue processes. Because both now have the same materiality in that form (they are in face both analogue photographs). The problem is that whereas before there was some guarantee in the fidelity of the image, to the object it represented (largely for the reason that it was too time consuming or costly to manipulate the image using airbrushing techniques). Now there can be no such guarantees. So people conclude that digital photographs have no indexicality. However, this is not precise enough. Digital images do have indexicality, in that they accurately represent the light rays that were present at the scene at the moment they were taken. They have in fact as much indexicality as analogue images when they leave the camera. The difference lies at the level of the code. For an image once digitalised can be manipulated at the level of the pixel using Photoshop software which produces photorealistic results (and because many of the operations have been automated by the software such manipulations are quick and cheap to do).

But the point I wish to emphasise, is that it is only at the level of the code that such ontological distinction meaningfully apply, since when the code is realised in a material form, all the affordances of digital no longer apply. Therefore what theories that posit an ontological distinction between digital and analogue are doing is reaching back (as it were) through the code to reify those differences in a material form. This is why digital verses analogue is a myth.

References

Bolter, D.J. & Grusin R (2000) Remediation: Understanding New media. London. MIT.

Kress, G & van Leeuwen T. (2001) Multimodal Discourse. London. Arnold

2010-01-09T03:47:00.008-09:00

Collapsing New Buildings

Those who are responsible for publicizing the opening of the world's tallest building, the Burj Dubai (nee Khalifa), seem intent on recreating the iconography of a more terrifying event involving tall buildings.

Example 1., the fireworks at the opening ceremony which to all intents and purposes turned the building into a fireball:

And now there are skydivers jumping off the top of the building (example 2.); recreating another image with uncomfortable connotations.

I am not for moment suggesting this is intentional, but it is unfortunate.

2009-10-08T13:57:00.002-09:00

Peirce: Notes on 'The Fixation of Belief' & 'How to Make Our Ideas Clear.'

Reference
Peirce, C. S. (1931-1935). The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vols. I-VI, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.

Here is a cutdown of two of the greatest papers written by Charles Sanders Peirce, removing a few digressions whilst retaining the essential shape of the argument.

§5. 374. The irritation of doubt causes a struggle to attain a state of belief. I shall term this struggle Inquiry, though it must be admitted that this is sometimes not a very apt designation.

The sole object of inquiry is the settlement of opinion…. as soon as a firm belief is reached we are entirely satisfied, whether the belief be true or false.

§5.375 That the settlement of opinion is the sole end of inquiry is a very important proposition. It sweeps away, at once, various vague and erroneous conceptions of proof.

§5.376 the mere putting of a proposition into the interrogative form does not stimulate the mind to any struggle after belief. There must be a real and living doubt, and without this all discussion is idle.

§5.379 the problem becomes how to fix belief, not in the individual merely, but in the community.

There are three methods:

1. The method of authority
§5.379 This method has, from the earliest times, been one of the chief means of upholding correct theological and political doctrines, and of preserving their universal or catholic character….wherever there is a priesthood -- and no religion has been without one -- this method has been more or less made use of…. Wherever there is an aristocracy, or a guild, or any association of a class of men whose interests depend, or are supposed to depend, on certain propositions, there will be inevitably found some traces of this natural product of social feeling. Cruelties always accompany this system; and when it is consistently carried out, they become atrocities of the most horrible kind in the eyes of any rational man….§5.380 It has over and over again worked the most majestic results. The mere structures of stone which it has caused to be put together -- in Siam, for example, in Egypt, and in Europe -- have many of them a sublimity hardly more than rivaled by the greatest works of Nature. And, except the geological epochs, there are no periods of time so vast as those which are measured by some of these organized faiths

2. The a priori method
§5.383 This method is far more intellectual and respectable from the point of view of reason … It makes of inquiry something similar to the development of taste; but taste, unfortunately, is always more or less a matter of fashion, and accordingly metaphysicians have never come to any fixed agreement, but the pendulum has swung backward and forward between a more material and a more spiritual philosophy, from the earliest times to the latest….not usually rested upon any observed facts… fundamental propositions seemed "agreeable to reason."

3. The scientific method
§5.384. To satisfy our doubts, therefore, it is necessary that a method should be found by which our beliefs may be determined by nothing human, but by some external permanency -- by something upon which our thinking has no effect. It must be something which affects, or might affect, every man. And, though these affections are necessarily as various as are individual conditions, yet the method must be such that the ultimate conclusion of every man shall be the same.

Such is the method of science. Its fundamental hypothesis, restated in more familiar language, is this: There are Real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them; those Reals affect our senses according to regular laws, and, though our sensations are as different as are our relations to the objects, yet, by taking advantage of the laws of perception, we can ascertain by reasoning how things really and †3 truly †4 are; and any man, if he have sufficient experience and he reasons enough about it, will be led to the one True conclusion.

Q It may be asked how I know that there are any Reals.

A If investigation cannot be regarded as proving that there are Real things, it at least does not lead to a contrary conclusion; but the method and the conception on which it is based remain ever in harmony.

§5.365
I may start with known and observed facts to proceed to the unknown; and yet the rules which I follow in doing so may not be such as investigation would approve. The test of whether I am truly following the method is not an immediate appeal to my feelings and purposes, but, on the contrary, itself involves the application of the method. Hence it is that bad reasoning as well as good reasoning is possible; and this fact is the foundation of the practical side of logic.

§5. 394. The principles set forth in the first part of this essay lead, at once, to a method of reaching a clearness of thought of higher grade than the "distinctness" of the logicians. It was there noticed that the action of thought is excited by the irritation of doubt, and ceases when belief is attained; so that the production of belief is the sole function of thought

Images pass rapidly through consciousness, one incessantly melting into another, until at last, when all is over -- it may be in a fraction of a second, in an hour, or after long years -- we find ourselves decided as to how we should act under such circumstances as those which occasioned our hesitation. In other words, we have attained belief.

§5.395. In this process we observe two sorts of elements of consciousness, the distinction between which may best be made clear by means of an illustration. In a piece of music there are the separate notes, and there is the air. A single tone may be prolonged for an hour or a day, and it exists as perfectly in each second of that time as in the whole taken together; so that, as long as it is sounding, it might be present to a sense from which everything in the past was as completely absent as the future itself. But it is different with the air, the performance of which occupies a certain time, during the portions of which only portions of it are played. It consists in an orderliness in the succession of sounds which strike the ear at different times; and to perceive it there must be some continuity of consciousness which makes the events of a lapse of time present to us. We certainly only perceive the air by hearing the separate notes; yet we cannot be said to directly hear it, for we hear only what is present at the instant, and an orderliness of succession cannot exist in an instant. These two sorts of objects, what we are immediately conscious of and what we are mediately conscious of, are found in all consciousness. Some elements (the sensations) are completely present at every instant so long as they last, while others (like thought) are actions having beginning, middle, and end, and consist in a congruence in the succession of sensations which flow through the mind. They cannot be immediately present to us, but must cover some portion of the past or future. Thought is a thread of melody running through the succession of our sensations.

§5. 396. We may add that just as a piece of music may be written in parts, each part having its own air, so various systems of relationship of succession subsist together between the same sensations. These different systems are distinguished by having different motives, ideas, or functions. Thought is only one such system, for its sole motive, idea, and function is to produce belief, and whatever does not concern that purpose belongs to some other system of relations…. the soul and meaning of thought, abstracted from the other elements which accompany it, though it may be voluntarily thwarted, can never be made to direct itself toward anything but the production of belief. Thought in action has for its only possible motive the attainment of thought at rest; and whatever does not refer to belief is no part of the thought itself.

§5. 397. And what, then, is belief? It is the demi-cadence which closes a musical phrase in the symphony of our intellectual life. We have seen that it has just three properties: First, it is something that we are aware of; second, it appeases the irritation of doubt; and, third, it involves the establishment in our nature of a rule of action, or, say for short, a habit…. belief is a rule for action, the application of which involves further doubt and further thought, at the same time that it is a stopping-place, it is also a new starting-place for thought. The final upshot of thinking is the exercise of volition, and of this thought no longer forms a part; but belief is only a stadium of mental action, an effect upon our nature due to thought, which will influence future thinking.

§5. 398. The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit; and different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give rise. If beliefs do not differ in this respect, if they appease the same doubt by producing the same rule of action, then no mere differences in the manner of consciousness of them can make them different beliefs, any more than playing a tune in different keys is playing different tunes. Imaginary distinctions are often drawn between beliefs which differ only in their mode of expression; -- the wrangling which ensues is real enough, however. To believe that any objects are arranged among themselves and to believe that they are arranged, are one and the same belief; yet it is conceivable that a man should assert one proposition and deny the other. Such false distinctions do as much harm as the confusion of beliefs really different, and are among the pitfalls of which we ought constantly to beware, especially when we are upon metaphysical ground.

§5.399 thought is an action, and that it consists in a relation, although a person performs an action but not a relation, which can only be the result of an action, yet there was no inconsistency in what I said.

§5.400 the whole function of thought is to produce habits of action… whatever there is connected with a thought, but irrelevant to its purpose, is an accretion to it, but no part of it.

If there be a unity among our sensations which has no reference to how we shall act on a given occasion, as when we listen to a piece of music, why we do not call that thinking. To develop its meaning, we have, therefore, simply to determine what habits it produces, for what a thing means is simply what habits it involves.

Now, the identity of a habit depends on how it might lead us to act, not merely under such circumstances as are likely to arise, but under such as might possibly occur, no matter how improbable they may be. What the habit is depends on when and how it causes us to act.

What the habit is depends on when and how it causes us to act.
As for the when, every stimulus to action is derived from perception; as for the how, every purpose of action is to produce some sensible result. Thus, we come down to what is tangible and conceivably practical, as the root of every real distinction of thought, no matter how subtile it may be; and there is no distinction of meaning so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice.

§5.401 how impossible it is that we should have an idea in our minds which relates to anything but conceived sensible effects of things. Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects; and if we fancy that we have any other we deceive ourselves, and mistake a mere sensation accompanying the thought for a part of the thought itself.

It is absurd to say that thought has any meaning unrelated to its only function

§5.402 The rule for attaining the third grade of clearness of apprehension is as follows: Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.

§5. 403. Let us illustrate this rule by some examples; and, to begin with the simplest one possible, let us ask what we mean by calling a thing hard. Evidently that it will not be scratched by many other substances. The whole conception of this quality, as of every other, lies in its conceived effects. There is absolutely no difference between a hard thing and a soft thing so long as they are not brought to the test.

[We may] ask what prevents us from saying that all hard bodies remain perfectly soft until they are touched, when their hardness increases with the pressure until they are scratched. Reflection will show that the reply is this: there would be no falsity in such modes of speech. They would involve a modification of our present usage of speech with regard to the words hard and soft, but not of their meanings. For they represent no fact to be different from what it is; only they involve arrangements of facts which would be exceedingly maladroit.

[This] is not a question of fact, but only of the most perspicuous arrangement of them.

For example, the question of free-will and fate in its simplest form, stripped of verbiage, is something like this: I have done something of which I am ashamed; could I, by an effort of the will, have resisted the temptation, and done otherwise?

The philosophical reply is, that this is not a question of fact, but only of the arrangement of facts. Arranging them so as to exhibit what is particularly pertinent to my question -- namely, that I ought to blame myself for having done wrong -- it is perfectly true to say that, if I had willed to do otherwise than I did, I should have done otherwise. On the other hand, arranging the facts so as to exhibit another important consideration, it is equally true that, when a temptation has once been allowed to work, it will, if it has a certain force, produce its effect, let me struggle how I may.

Many questions are involved in the free-will discussion, and I am far from desiring to say that both sides are equally right. On the contrary, I am of opinion that one side denies important facts, and that the other does not. But what I do say is, that the above single question was the origin of the whole doubt; that, had it not been for this question, the controversy would never have arisen; and that this question is perfectly solved in the manner which I have indicated.

There is no objection to a contradiction in what would result from a false supposition. The reductio ad absurdum consists in showing that contradictory results would follow from a hypothesis which is consequently judged to be false.

§5.404 the idea of Force in general.
This is the great conception which, developed in the early part of the seventeenth century from the rude idea of a cause, and constantly improved upon since, has shown us how to explain all the changes of motion which bodies experience, and how to think about all physical phenomena; which has given birth to modern science, and changed the face of the globe; and which, aside from its more special uses, has played a principal part in directing the course of modern thought, and in furthering modern social development.

§5.404 The idea which the word force excites in our minds has no other function than to affect our actions, and these actions can have no reference to force otherwise than through its effects. Consequently, if we know what the effects of force are, we are acquainted with every fact which is implied in saying that a force exists, and there is nothing more to know.

§5. 405. Let us now approach the subject of logic, and consider a conception which particularly concerns it, that of reality.

A definition may perhaps be reached by considering the points of difference between reality and its opposite, fiction.

A figment is a product of somebody's imagination; it has such characters as his thought impresses upon it. That those characters are independent of how you or I think is an external reality. There are, however, phenomena within our own minds, dependent upon our thought, which are at the same time real in the sense that we really think them. But though their characters depend on how we think, they do not depend on what we think those characters to be. Thus, a dream has a real existence as a mental phenomenon, if somebody has really dreamt it; that he dreamt so and so, does not depend on what anybody thinks was dreamt, but is completely independent of all opinion on the subject. On the other hand, considering, not the fact of dreaming, but the thing dreamt, it retains its peculiarities by virtue of no other fact than that it was dreamt to possess them.

Thus we may define the real as that whose characters are independent of what anybody may think them to be.

§5.406 it would be a great mistake to suppose that it makes the idea of reality perfectly clear... reality, like every other quality, consists in the peculiar sensible effects which things partaking of it produce. The only effect which real things have is to cause belief, for all the sensations which they excite emerge into consciousness in the form of beliefs. The question therefore is, how is true belief (or belief in the real) distinguished from false belief (or belief in fiction).

The ideas of truth and falsehood, in their full development, appertain exclusively to the experiential method of settling opinion.

§5.407 all the followers of science are animated by a cheerful hope that the processes of investigation, if only pushed far enough, will give one certain solution to each question to which they apply it

Different methods… may at first obtain different results, but, as each perfects his method and his processes, the results are found to move †4 steadily together toward a destined centre. So with all scientific research. Different minds may set out with the most antagonistic views, but the progress of investigation carries them by a force outside of themselves to one and the same conclusion.

This activity of thought by which we are carried, not where we wish, but to a foreordained goal, is like the operation of destiny. No modification of the point of view taken, no selection of other facts for study, no natural bent of mind even, can enable a man to escape the predestinate opinion.

This great hope is embodied in the conception of truth and reality. The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality.

§5.408 But it may be said that this view is directly opposed to the abstract definition which we have given of reality, inasmuch as it makes the characters of the real depend on what is ultimately thought about them.

But the answer to this is that, on the one hand, reality is independent, not necessarily of thought in general, but only of what you or I or any finite number of men may think about it; and that, on the other hand, though the object of the final opinion depends on what that opinion is, yet what that opinion is does not depend on what you or I or any man thinks.

Our perversity and that of others may indefinitely postpone the settlement of opinion; it might even conceivably cause an arbitrary proposition to be universally accepted as long as the human race should last. Yet even that would not change the nature of the belief, which alone could be the result of investigation carried sufficiently far; and if, after the extinction of our race, another should arise with faculties and disposition for investigation, that true opinion must be the one to which they would ultimately come.

The opinion which would finally result from investigation does not depend on how anybody may actually think. But the reality of that which is real does depend on the real fact that investigation is destined to lead, at last, if continued long enough, to a belief in it.

§5.409 Do these things not really exist because they are hopelessly beyond the reach of our knowledge? To this I reply that, though in no possible state of knowledge can any number be great enough to express the relation between the amount of what rests unknown to the amount of the known, yet it is unphilosophical to suppose that, with regard to any given question (which has any clear meaning), investigation would not bring forth a solution of it, if it were carried far enough.

5410 It is certainly important to know how to make our ideas clear, but they may be ever so clear without being true.

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2009-07-07T03:52:00.012-09:00

Why?

Type that question into Google and this is what you get…

Here are my attempts at answering these questions.

1. Why is the sky blue?

The sky is blue because molecules in the air scatter blue light from the sun more than they scatter red light (This is known as Rayleigh’s effect).

2. Why do men have nipples?

Men have nipples because all humans begin life in the womb as females. In foetuses in possession of a Y chromosome (men in other words) testosterone kicks in at around 8 weeks and the foetus is remodeled with its male attributes, but this remodeling does not eliminate entirely its innate female sex characteristics. That is why men have nipples but not breasts (have they not heard of moobs??)

3. Why do cats purr?

Purring is a reflex that does not just occur when the cat is happy and relaxed, cats have reportedly purred in labour, when they are frightened, ill and even when they are near death. The psychology of why they do this is not completely understood, but common explanations mention a desire to communicate and as a way of reassuring themselves.

4. Why did the chicken cross the road?

To get to the other side of course, but go here for a more amusing (if dated) set of theories.

5. Why do we yawn?

The best guess from science are that when we are tired, we breathe less vigorously and low oxygen levels in the lungs trigger yawning as a reflex to bring more oxygen into the body. Yawning and stretching also increase blood pressure and heart rate, as does flexing muscles and joints.

6. Why so serious?

Because we all love the Joker's catch phrase from the Dark Knight, and because Heath Ledger who played him is dead (no laughing matter).

7. Why do people smoke?

Physiological reason – nicotine is an addictive substance.

Sociological reason – because they think it’s cool. Is this due to the power of advertising and marketing? Well maybe, although most countries have banned cigarette advertising and people still smoke. Peer pressure and growing up with parents who are smokers are other factors.

Psychological reason – because young people think they are immortal and therefore do not consider the health risks (most smokers get into the habit before they are 18). Also there is a sense of being in control (the same phenomenon that leads more people to be scared of flying than driving, despite road deaths outnumbering aeroplane deaths worldwide by some 2000 to 1).

8. Why recycle?

Recycling is claimed to be better for the environment because it reduces waste and saves energy--since packaging does not have to be manufactured each time from scratch. It also helps to raise awareness about the environment in general at an everyday level.

9. Why did Chris Brown beat up Rianna?

Well, according to the deeply penetrating analysis of topsocialite.com it was because “Chris has been cheating on Rihanna, [and his lover?] called while they were in the car. Apparently Rihanna figured it out got upset hit him while he was driving and he flipped and beat her up.” I guess Chris is just a bad person, or maybe a good person in a bad place, (either way just remember that violence is never the answer kids!).

10. Why not Edinburgh?

Edinburgh is a lovely place to visit, but I can think of several reasons why someone would not want to go there: because they want a sun-kissed Caribbean holiday, because they hate local resident JK Rowling and everything associated with Harry Potter, because Castles do nothing for them…. Oh, wait a minute, ‘Why Not?’ turns out to be the name of a nightclub franchise that operates out of Edinburgh. Now somehow that's not half as interesting…

2009-07-06T23:14:00.001-09:00

What if Michel Gondry discoverd YouTube? The result is here (and it's cute)

2009-07-02T00:14:00.016-09:00

RIP Pina Bausch

Amongst all the celebrity deaths of late, this one stands out. During my adolescence, the choreographer and dancer Pina Bausch occupied for me the place of worship that Michael Jackson occupies for may others (judging by the amount of grief generated by his demise). Her style of choreography was totally captivating to my friends and I, and we even attempted to stage pale imitations to her work in my hometown of Swindon and at the Edinburgh festival. When I moved to London in the mid 1980s, Bausch had assumed the status of a near deity and seemed to be an influence on many of the other avant garde performers that I saw at the ICA, such as Jan Fabre, Bow Gamalan and La Fura dels Baus.

Here are some quotes from articles as well as links to YouTube clips that testify to her extraordinary genius:

She was known for her extravagant staging - in Nelken (1982), 21 dancers, four professional stunt men and four Alsatian dogs performed on a stage covered with thousands of pink carnations, while in Palermo (1989) dancers picked their way through dust and debris.

Each piece had its own character dictated by its setting – the carnations covering the stage in Nelken, the wall that falls as rubble in Palermo,the peat-covered floor of her Rite of Spring. (source BBC)

In 1998 Bausch revived Kontakthof a show she had made 20 years previously which explored the impossibilities of love in the setting of a dance hall. Then her dancers were young; when she revived the work she cast it with non-dancers, aged 65 or over. As the elderly performers enacted the hopeful rituals of courtship, they were at once laughably frail and endlessly touching (source telegraph online).

2009-06-30T07:06:00.014-09:00

If Songsmith is a crime against humanity, humans are fighting back!

Microsoft Inc. cements its reputation as the antidote to cool with 'Songsmith.' According to the Microsoft site, Songsmith generates a musical accompaniment to match a singer's voice.’ But what the Microsoft technicians have in fact created is a time-warp back to the 80s and the days of the Casio VL-Tone. If you don't believe me, check out this cringe-o-rama commercial on YouTube . Still, just as an arrow once fired takes on an intentionality of its own, a piece of technology once the public domain can be subverted to fulfilling functions its creators had not envisaged....

Hence the emergence a meme that combines famous vocal performance from pop classics to a 'swinging' songsmith beat (which spookily always appears to be a variation on the bossanova). As Techcrunch opined, this creates ‘a twisted breed of classic hits that are fascinating in the same way that terrible automobile accidents are.’

Check out these example of 'songsmith mashups' before the inevitable ‘copyright violation’ notices are posted:

"Roxanne" (The Police)

"We will rock you" (Queen)

"Should I Stay or Should I Go?" (The Clash)

"Somebody Told Me" (The Killers)

and best of all...

"Hurt" (Johnny Cash) "the needle tears a hole..." (salsa baby!)

2009-04-08T00:49:00.009-09:00

Smith Recall Has anyone noticed the striking similarity between the former Home Secretary, Jackie Smith, and that woman in Total Recall (who is actually a robot disguise used by Arnold Schwarzenegger's character to travel to Mars)? Every time I see Jackie Smith on television I keep expecting her head to hinge open to reveal Arnie, and then explode.

2009-03-15T03:45:00.009-09:00

Peirce – firstness, secondness, thirdness

All of Pierce’s philosophical thought emerges out of his categories. At a trivial level anyone who has undertaken even a cursory study of Peirce is immediately struck by his seeming obsession with the number three. This is explained simply because his categories are three in number. Peirce defines categories as a “table of conceptions drawn from the logical analysis of thought and regarded as applicable to being” (CP 1.300). In other words, if you want to understand life the universe and everything, you need to understand first how thought functions; whether in relation to perceptions about the world outside or to the ideas inside your head. Peirce asserts that all thought can be broken down into three component parts, which he calls firstness secondness and thirdness.

Each of the categories governs a particular domain of thought. 'Firstness' governs qualities, 'secondness,' forces and 'thirdness,' mediation. Firstness is a quality, Peirce says firstness does not refer to anything nor does it lie behind anything else. The first is that which whose being is simply in itself (1. 356). It is the sensation of having only one thing occupying your thoughts and permeating your consciousness; you are so mesmerized that you are not even aware of anything else. For example if you stare at the colour red, so that your mind becomes so infused with the redness of that red: you are not actually aware that you are experiencing anything else (This is not actually firstness but it gives you a metaphorical sense or what it is). Another example of firstness is experiencing the absolute present directly (if that were ever possible!). It is a kind of unmediated meditative state without unity and without parts, it just "is."

Now imagine being in this rapturous state of firstness and suddenly walking slap-bang into a lamppost. The shock of that experience, as you actually experience it, is secondness. Secondness is existential: a physical force, a shock that strikes you. Secondness is what makes a baby first realize (no doubt after it has hurt itself) that it is not the whole universe, but is part of a universe that has its own agenda, and one that is not necessarily conducive to the safety and comfort of the baby.

Now for thirdness, imagine seeing someone else walking down the street and smacking slap bang into a lamppost. We might say, 'Oh that must have hurt!' In other words, we would be putting ourselves in the place of that person and imagining their pain. Thirdness is the mediating category, it speaks of events happening of things acting upon us of things that happen in the past or (speculatively) in the future. Thirdness deals in representations not in things. When we think about something we are in the realm of representation and therefore also in thirdness. All culture to the extent that it is something communicated is thirdness. All norms, language, all expression, everything we consciously think is thirdness. This includes the experiencing of our lives. There cannot be any hard an fast ontological distinction between a physical, virtual or mental happening in the retrospective terms of memory.

More information on the Peircean categories can be found here.

Peircean categories and virtual reality

Virtual reality emphasizes the experiential, rather than the communicative, or informational aspects of media. The notion of telepresence contends that information is not just transmitted from senders to receivers; but rather that mediated environments are created and then experienced by users. Consequently, the experiences of the individual user becomes the 'unit' of analysis for virtual reality researchers (e.g. Steuer 1992). But two questions arise – first, how is one to distinguish between virtual reality and real reality? And second, if presence is to be the agreed measure, how is one to measure presence itself? These are areas where the semeiotic of Charles Peirce can make a positive contribution.

To answer question one, Peirce asks by what evidence can we immediately know what is "present" to the mind? His answer is that reality and existence are actually two different things. Existence is a special mode of reality, which, whatever other characteristics it possesses, has that of being absolutely determinate. Reality, on the other hand is a special mode of being, the characteristic of which is that things that are real independently of any assertion we can make about them (CP 7.349). Applying Peirce's rules to virtual reality, one can say firstly that direct experience is neither certain nor uncertain, because it affirms and denies nothing (CP 1.145). As Deledalle remarks, reality is not making signs to us, it is we who provide the interpretants which become signs (Deledalle 2000, 21) Everything that is thought or experienced has a reality of a kind and this includes real life, dreams or virtual reality. Therefore if we want to distinguish virtual reality from real reality, we must become aware of the particular resistances each version of reality offers - for these resistances are what shows us that something independent of us is there (CP 1.431). And moreover their relative strengths and weaknesses can determine to what degree an environment can be said to be existent.

As to the second question, Peirce avoids dualistic or subjective interpretations of Being. There is no duality between Being and existence because epistemology and ontology are in fact the same thing (Deledalle 2000, 70). The conception of Being is nothing more than a conception about a sign. Different predicates may be attached to a subject, and the job of each is to make some conception applicable to the subject. Therefore we are able to imagine that a subject has something true of it, merely due to the fact that a predicate can be attached to it - and that is what we call Being (CP 5.294).

So presence is definable in terms of signs and by its qualities, resistances and the laws which govern them, or to put this another way, by the Peircean categories of firstness, secondness and thirdness.

References

Deledalle, Gérard (2000) Charles S. Peirce's Philosophy of Signs - Essays in Comparative Semiotics, Bloomington USA: Indiana University Press.

Peirce, Charles Sanders (1931-1935), The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vols. I-VI, Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (editors), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Peirce, Charles Sanders (1958), The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vols. VII - VIII, Ed. AW Burks (editor), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Steuer, J. (1992) "Defining Virtual Reality: Dimensions Determining Telepresence" in Journal of Communication, 42(4), 73-93, PDF document, URL http://www.presence-research.org/papers/steuer92defining.pdf.

2009-02-25T13:50:00.005-09:00

Know me virtually

flickr
facebook
twitter
last.fm
Second Life
youtube

2009-02-14T04:17:00.002-09:00

Very much in the style of a technological johnny come lately, I have just joined twitter. You can follow my tweets here.

2009-02-14T03:01:00.009-09:00

MIX TAPES
There was a fascinating radio documentary broadcast a few months ago on radio four about mix tapes. Journalist David Quantick (fantastic name) reminisced about what has become a lost art. This is where people, usually young, usually male, would sit in their bedrooms all evening with a record player and cassette recorder, making up compilation tapes of their favourite music. The art involved was trying to avoid horribly audible edits between tracks, and timing the thing just right so that the last track ended just as the tape leader spooled into view (this involved a lot of close scrutiny of the tiny cassette window). Tracks of little or no running time were a boon in this regard - "Propaganda" by Sparks and pretty much anything by the Smiths at particular times in their career came in particularly handy. These tapes would be for one's own use or would be given to friends and lovers. They served as an answer to the perennial question of my youth, "So what music do you like then?" and also as a way of sharing a little piece of one's soul with a potentially kindred spirit. Of course there is a gendered aspect to this activity also: girls if you were to receive a mix tape from your man, you have to understand that this is probably the most pure form of romance, certainly a more sincere gesture than them buying you a red rose! Now don't get me wrong, the i-pod is a marvelous thing, and I especially love the way that it instantly makes compilations of your music. When I first got an i-pod, I was struck by the serendipitous way it would reorder my music, juxtaposing tracks in such a way that they unlocked all that was fresh and exciting. However, there is something equally magical about mix tapes. Especially on those admittedly rare occasions when you were the recipient of one and it turns out to contain bands that you grow to love. I do miss them.

2009-01-05T00:11:00.008-09:00

Charles Sanders Peirce is one of my favourite philosophers, but one whose writings are difficult to get into. This is partly because the corpus of his thought consists of unpublished notes and partly because of his tendency to fly off on tangents when he is outlining an argument. I often find it useful to examine suggestive fragments of his thought as points of departure. To this end, I present here a few of my favourite quotations, in the hope that they might spark a similar curiosity. (The citations are from the Harvard editions of his complete works)

It is certainly important to know how to make our ideas clear, but they may be ever so clear without being true 5.410

All this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs. 4.539

That truth and justice are great powers in the world is no figure of speech, but a plain fact to which theories must accommodate themselves. 1.348

That which gives actuality is opposition. We can only know facts by their acting upon us, and resisting our brute will. 1.432

All human affairs rest upon probabilities, and the same thing is true everywhere. If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery. He would break down, at last, as every great fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does. In place of this we have death. 2.653

The idea that we can immediately perceive only what is present seems to be founded on our ordinary experience that we cannot recall and reexamine the events of yesterday nor know otherwise than by inference what is to happen tomorrow. Obviously, then, the first move toward beating idealism at its own game is to remark that we apprehend our own ideas only as flowing in time, and since neither the future nor the past, however near they may be, is present, there is as much difficulty in conceiving our perception of what passes within us as in conceiving external perception. An immediate, intuitive consciousness of time clearly exists wherever time exists. But once one grants immediate knowledge in time what becomes of the idealist theory that we immediately know only the present? For the present can contain no time. 1.38

Good morals and good manners are identical, except that tradition attaches less importance to the latter. 1.50.

The effect of mixing speculative inquiry with questions of conduct results finally in a sort of half make-believe reasoning which deceives itself in regard to its real character... Men tell themselves they regulate their conduct by reason; but they learn to look forward and see what conclusions a given method will lead to before they give their adhesion to it. In short, it is no longer the reasoning which determines what the conclusion shall be, but it is the conclusion which determines what the reasoning shall be. 1.56.

Conscience really belongs to the subconscious man, to that part of the soul which is hardly distinct in different individuals, a sort of community-consciousness, or public spirit, not absolutely one and the same in different citizens, and yet not by any means independent in them. Conscience has been created by experience just as any knowledge is; but it is modified by further experience only with secular slowness. 1.56

True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied without the aid of scientific men. To employ these rare minds on such work is like running a steam engine by burning diamonds. 1.76.

The evolutionary theory in general throws great light upon history and especially upon the history of science -- both its public history and the account of its development in an individual intellect. As great a light is thrown upon the theory of evolution in general by the evolution of history, especially that of science. 1.103 .

It is to be noted that existence is an affair of blind force. "The very hyssop that grows on the wall exists in that chink because the whole universe could not prevent it." 1.329.

Though "desire" implies a tendency to volition, and though it is a natural hypothesis that a man cannot will to do that which he has no sort of desire to do, yet we all know conflicting desires but too well, and how treacherous they are apt to be; and a desire may perfectly well be discontented with volition, i.e., with what the man will do. The consciousness of that truth seems to me to be the root of our consciousness of free will. "Involuntary attention" involves in correct English a contradiction in adjecto. 1.331

Some writers insist that all experience consists in sense-perception; and I think it is probably true that every element of experience is in the first instance applied to an external object. A man who gets up out of the wrong side of the bed, for example, attributes wrongness to almost every object he perceives. That is the way in which he experiences his bad temper. It cannot, however, be said that he perceives the perversity which he wrongly attributes to outward objects. 1. 335.

To be angry with sceptics, who, whether they are aware of it or not, are the best friends of spiritual truth, is a manifest sign that the angry person is himself infected with scepticism. 1.344

All thinking is dialogic in form. Your self of one instant appeals to your deeper self for his assent. Consequently, all thinking is conducted in signs that are mainly of the same general structure as words (symbols) these consist of conventional signs that bare no relation to thier object except by association of habit. 6.338.

Signs, are the only things with which a human being can, without derogation, consent to have any transaction with. The human being is in fact a sign himself. 6.344 .

Existence is a special mode of reality, which, whatever other characteristics it possesses, has that of being absolutely determinate. Reality, in its turn, is a special mode of being, the characteristic of which is that things that are real are whatever they really are, independently of any assertion about them. 6.348

If Man is the measure of things, as Protagoras said, then there is no complete reality; but being there certainly is, even then. 6.348

At first sight it seems no doubt a paradoxical statement that, "The object of final belief which exists only in consequence of the belief, should itself produce the belief"; but there have been a great many instances in which we have adopted a conception of existence similar to this. 7. 340

If it be asked us, whether some realities do not exist, which are entirely independent of thought; I would in turn ask, what is meant by such an expression and what can be meant by it? It is clear that it is quite beyond the power of the mind to have an idea of something entirely independent of thought. 7.345

Metaphysics is a subject much more curious than useful, the knowledge of which, like that of a sunken reef, serves chiefly to enable us to keep clear of it. 5.410

Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object. 5.2

The essence of truth lies in its resistance to being ignored. 2.139

The first questions which men ask about the universe are naturally the most general and abstract ones. Nor is it true, as has so often been asserted, that these are the most difficult questions to answer. 1.152

[There is a] common aversion to recognizing thought as an active factor in the real world. 1.348.

Those problems that at first blush appear utterly insoluble receive, in that very circumstance.. their smoothly-fitting keys. 6.460

Higher weapons in the arsenal of thought are not playthings but edge-tools. 6.461

With your eyes open, awake to what is about or within you, and open conversation with yourself; for such is all meditation. It is, however, not a conversation in words alone, but is illustrated, like a lecture, with diagrams and with experiments. 6.461

[I]t is almost always found that when a new idea is born into the living world of thought, it labors under all sorts of inconsequential and inconvenient adjuncts. A new machine, for example, is at first needlessly complicated, and has to be simplified later. 4.661

Pragmaticism is not a system of philosophy. It is only a method of thinking 8.206

Every unidealistic philosophy supposes some absolutely inexplicable, unanalyzable ultimate; in short, something resulting from mediation itself not susceptible of mediation. Now that anything is thus inexplicable can only be known by reasoning from signs. But the only justification of an inference from signs is that the conclusion explains the fact. To suppose the fact absolutely inexplicable, is not to explain it, and hence this supposition is never allowable.

5.265

2008-12-02T01:02:00.022-09:00

Some notes on recursion, complexity & emergence

Recursion

Recursive patters are structures that structure themselves. Examples of recursion are the ‘bases’ in mathematics, where integers (numbers) are organised into complex patterns based on some properties of the numbers themselves.

For example, each large set of numbers in base ten contains nested subsets of all the other base ten numbers – these are vastly complex patterns generated by just 10 numbers.

1
10
100
1000
10000
100000
1000000
10000000
100000000

In recursive systems. Repeating a patterns like this creates a syntax (a grammar) which organises further iterations (repeats) of that pattern.

Fibonacci
So far we have dealt with purely abstract numbers patterns. In the twelfth century, an Italian mathematician called Leonardo of Pisa (now better known as Fibonacci) came up with a famous example of recursion, which seemed to describe natural patterns. This sequence is known today as the Fibonacci sequence. It starts like this:

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34

To make a Fibonacci sequence all you do is add to the sum of the two previous numbers together to get the next number in the sequence. So for example if you start with 0 & 1 then the next number would be 1, (0+1), and the next number would be 2, (1 + 1), then 3, (2 + 1), then 5, (3+ 2), then 8, (5 + 3) and so on……

Graphically represented, the Fibonacci numbers can be arranged as squares which results in a pattern like this.

Fibonacci numbers form a spiral pattern which occurs everywhere in nature:

They are in the branching structure of trees…

the fronds of ferns…

in the shells of crustaceans…

and in the structure of the human hand

Beyond noting their ubiquity, I am not making any claims for these spiral patters as some kind of key to existence. Fibonacci numbers only describes, they does not explain. Those who have searched through them for the answers to life, the universe and everything (and many have) discover rather that these numbers do not reveal truth, all they reveal is more iterations of the same structure - behind the patterns there are only more patterns, stretching into infinity.

Complexity

The notion that behind a structure you get more structure is known as complexity. And this is also in essence the message of another concept called self similarity. Self similarity was examined in a famous 1967 paper by Benoît Mandelbrot “How Long Is the Coast of Britain? What Mandelbrot showed in that paper was that a measured length of a coastline behaves in a similar way over a range of measurement scales. He called this behaviour fractal.

Fractals are curves that are irregular all over. Moreover, they have exactly the same degree of irregularity at all scales of measurement. So it doesn't matter whether you look at a fractal from far away or up close with a microscope-in either case you'll see exactly the same picture. If you start looking from a distance (i.e., with a "long" ruler), then as you get closer and closer '(with shorter rulers) small pieces of the curve that looked like formless blobs earlier turn into recognizable objects, the shapes of which are the same as that of the overall object itself (Casti 1994, 232).

James Gleick in the book Chaos writes;

Although Mandelbrot made the most comprehensive geometric use of it… [s]caling also became part of a movement in physics that led, more directly than Mandelbrot's own work, to the discipline known as chaos. Even in distant fields, scientists were beginning to think in terms of theories that used hierarchies of scales, as in evolutionary biology, where it became clear that a full theory would have to recognize patterns of development in genes, in individual organisms, in species, and in families of species, all at once (Gleick 1988 , 115-116)

The principle of self similarity means that repeating patterns result in similar configurations nested over different scales

Here is the pattern the retreated tidal water makes in the sand...

Which is repeated in the configuration of a river delta...

Extraordinary complex phenomena can be broken down and modelled based on this concept:

The mathematician and brilliant computer scientist Alan Turing's last published papers, before his death in 1954, had studied the riddle of "morphogenesis"-the capacity of all life-forms to develop ever more baroque bodies out of impossibly simple beginnings. Turing's paper had focused on the recurring numerical patterns of flowers, but it demonstrated using mathematical tools how a complex organism could assemble itself without any master planner calling the shots (Johnson 2001, 14).

Turing's paper on morphogenesis found its application in Lindenmayer systems. These are sets of rules which can be used to generate self similar fractals that model the morphology of a variety of organisms.

The principles of fractal geometry are used in virtual reality modelling. The self similarity of fractals create extraordinarily life-like computer generated images....

These examples illustrate how recursion can generate extremely complex patterns by repeating simple configurations nested inside one another. The outer systems repeats the patterns are found in the inner systems, but those patterns act as structuring elements across the whole system.

Descartes’ legacy
in the 17th Century, the truth of Rene Descartes’ theory of being (ontology) was seemingly confirmed by the usefulness of his analytical geometry. Descartes argued that the true being of substance was contained in the simple fact that it could be extended in space along x, y and z axes. Today it can be argued that the truth of recursion, as a theory of being, is demonstrated in fractal geometry that creates stunningly simulations of the real world. (The fact that these are incompatible truths says more about the contingent and context bound nature of truth than it does about the weakness or either theory. The point being that a theory is true so long as it helps advance human understanding - as Descartes analytical geometry undoubtedly did in the fields of mathematics.)

Emergence

In August of 2000, a Japanese scientist named Toshiyuki Nakagaki announced that he had trained an amoebalike organism called slime mold to find the shortest route through a maze. Nakagaki had placed the mold in a small maze comprising four possible routes and planted pieces of food at two of the exits. Despite its being an incredibly primitive organism (a close relative of ordinary fungi) with no centralized brain whatsoever, the slime mold managed to plot the most efficient route to the food, stretching its body through the maze so that it connected directly to the two food sources. Without any apparent cognitive resources, the slime mold had "solved" the maze puzzle.

How did such a lowly organism come to play such an important scientific role? Slime mold spends much of its life as thousands of distinct single-celled units, each moving separately from its other comrades. Under the right conditions, those myriad cells will coalesce again into a single, larger organism, which then begins its leisurely crawl across the garden floor, consuming rotting leaves and wood as it moves about. In the simplest terms, [systems like slime mold] solves problems by drawing on masses of relatively stupid elements, rather than a single, intelligent "executive branch." They are bottom-up systems, not top-down. …In a more technical language, they are complex adaptive systems that display emergent behavior. In these systems, agents residing on one scale start producing behavior that lies one scale above them… The movement from low-level rules to higher-level sophistication is what we call emergence. (Johnson 2001, 11-18)

Emergence is easier to spot in primitive systems like slime mold because paradoxically their complexity exist at the microscopic level and their individual elements are opaque to the naked eye. It is only when you move away from microscopic scales and view phenomena at a macro level that its emergent properties become apparent. The human species for instance when viewed at cosmic distances is easier to represent as an emergent system. While. at a human everyday scale of understanding, the individual entity is more salient and emergent properties are correspondingly much harder to demonstrate.

Experiencing the world ultimately comes down to the recognition of boundaries: self/non-self, before/after, inside/'Outside, subject/object and so forth (Casti 1994, 230).

From the individual’s point of view existence is diagrammed in its binary oppositions, black/white, good/bad wrong/right etc. As Mandelbrot showed mathematically, the complexity of life is always going to escape the confides of our diagrams. because "Mountains are not cones, clouds are not spheres, and rivers are not straight lines." Furthermore, as Nakagaki found out with slime mold - collectively, self-organizing systems are smarter than their individual components. If we accept that self similarity works across all scales we could presume that the human species is more intelligent at the species level than it is at the level of individual human beings. This is a notion intimated by Jung’s collective unconscious and by the idea of God.

References

Casti, J. L. (1994) Complexification. London: Abacus.

Gleick, J. (1988) Chaos. London: Sphere

Johnson, S. (2001). Emergence. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

2008-11-06T05:42:00.005-09:00

Change has come, but a little too late for the Daily Mail.

Bush…unforgivably, exploited Americans' fear and anger by launching an unfocused war in Afghanistan - which failed in its principal objectives of capturing 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden and isolating Afghans from the Taliban. Then he started a pointless, bloody war in Iraq - which had never harboured Al-Qaeda - and achieved nothing other than establishing itself as a huge drain on America's human and financial resources.

This is not a quotation from the Stop the War Coalition, but Peter MacKay writing in today’s Daily Mail. That’s right, you did read that correctly, I said the Daily Mail. It would be naïve (not to mention a rather puerile attempt at satire) merely to point out the hypocrisy of Mr McKay or the Daily Mail for writing and publishing these words. What I wish to highlight is what I think must change if we are to take my Obama’s words as a pragmatic call to action - "Let's resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long." I take these words to mean an attack not just on the pettiness of US party politics but also on hypocrisy and and intellectual cowardice generally. The man or woman who has hidden behind patriotism in the past or fear, offereing up excuses for not speaking the truth about the US initiated wars in our recent history. This is a different kind of poison. This is the poision which permeats into our moral judgements as a nation (or group of like minded nations) this is a poison which allows us to look the other way when millions of young, innocent and for the most part silent people on both sides of conflicts have lost their lives or have suffered in ways in which we can only imagine.

The issues addressed in the Mail's quotation are no revelation of course. Some of us have been saying these things even before the war in Afghanistan in 2001 and certainly before the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Saying it loud, but for the most part in isolation, without the backing of the official media, or politicians (Clare Short your cowardice still cannot be forgiven) and least of all by the Daily Mail of course. The point is that in the early years of this decade, in those times of fear and paranoia, just uttering the truth meant being ignored, insulted, accused of being unpatriotic and above all being marginalized as some lunatic fringe. Unfortunately, that time was precisely the time when the truth needed to be heard. Needed to be spoken loudly and authoritatively by all who knew it to be so, but kept quite through expediency, or ambition, or cowardice or vanity. You silence, the silence of the whole system is stained by the blood of all the countless victims of this century's futile wars. So let me now commend the Daily Mail for its honesty and express my wish that we cease to live in a culture where the only way to effect the reorientation of our moral compass is to indulge in retrospective hand-wringing and scape goating. Instead let us live in a culture where the truth is spoken and acted upon at the time when it actually matters.

2008-11-05T00:33:00.004-09:00

"[T]he true strength of our nation comes not from our the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope."

Close Guantanamo. End Torture.

2008-08-10T23:53:00.055-09:00

Weights and Measures
My understanding (actually non understanding) of imperial weights and measures can be told through two conflicting stories. I remember my father taking me and my brother for a walk in Savernake Forest when I was about twelve years old (so that was probably 1977). He got chatting to a local man. I have a memory of him being a blacksmith but I would not vouch for that. The conversation turned to weights and measures. I remember this man arguing with passion and intelligence about the stupidity of the government for introducing the metric system and just how profound the loss the imperial system was going to be. I was only half engaged with this argument at first (It was just dad talking with a man) but towards its end I became more interested. What he said made perfect sense to me at the time, but unfortunately, being 12 years old, I could not remember even the gist of the argument. Only the mood of the talk lingered, and it was a powerful mood, shaped around a form of an argument the substance of which was entirely gone. Somewhere in the recesses of my brain I filed away a note to self – try to find out what this was about.

The second story goes like this. I was born in the UK in 1965 and the metric system was introduced in 1971. Thus, the teachers at my primary school were grappling with the new weights and measures system at the same time as my foundational sense of it was being instigated--and my initial grasping of it was flavoured, shall we say, with a certain amount of politically-tinged muttering. However, the metric system made sense to me: 100 centimetres to a metre; 100 metres to a kilometre—even though I had no real conception of what these lengths looked like. The imperial system on the other hand was baffling—12 inches to a foot; three feet to a yard; god knows how many feet to a mile! And weights were different again: 16 ounces to the pound; 14 pounds to a stone—where was the logic in that?! I would try to work out the pattern in these figures, (assuming as I did that a pattern must exist) but try as I might, there did not seem to by any rational principles underpinning it. In short, I really could not understand why people felt so strongly about keeping this wholly arcane, idiosyncratic system.

Very recently these two story stands came together in an unexpected way. I was playing Trivial Pursuit with my wife, our two kids and my mother-in-law who lives with us. A question came up about imperial weights and measures and I used the occasion to retell the above stories and explain my puzzlement about what the blacksmith could have said. My mother-in-law was obviously listening, because sometime over the next few days she showed me a newspaper cutting in which someone explained precisely how imperial measurements originated - and that when the missing pieces of the puzzle fell into place.

I don't have the original article but the gist of it went something like this:

In all the English-speaking countries, land is traditionally measured by the acre, a very old Saxon unit that meant "field" as a unit an acre was originally a field of a size that a farmer could plough in a single day. The acre was never visualized as a square, it is long and narrow: one furlong by 4 rods. A furlong was the length that could be ploughed before the horses needed to be rested which worked out at 40 rods (presumably a rod is something to do with the length of the wood of the plough). The distance the constitutes the 'width' of a field also measured out in chains - 1 chain is the distance a team of horses could go back and forth before their harnesses (the ‘chain’) were taken off and the animals rested for the day. This amounted to four furlongs: four furrows in the ground measuring 4 rods in width.

I realised this article contained the substance of what that blacksmith had said to my father all those years before. Imperial measurements were traditional measuring systems marked out distances that measures the earth, or parts of the human body or the distance over time taken for human or animal labour - concrete things rather than abstractions. In essence, the crucial distinction between imperial and metric was the level of abstraction contained in each. The units of the imperial system were a mini picture of what the culture was like at the time of their inception. By contrast the metric system was based on a metal bar in a vault in Paris: some arbitrary length whose function was merely to create a standard around which a system of scientific measurement could be built. However, the problems came when anyone tried to combine the concrete things that made up the imperial system. (By the way, I assume it is called 'imperial' because of the various acts of the British parliament which heroically attempted to standardize all the ad hoc measuring systems in the 16th and 17th century). For when the ploughing regime of Anglo Saxon fields was matched with a mile--the distance that Roman soldiers marched over a thousand paces-- it is no wonder that imperial measurements did not fit neatly together .

The revelation in this story is I had simply failed to see the paradigm shift involved. (Paradigm in the Kuhnean sense of one worldview being replace by another). As a 12 year old I was already thoroughly embedded in the abstract mathematical paradigm of metric. And it made perfect sense to me to see a measurement system as self contained and logically consistent. I had unquestioningly assumed that the imperial system derived from the same paradigmatic assumptions and had followed a similarly deducible logic; but merely substituting different scales: feet and inches for metres and centimetres. This ignorance of mine actually betrays a wider cultural ignorance about the land and the issues surrounding working and living on it. I am a 'townie,' I grew up in an urban environment and therefore have no conception of ploughing fields or horses, or any kind of agricultural labour. Distance to me is the distance that grids a map. Distance wasn’t real like something you could touch. I thought my misunderstanding of imperial measure was simply a question of units when it was actually a question of how one saw the world. No wonder the blacksmith's speech seemed so mysteriously compelling. It's actually a wonder that such people--who properly belonged in the pages of a Thomas Hardy novel--existed in 1977.

On a more academic note, the theme of being disconnected from the concrete signs of material existence in a world of abstraction (and absurdity) plays into a very modernist narrative of alienation. I wonder, is this the real reason behind the general but poorly-argued hostility to metric? Maybe? But I don't want to use this post as a forum to rehash such arguments. I should already be apparent that I am not one of the traditionalists who want to preserve metric; and if its preservation is metonymically linked to the preservation of the past, then the past can can wither and decay as far as I am concerned. But while I don't care for imperial measures politically, I do care for them as one cares for archeology or etymology. Like old buildings or the origins or words, the stories behind weights and measures are fascinating, because they are embedded with whole cultural history of experiences, like tiny time capsules. But, that said, campaigning to bring them back now as viable alternatives to what we have today is as anachronistic as trying to revive Anglo Saxon English or the steam train.

_______________________________

Other Weights and measures

I have compiled a summary from Russ Rowlett’s excellent article, “How Many? A Dictionary of Units of Measurement”

Short distance units are based on the dimensions of the human body.

The inch represents the width of a thumb; in fact, in many languages, the word for "inch" is also the word for "thumb."

The foot (12 inches) was originally the length of a human foot, although it has evolved to be longer

The yard (3 feet) seems to have gotten its start in England as the name of a 3-foot measuring stick, but it is also understood to be the distance from the tip of the nose to the end of the middle finger of the outstretched hand. Henry I appears to have ordered construction of 3-foot standards, which were called "yards," and William of Malmsebury wrote that the yard was "the measure of his [the king's] own arm.” In fact, both the foot and the yard were established on the basis of the Saxon ynce, the foot being 36 barleycorns and the yard 108.

The fathom - if you stretch your arms out to the sides as far as possible, your total "arm span," from one fingertip to the other, is a fathom (6 feet).

Longer distances have more idiosyncratic origins..

The mile is a Roman unit, originally defined to be the length of 1000 paces of a Roman legion. A "pace" here means two steps, right and left, or about 5 feet, so the mile is a unit of roughly 5000 feet (For a long time no one felt any need to be precise about this, because distances longer than a furlong did not need to be measured exactly).

Weights

In traditional English law the various pound weights are related by stating all of them as multiples of the grain, which was originally the weight of a single barleycorn. Thus barleycorns are at the origin of both weight and distance units in the English system.

Gallons are always divided into 4 quarts, which are further divided into 2 pints each. For larger volumes of dry commodities, there are 2 gallons in a peck and 4 pecks in a bushel. Larger volumes of liquids were carried in barrels, hogsheads, or other containers whose size in gallons tended to vary with the commodity.

On both sides of the Atlantic, smaller volumes of liquid are traditionally measured in fluid ounces, which are at least roughly equal to the volume of one ounce of water. To accomplish this in the different systems, the smaller U.S. pint is divided into 16 fluid ounces, and the larger British pint is divided into 20 fluid ounces.

Rowlet R (2001) "How Many? A Dictionary of Units of Measurement"
http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/custom.html

2008-06-17T23:19:00.004-09:00

Paul Otlet - Grandfather of the World Wide Web

The New York Times published a fascinating article yesterday on the work of Paul Otlet (pronounced Otley), a Belgian bibliophile who in 1934 mapped out and started to produce a card index and telephone prototype of the World Wide Web. This was eleven years before Vannevar Bush published his seminal article "As We May Think" in the Atlantic monthly. An event which is often cited as the germ of the idea which spawned hypertext and then eventually the World Wide Web.

2008-06-11T00:52:00.002-09:00

Quote of the day!

US president George Bush in an interview with The Times newspaper:

“I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric.” Phrases such as “bring them on” or “dead or alive... indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace”

2008-06-02T05:13:00.008-09:00

I'd like to ask a favour to one of the millions of fans who read this blog who lives or is visiting London soon and is even slightly interested in issues of consciousness and how the brain works. Will you please go to Scoobs book shop, walk along the corridor (past the upright piano on your left) until you reach the end wall. There you will be faced with a shelf of popular science books. On the second or third shelf down from the top you will find a first edition hardback of Gerald Edelman's Bright Air Brilliant Fire. Will you buy it please. It is a brilliant book and it will not disappoint you, probably it will change the way you think about conscious and a whole lot of other things. It depresses the hell out of me that every time I go into scoobs I see the same edition still unsold on the same bloody shelf. Edelman deserves better than this people - as I'm sure you will all agree once you have read him - which I'm sure you will do now on the basis of this recommendation. If you are a bit of a bibliophile, Scoobs is well worth a visit anyway. Scoobs (or Scoob Books), is located at 66 The Brunswick London WC1N 1AE. The entrance to the shop is just off Marchmont Street, which is the street in London for bookshops. You will find it between Russel Square and the British library - nearest tube is Russel Square on the Piccadilly line. Please just go and buy this book now and put me out of my misery.

2008-05-01T03:25:00.006-09:00

Postmodern Phishing

Because I am the webmaster of a fairly popular site I get swathes and swathes of spam mail. Phishing mails are fairly common (along with Viagra Cialis and penis extension of course). The phishing mail quoted below was particularly audacious. It has I feel a self reflexivity awareness of its own status as a cultural (phishing) object, it has irony, it calls into question notions of authenticity and depth, quotes freely from discourses of security and commerce and calling into question Beckian notions of 'risk and trust', in short it has all the characteristics of a post modern artifact.

From:Abbey National Plc

Dear Customer
These days, fake emails are getting more sophisticated, so it can be tough to know whether an email is real or not,Test your knowledge with the Fight Phishing Challenge to learn what to look for and how to avoid a scam.This might be due to either one of the following reasons,so as a result we are making an extra security check on all of our Customers account in order to protect their information from theft and fraud.

Click on the link below and you will be taken straight to where you can activate your account.

2008-04-17T07:54:00.007-09:00

The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds
I can't believe that no one has used the above headline in connection with this story so I thought I would.

2008-03-28T01:07:00.028-09:00

Abduction

The aim of post is threefold: first to clarify the concept abduction by showing how it is differentiated from induction and hypothesis. Second to show how abduction is related in Peirce’s philosophical system, especially to the understanding of ‘precepts’ and ‘perceptual judgments’. Thirdly to summarise Peirce’s ideas on abduction as an instinct for guessing. Finally I will critique Peirce’s notion of abduction from the perspective of embodied cognition.

1/ CLARIFYING ABDUCTION, INDUCTION AND HYPOTHESIS

1a/ TERMINOLOGY

The first point to consider when trying to clarify abduction, induction and hypothesis is the problems caused by Peirce’s habit at different stages of his life of assigning different neologisms to represent similar ideas. Abduction is no exception since it also went by the name of ‘retroduction’ and even ‘hypothesis’. It is important to make clear that differently named terms in Peirce’s system are not necessarily conceptually synonymous, see for example the forceful argument of Deledalle (2000) makes regarding how Peirce’s thought was subject to radical change in his lifetime. There really daunting implication of this is because of the fragmentary nature of Peirce’s writings, and because he published no canonical exposition of his philosophical system in his lifetime, the researcher who is primary interested applying Peirce’s thought has to become a Peircean scholar in order to navigate the minefield of misinterpretation and confusion.

1b/ HYPOTHESIS

The second problem, as already intimated, pertains especially to Peirce’s use of the term hypothesis. For hypothesis is often used, not just as a synonym for abduction, but also in the sense of its traditional meaning as defined in the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy for example as, “A hunch, speculation or conjecture proposed as a possible solution to a problem” (Honderich 1995, 385).

In this sense, an hypothesis is common to both modes of logical inference deduction and induction, the function of the hypothesis is to provide a claim that is tested in induction and, if found to be robust, applied in deduction. Peirce’s innovation was that he added a third mode of logical inference – abduction. Like induction and deduction, abduction involves a hypothesis, however, unlike them, the abductive inference does not begin with a hypothesis as its starting point, but rather it produces one as its end result.

I want to examine this last claim in more detail since it clarifies the confusion between hypothesis and abduction. The following quotation from Peirce explains the relationship between deduction, induction and abuction:

Deduction is the only necessary reasoning... It starts from a hypothesis, the truth or falsity of which has nothing to do with the reasoning; and of course its conclusions are equally ideal….Induction is the experimental testing of a theory. The justification of it is that, although the conclusion at any stage of the investigation may be more or less erroneous, yet the further application of the same method must correct the error….. Abduction consists in studying facts and devising a theory to explain them. Its only justification is that if we are ever to understand things at all, it must be in that way" (Peirce 1998, 205).

One of the unfortunate consequences of the concept of Abduction successfully entering the academic mainstream is that seemingly canonical definitions proliferate, but when they are examined they all differ in some important respects . Vagueness emerges especially in regards to an inappropriate emphasis on the principles rather than the process of forming an abductive inference. An example of this is the definition in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy which is quoted here in its entirety:

Abductive reasoning accepts a conclusion on the grounds that it explains the available evidence. The term was introduced by Charles Peirce to describe an inference pattern sometimes called 'hypothesis' or inference to the best explanation'. He used the example of arriving at a Turkish seaport and observing a man on horseback--surrounded by horsemen holding a canopy over his head. He inferred that this was the governor of the province since he could think of no other figure who would be so greatly honoured. In his later work, Peirce used the word more widely: the logic of abduction examines all of the norms which guide us in formulating new hypotheses and deciding which of them to take seriously. It addresses a wide range of issues concerning the 'logic of discovery' and the economics of research" (Honderich 1995).

The problem with this definition is that it does not demarcate with sufficient clarity the difference between ‘an inductive hypothesis’ and ‘an abductive hypothesis’. With the result that it becomes easy to conceive of abduction merely a species of induction. One of the reasons the confusion surrounding the terms is so prevalent is that even Peirce himself was guilty of convoluted abduction with hypothesis, he wrote, “in almost everything I printed before the beginning of [the twentieth] century I more or less mixed up [abduction] and induction . . .” (CP 8.227).

Thomas Sebeok (1981) highlights this problem of hypothesis being common to both induction and abduction. He claims that hypothesis is conceived of by logicians as “an overly “narrow and formalistic conception of inference as necessarily having formulated judgments from its premises" (33). However, with abduction no judgement can be formulated in this way because no premises exist in an abduction: all the inquirer has to work with is a set of seemingly unrelated facts.

1c/ PROCESS LED VERSUS DEFINITION LED ANALYSES

In order to differentiate between the two kinds of hypothesis, Sebeok says that the analysis needs to be processes led rather than definition led. Process led means that it should focus especially on the chronology of the various hypothetical and perceptual steps which lead to either an induction or an abduction. The simple rule to apply here is, induction seeks some facts to prove its hypothesis, whist abduction seeks an hypothesis to explain its facts (Sebeok 1981 34).

In induction a person approaches the facts already armed with a theory to explain them. This inductive hypothesis may be ephemeral. Indeed ephemerally is arguably a characteristic common to all hypotheses. But in induction the hypothesis nevertheless should be strong enough to determine which facts are relevant and which are irrelevant - and consequently also suggest to the inquirer how the process of induction should then proceed. In abduction, however, the confidence is lower because the ordering of theory and facts is reversed. A person begins with a number of seemingly unrelated facts. But armed with the feeling that they may be related somehow (CP 7.218). Peirce notes that the abductive inference often comes in a flash of inspiration, which he calls an act of insight, but of an extremely fallible kind. While it may be true that all the different elements of the hypothesis are already present in a person’s mind before making the abduction, the idea of putting them together is what flashes the new suggestion before the person's contemplation (CP 5.181).

In summary, the way to differentiate adduction from induction is to realise that there must first be an abduction for an induction to take place. Simply stated, the difference between abduction and induction is that abduction produces the hypothesis while induction tests the hypothesis.

It is impossible to see this is one does not take a process-led approach, for when induction and abduction are presented as principles, the two stages of inference formation are easily collapsed into one overarching concept – the hypothesis. This is why in the scientific method pioneered by Galileo and Bacon, the abductive stage of hypothesis formation is simply collapsed into induction. In the twentieth century this collapse was ironically reinforced by Karl Popper's explication of the hypotheco-deductive method. Popper considers the hypothesis is considered to be just “a guess” (Popper 2002, 536), however, in terms of the chronology of the process, this guess is already the starting point for the testing of the facts in an induction, rather than an awareness of a possible connection between them that will produce a flash of insight characteristic of an abduction.

1d/ THE RELATIVE STRENGTHS OF ABDUCTIVE AND INDUCTIVE HYPOTHESES

Another way abduction and induction can be distinguished is the strength of inferences which lead from them. An example of this is found in Sebeok (1981, 34). Imagine a crime has been committed. Detectives working on the case discover a vital clue when a torn piece of paper comes to light, containing a specimen of handwriting from an anonymous source. The identity of the author is suspected and his desk, to which only he has access, is thoroughly searched. In the desk a notebook is found, in which one of the pages has been torn out and whose torn edges exactly match that of the paper in question. Sebeok argues that it is a fair hypothesis to infer the owner of the desk is the author of the writing. But, if the hypothesis were taken an induction, then he argues inference could never be justified with this degree of certainty. For the only permitted conclusion that induction allows a person to make is that the two matching torn pieces of paper might suggest a rule by which other torn pieces of paper can be compared in future. Whereas in abduction it is the nature of the inference presumes the two edges are same because they seem to exactly match. (Sebeok 1981, 34). This seems contradictory until it is realised that the purpose of logic is to formulate general principles from particular insights. In this example, although the insight is dramatic and strong, it could only apply to the particular circumstances in which it occurred, thus it is a poor hypothesis for induction. Peirce warns that this apparent certainty is not the basis for ontological security but rather it is precisely what makes abduction a bolder and more perilous step (CP 2.632).

This once more underscores the point that the notion of 'hypothetic inference' found in both abduction and induction (and indeed in deduction as well) it is not the same inference in every case.

2/ PERCEPTS, PERCEPTUAL JUDGEMENTS AND ABDUCTION

The second part of this post outlines theoretically how an abduction is arrived at by examining the relationship between abduction and two other Peircean concepts: percepts, and perceptual judgements. The concepts of Percept and perceptual judgements will be explained in the paragraphs to follow, but it is useful at this stage to familiarise the reader with the structure of the steps that will combine to produce an abductive inference, even though the steps themselves are undefined at this stage. These steps are three: the percept acts as the ground for the perceptual judgement which acts as the ground the abductive inference.

2a/ THE PERCEPT

The percept can be defined as the direct object of all thought. In this sense it exists in a state Peirce calls Firstness, which is notoriously difficult to explain, because firstness does not refer to anything else, nor does it lie behind anything. The first is that which simply is of itself (CP 1. 356). If the analogy is helpful, a percept can be likened to a “thought-image”, but with the caveat that this image is only taken to mean product of a person’s direct perception, rather than being a representation (CP 4.539). Percepts are not representations as such, because they are produced by mental processes we are not directly aware of, that happen below the threshold of conscious awareness (7.624 ). This means that the percept is not capable of describing itself; for such a description would involve analysis. However this does not mean that once a person has a percept, they may not then contemplate it, and say to themselves, “That appears to be a yellow chair” for example. In which case in ordinary language it might be presumed that the chair of the previous example is perceived to be yellow. However this conclusion is erroneous, because the sentence, “the chair is yellow” contains a judgment about the chair, which because it is a judgement involves processes of conscious thought (7.626 ).

2b/ THE PERCEPTUAL JUDGEMENT

It is this judgement that Peirce calls ‘the perceptual judgment.’ A Perceptual judgment can be defined as, a proposition of existence determined by the percept, which it interprets. (4.539 fn) Such a judgment takes place in an act of forming a mental proposition and then assenting to that proposition, in the sense of professing to one’s future self what the character of the present percept shall be (5.115; 7.631).

Perceptual judgments are the first building block of knowledge. They appear to exist in what Peirce calls Secondness. Secondness consists in one thing acting upon another, -- [a] brute action (CP 8.330). Perceptual judgements impress themselves on the mind in this way. They have the characteristic of being “necessarily veracious in greater or less degree according to the effort made” (5.141). But just because they are veracious it does also mean that they are true. The reason for this is found when the relationship between percepts and perceptual judgements is explored more fully.

As I have mentioned, percepts cannot be subject to conscious discriminations because they are apprehended below the threshold of consciousness. They are for that reason neither true, nor false, they just are. Similarly, there is not enough information in a perceptual judgement to confirm of deny the percept. For instance one may be mistaken about one’s perceptual judgement that the chair is yellow, but all this means is that further contemplation of the chair yields a different percept which in turn yields a different perceptual judgement the particular veracity of which is no different to the first, but is felt to be contradicted only by linking the two judgements together in an action of mediation. That kind of judgement in which one could say which perceptual judgements is true and which is false can only be reached when a number of perceptual judgements are compared and evaluated. To clarify this point Peirce provides the following example:

I may judge that I see a clean white surface. But a moment later I may question whether the surface really was clean, and may look again more sharply. If this second more veracious judgment still asserts that I see a clean surface, the theory of the facts will be simpler than if, at my second look, I discern that the surface is soiled. Still, even in this last case, I have no right to say that my first percept was that of a soiled surface. I absolutely have no testimony concerning it, except my perceptual judgment, and although that was careless and had no high degree of veracity, still I have to accept the only evidence in my possession (5.141).

Another important characteristic of perceptual judgements is that, although they are of themselves strikingly singular in nature, the fact that they are judgements means that they also involve generality to some degree. Although at first glance this seems surprising: it seems counter intuitive that anything so immediate as a perceptual judgement could contain any generality at all. However if the term ‘general’ is defined in the Aristotelian sense of “being that which is fitted by nature to be predicated of many things”, then it must be recognized that every judgments contains an element of generality, because it identifies a percept with a quality, and a quality is a general, thus perceptual judgements involve generality in their predicate (5.151).

2c/ THE ABDUCTION

The human mind’s further consideration of percepts and perceptual judgments is the basis upon which abductions are reached. Armed with this information we can make a more precise definition of abduction. It is the evaluation a person makes to assess different perceptual judgements of seemingly equal veracity. This is where the element of mediation enters into the analysis, "to subject these processes to logical analysis is simply to arrive at the logic of an abductive inference" (CP 5.181).

To exemplify the process behind this idea consider the following quotation from Peirce:

Looking out my window this lovely spring morning I see an azalea in full bloom. No, no! I do not see that; though that is the only way I can describe what I see. That is a proposition, a sentence, a fact; but what I perceive is not proposition, sentence, fact, but only an image, which I make intelligible in part by means of a statement of fact. This statement is abstract; but what I see is concrete. I perform an abduction when I so much as express in a sentence anything I see. The truth is that the whole fabric of our knowledge is one matted felt of pure hypothesis confirmed and refined by induction. Not the smallest advance can be made in knowledge beyond the stage of vacant staring, without making an abduction at every step (Sebeok 1981, 20) [Ms. 692].

3/ ABDUCTION – AN INSTINCT FOR GUESSING

The above quotation pushes to the fore the most perilous aspect of abduction, for it is merely guessing. But Peirce was struck by the frequency that people guess right about things, which was far greater than would be presupposed by mere chance (CP 8.238). For example in the sciences:

Think of what trillions of trillions of hypotheses might be made of which one only is true; and yet after two or three or at the very most a dozen guesses, the physicist hits pretty nearly on the correct hypothesis…. Even now he cannot give any exact reason for his best guesses. It appears to me that the cleanest statement we can make of the logical situation…is to say that man has a certain Insight, not strong enough to be oftener right than wrong, but strong enough not to be overwhelmingly more often wrong than right. An insight, I call it, because it is to be referred to the same general class of operations to which perceptive judgments belong." This faculty is at the same time of the general nature of Instinct, resembling (Peirce 1998, 217).

Peirce maintained elsewhere that the ability of a newly hatched chick to pick up food, [is] like abductive inference," and can be further traced back to the “animal instincts for, respectively, getting food and reproduction” (Ms. 692, quoted in Sebeok 1981, 20).

Peirce considers abduction as resting upon the hope that there is sufficient affinity between the reasoner's mind and nature to render guessing not altogether hopeless, provided, he adds that, each guess is checked by comparison with observation" (CP 1.121).

That no new truth can come from induction or from deduction, we have seen. It can only come from abduction; and abduction is, after all, nothing but guessing. We are therefore bound to hope that, although the possible explanations of our facts may be strictly innumerable, yet our mind will be able in some finite number of guesses, to guess the sole true explanation of them. That we are bound to assume, independently of any evidence that it is true (Peirce 1998, 107).

CRITICISM

The way that abduction relates to percepts and perceptual judgements can be criticised because of its complexity and unwieldiness. This I argue is due to Peirce trying to explain these concepts using a representational framework to describe something that is in essence not representational. The processes of judging percepts happens below a level of conscious understanding. This may be explained in the way Peirce has explained it, but the explanation implies too forcefully a process of conscious analysis, whereas it is in fact only an interpretation of what presumably goes on in the mind. Another way to articulate these preconscious processes is from the perspective of embodied cognition theory; what may be called the logic of simulation. This logic ironically owes a dept to Peirce, because it is based heavily of pragmatism. Here is a sketched account of this position taken from the work of Adenzato & Garbarini (2006).

THE LOGIC OF SIMULATION

A pragmatic dimension of the theory of knowledge has emerged from the present interdisciplinary analysis of the as if concept—an analysis involving the neurosciences, cognitive sciences, anthropology and ethnology. This pragmatic dimension underscores the role of action, and especially simulation and interaction, in the knowing process.

The embodied cognition perspective views the mind no longer as a set of logical/abstract functions, but as a biological system, which is rooted in body experience and interwoven with action and interaction with other individuals. Specifically acting in the world, interacting with the objects and individuals in it, representing the world, perceiving it, categorizing it and understanding its meaning are merely different levels of the same relationship that exists between an organism and its environment. For example, we might ask, ‘how do children manage to become expert walkers?’ An embodied cognition answer contends it is not due to the mere application of previous (genetically codified) instructions, but, rather, due to behaviour emerging out of the continuous interaction among neural, bodily and environmental factors.

Embodied cognition allows not only for the planning and execution of actions, but for their representation as well. Based on a principle of cognitive economy, the same mechanism that leads to the explicit execution of an action also allows for its representation (and for the representation of its underlying objects) when the action is only virtually activated. Hence, representing objects and actions implies a simulative process, an implicit as if action.

Recent discoveries in the neurophysiological domain have experimentally confirmed the existence of a mechanism by which an object’s shape and function are coupled and perceived directly by an observer. In a series of studies Rizzolatti and colleagues (Rizzolatti & Craighero, 2004) have discovered the existence of groups of neurons in the premotor cortex of monkeys and humans, which fire when specific actions are executed. Some are triggered by the mere observation of an object, while other called mirror neurons are triggered by observing another person executing that action with the object. The activity of these neurons can be conceptually captured by referring to a simulation mechanism in the sense that when an object is under observation, a motor schema appropriate to the characteristics of that object is activated as if the observer were interacting with it.

Similarly, when observing another individual executing an action with an object, the observer’s neural system is activated as if he himself were executing the same action. In both instances, motor activation is only virtual - the action is not actually carried out, but it is neurally simulated.

This perspective makes it possible to maintain a representational conception of the mind, without adopting the model of abstract representations of formal logic and the linguistic/propositional format in which they are expressed. People construct representations of their world based not on theoretical categories, as traditionally assumed, but on pragmatic categories, derived from the dynamic interaction of living organisms with their adaptive environments.

CONCLUSION
I believe that if a strict representational framework should be abandoned when the discussion turns to percepts and perceptual judgements and especially in respect of his semi-mystical formulation of an instinct for guessing. Instead an as if schemata/simulation frame work should be adopted, because this leads to a clearer picture of the function of abduction, which can be conceived of as a bridge between preconscious activity and the conscious reporting of that activity. By viewing abduction from the perspective of as if schema, it is possible to delineate the concept with more precision that Peirce could achieve. The feeling which is the basis of an abduction is in fact the result of cognition taking place below a threshold of conscious reporting. Not as Peirce asserted due to direct perception of representations. Abduction is therefore the flash of insight where a hitherto non conscious thought announces itself to consciousness.

Peirce is made an important if overlooked contribution to the understanding and development of the logic of representation, but his work was also an important precursor of the logic of simulation as well. Not only did he perceive the limits of analytical thought in respect of his critique of novelty, but his understanding of logic was so sophisticated that all the major tenants of simulation are recognisable in his descriptions, even though they are framed in terms which fight to mislead the inquirer at every step. It is as if a medieval alchemist works were found to contain all the laws governing modern chemistry, but written in a language best suited to discussion of the transmutation of base metals into gold.

REFERENCES

Adenzato, Mauro and Francesca Garbarini (2006) “The As If in Cognitive Science, Neuroscience and Anthropology: A Journey Among Robots, Blacksmiths And Neurons” http://tap.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/16/6/747

Deledalle, Gérard (2000) Charles S. Peirce's Philosophy of Signs - Essays in Comparative Semiotics, Bloomington USA: Indiana University Press

Flach, Peter & Antonis Kakas (editors), (2000) Abduction and Induction: essays on their relation and integration, Norwell, Mass, US: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Honderich, Ted (editor), (1995): The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Peirce, Charles Sanders (1998): The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Vol. 2 (1893-1913), edited by the Peirce Education Project, Bloomington, US: Indiana University Press
___________________ (1931-1935): The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vols. I-VI, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, Cambridge, US: Harvard University Press.
___________________(1958): The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vols. VII-VIII, Edited by AW Burks, Cambridge, US: Harvard University Press

Popper, Karl (2002) Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, London, UK: Routledge.

Rizzolatti, G., & Craighero, L. (2004). The mirror-neuron system. Annual Review of
Neuroscience, 27, 169–192.

Sebeok, Thomas with Jean Umiker Sebeok (1981): "You Know My Method" in The Play of Musement, Bloomington, Indiana USA: Indiana University Press

2008-03-14T05:10:00.002-09:00

Happy Pi Day! News about Pi day

2008-02-15T01:16:00.003-09:00

What is wrong with this picture?
In an interview with the BBC [President Bush] said information obtained from alleged terrorists helped save lives, and the families of the July 7 victims would understand that. Bush said waterboarding, which simulates drowning, was not torture and is threatening to veto a congressional bill that would ban it. [He also] insisted the US still occupied the moral high ground worldwide. (Guardian)

2008-02-08T05:56:00.000-09:00

BBC iPlayer to hit Macs in 2008

The BBC will launch a download version of its iPlayer online video service for Apple Mac users by the end of 2008. Well its about bloody time, the question is why has it taken this long?

Explaining the decision to launch for just Windows users, Mr Thompson said it had been about "making the service available in the shortest time frame to the greatest amount of users".

Hmm, hasn’t he heard of flash players? Why the hell did the BBC have to use a proprietary windows player anyway??

2008-02-08T01:11:00.000-09:00

Please take my survey.

If you have come across this blog I would be very grateful if you could click on the following link and take the survey.

http://users.aber.ac.uk/ram05/survey.html

You do not have to be a serious gamer to take part. all you need to have done is played a videogame. The survey is very short and should not take more than a few minutes of you time.

I am interested in why playing games is such a different experience from watching them, and from watching other kinds of media like TV and films. I have a theory that the feeling of greater involvement players experience with videogames is to do with the way people model the layout of their environment in their heads, which then gets applied to videogames as if they are real environments. This faculty is not so engaged when watching a film or TV because from a very early age we learn that we cannot interact with these kinds of media, so we tend to sit back and scrutinise them instead. I don't want to say more than that because I don't want those taking the survey to have their expectations micro managed.

2008-01-17T11:19:00.000-09:00

Two classic books on digital culture
are free to download

Julian Dibbell's account of life in a MOO, which
includes the infamous "rape in cyberspace" chapter
about the activities of Mr Bungle is now available
to download free at...

http://www.lulu.com/content/1070691

Also Steven Pool's great early book on videogames
"Trigger Happy"is free to download at

http://stevenpoole.net/blog/trigger-happier/

As far as I can tell both downloads are legal and
approved by the authors. They are must reads for
anyone interested in digital culture.

2008-01-14T14:00:00.001-09:00

Check out this amusing video of Wii bowling tournaments in senior citizen homes in the US.

For the past nine months, residents in Erickson’s old people’s homes in the US, most of whom have never picked up a video game controller in their life, have been playing Wii bowling, tennis, golf, and baseball.

With professional graphics and their own team uniforms, it seems
that Erickson are taking the tournaments pretty seriously

"I've never been into video games," said 72-year-old Flora Dierbach last week as her husband took a twirl with the Nintendo Wii's bowling game. "But this is addictive."

Nintendo has been bolstering its senior-friendly image, partnering with retirement communities, including Erickson, which has received 15 free Wiis. Nintendo has more than doubled annual profits partly thanks to the popularity of its Wii consoles. In the UK, the Wii is the fastest-selling games console in UK history, Nintendo sellin 245,653 units in four weeks.

2007-10-18T01:20:00.000-09:00

Mutating pictures and emergent systems

One of the key characteristics of the paradigm of emergence is that it favours selectional rather than instructional systems. The most famous selectional system is Darwin’s theory of evolution. In the twentieth century work on computers suggested many more applications - chaos theory, recursion in cybernetics etc etc. For a more concrete example of a selectionist approach, imagine your goal is to hit a bull’s-eye on a dartboard. If you favoured an instructional system, you would presumably have to build a very accurate dart trowing machine or practise until you perfected the perfect throw with one dart. A selectional system, on the other hand, launches a million darts in every direction so that the probability of one dart hitting the bull’s-eye is sufficiently high. Here is a good example of a selectionist approach to creating a picture. The site is called Mutating Pictures.

A population of 1,000 random pictures is selected. Users of the website select the fittest pictures to survive. The higher the rating for a pic the more mutated offspring it produces. The above picture represent a kind of before and after, illustrating the process of producing a face. I wonder how far this will go and how good the representation will get?

2007-09-18T11:15:00.000-09:00

Cosmic Calendar
I've just uploaded a video clip of Carl Sagan's Cosmos show from the later 1970s. In it he likens the history of the universe to a year of the calendar. This approach (I'm not even sure if Sagan was the first) has been used many times since, often to endorse an ecological message: it was a favorite recruiting tool of Greenpeace when I worked there, but Sagan is the master. The end carries a particular punch as Sagan sums up our species particular place in the universe.

Those of you who are familiar with the eponymous passage in Sagan's Pale Blue Dot book, will notice a certain foreshadowing. What Sagan does for space there, he does for time here: namely the cosmic insignificance of the human endevour.

Cosmos used to be on Google video but it has been removed. Shame, it could have reached all sorts of people there who would have not shelved out the money to buy the DVD. Hopefully the clip is fair use and won't go the same way.

2007-08-19T01:09:00.000-09:00

[[ZEITGEIST]]

Wikipedia Scanner

Virgil Griffith a graduate student from Caltech wrote a program that reveals who edits Wikipedia articles, via a system where it scans the I.P address and cross-references it with the I.P. directory. Here is how the MaltaStar.com reported it.

As soon as the software was launched on the internet, chaos erupted. Among many revelations, Wikipedia Scanner reported that:

- Microsoft tried to cover up the XBOX 360 failure rate

- Apple edit Microsoft entries, adding more negative comments about its rival

- Bill Gates revenge? Microsoft edits Apple entries, adding more negative comments about its rival

- The Vatican edits Irish Catholic politician Gerry Adams page

- In the 9/11 Wikipedia article, the NRA added that “Iraq was involved in 9/11”

- Exxon Mobil edits spillages and eco-system destruction from oil spillages article

- FBI edits Guantanamo Bay, removing numerous pictures

- Oil company ChevronTexaco removes informative biodiesel article and deletes a paragraph regarding fines against the company

- Scientology removes criticism and negatives article from Scientology page.

In the Wikipedia entry on the scanner Jimmy Wales commented:

"It's awesome -- I love it...It brings an additional level of transparency to what's going on at Wikipedia...[Wikipedia Scanner] uses information we've been making publicly available forever, hoping someone would do something like this."

_______________________

Fine more about the Wikipedia scanner

Virgil Griffith's homepage

Wired article

wikipedia entry

2007-07-19T15:16:00.000-09:00

Timelapse
This is the result of an experiment where I filmed the view outside my window for a year. The music is by Les Grandes Gueules,

2007-07-15T23:33:00.000-09:00

[[ZEITGEIST]] Harry Potter at the New York Times
While newspapers debate their online strategies, I think a lead has been stolen by the New York Times. I really Like this article, where they have gotten two film critics to discuss all the Harry Potter films. Mousing over the pictures (illustrated) brings them to life, very much like the paintings at Hogwarts, and a tantalising snippit of audio is played. If you like what you hear, you can click on an image and see a minute long item discussing an aspect of the films over some clips. This is to be praised not just for the content but for the interface also.

2007-07-15T04:51:00.001-09:00

[[IMMERSIVE]] Video Game Generation Gap
http://view.break.com/315181 - Watch more free videos

Here is an exchange between a teenage child and his parents the illustrates the gulf of understanding created by the computer game generation gap. Particularly interesting is the role the game itself assumes in this dispute. The parents equate videogames with something of no intrinsically value, and which are furthermore dangerously addictive. This discourse seemingly has given them permission to escalate the situation very quickly into conflict. Rather than managing their child's play and setting expectations beforehand about time limits for play. This is not to say that the child is an entirely innocent party here, but (unfortunately for us parents) the burden is on us to manage these situations and set the limits beforehand. Not for the child to superhumanly be able to curtain his interest on cue.

On this topic, I particularly liked this exchange between a parent or an autistic child a educator, because I think it illustrates very well how prejudices about videogames simply get in the way in trying to understand a child.

"[My son] is a video junkie and not in a way that I think anyone would consider healthy, either physically or mentally. "

"This is not a respectful way of talking about your son's passions and joys. You need to reconsider how you view his hobbies and likes and dislikes, because it is through them that learning will happen."

This is the point. Nothing in human development is useless, if the obstacle and reward structure of computer cames is compelling, it is only because it reproduces something in our evolutionary psychology for making progress in life. See, for example, Steven Johnson's argument about this:

"Our brain is wired with “seeking circuitry” and relishes exercising “the regime of competence.” TV shows like “Lost” and video games like “World of Warcraft” are addictive because they reward exploration. Instead of employing narrative arcs, they keep you in a state of being always challenged but not quite overwhelmed as you ascend from skill level to skill level."

2007-07-04T05:01:00.000-09:00

[[ZEITGEIST]] Blaise Aguera y Arcas demonstrates photosynth

Feeling pretty good that I stole a lead on Boing Boing by featuring Hans Rosling on this blog several months ago (Yeah I know it was an older talk and the new one is really worth watching btw). But I though I would draw your attention to another stunning TED presentation. This time it is of a piece of software called photosynth. Photosynth is based on a technology called seedragon which instead of struggling to represent data heavy images by loading them and then interpolating them, seems to be able to rasterize the screen and allocate each image a share of the available real estate of pixels. This means the computer never has to represent more detail than is contained in the pixels on the screen, although the user can dynamically zoom into the images as much as they like. Doesn't this present really exciting possibilities for all virtual world? I means why struggle with clunky 3d representations and distance rendering if all images can be rendered like this. A case in point is Photosynth itself. Photosynth is a dynamic three dimensional representation of seedragon images arranged as a virtual world. In this demonstration its inventor (?) The fabulously named Blaise Aguera y Arcas who wows the TED audience with a virtual Notre Dame Cathedral, constructed out of thousands and thousands of non copyright photographs stored on flickr. As Aguera y Arcas says, this constitutes, in a sense, a representation of the collective memory of humanity. A a memory that what is more can be accessed and explored by anyone using the software. UNFORTUNATELY though photosynth is owned by those kings of the proprietory software , Mircrosoft, and I see from googling photosynth that it is only available to on XP or Vista. Shame that Google were not quicker of the mark with acquiring this one.

picasso.JPG

2007-06-19T06:35:00.001-09:00

picasso.JPG, originally uploaded by Rod Munday.

See photos of my New York trip

2007-05-16T05:07:00.000-09:00

[[ZEITGEIST]] Hans Rosling
I came across a great talk (flash video) by Swedish Professor of International Health Hans Rosling on how publically available statistics can be mined and displayed dynamically to debunk some of the most pervasive 'third world' myths. Rosling is an engaging and charismatic speaker and the software he uses in his presentation (recently acquired by Google) is mind blowing

Here is the text that went along with talk

Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you’ve ever seen
"With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called “developing world” using extraordinary animation software developed by his Gapminder Foundation (http://www.gapminder.org/). The Trendalyzer software (recently acquired by Google) turns complex global trends into lively animations, making decades of data pop. Asian countries, as colorful bubbles, float across the grid -- toward better national health and wealth. Animated bell curves representing national income distribution squish and flatten. In Rosling’s hands, global trends — life expectancy, child mortality, poverty rates — become clear, intuitive and even playful."

And this from the gapminder FAQ...

"A lot of people are interested in the data, but don’t get access to it (and if they manage to access the data, they need to be advanced skilled statisticians to analyze it). Gapminder wants to make data more accessible and easier to use for instant visual analysis. We believe decision makers, politicians as well as education at almost all levels lack adequate tools."

Have fun with stats with the gapminder beta
http://www.gapminder.org/downloads/handouts/

2007-04-27T04:08:00.000-09:00

2007-04-26T09:28:00.000-09:00

[[ZEITGEIST]]
This is a great story, it sounds like the start of an Umberto Eco novel...

A medieval prayer book has yielded three key ancient text buried within its parchment. Works by mathematician Archimedes and the politician Hyperides had already been found buried within the book, known as the Archimedes Palimpsest. But now advanced imaging technology has revealed a third text - a commentary on the philosopher Aristotle.

One of the recycled books was proving extremely difficult to read. The book was being read using a technique called multispectral imaging which uses photographs taken at different wavelengths to enhance particular characteristics of the imaged area. Subtle adjustments of this method suddenly enabled other hidden words to be revealed. "Even though I couldn't read Ancient Greek, just the fact that I could see the words gave me shivers," said Professor Roger Easton

The passage has been identified as a relatively early commentary to Aristotle's Categories, Professor Roger Easton. Project director William Noel added, “At this point you start thinking striking one palimpsest is gold, and striking two is utterly astonishing."

link from BBC.

One could interpret this is a mode of modern condescension, condemning the medieval scribes that erased these classic manuscripts to write their own prayers. However I sympathize, having just given a way a load of books myself to make space on my groaning bookshelves, I am very well aware that pragmatic considerations in this matter can outweigh more profound ones. And anyway, it seems the worst kind of cultural relativism to valorise one knowledge episteme and condemn those who do not agree with the opinion.

2007-03-13T02:01:00.002-09:00

[[IMMERSIVE]]

The latest installment of my notes on Heidegger's masterwork, Being and Time (Part 1, Division III, sections 19, 20 and 21). I have posed a picture of Descartes this time as he is the main subject of the treatise. As usual, if you have any comments or questions about the text, please submit them by commenting on this post.

Link

2007-02-25T10:21:00.000-09:00

[[IMMERSIVE]] Now online, the latest installment of my notes on Being and Time: Part 1 Division III, section 18. Just one section this time 'cause it was really hard - ha, ha. Actually I was well into sections 19 and 20 when I realised that I would also need to include the next section as well in order for it all to make sense, so I decided to publish section 18 and be damned. As always, if you have any comments or questions about the text, please submit them by commenting on this post. .

link: Heidegger's Being and Time, an explication and commentary

2007-02-23T04:51:00.000-09:00

StumbleUpon
I have just discovered StumbleUpon from this site continually cropping up in my stats for the Kubrick Site. I took the plunge the other day and downloaded the StumbleUpon toolbar for Firefox. I can't tell you how great this thing is. Site after site worth bookmarking hours of endless entertainment. As you can tell I'm a real fan.

For example this really made me laugh.

2007-02-07T13:50:00.000-09:00

Iron Orbit
Here is a video a made with the band Statik for a song called Iron Orbit some seventeen years ago now. I made it with Thom McIntosh and Jane Walker who lived downstairs from me in a house I rented in Hackney. I had just started working as a tape op in a facilities company called West One Telelvision in Soho, London and was experimenting with the (then analogue 1") video editing suites after hours. Thom got to hear of this and suggested I do the video for Statik's debut single, which was also single of the week in Sounds magazine. The video emerged out of a painstaking process of layering images--old nuclear promotion films, Nasa footage, stuff Jane had drawn or Thom had created on his Amiga computer and even me flailing my arms around under a caption camera--together with lots of feedback (and I mean lots of feedback!!). We used to spend all night on this stuff, for weeks on end and I remember leaving the edit suite at eight or nine o'clock the next morning with the after-image of the feedback still on my retinas--anyway, here's the video...

2007-02-02T00:27:00.000-09:00

The Power of The Indexical Sign

2007-01-20T08:07:00.000-09:00

[[ZEITGEIST]]

The Power of Political Correctness

The recent hoo-ha over allegations of racism in celebrity Big Brother, highlights that racism and bullying is endemic in British culture. Well, duh! Of course it is, and it would be difficult to imagine a scenario where it would be otherwise. People have always been singled out because of difference. There are many examples of this, not just in human social interactions, but in animals societies also. This is a fundamental aspect of our behaviour and, in a way, it is good that a programme like Celebrity Big Brother brings this to our attention. Because I am not for one moment condoning the behaviours of Jade Goody et al, or even excusing it, but pointing out that the first thing that needs to be done to address questions of racism and bullying is to recognise that we are all racists and bullies and only then can we think about bringing this aspect of our being into full consciousness and scrutiny.

However, another aspect of this story has not been explored so far in the British media and I find that surprising. The aspect I am talking about is political correctness. How often is it that you hear in the press that some scheme or policy is "political correctness gone mad," the accusation is such a favourite of right-wing publications that it almost approaches a vaudeville routine at times. However, despite the Jade Goody incident being, if we apply the criteria, an almost textbook case of 'political correctness gone mad,' not one Daily Mail headline or leader column has pointed this out. Not one. Why is this? Well to put simply, it is the power of political correctness. The issue of race today has assumed the status of something so untouchable and so policed that no one (except for fanaticists like the members of the British National Party) will consciously say anything that they think will be perceive as being racist. Think of the stigma the 'n' word now attracts. To think that even a few decades ago it could have been said on telelvision or film without a whisper of complaint. For example, check out the dog's name in the film The Dambusters (1954), if you can find an uncensored copy that it!

Is this a good thing?

Well yes and no. One thing it tends to confirm is that the rationale upon which political correctness is theoretically grounded is correct. That is to say, semiotics. Semiotics teaches us, rather than seeing the language representation as trivial and not reflecting the values of a culture, that a culture’s values are in fact determined by its language and its representations. Ferdinand de Saussure said in the Course of General Linguistics that things in the real world only take on their meaning after we have named them, because it is only in the naming that their differences from other things are fixed by language into the very qualities which make them conceptually distinct. Words therefore cannot represent ideas fixed in advance, when such ideas are themselves values emanating from a language system (and we can extend this to apply to other representational systems as well). This implies that a show like The Black and White Minstrel Show actually influences the racist values of its audience and the way UK culture chooses to see black people within in a very narrow and demeaning frame of representation. And it also implies that mainstream representations do contribute to a large extent to the way we stereotype these people. That is to say, restrict the way in which they do appear to us, in advance of the potentially limitless ways they could appear to us if there were no stereotypes in place).

Of course today, the Black and White Minstrel Show and other dreadful excuses for entertainment like Mind Your Language have been consigned to the dustbin of history, (they only live on ironically now in shows like Little Britain - ha ha!). But people of my generation watched those shows and, to an extent, it can be argued that they have left their mark on us. Externally, they are demonized of course, but internally their influence lives on, precisely because they have been demonised. The shows themselves have become scapegoats for our racism. They carry the burden of our racist guilt, so that we do not have to carry it ourselves. In other words, we can blame the shows, not ourselves, which is why the only way we are allowed to think about those shows today is as a terrible stain on our culture. Their true influences has remained largely unexamined - and persists because of this.

Which brings me to the issue of Jade Goody - scapegoat extraordinaire for all our negative views about race. Someone said to me today, “the trouble with Jade Goody is that she just doesn’t think,” implying that she opens her mouth and says the first thing that comes into her head. Now I think the issue here is not that Jade doesn't think, but rather than she is not reflexive enough to weigh up the consequences of her thoughts, and self-censor her opinions based on what other people think of her. This is why I think people love(d) Jade . She was, in a way, the big brother contestant least likely to have all the things she has now – several TV series under her belt, a residency in Heat magazine, even her own perfume. How has she achieved all this? Precisely by displaying that rare ability to be herself and say what she thinks. We love her, no doubt, because we do feel superior to her. She valorizes our inadequacies and, at the same, time makes it alright for us to be inadequate. Why? Because Jade has other, more positive qualities than her stupidity, like forthrightness, honesty and charisma, which makes up for what she lacks in brains and diplomacy. However, it is precisely for these qualities that people have decided to turn against her now. She is persona non grata because she expressed what we are all thinking, but are too calculating to express ourselves. Therefore she is castigated while we go unchallenged. We can still feel superiour to Jade, but in doing so were are guilty of the very things we are accusing her of. Jade's honesty reflects our culture and shames us all. Jade Goody is the bad consciousness of a nation.

What has been an undoubted strength of Big Brother is that it turns us all into psychologists. We can, for instance, see how easy it is to bully and how banal and trivial the actual act of bullying is. When a child hangs themselves over bullying at school, it seems extraordinary that no one could have spotted the signs. However, bullying is very much subjectivised by the victim of bullying. To the victim of bullying, an incident which looks from the outside to be very trivial and minor can be majorly traumatic. This is not to say that we should admonish the victims of bullying for making mountains out of mole hills, but rather understand that bullying is ordinary and something we are all capable of doing without really noticing it. In fact it is the very ordinariness of bulling that should alert everyone to the fact that each and every one of us is susceptibility to perpetuating it. The logic of alcoholics anonymous applies here. We must admit that we have a problem before we can deal with it. In fact the admission is the first step in dealing with it.

Admitting we have a problem because we are all bullies and racists means that there are inevitably things we are going to say or do that offend other people. This is not to say that in an ideal world these things wouldn't happen. For such a world could not actually exist with human beings in it. Rather, I would say that an ideal world is a place where we are able to tell the person who has made the ill judged, offensive remark why their remark was ill judged and why it was offensive. And tell them without fear of the crowd (for bullying always takes place in crowds) uniting against us and use our admission of hurt as more ammunition to berate or belittle us. I fear now, because of Celebrity Big Brother, this world is further away than it ever was. I fear now it will be harder for people to explain why they have been offended by a seemingly innocent remark. Because now everyone, no doubt, will get really defensive and will bluster and protest rather than take on board any criticism of their behaviour which they consider tantamount to racism or bullying. This is a shame. Imagine what would happen if we did take the seeming banality and triviality of bulling and racism seriously. The victims of bullying would no longer have to suffer in silence because they would not longer have to justify why a seemingly trivial remark and innocent looking behaviour had affected them so deeply. They could just say, I feel bullied. And the onus would be on the bully to change their behaviour. Now that would really be the power of political correctness gone sane. However, because of the hoo-ha of Big Brother, people bullying and racism will persist, while at the same becoming demonized all the more. I think in this negative way because of the reactions to Big Brother expressed so far by the media, see the BBC and the Guardian. These reports to my mind legitimate a culture where it is OK to believe that the majority (us) are not racists, while a small majority of (them), other people like Jade Goody are. And moreover the dominant opinion seems to be that these people should be removed from our screens and punished. I ask you, what kind of fascism is that?

2007-01-05T09:07:00.000-09:00

[[ZEITGEIST]] There have been some interesting stories in the news of late. Here's a roundup…

Scientists find way to slash cost of drugs
Two UK-based academics have devised a way to invent new medicines and get them to market at a fraction of the cost charged by big drug companies, enabling millions in poor countries to be cured of infectious diseases and potentially slashing the NHS drugs bill. Link

Cloudbusting
Not Wilhelm Reich, nor Kate Bush I'm afraid but a story about a Californian farmers' has installed 24 cannons on his 1,200 acre farm. At the approach of a storm, his 20 ft cannons emit an electronic blast. As the sound waves travel up into the sky, they disrupt the water that is gathering to turn into hail, causing it to fall as mere rain. Link

Free Will Or Not? Not It Seems…
A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control. As a result, physicists, neuroscientists and computer scientists have joined the heirs of Plato and Aristotle in arguing about what free will is, whether we have it, and if not, why we ever thought we did in the first place. Link

Thinking about the future
Brain scans have given US scientists a clue about how we create a mental image of our own future. When patients or volunteers are placed in the functional MRI scanner and asked to think or move in a particular way, specific areas of the brain 'light up' on the scan image, corresponding with increased electrical activity in those regions. The technique has developed to the extent that scientists can almost know what patients are thinking about simply by looking at the brain areas they are using. The latest project looked at one of the qualities thought to be unique to humans - the ability to create a mental picture of events that have not yet happened. The researchers placed 21 volunteers into the MRI machine, then contrasted the scan results when they were asked to imagine vividly future events and recollect past memories. Link

2007-01-05T02:53:00.000-09:00

[[ZEITGEIST]] Stem cell research and the creation of chimeras

This from the BBC:

UK scientists planning to mix human and animal cells in order to research cures for degenerative diseases fear their work will be halted.... Opponents say this is tampering with nature and is unethical... Scientists accuse the body that grants licences for embryo research, the HFEA, of bowing to government pressure if it fails to consider their applications.

Here is a quote from Charles Sanders Peirce [CP 5.385] that I think throws some important light on this issue

"With the method of authority: the state may try to put down heresy by means which, from a scientific point of view, seem very ill-calculated to accomplish its purposes; but the only test on that method is what the state thinks; so that it cannot pursue the method wrongly. So with the a priori method. The very essence of it is to think as one is inclined to think. But with the scientific method the case is different. I may start with known and observed facts to proceed to the unknown; and yet the rules which I follow in doing so may not be such as investigation would approve. The test of whether I am truly following the method is not an immediate appeal to my feelings and purposes, but, on the contrary, itself involves the application of the method. Hence it is that bad reasoning as well as good reasoning is possible; and this fact is the foundation of the practical side of logic."

Good Science thrives in an environment were it is permitted to experiment freely. Since ethics are always contingent on the context of the good and bad being defended or attacked one cannot use ethical reasons alone to prohibit investigations. For those investigations, which in the short term are considered unethical, may in the long term yield results that appeal to a higher ethical order, for examples prohibitions against chimera research today on religious ground may prevent life saving applications tomorrow. Thus we can conclude that religion is against life, which seems fundamentally unethical. However, ethical considerations must within certain parameters be suspended in the investigation of new territories. A say certain parameters because some ethical issues obviously transcend this – the work of Dr Mengele for example. But the existence of an ethical scale is not the same thing as assuming that all the rungs on that scale are of equal importance and religious objections of some seem a very poor reason to halt research that may benefit the many.

2007-01-04T14:32:00.000-09:00

The nature of nature

It's getting near twelve o'clock so here are some rambling thoughts on the nature of nature, which, thinking ahead, if they convince me of anything will probably convince me always to revise what I write before I push the 'publish post' button. Still, a nice picture from flickr.

Nature is both the natural world that surround us and an essential characteristic of things. The essential characteristic of things is also described as being natural. This word designates a whole host of ideologically motivated opinions. It's either perfectly natural to do or be 'x', or not natural. I wonder Do these concepts 'nature' and 'natural' exist independent of each other or is there a way of uniting them. What then is the nature of nature?

Nature when applied as a description of the natural world seems to rope together all phenomena that is not a product of human work of interference. There is a distinction for instance between natural and manufactured materials and natural and manufactured products. In the latter case this distinction seems oxymoronic. Who ever heard of a natural products? Although this is taken to extremes today, as 'natural' is an appellation applied to all sorts of dodgy foods and toxic shampoos so as to mean roughly its opposite.

But what is the idea of nature implied in this natural/artificial distinction? I think the answer to that question if that nature is considered to be something that exists beyond us and in spite of us (humans). Like Antarctica is considered to be the last natural wilderness left on earth because it is the only place not routinely occupied by humans (with the honourable exception of the citizens of McMurdo and other permanent bases on the ice of course).

If that is true, what then should we make of human nature? Is this something inside us that exists beyond us and in spite of us? Well perhaps. Jung certainly seemed to think so, he wrote in Man and His Symbols that we will never be able to triumph over nature because we would first have to triumph over our own human nature, which was impossible. Jung thus suggests that nature is the fundamental ground on which humanity stands, something unknown and unknowable and yet we cannot escape from it no matter how hard we may try. Of course other cultures do not share this dualistic view of human versus nature. The Japanese have no myths appointing them stewards of the Garden of Eden. In the west we are taught from an early age to consider ourselves, like Spiderman, hugely powerful, but weighted down by the guilt of the responsibility of that power. Whether this is hubris on an accurate description of events is open to question.

Human beings are driven by curiosity, dare I say, the desire to find out and to know and understand their nature is actually part of their nature. Therefore if nature is to be understood as what is not known, this means that the destiny of our nature is in some senses to destroy itself, or know itself, and thus transcend itself. And you can take that particular metaphor into all kinds of well worn territories. For example you can consider human beings to be the consciousness of Gaia. An then the desire to understand rather than conquer nature suggest a noble teleology for the race. But can nature completely disappear? And is it possible for the knower to know everything about themselves for surely a position of knowledge assumes a knower who is more knowledgeably than that which is known. Or do we in the final analysis adopt a similar view to Jung and conclude that nature itself cannot be transcended, precisely because it will always inhere in humans (this seems to be to be a particularly fixed and immutable view of nature but no matter). I suppose the answer to that question is logically the knower has to transcend the framing of his knowing and become a different kind of knower. Only then can the knower can look back on her old self and define it in terms of its limitations. Thus I conclude that the destiny of nature is to disappear into knowledge. Although, Shiva-like, human curiosity has a capacity to destroy its, knowledge of anything operates according to the rules of the dialectic and according to the principles of balance and equilibrium. Although all systems are susceptible to pressure and tolerances can only be pushed so far. Even when all things are known, there will still be things that are unknown, although the nature of these things will be quite different from the mysteries we can envisage now.

2006-12-24T11:10:00.000-09:00

[[IMMERSIVE]] The latest installment of my notes on Heidegger's masterwork, Being and Time (Part 1, Division III, sections 16 and 17). As usual, if you have any comments or questions about the text, please submit them by commenting on this post.

Link

2006-12-24T04:27:00.002-09:00

Cut Up

One of the wonders of youtube and google video is the possibilities of revisiting your past. A case in point is a documentary on Williams Burroughs that I remember seeing at about age 14. This documentary had a seismic impact on me, especially Burrough's talk about the cut up method which fired my imagination.

Here are two items on the cut up method and related concepts. A seven minute clip from the aforementioned documentary. The most interesting bit of the clip is a conversation between Burroughs and Alan Ginsberg at the end, where he explains that if the whole universe consists of pre-recordings, then the only things that aren't pre-recordings are the pre-recordings themselves. Thus, if one tampers with those pre-recordings; one is tampering with the very fabric of the universe....

It seems to me that Burroughs, by quoting Wittgenstein's assertion that an argument cannot contain itself as a proposition, is convoluting two quite different things: an argument which is a judgement about something and a pre-recording which is a descriptive of the physical fabric of the universe. While laws can be adequately descriptive of the universe (since that is why they are laws) they can never be prosciptive (they cannot be the cause of something). Therefore Wittgenstein's propositions and Burroughs's pre-recordings are not the same thing.

Incidentally, the lady who shows Burroughs around his old flat in the film who is called Jessica. Jessica was my ex-landlady when I first moved to London in the 1980s. I remember talking to her about Burroughs. She wasn't a fan. I think an astute viewer will be able to detect a certain amount of tension between the two when they watch the film.

______________________

Here is 'Playback from Eden to Watergate,' Burroughs' preface to The Job, with more of his meddling with pre-recordings.

Playback from Eden to Watergate

In Encounter Magazine, admittedly once subsidized by the CIA, there was an article called "Night Words" by George Steiner. Talking about my writing and the writing of other writers in whose works sex scenes are frankly and explicitly described, he says, "In the name of human privacy, enough!"

In whose name is human privacy being evoked? In the name of those who bugged Martin Luther King's bedroom and ransacked the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist? And how many other bedrooms have they bugged? Does anyone believe that these are isolated instances? That they were caught on the first job? Who is casting the first stone here?

It is precisely by breaking down the whole concept of privacy that the monopoly the Nixon Administration wishes to set up will be broken down. When nobody cares, then shame ceases to exist and we can all return to the Garden of Eden without any God prowling around like a house dick with a tape recorder. Books and films in which the sex act is explicitly represented are certainly a step in the right direction. It is precisely this breakdown of shame and fear with regard to sex that the Nixon Administration is all out to stop so it can continue to use shame and fear as weapons of political control.

It is generally assumed that the spoken word came before the written word. I suggest that the spoken word as we know it came after the written word. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God-and the word was flesh . . . human flesh . . . in the beginning of writing. Animals talk. They don't write. Now, a wise old rat may know a lot about traps and poison but be cannot write "Death Traps in Your Warehouse" for the Reader's Digest, with tactics for ganging up on dogs and ferrets and taking care of wise guys who stuff steel wool tip rat holes. It is doubtful that the spoken word would ever have evolved beyond the animal stage without the written word. The written word is inferential in human speech.

My basic theory is that the written word was actually a virus that made the spoken word possible. The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host though this symbiotic relationship is now breaking down, for reasons I will suggest later.

I quote from Mechanisms of Virus Infection, edited by Mr. Wilson Smith, a scientist who really thinks about his subject instead of merely correlating data. What be thinks about is the ultimate intention of the virus organism. In a chapter entitled "Virus Adaptability and Host Resistance," by G. Belyavin speculations as to the biologic goal of the virus species are enlarged. "Viruses are obligatory cellular parasites and are thus wholly dependent upon the integrity of the cellular systems they parasitize for their survival in an active state. It is something of a paradox that many viruses ultimately destroy the cells in which they are living."

Is the virus then simply a time bomb left on this planet to be activated by remote control? An extermination program in fact? In its path from full virulence to its ultimate goal of symbiosis will any human creature survive?

"Taking the virus-eye view, the ideal situation would appear to be one in which the virus replicates in cells without in any way disturbing their normal metabolism. This has been suggested as the ideal biological situation toward which all viruses are slowly evolving."

Would you offer violence to a well-intentioned virus on its slow road to symbiosis?

"It is worth noting that if a virus were to attain a state of wholly benign equilibrium with its host cell it is unlikely that its presence would be readily detected or that it would necessarily be recognized as a virus." I suggest that the word is just such a virus- Dr. Kurt Unruh von Steinplatz has put forward an interesting theory as to the origins and history of this word virus. He postulates that the word was a virus of what he calls "biologic mutation affecting a change in its host which was then genetically conveyed One reason that apes can't talk is because the structure of their inner throats is simply not designed to formulate words. He postulates that alterations in inner throat structure were occasioned by a virus illness. And vot an occasion! This illness may well have had a high rate of mortality, but some female apes must have survived to give birth to the Wunderkinder The illness perhaps assumed a more malignant form in the male because of his more developed and rigid muscular structure, causing death through strangulation and vertebral fracture. Since the virus in both male and female precipitates sexual frenzy through irritation of sex centres in the brain, the male impregnated the females in their death spasms and the altered throat structure was genetically conveyed. Ach, lunge, what a scene is here . . . the apes are moulting fur, steaming off, the females whimpering and slobbering over the dying males like cows with aftosa and so a stink-musky, sweet, rotten-metal stink of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. . . .

The creation of Adam, the Garden of Eden, Adam's fainting spell during which God made Eve from his body, the forbidden fruit, which was of course knowledge of the whole stinking thing and might be termed the first Watergate scandal, all slots neatly into Doc von Steinplatz's theory And this was a white myth. This leads us to the supposition that the word virus assumed a specially malignant and lethal form in the white race. What then accounts for this special malignance of the white word virus? Most likely a virus mutation occasioned by radioactivity. All animal and insect experiments so far carried out indicate that mutations resulting from radiation are unfavourable-that is, not conducive to survival. These experiments relate to the effect of radiation on autonomous creatures. What about the effects of radiation on viruses? Are there not perhaps some so-classified and secret experiments hiding behind national security? Virus mutations occasioned by radiation may be quite favourable for the virus. And such a virus might well violate the ancient covenant of symbiosis, the benign equilibrium with the host cell. So now, with the tape recorders of Watergate and the fallout from atomic testing, the virus stirs uneasily in all your white throats. It was a killer virus once. It could become a killer virus again and rage through cities of the world like a topping forest fire.

"It is the beginning of the end." That was the reaction of a science attaché at one of Washington's major embassies to reports that a synthetic gene particle bad been produced in the laboratory. "Any small country can now make a virus for which there is no cure. It would take only a small laboratory. Any small country with good biochemists could do it."

And presumably any big country could do it quicker and better.

I advance the theory that in the electronic revolution a virus is a very small unit of word and image. I have suggested how such units can be biologically activated to act as communicable virus strains. Let us start with three tape recorders in the Garden of Eden. Tape recorder one is Adam. Tape recorder two is Eve. Tape recorder three is God, who deteriorated after Hiroshima into the Ugly American. Or, to return to our primeval scene: tape recorder one is the male ape in a helpless sexual frenzy as the virus strangles him. Tape recorder two is the cooing female ape who straddles him. Tape recorder three is DEATH.

Von Steinplatz postulates that the virus of biologic mutation, which he calls Virus B-23, is contained in the word. Unloosing this virus from the word could be more deadly than unloosing the power of the atom. Because all hate, all pain, all fear, all lust is contained in the word.

We now have three tape recorders. So we will make a simple word virus. Let us suppose that our target is a rival politician. On tape recorder one we will record speeches and conversations, carefully editing in stammers, mispronunciations inept phrases-the worst number one we can assemble. Now, on tape recorder two we will make a love tape by bugging his bedroom. We can potentiate this tape by splicing it with a sexual object that is inadmissible or inaccessible or both, say, the Senator's teenage daughter. On tape recorder three we will record hateful, disapproving voices. We'll splice the three recordings in together at very short intervals and play them back to the Senator and his constituents. This cutting and playback can be very complex, involving speech scramblers and batteries of tape recorders but the basic principle is simply splicing sex tapes and disapproval tapes together. Once the association lines are established, they are activated every time the Senator's speech centres are activated, which is all the time (heaven help that sorry bastard if anything happened to his big mouth). So his teen-age daughter crawls all over him while Texas Rangers and decent church-going women rise from tape recorder three screaming "WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN FRONT OF DECENT PEOPLE!"

The teen-age daughter is just a refinement. Basically all you need are sex recordings on number two and hostile recordings on number three. With this simple formula any CIA son of a bitch can become God-that is, tape recorder three. Notice the emphasis on sexual material in burglaries and bugging in the Watergate cesspool-bugging Martin Luther King's bedroom. Kiss kiss bang bang. A deadly assassination technique. At the very least sure to unnerve opponents and put them at a disadvantage. So the real scandal of Watergate that has not come out yet is not that bedrooms were bugged and the offices of psychiatrists ransacked but the precise use that was made of this sexual material.

This formula works best on a closed circuit. If sexual recordings and films are widespread, tolerated, and publicly shown, tape recorder three loses its power. Which perhaps explains why the Nixon Administration is out to close down sex films and re-establish censorship of all films and books-to keep tape recorder three on closed circuit.

And this brings us to the subject of SEX. In the words of the late John O'Hara, "I'm glad you came to me instead of one of those quacks on the top floor." Psychiatrists priests, whatever they call themselves, they want to turn it off and keep tape recorder three in business. Let's turn it on. All you swingers use movie cameras and tape recorders to record and photograph your sessions. Now go over the session and pick out the sexiest pieces -you know, when it really happens. Reich built a machine with electrodes to be attached to the penis to measure this orgasm charge. Here is an unpleasurable orgasm sagging ominously as tape recorder three cuts in. He just made it. And here is a pleasurable orgasm way up on the graph. So take all the best of your sessions and invite the neighbours to see it. It's the neighbourly thing to do. Try cutting them in together, alternating twenty-four frames per second. Try slowdowns and speedups. Build and experiment with an orgone accumulator. It's simply a box of any shape or size lined with iron. Your intrepid reporter at age thirty-seven achieved spontaneous orgasm, no hands, in an orgone accumulator built in an orange grove in Pharr, Texas. It was the small, direct-application accumulator that did the trick. That's what every red-blooded boy and girl should be doing in the basement workshop. The orgone accumulator could be greatly potentiated by using magnetized iron, which sends a powerful magnetic field through the body. And small accumulators like ray guns. There is two-gun Magee going off in his pants. The gun falls from his band. Quick as he was he was not quick enough

For a small directional accumulator obtain six powerful magnets Arrange your magnetized iron squares so that they form a box. In one end of the box drill a hole and insert an iron tube. Now cover the box and tube with organic material-rubber, leather, cloth. Now train the tube on your privates and the privates of your friends and neighbours It's good for young and old, man and beast, and is known as SEX. It is also known to have a direct connection with what is known as LIFE. Let's get St. Paul off our backs and take off the Bible Belt. And tell tape recorder three to cover his own dirty thing. It stinks from the Garden of Eden to Watergate.

I have said that the real scandal of Watergate is the use made of recordings. And what is this use? Having made the recordings as described, what then do they do with them?

Answer: They play them back on location.

They play these recordings back to the target himself, if the target is an individual, from passing cars and agents that walk by him in the street. They play these recordings back in his neighbourhood. Finally they play them back in subways restaurants, airports, and other public places. Playback is the essential ingredient.

I have made a number of experiments with street recordings and playbacks over a period of years, and the startling fact emerges that you do not need sex recordings or even doctored tapes to produce effects by playback. Any recordings played back on location in the manner I will now describe can produce effects. No doubt sexual and doctored tapes would be more powerful. But some of the power in the word is released by simple playback, as anyone can verify who will take the time to experiment.

I have frequently observed that this simple operation making recordings and taking pictures of some location you wish to discommode or destroy, then playing recordings back and taking more pictures-will result in accidents, fires, removals, especially the last. The target moves. We carried out this operation with the Scientology Centre at 37 Fitzroy Street. Some months later they moved to 68 Tottenham Court Road, where a similar operation was recently carried out.

Here is a sample operation carried out against the Moka Bar at 29 Frith Street, London, W.1, beginning on August 3, 1972. Reverse Thursday. Reason for operation was outrageous and unprovoked discourtesy and poisonous cheesecake. Now to close in on the Moka Bar. Record. Take pictures. Stand around outside. Let them see me. They are seething around in there. The horrible old proprietor, his frizzy-haired wife and slack-jawed son, the snarling counterman. I have them and they know it.

"You boys have a rep for making trouble. Well, come on out and make some. Pull a camera-breaking act, and I'll call a bobby. I got a right to do what I like in the public street."

If it came to that, I would explain to the policeman that I was taking street. recordings and making a documentary, of Soho. This was after all London's first espresso bar, was it not? I was doing them a favour. They couldn't say what both of us knew without being ridiculous.

"He's not making any documentary. He's trying to blow up the coffee machine, start a fire in the kitchen, start fights in here, get us a citation from the Board of Health."

Yes, I had them and they knew it. I looked in at the old prop. and smiled, as if he would like what I was doing. Playback would come later with more pictures. I took my time and strolled over to the Brewer Street Market, where I recorded a three-card Monte game. Now you see it, now you don't.

Playback was carried out a number of times with more pictures. Their business fell off. They kept shorter and shorter hours. October 30, 1972, the Moka Bar closed. The location was taken over by the Queen's Snack Bar.

How to apply the three-tape-recorder analogy to this simple operation. Tape recorder one is the Moka Bar itself in its pristine condition. Tape recorder two is my recording of the Moka Bar vicinity. These recordings are access. Tape recorder two in the Garden of Eden was Eve made from. So a recording made from the Moka Bar is a piece of the Moka Bar. The recording once made, this piece becomes autonomous and out of their control. Tape recorder three is playback. Adam experiences shame when his disgraceful behaviour is played back to him by tape recorder three, which is God.

By playing back my recordings to the Moka Bar when I want and with any changes I wish to make in recordings, I become God for this locale. I affect them. They cannot affect me.

Suppose, for example, that in the interest of national security, your bathroom and bedroom are bugged and rigged with hidden infrared cameras. These pictures and recordings give access. You may not experience shame during defecation and intercourse, but you may well experience shame when these recordings are played back to a disapproving audience. Shame is playback: exposure to disapproval.

Now let us consider the arena of politics and the applications of bugging in this area. Of course, any number of recordings are immediately available since politicians make speeches on TV. These recordings, however, do not give access. The man who is making a speech is not really there. Consequently, intimate or at least private recordings are needed, which is why the Watergate conspirators found it necessary to resort to burglary.

A Presidential candidate is not a sitting duck like the Moka Bar. He can make any number of recordings of his opponents . So the game is complex and competitive, with recordings made by both sides. This leads to more sophisticated techniques, the details of which have yet to come out.

The basic operation of recording, pictures, more pictures, and playback can be carried out by anyone with a recorder and a camera. Any number can play. Millions of people carrying out this basic operation could nullify the control system which those who are behind Watergate and Nixon are attempting to impose. Like all control systems, it depends on maintaining a monopoly position. If anybody can be tape recorder three, then tape recorder three loses power. God must be the God.

London, 1973, William S. Burroughs

2006-11-01T16:00:00.000-09:00

[[ZEITGEIST]]
NIGEL KNEALE DIES
Just heard the sad news that Nigel Kneale, the creator of Quatermass, has died at the ripe old age of 84. It was my privilege to meet Mr Kneale a few years ago, at a weekend held to honour his work in Cardiff.

He was the possessor of a truly astonishing and prophetic imagination, as well as the ability to craft a nail-biting story. I remember him talking about the last Quatermass films made in 1979 (known as the Quatermass Conclusion). The story revolved around young people becoming violent and obsessed with ancient sites like Stonehenge. These sites it turned out were in fact transporters for and alient civilisation to harvest people as food (!) Mr Kneale was telling me that he was always disappointed by the way Euston films had chosen to represent this group as hippies. He saw them as much more aggressive, like hells angels with certain hippie elements. It struck me then is what he was describing was 'crusties,' the traveler movement who stages bloody battles with the police around Stonehenge and other sites in the mid 1980s.

The other thing he envisaged in the 1960s was the rise of reality television. His play, Year of the Sex Olympics, made I think in 1967, described a reality TV programme where the protagonists were stranded on an isolated Scottish island and stalked by a murderer. This was broadcast to a Huxlean society of drugged up masses, fed a television diet of pornography to passify them. Lurid perhaps, but certain parts of the play were uncannily accurate. I asked Mr Kneale how he managed to be so prophetic, and he replied, self-depreciatingly, that the signs were already in the culture if you looked for them.

A sad fact is that some of his work was wiped by the BBC in the 1970s in a tape saving economy dive. The most famous example was his play, The Road, an extraordinary tale of a 17th century community that are haunted by visions from the future, of people fleeing a nuclear war. I really hope that some recording of that turns up one day, in the meantime, maybe the BBC will repeat The Stone Tape, which is the most fantastic television ghost story ever committed to videotape.

2006-10-31T00:37:00.000-09:00

[[ZEITGEIST]]

IPOD RANDOMNESS

The Guardian recently published an article by Steven Levy about the non randomness of the ipod shuffle function. This article concludes that,

true randomness is hard to achieve and
humans perceive patterns where there are none.

I wonder if a paradoxical interpretation of these facts may better explain what is happening. That is to say

randomness is difficult to achieve because the universe is not random and
as part of the universe, human beings are attuned to these patterns. This is in fact why there is such a thing as meaningful coincidence. Wasn't this what Jung was talking about when he advanced the concept of synchronicity?

Like levy and everyone else apparently, my ipod tends to favour certain songs over others. The trick is to delete those songs when they get too boring and thus disrupt the pattern of meaningful coincidence. This got me wondering if the ipod analogy could be extended to apply to life. In life, certain pattern clusters predominate, for example a person might have a run of good or bad luck. The wisdom of ipod suggests to me that, if it is the latter, a person should deliberately mess with the patterns of their lives (i.e. change their habits) and this would produce a different pattern configuration. Changing a habit would be the life-equivalent of deleting the oft recurring tune on the ipod. Thus, a whole self help philosophy emerges from the latest must-have consumer durable.

Here is an edit of the Levy article.

____________________

My first iPod loved Steely Dan. So do I. But not as much as my iPod did. By 2003, among the 3,000 or so songs in my iTunes library, I had about 50 Steely Dan tracks. Yet every time I shuffled my music collection "randomly" to mix the tunes, it seemed that the Dan was weirdly over-represented. Meanwhile, it began to dawn on me that there were songs, and even artists, that my iPod had taken a dislike to, if not a formal boycott. Where was Van Morrison? His work was in abundance in my iTunes library, but in my iPod's marathon rock fest, the Belfast Cowboy was perpetually waiting in the wings.

I made it a point to ask iPod owners if their beloved little units were judicious in distributing the songs among various artists or whether they played favourites. People would generally respond with a sigh of relief. Yes! Someone else has noticed! From the results of this admittedly nonscientific survey, it appeared that nearly everybody's iPod seemed to have a favourite artist, or two, or three. After I wrote about [this] in Newsweek, my inbox was flooded with emails - iPod owners were taking serious note of what happens in shuffle, and virtually all of them seemed to think that something funny was happening.

Apple insists that there is no computational flaw in its execution. "It is completely random. It is absolutely, unequivocally random," says Jeff Robbin, one of the original authors of iTunes and later head of the iTunes development team.

Robbin is talking randomness in terms that software can reasonably produce, which is not perfect randomness. Let's look at the way shuffle works. First of all, note what it doesn't do - it's not like mixing all the songs in the equivalent of a big bucket of lottery balls and picking out the next one. Instead…it shuffles the entire library so as to reorder them, just as a blackjack dealer shuffles a deck of cards. If you listen to the entire library all through, you will hear every song once and once only.

True randomness, it turns out, is very difficult to produce. This subject was most famously examined by Claude Shannon, arguably the Father of Randomness. Basically, he defined randomness as a question of unpredictability. If a series of numbers is truly random, you have no possible way of guessing what comes next. If something isn't random (as in the case of what letter might follow another in a message written in English), you have a better chance of figuring out what comes next. That's why it's so crucial to remove the natural redundancy of language from an encoded message and make the coded text look random.

But perfect randomness is an elusive ideal. For instance, if you're flipping a coin, a minuscule weight imbalance might, over the course of millions of tosses, make heads come up slightly more than tails. And if you're randomising on a computer, you have to introduce a "seed", which is a starting point for the algorithm that mixes up the selections. The seed must draw on some unpredictable input of time that begins outside the computer. Otherwise, the results would be the same over and over again.

Paul Kocher, CEO of Cryptography Research concludes that Apple's claims of a high degree of randomness are almost certainly valid. Another expert I consulted, John Allen Paulos, a Temple University mathematician, agreed. He wasn't surprised, though, that iPod users were questioning whether the shuffle was random. "We often interpret and impose patterns on events that are random," he says. "Especially with something like songs. Songs evoke emotion, and some stick in our minds more than others."

Steven D Levitt, the self-described "rogue economist" who co-wrote the bestselling Freakonomics, also fell into the trap. Writing on his blog, he professed constant surprise at how often his iPod shuffle "plays two, three or even four songs by the same artist, even though I have songs by dozens of different artists on it". But as a statistics maven, Levitt understood that the bottom line is that "the human mind does badly with randomness".

Indeed, says Kocher, "Our brains aren't wired to understand randomness - there's even a huge industry that takes advantage of people's inability to deal with random distributions. It's called gambling."

So why does Autofill produce nine Springsteen songs out of 188? Because that is what almost always happens in normal distributions of items from databases. Clusters of something are to be expected. Here's a classic maths trick: gather 40 people in a room and have everyone write down the day he or she was born. What are the odds that two people will have the same birthday? Nearly 100%. It sounds like a coincidence, but mathematicians will tell you it's much more unusual for there to be no such clusters.

We perceive trends when there are none. Poker players invariably believe they can lock into streaks. Backgammon champions swear that dice can go hot or cold. Likewise, people think they can cosmically predict what song will come next on their shuffle.

he seemingly magical effects of the shuffle function - a spooky just-rightness, even brilliance, that comes from great song juxtapositions - were also consequences of randomness. And, in its own way, that was much more disturbing.

2006-10-01T07:25:00.000-09:00

[[ZEITGEIST]] Cosmos
I have just discovered that the entire series of Carl Sagan's seminal Cosmos programme are available on google video. Sagan co-wrote and presented the series in 1979, billed as a "personal vision," it covers an ecletic range of subjects from tours of the known and speculative universe, to a brilliantly staged explication of the 'theory' of evolution, which Sagan confidently proclaims is, "not a theory, but fact."

I remember seeing some of the episodes of Cosmos on the BBC around the time when it was first produced. Then its thirteen episodes were cut down and broadcast as 50 minute segments and shown late in the evening. Why the BBC did this I have no idea. The series, although inspired apparently by home-grown documentaries like David Attenborough's Life on Earth, surpasses even these impressive achievements in my opinion. I am astonished revisiting the series again how much of my own speculative day dreams and musings were in fact inspired by the speculations of Sagan. His lamentation of the loss of the Library of Alexandra in the first episode, for example, seared into my consciousness and later manifested in all sorts of ideas which I have speculated upon and been obsessed with over the years. Later in my life, I came to admire Sagan's writing, both his non-fiction works and the novel Contact, which was later made into a cowardly movie by Robert Zemeckis, starring Jodi Foster. Cowardly because Zemeckis did not attempt the books jaw droppingly astonishing ending.

Sagan is of course a superlative teacher, his explanations of even the most gnomic and difficult theories have a clarity and an entertainment value which has not been surpassed. This series has several some heart stopping moments of astonishment, the majority of these are generated, not by the special effects, groundbreaking for the time, but which now appear a little ropey, but by Sagan's conviction and the strenght of the writing . I stongly recommend if you have a broadband connection and thirteen plus hours to kill to tune into google video and watch the show.

2006-09-23T12:25:00.000-09:00

[[ZEITGEIST]]
Breathing Earth
This site (requires flash) is really fascinating and a little bit chilling. When you log on it dynamically shows you the number of births and deaths and also the carbon dioxide emitted per second. I logged on for 30 seconds and it was already up to 40,000 tonnes - eek!

2006-09-18T10:02:00.000-09:00

[[IMMERSIVE]] Being and Time Glossary of terms
I have just finished the substantial update of the online glossary for Being and Time. It took bloodly ages and a lot of the definitions that were there have been revised, plus new ones have been added which pertain to part one, divisions one, two and three of the work.

2006-09-16T03:48:00.000-09:00

[[IMMERSIVE]] At long long last here is the fifth part of my notes on Heidegger's masterwork, Being and Time (Part 1, Division III). Actually this division numbers fifty or so pages so this is only the first ten. I am in the process of updating the
glossary and hopefully this will go online in the next day or so. If you have any comments or questions about the text, please submit them by commenting on this post.

2006-09-07T09:57:00.000-09:00

I was partly inspired to write this post by a guy on you tube that performed a strangely affecting version of Amelia. Joni herself is criminally under-represented on Youtube, although perhaps if I were a copyright holder I would be more inclined to say that other acts are criminally over-represented on Youtube - in a very literal sense (lol). but I digress.... This post was prompted by the fact that I looked around for some written praise for my favourite songs and found that they were rarely discussed, hence this write up.

While Morrissey may have written wittier lyrics, I consider the two candidates for the prize of most affecting song ever written to have come from Joni Mitchell 1976 album Hejira. They are Amelia and the title track itself – Hejira.

The title of the album refers to the journey Mohammad's made in 622 A.D. to avoid persecution in Mecca. Like the prophet, Joni's Hejira is obviously one of purging and healing also. According to Brian Hinton's a badly written and somewhat untrustworthy biography, Mitchell wrote the album Hejira while fleeing from the break-up of her relationship with drummer John Guerin. Travelling across the US by Car, Joni dealt with her celebrity by often pretended to be other people, disguising herself by dressing in wigs (Hinton 1996, 190).

The song Amelia is an extended metaphor involving the Aviator Amelia Earhart whose plane was lost over the pacific in 1937. In the song Earhart stands for both female achievement in a man's world and the perilous and self destructive nature of ambition itself. At one point in the song Joni confesses she has spent her whole life in clouds at icy altitudes, alluded of course to her biggest hit song – Both Sides Now.

The track Hejira is far less easy to pin down. In a sense it is a reading of Joni's life on the road. A catalogue of her strange experiences and mood, while at the same time being an implied memento mori for home and security and all these things she left behind.

The lyrics to both songs, although they may be somewhat self consciously poetic at time, seem nevertheless to be a good fit for Wordsworth's dictum that poetry is "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from emotions recollected in tranquillity." When combined with the scarcity and power of the songs what you have is something crystalline and coldly beautiful.

It's hard to pin down exactly why these songs work as well as they do. It has a lot to do with pristine technique and execution. Like Leonard Cohen, Joni writes, writes and writes her poetry, and yet still manages not to overwrite. Lyrics that seem only intriguing at fist grow in power and stature with each repeated listen. It does not take a genius to infer that Joni was not a happy woman making Hejira. A feeling of melancholy infuses the work and gives it a cohesion that countless revisions would no doubt otherwise have fractured – as is the case with other Joni Mitchell recordings actually.

Ultimately, Joni understands balance. The density of her writing is counterpoised with the sparse arrangements, and here Jaco Pastorius' bass lends the songs an air of spontaneity, not found in either the lyrics or in Joni's precise playing. Despite being narcissistic and self absorbed, the songs are, I think, a genuine attempt to think through the narcissism and self-absorption of her profession. While there are no answers, in the sense of epiphanies, Hejira does presents songs which border on intimate, if not forensic in self examination at times. However, Joni's gaze is unflinching in her search for truth and the songs, in their own way, become a kind of palliative for lesser mortals - a comfort to listen to when you are feeling down, yes certainly, and listening to Joni's songs bequeath to one's otherwise insignificant sorrow (in the grand scheme of things) a sense of epic and cinematic grandeur.

The album's art work is worth a mention. On the from sleeve Joni is decked out like a ingénue from the 1930s, complete with fur coat (a bit of a contradiction for this noted eco supporter surely?) On the inner sleeve she is dressed as a black crow wings spread anticipating Kate Bush's metamorphosis as a bat on Never for Ever.

2006-07-25T13:13:00.000-09:00

[[IMMERSIVE]]
If Man is the measure of things, as Protagoras said, then there is no complete reality; but being there certainly is, even then. (Peirce 7.349)

The big bearded philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce argues that what we called reality was made of two separate states: existence and reality (being). Existence is a special mode of reality, which, whatever other characteristics it possesses, has that of being absolutely determinate. Reality, on the other hand is a special mode of being, the characteristic of which is that things that are real independently of any assertion about them (CP 7.349). How are we to make sense of this?

Peirce asserts that whenever we come to know something as a fact, it is by its resisting us. The resistance shows us that something independent of us is there (CP 1.174). When anything strikes upon the senses, the mind’s train of thought is always interrupted; for if it were not, nothing would distinguish fact from fiction. With ever interruption there is always resistance, and so difference between the operation of receiving a sensation and that of exerting the will is merely a difference of degree, not of kind. When we pass from the consideration of the appearance of a fact in experience to its existence in the world of fact, we pass from regarding the appearance as depending on opposition to our will to regarding the existence as depending on physical effects. Thus reality consists of the aggregate of physical effects and of facts which persist in forcing themselves upon our recognition as something other than the mind’s creation. If we experienced no such persistence, life would be a mere dream. As Phillip K. Dick remarked, reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

A fiction on the other hand is a product of somebody's imagination; it has such characters as her thought impresses upon it. Fictions are real in the sense that we really think them. But though their characters depend on how we think, they do not depend on what we think those characters to be. A dream, therefore, has a real existence as a mental phenomenon, because somebody has really dreamt it; and moreover it does not depend on what anybody thinks was dreamt, and in this was Peirce says is completely independent of all opinion (CP 5.405). Therefore the thing dreamt retains its peculiarities by virtue of no other fact than that it was dreamt to possess them. Thus we may define the real as that whose characters are independent of what anybody may think them to be.

Applying Peirce's distinction to virtual reality we can say firstly that everything that is thought or experienced has a reality of a kind, this includes life as we experience it, dreams and mediations. Therefore if we want to distinguish these states from each other, judging them simply on the basis of how they appear will not provide us with a solution, since the appearance of reality is at the same time merely the reality of an appearance. However using Peirce's concept of resistances. we can distinguish a hierarchy of reality effects if we consider the resistances that each state imposes upon our being. If we can outline, at least in theory a way of measuring the reality effect of a virtual reality simulation depending on the resistances it offers. We have a way of determining the reality effect of a simulation.

For example in the film The Matrix (1999) the after Morpheus has explained the nature of the matrix to Neo, he exclaims "so none of this is real?" to which Morpheus replies, What is real? if real is something you can hear see taste touch smell then real is just electrical impulses interpreted by your brain." But if we apply Piece's rules we can say that whether the Matrix is real or not is actually immaterial, because if the matrix can affect a person physically, indeed if the Matrix can actually a person, then that person would be wise to take it seriously, whether it was real or not.

Lets take another example, imagine that you are in a virtual reality simulation built by a particularly sadistic engineer. The simulation looks really low resolution, it may even consist of just wire frame graphics, but inside the date gloves you wear are place little knives, so that when you touched a sharp object they would cut your hand. Now you become aware of the fact that brushing against one of those unrealistic wire frame objects actually results in a physical injury and this would mean that you would take the simulation much more seriously that say a simulation with much better graphics but whose surfaces did were not felt to be sharp enough to result in physical injury. What should be hopefully apparent from this discussion is that which we regard as real is not determined by mere appearance: reality is not a symptom of high-resolution graphics but is created in the resistence it offers. Thus reality is a sign of mattering.

2006-07-16T13:26:00.000-09:00

Sorry for the lack of posts, I've just finished writing a chapter on video game music for a forthcoming book on new media to be published in the winter (actually I'm not sure when it's going to be published). The writing and research for this chapter has been taking up rather a lot of time. If anyone is checking back here in search of Heidegger updates, I just want to say, don’t worry, I am on it. I intend to get back to Heidegger presently. Actually I think I'll take next week off an do some music, since this has been more sorely neglected than Heidegger.

I am concerned that the government is now committed to nuclear power. I thought we were supposed to live in a democracy (stop sniggering!) and here like the war in Iraq is another situation where the people are not consulted on major issues that affect everyone. I am also concerned that public opinion, according to James Lovelock on radio 4, has moved from something like 99% against nuclear power to 40% for. This in my opinion shows how fragile public opinion is when people rely on the media to inform them.

There is a great sight that Boing Boing linked to called Captain Copyright, Yes, that's right a copyright superhero – why hasn't anyone thought of this before? Oh yes, because its crap. The site is a Canadian initiative to teach children about the evils of copyright theft in the style of a comic strip. I thinking of ripping this off and claiming it as my own work. (Ha, Ha)

I have been getting into web stuff on Goldfrapp recently. Goldfrapp aren’t one of my favourite bands (I can take or leave the albums but I really like some of their single – do you know what I mean?), I especially the glam stomp stuff like "Strict Machine" and "Ooh La La". The video for the latter song is particularly good, a kind of distillation of all those acts I remember watching on top of the pops, like Suzy Quatro, Marc Bolan and Abba. I can't understand why people think Goldfrapp are particularly innovative, or have to ask them about their influences, since they are pretty obvious, well if you are over 35 at least. Personally I think they should open all their concerts with "The Cruch" by the Rah band, in the same way that the Smiths opened their's with "The Montagues and Capulets" from Sergey Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet.

Goldfrapp's website is pretty good. They have a video Q and A session with the band where they come across more like the hippie parents of rockstars than rockstars, but I think its quite funny in an endearing way. I also like this anecdote from Alison, talking about her misspent youth in the Independent:

"I wasn't properly bullied but they had it in for me," she says with a dry little laugh. "And then I got into make-up and Tippex and was well at home." Tippex? For correcting homework? "Inhaling," she laughs. "Then I ended up doing community service, just for being generally bad. They sent me out to make posters but they put me in a room with a lot of solvents so not many posters got made. And the ones that did were unreadable."

2006-06-13T13:37:00.000-09:00

[[ZEITGEIST]] Comedian Rob Newman on oil
You must see this. video on Google video. "Rob Newman gets to grips with the wars and politics of the last hundred years - but rather than adhering to the history we were fed at ... all school, the places oil centre stage as the cause of all commotion. This innovative history programme is based around Robert Newman's stand-up act and supported by resourceful archive sequences and stills with satirical impersonations of historical figures from Mayan priests to Archduke Ferdinand. Quirky details such as a bicycle powered street lamp on the stage brings home the pertinent question of just how we are going to survive when the world's oil supplies are finally exhausted"

2006-05-26T05:37:00.000-09:00

[[ZEITGEIST]] back with a vengeance
In a CBI dinner speech on 16th May Tony Blair announced nuclear power was back on the agenda with a vengeance. Nuclear power is seen by some – mainly those in the nuclear power industry!- as being the answer to global warning. However there is the non trivial problem of managing a substance that remains toxic for 4.5 billion years as is the case with uranium-238

While electricity generated from nuclear power does not directly emit carbon dioxide (CO2), the nuclear fuel cycle does release CO2, uranium mining for example is one of the most CO2 intensive industrial operations. And the construction of new nuclear power stations will need to be subsidised, most likely through increases in electricity bills.

Apparently it is not economically feasibly to power the UK using alternative energy sources alone. Presumably because nobody want to implement a cultural change of more efficient energy usage or better insulation. Does this sound like fiddling while Rome burns? Research by the Energy Savings Trust suggests that home generation of power is developing so fast that it could potentially provide 30%-40% of the UK's total electricity needs by 2050.

Sweden generates more nuclear power per person than any other country. With half the nation's electricity coming from nuclear sources. However in Januarey 1991, the Sweden's government agreed to stick to its commitment to phase out nuclear power by the year 2010. The government promised to spend 352 million Pounds to develop alternative sources of power and improve energy efficiency over the next five years.

Finally let us not forget this.

2006-04-27T10:59:00.000-09:00

I've just found two of my favourite videos on "youtube.com"

http://www.youtube.com/laurie_anderson

http://www.youtube.com/talking_heads

2006-04-02T11:39:00.000-09:00

landscapes of the lost and found
Charles Sanders Peirce said that a man who gets up on the wrong side of the bed attributes wrong-sidedness to every object he meets, and it is true that moods imprint themselves on the objects one encounters during the day. But similarly objects too have the capacity to imprint themselves onto a person's moods. For instance if you encounter a gnarly object like some old ivy twisting round the boughs of a fallen tree, your thoughts are liable to become somewhat gnarly and twisty themselves.

How those feelings are grasped and representation in language can in turn influence ways of thinking and feeling. Thus, someone who writes on the top of a mountain is going to have something of the mountain in their writing, and conversely someone who writes in the tangle of a forest is going to have some of the forest in their writing.

Although here I think the point cannot be taken too far. Sometimes people write precisely for the reason that they want to escape where they are. Does a person who writes in front of blank walls produce blank writing? No. Does a person who writes in front of a computer monitor produce monitorish prose? Possibly???

A friend of mine has taken to writing with a typewriter, and is eagerly advocating that I do the same; something about the percussive rhythm of the keys hammering out the prose that, apparently, leads to a punchier writing style. To write on the word processor is of course not really writing at all. For instance, I believe some Muslim clerics were charged with deciding whether is was allowable to word-process the Koran. The controversy was because it was forbidden that the word of God be tampered with in any way for instance with a spell checker – luckily, it was decided that the word of the Koran could not be said to be words at all until one pressed print.

Gnarly objects producing gnarly thoughts. This is the non-poetic justification for symbolism. For instance think of the mise en scène of Dr Caligari. Or when the hero of a fairy tale is lost in and alone and is described as running though a tangled landscape of thorns. This is the landscape of the lost. Just as the sweet grass picket fence cosy kitchen fire of fairy tale endings is the landscape of the found.

2006-03-25T01:28:00.000-09:00

[[IMMERSIVE]] Now online, the fourth part of my notes on Being and Time: Part 1 Division II. As always, if you have any comments or questions about the text, please submit them by commenting on this post. .

link: Heidegger's Being and Time, an explication and commentary

2006-03-05T04:50:00.000-09:00

[[IMMERSIVE]] Technologies of knowledge creation

Recently my wife and I have been retiling our bathroom. I am also writing my doctorate. These two experiences means that I speak with some conviction about the following…

If I saw a tile by hand it takes all day. If I buy a tile cutter it takes a matter of minutes. This makes one appreciate the tile cutter as one of a miracle of industrialisation.

If one reads a book, it takes all day. In that day maybe a few important connections will be made. If one reads Wikipedia you can gain the same information in a matter of minutes. This make one appreciate Wikipedia as one of the miracles of the knowledge revolution.

However with both miracles something is lost - with the former in terms of craft and with the latter what might be called a craft of scholarship.

Let me indulge you in a little myth spinning. Before the industrial revolution, objects were produced by craftsmen. They were not uniform or particularly perfect creations but they had what might be called "soul". Is the soul a by product of the time it took to create them? It possibly is For example I wonder if the modern preference--of some of us--for rough hews earthy furniture (see treehugger for details) a nostalgic throwback to the days of craft? What thoughts does one have when one spends all one's days making furniture?

If you agree that some soul is lost in the mass production of goods. Is this because perhaps the "soul" of education is lost in the information revolution? In terms of value, people tend to value most what is for them hardest to obtain. Does the value of knowledge then get defined in the struggle to obtain it?

While it is true that we certainly do not value stuggle for its own sake. But it also goes without saying that some of us (me) do value the products of struggle. For instance if I confessed a preference I'd have to say that I prefer Beethoven's music to Mozart's, and it I were asked why. I think it is because Beethoven's music has more stuggle in it - and therefore more soul. A propos, Wittgenstein said something to the effect that you can measure the value of anything piece of work in terms of what it cost you. Which reminds me...what exactly does one think about when one is reading a books all day?

Cutting and pasting one's doctorate from the pages of Wikipedia seems like a duplicitous thing to do. After all how much of a contribution to knowledge can a piece of work make when it was produced like that? Why do I really want to do it then? I have several theories....

If knowledge increases exponentially, then the contribution a scholar can make is in the analysis not the gathering of knowledge. However, if knowledge is increasing then the categories for analysis are also increasing and one needs to find short cuts to be able to refine those categories so that the real work can be done.

Why is it that you don’t produce anything meaningful without a struggle? Is it in fact the struggle itself that defines what is meaningful and what is not? I think perhaps it is. There is much toil in the production of anything, but it does not make the results of that toil necessarily worthwhile. On the other hand, there hasto be toil in the productions of things worthwhile, or else they would lack the sufficient meaning.

I do not want to do without the struggle, but at the same time I do not want to be outdistance by the subject before I have finished writing about it, which can happen when one's subject is tehnological innovation.

As a scholar I think I have to find ways to work faster to really get inside a problem, Is this the solution? What do you think?

2006-02-12T03:49:00.000-09:00

[[ZEITGEIST]]

When society is broken into bands, now warring, now allied, now for a time subordinated one to another, man loses his conceptions of truth and of reason. If he sees one man assert what another denies, he will, if he is concerned, choose his side and set to work by all means in his power to silence his adversaries. The truth for him is that for which he fights.

(Charles Sanders Peirce)

2006-02-07T15:21:00.000-09:00

[[IMMERSIVE]] I have just posted an update to the glossary of terms for Heidegger's Being and Time. As usual, if you have any comments or questions, please submit them in the section below.

link: Heidegger's Being and Time, glossary of terms

2006-01-31T14:32:00.000-09:00

[[ZEITGEIST]]
Two stories from the New York Times that are not related in any way

Climate Expert Muzzled by Nasa
The top climate scientist James E. Hansen at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming. Dr. Hansen said it would be irresponsible not to speak out, particularly because NASA's mission statement includes the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet." He said he was particularly incensed that the directives had come through telephone conversations and not through formal channels, leaving no significant trails of documents.

Exxon Mobil, disclosed record profits
It was announced last week that profits at Exxon rose to $36 billion in annual income. It now has the largest revenues of any company in the US. But Exxon did everything it could to play down the news. The company's wealth of $371 billion surpasses the $245 billion gross domestic product of Indonesia, an OPEC member and the world's fourth most populous country, with 242 million people. Republican lawmakers were on the defensive on Monday. Not only are they under heavy pressure from party leaders and from the White House to kill the proposed tax on oil companies, but they also inserted more than $2 billion in additional tax breaks for oil and gas companies in the energy bill that Congress passed last November.

2006-01-31T09:42:00.001-09:00

This sublime image graces my desktop. Nam June Paik 1932 - 2006

2006-01-11T00:11:00.000-09:00

[[ZEITGEIST]] Of Contemporary Interest…

BBC NEWS
Path to true happiness 'revealed'
Experts believe they have found the essential ingredients to make a person's life happier.

NEW YORK TIMES
President Bush calls for Congress to renew the antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act

THE GUARDIAN
Mike Evangelist tells the insider secrets of his gruelling preparation for the Apple Keynote speeches with Steve Jobs. This is interesting because it shows how much effort goes into an effortless presentation.

BBC NEWS
BBC opens its archives to public
The fall of the Berlin Wall and footage of the 1966 England World Cup team are among items released from the BBC News archives for the first time.

THE GUARDIAN
Google's $200 computer. Speculation is mounting that Google will this week unveil a no-frills personal computer.

2006-01-06T05:15:00.000-09:00

[[ZEITGEIST]] Kennedy Assasination
With all this talk about on of the great conspiracies of our time solved regarding the assassination of JFK (see here and here for details) I thought it would be fun, in an extremely black comic way, to look at another Kennedy assassination. One that is closer to home this time. I'm talking of course of the media assassination of the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Charles Kennedy. I am not going to concentrate of the many stories about Kennedy's drink problems, instead I want to examine the photographs that accompany the stories and show how these photographs provide their own mythical commentary (in the Bartesian sense). In order to do this I will be utilising another of Barthes' theories, that of anchorage. Anchorage, as someone in Stanford University put this, is text (such as a caption) that provides the link between the image and its context; the text that provides relevance to the reader.

In order to cut down on the possible variables I will constrain my focus to the BBC Online News site. Let's start with the story on 5 January 2006 when news of Kennedy's confession of his drink problem broke...

Accompanying the headline "Kennedy admits battling alcohol" there is an image of a very contrite Chares snapped at a lib dem conference. Conferences are excellent locations for the candid political snap for two reasons. Firstly because the leaders of the various parties are decked out in their leadership uniform of smart suit, and usually situated just in from of an emblematic banner which helpfully established the link between party and leader. Secondly because conferences go on for such an long time that you are inevitably going to catch a moment where the partly leader is caught off guards, or in this context, off message. Especially subversive is the snap with the leader is caught looking slack in front of some kind of righteous slogan. See the picture at the top of this post for an example of this.

Next we have the image chosen to accompany a transcript of Kennedy's statement to parliament on the 6th January where he admitted his drink problem.

Here we have a steely and yet vulnerable Charles: more an an image of a little boy who is facing up to a neighbour after smashing his window than a political statesman. In terms of eliciting our denying our sympathy, there is some ambiguity in the image. While this man does not look entirely trustworthy or heroic he still seems somewhat lovable.

Now we come to today's preferred image with the headling "MPs increase pressure on Kennedy"

Do you think that the BBC already made up its mind which way this story is going to go? Here we have an image of a spectacularly tipsy and unhinged Kennedy. I particularly like the sinsiter trick of lighting him from the side in harsh light (representing the sting of sobriety perhaps?) Gone is the lovable boy of yesterday, to be replaced with the sinister drunk.

I suggest that the mythical template for choosing this image was a combination of this

(A drunk)

and this

(Charles Laughton as the Hunchback of Notre Dame)

The image in today's Times Online is even more spot on in respect of the latter...

Link: an excerpt of Rhetoric of the Image by Roland Barthes

2006-01-02T02:45:00.000-09:00

[[ZEITGEIST]]
Wikipedia
There has been a lot in the news about Wikipedia recently. As the BBC reported, "Wikipedia has tightened its submission rules following a complaint from journalist John Seigenthaler described as 'false and malicious'," when an entry implicated him in the Kennedy assassinations. Seigenthaler phoned to complain to Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales (pictured), but he was informed that there was no way of finding out who wrote the entry. Wikipedia has since removed the entry and now requires users to register before they can create articles.

This seems like a good opportunity to discuss the trustworthiness and or tardiness of this online resources especially for scholars seeking short-cuts in their research. Of course being my ideal reader, your are already aware that Wikipedia works on an open source model. this means that anyone can edit its content. This alone can give conservative minded scholars the willies. As Bill Thompson writes, "Andrew Orlowski, writing in The Register, a UK-based technology website, is scathing in his dismissal of the site as a cult-like organisation where faith triumphs rationality" On the other hand as the Guardian in its leader on the subject remarked

In theory it was a recipe for disaster, but for most of the time it worked remarkably well, reflecting the essential goodness of human nature in a supposedly cynical world and fulfilling a latent desire for people all over the world to cooperate with each other without payment.

But the debate is not just a choice between academic condescension and utopian gloss. The guardian also published a useful article because it actually tried to address the issue by asking experts in the field to comment on the encyclopedia's accuracy. However this only underscored the fact in some cases that if one is going to be prejudiced against something no end of evidence is going to overturn that opinion. For example the "Encyclopedia" entry reviewed by the former editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Robert McHenry:

A cynic might conclude that the whole article exists chiefly as a context for this paragraph: "Traditional encyclopedias are written by a number of employed text writers, usually people with an academic degree. This is not the case with Wikipedia, a project started in 2001 with the goal to create a free encyclopedia. Anyone can add or improve text, images, and sounds ... By 2004 the project has managed to produce over a million articles in over 80 languages."

And the BBC Online's technology correspondent Bill Thompson reported on a study by Nature:

In the midst of all this controversy, Nature published the results of an analysis of a broad range of entries from the websites of Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica which shows a different picture… After looking at 42 articles, according to Nature, "only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopedia…. "But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively."

I broadly concur with Thompson's conclusion:

that we should not place complete faith in something which can so easily be undermined through malice or ignorance thanks to its open architecture… That does not devalue the project entirely, it just means that we should be sceptical about Wikipedia entries as a primary source of information, and not accept the claims that it marks some form of emergent collective intelligence, a new era in human consciousness or the rebuilding of the Library of Alexandria.

But I would add that the same 'cautiousness' should be extended to all sources, be they internet based or book based. What is really useful about internet-based research however is that you can cover a huge amount of ground and bounce from one idea to another very quickly, almost as if google or Wikipedia are an extension of the thinking process itself (I know that this statement is in need of some unpacking for its techno-determinist assumptions alone, but just go with it OK). What this means is that online research becomes something like brainstorming. It is true that whole pathways and areas are opened up. This is a different approach to research than the "looking for authoratative justification model" that is critiqued in the reports cited in this post. And in this context one consideration should always been at the front of the reasearcher's mind, namely that the opening up of knowledge is never a justification nor an end in itself, it is only the beginning of the sometimes wearisome but necessarily fastidious exploration of the territory that academic research demands. This is an endeavour of not just shoring up but actually substantiating or indeed refuting claims that are generated in the brainstorming phase. The fact that wikipedia is a free and widely available resources opens up access to knowledge for everyone. This is I think the reason that it is disparaged in some quarters.

________________________________

Update

Good article on why the media can't or just doesn't get Wikipedia

2005-12-23T14:36:00.000-09:00

A One Man Guy
I want to talk up Rufus Wainwright who is just brilliant and for anyone who hasn’t heard him I recommend that you go out and buy “Want One” and “Want Two” immediately. Rufus is the son of the singer songwriter Loudon Wainwright III, and has a stormy relationship with his father which he has chronicled in the song “Dinner at Eight” off the “Want One” album. “Dinner at Eight” is a poignant tale of a father who walks out on his young child, “

“long ago, actually, in the drifting white snow you left me”

and it describes how the child is always trying to get back at the father for that betrayal.

No matter how strong
I'm gonna take you down
With one little stone
I'm gonna break you down
And see what you're worth
What you're really worth to me

But I want to focus on the song “One Man Guy” off the “Poses” album.

You might presume from the title, especially if you knew Rufus was gay, that “One Man Guy” was a tale of male monogamy. I think this is one of the connotations the song is playing with actually, but in fact it was written by his father who is of course straight and the song turns out to be about him.

Cause I'm a one man guy in the morning
Same in the afternoon
One man guy when the sun goes down
I whistle me a one man tune

However, there is a certain killer irony in Rufus covering his father’s song which is a paean to selfishness, especially with the lyric…

People depend on family and friends
And other folks to pull them through
I don't know why I'm a one man guy
Or why I'm a one man show
But these three cubic feet of bone –
and blood and meat are all I love and know

So I see the song as actually being a companion piece to “Dinner at Eight,” in that the son is trying to address the father using the very words that define his selfishness and therefore are also the rationalisation of his betrayal of Rufus. The song therefore is not so much of a homage but an accusation.

2005-12-11T14:36:00.000-09:00

[[IMMERSIVE]] The third part of my notes on Heidegger's masterwork, Being and Time is now online (Part 1, Division 1). Instead of the old codger Heidegger, I have found a picture of the young pensive Heidegger - perhaps he is proof-reading the text of Being and Time: "the Being of Dasein is in each case mine," and thinking "what on earth did I mean by that?"

Well if you follow the link, you can find out. The drill is the same as before, if you have any comments or questions about the text, please submit them by commenting on this post. I have decided to break the text into chunks, since at 187kb it was becoming a bit unweildy - and some of us still have to use 56k modems! Hopefully the navigation is pretty intuitive so that the only headaches should be with the content - he he.

link: go to the index page here

2005-12-11T13:47:00.000-09:00

[[ZEITGEIST]] If you're a webmaster of a tab site, this man wants you in jail
Meet Lauren Keiser, if you are the webmaster of a guitar tab site he says he wants to put you in jail. Kasner is the president of the Music Publishers' Association (MPA) which represents US sheet music companies and who launched its first large-scale legal campaign against guitar tab sites recently.

Kasner is quoted as saying that he did not just want to shut websites and impose fines, saying if authorities can "throw in some jail time I think we'll be a little more effective".

David Israelite, president of the National Music Publishers' Association, added his concerns. "Unauthorised use of lyrics and tablature deprives the songwriter of the ability to make a living, and is no different than stealing," he said.

Hmmm, this is a difficult area. A Technological shift has made certain protectionist practices somewhat redundant and reaffirmed as basic truth - that all music want to be free! The fact that sheet music publishing is an anachronistic, exploitative and unfair practice does not seem to have crossed Messers Kasner and Isrealite's minds. After we have all heard the story of those fat-cat artists driving around in stretch limos and the poor publishers struggling to feed themselves in one room apartments - yeah right!

The first thing to say about tab sites is that people do not go out and buy the music and copy out the notation. Usually they sit a home with a song and their guitar and work out how to play it from scratch, for the love of it. Then they publish the results of their efforts online as a gesture of pride, as well as offering a helping hand to other musicians. I have to say that I love tab sites, but I often find that the tabs on them are wrong and I have to sit at a piano usually and work out what is happening (mind you that is exactly the same with sheet music, some of which is appallingly notated). But I digress, tab sites are still incredibly useful, since a lot of the hard work has been already done for you.

Now as for the legal implications. I don't know where publishers stand on this, because strictly speaking it is reverse engineering not copying. Reverse engineering is something that computer companies did in the 1980s to copy IMB's largely third party desktop PC. It ushered in the age of the personal computing. What happened was that a project manager (for Compaq say) would get a group of boffins in a room and tell them, "I a need a component that can do such and such, can you design one?" and "voila!" you had a IBM clone in the shops: leaching vast amounts off IMB profits. I would have thought a similar defence could be tried in the case of tab sites, since the songs on them can be considered to be reversed engineered.

For the source story go to the BBC

Here are some completely balanced and impartial comments on this story

Some good tab sites (visit them while you still can) are:

http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/

http://www.guitaretab.com/

2005-11-28T14:32:00.000-09:00

[[ZEITGEIST]] "It's official: Romance lasts just a year, Italian scientists say."
Or so the BBC site proclaimed in the above tagline relating to this article...

"The University of Pavia found a brain chemical was likely to be responsible for the first flush of love… In those who had just started a relationship, levels of a protein called nerve growth factors, which causes tell-tale signs such as sweaty palms and the butterflies, were significantly higher….Of the 39 people who were still in the same new relationship after a year, the levels of NGF had been reduced to normal levels. "

Why do I bring this up? Well I think it is interesting that we frequently see this kind of article in the popular media. if you don't belive me just look at the items on the "see also" section associated with this page on the BBC health site. There is a basic template to this kind of story. The word of a scientist (preferably working in the field of genetics) is presented as the final word on determining a certain type of human behaviour, be it a predeliction to murder, sexual preference of even our capacity to love. It is in the genes we are told. Funny that you never see an article which says, social scientists prove that love is not in the genes. I suppose it is assumed that we all know that already?? But then if that were true it begs the question why we are apparently so interested in hearing that we have no choice in determining who we are.

I wonder, and this is only a ~~half baked~~ tentative supposition, if this has anything to do with a human need to believe that there is such a thing as fate governing our lives. Of course such a belief was very prevalent in past societies. The ancient Greeks for instance has the Μοίραι (Moirae) Who were the personifications of destiny and as wikipedia put it "controlled the metaphorical thread of life of every mortal and immortal from birth to death (and beyond)." My theory is that in our modern, mostly secular age the idea of the fates probably won't wash, so we have transmuted the Moira and they not live in the strands of our DNA.

Of course the idea of 'fate' is opposed by that of 'free will' and indeed the very personification of fate sets up a kind of dialectic, which in later cultures to ancient Greece, (I'm thinking especially of the Enlightenment here) created a tension around the idea that life was fated, and a belief that perhaps the fates could be challenged by either one's strength of character or even by technology. It is an irony then that when we have seemingly banished the chimeras of superstition to the nether regions of the subconscious, that they have re-appeared in the very guises of those who were intitially credited with vanquishing them, i.e., the scientists.

2005-11-16T01:38:00.000-09:00

Not In My Name
The Guardian has a story about the blood-stained man who graced the cover of the Sun on the day that parliament voted on the 90 day terror laws with the headline 'Tell Tony He's Right'. Well, irony of ironies, this man turns out to be the media studies professor John Tulloch, author of Risk and Everyday life. Not a man you would have thought who would have supported a Draconian curtailment of individual freedom that was Blair's proposed anti-terror laws... and you would have been right.

"There could be no more inappropriate image for the Sun to have chosen. The bloodied victim, John Tulloch, feels deep anger with Tony Blair and politicians for the role they played in stirring up the violence that came to London on July 7. But Tulloch also happens to be a university professor in media studies. As the Sun's editors were putting together their front page on Monday night, Tulloch, slowly recovering from his injuries, was hard at work on a book he has just started. The subject? What happens when a professor of media studies, habituated to deconstructing news stories, becomes the subject of the story."

for more on Professor Tulloch's academic career go here and here

2005-11-09T02:08:00.000-09:00

Exploding Whale
To celebrate the launch of Google Video, well of me finding it anyway, I bring you a perennial internet favourite the Oregon State Highway Division's nightmare that was the exploding whale. Although this story is absolutely real, I love the combiniation of satire on homespun news reporting and out and out slap-stick (good descriptive actually). This one always went down very well when I worked at Greenpeace by the way.

Now if only I can find a decent copy of 'loving cat.'

Update
I found 'loving cat' here

2005-11-08T09:36:00.000-09:00

[[ZEITGEIST]] Kate Bush 'Aerial'
I was eagerly anticipating the release of this one, and I must say it does not disappoint. I particularly love the use of birdsong mixed with Kate's own vocals. Wood pigeons form a chorus intoning that the 'sea and sky are full of honey'. Blackbirds' song mixed with human laughter. It seems that with Kate, metaphorical allusions no longer need to be spoken of; they can be demonstrated - it's just genius really! I was intrigued when I heard Kate Bush's new album was going to be called 'Aerial'. I wondered if it was a nod to Sylvia Plath's elegiac last book of poems - Ariel? Seems not: the dominant emotion in Kate's work is joy. The connection is interesting though, I wonder if Plath served as Bush's educator in the same way that Shopenhauer served as Nietzsche's?

"...for your true nature lies, not concealed deep within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you usually take yourself to be. Your true educators and formative teachers reveal to you what the true basic material of your being is, something in itself ineducable and in any case difficult of access, bound and paralysed: your educators can be only your liberators. (UM3:129)"

Implicit in Nietzsche conception of an educator, is the notion that eventually the educator will be ultimately transcended. It is tempting to draw connections between Bush and Plath, so I will! Perhaps by entitling her work 'Aerial', Kate feels confident enough to both acknowledge Plath's influence and transcend it at the same time???

Now a more fatuous remark about Kate Bush's return. Has anyone tried to navigate her website yet? If you fancy your chances go here. It is very beautiful but just a little too controlling (metaphor for Kate?). Anyway, I think Kate needs to consult with Jacob Nielsen as well as with her other artistic muses on future designs!

Links
The text for Shopenhauer as educator can be found here
The Kate Bush fanzine homegound can be found here

2005-11-03T22:46:00.000-09:00

[[IMMERSIVE]] PLAYBOY OF THE VIRTUAL WORLD
There is a story on the BBC website of a guy paying $100,000 for a virtual space station that he plans to turn into a nightclub. Here is some info on the guy, his name is Jon Jacobs aka NEVERDIE

In October of 2005, Project-Entropia developer Mindark placed into public auction a Virtual Space Resort built upon an Asteroid with a nightclub, multiple hunting areas [hunting areas?!!], a stadium, and a 1000-room hotel. This extraordinary piece of virtual Real Estate with incredible real-cash revenue potential captured the imagination of the gaming community and within only three days, eight serious bidders had emerged. NEVERDIE, who is based in Miami, Florida, watched as hurricane Wilma approached and realized that if the winds took out his power he might lose the auction, so in the early hours of the morning he used the "Buy it Now" auction feature and purchased the Resort outright for the Record sum of $100,000 U.S. dollars. NEVERDIE has officially named the spacre resort Club NEVERDIE and he promises to develop it into the Greatest virtual night club in the Universe

Heady stuff I'm sure you'll agree. However investigating further into project Entropia I get the impression that rather than being the stuff that dreams are made of, it is the stuff that I get spammed about all the time, "you too can be rich... you too can find luurve" which proports to be the stuff that dreams are made of... if you grasp my meaning. Check out the unintentionally hillarious promotional video, in which the PVC clad Sayah King is your virtual guide on a tour of project Entropia. This tour quickly reveals the paucity of the imagination of Entropia's architects, who equate "virtual utopia" with "terrestrial shopping mall."

I also like this oh so inclusive statement on their FAQ:

3.4 Why is not Macintosh or Linux supported?
Project Entropia is built on a graphics engine from NDL which currently requires DirectX from Microsoft to run. There are currently no plans to make PE available on other platforms than the Microsoft compatible PC.

hmmmm....

2005-11-03T16:24:00.000-09:00

[[IMMERSIVE]] I have just posted a glossary of terms used in Heidegger's Being and Time. I think the glossary is a useful introduction to Heidegger's masterwork.

If you have any comments or questions, please submit them in the section below. Note; this is a work in progress and only covers the introduction so far.

link: Heidegger's Being and Time, glossary of terms

2005-10-29T00:34:00.000-09:00

Lose Weight the Hacker Way
Boing Boing included a link to an extraordinary diet book written by self confessed hacker John Walker.

From a cultural studies perspective, I find this fascinating for what it reveals about the hacker ethos as much as for any weight loss tips it contains. Its gets right to the heart of that systems mindset as well as the hacker desire to control events - "Once you possess the power to circumvent limitations, to control things most people consider immutable, you're liberated from the tyranny of events. You're no longer an observer; you're in command. You've become a hacker"

Walker offers this succinct definition of the Hacker, which is the antithesis of a popular conception of a computer criminal...

The word ``hacker'' and the culture it connotes is too rich to sacrifice on the altar of the evening news. Bob Bickford, computer and video guru, defined the true essence of the hacker as ``Any person who derives joy from discovering ways to circumvent limitations.''

There is also a lot of humour to be found too....

"People who thrive on unscrewing the inscrutable--figuring out how complicated systems work and controlling them--sometimes fail to apply those very techniques to maintaining their own health. How strange to on the one hand excel at your life's work and on the other, XL in girth."

Fascinating stuff, here's the link

2005-10-28T00:00:00.000-09:00

Flock to this
BBC are running a vanity piece (interesting though) on the new flock browser, that works according to open source principles of sharing information not just pushing it out.

"What Flock represents is the first coherent attempt to write a web browsing programme where all the interactive elements are part of the programme, not bolt-ons... the way we look at the internet is about to change dramatically. And with the open source movement getting further into the mainstream of business, programmes like Flock have a better chance than ever of shaping the change."

Go to article

2005-10-26T06:35:00.000-09:00

Good to see my home town making the front page of the BBC site yesterday (it is pronounced "Mac-HUNT-leth" btw,). The town is hosting an amateur film festival and to publicise the event Alex Randall, Nicola Arciero, Jenny Hall, John Hedley and Mark Bloomfield, decided to erect their own Hollywood sign on the hillside on Pen'Rhallt Common which can be seen throughout the town - just like the Los Angeles hillside in fact.

This is typical actually of the energy and enthusiasm of local people to create something special about living here, If anyone is around in mid Wales next Saturday (I know this is a stretch for most of you) I thoroughly recommend coming to Mach for the lantern parade and fireworks display. This is where locals march through the town carrying home made lanterns, some of which are quite spectacular

2005-10-09T21:53:00.000-09:00

[[IMMERSIVE]] The second part of my notes on Heideggers masterwork, Being and Time is now online. Like before, if you have any comments or questions about the text, please submit them by commenting on this post. Note; this is a work in progress and I still intend to add a bibliography and a fully linked glossary.

link: Heidegger's Being and Time, an explication and commentary

2005-10-04T15:39:00.000-09:00

Infinite Escher

Hey, here's a great thing. Someone has created an infinitely regressive/progressive flash presentation, of a fantasy landscape inspired by an Escher-type painting. Go there and enjoy!

Thanks to Rich M for the link...

2005-10-01T14:37:00.000-09:00

Sparks are on Blogger
This is very exciting, it turns out that one of my favourite bands are also bloggers. So as a token of my profound respect and admiration for the Mael brothers I urge you both to go there and also to buy their music!

2005-09-30T00:36:00.000-09:00

[[ZEITGEIST]] The power of Nightmares
It is great to see that Adam Curtis's remarkable film on the war on terror is online. I am proud to say that I worked on this film and his previous effort, Century of the Self, albeit in a very humble capacity of assisting the edits. If you haven't seen it go to archive.org and enjoy.

2005-09-30T00:29:00.000-09:00

[[ZEITGEIST]]
The British Kinsey Report
I'm sure this will be widely reported in the blogosphere. A Really interesting BBC article on a British Kinsey style report about the sexual mores of the British people in the 1940s. It seems to echo some of the (im)famous finding of Kinsey himself. I wonder what those on the the political right, who have been steadfastly trying to undermine Kinsey's findings ever since they appeared will make of this?

"The Kinsey Report of 1948 famously lifted the lid on American sexual behaviour. But when a similar study was conducted in Britain the following year, the findings were so outrageous they were suppressed. Only now have they been revealed."

2005-09-30T00:19:00.000-09:00

[[ZEITGEIST]]

Surveillance is defined as a social technology of power and the traditional approach to surveillance studies has been to understand its central role in the maintenance and reproduction of the social order, But surveillance is also a fantasy of power – the creation of virtual control where supervision may not be a social operation – and to understand what the technology of surveillance is, we have to appreciate the fantasy that drives it (William Bogard: 1996, 8).

The modern bureaucratic state gathers massive amounts of data on its citizens, we are the most surveyed populous in history (ibid., 16).

This recent Guardian article on loyalty reward cards inspired me to dust off some thoughts on surveillance technologies particularly the US government Total Information Awareness Program, which was killed by Congress in 2002 (Dead but not exactly buried, if you know what I mean).

Personally I do not think the surveillance society is altogether a bad thing, but that is a much more complex argument than is outlined here, and it will have to wait for another time. Meanwhile, here are the thoughts…

*********

It can be argued that 9/11 should have undermined rather than strengthened our faith in technology. For on that day the devices that should have kept us safe broke down in the most catastrophic way imaginable. However, the disillusionment that was undoubtedly felt was overwhelmed by a spirit of patriotism, and people's faith in technology quickly reasserted itself. Specifically in what David Lyon called the "guaranteed security myth," where populations feel they can and should be totally protected by technical and military means (Lyon: 2003,46). In terms of the guaranteed security myth, the 9/11 disaster can be seen as a failure of the democratic system not of technology. It came about because the rights of the individual were prioritised above the safety of the society as a whole. This is the failure that the PATRIOT Act and new surveillance technologies aimed to correct.

The Total Information Awareness program or TIA, that was being developed under the auspices of the Pentagon. The aim of TIA was to identify potential terrorists before they strike. In a process known as data mining, vast amounts of data would be searched for patterns that might indicate terrorist activity (CNN, www). To get an idea of how much data could be searched; it was envisioned that the software could analyse "multiple petabytes." One petabyte is so vast that it can hold forty pages of text for every one of the six billion people on Earth (CNN 1, www).

With TIA technology, the government would be able to compile so much information on a person that it could reconstruct her daily life instantaneously. This bares an uncanny resemblance to William Bogard's theory of dataveillance. There would be no need for a detective to trail a suspect, or for CCTV cameras to film them, because the data would simulate their every movement and construct their life in advance of them living it. The government would no longer need to identify potential suspects either, because with total information awareness; everyone would be a suspect.

Defence Under-secretary Pete Aldridge gave the government's view of TIA as a choice that had to be made between liberty and personal safety: "We are in a war on terrorism… we are trying to give our people a sufficient set of tools to track down the terrorists" (CNN, www). In the light of the claims of total information awareness, "sufficient tools" sounds like a remarkable understatement. But critics of the program asked how much freedom Americans must give up in the pursuit of potential terrorists? One of TIA's own researchers admitted that a high number of "false positives" could result from such techniques. A false positive, in this case, means being labelled wrongly as a terrorist, and thanks to the PATRIOT Act, this potentially could result in imprisonment without trial.

One of the effects of 9/11 has been to re-establish the dependency populations feel on their governments to protect them. It is not that society has become fairer, but citizens have become more aware of their dependency on governments. Arguably that dependency has been exploited since the 9/11 attacks and a climate of fear defines much of the political discourse. Ironically in the U.S. it has been staged as a fight for freedom versus tyranny, when in fact many individual freedoms have been taken away.

___________________________________________

References

Bogard, William, The Simulation of Surveillance, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996

CNN, Military intelligence system draws controversy, URL = http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/11/20/terror.tracking [accessed 10/1/05]

CNN 1, Anti-terror record mining research continues, URL = www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/02/23/terror.privacy.ap [accessed 11/1/05]

Giddens, Anthony, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991

Lithwick, Dahlia and Julia Turner (2003) A Guide to the Patriot Act, URL = http://slate.msn.com/id/2087984/ [accessed 5/1/05]

Lyon, David, Surveillance After September 11, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2003

2005-09-13T10:15:00.000-09:00

[[ZEITGEIST]] John Titor

A friend told me this story the other day about John Titor - a time traveller from 2036 who posted on bulletin boards in circa 2000. I have to say that I am not a believer, however I am really interested in the guy who was John Titor, who obviously is very intelligent and interested in speculating about possible future scenarios regarding the way civilisation is heading and has concocted a very successful cultural myth in order to present these ideas to a wider public. The thing about being the "man from the future" is that your words carry a great deal more weight and authority than they would if you were just "a man from the present".
LINKS
Wikipedia has I think the best overview of the Titor phenomenon.

There is also this site, which shows some of the cool graphics from the time travel machine instruction manual that Titor used (very Back to the Future)

Finally, here is some information about Alas Babylon a novel, written in the 1950s, that deals in fascinating detail witht the aftermath of an massive atomic strike on the US, and which is said by his critics to influence Titor's account.

2005-09-12T11:16:00.000-09:00

[[IMMERSIVE]] I have just finished the first section of my notes on Heideggers masterwork, Being and Time. If you are at all interested in Heidegger, existentialism and the like you should go there. If you have any comments or questions about the text, please submit them by commenting on this post. Note; this is a work in progress and I will be adding stuff as I go like a bibliography and a fully linked glossary.

link: Heidegger's Being and Time, an explication and commentary

2005-08-13T21:20:00.000-09:00

Meat is still murder
From the Guardian today...

It is the ultimate conundrum for vegetarians who think that meat is murder: a revolution in processed food that will see fresh meat grown from animal cells without a single cow, sheep or pig being killed.

Gosh what a simple-minded and patronising statement! If they choose to become a vegetarian, a person's reasons can be many, varied and complex. Mine was because I became aware of and was increasingly worried by the seemingly all pervasive industrialisation of the meat industry. The tipping point came while reading an article about genetically enhanced animals being created for food consumption in 1987. The idea that I'm going to start eating meat again, because they are now growing it in a laboratory is patently riduculous. Frankly if I were to start eating meat again, I would buy land and some chickens, feed them organic food and slaughter them myself.

Link: read full text of Guardian article here