deep not overextended (norma fraser versus judy mowatt)

Seems to me the only time I feel OK is when I'm not feeling
overextended in one way or another. Like the times when I'm not
saying "oh yes for sure I can do that" to everyone. And the times
when I've got a reasonable amount of money in the bank. And when I'm
getting enough sleep. Ha ha ha.

Pretty rare times, seems like, but maybe it's just because I never yet
mastered the idea of keeping it simple, herp/derp. I got a new idea
about that.

The world reduces to Projects X Time. Or Activities X Time, whatever
you want to call it. And Time naturally breaks up into Now, Next,
Soon, and Later. Projects at any given moment break up into whatever
you want. And then things just pop off the various stacks without
disruption.

* * *

that's how my love is
listen to me boy
alright now
silent river runs deep
when it comes to lovin' me she's worst
but when it comes to being loved she's first
I say silent river runs deep
I realize love ain't no toy
you might think I don't love you boy
you might think
but listen
things ain't that bad
listen to me boy
baby you can’t love a key without love
but I realize
love ain't no toy
but there's someone who's torn it apart
but listen
if sometimes I feel sad
silent river runs deep
silent river runs deep
when I say listen to me boy
when it comes to being loved people
I say silent river runs deep
The first cut is the deepest, baby I know
'Cause when it comes to being lucky people
I love you boy
just to help me dry the tears that I've cried
but listen
listen to me boy
alright now
but listen
The first cut is the deepest
The first cut is the deepest
'cause when it comes to being lucky people
that's how I know
that's how I know
I say silent river runs deep
but baby, I'll try to love again, but I know
I'm cheating boy
silent river runs deep
believe me when I say
silent river runs deep
The first cut is the deepest, baby I know
I love you boy
that's how my love is
I'm cheating boy
and it's taking almost all that I've got
Just to hold you by my side
when I say believe me when I say
I would have given you all of my heart
but listen
The first cut is the deepest, baby I know
listen to me boy
silent river runs deep
when I say
you might think
'cause I'm sure gonna give you a try
silent river runs deep
and if you want, I'll try to love again
don't worry darling
The first cut is the deepest
when it comes to lovin' me she's worst
but if you want, I'll try to love again

nested

"Without sustained social interaction, the human brain may become as
impaired as one that has incurred a traumatic injury."
--http://www.boingboing.net/2010/12/17/is-long-term-solitar.html
quoting http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_gawande
which cites a 1992 medical study.

I can't find the study written up anywhere in particular, but cf.
http://www.solitaryconfinement.org/uploads/sourcebook_web.pdf
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sremska_Mitrovica_camp

This is all circulating now with regard to this:
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/14/manning/index.html
(it being mainly an irony that Assange was briefly held in solitary
confinement in the UK).

?em ekil uoy t'nod yhw (beck versus radiohead)

"Generally speaking, those men who reported a great deal of sex
fantasy had no partners or were in some sense sexually unfulfilled.
Women who engaged in a great deal of fantasy were usually also having
an active and satisfying sex life with a loved partner. Thus it seems
that men's fantasies often signify sexual frustration, while women's
fantasies are awakened or liberated by sexual activity." -- Glenn
Wilson, The Great Sex Divide, pp. 10-14. Peter Owen (London) 1989;
Scott-Townsend (Washington D.C.) 1992.
(http://www.heretical.com/wilson/sfantasy.html)
* * *
(double barrel buckshot)
You're so fuckin' special
so why don't you kill me?
You're just like an angel
asleep on the love-seat
Ban all the music with a phony gas chamber
Sprechen Die Deutsch hier, Baby!
You can't write if you can't relate
Soy un perdedor
She run run run run...
run away
I'm a weirdo
I don't care if it hurts
Dog food stalls with the beefcake pantyhose
With the rerun shows and the cocaine nose-job
I wanna have control
One's on the pole
Forces of evil on a bozo nightmare
I want you to notice
Your skin makes me cry
Someone came sayin'
I'm insane to complain
You float like a feather
And my time is a piece of wax
fallin' on a termite
You're so fuckin' special
when I'm not around
I'm a winner; things are gonna change I can feel it
You're so fuckin' special
I want a perfect body
But I'm a creep
I wish I was special
so why don't you kill me?
I'm a driver
Whatever makes you happy
In a beautiful world
Don't believe everything that you breathe
With the plastic eyeballs
Savin' all your food stamps
and burnin' down the trailer park
I want a perfect soul
'cuz one's got a weasel and the other's got a flag
run... run...
spray-paint the vegetables
why don't you kill me?
Baby's in reno with the vitamin d
He hung himself with a guitar string
Whatever you want
Trade the cash for the beef for the body for the hate
I wish I was special
You get a parking violation
(yo bring it on down)

head in up to your diagram

"We report two experimental studies on the potentially detrimental
effects of nonshared, external representations in an instructional
setting. Domain experts viewing an external representation responded
to E-mail inquires for medical advice written by people who were
unable to see this external representation. Based on research on
expert–layperson communication, we predicted that the experts'
extensive and highly integrated knowledge of their own domain would
make it very difficult for them to comprehend the completely different
perspective of a layperson. We assumed that such a one-sided immersion
in one's own privileged knowledge would be exacerbated by the
availability of external representations (e.g., diagrams of body
functions). Results confirmed that visualizations making the subject
matter immediately evident for the expert did have such a detrimental
effect." -- "Explaining with nonshared illustrations: How they
constrain explanations" (abstract), by Regina Jucks, Rainer Brommea
and Anne Rundea
Sadly I seem to suffer from this problem quite a lot ><

the thin ribbons of gray macadam

The ambush of Barrow and Parker proved to be the beginning of the end
of the "public enemy era" of the 1930s. New federal statutes that made
bank robbery and kidnapping federal offenses, the growing coordination
of local jurisdictions by the FBI—plus the installation of two-way
radios in police cars—combined to make the free-ranging outlaw bandit
lifestyle much more difficult in the summer of 1934 than it had been
just a few months before. Two months after Gibsland, John Dillinger
was ambushed and killed on the street in Chicago; three months after
that, Charles Arthur "Pretty Boy" Floyd took 14 FBI bullets in the
back in Ohio; and one month after that, Lester "Baby Face Nelson"
Gillis shot it out, and lost, in Illinois. Thereafter, the Public
Enemies would no longer operate on thin ribbons of gray macadam across
America, but only on silver screens throughout the world. --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonnie_and_Clyde

naming things

Example: The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics gets its name
from the fact that song and voice is carried by the breath. Kerouac
practiced tracing his mind's thoughts and sounds directly on the page.
Allen Ginsberg's poetry works on this model, and Chögyam Trungpa
wanted meditation-teachers-in-training to learn to be poets in this
style, so they would teach with attention to the breath, as poets. --
Based on page 427 of "Recalling Chögyam Trungpa"

a void

"My input revolved around the idea of ritual art—what options were
there open to that kind of quasi-sacrificial blood-obsessed sort of
art form? And the idea of a neo-paganism developing—especially in
America—with the advent of the new cults of tattooing and
scarification and piercings and all that. I think people have a real
need for some spiritual life and I think there's great spiritual
starving going on. There's a hole that's been vacated by an
authoritative religious body—the judaeo-Christian ethic doesn't seem
to embrace all the things that people actually need to have dealt with
in that way—and it's sort of been left to popular culture to soak up
the leftover bits like violence and sex." -- David Bowie,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hearts_Filthy_Lesson

the most wonderful time of the year

"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be
their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge
gives." -- James Madison

"While it is a crime to leak classified information, receiving and
publishing it is not."
--http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/paypal_announces_it_will_no_longer_handle_wikileak.php

$ -> WikiLeaks
BOX 4080
Australia Post Office - University of Melbourne Branch
Victoria 3052
Australia

how'd that happen?

An engineer, Hines said he was inspired to create the robot after a
friend died in the September 11, 2001, terror attacks. That got him
thinking about preserving his friend's personality, to give his
children a chance to interact with him as they're growing up.

Looking around for commercial applications for artificial
personalities, he initially thought he might create a home health care
aide for the elderly.

"But there was tremendous regulatory and bureaucratic paperwork to get
through. We were stuck," Hines said. "So I looked at other markets."
--http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/worlds-first-sex-robot-revealed-at-porn-show-1864266.html

open sourcerors

"Open source development and OSINT are conceptually linked because of
their inherent collaborative nature and wide focus, as well as an
emphasis on transparency in methods and sources. When employed
jointly, these two methods can serve to force a break from the culture
of secrecy in the intelligence community to an more open system that
is better suited to the challenges presented by increasingly networked
adversaries. The interaction between a new kind of knowledge
management (open source development) and collection (OSINT)
indiscriminately empowers government affiliated groups, positive
social activist networks, as well as terrorist and criminal networks.
Groups who take advantage of open source methods gain access to huge
pools of collective knowledge and the means to build networks to both
collect and distribute it, facilitating the horizontal movement of
information and knowledge. The possibility of the application of an
open source development system to the intelligence process allows for
the best practices of the IT industry to be applied to the exponentially
expanding quantity of open source material available to create the highest
quality intelligence products with the greatest utility." -- Freeing
knowledge, telling secrets: Open source intelligence and development,
http://epublications.bond.edu.au/cewces_papers/11

the applications layer

My "psionic" review of the recent film, "The Social Network":

As I understand it, Facebook exploits semi-open information in a
semi-centralized way.  Instead of the Applications layer being
something that people can really socialize about, it only supports a
closed, firm-like, collaboration at that layer.  I hope that Diaspora*
et al. will support "social apps" that aren't just miniature corporate
themeparks, but which instead correspond to real "grassroots social
organizing".  How might that work?

Some analogies:  this might be like adding a "problems" layer on top
of PlanetMath's mathematics encyclopedia, or like adding a radio drama
layer on top of the collection of sounds at Freesound.org, or like
adding a literary discussion layer on top of the collection of public
domain texts at Project Gutenberg.

Indeed, maybe these aren't just analogies, but could themselves become
"applications".

tarot + AI

"Computers were originally invented to process patterns denoting
numbers, but they are not limited to that use. The patterns stored in
them can denote numbers, or words, or lizards, or thunderstorms, or
the idea of [J]ustice. If you open a computer and look inside, you
will not find numbers (or bits, for that matter); you will find
patterns of electromagnetism." -- Herbert Simon, quoted in
http://newsletter.tarotstudies.org/2009/03/tarot-dis-contents/

selfsploitation: beaten to the punch

http://dawnokoro.blogspot.com/2010/07/selfsploitation-women-technology-and.html
(prose) &
http://www.dawnokoro.com/selfsploitationproject.html (paint)

However, this only adds fuel to the fire, like so much lighter fluid.
As John Bernoulli said about Isaac Newton's anonymous solution to the
brachistochrone problem, "I recognize the lion by his paw." Only this
time it's as if I'm walking in my own footprints, but faster than ever
before!

the shaky foundations of post-structuralism (in excerpts)

"Here it is a question of a critical relationship to the language of
the human sciences and a question of a critical responsibility of the
discourse. It is a question of putting expressly and systematically
the problem of a discourse which borrows from a heritage the resources
necessary of that heritage itself. A problem of economy and strategy."

"One begins to understand that the distinction between state of nature
and state of society (we would be more apt to say today: state of
nature and state of culture), while lacking any acceptable historical
signification, presents a value which fully justifies its use by
modern sociology: its value as a methodological instrument."

"On the other hand, still in The Savage Mind, [Levi-Strauss] presents
as what he calls bricolage what might be called the discourse of this
method. The bricoleur, says Levi-Strauss, is someone who uses 'the
means at hand,' that is, the instruments he finds at his disposition
around him, those which are already there, which had not been
especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are
to be used and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them,
not hesitating to change them whenever it appears necessary, or to try
several of them at once, even if their form and their origin are
heterogeneous -- and so forth. There is therefore a critique of
language in the form of bricolage, and it has even been possible to
say that bricolage is the critical language itself."

"There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure,
of sign, of freeplay. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of
deciphering, a truth or an origin which is free from freeplay and from
the order of the sign, and lives like an exile the necessity of
interpretation. The other, which is no longer turned toward [or away
from] the origin, affirms freeplay and tries to pass beyond man and
humanism, the name man being the name of that being who, throughout
the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology -- in other words,
through the history of all of his history -- has dreamed of full
presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of the
game."

"I do not believe that today there is any question of choosing [...]
we must first try to conceive of the common ground, and the difference
of this irreducible difference." -- Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and
Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences",
http://hydra.humanities.uci.edu/derrida/sign-play.html

relevance theory

"In this conceptual model, the author takes into account the context
of the communication *and the mutual cognitive environment* between
the author and the audience. (That is what the author/speaker thinks
that audience already knows). They then say just enough to communicate
what they intend - relying on the audience to fill in the details that
they did not explicitly communicate." --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relevance_theory

(my emphasis)

the perils of personalization

'"Now, even if a competitor offers the same type of customization and
interaction, your customer won't be able to get back to the same level
of convenience until he re-teaches the competitor what he's already
spent time and energy teaching you." In other words, relationship
marketing and its one-to-one cousin were from the start strategies to
limit consumer choice.' -- Steve Evans quoting Zuboff and Maxim
quoting Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, from
http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/theory-mathematicsofdesire-print.html

"In [customer relationship management] we find a hollow flattery of a
customer's individuality, purporting to offer something for 'you',
when in fact it disguises that 'you' are offered the familiar products
of mass manufacture, but in a way that increasingly limits choice and
maximises expenditure. Furthermore, the de-limited 'self' these
technologies 'know' is one the individual is invited, obliged even, to
inhabit." -- ibid.

innocent until proven guilty

"For a jealous man to murder a woman or his rival in love is
reprehensible enough, but for a man to plot such a murder and pay two
men to carry out the dirty work on his behalf, is infinitely worse.
Especially when the murdered man is a perfectly innocent individual
who had no possible claim upon the attentions of the woman with whom
he was accused of having a liaison: in fact the only time he ever met
her was when he passed her once on the stairs when she was staying for
a few days in the same house." --
http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/history-from-police-archives/RB1/Pt2/pt2ChalkPit.html

familiar faces

"All around us today are artifacts that were generated in the
technological dramas of their time: railways, canals, aviation
artifacts, radios, and more. And yet their meaning, together with
their location in what was formerly a deeply felt grammar of political
action, is utterly lost; in their place is what appears to be nothing
more than a material record of `technological progress.' What was
once the conscious product of human cultural and political action,
passionate and meaningful, is now a silent material reality within
which we lead our daily lives, mutely acting out patterns of behavior
that once had obvious connections to the root paradigms of our
culture... To become fully aware of the political circumstances of
their lives, new generations of students, at every level of education,
must be trained (as Hughes suggests) to `fathom the depth of the
technological society, to identify currents running more deeply than
those conventionally associated ith politics and economics.' Because
Social Study of Technology offers a way to recontextualize
technological artifacts, it is therefore the political philosophy of
our time, and it deserves to stand at the center of any curriculum
that teaches political awareness and civic responsibility." Brian
Pfaffenberger, "Technological Dramas", quoting Thomas P. Hughes,
American Genesis; cited in "Commons Based Peer Production" by Benkler
and Nissenbaum

the white queen hypothesis

(Quotation 1) Alice laughed. `There's no use trying,' she said `one
ca'n't believe impossible things.'

`I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. `When I was
your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've
believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes
the shawl again!'

(Quotation 2) `Well, in our country,' said Alice, still panting a
little, `you'd generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast
for a long time, as we've been doing.'

`A slow sort of country!' said the Queen. `Now, here, you see, it
takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you
want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as
that!'

(Quotation 2) inspires the Red Queen Hypothesis about co-evolution
(evolutionary change is faster when it runs against a system that is
also changing).

(Quotation 1) should inspire a complementary White Queen Hypothesis,
perhaps a sort of "Fourier Transform" of the Red Queen Hypothesis.
The "impossible thought" might be any given quasi-evolutionary move,
the ability to "try something out" (as when exploring counter-factual
future-histories on the chess board).  Perhaps it describes something
happening in some sort of "co-tangent space": it might be much like
what Tim Teravainen said to me about how it is good to be able to rule
out ideas or variations quickly.

They say that master chess players don't "think", they just "pattern
match".  Not only should selection pressures be consistently high, but
variability must also be consistently high. But I also want to
consider changes enacted *on* the system.  The real "orthogonality
condition" here would say: evolutionary change is faster when
throughput between the evolutionary agent (species, learner) and the
system (antagonist, environment) is richer.  So, the more
intelligible/palpable and, especially, the more semantically
fine-grained the channel that communicates between agent and system,
the faster the agent can learn.

(In a way this is a corollary of the Red Queen Hypothesis, but one
would *study* it in a very different manner.)

random silence (the knife vs pale fire)

/ Whatever in my field of vision dwelt—
/ Stilettos of a frozen stillicide—
A cracked smile and a silent shout
Yes, in a dream all my teeth fell out
/ Or, with a silent shiver order it,
He'll have you later 'cause it's never free
/ And while this lasted all I had to do
I caught a glimpse, now it haunts me
What you are and what you mean to me
/ Took photographs. Whenever I'd permit,
/ Was close my eyes to reproduce the leaves,
In a dream I lost my teeth again
Instead I mumble randomly
You stand by and enlighten me
/ Was printed on my eyelids' nether side
/ Or indoor scene, or trophies of the eaves."
Calling me woman and half man
/ An indoor scene, hickory leaves, the svelte
You were at the gigantic spree
"All colors made me happy: even gray.
If I explain it once thoroughly
A cracked smile and a silent shout
I know now fragility
Wish I could speak in just one sweep
/ My eyes were such that literally they
+ know of people who are getting old
+ never knew this could happen to me
+ caught a glimpse, now it haunts me
+ know there's people who I haven't told
/ Where it would tarry for an hour or two

is it zen, or just meaningless drivel?

http://objects.icanhascheezburger.com/

coevolution ftw

"The Red Queen hypothesis proposes that coevolution of interacting
species (such as hosts and parasites) should drive molecular evolution
through continual natural selection for adaptation and
counter-adaptation. Although the divergence observed at some
host-resistance and parasite-infectivity genes is consistent with
this, the long time periods typically required to study coevolution
have so far prevented any direct empirical test. Here we show, using
experimental populations of the bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens
SBW25 and its viral parasite, phage Φ2, that the rate of molecular
evolution in the phage was far higher when both bacterium and phage
coevolved with each other than when phage evolved against a constant
host genotype. Coevolution also resulted in far greater genetic
divergence between replicate populations, which was correlated with
the range of hosts that coevolved phage were able to infect.
Consistent with this, the most rapidly evolving phage genes under
coevolution were those involved in host infection. These results
demonstrate, at both the genomic and phenotypic level, that
antagonistic coevolution is a cause of rapid and divergent evolution,
and is likely to be a major driver of evolutionary change within
species." -- Michael J. Benton, Antagonistic coevolution accelerates
molecular evolution, Nature 464, 275-278 (11 March 2010) abstract

Cf. Leigh Van Valen. (1973). "A new evolutionary law". Evolutionary
Theory 1: 1—30.

nerd love?

"If positive emotions are to occur in a close relationship, then one's
partner must have sufficient resources so that he or she can remove
interrupting stimuli or accelerate the completion of plans. However,
these acts of removal and acceleration must be unexpected if they are
to generate positive emotion. Furthermore, an individual must have
plans or dreams that he or she cannot complete alone so that a partner
can make a difference. This last condition is hard to meet in most
close relationships because each partner usually drops plans that
cannot be accomplished or accomplishes them by some other means. If
positive emotions are to occur at all, each person needs to keep
adding new plans that cannot be accomplished alone, but they also have
to be plans that the partner cannot predictably accomplish either.

The implications of these propositions about positive emotions for the
development of relationships is sobering. As the other person in the
relationship becomes more predictable, and as a partner expects that
person's help, there should be fewer occasions for positive emotion to
occur." -- Karl E. Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations, page 47

the pre-mature autopsies on mermaid avenue

This seems like a really interesting opinion piece:

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/31/arts/music-what-jazz-is-and-isn-t.html

Which forms a sort of prequel to this:

http://www.mdcbowen.org/p1/cobb/premature_autopsies.htm

And all of this forms a setting into which we could transpose other
sorts of controversy taking place outside of the Jazz world:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah_Wright_controversy

Further, as a contrasting case, it is interesting to examine the
intellectual property transfer and/or "collaboration" style employed
by these singer-songwriters:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mermaid_Avenue

They say there is no accounting for taste, and maybe even for opinion
(Is "free jazz... JAZZ"? -- Gosh, who knows!). Still, I think these
discussions about Jazz are an interesting nexus of the aesthetic, the
political, and even the technological -- e.g. how do we think about
musical art in world in which recorded music is so easily shared by
file transfer? Presumably not the same way we thought about it when
it was shared on LPs or radio broadcast, etc.

To compare:

* this rather horrible recording by Billy Bragg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1Ib0-yKmoA

* a *potentially* slightly less awkward one by Woodie Guthrie and pals
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwcKwGS7OSQ

Of course, we can't think about the technologies of war the same way
we once did, either -- e.g. consider this statement by Jeremiah
Wright, made in his capacity as 'controversial figure': "The
ambassador said the people that we have wounded don't have the
military capability we have. But they do have individuals who are
willing to die and take thousands with them. And we need to come to
grips with that."

I don't think this statement implicates only "terrorists"; e.g. some
variant would apply to "internet pirates", another to
"third-worlders", another to "drug overlords", etc. At question is
the relationship between individual and society.

To bring in another familiar angle:

"[Reading 'And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks', w]e have, in
essence, finally come full circle after almost six decades, turning a
corner into a blind alley and walking smack-dab into a mirror image of
ourselves, credit-crazed zombies with the dropping eyelids of a
Burroughs morphine addict, hungover from the post-war boom, slogging
through a nightmarish netherworld [...] In a bleaker assessment than
those of most private forecasters, the World Bank predicted a
shrinking of the global economy for the first time since World War II
[...] We are not exactly sailing into uncharted waters here, but until
our new artists arrive to help us understand what we have done to
ourselves, it would probably be best to heed the words of Henry
Miller, a writer who wielded great influence on the Beats: 'I am
against revolutions because they always involve a return to the status
quo.'" -- http://www.popmatters.com/pm/column/71573-little-murders-and-the-hippos-were-boiled-in-their-tanks/

To wind this up: it seems Miller would agree with Marsalis and Crouch
in this matter?

the untold hazards of backromology

From the software-based Greek-to-English dictionary Magenta, the
actual definition of "paragogy" (παραγωγή):

generation [dzhenerEishn] ουσ. παραγωγή: generation of heat παραγωγή
θερμότητας # γενεά, γενιά: for many generations για πολλές γενιές §
from generation to generation από γενιά σε γενιά § the younger
generation η νεώτερη γενιά # γενεσιουργία, γένεση: alternate
generation βιολ. γένεση κατ' εναλλαγή

output [Autput] ουσ. (συνολική) παραγωγή: average output μέση παραγωγή
§ daily output οικον. ημερήσια παραγωγή # ηλ. ισχύς παραγωγής: the
unit has an output of 400 megawatts η μονάδα έχει ισχύ παραγωγής 400
μεγαβάτ # τεχνολ. απόδοση ή παραγόμενο έργο Η/Υ # ΦΡ. output bonus
οικον. επιμίσθιο αυξημένης παραγωγικότητας # output conditions (στη
γλωσσολογία:) όροι εξόδου

production[prodAkshn] ουσ. (ως διαδικασία και ως αποτέλεσμα:)
παραγωγή: increase the production of.. αυξάνω την παραγωγή τού.. §
increased production of wine αυξημένη παραγωγή οίνου # οργάνωση και
παρουσίαση θεάματος, "παραγωγή", "ανέβασμα": spectacular production
υπερθέαμα, επική παραγωγή

turnout [tErnaut] ουσ. πλήθος συνάθροισης, "προσέλευση": count the
turnout μετρώ το πλήθος των παρισταμένων # αμφίεση, περιβολή:
inappropriate turnout ακατάλληλη περιβολή # παραγωγή (κατά ποσότητα)
συνολική παραγωγή: the actual turnout was over one million a year η
ετήσια συνολική παραγωγή ξεπέρασε το ένα εκατομμύριο

the country doctor effekt

We discussed the general idea last year (thanks go to correspondent
Ian Coe), but since I *use* the result a lot, it is worth noting the
proper citation:

"Connections From Kafka: Exposure to Meaning Threats Improves Implicit
Learning of an Artificial Grammar" by Travis Proulx and Steven J
Heine, Psychol Sci 20(9):1125-31 (2009)

The abstract is as follows: "In the current studies, we tested the
prediction that learning of novel patterns of association would be
enhanced in response to unrelated meaning threats. This prediction
derives from the meaning-maintenance model, which hypothesizes that
meaning-maintenance efforts may recruit patterns of association
unrelated to the original meaning threat. Compared with participants
in control conditions, participants exposed to either of two unrelated
meaning threats (i.e., reading an absurd short story by Franz Kafka or
arguing against one's own self-unity) demonstrated both a heightened
motivation to perceive the presence of patterns within letter strings
and enhanced learning of a novel pattern actually embedded within
letter strings (artificial-grammar learning task). These results
suggest that the cognitive mechanisms responsible for implicitly
learning patterns are enhanced by the presence of a meaning threat."

Of course, there's plenty of chances for just this sort of "uncanny"
stuff on the internet -- including this video by Rich Ragsdale, which
both explains and illustrates the idea:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mqcx6r57GRI

"The story of The Sandman as told by E. T. A. Hoffman intrigued the
great Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis. Freud attempted to
describe Nathaniel's state of mind upon realizing that his true love
was in actuality a mechanical doll! He labelled this confusion
between the human and the artificial 'The Uncanny!'"

Such "artificiality" can include many things. Consider *this*
marvelously "flat" beginning:

"I was in great difficulty. An urgent journey was facing me. A
seriously ill man was waiting for me in a village ten miles distant. A
severe snowstorm filled the space between him and me." -- A Country
Doctor, Franz Kafka

In the world of the story, of course, the premise is not flat -- it's
urgent, there is a seriously ill man, etc.! However, my confusion is
oh so real, and it is precisely the confusion between this
"artificial" story and my real life and emotions. Hence, a little
later on in the story when we read --

"The servant girl stood beside me. 'One doesn't know the sorts of
things one has stored in one's own house,' she said, and we both
laughed." -- ibid.

we're likely already to be caught up in the story, but perhaps also
somewhat uneasy about this fact. As the poor girl (whom we have known
for all of a few hundred characters) is quite brutally victimized in
very short order, I'm sure I care about her more than the narrator
himself, who gets swept up in his own story, and he, almost
conveniently, appears to meet his own doom by the end of the story
anyway. We need not go into further detail:

"Once one responds to a false alarm on the night bell, there's no
making it good again—not ever." -- ibid.

That's just the point: this is all of us responding exactly to such a
false alarm at each moment! This is *how* we "learn novel patterns",
precisely *through* our response to "unrelated meaning threats". In
other words, we emote about whatever it is that comes to mind, our
feelings become "ingrained" or learnt -- in an effort to maintain some
kind of self-unity, say -- and meaning is built and/or maintained as
an end or as a side-effect (it almost doesn't matter which one)
through or throughout this process.

Kafka has a way of showing precisely how uncanny and even sinister
*life* is in its essential nature...

mathematical models of emotion

Suppose I want a *banana*. If I get a banana, I am happy. If I don't
get one, I am slightly or even significantly less happy.

This forms the basis of a mathematical model for emotions based on
*pattern matching*. Does this seem like a good start for a "real"
model?

spectres of capitalism

"A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism."
-- http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm

Perhaps it is time to consider a sort of reversal of the above axiom:

"The World is presently haunted by the spectres of capitalism."

In any case, such an idea may be useful as the basis of a 3D game
entitled "PacMan 2010".

To make this more clear:

PacMan 2010 : Welltris :: PacMan : Tetris

Note in particular the Hammer and Sickle appearing centrally in the
cover art for Welltris:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welltris

Here's PacMan interviewed:

Question: What's life like in the 3-torus?

Answer: Comparing the 3-torus to the 2-torus is sort of like comparing
the Internet to books. The higher dimensionality means it is easier
to get lost, but somewhat harder to get cornered. You know what
Hamlet said, "I could live in a walnut shell and feel like the king of
the universe. The real problem is that I have bad dreams." That's how
I feel sometimes, too. I mean, I know they say I'm crazy... but you'd
go crazy too if you were locked in here with those ghosts! No, I'm
just kidding. But seriously, it's a continual struggle just to stay alive.

> 3:14 PM me: i've done my best to create a derridian pac-mashup
>   communism is being chased by the spectre of the dollar [0]

[0]: "· · · · · ✺ · · · ·☭ $"

paragogical principles

Paragogy is a name for the theory of peer-to-peer or
peer-based teaching-and-learning-between-equals.

A more informal synonym is "peertagogy".

The theory of paragogy is developed in opposition to
"andragogy". Here are its defining principles as I see
them today.

1. CONTEXT AS A DECENTERED CENTER

A paragogic view suggests that everyone has a mixture of
"dependent", "self-directed", and "other-directed"
behaviours, without saying that any of these is "good" or
"bad". It suggests that a self-concept may be less
important than the concept of "shared context in motion".
This has various consequences, e.g. as to the relative
value placed on social intelligence and so-called "mental
age". It also de-emphasizes personality-based critiques
in favour of a critique of social/dynamical systems.

2. META-LEARNING IS A FONT OF KNOWLEDGE

A paragogic view says that we all have a lot to learn
about learning.

3. PEERS ARE PEOPLE WHO LEARN TOGETHER

A peer isn't necessarily someone who happens to be stuck
in the same ruts you are stuck in. In fact, the paragogic
view says you can learn from practically anyone, and that
people who learn from one another are "peers".

4. LEARNING IS DISTRIBUTED AND NONLINEAR

Learning, whether with a given application in mind,
or for some other reason, can come from many different
sources.  Part of paragogy is learning how to work one's
way around a given social field.

5. REALISE YOUR DREAM AND THEN WAKE UP

Realising a motivation seems at least as important as its
existence in the first place. Merely indicating that a
given motivation is "internal" or "external" is likely not
to be fine-grained enough to be very useful. Paragogy is
the art of realising motivations when possible, then going
on to the next thing.

dualisms

I think it is important to understand a few things occuring in
opposition or in pairs, it doesn't matter so much which way; these
aren't just your standard vocabulary words. Presumably tons of
philosophy books could be written about them (and already have been).
This note is just meant to be a quick reference guide.

1. ANATMAN and ANAMNESIS

The idea of "anatman" is usually taken to mean that there is no
"permanent, integral, autonomous being within an individual
existence". The common translation is "the Buddhist doctrine of
no-self". However, a more literal translation would probably be "the
Buddhist doctrine of no-soul"; and an even more literal translation
could be: "there is no single universal self shared by all persons".
(It is interesting how Buddhist terms are often mis-translated; cf.
this earlier blog post:
http://gathatoulie.blogspot.com/2009/10/dukkha.html.) So there is no
"holy ghost" or what have you (contrast http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iandi,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entheogen), and from there the rest of the holy
trinity topples along with any other transcendent quantity, including e.g.
the Self (to recover the standard interpretation).

The idea of "anamnesis" is related to the "sophistic paradox" which
says you can't look for something you don't know anything about; in
other words, learning by doing is impossible... unless it is
constrained to function within a certain axiomatic system, say.
Anamnesis is the idea that the soul does know things, but it forgets
them; we then un-forget as we encounter things in the world,
especially if we look at them the right way. This idea is the
theoretical justification for the "socratic method", which basically
takes the sophistic paradox and turns it into a tool. The key thing
for this discussion is that, for all of this to work, we need a soul,
and the soul needs to be inscribed or imbued with something we could
call eternal knowledge.

It seems to me that whether this eternal knowledge is idiosyncratic or
universal, the theory of anamnesis is in sufficiently direct
opposition to the theory of anatman that we should all perk up our
ears a bit, especially given some of the other more superficial
similarities. Whereas in the greek theory, knowledge awakens, in the
indic theory, one awakens (if at all) to the absence of knowledge in the platonic sense, and moreover to a profound contingency.  (I won't say a "field of immanence", because that just makes immanence transcendent.)

Note, however, that this puts us back at the prologue to the greek story, with
Socrates, who says "all I know is that I know nothing" or "OK, I know
something about 'love', but that's it!"

2. MATHESIS and POEISIS

Mathesis means "lesson" and it comes to mean "mathematics", as well as
"science". For Foucault is it is "a general science of order".  (I've written enough about this topic elsewhere, so I won't go on here, but this seems a good place to mention that the pegagogic bent of these various dualisms is worth paying attention to.)

Poiesis means "making" or "genesis" and it comes to mean "poetry".
Some would see fit to oppose "making" with "faking" (mimesis), but of
course simulation combines the two. It would also be possible to
think of a "general science of disorder", but in fact we seem to
require a double deviation; we would then ask for "songs of
exception", for example in punk rowk.

3. NOMIC and LUDIC

Nomos means "law" or "custom", but in a rather amazing way, Deleuze
and Guattari connect it with numbers, names, and nomads. Perhaps the
idea is to continue the sophist's distinction between nature (physis)
and convention (nomos); the state or city requires its own physics,
e.g. gravitation, above and beyond the "law", whereas the desert or
steppe requires only, and exactly, conventions -- i.e. if its inhabitants are to survive.

Ludus means "play", or "sport", including e.g. gladiatorial combat,
and circuses more generally, but also "play schools" for youngsters.
The notion of "ludi votivi" was that in the sport one fulfilled a vow
to some deity. Circuses could also feature executions, which would of
course be a chance to show off the "transcendent" power of the local
tyrant. "Ludicrous" (causing laughter because of absurdity; provoking
or deserving derision; ridiculous; laughable) might be a term one
would apply to someone sentenced to die in such a setting.

what is ei?

"Emotional intelligence matters in surprising places such as computer
programming, where the top 10% of performers exceeded average
performers in producing effective programs by 320%, and the
superstars at the 1% level produced an amazing 1,272%
more than average. Assessments of these top performers revealed
that they were better at such things as teamwork, staying late to finish
a project and sharing shortcuts with coworkers. In short, the best
performers didn't compete -- they collaborated."

they only did it cause of fame

"joe corneli"... About 5,370 results.

For comparison:

"cory doctorow"... About 457,000 results

interestingly enough:

"joseph corneli" -gerlach -valkenburg -maastricht... About 1,140 results

(I tend to use "joseph" only in professional communications.)

But my favorites are the "legitimate false positives" and other weird shit:

BOY DIES IN GIRL'S HOME.; Hoboken Youth Believed to Have Taken Carbolic Acid.
http://bit.ly/b2lbto

Comprehension of Requisite Variety for Sustainable Psychosocial Dynamics
Transforming a matrix classification onto intertwined tori
http://www.laetusinpraesens.org/musings/torus.php
(They actually cite a paper I co-authored.)

a book by Joseph B. Corneli -- !!
Mit Kindern die Natur erleben
http://www.amazon.de/gp/offer-listing/3884030094?tag=toggenbunatur-21&camp=1410&creative=6378&linkCode=am1&creativeASIN=3884030094&adid=05RKR0T1X27HQX57Y4YX&

leaving las vegas (review)

Preamble

In case you haven't seen the film you can save yourself some time by
just listening
to this track by the (almost unrecognizable Young Tom Waits):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMIObyJLtuU
http://www.tomwaitslibrary.com/lyrics/miscellaneous/gettingdrunkonabottle.html

Review

What does 'sobriety' mean when drugs/alcohol aren't necessarily
involved in answering the question or in creating the conditions that
lead one to ask the question?

How do I know if I'm thinking clear-headedly or not? Maybe the times
when I think I'm thinking clear-headedly are when I'm most
deluded/delusive?

On the other hand, maybe I *need* to be somewhat delusiatory or
perhaps even deleuzian to generate certain questions -- perhaps I am
at my most "creative" when I'm thinking the *least* clearly? (Cf.
Bloom's Taxonomy:
http://web.uct.ac.za/projects/cbe/mcqman/mcqappc.html).

To finish this off, we turn to
http://www4.hmc.edu:8001/humanities/Beckman/Nietzsche/Genealogy.htm :

The Third (and final) Essay [in Genealogy of Morals] questions the
meaning of what Nietzsche calls "the ascetic ideal" --- that is, the
ideal of rigorous self-discipline, austerity, or self-denial and
abstinence. The opening complaint about Wagner's Parisfal is, of
course, prompted by Wagner's "adaptation of the myth to an orthodox
Christian austerity in contrast to Wagner's own life, which was
scarcely either austere or self-disciplined. The conclusion that there
is probably little meaning to an artist's asceticism (because artist's
are just functioning at the will of their publics) is a bit harsh and
of little general value.

Nietzsche moves on to philosophers and suggests, as a first
approximation, that the philosopher "wants to gain release from a
torture." (III, #6) Proceeding onward, he declares, "there
unquestionably exists a peculiar philosphers' irritation at and rancor
against sensuality." In view of this, "the philosopher abhors
marriage. . . A married philosopher belongs in comedy." (III, #7) The
torture, then, is everyday life, life in detail, as it were; the
philosopher sees the ascetic ideal as the "optimum condition for the
highest and boldest spirituality." Nietzsche makes it clear that the
philosopher's relation to the ascetic ideal is not out of any hatred
of life but, rather, it is purely out of a love of life, the
philosopher's own life. The philosopher, indeed, is possessed by a
"maternal" mission, a "pregnancy," that requires full attention. But
why have philosophers adopted the ascetic ideal as such in order to
secure attention on their spiritual "children"? According to
Nietzsche, the philosophical spirit has always been despised by the
majority of men. And is it now different? Thus, philosophers were
always forced "to use as a mask and cocoon the previously established
types of the contemplative man --- priest, sorcerer, soothsayer, and
in any case a religious type --- in order to be able to exist at all."
(III, #10) Philosophers are no more advocates of asceticism than are
artists, then; their embrace of asceticism is purely pragmatic.

(end quote; but it's well worth a longer look via the link above.)

4 out of 5 stars

who cares?

"To approach the most biasless state of death is to pursue a course of
rational self-destruction through a rigorous elimination of biases
towards life." -- Mitchell Heisman, "suicide note" p. 1836

"Who cares? I don't care!
A horse's ass is better than yours!" -- Cibo Matto, "Beef Jerky" on
"Viva! La Woman"

"In many cases, just having a sympathetic 'sounding board' for a student who feels isolated at a distance can help the student to know that they are not alone," Mr. Schroeder says in an e-mail to Wired Campus. "Without that connection, an isolated, distant student may simply drop out." -- Marc Parry, "Preventing Online Dropouts: Does Anything Work?" (http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Preventing-Online-Dropouts-/27108)

"Nock and his colleagues found that participants with strong associations between self and death/suicide were six times more likely to attempt suicide in the next six months as those holding stronger associations between self and life. [...] These findings suggest that a person’s implicit cognition may guide which behavior he or she chooses to cope with extreme distress." -- Steve Bradt, "Inklings of Suicide" (http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/07/inklings-of-suicide/)

flows

I don't know why my existence feels so threatened at times.
(Heidegger said: "Fear is the feeling one feels when one's
life is threatened. Anxiety is the feeling one feels when one's
existence is threatened.") I think it helps a bit to have some
of the flows which would otherwise circulate in my mind go
out, either linearly or "over the network".

I've found that it is fairly effective (as popular wisdom has
expressed) to "hook" one activity into another to create new
habits. The latest example I have in mind is to actually
write something about each of several projects that I *think*
about so often -- I made a page for that.

http://metameso.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl/joe%27s_alt_research

This is part of my philosophy of writing in general. If I'm
going to be thinking in words, the idea goes, I might as
well write those words down. Maybe after a while (thanks
to Grice's maxim or otherwise) I'll start thinking some new
words.

all donne, all the time

And new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out,
The sun is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world's spent,
When in the planets and the firmament
They seek so many new; they see that this
Is crumbled out again to his atomies.
'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,
All just supply, and all relation;
Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot,
For every man alone thinks he hath got
To be a phoenix, and that then can be
None of that kind, of which he is, but he.
-- http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/643.html

Naw, jus' kidding -- here's a quote from Alan Moore:

"I'm a great believer in the theory that the more work the audience
has to actually do, the more they enjoy it 'cos the more they've
invested." -- http://www.laurahird.com/newreview/alanmooreinterview.html

more spaceships

"To the degree that education is about the transfer of the known
between generations, it can be digitized, analyzed, optimized and
bottled or posted on Twitter. To the degree that education is about
the self-invention of the human race, the gargantuan process of
steering billions of brains into unforeseeable states and
configurations in the future, it can continue only if each brain
learns to invent itself. [...] Roughly speaking, there are two ways to
use computers in the classroom. You can have them measure and
represent the students and the teachers, or you can have the class
build a virtual spaceship. Right now the first way is ubiquitous, but
the virtual spaceships are being built only by tenacious oddballs in
unusual circumstances. More spaceships, please."
-- Jaron Lanier,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/magazine/19fob-essay-t.html?ref=magazine

elsewhere

War is what happens to other people, different people, people not like
us, and it really isn't our business (even though we are often
paying for it). -- Deborah Ellis interviewed by Aline Pereira

efficacy

"The lives of innovators and social reformers driven by unshakable
efficacy are not easy ones. They are often the objects of derision,
condemnation, and persecution, even though societies eventually
benefit from their persevering efforts. Many people who gain
recognition and fame shape their lives by overcoming seemingly
insurmountable obstacles only to be catapulted to new social realities
over which they have lesser control. Indeed, the annals of the famed
and infamous are strewn with individuals who were both architects and
victims of their destinies." -- A. Bandura, "Exercise of personal and
collective efficacy in changing societies"

summary statements

uneasily coaxing myself into calm
attention to happiness
at the push of a button
i feel like this all the time
a chance that by chaining
a place at the table
stepping on snail shells
pain
clarity of the characters
coming by after the show
to be useful
waiting for a train
angrily and violently bored
better things to do, how to remember?
the thirst for confirmation
tired enough to doubt how this works
things are so simple
not creating further disappointments

ok

"We're sorry things didn't work out.
But don't give up hope…" --Staff Robot, OKCupid

"Eighty percent of new products fail - as is appropriate,
considering the general ineptitude governing their conception and
marketing." --http://www.suck.com/daily/96/02/14/

"The tragedy of OK Soda, though, wasn't that it didn't resonate,
but that it resonated too well. It was too perfect. " -- ibid.

neitzschian time

"And mankind reckons time from the dies nefastus when this fatality
befell--from the first day of Christianity!--Why not rather from its
last?--From today?--The transvaluation of all values! ..."
--Nietzsche, "The Antichrist" (end), http://www.fns.org.uk/ac.htm

yet another effort

"If, for the vainglory of establishing your principles outside your
country, you neglect to care for your own felicity at home, despotism,
which is no more than asleep, will awake, you will be rent by
intestine disorder, you will have exhausted your monies and your
soldiers, and all that, all that to return to kiss the manacles, that
the tyrants, who will have subjugated you during your absence, will
impose upon you; all you desire may be wrought without leaving your
home: let other people observe you happy, and they will rush to
happiness by the same road you have traced for them." -- de Sade

reduced to vandalism

Video games and web pages such as Chatroulette.com, Facebook.com, and
Youtube.com all provide the end user a different experience in their
attempt to cure boredom.[22] *The unfortunate irony is that many of
these sites are themselves fairly boring.*
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Boredom

(My thoughtful comment was reverted seconds after I made it. Damn them!)

annie hall moment

So the thing that these people don't seem to
understand about my work is that we can
*exactly* understand "motivation" by looking
at attention, i.e., by looking at what people do
over a period of time and in aggregate. OK,
we can't necessarily understand their deepest
reasons for it (e.g. maybe they fight crime because
their parents were gunned down in the street -- or
maybe they do it because it's the best cure for
ennui)... but we can definitely begin to see patterns,
like,

A, B, C <quit>
A, B, D, E <quit>
A, B, D, E, F, G <quit>
A, B, C <quit>

etc.

Maybe I'm using the word "motivation" in a nonstandard
way? In any case, I think my work is about understanding
and responding to motivation... I don't know what else
there is to say about it, really.

on being left awake at my desk all night

no worries, I finished reading my suspense novel and massively updated
my OKCupid profile, had beans and toast at berrill, and several teas, and
am feeling as fresh as eggs and am generally entirely ready to look at my
probation report from a new angle today, which is actually necessary, because,
despite the magnificent proportions that this particular sentence has already
grown to and indeed will grow beyond ere long (as I'm sure you can see quite
plainly in the first instance and moreover, intuit in the second or
possibly greater
instances, whether with a sense of foreboding or incipient pleasure I know not)
and despite, also, the semi-analogous prolixity with which I have hithertofore
enunciated my somewhat, shall we say, scientistic strategems and made known
to those concerned in the matter my various scholarly ambitions (always with
some slight reservations as to just how scholarly they really are -- perhaps too
scholarly in some respects and not enough in others), what's really needed now
is a rather different (although not, if you think about it, an
altogether unrelated)
writerly manoeuver which will, I hope, ensure the general cogency and
dare I say,
fluidity, of my rhetorical argument in the other, aforementioned, semi-formal
research-related document, as it coalesces into its final form, by infusing it
throughout with the radiant energies of a certain
mystico-philosophical principle,
namely, that of pure creativity as the sensation associated with engagement
within a libidinal economy; which, in short, is exactly what I feel
prepared to deliver
in my present frame of mind, if only I can find the words with which
to express it --
perhaps simply put it would be something along the lines of "it feels
good to do stuff",
which sentiment one might readily adduce to what is called either wakefulness or
fatigue, as two now predictably different names for activity within an
inhomogeneous
field seeking to further differentiate itself within itself.

falsely attributed...

It's quite interesting that the quote

"Everything is rational in capitalism, except capital or capitalism
itself. [...]"

at http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=8858&ttype=2
*appears* to be a quote from Guattari, but it actually isn't. In fact, unless
it has been re-translated, the quote itself appears to be mis-quoted. In
my copy of the book it goes like this:

"Everything is rational in capitalism, except capital or capitalism
itself. The stock market is certainly rational; one can understand it,
study it, the capitalists know how to use it, and yet it is completely
delirious, it's mad. It is in this sense that we say: the rational is
always the rationality of an irrational. Something that hasn't been
adequately discussed about Marx's Capital is the extent to which
he is fascinated by capitalist mechanisms, precisely because the
system is demented, yet works very well at the same time. So
what is rational in a society? It is -- the interests being defined in the
framework of this society -- the way people pursue those interests,
their realization. But down below, there are desires, investments
of desire that cannot be confused with the investments of interest,
and on which interests depend in their determination and
distribution: an enormous flux, all kinds of libidinal-unconscious
flows that make up the delirium of this society. The true history
is the history of desire." -- Gilles Deleuze, in interview with Felix
Guattari (presumably the interview was conducted by
one of Michel-Antoine Burnier, Patrick Rambaud, Jean-François Bizot, Graine Philippe,  Anne Berger and/or Michel Moret, but I'm not sure who) in "Chaosophy", p. 36, originally in  "C'Est Demain La Veille".

There is another translation of the entire interview here:
http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpdeleuze7.htm
Anyway, I "irrationally" attributed the quote to Guattari in a preprint,
I hope they will let me fix it later...

non-link spam

First time I've ever knowingly encountered spam in an apparently
pure form; I'm putting this up here like a first dollar bill behind the
counter.

"whats the best size dobsonian
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-- http://truthinnumbersthemovie.com/foro/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=193&sid=8262bcc042ac518288f0616b2185c970

The "pedantic risk"

"The assumption of 'intellectualism' goes contrary to the facts of
what is primarily experienced. For things are objects to be treated,
used, acted upon and with, enjoyed and endured, even more than things
to be known. They are things HAD before they are things cognized...the
isolation of traits characteristic of objects known, and then defined
as the sole ultimate realities, accounts for the denial to nature of
the characters which make things lovable and contemptible, beautiful
and ugly, adorable and awful. It accounts for the belief that nature
is an indifferent, dead mechanism; it explains why characteristics
that are the valuable and valued traits of objects in actual
experience are thought to create a fundamentally troublesome
philosophical problem." -- John Dewey in "Experience and Nature",
quoted in "Enacting silence: Residual categories as a challenge for
ethics, information systems, and communication" by Susan Leigh Star
and Geoffrey C. Bowker.

learn to draw

you <expletive deleted>

destroy

"By the way, if someone were to get violently bored and decide to make
a CD that isolated the sounds of Glenn Gould's humming along to his
piano playing and just recorded that, I would buy it. The humming
ones, played on headphones, are some of my favorite parts." --
http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2009_12.php#015521

"Everything in nature vibrates at a certain frequency. When an object
is vibrated at its natural resonance, it begins to undergo severe
shock, as it tries to shake itself apart. It would be ludicrous to
imagine that a tiny oscillator could by itself bring down a building,
if not for the principle of resonance. Like a child on a swing, only a
very small force is required to maintain a fairly large reciprocating
motion. A major vibration could be established in a house by
coinciding each stroke of the piston with the return of the individual
vibrations through the building to where the oscillator is. Every time
the piston hits, it magnifies the force a little more. At frequencies
of 1000Hz, the force build-up can be very appreciable! The frequency
of resonance is linked to the time it takes for the vibrations to
spread out through the building, reverberate, and the "echoes" to
return to the oscillator again. By finding the correct frequency, ANY
structure can be destroyed. In fact, the larger it is, the lower the
resonant frequency is, so the easier it is to destroy. Tesla once
joked that he could split the Earth with one of these devices, and
no-one ever knew if he was joking...................."
--http://www.angelfire.com/scifi/EclipseLab/Tesla/Oscillator.html

it adds up

Celebrating over a thousand postings in google groups since 2006:
http://groups.google.com/groups/profile?enc_user=JP69ABcAAAB1eD6iNAFENfVIrzauVqeaHqZiDvCVswhrZ6TQxKj0ww
(thanks to John McLear for generally pointing this out to me, and
demonstrating the use of these google group profiles for social
networking).

Moral of the story... well, I'm not sure; it's a lot mileage on the fingers
for one thing. I guess my question is whether I can or will pick up the
pace in the coming lustrum. My *guess* is yes, but what does/will
that mean?

* Trying to be social
* Trying to organize things
* Trying to get code to compile...
* Enjoying the act of writing and/or listening to myself talk

Of course, this sort of engagement doesn't "count" (who's counting?)
but my guess is that in another way, it counts more than one might think.
Besides, it keeps me from annoying my friends with a continual onslaught of
annoying email (ha ha, yeah right -- really, you guys are too forgiving!).
In this world in which "there's an app for that", I wonder if people will
still remember that "IT'S USENET OUT THERE"

(http://identi.ca/conversation/24182189).

the great thing about disappointment is...

I was thinking that maybe every disappointment or
anxiety has a semi-secret positive value. (E.g.
feeling unwanted? -- maybe what I really want is
an excuse to spend time by myself...)

It's certainly a humorous exercise to look at
each "unhappy" thought and think of what could
be cool about it. Not necessarily an exercise
to be conducted on an empty stomach however.

you'll be lost and never found

when they say "the old writer had reached the end of words, the end of
what could be done with words", (http://www.blank.org/memory/) what
are they really talking about? ...

I remember when I used to think Tom Waits's music just sounded like a
soundtrack for slutty calisthenics. Things have gotten better since
then. Or so I'd like to imagine... Mister Tagomi.

"When it came to close down the novel, the I Ching had no more to say.
So, there's no real ending on it. I like to regard it as an open
ending." --PKD

Irony of ironies... losing phantasms. Without proper guidance or
restraint, practitioners were observed to lose touch with reality.
DSM-IV includes the diagnostic category "qi-gong psychotic reaction"
in its "Glossary of culture-bound syndromes". It is described as: "A
term describing an acute, time-limited episode characterized by
disassociative, paranoid or other psychotic or non-psychotic symptoms
that may occur after participation in the Chinese folk
health-enhancing practice of qigong. Especially vulnerable are
individuals who become overly involved in the practice.

abstract/love

This paper discusses the ego functioning and self psychological
aspects of falling in love and passionate love. These universal and
extraordinary phenomena are conceptualized as representing the
activity of the creative imagination in solving problems related to
coping with intense narcissistic and libidinal pressures. The work of
other authors is reviewed and recast into a metapsychological
framework involving ego and superego contributions to the experience,
and focused on self cohesion. An illustrative clinical psychotherapy
case is presented in an effort to understand what has traditionally
appeared to be a mysterious and disjunctive life experience, and to
explore the creative surge that can be generated by falling in love
both in and out of the transference. --Chessick, R.D. (1992). On
Falling in Love and Creativity. J. Amer. Acad. Psychoanal.,
20:347-373.

Donatien Quincampoix

Best known for his imagistic portrayals of predatory
sexuality in village life, the impact of Donatien
Quincampoix's background as a sausage-maker is
often ignored by contemporary scholars..

step away from the computer

after watching a million instructional videos on youtube this morning,
I still have no idea what to say (maybe it's better just to enjoy the
silence, after all, I don't always need to get the last word in). But
as someone else said in some online forum "life's to short to waste
another second of it". Which might translate to: time for a cup of
green tea and/or lunch, preferably something fried. it's a good thing
I have a pocket watch, or I wouldn't know what time it is.

i exist!

bielefeld conspiracy: bielefeld doesn't exist
general conspiracy: XYZ threatens my existence

why i am so stupid

"'Cause I used to live
In a fuzzy dream
And I wanted to be
Like all the pretty people" -- Madonna

cf.

The happiness of my existence,
its unique character perhaps,
lies in its fatefulness:
expressing it in the form of a riddle,
as my own father I am already dead,
as my own mother I still live and, grow old.
[...]
I am gifted with an utterly uncanny instinct of cleanliness;
so that I can ascertain physiologically
that is to say, smell
the proximity, I may say, the inmost core,
the "entrails" of every human soul.

-- http://users.compaqnet.be/cn127103/Nietzsche_ecce_homo/eh1.html

she's just not that into you... in fact, she doesn't even know your name

Ryan Dodge, 26, admits that when it comes to reading women's signals,
he sometimes strikes out. "I think a girl on the subway is checking me
out," he says, "but then I realize she's watching the guy next to me
while he's stealing my wallet or something." --
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/personal/07/10/shes.not.that.into.you/index.html

lol

what i never understood was...

"The goal is always to get people interested in philosophy by speaking
first in terms that people are familiar with."
-- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-10900068

searching for mark fisher

After American Graffiti, George [Lucas] had wanted to do Apocalypse
Now. George ... had worked on the script ... back in 1969.Then, when
Warner Brothers backed out, the project was abandoned. It was still
too hot a topic, the war was still on... and it just wasn't going to
happen. So George considered his options [and] he decided, 'All right,
if it's politically too hot as a contemporary subject, I'II put the
essence of the story in outer space and make it in a galaxy long ago
and far, far away'. Star Wars is George's transubstantiated version of
Apocalypse Now. The rebel group were the North Vietnamese, and the
Empire was the US -- quoted at
http://www.cinestatic.com/trans-mat/Fisher/sfcapital.htm

This guy Mark Fisher writes sensible stuff about topics I only drool
over. Here's a link to his thesis:
http://www.cinestatic.com/trans-mat/Fisher/FCcontents.htm

sexuality of the bourgeois type

Craigslist london:

I'm reading "A Thousand Plateaus" by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
I'm bored of 'sexuality of the bourgeois type', and especially of having
a million crushes that go nowhere. WTF?

Maybe this lines up with your interests and proclivities. How about a
bi-weekly reading group and maybe more? Only serious philosophers
need apply ;)

rejection is awesome!

The thing is, it's more or less all in your head. As opposed to other
sorts of suffering, right, like the pain you experience when you stub
your toe. Thanks to the imagination, you can feel rejected even when
you're not. It's a pure auto-creation. Of course, you will aim to
prove that you really have been rejected, i.e. that your name has been
dragged through the mud, that you have been treated in the most
debasing manner -- in this way you exhaust your energies and make
yourself entirely pathetic. The sense of rejection is what reveals the
fixity of a person's thought. For someone who manages to grasp it,
it would seem to be an excellent tool for making oneself more adaptable.

never could stand that dog

So I was talking with my aunt and she asked me, what makes you
happy? -- and how can you extend that into relationships?

The first thing that came to mind was "hacking" (or any kind of
detailed, engaged, thoughtful problem-solving behaviour).
Since I already like doing this with other people, one rather obvious
idea would be to do it in groups, i.e. social settings. The point is,
by default most popular social activities are completely disjoint from
hacking behaviour -- theatre and films and watching sports and so
forth -- which isn't meant as a strong value judgement, just a
starting point...

In particular, this doesn't mean that I dislike "culture"; I think
there's something about the flow of life within dramatic situations,
or within casual social groupings, that is, or can be, hackish.
(E.g. Oscar Wilde's plays are typically so *clever*...)

And I think I would be leaving something important off of my
list if I didn't include things like "dreaming" or investigating
intuitive combinations of things. But I'm not so sure I feel
*most* at ease in cultural situations -- especially given that
they all have a life-cycle. ("How much is he going to kill me
for accompanying you to the theatre...?")

My idea was to write a second page of my famous "Wall
Chart" (http://metameso.org/~joe/docs/wall-chart.pdf) including
some more personal reflections. My aunt suggested that
"happiness" could have it's own page, and e.g. Fear, Surprise,
Sadness, etc., wouldn't need such huge developments.
Still, they're there, so maybe start, imagining each will take
1/12th of a page -- and then make an annex for "happiness"
if it really takes off?

god bless jwz

"So I said, narrow the focus. Your 'use case' should be, there's a 22
year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software
get him laid?
That got me a look like I had just sprouted a third head, but bear
with me, because I think that it's not only crude but insightful. 'How
will this software get my users laid' should be on the minds of anyone
writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social
software). 'Social software' is about making it easy for people to do
other things that make them happy: meeting, communicating, and hooking
up." -- http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html

Also c/o http://groups.google.com/group/activity-streams -- crazy
thing is, I was just searching for "why groupware fails" earlier
today.
Maybe I meant "Why CSCW applications fail: problems in the design and
evaluation of organizational interfaces". That was probably
it. (http://portal.acm.org.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/citation.cfm?id=62273)

never let the weeds get higher than the garden

"Many a man has cherished for years as his hobby some vague shadow of
an idea, too meaningless to be positively false; he has, nevertheless,
passionately loved it, has made it his companion by day and by night,
and has given to it his strength and his life, leaving all other
occupations for its sake, and in short has lived with it and for it,
until it has become, as it were, flesh of his flesh and bone of his
bone; and then he has waked up some bright morning to find it gone,
clean vanished away like the beautiful Melusina of the fable, and the
essence of his life gone with it." - C. S. Pierce, "How to Make Our
Ideas Clear" http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/How_to_Make_Our_Ideas_Clear

fenollosa riff

I've been getting some mileage out of the ideas from
"The Chinese Written Character as a Medium For Poetry"
by Fenollosa c/o Pound, especially the bit where they say
that the prototype for a sentence is a lightning flash --

Cloud-->lightning-->ground

TERM --transfer of force--> TERM

As an example, consider the verb "comprend", which means
"take together". If you disagree, you say "I'm not having any
of that".

Looking at this in a (more) Nietzschian way, we might instead
write

FORCE --transfer of force--> FORCE

or just

FORCE --FORCE--> FORCE

so that we're ultimately led to a picture of different forces
acting and reacting on one another in a distributed, fluid, and
nonlinear way.

So instead of networks of terms, a better model might be
overlapping coloured disks of changing size and luminescence.
This model should recover the ball-and-stick model in a certain
limit, but it should also deal with issues like "reacting to an entire
conversation". It seems to me that working with e.g.
elements of the power set of nodes of a given diagram,
we're able to better understand an "outside" relative to a
given "inside". (How a "conversation" can become
a "document" or even a "testament", for example.)
As an example, consider the idea that listening to a designated
or marked outsider defines or creates a "constituent moment"
(Arendt).

The idea that we're effectively thinking about everything at
once once seems to liberate thought from most of its
mechanical and combinatorial preoccupations. Which is
not to say that these aren't important as tools. It seems
better to be clear that forces are not always "channelled",
and that the dynamics represented and conveyed by
language are often much more complicated than the
language itself would have you believe...

PHILOSOPHY AND PLANETMATH

PRELUDE: PHILOSOPHY AND THE MATRIX

So, philosophy and the matrix, huh? It's interesting: I'm
sure I wouldn't have read much philosophy if it wasn't for
"The Matrix". My friend Caroline explained to me how it
was based on "Simulacra and Simulation", so I decided to
read that before seeing the movie. Well, I had already
seen the Trinity fight scene when I was waiting to go to
Star Wars I, and at the time I regretted not seeing The
Matrix instead. Shall we say, I was easily tempted and
more than intrigued.

NOTE: Incidentally, Wikimedia Foundation's executive
director looks rather like Trinity, and she apparently
kicks ass in a similar fashion:

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:Sue_Gardner

1. OUT OF THE SHADOW OF WIKIPEDIA: PLANETMATH AT TEN

Initial history of my involvement -- walking the
hexagon-tiled path of bubble math.

And after that, I went to math grad school, and realized
that it was hard, and in many ways controlling -- that is
to say, the process of learning mathematics was controlled
by some gatekeepers called 'professors' who seemed to be
doing everything they could to make my life conform to
their ideals; but I wasn't having it. I didn't go to
class much and instead figured I'd learn the material on
the exams on my own, and create a repository of
information that would help other people teach themselves
to pass the exams too. That way we could avoid all this
external control stuff and just get on to business with
doing research.

Joining up: it seemed like a straight shot:

PlanetMath was the only thing I found on the web that
seemed to be doing something reasonably close to my
ideals.

* Do mathematics the way we do free software

* Make free software that helps us do math.

* Have some discourse to help decide what to code.

And to some extent that's what we did.

But... As we look at the actual state of
PlanetMath... mathematics... or much more broadly at the
actual state of 'human knowledge' --

We see:

* Things are a bit broken.

* Yes, PlanetMath is still there, but it is currently
running without much support for further development.

* And as far as I can tell, the vision I described is not
really implemented anywhere, yet.

What I had hoped was that the PlanetMathers would be a
sort of revolutionary group like Morpheus's. I was, shall
we say, very idealistic, but also not necessarily so
skilled. Somehow that didn't seem to matter as much as
'waking up' to the fact that academia was based on these
palpable structures of control. Even professional
mathematicians who hadn't realized this were, in my mind,
no better than machines for producing mathematics. Well,
although this was my emotional reaction, even then I
started to think about things a bit differently: Actually,
Mathematics itself *was* the Matrix! -- which is to say, a
tool for "simulating" reality in ways that went beyond
reality itself. Mathematics *was* the 'hyperreal'. It
was thinking like this that made me give the title "The
Hyperreal Dictionary of Mathematics" to the conceptual --
but not just conceptual -- project that I had in mind.

This is why I'm asking:

2. "HOW CAN WE BUILD A FUNCTIONING PLATFORM FOR
CROWDSOURCING EDUCATION?"

That was sort of like what I was asking then, too, but my
understanding of how such a thing could be 'bootstrapped'
was fairly different; I hadn't heard of 'crowdsourcing'
and I still thought that the 'band of brothers' at
PlanetMath could do it. Hell, I even imagined that *I*
could do quite a bit of it on my own if needed. By "it" I
meant: creating the kernel -- the core bits of
mathematical knowledge and computational linguistics that
would be needed for an automated system to start
extracting more mathematical knowledge from regular old
humanly-written mathematical texts. At other moments, I
figured that most of what I would have to do would be to
build the appropriate platform for coding this 'kernel'
and that I would find other people who would want to
participate in actually doing the mathematical stuff;
'crowdsourcing' (by some other name, of course). The idea
here was that people would learn by teaching the computer
for a while, until eventually they would learn from a more
fully-automated computer system.

I think we look around at free software projects that work
well (e.g. Firefox, Emacs, Linux kernel), there are some
features seem to apply quite generally.

* Patches

* Plugin architecture

* Fork, branch, and merge

Well...! Probably I should also add to the list that such
projects need to be appropriately social. It's not just a
matter of a hacker like Neo ("my own personal Jesus
Christ") cranking everything out; or not typically. This
isn't meant to say anything against the style used by the
early Stallman or Torvalds or anyone else of that ilk.
(Cf. XKCD "3117".) Even the most groundbreaking people
often realize in hind-sight that they have to be
'appropriately social' -- I'm thinking of the
mathematician William P. Thurston's paper "On Proof and
Progress in Mathematics".

These ideas can be applied quite generally, but a few
words about how they can be applied in the case of
mathematics?

3. "PEOPLE SHOULD BE FREE"

You know, before getting on with that, it strikes me that
my friend Stephan Kreitmayer's comments about my recording
"People should be free" -- that the music was played in an
unscholarly fashion or something to that effect -- could
also be applied to the way I've historically done
scholarship. In Texas, academia was just a desire or a
disaster waiting to happen. I was wrapped up in my own
passions, with 'the sound and the fury of a tale told by
an idiot, signifying nothing' -- well, you deserve the
actual quote:

"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."

All of my 'excessive' attributes are wrapped up in my
collection of avatars -- the 'names I call myself': Fear,
Deneb/Arided, Constante, Joseph K, holtzermann17...

These names have quite plainly to do with me mapping my
understanding of things back to my own body, a body that I
think of as 'mortal' and in other ways, quite limited; or
else to my understanding of bodily matters in general.

To be a bit more clear: the 'hyperreal' projects have to
do with a sort of yoga, a sort of 'binding' or 'yoking' of
mind and body.

In fact, each of the above monikers contains within it a
fairly obvious sense of cancellation or paradox: the
collection of names I call myself is 'excessive' in the
first instance only insofar as it has expanded to contain
the excesses of my cancellations, to turn them into a
regime of self-limitation.

I am a dare that hasn't been taken up,
a star that faded to black,
the angel of ambivalence,
a sort of puppet that bites back,
or else a simple place of residence
that I moved away from long ago.

It should really come as no surprise that part of the
vision is becoming-machine, that what I was saying before
in a critical tone about mathematicians-as-machines was
somehow an ingredient in formulating a 'neutral' target
self-description; neutral in this case being better than
negative, both in terms of self-distaste and in the more
extreme sense of containing a seed of death.

In short we are looking at 'free software -- the free
software of patches, plugins, forks and so forth -- as a
way of life, or way to life, or simply as the matter of
life'. Mathematics was always seen as a primitive form of
such software, whereas life itself is perhaps the most
primative form.

Without further ado, we will turn to some more impersonal
themes.

4. STAKEHOLDERS, ROLES, AND ACTIVITIES

This 'anthropological' picture of Mathematics as a sort of
ecosystem provides at least temporary relief from the sort
of self-scrutiny I was discussing above. Culture and its
multiplicities give a very different sort of "map" or
"terrain" -- and the idea: 'what sort of activities do we
want to support' ultimately gives me something to think
about.

See, as you pass from the amorphous picture of
'stakeholders in mathematics' (academia, the state,
industry, and so forth) and on to a collection of roles
(researcher, learner, teacher, employer, colleague,
friend, etc.) and ultimately to a set of purposive
activities (writing a paper, attending a class, creating
an exam, defining a goal, chatting, smiling, etc.), we can
absolutely develop a sort of "matrix" that can be said to
define "mathematics" as a field or locus of human
endeavor. We could do this for other fields as well.

Revolution in this space might consist of moving the
cultural patterns off of one sort of hardware and on to
another, for example. A smaller revolution just might add
a new row or column to this matrix.

Here we are thinking as anthropology-machines; slowly,
methodically, comfortably. Of course it must be noted
that even a relatively minor change like adding a new row
or column to this matrix may correspond to ridiculous
upheavals in the underlying picture of social dynamics.
As it currently stands, I'm inclined to map the matrix I
have in mind the following phase diagram, in which the
first bit is somehow central, the second bit is somehow
ambient, and the four final bits plug in to the first bit
in order to interface with one another.

5. SEMANTIC CORE ; EYES AND HANDS

My current agenda for the project is assembling a new
semantic core, together with enough eyes and hands, as
well as support for writing and doing exercises,
connections to original research, integration of computer
algebra systems, improved communications on the site, and
functional social networking to connect it to outside
issues.

Such a diagram brings to mind again a cluster of bubbles,
or perhaps better still the gluing-together of various
more complicated geometric spaces with their own curvature
and physics (cf. Thurston again).

But it isn't so necessary to froth at the mouth about
*these* things: it is more effective to just build them --

* To work with Michael Kohlhase and his group in Bremen;

* To make PlanetMath work as a 'frontend' to Wikipedia;

* To set up a place to write and work on self-grading
exercises;

* To correlate encyclopedia terms with terms used in 'the
literature';

* To make it possible to move mathematical expressions from
a discursive setting to a computational setting;

* To make discourse about mathematics work better.

The "philosophy" described in this article is not just a
matter of moving from Baudrilliard to Deleuze, but also, I
hope obviously, a matter of 'maturing' in some ways.

I seems like I still haven't turned these sorts of musings
into a "research question".

At the same time, I think I am much less attached to or at
least less embedded in "mathematics" than I was 8 years
ago. This distance may possibly correspond to some
increase of intimacy with myself and my peers, a new
feeling of who those peers are, or better still -- since I
am no longer attached to the 'band of brothers' idea and
am instead engaged with new ideas about 'dynamics' or
'dynamism' -- of HOW such people operate.

I don't think it is entirely possible to abandon a
"Philosophy of the Matrix" but I do think we can remove
some of its most obnoxious dualisms.

In pragmatic terms, this corresponds to the pursuit of

6. HAPPY HACKING

(to be continued...)

politically motivated

Spending a week at Wikimania 2010 I got a taste for
what it feels like to be around a bunch of people whose
political motivations are similar to my own.

Really good.

The obvious sceptical response is: does this good
feeling make me too uncritical and accepting?
MAYbe, but the highly idealised vision is of a body
politic in which "we may not agree, but we agree to
discuss".

This is quite different from an environment in which
discussion is ruled out from the beginning, e.g.
because the people involved don't even speak the
same language.

A political common ground somehow functions as a
linguistic common ground -- and all the same sort of
'implicit assumptions' apply. In an interesting way,
"politics" opposes "research" --

In research, everything must be questioned in order
to build a "theory"; in politics, the theoretical questions
have already been decided and are embodied in principles,
what remains are the pragmatic issues of implementation.

communism of writing

"One must think and write, in particular as regards
friendship, against great numbers. Against the most
numerous who make language and lay down the law of its
usage. Against hegemonic language in what is called
public space. If there were a community, even a
communism, of writing, it would above all be on condition
that war be waged on those, the greatest in number, the
strongest and the weakest at the same time, who forge and
appropriate for themselves the dominant usages of
language[.]" -- Jacques Derrida, "Politics of Friendship"
(p. 71 Verso edn)

looking for rest in all the wrong places

Maybe what happens is that I look for *rest* in my email
inbox, and what I should just do is go take a nap!

philosophical background...

1. So my idea for a research problem is: building a
"weather map" of learning. I'm actually interested in
"weather maps" of all sorts, but learning is a nice place
to start.

What do I mean by a "weather map for learning"? First of
all I'm thinking it could be either personalized, showing
what *I* am learning, or what *you* are learning,
relative, somehow, to the grand scheme of things -- if and
when there is a "grand scheme" (there is, in mathematics,
for instance). But the map could also be larger scale,
i.e., at the level of a community or even a society.
E.g. what are the students in the different cities in the
Bay Area learning? Do students in Oakland and Berkeley
spend their time on very different things? Or what about
students in the USA, Japan, and UK?

A lot of the large-scale data streams are presumably
available from ongoing research. But the small-scale data
streams may not be so detailed; maybe we just know an
individual's test scores, for example, but we have no
record of specific learning modules. Well, if computers
are used more and more intelligently, I think more
fine-grained data about user interactions will be
available. We could start with some simple things like
looking for trends in web browsing history.

2. BUT, OK, just what good would this sort of "map" do
anyone? Why do we like "data" so much? Or, more
specifically, even if we have mountains of data, how do we
make sense of it or do anything useful with it at all?

This is where the "foundations of knowledge" stuff starts
to come in real handy. Some issues here are as follows:

A. Is a "learning map" actually useful to the student? I
personally think it would be -- but do I have any
convincing reasons for thinking this? Why would it be
better to have a picture of how much "coverage" something
like the quadratic formula gets me, as opposed to just
knowing that I'd completed the quadratic formula chapter
in my Algebra text book (for example)?

B. I personally think it has to do with motivation and
power. Or, another way to put this, it is really
distasteful to me to see learning separated from both
emotional and social contexts. When I was a kid, I liked
completing another math course just because it gave me a
sense of progress and mastery. But I'm imagining how much
more accurate my sense of what was going on in these
regards would have been if each problem was justified --
if I was getting an accurate read-out of my real
empowerment (e.g. you're 70% of the way towards mastering
the basics of civil engineering, or what have you). A
student who has a map of the educational process doesn't
need to be led (like a lamb to the slaughter, as it were)
but can instead lead themself (onwards to glory!). How I
would have liked to be able to say: "I know what I'm
doing, and I have the skills profile to prove it." As it
was, I think I've always been a bit clueless about what my
real skills are...

C. So I think that a learning environment that includes a
detailed map of the learning process is going to boost a
student's self-confidence and sense of useful social
connection as well. ("I've just got to do another 30% of
this course and I can get a job as a civil engineer.")
Part of the problem here is where does that extra "30% of
the course" come from? It's nice to imagine a learning
environment with all these brilliant features -- but in
fact, we're in a very different reality at present.

D. If we're going to take up the challenge of creating an
educational world like the one I'm envisioning, I think
that at present the real challenge has to do with putting
together many different statements (e.g. from government
or philanthropic non-profits, from educators, from
students, from employers, etc...) -- e.g. "we don't have
enough graduates with proficiency in Science, Technology,
Engineering, and Mathematics" -- and actual functioning
operations that address the various issues that these
folks are bringing up.

E. These "functioning operations" bring us into a
relatively broader sphere of "knowledge" and "practice" --
we're no longer just talking about mapping some *stuff*
called "Science, Technology, Engineering, and
Mathematics", but both mapping and engineering a broad
range of social practices that relate, whether closely or
not so closely, to these subjects.

F. From this point of view we could say that the relevant
"knowledge" isn't embodied in textbooks and course notes
or even things like experiment and publication practices,
but in a huge multidimensional social/cultural engine/loom
that weaves HISTORY.

G. I would claim that the more usefully or intelligently a
given learning activity connects to THAT, the better.
Learning should just be a matter of "something I read in a
book one time", but almost a matter of
learning/experiencing/becoming who one *is* -- enjoying
and expanding one's view on society, for example.

3. The thing is, life goes on (or has so far) without big
or expensive projects to centralize and coordinate all of
this cultural knowledge in support of learning. Indeed
arguably "culture" works much better in a decentralized
way -- so maybe learning does too?

And yet -- isn't it also the case that, though they be
dispersed and flexible, things like LANGUAGES already
provide some sort of "integration" for the way people work
together? Integration need not be a matter of lock-step,
but can instead be a "loose-enough interoperability".

In short, decentralization is good, but interconnection is
also good, and we can have both. One of the most
interesting features of a system with interconnected bits
is that each interconnection can be a place to gather
"data" (on how information flows between the components).
Data is something people are often interested in...

4. But as I was saying above, "even if we have mountains
of data, how do we make sense of it or do anything useful
with it at all?"

The *specific* "foundations of knowledge" thing that I'm
thinking about is that people like it when things "make
sense" -- but what's that? I'm guessing that it has to do
with employing a handful of activity patterns --

simplifying, interconnecting, establishing control,
establishing practices, discerning motivations, and
doing experiments

At present these are just some ideas I sort of cooked up:
I'm eager to "put them to the test" -- specifically, I
want to make a nice survey of "the way things are" and
then see if I can use those 6 patterns to get to "the way
things could be". That sort of design work is what's "on"
presently.

5. As for why or how "philosophy stuff" relates -- I don't
think I would have thought of half of the things I've
talked about here had I not read Deleuze's "Logic of
Sense". Really that book is about *how events happen*,
given that otherwise we just have a bunch of *stuff*
sitting around. In a way it almost seems like magic --
looking at the various patterns and trends and seeing how
ultimately they spring to life at some points!

At the same time, I'm also seeing more clearly (thanks
partly to a book on Nietzsche that I'm reading) that this
is absolutely just a point of view... MAYBE a point of
view that I can use to enhance my own personal power, or
to help enhance the power of organizations I'm working
with/for.

Even just the idea of "assembling things" is actually a
sort of complicated idea from a philosophy point of view:
this would be something having to do with Hume, for
example, as opposed to Plato (who would probably instead
look for the essential nature of things to reveal
themselves with time).

Finally, I've been trying to get more into Foucault, who
as both a sort of "archivist" and "cartographer" is in
many ways close to what I have in mind as a way of
working. If there is an "philosophical update" from me,
it is to think in terms of dynamic maps and not static
ones. (This relates also to a mathematical idea I've been
thinking a little bit about -- having to do with
semi-self-similar structures; maybe 'practals' or
something like that...)

Obviously I'm not just here to "play with ideas" and so
forth -- but a little bit can't hurt if I'm also able to
"produce". It may in fact turn out that one of the things
the people here would *most* like me to produce is some
"theory" to go along with the practical stuff the grant is
working on.

But at the moment as I said, I'm more concerned with
designing "practical implementation projects that will
produce measurable changes"... and I'm perfectly happy
with that. THIS essay just describes what's going on in
the background.