Gathatoulie

poetic pirate coelho

2012-01-29T08:42:00.001-08:00

Pirates of the world, unite and pirate everything I've ever written!

The good old days, when each idea had an owner, are gone forever.

First, because all anyone ever does is recycle the same four themes: a
love story between two people, a love triangle, the struggle for
power, and the story of a journey.

Second, because all writers want what they write to be read, whether
in a newspaper, blog, pamphlet, or on a wall.

-- http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2012/01/20/welcome-to-pirate-my-books/

1984 the music(al) video: script

2012-01-13T10:32:00.001-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lUQs_TF9yE

An idea I had a while ago, now realised in draft form.

Stylistic notes: "Brazil" meets "Eternal Sunshine of the
Spotless Mind" meets J. G. Ballard's "Crash".

BIG BROTHER (who is a girl dancer in male drag, black
pants, braces, black and white retro shoes - roughly like
Fred Astaire "Puttin' on the Ritz", but dressed down a
little bit - a more "worker" than "high class" style)
enters for a street scene. It's an "open air market" in
London but "1984" style, which means that it sells only
things like soup ladles and other stuff that people don't
want. She is the only one with any vivaciousness,
everyone else is sort of gray and pasty -- like, but not
quite as dismal as, the "What have you done with his
body?" dream from "Brazil".

WINSTON (who is roughly speaking, one of the people
described above) buys a newspaper from a newstand in the
market, and a package of "Victory" cigarettes, and heads
home. This is of course the same newspaper that he
produced at the office. He puts the newspaper down on his
writing table and opens up the drawer to reveal his secret
journal.

BIG BROTHER dances along behind him and enters into a
run-down telescreen repair shop on the ground floor of
WINSTON's highrise, where she winks at the PROPRIETOR, and
dances into the back room, where there is a surveillance
substation: she tunes into his telescreen and watches him
writing in the journal.

DISSOLVE

Meanwhile, across town JULIA leaves a Junior Anti-Sex
League meeting for a liaison with a party member (O'BRIAN)
at his apartment. She takes a sweet out of a red
cellophane wrapper and puts the wrapper into a wastebin
before heading upstairs. We see a little skin through the
window before the light's out

and CUT

to WINSTON working at the newspaper office, redacting
newspaper stories. Then it's his lunch break, and in the
cafeteria, BIG BROTHER (now dressed in light coloured
dungarees and a white long-sleeved shirt, as if she was
coming from painting or cleaning windows) leads the office
workers and food servers in a choreographed dance through
the food line (based as directly as possible given the
limitations of space to the video of Feist's "1234" for
Apple's iPod Nano commercial) while WINSTON talks a bit
too freely with SYME sitting in the canteen. WINSTON is
clearly somewhat perturbed, and you can't tell (based on
the passive diners sitting in the main part of the canteen
and the antics in the food line) if he might be unhinged
and imagining the whole dance. He sees JULIA walk through
the line without dancing, and she smiles at him; he looks
a bit surprised. The whole mood is managed with tricky
camera work, which ends up focusing on the blue sky:

and PAN DOWN

to O'BRIEN'S apartment, through another window and into
his office, revealing bookcases. He was clearly working with
ink on relatively sumptuous paper, but is now talking with
someone who we don't see and shaking his head, no. He
notices a red cellophane wrapper on the side of the desk and
distractedly flicks it into the wastebasket

and BACK OUT THE WINDOW through blue sky (now darker)

to WINSTON walking in the woods in the evening with JULIA.
We see some fireflies in the ditch and PULL BACK we see
BIG BROTHER, dressed as originally, watching from
a treetop as WINSTON and JULIA begin to make out (we
see that we initially had BIG BROTHER's view on the
scene). BIG BROTHER's expression now: Tsk Tsk!

and CUT

to basement rooms in the MINISTRY OF LOVE in split screen,
where WINSTON is scrambling away from a RAT, and JULIA's
legs and feet are being flogged with a ratan cane. Both
are in an extreme state of pain and terror. The 2 cameras do
long panning shots, coming up out of sewer gratings and
basement-level windows (cf. long shot from "The City of
Lost Children") to converge on a table in front of the nearby
CHESTNUT TREE CAFE (the split screen now reuniting into
one stable shot) where BIG BROTHER and O'BRIAN are out on
a date drinking gin flavoured with cloves. They clink
glasses and look lovingly into each other's eyes: this is
all a big game for the two of them. They now seem less like
"1984" characters and more like American tourists in a
European cafe, looking at the passers by to see if any of them
look like they can be seduced.

Be the machine that you are in the world.

2011-12-25T22:22:00.001-08:00

Baudrillard: Surplus value, profit, exploitation -- all these "objective realities" of capital have no doubt worked to mask the immense social domestication, the immense controlled sublimation of the process of production, appearing only as the tactical side of the process. [...] For the system no longer needs universal productivity; it requires only that everyone play the game. [...] Excluded from the game, their revolt henceforth aims at the rules of the game. This revolt can remain ambiguous if it is experienced as anomie and as defeat, if it occupies by default the marginal position assigned to it by the system or if it is institutionalized as marginal. But it is enough that it radically adopts this forced exteriority to the system in order to call the system into question, no longer as functioning in the interior but from the exterior, as a fundamental structure of the society, as a code, as a culture, as an interiorized social space.

wittgenstein #18

2011-12-16T11:12:00.001-08:00

Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets
and squares, of old and new houses with additions from various
periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with
straight regular streets and uniform houses.

research tidbit

2011-12-11T13:20:00.001-08:00

"The functionality of Nature structured by labor, and the
corresponding functionality of the subject structured around needs,
belong to the anthropological sphere of use value described by
Enlightenment rationality and defined for a whole civilization (which
imposed it on others) by a certain kind of abstract, linear,
irreversible finality: a certain model subsequently extended to all
sectors of individual and social practice. This operational finality
is arbitrary in such a way that the concept of Nature it forgets
resists integration within it. It looks as if forcefully rationalized
Nature reemerges elsewhere in an irrational form. Without ceasing to
be ideological, the concept splits into a "good" Nature that is
dominated and rationalized (which acts as the ideal cultural
reference) and a "bad" Nature that is hostile, menacing, catastrophic,
or polluted." -- Jean Baudrillard, "The Mirror of Production" (pp.
56-57)

33 1/3 Mercy Street (vintage material!)

2011-12-07T13:14:00.001-08:00

(Anne Sexton vs Peter Gabriel, Nick Cave, and Tom Waits
with a sprinkling of Kathy Acker.)

In my dream, looking down on empty streets, all she can
see is that it began when they came and took me from my
home. The dreams all made solid and, drilling into the
marrow of my entire bone, they put me in death row, the
dreams of which I am nearly wholly innocent, you know.

MY REAL DREAM:

The bats in the belfry and I'm walking up and down Beacon
Hill. Searching for a street sign, namely MERCY STREET.
Waiting. Not there. Where are the arms that held me and
I'M YEARNING.

Try the Back Bay. Not there.

I pledged her love before, an eye for an eye and a tooth
for a tooth. It's such a sad old feeling and yet I know
the number, 45 Mercy Street.

I know the stained-glass window, it's memories. But
you're innocent when you dream and i think of the foyer,
my head is glowing.

When you dream the three flights of the house
when you dream its parquet floors

And we'll be done with all this weighing up of truth, the
furniture, and mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, the
servants and the graveyard. We laughed, my friends and I
know the cupboard of Spode, got nothing left to lose.

The boat of ice, solid silver, where we swore we'd be
together and the butter sits in neat squares until like
a strange giant we died on the big mahogany table.

Not there.

Glowing until the day we died and I think my head is
smoking and where did you go?

In a way I'm hoping I made a golden promise to be done
with 45 Mercy Street, all this looks of disbelief.

That we would never part with great-grandmother, an eye
for an eye, a locket and a tooth for a tooth, kneeling in
her whale-bone corset, and praying gently but fiercely;
then I broke the wash basin, her heart at five A.M., and
anyway at noon there was no proof and then I broke her
heart, nor motive why, dozing in her wiggy rocker.

And grandfather taking a nap in the pantry, smoking all of
the buildings, grandmother pushing the bell for the
downstairs maid, all of those cars and, I'll say it, Nana
rocking Mother with an oversized flower.

And my head is melting again on her forehead to cover the
curl where once just a dream of when she was, good, and
when she was... not afraid to die.

And in a way I'm helping in somebody's head where she was
begat, and in a generation, the third she will beget, I
began to warm and chill, she pictures to be done with all
this, twisted of the truth.

In the broken glass, she pictures the steam to objects and
a lie for a lie, their fields, she pictures a soul, a
ragged cup, a twisted truth for a mop with no leak at the
seam the face of Jesus in my soup and I've got nothing
left to lose, let's take the boat out, those sinister
dinner meals wait, and I'm not afraid to die.

Until darkness, with the stranger's seed blooming, the
meal trolley's wicked wheels let's take... melting the
boat into the flower called Horrid. A hooked bone rising
from my food wait until I walk in a yellow dress. And I
think my blood is boiling darkness comes, all things
either good or ungood. Nowhere, and a white pocketbook
stuffed with cigarettes, I'm spoiling in the corridors of
pale green and grey and enough pills, my wallet, my keys,
all the fun with all this truth and consequence and being
twenty-eight, or is it forty-five?

I walk. I walk. Waiting nowhere in the suburbs and I hold
matches at street signs burning in the cold light of day,
for it is dark, and in a way I'm yearning, and a truth for
a truth, there in the midst of it so alive and alone as
dark as the leathery dead to be done and anyway I told the
truth with all this measuring of words that support like
bone, and I'm not afraid to die.

Dreaming an eye for an eye of Mercy St. and I have lost a
tooth, my green Ford waiting, anyway i told the truth and
i think my head is burning. My house in the suburbs
dreaming of mercy, two little kids, and i'm not afraid to
die.

In your way sucked up like pollen by the bee in me and in
a way I'm yearning for daddy's arms and a husband again
interpret signs and catalogue who has wiped off his eyes,
dreaming, done with all this measuring of proof, in order
not to see me inside out.

Of Mercy Street, a blackened tooth, a scarlet fog. I am
walking and looking. Swear, a life for a life, they moved
that sign, the walls are bad. And this is no dream-black.
Just my oily life-bottom. And a truth for a kind truth,
where the people are alibis, and the street is unfindable
for an entire lifetime.

Pull the shades down (dreaming of mercy) they are sick
breath and I don't care! anyway there was no proof in your
daddy's arms, bolt the door, mercy, they are sick breath,
erase the number, but I'm not afraid to tell a lie.

Rip down the street sign, pulling out the papers from the
drawers that slide smooth and the mercy seat is waiting
what can it matter, they are sick breath tugging at the
darkness, and I think my head is burning what can it
matter to this cheapskate word upon word they are sick
breath gathering who wants to own the past that went out
on a dead ship and in a way I'm yearning confessing all
the secret things and left me only with paper in the warm
velvet box, done with all this measuring of truth.

Not there.

Hear stories from the chamber, between the dollars and the
lipstick. I open my pocketbook to the priest, as women
do. He's the eye for an eye doctor, christ (I pick them
out) and fish swim back and forth. He was born into a
manger. He can handle the truth and the truth shocks and
like some ragged stranger dreaming of the way I told the
truth -- tenderness -- the tremble in the hips that died
upon the cross but here I'm afraid I told a lie.

Kissing Mary's lips and might I say it seems so fitting in
its way of Mercy St. -- I'm dreaming he was a carpenter by
trade, wearing your insides out, one by one or at least
that's what I told, them dreaming of mercy like my good
hand in your daddy's arms again, tatooed evil, that filthy
across Mercy st. throw them at the street signs.

Dreaming, shoot my pocketbook, they did nothing to
challenge, swear they moved that sign in heaven, his
throne is made of gold looking for mercy the ark of his
testament is stowed into the Charles River. In your
daddy's arms, a throne from which I'm told all mercy does
unfold.

Next I pull the dream off. Mercy, mercy, looking for
mercy down here it's made of wood and wire anne, with her
father is out in the boat and my body is on fire riding
the water and God is never far away. And slam into the
cement wall riding the waves on the sea into the mercy
seat of the clumsy calendar I climb my head is shaved, my
head is wired and like a moth that tries to enter the
bright eye I go shuffling out of the life I live in, just
to hide in death awhile.

I never lied in my notebooks.

My life, a wedding band its hauled up, collaring all that
rebel blood.

buster benson's rules to live by

2011-11-30T02:23:00.001-08:00

1. You must not dilly-dally. 2. You must be your word. 3. You must
have good intentions. 4. You must admit to being the maker of meaning.
5. You must not feel sorry for yourself. 6. You must have a vision
that you are striving for. 7. You must tie creativity and
experimentation with survival. 8. You must be the change you want to
see. 9. You must rally others with your vision. 10. You must stake
your reputation on your better self. 11. You must be comfortable with
the consequences of being who you are. 12. You must share. 13. You
must make your own advice and take it. 14. You must manage your
stress, health, and clarity. 15. You must study your mistakes. 16. You
must retry things you don't like every once in a while. 17. You must
make time to enjoy things. -- http://busterbenson.com/

focus, leonardo

2011-11-25T04:15:00.001-08:00

"Inhibition may have an opposite impact on two aspects of creativity:
convergent thinking and divergent thinking. [...] Thus, poor
inhibitory control may present a disadvantage for individuals with
ADHD on convergent thinking tasks, such as the Remote Associates Task,
that beneﬁt from strong inhibitory control. In contrast, given the
positive relationship between poor inhibitory control and divergent
thinking, individuals with ADHD may show above average divergent
thinking. [...] On the other hand, some models of creativity suggest
that both the ability to diﬀuse attention and generate ideas, and the
ability to focus attention and work within certain constraints, may be
important for actual creative production." --
http://proadhd.nl/White_Shah_ADHDCreativity_PAID.pdf

Circumstantial evidence: a friend of mine who is more towards the ADHD
end of the spectrum has told me on several occasions that he thinks I
am very good at relating otherwise unrelated things (convergent
thinking). Am I comparatively bad at coming up with alternatives? I
must admit that although I like to think all over the place, I often
do so through the use of textual aids (e.g. using Gathatoulie posts to
record weird ideas -- which I then later draw connections between).

My guess is that I think more towards the high anxiety ("inhibited")
end of the spectrum (cf.
http://gathatoulie.blogspot.com/2011/11/old-mail-amy-g.html,
http://gathatoulie.blogspot.com/2011/10/self-agency-reward-and-anxiety.html)
-- which makes my own issues with focus and attention somewhat
curious.

Perhaps instead of what would be called divergent thinking (generating
ideas), I sensitively search and observe the world I'm in. Hm... it's
also curious that at the same time as having a fairly strong ability
to put up with things and deal with problems by self-soothing (not
always the best way, I might add), I also seem to have fairly bad
impulse control when it comes to things like budgeting money or
playing cards or whatever. Maybe being creative isn't always the best
blend for dealing with normal day to day life? In fact I'm pretty
sure it isn't. To put it another way, creativity and adaptivity are
vastly different things.

old mail: amy g

2011-11-25T03:55:00.001-08:00

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/08/22/depressed-mothers-have-children-with-enlarged-amygdalas-says-study.html
Awesome article, fucked up but interesting neurological effect! On
the positive side, such persons would be well qualified for careers as
super-detectives! :)

"If you grow up in an environment in which you don't have all the
support you would need, maybe you become a super-detector of threats."

On the down-side, somewhat subject to stress...

"a larger amygdala might be the equivalent of having not one fire
alarm but many go off at the slightest whiff of smoke."

My friend who's a psychologist by training had a different view: "I
think the actual effect of amygdale size is very small... a person's
education probably has much more to with how well they cope in real
world situations than the size of any particular area of their brain."

Cf. http://gathatoulie.blogspot.com/2011/08/comic-book-psychology.html

apomorphine reconsidered

2011-11-20T04:12:00.001-08:00

The classic D1/D2 receptor agonist apomorphine has been
used as a centrally acting emetic in Parkinson treatment
and to treat erectile dysfunction. A new sublingual form
of apomorphine has recently been developed, which produces
fewer side effects, such as nausea and vomiting. It has
been assumed that apomorphine would primarily influence
erectile function by acting on oxytocinergic neurons
located in the paraventricular nucleus of the
hypothalamus. However, animal studies as well as
observations in humans have shown that motivational
aspects of sexual behavior are influenced by apomorphine
administration as well. Summarizing a series of animal
studies, we may conclude that dopamine is involved in the
appetitive phase of sexual behavior, which is primarily
processed by the nucleus accumbens, whereas consummatory
aspects of sexual performance are controlled in the dorsal
striatum. -- http://66.199.228.237/boundary/Sexual_Addiction/orgasm_dopamine.pdf

linklater

2011-11-19T16:08:00.001-08:00

"Slackers might look like the left-behinds of society, but they are
actually one step ahead, rejecting most of society and the social
hierarchy before it rejects them. The dictionary defines slackers as
people who evade duties and responsibilities. A more modern notion
would be people who are ultimately being responsible to themselves and
not wasting their time in a realm of activity that has nothing to do
with who they are or what they might be ultimately striving for." --
Richard Linklater, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slacker_(film)

the ethical parent

2011-11-18T09:56:00.001-08:00

The following are ﬁve basic elements of how caregivers can foster a
secure attachment in the children under their care:

Collaboration [...] Reﬂective Dialogue [...] Repair [...] Coherent
Narratives [...] Emotional Communication.

-- http://www.robsilvermancounseling.com/images/siegel-interpersonal-neurobiology.pdf

Leigh Brasington's tentative hypothesis

2011-11-13T10:07:00.001-08:00

First, from Emily Yoffe in Slate Magazine:

Mammals stimulating the lateral hypothalamus seem to be caught in a
loop, Panksepp writes, "where each stimulation evoked a reinvigorated
search strategy". [...] 'Wanting' is Berridge's equivalent for
Panksepp's 'seeking' system.

[However,] it is the 'liking' system that Berridge believes is the brain's
reward center. When we experience pleasure, it is our own opioid
system, rather than our dopamine system, that is being stimulated.
This is why the opiate drugs induce a kind of blissful stupor so
different from the animating effect of cocaine and amphetamines.

[In short,] wanting and liking are complementary. The former
catalyzes us to action; the latter brings us to a satisfied pause.
Seeking needs to be turned off, if even for a little while, so that
the system does not run in an endless loop. When we get the object of
our desire (be it a Twinkie or a sexual partner), we engage in
consummatory acts that Panksepp says reduce arousal in the brain and
temporarily, at least, inhibit our urge to seek.

Now, from http://www.leighb.com/jhananeuro.htm:

Quite secluded from the dopamine-based wanting system (substantia
nigra), secluded from any other disturbing mental activity -- one
enters & remains in the first jhana: dopamine-based liking system
(ventral tegmental area) activation [...] accompanied by background mental
activity.

With the stilling of background mental activity, one enters & remains
in the second jhana: dopamine-based liking system activation &
opioid-based liking system activation born of concentration,
unification of awareness free from background mental activity --
internal tranquility due to opioids flooding the nervous system.

With the fading of dopamine-based liking system activation, remaining
equanimous, mindful & clearly aware -- with continued opioid-based
liking system activation, one is physically sensitive of pleasure. One
enters & remains in the third jhana, of which the Noble Ones declare,
'Equanimous & mindful due to opioid system activation, one has a
pleasurable abiding.'

With the abandoning of liking generated by opioid system activation --
as with the earlier disappearance of liking generated by dopamine
system activation -- one enters & remains in the fourth jhana:
mindfulness fully purified by the equanimity remaining from the prior
opioid activation, a neutral state now that the liking systems have
calmed down.

(N.B.: both dopamine-based liking and opioid-based liking are housed
in the Nucleus Accumbens, cf. this recent post on Gathatoulie,
http://gathatoulie.blogspot.com/2011/10/self-agency-reward-and-anxiety.html)

judeo-buddhist

2011-11-11T10:22:00.001-08:00

I noticed some fascinating parallels between the instructions for
Buddhist meditation in the Anapanasati Sutra
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anapanasati_Sutta#Preparatory_instructions)
and the layout of the Kabbalistic tree of life.

Let me run through the "steps" in that Sutra with parallels to some
tarot cards that seem to make sense. (These can certainly be switched
around considerably for other interpretations.) What's interesting to
me is how these steps map onto the "male" and "female" attributes of
the tree of life.

The parallels can serve as a mnemonic for remembering the various
components of a meditation practice, and for better understanding what
some mystical Kabbalistic things might "really" be about.

Contemplation of the Body / Malkuth
1. Discerning long breaths: 10 of wands, Oppression, as in a sigh
2. Discerning short breaths: 10 of coins, Wealth, as with speech or laughter
3. Experiencing the whole body: 10 of swords, Ruin, as in bodily pain and decay
4. Calming bodily formations: 10 of cups, Satiety, as in calmness

Contemplation of the Feeling / Netzach
5. Being sensitive to rapture: 7 of wands, Valour, as in being in love with an idea
6. Being sensitive to pleasure: 7 of cups, Debauch, as in taking it a bit far

Contemplation of the Feeling / Hod
7. Being sensitive to mental fabrication: 8 of swords, Interference, as in this stuff is messing with me
8. Calming mental fabrication: 8 of coins, Prudence, as in, hey, what's really going on

Contemplation of the Mind / Chesed
9. Being sensitive to the mind: 4 of cups, Luxury, as in what we cook up in fantasy
10. Satisfying the mind: 4 of coins, Completion, as in getting what you're after
(at least in fantasy)

Contemplation of the Mind / Geburah
11. Steadying the mind: 5 of wands, Strife, as in how we must be prepared for a struggle
12. Releasing the mind: 5 of swords, Defeat, as in moving on when we see that the
fantasy level doesn't really "work"

Contemplation of the Mental Objects / Chokmah
13. Focusing on impermanence: 2 of coins, Change, as in things are always changing
14. Focusing on dispassion: 2 of wands, Dominion, as in 'truth will make you free'

Contemplation of the Mental Objects / Binah
15. Focusing on cessation: 3 of swords, Sorrow, as in the the sadness of giving something up
16. Focusing on relinquishment: 3 of cups, Abundance, as in, actually there's plenty so don't worry

london psychogeographical association?

2011-11-10T12:35:00.001-08:00

You get a shiver in the dark
It's raining in the park but meantime
South of the river you stop and you hold everything
A band is blowing Dixie double four time
You feel all right when you hear that music ring

Well now you step inside but you don't see too many faces
Coming in out of the rain to hear the jazz go down
Competition in other places
But the horns, they blowing that sound
Way on down south
Way on down south in London town^*

[...]

*: I looked this up after listening to the Kiosk version of "Green
Grass", which is to Tom Waits what "Sultans of Swing" is to swing (as
I remarked on YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rlv_KejUI_k#t=1m6s); anyway, it seems
like the two songs use a similar metre. I like the spooky original
addition to the cover by Kiosk frontman Arash Sobhani:

The grass grows by every stream
Like smiles faintly gleam
step gently cause it not to scream
For it has grown from a lover's dream

hamming

2011-11-08T05:48:00.001-08:00

"Now, how did I come to do this study? At Los Alamos I was brought in to run the computing machines which other people had got going, so those scientists and physicists could get back to business. I saw I was a stooge. I saw that although physically I was the same, they were different. And to put the thing bluntly, I was envious. I wanted to know why they were so different from me. I saw Feynman up close. I saw Fermi and Teller. I saw Oppenheimer. I saw Hans Bethe; he was my boss. I saw quite a few very capable people. I became very interested in the difference between those who do and those who
might have done." --http://www.newschooljournal.com/files/NSER03/05-26.pdf

maladaptive and progressive schemata

2011-11-01T08:08:00.001-07:00

Emacs Lisp mode for fontification of "maladaptive" schemas:
https://raw.github.com/holtzermann17/rid-mode.el/master/mal-mode.el

Working on this was rather tedious. What I'd like better than what
I've made here would be a "progressive" word-list generating tool that
would not only extract an initial list of keywords from a given
document, but flesh that list out over time to make a better
representation of the key ideas, based on keywords found in the
documents. For example, if a known keyword A appears many times in a
given document, some new word B that also appears frequently in that
document should be added to the list of words that A is a part of.

Also, the maladaptive schema stuff is tedious because it is
depressing! "Maladaptive Schemas are self-defeating, core themes or
patterns that we keep repeating throughout our lives." Things like
"The perceived instability or unreliability of those available for
support and connection", or "The expectation that others will hurt,
abuse, humiliate, cheat, lie, manipulate, or take advantage."

It's also not entirely clear to me that working on this tool was
itself "adaptive", but I wanted to make another analytic module I
could share on the GNU Emacs mailing list (because rid-mode.el was
copyright encumbered).

Some other details about maladaptive schemas:

Definitions: http://www.schematherapy.com/id73.htm

Questionnaire: http://www.schematherapy.com/id53.htm

Scoring: http://www.schematherapy.com/id111.htm

look at who stands to benefit

2011-10-25T15:16:00.001-07:00

«These are the ones who stand to gain from the whipping up of
chauvinism, from the chatter about "patriotism" (cannon patriotism),
about the defence of culture (with weapons destructive of culture) and
so forth!» -- V. I. Lenin,
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/apr/11.htm

self-agency, reward, and anxiety

2011-10-25T02:55:00.001-07:00

Our previous work demonstrated that behavioral inhibition is
associated with perturbations in the appetitive-motivational system.
In this study, we found that these perturbations were specific to the
condition in which participants believed that choice of self-executed
responses determined outcomes, and did not extend to the condition in
which outcomes were independent of subjects' agency. Indeed, a sense
of "responsibility," or self-agency, in a context of uncertainty
(probabilistic outcomes) drives the neural system underlying
appetitive motivation (i.e., nucleus accumbens) more strongly in
temperamentally inhibited than noninhibited adolescents. One important
next step will be to determine how the reward system interacts with
fear circuitry among subjects characterized by behavioral inhibition
and elevated anxiety. --
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2785902/

nerves of the face

2011-10-17T14:02:00.001-07:00

«The theory has two important parts. The first is the link between the
nerves of the face and the nerves that regulate the heart and the
lungs. The second is the phylogenetic hierarchy that describes the
evolutionary sequence from a primitive, unmyelinated vagus related to
conservation of metabolic resources, to a sympathetic-adrenal system
involved in mobilization strategies, to a myelinated vagus related to
modulating calm bodily states and social engagement behaviors. The
hierarchy emphasizes that the newer "circuits" inhibit the older ones.
We use the newest circuit to promote calm states, to self-soothe and
to engage. When this doesn't work, we use the sympathetic-adrenal
system to mobilize for fight and flight behaviors. And when that
doesn't work, we use a very old vagal system, the freeze or shutdown
system. So the theory states that our physiological responses are
hierarchically organized in the way we react to challenge, and the
hierarchy of reactions follows the sequence in which the systems
evolved. Additionally, the linkage between the nerves that regulate
the face and the nerves that regulate the heart and lungs implies that
we can use the facial muscles to calm us down. Think about it: when
we're stressed or anxious, we use our facial muscles, which include
the ears. We eat or drink, we listen to music, and we talk to people
to calm down.»

«So we could use dramatic facial expressions to calm down?»

«Absolutely. Think about how pranayama (a yogic breathing technique)
works. When you do these breathing exercises, you're actually
"exercising" both the sensory and motor nerves regulating the facial
muscles; you are controlling breath and maneuvering the oral motor
cavity. It's a very efficient way of working on the system. A lot of
people don't like to teach pranayama because they think it's too
powerful. Polyvagal theory explains how pranayama might work and how
other methods of stimulating the same system, including social
interactions, can result in similar benefits to our health and mental
state. The social engagement system includes the nerves regulating the
face and the myelinated vagus regulating the heart and bronchi. The
power of the social engagement system is amazing both in terms of its
effects on behavior and mental state, but also in terms of the speed
with which it works.»

-- Stephen Porges interviewed by Ravi Dykema,
http://www.nexuspub.com/articles_2006/interview_porges_06_ma.php

A Villanelle for Their Time

2011-10-16T11:22:00.001-07:00

"Are you not weary of ardent ways,
Lure of the fallen seraphim?
Tell no more of enchanted days.

Your eyes have set man's heart ablaze
And you have had your will of him.
Are you not weary of ardent ways?

Above the flame the smoke of praise
Goes up from ocean rim to rim.
Tell no more of enchanted days.

Our broken cries and mournful lays
Rise in one eucharistic hymn.
Are you not weary of ardent ways?

While sacrificing hands upraise
The chalice flowing to the brim,
Tell no more of enchanted days.

And still you hold our longing gaze
With languorous look and lavish limb!
Are you not weary of ardent ways?
Tell no more of enchanted days."

-- James Joyce, "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"

Don’t be afraid to really want what you desire.

2011-10-15T05:24:00.001-07:00

«And so contemporary French theorists remain trapped in
this conceptual cage: Althusser sees theory as a
"production," Deleuze and Guattari give us an unconscious
that is a "producer" of desire, the Tel Quel group refers
to textual "production." But it was political economy
that erected that "phantasm," in Baudrillard's words, of
labor as the human essence. To whatever extent Marx was
able to demystify its liberal usage, to extract it from
the hegemony of bourgeois rule, he still turned it over to
the working class, imposed it on them, as their central
means of self-comprehension. Baudrillard would like to
liberate the workers from their "labor power," to have
them, if they are to represent a radical alternative to
the present system, think themselves under another sign
than that of production.» -- Mark Poster,
http://theearthisdying.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/mark-poster%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Ctranslator%E2%80%99s-introduction%E2%80%9D-1975-to-baudrillard%E2%80%99s-the-mirror-of-production-1973/

«What do we perceive today as possible? Just follow the
media. On the one hand, in technology and sexuality,
everything seems to be possible. You can travel to the
moon, you can become immortal by biogenetics, you can have
sex with animals or whatever, but look at the field of
society and economy. There, almost everything is
considered impossible. You want to raise taxes by little
bit for the rich. They tell you it's impossible. We lose
competitivity. You want more money for health care, they
tell you, "Impossible, this means totalitarian state."
[...] The only sense in which we are Communists is that we
care for the commons. The commons of nature. The commons
[not] privatized by intellectual property. The commons of
biogenetics. For this, and only for this, we should
fight. [...] The only thing I'm afraid of is that we will
someday just go home and then we will meet once a year,
drinking beer, and nostaligically remembering "What a nice
time we had here." Promise yourselves that this will not
be the case. We know that people often desire something
but do not really want it. Don't be afraid to really want
what you desire. Thank you very much.» -- Slavoj Zizek,
http://www.thenewsignificance.com/2011/10/11/slavoj-zizek-we-are-the-awaking-occupy-wall-street-talk/

the much awaited venus in gold (reed vs young, circa 2005)

2011-10-12T09:42:00.001-07:00

I want to live,
I want to give
comes in bells, your servant, don't forsake him
strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart

It's these expressions
I never give:
ermine furs adorn the imperious
severin, severin awaits you there

i am tired, i am weary
i could sleep for a thousand years
You keep me searching
for a heart of gold

I've been to Hollywood
I've been to Redwood
tongue of thongs, the belt that does await you
strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart

I've been in my mind,
it's such a fine line
taste the whip, in love not given lightly
taste the whip, now plead for me

i am tired, i am weary
i could sleep for a thousand years
You keep me searching
And I'm getting old

shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather
whiplash girlchild in the dark
I've been a miner
for a heart of gold

mother of exiles

2011-10-12T02:32:00.001-07:00

"The scarcity of copyright cannot compete against the abundance of
gifts." -- Richard Barbrook, "Cyber-Communism: How the Americans are
Superceding Capitalism in Cyberspace",
http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/17/cyber-communism-how-the-americans-are-superseding-capitalism-in-cyberspace/

"Nothing can intensify my passion more than tyranny, cruelty, and
especially the faithlessness of a beautiful woman." -- Leopold von
Sacher-Masoch, "Venus in Furs"

"As the seventeen-year-old Karl Rossmann, who had been sent to America
by his unfortunate parents because a maid had seduced him and had a
child by him, sailed slowly into New York harbour, he suddenly saw the
Statue of Liberty, which had already been in view for some time, as
though in an intenser sunlight. The sword in her hand seemed only just
to have been raised aloft, and the unchained winds blew about her
form." -- Franz Kafka, "Amerika"

agorism

2011-10-11T04:06:00.001-07:00

"The state is the primary source of violence, oppression, theft and
all forms of coercion. Stop funding the state with your tax dollars
and direct your productive energies into the black market." -- Silk
Road, quoted at
http://gawker.com/5805928/the-underground-website-where-you-can-buy-any-drug-imaginable

applied catastrophe theory

2011-10-09T04:11:00.001-07:00

"The key, then, to dealing with organisms in highly accumulated
'stasis' states is the application of finely timed sequences of
autonomically acting stimuli coupled with the evocation of appropriate
behavior in terms of mobilization. It is this sequential patterning
of autonomic and somatic behavior which is central to the resolution
of accumulated stress as well as to its regulation in general." --
Peter Levine, "Accumulated Stress, Reserve Capacity, and Disease",
1976 Doctoral dissertation,
http://www.somaticexperiencing.com/images/stories/Peter_A_Levine-Thesis.pdf

i know you'll take care of all my needs

2011-10-07T12:33:00.001-07:00

«Below are provisional lists of [...] emotional skill needs, and
experiential needs.

Emotional skill needs are the need for basic skills and abilities for
handling emotions:

* Emotional self-awareness: a need to learn to appraise and express
what one is feeling;
* Managing emotions: the need to handle and regulate feelings so that
they are appropriate;
* Self-motivation: a need to learn to harness one's emotions in the
service of a goal, for example by delaying gratification.
* Affect perception: a need to accurately appraise what others are
feeling as they are feeling and expressing it;
* Empathy: a need to learn to appreciate what others are feeling
(closely linked in the literature to emotional self-awareness);
* Handling relationships, primarily via managing the emotions of
others. This skill is a necessary component of friendship, intimacy,
popularity, and leadership.

Experiential emotional needs [...] are mostly inherently social needs,
and are therefore usually only met with the assistance or presence of
others.

These include a need

* for attention -- strong and constant in children, fading to varying
degrees in adulthood;
* to feel that one's current emotional state is understood by others
(particularly during strong emotional response);
* to love and feel reciprocity of love;
* to express affection, and feel reciprocated affection expressed;
* for reciprocity of sharing personal disclosure information;
* to feel connected to others;
* to belong to a larger group;
* for intimacy;
* to feel that one's emotional responses are acceptable by others;
* to feel accepted by others;
* to feel that emotional experience and responses are "normal";
* for touch, to be touched;
* for security.»

-- Jonathan Klein, Rosalind W. Picard and Jocelyn Riseberg, "Support
for Human Emotional Needs in Human-Computer Interaction",
http://affect.media.mit.edu/pdfs/97.klein-picard-riseberg.pdf

socrates

2011-10-05T11:35:00.001-07:00

"Socrates says three important things with regard to his invitation to
others to occupy themselves with themselves: (1) His mission was
conferred on him by the gods, and he won't abandon it except with his
last breath. (2) For this task he demands no reward; he is
disinterested; he performs it out of benevolence. (3) His mission is
useful for the city, more useful than the Athenians military victory
at Olympia - because in teaching people too occupy themselves with
themselves, he teaches them to occupy themselves with the city." --
Michel Foucault,
http://foucault.info/documents/foucault.technologiesOfSelf.en.html

self-deception

2011-09-28T08:15:00.001-07:00

My feelings were hurt
because I felt like
my feelings weren't taken into account.

But I had disguised my feelings before,
or downplayed them,
or simply didn't know what they were.

Wrong Desire is the Source of Suffering‎

2011-09-26T05:37:00.001-07:00

"[...] They shed their sense of responsibility
Long ago, when they lost their votes, and the bribes; the mob
That used to grant power, high office, the legions, everything,
Curtails its desires, and reveals its anxiety for two things only,
Bread and circuses."

"So is there nothing worth people praying for? If you'll take
My advice, you'll allow the gods to determine what's right
For us, and what's likely to benefit our situation; for
The gods grant us gifts that are more fitting than nice.
They show more care for us than we do for ourselves. We
Seek marriage and offspring driven by blind emotion, by
Vain desire, while the gods know all about the children
We'll have, and what kind of wife ours will turn out to be.
Still, if you want a reason for prayer, for offering a pretty
White piglet's innards, the sacred sausages, at the shrines,
Then you might pray for a sound mind in a healthy body.
Ask for a heart filled with courage, without fear of death,
That regards long life as among the least of nature's gifts,
That can endure any hardship, to which anger is unknown,
That desires nothing, and gives more credit to all the labours
And cruel sufferings of Hercules, than to all the love-making
All the feasting, and all the downy pillows of Sardanapalus.
The prayer I offer you can grant yourself; without doubt,
The one true path that leads to a tranquil life is that of virtue.
If we were prudent, you'd possess no power, Fortune[!]: it's we
Who make you a goddess, and grant you a place in the sky."

- Juvenal, http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/JuvenalSatires10.htm

the problem of (re)thinking bodies

2011-09-16T14:41:00.001-07:00

«Thought is a consequence of the provocation of an encounter. Thought
is what confronts us from the outside, unexpectedly: "Something in the
world forces us to think" (Deleuze, "Difference and Repetition", page
139). What confronts us necessarily from outside the concepts we
already have, from outside the subjectivities we already are, from
outside the material realities we already know is the problem. The
problem provokes thought [...] Thought-events [...] are singularities
that mix with and have effects on other materialities, with other
political [and] cultural [...] events.» Elizabeth Grosz, "Space, Time,
and Perversion", 1995, pp. 128-9, Epigraph to Nicole Dawson's Master's
thesis, "(Re)Thinking bodies: Deleuze and Guattari's becoming-woman"

She (Dawson) continues on page 2: "Becoming-woman is an occurrence in
which the poles constituted of the dualism and enforced by dualistic
thought no longer serve to determine a body's experience of itself."

And on page 3: "It is not unlikely that these transformations will
have political and empirical consequences, but any transformations
that might arise of conceptual shifts inspired by becomings-woman are
to be regarded as open ended -- open, that is, to the endless
possibilities of becoming other (other than what (one) has been, other
than what (one) presently is, other than what (one) *might* come to
be)." (My emphasis.)

creativity and lack thereof

2011-09-14T11:01:00.001-07:00

«Kris (cited in Martindale, 1999) proposed that creative individuals
are better able to shift between primary process and secondary process
modes of thinking than uncreative individuals. The primary-secondary
process continuum is assumed by Fromm (cited in Martindale, 1999) to
be the main dimension along which cognition changes. Primary process
can be detected in normal states such as dreams, as well as in deviant
states such as psychosis and hypnosis. It can be characterised as
autistic, free-associative, analogical, and involving concrete images
as opposed to abstract concepts. Secondary process thought can be
described as abstract, logical, reality-oriented thought of waking
consciousness (Martindale, 1999). According to Kris (cited in
Martindale, 1999), creative inspiration includes a regression to a
primary process state of consciousness. This state presumably
facilitates the discovery of new combinations of mental elements.
Creative elaboration, in turn, is marked by a return to secondary
process thought. Uncreative people are assumed to be caught at one
point in the primary-secondary process continuum. Hence, they are not
able to develop creative ideas. Martindale quotes several lines of
research as evidence for this theory, including that creative people
are found to be more easily hypnotised than uncreative people (Lynn &
Rhue, 1986). Wild (cited in Martindale, 1999) found evidence that
highly creative individuals are better able to shift between use of
primary process and secondary process cognition.» -- A cross-cultural
investigation in suggestibility and creative imagination in young
adults, Claudia Trebes, Master thesis presented in partial fulfilment
of the requirements of the degree Master of Arts (Psychology) at the
University of Stellenbosch

(Martindale, 1999) is Martindale, C. 1999. "7 Biological Bases of
Creativity.", in Robert J. Sternberg, ed., Handbook of creativity,
Cambridge University Press, pp. 137-152 (mostly available on Google
Books, at http://bit.ly/qFBwhS).

love grows

2011-09-12T10:58:00.001-07:00

I think love needs to grow in a context of visceral conflict
either involving eating really greasy food and drinking a lot
or playing sports
or both

think about families
Thanksgiving, we go toss the football around
and eat til we're sick
then start over again
OK, maybe not every family
OK, maybe not even my family
but it's close

Four Freedoms of Free Wetware (draft)

2011-09-04T06:15:00.001-07:00

(0) the freedom to use your body and mind how you see fit
(1) the freedom to compare one situation to another honestly and to
act on these judgments
(2) the freedom to engage with whomever you'd like in the pursuit of
pleasure or power
(3) the freedom to fill your time with the things you find important,
and to change what you're doing to suit circumstances

comic book psychology

2011-08-18T14:20:00.001-07:00

«Batman. His deductive talents seem highly overrated. It doesn't take
great intellect to tackle street crime. Luck and timing are the
operative skills. No, what interests me . . . is the fact that he
functions as a lightning rod for a certain breed of psychotic.
[pictures of the Joker, the Riddler, and Two-Face are shown
successively] They specialize in absurdly grandiose schemes, and
whatever the ostensible rationale -- greed, revenge, the seizure of
power . . . their true agenda is always the same: to cast Batman in
the role of nemesis. Hence the puns, the riddles, the flagrant clues
in their collective wake -- daring their foe to penetrate the obvious.
He always triumphs. If he failed, they'd be bereft. The pas de deux
would have no point. Like naughty children, who tempt the wrath of a
stern, demanding father . . . They seek only to shock him by the
enormity of their transgressions. It's the moment of acknowledgement
they crave. Thus "good" conquers "evil." True evil seldom announces
itself so loudly. The dangerous ones set their subversive goals, and
achieve them, bit by bit . . . invisibly, inevitably. They have no
taste for theater. While Batman busies himself with petty thieves and
gaudy madmen, an abyss of rot yawns ever wider at his feet. He's a
band-aid on a cancer patient. I am of course no moralist, but this
Batman, I think, has a very poor understanding of the world.» --
http://www.adherents.com/lit/comics/Batman.html

Marvin Minsky vs Lou Reed

2011-08-04T15:59:00.001-07:00

"You can't blame teachers for trying to make numbers interesting. But
-- let's face it -- numbers by themselves don't have much character.
That's why mathematicians like them so much! They find something
magical about things which have no interesting qualities at all. That
sounds like a paradox. Yet, when you think about it, that's exactly
why we can use numbers so many different ways! Why is it that we get
the same kind of result when we count different kinds of things --
whether we're counting flowers or trees or cars or dinosaurs? Why do
we always end up the same -- with a number? That's the magic of
arithmetic. It wipes away all fine details. It strips things of their
character. The qualities of what you count just disappear without a
trace. Programs do the opposite. They make things come to be, where
nothing ever was before. Some people find a new experience in this, a
feeling of freedom, a power to do anything you want. Not just a lot --
but anything. I don't mean like getting what you want by just wishing.
I don't mean like having a faster-than-light spaceship, or a time
machine. I mean like giving a child enough kindergarten-blocks to
build a full-sized city without ever running out of them. You still
have to decide what to do with the blocks. But there aren't any
outside obstacles. The only limits are the ones inside you." -- Marvin
Minsky, "Introduction to LogoWorks"

"I have made very big decision
I'm goin' to try to nullify my life
'Cause when the blood begins to flow
When it shoots up the dropper's neck
When I'm closing in on death

You can't help me not you guys
Or all you sweet girls with all your sweet talk
You can all go take a walk
And I guess I just don't know
And I guess I just don't know

I wish that I was born a thousand years ago
I wish that I'd sailed the darkened seas
On a great big clipper ship
Going from this land here to that
I put on a sailor's suit and cap

Away from the big city
Where a man cannot be free
Of all the evils of this town
And of himself and those around
Oh, and I guess I just don't know
Oh, and I guess I just don't know"

-- Lou Reed, "Heroin"

further

2011-07-23T02:47:00.001-07:00

Zeynep rides a red motorcycle across the country

One supposes she will never crash

Just ride out into the sunset, forever

Like the appropriate citation

For a half-remembered paragraph

That one agreed with entirely

But neglected to bookmark,

And so, it's gone.

maths of god

2011-03-15T14:58:00.001-07:00

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/73/Shield-Trinity-Scutum-Fidei-compact.svg/1000px-Shield-Trinity-Scutum-Fidei-compact.svg.png

Deus forms a "cone" over the other nodes. There are no
higher-order triples. There is no "excluded middle"
between being and non-being.

conceptual/anti-conceptual

2011-03-09T13:03:00.000-08:00

Outsiders see mathematics as a cold, formal, logical,
mechanical, monolithic process of sheer intellection; we
argue that insofar as it is successful, mathematics is a
social, informal, intuitive, organic, human process, a
community project. -- Social Processes and Proofs of
Theorems and Programs, DeMillo, Lipton, and Perlis.

It is the thesis of this book that society can only be
understood through a study of the messages and the
communication facilities which belong to it; and that in
the future development of these messages and communication
facilities, messages between man and machines, between
machines and man, and between machine and machine, are
destined to play an ever-increasing part. -- The Human
Use of Human Beings, Norbert Wiener.

ecosophy

2011-03-05T08:20:00.001-08:00

"Guattari holds that traditional environmentalist perspectives obscure
the complexity of the relationship between humans and their natural
environment through its maintenance of the dualistic separation of
human (cultural) and nonhuman (natural) systems; he envisions ecosophy
as a new field with a monistic and pluralistic approach to such study.
Ecology in the Guattarian sense then, is a study of complex phenomena,
including human subjectivity, the environment, and social relations,
all of which are intimately interconnected. Despite this emphasis on
interconnection, throughout his individual writings and more famous
collaborations with Gilles Deleuze Guattari has resisted calls for
holism, preferring to emphasise heterogeneity and difference,
synthesising assemblages and multiplicities in order to trace
rhizomatic structures rather than creating unified and, holisitic
structures." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosophy

the god complex

2011-03-01T18:46:00.001-08:00

«From our perspective, hochmah is that "higher wisdom" that some
systems call primordial Awareness. [...] Binah, meaning understanding,
is a kind of partner to Hochmah. The sefirot are often gendered
(sometimes multi-gendered), and their interaction is often depicted as
a series of erotic interchanges. In this case, Hochmah is the male and
Binah is female, the Divine womb, the generative principle of the rest
of the universe. [...] Binah and Hochmah map easily onto "left brain"
and "right brain" thinking, even though the Kabbalists presumably had
no scientific knowledge of the brain's internal structure.»
--http://learnkabbalah.com/keter_hochmah_and_binah/

I've been attempting to redrawing the standard "tree of life" as a
phase diagram in three dimensions. It's quite tricky to get the
drawing right, partly because Beauty is adjacent to nearly
everything... :)

One of the striking characteristics of the figure is that the Tower
and Strength/Lust form a very noticeable division between the two
"hemispheres", perhaps playing a role something like the "corpus
callosum" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_callosum)? This is
mirrored again by the Empress, but in a way that seems structurally
different. In my drawing, Binah/Understanding, Hochmah/Wisdom, and
Kether/Crown are projected "inside" of Tifaret/Beauty. For
comparison, the hippocampus appears deep within the temporal lobe...

I'm hand-selecting a picture of the brain with just about the right
number of components (accounting for left and right side):
http://en.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brain-anatomy.jpg -- but
developing well-thought-through correspondences in a coherent fashion
will have to wait for a later date.

For the moment I'm just intrigued by the idea of Malkuth/Kingdom as
the nervous system *outside* of the brain. What if the
World/Universe corresponds to the corticospinal tract (motor), the
Moon to the posterior column-medial lemniscus pathway (fine touch,
vibration sensation and proprioception), and The Aeon to the
spinothalamic tract (pain, temperature, itch and crude touch)? This
all makes a certain amount of sense to me...

last fragment of a half a manifesto

2011-03-01T15:23:00.001-08:00

"The greatest crime of Marxism wasn't simply that much of what it
claimed was false, but that it claimed to be the sole and utterly
complete path to understanding life and reality. Cybernetic
eschatology shares with some of history's worst ideologies a doctrine
of historical predestination. There is nothing more gray, stultifying,
or dreary than a life lived inside the confines of a theory. Let us
hope that the cybernetic totalists learn humility before their day in
the sun arrives." -- Jaron Lanier,
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier/lanier_index.html

back to work

2011-02-28T19:36:00.001-08:00

"Desktops inspire the ultimate fantasy as business accoutrements are
knocked to the floor with one fell swoop of a worsted-clad arm
(difficult with all the PC equipment, I know - all those leads and
plugs and mouse-mats), buns are unpinned, spectacles torn off, plus
all that ice-cold laminated chipboard stretching out beneath you with
just the odd unseen paperclip or stapler to mar the magic of the
moment." -- http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/when-a-colleague-becomes-a-lover-1153739.html

travel trip: day 1, remembering silent camaraderie

2011-02-20T11:13:00.001-08:00

Are my "social" frustrations actually a mis-directed expression of
"work" or "learning" difficulties? It's interesting to imagine what
things would look/feel like if I felt my work was going swimmingly. I
do hope to learn a lot this week! -- maybe getting over the next major
hill workwise.

But I'm also thinking that there is something that feel almost
strictly "social" about the way people (can sometimes) spend time
together. I remember thinking of the college library as space of
"silent camaraderie", for example. Why did I feel like we were "all
in it together"? Maybe because in college there is a natural 3rd
party ("the college") to triangulate with -- whereas a collection of
independent researchers will typically all be triangulating against
landmarks related to their own fields, disciplines, or hobby-horses.
It's chaos!

personal

2011-02-19T15:31:00.001-08:00

It seems I "ask" a lot and I "give" a lot, so I'm happiest in
relationships with a lot of bandwidth. Also a big plus when people
can find a way to exercise their independence *without* being
inconsiderate, imposing, or super distancing. That right there's a
lot to ask, but hopefully possible when everything's going well...!

health notes from the heart of saturday night

2011-02-19T07:54:00.001-08:00

I like peers but I hate "peer pressure" (not just because of the extra
double letters either) and unfortunately I tend to react to stress by
not sleeping, partly because I typically try to readjust my mood by
doing "creative things" whereby perhaps I achieve the most tenuous
sense of "belonging". It's doubly ironic that I worry about being
"lonely" when in fact I simply can't cope with people (and the things
they seem to enjoy) 9 times out of 10. Which of course either renders
me as extremely fragile or manifestly subhuman, and I'm not sure which
I like least. No one would know until I told them what sorts of
things set me on edge, but anyway the category is general enough that
it's no wonder I'm e.g. frequently ill and avoid daylight like a
vampire. I didn't have such a full grasp of this until moving
overseas, but a lot of my life it's been variations on the same theme.

thinking with your !

2011-02-11T18:20:00.001-08:00

"The parts of the homunculus that have huge representations (such as
hands, lips, and tongue) are not merely able to detect faint
sensations but can also discriminate the location of these sensations
very precisely. … The genitals, while they can easily detect faint
sensations, cannot accomplish tactile form perception." --
http://zeebees.wordpress.com/2010/02/26/how-much-of-your-brain-is-for-sex/

ugly / pretty

2011-02-11T18:06:00.001-08:00

ugly: http://metameso.org/~joe/music/lost-wheeze.mp3
pretty: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkumhBVPGdg

Went out a dance club w/ my friends for a bit this evening, the loud
music hurt my eyes (ears rather) and I decided to leave and walk home.

Thinking about folk music on the walk home.

"It is always easier to see human behavior in terms of roles when we
look backwards to earlier times, so this retrospective look makes it
easier for Reed to clarify his intentions." --
http://www.reasontorock.com/tracks/sweet_jane.html

massively obvious online denial

2011-02-09T03:43:00.001-08:00

It's interesting to see a common category emerging: slacktivists and
slackademics alike finding it easy to say "yes" to things online, and
then not having the wherewithal (or the motivation) to follow through
in any way.

Of course, this happens offline, too: February is the season of failed
New Year's resolutions. The question or issue is not just "why", but
what if anything can we do about it!

on structurelessness

2011-02-09T02:28:00.001-08:00

http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2613/2479

never in anger...

2011-02-03T06:57:00.001-08:00

«Positive: The Goat can be appealing, altruistic, creative,
empathetic, intuitive, generous, artless, gentle, romantic, sensitive,
compliant, candid and self-effacing darlings. Negative: The Goat can
also be self-pitying, pessimistic, fugitive, parasitic, vengeful,
lazy, indecisive, contentious, violent, capricious, irresponsible,
tardy, careless, bigoted, nasty little pieces of work.» --
http://www.gotohoroscope.com/chinese-zodiac-ram.html

«In Genesis 2:18 ... the Hebrew expression ezer kenegdo appears,
meaning "one who is the same as the other and who surrounds, protects,
aids, helps, supports." There is no indication of inferiority or of a
secondary position in an hierarchical separation of the male and
female "spheres" of responsibility, authority, or social position.»
--http://www.godswordtowomen.org/help.htm

hyperreal enterprises

2011-01-31T18:03:00.001-08:00

"Stay in your hyperborean mists and Christian incense and leave our
pagan world to rest under the lava and the rubble. Do not dig us up
... You do not need the gods – they would freeze to death in your
climate!", Sacher Masoch, "Venus in Furs", quoted in Gilles Deleuze
(tr. Christian Kerslake) "From Sacher-Masoch To Masochism", Angelaki,
Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, volume 9, number 1, April 2004.

sublime masochism

2011-01-29T20:26:00.001-08:00

Two quotes from
Slavoj Zizek. Notes on a Debate "From Within the People"
Criticism - Volume 46, Number 4, Fall 2004, pp. 661-666

...

With reference to Deleuze:

"The masochist, while remaining within the domain of the
paternal (contract), reintroduces the Woman as the partner
in the contract—not in order to fully enjoy the Woman, but
in order to mockingly undermine the paternal
authority. The masochist thus stages an uncanny
short-circuit, a monstrous travesty of the Law: in her
very elevation to the undisputed Master, whose every whim
the masochist is obliged to obey, the Woman is turned into
a puppet effectively controlled by her slave, who controls
the game, writing its rules—the explicit asymmetry of the
masochist contract (at the level of enunciated: man's
subordination to woman) relies on then opposite asymmetry
at the level of the position of enunciation. The humor of
masochism is therefore not directed only at the figure of
the father; it relies on the ridiculous (and,
simultaneously, monstrous) incompatibility or discord
between the symbolic place of symbolic power and the
element who occupies it."

With reference to Badiou:

"How can a human animal forsake its animality and put its
life in the service of a transcendent Truth? How can the
'transubstantiation' from the pleasure-oriented life of an
individual to the life of a subject dedicated to a Cause
occur? In other words, how is a free act possible? How
can one break (out of) the network of the causal
connections of positive reality and conceive of an act
that begins by and in itself?"

qualia (Sonnet 18 and Zombies)

2011-01-27T15:32:00.001-08:00

"Examples of qualia are the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, or
the redness of an evening sky." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

"Zimboes think^Z they are conscious, think^Z they have qualia, think^Z
they suffer pains – they are just 'wrong' (according to this
lamentable tradition), in ways that neither they nor we could ever
discover!" -- Daniel Dennet,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

"When philosophers claim that zombies are conceivable, they invariably
underestimate the task of conception (or imagination), and end up
imagining something that violates their own definition" -- Daniel
Dennet, at ibid.

"As I see it, feelings are not strange alien things. It is precisely
those cognitive changes themselves that constitute what 'hurting' is —
and this also includes all those clumsy attempts to represent and
summarize those changes. The big mistake comes from looking for some
single, simple, 'essence' of hurting, rather than recognizing that
this is the word we use for complex rearrangement of our disposition
of resources." -- Marvin Minsky, again in the Qualia article

...

The quote from Minsky makes me think that the "discretized" world
of Qualia can itself be painful, perhaps even capturing (as well as can
be imagined), a sort of essence of hurting, after all.

What I mean is: it is quite painful either to feel that others aren't "real",
and possibly even more painful (and disturbing) to feel or imagine
the irreality of one's own inward existence. However, the "instrumental"
nature of Qualia seem to be a step precisely in the irreal direction of
think^Z -- "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day", and so forth.

In other words, the simple mechanics of "judging" or "evaluating" (as
via an integral, for example), even just of "the thinginess of things" --
the self-same clumsy summarising and representing -- what might
be called "grasping thought" -- *are* Qualia, *are* pain, and *are
also* the key move to zombieism.

As an application: judging things/others to be irreal (i.e. to be zombies),
whether this is true or not, effectively infects one with zombieism.
It would be absolute insanity for a human to *embrace* this move...
and yet... taking a look at Sonnet 18, there are certain clear attractions
or, shall we say, enticements...

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

sonnet for joanne 2

2011-01-26T17:00:00.000-08:00

I'M A buSy womaN AGAINST A BLACK BACKGROUND
aND EVERYTHING IS JUST OK
what thE hell WaS thAt crAzY Thing i sAid neXt?
PoppIng out of his HeaD lIkE thosE

(what is It you're after)
MAYBE IT IS JUST THAT ONE SECOND GUESSES ONESELF
MAKING IT EASIER AT TIMES TO APPROACH ELEGANCE...
OUT WITH THAT INVITATION.

WordS in my MoUth BACK, i
RE-SOLDERED THE TYPE ELEMENTS ON MY TyPewRiTeR

mad (what degree of intimacy + mutual care?)

2011-01-17T17:10:00.001-08:00

Where do things stop short? Perhaps at the moment any sign of real
pleasure is involved ("jouissance"?)?

"This much madness is too much sorrow"

anatomy of a callback

2011-01-16T10:11:00.001-08:00

"The 'Call back' is usually the first time everybody making the
commercial has been in the same room together, thus it's no surprise
that lines and action get changed or re-worked. So you may walk in to
see you have been rehearsing the wrong sides, or you might get asked
to read for a different part on the spot. This is all business as
usual, so be ready for it." --
http://commercialsuccessresource.blogspot.com/2009/03/anatomy-of-callback.html

D'oh - not that kind of callback!

At http://tanks4code.blogspot.com/2008/07/c-style-callbacks-in-c-code.html
there a kind of complicated object-oriented scenario is described,
indicating that a "callback" is quite similar to a "hook" but also a
bit like a "closure".

So then... from
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/615907/how-is-a-closure-different-from-a-callback:

"The bit that makes it a closure, is when that function accesses
anything on the context where it lives, like variables outside it."

And from here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2070275/javascript-closures-and-callbacks,

"Callbacks are a simpler concept. A callback is basically where a
function accepts another function as a parameter. At some point during
execution the called function will execute the function passed as a
parameter, this is a callback."

They further remark:

"Quite often the reason that closures get created (either
incidentally, accidentally or deliberately) is the need to create a
callback. [... some code defining a function ...] A closure is
created containing in part the 'message' parameter; 'fn' is executed
[on delay] quite some time after the call to 'AlertThisLater' has
returned, yet 'fn' still has access to the original content of
'message'."

So, that's the scoop on that: a "callback" is when a function executes
another function that is one of its arguments, and a "closure" is when
a function executes another function (whether it was initially passed
in as an argument or not) that continues to have access to the scope
of the original function.

OK, not so bad, but still it seems so much more *comprehensible* in
LISP, where one wouldn't geverally bother thinking about whether the
thing was a "closure" or not - one would just put some local variables
to a lambda, then pass that lambda as an argument to another function,
and be done with it.

BDGBTW

2011-01-14T17:50:00.001-08:00

Do you like girls or boys
It's confusing these days...
They sat together in the park
As the evening sky grew dark,
holding hands in the moonlight.
There was silence between them.
Silence to say goodbye.
(And the wall won't come down,
until they're no longer afraid of themselves.)

when reviewing or writing a paper

2011-01-13T21:17:00.001-08:00

Two thematic questions one could ask about any paper are:

(1) What problem and solution does the paper
describe? (What have the authors themselves learned?)

(2) What problem does the paper itself solve?
(What do the authors want the readers to learn from
reading the paper?)

paul coelho on being read

2011-01-10T15:02:00.001-08:00

"I always thought that when, at the beginning of your career, you
strive to be read, you can't change your mind later and become greedy
about it" -- http://www.newsweek.com/2008/02/05/free-speech.html

like a chronically stressed rat looking for sugar

2011-01-05T12:05:00.001-08:00

"Bike Messengers face death on a constant basis. And what do they
receive in return. Harassment, ridicule and getting ripped off[,] and
this is from the companies they work for. Bike Messengers are paid by
the amount of packages they can pick up and drop off in a given day.
This is why they usually look like a rat on crack. All jittery and
looking for sugar." -- "Those Crazy Messengers", Hideousewhitenoise
#56, 2003, by Mr Forehead,
http://www.messmedia.org/Toronto/hwn56-crazy.html

"Extrapolating from the observations that positive emotional
experiences boost the immune system, Roberts speculates that intensely
positive emotional experiences –- sometimes brought about during
mystical experiences occasioned by psychedelic medicines -- may boost
the immune system powerfully. Research on salivary IgA supports this
hypothesis, but experimental testing has not been done." --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoneuroimmunology, citing
Thomas B. Roberts (2006). "Do Entheogen-induced Mystical Experiences Boost the Immune System?: Psychedelics, Peak Experiences, and Wellness." Chapter 6 in Psychedelic Horizons. Westport, CT: Praeger/Greenwood.

Even if the connection to psychedelia is "as fine as powdered doll
shit" [0], it seems like a good idea to look around for positive
emotional experiences as a general contribution to health and
wellness. And perhaps also to look for any associations between
negative emotional experiences and a downturn in general health.

In a glance through this "negative" lens, we find some research with
an interesting extrapolation of that thought, namely that exposure to
"chronic stress" can sap an individual's ability to select actions
based on the consequences of those actions, and instead causes the
stressed person (or rat) to fall back on habit [1]. The conclusion of
[1] is quoted below in full (minus citations, for readability):

"Optimization of decision-making processes confers an important
advantage in response to a constantly changing environment. The
ability to select the appropriate actions on the basis of their
consequences and on our needs at the time of the decision allows us to
respond in an efficient way to changing situations. However, the
continuous control and attention that this process demands can result
in an unnecessary expenditure of resources and can be inefficient in
many situations. For instance, when behavior is repeated regularly for
extensive periods without major changes in outcome value or
contingency, or under uncertain situations where we cannot manipulate
the probability of obtaining an outcome, general rules and habits can
be advantageous. Thus, the more rapid shift to habits after chronic
stress could be a coping mechanism to improve performance of
well-trained behaviors, while increasing the bioavailability to
acquire and process new information, which seems essential for
adaptation to complex environments. However, when objectives need to
be re-updated in order to make the most appropriate choice, the
inability of stressed subjects to shift from habitual strategies to
goal-directed behavior might be highly detrimental. Such impairment
might be of relevance to understand the high comorbidity between
stress-related disorders and addictive behavior or compulsivity, but
certainly has a broader impact spanning activities from everyday life
decisions to economics."

One of the citations here is [2], which at 33 pages is effectively a
guidebook to stress, including a bit of "stress management".
Recommended reading. (Just now sitting on my desk as a printout.)

I now briefly return to the theme I suggested above: What if a negative
emotional experience is like a "hit" of "chronic stress", inasmuch as
it *temporarily* ratchets up the use of previously learned habits, and
ratchets down the learning of new patterns? As one becomes (perhaps
only briefly) more automaton- or puppet-like, "health" becomes
less and less of a viable facility and perhaps even an undefined
quantity.

To switch to the positive lens: Situations in which we are adaptable
(let's say, autonomous, not automaton-ish) could be taken to be the
very *definition* of health - and positive emotional experiences could
be found by ratcheting habit-use down, and pattern-learning up.
For some reason I'm reminded of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are
Dead"... [3].

"There was a messenger.
Rosencrantz... Guildenstern...
We were sent for."

And for whatever reason, it cheers me up.

[1]: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/325/5940/621.full
[2]: http://physrev.physiology.org/content/87/3/873.full.pdf+html
[3]: http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/r/rosencrantz-and-guildenstern-are-dead-script.html

what are you adding?

2011-01-01T19:10:00.001-08:00

It keeps occurring to me to post in various mailing lists

"Hey have you considered such-and-such?"

But it also occurs to me to stop myself. Is it really going to add
much? Perhaps not unless I actually have time to follow through and
actually implement the thing in question.

I don't see the point in talking in that way, if I'm just doing it to
hear myself talk. That's what blogs are for :)

1->2

2011-01-01T02:49:00.001-08:00

"My philosophy basically reduces to the idea that
if one is good, two would be better."

(How many philosophies are really so different
from that?)

deep not overextended (norma fraser versus judy mowatt)

2010-12-26T11:49:00.001-08:00

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

2010-12-18T14:56:00.001-08:00

"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)

2010-12-18T13:15:00.001-08:00

"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

2010-12-13T16:35:00.001-08:00

"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

2010-12-12T14:51:00.001-08:00

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

2010-12-07T17:12:00.001-08:00

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

2010-12-07T13:33:00.001-08:00

"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

2010-12-06T04:10:00.001-08:00

"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?

2010-12-05T08:58:00.001-08:00

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

2010-12-04T14:50:00.001-08:00

"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

2010-12-03T08:19:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-02T07:28:00.001-08:00

"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

2010-12-01T11:21:00.001-08:00

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)

2010-11-20T15:45:00.001-08:00

"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

2010-11-19T15:00:00.001-08:00

"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

2010-11-12T12:47:00.001-08:00

'"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

2010-11-02T20:38:00.001-07:00

"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

2010-10-31T15:55:00.001-07:00

"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

2010-10-24T11:30:00.001-07:00

(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)

2010-10-20T16:33:00.001-07:00

/ 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?

2010-10-18T14:57:00.001-07:00

http://objects.icanhascheezburger.com/

coevolution ftw

2010-10-18T04:54:00.001-07:00

"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?

2010-10-16T15:56:00.000-07:00

"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

2010-10-15T11:46:00.001-07:00

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

2010-10-15T08:42:00.001-07:00

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

2010-10-12T16:47:00.001-07:00

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

2010-10-12T04:02:00.001-07:00

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

2010-10-07T07:41:00.001-07:00

"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

2010-10-06T13:14:00.001-07:00

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

2010-10-04T16:20:00.001-07:00

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?

2010-09-28T04:18:00.000-07:00

"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

2010-09-27T13:58:00.001-07:00

"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)

2010-09-26T09:10:00.001-07:00

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?

2010-09-24T16:35:00.001-07:00

"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

2010-09-21T17:16:00.001-07:00

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

2010-09-21T15:48:00.001-07:00

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

2010-09-20T01:10:00.001-07:00

"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