Wednesday, July 31, 2002
Spring Journal
 | I have an earlier link to Spring Publications, however they no longer publish the Spring Journal, that happens here at Spring Audio Journal and Books. See the site for who is who. |
[12:46 AM | wl | permalink
| | I have an earlier link to Spring Publications, however they no longer publish the Spring Journal, that happens here at Spring Audio Journal and Books. See the site for who is who. |
 | And a quote from the Interview: One of the reasons that I use the term "Singularity" is to invoke the notion that it is something that you can't see into or beyond. Nevertheless, I like to think about what things would be like afterwards! (Call me inconsistent, what the heck!) There are a variety of analogies that I can come up with to imagine the situation afterwards. |
The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century. I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.Update: Actually it is available online without the Wayback Machine.
 | Yes there is a site for the Van Gogh Museum With its own great online collection. There is also a Gallery on a different website, where I got the picture shown here. |
 | I love art galleries, online too. Vincent van Gogh's Emperor Moth is shown here from an exhibition at the National Gallery Of Art - Washington Interestingly the exhibition is over but the site, with commentary remains. I wonder if the Dutch museum has the same stuff online? Van Gogh's Van Goghs: Masterpieces from the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam is no longer on view at the National Gallery of Art. Our exhibition-related Web features, however, are still available. |
I have argued above that we cannot prevent the Singularity, that its coming is an inevitable consequence of the humans' natural competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology. And yet ... we are the initiators. Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things. We have the freedom to establish initial conditions, make things happen in ways that are less inimical than others. Of course (as with starting avalanches), it may not be clear what the right guiding nudge really is.Here he makes it clear that some small tiny thing, unknown to us now could be triggering the avalanche. That allows the future to remain an unknown. This is from a 1993 article - better than the interview I post later.
... movie people as a whole have trouble understanding the joys of interactive media. It's just a different culture. A dystopian movie about virtual worlds, like The Matrix, can make its way through Hollywood and be distributed, but a utopian movie about an interactive future seemingly cannot. Movie people are subliminally terrified by interactivity. It spells not only a loss of creative control, which movie people would miss more than you can imagine, but also a loss of business model. Napster lurks implicitly inside every shared virtual world that's under the control of its users. The world that seems utopian to me is dystopian to Hollywood.
For Hillman it is enough to continually deepen one’s sense of life’s beauty. This is soulmaking. We should not confuse the soul with the Self. The soul seeks and expresses difference. It delights in multiplicity. It confers meaning by processing images and, most important, it is not “inside” us. It is an "other." It is with us. It is connected to the soul of the world, but it is most definitely not “us.” In Hillman’s world, we live as poets, not as Christs-in-training.I mentioned this article in an earlier post, and there was mention of a conversation with Kevin Kelly on this topic. I am curious and have found these links:
There is always such a rock-bottom lifelessness in the machine, which betrays itself, not merely at the bottom, but at any level of description you choose. The organism, on the other hand, is enlivened from within, which means, among other things: all the way down.I take this as meaning that KK is wrong because in the end, no matter how complex the machine it is just a whole bunch of little things like a hammer. I am with KK here, even a hammer is more than the sum of its parts, and while it is "made not born" it has soul. "All the way down" we have stuff with soul. It takes a knack to see it. Now that puts my response to them both in danger of being dismissed as "mystical". OK, maybe, but it is experience that imbibes something with soul and experience is the basis of empirical science. Experience is in the realm of consciousness. Let's role-reverse with a hammer and speak for it. I like the way ST suggests we do that with rats we use in experiments (though he uses different words.)
 | This is me right now. Self portrait. Drawing on the PC is hard, I'll do more on the Palm, it is easier. |
 | I see my journey in cyberspace as epistolary. The email is the return of the letter! It is an art. Are weblogs letters? In a way. The letter shown is from a site full of illustrated letters. I felt an affinity as I illustrate this weblog with pictures I like from the web. But I could make them! I'm inspired. Here is the commentary: Painter John von Wicht (1888-1970) often personalized his letters with bold abstractions. In this note to his friend Will Barnet, von Wicht takes up a familiar topic among artists --the trade-off between teaching and painting. He also mentions his upcoming residency at Yaddo in Sarasota Springs, New York. |
Here's the President of the United States speaking at a library in 1890. ``The boy who greedily devours the vicious tales of imaginary daring and blood-curdling adventure which in these days are far too accessible will have his brain filled with notions of life and standards of manliness which, if they do not make him a menace to peace and good order, will certainly not make him a useful member of society.'' Grover Cleveland hit the nail on the head. I feel very strongly, I feel instinctively, I feel passionately that I am one of those nails. Not only did I start out in libraries as that greedy devouring boy, but thanks to mindwarping science fictional yellow-covered literature, I have become a menace to Grover Cleveland's idea of peace and good order. Far too accessible, eh Mr President? Too much access. By all means let's not provide our electronic networks with too much access. That might get dangerous. The networks might rot people's minds and corrupt their family values. They might create bad taste. Think this electrical network thing is a new problem? Think again. Listen to prominent litterateur James Russell Lowell speaking in 1885. ``We diligently inform ourselves and cover the continent with speaking wires.... we are getting buried alive under this avalanche of earthly impertinences... we... are willing to become mere sponges saturated from the stagnant goosepond of village gossip.'' The stagnant goosepond of the global village. Marshall MacLuhan's stagnant goosepond. Who are the geese in the stagnant pond? Whoever they are, I'm one of them. You'll find me with the pulp magazines and the bloodcurdling comics and the yellow-covered works of imaginary daring. In the future you'll find me, or my successors, in the electronic pulps. In the electronic zines, in the fanzines, in the digital genres, the digital underground. In whatever medium it is that really bugs Grover Cleveland. He can't make up his mind whether I'm the scum from the gutter or the ``cultural elite'' --- but in either case he doesn't like me. He doesn't like cyberpunks. He doesn't like cyberpunks. That's not big news to you people I'm sure. But he's not going to like cyberpunk librarians either. I hope you won't deceive yourselves on that score.
WHY PEOPLE THINK COMPUTERS CAN'T Marvin Minsky, MIT First published in AI Magazine, vol. 3 no. 4, Fall 1982. Reprinted in Technology Review, Nov/Dec 1983, and in The Computer Culture, (Donnelly, Ed.) Associated Univ. Presses, Cranbury NJ, 1985 Just as Evolution changed man's view of Life, Al will change mind's view of Mind. As we find more ways to make machines behave more sensibly, we'll also learn more about our mental processes. In its course, we will find new ways to think about "thinking" and about "feeling". Our view of them will change from opaque mysteries to complex yet still comprehensible webs of ways to represent and use ideas. Then those ideas, in turn, will lead to new machines, and those, in turn, will give us new ideas. No one can tell where that will lead and only one thing's sure right now: there's something wrong with any claim to know, today, of any basic differences between the minds of men and those of possible machines.
 | More from stumbleupon - The William P. Gottlieb Collection, comprising over sixteen hundred photographs of celebrated jazz artists. Burrow down to hi-res photos. |
But while President Bush publicly embraced the community of holocaust survivors in Washington last spring, he and his family have been keeping a secret from them for over 50 years about Prescott Bush, the president's grandfather. According to classified documents from Dutch intelligence and US government archives, President George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush made considerable profits off Auschwitz slave labor. In fact, President Bush himself is an heir to these profits from the holocaust which were placed in a blind trust in 1980 by his father, former president George Herbert Walker Bush.
The researchers traced the links between 30,000 English words in an online thesaurus. For example, the word 'actor' can be connected to 'universe' through two intermediaries. The thesaurus lists 'character' as a synonym for 'actor'; 'character' is also equated with 'nature'; and 'nature' with 'universe'. Moving from 'actor' to 'universe' in the network of words therefore takes three steps. To the surprise of Motter and colleagues, they found that the same was true of just about any randomly chosen pair of words in the thesaurus. The English language, in other words, enjoys just three degrees of separation.Word Association has long been standard fare in psychotherapy, not just as formal tests but as a way of seeing into dreams or noticing themes and archetypes. Given this new research some might think that anyone can link anything, making nonsense of the lot. My hunch is no, making links is not nonsense. The art of seeing these links is profound. Also consider this: if linking like this is so prevalent then there must be a choice of conduit words (my word for the linking theme word) and thus highlighting one over another will have some impact. I doubt a computer could do that, though a computer could be a great aid here. I bet that there are some words that are stronger, more prevalent than others as conduits - eye. ear, head, arm, etc. earth, air, fire, and water? At last there might be a clearer reason why Tarot, astrology and alchemy can be so profound; they channel the immediate through "star" words that make archetypal sense of experience. Thanks Josh for the link! Love to see a visual map of this!
Update: Hmmm, I filled it all in. It works technically. I got some OK recommendations. Is it "feature" based or "collaborative filtering"?
The name is wrong IMO, as is the choice of rating: Bad, Good, Great. This sounds like a popularity quest which is what we DON'T need more of. Bad good great... Match for me. would be better or even better ''I Like This''.
Still it is delivering OK! For example I got this in the first go: Biblioteca Arcana That is quite me. From the perspective of Generation Txt, a certain kind of crowd comes about in response to texting. It is one that bears, in both senses of that word, the hegemony of middle class intentions. Texting in its apolitical mode, sought to evade the crowd. But in its reformist mode, it is credited with converting the crowd into the concerted movement of an aggrieved people. In the latter case, the middle class invests the crowd with a power analogous to their cell phones: that of transmitting their wish for a moral community, whereby the act of transmission itself amounts to the realization of such a community. Such a notion assumes the possibility of endowing the crowd with an identity continuous with that of middle class texters. However, this assumption had another aspect. Not only did it lead to the fantasy of ordering of the masses under bourgeois direction. As I demonstrate below, the middle class interest in ordering the crowd also tended to give way to a different development. At certain moments, we also see the materialization of another kind of desire this time for the dissolution of class hierarchy altogether. How so?
New Phase, lets call it phase 3. The first was my go at Debian way back in July 1999. Then Mandrake 8.1 on the Dell, which ended with severe problems. Now Red Hat 7.3
... the basic aims and principles of dialectical materialism remain very much in harmony with the fundamental spirit of progressive, rational scientific thought, which continues to perceive a fundamental opposition between scientific theories and religious myths, to address the scientific challenges posed by the failure of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mechanistic programme, and to seek a scientific metaphysics as the basis for an enlightened view of the world.
From Evolution to EmergenceOK, if it isn't intelligence, what is it? Is there some sort Chardannian teleology? Is it just nature, bell curves and Bradford's Law? There is a method in the swarming mobs of a net-work. Emergence looks interesting. How does it relate back to the old classic on this, Engles'
There are a few faiths in which congregants are invited to participate in the creation and interpretation of the underlying narrative. Certain Jewish sects spurn answers in favor of more questions and interpretation; Quakers enjoy a dogma-free, town-meeting-style Sabbath. Most religious traditions, though, simply treat their believers as a "mass" who must depend on priests or ministers for access to the "story." But just as the Internet has led patients to information about alternative medical treatments (often against doctor's orders), it has given congregants something in the spiritual realm that is very rare-the ability to find alternative stories about who we are, who made us, and why. More important than any one story we may have discovered or written, the experience of sifting through them all and writing our own has changed our relationship to religion, perhaps forever. The Internet is anathema to unitary narrative. If you want to understand life only as a story etched in stone, you had better stay away. Every early culture composed stories-myths-to explain the basic facts of existence. For centuries, we have understood our world-even our sciences-as being somehow authored: that things were set in motion by someone or something. We cling to the belief that our existence proceeds by design. That's why Darwin's theory of evolution was such a threat to our narrative understanding of the world, and why creationists resist its implications to this day. But even those of us who believe in evolution have been able to impose a kind of narrative on top of it in which we imagine matter and life to be groping steadily and consciously toward complexity, with evolution itself as the agent of that grand authorial entity we dearly hope exists. Now our computers are forcing us to entertain new, even less linear models for why things happen. One of these models, described in Steven Johnson's new book, Emergence, explores the way everything from ant colonies to ancient cities finds its order. It turns out that queen ants issue no decrees, and ancient cities still in existence today had no official planners. The necessary preconditions must exist, but it now appears that life, organisms, communities, and order arise-emerge, in other words-from the bottom up. There is no central story, yet there is radical change and something that, if it isn't intelligence, has often been mistaken for it. And what is the chief prerequisite for emergence to occur? You guessed it: networking. Interconnectivity is what allows an "it" to become a "they." Instead of acting on its own, each atom, molecule, cell, organism, or community can act as part of a larger complex-a networked being.
The big battle coming over the future of smart mobs concerns media cartels and government agencies are seeking to reimpose the regime of the broadcast era in which the customers of technology will be deprived of the power to create and left only with the power to consume. That power struggle is what the battles over file-sharing, copy protection, regulation of the radio spectrum are about. Are the populations of tomorrow going to be users, like the PC owners and website creators who turned technology to widespread innovation? Or will they be consumers, constrained from innovation and locked into the technology and business models of the most powerful entrenched interests? HOWARD RHEINGOLD: SMART MOBS [7.16.02]
 | Could not resist this one from George Eastman House Yousuf Karsh Series |
The news of the death of Yousuf Karsh led me to the amazing Google Image search led to Peter Fetterman Gallery : Yousuf Karsh where the images here, just a sample, come from. They are for sale for thousands of dollars. Wonderful to see them here on the Net. Here is a quote from IHT:
Working with a large-format view camera and a battery of artificial lights (he was said to carry 350 pounds - nearly 160 kilograms - of equipment on his trips abroad) he aimed, in his own words, "to stir the emotions of the viewer" and to "lay bare the soul" of his sitter. (NYT)SHS ArtWeb: Photography - Yousuf Karsh - Nice selection with links to big images.
Anything can be imagined, yet sometimes the mind is blank and nothing will come or it repeats the same image over and over. Imagination takes work, work to *allow* the images to present themselves. Yet if they present themselves, what do we have to do with their creation? What emerges from the void is not of our making but of our allowing. The emergence of experience is an autonomous process like the breath. We can stop and start it, allow it, but in the end it is life for ever re-emerging in us. Our life is not of our making, it is of our allowing. Our experience of meaning is out of our hands, it is generated through a web or a net of previous givens.
And what is the collective unconscious? It's a level of awareness below that of one's personal unconscious, and is unknowingly shared by people across different traditions and cultures. At this level Jung saw "archetypes" of demons, sages, dreams, etc. common to all humankind and all human history.
But Afghanistan's strategic importance has not changed. In September, a few days before the attack on New York, the US Energy Information Administration reported that "Afghanistan's significance from an energy standpoint stems from its geographical position as a potential transit route for oil and natural gas exports from Central Asia to the Arabian Sea. This potential includes the possible construction of oil and natural gas export pipelines through Afghanistan." Given that the US government is dominated by former oil industry executives, we would be foolish to suppose that a reinvigoration of these plans no longer figures in its strategic thinking. As the researcher Keith Fisher has pointed out, the possible economic outcomes of the war in Afghanistan mirror the possible economic outcomes of the war in the Balkans, where the development of "Corridor 8", an economic zone built around a pipeline carrying oil and gas from the Caspian to Europe, is a critical allied concern.
As Myth, News Will Be Crucial But Conflicted In An Online World Myth and the new technology may seem to be an unlikely pair. But we have already seen that myth has adapted to every storytelling medium from tribal tales to cable television. The new technology is no different. The combination of myth and online news, though, will produce intriguing, paradoxical, perhaps ominous, results. The information model of journalism, already in great disrepair, will be dismantled by the marriage of myth and new media. News is losing whatever franchise it had on whatever information is. Information is no longer some scarce resource, a commodity that newspeople can cull and sell. Our society rapidly moved from information explosion to information overload. Information is everywhere. From online events calendars to live, continuous congressional coverage, anyone can give and get information online. If news is only information, news is nothing. Yet information overload offers opportunities to news: as myth. In the throes of all this information, the need for myth increases. People grapple with the meaning of rapidly changing times. People seek out ways in which they can organize and explain the world. People need stories. Myth has long played these roles. Myth has identified and organized important events in the lives of individuals and societies. Myth has interpreted and explained the meaning of the past, the portents of the future. Myth has offered the stability of story in unstable times. Decades ago, Marshall McLuhan foresaw the increasing need for myth to organize experience in the face of information overload. "You cannot cope with vast amounts of information in the old fragmentary classified patterns," he told literary critic Frank Kermode in a 1964 interview. "You tend to go looking for mythic and structural forms in order to manage such complex data, moving at very high speeds."
As the West prepares for an assault on Iraq, John Pilger argues that 'war on terror' is a smokescreen created by the ultimate terrorist ... America itself
I am collecting snippets here on the autonomous nature of the psyche or soul.
Writing in Encounter (April, 1954), Auden discusses ''The Word and the Machine.'' Poets today, he says, envy ''not the rich or the powerful but the scientists, doctors, machine designers, etc., for whose happiness our age seems designed as earlier ages were designed for great landowners, for these people enjoy the satisfaction both of meaningful work and of an unequivocal social position. When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a curate who has strayed into a drawing-room full of dukes.''
A few years before, Mr. Auden's colleague Stephen Spender was wanly asking why, when he met a communist, did he feel so small? Both having failed in the thirties to find a satisfactory lyrical idiom to glorify the machine might now unite in the matter of dukes. Or doesn't it matter that the machine has now brought English noblemen to the pass of purveying homemade jam at the roadside? The fact of the matter is that Mr. Auden typifies our current failure to examine the forms of technology, past and present, as art forms. He concludes his essay:
Is there something in the essential natures of the machine and the Word which makes them incompatible, so that at the slightest contact with the former the Word turns into lifeless words? Is even the mechanical printing press, but for which I would never have been able to read the books that formed my life, nor for that matter be writing this article now, an evil? Sometimes I have an uneasy suspicion that it is.
Marshall McLuhan is making a comeback or at least many his ideas are. Twenty years after his death, many of his thoughts and ideas about technology are cropping up again. Especially now that many of these ideas seem quite prophetic. During his lifetime, many readers of his work assumed that his theories on mass communication revolved around television. Looking back on his work, many admirers are now realizing that most of his thoughts apply to the Internet. In his 1962 book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, he predicted that the print culture would eventually be replaced by the electronic age. In his well-known 1964 book, Understanding Media, he goes on to foretell how technology has and will continue to change social relations and attitudes. In fact, he describes future society as a global village in which "we are all within reach of a single voice or the sound of tribal drums." McLuhan understood the incredible impact that technology would have on the world and added many new quotes to the language that are recognized today, one of the most familiar being, "the medium is the message." While still controversial in some circles, McLuhan's ideas remain thought provoking and enlightening.
Articles freely available online are more highly cited. For greater impact and faster scientific progress, authors and publishers should aim to make research easy to access.I wonder what wealth lies off-line? I wonder too what wealth lies buried and unused behind various proprietary systems? The un listed however can be searched! It is via relationships. People know stuff and will send you stuff. But then again some people are not "online" - still someone is bound to know them. It adds up this: cyberspace is beyond any specific technology to access it.
Bradford’s law, sometimes called Bradford’s law of scatter, is useful, not just for writers and bibliographers, but for librarians doing collection development as well. 1/3 of the literature in a field can be covered in a small collection of core journals. To cover 2/3 of the literature, multiply the number of journals in the core by a constant (n) which varies by field. To have a comprehensive collection, multiply the number of journals in the core by the square of the constant.
''From start to finish, an O'Reilly animal requires anywhere from 8 to 20 hours of manual labor. And for reasons no one can fully explain, hand-drawn animals on high-tech computer books became a wild success.''I think it is because computers were never about the thing itself... the fetish is about the living and organic thing they do. I feel an affinity with the O'Reilly images as I have used the William Morris tapestry in as a logo for years, I see a similarity... the same idea, something, in this case, hand crafted, beautiful and symbolic of the Psybernet work... (tree of) life work contained in the (circle) groups. With that in mind I kept looking. How is this for something Psybernet, more Morris stuff, the harvesting of our work?
This is a recording of interviews and conversations at the Mobilization for Global Justice in Washington DC. Please subscribe to our newsletter for updates and how you can create your own MP3 news/talk webcasts in the near future. TalkAboutTheNews.com will be providing free webspace, discussion boards, polls, and a whole lot more! Stay in touch! Listen to the unedited MP3 WebCast streamed by Live365.com "Well if this was a test it worked beautifully and it seems great to be able to get the feel from people on the spot... as it is right there. What a contrast the sounds of a demonstration are with my autumn shot in the garden today.
This is one of Dee Hock's favorite tricks to play on an audience. "How many of you recognize this?" he asks, holding out his own Visa card. Every hand in the room goes up. "Now," Hock says, "how many of you can tell me who owns it, where it's headquartered, how it's governed, or where to buy shares?" Confused silence. No one has the slightest idea, because no one has ever thought about it. And that, says Hock, is exactly how it ought to be. "The better an organization is, the less obvious it is," he says. "In Visa, we tried to create an invisible organization and keep it that way. It's the results, not the structure or management that should be apparent." Today the Visa organization that Hock founded is not only performing brilliantly, it is also almost mythic, one of only two examples that experts regularly cite to illustrate how the dynamic principles of chaos theory can be applied to business.
Welcome! Here is a collection of the best writing to be found concerning Critical Thought, and the Paradigm (and Ethics) of computing in our daily lives, with a list of the best writers who exhibit Critical Thinking in their work. Refresh this page often, as this site is growing. You are welcome to send additions.
Succumbing to the "ontology" fallacy The hot new term in information organization is "ontology." Everybody's inventing, and writing about, ontologies, which are classifications, lists of indexing terms, or concept term clusters (Communications of the ACM, 2002). But here's the problem: "Ontology" is a term taken from philosophy; it refers to the philosophical issues surrounding the nature of being. If you name a classification or vocabulary an "ontology" then that says to the world that you believe that you are describing the world as it truly is, in its essence, that you have found the universe's one true nature and organization. But, in fact, we do not actually know how things "really" are. Put ten classificationists (people who devise classifications) in a room together and you will have ten views on how the world is organized.Got this from Cory in boing boing, he liked it. I noticed that in a discussion, Cory with Justin the topic comes up again, and Justin makes it very clear:
Nice rant about categorization. Talking about the universe and washing machines, you nail a problem I've had writing on the web about my life. For example, I'm in love with a woman and I want to write about her on my site. Where do I file her in my hierarchical life-cum-directory structure? Under San Francisco, where we met? Or Oakland, more precisely, which was somehow created as a subdirectory of San Francisco? Or maybe Japan/Tokyo where we had the first date of the rest of our lives. Maybe I'll marry this woman and so maybe she should be her own subdirectory! Or a subdomain off Justin.org. I link to her site in the meantime; but wouldn't it be nice to say a few tender words as I pass a web surfer from my site to hers?I think the answer is in the direction of better conversations, and automated mass conversations via collaborative filtering, like in our project that never eventuated I like this! Update:I have read Marcia J. Bates' article with interest. It has some great ideas and information, SDI = ''push'' technology which has a long history. faceted classification would be worth studying up, the Bradford Distribution is a concept that made immediate sense. HOWEVER, the overall thesis, that some sort of rationality of classification could prevail and actually be useful I have doubts about. I remain positive about the idea of groping through a tangle of information. Not information, relationships, conversations. No where in the article does she really mention *self organising information* emails stored on my computer are self organising. I can search them by title, or test date, author etc. And no where does she mention the word chaordic, or collaborative filtering. My hunch is that there is great value in the work Marcia does in specific niche areas. BUT. Just as she says linguists are not much good at thinking systemically about information retrieval, I am now thinking that information researchers do not grasp the nature of... surfing the noosphere. God, there is hardly a way to speak about the soup we are in, but I bet that someone right in there well netted-in could find anything on the net, by hunches, by surfing through the links on likely pages, by blogging, by Googling through usenet and asking the odd guru. That way we'd not only find the information, but learn that we did not actually need it, or that there was a new paradigm, or what to do with it once we had it, or that it was not actually cataloged anywhere, but in my grand mothers drawer. I'll sprinkle hyperlinks through all of the above in good time as I think on this one I am with Justin - it is a rhizome like beast. I also want to follow up on Cory's piece about cataloging.
Hi Tony, Your item makes good sense to me, as I am back here in XP *unable* to do what I want in GNU/Linux. One thing you do not mention that will take me back as soon as I am able... the *values* implicit in the GPL. Human knowledge is built on the shoulders of those before us for a long time, that tradition is under severe threat, and the GPL is one of the more hopeful phenomena of this era. I like it when RMS says thing like "I don't care!" to many of your valid points. Freedom is more important, the freedom to build knowledge for the use of us all. I will pop this on my weblog, and if in the millions of emails you will get, you manage to respond to this in some way, I will link to that too. Thanks, Walter
It turns out that it works fine in IE but not Mozilla (at least 1.00 release candidate 3 - I will try an upgrade). What I had done to create the corruption was to omit a closing quote around a url in a link. Easily fixed in safe mode in IE. My IE was crashing, but that is another story, reinstall, reactivation 24 hours later... Now IE is working, Blogger is working, Yay! I will keep you posted re latest version of Mozilla, as it would be good to have that functionality there too. Can others use Safe Mode to fix such things in Mozilla? Walter
Here is the jacket summary on the Ginko Press site, looks like a site worth noting: (thanks for the link Josh) Until now no book has explored the full expanse of Marshall McLuhan's thinking or writing. The Book of Probes is an exciting new publication that brings together for the first time a collection of his most prescient aphorisms and excerpts from his prolific life's work. It is a revolutionary book that distills the wisdom and wit of the brilliant man who was first to understand and articulate thoughts on media, privacy invasion, the information environment, and much more. McLuhan's bold perceptions, such as ''obsolescence is the moment of superabundance'' he called 'probes' and they gleam today like hidden gems in his many books, in more than 200 speeches, in his classes (especially the Monday Night Seminars), and most of all in the nearly 700 shorter writings that he published between 1945 and 1980. Over the past couple of years Eric McLuhan, Marshall McLuhan's son, and William Kuhns have combed through all of his writings to extract and compile a complete collection of 'probes' which has become The Book of Probes. Not only are these one hundred percent McLuhan's own words, these are McLuhan's finest words and, incredibly, most 'probes' are so fresh they will be new to even the most avid McLuhan readers and enthusiasts. The Book of Probes opens a new portal to McLuhan's mind and sets a new precedent as to how we will interpret and appreciate McLuhan in the future. Readers will marvel at how the consistency, the clarity of concept, and the abundant wealth of observations, some made twenty or thirty years apart, dovetail to form a whole. Art Director and Designer David Carson presents McLuhan's work with refreshing new visual insight, and in doing so has added his indelible mark to a body of work that is destined to be recommissioned and reinterpreted by countless generations to come. With commentaries by Eric McLuhan and Terrence Gordon, author of Marshall McLuhan – Escape into Understanding.Also on the Ginko site: Letter from Marshall McLuhan to Harold Adams Innis amazon
Links have always been fundamental to the web. In the last few years their value has become regulated as search engines and other systems that find and define the structures of the Web increasingly index links and anchor text in addition to keywords and page content. In these projects, links are seen as objective, democratic and machine-readable signs of value. This paper discusses the implications and the power structures inherent in this relatively undiscussed but influential change in the structuring of the World Wide Web.
Google! DayPop! This is my blogchalk: English, New Zealand, Christchurch, City, Walter, Male, 56-60!
the ongoing dialogue between Steve Talbott (editor of NetFuture ) and Kevin Kelly (editor-at-large of Wired) which began with Steve's essay The Deceiving Virtues of Technology. Their forthright give and take cuts through to the deeper issues concerning technology and how it is changing our sense of what it means to be a human being.
''That is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions... Physiologically, man in normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms.The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth.''
 | Phoenicia, Phoenicians: Cadmus the Phoenician - Another telling of the myth. Unfortunately, now Cadmus had no men. He looked to the gods and since he had sacrificed the cow, Athena answered his plea. "Don't worry," said the goddess. "Just plow a field and sow the dragon's teeth in the furrows." Cadmus followed Athena's strange advice and as soon as the teeth were sown, fully grown warriors sprang up. They all ran at Cadmus and again he feared for his life, but again Athena stepped in. "Throw a rock among them!" she told Cadmus. Again, Cadmus did as the goddess said, and at once the warriors fought each other fiercely, accusing their neighbor of being the thrower of the rock. In the end, only five remained living, and those were wounded badly. Cadmus nursed them back to health and they helped Cadmus establish the city of Thebes.Is this then the five vowel sounds? |
Having found this site (see previous Item) and noted the paucity of references to him, here he is again, Harold Innis:"Innis sees communication media as extensions of the human mind and believes that the primary interest of any historical period is a kind of bias resulting from the predominant media in use. In other words, what happens, and what seems significant in a historical period are determined by the media. "Heavy media such as parchment, clay, or stone are lasting and therefore time-binding. Because they facilitate communication from one generation to another, these media favored relatively close communities, metaphysical speculation, and traditional authority. "In contrast, space-binding media such as paper are light and easy to transport, so they facilitate communication from one location to another, fostering empire building, large bureaucracy, commercialism, and the military. "Speech as a medium, because it is produced one sound at a time, encourages people to organise their experience chronologically. Speech also requires knowledge and tradition and therefore supports community and relationship. Written media, which are spatially arranged, produce a different kind of culture. The space-binding effect of writing produces interests in polotical authority and the growth of empires across the land. "Innis grew increasingly pessimistic later in life. Changes in communication technology were seen as a revaluation of community and a of loss culture and freedom. What Innis saw most clearly was that the main meaning of electronics was not in the provision of entertainment and information through radio and television. he recognized that the speed and distance of electronic communication enlarged the possible scale of social organization and greatly enhanced the possibilities of centralization and imperialism in matters of culture and politics."Update: There are two spellings of Innis on the site but I have (I think) corrected this item to Innis.
The alphabet is a magic technology. These dragon's teeth/letters contain the magic of fertility and trans-substantiation. Teeth/letters grow magically into soldiers. The alphabet, as we see again when we reread the story of Moses in the court of Pharaoh, unleashes a new power in its users to convert one thing into another. The secret lies in the alphabet's magic ability of abstraction. This can become that because more information can be held more compactly and meaningfully in the head, and manipulated mentally. Pictographic writing is either literal - this is this - or else it is iconic: this stands for that (and only that). The alphabet endows its user with a mental plasticity that is impossible for pictography. Letters signal hidden connections and correspondences, tracing the roots of meaning that lie beneath the surface of language. To illiterates or to cultures still using pictography, the alphabet fulfills Clarke's Law: it must seem like a form of sorcery for the powers, the grammar and glamour, it grants to those who commandeer it.Another snippet - variation - on the Cadmus story, DRAGONSTEETH
When Jason sows the dragon's teeth, each tooth transforms into a fierce warrior. But Jason, by magic, kills all of them and claims the golden fleece. The myth goes on from there, but our concern is with the sgnificance of the dragon's teeth. The dragonteeth-become-warriors represent the letters of the alphabet (also credited to the legendary Cadmus). Why warriors? Because the invention of writing made possible extending communication to aid long-distance strategy in warfare. A strategic leader would send a long-distance runner to a tactical leader in the field. The illiterate runner might be able to remember many details (illiterates often compensate thus), but within serious limits. An illiterate messenger bearing a long, written scroll could transmit extensive military orders to a field commander. Thus was the city-state extended to the empire -- BY THE ALPHABET!This is from John Hays - and is the thesis I have understood as coming from Harold Innis.
E-mail is not just electronic mail sent via the internet. E-mail communication creates a psychological space in which pairs of people -- or groups of people -- interact. It creates a context and boundary in which human relationships can unfold.Well put.
You should define an acronym whenever you use it, or at least once per post. How to do it The first time you use an acronym, mark it up with an tag, like this: The first time you use an acronym, mark it up with anThis item is hot on daypop and no wonder. Mark has created profiles of users who would benefit. Lovely, see Bill's story for instance.<acronym>tag, like this:
<acronym title="cascading style sheets">CSS</acronym>
Janis Ian writes what is sort of well known and obvious, but great to hear from someone like her. It's absurd for us, as artists, to sanction - or countenance - the shutting down of something like this. It's sheer stupidity to rejoice at the Napster decision. Short-sighted, and ignorant. Free exposure is practically a thing of the past for entertainers. Getting your record played at radio costs more money than most of us dream of ever earning. Free downloading gives a chance to every do-it-yourselfer out there. Every act that can't get signed to a major, for whatever reason, can reach literally millions of new listeners, enticing them to buy the CD and come to the concerts. Where else can a new act, or one that doesn't have a label deal, get that kind of exposure? As artists, we have the ear of the masses. We have the trust of the masses. By speaking out in our concerts and in the press, we can do a great deal to damp this hysteria, and put the blame for the sad state of our industry right back where it belongs - in the laps of record companies, radio programmers, and our own apparent inability to organize ourselves in order to better our own lives - and those of our fans. If we don't take the reins, no one will.I wish some NZ would do the same, perhaps they have?
Many Wi-Fi networks, intentionally or otherwise, allow passers-by to use the networks without any password. And there are tools that amplify the Wi-Fi radio signal, enabling it to be delivered over an even larger area, like a park. Many broadband providers fear that every user of a free wireless network is one less paying customer. "Our goal is just to protect our customer base," said Mr. Rosenblum, adding that Time Warner Cable currently had no plans to extend this enforcement campaign to other areas that it serves.Maybe it is a fantasy and I just dont get the science, but I have a sense that companies are trying to bottle air and sell it, and stop anyone from breathing who does not pay up. Maybe there are some gadgets involved and some regulations required, but that is about it. It is probably like music. Once there was a lot of cost in copying and distributing music. Now that is free but the old companies will not accept that. They want to make it scarce by technological and legal means. Now that is perverse use of tools (though probably familiar law.)
In a BBC News item Write here, right now Mark Ward writes, quoting Matt Jones:This is an item that makes the whole thing easier to grasp if it is all a bit new - as it was for me. I'd love this - hope there are these hotspots wherever I go!The warchalks are intended to let people know about the open nodes that many people are happy for others to share. Jones said he did not think there was much danger that it would be taken over by anyone malicious to post notice of corporate networks that are not doing enough to protect themselves. "If someone is chalking it up they are doing something quite beneficial to the network operators by saying I have spotted this. Then they can decide to secure it or instigate a free wireless type scenario."
lain image I find it all intriguing, mainly because it is so psybernett-y and so matrix-y. ''Has the line between the real world and the wired world begun to blur?'' What a nice question... and though it seems that it is treated literally here, as if the dead can email from the grave, the power of that notion is interesting. Like all stories, their truth is not related to what actually happened. The two headings, Psyche and religion - are just interesting. Update: Later I return to this theme in my weblog post re Axis Mundi Plan. It comes up there because of the church thing they have going.''There is the world around us, a world of people, tactile sensation, and culture. There is the wired world, inside the computer, of images, personalities, virtual experiences, and a culture all of its own. The day after a classmate commits suicide, lain, a thirteen year-old girl, discovers how closely the two worlds are linked when she receives an e-mail from the dead girl: "I just abandoned my body. I still live here..." Has the line between the real world and the wired world begun to blur? layer 03: PSYCHE lain receives mysterious circuit called "Psyche" that improve functions of any type of NAVIs. layer 04: RELIGION lain is into remodeling her NAVI after getting Psyche. Outside of her room, the real world and wired world start mixing.''
In concrete terms, this means that the productive cooperation practices, well tried in software, can and must be extended to other cognitive fields, and to other social subjects. Beyond the slogan, it is about inventing now social and material structures making possible an effective circulation of technical knowledge, of peculiar uses and practical innovations. It is about creating structures of public access to skills involved in a full use of the potentialities of free software and Internet, to give every user the possibility to access the "source code" of communication's technosciences.That this should be under threat, that it has become an issue to fight for is so sad. So much good will! So much knowledge and it is somehow being well repressed, almost without our realising it. We are creeping toward the world described in Richard Stallman's short story: The Right to Read. (link to the Google cached version as I could not get to the GNU site's version.) I linked to this site ages ago too.
