Have you ever had one of those days when you just can’t win?
Cuteness is a way of aestheticizing powerlessness.
ideas
Terminator X yellin’ with his hands
In Jorge Luis Borges short story, Funes el Memorioso, the titular Funes suffers a brain injury that results in an inability to forget. At first his altered status feels more gift than impairment. He is capable of fantastic mental feats. He no longer wastes time trying to learn things by repetition. Every important detail is immediately accessible to his extraordinary brain, allowing him to spend less time on drudgery. He is also able to focus and remember minutiae like he was never capable of before. The world unfolds before him in striking clarity. No data point, however inconsequential, escapes his viselike attention to detail. Alas, this becomes his downfall. He loses focus on the important. Not forced to prioritize on initial intake due to a limited storage capacity, he drowns in a sea of the irrelevant.
In his New York Times piece, “The Web Means the End of Forgetting,” legal commentator Jeffrey Rosen warns of the special problem the web presents, particularly for people’s personal lives. Rosen warns: “we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent — and public — digital files.”
Although new tools like Google’s “Me on the Web” are allowing users to better monitor their personal information available on the web, there is no real means of managing this information. This article seeks to explore what it would take to have enforceable “administrative rights” to one’s personal information – the ability to edit or modify one’s online persona just as a webmaster would be able to edit or modify on an individual website.
oil on canvas { Till Rabus }
three tommix, soldiers free, cockaleak and cappapee
The first thing I did after I heard about the highly classified NSA PRISM program two years ago was set up a proxy server in Peshawar to email me passages from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
{ John Sifton/Warscapes | Continue reading | Thanks Aaron }
Particular things I call possible in so far as, while regarding the causes whereby they must be produced, we know not, whether such causes be determined for producing them.
Back in 1996, economist Paul Krugman wrote an essay about the next 100 years of economic history, as if looking back from the year 2096. […]
When something becomes abundant, it also becomes cheap. A world awash in information is one in which information has very little market value. In general, when the economy becomes extremely good at doing something, that activity becomes less, rather than more, important. Late-20th-century America was supremely efficient at growing food; that was why it had hardly any farmers. Late-21st-century America is supremely efficient at processing routine information; that is why traditional white-collar workers have virtually disappeared.
… Many of the jobs that once required a college degree have been eliminated. The others can be done by any intelligent person, whether or not she has studied world literature.
My story being done, she gave me for my pains a world of sighs
Two notions of reconciliation exist.
The weak or thin conception is akin to “resignation.” It is sought by groups that have waged war against one another but have come to the realization neither can win. Reconciliation in this sense results from an enforced lowering of expectations.
In the stronger sense, reconciliation means a virtual cancellation of enmity or estrangement via a morally grounded forgiveness, achievable only when conflicting groups acknowledge collective responsibility for past injustice, and shed their deep prejudices by a profound and painful transformation in their identities. It is because this process is not possible without a somewhat brutal confrontation with oneself and a painful recognition of one’s own moral degradation that reconciliation is difficult to achieve.
Meanwhile, our society continues to fall apart all around us
sonder.— n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own
adronitis.— n. frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone
photo { James P. Blair }
O the lancers they’re grand
Saints may always tell the truth, but for mortals living means lying. We lie to protect our privacy (”No, I don’t live around here”); to avoid hurt feelings (”Friday is my study night”); to make others feel better (”Gee you’ve gotten skinny”); to avoid recriminations (”I only lost $10 at poker”); to prevent grief (”The doc says you’re getting better”); to maintain domestic tranquility (”She’s just a friend”); to avoid social stigma (”I just haven’t met the right woman”); for career advancement (”I’m sooo lucky to have a smart boss like you”); to avoid being lonely (”I love opera”); to eliminate a rival (”He has a boyfriend”); to achieve an objective (”But I love you so much”); to defeat an objective (”I’m allergic to latex”); to make an exit (”It’s not you, it’s me”); to delay the inevitable (”The check is in the mail”); to communicate displeasure (”There’s nothing wrong”); to get someone off your back (”I’ll call you about lunch”); to escape a nudnik (”My mother’s on the other line”); to namedrop (”We go way back”); to set up a surprise party (”I need help moving the piano”); to buy time (”I’m on my way”); to keep up appearances (”We’re not talking divorce”); to avoid taking out the trash (”My back hurts”); to duck an obligation (”I’ve got a headache”); to maintain a public image (”I go to church every Sunday”); to make a point (”Ich bin ein Berliner”); to save face (”I had too much to drink”); to humor (”Correct as usual, King Friday”); to avoid embarrassment (”That wasn’t me”); to curry favor (”I’ve read all your books”); to get a clerkship (”You’re the greatest living jurist”); to save a dollar (”I gave at the office”); or to maintain innocence (”There are eight tiny reindeer on the rooftop”)….
An important aspect of personal autonomy is the right to shape one’s public and private persona by choosing when to tell the truth about oneself, when to conceal, and when to deceive.
photo { Joel Meyerowitz }
Le temps est-il essentiellement destructeur ?
Imagine we rewound the tape of your life. Your diplomas are pulled off of walls, unframed, and returned. Your children grow smaller, and then vanish. Soon, you too become smaller. Your adult teeth retract, your baby teeth return, and your traits and foibles start to slip away. Once language goes, you are not so much you as potential you. We keep rewinding still, until we’re halving and halving a colony of cells, finally arriving at that amazing singularity: the cell that will become you. The question, of course, is what happens when we press “play” again. Are your talents, traits, and insecurities so deeply embedded in your genes that they’re basically inevitable?
For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance
Big news from the annals of science last week. A British newspaper reports that the mysteries of the universe may have been solved by a hedge-fund economist who left academia 20 years ago. Eric Weinstein’s theory – he calls it geometric unity – posits a 14-dimensional “observerse”, which contains our work-a-day, four-dimensional, space-time universe.
{ The National | Continue reading | More: Guardian }
photo { Alessandra Celauro }
‘What we need are more people who specialize in the impossible.’ –Theodore Roethke
Sturgeon‘s law is usually expressed thus: 90% of everything is crap. So 90% of experiments in molecular biology, 90% of poetry, 90% of philosophy books, 90% of peer-reviewed articles in mathematics – and so forth – is crap. […]
A good moral to draw from this observation is that when you want to criticize a field, a genre, a discipline, an art form …don’t waste your time and ours hooting at the crap. […] In order not to waste your time and try our patience, make sure you concentrate on the best stuff you can find, the flagship examples extolled by the leaders of the field, the prize-winning entries, not the dregs.
‘Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.’ –William James
Max Planck’s conception of progress in science:
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
I love origami, but HATE paper cuts. Dilemma.
There is no scientific evidence that psychiatric diagnoses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are valid or useful, according to the leading body representing Britain’s clinical psychologists.
In a groundbreaking move that has already prompted a fierce backlash from psychiatrists, the British Psychological Society’s division of clinical psychology (DCP) will on Monday issue a statement declaring that, given the lack of evidence, it is time for a “paradigm shift” in how the issues of mental health are understood. The statement effectively casts doubt on psychiatry’s predominantly biomedical model of mental distress – the idea that people are suffering from illnesses that are treatable by doctors using drugs.
Dr Lucy Johnstone, a consultant clinical psychologist who helped draw up the DCP’s statement, said it was unhelpful to see mental health issues as illnesses with biological causes.
“On the contrary, there is now overwhelming evidence that people break down as a result of a complex mix of social and psychological circumstances – bereavement and loss, poverty and discrimination, trauma and abuse,” Johnstone said. The provocative statement by the DCP has been timed to come out shortly before the release of DSM-5, the fifth edition of the American Psychiatry Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
The manual has been attacked for expanding the range of mental health issues that are classified as disorders.
images { Kazuki Takamatsu | Maja Daniels }
The spectre of the Cartesian subject
When Latin lost many of its inflectional exponents and morphed into what is now modern French, the pronouns of Latin, which were used for emphasis only, became obligatory.
{ Frontiers | Continue reading }
The Romance languages are all the related languages derived from Vulgar Latin.
In 2007, the five most widely spoken Romance languages by number of native speakers were Spanish (385 million), Portuguese (210 million), French (75 million), Italian (60 million), and Romanian (23 million).
The Romance languages developed from Latin in the sixth to ninth centuries.
The patty duke, the wrench and then I bust the tango
We live in an age of unusually rapid fundamental discovery. This age cannot last long; it must soon slow down as we run out of basic things to discover. We may never run out of small things to discover, but there can be only so many big things.
Such discovery brings status. Many are proud to live in the schools, disciplines, cities, or nations from which discovery is seen to originate. We are also proud to live in this age of discovery. […]
This ability to unite via our discoveries is a scarce resource that we now greedily consume, at the cost of future generations to whom they will no longer be available. Some of these discoveries will give practical help, and aid our ability to grow our economy, and thereby help future generations. […] But many other sorts of discoveries are pretty unlikely to give practical help. […]
This all suggests that we consider delaying some sorts of discovery. The best candidates are those that produce great pride, are pretty unlikely to lead to any practical help, and for which the costs of discovery seem to be falling. The best candidate to satisfy these criteria is, as far as I can tell, cosmology.
While once upon a time advances in cosmology aided advances in basic physics, which lead to practical help, over time such connections have gotten much weaker.
To this idealism is opposed transcendental realism
In 1884, Scientific American asked and answered the famous question, “if a tree were to fall on an uninhabited island, would there be any sound?” […] “If there be no ears to hear, there will be no sound.” […]
Dolphins, for instance, hear 150–150,000 Hz oscillations, whereas humans hear in the range of 20–20,000 Hz. We perceive only as much of reality as our mechanisms of transduction, our sensory organs, afford us. The remainder, the un-transduced portion, is lost to oblivion (or to instrumentation). Transduction induces both veridical representation and editorializing on the biological value of events and objects, such as fright at the apprehension of threat. Morality, perhaps counterintuitively, begins with editorialized sensation. […]
Churchland describes her project as examining the platform upon which morality is constructed. Her thesis is that the platform is maternal attachment to young. The largest single factor in human brain evolution is our exaggerated juvenile phase, during much of which we are helpless. This surely exerted strong selective pressure for parental behavior, care for kin. Churchland argues this is the forerunner of care for kith and strangers. Haidt, drawing from cross-cultural psychology, argues that the normative bedrock is not monolithic. He proposes six innate dimensions about which we are predisposed toward moralizing: harm-care, fairness-cheating, liberty-oppression, loyalty-betrayal, authority-subversion and sanctity-degradation.
She’s a moving violation, from her conk down to her shoes
Researchers placed an atomic clock on the ground, and another one in a high speed aircraft. The scientists found that less time passed on the clock in the plane. The faster we move, the slower time passes; and if we travel fast enough, theoretically we could go backwards.
Radio, suckers never play me
Mirrors are defeating because they don’t tell you what you look like to someone else.
{ Lynne Tillman | Continue reading | via Rob Horning }
Step aside for the flex Terminator X
From assembly line robots to ATMs and self-checkout terminals, each year intelligent machines take over more jobs formerly held by humans; and experts predict this trend will not stop anytime soon. […]
“By 2015, robots should be able to assist teachers in the classroom. By 2018, they should be able to teach on their own, and this will cause many teachers to lose their jobs.” […]
The ultimate tool to replace doctors could be the nanorobot, a tiny microscopic-size machine that can whiz through veins replacing aging and damaged cells with new youthful ones. This nanowonder with expected development time of mid-to-late 2030s could eliminate nearly all need for human doctors. […]
Experts estimate by 2035, 50 million jobs will be lost to machines […] and by the end of the century, or possibly much sooner, all jobs will disappear. Some believe the final solution will take the form of a Basic Income Guarantee, made available as a fundamental right for everyone. […] America should create a $25,000 annual stipend for every U.S. adult, Brain says, which would be phased in over two-to-three decades. The payments could be paid for by ending welfare programs, taxing automated systems, adding a consumption tax, allowing ads on currency, and other creative ideas.
Eternal whisperings around desolate shores
I think one of the things that make planning (and living) life so hard is the combination of the facts that
Its end date is uncertain;
It is rather highly likely that one’s faculties will be duller towards the end.If it was certain that when we sleep on our 40th birthday, we wouldn’t wake up, how different would the world be?
[…]
There will be considerable pressure to have kids at age eighteen or so. […] Other people would attempt to maintain a collegiate lifestyle through their death at age forty. […]
The likelihood of warfare would rise, if only because the sage elderly won’t be around and male hormones will run rampant. […]
Credit would be harder to come by and the rate of home ownership would fall.
‘What one refuses in a minute, no eternity will return.’ –Schiller
A second problem is that Foucault’s concept of resistance lacks a notion of emancipation. As the autonomist Marxist John Holloway argues, “in Foucault’s analysis, there are a whole host of resistances which are integral to power, but there is no possibility of emancipation. The only possibility is an endlessly shifting constellation of power and resistance.”
