19:06, Sunday 1 Jan., 2012 Link

There's a nice turn of phrase in Borges' short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius:

He and my father had entered into one of those close (the adjective is excessive) English friendships that begin by excluding confidences and very soon dispense with dialog. They used to carry out an exchange of books and newspapers and engage in taciturn chess games... I remember him in the hotel corridor, with a mathematics book in his hand, sometimes looking at the irrecoverable colors of the sky.

In the Mars trilogy, Kim Stanley Robinson has his characters also watch the colours of the sky. In one of his fictions (it might be the Mars trilogy, it might be a short story, it could be both), Robinson has theatre become a resurgent art form: irrecoverable experiences in an age of on-demand media. I can see that.

Borges approaches the uniqueness of experience from another angle in this footnote of the same story:

All men, in the vertiginous moment of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat a line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.

There's something appealing about this. At birth, as tabula rasa, we are as one. A single entity, instantiated in billions of brains across time and space. And symmetry breaks and breaks again, and we become our separate selves. But this loneliness can be reversed: at certain singular moments, we exist in transcendent communion with other individuals who have taken the same journey as ourselves, and for an instant we are identical, one, the same thoughts and the same concerns, before time drags us on and we become individual once again.

But you know, exiting that moment of communion, you could have taken a different turn. You know, and that's comforting.

17:43, Saturday 7 May., 2011 Link

Books read February to April 2011, by date finished:

• Bluebeard, Kurt Vonnegut (4 Feb)
• My Name is Legion, Roger Zelazny (7 Feb)
• The Boy Who Would Live Forever, Frederik Pohl (20 Feb)
• Generation X, Douglas Coupland (12 Mar)
• Neuromancer, William Gibson (24 Mar)
• The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future, Andrew Pickering (7 April)
• Ascents of Wonder, David Gerrold (editor) (8 Apr)
• Glasshouse, Charles Stross (9 Apr)
• In the Bone: the best science fiction of Gordon R Dickson, Gordon R Dickson (15 Apr)
• Incident on Ath: Dumarest Saga 18, E C Tubb (17 Apr)
• The Explorers, C M Kornbluth (22 Apr)
• Taurus Four, Rena Vale (24 Apr)
• Only the Paranoid Survive, Andrew S Grove (24 Apr)
• The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande (30 Apr)

It's rare to find a second-hand bookshop in London with a good cache of science fiction nowadays. People buy up the books and sell them online. But I ran across one, way out of the way, and picked up a half dozen books and collections of short stories from the 1940s-1970s. The short stories are the best: Ascents of Wonders, In the Bone, The Explorers, and The Complete Venus Equilatoral (not on this list as I only finished it today) are all worth picking up. It's weird reading old stories -- some of the ideas were copied so many times they've become bored tropes. But others ideas never made it into the mainstream and are as fresh as the day they were written. And then of course there's the pleasure of the history diving of it all: the 1940s were all engineering-led, the 1970s all psychology. From outer space to inner space.

Bluebeard is probably my favourite Vonnegut. It's a great story, brilliantly told, and without the familiar Vonnegut tricks of paragraph-by-paragraph cut-up or surreality. So it gets a little deeper inside me I guess. The protagonist is Rabo Karabekian (SPOILERS), one of the founders of the (fictionalised) American modern art movement Abstract Expressionism. Karabekian also appears in Vonnegut's earlier novel Breakfast of Champions, in which he is attacked for the emptiness of his art: Well, we don't think much of your painting. I've seen better pictures done by a five-year old. The painting in question is called The Temptation of Saint Anthony, and is green with a single, solid, vertical line of yellow tape.

Anyway, at this moment Vonnegut puts into Karabekian's mouth a defence of this fictional art as fine as I have ever read:

I now give you my word of honor that the picture your city owns show everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animals--the 'I am' to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us--in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint Antony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.

Amen!

Let me finish on The Cybernetic Brain, which is hands down the most remarkable book I have read for months and months. On the face of it, Pickering has written a biography-of-ideas of several key players in cybernetics (specifically British cybernetics) from the 1950s to the 1970s: Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, R. D. Laing, Stafford Beer, and Gordon Pask. And he goes deep. There are sketches of Laing's grand alternative to psychiatry (fully integrated cooperative community houses); Beer's attempts to use the rich ecology of woodland ponds as the brains of factories, hooking sensors up to production lines and pond weed; the influences on Brian Eno and others; electronic circuits for both Walter and Ashby's proto-robot experimental probes into learning machines; more.

But what Pickering really does is put forward that these cyberneticians (in particular, as opposed to American crowd more occupied with control systems) saw "intelligence" as something not representational (ie, the brain encodes or contains knowledge) but essentially performative. He opens with Walter's Tortoise, a toy robot that can avoid obstacles, and is attracted by moderate light (and repelled by bright light). A community of Tortoises would have unexpected emergent behaviour. Pickering: The tortoise is our first instantiation of the performative perspective on the brain ... the view of the brain as an 'acting machine' rather than a 'thinking machine.'

Pickering comes to present cybernetics as holding a view of intelligence as something that only thinks by doing; something that, even when it follows rules, is not unpredictable so much but can only be calculated or predicted by actually doing its thing. It's a wonderfully optimistic, re-humanising, uncontrolled, lively, meaty way of seeing and being, which runs so counter to the statistical, predictable, crowd behaviour, goal directed, success/failure and "psychohistorical" perspective we usually take on the world.

This is also intrinsically a view on design, as Pickering says: a distinctly cybernetic notion of design, very different from that more familiar in modern science and engineering. If our usual notion of design entails the formulation of a plan which is then imposed upon matter, the cybernetic approach entailed instead a continuing interaction with materials, human and nonhuman, to explore what might be achieved--what one might call an evolutionary approach to design, that necessarily entailed a degree of respect for the other.

The Cybernetic Brain is academic, large and grainy; it is skittish and the anecdotes flock and tumble. It's terribly easy to read, like a month of late night conversations with a brilliant friend. It is not fair of me to say that it boils down to a single worldview or puts forward just one perspective. But it does pass on the torch of that perspective. It is not a perspective which can be learned from reading papers, only kindled by experiencing experiments vicariously, and above all Pickering's book does just that: it is inspiring. Recommended.

18:55, Thursday 17 Mar. Link

The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996 to creatively foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.

Sticking a zero at the beginning of the year is ace. They're building a clock that'll last those 10,000 years. Two lovely interventions in culture! Yum.

They recently asked on their blog, Peak Science? First they point out a trend, identified by Samuel Arbesman (Harvard Medical School): By measuring the average size of discovered asteroids, mammalian species and chemical elements, he was able to show that, over the last few hundred years, these three very different scientific fields have been obeying the exact same trend: the size of what they discover has been getting smaller.

And follow it with this speculation: we've basically picked all the low-hanging fruit of scientific discovery -- all Galileo had to do was be the first person to look at Jupiter through a telescope and he discovered four moons. But, we've found all the moons now, and without those easy to reach facts, we’re now forced to pool more effort and resources into learning new things.

Interesting! But I disagree.

The kinds of science mentioned are what Deleuze and Guattari call "royal science" -- it's the science you get taught at school where the discipline is given capital letters: Physics, Chemistry, Computer Science. It's the science where there are institutions, journals, funding, prizes, PhDs, and a division between those who are Scientists and the rest of society. It's the science you can get a qualification in, and the science you can fail in.

It happens that sciences start their lives somewhat differently -- biology emerged from hobbyist Victorian men and women first collecting, and then taxonomising animals and plants. Electricity was a hobbyist's occupation before it was formalised: the same journal would speak about a lecture, a new patent, an experiment with lightbulbs, and who had been hit by lightning that month. Sciences don't look like sciences to begin with. You can't "fail" in collecting examples of finches.

So, my first question: (1) where are the hobbies?

Of course, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, that particle accelerator loop 27 kilometres around, can't be a hobby -- it's too big and too expensive. But it's at the final "white dwarf" end of scientific evolution. It's way past its lively period of heady, explosive growth and illumination. Science goes through stages: first you collect (write down many examples), then you have a period of making taxonomies and hypotheses (a period of crazy invention and fights and predictions), and then you settle on a reductionist model and (a) the science turns into technology (lasers and CD players), and (b) you look for experiments to disrupt the model to start over again (CERN).

I simplify. But, y'know.

Collecting is easy. But it's not really seen as science (though it's essential). It's a an incidental activity, or a hobby, often by people who are fans of science, or philosophy, or some other similar discipline preoccupied with causality and structure (where it is also accompanied by cataloging and rule-making).

So my second question is (2) where are people collecting?

Answer my two questions, and we'll find new proto-sciences, science nurseries full of low-hanging fruit.

And here are some examples that pop immediately to mind:

• PageRank, by Google, their form of analysing the web, is right at the beginning of a new science. As a way of understanding networks, it was ripe for the picking - Page and Brin just had to do it! - and we've still not looked at the higher-level molecules in the structure of the web. Links and pages are the fundamental particles. But imagine if the attention given to string theory was given to networks in the web: what evolving manifolds might we find? What 11-dimensional rules?
• Stephen Wolfram's work with cellular automata. Algorithms are not expensive, and don't have to be examined by experts. So many of us could examine simple sets of rules that evolve, and find new interesting creatures in Conway's Game of Life. It's not hard, there's just a lot to territory to explore. So be explorers!
• "Phenethylamines I Have Known And Loved" by Shulgin. An exploration of psychedelic compounds. They act so differently. #125: QUALITATIVE COMMENTS: (with 35 mg) There was a vague awareness of something all afternoon, something that might be called a thinness. There is a universe of internal life to catalogue before we can start drawing architectures, that super-complex muddy hinterland between consciousness and wet chemicals.
• Mandelbrot and the world of fractals. There are shapes and rules in fractals which are as wide-ranging and fundamental as circles and rectangles. We see the networks of neurons in the brain reflected in the super-filaments of galactic superclusters that braid the known universe, and reflected again in the patterns that emerge at the end of a game of Go. Why are these similar? Can looking inward at one educate us about looking up at another? Perhaps. But we need to collect and taxonomise first, to learn how to describe new shapes. We're maybe 50 years off a breakthrough here, I guess, and Mandelbrot is our Galileo: Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.
• Small group dynamics and psychiatry. The experiments made on subjective experience, the social world, and the brain are easy (there are home brain imaging kits), and depend more on constructing a language for discussion (as Freud did) and data than slicing the brain up into tiny slices. There is a cosmos, a natural philosophy, of subjective experience to be described, and we'll need to make a lot of mistakes and try all kinds of alchemy before we attain the chemistry - or its equivalent - to speak about it, even to the level of literacy we have speaking about, say, modern art.
• Kevin Kelly's Computational X -- Computational Medicine, Computational Linguistics, Computational Architecture, and more: Inventing materials, forms, structures that cannot be made with concrete and glass. Generate endless varieties of one form, with ease. There must be a commonality between these areas, if they are tractable to investigation with the same techniques. So how do we describe it? First, we need the stuff to describe. We all have computers. As hobbyists, let's apply computation to everything! Ah, we are doing that. So carry on, and look for abstract bridges and common shapes! It's a proto-science. A proto proto-science.

There are a billion low hanging fruits. We don't recognise these worlds as capital-S Science because they're not what we've been taught to see. Get out your telescope that you don't recognise as a telescope, and you'll see moons and Jupiters that have never before been spied.

09:07, Tuesday 15 Mar. Link

Every morning I wake up to continuing news from the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, which engineers are fighting to control. The problems - fires, explosions, venting of radioactive gases, a fire in the spent fuel area, the risk of fuel rods melting and releasing highly toxic substances into the environment - are the result of broken cooling systems damaged by a tsunami, itself the result of an earthquake, natural disasters in which large numbers of people died, in highly local but massively multiple tragedies.

I write as if you didn't already know, mainly to wrap my own head around what's going on. From the other side of the globe, I really can't grasp what's been happening on the western Pacific Rim these last few months. The floods in Australia, earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan, Japan's continuing crisis. I don't have the imagination, it's a struggle to put myself there.

But Fukushima:

There are a few dozen engineers, and they're fighting, warring really against this problem, this overheating. And there's little or no electricity, and everything they're doing is outside operational parameters. It's become chaotic. I can just about get a little-finger hold on what that's like. They said on the radio this morning (or maybe overnight) that the current attempts to cool the overheating fuel rods are all improvised now. The engineers are using fire engines to pump sea water in through internal sprinklers. It's rumoured that one of the fires started when a fire engine ran out of fuel and could no longer pump. I can almost grasp that, the scrambling, the constant brainstorming and the constant new emergencies. I can't quite get the rest. The danger of death from radioactivity, the hundreds of thousands of people evacuated from the local area. That's the size of the whole city where I went to school!

The nuclear aspect touches old fears. I was born and grew up in the Cold War. I was almost 12 years old in December 1989, at the time of the Malta Summit, when the corner was turned, detente found, and the end of the War declared. I'd had a childhood talking about atom bombs with my friends, and having nightmares about mushroom clouds and fallout. The fiction we read in class was often enough about nuclear apocalypse. A sudden escalation was not off the cards. I remember the first day, in the early 1990s, that I realised that the weight of possibility of nuclear war had lifted. I felt like I could breathe for the first time.

1991-2001 were blessed years in the West. The Cold War had ended, and the effects of foreign policy and a callousness to the rest of the world had not yet cross-multiplied with psychopaths and boomeranged into terrorism. There was crazy growth and there were easy recessions. India and China were off the radar, changing slowly, but not the obvious inheritors of global cultural leadership. The West was it.

I feel no guilt. That was the most carefree decade I'll have.

So the events in Fukushima touch an old terror for me.

They'll never read this, but I wish the very best of luck to all those fighting to bring the reactors under control. You're in my thoughts.

I want to end on something more abstract.

Matt Jones and I were talking in the studio yesterday and he mentioned the Holocene -- the geological period lasting from 12,000 years ago, the end of the most recent glacial period, until now. All of recorded human history is within the Holocene. But now, maybe (the story goes), we're in the Anthropocene: the epoch in which human activities that have had a significant global impact on the Earth's ecosystems.

It's the era of human-altered climate and of artificial islands. When archeologists in a million years dig deep down and take a core sample through 2011 AD, they'll look at the thin, white, compressed layer of undecomposed plastic waste and iridium traces - a geological layer 100% due to human civilisation - and they'll point to it and say "Ah, the Anthropocene," before turning it into shimmering jewellery and what-have-you.

The thing we have to realise is that this isn't an era of control. Our attempts to control the world have multiplied so much that they themselves have become part of the system, part of the world, and the entire thing has once again become chaotic, unpredictable, and uncontrollable. We live in a world in which we must constantly adapt, improvise, and take care. We must show it respect (the world is not a resource: it is as big as us); we have to swim through it, not walk over it. Engineering is not only problem solving, and not only a way to manage risk, but an improvisational skill. We're going to need that.

It's all very grim in Fukushima. And I'm really feeling that grimness this morning, apologies for passing it on.

16:04, Friday 11 Mar. Link

List of quotes from Ayn Rand.

Rand developed the philosophy of Objectivism, in which the pursuit of one's individual happiness and productive achievement is the highest moral purpose.

One should not depend on nor sway to others.

Rand: The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me.

Anyway, I've been thinking about an email app built on a principle of Objectivism. At the moment, my email client defaults to doing nothing, and I must intervene to create action (ie, write a reply).

But if I had an Objectivist email app, it would automatically respond to all emails with stock enabling and forceful replies after a period of (say) 15 minutes, and I would have to intervene if I wanted it to not do that.

18:13, Friday 4 Mar. Link

Google

Origin of the name "Google": Sean and Larry were in their office, using the whiteboard, trying to think up a good name - something that related to the indexing of an immense amount of data. Sean verbally suggested the word "googolplex," and Larry responded verbally with the shortened form, "googol" (both words refer to specific large numbers). Sean was seated at his computer terminal, so he executed a search of the Internet domain name registry database to see if the newly suggested name was still available for registration and use. Sean is not an infallible speller, and he made the mistake of searching for the name spelled as "google.com," which he found to be available. Larry liked the name, and within hours he took the step of registering the name "google.com" for himself and Sergey (the domain name registration record dates from September 15, 1997).

Baidu

Baidu is Google's competitor in China, and is the 6th most popular site in the world.

Origin of the name "Baidu": 'Baidu' was inspired by a poem written more than 800 years ago during the Song Dynasty. The poem compares the search for a retreating beauty amid chaotic glamour with the search for one's dream while confronted by life's many obstacles. '...hundreds and thousands of times, for her I searched in chaos, suddenly, I turned by chance, to where the lights were waning, and there she stood.' Baidu, whose literal meaning is hundreds of times, represents persistent search for the ideal.

Beautiful.

Incidentally, Baidu's city maps in China are all super-cute pixelated 3D cartoons of themselves. Here's one place I found: a miniature Eiffel Tower, next to a dense urban city hive. [Huh, my link stopped working.] It's like browsing the future dressed up as a children's game.

17:40, Thursday 3 Mar. Link

Conviviality:

People need not only to obtain things, they need above all the freedom to make things among which they can live, to give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them to use in caring for and about others. Prisoners in rich countries often have access to more things and services than members of their families, but they have no say in how things are to be made and cannot decide what to do with them. Their punishment consists in being deprived of what I shall call 'conviviality.' They are degraded to the status of mere consumers.

I choose the term 'conviviality' to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment; and this in contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others, and by a man-made environment. I consider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal interdependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value. I believe that, in any society, as conviviality is reduced below a certain level, no amount of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy the needs it creates among society's members.

And so: To formulate a theory about a future society both very modern and not dominated by industry, it will be necessary to recognize natural scales and limits. We must come to admit that only within limits can machines take the place of slaves; beyond these limits they lead to a new kind of serfdom. Only within limits can education fit people into a man-made environment: beyond these limits lies the universal schoolhouse, hospital ward, or prison. Only within limits ought politics to be concerned with the distribution of maximum industrial outputs, rather than with equal inputs of either energy or information. Once these limits are recognized, it becomes possible to articulate the triadic relationship between persons, tools, and a new collectivity. Such a society, in which modern technologies serve politically interrelated individuals rather than managers, I will call 'convivial.'

-- Tools for Conviviality, Ivan Illich (1972).

17:26, Monday 28 Feb. Link

Fits.me (strap: "Virtual Fitting Room for Online Clothes Retailers") has a shape-changing robot mannequin hooked up to a webcam. Deets: Customers shopping at a participating site enter their body measurements online (height, chest, arm length, torso, type, and so on), then see photos of a mannequin shaped just like them 'trying on' the item they're eyeing in different sizes and styles.

Great photos here. And also, this quote from the CEO: Now, we have a robot that can be any shape at the push of a button. I wish I had a button like that. WHOA.

Superpowers suddenly seem more of-our-world if they have buttons. What if Mr. Fantastic had to press a button before he stretched? What if Superman had one button to fly, one button to use his heat rays, and another button to fly or use his super speed? Villains would try to press them! He would fumble for them in a rush! What if the Iron Man suit ran on Windows 3.1, and the mouse ball kept sticking? What if Superman lost his user-defined preferences file and his only back-up was at the back of a drawer in the Fortress of Solitude?

15:36 Link

RentAFriend.com has Friends from around the world available for hire. Rent a Friend to attend a social event, wedding, or party with you. Hire someone to introduce you to new people, or someone to go to a movie or a restaurant with. Hire a Friend to show you around an unfamiliar town, teach you a new skill or hobby, or just someone for companionship. You can view all of the profiles & photos on RentAFriend.com right now for free!

I have a hunch that television is really bad for us. When we can speak about social psychology with the same degree of accuracy as we can liver function, we'll find that TV has been poisoning the social body. Future generations will look back and say, What?? You used to train your children into believing the environment and other people were non-responsive to their moods and expressions? Are you insane?

Facebook is better. At least it's not passive. Although I'd like to test this. Let's find two remote Canadian towns, cut off physically from the rest of the world by winter. One we'll accidentally-on-purpose break television. The other we'll accidentally-on-purpose break the web. Then: observe.

There's something dangerous, still, I'm sure, with Facebook. I don't know what it does to a person to have social interaction without proximity of bodies. It's weird to do talking without smelling. I can feel my Jacobson's organ shrivelling up like a walnut.

Facebook is a technology of disembedding: social relations are no longer confined to the 'local context.' Rather, the location of individuals and the time frame in which they interact has become indefinite. It is hard to say when this began, but the development of a postal service is a good example. With mail, social relations could be conducted across broad geographic areas (no longer limited to the local context) and within indefinite time spans (due to the time lag in mail delivery).

Money is also a technology of disembedding. In barter, the goods to be exchanged need to come together in time and space. With money - the crystalline form of trust - there's no need.

Disembedding isn't bad. A community of one hundred people couldn't support - and wouldn't need to support - a cartographer, but a community of a hundred thousand has just the niche for such an abstract role. And I'm glad, because I like maps. Big communities are supported by disembedding.

But now we have a trade-off. Currency to disembed exchange of goods from markets in town squares is, well, handy. Social currency to disembed exchange of friend interactions from the fuggy physical world of smells and touches is... well, handy - in that I get cartographers - but a teeny bit inhuman. Possibly. Facebook (and the like) also means eventually smelling and touching people you'd otherwise have never met. And television gives you things in common with a billion people you'll probably never meet, although you might.

I don't have a conclusion. And I'm not planning on renting any friends.

14:14, Saturday 26 Feb. Link

This morning I've been watching the cricket world cup, playing the lovely, simple iPhone game Tiny Wings, doing some basic scenario planning for work, and a little tidying, during which I ran across some UK coins designed by Matthew Dent, which I must have collected when they were released.

Work is brilliantly odd and fun (and busy with a trajectory to becoming crazy busy) at the moment. Lots of pots on the bubble. Just today, on the BERG blog, there's a sneak peek at the art of SVK, the comic we're working on with Warren Ellis and Matt Brooker. I should make a list of everything that contributes to my general feeling of living in the Absurd.

But not right now, as I'm off to an exhibition about Isotype.

Last thing: blue eyes are blue not because of pigment, but because of the Tyndall effect: light scattering by particles in a colloid or particles in a fine suspension. ... It is similar to Rayleigh scattering, in that the intensity of the scattered light depends on the fourth power of the frequency, so blue light is scattered much more strongly than red light. An example in everyday life is the blue colour sometimes seen in the smoke emitted by motorcycles. Rayleigh scattering has slightly different physics, but is the reason the sky is blue. Neat.