Interconnected is by Matt Webb, who can also be found at S&W.

This is his email address, and the syndication feed for this weblog is here.

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1 May, 2008:

Posted at 13h41. Permalink.

Books read April 2008, with date finished:

Arcadia's deeper than I remember. Wow. Harmonograph has taken me on a journey. Jarry's books, I have no idea what's going on - I don't even know if I enjoyed reading them - but they've wriggled deep inside my brain and changed me more than most other books I've read in the last couple years. Valuable ammunition in the assault on cause and effect. World War Z is very close to the stand-out book this month. A great zombie novel didn't need to be told as a retrospective oral history from multiple perspectives, but Brooks did it, and my goodness I haven't encountered a book so impossible to put down for a long time. I'm not kidding: I couldn't sleep with that book unfinished on the floor, and picked it up and held my eyelids open until it was done.

But I try to recommend only one book a month. Read Rosen's Sad Book. Sigh.

1 April:

Posted at 13h41. Permalink.

Things are not good. Staying undercover for a bit, back later perhaps.

30 March:

Posted at 18h11. Permalink.

Books read March 2008, with date finished:

Graves' fraudulent Rubaiyyat is breath-taking, as always. Cherry-Garrard, Carr, Stoppard and Ryman are also happy additions to this month's reading. But Barthes' Lover's Discourse is an observed and poignant pattern language of love. Recommended.

4 March:

Posted at 17h50. Permalink.

Speaking at ETech. I've snagged a last minute speaking spot today (Tuesday) at 16h55, in the Mission Hills room--I'll be rambling through ideas from science fiction and vaguely relating it to design (a toned version of this talk). Come along. (I gave a 5 minute science fictional tour of the Solar System yesterday, as part of the Ignite session. This will be similar.)

29 February:

Posted at 2h24. Permalink.

Books read February 2008, with date finished:

There's been a smell, biochemistry and science theme: scent last month, then Aphrodite, Latour, Calvino and Essential Cell Biology. It's all felt a bit Powers of 10... not just from seeing the proteins behind the experience of taste and food, but reading straight-forward textbooks and simultaneously being aware the colossal energy and practice of science that went into producing facts.

Science in Action is the stand-out book this month. I studied physics at college, and have had heated debates both with those who regard science as entirely a social construction and those who believe in big-s Science (as a process and as outcomes. Mainly people without a science background curiously). Latour is the first I've read to describe science as I've seen it, and to show in a single breath the complex interplay of humans and nonhumans. Superb.

25 February:

Posted at 19h32. Permalink.

Quiet. Preparations for my upcoming trip have meant a race to the finish on several tasks, with the consequence that everything nonessential is being dropped to the wayside. This has led me to notice a third way I get things done:

  1. The marathon: start doing a thing and continue doggedly doing it until it's done. I do this with books.
  2. The leap: take a small step which forms an unbreakable commitment to doing the rest. This is how I started doing talks: once the abstract's published there's no way to not make a decent presentation without letting down a lot of people.
  3. Pace: if an activity gets boring, switch immediately to something else. It doesn't matter what the activity is, so long as expressing it produces useful output. This is what I'm doing now.

One of my activities is reading Essential Cell Biology. (Yes, I regard reading which is not related to work as essential. And if I don't finish it before I go, I'll lose the tenuous understanding I need to complete it.) Reading about cell biology is reading the best whodunnit: we start with the cell working downwards - to proteins, metabolism, meiosis, ATP - and working up, to people. I'm beginning to hit the magical moments of the loop closing, where the top and bottom link up: oh, so that's why I eat!; oh, so that's what breathing's all about! The Krebs citric acid cycle, with the lead pipe, in the ballroom! And the denouement is life itself, there in-front and inside of me, while I'm reading on the Tube.

18 February:

Posted at 17h04. Permalink.

Getting older. From this to that and now here, I'm 30. In addition, my lightcone is two weeks away from Gamma Pavonis and some weeks ago enveloped its 45th star, Kappa-1 Ceti. Down to the forest where I grew up to celebrate, knotting off loop after loop.

You don't talk about the ingredients getting old when you make soup, you wait for the complexity to emerge. Two ingredient combine, and then there are three flavours. And they themselves recombine in all permutations and you have six plus three is nine flavours. And then they combine, and so on. Not getting older but simmering. Thirty years cooked.

What have I learned? That I get a long way by assuming the other person is right and knows more than I do, and that I should always try to understand--I too often don't listen well enough. That everyone has something fascinating about them, and I'll never be bored so long as I'm trying to find the stories. But that some people are idiots; that took a lot of time to figure out. Always create. How I learn--that was a big one, and it's opened many doors. That hard work with my body is fun just like hard work with my head, and that both are better in combination. I wish I'd worked that out sooner. How to not be precious about what I write and how to collaborate.

And then there are general, often contradictory life principles I've run on for years, and they're doing me very well thank you: be less tolerant; care more; care less; speak and do without thinking first, but consider afterwards; do what I want and if it's toxic, move on; don't avoid being wrong or foolish, and it's possible to be wilfully obscure, absurd and fib while simultaneously meaning every single word; everything is interesting.

The first chapter of Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus is Rhizome [pdf], and it includes this advice:

Where are you going? Where are you coming from? What are you heading for? These are totally useless questions. Making a clean slate, starting or beginning again from ground zero, seeking a beginning or a foundation-all imply a false conception of voyage and movement (a conception that is methodical, pedagogical, initiatory, symbolic...). ... move between things, establish a logic of the AND, overthrow ontology, do away with foundations, nullify endings and beginnings. ... The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed. Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle.

Write to the nth power, the n - 1 power, write with slogans: Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! Don't sow, grow offshoots! Don't be one or multiple, be multiplicities! Run lines, never plot a point! Speed turns the point into a line! Be quick, even when standing still! Line of chance, line of hips, line of flight. Don't bring out the General in you! Don't have just ideas, just have an idea (Godard). Have short-term ideas. Make maps, not photos or drawings. Be the Pink Panther and your loves will be like the wasp and the orchid, the cat and the baboon. As they say about old man river:

He don't plant 'tatos/ Don't plant cotton/ Them that plants them is soon forgotten/ But old man river he just keeps rollin' along

15 February:

Posted at 12h49. Permalink.

Some pictures:

TorrentFreedom have built their service to never store any data which could be used for identification. In a pleasant turn of phrase, they call it structural anonymity: We built the system from day one so that there's no correlation between an IP+timestamp and a username - this means we can't hand over logs of 'who was on what IP at what time' ... Our payment system is fully abstracted from the operational environment - billing events are passed to the VPN engine via temporary 'tokens' that are one-way-factors ... we don't have 'server logs' like everyone else does ... all of our operational VMs run in fully-encrypted partitions.

Space smells metallic.

The law of unintended consequences is what happens when a simple system tries to regulate a complex system. See also, from cybernetics, the Law of Requisite Variety.

Jason Kottke has collected videos showing multiple time periods at once. He pulls a quote: But, we can kind of think of the multi-playthrough Kaizo Mario World video as a silly, sci-fi style demonstration of the Quantum Suicide experiment. At each moment of the playthrough there's a lot of different things Mario could have done, and almost all of them lead to horrible death. The anthropic principle, in the form of the emulator's save/restore feature, postselects for the possibilities where Mario actually survives and ensures that although a lot of possible paths have to get discarded, the camera remains fixed on the one path where after one minute and fifty-six seconds some observer still exists.

I think of it somewhat like ray-tracing an interactive space. Each player is a ray of light fired into the black box of the game world, bouncing off interaction possibilities differently each time. The integral of all the consequences gives the shape of the interaction surface. Then perhaps a diagram can be produced. (It's only be looking at parallel universes side-by-side that the contingency of a particular event or counterfactual can be ascertained. That is, you can't know from a single game whether a move was 'hard' or 'lucky'.)

As video games get trickier to learn - because learning is fun - they'll hit a point where it's as fast to get good at real-life skateboarding than it is to get good in-game. What an odd singularity. The choice for the player then becomes, where can I find the best teacher?

What would Richard Feynman do?

11 February:

Posted at 16h31. Permalink.

Next up: I've been to O'Reilly ETech since ETech 2002, and was planning to have 2008 off. But then I saw the sessions: tangible internet objects, the brain and society, activity-based interaction, crowds, social networks and warfare, PMOG, botnets, sex, Asian media, body hacking, Cuba, and more sex.

So I'm going, it looks to awesome to skip. See you in San Diego! Drop me a line if you fancy a beer.

I'm canyoning first for a few days in Arizona.

Also coming up: I'm keynoting at GUADEC, the GNOME Users' And Developers' European Conference, in Istanbul in July. Not my usual turf I have to admit, but the brief grabbed me--I've been asked to speak about what you see the future of software being - desktop vs web app vs hybrid - and of course the kinds of things that you have on your mind which led to Mind Hacks. And how could I turn that down? I'm a sucker for a good topic.

10 February:

Posted at 0h06. Permalink.

The visual cortex of developing ferrets has more territory containing neurons selective for vertical or horizontal orientations than oblique angles. We preferentially see up-downs and left-rights.

You drop a population of finches on an island: they speciate, populations diverging from one another as they find niches. But each incipient species has as part of its environment every other incipient species. It's complex. The eventual set of species are not only determined by the size of nuts, the type of trees and the local predators, but through an iterative solution to the force-directed graph of the species, overlaid on the peaks and contours of the fitness landscape.

Maybe with a slightly different composition of the initial population, and we'd have six eventual species, not eight.

Could we regard the fundamental forces of physics as species? Could they have speciated differently, at the end of the GUT Era?

There is general agreement that human personalities may more-or-less be plotted in a five-dimensional space, where the five trait-dimensions are: openness; conscientiousness; extraversion; agreeableness; neuroticism.

Within that space, are there attractors of personality, semi-stable or wandering fitness peaks? Just as our visual cortex is tuned to particular orientations of line, is our internal 'model of the other' tuned to particular personalities? Are there maybe only a few dozen personality archetypes which can mutually co-exist in a connected population? These archetypes emerge sometimes, perhaps.

And perhaps there are particular stories, too, that are easier to understand and easier to remember because they align with the grain of thought; narrative archetypes like cause-and-effect, the Fall, the Hero's Journey.

Maybe the root of narrative compulsion is that we see something occur, and the story that pops into our head is the 'cause-and-effect' one, we mistake the ease and fluidity of that story in our head for truth. We're fooled because "it slips into place because the explanation fits reality" is indistinguishable from "it slips into place because the explanation is easy to understand with my brain."

Cognitive therapy works because it helps patients re-narrate their lives (quote source). Cybernetics was a cognitive therapy for science. We need help re-narrating the whole time, because the problem is this: obvious looks like true.

Just as tricking a woman into unknowingly blushing fools her into thinking she's attracted to you.

Just as you misread movie close-ups for your paying attention, and tension from loud noises as suspense.

Here's one that happens a lot: the misidentification of understanding for original thinking.

And another: the relief, the release of tension at the end of a story, the knowledge that phew it was actually going somewhere, and when it all wraps up and there's an indicator - a nod, a rhythm change, - that we're done... that release of narrative tension being misidentified as funny.

Here's what my new hero, Steve Martin, has to say about being funny: What if there were no punch lines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension? Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation.