On my holiday wandering through the blogosphere, I learned that my identity (or a small piece of it) was out doing some wandering of its own. "Martial" apparently joined in the festivities at the Washington, DC "blogorama" this Friday and sat down with Jim Henley.
When you join the machines, they give you the power to be in two places in the Matrix at the same time. It doesn't matter which pill you take, what kind of program you are, or whether the primary goal is to win the game, resistance is, and always has been, futile.
I have a quirk. I won't start reading a series until the final volume has been published. However, I was finally convinced by friends to take up Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon (they claim the book stands alone; given that it is nearly cube shaped, I have to agree).
Stephenson is a breezy writer, the book kept me rolling right along, but he has got to work on his endings. When you have 1100 pages with which to work, the last fifty shouldn't feel rushed. And shouldn't there have been some tension? Oh, well, I got out of it what I expected: a week of fair-to-middling entertainment and a pretty good primer on cryptography.
I have always felt that Stephenson is a hell of an adventure journalist, even when those adventures are mostly intellectual. In other words, I am not bored by his exposition. He also has the exceptional talent of rendering his technical digressions within the minds of his characters so that you can tell who is thinking all of this stuff and, even more important, why. But I can't figure out why none of the characters - not even the Marine - will think the word "shit", always substituting "sewage". It's perplexing.
Three observations, then a quote edited to make Stephenson sound more arrogant than he meant to be, followed by a final observation :
" I think we need an upgrade path. I think we need a way to encourage people to become smart users ... [T]he only way I could see that happening is if somehow [Cryptonomicon] makes geek culture a little more accessible to people, so they don't feel like they are becoming some kind of monster as they learn how to use this kind of technology. "
Given that the military service of my family is comedic rather than heroic, I felt it was perhaps the better part of valor - or perhaps politesse - to post this small bit of family history today rather than Monday:
A thrice-great grandfather fought for the Union - and was captured in his first battle. By his brother. My ancestor gave his parole and spent the rest of the war living in the family root cellar.
Woke up this morning with Pink on the brain. I figure a car zoomed down our busy, busy, busy street blasting the tune, driving me up toward wakefullness, just far enough to set the chorus bouncing back and forth across my frontal lobe - though slightly altered to my circumstance.
I'm gettin' up/ So you better get the coffee started
My parents are moving out of the house in which they've lived for nearly thirty years. They want a place smaller and easier to take care of, one without stairs - or guestrooms. Last week, the children were invited to squabble over the knick-knacks of two well-traveled lifetimes. The living room was turned into a bazaar, heaps of treasure and dross intermingled and overflowing, my sisters haggling, piles collapsing. Some of the furniture is fabulous, some of the plates and bowls and glasses, the rugs and the wall hangings, the paintings and the heirlooms are wonderful. Some, of course, are crap. And looking at all this stuff (how did it fit in the house?), pawing through it for glimmers of gold, I realized that I had never even seen most of it. I had never seen the crap.
My mother is a woman of deeply personal, yet impeccable taste. When she puts a home together (or sets a table or throws a party), it will simply work, everything will be all-of-a-piece, and completely her own. While we picked over and through her life, she regaled us with histories of the items we were taking away. She also waxed almost too eloquent upon the process of remodeling the new apartment (hey, I'm still sad about the old homestead; I don't want to hear about the new one yet). In the course of this interior design overload, a discussion all about decisions and compromises (why some pieces had been prominent and others shut away, why the new home will have back and white checks on the kitchen floor), I had an epiphany about the nature of "taste".
Bennet Reimer, emeritus Professor of Music at Northwestern, characterizes the work of aesthetic anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake thus:
" In her search for an answer to the question 'What is art for?' (another way to ask the same question would be 'Why do humans value art?'), Ellen Dissanayake concludes that an essential characteristic of the arts is that they provide a mechanism for creating objects or events that 'place the activity or artifact in a "realm" different from the everyday.' ... That is, the arts, in unique ways, 'make special.' Other ways of expressing this idea are that the arts exist to make the seemingly ordinary extraordinary, or to make the seemingly insignificant significant. Whatever other values the arts bestow, their distinctiveness as a valuable human endeavor is their powerful capacity to accomplish such transformations. "1
I find this notion of "making special" compelling as a description of large swaths of human behavior. I find it especially compelling when I think about the ways in which people decorate their personal space (e.g. their houses, cars, bodies, etc.). All humans have within themselves the desire (the imperative, even) to make their surroundings special. We fill our spaces with things that make those spaces special to us. Why then are so many personal spaces so ugly? Why do people have "bad taste"?
We know when we are in the presence of great art. We are struck by the seeming unity of a masterpiece, by how every part fits into a larger whole, by how significant form reveals itself over and over, deeper and deeper. By contrast, when confronting bad art we are stunned by its incoherence, put off by mishmash, distressed by our inability to understand how it fits together.2
Dissanayake would add one crucial element to the above description of what is involved in art: art is communal in purpose.
Because our private spaces are just that, private, we tend to make them special to ourselves and to not think about their impact on our community. We can fill our spaces with items and accents, each of which is special, each of which carries some meaning for us, but none of which fit one with another. That space will be special to us, but will strike many others as confusing - as demonstrating bad taste.
We can, but it is more difficult, try to establish our space as a coherent whole, not relying on individual items or curious colors to demonstrate our uniqueness. We can attempt to create a space which is itself a significant form, holding the elements together, and just not a jumble of pieces, each insisting on its own primacy.
Bad taste is choosing to decorate with items or accents that represent themselves solely as themselves. Good taste considers the impact of individual pieces on the whole. Both are ways of expressing our aesthetic imperative, but they are differently experienced by others. One is directed toward visitors, an outward focused representation, while the other is directed inward and narcissistic.
. . .
1 This is the best one paragraph representation available on the web of Dissanayake's ideas. There was a lengthy article in the Chronicle of Higher Education some months ago, but it has been archived - and so forever lost to linking. Go read her books: agree or disagree, they will make you think; and that is the name of the game.
2 To be fair, this is also a common reaction to new art. Once we learn to see or hear it, the incoherence resolves into harmony. In the case of bad art this resolution never takes place.
I know a whole bunch of people all over the world and, you know, I think most of them are pretty interesting. They all have a story to tell, sometimes two.
Tony Pierce might just have six billion all of his own.
I love the internet.
Or, Why the Hell did Tom Ridge take the Damned job?
I see we're back up to Orange Alert.
I've been wondering why a presidentially ambitious, politically moderate Republican would take on the single most thankless and difficult job ever spun out of thin air (or whole cloth). I've also been wondering how long Mr Ridge was willing to eat the shit sandwiches that are a part of his compensation. Sisyphus Shrugged is beginning to wonder too.
I once came up with a good argument that Mr Ridge had been promised Vice-President on the 2004 ticket because he's everything Cheney is not. Briefly, Ridge (a) is former governor of a state that gave 23 Electoral votes to the Democrat in '00, (b) served in Vietnam, (c) is healthy, (d) is not seen to be in the corporate pocket, and (e) seems like a nice guy/doesn't exude evil.
I've since come up with a great argument that John Ashcroft has been sabotaging Homeland Security since the beginning because Ridge is everything Ashcroft hates. Quickly, Ridge is (a) Catholic, (b) pro-choice, (c) in favor of gun control, (d) all of that and running for President.
The picture fronts a new web-mag, Six Billion (the number of stories out there in the naked world). I saw the URL on a flyer for a punk rock show stuck to a stop-light stanchion.
The talking dog says to calm down and to remember that life goes on. He's right, of course. Even while we may perceive ourselves as living in extraordinary times, what we do every day is simple. We get up and feed the kids, send them off to school, go to our work for eight hours, come home, fix dinner, watch a little television, and then we sleep the sleep of the righteous and the scared.
The Times of London story to which the dog links discusses our reactions to terror and how paranoia contributes to further fear.
ADDITIONAL PARANOIA: Via Three-Toed Sloth, I see that Richard Hofstadter's 1964 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", is now on the web.
As the preacher says, "there is no new thing under the sun."
There are a few ads on tv which use a mouse cursor to manipulate the imagery in the ad. I find this disturbing. You see, normally when I look at a screen with a mouse cursor, I am the one doing the manipulating. When I see this on tv, I feel uncomfortable because I am not in control.
There is nothing more boring than watching someone else surf. Advertising can be many things, but boring is not one.
And these are: what you see with your own eyes and what you're told.
Michael Totten offers another in the endless array of "there are two types of people" jokes, suggesting that conservatives know more/pay more attention to the international scene than liberals do. Needless to say, this set off a bit of a brouhaha. To which I feel the need to contribute a caution.
We each live in the world in which we live. We each see the things we can see and we each hear the people we are with.
I often work with humanitarian aid and development agencies. Most of the people (but not all, by any means) working in such agencies are left-leaning; all of them take an active view towards understanding the international world. These are people "professionally engaged in politics" (to use Matthew Yglesias' extremely limiting formula); at the very least, their work is steeped in politics - which they must understand in order to do their work, even if their organizational mandates require that they remain impartial. Based upon this experience, I could argue that "liberals" know more about the world than conservatives, especially as they actually go out and live in it.
I could treat this particular set of experiences of mine as normative, but since it is not my only experience, I do not feel inclined in that direction. C'mon people, you have got to get out more.
" About 26% of adolescent couples trying to abstain from intercourse will become pregnant within 1 year. "1
This is funny. Entertaining even. I am amused.
Teenagers who are actively attempting to not have sex wind up pregnant one-quarter of the time. Teens who are trying to not have sex still wind up having sex at least one-quarter of the time - if every couple having sex gets pregnant. At least one-quarter of teens who try to not have sex still have sex.
I am rolling on the floor having hysterics.
. . .
1 The American Academy of Pediatrics footnotes this, so I will too:
Hatcher RA, Trussell J, Stewart F, et al. Contraceptive Technology. New York, NY: Irvington Publishers, Inc; 1994
(Via Alas, A Blog)
I went to a memorial service on Saturday. Giles was the husband of a friend and colleague of mine. I first met Giles when he worked for the United Nations in Geneva and then I saw him a few times when he and his wife Susan moved to Cambridge. But I cannot say that I knew him at all. And I am a poorer man for that.
About four-hundred people filled the center section of Harvard's Memorial Church to pay their respects, many of them from other cities and other countries. Senator John Kerry, who served with Giles in Vietnam, attended the reception.
Those people for whom the UN represents nothing good in this world should be shamed by the life of Giles Whitcomb, a man who worked tirelessly to leave a better world not just for his four children, but for all children.
One of his friends offered these words from Tennyson's Ulysses:
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in the old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal-temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
As happened when I tried to watch the Leonids last fall, the clouds came over and obscured my view of the heavens. Last night offered nothing as magnificent as that November dawn, but rather ended early (if the bars are still open, it's still early).
One of the premier sites for information about Sea Turtles needs to replace their aging server. Head on over and donate a dollar or two.
Gilbert Waldbauer, emeritus entomologist (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), continues to teach us why we should not indiscriminately destroy life's little annoyances. His most recent book (being added to my reading pile), What Good Are Bugs?: Insects in the Web of Life, would seem to be required reading in an age when we can contemplate the genetically engineered extinction of entire species.
I have a fascination with ants. I picked up a "SIMcollection" about ten years ago which had a bunch of the early SIM games, including SIMAnt. After playing a virtual ant for a week, I went out and started studying the real ants in the courtyard. Then I went back in and played some more - and found that I was doing much better. The game is quite fun, but it soon paled beside the real critters, and I've spent many hours contemplating anthills since.
A little education is also a good salve for fear as I pretty much got over the entophobia our clean, clean, clean culture instills. Which is a really good thing as I now find myself travelling places where the bugs are big and playful.
One ant story: In a hotel in Indonesia, the staff put out a sugar bowl when you came down for breakfast. The local dining room ants pretty much knew when people would be sitting down and they were already up on the table, prepared to dive right in to the sugar. This meant that people who took sugar in their coffee and tea had to stir in some ants. It was unavoidable. The ants also got into the food as plates were placed on the table. Yum, crunchy formic omelettes! The guests in the hotel quickly broke into two camps: those who ate breakfast and those who slept another half-hour (if the chirping cockroaches didn't wake them up...).
The wife and I headed off this weekend for a few days sailing on the Chesapeake. Due to the miracle of modern weather forecasting, we managed to sail not one single yard. Thunderstorms and tornadoes were threatened for all the days we had planned. So we abandoned the plan and went to visit the in-laws in PA. Spent some very quality time with my wife's infant nephew, making faces and cooing like the perfectly smitten idiots we were; spent some time chasing the dog when he wouldn't give the frisbee back. Despite not sailing, it was nice.
The night before we decided no sailing would take place, we drove to Annapolis for dinner. Annapolis, in addition to hosting the Naval Academy and serving as the capital of Maryland, is a tourist trap for sailors ("a drinking town with a sailing problem" as an ubiquitous T-shirt would have it). It has a couple of decent restaurants and too many shops that sell nothing but image.
Three observations:
Our young officers, in many ways the face that America now presents to the world, are being educated within the walls of the Naval Academy - just a hop, a skip, and a stumble from the harbor. They are learning certain ethics, modes of behavior and interaction, a type of knowledge about their place and role in the world. But they are also being educated in a very different way every time they step outside the Academy gates, imbibing a whole different set of ethics. Annapolis is one America, one America of many, and a very small one for young men and women for whom the whole world is a responsibility.
So you think you've written a hit song? Guess again. Perfect hooks, killer beats, and powerhouse singing add up to nothing for many aspiring songwriters -- and for ambitious record executives, who have historically relied on good ears and gut instinct when it comes to finding talent. A new company is trying to take some of the guesswork out of the artwork, with help from science and supercomputers. Hit Song Science already is generating controversy, with some artists and record-label insiders saying it only highlights the desperation of a struggling music industry.Hit Song Science is a high-tech music analysis system that compares new songs to a massive database of chart-topping singles and predicts hit potential based on shared attributes.
...
"Our technology is to music what X-rays are to medicine," says Polyphonic HMI CEO Mike McCready [the founder of the service]. "We help the record industry see their market and their music in a way they were previously unable to do."
...
"There are three requirements for a hit," says McCready. "It has to sound like a hit to human ears, it has to have the right promotion, and it must have optimal mathematical patterns. That's where we come in."
Other possible album titles for this post:
Blinded by Statistics
Sounds Like . . . A Hit, Smells Like . . . Death
Three Requirements to Graduate
Music Industry Flatline
X-Ray Specs
Bottling Creativity
Noromancer
Promoting Optimal Mathematical Patterns
Metal Machine Music
What happens to Elvis, the Beatles, the late Beatles, the Clash, Public Enemy, N.W.A., REM? All of those bands sound like hits now. Whatever happened to jazz influenced, big-band crooning? All of that sounds either old or like camp now. What constitutes "right promotion"? Heavy metal and hip hop had no promotion outside of constant touring until the mid-80s for the one and late-80s for the other. Believe it or not, children, it used to be difficult to find sampled beats or heavily distorted power chords anywhere on the radio dial.
Obviously, I have a listening bias toward rock and hip hop, but I'm sure the same questions could be raised about country and R&B. And, you know, Beethoven once sounded like the end of the world . . .
As for "optimal mathematical patterns" I am reminded of an old joke:
A man played the violin. After many years he stopped playing songs, but instead constantly sawed back and forth on one note.Finally, his wife shouted at him, "You're driving me crazy! Why don't you play other notes like other violinists?"
Serenely, the man replied, "All those other musicians are still searching for the perfect note. I've found it."
Transparency International, the global corruption watchdog, is on the case in Iraq.
Transparency and accountability must be the watchwords for post-war reconstruction in Iraq following the endemic corruption of the government of Saddam Hussein, according to Transparency International (TI), the world's leading non-governmental organisation engaged in the fight against corruption. "It is essential that Iraq be spared the kickbacks habitually paid in post-war situations by some multinational companies," said TI Chairman Peter Eigen today. ... "It is time for governments to require that their oil companies publish what they pay in taxes, fees, royalties and other payments to host governments. Publication of these payments should be a requirement for stock exchange listing in their own countries," said Peter Eigen. "Access to this vital information will minimise opportunities for hiding the payment of kickbacks to secure oil tenders, a practice that has blighted the oil industry in transition and post-war economies." TI has been working with Global Witness and other NGOs on the Publish What You Pay initiative in the context of post-war economies, such as Angola. ... According to the TI Bribe Payers Survey conducted last year in key emerging market economies, the public works/construction sector is the most prone to bribe-paying, followed by the arms sector and the oil and gas industry, three sectors of acute importance in a post-conflict situation, particularly in an economy dominated by oil exports, such as Iraq, which has the second largest proven oil reserves in the world.
(Emphasis mine.)
This is just bizarre. It's like there is a black hole at the center of American politics, causing every orbit to change, and sucking in and crushing anything that gets too close. And either it's eventually gonna blow, getting everything around it sticky with goo, or it's going to implode, taking out not quite so much, but destroying anything too close utterly.
Dick Cheney is still on the ticket with Bush in 2004. Flatly, Cheney is unelectable. This goes so far beyond the common wisdom as to be an immutable physical law of the universe, sealed like a love letter in the heart of every atom, expressed joyfully in the jump of every electron, and singing sweetly in the shimmer of the super-strings.
Yet, Dick Cheney is still on the ticket with Bush in 2004. Do these guys have no party loyalty whatsoever? Why not give the leg-up on 2008 that VP represents to some deserving - and relatively healthy - hawk with steely eyes and a tombstone disposition? Use a candidate who doesn't have too many corporate puppet strings to win out, and then use the four years to cocoon the guy. What happens to the Republicans in 2008 when they realize that the field is open, but that the previous eight years of Cheney have made the public disinclined toward elephants? Who will they find willing to sacrifice his career on the altar of public dissatisfaction and reaction?
It is conceivable, barely, that Rove and Cheney think that by 2008 the electorate will be sufficiently exhausted that they will go zombie for the (R). But I find it very hard to believe that either of them think that Cheney can play the necromancer in that movie.
(Via The Liquid List)
In an effort to save my template from necessary tweaking, let me direct your attention to this superb (if a little jerky) post from Cogent Provocateur on the whereabouts of the Iraqi chemical, biological, and nuclear programmes.
I will quote liberally from it, reinforcing the jerkiness, but also, I hope, providing you with incentive to follow CP through to the mirror raised at the end.
The Snipe Hunt is an American folk tradition, a rite of passage for the novice outdoorsman ... an elaborate practical joke which ends with the initiate crouching alone in the woods, in the dark, literally "holding the bag", waiting for the nonexistent Snipe. ... Bad enough if we were deceived. Worse if we deceived ourselves. Worse yet if we knew it all along, and deceived others. The downside is substantial. (Maybe that's why we never faced up to it.) We called the shot, we called it wrong, and there are consequences. ... We may learn to walk more humbly amid the wastelands of imperfect information and credulous social consensus. That's the big "we", all of us, given fresh object lessons in how wrong we can be when we're as certain as we can be. ... We really should have had a clue, shouldn't we? We did. ... We were deep in the grip of war fever, and flashing neon warning signs of cooked intelligence went by the boards. Jane's Defence Weekly (2003-03-05) diagnosed a case of "incestuous amplification ... where one only listens to those who are already in lock-step agreement, reinforcing set beliefs and creating a situation ripe for miscalculation". ... We've followed the arc of evidentiary inference from plausible surmise to untenable fixation. Now let's review the arc of opinion ... that's where we find the real smoking gun of collective gullibility.
(All emphasis in the orginal.)
I note that my template is allowing all sorts of shenangians down at the bottom of the page because I don't have enough recent posts.
There are two options, as I see it:
a) learn some more HTML and fix the template, or
b) write more posts.
You can't make this stuff up:
Empire Maker and Peace Rules went head-to-head and toe-to-toe, crossing the finish line together, but both came up short to Funny Cide.
. . .
Pats on the back all around: this is the 200th post on De Spectaculis.
NP: Middlesex County, Chelsea on Fire
Our leaders do not wear uniforms.
Our leaders come from the humble soil of the people - all the people. They are exalted by our will and by our actions, not by cabals of generals or thugs. The person chosen by us as our head of state is responsible for many roles - responsible to all of us - among which Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces is but one among many, and not the highest or most important. Our military, through its adventures and its misadventures, expresses policies set by civilians.
While Commander-in-Chief might seem to carry with it all the glories of martial honor, this is not so, for the President is not a warrior. The Commander-in-Chief is not an officer or a soldier, rather he is set above warriors to temper their lust for glory and to remind them that honor is derived from service, not reckless sacrifice. The US is not a warrior nation and we do not honor military commanders above the farmers and grunts who took upon their shoulders both the burdens of Cincinnatus and his dream to be able to lay them down again.
The President of the United States is not a military officer and he should neither dress like, nor act as one.