Confessions of a Keyhole

CEO Comedy Hour

2007-07-09T22:34:00.000-05:00

"There are four equal managing members. I am the most equal of the four."

"The names of the funds are pretty long and strange, but they do make sense. It's not just like 'Chewbacca 5' or something. There's logic to it."

"I couldn't manage to make those corners rounded. [Sigh.] For those who haven't had the pleasure of using PowerPoint...it really sucks. Really. [Pause.] It's an evil, evil program. [Pause.]"

"I just visited the Ben and Jerry's factory. It's sad that those dudes sold out. [Pause.]"

"Always be a little cranky."

Information Battlespace VI: A Sign for a Store

2007-07-09T22:25:00.000-05:00

"Electronic Concepts: The Digital Experience."

I think it sold cameras, maybe some porno. No concepts that I could see, but then again I was across the street.

Only in New York!

Semi-Demi-Hemi-Adulthood: Day 1.5

2007-07-07T06:49:00.001-05:00

I forgot to bring underwear.

Also, there's no toothpaste here, although I don't blame myself for that one. I just went to Duane Reade to buy the cheapest brand possible, which turns out to be Aim "Multi-Benefit" (cleans, freshens, protects (those are the benefits)); as soon as I got back into the apartment, I nervously googled around to make sure there was no Chinese antifreeze lurking in my cut-rate tube.

I secretly hope there is.

Pep Talk on the Eve of Employment

2007-07-05T20:52:00.001-05:00

xxB9erxx: i gotta sleep. but i gotta tell u, even though u dont really need me to say this. work is absolutely the worst thing in the world. its so bad. so fucking bad. you are going to be so miserable you dont even know

A Controversy

2007-07-05T20:29:00.000-05:00

Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 1:272:

[W]e shall not speak...of a "law for for freedom"...Generally we shall not speak of "ought" at all, for we speak in this way to children and to peoples still in their infancy, but not to those who have appropriated to themselves all the culture of a mature age. It is indeed a palpable contradiction to call the will free and yet to prescribe for it laws by which it is to will.

On the other hand:

Four Things: Two about Rap, and Two about the Past vs. the Present

2007-07-03T05:57:00.001-05:00

In the midst of an okay piece on T.I. (profoundly weakened by its super-lame attempt to analyze a stupid verse from "What You Know" using the vocabulary of old-fashioned poetry), Kelefa Sanneh makes a good point succinctly:

All this split-personality stuff is patently absurd..., though evidently it’s a common enough response to the impossible demands of hip-hop, which more or less requires its stars — even, or especially, the veterans — to say ridiculous things, and mean them.
An example of a problem with certain rap lines: in "Gangsta Grillz" (on In My Mind (The Prequel)), Pharrell says, describing the exterior of (I think) the Magic City strip club in Atlanta, "So many Phantoms the parking lot look like a graveyard." Now, the Phantom is a luxury car. Its name means "ghost." Ghosts hang around in graveyards (I guess). But a parking lot full of cars whose name means "ghost" does not look any more like a graveyard than a regular parking lot does (okay maybe a little bit but not much!). "So many friends of mine whom I refer to as 'dog' the club looked like a veterinarian's office." "So many Beatles the studio looked like Keyhole's bed because Keyhole's bed has a lot of bugs (beetles) on it."

But how am I going to explain all of this to Pharrell? It's not that I think he's too dumb too understand; I just don't think he's a very good listener.
The Iraqi boy band Unknown to No One (you have, by definition, heard of it), apparently still exists, but now it's based in the UK. I think I first read about these guys in a Sunday Telegraph article (linked to somewhere or other), which I just now re-dug up on LexisNexis. March 9, 2003 -- war just 11 days away. And even in this puff piece, we find a warning: "Given the fears that an American-led invasion could ignite a bloody civil war in Iraq, Unknown To No One is an impressively harmonious ethnic mix. Art Haroutunian and Shant Zawar are Armenian Christians; Nadeem Hamid and Hassan Ali, a 21-year-old biology student, are Arab Muslims, while Diyar Diler, also 21 and an English student, is a Kurd. When they are not rehearsing, the singers -- who all speak good English -- meet in Baghdad's popular coffee shops and video game arcades. They are opposed to war, but prefer not to discuss politics." Wise.
A year ago (I really need to clear out my "blog ideas" file one of these days), Defamer dropped a post with the title "Paris Hilton Plunges World into Black Hole of Meaninglessness," linking to a Sun interview in which Paris said:

“Simple Life is a reality show and people might assume it’s real. But it’s fake.

“All reality shows are fake basically. When you have a camera on you, you are not going to act yourself.

“So before I started the show I thought I’d make a character like the movies Legally Blonde and Clueless mixed together, with a rich girl all-in-one.

“Even my voice is different and the way I dress is different from me in real life. It’s a character I like to play. I think it’s carefree and happy. The public think they know me but they really don’t.”

So when Paris told Barbara Walters, "I used to act dumb. That act is no longer cute," everyone shouldn't have scoffed. There's a paper trail. I really do think that it was more or less (more? less? that's the issue) an act all along.

Less than Meets the Eye (Oh Snap)

2007-07-03T04:24:00.000-05:00

I just saw Transformers.

I think it gave me brain damage.

It is not very surprising, of course, that it failed to rise to the level of high art. But it didn't have to be moronic. It didn't have to be Autobot Comedy Hour. It didn't have to contain the following (approximate) dialogue, spoken in reference to the evil ringtone that the Decepticons somehow use to hack the U.S. military's computer systems:

Blonde Hacker Chick: This goes way beyond Fourier transforms. It's like quantum mechanics.

Skeptical, Uptight Military Guy: Nothing's that advanced. [Except for, well, quantum mechanics. Which describes all that is. --KH.]

Blonde Hacker Chick: This is. It's some kind of...DNA-based computer! I know that sound crazy, but...[Wow, that's so crazy it might work! And, in fact, it has worked since at least 1994, as you too can discover by looking up "DNA computing" on Wikipedia. Also, throughout the movie we are told that the Transformers are "non-biological" -- so they don't have DNA. --KH.]

No, I don't expect perfect scientific accuracy from a Michael Bay movie about alien robots that are also GM cars. But given that everyone in the audience knows that the characters are just talking bullshit, why do these people even bother? And if they feel like they have to insert pseudoscience claptrap in order to give the plot some verisimilitude, why do such a staggeringly half-assed job? Would it kill them to try Google?

At one point, we see the crafty, vicious little boombox robot downloading s33kr1t files from the Pentagon. I may have blinked at the wrong time, but as far as I could tell, most of these files consisted of old New York Times articles.

That's right: the Decepticons are so corrupt that they won't even spring for TimesSelect.

Other points:

Fighter jets and airborne Decepticons do battle in the skies of New York (or somewhere -- it's never really explained; Wikipedia's plot summary calls it simply "a nearby city"), but the moviemakers scrupulously -- scrupulously -- avoid depicting any hot plane-on-skyscraper action. They hint, they tease, but they keep us wanting more. I guess we'll have to wait for "Cloverfield" ("it has been widely regarded as a secret movie") or, barring that, my cinematic magnum opus. (Ask me if you don't know.)
There's a stupid Guantánamo scene, just as there was in Fantastic Four (the Silver Surfer under the knife). I smell trend piece!
Popcorn isn't good, and I should stop eating it.
Manohla Dargis panned the movie, and rightfully so. But her zany sentence-three punchline -- "The result is part car commercial, part military recruitment ad, a bumper-to-bumper pileup of big cars, big guns and, as befits its recently weaned target demographic, big breasts" -- is absurdly off the mark. Big breasts? Where, exactly? To be sure, the way the camera treats the female lead, Megan Fox, is embarrassing and exploitative, and, a few times, acutely so. Her "tops" do perhaps fall unrealistically low. But no one in the world would leave Transformers thinking about all the boobies they saw. I mean, even in this FHM shot (awk), it's clear that the photo pervs tried pretty hard to spiff up Fox's cleavage. She's a skinny girl. (And not necessarily a bright one: "Anytime I have a feeling about anything, I get tattooed. I have a poem I wrote on my ribcage and a symbol for strength on my neck, and my boyfriend Brian [Austin Green!!]'s name tattooed next to my pie." Vomit vomit vomit. Note: those three things (a poem she wrote, strength, the loser-y guy on 90210 who put crystal meth in his orange juice so he could study better for the SAT) are the three things Megan Fox has had feelings about. They are probably her interests on Facebook.)

Anyway: so basically Manohla Dargis thought she was on a riff-roll with her "big" thing, and she figured she would just lie her way through the final term in the series, running on feminist fumes. She takes another crack at the "Transformers hates women" idea later on, writing:

The actors tend to be more engaging, notably Mr. LaBeouf, who brings energy and a semi-straight face to the dumbest setup. Just as easy on the eyes, though for other reasons, are the two female leads, the genius hacker in throw-her-down heels (Rachael Taylor) and the grease-monkey bombshell (Megan Fox) who helps Sam rise to the manly occasion. These walking, talking dolls register as less human and believable than the Transformers, which may be why they were even allowed inside this boy’s club.

More nonsense. "Throw-her-down heels"? It took me just about forever to figure out what she was getting at there (possibly a copy-editing glitch), and even now I have no clue what part of the movie she's thinking of. The hacker wore heels? If that's even true, it was never emphasized. I'm not sure we ever even learned her name. Walking, talking dolls? Sure, but are they any more so than Tyrese or Josh Duhamel? Those smoldering military hunks aren't exactly fully realized characters either. I'm more than willing to entertain the thesis that Michael Bay is a sexist doofus, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a clear signal here against the noisy backdrop of generalized idiocy.

When a movie tries so hard to paint a target on its own back, it's strange to see Dargis aiming so poorly.
Anthony Lane also stumbles:

The opening scene of Michael Bay’s “Transformers” takes place in deep space. Out of the darkness comes a voice that is deeper still. It makes Barry White sound like a countertenor, and this is what it says: “Before time began, there was the Cube.” Hello? Mr. Rubik?

Again, a lousy, lazy riff. The Cube is stupid, yes. But only because of how the movie handles it later on. Why is this an intrinsically laughable idea? Because of the Rubik's cube? How is that a joke?

And then, after describing the original line of Transformers toys, Lane writes (emphasis added):

Now these delightful objets d’art have a movie to themselves. We should not be surprised. Long ago, when the impact of “Star Wars” was beefed up by a line of merchandise, some of us noticed that the five-inch Lukes and Leias possessed a depth and mobility that was denied to their onscreen counterparts, and, decades later, we have reached the reductio ad absurdum of that rivalry: rather than spin the toys off from the movie, why not build the movie from the toys? “Transformers” is not the first effort in this direction; I distinctly remember finding a couchful of children enraptured by a DVD of “Barbie of Swan Lake” and realizing that Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” had not, after all, signalled the final disintegration of human personality.

Sloppy, dumb. No, we should not be surprised. Not only is Transformers "not the first effort in [the] direction" of basing a movie on a toy line, it is not even the first Transformers movie. That came out in 1986 in America and 1989 in Japan ("although early promotional materials titled Transformers the Movie: Apocalypse! Matrix Forever [!] had promised a Summer 1987 Japanese release"). It featured Orson Welles's final movie role! Mr. Lane apparently didn't consult Wikipedia. Who cares, right? I do. You don't get to make your little point about how our culture is so degraded that now we're basing movies on toys ("when it comes to movie characterization, flesh and blood have had their chance. From here on, it’s up to metal and plastic") when the same exact degradation happened, in a directly analogous case, 21 years ago.

Lane also remarks -- so droll! -- that

The quarrel between the two sides [the Autobots and the Decepticons] began on their home planet. For the purposes of the movie, however, they duke it out on ours.

The implicit joke: there's not really a good reason for the 'bots to be fighting here. But just go along with it! The movie is dumb! Yes, the movie is dumb. But this is one of the few points that it actually explains. They're duking it out here because they're all looking for the (hilarious!) Cube, which crash-landed on Earth purely by chance. "For the purposes of the movie"? Yes, but in precisely the same sense that Rosebud turns out to be Orson "Unicron" Welles's sled for the purposes of Citizen Kane. (I love the critical edge of the second paragraph in that Wikipedia entry: "Note that although Unicron would seem to be above factions like Autobot or Decepticon, his toys in the Cybertron and Titanium line were released with the Decepticons.")

When the critics play just as fast-and-loose with the details as the big-budget auteurs do, who am I supposed to side with? Lil Wayne, Tha Carter II, "Best Rapper Alive": "Fuck 'em! Fuck 'em good, fuck 'em long, fuck 'em hard. Fuck who? Fuck 'em all." Not in a good way.

They Really Know How to Push My Buttons

2007-07-01T16:08:00.000-05:00

From: Hot news <hryrpvkob@punkass.com>
Date: Jul 1, 2007 1:28 PM
Subject: New act of terrorism in the ...

Hot news! New act of terrorism in the USA. Thousand victims.

"Hot news!"

An Image to Savor; or, a Watched Pot

2007-07-01T03:28:00.001-05:00

The great Cosma Shalizi, summarizing the Bayesian view of statistical mechanics:

Here's an (unfair) way of putting it: water boils because I become sufficiently ignorant of its molecular state.

The Only Technical Question

2007-07-01T03:18:00.000-05:00

The end of an old entry by Mark Kleiman from a blog I don't read:

By the way, am I the only one to have noticed that, insofar as the "Nuclear Winter" folks were right, we have the solution to global warming right at hand? The only technical question is how many cities we'd have to nuke to generate the degree of cooling necessary to offset any given degree of warming. Which cities to nuke is, of course, a political, rather than a technical, question.

A Common Problem among Those Who Post on Comics-Oriented Message Boards

2007-07-01T03:04:00.000-05:00

In a comment on Newsarama responding to a positive review of the upcoming Transformers film, the user "bigdaddyhub" wrote, no doubt breathlessly, "Now all I need is another fat kid to chest bump when I see this movie!!!"

Not Really Worth Blogging

2007-07-01T03:00:00.000-05:00

Martin Baxter and Andrew Rennie, Financial Calculus (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 65: "We could suppress those paths which had path probability zero, but now we have lost something. Those paths may have been P-impossible but they are Q-possible. If we throw them away, then we have lost information about Q just where it is relevant -- paths which are Q-possible."

But are they Kim possible?!

:'(

UPDATE: I should mention that I killed a ladybug with this book. As an instrument of death, it is slender and elegant, the .22-caliber pistol of quantitative-finance literary insecticides.

TMI

2007-07-01T02:55:00.001-05:00

My bedroom is across from a bathroom. I am on my bed (a popular watering-hole for the local arthropod population), reading about stochastic calculus and not understanding a dW_t of it (jokes for nerds, jokes for nerds), when my mother appears in the doorway, apparently on the way to the loo. Apropos of nothing, she says,

"I don't like Bon Jovi anymore."

I look up, but by then she's gone.

There Was a Law and Order Episode Like This, but the Culprits Were Evil, Not Crazy

2007-07-01T02:43:00.000-05:00

Via BoingBoing, via Mind Hacks, a six-year-old article from the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine:

A young man was admitted from prison to a psychiatric facility after reports that he had been acting in a bizarre manner. He had been arrested for stealing motor vehicles and assaults with weapons. At interview he was found to be experiencing the delusion that he was a player inside a computer game (adult-certificate game, widely available) in which points are scored for stealing cars, killing assailants and avoiding police vehicles. Psychotic symptoms had emerged slowly over two years. His family had noticed him becoming increasingly withdrawn and isolated from social activities. He developed delusions that strangers were planning to kill him and also experienced auditory hallucinations, constantly hearing an abusive and derogatory voice. Previously a computer enthusiast, he began to play computer games incessantly. He felt that the games were communicating with him via the headphones. In a complex delusional system he came to believe he was inside one of these games and had to steal a car to start scoring points. He broke into a car and drove off at speed, believing he had `invulnerable' fuel and so could not run out of petrol. To gain points he chose to steal increasingly powerful vehicles, threatening and assaulting the owners with weapons. Later he said he would have had no regrets if he had killed someone, since this would have increased his score.

Of course, as I told my personal rabbi, it's possible that we're all having this delusion all the time, except that the virtual world we're confusing for reality is just Second Life, so nothing bad really happens.

Information Battlespace V: The China Question

2007-07-01T01:52:00.000-05:00

In the most recent version of the Defense Department's annual report to Congress on "The Military Power of the People's Republic of China" (PDF), after a few paragraphs on anti-satellite weapons that quote Colonel Yuan Zelu as explaining that "[The] goal of a space shock and awe strike is [to] deter the enemy, not to provoke the enemy into combat," we find a section under the heading "Information Warfare." Apparently "a November 2006 Liberation Army Daily commentator" wrote about the importance of getting "the upper hand of the enemy in a war under conditions of informatization"; this objective requires "making full use of the permeability, sharable property [Napster?!], and connection of information to realize the organic merging of materials, energy, and information to form a combined fighting strength." The term "information blockade" gets tossed about. This is no small beer: the People's Liberation Army sees "computer network operations...as critical to achieving 'electromagnetic dominance' early in a conflict."

Perhaps we shouldn't worry about China's quest for electromagnetic dominance. After all, America still pwnz0rz the internet, right? Maybe, but this (coincidental?) juxtaposition gives some cause for concern:

It's no wonder that China is free to seek "cyber edge" when NO ONE HAS TAKEN THE TIME TO UNDERSTAND WHAT BLOGGING REALLY IS.

Take some time today, people. Your country needs you.

No No No

2007-06-29T02:50:00.001-05:00

A spider was just crawling across my bed. It tried to hide in my computer, probably seeking superpowers. I kept that from happening, but I think the thing is still alive.

APPARENTLY BUGS ARE ON MY BED CONSTANTLY.

Information Battlespace IV: Department of This Thing Looks Like That Thing

2007-06-24T01:13:00.001-05:00

Uh oh. Behold the Internet (or, more precisely, "the hierarchical structure of the Internet, based on the connections between individual nodes (such as service providers)"):

Cf. Hal (or, more precisely, "Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer") 9000:

Scared yet? You should be. "At the center of the Internet are about 80 core nodes through which most traffic flows. Remove the core, and 70 percent of the other nodes are still able to function through peer-to-peer connections."

See also terrorism, the brain, and biology in general. Remember that New Yorker article about how hemispherectomies aren't a big deal? Apparently nothing can be damaged ever.

Barely Legal; or, Not a Good Rule for the Club

2007-06-23T17:12:00.000-05:00

If a bond does not specifically state that it is junior, you can assume that it is senior.

—Franklin Allen, Stewart C. Myers, and Richard A. Brealey, Principles of Corporate Finance, 8th ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 2006), 674, n. 16.

Information Battlespace III: Cheney vs. the Archives

2007-06-22T11:46:00.001-05:00

Or, more precisely, Cheney vs. the Information Security Oversight Office ("Learn why Democracy Starts Here"), a 25-person subunit of the National Archives that handles the handling of classified documents. Cheney and his legal puppet-master, David Addington, don't think they have to submit to ISOO checkups because the executive order delineating the jurisdiction of the sad little mini-bureau applies only to executive-branch entities -- but ha!, they craftily contend, the veep's office is both executive and legislative (presidency of the senate, dig?). Cute, really.

But don't believe for a second that this dispute is playing out in the information quibble- or skirmishspace. Oh no: it's battlespace for sure. After "block[ing] [in 2004] an on-site inspection by [ISOO] that was routinely carried out across the government to check whether documents were being properly labeled and safely stored," Cheney & co. tried to get rid of the process of appealing interagency tussles to the attorney general (a process ISOO was attempting to use to break down the vice-president's informational battledoor) and tried to get rid of Information Security Oversight altogether. Didn't work out, though.

A lot of the time I think they engage in these shenanigans less to conceal anything in particular and more just for the hell of it. It doesn't seem like they had a lot to lose by submitting to the Archives; they just didn't feel like it. They weren't about to fall for the spell of false necessity; there was no non-human reality compelling them to do anything.

Maybe She Just Took the Word "Sitcom" Too Seriously?

2007-06-20T06:03:00.000-05:00

Paul Tough's article "The Class-Consciousness Raiser" from last week's Times Magazine is a mildly interesting profile of a woman (kinda funnily) named Ruby Payne who teaches teachers how to get along with lower-class students. Their culture is different, dig? Apparently, "Foucauldian" types (this word is actually deployed) hate her. Quack quack. Now, I think her basic idea is perfectly meritorious, but the article does raise some doubts. First, she believes, as so many people now bewilderingly seem to do, in the Force:

Then in 1993, after moving to Texas, Payne read a book that had a profound effect on her: ''Creating Money,'' a New Age-infused guide to ''the spiritual laws of money.'' It's an odd book, ostensibly dictated to the authors by two ''spirit guides'' named Orin and DaBen. But Payne was inspired. ''The book said, Make a list of what you want in your life and ask the universe to bring it to you,'' she told me. ''So I did. I wrote: 'I want a life without financial constraints. I want a life without institutional constraints. And I want to make a difference with children.' And it happened!''

Payne's ideas about class differences in perceptions of "everything from time to love to money to language" also sound a bit wonky:

In a few words, Payne explains how each class sees each concept. Humor in poverty? About people and sex. In the middle class? About situations. In wealth? About social faux pas.

Maybe this is just my middle-class sensibility talking, but don't the "situations" that I admittedly find so hilarious subsume people, sex, and even -- I hope I'm not trespassing on anyone's castle here -- social faux pas?

And, despite the fact that my mind is too scattered now to really put this point convincingly, I think there's something very telling and tragic about the conjunction of, on the one hand, Payne's noble New Age (but also modernist) wish to live "a life without institutional constraints" and, on the other hand, her preaching of the importance of lower-class adoption of upper- and middle-class personal stylings (what she calls "the hidden rules"). She's too smart and too awake to the transcendent qualities of the human spirit (yes I went there) to think that situations are really more funny than people or sex, or that poor culture is really inferior to rich culture; but the facts of institutional constraint dictate, albeit unjustly and arbitrarily, that submission is the price to be paid for membership in the elite, with all the benefits that brings. I'm sure she's right about the situation (giggle -- sorry, can't help it, was raised that way) as it stands -- you can't get a job without possessing pointless, irrelevant social grace X or Z -- but what sticks in my craw about this kind of analysis (which, if I remember correctly, David Foster Wallace uses at some point to justify foisting his version of grammatical purism onto recalcitrant black college students) is how quickly the injustice and arbitrariness fall out of the picture. It's like: shrug. Wink!

Same thing: Mrs. Keyhole received a comment on her thesis, from a respected professor of English, saying something to the effect of "I see that you don't obey the no-split-infitive rule. While some people do reject its authority, some don't, so you may be distracting your readers." This really got me (though not Mrs. Keyhole, bless her heart) angry: here this professor was, signalling her awareness of the idiocy and baselessness of the "rule" only to reassert its power! And what -- for the sake of the fogies and their all-too-rockable boat? Doesn't this line of argument suggest that we should never change anything, since someone somewhere might not be ready for the shock? Isn't this exactly the kind of limp gradualist whining that Martin Luther King, Jr., attacked in "Letter from Birmingham Jail" ("the appalling silence of the good people" who think that time on its own will wash away everything bad)?

Payne, in her oscillation between the vain hope for a life without institutional constraints and the total resignation to those constraints (regarded as lacking justification yet weirdly, robustly resisting change), is a miniature portrait of life without Unger. Look, people: we can never be totally free of institutional constraints, but we can be more free than we are now. Can't we?

Actually, Marx Is Jealous

2007-06-19T02:36:00.001-05:00

Stretched out and face down on my bed with my laptop before me, perusing a capsule description of the Santa Fe Institute's "zero-intelligence method" of analyzing financial markets (sounds kinda like pointless topology), I saw in the periphery of my perceptual world a nasty little spider. Without thinking much, I picked up a collection of Marx's later political writings and bashed the critter to death (I hope). I was reminded of a couplet from the Coup song "Not Yet Free," from the album Kill My Landlord: "Capitalism is like a spider / The web is getting tighter..."

This arthopod encounter came hot on the heels of another incident, in which I slew a moth that had settled upside-down on my ceiling with the mighty heft of the (two-volume, slipcase-enclosed) Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Interpretation is left as an exercise for the reader.

There should be a whole archive of such literary collisions. Consider: as Francis Wheen's delightful Karl Marx: A Life informs us (on p. 109), though "[Pierre-Joseph] Proudhon [the socialist/anarchist] made no public riposte to [Marx's] The Poverty of Philosophy [which was in part a polemical attack on Proudhon]...his own copy has furious marginal scribbles on almost every page -- 'Absurd', 'A lie', 'Prattle', 'Plagiarism', 'Brazen slander' and 'Actually, Marx is jealous'. An entry in one of his notebooks describes Marx as 'the tapeworm of socialism'." If we know that Proudhon called Marx a plagiarist and a tapeworm in his private writings, why can't we figure out what tomes the Frenchman used to kill real worms? Or other creeping things. I'm not picky. I'm sure the CSI creative team could crank out at least an episode or two riffing on this premise. "The copy of The Holy Family, or, Critique of Critical Criticism left at the crime scene doesn't have any fingerprints on it, but I did find this strange brown spot. It's probably nothing, but..." "Enhance! Enhance!" "Whoa! Looks like DNA from a false stag beetle, chief. But those are found only in California!" And the hunt is (would be) on.

(The worst thing about all this is that I now have to live the rest of my life with the absolute certainty that bugs do sometimes end up on my bed. I've long suffered from the (not uncommon, I don't think) fear that, when I sleep, bugs crawl all over my face; I've managed to carry on largely on the basis of the irrational but never (until now) disproven belief that my fear was totally unfounded.)

(In the past few minutes alone, I've been greatly startled by things that turned out to be 1) my comforter (ironically) and 2) my headphones. Help.)

Christopher Hitchens Never Doesn't Talk about Blowjobs

2007-06-19T00:05:00.000-05:00

From his dumb and silly January 2007 article "Why Women Aren't Funny":

If you can stimulate her to laughter—I am talking about that real, out-loud, head-back, mouth-open-to-expose-the-full-horseshoe-of-lovely-teeth, involuntary, full, and deep-throated mirth; the kind that is accompanied by a shocked surprise and a slight (no, make that a loud) peal of delight—well, then, you have at least caused her to loosen up and to change her expression.

He wants you to think he's jokingly alluding to orgasms, but I'm not so sure. From his dumb and silly July 2006 article "As American as Apple Pie," a study (?) of fellatio in US culture (he's American, don'tchaknow):

The United States is par excellence the country of beautiful dentistry. As one who was stretched on the grim rack of British "National Health" practice, with its gray-and-yellow fangs, its steely-wire "braces," its dark and crumbly fillings, and its shriveled and bleeding gums, I can remember barely daring to smile when I first set foot in the New World. Whereas when any sweet American girl smiled at me, I was at once bewitched and slain by the warm, moist cave of her mouth, lined with faultless white teeth and immaculate pink gums and organized around a tenderly coiled yet innocent tongue. Good grief! What else was there to think about?

For Hitchens, it seems, the question truly is rhetorical.

Probably the Cause of a Lot of Embarrassing Typos

2007-06-18T00:22:00.001-05:00

Wikipedia:

Herpetology...is the branch of zoology concerned with the study of reptiles and amphibians.

Foucault:

We might imagine a sort of systematic description -- I do not say a science because the term is too galvanized now -- that would, in a given society, take as its object the study, analysis, description, and 'reading' (as some like to say nowadays) of these different spaces, of these other places. As a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live, this description could be called heterotopology.

Say what you will about Foucault's "systematic description" of "different spaces," but at least it's not pointless:

In mathematics, pointless topology (also called point-free or pointfree topology) is an approach to topology which avoids the mentioning of points.

Cf. the tetragrammaton and the via negativa. Who knew math was so religious?

A Technique

2007-06-17T21:27:00.001-05:00

It's not always easy being a white rap fan who wants -- yes -- to sing along. There is the issue of "the N word." Self-censorship can seem prissy and ostentatious -- look at me not being offensive -- but the obvious alternative is scarcely any better -- look at me defying the dictates of political correctness!

The solution? Whenever you encounter "the N word," substitute "blogger." Con: the rhyme scheme will often suffer. Pro: it will never not be hilarious. You can probably make a lot of friends!

Things That Are Better than Other Things

2007-06-17T21:15:00.001-05:00

"Seven" > CAPM, says Tyler Cowen:

For risky equity assets in the United States, my preferred economic model is simple. Expected return equals seven. That is my model, "Seven."

Plus of course an random or error term. How's that for Occam's Razor?
Robotic cats > plush cats, say researchers:

"We used the plush cat and a robotic cat and found that a robotic cat was more self-engaging and triggered positive emotions and interest more than the plush cat," Alexander Libin told ABC News. ... Renata Bushko, chair of the Future of Technology Institute where the researchers presented their work, said that the concept could be extended. "Robocats will be very useful in disease management..."
"[T]he more homely, but more intelligible, maxims of distributive justice among the Saxons" > "the narrow rules and fanciful niceties of metaphysical and Norman jurisprudence," says William Blackstone (not exactly topical but (to quote Lil Wayne) "I just thought that I should mention it").
Putin > all Russian leaders in recent memory, says Perry Anderson (kinda):

Part of his chilly magnetism is cultural. He is widely admired for his command of the language. Here, too, contrast is everything. Lenin was the last ruler of the country who could speak an educated Russian. Stalin’s Georgian accent was so thick he rarely risked speaking in public. Khrushchev’s vocabulary was crude and his grammar barbaric. Brezhnev could scarcely put two sentences together. Gorbachev spoke with a provincial southern accent. The less said of Yeltsin’s slurred diction the better. To hear a leader of the country capable once again of expressing himself with clarity, accuracy and fluency, in a more or less correct idiom, comes as music to many Russians.
Minds > governments, says Lil Wayne:

Lil Wayne has been attending the University of Houston in Houston, Texas since early 2005, where he began studying political science. According to the Cash Money Records website, Wayne has since switched his major to psychology.

The Force

2007-06-14T19:19:00.001-05:00

Oliver Sacks, writing about an artist who lost the ability to see in color after a car accident, says that

At first he was intensely, furiously conscious of what he had lost ... He would glare at an orange in a state of rage, trying to force it to resume its true color.

Scientology turns this kind of wishful thinking into a religious experience. Some of the Church's low-level Training Routines, or TRs, involve the use of "Tone 40 Intention (intention without reservation or limit)," which is both a state of the will and a mode of speaking. The guidelines for "TR 8: Tone 40 on Objects" are as follows:

Trying to make the ashtray STAND UP. Student gives Tone 40 command "STAND UP!". Tone 40 acknowledges with "THANK YOU!". "SIT DOWN!". "THANK YOU!."

Repeat until cognition (about an hour).

As a disillusioned ex-Scientologist put it,

By this point, I was so deluded by the concept of Tone 40 that the fact that I was LIFTING IT WITH MY HANDS was irrelevant. I gave the command, the ashtray stood up. After doing this for half an hour, I felt like God, lifting the ashtray by sheer intention. My Thetan's (Scieno-babble for "spirit") Intention was using my arms and hands, though that was only for convenience, since with sufficient intent they were not necessary.

This is probably what happens when you start to worry about Free Will too much. Even rappers fall into this trap:

Jay-Z: "...he who does not feel me / Is not real to me. Therefore, he doesn't exist. / So poof: vamoose, son of a bitch" ("Izzo (H.O.V.A.)," The Blueprint (2001)).
Tony Yayo, in an interview somewhere: "I don't believe in Cam'ron. I don't believe in Jim Jones. I don't believe in Baby. I don't believe in Lil Wayne. I don't believe in Game. I don't believe in Fat Joe."

On the other hand, the loss of free will is pretty rough too. It only just occurred to me that Jack Kirby's Fourth World stories are pretty clearly one big allegory for the Cold War: Apokolips is the evil empire, clanging with machinery, filthy with smoke, sadists and spies around every corner, Darkseid the dictator presiding over it all. And do remember what Darkseid is always looking for: the Anti-Life Equation, which has long been one of my favorite comic-book concepts (alongside the Ultimate Nullifier, if only for the sake of the name). As Wikipedia explains, "Various comics have defined the equation in different ways, but a common interpretation seems to be that the equation is a mathematical proof of the futility of living." Armed with the Equation -- portions of which, in an odd bit of cryptic symbolism, are scattered throughout diverse individual minds -- one can "dominate the will of all sentient and sapient races." And because it eliminates free will in the target, the Anti-Life Equation also renders wanton violence permissible, since, according to some perverse moral calculus, beings without freedom can be freely abused. Thus the nefarious Glorious Godfrey (don't ask) dubs the ALE "the cosmic hunting license." Of course, you'd have to have a pretty strange configuration of qualms and non-qualms to think it was okay to eliminate freedom from the universe but not okay to kick a puppy, but why quibble ?

(As it turns out, the Equation has been used to prove empirically that, at least within the moral superstructure of the DC Universe, Benthamite utilitarianism and "libertarian paternalism" are both unambiguously wrong. It's never okay to override individual choice in the name of the greater good: when Darkseid's rebellious superhero son Orion "learned the Equation, and tried to use it to make people happy and good, ... [he] realised that the suppression of free will is always a bad thing." The end.)

Scrawl This All Over Me

2007-06-14T18:29:00.001-05:00

It's Still a Little Early to Call This One

2007-06-14T18:05:00.001-05:00

4 June 2007, BBC News:

...[T]op Iranian security official Ali Larijani described the [U.S.'s] planned deployment [of an anti-ballistic missile system in eastern Europe, purportedly aimed at "rogue states"] as the "joke of the year", adding that Iranian missiles were not capable of reaching Europe.

27 May 2007, The Financial Express (Bangladesh):

Awami League (AL) presidium member Suranjit Sengupta Saturday laughed off Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) Chairperson Khaleda Zia's dismissal of dynasty in her party as the 'joke of the year', reports bdnews24.com.

The former prime minister Friday said she had joined politics on merit and ruled out a dynastic bulwark in her BNP.

I Don't Know. I Just Don't Know.

2007-06-14T13:52:00.001-05:00

No, My Lip Gloss Is Poppin'

2007-06-12T23:39:00.000-05:00

Today, under the influence of the incomparable ideelz, I came across Lil Mama's song "Lip Gloss" for the first time. I'm afraid I can't even pretend to think this is okay. Especially:

Cherry, vanilla: flavors is a virtue
They loving lip gloss universal'!

No, no, no. It's not just brainless; it's sloppy and poorly delivered. I usually celebrate songs that cover territory outside the predictable, circumscribed realm of lovin' and bein' very sad or very happy, but you don't get credit for doing a song about lip gloss if all you can say about it is that some varieties of it are good. I was going to say that this song represents a weird return to the "Parents Just Don't Understand" paradigm -- rap is about fun/funny things we kids can all relate to, not shooting some people and selling drugs to some people (usually (?) different people) -- but at least "Parents Just Don't Understand" didn't restate the same thesis for like infinity minutes. WHO COULD WANT TO LIVE IN THIS WORLD
On the other hand, I have learned that "Unwritten" by Natasha Bedingfield is neither a new nor a bad song. It is, in fact, both a couple of years old and good (? (I have a lot of questions lately)). I've probably caught bits of it before, but I was thunderstruck when I heard it yesterday at the local pizza shack -- so thunderstruck that I found myself scribbling down a snatch of the lyrics and a brief annotation in the top margin of a page of the New York Times Magazine containing the middle of an article about economic inequality.

'feel the rain on yr skin / no one else can feel it for you'
little girls singing along

I was pretty irked by these tartlets at the time, but a quick download proved how wrong I was. It reads like a goddamn Cliffs Notes version of Unger:

I am unwritten, can't read my mind; I'm undefined...

I break tradition
Sometimes my tries
Are outside the lines
We've been conditioned
To not make mistakes
But I can't live that way!...

Release your inhibitions
Feel the rain on your skin
No one else can feel it for you
Only you can let it in
No one else, no one else
Can speak the words on your lips
Drench yourself in words unspoken [okay, this line is dodgy]
Live your life with arms wide open
Today is when your book begins

Would it be TMI to say that I feel weirdly, genuinely inspired by these schmaltzy pop lyrics, no matter how obscenely Bedingfield oversells them with her I Can't Believe It's Not Butter voice and, god help us, some kind of choir at the end? Tough cookies: this is Keyhole's blog, li'l mama. Did you know that Bedingfield was in a family Christian rock group when she was a kid, and that it was called "the DNA Algorithm"?!
Via Defamer, an only somewhat decontexualized quote from Michael Bay, giving the straight dope to the Republic of Korea:

There definitely will be a massive alien robot war in the future.

Unfortunately, I haven't found any commentary from the Democratic People's Republic up north, where one instead sees all the traditional, run-of-the-mill headlines: "Bush Team's Sophism Blasted" (they are very concerned with sophism), "Construction of Mushroom Production Centers Brisk under Way" ("The newly-built mushroom farm in Sinuiju City is equipped with all necessary facilities including ozonizer and autoclave"), and "S. Korean Military Warmongers Warned Not to Run Riot" (hey, military warmongers: you better not run riot!).

The previous day's news was similarly ho-hum: in the article "Poem Recital on Pochonbo Battle Anniversary," the writers couldn't help but yawn their way through a typical work of North Korean piety:

Recited then was the lyric "Lineage" to the effect that the revolutionary tradition established in the flames of the anti-Japanese revolutionary struggle is the historic root of the Korean revolution and it gives steadfast continuity to it. [Yadda yadda yadda.]

A human-interest piece on the Pyongyang Circus was fun (did you know that the Pyongyang Circus "won a gold prize in the 9th International Modern Jugglery Festival held in Karlovy Vary of then Czechoslovakia in April 1972"? and that its "hundreds of fine acrobatics" include "animal, magic, synchronized and ice feats," including both "Aerial Iron Bar Flight" and "Flying Girls"?), but by the millionth time that the Korean Central News Agency insists of referring to its creative class as "artistes" instead of artists (e.g. "dignified People's Artistes, Merited Artistes, highest skill possessors and talented acrobats"), it stops being enjoyable. (j/k) But you have to appreciate the clarity and sentiment of this headline:

KCNA Urges U.S. to Stop Acting Fool

The article describes the U.S. as "a centre of plot-breeding, fraud and swindle" whose claims would normally be of no interest, were it not for the possibility that the allegations of "Lefkowitz [no first name given], special envoy of the U.S. State Department for human rights issue of north Korea" might be taken seriously; alas, "there is the need to let the world community know clearly about the U.S. sinister aim lurking behind the nonsensical malarkey let loose by this guy in view of its crafty and serious nature. ... [W]hat he uttered is no more than a foolish ploy to convince others that he is not useless. ... The U.S. is the country of beasts which regards man-hunting as pleasure."
I recently read an old (1974) article from the Journal of Law and Economics by Ronald Coase: "The Lighthouse in Economics." It's apparently somewhat famous, but it's pretty goofy and trivial all the same: Coase debunks the lighthouse as an example of a public good, showing how, as a matter of historical fact, many of the lighthouses built in England were indeed the products of private enterprises operating under the aegis of the profit motive. Causing a sea change in the conceptualization of lighthouses by means of a carefully researched but fundamentally boring essay: I can't tell if it's during my more or my less ambitious moments that I dream of accomplishing something similar.
O'Reilly Media, which publishes all the nerds' favorite computer books, has a beautiful mission statement of sorts:

O'Reilly has been a chronicler and catalyst of leading-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.

They'll probably also sponsor the first and only time traveler's convention.
Via Language Log, it turns out that condescending multiculturalism may get accused terrorist Jose Padilla killed:

Defense lawyers also repeatedly jousted with FBI translators over how they converted the intercepted calls into English, suggesting that they used the most sinister language possible. They also noticed that sometimes they translated the Arabic "Allah" as "God" in English and other times left it in the Arabic form.

"You have to understand, it's my personal choice. I chose to use Allah. I think it's a beautiful word," said FBI linguist Joyce Kandalaft. "Allah does not have a negative connotation in this sense."

I kanda laft when I first read that.

But seriously, folks: how many times have we heard some grinning old coot ask a non-white somebody, often a child, what their name is -- and respond, upon receiving some crazy gallimaufry of foreign phonemes as an answer, "Why, that's a beautiful name!"? "Beautiful" here almost always means "vowel-containing." Why do people say this? It is worse (more annoying) than the worst (most annoying) racism. Didn't Edward Said die for these sins?
While we're on the topic, I have a difficult time believing this, from Cory Doctorow:

I once asked a Japanese friend to explain why so many people on the Tokyo subway wore surgical masks. Are they extreme germophobes? Conscientious folks getting over a cold? Oh, yes, he said, yes, of course, but that's only the rubric. The real reason to wear the mask is to spare others the discomfort of seeing your facial expression, to make your face into a disengaged, unreadable blank--to spare others the discomfort of firing up their mirror neurons in order to model your mood based on your outward expression. To make it possible to see without seeing.

I'll leave the musings on prosopagnosia and Levinas (check out his little Western Philosophy wiki-trading card on the right: "Notable ideas: 'the Other', 'the Face'") to the experts. But I will note in passing that Doctorow should not have been allowed this riff:

Ubiquitous and demanding, CCTVs don't have any visible owners. They ... occur. They exist in the passive voice, the "mistakes were made" voice: "The camera recorded you."

Um. "The camera recorded you" is most definitely not in the passive voice. Also, the passive voice isn't a "voice" in the way he's implying; you can't "do" it during an open-mic comedy event. Well, maybe...
Did you know that "the bear cub is born as a shapeless and eyeless lump of flesh, which the mother bear shapes into its proper form by licking it"? Well, according to various medieval bestiaries, it's true:

For bonus points, consider the financial implications of the following: "Bears fight bulls by holding their horns and attacking their sensitive noses."
There will be more.

Symbolism?

2007-06-07T03:35:00.001-05:00

I just bled all over a pad of paper that I got from the Ritz-Carlton in New York.

Scraps from My Aging Firefox Tabs

2007-05-31T15:45:00.001-05:00

Strategic essentialism, or how the Irish stopped being white:

Ireland’s investment recruitment agency is now crowing about the virtues of “the Irish mind” in a series of print ads. The most popular ad, using a drawing of the Irish rock star Bono, declares: “The Irish. Creative. Imaginative. And flexible. Agile minds with a unique capacity to innovate, without being directed.”
A headline begging to be ripped from:

Criminals in Baghdad are stealing corpses from the scenes of car bombings and murders in order to extract "ransoms" from grieving relatives.

In a macabre off-shoot of the capital's kidnapping epidemic, the gangs pose as medics collecting bodies to be taken back to the city's overflowing morgues.

Instead, though, they take the corpses to secret hiding places and then demand payments of up to £2,500 a time to release them to relatives for burial. Because Muslim custom dictates that a body must be buried as soon as possible after death, many families simply pay up, rather than involve the police.
LOL to David Remnick's year-old but highly readable profile of Bill Clinton:

Nearly all Clinton’s younger aides refer to their boss as “the President,” but they also “do” him.

Furthermore:

He picked up the thread of his monologue, describing in fantastic detail why Ray Nagin edged Mitch Landrieu in the New Orleans mayoral race (“I understand it, because I know how black folks think”) ...

“I don’t care how drunk he was sometimes,” he said. “Yeltsin really hated Communism.” ...

In Durban, he’d picked up an eight-foot-tall wooden giraffe for Hillary (“She loves giraffes!”) ...
Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame gets high on his own supply:

One of us, for instance (the economist, who lives in Chicago), grew up comfortably in a Midwestern city and has fond memories of visiting his grandparents’ small farm. This author recently bought an indoor hydroponic plant grower.
Get it? Y'all bloggers slow, man!
I wasn't aware of this example of path dependency, via Kevin Drum: "Why is the Pentagon a pentagon? Short answer: it was originally intended to be built on a pentagonally shaped piece of land, so a pentagon was what fit. It got moved later, but the shape stayed."
Maybe a good attitude:

I once had the opportunity to have coffee with Andros Epanimondas, who had been the assistant to one of my greatest heroes, Stanley Kubrick. Reminiscing, he mentioned that, over dinner, he once saw Kubrick hurriedly alternating bites of his main course and bites of a chocolate cake. He asked why. Kubrick, busy preparing for his greatest project to date, the unrealized Napolean, simply responded, "Andros, it's only food!"
Via the Economist's Free Exchange blog, I came across a lovely Deutsche Bank Research whitepaper entitled "The Happy Variety of Capitalism: Characterised by an Array of Commonalities" (PDF). The first page tells us that
The happy variety of capitalism is one of the four varieties identified by a systematic analysis of 22 rich countries.
- The happy variety of capitalism...
- The less happy variety of capitalism...
- The unhappy variety of capitalism...
- The Far Eastern variety...
For serious.

Alternate Universe of My Dreams

2007-05-30T05:54:00.000-05:00

At Berkeley this past December [1999], Unger bumped into David Bonior -- the influential Democratic representative from Michigan -- in the hallway of his hotel. Earlier in the day, Unger had delivered a fiery speech denouncing progressives for lacking the courage to experiment with bold new ideas. Now, however, he struck a more conciliatory tone. Handing two copies of each of his most recent books to the congressman, he told Bonior he hoped he would enjoy reading them.

"And could you," he added, "pass along these extra copies to Mr. Gore for me?"

—Eyal Press, "The Passion of Roberto Unger," Lingua Franca 9.3 (March 1999).

Make Either Fearsome or Lovable Your Implements of War

2007-05-30T04:06:00.001-05:00

From a somewhat old Washington Post article about combat robots and the men who love them:

Every time [the robot] found a mine, blew it up and lost a limb, it picked itself up and readjusted ... Finally it was down to one leg. Still, it pulled itself forward. [Mark] Tilden [the robot's designer, a physicist at Los Alamos] was ecstatic. The machine was working splendidly.

The human in command of the exercise, however -- an Army colonel -- blew a fuse.

The colonel ordered the test stopped.

Why? asked Tilden. What's wrong?

The colonel just could not stand the pathos of watching the burned, scarred and crippled machine drag itself forward on its last leg.

This test, he charged, was inhumane. ...

It's common for a soldier to cut out a magazine picture of a woman, tape it to the antenna and name the bot something like "Cheryl," says Paul Varian, a former Army chief warrant officer who has served three tours in Iraq with the Robotic Systems Joint Project Office. ...

"I've been a proponent for a long time of painting a mouth and eyes on the Global Hawk," the Learjet-size surveillance bot, says retired Col. Tom Ehrhard ... "Humans are social animals. Make that other thing part of your family, your social structure. Try to animate and make either fearsome or lovable your implements of war."

Information Battlespace II: Executive Ability and the Management of Barbarism

2007-05-30T03:18:00.001-05:00

From a Believer article by the incomparable Paul Collins:

Perhaps emboldened by their success [creating fake Harry Potter sequels]...Chinese publishers have gone on to promote entirely fictitious Western authors. One best-selling classic of business advice, Paul Thomas’s Executive Ability, is a five-volume work in Chinese by a Duke University business professor who does not, in fact, exist. Yet a very real Chinese business scholar, Yu Shiwei, has also found himself confronted with books he never wrote. Los Angeles Times reporter Don Lee noted in 2005 that after a lecture in Shanghai, Shiwei was accosted by an eager autograph seeker bearing ten copies of “his” book Ying Zai Zhi Xing (“Execution Wins”). Shiwei, not wanting to disappoint his fan, graciously signed them without a word.

The L.A. Times article that Collins draws on (reprinted in a Hong Kong paper) offers deeper insight:

Although bogus books are not confined to business topics, they are particularly prevalent in that field, largely because most management volumes are translated and are in high demand. ... "There are [bogus] recommendations from Bill Gates, The New York Times or even Einstein, which is really ridiculous,'' said Jiang Ruxiang, general manager of Beijing Zion Consulting ...

"The most harmful influence of these books is that a large number of China's best entrepreneurs are learning wrong and misleading management principles,'' he said. ...

"We lack the experience to distinguish these new fake books,'' said China Chang An Publishing House vice president Chen Xiaojun.

"[Executive Ability is] a nice book,'' said Wang [Zhe], who finished Volume 2 of the series in two weeks. He was hard-pressed to explain details of the 256-page book but said the overall point was that successful managers pay attention to details.

A strange phenomenon, no? How could so many people in an economy so successful be so gullible? Quite suspicious, especially when you recall the following tips from everyone's favorite jihadi guidebook, The Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Stage through Which the Umma Will Pass (PDF, 2004):

We must make use of books on the subject of administration, especially the management studies and theories which have been recently published, since they are consonant with the nature of modern societies. There is more than one site on the internet in which one can obtain management books [including] ... the site Mufakkirat al-Islam (The Notebook of Islam) ... Moreover, it is possible to obtain more management books and resources from other sites on the Internet or from libraries and publishing houses, keeping in mind that we must undertake practical application when study of them is complete so that we may see the administrative styles (positively) influence the work [i.e. jihad].

In short, the Chinese government is secretly collaborating with U.S. covert operations to undermine Islamic terrorists by giving them an inaccurate understanding of modern management techniques. Why else do you think 9/11 hasn't been repeated? Let's just pray that they never master GTD.

A Somewhat Stale Remaindered Reference

2007-05-29T22:28:00.001-05:00

Dr. Laura's son is apparently both a soldier and a pervert -- and not the friendly kind either. His "MySpace page, publicly available until [last] Friday when it disappeared from the Internet, included cartoon depictions of rape, murder, torture and child molestation; photographs of soldiers with guns in their mouths...and a blog entry headlined by a series of obscenities and racial epithets." I'm sure he's a repulsive little chickadee, but what really struck me about the linked article (from the Salt Lake Tribune) was this astonishing bit:

Army spokesman Robert Tallman ... said "it may be possible that our enemies are actually behind this.

"Our enemies are adaptive, technologically sophisticated, and truly understand the importance of the information battlespace," Tallman continued. "Sadly, they will use that space to promulgate and disseminate untrue propaganda."

I checked (i.e. googled): "Army spokesman Robert Tallman" is not just a figment of the Salt Lake Tribune's imagination. So a no-foolin' public representative of the U.S. Army honestly hinted that the likes of Al-Qaeda would spend their time mocking up fake MySpace pages for the purpose of discrediting the relatives of minor American media personalities. Just so we're clear on that.

Incidentally, "the information battlespace" appears to be something of a term of art in military circles. For instance, a company called Zel Tech has a DARPA contract to create an "IPIB [Intelligence Preparation of the Information Battlespace] process," which seems to consist of a checklist, a database, possibly some flowcharts, and a set of metaphors ("This project addresses ... whether it is feasible to identify cyberspace analogs for kinetic concepts such as terrain, weather, and adversary doctrine"). It's jarring to see how abstract and downright philosophical some of this wartalk gets. A 2006 article in the Air & Space Power Journal ("the professional journal of the United States Air Force"), subtitled "Affecting the Strategic Battlespace with Effects-Based Public Affairs," promises to consider "the application of nonkinetic effects or means to the information battlespace" but pauses first for some ontological clarification: "In order to understand why [Air Force Public Affairs] must operationalize and become effects driven, one needs to understand the nature of effects." This leads almost directly (seriously!!) to a discussion of blogs.

Remember when Russia (maybe) inflicted cyber-warfare on Estonia? "'If you are implying [the attacks] came from Russia or the Russian government, it's a serious allegation that has to be substantiated. Cyber-space is everywhere,' Russia's ambassador in Brussels, Vladimir Chizhov, said in reply to a question from the Guardian."

Everywhere.

A Weird Claim about Schumpeter

2007-05-28T05:22:00.001-05:00

Made by Robert Solow, no less:

The man was all problems, and one very important idea.

(It's the last sentence of "Heavy Thinker" (review of Thomas K. McCraw, Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction), The New Republic 21 May 2007. I do these citations purely for my own future benefit, by the way. I know no one cares.)

A Possibly Old-Hat Second Life Anecdote

2007-05-27T14:09:00.000-05:00

This is where Lazarus Divine comes into the picture. A few months ago, Divine began buying up small slivers of land near other Second Life residents and erecting on them giant, garish billboards emblazoned with the text: "SUPPORT OUR TROOPS. End the Illegal War in Iraq. Restore US Credibility. IMPEACH BUSH." The towering blue signs ruined the views of nearby residents and consequently threatened the value of their property. ... A few residents vented their frustrations by erecting "Impeach Lazarus Divine" billboards. Others joined forces and sent Divine endless instant messages complaining about his actions, but to no avail.

Apparently it was kinda politics, kinda extortion. Also, a : O quote from the "Declaration of the Rights of Avatars" that would probably take months to "unpack":

The principle of all sovereignty in a virtual space resides in the inalterable fact that somewhere there resides an individual who controls the hardware on which the virtual space is running, and the software with which it is created, and the database which makes up its existence.

Obvious point: is this actually the same weird metaphysical basis on which our regular constitutional rights rest -- that, allegedly, but probably/certainly incorrectly, there's some magical "individual" inside the hardware of our bodies and the software of our culture and the database of our, um, databases (memories?)? Freedom blogs.

Both quotes come from Steven (Berlin?) Johnson, "Brave New World: Online Fantasy Worlds Put Our Democratic Ideals to the Test," Discover 2 April 2006.

The Extent of My Ambitions

2007-05-27T13:51:00.001-05:00

...little more than a confection of heightened rhetoric and archive pleasures.

—Paul Myerscough, "The Flow" (review of Adam Curtis, The Trap), London Review of Books 5 April 2007.

Amusing Easter Egg

2007-05-27T11:55:00.000-05:00

[Creating sound from a spectrogram] allows electronic music artists to "hide" images in their music. Examples include:

Aphex Twin hid an image of himself in a spectrogram (using MetaSynth). The image can be found on Track 2 of the Windowlicker EP as a nine-second sweeping section right at the end. (It is recognizable in an MP3, but the compression changes the spectrogram and it is not as clear as from the CD.) Aphex Twin also hid the image of a spiral shape in his first track from the "Windowlicker" EP.

Etc. Nine Inch Nails also uses this technique to give out clues to its alernate reality game (?!). See WP for more.

If I were BLDGBLOG I'd go off on a whole riff about this. Alas.

Go Blog It

2007-05-27T01:43:00.001-05:00

Similarly, Bell and Gemmell would like software that organized the contents of the archive into movies—something, at least, to compress and shape it, to summarize its parts. “Auto-storytelling,” Gemmell calls it. “My dream is I go on vacation and take my pictures and come home and tell the computer, ‘Go blog it,’ so that my mother can see it. I don’t have to do anything; the story is there in the pattern of the images.”

—Alec Wilkinson, "Remember This?" The New Yorker 28 May 2007.

On Second Thought

2007-05-25T13:46:00.000-05:00

Who am I kidding? I give up. I do love the arbitrary juxtaposition of unrelated but independently kinda funny things:

(Starbucks supports Al-Qaeda.)

(Via Ellis.)

Vague Yet Bafflingly Precise Consumption Preferences

2007-05-24T02:54:00.001-05:00

At Tealuxe, a loud man stepped up to the register. Refusing to submit to the quiescent conformism of "working through the system," he spent not the barest instant looking at the lengthy menu, with its rigid notions of "respectable" beverage selection; no, this fellow would forge his own instrument of oral irrigation, answering solely to what he wanted, not to what Tealuxe wanted him to want. "You have anything hot, with a kind of raspberry flavor, kind of tart? Like a hot bubble tea?" "All of our bubble teas are cold." "Well, can't you just put the bubbles in?" "...I guess. We just don't have any specific recipes for that. I--" "So can I get a hot bubble tea, berry flavor, kind of tart, maybe a little bitter?" Undaunted, this guy. The spirit of 1773 lives on.
At the Morse Music & Media Library, two young men prowled the DVD collection. Said one to the other: "I want something intense: violence, death, destruction..." "Violence and death?" "Yeah, but witty violence and death. Maybe something Italian?"

Preserved for Posterity

2007-05-23T01:46:00.001-05:00

The copy from the front of the Killa Season DVD:

This is Harlem.

This is Flea's world.

At the end of the day, business is business, money is money.

And from the back:

This Harlem inspired story details Flea's rising empire to take over the streets and an unstoppable drive to hustle all the money in various places around the world. Flea was a basketball player, happy with his subtle hustle, until a Dominican connect introduced him to a new way to spread the work and make all the "cake." Revenge will take place when honor is at stake. No one wants to see you on top.

Cameron Giles, you saw him in Paid In Full, makes his directorial debut with this powerful and detailed story of growing up in Harlem and learning to be #1.

With powerful performances by Cam'ron (Paid In Full), Juelz Santana, and Hell Rell, the film also features cameos by Funk Master Flex and Michael Williams from HBO's The Wire.

A few points:

"an unstoppable drive to hustle all the money in various places around the world"
- "The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish [Dominican] connexions everywhere" (Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto)
- "Yo, I could promise this / You dealing with a communist" (Cam'ron, "Leave You Alone," Killa Season)
"happy with his subtle hustle"
the quotation marks around "cake"
"Revenge will take place"
the repetition, in the space of a couple of sentences, of the Paid in Full citation
the use of "detailed" as a laudatory term

Sincerely,
The Hood Internet

Marx on Wikipedia

2007-05-22T23:25:00.001-05:00

Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm more swiftly from success to success; their dramatic effects outdo each other; men and things seem set in sparkling brilliants; ecstasy is the everyday spirit: but they are short lived; soon they have attained their zenith, and a long depression lays hold of society before it learns soberly to assimilate the results of its storm and stress period. Proletarian revolutions, on the other hand, like those of the nineteenth century, criticise themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltriness of their first attempts...

—"The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978), 597.

"The Eighteenth Brumaire" drops jaws.

Economic Progress Party?

2007-05-22T23:13:00.001-05:00

I wouldn't call Will Wilkinson, a political-philosophy wonk (or something like that) at the Cato Institute, one of my intellectual heroes --- his well-justified appreciation for the achievements of "liberal capitalism" is too often marred, I think, by an unjustified identification of the priniciples underlying such a "regime" with the particular institutional forms it has taken in the U.S. --- but he's often an insightful critic (see my post directly below!!); the good thing about all these libertarian bloggers is their outsider status and their disdain for much of mainstream political discourse. I was particularly shaken by a tasty morsel that Wilkinson just threw up on his site, one of those "obvious in retrospect yet totally surprising when laid down in words" storms-and-stresses that I love to run across in my textual wanderings:

[re: the Rawlsian conception of distributive justice and its primary domain of application, the "basic structure" of society] This is, of course, massively confused. The deep objection to this way of thinking is that different basic structures don’t so much determine how stuff is distributed, but determine whether or not there is stuff at all, and how much. ... Because wealth is created and not just moved around, and more wealth is created under certain institutional schemes than others, the question isn’t so much one of distribution as production or creation. The question of whether people live under institutions in which they can realize their capacities and reliably acquire the necessary means to successfully enact their life-plans is mainly a question of what might be called productive justice.

I'm reminded of nothing so much as Marx, in "Critique of the Gotha Program," mercilessly assailing the naive idea of "a fair distribution of the proceeds of labour" as the vision for communist society: before you can get around to handing out checks, he says, you have to deduct from the total social product "cover for replacement of the means of production used up" (including, I assume, depreciation); an "additional portion" set aside "for expansion of production" (note: production is to expand, not stay constant); "reserve for insurance funds to provide against accidents, dislocations caused by natural calamities, etc." (Black Swans!); the costs of administration; the costs of public goods like education and healthcare; and the costs of upkeep for members of society who can't do productive labor. "These deductions ... are an economic necessity and their magnitude is to be determined according to available means and forces, and partly by computation of probabilities, but they are in no way calculable by equity." Marx sees such limits as things to be eventually overcome in later stages of communism, but you can't get there without paying attention to the contemporary "means and forces." Production, production, production.

I think we can detach Wilkinson's notion of the priority of productive over distributive "justice" (btw probably not the best term to use here) from his icky belief that all we need to do to fix up the world is to "install liberal capitalism" (wuzzat, exactly?) in every country, as if the Founders aced it for all time in 1787 and now we need only set their elegant clockpunk contraption in motion to ring in the end of history.

Inspiration one: America Beyond Capitalism by Gar Alperovitz. Breaking up wealth > redistributing income. Cooperatives, worker-owned firms, innovative collaborations between government and business. (I may riff more on this book later (preview: it's good/great but it pushes the "consumerism is bad! let's live simple and stop buying pretty things!" button (it's made of postconsumer recycled drywall and it's lacquered with organic pesticides) way too hard for my taste/comfort level/conception of political usefulness).)

Inspiration two: holycrapshit CHINA TO BUY A STAKE IN BLACKSTONE, a huge private-equity firm that is apparently doing an IPO pretty soon. Really, let that news sink in for a bit: nominally communist (and maybe, despite what the haters say, becoming more communist all the time) China is plowing billions of dollars into an American company that does nothing but take over and reignite other companies; T-bills aren't floating the bureaucrats' boats anymore. A bigger effort, "the State Foreign Exchange Investment Company," is apparently on the horizon; the Times opines that if the co. ends up looking anything like Singapore's state-run development operation, it "would effectively create the world’s largest hedge fund." !

The boys at Long or Short Capital (the blog that pays dividends) and the boys they link to harp on the possible dangers and shortcomings of the deal, for both sides --- China might kinda collapse any day now, given the brittleness of its program to inflict a hardened centralized will upon the whole of an increasingly restless (probably) civil society, and Blackstone could explode too (Black Swan Black Swan Black Swan), leaving China, which is committed to holding onto its shares and to not buying into competing firms for the medium-term future, in the super-shitty lurch --- but goddammit I was excited when I heard this gospel. Remember how China and McKinsey are also building a crazy utopian environmentalist city of the future? These people ain't thinking small, ladies and gentlemen; it must be improbably exhilirating, days like these, to be a Beijing functionary.

When will America wake up? The alarm's going off --- it's a clock radio, and NPR is playing Pharrell's remix of the Internationale --- but we keep hitting snooze.

Genius/Critic

2007-05-22T22:19:00.001-05:00

I'm sure everyone's sick of my Unger obsession by now, but: I was stunned, in the course of rereading his neat little piece "A Program for Late Twentieth-Century Psychiatry," to find him pretty much following the Currier House party line in the formulation of a key concept:

To gain freedom of insight and action in a more remote context, often at the price of ineptitude in an immediate one, is a definition of genius.

Emphasis mine. To gain expertise in the immediate context at the price of vision for the future would be the corresponding definition of "critic." Of all the nonsense bandied about in "my" intellectual circle, the genius/critic quasi-distinction stands as one of the most promising and fruitful bits, I (perhaps surprisingly) think. "Factoid," on the other hand, remains controversial.

In café-culture news, the last few times I've gone to the local Starbucks, I've heard men with indeterminate European accents arguing heatedly — to the point of raising their voices, even — about particle physics. Simon's, Peet's: get your cake up. Your concentration of hand-waving humanists isn't going to cut it anymore.

I Can't Say That I Didn't Feel a Bit of a Sting Reading This

2007-05-18T17:02:00.001-05:00

By the summer of 1929 the market not only dominated the news. It also dominated the culture. The recherché minority which at other times had acknowledged its interest in Saint Thomas Aquinas, Proust, psychoanalysis and psychosomatic medicine then spoke of United Corporation, United Founders and Steel. Only the most aggressive of the eccentrics maintained their detachment from the market and their interest in autosuggestion or communism.

—John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash: 1929, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 79.

But surely we can have all of this at once, can't we — more markets, more Proust, more communism? Otherwise, what's the point?

Crises Happen When I'm Not Paying Attention

2007-05-18T13:01:00.000-05:00

xxAlekseyxx: i have some weird thing on my tongue.
xxAlekseyxx is away at 1:51:35 PM.

To be continued.

Oh, Religion

2007-05-16T21:07:00.000-05:00

For example, when Terry Eagleton, a British critic who has been a professor of English at Oxford, lambasted Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” in the London Review of Books, he wrote that “card-carrying rationalists” like Dawkins “invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince.” That is unfair, because millions of the faithful around the world believe things that would make a first-year theology student wince. A large survey in 2001 found that more than half of American Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, and Presbyterians believed that Jesus sinned—thus rejecting a central dogma of their own churches.

…Critics of the Bible should find consolation in the fact that many people do not have a clue what is in it. Surveys by the Barna Research Group, a Christian organization, have found that most Christians don’t know who preached the Sermon on the Mount.

—Anthony Gottlieb, "Atheists with Attitude," The New Yorker 21 May 2007.

I'm a Hypocrite

2007-05-14T12:30:00.000-05:00

Despite everything, I have to say that I think this image, posted recently on BoingBoing, is pretty funny.

At least there are no robots, pirates, or Vikings. Yet.

I Thought This Day Would Never Come

2007-05-14T02:17:00.001-05:00

From an email I just received:

Subject: can i interview you about blogs?

Sure, but you might want to get a sandwich and something to drink. This may take a while.

I Feel There Is Still Potential in the "Funny Animal" Genre, Though

2007-05-13T02:24:00.001-05:00

There has been a fair amount of talk of "café culture" in my world line lately, due to the influence of certain elements. Mostly "café culture" seems to mean breaking minor laws while sitting in front of Au Bon Pain. Today I was doing the latter half when a strange conjuncture occurred:

I started eating a "caprese" sandwich, the most shamefully class-inscribed of all widely available sandwiches (mozzarella, tomato, pesto, baguette).
A truck drove past, its trailer emblazoned with the word "BOURGEOIS."
A loud-mouthed would-be troubadour said, by way of introduction, "This is a song about my identity."

The troubadour troubled me, which raises etymological questions I don't dare to confront. I encountered him at a different location earlier on, engaging in a weirdly violent performance/terrorism: as people walked by, he sang about them. "You, with that pastry / Is it tasty?" It was something of an "act" and a "joke," but you could tell how uncomfortable people were with the (unacknowledged) shattering of their anonymity. A few steps away, a hired hand dispensed free samples of Eclipse gum, but people weren't taking them because they thought there was a catch, such as homelessness. The troubadour greased the wheels with his dulcet tones: "Hey, why don't you take that gum? / It's actually free!"

Obviously there are lots of things here about space, "the city," quack quack. I kind of liked the guy. But by the time he wound up in front of Au Bon Pain, his gimmick had become weirdly toothless and dispiriting. He sang that Barbie girl song in a funny voice. Also songs by Britney Spears. The small crowd was eating it up, so he transitioned to original works. The song about his identity was actually a riff on being — get this — Jewish, but taking Jesus as a role model. Main joke: the idea of Jesus eating gefilte fish (Jesus was Jewish!). Next song (people are digging this): something about Massachusetts politicians drinking a lot, doing drugs, and "lov[ing] coitus." Main joke: name of Massachusetts politician + lifestyle infraction. Final song, loudly demanded (and therefore apparently previously heard) by a homeless man: begins with the phrase "Starbucks supports Al Qaeda." Main joke: Starbucks supports Al Qaeda.

Now look — and here is where I guess I cross the line separating Gawker-style "here's a thing" from other-blogs–style "here's a thing" — this is just terrible. Everyone was laughing and laughing, thrilled at how controversial this guy was being, at how un-Peoria they were for accepting his jester-like truth-to-power shenanigans in the heart of the town square. But what was his point, exactly? Jesus was a Jew: incredible how this still retains force as a "startling" "revelation." Politicans as "immoral" in boring way: a staple of conservative thought. Are we to be titillated by this? Starbucks + Al Qaeda: a little funny, I'll admit. But how characteristic of the whole currently dominant mode of production of culturally knowing pseudo-humor! Just juxtapose some things that are floating around in the culture. Jesus robots! Robot Jesus zombie terrorist monkeys! I don't even want to go on; it's too sad, and I'm wasting perfectly marketable YouTube screenplay ideas. In the comic store I patronize — the shelves of which are strewn with the works of Robert Kirkman, an avatar of this style of "creativity" who's starting up a wolf-man book to complement, among other things, his (hilariously irreverent!!) Battle Pope book — a white board behind the register lists the week's new releases. A few times in the recent past, books entitled Zombie and Zombies came out during the same week, and I think that a third book, Zombies vs. Robots, also came out one of those weeks. The mischievous store clerks added fictitious entries for Zombies vs. Robots vs. Monkeys and Zombies vs. Robots vs. Monkeys vs. Pirates underneath, but it took me at least a few cycles to figure out what was real and what wasn't.

Surely this isn't all the future has to offer, right?

Blog 1: a comics review: "First, I think we can all agree that 'Zombies vs. Robots' is the best title of anything in the history of the world.…One might wonder how anyone can get a good story out of this concept. After all, what possible threat can zombies pose to robots? And at first, the answer would seem to be, 'Not much.'" (But there's a twist.)

Blog 2: http://robotzombiejesus.blogspot.com/.

Where Can I Get Funding for This?

2007-05-13T00:55:00.001-05:00

When I got on the elevator in my building a few minutes ago, I noticed an empty beer bottle on the floor. I thought up an art project, based loosely on something I accidentally did once: upon leaving the elevator, I would position the beer bottle in such a way that it would straddle the threshold, breaking the photoelectric whatever-whatever and preventing the door from closing. It would probably take hours for the problem to be fixed. By then I would be long gone.

The title of this project would be Fuck Everyone.

Ziggy Stardust, CFA

2007-05-10T21:23:00.001-05:00

With modern technology available to everyone, we should all be David Bowies in our ability to hedge our risks.

—Robert Shiller, The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 145.

Could Have Been a Thing

2007-05-10T15:26:00.000-05:00

Failed initial experiments may have prejudiced movie-going audiences against movies with subtitles. The silent movie The Chamber Mystery, made in 1920 by Abraham S. Schomer, used words superimposed on the picture. They were placed in comic-strip style balloons coming from the mouths of actors, not along the bottom of the screen. The movie was not a success, and the text in balloons was apparently not used again.

—Robert Shiller, The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 103.

And That's Why I Can't Stand Certain Kinds of Academic Discourse

2007-05-04T23:24:00.001-05:00

The vulgar and the hypersubtle possibilities exist in the interpretation of any great social thinker. Typically, the defenders of each theorist adopt the hypersubtle account of their master and the vulgar account of his rivals.

—Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Social Theory lectures (1976), "Classical Social Theory I," 128.

A bit obvi when stated in such an upfront fashion, but can anyone deny this?

In a similar vein:

Everyone believes that their favorite philosophers are misunderstood. The problem will be especially acute insofar as one's favorite philosopher is oneself, but most of us extend the claim beyond this special case.

—Peter Godfrey-Smith, "Dewey on Naturalis, Realism and Science," Philosophy of Science 69 (2002), S1.

Quotations Are All I Can Handle at This Point

2007-05-03T02:14:00.001-05:00

In my day, we only had the one universe. Now it's like satellite telly. There's billions of 'em. And they're all shite.

—Captain Midlands in Wisdom no. 4 (Marvel, May 2007).

What Unger Would Call Institutional Indeterminacy

2007-05-01T19:50:00.001-05:00

Hebrews 10:1-4 (NIV):

The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming—not the realities themselves. For this reason it can never, by the same sacrifices repeated endlessly year after year, make perfect those who draw near to worship. If it could, would they not have stopped being offered? For the worshipers would have been cleansed once for all, and would no longer have felt guilty for their sins. But those sacrifices are an annual reminder of sins, because it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.

Bulls and goats, elephants and donkeys. Someone tell this to the Constitution fetishists.

Isaiah 1:22-23

2007-05-01T18:20:00.001-05:00

Your silver has turned to dross;
Your wine is cut with water.
Your rulers are rogues
And cronies of thieves,
Every one avid for presents
And greedy for gifts;
They do not judge the case of the orphan,
And the widow's cause never reaches them.

For the Record

2007-04-30T19:25:00.001-05:00

Tyler Cowen, the economist behind Marginal Revolution, quotes Seth Roberts, a psychologist (and blogger), quoting Tyler Cowen:

Blogging, of course, is one of the ultimate forms of self-experimentation.…Your blood pressure, how your brain is working, what new ideas you have, how your attention span has changed, how you now read other people’s work differently, who you find yourself liking more (and less), etc. I believe those effects [of blogging] are often quite striking.

Cowen fills in the details:

Blogging makes us more oriented toward an intellectual bottom line, more interested in the directly empirical, more tolerant of human differences, more analytical in the course of daily life, more interested in people who are interesting, and less patient with Continental philosophy.

Wink! Whattaya think, bloggers?

Hm

2007-04-30T19:13:00.001-05:00

Preview art from Andy Diggle and Jock's upcoming Green Arrow: Year One mini-series ("a frivolous playboy with little care for anyone or anything — apparently even himself…finds that he does care about something…justice!"):

"Real's just for people who can't afford to fake it."

The Past: Never Not Funny

2007-04-29T18:49:00.001-05:00

Via the excellent Paul Collins:

in 150-year-old correspondence between Darwin’s publisher, John Murray, and a clergyman, the Rev Whitwell Elwin…[Elwin] urged Murray not to publish [On the Origin of Species]. Darwin’s theories were so farfetched, prejudiced and badly argued that right-thinking members of the public would never believe them, he said. “At every page I was tantalised by the absence of the proofs,” Elwin wrote, adding that the “harder and drier” writing style was also off-putting.

He suggested that Darwin’s earlier observations on pigeons should be made into a book as “everybody is interested in pigeons”. He enthused: “The book would be received in every journal in the kingdom and would soon be on every table.”

—Shirley English, "Darwin Nearly Failed to Evolve in Print," Times 25 April 2007.

Just Lose It Ah Ah Ah Ah

2007-04-27T03:37:00.000-05:00

Today I saw a sign that said

The Craze over Bio-Ontologies

I think it was advertising a talk of some kind. I hope that someone's finally getting to the bottom of this; the bio-ontologies fad has been out of control for way too long, and I, for one, want some answers.

ORIENTALISM

2007-04-25T20:17:00.000-05:00

This just in from Mrs. Keyhole:

So, I need to read Dracula for one of my classes, and I bought a used copy. I just started reading it today, and it turns out the person who owned it before has written all over it — lots of underlining, and a few comments here and there ("superior attitude --> insulting people he encounters; bookish/learnish [sic] perspective } ORIENTALISM"), but it's mainly just single words copied from the text itself. I guess they're words the person didn't know (sometimes they have the definition next to them), but the weird thing is, even though they're written out meticulously — each letter looks like it was really carefully formed and all that — they're all spelled wrong. "Idolastrous," "polygot," "calèch" (should be "calèche" — he got the accent right, just couldn't bring himself to finish the word…), "volumptous lips," (to be fair, I think that one isn't actually in the text — Dracula's lips have a "remarkable ruddiness," but there's nothing mentioned as to the level of…volump they have), oh, and my personal favorite: "DRAUCLA."

I dunno, I guess the person's got dyslexia or something, and I should be nicer, but…c'mon!

All It Takes

2007-04-25T18:49:00.001-05:00

The threshold necessary for small groups to conduct warfare has finally been breached, and we are only starting to feel its effects.…Over time, perhaps in as little as twenty years, and as the leverage provided by technology increases, this threshold will finally reach its culmination—with the ability of one man to declare war on the world and win.

—John Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2007), 8.

Trilling

2007-04-25T15:03:00.001-05:00

On the fetishization of "madness" as a form of ultimate authenticity:

The falsities of an alienated social reality are rejected in favour of an upward psychopathic mobility to the point of divinity, each one of us a Christ—but with none of the inconveniences of undertaking to intercede, of being a sacrifice, of reasoning with rabbis, of making sermons, of having disciples, of going to weddings and to funerals, of beginning something and at a certain point remarking that it is finished.

—Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), 171-2.

A Technology

2007-04-25T14:51:00.001-05:00

From wp:

The Emotion Engine is the name of the Central Processing Unit (CPU) used in Sony PlayStation 2 video game consoles.

This is how our emotions work:

While the Emotion Engine is now getting on in years, most PlayStation 3s apparently still use it for backwards compatibility. Unfortunately, Wikipedia notes, PlayStation 3 units that use PAL color-encoding — those sold in Europe (but not France) and most of Asia, for instance — "do not include an Emotion Engine as a matter of cost-saving." They rely on "emulation" instead. But these units are in fact ahead of their time: "It is believed that eventually a hardware revision of NTSC units [ones using the color-encoding standard that prevails in North America] will remove the Emotion Engine chip in these territories." It's only a matter of time.

The Economist Views Bikini Waxing from under the Blindfold of False Necessity

2007-04-25T13:44:00.000-05:00

WHILE driving through rural South Carolina recently, I was surprised to find that nearly every home I passed had a sign advertising some cottage industry. Each offered a range of services from “small welding projects” to “bikini waxes”&hellip:

In developed economies home production is generally inefficient. Take the at home bikini waxer, whom I assume is female. Performing bikini waxes from her home, on a back country road, limits the scale of her business…

But does this hold in the internet era? For waxing, yes…

…workers who forgo other employment opportunities will not receive the level of benefits they would get with a traditional employer; and economically, their labour will not reap the productivity benefits of scale and network effects.

Thus saith The Economist's Free Exchange blog. The smug and static picture of the economy here enrages me to no end. The writer is so fucking confident that s/he, the enlightened journalist, understands the costs and benefits of self-employment far more than the ignorant South Carolina bikini waxes, tragically forgoing scale and network effects out of some overdeveloped sense of pride or autonomy. Doesn't the entire structure of neoclassical economics that The Economist so smirkingly defends rest upon the belief that, all things considered, businesspeople know better than outsiders and regulators, that one of the prime benefits of a free market is its ability to elicit correct information at just the right time? I could have sworn that I was just reading something trotting out that damn Hayek argument the other day (not that I think it's a bad argument, but still). Are at-home bikini waxers really so stupid, so immune to the promptings of the invisible hand, that they need the help of some globetrotting Economist reporter to shore up their bottom line (apparently by "set[ting] up a commercial shop in a central location")? It's incredible how casually the writer moves between a "command economy" perspective on the stupidity and waste of competing small entrepreneurs and an academic and arrogant political economy whose sole justification is the promise that those same competing small entrepreneurs will lead us to utopia.

And how dare these fucktards purport to know the effect "the internet era" will have on bikini-waxing efficiency. Who the hell knows? Where is The Economist's crystal ball? What if multiple bikini-waxing establishments ally, pooling supplies and marketing dollars and customer references — could that yield scale and network effects? What if they enter into relationships with, I don't know, tanning salons, hair-cutting shacks, whatever — what principle of economics precludes the ability of any number of diverse initiatives to substitute for the glories of scale & network that The Economist apparently believes can only come from some kind of pubis-pruning equivalent of a megachurch?

These people think they're the capitalists. But in their stodgy self-satisfaction they forget the words of the prophet: all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned…

The "O" Should Actually Be a Little Heart

2007-04-25T12:04:00.001-05:00

I just discovered in my "dropbox" a mini-poster from "POM," the company that makes pomegranate juice & tea. It's a periodic table; the joke is that they've added POM as element 122!! Shrug. The weird thing, though, is that the back of the poster says, in part, "Check out POM Tea's entire ad campaign and buy the collectible posters at www.pomtea.com." I guess they're trying to do an Absolut thing. But wait: check out their entire ad campaign? I thought the postmodern ad was premised on effacing its own advertorial purpose, because modern sophisticates won't deign to pay attention to something that transparently sells itself to them — hence the blog title "Ads without Products" (I mention this chiefly because said blog praised Michael Bérubé's awful, ignorant review of Unger's What Should the Left Propose?, to which I will return sooner or later). Somehow I feel this Pom periodic table resonating with a baffling press release put out by DC Comics and circulated in various places:

KRYPTONITE DISCOVERED IN SERBIA

[…]

A new mineral, matching the chemical composition for kryptonite suggested in ‘Superman Returns,’ was discovered by a team of geologists in a Serbian mine, according to London’s Natural History Museum. Unable to find a suitable match to a known mineral, the geologists turned to the Internet, which revealed the rock’s relation to the most famous element in comic books.

“The universe is full of mysteries, and some have been foreshadowed by comics,” said Paul Levitz, DC Comics President and Publisher. “We look forward to scientists figuring this one out.”

This has nothing to do with krypton the element, as it turns out. The story seems to be that the Serbian guy googled the chemical composition of his new mineral, and it matched some background text that shows up in the Superman movie. But kryptonite is radioactive, dammit! There's no way it's just sodium and boron or whatevs. Serbia and Hollywood are lying about kryptonite. 8 |

Doing a Thing Redux: Feelings, Art

2007-04-25T11:26:00.000-05:00

Does it make sense to love a work of art or a genre thereof not because of its consistent quality but rather because, against a backdrop of repetitive mediocrity, it occasionally shines forth with some unexpected burst of transcendence? I think, at the risk of sounding arrogant, that this is one reason why I enjoy both hip-hop and superhero comics. In the past hour, reading through Lionel Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity, which I pretty much love, I've been unable to stop thinking about a weird line from a stealth-favorite song of mine: "No Other" by Lil Wayne and Juelz Santa, from the 2006 DJ Drama/Lil Wayne mixtape Dedication 2. Wayne's from New Orleans, so he riffs desultorily (here and throughout) about how shitty that whole hurricane thing was, and how shitty life in general is. It's pretty good stuff. But I prefer Santana's verse, especially a bit into his opening: "Wayne, I feel your pain and I see your stress / How they think your people s'posed to get through Katrina off a FEMA check?" (Answer: selling drugs.) But I don't want that jokey parenthetical to undermine the achievement here. I honestly get that whole spine-tingly thing every time the words pass through my speakers. Santana means it, goddammit, and while he's only a few seconds away from converting the whole thing into a paean to the gangster lifestyle, up to and including torturing enemy drug dealers, he's genuinely sad for that fleeting moment. "I feel your pain"? What a weird thing for a rapper to say. What a brave thing for a rapper to say, if you want to be a little ridiculous about it. See also a far superior song: Clipse, "I'm Not You," Lord Willin', at 3:48: "I see them pay for they fix when they kids couldn’t eat / And with this in mind, I still didn’t quit / And that’s how I know that I ain’t shit." Would any of this have an impact if it weren't so atypical? Or maybe I'm the only idiot who thinks it has an impact at all.

Doing a Thing, Seat of Pants

2007-04-23T13:02:00.000-05:00

Keyhole Confessions Mark II begins here. How goes it?

I just finished reading Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh's book Off the Books: [lol: but it's a book!] The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor, which came strongly recommended by Tyler Cowen, the economist who's (chiefly) behind the ever lovable blog Marginal Revolution. I'm not sure that I share Cowen's unreserved enthusiasm for Venkatesh's work — I found the prose dull and distracting (similar, in fact, to Cowen's in In Praise of Commercial Culture, which is nevertheless also worth reading), and textual déjà vu cropped up in way too many places, as if no one at Harvard University Press could have been bothered to read over the whole book in one sitting before sending it off to the printers. But regardless: the book's about the underground/"shady" economy of a particular ghetto neighborhood in Chicago. I use the word "ghetto" advisedly: it's more or less isolated from outside influences and resources, it's almost entirely black, and it's desperately poor. But as Venkatesh shows, drawing on years of observations accumulated by hanging out with the people who live in this place, high rates of (official) unemployment and anemic streams of income don't testify to economic idleness. Actually, the ghetto has a crazy, amazing, inspiring economy, vital and active and testifying to the irrepressible human impulse -- dare I say it? -- to truck and barter. There are tons of "small-business owners," even if the small business is stealing socks and selling them in the park, or selling drugs, or sleeping on the floor of a convenience store to serve as a makeshift security guard (as some homeless people do).

Problems: two thriving sectors in the ghetto are super-illegal and taboo: drug-selling and "sex work." Also, even legit-ish business activities, which keep everyone alive and kicking, typically involve wages below the minimum, entrepreneurship without the proper permits, use of spaces in violation of building and zoning codes, etc. So the law is almost never on these people's side: the pseudo-contracts and property rights on which they rest their livelihoods have no legal standing. Uh oh. Also: in the absence of much policing or government, gangs stand in as sovereigns, taxing businesses (quite literally) in exchange for sham protection and attempting to secure a monopoly on the means of violence. Also: partially because of overly fearful assessment of the risks of trying new things outside of the comforting familiarity of ghetto life, people don't try to expand into radically new areas or ways of doing business or even different parts of the city. Too scary, too risky. They always nurse dreams of the big time, but they don't dare to try to live them out. And they're probably right: the world would probably fuck them, as things now stand.

Solutions: legalize prostitution and drug sales, but don't replace them with monopolistic brothels or "Big Pharma." A profusion of competing sellers should yield, in classical fashion, lower prices and better output, while preserving employment within the territory. Less violence and exploitation because the law can now be invoked. Puritans will object, but: whatevs. Slash regulations, grant amnesty to existing quasi-legal enterprises, institutionalize and regularize and accord legal existence to block associations and, hell, even gangs, as long as they stop killing people. These neighborhoods are already more organized than the boldest civic-participation leftist fantasy world; what we need to do is grant the organizations the respect and power they deserve and have earned. Energize and empower and liberalize. Fuck it: make these places islands of libertarian experiment, dispensing with the bugbears of the minimum wage and lengthy permit processes. Maybe it'll work. Beats doing nothing, and at least it would mark out a direction: not weeping over the ghetto as a hopeless den of sin and crime but recognizing, purifying, and radicalizing the elements within it that command respect and spark hope. Don't fucking hand it over to the homogenizing powers of shopping malls and yuppies and blah blah, although such things may occasionally help, as long as they're in service of the larger trajectory. The point is to preserve the diversity of activities, the competing nodes of authority, the casual amenability to individual initiative so alien to us white-collar office drones -- but to give them greater scope, more power, and a larger setting on which to play out. Other thoughts? I'm in a mood. Maybe we can put our money where n+1's mouth is.

There Is No Greater Disappointment

2007-02-01T08:32:00.001-05:00

…than looking at an HTML syllabus, getting excited that the professor is smart enough to just use simple text-based formats instead of needlessly resorting to Word or PDF, but then viewing the source and seeing this:

<html xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" xmlns:w="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word" xmlns:st2="urn:schemas:contacts" xmlns:st1="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40">

You just exported that shit from Word! You're a fraud! Richard Freeman, I thought we could have something together, but I guess I was wrong.

Adoring Fans

2007-01-03T03:56:00.000-05:00

I've come to realize in dramatic fashion that this blog, and the interests it draws on, are a liability in my life, at least for now. Blog silence will prevail for quite some time. Sorry.

Curveball, Futurist Edition

2007-01-02T04:51:00.000-05:00

More blockquoting from Edge. This time, I give you Jaron Lanier, who looks a bit like a Psychlo:

If all this sounds a little too fantastic or obscure, here's another approach to the same idea using more familiar reference points. Imagine a means of expression that is a cross between the three great new art forms of the 20th century: jazz improvisation, computer programming, and cinema. Suppose you could improvise anything that could be seen in a movie with the speed and facility of a jazz improviser. What would that mean for the sense of connection between you and someone you love?

It would mean that we were both awesome. There are plenty more details if you follow the link, but honestly: what a beautiful idea.

On a less reverent note, that Wikipedia article on Psychlos (the alien villains from Battlefield Earth) explains that (according to L. Ron Hubbard) "because of their extra digit, the Psychlos naturally developed a 'base 11' positional notation system, the mathematics of which is the basis of the teleportation technology that enabled them to dominate the galaxy." Um. Besides being ridiculous on its face and mathematically idiotic – base 11, base 10, who cares, it's just notation, and even if it does have some effect on the development of mathematics, that effect would undoubtedly shrink to nothing by the time a culture came up with the technology necessary for teleportation — this premise fails to take into account the fact that polydactyly — extra fingers or toes — is actually a genetically dominant trait in humans. So if working "naturally" in base 11 really did translate into reproductive success — which is precisely Hubbard's claim, at least according to Wikipedia — then polydactyl humans should be everywhere. Not just because their genes would own the pool, but because they could fucking teleport.

Further Wiki probes reveal that the Amish have higher rates of polydactyly than other groups, which I suppose I could have guessed. This immediately suggests an idea for what would be an all-time classic sci-fi movie — one that would not only rake in billions at the box office but finally end the brutal war between Scientologists and the Pennsylvania Dutch.

Not an action movie — an action-at-a-distance movie.

(Wamp wamp.)

Admirably Even-Handed

2007-01-02T02:19:00.001-05:00

I'm sure we've all done this before, but:

One Man's Fantasy

2007-01-01T22:25:00.001-05:00

When I die, there's going to be rappers at my funeral — hopefully, you know what I mean.…

—Lil Wayne, "Weezy on Retirement," Dedication 2 track 13.

Something to Chew On

2007-01-01T20:40:00.001-05:00

The Edge World Question Center has released the answers to its 2007 head-scratcher, "What are you optimistic about?" The respondents are mostly scientists/technology people, and/so the answers aren't uniformly gripping, but I found this riff, from psychologist Martin E.P. Seligman, pretty fascinating:

I am optimistic that God may come at the end.…

Consider…the principle of NonZero that Robert Wright (2000) articulates in his book of the same name. Wright argues that the invisible hand of biological and cultural evolution ineluctably select for the complex over the simple because positive sum games have the survival and reproductive edge over zero sum games, and that over epochal time more and more complex systems, bulkily, but necessarily, arise.…

A process that selects for more complexity is ultimately aimed at nothing less than omniscience, omnipotence, and goodness. Omniscience is, arguably, the literally ultimate end product of science. Omnipotence is, arguably, the literally ultimate end product of technology. Righteousness is, arguably, the literally ultimate end product of positive institutions. So in the very longest run the principle of Nonzero heads toward a God who is not supernatural, but who ultimately acquires omnipotence, omniscience and goodness through the natural progress of Nonzero. Perhaps, just perhaps, God comes at the end.

A Solid Sentence from a Blog I Read, That's All I'm Offering Here

2007-01-01T18:31:00.002-05:00

He's not a geotechnical engineer, or some wildly charismatic salesman of earth-moving equipment; he's just a man with a water hose and access to a few corn silos.

Via BLDGBLOG.

Fuck this year.

One of the Best, Most Thorough Nerd Riffs I've Seen in Some Time

2007-01-01T18:31:00.001-05:00

Via Merlin Mann's del.icio.us links, something no one will enjoy:

The phrase “giant penguin cock” is bound to offend someone. The destination anchor itself is harmless. Semantically, we want to let our visitor’s user-agent know that within our A element, the user may encounter a word, or phrase, or paragraph, or image, that is NSFW. REL would be the incorrect attribute under that scenario. CLASS would work much better.…

There's more, of course. I also enjoy this comment from "Ned Baldessin":

Funny geeky idea, but don't you find it slightly ethnocentric to standardize in a universal spec a very western set of moral/cultural values?

Of course, goatse is probably off limits on all continents, but what about corner cases like female breasts, that you can see on huge billboards over here in france…

The Thing about Derrida

2007-01-01T18:30:00.000-05:00

On page 27 of Of Grammatology (trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976)), Derrida asks, "What can a science of writing begin to signify, if it is granted…that historicity itself it [sic] tied to the possibility of writing…?" That should be "is" — an obvious typo.

Or is it?

KEYHOLE CONFESSIONS YEAR-IN-REVIEW 2006

2006-12-31T00:52:00.001-05:00

It's the roundup you've been waiting for.

Best Internet Things of 2006

Blogs.
Firefox.
ING Direct.
Wikipedia.

Things on the Internet That Aren't That Good, Actually Kind of Bad, but I Still Fuck with Them of 2006

BoingBoing.
Newsarama.
Any Gawker blog, especially Gawker and Lifehacker, but with the possible exception of Defamer. Do the words "fall off" mean anything to you, Mr. Denton?
Google. j/k Google is really good!!

Internet Personalities I'm Obsessed With/Want to Be, Male Edition

Ze Frank/Merlin Mann/Jason Kottke. These are all basically the same guy. One of the cutest parts of Infinite Crisis was when someone, maybe Alex Luthor, revealed that Kyle Rayner would have been the Earth-8 Green Lantern (and Breach, the Earth-8 Captain Atom) had the original Crisis not occurred. This is kind of how I view these three wired hipster hunks: they would have been the same superhero in three different universes, but instead they're three slightly different superheroes in a single universe. Is anyone still reading?
Cosma Shalizi. The man is a genius. Read his notebooks.

Internet Personalities I'm Obsessed With/Want to Be, Female Edition

I don't like girls.

Best Single Girl I Know

Jackie.

Best Intangible Christmas Gift Ever Given by Me to My Girlfriend (in 2006)

This one. (Mouse over the large yellow duckie.)

Member of My Tiny Audience Who I Expect Will Think Less of Me Because of the "Personal" Nature of This Post

Luxemburg.

Kind of Hole I Never Want to Talk About with Anyone Ever Again, 2006–07

Keyhole. This poses some problems.

So Last Summer

Journalism.

So Next Summer

Capitalism.

Blog to Watch, 2007

New Sulky Notes. "The presence felt, the pressure is on." Sulky has already challenged my dominance over the "quoting definitions from Urban Dictionary" sector of the blogosphere. What will the new year bring? For one thing, a Clipse mixtape subtitled The Spirit of Competition. That is relevant here. "I'm the best since he died and he lied / The spirit of competition / One [blog] could start jihad."

Best Blog-Related Business Idea I Came Up With Last Night

T-shirts with bloggers' faces and names on them. (Sulky helped with this idea.)

Neurotic Blog Practice That I'm Going to Straight-Up Brag About of the Year

In keeping with the principles of content–style separation and semantic markup, I tag foreign-language words like so: <span lang="lat" xml:lang="lat">Carpe diem<span>. (The attribute redundancy is required by the XHTML 1.0 specification.)

Personal Blogging Rate, 2006

Sometimes.

Personal Blogging Rate, 2007

Constantly.

The Question(s) of the Day

2006-12-30T22:49:00.000-05:00

This nation of 27 million people spent much of the day crowding around television sets to watch mesmerizing replays of a videotape that showed the 69-year-old Mr. Hussein being led to the gallows at dawn by five masked executioners, and having a noose fashioned from a thick rope of yellow hemp lowered around his neck. In the final moments shown on the videotape, he seemed almost unnaturally calm and cooperative.

—John F. Burns, "Hussein Video Grips Iraq; Attacks Go On," New York Times 31 Dec. 2006.

Is this good or bad for the drug-legalization movement? (It is clear that this kind of charming/"finely observed" detail — "yellow hemp" — is a "thing" par excellence.)
What exactly is "unnatural" about cooperating with your executioners? Doesn't almost every state-run execution proceed in this fashion? Not to do what I'm about to do, but "discipline" has long since overcome the kind of chaos and uncertainty that greeted the ancien régime executions Foucault talks about in D&P. Hell, even our good friend Charles I famously took his execution in stride, way back in 1649:

Then he called to the bishop for his cap, and having put it on, asked the executioner, 'Does my hair trouble you?' who desired him to put it all under his cap…

Then the king asked the executioner, 'Is my hair well?'…

After a very short pause, his Majesty stretching forth his hands, the, executioner at one blow severed his head from his body; which, being held up and showed to the people, was with his body put into a coffin covered with black velvet and carried into his lodging.

His blood was taken up by divers persons for different ends: by some as trophies of their villainy; by others as relics of a martyr; and in some hath had the same effect, by the blessing of God, which was often found in his sacred touch when living."

[Via.]

I wonder how long it will take for bits of Hussein to wind up on eBay…

Perhaps the best thing about this logo: it's from an eBay item described as "SADDAM HUSSEIN anti iraq war t-shirt mens peace arabic." Well, I guess that's as effective a protest as any we've had so far…

The Square on the Robot's Left Shoulder Is a Sensor of Some Kind

2006-12-30T21:52:00.000-05:00

Steve Ballmer, via the L.A. Times:

Many technologies have the potential to catch fire, including Internet television, mobile video devices and even robots.

He's not lying.

This has been the second in a series of crude cartoons based on comments made by Microsoft executives. Stay tuned for more.

Oh Yes He Does

2006-12-30T00:17:00.000-05:00

Bill Gates does not eat 1,000 times as much breakfast cereal as the valet who parks his car.

False. Check out the pictorial evidence.

[Quote via Free Exchange. Picture via me. Now that I have internet access in my room, I'm basically living in a universe of my own creation.]

I Will Look on Your Treasures, Gypsy

2006-12-29T18:31:00.001-05:00

I get the reference and everything, but this is just in poor taste:

He's So Pleased to See Them!

2006-12-29T00:17:00.000-05:00

We're all familiar with the Mission Accomplished incident, but did we realize that Bush was greeted on the aircraft carrier on by Teletubbies?

P.S.: This is my 100th post, apparently, not that that means anything.

You Have to Admit This

2006-12-28T20:28:00.000-05:00

So apparently that's just the title of the next Harry Potter book. But you have to admit that, without that information at hand, it's kind of weird to discover something like this in your mom's handwriting. It's like: is she trying to tell me something? Am I in danger?

Kamino

2006-12-28T19:13:00.001-05:00

Today the FDA released a draft risk assessment re: meat and milk derived from cloned animals, which basically said that it's not dangerous at all. Of course, why should it be? If the animal is really a clone, there's no reason to expect there's anything wrong with it that wasn't wrong with the original animal. And since cloning is still really expensive, it appears (i.e. the Times and the FDA tell me) that the technology will, for the foreseeable future, only be used to preserve good breeds, not to mass-produce critters. It's not like they have accelerated-aging tanks full of green goo, which I'm pretty sure is the crucial missing link between what we can do now and what they did in Episode II. Maybe we'll end up eating the grandchildren of a clone of an especially genetically awesome cow or something, but who really cares?

Everyone, apparently. Or enough stupid consumer groups to get the story in the news. Look, I'm perfectly willing to believe that the FDA would approve some nasty technology because an influential or rich company wanted it approved, but here I'm much more inclined to side with the scientists than with the self-appointed advocates who clearly haven't read the 700+ pages that the FDA released today, let alone the published studies they're based on, and who can only profit from further confusing the public about what cloning actually is. Even BoingBoing — BoingBoing, of all places/people/blogs! — seems to think that clonemeat is icky, that it's going to be in stores tomorrow, and that, I don't know, it probably has DRM on it or something. Yeesh.

Admittedly, though, I'm a little uneasy over this phrase from the FDA's press release: "The draft risk assessment…draws science-based conclusions." Are those like faith-based initiatives?

And there's still the strange phenomenon of the giant clone fetus, known among scientists as "Large Offspring Syndrome" (LOS — no Wikipedia page!), which hardly sounds more official if you ask me. Basically, when you clone some animals (mice are apparently exempt), the babies sometimes turn out big and deformed and nasty. Also, "LOS newborns may appear to be edematous (fluid filled)," but that happens to the best of us from time to time. Anyway, the mysterious and disgusting placenta seems to be the culpable party in all this, as well as the even more awesome fact that clonebabies sometimes have huge belly buttons. So blame the placentae, not the cloners. Placentae are like mitochondria and cats: always plotting something.
Science quote of the day:

Obesity in late-gestation cattle is a commonly reported problem resulting in anorexia…

If only it worked that way in humans…
Now out of date, but probably worth mentioning, via BoingBoing: an "Army vehicle piñata" for your next jihadarama:
Another leftover, explanation of which would ruin the effect:

Those are all the headlines for now, sports racers!

WHAT IS THIS THING DOING IN MY HOUSE

2006-12-28T14:59:00.001-05:00

His Name Is Probably Hideki

2006-12-28T14:36:00.001-05:00

Printing images using a PictBridge compliant printer

[…]

Notes:

You cannot print movies.

Also:

You can use the following batteries below:

R6 (size AA) alkaline batteries…

ZR6 (size AA) Oxy Nickel Primary Battery…

HR 15/51:HR6…

You cannot use the batteries unlisted above

I've done a fair amount of listing in my life, but I can't say I've ever had the pleasure of unlisting…

A few minutes after typing that out, it occurred to me what they're trying to say there: you can use the batteries they list, but you can't use any batteries they don't list. Duh. But there's something extremely strange about speaking of "the batteries unlisted above." It sounds as if they're actively committing a deed called "unlisting" upon a definite set of objects, as opposed to merely neglecting to list some hazy blob of stuff — as if, whenever they enumerate some possibilities, they're also not-enumerating every single other possibility, where not-enumerating is a physical exertion that requires an expenditure of energy, sweat trickling down their foreheads. As D.L. said recently, every time you order something at a restaurant, you're simultaneously not ordering everything else — and the anxiety he expressed over this ineluctable aspect of the human condition is about what I imagine was experienced by some Japanese guy at the Sony factory where my camera was made as he painstakingly unlisted all the non-R6/ZR6/HR 15/51:HR6 batteries he could think of, hoping against hope that he didn't forget anything.

Exegesis

2006-12-27T21:48:00.000-05:00

So, as previous entries have already indicated in abundance, I'm currently reading a book called Dressing the Elite: Clothes in Early Modern England. It's by no means a terrible book, but it does exemplify a phenomenon that I've noticed, in my diletantish way, in a lot of recent historiography: the baleful influence of the perceived need to make an argument. Dressing the Elite is, at bottom and at its best, a collection of citations, anecdotes, and examples, many of them funny, most of them interesting — but it doesn't exactly make a point. It just sort of assembles different materials pertaining to clothes from a range of disparate sources and writes sentences around them — a bit of summary, a bit of light analysis. There's certainly some light shed on what people were wearing back then and just how intensely they worried about it, but nothing earth-shaking. If you ask me, though, that's just fine. There's nothing wrong with compiling information, publishing it, and moving on. This is how people learn about things. It's a valuable enough public service — maybe not so valuable that a book needed to be printed putting this stuff out there, but if we lived in a world of fully electronic academic publishing, it would most definitely be worthwhile to let this work circulate on the internets.

But because the academia of today insists that scholarly works can't just compile information but must also make contentious, counterintuitive, non-commonsensical claims, Dressing the Elite ends up going in for a lot of dodgy, secondhand critical-theory nonsense that doesn't really help anyone understand anything. It's a pose, not an argument — but it looks enough like an argument to pass for one. For instance, Vincent (the author) mentions how pretty much everyone who writes about sumptuary law says that it was kind of dumb, not really enforced, never worked, etc. But she follows the lead of the plagiarist Alan Hunt (who was attacked in these "pages" on November 26 — no links, catdogs, I'm offline!) in scare-quoting this whole line of discussion as, like, totally "obvious." Therefore wrong.

Tempting as it is to accept this at face value, Hunt, from his revisionist position, warns us against such easy assumptions. To think so is to fall into the trap of equating the enforcement of a law with its validity and significance (Vincent 140).

You know, I would have thought that was a pretty safe trap to fall into in most cases, if by "significance" you mean "significance to the average person at the time, or let's say to more than 1% of the population of the country." And I have no idea what "validity" is supposed to mean there — a law that goes unenforced is certainly still "valid" if it was passed by means of the proper procedure, but all that means is that it's a law.

We're supposed to be impressed by the counterintuitive move of sidestepping the enforcement issue, but the problem is that neither Vincent nor Hunt have actually uncovered any evidence that previous researchers missed. So they just try to spin it differently: "Hunt points out that the paradox at the heart of the sumptuary project is that, although supported by the majority, it was impossible to enforce compliance with its provisions. 'Indeed enforcement always ran the risk of alienating the broad consensus that favoured the existence of such laws'" (Vincent 142–3). The idea is that people were sort of in favor of ending excess in apparel, but they didn't want to stop wearing fancy clothes themselves, so they might favor a law about it, but they wouldn't really follow it.

This is just a "human nature" point restated in slightly more pretentious terms by people who would shudder to be associated with the notion of a "fixed," "ahistorical" human nature: people kind of want to punish their neighbors for stuff they do, but they don't want to be punished themselves. Not that profound. But in the course of dressing up this point, Vincent and Hunt casually make up a bunch of stuff. "The sumptuary project" (there's that goddamn word again) was "supported by the majority"? The majority of whom? Occasionally a majority of the House of Commons and the House of Lords would vote for one law or another, but plenty of these laws failed to command majority support. But the unqualified use of "the majority" clearly hints at a broader meaning: a majority of the population of England. But obviously there weren't public-opinion polls in the 17th century. And if there had been, they wouldn't have been particularly relevant to this issue. No one has a clue whether or not the majority supported sumptuary laws or even knew about them, but through sheer rhetorical oomph Vincent & Hunt can kinda sorta pretend they do, even though they would deny it if pressed. Likewise there's that bit about "broad consensus" — these are just words. How broad? Give me some numbers, Hunt. You almost certainly don't have any, because votes in Parliament weren't counted with anything like consistency during this period.

Vincent moves on to a pretty cute story about how the then Prince Charles and the then Marquis of Buckingham got caught passing through France wearing crappy disguises — fake beards that fell off. French dudes were like, "Um, you guys are hell of shady with those fake beards; what gives?" They were like, "Here is a bribe" (I think). The end.

But Vincent can't just stop at telling a cute story, so she has to ask silly questions like "with their disguise but not their identities exposed, why were these men so questionable that their movements had to be marked and controlled?…[W]hat was so transgressive about not being as they seemed?" I mean, isn't this kind of, well, obvious? Disguises in the night = thieves. You wear a disguise when you don't want to get caught for something. It's not "transgressive"; it's just suspicious. "Marked," "controlled," "transgressive," the idea that caring about differences between "being" and "seeming" makes you an authenticity-obsessed reactionary with weird sexual feelings: these are just stupid vocabulary tricks that give a patina of critical-theory gravitas to a kind of affected ignorance about why someone would be worried that Englishmen with fake beards were wandering around the countryside at night. Hell, I'd be worried too if I were a 17th-century French guy, and I certainly don't have any weird sexual feelings.

Vincent also riffs on how everyone hated vagabonds and vagrants and were super-scared of them. All of those attitudes go, of course, into intense scare quotes, because we postmodernists have to love and cherish the rootless and the marginal. Okay, fine. The vagrants got a raw deal, their lives were terrible, and the noblemen and gentry were major assholes. But why does this mean we have to pretend that they were just hallucinating the dangers? Vagabonds killed and stole and did unpleasant things, which made it scary to go around at night; you can retain sympathy for them, or claim that the fear was still overblown in proportion to the severity of the danger, but those positions are too obvious to take, so Vincent has to basically suggest that all the fears about vagabonds were invented. Because, I don't know, everyone was scared of cross-dressers.

I've kind of lost my thread here, and I'm sure no one is interested in reading more examples of poorly justified arguments about 17th-century English clothing. But my bigger, equally poorly justified argument is this: Vincent's heart isn't really in all this hand-waving wankery. She doesn't try especially hard to make it compelling. Maybe that's simply because she knows that her audience will just accept that this is the way you talk about "the body" and such nowadays. But I feel like what actually happened was that she got interested in a funny little topic, drew up a list of cases to analyze, and forced herself to make more of them than she really had a right to, because That's What Academics Do. What a waste. Why not just let it be what it is?

This is sort of related to a point that Unger makes in Knowledge and Politics when he distinguishes between the classical humanities — grammar, theology, and legal doctrine — and the corresponding social sciences — linguistics, the sociology of religion, and the sociology of law. No one really does the former anymore: developing and recapitulating old ideas with minor adjustments, treating oneself as part of the same tradition as the stuff you're analyzing instead of as a distanced, third-party observer. It's more modest, more boring, maybe, but there's no reason to think that it has to be less rigorous or precise. And it's among the kinds of stuff that I really admire, come to think of it. Massive scholarly editions of esoteric old books, annotated novels, comics that refurbish but don't fundamentally alter characters like Cat-Man or Kite-Man or Plant-Man (all villains, incidentally): stuff that's ambitious in a limited but still occasionally major way, stuff that respects the past even as it moves beyond it, maybe recognizing that, yeah, it will probably never matter to anyone that this punctuation mark is a left bracket in Manuscript A but a left brace in Manuscript B, but fuck it, let's just mark it down anyway, because goddammit there is a thing called integrity in this world, and when we cut corners and fudge facts, we know we're doing it. And that's what makes it so dishonorable, even when the stakes are low and no one gets hurt.

That's why Alex is right to be annoyed that Marvel published a comic in which Spider-Man has a baby but has since refused to acknowledge that this ever happened. Sloppy and arrogant.

Happy birthday, Alex!

EDIT: I can't resist documenting my continuing annoyances.

With pseudo-scientific precision the rogues were sorted into complicated sub-groups, each of them named and explained.…Like insect specimens they were labelled and described, pinned to the page by the sharpness of textual observation (Vincent 157).

Well, we can hardly blame pamphlets from the late 16th century for being "pseudo-scientific" — science itself was "pseudo-scientific" back then. And the amount of violence inflicted upon the rogues by making up silly categories to put them in is roughly comparable to the amount of violence inflicted upon mullets or hipsters by those little books that do the same to them.

The Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics; or, Lamarck Vindicated

2006-12-27T21:47:00.002-05:00

In 1617 William Jones, in warning his readers, related the tale of a pregnant woman given to wearing ruffs. Afterwards she gave birth to a child with 'a peece of flesh of two fingers thicke round about, the flesh being wonderfully curled like a Gentlewomans attire'.

—Susan Vincent, Dressing the Elite: Clothes in Early Modern England (New York: Berg, 2003), 130.

Synchronicity

2006-12-27T21:47:00.001-05:00

Via my headphones, 50 Cent's "Surrounded by Hoes":

Everywhere I'm at, everywhere I go
I stay surrounded by ho's
Even when I'm trying to be on the low
I'm recognized by ho's

Via my research:

In 1562 a proclamation protested at 'the use of the monstrous and outrageous greatness of hose, crept alate into the realm'.

Legally Blonde

2006-12-27T21:45:00.000-05:00

On 11 January 1591/2, an attorney by the name of Kinge appeared before the Privy Council. Kinge was 'presumptuous' and presented himself before their Lordships 'in apparrell unfitt for his calling, with a guilt rapier, extreame greate ruffes and lyke unseemelie apparrell'. Presumably arrayed in his best, the unfortunate – or foolish – Kinge had dressed without regard for the acts and proclamations of apparel, and was in breach of the law. The Privy Council recommended that he be dismissed from his office and lose his job.

Such regulation by law of what a person may or may not wear is, within the broad outlines of 'decency', today in the West considered an unacceptable infringement of individual rights.…

—Susan Vincent, Dressing the Elite: Clothes in Early Modern England (New York: Berg, 2003), 117.

She can hem and haw as much as she wants, but Vincent still has this exactly wrong. If I testified before Congress or argued before the Supreme Court wearing, say, a t-shirt reading "U KNOW WHAT I SELL" or "STOP SNITCHING," I'm pretty sure they could pretend this was contempt and kick me out of everything. There's basically nothing strange or unfamiliar about the Privy Council's reaction to the "unseemly apparel," but Vincent, for the sake of a then/now comparative flourish "the past is a foreign country" etc. etc. riff, pretends that there is.

Just saying.

Holiday Remarks

2006-12-27T21:43:00.000-05:00

Italian food: just as Chester French's frontman once described the band's work as "music for people who don't listen to music," this is food for people who don't eat food. And, much like Chester French, it's extremely good anyway.
Presents received:
1. Digital camera (MySpace-style shots of my reflection in a mirror TK)
2. Beef jerky
3. one (1) box of Constant Comment teabags
Why do legal documents do that "one (1)" "two (2)" thing anyway? Is it just a failsafe system, i.e. there's a chance that someone (probably that cotton-candy–brained secretary of yours!) will "goof" and mistype a figure once, but there's a much lower chance that that person will make the same mistake twice in the same place, and any inconsistency will immediately throw up a red flag for editing? Or is there something more/less to it?
I kind of get a kick out of Richard Posner's monomaniacal efforts to examine every single social issue through the lens of simple algebra and simpler economics, but there's something a little troubling about the distribution of his opinions. Last week on the blog he shares with the economist Gary Becker, he wrote in favor of the New York trans-fat ban — basically because consumers are too stupid to internalize the now widely publicized findings about the negative health effects of trans fat, thus justifying a smidgen of paternalism. But this week he's literally arguing, albeit with a few caveats that come in toward the end, that the number of drunk-driving deaths that occur annually in the U.S. is optimal. Valuing a human life at $7 million, and assuming a 0.001 chance that drunk driving will result in a fatality, the expected cost of drunk driving is $7,000. But drunk drivers probably enjoy drunk driving about as much as they enjoy getting $7,000. So cutting down on drunk driving will make us worse off on average. I don't think I'm being particularly uncharitable in my reading of the argument. I would link directly to it, but I'm typing this offline; it should be easy enough to locate via the Google if you're actually interested.

At some point Posner (or was it Becker?) also argued that pre-emptive war on Iraq (or whoever) could be justified even if the likelihood that Iraq was ever going to do anything to harm the U.S. was very low. It's not hard to figure out how this works: you just have to multiply the low probability of a major attack by the extremely high cost that the U.S. would incur if such an attack happened. If you have the right estimates, then you can make the expected (/probability-weighted) cost look pretty scary indeed. Some blogger took this logic and ran with it, arguing that we should pre-emptively invade the moon, since, while the probability that moon-men a) exist, b) are hostile, and c) possess weapons of mass destruction is very, very low — say, 1 in 10¹² — the cost that they would inflict on the population of the earth, including loss of all life, destruction of all property, and deletion of all blogs, would be extremely high — say, $10²¹, so the expected cost of lunar terrorism would be around a billion dollars, so the world should be willing to spend that much trying to blow up the moon now before it's too late. Solving the collective-action problems that immediately arise is left as an exercise for the reader.
Unger, and plenty of other people, argue that the form of consciousness characteristic of the liberal state is basically a secularized version of transcendence — we consider ourselves to stand in relation to nature and to society as God stands in relation to the world. However, Tony Yayo says, "When I die, I hope heaven looks like the ghetto." Pure immanence. (He also says, "I'm cheap like the Chinese man with duck sauce.")
There are those who would deplore things they find insufficiently interesting as "obvious." I've never been a huge fan of the "obvious" critique, although I've certainly deployed it more than a few times in my day. The problem is that it's just too easy to make — too obvious, lol. Any well-articulated observation or theory will, after the fact, seem obvious; that's basically what defines a good explanation or an incisive comment. But that doesn't mean that the auditor would ever have spontaneously hit upon the observation or theory himself without the help of the observer/theorist; the auditor could easily have spent the rest of his life in ignorance. It's a piece of cake turned upside-down to claim independent discovery and roll your eyes when the other dude publishes first, more difficult by half to explain why you didn't beat him to the punch.

But even with the best of wills, you can end up heckling the "obvious" as "obvious" without really appreciating all the details. This is a large part of why I have a much better grasp of Marx than I do of Mill or Montesquieu, even if said grasp is loose and tremulous in all three cases. Classical liberal thought sounds so familiar, so American, so high-school, that you have to really concentrate to pick up the important nuances. Or at least I do. And I haven't. Which is why I don't know anything, still, after all these years.
An obvious point, but one I haven't seen anyone making recently: rapping is hard! Not "rapping" in the sense of content (interesting narratives, clever rhymes), which is also hard, but which people generally acknowledge as being hard, but rather "rapping" in the sense of form — saying things quickly and rhythmically but without slurring your speech or stumbling over your words. Nellie McKay and MC Paul Barman both try their hand at rapping, and both are kind of endearing, but neither can deliver the right syllables reliably; they just make a mess of things. (This is not, or at least not entirely, a racial thing: Eminem, for instance, has no trouble saying what he wants to say.) Anyone who has ever tried to rap along with their favorites — :-[ :-[ :-[ :-[ — understands this viscerally. But music critics who dismiss this or that catdog as a "bad rapper" rarely distinguish between the form and content sense in which someone can fail in this endeavor, even though this is a crucial distinction when, e.g, planning a party (not that I have ever done this).
It is somewhat well-known that, in the wake of the Matrix movies, lots of people named their daughters Trinity, after the Carrie-Ann (sp?) Moss character. But remember that Trinity was (one must assume) the hacker name she adopted after being rescued from the Matrix the first time around, much as Neo was the hacker name that Mr. (Thomas? I'm forgetting) Anderson took on. There's something a little perverse about a large number of people foisting upon their children a name that, in its original context, symbolized personal freedom and humanity's infinite power to redefine itself. Let the kids name themselves, that's what I say.
There's never a dull moment with Unger: "The closer the assignment of jobs comes to the ideal of merit, the more decisive the influence of natural talents in determining social place. The hierarchy of talents, distributed by nature without regard to men's moral purposes, succeeds the accident of inherited wealth and opportunity. The lucky ones can then cash in on the favors of nature like prostitutes whose price depends on whether they are fat or slim." Curveball!
It should be clear by now that I'm basically live-blogging my brain.
[At this point I fell asleep. My laptop also slept, humming and blinking, right by my side.]

Two Thoughts on the Origins of Life, Inspired by Reading about Science and Talking to My Ladyfriend

2006-12-22T04:48:00.000-05:00

[On the difficulties of explaining the origins of life:] Skilled chemists have prepared nucleotides in well-equipped laboratories, and linked them to form RNA, but neither chemists nor laboratories were present when life began on the early Earth.

Or were they? I propose that the easiest way to solve this problem is to invoke my favorite time-travel paradox. Life began when chemists travelled back in time, synthesized some nucleotides, dropped them in the ocean, and returned to their homes. Then, millions of years later, humans evolved, time travel was invented, and chemists travelled back in time, synthesized some nucleotides…
They [religious types and RNA World believers, mostly] would not be pleased if Freeman Dyson's description proved to be correct: "life began with little bags, the precursors of cells, enclosing small volumes of dirty water containing miscellaneous garbage."

Quote the ladyfriend: "ewww, life is gross!"

Two Things

2006-12-20T22:50:00.000-05:00

Straight-up reblogging this from Warren Ellis, because it's fabulous: a picture of the cosmos, just a few million years old.

It's got mom's eyes and dad's weird, computer-colored wiggly things.

"Whatever these objects are, they are intrinsically incredibly bright and very different from anything in existence today."…

"Imagine trying to see fireworks at night from across a crowded city," said Kashlinsky. "If you could turn off the city lights, you might get a glimpse at the fireworks. We have shut down the lights of the Universe to see the outlines of its first fireworks."

If I ever write comics, my first story will be based on the Batman cover where the Brain makes him want to commit suicide while Robin watches. But my second story will include a villain calmly saying, "We have shut down the lights of the universe."
A sign advertising a sleep study caught my eye: "WOMEN! Are you a night owl?" This sounded very strange and still does — first it addresses its reader(s) (implicitly) in the second-person plural, then in the second-person singular. But is this actually unusual? "Hey, kids! Tell your mom to buy you shit!" Perhaps it's just that in English "you" can be both singular and plural, so that ambiguity licenses various shady practices. But somehow the ad's use of the phrase "a night owl" throws a spanner in this particular works. Or am I just making this up? The words have lost all meaning!

Four Things

2006-12-20T22:08:00.001-05:00

I'm sure everyone remembers when Fox did this thing, but I've never actually seen it before. Nothing short of incredible. The commentary alone is transcendent.
Incidentally, a trend that I have noticed for a while now — people use "v." as the abbreviation for "vs." in all contexts. But, for whatever reason, in years past, "v." was always used exclusively in legal case names. DC vs. Marvel; Brown v. Board of Education. Somewhere along the way, people decided that "v." was always right and "vs." was always wrong. I am sure that this happened, but I have no idea when or why.
When I woke up today, I took a walk to the local non-Starbucks coffee shop, which legitimately offers superior lattes, albeit more expensive ones. At one point I looked at the sidewalk beneath me, and I saw a little red piece of paper. I looked more closely: yup. Just as I had suspected. The upper right corner of a Magic card. Color: red. Type: creature (a dragon of some kind). Summoning cost: three red and three generic mana. Ridiculously expensive, in other words. This was the kind of card that I and every other schmucky little boy just adored when we started to play the game — holy shit, a dragon! It can do so much damage! It is so tough! (In fact, a name occurs to me: Shiva Dragon? Is that the kind of dragon I have the top right corner of?) It only takes a few weeks to realize that these kinds of cards are pretty much useless if you're playing against anyone with a sense of strategy or a well-honed deck. Unfortunately, I had neither, but I was smart enough to realize that people with such things were superior to me, so I had aspirations. As a result, I shunned cards like Shiva Dragon, only to have them hand my ass to me on multiple occasions because I was talking the talk of intelligent play but not walking the walk.
I always preferred White Weenie decks to Control decks. Always.

No Matter What Pitchfork Tells You

2006-12-19T22:13:00.000-05:00

"Silent Shout" by the Knife aka the Arcade Knife on Fire is not the second-best song of any year, especially if that year is 2006. And "Trill" by Clipse is not the best song off Hell Hath No Fury, not even the second or third best. "Keys Open Doors"? Sure. "Chinese New Year"? Quite likely. "Wamp Wamp"? WAMP WAMP!!

I'm not mad at Pitchfork; I'm just disappointed.