October 2003 Archives

Arts Journal, one of the best art news sites on the web, started a group of weblogs a few months ago. My two favorites are by Kyle Gann and Greg Sandow, both on classical music. Gann, especially, targets my favorite era of classical music, the twentieth century. He also writes interesting reviews for the Village Voice.

His recent entry on Morton Feldman will give you a sense of Gann's work and the appeal of Feldman.

Just in case you've missed out on the last 25 years of contemporary music - and I could hardly blame you, so little attention is drawn to it - Morton Feldman was the greatest composer of the late 20th century. Or at least he looks that way. More significant than the accuracy or prematurity of the assessment is the fact that a remarkable percentage of young composers would concur with it. In the current Babel of musical styles, Feldman is almost the only composer (another might be Nancarrow, whose mechanical methods of writing for player piano, however, have not been as widely assimilated) whose music appeals across stylistic boundaries, among minimalists, postserialists, 12-tone holdouts, electronic composers, academics, Downtowners, MAX programmers, DJ artists, and other miscellaneous wastrels. His cross-cultural appeal comes from the fact that he created a postmodern sense of form - long, slow musical continua played in uniformly quiet dynamics - while holding onto the basic modernist pitch vocabulary of dissonant intervals. In other words, he deftly sidestepped the crisis of ever-increasing modernist complexity without giving in to what was seen as the vapid anti-intellectualism of minimalist consonance and tonality. Even more than that, by writing in his late years works of a continuous 90 minutes, three hours, four hours, even six hours in length, he reclaimed for the disspirited modern composer a sustainable measure of magnificent ambition, a pride in occupying an audience's time. Quietly but vehemently he asserted for all of us that new music is worth sitting still for, practicalities be damned. In addition to which, as his friend John Cage said, his music is "almost too beautiful."

Greg Sandow points to another interesting site for new American music. NewMusicBox

At this evening's Socrates' Cafe we discussed a question I raised: Why do we laugh? As a preface I started things off by asking whether humor is a biological/chemical response and if humor is a universal experience that crosses cultural boundaries. We all seemed to agree that there was a biological and chemical basis for laughter. Animals sometimes seem to have a sense of humor. There is a feeling of euphoria caused by laughter. Many studies have documented the power of facial expressions, smiles, etc. to make us feel better. But laughter is not a pure reflex. Sometimes we laugh without control, for example when we are being tickled, but other times we stifle our laughter, whether because of social context or some other factor.

Besides the biological part of laughter there is the socal and communicative part of laughter. One of the participants told a story about living in China and joining people at karaoke bars where the accepted cultural behavior was to embarrass oneself in front of friends and colleagues. When we watch sitcoms on television we laugh in response to the artificial laughter of the laugh track. In groups we may laugh at the frailities and foibles of another person. At work we may laugh cautiously at a superior's weak humor. Everywhere we laugh there seems to be a new situation and a new social context or nuance to our response. As people fired off example after example I became more and more amazed at the remarkable ability of the human brain to make social calculations at a blindingly fast speed. All of these factors are instantly calibrated leading to a hearty chuckle or else a contained giggle.

Laughter combines the instinctive reflex and the cognitive judgment of humanity. It's intriguing because it is controlled and uncontrolled at the same time, wrapped up in our individuality and our social natures at the same time. The topic and the experience is so universal and unique that describing what laughter is becomes impossible.

Some other interesting examples or questions to be raised: How does the way you tell a story or a joke affect it's humor? We've all been in occasions where a story that seems incredibly funny to us falls flat for another. Are there any types of humor that are unacceptable? How far can jokes about races, religions, sex, or any controversial topic go before we say that enough is enough? Is there a societal sense of humor and does it change between generations or over time? Would a joke in Shakespeare's time still have the same resonance it does today? Perhaps if the joke were explained to us it might, but the explanation robs it of some humor by destroying the possibility of surprise.

We laugh, in part, because of the absurdness of our lives. Physical comedy reminds us all of our human foibles and insufficiencies. Satire digs at our most cherished beliefs when direct confrontation may never succeed. There are layers upon layers to the problem of humor.

My favorite thing about such discussions is the sheer complexity they begin to limn. Whether laughter is biological or spiritual it makes life a little easier to bear. And, if there is a god, I think he or she has a wicked sense of humor. Someday a more in-depth exploration of this topic might yield an interesting book or essay.

Earlier this summer Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennet wrote some editorials praising the idea that atheists should begin to call themselves 'brights.' Although I'm an atheist myself I thought the whole renaming idea was rather silly. Chris Mooney has a commentary in the Washington Post and the Skeptical Inquirer detailing some of the same reasons why I think the idea is bad. He also questions some of the reflexive rejections of religion made by many atheist activists.

Still, I've come to wonder about some of the confrontational strategies espoused by combative secularist crusaders -- strategies that the Pledge of Allegiance case typifies. Sure, the pledge is probably unconstitutional, a violation of the separation of church and state. But I'm not sure it causes anything more than minor coercion to schoolchildren (I recited it countless times myself without lasting damage) or that stripping it of religious language will redound to the benefit of America's unbelievers in the way they hope. Rather, overturning the pledge seems certain to make atheists even less popular than they already are, while distracting attention from the far more troubling entanglements of church and state that have emerged under the Bush administration.

The uproar created when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled the pledge unconstitutional in June 2002 was a scary thing. Suddenly the United States seemed much more like a majoritarian religious state than ever before. President Bush, through his spokesman Ari Fleischer, called the ruling "ridiculous," when it was thoroughly defensible legally. The Senate voted 99-0 for a resolution supporting the pledge, though I suspect there's more than one closet atheist in that body. And those were the more temperate responses. William Donohue, the president of the Catholic League, went so far as to call for impeaching the judges in the pledge case and encouraged teachers in states affected by the ruling to "break the law."

Atheists such as Newdow shouldn't duck controversy if they believe they are right. But at the same time, the anti-atheist/pro-religion backlash they're courting by seeking to overturn the pledge could make the serious battle against some of the church-state mergers that have taken place under the Bush administration all but impossible. Wouldn't it be more constructive to combat the doling out of millions of dollars by the Department of Health and Human Services to proselytizing religious social service groups, including organizations affiliated with controversial figures such as Pat Robertson and Chuck Colson? Or here's another suggestion: Why not worry about the Justice Department's recently created special counsel for religious discrimination, whose position seems to exist simply to ensure that the religious have extra-special protections in law for their beliefs? The special counsel was recently involved in the investigation of a Texas Tech University biology professor, Michael Dini, who had refused to write medical school recommendation letters for students who believe in Creationism, even though such letter-writing is voluntary.

More background on this issue can be found at Philocrites and Chris Mooney's own blog.

Just some reminder links on where to find solutions to MovableType comment spam. MT-Blacklist by Jay Allen and MT-Bayesian by James Seng.

Kevin Walzer penned an impassioned complaint on academic prestige, The Poison of Prestige, in response to some comments by Invisible Adjunct about the dilemmas of writing recommendations for students to attend graduate school.

I know I fell into the appeal of prestige when I decided to attend Yale in 1990. My ten year class reunion is coming up next year and I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about the whole experience. On the face of it I loved the academic end of my undergraduate education and I still enjoy an intellectual challenge. At the same time there were occasions when the prestige was more a burden than a benefit.

The hardest part is balancing my past equivocal experiences with my current desires to continue my education. Reading the postings of most graduate students and a number of professors raise more doubts than assurances.

On Thursday evening I attended a philosophical discussion group at my local library. The topic for debate was why we censor violence more than we censor sex in America? It resulted in a number of interesting discussions but concluded with an interesting opposition between meliorists and deteriorists, those who think humans can become better than they are and those who think we will always remain animalistic.

One of the debaters, and a regular attender at the cafe, made an argument for the cyclic nature of human history. In particular he compared America to the Roman Empire, moving from the republic into the empire. I'm no expert on Roman history and when I've heard this argument in the past I've usually dismissed it as being a bit too easy and pat. But then I come home, fire up my computer and come across this interesting essay by Sydney H. Schanberg at the Village Voice, The Widening Crusade.

If some wishful Americans are still hoping President Bush will acknowledge that his imperial foreign policy has stumbled in Iraq and needs fixing or reining in, they should put aside those reveries. He's going all the way, and taking us with him.

The Israeli bombing raid on Syria October 5 was an expansion of the Bush policy, carried out by the Sharon government but with the implicit approval of Washington. The government in Iran, said to be seeking to develop a nuclear weapon, reportedly expects to be the next target.
...
In his new book, Winning Modern Wars, retired general Wesley Clark, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, offered a window into the Bush serial-war planning. He writes that serious planning for the Iraq war had already begun only two months after the 9-11 attack, and adds:

"As I went back through the Pentagon in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan. . . . I left the Pentagon that afternoon deeply concerned."

And suddenly the whole Roman empire connection seems a little less unlikely. In between the opening and concluding paragraphs Schanberg raises the usual questions about Bush's war but the most telling is one I've often wondered about before: why doesn't the President ask the American people to make a real sacrifice for this all consuming war.

But beyond all the distortions and exaggerations and falsehoods the Bush people engaged in to rally public support for the Iraq war, what I have never understood, from the 9-11 day of tragedy onward, is why this White House has not called on the American people to be part of the war effort, to make the sacrifices civilians have always made when this country is at war.

There has been no call for rationing or conservation of critical supplies, such as gasoline. There has been no call for obligatory national service in community aid projects or emergency services. As he sent 150,000 soldiers into battle and now asks them to remain in harm's way longer than expected, the president never raised even the possibility of reinstating the military draft, perhaps the most democratizing influence in the nation's history. Instead, he has cut taxes hugely, mostly for affluent Americans, saying this would put money into circulation and create jobs. Since Bush began the tax cutting two and a half years ago, 2.7 million jobs have disappeared.

My personal feeling about the battle between the meliorists and the deteriorists is that we are going to have both in abundance. We are going to have improvements in human nature made via psychopharmacology and genomics, while at the same time other parts of the world fall further behind economically. Wars will rage on one continent while on another continent people will use technology to safely comment on the issues from the comfort of their homes. It has already happened.

An article at the New York Times on text mining led to these other resources.

• A weblog, k-praxis, on knowledge management and unstructured data


• SPSS Lexiquest - text analysis software by statiscal software company SPSS


• Clear Forest - another software company involved in text analysis


• Freetext Technologies - maker of desktop text analysis software


• Gemini UDS - another desktop program, more for organizing multi-source searches


• Readware - yet another desktop analysis program

Matt Haughey wrote an essay on Google Adsense and the success he's had with his PVRblog. Blogging for Dollars.
Anil Dash and Nick Denton also commented recently about Adsense and its interaction with blogs.

The whole sounds worth considering but the trouble is finding the obsession that will prove interesting enough to other people to attract an audience to make the whole thing worthwhile.

Tom Coates of plasticbag has a new weblog called "Everything in Moderation." Its opening manifesto begins:

Online community development is one of my passions, and I have designed and/or managed social software "solutions" for organisations like UpMyStreet, EMAP and the BBC (often alongside Cal Henderson and/or Denise Wilton. Moderation systems are a particular subpassion of mine. In the abstract, people can think they sound bland, technical or intimidating, but fundamentally moderation is really about all those parts of an online community that stop it just being a place where people stand and shout randomly at each other. They're about finding the structures and the mechanisms, the techniques and the sensitivities which will help a community form out of a seemingly random clumps of individuals, which will help that community defuse unpleasant situations without killing each other and protect that community from attack.

His opening postings on the cliques among teenagers, political economies in self-moderating communities, and the four types of moderation are all worth reading if you have any interest in the development and evolution of online communities.

Matt Jones at blackbelt jones is collecting examples of timelines from around the internet.

I've been toying with the idea of changing my home page to include a collection of biographical snippets or essays. I'd like to have the page display a single snippet in the center, have a menu to navigate between snippets on the side, and a timeline at the top. I think I could make the timeline at the top dynamically respond to what snippet you were viewing by using javascript to manipulate the background colors of a table. If the project ever gets off the ground I'm sure I'll be mention it here.

Matt Haughey's recently commenced experiment, Ten Years of My Life is another intriguing example of representing time on the internet. I've been dreaming since at least the late 1980s of creating an easy to use timeline for viewing history or any time dependent event. It's mostly been an interesting idea up to this point.

Found a few interesting political columns yesterday:

• Bill McClellan, If Bill Clinton were an addict, here's how Rush might spin it


• Molly Ivins, A few rotten apples: Keep your eye on the business section, where scandals are boring, buried, but big


• James P. Pinkerton, Bush & Co. Use the Orwell Sales Strategy

From Danny O'Brien I find a link to a new weblog by Jonathan Moore which contained this jem on the amount of work it takes to find new communities on the internet.

The Fans and Fetishists problem is the desire to create partitions of the social network so that diversity can exist. Take for example two groups of Britney Spears devotees: fans and fetishists. The fans are mostly young people who actually enjoy the singer's music. These fans want a place to discuss Britney and engage in other such wholesum, fan related actvity. The fetishists on the other hand are mostly adults who have impure thoughts about the pop-icon. They are instead in discussion and activities not appropriate for the majority of the fans. The goal is to allow both to exist, guard against the fans from accidently stumbling in to a fetishist discussion group, and (probably) increase the difficulty for the fetishists to find a fans group.

In meat space, the separation between fetishist and fans is largely accomplished by performing resource discovery in the social network. The fans are unlikely to accidently end up hanging out with a bunch of fetishists because they are not connected to the adult network that the fetishists exist in. Similarly, adolescent fan social networks are inaccessible to the fetishists; they would find it difficult to know when and where the fans meet to trade gossip.

The twisty puzzle probliem is much simpler to describe. Simply, avid twisty puzzle fans are a disperse and disconnected group which would like to have a common discussion forum. A single forum is desired beacuse there are only a small number of true twisty junkies and they are physically and socially distant. This type of situation is not solved well in meat space but is handled fine on the internet. A short session with google will find you the twisty fan sites and mailing lists.

The contention between these two problems is the of ease of resource discovery. It should be easy for twisty and hard for Britney. For the Britney problem, we can borrow from meat space and allow a Britney group to be discovered only by reference from someone in your online social network. For the twisty problem, one common solution is to have a searchable directory interest groups. One could provide an option in group creation as to whether or not it should be listed in the directory. My issue with is I don't trust users to make the right choice when deciding to have their group listed or not. For me, the challenge is to find an approach that is "natural", requiring the user to make no choices about how resource discovery works.

Jonathan is absoultely correct when he says that some of these connections need to be easy to find and some of them should probably be harder to discover.

In my personal experience one of the best things about the internet has been the ability to find professional organizations and to begin to glimpse the social networks that link people together. Part of the reason I decided to put myself into the weblog world was because I thought these connections were worth pursuing and investigating.

Clay Shirky has written about the social issues of networks in a number of different venues. His most recent NEC essay, File-sharing Goes Social, talks about the potential impact of the anti-file sharing lawsuits currently being pursued by the RIAA.

There are several activities that are both illegal and popular, and these suffer from what economists call high transaction costs. Buying marijuana involves considerably more work than buying roses, in part because every transaction involves risk for both parties, and in part because neither party can rely on the courts for redress from unfair transactions. As a result, the market for marijuana today (or NYC tattoo artists in the 1980s, or gin in the 1920s, etc) involves trusted intermediaries who broker introductions.

These intermediaries act as a kind of social Visa system; in the same way a credit card issuer has a relationship with both buyer and seller, and an incentive to see that transactions go well, an introducer in an illegal transaction has an incentive to make sure that neither side defects from the transaction. And all parties, of course, have an incentive to avoid detection.

This is a different kind of border than a search horizon. Instead of being able to search for resources a certain topological distance from you, you search for resources a certain social distance from you. (This is also the guiding principle behind services like LinkedIn and Friendster, though in practice they represent their user's networks as being much larger than real-world social boundaries are.)

Such a system would add a firewall of sorts to the client, server, and router functions of existing systems, and that firewall would serve two separate but related needs. It would make the shared space inaccessible to new users without some sort of invitation from existing users, and it would likewise make all activity inside the space unobservable to the outside world.

Though the press is calling such systems "darknets" and intimating that they are the work of some sort of internet underground, those two requirements -- controlled membership and encrypted file transfer -- actually describe business needs better than consumer needs.

Although I find the arguments of copyright holders sympathetic I think that there are some serious questions that need to be asked about ideas and their relationship to property. In today's capitalism everything inevitably tends toward monetization, ideas are no different. Unfourtunately, as Lawrence Lessig and others have pointed out, such a move threathens to stifle innovation and creativity because new ideas are not allowed to build upon the old.

I'm so far from actually being invited to the Friends of O'Reilly camp that occurred over the weekend that the discussion it engenders seems to be miles removed, but out of it comes a very perceptive comment from Danny O'Brien about the different registers in which online discussion takes place.

The problem here is one (ironically) of register. In the real world, we have conversations in public, in private, and in secret. All three are quite separate. The public is what we say to a crowd; the private is what we chatter amongst ourselves, when free from the demands of the crowd; and the secret is what we keep from everyone but our confidant. Secrecy implies intrigue, implies you have something to hide. Being private doesn't. You can have a private gathering, but it isn't necessarily a secret. All these conversations have different implications, different tones.

Most people have, in the back of their mind, the belief that what they say to their friends, they would be happy to say in public, in the same words. It isn't true, and if you don't believe me, tape-record yourself talking to your friends one day, and then upload it to your website for the world to hear.

This is the trap that makes fly-on-the-wall documentaries and reality TV so entertaining. It's why politicians are so weirdly mannered, and why everyone gets a bit freaked out when the videocamera looms at the wedding. It's what makes a particular kind of gossip - the "I can't believe he said that!" - so virulent. No matter how constant a person you are, no matter how unwavering your beliefs, something you say in the private register will sound horrific, dismissive, egotistical or trite when blazoned on the front page of the Daily Mirror. This is the context that we are quoted out of.

This makes a ton of sense. Erving Goffman makes the very same points when he distinguishes between front and back stage behavior in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. What we do and say in public is very different from what occurs in private or in secret.

O'Brien goes on to tell us what we really need to be worried about are those secret gatherings that are completely outside of the public arena. A few people getting upset about a gathering to which they were not invited means that the cat is already out of the bag.

And we'll realise that the real conspiracies, aren't the ones that appear on publically readable Websites, with full names of attendees, detailed documentation of discussions, and endless braindumps of semi-private, clumsy, gushing conversations that nonetheless deserve a wider audience. That people who come across as eager to do good, willing to feed a couple of hundred people on the offchance that some benefit may accrue, who like hearing their friends sing in an off-key, don't mind others knowing that, and who are lucky enough to have smart friends and generous enough to share them, aren't the threat.

It's the real secrets; the real hide-aways; the people who are always either in public mode or in an ultra-ultra-secret combination we can barely guess at who are the dangerous ones. And they're a lot harder to spot from fifty yards, and a damn sight more immune to gentle satire.

Mark Lynas is working on a new book about global warming, after touring the world for three years to find stories. A preview article in the Guardian mentions rising oceans in Tuvalu, retreating glaciers in Peru, warming summers in Alaska and a host of other real examples of changing climate.

So I knew there would be change, and that the glaciers in my father's pictures would almost certainly be smaller. But it was the scale of it that was shocking. When I rounded a hill of moraine and saw the same place he had recorded on his slide two decades earlier, I could hardly believe there hadn't been some mistake. The big, fan-shaped glacier had vanished completely. The edge of the lake was now marked with bare rock walls, and the lake itself was swollen with extra meltwater. The area was barely recognisable.

It was with a heavy heart that I loaded my new slides into the projector after my return to Wales. As the image came up, my father leaned forwards with a stricken expression. 'Good God, I can't believe it. That was the whole character of the place. It's so sad.' He paused, as if to take it in. 'It's so sad,' he said again.

Some stories from Science Now back up his experiences. Warmer Ocean Blamed for Drought

As someone who occasionally tries to take the long view of time but seems caught in a cycle of temporary obsessions the news of Matt Haughey's Ten Years of My Life photo project looks very interesting.

Inspiration
The initial inspiration for this site also came from a few similar projects. Diego Golberg's Arrows of Time captures his family on the same day, every year, for 25 years. The 12hr ISBN jpeg project has been running for nearly ten years already. The Daily Photo Project was also an inspiration. Along those lines, I'll be posting a monthly photo of myself here, to track the cruel passage of time.

Salon had a number of interesting articles from recent weeks on the intersections between technology, biology, and education.

• Alan H. Goldstein starts with Invasion of the high-tech body snatchers. A description of the coming changes in bioengineering. If we can soon replace much of the human body with artificial parts, we will, and then who knows what we will become. He says that bioethics has been too focused on cloning and ignoring the potential threat and promise of what he calls bioengineering.


• Andrew Leonard then reviews a new book, Never Mind the Laptops, by Bob Johnstone. A laptop in every knapsack acknowledges that computers can probably improve education but what impact will they have on the digital divide. Will poorer children be left behind because their school districts cannot afford laptops for every student?

In addition to these items I've been reading Enough, by Bill McKibben, and Our Posthuman Future, by Francis Fukuyama. Both of them are arguing in favor of a basic human nature that could be endangered by the technology that Goldstein describes.

To me the biggest fear is who will control the technology. If the rich are able to design perfect children then the nightmare social stratification feared by McKibben and others probably will come true. Given the disparities in wealth in America today, and between America and the rest of the world, one could argue that the stratification has already occurred. But if the fear is not assuaged by saying that the effects have already happened then another response should be to question the intellectual property system that makes it possible for the rich to entrench their access. Even if the patents expire after 20 years the timeline is long enough for significant changes to take place. So the choice should be between openness and monopolies, not whether to pursue or ignore the technology.

A similar case for openness was made by Robert Carlson in The Pace and Proliferation of Biological Technologies. Carlson talks about access to biotechnology machines and products on the internet and the fact that these machines are becoming more capable every year. He, too, thinks there is a choice to be made between open and closed access.

Via boingboing I found the following interesting art site: Mondolitic Studios Looks like a lot of the illustrations have appeared in various issues of Wired magazine.

Some quick favorites: here and here.

YAML and the Art of Unix Programming
My peregrinations around the web turned up a very interesting markup language called YAML. Basically it is designed to be very readable by humans and capable of easy computer manipulation. This might be useful if I ever get around to developing a book review or annotation system. I like the idea of using text files to enter the data. BibTex is another potent example.

Following the links to the YAML email list revealed that Eric S. Raymond, of Cathedral and the Bizarre fame, has just released a new book. The Art of UINX Programming.

Some of my favorite comments on the California recall.

• From the Christian Science Monitor.
  "The angry voter is back," says independent pollster John Zogby. "Angry voters were on sabbatical for almost a decade. Now they want results, they want a fix."


• Christopher Scheer at Alternet


• John Scalzi unleashes the contempt.