There has been a myriad of sporadic cease-fires in the MidEast over the last sixty years. Indeed, over the last three millenia and each has proved but a tiny foyer opening onto yet another grand dark ballroom, whose weary dancers waltz endlessly to the dismal music of war. Still, I think this one’s going to last. Call it a hunch.
— Rob Corddry
Title Stroop color
Pylyshyn’s cognitive penetrability criterion: if performance is affected by beliefs (e.g. any cognitions, additional extra task information, etc) then performance is not due to primitives of functional architecture.
Heursitics for decentralised thinking
(Michael Resnick, ‘Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds’ MIT Press, 1994, p134ff)
1. Positive feedback can be good
Take-off effects 2. Randomness can help create order
comined with positive feedback -> self-causation shakes off local minima (annealing) prevents worst excesses of exploitation in exploitation-exploration dilemma 3. & 4. Emergence
Need to distinguish between levels Not all properties of a system have to be explicitly built in Emergent objects may have different properties than their subunits 5. The Environment is Active
Intelligent behaviour doesn’t just rely on agents. The environment is dynamic and a source of complexity
Shalizi review of TT&TJ
In Spanish there is a word for which I can’t find a counterword in English. It is the verb vacilar, present participle vacilando. It does not mean vacillating at all. If one is vacilando, he is going somewhere, but does not greatly care whether or not he gets there, although he has direction. Everything in the world must have a design or the human mind rejects it. But in addition, it must have purpose or the human conscience shies away from it.
John Steinbeck (in Travels With Charley: In Search of America, 1962)
It comes as the Revealer. Showing that no society can protect, never could—they are as foolish as shields of paper. They have lied to us. They can’t keep us from dying, so They lie to us about death. A cooperative structure of lies. What have They ever given us in return for the trust, the love—They actually say ‘love’—we’re supposed to owe Them. Can They even keep us from catching cold? from lice, from being alone? from anything? Before the Rocket can penetrate, from the sky, at any given point. Nowhere is safe. We can’t believe Them any more. Not if we are still sane, and love the truth.
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
I’ve always been slightly suspicious about the Freudian tendency to read meaning into everything. You see hidden meanings and get paid for it and you’re an analyst, you do it for free and you’re psychotic.I suspect this is why there’s so little psychoanalytic work on psychosis, the infinite regress of hidden meanings would probably cause a dimensional rift and the universe would collapse.
Vaughan Bell on Mindhacks.com
I am very interested in words, and what we have words for and what we haven’t got words for. For instance, the word “paranoia.” It always seems very strange to me that we have this word which means, in effect, that someone feels that he is being persecuted when the people who are persecuting him don’t think that he is. But we haven’t got a word for the condition in which you are persecuting someone without realizing it, which I would have thought is as serious a condition as the other, and certainly no less common.
RD Laing
On this bridge, Lorca warns: Life is not a dream, beware, and beware, and beware. And so many think because then happened, now isn’t. But didn’t I mention? The ongoing WOW is happening right NOW. We are all co-authors of this dancing exuberance, for even our inabilities are having a roast. We are the authors of ourselves, co-authoring a gigantic Dostoevsky novel starring clowns… An assumption developed that you cannot understand life and live life simultaneously. I do not agree entirely, which is to say, I do not exactly disagree. I would say that life understood is life lived. But, the paradoxes bug me, and I can learn to love and make love to the paradoxes that bug me, and on really romantic evenings of self, I go salsa dancing with my confusion. Before you drift off, don’t forget, which is to say remember, because remembering is so much more a psychotic activity than forgetting: Lorca, in that same poem, said that the Iguana will bite those who do not dream, and as one realizes that one is a dream figure in another person’s dream… that is self-awareness!
Timothy ‘Speed’ Levich in Waking Life
There are two kinds of sufferers in this world: those who suffer from a lack of life and those who suffer from an overabundance of life. I’ve always found myself in the second category. When you come to think of it, almost all human behavior and activity is not essentially any different from animal behavior. The most advanced technologies and craftsmanship bring us, at best, up to the super-chimpanzee level. Actually, the gap between, say, Plato or Nietzsche and the average human is greater than the gap between that chimpanzee and the average human. The realm of the real spirit, the true artist, the saint, the philosopher, is rarely achieved. Why so few? Why is world history and evolution not stories of progress but rather this endless and futile addition of zeroes. No greater values have developed. Hell, the Greeks 3,000 years ago were just as advanced as we are. So what are these barriers that keep people from reaching anywhere near their real potential? The answer to that can be found in another question, and that’s this: Which is the most universal human characteristic – fear or laziness?
Louis Mackey, in the same
www.idiolect.org.uk/elsevier/ is now live:
“Reed Elsevier is a publishing company with an arms trade problem. While the bulk of their business is in scientific, medical and educational publishing, they also organise arms fairs around the world. The aim of this website is to mobilise the academic community that writes and reads Reed Elsevier’s journals to persuade them to stop organising arms fairs.”
More details and petition here: http://www.idiolect.org.uk/elsevier/petition.php
Please pass the message on to academics, researchers and postgraduates
I met Matthew Watkins in a field in Somerset, where he was sitting beneath a sign saying “Free Maths Information”. He’s a musicomathematical nomad (or is that a mathemusical itinerant?) with some interesting ideas about the connection between the distribution of prime numbers and fundamental physics. Maths pages here (includes many interesting side notes, such as this essay by Philip K Dick). Music pages here and here (and make sure you check this out). More Big Green pictures here.
It is a grave but not important error that I happen to be a woman … I would really have been a very something man, and as a woman I am truly only a nuisance, only a problem … I am going to make the most of it and not let this biological accident hamper me any more than is necessary. I can resign myself to anything on earth except dullness.
Martha Gellhorn – quoted in a review of her collected letters
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
– Buckminster Fuller
Now we must confront something even more perplexing: next to the Communist Manifesto, the whole body of capitalist apologetics, from Adam Ferguson to Milton Friedman is remarkably pale and empty of life. The celebrants of capitalism tell us surprisingly little of its infinite horizons, its revolutionary audacity, its dynamic creativity, its adventurousness and romance, its capacity to make men not only more comfortable but more alive.
Marshall Berman in ‘All that is solid melts into air: the experience of modernity’
It can be fun to feel exceptional – to be the loophole woman, to have a whole power thing, to be an honorary man. But if you are the exception that proves the rule, and the rule is that women are inferior, you haven’t made any progress.
Ariel Levy in ‘Female Chauvinist Pigs’
I was speaking to Jess last week, who is a biotechnological law ethicist. She said “What is privacy? What kind of thing is it? Why do we want it?”. I said – and I don’t know if I entirely believe this, but it is what came out – privacy is a concern to keep things unknown so as to protect future advantage. Some things we don’t want others to find out because it might disadvantage us in the future. Because there is no use only keeping important things secret – if you did this it gives away what is an isn’t important, which is half of the advantage. The other factor which works to bring things into the realm of privacy is that the future is uncertain. You can’t know with any precision what will and won’t be decisive in the future, so you need to keep more private now, just in case. One of the proximate mechanisms that results from the (evolutionary) logic of privacy is embarrassment. Just because, I claim, privacy is a result of supra-personal logic doesn’t mean that it isn’t a real human need, nor, for that matter that there shouldn’t be legal protections against our embarrassment.
In my department we grade degrees based on four sets of exams – two in the second year, and two in the third year. In the University it is standard to assess students across the bulk of their courses like this. The alternative, which I presume used to happen at my University, and still does in some places such as Oxford and Cambridge, is to assess students in one set of finals at the very end of their courses. I can see that having one set of finals like this is a harsh discipline – especially for those who find exams stressful. Continuous assessment feels ‘fairer’ somehow.
Lately, however, I’ve been wondering if finals might be in fact be fairer, and might be based on a more inspiring model of what happens at a University. Continuous assessment seems to imply that students are receptacles, being filled with knowledge, regurgitating that knowledge at each stage and being assessed on their ability to do this at each point. Conversely, finals express the hope that education will be transformative. Over their time a student will be changed so that they can do some things, things which they were unable to do previously. Assessment on their final ability says ‘we are interested in what you have become, not what you were. We care what you are now able to do, not what you were once unable to do’.
Continuous assessment seems to discriminate against those who get the most out of University education – rewarding those who have been fortunate to grasp the essential model of absorbing and reformulating abstract information before they arrive.
It’s a convention to say that the scientific discovery has progressively pushed man further and further from the center of the universe. Galileo displaced the fixed earth from the center and set it revolving around. Now we see the sun itself as a minor light in the backreaches of a single galaxy on the edges of a cluster of glaxies, all of which are hurtling away from each other so that more and more of the black-loneliness of space seperates us from the rest of the universe and from the explosion-point of the universe’s origin. After the Englightenment, God died of neglect and obscelenscence (was Nietzsche really the first to notice?). Without God, in whose image are we made, and on whose authority are we privilaged above all other life? Darwin put us on the same level as the animals, provided a mechanism for our blind creation from the forces of time, chance and selection. The Crick, Watson and the neo-darwinists showed that it is not even us that evolved and still competes to evolve – it is out genes. Our bodies, and by extension the totality of our thoughts and souls, mere ‘lumbering survival machines’ in Dawkin’s mememoral phrase. This is the modern universe. Feel small, feel very small.
But it occurs to me there is another way to look at it. With each relegation, the necessity of man’s existence becomes less and less certain. Because we are no longer required, we become like an unrepeatable moment of time. Because of this we must treasure our existence all the more. (Who else will treasure it for us?). An old testament submission to fate is now outdated, stoic resignation is unacceptable both for individuals and for the species. It is suddenly far more important that we survive, for ourselves rather than for some grand design of which we are the central part. We may not longer be as substantive – foam on the crest of the wave of causality – but we have become infinitely more precious for our pecariousness.
Holy Crap! Why is so much of the US population in prison!? Both relative to other ‘basically well-functioning advanced capitalist democracies’:
(This from Crooked Timber post)
And relative to the the US of 25 years ago:
(from Martin Sereno’s presentation on Peak Oil.)
While we’re at it, here’s another slide which Sereno labelled ‘the beginning of corporate planet’.
(of course, although some would like it to be, what’s true for the US isn’t necessarily true for the rest of the planet)
It is, then, conceivable that we could be in for a period in which a synchronised upswing in the global economy turns into a synchronised downturn, as weaker demand from the US ripples out to the export-driven economies of Asia and the Eurozone. Protectionism will then exacerbate the recession. To which the response might be: a good thing, too. If, as Al Gore was arguing during his visit to London last week, the world is on the brink of ecological catastrophe, we ought to lose our fixation with growth and concentrate on self-sufficiency and sustainability instead…..From this standpoint, anything that throws sand in the wheels of the globalisation juggernaut is welcome. What we need is a full-scale cathartic crisis that will enable a new and better world to emerge.
It might not be that easy. True, a collapse of the Doha round, and a sharp contraction in global growth, could provide two of the elements that brought about change in the mid-20th century. But in the 1930s, the progression of events did not go stock market crash, recession, new world order. It went stock market crash, financial collapse, beggar-my-neighbour devaluation, protectionism, fascism, world war, new world order.
Clearly, the solution to Gore’s looming environmental Armageddon has to be collective, rather than unilateral. There is no way that the US, for example, is going to take action to cut carbon emissions unless it is sure every other country is doing likewise.
Yet the chances of multilateral action will be diminished in a climate of fear generated by economic weakness. The report on the economics of climate change currently being undertaken by Nick Stern at the UK Treasury is likely to conclude that the costs associated with a reduction in the emissions to the levels deemed safe by scientists are relatively modest. Gore himself believes that tackling climate change will be good for business, opening up plenty of new opportunities to make money.
That’s as may be. Multilateralism is a delicate plant; it does not thrive in harsh climates and the same impulses that drive countries to put up trade barriers when times get tough will persuade policymakers to listen to the special interest groups arguing that the price of tackling climate change is too high. The growth-at-all-costs lobby will be strengthened.
Delayed, but there is a day of reckoning Larry Elliot in the Guardian, 26 June 2006.
Two new blogs now enrich the blogosphere (warning: personal bias forthcoming)
To mark the start of his PhD, Dan is now blogging at coveredinbees.org about the science of self-organisation/’spontaneous order’ and how it affects political philosophy, and about markets and freedom. And about the war on terror and the state of the world. Read his introductory post to see where he’s coming from.
Sarah Eldridge, is now blogging as part of her work with ICAR (The Information Centre about Asylum and Refugees in the UK). ICAR “is an independent information and research organisation’ based at City University which aims ‘to increase public understanding of asylum issues in the UK, and inform policy and practice through applied research and policy evaluation.’ The blog comments on how asylum issues are handled in the media.
I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
At midnight in some flaming town,
[local news warning]
The conspiracy of planners and property developers to turn the whole world into yuppie flats for contemporary urban living ™ reaches the Sheffield General Cemetery – they want to convert the anglican chapel, fencing off the top entrance to the cemetery and enclosing the surrounding land in the process.
Petition here: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/saveourchapel
Look out for a benefit gig in the cemetery grounds on the 9th of July….
My wikipedia contail (after Matt Webb) – those autocomplete options when I type “en.wikipedia.org/wiki/” into my browser
In the 1970s Philip Knightly and the Sunday Times Insight team were pursuing the story of how thalidomide, which caused severe birth defects, was marketed as morning-sickness pill.
…the Sunday Times advertising manager, Donald Barrett had warned [Sunday Times editor] Harold Evans that Distillers [who had marketed thalidomide in the UK] was the paper’s single largest advertiser, spending £600,000 a year. Then he added, ‘I know that won’t stop you and it shouldn’t.’ Immediately the Sunday Times began its campaign, Distillers cancelled all its advertising….
Quoted from A Hack’s Progress by Philip Knightley, excerpted in Tell me no lies: Investigative Journalism and its triumphs, edited by John Pilger.