Did i mention that i put our pictures from Burning Man 2004 on-line? There’s a shed load of them, and there will be more coming eventually. The ones I took are pretty dull (i tended to take them only when nothing was happening), but the other guys have some good ones. Enjoy
To frame a philosophy capable of coping with men intoxicated with the prospect of almost unlimited power and also with the apathy of the powerless is the most pressing task of our time.
Bertrand Russell, via Three-Toed Sloth
Remember Lazlo’s Chinese Relativity Axiom:
No matter how great your triumphs, or tragic your defeats, approximately one billion Chinese couldn’t care less
Here’s something worth doing – a google image search for ‘leunig’. And bingo, a spread of wonders to enjoy!
So how do you go about finding a good host for your website? A google search turns up a million people and i’ve no real way of choosing between them. I want lots of space (250 MB +), Unix hosting (with PHP, Phython, MySQL) and preferably the ability to run at least 2 domains…And decent technical support would be nice too. Can anyone recommend a company in the UK who could do this for me please?
I’m at the ESF in London. The workshop i’ve come to has turned out to be an empty room. An empty room in LSE with an unattended networked computer. So here i am. Read this, on Indymedia, Dan on ‘The ESF: Hacking Networks of Power’.
Whatever you can do or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.
– Goethe
In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.
John Von Neumann
Catching up with my journal abstracts, I noticed this:
Rotteveel, M.; Phaf, R.H. (2004). Loading working memory enhances affective priming. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 11. 11, 2, 326-331(6).
Abstract: Stronger affective priming (Murphy & Zajonc, 1993) with suboptimal (i.e., reduced consciousness) than with optimal (i.e., full consciousness) prime presentation suggests that nonconscious processes form an important part of emotions. Merikle and Joordens (1997) have argued that both impoverished presentation and divided attention can produce suboptimal conditions and result in parallel effects. We manipulated attention by means of a concurrent working memory load while keeping presentation duration constant, as participants evaluated Japanese ideographs that were preceded by happy,neutral, or angry faces (affective priming) and male or female faces (nonaffective priming). In contrast to nonaffective priming, affective priming was larger with divided attention than with focused attention. It is concluded that manipulations of stimulus quality and of attention can both be used to probe the distinction between conscious and nonconscious processes and that the highest chances of obtaining the pattern of stronger priming with suboptimal presentation than with optimal presentation occur in the affective domain.
Which I can’t help thinking implies: if you want to pull people’s emotional strings (without them knowing it) then you should keep them busy.
Call me a social-control conspiracist, but i think this is another good reason for us all to spend more time sitting down with a cup of tea and less time working to keep the economy going
1. What a frikkin’ good day to be alive! Hello World!
2. It occurs to me that soundbite culture, like so many cultural phenomena, is the product of technological change. The television, and radio, technologies that carry the soundbites are those that create the need for the soundbites. We’ve always had slogans but the depthless soundbite is the product of the shift in political media from discursive to broadcast technologies.
Thanks to dan for this
Warnick B.R. (2004). Technological Metaphors and Moral Education: The Hacker Ethic and the Computational Experience. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 23, 4, 265-281.
This essay is an attempt to understand how technological metaphors, particularly computer metaphors, are relevant to moral education. After discussing various types of technological metaphors, it is argued that technological metaphors enter moral thought through their “functional descriptions.” The computer metaphor is then explored by turning to the “hacker ethic.” Analysis of this ethic reveals parallels between the experience of computer programming and the moral standards of those who are enmeshed in computer technology. This parallel suggests that the hacker ethic is being pushed by a computer metaphor and its functional descriptions in a direction of individualism and systems thinking. After examining some possible implications of the computer metaphor, this essay offers suggestions concerning how technological metaphors may be critiqued.
Ironically for a paper about the hacker ethic you can’t get the PDF on-line, but i did find Biella Coleman, from the University of Chicago and her blog, Sato Roams and her research proposal The Social Creation of Productive Freedom: Free Software Hacking and the Redefinition of Labor, Authorship, and Creativity. which contains, in the section headed ‘UNIX: A Living, Breathing Software Entity’, a quote from the wonderful In the Beginning was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson (1999):
..UNIX, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic… Likewise, UNIX is known, loved, understood by so many hackers that it can be recreated from scratch whenever someone needs it.
Quoting Slovic et al (1982), Facts versus fears: Understanding perceived risk:
…Sowby (1965) provided extensive data on risks per hour of exposure, showing, for example, than an hour of riding a motorcycle is as risky as an hour of being 75 years old.
Refs:
Real revolution means people choking to death on their own shit
Graffiti seen by Andy, London 2001
The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper
Eden Phillpotts
My feeling about technique in art is that it has the same value as technique in lovemaking. That is to say, heartfelt ineptitude has its charm and so has heartless skill, but what you really want is passionate virtuosity.
I’ve just put up a gallery for Shambala photos. Here.
Murray is able to produce a look that is sneaky and frank at the same time. It is a look that gives equal credence to disaster and lecherous success. He says that in the old days of his urban entanglements he believed there was only one way to seduce a women, with clear and open desire. He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilised world-weariness and a tragic sense of history – the very things, he says, that are most natural to him. Of these he has allowed only one element, vulnerability, to insert itself gradually into his program of straighforward lust. He is trying to develop a vulnerability that women will find attractive. He works at is consciously, like a man in a gym with weights and a mirrow. But his efforts so far have produced only this half sneaky look, sheepish and wheedling.
Don DeLillo, White Noise (1984)
Andy found a spiritual-epistemological necker cube! We both agree with the majority of the statements below, but reach exactly the opposite of conclusion from that intended by the original author.
I got a job at the University of Sheffield. Part time doing some social psychology (!) on a sustainability project, part time doing some social network work, and part time free for me to indulge my other interests (some cognitive psychology experiments have come up, during writing the book, which I would like to run, and I’m sure there’s some cog neuro / neuroimaging pies I can stick my fingers into).
So, back into academia, back to Sheffield…Is it like i’ve ever been away?
US to make legal the torture, without trial, of British citizens. Our government won’t be able to protect us from the US government’s breathtaking disrespect for human rights. Read about it here
(via helmintholog)
Update 9 Oct: here
Usually I use streetmap.co.uk to get a quick O/S map of an area by postcode or street name, but today I’ve found multimap.com more useful (the interface is more graphical, the zoom in and out is better – it’s easier to use if you’re not sure where what you are looking for is in relation to everything else).
I found a map of all the counties of Great Britain and a postcode map of the same
This guide tells you what the different parts of the postcode mean. And a map and list of all the london postcodes (strictly areas and districts, but not sectors or street information) is here
A friend writes:
if you click on ‘tom stafford’ on the amazon page for pre-ordering Mind Hacks,
you get a link to your other book. You know, the one you wrote when you were
minus three, about the space race.
And it’s true. The other Tom Stafford is an astronaut who flew on Apollo 10, amongst others. For a while he was top of google for a search on ‘Tom Stafford’, but i tipped him off the top spot.
Incidentally, he’s also quoted by my favourite band, the New Model Army (who are playing in manchester on the 16th of December, by the way). On their song Space from the album Impurity, Joolz reads this quotation by the astronaut:
The white twisted clouds and the endless shades of blue in the ocean make the hum of the spacecraft systems, the radio chatter, even your own breathing disappear. There is no cold or wind or smell to tell you that you are connected to Earth. You have an almost dispassionate platform – remote, Olympian and yet so moving that you can hardly believe how emotionally attached you are to those rough patterns shifting steadily below.
So there you go
The single clenched fist, lifted and ready
Or the open asking hand held out and waiting
Choose:
For we meet by one or the otherCarl Sandburg (1878-1967)
Good In Our Time this week on ‘Politeness’ (and thanks to Matt for the heads up). You can still use Radio 4‘s Listen Again thing to hear it online (until thursday i think).
So – politeness as an active, self-conscious – almost revolutionary – social moment, and as something evoked by social changes which brough people into new forms of contact, in new social spaces, and made less relevant the old behavioural guidelines of class, sex and rank.
I wonder how can ground-rules of behaviour, aimed at mitigating conflict and misunderstanding, can be propagated in the aftermath of the current, global, sweep of social change?
(remember quote #49)
For reasons which are not entirely nostalgia based – I promise – I’ve been looking through old photos. I’ve scanned a few and put them at the front of the gallery. They cover a random mix of people, in different places and in the date range 1998-2002. I resisted scanning anything from when I was at school – to the chagrin, i’m sure, of any old, nostalgia junky, school-friends who may read this blog (you know who you are).
If you hover the cursor over a thumbnail you get a little caption about that photo…
