I have covered trolleyology before. Twice.
I ran across this excellent satirical extension on the trolleyology theme, here.
You have to have a certain philosophical bent to enjoy these, probably. Definitely, if you start to read them and don’t understand what’s going on, you need to first make sure you understand the background trolleyological tradition. But I definitely laughed at them.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
A few months ago, I missed mentioning the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X, which was on February 21, 1965. It was one of those blog-posts I start to write but never finish. It seems apropos to think about it, however, in light of “Baltimore” and the many other events reflecting the dysfunction of racial and racialized politics in the US.
I don’t visit The Atlantic website on a daily basis, as I used to. At some point, I became fed up with the their constant efforts to pander to the lowest common denominator in the new internet-driven culture industry – so much in the same vein that I boycott the Facebook, I have been in a “soft boycott” (meaning not absolutist, but merely trying to avoid it for the most part) – I have stopped visiting The Atlantic website for the most part. Their recent reformats of their website were especially annoying, as it was all re-written to be “mobile-friendly” I guess, which is fine – but programming a website to have a “mobile” version and a “computer” version is technically trivial (well, not trivial, but certainly within the abilities of a competent IT department). So why “dumb down” one on my computer screen, too, making it more difficult to see all the different content they have?
Oops, OK, that was a digression (or a rant). I was intending to write about Mr X.
I mentioned The Atlantic because there is one editor / blogger at The Atlantic whom I nevertheless seek out and read on a regular basis. That is the journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates. He recently mentioned Malcolm X in passing when discussing the way in which Obama’s rhetoric on personal morality (of “people of color” – e.g. Baltimore) versus his rhetoric on issues of government policy forms a kind of “bait and switch.” This is cogent and uncompromising reasoning – as is almost always my experience with Coates. Anyway, I will let you read his thoughts, here.
However, Coates’ mention caused me to revisit X’s “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech from April, 1964.
Some people might find it dissonant that Malcolm X is one of people whom I most admire in history. I am neither black, nor a muslim, nor a revolutionary. I am not, arguably, American anymore, either. Furthermore, I have strong philosophical opposition to nationalisms of all flavors, and there is no denying Malcolm X’s nationalist bent.
I think I admire him because he seemed devoid of hypocrisy and self-deception, which is possibly the human failing I most dislike – both in myself and in those around me. Malcolm X called out hypocrisy wherever he saw it. His was a righteous righteousness, therefore.
It’s possible, too, that I admire him as a rhetorician. Certainly now, when I am, in essence, a teacher of rhetoric (if you want to reframe middle-school EFL in as grandiose manner as possible), I am very conscious of and inspired by his control of the spoken word. Even before my current career, however, I was quite drawn to talented speakers.
Regardless of why I admire him, I will merely conclude with an acknowledgement that I consider him one of the greatest Americans – something I’ve commented [broken link! FIXME] before on this blog, admittedly.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
This is an aphorism from my book of aphorisms.
귀소문 말고 눈소문 하라
gwi.so.mun mal.go nun.so.mun ha.ra
ear-report refrain-CONJ eye-report do-COMMAND
Refrain from [believing] the report of the ears, but rather [believe] the report of the eyes.
“Seeing is believing,” of course. Then again, as a fan of (or, anyway, someone fascinated by) apophenia, sometimes we see things that are not there, and we choose to believe them, because our impulse to believe seems to epistemologically precede our sensory capacity.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
I had actually had some thoughts, in this vein, before running across this. But Mike Rugnetta says it eloquently and in depth. So I'll let him say it.
You see, the copyright-litigious LegoCorp has made a movie that is symbolically anti-copyright-regime.
As Rugnetta points out, the "piece-de-resistance" is cash.
Anyway, hattip to Laughing Squid, where I ran across this video.
[daily log: walking, 6.5 km]
Last night, about 11 pm, I had the TV on, which is becoming a usual thing. Keep in mind that it’s just Korean broadcast channels (I don’t pay for cable), so my level of comprehension of the 99% Korean-language broadcasts is only low-to-medium, and therefore I kind of just keep it on as a background noise. It’s part of my philosophy that one way that my Korean will improve is with maximization of input.
Sometimes these old Korean movies come on, on the EBS network. The one that came on caught my attention, and I sat and watched it, rapt.
It was 바보선언. I guess it could be translated as “Declaration of an Idiot” or “Fool’s Declaration.” The internet translation I ran across was “Declaration of Idiot” but the lack of particle makes me think it’s not a well-thought-out translation. More online research found out about it, here (there’s not much about it anywhere in English).It was directed by Lee, Chang-ho.
The lack of subitles on the television was irrelevant, for once – the movie has almost no dialogue and what dialogue there is strikes me as more absurdist or atmospheric than relevant. Compositionally, with its many non-sequiturs and absurdities, the thing reminded me of something by Ionesco, such as La Cantatrice Chauve, but impressionistically one could say it is a kind of cross be Koyaanisquatsi and a Korean slapstick comedy “Gag Concert.” The show’s soundscape is remarkable, too, and its interesting that it captures the atmospheric of the early 1980s better than most American
movies I’ve seen of the era (keeping in mind that that is my era, having graduated high school in the year this movie came out), despite being filtered through Korean culture.
Further, the movie is quite subversive. It’s important to remember that in 1983, Korea was still a military dictatorship, during its twilight phase after the assassination of Park. As such, for example, the symbolism quite striking in the final scene, where the two “fools” are striping off their clothes and dancing wildly in front of the recognizable icon that is the National Assembly building, gesticulating at it wildly. That building was only 8 years old in 1983, and it must have symbolized an empty promise of democracy to South Koreans then entering their third decade of authoritarianism. How did this get past the censors?
Overall, it is a snapshot of the Korean id, circa 1983. Fascinating.
Oh, and guess what? It’s on youtube, with subtitles. You can watch it.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
Not me. Rather, Jared Diamond, a famous some-sort-of-scientist, wrote this article quite some time ago, that I just ran across.
Any discussion of the origins of the Japanese, he points out, is ideologically fraught in a way that the origins of most other cultures on Earth is not. Korea has similar problems. This is because Japanese and Korean cultural identities, as modern constructs, rely overmuch on pre-modern myths that still undergird modern nationalisms. Many Koreans will tell you with a straight face that Korea was "founded" in October 3rd, 2333 BC. If such a precise date seems implausible, well… they don't care.
Anyway, I found Diamond's article interesting reading.
[daily log: walking, 6.5 km]
A Chronic Condition
Berkeley did not foresee such misty weather,
Nor centuries of light
Intend so dim a day. Swaddled together
In separateness, the trees
Persist or not beyond the gray-white
Palings of the air. Gone
Are whatever wings bothered the lighted leaves
When leaves there were. Are all
The sparrows fallen? I can hardly hear
My memory of those bees
Who only lately mesmerized the lawn.
Now, something, blaze! A fear
Swaddles me now that Hylas' tree will fall
Where no eye lights and grieves,
Will fall to nothing and without a sound.
I sway and lean above the vanished ground.
– Richard Wilbur (American poet, b 1921)
Incidentally, "Hylas' tree" in this poem is a reference to Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, a book written by the philosopher George Berkeley in 1713. I wonder if the "chronic condition" of the title is in fact existence, itself. It does seem be a bit chronic.
[daily log: walking, 5.5 km]
Googology, apparently, is a subfield of mathematics dedicated to the study of large numbers. It has its own wiki. I found this wiki after attempting to read an old article by mathematician Scott Aaronson about big numbers. Actually, what surprised me about some of the material on the googology wiki more than anything else was that, in fact, I found myself making some effort to understand it, despite the dense mathematics.
I more-or-less understood the idea behind hyper-operators (and up-arrow notation), but became lost by what was called BEAF (a sort of systematic way of specifying functions with hyper-exponential growth, I guess), and I was eventually sidetracked by the plethora of whimsical terminology: big numbers beyond - way beyond – googol, with names like boogagoogolplex or meameamealokkapoowa oompa (which is defined by {{L100,10}10,10&L,10}10,10 , in case you were wondering – and no, I don't understand that).
There's a nice glossary of recently-coined, really big numbers (many created in response to Aaronson's original article) at an aesthetically-challenged web page called Infinity Scrapers. Note that the "meameamealokkapoowa group" appears at the bottom of the list (does this mean that it is really the biggest-of-the-big numbers? or just the most recently to be characterized?).
It is worth noting, for the uninitiated, that the absolute smallest of these numbers (but the largest which I can be assured that at least a few of my middle-school students, for example, might be aware of) is googol (= 10100), yet that number is still greater than the estimated number of elementary particles in the observable universe, 1086.
It's rare that I've tried so hard to penetrate a mathematical concept since my first year in college, when, after a semester of trying to make sense of the number-theoretical foundations of calculus under the unkind tutelage of Professor A. Wayne R__, nicknamed "B" Wayne R__ since he never gave A-grades. I concluded I wasn't cut out to be a math major, and abandoned ship for the more hospitable fields of the humanities surfing around to Religious Studies and English Lit before landing in Linguistics, which was a semi-return to the more rigorous fold. It's one of my few genuine regrets in life, I suppose. Not a regret at having jumped ship – rather, a regret to having found myself obligated to do so… which is to say, it's not really regret, more like disappointment with myself.
[daily log: walking, { {}, {{}}, {{},{{}}}, {{},{{}},{{},{{}}}} , {{}, {{}}, {{},{{}}}, {{},{{}},{{},{{}}}}} } (=amount in km, represented set-theoretically using Von Neumann ordinals)]
I discovered an interactive guide to aiport carpets of the world. This is soo useful. Didn't you ever wonder what the carpet would be like at some airport? Here is your chance to know.
They provide quirky, tongue-in-cheek, postmodern reviews. Here is the review of the airport carpet at Mexico City (Benito Juarez International):
The carpet of MEX is unremarkable save for one important feature: the carpet changes color every other year. Since its installation in 1987, its colors have included a midnight blue, a dull grey, a lime green, and a hot pink. After years of study, Mexican scientists have declared MEX a mircale, and attempts have since been made to have the carpet canonized.
[daily log: walking, 5 km]
I ran across this on another blog I look at sometimes. If you don't know about toxoplasma, you might want to read up on it to understand better – it's so bizarre that it seems like something in science fiction. Slatestarcodex writes a blogpost about memes, starting off with PETA, riffing on Ferguson and police brutality, and concludes discussing what it means to write about controversial topics on blogs. But meanwhile, he takes a little speculative detour that strikes me as tour-de-force of memetics:
Toxoplasma is a neat little parasite that is implicated in a couple of human diseases including schizophrenia. Its life cycle goes like this: it starts in a cat. The cat poops it out. The poop and the toxoplasma get in the water supply, where they are consumed by some other animal, often a rat. The toxoplasma morphs into a rat-compatible form and starts reproducing. Once it has strength in numbers, it hijacks the rat’s brain, convincing the rat to hang out conspicuously in areas where cats can eat it. After a cat eats the rat, the toxoplasma morphs back into its cat compatible form and reproduces some more. Finally, it gets pooped back out by the cat, completing the cycle.
What would it mean for a meme to have a life cycle as complicated as toxoplasma?
Consider the war on terror. It’s a truism that each time the United States bombs Pakistan or Afghanistan or somewhere, all we’re doing is radicalizing the young people there and making more terrorists. Those terrorists then go on to kill Americans, which makes Americans get very angry and call for more bombing of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Taken as a meme, it is a single parasite with two hosts and two forms. In an Afghan host, it appears in a form called ‘jihad’, and hijacks its host into killing himself in order to spread it to its second, American host. In the American host it morphs in a form called ‘the war on terror’, and it hijacks the Americans into giving their own lives (and several bajillion of their tax dollars) to spread it back to its Afghan host in the form of bombs.
From the human point of view, jihad and the War on Terror are opposing forces. From the memetic point of view, they’re as complementary as caterpillars and butterflies. Instead of judging, we just note that somehow we accidentally created a replicator, and replicators are going to replicate until something makes them stop.
Replicators are also going to evolve. Some Afghan who thinks up a particularly effective terrorist strategy helps the meme spread to more Americans as the resulting outrage fuels the War on Terror. When the American bombing heats up, all of the Afghan villagers radicalized in by the attack will remember the really effective new tactic that Khalid thought up and do that one instead of the boring old tactic that barely killed any Americans at all. Some American TV commentator who comes up with a particularly stirring call to retaliation will find her words adopted into party platforms and repeated by pro-war newspapers. While pacifists on both sides work to defuse the tension, the meme is engaging in a counter-effort to become as virulent as possible, until people start suggesting putting pork fat in American bombs just to make Muslims even madder.
What I'm listening to right now.
Hooverphonic, "Eden."
Lyrics.
Did you ever think of me
As your best friend
Did I ever think of you
I'm not complaining
I never tried to feel
I never tried to feel this vibration
I never tried to reach
I never tried to reach your eden
Did I ever think of you
As my enemy
Did you ever think of me
I'm complaining
I never tried to feel
I never tried to feel this vibration
I never tried to reach
I never tried to reach your eden
[daily log: walking, 1.5 km]
Sometimes I read a blog called JF Ptak Science Books. That's a pretty dry title for a blog, but the author runs some kind of bookstore of rare and unusual used books and publications, and I find it endlessly fascinating.
Today, after coming home and having my increasingly customary but seemingly insalubrious Saturday post-work nap, I was browsing that blog and ran across a posting of this article excerpted from a publication called The Emporium of Arts, and Sciences (1814). I will not reproduce the entirety of it here, because I'm not sure of Ptak's policy on republication of materials, but here is the first facsimile, as a live link back to the blogpost.
Much of the advice could apply just as aptly to the treatment of our fellow adults as to children. But over all it's remarkable, in that it gets at the core of something it is far too easy to forget, with children especially – they learn as much (or more) by our example as by our "instruction" – whatever that is.
When I followed up on Ptak's reference to the supposed author of this 1814 article, Christian Gotthilf Salzmann, I found the wikithing's entry far too tantalizingly brief – what, exactly, might a school founded on Rousseauian principles be like? He was translated by Mary Wollstonecraft? – A bunch of late 18th century hippies, I expect.
[daily log: walking, 5 km]
Why teach kids to believe in Santa? Will Wilkinson explains his opinion (at the Sullyblog):
Now, one of the most interesting truths about the empirical world is that there are all these powerful systems of myth that are kept afloat by a sort of mass conspiracy, and humans seem disposed to pick one from the ambient culture and take it very seriously. But it can be hard to get your head around the way it all works unless you participate in it. Santa is a perfect and relatively harmless way to introduce your child the socio-psychology of a collective delusion about the supernatural. The disillusionment that comes from the exposure to the truth about Santa breeds a general skepticism about similarly ill-founded popular beliefs in physics-defying creatures.
I don't ever remember believing in Santa. I vividly remember even at age 5 or 6, as I opened up the present under the tree labeled "from Santa" thinking to myself, "this is just a sort of story people tell because it's a fun idea." If I went through the disillusionment, I was too young to remember, but I suspect, based on my parents parenting style, that they never tried to deceive me, but instead explained it in a very adult-like and objective manner even though I was only 4 or 5. I think that perhaps in the long run, Mr Wilkinson is wrong: an even better way to teach kids about skepticism is to simply model it, honestly and forthrightly.
[daily log: walking, 5.5 km]
Speculative Grammarian observed yesterday, "Today is Noam Chomsky’s birthday. To celebrate, discuss linguistics or hegemony. But never both at the same time! Why is that?"
More seriously, this is a Chomsky quote in linguistics that is worth remembering, and fundamental to linguistics.
The most striking aspect of linguistic competence is what we may call the 'creativity of language,' that is, the speaker's ability to produce new sentences, sentences that are immediately understood by other speakers although they bear no physical resemblance to sentences which are 'familiar.' – Noam Chomsky
What I'm listening to right now.
TV On The Radio, "Careful You." The lyrics aren't that interesting, but I like the song anyway.
Lyrics.
Oui je t'aime, oui je t'aime
À demain, à la prochaine
I know it's best to say goodbye
But I can't seem to move away
Not to say, not to say
That you shouldn't share the blame
There is a softness to your touch
There is a wonder to your ways
[Chorus]
Don't know how I feel, what's the deal?
Is it real? When's it gonna go down?
Can we talk? Can we not?
Well, I'm here, won't you tell me right now?
And I'll care for you, oh, careful you
Don't know, should we stay? Should we go?
Should we back it up and turn it around?
Take the good with the bad
Still believe we can make it somehow
I will care for you, oh, careful you, careful you
Oui je t'aime, oui je t'aime
From the cradle to the grave
You've done a number on my heart
And things will never be the same
Freeze a frame, freeze a frame
From a fever dream of days
We learned the secret of a kiss
And how it melts away all pain
[Chorus] x2
[daily log: walking, 5.5 km]
I finally actually finished a book. I read Arthur Herman’s popularizing history about the Scots, entitled, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It.
Scottish history is a topic I haven’t actually read that much about – although I felt comfortable in my understanding of the broad outline of English History (and therefore British history post-Union), I never really spent any time studying Scotland, specifically – unlike Wales or Ireland. So I picked up the book in hopes of filling some of that in. In its purely historical aspect, I got a lot out of the book, including a much better understanding of the Scottish Enlightenment and some of the historical events surrounding it (Knox, the Covenanters and the Scottish Reformation; Bonnie Prince Charlie; etc.).
In fact, my main complaint about this book is probably the same as one of the other recent history titles I made a brief review of some time back, which is: good book, bad title. The title’s thesis (i.e. the idea that Scots invented modernity) seems unproven (and unprovable). It occured to me in looking up the text online just now that the title might not even have been the author’s chosen title, but rather the work of some hyperbolizing editor.
In any event, if the title had been something more modest to the effect of the Scottish Enlightenment’s impact on modernity (Hume, Smith, et al.), and their disproportionate contribution to the Anglosphere’s modern global cultural dominance, I’d have been less preoccupied with trying to decide if Herman did an adequate job proving his main thesis. As it was, I kept hoping the next chapter would explain exactly how it was they invented modernity. I’d say inventing modernity was a collective endeavor, in which the Scots definitely played a suprisingly outsized role.
[daily log: walking, 5.5 km]
When I was a child I had an inordinate fondness for Richard Scarry books. They weren’t really stories at all – they were cartoonified reference books with only the barest hintings of plot. Although which would be cause and which effect is not clear, I have ever since enjoyed refence books more than seems appropriate.
I ran across a comic in the series TomTheDancingBug, which I reproduce below. It is in Scarry’s classic style, “updated for the 21st century.” Funny.
I never realized that Lowly Worm was an immigrant. But seeing here that he is, it makes perfect sense. I read once that Lowly was the “true protagonist” of all of the Busytown books. Now I see that he is possibly illegal. Suddenly I want to write a postmodern novel about him. This feeling will pass.
[daily log: walking, 5.5 hm]
This is a complex sentence because it has a subordinate clause.
[daily log: walking, 5.5 km]
"Language is magic: it makes things appear and disappear." – Nicole Brossard
I spent part of the day neglecting my commitment to avoid the internet on Sundays, because I became obsessed with surfing random linguistics and political blogs and websites. I'm not sure why I did this, but I did find a number of interesting tidbits which, rather than trying to preserve and convert into multiple blog-posts here, I will just spew out all at once for your untimely elucitainment.
From a linguistics blogger (satirist?) called Speculative Grammarian, I discovered articles about imaginary languages and, more interestingly, imaginary linguistic theoretical constructs. For example:
The first oddness among the Oboioboioboiwikantsitstil is non-distinctive reduplication. Many speakers repeat elements of words without apparent change in meaning. Consider the following example. (Note that Oboioboioboiwikantsitstil is polysynthetic.)
(1) bin-bin-bin-bin-aistu-aistu-bin-bin-aistu- mipl-mipl-mipl- aistu-bin-aistu-aistu- mipl-mipl-iz-iz-iz- mipl-iz-iz
Imperative-Imp-Imp-Imp-1sg-1sg-Imp-Imp-1sg- use-use-use- 1sg-Imp-1sg-1sg- use-use-toilet-toilet-toilet- use-toilet-toilet.
"I need to use the restroom"
The same author subtly satirizes the current state of syntactic theory by comparing it with a non-existant theory based on the belief that the gods make us talk. He also has a manifesto that I would like to sign.
Finally, if you've ever taken a formal semantics (i.e. linguistics-meets-mathematical-logic) course at the graduate level, you might appreciate this:
λP[λQ[∼∃x[P(x)∧Q(x)]]]
<e,t>,<<e,t>,t>
What part of ‘No’ don’t you understand?
Amid the weeds of politics (or is it political theory?), I found this:
"You’ve been taught to worship democracy. This is because you are ruled by democracy. If you were ruled by the Slime Beast of Vega, you would worship the Slime Beast of Vega." – Mencius Moldbug (evidently a pseudonym of some political blogger)
[daily log: walking across the room]
If you wish your children and your wife and your friends to live forever, you are foolish, for you wish things to be in your power which are not so, and what belongs to others to be your own. So likewise, if you wish your servant to be without fault, you are foolish, for you wish vice not to be vice but something else. But if you wish not to be disappointed in your desires, that is in your own power. Exercise, therefore, what is in your power. A man’s master is he who is able to confer or remove whatever that man seeks or shuns. Whoever then would be free, let him wish nothing, let him decline nothing, which depends on others; else he must necessarily be a slave. – Arrian of Nicomedia, ENCHIRIDION of Epictetus, XIV (2nd century)
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
This seems like a kind of extreme case of a sort of confirmation bias:
"If no one comes from the future to stop you from doing it then how bad of a decision can it really be?" - This was circulating online, and as far as I can figure out it originated from Will Farrell (comedian).
[daily log: walking, 5.5 km]
I ran across this utterly fascinating book excerpt on the marginalrevolution blog:
One project is Michael Marcovici’s Rat Trader. The book describes the training of laboratory rats to trade in foreign exchange and commodity futures markets. Marcovici says the rats “outperformed some of the world’s leading human fund managers.” The rats were trained to press a red or green button to give buy or sell signals, after listening to ticker tape movements represented as sounds. If they called the market right they were fed, if they called it wrong they got a small electric shock. Male and female rats performed equally well. The second generation of rattraders, cross-bred from the best performers in the first generation, appeared to have even better performance, although this is a preliminary result, according to the text. Marcovici’s plan, he writes, is to breed enough of them to set up a hedge fund.
I think this bespeaks the utterly rational nature of the market. Humans are irrational. Rats are just doing what they're trained to do, and their feelings (except the avoidance of electric shock or the reward or food) don't play a role.
[daily log: walking, 6.5 km]
I spent some time watching this video. I like it, and it's interesting, in a Koyaanasqatsi kind of way, but I'm not sure if "abstract" really is what it is? But if not abstract, what is it? It seems very concrete, in fact – it's all "really there" as is inevitable if you're making a film, right? The camera is capturing something real. Perhaps only the ritual is abstract…
Circle of Abstract Ritual from Jeff Frost on Vimeo.
[daily log: walking, 5 km]
I have a hobby I don't talk about much – because it is not something most people can understand, and I don't always want to try to explain it. It does not even have a single term that describes it, but probably the most commonly used these days is "conworlding". This is derived from the noun "conworld" which is a contraction of "constructed world".
I have been doing it since childhood, when I called it "drawing maps", because that is how it started: drawing maps of imaginary countries. But by my teenage years it had become "writing encyclopedia articles about imaginary places." Mostly, I would fill notebooks with this material, as I was never satisfied (or expert enough) with the graphics software available for drawing maps, so I always drew the maps by hand.
This type of activity has a respectable side: JRR Tolkien apparently drew his maps and wrote his appendices for Middle Earth long before he wrote his novels. He also took very seriously the related pasttime of "conlanging" (inventing imaginary languages – not that he called it that, as the term came later). His complex Elvish and other languages are serious philological works. More recently, serious "professional" conlangers have even been able to make money: the guy who invented the Klingon language for Star Trek got paid something, and there's someone who works full time as a conlanger for the Game of Thrones TV show. I was always too perfectionistic, due to my linguistics background, to go very far with conlanging. Arguably, the the same thing that challenges me in learning Korean is what prevents me from being a serious conlanger. Setting that aside, however, I love to make maps and craft the fictional geographical data that accompanies them.
I remember when the wikipedia first appeared, I thought, "there should be a wikipedia for fictional places." Actually, this was an echo, updated for the internet age, of the themes in Borges' famous story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." I was so enamored of this idea that about a decade ago, I tried to use my database programming expertise to build a fictional online encyclopedia for myself, but that project lost momentum at some point.
Well, it turns out some guy in Germany has done it. Further, there is a google-earth-quality online mapping tool for it. Actually, the mapping tool was the thing created first, and I found it about 6 months ago – the wiki came just in the last few months. There are people who are much more serious about it than I am, creating fictional countries, with supporting encyclopedic articles, that are difficult to distinguish from reality. Tlön, indeed.
The collaborative aspect is what is genuinely new, and it changes things some. It is interesting to see what other people do. So I have been spending some time there – mostly crafting maps for my allotments (one can sign up for free, and receive a "country" by request – a terra incognita to do with what one wishes), but also writing some wiki entries for them. It has the same appeal to me of sim games like simcity or civilization, which I have spent plenty of time addicted to, but it is better: there are fewer rules, and the result is always cummulative and feels more creative.
I have attempted to attach a screenshot of a map of the downtown of the city state of Khaiwoon, a vaguely Singaporean nation created by one of the most prolific and talented conworlders. The site is called Opengeofiction – here is a link to his article about Khaiwoon. There are links from there to the mapping tool.
I will leave as an exercise for curious readers to find which countries are "mine".
[daily log: walking, 1 km]
Yesterday I was annoyed by the lack of internet at work.
Lately, you see, I've been making my blog-posts at work – either by coming in a little bit early or going home a little bit later. This is because I have almost completely ended my internet use at home – this is mostly as a means of self-discipline, because I find it improves my affect substantially. When I spend too much time online at home, I tend to feel like I've wasted my time and that I'm lacking in self-control, so by simply avoiding it, I feel better about my lifestyle and my choices. The consequence, however, is that I get my "internet fix" during breaks at work. It's more than sufficient, normally – but when the internet at work isn't working… well, it not only messes up my work routines, it discombobulates my fairly stable home routines, too.
Anyway, I came in early today and found the internet working again. So here I am.
I found this strange little essay online the other day. It's some of the best writting I've run across, recently, about popular culture. A bit unexpectedly, the topic is Sanrio and Japan's "Hello Kitty" empire. Euny Hong, at Quartz.com, writes,
Hello Kitty, you are not what you claim to be. Kitty, what’s your game? I have several plausible theories as to her true provenance (it is with great restraint that I avoid the possibility of interspecies mating):
Origin of Species: Hello Kitty is like Caesar from Planet of the Apes; a regular cat made highly intelligent and biped via an experimental Alzheimer’s drug.
The White family is in some kind of witness protection program. This would explain why a so-called British family is faffing about with apple pies, cookies, and pancakes. They might have to pass as English in their new identity as the “White family.”
The Whites are like a family from a Henry James novel, living in that liminal chasm between America and Europe. Just as they are living in the liminal chasm between human and cat. So much liminality for one family.
Sanrio is the world’s undisputed thought leader in “kawaii,” which is basically the Japanese word for “squee.” The Japanese, through some kind of cartoon phrenology and the design equivalent of genetic engineering (also known as “drawing”) arrived at an image that is the Platonic ideal of cuteness. And Hello Kitty is the brand ambassador for Sanrio. So it’s a bit shocking that it took the world so long to identify what she was. There’s more cult crit to be done here.
To paraphrase Nabokov: Hello, hello, hello Kitty. My sin, my soul.
[daily log: walking, 5.5 km]
Metonymy as an Approach to a Real World
Whether what we sense of this world
is the what of this world only, or the what
of which of several possible worlds
–which what?–something of what we sense
may be true, may be the world, what it is, what we sense.
For the rest, a truce is possible, the tolerance
of travelers, eating foreign foods, trying words
that twist the tongue, to feel that time and place,
not thinking that this is the real world.
Conceded, that all the clocks tell local time;
conceded, that "here" is anywhere we bound
and fill a space; conceded, we make a world:
is something caught there, contained there,
something real, something which we can sense?
Once in a city blocked and filled, I saw
the light lie in the deep chasm of a street,
palpable and blue, as though it had drifted in
from say, the sea, a purity of space.
– William Bronk (American poet, 1918-1999)
[daily log: walking, 5 km]
I was born in California, and lived my first 18 years there (with a few minor interruptions, never more than a few months). Although I generally identify myself as a Minnesotan now (because of my university and post-university years there), I have also lived in California for some years during my adult life.
I have always had an interest in California's unique history, and when I was in the bookstore last Sunday, I bought another book (aside from the one about the Chicken, already mentioned yesterday on this blog) that made for quick reading. It was a used book about California's missions – a fragment of some journal by a French traveller who visited Monterey (at that time populated by probably less than 50 Spaniards and maybe a couple hundred Native Americans, but nevertheless the capital of California) in the 1780's. How a book of this eccentricity arrived on the shelf of a bookstore in Seoul, I have no idea. But I bought it. It's quite short, has a well-written and academic introduction (and many footnotes!), and offers an interesting perspective on the earliest Europeans in California. The title is Life in a California Mission: Monterey in 1786, by Jean François de La Pérouse.
[daily log: walking, 5 km]
Niquitoa
Niqitoa ni Nezahualcoyotl: ¿Cuix oc nelli nemohua in tlalticpac? An nochipa tlalticpac: zan achica ya nican. Tel ca chalchihuitl no xamani, no teocuitlatl in tlapani, no quetzalli poztequi. An nochipa tlalticpac: zan achica ye nican.
– Nezahualcóyotl (poeta acolhua [azteca de texcoco], 1402-1472)
Encontré el poema en español primero – no soy capaz de leer el nahuatl (arriba), aunque durante una época sí contemplaba estudiarlo.
Siguientes, hay traducciones encontradas en un blog llamado 69puntoG.
Yo lo pregunto
Yo Nezahualcóyotl lo pregunto: ¿Acaso deveras se vive con raíz en la tierra?
No para siempre en la tierra: sólo un poco aquí.
Aunque sea de jade se quiebra, aunque sea de oro se rompe,
aunque sea plumaje de quetzal se desgarra.
No para siempre en la tierra: sólo un poco aquí.
I ask
I Nezahualcoyotl ask: Do we really live with roots in the earth?
Not forever on the earth: Only a moment here.
Although made of Jade, it cracks, although made of gold, it breaks,
although it's plumage of Quetzal, it is torn apart.
Not forever on earth: Only a moment here.
[daily log: walking, 5 km]
This song came around on my mp3 player and I could not remember the last time I heard it, but I used to like it a lot. I swear I blogged about it before, but I was unable to find any entry about it, so I will blog about it now.
It has an ecological message – a bit naive, in my opinion. But the entire Re album by Café Tacuba is one of my favorite albums – a masterpiece – and the lyrics are always deep, symbolic, and layered in meanings. Note, for example that the rebellious engineer in this song is named Salvador (AKA Christ). Because this is a Café Tacuba song, that is not an idle reference.
Anyway, it is a great song from a great album.
What I am listening to right now.
Café Tacuba, "Trópico de Cáncer."
Letra.
Cómo es que te vas Salvador
de la compañía si todavía hay mucho verdor?
Si el progreso es nuestro oficio
y aun queda por ahí mucho indio
que no sabe lo que es vivir en una ciudad…
como la gente.
Que no ves que eres un puente
entre el salvajismo y el modernismo.
Salvador el ingeniero,
Salvador de la humanidad.
Está muy bien lo que tu piensas
pero por qué no,
tú te acuerdas
que la nuestra es una civilización muy avanzada…
Como dice la gente.
Que no ves que nuestra mente
no debe tomar en cuenta:
ecologistas, indigenistas,
retrogradistas, y humanistas.
Ay, mis ingenieros
civiles y asociados,
no crean que no me duele
irme de su lado,
pero es que yo pienso
que ha llegado el tiempo
de darle lugar
a los espacios sin cemento.
Por eso yo ya me voy.
No quiero tener nada que ver
con esa fea relación de acción,
Construcción,
Destrucción,
Ahha.
Cómo es que te vas Salvador
de la compañía si todavía hay mucho verdor?
Ay, mis compañeros petroleros mexicanos,
no crean que no extraño el olor a óleo puro.
Pero es que yo pienso que nosotros los humanos,
no necesitamos
más hidrocarburos.
Por eso yo ya me voy.
No quiero tener nada que ver
Con esa fea relación de acción,
Construcción,
Destrucción,
Ahha.
Por eso yo ya me voy.
No quiero tener nada que ver…
Por eso yo ya me voy.
No quiero tener nada que ver…
[daily log: walking, 5 km]
The Past Is the Present If external action is effete and rhyme is outmoded, I shall revert to you, Habakkuk, as when in a Bible class the teacher was speaking of unrhymed verse. He said - and I think I repeat his exact words - "Hebrew poetry is prose with a sort of heightened consciousness." Ecstasy affords the occasion and expediency determines the form. - Marianne Moore (American poet, 1887-1972)
[daily log: walking, 5 km]
RIP Gabriel García Márquez. Ayer murió a la edad de 87 años.
Últimamente confieso no ser tan admirador de su obra, y sin embargo debo decir que durante un período de mi juventud fue un escritor cuya influencia en mi fue muy fuerte. Su novela Cien años de soledad fue probablemente el primer libro en español que leí de forma continua, de comienzo al fin. Creo que fue durante un fin de semana lleno de nieve y frío mientras vivía en Saint Paul en 88. 
Fue la primera vez que contemplaba la idea que quería estudiar la literatura española. Después de cinco años, esa idea se fijó y fue el comienzo de mi carrera académica de estudios graduados. Mis intereses se ampliaron pero llevo una deuda al autor colombiano porque fue él quien al principio me introdujo a la literatura española.
"La vida no es sino una continua sucesión de oportunidades para sobrevivir."
Lo que estoy escuchando en este momento.
MC 900 ft Jesus, "Buried at Sea."
Lyrics
is this a sound
or just a dream?
in my world nothing is quite what it seems
white shroud
clear blue sky
the sea swells a bit
when sailors die
was that a word?
is this a clue?
you're so very far away
but i'm sure it's you
feathers fall
birds in flight
they bury me slowly
is it really still night?
was that a word?
is this a clue?
you're so very far away
but i'm sure it's you
feathers fall
seabirds in flight
in my world
nothing is
[daily log: walking, 5km]
Note: this blog post was delayed 9 hours in posting due to my blog host being DOWN. It was down a lot yesterday, and there have been a lot of technical issues recently, apparently. One reason I tolerate the annoyances of the typepad blog host – and PAY for it (there are so many FREE blog hosting options these days that paying for mine as I do is a bit of an anachronism) – is reliability. Moments such as that one yesterday give me pause….
The difference between men is in their principle of association. Some men classify objects by color and size and other accidents of appearance; others by intrinsic likeness, or by the relation of cause and effect. The progress of the intellect is to the clearer vision of causes, which neglects surface differences. To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine. For the eye is fastened on the life, and slights the circumstance. Every chemical substance, every plant, every animal in its growth, teaches the unity of cause, the variety of appearance.
Upborne and surrounded as we are by this all-creating nature, soft and fluid as a cloud or the air, why should we be such hard pedants, and magnify a few forms? Why should we make account of time, or of magnitude, or of figure? The soul knows them not, and genius, obeying its law, knows how to play with them as a young child plays with graybeards and in churches. Genius studies the causal thought, and, far back in the womb of things, sees the rays parting from one orb, that diverge ere they fall by infinite diameters. Genius watches the monad through all his masks as he performs the metempsychosis of nature. Genius detects through the fly, through the caterpillar, through the grub, through the egg, the constant individual; through countless individuals, the fixed species; through many species, the genus; through all genera, the steadfast type; through all the kingdoms of organized life, the eternal unity. Nature is a mutable cloud, which is always and never the same. She casts the same thought into troops of forms, as a poet makes twenty fables with one moral. Through the bruteness and toughness of matter, a subtle spirit bends all things to its own will. The adamant streams into soft but precise form before it, and, whilst I look at it, its outline and texture are changed again. Nothing is so fleeting as form; yet never does it quite deny itself. In man we still trace the remains or hints of all that we esteem badges of servitude in the lower races; yet in him they enhance his nobleness and grace; as Io, in Aeschylus, transformed to a cow, offends the imagination; but how changed, when as Isis in Egypt she meets Osiris-Jove, a beautiful woman, with nothing of the metamorphosis left but the lunar horns as the splendid ornament of her brows!
– Ralph Waldo Emerson (American philosopher, 1803-1882), from his essay "History" (1841).
[daily log: walking, 3 km]
There is a fun website where you can make your robot dance.
"Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers the most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture." – Thomas Merton
My mother recently asked me how I feel about the NSA, the prospect of Big Brother via technology, the much-announced end-of-privacy and all that. She also mentioned the preponderance of "conspiracy theories" in the media universe that arise in relation to these issues.
I started to write a long, involved answer in email form, but decided to just give her a short answer and save the long answer for some kind of blog post. Here is that blog post.
One can't think about the state except in relation to what lies beyond it, the single world market, and in relation to what lies this side of it, the levels of minorities, becomings, and the "people." Beyond the state it's money that rules, money that communicates, and what we need these days isn't a critique of Marxism, but a modern theory of money as good as Marx's that goes on from where he left off. – Gilles Deleuze
I don't buy much into conspiracy theories, but concede the "scariness" of bigbrotherism via emerging technologies. My own marxian counterpoint is to observe that capital and the state are not natural allies. As antagonists, they tend to damper each others' totalizing tendencies. When google or facebook get out of hand with their accumulation of user data, the governments tend to step in. When the governments get out of hand with their spying on citizens, the corporations and the technoanarchists step in. This is a broad tendency, and of course there will be many exceptions and counterexamples in both directions, such as the apparent cooperation of US phone companies with the NSA or the recent failure of the government to back net neutrality.
As a reflection of this principle, I will note that a new internet browser was created recently by everyone's favorite Swedish anarchists at Pirate Bay, that "bypasses" the government sponsored DNS system through use of the same technology as the file torrenting systems, and therefore makes possible a sort of "stealth" internet that regulating governments can't "see."
The state-capital conflict is a long-standing interest of mine, and perhaps it is a source of my continued optimism for the lot of the little guy vis-a-vis big brother, even now. I think that Marx over-estimated the role of the "worker" (collectively) but that he also in some ways under-estimated the role of the state – hence his hoping that it would whither away under communism, for example. But this miscalculation in his theoretical work does not invalidate the perception that there is a sort of conflict at work, and my own tendency is to apply the more recent insights of cybernetics and ecological system to realize that it leads to a kind of "balance" that is, over the longest run, a steady state (different meaning for state, here).
The South Koreans know everything I do online. I have a very strong faith in their collective incompetence, and thus worry very little about it. My take on ALL conspiracy theories returns to the theorem: "Never attribute to malice that which is better explained by stupidity."
This was funny. 
Also, this somewhat hilarious linguist joke:
The past, present and future all walk into a bar at the same time.
It was tense.
[daily log (11 pm): walking, 5 km]
