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Below are the 25 most recent journal entries.

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  2003.12.09  21.22


The notion that we should
lower the threshhold of conditions
under which we go to war
as a way to reduce the amount
we go to war
is a very silly notion.

  
 


 
  2003.12.08  21.33


Why do dogs sniff their butts?

Because that's where the smells are.

  
 


 
  2003.12.06  20.47


<a href="http://www.theonionavclub.com/archives/fttf/archive_fttf_a.php>An invaluable film resource.</a> Oops. Oh well.

  
 


 
  2003.12.05  22.00


The NYT Magazine this week has an examination of the Dean campaign as a new sort of political phenomenon. This is the concluding paragraph...
[Ms. Teachout] struggles for a better word than ''friend'' to describe the relationship -- she still hasn't found a replacement for ''citizen'' either -- and settles on ''correspondent.'' ''What's happening is an unusual and unprecedented correspondence between the campaign and us,'' she says. It takes me a moment before I realize that when she says ''the campaign,'' she doesn't mean the people running the headquarters in Burlington. She means the people she's going to visit in her Airstream.
I think having that show up in a magazine like that is an encouraging sign.

  
 


 
  2003.11.15  18.47


This sort of thing
is a good lead in to a rant.

Reducing public discourse to public opinion
and polling it
and plotting it
on a graph
and labelling the axes
and there you are
a coordinate
a point on an axis
is murder in the first degree
of the individual
and the possibility
of progress.

The mathematic structures
which come closest
to the richness and complexity
of thought
are structures that occur
in spaces of infinite dimension.

Words, labels, these are the narrowing
part of language, the specifying part,
the capturing part.
The creative force and generative power
of thought
consists in discourse.

But our participation in this world
is not one of discourse
it is one of measurement
and -ahem- being counted
and assigned a bin
and tagged.

This is our most ancient fear and myth
come back to remind us of itself.
One's name is not be known.
Names grant power.
Naming calls.

What's your name?
Democrat?
Amazon customer?
Green?

Labels are traps.
Names are tombstones.

  
 


 
  2003.11.07  22.17


The anglo-saxon world
may have forgotten
that anglo-saxon
is a kind of barbarian
but the rest of the world hasn't.

  
 


 
  2003.11.06  21.45


So I have this theory.

I think we made a rather unfortunate turn in the road
when we adopted the practice of sending five year olds
off to spend their days in little corrals full of five year olds.

With, of course, one adult keeping order, and being in charge.
And teaching.

I think this has weakened the transmission
of essential parts of the fundamental legacy of
tens and hundreds of thousands of years
of learning how to be what we are.

I don't mean high culture, at all,
and certainly not low culture, whatever that could be,
(sorry, we call it pop I guess as a sort of
wrinkling of our upraised noses and blowing boos at
other upraised noses)
but something in a different direction,
the foundations of culture.

The principles, ideas, warnings, and evocations
embodied in the edifice of our creations,
and in the celebrations of their remembrance,
are the leaves and flowers of a tree
whose trunk and roots
are our most basic learnings about what
sort of creatures we all are and how
our lives operate as a whole.

The transmission of those lessons is an involved process
of cues and examples and dialogs,
those witnessed as well as those experienced;
it is a process that doesn't seem to work so well
when young children live segregated lives.

What is the function of politeness?
The imposition of a regime of cant formalities
does not alone convey much of an account
of what this is for,
or how it alters our collective experience.

Encouragement, example, counter-example,
and experiment do that, and it takes time
and patience and attention and engagement
of which in schools there are none.

That's just an example, I think there are more.

Don't get me started about the sex stuff.
By all means, let's take the most powerful
inclination of our beings, and try to make sure that
those encountering it in themselves for the first time
have no vocabulary for any part of it,
except an illicit forbidden one used only among their peers,
and no inkling that there could even be a way to
ask their models and prototypes and teachers
just what the hell is going on.
Just go ahead and render all discussion
forbidden, and impossible.
That should work great, let's do that.

  
 


 
  2003.10.21  22.24
Stuff about stuff. (*)

Does
the phrase
"the building on the south-west corner
of Harriett and Esmeralda"
refer
to
the building that lies to the southwest of the corner,
or does it
refer
to
the building to which the corner lies southwest?

The universe is a network of states,
exchanging information in a
ternary form with degrees of uncertainty
that relate directly to energy.

Precision is the dual of energy.

What I like about my dog
is that this is the language in which he operates.

The answers he understands
are yes, no
and let's figure it out.

Not maybe.
Digby's not into maybe.
Digby's into let's figure it out.
Trust me on that one.

The logic of the universe
is a logic of process
as well as principle.

[Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<size=1>') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.]

Does
the phrase
"the building on the south-west corner
of Harriett and Esmeralda"
refer
to
the building that lies to the southwest of the corner,
or does it
refer
to
the building to which the corner lies southwest?

The universe is a network of states,
exchanging information in a
ternary form with degrees of uncertainty
that relate directly to energy.

Precision is the dual of energy.

What I like about my dog
is that this is the language in which he operates.

The answers he understands
are yes, no
and let's figure it out.

Not maybe.
Digby's not into maybe.
Digby's into let's figure it out.
Trust me on that one.

The logic of the universe
is a logic of process
as well as principle.

<size=1>(*) Clear, informative labelling is essential to the user experience.</size>


  
 


 
  2003.10.18  05.04


This evening
while I was sorting out
part of a talk I have to give
to some people at work
I realized that I'd drawn a diagram
of the meaning of life.

Before you get all worked up,
I mean the meaning of the word "life".
The definition, rather than the purpose.

But still, that's not bad.

It's a diagram, not just a piece of text.
Not like one of those kabbala things
with guardians and mazes
and praeturnal beings with tails.
No pitchforks in my diagram.
Arrows, it has those.

It looks a bit like Jimmy Durante,
if you turn it around a bit and squint.

  
 


 
  2003.09.15  02.26
Still around

I've been busy.

It's been a while, I know. But, hey.

I've been doing stuff. I replanted my back yard way back when. That was a job o' work. But, grass.

I dug in to serious competitive Civilization for a while. I can win Deity games. There are people out there who play a very great deal of Civilization. There is a theoretical foundation.

I have a job. This is not so unfortunate as it sounds. I have job programming, and this is much less unfortunate than it sounds. It's a blast. I have near carte blanche to build something that satisfies these constraints: it has to be relevant to a particular aspect of the company's field, it has to be saleable and interesting to demonstrate, it has to have long-term potential, and it has to ready in a few weeks. Other than that, it's up to me. It's been a long time since I've built something from the ground up in an impossibly short time. It's great. The people are good. A mix of expertises, and some very bright lights. Mostly european. I find I have less of an instinctive urge to avoid certain topics with them, than I am used to experiencing in California, and that's very pleasant.

This is a really good book about the state of modern unified theory work. The first three chapters are the best non-mathematical explanation of the essence of relativity and quantum theory that I've ever run across. There's a chapter entitled The universe is made of processes, not things.. The first chapter is There is nothing outside the universe. There's a bit where he almost gets across the intricacy of the superposition principle, and the complexity of scientists' feelings about it.

I've almost made the home-officey room palatable. There's still too much stuff stuff stuff in here, but the fittings are coming along. I scraped and refinished the big slab table I use as a desk, so it's water-resistant and not grubby old plain wood.

Stuff like that.



Mood: productive

 
 


 
  2003.05.12  22.35


It's a messy world today.

It's just thoroughly fucked up
everywhere you look.

Even the seven seas are all fucked up.
We've killed off the dominant populations
of fish from entire oceans.

And that's in the safe places,
where people don't live.

That takes work.
You're not just coasting by on
your natural incompetence
to do this badly.

What the U.S. government
is doing in Iraq right now
is just a little scale model
of what humanity has done to the planet.

Just what is the problem with us?
Are we really just this inept
or are there underlying problems
that we could sort out?

I think there must be.
We can do a lot of impossible stuff.
It couldn't be much more difficult
to do it to our benefit.

I think we need less blame and more diagnosis.

  
 


 
  2003.05.11  18.08


Starting wars
to prevent them
isn't what anyone could call
a coherent policy

but it is the kind of policy
you might expect
from a man
who gets bashed in the head
from eating a pretzel.

  
 


 
  2003.05.10  01.01


Many noisy boosters of freedom in America
seem to completely misunderstand
what freedom is.

They see freedom as absence of restraint.
They see the question of maximizing freedom
as one of arranging the structure of society
to ensure maximal protection from interference
or constraint imposed upon any by others.
They see freedom primarily as freedom from.

But this is not the nature of freedom,
it is a byproduct, a derived concept, not a basic one.
You need to understand what 'constraint' and
interference are and those are complicated things
to build a fundamental moral directive out of.

The fundamental shape of freedom,
the enabling shape whose appearance and evolution
brought the possibility of freedom into the world,
is the shape of capability.

The original freedom, evolved as patterns of molecules
learned more complicated and far-flung tricks
to extend and perpetuate themselves
is the capability to act.

Freedom is awareness plus ability.
The contribution society makes
(and the way society evolved and flourished)
is to increase our abilities.
That's what keeps the whole ball rolling.
Containing and balancing the interpersonal constraints
and dangers from others
that complex societies can give rise to
is but a means to the end
of maximizing capability.

If we hadn't developed society
to extend and propagate our abilities
we would be capable even of awareness,
let alone moral choice.
Society is part of us.
We would be incapable of freedom without it.

Freedom to do something you are not capable of doing
is not interesting freedom. It is meaningless.

Society exists to foster people's capabilities.
That's what we evolved it for.

  
 


 
  2003.05.03  03.32


Conservatives are people for whom
the fundamental goal of the human endeavour
is a given.

It is the same goal that provides "clarity"
to the activities and decisions of corporate executives
as their always-to-be-kept-in-mind
central goal.

Get rich.

That's the goal.
All the rest of the values of modern freedom
are, to these people, aristotelean means
to the end of their own enrichment.

They have aesthetically impoverished
and intellectually discredited
philosophical epics
establishing this as the a priori
central goal.

It's not good to have these people
running governments,
because their outlook is incompatible
with democracy.
Democracy is a means for determining
what the goals are.
Every party has different goals;
that's what parties are.

The Randroid-Republicans are corporate hacks
of the corrupt influence-peddling bribing kind
who are deluded into thinking
that their greed is the only logical behavior.

So when you know that the goal is predetermined
you aren't inclined to respect the institutions
of democracy.

You don't find many successful
corporations that are democratic.
They have differentiated goals,
and so they don't make as much money.

For the converse reason, you don't find
many democracies run successfully
by corporate pitchmen.

They omit to pay attention to the
political message about current goals
and so eventually founder from
simple national dissatisfaction.

I hope.

  
 


 
  2003.04.30  23.45


Sometimes I get the feeling
that there isn't anything
secret and diabolical
going on.

  
 


 
  2003.04.30  00.05
Oh, by the way.

When the fundamentalists today
get obsessed with the idea that we're fighting a war
between the West and Islam
in which we are bound to defend ourselves
they forget something
important:
we started it.

Yes, it's been going for a millenium
without interruption
the war between the Christian West and Islam
that's evident.
It's just as evident
that the Christian West
is the agressor.

In the tenth century,
Paris had a population of about 38,000.
Cordoba, in Moorish Spain
(which is cast, in modern Christian
comic-book history,
as being a victimized outpost
of a bloodthirsty tribal empire)
had a population of about 500,000.

Their public buildings stand
to this day unequalled as
accomplishments of graceful design.

al-Andalus was the most succesful,
tolerant, prosperous, and culturally rich
civilization that Spain has ever known.
It was established by driving out the Visigoths.
It lasted until the Christians came
and brought the Inquisition.

  
 


 
  2003.04.29  22.56
Life Goes On?

They can't find Saddam,
but they've found the head of the royal family.

Man of Shuruppak, son of Ubar-Tutu,
Tear down this house, build a ship!
Give up possessions, seek thou life.
Despise property and keep the soul alive.
Aboard the ship take thou the seed of all living things.

Even God plagiarized from the Epic of Gilgamesh.

  
 


 
  2003.04.29  22.45
The Sex Life of My Rhizomes

My rhizomes are a randy lot.

Sometimes, two rhizomes merge.
They entangle themselves together
to a make a rhizome full of everything from both of them.
You call this recognition.

The two rhizomes combine to produce a new rhizome.
Sometimes a big rhizome recognizes a small one quickly.
Sometimes two big rhizomes mate slowly
in the churning spirals of my mind,
and gradually gestate a third.

Sometimes, a rhizome splits apart all by itself.
Each half of the rhizome comes to live
on messages it gets from other parts of my mind,
and stops sharing with the other half of its old self.
Gradually they become two different rhizomes.
Those child organisms feed from different sets of other rhizomes.
You call this distinguishing or telling apart.

Remember words?
A word is like a fungus, as a creature in my mind:
it grows out of another rhizome and exploits it.
It is shaped like a tree rooted in that other rhizome,
with branches growing out all over my mind.
It takes messages from the rhizomes outside
into itself and on to the rhizome at its root.

The rhizome at a root is the idea that the word refers to.
The word-rhizomes don't receive many messages from their
underlying idea; mostly, they feed that idea, and energize it,
when other rhizomes grow busy around their branches.
The idea, when it gets those messages from its name,
awakes, and sends messages back out
into the whole community of my mind.

All that activity keeps the idea prosperous, of course,
and it also feeds the word-rhizome and lets it grow.
A tidy little symbiosis, this language game.

Some words refer to small rhizomes, simple ideas.
Some words refer to big rhizomes.
Some words refer to ideas that have been told apart
(ideas that grew from one idea).
Such a word is hard to define.
It keeps the two distinguished rhizomes tied together.
Anything that awakes the word, awakes both ideas.
Eventually, a word too can be told apart into two words,
or more, as its family of ideas
grows distinguished from one another.

Needless to say, after a few years of this,
there are a lot of rhizomes in my mind.
And they're all related in ways
too numerous to mention.

But that's not the real problem.
The real source of the population explosion
and the malthusian crisis in my mind
is the constant insinuation
of foreign rhizomes.
Alien rhizomes.
Your rhizomes.

  
 


 
  2003.04.28  22.48
Nature or Nurture?

There are a lot of pop theories
about why our brains got so big.

We can leave aside their invaluable
and oft-noted utility as a radiator
to cool the blood.

Most of the others are better-known
but not more accurate

It wasn't, for instance, a matter of being
selected for increased fluency of language
or proficiency in killing.

I think our brains got bigger
under direct pressure
from culture.

The competitive advantage being selected for
that increased the capacity of our minds
was successful participation in culture;
that drove all the rest of the other effects.

It's clear in the anthropological record
that culture arose
back when our brains were small,
a third the size they are now.

You need culture before you can select for toolmaking,
or storytelling, or teaching, or inventing.

If those skills had to be transmitted as innate capabilities
they would not be accessible from genetic mutations;
that's just too much complexity to get from a chromosome.
It would take far more evolution than we've had time for
to accomplish "speaking English" as a genetic inheritance.

Culture is the other way.
If you can devise ways to pass along
the means of using language
after birth in childhood
and keep continuity of the knowledge
over large groups
then you can use that as part of the means
of passing along survival capabilities.

The business of passing along
survival capabilities
is evolution itself.

Culture is our acquired understanding
about how to survive.
It's not a reflection of that understanding,
nor some meditation upon it.
It -is- that understanding, vessel and wine.

Language is a part of culture.
It's one of the special features that
the prior establishment of culture
permits us to evolve.
Culture is the means of evolving of it
and the depository of its advancements.

Our genetic inheritance evolved in tandem
with that mechanism and its assets.

To abandon culture is to abandon fully half
of that tough darwinian establishment
that lends us our very existence.
The other half of our nature,
the instinctual genetic half,
is about as complete and useful on its own
as a gastrointestinal tract
without a circulatory system.

  
 


 
  2003.04.27  11.32
Mental biology

My mind is full of creatures made of flows of messages
between junctions. Each one of them is alive;
they are born, and live, and die, quite literally,
in the environment created by the activity in my brain.

( What can I mean by that? )

  
 


 
  2003.04.26  22.46
Being Postmodern

I live in a house in California.

My mind is a rhizome. It is an evolving, dynamic process
made up of little junctions, and long pathways between them,
and complex chemical messages slipping from junction to junction.
It is a spiderweb of chain lightning.

The network is present in my physical brain.
It is the world in which the process of my thoughts evolves.

I have a rhizome in my mind called Paris. It is part of my mind.
It is contained within my mind and connected to it along pathways.
My brain contains a network connected to everything I associate with Paris.

Paris is a very big rhizome, and my mind is vastly bigger.
There are many more junctions involved in Paris than there are cells in my body.
There are many more patterns of pathways in my mind than there are molecules in my body.

My experience when I think of Paris is the messages moving around that network
and into the rest of my mind. They are patterns of chemical exchanges in my brain.
When I think about Paris, that rhizome is awash with molecules swimming all around my brain.

My Paris rhizome is not the neurons and synapses of my brain.
It is a process happening in the cells of my brain.
But that's for another chapter.

My Paris rhizome is a living creature.
It's an active metabolism in an ecosystem.
It competes with other rhizomes, and feeds on rhizomes, and creates new rhizomes.

All the rhizomes in my mind are deeply connected by pathways into one another.
Paris and Rachel are rhizomes that intertwine in my mind.
I have a rhizome in my mind for my finger.
It has little rhizomes in it, that operate my finger.

My attention is the central process in my mind, its master rhizome,
participating in all the rhizomes that send messages into my brain
from my eyes, and my ears, and my skin all over, and my heart, and my lungs.
I send messages back out into my body, and it does things.
That's what my mind is for, inside my body, and why my brain is built to culture it.

When I am not thinking about Paris, the same rhizome is still passing messages.
I'm just not aware of it, because those messages don't do much to my attention;
there aren't enough of them to notice. Until I think about Paris.

Some rhizomes in my mind are special. They are shaped like trees,
with a trunk at the center, and roots and branches.
The roots take messages from many rhizomes,
and the branches feed them all into one rhizome, or a few.
These rhizomes are called words.
When they feed into rhizomes of people or places, they are called names.
They are unusual; most rhizomes don't have a strict direction like that.
They're very young, those kinds of rhizomes. A recently evolved species.

Each rhizome is alive. Each one is a tenous, fragile organism
with a home in my mind. The messages it gets are its food,
and passing them around and breaking them up and passing more out, are its metabolism.
The messages it sends out are how it sets up pathways to get more messages
from other rhizomes. All the rhizomes compete for messages in my mind.
It's how they eat and breathe and drink, all in one.

My senses are rhizomes that send messages into my mind,
in towards my perceptions, and my perceptions send messages all over my mind,
and the perceptions that respond to those messages send more messages all around,
and the rhizomes that get those messages, chew on them for a while, and send more all around.

Different rhizomes are connected by pathways in many tiny subtle different ways to my sensations.
The pathways are long with many little junctions along the way.

When I'm awake, the rhizomes in my mind are responding to those messages
by sending messages out all over my body all the time.

When I'm asleep, the rhizomes don't receive those messages very much,
because different chemistry is at work. The pulsing of the living rhizomes
in my mind goes on, but with awareness (that biggest rhizome of all) suppressed.
When awareness is suppressed, the various communities of rhizomes
in my mind aren't interacting very much, they're alone among their thoughts.

Sometimes, at night, the inner rhizomes, the busy multitudes in my brain,
send messages, and the rhizomes of my senses respond with old sensations,
old dances they recall; but disjointly, almost by accident, because they're not in harness to awareness.

Strange things can happen then.

  
 


 
  2003.04.24  20.31
Priorities

As many children die each day
day in, day out year in, year out,
from malaria in Africa
as people died in New York City
on September 11 2001

Malaria is preventable and curable.
It just takes a little money.

Repairing the electronic trading systems
after the world trade center was destroyed
cost 3 billion dollars.

That's about 3 times
the money spent each year
in Africa
in all
on care for children with malaria.

  
 


 
  2003.04.23  02.30
Emotions Condition Memory

They really do.
The means by which your experiences become memories
rely on the emotional context of the memories
to select what is recalled.

What you remember most of all,
the things that predominate your recollection of the past
are the things that hurt you or frightened you;
those are the strongest markers for determining what you recall.
Joyous or humourous moments also foster resilient memories,
but at lower priority and higher threshold
than pain and fear and anger.

The events uncolored by strong emotion
or intensity of engagement in the experience
just fade into a vast fabric of cognitive blind spots.

In human sciences these days, that's just a well-understood mechanism,
not contentious in the least, but really very well established.

It's no wonder we're a little pessimistic
about the world.

  
 


 
  2003.04.23  01.35
Bile

There's a habit that's a pretty good marker for an insecure alpha-wannabee: he bitches about his job in anecdotal detail as his favorite way of reminding everyone around him how clever he is.

Ari Fleischer is what made me think of that.

  
 


 
  2003.04.16  01.51
A short note

To the department of defense

We don't need new kinds of war
nor people paid to create them
at this time.
Such endeavours are incompatible
with the overarching common interests
of humanity.

Dismiss all such creatures
from your ranks.

Thanks in advance
for your cooperation
in this matter.

With best regards,
we remain,
the overarching common interests
of humanity

  
 


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