In lieu of actually writing something, I can tell you what I’m reading:
At NYT: The End of the Financial World as We Know It. Michael Lewis and David Einhorn talking about why nobody cared what Bernard Madoff was doing - among other things.
Thomas Levenson’s “Measure For Measure: A Musical History of Science”. This book hinges on the etymology of the word Instrument: It has broadened over time to include quite a bit of semantic territory, but its concrete usage Music and Science both lay claim.
Levenson attempts to tell a big story about how the aims of “science” have changed over the years in Western society: “The kind of question being asked”. Our concept of the scientific revolution - Galileo, Newton, and the early chemists, certainly - represents a shift to a different question. It’s a story I’ve heard told in many ways before.
Denis Donoghue’s “Ferocious Alphabets”. This book has been languishing on my bookshelf for years. I think I may even have carried it with me to India in 2000 - I brought a lot of books because I suspected that I would have downtime rained in at hotels (I did), and I thought it might be hard to purchase books (it wasn’t). Remind me to talk about the book stalls of Calcutta one day.
But my appreciation of “Ferocious Alphabets” was increased vastly after reading “Proust And The Squid”. The main thing I can say about it quickly is this: Donoghue holds up examples from several writers to illustrate several major approaches to writing. He leads us inevitably back to Plato’s Phaedrus, and the original complaints about writing versus speech.
Posted in economics, books, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 05 Jan 2009 01:44:00 GMT
I started reading Clay Calvert’s book “Voyeur Nation” from 2000. It is a criticism of mass media news and entertainment. Calvert singles out two particular formats: The low-brow talk shows like “Jerry Springer” and the culled-footage ‘video-verite’ of “Cops” and “America’s Funniest Home Videos”.
At issue is the problem of passive audiences substituting the watching of life-like experiences for begin involved in those experiences directly.
Also at issue is the power of the media conglomerates to weigh in and tip the balance in law between the privacy of individuals versus the First Amendment rights of publishers.
Mass media is a profit-driven business. Another balance is between arguments for regulating that content and letting the market decide. People are in more or less general agreement when it comes to obscenity, but there are many forms of less obviously harmful content.
Resonances
Was I reading about the IBM Prediction and its ramifications for privacy first? Or did I pick up Clay Calvert’s “Voyeur Nation” first? Because I can’t remember anymore. Last night in the middle of reading “Voyeur Nation” I suddenly remembered that uncanny link between the two.
To me, the best use of such an assisted technology is to have a record of what transpired. Earlier I said that I don’t have a problem remembering those details, but that is not entirely true: I have a pretty good memory for the details I know are important at the time. Other details don’t stick so well, and the significance doesn’t become clear until later.
I’m in a slightly better position to talk about the privacy ramifications of this development now.
Posted in media-studies, books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sat, 13 Dec 2008 00:08:00 GMT
Reading about dyslexia and brain hemisphere compensation in “Proust And The Squid” really stimulates my hypochondria. One specific portent involves anecdotal evidence of creative people who were eventually diagnosed with dyslexia. The suspicion is that we remember these people for the successes they had as a result of overcoming their disability. Many others were not so fortunate. But, the trend seems to indicate that so many problems go undiscovered because the strategies of compensation happen only in the head, whether they involve neurons seeking out alternative connections or a conscious attempt at ‘damage control’ and going a different route for the desired results.
The important thing to remember is that dyslexia is not one thing. From perception to comprehension is a chain of activity coiled up in the brain. If that activity is blocked or slowed at any one spot, people notice. Memory has to coordinate, and lost speed can mean the memories arrive late (or early!) to the party. The individual with only one contributing factor is lucky - they may have been born into a language that didn’t expose the problem at all, and they have fewer obstacles to work around to begin with. In that case, we can probably all dredge up some evidence of a problem: I have no memories of seeing words jumbled, but I had a maddening tendency to write ‘d’ when I wanted ‘b’ (only the lower case printed letters), and vice-versa. There was often a moment when I would blank, unable to visualize either, and having to take a leap in the dark. Reflexes in the hand drew the line before the circle first, and to my aggravation, it would be spaced wrong.
I spent five years learning Japanese - For reasons I won’t explain here, I was able to put a lot of time into that class the first year - and I had less trouble memorizing a strange script than other students did. I enjoyed practicing my calligraphy, and I even got Japanese script on my computer. But, as a result of diacritical marks to change voiceless consonants to voiced consonants in the kana syllabaries, I still occasionally type one letter of a pair instead of another - usually ‘d’ for ‘t’ - as if my hand knows that the distinction will be settled later and either will do. To this day I still can’t keep ‘u’, ‘i’ and ‘o’ from getting mixed up when I’m not looking at the keyboard. Maybe it’s because I’m left-handed, and my right hand just can’t be trusted to manage it without me drilling the lessons.
Very interesting to me was a passing remark in the book that her difficulty retrieving the right word put her on the path of studiously collecting words, the implication being that other, stronger, areas of your brain would be engaged in acquiring such a collection. Would that describe most poets? More attuned to an aspect of words that is less useful - possibly even disruptive - when writing everyday prose. More likely to see any writing task as an opportunity to attain the heights of virtuosity?
Posted in books, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 02 Dec 2008 18:01:00 GMT
This weekend one of my friends from high school was in town. He and his wife were catching a train back to Michigan this afternoon, so I met them for lunch at Union Station and we took a walk over to the National Gallery to look at art.
The east building had a show up called “Pompeii and the Roman Villa - Art and Culture Around the Bay of Naples”. There were artifacts, mosaic replicas and some more modern paintings, many including the erupting Vesuvius.
There was a new installation in the underground passageway called “Multiverse”: A grid of lights made strung in the grooves of the wall and ceiling at the moving walkways. The lights were white LEDs that lit up to different brightnesses. Clearly, there was a computer behind the scenes - Waves of light crossed the surface, bright and dark blobs moved together as swarms, and the whole thing would sometimes just shimmer. We stood there by the opposite wall just soaking it up for a while. It didn’t get boring - different subtle behaviors would crop up. I wondered if there was some cellular automata algorithm at work, but on second thought, the answer is probably something more direct: It was surely created on a plain old computer screen first. The lights must have been adapted to a video board of some kind.
Our last stop was the west building. I heard a woman walking by say “Well, I was impressed”. Then I looked in one of the galleries to see… Impressionist paintings. Was that some kind of joke?
An Odd Coincidence In The Book Basket
I was carrying around my recently purchased copy of Umberto Eco’s “Travels In Hyperreality”, reading it in my spare moments. I bid my friends farewell, and hopped on a bus in front of the station. In the very first essay, he writes about Pompeii. It would have really been weird if I had read further into the book before seeing the Pompeii exhibit.
Posted in DC-roaming, books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 02 Dec 2008 04:24:00 GMT
I’m starting to actually finish a lot of the books I’m reading. I am almost done with “Proust And The Squid” - but dwelling a bit on the final chapter. WETA has a show on right now about the brain and vision processing - Brain Fitness 2, Sight And Sound - which I just read about in terms of the brain and reading.
Although I still reference a lot of books, the list of books I am committed to reading straight through is shaking out. I suppose I can start a bunch of others on short notice…
Yesterday I finished the Los Angeles chapter in “Cities In Civilization”. It’s titled The City As Freeway. It provides a good contrast with the chapter on New York that proceeds it. They both deal with transportation planning in those cities at the beginning of the 20th century.
Through its history, Los Angeles always had more cars per person than any other city. Therefore, they faced some of the same traffic problems that other cities did, only decades before. Add to that the way public transportation was cynically controlled by land developers.
I thought this Lewis Mumford quote was funny:
“In short, the American has sacrificed his life as a whole to the motorcar, like someone who, demented with passion, wrecks his home in order to lavish his income on a capricious mistress who promises delights he can only occasionally enjoy.” -Lewis Mumford, “The Highway And The City”
Posted in books, urban-studies | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 01 Dec 2008 04:23:00 GMT
I spent my Thanksgiving with friends in Virginia. As I have the past couple of years, I hopped on a commuter train Wednesday afternoon and returned home on Friday. Sometimes I get a ride home, other times I am in a hurry to catch a train back to work Friday morning. Once when the trains weren’t running that Friday, I needed a ride back on Thursday night. This year none of that mattered. The trains were running, and I didn’t have to be at work Friday (the chief benefit of being unemployed - possibly the only benefit). Instead the health of their two young sons made it imperative that they get some rest and that their mom not stray too far from home. It’s a shame, really, because she doesn’t often get an excuse to take the boys to the Smithsonian, and the American History Museum has finally re-opened for business after a long renovation.
Thanksgiving with two boys both yelling and coughing is less than idyllic, and they were more excited than usual because of their ‘Uncle Evan’. That put reading on the back burner, which I mostly accomplished on the train. I was mainly able to skim the books I brought because finishing a paragraph was a challenge with Televisions showing kids shows and the chaos of scattering toys. Still, it’s my local brand of family. I even got to enjoy some football on a big-screen TV (all the while remembering with a sense of irony that the Umberto Eco book I was holding had an essay critical of sports…)
Now that I’ve read more than half of “Proust And The Squid”, the outlines of my original complaint are becoming clearer. In the most compact phrasing: The average person I meet is not as interesting as the average book I read. Please understand, people are interesting to me in their own right, but they are not interesting because they make a lot of sense. Add to that my degree of care in selecting what I read, and the result is that I shy away from people talking so I can go read something someone wrote.
In the book, Wolf spends some time reminding us of the joys we experienced on breaking through the wall of print into new worlds of the imagination. She quotes several authors and she quotes little kids suffering from dyslexia. She gives some evidence from brain scans to show that some of these virtual breakthroughs are accompanied by the brain’s ability to forge new pathways - shorter pathways - to speed up an activity and make it more automatic.
What you notice from doing a lot of reading is that someone usually took some care in getting the words right. They aren’t the kind of words that spontaneously erupt from a person’s mouth. Someone talking that way has usually rehearsed their presentation. And those presentations tend to be boring - you might even find yourself wishing to have a printed version of the script so you can skim it and read the best bits. In the shift to electronic print, this cherished quality of writing is in jeopardy. On several fronts. People who ‘write’ emails or comments on blogs and other forums - often the writer of the blog itself - don’t put that kind of care into their writing. They don’t edit. This doesn’t ruin the medium completely - A balance can be struck between spontaneity and thoughtfulness. I’m usually happy when I read comments with a ‘diamond in the rough’ quality. Get that grain of truth in there, and I can overlook problems with the language. Don’t assume that I’m such a stickler for correctness, either: I’m on the bandwagon with a lot of the inventions of keyboarding in the mobile phone and web 2.0 worlds. LOLcat and 1337speak are ingenious adaptations, not the downfall of society. But, they aren’t forms I would use for this discussion.
Here is a mystery that still remains: Why don’t people breathe more life into their spoken language? Print doesn’t prevent that form happening. Books don’t prevent it either. I can imagine those devices encouraging it. Wolf reminded me of what I already knew about Socrates: Rhetoric - the art of oration - uses special techniques in the presentation. The ancient Greeks were not giving the inherently boring talks you usually hear today. Socrates had good reason to worry: Writing was new enough then that it couldn’t be expected to record fully. Makes you wonder what the world would have been like if audio recordings came along first. But, not even that would have assuaged Socrates, because he had another elitist worry - one that should interest us in particular: Making knowledge too easily available will result in a lot of mis-application of that knowledge. By restricting your audience (the people who can hear you), you have a better chance of sending an appropriate message, and not filling people’s heads with ideas they don’t have the background to understand. That is a major battlefield in the digital world today. Freedom of information gives us many benefits - but it also sometimes lets the proverbial Genie out of the bottle.
But Back To The Joys
A fragment from “To Kill A Mockingbird”: Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.
This practically knocked me over when I read it in “Proust And The Squid”. You might do well to remember some Marshall McLuhan: Our prosthetic devices, whether they be automobiles, televisions, computer keyboards, or limb replacements - become comfortable extensions of self. It’s the story behind the brain development Wolf illustrates. The brain cells in your head are designed to specialize in what signals come along. Brain cells not in use will pick up a whisper of stimulus from their neighbors. So if an eye is blind and no vision signals arrive, those areas will gradually recruit themselves to participate in nearby activities. The area on the cortex wired up for that job cannot grow new brain, but that activity can spread to other areas, adding detail and precision. That is why the blind often report their other senses heightened. Similarly, the body that manipulates and experiences a tool like language - or even just a hammer - invokes new patterns in the brain that in time become automatic. The patterns in the brain that occur often are reinforced and more easily triggered later, and that includes the peculiar patterns evoked by using the tool. To the conscious mind it feels like the awkward layer between mind and tool falls away: Mind and tool become as one.
Well, I had to admit it to myself: I don’t love reading either. If anything, I read as much as I can so that it won’t feel like reading anymore. I write now for the same reason. My career in technical support hinges on it, too - the tools getting in the way of people doing things. I want to express myself without words getting in the way. I want to know the thoughts other people care to express without words getting in the way. Let that awkward layer between mind and tool fall away. Let the mind and the tool become one.
Posted in media-studies, books, writing-craft | 1 comment | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Fri, 28 Nov 2008 23:10:00 GMT
A lot of people probably think that predicting the future is hard in the same way that predicting the chart of stock market values is hard. Will the curve go up or down? Or will it meander in just such-and-such a way?
Hard as that might be, it’s nothing compared to the full-on complexity of reality. Real futures are not extrapolations, just as the future of a financial graph is not simply a trend. Real futures depend on competing factors. If you think you can just mix in a little of this factor and a little of that factor - Until you’ve accounted for all the factors you know about - Well, guess again: Some of those factors won’t matter at all, no matter how important they might seem today.
It’s something I was taught to call “non-linearity” - When you can’t simply add together all the contributions in their respective proportions. You can’t because most of those contributions have effects on each other. It’s not easy to do experiments with reality, because experimentation - the scientific method - relies on the notion that different contributions can be separately accounted for. When you tease out one factor and watch the results, or when you map the relationship between two, you’re experiencing a toy world. You don’t get to see all the chaotic interactions that happen in reality. And, in reality, you don’t usually get a second chance to run that experiment under the exact same conditions.
The digital logic in computers is an attempt to freeze out uncertainty. Using only ones and zeroes in every operation should in principle remove every source of error. And, it would - if you were willing to take it slow. All those ones and zeroes require a minimum amount of time to stabilize and propagate. What seems rapid to us will not seem rapid viewed from within the machine. One component really can be called on to sample another component too soon, causing fresh errors. Signals at the speed of light still require some time to arrive, and one signal arriving late can make all the difference on an outcome. Whole branches of a complex calculation can be mistakenly rendered mute - or mistakenly called into play - by poor timing.
And so it is with reality - And real futures. The chains of consequence branch in new ways due to some unappreciated factor. You might have heard it called the “Butterfly Effect” (now there’s even a movie with that title…) but, that emblematic idea can be a little misleading: The real complexity - And the real difficulty in predicting the future - is that so many of those unappreciated factors are at work all the time. And, at least as many of those factors are meaningless because they do not arrive at a moment when they can change the outcome at all.
Campaign Promises, A Reprise
I don’t know if you bothered to read this little gem of mine, but the preceding discussion relates to the campaign promises of politicians. I didn’t have trouble “pulling the lever” for my favorite (except that I drew a line through an arrow this time, touched a screen a couple times before, and most years had to punch a hole in a card), but all the while, leading up to the big lever-pulling day, I was certain only that none of the candidates was going to do what they said they were going to do. In one sense that’s good: They can’t predict the future with any more precision than I can, so when the time comes, I want them to do the thing that is appropriate for the reality they face - not some stubborn dream of what reality should be. Where we run into trouble is with the people who haven’t adapted.
I believe that many citizens of the United States of America are ignorant fools - And it’s not necessarily their fault. You can’t always make a reliable diagnosis, it’s true. And there are days when I think I’ve simply been duped by the media into believing a fairy tale. But I say “Ignorant Fools” because the coin of the realm is pandering. Whether it’s true or not, I have a prejudice against Republicans because I believe they subvert real discussion with emotional appeals. Conversely, I think Democrats are less likely to do it. The difference is probably subtle, I know, but I respond to that difference. All those “Ignorant Fools” out there are victims of that pandering. Rooting from the sidelines of America, unable to identify with a lot of the players in the political arena, I root for them to ignore all that pandering and demand the facts.
I read about it in “Nixonland”, where the ‘silent majority’ seemingly responded to a government’s - a politician’s - promise that they would take care of everything, don’t you worry your pretty little head about it. And there were ‘freaks’ and ‘weirdos’ who were willing to speak up - sometimes reluctantly. But participation in democracy is so inconvenient for the leaders. You really start believing that dictatorships are created as a convenience. “As your president, totalitarianism just makes my job easier, and I can be much more effective in serving you, the people.”
Posted in politics, ontology, books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:25:00 GMT
I’ve been reading Howard Blum’s “American Lightning” these days. It’s funny how fragmented it is in the telling. Blum has made a wonderful attempt to write the way movies are often cut, and how TV scripts are often formulated. He follows three major players in the investigation and prosecution of a case of terrorism from 1910: The filmmaker D. W. Griffith, The detective Billy Burns, and the attorney Clarence Darrow. In the telling, Blum has braided the strands tightly. I don’t disagree with how it’s done, it’s just that I’ve recently been very critical about that technique in general. When I’m reading it, I often wonder where the book is headed. The ‘cuts’ from one character to another can be as disorienting as a music video.
Certainly, the intent of the book was to show a parallel between Anarchist bombings in 1910 and the Jihadist attacks of 2001. It’s fun to read Blum’s account - it reads like fiction at times - but there are times I would rather just have the facts. I know this is how a lot of people prefer to read - to be taken along on a rambling journey. (I could accuse “Nixonland” of doing the same thing, come to think of it.)
Posted in books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Wed, 19 Nov 2008 23:22:00 GMT
I have finally come to the last few pages of “Nixonland”. It has been quite a chore at times: Blow-by-blow accounts of the ‘68 and ‘72 political party conventions are fascinating in their way. I can’t knock it, but my interest flagged regularly. I guess I thought the book would end much later than it does, and I was fooled into thinking it would therefore move a little faster to cover all that ground.
Still, I didn’t know that much about Nixon’s early career - and his involvement in the McCarthyite communist witch hunt. And all the bad things about Nixon I did know were largely second hand. Or worse - just vague memories of other people’s opinions.
The book isn’t really about Nixon, though… It’s about a brand of cynical politics that polarized a nation. In many ways it reminds me of the tales of the early days of computer security: People could legitimately wonder why anybody would deliberately attack a computer network. In retrospect it seems naive to forgo paranoid levels of protection. When you can’t even identify the cause of a problem, or you’re too embarrassed to disclose that anything even happened, it’s hard to concentrate on normal business.
Posted in books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 16 Nov 2008 18:06:00 GMT
I was reading the chapter on Haussmann’s transformation of Paris in the 19th century in “Cities In Civilization” when I came across some untranslated French. It is common for an author to provide translations for such quotes.
An observer in 1882 described the traffic situation in Paris as “le dernier mot de l’obstructionnisme”.
And that was one of the shortest examples. So it was over to Google Translate for some answers.
That was when I remembered that I wanted to road test the machine with some Japanese. Well, it didn’t take long to find a stinker.
Japanese is not like English. Maybe that’s why I found it so durned interesting.
As you can see, I’ve taken the liberty of color coding the sentence. This will allow you to see how different the grammar is, and I hope it helps understand what went wrong with it over at Google.
Here we have a transitive verb “To Eat”, and ostensibliy we have a subject and an object… Then it gets weird. In Japanese, there are postpositional particles (which often function like English prepositions) that mark the role of a phrase within a sentence. With no spaces between words, you have to rely on other strategies. “Wa” marks the end of a “Topic” which replaces another marker - obscuring the role of that phrase. “Sae” adds the idea of “even”, thereby replacing another marker - which is also now missing, obscuring the role of that phrase, too. What we do know is that “tabenai” is the negative version of a transitive verb requiring an object to make sense. We’ve definitely got a subject and and object here in this sentence (sometimes we don’t have them - they could be implied because they showed up in previous sentences…), but which one is which? Cat or Fish?
Google (#1) thought Fish was the subject, and Cat was the object. How naive. They were probably relying on phrase order to figure it out. Phrase order is not that important in Japanese. In the English version, you know immediately from context that this is wrong - but that doesn’t prove anything: Nonsense can still be grammatically correct. It’s a theory. Isn’t that exciting? Every little sentence needs a theory. I love that. “The fish” is wrong, anyway: it’s quite clearly ”this fish”, and “Even this fish do not eat my cats” forces the verb into “would not eat”. So that’s two problems already. “Uchi” and “neko” are neither singular nor plural, so it could be “my cat”, “my cats”, “our cat”, or “our cats”. I see why they picked “cats”: Doesn’t “eat” suggest an ongoing or habitual activity where the object is likely to be plural? I’ve become more sensitive to the way some English nouns like “fish” can be a substance - an indistinct quantity. One or many fishes can still be described as “fish”.
The textbook I took the example from (William McClure’s “Using Japanese: A Guide to Contemporary Usage”) supplied (#2). This represents the theory that Cat is the subject and Fish is the object. I agree. They editorialize thusly: “Sae places extreme emphasis on the noun in question, and is often followed by a negative”. There is another thing the Topic-wa construction can do: Provide a contrast. I only mention it because it’s a perfect way to pull an object to the front of the sentence. Here in this sentence, the contrast is this fish versus all other fish (the “not this fish”).
I moved the “not” for #3. It’s subtle, I know, but I like it. I just had to have the last word.
As I think about it, the textbook is less concerned with giving a natural-sounding English version than you or I would be. In fact, most of the Japanese textbooks I have seen do the same thing: English translations that make the subtleties of the Japanese examples more explicit, at the cost of sounding ridiculous.
I like to pull “not” to the beginning of the English version, even though there is nothing wrong with #2 here. The distinction may not be completely neutral, but having both versions available is nice when you have to fuss with the rhythm, timing, cadence, or alliteration of the larger utterance this sentence would appear in. On the face of it, though, as a stand-alone sentence, I get inspired by the distribution of the “Noun-sae, Verb-nai” construction in the Japanese version to produce another distributed construction in English. I just feel a little uncomfortable leaving the “not” with the verb when that “even” is there: Better perhaps to have them together. And I wonder if #2 is not simply trying to leave as much of the original as unmolested as possible.
The only thing left now is the “yo”. I was looking for some reason “yo” would inform the emphasis in the English version, and I didn’t find any. In Japanese, in addition to “phrase particles” (“wa” and “sae” in this example), there are sentence particles. The sentence particles typically indicate the speaker’s understanding of who knows what. That can be powerful in a language of subtlety: If I don’t want you to think I’m claiming to know more than you do, I might turn a statement into a question, or an imperative into an invitation. That’s part of the famous “can’t say no” reputation of Japanese, having the option to shift to the less confrontational version in every circumstance. “Yo” is the strongest member of the group: It means that I don’t think you know about the content of the preceding statement. It’s not so imposing when it refers to personal facts - in this case literally the inner workings of my house, and the dietary habits of its feline member - which won’t cause much embarrassment when I imply that you don’t know. So with the English translation, it might be nice if we could capture that revelatory tone. But the emphasis provided by “sae/even” seems to do the trick.
Posted in computer-interface, books, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 06 Nov 2008 01:52:00 GMT
