Deprograming

Lately Courtney has been listening to an ambient/experimental station while drifting off at night, and I'm becoming rather enamoured with it myself. Theremins and odd synthesizer shifts, birds or car horns, there's a mix of the digital and the natural with no obvious logic. It's an ebb and a swell, a fall and a crash without reason. I can't find the pattern, and it soothes me.

Pattern is the operative word here. I can't really say for sure why this stuff has caught my midnight ear, but I think the lack of a (discernible) pattern is important. Lately I've gotten bored with music. Period. Literature, too - I pick up a book, I read ten pages, and my mind is somewhere else. I think the ease I've been finding from all this semi-random noise is connected; I think the pattern has grown predictable.

Music is, classically speaking, artsy math. Don't get me wrong - I love music, I love math. Like most art, it's a pattern that predicates meaning from its predictability. There's a system, a theory underlying any art - not the same theory, mind you, but infinite theories. That's the real secret to why some people "get" Picasso, Modest Mouse, the Residents, Joyce, or bathroom wall graffiti. There's a master logic, a pattern-system that underlies each one. The more one becomes familiar with the pattern-system beneath any given piece of art, the more familiar it becomes, the more it evokes meaning. That comfortable sense of what comes next, of things fitting comfortably into a prefabricated world view - that is the essence of "meaning." The new is nearly always a logical extension of the old.

And that's where this ambient/noise stuff comes in. I can't find the pattern. It's probably there, mind you, but drifting off at night to something with no predictions seems to take apart all my preconceptions of what should come next. The older I get, the more I seem to seek out standardization for my moments - a pattern for the day, the week, the year. It's that pattern that makes sense of it all, that gives it meaning. But a century of great thought has been devoted to westernizing the ancient eastern notion that no, there is no real pattern, there is no real meaning. There is only a naive desire to invent such notions.

The last couple of years I've felt like every time I grab a guitar each note has already been predicted, every time I lift a pen I'm just transcribing something . And now I sense that drifting off at night to something without a pattern deconstructs the day, undermining my expectations and leaving room for calm surprise. i sense a space growing where something new might happen. Very nice.

Yadda, Yadda, Yadda

A few nights ago I was at the bar (imagine!) with good friends, having a good conversation over good beer. As the night wound down, one of them got the mistaken impression that I had some interesting ideas and chastised me for not doing more to get said ideas out of a small circle of friends and into the world. The gist of it was I should be writing more (i.e., at all), and since I returned that serve by chastising him about something he really needs to do...well, here I am, giving this blog thing another whirl. So, I thought I'd start -- again -- by discussing why I've developed a sort of apathy/aversion to writing. After all, it wasn't so many years ago that the focal point of my goals and aspirations was to be a bloody writer.

Funny, that.

I.
I believe in the unfortunate power of white noise. Back when I was doing my M.A., I noticed there were a lot of very intelligent people around me, and they were all talking. A lot. Also, I wandered into the library one day and it dawned on me - there were a lot of books there. Likewise, it turned out there were quite a few channels on TV, all producing quite a bit of programing...And meanwhile, there was this internet thing producing a positively unfathomable amount of text (not to mention garish little .gif animations). I also noticed amongst all this roar, nearly everyone - from erudite English professors and their budding acolytes, to reclusive novelists, to game show contestants - well, they were a fair bit more interested in being heard than in listening to anything. You do the metaphorical math on that one, but here are some fun numbers: According to UNESCO data, there were 178,000 books printed in the US and Britain during 2005. If those averaged 200 pages each - almost certainly a low estimate - that would be over 35 million pages, and if you read a page-per-minute constantly you could get caught up in 67.7 years.

Do I think that nothing can ever be heard amongst all that sound and fury? No, but I do think it is a strong argument that dumb luck and connections have a far greater influence on what is read/heard than the actual quality of anyone's ideas or articulation. It also makes me a bit embarrassed by how seriously I used to take myself.

II.
In terms of permanence, thinking, speaking, and writing lie on a continuum. Western society always posits permanence as a good thing, as that which we aim for. That gets problematic when you are talking about ideas, though. For ideas (and society) to progress they must be able to develop -- they must be flexible, they must be adaptable. The beauty of thought, left alone in one's relatively vacant head, is that it is infinitely mutable. The simple fact that one can forget all or part of an idea left ephemeral means that it must always be re-invented, and likewise, it will always be influenced by the present more than the past. Similarly, speaking/discussing keeps ideas ethereal, though provides a bit more fixation via multiple memories; more importantly, development is encouraged by multiple voices, each a unique incarnation of the present.

Now, the written idea is of course adaptable through a different method -- that of interpretation -- but ultimately the stuff of ideas contained in textual discourse is far more tethered to the "literal" and historical. That is, after all, the purpose of textual communication - and this sense of permanence contained in cultural texts (Das Kapital, Wealth of Nations, Barbie, the Eiffel Tower, etc.) congeals every society.

Does that mean writing should be abandoned in favor of bathroom pondering and bar chit-chat? No, but it does make the notion of putting things to paper quite sobering. A great American thinker claimed the mark of an intelligent man was the ability to change his mind*; putting today's mind to paper goes a long way toward making tomorrow's mind. Yes, my fear of commitment is that fundamental.

III.
Tyler Durden said it best: You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. Neither are our ideas. A quick look at the history of scientific discovery shows a seemingly bizarre number of simultaneous discoveries. Leibniz/Newton's discovery of calculus is likely the most famous, but a little digging will turn up tons of others, even if only one name generally makes the history books. Yes, this seems quite strange, until you accept that the ideas they are advancing are the product of a common intellectual history, and furthermore, their approach to those ideas are typically the product of common cultural history.

I deny that the prime motivator of history is individual genius. I deny it as Randian stupidity. I posit instead that the prime motivator of history is the combination of prior history, necessity, and a bit of blind chance. Yes, Einstein's ideas were groundbreaking and unique at that particular moment, but I would argue that they were more the product of intellectual history and present cultural necessity than of individual genius. That's not to say he wasn't a genius, but their was plenty of genius about at the time (the majority going unrecorded in popular history) and a different voice would have eventually been found for the same ideas. If it can happen, it must happen - eventually.

So, am I arguing that there is no point in tossing out one's ideas, as others will get around to them anyway? Of course not. But I do feel that any personal feeling of obligation and urgency for speaking out is more the product of egotism than necessity. Ultimately, there are only these possibilities for a given idea: you or someone else will speak it, and it will either be heard or ignored. I'm a Taoist, after all. Our meddling is ultimately irrelevant, if nonetheless necessary.

------

Blah, blah, blah. I also avoid writing because I can't spell for shit, and I sound a lot more intelligent when you don't see me saying alot. Anyway, there are things I like about writing, too. Like punctuation. I love punctuation. Maybe if I can stick with this blogging bit a little longer this time I'll remember what the others are.

diePod

Everyone worth knowing has one or two pop-culture obsessions. Quirks, to put it nicely. Mine are a) Ninjas and b) Zombies. This post has nothing to do with ninjas.

Sunday morning I headed out to the local Panera for coffee-flavored work. Heading to my usual table I discovered a good friend had beat me to it - I started to say hello, then noticed her plugged into the iPod. I decided to perform an experiment. Sitting down at the table behind her, I decided to see how long it would take her to detach from the iPod and notice me (or anything). But then The Wife came around the other way with our coffee, and walked right in front of her. Certainly she spotted her, and I thought no more about it - until an hour later, when Leah turned around and jerked in surprise as she noticed us for the first time.

I think you see where I'm going here.

If someone made a movie where 85% of people were plugged into some device, totally unaware of their surroundings, everyone who watched would be horrified by such a dystopian future (though you might still take the blue pill). But Steve Jobs and Co. have slowly zombified America, and everyone's more worried about the features/style/price of the new iPhone than the fact that sounds of conversation have drained from every street, waiting line, and tram station. I used to ride the bus to campus every day, and it was bloody creepy - perfect rows of filled seats, everyone looking at their shoes, wires running into their ears...I had to either stop riding or go buy a shotgun. Just in case.

Seriously, though - I don't know if their is some strange, modern desire to remove ourselves from the world around us, or if it's just apathy induced by all the semi-satisfying artificial contact we're inundated with. What I am sure of, however, is that this is not a good point in human history for impersonalization and disconnection. Darfur, Somalia, nuclear proliferation, insane dilettante dictators testing ballistic missles...not to mention the economic mess - like unemployment and thousands of nearly unemployable retirees forced back into SlaveMart as unbridled capitalism robs their savings and pensions. I suppose riding the iPod mothership to a mass exodus from personal involvement should come as no surprise....But the impetus to confront such problems is exponentially higher when confronted by a human factor like an 80 year old grandmother talking to you on her bus ride to inspect receipts at walmart, rather than data from an NPR podcast. Meanwhile, millions of people literally walk around with cotton stuffed in their ears...

Music is great. Just take the headphones off and enjoy it with someone. If for no other reason -I'm pretty sure the Ultimate Bad Thing that results from generalized civil apathy is the Zombie Apocalypse. And with only a sawed-off shotty between me and the brain-eaters, you shoe-staring iPod junkies don't want me getting confused.

No News = Good News

To change something, build a new model that makes the
existing model obsolete. - Buckminster Fuller

I have been known to take my laptop to the bathroom with me. I say this not out of my insatiable desire to make others uncomfortable by sharing minor, inappropriate details (it's fun, try it). Rather, I point it out because I may well be ahead of the curve - inadvertently preparing for a future where you no longer hear the rustle of newsprint in the stall next to you, but instead the peck-tap-peck of keyboards. Yes, the traditional newspaper may well not make it through the next decade.

The death-knell has already sounded for some major papers - Denver's Rocky Mountain News died last week and Tuscon's got one going soon. The Tribune company's bankrupt, though for now it's just financial purgatory as their many papers are still being printed. Others, such as the SF Chronicle are "restructuring" - a PC way of saying "panickedly selling off assets and cutting expenses (i.e., jobs)." Even the NY Times is 400 million in the hole. Meanwhile, all the other news outlets can't keep quiet about it - NPR's hit on it several times recently, and even the BBC's been talking. Some think it's inevitable, some fear it as a sign/source of devaluation for journalism, others shrug and read the Onion, missing the humor entirely.

For my part, I don't think we'll live in a world without newsprint within our lifetime. For starters, it's not just online journalism that's hurting the papers - free papers are doing quite well, hitting the same markets at everyone's favorite price. The desire for the tangible, tactile experience of reading a paper is still there - it's just that between the ad-driven free model and the instant-access online model, few see the need to shell out subscription fees for either information or newsprint-rustling pleasures. The old model of print journalism has been rendered obsolete - Buckminster Fuller-ed, if you will.

However, what really interests me - irks me, even - is how many folks are calling the failure of the traditional newspaper business model (and it is just the business model that's failing) a "blow to democracy" or lauding it as the "death of impartial journalism." For starters, part of me is almost glad to see these old daily papers go - most, like the rest of the mass media, are owned by huge conglomerates. This obviously injects a large amount of homogenization into coverage, and potentially into perspective; but more dangerously, this amplifies advertiser influence to the point where stories potentially threatening to them can get canned for fear of the consequences (or, due to direct threats, such as Monsanto shutting down exposes on its bovine growth hormones). No, saying goodbye to corporate media does not sadden me, and I've no fear of a hastening fascist state because of it. Quite the opposite.

Many criticize internet journalism as "lacking objectivity." All journalism lacks objectivity. Internet journalism increases access, and moreover, it increases the voices involved in that journalism dramatically. There aren't just a thousand news sites - there are thousands of blogs, thousands of individuals conveying and commenting on whatever happenings...happen...to be happening. Never mind that much of it is shit. That is democracy, kids. Of course, this exponentially increases the amount of "bad information" (which is often a fairly subjective notion, anyway) - but is this really a problem? I'd argue that the flood of contradictory, untrustworthy information is one of the greatest gifts of the internet age. Twenty years ago, the average person absorbed information from "official" sources - books, newspapers, TV - under the general assumption that, surely, it was truth (or close to it). Now, everyone is acutely aware that we must think critically about information. And it isn't just that we question the veracity of knowledge, but its importance. That flood of noise, those millions of voices out there on the internet - they make us acutely aware that we need to decide what is relevant for ourselves, in a way that a world of homogenized TV, newsprint, and radio did not.

Pretty cool. At least as long as the WiFi signal is strong in my stall.

Here's To You, Pong-Ball.

Confession: I'm a huge video game nerd. I was raised by a pack of wild Atari 2600's and their NES alpha-male. So, it's no suprise I got a kick out of this CNET article on forgotten game characters. While I'm unfamiliar with a few of them (never owned a playstation, myself), most of them are great. Even if you're not a game buff, it's worth checking out for the brilliant exposition of the pong ball's heroic angst. Plus, apparently there's a bikini-clad robot destroying chick in one of the PS Final Fantasy games. Gonna have to check that one out. And my vote for best forgoten video game character? The old man from the original Legend of Zelda. Yeah - the bald dude who hides under rocks in the middle of nowhere and speaks in broken English. My theory? The guy's Yoda's pale little brother. How CNET left out that dude is beyond me.

Oh, and if you're feeling a little nostalgic, check out this site for tons of classic games in free flash format.

Eisenhowered

In the news today, Microsoft is offering $250,000 to find out who created the Conficker worm. Apparently they already paid out $250k for info on the creater of another worm (Sasser), who was subsequently jailed by the German authorities. Now, I loathe these little virus creating twerps as much as the next guy - I'm not kidding when I say the death penalty is appropriate - but I wonder what it says about the State Capitalism and the world today when private companies are using their leverage to get law enforcement moving. For once I don't think Microsoft is being totally evil - they're just offering some public encouragement for justice - but it does make one wonder what effects billion dollar corporations could have on everyday life if they wanted to. Makes one recal that other evil empire, the RIA, and their legalized lawer-tossing extortion tactics against those awful, civilization threatening music pirates....Maybe next they'll offer rewards for turning in your friends...

Okay, okay - paranoia mode off. Still, those sci-fi dystopian futures ruled by corporate governments scare the shit outta me.

Sea Legs

Recently, I came across this article on CNET. I highly recommend perussing it yourself, but in sum it's about a bunch of silicon hippies who want to build floating cities on the high seas, tucked away from repressive governments in international waters. Seasteading, they call it. Never mind all the technological reasons this seems implausible (or the fact the group's executive director is a ringer for Seth Green) - the article intruiged me for a variety of reasons.

First of all, it reminded me of The Many-Headed Hydra, a history of the revolutionary and politically dissembodied sailors of the Atlantic (the authors aruge - convincingly - of their role in the American Revolution, among other events). Escaping social and political dogma on at sea is nothing new - but it does seem to have disappeared since the industrial revolution.* I'd wager that has to do with expanding industry weaving itself more firmly into the transport trades, both culturaly and economically, leaving far less room for autonomy. So, maybe nowadays life at sea would need to be totally autonomous from life on land in order to afford more freedoms...

Of course, another question is why folk (american folk, specifically) suddenly start feeling all repressed and looking to the sea again...The bush administration's fascit policy leanings aside, I don't think any of us can really argue we're more politically repressed than we were 10, 20, or 50 years ago. But then, what is really intruiging is that the folks plotting this escape from government oppression are silicon hippies. The prime proponents are technology savants pulling down more 0's than 1's in places like Palo Alto...Places that are financially restrictive for those of us who aren't Googlionare's, but are otherwise pretty liberal. What gives? Political escapism is supposed to be for the little guy, the proles, or at least for the middle class who bear the weight of keeping all the oppressive machinery running....

One thing's for sure - I'll never be able to afford a house on a floating platform. Which is just as well, because there's not much use in being all free and stuff, if I'm just hanging my sea-sick head over the toliet all the time.


*Somalia of course seems a recent exception...but then there isn't even a landlocked government to escape, so that's probably a different phenomenon.

Verbose Snow

So, after nearly three years of being shown radiographs, I'm finally in a course that (supposedly) is going to de-mystify interpreting all that anatomic snow. Not exactly going according to plan as of yet. We spent an hour today staring at lung lesions, which are (again, supposedly) easily classified into four main "patterns." So far, I seem to be improving on the system, easily classifying them into just one "pattern" - anatomic snow. Unfortunately, none of the expert radiologists on staff here are impressed with my greatly streamlined approach.

My personal inadequacies aside, it turns me back to a question I've pondered several times since starting vet school. How do we learn to see meaning in unfamiliar patterns? Or, less prosaically - how do we learn to see what we are seeing?

Way back then I was encountering a more colorful anatomic snow - histology - for the first time. Histology is the study of tissues and their cellular composition - essentially microanatomy - and involves looking at specially stained tissues under high magnification. At first, just separating one (red, blurry) cell from another (red, blurry) cell seems a monumental task. Eventually, though, you start to see the meaning of faint lines and variations in shading, organized patterns become apparent, and suddenly you are translating all this into larger structures and seeing meaningful relationships between different cell types and groups. Two groups of cells layered next to each other, which originally seemed indiscernible from each other, are now quite conspicuously unique, and moreover their differences and relationship to each other have become filled with meaning. Before you know it, you are learning histopathology - the study of diseased tissue - and suddenly slight variations from what you've come to see as "normal" colorful anatomic snow are even more meaningful, and they clue you in to specific disease.

I was acutely aware that this process was happening to me, but I couldn't for the life of me pin down exactly what I was doing (or having done to me) that precipitated such new understanding. I think it's a very commonplace learning experience, but it was the first time I experienced it as a relatively self-aware adult. Children discover new 'theaters of meaning' and learn their secrets all the time - imagine deciphering the meaning of faces for the first time, or decoding 2D photos to 3D realism, or moreover, learning to interpret drawn representations of reality with varying levels of abstraction (DaVinci to Monet to Picasso, say). I think that abstraction is the center of the mystery, too - how do we develop the rules for making loose, imperfect equations?