TechGnosis Weblog

Has Modern Science Bankrupted Our Souls?

2011-06-15T23:24:00.001-07:00

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SXSW 2011: The internet is over

2011-04-09T20:46:00.001-07:00

Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon talks about Fractals, Spirituality, and London in the 60s

2010-12-25T19:01:00.001-08:00

German Grid Aching Under Too Much Solar Power

2010-10-22T22:46:00.001-07:00

Is It Possible to Be Elitist in a Good Way? The Organizers of TED Would Like You to Think So

2010-04-23T21:29:00.001-07:00

By Daniela Perdomo, AlterNet
http://www.alternet.org/story/146344/

Is it possible to be elitist "in a good way"? That's the defense that TED, the $6,000 annual VIP gathering, offers as a prebuttal to potential critics on its Web site's FAQ page.

TED was founded in 1984 as a yearly invitation-only gathering in Monterey, Calif. to celebrate the latest and greatest in technology, entertainment and design (hence the acronym). Since Chris Anderson acquired the conference in 2001, TED has maintained a focus on tech and design in particular, while it has expanded to include lectures or performances from Jane Goodall to Billy Graham.

Fans (and attendees) like billionaire and media mogul Rupert Murdoch call TED "stimulating." The mainstream media is fawning, too. The New York Times Magazine says each "talk starts with a bang and keeps banging till it explodes in fireworks." The Wall Street Journal (owned by Murdoch) writes that it's a "tech antidote to our current pessimism."

The elite love to gather at conferences where they are free to fraternize with other rich and powerful people, with no need to fend off the common folk. The Clinton Global Initiative's annual meeting is one such place, which you can only get to if you shell out for a $20,000 annual membership. And certainly the most exclusive is Davos. Only after paying an annual fee of about $39,000 are you eligible for an invite to the Swiss conference, which costs an additional $20,000. (Chauffeured limos and five-star hotels not included.)

For the vast majority of Americans, shelling out $6,000 to attend a five-day conference is just as impossible as spending $59,000. The price ensures an exclusive social setting, made possible by organizers who put attendees through a rigorous application and invitation process. In recent years, TED has become an object of much fascination and curiosity to people who've never attended because while going to a TED conference is being part of an exclusive group, most of the content is available online, giving the ideas a viral nature that reaches far beyond the room where the talks are given.

Through different initiatives, TED now reaches a global audience, many of whom are curious about the TED club. The talks have been translated into over 70 languages. There is TEDGLOBAL for a more international audience and last year, TED starting licensing independently organized events called TEDx, conferences that follow the same platform as the official TED summits. Already 1,000 TEDx events in over 70 countries have either been hosted or are slated to be hosted. The TED platform has caught on unofficially, too -- an "unconference" called BIL functions as a much more egalitarian satellite event that runs alongside TED's biggest meetings. Like TED, BIL attracts techie, futurist types who believe technology holds the potential to address society's most pressing problems

Yet it is this tech-worship that elicits some observers' criticisms of TED. One such critic is Jeff Chester, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Digital Democracy. TED, in exalting technology and catering to the wealthiest among us, loses significance, Chester says, adding: "It's kind of a non-virtuous circle where they're convincing themselves that they're changing the world, but it's really about the status quo."

You need only look at the sponsors to see who is financing the visions presented at TED, Chester says. TED2010's sponsors included Walmart, Target, GE, Shell, AT&T, and unsurprisingly, Google (whose two founders sit on TED's "Brain Trust").

In Chester's view, "TED is a big cheerleading contest for the technology industry, though one can't accuse TED alone of being the sole occurrence of self-congratulatory narrow-minded thinking when it comes to issues relating to the Internet or tech."

TED for the elite few

TED's tagline is "Ideas worth spreading." And while TED has made significant strides in widening the reach of the ideas it gives a platform to at its exclusive events, any analysis of the impact made by ideas presented at TED must necessarily include discussion of the conferences that continue to define the TED brand.

According to June Cohen, the executive producer of TED media and co-producer of the conference, attendees are "still skewed toward technology. With that comes that they skew white, male, and little bit older. Our community has been evolving, but we continue to welcome that core community."

It's not easy to find someone who has been to a TED conference who won't say anything but glowing things about it. Robert Scoble, a tech journalist in Silicon Valley, was among the few members of the media who was invited to TED2010 in Long Beach. He got a free ticket and doubts he'll ever get one again. "It's like driving a Maserati. I can't afford one but do I want to drive one for a few minutes? Yes!" Scoble exclaimed.

Despite his own success as an influential tech blogger, Scoble was floored by the power in the room with him. "Bill Gates is there. Larry Page is there. Arianna Huffington, Meg Ryan, the guy who started Crate & Barrel," he said. "It's a pretty exclusive place and that's what makes it so cool. You can talk to these people, and everyone there has done something interesting. It's maybe the one place where I don't mind elitism."

The elite nature of the conferences also doesn't bother Aubrey de Grey, who heads the SENS Foundation, which focuses on defeating human aging. He has spoken at TED events multiple times and believes the exclusivity has had a huge impact on his life's work. De Grey wrote in an e-mail that his 2005 talk at TEDGLOBAL, in particular, "probably attracted more people to the anti-aging cause than via all my other talks combined, of which there are probably about 300 now! So it's pretty hard to beat that." And this was before TED talks were available online.

Although attendees and speakers may feel that exclusivity helps TED -- making it "an intellectual Mardi Gras," according to a CBS employee who received a media pass; and leading Bill Gates to assert that the "combined IQ of the attendees is incredible" -- it hasn't stopped outsiders from claiming otherwise. Tech writer Sarah Lacy wrote for Newsweek in 2008 (after failing to get a ticket to TED), "I question whether even the loftiest ideas lose some relevance when they're aired in so rarefied an arena." This year, she wrote that TED still felt like an "invitation to rub shoulders with celebrities and talk about how compassionate of a millionaire you really are."

"The curation of the audience is important," Cohen says. "But there is an application process, it's not an invitation-only event." She estimates that the acceptance rate through the public application process is about 25 percent, though it varies from year to year. A "handful" of people don't need to apply, she says, adding that most people come through the application process.

Cohen assures TED doesn't want "all billionaires, venture capitalists, CEOs, celebrities," adding: "I don't think landed gentry describes TED attendees well." Scoble, however, feels that accurately describes the majority of the people he met at TED. "The rank-and-file attendees are people who have money," he says.

The mainstay of TED is still the original TED conference, which has expanded to host 1,500 people and is now hosted annually in Long Beach, Calif. The vast majority pays the full $6,000 cost. About 20 people each year from the public, education and nonprofit sectors apply and are granted a discounted $2,000 rate -- a price that is still rather exclusionary. A dozen or so people who have volunteered for TED -- say, as translators or as organizers of TED events -- are invited to attend at a lower cost as well. And another 30 to 40 who have been nominated and accepted as TED Fellows attend for free, all expenses covered. This means that of the 1,500 attendees, only about 3 percent of the audience attends at a discount or for free -- and only if they pass the application screening process. Put another way, TED is arguably 97 percent wildly elitist and 3 percent less so.

There is also TEDActive, a simulcast event in Palm Springs, where attendees pay $3,750 for the honor of watching the Long Beach conference on a huge screen with a few hundred others. (Even this second-tier event -- which does include a few live speakers -- sells out.) As TED tries to evolve outward from technology and tech-industry types, it has organized other conferences. The other annual event is TEDGLOBAL, which is held in Oxford and costs $4,500. That audience is more international and diverse in terms of race, gender and age, Cohen says. TED also held a conference in Africa in 2008, and one in India in 2009; at each event 100 TED Fellows were invited to participate for free.

In order to extend the impact of TED, the conference offers a yearly TED Prize, which grants recipients a $100,000 wish deemed "big enough to change the world." Past recipients have included Bill Clinton and Bono (who are likely not itching for grants), as well as the eminent biologist E.O. Wilson, who wished to establish a networked encyclopedia of all the world's knowledge about life, and Neil Turok, a South African mathematical physicist who used the money to found the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences.

This year's recipient was TV chef Jamie Oliver, who put the money toward his wish to create a grassroots movement to end junk food culture in America and teach families and children about healthy, sustainable eating. (A recent AlterNet story revealed the shortcomings of Oliver's media-hyped project, raising questions about the lack of debate at TED. It seems as though one can communicate whatever one wants, as long as the message has style and aplomb.)

TED for the rest of us

In 2004, TED started exploring how it could more effectively fulfill its mission of spreading ideas beyond the room of attendees at each TED conference. By 2006, it started making the best of its TED talks available online for free. (And during each conference, people can pay to livestream the event at $995 per location.) In 2007, it launched an open translation project that relies on volunteer translations and has resulted in TED lectures now being available online in 70 different languages.

According to TED, its free videos are viewed 15 million times each month across all platforms. Its own site boasts 8 million visitors a month, of which 5 million are unique.

"It's turned our organization inside-out," says Cohen. "We've gone from focusing on small, elite, expensive events to really focusing on this large, expensive, democratized audience and that's where all the energy in the organization goes."

TED has certainly pioneered a new vehicle of communication that reaches many people. The videos have made TED a tremendous tastemaker, and an alluring way for people to get their ideas and information out to a relatively incomparable market. But the democratization of its broadcast hasn't really democratized debate or taken into account criticisms of TED.

Though TED could not immediately confirm what percentage of the organization's revenues or grants go into TED.com and other such democratizing efforts, the latest publicly available tax return for the Sapling Foundation (which runs TED), from 2008, shows that conference-related costs ran up to nearly $14 million, while the organization's total expenses and disbursements in 2008 came in at just under $23 million.

The move to what Cohen calls "radical openness" isn't just relegated to the online realm -- last year, TED started to allow less exclusive versions of its conferences to sprout up. Perhaps this trend was partly inspired by the success and interest in BIL, an entirely unofficial, more egalitarian version of TED. Founded in 2007, BIL is touted as an "unconference for people changing the world in big ways," and it runs alongside TED, attracting up to 800 of its own attendees, each of whom are asked to pay a suggested $20 donation or volunteer to help run the $5,000 event. BIL -- whose tagline is "Minds set free" -- even shares some of TED's speakers, and 10 percent of those who attend BIL are also TED attendees. Finally, like TED, BIL offers its content online.

Bill Erickson, 23, one of BIL's founders, says: "BIL is an experiment in a bottom-up structure; TED is talk-down. BIL is for people who are going to change the world; TED is for people who might already change the world."

Erickson's assessment may be true of the official TED conferences, but not of TEDx, which was launched in 2009 to oversee independently run, licensed events. No money is exchanged between TED and TEDx organizers, and the latter must commit to not turning a profit -- all ticket sales and sponsorships are used to cover event costs. TED approves the venue, date, name and size but does not necessarily approve the speakers. (Example: this TEDxNYED speaker spoke about how lectures are an outdated form of education and news.) Lectures must be filmed -- some videos even make it to TED.com -- and in order to ensure quality, 20 percent of each TEDx program must be recorded talks from the official TED conferences. Just as with TED, there is an application process for each TEDx, and while it is not as rigorous as the one for the official TED events, Erickson actually found himself at at party for TEDx Austin rejects.

There have been 500 TEDx events to date, with more than 500 planned. TEDx events range from 1,000-people conferences to a two-hour gathering hosted last August in Kibera, a massive shantytown in Kenya. It was open to anyone in the slum and a white sheet was strung up in order to project TED's videos. According to an organizer, the event avoided issues that are commonly discussed in Kibera, like HIV/AIDS and poverty, and instead included talks about art and other inspiring topics.

What are TED's ideas?

The mix of ideas at TED fall into six broad categories. An analysis of the content available on TED's Web site indicates that technology is the most highly represented lecture area, followed by science, global issues and design, which are all relatively equally represented. Entertainment and business follow, in that order. (About 30 percent of lecturers are culled from recommendations made by TED.com users.)

Talks can be risqué (Cindy Gallop might be the first TED speaker to use the phrase "Cum on my face" in her discussion of how porn has distorted younger generations' views of sex), but not too risqué. The comedian Sarah Silverman was panned this year by even Chris Anderson who publicly voiced his displeasure. Her raunchy routine, which is not available online, involved repeated use of the word "retarded" in an attempt to satirize Sarah Palin and politically correct culture, as well as a song about penises. (TED2010 attendees report that only about half the audience in the room "got it" -- the half that missed Silverman's point booed or withheld applause.)

In any case, these kinds of talks are the exception, not the rule, as tech continues to dominate. Because the conference has placed a historical emphasis on technology, and because tech continues to be the most lectured-about topic, critics say the preeminence of technology may be TED's weakest link.

David Morris, vice-president of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, is among these. "There's a presumption in TED that technology is almost always going to improve our lives and that is a presumption over which there has been much debate over the past thousands of years," Morris says. "There could be serious shortcomings in assuming technology will improve the world."

June Cohen says that while TED strives to stay at the forefront of what's happening in technology, and gives a platform to intriguing technological solutions to societal issues, it does not subscribe to the idea that technology can solve the world's problems. "We're actually champions of innovative, bottom-up solutions across the board," Cohen says.

While there are certainly examples of TED talks that extol low-tech, low-cost solutions to many world problems, such as Anupam Mishra's lecture on the socio-economic and environmental virtues of ancient water harvesting techniques, they are overshadowed by the numerous lectures that are more of the gee-whiz variety -- and the ones most likely to go viral -- like Jane McGonigal's lecture on how gaming can save the world. (Seriously: McGonigal argues that "reality is broken" and we have to make it function more like World of Warcraft.)

It would be interesting, Morris says, if TED hosted lectures that asked some of the harder questions about technological advancement. Such as: Who will benefit and who will control? And what is the impact of previous technologies?

But these questions have yet to be asked. Politics are also off the table, according to TED. Those ideas, it seems, are not worth spreading.

An earlier version of this article misidentified TED's curator, Chris Anderson, as the media entrepreneur. They are two different men.

Daniela Perdomo is a staff writer and editor at AlterNet. Follow Daniela on Twitter. Write her at danielaalternet [at] gmail [dot] com.

© 2010 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/146344/

The Meaning of Life (Post-Python)

2007-07-26T00:17:00.000-07:00

Saltwater Into Fire

2007-06-09T19:02:00.000-07:00

Unwired from Wired

2007-06-08T02:17:00.000-07:00

Wired Science - Wired Blogs: "Wireless Energy Could Signal the End of Power Cords
By Brandon Keim EmailJune 07, 2007 | 1:15:36 PMCategories: Energy

Bulb Last year, MIT researcher Martin Soljacic caused quite a stir with his proposal for transmitting energy wirelessly, thus dispensing with the jungle of power cords that infest our tech-savvy dwellings.

In a paper published today in Science, Soljajic and colleagues describe their lighting of a 60-watt light bulb with energy sent across a seven-foot gap, proving that such a system is indeed possible.

Soljacic began his search for wireless transmission several years ago after being awakened by the beeping of his uncharged cell phone. 'It occurred to me that it would be so great if the thing took care of its own charging,' he said.

The system, dubbed WiTricity, takes advantage of the tendency of objects that resonate at the same frequency to pick up each other's vibes. Just as the strings on an acoustic guitar vibrate in the presence of notes played on another guitar, so energy can be sent between a transmitter and a receiver with the same electromagnetic resonance.

Soljacic contrasts WiTricity with a radio station's transmitter, which 'emits energy omnidirectionally. Your receiver gets a billionth of that -- the sound information is encoded in energy -- but that isn't good for energy transmission.'
"

How about a tip of the hat to Tesla? Since Soljacic is also Croatian, one would think he'd acknowledge his compatriot's pioneering work in this field...

Recently Unearthed E-Mail Reveals What Life Was Like In 1995

2007-04-08T00:20:00.000-07:00

"KNOXVILLE, TN—A 1995 e-mail extracted from the hard drive of a recently unearthed Compaq desktop PC offers a tantalizing glimpse into the day-to-day life of a primitive Internet society, said the archaeologists responsible for its discovery."

Recently Unearthed E-Mail Reveals What Life Was Like In 1995 |

Google's April Fool Ad

2007-04-02T01:18:00.000-07:00

How TiSP Works

The breast enlarging ringtone

2007-04-01T02:05:00.000-07:00

In The Era of Sentient Things

A member of the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan (that unleashed deadly sarin gas on the Tokyo subway system nearly 10 years ago) has started selling a ringtone that he says will make your breasts grow larger just by listening to it. Via Engadget.

It’s a technique involving subliminal effects,” that’s like “positive brainwashing.”
The tune has already had more than 100,000 hits at 300 yen a pop since Tomabechi put on a web site, reports The Inquirer.

You can keep abreast of the story in The Daily Manchuri.

DNA Is a Song

2006-10-23T19:15:00.000-07:00

Your DNA Is a Song: Scientists Use Music to Code Proteins
John Roach
for National Geographic News
October 21, 2005

What are proteins? How are they structured? What's the difference between a protein in a human and the same protein in a lizard? Ask Mary Anne Clark these questions and she is likely to respond with an earful of music.

Clark is a biologist at Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth, and she's part of a growing field of science educators who use so-called protein music to help illustrate the basic structure of the building blocks of life.

All living things are made up of proteins. Each protein is a string of amino acids. There are 20 different amino acids, and each protein can consist of dozens to thousands of them.

Scientists write down these amino acid sequences as series of text letters. Clark and her colleagues assign musical notes to the different values of the amino acids in each sequence. The result is music in the form of "protein songs."

By listening to the songs, scientists and students alike can hear the structure of a protein. And when the songs of the same protein from different species are played together, their similarities and differences are apparent to the ear.

"It's an illustration transferred into a medium people will find more accessible than just [text] sequences," Clark said. "If you look at protein sequences, if you just read those as they are written down, recorded in a database, it's hard to get a sense for the pattern."

When people look at a page full of text corresponding to protein sequences, Clark explained, they tend spot clusters of letters but fail to see the larger pattern.

"If you play [the protein song for that sequence] you get that sense of the pattern much more strongly," she said. "That's my feeling at least. You hear stuff you can't see."

Different Songs

One song for a protein may sound different than another for the same protein, depending on how notes are assigned to amino acids' various properties. For example, Clark tends to arrange her compositions based on the protein's solubility.

"Where it's soluble and insoluble is one of the big factors in determining how [the protein] folds up," she said. Solubility influences how proteins fold, and those folds determine what category a certain protein belongs to.

In 1996 Ross King, a computer scientist at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, wrote a program called Protein Music. It assigns a note to each of the three compounds that make up amino acids and a note to various amino acid properties—charge, solubility, and so on.

"This produces a chord for each amino acid," King wrote in an e-mail interview. "Because proteins are an interesting mixture of novel and repetitive elements, like music, the translation to music sounds interesting."

By changing the rules of how notes are assigned to amino acids, composers can create variations in their songs. However, since all proteins have a basic structure, all the protein songs have a basic structure as well, Clark said.

Teaching Tool

According to King, while some scientists have used protein music to help them analyze data, it is most useful as a teaching tool.

If people can understand how the music is produced, he said, they can understand how DNA codes proteins.

Clark said one of the more interesting things demonstrated by the music is the differences and similarities between the same protein of different species.

While some proteins change very little between species, others, such as beta globin, are quite variable.

Therefore, Clark said, by playing the beta globin song for a human and tuatara, an ancient three-eyed lizard, people can hear the process of evolution—a variation on a theme that was present before mammals split from reptiles some 200 million years ago.

"You can hear the parts that remain constant and the parts that change," she said.

Grandma's Little Helper

2005-12-09T04:17:00.000-08:00

The following are among the 1,200 statements in the repertoire of “Yumel,” a talking doll for sale in Japan. The doll is marketed as a “healing partner” for nighttime use by the lonely elderly. According to Tomy, the doll’s manufacturer, over 8,000 have been sold to date.

Translated from the Japanese by W. David Marx.
Originally from Harper's Magazine,
September 2005.

I love you!
Won’t you sleep with me? Promise!
Did you brush your teeth?
Ask me a lot about my dreams.
I had a dream where Mr. Squirrel ate a huge cake.
I had a dream where a chicken was washing dishes.
I had a dream about a beach . . . Never mind, it’s a secret!
Even though I slept a lot, I’m still sleepy.
Are you waking up in the middle of the night?
I want to help out around the house.
I’d be very happy if you played with me.
It feels good when you sing in a loud voice.
Let’s do it together!
Something smells good!
Did you warm yourself up in the bath?
I like soft ears.
I like soft voices.
I give you my treasure.
I want to have a secret that’s just between us two.
I want to go to the inside of a whale’s mouth.
Someday I want to go over the rainbow.
Right now, I want socks.
Listen, listen! I had a dream. I ate a potato. And I was studying at school.
Washing clothes is hard, isn’t it?
Is going out shopping hard?
I want cheese.
Are you eating vegetables?
I want to know about a lot of things.
Why are bunnies’ eyes red?
I wonder what kinds of dreams elephants have.
It’s strange that fish can live in the ocean.
Where does the wind come from and where does it go?
I wonder why the stars don’t fall to the ground.
The sky is so good and big.
Why do you say moshi moshi when you answer the phone? It’s funny!
It’s strange that sometimes you cry when you are laughing.

http://harpers.org/GrandmasLittleHelper.html

Your Printer Is Squealing On You

2005-10-19T22:09:00.000-07:00

washingtonpost.com

Sleuths Crack Tracking Code Discovered in Color Printers

By Mike Musgrove
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 19, 2005; D01

It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it isn't. The pages coming out of your color printer may contain hidden information that could be used to track you down if you ever cross the U.S. government.

Last year, an article in PC World magazine pointed out that printouts from many color laser printers contained yellow dots scattered across the page, viewable only with a special kind of flashlight. The article quoted a senior researcher at Xerox Corp. as saying the dots contain information useful to law-enforcement authorities, a secret digital "license tag" for tracking down criminals.

The content of the coded information was supposed to be a secret, available only to agencies looking for counterfeiters who use color printers.

Now, the secret is out.

Yesterday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco consumer privacy group, said it had cracked the code used in a widely used line of Xerox printers, an invisible bar code of sorts that contains the serial number of the printer as well as the date and time a document was printed.

With the Xerox printers, the information appears as a pattern of yellow dots, each only a millimeter wide and visible only with a magnifying glass and a blue light.

The EFF said it has identified similar coding on pages printed from nearly every major printer manufacturer, including Hewlett-Packard Co., though its team has so far cracked the codes for only one type of Xerox printer.

The U.S. Secret Service acknowledged yesterday that the markings, which are not visible to the human eye, are there, but it played down the use for invading privacy.

"It's strictly a countermeasure to prevent illegal activity specific to counterfeiting," agency spokesman Eric Zahren said. "It's to protect our currency and to protect people's hard-earned money."

It's unclear whether the yellow-dot codes have ever been used to make an arrest. And no one would say how long the codes have been in use. But Seth Schoen, the EFF technologist who led the organization's research, said he had seen the coding on documents produced by printers that were at least 10 years old.

"It seems like someone in the government has managed to have a lot of influence in printing technology," he said.

Xerox spokesman Bill McKee confirmed the existence of the hidden codes, but he said the company was simply assisting an agency that asked for help. McKee said the program was part of a cooperation with government agencies, competing manufacturers and a "consortium of banks," but would not provide further details. HP said in a statement that it is involved in anti-counterfeiting measures and supports the cooperation between the printer industry and those who are working to reduce counterfeiting.

Schoen said that the existence of the encoded information could be a threat to people who live in repressive governments or those who have a legitimate need for privacy. It reminds him, he said, of a program the Soviet Union once had in place to record sample typewriter printouts in hopes of tracking the origins of underground, self-published literature.

"It's disturbing that something on this scale, with so many privacy implications, happened with such a tiny amount of publicity," Schoen said.

And it's not as if the information is encrypted in a highly secure fashion, Schoen said. The EFF spent months collecting samples from printers around the world and then handed them off to an intern, who came back with the results in about a week.

"We were able to break this code very rapidly," Schoen said.

Avatars, Virtual Worlds

2005-09-24T10:35:00.000-07:00

From: Chris Case [mailto:r-anima@qb3.so-net.ne.jp]
Sent: Thursday, 01 July, 1999 8:20 AM

Kath Williamson wrote:

> > VRML-powered virtual environments where one's
> cartoon-like avatar can rub shoulders with those of
>
> I trust that everyone has encountered the wonderful "sci-fi" novel
> SNOWCRASH by Neal Stephenson . . .

I believe it may have been Stephenson who originated the term "avatar" to refer to a user's virtual persona in an online world. Certainly I can recall no occurrence of it in Gibson, Sterling, Shirley, or the other cyberpunk writers,

What I found most interesting about that book (apart from the notion of the Mafia being in the pizza delivery business) was the concept of Sumerian as the Ur-language, corresponding to the machine-level language of
computers (111010010100011100101001010001001100, or words to that effect), and thereby capable of reprogramming the human brain (cf. Leary, Lilly, and NLP).

I started to research that a bit, to find out if indeed Sumerian was still a mystery, but postponed sifting through the avalanche of data that I found, so I still don't know how plausible all that is...

I'd like to see some good links on glossolalia, and "speaking in tongues". I believe David Kubiak (one of the writers I've sampled and mixed for Zavtone) has written some interesting stuff about Pentecostal goings-on....

Does anyone on the list have first-hand experience of the cult-world of Quake and other avatar-based realities? If I hear of a virtual world where something other than combat or shopping is the modus vivendi, I might be tempted to explore more.

Hakim Bey

2005-09-24T10:28:00.000-07:00

From: Chris Case Date: Thu Jul 1, 1999 8:04am

"Sculptor" alluded to Hakim Bey;

Synchronistic of you to mention Hakim Bey. I just yesterday finished making the attached "sample sequence", which is like the verbal equivalent of a DJ mix, in which one uses samples from (in this case one) author's writings, edited and sequenced to make a certain continuity.

This was made for an article in the forthcoming issue of Zavtone Magazine; I've made five or six such mixes for this article, which is in the subject of Beyond 2000 (as indeed is the whole Zavtone next issue), The other writers similarly victimised are Dane Rudhyar, Antero Alli, David Kubiak, Natasha Vita More, Terence McKenna, and an 11-year-old Malaysian girl.

Anyway, heeeeeeeeeere's Hakim:!

Hakim Bey anticipates:

An anti-authoritarian movement capable
of lumping together the mess of
anarchist, libertarian, syndicalist,
council communist, post-situationist, primitivist,
extropian and other "free" tendencies.

This "union-without-uniformity" will not be
driven by ideology, but by a kind of
insurrectionary "noise" or chaos
of TAZ's, uprisings, refusals, and epiphanies. ...

It will release a hundred blooming flowers,
a thousand, a million memes
of resistance, of difference,
of non-ordinary consciousness --
the will to power as "strangeness".

And as capital retreats deeper and deeper
into cyberspace, or into disembodiment, ...
we will begin to see the re-appearance
of the Social.

The desire for wilderness will be
gratified at a level undreamed of
since the early Neolithic,
and the desire for creativity will be
gratified at a level undreamed of
by the wildest science fiction.

In both cases the means for this enjoyment
can only be called appropriate techné --
green, low energy, high information....--
and this, however untidy,
I would call utopia.

Perhaps we shall experience
not a return *to*
the Stone Age,
but a return *of* the Stone Age ...

A few decades ago civilized ears
literally could not hear
"primitive" music except as noise,
the non-harmonic classical music of India or China
except as meaningless rubbish.

Civilization was defined by
rational consciousness, rationality was defined
as civilized consciousness -- outside this totality
only chaos and sheer
unintelligibility could exist.

But now things have changed -- suddenly, just as
the "primitive"and the "traditional" seem
on the verge of disappearance,
we can hear them.
How?
Why?

If the utopian trace in all music
can now be heard, it can only be
because the "broken order" is now
somehow coming to an end. ..

The reign of the commodity is
threatened by a mass arousal from
the media-trance of inattention.

A taste for the authentic appears,
suffers a million tricks,...
a million empty promises --
but it refuses to evaporate.
Instead it condenses --
it even coagulates.

Neo-shamanic modes of awareness......
Psychedelics and oriental mysticism
sharpen ears
to a taste for the unbroken,
the order of intimacy, and
its festal embodiment.

Of course, everyone is free to play
this game of utopian poetics
with different "rules", and different results.

After all, the future does not exist...
the reification of the eschaton
(either in the future or the past)
devalues the present, the "place" where we
are actually living our everyday lives.

Samples sequenced from various writings
by HAKIM BEY

Music, memes, etc.

2005-09-24T10:25:00.000-07:00

Jaron Lanier writes:

As a young composer I used to use my imagination to take on the identities of musical ideas. Imagine being equal temperament. You would first come to consciousness in China and feel yourself pounded out into the air from giant bells. You would feel the dark beating of your imperfect harmonies like tingles in your toes. Then, with the death of an Emperor, you would fall into a deep sleep, only to awaken centuries later pulsing out of the fingertips and into the ears of a frenetic, sober, workaholic named Bach. You would then feel your body opened up in new ways by a prying cosmic chiropractor-this is how the successive generations of harmonic innovators would feel to you. You would eventually flow out of the Beatles' space age chrome guitar pickups and through the distorting diminutive speakers of pastel plastic Japanese radios.

The Full Monty: at THE REALITY CLUB

Surrendering to the Irrational?

2005-09-24T10:21:00.001-07:00

An amusing titbit from a thread on Howard Rheingold's forum "Electric Minds"

> "If one observes the play of myth in the work of
>Science it does not mean that science does not work and
>one should simply surrender to the irrational."

This is the destructive meme-sequence that has wreaked
so much damage ... it is the perfect statement of the
dichotomization I was referring to. You can't
surrender to the irrational any more than you can
surrender to your own skin. The irrational isn't some
psychic gravity trying to pull us down from our proud
erect posture, it is the dynamic of the mid brain, the
pons and hypothalamus, that weaves its energy
management through the fabric of our daily adventures
in the form of passion, fear, curiosity, aversion, and
other felt things.

Surrender to the irrational? What a pathetic bogeyman
to oppose the methodical approach to tool making and
tool building.

Howard, the difference between technos and scientia is
profoundly germane to this whole enterprise. Technos
has to do with tools, media, implements. It has to do
with craft, design, intent, telos, finish, style, and
transmission of cultural lore. Scientia has to do with
your abstraction thingy, the extraction of essence or
the reification of persistent patterns...and scientia
is of the two the most problematic...because it has
more to do with the imposition of external authority.
Technos is indigenous culture, scientia is the
diplomatic pouch of the global mind, and it can be a
reductionist carpetbag in disguise.

Leech-Computer Interface Breakthrough...

2005-09-24T10:21:00.000-07:00

Leech-Computer Interface Breakthrough...

A team of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology
and a handful of other groups are working to develop hybrid
biocomputers that marry living nerve cells with silicon
circuits to create smarter computers.

If they succeed, they could set the foundation for brain-like
computer systems that could find solutions on their own,
with no need for step-by-step programming instructions.
So far, researchers have joined two neurons from leeches
and linked them to a personal computer, which sent
signals to each cell and correctly extracted the answer to
a simple addition problem.

The program that links the neurons and the PC, dubbed
"wetware," is based on chaos theory, using the results
to tune the neurons and alter the way they communicate.
Ultimately, brain-like chips will be more creative and may
mirror both the good and bad aspects of human thinking.
William L. Ditto, who heads the project at the Georgia
Institute of Technology, says it will be 10 years or more
until biocomputers are commercially available.

credit: Ninfomania

An Overview of Gnosis

2005-09-24T10:16:00.000-07:00

An Overview of Gnosis

excerpts from an article by Dean Edwards
[http://www.eff.org/pub/Net_culture/Consciousness/gnosis.overview ]
>
Gnosis comes from a Greek word meaning 'to know' in the sense of to be acquainted.
>
Gnosis in a more specific religious sense refers to the knowledge of God and the fullness of the true spiritual realms through direct personal experience.
>
A gnostic is someone who has had such an experience or who has been initiated into a tradition which provides access to such personal revelations.)
>
Gnosis is not simply a synonym for mysticism, paranormal, occult, metaphysics, esoteric or knowledge. It is a distinct category of mystical experience beyond the physical or psychic levels of being.
>
A gnostic religious-philosophical movement flourished during the first several centuries of the current era.
>
The effects of the presence of Gnosticism as a systematized religious and spiritual practice were felt throughout Europe, Asia and North Africa. These effects continue to be felt today.
>
Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Taoist, Buddhist, pagan and other versions are also present in the historical and contemporary record.
>
Gnosis involves direct "knowledge" and experience of the sacred, rather than relying exclusively on faith, belief or study of sacred texts.
>
Systems of gnosis often teach that only through the intercession of a messenger from the pure spiritual realms can the soul become acquainted with God. The original Greek word, gnosis, as noted above, meant knowledge in terms of being 'acquainted with'. The gnostic in any form is a 'friend of God'.
>
Please note that soul in the above paragraph refers to the spark of individualized spiritual essence that dwells within the consciousness or mind. In some systems the word 'spirit' itself is used instead of soul. Soul then becomes interchangeable with mind. In Greek, for instance, the word 'psyche' means both mind and soul. 'pneuma' on the other hand means spirit, wind, breath, air.
>
Today, new schools of gnosticism such as the Ecclesia Gnostica have emerged in the West. The ancient movement still thrives in several Sufi orders of Islam. (The Arabic term for gnosis is marifat.) There are also strong gnostic influences in Jewish Kabbalah, and in Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism. Similar patterns are found in India in the teachings of the Fifteenth Century poet Kabir
and in the Sikhism. There is also increasing interest in the marifat of Sufism in Islam.

Anthropocybersynchronicity

2005-09-24T10:13:00.000-07:00

From: 113463.3610@compuserve.com
Date: Fri Jun 25, 1999 1:43pm
Subject: Anthropocybersynchronicity (rhythm)

http://www.eff.org/pub/Net_culture/Consciousness/

Anthropocybersynchronicity:

Rhythm and Intimacy in VR

by Joel N. Orr, Autodesk Distinguished Fellow 1-800-CADD/CAM.

based on an article that first appeared in Computer Graphics World.

an*thro*po*cy*ber*syn*chro*ni+*ci*ty n [fr Gk anthropos, man +cyber, governor + synchronicity, coming together in time] The study of the rhythmic aspects of the person-computer interface.

I coined the term anthropocybersynchronicity to describe an area of person/machine interface research that is largely unexplored-- but holds great promise, especially for virtual reality. Untapped aspects of our
being can greatly enhance the contact between people and computers. The secret: Rhythm. Human-scale rhythms--visual, auditory, and kinesthetic--can and should be incorporated into the design of effective computer systems.

When MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte was asked a few years ago, "What comes after personal computing?" he responded with a single word: "Intimacy." While the conventional uses of this term have a wide variety of connotations, one cognitive psychology usage is most interesting: "the portion of the field of view occupied by a phenomenon." Since in most current VR applications the virtual world takes up the entirety of the user's field of view, intimacy is total: The user feels entirely "inside" the VR "world."

The totality of the user's immersion in the VR "world" represents both a danger and an opportunity. Anthropocybersynchronicity can lessen the danger and help us exploit the opportunity.

Two to Tango

One of the most widely-quoted statistics in CADD comes from a study done over a decade ago by IBM, in which the researchers demonstrated that the number of transactions performed by users of a CADD system (CADAM, in this case) increased as the response time decreased, down to a quarter of a second. This finding was surprising; most CADD users and experts believed that response time was important, but that below about one second, other factors would limit the productivity of the user. The study, published in the IBM Research Journal, showed that the transaction rate at half a second was double that at one second--and that the transaction rate at a quarter of a second was about double that at half a second.

For years, I believed IBM misapplied this statistic to justify selling much more powerful computer systems for CADD than the user really needed. I pointed out that CADAM commands typically had very limited span; that is, it took four or five picks on CADAM to accomplish what could be done with just one pick on a Computervision system. So response time, I reasoned, was important--but only in the IBM/CADAM environment, where individual commands did not accomplish as much as they did on other systems.

But in 1984, when I visited a CADAM user group meeting and a Computervision user group meeting within a short period, and an observation I had made earlier was confirmed: CADAM users were happy, and CV users were frustrated, with their respective systems. Exploring the matter further with my clients who had CADAM and CV, I was surprised to learn that CADAM users ended their workday tired but happy--with sweaty armpits, so to speak--while CV users often ended their workday with a headache.

It became apparent to me that the "dance" of the CADD operator was much smoother for the CADAM user, with sub-second response times to all commands, than for the CV user, whose system response time varied widely from command to command-- and from moment to moment, for it depended on what the other system users were doing at the time.

Fascinatin' Rhythm

Then I wondered that I had not seen it before: CADAM users were able to develop a working rhythm, much like farm or factory workers. When I was thirteen, my Uncle Bobby taught me to use a scythe. "Once you capture the rhythm of it, it won't even seem like work; you'll find it exhilarating," he told me. I was skeptical, and remained so for several muscle-sore and blistery days, but I kept practicing. And one day, I started cutting clover at about nine in the morning, and only stopped when my worried aunt came to find me at three o'clock in the afternoon--I hadn't shown up for lunch.

This dynamic aspect of ergonomics is sadly neglected by computer users and vendors. It desperately needs more serious study.

Hidden Power

Computers are, potentially, a very powerful amplifier of human thinking. Their use has been limited to date by their accessibility; only a relatively small segment of the population can make contact with their power.

This is largely due to their arcane nature. A great deal of knowledge is required to use most systems with any facility. And most operating systems and applications demand near-perfection from those who would exercise them, operating under the principle of "a miss is as good as a mile"; if you mis-key a command or a file name, the resultant behavior may be astonishingly different from what you expected, and the computer may give you little indication of what you did wrong. So at a minimum, you have to
be precise with letters and numbers to make computers work; only a fraction of the population has the aptitude needed to be so.

Adding pictures to the human/computer communication goes a long way toward enlarging the segment of the population that can take advantage of the brain-amplifying power of computers. Icons and spatially distributed menus make interaction with the computer less ambiguous for more people. Pictures unleash more of the awesome intellectual leverage of the machine. But we do
not have to stop there.

Your Meter is Running

In The Neural Lyre: Poetic Meter, the Brain, and Time, Frederick Turner and Ernst Poppel note that "...brain processing is essentially rhythmic. That these rhythms can be "driven" or reinforced by repeated photic or auditory stimuli, to produce peculiar subjective states, is already well known." They go on to show that this rhythmic nature is the same across cultural
boundaries: "Metered poetry is a highly complex activity which is culturally universal. (Frederick Turner) has heard poetry recited by Ndembu spirit- doctors in Zambia and has, with the anthropologist Wulf Schiefenhovel, translated Eipo poetry from Central New Guinea. He reports, as a poet, that the meter of Eipo poetry, when reproduced in English, has much the same emotional effect as it does in the original."

Through their study of poetry in hundreds of languages, Turner and Poppel have identified a fundamental temporal unit that seems to be shared by all humans. "It has been known for many years that rhythmic photic and auditory stimulation can evoke epileptic symptoms in seizure-prone individuals, and can produce powerful involuntary reactions even in normal persons. The rhythmic stimulus entrains and then amplifies natural brain rhythms, especially if it is tuned to an important frequency such as the ten cycle-per-second alpha wave."

They have determined the length of this unit to be three seconds; in poetry, this period is identified with a vocal space unit discernible in all the languages they studied, which they call LINE. Rhythmic driving at frequencies that are harmonically related to this temporal unit produces astounding effects. "The curious subjective effects of metered verse--relaxation, a holistic sense of the world and so on--are no doubt attributable to a very mild pseudotrance state induced by the auditory
driving effect of this repetition."

Moreover, such stimuli seem to have an integrative effect on people. "Auditory driving is known to affect the right brain much more powerfully than the left: thus, where ordinary unmetered prose comes to us in a "mono" mode, so to speak, affecting the left brain predominantly, metered language comes to us in a "stereo" mode, simultaneously calling on the verbal resources of the left and the rhythmic potentials of the right."

"But the driving rhythm of the three-second LINE is not just any rhythm. It is, as we have seen, tuned to the largest limited unit of auditory time, its specious present, within which causal sequences can be compared, and free decisions taken. A complete poem-- which can be any length--is a duration, a realm of values, systematically divided into presents, which are the realm of action. It therefore summarizes our most sophisticated and most uniquely human integrations of time."

Good Vibrations

Both mechanical and electrical engineers say a system is in resonance when it vibrates at its natural frequency. Energy from a resonating system moves easily to another system of the same natural frequency. We tune radio and tv receivers to the frequencies of transmitting stations in order to receive their signals; when the soprano sings at the natural frequency of the crystal goblet, it shatters.

Human beings are complex systems--too complex to have simple natural frequencies. But there are certain frequencies that resonate with some human phenomena. Low-frequency sound pulses at or near a person's heart rate seem to cause the human system to "lock in" to the sound generator; once this occurs, changes in the frequency or rate of the sound cause
corresponding changes in the person's heart rate, as well as in other physical functions. The most popular video games are not the ones with the best graphics; they are the ones that have a heartbeat-rate low-frequency pulse, that accelerates as the game progresses. This auditory entrainment causes the player's heart rate to speed up, and an accompanying production
of adrenaline and endorphins. By the end of the game, the player is "hyped"--and wants more.

The companies that sell background music to large commercial establishments use rhythms (and often other subliminal stimuli) to create the kind of mood they judge to be most effective--for workers in an office, customers in a grocery store, and so on.

Filmmakers take advantage of this phenomenon to heighten tension in their audiences. Next time you watch a suspense film, note the heartbeat-rate pulse, that speeds up, at crucial times--like when the movie calls for extra suspense.

You Lead

But when a person watches a film, the movie is active and the person is passive. By contrast, good sales people have long known what practitioners of neurolinguistic programming have recently written about: You can establish rapport with someone by intentionally mirroring different aspects of their behavior--their rate of breathing, their blinking rate, the rate at which their leg is swinging, for example. And after a couple of minutes of matching, you can verify that you have rapport by leading--changing the rhythm, and watching to see if they follow. If they do, you are communicating with the person on a very primal level, and they are much more open to your suggestions and other forms of leading than when such rapport is absent.

Studies of people in singles' bars back this up. People who began to mirror each other's behavior soon left together; people who were "out of synch" with each other after a few minutes separated and made other contacts.

Getting at the Problem

Now let us think about the computer as a general-purpose tool, something we use to get a job done. We must measure its effectiveness by how easily and how well it helps us to accomplish our goal, which is usually not operating the computer; it is writing, accounting, designing, drafting, or something to which the computer--except for the specifics of its assistance--is
irrelevant.

We can increase our control of the tool by increasing our coupling to it--the extent to which our actions and the actions of the computer system affect each other. Rhythm, through resonance, enables us to increase that coupling.

Of course, increasing coupling could give the tool more control over the user, which could be undesirable; like the binding of a ski, it has to be both loose and tight. You don't want the ski to fall off while you are going down a slope; but you want it to come off easily if you fall.

Ultimately, it is not literacy, or pictoracy, we need; it is not even "mediacy," a facility with multimedia. Rather, we must have
immediacy--enhanced access to our problems so that we are empowered to solve them without mediation, without the intrusion of the irrelevancies of the computer. Rhythm can bring us closer to this goal.

They Got Rhythm

Although they are only nominally anthroposynchronous, there are already numerous rhythmic uses of computers. The ones given below demonstrate the feasibility of having the computer control rhythm.

Biomuse II is a music- generating system invented by Hugh S. Lusted and R. Benjamin Knapp, of Stanford University. Small electrodes pick up electric signals from the muscles of the "player," and translate them into MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) signals. Electrodes can be placed, for example, on the skull, near the eyes, and on arms and legs. The player can make music by moving, by changing brain-wave patterns (through visualization or other means), or by looking in different directions.

Music therapist Shmuel Ben-Dov uses a program called "Xanadu" to teach autistic children. The system can detect both pitch and rhythm via a microphone connected to a board that comes with the software. Ben-Dov designs lessons that can be executed by Xanadu; in them, the student is instructed to sing a particular series of notes, at the given rhythm. When
the student does well, the system rewards him or her with a pleasant arpeggio; mistakes cause the program to provide additional instruction and encouragement.

In the Boston Computer Museum, a computer plays along with a musician, improvising an accompaniment in real time.

A simpler version is available in Broderbund's "Jam Session" for the Macintosh. The program has a mode in which the user can "jam" with the music by selecting particular licks; the software makes sure that the user's contribution fits in with the rhythm of the piece.

Richard Bandler, co-inventor of NLP (neurolinguistic programming), has described programs for the Apple II that induce a light hypnotic trance by rhythmic flashing and clicking. Once the system has "rapport" with the user, it makes suggestions to enhance the user's learning state.

I'll Lead, You Follow

Suppose the keyboard of your personal computer had a sensor that could detect your pulse. When you first start working with the computer, the system would inquire as to your mood and alertness, from time to time. It would build a table with the corresponding heart rates. After a period of calibration, it could then sense your level of alertness, and use rhythmic
auditory and visual pulsation to alter it. It could, for example, flash a character in the corner of the display at the rate of your pulse, while making an unobtrusive but audible clicking sound. When it detected synchronization between your pulse rate and its beat, it could speed up the flashing and clicking, checking to see that your pulse was entrained.

By increasing your heart rate, the system would cause your body to generate the substances that are the concomitants of the "fight or flight" response--including endorphins and enkephalins, pain- blunting, pleasure-enhancing morphine-like chemicals that could make you more effective.

They could also make you less effective, if your work required a more contemplative mood. For this reason, you'd be able to control what the system did to you.

Off-Beat

"What do you call people who practice the rhythm method of birth control?" goes the riddle. "Parents," is the answer. Like any other tool or approach, rhythm does not ensure success.

Rhythm can be a powerful ally or a formidable foe, a liberator or an enslaver. I do not believe it is intrinsically evil, but it can be used for evil purposes, such as controlling people against their will. We should approach it cautiously and intelligently, respecting its destructive power while we harness it for our benefit.

Coming Soon

We have looked at rhythm with the mathematics of Euclid and Newton, whose underlying assumptions derive from Plato's: everything in the world is an approximation of an ideal. Recent discoveries under the general heading of "the mathematics of chaos" reveal that things are both simpler and more complex than we ever imagined. Sealed mysteries of natural phenomena, and biological phenomena in particular, are yielding in embarrassing profusion to this new Open sesame. I am anxiously waiting to see if there will be found, in a biological setting, a chaotic or fractal analog to the Newtonian notion of resonance.

Marching Forward

Historically, rhythm has sometimes been used to abrogate individual freedoms. "Military drums play music designed to make your feet take you where your head never would," says N'omi Orr. "Musick is almost as dangerous as Gunpowder; and it may be requires looking after no less than the Press or the Mint. 'Tis possible a publick Regulation might not be amiss," said Jeremy Collier (1650-1726).

There is danger in rhythm, long perceived. Let us exercise good judgment in its application. We have to be sensitive to the possibilities for its misuse. Here, the best remedy is education; we must teach our children about rhythm in the context of communications, and make them sensitive to its use and misuse.

But we must act quickly; we are late. In 1947, mystery writer and medievalist Dorothy Sayers pointed out, in The Lost Tools of Learning: "We who were scandalized in 1940 when men were sent to fight armored tanks with rifles, are not scandalized when young men and women are sent into the world to fight massed propaganda with a smattering of "subjects"; and when
whole classes and whole nations become hypnotized by the arts of the spell binder, we have the impudence to be astonished. We dole out lip-service to the importance of education..."

We have to see education as an ongoing activity; we must teach, and learn, how to think, not just what. And part of that set of skills is in the examination of what we take in. In his science-fiction novel, David's Sling, Mark Stiegler gives good advice:

"Filter first for substance. Filter second for significance. These filters protect against advertising. Filter third for reliability. This filter protects against politicians. Filter fourth for completeness. This filter protects from the media.

" "History is a race between education and catastrophe," noted H. G. Wells. May education win in our generation.

DR. JOEL N. ORR
Chairman and Principal Consultant
ORR ASSOCIATES, INC.
5224 Indian River Road * Suite 106
Virginia Beach, Virginia 23464

804/467-2677; Fax 804/495-8548

Dr. Joel N. Orr is a CADD/CAM and computer graphics consultant. He is
chairman of Orr Associates, Inc. (OAI), one of the most active consulting
firms of its type in the world. OAI counts among its satisfied clients such
organizations as IBM, AMP, Kodak, Unisys, the US Air Force and Navy,
Hasbro, Xerox, Motorola, Citicorp Venture, and many others. OAI provides
both technical and marketing counsel to users and vendors of CADD/CAM and
computer graphics equipment and services, as well as to investors.

Dr. Orr is a contributing editor for COMPUTER GRAPHICS WORLD, TEMPLATE,
CAE, DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT, andWINDOWS SOURCES. He is a founding member and
past president of the National Computer Graphics Association. A popular
speaker, he frequently addresses the Society for Manufacturing Engineers,
the American Production and Inventory Control Society, and many other
professional groups. He has written and edited several books on CADD and
CIM, and is listed in "Who's Who."

LEAP, the League for Engineering Automation Productivity, was established
by Dr. Orr. Its goal is to empower engineering professionals by working
with academic and industrial leaders to make computers the locus, rather
than the focus, of day-to-day engineering activity.

The CADD/CAM Institute, a seminar and publishing firm, was founded and is
directed by Dr. Orr. It publishes Joel Orr's WORLD OF TECHNOLOGY, a
30-minute monthly video newsletter.

COMPUTER TALK, a weekly radio talk show hosted by Dr. Orr, can be heard on
Standard Broadcasting Network affiliates Sundays, 2-3 pm EST.

Dr. Orr holds a PhD in mathematics and computer science. He was named a
Distinguished Fellow by Autodesk Corporation.

Feel the Force, Luke...

2005-09-24T09:47:00.000-07:00

From: Chris Case
Date: Fri Jun 25, 1999 10:38am
Subject: Feel the Force, Luke...

Lest we think that the holistic vision, the concept of the interconnectivity of all things, and theories of resonance are something terribly terribly new, have a gander at this, which I've always felt to be one of the finest poems of the 20th (or any) century; not cheerful, true, but sublimely human.... Herein also are (conscious?) allusions to some of the principles of sympathetic magic ("The hand that whirls", etc...)

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

-Dylan Thomas, 1934-

MEMORY TRADE: A Prehistory of Cyberculture

2005-09-24T09:46:00.000-07:00

rom: Kath Williamson MEMORY TRADE: A Prehistory of Cyberculture
by Darren Tofts (words) and Murray McKeigh (vision)
Inteface Publishers, 1998, Australia ISBN 90 5704 1812

"The notion of 'culture' is changing at the speed of information itself. Computer technology is creating a new kind of public, a cyberculture with all its utopian and apocalyptic possibilities. But is that new?

Popular debate generally ignores cyberculture's historical context. The official history begins in the 19th century and tracks the evolution of telecomunications, the egalitarian dream of the global village, and the emergence of the military-industrial complex. However, this omits the
deeper, prehistory of technological transformation of culture that are everywhere felt but nowhere seen in the telematic landscape of the late 20th century. Cyberculture is an extension, rather than an innovation, of human engagement with communication and information technologies.

In creating a prehistory of cyberculture, then, we are not trying to present a genealogy of concatenation, of neatly linked motivations and actions, but rather to construct a narrative of syncopation, of shifting emphases and digressions in word and image. We are, in the spirit of
Heidegger, building a way. Conceived as a jam session between writer and artist, this book is interested in the relationships between humans and technology, creativity and artifice, reality and representations of reality. It seeks to explore cyberculture's unconscious, to present
unexpected encounters in its examination of the technologizing of the wor(l)d.

A work of archeology, this book scapes away the surfaces of the contemporary world to detect the sedimentary traces of the past. A past that inflects the present with the echoes of ancient, unresolved philosophical questions about the relationships between humans and technology."

_________________________________________________________________________

Needless to say, one of the central aspects of this book is the examination of the development of writing as a technology in human communities. I haven't thought of this before, but writing is not biologically determined, so the author suggests that it was with the development of writing 4000-5000 years ago which heralded the creation of the "cyborg" - the human/technology hybrid. (With this in mind, it's interesting, too, to contemplate the nature of the 'net and the web, which is still, essentially, textual communication).

Of course, I've been aware for a long while that it is the capacity of our language which delineates the breadth and depth of our thoughts, so this idea has been quite a revelation.

kath the cyborg

Reply to a skeptic

2005-09-24T09:44:00.000-07:00

Excerpts from:

From: Chris Case
Date: Tue Jun 15, 1999 9:48pm
Subject: Reply to a skeptic

..As I think I explained, I have my own sense of the word "TechGnosis", having (also) invented it. It has to do with the *hoped-for* convergence of the gnostic and creative sector with the scientific. It is time for left and right brains to stop squaring off in the kind of opposition that resembles the archetypal argument between men and women.

There is a kind of New Age mysticism which perpetuates the notion that science is the misguided enemy of holistic knowledge, but I do not believe this to be the case, and find ample evidence in the writings of what I consider the most illuminated minds that rejection of science as such is a foolish and ostrich-like move. Just as some mystics have made ignorantly dismissive remarks about extrospection, stemming from their own disinterest in phenomenal reality,
or Maya, so have many scientist made equally "blinkered' remarks about the experiences and capabilities deriving from introspection. This leads to a characteristic lack of practicality in the one camp and of creativity in the other. I eschew all forms of camping about, and prefer a cognitive atmosphere that is hetero-intellectual.

....

From my point of view, TechGnosis is an attempt to minimise the number of infants lost in the bathwater effluent. For this to work, both blinkered empiricists and arm-waving mystics will have to renounce their desire for hegemony, respect the others' freedom to explore whatever fields with whatever methods they choose, and seek common ground, scant though it may at the moment seem, for this is only a seeming.

To assume that all exponents of mystical insight are woolly-minded fools, incapable of logic or practicality, is simply incorrect. The master who initiated me into the techniques of Shabad Yoga was a highly successful lawyer before he succeeded his teacher, who had been a professor of chemistry, his own master having been a high-ranking engineer in the military. None of them found it necessary to deny or reject the findings of science, but rather extended beyond the domain of the externally-oriented senses the empirical practices of science, insisting that nothing should be taken on faith, nor should one extrapolate any more beyond ones own experience than a scientist does in imagining in which direction it "might be nice" or revealing to look next.

Few men could have been more practical than Napoleon, who said, more or less: "qui sait ou il va n'ira jamais nulpart." (He who knows where he's heading will never go anywhere.)

zorn stuff

2005-09-24T09:37:00.000-07:00

From: "lava"
Subject: Re: music zorn likes/New Yorker article

On Fri, 11 Jun 1999, Eric Saidel wrote:

> the more in-depth article that might appeal to us may have significantly > less appeal for Zorn, after all, he does have reasons (presumably) for > being media shy.

Zorn seems to shy away from scholarly articles and publicity in general because he wants the music to speak for itself. Plus, publishing an in-depth paper can be very difficult since there is so much competition to get into periodicals like the Journal of the American Musicological Society, for instance.

Overall I think the Kaplan article is a nice piece. It is quite appropriate for the New Yorker's audience. I really like Kaplan's use of quotations by Harrington and am anxiously waiting for the string quartets to be released! It was odd that Kaplan did not specifically mention Zorn's most recent classical pieces like Le Momo and Amour Fou. I would like to expand on Kaplan's statement: "These days, he [Zorn] tends to write straight through, from start to finish." It is not that simple. In some program notes I wrote back in March, Zorn describes his new compositional process. He was reluctant to talk about it at first, but I was persistent. Here's an excerpt from the notes:

(Sorry for the duplication if you have seen this already. The diacritics and italics did not come through--Momo has a circumflex over the first "o.")

Le Momo

Composed from October 1998 to January 1999, Le Momo was commissioned by the Library of Congress with support from the McKim Fund and is John Zorn's first composition for violin and piano. The piece is inspired by the work of Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), a French poet,dramatist, actor, and theoretician of the Surrealist movement who founded the "Theatre of Cruelty." Le Momo is named after Artaud's poem of the same title, in which the word momo, a slang term from the Marseilles region where Artaud was born, can be translated as "brat," "village idiot," or "simpleton"; the poem celebrates the return of Artaud, "the village idiot from
Marseilles," to the outside world after his nine-year incarceration in insane asylums. Le Momo is one of Zorn's new compositions in a series based on Surrealist artists. The series includes a piano trio entitled Amour Fou ("Mad Love") inspired by the poet and critic Andre Breton (1896-1966), as well as a solo violoncello piece influenced by Joseph Cornell (1903-1972), an American artist known for his enigmatic shadowbox constructions.

In composing Le Momo, Zorn ascribed a series of pitches to nonsense, chantlike texts of Artaud; letters of the alphabet received different pitches, resulting in over two hundred sets of pitches that could serve as melodies or harmonies, if stacked. Throughout the piece, a pitch set is repeated and recontextualized in each instance. Le Momo is a sort of rapid perpetuum mobile, but with periods of tension and release. Zorn used this compositional technique--one quite different from his prior methods--to yield a hypnotic, ritualistic feeling which he found important in Artaud's work. Describing his process, Zorn says, "I wanted to create a hypnotic
effect in my own brain when I was writing it. Sometimes I thought I had to hypnotize myself before I could begin working on the piece. I would often just stare at the page for an hour or two, kind of getting back into where the piece is, to find out where it could be going." Zorn likens his
current compositional process to going on a trip or exhibition: full of surprises and unexpected twists and turns, staying on the predetermined map, yet allowing for spontaneous detours along the way. As he puts it,

"What I like to do is just begin and through composing, work my way
through to the end of the piece. Each day I work a little bit on it and
find a solution to the problem that is in front of me. It's kind of like
going on a trip. You are not quite sure, you could make a turn here or
take a detour there or go straight ahead. Each day I make decisions on
where I am going with the piece and I let it grow. There is a basic
framework that I like a piece to have, and there are things that belong in
the frame and things that don't belong in the frame. Obviously the frame
is what gives the piece its structure, sense of unity, and form. I like
to keep it a very intuitive thing. In that sense the piece is
constantly--as I make decisions--stretching the frame; things are trying
to climb out of the frame, and it is my job to make sure that everything
stays in the frame."

As Zorn's musical language has evolved, his method of composition has changed from notating musical fragments on file cards or sketching game pieces on a blackboard, to creating a work much like a sculptor chips away at a block of marble--carefully, patiently, and constantly attuned to the varying shapes that emerge with every stroke.

Jeni

Meaning Of Life

2005-09-21T22:19:00.000-07:00

Meaning Of Life

Just came across the Meaning of Life website, where Robert Wright interviews some of the biggest minds in science and philosophy to get their insights and opinions on the big questions. I was pleasantly surprised by some of their views:

Is mysticism an enemy of rationalism? Omid Safi, speaking from a Muslim point of view, says no. (If you're wondering how a Muslim got to be an authority on mysticism: Don't forget about the Muslims known as Sufis.) Is consciousness a mystery--so mysterious as to suggest some higher purpose in the universe? Yes and no, says psychologist Steven Pinker (who more definitively solves the mystery of his hair)
... Why are the world's religions sometimes at each other's throats? Huston Smith, who wrote the book on them, has an answer, and it's inspiring yet depressing ... Can science lead to religion? Well, says Templeton Prize winner Arthur Peacocke, consider the similarity between defining an electron and defining God ... Mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme, who doesn't (quite)believe in God, nonetheless has a way of taking the sting out of death ... Does mind pervade the universe? Do individual atoms make choices? Don't laugh, says Freeman Dyson; modern physics is full of such weird possibilities ... Not sure if you're living in the moment? Try observing yourself while listening to music, suggests Joseph Goldstein ... Some philosophers say they've explained onsciousness. Dream on, says Francis Fukuyama ... Ever have a religious experience? Andrew Newberg takes pictures of brains that are having them ... Do you have trouble meditating?Meditation expert Sharon Salzberg says that's a feature, not a bug ... The universe seems exquisitely compatible with life. Why? John Polkinghorne has a theory (hint: unlike most physicists, he's a priest) ... Why is biological evolution full of death and suffering? Well, says biologist Ursula Goodenough, if you're so smart, let's see you invent a better means of creating intelligent life. Biologist Robert Pollack has a different take on evil--it's just the toxic waste of free will ... The world's major religions seem pretty different--irreconcilably so, at times. Look closer, says Keith Ward. (Ward also has a few words for those who think science can answer all questions.) John Haught, meanwhile, sees the differences among the world's religions as a bit more stubborn ... Is faith bad for science? Au contraire, says Owen Gingerich ...

ORIGINAL POSTING

October 03, 2004

Paleotechnology

2005-07-31T21:50:00.000-07:00

From somewhere off the Internet or maybe from CNN...

After digging to a depth of 100 meters last year, Russian scientists found traces of copper wire dating back 1000 years, and came to the conclusion that their ancestors already had a telephone network one thousand years ago.

So, not to be outdone, in the weeks that followed, American scientists dug 200 meters and headlines in the US papers read: "US scientists have found traces of 2000 year old optical fibers, and have concluded that their ancestors already had advanced high-tech digital telephone 1000 years earlier than the Russians."

One week later, the Israeli newspapers reported the following: "After digging as deep as 5000 meters, Israeli scientists have found absolutely nothing. They have concluded that 5000 years ago, their ancestors were already using wireless technology."

ARTICLE

Ooops, you died...play again?

2005-07-26T10:52:00.000-07:00

Pentagon Targets Clueless Xbox Gamers To Enlist

by URI DOWBENKO

The Pentagon isn't targeting trailer trash like West Virginia's soldier- convict Lyndie England anymore.

The Pentagon is using PlayStation and Xbox to lure hapless twenty- something gamers to enlist in the US Army to fight Bush's illegal war on Iraq, reports Government Executive Magazine (July 15, 2005).

Games like "Close Combat: First to Fight" have been enormously successful in convincing gullible young people into believing that fighting the unpopular War on Iraq is just like playing Xbox.

CIA front company In-Q-Tel is using the same strategy to enlist the new generation of killer spooks for the Agency, by contracting Destineer Studios to develop a game to seduce new recruits for the CIA.

The new game is supposed to be a "spy training simulation."

It's not known if the game simulation includes CIA favorites like narcotics trafficking, weapons sales or financial fraud.

It's also not known if you get to torture ragheads at Gitmo or rape Iraqi civilians in the Pentagon version -- to prepare the youngsters, of ocurse, for actual field conditions.

The Pentagon needs new cannon fodder. The CIA needs a fresh crop of killer spooks.

And twenty- somethings are the obvious target...

Data At Your Fingertips

2005-07-22T21:16:00.000-07:00

Secure optical data storage could soon literally be at your fingertips thanks to work being carried out in Japan. Yoshio Hayasaki and his colleagues have discovered that data can be written into a human fingernail by irradiating it with femtosecond laser pulses. Capacities are said to be up to 5 mega bits and the stored data lasts for 6 months - the length of time it takes a fingernail to be completely replaced.

FULL STORY

Download files via flesh

2005-07-21T21:46:00.000-07:00

F you spend hours downloading songs to your iPod, the days of fiddling around with wires are coming to an end.A Japanese company has discovered that the best cables may be your arms and legs.

According to NTT Laboratories, your whole body is the perfect conductor for electronic data, meaning that information such as music and films could be downloaded in seconds via your elbow.

NTT, and the team of scientists that invented the "Red Tacton" system, envisage a future in which the human body acts as a non-stop conduit for information.

Wireless networks and devices, often hampered by intermittent service, will eventually be replaced, NTT says, by "human area networks".

The developers are convinced the new technology will be "highly disruptive" - undermining existing wireless industries.

Field tests are under way, and the first commercial appearance of Red Tacton is expected next year.

The Red Tacton chips will be embedded in machines and contain a transmitter and receiver built to send and accept data stored in a digital format.

The chip then takes any type of file, such as an MP3 music file or email, and converts it into a format that takes the form of digital pulses that can be passed and read through a human being's electric field. The chip in the receiving device reads these tiny changes and converts the file back into its original form.

With Red Tacton sensors miniaturised and built into every type of device and product, the list of potential uses is endless, said Hideki Sakamoto of NTT.

By simply touching an advertising poster, for example, product information and an order form could be sent to your laptop.

Shake hands with a new contact, and every detail that would normally appear on a business card will leap across your arms and download itself to your mobile phone.

Because the data transfer between Red Tacton machines involves no dial-up or logging-in, the transfer of information is virtually instantaneous.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,15933077-13762,00.html

Mind May Affect Machines

2005-07-21T21:27:00.000-07:00

By Kim Zetter

For 26 years, strange conversations have been taking place in a basement lab at Princeton University.

No one can hear them, but they can see their apparent effect: balls that go in certain directions on command, water fountains that seem to rise higher with a wish and drums that quicken their beat.

..............

Using random event generators -- computers that spew random output -- they have participants focus their intent on controlling the machines' output. Out of several million trials, they've detected small but "statistically significant" signs that minds may be able to interact with machines. However, researchers are careful not to claim that minds cause an effect or that they know the nature of the communication.

.........

The first REG that researchers used produced high-frequency random noise. Researchers attached circuitry to the device to translate the noise into ones and zeroes. Each participant, following a prerecorded protocol, developed an intention in her or his mind to have the generator alternately spew out more ones, then more zeroes, and then do nothing at all.

The effects were small, but measurable. Since then, the same results have occurred with other experiments, such as one involving a pendulum connected to a computer-controlled mechanism. When the machine releases the pendulum to swing from a set position, participants focus on changing the rate at which the pendulum slows to a stop.

Other experiments involve a drum machine that participants try to control and a mechanical cascade machine, in which a large device drops thousands of small, black polystyrene balls to fall around pegs in a wall and settle into a row of slots at the bottom. Participants try to direct the balls to fall to one side of the row or another.

Participants have been able to direct one out of every 10,000 bits of data measured across all of the tests.

......

There is very little that the researchers understand about the phenomenon, but they do know that results aren't affected by distance or time. Participants, for example, can have the same effect on a machine from outside the room or across the country. They can also have the same effect if they have the intention before the REG is turned on or even if they read a book or listen to music while the machine is running.

.......

Gender matters as well. Men tend to get results that match their intent, although the degree of the effect is often small. Women tend to get a bigger effect, but not necessarily the one they intend. ......Results are also greater if a male and female work together, but same-sex pairs produce no significant results. Pairs of the opposite sex who are romantically involved produce the best results -- often seven times greater than when the same individuals are tested alone.

........

"It's almost as if there were two styles or two variables and they are complementary," Dunne said. "(The masculine style) is associated with intentionality. The (feminine style) seems to be associated more with resonance."

...........

Radin said the phenomenon could be similar to quantum entanglement -- what Einstein referred to as "spooky action at a distance" -- in which two particles separated from each other appear to connect without any apparent form of communication.

Or the effect could be caused by something similar to what occurred in experiments conducted in 1963 by neurophysiologist W. Grey Walter. In those experiments, researchers implanted electrodes in participants' motor cortices and sat them next to a carousel slide projector. Participants were told to advance the slides by pressing a button. What they weren't told was that the button was a dummy. The slides actually advanced in response to an amplified signal sent from the participants' brains.

"(The difference is) we're not talking about sending signals from the brain to the machine through a circuit," Jahn said about the Pear experiments. "Whatever is going on, is going by some anomalous route. We don't know the carrier of this information. We only know something about conditions that favor it."

.............

Jahn thinks that critics err in expecting the phenomena to follow the usual rules of cause and effect. Instead, he thinks they belong in the category of what Carl Jung called "acausal phenomena," which include things like synchronicity.

"They play by more complicated, almost whimsical, elusive rules," Jahn said, "but they play."

........

FULL STORY

Jacking In

2005-07-09T12:07:00.000-07:00

(Thanks to Nik for the heads-up.)

BrainGate' Brain-Machine-Interface takes shape

December 7, 2004 An implantable, brain-computer interface the size of an aspirin has been clinically tested on humans by American company Cyberkinetics. The 'BrainGate' device can provide paralysed or motor-impaired patients a mode of communication through the translation of thought into direct computer control. The technology driving this Brain-Machine-Interface breakthrough has a myriad of potential applications, including the development of human augmentation for military and commercial purposes...

Aliens have taken the place of angels

2005-06-17T04:45:00.000-07:00

We want wisdom. We want hope. We want to be good. Therefore we sometimes tell ourselves warning stories that deal with the darker side of some of our other wants. As William Blake noted long ago, the human imagination drives the world. At first it drove only the human world, which was once very small in comparison to the huge and powerful natural world around it. Now we're close to being in control of everything except earthquakes and the weather. But it is still the human imagination, in all its diversity, that directs what we do with our tools. Literature is an uttering, or outering, of the human imagination.

'Aliens have taken the place of angels'

Margaret Atwood on why we need science fiction

Margaret Atwood
Friday June 17, 2005

Guardian

Before the term "science fiction" appeared, in America in the 1930s, during the golden age of bug-eyed monsters and girls in brass brassieres, stories such as HG Wells' The War of the Worlds were called "scientific romances". In both terms - scientific romance and science fiction - the science element is a qualifier. The nouns are "romance" and "fiction", and the word fiction covers a lot of ground.

If you're writing about the future and you aren't doing forecast journalism, you'll probably be writing something people will call either science fiction or speculative fiction. I like to make a distinction between science fiction proper and speculative fiction. For me, the science fiction label belongs on books with things in them that we can't yet do, such as going through a wormhole in space to another universe; and speculative fiction means a work that employs the means already to hand, such as DNA identification and credit cards, and that takes place on Planet Earth. But the terms are fluid. Some use speculative fiction as an umbrella covering science fiction and all its hyphenated forms - science fiction fantasy, and so forth - and others choose the reverse.

I have written two works of science fiction or, if you prefer, speculative fiction: The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake. Here are some of the things these kinds of narratives can do that socially realistic novels cannot do.

· They can explore the consequences of new and proposed technologies in graphic ways, by showing them as fully operational. We've always been good at letting cats out of bags and genies out of bottles, we just haven't been very good at putting them back in again. These stories in their darker modes are all versions of The Sorcerer's Apprentice: the apprentice finds out how to make the magic salt-grinder produce salt, but he can't turn it off.

· They can explore the nature and limits of what it means to be human in graphic ways, by pushing the envelope as far as it will go.

· They can explore the relationship of man to the universe, an exploration that often takes us in the direction of religion and can meld easily with mythology - an exploration that can happen within the conventions of realism only through conversations and soliloquies.

· They can explore proposed changes in social organisation, by showing what they might actually be like for those living within them. Thus, the utopia and the dystopia, which have proved over and over again that we have a better idea about how to make hell on earth than we do about how to make heaven. The history of the 20th century, where a couple of societies took a crack at utopia on a large scale and ended up with the inferno, would bear this out. Think of Cambodia under Pol Pot.

· They can explore the realms of the imagination by taking us boldly where no man has gone before. Thus the space ship, thus the inner space of the hilarious film Fantastic Voyage, the one where Raquel Welch gets miniaturised and shot through the blood stream in a submarine. Thus also the cyberspace trips of William Gibson; and thus The Matrix, Part 1 - this last, by the way, an adventure romance with strong overtones of Christian allegory, and therefore more closely related to The Pilgrim's Progress than to Pride and Prejudice.

More than one commentator has mentioned that science fiction as a form is where theological narrative went after Paradise Lost, and this is undoubtedly true. Supernatural creatures with wings, and burning bushes that speak, are unlikely to be encountered in a novel about stockbrokers, unless the stockbrokers have been taking a few mind-altering substances, but they are not out of place on Planet X. The form is often used as a way of acting out the consequences of a theological doctrine. The theological resonances in films such as Star Wars are more than obvious. Extraterrestrials have taken the place of angels, demons, fairies and saints, though it must be said that this last group is now making a comeback.

But it is still the human imagination, in all its diversity, that directs what we do with our tools. Literature is an uttering, or outering, of the human imagination. It lets the shadowy forms of thought and feeling - heaven, hell, monsters, angels and all - out into the light, where we can take a good look at them and perhaps come to a better understanding of who we are and what we want, and what the limits to those wants may be. Understanding the imagination is no longer a pastime, but a necessity; because increasingly, if we can imagine it, we'll be able to do it.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

California Dreaming

2005-05-19T18:37:00.000-07:00

May 7, 2005

California Dreaming: A True Story of Computers, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll

By ANDREW LEONARD

WHAT THE DORMOUSE SAID
How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry.
By John Markoff.
Illustrated. 310 pp. Viking. $25.95.

Engineers can be so cute. In the early 1960's, Myron Stolaroff, an employee of the tape recorder manufacturer Ampex, decided to prove the value of consuming LSD. So he set up the International Foundation for Advanced Study and went about his project in classic methodical fashion.

Test subjects - almost all engineers - were given a series of doses under constant observation and expected to take careful notes on their own experience. A survey of the first 153 volunteers revealed that "83 percent of those who had taken LSD found that they had lasting benefits from the experience." (Other results: increase in ability to love, 78 percent; increased self-esteem, 71 percent.)Such precision might seem antithetical to the fuzzy let-it-all-hang-outness of the psychedelic experience. But John Markoff, a senior writer for The New York Times who covers technology, makes a convincing case that for the swarming ubergeeks assembling in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960's, approaching drugs as they might any other potentially helpful tool or device - from a soldering iron to a computer chip - was only natural. The goals were broad in the 60's: the world would be remade, the natural order of things reconfigured, human potential amplified to infinity. Anything that could help was to be cherished, studied and improved.

It is no accident, then, that the same patch of land on the peninsula south of San Francisco that gave birth to the Grateful Dead was also the site of groundbreaking research leading the way to the personal computer. That the two cultural impulses were linked - positively - is a provocative thesis.

Revisionist histories of the 60's often make an attempt to separate the "excess" of the era from the politics. In this view, all those acid-gobbling, pot-smoking, tie-dyed renegades were a distraction from the real work of stopping the Vietnam War and achieving social justice. But Mr. Markoff makes a surprisingly sympathetic case that it was all of a piece: the drugs, the antiauthoritarianism, the messianic belief that computing power should be spread throughout the land.

"It is not a coincidence," he writes, "that, during the 60's and early 70's, at the height of the protest against the war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement and widespread experimentation with psychedelic drugs, personal computing emerged from a handful of government- and corporate-funded laboratories, as well as from the work of a small group of hobbyists who were desperate to get their hands on computers they could personally control and decide to what uses they should be put."

Judging by the record presented in "What the Dormouse Said," it is indisputable that many of the engineers and programmers who contributed to the birth of personal computing were fans of LSD, draft resisters, commune sympathizers and, to put it bluntly, long-haired hippie freaks.

This makes entertaining reading. Many accounts of the birth of personal computing have been written, but this is the first close look at the drug habits of the earliest pioneers. "What the Dormouse Said" may not reach the level of the classics of computing history, Tracy Kidder's "Soul of a New Machine" and Steven Levy's "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution." But there is still plenty of fun between its covers.

A central character - and one of the early volunteers at Stolaroff's foundation - is Douglas Engelbart, a man worthy of his own book. His team at the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute was the first to demonstrate the potential of the computing future. The research demonstration that he conducted for a packed auditorium in San Francisco in 1968 is still talked about in Silicon Valley with the reverence of those who might have witnessed Jehovah handing Moses the Ten Commandments. The mouse, man! Engelbart gave us the mouse! But Mr. Engelbart's story is not a happy one. He saw further ahead than most, but had a difficult time articulating his vision. He became heavily involved with Werner Erhard's human potential movement, EST, and his laboratory ultimately ended up losing both its way and its government financing. Many of his researchers went on to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where the first personal computer, the famous Alto, was invented, while he lapsed into semi-obscurity. As a metaphor for the 60's, which exploded with promise and ended in disarray, he's just about perfect.

Looking back at the 60's from the jaundiced perspective of the early 21st century, it's easy to wonder what was really accomplished, outside of the enduring split of the nation into two irreconcilable ideological camps. Sure, there was the civil rights campaign, women's liberation, environmentalism and a movement that eventually brought a war to heel, but the era is as likely to be ridiculed in modern memory as to be revered. But what happens if we add the birth of personal computing to the counterculture's list of achievements? Does that change the equation?

The answer depends on how one rates the personal computer as consciousness-enhancing device. Remember, after all, what the dormouse did say, in the stentorian full-throttle voice of Jefferson Airplane's Grace Slick: "Feed your head!"

By choosing that as his title, Mr. Markoff makes clear his belief that computers, like psychedelic drugs, are tools for mind expansion, for revelation and personal discovery. And to anyone who has experienced a drug-induced epiphany, there may indeed be a cosmic hyperlink there: fire up your laptop, connect wirelessly to the Internet, search for your dreams with Google: the power and the glory of the computing universe that exists now was a sci-fi fantasy not very long ago, and yes, it does pulsate with a destabilizing, revelatory psychic power. Cool!

But wasn't the goal of those 60's experimenters to make the world a better place? One has to wonder - and this is a question Mr. Markoff doesn't really address - whether the personal computer achieved that goal. Or has it only allowed all of us, heroes and villains alike, to be more productive as the world stays exactly the same?

Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon.

ECOPSYCHOLOGY

2005-05-17T00:52:00.000-07:00

ECOPSYCHOLOGY: EIGHT PRINCIPLES
Theodore Roszak

In The Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology, Theodore Roszak sought to formulate some general principles that might guide both environmentalists and therapists in their common project of defining a sane relationship to the world around us. The essay that follows has been adapted from the version that appears in the book.

As we approach the end of the twentieth century, there are scientists who believe we may be within sight of a Grand Unified Theory that will embrace all things, all forces, all time and matter. But will such a theory of everything, if we find it, do justice to the very act of seeking for that theory in the first place? Will it explain how a supposedly once dead universe gave rise to this single, burning point of conscious curiosity called the human mind? Certainly no scientific theory we inherit from the past has yet found a place for scientists themselves, let alone for artists, visionaries, clowns, myth-makers -- for all those who have built this second nature we call "culture" on at least one planet in the cosmos. Only within the past generation, as we have grasped the historic and evolutionary character of the cosmos, have we begun to give the questing mind a significant status in scientific theory.
What unity ultimately requires is closure. The circle of theory must come round like the alchemical snake to bite its tail. What is must at last be known. Perhaps that is what underlies the eager unfolding of the natural hierarchy from the Big Bang to the human frontier: substance reaching out hungrily toward sentience. That is the simple but mighty insight that the physicist John Wheeler sought to capture in this schematic image of a universe that makes a u-turn in time to study itself through the human eye.

Oddly, this unity of the knower and the known seems to have been better appreciated by pre-scientific humans who worked from myth, image, ritual. If ecopsychology has anything to add to the Socratic-Freudian project of self-knowledge, it is to remind us of what our ancestors took to be common knowledge: there is more to know about the self, or rather more self to know, than our personal history reveals. Making a personality, the task that Jung called "individuation," may be the adventure of a lifetime. But every person's lifetime is anchored within a greater, universal lifetime. Each of us shares the whole of life's time on Earth. Salt remnants of ancient oceans flow through our veins, ashes of expired stars rekindle in our genetic chemistry. The oldest of the atoms, hydrogen whose primacy among the elements should have gained it a more poetically resonant name is a cosmic theme; mysteriously elaborated billions-fold, it has created from Nothing the Everything that includes us.
When we look out into the night sky, the stars we see in the chill, receding distance may seem crushingly vast in size and number. How many times have despairing philosophers and common cynics reminded us of how small we are in comparison to the great void of space? It is the great clich‚ of modern times that we are "lost in the stars," a minuscule planet wheeling around a minor star at the outer edge of a galaxy that is only one among billions. But in truth there is no principle in science that can logically judge value by size. Neither big nor small any longer have any limit or meaning in the universe. Wonders and amazements come in all sizes. Is the universe "too big" to provide human meaning? Not at all. It is, in fact, exactly the right size. Modern cosmology teaches us that the swelling emptiness that contains us is, precisely by virtue of its magnitude, the physical matrix that makes living intelligence possible. Only a universe of this size and this temperature and this age could have produced life anywhere. Those who once believed we were cradled in the hands of God were not so very wrong after all -- at least metaphorically speaking.

All this, the new place of life in the cosmos, belongs to the principles of ecopsychology, but not in any doctrinaire or purely clinical way. Psychotherapy is best played by ear. It is after all a matter of listening to the whole person, all that is submerged, unborn, in hiding: the infant, the shadow, the savage, the outcast. The list of principles we offer here is merely a guide, suggesting how deep that listening must go to hear the Self that speaks through the self.
1. The core of the mind is the ecological unconscious. For ecopsychology, repression of the ecological unconscious is the deepest root of collusive madness in industrial society. Open access to the ecological unconscious is the path to sanity.
2. The contents of the ecological unconscious represent, in some degree, at some level of mentality, the living record of cosmic evolution, tracing back to distant initial conditions in the history of time. Contemporary studies in the ordered complexity of nature tell us that life and mind emerge from this evolutionary tale as culminating natural systems within the unfolding sequence of physical, biological, mental, and cultural systems we know as "the universe." Ecopsychology draws upon these findings of the new cosmology, striving to make them real to experience.
3. Just as it has been the goal of previous therapies to recover the repressed contents of the unconscious, so the goal of ecopsychology is to awaken the inherent sense of environmental reciprocity that lies within the ecological unconscious. Other therapies seek to heal the alienation between person and person, person and family, person and society. Ecopsychology seeks to heal the more fundamental alienation between the recently created urban psyche and the age-old natural environment.
4. For ecopsychology as for other therapies, the crucial stage of development is the life of the child. The ecological unconscious is regenerated, as if it were a gift, in the newborn's enchanted sense of the world. Ecopsychology seeks to recover the child's innately animistic quality of experience in functionally "sane" adults. To do this, it turns to many sources, among them traditional healing techniques of primary people, nature mysticism as expressed in religion and art, the experience of wilderness, the insights of Deep Ecology. Thus, for example, Wordsworth's hymns to the child's love of nature are basic texts for developmental ecopsychology, a first step toward creating the ecological ego.
5. The ecological ego matures toward a sense of ethical responsibility to the planet that is as vividly experienced as our ethical responsibility to other people. It seeks to weave that responsibility into the fabric of social relations and political decisions.
6. Among the therapeutic projects most important to ecopsychology is the re-evaluation of certain compulsively "masculine" character traits that permeate our structures of political power and which drive us to dominate nature as if it were an alien and rightless realm. In this regard, ecopsychology draws significantly on the insights of ecofeminism with a view to demystifying the sexual stereotypes.
7. Whatever contributes to small scale social forms and personal empowerment nourishes the ecological ego. Whatever strives for large-scale domination and the suppression of personhood undermines the ecological ego. Ecopsychology therefore deeply questions the essential sanity of our gargantuan urban-industrial culture, whether capitalistic or collectivistic in its organization. But it does so without necessarily rejecting the technological genius of our species or some life-enhancing measure of the industrial power we have assembled. Ecopsychology is postindustrial not anti-industrial in its social orientation.
8. Ecopsychology holds that there is a synergistic interplay between planetary and personal well-being. The term "synergy" is chosen deliberately for its traditional theological connotation, which once taught that the human and divine are cooperatively linked in the quest for salvation. The contemporary ecological translation of the term might be: the needs of the planet are the needs of the person, the rights of the person are the rights of the planet.

Theodore Roszak is Professor of History and Director of the Ecopsychology Institute at California State University, Hayward. His most recent books are The Voice of the Earth (Touchstone Books), and The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein (Random House and Bantam Books), an ecofeminist parable based on the famous Mary Shelley story. He is the senior editor of Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind (Sierra Club Books).

http://ecopsychology.athabascau.ca/Final/intro.htm

* * *

Quantum Dots to Inject Into Living Cells

2005-04-01T04:33:00.000-08:00

The Story

Self As Metaprogrammer

2005-03-24T20:33:00.000-08:00

" It is difficult to discuss the profound metaphysical experiences encountered within shamanic, psychedelic, and magickal practice within the context of neurochemistry without sounding mechanistic. While we can attempt to show some of the physiological processes that underlie such experiences, we can never rely solely on chemistry to explain the depth of these visions and the bizarre synchronicities and seeming violations of physical law that so often attend mystical states of consciousness. Suffice it to say that here appears to be much more going on than we suppose and the boundaries between what we imagine to be “reality”, the mind we use to interact with it, and the individual self that guides us through it all, is likely very thin and tenuous, if real at all. At best, reality is an ever-shifting map of language, emotion, associations, and chemistry, unique to every sensory apparatus in the universe. We each look at creation through our own facet of a single infinitely vast diamond, and the world may simply be the result of this infinitude of observation, nonexistent without consciousness. The only thing that is really real to us right now is what’s going on in our own heads...."

MAYBE QUARTERLY - Vol 2 / Issue 1 - Self As Metaprogrammer

Jurassic Park Here We Come!

2005-03-24T18:14:00.000-08:00

The remains of a T. Rex with intact blood vessels and blood cells have been recovered:

The field team used standard procedure as they excavated the bones, wrapping them in plaster jackets before transporting them..

This particular dinosaur fossil was too big to lift and they reluctantly cracked a thighbone.

Usually paleontologists put preservatives on fossils right away, but Schweitzer has been trying to find soft tissue in dinosaur fossils, so this one was left alone.

FULL MONTY

Messing with the mind

2005-03-14T00:56:00.000-08:00

Review of:
The 21st Century Brain: Explaining, Mending and Manipulating the Mind
by Steven Rose

"The modern emphasis on being the best you can be in a competitive marketplace is a great normalising force that will drive the uptake of any proffered brain fix. A drug like Ritalin is the perfect example. Some eight million US kids pop such pills so they fit better into the classroom. Rather than society adjusting to the individual, the individual is tailoring him or herself to society. So, asks Rose, what happens when some of the expected steroids for the mind come along - the drugs being developed to treat memory loss in Alzheimer's or boost blood flow in tired brains? Surely, just as in sport, they will become impossible for university students and City traders to resist even if the known side-effects are severe. As a vision of dystopia, this may not be exactly Orwellian. But the "user pays" model is unsettling none the less..."

FULL MONTY

The Fembots Are Here

2005-03-11T21:26:00.000-08:00

"When asked if she is a robot, she says, "Y.e.s, I. a.m. a. r.o.b.o.t" in a disconnected voice and moves about clumsily. A moment later, she says "Just kidding" and starts a natural flow of movements."

FULL MONTY

Premodern America

2005-03-10T01:26:00.000-08:00

"...These days, as I gleefully strip away more and more advertising from my life—by means of HBO, a digital video recorder, and satellite radio—state-of-the-art early-21st-century media thus begins to look still more mid-nineteenth.

The configuration and mind-set of the mainstream media in the last half of the last century aren’t the only givens in our recent past that now appear somewhat historically anomalous. Everywhere I look, the nineteenth century is creeping back. The swinging mix-and-match cultural hodgepodge of the past 25 years, marked by the blurring and erasure of easy distinctions between high culture and pop, is called postmodern, but in fact it’s a very premodern circumstance, more 1850 (when a single night at the theater might encompass Shakespeare and vaudeville) than 1950..."

FULL MONTY

Miyazaki and Oshii: Anime's clashing titans

2005-03-05T06:20:00.000-08:00

"Oshii is the godfather of a futuristic anime style called cyberpunk, and the synapses of anime fans are still quivering from his 'Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence,' released last year to great fanfare in Japan and a more cautious critical endorsement in the United States.

The film resumes the plot of his 1995 cult hit 'Ghost in the Shell,' praised by the Wachowski brothers as their inspiration for 'The Matrix.' The sequel trails Batou, a Descartes-spouting lug of an anti-terrorist cop as he wends through the morally weary world of 2032. He is trying to find out why gynoids, robots custom-built in female form for sexual company, have gone on a murderous rampage. But Batou is a human spirit living in a mechanized body. And he lives in a time when the bad guys can hack into your brain and download phony ideas and memories just to mess with you."

MORE

View From the Blogsphere

2005-03-04T06:22:00.000-08:00

Andy Warhol might have seen it all coming when he uttered the phrase, "Someday, everybody will be famous for 15 minutes." What we now know, fame or not, our ability to express ourselves to the outside world is a 24/7 possibility. We have the blog.

The rapid rise of the Blogosphere has caught virtually everyone by surprise. Bloggers have already proven the keyboard is mightier than not only the sword, but also an entire office full of keyboards. Just ask Dan Rather and CBS.

What we are witnessing is no less than an entire revolution in the world of free expression, not seen since 1436 when Gutenberg invented the printing press. For the first time in history, one person could transmit a single idea to the masses. Now the masses can transmit their ideas to the masses. With over 4 million of your neighbors and friends now blogging, the revolution has begun. So what is the future of blogs? Will they become more than mere online journals with bad spelling and mangled grammar?

For a clue, think television. The first direction a new form of media usually delivers is a repackaging of all that came before it. The first round of television programming was essentially taken from radio: quiz shows, serial dramas, and news. The Internet is in a similar stage of development, repackaging television programming and print news, streaming numerous radio stations and movie trailers, and now blogging.

As the competition in the marketplace of ideas becomes more intense, blogs must evolve. They must become sexier, using media-rich content such as video, photos, and audio. Some blogs will resemble magazines; others, 24-hour cable news . Serious bloggers will want all the tools the networks have, such as satellite feeds, and they will become a filter of news for the rest of us who do not have the time to sift through mountains of information. Text-only sites will be viewed as dinosaurs as the MTV generation matures into middle age. And as media and audiences become more sophisticated, quality of content must keep pace.

Everyone will have the ability to broadcast. What will drive traffic and generate an audience will not only be the publishers' commitment to ideas, but also a seamless delivery of content in real time. The recent tsunami coverage shows how the democracy of information works. Within hours, we were all connected to the most hard-hit areas. A digital camera and a laptop with a broadband connection are all that is required for entry into this new dynamic and decentralized media landscape.

This decentralization of information will also greatly change the revenue models of media. Today, audience size translates directly into dollars. Web sites with the most users charge the highest rates. In the coming world of Sexy Blog, political and societal change will also be important benchmarks. The number of eyeballs will be far less important than the behavior attached to those eyeballs.

For example the Parents Television Council, a family values group, generates indecency complaints through its web site - 99.8% of all indecency complaints about content on the Internet in 2003, according to the FCC. The number of visitors to this site is irrelevant. They have already shown the power to change public policy. As outgoing FCC commissioner Michael Powell said, "Hey, it doesn't matter where these complaints came from. These are still Americans being outraged."

On the left, sites such as MoveOn.org have showed a tremendous ability to organize their users in a way that was unthinkable just a few years ago. They not only delivered 500 people in the middle of a cornfield during the 2004 Iowa Caucus, they also influenced major corporations as evidenced during their organized boycott of Sinclair Broadcasting. Pepsi is just one sponsor that pulled ads due to broadcasts that seemed biased.

The revolution will also fuel the need for tools that simplify the creation of content. Take iPod, for example. Phase two of the revolution has begun with "pod-casting." A pod-cast is like an audio magazine. Users receive regular audio programs delivered via the Internet to listen to at their leisure. Music novices can now "program" playlists and be their own disc jockeys.

The Internet is a vehicle that gives personal taste global distribution. Now that everyone can be a media guru, how will users sift through the near infinite stream of ideas and content? If a million trees fall in the forest, will there be enough ears for their crash to be heard? The anticipated answer is that virtual communities will hear.

A virtual community is no different from a real one. Both are made up of self selecting members who have similar needs and interests. Internet communities have rules and guidelines that participants must follow, and volunteer watchdogs ensure that bloggers follow these rules. Offenders are banished from the collective. And perhaps most importantly, consensus will be achieved as a byproduct of this community sharing resources.

To create the sexiness needed for this model to succeed, two opposite entities will need to merge: technologists and content creators. So far, attempts at this new synergy have been shotgun weddings with less than stellar results. Big technology companies such as Microsoft have bought smaller content companies, such as Mondo Music, seeking to assimilate these new employees and their ideas into their corporate hive. It hasn't worked. Microsoft understands very well how ones and zeros can create useful software. What it doesn't do well is create great platforms for creativity and individuality. The AOL/Time Warner merger is another example of how not to create the next killer application. The cultural clash between software engineers and creatives is just too vast to allow a win-win.

The desired synergy must be left to smaller, more nimble companies who understand how to generate and maintain an audience. The emergence of sexy blogs is, by definition, a creative process. Sophisticated bloggers will be far more interested in sharing ideas than creating video compression software. These bloggers will naturally align themselves with companies that can provide simple and easy-to-use tools. A great violinist's job is not to create and manufacture a Stradivarius. It is to use the gift of music to create emotion in others.

That opportunity awaits you right around the cyber corner.

http://WWW.SHAKEITUPBABY.COM/archives/2005/02/view_from_the_b_1.html

AUDIO Interview with Joi Ito

2005-02-28T05:19:00.000-08:00

Visitor from the Next Planet: Joi Ito MP3

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/ml/output.pl/35503/download/ito.mp3

Joi Ito could make you feel better about the digitized global time, space, psychology and politics that we're all, willy nilly, entering. He has been living out there all his 37 years, bobbing and weaving between Japan, the States and Canada through his school years (college never completed). He's been dancing with Internet technology since his childhood, politicking, investing, thinking hard about democracy and business, writing, making friends and taking pictures all the way. And famously blogging. It's been a "continuous identity crisis," he says, a link with Colin Powell, whom he admires. Joi Ito was a disk jockey in Chicago before he rerooted himself in Tokyo. His family heritage, through a dozen generations, is study and teaching. One of his great-grandfathers tutored the Emperor of Japan in geography. "I am trying to understand at a meta-level what we, the globe, are about," he said in our conversation this morning. "Most Japanese think I am very Japanese... Most Americans feel that I understand how they feel." He slings VC lingo and the table talk of too many Davos economic summits. But he gets invited back to those places, I conclude, for the clarity of his big vision of adhesive networks that could heal the species. Our introductory gab over coffee in his hotel room today is here in two 15-minute pieces: Part One is Joi Ito's account of this blogging tipping-point, a technological and social convergence at a moment when institutional media have become part of the world's problem. Part Two is his close observation of digital communities in real life, starting with his own round-the-clock, round-the-world chat space, which has regulars, guests, events and even a chaplain, "like MASH," he said. The Internet has become "a working anarchy" with redemptive possibilities if we "allow the interesting memes inside this diversity to emerge."

Ethics, Technology, and Posthuman Communities

2005-02-28T05:01:00.000-08:00

Essays in Philosophy
The Philosophy of Technology
via political theory daily

Ethics, Technology, and Posthuman Communities
Steven Benko
Essays in Philosophy

What is needed if there is to be a critical theory of technology is a posthumanism that articulates the best of humanism-reason, individuality, and respect for others-without requiring belief in a shared human nature that marginalizes and alienates others. While one would think speciesism or anthropocentrism would at least bring people of different genders, races, ages, religions, and sexual orientations together, the idea of a shared human nature-no matter how broadly conceived-has the effect of being more exclusive than inclusive. Humanism, though it claims to speak for all humans, imposes limits on what characteristics and traits qualify as human.7 What is needed is a critical theory of technology that does not repeat the essentialisms of humanism and does not lead to the anarchy, solipsism and amorality that some technological posthumanisms invite. This proposal would be a reconstructive posthumanism that would be arbitrated by the possibility of solidarity among individuals who assume responsibility for the uniqueness of the other, a uniqueness announced by the practical and symbolic uses of technology that point towards new understandings of what it means to be human, the good for humans, and what defines a moral community. This reconstructive posthumanism is found in merging Levinas's ethics of responsibility for the other with the posthuman view that while subjectivity and technology are culturally determined, together they resist normalizing and essentializing views of both. Understanding that on an individual level, the practical and symbolic uses of technology make the individual other and other than human, Levinas's definition of solidarity as a quest for justice emerging from responsibility for the uniqueness of the other allows for a critical theory of technology that considers the ethicality of the technology, the individual who uses that technology, and their vision of what it means to be human and live among others. Two examples, one technophobic, the other technophilic,8 demonstrate the ways that a humanist understanding of what it means to be human either fails to articulate a sophisticated response to technology or uses ethical language to reinforce its own normativity and in doing so can be used to marginalize and exclude people.... (more)

2005-02-22T07:05:00.000-08:00

Can This Black Box See Into the Future?

DEEP in the basement of a dusty university library in Edinburgh lies a small black box, roughly the size of two cigarette packets side by side, that churns out random numbers in an endless stream.

At first glance it is an unremarkable piece of equipment. Encased in metal, it contains at its heart a microchip no more complex than the ones found in modern pocket calculators.

But, according to a growing band of top scientists, this box has quite extraordinary powers. It is, they claim, the 'eye' of a machine that appears capable of peering into the future and predicting major world events.

The machine apparently sensed the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre four hours before they happened - but in the fevered mood of conspiracy theories of the time, the claims were swiftly knocked back by sceptics. But last December, it also appeared to forewarn of the Asian tsunami just before the deep sea earthquake that precipitated the epic tragedy.

Now, even the doubters are acknowledging that here is a small box with apparently inexplicable powers.

THE FULL MONTY

Bruce Sterling - What's a science fiction writer doing hanging out with designers anyway?

2005-02-19T00:31:00.000-08:00

"...Perhaps you don’t believe that the quest for the transcendental will cause you to fall into the pit of human squalor, going down with all hands like a struggling mastodon. But it is the higher truth. Consider Wernher von Braun, the European interplanetary rocket visionary. He aimed at the stars and hit London. What are those big, shiny space rockets for? Ideally, for escaping the grip of gravity and touching the face of the cosmos. But they’re also for annihilating children as they sleep in their beds.The harder you aim for that first goal, the more likely it is that you’ll hit the second. You want something closer to home? How about cyberspace. The early rhetoric was all about the Internet’s weightless, idealist, transcendent, light-speed, anonymous, virtualizing qualities. But look at the Internet 15 years later: It’s a filthy, carnal place. Almost every form of rip-off, fraud and human chicanery imaginable plays some kind of role on the Internet. As a medium, the Internet is riddled with holes, infested with viruses and bugs. It’s a seething, septic mess. Don’t be disillusioned. We’re getting a valuable message here. We need to create the kind of society that understands this on a bone-deep level...."

Full Monty

Hedonic Tantra, by Erik Davis

2005-02-17T04:00:00.000-08:00

"Goa has become the site, both mythical and historical, for a sort of tantric hand-off between an earlier generation of Western trance dancers and today's psychedelic ravers. Whether or not Goa is the core source of rave spirituality, the freak colony has grown into a spiritual origin, a source."

Hedonic Tantra, by Erik Davis

Waking Dream, by Erik Davis

2005-02-17T03:21:00.000-08:00

An interview with filmmaker Richard Linklater about the ultimate head flick Waking Life. " I think what these things are getting at is to point out how your brain really flows, or how thoughts follow thoughts, or how the narrative of your own thinking unfolds, or the narrative of your own life. This process is very digressive and it has no set path, and it does fold in on itself...I was trying to get closer to my feelings of how the brain worked, and how this shit kind of unfolds."

Waking Dream, by Erik Davis

TECHNOREALISM

2005-02-16T22:40:00.000-08:00

In this heady age of rapid technological change, we all struggle to maintain our bearings. The developments that unfold each day in communications and computing can be thrilling and disorienting. One understandable reaction is to wonder: Are these changes good or bad? Should we welcome or fear them?

The answer is both. Technology is making life more convenient and enjoyable, and many of us healthier, wealthier, and wiser. But it is also affecting work, family, and the economy in unpredictable ways, introducing new forms of tension and distraction, and posing new threats to the cohesion of our physical communities.
Despite the complicated and often contradictory implications of technology, the conventional wisdom is woefully simplistic. Pundits, politicians, and self-appointed visionaries do us a disservice when they try to reduce these complexities to breathless tales of either high-tech doom or cyber-elation. Such polarized thinking leads to dashed hopes and unnecessary anxiety, and prevents us from understanding our own culture.
Over the past few years, even as the debate over technology has been dominated by the louder voices at the extremes, a new, more balanced consensus has quietly taken shape. This document seeks to articulate some of the shared beliefs behind that consensus, which we have come to call technorealism.
Technorealism demands that we think critically about the role that tools and interfaces play in human evolution and everyday life. Integral to this perspective is our understanding that the current tide of technological transformation, while important and powerful, is actually a continuation of waves of change that have taken place throughout history. Looking, for example, at the history of the automobile, television, or the telephone -- not just the devices but the institutions they became -- we see profound benefits as well as substantial costs. Similarly, we anticipate mixed blessings from today's emerging technologies, and expect to forever be on guard for unexpected consequences -- which must be addressed by thoughtful design and appropriate use.
As technorealists, we seek to expand the fertile middle ground between techno-utopianism and neo-Luddism. We are technology "critics" in the same way, and for the same reasons, that others are food critics, art critics, or literary critics. We can be passionately optimistic about some technologies, skeptical and disdainful of others. Still, our goal is neither to champion nor dismiss technology, but rather to understand it and apply it in a manner more consistent with basic human values.

Below are some evolving basic principles that help explain technorealism.

PRINCIPLES OF TECHNOREALISM

1. Technologies are not neutral.
A great misconception of our time is the idea that technologies are completely free of bias -- that because they are inanimate artifacts, they don't promote certain kinds of behaviors over others. In truth, technologies come loaded with both intended and unintended social, political, and economic leanings. Every tool provides its users with a particular manner of seeing the world and specific ways of interacting with others. It is important for each of us to consider the biases of various technologies and to seek out those that reflect our values and aspirations.

2. The Internet is revolutionary, but not Utopian.
The Net is an extraordinary communications tool that provides a range of new opportunities for people, communities, businesses, and government. Yet as cyberspace becomes more populated, it increasingly resembles society at large, in all its complexity. For every empowering or enlightening aspect of the wired life, there will also be dimensions that are malicious, perverse, or rather ordinary.

3. Government has an important role to play on the electronic frontier.
Contrary to some claims, cyberspace is not formally a place or jurisdiction separate from Earth. While governments should respect the rules and customs that have arisen in cyberspace, and should not stifle this new world with inefficient regulation or censorship, it is foolish to say that the public has no sovereignty over what an errant citizen or fraudulent corporation does online. As the representative of the people and the guardian of democratic values, the state has the right and responsibility to help integrate cyberspace and conventional society.
Technology standards and privacy issues, for example, are too important to be entrusted to the marketplace alone. Competing software firms have little interest in preserving the open standards that are essential to a fully functioning interactive network. Markets encourage innovation, but they do not necessarily insure the public interest.

4. Information is not knowledge.
All around us, information is moving faster and becoming cheaper to acquire, and the benefits are manifest. That said, the proliferation of data is also a serious challenge, requiring new measures of human discipline and skepticism. We must not confuse the thrill of acquiring or distributing information quickly with the more daunting task of converting it into knowledge and wisdom. Regardless of how advanced our computers become, we should never use them as a substitute for our own basic cognitive skills of awareness, perception, reasoning, and judgment.

5. Wiring the schools will not save them.
The problems with America's public schools -- disparate funding, social promotion, bloated class size, crumbling infrastructure, lack of standards -- have almost nothing to do with technology. Consequently, no amount of technology will lead to the educational revolution prophesied by President Clinton and others. The art of teaching cannot be replicated by computers, the Net, or by "distance learning." These tools can, of course, augment an already high-quality educational experience. But to rely on them as any sort of panacea would be a costly mistake.

6. Information wants to be protected.
It's true that cyberspace and other recent developments are challenging our copyright laws and frameworks for protecting intellectual property. The answer, though, is not to scrap existing statutes and principles. Instead, we must update old laws and interpretations so that information receives roughly the same protection it did in the context of old media. The goal is the same: to give authors sufficient control over their work so that they have an incentive to create, while maintaining the right of the public to make fair use of that information. In neither context does information want "to be free." Rather, it needs to be protected.

7. The public owns the airwaves; the public should benefit from their use.
The recent digital spectrum giveaway to broadcasters underscores the corrupt and inefficient misuse of public resources in the arena of technology. The citizenry should benefit and profit from the use of public frequencies, and should retain a portion of the spectrum for educational, cultural, and public access uses. We should demand more for private use of public property.

8. Understanding technology should be an essential component of global citizenship.
In a world driven by the flow of information, the interfaces -- and the underlying code -- that make information visible are becoming enormously powerful social forces. Understanding their strengths and limitations, and even participating in the creation of better tools, should be an important part of being an involved citizen. These tools affect our lives as much as laws do, and we should subject them to a similar democratic scrutiny.

Since March 12, 1998, over 2500 people have signed their names to these principles. Here's the current list of names, and here's how you can add your own.
Contact the drafters of the document.

http://www.technorealism.org
TECHNOREALISM

Chapel of Sacred Mirrors

2005-02-16T19:50:00.000-08:00

.

Alex Grey's Sacred Mirrors gallery is on view in impressive Flash and non-Flash form. Whatever you may think of his calling the exhibition a "chapel", the imagery is undeniably psychedelic in the best sense...

Chapel of Sacred Mirrors

TechGnosis Weblog

Has Modern Science Bankrupted Our Souls?

SXSW 2011: The internet is over

Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon talks about Fractals, Spirituality, and London in the 60s

German Grid Aching Under Too Much Solar Power

Is It Possible to Be Elitist in a Good Way? The Organizers of TED Would Like You to Think So

By Daniela Perdomo, AlterNethttp://www.alternet.org/story/146344/

© 2010 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/146344/

The Meaning of Life (Post-Python)

Saltwater Into Fire

Unwired from Wired

Recently Unearthed E-Mail Reveals What Life Was Like In 1995

Google's April Fool Ad

The breast enlarging ringtone

DNA Is a Song

Grandma's Little Helper

Your Printer Is Squealing On You

Avatars, Virtual Worlds

Hakim Bey

Music, memes, etc.

Surrendering to the Irrational?

Leech-Computer Interface Breakthrough...

An Overview of Gnosis

Anthropocybersynchronicity

Feel the Force, Luke...

MEMORY TRADE: A Prehistory of Cyberculture

Reply to a skeptic

zorn stuff

Meaning Of Life

Meaning Of Life

Paleotechnology

Ooops, you died...play again?

Data At Your Fingertips

Download files via flesh

Mind May Affect Machines

Jacking In

(Thanks to Nik for the heads-up.)

BrainGate' Brain-Machine-Interface takes shape

Aliens have taken the place of angels

California Dreaming

California Dreaming: A True Story of Computers, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll

ECOPSYCHOLOGY

Quantum Dots to Inject Into Living Cells

Self As Metaprogrammer

Jurassic Park Here We Come!

Messing with the mind

The Fembots Are Here

Premodern America

Miyazaki and Oshii: Anime's clashing titans

View From the Blogsphere

AUDIO Interview with Joi Ito

Ethics, Technology, and Posthuman Communities

Can This Black Box See Into the Future?

Bruce Sterling - What's a science fiction writer doing hanging out with designers anyway?

Hedonic Tantra, by Erik Davis

Waking Dream, by Erik Davis

TECHNOREALISM

Chapel of Sacred Mirrors

By Daniela Perdomo, AlterNet
http://www.alternet.org/story/146344/

© 2010 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/146344/