Stress and Exertion

Chart of Stress vs. Exertion

Google Street View

from fukung.net

This image is from Chicago. The direct address image has now been removed from Google street view, however, you can still view the scene from other angles. I saw this while looking through a random image archive, and thought it was perfect timing as Ed and I were just discussing Google’s new face-blurring policy change with Dan.

Other interesting shots:
prostitutes
blurred face algorithm at work

Another update post

Sometimes it seems as if I’m in the middle of a soap opera.  Recently, I’ve felt things developing into one of those times.  I’m sure that if I were a gifted writer, I could spin some of this into some entertaining Sedaris-style work.  Unfortunately, I have just enough skill to break it down into manageable chunks.

The Onion: Black Guy Asks Nation For Change

Black Guy Asks Nation For Change CHICAGO—According to witnesses, a loud black man approached a crowd of some 4,000 strangers in downtown Chicago Tuesday and made repeated demands for change. “The time for change is now,” said the black guy, yelling at everyone within earshot for 20 straight minutes, practically begging America for change. “The need for change is stronger and more urgent than ever before. And only you—the people standing here today, and indeed all the people of this great nation—only you can deliver this change.”

When did the Onion get its groove back? I remember picking it up, wanting to laugh at anything even remotely funny. Now, I don’t have to try as hard. It’s like the dark years of SNL. My theory is that half of the Onion staff quit to move onto failing movie careers and/or died. Ed thinks they just got lazy because of Bush.

Manager-man may anagram my name

I’ve had a short-list of anagrammed noms-de-plume for quite a while now (Zelda Aranchi; Zacharia Lend, Hazel Cardina, etc.) but I couldn’t resist seeing what the computer would come up with, so I ran Daniel Haracz through the old mixmaster and came up with the following favorites . . .

Arachnid Zeal

Cardinal Haze

A Czar Inhaled

I handle a Czar.

I ran, haze-clad.

And, finally,

Hi, Anal-Czar Ed!

A personal extracurricular syllabus

This syllabus is meant to express a convergence of the networks of personal interest I maintain. In a broad sense the syllabus represents what I think I need to know in order to accomplish what it is I want to accomplish – but more on that later. I have all of the books that I reference except for Polya’s Solve It! and Ray Jackendoff’s Languages of the Mind: Essays on Mental Representation which are on my list of “someday books.” The books are in order as well as I can figure it now, though I am sure that all of this will change shape and shift as I go.

Math
1.
A. Technical Calculus with Analytic Geometry
B. Understanding Infinity
C. A Vector Space Approach to Geometry
D. Introduction to Partial Differential Equations with Applications
E. Differential Geometry
F. Complex Analysis with Applications

2a.
A. Differential Games
B. Evolutionary Games an Equilibrium Selection
C. Combinatorial Algorithms
D. Information Theory

2b.
A. Matrices and Linear Algebra
B. Modern Algebra

Philosophy

1. 1000 Plateaus
2. Difference and Repetition

Systems/Heuristics

1. Code Complete
2. The Mathematical Approach to Physiological Problems
3. An Experience with Populations and Communities
4. Solve It!
5. Spiral Dynamics

Brain Stuff

1. Accelerated Learning for the 21st Centrury
2. Mind Performance Hacks
3. Flow
4. Lifehacker
5. Speed Math
6. Photoreading

NLP/Linguistics/Semiotics

1. Patterns 2
2. NLP vol 1
3. Changing Belief Systems with NLP
4. Modeling with NLP
5. The Spirit of NLP
6. Semantic Structures
7. Languages of the Mind: Essays on Mental Representation

Whew- well that should be easy. Also, then there are “assignments” which I ought to be adhering to; writing based on what it is that I am studying at the moment, for instance, as well as writing for writing’s sake, that is to say organizing and collecting the various ideas that i get from time to time that I think are work remembering. Not to mention the school work I get from actual school and maintaining a healthy marriage/social life.

And then there are the long-term projects which I would like to complete: My as-yet unnamed prime number inquiry, analyzing a city block both ecologically and semiotically, priming essays and works of fiction to communicate deliberately with both the conscious and unconscious mind.

What I suppose I should start with is a project that integrates what it is that I am currently learning at any given moment and can be easily scaled to match the resources I am able to commit at any given moment. And I am totally willing to take suggestions as that goes. Currently it seems to me that the most easy project is to try an post an entry here as often as possible.

Rhizomes in Action

Wal-Mart has expressed interest in this technology.

This is also interesting. Valuable tool or one more thing to learn?

Things left unsaid

I have a habit of starting a blog and not posting. After I reduce all things to a singularity in my head, everything is the same as everything else. One thing is as important as another. Posting is the same as not posting. I have to stop zooming out so far. This is a part of my scope scope being broken.

Ed asked me to explain (in post form) a few blog-related things:

DeadlineWeaving
This is an anagram of Dave, Edwin, and Angeli. I posted a link to the anagram site I used. I was playing around and this arbitrary teapot anagram seemed appropriate.

Blog vs. Message Board
A blog has always seemed so personal to me. You can host your own opinion page, diary, running news commentary, etc. I don’t know if this is a common perception or if that is changing. We’re all use to message boards. We’ve spent so many years on them. There’s no need to touch on its structure.

I think that the structure of this WordPress blog (along with its modularity and plasticity) offers us a different way to think of things and link to things. This is all part of a rhizomatic structure as opposed to being forced falsely into a arborescent model. I think this will suit our habits of drawing parallels and direct connections between projects. This blog offers categories which relate to the poetry board, politics board, etc. at Society. Instead of a physical location, it’s purely virtual for us. In fact, a post can be in more than one category. We can also set up tags for a post on the fly. Both categories and tags are set up in “clouds” in the side pane. We’ll see the cartogram-style words solidify and become a little more helpful as time goes on. There is a calendar that will allow you to look at all posts from a certain day. There is a search bar. You can go through by month. There are many possibilities. They will be available to each of us without doing all of the research to find the one perfect way.

On a side note,
I have actually been waiting for an OS to be built entirely on this principle. I am staring to think that I’ve been looking in the wrong direction, however. You don’t need an OS for that (at least not now, and not in a world still run by Microsoft). This has been happening with Google. If you haven’t looked at their pet projects and their projects that are still in the mill, it’s worth a look. Consider that you can now own a virtual computer. Store your files in your near-bottomless Gmail account, post and edit images with Picasa Web, set up your own web page, update your blog, consult your lists of favorites, and post and edit documents with Google Docs, just for a start. It only takes one log-in to get to everything you need. Carry a thumb drive full of portable apps with you in the increasingly rare case that you access an unconnected computer. The world is changing in ways that fascinate me as much as it changes in the ways that depress me. I don’t spend enough time talking/posting about things like this.

Working Definition of “Body Without Organs”

This is a link to a page with a working definition for BwO which I found to be helpful in understanding the concept. It seems like D&G are interested in a sort of “flow permanence” or “process logic” which jives with NLP, but they express it through particularly idiosyncratic language. There are, of course, other facets to the concept, and the author of the page goes out of their way to make a point that this definition applies more to Anti-Oedipus than any of the other areas that the concept appears, and I found it to be useful nevertheless.

Additionally this is a concept linked to the BwO (in my mind) which I came across while looking into the BwO. It feeds into an idea I have been developing internally regarding information throughput in social systems.

Filters

I found this quote in “David’s Sling” – a pretty good book altogether, in a similar vein with “Dune” in my mind. Anyhow, this quote has always been something I appreciated:In the Information Age, the first step to sanity is FILTERING.
Filter the information; extract the knowledge.
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 against the media.
-Zetetic Commentaries

As a different kind of set of filters, there are these 9 Well-Formedness Conditions for goals:

1: Positive – What do you want? (vs. what do you not want) Are your reasons for pursuing the goal clear?
2: Evidence – How will you know you’ve succeeded?
3: Specifics – How, Where, When and With Whom?
4: Resources – What resources do you have? (objects, people, role models, personal qualities, time, money) Are they adequate?
5: Control – Can you start and maintain the outcome?
6: Ecology – What are the wider consequences?
7: Identity – Is the outcome consistent with who you are?
8: Cooperation – How do your outcomes fit together? Are there any mutually exclusive or incompatible outcomes?
9: Action – What do you do next?

Memes, Epimemetics, and Religion

I was talking to a friend of mine recently about memes, and their relative adaptivemness, or rather, how adaptive a meme might be to its host. What strikes me in particular are memeplexes for instructions like consumerism and the like. I take it for granted that memes can communicate on some level, and swap adaptive pieces of meme-code. I wonder what a conversation between two self aware memes would be like for us, as we are ontological prerequisites for their communication, but also party to the epiphenomena of memes. A meme trying to exaplin to other memes about what a meme’s purpose in life might be, and the god of the memes. If I may be so bold for a moment to think that a meme may conceive somehow of humans, (say someday that a human creates a submeme that allows the person to communicate with a submeme, which would doubtless be a difficult and labor intensive one-off) how this meme may try to communicate to other memes about this god of memes it received a message from.
Did Meme-god create us?
Um sort of, we are actually the thoughts and the words of god.
So god spoke and we came to be?
Well, a bit, you see we are sort of by-products of speech…
Why did god create us?
Well – in a broad sense to increase god’s utility, though that is a bit of an exaggeration…
Why do we memes suffer so much, living in constant battle and then perishing?
Well.. god doesn’t allow these things so much as these things are necessary for us memes to have utility for god.

on and on and on.
Not that this scans or maps exactly, but it has some interesting paralells with our own experiences.

Organization and Collapsable Heirarchy

I have found the concept of collapsibility increasingly interesting, especially as it relates to networks of information.

It occurred to me yesterday that while we generalize, distort, and delete to experience the world, these three processes can be generalized to any set of information and any organizing structure. The best way for me to articulate this is to refer to the way we read handwriting. Handwriting that is readable (i.e. has an arbitrarily low level of noise) is read by identifying the idiosyncratic structure of familiar letters as interpreted by whoever created them. This rationalization of the squiggles and lines continues until we impose the nearest analog structure we have available to us (i.e. “t”.) We perform this task for an entire reference structure, generalizing on a number of levels (perhaps a short word). Once we have a reference structure, rather than repeat this process, we make a generalized version of semantic units- “the” something. As we move up in the hierarchy of generalized semantic structures, we begin to develop a limited concordance, we generalize the handwritten letter to whatever idealized letter we have stored in our mind, and then delete the messy scribble we are left to interpret. As we proceed through the process while we go through this process with the written letters (information) we are performing a highly analogous process to the information that the written letters represents, so that interpreting another person’s writing is a very personal process – we impose order and practice philosophical apohenia among other things, meaning we can never read what anyone ever wrote, we can only read what we put there.

Resonance

The purpose of learning to write is to understand how language fails. Language fails to express those things that are contrary to its nature. Excepting those of us who can experience synesthetic reactions, language cannot create a duplicate of the thing it describes. A language cannot do anything without people, frankly, but that is separate from the point. Language cant tell us how any person among us feels, so much as it can tell us how a society feels about an idea, or more precisely, a word. Part of the art of writing is misusing the social construct of language to create a personal experience, and then share it with your audience. The issue with having an audience is that you assume a passive and static group who is unable to or unwilling to interact. Or does it? Perhaps that is an assumption on my part. I dont think beyond the point of consumption, because that is not how we all work: we consume and shit, but never digest. The issue with using a social artifact to create a personal artifact, which becomes a social artifact, is just that: it is a personal social act, and so personal expression fails to express those things that are contrary to its nature, expression artifacts of social importance or relevance. The exception to this is personal social expression artifacts that are resonant, resonant being the quality of the ability to perform an internal transderivational search and come up with a relevant application of the expression artifact that is encountered. Things that have the greatest relevance are retroactively referred to as parables, or metaphors, or in some unfortunate instances, allegories. These things are relevant because we can add them to our ad hoc instruction manual for life. This does make it difficult for non verbal art to have resonance, and even more so for non-narrative art, because non-narrative art is a comment, not an instruction, and so while it is not so pretentious, nothing ventured nothing gained, a well placed comment can never live up to a well received instruction.