blosxom at oblios-cap

For Twitter

Stagnation and lack of comments feeds are what drive the move. Will prolly end up on WP, but only after shopping to salve ego.

For Twitter

Does obsessing about this app to the exclusion of sanity qualify as being "twitter-pated"?

For Twitter

Prolly gonna migrate offa bloxsom soon so my one dedicated reader can get comments feeds via rss. Non-obvious suggestions?

For Twitter

10k in 57m8s, outside, very hilly. woo7!

Public Discourse Experiment

From now (June 7, 11:52 PDT) any and all ostensibly public discourse will first appear hæar. Twitter tweets, cafe-blue messages, seesmic vids, all here first. (And if I can't put it here I don't need to say it/show it/&c).

Coase, Commons and Semantic Punctuation

Paul Watzlawick writes of something he calls "Semantic Punctuation", an example of which can be seen in magic tricks where the trick consists of forcing an audience member to select a specific card while under the impression they are selecting at random. For the magician the trick is punctuated so as to include forcing the card. For the audience the punctuation excludes the selection and the trick begins at some later time.

While watching the video "Best of Cooperation Lectures" I was caught by the term "social dilemma", a circumstance where what is rational for individuals isn't best for the group. My initial interest in cooperation studies actually comes from a quibble I have with standard approaches to the Prisoners' Dilemma in which the choices of confessing or not are labeled with the semantically charged and behaviorally influencing terms "defect" or "cooperate". Now I have a new quibble: The notion that what is rational for an individual is not best for the group can only be defended if the semantic punctuation is such as to define the group as the two hoodlums rather than the larger social body which includes the liquor store owner, the DA, the guards, &c. Widen the net and confessing is both the rational choice for the individual and the rational choice for the group.

I lean heavily on two notions when thinking about the Prisoners' Dilemma. First is the notion of concurrent games. Any one act will have a payoff value in any number of concurrent games (as in the punchline of this old joke: http://xrl.us/bmhr2). Second, we need to distinguish between determinate and indeterminate alternatives. Only the former are choices. In the Prisoners' Dilemma each player has two choices, confess or not. Each of those yields an indeterminate pair of alternatives over which a player has no control or ability to predict, as attempts at prediction yield an infinite series. For me the moral of the Prisoners' Dilemma is that we need to be able to make this distinction between determinate and indeterminate alternatives.

(I also take exception with Axlerod's changing of the scenario to include iteration but still calling his games "Prisoners Dilemmas". While in no way disparaging the value of his work, this is sloppy nomenclature. Introduce iteration and it is not the same game.)

Back to semantic punctuation. Ronald Coase's theories similarly stand or fall based on this, for it is a matter of semantic punctuation whether the market and the government are external to each other. So too with any issue of "Commons". Viewed through one lens TotC is a strong argument for privatization, as it would seem only private interests will be motivated to protect and conserve and even increase resources. And to the extent that "commons" means "not mine" then perhaps such an argument should prevail. But if the semantic punctuation is such that the commons is mine because it is ours and because I am part of us then my interest in protecting and conserving and building the commons is no less than that of a single private interest.

Can It Be So Long Ago?

I've got a little singing gig this morning, and thought to review the bullets from Carl Anderson's workshop. Post #932, which means my 68th post to this blog. It's a little hard to believe it was so long ago. So for those still with us (it's my mom's 75th today!) and those who have moved on (Carl, Dad, Mr. Gerber) a reprise:

I will stay in AUTHENTICITY
I will not compete
I will not listen to myself
I will make space ('cause nothin' never happens!)
I will HONOR the composer
I will HONOR the accompanist
I will HEAR every chord CHANGE
I will know the story
I will listen to the audience
I will be willing to expose all of myself
I will USE my little helpers
I will be willing to let things be different from the plan
I will give BREATH a note value
The universe DELIGHTS to accompany YOU

Twitter Down (still/ again/ whatever)

Each time I can't get in reduces by some small but not infinitesimal amount the chance that I will try again. It will greatly reduce the number of folks reading my micro-updates, but one tires of trying a service that is only getting worse with time instead of better.

Liz Trotter (?) on Fox News: Over the Top? Maybe. Surprising? Not

Hardly.

Facial Expressions Don't Mean, People Do

As I follow my friends/mavens from this tool to that I have eventually found my way to seesmic, only to find I talk out of one side of my mouth. Devastating, and probably not always true, but certainly the self-consciousness triggered by the camera seems to bring out this affectation more than I care for.

Unrelated except in time, on an email list I frequent, a pal opines that Hilary's raising of her eyebrows when she says the word "no" has some intrinsic meaning. Said pal then links to , to which I replied,

There are generally two approaches to body language of which I am aware. One, ala Julian Fast's "Body Language" from the 70s, takes a dictionary approach in which a given posture or facial expression "means" X. The other takes a systems approach, ala Gregory Bateson's "Why do Frenchmen...?" meta-log in the opening of "Steps to an Ecology of Mind". I find the former fatuous beyond bearing. I find Eckman to smell, from a distance, of the former. But I have not dipped into his work; can't get past the smell to taste the meat, as it were.

I'm generally suspicious of attempts to codify emotion. I tend to prefer an action oriented systems type view rather than a reified items view. However, in taking the online test, I found if I mimicked the expression I was better able to select the right emotion.

I discovered this first with an expression of contempt. Well, more accurately, I discovered one of the test pictures had that side-of-the-mouth thing I observed in myself on seesmic. And when I tried on that expression, the word contempt fit better than the other options. This would seem to indicate that the test has some merit. But, stipulating for conversation that there is a match, at least in my socio-cultural milieu, between that facial expression and that "emotion" (said stipulation requiring me to set aside my epistemological disinclination toward the notion of reified "emotion") there remains the question of just what is it I am contemptuous of such that I display that emotion in my seesmic vids.

The answer, of course, is the look of my own face and sound of my own voice and even the meaning or value of my words as I record and perceive the near-instant feedback from such recording.

In all, I tend to think the value of the Eckman "training" is in the meta-skill of increasing one's "sensory acuity," that is, in helping folks respond to more fine-grained phenomena than they otherwise might. (Even that misstates, for I can't imagine that we don't all already respond to all these micro-displays, but training can help make those responses more amenable to conscious control or influence.) I am still disinclined to accept a world view where "X means Y". Words don't mean. People do. So too with facial expressions, no?

I Need A Moderator

Twitter is, of course, alive and well. Even a claim that it has jumped the shark would probably be quite premature.

Still, setting aside the sms features, I wish I could cruft a twitter-like experience using rss any friends' blogs. And why not? What's a following list but a blogroll? What's a follower's list but a kind of one-click-guest-book? I know, I know. There's more. But first and foremost that "more" is people. If I could get my peeps (or those peeps I think of as "my kind of people" to play as I'm describing, well, there'd be no reason to go elsewhere.

Twitter is Dead

Between constant downtimes, defections by high level engineers, and rumours of pay-to-use, I'm thinking I'll just bail now. I'll miss playin' there with my peeps. But, well, this too shall pass.

Thundering thunder thounding dumb

If I'm going to keep using this high-end laptop, I might as well play with some of its bells and whistles, hence the below:

I'm sure there's a word for trying to describe something with the name of the thing, when the noun form is a homonym with an adjective form, as I've done in the clip with "thunder". For today the name of the phenomenon is "fucking dumb", as in, "It's fucking dumb to talk about the thunder of the thunder."

And yet, in other contexts, at other times, I'd have been struck with the recursiveness, been somewhat awed at the way language wraps back on itself, noun to verb to adjective back to noun, I'd have taken this as a sign of something cool about humans and human nature, I'd have enjoyed riffing at length on the fugue repeat fugue thunder thunder boom. I would have had fun with it. But add visuals and I'm one critical bastard.

At least it's not YouTube.

Twitter Influence on Blog Reading Habits

Some lament twitter as the death of blogging. For me it has been a stimulus to change which blogs I read when. Rather than obsessively checking my feed reader I have found myself plenty busy just reading the many posts to which the folks I follow link. Where the blogrolls of my favorite blogs are comparatively static and overwhelmingly long, the flow of post recommendations seems much more organic and manageable. I almost never feel guilty or "behind" because of a twitter post announcement, whereas I often felt like I'd missed something if I didn't get back to my favorite blog pre-twitter.

I'm sure there's a wide variety of experience on this one, but the generalization I'd make is not that twitter is the end of blogging, but that it's a new, and possibly improved, blog referring and announcing system.

Of course that description has its own troubles, best summed up, perhaps, in Chris Lott's recent statement, "The platform pales in comparison to the People...". I don't check out posts because the recommendation comes from twitter, but because it comes from someone I'm following on twitter. I think that's a non-trivial difference.

Aesthetic, Not Ideology

I have had nothing but frustration in my migration from Linux to Mac. And the reason? Aesthetics.

Of course that's counter-intuitive. It's Apple who wins awards for design, Apple the darling of the mediascenti. My Macbook Pro comes with camera and microphone and wonderful software for making them work. It is clearly and vastly superior to the Compaq I gave up, at least in terms of hardware-qua-hardware. Even on a software basis, the default OS X package beats the default *nix package, hands down.

So what's my beef? Am I a frustrated Luddite? Am I simply incapable of appreciating a good thing?

The damned thing FEELS wrong. Sure, the keyboard itself feels good, as good as any I've ever worked on. Except for the faintly metallic feel. But worse still, working in the OS X operating system means working in a Window-Icon-Mouse-Pointer-centric mode, and I am much happier in keyboard mode.

It's a non-trivial investment we make, getting our typing speed up to 70+ wpm. To get there means falling in love with the home keys, with the sweet spots, with making each finger move with minimal effort for maximum speed and accuracy. There's rhythm and flow. It's a feel. And it's a feel pretty much divorced from the WIMP model. Even before I got into Linux the one thing I preferred about m$ over mac was the increased presence of keyboard shortcuts. But there's almost nothing in a Linux environment that can't be done by keystrokes. Whereas the mac was originally designed without a keyboard at all.

I have, partly in jest, described my feelings about the mouse as having to push a large, rusty switch in my brain to convert from safe, happy, keyboard mode to crazy, slow, hunting for the pointer and coordinating with the mouse mode. I fucking _resent_ every time I have to take my fingers away from the home keys.

In the end I guess that's really what it comes down to. Most of what I come to the computer for is words, not pictures or videos or mp3s. I come here for words, to read them and write them. And I like the way it feels to merge, mesh, blend with the keyboard. Mousing around the net is like having an automatic transmission in a Maserati.

Next installment: The visual aesthetic of command-line tools and syntax highlighting.

More Fair Use

With the caveat that I am not a lawyer, so I am not competent to give legal advice, and so this is most definitely _not_ legal advice:

I'm inclined to think that once we put our work on the web where billions can see, cut, and paste, that much use is pretty fair. Or, perhaps coming to the same result through a different door, trying to enforce our rights of exclusive use after putting our work into a form and distribution channel so easily appropriated and so impossible of monitoring is asking far, far too much of the limited resources of any court system. When we put something on the web we are asking, requiring, and hoping that an untold number of machines will casually and promiscuously copy and transmit that work. To then selectively enforce "exclusivity" seems, well, contradictory to me. I know it's a minority view, far beyond that of the reasonable folks at the Creative Commons. And it certainly isn't the law. Not today. I expect it will be for my grand-children.

sanscomp

~$~©

Neither Permission Nor Compensation

Regarding Intellectual Property Rights: I use various quotes on my various sites; in no case have I sought compensation nor permission for use of these quotes. I intend my use in all cases to qualify as Fair Use, and encourage bona fide copyright holders who take exception to my use of their materials to contact me immediately at sanscomp@semanticrestructuring.com. Inclusion of copyrighted material should neither be construed as praise nor condemnation of the material quoted as it may be both, either or neither.

Resquiat in Pace, Truman Curtis Link, II

September 30, 1938 - May 11, 2008

Long Live the Panopticon

Intended for cogdogblog, but the comments form clobbered on submit, saying I needed to enable cookies and javascript.

I'm a reactionary and inherently distrustful of commercial social apps/services, ever since reading the AOL TOS in the mid-90s and seeing they claimed perpetual rights to anything I put on their servers (this as I was preparing to put my speed reading book on line). So too with FB, MS, and even Twitter. I suppose the one thing that makes it easier for me to play on twitter is the brevity precludes posting of tremendous substance. That and I have dear friends active on twitter. But I'd be much happier with a an open protocol which enabled this kind of fun rather than a Murdoch or Theil sponsored app.
The above notwithstanding, MySpace and Facebook and Twitter "built it" and now "they have come." Ease of use trumps most other concerns, which is why television went from being the "killer educational app" to the wasteland it is. So too with all things tcp/ip I fear. Like the 78 and the betamax, open protocol based solutions have probably had their day. Long live the panopticon.

The Misogynistic And Exploitive- of- Women- as- Sex- Objects L Word

Increasingly disturbed by the paradoxical "L Word". Ostensibly a celebration of freedom to love and lifestyle diversity, but at it's core I keep thinking it's really about upping ratings by misogynistic exploitation of women as sex objects.

We've been watching it because dear friends loaned us four seasons worth of dvds over the past couple of months. Most of the characters are simply annoying, some downright hateful, few truly likable. Is this how we feel about lesbians? Is this how we want lgbt folks portrayed? And why isn't there even one pair bonding that has lasted throughout the run of the show? Most likely because what sells this show is melodrama and titillation, which makes it OK to stereotype lesbians as sexy neurotic sluts. (This leaves untouched the "sexy=Auschwitz-thin" formula that pervades the show. I can't decide if such a formula is simply misogynist or more generally inhuman.)

Sure, them broads are hot, but in the end I think we've all been demeaned.

There remains the question of why this should bug me. First, I suppose it's my own gender-and-sexual-preference self-loathing, otherwise, why would a straight guy give a damn. What kind of nut complains about a chance to watch hot chicks do soft-porn while sitting on the couch with his wife? And why would any man object to the whole woman-as-sex-object thing? I suppose I was raised funny.

A few weeks ago Gabriela and I were talking with our friends Gina and Sandy, and I asked if anyone else in the room had lgbt folks to whom they looked as mentors or role models when they were young. I was the only one in the room who could say yes. Starting with the pastor and choir director of our church, I grew up surrounded by lgbt adults who I never thought of as anything but the kind of people I wanted to be like, not in terms of sexual preference, because that didn't really matter, but in terms of loving and striving to be a good person and treat people well. Sure, I was a child, and no doubt idealized these folks. But that's the point; I was raised with an ideal of lgbt folks as just folks, people like mom and dad and grandma and grampaw. I was not raised to see folks, based simply on their gender-role-orientation or sexual preferences, as targets of any particularly special treatment, and certainly not as objects of ridicule, scorn, or crass commercial exploitation.

Is the show entirely bereft of valuable social commentary or pro-woman messages. No, not entirely. But the raison d'etre for this show is hot chicks play-fucking in the name of commercial entertainment. That's a lot of context above which to rise, and I think it would behoove friends of lgbts to gently introduce the point.

This post, by the way, is a piss poor example of such "gentle introduction", being instead more of a rant as I verbalize something that's bothered me since I saw the first episode and said, "Wow, that really seems more like something written by guys who can't stand to see another dick in the room."