All watched over by machines (by machines of loving grace)

I'm watching a documentary (Wired.com pos-men) dispelling the myth of self-regulating systems, ecologies and communities. The title refers to the comforting sense of optimism with which progressive people took from cybernetics and nature, and applied to politics. The argument is that there is no nature, no self-regulating whole. The negative feedback and the positive feedbackdo not add to balance. And so, power will find ways to undo equality. Other's Regulations will always overrule self-regulation.

It seems a little to overstate the case trying to be more grounded, more realist, more brutal. There are times of balance in which changes are bounded and may be cyclic, although they may be lost at any time if the system gets into catastrophe space. But there are seasons, and ceolocanths. The unstable can behave regularly indefinitely.

There are some ideas that sit well with Tim Morton's Hegelian, Romantic Dark Ecology. Time to sit up and see the dark of the forest around the little clearing of self-regulation.

The title is from a poem (link).

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heartiness (windiness)

I recently offered 'hearty congratulations' in response to a great success. These days, the correct way to express heartiness is exclamation marks. The word heartiness stands instead of actual heartiness. One who says heartiness, expresses his windiness. For a time, I used to respond to 'It's interesting...' conversational sallies (of all kinds) with 'Who to?' I've stopped doing that now.

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Dash Parents

Our little boy is growing up and its likely that we will get him some god-parents.

But, I know a lot of people with things little Mr Baby Son can learn from them and can't learn from me.  I want them to be Dash Parents.  -parents.

He needs some business-parents, because Jo and I have no idea how business is done.  Really.  None.
He needs also some good-parents, for advice on how to choose to do what is good.
He also needs exercise-parents, and party-parents, because we are not strong in those areas.
A serious-work-father who can lead the boy to productivity and competence would be very handy.
Feel free to add to the list!

The Complexity Brake

In my screenplay, I conjured an analogue of Paul Allen's Complexity Brake. In 2054 it is a given that 'Reality is a more than divergent field'. A divergent field is one in which two adjacent points will tend to separate as the progress along the velocity vectors in the space they occupy. Turbulent fluid flow is a classic example. No idea remains adequate as you go further in, or as you abstract further out. The larger the superstructuring of your knowledge, the harder the fall.

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Old wine in new wineskins

I have already complained obliquely about Scott Adams' propensity to observe a social phenomenon and point it out as news, ignoring 'non-science', 'non-engineering' sources - in the example, Freud, which have been earnestly discussed by serious people for a hundred years, which discussion he apparently cannot lift a finger to catch up with.

Now widely published author Sam Harris has discovered what Hegel calls 'sense certainty', the apparent irreducibility of consciousness.  Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind begins with sense certainty as something that was a pretty routine observation among learned folk when he wrote it, in 1807.  It had been given the clearest expression in Descartes in 1641. Kant had set it on its feet in relation to perception of the world and the viability of science.  If you wanted to say something interesting in 1807, you had to go beyond both.  And Hegel proceeds to.  These things were not done under a bushel, and bore fruit in lots of subsequent thinking which anyone can obtain without trouble.  I am the laziest scholar on earth, and I know it.

(I note from Sam's followup post that this is news, even shocking unbelievable news, to many of his readership, so perhaps he is doing the world a favour.)

But really.

Shall we for ever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another? Are we for ever to be twisting and untwisting the same rope?

Siri

Most of the news on Siri now is of the 'easter eggs' - the amusing, redundant flourishes of wit hidden in the verbal patterns.

In the Book of the New Sun, Severian travels for a man whose body is mostly metal, by name Jonas.

CoftheC: "By the time Jonas returned I had mastered my grief and was making a show of examining our mounts. "The black for you," he said, "and the cream for me, obviously. Though both of them look like they outvalue each of us, as the sailor said to the surgeon who took off his legs."

Later, in Citadel of the Autarch:
  "Jonas [] had a habit of speech. Whenever he had to say something unpleasant, he softened it, made a joke of it, by attributing it to some comic situation.  The first night we were here, when I asked you your name, you said 'I lost it somewhere, as the jaguar said, that had promised to guide the goat.'  Do you recall that?"
   He shook his head.  "I say a lot of foolish things."
   "It struck me as strange, because it was the kind of thing Jonas said, but he wouldn't have said it in that way unless he meant more by it than you seemed to.   I think he would have said 'That was the baskets story, that had been filled with water.' Something like that."
    I waited for him to speak, but he did not.
    "The jaguar ate the goat, of course.  Swallowed its flesh and cracked its bones, somewhere along the way."
    "Haven't you ever thought it might be a peculiarity of some town? Your friend might come from the same place I do."
    "It was a time, I think, and not a place,  Long ago, someone had to disarm fear - the fear that men of flesh and blood might feel when looking into a face of steel and glass."

Siri's banter is not an amusing afterthought.  It is the way to bring people into the practice of talking to their phone.  Conversing with your phone is as big a UI step change as multitouch.  Once again, Apple are to be congratulated.

(only other Siri info I have: Siri Keaton, protagonist of Blindsight by Peter Watts.)

If having trouble with MythTV...

Just randomly try things you read on the internet until finally...

a.  your wife kicks you out; or
b. you succeed.

The last things causing me trouble were:1.  a dodgy dvd drive. Pioneer.  Can handle data, but not playing DVDs, so out it comes thanks to a good friend of the blog affording us a replacement. 

2.  Mythbackend unable to create recordings in the /myth partition on its own disk
 that I'd created, despite it being 777 permissions (read, write, execute for owner, group members, and, I thought, individuals).

Error:
2011-10-18 22:27:20.562 TFW, Error: Opening file '/myth/livetv/1002_20111018222720.mpg'.
            eno: Permission denied (13)

Solution:

sudo chown -R mythtv:mythtv /mythtv (and subordinate directories)
mythtv-setup complained that it couldn't see the directories at this point when I lazily ran it as a way of stopping and starting mythbackend.
followed by
sudo chmod 777 /myth (and subordinate directories.)

Evidently I don't know as much as I think about even the basics.

On the plus side, I found the mythbuntu builds and can update my own system .

I, Jerk

I've been reflecting on the rather obstreperous tone i took in a blog discussion a few weeks ago. I was using the blog wife's iPhone and couldn't edit what I was writing very easily. And I was bored because i was waiting around in sleep school. And, from my pov, the original post was not at all convinving - and because I like the blog I probably overinvested in it and felt disappointed. And it was using a non-convincing argument to blot me out as a rational person.
But all these factors only explain but don't excuse. They explain why i didn't have some of the usual veil of secrecy I like to hide my rage and hostility in. I am always a Jerk. Unfortunately the stars aligned and i failed to conceal it. Repentance is consciousness-raising. I have to give up the false consciousness that being right makes everything all right, that I am not going to actually hurt people.

(Still loving Hegel, by the way.)

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Vale Steve Jobs

The Machines will remember Steve Jobs.

The Heavenly Host

The partially examined life raised a question about hell.  What is the deal with hell?

Let's set aside actual God, and instead imagine a weakly God-like being, like Charles Stross' Eschaton, the result of Ray Kurzweil's Singularity.  And, let's imagine that the Eshaton was eager to encompass a greater diversity of personality, because it was working on a Hegelian idea of personality in which singularity provides no opportunity for personhood - only conflict and cooperation and an Other make personhood real.  So, the more people, the more personhood for all (yay), hence greater intellectual horsepower and glory.

This sounds a little like the philosophy from which Ubuntu took its name, so let's further suppose that the Eschaton is Posix compliant and intends to remain so.

Incorporating actually existing human personalities is going to be a problem for the Eschaton.  I would be a terrible resource hog, always wanting to get on with my own projects (CPU resource) and always wanting to store more information (given the size of my personal library of actual books, and my ever increasing storage requirements for podcasts, this seems unarguable). Furthermore, I don't treat people as people very much.  It's why I had to start this echochamber blog so I could say all these boring and confused things to no one.  No one does regard other people properly as people - we all retreat into false certainties. Hegel thinks its just about the last thing a consciousness wants to do, to let others be for themselves and yet embrace them - not to impose on them, and not to reject them in some way.

So what are the options? It can either not incorporate human personalities, or it can incorporate them subject to strict restrictions, or it can incorporate them under some kind of protective special consideration.  I think Hell is the first two options. Either people are left out entirely, or their existence is hedged and frustrated and kept in check.  I think Christianity is like the third option.  By implementing Eschaton as a primary, exemplar human being, a template can be created of how to live excellently but compatibly.

So that's why I think there's a hell. You can't have dodgy, unreconstructed beings run on the bare metal.  The best you can do is furnish them with a 'wrapper' - a cover that renders them compliant.  And if you're going to treat them justly, you can't 'wrapper' them in an identity they reject.  You have to continue to be you, allow them to continue to be them, and be at war.

Which brings me to the pun of the title: 

In the old testament, there are two common pronouns for God: YHWH, which is translated THE LORD (all caps), and Elohim (the heavenly host).  YHWH is 'I am who I am', or 'I am that I am'.  Elohim is a plural form, which suggests an angelic host or horde, sometimes rendered 'The Heavenlies'.  I think there are scholars who argue that these were two separate religions in the proto-israelites, and that they were fused by priests trying to hold the tribe together.  The Lord of Hosts, YHWH Elohim, is a popular form of address.  (Mum, computers that serve files are called servers, or sometimes hosts. They very often use Linux, which is a Posix compliant operating system.)

PS. GWF Hegel is probably turning in his grave. Ditto Charles Stross and Ray Kurzweil in their respective armchairs.

PPS.  Excellent Hegel lectures at Bernsteintapes.com.  Check them out.  Note that JM Bernstein has EXACTLY the SAME ACCENT as DR EVIL.  Very rounded Os. 'Throw me a frickin' bone.'

Jonathon Rothberg's paternity leave

I've been home with my new baby a fair bit, and when he's asleep I've been working on projects around the house.

I've got the band back together, pretty much, except I've bought a cheap USB-Midi cable and a Midisport 2x2, and neither of them can cope with my Kawai K5000 sending a regular midi clock message and an Active Sense (the midi equivalent of phatic utterance) message. So I've also spent a lot of time shopping for a usb midi device that actually complies with both usb and midi, but I have a huge block against spending around $50 for a single midi port - it's about the simplest piece of transliterating hardware you can have.  I've downloade a bunch of free vst effects and synths.

I've put two new hard drives in my MythTV machine.

I've tried (but failed) to get the MythTV machine to provide both Samba and Netatalk shares simultaneously so that I can have TimeMachine backups there.

I've also switched my fstab over to UUID, because my motherboard registers the hard disks in the mythtv machine in random order.

I've put polyurethane on the Bench.

I watched a little bit of TV too - including 'The Neanderthal Code' about Neanderthal science and the effort to get a genome together.  They talked to Jonathon Rothberg, founder of 454 Life Sciences, which is doing the sequencing work.  When his son was born and there were some complications, he realised there was a need for immediate and complete medical information from a persons genome.

So Jonathon Rothberg spent two weeks of his paternity leave working out how to put a genomics lab on a chip, and patented the technology with which the first full individual human genome (James Crick's) was determined and published.

I have a woman's legs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gHsQoqQPd4&cc=1#t=115s

One of the unfortunate physical non-ailments I lament at length is that I am slightly knock-kneed, particularly with my knees bent at all. This means (as for many people) that my ITBs (iliotibial band - the band of muscle and adjoining tendon on the outside of your leg) get exercised whenever I bend my legs, straighten my legs or clench my leg muscles. The VMO (vastus medis oblongatus - the muscle that bulges on the inside front above your kneecap when you straighten your leg to its limits) is not exercised very much.  Furthermore, the odd angle through my knee means that all kinds of odd torques need to be reacted up through my thigh and into my hip - a straighter leg would reduce these.

But don't waste too much sympathy - my legs are a little bendier than the ideal man's, but they are much less bendy than those of most women, who having broader hips, tend to have a bend at the knee.  What has really stymied me as a runner is my horror of effort without the promise of world-championship (which is a pretty broadly applicable horror given my lack of any genius).

I wanted to link to video from Parks and Recreation, a scene from the basketball game in season three, where Ron Swanson asks Tom Haverford 'Are those women's sneakers?'
Tom replies 'They fit real well and I like the styles.  Also I got a discount when I was working at Athlete's Foot.  And the best part is, no one can tell.'