This place feels expensive...*

SFB is coming to you live from a new-bought laptop.  It's an Asus U36SG-RX138SS.  These were new perhaps 12 months ago, and are now being cleared out at a discount to make room for the next gen of ultrabooks.  I considered some other options, but concluded I would save some money - partly because we are getting the house re-stumped and it keeps getting more expensive (there were some concrete stumps in place on the only exposed side, so I thought it likely it had been professionally restumped, which would mean all the stumps were done.  But no, after the restumpers dug around it turned out that almost all the stumps were still the original 1930 red gum. Shenanigans.)


Intel core i5 - 2430M (2.4GHz up to 3+GHz with 'turbo-boost')
750GB HDD with ~4GB of NAND Flash as cache, which means some things are supposed to be fast and low power. It has seemed extremely fast.
8cell, 83 Whr battery, claimed good for 10hrs, in reality good for 5+ hrs.
1.7kg - nice and light.
White - actually incredibly similar to my previous laptop that died in colour, although the new surface coating doesn't mark as easily.
3 USB ports, VGA and HDMI, gigabit LAN, a SD/MMC card reader.
Allegedly it gets hot when gaming,but its nothing compared to my old ASUS laptop.
Bundled with a USB DVD burner & Home&Student Office
Screen is 13.3" 1376 * 768, but really poor - noticeably grainy. The illuminated space of each pixel is isolated - you can see the fine pattern of the grid, and the 'gamma' changes wildly with viewing angle.
The touchpad has some multitouch and I'm getting used to it.

$800 from MSY. My last laptop (in addition to being this colour, rather light, and prone to overheating to the point that I remember swearing to buy Apple next) was also bought somewhat reduced as it was superceded.  Here is a very good review.

I don't have buyers remorse, but I am reminded of a pair of proverbs that used to be translated:
If a fool persists in his folly he will become wise.
Though a fool persists in his folly, he will never become wise.

* Homer Simpson reference

Denominations

Whose likeness is on the coin?

I would be interested to know if the government could administer all electronic financial transactions - or at least the infrastructure. People like financial advisers, banks and credit unions could repackage the wholesale credit, but switching from one bank to another would be close to free because it would just change one or two fields in a common data set.*

If the government controlled the electronic and cash infrastructure, it would be more feasible to reduce the fungibility of cash (if you wanted to). You could have a dole moneykind that worked for healthy food and drink, for heating and electricity bills, and for modest internet - enough to do text things like read, write and learn. You could have other moneykinds for objects of addiction, like technology. Or perhaps the moneykinds should be more and more fungible - the most desired work earns the most versatile money, basic non-destructiveness is compensated with basic necessities. The careful contracting of lending and the 'capital controls' and food vouchers instead of cash are all examples of where restrictions on how money can be used could be useful. But I'm not sure this is even an idea.

* we could call it the National... well the Commonwealth... well, we could call it something.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

Why I blog...

One of the great things about having a blog is sharing the good and amusing things one runs across.  At the moment, the blog wife and I are reading 'The Magicians' by Lev Grossman, a novel referencing Narnia and Harry Potter, but written for a more adult audience about students who get into a bespoke university for magic.  The hero (and all the characters) are bright-tending-brilliant students who have a magic sensibility.  Naturally people are somewhat flawed and stressed - the hero gets his head punched by Penny, a punk magician who felt threatened by the hero's easy progress.  One character notes that he had been stewing a long time, with a lot of repressed rage.  "He was either going to hit somebody or start a blog."

Hey, wait a minute...

A year

It's a year since the blog son matured to the human equivalent of chest-burster phase and entered our world.  He's a fun little presence, especially since he's started sleeping reliably from about 7 at night to at least 5 in the morning.  It's amazing how little he knew when he was born, and how much he has had to learn just to have his current fragile toe-hold on reality.  Marvellous.  I recommend it to anyone.

The Rich Get Richer

There is always something of moral panic when we see growing income and wealth disparities because the rich get richer. The rich, for their part, see themselves as working for it - attending to their investments of time and money and care. I think the moral panic is because wealth per se is not an enjoyed good; it isn't food or drink or fine living or helping people or knowledge or any other good thing itself. People whose astute investments and good ideas make them money which they re-invest or spend are actually fine.

People move along through life. The rich get richer, the fat get fatter, the well-read read more. If we want to arrest this, one part is a need for metanoia - for life direction changes. There is no solution without solving this problem.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

Backstory Magazine

I just subscribed to Jeff Goldsmith's Backstory magazine for the iPad. IPad magazines are a great format - easy, glorious pics, documents, videos and more. If you have an iPad and sometimes see films, you might like to check out Backstory - it is at least as interesting as any 'making of' dvd extra, and the first issue is still free. There are four complete screenplays and several extracts. (Jeff has been a screenwriting booster for many years, starting a free podcast at Creative Screenwriting and now still free as 'The Q&A.')

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

REAMDE

The dear blog wife and I have been sharing REAMDE by Neal Stephenson, reading by turns as the other tidies up. It's sort of extravagant, because we could each read it silently and do the chores and have time left over. But, we wouldn't share it.

We have found Neal Stephenson suits us. We made it through the entire Baroque trilogy (it certainly was Baroque) and Anathem (although she found it too ponderous). We have also read Harry Potter this way, and others. But Neal Stephenson is referring so widely that it's often necessary to have too brains and backgrounds to get all the marrow out.

REAMDE was huge and very enjoyable, but much less conceptual than much of his earlier work. It has been described as letting his hair down, but it might also be a strategic move back from the pure philosotainment precipice beyond Anathem. I was expecting more to come of the computer networks and games background to this. In fact, like Alistair Maclean crossed with PG Wodehouse crossed with Tolstoy or Proust (someone prolix), he gives an endlessly detailed adventure yarn with a big cast. One of the interesting effects of putting so much effort into the detail is that coincidences which might (maybe should) seem contrived start to seem inevitable. (This is the likeness to PG Woodhouse.)

I would have enjoyed a little more denoument performance, an interval of comedy longer than the scant pages he gives. It's not confusing or disappointing (which he has been in the past), but it is short. I wanted some afterplay, some of the story of how sorry Olivia and Seamus's bosses were, how Oprah got Zula on - just how everyone was celebrated. I guess I'm just not a real Forthrast.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

New Girl

I have been hugely enjoying New Girl, a Zooey Deschanel vehicle about 20-somethings flatting together and trying to mature.  One of the funny devices that they use is revealing lists, lists that tell you a lot about a person.  These lists are usually hysterical in context, because they are so revealing and so incongruous.

Chris Reeder has done the internet a service by collecting some of them here.  I quote this one example, but there are a few more there:

Anyway, the gang found his [Schmidt's] 2007 New Year's resolutions, and read them aloud to much delight:

Everything is easy when you are a battleship invading the bay of success
Stop pursuing Caroline. She's Nick's girl. Deal with it.
Begin the search for the cocoon that will one day release your butterfly.
Find out where Winston gets his sparkle, and then steal it.
Only think about hot new CFO every OTHER time I masturbate.
Start floating the idea that people call me Mr. Finish/Game Time Jones/The Hook-Up-Erator
Just pick a color of Crocs and buy them already.

This week, Schmidt broke up with model girlfriend CC and tried a date with her room-mate Nadia, a model in the 6'2" estonian-waif-descended-from-partisan-femme-fatales mould.  Making conversation, Schmidt asks how does she like America. Nadia replies in halting English and somewhat uncertain tones:

'I like salad bar.  I like Despicable Me. Tash 2.0. I like 'Connect Four'.  Freedom of Speech.  David Fincher.  Sidewalk.  I like 1-800-SLIM.  "Yo' mama" jokes. Strawberry.  Wilma Valma Valma(?). Leon J Panetta. Ice-skating for fun, not to save life.'

It's funny when its trivial, and by starting at trivia, then going to what delights her inner child, then politics, then a specific director bespeaking a certain literacy in film...  As the list progresses you get a sense of her personality, and like any personality revealed there is real pathos in it, and a series of surprises that are the stuff of hilarity. 

It's a very warm show, on the whole, and it makes me laugh like a drain, but somehow the comic edge of immaturity it rides makes me think of liking it as immaturity in myself.

(What's weird is that you can get a PG rating on a show where Nadia announces that she's going to sex Schmidt in the face, and puts him in hospital with a broken penis. I guess its all talk. Still, I am often surprised.)

Gene Wolfe

My wife has always complained that Gene Wolfe makes her 'feel itchy' - that his writing has a real creepiness to it, redeemed by his great variety, skill and seriousness, but not fully explained either.

Case in point for those who have read TBOTNS - little is made of it, but Severian sleeps with both his grandmothers. Dorcas, who he raised from the Lake of Birds, was Ouwen's mother. He (Ouwen) first recognizes her while he Waits (tables) at the Inn of Lost Loves by the Sanguinary Field. Dorcas follows Severian the Thrax, but then journey's back down Gyoll looking for her real lost love.

In Thrax, Severian meets a beautiful older woman at an evening masquerade, Cyriaca. He allows her to seduce him and then cannot kill her as he is supposed to. He learns of her lost love, her daughter Katherine, sent to the Matachin Tower of the Torturers for occasioning some killing or other as a young beauty.

Finally he learns that Ouwen had slept with Katherine when she stayed at the Inn, in time for him to be born to her before her excruciation and death.

Waiting at the Inn of Lost Loves is so innocuously presented that I only realised it was symbolic in writing this. Is there something in the intimate relations with Dorcas and Cyriaca? Until I find something, I'm a little itchy too.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

I write the music and sing the themesong?*

Here's another coincidence of the interests of this blog. For mysterious reasons, I've ended up recording little versions of the theme song to Pilar Alessandra's On-the-Page podcast, a free 30-50min chat with the sharp and funny host (Pilar) and her producer and a guest. Very enjoyable. The original theme was composed by Dave Zukowski.   I can't find a web link for him, but episode 50, at the end, is where I got his name.  There's a hotmail email address.  Leave a comment if you believe me looking up the exact email address is a good idea for your porpoises.  I mean purposes.

I've put them on soundcloud.

Are you ready to be Bemused???**

I said, 'Are you READY to be BEMUSED?!!'

* Little Britain reference
** Really, if you don't come here expecting to be bemused, it is hard to know what you do expect.

More Life

If there is a common theme in 'The Stars My Destination' and 'The Book of the New Sun' and my worrying about right and right (adaptive, functional and moral, upright) and perhaps the gospel, it is the power of wanting and believing in More Life.

Gully Foyle spends six months in a wrecked spaceship fighting for enough food and water and air, and gets to know himself as a thing deserving and demanding more life. He finishes by stripping moral and real power from the few and imposing it on the many who had chosen to lead empty formalities instead of lives.

Severian, weighing the consequences of a white fountain (an energy emitting singularity) entering our solar system and interrupting life on Urth, remembers how the long tortured clients would lose hope of justice or vindication, and wish only for sunlight and air, for more life. The despair of an Urth in which everything has been tried and come only to frustration, is absolute. But even to be destitute, to despair, there must be something better that is despairing. In the end the only dimension that matters is more life.

This is Nietzsche's 'yes to everything' morality; a morality that works differently from 19th century morality of good and evil. To the 19th century late-christian morality, evil was a kind of monstrosity, a self-justifying wickedness that (like virtue) was its own reward. Nietzsche thought this was more an artifact result of an artificial (and therefore wrong) morality.

This week I saw a paper on Arxiv on a recasting of certain statistics to revolve around an analogue of Absolute Zero in thermodynamics. The goal was to create statistical tests for which more evidence would always be additive - to find a way of expressing an absolute zero for evidence.

I think Christianity needs to get back to its moral work of asserting that 'to be is good'. There is more and less good, but there is a limit to evil, an absolute zero of good. The fundamental communication from public christians to 'the world' has been 'no to everything' when it should have been More Life.*

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

PS.  There is not space to point out that such a view is already, exactly the non-Manichean, Evil only as absence of good, view of Christianity.

PPS.  The Absolute Zero metaphor of evil is actually made a real thing somewhere in The Reality Dysfunction series by Peter F Hamilton.

Aristotle on Screenwriting.

In a satisfying natural coincidence of two interests of this blog, Aristotle (notable in philosophy) wrote a book (Poetics) unpacking how serious drama was done in his time.  English script-development guru Stephen Cleary gave three talks at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne Australia.  (It's Victorian only in being in a State called Victoria.  It's nature is a sort of strident Bloomsbury for 18-20 year olds.)

This blog post introduces them, and you can download them from there.

Plato wanted to ban fiction because it wasn't true, and he thought, couldn't contribute civic value.  Aristotle's defence of fiction (not that they had the concept fiction, but poetry and drama were understood to be in a different category from every events and rules for living) - I will begin again.  Aristotle's defence of fiction (according to SC) understood it from the inside out.  He looks at each of the elements and how it interfaces with the others, and what the overall effectiveness hinges on.

What I took from SC's explanation was that in a story, we understand people in ourselves - we read their situation intellectually and emotionally (and even physically - I sometimes notice I've got breathing anxiety when I see someone in a film underwater).  The complex drama (e.g. greek tragedy), though, keeps the protagonists off balance, constantly challenged or threatened by events, to which they respond with emotionally motivated actions that are not quite right, don't resolve the tension. The tension is escalating throughout the film until, at last, there is a realisation.

The realisation needs to happen in a specific series of moments, the hero being knocked off balance one last time and then receiving information that throws the mind back to the start of the story, that changes the meaning of everything, that makes them realise for the first time what has really been happening. The audience, feeling along with them, should be moved - in tragedy they should feel pity, and terror.  This moment is the moment of catharsis, a moment of powerful intellectual, emotional and physical reprocessing that lays hold of one as you realise that you are subject to some powerful truth, just as the tragic hero is: Macbeth learns that murder is wrong.  In a different type of film, Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner (and we) remember how we love our fathers, and they love us.

Please listen to the whole thing.  It's very good if you are interested in philosophy, film, or even just an interesting bit of psychological / cognitive processing.

Casting Novels

Casting is a complicated business. Because of the extent to which audiences follow movie stars as indicators of film quality and sensibility, the money (following the audience) wants to know that a script has the right stars signed on. Conversely the wrong star can put money off.

This is especially complex for novels and other fiction, where there is no set appearance. Audiences will have extremely specific requirements in the appearance, but they may be mutually exclusive. Personally I understood Frodo for the first time in Elijah Wood's portrayal of him, but I though Jennifer Ehle was not as lean and long-limbed as Jane Austen had made her Elizabeth. Harison Ford is not fat enough to be Colonel Graff, but I can go with it.

I have a couple of firm casting opinions for films I wish were coming:

No1. Ricky Gervais for Chiark-Gevantsah Jurneau Morat Gurgeh from Iain M Banks' "The Player of Games". Gurgeh goes the gamut from lightweight Culture personality yearning for more risk, to Azad-addicted power pervert, back to Culture person and instrument of world-collapse for the Empire of Azad. He's got the beard, the sneer and the pathos to be Gurgeh. The other characters are mostly aliens and machines, but Lal Yay is a type* and Shohobohaum Za could be a Ryan Gosling smooth operator, or Idris Elba with a big Afro and some speed.

No2. Jesse Tyler Ferguson (from Modern Family) to be Dr Talos from 'The Book of the New Sun' by Gene Wolfe. Dr Talos is a homonculus - Severian thinks of his ur-self as a stuffed and mounted fox. It's mostly the red hair and beard, but Dr Talos' menace, vaudevillean streak, cruelty and yet his almost feminine care for the giant Baldanders seem like they would be within his range if he could play it a little less snarky.

No3. Who to be Gully Foyle from Alfred Bester's 'The Stars My Destination'? Someone massive, big and tall, with a barely restrained violence. He should be fat at the beginning and lean down and muscle up as he quests for more life. The cupboard of my awareness of actors is pretty bare.

* I'm unable to think of a young blond actress - is that weird? Britt Marling seems too smart, insufficiently frolic. But she might work out. Lal is a game player Gurgeh has some time for.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

The war of all with all

Many of the early philosophers of society (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau etc) tried to understand society as arising from the relations of humans in the state of nature.  Sometimes this meant the natural authority of fathers  would justify as natural the authority of Kings.  Sometimes it was assumed that the natural state was war of all with all, which could only be restrained by social contract or (internalized) subjugation.

I think the famous 'Prisoner's Dilemma' problem is a very nice source for considering these issues. Two prisoners have committed a crime, but prosecutors will need evidence against them to establish a full conviction.  Hence they will cut a deal if you default on your partner and give evidence against them.  Formalised, it assumes that by cooperating, both parties can benefit, but by defaulting while the other cooperates your benefit can be even greater, and their penalty large.  The penalty for both defaulting is equal, but less severe than the individual penalty.   Suppose this table gives outcomes - negative numbers are penalties for years in prison.  So if you dob and your partner doesn't, you go free and they get five years.  If you each dob, responsibility is split and you get three years each.

                    Cooperate      Default

Cooperate         -1 / -1              0/-5

Default             -5 / 0              -3/-3

The game theory analysis of this situation is that you should always dob, because cooperating is a dominated strategy - that is, your expected results are considerably worse playing 'cooperate' than playing 'default' regardless of what your partner plays. If you partner cooperates, you wish you'd defaulted. If your partner defaults, you wish you defaulted.*

This game theory solution always makes people anxious.  In real life, the person defaulted against will get out eventually, and may be able to penalize defaulting. They may have powerful friends. These stem from the idea that there is some continuity, and in fact you can change the game by playing indefinitely.  (Interestingly, if you play a fixed series, there is an argument via backward induction that you won't be able to sustain cooperation, because at the last turn, we both know we'll both default, and therefore the decision point moves to the turn before last. The turn before last becomes the chance to default against and so on.)  If you don't know when the last turn will be, and the probability is low enough, the potential benefit of a series of future cooperations may begin to outweigh the loss of being defaulted against once after which you default against your opponent every turn.

I think the cooperate / default choice is foundational for society and that philosophers have tended to come down on one side or the other without consciously / explicitly considering the payoff table.  Society works when you can find games in which 'cooperate' is not strictly dominated by default. You can start structures that will increase the penalties of defaulting and increase the benefits of cooperating - contracts and so on.  Nietzsche has a whole thing about the value of conscience and the construction of beings with the right to make promises, that (I think) is an attempt to undercut the distinction between cooperation and default and an attempt to revalue the two.  In this he is motivated by a justifiable suspicion that the structures that work against 'default' will become a way for indecent power to overcome legitimate power.  That is, the government / law / elders will be motivated to eat the benefit of cooperation and begin to use the penalties of default - thus defaulting in their way, against their society.

A wise old jewish friend took exception to this model applied to marriage, because of the assumption that there is always a solution of defaulting against a cooperator that is better than cooperating. I think it depends on the units of gain and loss, the concept of marriage.  If marriage is a cynical money-making scheme, it may pay to marry Mel Gibson and have a child with him, and then divorce him.  If marriage is a cynical sex-maximising scheme, it might make sense to have an affair or visit prostitutes.  If marriage is a scheme to be known and loved, default cannot increase the bottom line.

*   This changes if the payoffs are different, of course. You can imagine a weakly positive payoff from being defaulted against. You can imagine a game where being defaulted against is still not as bad as both defaulting it. 

Anxiety and Screenwriting

Scriptshadow is updating 'his' web-site and asked for suggestions that would support a new community site for discovering good scripts and nurturing talented writing.  There were a lot of good suggestions, most of which revolved around the way a high standard of review could be achieved by non-professional writers, many of whom (like me) aren't even working in LA. Most of these suggestions worked something like Slashdot, where good comments are moderated up, and good commenters gain some status from the contribution.  Moderators can spend their 'mod' points to lift up points they agree with.  A variation on this was to create a low-stakes market where you can offer a basic non-pro read for $5 and once your reputation was lifting your price could go up.

The problem of getting good screenwriting is an interesting search problem.  It's hard to say what  a good screenplay is.  There are perhaps four patterns by which good ones are produced:

• a great screenwriter who knows a lot of tricks, writes a great screenplay.  Easy to find if you know he's a great screenwriter.
• a bad screenwriter with a great idea sells a script on the idea, and then other screenwriters work on it.  Easy to find because the idea should be 'high-concept' - a sentence or two.
• a good screenwriter reworks his screenplay in development hell until it is purified or consumed by fire.  Easy to get into, hard to come out of, unless a great screenwriter lends a hand.
• a novice screenwriter writes a great script by some degree of accident.  Hard to find, because there are so many novices pumping out terrible accidents, and which of them are good?  Who wants to find out?

I would go back to what a good screenplay is.  A good screenplay offers a helpful 4D map of a world, exploring the challenges and the pathways, the anxiety and its resolution.  This post was going to be some examples of that - some of my favourite films.

The Big Lebowski - plays with the anxiety of unmotivatability.  The Dude is seduced by the Bunny Lebowski problem because he lives in denial and is looking for easy money. At least he's not a nihilist.

The King's Speech - explores the anxiety of social responsibility for which your aren't skilled.  The social aspect is important, because Bertie's identity is going to be jeopardised. He overcomes this by gaining a social identity in friendship.

No Country for Old Men - explores the anxiety of the meaning and meaninglessness - which is ultimate? There are two heros - the tragic hero whose realisation and death happen off screen and randomly, no lesson learned, no catharsis earned; the older policeman wise enough to avoid it though it means a young woman will be undefended. He has no fire of his own, but his father will meet him and welcome him. It puts the meaninglessness in a tenuous frame of meaning in life (before he was born & after his death), rather than life floating in a meaningless sea.  But its frail.  It's just a little flame.

Abuse

The defence forces in Australia are in the news again as places where people have been abused, and I guess the important issue is whether or not there have been little cultures of abuse, little breeder reactors, insulated from justice by management. There is a level of abusive practice in the background - reading advice columnists like Prudence @ slate.com furnishes examples, and if you've ever been to or played competitive sport you will have your own.

This abuse is theoretically marginal, but there are a couple of things that worry me. The first couple are from Zizek. Zizek thinks that the rights-based subject is by definition a vulnerable porcupine, who can't experience unwelcome events except as harassment or abuse. He also quotes Ayn Rand's hymn to money (in which she says that without money, the only way to sort out power relations is guns or mobs) as giving the game away: money is (in capitalism) an instrument for domination.

The second couple are from the 'war on terror'. The kill/capture missions, as described by Glenn Greenwald and Spencer Ackerman and others, are a relentless pounding on people taken to be enemy soldiers. But some of them are very young, all of them are very misguided, and it isn't clear that there are attacks on the sources of misguidance, or that the strategy is headed toward making an ommelette. This may be a phantom resemblance, an artifact of feeling that anyone you can film for 8hrs, you can capture or negotiate with. Second, more obviously, the enhanced interrogation techniques that are brutal, and the lingering strong support for Bush-era torture. People still occasionally give the game away, that waterboarding is not merely functional - its also satisfying a power instinct, that this is punishment.

Another interesting correlate for me was something Amanda Marcotte put in a footnote on some anti-feminist pushback that included very low verbal abuse - vulgarity and namecalling. She pointed out that some abusers had posted pornography, intending it to be taken as hate speech.

The Toffler's (Future Shock etc) apparently suggested that the way you make money becomes the way you make war. I think we could be in the middle of one of Heidegger's reconfigurations. We were in a time when we considered ourselves blankly useable, possibly useful, in which there isn't any obvious way of evaluating goals against one another. He called it the default of the Gods - the closing over of the sky. There are no longer super-personal entities to relate your behaviour to. You can't resolve on any God and so you settle on none. You can't agree on any future, and settle for a future no closer than the end of your nose. We are going into a time when every practice will refer itself no longer to use, but to abuse. Where Heidegger complained of the emptiness of enframing, we will try to substitute a fullness of violation, of raw power. Google will try to do good, but find it is smothered by accusations of abuse and Government intervention because it turns out what they intended for good is experienced by people as bad.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

On Twitter

I've been on twitter for a little while (since Scriptshadow's TwitPitch contest) - I mostly follow screenwriting discussions.
@BittrScrptReadr How has no one written a contained thriller about a man trapped in bathroom stall while victims of food poisoning attend to their situation?
RT @Morning_Movie: "Panic Room #2"
@BittrScrptReadr  That's pretty good. Anyone else? 
@MichaelBStark Sarcophagi -- A hemophiliac Egyptologist gets locked in the crypt he's plundering while he has explosive diarrhea


Diarrhea is a recurring theme for Michael and its always funny, and usually explosive. Explosive diarrhea has everything a good screenplay should have - tension, horror, shame, vulnerability, facial expressions and then EMERGENCY Running! Emergency Pants dropping!  And then resolution and peace.

Both Bitter and Michael have blogs, but there's something very liberating about knowing that your tweets will have been drowned from your correspondents' feeds in fifteen minutes.

Losses

One of the things I've lost in having a child, is my sense of humour about bad things happening to people, especially children. Back when I was fifteen, I was accutely conscious that there was not much innocence in my cohort. Now, though, when I read about children getting in trouble (gunned down by Apache helicopters while gathering firewood, for example; or recruited by the Taliban as lookouts - a dangerous job; or murdered by their parents for wanting to marry the wrong person) - I don't cope as well. All my defences were at bottom denial, or rested on a sense that no one was lovable, really, if you knew them as they knew themselves.

I'm not sure really, what the right response is now. I certainly can't save the world; and I can't not save it either. I guess I am liable to save it should I ever have the power and liable already to the extent I do.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

The Stars My Destination

Lorenzo DiBonaventura (producer - Transformers, other things), Raymond Wagner (producer, super-old) and Neal Adams (odd* conceptual designer) are listed on IMDB as developing 'The Stars My Destination' by Alfred Bester, for the screen, since 2007, scheduled to be released 2012.  Nothing seems to be happening on this film.  (Warner bros have some work under way for 'Cristo' or as I think of it:  Space Count of Monte Cristo. A shallow reader might think it similar to TSMD.  It is relatively lame (see below).  Still a great story and should be an awesome film though.)

The Stars My Destination should be made as a film.

  This is a hot, fast-moving book that I think should be an easy adapt, except for the complicated backgrounds that might need exposition.  The novel teeters on the brink of chaos, but somehow he wrestles the whole into shape with structures within structures, interlocking shapes of story that you can only read and marvel at.  I would write it for free if it helped it get made (though I can't imagine anything less likely to succeed than approaching a giant star and director and production company with - "here's the screenplay - it's by another hopeful dickhead you never heard of. You didn't read about it in the trades because it was free - it's literally worthless.").

Themes - why this is an important story for today:
1. Intellectual Property ascendant.  The background is a world of very high technology and a very stratified society, where an aristocracy of intellectual property holders dominates the globalized society.  If you think about how copyright is steadily being extended and patent law is more and more the ground on which inter-corporation wars are fought, this seems to be exactly somewhere we could get to.
2. Inequality. Everyone except the very rich is vulnerable to poverty, violence and crime.
3. Terrorism. The solar system is at war, but it's a fundamentally unequal war in which the tactics are terrifying, asymmetric - attacks on populations, exploitation and internment of refugees.
4.  Globalization. The power of Earth national governments to regulate issues of citizenship is limited, because transport (jaunting - pretty much 'disapparating' from Harry Potter) is very cheap and very fast. The boundaries that now define 'nationalities' are found at spaceports and similar, and Earth has a government and secret police and military.
5.  The body. Surgical intervention to augment and alter the body is available, but most heavily used by criminals, the military and social climbers.
6.  Life. The foregoing sets up a lot of very recognizable vulnerability (and corresponding, prized invulnerability). The story mythos is how to live under this vulnerability.

Synopsis (spoilers - but the book is from the fifties, so for goodness sake):
Gully Foyle is an emotionally shut-down ambitionless lump of a spaceman.  His ship is captured by Outer Satellites privateers, and he ends up in a small airtight locker on a ship drifting aimless out past the asteroid belt.  He lasts about half a year by scavenging air and food and water in desperate adventures in a leaky space suit.  When a ship appears, he thinks he will be rescued, but on seeing it is only him, SS Vorga doesn't stop.  This awakens Gully emotionally and when he tries, he finds he can repair his ship and get the main engine started, although navigation is not possible.  (There are a number of statistically very unlikely conjunctions in space in this story, but we'll just have to deal with it.)

     Gully reaches Earth where he is rehabilitated and learns to jaunt and begins to be a criminal, plotting against the Vorga and sexually assaulting his jaunte instructor Robin to ensure her silence. Then he makes a stupid attempt at revenge which sees him locked up.  At the same time, his story comes to the notice of Presteign of Presteign, a front rank aristocrat with basic patents on a lot of spacefaring.  Gully is imprisoned in the Gouffre Martel, a perfectly dark underground prison, from which jaunting is impossible. There he meets Jizzbella McQueen, a beautiful and brilliant professional criminal. They become dependent on each other - he for her intelligence (and he learns to prize intelligence) and she for his absolutely implacable courage/rage. When Presteign attempts to interrogate him in prison, he escapes with Jizzbella.  During his escape he sees the Burning Man, a grim apparition of a man on fire, for the first time.

    Gully and Jizzbella work out that there was treasure on his ship, steal a sporty spaceship and try to salvage it.  But Presteign turns up and Gully just barely escapes, by abandoning Jizzbella.

   On Earth, he is soon fabulously rich and takes an identity as Geoffrey Fourmyle, a ludicrous spendthrift clown-entrepreneur.  He travels with his Fourmyle circus, a sort of giant Carnivale / Burning Man Festival / royal court in which there are concealed a few terribly serious scientific investigations into the mysterious substance that came with the treasure.  But he is really beginning in earnest his quest to find the captain and crew of the SS Vorga, and he recruits Robin to coach him in civilization.  At the same time, Presteign wants to draw Fourmyle in, at first because of his wealth, and to keep his enemies close.  And Gully falls in love (violently, as he does everything at this stage of moral development) with Olivia Presteign, Presteign's albino daughter, with eyes that see Infra Red.

   Having identifed three former crewmen, Gully sets up an opportunity to interrogate them during a progressive New Years' Ball, in which he takes as an escort the partial telepath, Robin, who taught him to Jaunte. Each of the crewmen dies on trying to say the name of the director of the mission, but Gully gets a new facts: the name of crewman now working as a slave on the Moon's algae farms. The Burning Man appears at each killing, and the Burning Man is recognizable as Gully. He kidnaps him and hooks him up to life support before interrogating him.  Even though the hypnotic kill switch activates and his heart stops, he stays alive long enough to reveal that Lindsey Joyce is in the Skoptsy colony on Mars, having renounced life.

   Gully feels beaten.  Skoptsies are religious who give themselves to total sensory deprivation.  There seems no way to punish Joyce.  But Gully is implacable - he steals a telepath and uses him to intrude on Lindsey Joyce.  He terrifies the young telepath so much that everyone, including Joyce, is affected. Gully is absolutely disgusted by Joyce.  Her detachment is absolute evil in his moral scheme.
  Then Gully finds out the last name.  The director of the voyage, who refused to pick him up was Olivia Presteign. And all the silence was because she was scuttling refugees - taking their money and belongings, then dumping them to die in space.  Gully has the insight of a tragic hero - everything he's done to remake himself for revenge had made him too great to take revenge on her.  He gets captured by Presteign.

   Presteign explains that among the treasure was PyRE - a substance that is the primordial stuff that detonated in the big bang; and PyRE can be detonated any time, by Will and Idea.  Robin is there, and her idea of detonation radiates out - Foyle's lab in the Fourmyle circus had a smudge of Pyre left behind and it explodes.  Fortunately the main mass of PyRE is deeply secured below the lab, and cannot detonate.  Gully negotiates with Presteign for Olivia; he expresses his outrage at the power of PyRE being under the control of just a few people - having mastered all his smallness while remaining himself, he is enraged by the narrow, dirty cheating of the wealthy and powerful. Although drugged, he escapes to Earth, and from there he heads to his laboratory to do something about PyRE.

  His lab is on fire.  His great strength and augmented reflexes and courage lead him to try to go to the PyRE, but he gets stuck in a burning loom of wire, tangled and flailing.  He tries to jaunte, but being drugged is making it difficult to resolve a destination, and then he starts flashing to significant places - the air-tight locker, the cell, the scenes of the deaths of the spacemen, the present, and then the future.  In that future, Robin tells him how to get free.  In doing so he discovers the secret to space-jaunting - thinking through time - he space-jauntes to Arcturus' blue fire, to his old coffin and back to earth.  Presteign helps him.  The fire is coming under control, and Gully recovers and sits up.  He lectures Presteign on living, then distributes PyRE across the world and directs everyone to start living, right now.

Story Structure(s) - why this is a (very) filmable story

Neal Gaiman wrote an introduction to the story that highlighted the sequence of wombs, out of each of which, Gully is reborn more powerful: the air-tight locker; the Gouffre Martel cell and several others, culminating in the burning wire cage.  Each of these forms a sequence with goals, stakes, urgency of their own.  The sequences are basically the seven and a half paragraphs in the synopsis. A lot of detail has been lost to synopsising, but in every sequences, Gully grows and becomes more powerful, and more morally conscious, although he remains cruel and remorseless, beginning with neglect of even himself, through a blunt and aimless cruelty, to a razor-edge relentless predator ranging the solar system.  But you can't grow so much as a person without starting to have your shit together morally speaking.  Gully is genuinely sorry for raping Robin by the middle of the film, and does her only good once he recruits her.  By the conclusion of the film, Gully has transcended everything that made him, as has Robin.

Second, the morality.  There are two layers of morality operating in the story.  The more familiar is the conventional morality in which its wrong to hurt the weak, to be unfair.  The less familiar is straightforwardly Nietzschean 'yes to everything' morality, in which letting other people make you is a regrettable weakness, but evil is refusing life - refusing to make big choices and take big chances. Lindsey Joyce and all the other crew of the Vorga allowed Olivia Presteign to make them, and crushed by guilt, gave up on life.  This is their evil, the evil of weakness dwelling in and clinging to its weakness.  Its what Gully overcame when Vorga abandoned him.


Third, the characters all partake of both moralities, but strongly represent one or the other.  Presteign represents Nietzschean power, but in the end Gully judges him to have taken too much on himself, which is wrong even as a Nietzschean because it preserves his power that should exist by contending, not by secrecy and declining to compete.  Dagenham, Jizzbella and other minor characters operate on skill power - Presteign, though, is most skilled at holding on to his inherited power.  Robin operates entirely without Nietzschean power, and yet by the mid point Gully is begging for her help, and by the end depends on her to save his life.  He is moved into conventional morality by this.  Robin has lived to overcome his assault, to become too great to hold it against him.  Olivia is a pure Nietzschean, willing to do anything to sate her Presteign passions for blood and money - yet she expresses a desire to be overcome to Gully.  Gully was shut down to life until he nearly lost it - perhaps he was trapped in conventional morality, just going along, conforming, until the people really living life showed how little that meant to them.

Everyone has a story - indeed its bewildering how much story is in this short book.

Challenges

• Nietzschean 'yes to everything' morality freaks people out ('Yes Man' notwithstanding):  
• The protagonist is extraordinarily imperious, relentless and cruel - and those are the qualities his character develops.  
• The protagonist rapes a lovely woman who helps him, and then gets her to help him achieve his dreams.  I can't imagine that going over well with women and people who care about them - I would expect protests from feminists.  (I would argue that this is treated as seriously as anything in the story, but I doubt any writer could make it serious enough.)
• Olivia Presteign is the worst mass murderer I can think of in fiction - defrauding and killing the most vulnerable people she can, including Robin's family.  And her punishment is that Gully marries her.  It has a certain logic, but its to see audiences feeling satisfied.
• The protagonist may not be very sympathetic in the opening of the film.  Just getting pushed around and being unwilling to push back is not universally sympathetic.
• The amount that would need to be explained is large.  Jaunting, PyRE, the solar system's warring sides, the existence of telepathy, Gully's progressive identity shifts (Geoffrey Fourmyle, souped up Commando), and the complex webs of relationships, inferences, games and tricks that motivate all the participants.

Come on, guys!  Make this film!


* Neal Adams thinks that all seismic and geological evidence is best explained by his idea that Earth (and other planets) is steadily growing in size.  ?        ???              ?????

scared straight

Like most contemporary men, I sometimes believe (or subconsciously subscribe to a pattern) that the answer to the question 'How much sex does a man need?' is 'More.'*

The 'relationships' columns at Salon.com have scared me straight, though.
+ a lesbian woman who had hooked up with guys lately because it was easier, the relationship equivalent of Homer eating the dirt under the bleachers.
+ a polyamorous girl hoping to bonk a hot coworker from a different generation, who thought he might not get what that relationship would be. Who has the psychic energy to create and manage the turbulent sea of sexual relationship on a case-by-case basis with everything to be negotiated every time?
+ a woman whose relationship with her partner might have gone better without his kids, but after it broke down and the kids grew up, missed them terribly. Just sad, but written with a tone of surprise, as if it was news that every 'yes' says a thousand 'no's, and so there are some advantages in making it the biggest 'yes' you can.
+ a columnist writing about a hookup with her favorite male porn star and how it was too overlaid with performance to be as flat out enjoyable as she'd imagined.
+ the gay guy who was checking out a neighbour on grindr and gradually realised he was quite sick with sex addiction.

The men who have sex most (more than 20 times per month, which sounds exhausting) are almost exclusively doing it with one partner (who is also having a lot of sex) in a relationship. Although there is a lot of whining about how difficult a well worked out, committed relationship is, I think the alternatives are short-term easy, long-term bad for you.

* JP Morgan reference. He was talking about money. I linked a long time ago to an article about this. I, at that time, suggested that Nietzsche's reprehensible epigram alleging that pregnancy was the answer to the question of female unintelligibility was equally applicable to men. It was awesome.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

The Interval of Comedy

A couple of things came to mind after my last post.  First, when Berman speaks of an 'interval', it calls to my mind a moment from the Book of the New Sun, in which Severian has become the Autarch, but is lamed and weak. He travels up the Gyoll to Nessus on a ship of ordinary men, and finds them comical.  He declares that his story has reached 'the interval of comedy.'

The other thing that happened was that I listened to the Partially Examined Life podcast #57, reading a Henri Bergson essay from [1900] on comedy. (This is such an enjoyable and informative podcast - if you every listen to podcasts, you should check this one out.)  Bergson argues that comedy arises from a perceiving a rigidity, an automatism that has become irrational to you.  The sense of humour begins as something darker and more predatory:

In this sense, laughter cannot be absolutely just. Nor should it be
kind-hearted either. Its function is to intimidate by humiliating. Now,
it would not succeed in doing this, had not nature implanted for that
very purpose, even in the best of men, a spark of spitefulness or, at
all events, of mischief.

Bergson points out an important social function:

Laughter is, above all, a corrective. Being intended to humiliate, it
must make a painful impression on the person against whom it is
directed. By laughter, society avenges itself for the liberties taken
with it. It would fail in its object if it bore the stamp of sympathy
or kindness.
Shall we be told that the motive, at all events; may be a good one,
that we often punish because we love, and that laughter, by checking
the outer manifestations of certain failings, thus causes the person
laughed at to correct these failings and thereby improve himself
inwardly?
Much might be said on this point. As a general rule, and speaking
roughly, laughter doubtless exercises a useful function. Indeed, the
whole of our analysis points to this fact. But it does not therefore
follow that laughter always hits the mark or is invariably inspired by
sentiments of kindness or even of justice. 

And as Severian sees the behaviour of the common men around him as automatic, and comical, he shows he has their measure and is their master.

But I think laughter would be the nicest possible face to put on a coming interval of inequality. And if there is inequality but the poor are never too poor and the rich will only treat us as a comedy, perhaps we can bump through that interval together ok.

How it ends*

Looking forward, this essay sees the end-point of our civilization:

The planet’s metabolism has altered. The new Dark Ages will be socially, politically, and spiritually dark, but the economic Moloch — mass production and consumption, destructive growth, instrumental rationality — will not disappear. Few Americans want it to. We are hollow, Berman concludes. It is a devastatingly plausible conclusion.
An interval — long or short, only the gods can say — of oligarchic, intensely surveilled, bread-and-circuses authoritarianism, Blade Runner- or Fahrenheit 451-style, seems the most likely outlook for the 21st and 22nd centuries. 

Much of the material discussed in this review is drawn from Morris Berman's three volume epic.

That is indeed what Morris Berman concludes in his three-volume survey of America’s decline: The Twilight of American Culture (2000), Dark Ages America (2006), and Why America Failed (2011). 

The articulation of the inner truth that is being worked out in our history:

Berman seeks the source of our civilization’s decline in its innermost principle, its animatingGeist. What he finds at the bottom of our culture’s soul is … hustling; or, to use its respectable academic sobriquet, possessive individualism. 

The economic Moloch (Moloch symbolises murder of infants), also named Mammon (usually symbolises Money) in the essay, and the possessive individualism.  We have singularity now, and we know it as individualism.  The true singularity would maybe cause a great union.**

Hat tip: The Dish - a great smorgasboard blog, part of my daily diet.

* 'How it ends' [Scriptshadow] is a screenplay of the end of the world in which things begin shutting down, and falling down around America, and no one wants to make the sacrifices to save it, and many are delighted to watch it burn.

**Society is like a big game of prisoner's dilemma - you can usually benefit reliably by cheating, but greater benefits are available at the higher risk of trusting. Knowing you will play forever, or even knowing that the end is not likely enough, will make an equilibrium of trust a valid play.  But if the benefits of trust are lowered steadily (by hard economic times, for example), the threshold for thinking the end has arrived is lowered too.

Later Heidegger

I've begun listening to Sean Dorrance Kelly* on Later Heidegger. Early Heidegger is his work in Being and Time, in which he believed he was doing Fundamental Ontology - really getting to the bottom of how things are. Later, Heidegger decided that it was a mistaken value judgement to call his work Fundamental and final. Not that his insight wasn't the deepest so far, to a level that shows itself as just the way things are. Early Heidegger sees the world show up through practices, recurrent patterns of behaviour that, because phenomena in the world recur, allow you to go on. These practices are all the myriad entwined techniques by which we live in the world.
Later, Heidegger saw a historical progression in the modes of life of different eras that could further illuminate what he was saying about 'Being' as background practices. The techniques of life had a tendency to aim toward or elevate a particular style or maybe a particular verb. (I'm inventing my own description here.) The ancient Greeks in the time of Homer, expected things to exist by whooshing up, staying around for a bit, and then passing away, like storms. The medieval society expected things to exist in their own createdness and to progress more and more to express God's glory, either through Christ-likeness as a Saint, or through material richness or destitution as a moral creature, or through vileness (and I must acknowledge that this category was mostly for non-Christians, and I think is reinforced the forces that became why Jewish people had such a terrible time, up to and including the Holocaust. Rejecting foreigners and refugees is pretty universal practice, and survived several epochs of other understandings of being. But the catholic church of the middle ages (AFAIK) just surfed the convenient waves of public resentment.)
Heidegger felt that the current understanding of being (which he had uncovered) was Technological - that this was a technological age, in which the defining verb should be enframing (he used a german word connected with bookcases. Everyone got confused. As usual.) The technological view sees everything by its usefulness, (cf economics utility, also Kauffman's discussion of work as constrained or channelised energy) and frames things in a 'black box' and looks for more useful alternatives. The problem for this very reasonable view is that humans are easily enframed and hence turned into blank, individual-value-free 'resources.' We lose the distinctive quality of seeing ourselves in relationship to 'being'. Instead we see ourselves as a resource and the panoply of background practices as a resource. Where all previous ages felt being had been given them, we see how unavoidably coupled to it we are. Seeing everything as resources leaves nothing for goals, or goods, that can have validity, independence, or meaning.

* SD Kelly has a lot of Dreyfusian verbal tics, for those who've heard the Dreyfus lectures.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

Men and women

Ursula K Leguin is most famous as an author of fantasy and science fiction, although she's also done some interesting academic work.  In 2010 she wrote this.  It seems fairly satisfactory to me, and the point that greater aggression and competitive instincts need to be more thoroughly subsumed in mutual respect 'in-group' seems right.  This is the thing with group selection arguments for morality.  There is almost a 'conservation of good behavior' so that it should never be too much; to construct in-group altruism, you establish the need for out-group genocide. (You can't, after all, allow interlopers inside an altruistic space to take advantage.  This is rather like the need for Hell in Christianity.  You can't say 'Yes' to humanity without saying no to mans inhumanity, or sin.)

Determinate Negation II

Is this the second time I've used that heading?

Quantum theory and information theory exist (in my head) as a sort of puddle of bedraggled ideas, tangled in with one another.  Also, Hegel's theory of conceptual structures forming as networks of 'determinate negation' as expounded by Robert Brandom, have my brain by the stem.  He explains that Hegel thinks that the reason conceptualisation can work, get real grips on the world, is that the world already shows up 'in conceptual shape.' By this he means that things are not other things. Places are not other places.  Things don't occupy identical coordinates of space-time.  They don't occupy more than once set of coordinates. Concepts or intentional content works like the world, except that what in the world is describable with 'alethic modal' vocabulary (does), in human minds applies with 'deontic normative' vocabulary (should).  An object can't have two properties from the same system of determinate negation (round and square).  A person though, can have two mental commitments (ideas) that are incompatible, although they should not - and to be a person for the most part they do not.  The information theory aspect is just that the entropy.

This article at Ars Technica reports a fascinating result from the famous double slit experiment and the first comment outlines a collection of the ways it didn't need to get any more fascinating. I feel like there is some relationship - it is as if we see the mental life of the particle/wave.  It can get into a state of entaglement, holding two or more states simultaneously in tension, but to engage with anything else the wave function collapses and fall into a determinate state.  This collapse is arbitration with exquisite fairness.

Gene Wolfe (who I haven't talked about for a while) in his 'Wizard-Knight' novels constructs a seven-layered world.  The Most High God occupies the uppermost layer (Paradise); then Elysion (home of angels including Michael), then Skai (home of the Norse gods), then Mythgarthr (the middle level, home to humans), then Aelfrice (home to the Aelf), then Muspel (home to dragons), and then Hell, the home of one styling himself the Most Low God.  In Mythgarthr, things are most determinate - human life is quite conventional in most respects.  A level above or below, and things become a little more elastic - you can realise the mountain you have travelled three days on is a Frost Giant, but then fight him.  Each level also has its own time, but that's not so important.  I love Gene Wolfe for constructing this carefully, using it thoroughly and making it richly meaningful.

For both, I imagine a U shaped graph of scale and determinacy.  At the lowest and highest level there is the possibility of superposition, a thing that for a time is permitted to have two or more properties. No, I'm losing it.  Bad enough this blog is about everything, I definitely will try not to make posts about everything from now on.

The Film Sense

There's an ad for a show at the moment in which the final few lines are young man protesting:
'I won't go back inside, I won't go back inside.'
Then the voice-over guy says 'and a shocking conclusion...'
Then a woman says 'I'm pregnant.'

Join the dots on why that conclusion is shocking...

This is an example of Eisenstein's theory of montage.  The oft-cited experiment is of a great actor of the day who was shown intercut with a meal, or a gun, or something else, and ask people to rate the mans expression.  When the intercut was food, he looked hungry.  When it was a weapon, he looked threatening.  People also mentioned that he was the greatest actor they'd ever seen, even though it was the same footage of his face in every case.  The goal of montage-school film-making is to manufacture the passage of images in a way that the mind of the watcher puts a story on them.

Here's the book.  I got it from an op-shop, pretty much by accident.

Here's a good essay/post in case you want to actually learn something, rather than my half-remembered thoughts.

Inglorious Basterds

I finally caught up with Inglourious Basterds.  Heidegger's justly famous essay on the origin of the work of art talks about a hermenutic circle (or spiral) about trying to differentiate the whole of the work from what the parts are.  It's hard to know how to break in.  Inglorious Basterds is a grindhouse revenge-fantasy on the second world war.  It's about the viciousness of the Nazis, and a vicious retribution that should make you sorry for them.  I think the way I'm going to break in is in terms of Genre.

Grindhouse, for my money, is cinema for the weak, or rather, for those who are afraid of, and need to cover up their weaknesses with a prurient fondling of shock at sex and violence. That's a hoity-toity definition for a pretty common answer to a widespread hunger, the male equivalent of mills&boon and soap tv.

Can you use Grindhouse to talk about the holocaust?  Yes, you can do anything if you like.  Tarantino has done it; and of course its auteur grind-house, very cinematic and engaging, and with the dialogue and drama deftly constructed.  The end result is an enjoyable film, a memorable film, and a film with a moral - but the three are loosely tied together. What is memorable and enjoyable is not moral. It impresses you with a point, but it makes you a worse person.

I'm now very curious about 'Django Unchained', Tarantino's next film.  It seems likely to be a counter-part of Inglourious Basterds, unsubtly ramming home the point that Slavery in the South of the USA was an engine of violence and injustice that made with South liable for unlimited violence toward justice.  When Andrew Sullivan was objecting to a lack of anti-genocide protections for social classes, I thought he was right, but that the protections should not be universal, because there have been classes for whom it might be justice - for slave traders or slave owners to go into a Gulag for life would not have been unjust. Though it might have been counter-productive.

Chess and automaticity

I have played an awful lot of chess to be as bad at it as I am. I have a chess app that sees two moves ahead, and I beat it about one time in ten. The problem is that I play intuitively, doing things that I believe will be good ideas, usually because I've done them before - they are the kind of thing I do. I long ago took the correct insight that conscious processing of all possibilities will not be powerful enough to always win, and now act as though unconscious/automatic processing will refine itself over time into an unbeatable victory engine. In fact, conscious processing is the way to begin accumulating unconscious patterns to allow deeper insight into the future. Without puzzling it out, I have not improved.

This is a bit of a bad mental habit for me, which may be related to my mother praising 'cleverness' rather than 'effort.' This was heavily reinforced by schooling in a system that required respectful behaviour and a home life that fore-armed me with ideas. I think I actually did about 5% of my assigned homework, and so my facility with everything skilled, from algebra to music to Japanese to essay composition remained almost static.

At the moment I am struggling to become a skilled researcher instead of just a magpie-minded popinjay. But this long habit of believing that effort is a sign you should just give up, because you are innately unqualified and can't become qualified is hard to break. I need to get a virtuous dopamine circle going around reading things and learning, instead of a vicious shame-spiral at not already knowing them.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

Stuart Kauffman

I recently read Stuart Kauffman's 'Investigations' (Oxford 2000)*, a series of investigative essays examining different facets of what life is, how thermodynamics and life interact, the limits of reductionist science and so on. It aims to begin a conversation about a 'general biology.' Overall, it was like my ideal internet browsing, organised in a book - lots of fascinating references, big ideas and so on.  As an example that I remember most clearly now: there have not been enough femtoseconds since the big bang that if every particle was in a protein, all the proteins of length 200 could even have existed, much less their usefulness explored.  The sparsity of material in the universe is rather like the sparsity of explored combinations in the universe - there is only a very little yet in existence. Life on earth may be a very particular example out of a huge gamut of feasible lifes.

Kauffman's main point is that we probably lack some kind of paradigm shift and associated mathematical laws that would allow us to understand the autopoiesis of life from non-life.  He thinks there will be some entailment of the second law of thermodynamics that causes complexity to accumulate and well up, for energy to cascade through equilibrium pools which auto-catalyse toward some particular structures, into self-organised criticality, a near-chaos region that is not quite chaos, characterised by 1/F (Power Law) avalanches of disorder. He is already referring to the self-organisation of dissipative systems, so it goes beyond merely that.

I think the self-organised criticality of non-reacting systems has a constant dimensionality, whereas reacting systems can escalate their dimensionality as a means of structuring the dissipation. (I'm not sure he doesn't say this - it seems obvious.) This escalation of dimensionality in complexes reminds me of that Tononi paper on integrated information theory, giving phi, a measure of consciousness from how much information is integrated from moment to moment.  Someone good at thinking, get on that.

* Written, like Brian Arthur's book, at the Santa Fe Institute.

A cryptic whine

My current screenplay project is too much for me at the moment, so I am going to post a list (senseless to all but me) complaining about problems I don't know how to solve (timely objections from anothersomething notwithstanding).

The story takes place in 2045 or so.  The tensions in the social fabric of the USA have come undone again and the US Army's heaviest casualties occur in a war with secessionists in the southern states.  Our hero, Langley, wants to get away from the front line and is guided into investigating a biotech company which is not producing biotech.  The tech in question is equipment (nano-technology etc) that lives in the body to repair it and protect it, something Army would obviously want.  The script currently owes itself the following:

• clarity about the law on nanotech. When is it grounds to kill a person and destroy their body without a trial, just for survival / disaster prevention?  What is the mechanism that does it?  Lasers?
• clarity about the devilry of the major devil.  While there is a bit of moustache-twirling, I haven't really got the relationship to Langley, York, and Troy clear in the text.  If it does get clear, do I lose the tension in subsequent scripts?
• A decent set of clues and very concrete bits of evidence.  (I dislike detective stories - I shouldn't have started one, perhaps)
• An alternative to animated 'data mining', which is realistic but terrible in a story.
• Action to carry conversation: no one is busy.  It's all a bit 'miss marple' but without even wastrel hobbies to form a background while people answer questions.
• Hell needs more setup.

Thanks for bearing with.  Now, unconscious processing, go!

A talk on gender

This seems better than a lot that we often get (basically coherent).  I think there is some merit in the epistemic doubt of saying that we can't get unmediated access biological differences in mental function or psyche (John Milbank's attack on the biopolitical fallacy), but I feel doubtful that say anthropology's massive collections of different human customs would not add up to some insight about sex through all the contradictions of the ways of doing gender.

Pandora

Whenever I'm feeling low, which happens reasonably regularly, I begin to imagine that the world is in a shape that would fit a variant of the Pandora myth - that all the ills in the world have been unleashed, and that at the bottom of them was hope.  In the original myth (as I recall it), hope is there to counteract the ills - people get sick, but maybe they'll get better.  People die, but maybe the people left will live on, remembering them, and founding families that give the lie to death overall.

But, when I'm feeling low, it seems that hope is there to give all the ills teeth. Hope is what persuades you to press your teeth to the grindstone of your suffering. Buy a house, have a family, seek out work you imagine you'll enjoy - that way the ills will have more to work on.

Perhaps you can't identify with this (I think its slightly buddhist, although getting all upset about how upsetting everything can be is not).  Let me say to you who somehow are not depressed: an Avatar sequel is almost certain.  How about now?  Avatar, but derivative. Yikes.

Anyway, to get back to feeling low - its almost always a result of being laid low by something, or realising it after a period of poor outcomes.  Finish a report that looks dumb, enter a competition and get nowhere, complete something overdue and get two more assignments in its place.  The solution is to 'take up arms against a sea of troubles' by:

• exercising;
• organising;
• making some decisions about what you care about and how to do something about it;
• go to bed earlier
• ease up on the coffee
• ease up on the lollies, pastries, peanut butter from a jar
• stop ditzing on the internet and build something good!

All of these involve a degree of hoping in a certain mode; hoping of myself and my immediately visible sphere.  And

Clive Palmer

Annabel Crabb on Clive Palmer's proposal to rebuild the Titanic.  Seriously, someone should get him to a specialist.

Game Theory

I've been listening to Yale's Ben Polak on Game Theory.  It's very good.

Here are some highlights:

• Never play a strictly dominated strategy (if given a choice).
• Look for a strategy or mix of strategies that will make your opponent's choice of strategy indifferent, and is also a 'best response' for you, and you have a Nash equilibrium.
• Evolutionarily Stable Strategies are Nash Equilibria (an ESS is an evolution game that has reached an end point - male sea elephants have to be huge to hold down a big harem and have a lot of offspring; but the non-huge bulls can sneak around among the females. The ratios of effort spent on these two strategies prove to be a Nash equilibrium).
• Sometimes more choices make your situation weaker - burning your boats or otherwise making a total commitment can increase your chance of a positive outcomes; but it is important that your adversary knows you're committed, and that it is that sort of game.
• A game known as 'battle of the sexes' assumes that two people going on a date have slightly different taste in film but would prefer to meet up, rather than not. But if they both go to their least favourite film in the hopes of meeting the other, they lose out.  What was particularly interesting was that the example 'couple' for the class exercise won out every time because the woman went to her favoured film, and the man went to her favourite film.  The traditional practice that in courtship, the effort should be on the man's side, beat the rational game rules.

Vulnerability

Brene Brown has a couple of great TED talks on vulnerability and shame and whole-hearted living.

This is the first, on vulnerability. I have talked abou this as liability.

This is the second, at TED, on shame.

An interesting distinction is that guilt is rectifiable discrepancy from society; shame is unrectifiable cut-offness from society.

Dad joke: I guess that's why Tobias Funke wears cutoffs.

Beyond serious

This weeks screenwriting lesson for me, from Pilar's podcast (search podcasts for 'on the page' in iTunes), squares exactly with Scriptshadow's judgement of this line.

The lesson is 'get enough words to produce a vivid sense*, and then you're done'.  Sentences are nice, but a lot of life and film is not done in them, and a serious, careful, complete sentence or four to describe some action, is bad writing for a movie. The script is a prospectus for a million-dollar project, but you don't get to have flashy graphs, artful color scheme and cheese. Sadly, money is not a keen reader.  It gets eye strain and annoyance really easily. It doesn't even do its own reading, so the eyestrain and annoyance have to be felt vicariously by other people without money, like me.

Let's look at some amateur writing (me.  It's me, mum.) As there's only a paragraph, and my posts are usually way longer, you probably have trouble seeing 4.5 lines as a chore.  You have to imagine reading this after reading it 800 times (its an eighth of a page, say, and a screenplay runs about 100 pages), and its only ten in the morning, and you've got eight more scripts to read.

To intro - Reeves is an old man who has been dismantling himself under the influence of a chem**.

Reeves looks down, and starts to squeal with fear and horror.  The medic places a mask over his face against his terrified shaking of his head.  He eventually relaxes, recognizing his powerlessness.  His eyes dart terrified from face to face.

How should I have written that?  Well,
a. I don't know.  That's the main thing about me.  But
b. I can tell better from worse.  Maybe.

Reeves sees himself - 

- he writhes, squeals.   

The Medic FIGHTS - masking him. 

He snaps it on - gas floods Reeves.

His thrashing subsides - eyes dart terrified from face to face.

Better?  Maybe a bit, but there still isn't flow.  The test is, are you beyond serious? Is your skill so built up, so bedded down, that you can write like you're rapping, lyrically flowing from moment to moment, giving just the sense.  Seriousness can get you so far, but you have to get the serious into the background and just leave a vivid, emotional whole.


* Gottlob Frege reference
** A Chemical, but also the script you put in the head of a Golem.

Screenplays

I have just realised what I am trying to write about in my screenplays.  This is not of great interest to the readership, but as this is the nearest thing I have to a journal, I shall jot it down.

Langley (the protagonist) is the razor edge on our relationship to the future.  We are throwing away the future - failing to agree, failing to work hard, failing, failing, failing.  Langley puts a face on that. When he kills, he kills futures, happinesses for humanity that will now never arrive.  And he does it so that things can stay the same.  The last will not be first on his watch.

We are throwing away chances because we can't believe any of them, because they are all a confusion, a superposition, of mutually exclusive realities, and the only way we know to resolve this is to disbelieve them all.  Nature is over, but we can't find a well-governed nature we can believe in, much less tolerate.

This is why I think some belief in a God as the actuality of possibilities, the something of which the universe is the nothingness (not-ing). Something that keeps the future open and prevents the collapse into nihilism is needed.  And it has to have a moral character and authority, to tell us what should become, what we ought.

Capitalism

I have no good references for this, but I think of capitalism as specifying:

How Money Uses People to Make More Money.

This definition (for me) makes the business school / economics assumption that the purpose of a business is to turn some money into more money logical, by narrowing human motivation to just their cash equivalents. Pro-capitalism positions would tend to say that this misses the concomitant fact that to make money, you have to meet a human need, but I think the meeting of the needs of the human who notionally owns the money at the expense of clients and workers for the business, tends to discourage that. The humans who 'own' the money have to serve it relentlessly or it will migrate to or get captured by other humans who can tend it more effectively. I always think of the 'Ton' in Regency England, where living off your fortune meant marrying to maintain your fortune, which meant spending enough to keep up with rich class. Every decision was warped by this one fear - will our money run out on us, leaving us to reduce our lifestyle or heaven forfend, work!

Pro-capitalist positions will also point to the virtues obtained under capitalism - the material wealth, the vigorous uptake of innovation.  These, though, are neutrals.  Capitalism would not end slavery, workhouses, introduce schooling for all children, or preserve the environment.  The benefits to human life are side effects.  The good side effects are not combated, the negative side effects are. What is defined as negative sometimes has a corollary justification to money (climate change might, universal education might now, although not before 1900), but if that corollary were convincing, money would be invested spontaneously.  Capitalism is not the summum bonum.  It has to be a part, not the whole, of your ideas of good human outcomes.  This idea might explored in 'The Darwin Economy' which I should maybe read, although I think it is more about the fact that evolutionary stable strategies in nature and Nash equilibria in business-style games are described by a single theoretical structure.  The Darwin Economy probably points out that Nash equilbria (local minima in which neither player can move to a better strategy without losing out to the other) can occur which are not nearly Pareto optimal, and suggest that we need to selectively breed (or otherwise put evolutionary pressure on) corporations and markets to edge toward Pareto optimal benignity.

There is an interesting theorist of technology called W. Brian Arthur, whose book 'The Nature of Technology' captures a lot of the true things you can say.  It would have been a better book with more Heidegger (Equipment as a starting point for understanding Human Being can't not be informative about technology), but it's still excellent.  He has put out an article recently called 'the second economy' in Mckinsey's (registration-walled), but summarised and expanded upon at theatlantic.com.  Essentially, he's pointing out that equipment 'works'.  It doesn't just increase productivity, it produces. It finishes things. The Second Economy is the automatic economy. Arguably, we've always depended on this - farming depends on the productivity of fruiting trees and plants.  But trees and plants are not doing information work, and they aren't Turing-complete in being able to work indefinitely accomplishing who knows what (is that a fair use of Turing-complete in a sentence?  Possibly not).

 This would change my original definition to:

How Money gets things done to Make More Money.

There is much speculation about the singularity, about the second economy becoming independent of the humans who think they own it.  Charles Stross' Accelerando does a wonderful job of imagining it while keeping at least one tippy-toe on the ground.  It could happen.  Well before it does, he notes, Money will migrate toward it.  Google and Facebook and Intel and so on are that beginning.  Amazon has bought a warehouse-robot factory to turn all its warehouses over to robots (rather than abuse humans into robot-form).

(One difficulty with trying to recognize this is that it might mean people don't take money seriously any more, in which case you lose the good of capitalism (anti-nepotist, results oriented, energized, innovation-attracted) with the bad.  And people are no better off, because they've migrated to thinking that (detached cool/ethical validation/family affection/etc) is the only thing worth having, and they'll put that on a pedestal until it kills them too.)

* Is that Turing-complete?  Turing-complete means a language of instructions that can articulate write, read and delete, conditional execution and repetition (loops) - perform the functions of a Turing machine and be implemented by a Turing Machine.

Empathy & Beauty

I recently did a few of the tests from Simon Baron-Cohen's work on Systematizing vs Empathizing brains.  In his research, men are biased toward systematizing, such that there is a part of the systematizing curve in which women are almost never found, occupied by 5% of men.  Similarly there is a region at the empathizing end where nearly no men exist, but 5% of women spend their lives.  There were two self-report tests which didn't seem terribly reliable (Do you often say things that offend people without realising? - I don't know - I may not realise.)  But there was also a test of looking at just eyes and reading the expression.  I scored 24/36.  Asberger's suspicion starts immediately below 22, average is 29 for men and higher for women.

I hate being bad at things, and having lacks.  I spend a lot of mental energy worrying because I am aware of times past when I lacked empathy.  I respect and value it, but by working hard I can remain only in the bottom quartile of insensitive jerks. Although I hate it, there's not much to be done.

I take some encouragement from this poem (quoted from here):

               Pied Beauty
                         Gerard Manley Hopkins

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;	5
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:	10
Praise him.

All things Counter, Orginal, Spare, Strange - 

Spare in this context I take to mean, sparingly made, made out of not quite all the parts.  As I am.

I was giving a lift and taking directions

Which took me home by a different route than we had come by. The future, always so clear to me, was like a black highway at night. But I knew what Paul Muad-d'ib would do, and I took the opportunity to be a sort of Ersatz Haderach.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

A chip off the old block

My little son is not so little.  He's 11.5kg at 9 months 90-95%ile.  He's not especially big given the families he's from, but he's big and tall enough that crawling is more of a challenge than for more compact babies.  It's reasonably important, so we're putting him on his back or tummy instead of sitting up whenever we can persuade him to stop walking around holding our fingers.

On his tummy, he tries for 10-20 seconds to crawl, makes a reasonable approximation of leopard crawling, then decides its all too hard and puts his head on his arm and weeps until rescued.  So exactly like me.

Stereotypes and imperfect knowledge

Thinking again about the question of gender difference, I keep being driven back into stereotypes drawn from salient experience. Quantity and intensity both matter to the codified memory that is predicted onto people of particular types. Predictive-memory (as per Jeff Hawkins) means the world we perceive is continually being primed for recognition as things we're familiar with it. If I meet a person I haven't met before, I* am able to divine an incredible amount about them ('brief glimpses' research) because we are all trading in types all the time. We don't just fall into types, we clothe ourselves in them.

So stereotypes are not simply self-protective defences of the authoritarian mind; they are massively information-rich guides to convention and behaviour. That's not the safe, independent thing it sounds like though - you are your world existingly, and if this is your map of the world, its also you. When it seems inaccurate, your very self becomes and feels unstable. You are plunged into disconnectedness - shame, world-collapse.

Sometimes that needs to happen. Your stereotypes of winning and losing need to be transformed from those you formed in childhood, because they're wrong, whether you think it doesn't matter or it does. But your stereotypes of male and female aren't (entirely) like that. They've accumulated to manage differences between the sexes and here I would go a little way with Freud and say that the structure of mother and father is formatively important. These stereotypes pre-exist the self. Indeed, I think given the amount of evidence linking sensitivities to dna, they pre-exist the individual person (phylogenetic more than ontogenetic).

So I think the bible uses stereotypes as part of its 'now but not yet' structure of things demonstrated and achieved at the cross, but not universally accomplished. We know that 'in christ(ianity) there is neither male nor female' and in heaven there is no marriage, but here on earth, and even in church, both still matter. So I read the proscriptions on women teaching as something like the forbidding to eat meat offered to idols if that's difficult for anyone. Unless everyone is conditioned to tolerate it, it will be very threatening without being productive. There isn't a stereotype-free mode of 'being' that we could shift to. (This assumes that the patriarchy is pretty universal (which it was in the world of the new testament), but it isn't. I think it might be something like a Nash equilibrium though, that societies flourish (or at least grow aggressively) by playing it and it spreads by competition-contagion. Maybe the promise of 'neither male nor female' is coming to fruition in our time in the liberal refusal to impose on anyone's self-definition.)

I doubt anyone is very impressed by this. It certainly has some weaknesses. When my little brother was about three, he was with my mother in the street when something happened that caused a total meltdown - a bus went by, driven by a woman. One of the few things he felt sure of had given way, and he was enraged. So there's an amusing story as compensation.

*actually not so much me as everyone.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7