February 24, 2005

the hours, they slip away

file under: my life

the internet and the computers that feed from it are many things, but they are one thing above all else: temporal vampires. they suck time like a pornstar.

it evaporates. you blink, and two hours have passed. maybe three. maybe five. sometimes that time was well spent. other times, not.

we pay a price for technology. use it wisely and you benefit. use it poorly, and you're sucked dry.

Posted: 02.24.05 at 1:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

February 20, 2005

thomas koner - nuuk

file under: music

i first heard thomas köner on a 1994 darkwave ambient compilation called ambient isolationism. he contributed 'kanon (brohuk),' and while i enjoyed it, it didn't captivate my attention as much as the tracks by :zoviet*france and Lull. a few years later, i was at a local favorite indie record shop (Aquarius Records on Valencia), and i spotted a special köner post–vinyl–only CD-release of an album called 'unerforschtes gebiet' (which translates roughly as 'uncharted territory'). based on their recommendation, i picked it up.

i couldn't stop listening to it. in fact, i still can't stop listening to it. although now, i probably listen to Nuuk a lot more.

...

[to get to the bottom line without having to read all this drivel, click here.]

köner is held up as one of the pre-eminent soundscape minimalists. his particular brand of dronology would probably put most people to sleep. for others, it might inspire nightmares. for me, it's near perfection in sound, the minimalist ambient analog to bohren & der club of gore (possibly the lamest band name ever for a group that does dreamy, lush jazz–inspired soundscapes à la angelo badalamenti).

my fascination with this kind of music is intense, but i'd be hard–pressed to explain it. i fall into these expansive soundscapes that are more atmosphere than rhythm, context that generates imagined experience. for me, they fit eno's definition of ambient music perfectly: music that can either be actively listened to, or ignored.

Nuuk is my latest köner acquisition. his CDs are hard to come by; it's a niche market. this latest cost a pretty penny (actually, 2700 of them); it's a re-release of something he did back in 1997. his inspiration was a series of webcam recordings from Nuuk, Greenland. of course, at the time i bought this CD+DVD release, i didn't know Nuuk was the capital of Greenland. i only found out when i got curious – why did he call this CD 'Nuuk'?

this is the kind of thing the Web is perfect for – look up an obscure, specific term and find out instantly what it is: the capital of Greenland – its largest city, in fact, with a population of roughly 14,000.

why was he so interested in Greenland? isn't it just a big frozen rock out there in the Atlantic ocean somewhere? i suppose under some limited world views, that might be true. under others, Greenland might be seen as an other–worldy landscape of fierce, cold beauty. check out the pictures below for a few slices of this other world (taken from carl obling's photo site). you might also read some analysis on köner's web site (apologies if this feels like mental masturbation).

after reading a bit about its history, and seeing these breathtaking photos, i can't wait to go. it looks like it might be a very, very cold version of New Zealand (without the tourists and the Hollywood jerks). i mean, think about it – a country whose capital has a population of 14,000? doesn't that seem a little odd?

the bottom line
local record shop leads to obscure music purchase leads to interest in Greenland leads to [unknown futures]. who can say where my interest in Greenland will go? imagine, though, a pre–Internet release of this record (actually, its original release might qualify as just that). how many people know what (or where) Nuuk is? how many people would even bother to look, if they didn't have the Internet a few clicks away?

ok. maybe not that many.

my point is that things are connected. everything is connected. we don't see the connections, but they are there. and sometimes, now, we can follow them, and they will lead us to uncharted territories...

Posted: 02.20.05 at 9:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

February 14, 2005

v-day

file under: my life

perhaps, if i am lucky, she will be my valentine again

Posted: 02.14.05 at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

February 9, 2005

newsflash: intelligent design is not a scientific theory

file under: thoughts about things

i am just about at my wit's end. the intelligent design (ID) 'debate' has reached the point where i can't hold my tongue any more. it seems that every other day, i hear a new story in the news about some court case related to pulling evolution out of public schools. it's not only sad...it's frightening.

...

wired ran an article about intelligent design a few months back. all things considered, i'd say they were pretty fair to the people in the ID community (although the Wired writer was clearly pro–science). while i applaud their tolerance, i think it is undue: the people in the ID community are religious zealots with a clear political agenda. in the ideal scenario, their efforts would be politely ignored. unfortunately, that's not going to happen. it's going to take communication, education, and activism to make these people stop trying to push their agenda in America's educational system.

intelligent design (ID) is defined (see Intelligent Design: The Scientific Alternative to Evolution) as follows:

ID is a scientific theory that intelligent causes may have played a crucial role in the origin of the universe and of life and its diversity. It holds that design is empirically detectable in nature, and particularly in living systems. ID is an intellectual movement that includes a scientific research program for investigating intelligent causes and that challenges naturalistic explanations of origins that currently drive science education and research.

i could not possibly deconstruct this "theory" any better than the analysis of intelligent design at the Skeptic's Dictionary.

here's my summary of their basic conclusions:

• ID is not a scientific theory because it does not rely an objectively testable hypothesis. intelligent design is a perfectly valid philosophical (metaphysical) belief system. it can neither be proved nor disproved, and as such, it should not be taught as a scientific theory. it is not a plausible alternative to natural selection, and anyone who pits the two against each other is confusing the argument.
• no matter how much ID proponents call their empirical observations 'science,' it doesn't make them so
• God and religious belief are completely compatible with the theory of Darwinian evolution; ID defenders have created a false dilemma by saying that the two are inconsistent

ID proponents are very careful to avoid the G-word in their arguments. it's not about God, or creationism vs. natural selection, they say. it's about the darwinian materialist paradigm and its shortcomings, and the need for a measure of objectivity and the presentation of alternative scientific theories that "ask the right questions."

nonsense. absolute nonsense. this is about politics; it's about religion in the classroom; it's about indoctrination; it's about misinformation. anyone who pretends otherwise is lying.

and yet people fall for it.

if you don't think it's about religion, let's do a little gedankenexperiment....imagine the situation where the ID proponents win their battle – they win the right for ID to be taught in schools. suppose i were a high school teacher, and i decided that right after talking about darwin and natural selection, i'd shift gears and talk about intelligent design, except i'd take it one step further. the first question out of student's mouths would probably be, 'so who or what was the designer?' i'd say the following:

"that's a great question...evidence actually shows that the Earth was seeded by an advanced alien species. easter island, the great pyramids, crop circles, landing strips for spaceships – they all point to a race of superbeings that set life loose on this planet. the thing we still can't figure out is why our designers would make so many people so dumb."

snarky comments aside, i suspect the ID people, and anyone who would vote for them to be a part of your local school board, would be unhappy were i to make reference to alien creators. after all, everybody knows somebody just made all that stuff up about the pyramids and everything so that leonard nimoy would have something to talk about on 'in search of....'

addendum 1: i would be the first to defend people's right to religious expression (provided it doesn't actively harm another person). as i stated above, creationism and religion are NOT a priori incompatible with darwinism (or science in general). if people want to promote their faith, it can be done in a church or synagogue or mosque. it should not be done in public schools, not in this country.

addendum 2: if people want to teach or discuss intelligent design in school, do it in a class about philosophy (e.g., metaphysics). there's no reason the discussion can't occur, provided it (1) doesn't promote a single religious belief system, or (2) doesn't claim to be a scientific theory that competes with the theory of evolution.

addendum 3: darwinian evolution is a theory (backed by a great body of hard, objective scientific evidence that is not strictly empirical). it's not a perfect theory, but that doesn't mean it's wrong in toto. newtonian mechanics can't explain lots of things that quantum mechanics does, but that doesn't mean it's wrong, either; the two are quite compatible, acutally. by a similar token, general relativity is a theory. quantum mechanics is a theory. the big bang is a theory. all realms of scientific endeavor are composed of theories, hypotheses, and experiments, with one exception: mathematics (the only science that could be said to represent objective truth). even then, gödel's incompleteness theorems showed that there's some fuzzy stuff going on in math.

my point is that no one in intelligent design is going after the big bang, claiming that textbooks should put it forward more clearly that this is "only a theory" and that someone might have actually designed the universe. why is that? why stop at evolution? why not take on every realm of scientific endeavor that could be conceived (however incorrectly) as incompatible with a creation myth?

Posted: 02.09.05 at 7:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

the things you find on your car

file under: thoughts about things

i found a small piece of white paper on my car windshield one day.

it's been sitting on my office shelf for months. i kept it for some reason; throwing it away out of hand just didn't seem right. now i'm cleaning and can't bring myself to cast it into the great recycling beyond without sending its echo across the digital ether.

maybe it's nothing. maybe it's profound. i suppose it could be either. or both.

Posted: 02.09.05 at 4:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

February 4, 2005

death by digital proxy

file under: technology

a few weeks ago, i ceased to exist.

...

at least, that's what one of my friends thought. like other content junkies who want maximum information with minimum distraction, he uses a syndicated content aggregator (like bloglines or feeddemon or netnewswire) to chow as many headlines as his brain can handle. (for a refresher, see my synopsis below: the wonderful world of blog syndication)

this is all fine and well, even good — possibly great. it's a useful strategy for handling information overload, while steering clear of many of the landmines on the info superhighway (e.g., spam from mailing lists you never read, web sites full of advertising you don't care about, etc.). the problem comes when the content oil stops coming down the syndicated pipeline, as it were.

let's take my site as an example. suppose you subscribed to my site. you go to your aggregator every day to check the latest from the blogosphere (ack), and you notice after awhile that i'm just not writing any more. it's been six months, and not a single post. hmm. interesting. looks like ryan stopped writing; i wonder why?

the problem with our brave new world of mediated experience is that we draw conclusions from unreliable digital proxies. if an RSS aggregator says i'm not writing, then to a lot of people, i'm not writing. maybe i moved to alaska and fell off the grid. who knows? a phone call or an email or a trip to my web site would clarify, but in a world where the sands of time are coated with teflon, it's just too much effort.

and so, from a limited digital perspective, i ceased to exist.

cause of death? carelessness

in my case, my feed died due to sheer carelessness: in my headlong rush to redesign, and to clean up the architectural mess that was causing me to lose sleep, i altered the directory structure on my site. two things resulted: (1) a wonderful simplification in the way my blog files were organized (which no one but me cares about), and (2) a dead RSS feed. dead simply because the file containing my feed moved from one place to another.

sorry...[geek shudder]...my bad.

for reference, here are the proper URLs for the syndicated version(s) of this site (pick your XML format of choice):

• Atom 0.3
• RSS 1.0
• RSS 2.0

the emergent properties of technology–mediated experience

this might seem like a problem that will affect only the weeniest of the techno weenies. i don't think it's that simple. mediated experience is giving birth to unexpected things; it will affect more and more people as time passes.

the Wikipedia defines an emergent property as follows:

An emergent behaviour or emergent property is shown when a number of simple entities (agents) operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviours as a collective. A system made of several things can host properties which the things themselves do not have...[snip]...Emergent properties arise when a complex system reaches a combined threshold of diversity, organisation, and connectivity. The property itself is often unpredictable and unprecedented, and represents a new level of the system's evolution. The complex behaviour or properties are not a property of any single such entity, nor can they easily be predicted or deduced from behaviour in the lower-level entities.

the internet and everything digital attached to it (e.g., browsers, blogging applications, and RSS aggregators to name just a few) can be viewed as a system of relatively simple (ahem) entities. unpredictable things are starting to happen as we combine and recombine all of the parts of this system, and as we use them in ways no one could have imagined. this is obvious. what i think is less obvious is that our human (social) experiences are becoming a part of this system, and they are being affected as a result.

as we rely more and more on technologies to mediate our experience, we subject ourselves to the vicissitudes of digital systems, and more importantly to what their agents tell us. quotidian changes (like moved files or dead servers) can have broad consequences (both visible and invisible). my RSS feed dies due to a moved file, a friend concludes i am no longer writing, and we lose touch for four months. how would our lives have been different if that hadn't happened? maybe he would have read a particular entry in my blog that sparked a thought that led to an action that caused an event that changed the course of his life (even in the simplest way). this wasn't possible, though, because his RSS aggregator led him to a wrong conclusion.

we suffer and benefit from our reliance on digital proxies. we suffer for their inaccuracies; we suffer because we can't always interpret what they're saying; we suffer for the laziness they engender. at the same time, they enable communication and interaction that wouldn't otherwise be possible; we are richer because of them.

whether or not someone reads my blog is a small, immaterial thing. how many of these small things does it take, though, to have broader social consequences? after all, great events may shape the world, but not without the million small events that make them.

where do we go from here?

we create the proxies; this isn't the matrix and there's no malevolent AI running around trying to do us in through addiction to technology. we are the ones actively mediating our experience. maybe we do it because the benefits seem to outweigh the costs; maybe it's just a matter of laziness. in either case, it seems we would be wise to really think about what we're doing, because at some point, the costs will be too high, and there will be no going back.

...

the wonderful world of blog syndication

a synopsis of syndication
syndication is a method of providing content on a periodic basis to a set of interested readers (or other content providers, who subsequently redistribute). this is usually done with news, but it translates quite nicely to other things. the application of syndication to blogs is simple — anybody can "subscribe" to this blog and get quick access to all the latest headlines (and maybe more).

how syndication is done with blogs
any syndicated blog provides one or more feeds. each feed is really just a Web link to a text file that contains various information about the blog in question (latest headlines, excerpts, author, etc.). every time the blog gets updated, so does the feed. all you need is the address (URL) of the feed, and something that knows how to read the feed, and you're in business, reading blog headlines and digesting the blogosphere like so much digital chicken.

really simple, right? that's why the most popular data format for feeds is called RSS (which stands for Really Simple Syndication, among other things). a few different formats exist (each with benefits and drawbacks); by the way people argue about this stuff, you'd think they were talking about religion. developers regularly get pissy about RSS 0.93 vs. RSS 1.0 vs. RSS 2.0 vs. Atom vs. snerd feebler's really cool syndication format (SFRCSF). you can safely ignore this discussion for the most part (i do; i'm hoping the people smarter than me eventually sort it out and then share their wisdom quietly in the form of stuff that just works).

why bother? who cares?
syndication and feeds make it easy to cover a lot of ground on the web. if you subscribe to 100 feeds (from 100 Web sites), you can pretty easily scan the headlines from all of those sites in 10-15 minutes, depending on how much they publish (this doesn't include any time you might spend reading complete articles you find along the way). so, getting lots of content is one benefit (although cable TV is a clear counterexample to the more–is–better way of thinking). the other nice thing about syndication is that (at this point) it contains no advertising; it also doesn't require you to share your email address to get the syndicated content (it's a pull technology, where you grab what you want, rather than a push technology, where content is pushed to you via email, for example).

technobabble about dead feeds

you'd think that this problem of dead feeds wouldn't be a big deal. we're smart; why not build a better RSS mousetrap so that when a feed disppears, the feed reader figures out if it just moved, or if it's actually dead? good question. there seem to be at least two technical problems:

problem 1: RSS auto-discovery is hard
it's not easy to automagically figure out what the feed is for any given Web domain. in some cases, like yahoo! news, there's more than one feed, which makes it pretty much impossible without human intervention to say which feed disappeared. as a result, if a feed disappears, there's just no simple, automated way to look around its parent domain to see if it moved or if it's indeed dead as a digital doornail. (jeremy zawodny has a good summary of RSS auto-discovery issues ).

problem 2: if you move your feed, telling everyone is hard
with a Web site, it's easy to put up the digital equivalent of a "We've moved!" sign. i wasn't able to locate a universal method for doing this for an RSS feed (read this discussion on feed redirection to see just how nuts this whole thing gets).

Posted: 02.04.05 at 11:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)