Although it's half-life will doubtless be shorter than that of Werner Heisenberg's fame, today, a few weeks after the conclusion of the terribly popular broadcast melodrama called Breaking Bad, its flame burns brighter for sure. Hence the need to specify.
I had an idea on waking this morning that made me downright happy. Buzzword-compliant, informative, and entertaining web portal idea that would, along the way, make the world a better place, if only a little at a time. An hour after I got up and started perambulating, I felt it necessary to write it down, but, literally, as I opened a notepad to write it down, it faded to white. I am sure if I rifle through my mental trash, I'll recover it, and now I'm thinking it must be good if it is so resistant to captivity.
I don't think I'm the only one, and this is not the first time this has happened. I think it's part of the creative process. Corralling an idea without breaking it is no simple task. Ideas are born of other ideas shamelessly cavorting together, and the change in mindset that happens when instead of letting them cavort you ask them to come inside, wash their hands, and do their homework, changes their state completely. This is not a bad thing, but it does make the things elusive to capture.
Werner Heisenberg is no less than the creator of the matrix, the father of quantum physics. His uncertainty principle, though, is what really has made him a household name. Everything that is a good formal mathematical model expressed in lay terms is a misrepresentation, because the very richness of language works directly against logical rigor. Nevertheless, the basic idea of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is that the more you try to pinpoint where something is, the less certain you can be about where it is going. Heisenberg only articulated the heuristic principle, and the resulting inequalities are often confused with the observer effect, which states that 'watching' a phenomenon may actually alter the outcome of an event. The literary symbolism of that observation is fairly irresistible, and Heisenberg is a pretty cool name, so there you have it - a short history of everything that is not topical about Heisenberg in popular culture.
Monday, October 28, 2013
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Advice on running the Bay to Breakers
About 25* years ago I ran the Bay to Breakers, San Francisco's iconic foot-race. After a long spell not blogging, I thought the better of it and decided to start small, so here is an answer I posted to a recent question on Fluther about training for the race:
In the participatory spirit of San Francisco life, I was taken with a desire to take part in this celebration of off-beat solidarity at least once. I trained specifically for the Bay to Breakers in a month, after not running for years, by sprinting furiously up and down Bernal Heights, where I lived at the time, every day. My training was impeccably week-end warriorish, but no matter. I managed to finish the race in under an hour, and, according to the results, passed some 30,000 people in the process!!
That last statement should raise an eyebrow or two. The point is that the Bay to Breakers is less of a race and more of a melee the further back you get from the seeded runners. Although it is seven miles long, you end up running about 10 miles, most of it in a zig-zag pattern, to work your way around the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, naked extraterrestrials, rolling bondage platforms, prams carrying large hairy men, and what-not. What’s worse, I was exhausted crossing the finish line, but with 50,000 people behind me, I could not stop for another 100 yards or so!
All the above advice is good. What I would hasten to add is this: If you want to actually run it without running a challenging obstacle course, you need to be there really, really early. Only then will you be able to run about seven miles.
*Note - in the interest of full disclosure - when I posted the original answer on Fluther, I guesstimated it was 15 years ago. After a quick nap and a Centrum, I recalculated... it was closer to 25 years ago, around 1987.
In the participatory spirit of San Francisco life, I was taken with a desire to take part in this celebration of off-beat solidarity at least once. I trained specifically for the Bay to Breakers in a month, after not running for years, by sprinting furiously up and down Bernal Heights, where I lived at the time, every day. My training was impeccably week-end warriorish, but no matter. I managed to finish the race in under an hour, and, according to the results, passed some 30,000 people in the process!!
That last statement should raise an eyebrow or two. The point is that the Bay to Breakers is less of a race and more of a melee the further back you get from the seeded runners. Although it is seven miles long, you end up running about 10 miles, most of it in a zig-zag pattern, to work your way around the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, naked extraterrestrials, rolling bondage platforms, prams carrying large hairy men, and what-not. What’s worse, I was exhausted crossing the finish line, but with 50,000 people behind me, I could not stop for another 100 yards or so!
All the above advice is good. What I would hasten to add is this: If you want to actually run it without running a challenging obstacle course, you need to be there really, really early. Only then will you be able to run about seven miles.
*Note - in the interest of full disclosure - when I posted the original answer on Fluther, I guesstimated it was 15 years ago. After a quick nap and a Centrum, I recalculated... it was closer to 25 years ago, around 1987.
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Burocracia Emocionante...
Un día lleno de aventuras en la frontera - tenía que salir de Nicaragua porque la visa de la camioneta vencía hoy. Muchos extranjeros que viven aquí se dan esa vuelta cada 90 días por la visa personal, o cada 30 por la visa del automóvil. A los aduaneros les carga la movida; la llaman la vuelta del perro. La lata es que técnicamente uno debe egresar por 72h, pero con $10 por acá y $10 por aya, generalmente se puede dar la vuelta en un día, lo que vale la pena, porque Costa Rica es carísimo, así que pasar tres días aya significa derrochar 15 días de gastos en Nicaragua.
La salida de Nicaragua fue fácil. Una hora de papeleó, fumigación, etc. Pasar por 'la aguja', entregar el comprobante de importación de la camioneta, y ya. Entrando a Costa Rica hay que primero sacar visa, lo que es fácil, y luego navegar por un mar de camiones hacia la aduana automotriz, que forma parte del Ministerio de Hacienda. Ahí se sacan copias del seguro, y luego se hace cola para pasar por la ventanilla donde ingresan tu vehículo al sistema.
Pasaporte, licencia, titulo, seguro, y comprobante del último egreso, con copias. Me presenté luego de una entretenida espera. Hay una tres filas de sillas, y está principalmente lleno de camioneros el recinto. Hoy, la fila de camiones esperando para cruzar la frontera estaba más corta que ayer - solo 20 kilómetros de camiones! Antes de ayer, llegaba a Rivas la cola - 40km. Habiendo rebasado todo eso en el camino, manejando 20km en el carril izquierdo y lanzándome a la berma cada vez que venía algún camión, bus, colectivo, o carreta en el sentido contrario, esperar en 'fila' una hora par pasar a la ventanilla parecía como si nada. Lo cómico es que ahora tienen estas tres filas de asientos, y hay una orden social muy divertida. Para guardar turno, los camioneros se organizan, y se sientan en orden, de modo que cada vez que se despacha uno y hay una ventanilla libre, todo el mundo se para, y se mueve una silla a la derecha.
Hasta hace poco, esto era una especie de terraza cubierta. Nunca faltaba el calor insoportable, ni la polvareda, ni los bichos. Ahora es una moderna sala de espera con sus sillitas y aire muy acondicionado. El aire se siente rico cuando uno recién llega todo acalorado. Pero la espera suele ser larga, como hoy, y luego de 20m uno empieza a propiamente cagarse de frío. Solo queda aguantarse y congelarse.
Cuando llegó mi turno, me tocó la primera ventanilla, donde estaba atendiendo una señora que, me habían informado los camioneros a mi alrededor, es una real puta. Bueno, yo la conozco, y en general ha sido bien profesional, cortés, y eficiente conmigo. No le di mucha importancia a las advertencias. Pero hoy hubo un problemita. Miró ella mis documentos por un instante, ingresó al sistema, y luego fue como si tuviese ella un foco de alarma en la cabeza! Se alteró, y me informo que no pensaba dejarme pasar por ningún motivo con mis datos en ese estado. Parecía que el ultimo funcionario que me dio la salida no la ingresó al sistema.
Casi perdí la camioneta debido a este problema con el sistema Tico, que al parecer borró mi ultima salida de Costa Rica a Nicaragua - según ellos, la camioneta había estado en CR por un més sin permiso, y me cobraban $1300 de multa por devolvérmela! Por suerte me puse las pilas, volví a pata, sin pasaporte y simplemente explicando el problema a los pacos aduaneros, a Nicaragua; hablé con el viejo de "La Aguja" - la caseta que representa el control aduanero final, y lo convencí que me dejara revisar sus archivos, encontrar el documento de mi ultimo ingreso a Nicaragua, y sacarle copia.
Armado con aquél papel, volví al ministerio de hacienda Tico, y cara de palo me metí adentro de la oficina por la puerta de los empleados y fui a buscar al gerente. Le conté lo que pasaba, y creerás que fue muy amable, hizo un par de llamadas, me hizo esperar 3 horas, y por fin, gracias a mi comprobante Nica, me pasó un documento corregido? Llegué a la ventanilla con este documento, pedí mi ingreso de nuevo, el funcionario que me tocó esta vez se paró de su silla y literalmente fue a gritarle a su jefe, pero el señor, muy calmado, lo mandó a darme el documento corregido, y recuperé la camioneta!
Fueron horas de tensión, pero todo salió mas o menos bien, solo que tuve que perder el día y dejar la camioneta en Costa Rica por otros dos días. Vuelvo pasado mañana a buscarla, y se acabó el cuento!
Ahora me tocaba volver a San Juan, pero ya eran las 7, así que el paseo económico - colectivo a Rivas y luego otro a San Juan, ya no era posible, porque el último colectivo a San Juan de Rivas sale mas o menos a las 7:30. Sin falta, alguien se presentó. Gabriel es un joven taxista, muy amable y profesional, y se imaginó que cobrarme el impuesto de ojos azules no sería problema, solo que yo no tengo los medios que son la norma de los ojos azules. Negociamos un rato, y quedamos en que era un pésimo trato para los dos, pero que me llevaría hasta San Juan por $20 US. Siendo que eso es menos del doble del costo de combustible, me parecía sensato, pero me dolía de todos modos. Por suerte, apareció Xavi, un joven Francés que venía llegando de Costa Rica armado con largos palos de malabarismo con antorchas a cada lado.
Compartimos el viaje y nos entretuvimos conversando acerca del robo que representan los proyectos de energía renovable para este país, con sus prestamos dedicados a devolver el dinero a contratistas extranjeros y ahogar al país en cuotas con interés.
Llegué a mi departamento a descubrir que había dejado las llaves en la camioneta, y que el dueño de la propiedad había salido, así que tuve una larga búsqueda hasta que salió su señora que me oyó hablando por teléfono con el hermano tratando de ubicar a Paco, y me pasó las llaves de ellos. Por fin, en casa.
Tengo sueño...
La salida de Nicaragua fue fácil. Una hora de papeleó, fumigación, etc. Pasar por 'la aguja', entregar el comprobante de importación de la camioneta, y ya. Entrando a Costa Rica hay que primero sacar visa, lo que es fácil, y luego navegar por un mar de camiones hacia la aduana automotriz, que forma parte del Ministerio de Hacienda. Ahí se sacan copias del seguro, y luego se hace cola para pasar por la ventanilla donde ingresan tu vehículo al sistema.
Pasaporte, licencia, titulo, seguro, y comprobante del último egreso, con copias. Me presenté luego de una entretenida espera. Hay una tres filas de sillas, y está principalmente lleno de camioneros el recinto. Hoy, la fila de camiones esperando para cruzar la frontera estaba más corta que ayer - solo 20 kilómetros de camiones! Antes de ayer, llegaba a Rivas la cola - 40km. Habiendo rebasado todo eso en el camino, manejando 20km en el carril izquierdo y lanzándome a la berma cada vez que venía algún camión, bus, colectivo, o carreta en el sentido contrario, esperar en 'fila' una hora par pasar a la ventanilla parecía como si nada. Lo cómico es que ahora tienen estas tres filas de asientos, y hay una orden social muy divertida. Para guardar turno, los camioneros se organizan, y se sientan en orden, de modo que cada vez que se despacha uno y hay una ventanilla libre, todo el mundo se para, y se mueve una silla a la derecha.
Hasta hace poco, esto era una especie de terraza cubierta. Nunca faltaba el calor insoportable, ni la polvareda, ni los bichos. Ahora es una moderna sala de espera con sus sillitas y aire muy acondicionado. El aire se siente rico cuando uno recién llega todo acalorado. Pero la espera suele ser larga, como hoy, y luego de 20m uno empieza a propiamente cagarse de frío. Solo queda aguantarse y congelarse.
Cuando llegó mi turno, me tocó la primera ventanilla, donde estaba atendiendo una señora que, me habían informado los camioneros a mi alrededor, es una real puta. Bueno, yo la conozco, y en general ha sido bien profesional, cortés, y eficiente conmigo. No le di mucha importancia a las advertencias. Pero hoy hubo un problemita. Miró ella mis documentos por un instante, ingresó al sistema, y luego fue como si tuviese ella un foco de alarma en la cabeza! Se alteró, y me informo que no pensaba dejarme pasar por ningún motivo con mis datos en ese estado. Parecía que el ultimo funcionario que me dio la salida no la ingresó al sistema.
Casi perdí la camioneta debido a este problema con el sistema Tico, que al parecer borró mi ultima salida de Costa Rica a Nicaragua - según ellos, la camioneta había estado en CR por un més sin permiso, y me cobraban $1300 de multa por devolvérmela! Por suerte me puse las pilas, volví a pata, sin pasaporte y simplemente explicando el problema a los pacos aduaneros, a Nicaragua; hablé con el viejo de "La Aguja" - la caseta que representa el control aduanero final, y lo convencí que me dejara revisar sus archivos, encontrar el documento de mi ultimo ingreso a Nicaragua, y sacarle copia.
Armado con aquél papel, volví al ministerio de hacienda Tico, y cara de palo me metí adentro de la oficina por la puerta de los empleados y fui a buscar al gerente. Le conté lo que pasaba, y creerás que fue muy amable, hizo un par de llamadas, me hizo esperar 3 horas, y por fin, gracias a mi comprobante Nica, me pasó un documento corregido? Llegué a la ventanilla con este documento, pedí mi ingreso de nuevo, el funcionario que me tocó esta vez se paró de su silla y literalmente fue a gritarle a su jefe, pero el señor, muy calmado, lo mandó a darme el documento corregido, y recuperé la camioneta!
Fueron horas de tensión, pero todo salió mas o menos bien, solo que tuve que perder el día y dejar la camioneta en Costa Rica por otros dos días. Vuelvo pasado mañana a buscarla, y se acabó el cuento!
Ahora me tocaba volver a San Juan, pero ya eran las 7, así que el paseo económico - colectivo a Rivas y luego otro a San Juan, ya no era posible, porque el último colectivo a San Juan de Rivas sale mas o menos a las 7:30. Sin falta, alguien se presentó. Gabriel es un joven taxista, muy amable y profesional, y se imaginó que cobrarme el impuesto de ojos azules no sería problema, solo que yo no tengo los medios que son la norma de los ojos azules. Negociamos un rato, y quedamos en que era un pésimo trato para los dos, pero que me llevaría hasta San Juan por $20 US. Siendo que eso es menos del doble del costo de combustible, me parecía sensato, pero me dolía de todos modos. Por suerte, apareció Xavi, un joven Francés que venía llegando de Costa Rica armado con largos palos de malabarismo con antorchas a cada lado.
Compartimos el viaje y nos entretuvimos conversando acerca del robo que representan los proyectos de energía renovable para este país, con sus prestamos dedicados a devolver el dinero a contratistas extranjeros y ahogar al país en cuotas con interés.
Llegué a mi departamento a descubrir que había dejado las llaves en la camioneta, y que el dueño de la propiedad había salido, así que tuve una larga búsqueda hasta que salió su señora que me oyó hablando por teléfono con el hermano tratando de ubicar a Paco, y me pasó las llaves de ellos. Por fin, en casa.
Tengo sueño...
Friday, March 25, 2011
Just Another Day in Paradise
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| View over downtown. |
My Mac was overheating, so I tossed it in the refrigerator to cool down, got on my bicycle, and went shopping for food. I got to the store, and there was an acquaintance there parked in the middle of the vegetable section in front of a fallen sack of beans recounting some horror to a rapt audience. Since she didn't acknowledge me, I didn't interrupt. I just worked my way around the sullen employees and the gaggle of Americans listening to the tragedy, grabbed some tomatoes, and moved on. After getting some milk and a small bag of bleach, I checked out.
The bags are a funny thing. Many liquids are sold in plastic bags here. Sturdy little bags full of mostly dairy or cleaning products. I don't even want to think right now about the endocrine-disruptors leeching out of these bags into foodstuffs and the products used to clean everything. I guess a low life-expectancy is a self-perpetuating thing. It is very comical, nonetheless, to see the Jinga game people play gently pulling a plastic baggie of milk from a cooler stacked high; one has to marvel at what must be a really high percentage of these baggies that make it home in the bottom of a grocery-bag jostling in a truck driving miles home on deeply rutted roads.
At the checkout counter, my bill adds up to C$82.26. The leading and only supermarket here, where I am, is owned by Wal-Mart, so they are no strangers to sucking the very life out of local capital, and one way they do this is by having centesimal prices in a town where no one else accepts currency smaller than 1/2 a Cordoba (C$), and a country where as far as I know there is no C$0.01 coin. So when your bill adds up to fractional units no one has currency to deal with, a rounding rule is applied by the register, and you get fractionally less back than you are owed, but only sometimes. I don't understand the rounding rule, but my intuition, and my prejudice about Wal-Mart, tell me that it is a calculated way of gaining a few extra pennies by charging x.x4 and returning x.x5 instead of x.x6.
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| The kitchen at the Blue Marlin restaurant. |
I blew a gasket when the cashier's drawer opened and after grabbing a C$10 bill, he started counting out C$9.75 worth of annoying coins. I said: This is ridiculous! Why did you refuse my C$0.50 coin, when you're giving me back a handful of coins now, some much smaller? There was a queue forming up behind me. It was not comfortable. Nevertheless, it seemed like a principle to disallow that bullshit at this precise moment. He was befuddled at my annoyance. I think I said some dirty words in the process of explaining the arithmetic once again. The panic button got pushed, and a manager promptly appeared. The cashier told his story, I told mine, and the manager instructed the cashier to take my C$0.50 coin & give me back C$20.25.
I never exchanged another word with the manager, except to thank him, but I got back C$0.01 more than I was owed. Sadly, I'm guessing a situation report from the manager to management will be forthcoming and reprimands all-around for disrupting the amicable atmosphere of that dungeon. Even more sadly, I think the cashier had no nefarious intent to cause me a small bureaucratic annoyance. He just really could not do the math.
After watching the BBC documentary on "The Century of the Self" describe in detail the application of Freudian theories on the subconscious to propaganda and the control of masses, both by states and private businesses, reading about Situationists this past week left my head spinning. "The Society of the Spectacle" by Guy Debord was the pinnacle of that line of thought, and held to be largely responsible for impelling the general wildcat strikes of May, 1968 in France. Since I had been watching & studying The Century of the Self, reading about Situationism was just icing on the cake. I had to stop when I got to the concept of recuperation. The very idea that evolution can render such an evil plan into play is both delicious and terrifying. So much of what I thought was good and honorable resistance to capitalism may be actions that are easily harvested by a machinery more able than any individual,and ultimately benefitting bad guys. So I stopped reading forward, and have been reading laterally and thinking about it ever since. If subversive icons, like Che Guevara, become commodity images to be silk-screened into profitable t-shirts made by forcibly sterilized slaves in Chinese sweat-shops, then what of subversion?
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| Textures detail. |
Semana Santa is coming up, and possibly that bears a little explanation. "Holy Week" is Easter. It is also "Spring Break". In a Communist Catholic surfing mecca, it is easy to see how that might create some opportunities and some tensions simultaneously. The bottom line is that unless your'e very diplomatic, or loaded like the Spring Break revelers, you're sleeping in the street. Most month-to-month renters get kicked out, since places will fetch for just the week the same amount of money they generate in about 50 days normally. I found a place in a small villa of charming yet rustic apartments with great views, and wi-fi. After many extended conversations with the manager, I finally nailed a room for next month & made an arrangement for Semana Santa; a place to sleep within a price-range I can afford doing death-defyingly underpriced syndicated blogging and off-shored technical contract work. Nevermind the scorpions, ants, wasps, and parasites. It is a God-send.
I got back to my house. Since the water was running, which only happens part of the day, I grabbed a shower & did some dishes. Then I grabbed the computer out of the fridge, enjoyed the cool whisps issuing from it, and plugged it in. Along the way, I could not resist getting my infrared thermometer to take a few readings. What is a "cool whisp" in this land? The walls, the floor, and the furniture were all mostly around 89°F 30m after the sun had gone down. The computer, just out of the fridge and feeling huggably cool, was at 82°F. It's pretty warm here. When the temperature drops below 80°F, you wake up, and have to go hunting for a top-sheet.
Friday, March 11, 2011
The Strange Science of Fear
There was a terrible earthquake this morning in Japan, centered around Sendal, in the Miyagi prefecture. There is not much to say about the destruction the earthquake and subsequent Tsunami rought in the immediate region. Japanese television helicopter shots are awe-inspiring. Obviously, the disaster is of unspeakable proportions, and hard to understand in a human scale. Initial reports of a missing passenger-train should give you an idea of the apocalyptic disaster that took place there today. Further reports that it was big enough to shift the earth's axis 8cm paints a picture of cataclysmic proportions until we consider that this represents a shift in mass of approx. 10^-9, a number that is a little hard to visualize.
Looking around, I saw that early this morning the national newspaper of Nicaragua predicted an arrival time of 4:30pm today for the tsunami, and the fear started. It was about 9am when trucks started driving around broadcasting emergency preparedness and an evacuation plan, and the 4:30pm expected arrival time for the tsunami, detailing how the beach area must be evacuated and people should congregate along escape routs in higher ground.
When I heard about it, I looked up predicted arrival times and did my own calculations. Assuming a fairly constant rate of travel, the tsunami, traveling about 510mph, would have hit San Juan del Sur between 2:30pm and 3:42pm - well 45m shy of the time when the government suggested hyper-vigilance.
Well, it's 5pm now. I had a stroll through town 90m ago and the locals thought I was crazy, while Europeans were interested in my calculations and seemed to agree that it was pretty obvious that the nothing of much-ado notoriety had already passed by the time everyone was starting to run around like headless chickens. Still, despite advertised fatalism, real fatalism, or disregard permeated the city - a few very nervous people remained tense, trying to fgure out where to seek safety, with others not breaking step from their daily routine.
I came back home, trained a camera on the beach at the bottom of the street just in case something interesting happened, and proceeded to make myself some linguine with a chile cabro / garlic while-sauce, and write this.
In an era of up-to-the-minute reporting, and of desperation over Google page-ranks, is it possible that mejor media outlets and the blogosphere are equally committed to the "If it bleeds, it leads" philosophy of editorial integrity?
Here we are - in the next 3 hours a giant wall of water could theoretically engulf us, but there is really no rational analysis that would lead to that conclusion. Would there be a possibility that this is all subliminal brain-washing: a government bent on showing they were willing to help when they knew that it was a lot of nothing?
Looking around, I saw that early this morning the national newspaper of Nicaragua predicted an arrival time of 4:30pm today for the tsunami, and the fear started. It was about 9am when trucks started driving around broadcasting emergency preparedness and an evacuation plan, and the 4:30pm expected arrival time for the tsunami, detailing how the beach area must be evacuated and people should congregate along escape routs in higher ground.
When I heard about it, I looked up predicted arrival times and did my own calculations. Assuming a fairly constant rate of travel, the tsunami, traveling about 510mph, would have hit San Juan del Sur between 2:30pm and 3:42pm - well 45m shy of the time when the government suggested hyper-vigilance.
Well, it's 5pm now. I had a stroll through town 90m ago and the locals thought I was crazy, while Europeans were interested in my calculations and seemed to agree that it was pretty obvious that the nothing of much-ado notoriety had already passed by the time everyone was starting to run around like headless chickens. Still, despite advertised fatalism, real fatalism, or disregard permeated the city - a few very nervous people remained tense, trying to fgure out where to seek safety, with others not breaking step from their daily routine.
I came back home, trained a camera on the beach at the bottom of the street just in case something interesting happened, and proceeded to make myself some linguine with a chile cabro / garlic while-sauce, and write this.
In an era of up-to-the-minute reporting, and of desperation over Google page-ranks, is it possible that mejor media outlets and the blogosphere are equally committed to the "If it bleeds, it leads" philosophy of editorial integrity?
Here we are - in the next 3 hours a giant wall of water could theoretically engulf us, but there is really no rational analysis that would lead to that conclusion. Would there be a possibility that this is all subliminal brain-washing: a government bent on showing they were willing to help when they knew that it was a lot of nothing?
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Stability in the Middle East
The fertile crescent has been a seat of political unrest ever since the beginning of what we recognize as history. Archeological records and early prototypes of "social media", in stone, attest to that pretty clearly. Of course one of the great sticking points of modern society is an absolute commitment to a singular monolithic and monotheistic idea of what is real and of what is right. The broad divergence in the particulars of one person's reality versus another's creates a funny cognitive dissonance, particularly between people who live substantially different realities while maintaining open communication channels, like conservatives versus liberals in the US. It is interesting that the validity of these differing points of view is often contested on a wrestling-ring where reason and principle take a decided back-seat to the weight of media in favor of one point or another.
The confusing thing about that conservative versus liberal divide today is that we have people like Hillary Clinton, rabidly defending the improprieties that enable an empire to extract capital from the conquered, such as when she "condemned" WikiLeaks on charges of endangerment that she knew at the time to be false, and the very same administration, which has supported a mockery of representative government in Egypt for decades, now calling for an orderly transition and preaching moderation, as if they had credibility or authority there. They have no such thing with the people there. What they have is money, and lots of it. Egypt has been an American base of operations second to few in the area for a long time. Today, Egypt is a huge recipient of US foreign aid, at $1.99B a year. This money, of course, is largely earmarked to be spent on US goods (mostly killing machines), and has been used to maintain strategic security for fuel-supplies, protect American industrialist investments, and keep opposition leaders incarcerated, among other things.
There is revolution in the air in the Middle East, which seems about ready to cast off the imperial yoke of the US that nurtured and trained and funded the Taliban, Saddam Hussein's regime, and the many cross-border civilian massacres that Israel glibly carries out in the region, like Sabra and Shatilla, and Hebron, to name but a few. It started with a popular uprising in Tunisia, which is of little strategic value to our modern Roman Empire, but in a few short weeks the seeds of a people intent on recovering some sense of self-determination have spread like Roundup-ready seed in the mid-west. I can't possibly pretend to know enough about the middle-east to understand the political machinations in play, so take this for what it is - the opinion of someone who reads the news once in a while and remembers.
The whole American discourse about moderation is especially infuriating because this is coming from the country that has the highest percentage of its population, and the most people, incarcerated in the world. A country where exit-polls disagree violently with election results, yet the vote-tallying is done by machines that have legal protections from accountability, and where there are many laws making someone accused get treated as guilty unless they can prove their innocence by presenting evidence they are legally barred from accessing. In other words, the US is pretty far from democracy today, but they sort of have a trademark on the word, and on the awesome power of repetition through media. So what is 'preaching moderation' really getting at?
Moderation, in this context, seems to be simply a code word for stability in a place where justice and democracy are hard to come by. Mind you, there already is a brand of democracy in the area that people living in the US do not enjoy. Can you imagine what your life-expectancy would be if you went with a bunch of your friends and barricaded Times Square? Brave people have taken to the streets, blood has been shed, and there is a lot of tension in the air about how much more blood will flow during these demonstrations, but I have the distinct impression that people in Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, or Chiapas for that matter, protesting thus in the streets, have a noticeably longer life-expectancy there than counterparts might have in the US. In September of 2010 Peter Cunliffe-Jones published an interesting analysis of the difference between Nigeria and Indonesia. Starting out equally troubled in the scope of his analysis, things have taken a substantially more democratic turn in Indonesia. His conclusion, loosely paraphrased, is that citizens of Indonesia took to the streets relentlessly until political change was necessary to appease them, while in Nigeria dissent mostly equalled death.
Could it be that the presence of totalitarian American puppets is what has been keeping the Middle East so troubled and unstable for the past 30 years? Imagine a middle-east with no American army-bases or re-labeled missiles, bombs, satellites, F-16s, or monthly cheques doing the bidding of US investment through these proxies. For me, it is a troublesome concept because I have precious few heroes, and Jimmy Carter, one of them, would have been instrumental in architecting modern instability & repression in the region. But such is the history of the South. I might not be so opinionated about it, except that I have much direct experience. I went to private high-school in the deep south, and learned there that as a Chilean I was as much a foreigner as "immingrants" from the mid-west. More recently, I worked for Al Gore, and got to see first-hand the staggering difference between the democratic principles theoretically espoused by his political philosophy and the completely cavalier disrespect for ethics, legality, and workers' rights in a company he heads.
The number of people engaged in full-time prognostication about what will happen in the coming months in the Middle-East is staggering, but one thing is for sure. People who need some semblance of democracy have not seen a friend in the US for decades, and rightly so. It is very possible that an ouster of US influence would help the region's governments become more representative of people than of corporations, as has been slowly but surely happening in Latin America despite the best efforts of the United Fruit Company, and its love-child, the CIA.
The confusing thing about that conservative versus liberal divide today is that we have people like Hillary Clinton, rabidly defending the improprieties that enable an empire to extract capital from the conquered, such as when she "condemned" WikiLeaks on charges of endangerment that she knew at the time to be false, and the very same administration, which has supported a mockery of representative government in Egypt for decades, now calling for an orderly transition and preaching moderation, as if they had credibility or authority there. They have no such thing with the people there. What they have is money, and lots of it. Egypt has been an American base of operations second to few in the area for a long time. Today, Egypt is a huge recipient of US foreign aid, at $1.99B a year. This money, of course, is largely earmarked to be spent on US goods (mostly killing machines), and has been used to maintain strategic security for fuel-supplies, protect American industrialist investments, and keep opposition leaders incarcerated, among other things.
There is revolution in the air in the Middle East, which seems about ready to cast off the imperial yoke of the US that nurtured and trained and funded the Taliban, Saddam Hussein's regime, and the many cross-border civilian massacres that Israel glibly carries out in the region, like Sabra and Shatilla, and Hebron, to name but a few. It started with a popular uprising in Tunisia, which is of little strategic value to our modern Roman Empire, but in a few short weeks the seeds of a people intent on recovering some sense of self-determination have spread like Roundup-ready seed in the mid-west. I can't possibly pretend to know enough about the middle-east to understand the political machinations in play, so take this for what it is - the opinion of someone who reads the news once in a while and remembers.
The whole American discourse about moderation is especially infuriating because this is coming from the country that has the highest percentage of its population, and the most people, incarcerated in the world. A country where exit-polls disagree violently with election results, yet the vote-tallying is done by machines that have legal protections from accountability, and where there are many laws making someone accused get treated as guilty unless they can prove their innocence by presenting evidence they are legally barred from accessing. In other words, the US is pretty far from democracy today, but they sort of have a trademark on the word, and on the awesome power of repetition through media. So what is 'preaching moderation' really getting at?
Moderation, in this context, seems to be simply a code word for stability in a place where justice and democracy are hard to come by. Mind you, there already is a brand of democracy in the area that people living in the US do not enjoy. Can you imagine what your life-expectancy would be if you went with a bunch of your friends and barricaded Times Square? Brave people have taken to the streets, blood has been shed, and there is a lot of tension in the air about how much more blood will flow during these demonstrations, but I have the distinct impression that people in Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, or Chiapas for that matter, protesting thus in the streets, have a noticeably longer life-expectancy there than counterparts might have in the US. In September of 2010 Peter Cunliffe-Jones published an interesting analysis of the difference between Nigeria and Indonesia. Starting out equally troubled in the scope of his analysis, things have taken a substantially more democratic turn in Indonesia. His conclusion, loosely paraphrased, is that citizens of Indonesia took to the streets relentlessly until political change was necessary to appease them, while in Nigeria dissent mostly equalled death.
Could it be that the presence of totalitarian American puppets is what has been keeping the Middle East so troubled and unstable for the past 30 years? Imagine a middle-east with no American army-bases or re-labeled missiles, bombs, satellites, F-16s, or monthly cheques doing the bidding of US investment through these proxies. For me, it is a troublesome concept because I have precious few heroes, and Jimmy Carter, one of them, would have been instrumental in architecting modern instability & repression in the region. But such is the history of the South. I might not be so opinionated about it, except that I have much direct experience. I went to private high-school in the deep south, and learned there that as a Chilean I was as much a foreigner as "immingrants" from the mid-west. More recently, I worked for Al Gore, and got to see first-hand the staggering difference between the democratic principles theoretically espoused by his political philosophy and the completely cavalier disrespect for ethics, legality, and workers' rights in a company he heads.
The number of people engaged in full-time prognostication about what will happen in the coming months in the Middle-East is staggering, but one thing is for sure. People who need some semblance of democracy have not seen a friend in the US for decades, and rightly so. It is very possible that an ouster of US influence would help the region's governments become more representative of people than of corporations, as has been slowly but surely happening in Latin America despite the best efforts of the United Fruit Company, and its love-child, the CIA.
Sunday, January 16, 2011
The Acorn Doesn't Fall Far From the Tree
Until the 15th century, the concept of authors' rights was basically non-existent. If you came up with a great oral poem, and it was repeated, your stock could only go up. Books were a painstaking labor, and each one owed much of its value to the very act of its construction.
In the 1490's Guttenberg was a businessman who had struggled with many ideas, mostly around the reproduction of some divine essence or other, such as light from mirrors. After many attempts at fame and fortune, and many impasses, he came up with movable type. Nevermind that in China, movable type was in use as early as 1045. It is worthwhile to note that a big profit-machine for Gutenberg was the mechanical duplication of Papal indulgences. At that time, there were few challenges to the 'authenticity' of the pardons from God that he was selling. Six centuries later, digital communications make the reproduction of any given original work already present in a distributable medium really trivial.
The past few decades have seen many changes in the ability to reproduce printed or recorded material. From the very start of this revolution lawyers acting on behalf of capitalists have been at the forefront of a maelstrom of misinformation, intimidation, and repression in the interest of "protecting the profits" of their clients, while profiting themselves. At the same time, middlemen in the various publishing industries - books, sound, and video - have been gaining a larger and larger share of the revenue generated by product with a market for reproductions. An interesting corollary to this, but far outside the scope of this little diatribe, is the down-market luxury label.
The recording industry has made a joke of itself in the past 30 years with middleman-sponsored organizations that are famously inept at trying to cow the masses into compliance to preserve a profit-machine. The first outstanding example of the tomfoolery that would define this industry is the British Phonographic Industry's campaign against the rising popularity of cassette tapes: "Home-Taping is Killing Music". 30 years later, it looks like a bunch of bullshit, yet the same message is replicated incessantly by producers and distributors who have as much capital as lack of interest in seeing how grass-roots diffusion has helped popularize their product. Weasel-words like "war" applied to the American invasion of Iraq, or "piracy" applied to the sharing of books, music, or video without re-purchasing of a license, have been terribly effective in misinforming the general public about cause-and-effect, and a mainstream media driven by a profit-motive have been exceptionally compliant in spreading corporate propaganda about how this must be bad because they can't clearly see the revenue arising from these interactions, despite strong evidence that musician revenues have actually risen in the age of file-sharing.
Philosophically, the question of reproduction of ideas is a tough one, and a legal system, which operates fundamentally to preserve inequities in capital-distribution, is hardly equipped to be standard-bearing for civilization in untangling the complex question: Where do you draw the line between an idea infecting a mind from a distribution means, like a licensed book, as "intended" by the seller of the idea, and that idea being plagiarized, because a mechanical device was used in its transmission? If I quote Shakespeare in a declaration of love, I will, apparently, not get sued. So far, it is legal for me to make a copy of anything I want in my mind and reproduce it ad nausiem in other people's minds through any means I choose except literal reproduction. Curiously, this bit of law is quite ill-formed, because I can recite ideas from most any book I have read without getting in trouble, yet if I sing a song authored by someone else, from memory, I am liable for royalties. Worse yet, if I hand over a mix-tape of songs that speak my heart's desire to the object of my love, I am liable for imprisonment and a $250,000 fine. unless the mix tape is of nature sounds recorded by a chim, since the law has been interpreted to specifically not protect work created by "non-humans" What?
Derivative works open up a whole new can of worms. Why does not Andy Warhol's "Campbell's Soup Cans" owe royalties to the Campbell Soup Company? Is it just that the privilege of being a media-darling made Warhol deserving of a different standard in human rights? Chalk that one up to the inequity preserved by the system that attempts to regulate and profit from communication between you and your neighbor - the legal system. I jumped onto the tail end of the internet boom in San Francisco in 2000, only to work very hard on some beautiful ideas about context that were absorbed in the crash by Dell in the interest of figuring out how to recommend alternative laptop configurations to shoppers. The frenzy of invention was a lovely thing to behold while we tackled fascinating problems about codifying some small aspects of cognition, and developed cool ways to range result sets in purely set-theoretic ways, using predictive methods and thus avoiding a lot of enumeration inefficiencies.
Needless to say, there was a lot of coffee involved, and so, I thought it would be a nice update to that Warhol piece to do a piece called "dot-com", consisting of 40 Starbuck's cappuccino cups. It didn't take long to collect 40 photogenic used Starbucks cup. I photographed them individually, intending to silk-screen each worked image onto a small canvass so as to reproduce the Warhol piece without cheapening it. The unspeakable treachery of a bad marriage put a stop to many creative projects, and this one got swept away in the maelstrom. Nevertheless, had I done the piece, and had it, for some reason, gained some notoriety, would Starbucks have been as forgiving with an amateur like myself as Campbell's was with the juggernaut of Andy Warhol? And, more to the point, would I really have been taking advantage of their fair due in copyright by making a statement referencing their image? How does that differ substantially from an image of Christ on a cross infringing on the Catholic Church, or an image of the American flag infringing on the US Government?
There's no question that a cultural cannon is based on precisely the use of one idea to inseminate another. If it were up to the lawyers, all of literary history would be based on a cost-per-epiphany model. This absurdity was highlighted for me recently, when I started looking into the Golden Record. Back in 1977, the US launched a satellite into deep space intended to carry a message from our civilization to whoever might run across it. The satellite naturally included this magical capsule of media, containing 115 images, followed by a series of sound recordings etched on at 16 2/3 rpm. You know - a plate with a groove in it. The Golden Record is a thing of beauty on many levels, as it contains a bundling of information painstakingly selected by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, who fell in love with each-other in the process of putting it together. In a way, this is quite the Narcissists' mix-tape. There are speeches, images, and pieces of music up through modern times. So this record was cast adrift into the far reaches of the universe for any random unannounced civilization to find out there in the next few dozen millenia. Beautiful thought.
Naturally, reading about the glyphs on the record, and its contents, I got curious to have a listen. I looked around, and found it. Apparently Warner News Media "published" it in 1978 and re-issued it as a CD in 1992. So a private media concern is distributing it. That might be OK, except for one little thing. There is no public-domain image available on this earth of this recording. It's all Copyrighted.
So I guess that means that any sentient beings out there who decipher it, etch it in their brains, and barf out briquettes that include the contents of their memory, are liable for copyright infringement. So the millennial universal message sent into the deep reaches of space is "meet us and get sued!", and it's entrapment at that because I'm pretty sure there are no copyright symbols or FBI piracy warnings on the entire craft, let alone on the disk. On reflection, it's quite a telling message to send into outer space.
In the 1490's Guttenberg was a businessman who had struggled with many ideas, mostly around the reproduction of some divine essence or other, such as light from mirrors. After many attempts at fame and fortune, and many impasses, he came up with movable type. Nevermind that in China, movable type was in use as early as 1045. It is worthwhile to note that a big profit-machine for Gutenberg was the mechanical duplication of Papal indulgences. At that time, there were few challenges to the 'authenticity' of the pardons from God that he was selling. Six centuries later, digital communications make the reproduction of any given original work already present in a distributable medium really trivial.
The past few decades have seen many changes in the ability to reproduce printed or recorded material. From the very start of this revolution lawyers acting on behalf of capitalists have been at the forefront of a maelstrom of misinformation, intimidation, and repression in the interest of "protecting the profits" of their clients, while profiting themselves. At the same time, middlemen in the various publishing industries - books, sound, and video - have been gaining a larger and larger share of the revenue generated by product with a market for reproductions. An interesting corollary to this, but far outside the scope of this little diatribe, is the down-market luxury label.
The recording industry has made a joke of itself in the past 30 years with middleman-sponsored organizations that are famously inept at trying to cow the masses into compliance to preserve a profit-machine. The first outstanding example of the tomfoolery that would define this industry is the British Phonographic Industry's campaign against the rising popularity of cassette tapes: "Home-Taping is Killing Music". 30 years later, it looks like a bunch of bullshit, yet the same message is replicated incessantly by producers and distributors who have as much capital as lack of interest in seeing how grass-roots diffusion has helped popularize their product. Weasel-words like "war" applied to the American invasion of Iraq, or "piracy" applied to the sharing of books, music, or video without re-purchasing of a license, have been terribly effective in misinforming the general public about cause-and-effect, and a mainstream media driven by a profit-motive have been exceptionally compliant in spreading corporate propaganda about how this must be bad because they can't clearly see the revenue arising from these interactions, despite strong evidence that musician revenues have actually risen in the age of file-sharing.
Philosophically, the question of reproduction of ideas is a tough one, and a legal system, which operates fundamentally to preserve inequities in capital-distribution, is hardly equipped to be standard-bearing for civilization in untangling the complex question: Where do you draw the line between an idea infecting a mind from a distribution means, like a licensed book, as "intended" by the seller of the idea, and that idea being plagiarized, because a mechanical device was used in its transmission? If I quote Shakespeare in a declaration of love, I will, apparently, not get sued. So far, it is legal for me to make a copy of anything I want in my mind and reproduce it ad nausiem in other people's minds through any means I choose except literal reproduction. Curiously, this bit of law is quite ill-formed, because I can recite ideas from most any book I have read without getting in trouble, yet if I sing a song authored by someone else, from memory, I am liable for royalties. Worse yet, if I hand over a mix-tape of songs that speak my heart's desire to the object of my love, I am liable for imprisonment and a $250,000 fine. unless the mix tape is of nature sounds recorded by a chim, since the law has been interpreted to specifically not protect work created by "non-humans" What?
Derivative works open up a whole new can of worms. Why does not Andy Warhol's "Campbell's Soup Cans" owe royalties to the Campbell Soup Company? Is it just that the privilege of being a media-darling made Warhol deserving of a different standard in human rights? Chalk that one up to the inequity preserved by the system that attempts to regulate and profit from communication between you and your neighbor - the legal system. I jumped onto the tail end of the internet boom in San Francisco in 2000, only to work very hard on some beautiful ideas about context that were absorbed in the crash by Dell in the interest of figuring out how to recommend alternative laptop configurations to shoppers. The frenzy of invention was a lovely thing to behold while we tackled fascinating problems about codifying some small aspects of cognition, and developed cool ways to range result sets in purely set-theoretic ways, using predictive methods and thus avoiding a lot of enumeration inefficiencies.
Needless to say, there was a lot of coffee involved, and so, I thought it would be a nice update to that Warhol piece to do a piece called "dot-com", consisting of 40 Starbuck's cappuccino cups. It didn't take long to collect 40 photogenic used Starbucks cup. I photographed them individually, intending to silk-screen each worked image onto a small canvass so as to reproduce the Warhol piece without cheapening it. The unspeakable treachery of a bad marriage put a stop to many creative projects, and this one got swept away in the maelstrom. Nevertheless, had I done the piece, and had it, for some reason, gained some notoriety, would Starbucks have been as forgiving with an amateur like myself as Campbell's was with the juggernaut of Andy Warhol? And, more to the point, would I really have been taking advantage of their fair due in copyright by making a statement referencing their image? How does that differ substantially from an image of Christ on a cross infringing on the Catholic Church, or an image of the American flag infringing on the US Government?
There's no question that a cultural cannon is based on precisely the use of one idea to inseminate another. If it were up to the lawyers, all of literary history would be based on a cost-per-epiphany model. This absurdity was highlighted for me recently, when I started looking into the Golden Record. Back in 1977, the US launched a satellite into deep space intended to carry a message from our civilization to whoever might run across it. The satellite naturally included this magical capsule of media, containing 115 images, followed by a series of sound recordings etched on at 16 2/3 rpm. You know - a plate with a groove in it. The Golden Record is a thing of beauty on many levels, as it contains a bundling of information painstakingly selected by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, who fell in love with each-other in the process of putting it together. In a way, this is quite the Narcissists' mix-tape. There are speeches, images, and pieces of music up through modern times. So this record was cast adrift into the far reaches of the universe for any random unannounced civilization to find out there in the next few dozen millenia. Beautiful thought.
Naturally, reading about the glyphs on the record, and its contents, I got curious to have a listen. I looked around, and found it. Apparently Warner News Media "published" it in 1978 and re-issued it as a CD in 1992. So a private media concern is distributing it. That might be OK, except for one little thing. There is no public-domain image available on this earth of this recording. It's all Copyrighted.
So I guess that means that any sentient beings out there who decipher it, etch it in their brains, and barf out briquettes that include the contents of their memory, are liable for copyright infringement. So the millennial universal message sent into the deep reaches of space is "meet us and get sued!", and it's entrapment at that because I'm pretty sure there are no copyright symbols or FBI piracy warnings on the entire craft, let alone on the disk. On reflection, it's quite a telling message to send into outer space.
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