lisp service

This is the old blog

2007-12-20T18:22:00.000-08:00

I don't blog here anymore. The new blog is here.

I have a small book here.

Thank you.

A List for Summer

2007-06-04T10:48:00.000-07:00

June, July, and August, you will be used to these ends:

1) Do this blog again, but differently. Notes written from an odd locale sorta thing.
2) Sew the clothes that need sewing.
3) Read two books for my thesis.
4) Visit the zine archive.
5) Fix the CCM: new stem, headset & bars, maybe SPD pedals. New front tire. New brake, for sure.
6) Infinite Jest?
7) Find a new fiction writer I can appreciate.
8) Bike to Duluth.
...to be continued...

The curiosity cabinet

2006-11-29T15:13:00.000-08:00

I'm not posting what I said I would, but this is better--an excuse to link to an article from Cabinet magazine about curiosity cabinets that I really like. (Go there for images!) Be warned--this post is from a school paper.

The curiosity cabinet, popular during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is a microcosm for the study of a larger, concomitant shift wherein an initially aesthetic appreciation of natural phenomena became a scientific endeavor to classify and define. This change paralleled the changes brought about by Newtonian physics and the rise of science, changes that affected, among many other things, both how and where we look for truth. Science became the preferred "how," and a nature whose truths are accessible to scientific method became the "where." Rather than look for truths inherent in nature, Nietzsche, Koestler, Hesse, Arbib, Kövecses and others argue for a reality of contingent truths constructed by humans, a mythos that is, as Robert Pirsig says in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, "a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues" (317). The everyday act of constructing reality through metaphor becomes an artistic act, one that relies on an aesthetic appreciation of similarities to create the network of meaning and relationships that is our reality. It is also a rhetorical act, one defined by probability rather than certain truth, and one that implicates us as creators of the very causality and reality science once defined as unaffected by human involvement.

The claim that "all is metaphor" represents a thorough departure from the ideology defined by the science formed up to and during the 17th century ---to be an inquiry, first by Aristotelian deduction, then by induction, into nature in order to discover its fundamental truths. As Hesse and Arbib characterize it, "In the seventeenth century, the rise of science was accompanied by the conception of an 'ideal language' that would enable us to read off from the 'book of nature' the true science that exactly expresses reality" (149). The universe was seen as a book humans could read, given we could divine the proper (that is, logical) methods for reading its text. Science was the chosen system of methods for doing this, and this choice represents a calcification of values that even today seem established, a priori, obvious--indisputable. As Hesse and Arbib argue, the seventeenth-century myth of inherent truths in nature discoverable by humans lives on in the nineteenth-century project of a universal logic, a formal analysis of language that takes for granted fixed, stable meanings (150). Within such an analysis, there is little room for metaphor as anything more than decoration, so metaphor is afforded no more status than mere decoration. Wherever there is the notion of fixed meanings, metaphor, with its quixotic displays of novel meaning, will always be anomalous, deviant, difficult to systematize, and thus relegated to an innocuous outpost that is even inferior to aesthetics.

At the time when Liebniz was searching for a language that corresponded exactly to the language in which the text of nature was written, the curiosity cabinet represented visually the contemporary shift from an aesthetic, haptic understanding of nature to a logical, categorical, and ultimately textual understanding. Prefigured by the Wunderkammern (wonder chambers) of the Renaissance, curiosity cabinets were collections of rare, curious, beautiful, and valuable objects that were for the most part nature's dead: dried, stuffed, preserved, bottled and skeletal (Olalquiaga "Object Lesson/Transitional Object"). They represented at first wonder at nature, over time control and categorization of nature, and finally a conquer of nature through the repetition of (and perhaps ritualization of) organizing, naming, labeling, and categorizing natural phenomena.

Curiosity cabinets came to resemble texts, filled as they were with systems of organization and displayed in an increasingly linear way behind glass, rendering them two-dimensional and discouraging any sensory involvement beyond sight. The immediate accessibility of exhibition was transformed into an esoteric system, which suggested that "truth" was not immediately apprehensible but required study, initiation, and knowledge of particulars. "Natural history was no longer a matter of surface and exteriority, and therefore of mere aesthetic arrangement and disposition, but rather one of depth and interiority in the empirical sense. Admirative joy gave way to autopsic glee" (Olalquiaga "Object Lesson/Transitional Object"). Curiosity cabinets were no longer about the clutter and curiosity of the Renaissance Wunderkammern but about systematic inquiry, and inquiry was no longer about looking but about studying, learning the boundaries of categories, reading nature's text--no matter that nature's text was ordered, defined, and ultimately written by humans.

Brain Maps, Icons & Indices, THE END.

2006-11-08T20:17:00.000-08:00

"So anyway, like I was saying" is part introduction, part resignation concerning a debate I've addressed obliquely but hope to illustrate a little more bluntly here. But I've resisted roughhandling it so far, this little argument, because roughness begets dichotomous, angsty things I want nothing to do with, no way. I don't want to see this intricate argument turned out and pried apart. And I certainly don't want to see it solved. Some things, particularly this sort of debate, lose to the wastes of resolution what made them meaningful all along: an ability to exist outside strict categorization, to remain unnamed.

But to keep an air of inscrutability about this business, I won't yet address this thing directly. Indirectness and uncertainty -- in fiction, these often lead to revelation of identity and knowledge. There's Box Man, the narrator of Kobo Abe's The Box Man, who lives and moves about Tokyo in a cardboard box he outfitted with one-way windows and little air holes and hooks. A chapter near the end is titled "In His Dream the Box Man Takes His Box Off. Is This the Dream He Had Before He Began Living in a Box or Is It the Dream of His Life After He Left It...?" Ambiguous 'its'...ambiguity abounds. So too in Virginia Woolf's Orlando, where "box" is physical appearance and literature the frame for the contexts Orlando's many guises suggest. That unity can be achieved via opposition and divisibility is the idea that disguise and change make clear, especially in something like Dhalgren, an ode to mutability and who-the-hell-am-I meanderings that arrive by departure from any pretense to a coherent story. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the same people keep appearing as different people, and in this time-bound cycle there's the sense that while individual crusades will fail, the answers each is after are somehow contained in an overarching and messy and glorious thrust toward...who knows. It contains that answer, too.

It's in this light I want to suggest that science relies on metaphor -- whether admittedly or not -- whenever it makes claims about the outcome of experiment. A recent article illustrates this nicely with its suggestion that we'll soon be able to experiment on simulations of bacteria rather than on bacteria itself (itsselves?). The reason? We already know all there is to know about bacteria -- it's a closed system, so modeling it is less complicated than modeling something like the brain, about which much is still unknown. As the article suggests, models are becoming experimental subjects, proving valid at least one instance of the annoying postmodern claim that science really just ends up investigating its own constructs. That aside, what give me hope is the fact that the human brain, the unknown that it is, allows debates like this one to sprawl and mutate and get absolutely no closer to resolution on this coordinated thrust toward who the hell knows. Where it's headed doesn't so much matter, does it?

What to expect

2006-11-07T20:21:00.000-08:00

Soon: A last post about brains.
And then: What happened when a lecture on the Ptolemaic universe and theism inspired a daydream about aliens.

Brain Maps, Icons & Indices, continued

2006-10-13T15:41:00.000-07:00

A representation of any process seems, paradoxically, more abstract and removed from reality until time is visually accounted for--nevermind that time is probably one of the most abstract concepts we've devised for ourselves to deal with. Very briefly, the history of brain-imaging techniques shows a progression from direct observation (sawing into the skull and prodding), to observation via static x-ray images, to static MRI-imaging, to SPECT images (also static, and revelatory of only appearance and not function at the time of the image), to PET images (reconstruction of imagistic "slices"), to functional imaging (depictions of the brain as it's working), to various still-experimental techniques of analyzing the brain from within (such as tiny "devices" like bacteria that could sense the localization of blood flow to a region of the brain and follow it there to record). Overall, the progression is from image-as-representation (icon) to image-as-diagnostic tool (index). The important change from the static to the functional representation is the addition of time--and the corresponding but implicit assumption that time implies causality.

It's difficult to look at a time-series progression of images of the brain without importing some causality from one image to the next. (Really, this is the simple principle that accounts for the magic of those early-animation flip-books.) Especially when a series of brain images depicts a "real-time" event like a movement of the arm, for example, it's almost irresistibly easy to regard the image as the event's equivalent. However, it might be more conceptually sound to regard it as no more than an analogy. ("No more than" should not lessen the usefulness of the analogy, though.)

An analogous rather than a causal link is useful for both practical and metaphysical reasons. Practically, it maintains the distinction between brain and brain image, between object and exploratory method. If the interest of science is objective observation, it should at least focus some of that observation on its own methods, and any initial conflation or blurring of important distinctions might make science blind to itself and as such a rather unwieldy beast. Metaphysically, to accord an analogous relationship to the time-series image of the brain and the brain itself at least leaves room for a distinction between mind and brain, which (it has been argued*) is conflated by increasingly precise time-series images of the brain without a corresponding increase in accuracy.

My summary of the argument is: scientists are much more precise than they are accurate. Overly precise images of the brain might give the mistaken impression that we know more than we do. For instance, a time-series of a brain showing an arm movement might give us very precise information about the brain during segments of this event, and, along with the illusion of causality, this precision might suggest that the cause of the event--the impetus for movement--is discernable. When really, we might be looking at the wrong thing entirely--or at the thing in the wrong way entirely.

*This was Prof. Alan Gross' argument in a lecture of his I recently attended. This post owes much to his lecture and to the audience's questions during the lecture.

Tbc, again...

Brain Maps, Icons & Indices

2006-10-05T21:09:00.000-07:00

There are certain things we take for granted about science, that paradigm of objectivity. For one, there's its objectivity; that science is not objective seems a vague and fundamental contention whose proof seems as obvious and elusive as the horizon. There's another thing we take for granted: that models mirror the causal structure they depict. It's easy to forget that images generated by apparatuses such as MRI and electron microscopy are still essentially maps, and it's easy to construe the image with the thing generating the image--a tool that's the product of another tool (the scientific method) that's the product of The Human Brain, a popular subject of so many models and images.

First a few concessions: these images are for teaching and learning; the people who drew the amygdala in early issues of Brain knew very well that it wasn't perfectly congruent with the original. It was The Amygdala, a representation, not an amygdala functioning as part of a system filled with idiosyncracies and undocumentable anomalies. Really someone just wanted to convey the idea of the amygdala, enough said.

But these icons can become a little more connected to the real thing: they can become indeces. Comparing a representation of the brain to an actual brain, certain variations become noticeable. A representation that records this variation is an index: basically, a repository for information storage and retrieval. Now the diagram is a little more implicated in the system it represents.

There are other examples of images that are both icon and index: for instance, a map drawn by someone who, nevermind the circumstances, is quite without significant parts of his left brain. For this person, the map is an icon--it's a familiar, sorta gestalt representation suggestive of the represented (the actual content of which is often not experienced, or not able to be experienced, entirely and simultaneously). So, working from a map, this person draws, say, the U.S's West Coast, sees that he's copied what the map shows, and calls it complete. For a psychologist, this map isn't an icon, but an index of the guy's brain injury. The guy was his own diagnostic tool. The diagram is an important part of the system at work in this guy's brain.

To be continued...

"Prototype for new understanding"

2006-10-01T08:21:00.000-07:00

Totemic and athletic shoe sculptures. I've been liking this lately.

Jump

2006-09-01T13:23:00.000-07:00

I’m standing in the drop zone at Twin Cities Skydive in Baldwin, Wisconsin, and I’m watching the sky. It’s about 10am, a late-August Sunday morning, and the sky is perfect and dull. Lawn chairs edge the drop zone, a field of mown grass among farms, and in the chairs a few spectators yawn. All over Wisconsin cows have been awake for hours, immobile, only working their jaws, as we’re doing now on this flat field under monotone blue. But then we hear a plane’s engine way off, see a plane reduced by distance to almost nothing, and suddenly the sky is dotted with divers in free fall. I let myself imagine free fall now, and for a moment my mind assumes what I can only describe as a psychic fetal position. Then the divers’ parachutes begin to deploy in colorful fusillade, they drift on rainbows to the ground, and the sky is once again predictable. Vicariously elated as the divers congratulate each other and gather their chutes, I am ready to sign waivers I will try not to read in too much detail—I am ready to dive.

We—my dad, brother, two women who appear to be mother and daughter, and myself—are taken through the parachute packing area (a fascinating place, and deserving of at least a long essay, if not a Herzog documentary) to a carpeted room with enough space for the ten or so chairs arrayed around a television. The walls are covered with photos of divers in mid-air, harnesses, and other paraphernalia I don’t recognize but hope is flawless and well understood by the staff—many of whom I recognize in these photos from the packing room. Several ladies who are all business deliver the not-too-surprising news that we all might die, and they scrupulously inspect the Initial Here boxes on the six page waivers we’re given while we’re shown a video. The video is five minutes of a long-bearded, creepily serious man who looks to be a living embodiment of any of a number of Dostoyevsky’s more wracked characters, who explains the existential situation we’re in, this Sunday morning in Baldwin: we are choosing of our own free will to leap out of a small aircraft at 13,000 feet, to free fall at a terminal velocity of about 125 miles per hour for a minute or so (during which time we’ll fall about 10,000 feet, or two miles), and then to fall the remaining thousands of feet to earth after our parachute may or may not have deployed properly. It will be dangerous, yes, but also beautiful, this man is telling us sedatedly.

Then the video ends abruptly. A man named Nick enters the room and says we’re going to practice our free fall position. Right away it’s clear that Nick is someone you want nearby when you panic because he probably will not panic and will level-headedly know just what to do. In fact, all of the experienced jumpers I meet have this quality about them, a calm that’s nothing like laziness, that comes of the slow attenuation of fear via daily encounters. Nick tells us that during the week he’s a pilot for a small local airline. The daughter of the mother-daughter pair says she’s a flight attendant. She says she’s imagined many times what it would be like to jump from a plane, and it terrifies her. Someone jokes that at least she’ll know how to open the door should we need to evacuate in mid-air.

We all practice our free fall position, which we’ll assume as soon as we’ve leaped from the plane cabin, by lying on our stomachs and lifting our legs, heads and arms back and up, so only our bellies touch the ground. One of the scrupulous waiver ladies explains that this position will let us fall like a shuttlecock beneath the parachute, a stable way to descend. The mother of the mother-daughter pair asks if we’re required to keep our eyes open when we leap from the plane cabin, and Nick earnestly says that he thinks it’s very important to keep our eyes open the entire time we’re in the air. We’re going to see things we’ve never seen before and may never see again, he says. Profundity relies so much on context, and right now in this small room where we’ve just practiced how to fall is exactly the context Nick’s answer needs to be profound.

We have an hour to kill before we’re scheduled to get into our harnesses and board the plane, so I spend it watching the action in the drop zone and packing room and talking to a few of the jump masters—men (and they are, almost exclusively, men) who have passed the Accelerated Free Fall program, have completed many successful solo jumps, and can assist inexperienced student jumpers in free fall. It appears there are half a dozen or so students practicing jumps today, and there’s clearly a difference in demeanor between the students and experienced divers both in the drop zone and packing room. Students tend to land further afield (one landed in the next field over and needed a ride back to the main building) because they haven’t yet perfected controlling their free fall and maneuvering themselves with steering toggles after their chute has deployed. Also, the students do not race to the drop zone as many of the expert jumpers will often do. Skydive racing, as far as I gather from observing a few masterful jumpers, requires that the diver delay deploying his chute until the last reasonable second in order to gain fast distance in free fall, and that he maneuver his chute once it’s deployed so that instead of gliding gently to the ground, he swoops into the drop zone almost completely horizontally at a speed faster than he can run, then slides on his feet along the ground to a stop. The students tend to drop at more gentle speeds and do timid little slides that are more proof of concept than stunt, showing they understand how the thing’s done, but experience and its attendant finesse have yet to transform what’s still a rote skill into a single, graceful movement.

Differences in landing skill and confidence in the drop zone belies an important element of skydivers’ culture: the people who succeed and become the social center of the group tend to be the people who are in no hurry to get good and show off, but who respect their positions within the hierarchy and are humble about how much work advancing will require. At least to this outsider, skydivers’ culture and US media culture are vastly different: among skydivers, stardom isn’t based on style alone, but on the mastery that is gained from competently navigating many novel situations in the air, some of them life-threatening. When experienced divers perform for cameras, they’re performing primarily for themselves and other divers who have the experience to judge the technical mastery from which aesthetic style arises.

Experience and coolness are also evident in the packing room, where the attitude of the experienced divers who’ve just returned from a dive is one of focused enthusiasm—the disposition of experts doing what they love—among brightly-colored parachutes, which lend to the affair a carnivalesque “come one, come all” accessibility. Focus and control are just as important here in the packing room as they are in the air. Mistakes made here can be fatal for the diver—either oneself or the diver whose chute one packs. There are a couple of packers who don’t jump at all, at least not today, and do nothing but pack chutes with intense focus—I watch one packer angrily chase outside a trio of kids who had wandered onto the packing floor, and when I ask if he would explain what he’s doing as he works, he says he is really too busy to talk.

Many of Skydive Twin Cities’ employees, from jump masters to packers to the scrupulous waiver ladies, live during the skydiving season in a trailer park beside the drop zone, working in exchange for practically unlimited access to the facilities and whatever of their salary is left after diving expenses are deducted.
When it’s our turn to get into our harnesses, we meet our tandem masters. These are the people on whom our lives will depend once we’ve jumped from the plane. They’ll be harnessed to our backs and will do all of the maneuvering during our free fall before deploying our chutes to land us safely in the drop zone. My tandem master is Joe, a bald man somewhere in his mid-twenties who is both muscular and spry, a combination that reassuringly suggests competence, or so I am ready to convince myself, because by now I’m nervous. As Joe gets me into my harness, he says he’s been jumping for six and a half years and has been a tandem master for about three and a half. I ask how many jumps he’s done. He’s quiet for a moment, thinking, and then says that while he does record each jump, he doesn’t have the exact number with him, but it’s close to 2,500. Joe goes to the packing room to put on our chute, and I head out to board the plane.

The plane’s cabin is lined with low benches, which we straddle, each of us sitting in our tandem masters’ laps since we’re now harnessed to them. As the plane takes off, our tandem masters buckle our seatbelts through our harnesses. The seatbelts seem superfluous, like sunglasses at night, since we’re all strapped to parachutes, ready to fall. But statistically the plane ride is as dangerous as the jump will be, so precautions now are not unwarranted.

During the ascent, an experienced jumper doing a solo dive gives a detailed description of a recent accident in which an experienced diver tried to race another diver, tangled some lines on his chute, and plummeted. Behind him is a young man doing his last accompanied solo dive in the AFF course, and this kid looks nervous. His lips move slightly and he sort of pantomimes the hand maneuvers that will stabilize him in free fall. He is wan though he’s trying to appear gung ho among the experienced divers, who are now analyzing what must have gone wrong to tangle that guy’s lines. I’m in the middle of the cabin, behind my dad, and my brother is behind me; we’ll dive from the plane in this order. My dad won’t have to watch either of his kids fall away from the plane, which would probably only add to the tension he’s obviously feeling as we reach jumping altitude, the plane’s engine is suddenly quiet, and the cabin door opens.

A solo diver, a woman, pounds her buddies’ fists good luck before catapulting herself out the doorway. Watching her body twist and fall away from the plane, I feel my mind do a similar maneuver to evacuate my body. Fear is a powerful alternative to rational thought, and luckily I don’t have much opportunity to explore its intricacies because suddenly my dad’s tandem master slides them both down the bench and out the door, and I find myself crouched in the door, watching dad fall, but only for a second, because now I’m falling, too.

The experience of free fall is nothing like those nightmares of falling. It is quite outside the human experience altogether. You don’t feel like you’re falling because you reach terminal velocity quickly and so do not accelerate beyond about 130 mph. Also, there are no nearby references to suggest how fast you’re falling. The brain has no routinized way to process and record the strangeness of this, so as you fall you maybe try to grunt or speak or think something lofty and grand, but you cannot, the mind reels, and then it’s over. So at least on your first dive, the experience is primary and physical. What I recall of it is this: hovering in a cold, loud wind among clouds above a broad and far away expanse of farmland whose rectangles curve slightly at the distant horizon, simple geometry that conveys grandness of a scale that’s so woefully underserved by the word “big.”

Joe deploys our parachute, and everything is still. The contrast between this calm and the howling chaos of free fall provides sensory pleasure that’s also aesthetic, because as I appreciate the scenery I’m also appreciating my place in it, the feeling of drifting slowly down through it toward ground that’s not at all monotone seen from up here. The air is warmer now—we’ve gained three degrees for every 1,000 feet—and I relax into the steady descent, letting Joe steer us in swoops and circles.

Our landing is gentle and spot on target in the drop zone. I look around and see that my dad and brother have landed, and that the mother-daughter pair have also landed and are hugging and exclaiming to their family, who receive their hugs and exclamations with the pleased but slightly embarrassed expressions of a sideline audience straining to feel as intensely as the players seem to the immediacy of winning. Before we leave, we’re each given a certificate signed by our tandem master, a coupon for a free drink at a bar in Hammond, and a couple of bumper stickers. I shake Joe’s hand and thank him. I’m feeling sentimental and want to say something more, like tell him how glad I am to be alive, how he’s helped me experience something unforgettable, but all of these things seem corny and insufficient, and anyway I can tell by his smile, by all the divers’ smiles, that they understand all of this and that any more words would utterly lack the intensity of the actual experience.

Jump

2006-08-26T20:22:00.000-07:00

I'm jumping from a plane tomorrow morning, and later I'll write about the whole thing. Also...pictures!

I'm really into parachutes right now.

Finding Home

2006-06-29T15:31:00.000-07:00

"...In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a city, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province." From "On Exactitude in Science" by Borges

Early maps of the world contribute much to deep sea dragon hunting and not a lot else, as far as modern wayfinding goes. Like if you want to get to California by some early cartographers' maps, you'd have to go by boat--California was depicted as an island in the Pacific--sailing very close to the Garden of Eden. Watch for dragons, and mind the grumpy marginalia between Earth and chaos, it disturbs unless sacrificed to. Apropos it may be for the state founded by opportunism and known for raunchy artifice to appear on maps so near the site of original sin (filmed on location at low transportation cost!), but it's little more than a coincidence among myths.

On the Typus Orbis map, the standard world map from 1540 to 1570, wind-blowing heads surround the world's land as in Homer's Odyssey, on which the depiction was based. (At some point in their journey back to Ithaca, Homer's crew untie the bag of wind given to them by King Aeolus, letting out a wind that blows them ashore of an unknown island.)

The Typus Orbis world map, popular from 1540-1570

Plenty of maps from the Mediterranean regions show winds symbolized by heads or windbags, and given how important wind was to sea travel, it isn't too surprising that cartographers would reference myth and legend in their schemas: the map had to be accurate to documented reality and supplicatory before chance, making it both tool and talisman.

The idea that a map should be usable by anyone, should overcome limitations of language and relative orientation, is one that's unique to our time and place. Marshall Island mapmakers constructed maps out of sticks, strings and shells to memorize ocean swell patterns and islands' locations before leaving by boat for a journey.

A stick map used by Marshall Island navigators

Often these maps could be interpreted only by the mapmaker, who, having memorized his map, would be the primary navigator for the trip. Rather than consult a map during the trip, he would rely on memory and a sense of how the water moved honed by lying on the bottom of the boat to feel its pitches and rolls.* This sort of tactile training, seen and experienced after much practice, can look and feel like "intuition," a conflation that's both easy to mock and venerable as a synthetic, much like polyester (which I learned is often used to make boat hulls).

Echolocation is another technique that's a rare deviation from our reliance on one sense--sight--to navigate. Bats, whales and dolphins use it regularly; the blind can be trained to use it to find a course among objects. This is done by emitting a clicking sound with the tongue (or using a device that makes a clicking sound) and interpreting the sound waves that return. I talked with a man who'd been blind since birth and relied on echolocation to get around in the city; he said that different cities obviously sound very different (some, like Boston, have lots of buildings made of heavy stones, some are often snow-covered, some have lots of glass-covered buildings) and that he'd developed "sound maps" of areas he frequently traveled, which made it easy to know when familiar objects on his route had changed. He remembered these maps the way you'd remember a song, and each place's song was a mnemonic that encapsulated not only information about objects' locations, but also his own dispositions in each place, with favorite places' sounds being of course more pleasing.

Plenty of research disagrees about how we go about wayfinding. Do we perform complex computations, summing vectors and optimizing manifold possible routes? Do we memorize sequences of images? Do we store whole maps, or do we store route information more abstractly, and in more than one physical place in our brains? None of these questions have been answered without being challenged almost immediately by contradictory evidence; a few simple observations about wayfinding techniques will have to suffice, as far as answers go: wayfinding techniques include dead reckoning (estimating your position based on the distance you've traveled in your current direction from your previous position), using a map and compass, echolocation, astronomical positioning, and the latest fad, global positioning.

Those aren't the four winds in the corners, they're satellites.

The Global Positioning System (GPS) was developed by the US Department of Defense, and it consists of a number of satellites orbiting Earth. Very simply, how it works is this: a satellite sends a signal to your GPS device (which is basically a receiver for said signals) and it measures the time delay between when the satellite sent the signal and when you received it. It multiplies this time by the speed of light, and it compares this to the satellite's location, which the satellite occasionally sends the receiver. Using position and range, the receiver can determine its own position. And satellite images are also useful for wayfinding: Google maps and google earth are two fine examples of how nice it is to augment meager human wayfinding abilities with our more formidable abilities to develop sense and memory extending technologies.

And these super-accurate maps render superfluous the "Here there be dragons"
commonly written on ancient maps' uncharted regions. We've gone from murk and darkness and monsters to very precise representations of what's really out there, making the old maps and myths obvious allegories for our fears of the unknown--which isn't to say that these have been rendered superfluous. They'll just be a little more private, the echoes, songs and mnemonics that make the murk and darkness of even the most well-documented places more familiar.

*Maps' importance (or lack of) as political documents is apparent: that the Marshall Islanders didn't carry maps to show expectant royalty or patrons newly conquered territory at least suggests that their sea travels were motivated by different goals than were those of early Europeans.

Retraction simile*

2006-06-22T15:33:00.000-07:00

ghost politicos' cadenced march to tollers
may bring up oil and some seasonal despair
written by self-appraisers in styptic metaphor
to encourage enactments of propriety in minature relief
from seabed ablation, the answer
being nowhere in the distance of that metaphor.

*The title of spam I recently received. Content is not spam.

More Machine Love

2006-06-11T16:54:00.000-07:00

The tour proper of the steam plant was led by a man in a machinist's jumpsuit who knew the turbines minutely, who for about an hour did not stop giving us very specific information about parts and frequencies and other etcetera, and often stood very close and spoke like he was trying with some effort to meter out information at an intelligible rate and not in one explosive gust. (Even so, I didn't understand most of what he talked about, so I looked up the following description.)

Briefly, here is how a steam turbine works. A steam engine's function is based on a principle of thermodynamics that says that entropy (unusable energy--heat--that sometimes is described as a measure of randomness or disorder of a system) increases in any system producing work (in thermodynamics, work is a little more general than mechanical work--weight lifted to a height--and basically refers to energy that changes a system macroscopically). Since steam turbines rely on the irreversible process of cooling (heat moves only from hot to cold), some amount of energy will be irretrevably lost during the process of generating work. The idea is: steam inside the turbine is expanded in chambers, and nozzles direct this pressurized steam to rotor blades, which the steam turns. These blades spin an electric generator (the dynamo was the first electric generator), which operates on the principle that when electric conductors are perpendicular to a magnetic field, potential difference is created that can generate a current. From mechanical movement comes electricity, but never with ideal efficiency--there's always friction diverting some energy to useless heat. In an ideal world, theoretical machines turn energy into work with no losses, but as touching the nearest lightbulb will show you, this is not an ideal world.

Turbine rotor blade

The Georgetown turbines are capable of generating 3,000, 8,000 and 10,000 kw, respectively. For a comparison: Puget Sound Energy, which now supplies Seattle's power, is capable with all of its plants of generating a combined 1,800 megawatts, which is 1,800,000 kw. This is why the Georgetown Steam plant is very much a museum and not an operating plant. It is simply dwarfed by demand for electricity.

[Actually a watt is sort of complicated to define, and this complication gets at how abstract units of measurement actually are, the ones that reference the human body (the foot, the mile--which is from the Latin phrase for 1,000 steps, the inch--possibly originally the distance between the tip of the thumb and the first joint of the thumb, and the hand) being less so than the ones associated with really big or really small units, or with things that cannot be visualized laid end to end or stuffed in mouldy plastic containers at the back of the fridge. Which is perhaps yet another example of how an abstraction can become what's considered technical over time and through a routine course of associative training, which is what the above comparison between kilowatts and megawatts assumes. For me, it's only a comparison between numbers of zeros, which are themselves nifty abstractions.

For the definition, a watt is one joule of energy per second, a joule being the energy required to produce the power of one watt for one second, a definition which may not make the defined any more clear. Sorry.]

During the tour, it was difficult not to pay attention to this: what the machines do to someone intending to write about them is make superfluous the whole project of generating metaphors and trying by (often facile) literary tactics to make the machines mean anything beyond their utility. Sort of in the same way that trying to frame a stampeding elephant calls attention to the frame rather than the intended subject, making the device the subject--and the guy wielding the frame a damn fool. Which is to say, I felt silly, and this feeling is also part of the appeal, another aspect of machine love.

And I suppose this is where all kinds of obvious things can be said about why we tend to romanticize* what we know of through myths and abstractions and icons rather than through technical expertise. Not knowing anything about the turbines, I felt like a tourist in the steam plant: a little detached, consciously ignoring a sense of being where I didn't quite fit in.

What's preserved in the steam plant, in the weird silence surrounding big machines still capable of being very noisy, is the Myth of the American Inventor. This is unexpected, given the machines' obsolescence, and only reaffirms that the myth doesn't really have anything to do with the thing invented, but rather with the way the inventor has supposedly bypassed repetitive drudge work (the mechanical definition of work) to produce something seemingly from nothing. And then the inventor's name is put on the product and maybe the unit of measure the product requires we adjust to, and the process of invention is eclipsed by the Proper Noun.

Why the Myth of the American Inventor seems obsolete, too, like it definitely belongs in a museum, can perhaps be attributed to corporate R&D and marketing. Now the company puts its name on the product, and through marketing maintains focus on the product...but this is getting really tangential, except to say that there might be instances where overlooking the process of "inventing" a product is unethical, and this could lead into a discussion of bio-engineering and gene synthesizing that I'd be happy not to pursue right now. Suffice it to say that maybe the myth of the American inventor has survived as the myth of the American invented, where the process is often patented and sold to the public via euphemisms and abstractions. And from here the leap to talking about a much anticipated invention--the robot--is not that far.

There is the argument that our brains are chemically-controlled machines, that humans are big meaty chemical factories that house various mechanisms, including one called "soul" or "mind" or whatever. One aspect of this argument has cohered in the practice of prescribing and taking pills to alter the brain's inputs and thus its outputs. Another in the practice of designing machines that can reproduce thought (and whether it must be human thought in order for us to validate it as thought is also obviously debatable). A compelling argument can be made for defining love as a totally chemical phenomenon. Consider the effects of oxytocin, a hormone, on the brain: arousal (spontaneous erection in rats injected with the stuff), pair bonding, maternal behavoir, increased trust, fewer symptoms of stress.

Of course the gist of the opposing argument is that there is more to the human brain than the behaviour it causes; hence, we'll never really know how it works. Really, the arguments for and against brains as machines are complex, and they revolve around the equally complex arguments for and against the brain as mind/soul/third eye/etc. Either way, the debates themselves are fine evidence of just how complicated and self-conscious the brain certainly is, machine or not. And just this sort of self-consciousness is a crux of both sides.

We may resist seeing ourselves as machines, but we do readily anthropomorphize them. We enhance them with humanlike qualitative motivations and sensibilities, a practice that makes fairly routine advances in robot building (one I read about recently is a tacticle-sensing mechanism intended to allow surgeons doing minimally-invasive surgeries to "touch" tissue that might be abnormal to decide whether it is) seem familiar, even destined, and talk about robot ethics (like this article about human-robot interaction) seem warranted. We often don't want to see ourselves as machines, and yet we do, judging by the robots to which we pay the most attention. It's a case of real life catching up with a version of fictionalized--and idealized--life. (And aggrandizing the future is not unlike doing the same to the past.) Only in life, as in machines, idealizations turn out to be a lot less intricate (and certainly colder) than the real thing.

*Romanticize is the word to use here. What the group of philosophers, writers, painters, musicians, etc. cordoned into the category "Romantics" were (very generally) doing was sort of reacting in an unorganized way (from the p.o.v. of their present) to aspects of the Englightenment they found devoid of moral direction, a.k.a. nihilistic. While the scope of what they accomplished is broad and not necessarily subordinated to the thematic thrust of most histories, generally speaking they sought the individual, subjective experience and tried to get at the unification of phenomena

through disciplines perhaps not as hell-bent on rigorous classification

as the emergent sciences. In retrospect what this generated was, from one perspective, an almost exclusively aesthetic focus that survives in modernist lit. and art and that lots and lots of people see as a slipshod platform on which to build any sort of ideology/ethics, or as an escape altogether from dealing with trying to do this. Anyway. There's a bit in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that gets close to how I've come to understand the Romantic outlook: "Arete implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency--or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself."

Machine Love

2006-06-11T14:50:00.000-07:00

Here is one human predicament, one of many: we desire that which does not desire--and certainly does not desire us. We seem to want to jump the circuit of human logic, human wish-fulfillment, human design totally, bodies intact or not intact, minds recording or not recording, doesn't matter, because (it seems) what's outside of knowledge must sustain itself via a mechanics that doesn't much depend on bipedal legs and opposable thumbs and neocortical tissue, wonderful as these advances have been to our own manufacture of artifacts.

My own escapism often focuses on machines: I love the big ones, the obsolete ones that once embodied the height and breadth and depth of enigneering. These machines-- the dynamo, the steam engine, the turbine--sustained the infrastructure of human movement while being visibly absent from that system save to the few who had to know the machines thoroughly to keep them working. And the inventors: here were the fellows who straddled the systems' divide, guys easily made heroic and inaccessible by their specific knowledge of what appears to be complexity contained, chaos gauged by meters, controlled by levers and made to output itself, quantized: electricity.

This is decidedly a skewed view, one made possible by a vague understanding of how these machines work communicated mainly through three-page essays with titles like: Michael Faraday: Taming Electricity, and Maxwell's Darling Demon. These essays tend to hero worship, furthering the "Myth of the American Inventor," a phrase from an apropos scene in The Crying of Lot 49 (by Thomas Pynchon).

Briefly, the scene: protagonist Oedipa Maas is touring the R&D side of a large aerospace engineering corporation, Yoyodyne. She talks to a young inventor-hack, a guy made cynical and distracted by the routine of his job. She mentions that she didn't think people invented anymore: "I mean, who's there been, really, since Thomas Edison? Isn't it all teamwork now?" And the engineer explains that what's taken the risk and reward away from invention is the patent system and corporate-owned intellectual property. The myth, "one man per invention," is not borne out by experience. Disillusionment with the present ensues, and so does the aggrandizement of the past that is often coincident with disillusionment. So the myths persist.

Thinking I might investigate the focus of some rather mythical ideas I have about machines, I toured the Georgetown Steam Plant, home of three turbines that once powered Seattle's cable car system and provided electricity for the Georgetown neighborhood, an industrial zone wholly inhospitable to sentiment, what with the emphasis on distribution rather than consumption: lots of barbed wire, loose gravel, nondescript warehouses, and desolate backdoor break areas composed of mismatched, often broken chairs that suggest a contingent comfort, a waiting space for something that already happened.

It was a fine setting for a visit to past circumstances, their focus being industry enabled by new ways to move stuff, lots of it, around. It's fitting that Boeing field edges the steam plant to the south because riding up to the plant, one sees it's planes doing the moving of stuff, not the cable cars the steam plant once powered. With 1906 moulded in poured concrete on the building's neoclassic-revival style facade, the planes are a superfluous counterpoint to the building's outmoded utility.

But then you go inside, and you see the machines themselves, and you start to think that if utility had a distributor, the steam plant could surely still be it. The turbines are big, and the intracacy of their sprawl beautiful. That they're still "fully functional" is all the more tantalizing, given their current quiescence. Around the base of one machine steam or smoke whorled suggestively.

Next: The love affair continues, culminating with: robots.

From the Fungus Garden, III

2006-05-25T13:02:00.000-07:00

It's true: they are relentlessly observing themselves observing themselves, meta et al, etc. There is not much that's left to say about that. Even: it's becoming a paradigm in physics, bastion of the last to adopt paradigms, that recursion characterizes all kinds of human structures, that it exists at low levels among particles--every particle's existence involves the existence of a network of virtual particles, each with their own networks, ad infinitum--and on up the hierarchy to the level of humans observing particles.

There's this quote from Douglas Hofstadter, author of a book I am still trying to finish, regarding the complexity of diagramming a propagating particle (here, an electron) and its infinite networks in order to get at the final behavior of the electron: "Fortunately, the more complex a diagram, the less important its contribution."

All of the worlds within worlds, bubbles within bubbles, networks withing networks--whatever metaphor you want to use--can be summed up with enough of the simplest diagrams.

These diagrams do in a more technical way what any good literary metaphor does: creates continuity where there's a gap of no meaning between effects. Meaning seems to come out of the connection, somehow, in an odd reciprocal way. And it seems that simulations are nice enactments of Hofstadter's quote and the general principle by which metaphors work.

So if you ever find yourself living inside a termite nest, or booking your next hotel room in one, consider the extent of humans' metaphor-generating capabilities. Ask to stay in the fungus garden.

From the Fungus Garden, II

2006-05-03T10:37:00.000-07:00

You can learn by watching the one who's watching you with just as much slavish voracity. You start to see what it is that's keeping you both interested: the structure of the thing, as it is inside as seen from outside the fungus comb. You crawl around during your free time, trying to get that perspective. For one thing, you see that this thing, this mound you're living inside, goes on and on, probably it's meters tall. The ridges on the walls, these are keeping the place cool. And a couple times a day a few lazy gaffers hanging out near holes in the outer wall move some wads of chewed crud to block or unblock the openings. Keeping things comfortable enough, temperature wise, that you don't think about marching out of those holes. Right out into the curious documenting eye of science. To sum up: right out into nothing.

Pretty soon, that eye becomes like the distant queen. It's there, you know it is, but thinking about it doesn't bring it any closer or farther away. You don't think about it until you have to, which is to say, not until the nest splits, or is split, perfectly in half.

Which gets to the more interesting business of what they hope to find. Here you are, small, but not the smallest among your kind, and admittedly as sterile as the next worker. And so you think, it's the nest they're into, has to be. So now, like you ever really wanted to know what life outside the fungus comb is like, to know what all those spongey upright creatures do with their heads and hands, you get to find out.

For one thing, they've made a word to describe how you all know what to do without being told. They call it "stigmergy," from a Greek phrase that means "incite to work." They use words like "dynamic" to describe how the nest interacts with you and your nestmates. As one guy* says, "in stigmergic labor it is the product of work previously accomplished rather than direct communication among nestmates that induces the insects to perform additional labor."

And they've been making termite nests that aren't termite nests at all, but simulations of termite nests. Factories and other industries could apply stigmergic principles to production, making a large, unweildy labor force a more cohesive entity that, gasp, does not need a tumescent queen dictating where and when not to build tunnels. Also, your nest is being used to design thermoregulation systems for big units of humans, like in the hotel below.

Is decentralization really so new? To you, it's as familiar as the fungus garden. But to the guys with microscopes and wires, it doesn't seem to be. They simulate traffic patterns on highways and ant swarm raid patterns and see similar principles being used in similar ways. They compare their brains' neuronal network to the internet. (And obviously using the same word, like "network," to describe different events makes it all more richly complicated.)

And so, moving away from the now hacked up nest, the fungus garden arid, you start thinking about hanging out in some moist crevice to go over some things.

Such as: are simulations simplifications? or just complex in a different way? or does that question beg an impishly intellectual/uninteresting answer? and do icons have anything to do with augmenting perspective? and is there termite life on mars?

*Edward Wilson

From the Fungus Garden, I

2006-05-02T08:17:00.000-07:00

Irvine Welsh (minus the ayes and taes) impersonating a termite--that's how this entry will be written. Partly to distract from the chintzy props, the tired subject, the blown out speaker, the flicker that may or may not be only in the eye of the beholder. I want to give a sense of replaying something that never quite existed as though it did, famously, and to acclaim. Affecting this distance in person requires diligent body prodding, face arranging, getting into getups that sweat some other impersonator's sweat under lights arranged to hide as much as they reveal. It takes time anyway, which this introductory interlude is filling. When I waited for a Michael Jackson impersonator to finally get the glove on and start his show, I felt obscenely self conscious, a feeling I didn't expect to enjoy as much as I did, this many years out of high school. Feeling honest in the middle of a lie creating itself at a distance. A nice illusion of objectivity. You're watching the life of a termite...

You were born in the fungus garden. Inside the fungus comb. The fungus comb, it doesn't let you believe you're anywhere but where you are. So you get used to not acknowledging it, but all the time you know: you are a termite. You are surrounded by thousands just like yourself, your termite agendas exactly alike. Once you've decided not to acknowledge this, you get on with being you: Macrotermes bellicosus, an African fungus growing termite. Thousands like you are spawned by a distant queen every day, but she's distant. Far enough away that you can more or less forget about her. You're surrounded by the swarm. You're surrounded by fungi, a great, encompassing gut that helps digest the wood you have to chew. There's enough fungus between you and that focus of doubt, that whore queen, to keep you satisfied with you. The stench isn't really so unbearable.

There have been intrusions.

You know you are being observed. Sure, by the other drudges gnawing their way to oblivion. But also from a perspective none of you can maneuver to, from outside the fungus comb. There are visages out there peering in. A scummy intellectual ken that, when it isn't being fascinated with itself, makes one spastic swarm of all you wriggling through the fungus garden. That doesn't even see you, not really. Watching them watching you, you're more aware than ever of the situation.

The Dynamo and the Spime, part three

2006-03-13T08:46:00.000-08:00

Metaphors grafted to science develop their own sort of force, an auxiliary ability to convey a message, albeit to an audience expecting the relative ease of journalistic minimalism.

This entry will be short; it's devoted to a metaphor that I want to address obliquely because it deals with something that's indirect: chaos.

Adams writes that he'd become convinced that the sequence of human thought is chaos. Sequence implies continuity, at least some connection between the first and last elements and a channel to navigate the way between. Final conditions in some way, whether the way is obvious or obscure, arise from initial conditions. The channel is all process, all participation: turning points, decisions, may seem arbitrary, their effects transient. Superfluity defines the experience.

According to Sterling, the Gizmo, the predecessor of the Spime, is "...delicately poised between commodity and chaos." Here an older definition of chaos is probably more useful than what we currently associate with the word: instead of disorder, chaos is empty space, a chasm. According to the dictionary I use, this latter definition is obselete. It's still accessible, though, and I think it applies.

There's another definition I'm underqualified to speak of in any way other than obliquely...in math, chaos describes a property of some systems sensitive to initial conditions. Whether we can find how a final condition is described by an initial one depends on the precision of our tools. To place Henry again between the dynamo and chaos: looking for a cause and finding only effect, he could easily invoke the "occult mechanism." As precision in cataloging and defining causes might be aided by Spimes and their ilk, the human thought process may remain occult.

As definers of experiences, Blobjects, Gizmos and Spimes aren't so unlike the Venus, Virgin and dynamo. Via intention, each renders something of the transience of its creation, making flux static. As metaphors for whatever happens in the channel, they're direct, accessible, and sometimes forceful. This, from Mork's comment at the end of the last entry, nicely concludes this topic by broadening it.

The dynamo and the Spime, part two

2006-03-02T11:26:00.000-08:00

When Francis Bacon said that science is "the development or economy of forces," machines were just beginning to economize and amplify force. Perspective as a graphic tool was still a relatively new way to realize space, and crafty building techniques like the cupola were the height of techne.

Cupola at St.Peter's Basilica, Rome

The "occult mechanism" was concomitant with popular modes of representation. Adams' statement that no machine could've generated the force that built the cathedral at Amiens bluntly makes my point for me: even up to and including Adams' lifetime, modes of discovering the unknown were mediated by analogy. Religious iconography and art were the primary modes, but science as a distinct discipline and system was also being leveraged to explore the occult. (What's now called the Romantic movement is popularly synonymous with "anti-science": a literary attempt to keep the mechanism occult. In retrospect it's interesting to see how deeply into the occult some preeminent scientists of the time were. Newton lived about twenty years after Bacon; he spent the latter part of his life in esoteric bible studies. Also: there's a blog that treats the subject of communication between science and literature.)

The Last Supper, Leonardo Da Vinci, 1498

The dynamo is from the era when the machine was the best representation of Bacon's statement. The Spime (see "When Blobjects Rule the Earth," bookmarked in the sidebar) is from a future era when the "development or economy of forces" is the responsibility of anyone who interacts with objects. It's an interesting way of thinking about the evolution of science. And of omniscience.

The Spime doesn't yet exist--Bruce Sterling (who came up with the idea) calls it a "historical thesis." I'm treating it as a literary device--a plot mechanism--but because of the medium (genre?) we're communicating through, even a literary device can be applied beyond text. For one thing, it can augment repututation. It can help out in first-person narrations. (This lets me do some "wrangling" for Sterling, about which I'm a little ambivalent as I only know Sterling the narrator. That he does some wrangling for me by commenting here, well, doesn't make me glib.)

Spimes are objects that narrate themselves. They exist in space and time, accumulating a past that determines their future. A Spime would likely not want you to attribute its workings to an "occult mechanism." If you do, it hasn't done what it's designed to do: to negate all that time (and mystery) between its existence as potential--some designer's idea--and its realization as your object, by telling you everything about itself. Ostensibly, a Spime can give you all the information the Spime's creator has, thereby making itself transparent. With transparency, you get omniscience: information about where the object came from, how it works, and where it needs to go when you're done with it is part of the object from the beginning. The process becomes the product...but all of this is in Sterling's speech.

Sterling talks about the Spime to an audience of SIGGRAPHers: a cohort of animators, computer game designers, motion picture makers...people who design virtual worlds. They work in two dimensions to simulate three; they've got algorithms to apply principles of perspective Da Vinci would've had to spend many, many hours on his back fast with a church ceiling to realize. Sterling suggests that these designers, or their future counterparts, will be creating not only useable objects via computer simulations (which they're already doing), but also a process by which we can find out nearly everything about our objects. They're embedding the process by which the object was created in the object, so it can communicate its history to its user. Representation no longer decorates the occult but the process by which the occult reveals itself. We participate in this process by using the object.

This process is one that is akin to what Adams experienced when he tried to understand, via analogy, how the dynamo could so affect his imagination. It's also akin to the process that makes pet rocks pets. In fact, the process is one that's so familiar and obvious, it doesn't even need an analogy. Or: the analogy is designed into the process so as to be transparent. It has been wholly digitized. And it ostensibly obviates the analogy the Romantics tried to write between human and machine. As a literary device, the Spime lets us think about what first-person omniscient narration might be like.

Next: Part three, if there is one, will address whatever remains to be said about this topic.

The dynamo and the spime

2006-02-25T12:54:00.000-08:00

Henry Adams writes about his life in the third person. Annoying as this is, a limited omniscience does fit his subject matter: himself, a nineteenth-century, Harvard-educated East Coast aristocrat who sees enough during his travels to decide that people like himself have been applying some outdated metaphors to encompass with language all that they did not understand (pretty much anything to do with science, art, and the creation of the universe). Affecting a distance to write about a younger Henry, Adams might as well be the narrated subject fifty or so years in the future. The device is useful, a sort of deus ex machina that spans time.

One of Henry's loves is a machine. He meets it at the Great Exposition of 1900 in Paris. (See "The Dynamo and the Virgin," bookmarked in the sidebar, for Adams' account.) The dynamo had been around for about 70 years, but people like Henry, who knew scientists but wasn't one, were separated by nearly a generation from a device as intellectual know-how and the device as useable object. Henry does not know where to look to see what "the development or economy of forces" (what true science achieves, according to Francis Bacon according to Adams) has been silently generating until a scientist friend leads Henry through the exhibition--past all the latest, de rigueur paintings that fail to show Henry signs of the time--to where the dynamo is silently (a baby sleeping beside it wouldn't wake, Adams writes) generating electricity.

The dynamo

Henry decides that the "occult mechanism" of the dynamo is to the modern sensibility what the occult mechanism of religious iconography (the cross and images of the virgin and Venus) and art had been to (Western, Christian) man until the break with the past the dynamo and its implications affected. The occult mechanism is the mysterious force that turns cause into effect: whatever happens to turn the dynamo's spinning--mechanical energy (a measurable quantity)--into electricity (less obviously, and to Henry impossibly, quantifiable).

The Virgin:
she wants you to think sex is mysterious

Henry doesn't understand how the dynamo could be just a channel for forces already, mysteriously latent in the device itself. The dynamo creates a current--a potential--but does not create electricity. This break between cause and effect leaves Henry a little muddled, so he tries out a metaphor to reconnect the two. What Henry concludes is, the dynamo mysteriously exercises the same force on the mind that other "symbols of infinity" have exercised in the past--the cross could get people to believe in an occult force (g-o-d), and images of the Virgin and Venus could get people to believe in sex as an occult force, something more than just a cause that leads to an effect (babies). In his muddle, Henry anthropomorphizes: he decides that the dynamo now exercises the power once exercised by the artist, "the creator," over the imagination.

The Birth of Venus

Henry also does a little reverse-anthropomorphizing. He compares the human trying to understand the dynamo to a Branly coherer. To indulge in the metaphor Adams sets up: the human is a signal decoder, a device made of material that, when exposed to the right kind of input (in the case of a coherer, a high enough voltage), changes its composition accordingly. Henry, trying to figure out how this machine works, is a component in an analog circuit, analog being an analogy between cause and effect, on and off. (And hey, look at analog.)

In this circuit, there is no omniscience; or rather, the omniscience comes of the process begun by the desire to understand and involves both the subject (human) and object (machine). It's a process that involves human understanding as a component, or channel. (And to be a word drudge one more time, and possibly to point to the obvious, the root of "omniscience" comes from the same Latin word from which our word "science" comes. It means "to know.") By Adams' metaphor, the attempt to understand the unknown is a process much like the one by which the dynamo uses mechanical energy to produce electricity. Latent potential realized through a channel of intentionality.

All of this from the omniscient Adams, removed from himself by his own devise.

Next: What all of this has to do with Bruce Sterling, spimes, and pet rocks.

index economy

2006-02-21T12:11:00.000-08:00

you're building a list
to hold the old securities
lax in confidence but
limping to perform
a new economy trick
hidden rankfile in the basement
your maniple's a flock
in a flattened field
where you plan to build a breakwater
get a little privity
a corner and a market
and finish out the summer.

Car lot (sonnet of the car salesman)

2006-02-11T14:21:00.000-08:00

I'm walking in new shoes
Through a very narrow space.
I'm getting closer to the thing I lose
In every window. I see my face.
I learned math underneath a little flag, counting up from nought.
It helps me see what's receding, this adjustment I've learned to make.
I looked inside a microscope, staring down my blind spot.
It didn't offer much direction, just wind inside a bag.
Everywhere's a destination, I keep a little map.
I follow lines to where they're going, I might find someone I know.
At night the road looks like it's ending, she could have set the trap.
I demonstrate with all the lights on, they clap at the end of the show.
Light reflects off every surface, unless you want it black.
Look both ways at all the faces, you might see me looking back.

a gift

2006-02-07T20:12:00.000-08:00

an access of disease coiled in a drupe,
a little embolus to empty what it fills.
to make a calm to wake to,
when you do,
under a hung blade.
isn't it ideal-
an axenic fiend for cleaning,
an emetic friend that never speaks
but fills the corners' blanks, grows,
sits on its bone exedra and silences.

birdwatching

2006-02-05T11:39:00.000-08:00

a slight after banding your red crest coxcomb?
the head of a roc affixed to a mawk.
you're the object of rearrangement,a migration of intention,
a sport or a rite of spectation.
the lens makes two of you, reflecting its own boundary:
one to praise the other's span,
a scenic mirror.
your audience is you, duplicate.
there's a price for that crest,
the emptor of zero wants the sale.

i'd call but i can't affect the pitch you anwer to.

a kind mother

2006-02-03T15:15:00.000-08:00

there it goes, night. she's on.
where does it gentle you to, in a sweep of.
of forgetting.

a planked descent into impression:
a chiton sleep dress lapped on
a camphor blanket's fringe.
that enfolding comfort
of forgetting when.

caliginous. a cave
and a dead myth to fix.
build you in it, make a ship of it,
it'll go till the next atomic effacement
of forgetting who.

mother chlorosis you can swim.
arms, galleys of hands
pulling you to an axis
of forgetting where

a space from a word surrounds.
paper bats carry its dark to you,
an atony telling
of forgetting what.

gallipot into intimacy. that alchemy.
chloropicrin in this water?
kisses, mother, put on your yellow fringed vest, rest.

mall!

2006-01-29T14:20:00.000-08:00

The acrobat fan club in leopard print watches the knife man spin his blade. By the fountain sisters trade nervous assurances. He isn't looking at who is. He says, this place could use some real acrobats.

Let's buy up the season's tint of plush to line our sleep from now till spring.

Which way? I lost you in a distraction of darts. Here arrows' tips are for remembrance. Days are not the currency of weeks. Declivities are what poets fondle behind kiosks while the mechanics of geriatric kneebraces occupies a fleet of bandy engineers. The still spectre at the center is turning in its node, generating the flicker that animates so convincingly. [Does that mean it's bright?]

Satin Ricky Martin is riding a blind horse! singing about Puerto Rican bridesmaids. They chase. They do so gently. The damn shoe doesn't fit.

synthetic bloom

2006-01-29T14:11:00.000-08:00

a tribute to a very hygenic person who has just sprayed air freshener.

white the air with asperity vesta and the dank. you see the threat of teeth where no lips reach porcelein's diseases. silence describes your name to excess. the corners hiss appreciation for you. they hold your tin trophies in glass regiments. your spignet ritual singes the sick and slow, turning their tongues to ash. your favorite words come from places nobody wants to go.