Nick Perich and the Stttttuttering Six

2:16am: wiener+education
A professor recently gave me both volumes of Norbert Wiener's autobiography. I picked up the first book last night intending to just page through it a bit and get a sense for what it was like. I have a lot of crap for school I need to do, but I ended up reading over 200 pages before I passed out with the book on my face. Who knows what time it was when I finally gave in, but I ended up somehow sleeping through my alarm and didn't wake up until 1:45 minutes after I was supposed to be at work. It didn't really matter I was late, though.

Norbert Wiener is one of the few people who I truly admire and reading his autobiography has only added to my respect. His life was obviously one of study so most of his story deals with his intellectual development. It remains fascinating to me largely because of how often I find my own thoughts on education and achievement echoed in his.

He observes for example, that one's graduate dissertation is often viewed as the greatest thing one is to do for many years...and perhaps in one's entire life. Wiener maintains, however, that in many cases if one does not quickly outdo his dissertation he should likely be viewed as an intellectual failure. Because he is now relatively freed of needing to pass through formal assessment his ideas can flourish in all their complexity. He can do the work that he truly wants to.

Wiener recounts his education in great detail and he is not always happy with how it went. He often complains about the narrow scope, poor conceptual foundation, or rote banality of many of his courses. I've never been a particularly good student. Not a bad one either, of course, but no one particularly noteworthy. No doubt part of this is due to certain intellectual shortcomings I have, particularly my relatively weak skills in rote learning and quick boredom and lack of care when I'm not being challenged. But I had always suspected that many things I have failed to properly understand would have come easier if certain weaknesses in the presented material would have been addressed and particularly if material was taught within a much larger context.

Mathematics is probably the best example here. I've always been fascinated by math, but could care less about repetitive manipulation. I have better things to do than to solve the 50 assigned equations, you know? But what if math was taught from as early as possible in terms of its logical structure? What if the proofs were adequately emphasized and dealt with rather than languishing at the chapter introduction if they can even be seen at all? It would be neat if there was at least a superficial mathematical logic course geared towards advanced secondary students or freshmen undergraduates and non-math majors. Even better, and perhaps less radical, would be to teach math as a historical practice. Not as the standard undergraduate history of math course. Even I would be hesitant to enroll in that unless the professor was exemplary. But when we learn of Riemann sums, we learn about...oh what's his name...Bernard Riemann(?) and how the theory came to be and the influence it has had rather than just memorization of how to solve Riemann sums for the test. Or in an accelerated secondary geometry course we are exposed at least conceptually to non-Euclidean geometry, maybe with discussion of tensors and manifolds or whatever would be deemed appropriate to put Euclidean geometry in a larger and more meaningful context.

Wiener elegantly says what I've always lived by...and I marked it..."It is not essential for the value of education that every idea be understood at the time of its accession. Any person with a genuine intellectual interest and a wealth of intellectual content acquires much that he only gradually comes to understand fully in light of its correlation with other related ideas. The person who must have the explicit connection of his ideas fed to him by his teacher is lacking in the most vital characteristic that belongs to the scholar."

For a long time now I've taken that attitude that I should read as much and as broadly as possible even if I don't fully comprehend something. If I had spent months pulling apart, say, Nozick's Anarchy State and Utopia, I may have understood what Nozick believed better and likely would even have understood the questions he was raising more thoroughly. But, you know, I only have so much time. And as highly as I value learning and intellectual productivity, I do have a job and at least something like a life. In the process of mastering Nozick I would have had to sacrifice at least a dozen other books that I would have read during that time. Now, in a few years, probably even next year, I will go back and reread Anarchy State and Utopia. The book was brilliant, but a little too much for me to really take in at the time since it was the first work of political philosophy I ever attempted. I was able to gather enough from my amateur reading, however, to really spark my thought and truly begin a foundation on which other ideas could settle or fight for space. And by not obsessing over Nozick I was able to immerse myself in a far broader spectrum of ideas to connect.

As the saying goes, a jack of all trades is a master of none. But I know I would rather be a failure who burns trying to fly into the sun than to rest complacently on the cold moon.

2:09am: politics
Richard whose excellent blog Philosophy, etc I read occasionally, asked about a month ago that people locate their views on a scale of 1-7 for various political perspectives. So what the hell, this blog never sees much posting. Might as well resurrect the meme. My personal comments are italicized.

a) Liberalism - - - X - - - Radicalism (4/7)
Do the ends justify the means? Procedural liberals insist on the primacy of fair play and democratic process. Radicals care less about method, and more about getting the desired result. The result is what is important, but a reasonable degree of respect and debate should exist if possible. This collective respect will often be the best way to achieve the desired result anyhow.

b) Rationalism - - - - X - - Subjectivism (5/7)
Is there ever a "right answer" to political questions? Rationalists think that reasoned debate could, ideally, lead to consensus about the common good. Subjectivists see politics as a mere contest of wills, all rhetoric and power plays, where the goal is simply to have your individual preferences win through. I'm not sure I'd put an view on political rationalism/subjectivism since the dichotomy itself is misleading and not particularly helpful. But what Richard is getting at seems clear enough: the primacy of the individual vs. that of the collective. Even with both of these formulations, however, I find this question difficult to answer. I'm going with a tentative 5/7 due to a strong belief in subjectivism and individuality, but with an added acknowledgement of the ability and necessity of individuals to act beyond entirely selfish means.

c) Direct - X - - - - - Representative Democracy (2/7)
Should power rest more with citizens or elected representatives? Citizens for sure. Elected representatives have already proven incompetence...what do we have to lose? Will Wikipedia and the emerging democracy 2.0 crowd become of fundamental importance?

d) Aggregation - - - - - X - Deliberation (6/7)
Should political decisions be reached by simply aggregating individuals' prior preferences, or by submitting reasons for deliberation and critical scrutiny? It seems clear to me that a considered response should recieve more weight than a simple undeliberated vote.

e) Federalist - - - XX - - - Globalist (3.5/7)
What's the most appropriate level for political decisions? Federalists favour local-level decision-making (which may vary across localities), in contrast to Globalists. I have to break the model here and put this perfectly in the center. A balanced dialogue between the local and the global is not just desirable but necessary.

f) Libertarian - X - - - - - Authoritarian (2/7)
How much discretionary power should be allowed in politics? Libertarians favour greater (e.g. constitutional) constraints on the exercise of political power. Authoritarians (may include populists and paternalists) are the opposite. Richard formulates this binary in an interesting way... Anyway, authoritarian systems are something we should and will move beyond, regardless of benefits that they had promised and occasionally did bestow.

g) Economic Left - - X - - - - Right (3/7)
How favourably do you view redistributive taxation and other typically "Left-wing" economic policies? I'm having this slightly to the Left because of obvious inequalities a competitive system creates and because of a belief that someone who has success should, if not exactly return the money, then at least give back a greater percentage than others.




My average score here turned out to be 3.64. Not too surprising considering the motto I live by is 'everything in moderation'.

8:00pm: time wasting
INTRO: There's so many other things I should be doing right now. But what the hell, I'll just make a pointless blog post.

BODY: ajsdlfjlkasjdfklj;lkjslakjflkjlkfjdlkjsaklsjdlsafjdkljlasnnxz,mvnxcnzvooiueiorwoie. ajsdljflkajsdlfjierioueiow.s. lsdaaoweirueiworeiu!!!!1!1!!!!111!!!!!!!

CONCLUSION: Woe is me. !or! I'm so happy.

12:30am: berkeley video
http://video.google.com/ucberkeley.html

This is cool. UC Berkeley is putting courses and symposia online. MIT should switch to Google Video also since it seems that bandwidth was their major limitation.

This Physics for Future Presidents course is great. I actually think I'll end up watching all the videos for it eventually.

2:26am: myspace
I've had a myspace for a while of course, but I never made a profile until tonight. Well, I guess I still didn't make a profile, but now I at least have a...presence.

1:58am: okkervil river
It's been a while since I've heard a song that's floored me enough to replay it over and over. Yesterday I heard Okkervil River's Red and...wow. I had heard two of Okkervil River's more recent albums and thought the music pretty good for what it is, but nothing I really want to listen to. Red is different. It's the strange anomaly that is simultaneously the band's most defining song.

Here's the lyrics to Red. Insound is selling the CD it's from for 7.00 after a current additional 20% discount if you're interested.

-
Red is my favorite color, red like your mother’s eyes after awhile of crying about how you don’t love her. She says “I know I don’t deserve supervised sight of her, but each day becomes a blur without my daughter.” Fall is my favorite season, like falling to reasoning why you crashed from on high. She says “Why is my life so uneven, and what have I done right but given you your life if after I led you on into that bar room?” “Yes” is my favorite answer. I took a dancer home, she felt so alone. We stayed up all night in the kitchen doing my dishes, on and on until the dawn. She said “I know it’s easy to have me, but I have seen some things that I can’t even tell to my family pictures,” and “I’m full of fictions and fucking addictions” and “I miss my mother.” She’ll never know I could never forget her. If I could write her a letter, I’d try with every line to say “She still remembers your touch. And I know that it’s not much, but you still haven’t lost her.
-

12:32am: youtube: charlie the unicorn

...



BRILLIANT!!!

2:06am: camera!
I finally got a camera! It's nice. A Sony Cybershot T9. It fits in my tightest pocket (when even my wallet and phone won't fit) and it takes pictures like a dream. It can even take pictures in very dim light with no flash, which necessary for me. I hate flash.

Anyway.

W00T!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111111111!1!!!

2:13am: quote
Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.

-Camus

2:20am: pee wee's playhouse

Pee Wee is back on TV!!!

Adult Swim at 11:00 Mon-Thurs. Watch this clip for a taste of what's in store.

It's a shame, but I don't think the show'll last long. It has no audience. Besides being too utterly weird and maniacally brilliant, it doesn't seem...edgy (uhg)...enough to satisfy many AS viewers. It's also really weird watching it at 11:00. If anything deserved late night airings, it's this show.

I loved the show when I was little, of course, but I never realized just how awesome it is. Oddly enough, it doesn't really seem like a children's show at all. Far too bizarre. It's more like the portrayal of the imagination of a hyper, creative kid than a show catering to kids.

3:34am: daily show: net neutrality

I'm glad The Daily Show got around to picking this up.

It pisses me off so much I can barely even laugh. What a fucking moron. Little kids know more than this jackass and he's in charge of regulating the Internet.

2:45am: materazzi
Uhhh

Marco Materazzi admits he insulted Zinedine Zidane before the France captain head-butted him in the World Cup final. Materazzi denies calling him a "terrorist."

"I did insult him, it's true," Materazzi said in Tuesday's Gazzetta dello Sport. "But I categorically did not call him a terrorist. I'm not cultured and I don't even know what an Islamic terrorist is."

Okay...

1:29am: world cup
ITALY WINS!!!!!!!!!!

Well, to be honest, I don't really care that Italy won. They were obviously good, but I found them pretty boring to watch. I'm happy for them, though.

I can't figure out how I feel about Zidane and his red card. On the one hand, come on man, a blatant and violent headbutt? On the other, he'd been giving it his all with a level of stress I can't even imagine (over a billion people watching!) for almost two hours and with the game on his shoulders. I can't really fault him for snapping under a taunt. I feel really bad for him...I mean, this was his last game. For the rest of his life, he'll have this over his shoulders and be wondering whether he would have been able to lead France to victory. I don't even remember the poor guy coming out to get a second-place medal. That's no way for one of the best players in the world to go... I kinda hope he wins the Golden Ball. He certainly earned it...

2:02pm: will wright seminar
The seminar that Will Wright gave with Brian Eno last week for The Long Now Foundation is now available for download.

I listen to the Long Now seminar every month and I recommend everyone else to do the same. They are (almost) always entertaining and enlightening. My favorite is James P Carse's talk on finite and infinite games. I'll probably do a blog entry on Carse one of these days...

The Will Wright talk is interesting enough to give a listen, though I wouldn't say it's among the best.

The best thing about it, actually, was hearing Stewart Brand read a piece he did on videogames for Rolling Stone in 1972. Definitely check that out here. Weird that it would take 25 years for people who actually called themselves videogame writers to catch up with him in terms of quality and insight...

2:57am: videogame writing
I just feel like rambling until I get tired tonight. Bear with me. Who knows how coherent or readable this will end up.

It seems that each time videogames gain more critical and cultural acceptance and respect it only becomes apparent just how far away from true saturation they really are. Take, for instance, Chuck Klosterman’s recent article in Esquire about the need for the maturation of videogame criticism. His point is well taken, of course. Most videogame criticism is commercial trash and the medium would do well to see a more vibrant community of writers (and readers!) develop.

Sure, we all know of The Gamer’s Quarter, Insert Credit, Edge, and of course the dozens of fascinating articles scattered across the web. Klosterman has drawn much criticism for not pointing out examples like these. It’s pretty obvious why Klosterman didn’t bother to research much (or discuss what he did find): that would decrease the “importance” of Klosterman’s Kall. And it kinda makes me uneasy to center a rant around his article, as if that somehow validates his ambition. But you know, he may not be original in saying it, but he does have a point.

I’m sure any of us can rattle off five or ten pieces we think every gamer should read, we’ve read a couple dozen more, and there are likely a few dozen extra undiscovered. The thing is though…that’s about it. There’s only a few dozen worthwhile pieces on videogames. And only a handful of those could be called brilliant. There’s a community...a tight one at that...and the community has managed to make itself visible enough to attract the occasional outsider attention. I don’t see how it could be argued, though, that there isn’t huge room for improvement.

Here’s one way of approaching the issue. If you look at a possible spectrum of ways to engage with things, you have the attempt to unite on one end (the general tendency for narrative...delineate what the thing is) and the attempt to differentiate on the other (the general tendency of philosophy...delineate what the thing is not). The majority of writing tends to be right in the middle...not enough description to be interesting, not enough analysis to be insightful. On the flipside, the greatest writers take both ends and bend them together into a tapestry of cutting passion. The thing is destroyed only to be weaved anew through the author’s towering vision. See Joyce, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Proust...Bangs?

(obviously any piece as a whole will not be solely on one side or the other...this is strictly a metaphor for approaches to writing)

There are few examples of writing about videogames that venture outside of the safe middle ground between unision and differentiation. Writers that do ride into the danger zone (cue Kenny Loggins) tend to be dismissed by the majority of gamers as pretentious wanks and are simply ignored by those that play videogames. Part of the reason, I suppose, is that the pieces usually just aren’t that noteworthy. Even if they aren’t bad, exactly, they can’t hope to accomplish much but preach to the choir.

Videogame writing has come a long way in uniting videogames into an implicit experience. This is the strong point of TGQ and IC, for example. I think lots of talented people are on the right track here and it’s only a matter of time before this style of writing takes off (disregarding the recent premature and amateur surge of New Games Journalism). I also think this style of writing carries the most short-term potential for enacting genuine change in how videogames are perceived and created.

What has been much less successful thus far is the differentiation of videogames into tangible pieces. Academic discourse, what should be the hub of this strategy, is mired in tradition and the formal education of its proponents. For every Aarseth, who, for better or worse, tries to stake out new ideas, there are dozens of people just trying to almost lazily apply, say, Lacan or Fiske to virgin topics. The potential of this group as it currently stands is also hurt by tastemakers of all levels identifying a lack of cred in most of these writers. Gamers scoff at how narrow their knowledge of videogames tends to be and academics scoff at a perceived lack of sophistication, whether in analysis or taste. For sure, this is a stage that will pass as people who grew up playing games take more of an interest in their makeup. Despite current evidence to the contrary, I would not be surprised if a handful of major essays and perhaps one truly important book are published in the next couple years.

Anyway.

The biggest thing holding videogame writing back is gamers themselves. It’s an easy joke that most don’t like to read...but they do love Final Fantasy 7! Gamers need to become less insular, that’s for sure. They need to not ostracize their own for attempting to expand an audience or cater to interests and desires that the typical gamer may not possess (see backlash against NGJ). If any progress is to be made, I think it’s important for gamers to realize that stepping out of the safety zone and actually trying to say something, whether by unision, differentiation, or both, is good. And of course, that being satisfied by saying Halo 2 has dual-wielding and badass gunz is bad.

PS: Any gamer who says they play videogames simply because they are fun is either full of shit or using a very loose definition of fun. If videogame writing is going to improve, we need to fire the cerebral bore into the idea that fun is the one.

1:14am: youtube music videos
So this Pitchfork feature from last week is pretty cool. They put together a collection of 100 music videos already on Youtube. There's several that I'd seen before and forgot about, some I wanted to see again, and a whole bunch I had no idea about.

Definately worth a browse. I'll list some personal faves.

Actually Good:
Avalanches - Frontier Psychiatrist
Bone Thugs - Tha Crossroads
Ice Cube - It Was a Good Day
Jason Forrest - War Photographer
Madvillain - All Caps
My Bloody Valentine - To Here Knows When
Public Enemy - Night of the Living Baseheads
R Kelly - Trapped in the Closet (of course!)
The Replacements - Bastards of Young
Sigur Ros - Untitled #1
Twisted Sister - We're Not Gonna Take It
Yo La Tengo - Sugarcube

So Bad It's Good:
The Jacksons - Can You Feel It?
Journey - Seperate Ways
Kidz Bop - Since U Been Gone
Lionel Richie - Hello
Village People - Sex Over the Phone


And the one that everyone MUST check out:
David Hasselhoff - Hooked on a Feeling, which I was impressed by enough to capture these three images:

12:37am: video: super soaker

I'm trying out this new blog video feature on Youtube.

Watch this hilarious commercial if you haven't seen it yet. It's unbelievable that it got approved. And in case you miss it, at the end the announcer really does say "Major pumping required." I would have thought it was a joke if I didn't see it for the first time looping on a TV in Toys R Us.

1:29am: online collectivism
In case you haven't seen it yet, here's an interesting essay by the always interesting Jaron Lanier. It's published by a favorite site of mine, edge.org

Lanier writes about "the hazards of online collectivism". It's a really clear and insightful articulation of a perspective I'm sure many of us share: that the hive mind is fascinating but dangerous. What also makes this essay appealing is that Lanier acknowledges, even if not always explicitly, that we don't understand what we're dealing with here and we have only a vague idea of what is going to happen.

This seems like a pretty important and timely article, so I'll provide a disjointed summary in excerpts that gives a skewed perspective for those short on time or attention:

"the problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly."
"A core belief of the wiki world is that whatever problems exist in the wiki will be incrementally corrected as the process unfolds. This is analogous to the claims of Hyper-Libertarians who put infinite faith in a free market, or the Hyper-Lefties who are somehow able to sit through consensus decision-making processes."
"A desirable text is more than a collection of accurate references. It is also an expression of personality."
"Myspace is a richer, multi-layered, source of information than the Wikipedia, although the topics the two services cover barely overlap. If you want to research a TV show in terms of what people think of it, Myspace will reveal more to you than the analogous and enormous entries in the Wikipedia."
"The Wikipedia is far from being the only online fetish site for foolish collectivism. There's a frantic race taking place online to become the most "Meta" site, to be the highest level aggregator, subsuming the identity of all other sites."
"In the last year or two the trend has been to remove the scent of people, so as to come as close as possible to simulating the appearance of content emerging out of the Web as if it were speaking to us as a supernatural oracle. This is where the use of the Internet crosses the line into delusion."
"Mainstream news sources all lead today with a serious earthquake in Java. Popurls includes a few mentions of the event, but they are buried within the aggregation of aggregate news sites like Google News. The reason the quake appears on popurls at all can be discovered only if you dig through all the aggregating layers to find the original sources, which are those rare entries actually created by professional writers and editors who sign their names. But at the layer of popurls, the ice cream story and the Javanese earthquake are at best equals, without context or authorship."
"The hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it?"
"Just as people are willing to bend over backwards and make themselves stupid in order to make an AI interface appear smart (as happens when someone can interact with the notorious Microsoft paper clip,) so are they willing to become uncritical and dim in order to make Meta-aggregator sites appear to be coherent."
"The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people. If we start to believe that the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we're devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots."
"Google News is for the moment better funded and enjoys a more secure future than most of the rather small number of fine reporters around the world who ultimately create most of its content. The aggregator is richer than the aggregated."
"More people appear to vote in [American Idol] than in presidential elections...The winners are likable, almost by definition. But John Lennon wouldn't have won."
"If the code that ran the Wikipedia user interface were as open as the contents of the entries, it would churn itself into impenetrable muck almost immediately. The collective is good at solving problems which demand results that can be evaluated by uncontroversial performance parameters, but it is bad when taste and judgment matter."
"Here is a quick pass at where I think the boundary between effective collective thought and nonsense lies: The collective is more likely to be smart when it isn't defining its own questions, when the goodness of an answer can be evaluated by a simple result (such as a single numeric value,) and when the information system which informs the collective is filtered by a quality control mechanism that relies on individuals to a high degree. Under those circumstances, a collective can be smarter than a person. Break any one of those conditions and the collective becomes unreliable or worse. Meanwhile, an individual best achieves optimal stupidity on those rare occasions when one is both given substantial powers and insulated from the results of his or her actions. If the above criteria have any merit, then there is an unfortunate convergence. The setup for the most stupid collective is also the setup for the most stupid individuals."
"Every authentic example of collective intelligence that I am aware of also shows how that collective was guided or inspired by well-meaning individuals."
"Some of the regulating mechanisms for collectives that have been most successful in the pre-Internet world can be understood in part as modulating the time domain. For instance, what if a collective moves too readily and quickly, jittering instead of settling down to provide a single answer? This happens on the most active Wikipedia entries, for example, and has also been seen in some speculation frenzies in open markets."
"The Wikipedia has recently slapped a crude low pass filter on the jitteriest entries, such as "President George W. Bush." There's now a limit to how often a particular person can remove someone else's text fragments. I suspect that this will eventually have to evolve into an approximate mirror of democracy as it was before the Internet arrived."
"The reverse problem can also appear. The hive mind can be on the right track, but moving too slowly. Sometimes collectives would yield brilliant results given enough time but there isn't enough time. A problem like global warming would automatically be addressed eventually if the market had enough time to respond to it, for instance."
"History has shown us again and again that a hive mind is a cruel idiot when it runs on autopilot. Nasty hive mind outbursts have been flavored Maoist, Fascist, and religious"
"The hive mind should be thought of as a tool. Empowering the collective does not empower individuals — just the reverse is true. There can be useful feedback loops set up between individuals and the hive mind, but the hive mind is too chaotic to be fed back into itself."

"The illusion that what we already have is close to good enough, or that it is alive and will fix itself, is the most dangerous illusion of all. By avoiding that nonsense, it ought to be possible to find a humanistic and practical way to maximize value of the collective on the Web without turning ourselves into idiots. The best guiding principle is to always cherish individuals first."

1:55am: hi-def squirrels


This, my friends, is the next generation of virtual squirrel. A squirrel that can be displayed at up to 1080i resolution and that has a true squirrel-ly personality. Unlike past videogame squirrels in ye games of olde, when you walk up to this squirrel, he runs from you realistically.

He sits atop his perch and while gazing into the endless expanse of nothingness allowed by a teraflop of processing power, he encounters the all new HD-era sublime. Indeed, the fear and awe one feels when playing Kameo is almost beyond words.

Fear that videogames will continue down this path. Awe that a game for a $400 console that was in making for over five years by a developer that was bought for $375 million can suck this bad.


At least the squirrel was awesome. Just don't tell these guys.

1:17am: hot dogs and irons


No, this was not photoshopped. This isn't even supposed to be humorous. I got it from a Youtube video about a DIY junk race. It's a several minute video on racing, but the highlight is certainly this little gem which barely gets a few seconds. Who would have thunk it?

As tends to be the case when the Internet speaks, the comments are particularly enlightening. Keep in mind that the hot dog scene is only a very, very small portion of the video.

"wtf is with the hot dogs? and irons?"
"I congratulate the person who haved the idea of iron the hot dog, this idea is too stupid for I think to that...."
"why the hell wuld she cook hotdogs with iron wtf... lol"
"Oo ironed hot dogs!"
"THAS HOW STUPID PEOPLE WASTE TIME NICE RED NECK XD"
"I wanna know if she got the wrinkles out of those hotdogs!"
"the red neck special olympics lol."
"wud is dis..redneck convention?"
"i feel like i should say YEEEEEEHHHAAAAAAAW or something"
"Funfor the whole redneck family! Gotta show this to my hubby, he's a carpenter!"
"hmmmm you done realize but their not rednecks....these people are smart....so they cant be rednecks lol...just people that love tools my dad would fit right in"
"ironing hotdogs??? how poor are these people????"
"Wow. Creative, but kind of lame. Ironing hotdogs?"
"omg this is lame... the person with the camera is idiotic and all people there are stupid"
"WTF WAS THAT??????"
"fucking hick."
"Apart from the Iron and hot dogs, very sad, very boring."
"i dunno, hot dogs with an iron? i guess it sounds ok just gotta watch out for lint 'n' stuff"
"I want hot dogs now."
"...two words: RED NECKS"
"wtf that lady was cooking hot dogs with an iron thingy what red necks holy crap lol"
"oh wel aslong as ya dont hear a redneck say: Hey Yall! look at this!! then its all okay ^^"
"im embarrassed to be white"
"these stupid people clearly don't have lives to live. what a bunch of idiots." [says the person commenting on a Youtube video just to tear it down]

And of course:

"u suck"

1:52am: list: terence mckenna
So I got on a bit of a Terence McKenna kick over the past few months. I still haven’t read any of his books (Food of the Gods, True Hallucinations…), but I’ve collected quite a bit of bootlegs from his speaking tours. He’s an utterly captivating speaker, and it’s a good thing considering how out there many of his ideas are. It’s amazing. Even at his weirdest he maintains a skeptical, erudite style.

It’s a true shame he died early several years ago. In his later years he transcended his role as psychedelic spokesman and quirky scientist to become a fascinating thinker on virtual worlds, the Internet, life, death, space, time, etc…

For fun (and to celebrate the 1 Year/10 post anniversary of my blog!) I’m gonna throw together a list of my favorite recurring Terence McKenna discussions. This can also serve as a very brief and casual summary of McKenna’s very broad and serious thought. I’m only focusing on the major topics that he kept going back to and leaving out such fascinating rants as the birth of the bicameral mind, his thoughts on Finnegan’s Wake, and the balkanization of epistemology. I’m also not going to include any of his raps that were specifically about drugs. So no self-transforming machine elves or different ways to take cannabis. The bulk of his talks prior to his last few years focused on the experiences of psychedelic drugs and his descriptions never cease to fascinate so perhaps it’s a little unfair, but hey, I have to draw the line somewhere. I'm also sure I'll forget a bunch of important and interesting things, but oh well.

I've been listening to McKenna talks at night to help me fall asleep. The nice thing about listening to them is that McKenna is thought-provoking, but never dense. He's very clear and lucid...even, at times, poetic. And best of all, you never know what you're gonna hear next. One moment he can be talking about very technical biochemistry, next about circuses, and then about the epistimological foundations science...all held together by psychedelic drugs.


Top 5 or so Terence McKenna Rants:

6) Evolution is attaining greater dimensionality. The progression of life in a nutshell: immobile with no sensory inputs…able to perceive immediate environment…able to inch forward and backward…able to turn…able to jump/fly [three dimensions of space now mastered]…able to speak [language is a tool based in time: talk about seeing the animal]…able to write [further step towards moving through time]…able to access anywhere from anywhere and transcend physical space [promise of virtual technology].

5) Alien intelligence. McKenna had no shortage of jokes about people being abducted by humanoid (or reptilianoid) alien invaders. As he often said, “Any alien creature that interested in the tenderer portions of my anatomy is not alien enough for my taste!” McKenna instead observed that the difficult thing about alien life is recognizing when it is in front of you because it will likely be nothing like you would expect or even imagine. He had three suggestions for possible alien intelligence (by alien meaning unlike our own more than extraterrestrial). The first is…mushrooms. He actually had a more solid argument than you would think… mushroom spores can survive in the vacuum of space… an intelligence advanced enough to travel many light years through space also must have the ability to sculpt their form and mushrooms are the lowest on the food chain…an advanced intelligence is likely to exist in a dimension of pure information (the entities encountered in psychedelic experiences)…the psychedelic chemistry of mushrooms has no apparent self-serving purpose yet constitutes much of their make-up. Besides the mushrooms, he also suggested that a planetary intelligence (Gaia) may have developed during the hundreds of millions of years life has been on Earth. And of course, what he argued was most likely: we are birthing alien intelligence as we speak. Over the past fifteen years, the machines have connected and they are beginning to awaken.

4) The evolution of human beings was assisted by the foods they ate. What this really means, of course, is that we had a fundamental relationship with psychedelic mushrooms until a significant climate change occurred roughly ten thousand years ago. Like most of McKenna’s theories, it sounds a little kooky at first…that psychedelic drugs helped bring us into consciousness…but after some reflection and explanation, it turns out not to be so far fetched after all. For one thing, it’s now a fairly standard view that the Dimethyltryptamine in our brains causes our dreams (an idea, it should be noted, that McKenna was among the first to suggest). Much pre-historic art also glorifies cows (cow patties=location of mushrooms) and mushrooms themselves. It’s also intuitively apparent that if psychedelic mushrooms were readily available, people would have eaten them and their bodies would have been affected by what they regularly ate.

3) Novelty theory. Novelty theory is McKenna’s suggestion that the great force left out of cosmological understanding thus far is that the universe becomes more novel as time moves on. Novelty is greater complexity and differentiation, more connections, and unprecedented developments. It’s an easy concept to intuitively understand: Physics>chemistry>biology>consciousness>virtuality is one broad way of describing it. But putting it this way is neither novel in itself nor particularly interesting. What McKenna goes on to do, however, is construct a partial differential equation to describe the trend of novelty, and amazingly (and almost suspiciously), so long as 0=the year 2012, the graph it generates matches up perfectly with our intuitive understanding of novel development. You can use or look at pics of his Timewave Zero software to study the graph. If you zoom in around 65 million years ago, you see an enormous drop in novelty due to the suspected asteroid impact, a large increase in novelty when Heraclites, Confucius, and Aeschylus were contemporaries, and a drop in novelty during the 30 Years War, to give just three examples. The best evidence that he wasn’t just making crap up is his predictions. For example, in the early 90s he predicted that during fall of 1994 there would be the most novel occurrence ever. McKenna’s supporters argue that this was the web beginning to enter the mainstream. He also predicted something equally novel would occur in early July of 1996. Within one day of his prediction, Dolly was cloned. Strange at the very least… What also distinguishes this theory from other similar ones such as Darwin’s or Kurzweil’s is that there is an attractor at the end. The universe is moving towards…something…what McKenna refers to as the transcendental object at the end of time.

2) 2012. In order for novelty theory to work, McKenna had to set 0 at 2012. This is coincidentally the year the Mayan calendar enters a new cycle and the year Ray Kurzweil predicts computers will achieve the processing power of the human brain. McKenna was a rational person, and he didn’t think the universe was actually going to end just because his equation became 0 during that year. Instead, he suggested several theories to try to explain what really will happen. One is simply that time travel will be invented. Novelty theory is a theory of time…that the universe becomes more novel as time progresses. If time can be freely navigated it can no longer sustain a linear trend. As for the grandfather paradox, McKenna casually suggested that time machines cannot travel before their invention. Another of McKenna’s suggestions is that machines truly awaken and the era of biological man ends. Regardless, after 2012 McKenna insisted things will never be the same again.


1) Information is somehow more fundamental than gravity or light, and language is thus of primary importance. This is perplexing yet fascinating. For one thing, it’s unintuitive. But McKenna was insistent upon the primacy of some thing we don’t really understand called “information”. This notion is most obvious when dealing with virtual spaces, and this was usually the context when this idea came up. But McKenna was often willing to extend the primacy of information to the physical universe as well. As he argued, physics could not be physics without the information carrying capacity of the electromagnetic field…biology could not be biology without the information carrying capacity of DNA. He was also fascinated by the nonlocality principle initially formulated by physicist John Bell which explains that quantum particles are entangled…what Einstein had previously called “spooky action at a distance”. But at the center of this theory, as with about all of McKenna’s thought, was his experience with psychedelics. Self-transforming machine elves and the disembodying of the self in certain altered states were his primary evidence. It’s different from how we usually verify a proposition’s truth, but that’s exactly what makes Terence McKenna so fascinating. Most people that take psychedelics say kooky things and end up looking like kooks. McKenna says kooky things and ends up, at the very least, intriguing.


And now, to reward you for all this reading I’ll post my favorite Terence McKenna quote. This is taken from a talk with Ralph Abraham in 1998 and is one of the most poetic and brilliant lines I've ever heard about the Internet. Even more amazing is that he riffed it off the top of his head and went on like this for over an hour.

"The occult dreams of Gnosticism and alchemy and hermetic thought, the idea that man rather than being a fallen creature could be a co-partner in the enterprise of creation, that particular strain of fantasy gets an enormous shot in the arm from the rise of cyberspace, the informational technologies, and the power to manipulate them...the power to steer human history toward a world of ever greater art and artifice with all the contradictions and ambiguities that necessarily would entail."

1:19am: news: science
Venter has finished sequencing his own genetic code!

Absolutely amazing.

His next project? Artificial life.

And speaking of new forms of life, check out this hypothesis.

Things keep getting stranger and stranger. It makes me nauseous to think of a decade or two from now. 2006 was certainly not this hazy in 1996.

2:36pm: impression: new super mario bros.
New Super Mario Bros. is another Nintendo game that reveres its predecessors and Nintendo’s legacy a little too much for its own good. The game is a homage to Mario games of old, with just enough of its own personality to keep things cohesive and fresh. Indeed, nearly every significant element of the game can be traced back to a previous title, whether it is the wall jumps from Mario 64, the flags from Super Mario Bros., or a world map similar to Super Mario Bros. 3.

New Super Mario Bros.’ adherence to tradition is not necessarily bad as the game always offers the past from the vantage of the present by allowing new spins on familiar elements. To the game’s credit, it never tries to relive the past or merely imitate former glories. The fresh way gameplay elements from the 3D Marios were implemented, the new power-ups (most notably the blue Koopa shell), and the exaggerated momentum all contribute to a distinctly different experience. Some might even argue that New Super Mario Bros. is the best Mario yet for taking the best elements of all the Mario games and making one truly super Mario adventure. I can’t believe I just said that…

It seems to me, though, that every Mario platformer so far has been distinctly different. Put simply, Mario Sunshine was mystery, Mario 64 was a puzzle, Mario World was a vacation, Mario 3 was a quest, Mario 2 was a dream, and Mario 1 was a challenge. New Super Mario Bros. does not suggest any clear theme that unites the game into a satisfying and cohesive whole. The game is more equivalent to an average of all the previous Mario titles. It may not reach some of their lows, but it also can’t obtain their highs.

New Super Mario Bros. is a solid game and I enjoyed playing it, yet after completion it didn’t feel like I had experienced or accomplished much of anything. Unless you play exceedingly reckless, it is a disappointingly easy game that only offers an occasional challenge that can be easily overcome after an attempt or two. Now, Super Mario World is not much different, of course. But the games are of two distinctly different breeds. Super Mario World forgoes challenge in favor of a sandbox-style romp centered on exploration. New Super Mario Bros. is structured more like Mario 1 and Mario 3, with exploration being a (small) part of the challenge more than the focus of a lighthearted game.

Perhaps what most defines the place of New Super Mario Bros. in the Mario canon is Mario’s distinctly different physics: the ridiculous momentum and the floaty jumps. A clear cue was taken from Sonic games, and the results are mixed. At times toying with the post-jump slides and ridiculously high spring Mario gets from jumping on an enemy can be amusing. Often, however, the lower level of precision can become aggravating, particularly when thin platforms need to be jumped to. It might even be argued that most of the game’s challenge comes not from the obstacles Mario faces, but the floaty control.

The essence of New Super Mario Bros. is, more than anything else, simply an imagining what Super Mario Bros. would be like with new physics and minor structural and graphical updates. It’s not at all a remake, but the spirit is certainly strong. It’s not entirely successful, mostly because Nintendo failed to think through the implications of the changes they were making. It’s an entertaining diversion nonetheless, even if it will not go down as a classic.

2:05am: reading weekend
So I don't have much to do this weekend for a change. I only worked Saturday night and have no places to go, people to meet, or schoolwork to catch up on.

On Friday I did nothing but read all day, broken only by ordering a pizza and traveling to a coffee shop to read some more. First I finished a book I had been working on for a few weeks now, Stephen Kern's The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918. It turned out to be as interesting as the title suggests. Though it was not nearly as good as Wolfgang Schivelbusch's masterpiece The Railway Journey. Where The Railway Journey digs deep into a small area of focus...the effect of railroads on interesting topics like the perception of space and time...The Culture of Time and Space takes a much broader view of more diverse phenomona. It is structured around general themes such as the past, distance, and speed rather than a single technology. There's something to be said for this approach, but it was ultimately less satisfying. Especially because the sources Kern used were exactly what one would expect: Joyce, Proust, Stein, James, Bergson, etc, while The Railway Journey cited obscure pieces of historical record and mystery novels.

So I finished Kern's book fairly early and devoted the rest of the day to reading through the entire lengthy essay (or short book) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. The edition I have has a beautiful hot pink binding and the title "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" plastered across almost entire front cover. It's a good thing I have a girlfriend, cause there's no way I would have met a girl at the coffee shop reading that on a Friday night.

At first I was kinda disappointed at how obvious Kuhn's argument seemed. Considering it is such a legendary text, I had assumed reading would be slow as I came to terms with insight after insight. His method turned out to be fairly subtle, however, and once the book started picking up steam I was hooked if never overwhelmed or blown away. Kuhn is absolutely brilliant, and I definately understand why this book has achieved such high renown. The only thing that dissapointed me was that I would have loved to hear Kuhn's thoughts on the relationship between progress in technology and progress in science and the ways in which scientific knowledge is inherently tied into a power structure that extends beyond the paradigmatic structure Kuhn discusses at length. I suppose that might be too much to ask for such an ambitious topic being limited to such a small size...

Today I woke up, ate an egg salad sandwich, then sat outside under an awning to listen to the rain fall and start reading some book on the history of mathematics I've recently acquired. It's alright so far...surprisingly well-written for a book by a mathematician...but it's a bit too superficial for my interests. At least I learned some cool stuff about Pythagoras' cult of the number!

I'll try to skim through the rest of that mathematics book tommorrow before I return to my usual routine of school, work, basketball/racquetball, girlfriend, sleep. I love getting weekends like this every couple of months, where all I do is focus on reading or playing videogames. But I can't imagine doing it all the time...

4:12pm: old school
Last night I picked up Tobias Wolff's Old School from the library. I can't put it down. I read till I passed out last night and read it during three of my four classes today. For whatever reason, I've always loved the coming of age genre, and this one has the added bonus of being about a love of books. Wolff exudes so much passion for both literature itself and the social relations that give it meaning that I can't help but be taken away and even inspired.

My favorite part of Old School so far has been when Ayne Rand came to the campus. I never really liked her, but I also never noticed how...radical...she was. Her appearance was an interesting contrast with Robert Frost's, as he acted the part of the wise old sage happy with his position in life, while Rand acted like the playground bully. Regardless of how true the account in Old School is, these portrayals certainly further solidified my view of both the authors.

I wonder if Wolff's other books are this good...