Paper for Thursday

Dalí’s surrealist activities and the model of scientific experimentation

Abstract (from author)

This paper aims to explore relationships between Salvador Dalí’s practices at the end of the 1920s and during the 1930s, and models of scientific experimentation. In 1928 Dalí took a growing interest in André Breton’s automatism and elaborated his first conception of surrealism which was based on the model of the scientific observation of nature. Dalí’s writings of this period mimicked protocols of botanic or entomological experiments and reformulated in an original way Breton’s surrealist project: they simulated the conditions and practices of scientific observations of nature. Paradoxically, this documentaristic and hyperobjective attitude led to a hyper-subjective and surrealistic description of reality: objects were taken out of their context, they were broken up and no longer recognisable. When Dalí officially entered Breton’s group and conceived the paranoiac-critical method, he focused his attention on another scientific model: Albert Einstein’s notion of space-time. Dalí appropriated a concept which defined the inextricable relationship between space-time and the object and which became, in his view, the mental model of the interaction between interiority and exteriority, invisible and visible, subjectivity and objectivity. Significantly, the Catalan artist almost rewrote one of Einstein’s own papers, by pointing out the active dimension of Einstein’s space-time and by conferring new meanings on his notion of the space-time curve. I will track down the migration of this concept from physics to Dalí’s surrealist vision by considering its importance in writings where the artist uses his method to interpret the most varied phenomena, from the myth of Narcissus, to English pre-Raphaelitism and the
architecture of Antoni Gaudí.

Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifesto 1918 (excerpt)

This is the essay I talked about today. It has refreshingly concise descriptions of cubism and futurism, as well as subjectivity in art. The whole manifesto is available here.

Cubism was born out of a simple manner of looking at objects: Cezanne painted a cup twenty centimetres lower than his eyes, the cubists look at it from above, others complicate its appearance by cutting a vertical section through it and soberly placing it to one side. (I'm not forgetting the creators, nor the seminal reasons of unformed matter that they rendered definitive.) The futurist sees the same cup in movement, a succession of objects side by side, mischievously embellished by a few guide-lines. This doesn't stop the canvas being either a good or a bad painting destined to form an investment for intellectual capital. The new painter creates a world whose elements are also its means, a sober, definitive, irrefutable work. The new artist protests: he no longer paints (symbolic and illusionistic reproduction) but creates directly in stone, wood, iron, tin, rocks, or locomotive structures capable of being spun in all directions by the limpid wind of the momentary sensation...

What constitutes Proof?

We worked very hard during the first few weeks of this semester to address this question. I listen to the radio, watch television, and hear people chatting in truck stops and dimly lit roadside diners often enough to know that people accept all sorts of claims with no proof whatsoever. Unfortunately, this indicates to me that an alarmingly large portion of our world a) have no idea what it means for something to be proven (or even supported), or b) don't care if things are demonstrably true or not Does repeating a claim represent proof? Of course not. What about my particular belief that a claim is true? Nope.

Without some reproducible, falsifiable framework for investigating reality, we are basically left with about 50% "I never thought about whether or not that was true" and 50% "I think it's true because I think it's true."

It's this notion of a "framework of inquiry" that we have been interrogating ruthlessly since august.

Conspiracy Theory Recursion

Something seems wrong about the way people instinctively make sense of the world. There seems to be a universal need in humanity for novel experience, for there always to be another layer behind what we think the world is. Perhaps some selective pressure in our evolutionary history predisposes to such thinking, or it is an expectation in light of the seemingly limitless progress of science...there we are thinking of deeper explanations. There is also bias in the way people come to know ideas, for much of what influences whether you buy an argument is determined by the person that expresses it. As written by Dostoyevsky in The Possessed, “you cannot imagine what wrath and sadness overcome your whole soul when a great idea, which you have long cherished as holy, is caught up by the ignorant and dragged forth before fools like themselves into the street, and you suddenly meet it in the market unrecognisable, in the mud, absurdly set up, without proportion, without harmony, the plaything of foolish louts!”

You didn't really think this post was about flaws in human perception, did you? You aren't that naïve. This post is about David Icke. He would have you believe his fall from British national spokesman of the green party to arch-alien-crackpot-conspiracist was the result of lots of drugs or a brain tumor that won't close the deal. You wouldn't fall for that one, would you?

Ostensibly Icke had nothing to gain by his supposed revalation. His meager sales in books will not make up for his salary at the BBC or restore his tattered reputation. If shapeshifting reptiles actually do exist, they now know they can breed within the human population without any threat of people finding out, for Icke's conspiracy theories are shamgasms of froth and fear mongering. They are caricature. You could even call it a smokescreen.

David Icke is an alien. The same flesh eating, shape shifting reptile from the constellation Draco that he writes about. Any reports of his scaly plans will be laughed off by the unwitting public, the herd he preys on. Sheeple.

Let the Physicist Beware

One of the classic and apparently still-popular conspiracy theories is that of a flat Earth. Notwithstanding the grandiose elements of myth and legend that are so often highlighted by the existence of a planar disc-shaped world (stories ranging from medieval sea tales to Tolkien's epic The Silmarillion), the modern proponents of a flat earth have quite a number of physical phenomena to account for.

A "convincing" flat earth model would necessitate a complete restructuring of how we view the universe, involving everything from a 32-mile-diameter sun to a universe-wide upwards acceleration at 9.8 m/s/s to a Wall of Ice [sic] guarded by the Government in an attempt to keep its Conspiracy under wraps.

More (mis?)information than you could ever want on the topic can be found at The Flat Earth Society Forum.

But who's to say the Earth isn't really shaped like a 21-dimension pentagonal orthoborotunda?

Conspiracy Theories, Part 1

Conspiracy Theories Part One: "What the Government/Nasa/A Baffling Network of Unlikely Cohorts United only in their Compulsive Desire to Mislead You Don't Want You to Know"

Conspiracy theories are marvelous things. By marvelous, I mean entertaining, bizarre, and often devoid of any link to what we in the Biz call reality. Unconstrained by things like evidence, logic, or reason, they are able to grow in spite of all contrary data. In a perfect world, a conspiracy theory's lifespan would be brief and brutal.

Step 1) Hypothesis is presented
The only reason the government refuses to address the shadow people dilemma is that our government ARE shadow people!

Step 2) Data is checked
Is there even a shadow person dilemma? No. Wait, what is a shadow person? Are you just making things up?

Step 3) Hypothesis terminated with extreme prejudice.

Sadly, in the real world, with its pundits, cable news stations, late night radio hosts and an internet absolutely bursting with literally anything anyone wants to say about anything, this sort of claim can grow exponentially as time passes. Every news cycle represents another chance to fill 30 seconds of empty air time with a passing mention of "the shadow person agenda"or the "neocon denial of a shadow revolution." This in no way represents proof or data, but conspiracy theories don't need those to survive--they only need continued exposure.

The proponents of conspiracy theories often use what appear to be evidence-based methods to establish their points. In class, we have been covering various forms of fallacious argument. Fallacies are the food, water, and sunlight of conspiracy theories.

(to be continued)

Is listening to music cognitive or pragmatic?

We are in the process of deconstructing our musical tastes to determine which aspects of our favorite genres are actually musical. As it turns out, lots of nonmusical information clutters our perception of what makes music enjoyable or not.

• "My ex-girlfriend liked the free form jazz stylings of Bruno Mindhorn, so I think he sucks," or
  
• "No TRUE Scotsman would listen to Terminal Margaret!"

However true these sentiments might be, they are in no way related to the arrival of pressure changes at the eardrum and their subsequent transformation into electrochemical signals. We have become a little more able to explore this departure since our experiences at Lakatos' pool party and our weekend at Martha's Vineyard watching Baudrillard and Lyotard deconstruct their favorite episodes of Quincy: Medical Examiner.

For the next couple of assignments, let's be especially aware of the boundary that exists between what we are talking about (e.g. music) and what narrative we use to talk about it (good versus bad, useful versus frivolous, moral versus immoral, structure versus chaos, etc). For a quick glimpse at a narrative-free description of musical genres, check out the Music Genome Project (the guts of the pandora algorithms).

Water on the Moon, Folks.

I don't know if you read that headline completely, because it said that we have found "unambiguous evidence" of water. Where, you ask, having not read the headline? The moon, that's where.

Link

Good Evening Sinners

Generally speaking, I would consider Warren Ellis to be the rabid dog of contemporary literature. He lives entirely by means of red bull, GOOD whisky, cigarettes, and a signed contract from the devil granting him complete immunity from death so long as Ellis doesn't let lucifer's missus know about the mistress he lets dress him up as a piece of asparagus and then trim him in ways that would make bmezine blush (I'm sure Warren tells her anyway, because he's just that kind of bastard). He's made his living, from what I know, mostly as a comics writer with a style that could probably be best described by taking Alan Moore's misanthropy of the 80's, turning it inside out as a hat, dousing it with gasoline, then running screaming naked down the streets of london with it ablaze in a whiskey induced haze that would have made Ernest Hemingway recommend him for rehab - by which I mean he would have called the cops to come restrain him down and put him a way in a padded room until judgement day with priests of all denominations around guarding to make sure that nothing ever came back out.

An early adopter of social media, warren ellis carved a niche among many of us by being out there on a daily basis, emailing, blogging, and now twittering -creating a connection with his audience that many now cite as their reason for psychotic break. Trademark of this was his introduction "Good Morning, sinners." In twitter, he has found some variance, a thing which now proves to be his downfall - the creation of a Warren Ellis simulator that is so spot on people now ask him if he's ever heard of it, or even worse yet, if that's where he gets his insults from. As someone who's been enduring Warren's derogatory remarks about everything for a few years now, I can certainly say that it is truly a third order simulacra. It is mechanical, algorithmic, and reproduces the bile which spews forth from the damnedable man in a way that only serves to infuriate him further. I present it to you now:

http://talklikewarrenellis.com/

We can only hope the apocalypse will come before the website "http://talkliketalklikewarrenellisdotcom.com" is created, otherwise I'm sure the man himself will do much worse.

For other instances of his work you can find him (or some of the things he does) here:

http://www.twitter.com/warrenellis
http://www.warrenellis.com/
http://www.freakangels.com/
http://www.bleedingcool.com/category/do-anything-by-warren-ellis/

Post Script: If anyone is offended by the tone or content above, just know that Warren would have made things much worse.

All your Baudrillard are belong to me

Here is a huge repository of Baudrillard information available to anyone comfortable with time travel.

Poetron, or My robot has more of the mead of poetry in his tiniest servomotor than you do in your wildest imaginings.

My poetry engine, Poetron, takes the ideas we develop in class and applies them to text. Here is an example of his work. After reading it, follow the link above and try out the engine yourself. This piece is a combination of Colonel Kurtz, the Sugar Hill Gang and an underground UK breakbeat pioneer, William Shakespeare.

How much more praise deserv'd thy beauty's use,
I watched a snail crawl
let's rock, you dont stop
the edge of a straight razor and surviving.
Crawling, slithering, along
to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat
well so far youve heard my voice but i brought two friends along
The Horror.
the edge of a straight razor and surviving.
That’s my dream.

Online Mapping Software

I haven't done much with this software, but it seems straightforward. Since it's online, you do not need to install anything on your machine to use it. Oh, and it exports in html or xml, so you can post any maps you make directly on controlmachine.

http://bubbl.us/

Day Three / Four: Pool Party at Popper's House

We waded into the deep end of the pool at Karl Popper's house. Luckily, Thomas Kuhn was in for the weekend, and he provided a slightly less brutal view of how science progresses. According to Kuhn, fields of study go through several stages:

1. Prescience-Folks working really hard to understand phenomena well enough to begin to propose a tentative suggestion of a solution. Once a set of conceptually linked theories, or paradigm, has its collective phaser set on falsify, the body of work moves to...
   
2. Normal Science-- Scientists go about their daily work of moving the body of knowledge slowly but surely forward. Errors and unexplained results happen and are recorded. They don't cause the disposal of the entire paradigm, since no more successful set of theories exists.
   
3. Eventually, however, enough problems, missteps, and falsified claims accumulate and cause an entire paradigm to be overthrown. This is revolutionary science.

Popper's version of scientific progress looks as tame as a Mayberry Cake raffle for the Daughters of the American Revolution compared to the cataclysmic shifts in power Kuhn described. "Ultimately this view is naive," shouts Lakatos from the diving board. Lakatos took Popper's wel-behaved linear model, folded in Kuhn's Great Battles in Norse Mythology style of progress, and combined the best parts of both.

According to Lakatos, families of conceptually linked scientific theories and methods are linked in a research program. Competing research programs do slow and steady battle every day. After a given research program gains prominence, it may begin to recede (become increasingly complex without contributing more knowledge) and be overtaken by one that is progressive (produces new knowledge). This shift in power between research programs can be considered a revolution, but not a discontinous event. It is instead the result of a long, steady tension between programs.

Thanks Again Science!

What's the smallest thing you have ever seen? Not any more. Scientists from IBM have successfully imaged a single molecule.

I am sorry if the shock and awe produced by this discovery caused anyone to faint, become incoherent or otherwise harm themselves in disbelief. A better introduction might have been "Are you sitting down? No, then find a chair because your mind is about to be blown."

Day Two

Today we discussed the scientific method as an iterative process. Rather than grinding out answers mechanically, the scientific method grinds out experimental results, from which we may infer the answers. Was our initial claim correct? Does that indicate anything about our hypothesis and it's underlying structure? Was there anything we assumed? Most importantly, does any of that affect the possible Truth of my claims? Deciding we needed a better understanding of these things, we called in the big guns, Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, et al for next time.

We also mentioned the differences between a hypothesis and a theory, and studied the long and winding road the former travels to become the latter.

Addendum: The analyses of the in-class poem were reviewed and discussed. Excerpts and commentary will be posted soon.

Day One

We constructed twelve randomly selected lines of text, divided into three groups of four. Ostensibly, these are the intro, conflict, and resolution of some internal theme. During our initial pass at understanding (first order approximation) we spotted some common threads.

• Christian imagery
• death and rebirth
• fire and water
• groups of people characterized by following
• suffering and the benefits of eventual discovery

and so on. For next time, we need to start thinking about how to combine these into a coherent theme or "meaning of the poem." Are these the only connections that can be found? Have we utterly exhausted the content of our text? Of course not. As long as we stare at the lines, we will continue to generate connections between varying images in the work.

As we continue to study these things (physical systems) we will get a clearer understanding of what it means to mean something, and how certain we can be that our meanings are real.

Forum for the course

I have set up a forum page for the class, in the event that we need one. If you can think of any subdivisions that would be useful, let me know.

controlmachine.freeforums.org

Go to Hell, Science!

Folks are flocking to the Israeli town of Kiryat Yam to cash in on what I can only call a sure thing. All they have to do is get a photo of the town's mermaid. Simple as pie, folks. Whoever ponies up this reward money is an idiot. How long can this contest take, like 8 minutes? Here's a contest idea for you: "$1,000,000 for any photo of a broken sand dollar!"

In my experience, it's more difficult to take beach pictures without mermaids littering the shot. I have a filing cabinet filled with vacation pictures absolutely ruined by mermaids. Perfect shots of the sun setting over the horizon...marred by comely sea wenches lolling about on the sands. Award winning visions of morning fog slowly fading under the intense gaze of the rising sun...poisoned by the emerging forms of she-fish. At least with jellyfish, you can listen to the radio and get an idea of the population density.

Note: The graphic accompanying this post does not constitute photographic evidence of mermaids.

Link to article (LiveScience.com).

And so it begins...

So a factory worker in Sweden got injured during a run-in with some bit of automated machinery yesterday. Seems innocent enough, I guess. The article is available here. Blah, blah, blah. Industrial accident.

One sentence in the report did, however, catch my eye.

"But the robot suddenly came to life and grabbed a tight hold of the victim's head."

Just so everyone is clear on what happened... A ROBOT CAME TO LIFE AND ATTACKED A MAN. A human man, not some audioanimatronic factory worker that shared a kind of perverse kinship with the malfunctioning (allegedly) assemblage. An actual man. Given that this is in clear violation of every human/robot precept, why is every newspaper not printing full page reports on this, or at least putting out special "Well, we're dead for sure" editions?

These editions/ads wouldn't even need an accompanying article, just a black and white spread (with a quick splash of dark fluid...is it blood, or oil...who can tell) and the words A ROBOT CAME TO LIFE AND ATTACKED A MAN. If I were appointed head of the worldwide media cabal, I would use every drop of ink at my disposal and a font of my own devising, Times New Holy Shit Bold, because this seems like that kind of emergency.

Full Disclosure: I originally designed Times New Holy Shit Bold for use with the potential future headline "Infinite Hamburgers!" It saddens me to think that due to impending robot massacre of the human race, we will never see a day that knows no limit on hamburgers.

Book Review: Seagalogy, by Vern.

If my mind had a wrist, this book would have broken it and thrown me through a window.

I normally don't feel like shadow boxing or meditating on the finite nature of man before reading a book. But this book, this awesome and terrifying book, leaves me more than a little worried that its subject, the likewise awesome and terrifying Steven Seagal, is somehow out to get me (or at least knows I am reading about him). The author applies his “Badass Auteur Theory,” or “the idea that in some types of action or badass pictures, it is the badass (or star) who carries through themes from one picture to the next” to the whole of the seagal's oevre, including musical efforts.

If you doubt the strength of the author's theory, ask yourself how any episode of any show would be transformed by even the most fleeting glimpse of Steven Seagal.

The most effective support for B.A.T., though, is the existence of the book itself. Since Seagal appears in it, it becomes a "Steven Seagal Book" rather than just an extremely readable and entertaining journey through all things Seagal. How about a "dizzying look through the seagalian lens, whose refractory power transforms governments into criminal agencies, submarines into helicopters, ponytails into widow's peaks, and of course, arms into pretzels."

Even DND is in on the Beaudrillard ideas.

Baraw's newest album - "Find A New One"

Album Covers

1: Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first article that appears is the name of your band. Example? How about OSS Detachment 101?

2: Go to http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last few words of the final quote on the page is your album title. Like...Do about it.

3: Go to http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
The third picture in the top row is your award-winning album cover.




4. Use what technomancers call "software" to combine these elements into an album cover.

Surrealism Papers

The papers we talked about in class are here. Choose one and read it. Then, we can talk about it.

Dada, or A users' guide to kung fu art survival (Repost)

From Tuesday we know that Dada was a reaction to the belief that rational thought and culture would elevate mankind to some sort of heightened state. The prevalent view at the time (early 19teens) was that technology, powered by logic and driven by science, would complete man as a species via enlightment and truth. To the founders of Dada, these things had instead lead to World War I, effectively lowering mankind's status beneath possible repair. The only response that made sense, therefore, was a complete abandonment of rational processes.

Their beliefs, by-laws, and boasts can be found in several "Dada Manifestos" from various members of the movement. In particular, we focus on one by Tristan Tzara, called shockingly, Dada Manifesto.

The assignment for Thursday is to figure out what they meant by one of the following statements:

---

cubism constructs a cathedral of artistic liver paste

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

expressionism poisons artistic sardines

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

simultaneism is still at its first artistic communion

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

futurism wants to mount in an artistic lyricism-elevator

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

unanism embraces allism and fishes with an artistic line

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

neo-classicism discovers the good deeds of artistic art

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

paroxysm makes a trust of all artistic cheeses

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

ultraism recommends the mixture of these seven artistic things

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

creationism vorticism imagism also propose some artistic recipes

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

---

What I want you to do is pick one of these statements (e.g. ultraism recommends the mixture of these seven artistic things) and decipher it. I don't want you to draw connection willy and/or nilly like our earlier exercises, but find out what ultraism is, for example, then what they meant by the 7 artistic things and so on.

Make me understand.

Damn you Baudrillard!

As if we had any doubt about House of Leaves, the book opens with a discussion about the nature of "authenticity." A series of documents about a film about a house. Layers one, two and three of Simulacra. This is turning out even better than I thought.

House of Leaves

OK. The book we will attempt to model as a general system is Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves. It's a big 'un, so we will need to read like the wind. Like the wind itself.

Mapping

The mapping software we chose turned out to be pretty nice. I hesitate to use the term "mindmapping" as it

1. Indicates that we are somehow tracing a topography of Thought. Since we are not using some ridiculously advanced brain scanning mechanism in the classroom (and unless the students have some fat NSF green they haven't mentioned yet) claiming something like this is ridiculous. The brain is made of meat with lightning inside. None of the class's instruments measure anything like this. What we are doing is recording the iterative processes that occur during our attempts to understand a given system--organizing our thoughts in the order they appear and looking for connections that do not necessarily depend on that order.
   
2. Implies a sort of trademark on what I would just call brainstorming. Evidently brainstorming is what helps kids decide on a science fair project but mindmapping is what marketing directors do to motivate their teams to pursue an operational paradigm-shift that strikes strategic brand equity. If you found yourself making air-quotes during either of the italicized phrases, you see what I mean.

What the software helps us do is abstract whatever system we encounter into a sort of "idea space" that we can study independently. This happens every day in physicist's notebooks and dry-erase boards. A man on a bicycle becomes an arrow named 5 m/s, or a falling battleship becomes a sphere of radius r. Potentially troubling details are considered and often discarded. For example, does the man happen to like French cinema? Did the MC5 ever write a soulful but impossibly violent garage rock tribute to this particular battleship? While interesting, these tidbits might not effect a given calculation.

I often mention the act of trying to understand a system as "rotating that system until a symmetry becomes clear." Imagine a poem being mapped, for example, and the concepts sorted or moved around the page until a series of connections becomes clearer. This is the sort of rotation I am talking about. If we could raise the map into three dimensions and rotate it in any direction, it might be easier to spot connections than if it were on the page, the same way relative height is easier to grasp on a 3-d model than a flat map.

The rest of the text.

After running the Billy the Kid piece through the ringer a few times, we extracted some promising patterns about simulacra, biblical imagery, lost pilots and the rugged individualism of the american psyche. Now let's use those patterns as the basis for a set of filters on the rest of the data set, i.e. the full text of Daumier, by Donald Barthelme.

By treating the first excerpt as a representative element of the whole space (text) we can focus tightly on behaviors that we suspect might turn up throughout the data.

Text I want you to map.

We Have All
Misunderstood
Billy the Kid

I was speaking to Amelia.
"Not self-slaughter in the crude sense. Rather the construction of surrogates. Think of it as a transplant."
"Daumier," she said, "you are not making me happy."
"The false selves in their clatter and boister and youthful brio will slay and bother and push out and put to all types of trouble the original, authentic self, which is a dirty great villain, as can be testified and sworn to by anyone who has ever been awake."
"The self also dances," she said, "sometimes."
"Yes," I said, "I have noticed that, but one pays dear for the occasional schottische. Now, here is the point about the self: It is insatiable. It is always, always hankering. It is what you might call rapacious to a fault. The great flaming mouth to the thing is never in this world going to be stuffed full. I need only adduce the names of Alexander, Bonaparte, Messalina, and Billy the Kid."
"You have misunderstood Billy the Kid," she murmured.
"Whereas the surrogate, the construct, is in principle satiable. We design for satiability."
"Have you taken action?" she asked. "Or is all this just the usual?"
"I have one out now," I said, "a Daumier, on the plains and pampas of consciousness, and he is doing very well, I can tell you that He has an important post in a large organization. I get regular reports."
"What type of fellow is he?"
"A good true fellow," I said, "and he knows his limits. He doesn't overstep. Desire has been reduced in him to a minimum. Just enough left to make him go. Loved and respected by all."
"Tosh," she said, "Tosh and bosh."
"You will want one," I said, "when you see what they are like."
"We have all misunderstood Billy the Kid," she said in parting.

Donald Barthleme

why don't poets just say what they mean (I)

An important question came up in class today. "Why don't poets just say what they mean."

If an absinthe maddened verse-jockey somewhere wants to tell me that he's upset over his most recent lover's decision to spend the rent money on a collection of needlepoint replicas of scenes from the patriotic body-art documentary "Tattoos of our Founding Fathers," he could just say it. This is often a source of frustration for science students attempting to navigate literature classes. The science student, as an ostensibly logical being, wants information that is direct and free of distortion. In fact, this is an issue for any person with a growing expertise in one field. After working so hard to compile a library of information and skills, we might not be terribly interested in having to adapt it to another, purposefully complex, system.

The poet is more likely to wonder (or probably opine) about the apparent sterility of mathematics and the engineer laments the theorist's ignorance of utility. What I want you guys to recognize is that underlying all these fields is a meaningful foundation: There is information in this system and you can get it.

Scientific Method

From PHD Comics.

If at first you don't succeed, GOTO LINE 1

If we don't want to spend the rest of the semester dumbfounded by lines like assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives, we must pick a starting point for understanding.

To that end, we focused on the act of understanding as an iterative process. Like a puzzle whose pieces we only slowly begin to recognize, physical systems can be approached in a simple but effective way: the scientific method. I am not claiming that scientists are alone in their efforts to understand systems, but the scientific method is at least an algorithmic approach to the problem.

1. Watch a thing happen
2. Suggest a way of understanding that thing
3. Test some aspect of your suggestion
   
4. Compare the results of the test to the claims you made.

If your results agree, you can move forward with more testing. Getting your friends to perform similar tests and checking out their results implies reproducibility. If your results crash and/or burn, you go back to watching the thing happen and try again. Tadaaaa! Iteration.

For us, the system that gave us headaches was Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation. We attacked it head-on and understood parts of it better than others. Viewing the text, or rather, the process of our attempt to understand the text, as a repeated application of the scientific method will do two things for us. First, we will get a clearer understanding of what Baudrillard means. Second, it will help us wrap our heads around iterative processes.

Funny thing is, I can see this actually happening.

http://www.xkcd.com/451/

William Gibson's Idoru

Through the year that this blog has been around, pattern recognition has been one of the primary topics discussed. A great example is the seemingly random construction of poetry which the mind can take and construct meaning from. This is a truly powerful tool. The capabilities of machines to infer meaning is exceedingly limited - Sure, there are semantic descriptions and machine learning algorithms to be able to probabilistically determine what might be inferred or entailed by a sentence, but really the whole thing is still in its infancy.

The brain though can construct patterns from anywhere, with anything. No where (to my knowledge) is this idea explored more beautifully than in William Gibson's novel "Idoru." The novel center's around Colin Laney, a man with a unique talent for sifting through data to find "Nodal points" - the patterns in the noise. Through this he comes to the attention of Rez - aging rock star - and meets the most interesting of all creations: Rei Toei, the Idoru. Throughout the novel Gibson explores the implications of a brain with an unfettered talent for pattern recognition, and how the massive amount of information presented to us now and in the future will affect our brains ability to construct meaningful patterns.

It's bloody brilliant.

we forgot to title this

I just called to hear your voice
our time is running out
over the Christmas break i traveled to key west
you can't push it underground

just look up, you might see an angel falling
there i watched the sun set every night
how did it come to this?
if that's so, it's the most elegant bullshit I've ever heard

some nights we slept in the car
you will be the death of me
I tried to be chill, but you're so hot that I melted
I enjoyed laying in the sun on the beach