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

Patterns in Text

This is the text from "Harold and Maude," but if you look carefully you can just make out the flickering image of Dorothy Parker. And yes, dear reader, that is Dali's handwriting.

Ruin Value: The concept that a building be designed such that if it eventually collapsed, it would leave behind aesthetically pleasing ruins

Since I remember this having come up, I'm posting it. Seems that in designing ruins as art we ran across an idea that had already come up. Funny, in'it? I wonder how long it will take the next person to come up with it independently?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruin_value