Robot Wisdom auxiliary

suppose incoming freshmen
at some big university
got to spend their first week
getting an intensive overview
of all the courses offered
at every level

fleshing out the arid course catalog
into a mini-encyclopedia

illustrated with slideshows depicting
textbooks notebooks blackboards

the graphs they draw
the simulations they code

maybe a few words
from every possible professor

lecturers sharing anecdotes
about the sorts of thing you'll learn
the skills required
the current hot topics
employment opportunities
publications available

boiling down the essence
as accessibly as possible

Meta 101

and then suppose the
a.i. department
offered an advanced grad seminar

Meta-meta 681 (the semantic web)

that looked at possible ontologies
that might someday
precisely describe
the full breadth of Meta 101

(should metameta 681 be discussed
in the first or last lecture
of meta 101?

or every lecture?)

.

if change is effected most quickly
by applying pressure at the weakest point

then loosening
the corporate media stranglehold
might best be addressed
by implementing a web2.0 'shadow'
to NPR

where news-spin can be collectively challenged
obnoxious egos downrated
story ideas opened to public vote

.

Copy this template to a wordprocessor (set it to Courier or another monospaced font), and graph your personal lifeline using the horizontal axis for longitude. (Maybe use "I" if you were there all year, "i" if only a month or more, "." if you just visited.)

 168 144 120 96 72 48 24 0 24 48 72 96 120 144 168 180
2006 2006
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 168 144 120 96 72 48 24 0 24 48 72 96 120 144 168 180

Alternate idea, continental USA only, two years per line:

 125 120 115 110 105 100 95 90 85 80 75 70 65
2006 2006
2004 2004
2002 2002
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1998 1998
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 125 120 115 110 105 100 95 90 85 80 75 70 65

"...none of the feelings
which the joys or misfortunes
of a 'real' person
awaken in us
can be awakened except through
a mental picture of those joys or misfortunes;
and the ingenuity of the first novelist
lay in his understanding that,
as the picture was the one essential element
in the complicated structure of our emotions,
so that simplification of it
which consisted in the suppression, pure and simple,
of 'real' people
would be a decided improvement.

A 'real' person,
profoundly as we may sympathise with him,
is in a great measure perceptible only
through our senses,
that is to say, he remains opaque,
offers a dead weight
which our sensibilities
have not the strength to lift.

If some misfortune comes to him,
it is only in one small section
of the complete idea we have of him
that we are capable of feeling any emotion;
indeed it is only in one small section
of the complete idea he has of himself
that he is capable of feeling any emotion either.

The novelist's happy discovery
was to think of substituting
for those opaque sections,
impenetrable by the human spirit,
their equivalent in
immaterial sections,
things, that is,
which the spirit can assimilate to itself."

One of Pynchon's girlfriends praised this quality in his company-- everything they did together seemed transformed into a movie.

And Joyce's method, after extracting an epiphany from its arbitrary context, was to re-clothe it in a "decor ideal".

.

each time a human branch
encounters (or hears of)
another branch
judgments are made

if branch A goes away
from an encounter with branch B
with a negative judgment
let branch B (not A)
be colored red from that point
until A's judgment changes

yellow for neutral
green for positive
(or even a full-spectrum
typology of judgments)

A's lifeline
meanders from locale to locale
making judgments that
paint
everyone A encounters
(or hears about)

A in infancy
coloring only a few close relatives

spreading 'paint'
as A's horizons spread

demonstrating more or less inflexibility
in changing judgments

more or less gullibility
in accepting others' self-judgments

more or less compassion
in allowing for others' differences




and complementarily
each time a B
encounters A (or hears of A)
that B forms a judgment

'passively' painted horizons
spreading similarly
except where many Bs
hear of A
(infamy, renown)
without A 'hearing back'




and if we toggle
between these views
A's-judgments-of-others
vs others'-judgments-of-A

we can look for red/green dichotomies
he loves her
she loves him not

.

google recently added
tags
to blogger

so if you click on a tag
you get a single page
with all that blogger's posts
tagged with that tag
in reverse chronological order [eg]


but i don't think they yet offer
rss feeds for that
'view'

nor feeds for all posts
by all blogger authors
(or all blogosphere authors)
with that tag
though technorati probably does [yep]

but since 1980
usenet
has been offering such 'feeds'

calling tags 'newsgroups'
and making chronological order practical
via a 'newsrc' file
that tracks which posts
have already been seen/read




it's purely a technical fluke
that usenet never offered
feeds-by-author

(though dejanews did
and google groups does)

and robot wisdom weblog
originated partly
to remedy this

regularly linking
my best usenet posts
(for which, unsurprisingly
i was flamed)

but beyond feeds-by-author
i was aiming too
for feeds-by-editor

not just my own best
but every keeper i found

and since i had to use web urls anyway
(via deja and GgG)
not just good usenet posts

but also good webpages

.

my spiritual/esthetic
evolution/education
split into 'before' and 'after'
on 13 april 1974
as i was mopping a floor
pondering krishnamurti and
a girl i had a crush on
but felt unworthy of

and then the penny dropped

(as it had, i think
for joyce in august 1902
pondering maud gonne)

i had put my spiritual room in order
(in krishnamurti's phrase)
and the window could open

not as an act of will

seeing an image
(in the gospel of thomas's phrase)
as an image

and my tastes mostly crystallised then
pynchon-nabokov-stone-murdoch-gs brown

no longer straining to emulate
the priorities of academics

but still unable to articulate
or defend my preferences

so over the next decades
as i practiced this articulation/defense
i was appalled to find myself
a magnet/target
for vituperation

my independence consistently
rubbed people the wrong way

and the more articulate i got
the more extreme
became my isolation

(so far as i can tell
the notion of
loyal friend
is a myth

and nobody nowhere's
dared to make a webpage
appreciating my site/ideas)




the blog was an attempt
to bridge that rift

a window of opportunity
when quality web-content
was hard to find

and so long as
my conventional tastes
sufficiently balanced my heresies
my blog audience grew

but once i'd linked
shahak
and other critics of israel
the balance catastrophically
and vituperatively
shifted

hardly anyone dared link me anymore

so i retreated to joyce studies
and the history of ideas

.

imagine a car stereo
that selected its own tunes
as a way of keeping you informed
about its systems' health

mellow tunes when all was mellow
hard rockers when you need to stay alert

and whenever a problem
needs immediate attention
a super-annoying
atonal repetitive
Philip Glass phrase

which i'll dub
a 'Glass earworm'

('earworms'
the infelicitous consensus
for songs that get stuck
in your mental jukebox)

so graphing your personal
mental jukebox playlist

green for creative
yellow for normal
orange for normally-annoying earworms
red for drive-you-nuts Glass earworms

suggesting something urgent
you're denying?

Do you ever suffer Glass earworms?

Yes, and I make an effort to root out the underlying problem

Yes, but they eventually work themselves out

All the time, they're driving me nuts

Rarely

Never

Don't understand

[view]

.

the tragedy
of 20th century social science
was its neurotic rejection
of the classical standards
of literary culture
(as effeminate)
in favor of
cargo-cult-level emulation
of mathematical physics
(as manly)

so the challenge
for 21st century social science
is to
outgrow those neuroses

clear away the
fake math

find a new math
that's compatible with
the wisdom of old literature

that offers a toolkit
for sketching paths
for robot behavior

go-there
do-this
test-result

a toolkit rich enough
also
to sketch the paths
of fictional heroes

Leopold Bloom
Stephen Dedalus
Anna Karenin
Frederic Moreau of L'Education sentimentale
Charles Swann of Proust's Recherche

of historical figures
Joyce
Napoleon

abstracting their motives

reconstructing
their developmental life-histories
their families
their communities

as embedded
within the Tree of Life

topologically connected
4D worldlines

whose full detail
(though unattainable)
would crystallise
all possible
literature

.

Capitalist:
"...Merely to need a sum
is not to deserve it."

Socialist:
"...In these times,
'need' arises directly from
criminal acts of the rich,
so it 'deserves'
whatever amount of money
will atone for it."

(Against the Day page 32)

"If you are not devoting every breath
of every day
waking and sleeping
to destroying those
who slaughter the innocent
easy as signing a check,
then how innocent
are you willing to call yourself?"

(Against the Day page 87)

.

the esteem motive parallels
at least in part
one's testosterone level

so if we map testosterone
green high
yellow normal
red depressed

(and similarly for other hormones)

the red phases
should be accompanied
by effort to restore esteem

and mindwrestling
often involves cunning blows
to the testosterone gland

.

the goal
of the Tree of Life
visualisation/paradigm

is to discover
by arduous bumbling
new geometric metaphors
for literary/psychological nuances

and this one's a beaut




like any list of motives
Maslow's
is necessarily both
heterogeneous
and incomplete

so it's a useful exercise
to ask, for each proposed motive
on the Tree of Life
which branches
at which moments
are dominated by that motive

and explore coloring schemes
to capture this

(right this moment
what motives
color those immediately around you?)

eg hunger
universally dominates cyclically
with famine at one
frequency extreme
and an IV drip
at the other

or comfort
making continual small demands

or sex
usually triggered by proximity
of an interfertile couple

or safety
never recapturing the primal womb
but well-cushioned by wealth

or esteem
vaguely discontent
with anonymous alienation

or stimulation
antsy from too much regularity




and when the patterns of dominance
for each of these
and 100 more
have been visualised and compared

(eg how are
conflicting motives
resolved?)

a truly universal model
of motivation
becomes more plausible

.

for a given school of ethics
on the yahoo zodiac
color white
all orthodox views

color black
any wholesale rejection
of the chosen school

(notice whether black or white
has the innermost orbit
ie the greater popularity)

and classify
all specific heresies
into six groups
red-orange-yellow-green-blue-violet
with as many subdivisions/shades
as you like

now
considering the whole Tree of Life
use this color scheme
to identify lifelong heretics
heretics just going thru a phase
gradually confirmed heretics
heretical teachers
heretical schools
heretical populations
heretical species
(eg bonobos
always the violet sexual heretics)

.

with 'Against the Day'
pynchon fans finally have
a large new body of
Gravity'sRainbow-like prose

allowing much better triangulation
of what th' heck TRP is up to
and how

now
if we want to explore
any period of history
via the old pynchonoscope

we first ask

what intoxicants were available?

what subversive groups
plotted against what power elites?

what superstitions
lingered at the fringes?

what new scientific theories
mathematical metaphors
metaphysical speculations
were about to stir up controversy?

which old ones
were fading from fashion?

what was the general state
of language and literature?

then take the standard
comic ethnic stereotypes

and contrast them against
anachronistic human hipsters
(who enter poetic fugue states
at the drop of a hat)

and glimpses of real love

find fitting names
for streets and bars

camouflage
your painstaking researches
by alluding to the worst obscurities
in the most offhand way

.

choose some human branch
on the Tree of Life

and consider all the other
human branches
ever influenced by that branch

color them green where
that influence is positive

red where it's negative
(yellow mixed)

find whose influence is reddest
(rush limbaugh, rm scaife)

whose greenest
(jesus? john lennon?)




(can someone be a good influence
on some branches
but bad on others?

a good influence sometimes
but bad at other times?)

.

color green those moments
when an artist
finds true inspiration

yellow
where they substitute craft

red
where they sell out
their muse




notice how green
were the Sixties

how rarely green
are even the best poets
(with WB Yeats as best case)

how inspiration descends
in bursts
for hours or days

rarely weeks

.

let panic be red
anxiety orange
ordinary existential alienation yellow
and inner peace green

notice which individuals
are normally green
which normally orange

notice life-shifts
between green and orange

notice individuals who
transmit
green or orange to their neighbors

notice media channels
that amplify those transmissions

notice paradoxical greens
(eg) in the heat of battle

(reds in the coolth of peace?)

.

by exact analogy
with the yahoo zodiac

we can visualise elastic links
between the taste-and-smell
of every pair of chemical compounds

and allow the whole to 'relax'
into an optimal shape
with similar smells clustered

and then find an axis of rotation
that offers maximal separation (say)
between the basic tastebud categories
(sweet sour salt etc)

and then flatten the whole
along this axis
so that every chemical
has a precise sequential
angle of rotation

in 'smell-o-betical order'
on this olfactory zodiac




and we can then promote
the most-commonly-experienced chemicals
into the innermost orbits

and demote the least common
to the outermost orbits

and we can light these 'stars'
(eg) by toxicity
with most toxic shining reddest
most nutritious shining greenest
neutral yellow

.

we need a web2.0 app
where you can easily input
all the places you've lived
and when you lived there

all the places you've visited
and when
and the routes you took

and that then generates
whatever view
at whatever scale
from whatever angle
you choose

along with comparative paths
for friends and family

map-menu letting you select
projection (dymaxion, mercator)
rotation
scaling




you should know your lifeline
like the back of your hand

.

any psychological or ethical theory
(if it isn't sheer b.s.)
should be visualisable
on the Tree of Life

let id be green
superego red
ego yellow

green infants
suffering increasing attacks of red

neurotics cycling red/green

psychoanalysis ideally resolving
red/green conflicts
to yellow

.

sometimes
for some variables

a standard 2D spreadsheet
doesn't suffice

especially when the variable describes
a relationship
between any two branches

necessitating a 3rd dimension:

for each branch,
for every other branch
light a star

or even a 4th

for each branch at every point in time
and for every other branch
at every point in time...




we may term these
problematic relationships
'modalities'

in that they posit
a sort of wormhole at every point
peeking into a parallel world
with trees and variable-values of their own

eg

every human branch
at every point in time
carries a compressed image of the Tree of Life
past and also future

where every person and thing in that image
is cursed or blessed
by the owner of that image
to some greater or lesser degree

say, orange for cursing
green for blessing
yellow for mixed

including especially
their judgments of their own past
cursing their errors
blessing their virtuous acts




and as they think about this image
particular orange or green elements
will be foregrounded

thus establishing a dominant color
for their whole image
at that moment

(color the whole Tree
with these dominant colors
at every moment)

.

uncompressed images
of the Tree of Life
can be modified
by 'what-if' counterfactuals

perhaps someday allowing a ranking
of crimes against humanity

eg charles kettering
parlaying a patent
on leaded gasoline
into a significant worldwide decline
in human IQs

or archer-daniels-midland
imposing corn sweetener
in place of sugar

or judith miller in the ny times
egging the christian gentiles
into a 400ドル billion quagmire
against the muslim gentiles
for the benefit of israel

or the anonymous pentagon bureaucrats
who approved depleted uranium
for use in conventional munitions

.

zoom to
height = one day
width = one home

spouses arise together
from one bed

separately visit the bathroom

maybe wake the kids
maybe woken by them

maybe breakfast together
weavingdancing around
a small shared dining space

parts of the day
spent separately
parts together
(fave teevee shows
rent a movie)

work and play
inside and out
at home or away

converging for lunch and dinner

kids to bed
in order of age

parent make love

happy families all alike
sharing quality time

unhappy families fragmented
each in their own way




we might look (if we could)
into each family member's thoughts
for which ideapatterns are shared
and with whom
which are kept private

happy families more open
than unhappy




maria montessori praised
a form of private quality time
where a child becomeds deeply absorbed
in some activity

and healed
strengthened
made wise
by that absorption

.

for every human branch
at every point of time
assign a brightness
proportional to their degree of celebrity

(warhol's future
evenly distributed
in 15-minute bands)

note the frequency
of children inheriting
part of their parents' celebrity
or surpassing it

note celebrity hang-outs (locales)

note quantum leaps
in individuals' brightness
(vs more-gradual decays
even for proverbial
flashes-in-the-pan)

contributing factors:
brains beauty talent
wealth power
pr
virtue
vice

(make unfavorable celebrity shine red
favorable green
mixed yellow)

.

let one vertical inch
equal 15 years
(conception to menarche)

ten inches for 150 years
allowing multiple generations
for a family tree

an average human life
five inches
split between
however many
home towns

represented by vertical lines
at their geographic longitudes

world travel
reduced to horizontal spikes

all family members
of interest
in a single town
sharing that longitude line

births and deaths
marked only by ticks

.

seattle 1926

home for christmas
from boarding school
14yo mary mccarthy
reluctantly gives up
after waiting an hour
for 26yo forrest crosby
whom she thinks she loves

who'd taken her virginity
with ambiguous consent
the month before

.

if google implements a keyword "meta:"

with syntax (maybe) "meta:author:james_joyce"

where webpage publishers are free
to add any 'meta' categories they like
in their html page-headers

then conventions should quickly emerge
to meet people's real needs

.

for any sufficiently long time-segment
of any human branch

some regions of space
will be visited repeatedly

others only once




one's home
one's bed
one's desk
one's office
one's favorite restaurant

these locales will
characterise that segment

and should be inventoried
by biographers

.

suppose the IMDb
encouraged fans to create fanpages
for their favorite movies and stars

fanpages combining
existing imdb data/elements
with newly added content
and links

so instead of always-uniform formatting
you could choose to browse
enthusiasts' views

so instead of just
writing a review
when you're impressed by a movie
you compile a page
echoing the imdb facts
you judge worth echoing

and cross-referencing
with your own related pages

and ditto for books
music
politics
news
philosophy
porn
etc

each new webpage framed
with its pluripedia alternates

with browsers offering a
'fork this page' button
that registers each forked page
as another alternate

and encourages
copy/add/delete/edit
of old and new page elements

and also maybe
a 'forkify these two tines' button
that declares two existing pages
to be virtually forked




turning wikipedia into pluripedia
requires that each article
accumulate links to all forks

most forks hosted
at pluripedia
but some perhaps not

so that wikipedia's current
arbitrary
policy of
not
trying to link
all related pages
would be explicitly abandoned

.

the paradox of 21st century science
is that common sense
is at once
common sensical
and impossible-to-formalise

so far
lacking a finite set
of fundamental concepts
in terms of which
all others can be defined

so the Tree of Life approach recognises
that most common sense concepts
share
at least
some relationships in 4D spacetime

and our shared spacetime
hosts definite organisms' worldlines
representing birth and death
kinship
and community

so we can build on this
as an abstract foundation/framework
upon which other variables
can be experimentally mapped
as patterns of color

gradually accumulating
(we hope)
a broad enough vocabulary of colorpatterns
to tame the greater welter

.

sort all words
in order of frequency

assign primary colors
to the commonest words

more subtle shades
to rarer words

and where a human branch
on the Tree of Life
thinks reads hears or speaks
a word
light a star of that word's color

at most 5 words per second
300,000 words per day




a given passage of text
becomes a pattern of colored stars

repeated wherever the passage is read

repeated with errors by poor readers
repeated with gaps by hasty readers
repeated in clumps by distracted readers




for a given piece of text
(book article poem quote)
light all the segments
of the Tree of Life
where it's being re/cited

(extreme case:
pedants debating the significance
of a single word)

light further
all future thoughts
on each given reader's branch
re/shaped by their memories
of that text

(did it add a word
to their active vocabulary?

toddlers gathering early vocabulary
mostly from speech

or are they reminded of a scene
whenever a similar scene arises?

does the influence quickly fade?

does it persist
while the source is forgotten?)




rank the most influential works
for a given reader

for all readers at a given time
(dr spock; harry potter)
for all readers ever (the bible)

rank the books with the most
separate influential patterns
(gravity's rainbow)

those whose influence
peaked quickly then faded
(nobody reads fulmerford anymore)




(how can we extend this visualisation to include
influential non-verbal works--
music, dance, painting?)

.

from a human-factors standpoint
when creating web graphics
it makes the best sense to fit them
to the average browser window

and similarly when visualising (eg)
the Tree of Life
it makes sense to scale the visualisation
down to the appropriate human scale

eg the whole worldmap
shrunk to the width of a notebook page

or the whole history of life
(3 billion years)
shrunk to the height
of a stack of books
(or a breadbox)

but more often
we'll need to zoom in
with both horizontal zoom
(for space)
and independently
vertical zoom (for time)

so we zoom in on our chosen time-span
until it fits the height of a breadbox
and on our chosen space-map
to fit the width of a notebook page

eg Leopold Bloom's wanderings
by foot, carriage, and tram
over the 16 hours of Ulysses
span two miles square



with most of the day spent standing
more-or-less still
(ie, a vertical line
on the Tree of Life)

and Bloom's walking speed
at this scale
by contrast
is quick enough to appear
almost horizontal

so here
and in general
human worldlines are normally
all right angles
lacking any obvious diagonals

(unless the topic
of the zoomed map
is the trip itself)

.

while every person's
compressed image
of the Tree of Life
is unique

their representation schemes
draw on a common pool

rooted in
the preprogrammed neural vocabulary
of human motivation
and action

which we might term
the polti vocabulary

after polti's 36 dramatic situations

being a vocabulary of elements
that can be arranged
to compose dramas

and while the maximum size
of a polti vocabulary
is still uncounted

we can at least
theoretically
rank the indivdual elements
by how familiar they are
across all compression schemes

and we can assign colors to each
in order of familiarity
with red-yellow-blue primaries first
and subtler mixes following

so a dullard's Tree of Life
might be limited to colored stars
of the dozen most-primary hues

while a proust tolstoy joyce shakespeare's
has a million different shades




movies books newscasts
teevee-series networks
teachers schools
etc
can be ranked by
their depth of shading

shallow polti vocabularies
may be
pollyanna shallow
or beavis and butthead shallow
or gw bush shallow
or isaac asimov shallow
or donald trump shallow
or paris hilton shallow

(all subtle vocabularies
are alike
but every shallow vocabulary
is shallow in its own way?)

.

"Reason, or the ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall be when we know more." --William Blake

consensus reality
is like a fragile raft
of lashed-together coconuts
floating on a roiling sea
of unlashed coconuts

and innovation is like wrestling
a new unlashed coconut
out of that roiling sea
and lashing it firm
to every other coconut in the raft

.

edward o wilson's
elegant autobiography
"Naturalist"

sketches an epochal
Shem/Shaun brotherbattle
in Harvard's biology department
of the 50s and 60s
between wilson
representing the classical tradition
of evolutionary macrobiology

and james 'double helix' watson
as the insufferable young turk
of molecular biology
dismissing wilson's classical tradition

until the introduction of mathematical models
for sociobiology
and island biogeography
rehabilitated that tradition




and i see a parallel
with the classical approach to the
unification of the sciences

versus the physicists' megalomaniacal
ten-dimensional Theories of Everything

rehabilitatable via
the Tree of Life
approach?

.

stack four billion
dymaxion worldmaps

representing all of
earth's history

with the poles
fixed
as two separate vertical lines

an equator halfway between

ocean temperatures generally
increasing towards the equator

and slowly drifting continents
breaking up and merging
(maybe three such cycles
in the last 3 billion years?)

forming a system of
irregular columns
on our 3D (actually 4D) map




climate and terrain roughly divide
these irregular columns
into dozens of
standard biomes
supporting characteristic ecologies

each biome gradually drifting
growing/shrinking
splitting/merging

each species
tending to track one biome
to fill one sub-biome

species that master
a second biome
tending to split
into a second species

(ancestral species rank-able
by the number of biomes
eventually colonised)

rarely merging biomes
forcing clashes-to-the-death
between more-or-less-distant
cousins

humans uniquely, continually
refining their toolkits
for colonising hostile biomes

.

every human branch
at every instant
possesses a unique
compressed image
of the whole Tree of Life

that has its origin
as the infant's image
of itself
and its local world

then its comparison
of self with others

its generalisation
of the 'usual' other

its cataloguing of
unusual others

experienced firsthand
or heard tell of
2nd- to Nth-hand

as the spatial boundaries
of the imagination
extend outward
to the ends of the earth
of the universe
to the ends of time

so that a query
about any particular
region of spacetime

generates a best guess
about that region's occupants

their similarities
to the local 'usual'

their degree and style
of un-usual difference

and much human conversation
spoken and also written
involves tweaking of these
'packed' general images

and instantiation of specific
branch biographies

named individuals
whose life histories

are 'usual' in most ways

but whose specific
un-usual differences
are itemised

conventionally in sequential order
but alternatively
in order of importance
or grouped by theme

less important differences
meriting less discussion

better documented differences
propagating more discussion

storytellers confabulating
you-are-there reconstructions

maybe prefacing the conventional
biographical sequence
with a vivid flashforward
that previews the un-usual significance
of the whole

.

refine/abstract
any moving car
down to a set of graphs

variables changing over time

acceleration/deceleration
left/right turn
smooth/bumpy ride
engine speed/roughness
fuel supply
exhaust temperature
buffeting from side winds
brakepad friction

now
instead of designing in
maximal silence

design in
acoustic expressiveness

so each of these graphs
contributes a harmonious
musical motif

implemented not digitally
but mechanically

bumpiness for drumming
(gas tank as drumhead?)

brakepads like strings

airspeed for woodwinds

acceleration piano

not so loudly
that it's obnoxious

just loud enough
to express
the car's personality

.

if the sixties represented
the most radical cultural shift
in human history

(and i think they probably did)

then the still-ongoing
war against the hippies

is the blackest
reactionary
incomprehensible
reaction

.

it's forever been a commonplace
of internet culture
that microsoft's unspoken motto was
be as evil as possible

so it's gratifying lately
in an almost pinch-me fashion
to watch bill gates scratching his head
dude, where's my monopoly?

finessed by google
flying the opposite flag

until one begins to visualise
the subsequent crumbling
of the republicans
the neocons
the capitalists

satan's earthly army

until sergey
turns in his chair

removes his mask

.

joyce revered dante's inferno
beyond all other art
for reasons i'm sorry to admit
i still can't entirely fathom

but dante at least invented
the genre of cruci-fiction
nailing his parochial enemies
to an eternity of earthly contempt

which surely appealed
to the youthful Stephen Dedalus
of silence-exile-and-cunning fame

but joyce also recognised from the first
that precision was a better revenge
than exaggeration

and by finnegans wake it seems
his ultimate target
has become himself
splayed and vivisected

incarnating all sins




in ulysses though
we face the test case
of gogarty/mulligan
still beloved of critics
for his exuberance

but likely doomed
eventually
like dante's nemeses
to cruci-fiction

once we resolve the riddle
of the midnight fistfight [notes]
and the morning rage [etext] [notes]

and i'm certain joyce
would have relished the prospect
of crucifying all the world's villains

mathematically
geometrically
on the Tree of Life

.

[this is an overview
of some more-or-less-recent thrillers
with special attention to
Michael Connelly
Colin Harrison
and Charles McCarry]

the very best novels
immediately establish themselves
as '10's
on a new scale
with no 9s or 8s in sight
and where even a 7
is cause for celebration

eg Pynchon's Lot 49
finds an unexpected 7 in
Alan Furst's silly "Paris Drop"

but Robert Stone's "Dog Soldiers"
arguably The Great American Novel
had barely found its first 6
(Lynn Kostoff's "Choice of Nightmares")
until Colin Harrison's "Afterburn"

Stone's special gift
is to sink his teeth, deep
into the heart of american darkness
so we desperately need
more like him

Harrison's first three works
are all admirable
but Afterburn is a quantum leap
out-Spiking Elmore Leonard

(Leonard has pwned
a scale of his own
in the shadow of
early George V Higgins

Ed McBain sometimes
hits an 8 there
despite generally disgraceful padding)

Harrison's plotting
has quickly caught up
to his always poetic prose

("Manhattan Nocturne"
was a perverse anti-noir
with less plot in the first 150 pages
than in Chandler's average chapter)

Harrison also has a weird obsession
with porn-star sexual athletics
where pounding your genitals raw
is supposed to equate to transcendence




this idiosyncracy is interestingly mirrored
in McCarry's extraordinary "Lucky Bastard"

effectively the backstory to Klein's "Primary Colors"
told from the point of view
of the Clintons' KGB handlers

the best part is a KGB school
called 'Swallows'
where agents are trained in
sex as a martial art

like Harrison
McCarry argues unconvincingly
that technique can always trump emotion

but his re-invention of Hillary
as deadly sex goddess
is priceless




if leCarre's "Smiley's People"
establishes the 10
McCarry never gets past 6
in the other works i've read
often bogging down
in gag-me-with-a-silver-spoon
aristocratic luxury-porn




the NYT blurb for Michael Connelly's
recent "The Closers"
claims he's reinvented the police procedural

and i'm inclined to agree

the dominant, exhausted cliche
has been the taunting genius serial killer
and more recently
the triple-twist ending
where the villain is revealed
as one of the investigative team
(Jeffery Deaver
i'm pointing at you)

Connelly has emerged from these traps
in his latest Harry Bosch episode
where this classic noir outsider cop
finally comes in from the cold

hammering us
from the first chapter
with the sort of
tenderness normally quarantined
in the next-to-last-chapter
then reburied
in the last

and instead of jumpstarting
tired emotions with exotic crimes
Connelly turns things inside out
building a tiny forgotten murder
into a cosmic ethical battleground

compacted into a single week
of minute-by-minute minutia
(Connelly is
the
master craftsman
for capturing character in the way
eg
one holds a coffee cup)

there are enough spoilers
in each Bosch episode
that serious thriller-fans
should try to read them in order

but each stands fine alone

Connelly's recent "The Lincoln Lawyer"
is a non-Bosch legal procedural
full of topnotch tradecraft
but almost too realistic
in its anticlimactic ending




and i must't omit Michael Gruber
aka Robert K Tanenbaum
whose Butch Karp series
hits consistent literary highs

(my addams family post
unconsciously plagiarised his early
"Immoral Certainties")

suppose wikipedia
modified their software
so you could rank editors

for individual articles
easily comparing alternate edits

or more generally
extrapolating credibility
based on familiar examples

and inherit as well
those editors' rankings
of other editors

not a popularity contest

rather the focusing
of an optimal community
based on your individual values

not a universe
(said cs peirce)
a pluriverse

wherever a human branch
spends money
light a white star

whose brightness is proportional
to the amount spent

(consumption spending
might need a different color
from investment spending)

note lives whose stars
vary widely in brightness

notice rich and poor neighborhoods




calculate
for each human branch

their total available credit
at each moment

and color blue the lowest
red the highest
with a spectrum inbetween




find frugal/misers
whose credit far surpasses
their spending

find catastrophes
where individuals' credit
plummets

victories
where it soars

on the Tree of Life
color red
every human branch
where it's sleeping

normally
pre-midnight
to post-dawn
in residential neighborhoods
in one's own bed

but some
sleeping in the day
some
in strange beds

(color orange insomnia
orange-red drugged sleep)




color yellow
any human branch
where it's working

normally post-dawn
to pre-dusk
in nonresidential neighborhoods

but some on night shifts
some whose work takes place
in residential neighborhoods

(color green when they're sick
color blue when they're in school)




color shades of purple
the various desires
for drink or drugs
(or sex or other escapes)
stress
anxiety
boredom
depression

often beginning on awakening
continuing thru the workday
peaking after work

(note which employers
which neighborhoods
promote the worst stress)




place colored stars
on drink-or-drug-taking
events (or sex or other escapes)

rarely during workdays
(except caffeine)

commonly at
clubs and bars and parties
after dark

some partying alone




some individuals indulging
thruout whole days

junkies enslaved
to purple desires

binges sometimes ending
in death




color white
episodes of creativity
catharsis (eg dancing)
meditation
deep communication

that quell desire
without escapism

(unknown to many

characteristic of few

more likely when
self-employed)




work to multiply, wherever, whenever
such episodes of white

analyse (and fight)
social factors
that reduce them

zoom out
until the milky way
is centered on your map

with Earth a yellow dot
towards one edge

flatten the galaxy
down to two dimensions
and drop Earth's dot
extending backwards in time
as a corkscrewing yellow line
orbiting the sun

35 years back
allow some tiny yellow tendrils
to reach the Moon

100,000 years back
mark the transition
to intelligent life
by reverting the yellow corkscrew
to green (for unintelligent life)

add green tendrils
for any recent space shots
with hitchhiking microzoa

and don't rule out
hidden green life
arising independently
within the solar system




Earth's green line
has corkscrewed around the galactic center
some dozen times since life emerged
three billion years ago

the Earthless galaxy
continues back
another ten billion years
as do a near infinity
of other comparable galaxies

guaranteeing a near infinity
of corkscrewing green lines

with occasional yellow intelligences
with green and yellow space tendrils
some perhaps colonizing widely
in their own galaxy

an unknown number of yellow intelligences
existing now

a portrait gallery
of all yellow intelligences ever
outdoing the Star Wars cantina

extreme manichaeism
might posit a single connected
universal conspiracy of evil
traceable all the way back
to the root of the Tree of Life

but more typically
conspiracies have origins
characterised by initiations
and violent enforcement
of a limited penumbra of consciousness
among non-initiates

tentacles venturing outward
among the gentiles
emboldened by each success

let's say
ego is injustice

and ego-types
are characterised by
characteristic injustices

which might be assigned
characteristic colors
on the Tree of Life

and adolescence
transforms the childish ego
(oriented towards parents,
siblings and playmates)
into an adult ego
with more-or-less adult
accountability

childbranchcolor breaking up
adultbranchcolor breaking thru

and the emotional extremes
of adolescence
are due in part
(or mainly)
to western society's incompetence
in modeling justice

so that every teen has to improvise
their own justice
their own anger
in their own ego




i praised the movie 'clueless'
for breaking new ground
in modeling compassionate solutions
to stereotypic teen angsts

and i await a teen tolstoy
writing the great teen novel
(presumably as an adult)
unknotting western teen angst

its egos and injustices

for good

Patricia Highsmith's
1972 'A Dog's Ransom'
opens with the dog's murder

her 1977 'Edith's Diary'
opens with an attempt
on a pet cat's life

both are peculiar meditations
on the uncomfortable status
of leftists in the USA

in the first case
a young cop
with a psych degree from Cornell

in the second
a Bryn Mawr alumna
who freelances for respectable
lefty magazines

the cop's story is a sort of
chemistry experiment
where a drop of something
with a mildly basic pH
is added to a mildly acidic solution
(ie, idealist among cynics)

and a gradual series
of individually innocuous missteps
each rubbing against the grain
escalate over a few short weeks
into major tragedy




in the other
over two decades
(1955-1975)
the leftist can't catch a break

isolated in a small town
with a bad-seed son
(the abovecited cat-smotherer)
and an ungrateful invalid in-law

her husband runs off
back to the city
with a younger woman

but instead of breaking out
she turns inward
stoically nurturing her ingrates
building a fantasy life in her diary
finding catharsis in competent sculpting

alienating her few lefty friends
with increasingly unconventional
political stances

until in the last 50 pages
based on clues we have to seek
between the lines

her friends all conclude
she's gone mad

and apparently she has

words and phrases
on the inner orbits
of the yahoo zodiac
are more common

those in outer orbits
less common

color the common ones yellow
the rare ones red
with a full orange gradient
between

when a person posts
a rare phrase (or word)
to the web
put a red star
on the Tree of Life

(a common phrase
yellow)

or if they speak
a rare or common phrase

or even think one

now step back

and look for patterns
of red vs yellow

people with large
active vocabularies
use redder words

poets and children and lovers
redder phrases

bad schools
enforce yellow conformity

communities are sometimes visited
by red topics

authors gather
red phrases
into notebooks

trying to turn
yellow pages
redder




[color version]

say you're in the mood
to rent a video

and you make a list of adjectives
describing the ideal video
you're in the mood for

now collect thousands of such lists
from a broad sample of renters
and compile a master list
with the most popular adjectives first




the design challenge
with heraldic barcodes
is to associate each of these
most popular adjectives
with a distinctive graphic element

carefully chosen
so that all the adjective/elements
describing any given movie
can be composed into an icon
that permits quick visual scanning
(eg on a shelf of box-spines)




as with my flickr proposal
the most convenient grouping
must be foreground-background-frame

backgrounds could again be colored stripes
representing genres
so a little element of horror
might be a thin red stripe
while a lot of nudity
a wide pink stripe

mild horror or mild nudity
might use less saturated colors
(or is pink already
unsaturated red?)

clever choice of color-variants
and stripe arrangement
might map more complex
genre-mixes




the frame
(maybe 4 pixels wide
around the whole icon)
should tell how long it is
how expensive/cheap it looks
how smart/dumb
how highly rated

the official rating
might be shown as a letter
located on a stripe
that indicates why it got that rating
(sex, nudity, language, violence)




perhaps the foreground
could be an 'auteur icon'
representing (eg)
a director (eg Tarantino)
a star (Jackie Chan)
a writer (Charlie Kaufman)
a franchise (James Bond)




shorter videos on (eg) youtube
need some custom modifications
to this scheme

frames: length, production values

background-genres:
pratfall, dancing
lipsynch, vlog, etc




and novels
and short stories
need something like this
too

or: I'm an idiot about
electromagnetic radiation

[this is a visualisation experiment
designed to discover gaps
in my own intuitions
about light, radio, etc

i hope to revise it
as these gaps are
gradually filled]

everyone's seen video
taken with night-vision goggles
of ghostly green GIs
firing into the dark

these work by detecting
the invisible infrared
radiated by any warm body
and somehow or other
translating it
into visible green light

so we could imagine
a future improvement
where the goggles have
a radio dial
and can be tuned to any frequency
(not just infrared)

displaying radiation of that frequency
as shades of greyscale

and rather than wait
until these 'radio goggles'
are practical/real
we could write a software simulation
that shows more-or-less
what we'd someday see

and by designing this sim
in our imaginations
we can refine our intuitions
without either actual
hardware or software




so one menu we'd want
is 'light sources'
(or radiation sources)
including incandescent bulbs
fluorescent bulbs
neon-etc
LEDs
flames and other chemical reactions
fluorescing chemicals
nuclear reactions (incl the sun)
electric circuits
radio transmitters
etc

and we could start by
choosing one source
and tuning the radio dial
to see how bright
that source shines
at every different frequency
(these graphs are readily available)




another menu would be 'materials'
that can be examined
at different frequencies
and different magnifications
under different light sources

and maybe also 'filters'
that could be inserted between
source and material

not neglecting polarising filters
which the display might indicate
with a different color for each
angle of polarisation
(white for unpolarised)




finally we'd like to include
a realworld mode
where any realworld scene
could be checked out
thru the goggles

toggling back and forth
between natural and 'source' light

with a teaching-menu
of 'textbook scenes'
for each frequency
that include examples to explore
of every interesting phenomenon
at that frequency




now starting with sources
my understanding is
that electromagnetic radiation
always originates from
accelerating or decelerating
electric charges
most often electrons

and that a continuous source
implies oscillating electrons
with the frequency of the oscillation
determining the 'color' of the 'light'

electrons normally bound into molecules
that don't radiate until they're excited
by heat or light or electricity
(while electrons in metals flow freely)

with the color of the radiation, then
depending on the structure of the molecule
probably polarised if
the molecules are aligned
and/or the excitation acts
in a particular direction

so i'd like an overview
of each lightsource in these terms
explaining why it emits
the particular frequencies it does

and special views for
broadcast radio frequencies
(AM and FM)
showing how transmitter-antennas radiate
and why reception is poor
under different conditions

and how 'noisy' electrical circuits
emit radiation unintentionally




and similarly for materials

why does a particular chemical
absorb rather than reflect
(or refract or transmit)
particular frequencies?
and how does it surface texture
influence this?

what happens to its
electron structure
as it absorbs photons?

and how selective absorption
can be used to make
detectors for given frequencies
(including radios and their antennas)

would it be too too heretical
to argue that the 99th remake
of Superman or Batman
has at least as much artistic legitimacy
as a 99th remake of Hamlet?

because the icons of popular culture
resonate necessarily in new ways
as pop culture evolves

and remakes offer a perfect canvas
for deconstructing or rethinking
those icons and their evolution




take the addams family

when the cartoons were adapted
from Ross's prudish New Yorker
to network children's teevee

they lost all hint of menace
so it all became a pose
they'd never really hurt a fly

where the originals had a strain
of corpses-in-the-basement
more suitable to texas chainsaw masochists

but the remake i'd like to see
would follow more the lines
of twin peaks' dale cooper
investigating the black lodge

sociopaths with social standing
sacrificing cheerleaders by the moon

and it could be useful to explore
parallels to the current crop
of political sociopaths

richard perle as gomez
echoing leland palmer's psychotic songs-and-dances

ann coulter as morticia
loosing the dogs of war on the inferior races

dick cheney as fester
you really don't want to know
what he's up to in the basement

barbara bush as grandma
brewing potions in the rose garden

W (or rush limbaugh?) as pugsley
playing frog baseball with beavis and butthead

and i'm seeing wednesday
as a suicidal teen
a cutter (think fiona apple?)
whose redemption
could be the main storymover

and there's a little-noticed
psychological twist
in the observation that
among these sociopaths
uncle fester is unique in retaining
a slightly conflicted conscience

you can see it in his face

a distant memory
that all this is somehow wrong

so agent cooper (eg)
might at least
talk him into untying his bound hands...