Robot Wisdom auxiliary

the most memorable comment i heard
during the Serrano "Piss Christ" controversy
was Frank Moore's
noting that the image itself was
beautiful (end of argument)

so the current "Britney Spears Pro-life"
hullabaloo [GoogleNews]
first makes me study the work itself
[flickr, 3pix]

and while i regret not yet finding
an unembarrassed photo
of the action end

i have to say
as art
i think it may be
the most powerful fertility image
of the last 20,000 years

the sculptor is evidently
school of Koons

playing the media
with serious intent
[2005 NYT] [mp3 interview]
but that won't matter
ten years from now

"Buchenwald, according to Freud, once the light was let in, would become a soccer field, fat children would learn flower-arranging and solfeggio in the strangling rooms. At Auschwitz the ovens would be converted over to petit fours and wedding cakes, and the V-2 missiles to public housing for the elves."
--Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

if part
of our self-knowledge
is blocked
by intimidation


there can be no
good
but withstanding that intimidation
and dissolving that block

and any attempt
to help
others

to help even
one other

is doomed to fail

light every human branch
over just those spans
when the human was
surfing the Web

the last ten years
show an exponential growth
of who's surfing, where
and how long they surf each day

now place a red star
at each point where the surfer
reads a word

so some surfers
minimise red
while others
maximise it

spans of red
end
when the costs of continuing reading
outweigh the benefits

each new red star
each additional word read
requires an effort

and those who flee reading
do so because
their costs would be too great

so the first goal of webpage design
should be readability

no flashing ads in the margin
no oversized or undersized print

lines of text neither too wide
nor too narrow
spaced neither too close
nor too far apart

and if the page designer
betrays these rules
the browser should step in
and painlessly reformat

understanding what does and doesn't work
for that individual surfer
in their current state

(i can't tolerate columns at all
and i prefer some margins, to none
but i have no control over this!)

content is signal
advertising is noise

S/N is the ratio between these two

and the history of the web
is the battle between them

most webpages offer a tiny amount of S
in a sea of N
(and not just ad N
but also garbage links
and decoration)

websites with good content attract eyeballs

but eyeballs use bandwidth
which costs money

advertising tries to pay for bandwidth
by decreasing the S/N

Google's empire was built entirely
on minimizing the N-cost of text-ads
(but there's still vast room for improvement
in matching text-ads to page-content)

before the bubble burst
there was an insane competition for
eyeballs at any cost

(YouTube is repeating this gamble)

rss paradoxically tries to strip the N
to attract eyeballs
sacrificing the decoration
and the garbage links
(so that all rss feeds look alike
and you can no longer tell
what site you're visiting
without doublechecking the titlebar)

but inevitably the N creeps back in

as images and media and ads in rss
(i deleted the Huffington Post
because their rss feed included
an embedded sound file!)

until your rss feed needs an rss feed
of its own

but if we'd just
GROW UP
we could create simple clean
high S/N pages
that served as their own feeds...

way back when, we painted
a white stripe on each human branch
each time its human
spoke a word

and we saw those stripes
in small groups
synchronise
when people chanted or sang together

or alternate, in batches
when they conversed

and we saw poetry
badly recited
forming uniform stripes

as the rhythms of network newsreaders
follow a limited set of patterns

or someone reading aloud

or the inner voice
of the narrator
as we silently read a novel

but when a good novelist writes dialog
a much broader set of rhythms can be used
to capture their mood
and reveal their character

(Joyce is the champ for this

George V Higgins gets an honorable mention)




now if we consider the cylinder
(or cone)
traced by a branch's radial ontology

with lit stars
when ontology-categories
are being actively
incarnated
as lifestories

we may view that life
as a novel
with stars implying
an almost-infinite
cascade of words

out of which
the novelist/biographer
chooses a finite subset

that can represent
all the important themes

not omitting, one hopes
words in rhythmic patterns

capturing the character's voice