the other blog doesn't seem to be working

Mission of Burma

I used to listen to Mission of Burma a lot. But I wasn't cool enough to listen to the band back when I should have. Instead I had to wait until a friend of a friend left a cassette copy in my car. The tape had most of the songs form "signals, calls and marches" on it, but I'm sure it also had "Academy Fight Song", so either that song was added to a release of the EP back in the days before CDs, or else this was tape that someone had put together themselves. I vaguely remember audience sounds at some point so it may have been a boot leg. Given the vagueries of memory, and the fact that this was an audio cassette played in a pretty crappy automobile sound system its tough to say exactly what I was listening to, but it really made mornings on the Mass Pike more bearable.

I was sad when that tape broke, and I didn't have much opportunity to listen to MoB much until recently. Yes, of course, I was surprised by their brilliance, but by much else as well. I was surprised by the extent to "post-punk" actually meant something.

The music I've been reading about has been praised so much for its "Pop constructions" and the sonic nature of the music. Think about any "Beastie Boys*" album, the most sophmoric lyrics can be ignored because they're tossed in front of interesting noise.

MoB, aren't old school punk, at least in the sense that everyone has learned to play their instruments and the sounds are carefully constructed. There's still a raw quality, but that's been carefully constructed.

(I once covered a specialty Punk radio show for a friend of mine who was passed out. I knew he took pride in running a good show so I kept a careful log of everything I played, and I constructed the show out of samples of his old play lists. Turns out the log was worthless since the track lists on the album sleeves didn't correspond to the track list on the albums. In any case, it was a good thing no one from the FCC tuned in.)

"New Nails" for instance, "There once was a special book it got changed by fascist creeps". All your Marilyn Manson nihilist posturing, or even Beastie Boys new age political awareness style fades in comparison to the anger that fuels MoB rebellion. There's more to be said here, but I'm not going to say because I lack the bands courage.

*legal disclaimer: nothing in this post should be taken as evidence that I own any Beastie Boy's music, despite my obvious committment to "kicking it old school".

Blog this gives me weird titles.

jay is-jay bibby's rants and raves of technology and games, very cool. DIY games are cool. More on games later. Anyone who reads this is probably already fascinated with games, so you don't need a warning.

When people bring up Dungeons and Dragons around my wife, she says that she got ahead by marrying the dungeon master.

You have been warned.

The Direction of Time

I'm right now reading Hans Reichenbach's The Direction of Time, the section on the "The sectional nature of Time Direction" is breath-taking in its imaginative scope. If postive time direction is defined as the direction in which entropy increases, and thermodynamic processes are random, then the positive direction of time will change at different "times". However, a time sequence can still be determined (that is, thermodynamics will give us a unique ordering of events, but not a consistent postive direction).

Reichenbach goes further, since human life could not survive in the peaks and troughs of entropy values, there is no possibility of experiencing time as flowing in the other direction and no possibility for contradicting experience.

This is not as detailed as Reichenbach's preceding arguments, and the conclusion itself is such an excessive speculation that, had it been presented along, I would have put the book and not come back. I prefer my science fiction with characters and plot. However, the arguments preceding this are so carefully constructed and the methods of analysis so interesting in the book, that I can afford to really enjoy Reichenbach's moments of imaginative freedom.

Of course, Reichenbach doesn't leave the apparent paradox in play. Reference to non-deterministic laws might be useful in figuring out which way the future lies, but more importantly, the various branching processes that we encounter in everday life are always increasing in entropy, so that must be the positive time direction, those temporal regions in which time might flow in the opposite direction are so distant as to not exist.

more signals

I'm reading William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. I'd sworn to read it after reading All Tommorrow's Parties, but then I'd promised that I wasn't going to read that after reading Virtual Light. This one though is well worth reading. This novels influence can be seen in my recent posts.

Signals do arise from the noise, that's the odd thing.

Signals arise in three different ways:

1. spurious signals, everything from paranoid delusions to various procedures for finding patterns that are really only reflections of the procedure (from reading tea leaves on)

2. genuine signals, appropriate inferences on available evidence leading to deeper knowledge. Looking as the movements in the sky and inferring that there are planets, that move in regular orbits and are explained a certain. Looking at the movement of a speck of pollen and inferring the molecular nature of matter. But not only scientific truths. Listening to person's speech and learning things about that aren't explicitly stated, where they're from, who they've spoken to and so on.

Whenever I get into the sorts of moods about how surprising it is that the world makes sense, someone tries to deflate my euphoria. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and if the deflators point is that I'm engaged in irresponsbile navel-gazing, well I have no defense. More frequently someone will object that order of either sort is not surprising because there are human minds around that are very well adapted for recognizing patterns. In fact, over-adapated for pattern recognition, which accounts for spurious patterns.

This strategy frustrates me. It's particularly frustrating when Peircean distinctions are used to deflate my mood. "Its simple," they explain "Every symbol means something for someone under some interpretation. There's no mystery because patterns only emerge for somebody."

Time to reread Peirce.

What is a person? "A Person is nothing but a symbol involving a general idea" (as he says in "Man's Glassy Essence" refering back to "Some Consequences"). Even more than being a natural system that can detect order, a person is a naturally ordered system. While the physical details of how the brain works still need to be worked out in their entirety, it's pretty clear that this is all something we do with our brains.

Explaining the human ability to recognize signals and patterns is equivalent to explaining the existence of signals and patterns through the existence of a special sort of signals and patterns (those that occur in brains). This come real close to circularity. Either the mind is something other than a naturally occuring patterned activity, or the mind can not be used in a non-circular way to explain why there are symbols, patterns or signals.

This dichotomy isn't really a challenge to any naturalist. Just explain the mind as a information process in turn explained physiologically. Thus, the third sort of symbol to be explained is

3. mind

signals in the noise

There are hidden messages. Some of these are guerrilla art, intentional acts of expression hidden in plain view. Some are the simple coincedental juxtaposition of informative elements into a psuedo-message. Do the latter count as messages? Guerrilla art instances that I've been thinking of recently are:

Screaming baby, There was a sign, maybe a route number or instructions to pedestrians. Smallish for a traffic sign. But the original sign had been covered with a poster of a screaming babies face. The poster was the same size as the original poster and the same black and light grey.

That Stupid Pencil. No link. This was a stunt that some people at my undergraduate institution* tried where they drew pictures on the boards of empty classrooms and took out classified adds in the paper which featured a cartoon pencil sharpened to a nub and a sentence like "It's coming." The problem was that the cartoonist in school paper had been using the same sigil as a signature for over a year. Anyone observant enough to notice their guerilla message had probably also noticed the cartoon. When I asked about it, I was told there was no big event planned, it was just to get people talking, but the stunt was never that interesting.

Andre the Giant. This campaign had some advantages: Andre the Giant is cool, and the posse vibe simultaneously intimidates and offers promise of belonging to a secret clique. Some people still look at me oddly when I mention that "Andre the Giant has a posse." If you've never heard of Andre's posse, then how did you get here.

Ana Ng. The song that really turned me to They Might Be Giants. I had appreciated them before I heard this song, but only because of their novelty flavor and because I had friends who liked them. I can remember a time when MTV would show this video back to back with Rockit by Herbie Hancock. MTV was cool once. When was the last time they put anything by a veteran of the Miles Davis Quartet in heavy rotation?

There's an important difference between Andre the Giant and Ana Ng. In the first case, some guy who sells t-shirts has conspired to hide his messages in the environment, while in the second, the messages arise on their own.

* refering to your "undergraduate institution" immediately identifies me as one of those people who aren't to be trusted.

Legal Reasons

Tim Wu, posting on Lawrence Lessig's blog gives a very cogent example of disciplined reason giving. This is reason in the thin sense, there's no need to refer to a substantive faculty to make sense of this entry. That's nice because it doesn't put any undue burden on other sorts of theories that might be contiguous to your legal reasoning.

Also, I agree with the general point that Wu is trying to make, and he makes it well.

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. -- Hanlon's Razor

Bumpersticker wisdom fails to satisfy. I find treatises by talking dogs and the Hulk far more entertaining. Moreover, I tend to try to think through the consequences and has so far each bumper sticker tends to lead to consequences other than the initial, surface meaning. The possible exception is "Sound fiscal policy doesn't fit on a bumpersticker."

I'm not judging you, I'm judging me

This is not my first journal, not by any means. I have 12 volumes kept in a closet at home, I keep volume 14 in my book bag wherever I go. One volume dissappeared when my bag was stolen in 1997.

This is also not my first expirement of publically displayed writing. I wrote a weekly column for the Stonehill College Summit from 1988 until 1991. This column, Meditations, was distinquished both for making a long string of deadlines on time, perhaps even a record, and generating exactly 0 letters to the editor, thus making it, word for word, the least controversial thing published in the paper, microscopic copyright notifications and straight news stories about new selections in the cafeteria not excepted.

I don't like thinking about the consequences of these observations.

The True Cyberpunks

I'm finishing Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon, its sort of fun, a through back to the days when the likes of Neal Stephenson, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling were writing something like straight science fiction. Gibson reports, I think on behalf of that cohort of writers, that the cyber-punk movement had to end because the future had arrived and it was much stranger than he had imaginged. Morgan doesn't feed any obligation to make his world any stranger or more inventive than the real world. He doesn't even hold up a mirror to the way the world. The Takeshi Kovacs books give voice to violent fantasies without having to really consider the consequences of that violence.

One of Moran's important characters is a "data rat", a skill hacker, part merc, part detective. Similar characters existed in the classic cyber punk works. These skilled professional were at the center of the action. Its not too much of a stretch to suppose that they were the characters with whom the reader was supposed to be able to best identify. Their abilities analyzing data gave them both power and freedom. The emerging culture surrounded the internet, at least in the early days of the boom, were energized with this sort of promise. And, to a surprising extent, the technology paid off on this promise. At least to the extent that it's inspired the above writers to move into contemporary and/or historical fiction.

But what about the promise of the data-runner. I remember the thrill that I got when I first developed some skills in teasing out hidden facts and discovering unseen patterns in the vast web of electronic data. There was a definite rush. I was working as a part-time proof reader/ copy editor. I bet fact checkers get the same rush. I bet mercs and detectives have more important things to do with their time. This sort of character has elevated the lowest position in the traditional publishing hierarchy to that of super-powered noire anti-hero.

I suppose it shouldn't be suprising that people in this position should find themselves elevated in genre fiction. What else is a struggling novelist going to do to buy food before selling that first novel?