Excerpts

Look Within

2009-07-07T07:51:00.003Z

There’s one problem with all psychological knowledge - nobody can apply it to themselves. People can be incredibly astute about the shortcomings of their friends, spouses, children. But they have no insight into themselves at all. The same people who are coldly clear-eyed about the world around them have nothing but fantasies about themselves. Psychological knowledge doesn’t work if you look in a mirror. This bizarre fact is, as far as I know, unexplained. Personally, I always thought there was a clue from computer programming, in a procedure called recursion. Recursion means making the program loop back on itself, to use its own information to do things over and over until it gets a result. You use recursion for certain data-sorting algorithms and things like that. But it’s got to be done carefully, or you risk having the machine fall into what is called an infinite regress. It’s the programming equivalent of those funhouse mirrors that reflect mirrors, and mirrors, ever smaller and smaller, stretching away to infinity. The program keeps going, repeating and repeating, but nothing happens. The machine hangs.

I always figured something similar must happen when people turn their psychological insight-apparatus on themselves. The brain hangs. The thought process goes and goes, but it doesn’t get anywhere. It must be something like that, because we know that people can think about themselves indefinitely. Some people think of little else. Yet people never seem to change as a result of their intensive introspection. They never understand themselves better. It’s very rare to find genuine self-knowledge.

It’s almost as if you need someone else to tell you who you are, or to hold up the mirror for you.

from Prey by Michael Crichton

The Mistake

2008-09-30T18:47:00.004Z

With the mistake your life goes in reverse
Now you can see exactly what you did
Wrong yesterday and wrong the day before
And each mistake leads back to something worse.

And every nuance of your hypocrisy
Towards yourself, and every excuse
Stands solidly on the perspective lines
And there is perfect visibility.

What an enlightenment. The colonnade
Rolls past on either side. You needn't move.
The statues of your errors brush your sleeve.
You watch the tale turn back - and you're dismayed.

And this dismay at this, this big mistake
Is made worse by the sight of all those who
Knew all along where these mistakes would lead -
Those frozen friends who watched the crisis break.

Why didn't they say? Oh, but they did indeed -
Said with a murmur when the time was wrong
Or by a mild refusal to assent
Or told you plainly but you would not heed.

Yes, you can hear them now. It hurts. It's worse
Than any sneer from any enemy.
Take this dismay. Lay claim to this mistake.
Look straight along the lines of this reverse.

from Selected Poems by James Fenton

Fear & Horror

2008-07-31T19:11:00.010Z

We like to confuse fear and horror, but they're not the same thing. Human beings have only two inborn fears, fear of loud noises and fear of falling. Quite reasonable responses to eons of life on the savannah, where noise meant danger and high tree branches were sanctuary. Fear's a survival instinct. It tells you when to run. H.P. Lovecraft said the essence of horror is to walk into your garden to find your roses are singing... metaphorically he nailed it. Gardens of Song? Not in the natural order.

All stories start as horror stories. Every sitcom, every cop novel, every romance. They presume a natural order of things, then something disrupts it. Disruption is horror. This level of disruption and how it's dealt with makes it the kind of story it is. In most cases the status quo's restored. This is why most "horror stories" aren't really horror. If things go back to normal at the end, they're adventure stories. It's why some crime stories are really horror stories: because they're about death. Death is both the ultimate disruption to the natural order - there's no coming back from it - and the ultimate reminder of the real natural order, the one we pretend doesn't exist... By the time we're adults we learn to rationalize pain and death. Most children don't. Animals can't. That's why we have greater sympathy for small children and animals. Adults understand that under the skin of the world there are monsters lying in wait. We might not like it, but we know it. We know about death camps, about creepy men in backwoods houses who waylay strangers and make soup and tuxedos out of them, about burglars who rape and murder 85-year old women confined to wheelchairs and religious crackpots who kidnap teenagers from their bedrooms. For children these things are true disruptions of the natural order... disruption can never be healed, or even forgotten, only ignored.

Because ignoring it's the only way to tell ourselves there's a natural order where little girls can remain safe, where monsters don't really prowl under the skin of the world. Anything else means something has gone fundamentally wrong with the universe, or, worse, it was fundamentally wrong to begin with and there's no way to make it better.

Fear's a survival instinct. It tells you when to run. Horror's when you realize there is nowhere to run.

from the Afterword to Scars #5 by Steven Grant

Acts of Surgery

2008-07-28T18:51:00.011Z

Staring at the many satellite dishes that now sprout like babies' ears from Lancaster's soil, ears cocked to the heavens, waiting to hear corrupting secrets from far up above

Imagine you are sitting down in a chair and on a screen before you you are shown a bloody, ripping film of yourself undergoing surgery. The surgery saved your life. It was pivotal in making you *you*. But you don't remember it. Or do you? Do we understand the events that make us who we are? Do we ever understand the factors that made us do the things we do?
When we sleep at night - when we walk across a field and see a tree full of sleeping birds - when we tell small lies to our friends - when we make love - what acts of surgery are happening to our souls - what damage and healing and shock are we going through that we will never be able to fathom? What films are generated that will never be shown?

from Shampoo Planet by Douglas Coupland

Craigslisted: I Hate All Of You

2008-05-27T07:30:00.004Z

I don't care what colour you are. I don't care where you're from. I don't care what you do for a living. I don't care what class you are, how you dress, what you smoke or drink or who you know or whom you've fucked.

I hate you all. I hate every last living, breathing, snot and feces producing, promiscuously copulating, celebrity obsessed, opinionated one of you. From right here in Toronto right around the planet and back, coast to coast, nationwide and internationally. Every. Single. Last. One. Of. You.

Fuck love. Fuck your insipid grasping at some abstract concept of chemical imbalances and reasonless actions, fumbling around in the crowd trying to find some cinematic supposition for real human interaction. Fuck lust, too. Fuck you all, from the lowlife dirtbags that think dropping trou and waving the little soldier in a sloppy arc is a pick-up line to the sniveling of the desperate 'nice guys' who never get the girl due to a total lack of testosterone grown stones. Fuck you all, from the crazy, under dressed sluts that judge a persons character by the price of their shirt, right down to the fat, flabby chicks that think personality is enough.

Fuck you drivers, for thinking that a yellow light is a sign that says 'step on the gas'. Fuck you wheelmen and women that think it's okay to sit in a left hand turn in the middle of morning traffic, even though there is a protected left in the intersections before and after where you need to make your turn. Fuck you too cyclists - you're not exempt from the traffic laws just because your peddling, you miserable spandex covered neon reflective fucks. Fuck you too, pedestrians. Use the fucking crosswalk if you don't want to get hit, and use it before the little countdown clock says '3'. You don't have enough goddamn time to lope across four lanes of traffic.

Fuck you chick on your cellphone. Fuck you attitude packed minimum-wager that makes my coffee. Fuck you cops that spend all their time handing out speeding tickets. Fuck you douche bag doing ten over the limit in the passing lane on the highway. Fuck you lady using exact change at the counter at the grocery store. Fuck you kids having a conversation in the doorway. And fuck you also for not getting the fuck out of your designated handicapped seat when a pregnant or elderly person gets on the fucking bus.

Fuck taxes. Fuck welfare. Fuck the whole selfish, over politicized and party driven government system. I'm sick and fucking tired of policies and new laws with seven hundred bylaws that nobody but you and your cabinet reads. Fuck you councilors and your stupid 'district improvement' plans. Fuck you unions, for asking for so much and giving nothing more that what you already give. Fuck the whole process that allows people who are supposed to be working for us work for interests that only benefit the next campaign. Fuck your short-sightedness, your rush to the bandwagons, and your incessant arguing over fuck all. Fuck the parties, fuck the conventions, and fuck your campaigns. Do some real fucking work for a change.

Fuck you bottles of water. You're water. You're not worth two fucking dollars.
Fuck you trendsetters, fuck you fashionistas. Fuck your little dogs and and your idiotic outfits. Fuck your high heels in the snow. Fuck your five dollar coffees and your fifteen dollar veggie burgers. Fuck your health kick, your diet or your fucking new interest in kickboxing or sushi.

Fuck your culture. Fuck your race. Fuck your sense of entitlement. Fuck your sense of uniqueness. Fuck you all for the belief that you have something unique and interesting to contribute. Fuck you for filling the internet with your useless garbage. Fuck your blogs, your wikis, your forums. Fuck your name calling. And most of all, fuck whatever you believe. It's all wrong. Fuck it.

Fuck your complaints. Fuck your addictions. Fuck your dependencies. Fuck your pain. Fuck your tears. Fuck selling whatever it is you sell. Fuck your manipulation of others. Fuck movies. Fuck fucking. Fuck everything you own. Fuck your allergies. Fuck your stupid commons sense. Fuck your spelling and fuck your lack of education, or your ignorance, whatever is applicable.

I don't give a fuck. Shut the fuck up and just get on with it.

Original at Craig's List

Untitled

2008-05-22T18:24:00.005Z

It is difficult to put thoughts into words. Difficult to catch those ephemeral visions and squeeze them out in ink. Difficult to understand the trickery of the unconscious with the subconscious. Difficult to locate those elusive mirages of questions and doubts and flashes and revelations. The mind is like a spinning collage, throwing up blends of fantasies and realities. Language chains this limitless space and calls that a thought process which never was a procedure.

Elections, Voting & Government

2006-11-08T04:03:00.000Z

A few excerpts especially for election time..

Excerpt 1:

In fact, let us not mince words...The Management is terrible! We've had a string of embezzlers, frauds, liars, and lunatics making a string of catastrophic decisions. This is plain fact. But who elected them? It was you! You who elected these people! You who gave them the power to make your decisions for you! While I'll admit that anyone can make a mistake once, to go on making the same lethal errors century after century seems to me nothing short of deliberate. You have encouraged these malicious incompetents, who have made your working life a shambles. You have accepted without question their senseless orders. You have allowed them to fill your workspace with dangerous and unproven machines. You could have stopped them. All you had to say was "No." You have no spine. You have no pride. You are no longer an asset to the company. I will, however, be generous. You will be granted two years to show me some improvement in your work. If at the end of that time you are still unwilling to make a go of it...You're fired. That will be all. You may return to your labors.

from V for Vendetta by Alan Moore & David Lloyd

Excerpt 2:

You may have noticed that there's one thing I don't complain about: Politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says, "They suck". But where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. No, they come from American homes, American families, American schools, American churches, American businesses, and they're elected by American voters. This is the best we can do, folks. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out.

....I have solved this political dilemma in a very direct way: I don't vote. On Election Day, I stay home. I firmly believe that if you vote, you have no right to complain. Now, some people like to twist that around. They say, "If you don't vote, you have no right to complain", but where's the logic in that? If you vote, and you elect dishonest, incompetent politicians, and they get into office and screw everything up, you are responsible for what they have done. You voted them in. You caused the problem. You have no right to complain.

I, on the other hand, who did not vote -- who did not even leave the house on Election Day -- am in no way responsible for that these politicians have done and have every right to complain about the mess that you created.

from Back in Town by George Carlin

Modern Man

2006-10-11T02:50:00.000Z

"I'm a modern man, a man for the millennium, digital and smoke-free, a diversified multi-cultural post-modern deconstructionist, politically, anatomically, and ecologically incorrect. I've been uplinked and downloaded, I've been inputted and outsourced, I know the upside of downsizing, I know the downside of upgrading. I'm a high-tech lowlife, a cutting edge state-of-the-art bi-coastal multitasker, and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond. I'm new wave, but I'm old school, and my inner child is outward bound. I'm a hot-wired, heat-seeking, warm-hearted cool customer, voice-activated and biodegradable. I interface with my database, and my database is in cyberspace, so I'm interactive, I'm hyperactive, and from time to time, I'm radioactive. Behind the 8-ball, ahead of the curve, riding the wave, dodging the bullet, pushing the envelope. I'm on point, on task, on message, and off drugs. I got no need for coke and speed. I have no urge to binge and purge. I'm in the moment, on the edge, over the top, but under the radar. A high-concept, low-profile, medium-range ballistics missionary. A street-wise smart bomb, a top-gun bottom-feeder. I wear power ties, I tell power lies, I take power naps, I run victory laps. I'm a totally ongoing bigfoot slamdunk rainmaker with a proactive outreach. A raging workaholic, a working rageaholic, out of rehab and in denial. I got a personal trainer, a personal shopper, a personal assistant, and a personal agenda. You can't shut me up, you can't dump me down, 'cause I'm tireless, and I'm wireless. I'm an alphamale on beta blockers. I'm a non-believer and an overachiever, laid back, but fashion forward, up front, down home, low rent, high maintenance; super size, long lasting, high definition, fast acting, oven ready, and built to last. I'm a hands-on, footloose, kneejerk headcase, prematurely post-traumatic, and I have a love child who sends me hate mail. But I'm feeling, I'm caring, I'm healing, I'm sharing, a supportive, bonding, nurturing, primary caregiver. My output is down, but my income is up. I take a short position on the long bond, and my revenue stream has its own cash flow. I read junk mail, I eat junk food, I buy junk bonds, I watch trash sports. I'm gender specific, capital intensive, user friendly, and lactose intolerant. I like rough sex, I like tough love, I use the F-word in my e-mails, and the software on my hard drive is hardcore, no soft porn. I bought a microwave at a minimall, I bought a minivan at a megastore, I eat fast food in the slow lane. I'm tollfree, bite size, ready to wear, and I come in all sizes. A fully equipped, factory authorized, hospital tested, clinically proven, scientifically formulated medical miracle. I've been prewashed, precooked, preheated, prescreened, preapproved, prepackaged, postdated, freeze dried, double wrapped, vacuum packed, and I have an unlimited broadband capacity. I'm a rude dude, but I'm the real deal, lean and mean, cocked, locked, and ready to rock; rough, tough, and hard to bluff. I take it slow, I go with the flow, I ride with the tide, I got glide in my stride. Drivin' and movin', sailin' and spinnin', jivin' and groovin', wailin' and winnin'. I don't snooze, so I don't lose. I keep the pedal to the metal and the rubber on the road. I party hardy, and lunch time is crunch time. I'm hangin' in, there ain't no doubt, and I'm hangin' tough, over and out."

from Life is Worth Losing by George Carlin

"Asshole" by Denis Leary

2006-10-11T02:19:00.000Z

Yes, Denis Leary might have plagiarized material from Bill Hicks. But this song is brilliant.

Peace, Inc.

2006-08-20T02:18:00.000Z

Why not, when nations have already lost the monopoly of violence, consider creating volunteer mercenary forces organized by private corporations to fight wars on a contract-fee basis for the United Nations - the condottieri of yesterday armed with some of the weapons, including non-lethal weapons, of tomorrow?

Governments unwilling to send their own young men and women to die in combat against Serbian, Croat, or Bosnian irregulars, including rapists and genocidal thugs, might have had fewer reservations about allowing the UN to contract with a nonpolitical, professional fighting force made up of volunteers from many nations - a rapid-deployment unit for hire. Or one under contract to the UN alone.

Of course, to prevent such companies from becoming wild cards, strict international ground rules would have to be set - transnational boards of directors, public monitoring of their funds, perhaps special arrangements to lease them equipment for specific purposes, rather than allowing them to build up gigantic warstocks of their own. But if governments cannot directly do the job the world may well turn to corporations that can.

By contrast, one might also imagine the creation, someday, of internationally chartered 'Peace Corporations,' each of which is assigned some region of the globe. Instead of being paid for waging war, its sole source of profit would come from war limitation in its region. Its 'product' would be reduced casualty numbers as measured against some recent base-line period.

Special, internationally sanctioned rules could permit these companies wide military and moral latitude to conduct unorthodox peacekeeping operations - to do what it takes, ranging from legalized bribery to propaganda to limited military intervention, to the supply of peacemaking forces in the region. Private investors might be found to capitalize such firms if, say, the international community or regional groups greed to pay them a fee for services plus bonanza profits in years when casualties decline. And if this doesn't work, perhaps there are other ways to seed the world with highly motivated peace-preserving institutions. Why not make peace pay off?

from 'War and Anti-War' by Alvin & Heidi Toffler

A related article:
The United Nations dithers as genocide goes on in Darfur and the Congo. Private security firms can end the killing, if anyone will let them...

Six Wrenches That Twist The Mind

2006-08-19T23:38:00.000Z

Spin doctors have used six tools over and over again through the years.. These are like wrenches designed to twist the mind.

One of the most common is the atrocity accusation. When a fifteen-year-old Kuwaiti girl testified before Congress during the Gulf War to the effect that Iraqi troops in Kuwait were killing premature babies and stealing incubators to take them back to Iraq, she twanged many a heartstring. The world was not told that she just happened to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington and a member of the royal family, or that her appearance was stage-managed by the Hill & Knowlton public relations firm on behalf of the Kuwaitis.

Of course, propaganda need not be false. Widespread accounts of Iraqi brutality in Kuwait were confirmed when reporters arrived after the Iraqis were driven out. But atrocity stories, both true and false, have been a staple of war propaganda. In World War I, writes Taylor in his excellent history of war propaganda, Munitions of the Mind, Allied propagandists constantly invoked 'Images of the bloated Prussian "Ogre"... busily crucifying soldiers, violating women, mutilating babies, desecrating and looting churches.'

Half a century later, atrocity stories were important in the Vietnam War, during which accounts of the My Lai massacre by American soldiers disgusted wide sectors of the American public and fed the anti-war fervor. Atrocity stories, both true and false, filled the air during the Serb-Bosnian conflict.

A second common tool is hyperbolic inflation of the stakes involved in a battle or war. Soldiers and civilians are told that everything they hold dear is at risk. President Bush pictured the Gulf conflict as a war for a new and better world order. At stake was not simply the independence of Kuwait, the protection of the world's oil supply, or elimination of a potential nuclear threat from Saddam, but, supposedly, the fate of civilization itself. As for Saddam, the war was not about his failure to pay back billion of dollars borrowed from the Kuwaitis during the earlier Iran-Iraq war; it was - he claimed - about the entire future of the 'Arab Nation.'

A third mind-wrench in the military spin doctor's kit bag is demonization and/or dehumanization of the opponent. For Saddam as for his enemies in next-door Iran, America was the 'the Great Satan,' Bush was 'the Devil in the White House.' In turn, for Bush, Saddam was a 'Hitler.' Baghdad radio spoke of American pilots as 'rats' and 'predatory beasts' An American colonel described an air strike as 'almost like you flipped on the light in the kitchen at night and the cockroaches start scurrying there, and were killing them.'

A fourth tool is polarization. 'Those who are not with us are against us.'

A fifth is the claim of divine sanction. If Saddam draped his aggression in Islamic garb, President Bush also called upon God's support .... the phrase 'God Bless America' ran through American propaganda.

Finally, perhaps the most powerful mind-wrench of all is meta-propaganda - propaganda that discredits the other side's propaganda. Coalition spokespeople in the Gulf repeatedly and accurately pointed out that Saddam Hussein had total control of the Iraqi press and that, therefore, the people of Iraq were denied the truth and Iraqi airwaves were filled with lies. Meta-propaganda is particularly potent because, instead of challenging the veracity of a single story, it calls into question everything coming from the enemy. Its aim is to produce wholesale, as distinct from retail, disbelief.

from 'War and Anti-War' by Alvin & Heidi Toffler

International Obsolescence

2006-08-19T23:08:00.000Z

This is the first of a series of excerpts from the book War and Anti-War by Alvin & Heidi Toffler. Published in 1993, the book provides thought-provoking insights into the nature of warfare and the forms it is likely to take in the future as well as strategies for dealing with warfare. According to them, as new forms of warfare emerge, the peace-form must evolve as well. Some of the issues which are discussed in the book seem chillingly familiar now.

The old tools of diplomacy will prove obsolete - along with the UN and many other international institutions.

Much foolishness has been written about a new, stronger United Nations. Unless it is dramatically restructured in ways not yet even under discussion, the UN may well play a less effective and smaller, not larger, role in world affairs in the decades to come.

This is because the UN remains what it originally was, a club of nation-states. Yet the flow of world events in the years ahead will be influenced by non-national players like global business, cross-border political movements like Greenpeace, religious movements like Islam, and burgeoning pan-ethnic groups who wish to reorganize the world along ethnic lines - the Pan-Slavs, for example or certain Turks who dream of a new Ottoman Empire that unites Turks and Turkic speakers from Cyprus in the Mediterranean to Kyrgyzstan on the Chinese border.

International Organizations unable to incorporate, co-opt, enfeeble, or destroy the new nonnational sources of power will crumble into irrelevance.

Idiot, Know Thyself!!

2006-01-14T19:30:00.000Z

There's one problem with all psychological knowledge - nobody can apply it to themselves. People can be incredibly astute about the shortcomings of their friends, spouses and children. But they have no insight into themselves at all. The same people who are coldly clear-eyed about the world around them have nothing but fantasies about themselves.

Psychological knowledge doesn't work if you look in a mirror. Like a computer program which is on an infinite loop, it goes on repeating and repeating, but nothing happens. The machine hangs. Its similar to those funhouse mirrors that reflect mirrors, and mirrors, ever smaller and smaller, stretching away to infinity.

The same thing happens when people turn their psychological insight-apparatus on themselves. The Brain Hangs. The thought process goes and goes, but it doesn't get anywhere.

(From 'Prey' by Michael Crichton)

Crew-cuts & Eggheads

2004-10-30T18:17:00.000Z

There's a difference between an engineer and a scientist. An engineer usually works to the rule book - that long list of verities tested through the centuries. He tends to forget that the rule book was originally compiled by scientists, men who see nothing strange in broken rules, other than an opportunity to probe a little deeper into the inexplicable universe. Any man who can make the successful transition from Newtonian to Quantum physics without breaking his stride can believe anything any day of the week and twice as much on Sundays.

A Rare Mood..

2004-08-17T18:51:00.000Z

I have loved badly, loved the great
Too soon, withdrawn my words too late;
And eaten in an echoing hall
Alone and from a chipped plate
The words that I withdrew too late.

- Edna St. Vincent Millay

How do you feel?

2004-08-15T08:59:00.000Z

Women have emotions; men have sport. That’s how it was for centuries. But this all changed at the end of the twentieth century. Emotions suddenly went public. They became compulsory for men. Getting in touch with your female side was the magazine cliché. The sorry spectacle of males in tears was everywhere. If you wanted so as to sell a book, then you had to cry on a talk show. Athletes were nothing if they hadn’t been seen weeping on TV, basketball stars wept buckets, soccer stars sobbed on the field, comedians cried copiously, Presidents could hardly address the nation without tears in their eyes. If you couldn’t hack it, then you’d better damn well fake it, brother, for this was Reality TV. Celebrities wallowed in public emotion, like warthogs in a muddy hollow. So, yes, TV was to blame again, changing behavior, lowering standards, intruding, falsifying, exposing. Emotion became the trademark of endless TV harpies, the Medeas of the media, with their frozen hairdos and their refrigerated smiles. How do you feel? People were asked moments after they had scored a goal or been told their family was lost in a plane crash. Prodding and jabbing. How do you feel? Until the tears would flow and the poor victim received his benediction from the blond show queen. Pass the Kleenex, check the ratings, pass the sick bag, please.

Men were by no means the only victim of this hijack by the harpies and perhaps they had it coming anyway. There was a lot of bullshit bleating about it at the time, as men found themselves, perhaps for the first time, vulnerable to particularly public forms of female revenge. Women, it seemed, could hardly wait to get laid to lay pen on paper, saving semen stained souvenirs to offer as evidence for the courtroom or the studio, it didn’t matter which, since both were on television now. Sharon reveals all. Naked pictures of the girl who fucked the country. Read the book of the blowjob. News at nine - sex, scandal, and weather. It was of course the total breakdown of privacy. Private life - that was such a Victorian concept anyway, and it went straight out the window with TV and the computer. Now the double ages had arrived, nothing was private. I could get your credit rating, your total net worth, your purchasing patterns, your private address; dammit, I could even check you orgasms online.

Who wants to be Famous!!

2004-08-12T11:38:00.000Z

For some people the oxygen of publicity is as vital as breathing. Publicity is the precious fuel of fame. It is gossip at the speed of light and it’s a poison, of course. Pollutes the soul, destroys the self, flatters the ego, but oh how good it tastes. And it certainly helps to sell books. So while fame is useful for getting tables in crowded restaurants and casual sex from strangers, admiration from strangers is desperately bad for the soul. The constant attention, the fuss, the adulation of the crowd, the seductive delight of never hearing the word “no,” the ability to bend people to your will, to seduce them, to have them do things for you. And to you. On your knees, baby. Worship me. Flatter me. Please me. All very bad for you.

I can hardly wait.

Of course I shan’t want all the entourage bullshit that goes with fame. Groupies are one thing, but I won’t need hairdressers, publicists, astrologers, chauffeurs, makeup, wardrobe, and endless assistants. The victims of fame are sad. Some are almost incapable of boiling an egg. They are terrified to be alone. For to be alone is to face what everyone else has to face: That we are all ultimately alone. That the camera is just a trick with light, and that your image too will fade. That there will come a time, horror of horrors, when your name will no longer be spoken. That there will be no more glossy pictures, no heart warming story. In short, no you.

Fame is terminal. But then, sadly, so is life.

Long Bets

2004-07-31T09:23:00.000Z

Stumbled across an interesting website, Long Bets, where people place bets on long term societal and technological possibilities. . For $50 anyone can put lay out a prediction and then others can place a bet against them. One of those bets was placed between Mitchell Kapor and Ray Kurzweil who have each plonked down $10,000 on opposite sides of whether a machine will pass the Turing test by 2029. The Predictors and Bettors must provide an argument explaining why the subject of their prediction is important and why they think they will be proved right.

The following excerpt gives a brief understanding of the turing test.

From The Imitation Game To The Turing Test

The Turing Test was introduced by Alan M. Turing (1912-1954) as "the imitation game" in his 1950 article (now available online) Computing Machinery and Intelligence (Mind, Vol. 59, No. 236, pp. 433-460) which he so boldly began by the following sentence:

I propose to consider the question "Can machines think?" This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine" and "think."

Turing Test is meant to determine if a computer program has intelligence. Quoting Turing, the original imitation game can be described as follows:

The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the "imitation game." It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either "X is A and Y is B" or "X is B and Y is A." The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B.

When talking about the Turing Test today what is generally understood is the following: The interrogator is connected to one person and one machine via a terminal, therefore can't see his/her counterparts. His/Her task is to find out which of the two candidates is the machine, and which is the human only by asking them questions. If the machine can "fool" the interrogator, it is intelligent.

This test has been subject to different kinds of criticism and has been at the heart of many discussions in AI, philosophy and cognitive science for the past 50 years.

The toughest test of Artificial Intelligence is going to be its understanding of Irony. How is a perfectly logical machine to understand it? It is impossible to spot irony without understanding irony, and yet how could it (the A.I.) understand irony without spotting it? If you don’t recognize irony, you can’t see it, and you can’t see it if you don’t recognize it. Fowler in his classic volume Modern English Usage says, “Irony is a form of utterance that postulates a double audience, consisting of one party that, hearing, shall hear and shall not understand, and another party that, when more is meant than meets the ear, is aware both of that more and of the outsider’ incomprehension.”

The more one reads the sentence, the more one identifies with the outsider’s incomprehension. Is it possible that the very definition is ironic?!

(To read the bet placed by Mitchell Kapor and Ray Kurzweil click here.)

Fame

2004-07-27T14:16:00.000Z

Fame is a terminal disease. It screws you up even worse than your mom and dad. Somewhere in the late twentieth century the pursuit of fame became a way of life. Suddenly everyone wanted to be famous. Newscasters, journalists, weather men, astrologers, cooks, interns, even lawyers for God’s sake, everyone went nuts trying to grab their fifteen minutes of fame as promised by the pop philosophy of Andy Warhol. It replaced life after death as mankind’s greatest illusion. Fame! You’ll live forever. Fame! Your chance to revenge your parents. Fame! Take that, you nasty kids who were so cruel to me at school. Fame! A chance to screw yourself across the flickering face of history.

Fame, fame, fame, fame, fame.

This syphilis of the soul was caused of course by the arrival of television and the instant attention of the new mass media. If the medium was the message, then the message was crap, for the TV screens were filled from morning to night with a constant twenty-four-hour shit storm. No one was spared. Not presidents, not princes, not popes, not people’s representatives. Knickers off, panties down, coming live at you in ten, nine, eight... Kiss and tell, kiss and sell, bug your neighbors, tape your friends, grab an agent and sell, sell, sell. Intimacy? Privacy? Forget it. Notoriety? Shame? No such thing. Fame. That’s the name of the game. Private life was washed away under the tidal wave of freedom of speech. It didn’t matter whether you were famous for murdering a president or inventing a pudding, now fame could travel at the speed of light, everyone was just a sound bite from stardom.

No one remembers the name of the anarchist who started World War One by murdering the archduke in Sarajevo in 1914. Everyone remembers Lee Harvey Oswald. Fame! A rifle shot away. Providing you have television. Fame the intellectual equivalent of waving at the camera. “Look at me, Ma! I’m here. I’m real. I’m on TV.” Sad, sick, and deplorable, isn’t it? I mean in the 1990’s even agents became famous, for Christ’s sake. And what do we call the famous? Stars! I mean hello. Have we no sense of irony? Look up – look up at real stars. Billions of them? Billions and billions of the buggers. Don’t we get it? There is no fame. There is no immortality. There is no life after death. There are just millions of tiny grains of sand scraping away at each other. We’re on the planet Ozymandias, people! Look on my works ye mighty and despair! The grains of time, grinding away at our insignificance… well you get the picture. You’re intelligent. You’ve read this far atleast.

(from 'The Road to Mars' by Eric Idle)

p.s. Gavrilo Princip was the man who assasinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914.

ill-fortuna!

2004-07-25T14:21:00.000Z

I have been the continual sport of what the world calls Fortune; and though I will not wrong her by saying, She has ever made me feel the weight of any great or signal evil; -- yet with all the good temper in the world, I affirm it of her, That in every stage of my life, and at every turn and corner where she could get fairly at me, the ungracious Duchess has pelted me with a set of as pitiful misadventures and cross accidents as ever small HERO sustained.

(from 'Tristram Shandy' by Laurence Sterne)