| on knowing your memes |
[16 Nov 2009|07:55pm] |
In another segment, Weird Al shows up to explain auto-tune. The series is a weird and strangely addictive mix of genuine research into the origins of popular memes and not-quite-there, but charmingly low-budget internet video comedy. Maybe they'll do a segment on themselves.
The Keyboard Cat one is okay too. Heh. So's the Yo Dawg one.
(Maybe all this is in fact old meme, but I've never watched these before.)
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| on being a sad bastard (with a guitar) |
[11 Nov 2009|04:23pm] |
So I've signed up for a 30-minute "acoustic lunch" set on campus, Wednesday December 2nd. It's totally unplugged so I can't even hide everything under layers of reverb like I do for youtube, or bring a drum machine to add some brittle syncopation here and there to mix things up and sustain (so far, entirely hypothetical) audience interest. We'll see, I guess.
Also, today is November 11th, which is not a patriotic occasion in my mind so much as a opportunity to reflect on the violence of our species and our continuing refusal to live up to the promises of sentience. War. I wish we were better than that, all of us.
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| Savings Time |
[02 Nov 2009|11:40am] |
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On Friday I was talking with a fellow Montreal expatriate who had come to London for grad school about the transition to living in a new place. She's in her first year of a PhD, bright, attractive, sagacious, mildly flirtatious, highly self-aware, the kind of girl I generally end up admiring from a distance as a well put-together human specimen in altogether many qualities, but not quite weird enough for me to be seriously interested (over and above the fact that I'm currently involved).
I was saying the hardest thing was forging new relationships while trying, best as you can, to keep the old ones going (and the weird guilt this brings about), but you know, things also carry on without you and by this Sunday or Monday on Facebook you will see Halloween pictures coming in and see your friends having a good time and your first reaction will be: "oh, fun!" and then "aw, fuck" and that's just the process, things will carry on, and the vicissitudes of academia are thus that you in all likelihood will never go home again, chasing the same scarce work that hundreds of graduate students all compete for, ready to settle in Redneck's Asshole, Texas if it means a tenure-track position, and the versimilitude of online interaction keeps you in some ambient awareness of old social networks that are palpably rusting away so you can count the reddish flecks in your hands like little measures of an entropy founded in your own will to do this one thing, which might be a bit dramatic for an eight-hour drive's worth of travel from London to Montreal.
"Don't make me cry," she chided, sarcastic, vulnerable, but of course I was just bracing myself, the self-absorbed fuck I am.
Saiche was away for the weekend at a conference. Some of the other graduate students were watching horror movies at one guy's place, but I couln't really go for reasons I can't get into now. So I stayed home, played guitar, read Amanda Palmer's blog and listened to the Cure (oh my gawth!) and watched The Wire's final few episodes.
All this to say: I miss you guys. Blah.
Damn November blues.
Also: watch The Wire. It's to television what Émile Zola is to the novel, a exemplar of social naturalism in a preposterous thicket of escapism and Romantic fan-service. It is the kind of show that makes you look back on everything before it that you liked and wonder why the fuck you thought it was any good, why we needed ridiculous space battles to pretend we gave two shits about prisoner abuse, civil rights, or the war on terror, or whatever veiled allegory justified the aesthetic and psychological excesses of histrionic science fiction and fantasy.
The Wire begins with a systemic demonstration of the ways in which institutional dysfunction ends up shaping the lives of those living in the colossal shadow of given sets of overlapping power; by the end of it though we are bequeathed something entirely different. A strange gift: genuine empathy for the human condition, not that bullshit sympathy where all blame is absolved in some bleeding-heart false consciousness, but a kind of first stab at authentic understanding of the hidden subjectivities we walk past every day. Just go buy or download the fucking thing, will you?
iopha
p.s. with gratitude to Cato, who berated me until I watched the damned thing.
p.p.s David Simon, the show's creator, said in an interview:
"We are not selling hope, or audience gratification, or cheap victories with this show. The Wire is making an argument about what institutions—bureaucracies, criminal enterprises, the cultures of addiction, raw capitalism even—do to individuals. It is not designed purely as an entertainment. It is, I'm afraid, a somewhat angry show."
p.p.p.s: Not that it's a documentary. But it tries harder than anything that's tried before. One perceptive comment: “Where I come from, women run most of the things [that the show] talks about. It’s the women that have the power in the ghetto. This show totally got it wrong when they made it all about men. Women are the politicians; they can get you a gun, they got the cash, they can get you land to build something on.”
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| Hallowe'en at home |
[31 Oct 2009|11:42pm] |
Recorded with the godawful Logicam, because I don't have a better working video capture device currently. I was going to record something newer first, but what the hell, it's October 31, and I'm fond of the bad old ones.
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[22 Oct 2009|12:59pm] |
As I mentioned earlier, I'm teaching formal logic to sixty undergraduates this semester at UWO. Today was the Mid-Term; I had to create the exam basically from scratch, something I'd never done before. It's an hour-long class, but university policy says I need to vacate roughly ten minutes early, so I can only count on 50 minutes of exam time. It's tough to gauge how long these things take, but in the end I think I did pretty well; a few people started leaving after about 30-35 minutes, and when time was definitely up there were maybe 8 or so left still trying to finish up, which is more or less how these things should go.
Anyway, I like to ask bonus questions that test the boundaries of comprehension. Wittgenstein once wrote that the ability to amend rules, the create novel forms was the best sign of comprehension, not the mere 'syntactic' ability of following rules already laid out. So here's my question, as it was on the exam:
BONUS:
The disjunction (‘or’) operator, by convention, is taken to represent inclusive-or. This means that when both sides of the disjunct are true, the disjunction itself is also true. We also know how to represent exclusive-or in SL. But here’s a trickier problem.
(1) I want you to invent a symbol for a new logical operator that represents exclusive-or. Make a truth-table for it.
(2) Then, using that symbol and whatever else you need, create a sentence of SL that captures inclusive-or… of course without using the normal disjunction operator at all! Show me the truth table proving this captures inclusive-or.
My solution is as follows: Let's say we use a lower-case 'x' to represent our new exclusive-or operator, so that the expression "P x Q" has a truth table such that 'x' is true when P or Q is true, but false when both are true and when neither are true, i.e.,
P x Q
T F T
T T F
F T T
F F F
This is different, of course, from the conventional disjunction. But the classical operators allows expression of our new "P x Q" operator via the longer sentence (P v Q) & ~(P & Q). So that answers part (1) of the question. In part (2) we want an expression that uses exclusive-or ('x') that captures conventional, inclusive disjunction. The best way to do this is work backwards: start with the assumption of a main logical operator whose truth-table mirrors inclusive disjunction then figure out what you need to "plug-in" to get that result.
(Of course those blessed with particularly well-endowed faculties of Logical Intuition may already figure out what we need to say: "one or the other, or both.")
So anyway, the expression I came up with was "(P x Q) x (P & Q)" and, glancing at the exams so far, is more or less the answer some students came up with too. Many of them have far more exotic-looking constructions, though, and no matter how clever I think I am by asking this question to my undergraduates, that feeling is entirely mitigated by how much fucking work it will be to test every one of the little resourceful bastard's answers. Argh.
But then if this is going to be my life for the next 30-40 years I guess I could do worse.
Although: I went to a Board Game night on Tuesday held by fellow grad students. We played "Agricola," a neat farming-themed strategy game that I'd never heard of. So naturally I googled it before going over there, and ended up learning some Roman history: there's a general called Agricola who went around kicking ass in the British isles c. 70-80 AD. And goddamn if I didn't spend a good half-hour wondering what that life must have been like. Political intrigue, warfare, conquest, governance, triumphs: it just sounds, I don't know, so goddamned interesting. I wish I could say more about that but all I feel is the inchoate press of millenia spanning, the imagined sounds of cavalry and spear, the complexities of power, a subjectivity distant. I don't know. Maybe the future will feel this way about us.
( Student Solutions to the Bonus Question )
iopha
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| On Tools (adapted from a comment on Fears' blog.) |
[14 Oct 2009|03:39pm] |
So this amazing tool is surprised that people disagree with hilariously misguided 'criticism' of an imaginary war on the Essential Maleness of the sci-fi genre. Never mind how stupid it is, or how much funnier and stupider it seems when contrasted with the carefully assembled articles they write, all indicative of how much Serious Business this must be to them.
No, just read the comments from supporters a bit and get a feel for how much this adorable little community has bonded over their trials. It provides fascinating insight into the power of dittoheaded confirmation bias and the ability of a small group to bond over meaningless internal jargon, self-satisfied talking points, vacuous generalizations and ad hominem invective, mistaking all these for insight, reflection, and argument, culminating in a tone of smug knowing condescension only true idiots coming together on the internet and convincing themselves they are special, smart and daring can possibly manage.
Buncha fuckin' prissy-ass snowflakes, if you ask me, giving themselves the worst kind of entitled self-worth by pretending they're some kind of incredibly provocative resistance movement, changing the world one priapically frustrated blog post at a time. Case study of Nietzschean slave morality: ressentiment sublimated into the creation of a fantastic external cause for their own failings, angers, fears.
The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge. While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is "outside," what is "different," what is "not itself"; and this No is its creative deed. This inversion of the value-positing eye—this need to direct one's view outward instead of back to oneself—is of the essence of ressentiment: in order to exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile external world; it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all—its action is fundamentally reaction. The reverse is the case with the noble mode of valuation: it acts and grows spontaneously, it seeks its opposite only so as to affirm itself more gratefully and triumphantly. (From the Genealogy of Morals.)
This is exactly right: an imaginary revenge against a made-up 'opponent' in lieu of the far more noble, I don't dare say 'manly' (though there is irony there, for the bold), alternative which just is to live the life you want to live. Instead of breaking down into a pathetic sequence of pleading whines dressed up in the bellicose masturbatory rhetoric of the truly, staggeringly insipid.
None of these perfect fools could even begin to write the manly science fiction they want to read so desperately, because it doesn't exist, it cannot exist except as the fantastical delusions of un-adults in noxious states of socially arrested development, and should they put pen to paper the output would be a laughing-stock of genre clichés and transparent hero-worship, with no audience save themselves, fanfiction for fans of a fictionalized past, fictionalized values.
The key to a real re-evaluation of values is the creation of irresistible cultural forms and this has been the success of progressives, feminists, LGBT activists and their allies: the values inhere naturally in the cultural artifacts produced and the promise of freedom for those who dwell there wields more power than any gun or bomb or blog post, because theirs is a morality that is an affirmation, a gratefully Nietzschean Yes-saying to life in its diversity and possibilities.
How could these angry white men compete, indeed? Their only reactionary defense is to create their little insular culture and watch from their small windows as the world moves on without them, none the worse for their absence.
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| Thanksgiving cancelled |
[11 Oct 2009|11:14pm] |
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music |
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pitbull (terrier) - kocani orkestar |
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...on account of being sick. On the mend now but ugh. Nasty last couple days, for sure.
Lost a hard drive and a gig of RAM on the computer too, for now apparent reason. Bought a 320gb for 80$; running on the one channel of memory, which is do-able. I guess. Lost no data, thankfully. External HD: FTW.
Haven't posted in a bit. It's been kind of crazy, actually. Went last weekend to an academic conference in Buffalo, big gathering on "experimental philosophy," where I presented a commentary on someone's else paper. Sort of a consolation prize; my own submission didn't make the cut (presumably because I didn't perform any experiments). Good conference, though. Interesting work being done. Meeting Stich and Weinberg was an important networking step to take. Was also nice to see old friends down there.
And just before that I was in Niagara for a funeral (not direct relations of mine, though). Right after I came back I gave a talk at Western for the department's grad student colloquium series and received 60-odd logic assignments which I haven't graded yet. Ugh. I had really hoped to record a new song for youtube by now.
Well. Anyway. This entry has been brought to you by medicated pointlessness.
iopha
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| Like Lunch (Take That, Friedman.) |
[28 Sep 2009|01:55pm] |
Publishers have taken to sending me free philosophy books in the hopes that, should I find myself enamored with one, would use it in a class (and hence make undergraduates buy it).
Unfortunately most of the books aren't that great. How many more critical thinking textbooks does the world need? I must have like 6 different books by now. They're useful to have around when comes to time to think of exams and assignments. So there's that.
Anyway, today's free book was "You've Got to be Kidding!: How Jokes Can Help You Think," which introduces basic critical thinking skills (fallacies, argument structure, etc.) through humour. Most of it is pretty corny. But I'm leafing through it and here's one attributed to Dr. Freud:
A guy goes into a café and orders a pastry. A minute later he brings the pastry back, untouched, to the counter and asks to exchange it for a glass of liqueur. The proprietor agrees and the man sits down, slowly finishes his drink, and then gets up to leave. "Hey," says the proprietor, "you can't leave until you pay for your drink."
"But I exchanged my pastry for it."
"You didn't pay for the pastry, either."
"But I hadn't eaten it."
Sigmund Freud, ladies and gentlemen.
( And another one. )
iopha
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| could we, now in self-indulgent black and white video! |
[14 Sep 2009|01:59pm] |
I've given up trying to record 'definitive' versions of songs at home. I always end up in that uncanny valley where it's just good enough that it definitely sounds bad by comparison to professional recordings, but not bad enough that the listener is charitably inclined. "Could We" has an okay mp3 version, recorded back in 2007.
So over the next two weeks I'll be recording youtube demos of some of my songs, new and old, as a way of working on music instead of playing video games out of frustration at the creative process.
So, uh, yeah. There you go.
iopha
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| Music in this new Decade |
[13 Sep 2009|05:47pm] |
Though I'm a child of the 90s, the 21st century, I think, has been good for music. It's an exciting time and not just because of the online revolution. So here's a top 21 for the 21st century.
Warning: this list is highly subjective, completely personal and reflects my own idiosyncratic musical tastes.
That being said, if you disagree, you're still wrong.
21. Combichrist - Everybody Hates You (2005)
20. ...and you will know us by the trail of the dead - Source Tags & Codes (2002)
19. Tom Waits - Blood Money (2002)
18. Unkle - Never Never Land (2003)
17. Xiu Xiu - Fabulous Muscles (2004)
16. MIA - Kala (2007)
15. Clint Mansell - The Fountain OST (2006)
14. Einsturzende Neubauten - Silence is Sexy (2000)
13. The Dresden Dolls - The Dresden Dolls (2003)
12. Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes (2008)
11. Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Lift yr Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven (2000)
10. Interpol - Turn on the Bright Lights (2002)
9. Deftones - White Pony (2000)
8. The Decemberists - Picaresque (2005)
7. Portishead - Third (2008)
6. TV on the Radio - Dear Science, (2008)
5. The Knife - Silent Shout (2006)
4. The Arcade Fire - Funeral (2004)
3. Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago (2007)
2. TIE: Radiohead - Kid A (2000) and Radiohead - In Rainbows (2007)
1. Silver Mt. Zion - 13 Blues for 13 Moons (2008) or ANYTHING they ever bothered recording, EVER.
BONUS! Most excellent 2009 albums I can't evaluate yet, along with rankings if I could somehow assign them: Bat For Lashes - Two Suns (11), The XX - The XX (21), Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest (15), Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion (18), Fever Ray - Fever Ray (10), the Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca (13).
( Edit: On What's NOT here... )
I will be editing this post over the next few days / weeks with extra commentary on some of the selections and on music in general. I'll notify when edits are made, in case anyone might give a damn. You never know.
iopha
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| Goddamnit.... |
[04 Sep 2009|11:58am] |
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So I'm re-reading the notes I took after my CPA presentation of "Wittgenstein, Constructive Mathematics and his Return to Philosophy," because I want to re-write it and submit the thing to a journal, for review and maybe publication.
My notes say this:
Paraconsistent logics help explain Wittgenstein's cryptic remarks on contradiction in RFM. Inconsistency-tolerant logics attempt to avoid explosion; this makes them weaker than classical logic, yet with peculiar advantages. The most common approach is to reject disjunctive syllogism, for obvious reasons.
Paraconsistent logic allow A & ~A to be true, while intuitionistic logic allow A v ~A to be false; so there is a kind of 'duality' relation. This may take us too far afield. One way to deal with this would be to discuss David Lewis' criticisms of paraconsistent logics in light of W.'s remarks? Does this help us with W.'s remarks on the Godel proof?
As I start my research and writing, I come across an article published in 2009, this very fucking year. Read the abstract and tell me if this sounds familiar:
An interpretation of Wittgenstein's much criticized remarks on Gödel's First Incompleteness Theorem is provided in the light of paraconsistent arithmetic [...] it is shown that the features of paraconsistent arithmetics match with some intuitions underlying Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics.
Now I know how Rageguy feels! I wanted to expand precisely in that direction, but I've been scooped hard. Looks I will have to incorporate this, lose my claim to novelty, and focus on the continuity between Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics in the 30s and his later work in the Investigations.
I guess there are worse things to be kinda-sorta-not-really angry about, though, upon sober-minded reflection.
Also, it's a really nice day outside.
iopha
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[03 Sep 2009|12:01pm] |
I rather enjoyed this op-ed about female characters in video games as much for the wonderful and funny turns of phrase as the thesis:
"I don't need games to have more female characters because I need to see myself reflected in them to enjoy them. One of the reasons I love games is because I get to be someone else. I feel very strongly that the ten-foot cow-man I get to be in World of Warcraft is as accurate an extension of my inner personality as any realistic avatar I've ever fretted over."
[...]
"Ultimately, though, I need games to have a few more girls in them because it's just downright *weird* that they don't. Girls are pretty much an epidemic. We get everywhere. We do all kinds of stuff. There really are an awful lot of us around."
[...]
"We're a diverse, welcoming and non-judgmental bunch, in my experience, but our games make us look like an outreach programme for the Ayran Nation."
Spot on, as they say. Spot on.
iopha
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| A Silver Mt. Zion |
[02 Sep 2009|09:30am] |
I've been listening to Silver Mt. Zion's Thirteen Blues for 13 Moons a lot. It's a great album. It marks the moment where they finally overtake post-rock predecessors Godspeed You Black Emperor, who may or may not record new music again...
Which is more than a little weird. It's as if there was a decisive and definitive moment where the Foo Fighters unarguably really became better than Nirvana ever was. Part of it is just temporal priority: even if Dave Grohl sells more albums in the end, creating that sound, that pop-influenced blend of 80s alternative and metal, is more important than polishing it over the course of a decade.
Godspeed didn't invent post-rock any more than Nirvana invented "grunge" or "alternative." They certainly are, or were, one of the most influential practitioners of the genre. Godspeed's F#A# Infinity is one of the very few albums that completely overwhelmed me on my first listen, and this was over ten years ago.
Yet tracks like 'blindblindblind' from Thirteen Blues sound like slow-moving broken transcendence, capturing a beautiful ache Godspeed's sometimes strident (and always militant) apocalypticism never quite got. They get close on Lift yr Fists like Skinny Antennas to Heaven, but they end up playing too big, too powerfully, with a sheer magnitude usually reserved for natural disasters.
Maybe it's Silver Mt. Zion's off-tune and ragged choirs, the delicate lilting of their arrangements, a certain delicacy of touch; Godspeed sounded like the rumbling of the "machine bleeding to death" alluded to in the opening chords of F#A#, while Silver Mt. Zion asks us to "sow some lonesome corners so many flowers bloom."
I should get to the office.
iopha
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| video games |
[30 Aug 2009|03:44pm] |
Turns out Mozart's famous Requiem Mass in D minor is just about the perfect soundtrack for a Left 4 Dead campaign. I've never really listened to it until now (found a nice, high bitrate version) so it's not too much of a cliché and the mood is darkly epic.
It's also about 54 minutes long, enough time to set up and start a campaign and play through and have it end pretty much as you finish up (unless you're making a speed run, in which case a campaign takes ~35 minutes).
So that's a happy thing.
Nothing else to report, though.
iopha
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| The Top 25 Conservative Movies |
[26 Aug 2009|10:03pm] |
We were watching Scrubs; got hooked on it in Montreal, got the first season. They made a Red Dawn reference, a movie Saiche had never seen, but I thought was absolutely the most brilliant piece of cinematic propaganda ever made. Right up there with Battleship Potemkin and Triumph of the Will.
What's particularly noteworthy is that it is perfectly low-brow, the movie equivalent of a Sarah Palin argument. You see, the year is 1984, the Commies have invaded, and a charismatic high-school jock leads an insurgency named after the school mascot. The film is both incredibly violent and self-consciously corny, veering madly between humourous vignettes and emotionally histrionic depictions of concentration camps and war casualties to demonstrate the importance of patriotism, the perils of planned economies and the American fifth column of effete liberals.
( Read more... )
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| quote of the day (or: I wish someone had told me this in cegep). |
[24 Aug 2009|11:43am] |
Not every problem that someone has with his girlfriend is necessarily due to the capitalist mode of production.
—Herbert Marcuse, 1898-1979.
Political theorist and sociologist of the Frankfurt School. Best known for Eros and Civilization, One Dimensional Man and The Aesthetic Dimension: Towards a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics.
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| he was dreaming wasn't he |
[18 Aug 2009|11:58am] |
(1)
"Barack Obama is the living symbol of our silence. He is our silence writ large.
He is our Silence running for president. "
-Juan Santos, "Barack Obama and the 'End of Racism' "
(2)
Of the 45 million Americans uninsured in the U.S. in 2003, 23 million were part of a visible minority group. Half the uninsured, though comprising less than one third the total population. Economic precariousness, particularly of minority groups, stymies class mobility in a country where the number one cause of personal bankruptcy is medical bills. It should be noted that America has one of the most entrenched class systems in the industrialized world. Loss of manufacturing jobs, starting in the late 70s, began the slow erosion of middle-class financial gains minority groups were making. Leading to a country with unheard-of income inequality.
Moreover, poor health-care coverage is a indicator of caste, beginning with one's mouth. Getting ahead in a service-based, affective economy requires your class markers to be properly aligned from the start. We call that privilege.
Wealth is built, from one generation to the next. Public health insurance is inextricable from historical issues of class, and hence, in America, also of race. Not that we'd know it from this hysterical discussion. If we can't talk honestly about class, what are the chances for a real discussion of race?
(2)
"The commission and referral system at Wells Fargo was set up in a way that made it more profitable for a loan officer to refer a prime customer for a subprime loan than make the prime loan directly to the customer. I knew that many of the referrals I received could qualify for a prime loan. It was in my financial interest to figure out how to qualify referrals for subprime loans.
[...]
I know that Wells Fargo Home Mortgage tried to market subprime loans to African Americans in Baltimore. I am aware from my own personal experience that one strategy used to target African-Americans was to focus on African American churches.
[...]
I remember being part of a conference call that took place in 2005 where Wells Fargo sales manages discussed the idea of going into black churches in Baltimore to do presentations about our subprime products. On that call we were told that we have "to be of color" to come to the presentation. Subprime loan officers did not target white churches for subprime loans. When it came to marketing, any reference to "church" or "churches" was understood as code for African-American or black churches.
[...]
I complained many times about what I thought were unethical or possibly predatory loan practices that Wells Fargo was engaged in. Managers never took any action to respond to my concerns."
-Elizabeth Jacobson, in Affidavit before the Federal Court, District of Baltimore.
(3)
“Your destiny is in your hands, and don’t you forget that. That’s what we have to teach all of our children! No excuses! No excuses!”
-President Barack Obama, to the NAACP
You're a muzzled man, Mr. President. Your own destiny isn't in your hands anymore.
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