Learning Aesthetics

Remember that Deming said; “The system is such that almost nobody can do his best. You have to know what to do, then do your best. Sure we need everybody’s best – everybody working together with a common aim. And knowing something about how to achieve it. Not just with what seem to be brilliant ideas, but with a system of improvement (10).”

okay, apparently the choice is between posting random/cryptic notes that don’t seem to have a defined context, or not posting at all. Since I said this blog is a process of thinking in public, will go with the former:

Let’s look at this another way. Jaques and Cason define work as; “the exercise of judgment and discretion in making the decisions necessary to solve and overcome the problems that arise in the course of carrying out tasks (5).” This is a non-trivial definition. If we no longer need to exercise judgment and discretion we can mechanize or computerize things and maybe automate them as well. This is where Ohno’s “autonomation” comes in – and remember Ohno’s initial context was automated silk spinning and weaving, way before any form of electronic control – machines replace the judgment and discretion that was once the exclusive domain of people. And why would we want to maintain such exclusivity if we can off-load it for more humanistically rewarding endeavors? Link

if you want an example of how strange things are going, a small group of bloggers were invited to spend 24 hours on the USS Nimitz. The best overall write up can be found here. I was actually in the Navy, one of those past life experiences, and while the post makes things sound a little too swell, basically he’s correct on all counts.  Of course you might want to read the Bloggess account just for balance.

HOME OF THE WHOPPER

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. We lie daily, very complexly, and at great length. If not for our excessive vanity and our over-active imaginations, we would be quite difficult to deceive.

from the Gibson Blog

Sometimes you have to stop and rethink everything; occasionally the stopping goes on longer than it perhaps should, but eventually things sort themselves out through the sorting is seldom what you expect. We are emerging from a period in which there didn’t seem to be much that we can do beyond keep our heads down and try to believe that things would pass. We elected a new administration on a platform of hope, but found ourselves confronted with problems that made hope seem almost irrelevant. Now there’s a feeling that we should do something, say something, respond in some way, but then we read something like Escape from the Zombie Food Court and realize that the problem is far more fundamental. Beyond that we realize that anything we might say, has quite probably already been said, and said far better than our own meager talents allow. And we follow that thread for a while until Zo reminds us of  The Better Man and that Chris Locke is and has been obsessively writing what threatens to become a book.  But that doesn’t make sense until you’ve read Liar Liar part one and then part two. Somewhere in the midst of all of this you remember quite clearly encountering

but now for the life of you you can’t remember where; not that it really matters because you know it’s  not a book you’re supposed to read but one that you listen to with pleasure while drifting off towards sleep or watching television so that a line resurfaces and after a moment or two you ask Shel, “What’s the cure for life?” And she looks at you like you’re not quite bright and says, “Living.”

One of the really cool things about the Internet is that if you carry an idea for a post around for a protracted period of time, say 48 hours or so, someone will come along and say it much, much more eloquently than you would ever have been able to:

And what we are going through now is the logical consequence of thinking like monkeys. If we can’t even get though a day without yelling at people on the road, stealing money from old ladies, or cheating on our taxes, cable bills or restaurant cheques, then any hope we have of building a modern technological society is probably doomed. They’re too fragile. They require a high degree of intelligent behaviour on the parts of their citizens.

please, please read the whole Stephen Downes article, and for a bit more on the monkey sphere and the Dunbar number check out Danah Boyd.

Black Hockey Jesus is one of the few people I’ve stumbled upon who seems to have figured out that blogging is a specific form, and that as such it might just aspire to art. That is, it might have some unique material nature that separates it from other forms and allows it to do things in ways that are specific to it alone. By way of example a post called Cracking Open the Bloging Question was gorgeous and started me thinking about privacy, language, and all manner of things. Then I read the comments; something I rarely do. Maybe it was because I liked the post so much, or maybe because he actually asked for comments; something BHJ rarely does:

What are we doing? Why does the bulk of the population, my poor wife included, crave a circle of privacy to live inside? And why do our experiences seem to yell "Hey! Check this out!"? And before any of you echo and parrot "Narcissism Narcissism Narcissism", OK, let’s deepen that. To what end narcissism? … What do you think? Talk to me.

The thing is most of the comments made me feel like I’ve been transported back to seventh grade English, and oral book report’s, "…this is a story about how the writer has lazy children and doesn’t like cats and uses bad words sometimes but it was really good mostly." It’s not just there wasn’t a lot of news, it’s that there wasn’t a whole lot of what I think of as real response; not much conversation, and way too much oversimplification. Or maybe just the wrong kind of oversimplification. That’s the thing life’s simple and the world is complicated, or else the other way around, your choice.

For those wondering about what I think a good discussion would look like I offer one of the longest Flickr comment threads following Anger Is the Swiss Army Knife of Emotions T-shirt.

Every now and then you turn the corner or click a link in the floor drops out from under you. The Institute for the Future of the Book occupies a prominent place in my newsreader; it’s usually fairly safe, interesting articles I can skim, but every now and then I hit something like this:

Ted Nelson, who we mention here from time to time, has a new, self-published book out, entitled Geeks Bearing Gifts, which is his own deeply idiosyncratic take on the history of the computer and how we use them, starting from the invention of the alphabet and explaining exactly where things went wrong along the way. Ted Nelson, of course, is the inventor of hypertext among other things; I hope to have an interview with him up here soon.

Xanadu is also famous for being the longest vaporware project in history. If you don’t want to buy the book Nelson provides an interesting précis; here are some interesting outtakes to whet your appetite:

Hierarchy is the official metaphysic of the computer world.  (Aristotle, the medieval Catholic Church and the Dewey Decimal System have all reinforced this concept,)  Many tekkies think all structure is hierarchical, and have arranged not to see any other kinds. They say if you have a hammer everything looks like a nail.  Today’s hierarchical computer tools (especially object-oriented languages and XML) make hierarchy an imposition, not an option. 

Phonetic alphabets are only one form of writing, but it’s the form that runs the computer world.  Our alphabet derived from the Phoenician; upper case is introduced under Charlemagne in the 800s. Then text is represented  electrically– in upper case because God was thought to require it. 

A database is any principled arrangement of information that you can look things up in.

But any computer scientist, hacker or teenage programmer can tell you that no amount of studying its external behavior will tell you what it’s going to do on election day.  It’s really a video game programmed to look like a democratic input device.

"Email is forever" (unless you want to keep it, in which case you’re more likely to lose it– Murphy’s Law).  If you like, you can go voyeuring in the Enron email corpus, placed on line after their court case.

IBM, reacting gradually, builds a huge piece of iron, big as a refrigerator top, much more expensive and unfriendly than the Apple with four times the size and ten times the weight, but it has the IBM name.  (Instead of HELLO, its startup program is called AUTOEXEC.BAT– a very bad sign.)

Google now has the largest computer– i.e., unified computer system– in the world (thought to be well over a million processors), with the most reliable operating system in the world– a distributed parallel Linux that never stops, even as disk drives die constantly.  (Hey, if something’s missing, how would you know?)

Basically I’m trying out integration of this WordPress blog with Microsoft live environment. But just to keep things interesting here’s the latest on the Singularity University:

I’m more of the Time Wave Zero kind of guy. If you’re wondering how the Dalai Lama got involved, just chalk it up to the dangers of YouTube.

The Dalai Lama wears glasses; if you really want to understand how things work, the Dalai Lama wears glasses.

Benjamin Zander helps kick off The World Economic Forum with an hour and 15 minute presentation. If you’ve read The Art of Possibility there’s not a lot here that’s news, but the presentation is wonderful.