Fans of Fight Club will get the joke. For those who haven't seen it, the title relates to a passage where Edward Norton's unnamed narrator reflects on who will get the naming rights to the various places we will explore in space. The joke hits pretty close to home nowadays.
Virtually every sports arena you hear about nowadays has some corporations name attached to it. Every event has some company's name attached to it. We in Houston have Reliant Stadium, Reliant Astrodome, the Toyota Center (formerly Compaq Center) Minute Maid Park (formerly Enron Field, for reasons we're all aware of.).
I'm sure y'all folks have your own local example. They call it selling the naming rights. Yeck. I agree with capitalism, to be sure, and look forward to making plenty of money in the future, but when do we get a break from Business?
I remember when the custom was to name places permanently after either people (safely dead, most of the time), or after nice sounding locations or concepts. Calling it the Astrodome was fine and dandy without a power company's name attached. Calling a place "The Summit" was an acceptable name. Even Minute Maid Park (formerly Enron Field) had a nice evocative name before the juice started flowing: Union Station. Doesn't that sound American to you? Doesn't that sound like the proper name of a ballpark?
I know it makes money for people to sell these things, but they're selling so much anyways. There are whole industries worth of profits one can make without having to be so crass as to use an establishment's name to sell corporate awareness.
In the old days, names were intended to have some power, some resonance for people. They weren't intended to merely function as somebody's marketing. They had weight and oomph; most importantly, they had identity. The Astrodome. Even without the corporate name added, it's a place, a known quantity, an almost living thing in people's memories.
I remember times when that is what identified a place. I'm no big sports fan, but I can recall names like Wrigley Field, Soldier Field, and Yankee Stadium right off the top of my head. I'm sure readers could provide more examples.
As a society, I think we need more breathing room, more space between us and the constant presence of the workplace in our lives. In short, I think people need to relearn the meaning of free time. Not everything has to serve somebody's profit.
Friday, October 14, 2005
Friday, October 07, 2005
Package Deal
Beneath my Television, in the cabinet of the entertainment center, are stacked just about every Clamshell and gem case I've ever bought. And their former contents? In the storage devices mentioned in the title.
I own 69 DVD titles at current count, with the total number of disks way over a hundred. It is about four cubic feet of packaging. I store the actual disks in a space about a third of a cubic foot, and I can carry these thing without the risk of scattering packages all around if I move wrong. I do the same with all the CDs and PC gamegame discs I get. There's a similar disparity.
I recall a time in which your average game package usually measured about the size of a thick textbook. Now, such games come in packages about the size of a thick trade paperback, if they don't come in gemboxes.
But the disks themselves? 4.75 inches apiece, typically. But size is a deceptive measure with Digital media. A regular DVD measures around 9 GBs on average. The latest RAID hard drive storage can put the information of about 277 DVDs in a machine that could fit inside my monitor.
Even that proportion fails to get to the scale of things if you realize that all the data we're talking about is imprinted or encoded on extraordinarily thin surfaces, that much of the machinery is purposed towards supporting. Your CD or DVD is merely a stable plastic surface on which is glued the actual material carrying the information, whether that's some polymer or the ultra-thin aluminum of a professionally pressed digital media disc. Hard Drives take it even further. The information is encoded on thin layers of a special material that stores information in incredibly small spaces. New internal harddrives carry 500 GBs of information apiece.
That's if you don't compress. Compress with something like the DiVX codec, and the storage of thousands of DVDs worth of visual information, tens of thousands of CDs, is available in that space (or more appropriately, that surface)
And surface is right. New technologies may take information storage for consumers into the third dimension, adding the advantages of cubic space to a field where information density is measure in squared units.
More and more, physical packaging becomes irrelevant to getting what we're looking for in the midst of all that: the meaning.
People tend to throw away packaging They see a bunch of it all over the place, and anybody who's seen disks stacked on one another directly (a great sin in my book), or laying around (don't even go there) knows that people can't always be bothered to put it back. The packaging after purchase is at most a convenient place to put things before and after they've been used.
Oh, but it's to be expected. This is an artistic business, and there are standards to be maintained, of course. I think it helps to understand how much the balance has changed. With film, then and now, the film occupies much physical space. Place all the canisters necessary to show 69 movies in a row- well you need a library. that many tapes would occupy a shelf. that many disks, I carry around in two thick wallets. I could toss them in a backpack and easily carry them. I guess, in a time where what contains the media is bigger and bulkier than the media itself, the packaging's got to have something nice to do.
I own 69 DVD titles at current count, with the total number of disks way over a hundred. It is about four cubic feet of packaging. I store the actual disks in a space about a third of a cubic foot, and I can carry these thing without the risk of scattering packages all around if I move wrong. I do the same with all the CDs and PC gamegame discs I get. There's a similar disparity.
I recall a time in which your average game package usually measured about the size of a thick textbook. Now, such games come in packages about the size of a thick trade paperback, if they don't come in gemboxes.
But the disks themselves? 4.75 inches apiece, typically. But size is a deceptive measure with Digital media. A regular DVD measures around 9 GBs on average. The latest RAID hard drive storage can put the information of about 277 DVDs in a machine that could fit inside my monitor.
Even that proportion fails to get to the scale of things if you realize that all the data we're talking about is imprinted or encoded on extraordinarily thin surfaces, that much of the machinery is purposed towards supporting. Your CD or DVD is merely a stable plastic surface on which is glued the actual material carrying the information, whether that's some polymer or the ultra-thin aluminum of a professionally pressed digital media disc. Hard Drives take it even further. The information is encoded on thin layers of a special material that stores information in incredibly small spaces. New internal harddrives carry 500 GBs of information apiece.
That's if you don't compress. Compress with something like the DiVX codec, and the storage of thousands of DVDs worth of visual information, tens of thousands of CDs, is available in that space (or more appropriately, that surface)
And surface is right. New technologies may take information storage for consumers into the third dimension, adding the advantages of cubic space to a field where information density is measure in squared units.
More and more, physical packaging becomes irrelevant to getting what we're looking for in the midst of all that: the meaning.
People tend to throw away packaging They see a bunch of it all over the place, and anybody who's seen disks stacked on one another directly (a great sin in my book), or laying around (don't even go there) knows that people can't always be bothered to put it back. The packaging after purchase is at most a convenient place to put things before and after they've been used.
Oh, but it's to be expected. This is an artistic business, and there are standards to be maintained, of course. I think it helps to understand how much the balance has changed. With film, then and now, the film occupies much physical space. Place all the canisters necessary to show 69 movies in a row- well you need a library. that many tapes would occupy a shelf. that many disks, I carry around in two thick wallets. I could toss them in a backpack and easily carry them. I guess, in a time where what contains the media is bigger and bulkier than the media itself, the packaging's got to have something nice to do.
Sunday, October 02, 2005
The Binding Problem And Storytelling
The binding problem is a problem in Neuroscience regarding how we bind together the disparate senses and mental processes that we have into the conscious experience we all live our lives through.
It comes across in the stories we tell in the difference between how we live a story, and how our telling of that story comes across. Language is an approximation, and our memories are a distilling and reconstruction of what we experience.
The consequences of this come into play as Hollywood remakes films, and makes formula pictures for the benefit of perceived audiences. Heck, this comes into play when you got bad movies and movies that almost made it. We're subjective creatures, and what's more, our brains throw away from our conscious notice much of the information we use to flesh out the feel and understand we have of the world.
This is particularly troublesome for those portraying real life events, as the sense of events changes with the adaptation from real life to one media or another. With any "true" story on film, even in documentary form, there is always something left out.
Human beings dwell in a rich sea of information, interpreting and experiencing it in real time as billions of neurons work in parallel. As we interpret it, we too throw away information. As a result, though there is much potentially discoverable in front of us, our minds take a certain course through life, and ignore the rest of the riches.
Effective storytellers, to create the desired effects, must do two things: discover those riches and make them accessible and desirable to those who haven't thought to seek or wanted to seek these things out, and translate them effectively from the author's experience and understanding to that of the audience. It's a dance, a high-wire act. It's no easy task.
It's this, not any lack of cultural high-mindedness or business savvy that makes storytelling so difficult a business to get right. This is the real challenge of show business, and the reason that financial success is not deterministically predictable from the basis of a high culture, big business, or even the putative quality of the work. The landscape of mind and heart in this country is constantly shifting, so the fitness of a story in the scheme of things (to borrow evolutionary terminology) is not a stable or predictable thing.
However, as long as we're not looking for deterministic predictability (That is, I do A, therefore B will happen), then the more successful stories, in whatever medium you might chose, are those that relay a great deal of unexpected meaning in the given period of time. Does that mean packing things to the gills with details? Not necessarily. In the case of a TV show, it might be to the storyteller advantage not to force the audience to remember too much from the last show, or if so, make the recall easier by inserting the proper cues in the episode as needed. Even that can be problematic, as anybody who's had to watch the "on the last episode of ______" montage can attest. Information always takes time to move between author and audience, and the less spent telling parts of the story you've already covered, the better.
No, what we're looking for is content organized in such a way that it expands people's sense of the world as they can know it and as they can imagine it. We're looking to give people an intense experience makes enough sense, whether it's that of the real world or that of a fictional one, that people lose focus on the prepared, artificial nature of the medium, and lose themselves in the story. To do that, we must understand better how the subjectivity that defines our existence and our conscious experience can shape our world, and how we interpret sensory cues, and assign meaning to different objects.
We don't have learn this explicitly, but we must have some intuition, some process of working out practical storytelling beats that do their job in such a way that it's not merely trial and error. Otherwise, we will tend to stick to what's already been done, and will continue down a path of formula and replication of earlier works. To get new life into new stories, we must be willing to confront what it is that gives life to our ordinary normal experiences.
It comes across in the stories we tell in the difference between how we live a story, and how our telling of that story comes across. Language is an approximation, and our memories are a distilling and reconstruction of what we experience.
The consequences of this come into play as Hollywood remakes films, and makes formula pictures for the benefit of perceived audiences. Heck, this comes into play when you got bad movies and movies that almost made it. We're subjective creatures, and what's more, our brains throw away from our conscious notice much of the information we use to flesh out the feel and understand we have of the world.
This is particularly troublesome for those portraying real life events, as the sense of events changes with the adaptation from real life to one media or another. With any "true" story on film, even in documentary form, there is always something left out.
Human beings dwell in a rich sea of information, interpreting and experiencing it in real time as billions of neurons work in parallel. As we interpret it, we too throw away information. As a result, though there is much potentially discoverable in front of us, our minds take a certain course through life, and ignore the rest of the riches.
Effective storytellers, to create the desired effects, must do two things: discover those riches and make them accessible and desirable to those who haven't thought to seek or wanted to seek these things out, and translate them effectively from the author's experience and understanding to that of the audience. It's a dance, a high-wire act. It's no easy task.
It's this, not any lack of cultural high-mindedness or business savvy that makes storytelling so difficult a business to get right. This is the real challenge of show business, and the reason that financial success is not deterministically predictable from the basis of a high culture, big business, or even the putative quality of the work. The landscape of mind and heart in this country is constantly shifting, so the fitness of a story in the scheme of things (to borrow evolutionary terminology) is not a stable or predictable thing.
However, as long as we're not looking for deterministic predictability (That is, I do A, therefore B will happen), then the more successful stories, in whatever medium you might chose, are those that relay a great deal of unexpected meaning in the given period of time. Does that mean packing things to the gills with details? Not necessarily. In the case of a TV show, it might be to the storyteller advantage not to force the audience to remember too much from the last show, or if so, make the recall easier by inserting the proper cues in the episode as needed. Even that can be problematic, as anybody who's had to watch the "on the last episode of ______" montage can attest. Information always takes time to move between author and audience, and the less spent telling parts of the story you've already covered, the better.
No, what we're looking for is content organized in such a way that it expands people's sense of the world as they can know it and as they can imagine it. We're looking to give people an intense experience makes enough sense, whether it's that of the real world or that of a fictional one, that people lose focus on the prepared, artificial nature of the medium, and lose themselves in the story. To do that, we must understand better how the subjectivity that defines our existence and our conscious experience can shape our world, and how we interpret sensory cues, and assign meaning to different objects.
We don't have learn this explicitly, but we must have some intuition, some process of working out practical storytelling beats that do their job in such a way that it's not merely trial and error. Otherwise, we will tend to stick to what's already been done, and will continue down a path of formula and replication of earlier works. To get new life into new stories, we must be willing to confront what it is that gives life to our ordinary normal experiences.
Sunday, September 25, 2005
Enabling the Politicians
How did it get this bad with the Bush Administration? The simple answer to this can be found in what many Republican voters have been doing, or moreover, failing to do.
It's not so simple as a failure to hold people accountable, though that's part of it. Some Democrats, Liberals, and independents resort to demonizing Republican voters, but that misses an important and much more universal point.
This society has a bad habit of abstracting purpose-driven behavior to the point of absurdity. Perfectly reasonable motivations become objects of unreasonable worship, idols of ideology, if you will. The notion that's missed is this complex world, is that few ideas are really that healthy when taken so far.
We didn't evolve these marvellous brains to get stuck in a rut like that, but to respond and adapt to our situation. What makes this tricky is that our brains are also evolved to allow a certain level of perseverance, and belief in unseen order, and that often times this is an utterly necessary thing to do.
The brain, one could say, is like a car. It can be functioning perfectly, even as it takes it's owner over the nearest cliff. The Republican party has functioned fairly well as a political organization for the last twenty or thirty years. Unfortunately, it's driving personalities have been heading for the cliff for the last generation.
You see, they cut the brake lines. They discouraged independent inquiry, encouraged a cloistered kind of groupthink, and encouraged their constituents to think that any trouble on the part of their leaders constituted a liberal political play to be resisted by Republican voters.
What happens when charges are true, like those related to recent events?
I think most Republicans have already been primed to disbelieve the truth of the charges. Most don't set out to deny the truth. Even those who do, often weigh their party's fortunes in the equation, convinced by years of propaganda that America's fate and that of the GOP are one and the same: with it's rise and fall, so go the fortunes of The United States.
This all came to a head with Bush 43's election. Here was a president who had no problem with alienating everybody outside the GOP and its natural constituency. He had no problem with resurrecting the monsters of McCarthyism to unleash on Democrats, no problem with running his policies strictly according to the political whims of consultants and special interests, no problem with using the Right-Wing Media Machine to keep America on message.
What he was not prepared to do was get down to business. There's a reason this guy takes long vacations, even when Category 5 storms are set to barrel down on the Gulf Coast. There's a reason it took Bush several minutes to get up and acknowledge what he had been told by his Chief of Staff. There's a reason that Bush doesn't say "I'll get right to it." and does what needs to be done.
That reason is plain: his idea of leadership is itself an abstract sense of vision and expectation, a deterministic view of the world that does not allow for the notion that one could do what's supposed to be the right thing, or just not obviously wrong, and still end up being wrong and needing to correct one's mistakes. If you do the right thing, know what's right, are guided by what's right (or at least realistic in his view), then things should turn out well.
In short, Bush does not plan with Murphy's law in mind. If I were to venture forth an idea of what kept him dazed in a world of his own those seven minutes after Andy Card told him what had happened, one possibility might be that he was trying to reconcile a national security policy he was told was best for America with results that explicitly demonstrated that policy's failure. How could this happen? I think that's been Bush's question every time something bad happens, and he hasn't learned to deal with it by working the problem. Like many CEOs, he doesn't see himself as integrated with his company, but above it, his purpose being to inspire other people to solve the organization's problems for him. Unfortunately, real world decisions, especially those that are rich in conflicts and problems, require a leader whose knowledge of the world is great enough to where his advisers are there to provide choices, not merely a recommended course of action that may go wrong in part or in whole.
His problem echoes the problems of the Republican party as a whole, and from there the rest of society as whole. Purpose taken to excess. The capability to do what one wants and what feels right worshipped and unquestioned, considered apart from any integrated look at the results, or any forethought of possible means and problems. That and submission from those whose best interest is to question.
I would submit that the central cause of our neglectful supervision of our politicians is this: the complexity of our society has outstripped our understanding of the world it exists in. Because of that, delegation or simplification is understandably welcomed. The simplistic notions of the world that once served us well, though, are now deeply problematic. We need to rework the way we learn and the way we understand. What was once obscure knowledge about the way the world works must now be common understanding. What we once judged ourselves too stupid or unsophisticated to understand, we must now grasp with all the intelligence that our gifts allow.
Confronted by a confusing, changing world, our first response has been nostalgia, the wish to return to the securely understood past. When we do that, though, we commit ourselves to a system of thought out of sync with the world as it now is. We can no longer idolize the past, idolize the images and illusions of things no longer meant to be. We must figure out what to do now, how to deal with the problems that threaten our peace and freedom now. We cannot wait for ideals to resurrect themselves, nor our ideologies to be made flesh.
We cannot continue to make ourselves slaves to dead systems of logic. The price of our freedom is that we not continue to support and enable leaders to simply do as they please, but hold them accountable. We must make the price of our continued support greater than applause lines, party loyalty and ideological correctness. We must make practical men and women of our elected officials, at least as far as having them match practical benefits to their political dreams. To do that, we have to stop underestimating ourselves, and underestimating what we deserve in terms of leadership.
(Revised edition, alterations made during publishing to Watchblog)
It's not so simple as a failure to hold people accountable, though that's part of it. Some Democrats, Liberals, and independents resort to demonizing Republican voters, but that misses an important and much more universal point.
This society has a bad habit of abstracting purpose-driven behavior to the point of absurdity. Perfectly reasonable motivations become objects of unreasonable worship, idols of ideology, if you will. The notion that's missed is this complex world, is that few ideas are really that healthy when taken so far.
We didn't evolve these marvellous brains to get stuck in a rut like that, but to respond and adapt to our situation. What makes this tricky is that our brains are also evolved to allow a certain level of perseverance, and belief in unseen order, and that often times this is an utterly necessary thing to do.
The brain, one could say, is like a car. It can be functioning perfectly, even as it takes it's owner over the nearest cliff. The Republican party has functioned fairly well as a political organization for the last twenty or thirty years. Unfortunately, it's driving personalities have been heading for the cliff for the last generation.
You see, they cut the brake lines. They discouraged independent inquiry, encouraged a cloistered kind of groupthink, and encouraged their constituents to think that any trouble on the part of their leaders constituted a liberal political play to be resisted by Republican voters.
What happens when charges are true, like those related to recent events?
I think most Republicans have already been primed to disbelieve the truth of the charges. Most don't set out to deny the truth. Even those who do, often weigh their party's fortunes in the equation, convinced by years of propaganda that America's fate and that of the GOP are one and the same: with it's rise and fall, so go the fortunes of The United States.
This all came to a head with Bush 43's election. Here was a president who had no problem with alienating everybody outside the GOP and its natural constituency. He had no problem with resurrecting the monsters of McCarthyism to unleash on Democrats, no problem with running his policies strictly according to the political whims of consultants and special interests, no problem with using the Right-Wing Media Machine to keep America on message.
What he was not prepared to do was get down to business. There's a reason this guy takes long vacations, even when Category 5 storms are set to barrel down on the Gulf Coast. There's a reason it took Bush several minutes to get up and acknowledge what he had been told by his Chief of Staff. There's a reason that Bush doesn't say "I'll get right to it." and does what needs to be done.
That reason is plain: his idea of leadership is itself an abstract sense of vision and expectation, a deterministic view of the world that does not allow for the notion that one could do what's supposed to be the right thing, or just not obviously wrong, and still end up being wrong and needing to correct one's mistakes. If you do the right thing, know what's right, are guided by what's right (or at least realistic in his view), then things should turn out well.
In short, Bush does not plan with Murphy's law in mind. If I were to venture forth an idea of what kept him dazed in a world of his own those seven minutes after Andy Card told him what had happened, one possibility might be that he was trying to reconcile a national security policy he was told was best for America with results that explicitly demonstrated that policy's failure. How could this happen? I think that's been Bush's question every time something bad happens, and he hasn't learned to deal with it by working the problem. Like many CEOs, he doesn't see himself as integrated with his company, but above it, his purpose being to inspire other people to solve the organization's problems for him. Unfortunately, real world decisions, especially those that are rich in conflicts and problems, require a leader whose knowledge of the world is great enough to where his advisers are there to provide choices, not merely a recommended course of action that may go wrong in part or in whole.
His problem echoes the problems of the Republican party as a whole, and from there the rest of society as whole. Purpose taken to excess. The capability to do what one wants and what feels right worshipped and unquestioned, considered apart from any integrated look at the results, or any forethought of possible means and problems. That and submission from those whose best interest is to question.
I would submit that the central cause of our neglectful supervision of our politicians is this: the complexity of our society has outstripped our understanding of the world it exists in. Because of that, delegation or simplification is understandably welcomed. The simplistic notions of the world that once served us well, though, are now deeply problematic. We need to rework the way we learn and the way we understand. What was once obscure knowledge about the way the world works must now be common understanding. What we once judged ourselves too stupid or unsophisticated to understand, we must now grasp with all the intelligence that our gifts allow.
Confronted by a confusing, changing world, our first response has been nostalgia, the wish to return to the securely understood past. When we do that, though, we commit ourselves to a system of thought out of sync with the world as it now is. We can no longer idolize the past, idolize the images and illusions of things no longer meant to be. We must figure out what to do now, how to deal with the problems that threaten our peace and freedom now. We cannot wait for ideals to resurrect themselves, nor our ideologies to be made flesh.
We cannot continue to make ourselves slaves to dead systems of logic. The price of our freedom is that we not continue to support and enable leaders to simply do as they please, but hold them accountable. We must make the price of our continued support greater than applause lines, party loyalty and ideological correctness. We must make practical men and women of our elected officials, at least as far as having them match practical benefits to their political dreams. To do that, we have to stop underestimating ourselves, and underestimating what we deserve in terms of leadership.
(Revised edition, alterations made during publishing to Watchblog)
Friday, September 23, 2005
An Idea That Should Quickly Be Nipped In The Bud
There's no doubt that the response to Katrina came far too late and too ineffectively, and that the Federal Government bungled it's part of it badly. Few debate that.
What's really annoying me at this point is that there are people who are making this a case for limited government. I agree that nobody should look at this situation, and take faith in this big government on its account, but I don't think it represents an inherent failing of the strong government response.
The reason we can say this, is that we have few complaints about the handling of the rounds of epic disaster that occured during the Category 4 Hurricane Hugo or the vast Mississippi floods. The people in Clinton's FEMA knew that their job was taking care of business, and they did so, and won bipartisan praise for that.
The myth about Democrats and Liberals like myself is that we love bureaucracy. In all actuality, we love results, and bureaucracies of appropriate size to maintain them. To suggest that we go to the state and local officials (or even private businesses) to bear the greatest burden of disaster response, is to ignore a crucial aspect of disasters of such scale- their overwhelming nature. That is not to say that local and state officials should not put their plans together, nor prepare supplies and whatever else is needed to deal with the worst of a disaster's onslaught. That is not even to discourage the open cooperation of businesses in helping disaster victims. That is to say that we should not count on ourselves to be that lucky, to expect the resources for preparation and recovery to survive disasters locally.
To use the negligence and unprofessional behavior of FEMA and other disaster handlers who were supposed to help the victims of Katrina as a excuse to pull back the federal government from supporting locals in these hard times is to justify laziness on the basis of irresponsibility, as well as add grave insult to grave injury.
I think the worst thing about these attitudes towards Federal government in today's world is that it creates an atmosphere of low expectations, coupled with an internal culture of negligence that develops because those inside the still existing government Bureaucracy don't feel the need to do their jobs right. Why, if you don't believe it's supposed to work, why make it work? This disrespect for the business of government becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. People must at least believe in the responsibilities they are given, if not not the decision to have those given to them. America may or may not need a government of our size, but it does not need half-hearted government from those who seek their offices, knowing they won't give it their all.
What's really annoying me at this point is that there are people who are making this a case for limited government. I agree that nobody should look at this situation, and take faith in this big government on its account, but I don't think it represents an inherent failing of the strong government response.
The reason we can say this, is that we have few complaints about the handling of the rounds of epic disaster that occured during the Category 4 Hurricane Hugo or the vast Mississippi floods. The people in Clinton's FEMA knew that their job was taking care of business, and they did so, and won bipartisan praise for that.
The myth about Democrats and Liberals like myself is that we love bureaucracy. In all actuality, we love results, and bureaucracies of appropriate size to maintain them. To suggest that we go to the state and local officials (or even private businesses) to bear the greatest burden of disaster response, is to ignore a crucial aspect of disasters of such scale- their overwhelming nature. That is not to say that local and state officials should not put their plans together, nor prepare supplies and whatever else is needed to deal with the worst of a disaster's onslaught. That is not even to discourage the open cooperation of businesses in helping disaster victims. That is to say that we should not count on ourselves to be that lucky, to expect the resources for preparation and recovery to survive disasters locally.
To use the negligence and unprofessional behavior of FEMA and other disaster handlers who were supposed to help the victims of Katrina as a excuse to pull back the federal government from supporting locals in these hard times is to justify laziness on the basis of irresponsibility, as well as add grave insult to grave injury.
I think the worst thing about these attitudes towards Federal government in today's world is that it creates an atmosphere of low expectations, coupled with an internal culture of negligence that develops because those inside the still existing government Bureaucracy don't feel the need to do their jobs right. Why, if you don't believe it's supposed to work, why make it work? This disrespect for the business of government becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. People must at least believe in the responsibilities they are given, if not not the decision to have those given to them. America may or may not need a government of our size, but it does not need half-hearted government from those who seek their offices, knowing they won't give it their all.
An Object Lesson in Chaos
A couple day ago, Houston was in the bullseye, and the hurricane rated a Category 5.
A week ago, Rita did not exist, even as Tropical Depression 18.
And now, the Hurricane rates a Category 3 and it's hooking its way towards Texas/Louisiana Border. There are probably some news viewers who are tearing out their hair at the imprecision. They shouldn't actually. The Weather services are doing the best they can.
Some observant viewers will take note of those segments where the Weatherfolks show a "spaghetti tangle" of possible storm paths. These maybe the more intellectually honest of the storm prediction. But people ask, why so many different possible paths?
Prediction is a funky game with the weather, and even funkier for phenomena like hurricanes. The famed Butterfly Effect has its origins in a program meant to model the weather, and for good reason. I guess what we have here is what we could call dense history, and what matters and what doesn't is often unclear.
It's not a matter of direct causation, though. It's more like being in a crowd where everybody's jostling everybody else towards some threshold, and which gate or exit one ends up depends on who one bumped into, where, when, and in what order. If you could find that out, you could predict where the person would end up. What if, though, you were incapable of working out that complete of a history, or that history involved not individuals, but groups within that crowd? Your perspective would blur, and actions beyond the scope of your ability to observe would be able to throw monkey wrenches into your predictions.
It gets even more interesting when organization becomes involved. Let's say some people in that crowd were sent randomly in, and then given instructions to stay in sight of each other. In nature, intelligence is not necessarily needed for organization, just physics. Thunderstorms sustain themselves by drawing in most air from below, which augments their organization, The rules complicitly act together to take what's unlikely on the atomic level, and change the odds, allowing complex behavior to result from these simple rules.
Hurricanes are emergent phenomenas that the laws of physics conspire to make not only self sustaining, but also a strong influence on their environment, to the point that they seem to act with volition. Getting back to the crowd, those people given instructions, if clearly marked, might seemed to be acting by an external intelligence, somehow moving in one direction or another by a collectively made decision, even though they are only working from a simple, basic rule. It is in this way that bird flocks can be simulated with a few rules with astonishing realism.
Emergence is the key word. Life is a common form of emergent behavior. Despite all the talk of a unique animating force in this culture and others, we acknowledge in common sense one profound truth about man's existence: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Emergent phenomenon are a direct result of the combination and configuration of substances and energies whose presence cannot be reduced to the simple consequence of any one part.
The motion the crowd takes in it's flow, as far as the details are concerned are not spelled out in any one individual. However, the context of a crowd's movement (that is, each person's physical presence, their range of their stamina, their speed of travel, and their own sense of self preservation and purpose, among other things) all contribute to an overall behavior that seems organized by intelligence, rather than the traditional laws of physics.
I guess the point people should draw from what I write here is this: Our world, if it can be described mechanically, runs with great complexity, and though we are just beginning to understand these phenomena, in many ways, we will always have the disadvantage of imperfect observation and ability to process that information.
Will our ability to model these storms improve? Well, meteorologists and other scientists studying these phenomenon continue to discover the peculiarities and ideosyncrasies, and those can help us refine our models. But if there is any lesson to be drawn, it's that our perception has its limits, and that we should allow for that. What does that mean? We plan as if things won't necessarily go our way because the next time, we may be the unlucky ones. It is a gift not to be in the way of nature's wrath, and nature is not always that generous.
A week ago, Rita did not exist, even as Tropical Depression 18.
And now, the Hurricane rates a Category 3 and it's hooking its way towards Texas/Louisiana Border. There are probably some news viewers who are tearing out their hair at the imprecision. They shouldn't actually. The Weather services are doing the best they can.
Some observant viewers will take note of those segments where the Weatherfolks show a "spaghetti tangle" of possible storm paths. These maybe the more intellectually honest of the storm prediction. But people ask, why so many different possible paths?
Prediction is a funky game with the weather, and even funkier for phenomena like hurricanes. The famed Butterfly Effect has its origins in a program meant to model the weather, and for good reason. I guess what we have here is what we could call dense history, and what matters and what doesn't is often unclear.
It's not a matter of direct causation, though. It's more like being in a crowd where everybody's jostling everybody else towards some threshold, and which gate or exit one ends up depends on who one bumped into, where, when, and in what order. If you could find that out, you could predict where the person would end up. What if, though, you were incapable of working out that complete of a history, or that history involved not individuals, but groups within that crowd? Your perspective would blur, and actions beyond the scope of your ability to observe would be able to throw monkey wrenches into your predictions.
It gets even more interesting when organization becomes involved. Let's say some people in that crowd were sent randomly in, and then given instructions to stay in sight of each other. In nature, intelligence is not necessarily needed for organization, just physics. Thunderstorms sustain themselves by drawing in most air from below, which augments their organization, The rules complicitly act together to take what's unlikely on the atomic level, and change the odds, allowing complex behavior to result from these simple rules.
Hurricanes are emergent phenomenas that the laws of physics conspire to make not only self sustaining, but also a strong influence on their environment, to the point that they seem to act with volition. Getting back to the crowd, those people given instructions, if clearly marked, might seemed to be acting by an external intelligence, somehow moving in one direction or another by a collectively made decision, even though they are only working from a simple, basic rule. It is in this way that bird flocks can be simulated with a few rules with astonishing realism.
Emergence is the key word. Life is a common form of emergent behavior. Despite all the talk of a unique animating force in this culture and others, we acknowledge in common sense one profound truth about man's existence: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Emergent phenomenon are a direct result of the combination and configuration of substances and energies whose presence cannot be reduced to the simple consequence of any one part.
The motion the crowd takes in it's flow, as far as the details are concerned are not spelled out in any one individual. However, the context of a crowd's movement (that is, each person's physical presence, their range of their stamina, their speed of travel, and their own sense of self preservation and purpose, among other things) all contribute to an overall behavior that seems organized by intelligence, rather than the traditional laws of physics.
I guess the point people should draw from what I write here is this: Our world, if it can be described mechanically, runs with great complexity, and though we are just beginning to understand these phenomena, in many ways, we will always have the disadvantage of imperfect observation and ability to process that information.
Will our ability to model these storms improve? Well, meteorologists and other scientists studying these phenomenon continue to discover the peculiarities and ideosyncrasies, and those can help us refine our models. But if there is any lesson to be drawn, it's that our perception has its limits, and that we should allow for that. What does that mean? We plan as if things won't necessarily go our way because the next time, we may be the unlucky ones. It is a gift not to be in the way of nature's wrath, and nature is not always that generous.
Thursday, September 22, 2005
AAAAAAAUUUUGH!
That's better.
Having learned that Rita was going to strike right at us, I was feeling like it was the end of the world. CAT 5 hurricanes, of course, are no joke, and we have no illusions about how strong our house is or how snarled the traffic is (We live close to I-45, the main route of evacuation for Galveston). Even now, going to a shelter is our likeliest course of action, if the storm's course sticks close to us.
So there I was, feeling like the world was dropping on my head, like there was no escape. The news was going on about this being the Third-Worst Hurricane In The Atlantic Basin. I remember being terrified about the Absolute Worst, our old friend Gilbert when I was a kid.
Then suddenly, I realized it was still just Wednesday night, and this thing was going to make landfall early Saturday morning. I broke out laughing, relieved and embarrassed at how panicked I had become. I don't know what God has in store, but whatever happens, it's not going to do much good for me to fear a threat I'm not directly faced with. We'll see what we can do here to stay out of the way of the worst, most damaging effects of this storm, but I'm not going to curl up in the face of all this.
Having learned that Rita was going to strike right at us, I was feeling like it was the end of the world. CAT 5 hurricanes, of course, are no joke, and we have no illusions about how strong our house is or how snarled the traffic is (We live close to I-45, the main route of evacuation for Galveston). Even now, going to a shelter is our likeliest course of action, if the storm's course sticks close to us.
So there I was, feeling like the world was dropping on my head, like there was no escape. The news was going on about this being the Third-Worst Hurricane In The Atlantic Basin. I remember being terrified about the Absolute Worst, our old friend Gilbert when I was a kid.
Then suddenly, I realized it was still just Wednesday night, and this thing was going to make landfall early Saturday morning. I broke out laughing, relieved and embarrassed at how panicked I had become. I don't know what God has in store, but whatever happens, it's not going to do much good for me to fear a threat I'm not directly faced with. We'll see what we can do here to stay out of the way of the worst, most damaging effects of this storm, but I'm not going to curl up in the face of all this.
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Sorry for the change of address.
Well, what is this blog about? Nothing in particular, and I like that. Science, Religion, Technology, Psychology, The Nature of Truth, the Nature of Storytelling. If it sounds profound, it's not. it's going to be essays that wouldn't feel right on my other blogging home, Watchblog.
I'll see about having something to y'all by tomorrow. Rita's going to come in, and things are going to get pretty interesting around here.
I'll see about having something to y'all by tomorrow. Rita's going to come in, and things are going to get pretty interesting around here.
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