cloquewerk's thought bank

Progress

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 18:35:48 GMT

Pursuant to a debate over societal progress and advancement last night, I
came across this quote while reading Gregory Bateson's Steps to an
Ecology of Mind:

[Cyberneticist] Ashby has pointed out in rigorous terms that the
steady state and continued existence of complex interactive systems depend
upon preventing the maximization of any variable, and that any continued
increase in any variable will inevitably result in, and be limited by,
irreversible changes in the system.

Specifically with regards to steady-state systems, Bateson discusses the
Balinese society as studied by him and Margaret Mead in the 30s:

Neither the individual nor the village is concerned to maximize
any simple variable. Rather they would seem to be concerned to maximize
something which we may call stability, using this term perhaps in a highly
metaphorical way. . . . In sum it seems that the Balinese extend to human
relationships attitudes based upon bodily balance, and that they generalize
the idea that motion is essential to balance. This last point gives us, I
believe, a partial answer to the question of why the society not only
continues to function but functions rapidly and busily, continually
undertaking ceremonial and artistic tasks which are not economically or
competitively determined. This steady state is maintained by continual
nonprogressive change.

Not a transhumanist

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:28:47 GMT

It probably strikes people as odd that I am a computer engineer without much faith in technology as a force for Good. It certainly seems weird to me. A bit over a decade ago, when frustration at the way the world works was first bubbling over in me, I still saw technology as a hope, at least for things like pollution and disease and the like. But my thoughts in the past 5 years have led me to visit the thoughts of the critics of civilization and technology, at least that more advanced than clothes and shelter.

Recently I have come to know several people who proclaim themselves as futurists or transhumanists, believing that the rapid acceleration of, amongst other things, information and medical technology will overcome a large cross-section of the problems of humanity. Certainly, there are technological trends that appear to following an exponential curve, leading to, at some point in the nearish future, a so-called "singularity" in which technological progress will become so accelerated that humanity will be utterly transformed.

One of these futurists has a professor who declared that no technological advancements in the last 20-30 years have significantly changed human lives, at least in the NorthWest (I will confine my discussion to that area, given that I have little direct experience with the other 3/4 of the globe. I also doubt that many outside of the NorthWest will ever read this, unfortunately.). This sounds like a pretty radical proposal, given that we have computers and cell phones and MP3 players and a host of other machines and gadgets that our parents never grew up with.

It didn't take me long to agree with his thesis. In fact, it makes quite a lot of sense if you also believe in the related idea that there have been no significant scientific breakthroughs since the 50s. The 20th century saw the discoveries of relativity, quantum mechanics, and DNA, all of which revolutionized scientific thought. However science hasn't had a big find since then, 60 years later, and there are really only two possible explanations: either we've identified "the big problems" and are working on filling in the gaps, or there are some surprises coming along.

It's not that technology hasn't progressed or been refined; rather, the trends started over the last few hundred years have been extended naturally. However most of these developments haven't had a profound effect on people's lives, certainly not as profound as the original development. Undoubtedly there are cases in which modern technology has transformed people's lives. Medical discoveries to formerly uncurable or untreatable diseases (though how many have their been, compared to the discovered of vaccines a century ago?) means that small portions of our populace can live longer and better lives. Heck even telecommuting has improved lives by avoiding the notoriously aggravating process of the daily commute. But to be really revolutionary, technology has to affect the lives of the majority. Let's go through a couple cases of recent developments and see if they have significantly benefitted the populace.

When I was young, there wasn't really such as thing as a cell phone. There were expensive, large wireless phones, but they lacked the defining characteristic of contemporary cell phones: portability. Now nearly everyone has one. Has this not significantly changed our lives?

No, I daresay it hasn't. Sure, we talk on the phone more—but kids when I was young spent hours on the phone just the same. They just do it out of the home now. True, having a cell phone can be a godsend when disaster strikes, but how many people do you know whose cell phone has saved their lives or limbs? Not many, I'm betting. So really the cell phone is an extension of the original invention of the phone 100 years ago—that undoubtedly changed lives, being truly revolutionary technology that affected both the home and the workplace, but there's nothing revolutionary in disconnecting the phone from the wall and carrying it around with you.

Another item that leaps to mind is the Internet. Acknowledging that its roots lie about 30 years ago, there's no question that the Internet we know today really got off the ground in the 90s, so that makes it a recent-enough invention. So what has it given to the average citizen? Communication and knowledge tend to be the answers we hear, but how has that changed our lives? We can now talk to people farther away for cheaper (at least, by text if not by the still nascent VOIP), and even people across the planet, for essentially free (or at least for a flat rate). But what about our daily life changes because of this? More communication, but, let's be honest, most of that communication is fairly vapid, if fun, and again it seems like just a further extension of the telephone. More knowledge? Definitely. It's arguable if the knowledge stores on the Internet constitute a revolution in themselves or if it is an extension of the invention of the printing press. Regardless, so far, this increased access to information has done precious little to remedy the woes of the world. If anything, it's downright embarrassing that we have so much information available yet continue to suffer needlessly.

Technology is supposed to make our lives easier; in utilitarian terms, all the new developments are supposed to bring us increased utility. The standard workweek is still 40 hours—a victory won over a hundred years ago. (And let's not forget the legislation proposed in Ontario a few years ago to "optionally" increase the workweek to 60 hours.) All our technology seems to be doing is giving us new ways to distract ourselves in our free time—on the phone, watching high-def TV, surfing through blogs and YouTube videos—without actually increasing our free time. All this technology should theoretically be increasing our productivity through corresponding gains in efficiency; to put it another way, we should be doing less work to secure more, or at least as many, resources. However we still fight for employment, when we should be fighting for better resource distribution. For the purposes of this argument I don't even mean completely equitable distribution—but surely some of the gains in efficiency should have translated into a consensus, or at least a majority, or even a sizable minority, that there's less work that needs to be done, and not into demands for more work to be created so we can earn the resources that are already there.

(To head off a possible critique, yes, the option exists for some people to work fewer hours and still live a decent life. However in most companies part-time work is rare and low-end, with low per-hour pay and rarely any benefits. Truly flexible hours, like the kind contractors and consultants have, are usually reserved for people with fairly specific, uncommon expertise.)

So, as usual, the problems appear to be social, and not technological. Progress of social welfare appears to have levelled off, at best, or more realistically decreased—the average wage of Canadians has gone down since the 1970s, inflation included, but the cost of living has only increased—so what are we doing with this technology? Using it to create more work, I guess, and therefore more drain on our resources.

To end this on a slightly positive note, as least we appear now to have the technological means to honestly start increasing our standards of living, assuming we correct the social factors that are preventing this from happening. As Murray Bookchin wrote 40 years ago, "This technological revolution . . . has created the objective, quantitative basis for a world without class rule, exploitation, toil, or material want." Or as a friend of mine said, "where are my flying cars?" except I would forget the flying car and just settle for more time to dream of them. It's too bad, but hardly surprising to me, that technological problems appear to be easier to solve than social ones...

The Navarra Blog

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 20:59:44 GMT

For any of you techies out there, my company, The Navarra Group, has a blog (with RSS of course) of mostly technical articles by myself and the other 6 members of the group. I'll probably confine my (limited number of) technical posts to that site. We have some pretty sharp fellows (no lasses yet, unfortunately), so if you ever read technical blogs you may want to add it to your list.

Obama, leading the world to the status quo

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 20:14:41 GMT

Shortly after securing the Democratic nomination, Obama has apparently already showed that the modern political/economic machine doesn't care who is elected to represent it—it'll plow on anyway. A Reuters article outlined Obama's commitment to stopping the Iranian nuclear threat, to the point of increasing sanctions past what they already are. His commitment to the state of Israel is also unwavering: Jerusalem will "remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided", making sure that no one could possibly think that he would ever consider objecting to Israel's seizure of half of the city 40 years ago. Yup, there's modern democracy in practice.

Of course people have written far better essays on this subject than I could ever do. Here's one I read recently, lending more credence to the idea that an elected "representative" really can't change much.

Published on Saturday, May 31, 2008 by The New Statesman (UK)

After Bobby Kennedy (There Was Barack Obama)
by John Pilger

In this season of 1968 nostalgia, one anniversary illuminates today. It is the rise and fall of Robert Kennedy, who would have been elected president of the United States had he not been assassinated in June 1968. Having travelled with Kennedy up to the moment of his shooting at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on 5 June, I heard The Speech many times. He would “return government to the people” and bestow “dignity and justice” on the oppressed. “As Bernard Shaw once said,” he would say, “‘Most men look at things as they are and wonder why. I dream of things that never were and ask: Why not?’” That was the signal to run back to the bus. It was fun until a hail of bullets passed over our shoulders.

Kennedy’s campaign is a model for Barack Obama. Like Obama, he was a senator with no achievements to his name. Like Obama, he raised the expectations of young people and minorities. Like Obama, he promised to end an unpopular war, not because he opposed the war’s conquest of other people’s land and resources, but because it was “unwinnable”.

Should Obama beat John McCain to the White House in November, it will be liberalism’s last fling. In the United States and Britain, liberalism as a war-making, divisive ideology is once again being used to destroy liberalism as a reality. A great many people understand this, as the hatred of Blair and new Labour attest, but many are disoriented and eager for “leadership” and basic social democracy. In the US, where unrelenting propaganda about American democratic uniqueness disguises a corporate system based on extremes of wealth and privilege, liberalism as expressed through the Democratic Party has played a crucial, compliant role.

In 1968, Robert Kennedy sought to rescue the party and his own ambitions from the threat of real change that came from an alliance of the civil rights campaign and the anti-war movement then commanding the streets of the main cities, and which Martin Luther King had drawn together until he was assassinated in April that year. Kennedy had supported the war in Vietnam and continued to support it in private, but this was skilfully suppressed as he competed against the maverick Eugene McCarthy, whose surprise win in the New Hampshire primary on an anti-war ticket had forced President Lyndon Johnson to abandon the idea of another term. Using the memory of his martyred brother, Kennedy assiduously exploited the electoral power of delusion among people hungry for politics that represented them, not the rich.

“These people love you,” I said to him as we left Calexico, California, where the immigrant population lived in abject poverty and people came like a great wave and swept him out of his car, his hands fastened to their lips.

“Yes, yes, sure they love me,” he replied. “I love them!” I asked him how exactly he would lift them out of poverty: just what was his political philosophy? “Philosophy? Well, it’s based on a faith in this country and I believe that many Americans have lost this faith and I want to give it back to them, because we are the last and the best hope of the world, as Thomas Jefferson said.”

“That’s what you say in your speech. Surely the question is: How?”

“How . . . by charting a new direction for America.”

The vacuities are familiar. Obama is his echo. Like Kennedy, Obama may well “chart a new direction for America” in specious, media-honed language, but in reality he will secure, like every president, the best damned democracy money can buy.

Embarrassing Truth

As their contest for the White House draws closer, watch how, regardless of the inevitable personal smears, Obama and McCain draw nearer to each other. They already concur on America’s divine right to control all before it. “We lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good,” said Obama. “We must lead by building a 21st-century military . . . to advance the security of all people [emphasis added].” McCain agrees. Obama says in pursuing “terrorists” he would attack Pakistan. McCain wouldn’t quarrel.

Both candidates have paid ritual obeisance to the regime in Tel Aviv, unquestioning support for which defines all presidential ambition. In opposing a UN Security Council resolution implying criticism of Israel’s starvation of the people of Gaza, Obama was ahead of both McCain and Hillary Clinton. In January, pressured by the Israel lobby, he massaged a statement that “nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people” to now read: “Nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people from the failure of the Palestinian leadership to recognise Israel [emphasis added].” Such is his concern for the victims of the longest, illegal military occupation of modern times. Like all the candidates, Obama has furthered Israeli/Bush fictions about Iran, whose regime, he says absurdly, “is a threat to all of us”.

On the war in Iraq, Obama the dove and McCain the hawk are almost united. McCain now says he wants US troops to leave in five years (instead of “100 years”, his earlier option). Obama has now “reserved the right” to change his pledge to get troops out next year. “I will listen to our commanders on the ground,” he now says, echoing Bush. His adviser on Iraq, Colin Kahl, says the US should maintain up to 80,000 troops in Iraq until 2010. Like McCain, Obama has voted repeatedly in the Senate to support Bush’s demands for funding of the occupation of Iraq; and he has called for more troops to be sent to Afghanistan. His senior advisers embrace McCain’s proposal for an aggressive “league of democracies”, led by the United States, to circumvent the United Nations.

Amusingly, both have denounced their “preachers” for speaking out. Whereas McCain’s man of God praised Hitler, in the fashion of lunatic white holy-rollers, Obama’s man, Jeremiah Wright, spoke an embarrassing truth. He said that the attacks of 11 September 2001 had taken place as a consequence of the violence of US power across the world. The media demanded that Obama disown Wright and swear an oath of loyalty to the Bush lie that “terrorists attacked America because they hate our freedoms”. So he did. The conflict in the Middle East, said Obama, was rooted not “primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel”, but in “the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam”. Journalists applauded. Islamophobia is a liberal speciality.

The American media love both Obama and McCain. Reminiscent of mating calls by Guardian writers to Blair more than a decade ago, Jann Wenner, founder of the liberal Rolling Stone, wrote: “There is a sense of dignity, even majesty, about him, and underneath that ease lies a resolute discipline . . . Like Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama challenges America to rise up, to do what so many of us long to do: to summon ‘the better angels of our nature’.” At the liberal New Republic, Charles Lane confessed: “I know it shouldn’t be happening, but it is. I’m falling for John McCain.” His colleague Michael Lewis had gone further. His feelings for McCain, he wrote, were like “the war that must occur inside a 14-year-old boy who discovers he is more sexually attracted to boys than to girls”.

The objects of these uncontrollable passions are as one in their support for America’s true deity, its corporate oligarchs. Despite claiming that his campaign wealth comes from small individual donors, Obama is backed by the biggest Wall Street firms: Goldman Sachs, UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, J P Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, as well as the huge hedge fund Citadel Investment Group. “Seven of the Obama campaign’s top 14 donors,” wrote the investigator Pam Martens, “consisted of officers and employees of the same Wall Street firms charged time and again with looting the public and newly implicated in originating and/or bundling fraudulently made mortgages.” A report by United for a Fair Economy, a non-profit group, estimates the total loss to poor Americans of colour who took out sub-prime loans as being between $164bn and $213bn: the greatest loss of wealth ever recorded for people of colour in the United States. “Washington lobbyists haven’t funded my campaign,” said Obama in January, “they won’t run my White House and they will not drown out the voices of working Americans when I am president.” According to files held by the Centre for Responsive Politics, the top five contributors to the Obama campaign are registered corporate lobbyists.

What is Obama’s attraction to big business? Precisely the same as Robert Kennedy’s. By offering a “new”, young and apparently progressive face of the Democratic Party - with the bonus of being a member of the black elite - he can blunt and divert real opposition. That was Colin Powell’s role as Bush’s secretary of state. An Obama victory will bring intense pressure on the US anti-war and social justice movements to accept a Democratic administration for all its faults. If that happens, domestic resistance to rapacious America will fall silent.

Piracies and Dangers

America’s war on Iran has already begun. In December, Bush secretly authorised support for two guerrilla armies inside Iran, one of which, the military arm of Mujahedin-e Khalq, is described by the state department as terrorist. The US is also engaged in attacks or subversion against Somalia, Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Bolivia and Venezuela. A new military command, Africom, is being set up to fight proxy wars for control of Africa’s oil and other riches. With US missiles soon to be stationed provocatively on Russia’s borders, the Cold War is back. None of these piracies and dangers has raised a whisper in the presidential campaign, not least from its great liberal hope.

Moreover, none of the candidates represents so-called mainstream America. In poll after poll, voters make clear that they want the normal decencies of jobs, proper housing and health care. They want their troops out of Iraq and the Israelis to live in peace with their Palestinian neighbours. This is a remarkable testimony, given the daily brainwashing of ordinary Americans in almost everything they watch and read.

On this side of the Atlantic, a deeply cynical electorate watches British liberalism’s equivalent last fling. Most of the “philosophy” of new Labour was borrowed wholesale from the US. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were interchangeable. Both were hostile to traditionalists in their parties who might question the corporate-speak of their class-based economic policies and their relish for colonial conquests. Now the British find themselves spectators to the rise of new Tory, distinguishable from Blair’s new Labour only in the personality of its leader, a former corporate public relations man who presents himself as Tonier than thou. We all deserve better.

Empirically determining the temporal boundaries of consciousness

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 20:36:50 GMT

Anyone who watches a lot of compressed video has probably come to hate audio-video sync problems. Having the sound come slightly before or after the associated video frames drives me crazy and pretty much ruins my enjoyment of the movie/show. Luckily a while ago I learned that you can adjust the sync in mplayer with the + and - keys, so now I rarely have to put up with such nonsense.

After doing this several times, I suddenly realized one day that I can always sync up the video and audio if I hit + or - enough. That is to say, I have never seen the audio go from being too early to too late with just one press of the button. But I have seen it happen with two presses. So the amount by which mplayer adjusts the sync with one button press--0.1 seconds--is apparently very close to our tolerance for synchronizing our senses. In other words, if some sensory input comes in from a couple different channels (in particular, visual and auditory), and I have mentally coordinated those senses into one external object (oh my Hegel class was so interesting!), as long as the matching inputs come in within 0.1 seconds of each other, I won't even notice.

Really interesting stuff. The issue of a "moment" in time is problematic, even if you accept the idealist thesis that time is integral to consciousness, not external reality, but this is evidence that consciousness apparently has a fairly fuzzy concept of a moment. Not really surprising, I suppose, but I found this example to be particularly illuminating.

iPod cracking, cont'd

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 23:08:00 GMT

Thought this quote from an article from about.com (what's up with that site anyway? They have like paid journalists or something?) about cracking the iPhone was interesting:

Do note: In all of this development, there are no guarantees that you won't render your phone inoperative (so-called "bricking"), but that was never guaranteed even with in-store use of the phone.

Ha.

cat /dev/random

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 20:48:17 GMT

I am impressed with Concordia's interlibrary-loan system. It's completely free for loans from all manner of libraries in the United States and Canada, and they'll even do the work of finding books for you, given the standard info (name, author, ISBN, etc.). For journal requests, it gets even better: they'll find it for you, photocopy it, and send it to you, and for free at that!

It costs, however, 7 cents per page to use the self-service photocopiers in the library to copy local journals. I guess there are far fewer interlibrary copies made than local ones, but if I were a lazier, cheaper person I'd try to just use other universities' resources.

I cracked my iPod the other day. Well not so much "I" as "jailbreakme.com". You just visit the site, and it will (with your approval) install (or should I say, meta-install) some installation software through a security hole, then it'll nicely patch the hole for you. Version 1.1.2 of firmware (or is it software now?) will patch that hole too, but then you can't do the "jail break", at least for now.

Anyway you know you're a geek when the most exciting moment so far about your new iPod Touch is the first command-line prompt you see on it, and the possibility of running a web server on it becomes in your mind awesome, ludicrous, and then very interesting in quick succession. I put python on it yesterday.

Birthday wishes

Sun, 25 Nov 2007 18:40:02 GMT

¡Feliz Cumpleaños KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNNN!

I took her to see... India!

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 23:22:50 GMT

Cloquewerk's Documentary Recommendation of the Week*

Anyone interested in historical/anthropological documentaries should check out BBC's The Story of India. It's a 6-part series covering the history of India from the first humans out of Africa to the modern day (I presume, having only watched half of it so far but already so enthralled that I had to tell others). I knew a bit about Indian history, but this show has already taught me far more than I knew before. I would write more, but I've gotta get back to episode 4.

* Title for effect only. Documentaries may not be recommended weekly, or ever again.**

** Yeah, maybe footnotes are starting to become a tired form of humour, but how about metafootnotes? Eh? Eh?

Books and the reading thereof

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 06:53:22 GMT

Enh I never do memes but this looks fun.

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users (as of today). As usual, bold what you have read, italicise what you started but couldn’t finish, and strike through what you couldn’t stand. The numbers after each one are the number of LT users who used the tag of that book.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)
Anna Karenina (132)
Crime and Punishment (121)
Catch-22 (117)
One hundred years of solitude (115)
Wuthering Heights (110)
The Silmarillion (104)
Life of Pi : A Novel (94)
The Name of the Rose (91)
Don Quixote (91)
Moby Dick (86)
Ulysses (84)
Madame Bovary (83)
The Odyssey (83)
Pride and Prejudice (83)
Jane Eyre (80)
A Tale of Two Cities (80)
The Brothers Karamazov (80)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (79)
War and Peace (78)
Vanity Fair (74)
The Time Traveler’s Wife (73)
The Iliad (73)
Emma (73)
The Blind Assassin (73)
The Kite Runner (71)
Mrs. Dalloway (70)
Great Expectations (70)
American Gods (68)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (67)
Atlas Shrugged (67)
Reading Lolita in Tehran : A Memoir in Books (66)
Memoirs of a Geisha (66)
Middlesex (66)
Quicksilver (66)
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (65)
The Canterbury Tales (64)
The Historian : A Novel (63) -- is this well known or something? I just picked it up in Mexico randomly...
~~A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man~~ (63) -- Maybe I'd feel different about it today, but that the notes had to be almost as long as the novel itself... yargh...
Love in the Time of Cholera (62)
Brave New World (61)
The Fountainhead (61)
Foucault’s Pendulum (61)
Middlemarch (61)
Frankenstein (59)
The Count of Monte Cristo (59)
Dracula (59)
A Clockwork Orange (59)
Anansi Boys (58)
The Once and Future King (57)
The Grapes of Wrath (57)
The Poisonwood Bible : A Novel (57)
1984 (57)
Angels & Demons (56)
The Inferno (56)
The Satanic Verses (55)
Sense and Sensibility (55)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (55)
Mansfield Park (55)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (54)
To the Lighthouse (54)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (54)
Oliver Twist (54)
Gulliver’s Travels (53)
Les Misérables (53)
The Corrections (53)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (52)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (52)
Dune (51)
The Prince (51)
The Sound and the Fury (51)
Angela’s Ashes : A Memoir (51)
The God of Small Things (51)
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-Present (51)
Cryptonomicon (50) -- Not sure why I never got back to this one...
Neverwhere (50)
A Confederacy of Dunces (50)
A Short History of Nearly Everything (50)
Dubliners (50)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (49)
Beloved (49)
Slaughterhouse-Five (49)
The Scarlet Letter (48)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (48)
The Mists of Avalon (47)
Oryx and Crake : A Novel (47)
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (47)
Cloud Atlas (47)
The Confusion (46)
Lolita (46)
Persuasion (46)
Northanger Abbey (46)
The Catcher in the Rye (46) -- Only book on this list I've read twice.
On the Road (46)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (45)
Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (45)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (45)
The Aeneid (45)
Watership Down (44)
Gravity’s Rainbow (44) -- Someday, someday...
The Hobbit (44)
In Cold Blood : A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (44)
White Teeth (44)
Treasure Island (44)
David Copperfield (44)
The Three Musketeers (44)

The death of Arnold Schoenberg

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 05:18:08 GMT

Tonight on The Signal, my favourite CBC radio show, Laurie Brown is playing a piece by Arnold Schoenberg, performed by Martin Tielli, a guitarist for the Rheostatics. The Radio 2 website has this bit of trivia about Schoenberg, taken from Tielli's website, originally from a book called Uncle John's Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader:

Schoenberg was born September 13, 1874, and believed he would probably die on the 13th as well. He predicted it was most likely he would die on a Friday the 13th, and in 1951, when he was 76 (7+6=13). July 13, 1951 fell on a Friday, and Shoenberg stayed in bed that day, awaiting death. In the evening, his wife went to his room to scold him for wasting an entire day so foolishly. When she opened the door, Shoenberg looked up at her, uttered the single word "harmony," and dropped dead. Time of death: 11:47 p.m. ... 13 minutes before midnight.

Laurie does play too much Björk though.

The Scarecrow on Kansas

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 05:12:29 GMT

"Tell me something about yourself and the country you came from," said the Scarecrow, when she had finished her dinner. So she told him all about Kansas, and how gray everything was there, and how the cyclone had carried her to this queer Land of Oz.

The Scarecrow listened carefully, and said, "I cannot understand why you should wish to leave this beautiful country and go back to the dry, gray place you call Kansas."

"That is because you have no brains," answered the girl. "No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home."

The Scarecrow sighed.

"Of course I cannot understand it," he said. "If your heads were stuffed with straw, like mine, you would probably all live in the beautiful places, and then Kansas would have no people at all. It is fortunate for Kansas that you have brains."

—Frank Baum, Wizard of Oz

The Kimchi Experiment

Tue, 29 May 2007 02:35:09 GMT

Kimchi
Originally uploaded by cloquewerk

Madhur Jaffrey's Eastern Vegetarian Cooking, which for me is gastronomic holy scripture, introduces her recipes for kimchi (aka kimchee) thusly:

Just as a meal without wine is inconceivable for a Frenchman, a meal without kimchee is inconceivable for a Korean. Kimchee is not a liquor but a pickle—a hot, tart, often garlicky pickle that has an honoured place at all Korean meals, from breakfast to dinner. Kimchees may be made out of several vegetables, like cucumbers and radishes, but the most popular kimchee—perhaps because it is the cheapest—is made with Chinese cabbage.

In the late autumn trucks piled high with the pale-green vegetable drive into towns and villages and the entire female population of the country succumbs to feverish bouts of pickle-making.

Well paint me a Korean housewife 'cause I just made my first batch. I'm not sure if I've even had kimchi before, but one of my favourite packaged ramens is kimchi flavoured—kimchi is used not only as a pickle on the side but also to give taste to soups and other dishes. Nong Shim recently changed the ingredients of their kimchi ramen rendering it nonvegetarian, plus of course all ramen has MSG and other lovely products of the industrial-food age. Thus began another adventure in DIY food creation.

It's an... interesting process. You leave a bunch of shredded cabbage in salt water overnight, then transfer it to a bottle along with garlic, ginger, spring onions, ground chilli pepper, and sugar (although I used honey). You then top it up with the salt water, cover it loosely with a cloth, and leave it unattended for a few days. Yes, that's right, leave it out in the open, no fridge, no top aside from the cloth to prevent anything from falling in, sitting out free as a bird as nature may or may not have intended. I must say it was, and still is, a bit of a shock to my neovictorian cleanliness-next-to-godliness cultural background. In an age in which we have antibacterial this and sterilized that, I think it's enlightening and mind-opening to make something that sours in open air and then eat it. I've still only tried a couple of teaspoons, and it's tasty (albeit strange). I'm waiting for our next stir fry to chow down on it properly.

Pictured above is the final product. Bubbles that were not there when the process began escaped as I shook it up to distribute the (near-tablespoon) of cayenne pepper.

EDIT: Seems one of flickr blogging templates doesn't work, so I just deleted the entry and reposted. My apologies to anyone who commented in the interim; feel free to re-comment.

we don't even know what "illegal" means anymore

Wed, 09 May 2007 05:32:39 GMT

"I am sure the people in Canada recognize this is an illegal act and would like to see legislation preventing that from happening," argues Dan Fellman, some guy in charge of distribution at Warner Bros.

Heh, Fellman would like to see legislation to back up this "illegal act". Maybe it's 'cause I find phrases like "usually always" or "literally took my head off" to be a sign that we don't even know what we're talking about anymore, but the idea that you designate an action as illegal and then make a law prohibiting it seems to hint at a strange idea of what terms like "legal" and "illegal" mean in contemporary society.

This of course is not an argument for or against music copyright laws (my arguments against modern copyright laws are undoubtedly better expounded elsewhere). It's just an example of how the mainstream idea of public debate is so incredibly, and sadly unsurprisingly, inane.

Interconnectedness

Fri, 13 Apr 2007 00:37:26 GMT

Tuesday was the last day of my introduction-to-epistemology class. I'd never read much about the philosophy of knowledge, and I didn't really think I wanted to. Turns out I rather enjoyed the class, boring Scienticians like Ayer and Quine excepted (although the ensuing discussion was interesting).

My prof is a rarity apparently—someone who largely disagrees with the aim of much of traditional analytic philosophy, that is, that philosophy should be mostly about defining and elucidating the foundations of science. I was under the impression that there has been a lot of work done in the last twenty or thirty years that has moved on past this view, but according to him it's still quite prevalent, in North America at least. Perhaps iopha could tell you more about this.

About a third of the way through the semester, he showed a movie called Mindwalk. In terms of artistic presentation, the movie is lacking rather a lot. It's essentially one long conversation, which isn't exactly a thrilling concept to begin with, but the director doesn't seem to know how to make it engaging past just shooting it in different locations in and nearby an old church in France. But the content was quite interesting.

It's based on the 70s book The Tao of Physics; the director is actually the author's brother. I haven't read this book yet, but the ideas are quite similar to many of those in Morris Berman's The Re-enchantment of the World. Anyone who has spent any time with me when I've been in a philosophical/pedagogical mood has probably at least heard the name, if not heard me go on at length about it. I read this book in 2004, and it is the main reason I am now studying philosophy.

I've been interested in social justice issues for about 10 or so years now. After my realization that there were some rather Bad Things in the world and that we could do something about them, collectively and individually, for several reasons I quickly adopted a fairly radical stance—that of the general rejection of hierarchy and power structures, aka anarchism. I was, and remain, convinced that reforms and other band-aid solutions are not addressing the real problems of society, which I believe are largely caused by power imbalances. In a sense I am both pessimistic and optimistic about humanity: when a human gets into a position of authority over others, she or (more often, historically) he will have a high probability of misusing that power, sooner or later. She or he will also not normally give up such a position willingly, often (but not always) creating a list of reasons why it would be a bad idea to step down.

I realized that political philosophy played a large role in clarifying the systems and structures that would lead to and maintain decentralization of power in society, but as for the rest of philosophy I was largely ignorant. Although not defining myself as an engineer, that part of me is undeniable, and traditionally engineers sneer at philosophers. I didn't accept that view wholeheartedly, but I had yet to be shown that philosophy could actually affect anything or, in general, be "useful".

One of the best things about facilitating a class on anarchism at Dawson is the new ideas that you encounter in a class devoted to learning as a group, in which the facilitator, while performing some of the duties of a traditional teacher, is understood to be at least part student at the same time. Several people in my first class were hot on an idea called "primitivism". As with any vague idea like this one, there are a lot of definitions and a lot of ground covered, but what I have been able to take out of it is a new understanding of civilization through the study of "primitive" ("traditional", "simple", "hunter/gatherer") societies. Here, I was being told, was anarchism in as close to a "natural" state as we as a species seem to get. I read more on the issue, by radicals like Bob Black, Hakim Bey, Dave Watson, John Zerzan, although I have a lot more to read still.

I was surprised and distressed that these ideas seem to have gone unnoticed except by those who read a few quasi-underground publications. But when I read the back cover of The Re-enchantment of the World at a friend's house, I realized that some of these ideas were being discussed in an academic setting. Berman's book is a birdshot blast at a range of topics including physics, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, and even alchemy. It was an attempt to examine some of the foundations of civilization and how we arrived at the worldview most of us share in contemporary western society.

One of the areas that interested me most is the examination of the assumptions and foundations of modern science. Berman essentially posits (along with many others, I've since discovered) that the mechanistic view of the world, enforced by a distinct subject/object split, has given us some power over it in return for a loss of connection with it. Part of the solution he (vaguely) discusses is an enlargement or replacement of this kind of science with one dedicated to connections, systems, and holism.

But back to my class on epistemology... a year or two ago I became aware of the field of "cybernetics", which is the study of control and communications and a part of systems theory in general. Systems theory has only really been around for 50 years or so, maybe less, and has influenced many areas of knowledge, by its very nature being interdisciplinary. Sure enough, I managed to find some philosophical treatments of its ideas, and, more interestingly, the derivative idea of "second-order cybernetics", the cybernetics of cybernetics, discovered when cyberneticians attempted to use cybernetics to construct a model of the human mind. Knowing my prof has some similar ideas gave me extra impetus to write my term paper on the epistemological ramifications of cybernetics.

I present the paper below for those of you who, for whatever reason, are interested in reading a brief survey of a bit of the philosophical origins and a few of the interesting and relevant features and discoveries of cybernetics, in my opinion of course. This is only a 200-level course, so it's a short paper that doesn't do much more than cursorily scan a small part of a large terrain, with a bit of my interpretation thrown in, but if you're really interested it should provide some directions for more information. I found the online journal Constructivist Foundations to be particularly interesting.

Voilà: Teleology, Cybernetics, and Cartesian Dualism

Btw I apologize for the quality of the PDF... OpenOffice apparently still has some work to do on its PDF-exportation feature.

Why I am a Vegetarian

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 23:50:34 GMT

I've been a vegetarian for about 8.5 years now. Some of those years were as a vegan (or quite close to it), but I haven't knowingly touched any meat products in that time (oh except for one jello shooter once, I think, heh). It's actually only in the last couple years that I have really solidified my reasons for becoming a vegetarian, my vegetarian ethic if you will.

My mother raised the point, as did a friend of mine, that if I ate organic, ethically produced (i.e. not factory farmed) meat, I might have more of an effect on the welfare of animals, since, theoretically, the meat industry cares more about the opinions (via the dollars) of meat-eaters than of people who won't ever buy meat. Since it's highly unlikely that meat-eaters will ever fall into the minority, nevermind disappear, there will always be a meat industry, and we should aim to make it as ethical as possible through both boy- and buycotts.

The only retort I have for this, and it isn't foolproof, is that a reduced demand for meat would reduce the benefit of factory farms, which rely on high demand. But it would take quite a lot of vegetarians to accomplish that, and it's entirely possible to have an unethical small-scale farm.

The one reason for my vegetarianism that I've really stuck with is based on my belief that hypocrisy should be minimized—you should walk the walk and not just talk the talk. Here's how it works for me and my vegetarianism:

- I would be extremely uncomfortable (that's actually probably an understatement) killing an animal myself. And not just in a gross-out way, but in an ethical way—I'd have a hard time looking an animal, pretty much any animal, in the face and then pulling a trigger (metaphorically or literally). This is, I realize, entirely "in my head" and subjective, but that doesn't change anything for me.

- Therefore, it would be hypocritical of me to close my eyes and let someone do the killing for me. And since hypocrisy is bad, I must therefore be vegetarian.

This argument obviously only works because I have an actual ethical problem with killing an animal. It's not a reason for everyone to become vegetarian, if one has no real problem killing an animal. But I know of a good many people who are as uncomfortable with the idea of killing an animal as I am yet can chow down on a hamburger with no problems—unless, of course, you bring up the fact that they're eating an animal's muscles, in which case they tell you to shut up and not talk about it. That kind of hypocrisy makes me sad. You can talk all about the plants I eat and I won't get upset, and I've both planted and harvested plants before with no ethical quandries.

So I have more respect for hunters (that is, hunters who eat what they kill) than for people who can only bring themselves to buy shrinkwrapped, fully butchered meat, almost as divorced as possible from the actual act of killing. I actually only realized this a couple of years ago.

That's the main reason I'm a vegetarian, although I started out with others. For instance, by avoiding meat, and knowing that there are at least a few other people who avoid meat, the general suffering level of life on the earth is reduced a tiny bit. Even if plants suffer in some comparable way (and I haven't seen anything really convincing for this argument), at least I'm removing one level of suffering—plant to human instead of plant to animal to human. This also is an argument from a resources point of view (energy is lost in the intermediate step of being transformed from plant to animal). But all in all, I just plain dislike hypocrisy.

Anarchism 101: Introduction to Anarchism

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 23:55:02 GMT

Anarchism is a set of ideas, ranging from philosophical to political to economic to sociological and further, with the common idea that unequal power relations are Bad Things. Different anarchists say different things about exactly how or why hierarchical structures are bad, how they should be abolished, and even what constitutes a hierarchy, but all¹ agree that they should, whenever possible, be avoided. Indeed this is simply the etymology of the word "anarchy", which is derived from the Greek word "anarchos", meaning "without ruler", and not having rulers is essentially what anarchism is about.

As a theory, anarchism had its beginnings in the middle of the 19th century. Anarchistic thoughts can be seen much earlier, such as in the writings of Gerrard Winstanley, and some trace anarchistic writings as far back as the Stoic philosopher Zeno of Citium (though I haven't read anything particularly anarchist in Greek writings yet). Most agree that four men in the 19th century set out basic anarchist thought: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Max Stirner, Mikhail Bakunin, and Peter Kropotkin. They didn't so much invent anarchism as much as give a theoretical basis for anarchist ideas, fleshing out concepts that had been tossed around society for who knows how long, probably since the ideas of social power and authority were first conceived (invented or recognized). They didn't all agree with one another either—Stirner refutes some of Proudhon's writings in The Ego and Its Own and elsewhere. But each influenced later anarchists in various ways, even if only by way of refutations.

While spanning many spheres, anarchism is more of a philosophy, a way of looking at things, than anything else. There is no orthodoxy, as opposed to Marxism, although individual schools might be more or less dogmatic. But as a whole, anarchism can be compared to the philosophy of the Greeks, who saw their actions guided by their philosophies. Anarchism is a way of approaching the various facets of life, social and individual, and it is generally agreed that anarchism is useless without practical applications; most anarchists are activists in one way or another. Many anarchists, though definitely not all, embrace the variety of interpretations; one could only think that, "after the Revolution", there would not be one society but a multitude, all living out anarchistic ideas in their own ways.

Next week: Proudhon's views on property

1 I use "all" in this sense as meaning all who self-identify as anarchists. However, this is not quite true; there is, in fact, a set of ideas called "anarchocapitalism". It is a variant of right-wing libertarianism, the economic ideal of which is a completely free market with no government to interfere with it. All industries, all services, would be privately owned. They take "anarchism" as meaning strictly "no government", where all other anarchists (to my knowledge) take it in the more general sense of "no rulers" or "no authority" of any kind.

The Philosophy of Relativity

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 17:36:13 GMT

I should have posted this a while ago... but here we go. I wrote a paper on the implications of the theory of special relativity on free will. Some people were asking, either out of real interest or to be polite (I don't really care which :), to read it, so there it is.

The PDF looks kinda weird sometimes for some reason; a bunch of letters are smushed together. I dunno what caused this, but apparently open office's PDF exporter could use some work. It prints fine... anyway sorry 'bout that.

Last semester I took an introductory course in the philosophy of science. I don't think it would have been too exciting aside from the fact that my prof, Dr. Vesselin Petkov, has PhDs in both philosophy and physics and has recently written a book on the "nature of spacetime". I've been reading books on "popular physics" by people like Stephen Hawking, John Gribbon, Michio Kaku, and the like since high school, and, while I won't claim to have thoroughly understood them, I was amazed at how incredibly weird our universe is at the extremes. Over the last few years, I've been pleased to see that this weirdness isn't confined to physics—and that's probably why I've decided to study philosophy for a while.

Our professor decided to dedicate about a month to the study of the philosophical ramifications of the theory of relativity. I think this was a bit of a controversial choice, since many students were expecting just a survey, discussing "real" philosphical issues like realism vs. antirealism, reductionism, the scientific method, scientific revolutions, etc. But it was a bold move on the professor's part, since from what he said and what I can tell, these ideas are regularly discussed in academic circles, despite the fact that the theory of relativity is over 100 years old now. So maybe we sacrificed depth on other topics for a real taste of what philosopher of science talk about these days.

In fact, next year is the 100-year anniversary of the talk Hermann Minkowsi, one of Einstein's teachers, gave in which he explained his idea of the 4-dimensional model of the universe. It was a pretty radical model, in which he claimed that time is a complete dimension, much the same way that length, width, and height form the spatial dimensions with which we are all familiar. The most intriguing part is that Minkowsi believed that this model represented reality; it wasn't merely a mathematical tool. In fact, he believed it was the 3-dimensional model that was the tool, that it didn't accurately represent the universe (or the "world" as he called it).

The argument rests on the fact that simultaneity is relative, that is, observers at different relative motions will have different set of simultaneous events. If you're moving very quickly towards me, and I see two nearby stars go super nova instantaneously, you might see one explode before the other. If you take the instant of time at which we are immediately side-by-side as we pass each other, the objects that simultaneously exist for us will be at different times. For you, the star right now might be as it was for me two seconds ago. I'm deliberately not saying "see", since the speed of light introduces further complications, but if you "freeze" the universe at a time common for both of us, the universe that is frozen for you will be different from the universe that is frozen for me.

The only way to explain this without introducing complete relativization of existence is to introduce an extra dimension. With a time as a dimension, special relativity "clicks" into place. An object extends into the temporal dimension, and I see a different three-dimensional "slice" [1] of the universe than you do, so objects are at different times in their lives for me and for you. In fact, the four-dimensional figuration neatly explains two other consequences of relativity—time dilation and length contraction—but I won't go into that right now.

On the surface, it doesn't really seem that weird to treat time as a dimension. When we arrange a meeting with someone, we normally specify a time coordinate along with spatial coordinates (corner of Guy and Ste-Catherine, 2nd floor, 12:00 pm). But if time is a complete dimension in the geometric sense, then it must be that the entire dimension exists, not just a point on it. In other words, when you look at a table, you see its entire height, its entire width, and its entire length. By extension, at one point in time the entire height, width, and length of the universe must exist (although weird things might happen far out there, but for all intents and purposes the universe has height, length, and breadth). Thus, the entire time of the universe, including everything in it, exists as much as its spatial dimensions do. The past and future of the universe exist in the same way that the present does; they have the same ontological status.

Well that's a pretty damn strange concept when you look at it for more than a second... the most obvious question being "why does it feel like time is passing then?" The only answer that anyone has been able to come up with is Hermann Weyl's idea that our consciousness "travels" up our world tube (the 4-dimensional representation of an object), perceiving a succession of 3-dimensional "slices". This is a pretty unsatisfactory answer for a number of reasons, but it stems from the fact that we need something to explain the disagreement between the theory and experience. Bear in mind that the theory of relativity has been experimentally confirmed many, many times; Prof. Petkov has even gone so far as to say it is the most tested of contemporary theories, given that GPS systems employ relativistic calculations constantly.

The question that really got me was pretty philosophical, something that I wouldn't have thought I would ever find particularly interesting—free will. If the future is already set, how can my actions and choices have any meaning at all? In some senses, it feels like a silly pedantic argument, the kind I would have scoffed at a few years ago... but I think back to when I found out that the church I attended as a child had predestination as one of its tenets. Even as a kid, this idea disturbed me... it didn't seem right that God would have put us on this planet and then determined in advance what I was going to do with my life. Moral responsibility requires free will in my mind. But after giving up Christianity when I was older and its concept of a god, I could breathe a bit easier.

It seems that, somewhat ironically, science has discovered that the old theological debate of predestination is once again valid. Interesting that at least we have something to fall back on... but while doing research for my paper I found the compatibilist approach (i.e. that free will and determinism are compatible) to be really... unconvincing, especially compared to the arguments that the incompatibilists had. So I wasn't getting much help there in fitting free will into a Block Universe.

I thought that perhaps quantum mechanics, with its ideas of probability (at least in the Copenhagen interpretation), might help out a bit here... and some people, like McGill professor Storrs McCall, have expounded a view, incorporating relativity, of a branching universe in which there are many, many possible futures, but only one becomes real. But the inverse of determinism, complete indeterminism, doesn't fare much better on the free-will front: a completely probabilistic universe doesn't give us any control over our actions either.

It was at this time that I starting noticing that the compatibilism/incompatibilism debate was mostly, if not entirely, over a certain type of determinism: causal determinism. This is the view that there's one single unbroken chain (or maybe tree) of causality, that goes back either infinitely or to a certain prime cause. But the theory of relativity itself doesn't imply anything about causality--one can imagine a Block Universe in which events were not linked causally in any way whatsoever. I guess you could say that the structure of the universe doesn't imply its content.

So in the end the only conclusion I could come up with is that free will isn't directly contradicted by the theory of special relativity, although if free will does exist it must be something rather strange, some ability for our consciousness to affect the world in an atemporal way. It's pretty odd, but then again the role of consciousness hasn't been very well defined in so far as it relates to a temporal dimension.

It seems, from a scientific perspective, that the real debate about free will really centres around biological reductionism. If our entire being can be reduced to physics and a (albeit hypercomplex) set of equations, then what we take as free choice might be just an illusion concocted for some reason by evolution, and our "decisions" are in fact just as deterministic as where a pool ball will go after being hit by another. The only way around it is to imply that we somehow cause effects that have no cause other than our will. Certain people call this "immanent causation", meaning the causation is immanent in us (in our consciousness or soul or will or something). If this is true, though, then what level of immanent causation do animals have? Unless there's a "big leap", which seems pretty rare in nature, animals must have some sort of free will, at least to some extent. But where does it end? Maybe then plants have a lesser but definite free will. What about inorganic structures? Unless there is some sort of gestalt that exceeds the sum of its parts and produces the ability to make conscious decisions, it seems that the only option is some sort of panpsychism, in which free will is present to some degree, greater or lesser, in pretty much everything in the universe. Weird.

None of these ideas are new of course, but one of the fascinating things in philosophy is how, when you take what appears to be a fairly straightforward idea, what appears intuitive to us, and really think about what it's saying and its implications and see what it really means, some weird weird stuff comes out. It truly amazes me how strange everything is when you peek below the surface.

1 Actually, due to the fact that the speed of light is finite, the "slice" we can see is in fact described by a 3-dimensional cone (a "light cone"), but the notion of a slice is close enough.

Good evening, Mr. Collins

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 07:39:22 GMT

Yessir, I do enjoy a good Tom Collins once in a while.

1. Ensure you have adequate powdered sugar. I try to buy ethical sugar, which comes fairly coarse, for whatever reason, so I use my mini-food processor-robot to grind it down to a powder. Powdered sugar mixes easier, so you don't get a thick, grainy syrup at the bottom.

2. Now technically these things are supposed to be served in "Collins glasses". I relate to the idea of having a diverse array of glassware on multiple levels: there are good reasons to have different types of glasses, and regardless it's fun... a bit of class never killed anyone. But anyway, I personally think that the Collins glass goes a bit beyond both reason and emotion. It's essentially a large highball glass--tall and skinny. I think the tall glasses I have qualify somewhere between highball and Collins, so I use them for drinks like this and gin & tonics, Harvey Wallbangers, melonballs, rum & colas, and such.

3. Now add 2 ounces of gin, 2 teaspoons of sugar, and the juice of half a lemon. Obviously fresh juice is best, but I often use bottled lemon juice, either for expediency or for want of lemons. Good lemon juice is key either way... I use some sort of organic lemon juice that comes in a glass bottle from my local natural food store. About 2 tablespoons should suffice. This also makes it very easy to remember: it's the 2-2-2 drink. 2 teaspoons sugar, 2 tablespoons lemon juice, 2 ounces gin.

4. Add ice. Lots. Fill the glass. This isn't a huge hot-summer-day chugging drink. The taste belies the alcohol content. Plus, too much soda will dilute it.

5. Fill the glass with soda. Roughly half the liquid should be soda.

6. Adjust all parameters for taste and repeat until fully satisifed.

7. (optional) A straw is sometimes fun. Warning: drinks go down even faster with straws.

BONUS: Add a half of an ounce of cherry liqueur and your drink is magically transformed into a Singapore Sling! That's right, a good Singapore Sling is essentially a Tom Collins plus cherry... think cherry lemonade (mmmmmmMMMmm! refreshing!). Best thing I've ever tried (and they claim on the label that it's an ingredient in the "original" Singapore Sling) is Heering, a Danish liqueur. They don't carry it in the SAQ, and they recently stopped carrying it in the LCBO though...

Hmm I'm gonna email them right now. Singapore Slings are too tasty to give up on that easily.

Anarchism 101: Introduction to New School

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 22:25:00 GMT

A few years ago I started teaching a class (more correctly, "facilitating a learning band") at Dawson CEGEP in their New School program. I've now facilitated four classes, three on the topic of "anarchism". Dawson's New School is a small subdepartment, an experiment in alternative pedagogy. About 35 years ago, Dawson students were asked to come up with ideas to improve college education. One way or another (I don't know the details), what emerged was the idea of a small class with an emphasis on discussion and participation on all levels—students having control over their class, selecting topics and the tools for evaluation. The founders dubbed this approach to pedagogy "critical humanism".

The teacher in New School is replaced by a "facilitator"; this role varies slightly according to the class, but it is essentially being a guide to discussion, both in the senses of presenting material to discuss and of facilitating the discussion itself. In some classes, I essentially lecture for half the time, and in others I merely participate in a discussion. I am officially, according to Dawson, a "teacher in training", though I'm not paid more than a $100 honorarium per semester. However the administration has recently decided that even unpaid facilitators need Master's Degrees, but I have essentially been grandfathered in with help from the fact that I'm taking courses in philosophy at Concordia, ostensibly with the goal of obtaining some sort of graduate degree in something or other someday in the future.

A very interesting facet of New School is the concept of a "band". Up to a few years ago, New School had a class, which all were encouraged (and earlier forced) to take, just called "Band". The class was of a standard New-School size, usually no more than 13 or 14 and often less, and met twice a week for 3 hours each time. There was mostly no other work, and the grade was 100% participation. The class would be spent in discussion on a variety of topics, usually suggested by the students themselves. The goal of the class was to improve communication skills in many ways, to learn how to relate to a number of other people, presumably most of whom you didn't really know before the class. As in all New School classes, everything said was confidential, and students would admit surprising things after the group had formed an "identity", as they say in New School.

Dawson's administration of late has been, well, shall way say hostile to the ideas and activities of New School. Apparently New School has always had its ups and downs over its 30-plus-year life, but I would be surprised if this wasn't one of the worst. Not only have Bands been entirely eliminated, but learning bands (originally called learning groups, when Band was a separate class) have had their maximum participation grade reduced from 50% to 30% and now to 20%. I think the classes are functioning essentially the same for now, but with the reduced participation mark it's conceivable that the priority, and thus the quality, of discussions will deteriorate.

But not to be too negative, if New School classes continue to function well (as all of mine have), it would be heartening to see that participation would still be valued despite its lack of enforceability. Perhaps that's closer to the heart of New School anyway, that people can come together and have intelligent conversations about a variety of topics without being forced to.

I don't know of any good anarchist "textbooks" out there, although there are a number of decent but limited surveys, and the curriculum of New School is supposed to be at least somewhat fluid, so I find and sometimes edit readings each week. I have a few "standards", but I change many of the readings from semester to semester. Sometimes I do this for clarity, if I've had a chance to study a topic more on my own and find a better piece, but also because the class has input on what specifically they want to study.

So I figured that, hey, not everybody can be in a New School class, so why not put the readings up on the web? Obviously this is not a real substitute, since the discussions are irreplaceable, but I plan to write a short commentary on each one, essentially what I would be presenting in the "lecture" part of the class.

We'll go through anarchist ideas, thinkers, events, and activists from the 19th century to today. The fact that anarchism is about as far from orthodoxy as possible means several things however. It is impossible to represent the entire spectrum of anarchistic ideas, since they range from the sociological to the economic and even to the aesthetic. Furthermore, I have my own biases, although I do not agree with all aspects of the chosen topics; in fact, many of the ideas are contradictory. But I've tried to give a fairly faithful survey of some of the important aspects of the theory and practice of anarchism.

Next time: Introduction to anarchism

I live in a bilingual society

Mon, 15 Jan 2007 05:35:20 GMT

From the current (12:30 am) Official Weather Warning from Environment Canada:

En addition, a low pressure systeme currently over Arkansas will move
rapidly northeastward and reach the state of New York Monday evening.
Near the lows track, significant snow amounts, that is near 15
centimeters, are expected by late Monday over several southwestern
and central areas of the province.

Heheh I absolutely love language mashups.

A couple of swells

Tue, 12 Dec 2006 22:16:12 GMT

A couple nice things I discovered lately:

- Saint-Paulin cheese. I'm not a cheese connoisseur, but every so often I try something new. Saint-Paulin is a local, vegetarian (no rennet) cheese, apparently similar to Oka (which I haven't tried much). I found it at Rocky Montana, a local (and great) grocer.

- VIA Rail now serves only Fair-Trade coffee. Actually they've been doing it since June, but I only discovered this on my most recent trip. I must say I'm both impressed and (pleasantly) surprised.

And with an iBook, a video cable, an audio cable, and a USB joystick, I've set up my own SNES emulating system that I can play on the TV with an actual controller (which beats the hell out of a keyboard). There are some annoying periodic short pauses, but hopefully I'll be able to fix that at some point. It's still very playable.

Ah, the world isn't so bad...

Lentil Soup

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 06:42:01 GMT

A number of people have asked me about the recipe for Indian lentil soup that I use. Here it is for your cooking and eating pleasure. It's pretty simple, if time consuming.

MASOOR DAL SOUP

Taken from Eastern Vegetarian Cooking, by Madhur Jaffrey, edited slightly by cloquewerk

- 10 whole cloves
- 2 bay leaves
- 1 tsp whole black peppercorns
- 6½ oz./185 g whole masoor dal*, picked over, washed, and drained
- ½ tsp ground turmeric
- 1¼–1½ tsp salt
- 1 tbs lime juice
- 1/8 tsp cayenne pepper (use as desired)

[* Regular ol' red lentils.]

Tie the cloves, bay leaves, and peppercorns in a piece of cheesecloth [I use a large tea ball].

Put the dal and 1 qt/1150 mL water into a heavy 2½–3-qt/2¾–3½-L pot and bring to the boil. Remove the scum that rises to the top and discard it. Add the spice bundle and the turmeric to the pot. Turn heat to low, cover so the lid is very slightly ajar, and simmer very gently for 1½ hours. Remove the spice bundle and discard it. Put the soup in a blender or food processor (you may have to do this in two batches) and blend until it is smooth. Add the salt, lime juice, and cayenne. Stir to mix.

Madhur Jaffrey also likes to add croûtons to hers, made by frying small pieces of bread in a fair amount of oil.

Cooling system?

Tue, 04 Jul 2006 16:12:48 GMT

So my CPU fan has been getting progressively worse, making a hell of a racket and seemingly doing very little. I was going to replace it but thought that, since P4s seem to run rather warm, I should get something a little more powerful.

Assuming I haven't cooked the rest of my computer, does anyone have any recommendations for cooling systems? I'm hoping spend no more than $100, which puts most of the fancy liquid-cooling systems out of the running. Are there superior fan systems or cheaper (but functional) liquid-cooling systems?

Star Fleet Battles -- who's in?

Fri, 07 Apr 2006 17:17:31 GMT

Just wondering, who is in fact planning to come to Star Fleet Battles tomorrow? So far I have confirmed messiahdivine, _watchtower_, wlach, and Pedro. Anyone else interested? The scenario I'm looking at could support up to 8 (4 ships per side).