Brisées et bricolage

A place to cache fragments that might be useful in constructing glorious phantasms. In no particular order, but LIFO:

My intention has been to draw things to the surface, place them in arrangement while keeping the parts apart, and to leave the reader free to cast their own light and to turn these things over in their own mind as I have in mine. I’ve come to think of this form as the exploded essay, and a record of how thought builds and ideas emerge. Each is a series of short texts that cast light on one another rather like the aspects of a poem. They align artworks, myth, strange voyages, scientific scrutiny, reminiscence and a poet’s response.
(from Lavinia Greenlaw’s The Vast Extent, cited by Warren Ellis)

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The mind is a camera obscura constantly trying to render an image of reality on the back wall of consciousness through the pinhole of awareness, its aperture narrowed by our selective attention, honed on our hopes and fears. In consequence, the projection we see inside the dark chamber is not raw reality but our hopes and fears magnified — a rendering not of the world as it is but as we are: frightened, confused, hopeful creatures trying to make sense of the mystery that enfolds us, the mystery that we are.
Maria Popova

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The great paradox of consciousness is that it constitutes both our entire experience of reality and our blindfold to reality as it really is. Forever trapped within it, we mistake our concepts of things for the things themselves, our theories for the universe, continually seeing the world not as it is but as we are. The supreme frontier of human freedom may be the ability to accept that something exists beyond understanding, that understanding is a machination of the mind and not a mirror of the world — that the world simply is, and our consciousness is a participant in its being but not a creator of it.
Maria Popova

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The key to understanding how technologies shape futures is to grapple holistically with how a disruption rearranges the landscape. One tool is probabilistic thinking. Given the initial context, the human fabric, and the arrangement of people and institutions, a disruption shifts the probabilities of different possible futures in different ways. Some futures become easier to obtain (the greasing of wheels) while some become harder (the addition of friction). This is what makes new technologies fascinating. They help open up and close off different possible futures.
danah boyd

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The reason that iron filings placed in a magnetic field exhibit a pattern — or have form, as we say — is that the field they are in is not homogeneous. If the world were totally regular and homogeneous, there would be no forces, and no forms. Everything would be amorphous. But an irregular world tries to compensate for its own irregularities by fitting itself to them, and thereby takes on form.

Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form (via noosphe-re)

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…we have not only a cynicism problem (bad faith) and a problem of means and ends (a policy problem), but something deeper: A reality problem. Another way of putting this point is that actually situating ourselves in medias res is harder than it might seem. We inhabit historical reality in a weird way. We are, willy-nilly, present in the world, we are thrown into it, but we flee cognitively and politically from the stark reality surrounding us.
Adam Tooze, Chartbook #197

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…an elemental fact of human nature: We are touchingly prone to mistaking our models of reality for reality itself, mistaking the strength of our certainty for the strength of the evidence, thus moving through a dream of our own making that we call life. It can only be so — given how many parallel truths comprise any given situation, given how multifarious the data points packed into any single experience, given that this very moment “you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you,” we are simply not capable of processing the full scope of reality. Our minds cope by choosing fragments of it to the exclusion, and often to the erasure, of the rest.
Maria Popova

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The art of dying is hard to master, especially if you bequeath an artistic legacy. Live too long, and your reputation may be marred by retrograde politics or senescent late work. Pass too soon, and your best years may be presumed to lie ahead.
(Colton Valentine, Maria Popova May 2022)

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In periods of frenzied haste toward wealth, of feverish speculation and of crisis, of the sudden downfall of great industries and the ephemeral expansion of other branches of production, of scandalous fortunes amassed in a few years and dissipated as quickly, it becomes evident that the economic institutions which control production and exchange are far from giving to society the prosperity which they are supposed to guarantee; they produce precisely the opposite result. Instead of order they bring forth chaos; instead of prosperity, poverty and insecurity; instead of reconciled interests, war; a perpetual war of the exploiter against the worker, of exploiters and of workers among themselves. Human society is seen to be splitting more and more into two hostile camps, and at the same time to be subdividing into thousands of small groups waging merciless war against each other. Weary of these wars, weary of the miseries which they cause, society rushes to seek a new organization; it clamors loudly for a complete remodeling of the system of property ownership, of production, of exchange and all economic relations which spring from it.

(Pyotr Kropotkin, cited by Maria Popova)

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The mind is a spectacularly inventive, if wildly inconsistent, storyteller, generating a continual stream of explanations, speculations, and interpretations, including of our own thoughts and actions. And these stories are so fluent and convincing that we often mistake them for reports from a shadowy inner world. But introspection is not some strange inner perception; it is the human imagination turned upon itself.
(Nick Chater)

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I like the word stochastic better [than ‘random’], because of its lineage in our language. The first root was stegh, meaning a pointed stake in the Indo-European of 30,000 years ago. Stegh moved into Greek as stokhos, meaning a target for archers, and then later on, in our language, targets being what they are and aiming arrows being as fallible as it is, stokhos was adapted to signify aiming and missing, pure chance, randomness, and thus stochastic. On that philosophical basis, then, I’m glad to accept all of evolution in a swoop, but I’m still puzzled by it.
(Lewis Thomas, cited by Maria Popova)

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…there ought to be a Latin scholarly expression that one could use when presenting the correction of an erroneous word or words in quoted material alongside the error itself… I never ran across such an expression until last night, when I saw it in independent scholar Nigel Simeone’s meticulously annotated book of selected correspondence of Leonard Bernstein, published by Yale University Press. There it was, in black and white: recte! Meaning, of course, “correctly’, as in “Victor Mare [recte Mair]”, or “Edwin Pullyblank [recte Pulleyblank]”. It’s so exciting to discover this, after all these decades of desiring it, that I almost feel like applying to a graduate program at my somewhat advanced age, choosing a thesis or dissertation topic that requires the use of lots of defective sources, just so that I can splash “recte” on as many pages of my work as possible.
(Victor Mair at Language Log)

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when a nation falls under the demagogue’s spell, a kind of collective mania of delusion takes hold. It will believe anything, lie after lie, in order never to have to admit the mistake of believing the very first one. Problems will multiply, and new Big Lies — usually centred on new scapegoats — will have to be told.
(Umair Haque, 16 Jan 22)

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The metaphor of supply CHAINS is misleading. Institutional and individual biases and decisions constitute these. Many of today’s supply chain crises are rooted in part in the excesses of neoliberal capitalism. Monoculture agriculture, international trade, and pharmaceuticals come immediately to mind. This capitalism professes a faith in markets but manipulates the market to express and concentrate power, then uses that power to extort further gains.
(John Buell)

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After all, one can’t complain. I have my friends. Somebody spoke to me only yesterday. And was it last week or the week before that Rabbit bumped into me and said ‘Bother!’ The Social Round. Always something going on.
(A.A.Milne Winnie-the-Pooh, Eeyore speaking)

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Call it what you like—relativism, postmodernism, deconstruction. The lesson is one and the same: The truth is not out there waiting to be objectively uncovered. The truth is made. Facts are fabricated as seen fit by the powers that be, and then consent for those facts is manufactured, enforced.
(Lauren Groff, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/07/lauren-groff-kent-russell-florida/612259/)

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It is, it seems, our civilisation’s turn to experience the inrush of the savage and the unseen; our turn to be brought up short by contact with untamed reality. There is a fall coming. We live in an age in which familiar restraints are being kicked away, and foundations snatched from under us. After a quarter century of complacency, in which we were invited to believe in bubbles that would never burst, prices that would never fall, the end of history, the crude repackaging of the triumphalism of Conrad’s Victorian twilight – Hubris has been introduced to Nemesis. Now a familiar human story is being played out. It is the story of an empire corroding from within. It is the story of a people who believed, for a long time, that their actions did not have consequences. It is the story of how that people will cope with the crumbling of their own myth. It is our story. This time, the crumbling empire is the unassailable global economy, and the brave new world of consumer democracy being forged worldwide in its name. Upon the indestructibility of this edifice we have pinned the hopes of this latest phase of our civilisation. Now, its failure and fallibility exposed, the world’s elites are scrabbling frantically to buoy up an economic machine which, for decades, they told us needed little restraint, for restraint would be its undoing. Uncountable sums of money are being funnelled upwards in order to prevent an uncontrolled explosion. The machine is stuttering and the engineers are in panic. They are wondering if perhaps they do not understand it as well as they imagined. They are wondering whether they are controlling it at all or whether, perhaps, it is controlling them.
(The Dark Mountain Project – Walking On Lava: Selected Works For Uncivilised Times) via https://othersidesofnobody.tumblr.com/post/657844451993059328/forbidden-sorcery-it-is-it-seems-our

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Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences. (Roy Ascott’s phrase.) That solves a lot of problems: we don’t have to argue whether photographs are art, or whether performances are art, or whether Carl Andre’s bricks or Andrew Serranos’s piss or Little Richard’s ‘Long Tall Sally’ are art, because we say, ‘Art is something that happens, a process, not a quality, and all sorts of things can make it happen.’ … [W]hat makes a work of art ‘good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you — so the value of the work lies in the degree to which it can help you have the kind of experience that you call art.
(Brian Eno) via https://othersidesofnobody.tumblr.com/post/657758344951545856

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The researchers determine the players in these comic collisions based on their masses, which calculate based on the characteristics of the gravitational waves; if one of the objects is about twice the mass of our Sun or lighter, they figure it to be a neutron star. If a mass is five times our Sun or larger, they say it’s a black hole.
(https://gizmodo.com/astrophysicists-detect-black-holes-and-neutron-stars-me-1847193273)

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…are beginning to wake up to the moral hazard of farming baby alligators in their bathtub: the promise of croc-skin shoes is all very well, but when the alligator grows up and gets loose in your house, you have a problem on your hand. (Charlie Stross, 8 Jan 2021)

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The experience of the pandemic was made ghastlier by being placed against the declension of Trumpism from evil to absurdity—who will ever forget Four Seasons Total Landscaping?—and then back into even darker evil again. Philip K. Dick is the only author who could match the monstrous improbability of the protagonist, this oafish orange showman, who incarnates every hypocrisy known to man, for this combination of grotesque carnival and incipient fascism, in a farce-nightmare of authoritarianism as a reality show.
(Adam Gopnik New Yorker, Dec 31, 2020)

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the human animal is not marrowed and tendoned to roam the vast vistas of universal truth for too long before growing paralyzed again by its invented parochial partialities.
(Maria Popova)

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Every act of living is an act of learning to die, of apprenticing ourselves to the loss of this moment, of this collarbone being touched, of this hand doing the touching. If we are thoughtful and tender enough with ourselves, the terror of the loss cusps into transcendence, the grief into gratitude, into a nonspecific gladness enveloping everything that ever was and ever will be, enveloping us in the sense of ourselves as nothing more than particles passing between not yet and no more, nothing less than particular, particulate miracles bewildered and bewildering in their passage.
(Maria Popova)

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In the preface to his English-language version of Ovid’s Epistles, John Dryden identified three categories of translation: Metaphrase, or the word-for-word shift from one language to another; Paraphrase, where liberties on the sentence level are admissible if they best preserve the original meanings; and Imitation, where the translator “assumes the liberty, not only to vary from the words and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion.” Imitation allows for virtuosity but traduces its source, which is why Dryden champions the golden mean of Paraphrase.
(Sam Sacks in WSJ)

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Divination systems are sensemaking tools, which continue to fascinate, enchant, and nourish an archetypal need. Among these, astrology is the ur-example: a narrative art form of weaving stories out of numbers and data points.
(https://boingboing.net/2020/06/26/a-scheme-of-heaven-is-a-deep-i.html)

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Waving a book he hasn’t read, in front of a church he doesn’t attend, invoking laws he doesn’t understand, against fellow Americans he sees as enemies, wielding a military he dodged serving, to protect power he gained via accepting foreign interference, exploiting fear and anger he loves to stoke, after failing to address a pandemic he was warned about, and building it all on a bed of constant lies and childish inanity.
(Robert Hendrickson, Rector at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Tucson, AZ)

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The reader whose idea of the novel is formed by the English canon may at some stage start to read books in the French tradition. At that point, it may suddenly seem that everything one has previously read has essentially been children’s literature. Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, even Austen and Eliot, are all wonderful writers, but their work is founded in wish fulfilment, happy endings and love conquering all. The side notes and off notes and internal dissent are all there, of course, but they are subtextual, subtle, inexplicit. The main current of the English novel is in the direction of Happy Ever After, along the lines of Miss Prism’s deathless observation: ‘The good ended happily and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.’ When you turn from that tradition to the work of Laclos, Flaubert, Balzac, Stendhal, Maupassant and Proust, it’s like getting a glass of ice water in the face. Everybody lies all the time; codes of honour are mainly a delusion and will get you into serious trouble; the same goes for love; if you think the world is how it is described in consoling fictions, you have many catastrophic surprises in store. Above all, the central lesson of the French tradition is that people’s motives are sex and money, and you can write about those things as sex and money, directly, no euphemisms required.
(John Lanchester, in London Review of Books 4 June 2020)

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The virus presses in on society’s weaknesses, just as it attacks places of weakest resistance in the body, causing each polity to tighten at the borders of its sovereignty, “trying to call the world to a stop through a kind of force that nothing else could exert.” It has attacked medical systems, eldercare, social gatherings, mobility and travel, the global economic system, all at the cost of human lives. (from anthrodendum)

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There are days when everything I see seems to me charged with meaning: messages it would be difficult for me to communicate to others, define, translate into words, but which for this very reason appear to me decisive. They are announcements or presages that concern me and the world at once: for my part, not only the external events of my existence but also what happens inside, in the depths of me; and for the world, not some particular event but the general way of being of all things.

Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler, pg. 55

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As I read it, the implied future involves all of the shittier aspects of globalized capitalism feeding off each other and making each other worse. Thomas Friedman and others spun out elaborate fantasies of globalized markets where consumers got what they wanted, businesses competed with each other across a world smeared into a flat reflective plane by the invisible hand, and geopolitics evanesced into market-subordinated states and neoliberal awesome. Gibson instead presents a globalization where all the purported externalities, the unfortunate side effects, man-made Sargassoes of garbage, urban sinkpools of destitution and imposed squalor, plagues and industrial poisons feed on each other to create a complex self-ramifying system of their own, which is more or less inimical to human survival. He doesn’t dwell on the precise ways in which they reinforce each other. They aren’t particularly difficult to extrapolate.

Henry Farrell reviews William Gibson’s Agency

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The stockpiling of toilet paper in private (ware)houses might signal the fragility of supply chains but it also reveals the inability of information delivery systems to metabolize anxiety in a moment of crisis.

via Bruce Stirling

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the most important asset for a data-driven advertising platform is consumer engagement. That engagement throws off data, that data drives prediction models, those models inform algorithms, those algorithms drive advertising engines, and those engines drive revenue, which drives profit. And profit, of course, drives stock price, the highest and holiest metric of our capitalistic economy.

John Battelle

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For those of us in the US, cancer, in several forms, is metastasizing. But this is not a traditional statement of the condition but a description of the final collapse. No point in rehashing the details, but we have a failed national government with all major political divisions corrupted and in the hands of various criminal groups. At the head is an insane but almost comical monster who is wholly devoted to feeding on the population and plundering the ruins. There has been no pretense of anything else for quite some time.

Mike Meyer

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every necessary civic function in America is based on grift (see also: education, finance).

…Wait a second, so you’re telling me the government can just pay hospitals directly for medical care? And that health insurance companies are just unnecessary middlemen out to make a buck? Well, I’ll be damned…

http://hipcrimevocab.com/

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As we’ve often observed (“No post too obscure to escape notice“), we humans have a hard time evaluating the combination of hypotheticals and scalar predicates.

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Everything you think you know about thinking you know
about thinking things are wrong
is wrong.

(Nicholas Blackmer)

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If you would lead, then bring your lead
and take your soundings from it—
you need not heed what’s in your head;
just stop and drop your plummet.

If to the object you object,
don’t seek to overcome it;
your sense is suspect, I suspect—
don’t guess the depth, just plumb it.

When you have read what you must read
from bow or bridge or summit,
then learn what’s plead and once more plead,
and look before you plummet.

(James Harbeck, https://sesquiotic.com/2020/02/17/plummet/)

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See, the problem for educational institutions in the digital world is that most were built to leverage scarcity: scarce authority, scarce materials, scarce workspace, scarce time, scarce credentials, scarce reputation, scarce anchors of trust. To a highly functional degree we still need and depend on what only educational institutions can provide, but that degree is a lot lower than it used to be, a lot more varied among disciplines, and it risks continuing to decline as time goes on.
(Doc Searls, http://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2020/02/10/commons/ )

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…The next steps are increasing privatization (already well underway)
and eventually phasing out “democracy” altogether. The final
destination is intended to be a global tyranny run by a tiny gang of
supremacist psychopaths and their technocrat commissars
… a utopia
for them, and a cleverly disguised gulag for everyone else…

(Gregory Prinsze https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/507/State-of-the-World-2020-Bruce-St-page06.html#post127)

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Had Turing lived longer, perhaps the state of artificial intelligence would encompass more than drearily corporate banalities such as the Amazon checkout window making suggestions about what you might like for your next purchase, Google offering up a few words for how to complete a sentence in progress, or a South Korean genius [Go master Lee Sedol] having his soul crushed by a roomful of statistics wonks—not to mention more chillingly Orwellian developments, such as facial-recognition software.
(Paul Grimstad, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/living-in-alan-turings-future)

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Writers don’t just read for the story: they read for the way the story is written, and the way the sentences are put together is the information that sticks. It helps, however, to have been taught in the first place what a sentence is: something that conveys information only by the rules it keeps. Grammar is a mechanism for meaning one thing at a time. Without it, you can’t even manage to be deliberately ambiguous, although to be ambiguous by accident is a result all too easily attained.
(Clive James, quoted by John Pistelli https://johnpistelli.com/2020/01/18/clive-james-cultural-amnesia-necessary-memories-from-history-and-the-arts/ )

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Dos Passos portrays his inner life as raw, messy, and ambivalently associative. His style, in its way, suggests how the twenty-first century’s preferred mode of expression and argument—the rant—fits into the larger media ecosystem. Bloggy essays, emotive social-media posts, and even text messages, with their nervous run-on sentences and eccentric punctuation, are a natural response to information overload: a way of channelling and acknowledging the hectic, perpetually uncertain state of the world and the barrage of intense, often contradictory information that is constantly being produced to describe it. Dos Passos arrived at his own, pre-tech version of this style.
(Matt Hanson https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/what-john-dos-passoss-1919-got-right-about-2019)

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“Start at the beginning,” he said. “Move one step in the direction of your goal. Remember that you can change direction to maneuver around obstacles. You don’t need a plan, you need
a vector.”
–Cory Doctorow Homeland, quoted by Jim McGee

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Only two factors count: the public has an appetite for the details of public lives that are supposed to be secret, and there are vast amounts of money to be made in giving it this information. What else is there to be interested in? What else can the media do but go on giving us what we’re interested in? You can choose between helplessly watching rich, stupid folk walk into brick walls, and helplessly taking in the global suffering caused by politicians and corporations, and, of course, by our own greed. Better to be unable to do anything about something you don’t really care about. So the books keep coming. They’re still writing about Marilyn and Princess Grace: why, after only ten years, wouldn’t we be deluged with books about Diana? It’s just, you know, the way the world is.
–Jenny Diski (2007): https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n15/jenny-diski/tunnel-vision

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Gaslighting instead of apologising; when accused of misconduct, especially by a woman, deny, smear and yell fake news, because truth is fungible now and victory belongs to the brazen. —Tom Dart, The Guardian 23 Oct 2019

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What I’m against is what William Blake called single vision—being possessed by one single idea and seeing everything in terms of this one idea, whether it’s a religious idea or a scientific idea or a political idea. It’s a very bad thing. We need a multiplicity of viewpoints.
–Philip Pullman (https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/the-fallen-worlds-of-philip-pullman)

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John Tukey wrote, “The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see.”
(https://flowingdata.com/2019/03/14/process-32/)

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As a serial abuser of parentheses, I warn you against their overuse, particularly in the conveyance of elbow-nudging joshingness. One too many coy asides and you, in the person of your writing, will seem like a dandy in a Restoration comedy stepping down to the footlights and curling his hand around his mouth to confidentially address the audience. One rather needs a beauty mark and a peruke to get away with that sort of thing.
—Benjamin Dreyer, from Dreyer’s English : an utterly correct guide to clarity and style (2019)

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I [suspect] that we are throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services, into activities that generate high private rewards disproportionate to their social productivity. I suspect that the immense power of the computer is being harnessed to this ‘paper economy’, not to do the same transactions more economically but to balloon the quantity and variety of financial exchanges.

–James Tobin, July 1984 (via Language Log)

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The pressing ethical questions in machine learning are not about machines becoming self-aware and taking over the world, but about how people can exploit other people, or through carelessness introduce immoral behavior into automated systems.

(Maciej Ceglowski, at the end of a remarkable talk on AI)

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Nie mój cyrk, nie moje małpy
Not my circus, not my monkeys

(Polish saying, cited in Dave Hutchinson’s Europe in Winter)

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Let us remember that the automatic machine, whatever we think of any feelings it may have or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor. It is perfectly clear that this will produce an unemployment situation, in comparison with which the present recession and even the depression of the thirties will seem a pleasant joke. This depression will ruin many industries-possibly even the industries which have taken advantage of the new potentialities. However, there is nothing in the industrial tradition which forbids an industrialist to make a sure and quick profit, and to get out before the crash touches him personally.

(Norbert Wiener The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), quoted in Language Log 27 Nov 2016)

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Over the decades, the U.S. health care industry has matured, so to speak, into an interlocked cabal of insurance companies, kieretsus of hardware, software and service providers, and captive regulators of both. And because the system is mostly disconnected from the controlling effects of direct accountability to patients, costs and inefficiencies within the system have grown out of control. To say the least of it. (Doc Searls Weblog, 9 Nov 2016)

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Northmore himself is an honest, vehement sort of a fellow who splutters out all his opinions like a fiz-gig, made of gunpowder not thoroughly dry, sudden and explosive, yet ever with a certain adhesive blubberliness of elocution. (Letter from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Thomas Poole, 16 Sep. 1799).

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And you know cyber is becoming so big today. It’s becoming something that a number of years ago, a short number of years ago, wasn’t even word. And now the cyber is so big, and you know you look at what they’re doing with the internet. (Donald Trump)

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…in Britain, where the mainstream media is dominated by private school graduates who were trained to debate as if it were a bloodsport in which empathy is a handicap. London media wonks routinely treat one another as sparring partners and drinking buddies despite their political differences: after all, aren’t we all on the same team really? Aren’t we playing the same game? (Laurie Penny, I’m with the banned, at the Republican convention)

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Glyphosate is one of the world’s most widely used herbicides, with more than 6bn tonnes of the substance sprayed on farms, gardens and public spaces in the last decade.

It is also a perennial for the agro-industry group, accounting for just under a third of Monsanto’s earnings last year before interest and tax.

Increased weed resistance to the substance has coincided with ever greater use of it and tests consistently finding that a large majority of those surveyed now have traces of the substance in their blood streams.

(from The Guardian, 29 June 2016) [what can possibly go wrong?]

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Archeology is always an encounter between a fixed past and a shifting present; we bring to it our fantasies, prejudices, and predilections—this year different from last year, next year different again. (Charlotte Higgins, New Yorker blog, 3 June 2016)

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Antarctica has always been friendlier to Christianity than to the other Abrahamic faiths. Judaism and Islam have problems at high latitude due to an unhealthy preoccupation with sunsets. Christianity works right out of the box. (Maciej’s Idle Words)

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I may be a recovering science fiction novelist, I still know how to plot: you drop some casual fact or remark into the early story, it seems like just part of the background noise, and then at some critical point later in the story that fact or remark explodes into prominence and gives the whole story meaning. This is such an old gimmick that it has a classical Greek name: anagnorisis, which roughly translates as “learning up”—the aha! moment when we glimpse what reality really is.

Also known as the “shock of recognition,” this sudden flash of insight seems to depend on connecting a newly learned fact with something already learned and assimilated. The Danish science writer Tor Nørretranders calls it exformation: the information you don’t include in a message because your reader/listener knows it already. Exformation is also the principle behind the running gag: each time we see it, we flash back to the last time, and our brains reward us by dousing themselves in various euphoric chemicals. (Crof, at H5N1)

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Perhaps the web is too complicated now. Perhaps the vested interests are too vested. Perhaps the barrage of content of and peck, peck, click, click, Like, addiction feeding, pigeon rat, behaviourist conditioning, screen based crack-Like business model has blinded us to the idea that we can use the web to build our own useful tools. (Tony Hirst, at blog.ouseful.info)

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Vellichor: the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time — filled with thousands of old books you’ll never have time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, bound and dated and papered over like an old room the author abandoned years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were captured. (John Koenig, from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, cited by Michael Quinion in World Wide Words

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Winter storms are not named. The Weather Channel assigns names to winter storms as part of a social media marketing campaign. When you mention “Juno,” you’re participating in the proliferation of Big Weather. Think before you hashtag. (http://thevane.gawker.com/monday-morning-blizzard-update-sky-still-expected-to-f-1681763738)

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[at the end of 2014] Writers who were pessimistic about the state of the world tended to be the ones looking at the domestic situation, especially in the United States – the corrupt and paralyzed congress, the falling wages, the crushing debt burdens of our citizens, the militarization of police, the insularity of elites, the lawlessness with which the rich and powerful operate, the revolving door in government, the carceral state, joblessness caused by automation, the rising costs of housing, homelessness, falling education rates, failing schools, crumbling infrastructure, and so on. (via http://hipcrime.blogspot.com/2015/01/it-was-best-of-times-it-was-worst-of.html )

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Rules of the Garage

  1. Believe you can change the world
  2. Work quickly, keep the tools unlocked, work whenever
  3. Know when to work alone, and when to work together
  4. Share tools, ideas. Trust your colleagues
  5. No Politics. No bureaucracy (These are ridiculous in a garage)
  6. The customer defines a job well done
  7. Radical ideas are not bad ideas
  8. Invent different ways of working
  9. Make a contribution every day
  10. If it doesn’t contribute, it doesn’t leave the garage
  11. Believe that together we can do anything
  12. Invent.

Bill Hewlett and David Packard

(via Bruce Sterling https://www.flickr.com/photos/brucesterling/15802072552/ )

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That seven-five pattern you see on the keyboard is only visible there because it’s the structure of the diatonic scales that we hear. It’s a pattern within the musical model our culture is dominated by. It’s not that pattern, but how it fits the hands, and the habits of the hands that become actual reflexes, that can be limiting. They can become so ingrained that they keep the imagination from roaming. That happens with the guitar fretboard too, though with different patterns, and with an instrument such as “Music Mouse” too, I suppose. Each instrument somehow biases our music in its own unique direction. Some composers manage to transcend those kinds of habits, some compose away from any instrument, others invent new instruments. But the physiological interface is sort of an algorithmic constraint all on its own, and I would think there are also similar cognitive constraints. (Laurie Spiegel)

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The public health blogger Crof is not given to hyperbole, so one perks up the ears when he excoriates:

As politically embarrassing as it is, we’d better admit that our health systems, whether in the US, Canada, Britain, or Europe, have been coasting on their successes. In the half-century since polio vaccine came in, we haven’t faced a serious challenge to our public health. SARS was scary but soon beaten (by smart Chinese experts, not by us). H1N1 was a dodged bullet, highly contagious but not quite lethal enough to knock our bureaucrats and politicians out of their ergonomic desk chairs.

Hell, we’ve been so good that our young, ignorant families could skip vaccinating their kids and get away with it, at least for a while. And we could even ignore the thousands who die yearly in our hospitals and seniors’ homes of MRSA, C.Diff, norovirus, and other nosocomial diseases. No one’s going to write a page-one headline: Senior with Dementia Dies Miserably of Diarrhea-Induced Dehydration.

Our health systems are just as happy to keep it that way. Running hospitals, clinics and seniors’ homes is damned expensive. For at least 30 years we’ve been solemnly told that paying taxes is a crime and maybe a sin, so healthcare becomes harder to defend. It’s cheaper to outsource cleaning chores to low-paid workers than to pay union scale to people who know how to do it. Better to wheel the poor old dears out to the hearse in silence, and wait for the next batch of poor old dears.

(http://crofsblogs.typepad.com/h5n1/2014/10/the-case-for-an-overseas-assault-on-ebola.html)

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Can machines learn? Sure they can, of course they can, anything that is networked can learn. Simple stupid neurons, when joined together, can learn. So can simple stupid computers. But the most interesting results happen when you take networks of humans and, instead of telling them what to do, enable them to make decisions for themselves. Now you have networks of learning networks. You get remarkable results, like memes, cat photos, and maybe, global democracy. And it’s not magic. It’s the simple, observable, science of networks.

(Stephen Downes http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2014/10/moocthink.html)

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describing Bard President Leon Botstein: “Botstein’s moral outrage, which he expresses in vivid, syntactically complex speech, conceals a relentless idealism, and to spend time in his company is to be convinced moment by moment that he is operating within an insane and crooked system rigged by villains and run by fools.” (Alice Gregory, in New Yorker, Sept 29 2014 pg 58)

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In the sublime construction of Dave Weinberger, Knowledge is seen to be forky fork forked (well, he presents it as the way Progress works on the Net, but I like it as a model for Education)

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The tide has turned against the collector of recordings, not to mention the collector of books: what was once known as building a library is now considered hoarding. One is expected to banish all clutter and consume culture in a gleaming, empty room.
(Alex Ross in The New Yorker Sept 8, 2014)

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Most of the promised innovation we can expect in the coming years boils down to enhanced capacity to monitor our student activity, to mine data on these managed interactions. It’s a big part of the rationale that insists we keep online learning inside managed environments… What I realize now is that by directing our students to adapt to a world in which they can exercise no control over their environment, where every click and eyeball twitch is monitored and analyzed by inscrutable algorithms, we are in fact preparing them for the real world of work that they will be living in. The Learning Management System is in fact a near-perfect training ground for the world they will be inhabiting.

(Brian Lamb at Abject Learning)

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As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

The Ivy League is, of course, the preferred bleaching tub and charm school of the American oligarchy.
(Mike Lofgren on the Deep State)

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“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” as Jeff Hammerbacher said. And it’s not just data analysts: it’s creeping into every aspect of technology, including hardware. (Mike Loukides)

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Almost all authors born before, say, 1960 are something-ist by current standards of political judgment, which have been reshaped beyond the ability of most people in the past to imagine by the widespread diffusion of anti-essentialist and anti-naturalist philosophies through the arts and humanities: the aforementioned Doris Lessing was a homophobe, Toni Morrison a rape apologist, Saul Bellow a racist, Amiri Baraka an anti-Semite, Richard Wright a misogynist, Allen Ginsberg a pederast, Joan Didion an elitist, Susan Sontag a liberal imperialist, etc. As Samuel R. Delany once remarked, our own views, no matter how correct, will be regarded as monstrous 50 or 100 years hence. (John Pistelli)

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I think we’ve known for quite some time that science is not a set of facts that can be amassed but rather a network of interconnected perspectives or points of view. As Michael Polanyi said in 1962, “This network is the seat of scientific opinion which is not held by any single human brain, but which is split into thousands of different fragments … each of whom endorses the other´s opinion at second hand, by relying on the consensual chains which link him to all the others through a sequence of overlapping neighborhoods.” (from Stephen Downes)

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re: why Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell isn’t more influential: Perhaps it’s just sui generis, so wonderful and unique that it can’t really be an influence except as a spur to excellence? Or maybe, in the same way it doesn’t appear to have much in the way of immediate ancestors, it can’t produce descendants? It’s wonderful, but it’s not what fantasy is, it isn’t in dialogue with fantasy and it’s hard for fantasy to engage with it? (Jo Walton)

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Is it not interesting that so many males in America affect to be warriors? What does this tell us about the psychological dimensions of manhood in this country? If I have to guess, I’d venture that many people of the male persuasion hereabouts can’t imagine any other way of being a man — other than as a fine-tuned bringer-of-death, preferably some species of cyborg, with “techno” bells and whistles …the romance of monsterdom is yet another theme in the current caboodle of American manhood. Boys are in love with monsters, and want to be them, or like them, or with them, and nowadays many succeed at that. The indulgence in all these juvenile enthusiasms presents in the absence of any better models of a way to be… what are the chances that such people reared on dreams of triumphal violence will operate on the basis of kindness, generosity, and consideration of any future beyond the next fifteen minutes. (James Howard Kunstler, Warrior Land, 20 Jan 2014)

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We are going through a difficult time, one in which very strong polarization exists. Turks are a race of survivors, and I believe the situation will transform itself into a calmer state. The majority of the country is made up of rock-solid, conservative, patient people with good sense, and I am hoping that their good sense will prevail. However, there will be a price to be paid: My generation of city-born, non-religious, well-educated, Western-oriented Turks will not accept the transformation that Turkey must necessarily go through, and they will end up being marginalized. These are the people who are presently in a very emotional state, their moods swinging like a pendulum from panic to anger. It’s not nice for a country to have its intellligentsia become marginalized, but I don’t see a way out of that. Demonizing a people’s religion and cultural identity is not a recipe for peace; the Soviet Union and Mao’s China were experiments that showed that this does not work. …our mini-cultural revolution that tried to convert us into a people dressed in the French style who whistle Beethoven symphonies has come to a dead end, and is now being shed like a used-up snake skin. If we do things right, something new and healthy will emerge from this. (Ayşe Soysal, quoted in Informed Comment)

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Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. …a place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller’s art, and then a way of traveling from here to there. (Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby, first page)

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Utility companies across America are fighting solar, imposing high fees on homeowners who install their own solar panels to feed back into the grid. This one was predictable from a long, long way out — energy companies being that special horror-burrito made from a core of hot, chewy greed wrapped in a fluffy blanket of regulatory protection, fixed in their belief that they have the right to profit from all power used, whether or not their supply it. (from Cory Doctorow, 27 December 2013)

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Luckily bureaucracy breeds, and it takes many meetings to manage the added complexity of administration required by our chronic overstaffing. There are people here who I only know of through their Outlook calendars, which are perpetually logjammed. Entire departments beaver away in anonymous quiet, building paper dams to hold the real world at bay. I shine my torch across empty in-trays, battered chairs, desks that reek of existential pointlessness. (from tor.com, 25 December 2013)

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Ruthlessly collecting every detail of online behaviour is something we do clandestinely for advertising purposes, it shouldn’t be corrupted because of your obsession over national security! (from O’Reilly Radar, 9 December 2013)

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Focusing primarily on cost, costliness, and administrative priorities takes the health of the “health care system” as the primary goal. It is a focus that provides no measurable advantage in caring for people. Persisting in this approach, and even expanding it, provides a temporary diversion, but not a solution. Neither the practice of medicine nor its infrastructure is the reason for medicine to exist. Furthermore, becoming a savvy consumer of “health care” is not what is meant by informed medical decision making. Medicine’s primary calling is to the personal, unique, idiosyncratic needs and values of each person who chooses to be (or must become) a patient. (from a SciAm blog)

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Adoxography is the rhetorical praise of things of doubtful value

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Assessment centres for accreditation are where corporations see their profits…

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