11:26pm
Ana has commanded me to update my blog, so here I am. Speaking of ana, I modified my 'dada phrase generator' into an ana pet name generator. It's nice to have that code base for random phrase generation -- it's an easy way to make web pages goofily interesting. mike had actually ported my original code, which was in qbasic, over to javascript for me, since I've never invested any serious time in trying to learn javascript. I can modify it without too many problems, especially since mike's code is so clean, but I don't know where all of those ridiculous little syntax particularites go, like various permutations of parentheses designated to go in very specific places or else the thing won't work.
5:39pm
alpesh wanted me to add a link to his website WHICH IIIII DESIGNED (me).1:00pm
I was reading about a priori knowledge and deductive reasoning, and came to the conclusion that they're inherently flawed in the same way godel found mathematical systems to be.
The way I understand it, godel said that within any system of mathematics, you start with basic axioms, or really basic and fundamental assumptions, like x=x or something like that. I guess we get x=x and other axioms from powerful intuition, something like common sense, or analogous experience in the real world; it seems to make sense that a cow is a cow, or an apple is an apple. So, we start out with these really basic assumptions, and then work from these to 'prove' (in the mathematical sense) more complicated assertions. But the problem of which godel made the world aware is that you can never 'prove' those axiomatic assumptions you started with unless you go outside the system entirely.
Essentially, it's a problem with cause and effect. If you work backwards from a formula that's been proven, you move along a series of preceding causes, until you reach the 'unmoved mover,' the axiom -- the little godhead and source of this world you've constructed. Incidentally, that's one of the philosophical arguments for the existence of god -- supposedly if you follow the chain of cause far back enough, you'll arrive at something that wasn't caused, that just IS. And when you've found that, you've found your axiomatic god. However, this is dumb because there's no reason to assume there can't be an infinite series of cause and effect. But anyway, our own little unmoved mover, our axiom that just IS, is arbitrarily created, or at least not deductively created. You can't reason your way to the conclusion that 'an apple is an apple' -- it's just acccepted as true.
So, the next thing one notices is that this principle of axiomatic knowledge being inherently unprovable reflects on a problem with deductive reasoning (what was your starting point?), a priori knowledge (by definition), and pretty much anything we can conceive of. Let's say that one were to deduce that jenny's mom will be given a paper snowflake for mother's day through a particular chain of cause and effect. First of all, jenny has no money and mother's day is tomorrow. We know jenny was making paper snowflakes because there were only two activities in the class (snowflake making and finger painting), and jenny wasn't finger-painting because her fingers aren't green. We can move backwards through the chain of cause and effect until we get to the first term, and then we're forced to seek out a new cause. We can struggle further back along the chain of causality, but we'll always be able to go farther back. So, we have to start somewhere -- this is our axiomatic assumption, our unmoved mover. In this case, our axiomatic assumotion was that jenny has no money and mother's day is tomorrow.
The alternative is to abandon the validity of deduction entirely in lieu of induction; we believe that mom will come home today because she has every day from time immemorial. But we don't 'know' it; we can't 'prove' it or deduce it. There's no a priori knowledge that guarantees mom will be home. In short, we can't know anything, ever.
Again, reality falls apart.
The idea of applying the incompleteness theorem to anything and everything is interesting to me, and I've blogged about it before. There's something mystical and unscientific about a priori reasoning and deduction; it smacks of platonism. Aristotelian induction and knowledge through observation strike me as being more zen, simple, and correct. Why major in math when you can major in physics?
11:36am
Every once and a while I look at other blogs that are 'powered by blogger' or greymatter or movable type, and I get depressed that there's no way to link to my individual entries or post comments. But then it passes, and I realize that I'm superior to you in every way. Some mormons came by the house the other night, so I fractured their skulls with my elbow, gouged out their eyes with my thumbs, bloody tore the flesh from their faces with my teeth, and threw them into traffic.
I was just thinking the other day -- most people don't keep 10-20 chicken bones in their cupboard and the remains of burned bibles in their bbq grills. Maybe I have what it takes to become a voodoo priest.
I was going to blog about god and religion at some point, but I'm having classic web-anger right now, so I think I'll blog instead about how I enjoy sulking and typing violent sentences while I listen to bob james and my mom sleeps on the couch.
I may take the Greyhound bus to charleston, wv, to visit ana this thanksgiving. It depends on if I'd be welcome, and if I can get picked up in charleston (and driven back to charleston in a few days).
Always remember that my not tearing you to pieces is a privilege, not a right.
3:12pm
I was in a bad mood yesterday, because ana's mother was unwilling to let her 18 year old daughter spend a week with an unemployed 28 year old man. Can you imagine? In all honesty, I'd be freaked out if my little doe-eyed daughter was spirited away to go spend a family holiday with this hulking, demonic-looking dude with jesus hair. But it's still disappointing -- I wanted ana to meet my family and local friends.
My website continues to improve. Without some kind of content management, I find myself often playing assembly line worker, opening 80 documents in a row with notepad and making the same change to the code.
I'm not sure what the weather's like; I'm thinking bikerideish thoughts. Lately, I've been using unix for more and more of my computing needs (i should really say 'wants'). Not only do I get to revel in unix snobbery, but it's much easier on my machine if it only has to run a few 200k putty terminals, through which I can browse the web, check email, chat on the AIM network, and edit my blog. This frees up resources for my mp3 player, design software, and other things that require processor/RAM-intensive sound and graphics.
I really shouldn't blog about computers; it's incredibly boring to read.
9:44pm
Well, thanksgiving is shot. Ana definitely can't come. And I wonder to myself: what exactly am I doing? For some reason, ana not being able to visit throws the stagnation of my life into relief. What am I supposed to be doing, exactly? I don't see the point of graduate school for art. Maybe graduate school for education, but quite honestly if I fill out another fucking form I will explode into a violent outburst, possibly at borders or maybe even 7-11, with one of those beretta military repeater shotguns that holds eight rounds. You can find them for sale on usenet.
Key point to remember: when has following a human's advice ever gotten me anywhere? I'm tired of people and their idiocy. I'd kill them all, but it's much easier just to ignore them.
Oh, I finished reformatting and updating my site. It's much cleaner and navigable now. Give it a try! It's funny, and I guess I should have expected it; the only thing ever to generate any significant traffic on my website is my bunnyranch article. Why fight it? Post 'dada revolution' artists are too focused on exlusion to concentrate on creation, and basically comprise a club of pansified intellectuals, perpetually congratulating each other on their superiority to the rest of the world. The people who will be remembered by history are the craftsmen, those who are defining visual culture by sculpting the very roots of society itself, like the person who designed the coca cola logo, the person who came up with the octagonal, red stopsign, the person who decided that apache servers should display their directories in the courier font, etc. These are the real 'artists,' not some self-important proponent of intellectual masturbation who plants a toilet in a museum and signs it 'r mutt.' dada, anti-art, 'art for art's sake' and 'conceptual art' were interesting for about five minutes, but for some reason we're still stuck on them almost 100 years later. The ironic part is that duchamp himself eventually muttered 'this is ridiculous' and went off to play chess. But we were all too busy asking 'what is art?' and rakishly tilting our berets in the mirror to notice.
Humans do not need to use their brains more than they do already. In fact, trying to escape the incessant mental chatter that our over-evolved brains are constantly broadcasting is essential to even marginal, transient spiritual awakening. Living in the moment, and striving to experience the clarity that is the root of being itself is not a noble goal, but a mindful one. This is why conceptual art isn't helpful to 20th century nihilism -- it's the antizen. You aren't going to find god in an aging academic's tenure piece about posthumanism, alleatoric happenings or any of the other fluxus/dada party-lines that somehow haven't been beaten quite to death; you'll obviously have better luck with a kindergartener's crayon drawing of a schoolbus. Intellectual masturbation isn't the road to anything, least of all beauty, inner peace and respite from the existential vacuum.
Speaking off all of this: a new art project is coming, maybe as soon as tomorrow night. Prepare yourselves.
4:15pm
Fixing my website is daunting. I don't know how long it'll take. I should work for a while.
11:41am
I'm in the process of cleaning up my website by taking out all the javascript. I will forever eschew popup windows and frames, since they confound search engines (well, unless the frames involve social commentary. I missed out on a lot of traffic over the past few days because people were looking at my writing pages as they found them with search engines, and none of the pages had any links back to my site, since they were intended for viewing in popup windows. For some reason, I had a really big hardon for popup windows a while back, and they're absolutely everywhere on my site. It's going to be quite a lot of effort to add links to all of these formerly linkless pages.
Today, I'm supposed to call ana's mother and ask her what her fucking problem is. She's threatening that if ana goes to my house for thanksgiving, she won't be let back in the house upon her return to west virginee. Truly, there are some psychos out there. Unfortunately, there isn't a basic competence and sanity test one has to pass before reproducing. I know I'd probably fail it.
Humans are largely dumb, unattractive creatures. Imagine if dogs were as dumb and ugly as people; no one would ever adopt them from the humane society.
I'm waiting for ana to get on AIM, so she can alert me that her mom is available. Here's what I'm going to say: 'hi, mrs. Williams...ana tells me there are some problems surfacing regarding ana's and my thanksgiving plans. Do you want to tell me some of your concerns?' haha, I sound like a PR exec.
8:26pm
Maybe one entry a day is enough. Oh, I fixed my problem with limited buffer size in vim. It's funny how all of these .*rc files for unix programs have almost identical syntaxes. Maybe there's a secret line you can put in one of them, like 'set lottery=WIN/1000000' that'll have corresponding results.
Oh, news: several blogs linked to my bunnyranch story, and I got over 12,000 hits on Monday, according to my site's apache server logs. It calmed down quite a bit yesterday and today, and I don't think it'll leave much, if any lasting change in my traffic patterns. But nevertheless, I changed my bunnyranch page so that it links back to my other pages. I also changed my resume from art-geek to prospective and eager employee. It's a good generic resume, I think.
10:00am
Losing part of my entry describing mark and peter's visit is really bothering me, and it was bothering me all last night. I think the solution is just to wait until this section is shunted off into the archives this Saturday, and move on with my life. But every time I've lost a file or part of a file due to a problem or lack of fluency in a human-computer interface adds to my feeling that I should really be seeking out other avenues of personal expression.
Which brings me to my whole discussion of the inherently flawed nature of 'usability' engineering (you knew it was coming). I'll keep this one short, if I can.
The purpose of 'usability' design/engineering is to make computers easier to use. Essentially, to force computers to come closer to our way of understanding the world (with gui point-and-click interfaces, individual executable files, etc). The problem is, in order to force the computer to 'think like a human,' one has to use up the computer's resources and damage the flexibility of a program or operating system. The more things a computer program is capable of doing, the less 'usable' it is. For instance, the most flexibility comes with a unix system, where you literally script your way through problems. If you want, for instance, a randomly generated signature appended to the end of each of your emails, it's just a matter of writing a simple script, in any programming language that is supported. In unix, anything you can conceive of, you can usually accomplish (for the most part). It's this flexibility that contributes to unix's lack of classical usability, or 'usability.'
On the other hand, consider a windows operating system. People are used to things like the taskbar and start menu, and so it becomes more 'usable.' but in actuality, it's essential frozen -- if you want something done, you'd better hope there is some program for sale out there somewhere that will do it for you. So, the more 'usable' a computer is (by microsoft/apple ca. Mac os 9 standards), the less flexible it's going to be, and the less you'll be able to do with it. Dumbed-down, 'don't make me think' 'usability' design actually makes a computer program less usable, in that you are capable of accomplishing less with it.
My conclusion is that 'usability' and flexibility are inherently opposed; the more 'usable' a system is made (defining 'usable' as 'easy to use' or 'familiar to use'), the less usable it is made (defining 'usable' as 'fit to use,' or 'capable of generating a variety of uses.')
I don't know about this new format -- it might be considerably more difficult to archive, but with the old format people could snidely call up blog.html, and not necessarily view it in the iframe I intended to be its home. Also, google was indexing blog.html separately, because, after all, it was a separate html document. Blogging directly on my index page solves that, but archiving is no longer simply a matter of renaming files in unix. Maybe if I figure out how to make greymatter look the way I want it to look, I'll start using that. But it's so much easier to handcode than it is to figure out some fucker's idiot template system. It's like they say: it's much easier to build things than it is to fix them.
By the way, I just figured out why I lost part of my file; vim has a maximum buffer size which I exceeded. So, when I tried to copy-paste from blog.html to index.html, the bottom of my first entry was truncated. In the future, I should just copy the whole file in unix instead of trying to use vim buffers.
Or, I can rely on the gruff-but-helpful counsel of one sven guckes, who implied on a usenet post that I was unworthy to use mutt because I 'couldn't be bothered to use sigdashes' on my posts. But he's been very helpful, being a vim and mutt guru, so I look upon his unix-ish testiness with affection. Sven gave me enough information to find on google some examples of .vimrc files that contained the appropriate line for increasing the buffer size. Good ol' sven, bless heez hawrt. A particularly sven-ish, sven-authored document on who is and who is not worthy to use vi can be found here.
7:06pm
Nick and I went for another bike ride, this time just to the bike store to look for headbands and to borders to look for books on bike trails. On my request, the repairman on duty wiped off my chain, cleaned some gunk out of the jockey-wheel assembly and adjusted some little screw for free, but my gears seemed to be sicker when he had finished. If I were paranoid, I'd say that he did it on purpose so I would later have to take my bike in for a $60 drive train and brake tune-up. Of course, his intention was not to mess up my gears, but the system has evolved that way.
Let me tell you about the system. In a society, things will evolve a certain way based on certain characteristics of the 'system,' and not necessarily due to any conscious effort. For example, imagine a company that sells lawnmowers, and imagine that they also repair lawnmowers. Imagine that they are the only place in town where lawnmowers can be bought and repaired.
Now imagine that they sell you a lawnmower. Imagine that your lawnmower breaks. Imagine that you take it in to be repaired. This happens hundreds, thousands of times, to all of the company's customers. The repair department is doing well, and is bringing in a lot of money for the company.
The lawnmower company has a limited amount of resources. Being limited, they're going to be invested in the things that make money, that yield a proven return. Obviously, the repair department is making money, so more repairmen will be hired, more equipment will be bought, etc. There is no impetus for the company to build decent lawnmowers to begin with -- they might not even be aware that they're building lawnmowers that break. But the money they put into the repair department is taken from the lawnmower research and development budget. There is no reason to work on building a lawnmower that doesn't break -- all of the accounting data points to the fact that the repair department is booming, and thus needs more attention and money. So, because the need to examine the fact that lousy lawnmowers are being constructed never comes up (because it doesn't need to), lousy lawnmowers keep being built, and keep being taken in to the repair department when they break.
Because companies work on the principle of growth, things that aren't growing can be thought of as actually getting smaller. Under our system, a company that doesn't grow and eliminate its competition is not successful. So, the lawnmower company's research and development department can be thought of as shrinking, since it's not keeping pace with the static growth of the rest of the company.
Let's use the bike shop as an example, just to stay grounded in reality. The repairmen there are payed to work, but are not discouraged by their management from doing simple repairs for free if they so desire. Of course, since they are not getting paid by the hour for these free repairs, they're encouraged to do a shoddy job so they can get back to their paid-by-the-hour repairs and bring home a fatter check. It's also tempting to speculate about the unconscious mind, and it's effect on repairperson competence. Also, repairmen get paid regardless of how skilled their work is, or what the results of that work are. This situation is only effective under monopolistic capitalism; under ideal capitalism, other bike shops would spring up to attract business away from the first bike shop with their crack repair department. But that isn't going to happen.
Companies evolve under monopolistic capitalism, much like a fish evolves into a legged thing, in the direction of the bottom line; a company exists because it is making a profit. So, things like competent, helpful customer service representatives are phased out or reduced, being replaced with maddening electronic telephone-trees ('if your lawnmower is spewing a red liquid, press one. If your lawnmower it spewing a green liquid, press two. Etc'), since customer service is a liability rather than an asset. Things end up this way under our system of monopolistic capitalism. Under 'ideal' capitalism, a good customer service department would encourage business.
The central principle is that the features of our system create situations that do not best serve the consumer.
All of this assumes the absence of perfect competition (or anything like it), under which the lawnmower company would be forced to figure out a way to build a lawnmower that doesn't break or else another lawnmower company will drive the first lawnmower company out of business with it's non-breaking lawnmowers. The reason this doesn't happen, the reason products and services are often subpar, is that monopolistic situations arise under our brand of capitalism.
Why do monopolies arise? Who's fault is it? A lot of people blame the government, but I don't know if that's entirely true. My instincts tell me that monopolistic behavior have a lot to do with human nature, and a intrinsic need not to challenge authority or to upset hierarchy. This ties in to esr's essay on the myth of man the killer ape -- how our original sin isn't violence, but rather blind obedience.
So, maybe capitalism isn't for us, if it's always going to end up as it is in our system, due to inherent problems with human motives and behavior.
12:24pm
Back to the grindstone. I slept for about 11 hours last night. I played with my resume a little bit, shrinking the margins to accommodate a readable font-size, because as we all know, people are much too busy synergizing action-items to flip to the second page of a resume. They're totally, totally swamped! They're sorry they didn't get back to you sooner, but they're just SWAMPED. Did you hear me? Swamped.
Distinguishing between wants and needs involves making some axiomatic assumptions that are arbitrary, as is the case with just about everything. godel's incompleteness theorem applies to any conceivable assertion, assumption or standard. For instance, if you say 'our basic needs are only food and shelter from the elements' then you are making the assumption that we 'need' to stay healthy and remain alive. But if our axiomatic assumption is that if we need to stay purple, then the needs that arise from that are 'purple magic markers or purple paint.' or, if your axiomatic needs are to stay happy regardless of how long you live or how healthy you remain, then the resultant set of needs might involve narcotics.
8:43pm
I went three days without blogging, because my friends mark and Peter were in town for their cousin's wedding. I feel almost burdened now that I have events to report, as opposed to theories to weave. I'll be frank.
Mark and Peter flew into dulles airport on Saturday morning at 7:30am. I wasn't able to get to sleep the preceding night until something like 1am, and so had a hard time waking up. Bedtime was delayed because I was cleaning the house in preparation for my guests, and all of that late-night frenetic activity sort of wound me up. As I tried to sleep, I kept on hearing noises downstairs and going down to check them out, armed with my beater-pole. They turned out to be the french doors bap-bap-bapping themselves against their frame. Anyway, I peeled myself out of bed at 6:37am, eight minutes before I had scheduled myself to leave the house for the airport.
Saturday was spent mostly at the wedding, which was all right; just another wedding, really. I hit the hors d'oeuvres pretty hard at the reception; multiple trips, multiple plates. There was an open bar, but I wasn't really in the mood, choosing instead to focus on meats-on-sticks. Mark and Peter had taken an overnight flight immediately after their workday, and then went immediately to a wedding, so they were pretty wiped out. But mark and his girlfriend wei (whom he brought along) managed to come bowling with me, jimmy and josie (two other people, previously unmentioned, who are friends of the bride's brother, richard). I rolled an 80-something, which was a pretty high score for me. I once rolled a 26.
Mark and wei stayed with jimmie and josie, while Peter continued to sleep on my couch. On Sunday, Peter and I went for a walk in seneca park, and then picked up mark and wei for a drive to columbia to visit mark and peter's father, the infamous bomi. After stopping at a really nice, quaint-but-clean diner along the scenic route (rt 28 to 97 to 108 to 32), we visited, took pictures and walked to a nearby playground with bomi's most recent set of children, ages (i think) 2, 5 and 6. We played freeze tag. Then, the hour had arrived for a dinner date with various family/wedding-oriented people at zed's in georgetown. Ethiopian food is served in disappointingly small-looking portions, but the spongiform bread, with which one scoops and soaks up the meaty/saucy chunks in lieu of silverware, expands the stomach to satiety. I had an ethiopian beer -- it was good (a little bit like tsingtao: spicy, fruity, tangy, metallic).
Peter and I dropped mark off at the airport, where he was to catch another red-eye flight and start work on Monday. I would have been demoralized in his situation, but mark has a lot of energy. Peter and I decided to revisit our youth that evening, and picked up a 30-pack of beast ice, partly as a kind of counter-revolutionary move against the haughty beer aesthetic that creeps into so many of us as we pass our teens and early 20's. Peter and I decided that holding our noses as we passed the cases of bud, coors and rolling rock on our way to the tsingtao, becks and sierra nevada pale ale was something that should be put aside for an evening, in order to make a stand against the immorality of enjoying the taste of a beer before its utility.
I lost a great deal of this entry. I hate computers. Anyway, what happened next was we sat around the house on Monday, and then I drove Peter to the airport. Oh, and we went for a walk along the railroad tracks, had a pizza on the way to the airport, etc. I really fucking hate computers. No one that uses a computer has not had the experience of losing something. This just doesn't happen in quite the same way in other forms of expression. Actually, Peter cites this as one of the main reasons he will not use a computer in any serious way.
I have 13 beers in my window-well.