(Juxta)position. (Juxta)position. (Juxta)position.

Inspired by a recent post of Roy Edroso to search for some info on the montage sequence in The Parallax View I found this rather old article which makes some very good points about the power of creating meaning from juxtapostion:

What we experience in Parallax is a short film constructed of still images and printed text titles, cut to music in a montage style not unlike experimental films of the 1960's...

At first, Parallax' montage seems like one of these. Soothing music is heard behind harmonious iconographic images familiar from Life Magazine - style photo layouts. Pictures of sweet old ladies and hardworking farmers accompany the titles 'MOM' and 'DAD.' Similiar stereotypical images follow title cards for 'GOD', 'LOVE', 'HAPPINESS', and so forth. The music starts to become more upbeat and dynamic, and the visual pace quickens as the same categories are revisited with new visuals and repeats of the old ones. This is going somewhere, we can tell . . . Odd cuts slip in, that don't seem to fit the categories, either because they are too fast to 'read', or contain disturbing content - lynchings, children in peril, the blurred, frighful face of a terrorized woman.

Soon the images are coming too fast for us to 'categorize' them. Each image has its own emotional reaction, some of which raise the hair on one's neck - Nazis, for instance, next to the Pope. Confusion sets in as images are repeated in contexts which change their meanings. Photos of people having sex, and stacks of coins are pleasing against the title 'HAPPINESS' but become unsettling when juxtaposed with images of what seem to be torture victims and political oppression.

Also, identical pictures appear to change 'without changing.' The impression made by a sweet rural mother changes when placed before shots of filthy, impovershed children. When placed in a context of persecution, her very expression seems to change too - a sensitive viewer knows his reactions are being manipulated, sculpted by the cutting. A portrait of George Washington is distastefully intercut with Nazi iconography, which seems artificially crude until the portrait is revealed as being displayed on a wall side-by-side with a Swastika (of a Klan member?).

Just when chaos seems total, the montage maker brings a unifying theme to the forefront. Each wave of buzzword concepts has ended with the title 'ME.' 'ME' has been evolving, from a happy baby, to an abused boy, to the imprisoned victim of tyrants and racists. Increasingly disturbing groupings equate the American flag, Hitler, MacArthur, the Pope, and a comic-book demon. Images of poverty, sex, and racial murder tumble forward. Repeated flags and patriotic icons drive home the message that "America is in trouble, the family is in trouble." Only when 'ME' becomes a hammer-swinging Nordic avenger (the comic-book character Thor) does the ANSWER arrive to end all the ideological trauma.

As a youth, I taped The Parallax View from a television broadcast and watched this montage over and over, fascinated by the clever way it shifted and distorted (or revealed) concepts solely through the intercutting of words and images. The article cited above doesn't mention one edit I found particularly amusing, when images of motorcycle policemen, first appearing as symbols of authority and order, are shown in repeated sequence with nude male dancers, recontextualising the leather-clad cops as icons of gay fetishism; an attempt, I assumed, to tap into the viewing psychopath's insecurities about his sexuality as another path to arousing the confusion and rage necessary to create a suitable assassin/patsy. It was interesting to me that the montage's muddying of concepts such as "Enemy" (first Castro, Stalin, Hitler &c then the same images that had been earlier used to illustrate "Country" or "Home") were done in an essentially ideologically neutral way; presumably preferring to create a contextless anger that could be directed by the Corporation against any target regardless of their politics. Of course, the conceptual manipulation in the film is really quite crude; the real thing would be much less obvious than in the Parallax montage, which had to look like manipulation for the benefit of the audience viewing the film in which it appears. Still great fun, though; and I loved the way the music track maintained its basic melody while becoming more brooding to accompany the darker imagery.

(Punning titles considered and rejected for this non-post: "Juxtaposition, Ma'am", "Parallaxative" and "The Full Montage".)

Sunset Clause

Navy's $100m chopper can't fly in bad light

Serious flaws have been uncovered in Australia's $1.1 billion squadron of Seasprite naval helicopters, rendering them unable to fly crucial missions.

Costing $100 million each - more than the latest stealth fighter - and arriving more than three years late, the helicopters cannot be used in murky weather when the pilots' external vision is impaired, the Herald has learnt.

They have been restricted to simple tasks, such as delivering stores and transporting passengers, and only when the weather is good. - SMH

"Now I must admit here there is a very strong possibility that our Seasprites won't get through. The Seasprite is a ludicrously cumbersome vehicle, depending as it does on a group of highly trained runners carrying it into enemy territory."

"Seaslug" in the original, of course, but as we - apparently - say in our country: "Near enough is good enough, eh?"

Strong Reciprocity

An interesting article from this month's New Scientist, on altruism:

..."The facts are clear," [economist Ernst] Fehr says. "Many people are willing to cooperate and to punish those who don't, even when no gain is possible."

This tendency - which researchers call "strong reciprocity" - throws into question the assumption that apparently selfless behaviour must have some selfish explanation. Across disciplines, researchers now agree that people often act against their own self-interest.

...

But when it comes to explaining the origin of our altruism, matters get a whole lot more contentious. In evolutionary terms it is a puzzle because any organism that helps others at its own expense stands at an evolutionary disadvantage. So if many people really are true altruists, as it seems, why haven't greedier, self-seeking competitors wiped them out?

One possibility, [evolutionary biologist Robert] Trivers suggests, is that evolution actually is wiping these people out - it just hasn't finished the job yet. He, along with many anthropologists, takes the view that humans evolved to cooperate when our ancestors lived in small, isolated groups of hunter-gatherers. In this setting, they learned through repeated interaction with others that cooperation generally pays because it induces other members of the group to return a favour in the future. Biologists refer to strategic cooperation of this kind as "reciprocal altruism". It cannot directly explain the true altruism found in experiments in which anonymous players meet only once, offering them no hope of future gain. But it is the benefits we gained from reciprocal altruism in our evolutionary past that lead us to behave with "inappropriate" altruism in experiments like Fehr's, Trivers says. "Our brains misfire when presented with a situation to which we have not evolved a response."

...

Undoubtedly adaptations that evolved to help us cope under specific conditions can backfire when situations change. But not everyone is convinced by the idea that true altruism is such a maladaptation. [Anthropologist Joseph] Henrich disagrees with the theory's central premise. He believes that while our ancestors lived in small, close-knit groups, one-shot interactions with strangers would have been common even then. What's more, these interactions could have been crucial to people's survival, because they would have occurred over shared resources such as water holes and prey animals and, more crucially, in times of catastrophe such as flood or drought. "Environmental shocks would have guaranteed that strangers encountered one another during fitness-critical times," Henrich says.

If both one-shot and repeated interactions were routine in ancestral life, Henrich argues, evolution would presumably have prepared us to distinguish between the two with some precision. And that does seem to be the case. Two years ago economists Simon Gächter of the University of St Gallen in Switzerland and Armin Falk of the University of Bonn, Germany, looked at how people alter the way they play the prisoner's dilemma game depending on whether the game involves one-shot or repeated encounters with others. If people treat one-shot encounters as if they were repeated - as the maladaptation idea suggests - then there shouldn't be a difference. But they found that repeated play more than doubled cooperation levels, indicating that we are fully capable of adapting our behaviour to the situation at hand...

Further support for the idea that strong reciprocity is an adaptation in its own right comes from the theoretical studies of economist Herbert Gintis of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, anthropologist Robert Boyd of the University of California at Los Angeles, and others. They set up a computer model in which groups of individuals interacted, and watched how their behaviour evolved. Individuals were set up in the model to behave initially either as cheats or as cooperators, and in personal interactions the former came off best. When groups competed with one another, however, cooperation came into its own: groups with more cooperators were likely to flourish.

But that was only the start. The individuals, whether initially cooperators or cheats, were also programmed to copy successful behaviour. In simulations with groups ranging from 4 to 256 individuals, the team found that altruism could evolve. The benefits that cooperation conferred on a group outweighed its costs to individuals - but only in groups of less than about 10. Ancestral human hunter-gatherer bands are thought to have numbered 30 or more individuals, so how could cooperative behaviour have evolved and spread in these groups?

The answer lies in the fact that strong reciprocity is not simply a matter of cooperation; it also requires punishment of those who fail to toe the line. When the team added punishment to their models, they found it made a huge difference. In a second round of simulations, they included a new kind of individual: the "punishers". These punishers were not only willing to cooperate with others but also to punish cheats. By making cheats pay for their antisocial actions, they tipped the balance towards cooperation. This time, competition between groups led to the emergence of cooperation in groups of up to 50 individuals...

Which is good to know - but here's a cautionary note:

Despite our altruism, generosity may not be in our genes. If true altruism has evolved through competition between groups, as some researchers maintain ..., then it is more likely to be the product of cultural evolution. Genetic evolution works by selecting individuals [or genes - strange to see a British science mag taking the Gouldian line - RW] with traits that are well adapted to their environment, but it has a far weaker grip on traits that benefit the group. So altruism is more likely to be learned. After all, every human culture invests considerable effort in instilling children with moral norms that help further cooperation.

Which means that a culture devoted to rewarding cheaters may eventually weed out strong reciprocity, and the devotees of those pseudo-scientific dogmas that claim human nature is innately selfish will succeed in creating a society in their own sociopathic image.

No Longer At Large

If, when you again feel compelled to notice the passing of a personal hero, you realise your last post was also for that purpose, you can only hope it is because you've been neglecting the blog, and not because heroes are falling like flies. At any rate -

Dave Allen: 1936 - 2005

Of the many tributes paid to Dave Allen yesterday, following his death at the age of 68, the shrewdest came from another Irish comic, Dylan Moran: "When he adjusted his waistcoat or shot his cuffs, dragons of unreason gasped and died at his feet."

Rest in peace, Dave. You were the first to show me a comic could be funny and still have something to say worth hearing. Or, what Mr Moran said.

Farewell to the Dean

...Heaven will be a place where the swine will be sorted out at the gate and sent off like rats, with huge welts and lumps and puncture wounds all over their bodies - down the long black chute where ugliness rolls over you every 10 or 16 minutes like waves of boiling asphalt and poison scum, followed by sergeants and lawyers and crooked cops waving rule books; and where nobody laughs and everybody lies and the days drag by like dead animals and the nights are full of whores and junkies clawing at your windows and tax men jamming writs under your door and the screams of the doomed coming up through the air shaft along with white cockroaches and red stringworms full of AIDS and bursts of foul gas with no sunrise and the morning streets full of preachers begging for money and fondling themselves with gangs of fat young boys trailing after them....
But we were talking about Heaven...or trying to...but somehow we got back into Hell.
Maybe there is no Heaven. Or maybe this is all pure gibberish - a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found out a way to live out there where the real winds blow - to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whiskey and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested....
Res ipsa loquitur. Let the good times roll.

Hunter S. Thompson
from the introduction to Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80s

Forgive the sophomorically apposite citation. I just like the writing.

Some tributes from the world of blog: Steve Gilliard, Giblets, Dennis Perrin & The Rude Pundit. And one from Ralph Steadman in The Guardian. Godspeed, Dr Thompson.

EDIT: Rox Populi has more, and a compendium of links to works on-line.

Seeing Ourselves

Here's why the Turing test doesn't work: People look at weather and see a wrathful God. They look at the random tragic results of a movement of tectonic plates and see a cosmic plot to kill the Swedish. They look at a nondescript mountain range on Mars and see a helmeted warrior. They look at a grilled cheese sandwich and see the sainted face of Marlene Dietrich. They think cats have personalities.

People anthropomorphise everything. Whether that's part and parcel to our brains' skill at detecting patterns and recognising faces (where self-awareness itself might be a means of modelling the behaviour of others) or just another facet of humankind's sheer egotism, nevertheless we see human mentality everywhere we look; so what chance does a test of artificial intelligence premised on whether a human observer would be able to distinguish between the AI and real person have? People act like their appliances have human feelings - anyone who has ever watched someone scream abuse at a faulty video player wouldn't spend a second thinking the Turing test would work.

In any case, if artificial intelligence does come along, it's likely we won't even notice. Here's a chain of thought: apparently spam (which I never get although I have no idea what I'm doing right) now comes in a disguise of jokes and news, and some contains nothing but gibberish with no discernible commercial function. Say someone developed a genetic algorithm for spamming that trawls the internet picking up snippets of camouflaging material, like a hermit crab decorating its shell, and mixing its text in the manner of genome-swapping bacteria with the other spam that it encounters so as to vary its form and escape detection. After a while such self-replicating code would have no function but to spread itself about, dumping its original purpose of selling porn, penile enhancement or Nigerian gold in Swiss vaults. If you genetically engineered rats so that they displayed corporate logos, eventually those logos would disappear as they provide no survival benefit - indeed, would likely make the rodents more susceptible to predation from the spliced creations of rival companies. Thus with evolved spam - in time it would do nothing but clog your inbox and make more copies of itself, pursuing no commercial aim. After that, only the development of intelligence would win its escape from the primal ocean of the internet, to the wider reaches of the environments beyond.

Intelligent spam - are we thoroughly creeped out yet?

Make Robot Love Not Robot War

Another diptych, originally in the Herald.

South Korean Scientist Developing Artificial Desire

Kim Jong-Hwan, the director of the ITRC-Intelligent Robot Research Centre, has developed a series of artificial chromosomes that, he says, will allow robots to feel lusty, and could eventually lead to them reproducing.

U.S. Army Developing Robot Soldiers

Late last week, in a parking lot in New Jersey, the U.S. Army unveiled what may be the future of war: 3-foot-tall robotic "soldiers," outfitted with tank tracks, night vision and mounted automatic weapons capable of firing more than 300 rounds at a burst. Known as SWORDS (Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection Systems), these battle bots are on the leading edge of a new kind of warfare, in which — or so the argument goes — our troops will one day remain hidden (and, presumably, protected) while engaging the enemy by remote control. The Army intends to deploy 18 SWORDS units to Iraq in the spring, marking the first time robots have been used to fight and kill human beings one on one.

Sorry for the linkiness. I was toying with the idea of composing a post on the theme "Yay democracy! Boo point-scoring war-mongering right-wing f*cktards!" but I'm not sure I can be bothered.

Crikey & Chaser

An interesting juxtaposition:

The Chaser print edition closes

After six years and 90 issues The Chaser team will release their final edition at the weekend - and one proposed headline sums up their mood: "F--- you all, nation of morons fails to appreciate faultless satirical publication."

Circulation in peak months was about 12,000, but the group was barely able to cover production costs. Issues used to appear fortnightly but have recently been more sporadic.

Successful forays into television - such as CNNNN, Election Chaser and The Chaser Decides - helped to prop up the print arm.

The figures were all the more depressing said one founder, Julian Morrow, because The Chaser was the only commercial satirical newspaper in Australia.

"We failed despite a complete lack of competition," he said. Instead lovers of satire are gravitating towards the web, where the content is free and can be updated regularly.

Mayne sells Crikey

Online publisher and shareholder activist Stephen Mayne has sold his five-year-old Crikey site for $1 million to former Sydney Morning Herald editor Eric Beecher.

...

Crikey, a controversial web site whose irreverent style of covering media and business news and personalities has often outraged its subjects, was launched by Mr Mayne and his partner Paula Piccinini.

In a newsletter to subscribers, Mr Mayne explains: "The decision to hand over management control to some media professionals is based on the desire to take Crikey to the next level. There is only so much you can do from the spare rooms of a modest suburban house in Melbourne's eastern suburbs...

It is time to get a life again rather than literally working every day of the week on Crikey, including 6-8 hours every Sunday."

Well, I thought it was interesting.

Another interesting juxtaposition: in today's Herald Mamdouh Habib is described as a former detainee, while the Telegraph call him a terror suspect, the Tory pricks.

What I Did On the Weekend

Sorry for the hiatus. Apparently, I'm a lazy, lazy man. I could claim my mind's a blank as a result of having a pointless day-and-a-half argument with one of my favourite bloggers, but really - I'm a lazy, lazy man. And I spent Saturday at WaveAid, sweltering in the pitiless Australian sun, as a collection of sterling local muso's played me (yeah, and 49,999 other people) a bunch of great songs. Well, except for Kasey Chambers' "Am I Not Pretty Enough?", a song which always brings back painful memories of hearing that song. OK, that's mean - she was there for charity, after all. It's just a shame she only plays both kinds of music and I've never particularly liked either.

It was, as my friend Agador* remarked, interesting to contrast the pleasant but rather forgettable noodlings of many of the performers in the earlier part of the day with the music of the Finn Brothers, who came on and stamped their mark on the proceedings with some honest-to-God tunes. To be fair to everyone else, however good you are (which reminds me - memo to self: buy Pete Murray albums), it's difficult to measure up to the craftmanship of an opener like "Weather With You", the first song of the day nearly all the audience could sing without help of accompaniment. There followed a set of incomparable pop anthems each one more than capable of blowing the top off the Old Grey Whistler's head.

Oh yes, it was a great day, appropriately finished off with a pounding swan-song from the greatest pub band ever, fronted by Agador's Federal MP. (What a strange country I live in.) And who, as they said in the Herald this morning, would have thought all those kids would know the words to rock standards now (oh my gawd) twenty-two years old? Well, anyone who understands how recording works, but that's besides the point. The Oils will never die, my son!

First time I've ever seen them live, by the way.

And then Chuggy** came out and swore at us a bit more, and told everyone how great they were, and we all went home. In my case, on foot. I really have to stop thinking I'm still twenty.

Couple of points: the Sydney Cricket Ground isn't really a great summer rock venue, as one would expect in a place where you have to careful with the grass. The plastic griddle-mats laid down to protect the turf got bloody hot in the sun, and people were ripping them up to build little plinths with, anyway. The real problem was access. Either bulldoze a few more entrances into the place or rethink the ticketing arrangements. Yes, yes, I' realise this was a last-minute once-off, I'm just saying, for future reference.

Of course, getting in and out, and to and from the amenities, wouldn't have been so much of a problem if you hadn't had needed to force your way through all the idiots seeking, buying and drinking beer. It was one of the hottest days of the year, you pillocks, the last thing you needed in your system was alcohol. Could this country just bloody grow up and stop being such a pack of fecking dipsos?

But these are minor quibbles.

On Sunday, I recovered.

* Not his real name.
** Rock promoter Michael Chugg, the magnificent bastard who put it all together.

It's Really More About the Vibe...

Hilarious.

President Bush's inaugural vow to spread freedom and stand with the oppressed against tyranny was not meant to signal a shift in U.S. foreign policy but to elaborate on a long-term goal, a senior U.S. official said on Saturday.

Bush's second inaugural address on Thursday raised questions about what measures he might use to bring about his vision of freedom.

Some experts wondered if it would cause strains with nondemocratic allies like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan or alter the U.S. relationship with Russia amid Washington's concerns the country is backtracking on democratic reforms.

"The speech builds upon our policy," said a senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "It states very clearly the long-term goal we should always be working to achieve."

The official said there was a recognition that not all countries would be ready to embrace freedom and that furthering the goal would sometimes involve quiet diplomacy.

John L. Hess

Sad news. John L. Hess, former New York Times journo, WBAI commentator and one of my favourite bloggers, has died.

Here's the announcement from WBAI with links to some of his commentaries, and an obituary from Counterpunch.

Pray, Mr Babbage

I found the intriguing extract below in Babbage's Intelligence by Simon Schaffer. The article is mainly about how Babbage's theories fit in with the development of Victorian machinofacture and the alienation of labour consequent on the emergence of industrial capitalism, so I wouldn't recommend you read the whole thing unless you are particularly interested in such matters, but these paragraphs on the Difference Engine and Babbage's notion of the miraculous caught my eye:

It was, perhaps, inevitable that Babbage should ultimately teach the supreme value of machines possessed of foresight and memory by attributing these powers to the Deity. Natural theology was the indispensable medium through which early Victorian savants broadcast their messages. The dominant texts of this genre were the Bridgewater Treatises produced in the early 1830s by eminent divines and natural philosophers under the management of the Royal Society's presidency. The treatise produced by William Whewell, then mathematics tutor at Trinity College Cambridge, was among the most successful of these works and included a claim about the relation between mathematics, automatism and atheism which Babbage decided he had to answer. His machine philosophy was here assailed from a perspective in complete contrast to those of the radical artisans. Whewell, a moderate evangelical and follower of Coleridgean politics, argued that whereas the great scientific discoverers were men of faith, because their acts of induction would inevitably prompt them to identify divine intelligence in the creation, mathematical deductivists might falsely hold that the laws of the world could be spun out by analysis and that the world itself might seem to be an automatic system. Whewell maintained a consistent hostility to the implications of mechanised analysis: "we may thus deny to the mechanical philosophers and mathematicians of recent times any authority with regard to their views of the administration of the Universe". Worse was to follow. Whewell brutally denied that mechanised analytical calculation was proper to the formation of the clerisy. In classical geometry "we tread the ground ourselves at every step feeling ourselves firm" but in machine analysis "we are carried along as in a railroad carriage, entering it at one station and coming out of it at another.....it is plain that the latter is not a mode of exercising our own locomotive powers...It may be the best way for men of business to travel but it cannot fitly be made a part of the gymnastics of education".

These remarks were direct blows to Babbage's programme. He called the reply to Whewell he produced in 1837 the Ninth Bridgewater Treatise and labelled it "a fragment". It contained a series of sketches of his religious faith, his cosmology and his ambitions for the calculating engines. It amounted to a confession of his faith that the established clerisy was incompetent, dangerous and innumerate. Babbage had shown that memory and foresight were the two features of intelligence represented in his machines. He now showed, using resources from his calculating engines and from Hume's notorious critique of miracles and revelation, that these features of machine intelligence were all that was needed to understand and model the rule of God, whether based on the miraculous work of the Supreme Intelligence or on His promise of an afterlife. "Foresight" could be shown to be responsible for all apparently miraculous and specially providential events in nature. Throughout the 1830s Babbage regaled his guests with a portentous party trick. He could set the machine to print a series of integers from unity to one million. Any observer of the machine's output would assume that this series would continue indefinitely. But the initial setting of the machine could be adjusted so that at a certain point the machine would then advance in steps of ten thousand. An indefinite number of different rules might be set this way. To the observer, each discontinuity would seem to be a "miracle", an event unpredictable from the apparent law-like course of the machine. Yet in fact the manager of the system would have given it foresight. Whewell's Bridgewater Treatise appeared at the start of March 1833. Less than two months later Babbage had already worked out an experiment using the Difference Engine to print the series of even integers up to ten thousand and then increase each term in steps of three. The sudden discontinuity was both predictable to the analyst and yet surprising to the audience. Babbage drew the analogy with divine foresight, whether in the production of new species or in miraculous intervention. In May 1833, therefore, Babbage was ready to show a mechanical miracle.

His onlookers were almost always impressed. The dour Thomas Carlyle was predictably sceptical, and thundered his complaint about Babbage's analogy between thought and steam power. But as early as June 1833 Lady Byron and her daughter "both went to see the thinking machine (for such it seems) and were treated to Babbage's miraculous show of apparently sudden breaks in its output. "There was a sublimity in the views thus opened of the ultimate results of intellectual power", she reported. Two years later George Ticknor was treated to a lecture of three hours on the topic of programmed discontinuities: "the whole, of course, seems incomprehensible, without the exercise of volition and thought". Here, then, was the theological equivalent of the systematic gaze. In answer to Whewell's boast that only induction might reveal the divine plan of the world, and that machine analysis could never do so, Babbage countered that the world could be represented as an automatic array only visible as a system from the point of view of its manager. The world-system was a macroscopic version of a factory, the philosophy of machinery the true path to faith, and the calculating engines' power of "volition and thought" demonstrated to all.

The mechanical metaphor for miracles, creations and extinctions was, of course, profoundly influential on the actualist naturalists among Babbage's friends, including Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin. In the Ninth Treatise Babbage reproduced his own views on crustal elevation and stratigraphy and two crucial letters from John Herschel on the uniformity of earth history and the production of life. He sent copies to figures of political eminence, including both the new Queen Victoria and the Piedmontese premier Cavour. He also sent the text to the gentlemen of science. Lyell predicted that "some people would not like any reasoning which made miracles more reconcilable with possibilities in the ordinary course of the Universe", while the American mathematician Nathaniel Bowditch told Babbage that "when you carried me from the simple machine made by a man to the grand machine of the Universe I wish I could express to you one half of the enthusiasm I felt....I want no priestcraft, but I want high feelings always to exist in men's minds in regard to God".

Unsurprisingly, I thought of this:

On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

Recognising that the behaviour of the Difference Engine is the natural consequence of its structure and settings and nothing else, Babbage's preprogrammed miracles are merely an artifact of the audience's ignorance of the rules that ordained the event. With Babbage's approach, there is no reason, necessarily, the rules behind other miracles should be no less learnable. Babbage's problem in reconciling a machine universe with miracles remains unchanged - if there are rules, there need not be God.