Zzzzz

Work is insane at the moment, and even if I wasn't exhausted when I get home of an evening, my mind's a blank anyway, so I hereby declare a hiatus. This blog is now officially moribund.

You could always go look at my crappy photos.

Getting Felt

Wow, that Peggy Noonan really is completely fecking insane:

Was Mr. Felt a hero? No one wants to be hard on an ailing 91-year-old man. Mr. Felt no doubt operated in some perceived jeopardy and judged himself brave. He had every right to disapprove of and wish to stop what he saw as new moves to politicize the FBI. But a hero would have come forward, resigned his position, declared his reasons, and exposed himself to public scrutiny. He would have taken the blows and the kudos. (Knowing both Nixon and the media, there would have been plenty of both.) Heroes pay the price. Mr. Felt simply leaked information gained from his position in government to damage those who were doing what he didn't want done. Then he retired with a government pension. This does not appear to have been heroism, and he appears to have known it. Thus, perhaps, the great silence.

...

Even if Mr. Felt had mixed motives, even if he did not choose the most courageous path in attempting to spread what he thought was the truth, his actions might be judged by their fruits. The Washington Post said yesterday that Mr. Felt's information allowed them to continue their probe. That probe brought down a president. Ben Stein is angry but not incorrect: What Mr. Felt helped produce was a weakened president who was a serious president at a serious time. Nixon's ruin led to a cascade of catastrophic events--the crude and humiliating abandonment of Vietnam and the Vietnamese, the rise of a monster named Pol Pot, and millions--millions--killed in his genocide. America lost confidence; the Soviet Union gained brazenness. What a terrible time. Is it terrible when an American president lies and surrounds himself by dirty tricksters? Yes, it is. How about the butchering of children in the South China Sea. Is that worse? Yes. Infinitely, unforgettably and forever.

I ask again, why can't Australian commentators be this entertainingly deranged?

Oh, and my apologies for the title. Did I mention I was ill?

Sickboy

Now I really do have a cold, so I'm going back to bed. But I note in passing that Andrew Bartlett's got a weblog. Pity he doesn't have a party, but I guess you can't have everything.

Oh dear. It seems a head full of phlegm brings out my mean side. How unfortunate. Go read him anyway.

Absurdity

Bush:

It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of -- and the allegations -- by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble -- that means not tell the truth. And so it was an absurd report. It just is.

I wonder if it's relevant whether or not they hated America before they were detained.

Note also the reference to material in the Al Qaeda Training Manual about "spreading rumors and writing statements that instigate people against the enemy". If Bush is alleging this is why released detainees have been making allegations of abuse he's either a) admitting the US has released AQ operatives without charge or b) a fecking idiot. Either the released detainees are AQ so they wouldn't have been released, or they're not AQ and therefore haven't been trained to make up stories. Rather an obvious bit of reasoning, I would have thought.

Edit: That's interesting. So taken was I with the stupidity of Bush's argument, I completely failed to notice his intriguing pronunciation of "dissemble".

Dummy Spit

I read a Matt Taibbi piece a while ago about the disturbing use of mannequins in advertising. Here in Sydney just recently we saw the re-emergence of a similar campaign that had seemed so wrong-headed the first time it came out it seemed impossible that the commercials could have been successful and, yet, here they were again. The campaign first ran a few months ago to publicise the opening of a local multi-level suburban mall, and involved television and poster ads featuring a young woman shopping while accompanied by a talking ventriloquist dummy. (Or possible a puppet without strings, it's not entirely clear.) She'd look at products and the dummy would say obsequious things like "Of course you need a pair of diamond stilettos", or (as she peruses a menu) "What looks good, apart from you?", or - my personal, skin-crawling favourite - "If it makes you feel good, it's a bargain." Even if we discount the longstanding horror-movie tradition of animated puppets, what normal person could not find these ads anything but irredeemably creepy? My local bus stop sported the most grotesque example, in which the dummy watches our heroine while she sleeps (Caption: "Your hair looks beautiful on the new sheets"). This is supposed to encourage people to shop? As opposed to, say, awake screaming in the night, running with sweat and clutching at the covers?

What disturbs me is that the ads must have worked with their target demographic because they were brought back, at least as bus shelter posters. Perhaps there's some everything about the advertising industry that I don't understand. I'd hate to think this was the average woman's idea of a perfect man, a fawning marionette that follows them about and validates their purchases.

At any rate, the posters have gone again now, the bus shelters now feature the teaser campaign for Hollywood's most recent exploration of the theme of beautiful people with guns, and the world seems a sunnier place.

Two Idle Thoughts

This refusing to comment on current events is working out just swell, isn't it? See, this is why I can't make small talk at parties - I'm only really interested in religion and politics.

I think I'm going to have to significantly lower my threshold of what I consider non-trivial enough to post. This will likely involve me simply posting every nonsense thought that occurs to me. Two examples should suffice to illustrate why I have resisted this approach so far:

1.

I was ruminating, for no reason at all, on the legend of Cassandra. Beloved by Apollo, she was granted by him the gift of prophecy, to see the future with perfect clarity. However, for spurning the god's advances, she was cursed with the proviso that her prophecies would never be believed by anyone.

It occurred to me that if Apollo's original gift had been bona fides then his spiteful codicil would have been superfluous, because it follows naturally that a prediction, at least of events other than natural disasters and similar phenomena beyond human control, can only be accurate if it is not believed. Had the people of Troy accepted Cassandra's forecasts of doom, they would have acted to prevent these events from occurring, thereby making her prophecies false. A prophetess can only correctly perceive the future actions of people if these actions remain uninfluenced by that perception.

If I had the necessary theoretical grounding, I could perhaps proceed now to compose some monograph on pre-Homeric conceptions of the Uncertainty Principle, but, thankfully, I don't.

2.

Reading through some neglected back issues of Interzone, I discovered in David Langford's list of brief obituaries that the number of the year of Christopher Reeve's birth (discounting the century) was the same number as his age at death, that is, fifty-five. Morbidly, I began to consider how the number of people of whom this would also be true would fluctuate over the years of any century.

In most centuries, including the 20th, and, for that matter, the 21st, there would be a significant peak at the beginning of the century accounting for the deaths of the very young. I would guess - students of infant mortality statistics should be able to make a better calculation - this peak would sharply decline at about '08 to a very low figure which would remain low throughout the rest of the century before rising again in the decades of the '50s to '80s (earlier centuries would have earlier inclines, but even in the 20th the impact of Third World lifespans on the average would bring the first appearance of a peak quite early). I was born in 1966, and so have only a moderate, and not extreme, chance of fitting into this numerological quirk myself - touchwood. After the '80s, the numbers steeply decline again.

Depressingly, the 20th Century is marked by a prominent peak in the first three years of the 1920s, these being the birth years of those who turned 20, 21 and 22 during the years of, respectively, 1940, 1942 and 1944. This spike is most noticeable for the populations of Europe and the Mediterranean regions, the Middle East, Asia, Australasia and North America, before disappearing almost entirely in these areas, although parts of South East Asia would have such a peak also appearing in the 1930s.

And there you have it.

At the Going Down of the Bun

I notice from an irate letter in today's paper, McDonald's are again using Anzac Day to sell their fat-on-a-bun. I'm not sure if the ad is the same as the one they used a few years ago, which went like this:

An aged digger sits glumly at a table. A young McDonald's countergirl comes over to him and gives him a coffee. "Oh, thank you," he says. "No," she intones back, "thank you."

Cue logo, nausea.

At the time I was disappointed they hadn't pursued my idea for a follow-up, in which the girl throws the coffee in the face of a nearby Japanese tourist, screaming "THAT'S FOR CHANGI!"

Headbangers

When in doubt, read Thomas Frank.

The illusion that George W. Bush "understands" the struggles of working-class people was only made possible by the unintentional assistance of the Democratic campaign. Once again, the "party of the people" chose to sacrifice the liberal economic policies that used to connect them to such voters on the altar of centrism. Advised by a legion of tired consultants, many of whom work as corporate lobbyists in off years, Kerry chose not to make much noise about corruption on Wall Street, or to expose the business practices of Wal-Mart, or to spend a lot of time talking about raising the minimum wage.

The strategy had a definite upside: Kerry's fund-raising almost matched that of the Republican candidate, while the newspapers brimmed with exciting tales of New Economy millionaires volunteering to work their entrepreneurial magic for the Democrats, and the society sheets offered juicy details on fund-raising stunts pulled by wealthy women of fashion. Yet there can be no question about this scheme's ultimate effects. As the savvy political journalist Rick Perlstein put it in a postelection report,

For a party whose major competitive advantage over the opposition is its credibility in protecting ordinary people from economic insecurity, anything that compromises that credibility is disastrous.

Swearing off economic liberalism also prevented Democrats from capitalizing on the great, glaring contradiction of their rivals' campaign, namely, the GOP's tendency to demote "values" issues once elections are over...

George W. Bush carried the white working-class vote by 23 percentage points, according to pollster Ruy Teixeira. Then, on the morning after the election, the country's liberals were astonished to hear that, according to exit polls, at least, "moral values" outranked all other issues in determining voters' choices. Later on that same day, the reelected President Bush set out his legislative objectives for his second term. Making America a more moral country was not one of them. Instead, his goals were mainly economic, and they had precious little to do with helping out the working-class people who had stood by them: he would privatize Social Security once and for all and "reform" the federal tax code. "Another Winner Is Big Business," declared a headline in The Wall Street Journal on November 4, as businessmen everywhere celebrated the election results as a thumbs-up on outsourcing and continued deregulation.

In the months since then the magnitude of the corporate victory has only become more apparent, with Republicans in Congress working to tighten up bankruptcy law at the request of the credit card companies, open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the oil companies, and crack down on class-action lawsuits for the greater glory of Wal-Mart. The clout of the US Chamber of Commerce, the D.C. glamour lobbyist of the moment, is acclaimed by all as it raises millions to keep the pro-business bills coming. "Fortune 500 companies that invested millions of dollars in electing Republicans are emerging as the earliest beneficiaries of a government controlled by President Bush and the largest GOP House and Senate majority in a half century," wrote Jim VandeHei in The Washington Post.

And the values issues? They seemed to dissipate like so much smoke once the election was over and won. Republican Senator Arlen Specter, the chair-apparent of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, waited only a single day after his buddy Bush had been safely reelected before informing the nation that, no, his committee would not be approving judges who planned on overturning Roe v. Wade. The great crusade against gay marriage, which had worked such wonders for Republicans in so many states, was essentially abandoned by the President in January. After all, more important matters were beckoning: the war with the trial lawyers, for example, or the need to persuade people that our basically sound old-age insurance program was actually in crisis.

In March the President and Republican congressional leaders chose to make much of the tragic Terri Schiavo affair, but the obvious futility of their legal demands and the patent self-interest of their godly grandstanding require little embellishment here. Let us simply note how perfectly this incident, when paired with simultaneous GOP legislative action on big-business items, illustrates the timeless principles of the backlash. For its corporate backers, the GOP delivers the goods; for its rank-and-file "values" voters it chooses a sturdy wall against which they are invited to bang their heads.

Just a Placeholder

I got nothing - let's pretend it's still because of the headcold.

Mr Schwarz has a great interview with that Chris Floyd fellow. Go read that instead.

The craziest time was right when the Soviet Union collapsed. Then later they had another economic collapse, right after I left—although it wasn't my fault, really...

Anyway, when I was there it was wild enough on its own. You'd go out to eat in some restaurant, and the next day read in the paper how someone had been machine gunned there right after you'd left.

We worked on Pravda Street, which is where all the old Soviet newspapers were. One guy at another paper across the way was investigating corruption in the army for a Russian paper. One day he got blown up in his office. There was a lot of stuff like that going on.

Reading Campaign Trail

The death of the Dean reminded me that I'd only ever read extracts of Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72, and, having purchased a copy shortly after, I've now cleared my "To Read" list sufficiently to be able to start it. So far its themes are depressingly familiar:

How many more of these goddamn elections are we going to have to write off as lame but "regrettably necessary" holding actions? And how many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?

...

Now, with another one of these big bogus showdowns looming down on us, I can already pick up the stench of another bummer. I understand, along with a lot of other people, that the big thing this year, is Beating Nixon. But that was also the big thing, as I recall, twelve years ago in 1960 - and as far as I can tell, we've gone from bad to worse to rotten since then, and the outlook is for more of the same.

Of course, this was written very early in the process of nominating the Democratic contender, and McGovern was a candidate HST could actually vote for but he lost all the same. In fact, he was crushed; which may explain why Americans have been having "lesser-of-two-evils" elections ever since.

Meanwhile, A Tiny Revolution informs me that another favourite Moscow Times columnist, Chris Floyd, has his own weblog now - Empire Burlesque. I don't know what I like about Mr Floyd's stuff more, the savage invective or the voluminous footnotes backing up the savage invective. His old columns can be found at The Smirking Chimp.

(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.

Hen3ry

For no reason at all, here's a selection of links to Tom Lehrer related material:

Interview with Paul Lehrman 1997

Interview in the SF Weekly 2000 - Page 2 seems to missing, and the piece takes an inordinately long time to stop talking about Greg Proops

Interview in the Onion AV Club 2000

Interview in the Sydney Morning Herald 2003 Hopefully to access the article you won't be required to provide photo ID and have your hard-drive engorged with cookies

Entry in St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture

Entry in Wikipedia I wonder how long this bit will survive community editing:

Fans of rapper Eminem have also noted some similarities in Em's style to that of Lehrer. The style comparison is best evidenced on Em's South Park parody "The Kids" with its piano backing, clever use of syntax and off-beat rhyming, and even references to torturing small animals similar to that of Lehrer's notorious "Poisoning Pigeons In The Park".

Heh

Compendium Page: "Bright Tom Lehrer Days"

Flash Animation of Lehrer's Song "The Elements"

Site about Tomfoolery, the 1980 revue based on Lehrer's work

The Aqueduct?

Blockbuster video conducted one of those non-polls over the Christmas period and ascertained that the funniest scene in cinema history is Reg's "What have the Romans ever done for us?" rant from Life of Brian. Given some of the more unpleasant examples of religious craziness distilled by recent tragic events in Asia, I found it almost nostalgic to recall the comparatively benign offense taken at this film and it's allegedly blasphemous content all those years ago.

Anyone who knows the film well realises that its chief satirical targets were not the religious so much as lefties, with all our least endearing traits - sectarianism, empty gestures, endless deliberation - all deservedly lampooned. The film made fun of feminism and identity politics, and it's not too much of a stretch to take the sketch mentioned above as a swipe at anti-colonialism, not that I'd want to argue the Pythons injected that subtext deliberately (although... they were all members of a generation old enough to watch their own country lose an empire of its own - no, no, that way madness lies!) Nevertheless, the religious griping took the limelight, unsurprisingly given the film's setting, and what with what was potentially the most controversial scene wisely jettisoned, known only to those who bought the published script.

Robert Hewison's interesting little book Monty Python: the Case Against details the backlash against the film, and the attempts to suppress it. While pointing up some of the more absurd aspects of Britain's common law provisions on blasphemous libel (legal precedent suggests it's a bad idea to compare Christ to a "conjuror"), the book demonstrates that the essential problem with censorship is the subjective nature of interpretation. For example, the book reproduces an extract from a speech by Roger Fulton, pastor of the Neighbourhood Church in New York, (unfortunately only the first page) detailing what he considered objectionable about the film. The first item was always my favourite, clearly showing the Rev. Fulton understood the value of leading with your strongest gag:

The mother of Messiah (Brian) is a man in woman's clothing, in direct violation of the Holy Scriptures.

I guess we couldn't expect a New York fundamentalist to be familiar in 1979 with the well-established British cultural tradition of drag, but you have to wonder how Fulton confused casting a man as a woman with the notion the character was intended to be a transvestite (which means Fulton's understanding of Terry Jones' performance in the stoning sketch was that he was a man playing a man playing a woman playing a man). But I've always liked the phrase "in direct violation of the Holy Scriptures"; it's important to dot the 'i's and cross the 't's, and who knows how many members of Fulton's audience would not have known the Biblical account makes that clear. It's just possible Fulton was referring to the Biblical prohibition on cross-dressing - OK, no, it isn't but I'm looking for a closer.

At the time these people seemed beyond the pale, with their cinema protests and their friendly suburban book-burnings; but compared to the present mob, they look like a harmless joke. I have a hideous feeling that's my only point. Aren't you glad you stopped by?