Moving into the second week of being without a functioning laptop capable of my research and writing needs. Amazing how dependent you get on switching between sources, channels, tools and apps, that just can’t be done with a one-screen phone and two thumbs. Nothing lost content-wise hopefully – all in the cloud and backed-up – just the loss of working configurations.
Working today on an old slow Windows 10 machine, last configured (not for me) over 5 years ago, so not just slow performance-wise but every task requiring updates and log-ins and passwords and configurations and reboots and … aarrgghh!!
So this will probably be my only catch-up post until I get repaired or replacement kit. So, in no particular order:
Less is More
When dealing with the reality of human complexity, there is a fractal amount of detail at the working level where the diminishing returns on knowing more detail at finer granularity and the wisdom of knowing about which details matter, conversely also risks missing small but nevertheless significant details which might lead to actual chaos beyond the complexity. More wisdom, less detail. But the choice of which detail isn’t one-dimensional. As well as the four familiar dimensions of real space-time at the working level, there are the choices of multiple dimensions and levels of abstraction. The devil may be in the detail but the angels are in the abstractions.
I’ve been having these thoughts every day the assisted dying bill has been in the news, with both chambers of the house debating details of checks and balances for foreseeable exceptional cases. Obviously, the motivation to find more and more exceptions, let alone how to address them, depends on the general favourability of the principle, and like many knotty issues it’s easy to be polarised for or against. Anyone against is incentivised to exaggerate the dogs breakfast to kill the bill. For me this bill would be two sentences. (1) Anyone facing low quality of remaining life, including their attorneys, should be entitled to ask for help ending that life. (2) The individual decision should be with the ethics committee of the relevant caring professionals. Challenged, doubtful cases would generate case-law. Next.
Prompted to post today thanks to this “Global Story” documentary broadcast on the BBC World Service last night, about Pearlman, the lobbyist who tried to sink the first CoP Climate deal, and the ongoing machinations of achieving consensus at the UN level thereafter. As my general rules of discourse say, there can be no real consensus without good faith – what-aboutery and sea-lioning (and pedantry) are always bad-faith – rational processes as cover for ideological or dubious motives.
RIP Todd Snider
I’ve never seem such quantity of outpourings of grief at the loss of Todd Snider. Still ten or more new ones daily, a week later on the social and music media channels I follow. As well as the memories of the many fellow-artists he’s worked with, he was the human kind of singer-songwriter you feel you know even if you never met him personally. I’ve mentioned here seeing and listening to him 3 or 4 times previously. As well as being under-60, the circumstances of his unexpected death were also particularly shocking – dying from pneumonia back home in Nashville a week or more after being refused medical treatment, and body-cam of being arrested, following an assault on tour in Salt Lake City?
I’ve mentioned the value in the poetry of our singer-songwriters more generally many times before. Roy Harper, Graham Parker, Elvis Costello and Shane MacGowan alongside Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen – anything with a folk-blues-rock backbone, and especially the Americana country-folk variant – Neil Young and John Prine, Tom Waites and Loudon Wainwright and the three guys we came across when we lived close to Nashville, Tommy Womack, Will Kimbrough and Todd Snider. Still have his “East Nashville Skyline” on CD in the car to this day.
We lost one of the good guys.
Open Adaptive Systems Theory
Just a placeholder for this post from Jim Stewartson, where he presents a Figure-8 diagram that I see as mapping onto the generative / degenerate (r-K-Ω-α) cycles of “The Adaptive Cycle” after Daniel Christian Wahl and the “Panarchy” of Gunderson & Hollings, which themselves map on to the various cycles of life of Hinduism and Buddhism as well as the industrial / economic cycles of Kondratiev and Kuhn etc.
BUT Stewartson presents it thus, with a chaos-theory “attractor”:
A LEMNISCATE (∞) is a mathematical figure-eight curve that represents a system cycling between states.
AN ATTRACTOR is a pattern toward which a complex system naturally settles, even as it moves through turbulence.
(Which also kinda maps on to Dave Snowden’s Cynefin stuff?)
My view of these things is that they’re useful descriptively of how things typically happen, maybe even diagnostically useful of a situation you are investigating, but not themselves predicters or decision-makers of consequences of actions, causal or emergent.
But if there really is an attractor … ?
More reading and thought needed.
Neil Hannon and The Divine Comedy
I’ve not been doing music reviews for a while – simply adding notes to earlier review pages, and I can’t believe I didn’t mention Neil Hannon amongst the folk-blues-rock-based / Americana poets above. Obviously because he’s more “chamber pop” but still a fine poet.
We saw him/them at York Barbican last month. Excellent.
Noticed just the other day that Sarah Ditum is also a long-term fan and had written a review in The Critic.
(A link there to an earlier during-Covid gig at the London Barbican.)
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