Category: Uncategorized

Noticed one Leo Sayer was in town last Saturday; catchy though he was he was never my cuppa 70’s tea. Anyway, after his Saturday show at Perth’s Burswood, he and his band dropped into Blue to the Bone and jammed along with Lindsay Wells. Seems they are old buddies after Lindsay once helped him out on an earlier tour. Great sax addition to Lindsay’s usual three-piece sound, and Leo’s voice sounded good with a great sense of timing on some old blues & rock’n’roll standards, even if he had to gamely improvise for those where his recollection of the verses was absent. A good sport, posing and pausing for mobile phone snaps and autographs.

(Leo’s one of those artists whose name always reminds me of a song with his name in the lyric. Like “The Beatles and The Stones” always make me think of Mott the Hoople’s “All the Young Dudes”; Elvis and Sinatra, too many to mention. “I hope Neil Young will remember, Southern Man don’t need him around, anyhow” say Lynyrd Skynyrd, whereas “Tom Robinson, The Beatles, The Byrds and Leo Sayer” is the line spat out by Bill Nelson in Phantom Zone.)

Cock-up rather than conspiracy naturally, but I wonder. Air-con refrigerant perhaps ?

Thought this was a very deep and expressive eulogy from Gordon Brown at Robin Cook’s funeral. Clearly some very personal chemistry between the Labour Scots, and some fundamental points about rhetorical skills and meaning it.

Like this Saul Bellow quote from Seb Fiedler. Don’t think it has to be head shrinks, but any professional advice about a problem always feels good if the problem gets an official name, more so than if it gets any meaningful solution.

The name of the rose. The bible of taxonomists everywhere ?

Browsing Ray Girvan’s Apothecary’s Drawer – Wave Related – fairly slow blog rate due to his “estivation” (summer equivalent of hibernation mainly in cold blooded creatures) – attracted by the Mexican philosopher Manuel DeLanda.

[Quote] DeLanda is a contemporary Mexican philosopher with a strong interest in the scientific and cultural crossover: “topics as diverse as warfare, linguistics, economics, evolution, chaos theory, self-organizing matter, nonlinear dynamics, artificial life and intelligence, the internet and architecture, amongst many others” (including solitons). [Unquote]
[Annotated Bibliography] [Interview] & [DeLanda Destratified]

Then noticed his previous thread on one-off waves or bores, linking back to controversial boxing day tsunami pictures, and existing pictures of previous bores. (A hundred links to browse in that lot.)

The connectedness – non-periodic waves, strange loops etc and mexican anthroplogical backgrounds to Northrop and Pirsig et al. Clear as mud ?

Manuel DeLanda [Quote] If you read the essays by the first guy who saw spontaneously oscillating chemical reactions, you find out he was unable to publish his essays. This was in the 50’s, not long ago. The idea that orderly behavior could arise spontaneously from matter was so counter-intuitive.. At that time, the only two ways they could see stable things arising in nature was through rational perfection — the best possible outcome — or heat-death. What nonlinear science brings about is a complete new range of structurally stable forms of behavior, which has absolutely nothing to do with rationality or the heat-death of entropy. Now attractors are appearing all over the place. We’ve discovered a whole new reservoir of forms of stabilization. It’s a paradigm warp. [Unquote]

Scepticism is too powerful – “nothing to do with rationality” – scarily true.

Manuel DeLanda [Quote] As they say, they key word here is not wisdom, but caution. You don’t know what happens at bifurcations. You have absolutely no control. The smallest fluctuation can make things go wrong. The predictive power of humans and technology is nil near bifurcations. All you can do is approach carefully, because the last thing you want to do is get swallowed up by a chaotic attractor that’s too huge in phase space. As Deleuze says, “Always keep a piece of fresh land with you at all times.” Always keep a little spot where you can go back to sleep after a day of destratification. Always keep a small piece of territory, otherwise you’ll go nuts. [Unquote]

Dynamic Quality is lost without the latches of static quality.

Oh wow … DeLanda is lecturing ” .. about a shift of paradigm in the postmodern world – the old, analytic way is replaced by new, synthetic one .. ” A man after mine own. Someone to take a serious interest in methinks.

[Post Note – for Mitch – Australian Apostle collapses into the sea. Could it be a sign ? No, stop it, you’re getting silly.]

Remember debating all the copyright custodianship issues about Google’s plan to create an on-line the content of all the great libraries in the world, at least a year ago, if not two.

Still think it’s an inspired idea, that must succeed; the amount of knowledge made available would be just mind boggling.

So many books would see the light of day, that would otherwise languish in a handful of largely hidden volumes. If anything the proportion of old texts that might benefit from new sales in printed (or electronic) form, would actually more likely be promoted by their on-line presence. (See legal music downloads story). For those older books with little prospect of sale ever again in print, the libraries themselves lose any commercial benefit from the cost of their custodianship, then this implies some fee needs to be paid somewhere, but surely the numbers add up easily from a very small Google subscription, if needed, and Google are investing millions in it anyway. Who needs to lose at all from this enormous benefit.

The copyright blockages must be temporary. See Google’s own blog here.

Always had mixed views about “The Edge”, John Brockman’s collection of the scientific elite as their publishing agent. Here is Technology, Entertainment and Design 2005 conference report, focussing on a comparison between Richard Foreman’s “Pancake People” and George Dyson’s “Godel to Google Net” (Which I think I blogged before).

Anyway whilst the science writing is always good and mixed, inlcuding plenty I believe and plenty I don’t, I was always a bit put off by the “hype”. However, seeing the recent shameless promotion of the Intelligent Design Creationism garbage, and the terrifying way it’s lapped up by an ill-informed popular press, and worse still, ill-informed education planners and school governors, I think science and any good quality intellectual thought needs all the promotion it can get.

More power to you John Brockman.

Thanks to Denise for this paper at ChangeThis. Has a summary of a number of group behaviour issues.

As Denise points out Seth Godin’s blog looks interesting too. You know this guy Johnnie (Moore) ?

Whilst the Christian / biblical tradition seems determined to degenerate backwards to ancient dogmas, witness the contagious spread of Intelligent Design Creationism meme from Bush’s mouth to the mainstream press here in Western Australia, and (god forbid) the science classrooms of future generations, one beacon is the suggestion from Salman Rushdie that the Qu’ran could benefit from positive evolution – a reformation – from the 7th century to the 21st.

It would be far from ironic, if the more oriental continued to lead the occidental. Go for it Islam, listen to your thinkers, you know it makes sense.

Intellectual may be a dirty word in some circles, but it really is the only thing that can save us from crude socio-cultural “democracy” – popular survival of the most-convenient, lowest-quality common-denominator, memes.

(That is of course what the Pirsigian Metaphysics of Quality would say too.)

[Post Note : My god, it gets worse. Full page “advertorial” in the West Australian positively promotiong IDC, and a DVD explaining the origins of life from some “missionary crusade” pastor, obviously a great source of disinterested knowledge on the subject. Wake up and smell the corruption of future generations. Criminal as I said, to give this stuff any credibility on a par with anything remotely scientific.]

Work In Progress – Interesting series of columns by the BBC’s Peter Day, charting very rapid market disruptions, mainly by new technologies, Google, Blogging and Podcasting, and also by the Chinese economy and Banking competition. The old 80 year Kondratiev economic cycles are being severely strained everywhere.

It really is spotting the market effect of the technology, rather than the capabilities of the technolgy per se. The Excite / Google / Amazon example says it all. It used to be millions of customers in dozens of markets, now it’s millions of markets each with dozens of customers – the so-called long tail.

Still haven’t got into podcasting, transmitting or receiving, but it looks unstoppable as the coming media. Leon reminded me of that this morning with this link to the first pod-cast from space. Good luck with the re-entry guys.