Uvær

Think I just experienced an original band, Norwegian too.

OK so the usual heavy grunge punk metal vocal delivery – indistinct monotonic screaming growl – I’ll never quite get.

But visually & stylistically different. Again all blues based rock is “derivative” and original is always relative, but not many give me that same sense that Devo did. Musically more than competent. Not too muddy for a catchy melody to escape, twin pedal drummer to double the pace when needed.

Oh, and yes, when they took off the cardboard box disguises, the square suits were indeed art school persona. I think I would have been disappointed if they weren’t. Ones to watch ?

Sent from my iPhone

Email Posting

Never switched this on before, but have more mobile mail / messaging options these days, so worth a try.

Brain Connections

Spooky experience today …  I was immersed in my new UK rail (north-east), “free” wi-fi, new HP laptop, new iPhone, blogging, facebook, work-email, learning experience, from Darlington en-route to Kings Cross, Heathrow, Terminal 3, SAS to Stavanger business travel, when the seat beside me was occupied at York by someone reading Sacks “Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat“.

I had to say to her – you don’t often see people reading that, one of my favourite books. Anyway, she had almost finished it, and – blow me – two minutes later she starts reading Jill Bolte-Taylor’s “Stroke of Inspiration“.

Oh, by the way, did I mention ? I’m back to being UK-based, and …. self-employed.

[If you do nothing else, follow that link to Jill Bolte-Taylor’s TED presentation … literally inspiring.]

[PS – SAS from LHR Terminal 3 ? – Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently reference gets me every time. A meme of limited circulation]

Computer Theology ?

Sounds like my kinda guy. Bertrand du Castel was speaking at Semantic Days 2010 which I was unable to attend. Notice he was chair of POSC for a while too, missed that. Thanks to Leon for the Link.

The Buddha in the Machine

Noticed a few weeks ago that Matthew Crawford’s “Shop Class as Soul Craft” had been published in the UK under the title “The Case for Working with your Hands“.

Noticed yesterday he was on Andrew Marr’s “Start the Week” on BBC Radio 4 with Martin Rees … billed as the philosopher Matthew Crawford. The listen again link (31st May 2010) is live, and looks like it stays up for a while, even if there is no podcast archive. So much motorcycle maintenance without a single mention of Pirsig’s Zen and the Art … who is duly acknowledged in the book itself. (Wendell Berry is mentioned by Marr.)

Interestingly, The Buddha was the subject of the immediate following program “A History of the World“.

Damned If You Do

Interesting headline / byline on this story … the BP Gulf of Mexico disaster … the more information is made available the less people are happy with what they “know”. Less is more. It’s complicated and scary techno-environmental problem BP are dealing with and they need to be allowed, encouraged to focus on that, rather than a complex PR & education problem. There will be blood, already

Dreadful self-destructive meme to assume maximum openness is demanded whereas maximum trust is in fact needed. Add to the “too-much open communication is bad for us” stack.

[Post Note … interesting NYT piece on our faith in technology fixing problems of the day. Hat tip to Matt, in philosophical mood – again.]

Life Changing Proust

Unusually literary philosophical post from Matt the creative human behind the WordPress tool with which I am blogging this post. Yet another strange-loop ?

Tabletop

Reminded by Marsha reading Hofstadter’s “I Am A Strange Loop“, that I never did record the Tabletop (or Theatre of Operations) metaphor for creative analogy … that is analogies that actually create things, things as interesting as humans and minds.

I mentioned it twice here and here referring to Hofstadter’s “Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies“, and I know I’ve demonstrated the Tabletop exercise in real life, but I’ve never recorded a description of it.

Scenario : Now is a point in time … everything you know up to that point. You have a decision to make – now. Your available options are laid out in front of you (on the Tabletop). Your decision is in reponse to the last action of the party you are in debate / dialogue / negotiation with. What next ?

The original point of the exercise was in fact to do with how humans created concepts as part of thought processes. However, it’s pretty much a model of any life decision, for any individual or organization … the question being, what next action is the best choice. The core point is that the “available options” laid out on the Tabletop in front of you are NOT all you will consider, even if they are the only available options in a purely practical – pre-defined rules of the game – sense. Your thinking process will invent relationships and analogies that exist in conceptual levels removed from the Tabletop itself, before making your choice. Your real theatre of operations is much greater than the Tabletop and most of it is invented in your head – created.

The example starts, as befits a Tabletop, with random cutlery and crockery, eating utensils chosen in turn by two people sitting across the table from each other. You choose a knife, I choose a knife / the same knife /  a fork / what ? Same object, same kind, same relation, same what ? Same by some created analogy, and you’re off … infinite levels of creativity. (In Fluid Analogies, these series of what-nexts start with simple number, letter, symbol, word, quine-series ad-infinitum.) The creative question concerns which next choice is “best“.

People vs the System

Much debate (here Thinking Allowed) since the recent financial crisis on the future of capitalism and global industrialisation, and the failure of economists to keep their eye on the underlying “systemic risks” in the trading of ever more convoluted financial derivatives. (Watched that excellent dramatisation of the Lehman Brothers demise just a couple of evenings ago too. Quality stuff.)

Anyway, talking of systems, I was reminded by David Gurteen that in 1923 F W Taylor wrote

“In the past Man has been first.
In future the system must be first.”

Scary ? Like shooting fish in a barrell to ridicule Taylorism nearly a century on for the excesses of scientific management and it is of course where my agenda started.  As David points out, context matters and no surprise, Taylor’s next sentence starts:

“… however …
… the first object of any good system, must be
… first class [people] “

The reason David’s quote caught my eye was a (cover to cover) re-read in the last few days of  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig is often cited as being against “social programs” – in polarizing Capitalist vs Marxist slanging matches – a meme which usually takes about three dialectical exchanges to sink to the level of Hitler & Nazism or Stalin / Mao & Totalitarianism. Bad people. Of course Pirsig too was careful to qualify what he meant:

” … [No] enthusiasm for big programs
full of social planning for big masses of people,
that leave individual Quality out.”

Oh, and how could I forget, the subject of the Denning piece that David Gurteen quotes is Dilbert or maybe Dilbertism. How often Dilbert mirrors real organizational life … now that is scary.

Blues & Twos

It’s a standard joke or maybe urban legend that people in emergency vehicles switch on their sirens and lights to beat the traffic and get home in time for dinner; a perk of the job.

I recall this impression vividly from a very exciting trip to Moscow earlier in the year, that there were an inordinate number of “emergency” vehicles demanding high-speed passage and even jumping the lights at will – traffic was already scary enough and gridlocked with both sheer volume and the number of accidents – at junctions.

 More than an impression apparently.