Christopher Butler

March 25th 2011

(Very Specific) “Linkouts,” Part 2

My first dispatch was back in August. Here’s another:

Michael, here’s a pretty good “Oh, Snap!” from Nicholas Carr on Google and the life of the mind. And while we’re wagging fingers at Google, here’s a video of Douglas Rushkoff speaking to Google. His message: “Don’t give up on the humans.”

Silas, you know you want to watch Lady Gaga’s exclusive interview with Google.

Able, for you, soundscape ecology. Teaser clip: “add the sounds of plants, molds, and root networks, of soil itself and groundwater, of shifts in air pressure and humidity and even the underlying deep geologic structures that support all that living terrain in the first place, and an intensely interesting sonic portrait of terrestrial ecosystems takes shape, mutating through complex blurs and inflection points over time, its parts weaving in and out symphonically.”

Keith, meet Mr. Rogers.

Aaron, Kevin Kelly says your attention is cheap ($2.50/hour).

Jason, here are some 1975 artist renderings of what a silicon-based ecology on Mars might have looked like.

Martin and Tripp, this Guardian piece about memorization reminded me of the lost abilities our Classical ancestors had to memorize large amounts of text. Have you developed new memory skills in your studies? Also, unrelated, is this 15 minute audio interview with Sarah Blackwell on Montaigne.

Dave, a recounting of one man’s year at sea.

Mark, this is the AdAge post I mentioned about data angst.

Posted at 2:28pm and tagged with: reading, two column,.

March 21st 2011

Recommended Reading (and one “Listening”)

8 notes |#

Robert Krulwich’s post, Cosmonaut Crashed Into Earth ‘Crying in Rage’ really caught me off guard emotionally. It’s essentially his review of a new book, Starman, which provides an account of a 1967 space disaster that resulted in the death of Vladimir Kamarov. Kamarov willingly took the place of a friend on a mission he knew was doomed. Midway through Krulwich’s post, he provides an embedded mp3 of Komarov’s last words from his crashing capsule. Here’s a snippet:

“Once the Soyuz began to orbit the Earth, the failures began. Antennas didn’t open properly. Power was compromised. Navigation proved difficult. The next day’s launch had to be canceled. And worse, Komarov’s chances for a safe return to Earth were dwindling fast.

All the while, U.S. intelligence was listening in. The National Security Agency had a facility at an Air Force base near Istanbul. Previous reports said that U.S. listeners knew something was wrong but couldn’t make out the words. In this account, an NSA analyst, identified in the book as Perry Fellwock, described overhearing Komarov tell ground control officials he knew he was about to die. Fellwock described how Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin called on a video phone to tell him he was a hero. Komarov’s wife was also on the call to talk about what to say to their children. Kosygin was crying.

When the capsule began its descent and the parachutes failed to open, the book describes how American intelligence “picked up [Komarov’s] cries of rage as he plunged to his death.”

My Monster, My Self is another long-ish piece (this time from Gary Greenberg at The Nation) on the whole what-the-internet-is-doing-to-our-minds meme. While I liked the last one I linked to better (the more literary The Information, by Adam Gopnik), this one has a sympathetic, winsome and insightful narrator in Greenberg’s 53 year-old, teva-and-wool-socks-wearing, ponytailed therapist (himself).

Information Half-Life II, a Quiet Babylon entry by Tim Maly, caught my attention as a follow-up to his last post, which he described as “punditry without speculation! The worst.” This post, though, on various ways of thinking about how long information lasts or should last, was much more brief and ended with an interesting thought:

“Imagine a government where senators are elected to go and live in a cave for 6 years. When their term is up, they emerge blinking into the sunlight and we lay out for them the current issues of the day. Their judgement is final. What kind of issues would we save up for that group of people?”

Try to visualize catastrophe. This Wikipedia entry on Risks to Human Civilization, Humans and Planet Earth should help you do just that. My favorite risk as of right now, Supervolcanoes:

“When the supervolcano at Yellowstone last erupted 640,000 years ago, the magma and ash ejected from the caldera covered most of the United States west of the Mississippi river and part of northeastern Mexico. Another such eruption could threaten civilization. Such an eruption could also release large amounts of gases that could alter the balance of the planet’s carbon dioxide and cause a runaway greenhouse effect, or enough pyroclastic debris and other material might be thrown into the atmosphere to partially block out the sun and cause a volcanic winter, as happened in 1816 following the eruption of Mount Tambora, the so-called Year Without a Summer. Such an eruption might cause the immediate deaths of millions of people several hundred miles from the eruption, and perhaps billions of deaths worldwide due to the failure of the monsoon, as well as destruction of the “American breadbasket”, causing starvation on a massive scale. Supervolcanoes are more likely threats than many others, as a prehistoric Indonesian supervolcano eruption may have reduced the human population to only a few thousand individuals, while no catastrophic bolide impact, for example, has occurred since long before modern humans evolved.”

Lastly, the UK Sound Map, an “interactive map showing 1574 soundscape recordings contributed so far by members of the public.” My favorite entry right now is the Vatarsay Sea Cave, way up Northwest of the Isle of Mull… If you’d like to be transported elsewhere, this is a good place to start.

Do you have any recommendations?

Posted at 1:26pm and tagged with: reading, reading-list, two column, longreads,.

March 18th 2011

Heptapod Consciousness

10 notes |#

This week, I read a short story called The Story of Your Life, which is one of eight included in a collection called Stories of Your Life: And Others, by Ted Chiang. I can’t quite remember how I heard about this book, but I do recall that it was generally well reviewed and tends to come up in many “even if you don’t like science fiction, you should read…” conversations online. Having been in my reading queue for some time, it became #1 this week. So far, I’m very much absorbed by it.

The story is told from the point of view of a woman (we eventually learn her name is Louise, but I had to look back to make sure) who speaks/writes with a strange tense that seems to straddle the past and future—saying things like, “Right now, your dad and I have been married for about two years, living on Ellis Avenue; when we move you you’ll still be too young to remember the house, but we’ll show you pictures of it, tell you stories about it.” She’s talking about the past, and the past’s future, which is, presumably, still the past. It takes some getting used to, but the odd tense becomes central to the story.

Louise tells the story of her involvement in learning the language of an…wait for it!…alien species who arrive unannounced and remain in orbit, using “windows” somehow sent down to Earth (we never learn how) that enable two-way visual communication on a large scale. (Think massive, wall-sized Skype windows.) A recognized expert in linguistics, the government has brought her in to help communicate with the aliens—seven-legged, radially symmetric beings, generally biologically different from humans in a radical way. Their vocalizations earn them the nicknames, “Flapper” and “Raspberry.”

Louise bounces back and forth between the story of learning the alien language and recounting her now deceased daughter’s childhood. We learn many things about both—how she decodes the language, how she raises her daughter alone, and then, over time, how the two stories converge. Her discovery about how the alien language works is central to understanding why this story exists. The alien written language is “semasiographic,” which means it “conveys meaning without an reference to speech.” A good example of this is the “no smoking” symbol that simply uses a circle bisected by a diagonal line. No words, no reference to spoken sounds. This insight helps her to understand the alien mindset, which becomes increasingly understood as very much unlike ours. They don’t have a concept of cause and effect. To them, there is little difference between what happens now and what happens later. Their spoken sentences don’t rely upon sequence—rearranging their words doesn’t change the meaning to them—and their written language is monolithically symbolic. The more complex the thought, the bigger and more complex the symbol, but it’s always just one symbol. As she learns to write like them, Louise begins to think like them. The tense-weirdness that stuck out so much at the beginning of the story makes more sense.

Eventually, we also learn that the scientist with whom she worked on the alien language project was the father of Louise’s child (I started to suspect this probably later than the average person would… not to quick sometimes), that they divorced at some point, and that some time after that, their daughter died in a rock climbing accident as a young adult. It also finally becomes clear that the entire marriage and child rearing years are all after the alien encounter. That seems trivial, but at the beginning of the story, her language made the sequence seem to be be opposite—that the alien story came later. Again, her sympathetic “tetrapod consciousness” explains this.

What’s fascinating is that the encounter is completely anticlimactic. The aliens, who had been clear that their purpose was only to observe, just abruptly leave one day. Aside from their language, the humans learned nothing new from the heptapods. The story, playing with tense the entire time, sets us up to learn the lesson that a full-life seems inclined to teach—that things don’t tend to go the way we expect them to. Typically, an alien encounter in the science fiction genre leads to significant world change: enlightenment, new technology, transformation, the opening up of possibilities and the expansion of our universe. Chiang provides an alien contact scenario that is just as likely as any fantasy we’ve conjured. Perhaps it wouldn’t change anything. Perhaps they would come, look around a little and leave. And that would be it. Why not? Why do we expect that they’d come with the intent of changing everything for us? Why do some even hope for this?

I’m looking forward to reading more from Chiang. I like the way he pushes the boundaries of the science fiction genre (that’s what it should be all about, really) and reframes my expectations of what might/will/should happen.

Posted at 11:15am and tagged with: book, reading, science-fiction, longreads,.

March 14th 2011

11 notes |#

I just posted this over at my Newfangled blog…

Why We Need to Learn How to Play

I recently finished reading Kevin Kelly’s latest book, What Technology Wants, and have since been reflecting upon his point of view on what technology is and how it shapes our culture. There’s a ton of material available on the book at this point, most of which covers the central idea that technology is so interwoven or embedded into human existence that it’s progression towards the future is almost deterministic. Kelly’s title comes from the idea that technology has “wants,” or demands its current existence makes on us.

But one idea that has stayed with me since the beginning of the book is something that Kelly mentions as he describes the slow progress of human civilization early in the book. He writes (it’s a long quote so I’ve set the most critical piece in bold):

“A typical tribe of hunters-gathers had few very young children and no old people. This demographic may explain a common impression visitors had upon meeting intact historical hunter-gatherer tribes. They would remark that ‘everyone looked extremely healthy and robust.’ That’s in part because most everyone was in the prime of life, between 15 and 35. We might have the same reaction visiting a trendy urban neighborhood with the same youthful demographic. Tribal life was a lifestyle for and of young adults.

A major effect of this short forager life span was the crippling absence of grandparents. Given that women would only start bearing children at 17 or so and die by their thirties, it would be common for children to lose their parents before the children were teenagers. A short life span is rotten for the individual. But a short life span is also extremely detrimental for a society as well. Without grandparents, it becomes exceedingly difficult to transmit knowledge—and knowledge of tool using—over time. Grandparents are the conduits of culture, and without them culture stagnates.

Imagine a society that not only lacked grandparents but also lacked language—as the pre-Sapiens did. How would learning be transmitted over generations? Your own parents would die before you were an adult, and in any case, they would not communicate to you anything beyond what they could show you while you were immature. You would certainly not learn anything from anyone outside your immediate circle of peers. Innovation and cultural learning would cease to flow.”

While this kind of anthropological evolutionary reflection isn’t exactly new (there are plenty of good, popular books in that vein, like Guns, Germs and Steel and Pandora’s Seed), I found Kelly’s point, in that it supported a reading of technology and humanity’s symbiotic relationship, compelling. If the point seems soft when considering a small tribe with the family structure we know today (I actually think that without Kelly’s point, we’d probably think of it that way anyhow), consider what today’s society would look like without grandparents. The difference would be radical…

Read the Rest >

Posted at 4:37pm and tagged with: digital-literacy, reading, the-future, longreads,.

I just posted this over at my Newfangled blog…
Why We Need to Learn How to Play I recently finished reading Kevin Kelly’s latest book, What Technology Wants, and have since been reflecting upon his point of view on what technology is and how it shapes our culture. There’s a ton of material available on the book at this point, most of which covers the central idea that technology is so interwoven or embedded into human existence that it’s progression towards the future is almost deterministic. Kelly’s title comes from the idea that technology has “wants,” or demands its current existence makes on us. But one idea that has stayed with me since the beginning of the book is something that Kelly mentions as he describes the slow progress of human civilization early in the book. He writes (it’s a long quote so I’ve set the most critical piece in bold):
“A typical tribe of hunters-gathers had few very young children and no old people. This demographic may explain a common impression visitors had upon meeting intact historical hunter-gatherer tribes. They would remark that ‘everyone looked extremely healthy and robust.’ That’s in part because most everyone was in the prime of life, between 15 and 35. We might have the same reaction visiting a trendy urban neighborhood with the same youthful demographic. Tribal life was a lifestyle for and of young adults. A major effect of this short forager life span was the crippling absence of grandparents. Given that women would only start bearing children at 17 or so and die by their thirties, it would be common for children to lose their parents before the children were teenagers. A short life span is rotten for the individual. But a short life span is also extremely detrimental for a society as well. Without grandparents, it becomes exceedingly difficult to transmit knowledge—and knowledge of tool using—over time. Grandparents are the conduits of culture, and without them culture stagnates. Imagine a society that not only lacked grandparents but also lacked language—as the pre-Sapiens did. How would learning be transmitted over generations? Your own parents would die before you were an adult, and in any case, they would not communicate to you anything beyond what they could show you while you were immature. You would certainly not learn anything from anyone outside your immediate circle of peers. Innovation and cultural learning would cease to flow.”
While this kind of anthropological evolutionary reflection isn’t exactly new (there are plenty of good, popular books in that vein, like Guns, Germs and Steel and Pandora’s Seed), I found Kelly’s point, in that it supported a reading of technology and humanity’s symbiotic relationship, compelling. If the point seems soft when considering a small tribe with the family structure we know today (I actually think that without Kelly’s point, we’d probably think of it that way anyhow), consider what today’s society would look like without grandparents. The difference would be radical…
Read the Rest >

January 26th 2010

A Reading List for Futurists

2 notes |#

Posted at 3:33pm and tagged with: the-future, reading, books,.

October 17th 2009

What are we doing on-line? John Barlow and Kevin Kelly for embracing the web vs. Sven Birkerts and Mark Slouka for refusing it

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This was a forum held fourteen years ago and reported in the August 1995 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Participant Kevin Kelly frames the discussion here:

And then there is the unrecoverable context of the times in mid 1990s. This forum took place at a point when the web had just been born. The internet referred to here is text-based – no images, no sound, all ascii characters. Users watched as light text on dark screen scrolled up. Email accounts were uncommon. Very few computers were connected. They stood alone. No handhelds, virtually no cell phones. To get on the internet was a chore, and it was a very small place.

It’s fascinating that despite the discussing having occurred so long ago, the points raised by each participant remain so pertinent to today. I suppose that makes Kelly’s introduction not so much of a disclaimer of anachronism but a reminder of prescience.

A couple of funny examples of what a difference a decade can make, though, are:

BIRKERTS: I don’t have a computer. I work on a typewriter. I don’t do e-mail. It’s enough for me to deal with [printed] mail.

Well, Sven Birkerts blogs now.

KELLY: You can’t download it. That’s the whole point. You want to download it so that you can read it like a book. But that’s precisely what it can’t be. You want it to be data, but it’s experience. And it’s an experience that you have to have there. When you go on-line, you’re not going to have a book experience.

This may not be true anymore either. With mobile devices taking on a vast array of shapes and sizes (even Microsoft’s upcoming device takes the codex format we’ve all been wishing for in a digital device), we are experiencing the web in a much more “book-like” way. Also, print on demand is still a significant concept. Whether the Lulu.com’s of the web survive is beside the point- some people (myself included) still like to compile web content and engage with it in bookish ways.

Read the whole discussion.

Posted at 11:02am and tagged with: interview, digital-literacy, reading,.

October 16th 2009

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Sven Birkerts, Reading in the Open-Ended Information Zone Called Cyberspace

Posted at 2:40pm and tagged with: quote, digital-literacy, reading,.

“

I put the highest subjective value on focus, on the ability to prolong a thought, to hold a perception until its resonances come clear to me. I prize a sense of inhabiting my self-constituted boundaries as a distinct “I.” I aspire toward a recognition of the uniqueness and consequentiality of my experience, and yes, I fear that the steady centrifugal pull of the internet blurs me in these respects, makes it harder for me to achieve the subjective distinctness I am after.

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October 9th 2009

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Two weeks ago, I posted a chart showing the various categories among the 25 articles I had read that week. Then last week, I posted a second chart comparing that weeks data with the previous one.

This week, I’m comparing the past three weeks. Some of the categories from previous weeks have been consolidated into more general ones (i.e. ‘Carl Jung’ has become ‘Psychology,’ and ‘Artists’ has become ‘Art’). Art and Tech Trends are up, Futurism is down.

I also noticed that I’m tending to read an average of 25 articles per week.

Posted at 11:39am and tagged with: reading, reading-list, infographic,.

Two weeks ago, I posted a chart showing the various categories among the 25 articles I had read that week. Then last week, I posted a second chart comparing that weeks data with the previous one.
This week, I’m comparing the past three weeks. Some of the categories from previous weeks have been consolidated into more general ones (i.e. ‘Carl Jung’ has become ‘Psychology,’ and ‘Artists’ has become ‘Art’). Art and Tech Trends are up, Futurism is down.
I also noticed that I’m tending to read an average of 25 articles per week.

September 27th 2009

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This quote comes from a 2003 article by Johanna Drucker titled “The Virtual Codex from Page Space to E-Space.”

I find it fascinating to read a six-year-old article on how electronic media interacts with the concept of a book, especially now that the ubiquity of devices like laptops, netbooks, tablets, Kindles, iPhones, etc. has began to truly impact how we consume the written word. However, many of Drucker’s points are still valid. The quote above touches on something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately- that the codex format employs something special that is the result of its physical construction. This special property is how elements from two side-by-side pages can interact graphically. When you hold a book open, you visually take in both sides at once, though you know you will likely begin reading at the top left, work your way down to the bottom, and then resume at the top right. In many textbooks or diagrams, the two sides present a unique opportunity to engage the design of the page in a conversation of elements on each side. “Breaking” the gutter with a visual element that crosses from one side to the other begins to create another space that is beyond the page. In other words, the single page has some inherent design limitations that can be harnessed when another page is attached to it and used to expand the graphic possibilities of the layout. As this works wonderfully in printed media, I think it could do even more in an electronic device that maintains the convention of the codex.

Posted at 9:02am and tagged with: quote, reading, education, ebooks,.

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Instead of reading a book as a formal structure, then, we should understand it in terms of what is known in the architecture profession as a “program” constituted by the activities that arise from a response to the formal structures. Rather than relying on a literal reading of book “metaphors” grounded in a formal iconography of the codex, we should instead look to scholarly and artistic practices for an insight into ways the programmatic function of the traditional codex has been realized. Many aspects of traditional codex books are relevant to the conception and design of virtual books. These depend on the idea of the book as a performative space for the production of reading. This virtual space, like the e-space, or electronic space of my title, is created through the dynamic relations that arise from the activity that formal structures make possible. I suggest that the traditional book produces this virtual espace, but this fact tends to be obscured by attention to its iconic and formal properties. The literal has a way with us, its graspable and tractable rhetoric is readily consumed. But concrete conceptions of the performative approach also exist.

”