24 January 2012, 0:14 UTCPanopticon Australia
I have to start with an admission. I have consistently underestimated Suelette Dreyfus. All that time spent discussing theoretical information economics [1], Suelette must have simultaneously been providing a necessary dimension of mature social insight to a revolutionary publishing cabal. Six young computer geeks on their own lack the necessary breadth of life experience to pull that kind of thing off.
It was the typical sexism and ageism that is such a problem in the I.T. field. I have no excuse.
So anyway, Australia's police seem to have acquired a nasty little habit of spying on a lot of people's telecommunications metadata. Telecommunicatins metadata means not the actual phone conversation, but when and who you called, and for how long. Also information about your internet access, such as IP address. Joseph McCarthy would have loved it. They did it because they could, because it was allowed, and they lacked the discipline and principles not to. A quarter of a million times. That's not finding criminals any more, that's indiscriminate spying on your own countryfolk. It's pretty disgusting.
War on the Internet event #2 - Suelette Dreyfus from Electronic Frontiers Australia. The rest of the videos from this event are well worth watching. Greens senator Scott Ludlam's talk is also particularly good. It's thrilling to see an elected politician with principles and intelligence.
This is the report Suelette was referring to. See page 63.
[1] I think I recognize the young gnu Peter Eckersley's ideas in the "indienet" of Little Brother.
3 January 2012, 13:50 UTCThree ways to singularity
(singularity being the point where the current mess we are in becomes solvable, and new concerns arise)
- Artificial Intelligence. Humans remain much as they have ever been as they nod off into irrelevance, coddled by the intelligence accreting around them, which carefully conforms itself to expectations. [Your phone is a far more powerful computer than those you grew up with... but show me the button you press that lets you write and execute a program on it.]
- Augmentation. Some few humans acquire weird new skills that let them use computation more effectively. The plasticity of the human mind is stretched to its limit. [Category theory is a prerequisite.]
- Group mind. To many minds, all present problems are shallow. It's just a question of getting the right information to the right people. [Hello reddit, violent young godling infested by parasites.]
It will be a mix, and in retrospect it will be obvious how far we already are down all three paths. It seems like the niceness of the singularity will be proportional to the extent the third option can be made to work, and I'd like to commend this option to anyone looking for an interesting project to tackle.
20 December 2011, 15:34 UTC"overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity it is an act of justice"
-- Nelson Mandela
Charity is a sign of a broken system, people should be able to demand an end to poverty for themselves. Hence if you wish to reduce poverty, Amnesty International is arguably an effective organization to support:
More simply, you could support access to justice in everyday life:
1 December 2011, 12:26 UTCIndian classical music
India has its own musical tradition, entirely separate to the West, and based on improvisation. This website has quite a lot of useful information. One gets the impression that Indian music is actually all music, and other countries have simply taken bits and pieces of it to make their own. This is my distillation, and is certainly full of huge omissions and misunderstandings.
A raga is an Indian piece of music, but it is not a set melody so much as an improvisational framework. It has:
- A collection of between five and seven musical notes. Sometimes the usual Western scale, sometimes a more middle eastern scale, sometimes a uniquely Indian scale, sometimes something simple like a pentatonic scale. The absolute pitch can vary between performances, what matters is the spacing of the notes. Also the notes can be played over several octaves.
- A key note, the "vadi", similar to the Western concept of tonic.
- A second most important note, the "samvadi", similar to the Western concept of dominant.
- Ascending and descending sequences of notes. The improvised melody is constructed roughly based on splicing together parts of these.
- A melody instrument, with a tuned pair of drums as accompaniment.
Each raga is associated with a time of day, a rather clever way of hinting at its character.
Here are some ragas to play with:
A common error I have observed is people trying to improvise a melody of the same complexity as a written melody. No. Start with one note, produce an interesting rhythm. Then add a second note. Mull over the possibilities. Add a third note, and so on.
I like to think of improvisation as moving around an energy landscape, which is just a fancy abstract way of talking about something you encounter every day in all sorts of things. Think of it like riding a skateboard around a bumpy surface, say. The vadi is a depression in the surface where you can come to rest (after jiggling around a bit). The samvadi is like the peak of a hill where you can can seem to pause before rolling back down again. Or perhaps it's a little dimple at the top of the hill. The landscape is somewhat constrained by physics, what is more or less consonant with what else, is somewhat a matter of listener's expectation, and is somewhat something you decide upon yourself and convey by your performance. As you move around the paths you've taken previously are carved into the landscape, to be followed again.
... well, that is to say, to the extent that this is a matter of conscious thought at all. The real trick is to disengage your consciousness and just feel your way around. At school you have been taught to always be in control of spontaneity. Now you need to temper that, and make self-control something you can turn on and off.
30 October 2011, 3:14 UTCDebt is not moral, morality is not debt
Ok, first off:
"Debt: the first 5000 years" by David Graeber
You need to read this book. Now. Neither history nor the present day make any sense without an understanding of money and debt. See previously. Go. Now. There is so much in this book, I can't hope to do it justice.
Two related points I would like to make.
1. Debt is not a sinful state, repayment of debt is not always just, creditors do not have a moral right to repayment, especially if usury is involved. Consciousness raising time. This is deeply ingrained, and when you hear it, or opine it yourself, I want you to be uncomfortable, and I want you to raise this point so other people are uncomfortable too.
2. Sin is not a state of debt. There is no possibility of repayment. Bad is bad, and good is good. Good actions by a person who has previously done bad are no better or worse than good actions by a person who has previously done good. As a utilitarian, I didn't realize this was how other people thought, but it does seem to be common. Things as simple as trying to lose weight (problem one: posing this as a moral issue) -- you indulge a little too much, so you feel you have to pay it off with some exercise. Nonsense. To eat or not is a simple cost-benefit analysis, the pleasure of the food versus a small increase in weight. The value of exercise is a function of your level of health, not a repayment of any particular previous consumption.
More to follow, I'm sure. I think there's a need reboot some of the historical constructs David was talking about in digital form. Bitcoin is clearly hopelessly mired in the world view it seeks to undermine. I'm thinking more along the lines of digital tally sticks, local currencies based on trust in the issuer, Islamic banking systems. Underlying protocols for a consensus reality -- a reality maintained while useful, discarded if it goes awry...
... Jubilee. Funny isn't it, how we retain the meaning of a time of celebration, but forget what the joy was about.
5 October 2011, 5:27 UTCEvery big idea has a twisted evil twin
that the powerful put about to justify themselves.
Darwinism gives rise to social darwinism. Economics gives rise to a whole rainbow of 1%-friendly bullshit. Christianity gives rise to the Roman Catholic Church. Socialism begets Russian-style communism. "Imagine there's no countries" globalization gives rise to a globalization where goods and capital can move freely, but people can not. The idea that nobility of spirit grants nobility at arms twists easily into its converse. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc.
That this happens is unsurprising. It's pointless to blame the powerful, it's in their nature. If it were not in their nature, they wouldn't be powerful. The flaw lies in the idea itself. The value of a big idea lies as much in its ability to resist this tendency as in its truthfulness.
- Christianity does OK on this score. Every hundred years or so someone comes along and say "actually, that's not what the book says", and nails a bull to the door, or wanders around barefoot making all the rich clergy look bad, or whatever.
- Democracy seems to have a heartening tendency to become more and more inclusive, veritably feeding off its evil twin. The powerful institute a system for resolving disputes amongst themselves, and over time find themselves including more and more people. The idea that legitimacy comes from people has teeth.
I am interested in finding further examples of this.
20 September 2011, 13:15 UTCPaul's favourite cantigas
I've been working through Chris Eames' transcription of the Cantigas de Santa Maria. There's some good stuff in there.
More.
30 August 2011, 7:00 UTCFreedom as the forgetting of debt
After all, every Mafiosi understands this. If you want to take a relation of violent extortion, sheer power, and turn it into something moral, and most of all, make it seem like the victims are to blame, you turn it into a relation of debt. "You owe me, but I’ll cut you a break for now…"
This interview with David Graeber is the best big-picture account of the current state of the world I've read in a while.
11 August 2011, 14:32 UTCFreedom (designed system)
Regarding practical freedom.
I've tried this before, failed before. Many others have tried too, failed too. I think the number one lesson I learnt from failing is: take one piece, and do it well.
That said, where to start? I seem to own more computers now than I did, in various form-factors. There's various information I want to keep in sync between them, just as a matter of personal information management. There are a variety of solutions on offer, but they mostly involve connecting to an external website. With the existence of distributed version control systems, this isn't necessary, but it does remain a question of making distributed version control trivially easy to use.
Having such thing, my next thought would be that there are some things I also want to share with my friends. Via the internet if that is convenient, by ad-hoc local network if that is convenient, and there may be things I don't want to pass through the internet ever.
Suddenly we are talking social network, and suddenly we are up against the social smarts of Facebook, the technical smarts of google+, the ability to instantly deploy a new version of the software that every website has.
Can we imagine an ecosystem of software, protocols, people and businesses that could compete?
This system will probably have some centralized servers, run by a competing gaggle of entrepreneurs. An always connected node to be your agent while you are offline. You may well pay for this service (presently your social network extracts value from you by various other means, you are the commodity that is sold). But it won't have central control. So there is a question of how to push out software updates.
And there's a question of who sets the rules of interaction -- if you've not noticed how brilliant Facebook is at this, you've not been paying attention. Super-star protocol engineers, the people who design the rules of social interaction will have to be recognised geniuses, with cults of personality on par with the rockstar game programmers of today. It needs to be an ecosystem of protocols. We're talking a restricted execution environment with very fine grained control over what software can access what data. Android has taken some promising steps in this direction. Beyond technical restriction of software, we need some sort of code review. Trusted, trademarked code reviewers, so you can tell your grandma "trust this symbol" and she'll be safe.
Because lesson two of failure (hello Jabber) is: it can't be static. If you stay still, you will turn into a ghetto and die.
It's a new world. The battle for the desktop rages on, but matters less and less.
A desktop is just there to run your browser.
The bars of the cage are now, ironically, servers running on free software.
With these new mobile devices, I feel like a punter running DOS again, mail-ordering shareware,
seeing hints of a stranger freer world than I imagined and here we go again,
11 August 2011, 13:53 UTCFreedom (archaic)
Free will in the modern sense is a transparent contradiction,
a sop to the vanity of the stupid.
There exists an older concept of freedom, however,
which will seem at first perverse.
As C. S. Lewis points out in "Studies in Words", the dangerous modern sense of a word can confuse our reading of older texts. (I highly recommend this book, it is sometimes wrong but always interesting.)
Freedom in this old sense is defined in opposition to servility. A servile person does things in order to profit in some way, or out of duty to other people such as their family or nation. A servile person isn't someone who's been whipped into unprotesting obediance, it's someone who's always scheming to get ahead. A lover of life and pleasure and status, a coward, a self-interested free economic agent.
On the other hand, when a person is free their actions are entirely generated from within. A philosopher pursuing the life of the mind, to no profit, is an excellent example of this. So is a Christian who is possessed by the Holy Spirit, who obeys God's laws not in fear of hell but because they believe in their rightness. So is a Buddhist devoted to seeking the nirvana state. So is an amateur mathematician or scientist.
Since Christians and Buddhists can be free in this sense, freedom is programmable, but it's not programmable in the same way. It's a question of cultural norms. The reward is for the belief rather than the action, for being rather than doing (and I will bet there's a further twist I've not yet comprehended).
Servility also is programmable, it's called advertising.
It's all arbitrary. It's all modifiable. There's nothing carved in stone.
The distinction is amoral, total freedom is as monstrous as total servility. It is however a useful diagnostic tool. If we seek to promote some activity, is it a servile activity that needs to be rewarded, or would it be better to set up conditions in which people are free to undertake it and a culture that believes this is something that people will do? Would rewarding it just promote a hideous mockery of the original that draws from the same resource pool?
24 July 2011, 11:10 UTCRhythm and melody, with particular reference to the styles of Arbeau and Playford
18 June 2011, 11:04 UTCFreedom(tm)
5 June 2011, 3:10 UTCDrone
19 April 2011, 5:05 UTCOrfism
17 April 2011, 12:32 UTCCarl Orff and the 1936 Olympic Games
16 April 2011, 11:08 UTCClass notes for Medieval and Renaissance Woodwind Instrument Making, Rowany Festival 2011
28 March 2011, 8:38 UTCDe Bruijn sequences for musical dexterity
25 March 2011, 21:08 UTCBlindsight
24 January 2011, 6:25 UTCNumerically Controlled Monkey
9 January 2011, 8:00 UTCCharles Limb, overthinking things
31 December 2010, 4:31 UTCAdam de la Halle
28 November 2010, 1:45 UTCPlayford's English Dancing Master (1651)
27 November 2010, 1:13 UTCThe game is rigged, and the first thing they do is chop off part of your penis
30 September 2010, 4:00 UTCGender inference: uncertainty vs fuzziness
3 September 2010, 14:04 UTCMachine learning
30 August 2010, 1:15 UTCClass notes from St. Vitus Dance and Music weekend 2010
16 August 2010, 11:03 UTCWoodwind design program rewritten
29 June 2010, 2:36 UTCScripting-language JIT compilation as data compression
30 May 2010, 12:00 UTCMusic
21 May 2010, 23:57 UTCFluency
