pfh's blog

Clothing rule of thumb

I have a new rule of thumb that I'm trying out: whenever you see someone wearing something a little bit extreme, a little bit in-your-face, look for bullying or oppression.

For example, if I were to see a suburban mother of three in rollerskates and a tutu, I would wonder to what degree her life choices were forced on her, what dreams she had that were put aside. Or if I were to see someone going full goth, extreme corset, platform boots, spikes and buckles everywhere, I would wonder about disfunctional family expectation or religious upbringing or such. Or if I see a couple being especially demonstrative, I would wonder who had told them they couldn't be a couple. Or a flamboyant homosexual. Or, ok, someone who wears plate armour more often than is strictly necessary.

It looks playful, or childish, or just aestheticly inexplicable, but I think there is almost always an edge to it of proving a point, of asserting their own reality, and in the background, someone who has hurt them.

In high school, one of my English teachers told the class she wanted to be a journalist, but that the relevant person (high school principal?) had refused to write a letter of reference because he didn't think it was a suitable job for a woman. This must have happened a lot in her generation and earlier.

This is not to say that every time someone wears something unusual it is an instance of this. There's a particular quality of being in opposition, of being extreme, rather than of following a necessary internal logic. The boundary is fuzzy.

Domain specific python

If you're typing

from xxx import *

you're using Python as a Domain Specific Language.

Apropos, my nesoni package is now, amongst other things, a DSL for parallel data analysis workflows, with capabilities similar to make but expressed in the terms of a parallel program.

Lords and ladies

I play in the SCA, a medieval recreation society. Most people who play take on a persona of minor aristocracy, referring to themselves as lords and ladies. This is clearly unrepresentative of the true make-up of medieval society, and something that I used to find faintly ridiculous. However a "knighting" ceremony at Canterbury Faire has given me reason to reconsider. As part of this ceremony, the king slaps the knight-to-be, saying let this be the last blow you do not seek retribution for. King Sheridan, who always puts on a good show, delivered the slap resoundingly.

The implication here is that most people in medieval society, those who are not peers of the realm, would take such a blow without complaint, perhaps even thanking the lord that delivered it. It's an alien mindset, almost childish, and it's not so surprising that people don't want to role-play it.

With this in mind, it's not so surprising that the democratic franchise took so long to be given to everyone. It makes no sense to give peasants the vote, they would just vote as their lord tells them to.

See also: The authoritarian-libertarian axis of the political compass.

Morality in animals

Here's a TED talk demonstrating a variety of moral behaviours in mammals. The claim is that these are evolved behaviours, but actually evolution (as currently understood) does not predict these behaviours. Evolution predicts selfish behaviour indifferent to the gains and losses of others. The behaviour must be evolved, because we know that evolution is why animals are as they are, but this is not itself evidence for evolution, it is evidence that our understanding of evolution is flawed. Various theories in philosophy and economics that draw support from the theory of evolution must also be flawed.

Wall of Sound

So there was this thing called the Wrecking Crew, who made a bunch of hits with Phil Spector. Their moral right to be identified as the artists was however not convenient for marketing purposes, and they for their part preferred to have regular pay. And now we have Danny Tedesco righting this wrong, and I like this, I think a healthy Intellectual Production Ecosystem includes people who track down the true artists and authors, the true origins of ideas, the milieaux and influences. This is a difficult and worthwhile activity, and surely a necessary first step in any system that rewards intellectual production.

And I also love the muppetesque wall of sound. I love the lack of pretence, the absence of ego, the perfect purity of the pursuit of record sales, the pushing of the medium toward its Shannon limit. The Rousseau wrongness of Phil Spector... is not likeable.

Economics zero

With David Graeber's long view of econmics in mind, can we come up with a pattern language for organizations not composed of wage slaves?

Here's an attempt at a pattern, it's a genuine expression of lived experience and I'm a little proud:

I think there are some aspects of running these things that are completely generic and could be purchased, such as physical hardware to run virtual machines that maintain a web presence. But I think a lot of it has to be by people who are non-exchangeable, who create systems that are an extension of their way of doing things so that a replacement would have to re-do a lot from scratch. Putting a dollar value on this is meaningless except by way of apology, and might even be insulting. Clearly these people exist, and they are willing to work just for the love of it so long as it doesn't become to onerous. Maybe we should worry more about keeping the load light, providing helpers and resources, so that they stick around.

Lazy web: Surely there's been manuals addressing this sort of problem written by I don't know... Sci-Fi convention organizers, maybe. Please tell me about any you know of.

Panopticon 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.

Three 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.

"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:

http://www.amnesty.org/

More simply, you could support access to justice in everyday life:

http://www.ibj.org/

Indian 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:

ragas.pdf

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.