Thursday, December 26, 2013

Viral stories vs. journalism

Esquire's Luke O'Neil has a fantastic look at the rise of viral bullshit and why it wins over actual journalism in today's media climate. It makes you wonder how you could take advantage of it while improving it - that, in a nutshell, would be the future of journalism.

Sunday, December 22, 2013

Deconstructionism

Here is a mind-blowingly illuminating, pithy description of literary deconstruction for the engineering-minded that is a must-read for .... for anybody, really, who's interested in analysis of the human condition.

Also mentions Baudrillard, who I have suddenly run across in another context. Triangulation of this nature always lets me think maybe I'm onto something.

Sunday, December 15, 2013

Story paradigms

Story paradigms like the Hero's Journey are useful for understanding how we perceive events in the world. We put everything in terms of stories, so the specific stories and story structures we know influence the very things we see around us (if it doesn't fit the story, we drop it).

What does that say about ... well, about everything?

Here's a pretty neat look at six different story paradigms in terms of how they're similar to and differ from a seventh one that the author has developed.

I find it useful to think of a story paradigm as sort of a cognitive boilerplate that we use to make sense of events in the world around us. This is doubly interesting when you consider that user stories are now becoming an explicit design tool for software.

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Matt Taibi on the Tea Party

Taibi did a Rolling Stone article on the Tea Party back in 2010 when Rand Paul was running for Senate (successfully, as it turned out - yikes!) that is a real eye-opener. Even though I'm pretty sure I read it in 2010, too...

The Tea Party is a pretty fascinating phenomenon, actually. It's really highlighting Middle America's fear of the future.

Friday, October 11, 2013

Ten key ideas of economics

What it says on the tin.

Generations in America

I seem to have bookmarked this study of American generations a while back, and recently found it again prowling through old bookmarks.  The key concept is that each generation raises its children in reaction to the way they themselves were raised, and that we can therefore see roughly an eighty-year cycle in American history (but you can see the same sorts of patterns in other countries, of course).

Pretty excellent stuff.

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Christian Dominionism

Cool - Ted Cruz and the government shutdown have a shudder-inducing theological explanation behind them. Huffington Post weighs in.

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

The economics of meth dealing

A tongue-in-cheek illustration of why economics is an important field of study. At least I think it's tongue-in-cheek. It's like the Breaking Bad of economics.

Abrupt rise of new machine ecology beyond human response time

What it says on the tin - pretty interesting concept, really. You can model high-frequency trading algorithms as predators and prey depending on their speed, and the ecological model makes a lot of sense. But as these predators are merely proxies to the benefit of their human masters, and since it's difficult to envision a set of circumstances where that fact could possibly change, the title is a little ... sensational.

Friday, August 23, 2013

Snopes mining

If we imagine oft-posted texts to be a kind of "organic astroturfing" (perhaps not so organic!) then we could also imagine looking at Snopes to identify them before even getting into an argument. This one came up on my Facebook feed recently and I can't help but notice that the positively portrayed charities are more military in nature and are shown as being selfless, while the negatively portrayed ones tend to be more liberal and are shown as being corporate and greedy, existing in reality only for the self-aggrandizement and personal enrichment of their managers.

This is pernicious because it meshes into the Tea Party outlook of sneaky liberals (itself surely an echo of the sneaky Jew) and isn't actually so easy to refute without some research. This makes it pretty darned interesting to me.  How spontaneous was this? Would it be at all possible to find out where it came from?

A list of fallacies

Here's a handy list-of-fallacies site that you can use for links when arguing. Neat.

I envision a decision tree for fallacy identification, which would be a lot more interesting.

R2D2 theory of Star Wars

So I think retconning is logically part of this blog, so I give to you the R2D2 theory of Star Wars, quoted for truth (the original is obscure, but the earliest link I have is its posting here on a Jeep forum, of all places, and another blog post seems to link to it at morningstar.nildram.co.uk, where it is now 404). The lack of a definitive source for this text is reason enough to quote it here.

(Update: here is Keith Martin's own LiveJournal post of the text. Attribution of popular texts can be difficult. There is a brilliant suggestion in the comments on that post to the effect that it would be great to look at R2D2's and Chewbacca's lines (especially together) in the original movies and work out subtitles that match this theory.)

A New Sith, or Revenge of the Hope
Reconsidering Star Wars IV in the light of I-III

If we accept all the Star Wars films as the same canon, then a lot that happens in the original films has to be reinterpreted in the light of the prequels. As we now know, the rebel Alliance was founded by Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Bail Organa. What can readily be deduced is that their first recruit, who soon became their top field agent, was R2-D2.

Consider: at the end of RotS, Bail Organan orders 3PO's memory wiped but not R2's. He wouldn't make the distinction casually. Both droids know that Yoda and Obi-Wan are alive and are plotting sedition with the Senator from Alderaan. They know that Amidala survived long enough to have twins and could easily deduce where they went. However, R2 must make an impassioned speech to the effect that he is far more use to them with his mind intact: he has observed Palpatine and Anakin at close quarters for many years, knows much that is useful and is one of the galaxy's top experts at hacking into other people's systems. Also he can lie through his teeth with a straight face. Organa, in immediate need of espionage resources, agrees.

For the next 20 years, as far as 3PO knows, he is the property of Captain Antilles, doing protocol duties on a diplomatic transport. He is vaguely aware of the existence of the princess but doesn't know much about her. Wherever 3PO goes, being as loud and obvious as he always is, his unobtrusive little counterpart goes with him. 3PO is R2's front man. Wherever they land, R2 is passing messages between rebel sympathisers and sizing up governments as potential rebel recruits - both by personal contact and by hacking into their networks. He passes his recommendations on to Organa.

Yoda is out of the picture by this stage, using the Force-infused swamps of Dagobah to hide himself from Vader and the Emperor. Or something. He is meditating on the future and keeping in touch with Obi-Wan via the ghost of Qui-Gon Jin, which as comm systems go has the virtue of being untappable. Obi-Wan, on Tattoine, keeps in touch with Bail Organa and the other Rebel leaders by courier, of which more later.

As Star Wars opens, R2 is rushing the Death Star plans to the Rebellion. R2, not Leia. The plans are always in R2. What Leia puts into him in the early scene is only her own holographic message to Kenobi. Leia's own mission, as she says in the holographic message, is to pick up Obi-Wan and take him to Alderaan - or so she thinks. Actually, her father just wants her to meet Kenobi, which up to this point she never has. There's a reason for that.

Obi-Wan has spent the last 20 years in the Tattoine desert, keeping watch over Luke Skywalker and trying to decide on one of the three available options:
A) If Luke shows no significant access to the Force, then leave him alone in obscurity
B) If Luke shows real Force ability, then consider recruiting him as a Jedi. The rebellion needs Jedi. Now.
But, if Luke shows any signs of turning out like his father, then C) sneak into his house one fine night and chop his head off. With great regret but it'll save a lot of trouble later on.
Knowing this to be the case, Bail Organa (perhaps at the insistence of his wife) has found excuses not to send Leia to Ben for assessment of Jedi potential, largely for fear of option C.

To be fair to all concerned, Leia has shown no overt signs of a link to the Force. Luke on the other hand has. In his home-built hotrod aircraft, with no formal fighter pilot training and no decent instrumentation, Luke can regularly score centre-hits on 2-metre targets in complicated zero-altitude maneouvres. Until he attends the briefing on Yavin, Luke has no way of knowing that hardened combat pilots would consider that nearly impossible. To him it's easy. Obi-Wan, who saw Anakin's performance in the Pod Race, is nervous.

Much of Obi-Wan's behaviour in this film, and Yoda's in the next, can best be understood if they are frankly scared to death of what Luke might become. (Ben is also scared that he himself will make all the same mistakes he made with Anakin.)

Now, with the existence of the rebellion at stake, Bail Organa has finally told Leia to go see Obi-Wan and has sent her along with R2. The original plan would then be for Obi-Wan (with optional Luke and/or Leia in tow) to leave his exile and take the Death Star plans to Yavin, where they can be put to use. R2 (with Leia if Ben doesn't want to take her) would then carry on to Alderaan to maintain the cover story. The original plan does not survive contact with a large Imperial Star Destroyer.

R2 and 3PO bail out in an escape pod, landing in vaguely the right area of Tattoine, where R2's first priority is transport. He arranges to be captured by a group of Jawas and, once on board their transport, he makes a deal with them (possibly using emergency funds stored about his person) to take him where he wants to go. The Jawas refuse to go directly to Kenobi for fear of marauding Sandpeople but they agree to R2's second request : transport to the Skywalker farm. They even get to keep the purchase price if they can sell R2 and 3PO there. The Jawas shake on it and go through with the plan.

Seeing 3PO fail to recognise the farm where he worked for 10 years gives r2 a moment's amusement but, as soon as possible, he gets away and heads for Kenobi. Luke and 3PO follow, which may or may not have been part of the plan.

On first seeing R2, Obi-Wan has a twinkle in his eye and calls him "my little friend". Well, he is. However, when Luke wakes up and says that R2 claimed to be owned by an Obi-Wan Kenobi, he blandly says "I don't seem to remember ever owning a droid." Ben has in fact owned several but the remark is aimed at R2 and translates as "You keep quiet. I'm not about to tell him everything just yet." Obi-Wan thinks fast and tells Luke a version of his past that does not involve a father who became a dark lord of the Sith. He wants to examine Luke a lot more closely before he risks telling him the real truth.

Although the Death Star plans need to get to Yavin as soon as possible, Obi-Wan needs to make one more diversion first. If the Empire knows that Leia is a Rebel leader, then they also know about her father and the whole Organa family may need immediate evacuation. Fortunately, before coming to Tattoine, R2 had already arranged transport, which is waiting at Mos Eisley, under the command of the Rebellion's other chief field agent and espionage asset. Chewbacca.

...

20 years earlier, Chewbacca was second in command of the defence of his planet. He's there in the tactical conferences and there on the front lines and is a personal friend of Yoda's. When he needed reliable people to join the embryonic Alliance, who else would Yoda turn to but his old friend from Kashykk? Given his background, there is no way that Chewie would spend the crucial years of the rebellion as the second-in-command to (sorry Han) a low-level smuggler. Unless it's his cover. In fact, Chewie is a top-line spy and flies what is in many ways the Rebellion's best ship.

The Millenium Falcon may look like a beat-up old freighter but it can outrun any Imperial ship in normal space or hyperspace, hang in a firefight with a Star Destroyer or outmaneouvre a dozen top-of-the-line TIE fighters. It's a remarkable feat of engineering and must have cost a colossal fortune to build. How does Han come to own a ship like that? He only thinks he does, actually it's Chewie's. Half-way through RotS, we see the Falcon landing at the Senate building on Coruscant. If it's the same ship (which of course it is) then it was the personal transport of one of the senatorial delegations - a much more likely source to commission its design. That delegatino must have later joined the Rebellion and given it the use of the Falcon. In fact, if the delegation is the one from Kashykk, then the ship may have belonged to Chewbacca as early as RotS.

Han is Chewie's front man. It's much better, and safer for him, if he doesn't know what's really going on. Chewie used to work with Lando Calrissian in a similar way but Lando wanted to settle down, so Chewie arranged for him to lose the Falcon in a card game to Han Solo, an even better choice as partner. Han and Chewie's working method is pretty much what we see in the cantina scene: Chewie make the contacts and sets up the deals, then turns them over to Han who haggles over the price and gives the final yea or nay. This lets Chewie wander the seamy underside of the galaxy pretty much at will, making contacts, gathering and passing information with no-one was the wiser, especially not Han.

Chewie persuaded Han to do business with Jabba the Hutt so he could make regular runs to Tattoine, where Chewie could pass messages between Kenobi and Organa. When R2's urgent message came through only days before, the only way for Chewie to get back to Tattoine in time was to make the "mistake" that forced Han to dump his cargo to avoid capture. As a down side, this led to Solo's getting a death mark out on him from Jabba the Hutt. Chewie was a bit upset about the need for that but figured they weren't going to be dealing with Tattoine for much longer.

En route to Alderaan, R2 and Chewie play stop-motion chess. This is the latest in a series of games they've played over the year in the back rooms of space stations and cantinas across the galaxy, but this is the first time they've done it in front of their respective straight men, so they put on a big show.

Then it all goes wrong again. Alderaan is gone and the Falcon is caught and brought aboard the Death Star. Only Han, Luke and 3PO don't know just how much trouble they're in but Obi-Wan has a plan and seems confident (but Jedi always do). Soon afterwards, R2 finds Leia in the detention cells and shouts that they have to rescue her, to which Chewie can only agree. If Vader learns he has a daughter, then they're all in deep trouble, so Chewie does his bit to persuade Han to go along with Luke's plan.

Then, on the verge of escape, Vader himself turns up only yards from both of his children, one of whom is leaking Force all over the place. Obi-Wan stages a distraction by letting himself die and go into the Force while the others escape. At this point, Chewie suddenly realises that he's been left in charge, not only of the Death Star Plans and the survival of the Rebellion but of the secret son and daughter of Darth Vader. With the Organas and Kenobi all dead, only Chewie, R2 and Yoda know who Luke and Leia are. And only Ob-Wan knew where Yoda has been hiding. Chewie is stressed out by the responsibility and R2 (who keeps making crude jokes about the whole affair) is being no help at all.

Chewie's first problem is what is happening between Luke and Leia. With a psychic link they can feel but don't understand, thrown together in a life-or-death escape, they are looking at each other with a sparky intensity that Chewie gradually recognises as Romantic Tension. He's no expert on human relationships but Chewie is fairly sure that that's Wrong, so he does the only thing he can under the circumstances - he throws Han at her. Han is at first not interested but after a while starts to warm to the idea with an intensity that gives Chewie new worries.

When they reach Yavin, Han decides to take the money and run and Chewie decides to go with him. Looked at in cold light, it's for the good of the Rebellion. Even if Yavin is destroyed, there'll be one agent who knows what's going on who can try and put something back together, but he doesn't feel good about it. When Han decides to turn around and join the attack, Chewie is all for it.

Han and Luke get medals but Chewie doesn't. Actually, Leia offers him one but Chewie turns it down. He got one of those things from Yoda about 20 years ago, but there's no way he can tell her that.

As the film ends, the three founders of the Rebellion are all gone. Bail Organa is dead, Yoda is out of contact and Obi-Wan's ghost can only talk to other Jedi. (So that would be Yoda then.) Thus, the field leadership of the rebellion has just been turned over to the daughter of Darth Vader. Chewie is really hoping that someone with an official rank greater than hers will get here real soon before he has to think really seriously about option C.

© Keith Martin 2005
I love this kind of brilliant recasting of known facts into fitting a hidden theory. This one is nearly iconic in this respect; I keep seeing it everywhere.

Thursday, June 20, 2013

Saturday, June 15, 2013

MuckRock

A service to coordinate and handle FOIA requests.  Nice!

Edward Snowden: smears to watch out for

Juan Cole has a nice top-10 ways they'll ad-hominem Snowden. It would be cool to monitor this kind of thing.

Friday, June 7, 2013

Semantics and philosophy

Got into a little discussion about propaganda and semantics the other day, and I decided to look up Heinlein's General Semantics thing I remember from so much of his fiction.  Turns out that stuff is Korzybski, so I'm reading his seminal work Science and Sanity.  (His earlier work was the Manhood of Humanity, now on Gutenberg.)

Really, the subject matter of this blog, in my life, traces directly back to Heinlein's mentions of general semantics; I had no idea this was based on something that had been important in his own life, but Heinlein was a member of Korzybski's Institute before he started writing.  That's pretty fascinating!

Anyway, reading on the edges of that, I was reminded of the fact that the state of my knowledge about philosophy in general stinks; it's great to be an autodidact in most instances, but there is a vast amount of knowledge of which I have only a vague inkling, and the history of thought is one of those areas I'm lacking.  Here's a timeline of Western philosophers. There have been a lot of them.

But it's Dave Chalmers's taxonomy (and post explaining it) that really (re-)caught my eye, along with the bibliography of AI philosophy that he started back in Bloomington.  Seems like I could read all day long for the rest of my life and still not run out of material.  Clearly our knowledge is outstripping our abilities, so it's a good thing we're on the cusp of augmenting those abilities.  Oh, here's another one out of Bloomington, with slick JavaScript.

Saturday, May 25, 2013

The rise of consumer capitalism

An utterly fascinating article in Orion Magazine about the origins of consumer capitalism in the United States in the 20's and 30's.

CEO: Corporate Europe Observatory

CEO is a neat organization monitoring corporate activities in Europe.  They recently sued the Union over providing copies of trade agreement to lobbying groups while censoring the same documents when providing them to public-interest groups.

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Michael O Church

Michael O Church has some pretty insightful essays about the structure of contemporary corporate capitalism and society.

Saturday, May 18, 2013

Fifty Shades as a view of the 1%'s consumer life

Wow.  Nicely framed.  The title says "late capitalism", which is optimistic to say the least.

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

The rent-seeking economy

Good article about rent-seeking behavior and how destructive it is.

None of the world's top industries are actually profitable

If the world's top industries were charged for the costs they socialize (let the rest of society cover for them), they would largely fail.  In other words, a lot of our economy crucially depends on moving money from the poor to the rich, not actually creating things.  (I guess that's not really news.)

Anti-authoritarians diagnosed as mentally ill

Because you can't make it through med school without being very authoritarian.  Makes sense.

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Yo as a pronoun, Ebonics

Children in Baltimore spontaneously invented a third-person singular gender-free pronoun.

So it turns out American English is actually diverging now due to cultural divisions.  AAVE (African-American Variant English) is a dialect getting some more intensive study - calling it "Ebonics" nearly led to the political death of all study of it, but it's a real dialect.  And it has some pretty fascinating grammatical differences from standard English, too, which just leads you to wonder how this language stuff really works.

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

C.S.Lewis's inner ring

C.S.Lewis had an interesting speech here about the Inner Ring.  I know I've fallen into this trap before.

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Welcome to the future

Amazon is a strange pulsing network of potential goods, global supply chains, and alien associative algorithms with the skin of a store stretched over it, so we don’t lose our minds.

I'm so there.

Thursday, March 7, 2013

A paean to global Coca-Cola production

What Coke Contains — Food for Thought — Medium - the money quote being this:
The number of individuals who know how to make a can of Coke is zero. The number of individual nations that could produce a can of Coke is zero. This famously American product is not American at all. Invention and creation is something we are all in together. Modern tool chains are so long and complex that they bind us into one people and one planet. They are not only chains of tools, they are also chains of minds: local and foreign, ancient and modern, living and dead — the result of disparate invention and intelligence distributed over time and space. Coca-Cola did not teach the world to sing, no matter what its commercials suggest, yet every can of Coke contains humanity’s choir.
That's poetry.

Friday, March 1, 2013

Loss of manufacturing capability in the US

Forbes has an interesting article on how short-sighted profitability strategies can easily harm the long-term viability of a company, and the effects of this on the US economy.

Ron Garrett on stock price reporting

Ron Garrett always has interesting things to say.  This time it's about how silly it is to look at a single number and think that says anything meaningful about the deep sea of data that is a stock market.

Survival of the stupid

This explains a lot.

Laser-targeted atomic phishing

This stuff is fascinating.  Social engineering is really getting to be something impressive.

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Foxconn leaving China?

Forbes thinks so. The Chinese government likes to impose trade sanctions for trivialities - making them unstable as a link in a supply chain.  Interesting.

True Cost of Healthcare

I haven't read more than the summary of this fantastically detailed site, but it's a great rundown of American healthcare from the doctor's point of view.

Monday, February 4, 2013

Fox failing?

I have to admit, I didn't see this coming.  It looks like maybe Fox's viewers were turned off by their actually actively lying about election forecasts....

The peaceful Icelandic revolution

Strangely enough, the Icelandic revolution wasn't televised.

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Rolling Stone on the bailout

Matt Taibbi rarely disappoints.

If-by-whiskey

A new example of argumentational fallacy (maybe) - so says Wikipedia but I see this as just a rhetorical figure.  "If by whiskey you mean <bad things>, then I'm naturally against it, but if by whiskey you mean <good things> then I'm for it, and I stand by that moral choice, etc., etc.".


Monday, January 7, 2013

Frames or tactics or ...

In "debate" on public fora, we very often observe a set of rhetorical frames or tactics that get reused a lot.  A response to the notion that conservative organizations constitute an ongoing financial scam is countered by "Do you know how much the CEO of the Red Cross makes?" (Real example; I've muted the poster because I just can't afford to blow up any more.)

OK.  So this "false equivalence" comes up a lot in this kind of discussion - it's OK for Republicans to do something because Democrats do it, too.  This one's a little weird because the Red Cross is generally considered in a positive light by essentially everybody, but money skews things.

I'd like to catalog this kind of rhetorical tactic so that I could just link to it in this kind of exchange, saving me a lot of time and agony.  Entries in this catalog should be dispassionate and sparse, showing as neutral a set of examples as possible.

I'm virtually positive this kind of catalog exists in multitudinous forms, so here would be a logical place to link to a few if I should ever get around to finding any.

Here's a paper, though: Equivalence and Issue Framing.  Definitely related.  Rhetoric.

False equivalence is what was used here - here's a list of other logical fallacies.

Bad Science

Speaking of which: a book on bad science.

Comment tone determines public reactions to science news

Interesting study.  Given a controlled set of blog posts on science with neutral or "less civil" comments, readers assign less trust to the scientific findings of the posts with less civil comments.

Saturday, January 5, 2013

Thursday, January 3, 2013

2013 forecasts

From the charmingly named Clusterfuck Nation, a doom-filled forecast for the future of America that I honestly have a hard time believing, and I specialize in hell-in-a-handbasket moping.  Still a good read, though.

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Scythes

Here's a thought-provoking article from Metafilter.  I have little patience for people who grew up in town but now think the simple life of the countryside is for them - and incidentally for everybody else. Balderdash; you want to be Amish?  No.  You don't, and neither do I, and if we all went Amish tomorrow, most of us would die.

Conservatives shift on prison policy

Looks like the conservative brain trust has decided that mass imprisonment costs a lot, and since they want to look like fiscal conservatives, now they've decided the sensible thing to do is have less imprisonment.  Interesting take on this here, to wit: qui bono?