inkbluesky

The advantages of amnesia - From the Internet to the iPod, technology is bringing rapid advances in memory. What society needs now are new ways to forget.

As digital-storage capacities reach seemingly boundless proportions, however, some thinkers are becoming nervous about the unintended consequences of memory technology. Certainly Google’s enormous reserves of user information, stored in dozens of secretive data centers across the world, and the literally photographic memory of the Internet Archive, which preserves billions of defunct Web pages for posterity, are enough to leave anyone rattled. New forms of memory are permanent and accessible from anywhere. As their reach grows, scholars are asking if now - perhaps for the first time in human history - we need to find ways to forget.

“We used to have a system in which we forgot things easily and had to invest energy in remembering,” says Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, an associate professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “Now we’re switching to a system in which we remember everything and have to invest energy in order to forget. That’s an enormous transformation.”

Jorge Luis Borges envisioned the risks of perfect memory in his famous story “Funes the Memorious,” about a man gifted with unlimited recall, and paralyzed by it.

Didn’t the movie the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind basically tell us that even bad memories have value. Maybe its a little of both. If I obsessed about my sad memories I probably would become an emotional potato. At the same time if I erased them I would lose some hard earned wisdom.

snarled old tree. 

Lives Wasted In An Impossible War - by Jim Sinclair & Rick Bender

We have sacrificed our sisters and brothers in wars that have no victories, and rather than bring freedom to these countries, they have brought violence, death and insecurity. If the death tolls of the invading countries are high, the toll in Iraq is truly staggering. While official numbers top 65,000 Iraqi deaths, unofficial numbers put the carnage at more than 500,000 lives.

As the death toll climbs, so does the economic cost. Public money and resources (working people’s taxes) support this war. The amounts are staggering. We watch as living standards continue to decline on both sides of the border. Poverty grows, and along with it so does the homeless crisis in all our cities. Every week the United States spends $8 billion more on war. To date the war has consumed more than $450 billion; in Canada the number has climbed to more than $5 billion. Swedish experts report that in 2006 the world expenditures on arms reached more than $1.2 trillion, enough to feed, clothe, house and provide basic education and medical care for the planet’s poor.

But wait a minute if we don’t fight all the Muslims over there they’ll attack us over here. An old bit of Indian wisdom: If the world’s Muslims decide to attack you’ll have plenty of warning. The earth tends to tremble when a billion people all charge at once.

from BuzzWhack - literatisement: An advertising product placement embedded in books, short stories, etc. Just like they do in TV. So beware the next time your book’s hero is driving a Lexus, the author may be on Lexus’ payroll. Ah, the plot thickens.

Conversation Among the Ruins - by Sylvia plath

Through portico of my elegant house you stalk
With your wild furies, disturbing garlands of fruit

literatisement version: Through the portico of my house built with drywall from Darrels Building Supply you stalk

With your wild Furies which were worse before you started taking Zoloft made by Pfizer, disturbing garlands of fruit from Ann’s House of Flowers at 5th and Market St.

casades croatia wallpaper 

Rep. Don Young’s (R-AK) alters earmark *after* it was signed into law 

Hopefully we’re about to get closer to learning how Rep. Don Young’s (R-AK) $10 million Coconut Road earmark made its famous post-vote change. A Washington watchdog group filed a complaint today with the House ethics committee asking for an investigation into the drastic edit, calling it “an extraordinary case of the House of Representatives’ integrity being undermined.”

This might be a first in modern history. Congress passes a spending bill. Which if you’ve ever read through one of these bills is very exact in language and obviously the dollars spent might as well be writ in stone. Any changes what so ever must be voted on again in a supplemental bill or Congress must write a completely new bill. This bill is then sent to the president who either signs it or vetoes it. Somewhere along the line Young got someone to change the bill once Congress had passed it and before the president signed it. The concept of one person taking a Congressional bill and altering it is pretty audacious and arrogant.

In Norse myths three gods Odin,Vili and Ve ( who were themsleves created by Bor and Bestla who came from Yamir. Odin,Vili and Ve killed Yamir. The blood from Yamir produced a flood that killed all the frost ogres except Bergelmir) created the first man and woman out of two fallen trees, an ash and an elm. Her name was Embla and his was Ask. Odin breathed life into the pair, but they were still not complete creations. Ve gave them sight and hearing, while Vili gave then the gift of intelligence. I haven’t added them all up yet, but I am amazed considering the bounds of geography and time how many creation myths contain incidents of flooding ( water as killer and purifier?) and incidents pertaining to having killed a parent or predecessor.

fallen acorn 

Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism 

Today’s online social networks are congeries of mostly weak ties—no one who lists thousands of “friends” on MySpace thinks of those people in the same way as he does his flesh-and-blood acquaintances, for example. It is surely no coincidence, then, that the activities social networking sites promote are precisely the ones weak ties foster, like rumor-mongering, gossip, finding people, and tracking the ever-shifting movements of popular culture and fad. If this is our small world, it is one that gives its greatest attention to small things.

…Instead of a palette of oils, we can employ services such as PimpMySpace.org, which offers “layouts, graphics, background, and more!” to gussy up an online presentation of self, albeit in a decidedly raunchy fashion: Among the most popular graphics used by PimpMySpace clients on a given day in June 2007 were short video clips of two women kissing and another of a man and an obese woman having sex; a picture of a gleaming pink handgun; and an image of the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants, looking alarmed and uttering a profanity.

This kind of coarseness and vulgarity is commonplace on social networking sites for a reason: it’s an easy way to set oneself apart. Pharaohs and kings once celebrated themselves by erecting towering statues or, like the emperor Augustus, placing their own visages on coins. But now, as the insightful technology observer Jaron Lanier has written, “Since there are only a few archetypes, ideals, or icons to strive for in comparison to the vastness of instances of everything online, quirks and idiosyncrasies stand out better than grandeur in this new domain. I imagine Augustus’ MySpace page would have pictured him picking his nose.” And he wouldn’t be alone. Indeed, this is one of the characteristics of MySpace most striking to anyone who spends a few hours trolling its millions of pages: it is an overwhelmingly dull sea of monotonous uniqueness, of conventional individuality, of distinctive sameness.

I understand the need to gossip, but I don’t understand the obsessive or at least near obsessive level that need has risen to. As to the expressing one’s individuality to the point where your individuality becomes ironically like everyone elses, while that phenomenon has taken an strange turn on social networking sites the trend itself is not new. A few years ago I was watching a reporter cover a bikers convention. Everyone she interviewed talked about expressing their individuality, their uniqueness yet all the motorcycles were styled in a similar way, they all wore the same style of clothing ( lots of black, denim, chrome studs, cycle boots, etc) and they all expressed themselves using the same lingo. There seems to be some point at which the individual reaches critical mass and becomes a standard adapted by the majority of the community.
Interesting look at individuality from Herman Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street

Vincent Moya is a French artist who says that he was influenced by the pioneer photographer Cartier Bresson. Moya does seem to capture a moment in a way that has motion. Almost as though in one picture Moya has distilled a few frames of film into one shot. His on-line gallery.

 reading glasses

Sigmund Freud and his daughter’s encounter with the Nazis. How Anna Freud probably talked herself and her father out of being arrested. How Freud’s understanding of the authoritarian temperament helped Anna deal with questioning by the Gestapo. Freud and Anna.

My father, she might have thought, as the dull questions came and came again, knows you better than you know yourself. A string of books and essays proves as much: “On Narcissism,” Group Psychology, Future of an Illusion, Totem and Taboo. For years he has been writing about the hunger for the leader — your Hitler, your half-monster, half-clown — and all the others who’ve come before and all who will come later in his image. He knows why you need the leader the way you do. He understands how the leader brings oneness to a psyche — and a state — at odds with itself.