psyche

Ted Nelson gave a talk at school today. It reminded me of two things:

1. The Matrix (lots of prisons and systems to control us and adapting to the machines’ way of life…)
2. The God Delusion *(a densely-packed refutation of something that you’ve suspected was fundamentally flawed all along)

Prof. Nelson handed out some copies of ZigZag and Xanadu and demoed XanaduSpace. Having heard about it for ages and seeing demonstrations in other videos scattered across the web, it was great to see it right there. I think a combination of seeing it materialise despite the rather long-lived smear campaign against it (it was like a Googlebomb of “Xanadu” for “vaporware”, but in print) and hearing Prof. Nelson talk about the concrete concepts behind it (C++, OpenGl and Python backend, next platform will be iPhone, Flash version soon) really solidified the concept in my mind. I think I’m ready to believe that with fine-tuning, the computer world can be turned on its head (in a good way).

The basic premise of the talk was that technology was really just “packaging and conventions” and that we had learned to use kludgy solutions rather than good solutions being engineered (this was blamed on techies). Nelson believes that the web’s infrastructure (one-way links, unsourced quotations etc.) is severely lacking, and that 1984, when Xerox PARC gave us the desktop metaphor, was when “it all went wrong”.

Another thing that struck me was the sense of activity and understanding. Age 70, having been ridiculously ahead of the curve for so long but never really achieving the maximal recognition he deserves, Nelson continues to pursue his original projects with zeal and an apparently very perceptive mind. Listening to his anecdotes and analogies reminded me strongly of interviews with Richard Feynman.

The subject of Lain remained fairly suppressed, although people now frequently tell me how often I mention it even when I don’t (…).

Of course, the best thing about Xanadu would be sourced or transcluded quotations - as people may know, I have a thing about blockquotes [1, 2]. With Xanadu I will finally get my wish! FINALLY! OH YEAH!!

On a rather insane note, I think I read somewhere (probably New Scientist or Wired but I really can’t remember - I should really find the source and, y’know, transclude it) that the Google generation is actually very bad at processing and finding information in most scenarios because of their (no, not me - it’s them!) ridiculously short attention spans and inattention to detail.

I think this is the other extreme that I’ve been waiting for; people generally have this rather idealised view of internet-savvy folks being greatly intelligent data processing machines, churning through some huge number of articles on RSS feeds, tagging hundreds of links every week etc. while the minority believe that people are now just dumb keyword filters. I think both of these views are inaccurate. Yes, there’s a danger that people may deactivate their higher thought and just sift through pages of Google results but intelligent reading and data processing is not dead.

When I did our first Module 1 past paper last week (unashamed boast: 95%), I applied the rules that I generally apply to webpages (not consciously, mind you. I had to really think hard about what I do) :

1. Keyword search - what is the general feel of this page? Large text? What does it say?
2. Specific subheadings? (Mark allocation?)
3. Start forming fuzzy answers
4. “Oh, crap! That doesn’t make sense… wait - let me read this in detail.”
5. “Oh. Oh. Right, wait.”
6. Answer questions on this page.

Repeat for every page.

Then finally, check every page in detail.

It’s kind of like modular programming or drawing something starting with a basic sketch and refining it (but not both at once. I should have said “xor” instead of “or”). You can either choose random bits and focus down on them or get a general outline and keep refreshing your knowledge with slightly higher information resolution. Eventually the answer crystallises in your mind, like an infinite function tending to root 2 or a sign becoming readable as your camera desperately focuses and refocuses.

Yeah. It’s all good, basically. It’s crazy about Taniyama, isn’t it? Man.

Mr Smith covered the talk in a slightly less haphazard way…

Pax

* Mr Smith has told me that there are in fact better alternatives.

I Pownced this before but having been since removed from Pownce, I’ll put this here:

Alex Wright - The Web That Wasn’t (embedding was disabled by request…)

It’s pretty awesome.

I watched The Golden Compass and it was okay - they did the person/daemon thing quite well.

This is my critique of Will’s performance on them and I’ve posted my thoughts on his new podcast on the accompanying blog post.

It’s worth a listen as Will is really spearheading the “I like podcasting”… movement… at school… He’s right, though - twitter is worth looking into, although I use it and jaiku rather half-heartedly.

I’ve just realised that while sometimes my thoughts are ugly, I really do try to blog beautifully. Every English essay I have scored full or close to full marks on has been angst-ridden and cynical. So be it!

My father somehow won a second Nintendo Wii (???) by accident and I’m thinking that rather than selling it, I could do something involving some of this stuff? That is, if my brother will let me. He probably won’t. I wonder.

Abandoned playground? The Lain PSX game movie media038.avi (stuff mirrored here [much more disturbing than anime, only gave me sound when I used MPlayer]) contains a weird moving still of her on a swing. This reminds me a little of the Animatrix short Beyond. The whole atmosphere of Lain, The Matrix (first one), The Animatrix and the Matrix Comics is one of despair and confusion. It seems to be my favourite thing in the world.

It appears that the new I Am Legend movie again fails to accurately mirror the novel. This is a shame as the novel is awesome.

I was recently put onto Denno Coil by weirdo in #lain while discussing how I thought Lain showed “augmented reality gone wrong”. How chillingly specific this is.

Why has the iPod been so successful? Because it enables people to quickly and easily turn on, tune in, drop out…

Pax

In the true spirit of teenage clique-ism, I’m going to have to point towards our friend Will Morland’s appearance on them.

While generally I make quiet hints about stuff causing me angst, I think I’m going to have to step it up for this…

Enthusiasm for technology…

Mm, ok.

…being good at it…

DEBATABLE, WILL! DEBATABLE!

You can’t just sort of like… luh [pause] become a social luddite [???] and sort of hang out in a corner sort of like staring at your old phone…

That kind of speech really takes itself apart.

I do realise that [pause] what I do does inf…er some social st-stereotypes on some people

…I don’t think you deserved to pass your English (Lang.) GCSE…

The internet isn’t working; quick, we must fix it!

HA HA HA!

As my sort of listening habits have changed, it’s changed me as a person OH GOD NO! OH GOD NO!

A skinny tie sort of worn without much sort of [pause, strained expression] well-tying and sort of just sort of slung around in a trUH! An uh… an attempt to look sort of formal

Sort of sort of, sort of? HA HA HA!

Just shove [jeans] in the wash, iron it [sic]

Iron… jeans…?

You have to pay for the T-shirts! They’re £7.50…[pause]… so we’ll have to go somewhere else […] the best thing about the event has been… the free pens and stuff that you get; all that crazy stuff.

Oh. I see.

[Hey There Delilah plays in background trying to make us feel sorry for suspected neek] An interest in technology conflicts with an interest in fashion and an interest in staying cool

As plaintext this seems like a good point but the situation made it ridiculous somehow.

Shop assistant:

Out of all our customers, they’re our favouri[laughs]

I have to give kudos to Dabson for this one - it’s funny:

My computer… just… crashed…

I think a quotation from Elliot sums this up quite well:

I have the utmost respect for the cameraman and crew: you don’t hear any laughing.

HA HA HA HA HA!

For the record, Will initially asked Elliot and me to accompany him to the MacExpo. We refused. Can you see why? Let us just consider, before we part ways, one more thing. Do people feel the need to identify with a group so strongly that they will create a persona? Let us ask ourselves this: should the BBC add a new profile to their list - that of the gutbustingly infuriating poser? Surely I would then be able to join the ranks.

Will, I’m increasing your traffic. Final word: HA!

Pax

I won only one fight during the BYC qualifier (proper results to follow) but Hugh Emerson came 2nd in the U16 sabre and Adam Zethraeus came 2nd 3rd in the U18 sabre (I don’t know how Adam did in the épée but Adam also came 6th in the épée and I’ll link to results later anyway). I felt rather sicktastic afterwards and got quite a bad two-point moving headache which intellectually incapacitated me on Monday and earlier today. This offered me time to re-evaluate something, though…

Going back to Rosebank Avenue, where my grandfather lives and where we lived a long time ago, reminded me of track 9 (or was it the other way round…?). This, predictably, brings me back to The Node. I think I’m going to need to formally define it and strategies for dealing with it if I’m going to be able to continue living.

Here it comes, then:

The Node is an event or concept which I cannot recall but which is somehow linked to many other certain events, concepts or situations in my life. I suspect this because of extreme feelings of déjà vu or nostalgia when confronted with certain events.

Now, what exactly reminds me of it? These are elements common to works of fiction or situations which remind me of …it.

• Suburban gloom
• (Old) computers
• One or many lonely people
• The telephone system

This brought up some funny stuff:

Places like Rosebank and other locations in Greenford where my family have lived have heavy doses of wires and suburban gloom. Council flats with satellite dishes on also remind me of it… hmm. Durston had those old Macs that felt old even when they were new… and the Macbeath Hall in the Haven Green churchy place evoked a feeling very similar to the suburban gloom feeling (in me, I mean).

This leads to my hypotheses. The questions I must ask are:

1. What is The Node?
2. What should I do?

So, possibilities for what The Node is:

1. It’s simply an exaggerated form of nostalgia for places I used to live or technology I used to use (very likely)
2. It’s my subconscious trying to give my life a purpose in the absence of any obvious external source of purpose (quite likely)
3. It’s a repressed memory of something very important (unlikely)

Well, it seems quite clear-cut, doesn’t it? However, I no longer have faith in the truth as a solution. Instead, consider which of these viewpoints it is most advantageous for me to adopt. The first gives me nothing. The second gives me some quirkiness but mostly nothing. The third gives me purpose. Memento, anyone? I’d rather have an artificial purpose than be swallowed by nihilism. I hope I somehow… urgh! I hope this turns out well.

This was Warren Zevon’s final public performance; he died about three months later, I think.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=WhRRWwH3Fro]

Isn’t this interesting? Why did they want to call the internet the intergalactic thingy anyway? To think I wouldn’t have known that had it not been for the Lain artbook, I wouldn’t have know that… I really need to research the history of the internet properly. Why didn’t we get taught this?!

Pax

I have to go to the southeast region U18 sabre BYC qualifier tomorrow, meaning I have to be at school at 07:30. Oh dear. I was thinking about Lain its random references to Ted Nelson and of course Vannevar and his Memex and was just wondering about why they chose that theme. I mean, Chiaki J. Konaka appears to be a computer enthusiast but his web presence didn’t come across as too… involved.

Oh yes, and SEL’s other reference to HotSauce still makes me think. Strange. SEL is really the perfect thing to destroy me: it seems like it’s been perfectly designed to distract me completely. Computing, informatics, psychology and philosophy and something that causes my reality connection to fail and my paranoia to increase. It’s something to do with suburban gloom! It’s The Node! WHAT IS IT? WHAT AM I LOOKING FOR? Am I just hopelessly lost in a mental fight to define myself, or is there something else?

Leader with info = Lain of the Wired

Pax

I went to a talk with my mother about dementia - it was to help us care for my demented grandmother. Most people there wanted to complain about the NHS’s stupidity in terms of distributing an acetylcholine-conserving drug (I won’t go into it; it’s pretty dumb) but I found the guy’s stuff quite chilling. Some was straight out of Memento (being unable to “make new memories”, reverting to old memories “for comfort”), some Lain (”if your patient doesn’t remember it, you’re best off pretending that it never really happened”) and the atmosphere - support group, like - was straight out of Fight Club…

I wish I’d known about XFN before! I have to add it to Psyche… and my blogroll.

This is cool and this may come in handy.

The whole OiNK/Pirate Bay thing reminds me of the Great Hacker War somehow.

I’ve seriously had to start sending emails to myself to remember stuff. I think I will use notes in Mail in Leopard after all…

There’s a new David Gray song!

From Everything2:

Serial Experiments Lain begins to scratch at the surface of what is on everyones mind, but is not yet full developed, quite similar to the show. The fears of a nation barreling towards self-oblivion, with ultra high suicide rates, low-paying-high-stress jobs, and family structures that are crumbling because of a lack of communication of emotions, and moral values.

Pax

Is it important that we’re always plugged in? How important is it? Is my extreme feeling of déjà vu just me being stupid or is my subconscious sadly piecing together stuff I’ve seen and reluctantly forcing me into this existential decline because it knows what’s going on? Why am I like this? Why are you like that?

I think I might know a few things which may be important. Information? Yes, I like information. I like it a lot. I also like railings and train tracks and voices over intercoms telling me that I am being stalked for my own protection. It’s not my fault!

I think that everything I’ve ever seen or read that hasn’t had any effect on me at all is now catching up with me. In this singularity of glorious rubbish, I am going to emerge a more messed up but more stable person? How is that possible? I don’t want to live in a world in which everyone is very annoying. As I said, I can only hope that I, in the words of Mathieu, “happy up”.

A face in the static!

I can’t wait for school to be over. I think the school part of me has expired prematurely.

I really, really hope that I will end up happy. I don’t care if I fail to help humanity and never get as clever as my friends but please, random interactions that are the universe, let me end up happy!

Pax

I shouldn’t really be awake. Every day is the same. I am hopelessly deluded. I will never win. My friends are just complicated enemies lost in the confusing search for purpose that robs us all of reason. I am not awake or asleep. I am not dead or alive. I am a thinking, growing and dying array of organic particles. I refuse to die. The state between alive and dead is not unusual - it is this. One day, everyone will be connected. It’s not an end in itself; merely a local maximum.

I foresee great things.

Pax

I went to a talk by Thomas Vander Wal at school today (it was organised, I believe, by Mr Smith. It was very interesting. Social software, to use the phrase of the day, is continuously evolving and binding us to the network, wherein we are all connected. As Mr Vander Wal noted, communication is the key to our success - even as a species. Collaboration and massive data retention ability are what defines us as a civilisation. We are continuously getting better at it.

I dream of this. Then, this.

Pax

It’s not a uselessly semantic distinction, as YouTube commenters would have you believe. Even Apple, in their dumbed-down advertising campaigns borne of their selling-out (they’ve been doing it for a long time), refer to things like “surfing the internet” and making the “internet look good on your phone”. I understand that when this ridiculous error is so prevalent, even intelligent people can inherit it, so here is the truth:

• The Internet is hardware - it is the network (analogous to, say, a LAN)
• The Web is software* - it is one of the many applications** of the Internet (analogous to your company’s intranet site)

* It’s a big bunch of HTML documents. On its own, you wouldn’t be able to access web pages from anywhere unless you were directly connected to the computer or server they were stored on. However, you can connect via the Internet so you don’t require a direct connection. See?** Yeah, ever heard of e-mail? File transfers? Internet-enabled games? You don’t connect to “the web” when you plug your modem into a phone port, do you?

For clarity, Wiki strikes again.

The internet is a marvel of engineering and hardware design coupled with software transfer protocols so awesome that I believe that it is the pinnacle of not only communications design but of all electronics.The web is a dynamic and thus shifting, self-maintaining in some areas, self-destroying in others mass of files designed to be opened by web browsers over networks connections and ultimately the internet. It is a remarkable experiment in content creation and sharing and is obviously one of the most important and frequently-used applications of the internet (along with e-mail, IM and file transfer). A massive sociological wonderland, it is novice programming on steroids and in another dimension.The internet combined with the web (no, this is not called the interweb) and other apps is, I believe, humanity’s greatest achievement. While retaining our individuality, we are becoming able to function as a true collective, silenced by no-one. It is great but it is not good or evil; it is neutral, as things with extreme power often are - and thus corruptible.

However, it remains the basis for my faith in computer science. We have become more than the sum of our parts. We are both man and machine. We have transformed into something altogether more interesting than I thought possible.

Pax