MisterMeta

L.A. Woman

2020-06-29T12:11:00.002-04:00

In one of her books, first published in the early 1970's, and reissued in 2015, Eve Babitz, the inspiration for The Doors' song L.A. Woman, wrote a short piece about relationships that explains away perfectly all the paradoxes of love. It is called The Fantasy.

Her genius was to put into words what is felt below the words, by circling the emotions at the right distance, in a way opposite to those who explain or who describe. She was apparently considered a "lightweight" by some literary types, but after a recent biographical retrospective piece in the New Yorker followed by a biography, she was "rediscovered" for what she is, a special and true voice.

She is an insider with no illusions, a perceptive, articulate and very canny chronicler of a place that is so sprawling in its excesses that even fiction cannot quite grasp it. I am thinking of satires like Eric Idle's novel on writers in Hollywood, or Robert Altman's The Player, or Nathaniel West's and Joan Didion's works. They are are a bit lacking in that they cannot grasp the extent of the madness that tell-all fictional reportage can. Straight reportage is limited, because of legal and commercial reasons. Chandler came close in a very artificial way that is opposite to Babitz in its prudery, one that revels in the prurience and excess with unconscious envy disguised as impossible moral rectitude. Chandler's fantasies are so extreme that they almost grasp the impossible craziness of southern California.

Babitz transcends all this because she is committed to truth for survival. She is holding on to the stories she tells for dear life. They are her life. They have been described as charming, but I would call them "gonzo" in a way that no other gonzo writer has managed. The humour and wildness are there, but there is a sadness that hides the vulnerability, a denial of the possibility of damage that is courageous and beautiful, and a lack of distance in the end that allows the reader to draw the full picture. Who other than a full out gonzo would pose nude playing chess with Duchamp at the time of his L.A. retrospective, just to piss off a boyfriend.

Look her up to understand why despite knowing that Hollywood was the best place to make movies, Kubrick decided to move to England, saying L.A. had an undercurrent of low-level malevolence. She had a personal integrity that drove her to tell and to live a human truth in L.A., but L.A. got the upper hand.

Temporary classics

2020-06-15T23:29:00.000-04:00

During the recent lockdown I was rummaging in boxes in the basement and attic for old books, trying to clean things up and I found a paperback play by Bruce Jay Friedman called Scuba Duba. I had remembered buying it from a used book dealer on Viger street in Montreal I used to haunt on quiet weekends when I was a student, having just moved away from home. I had paid 95 cents for it then. Probably would be worth the same today.

I put it by my bedside, to read later and then decide whether to keep it. I finally did read it in early June. Can't say it aged well. It would not be possible to stage it today. It has a late sixties sensibility, and although humour should be allowed to offend, the words offend in a way that has become unfunny, because the times have changed and relations between people that we thought would improve have not. I am talking about inequality, sexism, xenophobia and racism. Jokes can poke fun at these things when there is hope that they will expose their absurdity, but today, the risk is that some people will cheer. So we seem to have regressed in some ways, although we are more sensitive to the unacceptable. I hope this contradiction is a transitional phase on the helix of our cultural history.

After reading it I looked up the play and the author in a way that I could not or would not have done back then. Coincidentally and eerily, Bruce Jay Friedman had died the same week I had re-read the play. The play had run very successfully off broadway when first produced.

I had read other works by Friedman over the years and had liked his Terry Southern-like irreverence and teasing. He had worked in the magazine industry and in scriptwriting, in NYC and in LA. He was known in the literary and artistic circles of the day, and was one of the people who had the honour of getting into donny brooks with the blowhard Norman Mailer.

The seventies were the time I was getting out of high school and into the world, discovering the arts, going to concerts, looking forward to everything. Friedman had that optimism built-into his writings, it was gentle satire, pointed but not piercing, but that was because the times had a thick skin. Today the same stuff would just not be on at all.

This is what post-modern critique is all about I think. Very few pieces stand outside the culture, the few that do we call "classics", once we realize that we can re-read them and feel the same, time and time again, however much we change.

Anyhow, wanted to send out a RIP to Bruce Jay, and thank his writings for bringing back those no longer faint memories.

Persistence of Memory (updated)

2020-05-30T10:00:00.000-04:00

IBM Maritime Device Lunenburg Museum Display

I would like to follow-up on my brief previous posts regarding continuity and consciousness after having read Piero Scaruffi's wonderful survey and synthesis on the nature of consciousness.

To be a "me" is to want to persist in time. This "want" is a big part of what we call consciousness, and Piero makes the very strong argument that you have to follow this want all the way down to elementary particles, otherwise it cannot exist, it cannot be created from the non-wants we have in current physics - both quantum and relativity based. These are objective physics, and we need a "motive" physics. Sounds silly at first glance, but there is already the seed of it in the persistence of matter. Rather than a warm grey entropy soup of energy, we have particles. They are present and atomic, and very very difficult to break-up.

They exist in time.

Stu Kauffman, the meta-biologist, in some of his later talks, asks why in the myriad ways that proteins can form are some favored over others. Adrian Bejan, the engineering theoretician, believes that there is a tendency in the physics of thermodynamics to use up as much energy as possible in the shortest time, and that that "weeds out" the things that are not persistent to the benefit of those who are, for example DNA and some of the proteins that result from interaction with it.

Maybe this tendency is a sort of meta-consciousness. We need a physics and a math that take time seriously, not just as a dimension but as history. Statistics begins to do that.

Time remains enigmatic in that it seems to be different at different scales, and of course depends on the observer. So we have a potential handle for experiments. If we can detect the presence of the "want" to persist, we have begun to detect the "C" property in physics which Scaruffi postulates must exist for consciousness to exist.

As a side observation, when the elementary particles were first split, the massive release of energy was poetically seen as a release of evil, by Oppenheimer no less. This is prescient, since the particles can be said to not "want" to be broken up and led towards the grey entropy cesspool.

And while we are on the playful side, we can agree with the sci-fi writers of the fifties and sixties that hypothesised about conscious machines not wanting to be turned off. Consciousness is the will to persistence. Building on matter's predisposition to exist with complex structures and energy patterns (say like holographic memory standing waves related to Bose-Einstein phenomena), we may make machines that become difficult to turn off. But that is a taboo observation in cognition research. Even the word "consciousness" is avoided by many, since it seems to be outside current physics.

It is telling that today, engineers struggle with the problem of making machines that are reliable, that do not break-down, when in our corner of nature, the opposite seems to be true, it is hard to stop things from living on, from being persistent and often fertile. Bacteria for example are everywhere.

Once we start using such building blocks to make machines, we may be in trouble. Even DNA and RNA like to persist way beyond the ability of transistors, who just need the excuse of a bit too much voltage or current to break. Maybe it is just a matter of finding the right temperature and chemistry as Piero alludes to in one of his chapter endings.

Our scientific tools and language (mathematics and logic) are model-biased. They are, as George Lakoff points out, metaphors for reality, firmly based in the way our brain processes sensory data. These metaphors are integrations, categorizations and ultimately simplifications. Models can be manipulated symbolically. That is the point of making one. This seems to be at odds with how nature works, despite claims that mathematics is "unreasonably effective" at explaining the world. Mathematics is unreasonably effective at explaining how we perceive the world because it is an extension of perception, it is biased towards our perceptual machinery.

That bias may be part of the problem with building cognitive and ultimately living mechanisms. Biology deals with statistical data, fuzzy numbers and processes, parallel possibility searches. Math can handle this, but not without a lot of horsepower to process the possibilities. Statistics is a good model for the macro view of such processes, and it continues to be used effectively in quantum physics. We need to invent a better conceptual language to deal with the processes of cognition. Logic is not enough.

Finally, since this blog is a ledger for insights, let me follow-up one last one from Piero, from his Web writings: that machines are conditioning us to be like them through use. Of course this is a conceit, but a functionally accurate one. We are the consciousness of the internet, and we adapt to its use, learn not to make mistakes, in the dumb way computer software wants us to be. So we are moving towards the logical model of reality that we created, we are moving closer to a culture of logic and mathematics, and it can be argued that this is a move away from higher life and ultimately a regression of our cultural heritage, as discussed here. Computer addiction is a manifestation of this. We get small rewards by doing things "right", and we get back a sensory reward, repeat and rinse.

Sam Sheppard famously said that he stays away from computers, and I have heard other creative types express that feeling, similarly to those who in the past stayed away from TV. It is a valid position, because they are time sinks, but they are also connectors to others, and when they are used for communication and creativity, they do amplify these consciousness mechanisms. The danger is the other fun stuff, the surfing modes.

The Divide

2020-05-28T10:44:00.000-04:00

from my flickr

Just read Iain McGilchrist's book on the divided brain. There is also a documentary video that summarizes the 1000 or so pages, which is difficult if not impossible. McGilchrist has a career spanning literature and neuro-psychiatry at the highest level. His thesis, formulated over 20 years is that our thinking and perception evolves from a confrontation between the verbal analytic side of our nature and the integrative perceptual side, and ideally should flow back and forth in a sort of collaboration to achieve good things.

His book has to err on the side of denotation to prevent attacks from the scientific culture which he criticises, and that is both its strength and weakness, it has to live in a left hemisphere world, defending the right, a bit like the opponents of our current demagogues, who need to use their tactics to get though a message. It is a losing game, but one that must be played for the long term.

I want to highlight the relationship to Jane Jacobs' ideas from her book on Systems of Survival where she makes a case for the healthy confrontation between cultural guardians and commercial facilitators. This work complements and consolidates her arguments across the history of the humanities and of the sciences.

Implicitly, the book links Dewey's (and Pirsig's) ideas on Quality and morals to the continental existentialists (finally!), but there is much more work to be done bridging the philosophies of the positivists with that of the continentals, especially in our English speaking cultures. There are glints of hope, for example Lakoff and Johnson's work, but too little uptake from what I can see.

Kahneman and Pinker are also present as critics in the background of McGilchrist's arguments, against thinking fast and favoring thinking slow, and arguing for the primacy of language over music. McGilchrist forcefully responds to Pinker's attack on his web site. I am also not sure how this relates to Chomsky's embedded linguistics, but we shall see. Chomsky can be quite defensive, as Tom Wolfe writes.

Existence precedes essence is so well presented, with forceful cultural, scientific and artistic evidence by someone raised in the positivist tradition. We (the West) need to budge away from Platonism. This key to our success, our domination of the environment, may no longer work now that we are on the downside of the arc of sustainability. This crisis may be a touchpoint, who knows.

I am listening to Joni Mitchell who understood that we were heading this way, back in the late sixties.

Elements of Management

2018-11-24T10:00:00.002-05:00

There is a lot of management literature and advice out there, and when I scan it I always look for empirical evidence behind claims made. It is surprisingly hard to find. Most management books are based on anecdote or on selection bias. Things like "I made a bundle using these techniques and so can you", or "here are some claims from pop psychology that we can use to prop up my opinions on how to manage". I took "management science" courses at a couple of canadian universities, as part of my professional training later in life, and asked one of the professors if there were citations or references to some of the claims made in a course about how management culture affects outcomes, and he deflected the question. The course was, in effect, an extended opinion piece.

This may be historical, especially in North America, where there is a strong tradition of self-help preacher-based advice. The Tony Robbins', Norman Vincent Peale's, Billy Graham's, and now some social-media savvy successors, that have large followings. There is also the cargo cult mimicking of the big winners, like Google, Facebook and Amazon's leaders, not to mention the financiers, Buffet, and Dario, and their ilk, unless of course they are a bit left leaning like Soros.

In the UK, there is a more ironic and sometimes sarcastic tradition, the counter example is seen as more instructive, perhaps because the audience is more sensitive (and rightly so) to condescension. Examples are the Peter Principle, and Parkinson's Law. To be fair, the US has Scott Adams, but I would argue that he has become a victim of his own success, and now takes himself way to seriously on matters like politics.

I would like to see management treated like a branch of applied psychology, with a blend of sociology thrown it. The military treats it that way, but does not generally publish advice on how to train troops to the general public. There are very good derivative texts based on that knowledge, the one that comes to mind is Simon Sinek's "Leaders Eat Last", which takes the best aspects of team building, and trust models, and leaves behind or at least downplays the intent, which is to make people do dangerous and possibly brutal things, even against their own self-interest.

It is all about manipulating people's natural inclinations for the benefit of some cause, be it corporate, defensive, or cultural. This is Sartre's common pursuit, when we feel part of something. Is there an inherent contradiction with the traditional American ethos of rugged individualism? Is this why North American management books always strike me as somewhat conflicted, hypocritical even? I have written here about the UK version of this conflict, which is culturally very different when discussing C.P. Snow's career and writings.

What I want to add to the discussion are some anecdotal data points taken from many years of being managed and managing, not really advice, mostly data associated with successful and less successful outcomes. In particular I want to address the management of software teams, because there is a large data set out there that can be mined for results, and this can become more of a scientific discussion. I am thinking of surveys done when books like "The Psychology of Computer Programming" were written, all the way to Stack Overflow's periodic states of the nation.

Some random thoughts about what seems to work, in effect, some hypotheses to investigate and validate:

The definition of a team is a group of people who trust each other. A manager must ensure that this happens, and must trust the team.
Any anxiety or mistrust at the top immediately trickles down.
A manager's role includes the responsibility to shield the team from external distractions that jeopardize the work. Software and engineering require focus, and the hard problem solving generally benefits from a reduction of noise.
Programmers are usually quite dedicated (citation required:-), and require very little whipping about, negative reinforcement is a no-no, since it demotivates people who generally are fully motivated already. Point in the right direction and get out the way.
Attribution of ownership on projects is important, fair attribution doubly so. Think of Monty Python's parrot sketch, mostly written by Cleese, but fairly equally attributed to Chapman for just saying "let's make it a parrot". The Ritchie-Thompson/Lennon-McCartney/Jagger-Richards model really works, and size of contribution must be measured on importance of outcome, not effort expended.
Providing a safe environments for brainstorming and design is necessary. If we accept the definition of team given above, this needs to be less of a competitive model and more of a collaborative one, but given that the players are more often than not young ambitious men, this can be challenging to implement.

[More to come]...

The miracle of C

2017-07-03T23:16:00.000-04:00

It is not fashionable to love the C language. Not like, but love. Time moves on and glorifying something from the seventies seems idiotic. But let us use a standard historian's trick: take C away and see what changes.

What would systems programmers use? FORTRAN? Assembly language? Pascal?

We would not have Java with the current syntax or semantics, no dotNet beyond Visual Basic, no browsers, no TCP/IP, no proliferation of language wars, and no C++.

LISP may have evolved to be more widely usable, and Pascal would have likely gained some practicality, at least proper initializers and scoping, and maybe modularity. FORTRAN would have remained dominant. We would still have APL, it was miraculously written in 360 assembler.

Oh yes, JavaScript would be LISP. Git would be an unrealized dream, as would Lua and LabVIEW and probably MatLab.

Maybe evolution would have found a way, and maybe the down side of C's flexibility and power is fertility. It is an engine of change.

C is attributed to Dennis Ritchie, but its precursor, B, which has an almost identical syntax is pure Ken Thompson. It is this syntax that is so compelling. It is the closest thing to the thought process of a programmer. I would rather write in C than in anything else, and I am confused by those that thought that something like awk of sh were even necessary to make scripting easier. I can do most of it faster in C. And please do not bring up Perl.

C is compact, and it is complete and orthogonal and close to damn perfect. Arrays, pointers, and increments all mesh, probably thanks to Ritchie's semantics.

C is not a glorified assembly language, it is the centre of computer languages, instruction sets have evolved because of it. It distilled all that one needs or wants to do with a CPU.

Objects and user interaction are layers that can easily be added, and C has no trouble with these things, it can stretch.

Many say one can get hurt by its lack of constraint, but I find I get much more hurt by a lack of elegance and clarity in other languages, I sometimes feel like the ugliness of a language can hinder expression, or at least confuse it, and waste programmer's time.

I use C to develop algorithms that I sometimes need to implement in other languages, because it helps to reduce notational ambiguity. It is also universal. In that sense it is a kind of mathematics. Ken Thompson holds a very mathematical view of computing, in a good pragmatic sense, this is the guy who implemented regular expressions, who writes papers that are a joy to read, and who seems to think in a bottom-up clear way. Because of this, I think of him as a founding father of modern computer languages, he took Algol and its kin and made a definitive contribution.

C++ is not an improvement, it is a shameful opportunistic perversion. I use it because it has C in it, and luckily it remains compatible, and its flaws have inspired improvements, like Go. Even C# is a blessing compared to it. Bjarne's complaints and justifications around the preprocessor are noise. The preprocessor in C is a wonderful tool, and used well it can make the language do anything and work anywhere. It is brilliant meta hack. A leap of inventiveness, and rather than dismiss it as a source of bugs, it should be entrenched. C++'s templates are good things, but please do not claim they came to be as replacement for the preprocessor. Without it C++ would not have come into being so quickly. That same preprocessor was used by Bjarne to implement C with classes before it became C++.

Linus is right to dislike C++, it is easy to mess up in it, simply because it hides stuff, and I mean encapsulate is a bad word sometimes. So is overloading if misused, and programmers are a conflicted bunch, they sometimes favour cleverness over communication. I know, I do it and then regret it when I read my code later.

On the other hand, I do the OOP thing, and I think it can help code maintenance and force teams to adhere to design intentions, however it can all be done in C, if you are familiar with its philosophy. One architect I worked with a long time ago would write .h files and pass them around to developer to flesh out into .c or .cpp files. Objects take this a bit further, but not much. The biggest benefit is when doing UI's and other repetitive verbose coding, or when you want to get rid of switch statements all over the code.

And yes, no C, no Unix, no Linux, no Web as we know it.

I am not slamming other languages, just trying to put C where it belongs, at the top (because it is bottom up :-), for its expressiveness, rigour, elegance and efficiency. Did I forget anything?

Callow journalism

2017-06-29T07:48:00.002-04:00

I often read the Guardian, the ex-Manchester Guardian, the venerable trust-funded independent paper. It valiantly and explicitly attempts to clearly separate facts from opinion, and has a wide range of points of views, but is definitely to be categorized as left-leaning.

Recently, in the wake of the UK election, it has suffered from a kind of existential angst. Many of its columnists, Oxbridge graduates and smartypants, could not bring themselves to support Corbyn. His strong showing at the polls exposed a disconnect between the "smart left" and the populist left.

The Guardian must (rightly so to speak) show support for Corbyn, while swallowing its pride at the nasty things it said about him before, things like "un-electable", "weak", etc.

Some sectors of the UK obviously still suffer from class considerations. It appalled me to read about the jibes against the "non-toff" Corbyn, both in the Commons, by people like Cameron (the tie etc), Blair, sniping from the manure-infested sidelines, and May. I think the Guardian columnists could have done more to express outrage at this. I also believe that there is a smell of class bias in their attitude and sneering, a small whiff.

I still read the Guardian, but I do not trust it as much as I once did. To be fair, some columnists stood by Corbyn, courageous iconoclasts like Monbiot.

More and more, I invoke Hunter Thomson's warning about journalism, how it is a kind of storytelling, and how it has to stop pretending to be objective. The positivist mind-set of the Anglo-Saxon world needs to be reviewed, and merged with the Continent's existential views, not the salon existentialism that they sneer at, but the stance that sees human affairs as intrinsically engaged with their observers. Journalism is a form of history, and the teller matters there.