Perhaps our sun is not alone after all

Radical Society asks, What Went Wrong?

[...]

After 9/11, irony was out, and so was the compulsive criticism and debilitating self-scrutiny so beloved by liberals everywhere. Everything was to have changed. Solidarity, patriotism, and action were in.

Although some rag-tag remnants suffered severe hangovers from imbibing too much Chomsky, or displayed milder but still worrying forms of sub-Sontagian skepticism, many newly pious liberal intellectuals felt chastened and slightly ashamed of their previous carping. In the face of mass terror it felt hollow indeed. Of course, “everything” did not change after the attacks; most things, in fact, did not. We were told to keep on spending, and we did; we were told to stop consuming the decadent culture served up by the liberal elite and found that we could not. But American intellectual life did change. Two things, primarily, brought this about: the nationalism unleashed by 9/11, and the messianic promise of “bringing freedom” to persons sitting in darkness across the globe, starting with the grand strategy of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The intellectual and affective lives of nations, the ways in which they understand and emotionally respond to themselves and the world around them, do not change overnight. Instead, hinge-events of historical importance activate conceptions and attitudes that are implicit in the national psyche. Of course, this does not happen mechanically but through interested groups of people (usually “elites” of some kind). Generally, these groups do not put forth arguments; rather, by tapping into assumed verities, they offer pieces of common sense. Politicians and partisans, unlike philosophers, know that reason, at least in the short term, is no match for things that are simply taken to be true.

As Anatol Lieven points out in his study America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism, the dominant factor that was reactivated by the attacks of 9/11 was American nationalism:

Traumatized by the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, Americans very naturally reacted by falling back on old patterns of belief and behavior. Among those patterns has been American nationalism.

This nationalism embodies beliefs and principles of great and permanent value for America and the world, but it contains very great dangers…. One might say that while America keeps a splendid and welcoming house, it also keeps a family of demons in the cellar. Usually kept under certain restraints, these demons were released by 9/11.

According to Lieven, American nationalism has two sides, a positive “thesis” and a darker “antithesis.” The thesis is a commitment to the American Creed, those timeless truths that make up American civic nationalism: a belief in the universal value of freedom, democracy, the Constitution, the rule of law, and the dignity of the individual. These beliefs are tied to nationalism because in the U.S. collective life is maintained primarily through representations of ourselves as Americans. As Richard Hofstadter once wrote, America does not have an ideology, but is one.

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BLDGBLOG comtemplates the built environment’s impact on evolution

Attention, attention. There is another system… The Fast Artificial Neural Net Library

Fast Artificial Neural Network Library is a free open source neural network library, which implements multilayer artificial neural networks in C with support for both fully connected and sparsely connected networks. Cross-platform execution in both fixed and floating point are supported. It includes a framework for easy handling of training data sets. It is easy to use, versatile, well documented, and fast.

PHP, C++, .NET, Python, Delphi, Octave, Ruby, Pure Data and Mathematica bindings are available. A reference manual accompanies the library with examples and recommendations on how to use the library. A graphical user interface is also available for the library.

[...]

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Soon it will be possible to see more, the insect way…

We Make Money Not Art goes shopping for the latest in professional footwear…

Safety is one of the main concerns of urban sex workers. The Aphrodite platform shoes will have an alarm system, which emits a piercing noise to scare off attackers.

[...]

The shoes will transmit their location via APRS (Automatic Position Reporting System) developed in the late 1970s. APRS uses amateur radio to transmit position reports, weather reports, and messages between users.

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Needless to say, the American television situation comedy is in some amount of trouble.

The formula is simple: a suburban family, affable, if somewhat inept dad, lovely and long suffering mom, chatty, precocious children and, if there’s time, a dog. Within these boundaries, it’s difficult to craft and execute unique concepts.

As it happens, I’m dreaming of a few program ideas even as I type this.

The Wretched of the Galaxy

Generations ago, Z’Lerrg luxuriated in quantum strangelet splendor as the supreme ruler of an expanse of galactic real estate stretching from the frozen fire plains of We Sparked It to the completely ultraviolet shielded surface of Shatterings7, the sentient sunglasses dominated planet.

But a coup d’etat deposed him from his Quintanium Throne. His sentence: banishment to a backwater planet labeled TalkingMonkey3 on Imperial maps but called ‘Earth’ by its clue-free inhabitants. There, he’s forced to work as a greeter in a Walmart not far from Nashville. With his new friends, Tiffany, Jake, Earl and on again, off again love interest Shannon, he gets into one zany, madcap adventure after another. His dream: to be restored to the Quintanium Throne, toss the revolutionaries into a plasma vortex and enslave the Earth (especially his manager, the miserly Mr. Cratch). Will he succeed? Tune in.

Dog Plus Ball Equals Fusion

Each week, Sasha, a talking German Shepard, attempts to complete work on the beach ball sized thermonuclear explosive she must finish to silence the voices in her head. Unfortunately, the constant, loving attention of her human family slows the project’s progress.

Golden Globe winner Jenna Elfman provides the voice of Sasha.

Cell Phone, tales of the connected (sponsored by Cingular Wireless)

Bob marvels at the age of cell phone connectivity and the pleasures of being a Cingular customer. Each week, through the use of his cell phone (an LG C1300) crimes are solved, lost loves are re-united and diseases are healed. During the easter special, Jesus appears to present Bob with a celestial phone with infinite rollover minutes.

Where did all the sex go? (sponsored by Apple Travel)

Jessica used to have a lot of sex. Then, one day, she stopped having a lot of sex. She wonders, where did all the sex go? To answer that question, she embarks on a hilarious journey of self-discovery which takes her from the snow capped mountains of Tibet to the ultra mod metropolises of Asia and many other fascinating locales.

Music by Moby

As I was saying, I’m re-reading Joseph Weizenbaum’s Computer Power and Human Reason a book I purchased a while back – and eagerly read – which has rested in obscurity in a dark corner of one of my bookshelves for years and years.

a dusty bookshelf dreams of past glories

But recently, for some reason, I’ve been thinking – once again – about the myth of computer superiority; that is, the belief that what computers do is a more efficient version of what human minds do.

If only we could marry human consciousness with machine efficiency, the argument goes, we would achieve an elevated state of development and create a new, super humanity.

An alternate dream is the creation of artificially intelligent companions who remove from our shoulders some of the burden of managing a complex world and take on tasks beyond our physical and cognitive capabilities (a sort of roll your own deity).

As I recall, Weizenbaum’s core concern was dispelling the idea that computers and minds perform variations of the same thing – with computers looking better in any comparison because of their speed and completely accessible memories.

But I’ll know better as I read on.

Today we’re blogging against heteronormativity.

Bla(c)kademic defines heteronormativity like so:

heteronormativity is a term that can be used to describe institutions, policies and beliefs that reinforce the rigid categories of male and female. these categories, supposedly, determine our sex, sexuality, sexual desire, gender identity, and gender roles. therefore, there are expected behaviors for males (such as the patriarch of the nuclear family for example), as are there expected behaviors for females (the submissive wife to the patriarch, among other things). but we all know—THAT’S BULLSHIT!

[...]

Bullshit indeed.

How do you see heteronormativity? How do you touch it? We are, to borrow an old phrase, like fish swimming in an ocean we can’t perceive. From time to time, Bitch|Lab likes to remind us that no one is outside of ideology. The ideas shaping the behavioral and perceptual norms of our society are breathed in and out, flowing around and through us like wraiths.

We can’t see it. Not without long, difficult and often quite painful effort.

How do you see heteronormativity – that is, your subconscious belief that heteronormative forms are ‘natural’ – working within yourself?

There are passive ways. Maybe you’re watching a sitcom, something mindless to distract you from the day and encourage you to buy…everything. The sitcom family consists of the usual configuration, a straight couple with up to two children (or more, if it’s a show about ‘traditional’ themes). You may like the program, or dismiss it as a failure as teevee comedies go. As you watch, there’s a concept on display that you probably accept without any thought: this form, this arrangement of people is not one way of doing things but the way.

The only real way.

Other arrangements – for example, a lesbian couple with children or transgendered people doing anything at all – may, if you’re a ‘liberal’ in the usual way, be acceptable in a special sense, enveloped within the protective zone of tolerance (a sort of cognitive reservation where the ‘natives’ are safely contained), but they’re never considered natural, an expression of simply another human possibility.

This shuffling of people who stray too far off the heteronormative ranch into ‘tolerance’ reservations is something I’m very familiar with because I’ve done it myself; countless times.

You congratulate yourself for your Olympian altruism, your broad-minded acceptance of ‘diversity’. You’re a fantastic person. You deserve the sweetest of cookies and the wettest of kisses. And while tolerance is preferable to gleeful oppression (the fundamentalist approach) or even worse, bloodthirsty destruction of difference (the fascist maneuver) it ironically holds in common with its flaming sword wielding cousins the core idea there are normative humans and…others.

This is the endless battle that must be fought – starting with ourselves (even those of us who think we’re “outside of ideology”) and right onto the streets.

Other blogs participating…

A.

Abigail: damn straight
afrofuturist: monoblog
amanda: pandagon
amber: being amber rhea
a-menace: ubiqueer
ampersand: alas, a blog
ann bartow: feminist law professors
ann bartow: sivaracy.net
aster: no one’s dancing
az: going somewhere

B.

baileyflower: vivre sans temp mort
bakari: forward-ever
belledame222: fetch me my axe
bitch|lab: bitch|lab
blackamazon: having read the fine print
brownfemipower: woman of color blog

C

carla: carmige
chase: taste the world
corinne: midnight bridges
cypress: the soap box

D

didi: psychotic cocktail
dmfinny: from where i stand
dora: chicken scratch
dr. crazy: reassigned time
dumi: black at michigan

E

el: my amusement park
emily llyod: poesy galore

F

fabulosamujer: fabulosa mujer
frobisher: idle worship
fournier: privilege judo

G

greymatters: lobal warming

H

harper: the dyke squad
hexyhex: hexpletive
hugo: hugo schwyzer

I

irrationalpoint: the soapbox

J

jay sennet: jay sennet jaywalks
julie: definition

K

keguro: gukira
kevin andre elliot: slant truth
ktrion: ktrion
kwillz: the adventures of a crazy black screenwriter

L

lake desire: new game plus
le lyons: femivist
liz losh: virtualpolitik
lucy tartan: sorrow at sills bend
lythande: light of the moon

M

maia: capitalism bad; tree pretty
marith: i am speaking now
mary: putting the “fist” in pacifist
megan: feminazi by night
mili: emily’s journal

N

natasha yar-routh: an androgynes perspective

O

100littledolls: one hundred little dolls
outspokenmatrix: independent thinker

P

paris: romminghouse madrigal
piny: feministe
professorGQ: the emancipation of professorGQ

R

raznor: raznor’s rants–costarring reality based friends
river: life at paradux hill

S

sage: persephone’s box
serenity: sistah*geek
skyscraper: queering me
sly civilian: sly civilian
spotted elephant: the bipolar view
steph: quirky knit girl!
stinkylulu: stinkylulu sez

T

terrance: the republic of t
textaisle: arbusto de mendacity
the amazing kim: the amazing kim
the goldfish: diary of a goldfish
turtlebella: slow but steady

V

vegankid: words in resistance
verbify: signifying nothing

W

winter: desperate kingdoms
with my nappy heades ass: reframing productivity

Y

y.t. kholi: too [super dope word] for the masses

Z

zachary sharpe: the law, in its majestic equality

3 Quarks Daily explores how the brain might work

Abstract Dynamics asks, “Our Space?”

Via Ballardian, J.G. Ballard Looks Back at Empire of the Sun

BLDGBLOG Tours the subturranos of NYC

Cosmic Variance opens the lecture hall doors

DataIsNature re-explores Abstronics

Bla(c)k ademic  is sponsoring Blog Against Heteronormativity (BAH) Day, Saturday, April 22.

What attracts me to this topic (beyond the obvious appeal of supporting progressives in their multi-flavored activities) is an idea that has been gaining force, for me at least, with each passing year: a thriving human civilization is dependent upon our collective acceptance and understanding of all human possibilities, of, to use a single word, fluidity.

The effort to eliminate non-hetero (or non strictly hetero) variations on our common theme – if only via relentlessly assuming heteronormativity – is a war against our natures. Such struggles are always, of necessity, exceedingly brutal because our possibilities will manifest, one way or the other, making any effort to suppress them a kind of madness.

But more on Saturday, including a tour of the BAH knowledgium.

brought to my attention by the ever watchful Bruce Schneier

DHS releases Secure Border RFP

By Alice Lipowicz

The long-awaited request for proposals for Secure Border Initiative-Net was released today by the Homeland Security Department, which is calling the project the “most comprehensive effort in the nation’s history” to gain control of the borders.

The 144-page document outlines the purpose and scope of the border surveillance technology program, which supplements other efforts to control the border and enforce immigration laws.

“Adding agents at the border is insufficient unless we also can give them the technology they need and unless we contain and remove the aliens they catch,” states the work statement drawn up by Customs and Border patrol. Under the contract, the system must detect entries when they occur, identify the entries, classify the level of threat for the entry, and “effectively and efficiently respond to the entry,” the statement said.

The SBI-Net contract will be indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity with performance-based task and delivery orders. It will be for a three-year base period with three one-year options.

The request for proposals was initially scheduled to be released March 31.

At the same time, the department expects to meet a congressional request to prepare an overall strategy for immigration policy enforcement and border security by the end of April. Once the strategy is complete, the agency in June will begin to create an operational plan with supporting metrics, Gregory Giddens, SBI-Net program manager told the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security on April 6. It should all be done by September, when DHS intends to award the SBI-Net contract, he said.

“We have been charged with creating a strategy … but it does not stop there,” Giddens said. “We have to take that strategy and turn that into programs, and tasks, and metrics and milestones, so that we can have accountability.” Through that, he said, the agency will create a framework “that allows us to, collectively, make well-informed investment and policy decisions.”

[...]

full at Washington Technology

For the religously faithful, what is the most compelling demonstration of commitment?

Living an exemplary life – according to the divinely designed rules of one’s religion – is certainly one way. “Bearing witness”, proselytizing to create converts and pull them into the fold is another.

By far, some of the most common manifestations of religious ardor are the loud complaint, the fiery outburst, the flame singed riot. The depth of our commitment is expressed by the will to disrupt a society’s established order.

Two scattered examples…

Having a nervous breakdown as a sign of faith: The God Warrior defends her belief system

American television viewers might be familiar with a FOX program named Trading Spouses (a concept borrowed, I’m told, from a BBC show – like so many American TV ideas). The premise is simple: two families exchange mothers for several weeks; their inevitable discomfort is filmed for our amusement.

In 2005, a Born Again woman named Margaret was temporarily swapped into a New Age home.

After a short while, her network selected family’s “pagan” habits compelled her to emotionally explode, declaring the family (perfectly nice, as far as you could tell through the fun house mirror of televised reality) to be, ominously, “not of God!”

As I watched her outburst, it seemed to me to be a defensive maneuver of sorts, meant to create a safe zone around herself that kept alien ideas at bay. She appeared to desperately need a buffer from the unfamiliar and her irrational eruption (perhaps, per R. D. Laing, a rational response to what appeared to her to be an irrational situation) was precisely the thing.

I think, as she grew closer to the non-Christian family, she sensed a weakening of her born again cognitive framework and reacted quickly and dramatically to shore it up by creating a wall.

The Dutch Newspaper Cartoon Insult to Muhammad: demonstrating seriousness of purpose through violence

Earlier this year, what the BBC quaintly called the “cartoon row” spread like a wildfire. Following the publication of editorial cartoons caricaturing the Prophet, Muslim communities across the world expressed their displeasure through both peaceful and violent means.

Flags (among other things) were burned and that ubiquitous symbol of the modern era, police in riot gear, emerged from their imposing black vans to restore order through rubber bullets, clubs, mace and other pain-tech. False tranquility was replaced by emotional excess.

In the Western media, various thinkers – shallow and deep – wondered, in ways dependent upon political leaning and world view – why the Islamic world was so allergic to freedom of the press or, alternately, so wounded and humiliated as to resort to these outbursts in defense of their faith’s honor.

What I wondered about was the human urge to display fidelity to a credo through public violence. Nonchalance is not an option when it comes to faith. In fact, a relaxed or philosophical view may be the enemy of sustained belief.

We must show, sometimes through shouting, other times through dramatic violence, that our beliefs are not to be taken lightly.

Religious belief is a part of our evolutionary heritage. And it may be that violence in defense of our beliefs is as inevitable as death, sooner or later, following birth.

Dreamers dream of some future moment when the peaceful co-existence of all faiths is achieved. Some go further and dream of a religion-less world.

Considering our cognitive equipment, as currently understood, can either of these dreams be realized?

What motivated me, I think, to purchase this slim, but very complex book by David Bohm was my profound dissatisfaction with works such as Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics - popularizations of quantum theory that swerved into poetry or metaphysics or quasi-religious musings.

Someone – I don’t remember who or the conversation’s context – recommended Bohm’s Wholeness and the implicate order. I took a bus downtown to Borders bookstore; remarkably, there was a copy in the science section.

Bohm writes (pages 4-5 of the Routledge 1994 paperback edition):

The Newtonian form of insight worked very well for several centuries but ultimately (like the ancient Greek insights that came before) it led to unclear results when extended into new domains.

In these new domains, new forms of insight were developed (the theory of relativity and the quantum theory). These gave a radically different picture of the world from that of Newton (though the latter was, of course, found to be still valid in a limited domain). If we supposed that theories gave true knowledge, corresponding to reality ‘as it is’, then we would have to conclude that Newtonian theory was true until around 1900, after which it suddenly became false, while relativity and quantum theory suddenly became the truth.

Such an absurd conclusion does not arise, however, if we say that all theories are insights which are neither true nor false but, rather, clear in certain domains and unclear when extended beyond these domains. This means, however, that we do not equate theories with hypotheses.

As the Greek root of the word indicates, a hypothesis is a supposition, that is, an idea that is ‘put under’ our reasoning, as a provisional base, which is to be tested experimentally for its truth or falsity. As is now well known, however, there can be no conclusive experimental proof of the truth or falsity of a general hypothesis which aims to cover the whole of reality. Rather, one finds (e.g., as in the case of the Ptolemaic epicycles or of the failure of Newtonian concepts just before the advent of relativity and quantum theory) that older theories become more and more unclear when one tries to use them to obtain insight into new domains. Careful attention to how this happens is then generally the main clue toward new theories that constitute further new forms of insight.

So, instead of supposing that older theories are falsified at a certain point in time, we merely say that man is continually developing new forms of insight, which are clear up to a point and then tend to become unclear.

[...]

What I find particularly lovely about this passage is how Bohm elegantly dispenses with the notion of final, authoritative truth, of our understanding of the world ‘as it is’. Our natural way of thinking (or at least, one of our natural ways of thinking) relentlessly wages war against uncertainty, against the idea of provisional truth. Surely the chief comfort of nearly all forms of religous expression is the proclamation that the rituals and body of arcane knowledge believers share are an expression of a deep and eternal characteristic of the divine and, therefore, reality itself.

Perhaps the primary battle of the 21st centiry will not be, as so many now believe, between the ‘liberal’ traditions of the West and an intolerant Islamic fundamentalism but, more generally, between flexibility, fluid motion and carefully constructed fortresses of belief.

Bohm’s Implicate and Explicate Order is described in Wikipedia.

There’s a moment in 2002’s Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla when a police officer, a few miles away from the ominously approaching atomic beast, watches in stunned wonder as the monster reduces buildings to smoking rubble with its electric blue plasma breath.

He’s simultaneously frightened and riveted by the spectacle.

In 2005’s War of the Worlds, as the alien war machines make their first appearance, Tom Cruise’s character pauses – along with others – to look at the towering instruments of the world’s impending destruction with a sort of half smile, like a child enchanted by a new toy.

During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, as “smart bombs” rained on Baghdad, a group of men and women – middle class American office workers – gathered with their lunches in an empty conference room, tuned into CNN and watched the remote controlled catastrophe on a large, flat screen television.

…

Shortly after 9/11/01, Baudrillard wrote the following about the day and its meaning:

All the speeches and commentaries betray a gigantic abreaction to the event itself and to the fascination that it exerts. Moral condemnation and the sacred union against terrorism are equal to the prodigious jubilation engendered by witnessing this global superpower being destroyed; better, by seeing it more or less self-destroying, even suiciding spectacularly. Though it is (this superpower) that has, through its unbearable power, engendered all that violence brewing around the world, and therefore this terrorist imagination which — unknowingly — inhabits us all.

That we have dreamed of this event, that everybody without exception has dreamt of it, because everybody must dream of the destruction of any power hegemonic to that degree, — this is unacceptable for Western moral conscience, but it is still a fact, and one which is justly measured by the pathetic violence of all those discourses which attempt to erase it.

It is almost they who did it, but we who wanted it. If one does not take that into account, the event lost all symbolic dimension to become a pure accident, an act purely arbitrary, the murderous fantasy of a few fanatics, who would need only to be suppressed. But we know very well that this is not so. Thus all those delirious, counter-phobic exorcisms: because evil is there, everywhere as an obscure object of desire. Without this deep complicity, the event would not have had such repercussions, and without doubt, terrorists know that in their symbolic strategy they can count on this unavowable complicity.

[...]

full here

We entertain ourselves with both imaginary and real images of massive destruction. Even as we cringe, we look on in fascination.

What element of the human psyche is revealed by investigating this element of our behavior?