Wise words from Randall Munroe

1. Take wrong turns.
2. Talk to strangers.
3. Open unmarked doors.
4. If you see a group of people in a field, go find out what they’re doing.
5. Do things without always knowing how they’ll turn out.

[xkcd]

Shoot a real live Iraqi

“Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal has locked himself into a studio with live webcams for the month of May.

“The public can watch him 24/7 over a live webcam; and if they choose, visitors to his website can shoot him with a remote controlled paintball gun. Log on, shoot at an Iraqi. Bilal’s installation – titled Domestic Tension – disturbingly raises awareness about the life of the Iraqi people and the home confinement they face due to the both the violent and the virtual war they face on a daily basis.”

[From ArtThreat.]

Theodore Kaczynski

Thanks to (Dopamine) Rob I have (re)discovered Theodore J. Kaczynski, otherwise known as the Unabomber. I remember hearing about him on the news—back when he was arrested, I guess—but I hadn’t quite absorbed the interesting aspects of his biography. Aside from the posting of mail bombs, he was a brilliant mathematician. He graduated from Harvard, got a PhD from Michigan in geometric function theory, and then taught at Michigan for a few years, publishing several papers. I’ll let you follow the links to find out more; I just want to point to some sections of his political essay, Industrial Society and Its Future. In this essay he basically argues that modern society has made people miserable. He targets a few groups of people in particular—most amusing I found were his views on leftists and scientists.

He argues that leftists tend to have “low self-esteem, feelings of powerlessness, depressive tendencies, defeatism, guilt, self-hatred”, and that they are “overly socialised”, i.e., he argues, “to avoid feelings of guilt, they continually have to deceive themselves about their own motives and find moral explanations for feelings and actions that in reality have a non-moral origin”.

His description of oversocialisation:

“The majority of people engage in a significant amount of naughty behavior. They lie, they commit petty thefts, they break traffic laws, they goof off at work, they hate someone, they say spiteful things or they use some underhanded trick to get ahead of the other guy. The oversocialized person cannot do these things, or if he does do them he generates in himself a sense of shame and self-hatred. The oversocialized person cannot even experience, without guilt, thoughts or feelings that are contrary to the accepted morality; he cannot think “unclean” thoughts. And socialization is not just a matter of morality; we are socialized to conform to many norms of behavior that do not fall under the heading of morality. Thus the oversocialized person is kept on a psychological leash and spends his life running on rails that society has laid down for him.”

On scientists, he has to say the following:

“With possible rare exceptions, their [scientists'] motive is neither curiosity nor a desire to benefit humanity but the need to go through the power process: to have a goal (a scientific problem to solve), to make an effort (research) and to attain the goal (solution of the problem). Science is a surrogate activity because scientists work mainly for the fulfillment they get out of the work itself. [...] Other motives do play a role for many scientists. Money and status for example. Some scientists may be persons of the type who have an insatiable drive for status and this may provide much of the motivation for their work. No doubt the majority of scientists, like the majority of the general population, are more or less susceptible to advertising and marketing techniques and need money to satisfy their craving for goods and services…”

A truly amusing read.

Logic is the language of love

“Life, love and romance are all about surprise: the surprise of an unexpected bouquet of flowers, a mysterious stranger met by chance at a party, the unannounced return of an old lover at your doorstep, the confusion of finding the unknown side of an old friend or acquaintance who becomes your partner. The freshness of a relationship kept new even after years.

“Alive equals surprise.

“The logical world … seems to be a world of no surprise, no serendipity, no romance. Axioms generate propositions, one deduction blindly follows another. The game is over almost as soon as it is begun. Where is the romance in that? No chance for the heart to overrule the head, contradiction to conquer cogitation, desperation and devotion to deliver you from derivation.

“Or is there?

“In the 1920s, a mathematician named Goedel proved that in any consistent logical system [the result is a bit weaker than that... AF], there will always be statements whose truth or falsity can’t be proved by the simple mechanical rules of logic. Even if these “undecidable” statements are appended to the list of axioms, as long as this enlarged system remains consistent, there will still be other statements whose proof or refutation lies outside the power of formal reasoning.

“The unknowable and the unpredictable is embedded in even the most simple of things. Romantically speaking, I like to think of this as saying that if we have a guarantee of truth, and thus the possibility of honesty, then from this we must necessarily have surprise, even mystery—and maybe then, just maybe, with a little bit of luck, we must have love. Q.E.D.”

From Logic is the language of love by Daniel Rockmore

Florence Nightingale

A little bio of Florence Nightingale, statistician and nurse. Excerpt:

“Nightingale helped to promote what was then a revolutionary idea (and a religious one for her) that social phenomena could be objectively measured and subjected to mathematical analysis. Her work with medical statistics was so impressive that she was elected (in 1858) to membership in the Statistical Society of England. One of the pioneers in the graphic method of presentation of data, she invented colorful polar-area diagrams to dramatize medical data. Although other methods of persuasion had failed, her statistical approach convinced military authorities, Parliament, and Queen Victoria to carry out her proposed hospital reforms.”

[Photo of her Polar Area Diagram ("coxcomb") from over here.]

Words

“Love, the warmth of bodies in contact, is the only mercy shown to us in the darkness. But the only union is that of the organs, and it can’t bridge over the cleavage made by speech. Yet they unite in order to produce beings to stand by them in their hopeless isolation. And the generations look coldly into each other’s eyes. If you cram a ship full to bursting with human bodies, they all freeze with loneliness.”
- from Brecht’s In the Jungle of Cities

“… of course natural language is meaningless. Even in my most optimistic moments I can conclude only that conversation exists merely to disguise the fact that we are all going to die… No doubt following this lecture each of you will exist mostly in silence.”
- Maurice Clint, 2001 or so, in a maths lecture (quote from memory—it appeared from nowhere and left us all in shock )

“Language only lives in and through human culture, which on the one hand needs mutual understanding but on the other hand makes direct communication impossible. [...] People who use language lose their primitive desires which, however sinful, remain close to the self. Frightened by solitude, their only home, they become automata, slaves of the monster-machine of public relations.”
- from Life, Art, and Mysticism by Brouwer

“The more the words,
the less the meaning,
and how does that profit anyone?”
- Ecclesiastes 6:11

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’
Doesn’t make any sense.”
- Rumi

“Vows are spoken
To be broken
Feelings are intense
Words are trivial
Pleasures remain
So does the pain
Words are meaningless
And forgettable
[...]
Words are very unnecessary
They can only do harm”
- Depeche Mode, Enjoy the Silence

“What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.”
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“Silence is sexy
Silence is sexy
So sexy
So silence
Silence is sexy
Silence is sexy
So sexy
So sexy”
-From Silence is Sexy by Blixa Bargeld of Einstürzende Neubauten

Plato’s The Apology of Socrates

On Saturday I saw Yannis Simonides’s moving performanec of Plato’s The Apology of Socrates. Here’s a translation (not the one by Yannis). And an excerpt:

“Friends, who would have acquitted me, I would like also to talk with you about this thing which has happened, while the magistrates are busy, and before I go to the place at which I must die. Stay then awhile, for we may as well talk with one another while there is time. You are my friends, and I should like to show you the meaning of this event which has happened to me. [...]

… we shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is a good, for one of two things: – either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the sight of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king, will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others. Now if death is like this, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead are, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this? [...] What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again. I, too, shall have a wonderful interest in a place where I can converse with Palamedes, and Ajax the son of Telamon, and other heroes of old, who have suffered death through an unjust judgment; and there will be no small pleasure, as I think, in comparing my own sufferings with theirs. Above all, I shall be able to continue my search into true and false knowledge; as in this world, so also in that; I shall find out who is wise, and who pretends to be wise, and is not. [...]“

Maps, a cover by Duke Special

Grows on you—try to get over the Norn Irish “wait”:

Need motivation to vote?

This video of Toyama Koichi, part of an election campaign for the position of governor of Tokyo, may help get you down to the polling station. Choice quotes:

“To all the voters. This nation is horrible.”

“I have no interest whatsoever in political reform or any kind of reform.”

“This nation must be destroyed.”

“I do not have a single constructive proposal!”

“Annihilate everything that exists.”

“I despise each and every one of you.”

“If you think you can change something by voting, you are COMPLETELY wrong.”

“NO MATTER HOW MUCH REFORM IS DONE THERE IS NO HOPE!”

“Please give me a phone call.”

(He wasn’t elected.)

[via Boing Boing.]

Scottish Elections Party Navigator Thingy

Just tried My Vote Navigator (see the bottom of this page); got a tie between the Greens and the LibDems:

1. Scottish Green Party (79.1%)
2. Liberal Democrats (79.1%)
3. Scottish National Party (76.7%)
4. Labour Party (74.4%)
5. Conservative Party (61.6%)