Ways of seeing

almost taiwan

One of the most fascinating aspects of the birth of a new science is the new language it creates, allowing us to casually converse about ideas and issues that we were struggling to describe before.

Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Linked p222

Aside from the obvious sensory disarrangement, the main component of the psychedelic experience for me is a shift in perspective, a way seeing familiar things in a different light. One other way to do this is to read / listen as widely as possible. For example, you can go into a restaurant and trip out on:

• The taste, smell and texture of the food.
• The sense memories the meal engenders.
  
• The provenance of each ingredient.
• The chemical processes involved in their preparation.
• The physical processes of eating and digestion.
• The nutritional content of the food.
  
• The social dynamics between the people in the restaurant.
• The financial side of the business.
• How the place fits into the neighborhood.
• ...and so on.
  

All these things are floating around, different ways to talk about the same thing, and the richness of the experience seems to be in sometimes surrendering to one view and letting it take you as far as it can, and other times being easily distracted, taking a more comprehensive look at aspects that you mostly ignore.

Related posts:
Why I go out drinking more often than before
Mundane in one group
A continuous network of critical states

coop - mickey finn

Same again (hacking the beast-machine)

bialetti - one more

There's no way for me to directly control a lot of what I do. Essentially, I've given up responsibility for my actions as and when they occur, and instead as much as possible focus on the set and setting ahead of time. Fortunately [but mostly not] I'm good at getting habits, so I can set up workarounds and little hacks and see what they produce.

I used to drink way too much coffee, and I couldn't stop myself. I started grinding my own beans and using a little stove top moka pot so that the time / effort required for each cup would act as a restraint. It works very well - down to three cups a day - exploiting my own laziness / intertia to get things done.

Related post: Monkey orgasm button

The pratfall effect

french paper

The pratfall effect is a psychological phenomenon whereby the attractiveness of a person perceived as competent increases if the person commits a blunder. Conversely, the attractiveness of a person perceived as incompetent decreases if the person commits a blunder.

Wikipedia

....an experiment by Kay Deaux demonstrates that the pratfall effect applies most strongly to males. She found that, although most males in her study preferred the highly competent man who committed a blunder, women showed a tendency to prefer the highly competent nonblunderer, regardless of whether the stimulus person was male or female. Similarly, my colleagues and I found that males with a moderate degree of self-esteem are most likely to prefer the highly competent person who commits a blunder, while males with low self-esteem (who apparently feel little competitiveness with the stimulus person) prefer the highly competent person who doesn't blunder. It should be emphasized that no sizable proportion of people-regardless of their own level of self-esteem-preferred the mediocre person.

Elliot Aronson The Social Animal [via here - link contains a longer account of the original experiment]

Used goods

60s chessboard 01 - ilikegraphics

I've got more books than I need but less than I want, although sometimes I'll go through the ones I've read and have no intention of opening again and take them to a secondhand store. What happens later is I go back to the same store and half the things that catch my eye are books that used to belong to me.

I like secondhand stores, but sometimes it's depressing to see the crap that people have bought and owned and parted with and now it's trying to being sold. But when I die / hit bottom and sell out, my own possessions will be baffling - 'he made a life out of this?' - but life, as you know, isn't in such things.

There's no explaining the cotton coasters on this desk or the picture frames - they fail to transcend their nature as coasters and frames, and cut from active use they're horrible things, like false teeth. I'm pushing 40 and the house I live in is almost empty and totally undecorated, save for white paint and some of the landlord's paintings. I don't care. My desk is alive with things that have some meaning, which means: photos of me and my wife, pens, notes, scissors, tissues, water, beer, chewing gum, an army knife, speakers, some cacti, a stopwatch and tis machine.Welcome to my world.

The next warehouse, in Waukegan, brought a unit full of — depending on how you look at it — cherished household possessions or somebody’s trash. Most of the bidders took the latter view, disdaining an offer. Tonya Boyd bought the bulging plastic bags for all of $6. “It looks like someone had some troubles,” said Ms. Boyd, an employment specialist. There were piles of clothes, brand-new women’s shoes, old chairs, a dirty fan, kitchenware.

For some units, $6 is too much. “A dollar bill, first dollar bill takes it,” Mr. Snyder implored in front of one unit. “Come on, this is everything they own!” To no avail.

This is the eternal mystery of self-storage. If the material was worth money, it was foolish to let it go to default. If it was not worth much, why spend at least $50 a month to store it?

Losing a Home, Then Losing All Out of Storage - NY Times

Pushing at an open door

Al Wiseman

Having no lead to follow, we were swept up by words, memories, manias, grudges, and solidarities. Having no goal to aim for, we wasted what little life there was in our thoughts on joining in with a pun, speaking ill of common acquaintances, avoiding unpleasant facts, riding hobbyhorses, pushing at open doors, making faces, and preening ourselves.

Rene Daumal, A Night of Serious Drinking, p7

This must be the place

Home, is where I want to be,
but I guess I'm already there.

Talking Heads, above

It may be mild OCD or just a lack of imagination, but I rode my bicycle around the darkest, quietest streets downtown tonight for 2.5 hrs with this song playing on repeat, and I did it from feeling very good to feeling bad to feeling very good again. And then I went into a bar and washed out the fine body chemistry of caffeine, starvation and physical exertion, to achieve the robust equilibrium I now find myself in.

I'm quiet happy to see time as either an illusion or strictly linear - it's the circular thing that I find unconvincing. So years do not mean a lot to me, nor dates within them. But they serve an important administrative function, and this [mid-May] is the time of year I usually have to renew my visa. Been like that since 1998, but this year I don't need to - I have permanent residency, so no blood test [drugs, AIDS], photos and so on. This place is home.

An ideal for living

sarah franklin

You should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely-knit group of people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends.

Robert Anton Wilson

Pronoia: the suspicion the Universe is a conspiracy on your behalf.

Related post: Shadowplay

Transmission of the agape

meso-american mushroom stones

Nothing sacred ever really dies out.

Richard Evans Schultes in a two part lecture on hallucinogenic plants here [audio not great, because it's old, but I don't know how old]

Schultes was one of the founding fathers of the discipline, along with R. Gordon Wasson and Dr. Hoffmann.

The palace of excess

I'll say at least one thing about drinking with frat boys: it does quickly disabuse you of the notion that there may be any wisdom at the end of narcotic, alcoholic or sexual excess.

Manhattan projection

horizonless projection of manhattan, by schulze & webb [click to enlarge]

No one cares about what you think, unless you do what you think. No one cares what you do, unless you think about what you do. No one ever really cares what you say.

Spencer Thursfield, via Jack Schulze

Occupational hazards of the self-employed, #1

Never have a job, because if you have a job someday someone will take it away from you and then you'll be unprepared for your old age. For me, it has always been the same every day since the age of 12. I wake up in the morning and I try to figure out how am I going to put bread on the table today? It is the same at 75, I wake up every morning and I think how am I going to put bread on the table today? I am exceedingly well prepared for my old age.

John Cage, via Milton Glaser

For a while I've been letting the work fall into a random plan- but my life in its current iteration seems to lack the property of self-order. Or maybe I'm expecting too much. Every deadline is met and yet I appear to be doing nothing, hanging out in cafes and bars.

To misquote Flaubert, I need to be orderly and disciplined in my working life, like a good bourgeois, so that I might be wilder the rest of the time.

Interesting properties tend to arise just on the border of order and chaos, while one of my weaknesses is to blindly rush far over either side and hunker down, like an exile.

Why I go out drinking more often than before

The major implication intended by this paper is that the personal experience of individuals is closely bound up with larger-scale aspects of social structure, well beyond the purview or control of particular individuals. Linkage of micro and macro levels is thus no luxury, but of central importance to the development of sociological theory. Such linkage generates paradoxes: weak ties, often denounced as generative of alienation are here seen as indispensable to individuals' opportunities and to their integration into communities; strong ties, breeding social cohesion, lead to overall fragmentation. Paradoxes are a welcome antidote to theories which explain everything too neatly.

Mark Granovetter, The Strength of Weak Ties [pdf, 1973]

Click for a bigger version of an awesome 'map of science' from this paper

An idea mundane in one group can be a valuable insight in another.

Ronald S Burt, Structural Holes and Good Ideas [pdf]

Ways of escape

On October 10, 2006, Steve-O appeared on Tom Green Live, an Internet talk-show hosted by comedian Tom Green, alongside guests Jukka Hildén and Carson Daly in which he discussed his hatred for current U.S. President George W. Bush and organized religion. Steve-O also spoke out about his feelings towards his clown college alma mater, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, for abusing the animals used in the circus. He took calls from viewers while repeatedly huffing medical-grade compressed nitrous oxide (commonly called "whippits"), smoking, drinking alcohol and eating hash brownies. The show ran for three times its normal length, ending with Steve-O collapsing on the floor after drinking a bottle of Italian salad dressing and vomiting violently.

Wikipedia

Middle-age

a painting of some prickly pears by rudy rucker

When someone twice your age dies of natural causes and you're not surprised, then you're officially middle-aged [or older].

This effect is advantageous to the parasite

Toxoplasma gondii [above] infections have the ability to change the behavior of rats and mice, making them drawn to rather than fearful of the scent of cats. This effect is advantageous to the parasite, which will be able to sexually reproduce if its host is eaten by a cat. The infection is almost surgical in its precision, as it does not affect a rat's other fears such as the fear of open spaces or of unfamiliar smelling food.

Wikipedia [via Metafilter]

Homage

Inertia has delayed my get clean [cleaner] act by at least a month, but I've had fun.
A hi-def version of the video below is available at the links


Eclectic Method - The Tarantino Mixtape from Eclectic Method on Vimeo.

Panopticon

My wife has a small building downtown, a two up two down that's her atelier and hang out space. It means she has somewhere to go everyday, and it's a nice place.

Because I don't want to clean / decorate, or need to meet clients, I thought about renting a room in a cheap hotel to serve as an office so that I'd have somewhere to go and focus on work, rather than pottering about at home, half dressed and dragging three hours work out into six.

But it turns out that just being outside in cafes for an hour or two each day is enough, as with the world's eyes somewhat upon me there are fewer distractions, and it gets me dressed, albeit in alohas and cut-off jeans - a stereotypically unpresentable early middle-aged foreign man in the tropics.

A cheap room in a hotel looked good until I looked into my heart. I don't need an office with room service, mini-bar, cable TV and massage services on call. As I get older there is a diminishing gap between what I want and what I need, but in places my judgment is still very poor, and the best I can do is to avoid putting myself in certain situations. This is analogous to making all your good choices at the market rather than in the kitchen. Once the potato chips and beer have been purchased I'm already doomed. The simple answer is just not to let them in the house.

Working on this principle I now go to bars three or four nights week.

Running tests

two snails negotiating an aloe, via almost taiwan

I get to meet a lot of different people, but they're not that different. Nearly all of them are associated with the good local university, most are master's / PhD students or professors. I met a PhD student doing work on cognitive science, linguistics and special education. A really bright guy, and fun to talk to, as he sees one thing in many different ways.

His English was good, but there was one odd thing. He kept referring to both of us in the third person. He's called Bruce and I'm called Paul, and so he would say something like:

I'm studying face recognition, so we attach some sensors to Paul's head, and then when Paul sees Bruce, we can see what lights up in his brain.

It seemed rude to interrupt and correct him, as we weren't having a class but a discussion. But then later I got half the idea that maybe he was running some kind of test on me - we were talking on campus - and possibly I was being filmed. Which would work out fine. Some of our talk was on mirror neurons, autism, suggestibility and hypnosis, and while we were talking I was consciously mirroring his movements with slightly smaller, slightly different ones of my own, to a) create rapport [possibly], b) test his suggestibility, and c) keep myself alert and very interested in him, not only his words [see (a)].

Paul and Bruce, testing each other.

Youthful ambition

In a few years it'll be possible to sit in your basement and cook up a virus that's targeted to a specific person or group's DNA, and if you don't think that some 13-year old boy somewhere isn't going to try and kill everyone in the world except himself and all the big-titted blonde women, then you don't know 13-year old boys.

John Ringo on the Future & You (futurology / sci-fi) podcast [Transcribed from memory]

Maintaining a high noise to information ratio

caffeine

Long time no post. Have been busy, but never tired, alternating between information and noise, fueled by large amounts of caffeine at one end of the day and large amounts of alcohol at the other. Taiwanese bars are set up so that 2am is an early night and 5am is nothing to write home about, and anything that a Westerner does is greeted with the attitude of 'this is how they all live, this must be their culture'.

I want to write a post on the occupational hazards of being self-employed, but that will have to wait. This is just a placeholder to show that I'm not dead.

alcohol

Matryoshka selves, strange loops and inner voices

I don't do anything in particular to keep my energy level up during the summer. I guess the only thing I do specifically is try not to drink so many cold drinks. And eat more fruits and vegetables. ... I'm not eating these, though, simply to stave off the summer blahs, but because my body just naturally craves them. Being active every day makes it easier to hear that inner voice.

Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, p49

My last day at work was November 31st '08, and it's taken me a while to even get slightly used to the demands [and lack of] of a freelancing, unscheduled life. Meaning that for the first four and a half months or so I colored outside the lines way too often, but the almost total lack of stress and the freedom to follow the dictates of the body inre. food and rest seem to have more than offset the late nights, alcohol and often poor dietary choices. I may be distracted, but never tired.


The last few months have been a fall down the stairs series of surprises and sudden rebirths, like waking up within recursive dreams. So I feel like an entirely different creature than a few weeks ago, never mind a year, all the time sloughing off lives like snake skins, and although I don't feel personally responsible for anything that I may have done, other people are bound to think differently.



Related post:
Strange loops and the pleasure of finding things out

Mundane in one group

tokyo undressed

In proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to himself, and is therefore capable of being valuable to others. There is a greater fullness of life about his own existence, and when there is more life in the units there is more in the mass, which is composed of them.

JS Mill On Liberty

People whose networks span structural holes have early access to diverse, often contradictory, information and interpretations which gives them a good competitive advantage in delivering good ideas. People connected to groups beyond their own can expect to find themselves delivering valuable ideas, seeming to be gifted with creativity. This is not creativity born of deep intellectual ability. It is creativity as an import-export business. An idea mundane in one group can be a valuable insight in another.

Ronald S Burt, Structural Holes and Good Ideas [pdf]

Exercises in style

Three ways to tell the same story.

I.

georgina luck

Things don't sit in a stable equilibrium, but instead one critical state that then collapses into another. But collapse may be too negative a term for something that's only change, and there are few things that are undiluted positives or negatives for all players in the long run. There's always the ju jitsu possibility of turning weakness into strength.

This idea is neatly covered by Dmitry Orlov in a February '09 talk he gave at the Long Now Foundation, called "Social Collapse Best Practices" [summary here, MP3 here], in which he describes how the weaknesses of the Soviet system - essentially many forms of inefficiency - actually helped Russians survive the various post-Soviet collapses. An entertaining speaker, with lots of jokes and some good observations amid predictions you probably hope won't come true, building on his earlier The 5 Stages of Collapse:

Stage 1: Financial collapse
Stage 2: Commercial collapse
Stage 3: Political collapse
Stage 4: Social collapse
Stage 5: Cultural collapse

II.

A series of three articles in Asia Times from March this year. The problem the article sets up is essentially the one covered by the ugly name of Chimerica [Niall Ferguson- pdf]: how does China escape from its co-dependent relationship with America, not so much inre. exports - which it has little direct control over, as in its huge capital reserves which leave it overexposed to declines in the dollar / rises in US interest rates, both of which seem inevitable with the trillions of dollars of new US govt. debt that will come onto the market this year. Quotes from all three articles below, followed by the links:

Much discussion and debate is currently underway as to whether the US will find sufficient global demand for the more than $2 trillion in new Treasuries coming online this fiscal year alone. But the fundamental risks for the dollar aren't only arising out of that fear over whether demand for Treasuries will be sustained.

Serious risks for the dollar also arise if global demand for Treasuries is sustained. Why? Because that would only thrust the present Treasuries bubble to even more gigantic proportions, further warping the structure of the already severely deformed present global financial order, magnifying the dangerous distortions that already exist and increasing the likelihood of a massive second wave of damage and destruction in this present crisis, and an eventual burst in the Treasuries bubble.
...
Investors will begin to stampede out of financial assets such as Treasuries and into hard assets like precious metals and certain commodities whose price has been severely beaten down. These will offer comparatively much safer stores of wealth, ones with a real profit potential. China, via its resource buys, is already blazing the trail, going energetically into hard assets, rather than sustaining its 2008 rate of purchases of Treasuries and other financial assets.
...
There is mounting evidence that China's central bank is undertaking the process of divesting itself of longer-dated US Treasuries in favor of shorter-dated ones.

There is also mounting evidence that China's increasingly energetic new campaign of capitalizing on the global crisis by making resource buys across the globe may be (1) helping itscentral bank to decrease exposure to the dollar, while (2) simultaneously positioning China to make much greater profit on its investment of its reserves into hard assets whose prices are now greatly beaten down, while (3) also affording it greatly increased control of strategic resources and the geopolitical clout that goes with it. This is turning out to be a win-win-win situation for China as it capitalizes upon the important opportunities afforded it by the present global crisis.

1. Before the stampede
2. The not-so-safe-haven
3. China inolculates intself against dollar collapse

III.

too drunk

What’s going on now is nature’s way of telling you that America’s standard of living has to be reduced by something between 20 and 50 percent. You can have it in the form of a compressive deflationary depression, including widespread bankruptcies… or you can have by way of inflation, in which money loses its value. But there’s one basic qualification to this: the way down is not symmetrical with the way up. That is, it’s really not just a matter of ratcheting down to a standard of living half of what it was, say, in 2006, because in the event all the various complex systems that support everyday life enter failure mode before our society re-sets at a theoretically lower level of equilibrium.

Jim Kunstler

Related posts:
Old systems break before new ones are in place
The utility of slack
A continuous network of critical states

The planetary Other

plant technology

Reestablishing channels of direct communication with the planetary Other, the mind behind nature, through the use of hallucinogenic plants is the best hope for dissolving the steep walls of cultural inflexibility that appear to be channeling us toward true ruin.

Terence McKenna, Plan / plant / planet

33 years ago today

Bowie gets arrested

And happy birthday, Rachel.