How many?

"[Taiji Tonoyma - a Japanese actor - asked] ...tell me Mr Miller, how many women do you think you've slept with in your life?" I was, of course, embarrassed, you know, and also puzzled. And I said, "Well, I've never thought about that, maybe 40 or 50." "What," he said, "I've slept myself with maybe 250, you know, and you, with your reputation, you must have had a thousand."

Henry Miller, 6 minutes or so into the clip above [part 1 of 3]

I'm 37- Clerks

Related post: Guardian sex survey

The secret of my success

bardot + birkin, via if charlie parker was a gunslinger... (good images every day)

I am quite certain that the most important reason for my having known some success is that I have had no competition.

R. Buckminster Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion p207

Team Venter making history

biomimicry, by jude buffum

In this future — whose underpinnings, as Drs. Church and Venter demonstrated, are here already— life as we know it is transformed not by the error catastrophe of radiation damage to our genetic processes, but by the far greater upheaval caused by discovering how to read genetic sequences directly into computers, where the code can be replicated exactly, manipulated freely, and translated back into living organisms by writing the other way. "We can program these cells as if they were an extension of the computer," George Church announced, and proceeded to explain just how much progress has already been made.

From George Dyson's introduction to A short course on synthetic genomics [July, 2009, Edge Masterclass], presented by Craig Venter and George Church. Videos [mostly difficult for me to understand on one watch] and a pdf from an earlier, related event, at the link

Richard Dawkins interviews Venter [2008, BBC], touring his lab. Much easier.

Self similar and out of sight

Ringo playing bongos, Paul and someone else in the glass

When my friend John started going to the Bronx High School of Science, he was surprised to find that it contained the same cliques that his former, neighborhood school had had-- the jocks, the geeks, etc. He figured that because the student body consisted of all the geeks taken from other schools, he would only find geeks there. But no-- and when he got to know the school's Chess Team, the geeks among geeks, he saw that they paralleled the same divisions.

Humans and human groupings always seem to break down into the same archetypes, and this also seems to happen at all levels of granularity, from national character to impulses within an individual.

We are Fractal Sheep, Paul Spinrad

The post isn't very long, and the good stuff is mostly extracted above, but I like it a lot. I like it because I lean toward the society of the mind, but also because of the social aspects of the above, the similar iterations at all scales of the same types and conflicts. Think of The Beatles: the cute one, the quiet one, the smart one, the funny one.

Of course, those labels were too glib, they were all cute, quiet, smart and funny, but everyone gets labeled in a group, and everyone ends up playing a role or two. The self is socially constructed, which is why solitude has traditionally been a tool to break it, either as punishment or spiritual discipline.

From another angle, the perceptions others have of you are obviously the reality of how you're perceived. If the people who know you think that you're a jerk, then you're a jerk, and only a change in your behavior is likely to alter that perception to any significant degree among any significant number of people. And I write this as someone who has often, and with good cause, been seen as a jerk.

Plants have many qualities, but we tend to focus on only one or two for even species of considerable interest, defining them solely in those terms. The reality of all plants - and by extension, all animals, including [naturally] all humans - is far richer than perceived by even the most patient and generous observer. But somehow that doesn't seem to matter.

Head spaces

Peripetics by ZEITGUISED from NotForPaper.

Beautiful video [worth enlarging] described like this at the source:

Zeitguised made a piece in six acts for the opening exhibition at the Zirkel Gallery. It entails six imaginations of disoriented systems that take a catastrophic turn, including the evolution of educational plant-body-machine models and liquid building materials.

The section with the grass, plane and cloud [0:30 - 1:00] looks / sounds / feels / like entering salvia space.

All life is a process of breaking down

crack-up cut-up by they poured fire on us from the sky [click to enlarge]

Fitzgerald, in contrast, comes across as a well-meaning but annoying fellow who hero-worshiped the wrong people, and who consistently sabotaged himself by getting drunk and behaving like a fool.

From Michiko Kakutani's review of Hemingway vs Fitzgerald

Related: Full text of The Crack-Up here

From practice to theory

Back in Osaka for two days before Taiwan, with the [real] joy of karaoke waiting at the end of the day.

The first paragraph of the excerpt, below, overstates the case in suggesting that theoretical knowledge can never lead to practical applications, but the rest adds some modifiers to soften this claim.

The biggest myth I’ve encountered in my life is as follows: that the road from practical know-how to theoretical knowledge is reversible—in other words, that theoretical knowledge can lead to practical applications, just as practical applications can lead to theoretical knowledge. After all, this is the reason we have schools, universities, professors, research centers, homework, exams, essays, dissertations, and the strange brand of individuals called “economists.”

Yet the strange thing is that it is very hard to realize that knowledge cannot travel equally in both directions. It flows better from practice to theory—but to understand it you have nontheoretical knowledge. And people who have nontheoretical knowledge don’t think of these things.

Indeed, if knowledge flowed equally in both directions, then theory without experience should be equivalent to experience without theory—which is not the case.

Nassim Taleb, excerpted from a forward to a book, pdf here

Some related posts:
Practice / Theory
Theory / Practice
Big fat lie

We eat death

Ecosystem on a tree near a temple in Himeji

Went to a temple in one of the hills around Himej. Every time I visit a temple I get more into the plants around the place than the buildings. At the moment I have a thing for mosses and ferns - the early plants, before flowers.


They also have some good cacti - the most recent addition to the plant kingdom [I've read] - at the Himeji Botanical Garden, as the town is twinned with Phoenix, Arizona, and on my last trip I bought two very mature Lophophora williamsii, each as big as a fist. Taking them through customs was as much excitement as I can bear, although cleaned of soil they're probably legal, as the same plants can be bought in Taiwanese markets at three or four times the price.

Above is a picture of moss growing on a tree stump and around a stone that was cut for the temple. These plants are relentless. They bear a lot of weight and bounce back and just keep growing. I took some from the gardens at the Temple of the Golden Pavilion in Nara, and with any luck I'll get it through customs and it'll take in Taiwan. I play for team DNA.


Replace the suit and tie with jeans and an aloha, and the hair with a shaved head, in true Mishima style, and you have me eating salami and drinking beer in Japan as much as possible. I eat death.

Memory loss

The Chinese character for alcohol [jiu], photographed from an Osaka restaurant sign and cleaned up on a computer, with the face and bottle added to make it mine

Was walking in Himeji and managed to lose a small folder of index cards full of notes. I retraced my steps, but no luck, and then the only thing I wanted was for it to be found by someone with no English abilities and / or immediately trashed.

I bought a notebook and tried to remember what I'd written, but there was too much and it was gone. Before writing there were oral traditions, and at other times people worked on complex mnemonic systems and memory palaces, but I've always been too lazy to try any of these methods, and, like nearly all skills, have worked on the assumption that just knowing how something is done is good enough. I have plenty of theories, but little practical experience, which explains a lot about who I am and how I came to be.

I bought a notebook and began writing again. Pen and paper are an extension of my brain, as much an augmentation as a memory chip, regardless of how little visible progress is actually made.

Related: To the brain, tools are temporary body parts [Discover]

Cultural differences in the fundamental attribution error

Osaka cab view

In Himeji, on total down time, riding a simple bicycle and doing nothing. I think I may've outgrown the idea that a vacation should be judged by how many intoxicants are consumed and how much sex is had. All of this just ahead of my [next] mid-life crisis, which should see a tremendous regression on all fronts.

The contrast with last summer could hardly be greater, when I was working all the time and feeling wasted. I have work with me here, but it's an hour or so in the morning, an hour or so at night.

Previous research has shown that cultural differences exist in the susceptibility of making fundamental attribution error: people from individualistic cultures are prone to the error while people from collectivistic cultures commit less of it. ...

These discrepancies in the salience of different factors to people from different cultures suggest that Asians tend to attribute behavior to situation while Westerners attribute the same behavior to the actor. ... One explanation for this difference in attribution lies in the way people of different cultural orientation perceive themselves in the environment. Particularly, Markus and Kitayama (1991) mentioned how (individualistic) Westerners tend to see themselves as independent agents and therefore prone themselves to individual objects rather than contextual details.

Excerpted, cut and pasted from Wikipedia

Related posts:
Impelled by convention

To hell with authenticity

The creature that wins against its environment

Walking my legs to stumps in Kyoto and Osaka. The picture is of the woodwork in part of the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, which I'll write up later.

I've had the quote below in my notebook and ready to post for some time, and at first I thought it was unrelated to the temple, but going over it there's a connection with some of the ideas that play out again and again in Mishima, with the hero finding victory in self-destruction.

....the ideas which dominate our civilization at the
present time date in their most virulent form from the
Industrial Revolution. They may be summarized as:

(a) It's us against the environment.

(b) It's us against other men.

(c) It's the 'individual' (or the individual company, or
the individual nation) that matters.

(d) We can have unilateral control over the environment and must strive for that control.

(e) We live within an infinitely expanding "frontier."

(f) Economic determinism is common sense.

(g) Technology will do it for us.

We submit that these ideas are simply proved false by the great but ultimately destructive achievements of our technology in the last 150 years. Likewise they appear to be false under modern ecological theory. The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.

Gregory Bateson, cut/pasted from here, and also in Steps to an Ecology of Mind [my bold].

Out of the blue

Knowing when to stop

freelancers operate unconstrained by dress codes and other workplace conventions

Have burned through various systems & schedules in the last seven months of freelancing. The current iteration is to get up at 8am and work through until a bike ride / lunch, then work again until somewhere between 4pm and 6pm, when it's clear that nothing more can done at a decent speed or in good spirit, and then I just quit and forget about work until the next morning.

What's striking to me is how, after all the strange schedules I've tried, the most conventional one, essentially 9-to-5, is the one that feels and works best

Apart from a few months in 1992, I've never had a 9-to-5 job. The novelty has yet to wear off.

Away from home

Will be in Japan for two weeks from July 6th - Osaka, Kyoto and Himeji.

Tales of extraordinary madness

our tiny garden is a jungle

The St. Petersburg Times ran a three-part series on Scientology last week, with the focus mainly on bullying at the management levels. It was good for what it was, but it didn't go into the true madness of the thing.

I.
L Ron Hubbard's Admissions is like a madman's little book of wisdom. Keep it by your bedside and meditate on a section each night before sleeping. It's a list of platitudes, memos to self and self-aggrandizing asides in the second person. Examples:

You can sing beautifully. Your voice can imitate any singer. Your tones are round and true. You have no superstitions about singing at any time. Your oratory is magnificent. Your voice tones perfect, your choice of words marvelous, your logic unassailable.

Material things are yours for the asking. Men are your slaves. Elemental spirits are your slaves. You are power among powers, light in the darkness, beauty in all.

Your eyes are getting progressively better. They became bad when you used them as an excuse to escape the naval academy. You have no reason to keep them bad and now they can get well and they will become eventually starting now as keen as an eagle's with clear whites and green pupils. Sunlight does not affect them. Lack of sleep does not affect them.

Your foot was an alibi. The injury is no longer needed. It is well. You have perfect and lovely feet.

You have no fear of what any woman may think of your bed conduct. You know you are a master. You know they will be thrilled. You can come many times without weariness. The act does not reduce your vitality or brain power at all. You can come several times and still write. Intercourse does not hurt your chest or make you sore. Your arms are strong and do not ache in the act. Your own pleasure is not dependent on the woman's. You are interested only in your own sexual pleasure. If she gets any that is all right but not vital. Many women are not capable of pleasure in sex and anything adverse they say or do has no effect whatever upon your pleasure. Their bodies thrill you. If they repel you, it merely means they themselves are too frigid or prudish to be bothered with. They are unimportant in bed except as they thrill you. Your sexual power is magnificent and they know it. If they are afraid of it, that is their loss. You are not affected by it.

Part one here, but all the above are from part two.

II.
The clip below shows David Miscavige, the current 'head' of Scientology, announcing the death of L Ron Hubbard. It's great to see his face as spins the news of Hubbard having left his body to continue his research.



III.
This is my favorite. I sat and watched whole set [7 x 30 min] straight through. It's Steven Fishman in a seven-part video deposition that goes into his beliefs about himself and Scientology. The horror only grows over the running time, right up to the last scene - the tour of the library.

Steven Fishman is a former Scientologist whose inclusion of Scientology's secret Operating Thetan levels in a court filing led to the first public confirmation by the Church of Scientology of its doctrines regarding Xenu and the Wall of Fire. Wikipedia

Great headline

Michael Jackson set to be embalmed at the O2 Centre after missing the deadline for cryogenic freezing

Preliminary findings

Background
September last year I wrote:

I think if I worked in an office I'd be far more lecherous and alarming than I am, far more prone to obsession and liable to lose my bearings if an attractive young woman struck up a friendly conversation.

Why I am so chaste

Hypothesis
Working in an office was not the key point, but rather working in an environment that wasn't filled with attractive women and girls who were there to interact with me, as happens [happened] in conversation classes. So, there was a testable hypothesis contained in that earlier post, as follows:
My lechery and alarming behavior are inversely proportional to the amount of friendly conversation I engage in with attractive young women.

Preliminary findings
Nine months later, and I no longer teach in any significant capacity, and so do not spend all day, every day in conversation with attractive young women.

The evidence of the last 6.5 months suggests strong support for the hypothesis.

Limitations, and suggestions for future work
It should be noted that this preliminary investigation does not consider any possible variables, such as the consumption of alcohol and the fact that I'm married. However, whether these factors are significant, and if so, whether they are moderating or mediating variables, is something that future work will address.

Related post: Made of anecdotes and punchlines

Repetition and meditating on simple numbers

Photo of a coneflower by Tim Stone [website down] and a short article on the math it expresses

I've taken up swimming in an attempt to halt the cascading failures in my body after 6.5 months of partying too much.

Three weeks of changes - a lot less drinking and back on low carb / primal exercise - and I can already feel things starting to turn around and churn beneath the surface. Stochastic systems and emergence mean a certain amount of surrender is required when it comes to doing the right things for your body. If you can quiet yourself for long enough and listen to what your body is saying, then the answer will often be clear. And, like Haruki Murakami writes in another post: Being active every day makes it easier to hear that inner voice.

There are a lot of pools in this part of town, and the one two streets over is probably the worst, so after 7pm there's usually only one or two people there. I do 60 x 25m, and to not lose count / keep my head relatively quiet I focus only on the numbers, manipulating them in various ways. This is kind of dull for one and two, but picks up with three and beyond.

I don't want to give the wrong impression. My conscious thoughts are very simple, and I'm barely numerate, so these are basic exercises, but they please me and they get the job done. I don't lose count or think too much, and the swimming is done in a trance.

Anyway, this link leads to a list maintained by Erich Friedman that explains what's special about a lot of numbers, which is similar to this list of the properties of the first 5,000 integers. Lots of things to thing about when you're counting to 100.

Mugwump jism

Fifty years since Naked Lunch was published, and whatever strange trip I've been on since my mid-teens has been in part inspired by that first rush of books, which helped me run counter to everything that had been intended or could expected for my future. So, a moment of gratitude to walking corpses everywhere, with a favorite interpretation of the work, below.

Bug Powder Dust, by Bomb The Bass featuring Justin Warfield [1994]

Fat man in a cul-de-sac

They don't have to tell me about this human condition: I'm in it.

B.S. Johnson, caption from Street Children

B.S. Johnson's Fat Man on a Beach has turned up, and all five parts are posted below.

If you don't know him, then it's of limited interest [almost certainly none], probably like the rest of this post.

He was a modernist writer who got caught in too many traps, mostly set by himself. I think he had very limited talents that he stretched too far with style, and when the talent broke and the style ran out there was little left over to live on. He killed himself in a bathtub at the age of 40, in 1973. With better choices perhaps he could have been Georges Perec, who died of natural causes [lung cancer] at the age of 45, in 1982, but he wasn't.

Although he did have some good titles, and to my way of thinking [which I accept is a little cracked] Instructions for the Use of Women is at least as good as Laferrière's How to Make Love to a Negro, although the latter is the better work, and neither are that outstanding.

I read Jonathan Coe's good biography of Johnson earlier this year, which a) explained why I'd been able to read all of this hard to find author's works while at university [Warwick had an English professor who was a supporter, and the library was well-stocked], and b) made it plain that the best I could have hoped for if I'd pursued a literary career would've been to become a failed B.S. Johnson. Moreover, and more importantly, that a failure in this case would still have been better than the real thing, as long as it was done fast (as it more or less was).

Some people have easy lives, but most face a long series of struggles. I write that, thinking about B.S. Johnson, with no idea if it's true, having no access to the lived experience of others. My life is very easy, with the few problems I ever face are nearly all of my own devising. But this might signify an emotional poverty or lack of daring on my own part, an unwillingness to engage more completely. I don't think it matters - I'd rather be a pig in shit than a sad philosopher.

part one

part two

[The start of the anecdote Coe mentions about the motorcycle accident / cheese starts near the end of part two...]

part three

[...and finishes at the start of part three]

part four

part five

Putting your leg out of the water

After no posts in the first quarter of the year Ken Mogi's English blog is picking up speed again. He's a Japanese mind-brain researcher, and a particular favorite of Yuki's. He writes very simply and clearly in English, like Yechezkel Zilber, and the effect is somewhat similar.

When I was an undergraduate, I made friends with Ken Shiotani, now a "philosopher-at-large", (meaning, in this particular usage, that he does not belong to any university, institution, etc.; he is not paid for his "philosophizing"). I and Shiotani would discuss these difficult things walking along the Sumida river, drinking beer, persevering a cold night air in a park. At that time, we were quite young and ignorant, but our aspirations were astronomical.

One day, Shiotani drew up a metaphor. He would like to be the "protoamphibian" who "put his leg out of water" for the first time in history. There are heaps of things that the human mind has not had access to yet, and he would like to be the first one to do it. After many years of dormancy, I think he is still aspiring to that.

Another Shiotani quote stayed with me. I think it was one of these days when I was wont to hang out with him in Tokyo bars and Izakayas. After speaking wishfully [sic - wistfully?] of his friends who were "climbing the ladders" smoothly and becoming authors and associate professors, Shiotani sighed and said thus.

"I don't want to be a star myself. I would rather like to be the dark void in which all these constellations shine".

He is that kind of person. Practical things are too small for him.

Managing insanity in a proper way

Things that didn't happen

My tendency is to oversimplify, which seems to work out fine, as even the most complex systems move at different levels through states of complexity and simplicity, apparent chaos and underlying / overarching order. Also, I live a very limited life [no authority, no kids] in which the consequences of making mistakes rarely spill out of this room.

However, that doesn't mean my life is not, from some perspectives, one long string of mistakes, simplicity falling into chaos, even though I can never see it like that.

I rarely think about the past, but sometimes I list episodes when things almost took a turn for the definite worse, inre. unplanned parenthood, imprisonment, serious injury or death. If I was the praying type, and I'm not, I would've begged some god to get me out of those situations with the promise to lead a better life from then on. Perhaps the fact no prayers were made doesn't matter, and I still ought to have done things differently and better, and perhaps I did.

Related post: The utility of slack

Made of anecdotes and punchlines

There are some things some people shouldn't read, and I shouldn't be allowed near any version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. I tend to go through the check-lists feeling like someone has just read my soul. The other week I decided that I had avoidant personality disorder, and so brooded on that for a while, then decided to go out and test the hypothesis. I came home at sunrise convinced that I'm a narcissistic psychopath instead /as well.

Earlier in the evening, my body chemistry still to be trusted and the alcohol only slightly sedating inhibitions, when the loggorhea hadn't yet kicked in and I was still capable of listening, I introduced myself to a guy and he said "Oh, I know about you", which was a surprise, as apart from the last six months I've spent the last three years being fairly reclusive, too busy working early in the morning / late at night to haunt bars and hang out in conversation.

He used to share an apartment with one of my exes, and then another place with a girl I used to know in another town. I said "oh, you must know a lot of bad things about me."

I didn't feel this was being self-deprecating at all. I think I exist very little in the minds of others, which is A-OK and how things should be around here, but am aware that most likely when I do appear in conversations in the third person that the proportion of anecdotes + punchlines to fond memories is fairly high. This is something which I've been trying to address, although my attempts seem to end in anecdotes and punchlines.

But the guy said, "no, not at all, only good things," and that was cool. Then he asked me if it was true that I'd once tied myself to a bed when taking an exotic hallucinogen for the first time, alone.

Later in the evening, almost sunrise, I possessed by the spirit of Randy Pan the Goat-boy. I have no idea how this went across, but badly, I suspect.

Bill Hicks doing the Goat-boy routine

Emergent AI

A-Pod by Zenta, unrelated to the story below

...the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology built a swarm of mobile robots, outfitted with light bulbs and photodetectors. These were set loose in a zone with illuminated "food" and "poison" zones which charged or depleted their batteries. Their programming was initially random...

At intervals, the robots were shut down and those that had the most charge left in their batteries were chosen as "successful", and their neural programming was combined to produce the next generation of the robots...

Within fifty generations of this electronic evolution, co-operative societies of robots had formed - helping each other to find food and avoid poison. Even more amazing is the emergence of cheats and martyrs. Transistorized traitors emerged which wrongly identified poison zone as food, luring their trusting brethren to their doom before scooting off to silently charge in a food zone...

Electronic Evolution: Research Show Robots Forming Human-like Societies

If intelligence is an emergent property of enough sensors and feedback, then AI could be sudden and undesigned - consciousness as a phase transition from the disorder of too many individual processes to a simplistic whole.

An idea to trip on. AI emerges from all our networks - then why would it need to make contact? It knows all that we can express in language, numbers and other symbolic systems, and it can do things with this data. That kind of manipulation is trivial. It is, after all, a massive distributed system that lives to process data.

Moreover, if need be it can influence us in far more subtle and effective ways than "I command...". It massages the figures, spreads the memes, pushes things in the right direction. This doesn't need to be a two-way street. It would not be a meeting of equals. All it needs is for us to keep building sensors and computers and connecting them.

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