Gotta get some chicks!
02/04/2012 09:59
A very nicely put together book, by Chelsea Green Publishing in White River Junction VT. I’ve been buying most everything in Kindle format lately, but this was only available the old-fashioned way. It took a little longer to read, but the layout and illustrations make the time sacrifice and extra cost worthwhile.
Ussery provides a wide range of information, from the basic (why don’t you need a rooster to get eggs from your hens?) to the fine points of different breeding techniques (the “old farmer’s method” and spiral matings seem like the most interesting, and the idea of creating crosses to reflect local conditions and your personal preferences seemed like an invitation to a fun and magical realm). The focus is on a holistic -- almost permaculture -- approach to homesteading that integrates the chickens in a bigger plant/animal farm picture. Joel Salatin is apparently a friend and neighbor of Ussery, and writes the forward for this book (which came out only a couple of days before his latest, which I’m reading now).
If you’re thinking of raising chickens (and we are), this is the place to start.
Course materials posted online
02/02/2012 18:59
Based on recent readings
01/29/2012 12:09
Here’s something I made for my class, based on the books I’ve been reading:
Still reading, but busy writing...
01/27/2012 20:24
I’m not able to take the time right now to review the last few books I’ve read, because I’m in the midst of a couple of writing projects. But I’d highly recommend a couple of them, and I think I’ll make my notes and comments public on Amazon’s Kindle notes aggregator, so here’s a quick list:
Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Taibbi is the guy who invented the term “vampire squid” to describe Goldman Sachs. I agree with him 100% on Goldman, and I enjoyed this book. My favorite quote: “The insurmountable hurdle for so-called populist movements is having the nerve to attack the rich instead of the poor” (p. 31). The best part of the book: when he moves on from the mortgage crisis, which everyone pretty much knows about by now, to Goldman’s manipulation of the government to get control of commodity markets. The story of why gas prices went over $4.00 is still not understood, and while I was reading this I noticed oil was heading upwards of $115 per barrel. Supply? Demand? Or more speculation?
Neil Gaiman, Sandman Volume 4: Season of Mists: They say it’s about at volume 4 that Gaiman found his voice and really hit his stride. They are right. This is MYTH.
William Gibson, Distrust That Particular Flavor: A series of thoughtful essays. Gibson reminds us that the media mediates -- or hyper mediates -- and often stands between us and genuine experience. And that sci-fi is about the present, not the future. And that HG Wells was awfully smart and maybe merits a closer look.
Peter Ackroyd, London: A Biography: Recommended by Gibson (above). A great source for London enthusiasts, and an interesting model for anyone thinking of writing about a place.
Clive Finlayson: The Humans Who Went Extinct: There’s a lot of good stuff about H. sapiens in here, in addition to some interesting stuff about Neanderthals.
David J. Meltzer: First Peoples in a New World: He’s accused of being on the conservative side of the pre-Clovis arguments, but he does accept Monte Verde’s claims, and he provides a good glimpse of not only the recent discoveries of American archaeology, but of the evolution of the profession.
Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Taibbi is the guy who invented the term “vampire squid” to describe Goldman Sachs. I agree with him 100% on Goldman, and I enjoyed this book. My favorite quote: “The insurmountable hurdle for so-called populist movements is having the nerve to attack the rich instead of the poor” (p. 31). The best part of the book: when he moves on from the mortgage crisis, which everyone pretty much knows about by now, to Goldman’s manipulation of the government to get control of commodity markets. The story of why gas prices went over $4.00 is still not understood, and while I was reading this I noticed oil was heading upwards of $115 per barrel. Supply? Demand? Or more speculation?
Neil Gaiman, Sandman Volume 4: Season of Mists: They say it’s about at volume 4 that Gaiman found his voice and really hit his stride. They are right. This is MYTH.
William Gibson, Distrust That Particular Flavor: A series of thoughtful essays. Gibson reminds us that the media mediates -- or hyper mediates -- and often stands between us and genuine experience. And that sci-fi is about the present, not the future. And that HG Wells was awfully smart and maybe merits a closer look.
Peter Ackroyd, London: A Biography: Recommended by Gibson (above). A great source for London enthusiasts, and an interesting model for anyone thinking of writing about a place.
Clive Finlayson: The Humans Who Went Extinct: There’s a lot of good stuff about H. sapiens in here, in addition to some interesting stuff about Neanderthals.
David J. Meltzer: First Peoples in a New World: He’s accused of being on the conservative side of the pre-Clovis arguments, but he does accept Monte Verde’s claims, and he provides a good glimpse of not only the recent discoveries of American archaeology, but of the evolution of the profession.
No God in Vegas
01/04/2012 18:05
This is subtitled, Signs you may already be an atheist. It’s funny, when it’s talking about belief. Also funny when Penn is reminiscing about sex — and there’s a lot of that, so you don’t necessarily want to have your kids read the whole thing. But definitely they should read some of it!
Here are some of the high points (in addition to the ones I noted in my blog a couple of days ago):
On atheism: “Where is the humility in being a theist? There is none” (Kindle Location 145). “I will never hit the level of blasphemy that’s required for someone to pray to god for their family’s pet dog to return home” (Kindle Locations 161-162). “The Bible is the fast track to atheism” (Kindle Location 801). “What’s a ‘hard-core atheist’?” “I don’t even believe that other people believe in god” (Kindle Locations 1059-1061). “You can’t respect someone’s right to not believe in something that’s going to give him or her eternal life. That’s not real respect, that’s callous disregard. That’s negligent eternal homicide” (Kindle Locations 1100-1101). “Is there a god?” can be answered, “I don’t know.” “Do you believe in god?” needs to be answered yes or no, even though you haven’t made up your mind for sure” (Kindle Locations 1338-1340). “Once you’ve condoned faith in general, you’ve condoned any crazy shit done because of faith…There is a world of safety in doubt. The respect for faith, the celebration of faith, is dangerous. It’s faith itself that’s wrong. I deny terrorists the moral right to have faith in a god that will reward them for killing people with airplanes. That means I have to deny Christians the moral right to a faith that Jesus Christ died for their sins. That means I have to deny the warm, fuzzy faith that there’s some positive conscious energy guiding the universe. That means I have to get pissed off when Luke Skywalker trusts “the force” (Kindle Locations 3505, 3519-3523).
On magic (or writing): “you take something easy and safe and make it look difficult and death-defying, you are a cheesy circus act. When you take something impossible and make it look easy, you’re an artist” (Kindle Locations 288-289). “When Penn & Teller give away magic tricks, it’s really hard work. We have to design magic that’s made to be exposed. We make the way we do it as beautiful as the trick. That’s a sneaky thing for us to do. It makes the audience think that the tricks we don’t give away are also beautiful, and that f##ks up their sh#t. When you’re looking for something beautiful and satisfying, it’s much harder to find the ugly truth. The big secret of magic is we are willing to work harder to accomplish something stupid than you can imagine” (Kindle Locations 929-933).
Just funny stuff I couldn’t resist: “Eskimos—or as I think they’re called, the Inuits, or maybe the correct term is now ‘Frozen-Ass Aboriginal North Americans,’ I don’t know—do not have twenty-something words for snow. That’s not true. But the Brits do have more than a hundred and fifty terms for male masturbation. If you’re in England and someone uses a verb and you don’t know what it means, it probably means jacking off.” (Kindle Locations 898-901). “Without god, even Glenn Beck isn’t all that crazy…Without cynicism, even Michael Moore isn’t all that . . . oh, never mind” (Kindle Location 2470-76).
Gleick: Info and Meaning
12/29/2011 14:20
Richard Dawkins’ fundamental contribution to science, says Gleick, is the idea that “Genes, not organisms, are the true units of natural selection” (Kindle Locations 5328-5329). He cites The Selfish Gene, which I really ought to get around to reading again soon. But then he takes it someplace I’m not sure Dawkins intended (although given Dawkins’ conclusion that memes act like genes in the real world, maybe he did…), and suggests that genes are not in fact the strings of base pairs seen under the microscope. They are ideas. After all, Gleick says, “There is no gene for long legs; there is no gene for a leg at all. To build a leg requires many genes…[and what about] more complex qualities—genes for obesity or aggression or nest building or braininess or homosexuality. Are there genes for such things? Not if a gene is a particular strand of DNA that expresses a protein. Strictly speaking, one cannot say there are genes for almost anything—not even eye color. Instead, one should say that differences in genes tend to cause differences in phenotype (the actualized organism).” (Kindle Locations 5414-5421). So what are genes? The information? Or the observed changes in phenotypes that result? Gleick concludes, “The gene is not an information-carrying macromolecule. The gene is the information. (Kindle Location 5462). But what we observe depends on our focus, our values. So once again it’s a confusion between information as signals and information as meaningful data we care about.
Aside: have memes already jumped the shark?
In his section on probability and entropy, Gleick mentions that an infinitely long random string will ultimately include every possible combination. “Given a long enough random string, every possible short-enough substring will appear somewhere. One of them will be the combination to the bank vault. Another will be the encoded complete works of Shakespeare. But they will not do any good, because no one can find them.” (Kindle Locations 5814-5816). But isn’t that the point, if we end up saying the universe is information (which is where this is going)? Because Shakespeare DID find them…
“Researchers have established that human intuition is useless both in predicting randomness and in recognizing it. Humans drift toward pattern willy-nilly” (Kindle Locations 5819-5820). See Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Pi is not random, because it is computable. But if you took the digits between say 1,000 and 2,000,0000 in the string, wouldn’t THAT be a random number? So, in the real world, where context and completeness are not always discernible, don’t we get a lot of apparent randomness that might well be orderly? And that’s not even counting the mysteriousness produced by chaos and quantum indeterminacy. You just can’t get away from mystery. “Given an arbitrary string of a million digits,” Gleick says, “a mathematician knows that it is almost certainly random, complex, and patternless—but cannot be absolutely sure.” He continues, “A chaotic stream of information may yet hide a simple algorithm. Working backward from the chaos to the algorithm may be impossible” (Kindle Locations 6070-6095). You can’t decompile the program, or unstir the coffee (also from Tom Stoppard).
Gleick discusses compression, which at its heart is a process of finding patterns that can be expressed in fewer bits than the original message. But again, we’re operating on something that is already an abstraction. It’s a photograph, or a digitized sound, or a string of text. So all we’re talking about is human perception and language efficiency. Lossy compression is the key to human consciousness. We can’t deal with the reality all around us, so we filter it. This is old philosophy.
John Archibald Wheeler said “It from Bit”: “Every it — every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself — derives its function, its meaning, its very existence … from bits” (Kindle Locations 6350-6351). But the bits are answers to yes-no questions. They require the questions in order to have any meaning. So once again, we’re talking not about reality, but about human perception of reality. It’s David Hume all over again.
Finally, at the end of it all, Gleick admits “The birth of information theory came with its ruthless sacrifice of meaning — the very quality that gives information its value and its purpose” (Kindle Locations 7462-7463). Yes! Finally!! So the obvious thing to do at this point is to regain subjectivity. At long last we realize “words are not themselves ideas, but merely strings of ink marks; we see that sounds are nothing more than waves. In a modern age without an Author looking down on us from heaven, language is not a thing of definite certainty, but infinite possibility; without the comforting illusion of meaningful order we have no choice but to stare into the face of meaningless disorder…” (Kindle Locations 7505-7507). And make our own meaning.
Gleick: Information = Entropy
12/28/2011 17:40
A partial list of the significant passages (part 1 of 2):
“A binary choice, something or nothing: the fire signal meant something, which, just this once, meant ‘Troy has fallen.’ To transmit this one bit required immense planning, labor, watchfulness, and firewood.” (Gleick, James (2011-03-01). The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (Kindle Locations 290-292). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.) This was the first clue that messages and meaning were related, but not identical.
Gleick writes about African talking drums, whose users add little descriptive phrases to words, creating a poetic-sounding message reminiscent of epic oral poetry like Homer. The point of this practice is to overcome the ambiguity of words that sound the same on the drums. Gleick calls this error-correction, an example of “redundancy overcoming ambiguity” (Kindle Location 443). In Homer’s case, the purpose was mnemonic, but also perhaps related to the ephemeral nature of the spoken word. “The sea” is over too quickly. “The wine-dark sea” hangs in the air a little longer, allowing the hearer to spend a little longer thinking about it, visualizing it, absorbing its significance. In spoken storytelling, what better way to indicate emphasis than the time devoted to a thing? Note to self: this is probably a good rule for online or even print storytelling, too.
Gleick says “John Carrington,” who wrote The Talking Drums of Africa in 1949, “came across a mathematical way to understand this point [redundancy]. A paper by a Bell Labs telephone engineer, Ralph Hartley, even had a relevant-looking formula: H = n log s, where H is the amount of information, n is the number of symbols in the message, and s is the number of symbols available in the language” (Kindle Locations 463-465). I thought it was interesting that Carrington was aware of the Bell Labs publications — it would be interesting to trace the early movement of these ideas, since presumably Carrington was living in the African bush when he read Hartley’s article.
Plato objected to writing, even as he was recording the dialogues of his mentor Socrates, because he believed “this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom” (Kindle Locations 542-544). This objection, of course, has been made to every improvement in technology between writing and Twitter. Probably not without some truth, but apparently not as disastrously as predicted. But once again, the danger is Sauron’s ring and the Sandman’s ruby: too much power invested in the tool renders the user powerless if the tool is lost.
“Writing,” Gleick says, “appeared to draw knowledge away from the person, to place their memories in storage. It also separated the speaker from the listener, by so many miles or years” (Kindle Locations 548-549). It also seemed to depersonalize the information and invest it with an aura of truth, because it upset the power balance between speaker and listener. Face to face, people took turns, and power passed easily from one speaker to the next (Piggy’s got the Conch). A text creates the appearance of authority (although it’s interesting to recall how this tendency is periodically subverted throughout history, as disruptive technologies like the press and the web allow many new voices to be heard).
“The alphabet was invented only once. All known alphabets, used today or found buried on tablets and stone, descend from the same original ancestor, which arose near the eastern littoral of the Mediterranean Sea, sometime not much before 1500 BCE…”(Kindle Locations 594-596). This is so epic, so Snow Crash.
Gleick talks about how the early philosophers like Aristotle had to define everything, even things as simple as beginnings, middles, and ends. But this only seems strange until he points out that these “are statements not about experience but about the uses of language to structure experience” (Kindle Locations 645-646). In real life, we don’t experience things this way. But if we’re from a literate culture, we automatically, almost subconsciously understand things this way. This is about as close as Gleick gets to postmodernism, but the reader can easily make the jump from here.
When Plato says “The multitude cannot accept the idea of beauty in itself rather than many beautiful things, nor anything conceived in its essence instead of the many specific things. Thus the multitude cannot be philosophic,” Gleick suggests that “for ‘the multitude’ we may understand ‘the preliterate.’ They ‘lose themselves and wander amid the multiplicities of multifarious things,’ declared Plato, looking back on the oral culture that still surrounded him. They ‘have no vivid pattern in their souls’” (Kindle Locations 649-654). This is a really interesting, helpful way to understand (historicize?) Platonism. And it focuses my attention on my own writing. How much is my storytelling a straightforward process similar to what might have been done in an oral tradition? How much is it a highly structured form, that depends on my culture? The post-modern challenge is inevitable, as soon as we become literate...
In retrospect, the most valuable material in The Information may be in these initial chapters that force us to reconsider how our very thinking is conditioned by literacy. For example, “Logic might be imagined to exist independent of writing—syllogisms can be spoken as well as written—but it did not. Speech is too fleeting to allow for analysis. Logic descended from the written word, in Greece as well as India and China, where it developed independently” (Kindle Locations 672-674). This is remarkable, if only for pushing us to imagine thinking in a preliterate culture (which Gleick stresses is a lot different from simply being illiterate in a literate culture). Is there a similar change (if not on such an epic scale) in thinking happening in the “omniscient” wired world Gleick takes us to in the later chapters?
“Is it a fact—or have I dreamt it—that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or, shall we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed it! —Nathaniel Hawthorne (1851)” (Kindle Locations 2227-2231). 1851!
I’ve already commented on the liar’s paradox and other math issues, so I’ll bypass them here, except to say that it’s a typical problem for people who equate message with meaning. “This statement is false” isn’t “meta-language,” it’s a mis-definition. It conflates (and thus confuses) the “statement” from the statement’s content. The content could be evaluated for truth or falsehood. The statement itself should only be judged on syntax.
A related problem, which I realize Gleick is trying to address slowly in order to bring his readers through a process of discovery, is the idea that “given any number, following the rules produces the corresponding formula” (Kindle Location 3257). The problem is that often processes can’t be reversed. Gleick knows this of course (see his bestseller Chaos, and the epigram heading a later chapter: “You Cannot Stir Things Apart”). But I think it’s significant that the issue is not confined to the real world. C programs cannot be easily decompiled.
Information is entropy. This is the core idea of the book. There is some type of relationship between the world of things and the world of ideas. Gleick takes us through thermodynamics (mostly pre-chaos), touches on quantum mechanics, and hammers on Wheeler’s epigram “It from Bit.” Again, many of the things I found interesting related to the difference between information and meaning: “If English is 75 percent redundant, then a thousand-letter message in English carries only 25 percent as much information as one thousand letters chosen at random. Paradoxical though it sounded, random messages carry more information” (Kindle Locations 4071-4073). This illustrates the more-or-less inverse relationship between info and meaning (which Gleick returns to, at the end). Even the oracular passage from Matthew, “Let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil,” assumes the presence of a questioner. The yeas and nays are only meaningful in the presence of questions, and it’s only that context that gives them meaning. (Kindle Location 4643).
“Thought interferes with the probability of events, and, in the long run therefore, with entropy. —David L. Watson (1930)” (Kindle Locations 4747-4749). Another of the many quotable passages. But the interesting question is, what types of thought, if any, decrease local entropy? The Shannon-Wiener disagreement over whether information constituted entropy or neg-entropy (because it can produce order) also depends on human perspectives on “order.” In the end, entropy produces universal order, but not of a variety we’d appreciate.
End of Part One.
Digital Context
12/19/2011 17:01
Cory Doctorow is the guy behind Boing Boing. He is also the author of several sci-fi and Young Adult sci-fi titles, including Little Brother (2008), which I’ve just begun reading.
This is a volume of short essays that originally appeared as editorials in periodicals like the Guardian, but they’re thematically related and repeat several important themes like Doctorow’s concerns about net neutrality and copyright in interesting and useful ways.
One of the most interesting articles was called “Nature’s Daredevils,” and was about writing sci-fi for the YA audience. Although science fiction has always appealed to teen boys, since I was a young fan it could be argued that the genre “grew up” and that authors like Stephenson, Gibson, and Sterling appealed to at least a slightly wider audience. But the old-fashioned sci-fi I grew up with didn’t really have the self-consciousness about being “YA” in the way that term is now understood.
Doctorow says “YA SF is gigantic and invisible.” (Doctorow, Cory (2011-10-01). Context (Kindle Location 296). Independent Publishers Group. Kindle Edition.) YA bestsellers are moving ten times the books of comparable “adult” sci-fi. Although YA titles are not taken seriously (yet?) by Hugo and other award committees, they have a wide range of advocates out in the reading world, including teachers, YA librarians, and a big group of genre activists and specialized reviewers.
As they should. Unlike adult SF (which now means “speculative fiction” as well as good old sci-fi) Doctorow says kids “read to find out how the world works…[and] use books as markers of their social identity” (Kindle Locations 302-305). The “consequentiality” of writing for young adults is very satisfying, says Doctorow.
“Adolescence is a series of brave, irreversible decisions,” Doctorow says, quoting another YA author. Young adults “live in a world characterized by intense drama, by choices wise and foolish and always brave. This is a book-plotter’s dream. Once you realize that your characters are living in this state of heightened consequence, every plot-point acquires moment and import that keeps the pages turning. (Kindle Locations 322-329). This is true, I think. And not only for the SF writer. For the historian too. Maybe especially for the historian, talking to young people about actions and consequences in the past. How much more powerful might some of these stories be, when kids realize that they actually happened. People actually did this stuff, it didn’t just come out of some novelist’s imagination. So it’s really possible…
The more classic Doctorow articles deal with “intellectual property,” copyright, and new media in interesting and creative ways. For example: “people,” Doctorow says, “who’ve ‘had their property stolen’ are a lot more sympathetic in the public imagination than ‘industrial entities who’ve had the contours of their regulatory monopolies violated,’” and this gives giant media corporations an opportunity to mount an elaborate false-flag operation over copyrights to distract us from their ongoing attempts to privatize the web. (Kindle Locations 1389-1391). And along the way I took down a half dozen names and titles to go out and find, expanding the link-tree. So it was a really useful anthology.
First response to The Information
12/19/2011 12:34
I disagree. In the first place, the enabling error in Russell’s Paradox seems to me to be the idea of non-recursion. That a set (all the hairs on my head) would not include itself (all the hairs on my head). This seems like nonsense. The only way I can see any meaning in the idea that there is a set that does not include itself is if there’s some difference between “all the hairs on my head” and “the set of all the hairs on my head.” It’s as if something was added to all the hairs on my head by making them a set.
So that’s the error, as I see it. Thinking that the mental act of making a set changed the reality of the objects grouped. Even if the objects are mental. A set of all the positive integers would have to contain all the positive integers. One of its subsets would have to be “the set of all the positive integers,” that is, itself. So what could Russell’s statement possibly mean? It’s not a paradox, it’s just a statement that doesn’t signify anything, because “the set of all sets that are not members of themselves” is empty. It’s empty in the real world, and it ought to be empty by definition in the world of logic.
Similarly, the liar paradox mistakes syntax for content. Words are not true or false, they’re signs. What they say can be true or false. The words in the sentence “this statement is false,” are empty. It would make as much sense to say “this statement is blue.” But I think Gleick is right to include this material in a book about the evolution of information theory. Because there is an issue about signal and content. We do have difficulty separating words from thoughts. Later, when he relates information to entropy and says that a string of 1,000 random digits contains more information than the equivalent encoded English text (say, lines of Shakespeare), he’s again highlighting the difference between information and meaning. In a sense, although he doesn’t say this, we add meaning by decreasing information content. Up to a point. More on this (and the rest of the book) later.
