Amazing: Wet Seal+ and Chuck Close does Philip Glass

For some reason this photo has proved unusually popular in the last however many hours (it's 4:08 PM, Mar. 10, 2015). Why all the views all of a sudden? – 19 views today out of 113 all-time views:

I took it in the Newport Mall in Jersey City on 5 Oct. 2014. I guess that "Wet Seal+" is the name of a store. What interests me, though, is that face at the right. It's the minimalist composer, Philip Glass, as painted by the artist, Chuck Close. How did THAT end up in a shopping mall? Neither are middle-American icons, though I'd guess that Glass is better known than Close.

Since the image is OF Glass I'd think he's the more important of the two in this context. Perhaps there's something at the bottom of the poster that indicates who put the image there and, by implication, why. But I didn't take note of those things. I just snapped the photo while walking through the mall.

For what it's worth, here's a companion photo:

It's not so popular – only 45 total views, none today. The poster at the left is of an Andy Warhol, and we can see the identification at the bottom. Looks to me like some kind of campaign.

What makes an interesting, perhaps even a good, photo?

Here are two recent photos, both of which I like a lot:

The first of those has gotten a bit of praise over at Facebook. I haven't even posted the second to Facebook, but I wouldn't expect it to get much attention. And yet I rather like it; in fact, I like it a lot.

But is it as good or interesting as the first? It's hard to say. The first one has rather obvious atmospherics and I assume that's where it gets much of its impact. It's a night shot, of a city, and the diffused light and softness of the photo makes it very moody. And there's that boat in the foreground at the left – could almost be a ferry on the River Styx. Whatever impact this photo gets from composition an color values would, however, be meaningless without our knowledge of what is being represented.

3QD Politics & Social Science Prize (Vote for Me)

Voting is open for the 5th Annual 3QD Politics and Social Science Prize. The rules are explained HERE. Public voting will close on 11 Mar 11:59 pm EST. Kenneth Roth will then choose the winners from among the finalists. Kenneth Roth is the executive director of Human Rights Watch, one of the world’s leading international human rights organizations. Under Roth’s leadership, Human Rights Watch has grown eight-fold in size and vastly expanded its reach. It now operates in more than 90 countries, among them some of the most dangerous and oppressed places on Earth.

Cast your vote HERE. I've got an essay in the running: Free-Floating Anxiety, Teens, and Security Theatre.

"Seeing the elephant"

Ringling Brothers has decided to retire their elephant acts, ending a 200 year long tradition in American entertainment. Traditionally, elephants have been creatures of wonder, writes Janet M. Davis in the NYTimes:

Audiences spoke solemnly of “seeing the elephant” as an awe-inspiring encounter with a wondrous being. Others, who missed her appearances, pined for an opportunity to “see the elephant.” Soldiers during the Mexican-American War and Civil War even spoke of “seeing the elephant” as a metaphor for the incomprehensible experience of battle.

The sensational popularity of the Crowninshield Elephant led the way for others. The first elephant appeared in an American circus at the turn of the 19th century, and by the 1870s, impresarios defined their shows’ worth by the number of elephants they had. In response to decades of evangelical censure for displaying scantily clad human performers, circus owners pointed to their popular elephants as proof of their broader mission to educate and entertain.

See my many posts on Disney's Dumbo.

A Million Flickr Views

The East India Company: Capitalism and Colonialism Hand-in-Hand

William Dalrymple in The Guardian, on the East India Company:

For the corporation – a revolutionary European invention contemporaneous with the beginnings of European colonialism, and which helped give Europe its competitive edge – has continued to thrive long after the collapse of European imperialism. When historians discuss the legacy of British colonialism in India, they usually mention democracy, the rule of law, railways, tea and cricket. Yet the idea of the joint-stock company is arguably one of Britain’s most important exports to India, and the one that has for better or worse changed South Asia as much any other European idea. Its influence certainly outweighs that of communism and Protestant Christianity, and possibly even that of democracy.

Companies and corporations now occupy the time and energy of more Indians than any institution other than the family. This should come as no surprise: as Ira Jackson, the former director of Harvard’s Centre for Business and Government, recently noted, corporations and their leaders have today “displaced politics and politicians as … the new high priests and oligarchs of our system”. Covertly, companies still govern the lives of a significant proportion of the human race.

The 300-year-old question of how to cope with the power and perils of large multinational corporations remains today without a clear answer: it is not clear how a nation state can adequately protect itself and its citizens from corporate excess. As the international subprime bubble and bank collapses of 2007-2009 have so recently demonstrated, just as corporations can shape the destiny of nations, they can also drag down their economies. In all, US and European banks lost more than $1tn on toxic assets from January 2007 to September 2009. What Burke feared the East India Company would do to England in 1772 actually happened to Iceland in 2008-11, when the systemic collapse of all three of the country’s major privately owned commercial banks brought the country to the brink of complete bankruptcy. A powerful corporation can still overwhelm or subvert a state every bit as effectively as the East India Company did in Bengal in 1765.

H/t 3QD.

A Note on Dennett’s Curious Comparison of Words and Apps

I continue to think about Dan Dennett’s inadequate account of words-as-memes in his paper, The Cultural Evolution of Words and Other Thinking Tools (PDF), Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology, Volume LXXIV, pp. 1-7, 2009. You find the same account in, for example, this video of a talk he gave in 2011: “A Human Mind as an Upside Down Brain”. I feel it warrants (yet another) long-form post. But I just don’t want to wrangle my way through that now. So I’m just going to offer a remark that goes a bit beyond what I’ve already said in my working paper, Cultural Evolution, Memes, and the Trouble with Dan Dennett, particularly in the post, Watch Out, Dan Dennett, Your Mind’s Changing Up on You!.

In that article Dennett asserts that “Words are not just like software viruses; they are software viruses, a fact that emerges quite uncontroversially once we adjust our understanding of computation and software.” He then uses Java applets to illustrate this comparison. I believe the overstates the similarity between words and apps or viruses to the point where the comparison has little value. The adjustment of understanding that Dennett calls for is too extreme.

In particular, and here is my new point, it simply vitiates the use of computation as an idea in understanding the modeling mental processes. Dennett has spent much of his career arguing that the mind is fundamentally a computational process. Words are thus computational objects and our use of them is a computational process.

Real computational processes are precise in their nature and the requirements of their physical implementation – and there is always a physical implementation for real computation. Java is based on a certain kind of computational objects and processes, a certain style of computing. But not all computing is like that. What if natural language computing isn’t? What happens to the analogy then?

Galen Strawson on consciousness: the problem we face is simple, we underestimate the subtleties of matter

Writing in TLS Galen Strawson runs through the history of philosophical struggles with consciousness from Descartes to the present day. It's a fascinating read. The take-home is in his penultimate paragraph (emphasis in the original):

At the root of the muddle lies an inability to overcome the Very Large Mistake so clearly identified by Eddington and others in the 1920s – not to mention the lovely Irishman John Toland in 1704, Anthony Collins in 1707, Hume in 1739, Joseph Priestley in 1777, and many others. The mistake is to think we know enough about the nature of physical reality to have any good reason to think that consciousness can’t be physical. It seems to be stamped so deeply in us, by our everyday experience of matter as lumpen stuff, that not even appreciation of the extraordinary facts of current physics can weaken its hold. To see through it is a truly revolutionary experience.

H/t 3QD.

Friday Fotos: Thursday Evening in Hoboken

Last week I went for the photos that were most popular on my Flickr page over the last half day of so. Today I'm posting photos I took last evening in Hoboken along the waterfront, though not all of the photos are oriented toward the waterfront.

This is on one of the old piers. As you can see, there's a planter on it, with pine trees. That's Manhattan in the background. The glow, of course, is the city lights.

I'm standing on that same pier, but looking in toward the shore. That father and daughter had been playing on the pier. She'd been playing in the snow and he'd been photographing her.

A soda machine on a different pier:

We're a block or two off the river's edge. I'm shooting south along Hudson street. You can see a bit of snow hanging in the air and diffusing the light.

Myth-Logic and a Lady Librarian in The Rockford Files 2

This is a follow-up to my previous post about “The Return of the Black Shadow”, an episode of The Rockford Files. If you’ve not read that one, you may want to do so.

This episode is about a brutal gang rape. The victim, Gail Cooper, is the sister of one of Jim Rockford’s friends and associates, John Cooper. What had me puzzled is whether or not the fact that she was a librarian merely contingent, or whether it was part of a pattern. If so, what’s the pattern? The pattern, if there is one, would have more to do with how stories are constructed than with the way the world works.

I’ve decided that it’s part of a pattern, a pattern of the sort I characterize as myth-logic. My primary sense of myth logic comes from the work of the French anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss. And he emphasizes the importance of binary logic, of contrasts. The world, of course, is full of binary contrasts. The trick is to figure out which ones are at work in any given situation.

“Animal” and the Librarian

Let’s start at the point where Rockford and Ms. Cooper have stopped for gas. A motorcycle gang pulls into the gas station and Rockford is talking with the attendant. One of the bikers gets into the driver’s seat of Rockford’s car, thereby trapping Gail in the passenger’s seat. He’s big and fat and is known as “Animal.”

That’s our contrast right there, between “Animal” and the librarian. That is, the rape victim was set as an intellectual woman so as to afford maximum contrast to a brutish man known as “Animal.” As a shy intellectual she needs help getting a date – Rockford’s taking her out as a favor to his friend – and that also makes her maximally different from her rapists,

There’s another small detail that now falls into place. Where were they going on their date? Deep-sea fishing. And that’s just odd. There’s nothing strange about Rockford going deep-sea fishing; we know he likes to fish. But it’s strange that he wants to take Gail Cooper deep-sea fishing. Why would he agree to go out with her in the first place and then decide to do something so out-of-character for her–something she remarks on–for their date? He’s taken many women out to dinner; why not this one? Remember, this is not about what makes sense for real people, but about myth-logic. The “real” Jim Rockford wouldn’t do anything so stupid. But there are over-riding considerations in this story.

The point of taking her on such a strange date is simply the strangeness of the juxtaposition. Here she is talking about her project at work, which involves cataloging physics books, and she makes a remark about something totally different, deep-sea fishing. It just makes the situation seem even stranger and more awkward.

Not only is it awkward for Rockford and Gail, but it’s awkward for us, the audience. “It does not compute.” We’re at the edge of Brechtian distancing, not in the avant-garde theatre, but in mainstream American TV.

And why not? Rape is a very strange and uncomfortable thing. Distance is just what’s needed to make it a subject for mainstream TV.

Walls of an ancient temple just around the corner

Place in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

This is another post that’s primarily descriptive in character and is in response to a paper by Per Aage Brandt, Forces and Spaces – Maupassant, Borges, Hemingway. Toward a Semio-Cognitive Narratology, in which he outlines (to quote from his abstract) “a model of the constitutive architecture of narrative meaning as manifested by ‘good stories’, stories that make sense by conveying a vie& of the human condition.” In this model he proposes that actions move back and forth between “a canonical set of narrative spaces, each encompassing and contributing a significant part of the meaning of a story” and that these narrative spaces are typically “staged as distinct locations” in the physical space depicted in the narrative. He labeled these four spaces: Condition, Catastrophe, Consequence, and Conclusion.

I want to look at one text, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The story takes the form of a quest and so is rather explicitly about a journey. Setting aside a frame story, we can lay out the places as follows:

King Arthur’s Court: The story begins here and ends here.

Bercilak’s court at Hautedesert: This is something of an anti-court (e.g. where a woman sits at the head of the table) and has some specific sub-spaces we’ll get to in a moment.

The Green Chapel: This is the terminus of the quest.

The hinterlands between the first three.

Here’s how the story goes:

1) Frame material (about Troy and Britain).

2) A challenge, the beheading game, is proposed to Arthur’s knights in Arthur’s court at Camelot and Gawain accepts. Gawain prepares himself.

3) Gawain travels the hinterlands between Camelot and Hautedesert.

4) While at Hautedesert Gawain engages in an elaborate exchange with his host, Sir Bercilak. (we’ll look at this later.)

5) Gawain travels the hinterlands from Hautedesert to the Green Chapel.

6) Gawain completes the quest at the Green Chapel, and, as it turns out, the exchanges as well.

7) Gawain travels the hinterlands back to Camelot.

8) Return to Camelot.

9) Frame material.

On each of three days at Hautedesert Gawain engages in an exchange with his host, Sir Bercilak. Bercilak goes hunting in the woods and Gawain is pursued by Bercilak’s wife in her bedroom. They exchange their “winnings” at the end of the end. So this involves the spaces: the woods, the bedroom, and a neutral place of exchange within the palace.

The narrative is very stylized and has a ritual feel to it. I’ve got quite a bit to say about these elements on the text and, in particular, about the exchanges, in this essay:

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Semiotics of Ontology

Also see the following blog posts:

Being in Crisis and the Ontological Text

Structural Instability: Two Examples and a Question

Two photos

This is the third most popular photo over the past half day or so (the top two were in my most recent Friday Fotos):

I'd almost forgotten about this one (from a set of discarded toys):

Replication of experimental results and cultural evolution

Replication of experimental results has become a hot issue in the behavioral sciences and medicine. While some some of this reflects fraud, its mostly about "sloppy" science. Some results may be flukes, but even valid results can present problems. I tend to think replication is needed because the observations are often obtained through procedures that are so complex that it is not clear what's central to the procedure and what's not. Mark Liberman at Language Log has a post on "Reliability" that speaks to these issues. Here's a passage (emphasis mine):

Some of the reasons for the problems are well known. There's the "file drawer effect", where you try many experiments and only publish the ones that produce the results you want. There's p-hacking, data-dredging, model-shopping, etc., where you torture the data until it yields a "statistically significant" result of an agreeable kind. There are mistakes in data analysis, often simple ones like using the wrong set of column labels. (And there are less innocent problems in data analysis, like those described in this article about cancer research, where some practices amount essentially to fraud, such as performing cross-validation while removing examples that don't fit the prediction.) There are uncontrolled covariates — at the workshop, we heard anecdotes about effects that depend on humidity, on the gender of experimenters, and on whether animal cages are lined with cedar or pine shavings. There's a famous case in psycholinguistics where the difference between egocentric and geocentric coordinate choice depends on whether the experimental environment has salient asymmetries in visual landmarks (Peggy Li and Lila Gleitman, "Turning the tables: language and spatial reasoning", Cognition 2002).

The general idea is that meaning is always negotiated and that experimental replication is an aspect of the negotiations.

Machine Translation and Artificial Intelligence, a quick and dirty view

The folks at Language Log have been having an interesting discussion about machine translation, "They called for more structure", that was started by a passage from Donald Barthleme. Down in that discussion Jason Eisner has a useful remark:

The field of AI includes both neat and scruffy approaches. A neat system for MT would be a faithful implementation of some linguistic theory. Current leading MT systems are somewhat scruffy. They contain various hacks and shortcuts that help to produce a decent translation quickly.

Researchers with a scruffy-AI mindset may think that's just fine. Either they suspect that brains themselves are much scruffier than linguists admit, or they have no opinion about brains and simply want to engineer a working product.

A scruffy-AI researcher may want to enrich the current system to make more use of syntax, but will be perfectly happy to use a "big hairy four-by-four" approximation of syntax that is nailed onto the rest of the system with railroad spikes. The goal is to improve the end results by any expedient method.

Other researchers working on the same system may be true believers in neat AI. They really wish that the system had been designed on clean linguistic and statistical principles from the ground up. Unfortunately such systems would be hard to build and have not worked as well in the past, so these neat-AI researchers settle for helping to nail syntax onto an existing scruffy system. They feel proud of themselves for using (more) linguistics. But does this route really lead toward the utopian system they dream of? Can the hybrid system be gradually made more principled, as the old hacks are gradually phased out? Or is that just a comforting fantasy that sustains them, as it sustains Barthelme's construction workers? "The exercise of our skills, and the promise of the city, were enough."