Slashdot Mirror
Palm on a Bicycle
jcwise writes: "Want to use your Palm or Handspring as a bike computer? Here are two different products that use completely different approaches. I'm not sure if either are better than a $30 bike computer. With PDA prices falling, it might be a fun hack."
Would be a very expensive bike computer if you fell over and broke it.
at this time in the morning? heh
"Contrary to popular belief, UNIX is user friendly. It just happens to be selective on who it makes friendship with"
Want to use your Palm or Handspring as a bike computer?
No.
A PDA or those silly ultralight tritanium framed bicycles with full floating supensions?
all that's missing is a little meter that keeps track of how much time you're wasting by building this system.
mp3s by me
You're a putrescent mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon.
You are a bleating foal, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. An insensate, blinking calf, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts who sired you and then killed themselfs in recognition of what they had done.
I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformity. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell?
Try to edit your responses of unnecessary material before attempting to impress us with your insight. The evidence that you are a nincompoop will still be available to readers, but they will be able to access it more rapidly.
You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood. May you ckoke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs.
You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. You are foul and disgusting. You're a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won't have sex with you. You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot.
And what meaning do you expect your delusionally self-important statements
of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have with us? What fantasy do you hold that you would believe that your tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat, spinning rabidly in a circle,
waiting for the bite of the snake?
You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease, you puerile one-handed slack-jawed drooling meatslapper.
On a good day you're a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go.
You smarmy lagerlout git. You bloody woofter sod. Bugger off, pillock. You grotty wanking oik artless base-court apple-john. You clouted boggish foot-licking twit. You dankish clack-dish plonker. You gormless crook-pated tosser. You churlish boil-brained clotpole ponce. You cockered bum-bailey poofter. You craven dewberry pisshead cockup pratting naff. You gob-kissing gleeking flap-mouthed coxcomb. You dread-bolted fobbing beef-witted clapper-clawed flirt-gill.
You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you, and I wish you would go away.
I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. Your writing has to be a troll. Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the original big bang of stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know. I'm sorry. I can't go on. This is an epiphany of stupid for me. After this, you may not hear from me again for a while. I don't have enough strength left to deride
your ignorant questions and half baked comments about unimportant trivia, or any of the rest of this drivel. Duh.
The only thing worse than our logic is your manners. I have snipped away most of your of what you wrote, because, well... it didn't really say anything. Your attempt at constructing a creative flame was pitiful. I mean, really, stringing together a bunch of insults among a load of babbling was hardly effective... Maybe later in life, after you have learned to read, write, spell, and count, you will have more success. True, these are rudimentary skills that many of us "normal" people take for granted that everyone has an easy time of mastering. But we sometimes forget that there are "challenged" persons in this world who find these things more difficult. If I had known, that this was your case then I would have never read your post. It just wouldn't have been "right". Sort of like parking in a handicap space. I wish you the best of luck in the emotional, and social struggles that seem to be placing such a demand on you.
This troll was reposted from the Troll Library without permission of the original author. If you object to this post, or if you wish to add your troll to the Troll Library, please reply to this message.
bikebrain All you need to do to get your t-shirt is send them the description and directions for 5 biking routes you like.
Special Offer - Get a free BikeBrain T-shirt by sending us 5 route sheets. Each route sheet needs to have a clearly defined starting point, distance points, (delta distances are optional), corresponding turn indications and descriptions. If yours are usable, we'll send you a free T-shirt. Follow the directions below for submitting a route.
I had this back in 1999. There's a shareware program that does all this and simply connects to a el-cheapo bike "puter" and uses it's reed switch as the pulse input on the rs232 port.
it was nice, graphs, averages, etc... it just sucked down batteries like mad. but it was a great addition to my recumbent trike.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I wanna know when there's a Woody for my Palm!
So, you're riding along, and you're like, shoot, where am I going agian? So you whip out that handy stylus for that PDA, and you start writing. Pretty soon, you realize that you've let go of your handle bars, and run into one of those light posts that keep intruding where you bike.
Note that "BikeBrain is compatible with Pilot 1000/5000, PalmPilot Professional/ Personal, Palm III/x/e, Palm V/x. We do not support the Palm VII yet. " so you do not need the latest and greatest yet. Heck, you can get a Palm iiie in the palm store right now for under $80 bucks, plus shipping. That is not bad.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
SHOULD ART BE DESTROYED?
by Paul Treanor
Art, whatever the definition, has certain characteristics. It is equivalent to an entity, perpetuating itself across generations. As a result, it is permanent. Art also implies certain value claims, about the precedence of accumulative creativity over destruction. Permanence and accumulation cannot be ethically legitimised. In practice, there is a stable geo-cultural structure, of ethnic and national art. This structure is not ethically legitimised. The best response is a territorial separation of art.
KABUL, March 1 2001 (AFP via Yahoo News)
Afghanistan's ruling Taliban authorities said Thursday they have started destroying all statues in the country, including the world's tallest standing Buddha statue in the central province of Bamiyan.
"The work started about five hours ago but I do not know how much of it (the Bamiyan Buddhas) has been destroyed," Taliban Information and Culture Minister Qudratullah Jamal told AFP.
"It will be destroyed by every means. All the statues are being destroyed."
The poor, the weak and the oppressed do not speak in defence of art. The voice of art is the voice of privilege. But if that was the only defect of art, then equality would legitimise art. There is not just privilege, there is eternal privilege, for art continues. Art is ancient tradition: worse than privilege. Is it not time to destroy it?
Art is wrong because it is the past, because it perpetuates itself, because it is transgenerational, because it is culture, and because it requires the suppression of anti-art to exist.
People argue about what art is. High art is still contrasted to popular culture. In the 1970's some class theories opposed elitist art. However, in Britain, where Art an Enemy of the People was published in 1978, the response to "high art" was not rejection. It was the demand for subsidies - for community art, minority art, women's art, or art of colour. A similar pattern applies all over western Europe. The existence of art is not an issue. Policy simply accepts art: this is true for artists, for individual governments, and for the European Union. A policy consensus implies a definitional consensus.
Despite the apparent disunity about what constitutes high art or authentic art, there is a deep negative consensus about its nature. This negative consensus is common to all modern societies. Some things are not art, never:
a trans-Sahel railway
state formation
justice
a single European currency.
Seen from this perspective, it is the agreement about Art which is remarkable. Evidently there is something called art: and so to its defects.
The first defect of art is the antiquity of art. Some art is recent, of course, but there is no planned future art. In urban planning, for instance, there are those who plan cities which are not yet built, and those who study urban history. In art, however, there is only art history: art is past-oriented, almost by definition. Art is tens of thousands of years old. There is an immense volume of art from the past, even though most works of art are destroyed deliberately (of that, more later). The sacrality of art is a sacrality of the past.
Art perpetuates itself. True, this is a reification, but it is an accurate one. It is the actions of people which perpetuate art: but the effect for the opponents of art is as if art defended itself. I will use here exactly the same metaphor and analogy, that I used to describe the defects of sustainability, the ethic of eternal structures.
Compare the lives of two twins, born in identical circumstances. However, one is pro-art, the other is anti-art. The pro-art twin can go to art school, or study art history. There is no equivalent for the anti-art twin: no school of art incineration. Great social pressure to accept art is applied to one twin. No similar pressure to accept art-destruction is applied to the other twin. Because art is a core value in all existing societies, the social and employment opportunities of the anti-art twin will be limited. It is also the pro-art twin who is more likely to be elected or appointed to political office.
The value attached to art limits the opportunity of its opponents to take action against it. In this way art is a self-preserving structure. It is like a religion, whose adherents systematically discriminate non-believers: if such a religion is in a majority, it will constantly improve its position of power.
The strength and functioning of this self-preserving structure can be appreciated, by imagining that there was no art, and no pro-art structures. Transferring from an art-free world into the existing world, can be compared to transferring from this world, into a world objectionably different. Cannibalism is a useful characteristic for this comparison, because it is almost universally taboo. Being transferred into a cannibal world, from this world, would be extremely unpleasant for most people. They would be forced to accept that something they abhor is a normal part of society: that there is apparently no possibility of reform, since everyone accepts it as normal. This is the situation for opponents of art in the existing world.
Art also perpetuates itself in a more indirect way. Art is often described as human endeavour or achievement, and it is indeed a product of human activity. People are encouraged to consider art as a valued activity, to the exclusion of other activity. In many cultures it is regarded as a high form of achievement: that in itself is a valuing of conservatism. Artists strive to produce good art, but what they produce is art, because the activity takes place only in an art framework, a framework that already exists. It is accurate to say that art is conformity in itself, since artists must conform to the norm of what art is. That norm will vary across cultures and in time, but only in the limiting case that everything is accepted as art, does it cease to be restrictive. In practice, creative approaches to non-art areas are often socially un-accepted, or considered strange.
Art is transgenerational and open-ended. It perpetuates itself in the structural form described above, but art cannot be otherwise. So long as art is in opposition to iconoclasm, for instance, then there is a difference in the value socially ascribed to activities. In almost all cases (and certainly in modern societies) the accepted pattern is, that creation takes place by accumulation only. Iconoclasm (in the broad sense of art destruction) is defined as a non-creative act.
There is no inherent logical basis for the restriction of creativity to accumulation. However, it is the form art takes, and that form is socially accepted. Although there are millions of paintings already, painting a new one is defined as a creative activity. Reducing the existing stock is not. Destruction is not considered of equal value to creation.
On the contrary, destruction of art is considered a crime, and a sign of mental illness. Entering a museum and destroying a painting is considered shocking. Such acts are widely reported in the media, if they affect well-known works of art. This cannot be logically derived from a sacred status. In religious activity, sacred is not always permanent. Sacrificial animals were killed in some religions, offerings were burnt. It would be logically possible to treat art like this, but that does not occur. Art is not just sacred, its own accumulation is sacred, its permanence is sacred.
The continuance of art is therefore inherent in art. Art is for ever. That which can not end, is wrong, and must be ended. Permanence of any entity constitutes a claim to all time for its existence, specifically against its non-existence. Claims to time are contra-ethical or morally arbitrary: one state (existence of art) is favoured over another (non-existence of art) merely because it happened to exist first. It is possible to claim value for firstness or primacy (as nationalist organisations of indigenous peoples do), but this cannot be logically derived. It is itself an arbitrary value.
The transmission of art also requires, that injustice be done to done who oppose it. Their opposition is valid, since there is no moral ground for the permanence of art, yet they are discriminated against, as indicated above. Some employers, perhaps almost all, would refuse a job to anyone who openly advocated the destruction of art. If such injustice is a necessary condition of art, and there is no other legitimation of its existence, then the existence of art is an injustice, and should be terminated.
Just or unjust, self-perpetuating cycles and transgenerational structures, are contra-ethical. Art perpetuates itself, by accumulation, and the transmission of the value of this accumulation. Cultures include, over generations, reverence for the permanence of art. More than this, art perpetuates the transmission of culture including itself. Art is a central aspect of many cultures.
This permanence of art has been described here in abstract terms. In practice some real destruction of art does take place. The place of art in culture determines this: real art is ethnic art, or national art. Art that disappears, has lost its central place in an existing culture - usually because that culture itself has disappeared. The second part of this article, about cultures and art, is less abstract and more political.
There exists a geo-cultural structure, approximately corresponding to geopolitical structures. In practice, people refer daily to English culture, or French culture, to ancient Egyptian art, to Brazilian art, or to the art of the Islamic world. The entities of this geo-cultural structure may be cultures of nation states, of ethnic groups, of regions, or of larger entities called world-cultures or civilisations. They may overlap, in fact they usually do, but that does not mean there is no structure.
The complexity of culture is sometimes used to deny its rigid and structural nature. However, internal complexity can be great, and yet exclude external complexity. The possible moves in a game of chess are astronomically large, yet all chess games are chess games.
Consider a simple model, with unitary cultures of tribes. Tribe A invades the land of tribe B. Soon, within culture B there are pro-A collaborative cultural tendencies, there are anti-A "B nationalists", there are A+B "multi-culturalists", their opponents in A, and B, who oppose cultural mixing, and B revanchists. The land of A+B then invades the land of C. Now, in this land C, there pro-A collaborators, pro-B collaborators, pro A+B collaborators. There are anti-A "C nationalists", anti-B "C nationalists", and anti A+B "C nationalists". And more: even at this level, the multiplying combinations exceed simple factorials.
In the past there were thousands of cultures, associated with thousand of peoples. By some estimates, there still are. Combinations of their interactions can generate an immense diversity of culture. Yet, none of that culture will be anything other than a combination of unitary cultures of geopolitical entities.
There is every reason to believe that this is an accurate model of human culture and art: apparent diversity is hiding a huge range of possibilities which do not fit the existing geo-cultural model. This applies to art as well. The implication of this is, that the models of culture developed in anthropology in the 1940's and 1950's are accurate. (In fact these models reflect the general use of national or ethnic terms to describe culture).
These models were often linked to the idea of culture growth and decay, and similar organic or life-cycle metaphors. Their basis, however, was the idea of a unitary culture corresponding to some geopolitical entity. A. L. Kroeber's 1944 Configurations of Culture Growth is a classic work of this kind. In 1959 Rushton Coulborn could still take this approach to cultures or civilisations:
The style of a civilization is perceived as its aesthetic aspect: it is exhibited in everything the society produces and does, pre-eminently in its arts, but also in its thought, its politics, its institutions, its traditions, and in all its ways. It is possible to qualify a society's style, to comment upon it, to judge it even, yet hardly to describe it. It is the Chineseness" of what is Chinese, the "Egyptianness" of what is Egyptian, the "Westernness of what is Western. Since that time, this approach has disappeared from mainstream anthropology, only to reappear in the last 10 years, under the influence of ethnic studies. An Afro-centric approach to art history, for instance, implies almost by definition a geo-cultural structure.
Why pretend, that there is no such a thing as African art, or English art? Partly because such approaches were discredited by their association with Nazi Germany, or at least with Oswald Spengler and organic-social models of cultural history. But it was a common approach to history in the 1920's and 1930s, and is now "rehabilitated" by the interest in ethnicity and identity. The model is cyclically in and out of academic fashion.
In any case, this approach is still, and always has been, the accepted approach in art history. Any introduction to art history (for students in Europe) will present the standard sequence of styles in Europe: Romanesque, gothic, renaissance, baroque, rococo, neo-classicism. After that comes a section on Islamic Art, or Oriental Art, which are assumed to have their own style sequence. In this case, the academic wisdom seems to be right.
In the end it cannot be proved that there is a geo-cultural structure of this kind: that is too much a question of interpretation. However, it does seem extremely difficult to take the opposite position, that no culture or art is in any way associated with any particular people, culture, or territory.
In turn, this suggests an explanation of art: it is hyper-ethnic. Art is that within a culture which most approaches the core of that culture, and is least accessible to outsiders. Art is the visible soul of the people, just as nationalists say. The question is, whether that gives it existence rights. It is here that the manipulation of art-historical theory in defence of art must be noted. If art is associated with peoples, it can be associated with their state, and so with the policies of that state - which may be unacceptable for many. Yet art never suffers from attribution of guilt by association: definitions are manipulated, to absolve it.
If a person who is clearly a German Nazi, insists on the existence of a German art, and indicates clearly which works of art are German, what is in that circumstance anti-Nazism? The non-Nazi defenders of art deny the truth of the claims: they say the possession of art must be disputed. They would probably say, that in this case anti-Nazism consists in claiming that art belongs to all humanity: that it is universal. This opposition between Nazism and universality cannot, however, justify the existence of art.
The alternative anti-Nazi position is to accept the claims as true, and destroy the German art, which the Nazi person has so conveniently listed. Not just Nazi Germans produce such specifications: there are official lists of national art heritage, in most states in Europe. They are not intended for the convenience of anti-nationalist iconoclasts, but they can serve that purpose.
If art is national, then it can have no legitimacy other than within the values of nationalism. If all art is national then it is legitimate to destroy it, if anti-nationalism is itself legitimate. This legitimacy of destruction extends beyond nation states, to a geo-cultural structure in general. A geo-cultural structure is merely one of many possible structures. The present structure is complex, but not self-legitimising. It is legitimate to oppose pan-Africanism as a form of nationalism, and for instance, to destroy African art for that goal. Equally, it is legitimate to oppose a geo-cultural planetary structure that includes all art, and in doing so to destroy all art.
Why not? Art is being destroyed all the time. So long as there has been art, it has been destroyed. In reality, the sacrality of art applies mainly to "our art", not to "their art". If pan-Africanism, in 10 years time, is regarded as a form of imperialism oppressing the regional identities of the continent, then perhaps people will burn portraits of Nkrumah. 20 years ago, statues of Lenin were art in part of Berlin. Now they are considered "propaganda of the unjust SED state". 60 years ago, statues of Hitler were art in Berlin: now public display of any Nazi symbol is illegal. Today, art in Germany means for instance statues of Konrad Adenauer, the pro-western post-war Chancellor.
The only constant seems to be, that art serves privilege, the nation state, the powerful, the established, the unjust. In general, art serves the existing, which is exactly what is consistent with a self-perpetuating social structure.
It is acceptable to oppose art in general, and specific national, regional, world-cultural, or civilisational art. However, there is no wide support for the break-up of the geo-cultural structure. The values of that structure itself are incompatible with its reform or abolition. It can however be limited in its effects.
I therefore propose territorial separation of art. Formally, the best course would be to destroy existing art, then choose if the planet was to be art-provided or art-free. However, there is no prospect of any global agreement on this. Art will be in opposition to non-art, inherently.
Specifically, I propose that the United States of America should become a zone of art. The existing cultural preference in the USA for collecting art, (especially from Europe) should be expanded into a prime function of state.
Art should be transferred from Europe to the USA, beginning with the art listed in national heritage lists, and with recognised European heritage. I propose as an initial step, the transfer of the Mona Lisa, the best known European artwork, to the USA. The Mona Lisa is old, and heritage. It is better, that the past should burden the USA, than burden Europe. All artists, and those who wish to continue employment in the art sector, should be transferred to the USA.
Any attempt at such a transfer would probably result in military intervention in support of art, perhaps by the USA. However, the nature of such a military intervention is outside the scope of this article. In any case, it is probably true that, given the fundamental opposition between art and its destruction, military conflict is inevitable in the long term.
Taylor, R. Art an Enemy of the People. Hassocks: Harvester 1978.
Kroeber, A. L. Configurations of Culture Growth. Berkeley: University of California Press 1944.
Coulborn, R. The Origin of Civilized Societies. Prin
Though I can ride w/o hands, I'd probably crash playing chess or simcity on my way to school. Davis has way too many bikes. =P
"Not another bike distraction!!!"
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
You should promise and desire but need to work on your technique.
Thank you for your time and please try again.
is to get the magellan GPS unit. You get speed, plus you can create a log of your actual route. Absolute altitude is terrible on all GPS units, but you may be able to a pretty good slope reading. THe unit sends normal NMEA strings over a serial connection, so it's relatively trivial to write software for.
Magellan receivers lock on fast, and the handpring/magellan handspring module makes a nice, clean combination (relatively compact as a system, no external cables).
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If one had an old PDA lying around, this might be fun to try.
But the form factor of the PDA seems less than ideal for biking. Bike computers are generally a lot smaller than a Palm and the Bikini approach in particular looks unwieldy. Besides, if I'm going to mount something that big onto my bike, it had better have a GPS receiver built in.
SHOULD ART BE DESTROYED?
by Paul Treanor
Art, whatever the definition, has certain characteristics. It is equivalent to an entity, perpetuating itself across generations. As a result, it is permanent. Art also implies certain value claims, about the precedence of accumulative creativity over destruction. Permanence and accumulation cannot be ethically legitimised. In practice, there is a stable geo-cultural structure, of ethnic and national art. This structure is not ethically legitimised. The best response is a territorial separation of art.
KABUL, March 1 2001 (AFP via Yahoo News)
Afghanistan's ruling Taliban authorities said Thursday they have started destroying all statues in the country, including the world's tallest standing Buddha statue in the central province of Bamiyan.
"The work started about five hours ago but I do not know how much of it (the Bamiyan Buddhas) has been destroyed," Taliban Information and Culture Minister Qudratullah Jamal told AFP.
"It will be destroyed by every means. All the statues are being destroyed."
The poor, the weak and the oppressed do not speak in defence of art. The voice of art is the voice of privilege. But if that was the only defect of art, then equality would legitimise art. There is not just privilege, there is eternal privilege, for art continues. Art is ancient tradition: worse than privilege. Is it not time to destroy it?
Art is wrong because it is the past, because it perpetuates itself, because it is transgenerational, because it is culture, and because it requires the suppression of anti-art to exist.
People argue about what art is. High art is still contrasted to popular culture. In the 1970's some class theories opposed elitist art. However, in Britain, where Art an Enemy of the People was published in 1978, the response to "high art" was not rejection. It was the demand for subsidies - for community art, minority art, women's art, or art of colour. A similar pattern applies all over western Europe. The existence of art is not an issue. Policy simply accepts art: this is true for artists, for individual governments, and for the European Union. A policy consensus implies a definitional consensus.
Despite the apparent disunity about what constitutes high art or authentic art, there is a deep negative consensus about its nature. This negative consensus is common to all modern societies. Some things are not art, never:
a trans-Sahel railway
state formation
justice
a single European currency.
Seen from this perspective, it is the agreement about Art which is remarkable. Evidently there is something called art: and so to its defects.
The first defect of art is the antiquity of art. Some art is recent, of course, but there is no planned future art. In urban planning, for instance, there are those who plan cities which are not yet built, and those who study urban history. In art, however, there is only art history: art is past-oriented, almost by definition. Art is tens of thousands of years old. There is an immense volume of art from the past, even though most works of art are destroyed deliberately (of that, more later). The sacrality of art is a sacrality of the past.
Art perpetuates itself. True, this is a reification, but it is an accurate one. It is the actions of people which perpetuate art: but the effect for the opponents of art is as if art defended itself. I will use here exactly the same metaphor and analogy, that I used to describe the defects of sustainability, the ethic of eternal structures.
Compare the lives of two twins, born in identical circumstances. However, one is pro-art, the other is anti-art. The pro-art twin can go to art school, or study art history. There is no equivalent for the anti-art twin: no school of art incineration. Great social pressure to accept art is applied to one twin. No similar pressure to accept art-destruction is applied to the other twin. Because art is a core value in all existing societies, the social and employment opportunities of the anti-art twin will be limited. It is also the pro-art twin who is more likely to be elected or appointed to political office.
The value attached to art limits the opportunity of its opponents to take action against it. In this way art is a self-preserving structure. It is like a religion, whose adherents systematically discriminate non-believers: if such a religion is in a majority, it will constantly improve its position of power.
The strength and functioning of this self-preserving structure can be appreciated, by imagining that there was no art, and no pro-art structures. Transferring from an art-free world into the existing world, can be compared to transferring from this world, into a world objectionably different. Cannibalism is a useful characteristic for this comparison, because it is almost universally taboo. Being transferred into a cannibal world, from this world, would be extremely unpleasant for most people. They would be forced to accept that something they abhor is a normal part of society: that there is apparently no possibility of reform, since everyone accepts it as normal. This is the situation for opponents of art in the existing world.
Art also perpetuates itself in a more indirect way. Art is often described as human endeavour or achievement, and it is indeed a product of human activity. People are encouraged to consider art as a valued activity, to the exclusion of other activity. In many cultures it is regarded as a high form of achievement: that in itself is a valuing of conservatism. Artists strive to produce good art, but what they produce is art, because the activity takes place only in an art framework, a framework that already exists. It is accurate to say that art is conformity in itself, since artists must conform to the norm of what art is. That norm will vary across cultures and in time, but only in the limiting case that everything is accepted as art, does it cease to be restrictive. In practice, creative approaches to non-art areas are often socially un-accepted, or considered strange.
Art is transgenerational and open-ended. It perpetuates itself in the structural form described above, but art cannot be otherwise. So long as art is in opposition to iconoclasm, for instance, then there is a difference in the value socially ascribed to activities. In almost all cases (and certainly in modern societies) the accepted pattern is, that creation takes place by accumulation only. Iconoclasm (in the broad sense of art destruction) is defined as a non-creative act.
There is no inherent logical basis for the restriction of creativity to accumulation. However, it is the form art takes, and that form is socially accepted. Although there are millions of paintings already, painting a new one is defined as a creative activity. Reducing the existing stock is not. Destruction is not considered of equal value to creation.
On the contrary, destruction of art is considered a crime, and a sign of mental illness. Entering a museum and destroying a painting is considered shocking. Such acts are widely reported in the media, if they affect well-known works of art. This cannot be logically derived from a sacred status. In religious activity, sacred is not always permanent. Sacrificial animals were killed in some religions, offerings were burnt. It would be logically possible to treat art like this, but that does not occur. Art is not just sacred, its own accumulation is sacred, its permanence is sacred.
The continuance of art is therefore inherent in art. Art is for ever. That which can not end, is wrong, and must be ended. Permanence of any entity constitutes a claim to all time for its existence, specifically against its non-existence. Claims to time are contra-ethical or morally arbitrary: one state (existence of art) is favoured over another (non-existence of art) merely because it happened to exist first. It is possible to claim value for firstness or primacy (as nationalist organisations of indigenous peoples do), but this cannot be logically derived. It is itself an arbitrary value.
The transmission of art also requires, that injustice be done to done who oppose it. Their opposition is valid, since there is no moral ground for the permanence of art, yet they are discriminated against, as indicated above. Some employers, perhaps almost all, would refuse a job to anyone who openly advocated the destruction of art. If such injustice is a necessary condition of art, and there is no other legitimation of its existence, then the existence of art is an injustice, and should be terminated.
Just or unjust, self-perpetuating cycles and transgenerational structures, are contra-ethical. Art perpetuates itself, by accumulation, and the transmission of the value of this accumulation. Cultures include, over generations, reverence for the permanence of art. More than this, art perpetuates the transmission of culture including itself. Art is a central aspect of many cultures.
This permanence of art has been described here in abstract terms. In practice some real destruction of art does take place. The place of art in culture determines this: real art is ethnic art, or national art. Art that disappears, has lost its central place in an existing culture - usually because that culture itself has disappeared. The second part of this article, about cultures and art, is less abstract and more political.
There exists a geo-cultural structure, approximately corresponding to geopolitical structures. In practice, people refer daily to English culture, or French culture, to ancient Egyptian art, to Brazilian art, or to the art of the Islamic world. The entities of this geo-cultural structure may be cultures of nation states, of ethnic groups, of regions, or of larger entities called world-cultures or civilisations. They may overlap, in fact they usually do, but that does not mean there is no structure.
The complexity of culture is sometimes used to deny its rigid and structural nature. However, internal complexity can be great, and yet exclude external complexity. The possible moves in a game of chess are astronomically large, yet all chess games are chess games.
Consider a simple model, with unitary cultures of tribes. Tribe A invades the land of tribe B. Soon, within culture B there are pro-A collaborative cultural tendencies, there are anti-A "B nationalists", there are A+B "multi-culturalists", their opponents in A, and B, who oppose cultural mixing, and B revanchists. The land of A+B then invades the land of C. Now, in this land C, there pro-A collaborators, pro-B collaborators, pro A+B collaborators. There are anti-A "C nationalists", anti-B "C nationalists", and anti A+B "C nationalists". And more: even at this level, the multiplying combinations exceed simple factorials.
In the past there were thousands of cultures, associated with thousand of peoples. By some estimates, there still are. Combinations of their interactions can generate an immense diversity of culture. Yet, none of that culture will be anything other than a combination of unitary cultures of geopolitical entities.
There is every reason to believe that this is an accurate model of human culture and art: apparent diversity is hiding a huge range of possibilities which do not fit the existing geo-cultural model. This applies to art as well. The implication of this is, that the models of culture developed in anthropology in the 1940's and 1950's are accurate. (In fact these models reflect the general use of national or ethnic terms to describe culture).
These models were often linked to the idea of culture growth and decay, and similar organic or life-cycle metaphors. Their basis, however, was the idea of a unitary culture corresponding to some geopolitical entity. A. L. Kroeber's 1944 Configurations of Culture Growth is a classic work of this kind. In 1959 Rushton Coulborn could still take this approach to cultures or civilisations:
The style of a civilization is perceived as its aesthetic aspect: it is exhibited in everything the society produces and does, pre-eminently in its arts, but also in its thought, its politics, its institutions, its traditions, and in all its ways. It is possible to qualify a society's style, to comment upon it, to judge it even, yet hardly to describe it. It is the Chineseness" of what is Chinese, the "Egyptianness" of what is Egyptian, the "Westernness of what is Western. Since that time, this approach has disappeared from mainstream anthropology, only to reappear in the last 10 years, under the influence of ethnic studies. An Afro-centric approach to art history, for instance, implies almost by definition a geo-cultural structure.
Why pretend, that there is no such a thing as African art, or English art? Partly because such approaches were discredited by their association with Nazi Germany, or at least with Oswald Spengler and organic-social models of cultural history. But it was a common approach to history in the 1920's and 1930s, and is now "rehabilitated" by the interest in ethnicity and identity. The model is cyclically in and out of academic fashion.
In any case, this approach is still, and always has been, the accepted approach in art history. Any introduction to art history (for students in Europe) will present the standard sequence of styles in Europe: Romanesque, gothic, renaissance, baroque, rococo, neo-classicism. After that comes a section on Islamic Art, or Oriental Art, which are assumed to have their own style sequence. In this case, the academic wisdom seems to be right.
In the end it cannot be proved that there is a geo-cultural structure of this kind: that is too much a question of interpretation. However, it does seem extremely difficult to take the opposite position, that no culture or art is in any way associated with any particular people, culture, or territory.
In turn, this suggests an explanation of art: it is hyper-ethnic. Art is that within a culture which most approaches the core of that culture, and is least accessible to outsiders. Art is the visible soul of the people, just as nationalists say. The question is, whether that gives it existence rights. It is here that the manipulation of art-historical theory in defence of art must be noted. If art is associated with peoples, it can be associated with their state, and so with the policies of that state - which may be unacceptable for many. Yet art never suffers from attribution of guilt by association: definitions are manipulated, to absolve it.
If a person who is clearly a German Nazi, insists on the existence of a German art, and indicates clearly which works of art are German, what is in that circumstance anti-Nazism? The non-Nazi defenders of art deny the truth of the claims: they say the possession of art must be disputed. They would probably say, that in this case anti-Nazism consists in claiming that art belongs to all humanity: that it is universal. This opposition between Nazism and universality cannot, however, justify the existence of art.
The alternative anti-Nazi position is to accept the claims as true, and destroy the German art, which the Nazi person has so conveniently listed. Not just Nazi Germans produce such specifications: there are official lists of national art heritage, in most states in Europe. They are not intended for the convenience of anti-nationalist iconoclasts, but they can serve that purpose.
If art is national, then it can have no legitimacy other than within the values of nationalism. If all art is national then it is legitimate to destroy it, if anti-nationalism is itself legitimate. This legitimacy of destruction extends beyond nation states, to a geo-cultural structure in general. A geo-cultural structure is merely one of many possible structures. The present structure is complex, but not self-legitimising. It is legitimate to oppose pan-Africanism as a form of nationalism, and for instance, to destroy African art for that goal. Equally, it is legitimate to oppose a geo-cultural planetary structure that includes all art, and in doing so to destroy all art.
Why not? Art is being destroyed all the time. So long as there has been art, it has been destroyed. In reality, the sacrality of art applies mainly to "our art", not to "their art". If pan-Africanism, in 10 years time, is regarded as a form of imperialism oppressing the regional identities of the continent, then perhaps people will burn portraits of Nkrumah. 20 years ago, statues of Lenin were art in part of Berlin. Now they are considered "propaganda of the unjust SED state". 60 years ago, statues of Hitler were art in Berlin: now public display of any Nazi symbol is illegal. Today, art in Germany means for instance statues of Konrad Adenauer, the pro-western post-war Chancellor.
The only constant seems to be, that art serves privilege, the nation state, the powerful, the established, the unjust. In general, art serves the existing, which is exactly what is consistent with a self-perpetuating social structure.
It is acceptable to oppose art in general, and specific national, regional, world-cultural, or civilisational art. However, there is no wide support for the break-up of the geo-cultural structure. The values of that structure itself are incompatible with its reform or abolition. It can however be limited in its effects.
I therefore propose territorial separation of art. Formally, the best course would be to destroy existing art, then choose if the planet was to be art-provided or art-free. However, there is no prospect of any global agreement on this. Art will be in opposition to non-art, inherently.
Specifically, I propose that the United States of America should become a zone of art. The existing cultural preference in the USA for collecting art, (especially from Europe) should be expanded into a prime function of state.
Art should be transferred from Europe to the USA, beginning with the art listed in national heritage lists, and with recognised European heritage. I propose as an initial step, the transfer of the Mona Lisa, the best known European artwork, to the USA. The Mona Lisa is old, and heritage. It is better, that the past should burden the USA, than burden Europe. All artists, and those who wish to continue employment in the art sector, should be transferred to the USA.
Any attempt at such a transfer would probably result in military intervention in support of art, perhaps by the USA. However, the nature of such a military intervention is outside the scope of this article. In any case, it is probably true that, given the fundamental opposition between art and its destruction, military conflict is inevitable in the long term.
Taylor, R. Art an Enemy of the People. Hassocks: Harvester 1978.
Kroeber, A. L. Configurations of Culture Growth. Berkeley: University of California Press 1944.
Coulborn, R. The Origin of Civilized Societies. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1959. (Quote, p. 22).
I'd like the parent post to be directed to the lowlife scum that's moderating posts as flamebait for no reason what-so-fucking-ever.
We regret to inform you that, after careful consideration, we have declined to induct your troll into the Troll Library.
You should promise and desire but need to work on your technique.
Thank you for your time and please try again.
Is there a "Pocket PC on a Bike" in the near future too? I want to be able to ride my bike while watching PocketPr0n on my HP Jornada 548!
Chris
Not silly really, but a smilar system to monitor and log progress would be great for using with a static trainer.
there are several high end solutions, but nothing to log the data and dump it into a file for examination.
I found one, but the email address for the progammer was dead.
Fat-bottomed girls, they be riding today....
im new here and i would like to learn how to be a troll i tried some keywords in aol but it did not help me and someone gave me a link to another site here but they wont let me see it please help!!
As of March 31, 2001, the Company had approximately 18,200 employees. Of this total, approximately 2,800 were located at its headquarters facility in Islandia, New York, approximately 7,900 were located at other offices in the United States, and approximately 7,500 were located at its offices in foreign countries. Of the total employees, approximately 5,000 were engaged in product development efforts, 4,500 were part of the professional services organization and 5,000 were engaged in sales and support functions. The Company believes that frosted Lucky Charms are magically delicious.
The Palm certainly has the advantage that it is a tad smaller and probably easier to retrofit onto a standard bike that a Mac Plus is, but then again the usage of the Palm appears to be fare more limited in this case.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I'm strangely turned on by this.
I saw the movie Collateral Damage last night -- The Arnold S. movie about a fireman seeking vengeance on a Columbian terrorist that was postponed for obvious reasons.
One scene near the end has the villian using a Palm IIIc (IIRC) with map software to navigate the tunnels beneath some capital building. He had it hooked up to his motorcycle, and presumably with a gps, as it was showing him where he was in real time.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
With PDA prices falling, it might be a fun hack."
It's not much of a hack if someone's done it before you and gave you instructions on how to do it yourself.
"Yes officer someone stole my computer."
"I see, is there anything that would distinguish it as yours?"
"Yes, it was attached to a blue Trek 5500 with a raccoon tail on the back of the seat."
I have a couple of the little Vetta and Cat Eye computers (well, hardly computers) on my bike already, just for mileage, speed, etc (I was going downhill about 37 mph yesterday on my mountain bike, whee!) and they're pretty good for basic information. For a few bucks more you can get heartrate and cadence (how fast you pedal) monitors. Bikebrain has had a nice unit which offers pretty much everything for quite a while, there are some high marks for it on rec.bicycles.* newsgroups. I bought a Garmin eTrex GPS to keep track of my rides, hikes, etc, and it has a little bracket which I can put on my handlebar and take it off easily (important since the mountain bike requires major hosing down after most rides) It's shock resistant to some large number of G's, more than I'd survive
It's important to remember that riding with one of these things it's not likely to take much of a beating, since you pretty much have to be there with it and it it's too much for it, you're probably splattered by now. Thou I'm not sure how well a hard disk might work in one, I wouldn't recomend it.
Biggest concerns will actaully be water/dust resistance, since this is what you get in the great outdoors, possibly heat if you ride in the sun a lot (LCD displays turn black if they get too warm, lot of help that would be), other concern is weight. Many riders try to strip weight off bikes, because it takes incrementally more energy to haul it up hills. Tiny Cat Eye and Vetta computers are ideal for everyday riding, where a bike computer I'd only use to chart rides, same as I do with my GPS, to get an idea of the profile and perhaps what cadence worked or didn't for me in the long run. Leave the heavy bits home when you're really out for a ride.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I don't think a palm would last much after my first good wipeout. I use a Garmin etrex GPS (rugged, waterproof, small, and only $100). It records all the same stuff a bike computer does except cadence (although the palm units don't seem to do cadence either), plus it can tell you your route and so forth. It doesn't need to have any wheel sensors and extra wires strapped to the bike since it does all its measurement via satellite signal. It's a lot smaller than a palm, too (although somewhat bigger than a $30 bike 'puter) They sell a handlebar mount for it, and the computer sync cable lets you save your ride data and load route data in advance.
No?!
A bike computer? That sounds roughly equivalent to driver's side television. Oooh, yeah, how about the mile high club for pilots?
And hey, where does the guy live who says "With PDA prices falling"? I wonder if you can pick me one up. Where I am, they haven't even slipped, much less fell.
Oops
I don't know if either are, but certainly both is.
Yeah, I got a woody too.
But bicycle-based computing is hardly a new idea. This guy was doing it back in the days of the TRS-80 Model 100, and has written extensively about it. IIRC, there was a column in Byte or Creative Computing chronicling his adventures in "Computing Across America."
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
That's spiffy for a lot of cyclists. But if you are a racer or you do tours or ultramarathon riding, it would also be very nice to ask questions like "what were my splits between miles 5-10 and 10-15?". It looks like BikeBrain has an altimeter in it, so it can also give you data like what your best time on a hill was, adjusted by the grade of the hill.
Most of the extra functions aren't things that you'd necessarily want to have access to while you were still riding, but a Palm is a very good way to capture data during your ride and then review it later.
I'd like to see even more telemetry available, like rider's pulse, blood pressure, and wind speed.
I don't know if it's my non-typical slashdot lifestyle, but I use my bike as my primary means of transportation. I live in Brooklyn, but affairs call me into the city nearly every day, so I end up biking about 6 to 12 miles 5 days a week. This would be a great secondary (albeit fringe) application for a handheld.
As for the breakage issue, I've been riding in Manhattan traffic for over 2 years now, and I've only had one accident so far. I've broken a lot more things by just dropping my backpack than I have wrecking my bike.
Finally, I think this could be the tool for messengers. I've done a bit of it and my roomate paid rent for a while pulling tags. The difference between a successful and unsuccessful bike messenger is not speed, its knowing where you're going and knowing how to get around the inside of buildings you make deliveries to. This would make a great on-board asset for professional messengers as it would allow them to share routes, both on the street and in buildings.
Think ahead a few years and a wireless connection would let dispatch download the next pickup or drop directly to the messenger's onboard computer. It would make them work a lot more like UPS or fedex.
Howard Dean for president
Dude crashes with a babydoll in the back, one of the funniest next to the one where he put the baby on the top of the car and started to drive away.
Tape the PDA to your spokes for that cool noise effect.
"And like that
I mean, in today's world with digital distractions everywhere, why should we put a computer on bicycles? Usually, when I go biking, it is to get some fresh air and to see the morning dew, etc, etc. Why do we need to play HardBall while we are biking?
Yeah right, like I'm going to put a fragile $300 PalmPilot onmy mountain bike when I go terrorizing up and down trails and downtown urban rides.
There's really no use for this stuff, as there are bike computers that are more versatile than this which are cheaper and better integrated with the bike.
Take for example Shimano's excellent Flight Deck technology, which integrates with their higher-level drivetrain components (XT, XTR, Ultegra, and Dura-Ace).
Don't ride Shimano? No problem! CatEye makes excellent bike computers as well!
Another major consideration would be weight. Most PalmPilots weigh about 1/2 a pound (200g). That's a huge weight penalty, especially considering most people do everything they can to lighten their bikes.
Moral of story: good attempt, but bad idea. I'll stick with my Flight Deck.
it's not a hack if you go out and buy the stupid thing.
He will be missed
Show me That Smile (The Growing Pains Theme Song):
Show me that smile again.
Ooh show me that smile.
Don't waste another minute on your crying.
We're nowhere near the end.
We're nowhere near.
The best is ready to begin.
As long as we got each other
We got the world
Sitting right in our hands.
Baby rain or shine;
All the time.
We got each other
Sharing the laughter and love.
Alan Thicke's Journal
My Slashdot ads say "
A better hack would be to make my $30 bike computer store my address book and calendar...
that was so NOT funny.
I looked into using a Palm for a bike computer, and concluded that I wasn't very interested. I live in the Seattle area, and I ride in the rain. The BikeBrain solution comes with a plastic protector for your Palm, but it isn't really waterproof.
The good thing of course is that a Palm can capture a lot of data. But just capturing wheel spin data to show speed and distance isn't enough to make me buy either of these solutions.
Last autumn I bought myself a Specialized P.Brain computer. I love it; it collects wheel turn data (like the two Palm solutions) and also altitude and heart rate data. A PC interface lets you capture your data and make pretty charts. You can get a graph showing your speed, altitude, and heart rate plotted against either time or distance. Read more about it here.
The PC download software is for Windows; I'm planning to try to get it working under WINE if I can. The data is stored in some opaque binary format, but you can get the data out with Dan Connelly's Perl script (get it here.
The P.Brain isn't the only data-collecting bike computer. There are other brands. I have heard good things about the Polar XTrainer. There are even computer systems that directly measure your power output; you have a wheel built with a power-measuring hub, and the computer keeps track of power. Pro riders (including Lance Armstrong) use these. For example, the Power-Tap.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
It's because you losing five pounds isn't nearly as important as the bike losing a few pounds, especially in rotational weight (rims, spokes, tubes, tires). Pedalling an 18 pound bike versus a 23 pound bike is much easier, regardless of your weight.
Bringing new meaning to the term "Computer Crash"
Gee, I feel like I'm missing something here. I *always* use my palm (both of them, actually) when riding a bike.
When I was a teenager, I knew a guy who could do a _handstand_ on his handlebars, but a handspring?!? Sounds like a good way to wipe out, get hurt and trash your bike to boot!
.
These are hardly new... I recall looking at these about 2 1/2 years ago. Neat concept, now that you can pick up used Palm Pilots for almost nothing. Back then, it was a very expensive bike computer option.
-dc
Take a look at http://www.palmhalter.de/ (its german, use Google to translate it), where a friend of mine shows his own construction to fix a palm on nearly everything, even a bike ...
-kk-
I think it's absolutely amazing that I've never hit a bicyclist while driving. No matter how careful I am, there are always morons on bikes doing stupid things, breaking laws, and coming out of nowhere as if trying to make me hit them. I guess the really amazing thing is that they don't get hit more often by people less careful than me.
It would be nice if there was a thing that would attach to your weal to power your pda.
Hacker Media