We see perhaps too much beautiful people with no problems in our media (especially advertising) it can't help but affect or perceptions of ourselves, driving us down a sucking spiral of materialism.
Exactly. Madison avenue knows which side of its bread is buttered. The corporate goons could wish for nothing better than for every single one of us to feel completely worthless. The less value we feel in ourselves, the more we have to compensate, drown out, act out by buying stuff. Every industry has a direct pecuniary interest in making us feel like a sack of sH*t.
Let's face it. Industry is the biggest pirate in town. They steal your natural resources, your work ethic, your effort, your culture, your hospitality, mass produce it, shrink-wrap it and then sell it back to you.
That's a cool response. It's like an example of itself -- a kind of repackaged version of me shoved back down my throat! I give you an A+.
If you're sarcastic (55% probability), then this is supposed to be a reductio ad absurdum of my criticism. OK fine.
If you're serious (44% probability), then I agree, but with the reservation that although *some* property laws are required for a pluralistic, democratic society, since property imposes restrictions on freedom (I can't take what isn't mine) we should only have just enough property law to keep us happy. I argue that extending the idea of property to ideas is way more property law than is required.
Yes, but that's half of the story. They do a fair amount of creating (ahem) "culture" by providing content for people to socialize.
I think you're underestimating people's desire to socialize by implying that they need Ally McBeal episodes to fill the void. Anything will do, even talking about the weather or gossiping about neighbors or co-workers.
It's great that you can complain about how mass media is destroying your culture... but what do you propose to do about it?
Here are just a few suggestions:
Just stop protecting intellectual property. We've already got more than enough of it.
Support local theatre (by going out and enjoying it)
Support live music (by going out and enjoying it)
Write songs for the fun of it.
The common thread is that it's better to be a participant in culture than just a consumer of it.
Capitalism may be a poor method of resource distribution -- but there is none better.
Man, you are so, like, missing the point. Even if a perfectly efficient information market *were* possible, I would still be happier with art and culture of a local or regional nature.
One of the main functions of mass media is the perpetuation and dissemination of culture. Although RIAA may be greedy about it, why is the dissemination of culture bad necessarily?
It's not bad at all. It's just that the uniformity and ubiquitousness of the content is the result of corporate design, not social interaction.
I am really happy about local and regional culture getting recognition alongside the mass produced stuff. Just because it isn't a worldwide phenomena doesn't mean it's not culture.
In most cultures, people are willing to pay for reflexive representation of values they hold. Whether it's a poster for the movie Pi or an N'Sync album, both are cultural representations and perpatuations...and people are willing to pay for both. Why is this bad?
It's not, really. What's bad is the manner in which cultural representations are distributed and then *controlled* by virtue of IP laws and copy protection and such. Also, in order to mass produce culture, you have to mass market it which means it has to be low-risk, watered-down, drab, inoffensive, and facile. Lowest common denominator. I love culture, but not stuff that's been bleached and de-boned.
Since you can rent studio time and since you can now market your music over the Internet, shouldn't most bands and artists be telling the RIAA to "blow!"?
Yeah, you would think. But the record companies seem to have convinced everyone that there is such a thing as a "star". Of course, everybody knows that stars were just an invention of the manufacturing divisions of the record industry giants. They complained to their bosses about always having to change the damn plates on the record press. They said "Hey, instead of promoting 50 artists who each sell 100,000 albums, could you please just have one artist who sells 50*100,000 albums? It would be *so* much more convenient and *profitable*.
So the record companies realized that they could make much more money by having 1 big star and mass producing copies than by having regional music with no economies of scale.
So every garage band and coffee house wannabe still labours under the illusion that one day they will be great. Maybe they will, but they won't be in control.
Let's face it. The entertainment industry is the biggest pirate in town. They steal your music, your culture, your ideas, your stories, your language, mass produce it, shrink-wrap it and then sell it back to you.
Intellectual property laws have done their job -- they've created a massive amount of stuff -- some good, some bad. But now the system is choking itself.
I suppose if you consider "referring" as a kind of mapping from one well-defined object to another well-defined object, then I suppose that objects that are well-defined cannot also be random.
Actually, after I read this I realized that it is nonsense. How can a symbol that refers to something be "well-defined" independently of the thing to which it refers? No way. In fact, "referring" is probably part of what *makes* a symbol "well-defined". Being well-defined is not a quality that symbols possess intrinsically.
We now return to regularly scheduled programming...
Did you not understand the randomness in question? That's exactly what will not happen, ever, since that's the essense in randomness.
But if you can't calculate *all* of Pi's digits, how do you know that it isn't a repeating pattern? Until you know all of the digits, it's still logically possible for there to be a sequence. If you knew all the digits, then there *would* be a pattern, but not a repeating one. I'm definitely not a mathematician (as you can tell from my original post) so I would welcome a mathematical explanation of how one can say irrefutably that Pi is non-repeating.
It's like saying that by throwin the dice more and more maybe you'll find a pattern.
This is just restating what you have already said. I could still ask of a series of dice rolls "We might find a pattern if we throw the dice enough times". Not that this is a practical possibility; I just think it is a logical possibility.
The thing with randomness is that these "patterns" cannot compress the sequence. (worth noting is that the sequence of Pi is anything but random in a information science sense, since it's well known and can be compressed to, say, "Pi")
I don't really understand the difference between random in an information science sense and random in the other sense you were talking about. Do you mean that anything I can refer to using a symbol is not random? I suppose if you consider "referring" as a kind of mapping from one well-defined object to another well-defined object, then I suppose that objects that are well-defined cannot also be random. But this doesn't make sense to me either, because Pi is well-defined in the sense of being a ratio of parts of a mathematically defined object. But referring to the ratio is not the same as referring to the decimal expansion of the ratio. This of course means that my (light-hearted) comparison couldn't be taken as much more than a figure of speech. That's really all that it was meant to be.
Circle has hardly anything to do with this "chaotic quality", since most of the real numbers also have this quality.
But if the circle has that quality, the fact that other real numbers have that quality doesn't take that quality away from the circle. The circle may not have anything to do with the definition or essence of randomness, but that doesn't mean the contrast is any less interesting. Who says randomness, or any other mathematical construct, has an essence at all? Maybe mathematics is just a very complicated, hard-wired social behaviour, or a set of made-up rules for moving game pieces around. What do *you* mean by essence?
The expectation value of the position of any certain string of numbers is actually as long as that certain string. It might be easier to wait for some hwrandom() to produce Romeo and Juliet.
I gather that by expectation value you mean something like "the earliest position at which a string with any N digits can be expected to be found". So I agree totally. Where can I expect to find the first occurrence of *any* one digit? Well, at the first digit, I guess. And so on and so forth until you have Romeo and Juliet. That doesn't seem too earth-shattering to me, but I'm sure I don't understand all the consequences. Like I said before, I'm really not arguing at all, I was just attempting some light-hearted word play. But regardless of that, what you said hasn't convinced me that hwrandom() *cannot* produce Romeo and Juliet, given enough monkeys.
Re:What's the big deal with Pi?
on
Share The Pi!
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· Score: 1
0.11010010001000010000010000001
Would this be considered non-repeating? It seems like it should, but it's so damn orderly.
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Don't worry, it's just some lawyers helping out their buddies who happen to own some intellectual property!
Yes, we can give you any celebrity as your own personal plaything. All you have to do is send us the script (or enter it on our website) and we'll give you 5 minutes to remember. 5.99/minute. Long distance charges may apply.
Just out of curiosity, WHY did you go see Jelo Biafra?
I think the guy is a real character, and some of what he says made sense to me. I like his energy. For that matter, I also enjoyed listening to Henry Rollins do his rant.
From your other posts, you didn't seem like an actual communist...are you just commie-curious?
I'm totally middle of the road, really. I think it's stupid to believe that an economy could survive without paying for some social structure through collective effort. On the other hand, it is also ludicrous to think that the requisite collective effort could be achieved under anything but the most favourable economic conditions. You can't go around arbitrarily taking stuff away from people and then expect them to participate wholeheartedly in society-building. They'd do it grudgingly, the way people in Western Countries are acting right now. They would rather withdraw from society than participate.
Governments have earned some of their infamy, but a lot of the survivalist, anti-government sentiment has been nurtured by multinationals, much the way that the entertainment industry nurtures our perception that all worthwhile information comes from -- and only from -- the mass media. It's in the interests of these behemoths to weaken governments of any stripe, the same way sellers of all kinds stand to benefit from our personal weakness and shame.
I guess I'm not sounding so middle of the road now. But I firmly believe we should solve our problems by debate and science and reason and passionate optimism, rather than by ideologies that breed hatred and suspicion. I'm not into throwing molotov cocktails at WTO meetings, if that's what you were thinking. If what I described sounds to you like an "actual communist" then yes, I suppose I am an actual communist. I certainly wouldn't be ashamed of that label, but I don't really think I'm quite so ideologically rigid.
If anything, I am a Participatory Economics - ite. For an example of what that can be, see the Mondragon Cafe and Bookstore. I am slightly commie-curious. Just don't tell my wife. What she doesn't know won't hurt her.
There. You now know much more about me than you wanted to, I'm sure.
The consumer has no control here. The consumer thinks he sees a fair market. The consumer has been duped. The RIAA was always in control.
Yes, I agree they exert a lot of influence. I was trying to draw attention to the ease with which they wield that influence. For instance, one might assert that music that makes it onto the shelves of HMV or Tower Records cannot be "indy" by definition. There's no sense in which anything that is mass-produced and distributed in little packages could be called "independent". It depends on a whole infrastructure of mass markets and media.
I had a funny experience the other day that really left a lasting impression of how impossible it is to have real music when everyone thinks real music comes in a jewel case.
I have a nine-year-old daughter. A couple of weeks ago, I took her to a huge street festival with tons of live music and activities going on. There was a really funky band playing on stage, having lots of fun. My daughter called me to come and see something. She was standing closer to the stage than I was, so I assumed she wanted me to see the musicians up close. What she really wanted me to see was a discarded 7-Eleven Slurpee cup with a picture of Britney Spears on it.
What can real musicians do to compete? Nobody can be "indy" if they're already on the shelves of a music store. They've already sold out by allowing their work to be mass-produced.
I've probably contradicted myself a dozen times, but I stand by every word of it, dammit!!
When was the last time you bought a ticket to hear some guy read an artile he wrote for the NY Times three years ago? Have you worn out your "NY Times freelance guy" T-shirt yet?
I would pay to hear a lecture. In fact, I have done that many times. And I suppose I'd buy the T-Shirt, too (like I did for Jelo Biafra's spoken word concert) but only if you *promise* to admit that you're wrong.
Do you want the whole band of television programming to be nothing more than mediocre 'community access' channels?
Obviously you have been well conditioned by the forces of mass consumerism. I find 'community access' television to be far more entertaining and informative than most of what I see on 'high quality, nationally recognized, brand name' television.
And as far as your contention that people only work for financial reward: you must never have had to raise a child.
You have many good points, but I'll only respond to one:
Too often, people forget their real recourse - if somebody wants too much money for their work, don't buy it.
To use this argument as a defense of copyright is to miss the point of copyright. Copyright wasn't meant to turn creative output into personal legal tender. Copyright was intended to meet a social objective: to encourage creative output for the benefit of all citizens.
If a government sanctioned monopoly gives an artist enough market power to discourage distribution rather than submit to lower prices, then the system is failing. Just saying "then don't buy it" defeats the whole purpose of copyright. If artists are going to price things in a range that makes most people say "forget it", then the government has to rethink the way it encourages distribution.
The work has monetary value, in terms of the resources and time used to create it
I find it strange that people seem to use two standards to judge value.
On the one hand they say that a thing's value is whatever the market is willing to pay for it.
On the other hand (usually when they are trying to defend property rights) they claim that resources and time invested in something give it an intrinsic value.
This is like the split between the book value and market value of an asset. Sometimes the asset's market value goes to zero. If the market value stays at zero, at some point it becomes irrational to say that it is really worth anything.
Just look at Nortel Networks or JDS Uniphase for an example of how assets sometimes need to "disappear". The asset that disappears is usually something like "goodwill", which is equivalent to whatever the buyer paid above and beyond the book value of the company's assets at the time of the purchase. So compare that to the case of the record industry. Consumers are less willing to pay for music. The value of the record industry's "assets" has gone down substantially. Maybe it's time for the record companies to just write off these assets and get on with some other kind of business. I'm sure there's a huge market for T-Shirt and poster sales.
if an artist wants to get anywhere, they pretty much have to sign a contract with a big label.
So actually it is the music buyers who create the monopoly by limiting their concept of music to those artists who are "successful" or by thinking of success only in terms of being famous. I can think of many ways to judge success without considering a person's fame and renown. Why are we such suckers for Star-Power?
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We see perhaps too much beautiful people with no problems in our media (especially advertising) it can't help but affect or perceptions of ourselves, driving us down a sucking spiral of materialism.
Exactly. Madison avenue knows which side of its bread is buttered. The corporate goons could wish for nothing better than for every single one of us to feel completely worthless. The less value we feel in ourselves, the more we have to compensate, drown out, act out by buying stuff. Every industry has a direct pecuniary interest in making us feel like a sack of sH*t.
Don't buy it!
Let's face it. Industry is the biggest pirate in town. They steal your natural resources, your work ethic, your effort, your culture, your hospitality, mass produce it, shrink-wrap it and then sell it back to you.
That's a cool response. It's like an example of itself -- a kind of repackaged version of me shoved back down my throat! I give you an A+.
If you're sarcastic (55% probability), then this is supposed to be a reductio ad absurdum of my criticism. OK fine.
If you're serious (44% probability), then I agree, but with the reservation that although *some* property laws are required for a pluralistic, democratic society, since property imposes restrictions on freedom (I can't take what isn't mine) we should only have just enough property law to keep us happy. I argue that extending the idea of property to ideas is way more property law than is required.
If you're a bot (1% probability) then f**k off.
Yes, but that's half of the story. They do a fair amount of creating (ahem) "culture" by providing content for people to socialize.
I think you're underestimating people's desire to socialize by implying that they need Ally McBeal episodes to fill the void. Anything will do, even talking about the weather or gossiping about neighbors or co-workers.
Here are just a few suggestions:
The common thread is that it's better to be a participant in culture than just a consumer of it.
Capitalism may be a poor method of resource distribution -- but there is none better.
Man, you are so, like, missing the point. Even if a perfectly efficient information market *were* possible, I would still be happier with art and culture of a local or regional nature.
One of the main functions of mass media is the perpetuation and dissemination of culture. Although RIAA may be greedy about it, why is the dissemination of culture bad necessarily?
It's not bad at all. It's just that the uniformity and ubiquitousness of the content is the result of corporate design, not social interaction.
I am really happy about local and regional culture getting recognition alongside the mass produced stuff. Just because it isn't a worldwide phenomena doesn't mean it's not culture.
In most cultures, people are willing to pay for reflexive representation of values they hold. Whether it's a poster for the movie Pi or an N'Sync album, both are cultural representations and perpatuations...and people are willing to pay for both. Why is this bad?
It's not, really. What's bad is the manner in which cultural representations are distributed and then *controlled* by virtue of IP laws and copy protection and such. Also, in order to mass produce culture, you have to mass market it which means it has to be low-risk, watered-down, drab, inoffensive, and facile. Lowest common denominator. I love culture, but not stuff that's been bleached and de-boned.
Since you can rent studio time and since you can now market your music over the Internet, shouldn't most bands and artists be telling the RIAA to "blow!"?
Yeah, you would think. But the record companies seem to have convinced everyone that there is such a thing as a "star". Of course, everybody knows that stars were just an invention of the manufacturing divisions of the record industry giants. They complained to their bosses about always having to change the damn plates on the record press. They said "Hey, instead of promoting 50 artists who each sell 100,000 albums, could you please just have one artist who sells 50*100,000 albums? It would be *so* much more convenient and *profitable*.
So the record companies realized that they could make much more money by having 1 big star and mass producing copies than by having regional music with no economies of scale.
So every garage band and coffee house wannabe still labours under the illusion that one day they will be great. Maybe they will, but they won't be in control.
Intellectual property laws have done their job -- they've created a massive amount of stuff -- some good, some bad. But now the system is choking itself.
Copy protection schemes are the wrong target.
I thought they were using powder...
Hopefully not Parisites. Lawyers? Maybe.
I suppose if you consider "referring" as a kind of mapping from one well-defined object to another well-defined object, then I suppose that objects that are well-defined cannot also be random.
Actually, after I read this I realized that it is nonsense. How can a symbol that refers to something be "well-defined" independently of the thing to which it refers? No way. In fact, "referring" is probably part of what *makes* a symbol "well-defined". Being well-defined is not a quality that symbols possess intrinsically.
We now return to regularly scheduled programming...
But if you can't calculate *all* of Pi's digits, how do you know that it isn't a repeating pattern? Until you know all of the digits, it's still logically possible for there to be a sequence. If you knew all the digits, then there *would* be a pattern, but not a repeating one. I'm definitely not a mathematician (as you can tell from my original post) so I would welcome a mathematical explanation of how one can say irrefutably that Pi is non-repeating.
It's like saying that by throwin the dice more and more maybe you'll find a pattern.
This is just restating what you have already said. I could still ask of a series of dice rolls "We might find a pattern if we throw the dice enough times". Not that this is a practical possibility; I just think it is a logical possibility.
The thing with randomness is that these "patterns" cannot compress the sequence. (worth noting is that the sequence of Pi is anything but random in a information science sense, since it's well known and can be compressed to, say, "Pi")
I don't really understand the difference between random in an information science sense and random in the other sense you were talking about. Do you mean that anything I can refer to using a symbol is not random? I suppose if you consider "referring" as a kind of mapping from one well-defined object to another well-defined object, then I suppose that objects that are well-defined cannot also be random. But this doesn't make sense to me either, because Pi is well-defined in the sense of being a ratio of parts of a mathematically defined object. But referring to the ratio is not the same as referring to the decimal expansion of the ratio. This of course means that my (light-hearted) comparison couldn't be taken as much more than a figure of speech. That's really all that it was meant to be.
Circle has hardly anything to do with this "chaotic quality", since most of the real numbers also have this quality.
But if the circle has that quality, the fact that other real numbers have that quality doesn't take that quality away from the circle. The circle may not have anything to do with the definition or essence of randomness, but that doesn't mean the contrast is any less interesting. Who says randomness, or any other mathematical construct, has an essence at all? Maybe mathematics is just a very complicated, hard-wired social behaviour, or a set of made-up rules for moving game pieces around. What do *you* mean by essence?
The expectation value of the position of any certain string of numbers is actually as long as that certain string. It might be easier to wait for some hwrandom() to produce Romeo and Juliet.
I gather that by expectation value you mean something like "the earliest position at which a string with any N digits can be expected to be found". So I agree totally. Where can I expect to find the first occurrence of *any* one digit? Well, at the first digit, I guess. And so on and so forth until you have Romeo and Juliet. That doesn't seem too earth-shattering to me, but I'm sure I don't understand all the consequences. Like I said before, I'm really not arguing at all, I was just attempting some light-hearted word play. But regardless of that, what you said hasn't convinced me that hwrandom() *cannot* produce Romeo and Juliet, given enough monkeys.
Would this be considered non-repeating? It seems like it should, but it's so damn orderly.
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Don't worry, it's just some lawyers helping out their buddies who happen to own some intellectual property!
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Yes, we can give you any celebrity as your own personal plaything. All you have to do is send us the script (or enter it on our website) and we'll give you 5 minutes to remember. 5.99/minute. Long distance charges may apply.
I think the guy is a real character, and some of what he says made sense to me. I like his energy. For that matter, I also enjoyed listening to Henry Rollins do his rant.
From your other posts, you didn't seem like an actual communist...are you just commie-curious?
I'm totally middle of the road, really. I think it's stupid to believe that an economy could survive without paying for some social structure through collective effort. On the other hand, it is also ludicrous to think that the requisite collective effort could be achieved under anything but the most favourable economic conditions. You can't go around arbitrarily taking stuff away from people and then expect them to participate wholeheartedly in society-building. They'd do it grudgingly, the way people in Western Countries are acting right now. They would rather withdraw from society than participate.
Governments have earned some of their infamy, but a lot of the survivalist, anti-government sentiment has been nurtured by multinationals, much the way that the entertainment industry nurtures our perception that all worthwhile information comes from -- and only from -- the mass media. It's in the interests of these behemoths to weaken governments of any stripe, the same way sellers of all kinds stand to benefit from our personal weakness and shame.
I guess I'm not sounding so middle of the road now. But I firmly believe we should solve our problems by debate and science and reason and passionate optimism, rather than by ideologies that breed hatred and suspicion. I'm not into throwing molotov cocktails at WTO meetings, if that's what you were thinking. If what I described sounds to you like an "actual communist" then yes, I suppose I am an actual communist. I certainly wouldn't be ashamed of that label, but I don't really think I'm quite so ideologically rigid.
If anything, I am a Participatory Economics - ite. For an example of what that can be, see the Mondragon Cafe and Bookstore. I am slightly commie-curious. Just don't tell my wife. What she doesn't know won't hurt her.
There. You now know much more about me than you wanted to, I'm sure.
Yes, I agree they exert a lot of influence. I was trying to draw attention to the ease with which they wield that influence. For instance, one might assert that music that makes it onto the shelves of HMV or Tower Records cannot be "indy" by definition. There's no sense in which anything that is mass-produced and distributed in little packages could be called "independent". It depends on a whole infrastructure of mass markets and media.
I had a funny experience the other day that really left a lasting impression of how impossible it is to have real music when everyone thinks real music comes in a jewel case.
I have a nine-year-old daughter. A couple of weeks ago, I took her to a huge street festival with tons of live music and activities going on. There was a really funky band playing on stage, having lots of fun. My daughter called me to come and see something. She was standing closer to the stage than I was, so I assumed she wanted me to see the musicians up close. What she really wanted me to see was a discarded 7-Eleven Slurpee cup with a picture of Britney Spears on it.
What can real musicians do to compete? Nobody can be "indy" if they're already on the shelves of a music store. They've already sold out by allowing their work to be mass-produced.
I've probably contradicted myself a dozen times, but I stand by every word of it, dammit!!
I guess if I was fool enough to part with my money to hear Jelo Biafra, then yes, I would probably be the kind of person who would agree to that.
I like that: "NY Times Freelance Guy" emblazoned on a Tee! I think you're on to something!
I would pay to hear a lecture. In fact, I have done that many times. And I suppose I'd buy the T-Shirt, too (like I did for Jelo Biafra's spoken word concert) but only if you *promise* to admit that you're wrong.
Obviously you have been well conditioned by the forces of mass consumerism. I find 'community access' television to be far more entertaining and informative than most of what I see on 'high quality, nationally recognized, brand name' television.
And as far as your contention that people only work for financial reward: you must never have had to raise a child.
Too often, people forget their real recourse - if somebody wants too much money for their work, don't buy it.
To use this argument as a defense of copyright is to miss the point of copyright. Copyright wasn't meant to turn creative output into personal legal tender. Copyright was intended to meet a social objective: to encourage creative output for the benefit of all citizens.
If a government sanctioned monopoly gives an artist enough market power to discourage distribution rather than submit to lower prices, then the system is failing. Just saying "then don't buy it" defeats the whole purpose of copyright. If artists are going to price things in a range that makes most people say "forget it", then the government has to rethink the way it encourages distribution.
I find it strange that people seem to use two standards to judge value.
- On the one hand they say that a thing's value is whatever the market is willing to pay for it.
- On the other hand (usually when they are trying to defend property rights) they claim that resources and time invested in something give it an intrinsic value.
This is like the split between the book value and market value of an asset. Sometimes the asset's market value goes to zero. If the market value stays at zero, at some point it becomes irrational to say that it is really worth anything.Just look at Nortel Networks or JDS Uniphase for an example of how assets sometimes need to "disappear". The asset that disappears is usually something like "goodwill", which is equivalent to whatever the buyer paid above and beyond the book value of the company's assets at the time of the purchase. So compare that to the case of the record industry. Consumers are less willing to pay for music. The value of the record industry's "assets" has gone down substantially. Maybe it's time for the record companies to just write off these assets and get on with some other kind of business. I'm sure there's a huge market for T-Shirt and poster sales.
So actually it is the music buyers who create the monopoly by limiting their concept of music to those artists who are "successful" or by thinking of success only in terms of being famous. I can think of many ways to judge success without considering a person's fame and renown. Why are we such suckers for Star-Power?