There are *so* many ways of analyzing the role of gold (or other commodity standards) in the constitution of money. Remember folks, it's just a consensual hallucination.
Racism and Tolkien's Dark and Slanty Hordes
on
Lord of the Geeks
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· Score: 1
I've read LOTR more times than I'd care to remember. The first time was a sublime rush. Eventually though, as I matured (and my voice broke) I began to see the LOTR's incipient racism (a sad by-product of mid-20th century Eurocentrism and perhaps the Bloemfontein influence) as unfortunate and childish.
Of course the movie will erase the racial stereotypes from the invading hordes -- it'd be commercial suicide to do otherwise. But it remains in the books, a terribly bad note in an otherwise fine story for children and young adults.
There is of course the latent paedophilia inherent in the use of "Halflings" as romantic and heroic protagonists. I'm down with Michael Moorcock with this one. Tolkien was probably even more unconscious of this, perhaps even moreso than Lewis Carroll.
All great books have flaws, recognizing them honestly and coming to terms with them is a sign of maturity. But wait, this is Slashdot. Flame those hoity-toity Village Voice liberals!
There's a good article in April's Scientific American on Lanier's new work on virtual presence using Internet2. It's been renamed "tele-immersion", apparently. It's a good way to soak up all that extra bandwidth.
There's a good review of a Nicholson Baker rant against Librarians in general for their sins of deliberately pulping the paper records of the past 130 years and replacing them with decomposing and badly executed microfilm facsimiles.
It seems that Vannevar Bush's infatuation with microfilm was shared by many in the WW2 OSS community, and this seems to have led to a misguided attempt to replace papers and books with microfilm in the interests of "efficiency".
Right on! Whatever about him doing a Bill Gates and fighting cancer with Windows or whatever, he kind of fell on his sword in a very Nippon sense. When's the last time you saw an American CEO offer megabucks restitution for screwing up the company they were entrusted by the shareholders with running? Usually, they only take their snouts out of the options trough long enough to scream for more salary before jumping to another luckless company.
Property laws are nice, but assuming all your success comes from internal causes is essentialist and circular and pretty short-sighted. The West's ability to leverage its temporarily superior armaments and logistics technology to pillage Africa and Asia for human capital and raw materials undoubtedly enriched one side while weakening the other. The imposition today of a structured system of foreign intervention, subsidies, and sanctions that many interpret as a "free" market perpetuates the West's advantage. People used to make no apologies about this sort of thing and call it "mercantilism" but now we get these complicated books trying to pretend it all happened through good old-fashioned Protestant work ethic and responsibility? The success of capital-based systems in some of the richer Asian countries shows that you don't necessarily require Protestants, property rights and democratically ansewrrable organizations... sometimes a big army will do just as well (PRC).
Art can be *done* using programming, just as it can use acrylics, or sound, or analogy and metaphor. But is most programming art? Hardly. Are house painters creating art, or filling in blank spaces?
Creativity is all about psychodynamics...
http://www.human-nature.com/free-associations/gl ov er/chap6.html
This whole reductionist canard about genomes and phenomes is at least semi-mistaken. It's quite obvious to me that although fundamentally identical human genetic material has existed for many, many millenia, only comparatively recently did recognizably *human* social organizations emerge. the tendency towards civilisation is not innate -- it's in large part a product of social interaction. That's where a huge part of the emergent properties come from.
That's the problem with inward-looking genetic reductionism and the simple-minded comparison of genetic code to computer programming. You have to look outward as well... to the interstitial spaces between genetic individuals. Foucault recognized this, or Jung.
I've been hearing about e-paper for *years* -- and so far it's been about as much a success as nuclear fusion. It's a nerd fantasy. Until e-paper becomes as available, as cheap, and as universal as the last great printing invention (web offset litho) e-paper is and deserves to be a plaything of the rich and bored.
Slashdot Mirror
Ken MacLeod noted this in a Salon article.
There are *so* many ways of analyzing the role of gold (or other commodity standards) in the constitution of money. Remember folks, it's just a consensual hallucination.
e s/ vpmc.htm
http://www.rcgfrfi.easynet.co.uk/marxism/articl
I've read LOTR more times than I'd care to remember. The first time was a sublime rush. Eventually though, as I matured (and my voice broke) I began to see the LOTR's incipient racism (a sad by-product of mid-20th century Eurocentrism and perhaps the Bloemfontein influence) as unfortunate and childish.
Of course the movie will erase the racial stereotypes from the invading hordes -- it'd be commercial suicide to do otherwise. But it remains in the books, a terribly bad note in an otherwise fine story for children and young adults.
There is of course the latent paedophilia inherent in the use of "Halflings" as romantic and heroic protagonists. I'm down with Michael Moorcock with this one. Tolkien was probably even more unconscious of this, perhaps even moreso than Lewis Carroll.
All great books have flaws, recognizing them honestly and coming to terms with them is a sign of maturity. But wait, this is Slashdot. Flame those hoity-toity Village Voice liberals!
The authors also have a dog'n'pony show of the book's contents here.
There's a good article in April's Scientific American on Lanier's new work on virtual presence using Internet2. It's been renamed "tele-immersion", apparently. It's a good way to soak up all that extra bandwidth.
There's a good review of a Nicholson Baker rant against Librarians in general for their sins of deliberately pulping the paper records of the past 130 years and replacing them with decomposing and badly executed microfilm facsimiles.
It seems that Vannevar Bush's infatuation with microfilm was shared by many in the WW2 OSS community, and this seems to have led to a misguided attempt to replace papers and books with microfilm in the interests of "efficiency".
Right on! Whatever about him doing a Bill Gates and fighting cancer with Windows or whatever, he kind of fell on his sword in a very Nippon sense. When's the last time you saw an American CEO offer megabucks restitution for screwing up the company they were entrusted by the shareholders with running? Usually, they only take their snouts out of the options trough long enough to scream for more salary before jumping to another luckless company.
Property laws are nice, but assuming all your success comes from internal causes is essentialist and circular and pretty short-sighted. The West's ability to leverage its temporarily superior armaments and logistics technology to pillage Africa and Asia for human capital and raw materials undoubtedly enriched one side while weakening the other. The imposition today of a structured system of foreign intervention, subsidies, and sanctions that many interpret as a "free" market perpetuates the West's advantage. People used to make no apologies about this sort of thing and call it "mercantilism" but now we get these complicated books trying to pretend it all happened through good old-fashioned Protestant work ethic and responsibility? The success of capital-based systems in some of the richer Asian countries shows that you don't necessarily require Protestants, property rights and democratically ansewrrable organizations... sometimes a big army will do just as well (PRC).
Art can be *done* using programming, just as it can use acrylics, or sound, or analogy and metaphor. But is most programming art? Hardly. Are house painters creating art, or filling in blank spaces?
l ov er/chap6.html
Creativity is all about psychodynamics...
http://www.human-nature.com/free-associations/g
This whole reductionist canard about genomes and phenomes is at least semi-mistaken. It's quite obvious to me that although fundamentally identical human genetic material has existed for many, many millenia, only comparatively recently did recognizably *human* social organizations emerge. the tendency towards civilisation is not innate -- it's in large part a product of social interaction. That's where a huge part of the emergent properties come from.
That's the problem with inward-looking genetic reductionism and the simple-minded comparison of genetic code to computer programming. You have to look outward as well... to the interstitial spaces between genetic individuals. Foucault recognized this, or Jung.
I've been hearing about e-paper for *years* -- and so far it's been about as much a success as nuclear fusion. It's a nerd fantasy. Until e-paper becomes as available, as cheap, and as universal as the last great printing invention (web offset litho) e-paper is and deserves to be a plaything of the rich and bored.
Socialists get laid more, everyone knows this.
Even Abel Ferrara and some cool actors couldn't rescue Gibson's "New Rose Hotel".
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0133122
I'm beginning to see a pattern here. Doesn't bode well for the Neuromancer movie.
Now, a movie of Jeff Noon's "Vurt", now that's an entirely different proposition. Kind of Trainspotting-meets-The Matrix.