| | Rare is the book that increases my admiration for both open source software and my Grandmother. | comments: Leave a comment   |
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This morning by chance, I picked for my subway reading the copy of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article on "The Church-Turing Thesis" I had printed months ago. It was only later in the day that ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) rachiestar pointed out to me that today is Alan Turing's birthday. Because I owe the man quite a bit--not the most nor least my livelihood--I thought it would be appropriate to write something to honor the man.
( For the philosophers... ) Turing defended a thesis along the lines of "Every effectively computable process can be performed by a Turing machine." But in Turing's day a "computer" was a human being engaged in a rule-governed but otherwise mindless clerical task. The notion of "effectively computable" is explicitly defined in terms of what a person could accomplish with exact instructions, pencil and paper, finite time and no insight, ingenuity, or creativity whatsoever. In other words, it was defined in terms of a particular kind of materially necessary "mental" labor to which thousands if not millions of people were enslaved.
( some supporting quotations )
We should hail Turing as a liberator. For with the invention of the digital computer he made obsolete an entire genus of life-negating and alienating labor. The assembly line is to the dehumanization of physical existence as the clerical desk is to the dehumanization of mental existence. In the place of the clerical class, Turing established the hacker class, a class with more freedom and more potential for praxis than any than that have stood before it.
One commonly hears the worry, if not the lament, that technology is encroaching too far into the domain of life and the mind. Without making any claims about the extent of the technological infrastructure, it can be safely said of Turing's technology--the technology of computing--that the domains into which it encroaches are virtually by definition not worth of our life and our minds. Every new task conquered by computation is one that has burdened us and prevented us from engaging in lives of freedom, passion, and genius.
So thank you, Alan Turing. We owe you so much. Happy birthday. | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| I asked the bouncer if he had ever been at a party like this. "Let me tell you," he answered, "the shortcut to the bathroom is through there." He pointed at one of the man-sized holes newly punched through an interior wall.
( Read more... ) | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| A friend of mine, Lee, an aspiring writer, asked me to review a draft of his novel, Archipelago. I accepted. The favor of draft review is one that I will not deny anyone, so rarely do my vices take on the sweet character of a gift.
I am able to muster competitive instincts against printed text far better than I can against another man. The pen is a switchblade. Fat and clumsy writing lies bleeding into the margins. Survivors are marked with a star and passed on.
As far as I've read, this draft of Archipelago suffers from an intrusive narrator but gets by on an unfolding mystery plot and well-written lesbian sex.
The summer fiction edition of The New Yorker filled my train reading vacuum the other day. There was a good short story, "The Tiger's Wife", the first chapter of R. Crumb's recent illustration of the Book of Genesis, and a review of "The Program Era" by Louis Menand.
I liked The Metaphysical Club and appreciate Menand's position that (philosophical) pragmatism has been and is a relevant cultural force in America. It was interesting to read something by him on an entirely different topic. "The Program Era" is a book about how Creative Writing programs have influenced postwar American fiction. Not knowing much of the ins and outs of postwar American fiction, the main thing I took away from the article was a new appreciation for the fact that the institutions of fiction writing have ins and outs. Authors have lineages much like academics; they have been taught by so-and-so, and they have read so-and-so. There is tension between writing-as-craft and the conviction that irreducible individual genius is a necessary ingredient. There are ideological divides. Etc.
All this thinking about writing and exposure to the fumes of The New Yorker's new short fiction factory reminded me of one of my favorite short stories. It is a single paragraph, worth the read, and behind this cut:
( Altmann's Tongue )
That writing--the kind that cons you, trips you up, and leaves with your wallet--is my favorite. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | I take the physical damage dealt to my apartment as one of the many signs that last night's party went quite well. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| On the surface, Table Fighting is a "sport" in which mechanically enhanced tables (as in, the furniture) do battle for the favor of judges in timed rounds.
Jowett and I went to see a table fighting competition behind a deli in Chelsea a couple weeks ago.
( Read more... ) | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| Lest my journaling these past few months make you think my life is now devoted only to work, vulgar leisure*, and ROCKING OUT, I'm going to start a new series of posts called Arts and Culture, whose title is self-explanatory.
A few weeks ago I saw God of Carnage, which is a Broadway play that is famous lately because:
- The guy who played Tony Soprano on The Sopranos is in it
- All the actors in it were awarded Tony Awards
QUIZ: Did Tony Soprano win a Tony Award for God of Carnage?
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* A reason why I haven't posted anything interesting lately is because I haven't had stable internet** in my apartment for almost a year. That means that when I've posted, it's been while procrastinating at work, where apparently my inner monologue has a serious T-Rex*** filter. But Summer has come, and with it new neighbors, and with them new neighborly unsecure wifi. So now I can lay on the snoot instead of sleeping.
** My Firefox spell-check plug-in disapproves of "internet" in all lower case. It recommends, marvelously, "INTERNET." In all caps. Something has gone horribly right.
*** The webcomic character, not the glam rock band. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| I'm throwing another party this Saturday night. Sabin School, an awesome friend of mine, created this flyer and spammed everyone else who was invited with it. It is about the most compelling flyer I could imagine. He is an excellent friend.
"It's Practically Summer / TCHHBTTDTBUP" is the party theme. TCHHBTTDTBUP stands for The Cops Here Have Better Things To Do Than Break Up Parties.
Based on the people who are rumored to be coming (rilan, everabridged, rachiestar, Sabin School, Alpha Man, Zach, Whitney Wood, to name a few) I am pretty excited for it.
If you've got a way to get to Brooklyn on Saturday I suggest you attend. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| Ok, so this is pretty boring but:
Good: - I had a great time in Providence. As always.
- Last night I played a show with The Saltines at Union Hall in which, unlike the past two gigs, I was playing on every song and in all sorts of chord progressions that are not 12 bar blues and in a room with a ton more people. Maybe 60? Quite scary. I couldn't hear myself play in the lower register for much of the show because the monitors weren't turned toward me right, so I was convinced I was messing up the entire time. But not so. Crowd went wild for the solos, and afterwards I got a ton of positive feedback from the band and people in the audience saying how great I was and how well I meshed with the band, etc. It's getting to the point where I might as well just be cocky about this sort of thing.
The other huge thing about that concert was that a ton of friends and coworkers came out to see it, so I was playing for a lot of people I know. Thanks to all of you who came out for the show. - Tonight I've got nothing to do except chill out.
Bad: - I'm getting sick. I'm close to certain it's NOT swine flu, mostly on the grounds that that would be really dumb.
Ugly: - I've determined that what I ought to be doing is renegotiating the rent on my lease before renewing it. I'm pretty sure this is correct because I'm in a great bargaining position--I could just peace out to another place in the neighborhood that's cheaper--but I've never had to haggle for something so important before, so the task is daunting. Also, I'm still looking for a roommate for when Hal moves out, so I'm taking on the responsibility of finding a subtenant if I go this route.
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| | Current Music: | "Be Done" -- Garaj Mahal | | Subject: | Rockstar | | Time: | 03:53 pm |
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| I am a man with many flaws.
But say what you will about them, I have this going for me: on a good day, I fucking own at the harmonica.
( Read more... ) | | comments: 7 comments or Leave a comment |
| My one regret of the day is not making it to a Maundy Thursday service.
EDIT: I made it to a Good Friday service instead. It was a good decision.
( Read more... ) | | comments: Leave a comment |
| So, I recently got a new laptop for work. It's a suped up Lenovo Thinkpad. I dumped the copy of Windows XP that came with it and am running Ubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex." (Ubuntu is one of the more popular flavors of Linux, known for its usability.)
Going from a clean install of Ubuntu to a machine customized for your needs is an exhilarating experience, for a few reasons. First, everything is free. You realize there's something you need to do, but you don't have the application or libraries for it. So you go to your "Synaptic Package Manager," and just basically do an on-line search for the software that does what you need. Two clicks, and it's installed. You run the software and often things just work, immediately.
Another awesome thing is that a lot of these applications--especially the little stuff--are just written by some guy somewhere. So the documentation is dotted with Monty Python references, random quotes, sometimes sort of funnily worded descriptions. When investigating the software you're using, it's clear that it was written by a person, or many people, and that when you download their stuff you are treating yourself to the fruits of a community of developers that proud of their work and proud to have you use it so easily.
Strangely, this sense of being part of something larger is highlighted most when something doesn't work immediately. To the uninitiated, this can be scary and discouraging. But after this happens a few times, you discover the process for solving these problems, and it's simple. You copy whatever error message you're getting, with maybe a couple keywords about the context you're in, into Google, and you press Enter. Because every single time, you'll find that a hundred people have already had the same issue, found the answer, and have written blog posts about it or talked about it on forums. Again, this wide community of users and developers just spontaneously produces this documentation, for whatever reason. It's often a direct monetary incentive, but then that information is available to everyone on google. Often it's just somebody who figured out something cool and wants more hits to his blog.
I was psyched about open source stuff and its potential way before I had any direct experience with it, but the deeper I get into it the more rewarding it is. Even just as a user it carries a completely different phenomenology of consumption than proprietary software. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| A lifetime in the northeast teaches you to expect Spring's awkwardness. It announces itself too early then takes forever to crawl up the driveway. Trips on the doorstep. Trampled by and overeager blizzard. Embarrassed, it retreats to the bushes. Then it returns with affected dignity.
But it does come. Sunlight at 7:00 am reminds you that you still haven't purchased curtains. The morning sounds of blasted-at-red-light hiphop turn to a harmony of passing hiphop and birdsong. Heavy coats are donned, regretted, shed, then longed for. Night's prisoner's roam out on parole.
( Read more... ) | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| In other news:
I believe I mentioned a while back that some friends and I were getting together to play a pencil and paper RPG for nostalgia's sake. SHUT UP. THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT.
That game has continued, and it has been awesome. But some have been frustrated by the game mechanics (Shadowrun, 4th Ed.). Plus, some more people want to join our group. So we are going to start a second campaign with a new rules system (the creatively named d20 Modern, in which the setting is "modern" compared to most RPG's and one rolls a 20 sided die to resolve most situations.)
An exciting thing about this particular game (which we have yet to play) is that we all (or at least several of us) intend to trade off the GM position, meaning that at times each of us will step out and design an adventure and run the game for the others.
The dynamic this has created is really interesting. Each of us is looking at the game in terms of both what would be fun for us to GM and what would be fun to play, and we all feel empowered to have input into the setting. Four of us basically spent Sunday just reading through the copious rulebooks and supplements tossing out and honing down ideas.
As a result, I've been able to think of basically nothing else except how sweet this game is going to be, and how sweet my post-apocalyptic detective/investigative reporter character is going to be, since Saturday night. I am thinking about it right now. It's going to be totally frickin' sweet. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| This gig happened.
The band was called The Big Hat, and was made up of a really warm, considerate bunch of guys. One student, others recently out of college. I rehearsed with them for the first time, acoustic and without their drum set, yesterday afternoon, just going through the song a few times. The song was "Our Love Is Drifting," a Paul Butterfield Blues Band song, a straightforward twelve bar blues. The original track doesn't have harp on it (unusual for a Butterfield song), but the band was really generous about giving me space to solo in addition to having me play around the lyrics. Insisted on it, really, despite my inclination to stick to a supporting role for my first shot.
( Read more... )
The band talked a lot about wanting to bring in more guest performers to increase turnout and vary their act, and seemed psyched to work more with a harp player and, specifically, me. I'd be psyched to play again, because it was the most fun I've had in a long time. So with any luck this will open up more opportunities. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
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