Brian Eno / John Cale, “In the Backroom”, from the 1990 album Wrong Way Up:
When Señoritas walk at night,
Habañeros on the move,
It’s music to their ears in the backroom.
If there’s money to be made,
And it’s a hundred in the shade and in the backroom,
She’s sentimental like the last
Of the foreigners running past her to the backroom.
And if things aren’t sweet in Mecca
She’ll be begging for forgiveness in the vacuum.
They’re taking pains with California,
And they’re guaranteeing boredom for the monsoon.
And apart from what was offered
There were mothers buying orphans at the auction
Youre much better off in Twos
If you’re coming to see the carnage in the backroom.
Doubled over on the table
I was concentrating harder in the backroom.
Weaving in and out of consciousness
Hiding out behind the entrance to the backroom.
It took longer than expected:
They had difficulty swallowing capsules.
We had a keener nose for trouble
Than the sniffer-dogs at Heathrow –
You’d be trousers down in no time in the backroom.
Almost nothing in the papers…
Told me it happened when they emptied out the backroom.
A great song of incidents.
A wonderful thought from Boris Vian, quoted in A half-century homage to France’s master-prankster, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the author / jazz musician / artist’s death:
[Vian's] heightened sense of the absurd reached its apotheosis when he joined the Collège de pataphysique, a prestigious circle of French writers and academics studying pataphysics, a virtual science invented at the end of the 19th century by the author Alfred Jarry.
They held absurd honours ceremonies with strange decorations. Vian was promoted to Transcendent Satrap, in charge of the Extraordinary Commission on Clothing. Along with illustrious French names like Raymond Queneau, Eugène Ionesco and Jacques Prévert, they engaged in serious, scientific discussion of stupid ideas, such as crossing Paris using land tides in a boat made of small holes.
“I am applying myself to thinking about things that I think people will not think about,” Vian said in a radio recording…
Emphasis mine, because it’s a great credo to live by. Thanks to Tosh Berman for the tip on this article and for turning me on to Boris Vian. We should all be so lucky as to cross Paris using land tides in a boat made of small holes.
Leave it to science to transform dada into data. A new study suggests that the experience of nonsense, “may prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss — in mathematical equations, in language, in the world at large,” according to a recent article in the New York Times, How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect.
The article continues:
“We’re so motivated to get rid of that feeling that we look for meaning and coherence elsewhere,” said Travis Proulx, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and lead author of the paper appearing in the journal Psychological Science. “We channel the feeling into some other project, and it appears to improve some kinds of learning.”
Researchers have long known that people cling to their personal biases more tightly when feeling threatened. After thinking about their own inevitable death, they become more patriotic, more religious and less tolerant of outsiders, studies find. When insulted, they profess more loyalty to friends — and when told they’ve done poorly on a trivia test, they even identify more strongly with their school’s winning teams.
In a series of new papers, Dr. Proulx and Steven J. Heine, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, argue that these findings are variations on the same process: maintaining meaning, or coherence. The brain evolved to predict, and it does so by identifying patterns.
When those patterns break down — as when a hiker stumbles across an easy chair sitting deep in the woods, as if dropped from the sky — the brain gropes for something, anything that makes sense. It may retreat to a familiar ritual, like checking equipment. But it may also turn its attention outward, the researchers argue, and notice, say, a pattern in animal tracks that was previously hidden. The urge to find a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one.
That right there almost seems like a neurological explanation for the invention of religion (and art): The urge to find a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one.
“There’s more research to be done on the theory,” said Michael Inzlicht, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, because it may be that nervousness, not a search for meaning, leads to heightened vigilance. But he added that the new theory was “plausible, and it certainly affirms my own meaning system; I think they’re onto something.”
Read the full article — it goes on to cite a study where a group of test subjects who first read “The Country Doctor” by Kafka performed a letter-string matching test 30 percent better than a control group that read a more linear non-Kafka story.
This latest quest by science is trying to show that “nonsense makes sense”, which, paradoxically, would make it non-nonsense, right?
Researchers familiar with the new work say it would be premature to incorporate film shorts by David Lynch, say, or compositions by John Cage into school curriculums. For one thing, no one knows whether exposure to the absurd can help people with explicit learning, like memorizing French. For another, studies have found that people in the grip of the uncanny tend to see patterns where none exist — becoming more prone to conspiracy theories [or religion -- a weeping Virgin Mary statue, anyone?], for example. The urge for order satisfies itself, it seems, regardless of the quality of the evidence.
That’s too bad — John Cage should be added to the school curriculum regardless of the prematurity of these findings.
Uh-oh, I feel the grip of the uncanny overcoming me as I type. Will the urge for odor satisfy itself with me?
Still, the new research supports what many experimental artists, habitual travelers and other novel seekers have always insisted: at least some of the time, disorientation begets creative thinking.
I’ll think to that, ye uncanny drinkers!
I just stumbled upon a great essay by Philip K. Dick, written in 1978, a few years before he die: How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later. It is longish, but an entertaining read. Here are some excerpts:
It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe — and I am dead serious when I say this — do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.
…In Plato’s Timaeus, God does not create the universe, as does the Christian God; He simply finds it one day. It is in a state of total chaos. God sets to work to transform the chaos into order. That idea appeals to me, and I have adapted it to fit my own intellectual needs: What if our universe started out as not quite real, a sort of illusion, as the Hindu religion teaches, and God, out of love and kindness for us, is slowly transmuting it, slowly and secretly, into something real?
…Just about the time that Supreme Court was ruling that the Nixon tapes had to be turned over to the special prosecutor, I was eating at a Chinese restaurant in Yorba Linda, the town in California where Nixon went to school — where he grew up, worked at a grocery store, where there is a park named after him, and of course the Nixon house, simple clapboard and all that. In my fortune cookie, I got the following fortune:
DEEDS DONE IN SECRET HAVE A
WAY OF BECOMING FOUND OUT.
I mailed the slip of paper to the White House, mentioning that the Chinese restaurant was located within a mile of Nixon’s original house, and I said, “I think a mistake has been made; by accident I got Mr. Nixon’s fortune. Does he have mine?” The White House did not answer.
…The summation of much pre-Socratic theology and philosophy can be stated as follows: The kosmos is not as it appears to be, and what it probably is, at its deepest level, is exactly that which the human being is at his deepest level — call it mind or soul, it is something unitary which lives and thinks, and only appears to be plural and material. Much of this view reaches us through the Logos doctrine regarding Christ. The Logos was both that which thought, and the thing which it thought: thinker and thought together. The universe, then, is thinker and thought, and since we are part of it, we as humans are, in the final analysis, thoughts of and thinkers of those thoughts.
Early afternoon yesterday, before the news broke about the plane ditching into the frigid Hudson river, I made this larger drawing from a chunk of words I first entered in the small book on Jan 7th (click the pic for a larger version):
Is it megalomaniacal of me to think that I might be God, controlling fate with my words?
In a feat of amazing piloting by heroic captain Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III, All 155 Escape Jet’s Plunge Into Hudson after a flock of geese take out both engines of the Airbus A320.
Here’s a great cell phone photo snapped moments after the jet hit the drink by a tourist who was Twittering away at the time on a ferry bound from Manhattan to New Jersey that was one of the first on the scene to help rescue passengers (click for a larger version):
Here is the photographer, Janis Krums’ succinct caption: “There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.”
More evidence that the world has gone crazy, in the form of a major, seven-site coordinated terrorist attack on Mumbai, India. Here is the five-star Taj Mahal Hotel on fire, from CNN.com:
Super geeky, but a beautiful image — click on it for a larger version:
Image created by Perry Hung, who explains:
This is a visualization I made for funsies of a linux boot sequence where each function is a node and each edge represents a function call, direct branch, or indirect branch. Nodes are laid out using an unweighted force-directed layout algorithm, where each node is simulated as if it were electrically repulsive and had springs between nodes.
The little “lobe” on the left is made up the interrupt processing routines (irq vectors, irq_svc, etc). The tail at the top is the bootloader. The main thing in the middle is the linux boot sequence.
The entire graph represents a call chain from the bootloader up until it jumps into userspace to a shell prompt
edit: this picture was intended to be “art” and not something with a whole lot of utility. yes, you can zoom in and see individual nodes and control flow. yes, there are better layouts for this information. I have collected much of this information to find commonly executed parts of the kernel to optimize aggressively.
My irq vectors are in a tizzy!
Here’s a great shot from English Russia (click the pic to enlarge):
Says English Russia, which posted a series of pictures and a video of this smokestack collapse:
After the Soviet Era too much of objects stay abandoned in Russia and with the modern rise of development of new business and residential areas more and more are need to be removed from the terrain. Many controlled demolition companies act on this market, sometimes they have some nice objects to remove like those two old factory chimneys.
Time for another edition of Newsmash, a mashup of headlines taken from CNN.com over the last 24 hours. For added fun, guess which of the headlines below was NOT altered in any way, but appears just as it did on CNN.com (*answer following):
Amish invade Florida town
Baby squirrel to help count California rats
Best dressed sheriff loves house standing
Blind masseurs jump from bridge
Candy may prevent attack
How to avoid places that are good for teeth
How we got into this meltdown
Is boutique passenger jet worth the price?
Japanese glasses caught in submarine
Man finds dead satellite
Medicine gains in mass popularity
Mystery of bloody money mess
Orbiting shark scrambles for safe milk
Parents you’ve never heard of
Reality warned to back off
Rescuers free giant lizards from toilet
Russian roulette takes center stage
Squealing cat beats pig to death
This administration allegedly survives hurricane
Who gives better answers, people or miracle cat?
*And the winner is… Blind masseurs jump from bridge. Sometimes you just can’t beat reality, so… Reality warned to back off!
Ike Wavewall, a future persona of mine. Currently the title of this great image of Hurricane Ike making his presence felt on along the Texas coast. Ike has already innundated Galveston Island. From CNN.com: Sea floods Texas island; get out or ‘certain death’. I don’t recall ever hearing a warning as definitively dire as this one from the weather service:
“All neighborhoods … and possibly entire coastal communities … will be inundated during the peak storm tide,” the weather service warned. “Persons not heeding evacuation orders in single family one- or two-story homes will face certain death.”
That’s quite a guarantee. Apparently the last time such language was used, three years ago, a hurricane named Katrina was bearing down on the Gulf coast.
Now, if just by not evacuating and remaining at or near the coast makes you eligible for “certain death”, what exactly is this guy on the left getting set up for? Immediate certain death? No, I got it: Sudden Death. Sudden Onset Death Syndrome (SODS). Or, Hurricane Induced Denial & Elimination Syndrome (HIDES).
Get out of there, people. Get out.
If you want more proof that physicists are the best sculptors working today, beyond the Large Hadron Collider about to come online in Switzerland, look no further than the Large Helical Device Project in Japan — click the pic to see a larger version:
Whatever this thing does, it does it beautifully.
