For a bit of a lesson (I read it this morning, but I know I read it in Zinn at one point as well), follow follow follow follow. Try to remember that time in September…

The electric nature does not seem to do nearly so much as the networked and programmed natures, although the programmed/networked natures are of course dependent upon the electric foundation. Networks of electric force can of course be re-sequenced, but a brighter screen is an insignificant transformation when compared to the variations that can be induced through networking/programming (think light bulb dimmer switch versus a battle between the dimmer switch and a Kurzwellian Ourmind).

Once symbols, or meanings, enter the picture, such as beacon fires, the alphabet, morse code, , a program class or library, an operating system, once this has happened, lenses become significantly variable. There is an encoded beheld and a decoding beholder. I can’t appreciate Cervantes like Borges can, etc (if you follow the link, do a search for “flemish”). Human sight can’t appreciate Bat sonar, etc.. In similar fashion, Firefox sees differently than Explorer, which sees differently than Elinks, and Elinks sees differently than a text editor.

As we move towards web 4.etc, many lenses will be produced. These lenses will be to Firefox/Webkit as the nose of a dog is to the smelling organ of a rock.

So what is the content of this post? In one way, it is text (define, please). In another, it is HTML, in others, it is PHP, TCP/IP packets, bursts of electricity. Images, such as, randomly, this one, are part of the content. But if you have images blocked are they part of the content? Do you change the content with your lens, or is the content available, and you just pick what you want? Are you reading this in a feed reader? Do you have NoScript installed? What about Karma Blocker? Are you blocking my blog monetization and my unnecessary drain on your processor resources? Do script blockers save the planet?

Questions about content and perceiver can of course be posed about many objects. Film for example. We don’t watch the actual film reel. That would be boring. It just sits there, in all it’s SirCumfNerential grandeur. We watch a projection of light through the spinning ordered reel. Now that’s a movie. But the level of complexity seems much greater when we talk about computers and computer observers (browsers, us, other computers).

I thought I’d also say a word about blog post goodness, as this was mentioned in class as well. Many blog posts nowadays end with invitations to comment, such as ‘What do you think?’. This is part of community creation and monetization, and also, really, SEO. On the SEO note, let me say that this post has not been optimized for search engines, only optimized for me and my audience in this moment (whatever that means). And it’s rhetoric is pretty flawed, I think, especially in the beginning, but at least it wasn’t digested by Mammon. Or should it have been? What do you think?

(I must take that back a bit. I have several programs set up to do a bit of SEO for me. Nothing fancy or smart, just some wordpress plugins. And I make sure title tags are all good. But the CONTENT itself (hm…) has not gone through the Moloch mill).

Anyway, here’s the first section, stripped of some footnotes, etc. You might call it a teaser, and I guess you’d be right. Way to go.

Section 1:
I Know Not Seems

Different people come at different paces to an awareness of the possibility of deception in the World–some from very early on. This awareness can rise from different places. It can rise from a betrayal, a tumble, a prediction gone awry, the sun ‘rising’ and sharing its size with a foot (Heraclitus, fragment 61), a river seeming like itself(Heraclitus, fragment 55), a man escaping under both the belly of a sheep and the guise of a name that is no name (Odyssey, 9.360), the periodic slowing of the morning star, or the story of a cat in a box.(Schrodinger, 1934).

The trickster god revels in his thievery in many cultures: Loki, Anansi, Krishna. On Olympus the Greeks had Hermes, and not only him. Off of the mountain, they had Jason, Theseus, Odysseus, Autolycus, Themistocles, even Aesclapius (he didn’t get away with it), and Orpheus, who tried so hard but whose soporific, pathetique deception of Hades was eventually overturned by a deeper deception, one regarding death. And he was led in all of this by, of course, the trickster Hermes.

With such a pounding presentation of deception through the years, it perhaps seems natural that deception might become an object of thought. Somehow ‘seeming’ gets studied. And at some point words are seen as the signifiers they are. They are seen as possibly deceptive, not being themselves. Things may not be what they seem.

Heracleitus ‘said’ ‘Nature loves to hide itself’. If the Nature of things is hidden (e.g. agriculture, disease, strength or weakness of an enemy, invisible rocks that sink Athenian ships, pathways home to Ithaka), then our reactions to them, based on seeming, may not be appropriate. If what we consider to be the most important things are not what they seem (even our ideas of what the most important things are), then we act may wrongly in all that matters (again, even in deciding what matters).

But if tekne (craft) is ever to defeat tuche (luck), or if we are ever to discover whether or not it is good to attempt to conquer tuche, we had better get around to studying Seeming, how to recognize it, how to defeat it, how to throttle its growth. We had better somehow ‘know that we do not know’, but merely believe.

This is not an attempt to follow the ‘actual’ development of the study of seeming. It is only a sketch, to provide a sort of grounding, to at least some extent cultural, for the importance of deception in an analysis of Socrates’ censure of the poets in the Republic. And since persuasion is the cause of belief (One does not believe if one has not been persuaded (unless there are ‘hard-coded’ beliefs– not a trivial objection), the maker of the Seeming, we had better understand how it is that we are persuaded—how we come to believe things.

Section 2:
She Drugged the Wine

To read more, and more fully, download the pdf.

I want to understand the present and future of how people make decisions, and how they become who they become. This has always had to do with public/cultural narrative, and clearly in the past several hundred years, especially the 20th century, public/cultural narrative and decision-making has been overwhelmingly influenced by advertising.

Advertising today means something different than it did in the time of the Madmen (as the show studiously recognizes). The search engine is the method that we more and more use to imbibe, interact with, and hopefully criticize media, branding, information, community, whatever. So the mechanism of how this information comes to us is awesomely powerful and very interesting. And what it may do to our language (along with all the other weird things digitization may do to our language LOL) is interesting as well, as well as what it may do to our minds.

Although I can follow algorithms to some extent, I’m not a specialist. I don’t work for anything close to Google. But I can learn about and interact with this mechanism by entering the industry of SEO (search engine optimization). I think it’s one of the most interesting fields there is right now. It’s always both reacting to and affecting search engine methods (although Google doesn’t always like to admit this, I think). It seems to be a pretty complex system.

On this note, I’ve been reading a lot of SEO articles lately, trying to get a handle on the industry. I’ve listed some articles below, with some commentary. They’re pretty well publicized and several months old, so these aren’t dynamo links or anything, but they are certainly helping me out.

• Not From the Land of Unicorns

I came from the land of ‘A List Apart’ before entering SEO territory, from standards-based HTML/CSS. So the line I’d always kind of heard was ‘SEO is just good HTML’. Well, that’s partly true of course, but there’s lots more to it, and this article is pretty good at presenting an informed view about that.

• Pitfalls of International SEO

This one talks about international dimensions I hadn’t thought of at all that much. And one could draw some interesting conclusion about the relationship between SEO, linguistics, dialect, which is also something in which I’m pretty interested.

• Mobile Obsolescence?

This is a quick one that pretty much centers on the fact that mobile searchers are in a different context than desktop searchers, and therefore must be dealt with differently.

Google Authority

A satisfactory introduction to how google thinks about the trustworthiness and authority of sites. Which comes with this nifty mindmap. (You may want to download this one, as the shadowbox photoshowing script makes it difficult to see the lines in the mindmap). .

P.S. — I hope to try hard to not make this blog into another one of those blogs that are just out there to get publicized, and either directly or indirectly monetized. This is my space, for thinking, publicly. If I need a space to make me money I will try hard to do that, but this ain’t it. Interested versus disinterested inquiry, no? We’ll see how well the attempt fares.

]]> http://www.perelandran.org/wordpress/learning-seo-basics/feed 0 http://www.perelandran.org/wordpress/mix-indices http://www.perelandran.org/wordpress/mix-indices#comments Wed, 02 Jun 2010 02:48:14 +0000 escrubb http://www.perelandran.org/wordpress/?p=1088 A mix for my math students, and for anybody else. All songs came from CD’s that I purchased full price, in person, from a shiny-toothed employee of a large record store. I even keep the cellophane wrapping and the stupid protective tape. here’s a picture of one of the cds for proof.
mix at mirror 1
mix at mirror 2
(These links will be dead in like a week, as I’m using one of those temporary file upload places.)

This is not a party mix, or a sleep mix. It is for citywalking and traintaking.

I decided against open standard .oggs because I think most of you will use a music player that doesn’t recognize them. So they are mp3s. boo.

finally figured out the problem I was having with the damn tags. Every time I would try to open the mix in Itunes things would go awry (I don’t use Itunes, I use cplay and mplayer). Turned out I was only editing the id3v1 tags, and the id3v2 tags were trumping them (in itunes, at least).

So I installed me some ‘id3v2‘. that’s the one for linux, and other unixs. it was letting me edit them from the command line, which is what I wanted (well, I wanted a curses interface because I am fearful, but the goal is cli). So I needed a script. Found a great one that worked first time from a ‘creaky joe’ on the murga-linux forum. It instantly filled in artist, album, track, and importantly, took the filename, stripped the extension, and made it the title. great.

now I can look into the script and see what made it happen. it’s pretty simple I think. here it is. I hope it helps some cli learner somewhere. GUI tag editors are stupid.

#!/bin/bash
#
# tag-mp3-id3v2.sh
#
# Tags every .mp3 in the current directory with the band and
# album names, and creates a song title by stripping
# the .mp3 extension from the file name.
#
# Use as follows: tag-mp3-id3v2.sh Artist Album
# (Make sure relevant Artist & Album are input to the script).
#
# Am using id3v2 Type 2 tags for everything EXCEPT Podcasts
# as my 1GB Sony NWD-B103 player can ONLY use id3v2 Type 1 tags.
#
# My 2GB Sansa Clip+, 30GB Creative Zen Vision M, and 4GB Philips GoGear are perfectly
# fine with Type 2 tags.
# XBMC is also perfectly fine with Type 2 tags (both on xbox XBMC and PC XBMC).
#
#

pdir=`pwd`
echo
echo "Current directory is '$pdir'"
echo

if [ $# -ne 2 ]
then
echo "Usage: $0
" >&2
echo "Make sure
equates to 'Artist'"
echo "Make sure
equates to 'Album'"
exit 1
fi

echo $1
echo $2
echo

fcount=0
for i in *.mp3; do
let fcount=fcount+1

SONG=`basename "$i" .mp3`
id3v2 -2 -T $fcount --album "$2" --artist "$1" --song "$SONG" "$i"
done

]]> http://www.perelandran.org/wordpress/mix-indices/feed 0 http://www.perelandran.org/wordpress/grief-911-narrative http://www.perelandran.org/wordpress/grief-911-narrative#comments Tue, 04 May 2010 04:36:21 +0000 escrubb http://www.perelandran.org/wordpress/?p=1039 The following was written by Thomas de Constantius, who is perhaps the last man in the world to sound the alarm. It is merely a dance attempt, and a quick one at that.

This little girl was up on the fire escape somewhere around 10th street I think on Broadway. She had a conch shell, and she was blowing into it, quieting the street momentarily, echoing up and down it. It was mystical. The protesters, caught up by the magic of the scene of which they were a part, inclined their ear, tilted the heads, felt the chill up the spine, and gazed revolutionarily and grandiose up at our little Gavroche. We, with our cellphones, and our branded t-shirts, our sweatshop shoes and our deodorized armpits, were the miserables, hearing our Marseillaise Primitivo. It was a climax, a firework, a flag.

The five year old’s mother knelt behind her, proud and coaxing, stamping the memory in her head, and at the same time embedding something else in her girl’s little head. It was a masterpiece, her doing. How could we think of shedding this little darling’s blood for oil? The children are our future. In the darkness there is a light. Sing it, Whitney. This is not Montgomery. This is not Beijing. Really?



So that’s when my steady broke. What was I doing here? These fucking people. Show them crutches and they’ll cry. Show them tits and they’ll tune in. Show them Bush and they’ll throw tomato(e)s (or a shoe bomb). Show them an Iphone and they’ll get in line, waiting for their turn at the Revolution, flickring pictures of Chairman Mao, flipping on the AC, chemically deterring their bodies from sweating, and puddle hopping from NYC to Amsterdam and back again because, well, flights are really cheap right now! Oh, but I compound. I make evil, conglomerate beasts from multiple, separate sinners. And I am one myself.
‘Many acts of nastiness are committed by people who are deluded, in one way or another, about the subject.’

So what I did was I turned to Hitchens. I liked Hitchens. He always looked like he’d had a late date with J. Walker and he wouldn’t put up with any bullshit. I believed he was telling the truth (I still do). He demanded facts and logic, and he demanded memory. He’d been a Marxist, or a Trotskyite, I don’t know what the hells the difference (which is probably pretty ignorant), and he’d said bollocks to ‘The Nation’ in what I considered to be righteous anger. His personal website was absolutely unglitzed and he had a barbed wit, always my personal favorite. I think he misunderstands theology, but I can live with that, because I don’t.


In brief, for several years after the protest I kneejerked against anti-war folks, not necessarily pro-war myself (always hoping that I didn’t have to be), but certainly anti-anti-war, especially if the wit wasn’t barbed. I hated Rumsfeld and our Taliban Ashcroft and all that idiocy (especially the breasts on the statue. that made me nuts.) Here you go, John, how do you feel about this one? Get it, John?

I figured Cheney was evil, but I didn’t necessarily want to admit it, kneejerking again against popular leftist jokes about him, thinking they came from quite a bit of ignorance.

Basically, I couldn’t bring myself to believe that there was a CONSPIRACY. That’s where I think the Mills (Power Elite) reading was very helpful for me, and requires another read. Along with my suspicion and hatred of popular movements, it was my suspicion of CONSPIRACY that led me to not necessarily exorcise Cheney/Bush, etc.. I voted for Gore, by the way, so screw y’all if you’re hating on me right now. Actually, maybe I voted for Nader. Yes, I think I did. So feel free to hate. But I was in leftern New York, so it didn’t matter anyway, so take on back that hate.


I hated the fact that if I expressed disbelief of Bush evil/conspiracy then I was labeled a Republican Fundamentalist moron, and I hated that if I went to a protest-style meeting, or even a lecture, that I was met with emotion-filled anti-Vietnam, anti-Iraqwar, anti-Capitalist, hate-filled, unanalytic, Pro-green (by people wearing GAP), Pro-Socialism everything, anti-everything else revolutionary fervor. The lumping together was extremely offputting. Sure, they’re ‘all connected’, but it’s still offputting. I’m sure it’s a similar situation over on the right, for those who simply want to question specific things (abortion, gold standard, tariffs, security, surveillance, small government, etc.) and get lumped into the same room as horn blowing, WalMart buying, MegaChurch going, racist, ‘family values’ defending, hate-filled, condom and book burning, Boston Tea Party misnomering, whiteass, wideass Hannity types. I think I compounded again. O Bama, my savior, why hast thou not yet united us? Eli Eli Barakthani!

I had just gone to my girlfriend’s job to see if she was there. She’d left. At that point I was on 19th street and 5th avenue. I dazedly continued downtown. There was one tower still in the air, and that’s what I was walking to. We all were.

I don’t know how it happened or why, but I turned to the left and behind to look at a man who was falling to his knees, looking up at the sky, wailing. When I turned around the tower was gone, nothing left in the sky. I have much regret about this. I failed to say goodbye. I failed to be a ‘part’ of the fall, to see it fall, to bury it somehow. We have a lot of non-burial in our culture.


The funeral homes and funerial laws control the process. We cannot touch the dead. We cannot lower them, or burn them ourselves. I told my family I wanted to be burnt on a pyre. It won’t happen.

We are told by the DIRECTOR that the service is finished. I’ll tell you when the service is fucking finished you hellhole! Get the fuck away from my grandmother’s coffin! Everyone walked away, but I stood behind a tree so that I could see the coffin lowered, many yards away. I had to sneak to be a part of the burial. I wore a t-shirt, because I was younger then.

There are a lot of people in Lower Manhattan who were covered but not buried. We all know about that. A lot of people in Hiroshima too, and in Cambodia.


Of course I saw that 2nd tower fall on TV, and I’ve seen the bodies from Vietnam and from Kent State, and I saw the people fall on TV (but not others), but not for real. My father fell, but I didn’t see it, and it wasn’t televised. I used to tell my friends that he had jumped off of the Empire State Building. At age 7, I think I believed it. It was actually off of a church in Waterbury, CT. You can see it from I-95. It’s across from ‘The Holy Land’, which is a ‘replica’ of, well, ‘The Holy Land’. I think it’s mainly filled now with used needles.

(The previous photo of Calvary was also from Waterbury, CT)

Please bear with the lack of flow here.
‘The result was not invariably very intelligent or wise. Wittgenstein was absolutely determined to go to Vienna in 1938, just as Hitler was holding his triumphant procession through the city. despite his own Jewishness and his inability to be silent and diplomatic; he had to be restrained from going there by his colleagues in Cambridge college.’ Now who was wise, he or his comrades?

So what effect did I have? Was I silent? Why was I? If so, what did my silence promote? This was my fault?


And why is Steve Nash silent at this time? Is it because he’s Canadian? Or is it in every NBA contract not to act uppity, even if you’re white? Speak up, Steve. You have a stage.

(Edit: I wrote that 2 days before the Suns decided to wear “Los Suns” for the rest of the playoffs, and Nash made a statement about civil liberties. Good)

And for a little more discontinuity, here is yet another recent effect of Pasteurization:
hand towels
Too bad they couldn’t green up the ad a little bit. Green is really hot right now. It’s the new red.

(Also, since we are reading the 7th chapter of the Republic, you may absolutely totally enjoy the following video segment from Groundhog Day, which is a particularly apt representation of a riff on the Ring of Gyges, which is central to the themes of the Republic.

What would Heidi 2 look like? Someone should make it someday. David Cross as Grandfather.)

]]> http://www.perelandran.org/wordpress/grief-911-narrative/feed 0 http://www.perelandran.org/wordpress/hitler-and-the-census http://www.perelandran.org/wordpress/hitler-and-the-census#comments Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:21:17 +0000 escrubb http://www.perelandran.org/wordpress/?p=1036 I posted a question for my 4010 class (Communications) here. It’s about Barthes’ Mythologies.
]]> http://www.perelandran.org/wordpress/hitler-and-the-census/feed 0 http://www.perelandran.org/wordpress/groundhog-test http://www.perelandran.org/wordpress/groundhog-test#comments Tue, 13 Apr 2010 15:35:22 +0000 escrubb http://www.perelandran.org/wordpress/?p=1030

A Ramis/Murray take on the Ring of Gyges:

groundhog-gyges.avi

Currently reading the Republic again.

In Groundhog Day, Phil’s Ring is one of daily reincarnation. However, this wouldn’t be a Gyges Ring if he had to drink from Lethe each time. In this way he is like Er. LUCKILY, he keeps his memories between cycles, and has no other options but to be the same person over and over. In the film, this leads to the just, and happy, man. But that’s just because of Andie McDowell and the romantic comedy genre. Ew.

]]> http://www.perelandran.org/wordpress/groundhog-test/feed 1 http://www.perelandran.org/wordpress/the-500-hats-of-barthamblew-strugglins http://www.perelandran.org/wordpress/the-500-hats-of-barthamblew-strugglins#comments Mon, 12 Apr 2010 20:47:30 +0000 escrubb http://www.perelandran.org/wordpress/?p=1021
While walking, I am arrested by a van’s license plate. I am writing down the number. But the number is vain. It is “NOW SOLD”. At first I think it is from an artist, an adman in a deep sense. Not a madman. But then the frame- “Consult a Realtor”. The meaning has changed.

As I saw more, I realized more (it was actually an ad for a realtor) and less (I stopped thinking about the depth of the first, sane adman, artist meaning).

Would it have had the same meaning for you?
How is the meaning formed? By what? Must there be a meaning maker?

How would this essay be different if I had walked by with a camera?

Here is a GIMP’d version of what I saw, since I had no camera.



]]> http://www.perelandran.org/wordpress/the-500-hats-of-barthamblew-strugglins/feed 0 http://www.perelandran.org/wordpress/h-o-p-e-conference-hacking-future-freedom http://www.perelandran.org/wordpress/h-o-p-e-conference-hacking-future-freedom#comments Thu, 08 Apr 2010 16:43:22 +0000 escrubb http://www.perelandran.org/wordpress/?p=1014 Hackers on Planet Earth is happening in NYC in July.

This is through 2600, the hacker quarterly published by Emmanuel Goldstein since the (early 90s?).

If I am in town, I definitely want to go.
Future talk, freedom talk, computer talk.

main theme of the conference is ‘visions of the future from the past’.

sentences i liked from the announcement:
‘art–what’s your vision of the future? show us using hardware, software, electricity,and imagination.’

‘games–you have 3000+ people, three floors of a massive hotel, an RFID tracking system, and the city of New York. Teach, play, and explore.’

if anybody doesn’t know, ‘emmanuel goldstein’ is a 1984 reference.

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