Stupid Idea » Culture

Site Idea

method — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 23:39:29 +0000

Site allows users to enter their “cultural genetic code”; it consists of a humongous catalog of beliefs, attitudes, values, described responses to hypothetical situations, etc. For example, a user would subscribe to the statement, “It’s not okay to treat a waiter badly because of a mistake in the order.” and a thousand other statements¹ . The site would collect demographic data up-front but would hold onto it until a large-enough database had been constructed. Later, correlations and clustering could be identified, but in addition there would be the option for users to “bundle up” values and tropes into new groupings with evocative labels. So someone could bundle up “It’s wrong to eat meat” with “the US should have an aggressive foreign policy when it comes to protecting against genocide” into “Red-blooded Veggie” or whatever. Then people could choose to “adopt” the new values package, and then fork and modify it with their own additions. The point would be to promote the idea that values should be chosen “for their value” instead of their belonging to a particular obligatory milieu, and that values should be viewed as being elective and configurable and capable of being put into pragmatic competition with each other.

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So far, it’s similar to hunch.com. The differences are the focus on cataloging values over consumer and aesthetic preferences, and the focus on sharing statements with others in groups.

2008

method — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 03:21:03 +0000

You can’t really tell from this blog what I’ve been doing in the past year (or in previous years, either). Partly this is due to a congenital habit of not discussing anything that is directly relevant to my life. To know what’s going on you have to read the lacunae–if I’m not discussing it, it must be important to me¹. The most prolific periods in this blog are from times when I wasn’t doing anything meaningful (and hating it). The recent long stretches of silence are due to an abundance of positive forward motion. The truth is, 2008 was a good year for me. Indeed, probably the most pressing dissatisfaction (and there are always dissatisfactions, c’est la vie) is the lack of reflection in my present mode. This makes me think about a Zadie Smith statement that she writes mainly so that she won’t sleepwalk through life. Yeah, let’s not do that. Anway, let me tell you about some major unannounced features of my current life.

First, I am 28. I am okay with this, really. Although I do think of January 13 as the starter’s pistol on a 2-year mad dash toward 30. Expect some erratic behavior between now and then as I attempt to fill the waning years of my 20′s with value-added experiences.

Second, I am a graduate student. This is something that I’ve actually been doing since November of 2007. I am getting a Master’s in Philosophy at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. This implies that I am living in Pittsburgh. Duquesne’s is a “Continental” program. If you don’t know what this means, in a Continental program it is possible and even common to say something that sounds and may actually be insane and have everyone nod. I’ve taken 9 classes so far. 3 more and a language to go. Most of them have been really great.

Fall ’07: Freud, Aristotle Metaphysics, Hegel Science of Logic
Spring ’08: Hegel & Shakespeare, Husserl Ideas I, Nietzsche
Fall ’08: Deleuze A Thousand Plateaus, Sartre B&N, Heidegger Contributions of Philosophy
Spring ’09: Contemporary Political Philosophy, Early Modern Political Philosophy

I’m re-reading Leviathan! I’m reading about Rawls!

Third, I am living in Pittsburgh. In fact, I have been in Pittsburgh for more than 2 years now!² When I first got to Pittsburgh two years ago in January I was involved in a longish and dispiriting job hunt that ended with me joining a temp agency and doing some truly dull data entry. After the summer I got paid for a while to program in Ruby on Rails, then didn’t work in Spring ’08. The whole of the summer was taken up with an increasingly desperate and focused job hunt for a real, honest-to-god programmer job, which I landed in August! Also, randomly: Amy and I visited Hawaii in July.

Fourth, I am a software developer. I get up at 6:30 in the morning and go off to work as a web developer until 5 PM (well, I’m on salary, so this isn’t always true). My classes are all scheduled from 6-8:40PM. It could be concluded that I am following a course of study that is unified by the principle (or business rule, if you like), occurs after 5PM. This would be an ungenerous conclusion. The language I program in is PHP³. This is funny, because I actually hate PHP as a language (I’m a Ruby man). I like programming, though. I really like being a professional. After a post-collegiate career that has consisted almost uniformly of unchallenging, dull, hateful jobs I have a true appreciation for a job wherein I show up, devise technical solutions to interesting problems and then collect a reasonable salary for the work I do. And if I go straight from reworking the logic of the site “shopping cart” to a discussion of the Deleuzo-Guattarian “Body Without Organs”, that is the price of this lifestyle that I’ve chosen.

Fifth, other things I should mention:

I am paying down my credit card
I own a Playstation 3 and have completed Fallout 3
I watch too many movies
I hardly ever read any more and know this is bad. I like Murakami and graphic novels by Yoshihiro Tatsumi.
I have a nuanced but nonetheless loyal attitude toward open source

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I’ve long thought of this as the Kafka principle; Kafka never mentions God, Judaism or German ideology in his stories, which is how we know that he is preoccupied with these topics
I probably have a better internal map of Pittsburgh than I do of DC, because I’ve navigated a great deal of Pittsburgh’s east side by bike, whereas I seem to only know DC as a sliver of NW and a network of Metro stations.
Primarily; web development is actually a combination of SQL, HTML, javascript and CSS and a server language

A language game

method — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 19:26:10 +0000

Amy and I were sitting in an airport waiting for a flight. I said, “I should have been a pilot.” Amy asked me why. Really, it was just something to say; I was briefly imagining my alternate life in which I was an airline pilot. Instead of explaining the details of the fantasy (get to fly around the world, chicks dig on you, etc.) I said: “So I could fly far away from you.” See, it was funny to say because I didn’t mean it, and because this is so obviously a terrible thing to say to anyone, let alone your girlfriend. Oh, we had a good laugh.

Amy suggested that there could be an entire children’s book based on this premise:

I wish I were an astronaut… so that I could escape to another planet
I wish I were a deep sea diver… so that I could go to the bottom of the ocean and be alone
I wish I worked at night… so that I’d never see you
I wish I were an explorer in foreign lands… so that we’d lose contact
I wish I were a time traveler… so I could travel to before you were born… or after you died

Try this with your loved ones, the next time you’re feeling grumpy, or simply want to make an impression.

Mos Def

method — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:47:56 +0000

Is it bad that I really like this lyric? You kind of have to hear it. From Close Edge:

I’m Mos Definite, not think so
Flood ya city with the black ink flow
And my crew ain’t scared to let them things go
So, stop with the nonsense, like he conscious
I’m just alright dawg, I’m doin’ great dawg
I don’t play games so I don’t playa hate y’all
Get it straight or get the fuck up out my face dawg
I’m like the second plane that made the tower’s face off
That shit that let you know it’s really not a game dawg¹
Your grind and my grind ain’t the same dawg²

I think this is appropriate. While I was in Hawaii I went to the Pearl Harbor memorial, where you stand on a platform above the sunken USS Arizona with its 900+ interred corpses. Before you go out to the platform you watch a video that details the sequence of events. The tone of the video is mournful, but it never goes so far as to condemn the Japanese for the attack, only reminding the viewer that they were an Axis power. Yamamoto is treated as a figure like Robert E. Lee, personally against the war but determined to make the best military showing. Then when the attack happens, you feel a chill: so many ships in so little time, and there’s video of the Arizona exploding. Basically, because this was an attack on a military base, it’s possible to experience this event first objectively as awesome (deinos³), then parochially (and humanely) as dastardly, tragic, sad, etc. Anyways, I figure Mos Def’s figure is precise here. I remember on September 11, someone told me that a plane had crashed into one of the Twin Towers, and I assumed that he was talking about some freakish accident. It was only when I heard about the second plane, and then the collapses, that I knew it really wasn’t a game.

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The heavy repetition (e.g., dawg, dawg, dawg, dawg, and -ow for six couplets at the beginning) works IMO.
The other stuff going on in the song is interesting too. He’s saying that he’s not a gangsta rapper but he’s not going to criticize those who are. I like the poetic conflation in hip-hop. His “grind” is and isn’t the same as drug-dealing. It’s like the different accounts of gangsta on Damn, It Feels Good to be a Gangsta, one of which describes the President of the United States as a gangsta. Then, the main idea of Mos Def’s song is that he’s “close to the edge”, not of flipping out and killing someone, but he’s paying attention to what’s happening on the margin of society.
It’s a cranky prescriptivist cliche to remind people that something that is awesome, like an “awesome god”, is something that is terrifying to behold.

What’s this?

method — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 19:14:28 +0000

I just got this at the top of a search for “ruby rake” on Google.

Ruby — Rake: 4
According to http://jimweirich.umlcoop.net/index.cgi/Tech/Ruby - More sources »

The url under “More sources” goes here. All I can figure is that this is some kind of authority thing, or like the wtf feature on Technorati. jimweirich is a 4 or something. Maybe this is nothing, or maybe this is the beginning of semantic categorization on Google!!! ??? Why is this important? Well, if you search for Martin Luther King, one of the top links goes to a white supremacist hate page. It may be that Google is moving away from its raw algorithm, which can be gamed, and toward a trustweb system. Actually, it just occurred to me that that result could be from the Google search results tagging system that is already in place. So, is this old news?