pk Profile 2008

The deschooler: offered a cheap internet in 1970, arrested in 2006, censored in 2007, three thousand text files knocked offline.

Caesar & Pompey

When it was over, Federer returned to the locker room, cracked open the champagne and spent an hour with perhaps the only other athlete on the planet who understands such sheer domination.
They'd met for the first time earlier in the day, but had been distant admirers. And after Federer's third Grand Slam win this year and ninth overall — Woods has won 12 majors — they visited. Federer sat while Woods stood with his foot on a chair, two champions in the zone.Tiger could have fucked up KingFed's supremacy, maybe actually did a little. Now Fed says he's going to the golf majors and "pay Tiger back," standing at the 18^th green on day for.
Roger said that he wanted to play all the better with Tiger sitting next to his girl in his box. (Mirka's his business manager too, btw.)
If we were Romans 2050 or so years ago, we might have rooted wildly for Caesar: and for Pompey. Should each learn the other's sport now and face off? Can we really stand to have both Jehovah and Jesus in the same universe at the same time? In the same place?
On the women's side, Masha was devastating: and looked better than any female athlete ever had: losing, let alone winning. But pretty or not, she was petulant afterward -- when her father's illegally coaching her from the stands was mentioned.
We may wind up wanting to assassinate this queen.

Pepsi

"The Americans love Pepsi-Cola. We love death."
So said the Afghani guerrilla, according to Time.
That comes as a shocking revelation to me. You mean Coke has lost its grip on the world''s perceptions? You mean Pepsi has caught up not just between New York and California but in the mountains of southern Asia?
Could be. I don't exactly follow these things. It can take forever for a hermit to notice something well documented in public rivers.

Meta Tiger

Nixon's moron at the Times, William Safire, wrote perhaps the single stupidest hebetude I've ever seen. Responding to someone's metaphor of "quantum change," Safire looked it up, didn't bother to understand, and responded that quantum distances were very small. So, if a total change of state, occurs at a nanometer, we don't have to notice it.

Guy plays golf, shoots 106, gets a handicap of 34, shoots 99, gets a handicap reduction. The scratch players get no handicap: or aren't allowed to claim them in a PGA tournament. But seedings take over in a way: who gets to play at all, who gets to play last ... Somebody wins the tournament. Good. That's what the tournament was for: to declare a winner.

But there are tournaments next month too! next week, all over. a choice of tournaments, in countries around the world. For some time now there have been sort-out-the-champions tournaments: the British Open for one, the Masters for another. The next thing we know, to be champ, you have to have won not only multiple tournaments, but multiple Major tournaments. Thus, for the longest time, the only real champion was Bobby Jones; until there was also Jack Nicklaus.

Now there's Tiger Woods. Now there's been Tiger Woods for a decade, actually, for thirty years. But something else just happened. Not only did Tiger Woods just win the PGA title, again, for the third time, not only had he just won his two previous tournaments, including, ha!, the British Open, for a fourth time, not only did this record and that record and the other record fall, but something else happened too: Tiger moved into a new golf category. Not just the best golfer this week, in this tournament, not just the best PGA player, not just the greatest golfer of all time ... He'd been all of those things already, except for measurements involving a whole career, and you can't have that while the career is on-going. No, Tiger's accomplishment set up a whole new meta-category, for golfers anyway. It's a category previously known only to a very few: Achilles, Ruth, Ali ... Tiger is now everywhere understood to be the bestBestBEST...

The next step would transcend sport. Tiger would be with Jesus.

PS Mike Wilbon posted a related piece at MSNBC, but I wanted to relate parallel observations to a meta series.

Judgment

A symbol, codeable as a single datum, one bit, can stand for anything: "X" stands for "Cosmos." Meantime any universe within that cosmos may have some vast number of time lines: the location for example of each particle at time_m, time_n, time_o ... Thus the number of symbols needed to represent details within the cosmos may be enormous. The number of symbols needed to represent say the thoughts of male virgins under the age of fifteen in New York City on May 3^rd may be greater than the symbols needed to map all thoughts by all humans alive up until the reign of Rameses. Thus: any symbol in any world might sybolize the entire cosmos; but all the particles in universe_x might not be adequate to map all the events in world_y. Thus some twelve year old with a G12 processor might be able to hold his own judgment day for world NT of universe ZN, but all the gods that have ever lived or not lived, been imagined, or not imagined, couldn't map the complexity (or the simplicity) of the whole cosmos.

Trash Talk

Trash Talk And the Federalization of Everything

Zizou head-butted the wop talking trash to him. Now everyone tells Zizou that talking trash is part of the game: if you can't take it, get off the field.
Excuse me: are there no limits? no thresholds? Does the ref has no business knowing the specific insult? Are ethnic differences not to be considered?
Is lack of information ever wiser than presence of information?

Once upon a time you knew if you were sick. Your family knew if you were dead: even before the bacteria knew, or the vultures. With federalism, some expert, some priest, some anointed one, some bureaucrat with a certificate from the state alone can say to the satisfaction of the state whether you're sick, whether you're dead ... It's not enough to tell your teacher, your boss, that you were sick, that you're grandma died, you need a note from your doctor, from the undertaker.

Once upon a time no body knew better what junior needed, wanted, liked or didn't like better than mom. Then, past toddlerhood, nobody knew better than junior himself. Now junior needs a shrink to tell him what he wants, and the shrink needs a social worker in grace with the legislature to tell the shrink whether he's a quack.

The guy talks trash to Zizou. France against Italy. Some paper immediately says that the wop called Zizou a "terrorist." Now that's a hot topic. It used to be you had to be a Philistine ... or a Jew ... or a Commie ... or an anarchist to deserve no due process. But of course the paper had no idea what was said. Right now the preponderance of reported opinion holds that it doesn't matter what was said: athletes, playing before a paying crowd, with TV sponsors to consider, have no rights to any sore spots. It doesn't matter what the guy says, the athlete has to ignore it.

Can that view possibly stand up to experience?

The guy calls you a motherfucker, so what: these days that's just aural wall paper: like saying there are clouds in the sky. What if he says, "Your mother sucks the boils up the Saddam's ass"? What if he says, "I left a firecracker up your baby's cherry"?
Those insults don't bother you? Fine. Then you won't head butt. But since when can a committee decide what will and won't pull your trigger?

No, no, no. What was said can always count.

'Roid Rage

I'm just reading a second- or third-hand claim that Barry Bonds would go into steroid rages. If what seems true is true, then why should we care what happens to Barry Bonds? In the days of the caesars, his property could have been confiscated. In the days of any tyranny he could be boiled in oil, hung in a dungeon. In these days of the tyranny of the public, anything could happen.

But, even hanging from chains on the wall of a dungeon, rats crawling up his rag of a breech cloth, Barry should be able to sue. He should be able to sue Mark Maguire for going ahead of him. He should sue the chemists who synthesized the fucking things. He should be able to sue the Giants for encouraging him: and sue the public for a host of silly choices.

I threw the above up real fast (doesn't it show?): but a minute later read a very good suggestion that I believe applies to the whole society as well as to sports as mercinary entertainment: decriminalize all the drugs. Let the athletes take anything (just as we could let the junkies OD if they wanted, leave them to die in the gutter). Cheating can't be controlled, don't try. (I'll link to that article a bit later.)

And another PS: Since we can't ever be sure of how much cheating took place, don't take anything too seriously: not the World Series, not the Supreme Court, not the College of Cardinals.

Mickelson Crumbles

Journalism earns its keep by dramatizing events as though prized neuroses of the culture were being daily vindicated. Thus: Hitler winning an election isn't Hitler winning an election; it's a Triumph of the Will. If you add up the number of strokes with the club over four rounds of championship golf, then Geoff Ogilvy is the new US Open champion. No. Ogilvy isn't the winner; Phil Mickelson crumbled. Just as Colin Montgomery crumbled. As though it were about Will and lack of will.
Skill has something to do with will. Luck has something to do with success.
Journalism doesn't just give facts; it uses famous names to fashion a morality soap opera in which our deepest prejudices are vindicated. The one group that always wins and never loses is the public.

Sorry public: with journalism you lose every time.

PS. I don't mean that Phil didn't crumble: once again Arnie-like he went for more than sense might dictate: and at a time when his driver wasn't working! The bold win some of those, and lose a lot more. Certainly skill counts: and will: and luck ... And don't forget math: probability, averages, statistics ... I doubt there will ever be a journalist who will get it all correctly balanced. We'd have to call him god if he did.

Nothing

I worship the god of nothing. The god of nothing neither wants nor needs my worship. I do it because I am a human being: and human beings want and need to worship.

Human beings want and need to believe in something greater than themselves: and only nothing fits the bill.

Long live fools.
Long live nothing.

Boo Birds

Kid's parents are standing there screaming encouragement, kid hits a long ball. Parents go berserk: even if it's caught. Same kid gets to the finals, but on hostile ground. At the plate the boos drown the cheers. Will the kid hit one out?

Barry Bonds has heard cheers, he's heard boos. Bonds can hit the homer through the boos But he's been there before. Still, he'll hit more homers amid cheers.

Jesus spoke to the crowds. On arriving in Jerusalem they put down a royal carpet of palm fronds. For once he wasn't on foot. But he was riding no thoroughbred charger. Neither was he perched on the back seat of some open limousine. But not many hours later he was getting his flesh (and exposed organs) scourged off him. He'd have heard nothing but boos. Ditto a few hours later on the cross.

On the cross, was Jesus more like the kid in the enemy park? or like Barry Bonds in Chicago? Don't forget: it was his first time.

if Jesus is human, as the orthodox Mystery insists, he'll doubt himself with the hoard against him. If Jesus is divine as the orthodox Mystery also insists, why should he care about boos? any more than I sympathize with fire ants while they're biting my ankle?

Ah, but he is supposed to Love us.

Soul

Immortality of the Soul? No, no. Listen:The soul is emergent. Informational. Macroinformational.Like life, it is substanceless. There's no thing there. But unlike life, which manifests in organisms — bodies — the soul —being informational, mental — doesn't exist when not being thought about: like a lap when you stand up.

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How I put it before:The soul is a synergy of synergies among synergies: a synergy between the synergy stack of the individual organism and its relation to the aggregates of the aggregates of synergy stacks at large.
(I have also called god the synergy of synergies.")

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2009 04 05

I copy this post to my Macroinformation blog.

Hacker Shows Holes in US Defense

LONDON (Reuters)

Read that news bulletin. Read every word of it. I'll summarize in a moment, but don't rely on my summary. Don't ever rely on any summary. Don't trust what Moses said; get it from God. (And don't trust God either: who know what he's hiding.) Get the raw evidence.

English hacker sees War Games. (I saw that movie with bk, himself a hacker.) Kid hacks into the Pentagon. His hack winds up saving the world from the berserk computer. Now this contemporary hacker goes looking for UFOs, government cover-ups: a truth seeker, a weird pervert of a truth seeker: just what we could use a few more of.

But shame on us if this is news to any of us. Richard Feynman, genius extraordinaire, computer for the Manhattan Project, found US security to be as much hole as wall and told us all about it in the years following WW II. Did we listen? Of course not. No, we're too busy being the big cheese to imagine that what was wrong with Rome applies to us.

Richard Feynman, math whizz, funny-man, had full clearance throughout the military: it was his secrets we were keeping after all. Being involved in security, he started studying security: Houdini, safes, lock picking ...

The Pentagon spent top dollar on the best safes: then never bothered to read or follow the instructions that came with the safe. Feynman went around the Pentagon trying the default combination on unattended (!) safes. Most opened to the factory installed combination! If they didn't, he tried variants of the safe's assignee's birthday. Bingo, again and again. Or he dialed in π, or e ... The Pentagon officials were no better than ordinary citizens at their own security. Where unusual combinations were used, the combination was written out on the desk, where any spy could find it in a minute.

Feynman studied the safes. He discovered that the combination could be de-cyphered by looking at the tumblers. The tumblers were visible only when the door was open. Thus, the safe, with a secure combination added by the user, kept with its doors closed, was safe: worth the investment. But Pentagon offices kept the safe doors wide open, from 9 to 5! Any spy could learn the safe's combination simply by walking by. Feynman wrote memos to all concerned. What happened? The secretaries still kept the safe doors open, but if they saw Feynman coming, they would close the door; not the safe door, the office door! So Feynman wouldn't catch them giving the store away. The spies could read the secrets, but the watch dog wouldn't see.

Now this English nerd follows a movie! buys off-the-shelf software, a cheap hacker's guide ... and waltzes right into the Pentagon, NASA ... Instead of saying Thank you, Mr. Feynman, thank you Houdini, thank you, Mr. Whistle ... we want to crucify him, eat his gristle.

god gives us the materials to live, and the materials to snuff ourselves. We live. Then we get rich, powerful, lazy, drunk, stoned. We pass out, with our pants down, our jewels exposed. Why should anyone care what happens to us?

Standard Time

Sri Lanka wants to mess with its clock. Arthur C. Clarke is appalled, arguing for the world standard. Sri Lanka has already messed with its clock since Standard Time was invented and implemented politically, now it want's to mess again.

Political time is a lot less screwy than political calendars thanks to clocks being a far more recent invention than calendars. The universe is the universe: our descriptions of it, our ideas about it, our prescriptions for societies ... are something else again. My Sentiens: Stage Sense is one place at where I discuss the arbitrary political nature of Standard Time as distinct from the natural time that Prigogine assumes is infinite and predates the universe. I'll now discuss it again in the context of Social Epistemology / Reality / Time, repeating as appropriate. (Calendars too need more than a few words, but there's already a fabulous web site on the subject: I'll add the URL when I find it.)

First, there was time. We have evidence that men were recording lunar cycles by eighteen thousand years ago. Calendars developed. Much later, somebody came up with the sun dial: worked in good daylight only. Only recently have there been mechanical clocks. Only very recently has there been Standard Time: and standards require not only culture but politics: some authority sets the clock.

Prior to the telegraph "noon" was when you perceived the sun to be "overhead." The sun is actually wherever it is. The spinning earth revolves around it, at an angle. Thus, noon moves around the earth each "day." Noon, day ... these are concepts of local perspective. If we were orbiting Jupiter noon on earth would make little sense unless we were in contact with some specific earthling in some specific location: Greenwich, New York, Tokyo ... If I'm standing in a field in the Catskills, on the phone with somebody in another county or another state, we'll have very different noons. If our measurements could be precise enough, my noon on this side of the street wouldn't match your noon on that side of the street. With enough precision, we could be standing next to each other and not have the same noon.

Before the telegraph no one worried about that. With the telegraph, and the time stamping of messages, a guy in Brooklyn wires a guy in Hoboken. They seem to be "talking" at the "same" time, but the guy in Brooklyn time stamps his version of the message a few minutes before the guy in Hoboken's time. In step the politicians, and we have Greenwich Mean Time, Eastern Standard Time, etc. We pretend that it's noon at the same instant everywhere in the time zone, we pretend that Chicago is an hour earlier.

Just remember: in my house I can set my clock to any "hour" I want. It's my clock. And if the clock breaks, the hour is set at whatever position it was in when it broke: unless I move it manually. The missionary gives the clock to the cannibal chief. In Eco's illustration, the chief wears it as a necklace, the missionary has no idea what it means to him.

Meanwhile, real time is real time: infinite: unknowable.

Memory

A bigger more complex brain extends memory. The Homo sapiens mother recognizes one twin from the other, the 'gator mom, the ostrich mom, just has a bunch of little gator/ostriches behind her: switch in her neighbors', she won't know. or care.

Then we develop speech, then writing. Now we know precisely what was published as Twain, imprecisely what Shakespeare wrote (though precisely what was published AS Shakespeare), precisely what was published as Jesus, very imprecisely what Jesus might actually have said. And nothing at all of what Eve might have said 150,000 years ago. (But we sure know precisely, just recently, how her genes were different!)

I can know exactly, typos and all, what I emailed my son under my current MacMail. I have a clear memory of what I wrote to Ivan Illich in 1970, but no carbon. I remember, but more fuzzily, what my mother said to my grandfather after his cancer when I was a kid.

Once upon a time we knew what our mother looked like now and also had a fuzzy memory of how she looked when we were an infant. Then comes photography. Most people's snaps are brown and yellow and then nonexistent within a few years. Suddenly, at the museum, there's a good print from Lewis Carroll! Victorian!

Guy like me has a clear memory, photo assisted, of periods going back to the mid-19th C. I "remember" Carroll, Brady, Lartigue,
Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Boulougne
Cartier-Bresson ... Melies, Lillian Gish, Chaplin, WC Fields ... My actual life I remember more in the fuzzy style common to all moderns: some photos etc, but we sure don't know that many of them.

I have my own memories of Burt Lancaster, like my memories of my mother. Then there are the films-photos themselves. I artificially remember Burt when he was young, did trapeze work. My memory of Atlantic City, Burt old, is clear.

Now for the first time I watch Local Hero, 1983. Burt is old. Fine: I'd know him anywhere, any age. But then there's this twerp in the movie. Good god, it's that guy from Animal House!
Suddenly I have a "clear" memory of Animal House with this twerpy kid. I look him up at IMDb (Peter Riegert) . He's old! He did a million movies I didn't see! He grew old without me! He lived with Bette Midler and I didn't know.

What insanity to mix clear with fuzz, verifiable documents with unverifiable documents ... 

Then again I bet a worm has some sort of impressions: some clear, some fuzzy, some verifiable, some just ghosts.

Homeostasis as Decentralized

Homeostasis has been a pk theme for close for four decades. The group preserves its balance, like any system. It does that by repressing extremes, laying snares for mutations. Systems have "conservative" built into their core. Stability is served: and so is stupidity. Genius is regularly some sort of mutation. Ditto reform, ditto new efficiencies.

We say we honor intelligence, efficiency, order ... god. I deny it. We honor ourselves, we honor the familiar; we crucify messengers, threaten Galileo with torture.
Christians pretend that the crucifixion happened once: I see it happening every day.

Centralization / Decentralization has been a theme of pk’s for nearly as long. My founding of the Free Learning Exchange in 1970 was intended as a major blow for decentralization: replace schools, replace nations, replace governments ... with one coordinated system of decentralized bulletin boards, the form authored, but the content grass roots, all content coming unregulated from the public. From the public to the public, leave out all the middle men.

Today though I have to emphasize: homeostasis is perennially decentralized. No Pope has to tell the girl, the boy, the young wife ... not to rat on the priest that rapes them. No president has to tell Ma & Pa Kettle to shun the kid who doesn’t want to be drafted, to shun the atheist, the Quaker ... the free-love advocate.
And if the girl, the boy, the young wife does rat on the priest that rapes them, they’ll quickly learn: the system simply does not hear them. There’s many more than one thing that the police, the press, the legislature simply does not want to know: and can’t, won’t be told.

Homeostasis is as grass roots as grass. Homeostasis is ubiquitous.

F.X. Toole as "Van Gogh"

F.X. Toole (AKA Jerry Boyd)

What a great pen name. FX as in special effects. Toole as in tool. Toole as in Irish as hell. F.X. as in Francis Xavier (Irish as hell).

2005 I saw Million Dollar Baby, saw Clint, saw Morgan Freeman, saw Hilary Swank, saw them all win award after award. I liked Baby; though I sure didn’t like it that much, had quarrel after quarrel with it: thought it was one of Clint’s lesser good efforts, enjoyed seeing Swank buff, but didn’t think it was her best. ... Now I just watched the DVD: and hated more than liked it. IMDb.com informed me that the source had been called Rope Burns. I instantly thought that was a better title, went to the library, got it, read it. Van Gogh all over again.

This is great writing. This is great boxing writing. This is great gender writing. ...

So now I know: Jerry Boyd was 70 before he got published. He’d been fielding rejection letters for forty years. He dies two years later. Three years after that, the movie comes out. One year after that pk discovers the writing. ...

Are we still supposed to think that publishers can tell shit from Shinola? their ass from their elbow? "good" from "bad"? marketable from unmarketable?

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"Van Gogh," as a principle, has been a theme at for a decade, a theme with pk for half a century or more: just as is Jesus, just as is Galileo ... Just as has become kleptocracy, just had been civilization ... Nice to have a new example to add.

The author credits an agent for making "a silk purse from a sow’s ear." Editors, agents ... have long collaborated with authors, with composers ... How much of Michael Jackson’s excellence is Michael Jackson? how much the choreographers? the music teachers (or the whole family)? the Hollywood directors of the videos? the rest of the ensemble?

How much of the Mona Lisa is Leonardo and how much Walter Pater? How much of the sunset is the sun and how much the particular day’s atmosphere? How much of "seeing" is in the eye? in the visual cortex? in the pre-existing mind?

How much of the next day’s mind is the pre-existing mind?

Then again: how much of F.X. Toole’s acknowledgment of Nat Sobel is business obligation? mere courtesy? flat-out lies? We’d have to read all the MSs before Sobel, and read them again after, before we could have even so much as an opinion.

Self-criticism

Self-criticism is common among sentient creatures -- those with a "self." But can anyone possibly claim that self-criticism is reliable or accurate? Hitler might think he made a mistake to wear the dark blue socks, but would he think building concentration camps or invading Poland a mistake?

What's true of individuals goes bango for societies. You or I might be acutely conscious, at least as capable of self-criticism as Hitler, but it's preposterous for societies to pretend to any but the most primitive (and self-indulgent) awareness.

Centralized / Decentralized

Centralized / Decentralized ... Cause / Effect

Humans claim sentience. I don't dispute the claim: I only add that sentience must be a spectrum, and that we can't possibly know how "left" or "right" we are on the spectrum (left or right as in statistical limits). Are we toward its beginning? or toward "the end"? (Does such a spectrum even have an end? does it even have a beginning?)

Recently some humans share the claim of self-awareness with a couple of other mammals: the chimp, the orangutan. Note: we're all mammals. All bilaterally symmetrical. All vertabrates. We all have a top and a bottom. We all have a face at the top end. It's not surprising that we should associate self-awareness and sentience with having a bilaterally symmetrical face: and at the top end.
pk loves to point out that we have a "face" at the other end too. On women it's called "ass" or "pussy." (link temp. down)Humans are social: though some males and a very few females are loners. Chimps too are social. Orangutans ... uh ... on occasion: all the adults males are loners. (I suggest you leave them alone: unless you want to see some exquisite violence: exercised against you!)

Social, self-aware, sentient humans have a trick: they generalize. And they have a social trick: they grab generalizations made by somebody smart, and apply them: stupidly.

For example:
Newton was very smart. He figured out some characteristics of gravity. He figured out lots of things. Newton never said he had figured out everything. On the contrary, he said he had picked up a couple of pretty shells from along a vast shore.That's all right: the group tells the lie for him: we can figure out anything. It's not that we have this and that fragment of knowledge; no, no: we have knowledge. God has knowledge. the church, the state has knowledge. experts, the university has knowledge.If I hit you in the head with a stone ax, you might fall down. I see myself as the cause of your falling down. I generalize: I cause things. My generalization is stolen by the group: we cause things. the generalization becomes fuzzy: we cause all things.Uh, no, wait: we cause all good things; all bad things are caused by the enemy.We group together. Now and then the group follows together a decision of some individual. Let's all go beat up on the rooster who's down in his luck, has lost a few feathers. Let's kill him.
We centralize, we form a hierarchy. It works! We form a fearsome efficiency. We worship centralization, hierarchy, efficiency.

Now we do something that makes this individual think that our self-awareness, our sentience (our hierarchy and our efficiency), are definitely on the beginner's side of things: we made flawed generalizations about centralization: the universe must be caused! the universe must be centrally caused! the universe must be hierarchically caused!

Looking at a problem we truck in assumptions about centralization, about cause. We impose hierarchies whether they're there or not.
I always get a kick on sports shows, the commentator says, "There's the first lady, leading the cheers": where some president's wife is more likely to be behind the crowd in the clapping. The network does not get a flood of raspberries: we swallow the flagrant imposition.We sometimes have a true perception, but inevitably spoil it: what was wrong with the Soviet was Stalin; then we think: the solution would be Nixon.

I can imagine cavemen making these errors. They too were sentient, had faces, had a top and a bottom. But they weren't over-organized within an inch of their lives the way all modern kleptocrats are. We escape the church, but fall into the school. we escape Stalin, but fall under Bush.

If we consider the universe we'll find centers: lots of them: billions and trillions. Our earth is the center of our earth moon system. Our sun is the center of the solar system. But there are hundreds of billions of suns: just in this galaxy. Cells have centers: the nucleus. Atoms have centers: the nucleus. The galaxy itself seems to have something like a center.
(Always though beware: does it really? or are we polluting our perception with our prejudice? are we over-reifying our model?)

But consider the universe. We can't see it; we can only see light generated by nearby stars and that light reflecting from other matter. We have to try to conceive it, we have to try to model it. Look at some of the models developed by big astronomy teams. Is there a center? Is there anything like a center? Is center an appropriate concept for the universe? Beware of imposing order on one system by inappropriate analogy with order from a different system.

Does the universe modeled, in any of the models, "look" hierarchical? Where's its "top"? (And where is "north"?) Does the model look like it has a boss? a president? a god? It would be foolish to assume that it doesn't just because we don't see one, it would be foolish to assume that it does: just because we're encouraged to see things that way.

But the universe is too big, too unknown. There are lots of things nearer to hand that we can also look at. Check out a model of a nice big fat organic molecule.
more coming

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These thoughts fit with a number of pk projects. First I post this draft at my IonaArc blog, but the materials are destined for InfoAll.org and for the Thinking Tools and Society sections at .

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Nam myoho renge kyo: the universal law of cause and effect
Sure there are causes, sure there are effects: many kinds: not all centralized, not all direct, not all top down: not at all as simple as billiards.
But trust the group to get all generalizations wrong.

Steroid Competition

There’s a new book out saying that Barry Bonds used steroids devotedly, starting in 1998, the year Mark McGwire broke the single season home run record. Bonds has been injured recently. Bonds has been talking about retirement: he’s more than old enough by baseball standards. I’ve been speculating, including online, about whether there might be pressure on him to retire: in the light of the steroid allegations. He hasn’t been caught, nothing’s been proved, but he has been tarnished. The whole age has been tarnished.

Babe Ruth’s famous record was aided by a number of changes in the game specifically designed to aid Ruth’s home run rampages: a new ball, a new customized Yankee Stadium. It’s not that baseball has never been monkeyed with. Baseball has always been monkeyed with. But steroids, that’s another kind of cheating. Ruth’s advantages were manifestly natural: and were connived at by the sport itself: the team, the league, the public. Steroids too were connived at, but not openly.

So: does Bonds belong on the same stage with Ruth, with Aaron? Does McGwire? Bonds doesn’t just have the great bod, the great strength. He can see the ball, he’s coordinated. Most important, he has the patience, the judgment. He can wait on the ball, then unleash. In that he belongs on the stage with anybody. Ah, but the steroids.

On the one hand, if Arnold, why not Barry? If Mark, why not Barry? But here’s another angle, one sympathetic to Bonds. McGuire hit 70 home runs in 1998. Did he do it on Wheetina? Never mind what the public thinks, or thought; these are guys in the dugouts, they have their own grapevine. Should Bonds compete without steroids if important records are being broken with them? 1998 is not 1928.

I say let them compete in their own times. And stop taking records so seriously. I don’t trust that ANY of our records are accurate.
I don’t trust God to keep accurate records. But I trust God’s records to be far more accurate than ours.

I look forward to a time where our records would be compared to God’s: to our sorrow I bet.
But then I look even more forward to the time when God’s judgment comes up for judgment by the god he may not even realize is keeping tabs.

Then I suspect all the gods’ records will just evaporate: before no gods. Just swallowed in infinite time.

Buff Bucks

I love dominant competitors where the competition seems genuinely open. Tiger inherited his genes, but he still has to win the tournament. By the time we get to the US Open you or I and Michelle Wie can have tried to get there without too many artificial obstacles. It's the best golf which has the best chance.

A year ago at this time we were hoping Lefty, Veejay, Big Easy Ernie Els could give Tiger a run for the money. This year Tiger again stands alone.

Tennis too is blessed with a Titan. Roger Federer wins like no one in tennis has won before. Who's dominated a racket sport like that since Hashim Khan in the 1940s? Not even Rod Laver put up numbers like Roger had for 2005. But God bless us, Rafael Nadal, who frustrated Roger in last year's French, just took a final from Roger!
Even a Titan needs a rivalry.

I've ogled Tiger online before, and Roger Federer too, even oohed and ahed about Hashim. I jot this piece today to show off Rafa: but also to stand agape at another buff Spaniard: have you gotten a glam yet of Camilo Villegas? The guy is bursting out of his golf shirt and pants the way Britany Spears showed the world how to burst out of girlhood.

Notice: Nadal isn't exactly hiding. He wears those ridiculous cut-off sleeves, and with reason. Well neither is Villegas taking any evident vows of poverty, modesty, or chastity. This past weekend he was wearing orange shoes and an orange belt. Some other damn thing was coordinated orange: his wrist band, or a hankie. If it weren't for the articulated biceps, legs, butt, he would have looked like a freaking fairy.

I think I'll also put together a note on the subtle perfection of the Federer bod. He reminds me of Mike Schmidt: another physical genius of the super-average.