Two quotations which, while they do not fully describe photography or replace other views, do represent a truth not often enough emphasised. Both taken from a photography course graduation show.
“Photography is freedom, photography is a play day!” (Stacy Robson)
“Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world.” (Arnold Abner Newman, quoted by Kathryn Gatt)
Today's read, in a single sitting on an early morning bus ride, was Bellwether: yet another in the growing number of books which found their way onto my shelves via recommendation from The conscience pudding.
As one who is drawn into research always by delight in curiosity and love of the work itself, I find Bellwether's protagonist Sandra Foster irresistible. As one whose love of statistics is born of wonder, but who is always aware of teetering on the brink of the ridiculous, I enjoyed being invited to laugh at myself. As one who gloomily deplores fashion as a social evil, I warmed to the oblivious Bennett – but also to the infuriating victim, Flip. Peripheral characters such as the unexpectedly insightful Peyton, inventing symbologies in her time out, were a delight too; as were the sheep – ovine, human and bureaucratic.
Most of all, though, I revelled in a fun read: deep and meaningful is important, but we also need fun. And, apparently, Romantic Bride Barbie dolls...
Thank you, as always, Watoosa
Upgrades to Maplesoft's flagship computer algebra package Maple and high profile simulation sibling MapleSim have now firmly established an annual pattern of linked release, with versions 14 and 4 respectively having recently appeared. Since MapleSim draws its power from Maple, it therefore makes sense to make a shift from past practice and review them together. [more...]
I am a devout disciple of Barthes' tenet that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author”. Not that I am always, necessarily, uninterested in either the author or her/his intent; but neither can have any connection with the text being read. Or with the image being viewed.
Faced with those who are not so convinced, however, I am often at a loss to find a demonstration of the principle which doesn't immediately skitter away off their disagreement like water off a duck's back. I don't kid myself that this is about to change, but I do have a nice graphic reminder that I should practice what I preach and not expect my own intentionality to be any sort of exception to the Barthesian rule.
At the time of writing, I have had 143 responses to the Today 100602 image ... every one of which focusses on the shoes. Clearly, most viewers "read" the image as one in which footwear dominates. The semisillhouetted figure makes no appearance whatsoever. in any of these responses.
I (author) wouldn't actually go so far as to admit that I had an intention when I clicked the shutter button; but my instinctive response was to the figure, contextualised by the objects (that they are shoes hardly occurred to me at the time) surrounding him.
Insofar as I can reconstruct it, my own "reading" of the image involves:
There is nothing "correct" about my reading. It is of no greater value (arguably, on democratic grounds, less) than that of my 144 (another has come in since I started typing this) correspondents. In fact, since I already had my reading whereas the other 144 come as gifts, I place little value on mine while the others delight me. The Barthesian lesson, however, is simple: my view of what I saw is utterly irrelevant to anyone else's reading of the result..
Note: "Shoe-in" (before a blizzard of correspondents write in to correct me) is here a deliberately punning use of what is, as I learned recently from Ray Girvan at JSBlog, called an "eggcorn".
It seems to be a Dr C day.
In yesterday's "Friday crab blogging (late)" post, the good doctor twice refers to “...the English Pound, that funny letter "L,"...”. Ignoring the usual USAmerican conflation of "English" and "British" (analogous to the calling all USAmericans "New Yorkers" or, I concede, the British habit of calling anyone north of Mexico "Yankee") it's true that symbols are often perplexing.
The periodic table offers every child the puzzle of Ag for silver, K for potassium and Pb for lead. These derive, like "that funny letter L", from Latin origins: argentum, kalium, plumbum, librae, respectively.
Why "librae"? The Roman system of currency, before its departure from Britain, was arranged in a three tier system in which librae (from libra, the Roman standard unit of weight – from which also comes the abbreviation "lb" for the pound weight) were subdivided into solidi and then into denarii. The resulting abbreviations somehow survived Saxon and Norman invasions, to become the "£sd" (Pounds, shillings and pence) system which was still around through my youth and early adulthood.
For those too young to remember, there were twelve pennies, or pence, (d) in a shilling (s) and twenty shillings in a pound (£). In a sudden spasm of common sense (vigorously contested, but successful) when I was in my early twenties, the United Kingdom replaced this lovable but unwieldy cultural heirloom with a shiny new system. There were now one hundred pence (p) to the pound (still £).
The rest of Europe has since leapfrogged on from its various ancestral currencies to an even shiner and newer system: the common currency Euro, represented by a funny E (€) which has the virtue of a direct link to the currency unit. The UK has yet to find much enthusiasm for this obvious next step ... another 1300 years, perhaps.
The rest of Europe, and indeed the rest of the world, also shows greater enthusiasm than the UK for adoption of other standard measures – in particular, adoption of the almost completely logical SI system. The UK has adopted the system, but not to the extent of replacing day to day use of older customary units, which is somewhat confusing. The US (in company with those other two great global leaders Liberia and Myanmar) hasn't adopted it at all, preferring to stick with a quirkily unique variant on the Imperial system used by ... um ... nobody else.
So, to return to the point, the "funny letter L" is an abbreviation inherited from a predecessor currency whose name actually did start with an L.
The US, of course, uses the Dollar, the name of which derived from an old European silver (Ag!) coin called the Taler, and so its symbol is a funny letter T. Oh, wait a minute ... no it's not ... it's a funny letter S ($). Explanations for this vary, with the front runner being ... that ... S is an abbreviation for ... "Spanish peso" ... at this point, since my head hurts, I will hand you back to Dr C... or even onward to JSBlog, which has a stronger stomach for such labyrinthine historical cold trails than I...
Time for a cup of coffee and a shortcake biscuit.
In comment on the article to which my "Only connect" post links, Dr C says:
“I have been wondering lately some things, reflected in what you say in your article, whether someone who has been carried along by the flood (e.g. texting, Facebook, iPhone, GPS location, implantable chip) can't voluntarily turn the other way. Do a sort of Thoreau maneuver and walk away from it all. I feel actually chained to my cell phone and I am expected to be there, one heartbeat away from an anxious parent. I don't really mind it but I can't imagine all of society barreling down the road with our every action, every movement, analyzed by someone in Washington, London or Paris (actually in Bangladesh).”
Removing my scientist's hat (UFO shaped, in a padded fluorescent orange synthetic satin, carrying the words "Kiss me quick, Igor") and replacing it with my vigilant citizen headgear (a frayed and sunbleached beanie, with floral hippy insert) ... this is something that concerns me, too.
The answer, I think, is that (as with almost any aspect of social organisation) one cannot easily walk away from the ICT revolution as a whole and still remain connected to the main of society as a whole ... but one can pick and choose amongst its manifestations to a considerable extent.
I have indicated before my lack of personal enthusiasm for sites of the FaceBook variety (and an alternative approach to the same requirements). On the other hand, here I am making use of another online strand – the blog – and I am an enthusiastic exponent of wikis for many particular purposes. The thing is, in my view, to decide what serves your needs and what makes you serve it ... embrace the first, shun the second, and be aware that the distinction will be different for each person who asks the question.
In his third sentence (“...cell phone ... one heartbeat away from an anxious parent”) Dr C says, in my opinion, more about himself than about the technology. A warm and compassionate person, with a strong professional conscience, he feels that a device which makes him more available to a concerned parent must be used to do just that. My own cell phone, by contrast, is a vital component of my life but spends most of its time "on silent", taking messages which I check regularly but to which I respond when convenient (hmmm ... it suddenly occurs to me that perhaps I have painted myself into a corner here ... perhaps I am, also by contrast with Dr C, a cold and unfeeling...)
About a decade and a half ago, commenting on exactly this, I used the metaphor of “a free fall parachutist, compelled to fall downward but riding tiny variations to a choice of the available landing points”. It still seems to me, after all this time, a reasonable description of what needs to be done.
Once upon a time I spent several weeks, completely alone (long story; don’t ask), on top of a mesa with a precarious microecology, surrounded by desert. My only company was the local wildlife: mostly lizards, small rodents, and an unlikely colony of feral cats at the top of the food chain.
Those cats, as the only visible social species, became the focus of my attention for much of the time – particularly the complex network of behavioural relations that bound their tribe together. There were mentor/mentee relations. There were sibling and parent/offspring relations. There were hunting partners. There were bonded sexual pairings and temporary liaisons. There was a power hierarchy. And there was a rich web of what I could only describe as ‘best friend’ relations. Then there was also a small number of maverick individuals who appeared to be entirely outside all of this, part of the tribe, but operating alone, connected to the main only by apparently random acts of altruism or brigandism.
Studying systems of inter-relational linkage was, at that time, an important part of my day job. But computing resources were scarce in those days, and sheer volume of content and association limited what could realistically be done; things are very different today. While analysis of social networks stretches back at least to the 1940s (arguably to the late 19th century), and social network analysis (SNA) as a formal field has been well established in sociology (to which I shall return, shortly) for decades, ‘it has only recently been discovered by behavioural biologists as a useful tool in the study of animal behaviour’, to quote Amelia Coleing* in Bioscience Horizons just over a year ago. Coleing goes on to observe that ‘...methods devised to measure social complexity in studies of animal behaviour... often reflect the social relationships between individuals indirectly... social network analysis provides formal descriptors... and by providing quantitative measures... allows testing of statistical models about relationships and structure’. [More]
Amelia Coleing, "The application of social network theory to animal behaviour" in Bioscience Horizons, 2009. 2(1): p. 32.
An Isra'eli friend writes, gloomily:
“After living my whole life in a country which bases its foreign policy on mad dog principles, I should really be inured to surprise over anything it does. The whole point of a mad dog strategy is that one is unpredictable, that nothing is impossible, that no response is in principle too extreme or disproportionate, that the slightest perceived provocation may produce an insanely inappropriate reaction, that everyone around is always too jittery to organise a threat.
And yet, the habit and instinct of rationality die hard in me. I see my country indulge in an act of piracy on the high seas and I am wearily unsurprised; but to see it doing so against its only regional ally and (more significant still) its only Moslem ally, still has the power to make me shake my head in despair.
I don't like or approve the mad dog policy, though I understand where it came from. I don't like Turkey, much, either, though I understand that governments find their friends where they can. Now I see that when the two things come into conflict, the mad dog wins.
What haunts me now is the knowledge that there can, by definition, be no limit to what a mad dog will do. I have always clung to the rational belief that while owning nuclear weapons was an obvious enhancement of the mad dog image, actual use would make them valueless. Now, I am no longer sure that my rational belief is shared by those who will make the decision.”
