things apparent are the vision of things unseen
Lawrence Lessig has a piece in the nytimes on orphaned artworks. a few days ago i had another post about this subject.
the final sentences of lessig’s writing are:
“In a digital age, knowing the law should be simple and cheap. Congress should be pushing for rules that encourage clarity, not more work for copyright experts.”
+++++
“digital…law…simple…cheap” + “congress should be pushing for rules that encourage clarity…” = hilarious.
so long, class of ’08, i’ll miss you.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1yxI99OLdg&feature=related[/youtube]
>>NemesisMatch<<
from Peirce:
“Nature is a far vaster and less clearly arranged repertory of facts than a census report; and if men had not come to it with special aptitudes for guessing right, it may well be doubted whether in the ten or twenty thousand years that they may have existed their greatest mind would have attained the amount of knowledge which is actually possessed by the lowest idiot. But, in point of fact, no man merely, but all animals derive by inheritance (presumably by natural selection) two classes of ideas which adapt them to their environment. In the first place, they all have from birth some notions, however crude and concrete, of force, matter, space, and time; and, in the next place, they have some notion of what sort of objects their fellow-beings are, and of how they will act on given occasions. Our innate mechanical ideas are so nearly correct that they needed but slight correction. The fundamental principles of statics were made out by Archimedes. Centuries later Galileo began to understand the laws of dynamics, which in our times have been at length, perhaps, completely mastered (The General Theory of Probably Inference was written in 1883). The other physical sciences are the results of inquiry based on guesses suggested by the ideas of mechanics. the moral sciences, so far as they can be called sciences, are equally developed out of our instinctive ideas about human nature. Man has thus far not attained to any knowledge that is not in a wide sense either mechanical or anthropological in its nature, and it may be reasonably presumed that he never will.” pp 214-215 Philosophical Writings of Peirce, edited by Justus Buchler. Available (kind of) via Google Books.
Mircea Cantor: Deeparture
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMjOPwkS0fg[/youtube]
Derren Brown Zombie
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjRAcajFte0&feature=related[/youtube]
two days ago i quoted Peirce:
“It is a matter of real fact to say that in a certain room there are two persons. It is a matter of fact to say that each person has two eyes. It is a matter of fact to say that each person has two eyes. It is a matter of fact to say that there are four eyes in the room. But to say that if there are two persons and each person has two eyes there will be four eyes is not a statement of fact, but a statement about the system of numbers which is our own creation.” p. 59, from Philosophical Writings of Peirce, edited by Justus Buchler. Available (kind of) via Google Books.
now Piaget, from here:
“In cases involving the physical world the abstraction is abstraction from the objects themselves. A child, for instance, can heft objects in his hands and realize that they have different weights – that usually big things weigh more than little ones, but that sometimes little things weigh more than big ones. All this he finds out experientially, and his knowledge is abstracted from the objects themselves. But I should like to give an example, just as primitive as that one, in which knowledge is abstracted from actions, from the coordination of actions, and not from objects. This example, one we have studied quite thoroughly with many children, was first suggested to me by a mathematician friend who quoted it as the point of departure of his interest in mathematics. When he was a small child, he was counting pebbles one day; he lined them up in a row, counted them from left to right, and got ten. Then, just for fun, he counted them from right to left to see what number he would get, and was astonished that he got ten again. He put the pebbles in a circle and counted them, and once again there were ten. He went around the circle in the other way and got ten again. And no matter how he put the pebbles down, when he counted them, the number came to ten. He discovered here what is known in mathematics as commutativity, that is, the sum is independent of the order. But how did he discover this? Is this commutativity a property of the pebbles? It is true that the pebbles, as it were, let him arrange them in various ways; he could not have done the same thing with drops of water. So in this sense there was a physical aspect to his knowledge. But the order was not in the pebbles; it was he, the subject, who put the pebbles in a line and then in a circle. Moreover, the sum was not in the pebbles themselves; it was he who united them. The knowledge that this future mathematician discovered that day was drawn, then, not from the physical properties of the pebbles, but from the actions that he carried out on the pebbles. This knowledge is what I call logical mathematical knowledge and not physical knowledge.”
the discovery of a 140 year old supernova reminds me of a statement i heard julian barbour make – but i can’t recall where it was. to paraphrase, he said that we have come to know the age of the earth by studying rocks that exist right now.
last semester i asked some students to consider these quotes by C.S. Peirce:
The following quotes are from Charles S. Peirce, American Philosopher, 1839 –1914, and come from Philosophical Writings of Peirce, edited by Justus Buchler. Available via Google Books.
“It is a matter of real fact to say that in a certain room there are two persons. It is a matter of fact to say that each person has two eyes. It is a matter of fact to say that each person has two eyes. It is a matter of fact to say that there are four eyes in the room. But to say that if there are two persons and each person has two eyes there will be four eyes is not a statement of fact, but a statement about the system of numbers which is our own creation.” p. 59
“..for the real is that which insists upon forcing its’ way into our recognition as something other than the mind’s creation. The real is active; we acknowledge, in calling it the actual. (This word is due to Aristotle’s use of action to mean existence, as opposed to a mere germinal state.)” p. 79
“The reality of things consists in their persistent forcing themselves upon our recognition. If a think has no such persistence, it is a mere dream. Reality, then, is persistence, is regularity. In the original chaos, where there was no regularity, there was no existence. it was all a confused dream. This we may suppose was in the infinitely distant past. But as things are getting more regular, more persistent, they are getting less dreamy and more real” p. 358
Nassim Taleb, from The Black Swan:
“Platonicity[ed. you’ll notice julian barbour’s site is called platonia]: the desire to cut reality into crips shapes….Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.” p. 15
these thoughts are with me now while considering the different but related acts of the geologist (or anyone, for that matter) holding something in their hands (actual) and then studying (germinal) that thing, and then struck by how the result of that study, in this particular case, is a numerical value. …But to say that if there are two persons and each person has two eyes there will be four eyes is not a statement of fact, but a statement about the system of numbers which is our own creation.
the recent image of the supernova is actually a composite of two images, a radio image from 1985 (blue), and an x-ray image from 2007:
“the past isn’t even past” Faulkner
I’ve culled this post together from a bunch of recent emails from various sources:
In 1930 Woody Guthrie asked that the following be printed below his published songs.
“This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”
For Immediate Release: May 7, 2008
Background: The House Intellectual Property Subcommittee today approved H.R. 5889, the Orphan Works Act of 2008. Orphan works are works, such as photographs, music or film, or other works for which the copyright holder can’t be found by someone who wants to use the work in a way that normally would require permission. Works can become “orphaned” for a number of reasons: the owner did not register the work, the owner sold rights in the work and did not register the transfer, the owner died and his heirs cannot be found.
The following statement is attributed to Gigi B. Sohn, president and co-founder of Public Knowledge:
“We are pleased that the Subcommittee has approved this legislation with the promise to continue to discuss issues of concern with stakeholders before a full Judiciary Committee markup. Overall, we believe the bill would restore much needed balance to copyright law by freeing up for use by follow on creators so-called orphan works.
“We recognize there are some issues going forward on which we would like to work with the subcommittee before the bill is considered by the full Judiciary Committee. The ‘notice of use’ archive provision, would impose onerous filing requirements on users without providing any real benefits to owners by requiring users to submit summaries of their searches along with a notice of intended use. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) on behalf of herself and Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA), noted during the markup that there are already provisions in the bill that obviate the need for such an archive.
“We thank Subcommittee Chairman Berman, Ranking Member Coble and their staff for taking the time to work with us. We look forward to working with them on these issues of concern.”
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2008/05/support-the-orp.html
http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/1478
Definition of an Orphan Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works
http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/1553
http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2008/05/07/asmp-supports-orphan-works-bill/
Ken Robinson will be in Baltimore as a part of the Creativity Summit at Center Stage,
and there is a free lunch of some sort. He’s consented to let Radar Redux stream the event – and i’ll be doing some of the streaming with Jack Livingston.
Thursday May 22 – 9:30 to 3:30.
To register to attend for free go to GBCA site and click on the registration.
Here is his TED talk, entitled: Do Schools Today Kill Creativity?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY[/youtube]
…and if there was a chair, desk, papers, and a cat inside it would look just like my studio. without a cat it would look like my office.
here are its’ relatives.
i’m getting reports that this blog isn’t working on firefox – not sure why, trying to figure it out.
many of us have spent, and will continue to spend, a lot of time on the mid-atlantic states re-accreditation process, due early next year.
while searching for clip art for a project, i somehow found myself at The North American Association of Unaccredited Colleges and Universities. it made my day. please visit and explore, i don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
A SAMPLE LESSON from TAGOMA INSTITUTE OF TIE-KWAN-DOH:
Step 1: Place hands free option on cellphone and attach to your face.
Step 2: Find a random person.
Step 3: Battle them.
Step 4: We talk you through it.
Step 5: You tell us what you learned.
.