June 2006 Archives

My mom came in about three days ago. Two days ago, Mom, Heather and I went to Asakusa. Here's a picture of the famous pagoda at that temple complex:

Afterwards, we rode the water taxi (that is, a boat) to Hamarikyu garden near Shiodome. It was a very beautiful garden, I thought, but not quite as good as the Koishikawa garden, also in Tokyo. I hope that we have the opportunity to take her there. Anyway, here's a picture.

Here's a picture of our good friend Tortuga and an unidentified person. Guess which one is Tortuga?

I just couldn't resist another citation from PKD's essay:

In 1951, when I sold my first story, I had no idea that such fundamental issues could be pursued in the science fiction field. I began to pursue them unconsciously. My first story had to do with a dog who imagined that the garbagemen who came every Friday morning were stealing valuable food which the family had carefully stored away in a safe metal container. Every day, members of the family carried out paper sacks of nice ripe food, stuffed them into the metal container, shut the lid tightly—and when the container was full, these dreadful-looking creatures came and stole everything but the can.

Finally, in the story, the dog begins to imagine that someday the garbagemen will eat the people in the house, as well as stealing their food. Of course, the dog is wrong about this. We all know that garbagemen do not eat people. But the dog's extrapolation was in a sense logical—given the facts at his disposal. The story was about a real dog, and I used to watch him and try to get inside his head and imagine how he saw the world. Certainly, I decided, that dog sees the world quite differently than I do, or any humans do. And then I began to think, Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. And that led me wonder, If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe, it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too diffrently, there occurs a breakdown of communication... and there is the real illness.

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words. --Philip K. Dick

When I first really started getting interested into the works of writer Philip K. Dick (thanks to my friend Andrew), I soon found myself researching him on the web. I found this quote on his fan website, and I wondered about the source of the quote. A few months ago, I found it - through del.icio.us - in an essay entitled How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later.

Here's a really sweet excerpt that touches upon the points that resonate within me.

But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener. Sometimes when I watch my eleven-year-old daughter watch TV, I wonder what she is being taught. The problem of miscuing; consider that. A TV program produced for adults is viewed by a small child. Half of what is said and done in the TV drama is probably misunderstood by the child. Maybe it's all misunderstood. And the thing is, Just how authentic is the information anyhow, even if the child correctly understood it? What is the relationship between the average TV situation comedy to reality? What about the cop shows? Cars are continually swerving out of control, crashing, and catching fire. The police are always good and they always win. Do not ignore that point: The police always win. What a lesson that is. You should not fight authority, and even if you do, you will lose. The message here is, Be passive. And—cooperate. If Officer Baretta asks you for information, give it to him, because Officer Beratta is a good man and to be trusted. He loves you, and you should love him.

The rest of the essay is very interesting, too. Big Dick fans (ahem, that didn't sound good) will especially love the second part of the essay, where he dips into VALIS, Ubik, Gnoticism, the Bible, and the intersection thereof. Very cool.

The money quote for me right now remains the one about language as a tool for manipulating people. I'll cite it again:

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.

You know, living in California at that time, I wonder if Dick ever ran into my man Alan Watts. It seems like they would have had a lot to talk about.

"How's My Driving?" for Everything - Pervasive Reputation Tracking as Legal Theory

Good stuff on the The University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog by Lior Strahilevitz:

Over the next few decades, urban centers could increasingly resemble small towns. Technologists working on "wearable communities" want to give each of us a small device that will not only function as a cell phone, iPod, and Blackberry, but also integrate functions of social networking software like Myspace into our forays in the public sphere. Hence, when I enter a bar, my device may alert me to the fact that sitting off to the left is someone with whom I attended college, that standing near the jukebox is a fellow Sopranos junkie who lives on my block, and that an ex-girlfriend of mine also dated the gentleman playing darts by the back window. These wearable communities will likely integrate reputational information.

Strahilevitz continues by describing a potential danger of this intersection of technology and society:

And yet, there are obviously numerous instances in which majoritarian norms are controversial. People may be too quick to condemn intellectual, political, or artistic innovation. As a result, insecure geniuses whose ideas might have ultimately prevailed if protected by anonymity will be too discouraged by the high costs of nonconformism. Majority norms may reflect stubborn biases, like racial, gender, or religious animus. In other settings, there is simply no consensus about what the existing social norms are.

That's an interesting point. It's like the paradox of majority rule with the speed on high. This illustrates what I think is becoming a critical - but largely unnoticed - issue for the Internet and for our society.

We often extoll the powerful diversifying, educating force of the Internet. At first blush it seems reasonable. There's no doubt that people are educating themselves and exposing themselves to ideas in ways that were impossible before the Internet. But, as the speed of information accelerates, and as we instantly find exactly what we think we're looking for, we might end up exposing ourselves to fewer viewpoints, not more. When we search for people, we will more likely seek out and communicate with people endowed with the same perspectives, and we will not grow. Already, the Internet is talked about in terms of communities. After all is said and done, the Internet may end up being a culturally homogenizing force.

I'm especially interested in seeing how the business community embraces technologies like these. If these communities are effective at disseminating reputation, then no doubt savvy businesses will figure out ways to impute (rather than repute) upon the community in order to better compete. Today, we might call this hype.

The other day I was stumped by a real tough programming problem at work. As I am wont to do in such situations, I took a break, went out to the outdoor fire escape, and looked out across the city. It was near sunset. I gazed over the railing of my eighth-story vantage point down at the tops of neighboring buildings. The hotel next to us had a couple dozen beautiful plants on is roof. Why, I wondered? Much further below, I spotted the alley between our two buildings, and its stained, oily pavement. I fought the urge to drop a one-yen coin into the alley.

I heard somebody open the door behind me. It was A-san. He took a few steps up the stairs, to the management floor, and then turned around to address me.

"Pyuuuun?" he inquired, with a diving motion over the rail.

"No, no, no, no," I replied in English. I'm not going to commit suicide, A-san.

With that, he nodded once, and without a sound, and without a smile, resumed his ascension to the ninth floor.

My buddy R sent me this video. Check out those moves!

This YouTube embedding is bound to break sometime soon. Here's the link when it does.

There are several things, I think, that really fascinate me about the semasiographic writing system such as that of the Yukaghir tribes about which I wrote a couple of weeks ago.

First, of course, I'm intrigued that there is a class of sophisticated languages that don't correspond to any spoken language. I should mention here that the Yukaghir did in fact have a spoken language - apparently it is distantly related to languages in the Uralic family. I wonder, however, what Yukaghirs conceive of when they read this kind of script. Do they translate it into their spoken language by narrating it like a story? I suppose it is only natural, but from my English-language perspective this is the only way that I could conceive things - I am at the mercy of my linguistic acculturation. Perhaps, though, Yukaghirs translate the script directly into a series of images in their brain, without the spoken-language middleman. If so, is there an upper limit on the level of sophistication one can convey through such writing? I presume sophisticated constructs like conditionals and temporally-motivated ideas would be difficult to represent with such a system. But that's just conjecture - I certainly don't know enough about Yukaghir script to authoritatively comment on things like that.

The other thing that strikes me is the multi-dimensionality of the script. Most, if not all, modern scripts - like English or Japanese - are in general one-dimensional. Strings of words are placed side by side in a long line, and they are meant to be read from beginning to end. That is to say, there is a definite beginning and ending for any given passage. Observe that this line, though it is placed in physical space, represents a journey from the viewpoint of the speaker in time. In other words, one might argue that writing is a projection of images from the fourth dimension onto the first, and it is up to us and our imaginations to reconstitute this sequence of images back into the fourth dimension within our brains. I think that some may object to this characterization; what about, for example, apparently timeless descriptions of objects? What about, for example, instances in which speakers flash back between present and future? For the latter, I would argue that the writer is in fact guiding us along a certain one-dimensional trajectory in time that makes perfect sense within the context of the moment - and within the context of what the writer is trying to express. For the former case, observe that we can only look directly at one thing at one time. That is, we can foveate at most one thing at any given moment. Foveating other objects or aspects of the same object require us to move our eye and adjust our fovea in space - and thus, in time. Timeless descriptions of objects - as far as I can fathom - require writer and reader to sometimes freeze an instant in time and narrate as if it were flowing normally. The author in a real sense acts as our guide. Don't you agree?

Yukaghir writing, in contrast, appears to have no guide. There is no prescription for how to get from A to B. There are, in fact, no clear As or Bs. One can conceivably start anywhere in the script, roving his or her eyes at "random," extracting meaning in the way and order exactly of his or her choosing. I would liken the author of Yukaghir scripts as not guides but rather cartographers. "Here is the general topography of the situation; go where you wish and understand where you please."

I guess that it is no surprise that most modern writing systems - and hence literatures (notable exceptions include the Choose Your Own Adventure series) are one-dimensional. Speaking is essentially one-dimensional, after all. Though we might feebly wiggle about in the dimensions of pitch and articulation, we soon hit our limits. Time, on the other hand, presents no limits. We could theoretically ramble on indefinitely about anything. *cough*

I have long had an interest in the possibilites of multi-dimensional grammars - particularly generative grammars, which are important constructs for many language processing systems - including compilers - in Computer Science.

Google will soon be offering a new service for the creation, editing, and online collaboration of spreadsheets. However, the service is on an invitation-only basis. You can try to get an invitation here. Here's an article on zdnet about it.

I like where this is going. I already use Writely for all my word processing needs (Writely was bought by Google earlier this year). Personally, I'm looking forward to all-online compilers. It would be great to compile and execute my code wherever I wanted. Of course, implementing a compiler, an IDE, and a debugging environment completely in AJAX is no small feat; furthermore, the set of applications you can target might not overlap all that much with traditional application development. Even so, I'm very excited about developments like these.

What's next at Google? A free AJAX Photoshop clone?

先週この本を読みました。「ミッドルセックス」という本はJeffrey Eugenides著者の作品です。とても面白いし、ギリシャ系アメリカ人の移民の物語の代表作品だし、1920年代～1970年代のミシガン州デトロイトのアメリカを分かりたかったらとても薦めたいと思います。

「ミッドルセックス」という題名は意味を二つ持っています。一つはナレーターの家の名前です。知っているでしょうけど、アメリカでは家を名前付けることは当たり前ではありません。もしとても有名な建築家が家を作ったら、名前をたまに付けますけど、そんなケースにも名前を付けたらかなり自慢と思われているでしょう。ナレーターのケースには、物凄く有名ではなくて、やや有名さえな建築家にデザインされているから、少し笑いました。

[ミッドルセックス」題名のもう一つの意味は本当な意味です。「両性具有」という意味です。要するに男性と女性の真ん中と言う意味です。なんでかというと、ナレーターは両性具有の人ですから。勿論両性具有に関してナレーターの経験はページ何枚か書いてありますけど、移民の経験にも、昔のアメリカの場面にも書いてあります。ちなみに、例えば差別とか、60年代のデトロイトの暴動とかが書いてあります。

とても面白くて、良い本です。日本語版があるかどうか分かりませんけど、興味があればamazonでチェックしてみて下さい。

抜粋(amazonより):

「わたしは2度生まれた。最初は1960年1月、空気の澄みきったデトロイトでのある日、女の赤ちゃんとして。2度目は1974年8月、ミシガンのペトスキー近くの救急処置室で十代の少年として…。わたしの出生証明書には、カリオペ・ヘレン・ステファニデスという名前が記載されている。しかし、最新の運転免許証には、ファーストネームとしてただカルと書かれている」