Talking tech talk

Information of the kind that purportedly wants to be free is nothing but a shadow of our own minds, and want nothing on its own. It will not suffer if it doesn't get what it wants.

But if you want to make the transition from the old religion, where you hope God will give you an afterlife, to the new religion, where you hope to become immortal by getting uploaded into a computer, then you have to believe information is real and alive. So for you, it will be important to redesign human institutions like art, the economy, and law to reinforce the perception that information is alive. You demand that the rest of us live in your conception of a state religion. You need us to deify information to reinforce your faith.

One of the books I'm currently reading is You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier. Lanier is sharply critical of current trends in thinking about computers and information. Because he's an innovator in virtual reality, it's hard to dismiss him as a Luddite crank. Oh, I'm sure some do, but on the web you'll also find people insisting that Obama was born in Kenya to Elijah Muhammed and Chairman Mao. While I'm still in early chapters he seems to be making the point that you can do wonderful things on a computer, and also do wonderful things offf of it, but in each case you as a person have to make the choice to do it. While a lot of techno-libertarianism seems to amount to a hope that machines will make better choices for us than we make for ourselves.

Someone I've been reading about recently is Donald Deskey, an industrial designer from Minnesota. Industrial design is an interesting topic in that it shares some concerns with art, but takes place outside of the art world and is presented to people who may not consciously be looking for an aesthetic. And Deskey, along with other designers like Paul Frankl, Raymond Loewy, and Norman Bel Geddes, helped to make things look the way they did through much of the 20th century. Exammples of his work can be seen here and here, and yes that second page include the "target" box for Tide detergent. He and the others created the environments you remember from old movies and TV shows, and maybe your childhood as well.

Now we're not necessarily talking about deep thinkers here. Deskey, Loewy et al essentially took a look at what the Bauhaus was doing and stripped the Marxism from it so that golf cart riding executives would pony up for it. But it's a humanistic kind of aesthetic all the same. They were invested in the idea of the future as something that ordinary people would live in. We should expect no less now.

Quite the Friday Random Ten

I wonder how many people at work think of me as "the quiet one" as in "He always seemed so quiet," spoken to a TV jounalist between sobs.  Well, the ones I care about know me a little better than that.  I thnk.

1. Neil Young - Ride My Llama
2. Reading Rainbow - White Noise
3. Imperial Teen - The Hibernates
4. The Clash - Jail Guitar Doors
5. Amy Winehouse - (There Is) No Greater Love
6. Lambert, Hendricks & Ross - Bijou
7. The Bird & the Bee - Diamond Dave
8. New Pornographers - Crash Years
9. New Order - Age of Consent
10. Pink Martini - Ich Dich Liebe

Salutations

Hello and welcome.  Thank you for stopping by.

This is a post that just kind of is.  I don't have much I want to write about.  Or if I do it would require me to stay up much later than would be good.  Specially on a weeknight.

Just saying, I'm pretty sure this blog doesn't have that many readers.  Which is A-OK by me, because I know the ones I have are awesome.  It's that old thing of quality vs. quantity.

Breathing, a universal subject

I'm a part-time asthmatic.  I've had a couple of major attacks in my life and a few minor ones.  Nothing too recent, though.

In the grips of asthma it's difficult to sleep, nigh impossible without an inhaler.  One of the reasons for this is that you can hear your own wheezing, and for obvious reasons this sounds like a respiratory red flag.  It makes you aware of just how much you're not breathing well.

But in good health, or passable health, you also hear your own breath.  Especially when laying down to sleep.  It is, if all goes well, more calming in these circumstances.  Worth noting if only because it's something you tend to ignore the rest of the day.

Jazz and cocktails

This is one of the songs from Beck's Song Reader project, his book of sheet music. Which in itself was a pretty cool project. Anyone who can take a nineteenth century form and make it seem new is okay in my book. And this is just about the most infectious version of those songs that I've come across.

Glitch-delayed Saturday Random Ten

The more immediate glitch is that while I had my iPod hooked up to the laptop on Thursday night, when I tried to listen to it on Friday it had no juice at all.  This might be explained by the latest iTunes update.  Maybe while it was waiting for me to decide whether I'd download it, the gadget wasn't receiving any charge.

The odder, more interesting story.  Also on Thursday night, or rather very early Friday morning, I awoke to the sound of a circular saw cutting into a hornet's nest next to a megaphone.  Well, really it was the fire alarm.  This was somewhere in the 4:30 zone.  It turned out a leak in someone's bathroom had started to flood the apartment below it.  I wasn't the leaker or the leakee, luckily.  Anyway, water got on the smoke detector, which I guess made it think the sprinklers were going off so it sounded the alarm.  For some reason no one else but me thought to call the fire department - who made nice time when I did, by the way.  Still, I prefer the fire alarm to having the mice skitter around my apartment in the middle of the night.  It's a public nuisance, as distinguished from a private hell.

1. R.E.M. - Good Advices
2. New Order - Ultraviolence
3. Joni Mitchell - Black Crow
4. Arcade Fire - Normal Person
5. The Clash - I'm So Bored With the USA
6. Roxy Music - Manifesto
7. Mose Allison - You Can Count On Me
8. Amy Winehouse - Moody's Mood for Love
9. They Might Be Giants - Protagonist
10. Dinah Washington - New Blowtop Blues

The white stuff

We got more snow today.  I'd say when I first went out to lunch I felt little droplets, and when I came back bif fluffy flakes were falling. When someone at work asked about it, I said it was fluffy (as I mentioned before.)  Not really something to worry about.  We weren't going to get snowed in.  In point of fact when I left work at fiveish the snow had long since stopped with I'd estimate 1.5 inches on the ground. 

During the big storms, yeah, that was annoying.  But something like this people go "ugh, more snow" and I just shrug.  It's a perfect opportunity for stoicism.  I like not being bothered by stuff.  Which shouldn't be taken as an assertion that I never am, but you know.