Doctorow on Swartz

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing on Aaron Swartz.

For a blogger in the wild

For Mike:

Canada PM meets chiefs amid Teresa Spence hunger strike

Ms Spence has stayed inside this teepee despite freezing temperatures

Continue reading the main story

Related Stories

• Native anger blocks Canada line

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has agreed to meet a delegation of First Nation leaders, following a 25-day hunger strike by one chief.

Attawapiskat chief Teresa Spence says she will join the 11 January meeting, but continue her fast until then.

She began her protest against a budget bill critics say weakens native land rights and environmental safeguards.

Three other chiefs have joined Ms Spence in her hunger strike.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-20913720

Michael O'Connor Clarke

One of the funniest things I've ever seen was a representation of a laugh. It appeared in a blog post by Michael O'Connor Clarke. It was a work of art -- a long, evolving, rhythmic yeowl of, shall we say, critical delight at something -- it was many years ago, and even if I could recall the "giggle-worthiness" of the provocation, it wouldn't matter. What mattered was the amazing artistry of the depicted laugh -- a kind of verbal equivalent of a hamster dance that just kept going and going for nearly ever.

I thought I'd saved that laugh, but having looked in all the places it should be, I can't find it. While there are many, many amazing things people have said about Michael, I would say, even if I didn't know anything about him, if I only had that one string of unearthly leprechaunish giddiness turned to glory (I wish I could find it -- it didn't simply emulate a laugh, but escalated, then somehow seemed to become conscious, and find itself funny, sending it to a higher order magnitude of comicality), it that's all I had, I would know he was, and is, and always will be a marvel.

As he indeed turned out to be a few years later when we met in Toronto, where I was visiting. He and his whole family met us, took us around, and we enjoyed a meal in a tavern before saying goodbye.

Ruairi and Michael

There was a warmth, an intelligence, a wit, a care. It was his idea to start a little blog about the birth of his son, Ruairi, as well as my son, Sawyer, and Gary Turner's daughter Cameron. Three blogging dads talking about their kids. There was a care. When Ruairi was taken ill and back in hospital, the care came through with the same unfathomable intensity* that propelled that astonishing image of a laugh.

A few years later, when his son had injured his head, he wrote of it again with as great a depth of concern. You knew, felt, wobbled with the care inside him. A care now reflected in the thoughts, feelings, memories of many. A hug to him, and his lovely family. They might be needing some help. We'll surely be needing his.

*That intensity manifested itself as well in attention to detail, as in the final entry on his blog, a recipe for Orzo salad. 

Twitter

Orbe locus medio est inter terrasque fretumque
caelestesque plagas, triplicis confinia mundi; 40
unde quod est usquam, quamvis regionibus absit,
inspicitur, penetratque cavas vox omnis ad aures:
Fama tenet summaque domum sibi legit in arce,
innumerosque aditus ac mille foramina tectis
addidit et nullis inclusit limina portis; 45
nocte dieque patet: tota est ex aere sonanti,
tota fremit vocesque refert iteratque quod audit;
nulla quies intus nullaque silentia parte,
nec tamen est clamor, sed parvae murmura vocis,
qualia de pelagi, siquis procul audiat, undis 50
esse solent, qualemve sonum, cum Iuppiter atras
increpuit nubes, extrema tonitrua reddunt.
atria turba tenet: veniunt, leve vulgus, euntque
mixtaque cum veris passim commenta vagantur
milia rumorum confusaque verba volutant; 55
e quibus hi vacuas inplent sermonibus aures,
hi narrata ferunt alio, mensuraque ficti
crescit, et auditis aliquid novus adicit auctor.
illic Credulitas, illic temerarius Error
vanaque Laetitia est consternatique Timores 60
Seditioque repens dubioque auctore Susurri;
ipsa, quid in caelo rerum pelagoque geratur
et tellure, videt totumque inquirit in orbem.

Metamorphoses 12:39-63
Literal English trans.

They Don't Mitt

YouTube Doubler

Background of Troy

I posted this accidentally here. It was intended for, and now is posted to, the blog about Ovid. But given the date and theme of the fallen city, I'll leave it here as well.

With the story of Laomedon's scam of the gods, Ovid touches on the tale of Troy:

Sigeum, Rhoeteum, Troy

Latona’s son left Mount Tmolus and, flying through the clear air, he came to earth in the country of Laomedon, this side of the narrows of the Hellespont, named from Helle, daughter of Nephele. To the right of the deeps of Sigeum, and to the left of those of Rhoeteum, there was an ancient altar of Jupiter the Thunderer, ‘source of all oracles’. There, Apollo saw Laomedon building the foundations of the new city of Troy. The great undertaking prospering with difficulty, and demanding no little resources, he, and Neptune, trident-bearing father of the swelling sea, put on mortal form, and built the walls of the city for the Phrygian king for an agreed amount in gold. The edifice stood there.

A few helpful links for the location and genealogy of the city's rulers:

Troy - Parada has fine maps and a fairly detailed genealogy from Dardanus down through the Roman kings.

Hesione - adds some details to the Troy story.

Peleus - for the background of Aeacus's sons.

Genealogical Tree of the House of Troy 

Dardanus - sire of Erichthonius, who was father of Tros.

The Dardanians split into two ruling houses of Troy:

Ilus - Ilus founded the city of Ilium (Troy) that he called after himself. Ilus went to Phrygia, and taking part in games that at the time were held by the king, he won victory in wrestling. As a prize he received fifty youths and as many maidens; and the king, obeying an oracle, gave him also a cow and asked him to found a city wherever the cow should lie down. This took place when the cow came to the hill of Ate, and in that spot Ilus built the city which he called Ilium. Then he prayed to Zeus that a sign might be shown to him and he saw the Palladium, fallen from heaven and lying before his tent. Ilus was blinded, since the Palladium was not to be looked upon by any man. But later, when he had made offerings to the goddess, he recovered his sight

Assaracus - brother of Ilus and Ganymede, father of Capys, grandfather of Anchises.

Parada situates the Trojans within the descendants of Atlas (father of Electra and the other Pleiades). Parada's charts arguing that nearly everyone (except Athenians) can be traced back to one of three ancestors -- Atlas, Deucalion, or Io -- can be found here.

Model of Troy layer 1000 years before its destruction

Art of error

If a theory justifies the false position in which a certain part of society is living, then, however unfounded or even obviously false the theory may be, it is accepted, and becomes and article of faith to that section of society. Tolstoy - What is art? 

Test

This is a test - keep getting a Service Error 503 message from Google Blogger. 

British Government suddenly recovers sanity

The government is to unveil controversial plans to make publicly funded scientific research immediately available for anyone to read for free by 2014, in the most radical shakeup of academic publishing since the invention of the internet.

Under the scheme, research papers that describe work paid for by the British taxpayer will be free online for universities, companies and individuals to use for any purpose, wherever they are in the world.

In an interview with the Guardian before Monday’s announcement David Willetts , the universities and science minister, said he expected a full transformation to the open approach over the next two years.

The move reflects a groundswell of support for “open access” publishing among academics  who have long protested that journal publishers make large profits by locking research  behind online paywalls. “If the taxpayer has paid for this research to happen, that work shouldn’t be put behind a paywall before a British citizen can read it,” Willetts said.

“This will take time to build up, but within a couple of years we should see this fully feeding through.”

more 

Harvard bit by JSnake

We write to communicate an untenable situation facing the Harvard Library. Many large journal publishers have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive. This situation is exacerbated by efforts of certain publishers (called “providers”) to acquire, bundle, and increase the pricing on journals.  Harvard Faculty Advisory Council

We've grown accustomed to the insane

Gifthub points to a tale of infelicitous economics - French, of course - told by the Times:

“The United States is getting accustomed to a completely crazy level of inequality,” Mr. Piketty said, with a degree of wonder.

One might wonder (the Times, vastly culpable on this score, does not), how did this come about?


One thing to understand is that in the US, wealth long ago learned to be self-concealing. Instead of flaunting in the mode of nouveaux riches, the old money followed the Cosimo de Medici/Superman model: Appear normal and be the power.


This can easily be parsed via real estate patterns. The wealthy find islands, like Longboat Key, Casey Key, or Boca Grande in Florida, which are a bit off the beaten path. They are zoned to be almost entirely private - the one "public" beach on Longboat is a strip of lovely sand with three parking spaces. They offer no Wal-Marts, no reason, really, for the hoi to show up. If you kayak around in Florida, the money - hidden behind walls or hedge from the street -- stares at you on the water from palatial terraces, balconies, lawns, tennis courts, and often, a princely yacht.

In near "completely crazy" conditions, philanthropy is tasked with a not entirely consonant set of objectives: it has to pre-emptively fend off the usual ressentiment of the less fortunate; in a sense, it's a form of protection policy, buying the goodwill of the many via the machinations of experts; it might apply a bit of salve to the soul of the Giver, who is disproportionately a Taker. In the case of a Madoff, it's a fungible triple bottom line accounting scheme with heavenly overtones, inaudible to human ears. In the case of the Koch Bros., it's an entree to social cachet, to establishing a strategic position amid a network of potentially like-minded Takers. Philanthropy so guided can do small good, but is powerless to alter the power structure that makes itself possible. Its use value, in fact, lies in reinforcing that system.

How much longer will USians indulge the polite fiction that the wealthy -- who seize the best assets of nature, of art, of time -- make it all good by sending accountants, lawyers and pony boys to tend the altars of philanthropy. A nettled Business Week will piss about salient moments of poor monarchic judgment. Face the music, USians, and it's not Lawrence Welk, or The Band, or Ol' Blue Eyes: Like the Franco-appointed King of Spain, the rich are always gleefully trumping Big Game somewhere -- rarely they're caught in the act.

Trump boys

Seeing OWS from afar

This is essentially a People's contest. On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men -- to lift artificial weights from all shoulders -- to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all -- to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life. ~ Abraham Lincoln

~ Lincoln is explaining in a written speech to Congress why he needs to order up an army a couple of months after taking office. Note he's linking the viability of the Union with the project of Democracy in toto. In the same missive he also wrote:

.... this issue embraces more than the fate of these United States. It represents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy -- a government of the people, by the same people -- can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes. . .

Particularly nice: "by the same people."

From: Team of Rivals

Guanajuato

The Pope's recent visit to Guanajuato, Mexico, made me think of something I'd written over a decade ago, after visiting that lovely and peculiar city. Here it is -


Guanajuato ? excerpt from a Mexican travelogue 


In Guanajuato, a wealthy and sophisticated mining town north of Mexico City, things fall prey to a macabre whimsy.

To enter the town, whose name means “place of the frogs,” you navigate tunnels buried in mountains that used to be full of silver. The streets mislead, surprise, wind and turn into hidden plazas where lovers love and children play.

The spirit of Cervantes presides over Guanajuato’s cafes and little theatricals under perfect skies. The trees are carved into geometric forms that sing with hidden birds. Private homes are warrens full of bright furniture and brighter tile.

Guanajuato is also home to Museo de las Momias - the Mummy Museum, which originated by a chance discovery early in the last century.


It seems the town requires its citizens to pay a certain fee for perpetual cemetery maintenance. Families are supposed to cover for those who die without having paid their dues. If the merry town doesn’t receive payment within five years of your burial, it evicts you from your grave.

Soon after this policy was implemented, it became apparent that the unearthed residents of Guanajuato’s cemetery were failing to cooperatively decompose. Something in the soil, they saw, was turning them into calcified mummies.

If death can have its little joke, the town seems to have reasoned, so can Guanajuato. The remains of those in default are put on display in the museum. Well over a hundred momias are housed in glass cases there, where, for a few pesos, the public can examine their rotting boots, their death wounds, their gaping mouths.

On the day we paid our visit ? the National Independence Day of Nov. 20th ? it seemed as if the whole town had turned out for a viewing ? after the morning’s civic pride parade, kids in tow . . .

2001

Snap judgment

"Something snapped in him," is the mantra that USian media are using as the all-purpose explanation for Robert Bales' act of extinguishing 16 Afghan civilians.

This sort of empty linguistic nonsense passes for interpretive thinking at The New York Times, at the Diane Rehm Show, at NPR.

It assumes there is a place in a human's head where something can happen. It has nothing to do with military operations or ideology, it's a psyche thing.

What if human psychology were merely a negotiated protocol? A way to not understand anything?

What if there is no inside in Mr. Bales's head or in anyone else's? Where then might "something" snap?

What is a snap? What is "something?" We really do not want to understand, we just want to make verbal noises? The Times utters a meaningless noise and our cognitive intelligences all sit, like dogs?

What if the something that snapped was not in him? What if it had something rather than nothing to do with ideology, with a history of violence, with a hatred that began 4 million years ago. The heart of war lies in ideology, in stiffness, in the cohesion of wills crushed into refined cocaine, fusing blood and lies, and explanations a la The New York Times.

Hunched backs

Almost always the books of scholars are somehow oppressive, oppressed: the "specialist" emerges somewhere―his zeal, his seriousness, his fury, his overestimation of the nook in which he sits and spins, his hunched back; every specialist has his hunched back. Every scholarly book also mirrors a soul that has become crooked; every craft makes crooked.…Nothing can be done about that. Let nobody suppose that one could possibly avoid such crippling by some artifice of education. On this earth one pays dearly for every kind of mastery.…For having a specialty one pays by also being the victim of this specialty. But you would have it otherwise―cheaper and fairer and above all more comfortable―isn't that right, my dear contemporaries. Well then, but in that case you also immediately get something else: instead of the craftsman and master, the "man of letters," the dexterous, "polydexterous" man of letters who, to be sure, lacks the hunched back―not counting the posture he assumes before you, being the salesman of the spirit and the "carrier" of culture―the man of letters who really is nothing but "represents" almost everything, playing and "substituting" for the expert, and taking it upon himself in all modesty to get himself paid, honored, and celebrated in place of the expert. 

No, my scholarly friends, I bless you even for your hunched back. And for despising, as I do, the "men of letters" and culture parasites. And for not knowing how to make a business of the spirit. And for having opinions that cannot be translated into financial values. And for not representing anything that you are not. And because your sole aim is to become masters of your craft, with reverence for every kind of mastery and competence, and with uncompromising opposition to everything that is semblance, half-genuine, dressed up, virtuosolike, demagogical, or histrionic in litteris et artibus―to everything that cannot prove to you its unconditional probity in discipline and prior training, [The Gay Science, sec. 366] Cited here.

Human research in the JSTOR dungeon

Step back and think about this picture. Universities that created this academic content for free must pay to read it. Step back even further. The public -- which has indirectly funded this research with federal and state taxes that support our higher education system -- has virtually no access to this material, since neighborhood libraries cannot afford to pay those subscription costs. Newspapers and think tanks, which could help extend research into the public sphere, are denied free access to the material. Faculty members are rightly bitter that their years of work reaches an audience of a handful, while every year, 150 million attempts to read JSTOR content are denied every year.

Laura McKenna on:

Locked in the Ivory Tower: Why JSTOR Imprisons Academic Research

Occupy the debate

The notion of a surging Newt is pretty funny, if insupportable. The current debates tell us nothing.

Where is USian life, culture, reality, represented in political debates? Here are a few debate formats we'd like to see:

1. Have the candidates read a good piece of fiction - e.g. The Death of Ivan Ilych, The Metamorphosis, Michael Kohlhaas, The Overcoat, or The Queen of Spades. Require would-be surgers to speak about the story in some probing depth.

2. Have some fine ensemble perform a sonata or quartet. Each surger-in-waiting talks about its form, emotional range, complexity.

Fire Belly Newt

3. Arundhati Roy, Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, Stiglitz, Taibbi and semblables ask probing questions. See who's surging after that.

4. Eminem take them for a tour of Detroit, then asks more probing questions. Lady Gaga, JayZ, Yo Yo Ma, Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, Occupiers, join the panel, one by one. Kind of a countersurge. 

5. Bring in a sampling of hedge fund managers, big bankers, oil men, media moguls. The surgers take turns deciding either to grill these "job creators" or lick their scrota.

etc. Your suggestion here: ________________________

JSTOR, frail Angel

From here:

Register & Read (Coming soon!) 

Register & Read Beta is a new, experimental program to offer free, read-online access to individual scholars and researchers who register for a MyJSTOR account. Register & Read follows the release of the Early Journal Content as the next step in our efforts to find sustainable* ways to extend access to JSTOR, specifically to those not affiliated with participating institutions.
How will it work?

• Find an article that’s part of Register & Read, click on a “Get Access” option. 

•  

• Register for a free MyJSTOR account, or log into your account if you already have one.

• Add the content to your shelf to read the full-text online. After 14 days, you may remove it and add new items to your shelf.

• PDF versions of some articles will also be available for purchase and download. If you purchase articles from your shelf, the PDF versions may be stored and accessed in your MyJSTOR account at any time.

At launch, Register & Read will include approximately 70 journals from more than 30 publishers, a subset of the content in JSTOR. This includes content from the first volume and issue published for these journals through a recent year (generally 3-5 years ago). We plan to add more titles at a later date. See a list of the titles and publishers. Register & Read is a beta program, and we expect to adjust aspects of the program as needed. This may include both functionality and the available content.
If you would like to be notified of the launch of Register & Read, you may follow us on Twitter or Facebook.   

*"Sustainable" here has to include the sense: "supporting the salaried philanthropic lifestyle to which we good people at JSTOR have become accustomed."

Renting knowledge: Zizek

Zizek

The possibility of the privatisation of the general intellect was something Marx never envisaged in his writings about capitalism (largely because he overlooked its social dimension). Yet this is at the core of today’s struggles over intellectual property: as the role of the general intellect ? based on collective knowledge and social co-operation ? has increased in post-industrial capitalism, so wealth accumulates out of all proportion to the labour expended in its production. The result is not, as Marx seems to have expected, the self-dissolution of capitalism, but the gradual transformation of the profit generated by the exploitation of labour into rent appropriated through the privatisation of knowledge. more...

Roy - the supranational elite

You know these borders -- now it's becoming difficult to even use words like America, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan -- because you have the elites in all these countries that have actually seceded into a country of their own, and then you have the rest, you know, so what does one mean when one says "America" or "India," you know, I don't know what we mean by that...

19:28