But one thing Obama brings (returns?) to the office, and to government, and to our culture, which is in my mind unequivocally, marvelously, giddiness-inducing good, is the intellectual honesty required to be able to tell the difference. If we can’t honestly look at ourselves outside of ideology, it doesn’t matter what the policies are, because we won’t have honest access to the feedback of their effects, we can’t correct course when something goes wrong, and Rome will burn. This has nothing to do with liberal versus conservative philosophies, but does seem to have to do with the current Republican party versus the anyone else, and in particular versus the “reality-based community.”

An example. An Obama official admits the inevitable about the recovery plan: there will be wasteful spending. “How could it not?” columnist Gail Collins says.

Much of the stimulus money is being channeled through state and local governments, through tens of thousands of governors, mayors, county executives, transportation commissioners, parks superintendents and so on. Try to imagine the person in that pyramid with the lowest I.Q., and you’ll understand that there’s a dead-tree planter hidden in there somewhere.

(Note: That quote is the columnist, not the Obama representative.)

Can you imagine a Bush official agreeing that his plan will not work flawlessly? I can’t. A Bush administration official would talk around the point, avoid the question, generalize it to some kind of heroic-abstract “challenge” we must overcome. I keep coming back to the same metaphor (is it a metaphor?): Obama is a grown-up. Bush was a child. A well-intentioned, but petulant and untalented child.

Panicked and unable to understand why the complex world doesn’t bend to his will, a child will invent fantasies about the forces in play against him. Then he understands, he feels like he’s back in control. A grown-up accepts that the world is complex, evades understanding, that he can’t control it, but he takes responsibility and grapples with it anyway, on its own, ineffable terms. The grown-up is concerned with solving problems. The child raids windmills.*

I should say, it seems that Obama is bringing intellectual honesty to the government, it seems that he is a grown-up. We’ll see how the next years play out, but I am optimistic.

That said, I spent hours and hours trying to convince QC to do what I wanted. The macro I came up with for one part of the idea looked like this:

And after trying several variations, it actually—mysteriously—didn’t work in a critical way. I imagine it’s due to some lack of understanding of how QC’s pipeline works. But eventually I broke down and wrote the logic I wanted in Javascript using a single Javascript patch instead of that macro, and it looked like this:

Er. Yeah. You know how they like to say “and you can do all this without writing a single line of code”? Sometimes that’s only a good thing if you can also just write the damn code.

I also want to play with Processing sometime soon.

Which leaves me to say the thing I have said so many times, but which so many people don’t seem to want to understand: there is no such thing as the supernatural. If something exists, then it is real, and it is natural.

But I shoot for the middle path:

Whole-heartedly agreed that the word ’supernatural’ is meaningless. I cry a little inside whenever I see the word used by supposedly intelligent publications or people as if it has a referent.

But with respect to the whole discussion, I wanted to suggest a fundamental (ontological? epistemological?) difference between experience and representation of experience, and the consequences for science.

Let’s say we have the technology to hook someone to a machine that precisely constructs descriptions of her emotions in real time. We have a great deal of faith (ehem) that our model of the brain can convert electrical/chemical activity into these perfect descriptions. I’m not sure what such a description would be. Maybe it’s uncannily well-written, evocative prose. Or maybe a vector in some multi-dimensional emotional space that we know (somehow) is complete across the gamut of possible human emotion.

The person has experience, the machine constructs representations of that experience.

Now, if you could only pick one of those two things to have on a desert island, which would you pick? The exhaustive representation? Or the experience? Which is the more “valid” aspect of existence?

Neither; both. The two—a 1st person experience and a 3rd person representation of experience—are fundamentally separate yet equally valid aspects of existence. Science, no matter how perfect its models of the world are, will never be able to do more than generate representations. Experience can never be more than a private affair. Never the twain shall meet. (Except indirectly through the artifacts of reason and language and art and music and poetry and …)

So what’s the problem? you ask. Well, this places a real limitation on what science, as a method of investigation, is able to do, and raises questions about what “truth” and “validity” mean. Giving it short shrift, does a scientific account of an event always beat out a personal experience account of the same event in the battle for validity? If so, is that assertion “provable”?

The answer is of course, no, it’s not provable. Any claim science makes on validity depends on being able to represent the object of investigation.

So? What’s the problem? Two difficulties spring to mind:

1 – The practical impossibility of a complete model of the universe. Granted, this has little bearing on the everyday, whether your microwave works or not, but if we suppose that the project of science can be “completed,” then there is the problem of the amount of information and computation required to model the entire universe, if we suppose that, for any event, tendrils of causative dependency creep out into the entire universe (or at least to the information horizon of the speed of light), which, for completeness‘ sake, we must suppose.

But okay, forget the universe, how about modeling an afternoon thunderstorm? How about modeling a cup of tea? Completely? Without simplification? I don’t know, perhaps it will be possible some day. Maybe quantum computing will even be able to model the apparently probabilistic nature of the very small.

But, more relevant to the example above, how about modeling human emotion? Can we be sure that the multi-dimensional emotional space we made for our machine truly exhausts the gamut of human emotion? Can we prove it?*

Which brings us to …

2 – Representations must exist in some language, and science’s claims of validity in particular rely upon mathematics. I am no expert by any means, but one interpretation of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems is that “truth is a stronger notion than proof”. “Proof” exists only in the idealized, internal world of perfect spheres and such. “Truth” is something else. The philosophical implications for science are that “truth” is (provably!) slippery and the notion that science “explains” things, full stop, a bit naïve.

In fact, as should be well-known (but apparently isn’t), nothing is ever “proven” in empirical science. (I cry at the abuse of that word, too.) What we have in empirical science is a general consensus among experts, and faith, yes faith, that mathematical language maps well enough onto experience to trust the scientific models built from it. The models, the language, and the notion of proof are forever hermetically sealed away from the actual, 1st person experience of the world.

And that’s the part we care about, right? Our experience? Science is cool because it gives us microwave ovens.

So experience and 3rd-person representations of experience are (ontologically? epistemologically?) separate, but valid, aspects of existence. To compare the validity claims of science to the validity claims of personal experience is a bit like comparing apples and oranges. Ken Wilber would call each “true but partial.” It’s best, perhaps, to take each on its own terms.

Reuben Hersh calls mathematics a social activity, and if that’s true for math it’s got be even moreso true for science. Science is a collective representation of the world based on a very mature and useful method of inquiry. It is not, however, the holy grail or the end-all and be-all. I’ll take its results as wonderful things, and will often, but not always, defer to them in the face of a conflicting account of “truth” from my own 1st person experience of the world. Did I see a ghost? Probably not.

But, that’s a matter of judgement, not of mathematical necessity.

Bush’s encouragement for us to go shopping after 9/11 brought us to the mirror, but we can’t see ourselves. Rich or poor, we are all pawns to the global economy. As egocentric as we are, we will never be as important as money. We are disposable. The economy must keep growing at the expense of rich and poor. We elect politicians who will ensure our misery.

“We will never be as important as money. We are disposable.” That pretty much captures the brand of cynicism I subscribe to. In the short term, the greed and small-mindedness of the elite stupid dominate.

But then there are occasional spots of light and I do think that over the long term, the dominating trend of life is towards … not “bigger,” per se, but more-encompassing. The ever-growing economy is a flatland version, a shadow, of the larger trend.

Even the ever-higher pile of steaming matter accumulating on the hearth of this administration—and hence this country—is bound to be eventually called for what it is by the good judgement of competent (or at least morally non-blank) people, and the seeming prescience of the framers of the US Constitution. “Shocking,” “absurd,” and “moronic” are Cheney’s flailing attempts to avoid “adult supervision,” according to the George Washington University Law Professor consulted by Olbermann in the clip linked to above. Amen to that.

The Mighty Mouse is a 4-button optical mouse with a two-way scroll ball. Apple has never, until now (where “now” is like, 6 months or a year ago — I’m naturally way behind in “reviewing it” here), itself released a mouse with more than one button, though OS X has always supported multiple button input devices in software. I’ve never really cared too much, personally, because you can always buy third-party mice that are adequate. But the fact that Apple has stubbornly refused to let go of its one-mouse, one-button policy in a world where even your grandmother probably uses a two-button mouse on her $300 Dell PC for email has been seen as … dumb. Also getting a mouse that you’re never going to want to use bundled with your $2000 computer is kind of obnoxious. (As an aside, for those who don’t know, you can get a right-click on any single-button mouse by holding down control and left-clicking.)

So the Mighty Mouse should be good news. I’ve had one for a few months now, and this morning I’m particularly annoyed with it, so I’m going to do what every blogger procrastinating on homework should: complain about it pointlessly on my blog.

So first, it has two buttons, but this functionality is hidden and must be enabled in software. Everyone who’s a Windows user by default complains about Mac mice having only one button. It supports the perception that Macs are toys. The computer lab manager at school is ostensibly a Mac guy, got four new Intel iMacs (to replace four 4-year old(!) all-but-useless G4s in a lab full of more recent Dells), but didn’t know about the two-button Mighty Mouse functionality and so the replicated default install on each of the Macs leaves the second button disabled. Individual users could enable it in their preferences if they wanted to, but who — among a bunch of non-geek students — is going to know about or bother with something like that? And due to the design of the mouse itself — which is “cleverly” styled to look and feel like a one-button mouse — no one who doesn’t know ahead of time would ever suspect the mouse of having two buttons (much less four).

But maybe this is for the best, because that “clever” styling makes actually using the right button quite frustrating. It sounds easy on paper: click on the left-ish side of the mouse, you get a left click; click on the right-ish side of the mouse, you get a right-click. Click in the middle (a “chord”), you get a third button. In practice, the fact that there’s no hard dividing line between the buttons makes for a lot of mistaken clicks. When I’m working fast, I don’t want to have to think about where, precisely, to place my finger, or to bother with going to the edge of the left or right side of the mouse to be sure I don’t miss. It seems that Apple has forgotten Fitt’s Law. If there were some tactile feedback I could use — say, a rougher surface under the ideal clicking region — that would at least be something. The only such feedback available is the scroll ball, but for my finger to orient itself based on that, it has to move to the center of the mouse and then must travel back to where I think “left-ish” or “right-ish” unambiguously begins. That takes too long.

Though I have to say I’m impressed that it usually does get the middle-button chord right. I often get a right-click contextual menu when I really wanted a left click, but rarely do I hit the chord (which I have set to trigger Exposé’s Show All Windows) unintentionally.

And yes, then there’s the scroll ball. Another terribly “clever” bit of Apple engineering. It gives you both vertical scrolling, as is standard on most non-Apple mice, and horizontal scrolling (which, incidentally, you can also achieve using any vertical-scrolling mouse by holding down shift). Pretty spiffy in theory. In practice, it’s also kinda spiffy, if physically very tiny (and weirdly nipple-like). My main complaint is that it’s a piece of moving hardware that comes into contact with your skin — your oily, dirty skin. I thought the point of optical mice was to avoid the problem of dirty moving parts. Here we have one again, and, horrifyingly, stupidly, there’s no way to get into the mouse to clean it.

Apple has this sort of minimalist Modern chic thing going, which I like, but this is the classic issue of Modernism: clean, pretty and jewel-like, but really dumb at interfacing with us messy, organic humans, and/or the rest of the environment. (Though I’m glad to hear about their expanded recycling program.) The mouse fits better behind glass, under museum lights, than in the palm of someone actually trying to get work done.

So anyway, this morning, my scroll ball stopped working in the down direction. After futzing with it and scowling darkly for about 5 minutes, whatever piece of gunk had lodged itself between the ball and the wheel that reads movement in that direction dislodged itself and now I have my scroll ball back. This shouldn’t happen in a $50 mouse. Nor should mistaken clicks.

Thanks; rant done.

Everywhere in [archaic ruling-class European systems of education], at every age, you will find arrangements to place the child alone in an unguided setting with a problem to solve. Sometimes the problem is fraught with great risks, such as the problem of galloping a horse or making it jump, but that, of course, is a problem successfully solved by thousands of elite children before the age of ten. Can you imagine anyone who had mastered such a challenge ever lacking confidence in his ability to do anything? Sometimes the problem is the problem of mastering solitude, as Thoreau did at Walden Pond, or Einstein did in the Swiss customs house.

I don’t know about jumping horses, but certainly I find the idea of strict top-down universally prescribed requirements rather antithetical to what education should be about. But then No Child Left Behind is arguably not about education to begin with:

With reasonable guidelines and adequate funding, [the No Child Left Behind requirements and] timetable might have been a prudent course of education reform. But as the first sanctions are just now begininng to kick in, people across the country are belatedly discovering that NCLB is being structured and implemented as a punitive assault on public education, designed to throw the system into turmoil and open the door to privatization.

Ah. Privatization, of course. The administration’s essential imperative: re-distribute wealth to those who already have it. And in the meantime, schools become even more socialization devices than they already were, mechanically extruding mindless numb factory workers? Nice.

I’m not really so cynical as to believe it’s a conspiracy of this sort, but there was an interesting thing I read recently, in a paper called The Role of Non-Instrumental Adaptive Networks in the Evolution of a Sustainable World Community (pdf) … (breathe) … I have not actually read the whole paper, and it’s probably beyond me anyway, but on page 5, author Elaine Hartley says

Piecemeal ’solutions’ to issues such as global warming and urban sprawl have been found to be ineffectual as they are subverted by the self-sustaining dynamics of a system which has crystallized around growth in population, resources, and production. According to Hierarchy Theory, reality is ‘lumpy’: some holons maintain their integrity in the midst of flux and constrain what happens at other levels (Ahl and Allen, 1996).

Now that’s fascinating. It’s kind of obvious, too. Systems themselves, such as societies, economies, and the complex interrelations among them, once set up and stabilized, will tend to resist change to maintain their structure. It works at other levels without sentience; why shouldn’t it happen to a system composed of sentient people? So how do you define accountability when the system itself is tending towards certain behaviors? And this isn’t a matter of determinism; it doesn’t free us from individual responsibility. It just articulates the difficulty of swimming upstream to effect change.

So even if you can’t blame Bush et al for “mechanically extruding mindless numb factory workers,” that kind of social program is the radical extreme of a certain capitalistic tendency and one that seems to be “downstream” in our current state of relative conservatism. The system is not resisting movements in that direction as much as it could or should. If I knew more about economic or systems theory maybe I’d have something more useful to say, regrets.

Anyway, back to education. Seems to me that what we need first of all is not a lot of thought and argument driving towards top-down reform of our system, but first a legion of men and women like Gatto who are intelligent, passionate, and compassionate, in some system. The intellect at the top can’t possibly model the entire system in its complexity, so the bottom-up hope is that the system can just work itself out. I don’t know how to accomplish this, but re-distributing our wealth towards education and away from building bombs would be a good start. While Gatto points out how none of his ideas cost anything, getting more Gattos in there to begin with probably will. This is where the top-down influence can come in. Not in dictating change, but enabling change and then getting out of the way. Isn’t that supposedly a right-wing value, anyway?

If nothing else, as I always rant, our values here in terms of where our money goes are severely deranged.

The boobs in the title are metaphorical of course: you know, like the teats of education or something. I’ve got bottoms in this post, too. And urban sprawl. And holons. Wow, what a rambling rant.

So my Thursdays are like this:

• Get to the bus stop by 7:15-ish. Bus to Denver, arrive around 8 for class at 8:30.
• 9:45. Class over. Trot to the bus station (trying not to face-plant in the dirty street snow/slush), catch express back to Boulder to teach a class starting at 11.
• 11:45. That class ends, trot to bus stop to get next express back to Denver. Work (job-work, not school-work) from 2 to 5:30.
• Class from 5:30 to 6:45.
• Work from 7:00pm to 10pm.
• Catch next (non-express) bus back to Boulder. Get home at 11:30 pm.

The good news is this is only on Thursdays. Tuesdays are the same except for that last stretch of work from 7 to 10pm. But Mondays and Wednesdays are empty, as far as obligations to be somewhere.

So it’s not really so bad. But that back-and-forth bussing business is ridiculous. I fully expect to be skipping that 8:30am class. I, um, took it last year anyway. Yeah, I’m repeating it. So what? Ugh, I don’t want to talk about it.

The National Environmental Trust distributed custom-printed noise-making rubber whoopee cushions printed with a caricature of President Bush and the words “Emissions Accomplished.”

- U.S., Under Fire, Refuses to Shift in Climate Talks

Brilliant!

Meanwhile, according to New York magazine, there was some sort of very classy move by the Bush administration to try to keep Clinton from speaking in Montreal at all. I dunno. It seems like they were just looking for some reason to walk out. They didn’t care what. It’s like they were bored or something. “Can we go yet?” I picture our delegation whining. “This is boring.”

Ellis Henican used the phrase “the polemic business” to describe “the great cacaphony that is American political dialogue.” Well, at least if by American political dialogue you mean Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly (*flinch*), and the like. I think he must’ve let that phrase slip, ’cause it’s too close to a truthful description of what life here is like. We sell ugliness, we run a trade in dog shit. We buy it, too. We eat it up. Yum.

If none of that is depressing enough, read this:

What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days – conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead?

It seems to be, yes.

i am experiencing some extremely uncool behavior with Apple’s XCode. i have a library statically linked in my project. i have the code for the library. at some point i added some logging code in the library. i now want to remove that code. it’s expensive and annoying.

okay, so i pulled the call and re-built. the logging still happens.

i have built clean five times, i have pulled references to the library and put them back in, i’ve turned off ZeroLink. i have deleted the library object file and rebuilt. i have deleted all my main project products and re-built. i have deleted the file with the code to call the log routine. the function called “log” no longer exists. i can break the library build (by writing the syntactically anomalous but viscerally satisfying what the fuck???? on the first line of a function call. when i un-break it, the behavior returns. i have restarted XCode. i have done everything short of re-assembling the projects from scratch or throwing my computer out a window.

THE LOGGING CODE WILL NOT GO AWAY.

if i set a breakpoint on NSLog, it hits. the stack trace points to a place in the source where the call to “log()” USED TO BE. for the frame containing the “log()” function itself it shows absolutely nothing. BUT THEN SOMEONE IS CALLING NSLOG, ANYWAY.

this is not cool. i am going to get a beer.