This is an essay from The Culture We Deserve: A Critique of Disenlightenment by Jacques Barzun.#

In this essay, Jacques discusses problems with current historical research, criticism, and scholarship in general.#

The excuse that may be offered for the New Critics' misconception of history is that in the late nineteenth century, when academics who later taught literature were in their formative years, some historians did put forward the claim their their work was scientific. They were defending their domain against the aggressive self-conceit of the newly redefined "social sciences" and boasting to the world of their own "method" and "rigor." They repudiated those who wrote "literary" history and they eagerly gave up panoramic narratives for narrow "studies," microscopic in detail and free of ideas. In their place, "problems" became the sole justification of research. All the difficulties of life had turned into problems, from which it followed that the only worthy effort was to reach solutions. And nothing but science had solved or would ever solve a problem.

The paradox in the New Critics' assault is that under its pressure departments of ENglish in colleges and universities began to admit avowed critics into their ranks; and as soon as this surrender occurred, the New Criticism became a method; the study of literature was turned into problem-solving, while the creation of the work was also regarded as problem that the author had or had not successfully solved. The metaphors had to "work out," the structure to be tested at every joint; nothing flawed or excrescent could pass this engineering survey. [pg. 77]

A problem with methodology, is that when all you have is hammer, everything is a nail.#

Reinforced by the new interest in the metaphysical poets and the revived attention to Dante and Melville, the scrutinizing shortly transformed criticism into the decoding of ciphers. Every piece worth studying was found to contain "levels" of meanings; words and images meant anything but what they seemed to say. In short, the great writers of the world seemed to have worked in one genre only: allegory. [pg. 78]

Jacques begins to talk about a program of "Cultural Criticism" a colleague and he came up with.#

For cultural criticism presupposes the factitiousness of theory and the unsuitability of system when it comes to understanding art. One reads a poem as one reads a face-with a great deal of attention, knowledge, and experience of reading. There is only this difference, that one may stare at a poem. As for knowledge and experience, they can grow in regions apparently far from poems. Unexpectedly, long after, a fact or memory links itself with a verse or a rhythm to enrich a true reading. The great point is that none of the elements brought to bear is ever regarded as determinant, as a cause; it is only a condition, whose force is gauged, like everything in immediate experience, by the esprit de finesse. [pg. 84]

Jacques discusses the differences and similarities between a cultural critic and a cultural historian. The critic deals with contemporary works and thus cannot be as decided. But the historian is different,#

But, it may be asked, why should the historian venture to perform a task bound to be partial in both senses? The critic is need in order to sort out current production, but the historian can wait until we area ll dead and our full selves appear. This objection ignores the duty that goes with knowing something of the past. The cultural historian's motive is not the dubious pleasure of fault-finding. Rather, it is to reaffirm and perhaps strengthen what he thinks valuable in the activities of the culture makers, who are always subject to the distracting forces of fashion and competition. [pg. 85]

He closes by pointing out that criticism and historicism cannot predict the future of art, and thus life.#

It is useless to ask what the new art and culture will be like. The genuinely new comes only by concrete example. In any case, a critic deals only with the actual. On this principle, and in the present moment of dissolution, he can only say, like the Virgin in Chesterton's ballad: [pg. 86]

I tell you naught for your comfort,
Nay, tell you naught for your desire,
Save that the day grows darker yet.
And the sea rises higher.

A much more wholesome and beautiful way of asserting that only "Death and Taxes" are predictable.

There will be a lot of Panther posts today, I can just feel it. I'm practicing patience by waiting until next week to get it. I like to torture myself.#

Paul Thurrott and his wife waited in line last night,#

So my wife and I actually went to the Apple Store at the Cambridgeside Mall in Cambridge, Massachusetts to witness the "Night of the Panther" first hand (then I made it up to her with dinner in Boston). I was really impressed with the number of people waiting in line for the event (my wife described the line as "disconcerting"), though I couldn't help but think that everyone who was there was everyone in the area who would ever actually buy Panther at retail. Anyway, after an interminable 40 minute wait to get into the store, we finally received our 10 percent discount (unused) and a Panther keychain. Yippee, right? Also, my wife had a few choice questions for the geeks waiting faithfully for the software release ("What is wrong with what you're using now?" and "Why do you have to get this right now?" were my favorites). She's just not into computers.

Gordon Weakliem gives the background on Jason Salavon.#

How cool, I had no idea Jason had a website. Jason's little brother Ian is my friend from college. Jason was actually working in this medium (composing larger images from lots of little ones) when he was at UT ten years ago, when he was an Art major with a minor in CS. He's found this fascinating intersection between Computing and Art, composing abstract pieces from concrete works, sampling visual art the way musicians sample music, but reassembling in a totally different way, where the original is present but barely recognizable, if at all. I haven't seen Jason's work up close in years, but what he used to do is compose these pieces so that the individual images, while tiny, were still discernable at a very close distance (a few inches). IIRC, he was also working on generative programs that could automatically generate art based on whatever input parameters you might specify.

Kim comments on those images.

Jason Salavon has four images that show the average of all Playboy centerfold pictures during four different decades. Yes, it's work-safe. The interesting thing is that, while you can't see any detail, you can clearly see that the average model has gotten much paler and blonder over time. Having perused some older playboys myself, I suspect they've also gotten a lot thinner, but you can't really see that in the images.

I like being viral.

Radley Balko gives some info as well.

Jason Salavon is an artist with an interest in pop culture, evolutionary biology, demographics and mathematics. He combines his interests into really fascinating pieces where he takes large samples of data (two examples, the distribution of weath in the U.S. for 1994, and each one-second frame from the movie Deep Throat), simplifies them (for example, by applying mathematical formulas, or taking the mean colors of complex photographs), then rearranges the newly culled data in meaningful ways.

Kevin provides proof that we "won" in Afghanistan.#

Rob at Mac Net Journal gives some advice on Panther installing.#

OK, so I didn't follow my own advice. After writing last weekend about the additional safety offered by doing an Archive and Install installation of Panther, when I read through the installation instructions provided with the upgrade to Mac OS X 10.3 I noticed that Apple was explicitely instructing folks to simply choose the upgrade option rather than Archive and Install. So, like a good software tester, I followed the instructions. It still took about an hour to do the installation, but my 12-inch PowerBook G4 is now running Panther and my normal suite of apps is up and running and I am back to working for the rest of the evening.

No idea where she is, but young men should volunteer.#

Alex Halavais compares the position of Howard Dean and The Revolutionary Party.#

Been thinking about a run for public office at some point, despite my dismal performance in my last campaign. I had considered a number of possible parties, including the Greens and the Libertarians (which share more commonalities than either would like to admit--and no, I didn't say "librarians"), but the party that comes the closest is probably the revolutionary party.

So, as an exercise, I figured I would line up my current choice as a candidate, Dean, with the Revolutionary platform. He actually does better than I would have expected. What the revolutionaries and some of the other candidates forget is that in a democracy you have to win a majority of the votes, and the majority is rarely right. The best you can hope for is someone who hits at the minds of the thinkers and the guts of the feelers equally well.

Lisa Williams comments on last week's Thursday Meeting.#

The Berkman -- and in a more informal sense, attendees at the Thursday meeting, Harvard-affiliated or not -- could make a real difference and provide compelling case studies of the benefits of transparency and communication in local communities by simple efforts to get local communities blogging. This doesn't even have to cost any money -- just the willingness to encourage and befriend. Future headlines:

Berkman Bloggers Befriend Local Grade School: A Berkman meeting habitue takes one afternoone to show one teacher how to set up a class weblog for his/her fourth grade class. Visits the weblog. Comments on the kids' and teachers' posts.

Berkman Bloggers Befriend Town DPW: A Berkman meeting attendee approaches a DPW employee who has been enjoying pictures of his grandkids on his son's blog now has his own blog: Your Questions about Potholes and Water Mains Answered, Plus, What We Fixed For You This Week.

Berkman Bloggers Befriend Town Council: by hosting a two-hour meeting talking about how blogs can improve town government and civil services, showing examples of blogs in politics, and some brief pointers about how to get started and a photocopied handout listing some tools they can use.

This is a must read. Strange Women Lying in Ponds comments on Steven den Beste and the "Rape Exception" to Due Process.#

Society's zeal to prosecute certain offenses has led to an erosion of due process in a number of respects. This has been most problematic in cases where the law forbids consensual transactions, such as drug offenses. Because the parties to a drug transaction engage in it of their own free will, law enforcement has to take extremely intrusive measures in order to try to enforce the laws against it.

This has led to what is sometimes referred to as the "drug exception" to due process, as courts have increasingly allowed for more and more intrusive surveillance techniques, and civil asset forfeiture laws are used with impunity as revenue raising measures with very little in the way of due process protections. Essentially, in drug cases the government (or the state) always wins because politics dicatate that it must win.

Steven den Beste makes the case for how similar thinking has overtaken cases involving accusations of rape:

Via Chris Winters is a great theory about the Matrix and Diego's thoughts on Reloaded.#

Throughout their dialogue, (and aside from the end of their conversation, which is all about giving directions to the Keymaker) the Oracle essentially is telling Neo how the theory of space-time works when you mix it with human consciousness.

No, I'm not nuts. Just bear with me for a minute.

The Oracle keeps saying things like: "You're not here to find out what your choice is. You have already made the choice. You're here to find out why you made that choice."

In space-time, everything happens all at once. Space-time is four-dimensional, and just like we recognize the three spatial dimensions to already "exist" the fourth dimension (time!) already exists as well along its entire "axis". From our subjective experience, however, we see time differently since we experience reality through its axis, rather than any of the other axes of space. So we tend to think of time as "happening"--but that's just a trick of our consciousness. All time has already "happened," the moment the Universe showed up. (Currently physics understands spacetime as not present before the Big Bang, where the Universe was contained in a singularity). Given that, it's clear that every choice has already been made and every situation has already played out (a bit mindboggling isn't it). This does not preclude free will (or, more generically, choice). The choice existed in that moment when time was created. All choices at once. But from our personal, subjective experience, we still have to live through each moment and come to the point where we face each choice, that is we understand why we made that choice. The Oracle then (like Neo, who now has "the sight") simply sees the choices that have already been made, but can't tell you why they were made (since that's subjective to each person).

Kevin Marks clears up a BloggerCon comment.#

It's about barriers to entry, not power laws

The net extends the range of the power law distribution. If you look at relative popularity on the web, using something like Technorati, you get a power law curve that goes all the way down smoothly, to the bottom where you see pages that got just a single link. If you look at popularity in the publishing world - movies, chart music or books - the curve starts out with a power law, but soon drops like a stone. That's because in order to get a movie made, a recording contract or a book published, you have to convince somebody that you're going to sell a million tickets, a hundred thousand CDs or tens of thousands of books. You end up in a zero-sum game, where people pour enormous resources into being number one, because number two is only half as good. The promise of the net is that the power of all those little links can outweigh the power of the top ten.

Jorrit Wiersma finished a talk he gave at his institute and he put up the slides.#

Jorrit, on page 10 in the explanation there is a typo - "This means that the length scale of the proton process is theoretically about for times as large as the electron length scale." Should be "four"?

I thought that the presentation was interesting and easy to follow for someone with very minimal experience with Physics (I've had two General Physics classes... introductions to gravity, optics, electricity, magnetism, relativity, and quantum physics, but nothing in depth.) But it is difficult to understand the significance of the structure of the relativistic shocks when there are no known physical situation from whence they arise. Perhaps you could make some sort of guess or fill us in on your hypothesis for their relation to Gamma Ray Bursts?

Wendy promises to start writing about her screenwriting class soon. She's real smart and I can just imagine how good her writing is. So if you don't know I'll point out some interesting old posts.#

Desires

I want a man who reads.

It confuses me when someone says, "Oh, I don't really read."

I read as much as I can possibly manage. I read in bed, I read while I eat dinner sometimes, I read all day at work (blogs, articles, etc.), I read the paper on Sunday mornings, I read and read. I love it, I need it, it's like plasma. I don't necessarily need this man to feel exactly the same way, just some sort of literary enjoyment will do.

It would just be so fun to trade books, and talk about ones we've loved, and lie on opposite ends of the couch on rainy afternoons with fat paperbacks. I realize this makes me a Giant Nerd; I really don't care. Mmm, co-reading.

Five Dirty Minutes in the Dark

That's what E., one of my classmates, thought I should have called my piece for last night's class.

Don't get me wrong, he liked it. Perhaps too much.

Obviously, I read aloud last night. It was Exhilarating. I loved every second of it. I hadn't done anything like that in ages, and the feedback was incredible. Sandy, the instructor, busted out the bottle of champagne he brought after I read, which made me blush. The comments made me blush. Certainly E. made me blush. I'll explain.

I know you can't wait either.

Ben Adida wonders, "The Power of the Network: IBM Advertises, Apple Delivers?"#

A couple of years ago, IBM had fantastic TV ads about online business and the power of the network: a large Japanese company looking for a supplier finds a one-person small business in the US, all the while thinking they're dealing with a huge corporation because their interface is the Internet. It was cute, it was warm and fuzzy, and it was "the power of IBM eBusiness." Those were the days of overhyped business to business marketplaces. The hype was enticing. The reality was that not many small businesses actually had the opportunity to enter these larger marketplaces.

Richard comments on guidelines for focusing on learning (at Jason Kottke's blog.)#

I definitely try to do 1-6 and 8-10, but due to expectations of speed on the Internet (both on my part and on others') #7 ("Take time to reflect.") tends to get short shrift. One problem I can see with the guidelines is that there's no rationale for each point. Don't get me wrong, they're good tips. It's just that there's no reason why doing them is better than the alternative, nor are there examples. (If there were, granted, that would probably put the consultant who came into his work out of a job.)

Joy had a hot date last night.#

Ok, so I kinda fell asleep on my HOT date last night. Seriously. The install went well, my data was preserved and put into the right places, so I'm happy. However, I do have a couple issues.

Scott poses a question for aspiring technical writers.#

Have you ever noticed how most technical authors can be divided into one of two camps: either they write books geared for beginner/intermediate developers, or they write for the upper-tier of developers. Take, for example, someone like Don Box. Don has written a plethora of books on COM and the underpinnings of .NET, books clearly aimed at advanced developers. I have a hard time imaging Don would write a book titled, Write Your First Visual Basic .NET WinForms Application!, and for good reason. On the opposite end of the spectrum, consider Wallace Wang's impressive list of For Dummies books. Here is a prolific author who has written dozens of books for beginners.

Nicholas D. Kristof writes about homosexuality and genetics in the New York Times.#

Some people say we should settle gay rights disputes on the basis of the Old Testament. I say we should rely on blinking patterns.

In case you've misplaced your latest copy of Behavioral Neuroscience, there's a fascinating article about how people blink. It turns out that when males and females are exposed to a loud noise, they blink in somewhat different ways — except that lesbians appear to blink like men, not like women.

The study (peer-reviewed but based on a small sample) is the latest in a growing scientific literature suggesting that sexual preferences may be not simply a matter of personal preference but part of our ingrained biology. Indeed, some geneticists believe that sexual orientation in men (though not women) may be determined in part by markers in the Xq28 chromosomal region.

Gene Expression on the lightning bolt Jesus actor story.#

Michael Feldman commands language like a Wall street exec.#

Dowbrigade has been digesting the discussions from last nights Thursday Night's Blogger Group, which is groping to find a future apart from its role as backup singers to the inestimable Dave Winer's Traveling Circus and Roiling Rock Extravaganza.

It's a talented group of misfits who somehow seem to fit together, at least on Thursday nights: Andrew the dour and brilliant MIT coder, the demure but lethally incisive Redhead, whose light touch on the keyboard kicks our collective asses nightly on the rating board, Jammaster j, the super-librarian who doesn't care for books and keeps us all tenuously tied to the Berkman mothership, The Kid, whose whose voracious brain seems to be consuming great swaths of the intellectual landscape at a bite, and your humble correspondent.

Cameos from Lydon, Sooz, Seth the gloomy gnome, Halley, always up for an acerbic comment, the God Squad, and a revolving roster of itinerant geniuses, crackpots, malcontents and miscreants.

Joey deVilla posts his notes from the Neal Stephenson Q&A session.#

Joi Ito finds an old picture of himself.#

Anyway, I was looking at the various pages and found this picture taken by Philip Bailey of John C. Lilly with Barbara Lilly, Kazuo and me in The Scientist: A Metaphysical Autobiography by John Lilly. I'm sporting Anarchic Adjustment threads which were hip at the time and I was helping to distribute in Japan. If I remember correctly, they were having a conference about John C. Lilly's work in Tokyo. I remember lots of academics talking on and on about John Lilly and his work. When John was asked to make a comment at the end, he said, "you all know much more about me than I can remember so I don't have much to add. My forgetery is much bigger than my memory." I remember thinking that was very funny. John Lilly was a very smart and very funny man. I miss him.

It's kind of strange thinking about the path that this photo has taken. I remember Philip taking it, I think I remember seeing a print. Then it got published, printed, scanned, searched, downloaded and now blogged. I assume the copyright holder is Philip Bailey and I assume he doesn't mind me posting this.

Tony Pierce is enjoying 80 degrees and it's snowing in Boston this week.#

i walked along the boardwalk, picked up some cheap sunglasses, ate a slice of 'za and just took pictures of random things. nothing spectacular unless you blow them up full screen, lots of funny tshirts about smoking pot - that seems to be the new big theme of venice.

its so great to be there when theres no tourists and no bogusness going on. just the locals enjoying the unseasonably warm weather. i think it was an even 80 right there.

Tony Pierce posts the best dog picture ever.#

Tom Coates has good and bad things to say about Panther.#

Generally, I'm impressed by the functionality but not impressed by the finish. This one feels half-done - that it wasn't possible to get it any further down the line before launch date. I have a feeling that over the next few months we'll see a few patches that resolve 90% of OS's problems. And when they do - it's going to be more awesome than ever.

I'm going to LL3, are you?#

Doug Miller comments on the Knowledge Navigator, that Jon Udell wrote about recently.#

I watch the Knowledge Navigator video clip every couple of months myself. This vision of what computing could be like still awes and impresses me. I agree with Jon; we are getting closer. I hope to use a system very like the Knowledge Navigator within my lifetime.

David Hyatt reports that Safari 1.1 is in Panther. Baby, let's give it go!#

Safari 1.1 is here. Those of you who picked up Panther can take it for a spin. This release is big step forward from 1.0, chock full of bugs fixes, improvements and UI refinements.

The Agitator links Yes.Net.#

Pretty cool. A website that tracks what every radio station in the country is playing, up to the minute.