Verse A - a poem in two parts.

find lately cannot I
mind troubled oft, oh my
reversed perhaps it was
a-verse to sense its lost.

Dendrites

If you see
a porcupine
then you have
dendritic spines
Given a-
ny other fact,
you will still
have them, at that.

Zizek in the Woods

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
but this wood is trackless, white and cold.
I passed through unwelcoming aliens
they shivered, echoed in me something old.
An enmity, a fear, another time, a signal
of homeostasis lost. Was it ever owned?
Ecology! Ecology! A murder of plastic,
we writhe in guilty ideology, humility sold.

Expression

In the sciences, we spend our lives looking for truth. In the end,we express our ideas in words,  interpreting numbers or proposing theories. Mendelsson said something like "words, far from being too definite, are rather too indefinite". When has a scientific tract, other than awakening insights which were close to fruitition anyway (or you could not have had them), arisen that special feeling of truth-in-beauty or beauty-in-truth?
Much of modern thought, scientific or otherwise, is algorithmic, modelling. Models are dead things, only brought to life through understanding. Without the audience, this play is dead. Maybe we should strive to write a script that lives, as the Homeric poets.
...

Can you make art? Make a beautiful thing today, for the sake of those of us who only make models.
Esperanza Spalding

Nothing to say

How many things can be said in a way, that still allows that you have nothing to say?
How many phrases are put together, that never indicate a where or a whether?
How much bullshit will a man push out, and still never meet an ear of doubt?
How many words are there in this rhyme, how much information here in 4/4 time?
How long until the reader just stops, yeah how long how long this long tops...


                  OSU

Some W40k terrain

Been making ths for a while, finally finished painting it at the weekend.



OSU

Synecdoche

It's a pity that my head is mine alone, or rather that the confluence of concepts and metaphors that occasionally arises when I get on a good streak of discovery cannot be shared, in such a way as to lend context to something that arrives CRASH and crystallises amorphous forms.

Here is a quote that does it nicely:

"This website considers the apparent one-to-one correspondences found between the characteristics resulting from simple dichotomous development and some of the modern models of reality, leading us to the probability that we have adapted to the, at least 'local', spacetime continuum by internalising at least one of it's characteristics - dichotomisation. And so the tendancy by some to see 'mind' in the formation of the universe, or to find 'truth' in esoteric maps is based solely on dichotomous analysis, and results from the projection of the proposed template out into the universe; the models of reality are based on metaphors which are models of our selves."

Whether we call it god, or science, or something else, we are looking at ourselves.

 OSU

Language

Words, far from being too definite, are rather too indefinite - language is a by-product of our evolution of an extremely powerful capability to model the world, and thus manipulate it. Thus it is NOT a tool for communication - if anything, language is a hindrance to communication when it comes to concepts which we can know intuitively such as emotion. Only when we communicate abstract concepts, fixed, distant and eternal, are we really at an advantage using language. Even then, we must go to so much trouble to fix our definitions for mutual understanding, that a conversation without such fixing can be worse than useless. It isn't just that you don't know the terms from my field, but that the terms I use work from other metaphors. My perspective on the world, my model of it, is not yours and you can only communicate with me to advantage if you build a ground truth from the same metaphors. If this seems too rigid, if it seems that in your life you manage to communicate about your ideas quite well, remember that you live in a world where homogeneity of thought has been increasing for milennia. Try to imagine communicating your most sophisticated ideas to a Guarani indian. Or even just a randomly selected immigrant of different educational background.

Of course all this doesn't include so-called 'peripheral' forms of communication when using language, such as intonation, prosody and body language. These are actually deeper, closer to our true meaning (unless we dissemble). However pure prose, dissociated words, are fixed meaningless symbols manipulated to address real meanings.

Probably music is closer to an expression of our 'felt' reality than words.

                  OSU

Internet Life

OEEE OE OE OE OEEE

                  OSU

Israel's crimes

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Israel's crimes

View more documents from Ben Cowley.

Serious Games

Serious games, eh? There´s always a place for serious games. If we could just persuade everyone in the world to turn all activities into a serious game, everything would become a garden of halcyonic fucking delights.



toothpastefordinner.com



OSU

Buy Your Rebellion Here!

This isn't actually a social politics post (thank jebus), but the title is just a reference to what is so commonly assciated with rock music, which is what I really want to talk about.

Commoditisation of rock music could very nearly have killed the genre. That's a bold claim, but I think the way that punk washed overthe relevance of rock like a wave in the late 70s shows the point. Rock simply got too big, too commercial, too irrelevant. Metal had barely gotten off the ground before hitting the same doldrums. They both revived in the 80s, morphed a little (rock a lot more than metal, witness grunge), and that was in no small part thanks to punk and the inspiration that musicians got from seeing the energy created in Manchester and New York.

Further declines (does this follows a decadal pattern?) were answered with the internet. By now we are in a strange new place where new business models are the only hope of the dinosaur record companies who seem largely not to recognise that fact, and bands are doing all sorts of things now that money's too tight to mention.

So thats the history, and we all know where we are - so going back to my original point. Commoditisaton of rock (and all music to a lesser degree). Why is it a bad thing to create a product out of a band? Because, I argue, music is fundamentally a service...a good time, where the source is objectively less important than the experience. I don't say musicians shouldn't be well rewarded, but to create a monolithic branded entity, who is the only one who can give you your high, is pretty much the same as having only one dealer in town. Invitation to a monopoly, abuse of power and fixing the system to fleece the consumer - all the fun capitalist tricks that the music industry indulged in until thepiratebay changed the rules.

Its the fault of the Beatles really. Apple products (not the computers), branding films and merchandise...compared to them the Zep look quite tame. "Selling bootleg posters while the band are on stage"...nobody fucked with Peter Grant :)

Music is music. Musicians interpret it, and serve it to you as the skilled chef serves a meal. Celebrity chefs are only worthwhile when they're telling other chefs that they're 'fucking crap' on TV. Classical music has stars, but their power is not open to abuse because the real star is the music. People idolise Beethoven, but a) he's long dead, and b) it is really his music that is loved. So anyone can play it, and it sounds great, but there's no sense that you have to break up the band now that the composer is dead. More importantly, its not necessary to try to create another brand named Boothoven, selling its weak facsimile copy CDs for massive markups because the consumer wants so badly to not be able to believe it's not butter.

OSU

Serious Games blog

 Don't forget to keep checking out the SAVE ENERGY serious game blog, detailing (intermittently, like all my blogs), the development of the Green My Place game.
It would be nice if I could reply to your comments too, but right now the word press admins for the projects haven't even added a simple spam filter plugin to the blog, so its overwhelmed with ci@lis etc.
But I'll be happy if people simply know about the game.

All the best!

Feeds: http://serious-games.community.ict4saveenergy.eu/feed/


OSU

Funny Pages

 Here´s an idea for the day - why doesn't somebody create a website that aggregates all webcomics, using a folksonomy model in a social network way. The site links to the comics that people tell it about, and provides systems for people to rate the ones they like, comment and share. But what is most important, it gives the user some sliders to control content they see - like the slider for ratings, so you only catch the comics that are funniest. Even Cyanide and Happiness has crap days. Why waste my time? Just tune it out!
Then, a recommender system can act on top of that to start matching  your ratings with other people´s ratings to know what you like, so it can favour the rated comics from people who are like you. And people can recomment each others ratings, and recommend each other´s recommendations...

And then, why not use the same system to create non-funny pages? Go to the online newspapers and reproduce the best articles, topically arranged and rated by the community.

Seems pretty easy, so I'll give this one away - just an original idea credit please.






OSU

Memory

Memory is a funny thing. Is it an evolved trait that we have imperfect memory? If all our memories are retained at some deep level, and the machinery exists to recall it, why is it that the system works so poorly?
Perhaps it is evolutionary - natural selection does not favour introspection. The introspective aren't active enough, wallowing in the ghosts of their past. Did the first bipedal hairless apes feel nostalgia or melancholy? Do we only retain that because it is too neutral and adaptation to effect our survival? Perhaps memory has levelled off at the tradeoff point between the quality of our learning and the distraction of our internal lives. We know no more than we do because individuals that remember too much find it a disadvantage, and procreate less readily than those who just do.

Or is this all hokum? Evolutionary psychology, a lovely game for wasting the hours when you can't remember enough to waste them in the past.








OSU

TWENTY TEN

Greetings, blog lovers!

Well its been a long time since I blogged regularly here, practically a year - and so it is fitting to kick-off again at the dawn of not just a new year, but a new decade.
Although there was an abortive attempt at a restart last summer, it ended rapidly as the final leg of the PhD reared its ugly head: preparing and sitting the defence, followed by minor corrections made extensive by my own perfectionism. That sounds odd saying it, since I'd far from claim the thesis to have been perfect, even in its own small domain. The other words I tried simply fit less well :)

So where are we?
The new year should herald a good deal of closure as I wrap up the writing from my PhD - after Pacman conf. paper III must come journals 2, 3, 4, etc! Yet there are more opportunities for investigation there in the original data and methods, so that could open new lines of work (all extra-curricular, that is, outside working time :).
The personal projects also include running a Helsinki site for the Global Game Jam, which I proposed last October (or August?) in work. A few hardy souls ventured to row in with me and it looks like it's going to pay off. We've teamed up with two other loactions, Tampere and Kajaani, and possibly also a site in Turku still to be confirmed, to create the subset jam: Finnish Game Jam! Last year there were no jam sites in Finland (ironically since the whole concept started off as the Nordic Game Jam in Copenhagen, practically on our doorstep). Anyway, keep track of us on the site and through our twitter HelsinkiGameJam.

Meanwhile, the work projects opened last year, TARGET and SAVE ENERGY, will complete first phase by March & June, so phase shift will mean a new (hopefully more contemplative, less stressful) mode of working.
Right now I'm running a pretty large data gathering phase for my 'psycho-physiological correlates of learning in serious games' experiment (Raph Koster notwithstanding, it's a topic still needs some work).
On the SAVE ENERGY serious game, development is about to hit a new phase, as we commit to implementation of a complete visual/conceptual design for the meta-game, what we are now gonna call 'Green My Place', and begin the work of iterating our mini-games to beta. I did manage some blogging relating to the game, on the project's weblog, in the last few months. That was another reason not to ressurect this blog earlier. The final one had something to do with letting my old domain name lapse, so zenben.net was poached by some Californican cowboys and is gone from the world of (semi-)respectability forever...

Outside the head-space, I really want to get my nidan grade in karate sometime after August. That pretty much means training somewhere between 5 times a week and every day.

That's my diary for today, more cogent thoughts of interest-worthy content to follow!
I may do a cross-posting thing between this blog and the Green My Place blog, make myself seem a little busier that way :)
Eyes peeled!




OSU

Haha, eternal life! (but no cake)

Now, apparently we can quite safely say that caloric restriction will extend health benefits to the point of extending life expectancy (note all this does not guarantee a longer life, since age-agnostic diseases can still get ya).

All you have to do is eat less cake! A 20 year study on rhesus monkeys should be quite reliably predictive for hominids, although the effects seem to decrease the larger the mammal (rodents saw up to 80% lifespan increases).

It raises quite a question though - what do we prioritise? Most people quite enjoy food, and most people would quite like to live longer. So what a great joke that our own appetites are our greatest threat. Of course, certain ascetic god-fearing outlooks have made a virtue of denying the flesh in order to preserve the quality of the soul. And if one has a 'greater purpose' than having a good time, then it would be only logical to preserve the capacity to act by denying certain base pleasures and thereby deny debilitating ill health.

But these are all compromises of the basic question, and do not touch it fundamentally. So what do we want to do? Live longer, or live fuller?

OMG LOLZ!

Hehehe, that's me (with a varying rate of timelag, anywhere from 3 to 20 years is my backlog time for games, but new releases? never).

"Hey blog still cool! you read later, LATER!"

In the spirit of open and inclusive discussion, I'm going to post some links and some quick thoughts and just try to open up a subject area for random contributions and waffling.

Anti-aging research has come a long way, but in direct contravention of science fiction, we're still not handing out 'juvenat treatments' like sweetmeats. Are we coming close to the elixir of life? Or are we chasing a receding goal like some fever dream?
Aubrey de Grey seems to think that the solution lies in reorienting the approach to the middle ground between geriatrics and gerontology...
The approaches that are available are promising: resveratrol can dramatically increase the lifespan of nematode worms, caloric restriction can't be very much fun but it is proven to increase lifespan for larger animals (rats and mice by 40%). Genetics and proteomics are trickier for me to unravel, but I am assured that the answers there are coming...
If that's not enough to prompt some commotion, what about the fact that we seem to be built for immortality, but have natural selected against it? What are we to take from the fact that sex-cells are functionally immortal, but we are not? Is this a direct confirmation of the selfish gene theory?
http://www.world-science.net/exclusives/090607_germline


And then there's the ethics of anti-ageing research. Personally, I feel like arguing that longevity may actually be the answer to our problems, especially if we are of the optimistic viewpoint that ordinary people are still in control of their own destiny, and the goodness of man should prevail.

For instance, despite the accelerating increase in the speed of effective action, policy planning lifespans for everything from fishery to war is outstripping the political lifetimes of those who make the highest level decisions, and thus carry the can. If we assume a consequent/correlative 'drawing out' of the length of time we spend doing things, including our careers, then our lives may also begin to catch up on the timescales that politicians need to be responsible for. That's not to say that all the other problems with global capitalism will go away. But then again, why not? If the people who refuse to account for the full cost of their decisions suddenly realise that they're going to have to face consequences inherent in the raped system that they currently think they're 'leaving to the next generation', might they not think twice?

So lets get back to the waffles...