Logicomix

I impulse-bought this graphic novel at Powell’s because it was about Bertrand Russell and was subtitled “An Epic Search for Truth.” Who can resist a good epic search for truth?

Sadly, the book is laden with a blisteringly, mind-meltingly awful frame narrative. Roughly 1/5 of the comic consists of the authors and illustrators sitting around the drawing room, debating how the narrative should progress, and having shallow epiphanies and contrived Deep Conversations about the Deep Ideas in the book. This nearly ruined the book for me. It was just painful.

Chile’s electronic brain

I sat in on a systems theory class today, and the professor dropped an anecdote about this fellow named Stafford Beer…which led me to this fascinating story. (See also.)

He was an early cybernetics theorist who wanted to model social systems using principles of biology, and somehow ended up getting invited to come to Chile and help Salvador Allende “implant an electronic nervous system in Chilean society” — in other words, to set up a nationwide Telex network called Cybersyn (CYBERSYN!!!) to track and recursively model economic statistics from all the factories in the country. He believed that this information infrastructure could enable efficient, equitable and participatory economic coordination without relying on flawed Soviet-style centralization.

A pair of articles on apparel manufacturing

Confessions of a sweatshop inspector — a good article talking about how ethical manufacturing standards are (or aren’t) enforced in practice, and how the tension between companies’ stated ideals and the underlying financial incentives gets reconciled on the ground. I liked that it deals with the experiences of someone concretely involved in the process, rather than ideologically loaded generalities.

It dovetailed pretty well with an article in this month’s Harper’s which is sadly subscriber-only — Shopping for sweat: the human cost of a two-dollar t-shirt. (As an aside, man, I love Harper’s so much. It’s so consistently good.) It discussed the same contradictory incentives described by the inspector, and had an interesting section drawing parallels between old arguments for child labor in America and contemporary arguments for cheap labor abroad.

Quotes from the article:

Listening to Science Friday podcasts while cleaning the fridge

Humans’ digestive tracts are smaller in relation to our total body mass than any other mammal, which is probably related to why we do poorly with raw food diets while most other mammals do well.

Cheese was likely discovered by someone Back in the Day (5000 years ago?) using a stomach as a carrying sack for milk, thus getting rennet into it by accident.

There’s evidence that “fossil fuels” may be created by processes involving non-organic components as well as those involving organic ones. No one really knows how widespread this is.

A scientist speculates that organisms likely exist underground that we don’t recognize as alive because most of our assays for life involve testing for the presence of cells or DNA. If we are able to broaden our detection criteria, we might discover new mechanisms for life that are totally new to us and could help us to understand how life as we knew it came to exist in the first place.

ghostwritten

I finished Ghostwritten, by David Mitchell. It was pretty good. It had some similar stylistic elements to Cloud Atlas (which I really really liked) — vignettes that appear disparate but are actually interconnected tangentially and also thematically — but felt a little less developed or cohesive, which I suppose makes sense, since it was his debut novel.

Possible spoilers ahead.

Day Zero project

I’ve been in a rut lately, and I like the idea of this project, where you try to complete 101 goals in 1001 days. Specifically, I like the timeframe — it’s long enough to allow for time-consuming projects and the establishment of habits, but still structured enough to (hopefully) make the list seem non-hypothetical.

(One of the things on there is “learn Python”, so I typed up a version with of this list with numbers hard-coded, then wrote a script to delete the numbers and replace them with <li> tags for easier resorting. Go me! I really need to change that goal to “use Python for web programming with a database back-end,” but hey, baby steps.)

Of course I couldn’t stop at 101:

i suck at substantive blogging

But I sure can regurgitate links from other blogs! You should look at these:

• Brainbows
• Evolutionary psychology bingo

hot and smoky, almost irreverent

This is a totally halfassed post, since it’s a wikipedia link and was on boingboing like a month ago, but nevertheless, it’s awesome and made me happy. The Schmidt Sting Pain Index is without a doubt my new favorite classification system.

Specialized vocabularies are interesting, especially when they accompany actual increased sensory sensitivity to certain dimensions of an experience. (Can I tie this in with neural plasticity? Or, how about with a fantasy subculture of bee sting connoisseurs who go to stinging parties reminiscent of wine tastings and wile away the hours passing around jars filled with angry exotic insects and waxing snootily rhapsodic about the sensations they inspire?)

ethereal ideas shimmering overhead

There was a short article in last month’s Harper’s (which I just found in my kitchen a few days ago) about a data center that Google is building in The Dalles, Oregon, a dessicated industrial town situated on the Columbia right around where the desert starts. (It’s kind of jarring to drive into it along the I-84: you go from majestic tree-lined hills to flat hot rolling nothingness and the skeletons of old factories.)

The energy consumption of the server farm will be approximately equal to the energy consumption of the city of Tacoma, and Google’s purchase of the property was contingent on an assurance of access to cheap hydroelectric power. The article also talks about how many other energy-intensive processing facilities like this are being built in countries with weak or non-existent environmental protections to keep energy costs down.

auditory plasticity

The paper I’m currently trying to read is depressingly incomprehensible to me, so I’m gonna cheat and backtrack a few weeks to something with fewer undefined mathematical terms. This [pdf] is a review paper about learning-induced plasticity in the auditory cortex.

Ok, so!