“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe to break the frozen seas inside us.” – Franz Kafka

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.

Note that this is not a rant about comic authors appearing as characters per se — the technique can be done well (Alison Bechdel’s hilarious introduction to the new Dykes to Watch Out For anthology springs to mind…I know there are other examples I’m forgetting). However, in this context, the authors dramatically overestimate their own cleverness, and it comes across as self-absorbed and precious. Self-reference in narrative in and of itself is not novel or profound (see: the last 50+ years of contemporary literature), and glib “look at me, I’m being recursive!” crap is no excuse for a dearth of actual content…not even in a book that talks about recursion and Godel’s incompleteness theorem.

The ham-fisted explication of already-obvious themes was also painful. Like, “oh, maybe people won’t get that we’re trying to connect logic and madness, even though we heavy-handedly showed young Russell being traumatized by crazy relatives AND name-dropping his fear of madness multiple times AND talking about about using logic to distance himself from his emotions and how all logicians are neurotic! We need like 20 intrusive panels of the author having wanky debates about it with his computer scientist friend!” It felt condescending to the reader.

Speaking of which, they skimped on explaining many of the logical/mathematical concepts they were discussing (exception: an overly detailed 25-page explanation of Russell’s paradox). I assume that they wanted to make the book accessible to a broad audience, which is commendable, but still, I think they should’ve given their readers a tad more credit. Also, I wish they’d used more illustration to explain the concepts, given that it’s a freaking graphic novel — I bet you could come up with some really awesome art dealing with set theory, or the relationship between models and reality, but instead we just got lots of drawings of talking heads.

All that being said, I do still think it’s badass that someone made a comic that showed (however unevenly) that the progression of intellectual ideas can be gripping, suspenseful, thrilling, and emotionally engaging. I like seeing pop culture address the fact that abstract academic problems can be personally meaningful and emotionally resonant in an interesting way.

(Grappling with those kinds of issues [not mathematical logic, but other abstract philosophical questions] has been really formative for me, and affects how I interpret the world in a pretty pervasive way, but I often feel that it’s hard to express that without sounding pompous or pretentious because the primary association that many people have with intellectual ideas is “oh, so-and-so is trying to sound smart.” I approve of anything that creates cultural space for a different perspective on that.)

Plus, they did a great job of showing that many of the characters were totally weird and fascinating people. Seeing Frege as this weird whiskery geezer yelling about someone eating his cookies and then going nuts with anti-Semitic ranting made me think of Frege in a whole new way, and HOLY SHIT, the portrayal of Wittgenstein as this brooding, crazy-eyed, gaunt-looking, incredibly high-strung ranting gesticulating dude was totally inspired, and has forever flavored my mental image of him. That was one place where I thought the art really shone, and where they did an awesome job. (See here, and here.)

So, I didn’t totally hate it. In fact, I think the fact that it has some really good elements (and so much potential!) makes the bad editorial decisions seem more painful.

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.

They did indeed actually build the damn thing, and although it didn’t quite come to fruition as planned (it helped defuse a CIA-backed small business owners’ strike, but not Allende’s assassination!), it’s still pretty incredible. I respect the ludicrously sweeping ambition, but also the foresight (you can definitely see echoes of modern ideas about emergent self-organization, the importance of decentralized electronic communication media, etc).

Also — a key point that bears repeating — if you missed this link above, be sure to LOOK AT THE FREAKING CYBERSYN CONTROL ROOM. This is the most glorious retro-sci-fi piece of interior design you will ever see (especially in the context of leftist economic schemes). Please prove me wrong if you can.

I should also note that dude had a sweet freaking beard, and is rumored to have been entertainingly weird. Here, a former student reminisces about his “showmanship”, the “twinkle in his eye” and his habit of drinking a half-liter of scare-quoted apple cider while teaching classes. Yes.

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:

“None of the arguments extolling cheap overseas labor today hold up any better than did the earlier ones in favor of American sweatshops. Asian apparel workers are obviously not going to get paid First World salaries, but labor costs in the developing world are so low that the industry could still provide Americans with very cheap clothing while paying its workers significantly more, raising millions of people out of poverty. It’s true that the US and other industrialized nations went through their own sweatshop phases, but they also underwent reform phases that led to rising wages and indispensable safety regulations. And although a few Asian countries, notable Japan and Singapore, used apparel manufacturing as a route to prosperity, they did so only through the sort of massive interference with the free market — tariffs on imports, subsidies for local firms, tough capital controls, restrictions on foreign ownership — that our cheap-labor advocates vigorously oppose.”

–Ken Silverstein, the author

“The companies like to say that things have gotten better [since the mid-1990s when the industry was under assault for sweatshop practices] and there is no slave labor or child labor, but there was never much of that. The big problems then were low wages and forced overtime, and those are still the big problems today, where you go to Cambodia or Vietnam or Honduras or anywhere else. There is no fundamental difference in the way factories are run, because you still have the same predatory model of outsourcing. People are desperate for jobs. Working in an apparel factory is not a terrible job, but they work too long and get paid too little.”

– Jeff Ballinger, a long-time labor rights activist who spent more than a decade in Asia

“What we call ‘free trade’ should be called ‘debt-financed trade’. The whole world expanded industrial capacity in order to satisfy American demand for their products, which the United States bought on credit. We ended up with huge American trade deficits and the accumulation, during the past four years, or more dollars held overseas than had been built up in all prior history. That the bubble had to pop was obvious.

If you sell a pair of tennis shoes for $101 instead of $100, no consumer in Chicago will notice the difference, but it will totally transform villages in Vietnam. This is not a moral argument. We are currently on government life-support, but that’s not sustainable. We are going to have an international depression if we don’t figure out a way to create new sources of global demand — in which case, all of those apparel companies are going to go out of business anyway.”

–Richard Duncan, a chief economist at an asset management firm in Singapore, who supports a “trickle-up” worldwide minimum wage requirement enforced by import tariffs

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.

Possible spoilers ahead.

Stuff I liked:

• Thinking about how every peripheral character or element in a given narrative has their own associated story with its own nuances and complexity, and thus how any given narrative is a container full of pointers to other narratives, and could potentially balloon into a giant fractal at any time.

  (This makes me think of the end of DFW’s “Good Old Neon”, sorta, when he talks about how everyone is a fraud and that’s OK because language is incapable of fully conveying the weird recursive stream of conscious experience. DFW is talking about personal narratives rather than crafted fictional ones, but the idea that our descriptions are only scratching the surface of an unimaginably complex field of possible descriptions.) (also I just really love stuff ballooning into giant fractals, ok?!)

• The opening story was interesting to think about, because part of me was like “this is a caricature! No one actually thinks like this!” but then I realized that a) Maybe they do actually think like that — after all, I have no idea how a doomsday cultist thinks, and it does seem internally consistent. Sorta touches on the general problem of “how can I understand the worldview of people who seem insane to me without belittling or caricaturing them too much?!” (see also: US politics) b) maybe it read as stilted because he had the character explicitly thinking things to himself that I’m not sure anyone would normally actually articulate to themselves linguistically — the attitudes would exist more as vague emotional pulls.
• I liked the idea that everyone has their own city in their head, as articulated by the jazz-store-clerk narrator
• I liked the disembodied consciousness that could transmigrate between people. That part was cool. I don’t know why I liked it when I didn’t like some of the other supernatural plot elements (wait for it…) but I liked its reflections, and I liked how it interacted with its hosts and described interpersonal differences in how people perceive the world introspectively.

Stuff I didn’t like:

• I feel like his narrative voice was too similar across some of the stories. Problematic when you’re trying to narrate a bunch of very disparate characters. Plus, I’m not sure that I always like the voice itself, even ignoring the continuity issue…at its best you could say it’s spare and powerful in its simplicity, but other times it seems bland or emotionally flat somehow. Or glib. One example stuck in my head — the physicist character at one point says “technology is repeatable miracles.” and i found it annoying. Like, at first it sounds kinda ‘deep’ or what-have-you, but a) it’s kind of truism-ey/derivative of the “all sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” Arthur Clarke quote, and b) really now, would a super-genius physicist/engineer really think that to herself? Or would she have a much more fine-grained way of expressing the insight?
• The last couple of stories just didn’t do it for me. I liked the narrative device of the radio show host transcripts, but the whole AI/machine-struggles-with-ethics stuff seemed hackneyed and tacked-on. I did sorta like the irony of “hey we tried to make this machine that would be better at ethics than we are, but it ended up paralyzed and asking us for advice, because moral judgements are ultimately messy and don’t reduce to logic” but at the same time it felt a wee bit contrived.

I’m not sure that I got every interconnection (in fact I’m sure I missed a bunch), but I probably won’t reread it to find out, especially cuz I have my boss’s copy and should return it. I’m gonna write down what I remember to jog my memory later.
-the cultist calling the record store clerk makes him stay late so he can meet the girl
-the bitter executive dude sees the young couple being cute and is all “grarr”
-the disembodied presence inhabited the old lady in the tea shack
-the tea shack lady’s daughter is the maid for the bitter exec dude
-the broke musician inadvertently helps the physicist get away from the goons tailing her
-sherry, the girl who hosts the disembodied presence in Mongolia, shows up on the physicist’s home island
-the physicist designs the disembodied intelligence that talks to the guy on the radio
-there’s an ad for the guy’s radio show on the train where the cultist releases the gas

Oh also, there’s totally fun random intertextual references/shared characters between all his books. Cavendish was in this one for sure, and I know there was another one too. And Frobisher’s love interest from Cloud Atlas was in Black Swan Green. Helps with the sense that he’s weaving a cohesive universe.

(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:

Culture:

1. read 101 books (4/50)
2. Finish NaNoWriMo
3. Reread and/or sell every book I own that I haven’t read since graduating college
4. Watch 50 movies (fall asleep in the middle = doesn’t count) (1/50)
5. Read a non-fiction book whose premises I disagree with
6. Discover 10 albums that really deeply move me

Food/Garden:

1. Make 3 new kinds of cheese
2. Make bread (with yeast) 5 times
3. Identify and gather 3 new kinds of edible mushrooms
4. Grow a well-organized vegetable garden every year
5. Make 5 dishes from 5 different cultures whose cuisines are mysterious to me
6. Set up a system for recording recipes
7. Set up good lighting in the kitchen for taking food photographs
8. Grow a ginger plant
9. Make 50 weekly meal plans (2/50)
10. Grow a new houseplant from a cutting
11. Preserve garlic I grew myself

Making stuff:

1. Build a food dehydrator (I bought one at Goodwill instead)
2. Make an awesome lamp
3. Learn to weld (Could get better, though!)
4. Make jewelry out of empty nitrous oxide cartridges
5. Design a new tattoo
6. Make a mosaic
7. Make soap
8. Build a window box and grow herbs indoors
9. Press leaves in the fall, lacquer them in the spring
10. Make a bike chain-ring mobile
11. Put gears in the heron
12. Build a bicycle
13. Taxidermy something
14. Make art out of my brain scans
15. Sew a skirt out of ties
16. Make the “STFU” cross-stitch
17. Make an abacus out of electronic components
18. Knit or crochet something non-rectangular

Academic/Work:

1. Apply to graduate school (or develop alternate fulfilling next-step career plan)
2. Take a linear algebra class
3. Work through an MIT OpenCourseware course
4. Switch to R for all statistical analyses
5. Switch to SPM or AFNI for fMRI preprocessing
6. Take 2 systems theory classes (1/2)
7. Assemble documentation and training materials at work
8. Present a poster at a conference
9. Take a biology class that doesn’t involve neuro-anything
10. Learn about the history of photography
11. Learn about the history and culture of a country I know nothing about
12. Do 5 lit searches on cognitive science topics that interest me personally

Adventure:

1. Skydive
2. Go crabbing
3. Climb 3 new mountains
4. Visit Annette in Austin
5. Bicycle through SE Asia
6. Go to the Velveteria (They closed, so i couldn’t!)
7. Go to the toy museum
8. Go on a multi-day bike trip in the Pacific NW
9. Go to the redwoods in California
10. Backpack in the Wallowas
11. Backpack in the Enchantments
12. Circumnavigate Mount Hood
13. Catch a fish large enough to keep
14. Go to Enchanted Forest
15. Visit a bunch of hot springs in Idaho
16. Check out SCRAP and the rebuilding center
17. Explore and photograph a dilapidated building
18. Hike the whole Oregon portion of the PCT (not necessarily all at once)
19. Visit Paul in Montana

Random projects:

1. Learn to tie at least 10 knots (5 useful, 5 beautiful?)
2. Develop my own medium format film
3. Learn to blow the bottom out of a beer bottle
4. Get good at identifying native trees
5. Complete 10 interesting Instructables projects
6. Take a wilderness first responder course
7. Spend a day doing volunteer trail maintenance
8. Mail something unique to 3 friends outside Portland

Computer:

1. Learn Python
2. Make a google map mash-up with everywhere I’ve ever hiked
3. Make a personal website / maintain an interesting non-inane online presence
4. Build an EEG and use it to control something
5. Make skin conductance sensors that drive some wearable piece of electronics
6. Set up a low-power Linux file server at home
7. Integrate streaming video with other LED board functions
8. Find 5 new unique and interesting ways to visualize datasets
9. Develop a walking algorithm and follow it on at least one random walk
10. Implement a tracking system for all the goals on this list that require one
11. Purge my music library
12. Build 2 robots — one that’s at least partially self-designed
13. Build a bunch of logic gates out of analog components
14. Make 50 blog entries (low-pressure) about stuff I’ve read (3/50!)

Personal habits:

1. Stop biting my nails
2. Implement a system to deal with my bad attentional habits and keep myself from wasting so much time online
3. Stop using disposable coffee cups and plates at work
4. Volunteer somewhere worthwhile at least once a month for a year
5. Check out at least 2 Buddhist organizations around Portland
6. Practice vipassana at least twice a week for a year
7. Practice yoga at least twice a week for a year
8. Carry a camera every day for at least a month
9. Donate 3% of my income to charitable causes each year
10. Start a Roth IRA and max it out yearly
11. Spend a week actively working to project confidence through eye contact and body language
12. Abstain from processed foods for 1 week every season
13. Spend one weekend day a month cleaning the house (on track!)
14. Practice the violin enough to a) be able to jam with other people and b) be able to sight-read moderately complicated sheet music (in progress)
15. Write in a journal regularly for a year
16. Plot my daily moods against other relevant variables for 2 months straight
17. Stop using disposable grocery bags
18. Spend a day presenting as a male
19. Make myself do at least 10 things that are socially intimidating
20. Stop using ‘retarded’ as a pejorative term
21. Make 3 new close friends
22. Find library card; start using it regularly

• Brainbows
• Evolutionary psychology bingo

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?)

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.

The title “keyword: evil” seems a tad hyperbolic here: although hydroelectric power is problematic in terms of its environmental impact, that’s true of pretty much every method of energy production, and although Google’s lobbying against energy privatization is self-interested, it’s not exactly sinister, either (since privatizing utilities actually is a terrible idea). Emphasizing Google’s behavior too much risks missing the point — it is true that Google’s actions will help set the bar for its competitors, but as I understand capitalist economics, it’s not really realistic to expect a market to fail to respond to financial incentives because of an individual company’s intent to be evil vs not be evil — a more systemic view is needed.

However, I really like the overarching point that the internet isn’t an “ethereal store of ideas shimmering overhead like the aurora borealis.” No one ever actually makes this argument explicitly (since it doesn’t cohere at all), but then again, people don’t often engage with the material substrates underlying their experience of the internet either, especially not when engaging in techno-utopian prognosticating.

This ties in with a broader conceptual shift in American discourses about goods and economies over the last half-century or so: a tendency to abstract away from the realities of manufacturing as much as possible in favor of focusing on emotional and cultural connotations of how consumers interact with commodities. You can see it very clearly in advertising — hype about how Product X is well-built and made to last has largely been replaced by elaborate appeals to how Product X is essential to a certain demographic’s sense of self-identity (broad overview here). Abstracting in this way is even easier when dealing with things like “the internet” which is already an abstraction, not an object with material heft that you can touch and hold in your hand.

..Although, the same issue definitely arises with tangible goods as well. Computers themselves are a prime example (along with basically everything else). The rapid spread of the computer as an essential household item has created a massive outflux of cast-off computer equipment that is full of hazardous toxins and becomes obsolete within a year or two of purchase. Computer parts are almost never recycled in environmentally sound ways even when they make it to ‘recyclers’ — instead they are shipped overseas and sold to raw-materials brokers who mine them for a single valuable component (e.g. copper) and then toss them in a landfill. Or, y’know, burned in irrigation canals.

(Freegeek is awesome because they attack this on two fronts — selling un-reusable parts to the most reputable recyclers they can find and selling/giving people refurbished computers made from the reusable parts and running Linux, which doesn’t get as bloated and bogged-down and thus makes computers seem to last longer.)

There’s a lot to say on this topic, but I have to leave work.

• What kinds of strategies address these issues best? I see a problem of transparency/information distribution and a problem of economics. People are not exposed to information about environmental realities underlying their stuff unless they actively seek it out, which makes it hard for them to “vote with their dollar.” Plus, there’s that pesky segment of the populace who can’t afford the luxury of voting with their dollar.
• Related: how green-ness has itself become a marketing strategy. I find this really interesting. For now I will just cite Exhibit A and Exhibit B.