Memetics evangelist, Susan Blackmore has a piece in New Scientist which suggests that replicated information in computers is distinct from memes, and therefore something new altogether.
“Evolution’s third replicator: Genes, meme, and now what?”
Biologist Larry Moran calls this pseudoscience.
Forget about the fact that I was talking about something similar to Blackmore’s ‘third replicators’ in the post below (it was under the tag ‘half baked ideas’, a non-scientific ramble), one of the problems with the idea of memes is that it imagines that memes are somehow different from genes. This opens up the inevitable possibility of a zoo of gene-like things as Blackmore suggests and Moran takes issue with.
At an abstract level, genes contain information, so do memes and Blackmore’s ‘third replicators’. One of the defining features of information is that it can be stored in different languages or media.
A better way to look at memes might be that genes are a particular flavor of meme instead of the current notion that memes are a by product of intelligent gene-based organisms
New Scientist has a piece on re-assessing economics after the crash.
I’ve a half-baked idea here, that is, one the one hand, obvious, but I haven’t seen spelled out anywhere: that free-markets are prone to viruses.
Clearly some memes propagate despite the fact that they aren’t true: astrology; homeopathy etc., the memetic equivalent of viruses.
Much of free-market ideology is based upon application of darwinian ideas to economics.
Therefore, even if free-markets do evolve naturally under natural selection, not all market forces will be benign, there could be the free-market money equivalent of viruses. I’ll call these ‘benes’ (as in bean counter, slang for accountant).
These benes could be merely be specific memes to do with money – such as a speculative or panic rumor, or indirectly such as businesses based on memes e.g. horoscopes. But they could equally be financial instruments, business practices or business environments themselves that are attractive and therefore become widely used, but are damaging to the free market that creates them. (An example of the latter might be lobbying, where businesses such as Verisign, for example, protect a monopoly over .com domain names more effectively by seducing legislators than being competitive.) These are somewhat different from memes since they become much more like organisms, with a life of their own. In some cases, like the SWIFT transaction system or retail bank buildings, they arguably have a phenotype.
The idea that capitalism is prone to periodic viral infection through benes, seems like an obvious thing to investigate. It also creates a middle road between the doomsayers that claim that macro economics is dead and the libertarians who say that it would have been OK to let everything fail. The message: ‘Capitalism works overall, but be careful’. Just how careful, might be something that could be ascertained scientifically.
I never quite understood the beef between Dawkins and Gould over punctuated equilibrium, however the notion that just because species flourish at different rates does not mean that DNA mutation does. (I need to double check to see if that was Dawkin’s point. )
To illustrate this consider a sand pile and the mini-avalanches that happen as sand is poured on the top at a constant rate. The rate of the pouring of sand may be constant but the avalanches will be varied – some big, some small, following a power law distribution.
In evolution, a constant rate of change to genotype may create periods of rapid change and periods of little change in phenotype – punctuated equilibrium. The gradualist evolutionary mechanism of neo-Darwinism is not challenged by this.
(update – am checking the Gould vs Darwin debate – the literature is not very succinct, surely I don’t need to read an entire book to see what the exact difference of opinion was?
It seems to be this: Dawkins figures that all complexity at the level of species, how they interact appear and disappear within a changing environment can be explained by natural selection operating at the level of genes. There doesn’t seem to be a simple explanation of what Gould thought (perhaps that’s why there are no 3 line explanations). My instinct is that Dawkins is right and analogies abound in terms of simple processes producing complex interactions – like the 3 planet motion).
[The picture above is from the New York Post, it makes false or misleading claims (highlighted) about propsed healthcare taxes. It is part of an alarmist trend in the reactionary press which makes what could be a bi-partisan issue appear necessarily polarized].
Having lived in America for 10 years, its a great place – but there are two things that feel broken, the legal system (with opportunistic litigation and judges who legislate (on both sides of the political spectrum)) and the healthcare system (with its bureaucracy, mercenary feel and lack of universal coverage).
In healthcare the culture of litigation compounds the problems of both medicine and the law, and its failings should anger those on the left for its patent social unfairness and the right for its obviously inefficient free market failings.
Solving this should be a bi-partisan call to arms, but it has become a polarizing force through lies and deception. A proposal to increases taxes by miniscule (1%) and overhaul the whole system is being spun by knee-jerk reactionaries as a huge tax hike on the middle classes.
As an outsider who has experience of multiple countries healthcare, I feel compelled to share my anecdotal experience of it in the US.
Despite having healthcare coverage here, it was cheaper for me to pay for a doctors visit in France where my wife is from and buy an antibiotic out of my own pocket than claim against my insurance and pay the co-payment. If I lived there or in another european country such as the UK, (but not Ireland), this would be free with a nominal fee for prescriptions (less than $20) – and contrary to perception I would pay about the same in taxes. In Switzerland, I would pay for the mandatory healthcare (about half of the US rate, but with better service and results) but in the end it would be a wash because of lower taxes.
But its not just about day to day coverage. A health insured friend in the US who had a heart attack received a $300,000 bill after finding that his insurance company only paid 90%. A friend of my wife is nearly bankrupted by her treatment for cancer. The worst part is that many people in the US do not seem to know that its only there that this happens. In every single other industrialized nation the threat of being bankrupted by medical bills does not exist.
And treatment in the US is vastly different from anywhere I’ve been (I have lived in 4 other countries). Nearly every time I go to the doctor I am sent for some kind of test – this seems like a good thing and who am I to argue, I am not a doctor? But when I asked a doctor in the UK (after having been sent for a brain scan for dizziness that was a drug side-affect) I was told that the risk of the scan was possibly higher than the chance of disease. What may have been happening is that the doctor had to minimize his risk of being sued by increasing my health risk.
This abrogation of responsibility which seems to me to contradict the hippocratic oath also manifests itself in the annoying habit of giving you a choice for every treatment. When there are two people in the room making a health decision, a fully qualified medic and a trained architect, apparently the architect (me) has to make the choice. If you wanted to have an operation in a creative and unusual, but life threatening, way, you might want want to ask me. But I’d recommend a doctor. Yet when I say to a doctor, ‘well you choose from your recommendations’ he says (me) the architect should.
The responsibility problem is often not the Doctor’s fault. My sister, who is a doctor in the UK was told not to offer to help Americans if they fell ill while flying. The reason was fear of being sued. Litigation is just one part of the reason why US healthcare is a massive rip-off costing 40% more than anywhere else in the world with no better results.
For the capitalists amongst us, US heathcare is a DMV-like Byzantine rats nest of paperwork, unnecessary ass-covering treatment and co-payment drug costs which exceed buying them directly off the Internet.
And that is if you have healthcare. If you are one of the 46 million Americans, the only people in any developed country that don’t, then your life expectancy is less than if you lived in Libya.
What the Obama administration is proposing is to replace inefficient Stalinist style corruption with something economically far less socialist than the US military. So what’s the problem?
A 15 year old boy in Britain, doing work experience at Morgan Stanley, wrote up his description of how he and his friends use the Internet. MS subsequently published the report as if someone had handed them a 3 ton chunk of obsidian labelled Internet Era Teenager Rosetta Stone.
Some clue about how unrepresentative of the average teenager someone doing work experience at Morgan Stanley might be, comes from this:
“How teenagers play their music while on the go varies, and usually dependent on wealth –with teenagers from higher income families using iPods and those from lower income families using mobile phones.
Suspicion about whether he asked anyone else other than his possibly small and atypical sample teenager friends comes from the unconvincing and varied terms relating to stats:
“99pc of teenagers”…”Most (9/10)”…”No teenager that I know of”
The last item “that I know of” surely makes the former stats suspicious as generalizations.
And much of the report is just ‘so what’:
“Some teenagers use a combination of sources to obtain music [this says nothing]…Teenagers visit the cinema quite often, regardless of what is on [hardly groundbreaking]…”Most teenagers own a TV”…”Teenagers listen to a lot of music”
And of course, the newpaper industry:
“No teenager that I know of regularly reads a newspaper”.
Yes, nobody reads newspapers, this isn’t teen Spidey Senses in fact, according to one notable, middle-aged man (Steve Jobs) ‘nobody reads’.
In terms of trend insight, apparently outdated phones aren’t cool. Who could have known? What Is Not [hot] includes:
“Phones with black and white screens, Clunky ‘brick’ phones”.
The stuff on display media smacks of being irrelevant:
“Outdoor advertising usually does not trigger a reaction in teenagers, but sometimes they will oppose it (the Benetton baby adverts). Most teenagers ignore conventional outside advertising (billboards etc) because they have seen outside adverts since they first stepped outside and usually it is not targeted at them (unless it’s for a film)”.
Games billboards, as he says are very popular, but anyway one would expect most people of all ages to describe how they are influenced by billboards like this.
No doubt the conclusion, that teens like viral ads, will have agencies rushing to produce forced second rate memes and money pouring into gimmick guerilla marketing, without thinking about the content rather than the medium.
Getting access to what drives buying habits for the generation of teenagers that are growing up surrounded by Social Networks, the Internet and Cellphones is like nabbing the elixir of youth for old farts and bankers.
This makes them easily susceptible to useless crap, as the report released by Morgan Stanley, produced by a 15 year old intern proves. In short, it doesn’t reveal anything that isn’t obvious to anyone who actually uses the Internet or has seen a teenager in the last 10 years. There is no analysis, no sampling no controls or normalization of results – merely hearsay.
The single thing that can be concluded from this is that Internet consultants will be able to bilk large organizations for years to come, because people like Morgan Stanley will buy anything.
Why is the darker woman on the left called white and the relatively similar featured lighter woman on the right called black?
One of the things that struck me about the controversy surrounding Michael Jackson’s bleached skin and thinned features (the latter co-incidence suggesting the former wasn’t just vitiligo) was how extremely stereotypical racial classification is and how much it has to do with history. Michael Jackson ended up looking like a cartoon of a white woman.
In the US if you are of partially African and partially European decent you are most likely to be called black, suggesting that there is a notion of being ‘tainted’. The very fact that the half white, half black, President Obama is called black is proof of this prejudice.
The reverse is not quite the same. A person is often not tainted white in Africa as we will see with Obama’s trip there this week. That is not to say that people from various African nations are less prejudiced, just that the prejudices tend not to apply to ‘American Africans’ a term which shows the arbitrariness of African American and that the groupings where prejudices apply depend on local history.
The grouping of an entire continent which contains the majority of the worlds racial diversity, under one umbrella term ‘African’ is also an absurdity arising from the cruel fact that many people’s origins have been erased beyond the ability to pick a continent.
A randomly picked person from Africa will be as genetically different from another African as a randomly picked non-African. Someone from Ethiopia will typically have thin features and a Bushman may have fairer skin that Victoria Beckham’s tan. At the very least what it is to be black or white is blurred.
Victoria Beckham is a good way to illustrate this absurdity as the picture above demonstrates adequately. Both her features and skin tone appearing no more or less African than Whitney Houston in the picture above. Yet one is ‘black’ woman and the other is a ‘white’ woman.
Place people in meta boxes as they move from place to place and they often get more angry with each other than if the boxes weren’t there. The phenomenon is known as road rage and may have something to do with the removal of conflict inhibitions when contact with other hairless apes is more impersonal.
Sometimes, however the proximity of personal contact can be a bad thing, most murders happen in families and most wars are civil wars.
The Internet increases communication and personal contact, but in a way that is more impersonal than face to face, and the phenomenon of online flame wars seems to be similar to road rage.
I can’t seem to find any studies on this, but am curious as to what extent something like the Internet which is primarily a communications medium, and therefore hardly a failure to communicate, can have a negative effect on people getting on with each other, and what the dynamics of that are.
What would a map of Internet conflict look like?
I’ve just spent a week re-immersing myself in the world of architecture, visiting architects and engineers, end of year student shows and going to the Space Syntax 20th anniversary party.
Some of what is in the Bartlett and Architectural Association shows could have been done 20 years ago. There are still Peter Salter influences in drawings and layered collages are in permanent vogue but there is an important technological shift towards using digital technologies to produce organic results.
At the superficial level of graphic representation, there are 3 new tricks: bas-relief style layered laser cut plans that are somewhere between a model and a collage; combinations of nurbs based modeling with quasi cellular automata style programs and some very interesting uses of 3-D printing. Here, the Bartlett seems to have kept its edge over the AA, stylistically.
Most interesting is an emerging theme linking the less trendy but intellectually more rigorous domain of the planners with the hand waving architects.
This is how that relationship worked until now:
Architecture school is about training people to produce seductive presentation skills which serve to get you a foot in the door in a commercial practice, while looking like you are pretending to be at art school. In the commercial world architecture is often principally about working out optimal geometry to maximize developer revenue, say, and optimize chances of obtaining planning permission. Ironically, actual design in the true sense is often done by people who produce shop drawings for component manufacturers. The degree of value-add architectural ‘design’ varies according to the status of the project, from corporate lobbies to funny shaped curtain walls, however very few building are monuments, and architecture school in many ways teaches people to design monuments. Many architects are therefore left feeling unfulfilled.
Ironically, the town planners who are often considered the less hip cousins of architects, since there is less peacockery involved, get the last laugh because the real intellectual stimulation that is to be gotten from architecture most often comes from looking at cities and how they work. Hipsters yearn to be urbane, and there is nothing more urbane than cities, by definition.
But this is where the world of fancy presentation drawings and sober planning decisions are following the same trend. The connection is that the complexity of cities is based upon simple, iterated, changeable rules just in the same way that an organic looking 3D modeled design is based upon the same.
At the prosaic level of what this involves, in architecture, MicroStation Generative Components and Maya dynamic scripting can produce emergent complexity via iterative mappings in a similar way that some graphic designers using the Processing language have done with displaying quantitative data. Designers are able to produce the organic look and feel of natural objects or the complexity of cities. Planners, on the other hand are able to use iterative analysis of complex environments via methods such as Space Syntax’s, to derive underlying rules or non-obvious patterns from organic complexity.
Emergent, organic design is being produced and understood in both planning and architecture departments where the creationist-like, strict rules of modernist dogma used to dominate.
Dear Dwell:
Love the magazine. As a favor, I have rewritten the Table of Contents of your July/August issue:
Cover House with Horizontal Wood Slats
Page 43 House with Vertical Wood Slats
Page 52 House with Horizontal Wood Slats
Page 58 Ice Cream Makers
Page 66 Pavilion with Horizontal Wood Slats
Page 70 Philadelphia
Page 80 House with Horizontal Wood Slats
Page 88 House with Horizontal Wood Slats
Page 96 House with Vertical Wood Slats
I hope you find this useful.
Fondly,
Jeff Speck, AICP
Washington, DC
via harry wakefield
Pizza Hut has rebranded as 'The Hut', with a logo and name that now look more like a low end mid century modern furniture store than a pizza chain.
It true that the original logo was both awful and dated, but so does the new one. By European standards, The Hut looks very 1990s.
Pizza is an iconic part of American culture, much more so than Italy, where pizza may have originated but doesn't have the same history. This design could have been so much better if it had some how paid homage to that history in the manner than countless small, family pizza joints do effortlessly and subconsciously.
The top floor of Corbusier’s Villa Stein (one of perhaps the top 500 most important houses of the late 19th/early 20th centuries – i.e. a Van Gogh of houses) is for sale for the same price per sq.ft. (approx $1400) as buildings in the same area of suburban Paris, designed by nobody in particular. Meanwhile, Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet sold for an inflation adjusted price of $136 million yet a poster of similar square footage and style costs around $10.
In other words, a work of art that you can actually live in has zero premium over a commodity item, but one that you can look at has a premium factor of 13 million over a commodity one.
There are 2 possible conclusions: architecture is vastly under valued or painting prices are almost entirely irrational.
Given that the cost of a single floor of the Villa Stein would be almost exactly the same as entire US GDP ($13 trillion) in the former case, and that Le Corbusier’s mediocre paintings sell at a vast premium compared to the buildings he is famous for, it’s the paintings that are too pricey.
The world’s two most expensive painting purchases were by Steven Cohen the Hedge Fund manager and David Martinez the corporate debt financier. Both work in finance, where the creative output is money rather than painting, quantitative rather than qualitative. Money hidden in a vault, is a less visible form of status than a picture, so the two can be exchanged, where the highest quantitative measure, status, can be accrued by buying the most famous paintings. If it were a purchase based upon qualitative measures such as the highest value to the buyer, then the sentimental subject matter of the painting would override or skew the ownership of the most famous paintings with the richest people, but that tends not to be the case.
Famous painting prices are based upon the idea that fame equals talent and that absolute fame is absolutely priceless. They are bought for quantitative price rather than qualitative value. They are a form or elite rather than mass hysteria where the wealthy attempt to buy prized individual taste, something you can’t really buy, by purchasing mass taste and therefore inevitably get ripped off.
The sub-conscious force that drives this bubble market is that the action of buying famous paintings is not to buy for private enjoyment but for pubic (even if it’s just your friends) prestige. This is perhaps based on the underlying psychosis that actually possessing rather than merely being surrounded by an acknowledged work of art somehow bestows a portion of the artist’s great taste and vision on the one who possesses it. Is this really any different from magical flesh diets such as the primitive practice of swallowing a lion’s heart for strength or eating powdered Rhino horn to get an erection?
The portability and size of paintings allow them to be possessed and coveted in a way that buildings can’t, but there is another factor. You can move a Van Gogh to the Upper East Side, but its more difficult to do that with the Villa Stein. Paintings are an historical, but irrational, standard benchmark of wealth, rather like diamonds. But the reason for their prestige is no more permanent than the prestige of lyre playing which was the pinnacle art form of ancient Greece, but is not coveted today. Painting is the reserve currency of art – but reserve currencies can change.
The fact that the obvious, near total, fallacy of the art market is rarely questioned seems conspicuously odd. Is there a form of sub-conscious cultural censorship at work? Perhaps the preservation of the painting myth is based on the fear that to challenge it means that you can’t appreciate or understand it? To even suggest that the Emperor is naked is to sound cliched.
But perhaps painting is a religion? When you read a book you can enjoy it even if you know its not true, but for the religious, the Bible cannot purely be a work of fiction, it has to have some truth. Art allows you to have a quasi-spiritual feeling by temporarily suspending reason and disbelief, unlike religion which requires you to permanently do so.
Why should art (temporary belief over reason) be any different from religion (permanent belief over reason)? Why is it more surprising that people worship Van Gogh irrespective of true merit when people worship god? Somehow, to suggest that art is largely religion is, well, heresy, or at least philistinism. Bizarrely, in our secular culture, where Madonna has replaced The Madonna, art is more sacrosanct than religion when it comes to questioning value.
Value is difficult to judge, but perhaps it’s the mark of a true Philistine like a money-is-everything Hedge Fund manager to believe in the price of a Van Gogh. Perhaps painting is a specific case of an art form that has become a religion, the opiate of the rich.
Mark Gimein has a good post about Special Relativity, that makes some excellent points:
That it could just as easily be called the theory of constancy (of the speed of light), and that the best way to read about it is from Einstein’s own layman’s explanation.
But more than that, that it is a theory of a flexible space and time background, introduced to resolve the impossibility of both (a) the summed relative motion (i.e. non fixed speed) of objects to or from light beams and (b) the (always observed) fixed speed of objects to or from light beams when measured against (c) the same fixed, universal co-ordinate system (clocks and measuring sticks).
Instead of ditching (a) or (b), Einstein ditched (c).
(a) was proven mathematically, (b) was proven by observation and (c) was assumed as obvious common sense based on experience.
Special relativity is a triumph of science over the senses and never trusting instinct, yet the Einstein myth sometimes creates the idea of the opposite – of following intuitive hunches. Yes, but only if they could be backed up with evidence. His creative thinking should not be confused with quasi-spiritual or artistic acceptance of intuition without reason.
Summed relative motion is obvious (two trains travel towards each other at their combined speed) and constancy of speed of light is empirically proven, therefore the insight Einstein had was to reconsider what seemed immutable – the fixed background of space and time.
Or was it? Einstein was taught by Lorentz and the idea of spatial contraction (admittedly, of objects not the space itself) to resolve the speed of light paradox was principally his. Like all things the truth is less clean than the fable. Special relativity was a conceptual breakthrough (principally in the linking of space and time), but still part of a continuum of thought.
Anyway. Mark’s post is a really good digest of the background of Special Relativity in qualitative terms: see here.