Even if Donald Trump is impeached just after a bald two months into his presidency, he’ll still have attained his life-long aspiration of being a bona-fide billionaire (even if the denomination becomes on the level Silvio Berlusconi’s quintillions in lira)—thanks in no small part to the bully-pulpit and the Gordian knot of business connections that he and his cabinet members are incapable of extricating themselves from. By way of loophole, that failing pile of garbage that dares call itself a news outlet is inviting all of us to help triangulate more synapses in the some fifteen hundred side-deals so far identified and what’s anything but transparent and independent.
Sunday, 15 January 2017
late-stage parochialism
executive order 9066
Via Bad Ethnography, here is a moving and powerful narrative of the experience of the more than one hundred thousand American citizens of Japanese extraction made to relocate from the Pacific coast to internment camps in the interior of the country under very austere and uncertain conditions as told with the help of the keen lens of Dorthea Lange.
Under contract for the American Farm Security Administration during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression the pioneering photographer is probably best known for those iconic images, but Lange also sought capture this tragic episode when people’s loyalty was conflated with their ancestry and both were held in contempt in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbour. Germans and Italians were also detained but in far fewer numbers. Her photographs were seized however for being obviously critical of the forced evacuation policies and remained censored and unknown to the public until 2006. The whole exhibit is well-curated and makes effective use of the extensive amount of scenes from that time and personal stories. All of it is a chilling reminder of extraordinary times and the responsibility that comes with might but one of Lange’s early photographs of children reciting the pledge of allegiance just before being dispatched to a camp far from home delivers an especially poignant message of prejudice.
taking owls to athens
I knew a lot of the works of Pieter Bruegel the Elder were allegorical and depicted the foibles and follies of human conventions and his Nederlandse Spreekwoorden—translated by turns as the Flemish Proverbs or The Blue Cloak (for that shock of colour in the middle of the scene, where a woman is shrouding her cuckolded husband so he doesn’t see her adulterous ways—pulling the wool over one’s eyes) is no exception. I was unfamiliar with the fact, however, that some one hundred ten idioms were represented in the painting, many with near equivalents in English, like swimming against the tide, to be armed to the teeth, killing two birds with one stone or banging one’s head against a brick wall. Some of the bawdier sayings also captured have fortunately become outmoded.
motherboard or decision-tree
Applying the most advanced and universally accepted principles of neuro-science (arising out of the hubris that computational powers could begin to map out every possible neural daisy chain and we’d soon understand how the brain works) to a system that humans (as inventors) understand better by degrees, the microprocessor yielded some fruitfully disappointing results.
The failure of the model of a sophisticated neural network (not a neural network itself but the parameters by which one is made) to understand arcade games—despite the demonstrations that machine-learning was able to give with little to no supervision—illustrates, I think, that despite the mechanical and philosophical differences between brains and circuits perhaps we still don’t have the framework and the context to glean meaningful, correlated results. What do you think? Perhaps we cannot analyse the system we are in with the quiver of tools arising from the same.