Elderblog Sutra: 2

February 5, 2019 By
This entry is part 2 of 13 in the series Elderblog Sutra

A necessary, but not sufficient, condition for an elderblog to exist is an underlying pristine blog that is old enough, and contentful enough, to serve as a landscape on which an elder game can be played. Ribbonfarm is at 11.5 years, 715 posts, and nearly 1.6 million words. The numbers are merely skin in the elder game. The spirit of the condition is that a coherent pristine game — “refactoring perception” in our case — should be winding down.

Elder-blogging possibilities obviously depend on the nature of the pristine landscape. Newsy blogs suggest history-based elder games. Blogs based on transient subject matter, such as product or fashion blogs, suggest trend-mining elder games.

Atemporal longform blogs like Ribbonfarm, like cities past a founding era, suggest metatextual  or infratextual games. Skyscrapers on regraded or reclaimed land that reshape territory, versus new roads, tunnels, or bridges that conform to existing territory.

The two are not mutually exclusive. Seattle for example, features many examples of both kinds of urban-planning elder games. These have been played since the city’s pristine game ended with the Klondike gold rush in 1900. Last weekend, my wife and I walked the newly opened Seattle SR-99 tunnel. Over the next few months, the old Alaskan Way viaduct that the tunnel replaces will be demolished. We’re living through a major infratextual porn chapter of Seattle’s elder-game era.

I favor infratextuality. Tunnels over skyscrapers. Infratextuality weaves a landscape into a landscape. The pristine landscape is still there, modulo weathering, aging, falsification, and decay effects. Infratextual elements recode and grow the landscape while preserving memories. Metatextual elements, on the other hand, have a tendency to erase memories and rewrite history.

If you know of good elderblog candidates, I’d appreciate links in the comments, perhaps with a short comment on what elder game is going on there, if any.

Weirding Diary: 3

February 4, 2019 By
This entry is part 3 of 11 in the series Weirding Diary

A sense of weirdness in the environment can be understood as unfactored reality. A blooming, buzzing confusion of sensory input that impinges on awareness without the mediating effects of conceptual thought. This is the same thing as the void, but we typically conceptualize the void as a featureless black hole. The reason is that our cognitive reaction to unfactored reality is to seal our minds off completely. Eyes wide shut. When the going gets weird, the mind shuts its eyes. If you keep your mind’s eyes open, translucent, legibilizing models descend to manage the cognitive response.  As the eyelids of the mind descend, some variety of magical thinking takes root. Normalcy is just the majority sect of magical thinking.

In my 2012 post, Welcome to the Future Nauseous, I defined the idea of a manufactured normalcy field (MNF). An MNF comprises both the models in your head, and elements in the built environment meant to encourage it to stabilize in your head. A stable MNF keeps the sense of weirdness at bay, and normal people functioning as adults. When the field destabilizes due to models crumbling in your head, reality acquires a surreal character. When it destabilizes due to the built environment crumbling, you have an anxiety response. When both crumble, you experience weirdness. In all three cases, functional behaviors required for survival get disrupted.

A filter bubble is a special case of a manufactured normalcy field comprising curated information flows. I dislike like the term because filtration is not the essence of what’s going on. The essence is the active construction of adaptive, magical-thinking, escaped realities. So I like my alternate term: reality escape pods. Normalcy is just the biggest such escape pod, illustrated by the track of the pink circle in the picture above.  The white ones are subcultures.

Refactorings Roundup: 12/09/18 – 1/28/19

January 28, 2019 By
This entry is part 8 of 9 in the series Refactorings Roundups

Looks like people didn’t do much writing over the break and the start of the New Year, but did do plenty of reading. We have 8 posts by friends of ribbonfarm and 20 links from the dragnet.

This roundup is a human-filtered subset of links and short takes aggregated by the Feed Fox bot authored by Zach Faddis, and running on the refactorcamp.org Mastodon instance. You can follow the bot directly if you want the unfiltered firehose.

New Posts

  1. A new kind of overclocking by @msweet. Link
  2. Committing to Meditation by @bkam. Link
  3. On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: thirteen by zenpundit. Link
  4. Diving Into Ethereum Smart Contracts by @zacharius. Link
  5. Player vs. Character: A Two-Level Model of Ethics by Sarah Constantin. Link
  6. 2018 Reads by Joseph Kelly. Link
  7. In Conversation: SF Movie Adaptations w/ Seth Heasley by @adrianryan. Link
  8. Book Recommendations: An Everyone Culture and Moral Mazes by srconstantin. Link

Comment on this post with your blog link if you want it monitored by Feed Fox for potential inclusion, along with your mastodon (preferred) or twitter handle. 

Stuff We Read

  1. A more adaptable strategy for IPD than generous tit for tat. Link. ht @britt
  2. The wisdom of the all-father, wisest and most cunning of the gods.Link. ht @britt
  3. The Power of Talk: On Different styles of communication. Link. ht @bkam
  4. Hilary Hahn demonstrates playing violin pieces with various hindrances .Link. ht @strangeattractor
  5. (Long) interview with Adam Curtis. Link. ht @bkam
  6. Retorospective on the work of Donald Knuth. Link. ht @vgr
  7. Children raised by wolves.Link. ht @BruceJia
  8. What wit is and why we need it. Link. ht @dereklh
  9. Interactive tour of Garden of Earthly Delights (Hieronymus Bosch tryptich). Link. ht @vgr
  10. The Great Disillusionist (on Giacomo Leopardi). Link. ht @vgr
  11. Wendy Carlos created new scales, by doing away with octaves. Link. Link. ht @nindokag
  12. Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy. Link. ht @vgr
  13. A classic post on the misuse of categories in thinking and language. Link. ht @a
  14. A housewife manifesto. Link. ht @vgr
  15. Seeing like a network. Link. ht @vgr
  16. Generating wholes. Link. ht @msweet
  17. Deconstructing mindfulness. Link. ht @msweet
  18. If God Could Be Killed, it’d Be Dead Already. Link. ht @aRandomCat
  19. Staying Positive Without Going Insane. Link. ht @aRandomCat
  20. It’s All Over. Link. ht @vgr

If you are on the refactorcamp mastodon instance, you can tag links #heyfeedfox so they’re picked up by Feed Fox.

Happy 2019

January 3, 2019 By

We don’t have a post ready to go to kick off the year, but I figured I’d memorialize the New Horizons flyby of Ultima Thule into a new year’s greeting card for you guys. The story of how my new favorite Kuiper Belt Object was discovered and targeted is told in this excellent twitter thread by Alex Parker, who was part of the team.  I wrote about New Horizons during the Pluto flyby.

Hope you all had a good break. We’ll get going with real posts next week. Happy New Year!

Complete 2018 Roundup

December 26, 2018 By
This entry is part 12 of 17 in the series Annual Roundups

Well, that was a slow slog of a year. I personally felt like Spider-Man in the 3rd Toby Maguire movie, where he inexplicably briefly loses his powers. Surprisingly though, I did end up writing more posts than in 2017 (18 versus 13, even though 5 were… uhh… not quite longform). It was like pulling teeth, but I appear to be gathering momentum again.

Let’s do the roundup first, and then some commentary.

Editor-At-Large Posts

  1. Justifiable AI by Carlos Bueno
  2. Tarpits and Antiflocks by Carlos Bueno
  3. Glitches, uh, find a way by Carlos Bueno
  4. The Digital Maginot Line by Renee DiResta

Sarah Perry posts

  1. Luxuriating in Privacy by Sarah Perry
  2. Light of the American Whale by Sarah Perry
  3. The Well-Being Machine by Sarah Perry
  4. Treasure Hunting by Sarah Perry
  5. Cringe and the Design of Sacred Experiences by Sarah Perry
  6. Notes on Doing Things by Sarah Perry
  7. Hedonic Audit by Sarah Perry
  8. Social Media Consciousness by Sarah Perry
  9. Boilerplate by Sarah Perry
  10. Justice Fantasies by Sarah Perry
  11. “Something Runs Through The Whole Thread” by Sarah Perry
  12. Deep Laziness by Sarah Perry

Venkatesh Rao posts

  1. Think Entangled, Act Spooky by Venkatesh Rao
  2. Unflattening Hobbes by Venkatesh Rao
  3. The Speakeasy Imagineering Network by Venkatesh Rao
  4. Dodo Thoughts by Venkatesh Rao
  5. May You Live in Epic Times by Venkatesh Rao
  6. The Age of Early Divinity by Venkatesh Rao
  7. Why We Slouch by Venkatesh Rao
  8. How Do You Value a Human Being? by Venkatesh Rao
  9. Flying Blind into the Anthropocene by Venkatesh Rao
  10. Survival of the Mediocre Mediocre by Venkatesh Rao
  11. Boat Stories by Venkatesh Rao
  12. The Key to Act Two by Venkatesh Rao
  13. A Quick (Battle) Field Guide to the New Culture Wars by Venkatesh Rao
  14. Make Your Own Rules by Venkatesh Rao
  15. Reality Maintenance by Venkatesh Rao
  16. Chekov’s Gun and the Principle of Sufficient Reason by Venkatesh Rao
  17. Quiver Doodles by Venkatesh Rao
  18. Armpit Futures by Venkatesh Rao

Guest Posts

  1. Near-Deathness by Matthew Sweet
  2. The Unapologetic Case For Bullshit by Stefano Zorzi
  3. (Don’t) Be the Gray man by Patrick Steadman
  4. Symmetry and Identity by Kenneth Shinozuka

Community Stuff

  1. Into the Fediverse by Venkatesh Rao
  2. Refactor Camp 2018: Cryptoeconomics and Blockchain Weirding Post-Mortem by Taylor Pearson
  3. Refactor Camp 2018: Cryptoeconomics and Blockchain Weirding by Taylor Pearson
  4. Refactor Camp: Cryptoeconomics and Blockchain Weirding Summary and Wrap Up by Joseph Kelly
  5. The Art of Longform by Venkatesh Rao
  6. 2018 Annual Letter by Venkatesh Rao

Refactorings Roundups

  1. Refactorings Roundup 09/16/18 — 10/06/18 by Editor
  2. Refactorings Roundup 11/13/18 – 12/08/18 by Editor
  3. Feed Fox Links: 8/12/18 — 8/18/18 by Editor
  4. Refactorings Roundup 08/26/2018 09/1/2018 by Editor
  5. Refactorings Roundup 10/07/18 — 11/12/18 by Editor
  6. Refactorings Roundup 09/02/2018 — 09/15/18 by Editor
  7. Refactorings Roundup 08/19/2018 – 8/25/2018 by Editor

Here are the 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014 and 2013 roundups.New readers, here is the new readers start page. If you want to do some binge reading further back into the archives, there is a page for the Rust Age (2007-12) with both curated selections and complete roundups for 2007-12, as well as Kindle ebook collections.

After the monster 62-post year that was 2017 (thanks to the big bump created by guest contributions from people who took the longform writing course, which is now available in recorded form) this was a bit of a home-game year. Not counting administrative/community posts, we only had 38 proper posts: 18 by me, 12 by Sarah Perry, 4 by guests, 3 by Carlos Bueno, and 1 by Renee DiResta.

On the community front though, we probably had the best Refactor Camp ever  this year in Austin. There was also a healthy flow of meetups in the Bay Area, New York, Austin, London, LA, and Seattle.

The 2019 Refactor Camp will in be Los Angeles, probably on the weekend of June 7/8. Mark your calendars. Details in a month or so.

We also spun un a Mastodon server, and refactorcamp.org (open registration) has now been humming along quietly for 6 months. That has been the source of the irregular Refactorings Roundups posts (scroll up for back issues) with links to things people are reading and writing.

Interesting changes have gotten underway in the subterranean foundations of ribbonfarm, where our pet Cthulhu lives, so expect to see those bubble up to the surface next year.

Happy Holidays!

Refactorings Roundup 11/13/18 – 12/08/18

December 12, 2018 By
This entry is part 7 of 9 in the series Refactorings Roundups

We have 8 featured posts from friends of ribbonfarm, 19 selections from elsewhere around the internet, and a few short takes this roundup. We also have a new addition to our friends-of-ribbonfarm blogsphere dragnet: foolproof.ink.

I just realized my approach to curation is basically the same as my approach to reading to fuel writing. You could call it Postel Curation: Be liberal in what you read, conservative in what you write (after Postel’s Law). I’ve unconsciously been trying to include at least 2x as many selections in the “Stuff We Read” bucket as opposed to the New Posts (== “Stuff We Wrote” bucket).

This roundup is a human-filtered subset of links and short takes aggregated by the Feed Fox bot authored by Zach Faddis, and running on the refactorcamp.org Mastodon instance. You can follow the bot directly if you want the unfiltered firehose.

New Posts

  1. The power of explanation ht Foolproof Ink. Link. ht @vgr
  2. War like posture and other metaphors by zenpundit. Link
  3. The problem with Lindy by @msweet. Link
  4. Redecentralize (event report) by @bkam. Link
  5. thematic tension by thesublemon. Link
  6. Goodbye and hello by @msweet. Link
  7. Playing Politics by srconstantin. Link
  8. Rupetta pre-read w/ Charlotte Geater: Folk tales & feminist histories (audio). by @adrianryan. Link

Comment on this post with your blog link if you want it monitored by Feed Fox for potential inclusion, along with your mastodon (preferred) or twitter handle. 

Stuff we Read

  1. Whale ear wax and oceanic history .Link. ht @vgr
  2. Flash dance in support of euthanesia (video). Link. ht @machado
  3. The brain has 2 clocks, one for rhythms, one for experiences. Link. ht @vgr
  4. The predatory small-business lending industry .Link. ht @vgr
  5. The new Opportunity Zone tax laws allow for a lot of tax-minimization for the rich investor. Link. ht @Harry_Pottash
  6. 250 years later, benefits of education near Jesuit missions. Link. ht @dereklh
  7. Creative beefs. Link. ht @vgr
  8. Gandhi’s reputation is undergoing complexification. Link. ht @vgr
  9. On the origins of “Odinnic” sacrifice. Link. ht @msweet
  10. The African Middle Ages. Link. ht @dereklh
  11. The open office and the spirit of capitalism. Link. ht @dereklh
  12. Sweden’s Decades-Long Failure to Integrate. Link. ht @Elmkast
  13. Could poetry both freely create and rationally assert? Bonnefoy’s poetry. Link. ht @vgr
  14. Can toroid planets exist? Link. ht @nindokag
  15. Genetic error led humans to evolve bigger, but more vulnerable, brains. Link. ht @vgr
  16. Regenerative capitalism (paper). Link. ht @alec
  17. Environmentally mediated social dilemmas. Link. ht @makiaea
  18. Four laws of success and status. Link. ht @dereklh
  19. New Thomas Sowell interview. Link. ht @vgr

If you are on the refactorcamp mastodon instance, you can tag links #heyfeedfox so they’re picked up by Feed Fox.

Short Takes

  1. The apotheosis of NIMBYism would involve radical life extension. — @dereklh
  2. Opportunities for meaning are abundant. It’s sincerity of belief that is hard to come by. — @msweet
  3. The more you want to go against the flow, the more baggage you have to carry — @vgr
  4. Technology is human existence compounded. — @msweet
  5. The difference between a grand narrative and a narrative is that the former is where surplus middle-class attention preferentially flows — @vgr
  6. People think they have 20/20 hindsight. Actually most hindsight conclusions are just another theory that hasn’t been tested against reality yet. — @Harry_Pottash

If you are on the refactorcamp mastodon instance, you can tag short takes #heyfeedfox so they’re picked up by Feed Fox.

“Something Runs Through The Whole Thread”

December 7, 2018 By

The first zoom was the probably the sound of a train.

The various online dictionaries all give slightly different dates for the earliest use of the word zoom: a few confidently say 1892 (with no citation), others say 1886 (also no source), one gives a range 1885-1890 (same), and another is more circumspect with “late nineteenth century.” They all agree, however, that the word “zoom” originated as onomatopoeia: the sound of something traveling fast. Anything zooming by in the late nineteenth century would have been powered by steam. Perhaps it was a train, or a steam-powered automobile.

So zoom is the sound of speed – not the old speed of horses, but the new speed, vibrating and mechanical, exciting and high-tech. In the twentieth century, different aspects of “zoom” were then taken up by two emerging technological domains: photography and filmmaking on the one hand, and aviation on the other.

“Zooming” in aviation is a straightforward application of the original use. A pilot builds up a great deal of speed traveling parallel to the plane of the earth, then uses the build-up kinetic energy to fling the plane straight up into the sky, faster than it could go using just its thrusters. It’s easy to imagine what the ground looks like during this maneuver: rapidly shrinking as it gets further away and less detailed.

[Read more…]

Refactorings Roundup 10/07/18 — 11/12/18

November 14, 2018 By
This entry is part 6 of 9 in the series Refactorings Roundups

One of the interesting realizations I’ve had curating these links from a crowdsourced firehose is that the web looks subtly different from the perspective of a weakly interacting read/write crowd with a semi-permeable boundary, like a Mastodon instance fed by a hyperlocal blogosphere neighborhood. It is neither as incoherent as Twitter, nor as echo-chambery as a Facebook group, nor as aesthetically uniform as a single-curator feed. An open crowd mind seems to have certain harmonies and rhythms in the things it reading/writing/talking about. I like to think an ancient Silk Road bazaar would have had a feel something like this. Polyglot persistence of a network of human minds or something.

Straight Shot. Sculpture by Perri Lynch, Magnusson Park, Seattle

I have a month’s worth of curated links in this post. Ten new posts by friends of ribbonfarm, 27 assorted links from elsewhere.

This roundup is a human-filtered subset of links and short takes aggregated by the Feed Fox bot authored by Zach Faddis, and running on the refactorcamp.org Mastodon instance. You can follow the bot directly if you want the unfiltered firehose.

New Posts

  1. A Natural History of Beauty by Kevin Simler. Link
  2. Incipit as Infrastructure by Drew Austin. Link
  3. Things I Learned From Working With A Marketing Advisor by Sarah Constantin. Link
  4. The Algorithmic Bonus Mindset by @vgr. Link
  5. The Clock, Parts 1 and 2 by @bkam. Link Link
  6. Mandatory Obsessions by putanumonit. Link
  7. The floor and the canopy by @msweet. Link
  8. The Conflict by omniorthogonal. Link
  9. What poetry has to say about “the mob at the gate” by zenpundit. Link
  10. Towards Burja Mapping. Link. ht @tasshin

Comment on this post with your blog link if you want it monitored by Feed Fox for potential inclusion, along with your mastodon (preferred) or twitter handle. 

Stuff We Read

  1. Godzilla constellation. Link. ht @vgr
  2. Rewilding in Autumn. Link. ht @jayantkalawar
  3. Contrarian view on NIMBYism. Link. ht @machado
  4. Cats are good at hunting mice, but not at hunting city rats. Link. ht @vgr
  5. Left vs right = forager vs farmers? Hanson and Alexander’s take. Link. ht @steve
  6. Origins of Impersonal Markets. Link. ht @steve
  7. Algebra versus geometry views of the world. Link. ht @steve
  8. Sugihara’s list. Link. ht @vgr
  9. A Framework for Intelligence and Cortical Function Based on Grid Cells in the Neocortex. Link. ht @dereklh
  10. The Big Blockchain Lie. Link. ht @Elmkast
  11. Why fighter jets can’t just fly away from storms. Link. ht @vgr
  12. “Where were they radicalized?” Link. ht @britt
  13. Are gestures universal? Link. ht @vgr
  14. Reality has a surprising amount of detail. Link. ht @vgr
  15. Neat map of history of western philosophy. Link. ht @vgr
  16. Deadly vs. Holy theater is a useful lens for viewing politics in America right now. Link. ht @britt
  17. How to tell the temperature with cellular biology, I mean, crickets. Link. ht @britt
  18. Agreeableness linked to longer life in male chimps. Link. ht @dereklh
  19. Reading books and digital streams necessitates a “biliterate mind” Link. ht @dereklh
  20. A greypill manifesto. Link. ht @britt
  21. Doctors hate computers. Link. ht @vgr
  22. Gerrymandering is fragile. Link. Link. ht @vgr
  23. The kilogram is being redefined. Link. ht @vgr
  24. Why do we bother wearing bicycle helmets? Link. ht @vgr
  25. Nice deep profile of Bruno Latour. Link. ht @vgr
  26. Hayao Miyazaki makes films about what it means to live ethically in a cursed world. Link. ht @britt
  27. Schizophrenics can tickle themselves. Link. ht @vgr

If you are on the refactorcamp mastodon instance, you can tag links #heyfeedfox so they’re picked up by Feed Fox.

No short takes this time.

If you are on the refactorcamp mastodon instance, you can tag short takes #heyfeedfox so they’re picked up by Feed Fox.

Treasure Hunting

November 2, 2018 By

In 1861, Abraham Lincoln nominated Orion Clemens to the post of Secretary of the Nevada Territory. Clemens’ brother, a Confederate deserter who would later be known as Mark Twain, went with him to Nevada as his assistant.

Roughing It is Mark Twain’s account of his time in the Nevada Territory, an epistemic potpourri of lies, jokes, exaggerations, folklore, and – occasionally – facts verifiable from other sources. It’s a mistake to try to read too much of Roughing It at once, because every story follows essentially the same pattern:

  1. The narrator is tempted into some adventure or other,
  2. about which the narrator is extremely ignorant,
  3. but he nonetheless constructs fantasies based on romantic or biased sources and his own imagining;
  4. his adventure does not accord with his credulous fantasies.

However, these are anything but morality tales about the importance of shrewd dealing and hard work. Mark Twain’s heroes, including his narrator in Roughing It, are defined by gullibility and laziness as their great virtues. A sensible man would not fantasize about the lure of the frontier, and if he did, he would certainly not actually set out for the frontier in a stagecoach at the first opportunity he got. A sensible man would be content being the assistant secretary of the Nevada Territory; he would not run off to prospect for gold, or to stake a timber claim. Therefore, a sensible man would not have so many interesting stories to tell. “Gullible” and “adventurous” are near-synonyms, but each emphasizes a different emotional valence of the characteristic. [Read more…]

Seattle Drinks-and-Waterfront-Walk Meetup, Friday 19th

October 16, 2018 By

There will be a meetup on Friday the 19th, at 4:00 PM at Paddy Coyne’s by Pier 70. As with last time, we’ll hang out for a bit and get a drink to start, then go for a walk along the waterfront. Sunset is around 6:20 these days, so should be nice.

RSVP on this Facebook invite. Thanks to Weston Edwards for organizing.