(^^ Turn up your volume ^^)
Last week, we saw the first burst of above freezing temperatures on campus - a trend that has continued into this week too. The days see highs in the upper 40s or mid 50s, while the lows don’t quite drop low enough for everything to re-freeze. The sound of melting was all across campus, so pervasive and wonderful that I recorded some of it for future nostalgic ends. It really is the best thing to hear, when you’ve been through several feet of snow that winter and are beginning to see the first hints of bare ground.
Now almost all the snow has melted, save for some spots stuck in shadow or piled high from plows. On the sunny days it feels like spring has arrived, and on the cloudy ones like we’ve snapped back to fall. Unfortunately, I’ve been stuck inside the last few days with the cold from hell that’s caused all sorts of other weird symptoms at times: nausea, vertigo, and a weird daze halfway between asleep and awake. Still, though, I open the windows to let fresh air in and hope that it sticks around to when I’m ready for it….
I’m reading Rebecca Solnit’s excellent book on Eadward Muybridge (aka. the guy who photographed a running horse), and the introduction is such a cognitive thunderbolt. She describes the 1870s, when “the experience of time was itself changing dramatically… The newly invented telephone and phonograph were added to photography, telegraphy, and the railroad as instruments for ‘annihilating space and time.’” The implicit idea is that time isn’t experienced by most by anything so discrete as the ticks of a clock, but instead as the time it takes to do something. We used to measure our time in movement, traversing the world to connect with various places and people. The telephone, phonograph, and photograph played their part in introducing us to the constantly mediated world, a trend that has accelerated to today’s total access sitting at my computer keyboard. Our computer “windows” are less understood as mere views out onto the lawn, and more as some glowing rectangle of semi-omniscience - vaguely reminiscent of the window in Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zann”1.
What, then, becomes the new limit? What new metric will we use to measure time? Maybe attention. The idea of the “attention economy” isn’t new at all; Wired even wrote about it as early as December 1997. More recent, though, is our ability to directly increase our own supply of it. John Gruber himself just said that “attention is the real resource,” one of the only ways to gain leverage today. I’m not quite sure that’s the answer, though.
A Sampling of Links
Slate has a fascinating five-part series on capturing Saddam Hussein using social network analysis. Finding Saddam meant finding who would know where Saddam was - an incredibly small circle unlikely to be stumbled upon by chance. So investigators used interrogation testimony and a cherished photo album to try and map the relationships between different Iraqi officials, figuring out who knew who and then rolling down the road of links to Saddam, capturing the guy who knew the guy who knew the guy… who knew where Saddam was.
NY Review of Books just published a devastating indictment of our current system for deterring rape in prisons, jails, and even juvenile detention facilities. They also suggested ways to stop continued abuses in the near-future, although it seems to me that a good first step would be for everyone to stop callously making jokes about prison rape.
Add water systems to the long list of infrastructure with overdue maintainance; $355 billion needs to be spent in the next few decades laying pipe, which sounds like what Bea said.
Finally, Chat Roulette Piano Improv has singlehandedly justified the internet. (And if the speculation is true, it may also singlehandedly justify Ben Folds.)
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From the story:
Louder and louder, wilder and wilder, mounted the shrieking and whining of that desperate viol. The player was dripping with an uncanny perspiration and twisted like a monkey, always looking frantically at the curtained window. In his frenzied strains I could almost see shadowy satyrs and bacchanals dancing and whirling insanely through seething abysses of clouds and smoke and lightning. And then I thought I heard a shriller, steadier note that was not from the viol; a calm, deliberate, purposeful, mocking note from far away in the West.
At this juncture the shutter began to rattle in a howling night wind which had sprung up outside as if in answer to the mad playing within. Zann’s screaming viol now outdid itself emitting sounds I had never thought a viol could emit. The shutter rattled more loudly, unfastened, and commenced slamming against the window. Then the glass broke shiveringly under the persistent impacts, and the chill wind rushed in, making the candles sputter and rustling the sheets of paper on the table where Zann had begun to write out his horrible secret. I looked at Zann, and saw that he was past conscious observation. His blue eyes were bulging, glassy and sightless, and the frantic playing had become a blind, mechanical, unrecognizable orgy that no pen could even suggest.
A sudden gust, stronger than the others, caught up the manuscript and bore it toward the window. I followed the flying sheets in desperation, but they were gone before I reached the demolished panes. Then I remembered my old wish to gaze from this window, the only window in the Rue d’Auseil from which one might see the slope beyond the wall, and the city outspread beneath. It was very dark, but the city’s lights always burned, and I expected to see them there amidst the rain and wind. Yet when I looked from that highest of all gable windows, looked while the candles sputtered and the insane viol howled with the night-wind, I saw no city spread below, and no friendly lights gleamed from remembered streets, but only the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance of anything on earth. And as I stood there looking in terror, the wind blew out both the candles in that ancient peaked garret, leaving me in savage and impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium before me, and the demon madness of that night-baying viol behind me.
And just like that, Lovecraft predicted most of my experiences with the internet. ↩
