1. I don't agree that the essence of information is that it can reformatted or translated... I think there exist messages that can accurately be communicated in only one way (certain artworks?). And there are even more messages that are best communicated in only one way (way more than anyone would like to admit)... But all that does assume that the universe is this sort of giant conduit for the exchange of information (Boy, this conversation got out of hand almost immediately). Is that simplistic? [Tangent: I don't really think it's reductionist any more than saying the universe is electrical or binary... It's a nice, accurate assessment that lends itself to a lot of extrapolation and it scales well... Hmm... Actually it is reductionist, but I need to start somewhere, no?]

2. A prompt from J to look into information theory:
" This is a branch of science (or math) founded by claude shannon. They have very clear definitions of information in information theory (go figure) but even with clarity, the topic is still hard to come to grips with. In info theory, information is inversely proportional to someone's ability to predict what is coming next. In other words: a given stream of data has high information content if you can't predict what is coming next in the data stream. So, a data stream with every number in order from 1 to 10 contains (for most people) no information (because you don't need to hear what's coming next, everybody already knows, 1,2,3,4,5,6....) The weird part is that something totally unpredictable (like say the ravings of a schizophrenic) would contain a lot of information. A random stream of data would contain maximum information. Of course, if you look at information this way, then you don't want maximum information, because you can't make anything out of it. You want enough information so that something new is conveyed, but not so much that you drop off into unintelligibility."
Okay... this fits in with the idea that the more ambiguous the data (Is that the right word?), the greater the potential amount of information... That makes information pretty much unquantifiable...

3. One last thought: Mitsu talks about information being "fundamentally context-dependent; it depends upon knowledge of the whole system. Information involves the creation of a resonance between different parts of a system..." and references Gregory Bateson.'s "difference that changes us"...

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18 October 1999

Victor and I saturated ourselves with culture this weekend. We are so oozing with art that we leave trails of slime like sophisticated snails. For one thing, we went to Sensation at the Brooklyn Museum. It was amazing. It's first time I've seen Jenny Saville's work in person (so to speak), and it is incredible... Even more so than I imagined. I'd like to be an aesthetic purist and not describe a work I admire in terms of the emotion that it evokes in me, but standing in front of her Plan was excruciating... In a different way than reading the captions beneath the titles was. There were also some lovely paintings by Damien Hirst that were actually more alarming to those of us in compulsive pursuit of patterns, than any sliced up cow. Ron Mueck's disturbing homunculus, Dead Dad, has given me the most interesting sort of nightmares...

I'm hungry for colours and craving big shapes (Vernor Panton). I am going to go home and make something big and colourful and solid... and maybe wet?

Blanking by Tom Sherman (from allquiet.org-- thanks J). I say as I listen to an editorial by Andre Codrescu, chat with Amy (who is a devastatingly clever little beast-- said most admiringly) on IM and update my Visio schematics. I gulp coffee, my foot shakes, and I blink rapidly... I am heart-poundingly panicked by the idea of a paucity of stimuli. Andrea and I discussed this once. She told me about a retreat in the wilds of Connecticut or somewhere where very focused people go to meditate for three months. They may not speak or meet one another's eyes or read or... anything at all. We were simultaneously repelled and fascinated by the idea of retreating from the world sans stimuli for such an amount of time. Actually, I was mostly horrified. It reminds me too much of being stuck on a plane for 10 hours on the runway without a book when even the lame crossword in the airline magazine is filled in... It reminds me of a Patience Lesson.

I happily skip off to find out of what a gin gimlet consists besides gin.

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14 October 1999

It's cold and bright and windy and I walked to work with my hand shading my eyes. I walked past a man walking a small brown bear or a large brown dog. I walked past a man sleeping in front of my apartment, wrapped in a pink nightie. I walked past a woman with long arms and legs and a delicate, white face. I walked past a construction worker smoking a joint and two men unloading produce. They absentmindedly hooted and gestured at me. They made smacking noises without losing the thread of their conversation... I like people, but not in the way that prompts one to go into a service industry. I like them in a less interactive way than that... I've been screamed at a few times lately. It doesn't happen often. Lately upon being made the target of vociferous abuse, I am torn between a healthy outrage and a slack-jawed fascination. I start to very properly protest, murmuring words like inappropriate and unedifying and enough...But then I am overcome with a sticky fascination... I must admit it. I'm impressed. Probably not in the way I'm supposed to be impressed... But impressed, nonetheless.

SMH's Corning Museum of Glass.

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13 October 1999

Sometimes grad school starts to sound like fun... Although it seems that a lot of my friends are finding it less stimulating than they expected. It seems as though the more certian one is about one's direction or interests, the less relevant it is... At least for studies that are not exclusively technical.

The Institute of Research and Cordination in Acoustics & Music.

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12 October 1999

...Combatís su resistencia
y luego, con gravedad,
decís que fue liviandad
lo que hizo la diligencia...

-Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

I s'pose everybody wishes they could imitate other people's styles-- of writing, design, etc.

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11 October 1999

Saul Bellow as one of the New York Times writers on writers (which sounds a bit like a meat dish they might serve for breakfast at the Waffle House on the interstate in Tennessee).

I read a lot of books this rainy weekend: Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, which made my mouth water; NP, which was deceptively simple but left a persistent and disturbing aftertaste; and four short novels of Stendhal, the collection of which doesn't seem to be in print any longer. The last were interesting especially in the distance implied by the author. He encourages the reader to project himself in identifying with the motivations of characters in stories that took place some two hundred years before they were written in 1830-ish(?). By doing so, he emphasizes the reader's distance from the characters and settings (which seems to indicate an attitude slightly contrary to that to which he lays claim more explicitly, i.e. the French are missing something in the absence of the stereotyped Latin passion about which revolve the narratives). That in turn, emphasizes my distance from the readers for whom he was writing. Identifying with the characters is trying to see through a clouded glass of foreign and inscrutable motivations... But then suddenly everything becomes viciously lucid (e.g. two-thirds of the way through The Abbess of Castro). I am reading about a twenty-seven year old woman. She's depressed. She doesn't give a damn anymore... And then I pick up NP (which, like all of Banana Yoshimoto's work, might have been written by a friend; it is so little removed from my world)...

Yipes. The Insignificance of Statistical Significance Testing.

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07 October 1999

What Ume-the-Cat thinks about all day long. She always looks so pensive and engaged. She maintains a very serious look on her little pointed face...

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06 October 1999

I sit in a gigantic hotel bed on the 28th floor and watch TV with the volume turned down. It's surreal-- especially the commercials. A colossal mint leaf sails through an ambiguous ether and dramatically severs a floating steel chain. A layered textual world of anagrams advertises something or other-- oh, the New York Times. I am enthralled... TV's neat.

How healthy. The Shopping Avenger effectively channels the rage the rest of us bury deep within our subconscious where it festers and takes years off our lives, while we smile tightly and grind our teeth... Me, I've been doing a bit too much flying lately to have faith in humankind.

The "What do people search for?" page, from the CHI list. It's pure voyeurism disguised as research (or the other way 'round, depending who you are). I can stop looking any time I want. It's relevant research... And if you tell me all the juicy details, I can pray more effectively for you.

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05 October 1999

There are some personal insults that are so calculated and manipulative as to seem nothing more than... pathetic. Reminds me of a boy I went out with a couple times in highschool. When it became painfully evident that I was not as enthralled with him as he was with himself he began to drop little joking comments and making lots of sincere, sad observations ostensibly to help me improve myself. He kindly informed me that my nose is funny shaped and that I should probably try to lose some weight and not talk so much. Even at the fragile age of sixteen it didn't take long for me to find it all wildly amusing and, I am sorry to say, be very mean to the poor kid. As a grown-up I still find it howlingly funny, but my reaction has since become tinged with that most sordid of sentiments-- pity. The sticky ugliness of it all mostly prompts me to keep my mouth shut and smile sweetly... Mostly.

Diagrams of the Nuremberg race laws.

I read Enduring Love on the plane yesterday. It was, like everything by Ian McEwan, fine. Good, even. I've come to realize that I've lost my taste for a certian type of narrative, though. The book, though well written, seemed rigidly linear and formulaic to me... I think the former makes all the more probable the latter... An interview with Dana Atchley (warm cool system).

Oh, I'm working on the most delicious, the most succulently relevant wide-ranging search functionality... It just makes my mouth water. Words fail me.

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03 October 1999

Steven Pinker's book should be called How I Think the Mind Works and Six Hundred Other Pages of Words You Can Skip. It consists primarily of decontextualized, misread references with which he constructs a non-existent adversary / argument so that he can debunk said non-existent points and make three or four hundred pages of snide remarks at the expense of... someone. Certainly no one referenced could take him seriously enough to be affronted by his resolute misreadings. He Misses The Point with an impressive and comforting degree of consistency. The chapters that consist of random and unrelated information are the least outrageous although they mostly don't have much to do with how the mind works. I'm halfway through and I can't really see a compelling reason to finish... Maybe if someone paid me... That was a bit mean, I guess, but it is a pretty complacent work.

I'm interested in both imposing patterns on disparate pieces of information; and, of course, looking for existing patterns. However the former is more interesting in that it is, according the the basis of the (empirical) scientific theory, taboo. It involves manipulating one's data to fit a predefined pattern. However, it can produce rare and beautiful results. For example, imposing a grid will make vivid the shredded spots in the woof and warp of a relationship otherwise taken for granted. Change the data, impose the same grid and the meaning of the relationship is entirely new.

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September