Heads up, ye sapiens sapiens: @afarensis99 - Four Stone Hearth Volume 70.

Field reports to follow…

(july 1:09) Another piece, Kalis, and explanation at netdynam.org.

Nano Nets and Lucky Machines, posted by me on Netdynam 2.0

Subject matter: intelligent agents, artificial intelligence, machine-based minds

Courtesy of Crooks and Liars. (post: Bill Moyers on the “Single Payer” plan for health care on PBS
By John Amato Sunday Jun 07, 2009.)

Arlen Specter (R-D- PA- $4,026,933)
Max Baucus (DLC- MT- $2,833,731)
Mitch McConnell (R-KY- $2,758,468)
Ben Nelson (DLC-NE- $1,196,799)
Max Baucus (DLC- MT- $1,184,113)
Joe Lieberman (DLC- CT- $1,036,302)
Arlen Specter (R-D- PA- $1,035,530)
Chuck Schumer (D-NY- $981,400)
Mitch McConnell (R-KY- $929,207)
Chuck Grassley (R-IA- $884,724)

The dollars are contributions from the medical-insurance complex to Senators charged with serving their constituents. Kind of begs some questions.

Although Explorations is not focused on politics and the political economy, in this case I can’t help myself. In truth I’m preparing a long riff on the Republican implosion. It’s not ready.

Still, in our interesting times, the US has a President elected in part due to a grassroots money-raising dynamo, and, against this is the normal spoils system. It helps that only 50-ish percent vote in National elections, and, by the way, that rate of participation is–at least–halved in most local elections. It’s a weird system that mixes a mass of citizenry with plutocrats and the corporate elite.

Many years ago a mentor told me that one often is compelled to uncover what he termed “the agenda behind the agenda” and then to discover who is holding the gold that funds this agenda behind the agenda.

I can’t think of any single road here at the high reaches of consciousness trying to figure consciousness out which–eventually and practically–easily offers practical methods for improving self-development, relationships, group relations, and all the sundry modes for everyday consciousness and behavior.

More, see my post, The Mind Is Not the Brain, netdynamic.org

In this excerpt from my film “Zrareet ! ” my mother-in-law explains how to train a Moroccan husband with a great sense of humor. They have been married for over 60 years.

wifechadly Youtube channel

via Ron Chusid, from an interview of Rush Limbaugh by Matt Drudge.

Context: a full skeleton of an early presumed primate, Darwinius masillae, was discovered (story@Pharyngula; This is an important new fossil, a 47 million year old primate nicknamed Ida. She’s a female juvenile who was probably caught in a toxic gas cloud from a volcanic lake, and her body settled into the soft sediments of the lake, where she was buried undisturbed.

RUSH: Drudge had as a lead item up there this morning on his page a story from the UK, Sky News: “Scientists Unveil Missing Link In Evolution.” It’s all about how Darwin would be thrilled to be alive today. “Scientists have unveiled a 47-million-year-old fossilised skeleton of a monkey hailed as the missing link in human evolution.” It’s a one-foot, nine-inch-tall monkey, and it’s a lemur monkey described as the eighth wonder of the world. “The search for a direct connection between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom has taken 200 years - but it was presented to the world today —” So I guess this is settled science. We now officially came from a monkey, 47 million years ago. Well, that’s how it’s being presented here. It’s settled science. You know, this is all BS, as far as I’m concerned. Cross species evolution, I don’t think anybody’s ever proven that. They’re going out of their way now to establish evolution as a mechanism for creation, which, of course, you can’t do, but I’m more interested in some other missing link. And that is the missing link between our failing economy and prosperity.

Chusid believes this clip from the interview pegs Limbaugh as a creationist of some sort. The Rush-o-saur has never gone on record about origins. He may be against evolutionary biology in a doctrinaire sense, but his riff here is just ignorant in five different ways. “you can’t do”!!! LOL

That there is a doctrinaire non-argument against any research result that is employed anytime evolutionary findings hit the table, probably has something to do with the perceived offense given by biology to the varieties of foundationalism which infect anti-Darwinists. The idea being that human morality just can’t issue should there be found links to monkeys.

This monkey business constitutes a kind of memetic thread that peaked with the 1960 movie Inherit the Wind, the movie about the 1925 Scopes trial. (The movie followed by five years the play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee.)

As far as the origins of morality goes, it’s a fascinating problem for paleo-social-anthropology. I’d be surprised were I to learn Limbaugh is a young earth creationist, yet from that particular foundationalism human morality is worked out via the fall and the wisdom of patriarchs, and a bit of incest.

I wonder what the Rushster would answer if asked ‘what are the origins of conservative morality?’ Probably his answer would be appallingly ignorant…too.

Big find in the world of old artifacts: a female figurine was unearthed (New York Times), and its age was estimated at 35,000+ years. Hohle Fels Cave near Ulm in the Swabian Jurain Germany. It’s a fantastic find.

But, then came the finder’s modest speculation, and, next came projection. The key word for the latter was: pornographic. This following from the quote of one of the finders,

“It’s very sexually charged,” said University of Tuebingen archaeologist Nicholas Conard, whose team discovered the figure in September.

Later, an expert commentator remarked,

If there’s one conclusion you want to draw from this, it’s that an obsession with sex goes back at least 35,000 years,” University of Cambridge anthropologist Paul Mellars told LiveScience. He was not involved in the new finding. “But if humans hadn’t been largely obsessed with sex they wouldn’t have survived for the first 2 million years. None of this is at all surprising. The figure is explicitly — and blatantly — that of a woman, with an exaggeration of sexual characteristics (large, projecting breasts, a greatly enlarged and explicit vulva, and bloated belly and thighs) that by twenty-first-century standards could be seen as bordering on the pornographic.”

Then the Huffington Post headlined the story this way:

Venus of Hohle Fels: PREHISTORIC PORN

And so it goes, as Mr. Mellars’s odd sense of ‘the pornographic’ gets driven as a meme through all the media channels.

Also, of interest to me, is the difficult problem inherent in offering speculative yet informed descriptions of paleolithic life using modern categories. Those categories are abstractions with respect to what might be called ‘proto-categorality.’ Even to use ‘obsess’ may reach in too over-determined a way toward whatever were the affectual energetics–subject to being named–of paleolithic life.

I would have been a surfer. Had I grown up near the waves. Alas, Cleveland.

During the height of the Viet Nam war, I spent the summer of 1968 with the family of my Uncle Colonel Pat in Hawaii, on Oahu. It was quite an adventure. I learned to play poker. I was 13. But the highlights came almost every day, when I ventured into the breaks at Barber’s Point and at a spot–Ones, Twos–off of Waikiki, with my cousin Chris and a neighborhood lad, Teddy. (The neighborhood was Fort Kamemeheha, situated at the mouth of Pearl Harbor, and located a half mile off the end of Hickam Air Force Base’s main runway.)

I was goofy foot and an excellent swimmer. Being a good swimmer came in handy because I spent a lot of time chasing after the 7 foot long Hobie board. The break at Barber’s topped out at about four feet. We made several forays into the summer break off of Waikiki. The size of the waves was similar but the waves were steeper. One day my cousin told me the break was close to six feet. He shunted me off to the edge of Ones, and there I had my only close call, when a soldier on R&R loosed his board right toward my head, forcing me to duck, then abandon my take off. This happened in about three feet of water on top of a coral reef. I just managed to escape getting a rub job from the reef. The other guy’s board missed the side of my head my inches.

Billabong, Teahoopu, Tahiti

The next summer my aunt and uncle had moved to Virginia. I visited, and we made one trip to Virginia Beach, but the boards stayed on the car because the conditions were much better for body surfing. Then, during the next summer of 1970, with a red Greg Noll board of my cousin’s that I had a share in, I vacationed with my family at Hilton Head. There the swells rolling in from all the way across the Atlantic didn’t offer much of a sturdy up-welling and break, so the only surfing, such as it was, happened in the roiling wash. Until a hurricane blew by in Florida, tripling the size of the waves, and causing the 8-10 foot swells to become steep enough to ride down, like sledding on a snow hill. But, it became immediately apparent that their ferocious all-at-once close out, close to shore, involved way too much water for me, intrepid and fearless as I was, to safely surf.

And that was the last time I paddled out into anything.

Lots of surfing videos on Youtube. (Search: Billabong Odyssey | example | mini-documentary) One thing I’m mindful of is that these monster waves in the following videos are breaking in very shallow water, say, a 30-60 foot wave breaking in under 8 feet of water. Scary.

Local craigslist garage sale announcement. …seems like an interesting household.

garage in back open rain or shine.
hand tools,drill bits,power tools, collectible case international and versatile toy tractors, wilson’s leather jackets, harley davidson full face motorcycle helmet size xxs used twice for 12yr old rider,lawn equipment, nice new lighted gun case, new guitar amp, 55 gallon custom fish /reptile aquarium, 2×2 custom built harley davidson cage great for small animal or reptile, pair of adult ball pythons, adult female rose hair tarantula, adult female red claw emperor scorpion, (2) 4mo old male husky mixes one with steel blue eyes one brown eyed house and crate trained, pro form recumbent exercise bike like new, houseware items, antique mantle clock, computer stuff and more.

Construal Vectors

Walk Score allows one to plug in a street address and quickly learn how walkable is the neighborhood the address is located within.

I plugged in my own Shaker Heights address and it received a 65 score. This rates as very walkable, but in truth my neighborhood is residential blocks located between two close-by shopping complexes. Next I plugged in the Phoenix Cafe in Lakewood, and the core was 85. Extremely walkable, and it would put Lakewood in the top 10%, of the 2,500+ neighborhoods the Walk Score Project has scored. The project–and it’s methodology–scored over 1,000,000 locations.

click image for large version

The walker’s paradises are listed. It is restricted to scores taken from neighborhoods in the 40 largest cities. By way of comparison, I scored Church Street in Burlington, Vermont, (population: 39,000) and not surprisingly it scored 97 out of 100.

Cleveland garnered 60 points overall. Cleveland possesses several well-known walker’s districts. For example, the up-and-coming Gordon Square received a ranking of 83. I haven’t delved into the methodology by which many neighborhood’s scores are aggregated to arrive at a city’s score. Anyway, it’s neat that Lakewood is more walkable than New York is overall, and behind San Francisco.

A sign-system such as a natural language is not an input-output system of encodings and decodings for the transmission of contents from one mind to another. Instead, it is a normative and conventional resource consisting of semiotically salient differentiation-types for producing, acting on and transforming situation conventions and the cognitive representations that people have of the situations in which these conventions operate. Paul J. Thibault

Hat tip to eldon, my Netdynam colleague, for hipping me to the book Brain, Mind and the Signifying Body, by the semiotician Paul J. Thibault. It fits into a funny reflexive picture, because I’m reading my friend Heward Wilkinson’s The Muse As Therapist, and, trying to pare away time to keep two different music-making projects percolating. Then Thibault pops into the frame. Really, Heward and Paul should get to know each other someway other than in my tiny mind!

Which is to say, it’s probably been years since I set up two wondrously knotty books by my night stand. (I don’t recommend trading off between Heidegger and Husserl as I once tried to do.) Oh, and to make this picture complete, Bra Ken, generously sent me the back issues of his literary chap House Organ. This does make dr.p’s head spin when I can’t decide what looking glass I’m going to pick up.

Musings About the ND2.0 Project

Free time is tending towards its own opposite, and is becoming a parody of itself. Thus unfreedom is gradually annexing ‘free time,’ and the majority of unfree people are as unaware of this as they are of the unfreedom itself. –Theodore Adorno

Locus of Control Matrix (Original discussion on this blog: Slowing Down to Better Problem Solve.)

Group Entry Norming Matrix (Posted to the Netdynamics 2.0 group blog, Group Entry Schema.

My colleague, Eldon, and me enter into a dialog in the comments. This dialog points toward this:

Cognitive Construal Vectors

Anybody conversant with social psychology will note the conventions captured in this schema. The schema does not represent formalized theory-making. It simply depicts a way of looking at the conjunction of the egocentric/stereotypic conventions. (Hmmm, I shall coin a term, egotypic, less confusing to me than egocentric given the latter’s numerous meanings.)

I’ll be referring to and saying more about Netdynam 2.0. It is an offshoot of the Netdynamics email discussion list, of which I have been a spiky participant for 13+ years. If you’re interested in interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, or, oh yeah, post-disciplinary, wandering through the mashed fields of depth/social/group/personality psychology, and linguistics, and applied semiotics, and ecosemiosis, and, disruptive poetics, and the internet and Web 2.0, you can peruse the offerings, and, maybe give our tiny crew a pinch or two.

New Dub Collision, (my music-compiling pseudonym,) mix over at nogutsnoglory studios blog. It’s titled Lookout Cleveland Part 1 - Back On the Porch.

West coast drum master George Marsh. More over at my nogutsnoglory blog.

Gordon Knox, director of the global initiatives project at Stanford University’s Humanities Lab could be considered an instigator of the “post-professional” meme as it applies to the commons and articulations of knowledge and experience on the internet.

article: If Corporations Could Paint (Forbes)

Over on our, (being the Netdynam email discussion group,) new group project blog, Netdynam 2.0, I’ve posted Knox’s video, Darwin, web 2.0 and the Role of the Amateur.