Moby Dick & Francis Bacon

Reading list re-established !
Mentioned a month ago that I was reading Melville’s Moby Dick, and finding it enthralling so far. I got distracted however, and in the meantime read John Henry’s biography of Francis Bacon – Knowledge is Power, mentioned below and have since completed and enjoyed that (review to follow), together with dipping in and out of selected lectures from Poincare’s work, the selection edited by SJ Gould (much tougher going to find the relevance.) Poincare was a “geometer” – a perceiver of the big picture and claimant of sweeping generalisations – his arguments sound good on a rhetorical level, with exceptions ignored, but I’m not sure I can find much convincing rigour – I guess you have to be a mathematician. I think “maths-as-a-thing-of-beauty” is cool, I’ve certainly bought it for four decades, but it’s getting a bit overdone recently by the likes of Ian Stewart et al.

Struggled to get back into Melville, having put it to one side, but now back in full flow over one third through. I see now that my stumbling block was the series of chapters (scenes) on deck, written in the style of third person stage directions (unlike the rest in “I Ishmael” first person) which culminate in Ahab announcing in dramatic style his pursuit of Moby Dick to the assembled crew. One of the fascinating aspects for me is the degree to which the novel is a true story versus the fiction of Ahab and Moby Dick. For example, not only are Melville’s sea-faring credentials clear from the beginning, and the historical detail on the whaling industry, but in the sections explaining the credibility of Ahab’s attitude to Moby Dick, and that of the experienced crew, Melville cites in documentary fashion the cases of many “well-known individual whales” including names and ranks of the various ships and captains involved, with approximate dates. One of these chapters is entitled “Affidavit”, and Melville is clearly laying out supporting evidence – “Look, I’m not making this stuff up. Truth really is stranger than fiction.” If it’s just a literary ruse it’s very effective. I guess others must have researched all of this, (there is no end of books on Melville !) but I will just have to check-out this aspect – I’ve swallowed it hook, line and sinker.

Marvellous turns of phrase and humour throughout (too many subjects to mention here – race (colour), politics, communication, perception, motivation and madness to name a few.). Particularly enjoyed the passages describing the first lowering of the boats from the Pequod, and discovering the unexpected fourth boat (which I wont spoil by describing the circumstances), followed by the all action description of how Starbuck’s boat, with Ishmael, makes difficult and hazardous progress across the rising and falling waves, is upturned by the whale and ultimately smashed by being overrun by the mother ship in the grey squally conditions. You come out of it aching and sodden. By contrast their rescue and safe return to the Pequod is glossed over in a single, easily-overlooked statement. A little concentration pays off.

Some very interesting linguistic analysis too – not just the diverse historical and geographical sources of the words and styles, but artefacts like multiple threads of aliteration “crafted” in the one sentence and so on (don’t have the text to hand as I sit here, so I’ll dig out some quotes later – they’re worth it.)

Note the Hudson River analogy, when talking about [great] lakesmen – linked in Pirsig’s mind too ?

In view of some of my other threads majoring on “irrationality” and Catch-22 – the passages on Ahab’s “madness” when he returns from his original fateful encounter with Moby Dick, being “rationalised” by all who perceived it, drew lots of annotation for later use. As you can tell I’m getting a lot out of Moby Dick on many levels. (More than one drop of human blood per gallon of sperm oil at any rate.)

Kartoo – Visual Network Search Engine

Kartoo
A search engine that presents results as a network of interlinked graphic objects. Jorn considered it “mildly interesting”, but was clearly not impressed by the Flash content. (He picked up from the AI Forum). I reckon the idea is magic – in fact it exactly mirrors the Mind Map (or the Fuzzy Cognitive Map version of it) that I had in mind for organising research thoughts and references. Currently limited compared to (say) Google due to incomplete indexing of content out there, but very promising.

[I like the way that the links as well as the nodes are characterised – powerful concept – I wonder if they’re using RDF ? I wonder if the software is available as a tool to index and link any collection of information ?]

“Deliberate” Failure To See Facts

Deliberate failure to see the facts
(Another link brought to us by Robot Wisdom.) Those of you following the threads winding through this Blog, can’t fail to have noticed my “Emperors Suit of Clothes” thread. The in-built cultural tendencies to not see the obvious, even to justify not seeing it. This is part of, or at least closely related to my “Western Arrogance” thread, in terms of east vs west streams of philosophy and also parallels cock-up vs conspiracy theories. Formal management doctrines also recognise institutionalised “skilled incompetence” (ref Argyris et al.) in business decision making. These are facts that cannot be denied, but that’s the point, they are, always – Catch 22 again, again and again.

The linked article from Peggy Noonan is about the FBI failure over avoiding September 11th (surprise, surprise). It includes the line “FBI officials didn’t fail to connect the dots; they refused to see a pattern.” The refusal is not a malicious conspiracy, but a western conspiratorially-institutionalised cock-up. It gets better (worse if you like); it also contains the line “in an effort to avoid or minimize personal and/or institutional embarrassment” – the motivation straight out of Argyris, or my quoting of him in the earlier dissertation.

Wake up and smell the burning kerosene. Committees of moral men have been making immoral decisions since long before Ralph Nader pointed it out, and John Z Delorean heard him. Let’s not look for people to blame, let’s look at the information communication and decision making models with which we are comfortable in the west, and then move out of our comfort zone. Look east, or at least outside the rational positivist box.

Another (Cynical) Day At The Office

Yet another day at the office ? Letter of Resignation, Poem by Matthew Rohrer
Quote [extract] This office was designed to be pleasant, not the charnel house of lies and insinuations you have made it ….. I’m telling you this because you obviously have no marketable skills. Unquote. There’s a lot of it about apparently – see earlier post on terrorist mob training simulation.

Diskless In Detroit – Cars as Comms Trojan Horse

Diskless in Detroit – Why Your New Car Doesn’t Have a Built-in PC
Cringely says not just UI and apps problem, but disk drives just not rugged enough, and car / disk business development cycles will always be out of sync, however ..
Quote : Cars are the perfect Trojan horse for distributed communications, for example.
Cars are everywhere people are, they are generally outside, they have their own power source, and they have extra places to stash black boxes. An enlightened car company — or better still EVERY car company — should put a [Telecomms] node in every car they make whether the owner wants it or not. Unquote.

Dupuy – Mechanization of the Mind

Holding post only:

The Mechanization of the Mind : On the Origins of Cognitive Science
by Jean-Pierre Dupuy (Stanford), Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Princeton Univ Press.
von-Neumann, Wiener, Mind-Matter, Cog-Sci, AI, Chaos and Complexity all in one package.
Ref from RobotWisdom – must investigate.

Broken link above: See here for a full review.

Site Traffic Monitoring – Hits as Cross-Links

All the Hits – Site monitoring is interesting. I can recommend Site-Meter.
Over the past 3 or 4 months I have to say the majority of hits are Google hits. What Google indexes is mind-boggling. Amazing number of recurring Google hits from people in the US looking for Friedrich Durrenmatt references on “Die Physiker” (The Physicists), which is only an incidental part of this site. Next most hits direct from Blogger users and Internet Research Register.

Most interested (and hence interesting) hits from a few anonymous parties who seem to dwell at length on certain pages. Come on, don’t be shy, make contact.

Blogdex
MIT Project, keeps tabs on who’s linked to your site.