Property Rights

Getty Images complained enough about their right to intellectual property that Google basically disabled their image search engine.

That's right, go search for an image, and then try to view or save that image. And then wind your clocks back to the year 2005ish.

We now have to revert to searching through an entire website in order to find the image we've already "searched". Not ideal; in fact, it ultimately defeats the purpose of an image search function in the first place.

Not sure which part is more upsetting, that image searching just took a step back ten years, or that such a large entity as Getty is so clueless about how the modern world works. (Then again, there seems to be a lot of that going on these days.) And by clueless, I mean not recognizing the existence of a thing called the right-click.

In case you're having the same facepalm moment as myself, yes, right-clicking on the image and "open in new tab" completely defeats the purpose of the new changes, and erodes our confidence in large cultural institutions such as Getty, both at the same time.

Also, trademarks and logos are excluded from this new change.

Anger at Google image search 'peace deal'
Feb 2016, BBC


Post Script

But wait, because it doesn't end there. I like to provide proper source references for the imagery used on my page, just because. The problem I run into lately is this - many of the images I want to use have been populated to my search results from Pinterest (because they are owned by Google, let's not forget, it's no coincidence they run the image-search game). And people who post on Pinterest are very unlikely to leave source credits. And yet Pinterest is owned by Google, and so they dominate the image search results. So the chances of my finding the image on a site that gives its source due credit are close to zero. Soo, as a person who wants to do the right thing - the thing that Getty wants me to do, and the thing that Google ostensibly wants me to do - I cannot, because of the very entity that has made these changes in the interest of 'doing the right thing'. That's enough for today.


Post Post Script

Now we've covered that, it seems an appropriate moment to remind ourselves about the specifics of intellectual property. As a creator, all you have to do to gain the right to your own intellectual property is to make the thing.

You're a musician? Make a recording. Artist? Make a painting. Writer? Write it down. Once you have fixed that intellectual product into some physical form - be it a recording, painting, or even a poem scratched into the dirt and then photographed - you own it.

So that sounds great. Until you think about how some cultures, like the people who lived in America before Europeans, do not fix much of their cultural products into physical forms. Sand paintings? Not fixed. Tribal songs? No recording equipment, not fixed.

If you get upset because you can't find that Getty image, just take some cultural products from a culture that has no property rights (intellectual or physical). Public domain forever!

Grimm's fairy tales, that's another one. They were spoken, not written down. So when Disney went and took them all and made cartoons out of them...

Biology Takes Acid

I don't even think this is a chimera by definition, but it looks cooler.

Big week in biology news. Sometimes I read the news and I'm like, What the F is going on...Can't make this sh** up. This really is turning out to be the century of biology.

Human-pig 'chimera embryos' detailed
Jan 2017, BBC

Scientists create the first ever autistic monkeys
Jan 2017, BBC

Reverse Engineering

Moore's Law predicts life originated billions of years before Earth
Robert T. Gonzalez, 04.18.13
A new study co-authored by a geneticist at the National Institutes of Health concludes that life originated elsewhere in the Universe around 9.8 billion years ago – roughly five-billion years before the Earth was even formed.

Life Before Earth

NIH geneticist Alexei A. Sharov and theoretical biologist Richard Gordon

(Submitted 28 Mar 2013) [link]

...origin of life can be estimated by examining genetic complexity through the lens of Moore's Law and backtracking to some point of temporal origin.

"Genome complexity reaches zero, which corresponds to just one base pair, at time ca. 9.7 billion years ago... ±2.5 billion years."

Earth is on the order of just 4.5-billion years old. Ipso facto, say the researchers, life originated somewhere besides Earth, evolving not on a geologic time scale, but a cosmic one.

[crit, i09.com]
One thing that worries me about this paper is that it makes no effort, as far as I can tell, to distinguish between complexity and progress, an important distinction that many people fail to recognize.

Another issue: the idea that the complexity of life on Earth has increased at the same rate throughout history is highly suspect.

...how little consensus there is on what complexity actually is.

Phantom Streets and Authenticity

In an article about a mysteriously undiscovered island in the South Pacific, scientists wonder what happened. Did mapmakers, perhaps, create the fake island on purpose, they ask, because -

...some map makers intentionally include phantom streets to prevent copyright infringements.



South Pacific Sandy Island 'proven not to exist'
BBC, 22 November 2012 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-20442487

The Process of Creation

A composite false-color image of fire in space. The bright yellow traces the path of a drop of fuel, shrinking as it burns, producing green soot.photo: Paul Ferkul / NASA

When an artist creates a sketch of a work she intends to implement more fully in another medium, the sketch does much more than function as external memory to remind the artist what she intended. Rather, the sketch enters actively into the cognitive process of artistic creation.

As the artist works the sketch, erasing lines, drawing arrows, rearranging objects and so forth, the external object becomes part of her external mind, not just recording her thoughts, but transforming…

(Joseph Tabbi, Cognitive Fictions, p125)

In Space, Flames Behave in Ways Nobody Thought Possible:
Combustion experiments conducted in zero gravity yield surprising results
Ker Than, Smithsonian magazine, December 2012

Inside-OutsideVia the –membrane-, the cell controls exchange between interior/exterior to its own advantage in order to maintain a high level of internal organization, but in so doing it also requires reciprocation of the exterior – the two coevolve. (p155)
-Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos, 1997, Oxford
http://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2012/10/inside-out-side.html

Ray Bradbury on the Secret of Life

"How did you predict all this stuff, Ray, how did you predict all these technologies?"

Ray Bradbury

"The secret of life, is being in love
And by being in love, you predict yourself
Whatever you want is whatever you get.
You don't predict things, you make them.
You've gotta be a Zen Buddhist like me.
-audience giggles-
Don't think about things, just do them.
Don't predict them, just make them.

SoundCloud (listen)
http://soundcloud.com/brainpicker/ray-bradbury-on-predictions
Full Audio
http://www.theqandapodcast.com/2012/06/ray-bradbury-q.html
Mass Transference Device
http://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2012/03/mass-transference-device.html

A Reason for Irony

A response to The Stone article: How to Live Without Irony

credit: Leif Parsons

IRONY: “It pre-emptively acknowledges its own failure to accomplish anything meaningful. No attack can be set against it, as it has already conquered itself [do I even need to cite Anonymous here]. The ironic frame functions as a shield against criticism […] to dodge responsibility…to secretly flee…”

-OR, are we just unconsciously recognizing, finally, the fallacy of causality?

Irony is a defense, “a shield against criticism” but it also a weapon, or rather, a tool. It is what we use to sift through the bullshit. It is what we use to shift the power structures.

Value? From whence, for whom? In the old clothesline paradox, as value recedes, retreats, packs it bags and gets on a plane to Iceland, we use irony to make sure it doesn’t come back home. Back home to the banks and the corporations.

Irony is a shield, not just for us the users, but for the value itself, the lambswool that hides the wolf, but, in this case, not to penetrate and attack, instead to escape, like Iranian-crisis hostages.

It is not us who are hiding. We are hiding something, a game of hot-potato, or hide-and-seek, or just keep-away, just long enough for Big Everything and Big Everyone to lose track, or lose interest.

MEANING: “Moving away from the ironic involves saying what you mean, meaning what you say and considering seriousness and forthrightness as expressive possibilities, despite the inherent risks.” Sounds as if being absurd were a cop-out, yet the author says just prior, that being a hipster entails processing “several stages of self-scrutiny”.

In a world where it is almost possible to predict the future, (Barabasi’s Bursts, Sandy and the success of meteorological prediction, election forecasting, speculative futures, financial engineering, predictive analysis, etc…), how else can you avoid being a foregone conclusion unless you completely make no sense.

Absurdity is the antidote to the probabilistic world. Interestingly, Hipsters ^here are referred to as Harlequins; John Twelve Hawks, in his 2005 future-fiction, also writes of  Harlequins’ using random number generators to help them make decisions randomly, thus subverting the Vast Machine (or as PKD called it, the Vast Active Living Information System).

If Big Data has given us anything thus far, it is “The Search for Meaning”, and if culture has offered any comfort, any insulation, as is its purpose, it is giving us new ways of meaning, new ways of being.

How do you make meaning out of absurdity? That, of course, is the new frontier. Artists, in all regards, are  always one step ahead; Hipsters, with their slieght-of-hand tautologies, giving us a glimpse of the future, ghettouflaged in junk data – an encrypted program for a ‘way of living’: a generation not-yet has the cipher.

partially unrelated image

MODUS OPERANDI:

As my own page for a few years now has read in its subtitle: ‘Clarification, Contradiction, and Confusion’, I somehow seemed to have fallen victim to this pre-emptive defense. Or have I?

I gave feliz navidad christmas cards to my family for years (we don’t speak Spanish). It is not because I fear dislike, however, it is because I’ve tried to give away all my fucks, like an anti-Scrooge McDuck.

If I do not speak in the language of the world around me, how can I live? And yet, as such, I write, for cultural critics of the future to point out with effortless accuracy, the Greta Garbo Lips of my portraits.

BONUS:

ART THOUGHTZ: To Catch A Millennial (Live at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago 9-07-11)
Hennessy Youngman

NOTES:

How to Live Without Irony

CHRISTY WAMPOLE, THE STONE November 17, 2012

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/how-to-live-without-irony/

Bursts: Can Human Behavior Be Predicted And Controlled?

Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, 2010

http://barabasi.com/bursts/

“Sandy shows storm-prediction progress”, Business of Federal Technology

Frank Konkel, The, Nov 05, 2012

http://fcw.com/articles/2012/11/05/sandy-hurricane-center.aspx

[Argo, the 2012 film]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argo_(2012_film)

“Hidden Economies and the Shifting of Value”
http://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2012/10/hidden-economies-and-shifting-of-value.html

Stevens Institute, “Financial Engineering”

http://www.stevens.edu/sse/academics/graduate/financial-engineering

The Traveler, John Twelve Hawks, 2005

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Traveler_(novel)

VALIS, Philip K. Dick, 1981

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VALIS

Greta Garbo Lips and the Van Meegeren effect, in:

The Forger’s Art, Denis Dutton, ed., 1983

http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Forger_s_Art.html?id=wV_CHAAACAAJ

POST SCRIPT:

U.S. Cities Relying on Precog Software to Predict Murder
KIM ZETTER 01.10.13
The software parses about two dozen variables, including criminal record and geographic location. The type of crime and the age at which it was committed, however, turned out to be two of the most predictive variables.
“People assume that if someone murdered then they will murder in the future,” Berk told the news outlet. “But what really matters is what that person did as a young individual. If they committed armed robbery at age 14 that’s a good predictor. If they committed the same crime at age 30, that doesn’t predict very much.”
-Richard Berk, criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania who developed the algorithm
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/01/precog-software-predicts-crime/

Einstein Writing to Solvene

“Unless one sins against logic, one generally gets nowhere;…"

Also,

“One cannot build a house or construct a bridge without using a scaffold which is really not one of its basic parts.”

Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos, 1997, Oxford

Dystopian Vision

In an ironic attempt to protect our cultural artifacts, we will accelerate the globalization of culture by cutting-off future creators from the cultural legacy that has been protected, i.e. copyrighted, heretofore.

Perhaps the only way to maintain our distinct cultural identity in the face of globalization is to copyright the cultures themselves. And then you might ask: Which is the more dystopian?