Singularitar-WHAT?

After my lastest bout of paper-writing / cold-fighting / food-poisoning hijinks (a vegetarian salad? C'mon, I can accept getting turned inside-out by a salad, but a vegetarian salad?), apparently my resistence has been lowered to the point where I can now be infected by the Singularity meme.

In the fog of a mind overcome with something looking like scattered poetry magnets dancing just outside the Van Allen belts... or in the ionosphere with the aurora... or something... I did about the most dangerous thing I could ever do under the circumstances: go browsing at the bookstore.

How I ended up with Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near is a little beyond me; I wasn't particularly looking for a transhumanist manifesto. Never mind that the very first instructor I faced when I knuckled down and went back to school was Max More.

Sorry, but I just have to digress. I spent two years and change at Ambassador College in east Texas, and based on my experience there (which I would later discover was not all that representative of university-level study) I pretty much gave up on the idea of higher education. So I'm reflecting on how I left off with a very fundamentalist, authoritarian system and picked up again with a junior college class in Philosophy of Religion conducted by a libertarian transhumanist... Well, it makes me chuckle, anyway. I can chuckle because I've recovered from the resulting whiplash.

So, anyway, I'm back home, wiping the sleep from my eyes after a well-deserved noon rising, checking the UCLA website for my grades and looking at this tome I've picked up from the pound. Somehow, the fact that it is a BIG BOOK and that I normally shudder at the idea of reading BIG BOOKS doesn't cross my mind as I start thumbing through. It doesn't take long to get hooked. On several occasions, my husband is prying the book from my leaden sleepy fingers.

It's so... sudden. It's so... eschatalogical. And it's so... neat-o.

I want to be a cyborg.

That having been said, I remind myself as the diligent grad student in literature that any work offering a "straightforward" explanation usually is ignoring or eliding something. So I turn back to my friendly copy of Kate Hayles's How We Became Posthuman - a book that I admit I had trouble getting into at first - and I discover precisely what the trouble is. Namely, have we settled on this issue of embodiment? Granted, this work by Hayles predates TSIN by six years - enough time for significant fin-de-siecle technological changes - and Kurzweil does make a special point of acknowledging issues of embodiment... but does he fully satisfy the criticisms levied in HWBP?

I'm not so sure. But for me, this is thinking directly into the blog, and I require some time to explore this further.

But here are some questions I think of: if the point of converting to non-biological (super)intelligence is meant somehow to optimize the human experience, what does this mean to someone who is culturally Deaf, and who risks not only her deafness but her language in a potentially post-linguistic communication system? What does it mean to a model of "neurodiversity" that looks at differing ways of brain engagement not as pathological deviations from a norm (Miz AD/HD has got to ask this), but as multiforms? Is equating "open free market" with "evolution" a natural induction, or is it naturalized?

Did anyone working on this book stop to read Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto"? Cuz, you know, I personally am getting mixed signals here. There are two voices in the room talking simultaneously, each seemingly oblivious to the other, except for the strident increases in volume coming from both.

I bet the answer is somewhere in the middle. And as the middling person I am, maybe I'll find something. Well, between my assignments. Somewhere between Barnaby Rudge and Angels in America and OMG am I going to have to deal with that pompous ass Wordsworth again??? (Well, with that outburst, chalk one up for materiality.)

And I also bet that superintelligence won't be enough to resolve certain paradoxes of the networked demopublican society, regardless of how many "let's hopes" we plug into this otherwise utopian vision.

Hope everyone is enjoying their holidays. Or break. Or downtime. Please don't feel sorry for me: know that I undertake disturbing intellectual journeys during breaks on purpose, to keep the Boredom that Surpasses All Understanding at bay in the absence of assignments and deadlines. That's what I do.

This is My Brain on Deadline

I'm in the zone... I'm just not sure which zone I'm in.

Now You See Me, Now You Don't

The late morning ritual of rolling over and turning on the news radio is supposed to be mundane. It's supposed to be my one opportunity to lie in a state of relative quiescence and listen to snarled traffic, box scores and stock market averages while I pull together something resembling consciousness.

I'm not supposed to be disturbed by direct threats to my identity.

So I get to wake up in a bad mood and march over to my computer to check for that e-mail from acting Chancellor Abrams (yep, it's there) and go to the official UCLA "We Got Hacked and This Really Sucks" site. Look up some suggestions for additional action. Call a credit reporting agency and put (yet more in a long line of) fraud alerts on my reports.

KFWB offered up a sound bite from a "professor who seems blasé" about the whole thing. Darn, wouldn't you know, it's a voice I recognize, and a voice I have quietly disagreed with so many times before. Regardless of this person's opinion, unless you're a completely naïve mouth-breather who gives out personal information like candy, not every bit of information is equally accessible to everyone. Even someone like me, whose name and picture appear to reveal so much here, takes serious precautions. After all, I know what it's like to experience ID theft. I escaped serious harm, but I'm disappointed now that I listened to my bank's advice way back in the day and said nothing to the police. But I digress.

Here's the way I see it. If UCLA can be hacked, pretty much anyone else I do business can too. Assurances about encryption and login screens that attend to potential sound-recording hacks won't be enough anymore. (Not that they ever were enough, but this is front-and-center now.)

Now, I'm not going to tell you what I specifically intend to do next, but if you're in the same boat as I, I recommend that you go to the UCLA ID theft site and click on the "Protecting Your Credit" link. Take the most protective measure you can live with, not the least. Because the way I see it, anybody who is willing to hack something like the UCLA database (I show generosity to UCLA's security protocols here) must not only have smarts and speed, but also patience.

Someone with patience is willing to wait six months for a fraud alert to fall off a credit report if the money to be made is still good.

Excuse me; before I get back to writing on my papers, I'll need to grab a crash helmet to pull over my aluminum-foil cap.

The Sound of Two Stumps Clapping

Once I traveled with a retinue of journals and diaries, dedicated companions retaining the inscriptions of years of observations, some through coke-bottle filters of theory and emo, others with a fearsome clarity. Now these documents, once the bedrock on which the rest of my work rests, are gone, and I have no one to blame but myself for this crime. Worse yet, part of me has gone missing in the process.

It all started with the decision that I no longer needed these old archives; they did not define my experience, and my living space is chronically undersized, so I opted for the space. Space in which to work, to stretch, to breathe: this was my desire, and these old journals were part of the obstacle. So I chose to have them destroyed.

This was a part of the reorganizational project of this past summer, a way to clear the path for my new life as the Graduate Student - or so I had told myself. I started with Artist's-Way styled "morning pages" written in the mid-1990's, through the journals I had kept through my undergraduate studies at Pasadena and UCLA, even the archives of a blog I had published under another name not so long ago. What I could not erase with the stroke of a key, I loosed from ring binders, slashed from spines, freed from the embraces of manila envelopes and red-rope file pockets. I delivered these sturdier records into boxes and, in turn, to a shredding company, dispatching them with the ritual tapping of dust from my hands and my sandals, and a song in my heart.

It seemed the best thing at the time, an enactment of a psychic "leave no trace" traveling philosophy that I thought the erstwhile undergrad needed to break camp. All this while secretly recognizing its irrelevance for a base camp set up for so many returns, staring at the deep blue nothing beyond the nodding shreds of prayer flags.

So there's no denying the hostility. If I had local laws on my side, I would have taken a match to the whole damn pile. For within this collection was no end of insults and embarassments, burrs of rage and pathos, needles of guilt, resiny secrets that surely would ooze through their rough skins and onto the latex gloves of some disinterested archaeologist. Some collector and cataloguer of my moment's remnants, carefully dusting off, labeling, preparing these artifacts for the historical gaze, uncaring of the pathogenic effect on the tendrils growing in my soil and curling into neighboring trellises.

A commercial shredder certainly seems ecologically friendlier. What the AQMD doesn't know is that it can't write a rule to close this loophole on P.J.'s scorched-earth solution, fueled by shame, low relative humidity and a certain fallacy of periodicity (the periodical fallacy?); offering, perhaps, a sweet savour unto the LORD, but from here, reeking of all the charm of the exhaust from an engine down one cylinder. Even more damning is odorless carbon monoxide within. Moreover, among evolution's cruel jokes is the idiocy of the hemoglobin that prefers the CO to oxygen. Does god have a nose for CO, and if it does, how must it smell, as these smoke signals rise and evaporate, late signifiers of a pile of ashes itself swirling into fresh breezes?

The remains of the heart within this heap might suggest to the credulous yet more evidence of spontaneous human combustion. Heart is there, yes, it was on every last page, but I still feel a pulse in my chest. My head is splitting and I want to puke. Yet the pulse remains.

What I appear to have lost in the blaze, though, are my hands.

Hands which held pen and pad, drawing the words that looped and meandered the width of the page and the length of my thoughts. Or which rested at a keyboard, at frenzied moments beating a tattoo of tiny keys tinged with a bassoon's deep, reedy tone, serenading to a screen challenging my wits with its blank stare; conquering it with a flurry of notations within staves of darkness in a neat one-inch-wide frame; polishing the results, trimming the goofs and dead spots, reducing the noise, adding an occasional effect for shits and giggles.

Among all these mixed metaphors rests the fact of my hands - tools with a prior survival function, just like my lungs, my larynx, my teeth - another embodiment of my language, my best survival mechanism. I could tell stories of the too-small palms betraying the otherwise too-long fingers; the callus built up over decades around the ever-present pen; the scar defining a fingertip and its bone underneath reminding me of its presence as it presses into the fretboard of my guitar.

I could tell these stories - if I had my hands. The hands which I must have lopped off in my slash-and-burn project. Hands which I too late discover adhere to the words of my hands, the pages, the keyboard, the ink, the graphite, reflections of light in thousands of colors, the million gems too little valued and too easily lost, leaving blanks, blanks. Without my hands, so little remediates between my brain and the smooth surfaces of pages and disks. My voice fails.

If I had my hands, instead of whispering from the bottom of a well, my voice would wend into the script and emerge to fearlessly fill its own space, trusting in the handiwork of the tapestry suspended below. No thread? I'd weave with cardboard strips. No paper? I'd sign what I can't write, knitting the atmosphere, directing my words to those who won't be bothered with odd sounds.

If I had my hands, right now I would be lost in the music of compositions anticipated by eager audiences who won't exchange their tickets for a later performance.

I certainly would not be mourning their absence on a blog. I would not be reduced to confessing this sin to the priesthood of the bored and distracted, waiting in vain for the penance which, however insufficient to the deed, will cost more than my life.


Still... I know my own penchant for disorder, and no organizational project goes unfinished under my supervision. Perhaps I should spend time among the odd piles saved from the shredder and search. On an outside chance, I may have outsmarted myself and hid my hands from myself in the consuming fury that destroyed the witnesses whose testimony I now crave.

No host of witnesses can define a person, but they add to the chorus - the cacaphony - of me. They make the physical and psychological field of me that persists, demands, expresses, and I realize now that I have always needed their voices, however ancient, however awkward, to produce the voice that speaks now, that answers and interrogates anew.

If I ever find my hands again, I will be lucky to survive with the curse of the remaining silence, the close reminder of the void into which that expression of me is permanently lost.

At my own hands.

Immersed in a Sort of Silence

Sure, I’d been told that graduate study would take me places I never imagined I’d go, but I had no idea that this would be happening in my first quarter.

In Nagy’s Oral Tradition course, we’ve been exploring the relationships between oral traditions (and by extension folklore) and literatures in print. Never content to pursue a conventional line, I tried to imagine "orality" from a New Media standpoint – and realized that the one literature I hadn’t seen enough of, and that could easily take advantage of New Media, would be sign language literature. Deaf literature. Deaf with a capital D, for the distinct cultural group that defines itself not by a loss of hearing, but by adopting sign language as its primary idiom. Here, "orality" is often associated with the pressures brought upon Deaf people to conform to the demands of hearing people, often through forced reliance on speechreading to the exclusion of sign. (Hence "orality" in quotes.)

Precisely because of the progress of the World Wide Web and broadband access, sign communication, both synchronous and archived, ought to easily move to this stage. So a generic web search for "Deaf folklore" ought to be fruitful, hm?

Not necessarily. I found a few assorted articles explaining Deaf culture (again). On YouTube - ostensibly the one place I should see lots of ASL vlogging - I found only one video that would definitely count as a performance of Deaf folklore, the majority otherwise appearing to be vlogs of newbie signers showing off their new vocabulary. (I remember those days. What a snot-nosed audist I was.)

This was a wake-up call. If the Web seems such an appropriate medium for sign language performance, as well as for collection and analysis of Deaf folklore, why isn’t it there? I brought this idea to Nagy, carefully arguing the case for Deaf culture and hence folklore, and he OK’d it with a few suggestions for sources. Great!, I thought to myself. If these sources pan out, they might lead me to the golden Deafie web site carefully hidden from the all-seeing eye of Google-bot; at the very least, they could help explain why I wasn’t finding anything.

One, two, six books later, I still got nothing. But sometimes, footnotes are a grad student’s best friend. Footnotes shoot like tendrils back toward their original referents, and each cord leads to a book, an article, a database, a person. I used these to slowly build a list of follow-up sources.

And then I remembered CSUN.

Cal State Northridge is home of the National Center on Deafness (NCOD), a place of legend that I had developed a deep anxiety about visiting. But they had sources that I could find nowhere else and could not get via Inter-Library Loan in time. I had a car, I had gas in the tank, and I had a day off to visit. Hence, I had no excuse.

The Resource Center at NCOD – their library, basically – is quiet, like you would expect any library to be, but not really in the same way. From my observations, I think I was the only hearing person to visit that day. The silence I experienced was not a complete absence of sound – with Deaf people, there's the occasional vocalization, or the slap of an emphatic sign – but what struck me was that this silence was, how do I say it?, completely comfortable with itself. I could not sense any need on anyone’s part to "fill" this silence with sound; it was a fulfilled silence. And however rusty my own signing was (not practicing for ten or so years can do that), not once did I feel the desire to tear into this singular comfort with spoken words. (If only my computer had been as cooperative.)

The two librarians who covered the desk that day were great; in spite of my lack of any grammatical sense of ASL, and a deepening fear that my fingers were turning into bratwursts, they lead me in a beeline to the folklore-related items. And, after hours of watching Deaf videos and taking notes from Rutherford’s seminal work on Deaf folklore, they finally led me to the answer I needed (even if it wasn’t what I wanted): Deaf folklore is not big on the Internet because there isn’t as yet a critical mass of folkloristic research in print.

I had found an answer to the question, but a good scholar finds the question to the answer; that new question what I’m working on next. Knowing what I know of Deaf culture, the Internet, and cyberculture, I think I can look at the data anew and reconsider - in a contemplative quiet that, with a little effort, just might approximate the peace of that library. The work deserves no less.

Open-letter Advice for a Fellow AD/HD'er

A fellow grad student who, recently diagnosed, is now fighting the good fight against Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (AD/HD), sent me an e-mail asking me for tips on how to stay on-task. As messy as my response is, I liked it so much I figured, hey, why not post it here?


Sorry it has taken so long to get back to you. Let me see if there's anything I can pass along to you that may work...

Of course, the problem with AD/HD is not just the distractibility, but the alternation with hyperfocus. While the methylphenidate (Ritalin) has helped me stay more on top of my general attention, I've employed strategies over the years to help keep me on task that have met with some greater or lesser degree of success.

1) One bite at a time. This is the response to the question "How do you eat an elephant?" Instead of being overwhelmed by a project (which is easy to do when you can see the whole thing in all its ginormous complexity and depth), break it up into doable tasks. If still overwhelmed, break up the tasks into smaller tasks. Make a game of it (Always make a game of it, life is serious enough).

2) Delayed gratification. I make deals with myself to do a task with sight of a small reward at the end (not before starting, not with a little bit to go). This goes hand-in-hand with breaking down big things into small tasks. You can take a lot of pressure off yourself by self-negotiating a reward after completing a small task than by waiting until that "big moment" when "everything" is "done" (and I put these all in quotes because none of these concepts really exist).

3) The egg timer. This can be any countdown timer. I have a Timex countdown timer I use all the time when I do laundry so I don't forget it.

I use a tea bag timer widget that I got off of Yahoo! Widgets (widgets.yahoo.com) that I can keep on my computer desktop and set to whatever time I need and count down. I use this for when I have a task that I know I don't want to do precisely because I'll get carried away with it (like shredding my mail). Start the timer, do it, and stop when the timer goes off. This is best for tasks that you can walk away from and come back to, but will pile up unattended.

4) Choosing battles in the war of attrition. Part of that overwhelmed feeling comes from simply taking on too much. The world is just so full of possibility, isn't it? But not only do we assume we can do so much more in the same amount of time (that now/not-now binary that seems to be an AD/HD hallmark), but because of the AD/HD we can actually take longer than the average person to get things done well. So sometimes you will need to be brutally honest about what you can or can't do on a certain moment, day, quarter, year.

Of course, this requires knowing your priorities, and you can't know those until you know what exactly what you want to do. So go ahead, make a silly collage, post a dozen lists on your wall, do whatever you need to do to create a visually accessible reminder of what you're doing. This will in turn help you make decisions.

Yes, it is all right to use stickers. It is all right to change your mind one month later and go to highlighters.


These of course are very general (and not exhaustive) guidelines, and you'll have to adapt them as the need arises, sometimes on a moment-by-moment basis. Just don't get rigid and inflexible, don't take stuff too seriously, and whatever mistakes you make (and you will make them, because I make them constantly), remind yourself there is always a way to compensate, or correct, or walk away. There is no unfixable mistake. (For the most part. In my optimism I don't expect you to commit manslaughter anytime soon.)


I sure hope she can use the info. It would make one of us. It's not as though I really benefit from my own advice, hehe.

For those who like a little racing mixed in with their commercials

Last week, RacingOne columnist Shawn Akers observed something both intriguing and disturbing about the selection of new drivers for the Nextel Cup series. Is NASCAR truly "going Hollywood," making driving skill a secondary criterion to eye-candy factor?

Granted, I speak as the NASCAR newbie (only having started watching in earnest last year) but since racing runs in my blood (as I look at the portrait of my late mother in her youth, proudly sporting that helmet with the "76" on it), I think I'm qualified to have an opinion. I have an opinion anyway, regardless. I have a blog. Duh.

This is largely in response to the advertising assault on NBC during the Busch race at Martinsville yesterday which I barely survived. Nothing is worse than sitting in 110+ degree heat (I'm exaggerating, we kept it to around 90 in the apartment) and having to watch yet another ditzy driver wreck her SUV while mooning over Kasey Kahne.

What's even worse is how badly these commercials get in the way of watching the race. Martinsville, with its tight paper-clip shape, is notorious for doing lots of small damage to several cars and fraying the nerves of drivers who must concentrate on short straightaways followed by switchbacks in traffic. It's part of the charm of the short courses on the circuit - along with Bristol and Darlington - that, however much it challenges the drivers, is a thrill to watch.

Except when either NBC or FOX is covering the race. And NBC is worse because their commentary is duller. This is the programming scenario that plays out at a place like Martinsville: during a green-flag stretch, the network goes to commercial. Some eight or 10 ads march by, and when coverage returns, hey, what do you know? A caution is out. This gives us just enough time to replay the incident that raised the yellow flag, and, well, since the field is frozen anyway, why not go to another commercial break?

And if we in the audience are really good, we just might get to see the green-flag restart.

This is no digression; this has everything to do with Shawn's commentary. After all, it's the drivers themselves appearing in most of these commercials. Which begs the question: Is driver mediagenics ultimately good for NASCAR? However heavily dependent on sponsors the sport is, what does it mean when I see more of the drivers hawking their sponsors' wares on TV ads than I see of them running on the racetrack? Ostensibly, this is why I would tune into the race, hm?

On the other hand, don't we love it when we see our drivers in the commercials? Case in point: at the Beer Hunter in Rancho Cucamunga in February, I celebrated my birthday with the Daytona 500 amidst a crowd being introduced to the new season of NASCAR-inspired ads. Forget the Super Bowl - these ads are way better. From the little kid going airborne when Dale Jarrett drives by in a UPS truck, to the series of home improvements Tony Stewart convinces Zippy contributed to his Nextel Cup win the prior year, the ads are clever, funny, and effective. And the crowd loved them.

But what results is this wicked catch-22 where providing exposure to the drivers through TV commercials comes at the expense of showing them actually doing what they're good at - racing.

Makes you wonder what the suits at the networks think that people tune into NASCAR for, doesn't it? Or do they care, as long as they get their ad revenues?

Of course, you could fork out a few extra bucks and get the premium access through NEXTEL/AO-hell, travel to a few races live, but this, not surprisingly, creates a multi-class system of NASCAR haves and have-nots. This in what is a traditionally "working-class" sport. Wet your finger, raise it to the air, and feel for that gust of irony.

This is just something to consider while, in one breath, bitching about another onslaught of commericals, and in the next, laughing out loud at the Jeremy Mayfield piñata.

Welcome!

I take enormous chances in establishing a blogging persona that strongly resembles my "real" self, I know, but the potential confusion between persona and person has its benefits:

1) It will force me to think about what I'm posting before I hit that "publish" button.
2) It will force me to think about what I'm posting before I hit that "publish" button.

Can you see where this is going?

Frankly, I have had enough of half-baked and half-cocked rants. I've had enough of tiresome emo bellyaching and flame trolling. It seems time to make a safe haven for the best I have to offer a blogging audience, however small, and it seems that the best way to do it is by hiding in plain view.

I have no idea how this will ultimately be organized, if at all. But you're welcome to join me for the ride. I promise you that, if nothing else, it will be interesting.