Harold Pinter
"And so I say to you, tender the dead as you would yourself be tendered, now, in what you would describe as your life."
Alter Egos - I Am Done Watching This
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Death - Harold Pinter 1930-2008
'Death'.
Where was the dead body found?
Who found the dead body?
Was the dead body dead when found?
How was the dead body found?
Who was the dead body?
Who was the father or daughter or brother
Or uncle or sister or mother or son
Of the dead and abandoned body?
Was the body dead when abandoned?
Was the body abandoned?
By whom had it been abandoned?
Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey?
What made you declare the dead body dead?
Did you declare the dead body dead?
How well did you know the dead body?
How did you know the dead body was dead?
Did you wash the dead body
Did you close both its eyes
Did you bury the body
Did you leave it abandoned
Did you kiss the dead body
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Eartha Kitt - Santa Baby
D. B. had the checks, the convertible - bright blue. He was hurrying down the chimney.
This is the truth - he told his children the sad news of the great one's passing and just as he paused and watched their reaction, his CD player (on random) began to play Santa Baby.
Eartha D.B. is stuck in the chimney forever. Thank you.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Friday, December 19, 2008
God Is In the House - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
We've laid the cables and the wires
We've split the wood and stoked the fires
We've lit our town so there is no
Place for crime to hide
Our little church is painted white
And in the safety of the night
We all go quiet as a mouse
For the word is out
God is in the house
God is in the house
God is in the house
No cause for worry now
God is in the house
Moral sneaks in the White House
Computer geeks in the school house
Drug freaks in the crack house
We don't have that stuff here
We have a tiny little Force
But we need them of course
For the kittens in the trees
And at night we are on our knees
As quiet as a mouse
For God is in the house
God is in the house
God is in the house
And no one's left in doubt
God is in the house
Homos roaming the streets in packs
Queer bashers with tyre-jacks
Lesbian counter-attacks
That stuff is for the big cities
Our town is very pretty
We have a pretty little square
We have a woman for a mayor
Our policy is firm but fair
Now that God is in the house
God is in the house
God is in the house
Any day now
He'll come out
God is in the house
Well-meaning little therapists
Goose-stepping twelve-stepping
Tetotalitarianists
The tipsy, the reeling and the drop down pissed
We got no time for that stuff here
Zero crime and no fear
We've bred all our kittens white
So you can see them in the night
And at night we're on our knees
As quiet as a mouse
Since the word got out
From the North down to the South
For no-one's left in doubt
There's no fear about
If we all hold hands and very quietly shout
Hallelujah
God is in the house
God is in the house
Oh I wish He would come out
God is in the house
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Most Americans
Most Americans have long known that the horrors of Abu Ghraib were not the work of a few low-ranking sociopaths. All but President Bush’s most unquestioning supporters recognized the chain of unprincipled decisions that led to the abuse, torture and death in prisons run by the American military and intelligence services.
Most Americans have long known that the horrors of Abu Ghraib were not the work of a few low-ranking sociopaths. All but President Bush’s most unquestioning supporters recognized the chain of unprincipled decisions that led to the abuse, torture and death in prisons run by the American military and intelligence services.
Most Americans have long known that the horrors of Abu Ghraib were not the work of a few low-ranking sociopaths. All but President Bush’s most unquestioning supporters recognized the chain of unprincipled decisions that led to the abuse, torture and death in prisons run by the American military and intelligence services.
Most Americans have long known that the horrors of Abu Ghraib were not the work of a few low-ranking sociopaths. All but President Bush’s most unquestioning supporters recognized the chain of unprincipled decisions that led to the abuse, torture and death in prisons run by the American military and intelligence services.
Most Americans have long known that the horrors of Abu Ghraib were not the work of a few low-ranking sociopaths. All but President Bush’s most unquestioning supporters recognized the chain of unprincipled decisions that led to the abuse, torture and death in prisons run by the American military and intelligence services.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Cardinal Avery Dulles dies at 90
Cardinal Avery Dulles, who grew up in a famous American family (Dulles Airport is named for his father), converted to Catholicism while at Harvard, and went on to become the most honored Catholic theologian in U.S. history, died today at age 90.
Avery Dulles, the scion of a wealthy and prominent Presbyterian family, arrived at Harvard in 1936 as an agnostic, but found God in the buds of a tree by the banks of the Charles River one rainy February afternoon two years later.
"How could it be . . . that this delicate tree sprang up and developed and that all the enormous complexity of its cellular operations combined together to make it grow erectly and bring forth leaves and blossoms?" he asked himself. And the answer, he later wrote, was "Him who moved the stars, and made the lilacs bloom."
Dulles, a brilliant student passionate about learning, found himself ravenously consuming the new works of French Catholic theologians, and one day he marched into a Catholic bookstore and asked, "How do I get into your church?"
He had never even met a priest, but he decided to become one, figuring, "I guess I wanted to go the whole way."
Today, Dulles, whose great-grandfather, great-uncle, and father (John Foster Dulles) all served as US secretaries of state, and whose grandfather was a distinguished Presbyterian theologian, is now the most prominent Catholic theologian in America.
His accomplishments are many - 21 books, more than 650 articles, and a long career teaching thousands of students, for the last 13 years at Fordham University in New York, where he is still a professor at age 83.
And in February, he became the first American Jesuit and the first American theologian to be named a cardinal.
Last week, Dulles visited Boston to receive an award at a fund-raising dinner for the New England Jesuits. In an interview with the Globe at the Jesuits' humble provincial headquarters in the South End, Dulles talked about his journey to faith and his career since:
Q. What drew you to Catholicism?
A. Perhaps it was the studies of the Reformation period. We had to read Luther and Calvin and the decrees of the Council and Trent and all those sorts of things, and I just found myself resonating with the Catholic positions in all those controversies, and also feeling that the culture of Europe was destroyed or ruptured by the Reformation in a way that was unfortunate. And then I discovered the Catholic Church as it existed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and it was a very vital, vibrant thing. St. Paul's parish there - the liturgy was very well performed, and Sunday evening they were having benediction, they were all singing the hymns of Thomas Aquinas in Latin, and I said, `This is the church for me.'
Q. Your journey to Catholicism strikes me as having been more intellectual than spiritual.
A. I think that's probably true. I hope there was some spiritual aspect to it, but I've never had any great taste for what's called spirituality. I think it deals so much with emotions and feelings. I don't have many emotions or feelings. I tend to have ideas. I was interested in Catholicism ideally, intellectually. I was convinced that it was true. I was interested in truth.
Q. How has your life changed since you've become a cardinal?
A. I get more invitations to lectures and things like that. I try to get out of them when I can, but I'm on the road a good bit. And then some things you have to get dressed up for.
Q. What is the appropriate role of dissent in the church?
A. Dissent should be rare, respectful and reluctant. One's first reaction as a Catholic is to agree with the official teaching of the church.
Q. Can you imagine married priests, or female priests, in the church?
A. Married priests is a much easier question. We have married priests. In the early centuries many of the priests and bishops were married, and Eastern Rite Catholics have a married clergy, and we have a number of converts from Protestantism who are married priests who function as priests and enjoy their family life. So that's possible. The question of women is a doctrinal issue. I think the weight of scripture and tradition is decisively against it. In the early '70s I was not sure the question had been decided, I was kind of open. But after 1976, Paul VI answered the question pretty thoroughly. That pretty much settled my mind on the point.
Q. You have said one of the roles is to critique the culture. What is your critique of American culture?
A. Our technology is so advanced, we sometimes get the feeling that we can reconstruct everything, and we define power, so we have a hard time accepting anything that we cannot change. So we want to reconstruct the church, we want to rewrite all the dogmas of the church. We feel that we can replace everything by our own power, and according to our own preference. Our notion of freedom needs to be critiqued. We don't have a moral freedom to do what is wrong. We're under a higher law.
Then we want instant satisfaction. Part of the American culture is to produce as much as possible and consume as much as possible, so we consume an inordinate amount of the world's resources. Our consumption should be governed by need, and needs to be restrained more than it is. We need to take greater care of the needs of the poor who are left out of the capitalist process.
Dulles had taught at Fordham since 1988, but had been associated with the university for more than half a century; the university's president, the Rev. Joseph M. McShane, today issued the following statement:
"A man of prodigious intellect and great holiness, Cardinal Dulles devoted his entire life to the task of advancing the dialogue between faith and reason. In the process, he enriched both the Church and the Academy with his wisdom and his warmth. Therefore, it is not at all surprising that he was the first American theologian to be named to the College of Cardinals.”
Monday, December 08, 2008
The Raising of Pandemonium
Paradise Lost, Milton, Book I: the raising of Pandemonium:
There stood a Hill not far whose griesly top
Belch'd fire and rowling smoak; the rest entire
Shon with a glossie scurff, undoubted sign
That in his womb was hid metallic Ore,
The work of Sulphur. Thither wing'd with speed
A numerous Brigad hasten'd. As when bands
Of Pioners with Spade and Pickaxe arm'd
Forerun the Royal Camp, to trench a Field,
Or cast a Rampart. Mammon led them on,
Mammon, the least erected Spirit that fell
From heav'n, for ev'n in heav'n his looks & thoughts
Were always downward bent, admiring more
The riches of Heav'ns pavement, trod'n Gold,
Then aught divine or holy else enjoy'd
In vision beatific: by him first
Men also, and by his suggestion taught,
Ransack'd the Center, and with impious hands
Rifl'd the bowels of thir mother Earth
For Treasures better hid. Soon had his crew
Op'nd into the Hill a spacious wound
And dig'd out ribs of Gold. Let none admire
That riches grow in Hell...
Thursday, December 04, 2008
That's Me! That's Me! - A Writing Guide
In 1958 you wrote "Pandemonium". What does pandemonium mean? What was the concept of this?
The concept, "pandemonium" was a word first used by John Milton in a very long English poem called "Paradise Lost". Pandemonium comes from the Greek "pan", meaning all and "demonium", meaning the demons. The idea of pandemonium is that in recognizing something - for example, recognizing a face or a character on a page - we have a little demon for each feature, for each part of the picture. And when the demons see themselves in the picture they shout, That's me! That's me! and then a higher level demon listens to these other demons and decides who shouts the loudest. If you are reading a character, a letter in a word, if the higher level demon hears the "A" demon shout the loudest, then he knows it is an "A". The idea is that we have separate neural nets, say, representing the demons, and what they shout, their output, is the amount of themselves that they see, that they perceive in what they are looking at.
So it's a network of neural networks at the end.
Yes, in the long run neural networks will have to be built up of pieces that are neural networks. But they still have to work together. Then the whole system does not have simple purposes or goals but very complex ones, just like people. In that sense the neural network is very different from the network of computers which we are talking about now because here it is a social thing. In our society not every piece, not every computer wants the same thing. They want to communicate but not because there is a single purpose; they want to communicate because everybody wants to do something different. In the neural network, in the good neural networks, they are all contributing to the same end.
Oliver Selridge: From Cybernetics to Neural Networks
Question 1: What are neural networks?
Answer: A neural network is a model of the way real nerves, real sensors like eyes and ears and brains, work. It tries to imitate so that it will work in the same way and do the same things.
Question 2: E' possibile costruire macchine, computer e altre apparecchiature con le reti neurali?
Answer: It is possible. We believe that our thinking works in a way like that and we want to find out how real brains work, and also to build machines to do some of the same things that our brains, our minds do.
Question 3: But these machines are not programmable. Will they learn by themselves?
Answer: One hopes so. They do learn by themselves, by their own experiences but not as much as people do. They are still very simple. The kinds of tasks that these machines can now do are low-level tasks. As science improves, as the engineers and scientists, the people at SMAU, work them and practice with them they get better, but they are still very far from real people.
Question 4: Can you compare the ability of neural networks with the ability of animals or children?
Answer: It is not an age so much. The neural network in the machine keeps trying, but an intelligent child stops trying after a while and gets bored. Our machines do not get bored yet, which is a sign that they are very elementary indeed. There are tasks which they can do for us. They will keep track of the right way to do a very easy task. But as yet they do not have much sense of purpose of their own beyond what they are given by the people who build them.
Question 5: That is interesting because they have to understand from the environment. How can they understand from the environment?
Answer: That is a very interesting point. It is not that they understand so much, it is that they work with the environment to get something done, to perceive something, to have the right effect. But they do not really understand what the environment is or how it works. So neural networks today do not make a model of the environment in the way that you and I make a model of the environment, instead they merely play with what they can do until it works.
Question 6: And can you compare the goals of cybernetics and the goals of neural networks?
Answer: The goals of neural networks are much more cybernetic than present day computers. Our computers are nearly all programmed, that is, they are told exactly what to do. Neural networks are not told exactly what to do. The study of cybernetics started out with Professor Norbert Wiener at MIT, who was my adviser, studying how gets to a particular place. The word cybernetics comes from the Greek word for the steersman on a boat, who moved the tiller or the rudder to get the boat where he wanted to go. The steersman is performing the goal, the seeking of the goal, the going where he wants to. At a very low level neural networks move their connections and rewire themselves so that the machine will do what it is programmed to want to do. In computers the programs are written so the machine will do what the designer wants them to do. So the machines in computers do not want. Neural networks are beginning to want, to care, to have purpose.
Demons and Pandemonium - The Stuff of Writing
D.B. notes that Oliver Selfridge sadly died in a fall at age 82. Selfridge was a pioneer in early computer science and artificial intelligence. And as D.B. fans know, every writer worth his or her salt needs to understand the complex processes of intelligence. How else to improve the creative processes.
Selfridge himself understood the connection between literature and intelligent processes. Selfridge envisioned the mind as a collection of tiny demons (this idea of the demon came to him after reading Paradise Lost!), each of whom responds to a name -- or something close to it -- being called out by other demons. When one thinks it is being called, it begins to yell out to other demons. The more certain it is that it is being called, the louder it yells, until some other demon thinks it is being called in turn. And so on. Selfridge called this pandemonium.
He used this idea to explain and model the way perceptual systems recognize stuff. For example, the letter R has one vertical line, a "belly" on the upper right, and a "leg" on the lower right. When "feature demons" whose names are "vertical," "belly," and "leg" (and others with names like "one," "upper right," and "lower right") hear their names being called, they begin to to call to the "cognitive demons." The cognitive demons named B and D, for example, may each prick up their ears, since they are "sensitized" to such calls as are given out by the vertical and belly demons. K may be listening, because it is listening for the calls of the vertical and leg demons. But only the R demon recognizes the calls of all three. So while B, D, and K may be calling out to the "decision demon," it will be R who calls the loudest.
As Doctor C. George Boeree says, "This may seem rather silly, but pandemonium provides a very good model for much of what goes on in the mind. The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, for example: You are trying to think of the name of that actress in Moulin Rouge. Her name starts with an N, you are certain. Nancy, Nadene, Norah, Natalie... damn. You could say the N demon is yelling, and several names are responding. Nicole! That's it: Nicole Kidman. "
How about the poets amongst us seeking out a rhyme or a particular work, metaphor even - think of the connections.
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
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