11+11=110

From: Bill Barowy (wbarowy@lesley.edu)
Date: Mon Jun 19 2000 - 09:02:55 PDT


Recognizing that the symbol system used in the subject line is a representation created with binary logic, it makes perfect sense.

Binary works for many things computational, but unlike what many technological advocates would have us believe, it would not appear to completely dominate our future -- one may witness the resurgence of Moog synthesizers with techno fans, vacuum tube amplifiers etc. with the explanation by the new musicians that digital and solid state components just cannot produce the quality of sounds that the old ones can. What I find interesting is that our young musicians are also drawn to the analog instruments because they sound different each time they use them -- being very sensitive to environmental changes, and how recently they have been used -- something the musicians of 'my generation' found exasperating. The two different generations experience the performance of similar (and sometimes identical) equipment and come up with two completely opposing value judgements. The old guard wanted to reproduce the same sounds from one performance to the next (witness 'The Who' using taped synthesizer tracks during their live performances) while the new guard wishes to create anew with each performance.

Chacun voit midi à sa porte.

I don't draw analogies just for the kicks, but sometimes I do post to xmca just to clear my thoughts. The uptake has often been surprising and rewarding.

I can't deny the trend towards globalization. My mouse is made in Malaysia, the keyboard assembled in Thailand, and my monitor is assembled in Korea. The 25 year-old frame of my bicycle was made in Japan according to US specifications and with US steel. But globalization is not just now arriving as many digital advocates claim, but its partial emergence going much further back, past the first world war, not only beginning with technological advances in transportation systems that put things made or grown on one side of the earth for purchase on the other side, but going even deeper to our shared global renewable resources of the oceans and the atmosphere, and those that are unrenewable, in some instances putting humans in a global economic/ecologic zero-sum game or worse.

It seems Jay was indexing many aspects of psychological time, in contrast to clock time.
Clocks, of course, partially being advanced to solve problems of global transportation, allowing the measurement of longtitude that had eluded early explorers. Clocks made possible Einsteins special theory of relativity, with the surprising result that the ordering of events, that in everyday circumstances clocks help to keep sorted, can be 'scrambled', depending upon one's inertial frame of reference. Event A will occur before Event B in one frame of reference, but another frame of reference, moving some significant fraction of the speed of light with respect to the first, and in the right direction, may record B to occur before A.

Clock-time and psychological time are complexly interrelated -- with the *trend* in the relations between events in either dimension being monotonic, but we all know that clock time is perceived to pass slowly in the dentist's office, is riddled with gaps due to illness, injury, and deep sleep, etc. And so the relationship is not strictly monotonic when looking at events in close proximity. All this has been considered.

Jay's posting of timescales seem in some ways to be very similar to the notion of timescales often used in atmospheric chemistry and more generally the earths geological history. What I interpret to be important relating to 'timescales' is having to do with the ordering of events -- psychological events, in particular. There is no deyning a material basis for this -- one aspect being that there are correlations between psychological orderings of events and those as measured by clocks. "Longer timescales" reflect the long-range correlation of one event with another ( In clock time, I can attend a Shakespeare play and be moved and inspired centuries after it was written. In *event space*, I can read the play and be moved and inspired with an unknown number of events linking the creation of the play to my reading it -- there being arguably many more events passing in between these two events, than between Judy's posting last night and my posting this morning.) Psychological causality is not only complex (many to one) and anticipatory (proleptic) but also displays this long-range order (in event space and clock-time) -- partially due to the materiality of psychological processes, i.e. Shakespeare's text is still available today.

Some good examples of event space are Eva's link maps that are not sorted according to clock time -- a strict adherence would have large gaps due to silences on the mailing list, but are sorted in event space according to when the messages hit the server (instances of the category "event"). The complexity of the psychological causality appears partially in the often occuring many-to-many links that may be drawn between events. The complexity also appears partially in the link to events outside of the list, not captured in Eva's link maps, such as Paul's and Andy's accurate references to Marx --- xmca is an open system, that while may be materially bounded by the surface of the earth, is ever growing in event space, forwards and backwards. (The claim for the effective physical boundary ignores such things as Internet telecomunications satellites and their signals that leak into the rest of the universe.)
Eva's link maps, BTW, are also interesting traces of interweaving semiotic function circle interactions.

But the French are wrong about the local time of day. By the clock it is 6 hours earlier in Stockholm, and 3 hours later in San Diego and so on, with the clock, and the correlation of human activity to it, materially contributing to the patterns of posting on xmca. Clock-time also influences how much effort each individual may expend in creating messages, i.e. metering how much psychological time may be invested in writing with, what Eva and I have discovered is, the surprising result that collectively -- among all postings to xmca -- this effort (taken as a material measurement of psychological time by simply counting messages) is fractal in its distibution across clock-time. Effort is also fractal in its distribution across people who post.

Event space is simply a way of ordering events -- this can be done on an individual or collective level. As Eva has created link maps they are (as I can remember) ordered according to the time messages arrive (or are sent out) from the server -- a collective/decentered ordering. That differs from my personal ordering of events, as I am ignoring whatever incoming mail could be arriving while writing this message. For me, personally, the happening of writing this message is prolonged over a region of clock time, that may be spanned by the arrival of several messages, posted to xmca in the interim between my last checking of email and the completion of writing this one. Although my message will be posted after those other messages, hence occur for other people's event spaces after those messages arriving now, in my event space this message occurs before those others.

Gotta run, out of time.

bb
 



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