Summer Days, Summer Nights

The New York Times has seen fit to report on the deep and strange power of the American summer, and poq thinks they have found a thing, hidden somewhere in the langourous courthouse in which the Constitution was written and the lazy eddies of the Mississippi and the croaks of the bullfrogs and the hazy fields of gold barley and wheat in the Midwest and the red barn where the bats come flickering at dusk and the scattered fires in the brown poppy-studded hills of California and that old fairground with the caramel apples and the decaying merry-go-round and the ferris wheel and the sound of the ice cream trucks and out in the suburbs the necrotized grey asphalt parking lots and the box stores and strip malls and the air-conditioned cars all running along the highways of L.A. and the smog in the sky and the children playing with lawn hoses in the yards and selling lemonade out of garages and the bugs floating in their pool out back, and the adolescence and the highschools where the same musical is played again and again in the school gyms and theatres, forever forever in summer days and oh for the summer nights.

Alliteration for the Angry

poq proudly, poetically and pretentiously presents:

Alliteration Attack!

The theme that the thespians thrive on.

Coupons for Croutons

As poq muses on possible new names for the Brunch Bowl (a competition is running until July 4th to rename it, and whom-so-ever does so successfully will get a week of free coupons to eat there – five days of soggy chips!), poq is also musing on the vagaries of English weather.

Wimbledon is (with the exception of last year) generally seen as a sunny place, in which great quantities of strawberries and cream are consumed every year.

Glastonbury is generally seen as a muddy place, in which great quantities of tents and clothing are disposed of every year.

How can this be!?  They are always at the same time!

Guilt for the Greedy

“I want a balloon,” she cried, and what mother could possibly say no?  It was blue, deep as the sea.  They wrapped the string around her hand and it went up above her head like an angel. But the little girl wasn’t content.

“I want a balloon,” she cried, and her mother had not the heart to say no.  It was red, shiny as an apple.  They wrapped the string around her hand and it tangled with the other and went up like a second angel.  But the little girl wasn’t content.  What worked twice…

“I want a balloon,” she cried, and her mother had not the head to say no.  It was green, bright as grass.  It rose up with the others and they came together like rainbow threads in a tapestry, and the little girl was

pulled up into space to meet the Russians without a spacesuit.

Hypoqrisy

Ever since old Joe McCarthy cast his dark shadow over American politics, it has been a favourite game in American politics to single out one’s enemies as unpatriotic.   Attacking an opponent’s patriotism was a signature tactic for Karl Rove, for example, who drove the country to war in 2002 under the shroud of the flag; the Stars and the Stripes were used to silence critics in the House and Senate, and American politics was the worse for it.  The ploy was used again to smear John Kerry, in 2004, and Barack Obama in 2008.

In politics, nothing ever changes.  Michelle Obama has faced an array of recent attacks along these lines, most famously with her quote in Febuary 2008:  “for the first time in my life,” she said, “I am proud of my country.”  Those who wear their country on their sleeve immediately unleashed the attack-dogs and began burrowing in.

Now a new firestorm is brewing over John McCain’s words:  “I never really loved America until I was deprived of her”, and his opponents are preparing to dance the same old weary waltz.

poq does not doubt that these attacks have revealed a hypoqrisy; that much was obvious. But what the critics may have missed in all the mud-slinging is that both John McCain and Michelle Obama are right.  Loyalty to a country cannot come from birth or blood alone:  it must be earned.  America must with each new generation prove again by deeds the values it holds, and it must give all its citizens a stake in its prosperity.  For the black woman educated at Harvard, but marginalized by the colour of her skin, or the soldier abandoned and tortured in a place he never should have been sent to, patriotism is by no means a no-brainer.

Blood was spilled over ‘the land of our fathers’, but no lines on a map deserve unquestioning loyalty.  If our public figures are less American, less patriotic than we wish, well, it only demonstrates all the more the need for change.

Only HillBillaries Are Left Behind

“Wells, he’s a-gettin’ past us.”

“Why, I heard he don’t see the rain no more, he’s his very own limozeen now.  He’s all up with the big folks these days.”

“Gotta give it to him, but he don’t forget where he come from.”

“Sure, Mah, but he done and forgot us.  Forgot his promises and all.”

“He’ll come back, boy.  You’ll wait and see.  Ain’t no man of his sort can win it without us.  He’ll come back with a beggin’ bowl.”

“You better hope, Mah.  Elsewise, when he wins…who knows what he do?  If he don’t need us, who knows what he do?”

- A conversation overheard upon a front porch in Weston, West Virginia, June 2008

The Last Giant

He got big fast.

He got big so fast, that when they took him out of the cellar he was shaped like a box for a week, with his head bent down in prayer and his knees knocked together, but it wasn’t fear of God that shaped him so, it was the imprisonment, and the cruelty of the small-town folks who just wouldn’t let him out.

He remembered stomping and storming and howling in the cellar, all to no avail.  He remembered tearing out the lead pipes from the ceiling (stopping the sound of the showers in the morning) and bending them all to knots at his feet.  He remembered how they would throw food to him – a live rabbit, a brace of rats, or a seagull.  He remembered how he would wait eagerly by the door for that moment when it would creak open for dinner, and he would open his mouth and suck greedily at the fresh air from the pantry.

Most of all, he remembered the deep stain of darkness, so bright that it had burned itself into him and coated him like tar.  He felt wrapped in darkness, and even now, even now in his nightmares he would open his eyes and see nothing at all, nothing, and when he woke he woke with terrible rage in his eyes.

“Mudman,” they called him, “dirt face, Neanderthal.”

His own people had no use for names.  They lived out in the night without fire, and the cedar and the starlight were their roofs, and the pine-loam their beds.  Names were things humans used, to seperate themselves from the earth.  His people were from the dawn-times, when everything had a name held only in silence.

But he had been locked in a cellar for eight years (as far as he could reckon).

When they took him out of the cellar they leashed him with shackles and an iron collar that made the sweetest melody he had ever heard.  They took him down a winding gravel road where only crows sat in the trees to a coal mine and gave him a pick, which he used straight-away to kill the foreman by one blow to the head.  The other miners came running, but he brandished his pick-axe and they scattered like sparrows, and left him alone to freedom at last in the flickering light of the kerosene-lamps.

His people had no use for names, but he’d been locked in a cellar, and a killer now too.  So he made a name for himself from the anger left inside him, for it was the only thing he had left.  He named himself Ishmael, orphan, exile, and out of the mines he rose as an etiolated colossus, with a bloody pick in one hand and a thirst for vengeance in the other.

Yeah, they’d later say, he got big fast, but still – he was so small inside.

From Where, Mind? Part Deux

Charles Babbage was the first one to see that a stream of consciousness could be produced by a confluence of weights and wheels, gears, pulleys and punch-cards.  Joining together mind and matter, he envisaged a Difference Engine powered by (what else?) fore-sight and steam.

Alas, it was the dream of a man too early born.  A century later, and the great revolution of science has made more of what the mind-machine needs:  electricity to feed the pulses of its thought, silicon to carry its weight, and knowledge – we understand deeper now what thought is.  Thought is not mere mathematical calculations of brute logic:  it is fuzzy and unclear, and it travels not by straight lines, but through neural-networks, synapses made into vast and obscure links.

We have not yet made Babbage’s dream a reality, but it is ever coming closer.  An artificial intelligence cannot be far off, and sometimes seems already to have arrived.  Turing showed us how to recognize when we have made it – it is when something has become indistinguishable from ourselves.

Meet A.L.I.C.E.  Surely we cannot be far now.

poq is spin

From Where, Mind?

In many ways, mankind’s story has been a search for meaning (maybe here, maybe here, or maybe not anywhere in here at all).  An appreciation of meaning, or so we are told, is what makes us different from these and these. Even if we can’t find it in the general sense, the fact that we believe there is any at all makes us different from these.

The links above all do the same thing:  they connect the sentences above to symbols from which you can derive meaning.  Seen as they are here, they are just blue underlined words.  Click them, and meaning will come at you in a rush, and the sentence will make more sense.  Symbols can be imbued with different meanings through hyper-links, which are after all only connections between bits of information.  By connecting them, we are making semantic connections. And yet hyper-links are dumb.  They do not tell us how the information is linked; only that it is.

Imagine Web 3.0.  What would it look like?  The first Web connected information.  The second Web connected people.  Perhaps the third will connect meaning? And imagine the mind-machine which would search through all of this information.  Once meanings are part of the Web, it will be searching for meaning.  Just like us.

That, truly, would make it an artificial intelligence.