Who me?

So cool to see so many I know named here with their (newer) titles like "Professor" or just the circles of people and the circuit of desire traced by these names. And yet so horrifying to read her following post and feel so inadequate about being on the market.

Bong Hits 4 Jesus

Here.

Flatland Meets Elephant

I remember Carl Sagan's Cosmos series and I still have the book. In it, he used Abbott's thought experiment regarding Flatland, a 2-dimensional world with 2-D inhabitants, and what they would experience in a 3-D universe -- placed in a box, they could not climb out since they were unable to experience "up." This clip follows in the same tradition.

Sublime Americans?

I went to the Farm Toy Show in Verona today. It's a collection of collectors packed with their merchandise into a high school gymnasium and not limited to farm toys. It's really pretty expansive and includes Hot Wheels, baseball cards, beanie babies, Elvis, and sundry Americana. While it was exciting that my son came in second place for his age bracket in the pedal-tractor pull, I guess I never really critically noticed events like this.

First, it's interesting as a form of play and that has its own merits. However, it occurred to me as I stood there that there was something both alarming and wonderful about the spectacle. I head Snyder's words, "America -- your stupidity. I could almost love you again." Everyone had their own collection of things: big metal 1940s trucks, tiny plastic tractors, tables covered with astro turf and sets of mini-houses and dairy barns. It was as communal as it was individual. Folks cared about their neighbors and talked to us not to make one more sale, but to hear our story or connect with us as people instead of customers. Even the hipsters in Madison -- who have perfected the art of converting chit chat into greenbacks -- have the air of superficial interest. In the gym, though, were those seventy year olds who knew the pleasure of getting to know another human being, sharing together a brief moment of a long life.

Second, the resources: we're on the verge of war with Iran, already at war in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and involved in military strategy, skirmishes, support, or occupation in countless other places. Most of this is under the stated goal of "spreading democracy," and it's certainly part of the unstated goal of making the world safe for business. Yet, the plastic, the money, the time people spend looking at *things.* I can imagine their homes: a room or rooms formerly occupied by sons and daughters, the basement loaded with boxes and the table top scenes, living rooms adorned with china hutches and porcelain dolls. This is what people do to occupy their time, to stave off boredom, to connect.

So, the desire here -- the desire to connect, the desire to fight loneliness, the desire to not die alone. The gregarious American -- sublime? pathetic? a menace? Is this even just "American"?
Have we moved away from the frontier American who longed for the open plains, the miles between him and his neighbor, the lover of space? Has the frontiersman taken over the living room and in the name of conquest and commensurability tried to halt the space between him and his family?

ghosts in the machine

This clip over-hypes the Web a bit, but as Rebecca Moore Howard comments, it is "worth a watch." I may use it on Friday in my 201 course.

Animal Thoughts, or The Case of the Sri Lankan Elephant

I was watching Nature last night – an episode about whether or not animals can predict disasters. The 2004 Indian Ocean (and beyond) tsunami was used as a test case scenario to augment historical contemporary anecdotal accounts. It is an interesting question and I think basic prima facia evidence suggests that, like humans, animals respond to their environment yet unlike humans have varying ranges of senses through which to apprehend environmental cues. What distresses me, though, is that as a negative case they present a radio-collared Asian elephant in Yala National Park, Sri Lanka. At 9am, the transponder receives the elephant’s location near the coast. Shortly after 9am, the tsunami hits the coast and at 10am, the elephant’s position has moved but is equidistant, if not closer to the coastline.

Again, this may seem prima facia as evidence that elephants cannot detect infrasonic cues sent out from massive earth movements thousands of miles away. But – and this is the distressing part – it denies that elephant any real computational ability or decision-making capacity. In short, it denies the rhetoric of earth-organism interaction.

Margaret Syverson’s ecological theory of composition uses complexity theory to talk about writing as a system. She differentiates 3 types of systems in the literature she read: simple system such as a pendulum, complicated systems such as a motor engine, and complex systems such as a lake or population of organisms. Complicated systems are static and simply run how they are supposed to unless something monkeywrenches their operations. Complex systems can adapt. Think of blackbirds alighting en masse and how they move as a whole yet avoid a speeding car on the road. Organisms themselves can be seen as complex systems, adapting to different environments and conditions. There is a rhetorical moment in complex systems, even as that moment may be extra-discursive. There is some form of communication beyond stimulus and response. It seems that in the case of the Sri Lankan elephant, we are definitionally given an elephant that is a complicated, but not a complex system.

So, this elephant is a priori unable to think, make decisions, or even contemplate the exquisite grass she is eating and zone out from the plethora of stimuli she receives from her environment. Such scientific reasoning makes an object of animals and denies them any agency. Is this type of thought why we see the number of species in such rapid decline? Or am I being too utilitarian? No doubt Jeremy Bentham and Peter Singer would agree with me. But I don’t think I agree with them. Even those pathogens which infected my child obey some communicative patterns. DNA, when treated as information, is also a complex system and what are viruses but almost raw DNA?

So, this is how I see the process by which we slowly deny agency outside the human, limiting not only language but rhetoric and even thought itself to our own species. Diagram courtesy of http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/cells/virus.html