singularity: hurry up already

For those of you not in the know, ‘Singularity’ is the concept that sometime in the next 20 or so years, extrapolating from current trends, computing capabilities will so greatly exceed the human brain’s capacities that it becomes impossible to predict what happens afterward. [The link is to a very good piece by Vernor Vinge on the subject.] While the term doesn’t have much common currency, the aftereffects of singularity make for common sci-fi fodder: the Terminator and the Matrix are both set in post-singularity worlds. As you might surmise, generally speaking, the speculation is that singularity will probably not be so good for us: humans are either tolerated as pets, or loathed as vermin, by our new digital overlords.

On the other hand, perhaps we’ll all be remade as ideal, godlike beings, stripped of our every imperfection to experience eternal bliss in a digital heaven.

Ugh. I’ll take the vermin loathing, please. And hurry up about it.

Anyway, the somewhat overrated Charles Stross wrote a novel, Accelerando, about the moment of singularity as it happens, and for some reason I read it.

And as I haven't written any haiku in a while, here goes:

Singularity,
When it happens, hopefully
Won’t be this boring.

defectives, dependents, and delinquents

I was looking at the 1930 census [pdf] the other day. No, don’t ask why, it’s not important. But as I was looking at the table of contents, Section 2, titled “Defectives, Dependents, Delinquents,” caught my eye, as well it might.

The sheer, brutal, honesty of the title kind of takes your breath away. Hard to imagine how different a culture it must have been to permit such plain speaking—and in a government document, no less. And right front and center. Enumerating the flawed, halt, and lame was more important in the 1930 census than Climate, Money and Banking, Wages, Telephony…really everything takes a back seat to the number of paupers, the education of deaf mutes, and the number of female forgers in prisons. I don’t get that, exactly, but that’s the way it was.

The data themselves are nothing short of fascinating. The Census Bureau spent 26 charts outlining our great nation’s weak, lame, and insane. In 1928 there were 8,374 patients admitted to state hospitals for mental disease as manic depressives. In 1922 there were 63,807 paupers admitted to almshouses. And as of 1902 there were 320 blind people working as hucksters and peddlers. I’m sure your life is somehow better for this information..

is the new

I always apologize when I use this forum simply to link to cool stuff I've found online. So, I'm sorry. But you have to go check out this graphic from the folks at DIAGRAM, which I discovered thanks to Gothamist. They did a Nexis search or something on all the phrases on the pattern "X is the new Y," and built a sort of diagrammatic depiction of the results.

The color bit is the best part, but I'm quoting the most personally relevant section below. In my little world, gloomy is always the new gloomy.

amorpho-what??

Friday was lovely in New York. A perfect day for blowing off work. Which I would never do normally, except that as it turns out it was also the day that the Brooklyn Botanical Garden's titan arum decided to bloom.

For those of you not in the know, the titan arum comes from the jungles of Sumatra. It is one of the largest, stinkiest flowers in the world, with a smell that's supposed to be almost indescribably rank and terrible. Indeed, it's popularly also known as the "corpse flower," which I of course find intensely cool. And not only that but, well, the critter's scientific name is Amorphophallus titanum, and not without reason. Oddly enough, in a much earlier incarnation of this blog, I kept a list of "disturbing words," [sorry, the links won't work on this page, I'm not republishing the entire 1.0 version of Joe's Gloomy Spot...] and Amorphophallus was on it. So I'm previously acquainted, at least in theory, with the corpse flower.

As if this thing doesn't have enough names already, the BBG named its pet corpse flower "Baby," which kind of evokes small talking pigs, and kind of evokes Audrey 2 at the same time.

And they don't bloom just every day; in fact only very rarely. The last time one bloomed in these parts was around the 1939 World's Fair.

So let's recap:

• Rare event
• Smells like death itself
  
• Kind of gross
  
• Name has "phallus" in it
• And yet kind of cute
  
• Victorian men were loath to let women see one, fearing it made them seem inadequately large and stinky

With all that going for it, how anyone could not blow off work to go see it is simply beyond me.

Sadly as it turns out the stench, while powerful, is not long lived, and by the time I got to the garden on Friday afternoon, the flower was spectacular, but no longer stinky. Still it was a nice reason to get out of work.

thwarting the bacchae

This weekend saw some of the most amazingly beautiful weather I remember in all my time living in New York. So tonight was (I thought) a perfect night to go and see a free performance of Euripides's The Bacchae near the suitably classical Soldiers and Sailors Monument in suitably bucolic Riverside Park.

Alas, 'twas not to be, for reasons I gleaned from a couple of overheard conversations.

Apparently, there's some sort of feral homeless person who lives near there, who looks down on classical Greek tragedies, and who took the liberty of strewing large quantities of his own urine about the setting, rendering it unsuitable for the production. As one of the actresses was saying to a woman, "You couldn't make this sort of thing up." A little later I overheard a couple of other guys in the production, one saying that they'd had trouble with this feral homeless person earlier in the summer, but they talked to the Parks Dept and he stopped peeing all over the place, but, unfortunately, "he was saving bottles of that shit" to use all at once in a grand tragedy-stopping deluge.

Which, by the way, could've saved hapless Greek youths tons of trouble; if only they'd known the way to ward off the Bacchae was simply to spray urine all over the place. The whole play could've ended differently.

Also, digressing for just a moment, who knew there was a Xena collectable trading card game? Anyway, the Bacchae Horde had a card there. The things we learn from Google.

And finally, I know this is why I should never be put in any sort of position of responsibility, but why again can't society simply kill feral homeless people who urinate all over the place, ruining nice folks' evenings of bloody horror?

Below "he" is Pentheus, "she" is Penthus's mom. Just so you know.

Ignoring his cries of pity, she seized his left arm at the wrist; then, planting her foot upon his chest, she pulled, wrenching away the arm at the shoulder--not by her own strength, for the god had put inhuman power in her hands. Ino, meanwhile, on the other side, was scratching off his flesh. Then Autonoe and the whole horde of Bacchae swarmed upon him. Shouts everywhere, he screaming with what little breath was left, they shrieking in triumph. One tore off an arm, another a foot still warm in its shoe. His ribs were clawed clean of flesh and every hand was smeared with blood as they played ball with scraps of Pentheus' body.

-Euripides, Arrowsmith trans., U. Chicago ed., ll. 1124-1136.

the art i almost bought

Last Monday I took a long lunch and went to a gallery show in the West Village featuring prints of one of my favorite contemporary artists, Vija Celmins.

Among the pieces they had were two from her series of spider webs, though not the one pictured here (it was just the easiest image to find online for illustrative purposes). In their quiet, gloomy austerity, is it any wonder that I love these works?

Alas, though, not quite enough to say "I want that," whip out my credit card, and buy on impulse. I did ask about prices. 12 and 15, if you're curious. It's a lot to pay for a spiderweb, to be sure. If they'd been anywhere below 10, I might've done it, though.

A friend of mine expressed some doubts about these particular works. But I believe spending an outrageous sum of money on a spider web might be justified.

Celmins an obsessive observer of nature; it's not a photograph of a spider web, it's a print based on a painting. In addition, I love the obvious contrast between the permanence of a print and the evanescence of a spiderweb, about as close to not there as a thing can get, and still be there (unless you're a fly). And the self-referential aspect of an artist depicting one of the most beautiful objects created by a non-human living thing is kind of delightful. And finally there's the idea that on the one hand here's a spiderweb and all spiderwebs are alike, but on the other hand, this spiderweb is unique in all the world (except for the 64 other prints of it), a one of a kind piece of nature captured out of time.

Celmins's ability to obsessively observe and capture complexity particularly attracts me. I look at her work, the webs or the seascapes or the starscapes, and I think about the patience and the focus and the skill required to make them, and I find myself thinking, "Gods I wish I could do that." Which, although I love art, is a rare feeling for me. I don't look at The Starry Night and wish I could paint like Van Gogh.

So, someday a Celmins, maybe, but somewhat sadly, somewhat with relief, not this week.