The End of The Road

Tasmanian devil by Alexis Rockman

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and Mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

Cormac McCarthy. Final paragraph of The Road.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road ends on a hopeful note. The sweet small boy has been taken in by a family of good people. In the first chapter a series of massive nuclear blasts had destroyed the whole world and, it’s inferred, most animal and plant life and most humans. What is honourable in humankind has survived though and there is a sense of some kind of renewal. But the cryptic final paragraph reveals that the world cannot be remade and can never again be a paradise. I first read the novel when it was newly published and I didn’t give much thought to what the world might have been like in the moments before the blasts. Then Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize, along with environmental scientists from the United Nations, made me reconsider the notion of war. We’re already seeing small wars breaking out over food and water. In the last few days news stories about cloning and genetic manipulations, along with reading Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake, have made me wonder if the natural world, in The Road, had already been destroyed beyond recognition before those fateful nuclear blasts.  

The coffee wars were over the new Happicuppa bean developed by a HelthWyzer subsidiary. Until then the individual coffee beans on each bush had ripened at different times and needed to be hand-picked processed and shipped in small quantities, but the Happicuppa coffee bush was designed so that ll of its beans would ripen simultaneously, and coffee could be grown on huge plantations and harvested with machines. This threw the small growers out of business and reduced both them and their labourers to starvation-level poverty. The resistance movement was global. Riots broke out, crops were burned, Happicuppa cafes were looted, Happicuppa personnel were car-bombed or kidnapped or shot by snipers or beaten to death by mobs; and, on the other side, peasants were massacred by the army.

Margaret Atwood. Oryx and Crake.

 Oryx and Crake is also strangely hopeful in the way that The Road is. Humankind has been destroyed through an act of biological terrorism, but a set of humanoid creatures that had been bred without artistic and religious impulses, begins to create images and develop a sense of the divine as they seek to understand their world. But the natural world had already been perverted and societies torn apart by genetic manipulations of plants and animals before all the humans died.

They had lunch at one of the five-star Rejoov restaurants, on an air-conditioned pseudo balcony overlooking the main Compound organic-botanics greenhouse. Crake had the kanga-lamb, a new Australian splice that combined the placid character and high protein yield of the sheep with the kangaroo’s resistance to disease and the absence of methane-producing ozone-destroying flatulence. Jimmy ordered the raisin stuffed capon – real free-range capon, real sun-dried raisins, Crake assured him. Jimmy was so used to Chickie Nobs by now, to their bland tofu-like consistency and their inoffensive flavour, that the Capon tasted quite wild.

Margaret Atwood. Oryx and Crake.

 At Christmas I read Margaret Mittelbach and David Crewdson’s Carnivorous Nights, their account of a trip made to Tasmania in search of the Tasmanian Tiger and the myths that had grown up around it. They were accompanied by Alexis Rockman, who did the illustrations for the book. At the beginning of the trip they visited scientists at the Australian Museum in Sydney who were working on a project to clone a Tasmanian Tiger from an embryo stored there. It sounded crazy, straight out of Jurassic Park. Crewdson and Mittelbach imagined “…a zoo of now extinct animals: dodos, passenger pigeons, woolly mammoths.”

The Farm by Alexis Rockman

The Next Level of Artificial Intelligence

I’ve been reading Jeff Noon’s novels and as well as being swept up by the stories, I’ve been marvelling at the science and mathematics underpinning the action, as well as the history and culture of the punk rock music era in Manchester.

His new telling of Alice In Wonderland is the one I’ve enjoyed most so far, with oddball animals modelled on Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix, even.

Bethan Roberts interviewed him for  Spike Magazine:

He claims that Vurt was written whilst listening to The Pixies and Nirvana, Pollen to ambient dub trance. I asked him what Automated Alice was written to and his answer was “country and western! Drum and bass! Free jazz! Frank Zappa! A jigsaw, in other words, like the book.” This parallel between popular music and fiction strikes me as rather dubious, but Noon’s cultural roots are in music – he’s a former member of punk band Manicured Noise (”that’s okay – no-one else has heard of them either”). If he has to place his writing, he does so within the Manchester music scene rather than in any literary tradition: “it’s never been a literary city; I suggest it never will be. It’s a musical city. I hope this comes across in the language I use, the musical rhythms of Mancunian music.”

The most recent Jeff Noon book I’ve read is Nymphomation.  Alice’s robotic “double”, a doll, Celia, remained in the future after Alice went back through the clock and is part of the action in Nymphomation. Manchester gets gripped in a fever of a domino-based gambling game that unwinds – very macabrely – into a musing on the creation of artificial life systems on early computers. It may be the notion that there’s blank space in our genome, unwritten pages that our DNA hasn’t filled that could be used to store information, that might have inspired the flying insect “blurbvurts” advertising creatures that mate and mutate, as well as the early evolutionary experiments on flies.

Today in the New York Times there’s a profile of Daphne Koller, who is taking artificial intelligence to the next level:

Ms. Koller is beginning to apply her algorithms more generally to help scientists discern patterns in vast collections of data.

“The world is noisy and messy,” Ms. Koller said. “You need to deal with the noise and uncertainty.”

That philosophy has led her to do research in game theory and artificial intelligence, and more recently in molecular biology.

Her tools led to a new type of cancer gene map based on examining the behavior of a large number of genes that are active in a variety of tumors. From the research, scientists were able to develop a new explanation of how breast tumors spread into bone.

One potentially promising area to apply Ms. Koller’s theoretical work will be the emerging field of information extraction, which could be applied to Web searches. Web pages would be read by software systems that could organize the information and effectively understand unstructured text….

She didn’t spend her time looking at a computer monitor. “I find it distressing that the view of the field is that you sit in your office by yourself surrounded by old pizza boxes and cans of Coke, hacking away at the bowels of the Windows operating system,” she said. “I spend most of my time thinking about things like how does a cell work or how do we understand images in the world around us?”

WORDPRESS, POSSIBLY AN EDITOR

 

            The new ‘related posts’ feature on WordPress has placed my writing alongside a blog from Wired I consider kin and the post that relates to the pun I made in one headline slyly reinforces the pun. It almost seems as if a human editor, who, in an ideal world is the first, most careful reader of an article, has been creating the links. The service is offered by Sphere, which says the recommendations are generated by a “content genome” that doesn’t look at keywords or tags but assesses the whole article. Maybe it’s something like the grammar check function within Microsoft word, only better. It probably contains a collaborative filtering algorithm that learns from the way people click through to the recommendations and pass them on. A long time ago (I can’t remember when) I started noticing a Sphere widget at the conclusion of New York Times articles, recommending other articles that related to the same topic, some from the New York Times, some from other sources. I rarely clicked through. I’m wary of innovations if I’ve found out them first from them being used on a commercial site: I imagine it’s a commercial contract, something that’s been placed there to help sell me something, and I give it a wide berth. I also imagine that the sales and marketing division of the New York Times will always put monetary concerns before thinking about how readers actually use and respond to the articles on the website. This has been confirmed in the way that they’ve dropped the de.licio.us widget on the “share this” menu, in favour of a Yahoo! Buzz button. Yahoo! also owns de.licio.us, so it seems a purely commercial decision to make the article ranking service from Yahoo! popular, at the expense of de.licio.us. I’m annoyed enough to have gravitated towards the Google news service, and check the New York Times much less frequently than I used to.

            What Sphere gains from offering their service to WordPress’s free blogging community is the opportunity to test and develop its service without the dumbing down that occurs when its linked to marketing. The collaborative filtering service offered by Amazon.com is tightly linked to marketing keywords and obvious choices of what to buy next, it’s not in their best interests, sales wise, to pique your curiosity so much by its suggestions that you begin to question what you’ve bought or drift off into reverie. Ideally Amazon.com wants you to be so fascinated by what their predictive algorithms suggest that you have to have these objects, now!

            A more interesting question, and this ties with the ‘related posts’ function on WordPress, is what if a piece of software could make us think and lead us to the random wonders we find in everyday life, and lead us to the non-sequiturs that fascinate us? Ken Goldberg’s online projects Jester (which existed before Amazon’s prediction system went online) and the new Donation Dashboard seek to clarify what we’re thinking, with something as subjective and dependent on context as humour, and with the ethical dilemma of philanthropy: how do we decide what causes to give money to? These very personal, philosophically thorny questions – what’s funny/ and ‘what community service is so important that I’d pay to help it exist?’ – are able to be measured in an objective, neutral way when the community is unseen but identifiable.

 

NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR EGGHEAD FREELANCE JOURNALISM

 

Doo.ri’s cocktail dress is made of abaca, a fabric that is derived from the leaf stalks of a banana species native to the Philippines, $1,395. At Barneys New York.

FutureFashion, an initiative pioneered by Earth Pledge and sponsored by Barneys New York and others, is bringing eco-conscious clothes to a well-heeled audience. For New York Fashion Week, Earth Pledge presented a group show featuring everything from casual day wear to ball gowns — all made with nature-friendly or secondhand fabrics. “Design and creativity don’t have to be sacrificed to make garments that are less harmful to the earth,” says Julie Gilhart, Barneys’ fashion director. “In fact, developing something sustainable can be a much more creative process.”

“Green With Envy.” The New York Times. April 27, 2008.

 

This article in the Style section of the New York Times magazine on Sunday made me see cartoon lightning bolts and stars before my eyes. I felt exactly as if all of the things that I’ve been working on for the last ten years had been pushed together and had gathered momentum until they rolled over the edge of a cliff and plummeted into the mainstream, landing with great impact. “…PVC, a chemically-produced plastic that doesn’t break down, perhaps isn’t the slickest of materials after all,” was part of the second sentence of the first paragraph. It was a small profile of Future Fashion, which has a database of 1,000 sustainable materials and a white paper on sustainability available for sale on its website. There was a goofy edge: the materials sounded as strange as the bits of nature that Alexis Rockman sent home from Tasmania to mix with painting materials to make his portraits of the local wildlife. Future Fashion recommends fabric made from the “…leaf stalks of a banana species native to the Phillipines“ and “… fur from the brush-tail possum, which is an animal that has become a scourge in Australia.”

Fifteen years ago I inadvertently fell out of the mainstream media orbit. I was working on book-length projects about robotics and design for small, hyper-specific foreign publishers and almost everything that I was translated into Japanese, Spanish and Portuguese and never published in English. And I began experimenting with bookbinding techniques inspired by the engineering and construction techniques of modern architecture. I dreamed of writing white papers and profiles of materials that would be as fascinating and full of character as Joseph Mitchell’s profiles of the people he encountered in New York in the 1930’s and 1940’s. But it was too early, my interests were still out on the nerd fringe then and I’m no crusader or pioneer. So while the media world has changed, probably irrecoverably, I can suddenly imagine writing white-paperish features and biographies of materials for the few high-profile global magazines I’m still connected to.