"Good wine" and subjectivity

My laptop battery is solidly dead, and I am too lazy to get the charger (but not too lazy to type with my index finger), hence this is the first post from my phone...

Anyway, I was at a wine tasting today... (very nice perks of the job). We were provided with a selection of wines and asked to rate them on various criteria: flavour, acidity, alcohol, 'balance' (?) etc. It was a lot of fun, the highlight of my evening included meeting a forensic anthropologist (I now think I know how to sex a skull!). A comment made by one of the members of our group struck me, specifically, the comment was on the nature of subjective element of the scoring. Now subjectivity I think to most people implies an element of indetermination, arising from the belief in a 'right' answer and expressing a certain element of skepticism that the current experiment is capable of exposing the truth.

This statement got me thinking... (I personally have always been and remain convinced that if I think a certain glass of wine tastes crap/good then it is, I have no time for the 'quality', price, year etc... of the wine)... of my new thesis that we are all in a very frightening and vulnerable way very similar to each other. You and I share the same pains, the same anxiety, our mutual silence is what prevent us from realising this. I thought of my first experiences lecturing, the first time you present a set of material, your stomach is in a knot, your voice shakes , you think what will they ask me? These amazing brilliant students? ... (if you prepare well, they ask you questions you can answer) and and...most surprisingly the subsequent time you give the lecture, the very SAME questions are asked! I was astounded the first time, but I wonder what this says about subjectivity? Does it exist?

These people that put this wine tasting event on, and had us fill in a survey, they knew this, that on average we are all the same, and they just wanted to calibrate to our similarity...

Hmmm... I don't yet have an answer, but I think I need to think more, what does it mean - subjectivity?!

And before I loose myself to the ecstacy of music, I express my last naive subjective thought that my friend's ragou was very nice :)

Guilty until proven Innocent

Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat.
(that's me trying to appear clever :))

...now, without trying to appear overly dramatic, this is the treatment I received when I went to have my driver's license renewed recently. I'll divulge a little into the specifics of this story, and then relate it to the subject of this post.

So. Boring details aside, I needed to obtain a Sydney State license having a Tasmanian State license. Now from my conversation with the person working for the roads authority, I came to understand that she could not issue the licence to me then, because, they did not have proof that I had not lost my Tasmanian license due to negligence etc. Consequently, they would have to send off a fax to Tasmania to receive details of my driving record, and I would have to come back later. Damn it. I had my passport with me, and asked if it would help matters if I could prove to her that I was not in the Australia for the period in question, and consequently could not have committed any driving offence. (...well, at least that they would know of, as I was driving overseas...)

Anyway, point is, they did get a fax from Tassie 'clearing my name', I did come back later, and she did issue me a NSW license... but, after a little reflection, I realised that I was treated as someone who had committed an offence. And proof was required to state otherwise. Not the other way around.

Innocent, until proven guilty: A concept that we are (in the Western world) brought up with, and consider our fundamental right.

However, while this idea may be played out in courts, or at least portrayed as such, on an everyday level we are facing the complete opposite treatment. In interactions with government agencies (particularly!) we are frequently asked to present papers, documents (signed by JPs, lawyers and others...) that provide 'proof' of our intention, condition, statements. I'm not blind to the fact that this method of approach has grown out of necessity, as there are people that lie, steal and cheat, however, I like to also think that these are not actions of the majority. And yet, we, the majority pay for it, with our time, energy, and resources.

Is it correct to observe that the fundamental fibres/protocol for officially interacting with each other, and various agencies, are actually based on the very opposite premise? Namely, that you are guilty, until proven innocent?

The Appearance of Value

Do you know where one of the most annoying places to get a paper cut is? on the tip of your right index finger....ow...no typing right, no writing....bah....

Petty complaints aside, I have a bigger issue to tackle, and this is the idea that I crave my coffee in the morning. I will often get it from the coffee shop downstairs, where it will cost me about £1.30, although I have perfectly good coffee (which at this moment is actually a small fib, this unfortunate purchase has all the appearances of good coffee and none of the taste, but that's a side issue) in my office, which will cost me all of £0.30 or less to make (factoring in its cost, and milk and sugar, and my hourly wage ;)).
Yet, I get distinct pleasure from coffee served to me and have an irrational conviction that it is somehow better than what I could make. It is my little indulgence for getting up in the morning :)

With the plethora of coffee shops around my work, I understand that to attract more customers they need to 'differentiate' themselves from the rest. How? I can guess, by cooler music in their cafe, or fancy spoons, or red cardboard cups instead of gray ones, etc etc. How provide their customers with a 'feeling' that they are special without forking out the extra money for fancy coffee, or organic sugar, or whatever...

Successful marketing plays on this, i.e. selling hot air, 'a feeling at no cost, and all profit'. This is where the 'cost benefit' occurs - in the time lag between the actual/legal meaning of a word, and customer perception, or the 'street' meaning. For example, when you/I think organic, we think cows on green pastures, eating buttercups bathed in sunshine. It means 'good', 'warm', 'grassy', 'wholesome', that is it's street value. Yet, legally, to be allowed to stick an organic label a product, means obviously something different. Something like, the fertiliser which the food was grown with had to be 50% sourced from renewable sources (erm...let's not go to define renewable), for example. This is its 'real' meaning.

This disparity between meanings is where a lot of profit is to be made, and it's legal. Which is kind of crazy when you think about it. I would definitely not maintain a close friendship with a person, to whom I said: Please do not tell this to anyone....blah blah.
I later found out that they told everyone, and when I confront them they retort that they kept their word, they did not tell 'anyone'. Admittedly, this is a clumsy example, but I hope it carries the point. The people we value most are those who understand us most, not weirdos that don't 'get' our meaning.
Hmmm... this actually reminds me of a book about jokes that Freud wrote (yes! would you believe! and which I have read, that is also not a joke). In this book, Freud explores the mechanics of the most basic turns of phrase that make us laugh etc, and one of the most common is the brief misunderstanding of a word in a given context.
So I guess, I understand why this approach is so common in many branches of our society, not just between friends over a coffee.... ooohhhhh .... yes, coffee... in a brown coffee cup for £1.30 :D....special.

In the Eye of the Beholder

Hahaha....I never noticed before - but there's a 'transliterate' button in blogger now, very interesting.....

"I have just been to" <--> "И хаве юст бен to" ....хехехе....

Anyway, indeed, I have just been to the Degas exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. I remember seeing his painting "Musicians in the Orchestra" which for an instant made me think I was looking through a window at real people. It is a beautiful exhibition, and makes you realise that not that long ago, we had no idea what people looked like in motion - the way our muscles flexed, or the lines our knees/arms/thighs traced as we walked or swam. Amazing to think that this knowledge was absent from the collective consciousness! (...made me consider how trivial my research is in the larger scheme of things... in a decade or so, everything that I have done will be worthless, not to say it's not important, but that it will be assimilated into public knowledge, and hence become unnoticeable, because it will become obvious.)

I left with one distinct impression though...as though the exhibition, it's arrangement... had an idea to express: the idea of our (i.e. humanities) visual maturity. What I mean by this is, as you begin your walk through the exhibition, you see the first early paintings/sketches by Degas of dancers/people. And you realise how awkward and sometimes out of proportion the limbs are, and how sometimes the faces, heads, necks of his subjects are almost brutal in their coarseness. The plaques in the exhibit make mention of the fact that at this time, people in motion were rarely drawn because it was so difficult to hold a pose, and sometimes ropes or other props would be used to fix a dancer's figure in a certain position.

Then, as you walk on, you get introduced into the idea of photography, the efforts to capture motion. And Degas' paintings improve - the dancers now posses a delicacy, fragility and grace that was absent in his early drawings. Now, I do not want to say that Degas drew these later paintings from photographs, but that rather, the existence of photographs, and his exposure to them, allowed him to fix in his memory (for longer than was otherwise possible) the still figure of a dancer 'in motion'. Consequently, when drawing from memory, he was able to recall this image with greater accuracy than he was previously able to do.

Now, is it possible, that before photographs to compare to, people seeing Degas' first paintings of dancers in motion, really considered that this is what they looked like? Not having the capacity to 'feel' that the proportions where wrong, because they of course had even less exposure to dancers than Degas? (i.e. this sense of proportion, and motion, had not entered the collective consciousness?)

Could this in any way be justifiably related by analogy to the infantile early (early! i.e. BC) paintings? or those of small children? Photography/movies has allowed the specific fluidity of human form to enter our minds. Before this, we looked upon these forms, and in our 'minds eye' saw the stick figures of our early childhood?

Relational Relativity

I've had an interesting week, a spending a few more evenings in the pub than usual, meant that I spent a few more hours than usual harping on about my philosophical ideas (I apologise to my companions!). It occurrs to me, that 'the world is bad', 'life is unfair', etc etc. Yet, 'we are not bad', 'we are fair' etc etc., 'we' just 'do' bad things occasionally (as I expanded upon in one of my previous posts). So we live in a world that we say is all these negative things, and in which we try our dared hardest to be all the positive things, and occasionally find ourselves doing some negative things. And yet, we are the world - as Sartre said - "hell is other people".
Anyway, this is a nonsensical post.

Interconnectedness

"To live and not to know why the cranes fly, why children are born, why the stars are in the sky. Either you know why you're alive or it's all nonsense, it's all dust in the wind." by Chekhov . Wow :)

I'm sure it even sounds/feels even better in Russian! I'm sure I've read it too at some stage, but somehow it didn't have such an impact as I feel now - and funny thing is I just read it in: "The Making of a Fly: the genetics of animal design".... after hearing about the book watching a TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world.html. 


Hmmm....but for now...back to CryoSat :)

Growing up

What a day... how fortunate I am to be able to spend a day inside my head, with my body on the beach warmed right through by sunshine and sand, my soul calmed by the breaking waves.
I find myself again returning to 'problems' of 'our' society. (Hmm.... I have starting using these quotes in an attempt to indicate emphasis, or commonly questionable definition of a given term, but I fear that most definitions are questionable, consequently, in order to somehow progress, I should stop the formation of such a habit.) Okay, so, I'm reading way too many books, which means I'm not finishing any of them, however, one book I am hooked to, and have not yet finished simply because it is on my computer only (for now), is "Underground" by Suelette Dreyfus (cool name, huh?). It's fascinating reading about the act of hacking, possibly the reasons people hacked, the process, their successes and of course generally their stories. Wonderful book.
Hacking always fascinated me. I have always been and am on very good terms with computers, both their hardware and software. Dad decided early on that that should be the case, after forcing me through a touch typing course by the time I was in third grade, I then started learning QBasic. Hahaha :)
For all of this (and perhaps because of this... :)), it never occurred to me to 'hack' into a system. The drive for that was simply absent. My worst attempt at a prank, was to use the POP3 protocol to send my uni friend a friendly email from the 'Vice Chancellor'. Unfortunately, from memory I got her email address wrong, and then spent a few days thinking what would happen if my email bounced into the Chancellor's inbox.
But reading this book: the advent of computers, and computer hacking necessarily raises a few questions of 'why'? Was the attraction - the process of discovery? These people were cognizant (as I definitely wasn't!) at a time when the artificial (perhaps more apt - silicon) fabric of our society was starting to grow. (What could be brought up as an analogy to that time? The discovery of electricity - and it's gradual penetration into every household? I do not recall reading of any electricity hackers.) Their hacking was the act of breaking into computer systems that were ultimately built by individuals: engineers, scientists pushing the frontiers of knowledge and thereby creating a new cognitive process (existence/space). Why? What motivated these people? Instead of enrolling into colleges, unis or whatever means were available then, so as to become part of this new foundation and accelerate with it forward. To not only learn (and not by trial and error), but to write this new dialect, why instead did they choose to drive its evolution from the underground, the shadows?
What would these people have done (as others of their nature must have), had they not come across computers? Would they have become HAM radio operators? :) TV hackers? :) and before then?
Essentially, I do not think that it was the attraction to bits and bytes, to the hardware or software that motivated many of them. It seems to me, that it was for them simply a chosen medium of protest against authority, expression of dissent, and a means to understand ... (I want to say reality, but that seems a little facetious, undercutting the life believed, and lived, by the majority of people)...their world (?).
Perhaps, I shall attempt an analogy - that these people are themselves bugs, a viral infection in the fabric of society, and computers/internet was just a new weakness/backdoor of the organism which we call society? (Now, I am aware that by using words such as 'bug', and 'virus' I am necessarily evoking feelings of distaste. However, that is not my intent, nor is it applicable to these social protesters. I am also assuming that the understanding is that I am talking of hackers who had the intellect for introspection to ask themselves 'why'? and the motivation and decency to answer.)
Okay, and were is this drive to undermine: governments, corporations, big business etc coming from? All these systems are comprised of individuals, and yet, as we all know, or at least have an intuition (there is a little communist it all of us! :)) that the amalgamation of humans, the dissemination of their creativity, creates something something less than human. It's like back in the day when I was entertaining notions of studying medicine/genetics after my PhD, I read about a bacteria (?) whose cells will form 'secondary structures' (I don't remember much now, but the idea was that the same bacterial cells would, depending on their relative location, become different parts of the bigger structure.). The actions that these systems take (actuated by 'human' individuals!) in instances lead to intense suffering of other parts of our global society.
Where does this drive come from? and I think more importantly, is this drive simply reactive, intuitive due to social frustrations (which at least many of the people in this book seem to have experienced in an acute form)? or is it proactive (Wikileaks for example) and remedial in its quality. There is an effort here necessary to distinguish what would constitute as criminal behaviour and what would not? However, I find this difficult to answer, as I see most of these actions as an attack on the system, not attacks on the individual. Launching such an offensive attack is sometimes a healthy work out for the cogs of society. Without such actions women would still not be allowed to vote for example, and I am sure I do not need to mention others.
I think here, perhaps it is appropriate to mention the other book that I am reading - Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter. In the very first chapters, he talks of the merit/mark of intelligence as 'jumping out of the system'. To identify perhaps simply a level of discomfort and act on it, or: "there are cases where only a rare individual will have the vision to perceive the system which governs many peoples' lives, a system which had never before even been recognised as a system; then such people often devote their lives to convincing other people that the system really is there, and that it ought to be existed from!"
So, is this what motivated these people? Perhaps. Hopefully and most importantly, they have answered this question for themselves.