Don't Forget To Check Out Our Weekly Specials!

So I just went to the pharmacy. Let me talk about cognitive load. I'm directing this at the marketing executive who has been paid to design my shopping experience. I drive to your store, park, and enter, wander up and down the aisles looking for an item I need, and then try to buy it. Let me confess up front: I've been diagnosed (by the same professional and commercial Western Medicine System which you are in a very real sense a part of) with ADD (back when that was one of the things it was called; I know it's changed; the DSM be praised). As I attempt to carry out my intended tasks in your store, I am bombarded with words and images, visually and auditorily. Every square inch of the surfaces that surround me is emblazoned with advertisement, from the packages of the products themselves, to the logos and faces on the sides of the endcaps, to the stands holding flyers, which I try not to knock over. Voices, NON-STOP VOICES entreat me over the PA to check out your weekly specials. At every spot where I can interact with a human being acting as a representative of your corporation, the face I see has a halo extending to the edge of my vision consisting of candy to give me diabetes or cancer interspersed with pictures of scantily clad celebrities. As I shop, little plastic boxes protrude from the shelves, and blink at me, offering pieces of paper which can grant me infinitesimal discounts on products I don't need. At the register I'm told I need a Special Swell Customer Card so that, in addition to getting more infinitesimal discounts and letting you track the progress of my hemorrhoid, I can devote precious space in my already overstuffed wallet to what is, in essence, a billboard for your corporation.

And in among the logos and the slogans and the entreaties and the coupons and the Special Swell Customer Card and the acres of glossy cleavage, there is a VERY REAL risk I will FORGET what it is I came into your store to buy.

If that happens, it will defeat the purpose of my having offered this hour of my life to doing business with you.

My (justified) fear of that eventuality makes my shopping experience, frankly, hellish.

So. You, marketing executive, have been paid what is probably a pretty respectable salary to lure me into your store and make me into a loyal customer. And the result of your earnest labors is that the brightly-colored sign above your door might as well bear the words, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

Keep up the good work.

"Oh, and stop drinking tea."

This was said by my urologist this morning after she showed me the CT scan of the proto-boulder in my kidney.

Harvest

Have you ever eaten a perfect peach? No, really, have you? Are you sure? Most people are lucky if once in a lifetime they eat a perfect peach.

I have a magic power. I have contrived, in the past week, to eat over one dozen perfect peaches. In among a life of cars and cubicles, gas prices and taxes, I have included this superhuman accomplishment.

And I did not do it emptily. I did not arrange it and then let it pass unheeded. To each bite I paid rapt attention, and discerned with intense concentration the papery flat of the outer fuzz, the sharp tartness of the inner surface of the skin, the miraculous flesh which achieves the feat of being at once uniform and smooth and yet delicately fibrous. I have examined the mechanics of the pressure of my front teeth against the nestled stone, and the flow of the juice from the compressed flesh surrounding it. And that is the magic: not that I have eaten perfect peaches, but that I have done so mindfully.

And I send you this secret message, this missive which no other could comprehend, to inform you that this magic power belongs to you, too. Yes, I mean you.

Use it wisely.

Promises

I can't make promises. Promises aren't how the universe works. But I can tell you that given what I know, I assess a high probability that there is more good stuff to come.

Which Cognitive Vice Is This?

I have a password that was generated for me by a password program. It's reasonably secure; it's a pseudorandom set of mixed case letters and numbers. It's one of many like that; I generate a new one for each context. It contains, in the middle, by chance, a sequence of four letters that are the same as the name of a minor character in a lesser-known story by my favorite author, but with the vowels taken out. And only if you don't count y as a vowel.

It's an accident. And not a very interesting one, at that. And yet every time I type it, I think of it as an homage to great literature, and hope the writing gods see it as such.

More Eschatology

The Bafflement is the period of history between the moment a civilization discovers the facts of quantum mechanics, and the moment that civilization understands the facts of quantum mechanics.

Few civilizations survive the End of the Bafflement.

Our civilization is in the Bafflement now.

The End is nigh.

New Art Form: Quantum Scuplture

It doesn't have just one shape.

The Doubularity Is Nigh

Huh. Randall Munroe and Cory Doctorow met in person over a week ago, and the Internet didn't explode, or invert, or become the Virtù. So we need to come up with some new candidates for what event will trigger the Geekpocalypse. My vote is for when Randall and Summer Glau start dating.

They'd make a cute couple, wouldn't they? And she could use her mad ballerina skills to defend him from the pixel-eating bands of LOLzombies which will roam the Afternet.

My Cognitive Vices: Penicillin Thinking

Sometimes I justify my mistakes by telling myself that they might result in serendipitous discoveries. Like when Fleming accidentally contaminated a culture plate with mold, and discovered penicillin. I call that penicillin thinking.

Fake physics

Attention comes from points with nonzero curl in the noetic flux.

What's the wavelength of an attention? (uh-TEN-tee-ON)

Helping

Do you suppose that Newton had a buddy who suggested to him, over coffee, "Hey, maybe you should invent a new kind of math for that. You know, some way to talk about sums of infinitesimal things." Would we hear about that guy?

I wouldn't mind being that guy, even if we didn't.

phase-space

The phase-space of life is riddled with obstacles and currents. Our course through it is not simple. Bedeviling our navigation are the twin facts that we do not know our destination, and that our charts were drawn by madmen.

Ritual

The idea of the salt trick (the original idea, anyway) is finding the mental trick to get myself to do the things I need to do. Algorithms for human living.

Ritual seems to be a useful tool. The tea ritual gets good results pretty often. I'm hoping it's more the ritual than the drugs in the tea (theobromine? [edit: nope, theophylline]). I don't want to be dependent on drugs.

I once applied the tea ritual to my job, and good things came of it. I'm reluctant to do that regularly, though.

My deep fear, and I think I rationally support this, too, is that if I became successful at my job, I might forget to worry about, and put effort into, things which are more important.

Art

A bad artist who doesn't know any better will point to Picasso, or Monet, or van Gogh, to defend his bad art. You can't limit art with your narrow definitions, he'll say.

It's true; great art defies rules. This is because art is so richly complex a concept that any clean and rigorous definitions we try to come up with for it will be hopelessly naive. We're not smart enough to correctly draw boundaries for art. Every time somebody has set rules, a great artist has come along and broken them.

So we cannot set rules on art, yes?

Here's the problem: bad artists can break rules, too.

The reason we try at all to set rules is so that we can tell good stuff from crap. We're pretty sure there is a difference between good stuff and crap. So we try to decide what that difference is. When we've come up with an answer, though, it's always been wrong, or at least shortsighted.

But just because we can't codify our standards doesn't mean we should pretend we don't have any.

What do do?

Art isn't alone in this. There are many kinds of endeavor which fall into a problematic category: an endeavor that almost definitely has value, and ought to be undertaken, but the practice of which either cannot or should not be quantitatively evaluated regarding its value. Art falls into this category. So does education. So does philosophy. So do many things.

With any of these things, we end up, at any particular point in history, either trying to constrain it with ridiculous rules, or allowing it to produce huge quantities of utter crap. Sometimes we get creative and manage to do both at the same time.

I have a daydream that there exists a possible solution to this dilemma. I keep trying to figure out what it is.

I'm probably being shortsighted.

But it would be nice if we, as a civilization, knew how to talk frankly about the difference between breaking the rules because the rules are wrong, and breaking the rules because you suck.