David Byrne is disappointed by the bus-riding tourists of New York:

I wave to the double-decker buses from my bike, but the passengers never wave back. Why? Am I not an attraction?

badconlangingideas:

Require in your conlang unreleased implosives, like /ɠ̚/, after every few words or so. That way you can sound like you’re speaking to a nice thumping bass beat.

badconlangingideas:

Create a script for your metal band where the metal umlaut acts like the top line in Devanagari and Bengali and ëv̈ër̈ÿẗḧïn̈g̈ l̈öök̈s̈ l̈ïk̈ë ẗḧïs̈.

[tldr: inconclusive and poorly-explained ramble on identity and roleplaying]

I’m belatedly discovering Audre Lorde, reading my way through her collection “I am your sister. It’s touching and inspiring, and I agree with most of it. But here’s one aspect I’m struggling with.

Emotional consistency is supremely important to Lorde. You should be the same person with your family, with your friends, at work, with your lover or before the police:

In order to make integrated life choices, we must open the sluice gates in our lives, create emotional consistency. This is not to say that we act the same way, or do not change and grow, but that there is an underlying integrity that asserts itself in all of our actions.

None of us is perfect, or born with that integrity, but we can work toward it as a goal.

In Lorde’s life, that integrity was what allowed her to be unapologetically herself. She was fighting against silence — the silence that comes from subduing your identity to fit into society, and the silence of fear and self-censorship that stops you trying to break through it:

The women who sustained me through that period were Black and white, old and young, lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual, and we all shared a war against the tyrannies of silence…

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say?

What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself—a Black woman warrior poet doing my work—come to ask you, are you doing yours?

And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger.

Everything we are should permeate everything we do. Lorde condemns — albeit with gentleness and sympathy — anything that puts part of our life into a box. This comes up, for instance, in her discussion of BDSM (something I hope to return to another time):

I feel that we work toward making integrated life decisions about the networks of our lives, and those decisions lead us to other decisions and commitments—certain ways of viewing the world, looking for change. If they don’t lead us toward growth and change, we have nothing to build upon, no future.

Through all this the question I’m struggling with is:

must

we have only one identity, at least as the ideal state of self-actualisation? I would like to declare “

I am large, I contain multitudes

“. I’d like to play different roles without needing to merge them into one identity.

And — politically speaking — I believe there is value to this. The “world of work” is now breaking it’s 9-to-5 bounds, asking us to blend our employers’ needs into every moment of life. Increasingly, our work is also “affective”; requiring not just our minds and muscles, but our hearts as well. On the internet, social networks threaten to achieve Lorde’s aims by force — giving us an integrated identity whether we want one or not.

So now, if we behave with “integrity”, it means letting the areas where we are not free dictate our behaviour even when we are free. If I must be non-threatening at work, I must be non-threatening everywhere; for in this world without boundaries, my behaviour anywhere will be linked back to my work. Every compromise or self-denial we make in one context becomes expanded.

The excape from this is to divide our identities. danah boyd has been tracking this for a decade, looking particularly at teenagers. She and her subjects regard “collapsing contexts” — visibly connecting different facets of an identity — as a threat to wellbeing, perhaps even an act of violence against chosen identities.

Because when, for example, Google links a youtube profile to a real name, it performs a kind of outing. Whatever identity has been growing in the shadows is exposed to the full force of external scorn.

So Lorde’s prescription of consistency seems at odds with the human need for gradual, fallible self-discovery. Proclaiming her identity was an act of courage then, as it would be now. But perhaps we also need more space for people to develop and discover their identities, without immediately needing to justify them to everybody they know.

from the main blog – http://ift.tt/1EVeTbl

Church-building is one of the oldest forms of self-aggrandisement. It’s especially suitable for those with a bit of guilt about however they obtained their wealth and power. Even the Hagia Sophia, perhaps the greatest church (or mosque) ever built, was perhaps partly built to expiate Justinian’s guilt at massacring the Nike rioters.

Félix Houphouët-Boigny’s entry into this tradition will not be remembered for as long, even if it does outdo the Hagia Sophia in sheer size. In fact, it has some claim to to be the largest church in the world. The president of the Ivory Coast built it at a cost of $300 million, claiming it was “a deal with God”.

Messy Nessy Chic writes that:

the whole thing is arguably one big empty and outrageous contradiction. Up to 18,000 people can worship in the basilica (7,000 seated, 11,000 standing) but in a nation where more than two thirds of its people aren’t even Christian, it has a tough time filling just a few seats. A recent visitor to the Ivory Coast told me that there couldn’t have been more than three other people inside when he toured the massive house of worship.

from the main blog – http://ift.tt/1tyOfAz

Another idea I [Alinsky] had that almost came to fruition was directed at the Rochester Philharmonic, which was the establishment’s — and Kodak’s — cultural jewel. I suggested we pick a night when the music would be relatively quiet and buy 100 seats. The 100 blacks scheduled to attend the concert would then be treated to a preshow banquet in the community consisting of nothing but huge portions of baked beans. Can you imagine the inevitable consequences within the symphony hall? The concert would be over before the first movement — another Freudian slip — and Rochester would be immortalized as the site of the world’s first fart-in.

[source]

from the main blog – http://ift.tt/1DZRm5P

I’m enjoying this tumblr dedicated to bad ConLang ideas. Some highlights:

• A language that is right branching when the speaker is happy and left branching when sad.
• Boustrophedon is pretty cool, and having letters that are rotations and flips of other letters means that you have to make fewer letter shapes, making it easier to create and alphabet, so why not use both together?
• Your gender system should classify dead people based on how they died, and living people based on how you think they will die or how you want them to die. One of the grammatical genders is used only for wombat attacks.
• A conlang where each number is expressed as its prime factorization, rather than using a place system
• Require in your conlang unreleased implosives, like /ɠ̚/, after every few words or so. That way you can sound like you’re speaking to a nice thumping bass beat.

from the main blog – http://ift.tt/1ASRHLt

Alcoholics Anonymous is something I know mainly from Hollywood, which has an ongoing obsession with the format. It fills roughly the expository niche that was once occupied by psychoanalysis — it’s an easy way to fill in backstory, and enable introspection that would otherwise be totally out-of-character.

Still, AA gives me the creeps — the religiosity, the rigidity, the all-or-nothing approach. If I were ever addicted, I’d run a mile from anything with 12 steps.

I occasionally wonder how fair that is. Is AA, as Hollywood would have it, the One True Way to cope with addition? Scott at SlateStarCodex has dug into the research. Turns out that even

that

can’t help: “

the studies surrounding Alcoholics Anonymous are some of the most convoluted, hilariously screwed-up research I have ever seen

“.

AA

does

seem to work better than no treatment. But then, so does psychotherapy. So does

acupuncture

. So does 5 minutes of a doctor suggesting that you think about quitting.

most alcoholics get better on their own. All treatments for alcoholism…increase this already-high chance of recovery a small but nonzero amount. Furthermore, they are equally effective after only a tiny dose: your first couple of meetings, your first therapy session.

from the main blog – http://ift.tt/10oT8jS

The Interplanetary File-system must be one of the most interesting technical concepts I’ve come across lately.

[warning: the below is pretty technical. Likely both confused and confusing, written to help me et my head round IPFS]

Globally distributed file-storage is something that’s been

just around the corner

for a long time now. Bittorrent and the like got us 90% of the way there, but functioned as mechanisms for sharing single files, rather than as a layer of infrastructure for other applications to be built on.

To download a file (as with bittorrent) you query its hash in a Distributed Hash Table. You get a list of users storing that file, and download it from them. As a file becomes more popular it becomes cached by more users, so no one node gets overloaded — again like bittorrent. The IPFS designers are also leaving room for more ambitious incentive schemes like Filecoin.

As for uploading: each user has a writeable directory, with an address generated from a keypair. This means the system can enforce only one user being able to write to a directory, without needing any central authority. Only you can upload to your directory, because only you can sign uploads with the private key corresponding to the public key in your directory name.

There’s also a git-like version history built into the filesystem. This feels like overkill to me. The advantage, though, is that you can provide a mutable-seeming directory structure, while under the surface the directory is an immutable data structure, namely a Merkle Tree. It also means that files don’t get deleted — the user just commits a version of the directory without the files. And perhaps you hope that other nodes won’t store the old data, but you have no way to enforce that.

Here’s how creator Juan Benet describes it:

IPFS provides a high through-put content-addressed block storage model, with content-addressed hyper links. This forms a generalized Merkle DAG, a data structure upon which one can build versioned file systems, blockchains, and even a Permanent Web. IPFS combines a distributed hashtable, an incentivized block exchange, and a self-certifying namespace. IPFS has no single point of failure, and nodes do not need to trust each other.

IPFS gives every user a writeable directory, with an address based on their key

from the main blog – http://ift.tt/1sQoV4Z