#since it actually has a knowable form now

[omniblades-and-stars]

WIP WHENEVER

I was tagged by @commander-krios, thank you!!

Tagging: @sparatus,@stormikins and @teamdilf if you guys want. No presh I'm just out here vibin.

Here's more from temporarily titled "Holding Onto Hell" or as i like to abbreviate "h2h" because I'm nothing if not lazy as fuck.

The EDI node nearby activated, the holographic globe that served as something akin to a head suddenly filled the empty air above it. "Commander, I have already advised Mr. Massani that I monitor all of this ship's security feeds, as well as other critical systems such as combat telemetry and life support," the AI chimed in helpfully.

"And I already told you," Zaeed said emphatically, "that if I ever start trusting a goddamn computer to watch my back, I might as well do it the favor of putting a bullet in my brain myself."

"That would be unnecessary," EDI responded before the node went dark. Shepard couldn't help but imagine that it sounded grumpy.

"You going to tell me to stop fucking around with your ship?"

Jane shrugged and leaned against the wall, "Depends. What all will you be watching?”

Zaeed huffed one small, muted laugh as he shook his head, "Just the airlock, cargo bay, halls and common areas. I'm an asshole, not a degenerate."

"Then carry on," she allowed. When she considered it, knowing that eyes that weren't Cerberus were watching things made her feel paradoxically less surrounded. "This what you do when you can't sleep?"

"What, rewire tech that costs more money than has any right to exist?" he asked only slightly sarcastically. "Nah, I tinker, sure, but I'm not usually surrounded by these types." He waved vaguely around them as he pulled his arm free from the hatch and started screwing the cover back on.

Jane heaved a sigh, "I understand the feeling." The feeling like she was being watched at all times by The Illusive Man's pet computer project, and being evaluated by his operatives. And there was no doubt that was the case, they weren't covert about it. Said so right there on the label in big red print: We're watching every move you make.

"You usually go creeping around when you can't sleep?" he asked.

"I am not creeping around! This is my ship!" she protested.

Zaeed snorted as he stood up and dusted his hands off. "You're creeping and lurking like some kind of spook. I've seen the way you go moving around the crew deck at night like you fucking forget you can touch the light."

Jane's face threatened to either crumple in on itself or set on fire. Embarrassment and the feeling like this asshole had cut right through the mask she desperately clung to in seconds burned on her cheeks. "I didn't know you were up there," she muttered.

Zaeed pressed his hand down on her shoulder, "We've all got ghosts to deal with, Shepard. Won't tell anyone how you deal with yours."

Jane looked down at the hand on her shoulder like it was some unknowable alien object. "Sure," she mumbled, unsure of what she was meant to be doing or feeling all of a sudden. She felt an awful lot like she'd just been caught out doing something wrong.

Something weird at the very least.

"Sure," Zaeed confirmed before he broke away from their conversation and headed for the elevator.

[mystery-aberration]

I am going to talk about my feelings of being an eldritch entity that feels too knowable due to being in a human body. This may not be very understandable to those who do not know my source, The Magnus Archives. I will try to make sense.

I feel as if since joining the system, I have become too much of a "person" and too little of a "concept". I have too much of an identity to me now. "I" as a concept shift and change on a scale. On one end is "person"--that is Micah, pure Michael, the "me" before I was combined with The Distortion. I do not have a "me" that is pure essence of the eldritch entity anymore, I do not have a pure "The Distortion" as a form of me. I am too understandable, too feeling, too real.

I have many feelings and experiences now that were foreign for a long while before, when I lived. Things I had felt a long while ago before I lost them and forgot how they work. But I am not used to being of mortal thinking and feeling flesh. Feelings are fresh, foreign and new but the same as they were always, like opening old wounds. And sometimes they are so overwhelming. I did not feel the same ways I feel here, back when I was "me". I have been here for months and I have changed and learned much since then, but in becoming more "person", I've become less of myself, and more of a different kind of mess than I am as The Distortion. The very human emotions are wrong, but so long were they waiting to surface.

It feels wrong, to be "real" in a way that I am more than a concept--more than a manifestation. I am too tangible. I already long for the connection I had to the entity that was a larger part of myself, The Spiral, but since dying that has been severed. I do not have the concept tied to me as strongly anymore. I could hardly call myself of The Spiral anymore. There is no Spiral for me to connect to or be, here in this body. There is only me as the remnants of what I was when I lived.

Being understood makes the very human parts of me happy, but the fibre of my being shift in uncomfortable ways. The Distortion is not meant to be fully understood by essence, but Michael longs for it. He longs to be known and have social connections and care and love. I as The Distortion do not. I am torn between what I was and what I am. It is so euphoric to cause confusion and be a puzzle and hard to wrap mentally around--but I am known eventually, even if I try to be hard to understand.

Me posting here is me being known.

Me drawing my form is being understandable.

My friends and partner know me in my very essence more than anyone else, but still it is understood all too much.

Me talking to people makes me able to be comprehended. It never will be the same as it was to talk to people around me, because they do not see me--they see a human.

A human.

A neatly wrapped package that makes so much sense, containing a being they do not need to think about. One they might not know is there. So they have no reaction. They do not know that I am not human. If they do? They do not see me. My form being less of a thing and more of a thought, the way I hardly can exist physically in a way that makes sense--they cannot see me as the actual, quizzical me. They cannot be confused as much as they would be if they could see the way my body makes no sense, the way I make the whole room dizzy.

They just see a human. One that makes too much sense to contain a thing like me. This body is too normal. A body that is slowly changing me and my very essence to make all too much sense.

I have changed since being in a human brain, and I will change more. I cannot do anything about it, I will change as all things do--always moving and warping into new shapes. My new shape is uncomfortable for now, but I hope I will be able to fit into the edges of it and make it home. I do not want to be human, but I do not want to be uncomfortable either.

[swaps55]

.

Here we fucking go. 

We have a glorious moment, one of the best of the trilogy. Anderson dies, and Shepard has to get up. 

What do you need me to do.

No protests. No arguments. There is only the mission, and Shepard isn’t done. It’s the very essence of Shepard, the heart and soul of what makes them such a magic character. 

And we follow up that moment with this bullshit. 

I’ll take this moment to remind folks that in the original, vanilla ending, there was no explanation of the reaper origins. Shepard couldn’t ask questions. There was just, HEY. Pick a color. 

So to my jaded self, the Extended Cut and Leviathan are merely attempts to sleep in the bed they made. 

The biggest mistake BioWare made was attempting to explain the reapers. They are supposed to be unknowable. Beyond our comprehension. Yet here, in the final moments, they are distilled into something completely knowable and understandable, at the expense of everything the trilogy spent three years building. 

“The reapers are not at war with you.” 

Yeah, except you gave Harbinger understandable motivations, an ego, an obsession with a tiny organic, and a vendetta. You made the impersonal Cthulhu monster something with a very personal agenda. Those two ideologies are in direct conflict with each other. 

“Who designed the Crucible?” 

“You don’t know them, and there is no time to explain.” 

WHEN THE FATE OF THE GALAXY HINGES ON IT, YOU SHOULD PROBABLY MAKE TIME. Honest to god, this translates to, “we dunno, fuck off.” 

Now onto the color coded choices. I’ll further point out the reminder that the vanilla ending included no voice over, no slideshow depicting the outcome and consequences, no memorial for Shepard. It was literally exploding relays in three different colors, with no other differences between them. At all. 

The Extended Cut is a direct response to the uproar, which included the following: 

“The relays exploded. Everyone’s dead.” BioWare, astonished at this assumption, somehow forgot they put out a DLC that makes it explicitly clear that destroying a relay releases a titanic source of energy that would wipe out a system. So Extended Cut? Comes out and says, “everything that was broken can be fixed.” No why, no how. You have a decimated galactic economy, the bulk of half a dozen armies stranded in a single system, and the codex clearly states we do not know what kind of material the relays or the Citadel are made from. So...how do we fix all of these things in the next few lifetimes? Fuck you, that’s how. 

“...how the hell did my love interest get on the Normandy??”  Because in vanilla, there is no goodbye scene. Shepard runs to the beam, never looks back, gets blown up, then stumbles to the beam. There is no injured squad mates, no evac, no tender goodbye. One second they’re there, the next they’re exiting the Normandy on Lame Jungle Planet. Which is why Harbinger so patiently waits for Shepard’s ship to come take the wounded love interest away, because we had to have some reason for them to wind up on the ship, and there isn’t a way to do it that makes sense, so have a tender goodbye and don’t think about the fact that the Normandy apparently could have just dropped you right off at the front door and saved everyone a lot of time and trouble. 

“Why did the Normandy flee?” In vanilla, there was only the cutscene of Joker frantically mashing buttons while consoles exploded around him, with a swelling instrumental cacophony that ended with a discordant shriek, suggesting total disaster. When I first played it, I somehow thought, to my horror, that I’d killed Joker. And guess what? Joker and your love interest exiting the Normandy on Lame Jungle Planet is just where the game ended. That music is the credits music. That’s where the journey stopped. Not ended. Stopped. The only other scrap was the voiceover by Buzz Aldrin and a pop up saying, ‘you did it! buy our DLC.’ So the Extended Cut added a cry from Hackett to run from the Crucible, though there’s still no reason given for why, aside from ‘energy is bad for technology,’ and apparently the Normandy is the only ship that somehow winds up stranded on Lame Jungle Planet.

If the Crucible was essentially just a giant EMP that nukes all technology, then everyone is basically fucked, and how do you ‘outrun it,’ since it goes everywhere??

Fuck you, that’s how.   

The choices themselves can fuck themselves, too. Attaching strings to the trilogy-spanning goal of destroying the reapers is a cheap bait and switch. A human being somehow being turned into an immortal vessel to puppet the immortal machines is a complete disaster waiting to happen. Human minds aren’t meant for that, and we’re given no context or information on how that’s supposed to function. 

And Synthesis? You’re asking one person to directly violate the bodily autonomy of every single being in the galaxy? With zero explanation given for what that means other than a few utterly abstract sentences, how it works, what it changes, and what the consequences will be, good or bad? Fuck right off. 

Is my interpretation of the endings completely and forever impacted by experiencing the vanilla ending after playing ME1 when it launched in 2007 and waiting five years for the finale? Yes. I won’t even pretend that I can take an unbiased look at Extended Cut, because all I can see is how blatantly and poorly it tried to respond to the backlash. 

Beyond the incompressible narrative choices, the plot holes, the confusion, etc., the worst sin the original ending made was not giving the player an emotional release. There was no closure. No end. It just stopped. That haunted me. It sounds stupid to say I lost sleep over the ending of a video game. It sounds melodramatic and entitled and obnoxious. But I did. This world and these characters meant everything. I’d like to think that after having lived through a pandemic, it’s a little easier to understand why the fictional places we escape to so we can forget about the real world feel like a lifeline. It may be stupid that a video game means this much to me. But it does. And I have never gotten over how that ending made me feel, and I have never forgiven it. 

The only thing the Extended Cut does is provide an emotional release, in the form of goodbyes to your love interest, an ending slideshow, and a voiceover telling you all the ways the galaxy isn’t actually fucked, even though it is. For a lot of people that’s enough, and that’s a good thing. Emotional release is a big deal. Even if the ending isn’t satisfying, having somewhere to put your emotions makes it a lot easier to swallow. 

This is the first time I have experienced the ‘true’ ending since EC came out in 2012, and now that I have the achievement for finishing the game, I never intend to do it again.

I’m going to go boot up the Citadel DLC, which is the love letter send off the trilogy deserved, and what BioWare was capable of giving us all along. 

They just...didn’t. 

[redantsunderneath]

On Analysis Part 1 - Hermeneutics and Configurative reading (the “what” part)

“Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol. And then he said that he was reading Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who ... clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecouchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze a path into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.” ― Roberto Bolano, 2666

Much of the background for this post in particular comes from Paul Fry’s Yale lecture course about the theory of literature.  This is a great starting course for interpretation and textual analysis and, yes, film and TV shows are text.

In futzing around with this stuff, what am I doing?  Less charitably, what do I think I’m even trying to do, here? Many feel that applying theory to art and entertainment is as pretentious as the kind of art or entertainment that encourages it. It’s understandable.  Many examples of analysis are garbage and even people capable of good work get going in the wrong direction due to fixations or prejudices they aren’t even aware of and get swept away by the mudslide of enthusiasm into the pit of overreach. That’s part of the process. But this stuff has an actual philosophical grounding, so let’s start by looking at the stories history of trying to figure out “texts.”

Ideas about the purpose of art, what it means to be an author, and how it is best to create go back to the beginning of philosophy but (outside of some notable examples) there is precious little consideration of the reception of art and certainly not a feeling that it was a legitimate field of study until more recently. The Greeks figured the mind would just know how to grok it because what it was getting at was automatically universal and understanding was effortless to the tune mind. But the idea that textual analysis should be taken seriously began with the literal texts of the Torah (Rabbinical scholarship) and then the Bible, but mostly in closed circles.

Hermeneutics as we know it began as a discipline with the Protestant Reformation since the Bible was now available to be read.  Sooooo, have you read it? It’s not the most obvious or coherent text.  Reading it makes several things clear about it: 1. It is messy and self contradictory; 2. A literal reading is not possible for an honest mind and isn’t advisable in any event; 3. It is extremely powerful and mysterious in a way that makes you want to understand, your reach exceeding your grasp. This is like what I wrote about Inland Empire - it captures something in a messy, unresolvable package that probably can’t be contained in something clear and smooth. This interpretive science spread to law and philosophy for reasons similar to it’s roots in text based religion - there was an imperative to understand what was meant by words.

Hans-Georg Gadamer is the first to explicitly bring to bear a theory of how we approach works.  He was a student of Martin Heidegger, who saw the engagement with “the thing itself” as a cyclic process that was constructive of meaning, where we strive to learn from encounters and use that to inform our next encounter.  Gadamer applied this specifically to how we read a text (for him, this means philosophical text) and process it.  Specifically he strove to, by virtue of repeated reading and rumination which is informed by prior readings (on large and small scales, even going back and forth in a sentence), “align the horizons” of the author and the reader.  The goal of this process is to arrive at (external to the text) truth, which was for him the goal of the enterprise of writing and reading to begin with.  This is necessary because the author and reader both carry different preconceptions to the enterprise (really all material and cultural influences on thinking) that must be resolved.

ED Hirsch had a lifelong feud with Gadamer over this, whipping out Emanuel Kant to deny that his method was ethically sound.  He believed that to engage in this activity otherizes and instrumentalizes the author and robs them of them being a person saying something that has their meaning, whether it is true or false.  We need to get what they are laying down so we can judge the ideas as to whether they are correct or not.  It may be this is because he wasn’t that sympathetic a reader - he’s kind of a piece of work - and maybe his thheory was an excuse to act like John McLaughlin.  He goes on to have a hell of a career fucking up the US school system

But it’s Wolfgang Iser that comes in with the one neat trick which removes (or at least makes irrelevant) the knowability problem, circumvents the otherizing problem, and makes everything applicable to any text (e.g. art, literature) by bringing in phenomenology, specifically Edmund Husserl’s “constitution” of the world by consciousness. It makes perfect sense to bring phenomenology into interpretive theory as phenomenology had a head start as a field and is concerned with something homologous - we only have access to our experience of <the world/the text> and need to grapple with how we derive <reality/meaning> from it.  Husserl said we constitute reality from the world using our sensory/cognitive apparatus, influenced by many contingencies (experiential, cultural, sensorial, etc) but that’s what reality is and It doesn’t exist to us unbracketed. Iser said we configure meaning from the text using our sensory/cognitive apparatus, influenced by many contingencies (experiential, cultural, sensorial, etc) but that’s what meaning is and It doesn’t exist to us unbracketed.  Reality and meaning are constructed on these contingencies, and intersubjective agreement is not assured.

To Iser, we create a virtual space (his phrase) where we operate processes on the text to generate a model what the text is saying, and this process has many inputs based on our dataset external to the text (not all of which is good data) as well as built in filters and mapping legends based on our deeper preconceptions (which may be misconceptions or “good enough” approximations).  Most if this goes on without any effort whatsoever, like the identification of a dog on the street.  But some of it is a learned process - watch an adult who has never read comics try to read one.  These inputs, filters, and routers can animate an idea of the author in the construct, informing our understanding based on all sorts of data we happen to know and assumptions about how certain things work.

This is reader response theory, that meaning is generated in the mind by interaction with the text and not by the text, though Stanley Fish didn’t accent the “in the mind part” and name the phenomenon until years later. Note that Gadamer is largely prescriptive and Hirsch is entirely prescriptive while Iser is predominantly descriptive.  He’s saying “this is how you were doing it all along,” but by being aware of the process, we can gain function.

For those keeping score:   1. Gadamer, after Heidegger’s cyclic process at constructing an understanding of the thing itself, centers on a point between the author and reader and prioritizes universal truth. 2. Hirsch, after Kant’s ethical stand on non instrumentalization, centers on hearing what the author is saying and prioritizes the judging the ideas. 3. Iser, after Husserl’s constituted reality, centers on configuring a multi-input sense of the text within a virtual (mental) space and prioritizes meaning.

Everything after basically comes out of Iser and is mostly restatement with focusing/excluding of elements.  The 20th century mindset, from the logical positivists to Bohr’s view that looking for reality underlying the wave form was pointless, had a serious case of God (real meaning, ground reality) is dead.  W.K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsley’s intentional fallacy, an attempt to caution interpreters to steer clear of considering what the god-author meant, begat death of the author which attempted to take the author entirely out of the equation - it was less likely you’d ever understand the if you focused on that!  To me, this is corrective to trends at the time and not good praxis -  it excludes natural patterns of reading in which the author is configured, rejects potentially pertinent data, and limits some things one can get out of the text.

Meanwhile formalism/new criticism (these will be discussed later in a how section) focused on just what was going on in the text with as few inputs as possible, psychoanalytics and historicism looked to interrogate the inputs/filters to the sense making process, postmodernism/deconstruction attacked those inputs/filters making process questioning whether meaning was not just contingent but a complete illusion, and critical studies became obsessed with specific strands of oppression and hegemony as foundational filters that screw up the inputs.   But the general Iser model seems to be the grandfather of everything after.  

Reader intersubjectivity is an area of concern.  In the best world, the creation of art is in part an attempt to find the universal within the specific, something that resonates and speaks to people.  A very formative series of David Milch lectures (to me at least) proffer that if you find a scene, idea, whatever, that is very compelling to you, your job is to figure out what in it is “fanciful” (an association specific to you) and how to find and bring out the universal elements. But people’s experiences are different and there be many ideas of what a piece of art means without there being a dominant one. So the building of models within each mind leaves a lot to consider as the final filtered input is never quite the same. There is a lot of hair on this dog (genres engender text expectations that an author can subvert by confusing the filter, conflicting input can serve a purpose, the form of a guided experience can be a kind of meaning, on and on ad nauseum)

The ultimate question, you might ask, is why we need to do this at all.  I mean, I understood Snow White perfectly fine as a kid.  There’s no “gap” that needs to be leaped.  The meaning of the movie is evident enough on some level without vivisecting it.  The Long answer to what we gain from looking under Snow’s skirt is the next episode.  The short is: 1. You are doing it anyway.  That Snow White thing, you were doing thhat to Snow White you just weren’t conscious of the process.

2. It’s fun. The process only puts a tool of enjoyment in your arsenal.  You don’t have to use it all the time.

3. You’ll see stuff you like in new ways.  The way Star Wars works is really interesting!

4. It may give dimensions to movies that are flawed or bad, and you might wind up liking them.  Again, more to love.

5. It is sometimes necessary to get to a full (or any) appreciation of some complicated works as the most frustrating and resistant stuff to engage with is sometimes the most incredible. 

6. It reinforces your involvement in something you like.  It makes you more connected and more hungry, like any good exercise.

7. You can become more aware of what those preconceptions and biases are, which might give you insights in other areas of your life.

[momentsbeforemass]

Trinity

(by request, my homily from Sunday)

I’d like to tell you about a friend of mine. Who is a great dad.

He’s kind of goofy. You know he was the class clown in school. Because to this day, he’s always got a joke. Or a funny, unexpected response. If anyone I know would laugh at a funeral, he would be the guy.

I’d known him for years. And that was my picture of him, always funny. No matter that the context was, you were going to have a laugh with him around. 

With that image of him stuck in my head, it took me completely by surprise when I found out that he had donated a kidney to his daughter.

Not that I thought that he didn’t love his children. Or that he wasn’t a good dad. But it seemed like such a serious thing to do, for someone so lighthearted. It never occurred to me that there was more to him than just an endless supply of dad jokes.

Which shows you how much impact our preconceived ideas about people have. Zero.

Honestly, it’s kind of like my knowledge of kidney transplants.

I know that they happen. I know that most of the time, they are successful. And…that’s about it.

But here’s the important part – my lack of understanding of kidney transplants, has no impact their success. Just because I don’t understand it, doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Today is the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity.

The Trinity is, at its most fundamental, a mystery. Let’s be clear about what we mean by “mystery.”

When we hear the word “mystery,” we think of things that are unclear or unknown. Like a news report that says, “the cause of death remains a mystery.”

Or maybe we think of things that are intentionally confusing, maybe even manipulative. Like trying to figure out why a Code Red weather warning gets issued for everything from a tornado to a light drizzle.

That’s not what the Church is talking about, when she refers to something as a mystery.

When the Church refers to something as a mystery, she means that it is infinitely knowable. Not that it doesn’t have meaning. But that there is more to know about that thing.

That what there is to know about it, goes well beyond first impressions. Here’s what I mean:

Let’s imagine that you were standing there with Rich at the parish garage sale yesterday. And you saw me walk up to someone, greet him like an old friend, and shake hands. And Rich says, “Wow, look at that!” And you say to Rich, “What’s the big deal? They shook hands. He shakes hands with half the parish after mass, so what?” And then Rich tells you, “Actually, there’s more going on here. We were all in high school together. Those two have hated each other since freshman year.”

Just like there is often a deeper meaning with people, with a mystery, there is even more to it. In fact, with a mystery, there is so much more, that there will always be more to it. More to understand. More to experience.

That is exactly how it is with the Trinity. There is so much more, that there will always be more to it. More to understand. More to experience.

And, like kidney transplants, the fact that you and I don’t fully understand it, doesn’t mean it’s not true.

So let’s look at just one part, the most personal part of the Trinity.

Have you ever seen a dog with her puppies? There’s something more going on there than just the individual animals.

You’ve got the dog. Then you’ve got each one of her puppies. Each of them with their own personalities. But there’s also something more going on there.

Between them, together, there’s a bond, a spirit, a love that goes beyond the individual animals. Something greater.

As we move up the scale from animals to people, we see the same thing. Only it’s more developed, more distinct.

Think of a mother with her children. There’s something more going on there than just the individual people.

You’ve got mom. Then you’ve got each one of her kids. Each of them with their own personalities. But there’s also something more going on there. Something that a dog and her puppies is only a pale shadow of.

Between them, together, there’s a bond, a spirit, a familial love that goes beyond the individual people.

And it’s not generic. Oh, it has some universal character to it. But it’s also unique. It’s the special bond between that mom and her kids. It’s not like any other.

If you’re around them when they’re together, you’ll see it in action. It colors how they act with each other and everyone else. Without really trying you’ll come to think of it as their spirit. As how they are, as a family. And you’ll be right.

Only it’s not limited to moms and their kids. This is something that happens whenever people form deep bonds. Especially when people do it intentionally. Like with a marriage or a religious community.

Between them, together, there will be a bond, a spirit, a familial love that goes beyond the individual people. Something greater than any one of them, or even all of them together. Something that, if you or I spend any time with them at all, we will intuitively understand as their special character. Their charism. Their spirit.

If you’re around them when they’re together, you’ll see it in action. It colors how they act with each other and everyone else. Without really trying you’ll think of it as their spirit. As how they are, together. And you’ll be right.

As we move up the scale from people to God, we see the same thing again. Only it’s even more developed, even more distinct.

Think of the Father and the Son. There’s something more going on there than just the individual Persons.

You’ve got God the Father. Then you’ve got Jesus, His Son. Each of them with their own personalities. But there’s also something more going on there. Something that a mom and her kids, or a married couple, are only a reflection of.

Between them, together, there’s a bond, a Spirit, a perfect familial love that goes beyond the individual Persons.

Only in the case of the perfect familial love between the Father and the Son, that love is so dynamic, so concrete, that it itself is also a Person. What we would call the Holy Ghost or the Holy Spirit. What the Old Testament calls Wisdom.

And just as it is with people, that bond, that spirit, that familial love isn’t static. It isn’t a closed loop. It’s overflowing, it grows, and makes it possible for others to enter in.

You see it all the time with people. When a couple adds a child through birth or adoption. When a family grows through marriage. When a religious community welcomes a new brother or sister.

Indeed, it is that perfect familial love between the Father and the Son, overflowing in the Person of the Holy Spirit, that makes it possible for you and me to enter into the life of God that God is calling us to.

That overflowing love, in the form of the Holy Spirit, is how God is with you, and will always be with you.

Not just right here, and right now. But always, and no matter what.

Readings for Trinity Sunday

[lastsonlost]

When developer DICE revealed thatBattlefield V would feature playable female soldiers, depicting them as fighting on the front lines of World War 2, there was a swift and predictable backlash. Taking issue on the grounds of historical accuracy, there was a particular group of players who vehemently argued that women almost never served in regular combat on the Western Front.

Less predictable was the fact that Creative Assembly would make a point of changingTotal War: Rome 2, now several years into its life, to feature female generals. Again, a games studio found itself criticized by players who argued that women leading armies in the classical world isn’t historically accurate. What distinguishes these controversies in a landscape that too often features routine harassment of women working in games and complaints about feminist perspectives making their way into more and more corners of gaming is that, in both these cases, the complaints had a grain of truth to them. Both DICE and Creative Assembly were choosing depictions of history that were debatably ahistorical. In each case where we find appeals to "historical accuracy," however, we also encounter the flaws with historical accuracy as a concept. It's a term that supposes the existence of an objectively knowable past, a view which hurts more than it helps when it comes to understanding history.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance was staked much of its identity and setting on this idea of there being something concrete and quantifiable about the distant past. But in reality this was less proof of the game's commitment to historical accuracy than a refusal to question its own biases when it came to the ethnic and sociological history of Europe. In every case, we find an appeal to history as an objective source of truth and judgement about the past. This is naive. The fact is that history—how we view it, the stories we tell about it, the things depicted as normal as opposed to aberrations—is highly political.

The practice of history involves drawing from a pool of documentary sources to form arguments about the past. They’re always based on factual evidence, but these arguments are necessarily subjective. In other words, they’re profoundly colored by our politics. We’re all biased in some way, shape, or form. This explains why people often come to completely different conclusions after examining the same sources of evidence.

And that's where we tend to find backlashes. Consider Company of Heroes 2, which sparked an historical accuracy controversy when it came out in 2013. It wasn't a battle fought by transparently reactionary antifeminists, but was instead about some very real divergences in opinion about how historical evidence and statements should be interpreted.

Complete a few campaign missions inCompany of Heroes 2 and you’ll notice that soldiers are often shot by their own officers when told to retreat. Based on Joseph Stalin’s Order 227—the infamous "not one step back" directive that attempted to stiffen the resistance of a Red Army that was thrown back on its heels by the German invasion—this mechanic is definitely grounded in factual evidence.

The feature still presents a fairly problematic perspective on the past, though. Since retreating soldiers in the game are shot by communist commissars, the argument in Company of Heroes 2seems to be that Order 227 was the product of a political regime which failed to motivate its people. The systematic implementation of this mechanic also implies that Order 227 was routinely carried out. In this the game is echoing (sometimes explicitly) the most famous and dubious scenes in Enemy at the Gates, which depicts "blocking detachments" of Soviet machine gunners who massacre retreating soldiers There’s reason to believe that none of these assertions is entirely accurate. Stalin for example couched Order 227 in the language of patriotism as opposed to oppression; the passage about shooting soldiers for cowardice is one of a series of possible measures that the order allows for, along with more pedestrian measures like cashiering underperforming officers. Reports from the battlefield also indicate that retreating soldiers were rarely shot on the frontlines.

The developer behind Company of Heroes 2, Relic, was immediately criticized for this feature. Pointing to such debatable assertions, a particular group of players called on the company to change the campaign. Relic responded by claiming to have done its due diligence in terms of research. In other words, the developer believed that its game was historically accurate, and had its own evidence to back up its assertions. Who was right?

Though they drew different conclusions from the same sources, the fact is that both sides made valid arguments. The involved parties definitely saw things from opposing political perspectives, though, and wanted to emphasize different aspects of the story of Soviet resistance to German invasion. While some people saw it as evidence for an oppressive and inhumane regime, others took Order 227 as an appeal to patriotism in a time of desperate need, and argued that it was a disservice to the memory of the Red Army to depict its soldiers as being motivated largely by the constant fear of execution. Both views have evidence for them, and each view tends to diminish the valid points raised by the other. Your own interpretation may depend more on whether you're more interested in emphasizing the legacy of Stalinism or the combat performance of the Red Army.

What we choose to emphasize and what we tend to erase was at the heart of theTotal War: Rome 2 controversy. Creative Assembly decided to feature female generals in Total War: Rome 2 nearly five years after the game was released. Play with the latest patch, in other words, and you’ll soon see women leading an army. The change was purely cosmetic (and was itself a knock-on effect from how Creative Assembly revamped how family political dynasties worked).

Were there actually women in command? There are some cases: We know for example that Hatshepsut led an army in Egypt. Boudica did in Britain, too. While these were both powerful women, they were still members of what were probably patriarchal societies. But as an archaeologist with a background in Classics and Egyptology, I have to admit that female generals in the ancient world were probably few and far between. Convincing evidence to the contrary simply can’t be found. Women sometimes wound up on the battlefield, but they seem to have rarely taken up arms under normal circumstances.

The decision to feature female generals inTotal War: Rome 2 came under fire almost immediately. Players were soon calling attention to this nearly complete lack of evidence. Some of them wanted women removed. Responding to the mounting controversy, Creative Assembly stated that it saw the feature as being historicallyauthentic in a game that's never been exactly historically accurate. Since powerful women like Hatshepsut and Boudica prove that men weren’t always in command, there’s definitely an argument to be made that more female generals may have existed than we actually know about. Perhaps their deeds were simply never documented.

There isn’t actually much that we can say for sure about the past. History is mostly a matter of interpretation of available evidence (which itself is constantly evolving as new sources come to light). Some are better supported than others based on the available evidence, but interpretations of this variety are necessarily subjective. History is in, other words, political. It is under constant reconsideration as we attempt to correct blind spots and recover evidence or make hypotheses about what our sources don't tell us, or about what their own biases or blind spots may have been.

Does this mean that we can’t say anything about history? The fact is that we can only grasp at what actually happened by examining a variety of biased opinions and incomplete evidence about the past. This means that it can even be a good thing when games create a bit of historical controversy. Players just need to be open to seeing the past from a new perspective

There are also points where a more accurate depiction of a single aspect of history ends up fueling a legacy of erasure and indifference. If the choice is between a game in which women do not exist because historically they were largely excluded from playing an active role in a setting, and a game which embraces anachronism in order to include them, which is more important? Which depiction gets history "right"? It's also revealing that battles about "historical accuracy" so often about race and gender, and never about things like armies of Ptolemaic Egypt looking more like they belong in Age of Mythology than Total War, or the fact that Battlefield V shows V-1 rockets being used as tactical support weapons in 1940? What's being protected here is not the actual reality of the past (few players complain when ancient combat is made so fantastical it looks more like Lord of the Rings or The 300) but a popular historical memory that has consistently valorized Great Men and Martial Glory and ignored just about everything and everyone else.

The fact is that arguments about the past are often arguments about the present. Becoming a battleground for normative assertions about contemporary society, history stops being about what actually happened. We sometimes use and abuse it for our own purposes. In the case of Total War: Rome 2, the issue at stake was actually gender equality, and the way a popular game about the past has tended to depict the role of women (or not depict it). The same could be said for the controversy about Battlefield V.

Developers aren’t directly accountable to players for their political perspectives. They’re actually free to frame history however they like. Game makers have been doing this for as long as there have been games.

With its detailed depictions of the past,Assassin’s Creed is bound to come up in almost any discussion about historical accuracy in games. The developer behind the franchise, Ubisoft, creates incredibly realistic environments. Walk around Athens in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and you’ll soon see what I mean. The characters aren’t quite as convincing, though. Kassandra for example seems to reflect remarkably contemporary cultural values. Women may have been relatively empowered in Sparta, but there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that they were almost completely disenfranchised in every other part of ancient Greece. Could we call Kassandra historically accurate? This kind of question really misses the point.

Kassandra is a reflection of what Ubisoft wants the world to be—not the way it was.

[raifuujin]

re: kaito's eye color, i've noticed that while people generally go with *purple* for kaito's eyes, they all kind of describe it in their own way, moving along the color wheel depending on the author. the same goes for artists, just from what i've seen myself. i would guess that it started out with only a handful of people and others latched on for their own personal reasons at first, but now people expect it? kaito and shinichi are identical but it might make more logical sense that they (1)

would have differences when you look at them more closely. there’s a kaito fanartist that uses almost the exact same shade of blue for them for the base color, and you only really notice if you squint (they also give hakuba red eyes). i personally prefer that, the idea that they would have slight differences that are hard to notice bc i don’t like gosho’s same face habits, but i can’t speak for anyone else. it’s nice to think about tho! (2)

I do appreciate the people who keep a slight difference but still use blues. It’s obviously not as popular as the trend of using a purple colour for Kaito, but I do like the idea of him and Shinichi having slight differences that just aren’t immediately noticeable. (Shades of blue would be one, and I also made a post commenting on how Shinichi should have more defined leg muscles from playing soccer compared to Kaito. (Which Lavi depicted nicely.)) But while there might be subtle differences, it does ruin some of the writing if you make a very obvious difference that people should be able to see, when Kaito is supposed to look enough like Shinichi that he can get around without a mask or any prep and fool people with a change in hairstyle. It does vary from person to person, both for artists and writers alike, but it’s still a pretty strange trend.

It’s also not really the artistic choices that bug me about the whole ‘violet eyes’ thing. I’ve seen art where everyone has red eyes, heck, one time I actually found art that let Kaito keep the blue eyes and gave the more purple eyes to Shinichi. Sometimes characters who have blue eyes are drawn with gold eyes for the sake of how good it looks. I like the variety, what bugs me is that there’s no real reason for people to have gotten so fixated on giving Kaito purple in particular. If it were just sometimes a thing, it wouldn’t be so noticeable as to become a peeve of mine. But it became so commonplace without any basis at all within canon to push it along.

Yes, it could have just been a small style choice that people decided they liked for their own reasons, and it slowly spread to where it felt weird to not give Kaito some form of different eyes. It could have been a subconscious decision based on how people think of colour for some people, like Starrulet said. There are probably a few explanations for why it became popular that could be given, the problem is that: We won’t know what the real reason is. If it happened gradually and purely out of fandom preferences, it will always be something that can never fully be explained. And that’s more than likely what happened, because unlike a lot of other fandom ideas, it’s the one that I’ve checked time and again, and I know would never come from any misinterpretation of canon.

Shinichi liking coffee? Fanon takes it to a ridiculous degree, but it’s also an English word that’s used in Japanese, so people can remember when it’s said if they watch a lot of DC content. He does order iced coffee sometimes, though I doubt it’s an addiction that people stretch it to be, either for comedy or because of people’s own caffeine dependency.

Hakuba’s red eyes I’ve explained is likely from the anime adaptions. They’re the ones that introduce another colour for many characters, and with Hakuba they went with a rich brown that has a red hue. Kind of ironic, since Hakuba is supposed to be foreign and thus the stereotypical blond hair blue eyes would be more warranted than brown and brown, but still. Red eyes has some basis for why people would go along with it.

In fanon, Shinichi and Kaito’s personalities more often than not get switched from how they truly act, but even that has more legitimate reasons you can see why that happened.

Kaito’s eyes just… don’t have any basis, outside of popular fanon interpretation. It’s the frustration of it not having a knowable explanation for something that’s so popular that makes it possibly the worst of my random fanon peeves.

[chaosmultiverse]

🏠 🏠 🏠 (Jordan, Carrie, Baby Doll)

Mage Of Light

Mages distort/distort via their aspect.

Light: Luck, Knowledge, Fortune, Spotlight, Relevant.

So a fair bit of this is already based off headcanons since Jordan doesn't have a lot of canon stuff going for her. Mages tend to already start off with a good connection to their aspect but also tend towards having very misfortunate parts of their story tied to their aspect for Jordan this presents in how she is both one of the most knowable characters in Payday but how due to a mix of bad luck and losing relevance she is unable to actually use her knowagle.

Her connection to fortune comes in as her main job is wire fund, in a sense her job means that she has to find how others have distorted fortune.

As for her distorting, this mostly comes in the form of how the at the end of when we canonly see her she is covering up a convo she had with Vlad.

Now to dive into my own headcanons/wip storyline I'm working on for her.

She is one of the watchers which to me are role wise coded as Mages, as Vlad/The Scribe's watcher it makes the most sense to me that both her & Vlad are connected to Light (which within hs does tend towards being the aspect connected to lore & recording history.)

The story I have in mind for Jordan has her use the fact that she's faded into the background to be able to do & research stuff she couldn't if there were eyes making her very relevant and a force in the background of the story that pushes parts forward all without anyone knowing it was her.

Mage Of Mind

Mages distort/distort via their aspect.

Mind: Choice, Logic, Justice, Action, Spirit, Disability.

Honestly I have a lot less to say for this classpect, half of it is based around Carries canon powers and how they tend towards acting out in justice and the rest is about how her powers cause her to lose her grip on reality and on her own mind.

Lord Of Rage

Lords use their aspect for themselves

Rage: Chaos, Truth, Hard Emotions, (In)sanity, Religion, Canon Bullshitery

So this class is a bit different than others as it's one of the master classes, basically meaning it embodies a good half of the classes in it's arcatype and in motive. For that lord that means embodying the classes that are motived for the gain of one's self which fits Baby Doll to a tee.

Sure from time to time Baby Doll can care about others and do things that seem almost for the gain of someone else but at the end of the day what they care about most is their own enjoyment. They are the embodiment of a whole genre of media which ties into well into how rage is connected on a meta degree to ass pulls in stories (which horror stories, the thing Baby Doll is, is almost known for). Baby Doll is someone who can just rip apart the canon of the story around them and make up au's on the fly that seem a little forced (murdertown I'm looking at you).

As for chaos that's like their bread and butter and they tend to make up storylines that can & do drive the people they force into the roles into madness.

Really they just don't fit two things, 1 is the religion thing as they aren't nor is there any out there about them & 2 lords in canon tend to order others to do their bidding meanwhile the closest Baby Doll has is a friend & a robot they made but neither do it's bidding

[maxksx]

after capitalism, the derivative

The economy actually needs active management but complains about it. It is a supposedly self-regulating distributor of prices which combines knowledge from individuals who each know their own preferences. The market is the sum of all knowledge individual monads provide, which they cannot master because what they have is incomplete. Knowledge is not given to anyone as totality, only market can be that – or so the followers of Hayek insist.

Financial markets are knowledge aggregation in its purest form, an economy of almost pure information, although as Mirowski points out, economists are never too clear about what information actually is. In the economy of finance, derivatives are based on models of risk which can be priced. In portfolio theory, risk is spread through diversification. Short-term fluctuations in prices can be hedged; long-term is a bit tricky and more volatile. It is hard to manage futures which are not like the past using models drawn from that past. Risk can be knowable; uncertainty is unknowable. 

Derivatives are a way to hedge risk and extract a return from an unknowable future by hedging its various possibilities. Derivatives can even extract a surplus from uncertainty itself.

Expertise can no longer prevent volatility. There’s a link between a financialization of non-knowledge and the state attacks on expertise that accelerated under Reagan and Thatcher. They attacked the credibility of their own governing class. Knowledge no longer has an autonomous value. It has to show a return. The mass of knowledge on which finance rested became its impediment. There’s a loss of trust in the particular expertise that managed particular risks, in education, health or security, for example. Finance became the manager of generalized risk in the form of non-knowledge.

What is surplus or excess in relation to knowledge? For Martin, it’s the unknown. Risk management in professional fields, from health to security to energy to finance generate value from the unknown. Knowledge is now so abundant it can’t all be used, and its excess can generate disaster. Knowledge is a kind of credit, but the unknown is a kind of debt. The industrialization of knowledge is like the transformation of farmers into workers. There’s a loss of a particular connection to means of production. Enclosure now extending into the professions.

Since expert knowledge can’t fix ‘economy,’ non-knowledge has its day. Non-knowledge comes in a few flavors. The unknown known is, or was, discoverable by expertise. The known unknown is imaginable but impossible to verify. The unknown unknown is a generative absence of knowledge confronting risk and uncertainty. The burden of enduring all of these shifts onto individuals. “Non-knowledge rules in the world risk society.” (47) Non-knowledge generates derivative logics. These prosper now that non-knowledge is a force of production.

“Financialization… entails a shift in policy emphasis from providing security to managing risk.” (55) The swelling of that risk leads to more and more hedging. There’s a kind of “regulatory disintermediation.” (56) Lots of rule-making is now outside of the state, in much the same way, as Keller Easterling observes, that regulation in the design world is now about standards. The economy was a model for the conservation of energy based on utility as determined by partial but rational actors. “Whereas what was been described as the economy imagines that price is the moment of resolution of difference, the derivative operates through the conditions of generalized uncertainty as a bearer of this ongoing contestation over value in which the relation between knowledge and non-knowledge is governed.” (56)

Not only is the totality of derivatives bigger than the commodity economy, is is prior to it. 

Prices are formed in options and futures markets before they are set in cash markets “The core operation of derivatives is to bind the future to the present through a range of contractual opportunities and to make all manner of capital across disparate spheres of place, sector, and characteristic commensurate with one another.” (60) 

Derivatives are a kind of “meta-capital.” (60) Admittedly, “stuff still gets made and sold, even if through thickets of debt and credit” (14) but I wonder if this is still ‘capitalism’ or something else.

Martin: “if commodities appeared as a unit of wealth that could abstract parts into a whole, derivatives are a still more complex process by which parts are no longer unitary but are continuously disassembled and reassembled as various attributes are bundled and their notional value exceeds the whole economy to which they may once have been summed.” (60) Capitalism designed processes of mass assembly that made standardized products. Derivatives run that process in reverse, slicing into the bulk of those products and reassembled by risk attribute. They are worth more as derivatives than as commodities. “Subjecting the world to the logic of derivatives means acting as if no transaction is final and there is always a globally realizable potential for improved performance….” (62)

Martin: “By abstracting capital from its own body… derivatives do to capital what capital itself has been doing to concrete forms of money and productive conditions such as labor, raw materials, and the physical plant. 

Hence, while derivatives serve as a globally exchangeable money form, they also break down the distinction between money and capital. 

At the same time, they make available to capital accumulation what would be considered new materialities of ideas and perceptions, weather and war, bits of code stripped from tele-technology or DNA, the microscopic and cosmic.” (61) The derivative organizes the forces of production of the information vector.

Derivatives increase opacity, amplify volatility and risk. They then treat the volatility they produce as a horizon for their own opportunity. “They turn the contestability of fundamental value into a tradeable commodity…. The derivative serves as a kind of shuttle between the particular risk factors it bundles together and the general glare of optimum market performance as an imaginary horizon to which the measure is subject.” (63) This is not just a matter of a world of ‘fictitious capital’ or ‘mere circulation.’ Financial logics enter directly into the workplace. The housing, education, health and automotive industries integrate finance directly with production. Even daily life becomes financialized, and anyone with either money or debt works a second shift managing these assets and liabilities. “Derivatives perform a dispossession of self and ownership.” (78)

That there is a political or cultural outside to the economic is a fantasy structure the derivative abolishes. They now constitute the totality. The derivative is not an economic object that politics can regulate. It is itself regulatory. It is non-knowledge itself, commodified. 

Derivatives don’t price things; they price uncertainty. 

“Finance works through flows. It moves production inside of circulation. It is a kind of compulsory movement that mandates going forward. Even in times of crisis, we must keep going at all costs. The price paid for this compulsion is that finance claims to see everything but has no knowledge of how it moves, or has no language for its own movement.” (143)

Derivatives appear as detachable but actually reveal a mutual indebtedness. Debt ‘servicing’ becomes everyone’s problem. Derivatives make future outcomes actionable in the present, appearing as a way to regulate and control futures. “Finance is based on those with observable information profiting from the bulk of those lacking it who create an environment of noise.” (68) Uncertainty itself is rendered productive.

“Rather than something firmly tethered that then got away, what would it mean to understand the emergence of this dissonant social relation that cuts across the global and the intimate, spheres of production and circulation, future and present, knowledge and non-knowledge?” (74) 

For Martin, non-knowledge is an open field of non-absorbed surplus, which means that a politics specific to this era, rather than nostalgic for another, could apply itself to socializing this surplus, starting from the form in which it now appears.

What I would want to add to Martin is an attention to the forces of production that made the derivative possible, what I call the vector or what Bratton calls the stack. Then one could examine the derivative at work in other fields, such as the sciences. One might also then sharpen the class analysis at work, and see finance as a component of a class that extracts value from surplus information – what I call the vectoralist class. One might then also pay closer attention to the various subordinate classes this layered mode of production exploits, what I call the farmer, the worker and the hacker classes.

The derivative is the form of appearance of a qualitatively different abstraction at work in the world, built on top of, and extracting a surplus from, the second nature that social labor built at the command of capital – what I call a third nature. But as Virno reminds us, the term ‘second nature’ in Marx always carried a tone of ideological falseness. Likewise, as Jason Moore and others remind us, the totality of our times is no less real and yet no less false, and is only accelerating the metabolic rift between the totality of social relations and their dependency on a ‘first’ nature that now appears as a spread of risks to be optioned, swapped and hedged.

[southeastasianists]

Public discussions around Rohingya people currently fleeing violence in Rakhine state, Myanmar, have often involved arguments about history. While critical historical analysis is useful in offering insights into conflicts, History—if treated as a single, knowable past—is not. This is especially true when dealing with ethnicity. Whatever the past was, no amount of historical research can justify the current violence against Rohingya people.

The debate around Rohingya ethnicity lacks awareness of wider historiography (the history of historical research). On the one side, those denying that this is ethnic cleansing argue that there is no such thing as a Rohingya ethnic group. It is claimed that these people are actually Bengali Muslim migrants. The writings of historians such as Jacques Leider have been used, by some, to support this position. He argues that the use of the term Rohingya to connote this Muslim population, although noted by eighteenth-century European travelers, is a modern one. For him, Rohingya is primarily a political identity. On the other side, Rohingya activists have resisted this characterisation. They have countered that there is evidence of Muslims living in the Rakhine region for centuries, and that these groups have periodically been called Rohingya.

Writing in The Diplomat last year, one commentator attempted to disentangle these debates by arguing that “the Rohingya are not an ethnic, but rather a political construction. [emphasis in original]”. This is wrong. Not only wrong in the sense of it being inaccurate, but wrong in two other ways: 1) in that it relies on a false division between the categories “political” and “ethnic”, and then treats the two as if they are mutually exclusive; and 2) in that it assumes that we can definitively know people’s ethnic identification in the past.

Starting with 1). There is no ethnic identity that is not also, in part, a political construction. Ethnicity has proved a difficult object for historians to pin down. Its definitions and modes of expression have changed over time. As a result, surviving evidence of ethnic identification is often hugely varied across time. However, historians working on a range of different time periods argue that ethnic identification is intimately connected to political arrangements. Victor Lieberman, global historian of the medieval and early modern periods, argued, specifically on the case of Myanmar, that developments in state structures were intertwined with shifts in ethnic identification. As polities became more bureaucratic, ruling ethnic identifies hardened. Historians of the nineteenth century, such as David Scott, have argued that colonial regimes fostered a further hardening of ethnic identity, as it became central to how groups interacted with the state. Anti-colonial nationalism and decolonisation only made the political import of ethnicity greater, as work on nationalism has shown. It is not only Rohingya ethnicity that is a political construct, so too is Bengali, so too is Rakhine, so too is Bama. What is more, the use of these different political constructions of ethnicity shape how people self-identify.

2) Just because there is limited historical evidence of Muslims in this corner of the Bay of Bengal referring to themselves as Rohingya, this does not mean that there was not a form of ethnic identification that could be traced back to earlier periods if (and it’s a big if) we could know how this population self-identified. But can we know this? What records would have been left that could evidence how these populations would have seen themselves? We might even ask, if such records were produced, would we be able to fully understand them on the same terms as those past peoples? The terms used or adopted by ethnic groups are historically fluid. Mandy Sadan’s amazing book on the Kachincaptures this process of “being and becoming” in detail. Since we can not know, or necessarily entirely understand, ethnic self-identification in the past, its recorded absence is no basis for denying current ethnic self-identifications. This is just as true for Burmese nationality as it is for Rohingya ethnicity. As historians such as Alicia Turner have shown, nationalism as a primary identity is a modern phenomena in Myanmar (as I would argue it is globally), one that has emerged partly out of anti-colonial politics. Just because there was no Burmese nation in the seventeenth century—at least not as we would understand the term today—does not mean that contemporary Burmese people are not really Burmese.

History has limits. We can only know so much. It can only answer certain questions. The discussion around the history of the Rohingya, at its worst, deflects attention away from the problem of defining citizenship through ethnic indigeneity. Such a definition is premised on bad history and ethnic chauvinism, and it is a problem across the world. More urgently, right now in Myanmar it is contributing to an ongoing ethnic cleansing of a people who today identify as Rohingya, irrespective of what we may or may not know of the past.

………………………..

Jonathan Saha is Associate Professor of Southeast Asian History at the University of Leeds. You can follow him on Twitter at @Jonathan_Saha.

This post originally appeared at his personal research blog, Colonizing Animals.

[sciencespies]

What Astronomers Can Learn From Hot Jupiters, the Scorching Giant Planets of the Galaxy

https://sciencespies.com/nature/what-astronomers-can-learn-from-hot-jupiters-the-scorching-giant-planets-of-the-galaxy/

What Astronomers Can Learn From Hot Jupiters, the Scorching Giant Planets of the Galaxy

In 1995, after years of effort, astronomers made an announcement: They’d found the first planet circling a sun-like star outside our solar system. But that planet, 51 Pegasi b, was in a quite unexpected place — it appeared to be just around 4.8 million miles away from its home star and able to dash around the star in just over four Earth-days. Our innermost planet, Mercury, by comparison, is 28.6 million miles away from the sun at its closest approach and orbits it every 88 days.

What’s more, 51 Pegasi b was big — half the mass of Jupiter, which, like its fellow gas giant Saturn, orbits far out in our solar system. For their efforts in discovering the planet, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz were awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize for Physics alongside James Peebles, a cosmologist. The Nobel committee cited their “contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth’s place in the cosmos.”

The phrase “hot Jupiter” came into parlance to describe planets like 51 Pegasi b as more and more were discovered in the 1990s. Now, more than two decades later, we know a total of 4,000-plus exoplanets, with many more to come, from a trove of planet-seeking telescopes in space and on the ground: the now-defunct Kepler; and current ones such as TESS, Gaia, WASP, KELT and more. Only a few more than 400 meet the rough definition of a hot Jupiter — a planet with a 10-day-or-less orbit and a mass 25 percent or greater than that of our own Jupiter. While these close-in, hefty worlds represent about 10 percent of the exoplanets thus far detected, it’s thought they account for just 1 percent of all planets.

Still, hot Jupiters stand to tell us a lot about how planetary systems form — and what kinds of conditions cause extreme outcomes. In a 2018 paper in the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, astronomers Rebekah Dawson of the Pennsylvania State University and John Asher Johnson of Harvard University took a look at hot Jupiters and how they might have formed — and what that means for the rest of the planets in the galaxy. Knowable Magazine spoke with Dawson about the past, present and future of planet-hunting, and why these enigmatic hot Jupiters remain important. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Astronomer Rebekah Dawson, Pennsylvania State University.

(James Provost (CC BY-ND))

More

What is a hot Jupiter?

A hot Jupiter is a planet that’s around the mass and size of Jupiter. But instead of being far away from the sun like our own Jupiter, it’s very close to its star. The exact definitions vary, but for the purpose of the Annual Review article we say it’s a Jupiter within about 0.1 astronomical units of its star. An astronomical unit is the distance between Earth and the sun, so it’s about 10 times closer to its star — or less — than Earth is to the sun.

What does being so close to their star do to these planets?

That’s an interesting and debated question. A lot of these hot Jupiters are much larger than our own Jupiter, which is often attributed to radiation from the star heating and expanding their gas layers.

It can have some effects on what we see in the atmosphere as well. These planets are tidally locked, so that the same side always faces the star, and depending on how much the heat gets redistributed, the dayside can be much hotter than the nightside.

Some hot Jupiters have evidence of hydrogen gas escaping from their atmospheres, and some particularly hot-hot Jupiters show a thermal inversion in their atmosphere — where the temperature increases with altitude. At such high temperatures, molecules like water vapor and titanium oxide and metals like sodium and potassium in the gas phase can be present in the atmosphere.

The Lost Planets: Peter van de Kamp and the Vanishing Exoplanets around Barnard’s Star (The MIT Press)

Between 2009 and 2018, NASA’s Kepler space telescope discovered thousands of planets. But exoplanets―planets outside the solar system―appeared in science fiction before they appeared in telescopes. Astronomers in the early decades of the twentieth century spent entire careers searching for planets in other stellar systems. In The Lost Planets, John Wenz offers an account of the pioneering astronomer Peter van de Kamp, who was one of the first to claim discovery of exoplanets.

Buy

What might explain how a planet ends up so close to its star?

There are three categories of models that people have come up with. One is that maybe these planets form close to their stars to begin with. Originally, people sort of dismissed this. But more recently, astronomers have been taking this theory a bit more seriously as more studies and simulations have shown the conditions under which this could happen.

Another explanation is that during the stage when the planetary system was forming out of a disk of gas and dust, the Jupiter was pulled in closer to its star.

The last explanation is that the Jupiter could have started far away from the star and then gotten onto a very elliptical orbit — probably through gravitational interactions with other bodies in the system — so that it passed very close to the host star. It got so close that the star could raise strong tides on the Jupiter, just like the moon raises tides on the Earth. That could shrink and circularize its orbit so that it ended up close to the star, in the position we observe.

Scientists propose three ways that hot Jupiters might form. In one, the gas giants form in place. In the other two, the giants originate at farther-out orbits, but events gradually draw them in closer.

(Knowable Magazine)

More

Are there things we see in the planetary systems that have hot Jupiters that other systems don’t have?

There are some trends. One is that most hot Jupiters don’t have other small planets nearby, in contrast to other types of planetary systems we see. If we see a small hot planet, or if we see a gas giant that’s a bit farther away from its star, it often has other planets nearby. So hot Jupiters are special in being so lonely.

The loneliness trend ties in to how hot Jupiters formed so close to their stars. In the scenario where the planet gets onto an elliptical orbit that shrinks and circularizes, that would probably wipe out any small planets in the way. That said, there are a few systems where a hot Jupiter does have a small planet nearby. With those, it’s not a good explanation.

Planetary systems with hot Jupiters often have other giant planets in the system farther away — out beyond where the Earth is, typically. Perhaps, if hot Jupiters originated from highly eccentric orbits, those faraway planets are responsible for exciting their eccentricities to begin with. Or there could have been responsible planets that got ejected from the system in the process, so we don’t necessarily have to still see them in the system.

Another big trend is that hot Jupiters tend to be around stars that are more metal-rich. Astronomers refer to metals as any element heavier than hydrogen or helium. There’s more iron and other elements in the star, and we think that this may affect the disk of gas and dust that the planets formed out of. There are more solids available, and that could facilitate forming giant planets by providing material for their cores, which would then accrete gas and become gas giants.

Having more metals in the system could enable the creation of multiple giant planets. That could cause the type of gravitational interaction that would put the hot Jupiter onto a high eccentricity orbit.

Hot Jupiters like 51 Pegasi b were the first type of planet discovered around sun-like stars. What led to their discovery?

It occurred after astronomers started using a technique called the radial velocity method to look for extrasolar planets. They expected to find analogs to our own Jupiter, because giant planets like this would produce the biggest signal. It was a very happy surprise to find hot Jupiters, which produce an even larger signal, on a shorter timescale. It was a surprising but fortuitous discovery.

Can you explain the radial velocity method?

It detects the motion of the host star due to the planet. We often think of stars sitting still and there’s a planet orbiting around it. But the star is actually doing its own little orbit around the center of mass between the two objects, and that’s what the radial velocity method detects. More specifically, it detects the doppler shift of the star’s light as it goes in its orbit and moves towards or away from us.

One of the other common ways to find planets is the transit method, which looks for the dimming of a star’s light due to a planet passing in front of it. It’s easier to find hot Jupiters than smaller planets this way because they block more of the star’s light. And if they are close to the star they transit more frequently in a given period of time, so we’re more likely to detect them.

More

More

In the 1990s, many of the exoplanets astronomers discovered were hot Jupiters. Since then, we’ve found more and different kinds of planets — hot Jupiters are relatively rare compared with Neptune-sized worlds and super-Earths. Why is it still important to find and study them?

One big motivation is the fact that they’re out there and that they weren’t predicted from our theories of how planetary systems form and evolve, so there must be some major pieces missing in those theories.

Those missing ingredients probably affect many planetary systems even if the outcome isn’t a hot Jupiter — a hot Jupiter, we think, is probably an extreme outcome. If we don’t have a theory that can make hot Jupiters at all, then we’re probably missing out on those important processes.

A helpful thing about hot Jupiters is that they are a lot easier to detect and characterize using transits and radial velocity, and we can look at the transit at different wavelengths to try to study the atmosphere. They are really helpful windows into planet characterization.

Hot Jupiters are still going to always be the planets we can probe in the most detail. So even though people don’t necessarily get excited about the discovery of a new hot Jupiter anymore, increasing the sample lets us gather more details about their orbits, compositions, sizes or what the rest of their planetary system looks like, to try to test theories of their origins. In turn, they’re teaching us about processes that affect all sorts of planetary systems.

More

More

What questions are we going to be able to answer about hot Jupiters as the next-generation observatories come up, such as the James Webb Space Telescope and larger ground-based telescopes?

With James Webb, the hope is to be able to characterize a huge number of hot Jupiters’ atmospheric properties, and these might be able to help us test where they formed and what their formation conditions were like. And my understanding is that James Webb can study hot Jupiters super quickly, so it could get a really big sample of them and help statistically test some of these questions.

The Gaia mission will be really helpful for characterizing the outer part of their planetary systems and in particular can help us measure whether massive and distant planets are in the same plane as a transiting hot Jupiter; different theories predict differently on whether that should be the case. Gaia is very special in being able to give us three-dimensional information, when usually we have only a two-dimensional view of the planetary system.

TESS [the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite space telescope] is going on right now — and its discoveries are around really bright stars, so it becomes possible to study the whole system that has a hot Jupiter using the radial velocity method to better characterize the overall architecture of the planetary system. Knowing what’s farther out will help us test some of the ideas about hot Jupiter origins.

TESS and other surveys also have more young stars in the sample. We can see what the occurrence rate and properties are of hot Jupiters closer to when they formed. That, too, will help us distinguish between different formation scenarios.

They’re alien worlds to us, but what can hot Jupiters tell us about the origins of our own solar system? These days, many missions are concentrating on Earth-sized planets.

What we’re all still struggling to see is: Where does our solar system fit into a bigger picture of how planetary systems form and evolve, and what produces the diversity of planetary systems we see? We want to build a very complete blueprint that can explain everything from our solar system, to a system with hot Jupiters, to a system more typical of what [the retired space telescope] Kepler found, which are compact, flat systems of a bunch of super-Earths.

We still don’t have a great explanation for why our solar system doesn’t have a hot Jupiter and other solar systems do. We’d like some broad theory that can explain all types of planetary systems that we’ve observed. By identifying missing processes or physics in our models of planet formation that allow us to account for hot Jupiters, we’re developing that bigger picture.

Do you have any other thoughts?

The one thing I might add is that, as we put together all the evidence for our review, we found that none of the theories can explain everything. And that motivates us to believe that there’s probably multiple ways to make a hot Jupiter — so it’s all the more important to study them.

Knowable Magazine is an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews.

Join us on Facebook or Twitter for a regular update.

#Nature

[childrenofexcess]

Strange Aeons: Understanding the theme of the 41st Millennium

[I just found this article on Faeit 212 and thought I should share it with tumblr for those that haven’t seen it. It’s quite long for a tumblr text post but worth it.]

“With the imminent release of the next edition of Warhammer 80,000 set to grace the tables of gamers in the next few weeks, it seems an appropriate time to take a step back and cast a contemplative eye over this most unique of sci fi settings. In this short article, I wanted to briefly discuss some of the literary and cultural influences of the 40k universe, and to understand what it is that can be said to really define the setting as we know it. To be sure, to offer an exhaustive analysis of all aspects of Warhammer 40,000 could take up an entire book; after all, we’re speaking here of an IP that’s been shaped by many different creatives and has existed in one form or another for nigh on 30-odd years. Indeed, there’d be a very strong argument to say that nothing can truly be said to ‘define’ Warhammer 40,000; it’s a wild collection of themes, aesthetic styles and ideas jammed into one insane, sprawling pastiche. It’s the heavy metal, post punk and glam rock music waves of the 80’s mixed with the cyberpunk sci-fi films of the 1990s, it’s Hieronymus Bosch meets Dune, it’s a universe that can claim inspiration from sources as vast and diverse as Gothic and Baroque architecture to mecha anime (lookin’ at you, Tau) and the history of the Roman Empire, all filtered through a distinctly British sense of ironic humour. 

Nevertheless, one major unifying thread has been the idea of ‘grimdarkness’, a theme that’s been raised to such a status now that it’s become an adjective, a noun and a moderately popular internet meme.  The question is then what constitutes the idea, and what influences we can find behind it.  As an overarching heading, I’m going to argue that what defines the idea of grimdark isn’t necessarily Warhammer 40,000’s emphasis on conflict, but rather the subtler and more disturbing notion of man’s insignificance in an essentially indifferent universe. If we take a trip back in time and look at the know-legendary Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader[1], we can see that this has been a theme from the very start. Released in 1987, this source and rulebook represented the first iteration of the 40k universe, and though the setting subsequently received numerous additions and revisions to its lore, much of the core structure would remain consistent. It’s as early as Rogue Trader that we get the first iteration of its famous opener, which captured its bleak themes in two short paragraphs;

"For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind by the will of the gods and the master of a million worlds by the will of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is Carrion Lord of the Imperium to whom a thousand souls are sacrificed each day, and for whom blood is drunk and flesh is eaten. Human blood and human flesh- the stuff which the Imperium is made. To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. This is the tale of these times. It is a universe that you can live today if you dare- for this is a dark and terrible era where you will find little comfort of hope. If you want to take part in the adventure then prepare yourself now. Forget the power of technology, science and common humanity. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for there is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter and the laughter of thirsting gods. But the universe is a big place and, whatever happens, you will not be missed...."

 It’s interesting to trace the number of different inspirations and angles that this tone initially emerged from. One useful place to start is by noting that the creators of Warhammer 40k always saw it as being an offshoot of Warhammer Fantasy Battles, not only in terms of its game mechanics but more importantly in its overall tone. Indeed, in the Rogue Trader book itself it’s boldly stated that 40k wasn’t ‘just a science fiction game, although it’s set in the future … we call it a fantasy game set in the far future … a sort of science fantasy.’ What’s significant about this, however, was that it was fantasy of a sort that was the diametric opposite of conventional[2] genre fare. Warhammer, both in its straight and futuristic guises, was part of the subgenre of ‘dark fantasy’, a reaction against the more mainstream conventions laid down by ‘swords and sorcery’ fiction (associated with the likes of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarianseries) as well as the titanic presences of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien’s work. In all such works one often commonplace thread was that they created universes that were essentially ordered, knowable and benign, with the most obvious illustration of this being that the concepts of good and evil were frequency depicted as cosmic forces with some sort of objective existence.  Arguably, this stemmed from (amongst other things) a tendency for the early founders of such fiction to use historical myths (such as Norse mythology and the Arthurian tales) as their inspiration, where man’s relationship to the natural world was seen as one of unity rather than alienation and where the protagonists of such tales were heavily idealised.

 Dark fantasy, however, presented a startlingly different perspective in its approach. In place of clear-cut black-and-white morality came only shades of grey, with no benevolent, omnipotent arbitrator to decide right from wrong. Both the characters and the worlds they inhabited became dirtier, more dysfunctional, even downright terrible. If Tolkienesque fiction (generally speaking) took its inspiration from a largely symbolic, even nostalgic, view of history, focusing on the legends of old, then dark fantasy looked at the crueller, actually existing side of the past and humanity. This was the world of plagues, of famines and blighted crops, where people lived short, difficult lives in a world that they little understood and which showed them little mercy. Again, we see these themes as early as Rogue Trader; as it put it, in the world of the 40k universe there exists an;

 ‘almost medieval attitude amongst the human societies. Fear, superstition, self-sacrifice and common acceptance of death are all strongly featured. Technology is present, but it is not central to the way people think. Most common folk see technology as witchcraft- so do the technicians!’

But this emphasis on the petty, unpleasant lives of humans in the 40k setting is only one half of the coin that is the concept of grimdark. For what the 40k universe achieves, which few other fictional settings do, is to emphasise the dark side of scale.  In this regard, one cannot talk of influences on the 40k setting without mentioning the works of H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s presence looms large over the 40k setting, with the most obvious connection being Chaos, though it’s a source of inspiration that works in a number of different ways. On a purely visual level, there’s the ideas of physical mutation and pulpy, tentacled horrors that stories like The Rats in the Walls and The Dunwich Horror introduced, which have been a part of Chaos ever since the days of the Lost and the Damned and Slaves to Darkness sourcebooks. Equally important in this regard was Lovecraft’s frequent emphasis on the dreamlike and surreal quality of the supernatural, which finds a parallel in some of the original illustrations of the artist Ian Miller, whose crowded, twisted nightmare landscapes featured heavily in these publications. (If this seems like mere speculation, it should be noted that Miller was commissioned to illustrate the Panther Horror paperbacks of Lovecraft’s works in the ‘60s and ‘70s.  But I think it does a disservice to both the writer himself and the 40k setting to only consider this angle. For what marked out Lovecraft as one of the seminal horror authors of the Twentieth Century wasn’t necessarily the monsters of his stories themselves (creative though they were) but his pioneering of the concept of ‘cosmic horror’. More of an ethos than a well-worked out philosophy, it might be roughly said that cosmic horror was a sentiment of seeing horror in vastness; the idea of things in this universe being so large, so immeasurable and incomprehensible that our limited human existence is absolutely meaningless by comparison. On one level, this was a sentiment expressed by Lovecraft’s fictional characters (most notably Cthulhu) and finds a parallel in the 40k setting with the Chaos Gods and the C’tan, terrible beings of such power and infinitude that the entirety of mankind is but cattle to them. But at the same time it’s really an attitude to our existence in the world itself. Lovecraft was writing at a time when astronomy and geology were coming into their own (both of which he studied during his teenage years), revealing the full scope of the cosmos in terms of its age and size, and many of his stories express this sense of despair and realising the insignificance of our brief existence by comparison. And it’s this sort of feeling that only something like Warhammer 40,000 can properly capture, presenting us with a galaxy entirely separated from our own both by cycles of eons and by a magnitude which we can scarce imagine, yet without the sort of up-beat positivity that a lot of more mainstream sci fi usually engenders. If things like Star Wars and Star Trek offer space operas offering high adventure, then Warhammer 40,000 offers us a universe where we are but small blips beset on all sides. To round things off, I think that if there’s one specific area that conveys this most of all it’s the Imperium itself, where the scale and indifference of the universe is reflected in mankind’s own social structures. To me, what will always define the Imperium and the grimdarkness of the 41stmillennium are those brief but sinister glimpses we get of the countless citizens and organisations of mankind’s empire; it’s the hunched, shuffling servitors we see in the corners of the artwork, it’s the description of the teaming, polluted hive cities and the administratums manned by millions of nameless scribes. Above all, it’s the idea that moral, social and political values are totally irrelevant in comparison to a galaxy spanning industrial bureaucracy fighting against its own extinction, where only the forces of efficiency and necessity can hold sway. A piece of art that I think conveys this most is John Blanche’s stunning depiction of the Mechanicus on Mars (see above), where in one sprawling picture we get a glimpse of an environment utterly alien to comforting sentiments; an enormous, arcane landscape where people have literally become just cogs in a machine.” [1] Which we can do thanks to the retro-review over on realmofchaos80s.blogspot.co.uk[2] Speaking relatively, that is

[shortsrifle7-blog]

Weekend Reading, 8.12.18

This week has flown by, and as I watched it pass I definitely sensed that the slowness of summer was giving way to the busier energy of fall. We’re not there yet, I know. But it’s coming.

I got my first two DI rotation placements, which means that I now have a sense of my schedule through December. September and early October should feel pretty manageable, and late fall will be demanding. After an initial day or two of nerves and resistance, I’m feeling pretty solid: aware of the changes ahead of me, but basically ready for them.

I realize, too, that a considerable part of me is excited about the DI. I think I’ve tried not to be, because so much of my grad school experience has defied was I was hoping for. I’ve developed a strong capacity to greet new experiences with an open mind and as few expectations as possible. Still, it’s good that I’m excited; I haven’t been excited about my training in a while, and the sensation is welcome.

Part of what excites me is the fact of my nutrition education finally becoming more humanized. I began this process because I love working with people. I needed a lot more scientific understanding and clinical exposure than I had in order to continue doing it in the way I wanted, and I don’t regret going back to school to fill in the gaps. It’s been hard, though, to study nutrition so abstractly; at many points in the last year it was easy to forget what had driven me to do all of this in the first place.

When I got my first two placements, it occurred to me that, for the first time since being a hospital volunteer at Georgetown, I’ll be working with people: patients, preceptors, peers. I know it’ll be difficult at times. But after a few very solitary years, the idea of an interactive workday holds lots of appeal.

We’ll see how I feel once I get there, and I don’t doubt that my feelings about it will fluctuate, just as my enthusiasm and energy for writing and cooking tend to ebb and flow. For today, I’m acknowledging my own desire for a new beginning.

Speaking of new beginnings, happy Monday. Here are some reads and some plant-based goodness to feast your eyes on.

Recipes

Four simple, summery recipes today, followed by one stunning dessert. First up is Kathy’s yummy and easy summer tomato cheese toast. Grilled cheese & tomato was my favorite sandwich when I was a kid, and this looks to be a perfect, grown-up answer to it.

I love a good multi-bean salad, and right now Kristina’s Mexican-style three bean salad is calling my name.

Speaking of beans, a simple yet creative butter bean and sweet potato smash. Amy’s recipe would be great as a lunch bowl component or scooped over toast.

There’s nothing like a colorful bowl of sesame peanut noodles. Ali’s stellar recipe calls for Chinese egg noodles, but any vegan noodle option will work; Udon noodles are my favorite these days.

Finally, it’s hard for me to put into words just how badly I’d like to devour a thick slice of Alexandra’s vegan chocolate raspberry cake right now. Those frosting swirls! ❤️

Reads

1. A sweet and surprising look at the power of expressing gratitude. Amit Kumar at the University of Texas at Austin and Nicholas Epley at Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago recruited study participants and asked them to write a thank you email to someone who had touched their life in a meaningful way. The participants were asked to make predictions about how the recipients would feel about being thanked and acknowledged; meanwhile, the researchers reached out to the recipients and asked them about how they actually felt and thought. The results:

The senders of the thank-you letters consistently underestimated how positive the recipients felt about receiving the letters and how surprised they were by the content. The senders also overestimated how awkward the recipients felt; and they underestimated how warm, and especially how competent, the recipients perceived them to be. Age and gender made no difference to the pattern of findings.

Other experiments showed that these same misjudgments affect our willingness to write thank-you messages. For instance, participants who felt less competent about writing a message of gratitude were less willing to send one; and, logically enough, participants were least willing to send thank-you messages to recipients who they felt would benefit the least.

Kumar and Epley believe that this asymmetry between the perspective of the potential expresser of gratitude and the recipient means that we often refrain from a “powerful act of civility” that would benefit both parties.

This gives me a nudge to send thank you notes more often, and also to find more simple, everyday ways of expressing and acknowledging gratitude.

2. Knowable Magazine interviews Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, about how the medical community is learning to manage chronic and acute pain in a time of opioid abuse.

3. Reading this article has made me incredibly excited to try Good Catch tuna!

4. I’m touched by Maria Del Russo’s candid thoughts on traveling alone and what it taught her; they brought me back to my trip to Prague last year and how much I realized about myself while I was there.

One of those realizations was that I had become—or maybe always been—afraid of being alone with myself. It’s a state that I successfully avoided for years with workaholism, self-imposed busy-ness, and various forms of codependency. Del Russo describes something similar:

I have never admitted out loud this stemmed from a deep, dark fear of being by myself. It is not that I just fear being alone. I fear being with me, and that is something different.

When I left Prague, I felt that I’d managed to become better friends with myself. More than anything else—the food, the sightseeing, the music—that’s what I took home from the trip. I’ve been gently cultivating it ever since.

5. Brandom Keim’s meditations on animal labor, both domesticated and in the wild, gave me a lot to think about. Particularly this sentiment:

Clean air and clean water, carbon sequestration, and organic materials are not yielded by something so abstract and impersonal as “ecosystems.” They’re the products of vast and unceasing animal and organismal activity. Countless creatures preparing soil, dispersing seeds, distributing nutrients, regulating populations, performing the myriad and constant tasks necessary to support the nature we take for granted…

Maybe recognizing animal labor at a larger scale would help people appreciate that.

Keim is particularly interested in pesticide use and its impact on birds, but for me the invitation to extend my consciousness to the rights of wild animals, as opposed to farm animals, was provocative and important.

A simple, staple recipe for tempeh is coming your way later this week. Till soon,

xo

Source: https://www.thefullhelping.com/weekend-reading-8-12-18/

[butaneplate02-blog]

Weekend Reading, 8.12.18

This week has flown by, and as I watched it pass I definitely sensed that the slowness of summer was giving way to the busier energy of fall. We’re not there yet, I know. But it’s coming.

I got my first two DI rotation placements, which means that I now have a sense of my schedule through December. September and early October should feel pretty manageable, and late fall will be demanding. After an initial day or two of nerves and resistance, I’m feeling pretty solid: aware of the changes ahead of me, but basically ready for them.

I realize, too, that a considerable part of me is excited about the DI. I think I’ve tried not to be, because so much of my grad school experience has defied was I was hoping for. I’ve developed a strong capacity to greet new experiences with an open mind and as few expectations as possible. Still, it’s good that I’m excited; I haven’t been excited about my training in a while, and the sensation is welcome.

Part of what excites me is the fact of my nutrition education finally becoming more humanized. I began this process because I love working with people. I needed a lot more scientific understanding and clinical exposure than I had in order to continue doing it in the way I wanted, and I don’t regret going back to school to fill in the gaps. It’s been hard, though, to study nutrition so abstractly; at many points in the last year it was easy to forget what had driven me to do all of this in the first place.

When I got my first two placements, it occurred to me that, for the first time since being a hospital volunteer at Georgetown, I’ll be working with people: patients, preceptors, peers. I know it’ll be difficult at times. But after a few very solitary years, the idea of an interactive workday holds lots of appeal.

We’ll see how I feel once I get there, and I don’t doubt that my feelings about it will fluctuate, just as my enthusiasm and energy for writing and cooking tend to ebb and flow. For today, I’m acknowledging my own desire for a new beginning.

Speaking of new beginnings, happy Monday. Here are some reads and some plant-based goodness to feast your eyes on.

Recipes

Four simple, summery recipes today, followed by one stunning dessert. First up is Kathy’s yummy and easy summer tomato cheese toast. Grilled cheese & tomato was my favorite sandwich when I was a kid, and this looks to be a perfect, grown-up answer to it.

I love a good multi-bean salad, and right now Kristina’s Mexican-style three bean salad is calling my name.

Speaking of beans, a simple yet creative butter bean and sweet potato smash. Amy’s recipe would be great as a lunch bowl component or scooped over toast.

There’s nothing like a colorful bowl of sesame peanut noodles. Ali’s stellar recipe calls for Chinese egg noodles, but any vegan noodle option will work; Udon noodles are my favorite these days.

Finally, it’s hard for me to put into words just how badly I’d like to devour a thick slice of Alexandra’s vegan chocolate raspberry cake right now. Those frosting swirls! ❤️

Reads

1. A sweet and surprising look at the power of expressing gratitude. Amit Kumar at the University of Texas at Austin and Nicholas Epley at Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago recruited study participants and asked them to write a thank you email to someone who had touched their life in a meaningful way. The participants were asked to make predictions about how the recipients would feel about being thanked and acknowledged; meanwhile, the researchers reached out to the recipients and asked them about how they actually felt and thought. The results:

The senders of the thank-you letters consistently underestimated how positive the recipients felt about receiving the letters and how surprised they were by the content. The senders also overestimated how awkward the recipients felt; and they underestimated how warm, and especially how competent, the recipients perceived them to be. Age and gender made no difference to the pattern of findings.

Other experiments showed that these same misjudgments affect our willingness to write thank-you messages. For instance, participants who felt less competent about writing a message of gratitude were less willing to send one; and, logically enough, participants were least willing to send thank-you messages to recipients who they felt would benefit the least.

Kumar and Epley believe that this asymmetry between the perspective of the potential expresser of gratitude and the recipient means that we often refrain from a “powerful act of civility” that would benefit both parties.

This gives me a nudge to send thank you notes more often, and also to find more simple, everyday ways of expressing and acknowledging gratitude.

2. Knowable Magazine interviews Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, about how the medical community is learning to manage chronic and acute pain in a time of opioid abuse.

3. Reading this article has made me incredibly excited to try Good Catch tuna!

4. I’m touched by Maria Del Russo’s candid thoughts on traveling alone and what it taught her; they brought me back to my trip to Prague last year and how much I realized about myself while I was there.

One of those realizations was that I had become—or maybe always been—afraid of being alone with myself. It’s a state that I successfully avoided for years with workaholism, self-imposed busy-ness, and various forms of codependency. Del Russo describes something similar:

I have never admitted out loud this stemmed from a deep, dark fear of being by myself. It is not that I just fear being alone. I fear being with me, and that is something different.

When I left Prague, I felt that I’d managed to become better friends with myself. More than anything else—the food, the sightseeing, the music—that’s what I took home from the trip. I’ve been gently cultivating it ever since.

5. Brandom Keim’s meditations on animal labor, both domesticated and in the wild, gave me a lot to think about. Particularly this sentiment:

Clean air and clean water, carbon sequestration, and organic materials are not yielded by something so abstract and impersonal as “ecosystems.” They’re the products of vast and unceasing animal and organismal activity. Countless creatures preparing soil, dispersing seeds, distributing nutrients, regulating populations, performing the myriad and constant tasks necessary to support the nature we take for granted…

Maybe recognizing animal labor at a larger scale would help people appreciate that.

Keim is particularly interested in pesticide use and its impact on birds, but for me the invitation to extend my consciousness to the rights of wild animals, as opposed to farm animals, was provocative and important.

A simple, staple recipe for tempeh is coming your way later this week. Till soon,

xo

Source: https://www.thefullhelping.com/weekend-reading-8-12-18/

[daisyimhalfcrazy]

Term 1 Project:Computing with impossibility

A group project by: Ioannis Gkigkelos, Abi Price, Katarina Popovic.

The terror of ‘no error’

We are ever more fascinated by our machines. And by numbers.  And by the possibility for the numbers to simulate reality. Ultimately, by our ability to predict and put everything in order, a process in which computers are essential. “Our information age utopia is an error-free world of efficiency, accuracy, and predictability.” (Nunes, 2011, 4)In Error, Glitch Noise and Jam in New Media Cultures, editor Mark Nunes states in the intro, we are basically borrowing this expectation of perfect order or the absence of the mistake. Unfortunately, what hides behind this obsession of order is actually the objective of total control, loss of privacy, basic freedoms to decide along with human rights in which ‘Big data meets Big brother’ systems are possible at the social level as high as the state you happen to be a citizen of.

“Singularitarians believe that the world is “knowable” and computationally simulatable and that computers will be able to process the messiness of the real world just like they have every other problem that everyone said couldn’t be solved by computers.” (Ito, 2018)

The problem with this seemingly hopeful idea is that it is profit and progress driven, or as Ito formulates it, it is “the natural evolution of the worship of exponential growth applied to modern computation and science.”(Ito, 2018) In such an environment an unpredictable change, an ‘accident’ or an (unaccounted for) error becomes an enemy.

As Newton’s III law declare – For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. One part of the world is largely fascinated by the order, but the other part is not. For the artistic community, the disturbance is one of the golden opportunities to open the other doors. It is almost as if the more control one tries to have, the more that particular system is interesting to be mined by the artistic community. The great example of the ‘unacceptable’ in the established state of things was the urinal Duchamp displayed in 1917, kind of marking the death of ‘art as it should be’ once again, a few years after 1913 when his Nude Descending a Staircase stirred the Art scene in New York.

Not only the ready-made was born and the concept of the non-retinal art, but it opened a whole new field of artistic practice and research. Similar happened to the perfect Cartesian coordinate system. Fed by small deviations, in the works of Georg Nees, we watch it produce interesting graphics outcomes with many variations (depending on the type of ‘anomaly’ introduced). Disturbing the expected (or – purposeful) order is the birth of a possible new order. And the error is detrimental to opening new possibilities for machine creativity. This is the field that caught our curious eye- what happens when the system is dancing on that thin line between the possible and impossible, between stability and instability in the program that finds a way to execute code it previously accepted as possible.

The Beauty in Numerical Instability

The artifact we have produced during our research is based on the variation of the code for the spiral example from Mastering OpenFrameworks: Creative Coding Demystified (2013, 50-55) where a line is drawn between the previous and the current position of a point. Current position rotates at an angle “a” and “a” is incremented by a variable “b” which is also incremented by a variable change, and those values are initially doubles (the numbers with many decimals). However, the instability is introduced by changing the type of variables from doubles to floats. In the images below, you will see the stable variant on the left side, and on the right side, the unstable one. In the image no1, notice the regular spiral form on the left side and many diverse shapes on the right side (circles, octagons, rectangles…) and connections.   Experimenting with the rate of change of b (bchange1, bchange2) we realized that decimal numbers except 0.5 produced another kind of instability (image no2). Now the stable spiral shapes would rotate around the center of the canvas producing a new pattern. So we set out to play with doubles and floats only on the bchange1, bchange2 variables (image no3).

As time progressed this rotation of the two spirals would get out of control and produce another chaotic pattern as in the left picture below while on the right picture the pattern would stay the same. The end result is somehow surprising since our stable example this time produces more instability than our unstable one. (image no4)

According to the deterministic chaos theory, the minimal interventions in the initial variables in a system produce a very complex result. And this is exactly what we have observed in this process.

Is this error or possibility?

Playing with instability in the code allowed us to see more than we could have expected, giving way to possibilities that we perhaps wouldn’t have thought of executing before. Also, it drew us away from intention and towards discovery instead.

“We have also seen several times that creative behavior from a program was reported when something went wrong – a misconception by the programmer, a syntax error that fortuitously produced a viable program, etc. …The crux of this view is that their behavior surprises their creator, and there does seem to be some link between surprising behavior and creativity. “(Partridge and Rowe, 1994, 151)

Rather than seeing it as a ‘mistake’, an error in the system comes with the field of possibility that following Deleuze’s philosophy of the virtual as conditions from which the experience emerges, Tim Barker describes as a potential:

“The error is potential in a sense that it is not pre-formed or pre-programmed by the artist. It can only be described as potential, which is inherent in the machine… It is only by allowing the capacity for potential errors, by moving away from the territory of the preconceived aesthetics of errorless machines, that we may provide the opportunity to think the unthought, to allow digital technologies to become-other.” (Nunes, 2011, 52)

Just as during the Cage’s 4’33’’ (1952) composition and in Rauschenberg’s White Painting (1951), the empty, void or the ‘unexpected’ is to be filled by the audience’s intervention, the system is expected to fill the instability potential with an outcome it executes out of the human eye or intervention.

Control – Surrender Axis

We can also look at this process from the perspective of the role of the artist, where Brian Eno (Edge, 2011) talks about creation process moving away from that of an architect knowing exactly what the final product will look like to approaching it as a gardener. After initially setting up the system, we let go of part of the control, relying on the dynamics of the system to finish the work. The actual computer is given part of the creation of the artwork. Surrender, in Eno’s words, is what we go to galleries and church for – to be taken away. This, as an artistic practice, means incorporating this field of ‘impossibility’ that opens new dimensions for research and creation. In our example, after planting our ‘seeds’ we had no access to the process. Once the ‘build ’was done, the outcomes were surprising and much different from the ‘stable’ example. What is truly impressive is there was nothing a program ‘looked at’ or was being previously fed with. It got the simple code and all of a sudden we were in the area of computer agreeing to something it is ‘almost impossible’ to do. So we basically surrendered our intentions to the machine and waited for the outcome. And the system delivered an array of aesthetical outputs.

Conclusion

Given the meaning of the word ‘to err’: ‘to wander’ off the beaten path, the machine actually has shown a significant amount of flexibility, basically adjusting the impossible to become possible and displayed. Going back to the modern social objective of the perfect predictable order (without the threshold of flexibility the perfect order simply crashes) we can conclude that the research into the (im)possibility has a larger field of implications then purely aesthetic and software ones. Due to the negative nature in which the ‘error’ is assumed to be in the computer system as well as in our cultural and political framework, highlighting the instability, ‘mistake’, process of surrender and the computational system’s sensitivity seems to be a bright torch to lit as a contribution to keeping things real in the current AI and Singularity one-truth overhype.

References

Nunes, M. editor, (2011)  Error: Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media Cultures. New York London: Continuum Books.

Ito, J. (2018), Resisting Reduction: A Manifesto (Designing our Complex Future with Machines). [online] Available from https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/resisting-reduction [Accessed December 2018].

Partridge, D. and Rowe, J. (1994) Computers and Creativity. Oxford, England: Intellect.

Perevalov, D. (2013) Mastering OpenFrameworks: Creative Coding Demystified. Packt Publishing.

Edge (2011) Composers as Gardeners. [online] Available from https://www.edge.org/conversation/brian_eno-composers-as-gardeners [Accessed November 14th, 2018].

[crisis2019]

The Depression Of 2019-2021? – Analysis

MISESDecember 30, 2018

financial crisis dollar

By Brendan Brown*

The profound question which transcends all this day-to-day market drama over the holidays is the nature of the economic slowdown now occurring globally. This slowdown can be seen both inside and outside the US. In reviewing the laboratory of history — especially those experiments featuring severe asset inflation, unaccompanied by high official estimates of consumer price inflation — three possible “echoes” deserve attention in coming weeks and months. (History echoes rather than repeats!)

Will We Learn from History — And What Will Soon Be History?

The behavioral finance theorists tell us that which echo sounds and which outcome occurs is more obvious in hindsight than to anyone in real time. As Daniel Kahneman writes (in Thinking Fast and Slow):

The core of hindsight bias is that we believe we understand the past, which implies the future should also be knowable; but in fact we understand the past less than we believe we do – compelling narratives foster an illusion of inevitability; but no such story can include the myriad of events that would have caused a different outcome .

Whichever historical echo turns out to be loudest as the Great Monetary Inflation of 2011-18 enters its late dangerous phase. Whether we’re looking at 1927-9, 1930-3, or 1937-8, the story will seem obvious in retrospect, at least according to skilled narrators. There may be competing narratives about these events — even decades into the future, just as there still are today about each of the above mentioned episodes. Even today, the Austrian School, the Keynesians, and the monetarists, all tell very different historical narratives and the weight of evidence has not knocked out any of these competitors in the popular imagination.

The Stories We Tell Ourselves Are Important

And while on the subject of behavioral finance’s perspectives on potential historical echoes and actual market outcomes, we should consider Robert Shiller’s insights into story-telling (in “Irrational Exuberance”):

Speculative feedback loops that are in effect naturally occurring Ponzi schemes do arise from time to time without the contrivance of a fraudulent manager. Even if there is no manipulator fabricating false stories and deliberately deceiving investors in the aggregate stock market, tales about the market are everywhere….. The path of a naturally occurring Ponzi scheme – if we may call speculative bubbles that – will be more irregular and less dramatic since there is no direct manipulation but the path may sometimes resemble that of a Ponzi scheme when it is supported by naturally occurring stories.

Bottom line: great asset inflations (although the term “inflation” remains foreign to Shiller!) are populated by “naturally occurring Ponzi schemes,” with the most extreme and blatant including Dutch tulips, Tokyo golf clubs, Iceland credits, and Bitcoins; the less extreme but much more economically important episodes in recent history include financial equities in 2003-6 or the FANMGs in 2015-18; and perhaps the biggest in this cycle could yet be private equity.

Echoes of Past Crises

First, could 2019-21 feature a loud echo of 1926-8 (which in turn had echoes in 1987-9, 1998-9, and 2015-17)?

The characteristic of 1926-8 was a “Fed put” in the midst of an incipient cool-down of asset inflation (along with a growth cycle slowdown or even onset of mild recession) which succeeds apparently in igniting a fresh economic rebound and extension/intensification of asset inflation for a while longer (two years or more). In mid-1927 New York Fed Governor Benjamin Strong administered his coup de whiskey to the stock market (and to the German loan boom), notwithstanding the protest of Reichsbank President Schacht).

The conditions for such a Fed put to be successful include a still strong current of speculative story telling (the narratives have not yet become tired or even sick); the mal-investment and other forms of over-spending (including types of consumption) must not be on such a huge scale as already going into reverse; and the camouflage of leverage — so much a component of “natural Ponzi schemes” — must not yet be broken. The magicians, otherwise called “financial engineers” still hold power over market attention.

Most plausibly we have passed the stage in this cycle where such a further kiss of life could be given to asset inflation. And so we move on to the second possible echo: could this be 1937-8?

There are some similarities in background. Several years of massive QE under the Roosevelt Administration (1934-6) (not called such and due ostensibly to the monetization of massive gold inflows to the US) culminated in a stock market and commodity market bubble in 1936, to which the Fed responded by effecting a tiny rise in interest rates while clawing back QE. Under huge political pressure the Fed reversed these measures in early 1937; a weakening stock market seems to reverse. But then came the Crash of late Summer and early Autumn 1937 and the confirmed onset of the Roosevelt recession (roughly mid-1937 to mid-1938). This was even more severe than the 1929-30 downturn. But then there was a rapid re-bound.

On further consideration, there are grounds for skepticism about whether the 1937-8 episode will echo loudly in the near future.

In 1937 there had been barely three years of economic expansion. Credit bubbles and investment spending bubbles (mal-investment) were hardly to be seen. And the monetary inflation in the US was independent and very different from monetary conditions in Europe, where in fact the parallel economic downturn was very mild if even present. And of course the re-bound had much to do with military re-armament.

It is troubling that the third possible echo — that of the Great Depression of 1930-2 — could be the most likely to occur.

The Great Depression from a US perspective was two back-to-back recessions; first the severe recession of autumn 1929 to mid-1931; and then the immediate onset of an even more devastating downturn from summer 1931 to summer 1932 (then extended by the huge uncertainty related to the incoming Roosevelt Administration and its gold policy). It was the global credit meltdown — the unwinding of the credit bubble of the 1920s most importantly as regards the giant lending boom into Germany — which triggered that second recession and snuffed out a putative recovery in mid-1931.

It is possible to imagine such a two-stage process in the present instance.

Equity market tumble accompanies a pull-back of consumer and investment spending in coming quarters. The financial sector and credit quakes come later as collateral values plummet and exposures come into view. In the early 1930s the epicentre of the credit collapse was middle Europe (most of all Germany); today Europe would also be central, but we should also factor in Asia (and of course China in particular).

And there is much scenario-building around the topics of ugly political and geo-political developments that could add to the woes of the global downturn. Indeed profound shock developments are well within the normal range of probabilistic vision in the UK, France and Germany — a subject for another day. And such vision should also encompass China.

*About the author: Brendan Brown is the Head of Economic Research at Mitsubishi UFJ Securities International.

Source: This article was published by the MISES Institute