In philosophy, ontology (from the Greek ὄν, genitive ὄντος: of being (part. of εἶναι: to be) and -λογία: science, study, theory) is a branch of metaphysics, often considered the most fundamental. It is the study of the nature of being, existence, or reality in general and of its basic categories and their relations, with particular emphasis on determining what entities exist or can be said to exist, and how these can be grouped and related within an ontology (typically, a hierarchy subdivided according to similarities and differences). Though distinguished from epistemology, as theories of knowledge typically involve some assumptions about existence and what exists, these can be seen as complementary disciplines.

“Operating system” implies that we’re only operating. We’re not even necessarily existing, living or having the fulfillment of a life well lived with tangible meaning. We’re only operating with your system. How joyless.

A multi-dimensional augmented reality tuning device from which you receive novel information, record and transmit perceptual experiences and vibrationally tune yourself to any experiential frequency you want - or rather, that the technology can provide. Ha, that sounds like the plot of a dimestore sci-fi novel…

There’s not necessarily anything magical, supernatural or even spiritual about it. There can be, I suppose, though that likely has to do with the quality of information you tune into with the technology…

Hush, your computer knows you’re scared. It’s trying to carress you, but you only ever tickle it with the tips of your cold fingers, which it tries to warm up for you by emitting heat…

And here’s the Blu-Ray region one.

Is there some hidden geopolitical significance hidden in this? Did South America fall to NATCOMSAT or some such Orwellian mapping of the world that we just aren’t aloud to know about?

As songwriters who want to be successful by our culture’s standards, we tend to think that our music has to travel far in order to matter. We need to tour widely, or at least be heard beyond our local communities, via radio or the Net. We tend to believe (sometimes it’s an unconscious thing) that a non-touring local musician, especially one who hasn’t recorded his or her work, is less important than one whose product is shipped a greater distance.

But if we actually start living as environmental leaders recommend, getting more of our food closer to home, and choosing to buy and consume less, we might also start to value local artists in new ways. Local songwriters might feel more empowered to write songs grown organically in a real time and place…and we might not feel badly anymore if those songs (or if we as individuals) don’t travel so much.

This re-framing might encourage songwriters to respond in a more particular, specific way about what’s going on in their neighbourhoods, and to consciously sing the songs for the people there. The aim of writing a great song would be not to have it recorded by a big Nashville star, but to help actual people, right here and now. That kind of song, like that kind of great-tasting organic food, is nourishing to the soul. If songs are like food, maybe we can grow our own.

It’s nice to see these sorts of subjects spoken about from another angle, especially one which shows that not all artists are self-centered bores hell-bent on mega-stardom.

And the FDIC is bringing back retirees, staffing up and hiring an outside firm to help them with all the new work they expect to be having.

BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - Furious rail commuters in Argentina set fire to a train on Thursday in anger over delays during the morning rush hour.

What’s that famous line about how at least Mussolini got the trains to run on time?

As Italy slides into fascism:

However, defense of the public order cannot justify such a threat to individual rights. In principle as much as out of respect for the European Human Rights Convention, the government has an at least equal obligation to protect citizens’ privacy. The mobilization against Edvige is all the more justified in that this new information system covering French citizens is only the most recent: for the last several years, police files have proliferated, not to mention video surveillance. To cross over in this way from a society in which each person is presumed innocent to another in which everyone’s guilt is assumed constitutes a dangerous drift for a government of law.

They should have read their Google EULA!

Does the Google PageRank system reflect popularity of a website or determine it? Next week, on Oprah!

The original meaning of cant was a secret language supposedly used by rogues and vagabonds in Elizabethan England. This Thieves’ Cant was a feature of popular pamphlets and plays particularly between 1590 and 1615, but continued to feature in literature through the 18th century. There are questions about how genuinely the literature reflected vernacular use in the criminal underworld. A thief in 1839 claimed that the cant he had seen in print was nothing like the cant then used by gypsies, thieves and beggars. He also said that each of these used distinct vocabularies, which overlapped; the gypsies having a cant word for everything, and the beggars using a lower style than the thieves/

*{The assault on private meaning, hidden value not shared with the group}

Further benefits: licensing fees paid by governments and international corporations any time they use, access or make derivitative works based on your information. Each person becomes paid a “Basic Income Guarantee” type wage, but based on how much energy usage credits you can output, combined with, or compounded by your ability to generate entertainment and/or entrainment content to distill into other people’s nervosystospirits.

green economics - google search

Now only if we could put them directly into cubicles with feed slots we could eliminate our dependence on foreign oil fully and totally.

One time at a motorcycle convention in Manhattan, I ran into some of my former Israeli co-workers, all really nice people. And one of them remarked on my style of dress at the time that I looked like a “Representative,” at which I must have frowned imperceptibly over not understanding what he meant, because his eye sparkled immediately and he seemed to correct himself. He said to me, smiling - that sly smile that landed him in jail at least the one time I worked with him, “Superstar, I mean.”

Narcotics and hallucinogens are trifles compared to ‘mascons’, which are so powerful that they mask whole swaths of reality.

Trottelreiner explains, “[mascon derives] from mask, masquerade, mascara. By introducing properly prepared mascons to the brain, one can mask any object in the outside world behind a fictitious image–superimposed–and with such dexterity, that the psychemasconated subject cannot tell which of his perceptions have been altered, and which have not. If but for a single instant you could see this world of ours the way it really is–undoctored, unadulterade, uncensored–you would drop in your tracks!”

Remember, we have lazers!™

is a showcase for what economist Timothy Considine calls “industrial symbiosis, where waste from one industrial plant is used as inputs for another.” […] The sludge from the pharmaceutical plant’s yeast-based processes fertilizes farmers’ fields. Like symbiosis between plants or animals, what one partner excretes the other needs. One industry’s trash is another’s treasure.

With an ever increasing gap between rich and poor, and the increasing number of people living below a minimum standard of living, there is a need for new solutions and a complete reassessment of the problems and what really counts.

The Layers feature in Google Earth provides a variety of data points of geographic interest that you can select to display over your viewing area. This includes points of interest (POIs) as well as map, road, terrain, and even building data. The full list of layers is available in the Layers panel […]

Tip: You can display or hide country, state or province borders by checking or unchecking Borders in the Layers panel.

All you need is to have people’s augmented reality filters being fed information off the freely available Google Multiple Parallel Earths API central processing device, itself floating on an infinite sea of free wireless interweb courtesy of Don’t Be Evil family reeducation courtesy campaign&trade.

/I’m sorry, that’s an evil web search. We can’t let you do that./

Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt suggested in their 1972 book Take Today, (p. 4) that with electric technology, the consumer would become a producer. In the 1980 book, The Third Wave, futurologist Alvin Toffler coined the term “prosumer” when he predicted that the role of producers and consumers would begin to blur and merge (even though he described it in his book Future Shock from 1970). Toffler envisioned a highly saturated marketplace as mass production of standardized products began to satisfy basic consumer demands. To continue growing profit, businesses would initiate a process of mass customization, that is the mass production of highly customized products.

But sometimes the witness to an event changes those events.

While practicing in China earlier in his career, Boal would apply ’simultaneous dramaturgy’. In this process, the actors or audience members could stop a performance, often a short scene in which a character was being oppressed in some way (for example, a typically chauvinist man mistreating a woman or a factory owner mistreating an employee). The audience would suggest different actions for the actors to carry out on-stage in an attempt to change the outcome of what they were seeing. This was an attempt to undo the traditional audience/actor partition and bring audience members into the performance, to have an input into the dramatic action they were watching.

Beijing Jiaoda Microunion Tech. Co., Ltd is a high-tech company with legal person status, and has the backing of Beijing Jiaotong University, a famous university with a history of over one century. Since its establishment, the company insists on technical backstopping and market-orientation, and aims at constructing a first-class company, setting up renowned brand, and entering into global giants. After several years of arduous efforts, our company has established strict management system, complete supervision mechanism, scientific decision-making procedure, free R&D atmosphere, and perfect quality guarantee and after-sale service system.

I’ve never seen a US company openly emphasizing the fact that it has “legal person status” on its website. The wave of the future? I wonder if it has to do with that they work with “computer supervision system.”

Ironically, the biggest buyers of advertising on Google’s new take-over-all-media product are HDTV manufacturers and retailers, along with big Cable TV companies/paid ISP providers. Google vs Comcast, two and a half years from now.

I see strands of the metanarrative coming together into a tapestry that looks something like this. Conversations about healthy local economies rest on the assumption that a community can basically produce enough self-sufficiently to take care of its own immediate needs, and enough extra to trade with other communities.

Strong local economies are likely to become strong and stay strong because they keep an eye on their ecological inputs and outputs - what the land can sustain and how to use it optimally for all species. Local, alternative or complementary currencies may be a viable tool for local economies {see also: shared value community, community of meaning} to favorably manipulate trades and exchanges of value inside and outside of the community. Microcosm macrocosm. Urbanates and technates.

Dale is right:

alternative currencies could base value on a gold standard, a representation of work-hours, or whatever local convention might come up with.

We’re currently in the midst of an “energy crisis” or whatever the vogue term is right now. Our energy crisis isn’t just a matter of human greed, but Global Warming as a quasi-Nature-god type of phenomenon essentially can be read as a “Nature is mad at us,” or, by extension: “God is punishing our bad behavior” - ie, misusing fossil fuels and fucking up the balance of not just nature, but of the human world as well.

An energy crisis means that as national economies become flaccid and balkanize into regional and community currencies, you’re going to see economies which are based strictly on energy usage, “energy credits” as they call it.

People stop commuting as much, and communities start to produce their own food and trade goods: creating fresh new jobs and inspiring new culture of working together to make the region succeed after a time of extreme crisis.

Less commuting means telecommuting means people exist in multi-realm digital spaces, some virtual reality, some augmented reality, some text-based, some based on paradigms wholly other. Energy credits in such a locally-based society become less used for travel than for energy production to power simple electronic conveniences upwards to fully-immersive digital realms.

The files they exchange are, in effect, a system of measuring value. Trading files is a form of exchange after all, bartering. The old days of FTP mp3 servers where you had to upload so many new files in order to download anything.

also, if anyone can create money, then there is the possibility of competition among the monetary systems, rather than a government-run monopoly on formal forms of economic exchange.

Competition among alternative, complementary, and individual monetary systems and methods of determining value within a community. Sounds pretty crazy right?

This is all the more odd when the original EULA (the terms of use license) is read carefully. It essentially says that anything you do with the browser is Google property. If you use it to load Google Docs and write a book, then the book belongs to Google.

It’s hard to imagine that the company thinks it could get away with what is an apparent scam to steal content.

I predict that the future of technology marketing will everything to do with licensing agreements between user and producer, because all products and services will be basically of the same quality, with the same basic underlying technological paradigms and assumptions - give or take. It’s like how marketing first began to differentiate essentially identical product offerings into distinguished sets of meaning with identifiable characteristics: logos and mascot characters to make it seem like our peas are better when they’re actually basically the same.

Watch what you agree to. No one reads user licenses anymore. You just click on “I Accept” blindly along party lines so you can get from point A to point B; no wonder politics are the way they are now…

Web browser sessions as entities. URL’s open together at once as a frame of reference, set of reference points, stage, story-space against which some meaning is interjected via a narrative sequence.

It’s generally bad for the economy if someone can just create money on their own.

So says conventional wisdom, certainly. But how and why did such an infobit become conventional wisdom in the first place? Did it have anything to do with the fact that the people who own banks are the people who sponsor what conventional economic wisdom for the masses turns out to be?

Whether or not creating your own *money* is good or bad, creating your own value is unarguably good, because you can use it to exchange value with your neighbors in non-zero sum deals.

“Simplicity of character is the natural result of profound thought.”

1. Theatre of the Oppressed
2. Liberation Theology

This is what I was saying about deletion earlier today, that in the computing world it tends to mean reassignment of value-status, as opposed to actually being eliminated altogether.

After a few days of waiting, in mid-June, Facebook wrote me back (I made sure to get specific “written” [electronic] record that they deleted the information):

Hi Tim,

We have deleted your profile information and removed your email address from our login database. Please let me know if you have further questions or concerns.

Thanks,

Oliver
User Operations
Facebook

I’m curious how my account deletion has affected other people within my [community of meaning]. Are comments I made or actions I took within their virtual world altogether eliminated, or have they now some kind of anonymous actor who was responsible for actions which remain? Have I been blown out of existence as a node in their network, like the mysterious sephiroth on the Tree of Life, or do they retain me as a “null” node, out of which connective information between others still radiate?

I’m thinking about it within a larger array of communication tools and options available to me via the internet. Blogging for me, is equivalent to email, although the relative importance of each goes up and down depending. Emailing for me is generally specific, and blogging for me is generally universal. Although, occasionally I will write blog posts or include specific words or phrases in a post for a specific person, often without ever telling them. Some part of me just assumes that the information will get through as needed, even if its specific means of transmission remains esoteric.

Natya Yoga, popularly known as Dance Yoga, the all-inclusive spiritual path of action, is a combination of mainly Bhakti Yoga and Karma Yoga with many elements of Hatha Yoga and Raja Yoga.

Those practising Natya Yoga believe that the fastest way to realize all the intricate aspects of Bhakti (e.g. different types of Lilas) is by enacting various devotional songs, which require one to master one’s emotional states.

According to the Karma Yoga principles, the practitioner of Natya Yoga learns to do everything with a certain attitude that leads to the complete detachment from and control of one’s physical, emotional and mental activities. One is expected to devote all one’s actions to the Supreme as a sacrifice. The stage performances are an opportunity for the dancer to remain indifferent to the spectators’ reactions, which require a great deal of self-control.

So I’m sort of picturing a re-telling of that story of immigrant groups vying for territory and identity in Upper Manhattan in the fifties or whatever into a locally-based drama about the clash of cultures and competition for resources happening right on the streets of my neighborhood every day. I’m thinking not only would such a drama - set to music, obviously - be freaking hilarious, with really exaggerated versions of costumes and character types, but that it would also - if done well - bring together “warring” factions within the neighborhood, give them appropriate voices and allow them to talk together within a “safe” public space about the changes happening within the neighborhood, why they’re happening, and what to do about them. That kind of shit, to me, is what the inherent power is within theatre: creating a shared space within which a community of meaning may define or re-define itself.

Concinnity is the harmonious or purposeful reinforcement of the various parts of a work of art. Generally the higher the art, the higher the degree of concinnity.

Concinnity comes from the Latin “concintas”, meaning skillfully put together.

And they relate it to Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk

Gesamtkunstwerk (”total,” “integrated,” or “complete artwork”) is a German term attributed to the German opera composer Richard Wagner (who first used the term in his 1849 essay Art and Revolution). He used it to refer to an operatic performance encompassing music, theater, and the visual arts. Wagner felt that in ancient Greek tragedy, these had been fused, but at some point they drifted apart — he was critical of the opera of his time, especially Grand opera, which he felt emphasized bravura singing, and sensational staging, orchestral and plot effects, too heavily and did not feature quality poetic drama genuinely supported by other arts. …

Opera has been often thought to be an example of Gesamtkunstwerk in general, as it requires the that all of the major classical schools of art be utilized. This includes painting and the two-dimensional visual arts in general (set painting, e.g.); sculpture and architecture (set design); poetry and narrative (the libretto); music (the orchestration and the vocalizations); and movement (blocking, or dance).

Wagnerian opera not only combines all these things, but demands for the most part that all of them be present on the stage both concurrently and constantly for the entire duration of the performance.

This is exactly what got me so excited about doing theatre work this summer, to be in an environment where all these different arts were being applied together. In some cases, I wished that this or that element of the overall thing were better, but it also gave me a sense of what kinds of trade-offs you can get away with in such things and an elementary grasp of how these various forms complement and uplift one another.

But I like surveillance as a subject for another reason: because its a good metaphor for some element of how the human perceptual system operates. During what I think of as conscious awareness, the mind is typically always watching or listening (although its attention and level of focus tend to modulate). Mind itself, or maybe part of it, maybe something like “omnipresent surveillance”, like an “oh my god, did you just see what Gladys did?”

This quote is cool:

Indeed, without stories our experiences would merely be unevaluated sensations from an undifferentiated stream of events. Stories are the repository of our collective wisdom about the world of social/cultural behavior; they are the key mediating structures for our encounters with reality.

Telling a story is the essence of theatre: creating in the perceptual field of the audience a sensation of meaningful sequential events. The sets, props, costumes and acting in theatre is all designed to enhance that, to make that both more concrete and more evocative.

Surveillance is a sort of omni-present theatre writ large on a societal scale. I think Grant Morrison may have talked about this somewhere: that the more cameras go up in front of people’s faces, the more they’re going to start acting like, well… actors. Surveillance is theatre in that it forces people to perform (”for the cameras” - nevermind whoever’s watching or not watching), but it becomes a form of legal story-telling when a subset of surveilled moments is selected and edited in order to present evidence for or against a crime.

The courtroom, itself, is a place where stories go to battle in the [community of meaning]. Multiple variations of one particular narrative (made up of many surveilled theatre moments, activities committed when you know someone’s watching, or want to put on a good show - “what’s my motivation here?”) being presented and weighed against one another, and then ultimately selected or thrown out by virtue of arbiters or agents of meaning selection on behalf of a community.

I haven’t seen it but I think there’s a Robin Williams movie that sort of deals with this: that everyone’s life is surveilled completely and that at death, the footage is edited to make a memorial real. I don’t know how the movie talks these things through via the story format, but it makes me wonder things apropos to our given situation and the situation in which we’ll increasingly find ourselves in the years to come: who owns the rough footage of your life? Who gets to do the editing and how do they pick out what kind of story to tell about you out of all possible narrative strandes available?

In semiotics, denotation is the surface or literal meaning encoded to a signifier, and the definition most likely to appear in a dictionary.

From a more internet-tech perspective, we could look at the signifier as being like the URI (universal resource identifier) anchor.

In Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, showing a maliciously-crafted black-and-white bitmap to a person familiar with binary numbers can cause their brain to be reprogrammed. These images tap into the brain’s lower-level functioning which, the book suggests, all humans share. Thus, showing someone familiar with binary results in the reprogramming, regardless of what language they speak, because, the book suggests, each individual’s understanding of spoken language is built on top of the brain’s lower-level functioning. If the image is crafted properly, the binary message bypasses the spoken-language level of understanding and reaches the framework on which higher thought is built.

The harp can play three songs: One of sorrow, one of joy, and one of peace. When heard, the song of sorrow inflicts pain, the song of joy causes laughter, and the song of peace brings calmness. The duration that the song is played changes the effect. If the song of peace is played too long, for example, the listener falls asleep, which can ultimately lead to eternal sleep, the equivalent of death.

I’m still not sure what this entire entry is about, but it’s interesting….

One thing that struck me about partner juggling: since it’s a cooperative activity based on you syncing up with someone else, you must spend the time making sure your partner is good too. Seems like a very good lesson for other kinds of human relationships as well…