Production and Decay of Strange Particles

The Truth Is A Revolutionary Act

...The second virtue is relinquishment. P. C. Hodgell said: “That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.” Do not flinch from experiences that might destroy your beliefs. The thought you cannot think controls you more than thoughts you speak aloud."

From "Twelve Virtues of Rationality"

Eliezer Yudkowsky

http://yudkowsky.net/

Vanishing Point

On My iPod This Morning

Listening to

"Ruby Tuesday"

Franco Battiato, Fleurs (1999)

An Army of One

“To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event.”

Don DeLillo

from "The Names"

I Wake Up and Have My Realizations Sprayed

My fondness for Brion Gysin and William Burrough's Cut-up Method continues, this time directed towards already mind bendingly surreal chemtrail/New World Order conspiracy theories. Genuinely creepy, shamelessly opportunistic and vastly unethical Henry Kissinger, it should come as no surprise, figures prominently in a lot of NWO scenarios, having been pulled directly from the Dr. Strangelove branch of Central Casting for Villains. The fruits of this exercise are as amusing, and revealing, as ever:

"Kissinger lives in depopulated California. The reasons that stopped a number of chemtrail depopulations are indeed useless. Nothing magical, the "contrails" have been overcast since 1998. I had your toxin-laden contrails posted horizon-to-horizon and lived the sprayed Holy chemtrails, described by Kissinger's NWO Society. Indeed, I stopped the dark sprayed plans, believing the depopulation peddlers are all useless eaters.

I wake-up, have my realization sprayed, and now: no reality."

Counterpoint

The Bang and Olufsen Serene is the anti-iPhone. Or it was before the marriage between B&O and their manufacturing partner Samsung went south.

As a design object it's polarizing and spectacular, luscious and maddening. It bucks a raft of industry trends and glides obliviously past consumer expectations: something of a Bang and Olufsen tradition. Living with a Serene day-to-day requires lot of patience as well as a willingness to abandon wholesale a lot of reasonable expectations for a mobile device.

Where to start. On my carrier in the U.S. (T-mobile) it was ultimately impossible to set up the Serene to send or retrieve email or multimedia messages, so after a long struggle I threw in the towel. Next, the experience of dialing a number –never mind pecking out a text message– on the circular keypad runs from awkward to militantly counterintuitive, depending on your patience and the length of message (note: shorter isn't just better, it may very well be all you have the time to compose). And about that circular keypad: for a company that prides itself on innovative and superior solutions, the same diabolical, hand-cramping idea was abandoned as unworkable over 40 years ago by AT&T's Bell Laboratories before reaching the market, then attempted unsuccessfully by Nokia decades later to a chorus of hoots, jeers and mountains of scorn in the marketplace. Why repeat a competitor’s failed approach?

In the end, all of this is irrelevant to a niche product like the Serene. Designed by an audio company, the Serene delivers crisp, better-than-landline-quality voice communication, but either by default or design –take your pick– it makes any other activity so grudging and onerous that the user is discouraged from even trying. Ironically, It's this distinction alone that makes the Serene the anti-iPhone. While the iPhone’s ludicrously unreliable and overextended network is seldom able to make or complete a voice call, but offers a zillion applications to keep the user distracted, the Serene offers few features beyond the ability to hold a conversation in sparkling, interruption-free clarity, and this it does exceedingly well.

I like the Serene. Closed, it looks like an anodized aluminum and black rubberized Chanel compact. The build quality is first rate, the ringtones pleasing, the audio quality second to none, and the motorized open/close function at once truly useful, beautifully executed, and geekily delightful. Of course it's feature-free, favors style at the expense of usefulness, suffers from an near total absence of any technical support in the U.S. market, and is completely overpriced. In that sense it simultaneously represents everything that's right and wrong about Bang and Olufsen and offers some insight into why the phone and the partnership that sired it failed.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

On My iPod Tonight

Listening to

Splitting the Atom

Massive Attack, 2009

Round and Round

"Experience is a form of paralysis" -Erik Satie

The Measured Response