Feliz Natal!

Each year, I try to make a gift for the world. Last year it was the Infinite Canvas.

This year, it’s the Clicks Image Search.

It’s more of a journey than a search. Click the save/thumbs up button on images you like (or are like what you’re looking for), and drop/thumbs down the ones that aren’t what you want. If you don’t see images you want, start with a search.

It develops a model of what you’re looking for, and tries to give you more pictures like that.

It’s based on tags and a naive Bayes classifier. If you want to see and adjust the model, there’s a spot at the bottom. It seems a bit buggy in IE, but it works fine in Firefox.

Try it out, and tell me what you think! http://www.existencia.org/clicks/

I’ve been waiting for my new bank card for weeks and I’m stir crazy. But I think it will arrive tomorrow, and I’ll be off to friends in Brasilia, late Christmas in Rio, huge rave in Bahia, the French in São Luis, and the World Social Forum in Belém.

Hey! The World Social Forum! You should come!

The WSF is the international left’s answer to the World Economic Forum, and this year it’s in Belém, my old haunt in northern Brazil! It’s at the end of January, and you totally have enough time to get a visa, or to just fly to French Guiana and get a temporary visa there! Come on: It’s the perfect time to get out of the snow. The list of attending groups and events is dauntingly incredible. If you want help with the details or finding a place to stay, we’ll work it out!

Check out the site: http://www.fsm2009amazonia.org.br/

Anyway, this last night in PoA, there was a fairly droopy storm, but it caused a huge electrical outage in my neighborhood. I *love* outages, so I went out into the now-serene night to watch Brazilians.

My apartment is on a big artery, where the street lights still gleamed out of place. Here, people stood outside in hushed circles. I walked three dark blocks to an artist’s street, where open doors showed artists talking around candles.

On the next street, a full restaurant bustled with comradery, with people talking loudly in the dim light. I also passed kids, lit by their cellphones in doorways, and the homeless, archetypically taking no notice as they lay on their cardboard.

I returned home and walked up a dark staircase to my door. As I squinted to see if I’d gotten to the right door, someone inside turned on the lights.

For the past couple weeks, I’ve been working on a new homepage! I haven’t made a general homepage since my MIT page from 2003 (which feels like an eternity, since I haven’t updated it since 2004). The goal is to have a depot for the best of my projects and a connecting point between my scattered sites.

The page is still under construction, but I want any comments you have! Check it out. I have 15 more pages I want to add before it’s “ready”, but each one needs a main graphic, so it takes a while.

The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of ten thousand things.
Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.
Ever desiring, one sees the manifestations.
These two spring from the same source but differ in name; this appears as darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gate to all mystery.

– Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching

The greatest strength and the greatest weakness of humankind is our ability to name– our capacity and propensity to conceptualize the world. From this ability, we conquer the world and know the gods. But it is also the root of injustice, prejudice, and much misery.

We each live in a personal universe. Everything we know comes from personal experiences layered on endless memories, subconscious presumptions, and personally-selective hearing, sight, and feeling. Although we speak the same objective language, every symbol we use is uniquely subjective. The difficulty of communication is not only philosophically significant– it concretely affects every aspect of our lives.

If pragmatically we know that communication is possible, it’s equally clear that most of the world’s misery and disputes stem from pervasive failed communication and a lack of understanding. Relationships, business ventures, and movements are made or broken by the effectiveness of their communication. Sweatshop workers and Islamic extremists cannot make themselves heard by the institutions that oppress them. Corporations use misleading communication to direct honest emotions into a money-syphoning spiral. When good communication does happen, as in the work of Amy and Arnold Mindell, apparently intractable race tensions, social status divisions, and relationship dilemmas can melt away.

Following Thomas Nagel, what is it like to be another person? How does the world play upon her senses, and how does the emotional content of objects, situations, and decisions play out? In her political map of the conceptual world, what are the boundaries and border disputes of lust, or work, or family, or sugar, or formal wear? What does it feel like for a minute to pass? Someone wrote that a minute inside another person’s head would be wilder than the most intense acid trip, and I believe it.

Kim Krizan presents the quandary in Waking Life:

When I say “love,” the sound comes out of my mouth and it hits the other person’s ear, travels through this Byzantine conduit in their brain, through their memories of love or lack of love, and they register what I’m saying and they say yes, they understand. But how do I know they understand? Because words are inert. They’re just symbols. They’re dead. And so much of our experience is intangible. So much of what we perceive cannot be expressed. It’s unspeakable.

The unspeakable is much more common than it appears. In Euclid’s geometry, there are two kinds of numbers– the rational and the irrational. The rational are, by definition, those that can be put in relation to each other: 1, 2, 1/2, A x B, and their kin. We reason and define by putting things in relation. The irrational numbers are all the rest, and they can barely be identified, much less reasoned about.

And all real things are irrational. Reality can never be precisely measured, identified, or put in relation. It is nameless. It is only the abstractions that we create around real things which are rational. By naming the world, we create a parallel universe of things about which we can reason.

In the real world, there are no races, fathers, chairs, crimes, or companies. Any mode of identifying them will fail due to ambiguities in its internal definitions, application to all elements of the class, and application to the same object over time and space. Try it. Language itself is founded in the irrational, and all of our words (mathematical concepts excepting) are ultimately undefinable. The abstractions we make, no matter how sensible, are founded in the unspeakable, so their use necessarily lends itself to misunderstanding.

But language is not the extrapolation of definitions, although that’s how we describe it. The political boundaries of our conceptual world are infinitely fine– a fractal landscape– as well as fuzzy: they cannot be measured, because they are irrational. The structure of the meaning of words is founded on every level in irrationality.

It is exactly this irrationality that gives language its strength and makes communication possible.

What is said is only the tip of the communication iceberg. In person, we communicate on many levels simultaneously– through body language, voice tone, and reaction– but an isomorphic wealth is available in text (though, with more opportunity for miscommunication because there’s just less of it). The words we choose represent so much more than what they state.

That deeper communication is registered subconscious level. Cognitively, every word evokes a world of associations. We actually each contain many distinct worlds of names, which interact, exchange, rise, and fall (see “Don’t Think of an Elephant”). Every utterance carries with it a reflection of the world from which it was spoken, and the greatest effect of an utterance is to evoke that world within us.

All true communication is subconscious, and consists of this evoking of worlds. While the conscious mind is rational and name-bound, the unconscious mind is at least equally powerful but irrational.

The communications of the subconscious mind are exactly those things that are left unsaid. These are below the consciousness, so we don’t think to express them consciously. They nonetheless are expressed, albeit in the form, rather than the content, of our expressions. My favorite book on this is “Training Trances: Multi-Level Communication in Therapy and Training”.

Then how do we ensure good communication? Without dismissing the studies of rhetoric, neuro-linguistics, and therapy, all of which are effective ways to improve both conscious and subconscious communication, the most effective way to improve communication is to cultivate a sound subconscious mind. If your deepest believes, presumptions, and world-view are solid, that will be communicated.

In polyscriptivism, we can say that subconscious communication is concerned with communicating gods, rather than facts. Good communication comes from forming good relationships with the gods, so your subconscious has something to communicate. Only that can empower our words with sound meaning.

Life is a mystery, because it too is irrational. No amount of naming will make it any less mysterious. But, by seeking out our personal Tao, we can face that mystery with confidence, and communicate it with hope of a clearer meaning.

Where do the hours go???

I’m long back from volunteering. I just worked there for three days– it
felt good to help, and it feels good to be back.

As part of a big server move this week, I set up a new photo gallery
and uploaded many never-before-seen pictures. Take a look: http://www.existencia.org/pics. My captions were lost, so ask if you want to know more about any of them.

Also, I’m now on Twitter. It’s sort of what I’ve been looking for– a personal zephyr class. Follow me: jrising.

Brazilians go crazy for football (soccer). A game in person is supposed to be out-of-the-ball-park intense, but I get a flavor from my apartment: Half the city dresses up and they drive by my apartment building beeping and shouting and thumping their cars with flags and jerseys flying out the windows. And that was before the game. The noise is even worse afterwords. There were so many fireworks today, it sounded like Las Fallas. And every team has songs, all of which go something like…

Oh the team from here is all my lowly life,
And to them, I’d even prostitute my wife.

They wear two or three great hues, their special honour
and to earn their just nickname, The Multi-Color.

The first symbolizes skill at winning and boozing,
the second color: drinking beer and not-losing.

When they win, the sun shines bright and joy overflows,
And they always win, but when they lose, it really blows.

Is it already mid-December?

Hi, from Itajaí, Santa Catarina, where I’m helping out with a disaster relief effort. First, to catch you up:

Thursday night, I went out with Couchsurfing friends to a party. (The call clubs event nights “parties”, and treat them that way.), and it was “Mr. Random’s B-Day Party”! For the non-Random among you, I lived in the dorm Random Hall at MIT, and helped organized its last anniversary, which only comes every leap year, which we called “J. Arthur Random’s Birthday Party”. So I was pleased to finally meat the guy, who is totally blue, and saluted us the whole night from the DJ platform, until he was leaned back against the wall.

Did I tell you I love Porto Alegre clubs? The party was in a long basement room, painted completely black, with red, black, and laser lights. When we arrived, the still-sparse partiers were wearing party hats as unihorns, noses, cat ears, swaying or jumping up and down or duck walking as suited each her own genius, Two girls were making out in one corner while Blur’s Boys & Girls played loud.

On the way back, I had my first street robbery! It was super-gentle (tranquilo, one says here) and professional. Two guys walked out from different points of a park across the street and converged on me, ushered me into an alcove, reached in my pockets and took my wallet and my cell phone (but lefy my keys), and then told me to go. The only thing I was sad to lose was the facebook info of the model I danced with at the party. I took another route and got lost, but I found a nice Brazilian couple (or maybe a prostitute and her client– not sure) who showed me to my street. Good fun.

Anyway, I worked extra this week, so I told my company I deserved a vacation. During the week, storms caused a rash of avalanches and floods, just 10 hours north of me (the next state up), with cities unreachable and 80 000 people out of a home. So I left Friday night to go help.

The relief effort in Itajaí is a lot like the Astrodome, with the most effort going into food and clothing sorting and distribution, and the whole throbbing mess always staying just a step away from total chaos but erring on the side of incompetence, as very few people know what’s going on try to direct ever-changing layers of volunteers, who variously over and understep what’s expected of them, and “the system” of how things are supposed to be done changes ever 40 minutes. The biggest differences were that it’s smaller, because the effort is distributed over several cities (this is just for the 40 000 Itajaíans affected) and the disaster victim’s don’t live there, and it has more audible spirit, with people cheering and shouting, because it’s Brazilian.

I did just about every job. They welcomed me in, tickled that an American would help (I figured it’s our fault the storms happened, though). I started with heavy lifting and moving; but archtypically my group had one more people than it needed. I wasn’t that one-more-person the first two times the group turned over, but I was the third time. So, I spent the new two hours sorting clothing, and finally getting to handle the funky styles of Brazilian women’s dress. A head-volunteer came by to offer more interesting work, at the front desk; I shied away at the language demand, but eventually went down. They didn’t need me then, but had use for me in the next step, helping victims by collecting their individual lists of things they needed. It was fun, but eventually a lull in requests went on too long, and I went to help make bags of shit. These are a lot like the Rocky kind, with a big standardized set of food and things people need to have fun– I think they called them scat-olas. And they had the same kind of assembly line, and the same discussions: “Oh, no, we’re out of rice!” “Don’t stop, we’ll just make the bags without rice. Give them twice as much beans.” “Without rice? We can’t make the bags without rice!” But after handling all the bags of flour and sugar and whatnot, I was starting to feel like a cake, so I took a break for dinner. I got in a conversation with a head-kitcheneer, and asked if there was work there (and in Brazil, disaster food isn’t catered by Aramark, so there’s something to believe in. There was, so I helped make sandwiches for a while, and finished the day cleaning, before the kitchen crew offered me a ride back to my hotel.

While we were working, we heard that yet another city was in trouble from the rains that night. The word used that the city was “rising” (subindo), but I think she meant “mountains collapsing on unsuspecting families.” Out work is never done.

I’m trying to learn the guitar in a way that’s compatible with reading standard sheet music. But the notes on the guitar fingerboard seem at first fairly random– because of the different number of steps between successive notes and between strings, it’s tough to predict.

Here’s a standard fingerboard diagram, from wikipedia:

But there’s another way of looking at it, and every note makes sense:


Edits: corrected score octave, added mysteriously-disappearing notes.

Every note is either on a staff line or a staff-middle. This diagram is for a guitar in standard tuning (E-A-D-G-B-E), against a staff in C major. Changes in the tuning move a guitar string up or down; sharps and flats in the staff move its lines up and down.

The guitar strings aren’t evenly spaced, because there are only four half steps between the G and B strings. The staff lines aren’t evenly spaced, because there are different numbers of half steps between them. The one thing that is evenly spaced here is the one thing that’s not on a guitar: the frets. That’s because what’s non-linear in space is linear in what we hear. All music is on a log scale, but so are our ears (like all our senses), so it cancels out.

I’ve called out the C’s in purple for convenience. Also, I show the notes on the frets, instead of between them where you hold the string.

Note: this, along with all my posted material, is Creative Commons.

I still need to write a post about life, which has been full of reflection recently. Suffice it for now that I’m working a lot; I’m inspired that my moon sign is Taurus and my ascendant sign is Leo; I love LiveMocha; I miss my friends; I’m considering going back to school in Geopolitics; and I’m the captivated owner of a beautiful new all-wire-strung black acoustic guitar.

Some nights, loud (street-cleaning?) trucks move past my window, with an airy whine that sounds exactly like snow trucks in Boston, on a quite night after a deep snow. Saudade. I hear Boston got its first snow! How’s winter?

Here are a few pieces in pictures of my life in Porto Alegre.

Last weekend was the 12a Parada Gay Livre Porto Alegre. I’m sorry these are so far away; you can only see the aggregate energy and festivity (but click on the thumbnails for more!). I partied in the parade before this point, but there was no room for pictures.

The Leading Edge

Marchers

Down the Avenue

More Parada Gay Livre Porto Alegre

Brazil has avacados like a guacamole-maker’s wet dream, but they don’t know what a tortilla chips is. How can a country not have tortilla chips? I’m going to have to serve my guacamole on fried dough! What kind of messed-up third world country have I gotten myself into?

That said, I’m really enjoying Porto Alegre. This is a city where same-sex making-out on the dance floor outnumbers hetero even the straight clubs.

There’s a bar I’ve gone to a couple times that absolutely oozes alternativity. People relax on home-made chairs over hot discussions of art and politics. In the back are three cluttered artists lofts, and against one wall is a table of books for sale by one of those artists. If I can place two closely related aspects in opposition, the people there are funky instead of beautiful. People that comfortable with unconventionality talk and move and carry themselves differently. Not since Cambridge have I been in a place so casually different.

Edit: Turns out today is also the Porto Alegre Parade Gay! After Belém, Rio, and a near-miss in another city, I really think Brazilian cities have a gay pride parade every two weeks. I love them, and it’s good to be counted… but this city needs another gay-pride supporter like Obama needs electoral votes. I think I’ll wait until it passes in front of my apartment, in a couple hours.

Is moon as beautiful there as it is here?

I’m planning to go to the World Social Forum in Belém, in January. It’s an incredible opportunity to gather a group of similarly motivated people to help me help the world.

If you could do anything to make the world a better place for 6 months, what would you do?

Say you have at least four other people working with you, containing any skills you might want, and that you don’t need to earn money– in fact, you can work 20 hours a week from anywhere and have $2000 a month to support something more expensive. What would you do?

At the Forum, I’ll carry around a colorful cardboard sign, to attract people to my projects. On one side, I’ll advertise for people to join me in buying a sustainable bus, like BioTour, to travel around South America in. But the other side? Who knows. Maybe I’ll make the bus a mobile medical center. Maybe I’ll start a new web 2.0 project to make it natural to live green. Maybe I’ll start a learning/teaching/community and craft center. I need more ideas!

The project doesn’t need to fit in with my sustainable bus plan, but it’d be nice. It also doesn’t need to involve me leaving Brazil for the 6 months before I can get another visa, and then return here– but that’d be ideal.