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This site is maintained by Stewart Butterfield: stewart@sylloge.com

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  After Kant, idealism was able to really take off. Schopenhauer is someone I've never really studied, but I've always loved the title: The World as Will and Representation:

To the subject of knowing, who appears as an individual only through his identity with the body, this body is given in two entirely different ways. It is given in intelligent perception as representation, as an object among objects, liable to the laws of these objects. But it is also given in quite a different way, namely as what is known immediately to everyone, and is denoted by the word will.

Every true act of his will is also at once and inevitably a movement of his body; he cannot actually will the act without at the same time being aware that it appears as a movement of the body. The act of will and the action of the body are not two different states objectively known connected by the bond of causality; they do not stand in the relation of cause and effect, but are one and the same thing, though given in two entirely different ways, first quite directly, and then in perception for the understanding. The action of the body is nothing but the act of will objectified, i.e., translated into perception.

The reason I am telling you this: if you don't want to argue with someone with whom you are arguing, you may find that smashing a banana on your face will end the argument in laughter. And the banal banality of any argument will be realized and the laughter can blossom and you may flourish. Heed this advice and will what you want.

On another note:

Or, if I may be permitted a facetious comparison, because it is more striking, the philosophical investigator must always feel in regard to the complete Etiology of the whole of nature like a man who, without knowing how, is brought into a company quite unknown to him, each member of which in turn presents to him another as his friend and cousin, and thus makes them sufficiently acquainted. The man himself, however, while assuring each person introduced of his pleasure at meeting him, always has on his lips the question: "But how the deuce do I stand to the whole company?"

Quite honestly, I have no idea what he means by that, but I still like it.

  Claude Shannon, "inventor of information theory", died on Saturday. Here are some good links to mark his passing (if you really want to dig deep, Darwin College Fellow David MacKay's A Short Course in Information Theory is available online). Shannon was one of those people who made the first half of this century just passed the most fecund period of theoretical innovation in human history and the second half the most fecund technologically. I had no idea that he was still alive. Alzheimer's.

  New: Poll at left.

Old: continuing to be amazed by the fundamental power of the words we speak. What else is there?

Funny: If only things which didn't quite work always worked out as well as this.




Thursday, February 22

  The reason that there is no such thing as perspicuous, direct, exegetical poetry is that sublimity can only be suggested. You can't just come out and say it. Thus, it's all close-but-not-quite, from philosophy to physics. Thus, we're free to create.

  I never get tired of reading this: "...and he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to correspond."

I was writing an amazingly lost post on parthood, but a bad thing happened deep inside of Windows when there'd been a few hours since the last save. So, anyway, a niced-up version of notes from a previous incarnation is here. Good selections, anyway.




Wednesday, February 21

  From Peryl, on the phone: "I've even started reading your site because you never email me." If you, reader, have had to stoop to reading this garbage merely because you feel like you are owed mail, just email me again. I will respond. I promise.

  World New York is working out fantastically.

  Wow! Cool! I just noticed that the Doors website has been updated recently and they posted a transcript of my second talk last November. I had assumed that I would never find out what I said. The thing is here, that this one was at 9:30am on the second day of the conference. I had a typical transatlantic cold (I get those, unfortunately) and was, basically, ill-prepared ...

The night before there was a dinner for the conference speakers at the Waag which didn't get going until about 10:30pm. While at the dinner, I devised a plan for my next talk, which I knew was going to be about Milo's 5k entry and the efficient re-use of information.

I had this joke that I thought of just before I left for Europe, walking down Comox St. with Michael: I'll come on stage with a joint and say "The great thing about Amsterdam," and then take a huge toke on the joint. And then stare blankly at the crowd. I'd fidget for a second and look from side to side, getting progressively more nervous, finally leaning forward into the mike and admitting, "uh, I forgot what I was going to say". I am resisting the urge to explain this joke. There. OK.

So, at dinner, I imagined that on stage at a place as big as the RAI, I'd really have to hammer the joke home. There is nothing worse than taking a chance on a joke that no-one gets. So I decide that I am going to find a bong and a tie-dye shirt and come on stage in sandals, you know, really hamming it up. I needed props.

The earliest I could duck out without being rude was close to 1:00am. Now, normally, obtaining a bong and a tie-dye shirt in central Amsterdam is really not a problem (the Waag is right beside the Waaletjes). But it was pretty late and I made all the wrong decisions on where to look, not trying the Damrak or Nieuwendijk until just after 2:00. Everywhere I went, the steel cages were being pulled down for the night and almost everything was closed. Some last minute poking around in a generic tourist shop was futile, although I almost came away with a "My friend got high in Amsterdam and all I got was this lousy T-shirt"-type T-shirt.

Feeling pretty frustrated, I secured a pre-rolled joint as my sole prop and then booked into a nearly empty restaurant to write out my notes. I wanted to have examples of the sorts of facts you might have to know before you would know that a joke was funny, ones that I could use without actually having to tell any jokes: I settled on "Pat Robertson is racist" and "Blondes are stupid" as good examples. But I wasn't sure if the European component of the audience would know who Pat was. (In the transcript it comes out as "Pat Kennedy" and even I don't know who that is.)

Things there were complicated by extreme awkwardness when I asked the (Turkish?) proprietor if he could tell me the name of some Dutch politician equivalent of Le Pen or Jörg Haider. I had underestimated his English and could only imagine what he thought I was trying to suggest to him. "You know, some Dutch politician who is really right wing and racist. A nationalist. Someone like Le Pen? Or Jörg Haider? You know what I mean?"

He really didn't know what I meant and I seemed to be totally ineffective in explaining that I don't like people like Le Pen and Haider, I think they're horrible, but I was trying to translate a joke from an American context to a European one, blah, blah. For a minute I thought he was going to physically throw me out the door. Instead, he went and got his brother who understood English (marginally) better than he did.

Another round of explanations later, some earnest looking nodding and smiling, and they were assuaged and I had a free drink. I finished up, headed over to easyEverything to check mail and have a terrible coffee, then grabbed a cab back to the hotel.

By the time I got finished making the slides to go along with the notes made earlier, it was almost 6:00 (In typical fashion, a precious hour was wasted on achieving an effect which was gone in 10 seconds on stage and which maybe 12 people in the audience appreciated). I checked my html and immediately feel asleep.

I had to leave the hotel at 8:30 at the latest to get to the RAI on time and had requested a 7:45 wakeup call the day before. It came at 8:30 instead. I bolted up, jumped into clothes and ran downstairs to flag a cab, arriving with not one second to spare: hooked up my PowerBook, had a mic put on, and then was on stage. And then my prop inadvertently got me a little bit higher than I intended (not that I had intended anything at all in that respect). And I was still sick.

All of this is an amazingly long way of saying that I apologize in advance for any failures of phrase, any awkward expressions, any embarrassing screw-ups. This talk was strictly limited to five minutes, and it is much harder to present something cogently and coherently in five minutes than in twenty.

So, I have mixed feelings about pointing to a transcript of what I said, since, of course, if I was intending to deliver the ideas via text I would have written it instead of saying it; I always regret my on-the-fly ways of saying things, although I simple am not able to speak from a text. I have to speak extemporaneously, otherwise I get really flustered and constantly screw up. I think it is because I am raving gesticulator, and a face-expressor and a general mover-about when speaking. This doesn't go with something that conceived as writing. (In other words: I say some things, and I write some things: ne'er the twain shall meet.) So, well, there. Enjoy. Maybe.

(Most of the jokes inside don't work very well without the slides; I will try to get those up soon. Also, I often point to the screen when an important textual slide is up, and I hate it when other people read me their slides old loud when I am staring right at the words already, so I never read mine. The slogan I was referring to was on a slide which read: "When possible, re-use or otherwise exploit existing information.")

  Darren Wershler-Henry's Nicholodeon (scroll down to the word "Nicholodeonline" in grey and click), chock full of lowerglyphs, mesoglyphs and more! (thanks Derek).




Tuesday, February 20

  Beauty. Related: here. Send me good links, expecially for line drawings, and I'll like you more than I already do.

  For the second time in a year, I have unknowingly let a plane ticket sit on my desk, unused, while thinking that I was good to fly at some later date. (I somehow bought tickets to Austin which depart and return one month early than I meant to. That's dumb.)




Monday, February 19

  Speaking of fuss, my family has developed my grandmother's seemingly-impoverished set of post-movie comments into a full-fledged rating system (forecast to replace the both the 1-4 stars system and the thumbs-up/down system by 2013, according to a recent report by Wilkofsky Gruen):

• "I'm not sorry I went." [best]
• "What's all the fuss about?"
• "I don't know, I can't say."
• "Too loud." [worst]

  Apparently, "people like Caterina.net". I don't see what all the fuss is about though.




Saturday, February 17

  The Slow Food International Movement Home Page: "There are more tastes in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your gastronomy..."

Join your local convivium (and think about what a great word that is).




Friday, February 16

  This is still a life.

Early on in life, we master the art of "answering for ourselves" to our mentors and caretakers—saying what we want, explaining what we are doing, if necessary excusing ourselves—in a word, we become "accountable" for our actions. These, too, are things that we first learn to do openly and out loud; but, once again, we soon enough catch on to the possibility (and the advantages) of doing the same things "inwardly": thinking out our plans privately, and rehearsing to ourselves the things we are going to say later (or could say, or would say if we were challenged) about this or that situation or action.

  Confidential to Martin Kurylowicz: Marty, if you're out there, drop me a line: the Berlin address appears to be dead.

To everyone else: Look: no more complaining about Finnish dates. The long nightmare is over.

One more: I had forgotten all about the Stanja van Mierlo coincidence on the train back from Arnhem yesterday. Whoops!




Thursday, February 15

  For that special someone: The World's Largest Roadside Attractions and The Gallery of Huge Beings (via a site that I found from Alice who today wrote: "In case you were looking for a hyper-animated gif of a guy in a hat who suffers an epileptic attack while watching Pokemon and then tries to attack a cat with the power of 3D glasses, here you go (warning: 80k).")

  Yes. So, I lost my phone. Boring. BORING. The person who said my posts are not as thoughtful as they used to be was right. The missing post below ought really to have gone over this: I can't talk about a lot of things here (or at least, I feel like I can't) and since I can't talk about them, I can't be myself. There is a certain inauthenticity, and I don't like it. So, fuck having a website like this, right?

Well, no, maybe not. The times are changing. I have a different life than I did seven days ago. For example, still in the boring category perhaps, but significant nonetheless: I haven't smoked in a week. That's 140-odd cigarettes that still exist now, due to my incredible self-restraint. More importantly, I now remember why I do anything at all.

  Ruthie's Double: "The whole purpose of this weblog, really, is to make sure I am constantly embarrassed, between titillation and shame." (On the other hand, Joseph has no shame.)

  I cannot believe that whole post is gone. Wow. Drag. (And my fault taboot.)

Anyway, uh ... language; consciousness; language and consciousness; how people think about each other; about me; the first philosophy paper I wrote as an undergrad; why that thesis was unsatisfactory; our existence in the minds of others; that we are what we say (an oath, a declaration of love, a joke, something mean, something strange, something interesting, etc.) or not; that when we say "You should see what [Mr. Black] did!" we usually mean "You should hear what Mr. Black said!"; a few in-jokes; that quitting, marrying and most other important things are word-acts; how I insulted someone in an email and was oblivious to it for eight months or so; that other people talking about you is insignificant only under special circumstances. And boy, did it go on.

And there were well-integrated links to Wittgenstein's Private Language argument, Paul's Democracy of Self, and Dennett's The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity.

At least this was shorter.

  You can't really hold feelings up to the light and say "this one is like that one" or not, but I still feel confident asserting that I haven't felt like this more than twice in my life. Nil Magnum Nisi Horrendum. Timeo, pertimesbo: conturbabimus omnia.




Wednesday, February 7

  metatalk.the5k.org: yap, yap, yap.




Tuesday, February 6

  trippy walls

  The greatest thing about the song Slip Sliding Away is the way this whole complicated story is contained in a simple verse:

I know father who had a son:
He longed to tell him all the reasons for the things he'd done.
He came a long way just to explain.
He kissed his boy as he lay sleeping
And he turned around and headed home again

  New phone. New number is the same in the last four numbers and the area code, but replace the "809" with "551" for the prefix. But, now all you have to send me all your numbers because I have none (I don't know anyone's phone number anymore). And I can spend a few hours with my Nokiafingers being bored senseless. It shouldn't have to be this way.




Monday, February 5

  Still no phone. It's disappearance appears to be permanent. Sniff. If you don't know my landline, send me an email: I'll pick up a new phone in the next day or two. Also, anyone have suggestions for sexy new phones and good (Canadian) rate plans? Thanks.

  Rotten Teeth and Dead Babies: the new Canadian cigarette packaging. I really think this will be effective, at least at preventing kids from starting. Also, anyone know of cigarette case manufacturers I could buy some stock in? (Via email from itchy eyes.)




Sunday, February 4

  Beauty of a rare and exotic kind. (via Kopelow, IDEO Lieutenant-Governor or something and co-creator of the ever popular IDEO Web Color Visualizer).

  You can call me, but if you do, leave a message: I lost my phone last night (the worst part is that I lost 80% of my phone numbers with it). I think the cab company has it, but their lost and found is not open today. It must happen quite frequently; the dispatcher said "Oh yeah, probably. We got a lot of phones last night."

Since that's neither funny nor interesting, I'll close with this snippet of conversation from a few weeks ago (we had been discussing the ages at which we learned the nature of various exotic sexual practices):

"Yeah. Ha ha. Do you remember how old you were when you learned what a 'rim job' was?"

"Yeah. Ha ha. I didn't even know what a golden shower was until a few years ago. I had to phone the Frank Zappa hotline to find out."

The Frank Zappa hotline is the new Talking Yellow Pages.




Thursday, February 1

  Interconnected -I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons. That made me feel good better.

Here are some of the other things on this site:

The 5k contest
This year's contest is now open for entries. Help collectively correct for my laziness by telling everyone you know.

Stephen Toulmin's 1979 Ryerson Lecture at the University of Chicago, The Inwardness of Mental Life, reprinted with the kind permission of the Author & the University.

An excerpt from an interview with philosopher Donald Davidson, which I find complements the former.

A motion study where you can see all the frames of an animation at once, but also still see the animation.

Some pictures of my friend Paul spinning around in some art, which is really a machine.

Some pictures of Illuminares, Vancouver's annual latern festival.

Some pictures of The Symphony of Fire, Vancouver's annual fireworks competition.

A video from my second trip to Vegas in the year 2000. Sad, that.

And more, to be dusted off.