One and a half fake teeth

Counting On It

I'm more optimistic about the promise of the Mechanical Turk than many of my peers, but could never justify my optimism with an obvious killer app.  Audio transcription?  Pattern recognition across huge data sets, like with SETI?  Tagging mechanism for photography databases?  Nothing seemed convincing.  Certainly, nothing seemed creative.  But I think the Turk has the capacity to surprise, and it caught me offguard today by showing evidence that it will be used for massive collaborative art projects.  The horizon may be far off, but there should be some really cool stuff on it.

???

Pleading Philosophy

There's a scene in Sherman's March where the filmmaker is chatting with a scholar of linguistics who is one of the women he courts over the course of the movie.  (The film begins as a historical documentary and ends up a meditation on southern womanhood or, to paraphrase the subtitle, a story about the improbable search for love under the prospect of nuclear holocaust.  Eighties.)  She casually mentions her interest in counterpart theory, some crutch that logicians have used to facilitate the discussion of "possible worlds" with respect to events and morality.  As I understand it, the idea is that there is some counterpart of mine in the "possible world" where I, for instance, continued to live on the east coast instead of moving west.  I suppose there is also the possible world where I ceased to breathe for a moment while typing this sentence, instead of breathing at pace as I happened to do.  Seems like a slippery slope, maybe even pointless from a practical standpoint.  (I'm no logician.)  But in any case, since there are these entirely possible other worlds which differ from what actually happened in this one, I must have a counterpart in each who is my doppelganger in that parallel universe.  He might be thinking of me right now, over there on his east coast.  Or all of them are thinking of all the others, or whatever.

She merely mentions that it's interesting to considering your life in reference to all your counterparts.  I agreed that it was interesting, at least enough to warrant an internet search, but apparently it's so arcane that it barely exists on the internet.  I mean, it's there, but as I write it's there only in syllabi, PDF lecture notes, and obscure blog debates.  That's it.  It has no explanatory page, it has no wikipedia summary, it has no champion stewarding its google-able existence.  Google does not contain the entire known and referenced-in-rentable-movies universe.

Anyway, my favorite part of this brief and fruitless exploration was stumbling on a blog post where someone worries if morality is baseless in a world(s) where everything could be blamed on counterparts.  Which is to say, if my counterparts took all the other available courses of action, down to the very last ethical one, then I was forced into unethical behavior just by the luck of the draw.  Don't blame me...the other mes had dibs on being good. 

I'm totally using this excuse the next time I screw up. 

Learning to Blog

Well, I've been doing the blog thing for not much longer than a year, and just in that time, the vast majority of what I write online has migrated over to 43 things, places, and people.  This leaves behind an atrophying list of bad rock haikus where a blog once lived.  I now see the wisdom in dividing separate threads of writing (professional blurbs, media critiques, personal entries, creative writing) into separate blogs entirely, as do the experienced.  Categories schmategories.  So I'm pulling the weeds from this space and initiating a different approach where only the occasional "real" blog entry goes here, the applicable majority goes onto Robot Co-op sites, and the less categorizable stuff goes elsewhere.  Anyone who's tolerant of the whole sweep of entries can always track them via our, whatchacallit, Customizable Digital Lifestle Aggregator on 43 people.  Word.  Er, I mean, words.

Bad Rock Haiku #30: Korby Lenker

2005.11.17, at the Crocodile

Things that are jammy:
Some guns, some toes, puréed fruit,
And Bellingham bands.