on reading unfinished novels

There's no reason to read an unfinished novel if the author is alive. He just might finish it, for instance, and then that finished product would have the stamp of approval from an artist (presumably) one is already interested in, or at least, one has heard is worth being interested in. If that artist has produced an unfinished work worth consuming, one might as well wait until he/she is dead before consumption in order to ensure that one doesn't eavesdrop on notes and ramblings when a mature work is imminent.

[Exception which proves the rule: the recent trite crap "completion" of the Star Wars saga. nuff said.]

[Of course, in media other than the written word, unfinished status can be conferred by situations other than the writer/creator's death: go watch post haste if you have not already, Andrzej Żuławski's On the Silver Globe, the greatest unfinished movie of which I am aware—and be moved.]

There are, of course, famous examples here, e.g. Kafka's Amerika or Nabokov's Dying is Fun—although in both cases an ethical question arises since the respective authors requested their unfinished works destroyed upon their deaths.

In the case of David Foster Wallace's The Pale King, I know of no such request. The question does, nevertheless, arise: what legitimates publishing this unfinished work and distributing it widely?

Apparently, upon Wallace's suicide from depression, he left behind on his desk "a neat stack of manuscript, twelve chapters totaling nearly 250 pages" and "hundreds and hundreds" of additional pages and notes for the novel scattered about his office. (There was, however, no outline, or explicit description of the novel's intended structure and ordering of events / written sections.) His editor on Infinite Jest, Michael Pietsch, was tasked with assembling this chaos into something that could be published, and make money for the publisher / the estate.

Graciously, the details of these circumstances are described in an introductory editor's note.

So, when reading the book, there are many questions: is this the right order of the information? Would this chapter have even been included? In this form? Questions which, when reading a completed work, are not raised. And worries (questions / confusions / imaginations) about the structure of the work are no longer criticisms of the author (and, perhaps, only on some occasions criticisms of the editor), but rather merely circumstances under which one might imagine one's own perfect version of the work, or extrapolate its completion into the ideal work for you, the reader (even if not one that's realistic for the author to have produced, editor to have approved, etc.).

Was it right? ( . . . to publish this unfinished, to charge $27.99, etc.?) In the case of The Pale King, I know of no countervailing demands expressed by Wallace, and I emphatically agree with Pietsch's assessment that there is plenty here for the reading public to enjoy / value. (Even if there is some sense in which the dead are being taken advantage of, you, the $27.99 reader are not. I say this only a fifth of the way through the book, and already having earned back the cost through insight, amusement, and beatific and sublime experiences.)

The first chapter (only a page and a half) is almost worth the price of admission alone for sheer beauty. There are ups and downs, but chapter 9, the "author's forward" definitely confirms the value and insight of the work, no matter how disjoint, and (ultimately, despite the fact that only Wallace's name appears on the title page) collaborative the work in this form is. (Look, chapter 11 is just notes, it would not have appeared in a finished novel by Wallace. And the influence of its content on the novel would not have been felt at the precise place in the ordering in which it was placed. Pietsch knows this. But he acknowledges it and, more importantly (consequently?) you the reader know it as well: this affects your processing and interpretation of chapter 11.)

I have to admit, however, a spooky feeling, when reading passages like

. . . this right here is me as a real person, David Wallace, age forty, SS no. 975-04-2012, addressing you from my Form 8829—deductible home office at 725 Indian Hill Blvd., Claremont 91711 CA, on this fifth day of spring, 2005, to inform you of the following: All of this is true. This book is really true.

Of course, even in this "autobiographical" section, there are deliberate obfuscations and falsities. But from the style, from the circumstances, we know that one day Wallace sat down and wrote these words, and he wrote them from a perspective in which the novel was finished, and published, and it had only taken 3 years to write. We know that he put himself in that frame of mind, and "talked" to the potential reader. But within 3 years he had become so completely unable to find this frame of mind in which the novel was done again that he committed suicide.

This is a man talking directly to you, the reader, from beyond the grave, yet it was not him who decided that you would hear him, but his estate and publisher and editor. Again, not that that's wrong (this is the start of the aforementioned chapter 9, well worth the price of the book alone in terms of insight and depth), but that it's certainly spooky. And you allow yourself to imagine Wallace cutting it, or rephrasing it, or (more likely, my imagination), dropping the conceit that the work is real, and introducing the (admittedly, startlingly profound) discussion of the history and nature of American taxation into it in a more organic way. To imagine that this was an exercise in the style of his popular nonfiction essays to bring together information that ultimately would be more effectively (?) conveyed through fiction.

But then that's just my fantasy of David Foster Wallace, and what he might have done. But to even take the first tentative steps on this staircase, to even find a direction in which to look, is not only worthwhile, but strangely creative as a reading experience.

color in black and white

The experience of color television doesn't require a special TV. This is because of the Benham effect, which occurs when the experience of color is produced by rapidly oscillating patterns of white and black. Differences in the phase of this oscillation produce different color experiences.

You can experience the Benham effect for yourself here.

Although we don't know exactly what causes the Benham effect, we do know what relationship between phase and oscillation speed produces which color experience. In 1968, James Butterfield employed this knowledge to broadcast color information from a black and white TV camera to black and white TV sets. The idea is to use a rotating disk, half of which is black, the other half comprising a sequence of filters (in primary colors, red, green, and blue). The filters are placed to ensure that only the relevant color signal (whatever makes it through the filter) is phased appropriately with respect to the rotating disk. The end result is a flickering image which reproduces the sensation of color in the viewer, even though it is projected on a regular black and white television.

Read more about the Butterfield Color Encoder here.

According to Arthur Winfree:

Its first public demonstration was a soft-drink advertisement over station KNXT in Los Angeles. Nothing was said about color, to the consternation of thousands of viewers who seemed suddenly to be hallucinating. Its last public demonstration was in Argentina during political advertisements by Eva Peron.

~ Winfree (1980 / 2001) The Geometry of Biological Time, 2nd ed.

real terrorism

Are Julian Assange and wikileaks "terrorists" as some US commentators have claimed?

I'll reserve judgment on that point. But insofar as "terrorism" includes the use of intimidation and the interruption of normal civilized procedures in order to force one's opponents into following some particular course of action, the response by the US government and, especially, various credit card companies seems to exemplify that attitude.

Issuing an interpol warrant for Assange because his condom broke is patently ludicrous. But downright offensive is the recent decision by Visa and Mastercard to block donations to wikileaks. Of course, the claim that using Visa or Mastercard to donate to wikileaks contravenes the user agreement, in particular, the stipulation that funds not be used for illegal purposes, is completely spurious. Wikileaks has not be convicted of violating any international law—treating them as otherwise constitutes a clear violation of the "innocent until proven guilty" principle (not the first time from either the US government or its cronies - one of the very points revealed in wikileaks leaks).

Although the link for credit card donations on the wikileaks page doesn't currently function, donations can presently be made through xipwire. Donate today, or else you may lose control over how you spend your money entirely.

how's that for irony?

So, I haven't been following the recent wikileaks fiasco closely enough to make any general comments (yet . . . ?).

Still, a quick browse immediately produced some interesting irony. This security level: CONFIDENTIAL document, 10BERLIN128, urges U.S. officials interested in getting more data from Germany (on German citizens, of course, for "anti-terrorism" purposes, of course) to reassure German officials of U.S. data security, concluding with the sentence: "We need to also demonstrate that the U.S. has strong data privacy measures in place so that robust data sharing comes with robust data protections."

'nuff said: keep your secrets Germany, we'll just lose them.

hayek on beer in airports

Hayek developed the idea of spontaneous order in order to characterize the organizational properties of certain types of naturally occurring complex system (a camel, a school of fish, an economy). In "Cosmos and Taxis," Hayek defines order in terms of the relationship between local information and global knowledge:

By 'order' we shall throughout describe a state of affairs in which a multiplicity of elements of various kinds are so related to each other that we may learn from our acquaintance with some spatial or temporal part of the whole to form correct expectations concerning the rest, or at least expectations which have a good chance of proving correct.

This definition of order is supposed to rule out chaotic systems like gas in a box or a climate. In such chaotic systems, local interactions do not necessarily give you information about global properties of the system. The bumping of two molecules together does not tell me anything about the overall density of a gas in a box. The weather in Calcutta does not tell me anything about the weather in La Paz.

A natural interpretation of Hayek's definition of order as applied to an economy might be something like this: a local interaction (say, exchange of money for a good) tells us something about global properties of the system (say, the marginal exchange rate of that good). This relationship between local and global properties depends upon the equilibria which develop in economic systems. Because local interactions produce global equilibria, I can learn about such equilibria from the local interactions in which I participate.

However, there is a problem here. Hayek has attempted to define a property internal to the system (its degree of order) in terms of the epistemic access of some agent interacting with the system. This definitional strategy does not (cannot?) take into account an important property of information: information is profligate—information is never monogamous!

What this means is simply that a local interaction contains information about an arbitrarily large number of complicating factors. The agent, attempting to derive "correct expectations" about the rest of the system has no principled way to determine which factors are potentially relevant to his local interaction.

Consider, for example, the case of beer in airports. On average in the U.S., the price of beer in airports is about double that in a regular street bar. If I walk into an airport bar and purchase a beer, the information I receive is qualitatively different from that I receive if I walk into my neighborhood dive bar. The transaction in the dive bar tells me something about the global marginal exchange rate of beer. The transaction in the airport bar tells me something about the marginal exchange rate of beer in airports. But how do I know that the fact that I am in an airport is relevant? We are trying to understand the informational content of a local interaction—how do I even know that I am in an airport?

Both the determination that I am in an airport and the determination that, in this case, the location of my exchange is relevant to the global information I receive from my transaction depend crucially on background knowledge. However, background knowledge is a property of the agent, not the system itself. So, Hayek's definition seems deficient in its attempt to define a property of the system in terms of the epistemological access of a potential agent.

Consider a final example: local beer in a Turkish airport costs roughly the same as local beer in an American airport. Now, suppose I am an American businessman traveling to the Middle East and I have a brief stopover in Turkey. I only see the inside of an airport and during my stopover I purchase a beer at an airport bar. What do I learn? On the basis of my background knowledge, I might deduce that the price of booze in Turkey is roughly that of booze in the U.S. This deduction makes sense on the assumption that the relationship between the cost of airport beer and everyday bar beer is the same in both countries.

However, I would be completely incorrect! As it turns out, the price of local beer at everyday bars in Turkey is about a third that of beer at everyday bars in the U.S. So, on the one hand, I have grossly overestimated the cost of beer in Turkey. On the other hand, the cost of hard liquor, since it is mostly imported, is approximately twice that in the U.S.—by generalizing to all booze, I have gone wrong again. Both assumptions (based reasonably on my background knowledge)—that beer in airports is twice that in an ordinary bar, and that the relative price of different types of booze tracks that in the U.S.—were in error. Again, if an agent's epistemic access is built into the definition, then the informational property defined is inherently relative to the agent's background knowledge and cannot distinguish a property purely internal to the system.

information ii

Last time we considered the information in a single event and determined that a decent measure of that information might be:

I(e) = − log P(e)

Suppose, however, that we are not interested in the information in a single event, but in a source of information. We can think of this as a source of events, or a source generating signals. All that really matters is that there are a number of possibilities, and they appear with different frequencies. Let's use π to denote a source and p_i to denote the probability of the i^th outcome amongst the n possible outcomes π might generate.

What can we say about the information generated by this source? Well, suppose we want a measure of the average amount of information in any signal coming from this source. This could mean something like "How chaotic is this source?" Suppose we are looking at fluctuations in background radiation—are they the result of chance (i.e. chaotic) or are they remnants of communications from an alien civilization?

An equivalent interpretation is this: "How efficient is the coding of this source's signal?" If there is lots of redundancy, then there is less information in each event generated by a source. For example, if the source is generating letters of the alphabet and it generates "th" then we would not be surprised if the next symbol is "e"—if the source is generating English text, that is. This is because there is a lot of redundancy in written English. Whenever the probability associated with the next symbol drops below 1/26, i.e. whenever some symbols are more likely than others, we receive less information when the likely symbols occur.

A third interpretation here is this: "How predictable is the source?" Suppose the source is generated by the toss of a fair die and the symbol "x" is sent if the outcome is 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5, but the symbol "y" is sent if the outcome is 6. Then "x" should appear five times more frequently than "y" and we receive much less information whenever "x" occurs. So, if all we do is predict "x", we'll be right five times out of six.

So, a chaotic source is an efficiently coded source is an unpredictable source. But how can we put a measure on this property? Claude Shannon (1948) "The Mathematical Theory of Communication" argues that we need a function H which will satisfy four intuitive properties:

1. H should be continuous over the event probabilities—i.e. small changes in the probability distribution should only have small changes on H.

2. If the probability of all events generated by a source is equal (i.e. for n events, the probability of each is 1/n), then the value of H should increase as the number of possibilities increases (intuitively, there is more information in a die toss than a coin flip).

3. If the end results (the sequence of events) are generated by different probabilistic processes, but the ultimate probability of each symbol is the same, then H should return the same value in each case. For example, consider two sources, π₁ and π₂. π₁ first flips a fair coin. If it comes up heads, it sends "a", if it comes up tails, then π₁ rolls a fair die and sends "b" if the outcome if 1, 2, 3, or 4 and "c" if the outcome is 5 or 6. π₂ just rolls a fair die and sense "a" if the outcome is 1, 2, or 3; "b" if the outcome if 4 or 5; and "c" if the outcome is 6. Although the signals are generated by different mechanisms, in both cases, "a" will appear with probability 1/2; "b" will appear with probability 1/3; and "c" will appear with probability 1/6. So, H should assign the same value to both π₁ and π₂.

Shannon proves that all functions which satisfy these three desiderata will be of the form:
$$
H = − K ∑_i=1ⁿ p_i log p_i

Where K is a constant (essentially, it sets an origin) and the basis of the log represents a choice of units.

Shannon called H the entropy of a source. This is because it happens to be the same equation as is used to calculate entropy in statistical mechanics (note, however, that the derivation of the equation is totally different). Is there any deep connection between entropy in information theory and entropy in statistical mechanics? This is an open question about which opinions differ wildly.

information i

Suppose we observe an event e — how much information do we acquire?

We'd like a function I such that for any e, I(e) tells us how much information is contained in the occurrence of e.

Intuitively, if the probability of e occurring is very large, then I(e) should be very high. We learn a lot when something unlikely occurs. If your math teacher stands on one leg, barks like a dog, turns around three times, then leaps through the window, you learn a lot about him.

If the probability of e occurring is very high, though, I(e) should be very small. In the limit, as the probability of e approaches 1, i.e. certainty, I(e) should approach zero — we don't learn very much when we see the sun rise in the morning (at least, not if we've been paying attention!).

In the limit in the other direction, as the probability of e approaches zero, the information we gain from observing e approaches infinity.

Finally, if two unconnected (i.e. independent) events occur together then the information we receive about them is just the sum of the information we would have received had each of them occurred separately. (Remember that two events are independent if the probability of both of them occurring equals the probability of one times the probability of the other.) If my math teacher puts a banana on his head, and your english teacher, in a different state, smothers himself in jello, then we learn everything I would have learned separately about my math teacher, plus everything you would have learned separately about your english teacher.

So, we now have several constraints on the function I:

1. P(e₁) < P(e₂) implies I(e₁) > I(e₂)

2. P(e) = 1 implies I(e) = 0

3. P(e) = 0 implies I(e) = _∞

4. P(e₁ ∧ e₂) = P(e₁) × P(e₂) implies I(e₁ ∧ e₂) = I(e₁) + I(e₂)

One convenient analysis of information which satisfies these four constraints is

I(e) = − log P(e)

the "temporary autonomous zone"

The medieval Assassins founded a "State" which consisted of a network of remote mountain valleys and castles, separated by thousands of miles, strategically invulnerable to invasion, connected by the information flow of secret agents, at war with all governments, and devoted only to knowledge. Modern technology, culminating in the spy satellite, makes this kind of autonomy a romantic dream. No more pirate islands! In the future the same technology—freed from all political control—could make possible an entire world of autonomous zones. But for now the concept remains precisely science fiction—pure speculation.

Are we who live in the present doomed never to experience autonomy, never to stand for one moment on a bit of land ruled only by freedom? Are we reduced either to nostalgia for the past or nostalgia for the future? Must we wait until the entire world is freed of political control before even one of us can claim to know freedom?

You will argue that this is a counsel of despair. What of the anarchist dream, the Stateless state, the Commune, the autonomous zone with duration, a free society, a free culture? Are we to abandon that hope in return for some existentialist acte gratuit? The point is not to change consciousness but to change the world.

I accept this as a fair criticism. I'd make two rejoinders nevertheless; first, revolution has never yet resulted in achieving this dream. The vision comes to life in the moment of uprising—but as soon as "the Revolution" triumphs and the State returns, the dream and the ideal are already betrayed. I have not given up hope or even expectation of change—but I distrust the word Revolution. Second, even if we replace the revolutionary approach with a concept of insurrection blossoming spontaneously into anarchist culture, our own particular historical situation is not propitious for such a vast undertaking. Absolutely nothing but a futile martyrdom could possibly result now from a head-on collision with the terminal State, the megacorporate information State, the empire of Spectacle and Simulation. Its guns are all pointed at us, while our meager weaponry finds nothing to aim at but a hysteresis, a rigid vacuity, a Spook capable of smothering every spark in an ectoplasm of information, a society of capitulation ruled by the image of the Cop and the absorbant eye of the TV screen.

Babylon takes its abstractions for realities; precisely within this margin of error the TAZ can come into existence. Getting the TAZ started may involve tactics of violence and defense, but its greatest strength lies in its invisibility—the State cannot recognize it because History has no definition of it. As soon as the TAZ is named (represented, mediated), it must vanish, it will vanish, leaving behind it an empty husk, only to spring up again somewhere else, once again invisible because undefinable in terms of the Spectacle. The TAZ is thus a perfect tactic for an era in which the State is omnipresent and all-powerful and yet simultaneously riddled with cracks and vacancies. And because the TAZ is a microcosm of that "anarchist dream" of a free culture, I can think of no better tactic by which to work toward that goal while at the same time experiencing some of its benefits here and now.

In sum, realism demands not only that we give up waiting for "the Revolution" but also that we give up wanting it. "Uprising," yes—as often as possible and even at the risk of violence. The spasming of the Simulated State will be "spectacular," but in most cases the best and most radical tactic will be to refuse to engage in spectacular violence, to withdraw from the area of simulation, to disappear.

The TAZ is an encampment of guerilla ontologists: strike and run away. Keep moving the entire tribe, even if it's only data in the Web. The TAZ must be capable of defense; but both the "strike" and the "defense" should, if possible, evade the violence of the State, which is no longer a meaningful violence. The strike is made at structures of control, essentially at ideas; the defense is "invisibility," a martial art, and "invulnerability"—an "occult" art within the martial arts. The "nomadic war machine" conquers without being noticed and moves on before the map can be adjusted. As to the future—Only the autonomous can plan autonomy, organize for it, create it. It's a bootstrap operation. The first step is somewhat akin to satori—the realization that the TAZ begins with a simple act of realization.

Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (1985)

"talking" apes

Language does not consist in the mere matching of words to events ~ such signaling is no different from the "language" of warning signals used in the wild by many animals to alert their comrades of predators. These signals cannot distinguish cause (= presence of predator) from effect (= run!) ~ declarative and imperative are rolled into one. Furthermore, they cannot distinguish between the presence of a single predator, many predators, or the mere evidence of a predator ~ nor can they distinguish between the fact of a predator's presence or the mere opinion that there is such. These "talking apes" demonstrate this same lack of syntax, lack of a first person perspective, as such they are no better than rabbits, parrots, dolphins, or virtually any other signaling animal at "language," no more like us. Perhaps they even fall short of our poor cousin the bee whose intricate waggle dance at least displays a syntax!

the scholar

The scholar seeks knowledge for its own sake. He desires no reward but the accumulation of understanding. He disdains all patronage, for the nature of the patron is to infect the scholar's inquiry with petty bias and diversion. The watchword of the scholar is dispassionate distrust, for only through skepticism can he separate information from noise. The scholar is open with his knowledge, making it freely available to all others, whether they be fellow scholars or common men. Yet the scholar does not promote his knowledge, he does not march through the streets with banner unfurled, shouting his knowledge with all his voice until his throat grows hoarse. Nor does he seek to silence the voice of his critics, but implacably he listens to their cries and dissects their every word in silence. For the scholar's audience is other scholars; he knows they also follow the doctrine of skepticism, and if his knowledge be true, then they will filter it from the clamor of surrounding noise. Patiently he works, and trusts only his inner compass. These are the signs of a scholar: O, that there were such a one!