Plausible text

A Technorati search on Sir Philip Sidney points you to this page:
http://fancyfoot.info/index.php/footnote-377-correlative-abstract/


It appears to be computer-generated spam blog, but I love two things:
the pun on having a blog about shoes w/ footnotes
and the change in register from "correlative abstract" to "snowman art."

I've started to save many of the spam emails sent to me at work, because I'm fascinated by the "plausible text" appended so they can pass through spam filters. I'm receiving cut-ups of the zeitgeist in my inbox.



An incidental thought: can spam filters get any better, excepting changes at the margin? That is, is there any systematic way to distinguish (with 95% accuracy) between text written by a computer concatenating random strings from web searches and text written by a human with some sort of rhetorical purpose? If so, won't that drive spammers to make their algorithms generate more humanlike emails--that is, emails that fall in the zen koan to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry section of the sense range?

if so, do spam algorithms count as poetics? or at least as art?

(Paul Graham on "How Art Can Be Good")



Sorry about how disjointed this is; I'm still getting back into the rhythm of thinking in writing, so I'm trying to post more regularly. You can't get good w/o getting.

worth reading:

Article on Visual Studio as a programming tool. I don't know a damn thing about Windows programming, but I'm interested in the way that the tools we use change the way we address problems. The beginning, in particular is interesting..

Hmm

"It is a relatively new phenomenon," said Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, a historian and futurist at the Institute for the Future, a research organization in Silicon Valley. Cyberspace used to be considered an alternate dimension, he said. Now, with the proliferation of cellphones, BlackBerrys and other wireless devices, that alternate dimension has begun to meld with everyday life. "It's a move away from talking about that information as separate from the physical world," Dr. Pang said.

(from NY Times)

Incidentally

I feel like I just whined in public. Bad blog ettiquette.

What I'm thinking about:

I've been trying to identify the common metaphors people use in talking about what the Internet/computing will be like in ten-fifteen years.

So far:

The Neuromancer Model:

The Internet becomes a virtual reality space in which people interact with each other and representations of various entities through personae.

Gibson's model has physical sensation being piped into the individuals in some cases, but that's not strictly necessary. At it's most basic, this model is Everquest or The Sims Online with the existing marketization of those games dramatically extended.

I read recently about a Korean site that was a cross between The Sims and MySpace or Friendster. People decorated virtual rooms and went to visit each other. I wouldn't be surprised if some companies set up shop in the same way.


The Gadget Model:

Computer chips keep getting smaller and wireless broadband becomes more and more widely available. So data production and checking becomes embedded in everything. The paintings on your wall are flat-panel TVs searching the internet for high-resolution images that are similar to paintings you tell it you like. Your car is constantly aware of the location of the nearest gas station and may suggest detours to stores you might like. Historical markers relay information to your iPod about what happened here. Life becomes overlayed with a layer of information.

If in the Neuromancer model the Internet turns data into virtual space, here it becomes a sixth sense. Being disconnected from the Internet already feels a little odd. A Wired article I read pointed out that you often Google things multiple times rather than just remembering them. In this model, the internet becomes, in part, our memories, our means of communication, and a way of richening what we learn about the world.

The technology piece of this will happen. What makes this really compelling, however, is if we can improve our algorithms for finding the right information.

Collaborative filtering, for instance, lets Amazon predict books you'll like. And Page Rank, ideally, means Google can find the webpage you want, rather than all the junk. As these processes develop, we might do better and better and predicting kinds of information than can be pushed unintrusively onto customers. So your iPod goes and finds songs you'll like. And your house goes to the temperature you prefer given the weather. And, a touch creepily, stores track your behavior and purchases and recommend that you buy things that you actually want.

The Brain Model: This metaphor still captivates me. The basic principle is that the connected-node structure of the internet maps rather nicely onto the similar structure of a brain. Just in the way that an ant hill is a super-organism that performs relatively complicated operations despite the simplicity of its fundamental units, the Internet may yield highly complicated or even intelligent behavior from its traffic.

At its most ambitious, this metaphor suggests that we may generate a meta-mind. More coolheadedly, that there will be interesting effects emerging out of the way traffic flows through the internet. Maybe these effects will be at the memetic level--different schools of thought encounter and respond to one another*--or maybe higher--the way people think changes, in a sort of feedback loop.

*One of my favorite lines in /Kaddish/ occurs when the author wishes that the Buddhists and the Jews had encountered each other a few hundred years earlier. Think of the disputations, he says.



I don't like any of these metaphors, and have my own to suggest. But this is enough for tonight.

hmm.

so at work I'm doing web development and i've found that i can really only think about things by using a legal pad, drawing things out, and then moving to the computer.

and at home, i've started trying to write again. that i can't write down on paper at all. there's something about the way chunking-on-the-fly works in a text editor that feels incredibly natural to me when i'm writing a poem.

i'm trying to figure out what that means. are there really two different kinds of thought processes going on in my head? or have i just learned to associate success with certain tools? (when i write papers, i've started thinking on sheets and sheets of legal paper before writing.)

note: when i say web development, i should clarify that i'm using a front-end program that does all the heavy-lifting. i'm really just setting up content. i've entirely lost any ability i had to hack html and that wasn't much in the first place.

but i've realized that my boss doesn't really know html any more than i do. the computer programs seem to do most of the work and all the random-access knowledge he needs is stored on a bookshelf. it's an incredibly efficient system and one that is steadily getting me out of the computers-are-scary mood i've been in for the past few years.

so i've started to think about the attributes of a work environment that would be designed to help me write poems. kinda like those coding environments that ship with programming languages now, so you can have a language and scripting tools and various other things all open at once.

so what the Matthew-Writes software environment would look like:

to start with, a description of what i use now. i tend to have three or four text files open with lines and ideas and parts of lines. one of these is a main-poem file, that has the text of the thing i'm building, and the rest are gibberish files, with loose lines and stanzas and things.

i work by writing down little snippets, expanding on snippets, and accreting things into the main file. fairly regularly, i'll junk a main-file, move it to the side, start a new main-poem file based on some other snippet(s), and raid the old file for ideas. so at any given point i have something like the following files open: junk.html, junk2.html, index(old).html, index.html, and maybe an index(new).html which may turn into something, but may also turn into another junk file.

So my software environment might have the following "areas":
a workspace: such that i could click on the screen and type in a word or group of words, so that i would be able to write down loose lines as i thought of them.
a tablet: where i would be actively working. that'd be the latest version of the poem/stanza in question. by highlighting a group of lines and then clicking a button, i could push them to the archive (next) where they would be saved.
an archive: where bigger chunks could be kept. sometimes this would hold stanzas that didn't fit in the poem i was working on. sometimes this would hold multiple versions of the same idea, so that i could keep playing with it. the key is to keep my tablet relatively clear. right now i just put things at the bottoms of documents, but then they're hard to find.
a stable version: my current best version of the poem, pulled staticly from the tablet when i decide to keep something, would be accessible at the right.

in addition, i'd want easy look-ups for the bible, shakespeare, oed (etymology), dictionary.com (spelling), and a rhyming dictionary (willful perversity).


all right. enough willful self-indulgence.


current idea obsession: how the tools we use change the job we do.