For the last few months, friends and I have been working on the lighted-batchi technique with the hopes it will enable more detailed comparison of one’s right and left-hand strikes, as well as comparisons of different players’ movements.

The video below is excerpts of right vs left hand comparisons and Yuta vs Kris comparisons in both betta and slant-drum position. We tried a two-camera shot, as well as more complicated moves at the end. If nothing else, they’re pretty to look at!

With practice, I hope lighted batchi will be a useful tool in our taiko exploration toolbox!

(Hopefully I’ll post a video of this year’s gift to my mom — a praxinoscope made from an old record player! — sometime before next Christmas.)

Hiro and I have just returned from a two-day trip on our new bike. Oh… my… goodness…

We love this bike!

This was perhaps the most fun overnight trip I’ve ever had! We rode up to South Pasadena to have lunch at Charm Vegan , then over to South El Monte for dinner at Thien Tam Vegetarian Restaurant, and a night’s rest in Rosemead. We then took the beautiful Rio Hondo bike path home. The food was great, but it was basically an excuse to ride, and the riding was delightful. Not only is the recumbent comfortable, but the bike inspires amazing responses from onlookers. The weird-looking bike elicits shouts of support wherever we went. It’s hard not to be happy while a guy in a Compton low-rider gives you the thumbs up while a family on the sidewalk applauds and an old guy on the corner yells, “Pump that shit! Pump that shit!” Riding this bike is like being transported to a country where everyone is friendly and the pace of life is just right. The basics of getting around, eating, and talking become a joy.

Meet Alphonse! With a frame made by Greenspeed in Australia, and parts assembled by Bent Up Cycles in Hollywood, this is our dream bike! It’s 10.5′ long, fast, and really fun!

I had long planned to build a recumbent tandem. The bikes are surprisingly expensive, so I figured I could buy the welding tools and pay myself to do it and still save money. But just before the holiday break I happened to learn of a used Greenspeed GTT recumbent tandem going on sale. Suddenly, Hiro and I were excited about the possibility of having a tandem now, rather than five years from now, so we jumped in and bought it.

I’m surprised how fun it is to be recumbent. It feels sort of like flying, and cars generously share the roads with us. It’s easy to chat with your partner and it’s nice to feel the push of another set of legs. We are recent converts to clip-in pedals, which are even better on a recumbent trike where you can’t fall over.

The long-term dream is to be able to do taiko tours on bike. I’m not sure how feasible it really is, but I’d very much like to find a way that future career success doesn’t mean environmental failure.

We’re heading out on a two-day, 65-mile trip right now. More tomorrow on how it went!

• Creative License —
• Using Drupal —
• The Chairs Are Where the People Go —
• Program Or Be Programmed —
• But Will the Planet Notice? —
• Moby Dick —

Title: Creative License, The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling
Author: Kembrew McLeod, Peter DiCola
Source: LAPL
Interest: 3 stars

This is perhaps the best book I’ve never finished. The authors interviewed more than 100 musicians, including David Byrne, Cee Lo Green, George Clinton, De La Soul, and DJ Qbert to understand the variety of opinions on sampling and music licensing. The book’s explanations of sampling history, famous sampling lawsuits, and the danger of restricting sampling are all well-written and authoritative. The underlying theme is that the current system of music licensing is broken and threatens creativity. I feel passionately about the topic but somehow I didn’t find myself passionate about finishing the book. Many of the artists have a relatively basic understanding of copyright law and a conservative approach to ownership of music, even those who sample extensively. Only a few artists like Negativland question whether music should be owned at all. Creative License is decidedly even-handed with all opinions. I found myself pining for the revolutionist, copyleft writings of Eben Moglen and Richard Stallman.

The book is a significant addition to copyright academia and I’m glad to know the go-to book for facts on the creative importance of sampling. Kembrew gets props for responding to my questions by email!

Title: Using Drupal
Author: Angela Byron, Addison Berry, Nathan Haug, Jeff Eaton, James Walker, Jeff Robbins
Source: LAPL
Interest: 3 stars

I’m working on a website to allow taiko players to learn and share slant-drum movements and rhythms. Using Drupal provided a useful overview of taxonomy, views, and a few other topics with which I needed help. I didn’t complete the guided website creation tutorials but rather wish I had as that might have provided a more comprehensive understanding than my out-of-order reading. With the release of Drupal 7 the book will be out of date in a few years, but until then, it’s another good offering from O’Reilly.

Title: The Chairs Are Where the People Go — How to live, work, and play in the city
Author: Misha Glouberman with Sheila Heti
Source: gift (thank you Margaret!)
Interest: 3 stars

Although I wasn’t initially inspired by this book, at about 50 pages in, I acclimated to the short entries on random topics and grew attracted to the real-life protagonist, Misha Glouberman. Having been recommended by the brilliant Margaret McKenty and following the book’s laudatory preface, I probably had set my expectations too high. But reading the book while travelling by bus, overhearing others’ complaints about the challenges of daily life, and feeling particularly reflective, I came to see the charm of The Chairs Are Where the People Go. Some of Misha’s ideas seem a little immature, and I disagreed with perhaps 20% of the ideas. In How to Improvise, and How Not to Not Improvise“, for example, he says, “… I’m much more interested in improvisation as a practice, or as something to do, than as something for people to watch.” Hallelujah, Misha! He immediately goes on, however, to explain how virtuoso performance is essentially “Look at how good I am”. Although I might have agreed 10 years ago, I have come to be very inspired by displays of skill and and associate Misha’s reactionary view with inexperience and lack of confidence.

In the end, these bits of disagreement likely kept me more engaged with the book and I very much enjoyed reading it.

During these events, people are able to derive a lot of aesthetic pleasure from the very simplest group exercises. You get a roomful of people and you ask them to close their eyes and make and hold a vowel sound together. And you know what? It sounds amazing!

Charging for My Classes… now I just name a price: “$360 or whatever you want.” … Amid all this, though, I’m also a real stickler about payments. If people drop out of the class, I usually won’t refund their money. People are allowed to pay in installments, but they have to give me postdated checks up front. So there is a contract and the contract is binding, it’s just up to that person to choose what the terms of the contract are.

I think playing the (improvisation) game can make people smart about things like: what it means to participate in a pattern versus what it means to break a pattern; what it means to try and start a new pattern or to do something that’s a counterpoint.

We’re all proud of our society’s ability to bring things about without violence. So, for instance, we applaud freely elected governments, where the reins of state can change hands without people having to kill people. But I think that a more advanced version of that goal is to be able to do things without antagonism.

At Trampoline Hall, after every lecture, there’s a Q&A with the audience. One of the things that’s really great about the show is that the Q&A’s really work. The audience asks really good questions. I think a big part of the reason they ask really good questions is that at every show, right at the beginning, I talk for a long time about what a good question is. The first thing I tell people is that a good question has to be a question. … I tell people that if they think they have a two-part question, what they really have are two questions, and that they should just pick the better of the two. … What I warn people against is feelings of pride. I ask them to pay attention to the pictures in their minds when they feel a question coming on, and if they see themselves becoming enormous and floating God-like above the audience, and the lecture getting smaller and smaller in the distance, then maybe that’s a sign the question isn’t that great.

Title: Program Or Be Programmed
Author: Douglas Rushkoff
Source: LAPL
Interest: 2 stars

The opening is gripping. “When human beings acquired language, we learned not just how to listen but how to speak. When we gained literacy, we learned not just how to read but how to write. And as we move into an increasingly digital reality, we must learn not just how to use programs but how to make them.” Fantastic! I am a big believer that our society’s move toward “user-friendly”, dumbed-down, Apple-approved products is a detriment to our potential and this book contains interesting perspective on the topic. After setting the bar so high at the beginning, however, many of the later sections are less compelling. My confidence in the author took a significant hit with the borderline-mystical description of the limitations of digital audio (versus analog). “… early tests of analog recordings compared to digital ones revealed that music played back on a CD format had much less of a positive impact on depressed patients than the same recording played back on a record. Other tests showed that digitally recorded sound moved the air in a room significantly differently than analog recordings played through the same speakers.” What?! It sounds to me like Rushkoff is letting tecnhophobia get the best of him here. But in other areas, his insight into the internet and its cultural effects are enlightening. While I find Eben Moglen‘s use of history and understanding of digital culture more compelling, Program Or Be Programmed is worth the quick read.

Like the participants of media revolutions before our own, we have embraced the new technologies and literacies of our age without actually learning how they work and work on us. And so we, too, remain one step behind the capability actually being offered us. Only an elite — sometimes a new elite, but an elite nonetheless — gains the ability to fully exploit the new medium on offer. The rest learn to be satisfied with gaining the ability offered by the last new medium. The people hear while the rabbis read; the people read while those with access to the printing press write; today we write, while our techo-elite programs.

… the more we live this way, the more we value the digital’s definition of the now. Our search engines preface their more relevant results with a section of “live” links to whatever blog comment, social networking message, or tweet has most recently been posted containing the words in our queries. The only weighting that matters is how few seconds have transpired since it was blurted.

The danger, of course, is that today’s “penny for your friends” social networks will survive long enough — at least one after the other — for their compromised social standards to become accepted or even internalized by users. … If the social urge online comes to be understood as something necessarily comingled with commercial exploitation, then this will become the new normative human behavior as well.

Title: But Will the Planet Notice — How Smart Economics Can Save the World
Author: Gernot Wagner
Source: LAPL
Interest: 4 stars

The book’s ending provides the most concise summary.

By all means, de-clutter your life. Move to the city and, once there, downsize your apartment. Carry around a canvas bag. Bike. You’ll be that much better prepared when everyone else catches up to your good deeds. But everyone else won’t catch up to your good deeds voluntarily — not in time, and not with sufficiently strong action.

That’s where economics enters the room. There’s simply no way to go about tackling this problem other than taking seriously the incentives all of us face. Getting several billion of us to behave differently — to behave morally — means guiding market forces in the right direction, making it in our interest to do the right thing. It’s the only way to make the planet notice.

Wagner, an economist at the Environmental Defense Fund, makes the case that solving climate change will require fundamental changes to global economies such that the cost of pollution and environmental degradation are factored into the basic costs of production and consumption. This seems entirely logical to me. I especially appreciated the examples of regulation that allows markets to work properly (Maine lobster and Alaska halibut laws).

At the risk of niggling, I don’t think Wagner need emphasize the insignificance of individual action.

I never got my driver’s license. My reason back when I had the chance and refused was that if a billion Chinese all start to drive, the planet will be toast, so why should I?

The problem with my logic was precisely that a billion Chinese are going to start to drive sooner rather than later. Chances are they won’t take their cues from my behavior. My making the sacrifice and not driving contributes nothing to the solution: 1,000,000,000 – 1 = 1 billion.

I agree that individual action isn’t enough to solve our problem, but all the same, Wagner’s logic sounds great to me. Why not discuss the importance of being vegetarian, riding one’s bike, and working toward fundamental economic change. Perhaps the dichotomy enabled catchy one-liners for advertising the book, but that could be my overly-sensitive, anti-advertising twitch kicking in.

However much you recycle or turn off lights, it will be canceled out many times over by your driving a car. Driving ten thousand miles in even the most fuel-efficient Prius produces four tons of carbon dioxide.

This isn’t as easy as the decision to go vegetarian, as much as I would have liked to write a book like Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, a gripping essay that convinced Natalie Portman, a lifelong vegetarian, to turn vegan… The conclusion is simple: Don’t eat animals. Saving the planet is in a different league altogether.

… one ton (of CO2) corresponds to the subsistence level of someone living with the bare necessities.

(Lobster-catcher) Gangs aim for self-preservation: preserving their families, their way of life, their territories, and, as it turns out, the lobster stock at sea… If lobsters left alone spawn and multiply on your very own territory, it makes a lot of sense to let some go today for a greater haul tomorrow and in years to come… Tuna, sadly is in the opposite situation. … Catching tuna is a global scuffle with factory ships chasing increasingly dwindling stocks in international waters. Letting tuna go today does not mean you will catch more next year. It means your competitor will catch them tomorrow.

Let’s turn to a superbly performing fishery that uses caps on total catch the right way: Alaska’s halibut fishery after 1995. … Fishery scientists determine the total sustainable catch, but instead of declaring it as the overall goal of the annual race to catch as many fish in as little time as possible, regulators print up individual shares in that total catch. Fisherman then get the guaranteed right to catch a predetermined amount of fish. That simple step makes all the difference. It’s no longer a race. … The motivation to treat fishing as if it were a competitive free-for-all is gone.

Anytime we talk about carbon pollution associated with consumption — which is fundamentally the right way to look at things — we immediately get to something akin to border tariffs. … That’s not a tariff for the sake of throwing a wrench into world trade. It’s a tariff that would help throw a wrench into our unbridled desire to use the atmosphere as a free sewer.

… the Endangered Species act hasn’t saved the ivorybill (which was very likely extinct before it was listed as endangered), it didn’t save the bald eagle (that was thanks to the ban on DDT), and it won’t save the polar bears (that will require serious efforts to stabilize the global climate. … We can’t stop global warming by edict.

Socializing costs of private actions is the exact opposite of what libertarians would want to do, but that’s what the market does, when left entirely on its own. So yes, by all means, make your own decisions about how much you would like to drive, fly, and to pollute, but be prepared to pay every last dime of the consequences. … It doesn’t get much more libertarian than that.

Title: Moby Dick
Author: Herman Melville
Source: LAPL
Interest: 4.5 stars

Just as I was lamenting my long lapse from reading fiction, my mom recommended Moby Dick. Why not be ambitious?!

I loved it.

It took about 40 pages for me to warm up to it, as I had to transition from the non-fiction mindset. At the beginning, I prepared myself to be “entertained”. I found myself missing the non-fiction satisfaction of learning something concrete. Then I was caught up on the wonderful word selection and terminology, and I found myself inspired to improve my own language. Between readings I would catch myself observing things differently, with more attention to detail. Even the length of the book presented a satisfying challenge. In every way, the book felt “good for me”.

Moby Dick is narrated by Ishmael, a quirky sailor who gets geeky about all-things-whale. He spends the majority of the book reflecting on the significance of the whaling occupation, the manner of its coterie, and the beauties of the whale, and the sperm whale in particular. The 600+ pages are split into 135 chapters, most of which focus on some specific topic, like the tail of the sperm whale, which Ishmael expounds in beautiful language and from which he derives some truth about humanity. Though the sheer length of the novel was daunting in a few spots, the satisfying structure of the chapters made for fun reading at brief intervals throughout the day.

Faced with the challenge of finishing the book within the public library 3-week check-out period, I simultaneously borrowed the audio book version, read by Anthony Heald. This is fantastic, and Heald deserves great praise for meeting the momentous challenge of acting all the parts and convincingly delivering the language of Moby Dick. Although I only listened to 4 or 5 of the 19 CDs, they got me through a number of traffic jams and provided the satisfaction of moving the bookmark ahead whole chunks of pages at a time.

March 11, 2012 will be the SoCal debut of the Matsuri Crashers battle! More than a dozen players have signed up to participate and we’ve had a great time practicing thus far. We will each be developing a solo to fit the “battle structure” of our choosing. There are currently six structures, named after Los Angeles freeways, each designed to allow a player to focus on some aspect of slant-drumming, from basics to new movements, rhythm and timing, to playing fast.

I’m pleased to announce we have completed rough drafts of the written scores and audio recordings of the structures! You can download the individual pieces below, or the full zip file containing everything.

We’ve been working on some exciting new moves and some basic-strike research and I’ll be posting more in the coming weeks. As always, if you would like to participate, contact me at kris at On Ensemble dot org.

Happy drumming!

(The written score and audio recordings are released under the Free Art License 1.3.)

Written Score
battle_structures_111130a.pdf

Audio Recordings (mp3 format)
5_jiuchi_111128.mp3
10_jiuchi_111128.mp3
101_jiuchi_111128.mp3
110_jiuchi_111128.mp3
134_jiuchi_111128.mp3
405_jiuchi_111128.mp3

Audio Recordings (ogg format)
5_jiuchi_111128.ogg
10_jiuchi_111128.ogg
101_jiuchi_111128.ogg
110_jiuchi_111128.ogg
134_jiuchi_111128.ogg
405_jiuchi_111128.ogg

Graphics File (Inkscape SVG format)
structures_print_111130.svg

Everything
matsuri_crashers_battle_structures_111130a.zip

• Physics for Entertainment —
• The Art Instinct —
• Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed —
• Life Inc. —
• Moonwalking With Einstein —

Title: Physics for Entertainment
Author: Yakov Perelman
Source: LAPL
Interest: 3.5 stars

Although the thirteenth and final edition of this delightful exploration of mechanics, friction, gravitation, and other scientific topics was printed in 1936, the information is surprisingly accurate. Alongside interesting facts of physics, the translation retains the charm of old-school language, with phrases like, “You will understand what I am driving at if you ask yourself: why did the fire, which the trapper lit, run towards the other fire and not contrariwise?” The frequent references to H.G. Wells and Jules Verne complete the steampunk-for-nerds mood.

Over the course of the book I remembered many facts I’d forgotten; throwing a ball into the air also pushes the earth downward and the ball’s gravity also pulls the earth upward (albeit to a diminutive degree). My favorite thought problem was a precurser to explaining the Doppler effect with newspapers on trains, quoted below. Definitely worth checking out from LAPL for the young scientist in your life.

Here it is. Daily, at noon, a train pulls out from Moscow for Vladivostok. Also daily, and again at noon, another train leaves Vladivostok for Moscow. Suppose the entire journey takes ten days. The question is: how many trains will you meet on your way from Vladivostok to Moscow? Most people rush to give the answer: ten. That’s wrong though. Besides meeting on the way the ten trains that will leave Moscow after you depart from Vladivostok, you will also meet the trains already on the way at the time you left. Consequently, the right answer is not ten but twenty.

We have come to the end of Physics for Entertainment. If now that you have read it, you feel you would like to learn more about this boundless domain of knowledge from which this motley handful of simple facts has been culled, I shall consider my task fulfilled and, happily content, will write The End.

Title: The Art Instinct
Author: Denis Dutton
Source: LAPL
Interest: 3 stars

The Art Instinct makes the case for an evolutionary basis of art and is an interesting read for someone contemplating the definition of “art”. Unfortunately, my simple approach of evaluating art in terms of its total effect on the creator, the viewer, and society, was not challenged by this book. I found myself losing interest during Dutton’s attempts to delineate “art” vs “craft” and it seems straightforward to me that our basic instincts should play a role in our appreciation of music, painting, and other forms of creative expression. Even when my mind wandered, however, The Art Instinct inspired thoughts about art that were useful and enjoyable.

The whole idea of asking whether a culture has a “different concept” of art from ours raises a curious challenge: you cannot even call it a different concept of art unless it shares something in common with our concept. Otherwise, why did you use the word “art” in the first place? Chapter 4 explores this paradox, arguing that cross-cultural transformations have been wildly exaggerated and misunderstood by anthropologists and others intent on exoticizing foreign cultures and denying the universality of art.

With the arts, perhaps we should regard ourselves like moths who have “succeeded in inventing a lantern in order to have fun circling it.” If the arts are like the lantern, the Darwinian question is why we worked so hard to invent them and why we have such fun circling them in the first place. The evolved adaptations are there to be discovered, and so are their extensions into our artistic and aesthetic lives.

But if art is an adaptation, mere survival is a completely inadequate explanation for its existence. The reason is clear: artistic objects and performances are typically among the most opulent, extravagant, glittering, and profligate creations of the human mind… The classic case is the peacock’s tail, as both Darwin and his early critics well understood… Darwin worked slowly over years developing his solution to the riddle… sexual selection by mate choice.

[random trivia] Men, on the other hand, may produce around twelve million sperm per hour and, in principle, may inseminate large numbers of women — and then abandon them at will. Thus the biggest recorded number of children born of one woman, an eighteenth-century Russian peasant, is reported to be sixty-nine, but that included many multiple births in twenty-seven pregnancies. The largest number of children fathered by one man, Mulai Ismail Ibn Sharif, a contemporary of Louis XIV, is said to be 1042, naturally involving hundreds of mothers in a harem. (This number is on the low side: it is merely when they stopped counting.)

We pay craftsmen to paint houses or repair clocks because of the dependability of learned techniques: these people know what they are doing. But in the sense of using skill to produce a preconceived result, creative artists strictly speaking never know what they’re doing. Even Mozart, who could compose music faster in his mind than he could actually write it down, and might therefore look to a naive observer like he was transcribing a preconceived outcome, was fully an artist in the sense described: he did not, after all, compose his music before he composed it. The domain of craft is one of recipes, instruction books, formulas, methods, and routines. The arts, Collingwood argued, are always open to the unexpected; a change in a single word or note or brushstroke can alter or even reverse not only the meaning of the work but the artist’s entire objective.

As the literary theorist Ihab Hassan has put it, politics, “when it becomes primary in our lives, tends to exteriorize all the difficulties of existence. It literally makes them superficial as Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Pascal are not. Tragedy is not injustice.”

Why would anyone find it awkward when two women show up at a party coincidentally wearing the same evening dress? Where did we learn to react in this way? The answer is that we didn’t simply learn it, as we learned the road code. The sense of awkwardness comes from an intuitive recognition that an evening dress — along with the coiffure, the makeup, the jewelry — ought in the context of a party to be the expression of an individual personality, ought to show the originality of a person. … If personal distinction is a basic desideratum in social life, it is much more important in the life of art. … The fascination, sometimes near obsession, with individual expression is evidence for its being an extension into the arts of an evolved adaptation relevant to interpersonal recognition and evaluation — something that has come about, no doubt, through a pathway in sexual selection.

If you are an artist, the most enduring way to achieve a lasting artistic success is to create works of aesthetic pleasure that are perceived as yours. Cheap sentimentality in art traffics in emotions that are everybody’s: that is why soap opera is a genre art; consumers of soaps have little curiosity about who writes them.

Psychologically, some of the most staggering moments in aesthetic experience, the ones we may remember all our lives, are those instants where the events that make up the whole of a vast novel, an opera, or a poem, sonata, or painting fall meaningfully into place. … The are marked by the utmost lucidity and coherence.

The evolutionary implications of waist-to-hip ratios for art history are not unlike the evolutionary implications for the presence of sweetness in food. That sugars are found in all cuisines and that sweetness makes some foods more attractive for evolutionary reasons does not mean that a bowl of corn syrup and a plate of sugar will ever be dinner.

The kitsch object openly declares itself to be “beautiful,” “profound,” “moving,” or “important.” But it does not bother trying to achieve these qualities, because it is actually about its audience, or its owner. Thus an expensive and ostentatious set of “great works of literature bound in hand-tooled leather” does not exist for the sake of the actual literary works it contains.

Title: Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed — Educating for the Virtues in the Twenty-First Century
Author: Howard Gardner
Source: LAPL
Interest: 1.5 stars

This book examines the terms “truth”, “beauty”, and “goodness” in detail, asking whether they are relevant in a contemporary context. It is critical of much of post-modern thought, arguing that multi-culturalism and moral relatavism have overstepped, undermining values that are relevant and useful. As with The Art Instinct, however, I’m sorry to say that I didn’t find the essential questions of the book particularly challenging, and when my mind wandered this time, it wandered to a new book. I didn’t finish Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed and will leave a full review to someone else.

Title: Life Inc. — How the World Became A Corporation and How to Take It Back
Author: Douglas Rushkoff
Source: LAPL
Interest: 4 stars

Life Inc. is a stirring condemnation of the developed world’s shift of values to economic priorities and corporate power. Although I don’t have the historical knowledge to refute or verify much of the evidence presented, even read with skepticism, the book is compelling. The final chapter encourages individual action and is a relief from example after example of corporate greed. The book changed the way I listen to NPR’s “Marketplace” program and solidified my desire to build a home without taking out a loan.

The problem was that, unlike railways, cars required public space to operate. Who would build, and pay for, all the roads? Although it might have seemed logical for drivers to pay the tolls and taxes required to maintain automobile thoroughfares, this would have discouraged people from buying cars in the first place. Instead, the automobile companies, as well as tire manufacturers, oil companies, and, of course, land developers, pressured the government to pick up the tab. While GM’s role in dismantling the city streetcar has been overstated, the company did identify the cities where trolly systems were vulnerable, and then created competetive lines that put them out of business. Once this was done, GM would convert the new system into a bus line — serviced by GM’s buses. Then GM would divest itself of the company. This practice spurred the transition from city streets that served pedestrians, merchants, and kids along with trolleys, to roads that served the automobile.

For his first client, Dichter took on Betty Crocker. The new instant cake mixes were failing, but why? Dichter’s free-association sessions with housewives revealed that the product’s image of ease and convenience made these women feel guilty — as if they weren’t really providing for their families, or being adequate mothers. So Dichter suggested that Betty Crocker give housewives a greater sense of participation. By removing egg from the mix, and requiring women to break and add a real egg instead, the company could turn the procedure into an unconscious symbol of fertility and nourishment. After making this change, Betty Crocker saw sales soar. Dichter became a sought-after consultant and millionaire.

The landscape of corporatism favors the selfish over the social, the brand over the product, and the central over the local. This is why our search for solutions has been so stunted; we look for nationally branded answers to problems that can be approached only on a local or a personal level. We are drawn to solutions that offer the same instant gratification as consumption, the same frictionless immediacy as high-end salesmanship. Political leaders have all the emotional power — and insubstantiality — of the tested images on which their campaigns are based. As long as we experience the world from the perspective of its corporate conglomerates, we will remain oblivious to the activity and opportunities still available to us on a human scale. We will continue to fight on a battlefield that was created to benefit corporate actors while disempowering and dehumanizing real people.

Through the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, lender nations would be in a position to assist developing nations with huge injections of cash. By accepting the loans, however, borrower nations would be obligated to open themselves to rules of free trade as established by the international lending community at Bretton Woods. … Taking a loan meant opening one’s ports to foreign ships, and one’s markets to foreign goods. It meant allowing foreign corporations to purchase land within a country, and to compete freely with any domestic company.

The department-store sales floor is no less coercively biased than the the playing field on which free-market competition supposedly takes place today. The store uses the language of free and fair competition to justify near-absolute control over its empoyees; salespeople fight over a supply of customers made artificially scarce through overemployment, and learn to measure their own success against the failure of others. … Under the guise of promoting its workers’ self-direction, the store manages to pay less for more work. The greater competitive marketplace, likewise, works under the presumption of a natural and free contest between self-directed individuals, unencumbered by “senselessly” debilitating regulations.

Given the premises he worked under, Hayek’s conclusions were intelligent enough… When it’s working as designed, the free market can accurately predict and address a wide range of human needs, with a minimum of central planning. … But both principles are operating in a social landscape and economic framework dominated by their own forced implementation. We built this economy from the ground up — at the expense of other social mechanisms — and then used its existence as evidence that this is the way things have always been. … By accepting greed as the foundation and the market as the context of all human interaction, we ended up replacing a coplex ecology of relationships with a much simpler and balance-sheet-friendly set of zero-sum equations.

There is a vast middle ground between attempting to design a socialist welfare state and leaving self-interested individuals alone to spontaneously develop a free-market utopia — especially when the rules of that marketplace have been imposed by forces as powerful as any dictator. To approach that middle ground, however, we must dispense with the assumption that human beings were born to be economic actors or, in Hayek’s more nuanced view, that we were all the unconscious arbiters of natural market forces. The principles of the intentionally corporatized marketplace are not embedded in the human genome, nor is self-interested behavior an innate human instinct. If anything, it’s the other way around: a landscape defined by the competitive market will promote self-interested behavior.

In a practice first introduced in ancient Egypt, a farmer would reap his harvest and bring it to a grain store. The grain-store operator would then hand the farmer a receipt, indicating the amount of grain, wine, or other commodity he was storing on the farmer’s behalf. This receipt then served as money. … The local coinage was not saved for long periods, because it didn’t earn any interest. In fact, the longer it was kept, the less it was worth. That’s because the person storing the grain had to be paid, and because a certain amount of the grain was lost to water, rats, and spoilage. So once a year on market day, if the grain had not been claimed, the grain-store operator collected his fees by reissuing the money. … He simply issued new coins with a new date imprint, and exchanged back, say, three coins for every four he collected. … Hoarding money meant losing money. … The fact that the currency cost money encouraged people to think of other ways to create value over time. On average, at least 10 percent of gross revenue was immediately invested in equipment maintenance — a higher percentage than at any time since. … The coexistence of these two kinds of currencies [locally vs nationally-recognized currencies] with very different purposes and biases led to an economic expansion unlike any we have seen since. Sometimes called the “first Renaissance,” the late Middle Ages offered an enviable quality of life for ordinary people. The working class enjoyed four meals a day, usually of three or four courses. They worked six hours a day, and just four or five days a week — unless they were celebrating one of about one hundred fifty annual holidays. Medievalists from Francois Icher to D. Damaschke almost unanimously agree that between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, the quality of life of Europeans was better than at any other period in history, including today.

Alan Greenspan, a disciple of Ayn Rand, repeatedly deregulated markets, leading to the average CEO’s salary rising to 179 times the average worker’s pay in 2005, up from a multiple of 90 in 1994. Adjusted for inflation, the average worker’s pay rose by a total of only 8 percent from 1995 to 2005; median pay for chief executives at the three hundred fifty largest companies rose 150 percent. The top tenth of 1 percent of earners in America today make about four times what they did in 1980. In contrast, the median wage in America (adjusted for inflation) was lower in 2008 than it was in 1980. The number of “severely poor Americans” — defined as a family of four earning less than $9,903 per year — grew 26 percent between 2000 and 2005. … In 1894, John D. Rockefeller, the richest man in Guilded Age America, earned $1.25 million — about seven thousand times the average income in the United States. In 2006, James Simons, a typical hedge-fund manager, “earned” $1.7 billion, or more than thirty-eight thousand times the average income. On top of this, hedge-fund managers’ salaries are taxed at “capital-gains” rates much lower than the rate that average workers pay…

Those of us who don’t understand the capabilities of computers are much more likely to accept the limits with which they are packaged. Instead of getting machines to do what we might want them to do, the machines and their programmers are getting us to do what they want us to do.

The 95 percent of Gates Foundation holdings that aren’t spent on charities each year often work against the very causes the foundation tries to champion. A study by the Los Angeles Times revealed that 41 percent of Gates Foundation investments have been in companies that counter the foundation’s charitable goals or socially concerned philosophy. … It holds $1.5 billion of stock in the very drug companies whose pricing policies are restricting the flow to Africa of medicines that the foundation is supposedly trying to get there.

An even more promising variety of complementary currency, like the grain receipts of ancient times, is quite literally earned into existence. “Life Dollars,” such as those used by teh Fourth Corner Exchange in the Pacific Northwest, are not exchanged for traditional currency. Instead, members of the Fourth Corner Exchange earn credits by performing services or providing goods to one another.

Finally, we must fight the notion that redirecting our concerns in this fashion represents a retreat into provincial self-interest. The efforts may be local, but the effects are global. Every gallon of gas we don’t burn is a few bucks less going to exploit someone in the Middle East. Every student we educate properly has more potential to create value for us all. Every plate of chard we grow is another patch of top-soil saved, another square foot of room on a truck, and another nail in the coffin of Big Agra. Every Little League game we coach is an assault on the obesity epidemic, every illiterate adult we teach to read may become one fewer welfare case to fund, and every hour we spend with friends is that many eyeballs fewer glued to the TV. The little things we do are big, all by themselves.

Title: Moonwalking With Einstein — The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
Author: Joshua Foer
Source: LAPL
Interest: 4.5 stars

What a delightful read! On tour without a computer, I read Moonwalking With Einstein in three days, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Foer engagingly describes his year-long experiments with memory practice and his participation in the U.S. Memory Championships. The story-telling is interspersed with overviews of specific memory techniques and Foer’s research into the changing historical concepts of memory.

“I figure that there are two ways of figuring out how the brain works,” he (Ed Cooke) said. “The first is the way that empirical psychology does it, which is that you look from the outside and take a load of measurements on a load of different people. The other way follows from the logic that a system’s optimal performance can tell you something about its design. Perhaps the best way to understand human memory is to try very hard to optimize it — ideally with a load of bright people in conditions where they get rigorous and objective feedback.”

Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it.

The variability that is built into the poetry of oral traditions allows the bard to adapt the material to the audience, but it also allows more memorable versions of the poem to arise. Folklorists have compared oral poems to pebbles worn down by the water. They’re made smooth over many retellings as the harder-to-remember pieces get chipped away, or made easier to retain and repeat. … work by Parry’s successors has found that virtually every word in the Odyssey and the Iliad fits into some sort of schema, or pattern, that made the poems easier to remember.

Though years of language use condition us not to notice, scriptio continua has more in common with the way we actually speak than the artificial word divisions on this page. Spoken sentences flow together seamlessly in long, blurry drawn-out sound. We don’t speak with spaces. … For a period, Latin scribes actually did try separating words with dots, but in the second century A.D., there was a reversion — a giant and very curious step backward, it would seem — to the old continuous script used by the Greeks.

Michael Montaigne expressed the dilemma of extensive reading in the sixteenth century: “I leaf through books, I do not study them,” he wrote. “What I retain of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else’s. It is only the material from which my judgment has profited, and the thoughts and ideas with which it has become imbued; the author, the place, the words, and other circumstances, I immediately forget.”

As the early-eighteenth-century Dutch poet Jan Luyken put it, “One book, printed in the Heart’s own wax / Is worth a thousand in the stacks.”

Remembering numbers proved to be one of the real world applications of the memory palace that I relied on almost every day. I used a technique known as the “Major System,” invented around 1648 by Johann Winkelmann, which is nothing more than a simple code to convert numbers into phonetic sounds. Those sounds can then be turned into words, which can in turn become images for a memory palace. The code works like this:
0 – S
1 – T or D
2 – N
3 – M
4 – R
5 – L
6 – Sh or Ch
7 – K or G
8 – F or V
9 – P or B

… “learning, memory, and creativity are the same fundamental process directed with a different focus,” says Buzan. “The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas. Creativity is the ability to form similar connections between disparate images and to create something new and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a building, or a dance, or a novel. Creativity is, in a sense, future memory.” If the essence of creativity is linking disparate facts and ideas, then the more facility you have making associations, and the more facts and ideas you have at your disposal, the better you’ll be coming up with new ideas.

Ben (Pridmore) developed a similarly Byzantine system for memorizing binary digits, which enables him to convert any ten-digit-long string of ones and zeros into a unique image. That 2^10, or 1,024, images set aside for binaries. When he sees 1101001001, he immediately sees it as a single chunk, an image of a card game. When he sees 0111011010, he instantaneously conjures up an image of a cinema. In international memory competitions, mental athletes are given sheets of 1,200 binary digits, thirty to a row, forty rows to a page. Ben turns each row of thirty digits into a single image. The number 110110100000111011010001011010, for example, is a muscleman putting a fish in a tin. At the time, Ben held the world record for having learned 3,705 random ones and zeroes in half an hour.