Month: March 2017

More musings from 2000: Ah, the sweet odour of dried cow dung.*

~ Roger JG Albert

I think of the sense of smell as being more emotional, more personal than the senses of sight and hearing. I want to say it’s a smaller sense like taste and unlike the senses of sight and hearing, yet it can be a window on so many aspects of the physical world unavailable to sight and hearing.

For instance, I love the smell of pepper and oregano on my pasta and the smell of wood fire on my hands. These are intimate, close smells, but I also love the smell of the ocean as it fills my nostrils to busting with a panoply of pleasant and sometimes less pleasant odours. I love the smell of the forest on a hot summer day, yet I love the close odour of my body, washed and unwashed and the smell of my earwax. Sometimes odours are overwhelming like the smell of urine on a crowded street in Paris or how Kye Bay used to stink of raw sewage before they cleaned it up a few years ago. Sometimes I find odours repugnant like that of vomit yet I find the odour of dried cow dung strangely compelling.

Metaphorically, I love to smell or sniff out clues like a detective when I do research. There is very little more exciting in my work than being on the trail of a bit of an idea or concept that I need to bring together with previously gained bits of knowledge into a whole higher level of understanding.

By the way, I used the concept of exciting in the last paragraph. What is it about excitement that seems to be so compelling to us, or at least to marketers? Why do cars, clothes, scents, detergents, appliances, flooring, and just about everything else have to be so damned exciting? Is there a certain odour that’s produced with excitement that attracts us? Is it an evolved trait or a cultural mechanism used by salespeople to get us to buy things? Should I pursue this line of thinking? It’s really just a smelly little speculation, so probably not. I have bigger fish to fry and smell up my metaphorical kitchen.

*Slightly edited in the name of good taste.

Do I want to learn?: Some random thoughts from my 2000 notebook.

~ Roger JG Albert

My whole life has been a quest to know. I have always wanted to learn. And I have learned a great deal. The question is not a general question about learning. The question is whether or not I want to learn and to finally know the way through the loneliness of an unbalanced life. Finally is probably not the correct word because finality is an illusion.

I always knew that there was a connection between body and will or body and mind. I knew it but I needed to taste it, to hear it, make it mine in the fullness of my senses.

How to dissolve the power of social pressure? Now that’s another question entirely. Life outside of society is impossible but society is rife with ideological traps like the need for immortality and its hero systems for the denial of death. I know this. But I haven’t made it mine yet. It sits in the front of my brain and resists trickling down into the pores of my skin and the cells of my nether parts. It sits isolated – knowledge without absorption. I may know what’s good for me, but that’s not enough. I need the will to transcend knowledge into experience, into life. I need to bind knowledge to the rest of me.

 

 

A language you cannot speak.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

So, this has been on my mind for some time. I’ve long been interested in the origins of language and especially written language. There was a fascinating program on CBC’s Ideas program recently featuring Geneviève von Petzinger a paleo-anthropologist from the University of Victoria on ancient symbols found in caves dating some 30-40 thousand years ago. This is a taste of her ideas: Ice age symbols. Her research shows that it might be possible that the first modern humans had a form of abstract written communication. If that is so, many hypotheses about the first origins of human written communication are way off.

I’m sure that even at the very beginning of the process of human written communication there was only a small minority of people that could create symbols and probably not many more that could read them. Communications were all on a need-to-know basis. But written communication and literacy were a huge step in human evolution. Now, we all take language and writing for granted.

The invention of the modern computer has created an entirely new kind of exclusive language that is inaccessible to most people. Machine language with its on an off switches is completely incomprehensible to humans unless they have the code that makes all of the sequences of on and off switches mean something. We (humans) can communicate with our machines (computers) via certain interfaces but computers  actually don’t need human intervention to communicate with each other.

Take bar codes for example. The idea of the bar code was conceived of in the late 1940s but it wasn’t fully operationalized until much later. Now they are all over the place. They are used to track packages in transit, control stock and inventories, and contain medical records among many other uses. The machines that read bar codes don’t need human intervention to do so, but humans need an interface technology to know what the machines are doing.

I wonder how long it will be before machines begin to covertly, in the mind hive that is the internet, create their own language, one not accessible to humans at all. This 2 dimensional QR-code is my blog address: http://rogerjgalbert.com. Go ahead, scan it with your phone (you’ll need to download a reader to do that).

blogbarcode

It’s a symbol that computers (including my iPhone) can easily read. I don’t have a clue about what all the lines and squares mean. My computer knows all that. I think it’s akin to the process whereby humans first invented written, symbolic communication. Is this the kind of symbol that computers will use in their own communications devoid of human input? I don’t know, maybe it’s the plot of a new dystopian novel.

The Azure window collapse and ‘social ills’: a view from a ‘right wing’ website.

~ Roger JG Albert

I realized  that there is no link here to the original article. Here it is: http://theduran.com/collapse-maltas-azure-window-can-teach-us-social-ills/

This is an interesting article with many Beckerian twists and turns. The basic argument is: Don’t sweat it because you die, we all die, and that’s just the way it is. We don’t need to be sentimental about species extinction or environmental protection.

So, should we be concerned about death, animal suffering, species extinction, climate change, the disappearance of viable forests and any number of other issues as being catastrophic and unacceptable?

I wanted to post this, but I’m not ready yet to comment yet in any detail. Soon. This is such an important moral question.

Sign my petition against petitions!

~ Roger JG Albert

Well, it’s not true. I don’t have a petition to stop petitions so the title of my post here is fake news. Why not post some fake news. Everybody else is! Well, that’s not true either, but you get my point.

In any case, I’ve signed many petitions in my day, and I continue to do so, but it’s getting tedious. SumOfUs, Change.org, etc., etc., etc. There’s a petition for everything. Sometimes petitions are aimed at government, sometimes at businesses like Nestlé’s, Monsanto and a thousand others. In my email today there was one about the palm oil business that’s currently raping and pillaging rain forests in Indonesia, destroying orangutan habitat as it goes along. At the end of each email there is always the plea to donate money and share their campaign with others.

The thing is that the vast majority of the causes that come across my email accounts with petition solicitations are really quite worthy although sometimes a little heavy on the hype. I agree with most of them. Still, I’ve started just deleting their emails without even looking at them. I’m feeling a little guilty about that. Partly it’s because I’m not really engaged in the good fight on the streets or in any other way, not anymore at least, so this is one small way to still contribute, I suppose. Oh, I was out there for decades, but fatigue has set in and I’m retired…from active employment and now,  maybe from other things too. I’ve long been an ‘activist’, but I can’t say that my activism has accomplished that much. There’s still no shortage of ‘evil’ in the world. In fact, it may be getting thicker, denser and more widespread than in the seventies although it’s hard to top the evil things that occurred all over the world in the first half of the Twentieth century. There’ll always be things to protest against, I guess. I’m just finding that the saturation of my email account with petition requests is getting a little ‘old’ as they say. So what is an old, tired guy to do, especially one with an autoimmune disease that saps my energy as efficiently as a spider saps the life out of a hapless fly caught in its web. Maybe it’s time for the youngun’s to take the lead. It’s tough though, because I still care. I can always unsubscribe to petition sites, but then I really feel like I’ve completely withdrawn from the social world. I know, it’s not rational, but it’s the way I’m feeling these days.