Home About Geoff Blog Critiques of KW Books CRM Frontiers Email List Recommended Leaving Cult, $
I had no idea that the classic Muppet Show song Mahna Mahna had this much history behind it.
Or, um, in front of it....
You probably already knew Ken Wilber's views on non-integral approaches to world government and the continuing War in Iraq:
I harbor the pain of vision unrequited ... the loneliness of integral heavily weighs on any who yearn for wholeness in action. Until that time, the bright promise of a tomorrow that coheres is no consolation but source of torment....
If you like purple-meme prose....
Old Baldy wrote those lines, of course, back in the spring of 2003—even before I had started to see through his dishonesty- and/or incompetence-based misrepresentations of real academic research to suit his own "integral" purposes. That is, kw's "insights" in the piece date from a time when even his worst critics (yes, including myself) still found great value in the "brilliant" AQAL framework.
How times have changed, eh?
Anyway, if you want to hear what someone who actually has a clue has to say about the War in Iraq, how about Donald Trump?
All that pragmatic, real-world insight, and nary a red, green or yellow value-meme to be found floating around anywhere. Refreshing, ain't it?
Don't try to tell me technology isn't wonderful: The SongBird travel/practice guitar.
There was already the Behringer iAxe and the Line 6 Variax, in all their permutations—basically, computers behaving as if they were "real" instruments, via digital modeling.
All in all, it's just too much! (In a very, very good way.)
But alas, "when you have time you have no money, and when you have money you have no time." Ah, to be independently wealthy....
Stumbled on this collection of the origins and meanings of the songs on The Beatles' White Album today.
Now the sun turns out his light....
The method of loci or Ars memoriae (art of memory in Latin) or Mnemotechnics is a technique for remembering that has been practiced since Classical times. It is a kind of mnemonic link system based on places (loci, or locations), used most often in cases where long lists of items must be remembered in order. It was taught for many centuries as a part of the curriculum in schools as part of Rhetoric. It enabled an orator to easily remember a sermon or speech....
In ancient advice, the loci were physical locations, usually in a familiar large public building, such as a market or a church. To utilize the method, one walked through the building several times, viewing distinct places within it, in the same order each time. After a few repetitions of this, one should be able to remember and visualize each of the places in order reliably. To memorize a speech, one breaks it up into pieces, each of which is symbolized by vivid imagined objects or symbols. In the mind's eye, one then places each of these images into the loci. They can then be recalled in order by imagining that one is walking through the building again, visiting each of the loci in order, and viewing each of the images that were placed in the loci, thereby recalling each piece of the speech in order....
Because one can readily imagine moving through a memory structure starting at some arbitrary point, one can easily recall the list starting from any point in it, and even recall it easily in reverse order. Prodigious memory feats have been attributed to this method....
A reference to these techniques survives to this day in the common English phrases "in the first place", "in the second place," and so forth....
Using this technique a person with ordinary memorization capabilities, after establishing the route stop-points and committing the associated images to long-term memory, with less than an hour of practice can remember the sequence of a shuffled deck of [fifty-two] cards. The world record for this is 34 seconds (Wikipedia).
On the other hand—
Several years ago, during an interview on the late-night NBC program Later, [actress Marilu Henner] revealed that she can remember what she did on any given date in the past. When the host, Bob Costas randomly chose the night that Neil Armstrong landed on the moon she was briefly dumbstruck before revealing that she had lost her virginity that night in the shower.
"One small step for man...."
There are many reasons why I had been avoiding making the phone call to Bell Canada to ensure that the (unused) dial-up account I had with them didn't auto-renew at the end of its initial twelve-month contract. One of those reasons is that in my heart I knew that at some point during the conversation, and the associated endless attempts at up-selling me to a different package, I would end up raising my voice at the CSR and saying, "All I want to do is cancel my account and change the credit card it's being billed to!"
(Bell, in a stroke of Customer Service genius, doesn't let you do either of those simple activities online—you can only view your bill and change the billing address. In fact, they don't even accept Internet service-related emails. So, you can sign up easily enough online, but you can't get out without enduring a maddening phone call, during which they will make every attempt to retain you as a customer, even if it means driving you to the point where you want nothing more to do with them.)
And yep, sure enough, by halfway through the 23-minute call I made from my cell phone today, I got to exactly that point, even while knowing that the CSR in question was just doing her job, albeit none too competently even outside of the attempted up-sell.
I would have probably handled the whole thing better if I hadn't been in at Future Shop yesterday afternoon, needing nothing more in order for me to be happy than to pay for a LAN cable, and been subjected to exactly the same thing by the salesguy:
Him: Do you have Internet? Me: I'm not looking for an ISP. Him: Are you with Bell or Rogers? Me: Actually, I'd avoid both of them. Him: You're going to need Internet.
Him: Do you have Internet?
Me: I'm not looking for an ISP.
Him: Are you with Bell or Rogers?
Me: Actually, I'd avoid both of them.
Him: You're going to need Internet.
Grrrrr. Simply saying "No" is never enough, is it?
And, as if local area networks (and their associated cables) couldn't exist without the Internet! (As it happens, I will indeed be using the cable to connect to an Internet-enabled LAN; but that was really none of his effin' business, was it? I don't even generally buy computer-related stuff at Future Shop anymore, simply because the prices at PC Village are so much lower.)
So, I want nothing more to do with Bell, I can't stand Primus, and I've researched Rogers enough to know that their Portable Internet doesn't work. What does that leave me with? Yep, One Zone Wi-Fi. (Or a land line and 295.ca. But from whom do you get a land phone line in Toronto? Yep: Primus, Rogers or Bell. Oh, my.) 'Cause even though it doesn't work either, at least there's no upgrade/up-sell path! And no long-term contract, and you can (presumably) get out of even the monthly billings online, without having to go through a 23-minute phone call.
I worked for several months, a while back, in an office that (foolishly) utilized a cheap wireless router for providing the network access for even its desktop users. It was exactly as unreliable as One Zone is.
They (brilliantly, ha!) fixed that problem by having a $100/hour consultant rebuild the entire network from scratch, replacing the old (desktop-motherboard, ha!) "servers" with new ones ("new" being a relative term—they cobbled most of them together from machines which had been discarded by other real companies), and even (stupidly) reformatting all our machines so they'd be "clean" for the new LAN. Must've spent at least ten grand.
All they really had to do to make it work, though, was replace the router. (That's not my opinion, but rather the judgment of a major-league hacker/cracker who had been tricked into working at the same company via the promise of challenging work which never materialized, and who had set up thousands of machines for network access at previous jobs.) But when you're working under Three-Stooges management, at the mercy of clowns and blatant amateurs who ignore good advice in favor of doing things in their own hopelessly bumbling way....
I saw the Sustain Yourself: Grow a Garden posting on BlogTO yesterday, and had to respond, for a variety of reasons:
You might wanna go easy on the vermiculite: "An article published in the Salt Lake Tribune on December 3, 2006 reported that vermiculite ... had been found to contain asbestos which had led to cancers such as are found in asbestos related cases."
I am not a gardener, but shredded bark might work well as a substitute.
Also, regarding the general accuracy of the Farmer's Almanac: "In the October 1981 issue of Weatherwise, pages 212-215, John E. Walsh and David Allen performed a check on the accuracy of 60 monthly forecasts of temperature and precipitation from the Old Farmer's Almanac at 32 stations in the U.S. They found that 50.7 percent of the monthly temperature forecasts and 51.9 percent of the precipitation forecasts verified with the correct sign [i.e., as correctly predicting temperatures above normal or below normal]. These may be compared with the 50 percent success rate expected by chance."
The Almanac's "Frost Chart" is "Courtesy of Environment Canada," though, and so is thankfully based on actual science rather than the "secret formula" used for the Almanac's long-range weather forecasts ... with the associated, laughably weasel-worded claim that their predictions are "almost always [!] very close [!] to our traditional claim of 80 percent." [Note that they also say, "Our forecasts emphasize temperature and precipitation deviations from averages, or normals"—exactly what the study by Walsh and Allen was testing.]
Not to rain on yer parade ... er, garden.... :)
The quacky irony of Ye Olde Farmers using a "secret formula," which they will not share, to derive predictions which for the sample size in question look to be no better than chance—and certainly (with their < 57% accuracy) are not regarded by actual meteorologists as being useful for predicting temperature or precipitation trends in practice—should not be lost on anyone, here.
Yes, in a sense half of what goes into the Almanac's forecasts is science: They have a hypothesis which generates testable predictions, which can be compared against reality via quantitative measurements of the latter. So far, so good.
Where they cross the line from science into pseudoscience is in (i) not competently comparing the predictions of their hypothesis against reality, (ii) continuing to make false claims for the accuracy of their theory even long after that had been shown to be untrue, and (iii) clinging to the original hypothesis and "secret formula" long after it has been discredited.
Keeping their "formula" a secret doesn't help either, but that's not so much irreconcilable with a scientific approach as it is a semi-standard behavior of quacks whose ideas don't stand up to questioning ... or of companies protecting a "trade secret" for a best-selling product.
Since the data doesn't match the predictions, any perception that it does can only be the product of psychological influences, e.g., of seeing the Almanac predict an abnormally warm summer, and then taking note of every hot day more than one would have otherwise (cf. confirmation bias). Same kinda stuff that makes astrology look like it works, when it really doesn't work at all. ("Even professional astrologers, most of whom have nothing but disdain for sun sign astrology, can't pick out a correct horoscope reading at better than a chance rate.")
I was very pleased to learn of the Holons: The World of Wilbergral Poseurs blog entry, and of this related piece:
For a Wilberian integralist, heaven means becoming special, like a guru. Damnation means remaining an ordinary human being.
Problem is, if everyone becomes enlightened and no longer needs a guru, there's no need for a leader.
Therefore a leader who wants to remain special has no incentive to help his students become enlightened, no matter how much he insists he wants them to become so. Because if they all became enlightened, the guru would no longer be special in relation to them.
As Broken Yogi further observed:
[Wilber's] originality, if one could call it that, is in trying to be a comprehensive, all-inclusive derivative thinker....
[T]ry as he might, Wilber himself doesn't have the gifts he really needs. He doesn't have the genius of an original viewpoint, only the ambition to have one, and the idea that by incorporating everyone else['s] theories into one grand theory, that will constitute an original theory. Sorry, it doesn't. Wilber will never make the top ranks of world geniuses, and he will undoubtedly shed a few tears over that.
One of BY's readers likewise commented:
I read some of the ["Wyatt Earpy"] rants you mentioned in your blog entry, and if they are not the product of a demented, adolescent moron then there is no such thing. A clever moron, to be sure, but gad, what a putz.
I was fascinated by Meccano as a kid. But I never built anything like this.
Very good to see that Jeff Meyerhoff's deeply insightful Psychological Analysis of Wilber's Beliefs is now online. (I hadn't previously had access to it.) From which:
Wilber's work ... is grandiose according to the two definitions of the term. It is enormously large in scope and, because it is fundamentally flawed, it is incommensurate with reality. Mistakenly maintaining that one has a valid theory of everything is a sign of personal grandiosity. The great danger for the grandiose person is deflation by the intrusion of the real. For the theory and psyche that are inflated to the breaking point like a balloon every criticism looks like a sharp pin. This ever-present danger of deflation results in a shadow insecurity. The job of the grandiose psyche is to keep from awareness those aspects of reality which could threaten the grandiose vision. Consequently, maintaining a positive, progressive, Kosmic system which redeems all loss is difficult; it requires a lot of mental contortions in order to avoid seeing its flaws....
Sometimes Wilber's insecurity drives him beyond repetitiveness and caricature to the sarcasm and snideness for which he has been criticized. This rudeness has become a topic of debate. Some think it inappropriate. I happen to like polemical invective when used against people who have acted cruelly or hypocritically and are not recognized as such.
Hey, that's exactly what I've been doing, isn't it? :)
Derrida and Foucault are considered negative thinkers, but Wilber generally treats them favorably. An apparent anomaly, but easily explained. They have achieved such a level of fame and their work is so influential that a person such as Wilber, who wants to claim inclusiveness, must incorporate them into his synthesis. He does this by extracting something from them that agrees with his view, thereby misrepresenting them in the process. Another reason for Wilber's respect for famous negative thinkers is that he tends towards hero worship and so their fame alone insulates them from the derogatory treatment that less famous, but no less negative, thinkers have to endure....
On the final page of the main text [of SES] Wilber tries to prove by fiat what he has not proven through argumentation: "if today is rationality, tomorrow is transrationality, and there is not a single scientific argument in the world that can disagree with that, and every argument in favor of it." There is a crazy desperation in a statement like that. He cannot admit to himself that he is not confronting the reality of his opponents' positions....
Wilber's method of culling preferred pieces of knowledge from diverse sciences allows him to give his story of the Kosmos "whatever meanings from a higher level he wishes to put into them." He "can both claim scriptural authority" (by saying he is using our taken-for-granted knowledge and by having 238 pages of endnotes), and "basically ignore it at the same time" by only really using a select few scholars and misrepresenting those who disagree.
Heh. Bingo, bingo, bingo!
Several years ago, Andrew Smith penned a generally complimentary review of the pre-publication manuscript of Bald Ambition, with this caveat:
Brouwer says of such writing that "the vilefulness [sic] and spitefulness of Meyerhoff's analysis reaches almost paranoic heights." I think there is a much more sober, and to-the-point, response to Meyerhoff's critique: so what? Even if we grant that Wilber had an unusually difficult and unhappy childhood—I don't really believe this [I, Geoff, absolutely do believe it], but for the sake of argument let's assume he did—couldn't we find his accomplishments all the more remarkable for what he had to overcome?
That may well have been an understandable position "back in the day," when the full depth of kw's manipulation and suppression of debate, and his raging academic incompetence and/or dishonesty, had not yet been documented, leading even the most rigorous of Wilber's critics to give him far more respect than (in hindsight) his feeble attempts at scholarship ever deserved. ("Accomplishments"? Pfft! "Damned lies and Wilberian philosophy" is more like it.)
I hope, though, that by now we can all appreciate just how bang-on Meyerhoff's analysis of Wilber's motivations was, and how much of kw's actions during and since his "planned meltdown" less than a year ago could have been predicted simply by following through on Meyerhoff's observations, when combined with the dismal fact that Old Baldy's "integral synthesis" invariably falls apart as soon as you start questioning it in comparable detail to which the claims in any field of real academic knowledge would be subjected even before (not merely long after) being published.
I was recently apprised, by a friend, of the following piece of Wilberian blogshit, regarding kw's sort-of "call for papers":
It can be an essay on any topic, from psychology to economics to art to religion. It can be the review of a current (or past) movie, whether it's attempting to be integral or not; or of a CD, in terms of the actual lyrics or the states that are evoked. It can be a defense of my work, where somebody has criticized my work without fully understanding it, or where their view understood it well enough but can be easily responded to and outcontextualized by a truly AQAL response. It can be a critical essay on a past theorist or writer, showing how they can be AQALly transcended and included. And so forth. If you have a website, we will link to that and give it significantly increased traffic, and where, on your site, you might wish to engage in online responses and discussions of your piece, whether friendly or more like blog wars.
Nothing resembling an allowance for the possibility of valid criticism of his own bumbling work (of which there is already plenty), is there? Just more integral denial from a raging clinical narcissist and "integral Viking" (i.e., raper and pillager of reality).
As Mark Twain might have said of the four-quadrant world: "Lies, damned lies, and Wilberian philosophy."
And so it goes for The Celebrated Slippery Philosopher of Delusional County....
Scientists are engineering microscopic bugs to extract fuel from a variety of non-corn sources, including the human urinary tract, a Russian fungus and the plant responsible for tequila. (more)
Fuel from the human urinary tract?
Get my motor running....
From the Toronto Hydro Telecom One Zone website:
Toronto Hydro Telecom is please to have been able to offer a free trial during its service deployment and extension over the last seven months.
New hourly, daily and monthly access packages, payable by credit card, are coming soon.
They were originally planning to start charging the $29/month back in early March.
I've been using the wireless One Zone Wi-Fi blanket exclusively for my Internet access from home since the beginning of last December. And I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.
I'm not even out there with a laptop, roaming around and hitting "dead spots" in the coverage: I simply have a USB antenna sitting out on the ledge of my third-floor balcony (facing the street) whenever it's not raining outside. Yet it's still an unusually good day when I'm able to check my email and surf without the connection dropping multiple times throughout the day.
Last week, there was a 30-hour period when I couldn't even get an IP address when trying to connect, though the signal was consistently "Very Good," as it is 80% of the time. That same thing happens for minutes or hours at a time every few days.
No one would tout city-wide Wi-Fi as a usable technology in general if it were even one-tenth as unreliable, when done right, as One Zone has been in my experience.
And customers are going to line up to pay $29 a month for not-ready-for-prime-time technology like that? Not bloody likely. I, anyway, would rather make a deal with the portable, high-speed WiMAX devil, even knowing how awful the customer service given by both Bell and Rogers is. (Geez, or maybe not. No, not.) The alternative, after all, is to pay for a service which, even when it was being given away for free, was far more trouble than it was worth—I honestly miss just having reliable dial-up—and isn't even close to being usable even just for personal stuff, never mind for business/professional activities.
My own guess is that this bumbling, city-owned venture into IT is going to be such a financial wash for our blessed Toronto Hydro that ... yep, they'll end up raising hydro/electricity rates to cover for it.
I've just noticed that my "Age of Wilberius" review of kw's bullshit-based Integral Spirituality is still, flatteringly, linked on the front page of Integral World.
Makes me wish I had gotten the subtitle ("Starting New Role" vs. "Startling New Role") of the book right, in my rush to get that posted while other I.T.-related responsibilities were crashing all around me....
Favorite Weird Al Yankovic videos:
The Saga Begins
Close But No Cigar. Listen carefully to the lyrics, beyond the mere rhymes, humor and Flash animation, and then try to tell me that Al hasn't evolved into a genuine poet. (Uh, but it's a "Buddy Rich solo," geez! Al obviously knew that; though it's also worth noting that, as he may not have known, the obese but nevertheless 160-IQ Mama Cass died from a heart attack, not by choking on a ham sandwich.) You can hear he's a real writer even in something like Couch Potato, but his abilities reach well beyond mere skillful hip-hop wordplay, though he can certainly do that too
Pancreas (not for the video itself, but rather for the amazing, Beach Boys-inspired arrangement; likewise for the lyrically brilliant Bob)
Money For Nothing—Beverly Hillbillies
Amish Paradise
Trapped In The Drive-Thru
Yoda
UHF
The word "genius" is thrown around far too easily, in fields from art to philosophy; but in his best moments, as Kurt Cobain once observed in his private journals, Weird Al does indeed show more than mere flashes of "comic genius."
This is just, well, sad. Brilliantly sad:
Sad Kermit.
There were happier days, once in a lifetime....
A Croatian activist Friday completed a 24-hour stay in a chicken cage in a central square in Zagreb to urge people not to eat eggs on Easter Sunday (more).
By contrast, as Paul Simon once put it on Saturday Night Live (paraphrased from memory):
I'm not going to sing "Still Crazy After All These Years" dressed in a turkey suit!
Anyway, the bumper-to-bumper traffic on the street I was trying to cross around 1 pm today must mean it's Easter Sunday, the time at which we reverentially celebrate the death and resurrection of the only begotten Bunny.
So as we go through our lives as faithful servants of the Great Heavenly Rodent, let us never fail to ask ourselves, in times of anger, trouble and sorrow: What Would the Easter Bunny Do?
On a completely separate note, this is too good not to share: Steve Nicks' Fajita Roundup. Its Tex-Mex theme is making me "homesick" for Scottsdale, AZ, where I took two weeks of SalesLogix administration and customization training back in the summer of 2002. My first (and, as yet, only) time in the desert, where the whole 108-degree-Fahrenheit world feels like the inside of a car that's been sitting in the sun all afternoon on the hottest day of the summer with the windows closed. The wind dries out your hair something awful ... but, on the bright side, girls riding down the sidewalk on bicycles say "Good morning" to you when you smile at them. And, during breaks from corporate training, the iced tea sells for 25 cents from vending machines.
The chips were sharp shards of crisp specialness, spearing their way into the soft flanks of the beans which were driven into a careering retreat for the side of the plate. The eggs peered imperiously over the battleground like generals directing their troops from afar. The bacon lurked around the corner, ready to strike when the taste buds had grown weary of the fight. —eggsbaconchipsandbeans
—eggsbaconchipsandbeans
I really must visit Merry Olde England some day. "Her Majesty's a pretty nice girl...."
