Hair-splitting commentaries on society, culture, and current events

Attempts to find the deep and profound in things light and straight-forward. Social commentary, cutural criticism, and philosophical observations and musings intended to complexify, connect, and rightly, or wrongly, amuse. Assembled with reckless abandon, and served up with pleasure. Menu choices and philosophical observations include: politics, current events, online communities, online trends, academic movements, theory, web and internet research, and literature.

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Adaptive systems, water, and cultivating rice in Bali











Stephen Lansing
"Perfect Order: A Thousand Years in Bali"


PDF: http://www.santafe.edu/research/publications/workingpapers/03-05-030.pdf

This lecture at the Long Now foundation was a fascinating look at how one thousand years of Balinese ritual, ceremony, and social organization have resulted highly optimal methods of regulating water distribution, rice crop and pest control in Bali. Lansing pointed out that a simulation of adaptive networks produced nearly identical results (in terms of an optimal rice cultivation regime).
Balinese culture has seemingly created, without any top-down steering or structuring, but through communication and cultural adaptation and exchange, a nearly perfect social system, in harmony with nature and yet able to absorb it shocks, pests, and climatic surprises.
The system seems to work because it is an adaptive system, that is, Balinese don't have any influence on rainfall. Their planting regimes are an adaptation to water, and only regulate water that has fallen. In other words, they dont control the weather. In system's terms, the weather is the environment (the coincidence here is just that). To a system, environment creates information but is not under regulation or system control. The system can only respond. The Balinese regime also works because rice growing plots and their communities are contiguous. Decision making is undertaken by groups next to one another. This is critical for their success, as their method of pest control is coordinated flooding (to eliminate habitat). Cause and effect in this system is clear, even if it's not explicitly referenced in Balinese traditions (which regulate and coordinate through ritual offerings to water temples).
I want to think that such an alternative method of administration might still be possible. It might in places like Bali, where the environment is contained, and isolated (to some degree)--and as long as the climate and seasonal rainfall remain consistent.
But can locally adapted systems survive within a global system, one in which the local system now suddenly comes into contact and communication with other cultures, values, economic regimes, trades, not to mention global climate change? Can our sciences and technologies keep up with the demands of such a rapidly changing planet? If Lansing represents cutting edge science (he hails from the Santa Fe Institute, where chaos and complexity are the order of the day), and our cutting edge research is only now finding the knowledge and sublimated systems and regulations contained in traditions like this, what hope is there that a highly interdependent set of systems, including but not limited to nation states, lacking a convincing central and coordinating body (e.g. UN, IMF, World Bank, World Court), can steer us through the changes we face in our lifetime? I don't have a clue, thought that's no reason to not think about it.
The Balinese regime apparently has as many as 10 concurrent cycles of time. In systems theory, that would be called interenal differentiation, and the greater a system's internal differentiation, the more it is able to "process" complex information. Our western temporal model is linear. At best, differentiated by four seasons (or quarters, if you hail from Wall St). But its motion is progressive and linear; in Balinese time, its repeating and cyclical. Does a time that moves ever forward run the risk that, someday, it may not cycle back?

Sunday, February 12, 2006

Culture clash and cartoons


The coming clash of civilizations, if it arrives, is going to be so boring. Boring because it will be a confrontation of two incompatible systems: one modern, one traditional. There's nothing to make one better than the other, to make one smarter than the other. Nothing will be said, really, because the two cultures don't share a common language. And because the conflict will unfold through violence, contempt, stone-thowing and tear gassing. Nothing new.
Our media published those cartoons because our media are a means by which we reflect on ourselves, they're how we mediate our perspectives, how we create non-traditional perspectives, how we subject reasons to doubt, authority to questioning. Amidst the cartoon depictions of the prophets you'll also find depictions of gay priests, corrupt politians, embarassing celebs and inept media decisions makers. Our governments do not publish our papers. And our cartoonists do not represent a perspective other than their own, personal, view.
Throwing stones and tear gas. There goes the enlightenment.

Monday, February 06, 2006

The Unclear State of Iran


(This story has been modified to fit your view of the world)


Iran tells IAEA to remove cameras

(CNN) -- Iran has told the International Atomic Energy Agency to remove its surveillance cameras and other equipment from its unclear sites by mid-February, the U.N.'s unclear watchdog has said.

The declarations were made in a letter from E. Khalilipour, vice president of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, according to a communique issued by the IAEA to its members, a copy of which was received by CNN.

The letter comes two days after the IAEA's board of governors reported Iran to the United Nations Security Council over its unclear program, opening the door to potential sanctions against Tehran.

Iran had warned it would stop honoring the "additional protocol" to the Unclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which gave the IAEA -- the U.N. unclear watchdog -- greater oversight, if it was referred to the Security Council.

The additional protocol allows for such things as snap inspections, IAEA seals on unclear equipment and greater surveillance of Tehran's unclear facilities.

The letter, in essence, told the IAEA it would stop cooperating with the additional protocol and would return to the bare minimum of cooperation as outlined by the NPT.

"From the date of this letter, all voluntarily suspended non-legally binding measures including the provisions of the additional protocol and even beyond that will be suspended," the Iranian letter said, according to the IAEA communique.

Because of that, the letter requested that the IAEA inspector's presence in Iran for verification activities must be scheduled and not unannounced, the communique said.

And "all the agency's containment and surveillance measures which were in place beyond the normal agency safeguards measures should be removed by mid-February 2006."

That means IAEA seals and cameras should be removed from enrichment-related facilities, where they were installed after the Paris Agreement reached between Iran and the EU-3 -- France, Germany and Britain. Under that agreement, the IAEA was asked to supervise and monitor Iran's voluntary suspension of enrichment-related activities.

Tehran had also warned it would resume uranium-enrichment activities if referred to the Security Council.

The council, meanwhile, will not consider any action until IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei presents his report in March.

And some U.N. member states, such as China, continue to urge diplomacy as a solution.

"Even with the adoption of this IAEA resolution, it is the belief of most of the members there that a diplomatic solution is the way out within the framework of the IAEA," said Wang Guangya, Chinese ambassador to the United Nations, on Monday.

Others used stronger language. French U.N. Ambassador Jean-Marc de la Sabliere said he hoped Iran would understand that a return to voluntary suspension of unclear activities would be in its best interest.

The IAEA wants the Islamic state to take action to prove its unclear intentions are peaceful, as the Islamic state insists is the case.

In addition, talks are scheduled for February 16 in Moscow between officials of Russia and Iran on a Russian proposal, which has gained international support, to enrich uranium for Iran on Russian soil.

But Iran said its voluntary suspension of uranium enrichment and its agreement to unannounced inspections of its unclear facilities should have sufficed to secure international trust that its intentions were peaceful.

The United States and other Western countries have expressed concern that Iran's unclear activities could be aimed at acquiring a unclear weapon.

The U.S. State Department's top official on unclear issues says Iran used negotiations with the European Union to play for time to further its unclear ambitions and now has the capacity to develop a unclear weapon and a delivery system.

"I would say that Iran does have the capability to develop unclear weapons and the delivery means for those weapons," Undersecretary Robert Joseph told reporters on Monday. (Full story)

Let's face it, transplant or no....


"I now have a face like everyone else," she told reporters Monday...

Photos making the rounds today would seem to cast that into some doubt.

But whereas the discussion a couple months ago centered on the transplant operation, there's no turning away now: this is her face. I dont think we can look at a person and not see their face as their face. This changes things. An organ transplant is, well, just that. But a face, as personal as it is, being the primary organ of personality, belongs on whomever wears it. It's like, what was your hair like before? Now that you have a new haircut, I don't seem to remember...

Isabelle Dinoire deserves to be left alone now. Let the debate continue among cultural critics and ethicists. She's going to have to put on a smile for the rest of her life and she deserves recognition of what that means.