Rice shortage-network demonstration

This is a cross post from my other blog, http://bookhling.wordpress.com , to tide me over until I can finish that Jasper Johns post.

The work, or rather, the vision of Jasper Johns is so profound for me, I'm having hard time actually writing about it.

The matter of rice shortage is becoming increasingly mainstream. The warning of possible shortage and dangerous increase in price had been around for a long time, and unusual price hike of rice in major exporters like Thailand had been reported in (relatively) mainstream media about three to four months ago. In fact, major United Nations advisers and IMF personnel had been giving warnings since mid 2007 in mainstream sources. I myself remember scoffing at a particular warning given by a United Nations forecaster, warning of possible food shortage and criticizing the rapid increase in biocrop cultivation as a major player. I guess such is the evanescence of appealing to mainstream media, where the specific sources and logistical data to support novel claims are frequently invisible or simply unavailable.

The warning was in place, and the back-up system for possible shortage in each of the nations most heavily affected had been more or less in place. So why do we have a developing crisis at hand with reported casualties? The answer I believe, lies in the lack of distribution network in the world today. Of course, with the advent of the technology the world itself is ever more networked than before. As each second passes it is predicted that the network of the world will become thicker and wider, someday possibly encompassing every single member of humanity in direct and accessible way. But that is the network of information. What about the physical network, the infrastructure, the ones we use to ship the things we order through the virtual spaces of the net? The airlines, the shipping lanes, the railroads and the expressways. I have on reliable sources that the actual range and volume of physical shipping across the world had remained at similar or lower levels since the height of the age of imperialism so long ago (the specific source I can’t find at the moment, if someone knows otherwise please correct me). It is somewhat unlikely that there is an actual shortage of food (at least not to the degree that some sensationalist media would have us believe). What we have at hand is more akin to the lack of distribution network, so that the flow of resources are channeled into the most readily available physical network without regards to economical balance, or even, the need. In the type of eschewed free market system we have in place at the moment, there is virtually no incentive for tapping into parts of the world without pre-built infrastructure. And without the resources of the world available at hand, popular discontent is bound to rise, leading to further instability.

Living in New York city, I am physically and mentally insulated from most of such problems plaguing the world. Hipsters in fashionable clothings walk into fashionable restaurants and eat a plateful of vegetables, supposedly crafted from fashionable ingredients, possibly grown in fashinable dirt, as they clutch their fashinable laptops while hoping someone sees them writing down a ‘novel.’ In the subway a woman so bloated that she has to take up two sits and a half holds onto her third bucket of KFC. Is there something wrong with this picture? I do not particularly think so. Of course, the scene I’ve just described is certainly distasteful, but I do not believe people should be judged and criticized for utilizing the resources made available to them by the environment. The physical network of the world is configured in such a way that massive amount of cheap resources and resources expensive beyond their actual value exist hand-in-hand, composing the greater fabric of the market system.

We are all cogs reinforcing the current system of the world. And this system of the world, this world-wide system of ‘free-market’ seem to be suffering from some sort of bug. A free market system without proper physical distribution network for the market to take place on is fundamentally oppressive and exploitative, even without malice, even with good will of the individual members of the system. Perhaps it is possible to speculate that the fiasco experienced by certain biocrop based national economies are very similar to that experienced by planned and enclosed economies of the old communist nations. There had been a few novel attempts at readjusting the system of the world through various means, like freer access to information network from poorer places of the globe allowing development of a market system based on information and knowledge, but outcome of such works-in progress are unpredictable at the moment.

All I can say is, I think the problems like the kind we are seeing right now seem to stem from certain inadequacy of the global network itself, and will persist in different forms so long as that inadequacy continues to plague the system of the world. And the developed nations of the world are making a huge mistake in allowing such unbalance to continue, as such difference in network-system tend to cluster individual components into groups sharing similar traits, which in this case would be poverty and isolation of economic and cultural nature.

This reminds me, how about donating some rice to the UN? It won’t cost you a dime and you’ll probably have fun doing it.

Jasper Johns lecture

Just came back from the Met. I attended the Jasper Johns public lecture there today. I must say that I am bitterly disappointed.

I am fascinated by Jasper Johns, both in terms of his personality and his work-philosophy. I scour over any book or articles I can find regarding his thoughts and visions. Yet this lecture bored me to tears. The first one about the form-meaning relationship of Jasper Johns' work was alright. A little dry, but there were quite a few interesting interpretation of his work which allowed some interesting and novel perspectives upon his works I previously glossed over. The second lecture on Jasper Johns, titled "Gray is my favorite color", given by a famous Harvard alumni with a degree in arts was simply horrible. The problem wasn't that it was too hard to follow or too far away into the realms of professional nomenclature. The problem was that there wasn't any content. The doctor droned on and on about his personal feelings for the work of Jasper Johns while listing bunch of lackluster theories on his works with the depth of cheap art analysis text books for an hour and a half. I believe about half of his lecture was composed of "uh", "ahhh", and "ehh." I actually had to tear at my hair to keep myself from falling asleep, and I am used to my fair share of mind-numbingly boring classes. This is something I don't ever want to go through again.

The highlight of the lecture series was the panel discussion between the museum curators about what they've learned while working with Jasper Johns' work. Quite interesting stuff. Nothing with too much depth, but one cannot expect much in public lectures I guess (the lecture on Poussin's landscape series a few days ago, however, was amazing, which leads me to believe that today's lector was simply sub-par). Interesting comparison on Jasper Johns' past and present works and techniques and manifestations of his philosophy were shared. I am a little too tired right now. I'll share the details on the lecture and Jasper Johns in general with you after I catch some sleep.

Interesting service

Just came back home around thirty minutes ago. It's interesting how my whole body aches when I'm only doing some labwork, a desk job.

I came across an interesting service awhile ago, thought I'd share it with you.

http://vixy.net

It's an online application that transcodes FLV files into other format of choice, like mp4 for ipod or avi for desktop viewing (for those who don't have flv viewer). Although there are free desktop applications that does the same thing better, this one is useful in that it doesn't eat up your computer's resources. I'm transcoding some music videos and interesting TED talks into mp4 format right now.

Oh, and in case you don't know what TED is, it's an annual meeting of brilliant minds across the globe, giving talks on issues related to betterment of humanity. Their topics vary widely, from performing arts to particle physics, and each of those talks are truly a gem. I've been binge watching/listening Craig Venter these days. He is currently attempting to build a minimal genome network for construction of a base life-like system, so it has a lot to do with my obsessive interest in artificial life. It's interesting how easy it is to find genome and synthetic biology relevant talks among the TED list. Whatever the result may be it certainly is the trend of the times... Makes me want to live forever. 

The weather outside is the cool shade of a thunderstorm. I hope it continues into tomorrow.

New Tablet

I finally got a new tablet. I went for wacom's low end mass production model bamboo, which was a bargain at only forty or fifty dollars. I was worried about quality issues but so far the tablet had been satisfying in its utility and sensitivity.

I can't wait to scratch something up. Maybe I'll get to post something nice around here at last.

Apple envy

I read about an interesting demonstration of the capability of ipod touch.
Ipod touch might be really worth it in the future.


I already have my 80GB ipod classic, the first and only apple product I've ever owned. But I must say, there was always a place for an apple product somewhere in my heart, ever since my old high school gave out G4 ibooks to students (a small, rich, and elitist school can do wonders) for the duration of the school life.

Strange thing is that I don't like the apple corporation. I don't like Steve Jobs (though I don't particularly hate him either), I don't like the apple corporate tactics, and while I do appreciate the beauty of OS X and physical design of the apple products themselves I was never infatuated with the stereotypical apple target demographics or the apple 'style', if there is such a thing. What I can't forgive about apple is how they attempt to lock in their customers to their own proprietary softwares and hardwares, to the extent that anyone thinking of breaking from apple brand products must be prepared to dish out significant sums of money and time.

Yet despite my predisposition against apple practices, whenever I am considering getting a new portable media player or a computer (something I should be thinking about, seeing how laptop is almost at the end of its lifespan), I can't stop thinking about apple. I am beginning to think that I am not the only one in this predicament. Everyone seem to have something to say against apple, yet its products are always glooming around the horizon like ever present fatality.

Will my next main computer be macbook pro? Or will it be something from lenovo or dell? Ugh. I really want a macbook pro. My principles seem to be the only thing standing against going out and purchasing it right now.

Solemn dictations

This is a cross post of something I wrote a long time ago in middle of nowhere. I kind of like this one, so I thought I would move this one to somewhere more accessible.


 

             

This is something I ran across in my visit to the Met today. It's a funeral marker of the ancient Greece, around 500 B.C. or so. According to the description given by the little placard at the bottom, there was an inscription on the stele at the original site. The translated version of the inscription reads like this.

"My daughter's beloved child is the one I hold here, the one that I held on my lap while we looked at the light of the sun when we were alive and that I still hold now that we are both dead."

The time was almost three thousand years ago, but the human sentiment runs the same. I might even argue that the dying grandmothers of the old were much more articulate than the living young ones we have right now. Nonetheless, I feel saddened and glad at the same time when I remember this scene, bathed in a solemn and melancholy light, phrases and situations telling its story through subtle hints which later echo in the heart of a young man from three thousand years in the future. Will we leave something behind as such? Will we leave behind something so that people living in three thousand years in the future would shed a tear or feel their heart wrench at the tales of people long gone and forgotten? Will the human identity remain resonant throughout the times?

                            

Another something I picked up. It's from roughly the same era as the above funeral marker. This one depicts a little girl saddened to let her pet pigeons go. This clumsy photo of mine doesn't do justice to the subtle nuances and expressions that were retained in this piece despite its age. People talk of evolution and change all the time, but what we consider to be fundamentally human trait doesn't seem to have changed much, if we can communicate across space and time like this through frozen motions and facial expressions.

I am beginning to suspect that what we consider to be the nature of humanity has deeper roots than previously imagined, perhaps even locked up with the characteristics of the human body/nervous system. In that case, it should be possible to engineer psychology to create the most fundamental, minimal model of 'mind', possessing consciousness yet universal enough to be applied to every physical system, akin to the stripped down version of gene sequence for the most basic life form to act as a template for synthetic life.

Good things

You know what's good?

A long hot bath with Claude Bolling's cello collection in the background, at 2AM.

And a cup of green tea ice cream while running a dvd of videodrome.

That's what's good.