It’s May the Fourth, which means I’ve heard the John Williams opening theme to Star Wars on three different radio stations and it’s not yet 11 am here in Portland. For me, though, today is a wonderful day – it’s my son’s sixth birthday.
Holly, Ontario
(with apologies to Said the Whale)
The sky is filled with high clouds, some white, some grey, some gold as the sun edges behind them toward the west. The wind pushes the water west to east, on the inner arm of an inner arm of an inner arm of a bay of Lake Ontario. Willow trees line the shore, stalks of old celery with less water and more time making them stretch towards the sky, the brown green fuzz of spring buds anointing their furthest limbs. Across the water the birch trees are still bare. The trees on the south shore get the spring light last; their leaves will take a few more weeks to appear. Yesterday was bright blue sky, no clouds, but the wind was stronger from the north. Today is warm and kind, the wind from the west, the sun a little harder to make out.
Shift
I was in Cooperstown, New York on Thursday night. The drive from Portland was fast and easy, a little rain to begin which quickly cleared up. The highways were clear – not many people traveling on the Mass Pike or the New York Thruway on a spring midweek midday – and the dog and I made the most of the empty parking lots and open fields of the rest stops. I haven’t driven west of Sturbridge in a long time, but memories came back – the long climb into the Berkshires with an old farm barely fifty feet from the eastbound lanes, the drive across the Connecticut River outside Springfield, then across the Hudson south of Albany. The Hudson River bridge was terrifying; the railings are open down to the roadbed, and the bridge carries three lanes with no shoulder on either side. I stuck to the middle lane as my panic level slowly rose, reminding myself that we would get across, talking to the dog and trying to reassure myself while telling him it would be okay.
Understandably so
First, a quick apology. I referred to Jurgen Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action in my last post as a “lousy book”, and was quickly called out on it by an old friend in the UK who, apparently, wrote his doctoral dissertation on said book. In fairness, the book isn’t lousy; it’s a bit densely written, which is in keeping with it being a work of philosophy by a German author, and I’m not sure I’m wholly convinced of the argument within it, but it’s closely reasoned, provocative, and intelligent. And not lousy. This also gives me a chance to link to my friend’s own writing, as the way he writes and what he writes about is worth checking out – please visit. He’s also a wayward banker, so for those of you thinking about concepts of value and credit and their changing essence, you’ll enjoy visiting his work.
A theory of context
The brief paper entitled A Mathematical Theory of Communication by Claude Shannon, written in 1948, is often described as the foundational document of the Internet age. It gave us the term “bit” for the foundational unit of information (a 1 or 0), either in use by a computing process or as a piece of data in transit. The paper is really not about communication as we think about it, that is, the process of people exchanging meaning amongst one another, either instantaneously in conversation as it may occur or across time; rather, a better title would be “A Mathematical Theory of Data Transfer in the Presence of Uncertain Errors in the Transmission Medium”. Not nearly as catchy, of course, but far more accurate, and far less likely to confuse a reader who stumbles across it and thinks about the implications on critical theory and epistemology.